A Love Letter from a Stray Moon Read Online Free Page B

was not his forte. He fathered his art. And my child was him.
    But do not think I serenely accept this. Do not ever call me tranquil. You can keep your moonlight sonatas—I don’t recognise myself in them. I can’t take this kind of solitude any more. To be wholly immaterial is too lonely. Must I stay forever so fucking ethereal? Why can’t I matter, materially? Why can’t I be beflowered? Why can’t I spend a few years making cakes and splashing? Why can’t I be a fucking lovely ordinary lovely fucking woman? I want to slope off to a bar, warm my hands by the stove, I want to be sleepy with wine, my head on his soft shoulder, as round as a baby’s, and I have a sweet, swollen, musky kind of longing to kindle my own kitten. Any scraggy farm cat is allowed her litter of kittens, but not me; I am a stray moon at the back door, mewing for a crescent kitten. The door is slammed against me. ‘It’s only the moon. Should be fucking neutered.’
    All women wanted to mother him. (And fuck him.) Peter Pan, I called him, because I knew him as both child and age-old Pan, goat-god, satyr, erotic to the hilt, genius of the groves, god of the groins, wickedness in the wink. Lascivious as Jean Genet but still as lucent and innocent as the sleeping Endymion, the man given eternal youth because the moon was his lover and came down nightly to embrace him as he slept on the mountain. And the moon bore him daughters.
    We only saw each other truly, nakedly, at night, in the darknesses of space and in the little unlinked hours, uncounted, unaccounted by anyone but us, the dark jewels. An elfin love, a faerie love, magically true, actually unreal, but rawly corporeal as the memory of his cock in me sent flutters through the muscles of my cunt for days afterwards.
    The first of these jewels was a midnight hour. He had asked about my mind and I had answered about my cunt. How not, if I was to answer him truthfully? You speak in blood and silver, he said. If we drink from the same red cut-glass cup, his lips touching the red glass and the red blood, then we (‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’) share a passion and a feral mystery. (‘Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I’ll not look for wine.’) Let’s face it, most people don’t do things like that. I was mad, and I had the true lunatic’s lunar alibi. How the full moon shone that night.
    I was born in tidalism, as the earth was changing from liquid to solid, one huge tide of swirling swept off the earth and coalesced as moon. Being tidal myself, I willed his tides to their fullness and I surged over his flood defences, breaching his sea walls so he could not keep me out. I was his madness and his magic and his muse, I was his devotion and his devastation and his devouring passion. I could walk through walls, swim through them, so no air or water or brick could stop me, and when his soul was lost I could find it, curl up next to it and sleep in its arms.
    I was an inverse thief in the night: I stole nothing from anyone but I stole into everything, I gave myself away, shedding myself till I waned to nothing, a blank edge of darkness. I stole in through his eyes to his thoughts and I crept in through windows, or through the sky, stealing into his body, an extra ever-undiscovered mineral in the nature of my light, so my quicksilver slipped into his head, and the mad hatter was moon-maddened. Draw down the moon till the tropics are glades of liquid silver and know that the moon has a wingspan the size of the world while the wingtips of madness brush the wind whose own madness in turn stretches the wings tauter. So a gale-force wind and an angle of feather reach further for another wing-inch of turbulence till, at the point of maximum tension, the hurtling bird is almost torn apart by the force of the storm. Almost.
    I was as naked as the moon to him. I was, in fact, inside out. Raw, willingly so, shivering with exposure, my cunt