Fix the Moon

She will be so close. So big and bright. It was a week before midsummer's eve, I knew what was right to do. For freedom and fortune, for future and flame, I'd cross the vast wild to call an ancient name.

With all memory in madness I shuttered the door, turning down and away on the long road. My heart reached ahead to all distant places and I grew weary as the day grew long.

Beneath a stone I lied down when the night closed in. I thought of her, lingering, longing, alone. A piece of her missing, the wound unending.

I finally heard her one silent, sightless morning. Only just as she had slipped below the edge of dark, her name clung softly to the lips of dawn.

A path spun out before me, lined in molten silver I saw the way almost like day. Every night it fills me like a dream, my limbs weightless in a mire of sleeplike recollection. Shining, calling, winding, falling.

Suddenly I wake. Time to go.

Which way to turn in the traceless day? I see one who is a friend and we go on together. His way is a different name, but we walk the same road.

A stream crosses below. A fish or two to keep going. Day after day to where the earth meets the sky. We go where the edges meet all together, every twisting path laid plain from the root.

It heals to cry names to infinity, to tell stories of scars and love and ask a way forward please. A passage to the breaking between day and night. I have seen it unraveling far away and we hasten before the rising sun.

There are deep shadows in the valley. The river runs in darkness. No way left but the hero's way, may we equal it together.

Does something follow in the dark day? A shape in the spaces between, a shadow of fear in the path to courage. Come get us. We're ready, come get us. Show your true self on this, the edge of oblivion.

And the wilderness ebbs and flows again, collapsing time into the bedrock. We run against the tide of mayhem, made to unmake. We cry a name to a shaking sky, God let us learn to soar above the rain.

The mystic speaks from the far side of the fire. We wait below the world, wait for wisdom from the cave. There are stars in the deep dark, sparkling from the depths. The memories of a world that no longer fills the distance. From the glittering relics find the call of the way to go on. Of the way beyond.

Down holds ever more wonder, though mortals must ascend. The mystic vanishes inward, some words still drifting landing around the mantles of our souls. Do they tell of a way forward? Or threaten a way back? Does wisdom know the way of what has never come before?

Still she longs far away for the world, the fragment torn apart. Turning, she's looking and waiting through the midnight arc of Heaven's eyes. I dream again of the way, the piece, the scar, the peace.

The river runs beyond the valley, a shining ribbon to the sea. We follow on, and on. Through day and night. It rains, the wind swarms and pulls us on. There is no gentleness here, it is the wild beyond the wilderness.

The tower of light lay out to sea. It spires up to the dome of celestial bodies, to the beginning and end of the rhythms of the wild.

Ask for the nature of it and be confounded. Ask for the nurture and be uplifted. So we sang songs of fires in the night to a roaring sprawl of primal fury. We passed through, no harm done.

The least we could do for safe passage was nothing, leaving the wild to dance forever on her own in bright beams of silk and silver.

With trepidation now, the tower lies out to sea. Where the waves seeth against the edges of land and sky. The water, the ocean, the place that lies between.

Gifts of the wild lashed together with hope adrift in the edgeless sea. Is this the place where we learn to be? The night dissolves the colors down. Left are only groping senses in a senseless trough of nothing. Sleep, or else lie awake in fear.

Are there eyes in the night? Giants just below? Thought is more dangerous here than before. Let go of the fear before it sinks us into the senseless eternity.

The tower stands shining against the deepened sky. Waves whip the guarded shores of its isle. A different kind of wild, made for a single purpose.

A passage opens tall and narrow, the tower's light gleaming along the waterway. The path illuminated, we wade in the sandy shallows.

Overhead the light recedes, a spidery canopy of woven bare branches shuts out the light. Again we wander in darkness, but for the first time we wander in knowing the end is there. The piece long lost, the broken name mended, gathered all and waiting at the end.

A shield of blossoms sweetens the gateway, parting to show the final beyond. Bright, fair, furiously reaching to the sky above dreaming. A canopy unfettered.

The tower glows and brightens within, another kind of sightless journey. We ascend.

The summit in hand, many have come before. The tower now standing made by more ancient others. A name whispers in the winds of high places, tracing letters in the air with breath warm and sweet. I call a name long waiting in my throat. I call a name I've heard, but never spoken.

Out to the edge of night and day, sea, shore, and sky, the living and dying, breathe against the nothing's chill.

Fair as silken silver hair, a thread meets waiting hands. A piece not lost, but a piece too far!

Now calling again in ringing joy, the silken cord thrills twenty fingers and together we pull. A flash of moondust wakes her, the silken thread falls to the water and shines no more. A shard of emptiness plunges in after, staining the water with what came before.

Are we falling or flying? Fearing or living? Spinning or starting?

A blur of color, light, form, the scent of lilacs, roses and salty sea breeze. And the body she was rises renewed to luminous splendor. The tides mix and frolic below her. We ride the fury to land, alighting upon a different world. A different future. Venture far enough, crash with courage bold enough, you win another future.

The ever-changing light sings at night, sleeping the wakers and laying the law of dreams.