It's not the lover that we love, but love itself, love as in nothing, as in 0; love is the lover's coin, a coin of no country, hence: the ring; hence: the moon- no wonder that empty circle so often figures in our intimate dark, our skin-trade, that commerce so furious we often think love's something we share; but we're always wrong.
When our lover mercifully departs and lets us get back to the business of love again, either we'll slip it inside us like the host or we'll beat its gibbous drum that the whole world. might know who has it. Which was always more my style:
O the moon's a bodhran, a skin gong tom from the hide of Capricorn, and many's the time I'd lift it from its high peg, grip it to my side, tight as a gun, and whip the life out of it, just for the joy of that huge heart under my ribs again. A thousand blows I showered like meteors down on that sweet-spot over Mare Imbrium where I could make it sing its name, over and over. While I have the moon, 1 cried, no ship will sink, woman bleed, or man lose his mind-
but truth told, I was terrible: the idiot at the session spoiling it, as they say, for everyone. O kings petitioned me to pack it in. The last time, I peeled off my shirt and found a coffee bruise that ran from hip to wrist. Two years passed before a soul could touch me.
Even in its lowest coin, it kills us to keep love, kills us to give it away. All of which brings us to Camille Flammarion,
signing the flyleaf of his Terres du Ciel for a girl down from the sanatorium, and his remark the one he couldn't help but make- on the gorgeous candid pallor of her shoulders; then two years later, unwrapping the same book reinscribed in her clear hand, with my love, and bound in her own lunar vellum.
