THE MOVEMENT OF LIGHT
I wrote a novel after seeing a full moon inside a halo of pale light, and lines of cloud around and through it, some waved, some gently curving.
I was born in a sack of amniotic fluid, turned to flesh by a miracle and my mother’s blood. The blood she gave me was a lubricant and a blessing. I thought I was part of her first, then thought I was different. That was the source of a never to cease confusion.
The things I know to be true are that I am often wrong and that I’m going to die. Otherwise, I can’t know or honestly say what is right or wrong, true or false, what love is, other than mother, what is real or illusion and what it is to die, though I know it will happen.
Critics attacked the work I did to see things naturally at least and write it down. None discussed death, because each of us is alone and naked.
I finished that novel in a summer dawn, the wakening sky bleeding scarlet on diaphanous pink upon a robin’s egg blue canvas. Velvet cloud piles turned to ash above a pencil-sketched, grey, if anything, curve of horizon flecked with gold. The moon was pale and fading but still insistent on its value in a remnant of celestial blue on the far side of my sight above the hours. It hung aloof well above my heart, my hair, my vision as a burst of blindness passed my face and shoulders and became heat and light behind me in a world newly forming.
That was the morning, a movement from apprehension to bondage in the curse of time. Not a word did I say or think as that light renewed me, then chained me down with a new birth cord to a fate unspoken that would never change. Nor cursed but accepted it all as I had written.
