Saga of the Blue Moon
Driving home tonight
everyone seems so aggressive
cutting me off, running
lights in front of me, stabbing, darting.
Or is it my perception?
Am I seeing reactions to my own bad driving,
is the perceiver deceived?
Driving
on another night
cresting a hill near the
Todd Lake cabin, I see
the moon, full for a second time this August,
a Blue Moon
and I say to myself
oooh, oh Man,
it's gonna get...
Bruce greets me at the door
with a plate of paper squares
two stick to my wetted finger
ohwhatthehell...
An hour passes
without much event.
I'm by the beachside fire as
in ones and twos, people slowly drift away
only three of us left there when
Heather says to Bruce
is everything set
and Bruce replies
almost,
hitching at his pants as if they bind his crotch.
Now I'm alone
by the fire, on the beach
contemplating the flames
my aloneness
the hissing of grasses.
Then maracas, a tambourine, a chalice drum.
Three women
making music, snaking
through waist-high grass towards me
dancing around the fire,
flashing eyes, shaking breasts, shaking out rhythms
and I can have them all
all three, right now, here,
by the fire, on the beach this
Blue Moon August night.
Just
as my lust
is rising high,
a price appears.
Bruce,
swaggering, sardonic,
arbiter, voyeur, Collector of Souls.
Mine's at peril here.
A Dark God is hungry for a sinner
and I rail against the proposition,
climbing onto a picnic table which would
become my blood altar, declaiming, denying, for endless hours
as Heather stokes the fire with savagely chopped wood
as Bruce struts, sneers, feigns implacable incomprehension.
By near to dawn everyone is back,
gathered round the fire.
Eyes looking into eyes,
the Mask of the Beast passing from face to face
alive within them, still hungering for blood.
A brood of ducklings following mother passes by
and one of us gathers stones and stands.
Let the lake be I say,
Let the ducks live
Let the lake be
Let the ducks live
over and over and over
an absurd, simplistic mantra
my last plea for purity.
The stones drop from his hand
he sits down, and
the sun rises.
jimmy shaker writes this
