Apsides
This is the full moon of my life. I’ve lit a torch to meet it.
I. PERIGEE
I changed the shape of my finger last night with the kitchen knife among the green onions. I will watch my body grow back.
Hecate is the only goddess who chooses to visit Hades. For a long time, I didn’t understand. The moment before your foot lifts, still in the doorway, fingertips on the frame. Hecate holds that moment open. She governs the brink.
“Do I dare disturb the universe?” Eliot’s Prufrock asks, wringing his gloved hands. But I’ve already disturbed it. Split myself open on the cutting board. Walked barefoot over the coals. I dare all the time. I just don’t always survive it real clean.
II. APOGEE
In Pathways to Bliss, Joseph Campbell writes, “You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.” I don’t think I entered. I fell into ditches. Climbed out of drainage pipes. I know darkness that accumulates.
“I have known the eyes already, known them all—the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,” Prufrock is pulling on his collar. The mirror isn’t the problem. It’s the hush.
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” And what of it? What if time is never a sword stroke, but a spoon. A rinse cycle. A doorbell. A silence too short to name. Do I dare disturb the universe? Not the mirror, but the stovetop clock. The blinking fire alarm. The tiny, repetitive tick.
III. FULL MOON
This is what I wanted. I wrote it everywhere. A little green house. Three rooms of my own. Wood floors. A compost bin.
No one tells you how hard it is to stay with bliss. Campbell says, “Just stay with it, and there’s more security in that than in finding out where the money is going to come from next year.” But bliss isn’t soft. It isn’t a balm. Bliss is a burn. It has fingertips. It knocks. You open the door, and it disappears into the hall.
Desire fulfilled becomes another kind of absence.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek,” Campbell writes. Hecate stands at the cave mouth that inhales and exhales around her. The shimmer is real, but so is the shadow that carries it.
IV. RETURN TO PERIGEE
I refuse the hold. I’ve opened myself before. I know what rot looks like when it’s sealed. The scent of letting it out.
Anne Carson writes in “Short Talk on the Sensation of Aeroplane Takeoff:”
“Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!”
Bliss doesn’t wait for courage. It barrels in, buoyant and wild. Maybe all I’ve done is practice being ready.
I am thinking about this when Hecate turns around and swings the gate open, laughing.
The sunlight moves across the kitchen tile like an airplane over tidewater. I am not the woman in the myth. I am the moment she swallows the key.
V. ECLIPSE
“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you,” Campbell says.
Prufrock said, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” But I’ve heard the mermaids. They didn’t sing a lullaby. They pulled a song from under my tongue.
“Myth is the song of the universe,” Campbell writes. “It tells the story of how we are all connected.”
I am not waiting for my bliss. I am circling it.
This is the full moon of my life. I’ve lit a torch to meet it.
Works Referenced & Inspired
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
Anne Carson, Short Talks
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