- This is a short musing I wrote during this last Winter Solstice, during the Lunar Eclipse. It was free-writing, meaning I didn't stop to worry about sentence structure, grammar, or even making sense. It creates a much more raw, innate appeal in my writing when I do it that way. It's rough but it's interesting. It was just something I did to get all those pesky words out of my head. It skips around, hitting on more topics than just the solstice and the lunar eclipse; it goes into string theory and quantum mechanics here and there, because I was studying M-theory at the time, and it was all rattling around inside my mind. And I'm sure some of it is just pretty nonsense. ______________________________________________________________________________
Oh What Tacit Shameful Tithes Shall Betroth our Infant ivory orb with this Ill-Season?
The quarks and strings have forgotten to pluck the fruit from the limbs of trees so slacken with the bloated sugar-pulp of the ripest fruit in clustered galaxy or threads and sparks in shivering frenzy smaller than eye can see, and only in just such a way until some one's watching, and then it'll be every way but where some bare witness to the quantum fray. But the fruit bears a bite far too young in this night of betrothal in our fair equinox.
Like a feral child without sustenance for days, the solstice comes like a Bedouin's laggard mare trembling beneath the weight of sand always slacken in desert dune land and a charge atop thinking himself fit to wed the moon, ensorcelling the last of sweet light from her laudious rouge, and bequeath himself as her untimely bridegroom.
A tender, timid Luna, would some way be made know to me, some way to bemuse the eccentricities of orbit and polar tilt on our own axis and then you might be cherub sweet in the days that follow, our virgin-white frost-light saucer betwixt and enrapturing us in the lunar pull of ocean swell and swoon.
But the bachelor so debased who has refused to wait a few years pace will come to wed his babe-moon in the shadows silence of solstice tonight.
Far from gentle, patient farmers, and lent to seem the ravenous, rabid wills of fetid forest creature who has but a meager meal of chestnut and holly upon which to survive the unforgiving white-fall of tundra-thickets from lying afoot the disgrace of a night both darker and longer than it has been measure to be for some great craven-sum of many, many centuries.
How have the gods and great worlds become such poor farmers?
They eat the fruit of sapling tree and grind at the sopping gristle, the budding crescent of infant-fruit, jaundiced where the air singes the crevices and cavities left by the noxious salvation and nosh-chomps of fair-fruit plucked too soon in season to be bled for nectar and shucked for saccharine flesh.
Let the babes be bitter, chalky bulbs blesses to be upon mother bow until they ripen fully, until they are throbbing with shiny-rind, like a woman late with child will sometimes find her belly skin.
The luxen glean of buddlings engorged til they burst with sun-glut suppleness, swimming beneath pulled-to-shine rinds the sugars-swill of a man rewarded for patience and shrewdness of will.
He let the blossoms bloom to buddlings, and the buddlings grow to orbs, and the orbs became a bloated and bulbous harvest of sun-drunk citrus, branches buckling beneath the heavy globe of summer-courted strawberries and June-seduced blooms crowning the brow of apples and plums and peaches and all that which is ripe and ready when left alone until properly-sunned.
What season is this that the moon is sought for betrothal when yet since last the solstice came it was not long enough, and a bitter buddling is still our infant moon in the eon of time since then.
She ages on a pace much more bedrazed and withdrawn than do the smoke-cloud lives of human should ever hope to achieve, just a trickle of smoke upon the breathe of a Bedouin in the lonely Negev, upon an ass that tremors under the wait of his charge, the chivalrous cad.
That is the man who comes to ask the hand of our fair moon, and alas, her dowry is only a bit of iron ore at her molten core, and I am sure in this ill-fated season of axial tilt and polar precession at the perigee of perennial posturings, and foul is this brute we'll come to know as the bastard son who takes our Luna in the swift of night under the shadow of our back-turned cloak plume and a disgrace is he who turns cold and knowing and pallid all that is blushing and foolish and naive, for let her have -- before her summer comes to claim her -- let her know the bows of ancient arbors in the nursery of her orchard garden, to sup on sun and sweet soil, to grow in the lands for length where the roots beseech to river for water and the daytime for yellow bleary-bright sunlight, and let the buds want for not as they grow sweet with the late turn of summer season, only then robbing the bejeweled trees of ripe-limbed orchards, who have farmers decent enough to know that the sun and soil are the life of the plucked buddling.
And they will be so little a thing one can eat that if they are plucked indeed too soon out of impatience or deviance or a heart hungry and therein cruel, the flesh will be like the pulp of wet paper before it is sheeted and pressed to page-mesh, and the anxious man who weds the world too soon will be applaud upon his first night as groom when he betakes upon some new limb the fruit that withers in the waning night from the dusk-hour she was betrothed to her benefactor who chews the wax pulp of the bitter babe-fruit as though upon its cradle limb it had already plumped with some viscous decadence, as though the bulb of tender bloom had some delectable resolve upon the pallet, the mouth and teeth at resolve to take their bride come worst what may, and so they chew and chew the baby fruit the way vacuous livestock chew hay, the husband of fair moon will taste the bitterness of what he plucked too soon, doubt be not at that facet I think, but that he will falter when the greenness and unreardness of the flavor betray their pretense of indulgence and they will wish the soil had yet nursed this sapling a season's more.
They will wish the plow plundered fodder had fed the wife more befit to be a daughter until summers-age she had reached and peached.
But the moon is no nectarine, and the celestial canopy is not the bow that bears its weight.
It plumps upon the flaxen seams of gravity and entropy and relativity, and thus it is not something that can so soon be a centuries fair maid, but needs the adolescence of a hundred years more, before the eclipsing aperture of a closing door or heavy eyelids or paling daylight, come to shepherd luminous Luna into the dilation of time til the night is sworn endless till dawn breaks in slothful slow and grave restrained, and with the terrible elongation of the emptiness of vacuous nocturnal-solstice then reminded of the malice are again by the child of whom a mother tree once thought she would be privy to see the babe's long year-near bloom on branch-and-bow of her one plume and when she was plucked, a matron-orb she thought she'd nurse her to be, but a child-bride buddling wed and to a man plucking babes to suit his belly, well, disillusion grips the trip and sours the ciders when the fruit is taken from cradle canopy instead of waiting til they riped steady upon a limb in only gentle breeze may they be flustered in the worlds rhythmic tantivy.
Solstice summons us this night. Will the man too hungry to wait to wed in summer-come be so famished he can't stop at just one, but eats the arbor's bounty in the virgin days of bitter-wax buddling fruit when no sweet juice has come to fragrance the pulp, and will they just keep chewing their cud, like a Bedouin's meager mule, or a lot of cows who twice satiate pallet as they go about gnawing the bitter bulb of sap and their gut and rumens there-lower will curse the fruit and blight from it's sour but they shall chew until even the twiddled core has nothing left to plant for seed and thus, all that shall be of the winter bride-fruit is in the belly of those who from the dwindle-thin limbs did still without blanching at the sin prematurely drew the bud-fruit from limb and alas, as it is gnawed upon in utter repulsivity as though it holds some fruit, I can only but seethe and rue that alas all that shall be fostered of that child-bride is now not what seeds but what already last-yule grew.
Nothing from the tooth-whittled core can be salvaged, and nothing from the maize of mush in the mouth that chew will ever don the infant bud hue that was robed from the world on this night of petulant perigee.
Until morrow brings some more gradient of a week ahead in time that will come to pass and bring with slug-quest pace the return of the moons full efface and the correctness of the hour's length and nightfall's incandescent pallor will return again I know, once healed from the vows to her betrothed, and until this nocturnal destitution of wet and frozen wastelands passes over some blood never painted upon our earth's door, until the solstice sires our nightlight moon for his be-wed maiden who he shall kiss upon the alter of all the starry night in the heavens still a season's shy of harvest
for we are still stuck on the grand unification of everything but we're quelling it with quantum mechanics.
And either way it goes, governing god or a galaxy of unfeeling flux and probability, it is still the chapel of the night, our sky, which we cast our face up towards in dismal hope we shall find some meager reward, and we wish our tender worries upon the first star we see shivering brilliantly right back, and I don't particularly have anything I need and lack, so if I had only the blushen aura of the moon and the frenzy-swift ebbing of the hour to carry me through the solstice nuptials then I'm certain I'd have nothing with which to feel so encumbered, and yet I feel oppressed by this utter black and extra hour, and the time and vexing void of midnight in a truth I never knew it, has shamed me for what fears I may have harbored before it, for nothing is more wicked than the bridegroom of winter pillaged and lunacy be-wed to the frozen-defender, the foul and wicked groom who fondled the fair fruit before her bloom.
In the solstice tiding comes wakes of blackness so devoid it almost becomes a world its own...a world of what may have been by isn't, what should have been but will never be, what will surely become of us if linger, what will become of light in such blackness it leeches the world like the blight blessed-light and from this leprosy upon the day's delight the celestial sphere quivers in gradient of blanch, stark, all enrapturing dark, and when dawn and day's reclusive sun seem at last to be of no more, to have been never at all, to have been a mistake of mind, a wish of heart to star-fleck in tar-pitch of night like a ghost of the splendorous luster hey once hadn't trembled or blanched to muster, but meager is the light of far-off photons so old the shine those penlights show somber is but a ghost reflection of stars and planetary bodies that are likely no longer, just the ghost of photons traveling light years between stars that were in their youth and.
By the time we see those child stars with our eager eyes, the light carried to us has likely arrived when the star from which it came has long since imploded or simply faded away.
The starlight we see speaks of youth in the heavens above, but the light we receive from young stars aloft is now, in truth, ghost light from a-now old, old celestial body, waiting to die.
We see the star's golden years when they have, in reality, long since lost the good fight of nuclear fusion.
We see the stellar bodies in the heaven aloft as alive and well, though many have already turned cold and dead and small and dense, like a coal scattered far from kindled flame.
Even our sunlight is 8 minutes old. 186,000 miles per second squared is fast enough that everything else old; everything going slow enough to be matter rather energy -- particle rather than wave -- is an ancient specter of its previous self by the time our eyes are made privy to it.
Even Proxima Centauri -- only 4.2 light years away -- is 4.2 years older than it appears. It might even be gone already, and we'd have years yet to see it go.
But the winter solstice is more honest than any other night, as it is the darkest and the longest of the year.
And the darkness -- unlike light -- is new and real and now.
Hard and metallic and embers flickering dim in failing fission. when night is so long and ensnaring that the siren song of nothingness harks that light and day and the blessed sun were not of truth but were the pitiful tales of drunkards pipe dreams and the fears of night-washed world turned their back on science, without light to see, to observe, to test, to repeat.
The quarks won't let you get a good look anyway, so the final frontier was a bust in light or lapse, but we tried to be good sports about it and let them flux in phase and in ways thought impossible in the light of day and reason, we tried to catch them as they mad their move about the maps, like a child who hopes to catch her doll becoming animated and alive as soon as she leaves the room or falls asleep...a common wonder for a child, but when night befalls day for all time all adulthood is lost.
We are all these creatures, so traumatized, terrified, quivering, quixotic, dramatic, superstitious and ridiculous, we are all these children of ridiculous phobias that grip us and taunt us in the blackest, longest nights, and will not forsake our trembling enthrall until the day-shine bleats out the unreasoned, elucidates the absurdity of religion.
It exposes the shadows in childhood bedrooms that haunt us at nighttime -- shadows without furniture or object seeming to cause or cast them, creeping eerily and untethered along the wall.
These things are vanquished by day and sequestered by the solstice nights.
But I have lived with them all my life, even summer days tasted of some flavor I knew as fright.And when on winter long and withdrawn the world is lost to darkness, reverent of the old hymns and fable and folklore, then true as black be the absence or absorption of all visible light, believe this for certain, when the night takes the scientist and draws from him some child's tale or dogma's lore, know that it is certain and sure, the solstice and perigee of our depravity --of mind and method-- the lore is the wedding's maiden of honor, and she will be elegant and beautiful and don't think that proof -- the lore is the opiate of the niches, the scholars, the bards and dons and deans, the pedagogues and provosts and prodigies, and when this becomes a home for lore, the solstice frozen-night has won his child bride, and wed her as his whore.
The quantum flux is bemind to such things, so long as no one's measuring much. So we won't count the apples that fell from the tree, just the ones that become cider, and surely that's the closest thing we have mustered to being an outsider to our own trivial corporeal reprieve, which is but a breathe of air and upon the world's exhale, you become the smoke that bleeds from the pallet and tongue as thick as burdock's blightless in the sun until it hits the infinity coaxing it in all directions and becomes a diminutive fleeting echo of a ghost-gray pleated gust of satin smoke like ivy growing own along the invisible trellis arching from the foaming murky fodder of the human mouth.
A life is long so long as is an inhale of noxious sweet cigarette.
And long though you loan it in your lungs you must exhale before CO2 builds up, and thus, the smoke diffuses to attempt to fill the void in which our canopy of dense tropospheric gases cradle us as though we are always the infant to the ancient sages of celandine spheres in their Sisyphean revolve, as though always were it the days of blessed spring, and every Jovian globe and barren frozen ball alight in the universe is not only twirling in some jubilant parade but also the spin upon themselves, lackadaisically and unsteady, like toddlers around a ribbon-spun maypole.
Like children we are indeed until the day the world bestows the death-reprieve, but more so behave the celestial this season than do we mortals make name for ourselves as belligerent fawns or fledglings.
We would never deprave our sweet Luna, who's face shall never turn away.
A firm-rind and bitter waxen plush tells the haste-rioted orchard worker that the fruit he nurses upon has been weened from bow and branch too soon, and the ashen tuft they chew threw in the infantile fruit is all the natural proof one should need.
The night grows taciturn but the moon beams tandem on, despite her sweet disquiet.
The luxen-flushed Luna, the child bride betrothed to apses and orbit and gravity (the weak force, they call him, and thus he already feels vindicated in his vendetta, and alas there is little to be done, save for the vacuum of worlds where feathers from a robins breast falls in line and time with a dense red brick.
There's no real trick, but always there is a tug-of-war so wicked that if the poor moon should be seduced by the celestial moorlands far beyond her ellipse, she should eventually fall and slip, and well -- while not really a fall -- it would definitely be a slip, and soon she'd loose the tether of her repugnant husband planet. The winter solstice ushers in our ashen moon, and she sulks beneath the saturnine gown she dons to wed her groom. But soon she will cower in the sway of season, giving herself in disdain; she pales at the site of her bridegroom, and in a fevered trembling submission she is seized....
For lunacy drives the principality of royal December, who claims for himself a celestial
kingdom. He enjoys the spoils of war; his frost black fingers eclipsing the innocent ivory orb.
Fair Luna, so frail is she; to his servitude she is lent, listlessly.
The sickly shivering solstice-moon yields to tyrant gloom, and swiftly she is taken.
Tender, tainted moon; she who was married to ice and night too soon.
--Erin Wheeler--
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