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 up 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.
Maracas,
a tambourine, a tambour.
Three women
making music, snaking
through the waist-high grass towards me
dancing around the fire,
flashing eyes, shaking breasts, slapping 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,
the price appears.
Bruce,
swaggering, sardonic,
Satanic Master of the Seventh Ring,
arbiter, voyeur, Collector of Souls.
Mine's at peril here,
a Dark God is hungry for
an immaculate sinner
and I rail against the possibilities,
climbing onto a picnic table which wants to
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 us, still hungering for Blood.
As a brood of ducklings following mother passes by
one of us gathers stones and stands.
Let the Pond be I say,
Let the ducks live
Let the Pond be
Let the ducks live
over and over and over
an absurd, simplistic mantra
my last plea for purity.
The rocks drop from his hands
he sits down, and
the Sun rises.
Robert Douglas Hickey
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