False Hope

Full Moon, October 9, 2022

December 4, 2018

The one who paints merges with the woman who grieves, the pain too intense not to bleed out, blurring the edges between them. 

In twenty days he will be dead one year.  No, no, no, no…dead?  No.  A year.  No. One year, one day, forever and yesterday.  Dread and sorrow fill her still.  She’d wanted to be a vessel, her heart a red hot alchemical vessel, transmuting grief into the gold of love.  She had hoped.

A blue night sky, full moon nestled in the crook of an old tree, a thick black root morphs into a large hand cradling the vessel, her vessel, the woman who grieves.  Inside, she sits, her image doubled, the dark woman and the golden woman.  Despair and hope.  Despair she believes in.  So little fire to heat this pot, she worries. She doesn’t yet know that being flayed and scoured kindles the fire.  She thinks of settee in India.  The burning body of the husband, mercifully dead, ignites the living body of his widow, writhing in the fire.  It’s like that.

The painter wonders, is this alchemy.  She turns the painting upside down.  The tree now the figure of a man, moon held between his thighs, the way he once held the woman who grieves him.  His hand a blessing on the overturned vessel.  Her life.

She sees the woman tumbling to earth, the hot liquid nigredo a baptism, the Dark Mother sanctifying her marriage to the darkness where things grow.  Love cradles the seed of memory, of longing, of the broken heart.  Grieving woman feels no moon, no night, no seed.  No thighs, no hands.  Held in the Mother’s black mud, she hears the wind, the crickets and knows her soul.  It is not gold, not sunlight, soul births soul, deepens Mystery, rides the swells and ebbs of life, the dark night’s journey.  And makes more soul.

Her body, the crucible.  Searing anguish, the nigredo.  She waits.