631 - The Singer Drinks, the Drinker sings

The Diem of Purification of Thoroughfares Arterial dawned very quiet this year.  I peeled my eyes open slowly and gazed across the wreckage of our bed, all limbs and pillows and crumpled sheets and faces and hair. I was no artist of any kind, but I was seized with the urge to paint the beautiful lines of everyone’s entangled limbs.

Ky’s head was on Gan’s shoulder and Fara’s on his belly, His head was pillowed on my thigh.  We’d washed and played and smoked Arkanherb and made love as many times as he and I could manage, and the Fara and Ky showed us men to be easily vanquished there.  I had to smile it was such a beautiful memory.

Altras lay stretched along the narrow top of the headboard, paws hanging, and I could hear Bella’s snort from the rug next to the bed.  Doof sat on a chairback, fluffed and her tail trailing down.  Last night she’d been completely disgusted by our ignoring her in the baths and come back to the suite.  When we came back she’d whistled and reviled us as we giggled and fed each other with our fingers.

I was sweaty under where Gan’s head was, and stiff all over.  I managed to sit up without dragging any of the rumpled sheets over anyone, it was so warm, shifted my thigh and Gan groaned and moved to stuff a pillow under his head in his sleep.  I stood for a long, long time at the side of the bed and just drank in how beautiful my knot of lovers was... My wife, my heartsbrother, his wife.  It felt like my heart was expanding in my chest, so full of joy that if I moved it might spill out all around me somehow.

I tore myself away, finally, because the pressure from my body, to visit the garderobe, splash cool water on my hands and face, found a fresh silk robe that had mysteriously appeared just inside the outer door to the suite, along with a jug of fresh juice and clean cups on the table.  “Thank you,” I said to the empty air, “but you really shouldn’t do this in Jitzmitthra.”  There was no answer, of course.

I took my juice over to my desk and lowered my wonderfully achy self onto my chair.  Bella shambled out of the bedroom to groan down on my bare feet.

I found myself doodling trailing hearts and flowers and smiley faces all along an edge of paper and then I began writing.

Love... I am a fool and thus wise, this single word is my fortune. This folly, this indiscipline, thought experiment, this drunkenness, is the harp-song of the One who plays at folly.  My fortune, oh thou child of wisdom, is folly and I bid thee cherish it.

Love whole and full and let it spur you to great deeds and wild abandon.  Let wounded heart, cut by logic, hardened with sense, be watered and soften to allow the wildest of variations grow. Living variations might yet be better than any gone before.  Rigid lines of Creation limit. Let the Singer draw the art out of the science and teach the song.

Loss of variation means death.  Dry death knows no love. Dust, ashes, and life out of rot beneath a lens know naught of love. Weep loving tears and know that thou art alive, because thou lovest.  Love grows only in the beating divine hearts, the living, pulsing, red flow of human history.   

Love will save the most forzak soul, even from darkest, coldest, most airless of Hayels. 

Love deep.  Love true.  Love more.  Anything or anyone who bids you hate, is incorrect, a life withered.  Anyone who bids you love, listen to them. Anyone who tells you that their path of love is the only one, is mistaken.  Life loves profligately. Love is as infinite as the number of creatures who love.

The Singer drinks, the Drinker sings. Of life. Of love.

I laid down the pen and re-read it.  Then I disturbed Bella and got up to tip-toed into our chapel, and fetch my Holy Book from the altar to copy this into the blank pages.  It seemed like something a Divine would say.  I had the image of Risae in my head and wondered. Mikas was often called the Singer. But Risae was certainly the least likely of the Ten, I would have said, who would praise love.

Ky and I, in the white robes, with Gan and Fara with us, stood behind Kallijas as he pulled the lever to release the cleansing water for the above Rim reservoir; to the cheering crowd out of the city.  I showed my loves what had flowed out of my pen that morning and they thought it was beautiful and told me to stop thinking I was not a poet.  We argued gently and teasingly about it all day.

Our wedding guests had a wonderful view of the city being scrubbed down to within an thumb-width of its life.  Reknarja’s princess particularly liked the soap fights she could see.

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Happy  Valentines Day, everyone.