Seven

BOND

I become better at this existence, and I begin to do what I did not do enough when I walked the earth. I go off, as men do to war, to test and challenge my cocoon of light. I go in search of storms. Over the archipelagos I find a system bigger than a city, and in its maelstroms, I weave my silver thread, keeping it taught, like a fishing line in breakers. I feel the currency of winds and water strain against my neck. I come close to hearing the torrents as they beat upon my thread. I am able to pursue a course through the electric vortex, even though the blitz shakes my heavenly hologram, and cauterizes my consciousness. In some ways it is a pleasant madness. But the day is late when I finally find you.

You are a candle, a pair of candles. One is glowing gently in the dull late afternoon light. Only rainy shadows poke through, dampening what's left of the room into a blur.
One candle is dull and cold, but under your fingertips, she's a blue flame that quickens into sparks and then the warm flame oozes over, dancing a slow dance with yours. Your waxy bodies glow, and drip, and shine with melted delight.

The lightning has burnt afterimages in my brain, and they begin to spin like roulette wheels through kaleidoscopes. I sit beside your twitching feet. And the rhythm draws me along the soul ties and eggy yolks that we lash onto our lives. I see faces and bursting and gulping, the soft sweet kisses in an Oxford meadow...the winter lips sweet like maple syrup whispering under a Scottish castle.
I flash through my own airport trips and hotel rooms. Babies come from some of these couplings, and sometimes we want them, most times we don't.
I made a mistake, though a mother cannot think of a child in that way. But now I am here, and I see clearly that it was.

But you are my son, and you are not a mistake. The gaffes were made in whirlwinds of desire and lust and love, and so who can say what mistakes were not just magic and holiness mixed into the chaos.
These ministrations make me cry, because here is the surest sign that I have left an indelible mystery behind for you to solve. Is this girl really the girl you see, or do you haunt her meaning with motion pictures of me? Is her hair really blonde or dark, or short or long? Beneath the hue of the candle, time warps through the room, taking you both to families and marriages you will never know, but may yet come to pass as you both drip and breathe and merge.

Here her face is old, and her womb has been unlocked at childbirth, and then locked again through neglect. Will you still be my son, with another son's mother; a son, I imagine, younger than mine. Will you be a son, larger than the son's mother, burning with youthful thrusts, using all your power and vigor to wake the dead husband, the dead wife inside her? Will you try to shake the babies and staleness from her domesticated flesh? Or will you let it go, let the ghosts say goodnight, and emerge each day, not a son, but a man, with a lover who is not your mother?
Will you emerge like a candle, where the lateness of the day turns to the darkness of the night, but the candle bursts even brighter?

Have I left a hollow that you will spend your whole life looking for ways to fill? Or can you, being starved for air, for so long, then swim your way through the heavy yolks, and into fresh water and open your mouth at last to the free air that smokes above this sea?

I sink through the walls and into the rain, and bolt along a slow shard of energy. It hisses as I walk along it. It throbs with light, but it is a no more than a candle facing the Heavens.