Even Celts Get Moon-eyed on Saturday Night

Even Celts Get Moon-eyed on Saturday Night          
            
     I remove my frock to bathe in a spring-fed pool. But as I draw closer, I spy a woman behind the shrubbery drinking from the same pool. I approach slowly as not to frighten her. I begin with, “Sorry to behold your nudity. Most maidens run wild as the Irish Ivy here. But you don’t seem to mind.”            
     She could be any woman out of a thousand. I breathe the name she went by like the murmur of a dream. But if she is another and seduces me then woe betide me for I will have banished myself to a life with a stranger. We always find each other no matter how far apart on the planet we are born. Morning wonder sighs through my heart which throbs only for her.              
     Soon the noon sun casts its warm rays upon her bare body. Her long curly black tresses of hair fall down around her shoulders in a luxuriant canopy.            
     Clouds pass over us casting shadows. The clouds are fringed with a lace of fiery golden light as they block the sun. When they pass, we are once more immersed in a bath of solar warmth. I watch silently as the sun makes its path across the sky. Soon the sun sinks below the rise of land. We are immersed in a sea of darkness. So far she shows no sign of recognition of me. If words were gold she would be a miser.              
      She gazes at her reflection in a pool illumined by the flash of fireflies as Helios dips below the horizon. Venus emerges in the night sky. It is a bright white gem shining in the east. The summer night breezes are warm and brush against my skin softly. The full moon rises above us. It casts its pale yellow light on my fevered skin. I feel warmth rise from my belly only to swell through my arms, legs, hips, and thighs. I sink into a blissful sleep.              
     The sun rises in the sky. We walk through green grass by the artesian well water. I feel the moist earth under my bare feet. I ask her, “Is your native tongue Gaelic or were you schooled in Latin by the Romans?” The only sound is birdsong. I stick my tongue out. She mimics me by pointing her tongue at me. I press my fingertip upon the tip of her tongue and repeat my question but her only response is “ahhhhh.”            
     If she be the one I seek, the only way to know is to share objects that only the spirit who animated her former body would recognize. So I draw a pentagram in the mud. She grabs a stick and inscribes Rowena her name from the olden days. I take a stick and draw the Celtic “Trinity Knot.” Her eyes open and her soul light shines through them. Then she puts her stick down and tears form in her eyes. I don’t know whether she is crying for love or despair. My heart sinks.            
     “I took liberties by gazing upon your bare body. I presumed the women here cared not a whit if men saw them naked as a shamrock in the forest. This may be the cause of your silence. You have my apologies.”            
     I take her hand, hold her finger in the mud, and with it I etch ‘Cian’ in the muddy soil. She smiles like the risen sun. She repeats, “Cian, Cian, Cian.” I blush and she touches my cheek.            
     She addresses me, “You surmised correctly that being naked in front of a strange man was the source of my quiet. But you are no longer a stranger. What moniker do you go by now?”              
     I reply, “Tristan is my name.”            
     Rowena replies, “I hope you don’t mind that I rent my clothes and tied the rags to a tree leaving me bare as a rowan in winter. I was on a pilgrimage to the spring that feeds this pond which any true Celt must know is a cloutie well. This is my way of honoring the spirit of the well and thereby bringing the luck of the Irish to this lass and any passersby such as yourself. But enough of my babbling, tell me what brought you here.”            
     “My travels had been along the eastern shore of our fair island. The pull of the western sea drew me here.”            
     The sun finds its way across the ancient path of the sky. Unlike the fireball, we do not sleep with the shades of dusk.            
     Rowena leads me into a thermal pool where bathing in the steamy water might give rise to offspring. Rowena prostrates herself upon the pool shore like a Buddhist monk in prayer. She curtsies like a bridesmaid whose wedding gift is an invitation to sightsee her backside scenery which is just inches from my face.            
     Smoke from aboriginal funeral pyres rises on the horizon. The incense of burning bodies wafts on the moist breeze. The fragrance of the distant burning bodies reminds me that the flesh is fleeting like the wind or a whisper of love in the night.            
     I say, “OK here is the plan. I will write hex symbols on your derriere. Like any good Celtic woman, you should know them and be able to describe them to me. Are you up for it?”            
     “Well, my bottom always was sensitive to the brushstrokes of the shaman when he painted me blue for our Druidic rites of spring. So my feel for touch should give me a good interpretation.”            
     I reply, “Just stand still. If nothing else you may enjoy the sensation of my fingers as I draw shapes on your posterior.”            
     I stand behind her and she is motionless as though mesmerized by the feel of me tracing swirls upon her skin. For just a moment her bottom quivers perhaps from nervousness or maybe excitement I can’t tell which. But the moment passes and she regains her composure.            
     She says, “Please use dye when designing me. That way you can see what you are doing better. I already have prepared blue dye from the Woad plant in anticipation of such an evening as this. You will find it in the Mortar by the clover patch where the pestle already has done its work.”            
     My fingers do a wild dervish dance on her derriere stroking her into a fey passion. I dip my fingers in the Woad puddle and write pentagrams into her elegant orbs. My river of cursive flows down her buttocks with “Celtic Tree of Life” on one cheek “Trinity Knot” on the other after the ink dries.            
     Hex symbols take shape from the dye on my fingertips upon the canvas of her skin.            
     She gets excited and says, “You stained a good luck sign on my bottom! Your tracery upon my skin feels like when a girl drew her name upon my hand with her quill. The lines move across me like cursive writing. It feels like you are writing a love note upon my cheeks for only you and me to read.”            
     I take my treasured book of spells out of my knapsack. It will serve a different purpose which she has yet to see.            
     I reply, “This is a book of spells for any occasion. I consider this to be the right one.”            
     “Are you the sole proprietor of your hexes? Because exclusivity will be in the past. Besides, My Gaelic is so rusty my responses might give you tetanus.”            
     “The book is papyrus thickly rolled around a wooden rod and encased in a cotton sleeve.”            
     “Is that book important to you? Such a rod is best used for Rolfing my little valentine. But it will be rendered asunder once put to your intended use.”            
     “It should be comfortable for you.”            
     “Your fingernails are those of a woodsman, rough and unhewn. When the combination of the steam and your brush down brings about my blush, I want you to pinch my bottom for being Irish and not wearing green. But you know, one day my dream is for all the paper books to be recycled into posters for husbands and wives lost to nefarious home-wreckers.”            
     “Yes, that way the spouses could face off their competitors on hopefully even ground.”            
     “Think of all the trees felled in our ever more denuded Irish forests all to build armories for our wars,” she says.            
     “Our woodlands are the lungs of the earth. To what useful purpose do our wars serve? It is time for sanity on this planet lest we perish” I say.            
     “Oh and don’t get me started on honeybees. They have a utopian matriarchal society with the queen bee at the center. And they are the key to the pollination of fruits and some vegetables.”            
     “The male drones meet death before their lives have truly begun.”            
     She says, “Yes but they do so in ecstasy after inseminating a virgin queen. Mating with a virgin is the ubiquitous male dream. Their penis is ripped from them during sexual intercourse in a sacrifice for the sake of the colony, truly a noble purpose.”            
     “Well aside from their macabre but necessary mating ritual what is the trouble in bee land?”            
     “The vinegar our farmer’s use as a pesticide is wreaking havoc on the drone’s potency. The drones, whose primary role is to inseminate a virgin queen, are becoming impotent. They are shooting blanks.”            
     “Where on earth did you learn so much about bees?”            
     “I read the book ‘Naturalis Historia’ by the Roman author Pliny the Elder. Sadly that was his last book before Vesuvius consumed his mortal coil.”            
     “We think alike on this issue and others to I bet.”                
     She looks back at me with a wicked grin. Our dance of words opens a door. “There is a deed repository nearby where I worked once upon a time. As a worker in a civil records office, I surmise that I am a document you could check out for whatever legal proceedings you might need me for. Would you like to check me out and take me home? You can only have me for one the duration of the court proceedings.”            
     “Don’t I get renewals?”            
     “Unlimited renewals as long as you keep me in good condition. You know it’s just you and me alone here.”            
     When she shifts to distribute the steamy heat from one spot to others, I slide the book between the fertile crescents of her inner thighs. I feel the pages unfurl beneath my fingers but firmly held in the cotton sleeve. Her thighs clench the book like the wand of the warlock for whom she clefts.            
     “Get my literary groove on by performing a corporeal ritual with that rolled-up spell book to swat my derriere. Go ahead, don’t be shy. I won’t tell on you. This is consensual after all.” What starts off as a tap dance on her wiggly valentine turns into her leavened joy as her buns rise to the urgency of my touch until her first pink blush of dawn forms deep moans from her diaphragm. She exclaims, “Your hands are the summer sun upon my tomatoes.”  
     “Knowing my pink lace work is more than visual art but that you feel the ribbons in a concupiscent way makes my illustration as satisfying to me the artist as if it hung in a museum.”
     “Glad to have provided shelf wear for your book,” she says. “This is a book I can’t put down,” she says between gasps.              
     Her reminder to wear green comes as promised courtesy of my claws.            
     “Now, please recite some hexes to bind me as your lady.”            
     I reply, “You were forged by the blacksmith of the dungeon Lord with iron in your veins and fire in your heart. Your molten love was to be given shape by an anvil.”            
     “Having shelved your book, your recitation sends sheet-lightning through the bookends of my thighs.”            
     “When Orion ran across the Irish hills your cast iron feet caught fire and found flight. They became light as a flame dancing on the range in search of the only sustenance a woman can thrive on.”            
     She says, “And what, pray tell, would this be that is the sole provender for a woman such as I?”            
     “For men love is a sigh of Zeus that lasts a century. For women, it is the moan of Aphrodite that lingers for millennia.”            
     Giggles of delight are born from her burgundy lips. She says, “I am a bit drunk now, pardon my mirth.”                
     I say, “But you haven’t been drinking?”            
     She replies, “The thrust of your arm was strong. I am drunk on your manly brawn.”            
     Fireflies blink on and off like stars in the Galactic night. Our little-winged lanterns illuminate the trail to a bed of moss softened more so by the welcome of a patch of clovers.            
     On the rise in the land, the flames of the funeral pyres glow as she leads me into realms of light and darkness.            
     Her touch is the rich earth that nourishes my roots. Her body is the open flower craving my pollen. She opens each petal of my heart with gentle persistence and lays bare my center. She gently cradles my most secret self-holding the vulnerable egg of my deepest feelings. She tenderly strokes the nexus of my sensate swell.            
     Our floating flashbulb friends illuminate us imprinting my retinas. Our tail haloed friends blink merrily to the tune of her deep-throated warble to let me see the passion play on her face as though she were a soul rising in ecstasy from purgatory into heaven.            
     And the years pass as our faces grow wrinkled.            
Simple tasks fill the hours. We walk the memorized paths from the seashore to our home in the hills. My life as a fisherman brings us sustenance and income. Though Rowena has fished from the beach she desires to go out on a boat with me to experience for her own self offshore fishing.              
     So we take to the ocean in our currach with our crew rowing us so far out that a storm capsizes us into a grave that has no name. But my love and I find ourselves sailing a heavenly sea until we are welcomed ashore by those who went before us.              
     There, the fish swim freely as I become a farmer whose crops feed us in this new earth. One night my wife hears a knock on the door. We are told our lease on this land has expired and we must move on. There is no need to bundle our woolens as we lock up our home and part ways with the hope that the life we made together will find a new lease.