The garden in full moonlight

When I got up at 4 this morning -- my usual waking time for the next dingdong working day -- my first task as always was to indulge the cats (dogs have owners, cats have servants) by putting out Whisker Lickins Crunch Lovers treats for Violet our Siamese and splitting a can of Fancy Feast mackeral feast for our ever-growing kittens Hugo and Belle. Then I went outside, first to the back porch where I fed Cecil Greykitty his Fancy Feast (dry and wet) and then to the front stoop where I settled with Mamacita, as I usually do, sitting with her while she ate her bowl of food. We should buy our Fancy Feast by the rail car.

Anyway, as I sat with Mama I reveled in the moon-drenched night, milk-silver light over the house and yard and street in that eerie brilliance that peaks toward infinity when the moon grows fullest, beaconing and beckoning the mind back to the first world, our first time, nourished for so long in the womb of the world. The October moon for some reason is most special, brighter and wilder than the twelve other moons of the lunar year. This full moon – it’s called the Hunter’s Moon -- which follows September's Harvest Moon is when darkness has reclaimed enough of the early and late day to become a dooring presence, the year's slow fateful dying fall held up in a strangely golden lunar light the full glory of autumn. Amen.

Whatever the case, our garden in this moonlight is so beautiful. I sat and meditated with it as Mama tore softly at her food. Stroking her jet-black fur I watched the Mexican petunias weave to a faint breeze so willowy and tall; the pinwheel jasmines were like a pair of noctal Graces at the garden's entrance awaiting their third sister to begin their dance. The African violets and Indian hawthorne are still and black yet fulsome in the light, dreamers deep in the womb of their sleep, refreshing in the night's blue depths before another day of sunsoak, albeit a short and shorter one. Here in Florida we've had a few notes of cool but autumn has been a manifestation mostly of ebbing light; but the fronts will come, in a few weeks, and cool eddies will begin to fill in from the early and late parts of the day. It will come: that certainty is here in full moonlight this early morning ...

The six-month anniversary of Timm's death is a few days away. Tonight's October moon tells me that his death is real and not, enough time ago to feel like there is history without Timm in this world and yet, especially in the silver-black light of the otherworld, be so small in duration that he is here, standing somewhere out just beyond the garden, showing up for a visit which I forgot we had planned - you know? I read in one of Timm's journals this morning that Timm was taking blood pressure medication in 1997, eleven years before his heart attack; his heart malaise was old, older than that, a blend of history and mystery, of temperament and physiology, a tale which we'll only know the tangents of, like the part of darkness which glows, along its outer- and upper-most surfaces, in moonlight, with the greatest half of the heart obscured now below, now forever so (but oh, how I continue to stand here at the shore of my brother, peering with all of my heart into those depths, believing I'll find him there ...)

Time and Timm have become homonyms of him: I can't believe he's gone; I think the phone will ring and it will be him, just checking in, swapping stories of looking for work or sponsoring guys in AA or finding out some way to make our passion for photography or writing pay for itself. That cold wet weekend in Salem, still in the grips of another people's winter, seems apolunar to this morning and is -- this moon beams over all that has passed since then (and oh, brother, so much has happened in our world): Yet it's the same moon as the one where you and I walk together in it, walking and talking, brother to brother, selves of some same root, together forever as we never quite were in life ...

This moon we share yet can't, is a symbol for the impossibly true relation we still have, or will have as long as I believe in it and do what I can to keep it alive in my heart. You know? The dead fade, they hike off so far into oblivion we can't see them any more, don't reognize their voices in our sleep, I don't know, they lose their vital colors, becoming vast in the singular dark white spectra of the full moon, here, here, standing in the garden in moonlight yet gone, walking on some vastly booming shore with all the others we loved and lost, grandparents and lovers and spouses and siblings and pets, the sound of their footsteps, once so intimate in the creaky reaches of a house, now lost in the fomenting curve and crash of that surf which will claim all of us someday and take us where they have gone.

But this morning, in this moonlight, I believe he's here. O Hunter's Moon, find him ...

Bring him home ...