AVANT SOUL

"I appeared before; you were too busy to notice," she answered. Her long hair was lovely and wispy and seemed to glow. It trailed in such a way that I couldn't quite tell where her hair ended and the mist of clouds began. Her face was so perfect and enchanting that I edged closer for a deeper look, and it was like falling into a reflection of total knowing. I felt myself gasp and my breath being taken away.

"May I come in?" she asked. "Come in?" I exclaimed, as if the most haunting and elegant gypsy had appeared with a hurdy-gurdy and trained capuchin in a gold and scarlet suit, and asked only for a biscuit, "Of course you may come in!"

A blast of cold air was sucked in through the doorway, and I found myself shivering. I gasped. Ice crystals, fantastic prismatic shapes of wind and thought crystallized into streams of being, hung in the air and wrapped around her like a shawl whose tendrils pressed into my mind with tenderness and pain.

"Please don't kill me," I said, easing into her eyes.

She laughed, but the sound had just enough of a hollow base to give me chills. "My dear boy, if I were to kill you, what good would you be to me? How could you serve me?" And she settled into my large rocking chair and began to sing a song so eerie and sad that my emotions began to puddle, and as I cried, my tears transformed into butterflies which shattered as hail against my windows.

"Open your windows, boy," said the enchantress of the moon. "Don't be scared."

I was gripped with excitement and simultaneously a sense of freedom, and leapt up to open the living room windows into the rose garden. Only then did I notice the iridescent silver and copper and metallic sheen of her gown which still trailed out my front door, where tiny puffs of mist and steam quivered with her every motion like unspoken prayers.

"What do you want of me?" I asked. The tears began to stream again from my eyes. All the sorrow I'd felt from my illness began to release, as each tear coalesced into the most dazzling butterflies and moths, emerald and burnt orange, crimson and sienna brown, forest green and sky blue. Antennae trembling and quivering, they followed one another and formed kaleidoscopic patterns, as if my every thought and emotion could be seen as motion and color, before fluttering out the window.

"You are to serve me in the expression of art and beauty," replied the enchantress.

"Kiss me now."

I tripped over my feet in my eagerness to approach her, and she wrapped her arms around me. As she drew me into that shimmering pull and glow of her visage, I felt her fingernails scratching through the cloth of my shirt, and I practically fell into her lips which enveloped me like a flower enfolding a bee.

"You need to breathe," she said, and there was again that laugh, mocking my pain and raising some inner eyebrow to my self-seriousness and to all within me that had not yet been created. I felt my lungs explode with air as I broke away from her lips which looked not even slightly smudged, though I was exhausted from the depth and revelation of one rippling kiss.

"And why should I breath?" I asked, raising my voice in anger. "Why not just kiss you into infinity, and die in your arms, and get it over with?" "May I have some mint tea?" replied the enchantress of the moon. And I made mint tea for her and served it with my grandmother's tea service: pale red roses etched onto bone china with a pattern of vines and tiny white lilies.

I stared at her glumly, like a boy who had been caught raiding the cookie jar and who no longer desired his regular supper.

"Bring paper and pen. Begin writing," she commanded.

I did as she said and knelt by her feet. Her gown wrapped around me like waves which were ready to upset my every sense of balance, not unlike a ship lifted into a moonlit night with no rudder and only the sails of pure thought to keep me from capsizing into complete breakdown.

"Steady now," she said. "Apply your pen to paper, not to me."

I looked down and saw that I had been writing my sonnets onto her thighs. Her laughter shot to the ceiling and exploded into nightingales and sparrow hawks and what looked like a few baby gargoyles which scampered up into the vent of the attic.

"Steady now," she said. "Stay focused."

And I began to write and write until the sorrow in my soul began to be appeased. The boat of my soul sprouted a leaf which became a sail drawn tight by a lotus blossom, opening and uncoiling. I was spinning! I soared against the stars from the Cone Nebula fourteen trillion miles away and tumbled into knowingness. Sounds erupted in a fountain splattering my face with droplets of light, thoughts streaming into a veritable river where each word merged into a petal of a flower, a blossoming of translucent hues, of diaphanous mind-stuff, and I peered through the petals to view the pulsating veins of comets.

My pen was translucent and shot through with color. Anthers of its words stuck themselves to the rudder of an even larger blossom of an unfurling magnolia, and my vessel was carried in the current of consciousness like a hand with countless fingers. I gazed through the creamy white petals which engulfed me and watched the fiery lattice work of faraway galaxies.

The tiniest black dots seemed to be pollen, yet were virtual distant black holes connected to threads of fluttering filaments pulling my craft in that invisible night. I was naked except for a top hat, stretched through various explosions of awakenings. The buds of numinous poems opened to arrays of tea cakes and sandwiches, my writing desk of attention balancing silver trays of succulent canapés and appetizers strung to a tablecloth studded with mouths and the flickering faces of hungry souls. The music was so effortless that, again, I cried, but this time my tears sung themselves into diamond-shaped droplets and paisleys swirling in space, miniature mandalas woven like jewels in the web of the transfigured night.

I forgot myself, forgot my bills and letters due, forgot the people I was attempting to help, forgot the car needing a tune-up and my teeth needing to be cleaned, the leaves waiting to be raked in the backyard, as expanding, then contracting into better-balanced spirals of understanding, I finally saw what my true place is, why I am here, and in one instant I was healed.

"Very good," said the enchantress. "Keep writing." I felt a bit ill.

The door to my tiny house opened. She carefully lifted herself up from my rocking chair, glowing yet very contained, to keep her luminosity from spilling out. And daffodils with pale white daisies, fuchsias and buoyant narcissus, sprang through the polished wooden floors of my home, as if the ground had become a proper bed for a field of flowers. I looked at the walls which had imprisoned me and saw only rich growth, with a winding verdant path leading into the lush wilderness, a large walking staff suitable for a king, and a pair of winged sandals, which fit as if they'd been made for me.

I fed the cats and put on the sandals. Removing the cloak of my sadness, I took the path into the forest and never looked back.

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