House of Refuge, Chapter 8

8 Yarrow

The beginning of supper was agony for us all.

Space had been set aside for Arrowshot and Brightsong as my visitors, with Willowwind on Arrowshot’s other side as his beloved.  Brightsong refused to sit next to me and took his seat between the other two. Willowwind sat with his hand on Brightsong’s arm. Yellowwood had changed places with Starcourse. I saw misery in his eyes when he looked across to us from where he now sat. “If it could have gone worse, I don’t know how,” I told Arrowshot.

“You could have made it easier on him,” he said, turning towards me and lowering his voice. “He didn’t have to see the two of you carried completely away with each other. Witnessing a little mild affection between the two of you would have taught him the last of what he needed to understand before tonight.” I knew his frustration wasn’t only for Brightsong’s sake. His own Full Moon, and his one day of reunion with Willowwind before heading back down country, were all but certainly ruined.

“We never meant it to go so far,” I said. “It just happened, when you’d barely taken him to Willowwind. And then we lost track of time.”

“Couldn’t the two of you have just given it a rest, for his first Full Moon?” he pressed on. “The lad’s heart was so open. He’s longed for you so desperately.”

He held it in for a moment and then let the rage flow. “It’s times like this I understand why our father came back down country.”

“That’s not fair,” I shot back. “We made a mistake. We never intended to hurt him.

“And maybe you’re forgetting how hard it is for all of us to set aside what our whole life down country led us to expect life would be like here,” I added.

“No,” he said, and turned to see Willowwind still talking to Brightsong, cradling my nephew-down-country’s hand in his. “I think that’s what you’re forgetting. Maybe what everyone who lives up here has forgotten. He saw your tenderness with Yellowwood when we first arrived. He already understood we’ll all be together under the Tree tonight. Isn’t that enough? How much do you expect a newcomer to take in on his first afternoon?”

“Enough that our life here isn’t held hostage to the jealousies men from down below think they’re entitled to when they arrive,” I retorted. “Men coming up here trying to lay claim to one another almost tore Refuge apart before we began showing them our life from the outset. Ask Firesong. He still remembers what it was like when he was young. ’Twice-begotten and twice-born in Cernunnos’: birth isn’t easy, Arrowshot. If it were, the Staghorn Lord himself might never have come up country. A House of Refuge wouldn’t exist at all.

“We’re not one another’s husbands. We’re not one another’s wives. He has to understand that from the beginning.” I wasn’t happy for the severity in my own voice. Perhaps it flowed, at least a little, from what was left of my own regrets in my first days coming here, for what I hoped to find and didn’t--before what I found instead came to seem even richer. And prayed Brightsong was too absorbed with Willowwind to overhear. How could I long for him so deeply, even as I knew that being united with him meant letting him go as well?

I didn’t expect tears streaming down my cheeks. Nor my brother-down-country turning to cradle my face in his hands. Mercifully, there was enough conversation humming in the hall to make them less conspicuous. Others near us looked decorously away, turning to their own talk. Save for Brightsong and Willowwind.

The lad’s eyes melted and welled up as well. He reached across Arrowshot to take my hand. Arrowshot almost immediately moved his stool back from the table, stood up, and laid a hand on his shoulder,  encouraging him to switch places.

“This isn’t the reunion either one of us hoped for,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Brightsong broke in, and then sobbed, “I just want to be with you. I can’t stand not being with you.”

Yellowwood has told us both that for the rest of supper we looked more like two sixteen-year-olds rutting for each other than a newcomer talking with a man who’d taken Refuge years earlier. I felt more like a sixteen-year-old. My need for him was as strong for him as his for me. Perhaps not as desperate, for my time here. Even so, years of my own desire, mounting ever higher but ever more pent-up as he’d ripened toward manhood, poured out between us in that short space before the end of the meal. We were the last ones to leave the tables when everyone else had withdrawn to the far side of the hall in conversation with a draft of mead and a brazier on which some hemp seeds already smoked to help ease us all out of our small selves and into the Soul of Cernunnos.

I can’t say how much he really understood by the time Full Moon began. It’s one thing to grasp such things with the mind, another to feel them them in the heart, the belly, the loins. It was pointless telling him that my love for Yellowwood could never replace what he meant to me, that it wasn’t a contest for anyone to win or lose. That, and all such truths, can only be lived into. I could only offer a prayer of thanks to the Staghorn Lord that he’d brought my beloved here, and a prayer that His healing power would open his heart to the infinity of love of which we’re capable. If not under the Tree that night, then in the fullness of time.

As we walked down the length of the hall, he released my hand and walked directly up to Yellowwood to lay a hand on his heart. I could see that he’d startled himself no less than Yellowwood. They both stood awkwardly for what felt like a much longer time than it could have been--and then began laughing. Arrowshot saw it, with initial alarm at the thought of what his son-down-country might have intended, approaching the man he saw as a rival, and then with relief.

A little later, the mead and the burning hemp seeds began having their effect on us as they’d already done on the men who’d withdrawn from supper before us. Welling up within me I felt my longing to go the Tree--a desire I saw sweetly mirrored in the gestures of men toward one another all around the hall. Brightsong, unaccustomed either to strong drink or the smoke, hung on my neck like a vine on an elm tree, but watched in fascination to see Arrowshot standing chest to chest with Willowwind, whispering together, their arms around one another’s necks. Yellowwood, bless his dear and generous heart, withdrew to the company of his other closest friends.

And then the moment when so often we move together like a flock of birds, all knowing when to turn as one toward their place of their rest, witness to the Soul of Cernunnos already blossoming within us. Without words, without the bell ringing to summon us, we all flowed from the hall, out along the walkway, around the side of the dormitory to the welcoming darkness of the Great Tree silhouetted by the rising moon.

House of Refuge, Chapter 7: A Queer Utopia, Continued

7 Brightsong

Inside, light slanted through windows placed high on the walls, offering views into the tops of the trees that flanked the building. On either side of a central aisle, four sets of muslin curtains hung from rods about eight feet above the floor, just below the window sills, dividing spaces that each held a bed, a small table, and some square, open boxes sitting on the floor. My eyes began to adjust from the brilliance of the late afternoon sun outside, and beyond these ten partitioned areas I could make out a Lingam rising in front of another curtain that blocked the view beyond. Outside I'd heard birdsong, and the sounds of men still working in the gardens beyond the inner compound. The stillness in the great room was complete.  As I walked forward, I saw linens carefully smoothed on each bed, and a bowl on every table in which floated a single flower.

The Lingam was a little shorter than the one in the Longhouse. The top came just to my eye level.

Before it stood a sizeable table set with a bowl. As in the alcoves, a flower floated here as well.
I could see clearly now that the surface of the shaft was even more elaborate than the gatepost outside. Here there was no abstract interlace. The figures of men, larger in scale than outside, teemed around its circumference, so densely that it seemed entirely composed of them rather than merely decorated on its surface.  Rather than the chains of figures I'd seen outside, here they piled on top of one another in complex, irregular knots. At the very base, the Staghorn Lord sat in lotus position, his stand jutting from his lap and grasped from either side by an attendant. At the top, two elongated torsos formed the the ridge on the head. Their arms stretched toward the slit carved in the top, which held a deep silver insert borne in their hands. 

From further back, I heard soft laughter that I recognized.

The centre aisle ended behind the Lingam with another curtain stretched across the middle of the room, leaving a wide opening to left and right as far as the outside walls, where tall, narrow weavings hung, one worked in brilliant reds and blues, the other in green and violet. Behind the curtain to the left, I found another single, central row of partitioned spaces. Curtains hung at either side of these, separating them from each aisle, but drawn back partway on the first two I passed. The curtain of the third was almost fully closed, open only an inch or so at the nearer end. I heard a deep sigh, and a whispered, "Oh, yes. There. Right there."

My breath caught. I inched forward to look between the curtains. Two men sat naked on the bed, their legs entwined. Yellowwood was facing me, arched back with his arms braced behind him. His nearer leg sprawled toward me. His fingers curled through Yarrow's unshorn red hair as he pulled my uncle's head to his chest. Yarrow's jaw rolled, and Yellowwood gasped. Between their bellies, their hands lay curled around each other's stands.

"Lord of the Dance!  Please don't stop. Suck it harder," Yellowwood pleaded. Yarrow slid his hands from the younger man's flanks further around his back. The muscles of his shoulders went taut as he pressed his face tighter into Yellowwood's pale flesh.

Then he pulled back, and I heard his soft laugh again. "You really like that, don't you, sweet boy?" he whispered. "I like hearing you beg me to do it." He laid the pad of a thumb against each of Yellowwood's tiny, tight pink nipples, then caught them with a forefinger. "Do you want me to go on?"

Yellowwood collapsed forward, whimpering into Yarrow's shoulder. Yarrow responded by burrowing back into the flesh of his chest. Yarrow's hand flashed into a blur on Yellowwood's stand, stopped abruptly, flashed again, stopped.

"I need it. Please, I need it. I'm so hot for it. Suck on it. I love you, Yarrow, and I want you to please lick it forever. Till I merge into Lord Cernunnos."

My stand rose rock-hard watching them, but despair churned in my chest. I hated my own arousal. I wanted to to tear the curtain apart screaming. I wanted to part it gently, steal upon them and kiss Yarrow on the back of his neck. I wanted to pound my fists into the hunched muscles of his shoulders. I wanted to slap Yellowwood's face. I wanted to be Yellowwood and feel my uncle's mouth on me, as he felt it. I wanted to be Yarrow and feel Yellowwood's hard shaft in my hand. I wanted to be myself and do to Yarrow what he was doing to Yellowwood.

Unconscious of my action, I'd unknotted my lunghi and taken myself in hand. I looked down to see the thin, clear flow of my excitement drooling from the tip onto the floor below, then back up to find Yellowwood's eyes gazing directly into mine. I gasped, and Yarrow turned.

The slap of my shoes echoed from the walls as I ran toward the door. I remembered my nakedness only as I pushed it open into the glare of daylight. A man passing the gate looked across the garden court as I stood on the threshold. In embarassment at what was left of my stand, I slunk back into the dormitory.

Yarrow and Yellowwod stood near the Lingam. Holding the lunghi I'd dropped, Yarrow came toward me as I began to weep.

"Brightsong--"

I jerked away as he reached out to touch my shoulder. I heard my own wailing as if it were coming from outside my own body.

"Brightsong--" he began again, and pulled me into his embrace. He was still naked, as was Yellowwood as he watched from further off. "Oh, Brightsong. My sweet, sweet boy."

"I'm not your sweet boy," I shouted. "That's what you called him." Yellowwood stood looking miserable and helpless without coming forward.

I wanted to push Yarrow away. Instead I collapsed on his shoulder and sobbed.

"So much to take in all at the start," he said, and stroked my hair. "It's all too fast."

"You said you wanted me to come. You said how glad you were I was here." I choked the words out in short gasps.

"It's alright. I meant every word of it," he whispered, and rocked forward and back as he held me. "I love you more than I can tell."

"But it's him you were with like that," I blurted back. "Go back to your sweet boy and finish chewing on him till he sees his god." I regretted the venom in my voice as soon as I spat it out.

He pulled back from me, visibly stung. "Leave Yellowwood out of this," he said, his voice gone cold. "This is about you and me."

"I came here to be with you, and you hardly took your eyes off him to look at me when we met you in the forecourt." I felt sudden humiliation at the thought  of what Willowwind had said he remembered of me with Yarrow. "I'm not a puppy waiting for you to pet him. I'm a man. I don't need you if you're so busy with him."

His eyes blazed at me. "You're not acting like a man. You're acting like a child."

"You never complained about how I acted when we were together all summer."

"Then you were a child."

"And you like your boys grown up."

He slapped my face. I recoiled from the sting of it. "Oh, gods, Brightsong, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he said at once, reaching out to me again.

I grabbed my lunghi from where he'd dropped it at our feet.  In the garden, I sat down weeping into the fountain.

House of Refuge, Chapter 6

6 Brightsong

From the Great Tree, Willowwind brought me around again past the kitchens by the walkways between the buildings to the forecourt of Refuge.  At everything he’d told me, I felt confusion and excitement inseparably mingled. What he’d said would happen was like the fulfilment of everything I’d half-consciously longed for monthly in the Longhouse between me and the other boys receiving instruction. The thought of it happening in Arrowshot’s presence brought me up short. I understood more completely, now, what he’d meant when he said that in Refuge we were no longer father and son but brothers. I thought too of the love I was beginning to accept flourished between him and this man who was guiding me for the first time through the ways of Refuge. That I would witness whatever passed between them in the shade of the Staghorn Lord’s Great Tree.

That Yarrow too would be there.

And the man to whom he’d showed tenderness on the verandah before he looked up to see us.

I felt my heart reaching out to Willowwind. And saw in his eyes his heart reaching out to me.

The man who was already Arrowshot’s.

Nothing of ways down country had prepared me for this. My soul felt like one of the streams we’d forded on our journey to Refuge--crashing down its watercourse, turned aside this way by one boulder, that way by another.

From the forecourt, we entered the bathouse. Inside the double doors, shoes were lined up to either side. Baskets on shelves held clothing. Beyond the next doors, water poured from spouts on the wall into two steaming pools. In one, three men lay back, their eyes closed, their arms over the lip of the pool. In the other, two men half-sat, half-floated facing one another, their legs entwined as they talked, laughing, their hands cradling one another’s stands. It was less of a shock for having already seen the tenderness between Bowstring and his cousin. I was beginning, already, to understand that we’d left shame behind on the other side of the gate, as well as our down country kinships.

“We need no fuel for the hot water,” Willowwind said. “It comes as up as a blessing from the hills. In days long past, the pools were here before the building.”

In a room still deeper within, we left the steam and heat behind. A man hesitated on the edge of a pool into which two others encouraged him to plunge. Jumping in, he ducked, came up gasping, then relaxed into a motionless float. While Willowwind and I still stood there, all three emerged together and trotted back to the steaming pools behind us.

The hall on the other side of the forecourt, the building on whose verandah Yarrow had stood, was the great room where the brothers spent most of the waking hours they weren’t engaged in labour.

Cushions lay piled into corners and against side walls, where three men sat talking, and another reading. Stools and trestles were stacked against one wall, and wide boards like the ones I’d seen Yarrow and his friend carry in. A cabinet in one corner overflowed with palmleaf books.

The building opposite the entrance to the compound, with its own gate and its own garden court, and over which I’d first seen the crown of the Great Tree, was the sleeping quarters.

We paused by one of the carved gateposts at the entrance to its garden. Willowwind put out his hand to touch it. An intricate, not quite regular interlace pattern twisted around it. His fingers played over the serpentine ribbons of wood. Between them, tiny human figures played among the complex curves. Men stroked themselves, or lay in long chains with faces pressed to one another's groins, hands laid to chests, or fingers inside each other's bungholes.

Everything our classmasters had taught us we could do to pleasure ourselves, these figures were doing to each other. At the top, men danced around a flame that rose to the crown of the post, their hands joined, the muscles of their backs polished by years of touch from the fingers of men passing the gate. I couldn't take my eyes off the carvings. Willowwind's touch was habitual and unselfconscious, but I was also aware that he noticed my fascination and smiled.

"It's amazing, isn't it? It's over a hundred years old. A man named Hawkflower spent most of his life on the  carvings. He died when your kinsman-down-country Firesong was still young. Firesong finished it about twenty years ago." He ran his hand over the men dancing at the crown. "These are his work. And this chain of men sucking each other’s nipples that runs sunwise from here around the back." He put his hand on the small of my back as we leaned over to see the carvings where they twisted up the back of the column. "No one's ever wanted to try matching it on the other post."

He paused, then smiled more broadly. "It moves you, doesn't it?"

I felt my face go red but managed to return his smile. "Yes. Yes it does."

"Look at how perfect the hands are here," he said, pointing to a knot of men whose palms cupped one another's balls. He looked sideways at me and grinned. "But it's what they're holding that I admire most."

I felt a sweetly drunken churning in my chest and groin. My lunghi tented out a handbreadth in front of me. Willowwind's angled out a little less obviously below his flat, hard belly. "Aren't you glad you came to visit?"

"It's the best part of coming of age," I blurted out.

"It was for me too," he said. "I hear people still talk about me taking Refuge two New Moons after I became a man." He laughed.

I giggled. "I remember everyone said your mother kept trying to hold you back till the winter."

"Mother and her best friend made up their minds their children were going to be each other's first when we were still playing with blocks," he grinned. "Skylark and I were both afraid that if I didn't take Refuge right away, they'd push us into the same bed before autumn, and she had as little interest in being with a man as I did being  with a woman." He paused. "She didn't go up country to Women's Haven until the next spring. The pressure was off, once I was out of the running. We’re still close. We try to arrange our trips down country to spend time with one another when we can."

"I think you'll find Yarrow here," he went on, laying hand over heart in the same gesture  that all the men had used in  greeting and farewell, but then reached his fingertips toward my cheek. "May I?" he asked. I started to stammer, then silently reached my own hand out to his face instead. Our lips brushed each other and opened. Our tongues glided gently together like two otters finding each other in a stream. It carried me away, yet I struggled with anxiety--what if Yarrow emerged from the dormitory to find us like this?--and still with resentment over how tender my uncle had been toward Yellowwood. I was surprised to feel Willowwind gently pulling away from me.

"It's sweet to see you again, Brightsong. I remember you as a little boy , how you followed Yarrow alll over town like a puppy. He's been so happy you were coming to see him."

"He seemed busy with Yellowwood when we got here," I said, and then immediately regretted the pout I could hear in my own voice.

"I know for a fact he's been talking about your visit all week." He paused. "Go look for him. Supper's not for an hour." He brushed my cheek with a final peck and turned back toward the workshops.

Inside the gate, water splashed in a fountain I was surprised to find shaped like a woman's yoni. All around its edge someone had strewn flowers. At the end of the fountain nearer the gate, the water spilled from a lip and then into three channels cut into the paving stones. It trickled from there toward the plants that grew beneath the low brick walls around the forecourt.  Behind it, benches of pale grey wood flanked the door, under arbors where wisteria was just coming into bloom. The plain door was made of broad planks and showed no sign of a latch. It swung open silently with a light touch.

A Queer Utopia, Continued: House of Refuge, Chapter Five

5 Willowwind

Brightsong walked into the workshops hand in hand with Arrowshot, his face all timid smiles and yearning curiosity. I expected them: Arrowshot had asked me months before to serve as his son's guide, and Yarrow had confirmed they were coming at Full Moon. I hadn't seen him in eight years. He had the set of his father's shoulders now, and the line of his jaw.

Once or twice a year I take my turn serving as a guide, more often than not to younger brothers or uncles, cousins or friends,  who make the circuit of Refuge with bored indifference--or else masking their uneasiness with a show of boredom--months or even years after their Coming of Age. We often joke about young men who needed to convey clearly how little interest they have in our life--and who then appear unexpected, on the excuse of visiting their kin, for all their indifference on that first visit, to take full part in another Full Moon a few months later.

Then there are the men, one or two a year, who arrive looking like they've come home at last after  a long journey through the Outerlands. It brings back the joy of our own first arrivals, seeing in the elation and relief of younger men something like what we ourselves felt.

And sometimes, the momentary heartache.

Yellowwood had been one such, Yarrow told us after he'd guided him around the compound, two years past. It was easy to fall instantly in love with such men. It wasn't uncommon for love-matches to come out of those visits, pairings that lasted sometimes for months or years once the newcomers had taken Refuge.

"Take care of my fine young son," Arrowshot said, laying a hand on his shoulder, and a hand on mine, and then corrected himself, “--my fine young brother.” There was loving mischief in his eye. "I think you'll find him a keen observer." The jest wasn't lost on the new man, who blushed like a ripe cherry. I felt a little sorry for the lad. I could see Arrowshot had been right about him. But it was only what he chose for himself, in his own time, that mattered.

I touched his heart, and tentatively, he laid his palm on mine. “We’ll start here, “ I said. “Some of us are out in the gardens. A few are preparing for New Moon. But here’s where we build what we need , and repair what needs replacing.” Starcourse was operating  a treadle saw while Elmroot and Brookstone fed a cedar log along the guide, shaving it into clapboards to repair the side of the bathhouse that wind and sun had weathered beyond soundness. They stopped long enough for me to introduce them to the newcomer. “Brother in Cernunnos,” they each greeted him. With less hesitation than with me his first time at the gesture, he put his hand to the chest of each man.

In the next shop, Broadleaf was removing clay tiles from their molds and glazing them for firing. I heard Brightsong’s breath catch for a moment at first sight of him and couldn’t but smile at his stammer as they spoke greetings to one another. No wonder in that. The kiln was already blazing, and Broadleaf had stripped to his waist. There’s no one in Refuge who wasn’t mesmerized by the sight of him when he first arrived. The poor man couldn’t wash, those first weeks, without being hailed by the stand  of every man in the bathhouse rising to greet him. Though he seemed unfailingly to enjoy the attention--as new brothers often do, in their hunger for our life. Or at least received it with good humour and grace, till we’d all come to take his beauty at least a little more in stride.

Not much more was happening in the shops. About a dozen of us were tending to undone work in the garden that day, and another six in the kitchens, preparing an evening meal substantial enough to carry us all through Full Moon.  From the back workrooms, I led him the long way around toward the Great Tree, along the path that overlooks the gardens. Below us, brothers were cutting greens for dinner, hoeing early weeds out of the rows, watering seedlings that wouldn’t thrive till the next rainfall. But it was the sight of Waterfall and Bowstring, in the shade of an arbor this side of the beds, that snared Brightsong’s attention.

Witnessing Brightsong’s astonishment, I could see the two of them through my young visitor’s unaccustomed eyes. Waterfall had thrown his spade aside, and the two of them were locked in each other’s arms, Bowstring’s head bent back, his mouth open, clutching at Waterfall’s shoulders, whose face pressed into the hollow of Bowstring’s neck.  A few men working in the garden looked toward them, exchanging smiles at the sight, or fascinated for the moment and stirred themselves, but then going back to their tasks to leave Waterfall and his cousin-down-country the unintruded freedom of their reunion. They hadn’t seen one another for three Full Moons. Bowstring’s unsteady attentions had cost Waterfall unhappy days--and cost those of us in whom he confided hours of listening to his hunger for a man he loved with so little reservation--with so little insight, some of us would say. It needed my hand brushing Brightsong’s arm to bring him back to himself. I led him on to where the path looped back toward the compound and  from there to the meadow of the Great Tree.

The bowers had already been set up and furnished, and our banners untied from the gate of Refuge and brought here for the night to hang from the lowest branches. As we rounded the rear corner of the dormitory I turned aside from the path to face him. “This is the holiest site in Refuge,” I began. “And it’s now that I ask your promise to say nothing down country, ever, of our life here--of Full Moon, of your brothers in the Staghorn Lord, of the House itself, of the ways of this place. Refuge depends upon this. Can you swear by Cernunnos and by all the Six to this?”

The lad nodded. He couldn’t take his eyes from the Tree. “Yes,” I said. “It’s Him. His living presence among us, above the grave of His beloved.”  At this, his face radiated surprised, unmitigated joy. Without hesitation, he took my hand and continued to gaze on the enormity of the trunk that the holy records say began its life six hundred years ago.

So I began to prepare him for what would take place when the Full Moon was at the height of Her nighttime journey, sending Her light down through the branches: we are sons of Cernunnos, all of us, but sons of Gil too--twice-begotten of the great seedflow that made a garden of this place. We gather around the Tree of the Staghorn Lord to offer Him our own seed, for He has now no hands but ours, no voice but ours, no heart but ours, no seed but ours. In our seedflow gifted to His roots is the continuation of His seedflow, calling His sons here in every generation. In His taking up of our seed into himself, we ourselves become Cernunnos. The seed of brothers long departed has become the strength of His branches, the greenness of His leaves.

This we do at Full Moon, as men have done since Cernunnos sent down roots to emrbrace His Beloved. We welcome you here and invite you to join us in devotion to the Staghorn Lord. As a newcomer, you may choose to stand aside, I added. If men return, it’s understood that they’ve come to take part.

I could see him struggling to take it all in. As almost every newcomer does. Especially those who’ve come to be united to a Refugetaker they’ve loved down country. But the wisdom of our elders in Cernunnos has always dictated newcomers should understand this centre of our life from the day they arrive. There’d be no profit to them, nor to Refuge, in delaying the knowledge. And new men who arrive just after their Coming-of-Age are less likely to shrink from the ritual, when they’ve just finished years of being naked together for their lessons in the Longhouse every month.

“Arrowshot will be here, as he always is,” I explained, as gently as I could, his hand still in mine. “As will I. And Firesong.”

“And Yarrow,” he added.

“There’s place for the love of two men for one another here,” I said, turning to face him and laying my other hand to his heart. “The bowers are here to shelter a couple who want to withdraw together before they make their offering.

“Or sometimes, three or four men together.” The more fully he understood in advance what he’d witness, and perhaps take part in, the less likely he was to withdraw when Full Moon began. And I longed for him not to withdraw. If the Staghorn Lord had ever twice-begot a son, it was this new man.

“But we never learned...” his voice trailed off.

“Never learned what?” I prompted.

“We never learned how to be with another man.”

I smiled encouragement. “You already know here,” I said, pressing my palm a little more firmly over his heart. “Everything you learned how to do to bring yourself pleasure, you can do to bring pleasure to another man. To Yarrow.”

I was falling in love with the lad. It felt a little like falling in love with Arrowshot, all over again.

Kanamara Matsuri

OK. So while some of us were celebrating Easter last Sunday, the city of Kawasaki, just west of Tokyo, was celebrating the Festival of the Steel Phallus. So named because a young woman rejected a demon who in revenge took up residence in her vagina and bit any penis that ventured in, until the resourceful heroine contracted with a blacksmith to forge a steel dildo on which the demon broke his teeth and fled. I’m not making this up. But if it didn’t exist, I’d have to. The current festival only goes back to 1969. It’s happy-making to know that when you need a tradition, you can always invent one.

From Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Make ready for the Christ, Whose smile, like lightning,

Sets free the song of everlasting glory

That now sleeps, in your paper flesh, like dynamite.

                --Thomas Merton, “The Victory."

 

For Christ plays in ten thousand places

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
 
                --Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

Death is Abandoned

 

Graydon Parrish (b. 1970)