JUPITER AND SATURN

Said Jupiter to Saturn

“Draw the curtain, my love.

Only draw the curtain, and I will dance with you as we have not danced for two-hundred years.

A dance long remembered, never forgotten.

Draw the curtain, and we will make the tenderest of loves, the graceful touches, the delicate steps we both know so well. I know they cannot have slipped your blessed memory, as the fire of them still burn in my core.”

And Saturn, flush with love and desire, drew the curtain. A heavy layer of fog billowed gently across the earth, laid softly down with rosy fingertips at the end of a December day.

In their cosmic stillness, in their holy Dao, in their wanton matrimony, in their hallowed loneliness, Jupiter danced with Saturn. No eye of man looked on.

On Earth, the astrologers stomped about their gilded glittering towers, gnashing their teeth with cheated rage. The philosophers pondered the ethics of the matter. The poets gazed, smoking and ruminating, up into the ever-long nothing, grey clouds illuminated by the lights of men and not the brilliance of stars. The lovers went about their regular business of loving, and the mushrooms continued to sprout from the carcasses of animals who died silent in the forest.

Jupiter and Saturn danced long and well, remembering their steps with perfect harmony. Without the intrusion of prying eyes and curious minds, they made rhythmic love that echoed out into eternity, knowledge without proof, believing without seeing, being without needing, passage without stamped tickets. Solitude without loneliness. In the end, I dance only with myself.

You and me and the Devil make two. Take that as you will.