11.16.06
On this Day, Your Birthday
You walk into the watershed moment all rainbow by moonlight and plastique by dawn, coronal diadem verses leaping plosively from each uncut jewel and its refractive properties. An alliterative splurge surging westward through the brow, proudly saying, “Fear’s feckless feint frames the fantastic failure of fatalistic misfortune! I am free now forever!” And so you, my Captain, are to the heaving and sparkling prow what the wind-pregnant sail is to the foaming waves or as the cyclopean lighthouse is to the Hydrobatidae of the Straight of Messina. And in the spiralling curls of your amber scented ebony locks — decorated with a thousand drops of life-giving water, resplendant in those locks’ embrace — is the history of the ocean and its love for the moon, your ur-cu sister in blood. And in your eyes is the light of the black sun, shone as from a movie projector. And in your mouth is a scorpion bearing her young through a ring of scarlet fire sweet as pomegranate seeds. And your heart is the furnace of love. So it is you have sailed on through three decades, a myth made of mercury and ash in an earthenware skin glazed by the sugar sweat of stars….
This morning as you lay sleeping, I gazed upon you with the accumulated interest of our times together and I sighed. How it is you came to be here, now, is a tale-and-a-half not to be told out of school. What I know of you is both a blessing and a burden, and, inititiated as I am in your mysteries, all the more reason for me to love you as you are, for who you are and how you are. It is my contention that we have only just embarked on the real voyage of our lives. What came before served to teach us who we are, or were, or could be, — though never the three at one time, or so it seems to me.
Perhaps today marks for you the end of a thirty years’ war; perhaps the treaty you shall sign with your life will mark a new era with whole new freedoms.
Perhaps it’s like I said only yesterday: “Life is like a bargain show in Las Vegas. It’s all in the sequins of events”.
No matter.
Today is your birthday and I am grateful, grateful, grateful for your being here. I’ve all the hope in the world that it will be a good day in the same way that our evening at Mimi’s Café was a good time. You deserve no less — ever. And, too, it is my sincerest wish that every birthday to come will in some wise be better than the previous one.
So, happy birthday, Kisha, my love, my heart, my life. Happy birthday.
