The Voluptuous Midnight
She goes parading in splendour and in choice finery, the voluptuous midnight, attired in stars and heavenly glimmers, walking in grandeur and self satisfied smugness, since her beauty is the most ornate and the most enviable. The entire breadth of creation is her suitor, her infatuated lover, her confidante, her recourse to a reciprocating animus. Her suave beguilements know no rejection. Her superlative pulchritude is lit by the moon’s adoring glow. Her majesty knows no diminution by exposure to mortal souls. She is an inimitable paramour in her chapel of the infinite. She is a limitless fount of loveliness, the bold and voluptuous midnight.
I am awake in the monastery, surveilling the sky from the window, enraptured by the diademed heaven and all the adorable planetary glisters which offer such sweet variations of consolation and affection. The voluptuous midnight speaks to me alone, since my worshipful heart must be obvious from above. The air speaks to me in cool tones and ineffable silence, bringing wisdom and secrets from across the ocean and across the dissolving centuries. The winds of heaven and the updraft of hell come to confide the news of their respective domains. As the chief monk and the spokesperson for the monastery, they have a duty to keep me informed. Heaven brings tell of new variations of God’s love, and the devils from below describe new barbs of antipathy and vexation.
Pigeons roost in the cavities in the walls and I can see them nestling and jostling even by the silvery light of the effulgent constellations. I worry and fret should their precious eggs topple and descend through the vacuum and be obliterated on the rocks. But this daydream is a momentary diversion, because the voluptuous midnight and I are lovers, sweethearts enamoured of each other’s glance. I look at her in perfect silence and without recourse to wild poetry and eloquent devotions and still she smiles in earnest, gifting new shimmers and intimations of affection. Even by the light of my mortal eyes she is thrilling and strutting and debonair in her looks. Even though I woo her in unspoken ardour, she sees my heart directly and leaps for joy.
