Soul -- It's Not About Love

If anima is defined as the eros factor, then we are always bound to assume that sexual excitation is a soul-message and cannot be denied -- who would deny the call of his soul? And we are bound to assume that active human relationships and uplifting enthusiasms are anima-inspired, whereas in truth they are less promoted by the reflective moisture of the soul than by eros captivating the soul. For here we must concede that, though anima is not eros, her first inclination is toward love. So she seduces in order to be turned on, set afire, illumined. So she makes advances in order to move pure reflection into connecting. So she commands an incredible range of voluptuous imagery in order to draw eros down upon her for what Plato calls “generation,” or soul-making. Nevertheless, though love be essential to soul, theology insists and psychotherapy affirms, and though soul be that by which we receive love, soul is not love.

James Hillman, Anima: Anatomy of a Personified Notion, p. 31, 33

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LUNAR BETRAYALS


How many times have I betrayed you
by the light of that full moon, my oh-
so sea-deep sweetness, exchanging
your reflective swash for that louder-
plashing fire? Such lamps were lit
to find you; and yet my torch replaced
your passage as I ravelled through
the world’s desperate, unyielding heart.
The curves and cleavage of those
beginnings became my only end, my
star-tarred greed to plunge what you
only meant as billowy invitation
to drowse toward more richly lucent
shores. Not that you didn’t conspire
in part with my betrayal, in thrall
yourself with the signage in my ever-
outward zeal, my heart’s frantic
egressing heat the zionist
who pays back every loss of you
by settling on every slickslide same
in all the ways you won’t, no,
can’t be fully entered.

That moony autumn night
when I was 14 & sat behind Sue
on a parked motorbike no one
was old enough to ride: Surely
you sighed all those honey
bells when my hands
crept under her t-shirt to
ring those hafts of startlingly-
wobbly warm flesh; surely you
were beaconing me when I
dialed those hard pubescent nipples
-- islands trilling danger in your
equinoctal seas. I squeezed those breasts
in terror and pure desire, flooding
with all the brilliance of that harvest
moon which arched so high above,
its light tolling from an unseen cathedral
where for 30 years now I’ve daily
prayed and counted out your beads
& feasted on the host.

Not that you didn’t lead me
here to fall hopelessly in love
with insides I’ve never found a way
to enter. My longing is like a wave that
never crosses all the waters
you remit and shore. You’ve
kept me forever here adrift,
searching for that naked
strand where you wait and
sigh and welcome moons in every tide.

This morning going on 5 a.m.
that big moon is lost to cloud,
the sky a drossy net of blueblack milk
which hides even the itch of my desire
in abyssal folds of paling ink.
Sweet temptress beyond
all tempting sights, I have always
sought to shape a face according
to the ache I felt, believing you
would finally appear on the horizon
when I finally found the shape
your song desired.

See? Even now I’m burning in the
prow of this descending boat down the
deepest fissures of sea cold gloom,
belling all the way down your
wavelike sound, that echo at
the end of every line which
seal-barks in the dark
the siren-warble of infinity
which my most naked love bestows.

For even love is just another
further door into the your
downward-plunging dream, a
bed conjugal to that thrall
which births a darker,
unknowable and unforgettable
gleam. There is a bell-note to this
world, a single deep resound,
the sum of all the waves which
pulse outward from this heart,
which reach, collapse, and
pound in sad returns: A drone
deep on the basalt bed which
aches for the moon we found
and lifted with our kiss.

I want to end this poem right
here and go up and hold my
wife, and squeeze her
incommensurate curves
with hands as trembling as
the ones that ventured
under that young girl’s shirt
a hundred lives ago
beneath the silent belling roar
of the one exiling door.
Surely I will lose your there
again, but that’s the dance
you love most: Me hearing
wild music everywhere
and not a single coast.