dead brains don't dance

On this grey and drizzly summer solstice, here's a winter solstice gift of darkness and light for you all from The Book of the Night:

The finger of the moon touched the face of the rose window and suddenly, as if in answer, a thin film of flesh covered the bones of the abbey and the bones of the abbey became rounded and soft, and the towers became … what is it … knees. And the crack of doors, a human, fleshy ass, and the rose window—the great seat of birth—burst open with the light of birth as a living eye. A cathedral of flesh, the abbey became, her belly the roof of it all. I raced from the barn but stopped at the Tree of Life and hid, somehow, in its shadow. (Aah, Nicholas, you fool.) There I saw her navel, the nave, her arms outstretched into the apse, and her head as altar. Her woman part opened in the red-gold of light. I saw her and knew that I looked upon a woman with her knees in the air, giving birth to living light. What had been the soft gold reflection on the glass, now became her own fire. I watched. Stars rested on her fingers and glinted on her kneecaps.

And then she stood and shook stiffness from her limbs and the transparency of flesh became solid and she walked along the Street of the Dead down toward the sea, past me, knelt, dropped her long dark hair into the pool of sea, and washed herself. And then she stood and spun over the fields, her robes of moonlight twisting about her, twisting until she became a triangle of light, five parts four, four parts three, shimmering, and the moisture from her hair dripped as dew on the fields. She lay down again where the abbey had been, lifted her knees to the sky, stretched out her arms across the fields, opened herself, her woman part, and was stone again. Doors, towers, window, stone. The moon rose above her knees as if it had been born from them. I saw the miracle, that night, only once, but I knew then that the true light came from the darkness and it was to the darkness I must go. I could not hide.