She was a woman like none other. With her, another Reality, too long dormant, had come calling. Layers of dead bark had fallen away and a kind of life-fire had flowed once again after years and years of dormancy. She was a Magna Mater, an Earth Mother, with all the life force of the Universe. Of which she wasn't even aware. For once, he couldn't put it into words. He could only feel. And had felt such forces before.

At ten years of age he had watched his grandmother die. At sixteen or seventeen, he'd gotten a closer, more personal introduction to death and had cheated it for the first time. He and two friends had been doing something foolish -- climbing, going across a shear rock shale cliff which fell straight down into the rocky shoals of the Pacific Ocean down below. The cliff was in a sharp U-shape. He was perched on the curved portion of the U, with one friend on each of the legs, one behind, one ahead. He had a sheath knife tucked into his belt, and somehow when he'd moved, at one point, the knife handle had gotten caught on something, pulling the knife free, which in turn had sent it sliding down the face of the cliff, setting off a loud avalanche of loose shale which crashed into the rocks and breakers of the ocean below. Both of his friends had shrieked in terror, believing he had fallen to his death below. He hadn't. But for him, at that moment, Death was no longer a recollection of a pale old woman going to sleep forever in her bed in a huge hushed 14th century house with an inner courtyard and a well and ivy-covered walls. Death then was a shrieking terror in his guts and saliva that wouldn't stop flowing and a body that frantically clutched a rocky handhold and just wouldn't quit shaking ... nonetheless, he'd gotten himself together enough to reassure his friends and to lead them up to the top of the cliff, and he left death behind.

And then, walking along a road, still shaking, it had come. A sudden intake of breath and ... it was really good to be ALIVE. He had become ALIVE. The sky had never for anyone else ever been so BLUE, so searingly imprinted on his retinas. It seemed a great shining steel-blue cymbal that would peal forth with the very music of the Universe if only one could reach up and tap it. And the sun, the sun, was there ever before such a yellow wonderful creature, racing, racing like hot searing fire in his veins? And such air -- his lungs couldn't get enough of it, he wanted to empty himself totally into it, to race through the skies like lightning and descend on everything and anything which struck his fancy, himself even, possess it, love it, consume it, destroy it and himself into the sheer ecstasy and joy and intensity of the perfect present moment. He wanted to possess it all and be possessed by it all, with an INTENSITY he could not put into words. He felt he could in that moment possess it all, utterly, utterly, and never ever use it all up.

That's how he remembered it, and still remembers it. Years passed after that original seminal experience. There were other moments like it, but mostly they were without the .... innocent, clean JOY of that first time. There'd been a combat assault once, on an enemy village, when he'd found himself afterward under a tree, shaking ferociously, unable to stop drooling. Vastly surprised that he was still alive, unhurt, it had come upon him again, that feeling of being incredibly ....... alive. He'd felt it in spite of the sheer terror and savage butchery that was still going on around him. He had exulted. He'd felt so BECAUSE he had killed. "Up close and personal," instead of the alternative. But the moment was bereft of the transcendent lyrical beauty and grace and joy of the time at the cliff. It was simply a pure intensity of animal existence, successful existence at having beaten the odds, once again. A bodily celebration of power and success of his command over life and death. "Rejoice, oh young man, in the time of thy youth."

Years later, there came the Woman. SHE could bring all that back, particularly the JOY part of it which had been missing during the war. In the intervening years he'd known desire and lust and carnal pleasure. With the Woman there were these too, but before any of those were ever consummated there was something else as well, much more profound, much more dangerous -- a stirring of the old forces, a rekindling of the mythic and mystic dimension. Looking back on it now, though, he wondered: had she even ever been AWARE of all that? He thought she had been. God knew he'd talked to her about it. Or had tried to. In any case, he had talked enough to her while and when they'd made love, trying the only way he knew to share, evoke, conjure up for HER the same world that she loosed, unleashed, resurrected with such ferocity within him. When they'd made love, he'd see in her face, in her eyes, sensed in the female feel and taste and smell and warmth of her, in her very presence, movements, in her very insistence, in the way she emptied herself to him, submitted to him .... something that seemed to shriek at him, "THERE! HERE! NOW! This is what you first sensed, years and years ago after the cliff, and the times after in combat, the force of the universe, what keeps the world spinning, the quicksilver of life; squeeze me quick and watch me run out between and around and through the fingers of your clenched fists!!"

That's how she made him feel. It hadn't begun that way. It had begun with her when he found that he could really TALK to her, that she would listen and HEAR him; and that she would talk to him, that they could talk to each other. At least, in the beginning, during the Wonder Months. Anyway, by the time they got around to making love, he found that she was somehow already deeply flowing in the very deepest, stillest currents of his life-forces, and that she could in those sweet intimate moments bring them to an instant ferocious boiling, and send him aloft, once again. Without her knowing it, she became very, very important to him. That torrent she unleashed always wanted to take her along with it, wanted her to soar with him over the fields, and through the skies, and finally, come back to her for its resting place: that quiet you're-always-with-me-on-a- backburner-of-my-heart-even-if-I'm-not-with-you kind of repose.

It wasn't until years after the cliff and the war that he found the correct "mytho-poetic" words for it all; by the time he had, and by the time he met her, he knew that she made him feel he was a sky-god, creator and created, cosmic ravishing seed-giver, possessor of and possessed by the eternal earth, the Magna Mater.

There were times, too, when under her aegis he would forsake his sky-god identification; when instead she would release the wood satyr in him, vaguely chthonic, no longer sky-ee soaring in his own inner fancy but rather a somber downward vortex, all enfolding, the master demon of Bald Mountain sweeping her up in symbolic swirls of this emotional cloak with its darker inner linings ... Ah! but in those moods, was the Woman not indeed a most delicious sylvan nymph unto him, and thereby all the more intoxicating? Farewell the stately sky pleasure dome! Then it was truly a journey down the sacred life-force river through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.

Then things changed. He never completely understood why. Or maybe he did but couldn't/didn't WANT to accept the "why" thereof.

He now longed to tell her, "You've gotten beyond me, but you know, things have a way of hanging on; years hence .... or was our lovemaking nothing more than a garden-variety healthy animal rutting .... and did I go there all alone, all along?"

He longed to tell her, "I want you to be enthralled, impassioned with ME as I am with you. Not the 'enthralled' as in 'gotta be with you 23 hours a day adolescent puppy love stuff'. No. It's the 'enthralled' as in 'making love to someone/anyone but while doing so unable to keep from thinking of That Other Person instead, still, years later even.' It's the enthralled as in knowing NOW that in future years you will wake up occasionally in the middle of the night, in the Hour of the Wolf, and think, 'My god, how the hell could I have ever let him slip so totally out of my life?' A back-burner kind of thrall -- but not the back-burner of parents-brothers-sisters whom you can conjure up and dismiss out of your mind at will with no untoward effects. No. A back-burner presence that refuses to be dismissed: like an apple on a branch that you usually ignore, yet when you do reach up to pluck it, the branch recedes, ever just out of reach; like a pool of water you ignore until you decide you need to slake your thirst, but when you bend over to do so, it runs away like mercury out of a broken thermometer right through your fingers ... and then comes back in the corner of your eyes' vision when you straighten up. THAT kind of back-burner thrall.

He longed to ask her, "Do you, right NOW, really, really NOT feel for me the way you did during the Wonder Months? Or are you hiding it, because of your own fears, vulnerabilities, hurts, and on account of MY failures? How the hell could it have changed? Or was I there alone, all by myself all along, and am only now realizing it?" Ach! It was the oldest story in the world: man meets woman, man and woman fall in love, woman falls out of love, man is left "holding it." He'd been on both sides of that equation a time or two before; why was it so hard now to get on with it? He KNEW the answer, of course; because .... because .... heart and guts never follow the head; they have a life of their own ... and, after all, are we not ultimately the prisoners of our own devices?

The genie, too long in the bottle, once out, refused to return to it. But alas, neither was he strong enough to go forward to complete renewal. Come the spring, the earliest and loveliest in many years, and the urges, the desires, too often deferred during the past 12, 18 months, came raging forth in search of their natural object, shaking themselves like a great waking bear voracious in its hunger after a too-long hibernation. He attributed it to those early skies that morning after morning called to him, thrust themselves upon him, as he drove in to work: some days again the great pure blue over-arching cymbal beckoning him to unleash its musical mystical fire; some days, flushed with early morning yellows and oranges and purples, talking to him of gentler currents within. Arrived at work, he would step out of his car and the brisk air and bracing, dazzling, hungry early-morning sunshine would snatch him up and take his spirit racing and he would find himself crying out to the Woman, "Life is passing, passing, passing, passing by. We should be out in this moment racing with it, celebrating, rejoicing in and with each other's bodies and hearts and souls." The man took to the outdoors, some days tramping the woods, some days merely slumbering underneath a tree, perched over his memories. Poor pale inadequate substitutes! Under the impetus of all this he had even sought to celebrate a Sacre de Pringtemps with the Woman. On the day itself, however, it had become an occasion for them to quarrel. The auspices were not good.

In the process of untying themselves, she'd once asked him, "What do you want?" and he'd answered, "A mistress, a lover." Within days it came to him: that was probably the WRONG answer. Like most American women, she'd probably interpreted his answer as, "All he wants is sex." Whereas what HE meant and understood by that phrase was, "Intimacy and passion and yes, sex, but without all the crap that inevitably accumulates in marriage and gets in the way and eventually kills things." Unrealistic? Selfish? Perhaps. But he would have preferred to have been judged -- howsomever harshly -- on the merits, or lack thereof, of his true position, rather than on the basis of a misapprehension. By the time he came to this realization, he simultaneously realized it was probably too late: as they say in Russia, words are not like birds; once they're out of the cage of your mouth, you cannot go catch them back again.

Under prompting he began to write about it all. After he had writ much, he read it but was not pleased. "The Woman will not understand, or if she does, she will get the wrong impression." He had been writing for her all along, it seemed. But a voice within immediately answered, "Perhaps, but you should be doing this for you, not for her; she isn't going to change her position on the basis of anything you've written, much as you might hope and wish to the contrary." And he agreed, but the answer left him strangely unsatisfied. He redoubled his efforts and wrote more. Eventually there came a time when any more writing about it began to seem pointless, which is when he put it aside.