Check ignition, and may God's love be with you.
Last night the moon was full and eclipsed totally. It shifted, white and black and red, red being the colour of the earth's shadow. Beth and I went walking, standing on the sun and looking at the red moon. The sky was clear, to my great surprise: I'd heard rumours that it would be a cloudy night, as it has been every other time such an event had blazed across the heavens. (I don't often converse with sky gods.) We aligned ourselves with a pyramid that stands atop one of Philadelphia's skyscrapers, and there found a mural in a playground of a sort of cosmic vagina-tortoise, opening red and shining beams of white light, surrounded by fish while a young voodoo priestess or grade school student, one of the countless denizens of the uplifting murals of this town, waved her arms in encouragement. It seemed to summarise the event nicely. Two older citizens of the ghettos found us standing still, looking straight up. They found the marvel before we could explain ourselves and joined us. The woman instantly exclaimed, "You just know something's going on tonight. Mm. You've got to keep the faith." And she was right. We shook hands and introduced ourselves at their most polite prompting, and they encouraged us to stay safe. "It's crazy out here." Right again, friends. We parted ways and kept walking, finding the Broad Street Victorians, stained glass saints and plants and lights and children reading from the Book of the Dead in their windows. We kissed on a street corner while snow fell from a still cloudless sky. On the way home we passed a house with a large statue of Mister Punch and a smaller bronze fish on its porch. We kissed Mister Punch and I pet the fish, and then turned for home. Before returning for cider and warmth, Beth kindly reminded me that we hadn't yet danced paganistically under the bleeding moon. She raised her hands in a salute of dark and hysterical high magics and we danced a terrible tango in the dark in honour of a rare moon dressed in sun and earth and shadow.