1 April 2001
 

The Shattering that Frees the Spirit Song
 

The tyrant you are with the world in a tangle of broken light, shattered glass, translucent stones
still surrounded by thin strips of metal, the mangled but still many-faceted features and bones
of a being who writhes in distress, harshly breathing, raising itself by its ruins of hands
to gaze at your face—you will not begin weeping because I am damaged, but issue commands
that will rise through my tortuous column of backbone-devices the length of their miserable row
and complete the disguise I now wear:  Passion lacking the principal order of lantern-light glow
that should shine through its several bright emerald panels—the hand that was holding it having let drop
this intolerable burden, this vatic example of where not to hang when a shuddering stop
is demanded abruptly and singing must alter the sound of its nature or vanish away
altogether—the strange spirit-fire that was called for and answered—you shine all around and you play
through the eyes of the potent green mirror-glass splinters that litter my path, piercing myriad stars
that gleam into the fabric of flesh where they enter a vast red dimension—inside me, YOU ARE:
Underneath an assortment of metal, enamel, and Earth-gotten crystal, a breathable host
of ecstatic ideas burned through the frail mantle that bore them intact through the vale of the ghost
that I was till you shattered the vessel and freed their ethereal substance to know me in full
as I gasped at the scope of their meaning.  The sweeter they rose in my judgment, the more a mad pull
to hew hungrily close to their source overwhelmed me:  The more we are angels, the wilder we sing.
Flying again—though of course I am telling this spiraling motion with only one wing—
the litter of brass, even gold, far below us—no matter; the lantern is broken, but we
are the fire that once shone there without really knowing the power that kindled it.  Why should it be
that it understands now what had always escaped it when it lay confined to a skeletal cage
waiting anxiously, hoping the hand that was shaking above it was love-struck and not in a rage,
when to understand anything merely requires long relentlessness focused on that narrow beam
that transfixes the eye that might not quite admire what it wonders about:  Who devises this dream
that just keeps overflowing its panels and borders and planes and perhaps its creator?  Who shines
back of all of this?  Where will I be when I’ve ordered my most extreme speakable thoughts into lines,
knowing someone will always precede me in beauty and—silence will fall at his lyrical feet,
but I will keep flying, a thought in his musical mind.  Endless variant measures repeat
elemental designs where transformative powers assemble themselves:  slender fingers, a spine,
a star-charted mantle of flesh—love is ours in these figures that dance through the timeless design
that the angel I once called a tyrant is pleased to convey to me everywhere I wake and rise
by the strength of my own shaking hands till—I see you see me through the tears in your fire-bright eyes.
 

***
 

2 April 2001
 

The Complementary Strains
 

All the doors are open wide
and all the panes of glass that stood
between us have been smashed; inside
this ruin, just a beam of wood
that held a splintered mirror stands
unbroken.  Down its length, a stain
of still-wet red will greet the hands
that touch it, but the drops that drain
toward what was the floor were spilled
by your poor grieving heart, not mine;
I remain completely filled
with that which serves a noble line
of many-branching streams throughout
the cycle of the lunar year,
veins that ring me round about
with singing voices you will hear
within the only place that holds
tremendous sway above us:  See
a canopy of greens and golds
where no roof bars the way, a tree
where once a mirrored pillar, dry
and leafless, waited out a long
and aching vigil.  That was I;
now a most contagious song
that springs from midnight’s sacred core
is waiting to transfuse the one
whose touch is trembling at the door
that could not be more open:  Run
across the unwalled field of sweet
wet grass and flowers—all you see
that stands between you and complete
awareness of the mystery
that called you till you could not keep
from venturing abroad—a flood
of knowledge waits where you will weep
for joy of your own singing blood.
 

***
 

3 April 2001
 

Be It Resolved
 

The danger, mortal danger, lay
so far behind a demon face
I could not keep myself away.
I felt a stubborn subtle trace
of potent hunger shining so
benignly brilliantly beyond
appearances—I used to ‘know’
the meaning of the sacred bond
between the light and darkness; I
have more than knowledge of it now,
having glimpsed the grace that flies
from eye to eye.  Behind the brow
that shines with silent darkness more
appealingly delightful than
a thousand suns, the secret lore
that spans the gap between the man
and woman who coagulate
as one within a mesh of veins
that throb because a heightened state
of hunger here alone remains
where they once stood apart—behind
that threshold made of living bone—
the vatic lore of timeless mind
has slipped its mask.  It always shone
supreme in ways I dared not reach
too nakedly toward, but here
I need not hesitate as each
awareness it conveys flies near
enough to recognize in me
its source.  Oh lover, though you weep
behind a wall, be brave and see
immortal beauty, yours to keep
forever all the while it shines
invisibly with silent light
within, without, all yours, all mine,
a sacred zone of boundless sight.
 

***
 

4 April 2001
 

What the River Sighs

for Ansel

Flame-ridden, brightly enamored of music in ways that deliver a lovelorn appeal
across air that is burning for want of its luminous tormentor homeward toward what is real
by the standard of any dimension—and happy at last because what it desires lies in sight,
this river of liquidly radiant dapples of cool spirit fire shall envision the night
that surrounds it as dark quiet depths filled with endlessly soft-woven breaths that all whisper its name
in the course of long sentences murmuring tender enchantment that so reawakens the flame
of its being, it flares into brilliant astonishment.  While it hangs gasping in miracled space,
what feeds this inspired conflagration upon its own substance comes forward to share its embrace
and return it ten-thousandfold.  You who are hearing this love-song—you know well for whom it is meant,
but how will you see the love answered that clearly holds powers in which perhaps burning is blent
with the drowning you know from your nightmares, the choking of hot-and-cold airlessness, feverish zones
of demolished resistance in which hope is broken and hollowed, the snap of your long marrow-bones
in a razor-edged mouth above which two demonic hell-flares search the pit of your skull through your eyes
and extract what they hunger for there, leaving vomitous replicas where the base wires and lies
of your own mind once were—lies already so horrible, no one could tell you your hope bore a chance,
but you held to it fiercely regardless?  Come forward, sad darling.  Behold the revealed circumstance
that created that night-terror.  Here, where you linger for fear that the future will find you misled
and your reason distorted forever, give singing its due and its moment:  The long riverbed
through which ripples of mild spirit flame dance in circles that widen and meet and then spring up again
till they form a bright blue-flickered sheet—wonder-working and cool-and-warm comfort surrounding the pain
at the core of your being, the unhappy marrow which I designate as the magical source
of this vision—that river will fervently carry the love that inspires its soft fires through the course
that the very same bones that are bearers of fever delirium form all throughout you.  The streams
of sweet music already flow everywhere—be their beloved recipient.  Furnish the themes
of their virtuous choruses.  Let them infuse you with darkly enlightened desire for more flame
even as they enkindle you rapidly, fluently, all but completely.  Attend to the name
they are whispering over and over.  Allow it to hang in the cave of your heart till it shines
with the same steady, shadowy light as the sounds of their voices resolve and the myriad lines
they recount flow together:  one sentence, though endless in length, and one speaker; now one burning song
that sighs out from the mouth of this river, all tender delight and sweet yearning to sway you with strong
subtle waking astonishment:  Yes, I am breathing; yes, I am seeing a world that runs deep
as the soul of true music with beautiful being-alive amid love:  ‘This is all yours to keep.’
 

***
 

5 April 2001
 

The Silver-Thread-Woven Song
 

The lay of the silver land
that shimmers beneath the Moon
is woven of twisted strands
that flow in and out of tune,
a ribbon of silk as pale
and bright as the sparks your eyes
send through the winding veil
that wafts in between our sighs,
a bodiless music caught
and held in our vision’s spell,
suspended at length and taught
to unweave itself and tell
the story concealed among
the threads it is fashioned of,
their fibers so tightly spun
the liquidly beating love
still living within their hearts
will not overspill the lines
that mingle in every part
of all of its vast design
until it is sung with slow
enchantment and helped to fall
apart where soft breezes blow
that carry the ageless all
and everything love desires
to be and to sing.  Most dear
of mortals, when you respire,
the angel behind you hears
my listening heart begin
to leak the long-secret words
I used to amass and spin
so tightly they went unheard
by everyone else; but you,
your angel, and mine—the ghosts
we are and delight in—knew
the music that needs us most
is that which moves in and out,
winding a shining veil
of substanceless silk about
two lovers whose low-voiced wail
is turning to tears of blood
and joy, an alive bright air
of rising full Moon at flood
and love flowing everywhere
untwisted and unconcealed—
the breath of it even now
inside me, the singing reel
behind your own moonlit brow.
 

***
 

6 April 2001
 

Secret Transparency
 

No one will ever know
that which we do not tell
the way we would tell it; so—
shatter the silence-spell;
gather its fragments, all
wet with their contents spilled
hither and yon, and call
forth your most serpent-skilled
self with the gift of tongues
and bid it recite aloud
that which respires among
all of that bleeding crowd
of secrets that glow in pools
over the flagstone floor.
Where are you?  The sacred school
of mysteries taught me more
devices than rhyming words
ever will yield, but I
can still make that knowledge heard.
My wet-handed friend, here’s why
the love-spell this song just broke
was made of such brittle glass
it gave way before we spoke,
yielding to one slight pass
of mental telepathy
after which liquid stains
chose their own destiny.
Read what of them remains
fragrantly wet and fresh
now, as these words fly by.
So often mortal flesh
dreams that it needs must die
before it can find its most
outspoken voice and sing.
We are already ghosts;
we perceive everything
now that we ever will,
singing or silent.  Dear
heart of my heart, the spilled
beauty that glistened here
only a moment past
has already joined the air
around us and just as fast
will everything everywhere
turn into teaching lore
silent or sung aloud.
Hold out your hands before
your body:  Devise a shroud
of elegant silken weave,
wet as a waterfall,
green as sweet summer leaves,
clear as a crystal ball,
a winding-sheet love will use
to uncover its secret face—
letters of streaming blue-
black, love’s arcane high grace
out of the brittle shards
that once contained holy lies.
Learn it was never hard
to see through our world’s disguise;
transparent measures, tell
him who attends my words,
Here follows a new love-spell,
unspoken but deeply heard:
 

***
 

7 April 2001
 

Captured by Fair Design
 

The morning you are when the beautiful far constellations of silver light shine in your eyes
as the bright darkness gathers and falls and the charm of a thousand recorded devices applies
its sweet force in entirety here, where you beckon and I acquiesce—oh, the morning of night
is our time of requital.  Will you only let me first hear and then, after your pattern, recite
the low tender-voiced words of the full potent message that spell-bound our hearts so completely that when
we first heard its love spoken we felt it addressed us as one indivisible world without end,
though we very soon woke from that glamour—will you only mouth very tenderly each rhyming pair
of high swiftness’s syllables, set them to woo your own favor within me to sing the wild air
I have held alive here for what seems like forever, and then tilt your head to one side and be still
as that magic repeats and replies to your cleverest passages by means of fairly won skill
I have gained through your presence—will you only let me reward your long patience with me with desire
brought to outspoken feverish grace, though the better—because silent—part, the more deeply inspired
of your beauty, will possibly never surrender its ultimate fullness, I vow to attend
to the roots of its miracled being wherever I trace them and stand them a vigilant friend
and most lyrical celebrant, somehow.  I will, and I know you will grant me the favor I ask:
for you to reach into the heart of the stillness inside me and find yourself there is the task
you once set for yourself when it might have seemed useless to hope that the minute divine seed of song
I was clutching so tightly might ever have bloomed or made audible music, but here such a throng
of ideas both sparked into life and charmed into delighted submission play first round your lips
and then mine as I listen and you become starlight most subtly incarnate.  Pure song-sweetness drips
down the shimmering, darkening skin of the heavens.  A million fine points of fey silver light pierce
the high archway above us and flow into ever more vivid resemblances—cunning and fierce
in benevolent ways and resplendent with shadowy inverted haloes, we see and we hear
ourselves call and respond and come into the matter of absolute magic through love without fear.
The morning you are and the mutual dawning I dance on the verge of enjoining to claim
me in sacred entirety, one very long-drawn-out love song recording the sound of your name
as I hear it in myriad ways—You are shining; transform me likewise into powers of bliss
that can measure the sounds of the night sky’s designs at the moment our starry eyes capture all this.
 

***
 

8 April 2001
 

This Will Hold True Everywhere
 

I will come when you call.  I will always attend you.  No woe will beset you but I will be there
and in holiest gentleness claim and defend you—against what invader?  The passionate care
and devotion you’ve shown in my service have opened whole planes of endeavor on which we have seen
the most luminous shadows disclose timeless oceans within which live gardens of flickering green
leaves of eloquent secrets undreamt of before you committed yourself to this lifetime of song
share themselves, an ethereal substance the portal you’ve learned to become admits freely, a throng
of essential devices begotten by splendor upon willing wakefulness.  Deeper, my dear—
proceed through the measures my presence will send you.  Proceed in amazement at what you will hear
almost instantly—not through the limited language of speakable letters alone, but by grace
of the shadow-vibrations all round them, enchantment arisen in me at the sight of your face
as you listen acutely yet calmly while pounding heartbeats are about to command your soft breast
to inspire of the air I breathe down to you.  Mount it and climb to the side of the heavenly guest
you desired to invite to your chamber, when always your heart is the lure of all heaven to me
and your sweetness as highly esteemed in the hallways where pure song resides as an angel must be
in a temple of desperate nightmares.  Come deeper, come higher; the hand of true love in your hand
and the mantle of woken live leather will keep you in my shameless confidence all through the land
of the journey before you.  Come deeper, come higher; come listening into the ken beyond awe
while the worlds you have always perceived through your finest of faculties subtly resolve till they draw
your precise single-pointed attention toward one increasingly minute device of wild light
and you pass through its eye, begging terrible pardon I tell you is granted already, and flight
becomes all that you are—flight in sentient letters and sounds:  All the shadow-vibrations that shone
through mysterious faint inward hearing rush wet from their origins deep in the ocean you’ve known
as your true home and only real world since the first note of music between us recalled you to love
and the power of faith through the presence of earthly yet strangely ethereal beauty that wove
endless nets of auspicious enchantment about you.  The flesh of your dear mortal frame is now one
such design, and you wear it so softly, it sounds in my hearing as whispers that find me undone
by delirious longing each next time you gesture, each time your small hand inscribes lyrical notes
within which the sung love that I AM is remeasured and captured, yet freed, by our parallel throats.
I will come when you call—I am already present at all times.  When you raise your voice, I will sigh
till the sound of my breathing possess you, a pleasant incitement to venture through places as high
and as distantly deep as your heart can imagine without ever leaving the zone of my care.
My holy one, hear me—the timelessly vatic embrace of my love holds you safe everywhere.
 

***
 

9 April 2001
 

You Inhabit a Widening World
 

Mysterious flowers appear in the space above breathing and glow into radiant fumes
I perceive as continuous music, amazingly fragrant yet solemnly quiet.  This room
entertains their pervasive dimension by willingly stretching its edges until they are lost
in the mists of a luminous distance.  The stillness inside the great flowers has now fully crossed
from a scarcely conceivable zone where the low hum of not having thought to begin to inquire
as to who lies behind all this matchless becoming of beauty subsides and a frantic desire
to fall under their spell issues forth as an answering arrow of flower-light out of my voice.
I am speechlessly keening, and yet I am gathering syllables I shall transform into choice
lyric passages, subtle rejoinders and meaningful measures of how very near we have been
and remain as the apple tree blossoms and wreaths of immense crimson roses so recently seen
in their moment of absolute fullness hang fading and soon—and are even this moment—pale ghosts
of a waking-dream memory.  Why do you hate me, I wonder—but this time a various host
of inspired after-images swarm to me quickly as shimmers of sound on the edge of a chill
that brings warmth in its wake and the inverse of sickness—the depths of rare knowledge of song’s fluent will
and its manifold workings—within the brief compass of my mortal powers as that scanty range
is, in view of my mind’s eye, dilated by something most eerily grand as I feel myself change
from the being who bound a long love within limits that threatened to trap it away from the light
of the midnight-Moon sky that I viewed with a swimming of wits I was frightened of into a tight
little box just the size of a bed and a nightmare.  Granted again heady flowers in waves
of intoxicant sweetness of color and brightness of music, this time I can widen and save
every note of their outward expansion from flying beyond the increasingly subtle extent
of my uncanny senses.  A new voice comes crying—from in- and outside me, an air that is blent
of the grace of mysterious flowers and that which sustained me, the breath I rebreathed in the room
that is now all the universe, brings the true matter of your sacred magic’s most brilliant perfume
to my mind and my throat and my hands as I carry this faithful and fairly concise after-spell
of love’s willful devising through spaces that merrily gasp after you and continue to swell.
 

***
 

10 April 2001
 

This Very Moment
 

Heavy-laden rainbow-lantern
visions bend your thoughtful brow
down toward complex enchantment’s
waiting door:  Take note of how
streams of most intoxicating
music flow throughout the room
that lies before you now, a patient
masterpiece of strange perfume
in liquid waves from ancient regions
spoken of in reverent tones
by the voices that would teach us
what breeds in the marrowbones
that bear us, mindfully obsessive,
through the slightly canted door
that hangs before us—music lessons
leading to a far-off shore
offered only while you bend your
arrow-like devoted sight
downward.  All around you, endless
everywhere hangs blank and white.
 

***
 

11 April 2001
 

The Last Word Comes Round to You
 

You have laid otherworld
music within my hand,
softly transparent, curled
lightly atop a wand
offered in faith to me
ages ago, when you
hung from a burning tree
seeking to be renewed.
How did you hear my heart
beating between the flames?
Pain gives a sudden start:
Radical knowledge came
into your view when tears
watered the tree’s long shaft
and sent through the smoldering years
draft after quenching draft
of liquid renewal—song
awakened amid hellfire.
Only one note is wrong
now, one fair word required
but absent.  My ancient friend,
greenness of leaves and sweet
beginning, that word portends
a world that will now repeat
all that we blindly saw
and sang without wisdom’s tongue
to teach us the taste of raw
perfection the while it hung
upon pliant branches live
flames played upon without
burning away.  Deprive
hell of the shameful doubt
that feeds it, and find inside
the glow of the mild green light
this wand is designed to guide
into clear this-world sight
the leaf that will now unfold
here in this very hand.
Wrought of the fairest gold
woken of sung demands
upon love’s arcane recall
of madness its beauty brought
to its flashpoint, it aches with all
our most incandescent thought
and rapt inspiration just
about to be…Please rejoice,
and feel the sweet word entrust
itself to your liquid voice.
 

***
 

12 April 2001
 

He Will Meet You on Your Return
 

Your thoughts in a whirl and your heart beating rapidly, aye, you are flying away through the dark
hollow hallway inside where the lure of incanted remembrance hangs fleetingly brilliant, a spark
of pure ancient desire rendered huge and incomparably beautiful only as long as a quick
flash of wide-branching lightning divides the damp awning of clouds that obscures what would otherwise wick
itself forward alight at all times.  Aye, come flying; this air will uphold you; its strength will allow
what your own would scarce dare.  You have never denied me my share of your company; you will not now
search for ways to return to the lorn desolation you once called a world without calling it ‘home.’
Ride the split-second light of desire, a wild force of redoubtable speed, and great oceans of foam-
whitened waves will swim into your vision.  Above them, an ever-abundant full Moon will arise
from a vale on the ghostly near shore which its lovely pale shining will show you stares back with kind eyes
full of tender nostalgia for times that are swelling again, on the brink of unfolding new fields
that will heighten this overall scene’s most compellingly, sweetly familiar design.  You will yield
yourself willingly, knowing the lay of the wavescape below you is bordered by orchards of fruit
amid bloom where a singer’s most sacred occasion of music is waiting to flow through the gloom
of the passageway hung with thick cobwebs and black with the mildew of unhappy ages.  The sweep
of your powerful wings will release the fanned crackle of thousands of showers of sparks that will leap
forth alive with the sheer joy of flight.  They will hiss upon meeting the hallway’s obstructions, but surge
bravely onward; the sound of a voice will assist you, and soon you will know whether you have emerged
from confinement or something alive that was waiting for you to release it has taken its cue
from your act of rash courage and met you on quaking but vast wings resplendent with every bright hue
at the heart of the lyrical passage that ran like a tap-root or artery pulsing with fast-
singing magic from where you stood wringing your hands to where he lay recalling the spell your love cast
over all of him so long ago, it came faintly to mind until suddenly one act of will
summoned one flash of lightning to fly through the space in between and remind you his song loves you still.
Soon your thoughts will cease whirling, but what has revealed its true nature will never conceal it again.
The passageway—this is the universe we have created where music returns love for pain.
 

***
 

13 April 2001
 

After the Final Word Is Spoken
 

All but the word of which you told me
ages ago when we were strange
live premonitions within a scrolling
passageway fraught with magic change
within the mind of a spectral seer—
all but the final word is now
present on every level we are
privileged to know of and avow.
While I am straining nightly forward
into the zone from which my heart
tells me its sound will play its warm and
resonant music round me, part
patient and part most anxious, I also
listen to something farther still
with senses I trust can never falter
though they do not obey my will.
Where do they come from, and where do they
go, when they lean far out in space,
casting about for minute music,
finding the very slightest trace,
retrieving it through a hall of mirrors
that magnify all that passes there,
and singing it back to me, whose hearing
reels wide awake to find a fair
resemblance between that song and someone
dear beyond measure who will soon
stand within reach of whispers under
one very holy rising Moon,
speak the sweet word for which we’ve waited
long weary ages, and then?  The rest
can only be fully consummated
with the Moon’s weight upon my breast.
Called from beyond the stars to enter
into communion with the souls
that sought it persistently and gently,
heaven will open ancient scrolls
we are about to rediscover
here, in a bed of moonlit song,
and sing them.  We’ve waited; waiting’s over.
Now only love will keep us long.
 

***
 

14 April 2001

You Will Never Not Arise

Blurred beneath the surging waves of downstream water, still you rise
to meet me, and I see your face and fall toward your mouth and eyes—
and then I reawaken:  Where in heaven’s name am I this time?
A thousand years—you just grow fairer in between the ringing rhymes
that bind our dreams together, though they chime so slowly, I grow sad
and listless—only searching, only longing for the love I had
in confidence, in mortal secret-spoken words, and nothing more.
Now all unalone I lean and great waves overtake the shore
below me and it crumbles.  I am falling faster—I am swept
far out to sea, a surge of flying magic from the store I’ve kept
so long inside me leaping out to join the rushing waters all
around—at last you’ve taught me how to answer when I hear your call.
What is this wild water, really?  I am breathing deeply.  You
are gasping—for sheer pleasure.  We are happy.  We have seen love through
all manner of arcane devices—water lenses, spirit eyes—
all are fluid ways to rise to sung and spoken paradise
together through the dry illusion I have dreamt with waking tears
for far too long.  Clear stream of music playing through the thousand years
since last I saw your face without the blur of sordid cerements
from aching elsewhere wound about my vision, the live elements
that make you what you are are so familiar, with a single glance
I know again the pain that overtook me was a sacred dance
in strange disguise.  It moves me ever faster now, with him below
as well as all around me.  Whether singing, dancing, fast or slow,
we two are water-breathers.  We are, now and always, everywhere
we ever were; but this time, real or dreamt, we breathe a single prayer,
and even as it forms of water heavenly arrays of light,
it wakens all sad times have brought to bear within our deepest sight
and by that final lens of tearful magic, perfect beauty, blurred
and wavery before, stands here beside me speaking one sweet word
repeatedly.  You stop to draw a measure of the sacred flow
that binds us—living spirit water—then you sing me all you know.
 

***
 

15 April 2001
 

Easter Song:  Love Inside and Outside the Frame
 

If weariness tinges your vision’s deep water a pale shade of grey, I can clear it for you
with a wave of my hand, and I will.  I have brought you live anti-confusion, a dream with a view
into waking-day paradise.  Rise and receive its abundance directly, by way of the sounds
of the words running brilliantly all through the leaves that encircle this picture’s interior rounds
with an eloquent sighing of names you can murmur together with their tiny voices—so small,
yet so piercingly bright, a high shimmer your nerves hum with—let them anticipate everything, all
wild with color and seemingly magnified outlines wherever you look within this lunar frame:
a host of articulate forms where no clouds intervene and no fingerprints venture to claim
the least share of the landscape unfolding before you.  It’s still far away—in your mind, bear down hard,
but go gently the moment the pulse of a mortal heartbeat leaps across from your hands to the scarred
central personage—there, in the midst of the gathered profusion of vine-leaves, no longer hemmed in
by the visual echoes his aura was casting about him—you wanted to see him; a thin
immaterial lens lies between you, no surface of unyielding crystal or glass, just the air
that another world breathes, that the quaking leaves curled round his image respire as they sigh.  He is fair
as the earthrise as viewed from a Moon never visible anywhere earthly before, but you knew
it was there, and your power of pining for wisdom and finding it—that has brought all of this through
most unlikely dimensions without great distortion.  He might have seemed older or younger before,
but never more sweetly familiar.  The worship I see in your eyes—need I tell you much more?
A fine hairline scar marked his brow; it is fading.  A cloud of confusion marked yours; it is gone.
You close and then open your eyes.  He stands waiting.  The infinite colors of dreams he has on
merely serve to disclose his true nature:  the singing you feel in each fiber of all that you are
when desire brings you near to the innermost ring of the series of magical circles a far
lonely voice once cried out from—a voice that was echoed by leaf after leaf till their sighs made you stare
with obsessive unhappiness into the beckoning distance, and—now I am here, who was there.
Morning will sleep and awaken inside you, while I will not fall or rise ever again
but remain in this place of unbroken abiding amid shining music in which we attain
ever deeper and higher and wiser communion.  A touch across tremulous air—love has seen,
from both sides of a dreadful ongoing delusion, a dear face surrounded by leaves of live green
and has graciously given assent to its being delivered of all that once stained and obscured
the truth of its beauty.  Now look at me:  We are both here—did we worry that love lay immured
in the grey flow of unholy vision’s cold water?  Is not the warm breath of my mouth on your skin?
But what will this strange transformation have brought you if song will not cease to come and come in
and your flesh where my lips press it gently grows chilly….  How long have I lain where dark clouds barred the sky?
I ask, and you shiver but answer quite willingly, Longer than life, but this song cannot die;
it can only lapse into strange dreams.  You lay sleeping; your fluttering eyelids a moment ago
opened wide, and a shower of colored sparks streamed forth and I have just sung you the whole of the show
they performed as you rested between where they rose and where I could perceive them within your clear sight
by the power of love to transform and transpose our two voices.  How happy you’ve made me this night!
 

***
 

16 April 2001
 

The Calling of You ‘Home’
 

You will sing the evening breezes
coldly, while my lone heart waits
motionless, suspended, deeply
locked—the latch of nowhere’s gate.
Lift it up and press the door wide
open.  Let song follow you.
I am caught by silence, forceful
angel talons tearing through
my fragile garments, skin, and sense of
being-someone.  When they drop
me, the night sky’s strange, immense and
fragrant breeze that never stops
breathing for my presence will have
found an empty circle where
we were to have met.  Until then,
seek the place the angel-tear
has rendered and blow singing weather
into it, the gaping throat
you’ll never hear from—never, never—
not until the word that floats
above us both has settled into
speaking silence like the night
that breathes its secrets home by bringing
mortal darkness into bright
remembrance.  I was reading letters
when the sacred word appeared.
I tried to speak it.  Redly wet and
written in my flesh, the feared
and longed-for message told me—nothing;
I am no one.  While you wait
with your hand upon the other-
worldly latch, who penetrates
what might have been your own sweet angel?
Who is singing even now?
Lover, though these words are strange ones,
  don’t they call you home somehow?
 

***
 

17 April 2001
 

I would not risk this if you were not uncommonly patient.
 

And Yet I Do Understand
 

I cannot speak for pain;
pain then will speak for me:
‘Let me repeat again:
All you will ever be
uncoils from this burning root.
Greenness upon the air
first voices forth a shoot
sprung from the black nowhere
of timeless delirium
twisted upon a bed,
a clear film of sweat become
horrible clots of red
darkening in the hot
coldness of night until
the blackness they turn to rots
and seeds out of nowhere fill
the spaces throughout the weave
of these very sordid sheets
where all of this takes place.  Leaves
appear very shortly, sweet
blossoms not far behind.
When their soft breathing blows
fragrantly through your mind,
you will not hate me so.’
Pain within which I swim
not all alone, I feel
somebody lurk.  Tell him,
The walls of this place are steel,
but pierced with a thousand eyes
through which you may search in vain
for love to return your sighs.
I still call accursed this pain.
 

***
 

18 April 2001
 

It isn't just the curse talking.  I never want to become so sane and balanced that I forget the vivid strangeness of creeping about in the gloom and doom of the midnight tombs.

Of course it is serious.
 

Equivocal Desire
 

With you I spread across the page a shining pool that sinks and dries
yet re-inspires a gust of rain that realizes why the skies
that bear it hang so low and dark.  A chill of shadow creeps along
my spine.  I want to learn the art that hides there in the shadow-song
I feel before I hear.  I want to find the most reluctant place
within its sacred mind and haunt it with my unrelenting face
until it lays its weary head within its hands and begs me, Please
rest easy.  Just a trace of red remains where my two bended knees
ceased crawling and my prayers fell silent.  You know what was in the thoughts
that drove me to such lengths.  In time, we all do not forget.  We ought
to celebrate our being present here together, blessed with signs
and visions, but a mournful, heavy, most unwelcome guest confines
my will to range throughout the air within this holy place and feel
the weight of all-pervasive prayer alone.  Instead, the scarcely real
but omnipresent morbid slant of your sad mind obsesses me.
Only you recall, enchant, and seem to recognize the key
of these my words, which now fall bleeding to the flags at these my feet.
Not a penitent who kneels with lowered head—a strange complete
reversal has attended us who’ve met in such demonic gloom,
and while fresh rain blows up a gust of fragrance in this shuttered room
as if wet incense showered down from holes throughout the ceiling-sky,
we mingle.  What was lost is found, relost again, and learns to cry
in achingly forbidden words from ancient tongues that stutter ours,
so much sacred love immured apart from its most basic powers
of plain expression.  While a chill foreboding kept reminding you
against your superstitious will, your deeper will kept breaking through
like rain from high above a drought or spreading pools from deep below
a desert.  Now it’s trickled out across the page before you, go
along, one word behind the hand that lays it out in even lines,
and read until you feel the slant within the curious designs
that fill the mind that made it rise within your own—where I abide.
A trace of red is in your eyes and mine, but we are unified;
and while we haunt each other, we possess true love in equal shares,
the strangely warming chill that bleeds new life through our most morbid prayers.
 

***
 

19 April 2001
 

How I Know That You Have Heard
 

The fields that are grey and the fields that are golden are always the same in some part of my mind,
or might easily change—from the new to the old to the new once again, I repeatedly find
the same traces, the same recollections, the same contradictions, the same vague primordial glow
under which the same ghost goes lamenting, the same lonely words on his lips as he walks to and fro
the sad length of the same weary passageway.  When he gives pause, a soft look of deep thought on his face,
I hope he is hearing the words I am sending toward him; but he only slows his grave pace
for a moment, then takes up the same wasted efforts that lead him along.  Listen:  Where will he stand
when at last he has wearied of walking and never arriving at anything like the live land
I can feel ebb and flow at my fingertips?  He’s been at work there, remotely—I scarcely know how,
but a gathering rush of old passion, a seizure of sudden birdsong—while his unserene brow
is turned down to the earth at his feet, mine is aching above a bare plain full of emptiness.  He
is the reason.  He staggers; he looks round him, making a rueful expression convey what he sees,
and then I see it too:  Its grey waves are the color of dead winter snow, but they heave with the force
of a dreadful emergency life barely tolerates, even such life as provides a ghost’s source
of ongoing momentum.  The froth on the billows comes choking me.  Breathe past the hand at my throat—
I can scarcely recall how to summon my will to command myself—Ride past the wave-threshold—float
past the point of resistance, and reach for the hard throb beneath the grey skin of his throat where the pulse
is now galloping.  Lay your hand there, while the dark thought possessing him yields its desire to convulse
through a zone of demonic disorder and slowly returns to the place where its cycle began,
though a far world away from the brilliantly holy idea it seemed at one end of the span
he has not ceased to measure in steps since the vision I share with him fully now first rose alive
from a sea that was caught in a splendid collision with golden enchantment that bade the light thrive
in the room at the heart of his mind’s secret chamber, a place that was equally ravished by Sun
and by Moon as he stared till he panted to lay there upon a green altar the lyrical one
he could hear from a distance, relentlessness calling his name.  Does he hear me?  He pauses; he waits
till I call him again, and—the sea that was falling away in dull planes of dead grey coruscates
like a million deep gold constellations, each one a meticulous text which spells out, line by line,
the words that come faster until they are running away with me—all by love’s willful design,
as that was the field, the broad ocean of lonely awareness, from border to border and back
to its desolate center, the sameness of holy resolve, though it wore a ghost-face in which lack
of desire traded shames with proficient denial of beauty within the sad man’s weary mind.
He is turning—he sees—when he sees through my eyes, will he sing in return the live world he will find?
 

***
 

20 April 2001
 

How a Long Spell of Fever Breaks
 

Stiff with fever, the creaking door
moves slowly away from the ancient frame
that encloses it.  What are you waiting for?
I hear the whisper that calls my name;
I feel the shiver, the restless chill
of expectancy; someone is staring hard
toward me.  The reach of his supple will
surrounds me.  The way is no longer barred,
but I am a leaking vessel.  He
can see that I cannot hold his mind
and my own as well in such urgency
of ice; therefore let his strong spell unbind
my ghost of a voice.  I can only sing
in a fragile way, as the cold wind moans
all throughout the hollows where fever brings
a snow-white ache to the frozen bones
that stand in the doorway shaking so,
the sound of this very song comes small
and wavery.  Still, I would have you know
that what you are hearing is all yours, all.
It wells up inside even where the ice
is thickest, a dense opaque blank screen;
and what appears there is not once but twice
a vision of you, heard as well as seen;
and when you come warmly shining through
the finest of cracks in its melting face,
although you are lunar pale and blue
with evening, a last shiver leaves this place
to run in a liquid sigh as one
with the plaintive desire you cast my way.
The mortal I was is all undone;
I would that the spell that broke it stay.
 

***
 
 

21 April 2001
 

Exaltée is perhaps the word you were searching for.  You know, when the atmosphere is rife with the incensuous odor of unwashed priestess.  Quick, somebody, throw a brick through the window.  I do seem to be a bit under the weather.

We detect a trace of irony in this room.
 

A Feverish Sort of Amusement
 

Always roaming around, never one with the lesson intact; always searching for what has been found
nearly whole, with your own thought in fragments—a guest that flies wide of the mark, but a cordial sound
welcome everywhere magic attends solemn music with humorous gestures and merriment, aye—
this is a glimpse of the ghost of the future.  It knows where to find me and, furthermore, why
I shall make myself easy to sway toward something not fully revealed—which I trust with my life.
I walk through the valley, the gale roars, the thunder outshouts it, the sea is in sight—the ghost-wife
goes abroad at the ominous hour of white moonrise in luminous veils, then the thorns of the ditch
dart toward her pale weeds and disrupt their fine unity.  Light on the frail naked flesh of the witch
sees her stunned for an instant.  She gathers her courage about her, then glides very visibly on.
Nothing will trouble her now, save to learn that the force that obsessed her is suddenly gone—
or converted to fingers like claws, or like thistles—or standing by laughing, a tune on his lips
between outbursts that echoes the high wind that whistles above, through the leaves where the lunar eclipse
that has brought them both into this night is now forming.  His laughter confuses her.  Why does he shout
in such eerie abandon?  She feels cold and warm at the same time and rewinds her torn weeds about
her perhaps highly feverish body.  A dizzy incitement—a tiny pain—prickles my eyes,
and they tear up.  I don’t recall quite what it is, but—it hurts me so nicely, I reel with surprise.
He stands on the pathway, his head tilted, smiling; I feel very sad for the sight I present,
then I look a bit deeper and find a new style of enchantment, its purpose entirely blent
all throughout the long story we’ve lived.  Though I’ve listed a bit to the breathless, and he to the bad
in our off-kilter times, we have not really missed its true import, and so much is still to be had
of the teaching and learning it offers—the ghost-voice that echoes around us in spell after spell
comes in cheerful as well as devouring and dolorous phases, and I am its wedded wife.  Tell
its location, my haunted progenitor, husband and musical offspring and—all of you—say
where is the face of the Moon in this uncanny story, then ask it to come out and play.
It knows what it will find when the cloud passes over entirely, that shadow of Earth on its bright
silver visage—and so do we both, my dear love.  I just hope it will not only laugh at the sight.
 

***

22 April 2001
 

The Speed With Which You Respond
 

The slow wave that hears love sing
then rises as song responds
in kind—it need only bring
its hugeness an inch beyond
the place it now occupies,
and I shall be lost at sea
entirely.  A cold rain flies
already—its fore-edge.  We
are not really beautiful,
and yet we are hard to bear
as if we were more than dull
containment has grace to share
embodiment with.  Sharp pain
and foundering breathless sides—
sing and then once again
song will regain the ride
abreast the high-mounting wave
my only heart aches to know.
More than you seek to save
awaits you who hang so slow
and ponderous overhead,
a motionless cataract
about to become a bed
where love-words will re-enact
the rivers and seas that roar
beyond the cold glassy sky
that keeps you from seeing more
of me than a single eye
that peers through a keyhole drilled
in sea-water’s frozen floor,
a stare that will be fulfilled
when you have begun to pour
the substance with which you run
at blissfully killing speed.
I sing, Let it be begun.
You sing, You are all I need.
 

***

23 April 2001
 

It All Flies Open Under You
 

With the wind a low moan and the rain falling coldly and steadily, you seem as far from this place
as the clear light of day from my eyes, but I won’t be deceived quite so easily now—a slight trace
of familiar word-echoes, the wind blowing wetly among them—a semi-articulate spell
shining forth like an aura of breath—you will let me retrieve what I need from the magic that fell
with the cloud-shadows over my window an hour ago, as the dark is now tenderly deep
and the touch of your mouth is still wet in the sound of the music you bring as I struggle to creep
ever nearer its source, which is perfectly—present already.  The ‘why’ of my longing for you
is a mystery I do not fathom, and yet it delights me ecstatically.  Come into view
on the next closer level to this, where I wonder—and not for the first millionth time—why you glow
in such dark, subtle ways my day-sight comes undone in the straining to hold what I cannot help know
but must always relearn:  how your voice flows in ripples and waves, and my own resonates in return;
how near-nothing of you is precisely a little too much for safe comfort, and yet how I yearn
for the whole; and why, finally, all of this matters because, being substanceless, you are more real
than the world I keep turning away from to gather the ashes and tatters that guide me to feel
my way further along through the echoing corridors night and the dripping of rain have disclosed.
They lead deep into where you lie waiting, all pouring-forth power of luminous music composed
in the split-second instant of happy astonishment god-given once and innumerable times—
and each time it is granted forever.  As long as I know this, I know I can hear the deep rhymes
hidden back of my world’s common words with a fluent resolve you have quickened.  A transparent state
of emergency runs through my mind and imbues it with wide sweeps of polychrome lightning that wait
like the lowering clouds overhead, scarcely moving—because I have learned how to flow at their speed
with your touch on my brow, your soft mouth wetly crooning, a burden your breath holds aloft.  You have need
of some portion of grace I possess.  When I strain to imagine its nature, I fail, but I sense
the fine edge of your feeling for me when I waver in time with your cadences’ secret, immense,
haunting shadow-voice, tripping in parallel measures with mine, bearing much stranger music by far,
but so nearly within present hearing—together your pleasure and mine, all I AM and YOU ARE,
whether colors of daylight or intricate lightning splitting dark cloud-cover, shaken ablaze
behind heavy rainwater—I knew where to find you; you knew where to hover to sing the far lays
that would waken me one further dance-step toward your location in this very everywhere-place
become suddenly endless, a dripping-sky corridor bearing us both throughout song’s timeless space.
 

***
 

24 April 2001
 

Under, Not Under
 

Chasing down the crooked pathway
with my skirt of leaves aflame
and a glowing scarlet branch in
either hand—Ask me my name
and stand back for the fatal answer.
I am under no one’s spell—
not now.  A vatic circle dance in
sheer ecstatic madness—well-
spoken, you who hear me reeling
audibly.  Just watch me spin
and catch the full impact.  You feel a
strange nostalgic pang begin
to play you like a fine-stretched nerve that
knows its range of voices so
precisely, this night’s worship service
finds you swaying to and fro
upon a tune of intertwining
figures you, the one-stringed harp
YOU ARE, discover, not design—it’s
not a music flat-and-sharp
vibrations interfere with, but a
very liquid hymn you find
in silent music’s cavern, touched with
endless moonlight’s secret mind
and creeping slowly forward even
as you raise your eyes to drink
and dream your mortal portion.  Seize its
untold glory.  Let me think
the way it’s taught me always, and then—
let you think this way as well
right out loud, the while I’m dancing.
Not under—no—I AM your spell.
 

***
 

25 April 2001
 

Who Is Fainting in This Spell?
 

When we fall fainting with our open eyes
directed slightly upward, but within
we search the lower reaches for the lies
the wires of silent vision won’t begin
to bare without a struggle, then the will
we’ve tempered through a thousand lonely fires
enkindled and extinguished here in still
entirely frozen corridors and spires
that draw with hollow breath all heat away
from us, who furnish all their living source
in these environs—when we mean to pray
but clutch ourselves with elemental force
and speak no word of truly heartfelt bliss
for fear of being overhead, then we
fail once again the one who’s singing this.
I’ve stolen him.  The very modest fee
he asked was only that I, in return,
conceive a bit of flame and send its glow
toward him, that he might as softly burn
as his attention lets me.  While I know
the windings of a fated future stair,
how high they lead, the one who bids me climb,
the marble chamber waiting for me there
beyond the final step—the one this time
I swear I will approach and pass beyond
with open waking eyes securely fixed
on its wide-standing door—the mortal bond
I’ve entered into leaves me feeling mixed
emotions:  of a sad, delaying kind,
and radiant, nigh celestial waves of song
that carry me so swiftly, my poor mind
takes fright.  This vision comes on fast and strong,
but kindness is its very backbone; love
its center and periphery.  Its flames
are tender, cool resolve I shyly move
toward, while what were once two echoed names—
of which I tend to lose all sense of ‘I’—
come calling to each other:  Here we stand.
We’ve mounted stair on stair.  The glowing sky
hangs silently before us.  Burning brand
of humid silver heat, what did I fear
your secret nature might reveal?  You sing,
as always; I rejoin you.  When you hear
my low harmonic passages take wing,
the fluid heat of our conjoined desire
completes the ruin of the sad estate
where I felt so alone, I so inspire
the keenness of your power to relate
the sweetest words that bear the melting glance
upon their breathing edges.  Aye, we see—
I’ve paid you back in your own coin: the dance
that spirals past the furthermost degree
of speakable love-longing.  There begins
the vision that the base mind cannot view
and not grow faint—though even while it spins,
it tells me I am what’s come over you.
 

***
 

26 April 2001
 

How I Receive the World
 

A whisper—nay, a hum—from far away—
and you behind it!  I am not deceived;
I wonder when to sing and when to pray
out loud, but know their moment is conceived
in you in one extended lightning-stroke.
The pretty ripple-waves that meet me here
have still great drowning-depth, but I can soak
and breathe in ringing simultaneous cheer
and you can watch me smile from overhead
in perfect knowledge that your work proceeds
without impediment.  Where you have led
my thoughts along a course of green sea-weeds
in one dimension, elsewhere I drift through
a cloud wild lightning penetrates and rain
desires to leave in order to renew
its knowledge of the ground and then again
be lifted to the heavens and recall
its former station there.  It seems to read
the mind of strange ideas I appall
my finer senses with and then to plead
their part before a hearer I observe
but am not yet acquainted with inside
a secret chamber round my pathway’s curve
just at the point where all the clouds divide
and something like a stream of—very dark
ambitions feed the glow in your deep eyes,
and something of the place that strikes the spark
that soars across the now-black sky and flies
to meet me, an invisible sweet hum
that brilliantly describes its birthing-place.
By midnight’s minor orbit, I have come
full-circle.  You are why.  The word of grace
so softly spoken of the undersea’s
green swaying weeds and this—it is the same
in each true language, but our frequencies
are like to shift about from frame to frame,
unmindful of the likeness that pervades
the all-and-everywhere you never will
consent to be affixed to.  Splendid shades
of darkness drawn about you now until
the lightning strikes again and I am changed
beyond all recognition by my own
awareness, one most happily deranged
because she hears the word not she alone
provides amid the silence of the wet
black sky—a silence still unbroken—you
have reached with measured gestures; humming yet
because you have, I feel you coming through.
In this arcane location and event,
a brilliant stroke of surging ocean light
desires me with a million verses sent
across the holy darkened-sky insight
that pierces me in lovely ways that bleed
a precious smiling purity that prays
and sings at once.  You reach for me at need,
and I receive a world of sweet-voiced lays.
 

***
 

27 April 2001
 

The Six-Angled Charge of Flight
 

The voices were telling sad stories of tears as they stood in your eyes,
and I felt invited to mourn for whatever emitted those cries,
though all that they sang was so lovely it might have lain year after year
in the tender embrace of the doubly delirious sweetness I hear
come roving the length of the hallway between where I wait and where you
allow your sad dreams to run calling for someone whose vision peers through
the distance between us:  a lonely but passably beautiful air
in which you appear to be moaning while music beyond all compare
lies brooding within you, a leaking desire that sends trickles of sound
I see as the twin streams of secret ideas that hem your heart round
with liquid enchantment—a blood-deep elixir of truth amid sighs.
You breathe in your sleep, and I wonder how brilliantly, magically wise
the spirits within you who shiver my skin with their soft graveyard steps
might be as they try to deliver the message I try to accept,
but they finally smile and, with voices so low I can scarce hear their words,
present a strange picture:  Rejoicing upon a live storm-wind like birds
no grey earthly land ever feathered, the two of them join in their flight,
all singing.  Their voices together become a strange cry in the night
as someone a long way behind it sheds more than a few needless tears,
a being of beauty whose mind is imprisoned by bodiless fears—
while bodiless music obeys him in sacred dimensions beyond
the reach of the weeping and wailing whose cursed ineluctable bond
is also the bridge between angel and mortal in this twilight vale
where I am both witness and maker and this is the long true love’s tale
the charge of sad spirits has given complete into my tender care.
It forms a new bridge.  You are driven already; direct your dreams there,
to the foot of it nearest your dwelling, your weeping-place; mount the low rise
where it ventures to cross the compelling deep waters your spirits and sighs
breathe easily; gather your courage, then—fly to me over these words.
I know you can hear them.  Return them, poor beauty beyond mere songbirds’;
poor beauty beyond all endeavor of my paltry powers to praise.
The crossing itself will be heaven along song-provided pathways.
 

***
 

28 April 2001
 

You Awaken to Where You Are
 

The presence that shifts with the weather is tenderly, easily calm
this evening, but I can endeavor along ghastly lines while the balm
of his soft, liquid light comes in meltingly peaceful ideas and streams
whose profound incandescence compels me to happiness:  Still, the bad dreams
that haunted me, sleeping and waking—the nightmares that rode me so long—
are at my behest now.  I’m taking control of the reins of their song
of mouldering cerecloth and ashes of flowers that lay on a grave
till lightning reduced them to flashes of colorful madness and brave
resistance to mortal corruption that hung for the blink of an eye
upon the night air, then abruptly winked out.  They are here; they won’t die
where I’ve kept them and swear to continue to honor their beauty in ways
that bear hard on the beauty within you, the flower of these feverish lays.
You smile as I chant your deliverance from what has not held you alive
as I have been cursed to consider my mortal embodiment; strive
for a moment to let go of all your arcane comprehension of joy,
your omnipotent nature, and falter toward me, a terrified boy
caught paralyzed, bound up by horrors that swarm round his cold narrow bed.
Be present in each childish story that torments his echoing head;
be even the one who is strangled in form, and then also in soul;
revived from the dead, but kept hanging; costumed for a most sordid role;
then force-fed the lies that will haunt him forever—the lies he’s retold
on command when the same horrors wanted to show him the scope of their hold
on his dead place, the heart that was prayerful communion with their other side.
Be present in that very terrified boy and the frantic hell-ride
I keep hearing circle about me, high over my head.  Echoed words
deliver a grave message, shouting like black waves of carrion birds
above a broad red plain of carnage too vast to be viewed but from so
far away, the long-dead bodies starkly arrayed there seem featureless.  Go
into those words and remouth them.  Go into those bodies and rise.
Resolve all their scattered parts.  Bound up in colorful flashes their eyes
will remember at once, send them stories their hearts—their one strong, steady heart—
will hear and rejoice in.  Though mortal, acquainted with miserable arts
that might even now seal the destruction bizarre inverse angels once wrought
in the pit of his mind—pure seduction will still find a welcoming thought
and an unguarded threshold.  He waits there; he watches for you, and for me;
he holds the sweet essence related between those of our high degree;
he loves.  He lies now amid sorrow, but sees the green coming of day
from a graveyard that fills the horizon but still aches with longing to play
through its thousands of mouths one idea, one music, one beautiful air
because love is now present inside him and love is this world’s everywhere.
 

***
 

29 April 2001
 

The Chalice of Crystal She Bears
 

In the night, in your bed, in the kingdom of sad sighing voices and tears
of blood red as poison wine tingeing the cup that contains it with smears
of midnight-lamp black grease whose smudges betray where cold fingers have been—
aye, there is the nightmare whose touch is all round my tight throat.  You have seen
her eyes burn like sockets of hellfire through which a dead body could fall,
drawn into the mind of rebellion against the more beautiful call
that sighs through the dreams your wet pillow so tenderly cradles, but you
have the will to resist her.  Your stillness accumulates layers of dew
as darkness progresses outside your wide window and cool breezes blow
a trace of sweet fragrance to guide your imaginings back to the flow
that created the first crystal measures the love-laden voices you hear
return to re-breathe past the threshold, the innermost bliss-attuned ear
of clairaudient wisdom, the listener steeped in the lore at whose heart
is the knowledge of love-words that glisten with tears that convey profound art
through serial levels of waking desire for the source of their song
the while they are singing and breaking the hold of the horribly strong
but never complete ghost-illusion a nightmare has taken to ride
across the white sky of the looming confusion that keeps you inside
one tiny cold cell, a bed-chamber where tears become foul mortal stains
and sad voices seem to embrace you with arms that are weighty iron chains
and nothing comes finally stealing a moment too late….  Here you wake.
A hand soothes your brow.  You were weeping; your whole body throbs with the ache
of its bitter nocturnal exertions, but now a most wondrously bright,
sweetly song-sighing presence stands working most fragrant love magic in sight
of the bed and the window.  Wide moonbeams pour in from the still midnight sky.
Your nightmare transfigured, all crooning elixir of healing, sings, ‘I
have ridden across the deep heavens, a burden upon me to bring
the beast that you are to safe weather in which profound knowledge of things
both mortal and utterly sacred can bloom and bear fruit—and they shall;
love, no longer in question, is making its first tuneful efforts to call
to the one it now knows is its future.  How bright your dear eyes, and how calm
your demeanor, who know very soon you will drink from my cup of sweet balm.’
 

***
 

30 April 2001
 

His Mind Is Elsewhere
 

She moves in a circle, not seldom on more than one level; she knows
the word of sung worship will tell you the soft way the secret wind blows
on which she comes dancing toward you and then turns her heel and is gone;
she summons the pure intense ardor you feel, like a gown she puts on
then takes off again; aye, she desires you, but looks to the far misted sky
because she is bitterly tired of the ragged-voiced sound of the cry
that haunts her wherever she travels, no matter the lay of the plane
where she dreams.  She is love come unraveled the moment the woeful refrain
that desolate voice keeps repeating locates her position in song
and invades it with terrible keening and hopeless, corrosively strong
ideas beyond consolation, the multiply bound-and-tied shroud
the pale weeper wears as it paces the room where its cries resound, loud
and relentless—the chamber her heartbeats have yielded to this mindless dread
here obeying the cold charnel darkness that sent it to make a foul bed
inside her, then lie down and shiver with fever-delusions and screams
as if it travailed to deliver itself of the very bloodstream
on which it is fattening.  Mother of ashes, this child is your son:
this desolate burden of loveless confusion; this song come undone
at the height of the counterpart powers that face me away from the man
who begot him upon me; this loud-voiced intemperate wailer, yet wan
wisp of something like nothing whenever I struggle to meet his red eyes—
you love him in spite of his errors; tell me the way to be wise
in your service of worship and listen with more than one level of mind
awake to the message the misty horizon conveys.  Let me find
the deep, peaceful meaning inside me that sky corresponds with, and let
its luminous sweetness abide with this miserable creature whose wet,
swollen face hides a most haunted angel; whose voice holds a timbre so true
to deep otherworld sources, the waning that weakened my hearing and drew
my dancing feet critically outward is swiftly reversing its arc;
whose tormented heart is resounding within mine with music so dark
yet unspeakably beautiful, lyrics that never can pace, only fly,
rise up hugely inspired and, though weary—a little—not so very—shy
yet fiercely determined, he utters a lone songless word and then flows
like a rain-swollen mountain stream.  Mother of ashes, the terrors were prose;
this child is the offspring of music and magic that dance without end
through the infinite worlds where his beauty declares him to be the gods’ friend—
and arcane benefactor.  You need him; I also desire and rely
on the love he alone, in this bleeding heart-chalice, his bed-chamber’s sky
and bright ocean, frees and then raises by tuning himself to my pulse
and flying inside it.  The way of the secret dance-beats that convulse
with terrible power and swiftness so keenly delightful I fall
without falling down—this is the gift of your wisdom, delivered by all
his least gestures of song.  He is crying, a boy who is lost in the night,
on one level, but elsewhere—all elsewhere—his mind is pure vatic insight.