AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

April 2003
 
 

2 April 2003
 

The Other Word
 

The blast—the white heat of the sky—the bright riddle
of sheet-lightning bearing down branches of steam
through the ghost-reeling rift in the sigh of the little
idea I can’t quite remember to seem
right out loud, much less be—not entirely—but shining
like fire on the plain of the sea, there it rides
on the meaningful lilt of the waves, made of twining
devices, our dreams, as the realized tides
send up storm-clouds and showers where lightning-struck letters
branch outward, fast-flowering sheets of live flame.
Read me aloud from that page of sea-wetness.
Find me endowed by the sound of a name
to move forth as an echo of—now I am breathing
you home again into the heart of a word
that tangles and twines with the steam this is, wreathing
you into the bloodstream of love deeply heard.
 

***
 

3 April 2003
 

Come This Way
 

Come open to dance the unreeling green spiral
of tiny new leaves, tightly twisted and pale;
the shy sweet design of white petals; the lyre of
fine nerve-endings lifting the latch of a jail
that is all waiting doorway; come listen, come linger,
come lilt to the flow of a flickering tongue
that is swifter than lightning once struck into singing
the shower of sparks of the glow of the sprung-
from-the-moment-that-lies-behind-time rising crescent
so silverly trembling the spine fairly melts.
Come, do you—home—to the heightened distress of
unbearable pleasure relinquished where pelts—
the clear needle-like rain of strange fire so inspiring—
our skins breathe it in and breathe out—reels so wild—
down the faery-eyed face of the mind where this spiral
idea lay sealed—till you opened and smiled!
 

***
 

4 April 2003
 

The Womb of Your World
 

Such hope-shot awakening showers of womb-light
bedazzled then wearied my aching love’s eyes.
Who trickles down my—I know the real moonrise
aspires to beam clearly beyond all disguise—
but whose is this now?  I am perfect confusion.
Who, by the leaking of chilly brow-sweat—
bright as the faery-wide eyes whose mild hugeness
desires you in dreams you can’t fathom as yet—
sprung lushly with spiralling green leaves and petals
from opening places so deep, late and soon
humming need through the ache of your mind will beget you
strange music whose magically eerie love-croon
will reveal itself—moonlight with hands straining wetly
to steady your gaze that it shine on the face
that is singing the tenderest lyric already—
to whom?  This world’s womb is an echoey place….
 

***
 

5 April 2003
 

Dedicated Loneliness
 

A loneliness-spirit ennobles its hearer:
It whispers down hollows:  Its green-shaded words
deliver melodious meanings through clearly
though slowly love-calling ideas like birds
that spiral on wide iridescent flight-feathers
in tightening circles.  Come nearer, so near
I can feel the warm cloak of your breathing.  Untether
the wingspan of mine.  In a half-spoken tear
as it slides down the face of a wan apparition,
hosts—spirit-masses like stormclouds—divine
live oncoming torrents behind the false vision
where loneliness strangles as arms intertwine
and stuttering tongues meet the skin of a music
that only describes itself through the live act
where the innately learnéd love-touch of the lucid
desire you have taught to fly after the fact
of your numinous words—become flocks fairly reeling
down hollows of sky through the core of all thought—
soothes us strongly.  The strange, sweet, enveloping feeling
of where they have been—the deep source you have brought
to the surface as lowering skies river-channel
a bed of new dreams as wild birds circle round—
only the work of such warm understanding
can further enchant such long song-hallowed ground.
 

***
 

6 April 2003
 

The Fountain of Rose-Light
 

The flame you gave—with a leaf’s abandoned
spirit over to vivid spring
as petals opened by heart-red handsful
and magic met us where wondering
desire gave way to immense fulfillment—
that bright flame rippled crimson-wet
through shining layers where slow and silken
unwritten letters I won’t forget—
not this time, on further and further waking—
glowed the color and fragrance rose-
ecstatic gardens aspire to, shaking
blood-high branches where aching woes
change into fountains of driven laughter
fraught with meanings a deep kiss finds.
Deranging beauty abounds there.  Drafts of
spirits drink from our holy minds’
entangled vessels as veins of music
offer ink to the petals coiled
but about to open up dripping, loosely
clinging signs of long, many-toiled
yet joyful nights of uncanny labor,
flame-wet songs caught in living leaves.
When yearning mouths meet the matchless flavor
of rose-leaf kisses and each conceives
a way as swift as unerring circle-
branches back to the single heart
where the secret Moon’s deepest wonder-working
becomes a ring of wild darkness-art
in waking dreams on a page of daylight,
we shall flare up again.  Our night
reels round where memory never fails and
gardens bear beams of singing light.
 

***
 

7 April 2003
 

To Read the Real You
 

What onlooker’s eye searches through the obscurely revealing grey mist stealing now through the mind
that invites mine to dream?  I lean forward, unsure of myself; I am frightened, but one I would find
has conceived an appealing idea whose echoes move tenderly everywhere I do—then fade
when I gesture as if to run after them.  Beckon again, whisper-beings—your swarmings cascade
from a prominent place in a fellow diviner’s ulterior reaches—so like these words’ flow.
Steady yourselves to take on deeper shining, aspire to sheer magic, then let yourselves go….
Spark between crystalline planes of electric transparency, stretch into lightning and long
for the cauldron of art at the heart of a hectic, entirely nightmarish high priestess of song
to home-welcome—by force of great need grown attractive beyond all resistance—and hold you within.
Under strange writhings of steam, an emphatic design shifts and flickers upon the live skin
of a carefully blended elixir of moon-dew and bright woman-blood caught at intervals spaced
round the wheel of a year and a day.  In that humid environment, someone desires to be faced
by a viewer whose greatly mysterious origins ripple fast-rooted in similar wise.
Where is he now?  Does he linger, malformed by delusion in outwardly listless disguise,
while behind sleeping eyelids he carries a burden of dread through a forest?  Or does he confer
with a fit of arcane misdirection while working an arrowhead—really an empty-shelled bur—
from a wound where it lodges unlightninglike?  Does he remember at all?  The high priestess here smiles.
Swimmer in love’s heady cauldron, a rustle of undersea leaves fraught with genuine wiles
so completely surrounds you, its sounds are confused with the fast-and-slow movement of parallel thought
in a mind that is not merely yours but so huge it encompasses all of us.  Moon-vision brought
to the surface of words by a shift of keen power, cleaving through mists that we shine crystal clear,
murmuring magic along with the downward sight-angle your passage has opened up here,
where were you born?  When a mind first conceived you, whose vastly love-overwhelmed heart rang round,
crying as deep heaven-torrents of sweetness bathed it in layers of literate sound?
You know for yourself the sole transparent answer to all you’ve been asking, this now-mistless view
of the Moon-cauldron’s kind nightmare face.  As its glances strike home and you meet them, it reads the real you.
 

***
 

9 April 2003
 

What You Won’t and Will
 

You won’t have turned to a far horizon
blindly, whispered a heart-worn name
for no known reason, searched the skies for
a sign in vain while a list of lame-
footed, lucid dancer’s desirous measures
chanted murmurous erstwhile woes
in lunar, circular weavings—says your
will, you won’t have rewarded Noes
to one who answers your every lonely
longing-ache with prefigured smiles
transported gladly across a glowing
forest canopy song beguiles
by force of a thousand timeless spirit-
echo dreams into leaves that shake
in advance of oncoming winds.  You hear their
whispers working the name awake
between its source in the heavens’ midnight-
moonrise silence and your heart’s halls;
won’t you beckon toward the hidden
purpose gliding behind the calls
that keep you tormented, chilled, enthralled and
on the verge of enraptured dance
yourself, laid under a willing pall of
divined leaves only?  Break the trance
of staring into a sightless future
hearing only the Moon’s worst hiss.
Face the scarily eerie truth of
nightmare music:  Whose sign is this?
Won’t she tender you endless branches
reaching up into winds that sing
the tunes to all of your own leaves’ chants of
magic?  Won’t you give everything?
 

***
 

12 April 2003
 

Waxing Moon Magic
 

Sung of the low soft cloud of midnight-
morning above our Moon-drenched heads—
the wondering son of nightmare-ridden
magic whose fountain-spirit sheds
a much deeper stream of glowing silver
over us both as long we lie
awake to the starry-clad bewilder-
silence the brightly leaking sky
desires that we be most clearly swept by
here, in our forest glade where birds
half-sleep as imagined songs beset them
stormily—strange scarce-mortal words
fulfill the as yet unspoken promise
held in the black vale underwing
of one nearest by.  Its lonely sobbing
sigh entertains the Muse we sing
in our every dream; this night, its restless
feathers are fairly twitching.  Sweet
cascades come unreeling through it wetly.
Oh, the wild bird whose pulses beat—
twin ribbons of interspiralled letters
none but its throat could cast out loud—
all through its sleep as we forget our
vague early thoughts and face the cloud
beheld first in mirror-eyes and then in
dread sacred earnest—everywhere—
sees us dispersed, while subtle blended
layers remain in open air—
which now come as clear, clear music sent by—
wakens the bird and with it, song—
throughout our two hearts the one Moon meant to
lead us now reigns:  Love waxes strong.
 

***
 

14 April 2003
 

Drawing Nigh
 

I hold you alight, a great candle obsession creates and enkindles in one stroke of heat,
dizzying softly the learner of lessons I ache to become to the unsteady beat
of the heart underlying the breath that makes singing so nearly impossible not to allow.
Soon I shall hold you more brightly.  But cling to a moment a hairsbreadth beyond the clear now,
and sigh deeply:  Dear love, you have come of your own self to cross the death-threshold the crescent Moon keeps
broom-of-maidenhair-swept free of ashes and bones and strewn lightly with petals so fragrant it weeps
with a sweetly articulate joy in the blossom of mind where you hear and grow more richly wise.
Under a canopy-cradle of tossing and turning desire in the sky of your eyes,
it hangs seen in the scale of ideas where nightmares arise as a species of thought all its own,
a kind, passionate friend to the thunder and lightning that shadow the stars in the fields you have sown
thick and far with the same dark-awakening flowers as those whose pale petals sigh dreams at its feet.
Breathe of bewitchment as radiant powers steal forward to lead you to rise up and greet
your imagined companion.  A flickering lantern, a green-shaded candle surrounded by leaves
as it sways under layers of canopy-branches on both sides of borning and dying, conceives
liquid fibers and tendrils of lightning cast living to read out their secrets as mind-storied folds
of yourself, your most eloquent being.  Deliver the ache of that shining to her who now holds
a round-tapering ray by its quickened attention the better to pique its desire to give more
silver light to this luminous ancient dimension while gliding again and again through the door
that is everywhere threshold—all breathing, no substance to block you but air, lunar music your heart
welcomes through this grave passageway.  Words dare not utter its name, but we know it as true darkness-art
as it stands self-revealed, power mouthing a language beyond mortal thought while we listen and hear
vast and beautiful cascades of sound lightly hanging before us—impossibly, boundlessly clear,
born of nightmares upon the dead bodies and ashes that once were the bones of the ghosts magic brought
to dance round us between diamond heat-strokes and flashes of love’s midnight-lightning.  Its seeds in our thought—
that singular, unified gift of obsession we shared long before we were known to have raised
sighted eyes to the light of the Moon-silvered heaven inside us and found ourselves fit to be praised,
even shamelessly, there, by the clairvoyant reaches it opened in layers, swift thresholds aligned
with the beat of a gathering joy that came seeking our knowledge—they need us; their strength is designed
to expand into overflow lyrical lappings toward and away from mere words as we sing.
Light of my eyes and my hands, be you happy; candle become vatic burning, please cling
to the touch of a future already now present in mind and in heart as soft petals mount high
all around us.  There, cradled by moonlight, our lesson awaits us:  The breath of death’s darkness draws nigh.