AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

April 2004
 
 

5 April 2004
 

No Riding Slow
 

There's no going slow here.  The dreams all unfading
tomorrow-today will have told you the same
when you’ve woken to know them.  The purpose of staying
their course is to hold with no more halt and lame
hands and feet to a magic so formally perfect,
so huge, yet so easy, the Moon’s set and rise
as it dances away and toward you will turn you
to trance-broken luminous streams deathless eyes
will view deeply with glad recognition.  How hopeful
the sign that you hear me—your canted regard
as you leak a bright tear in the dream lying open
beneath the night sea of a sky over-starred
with live sentient patterns.  The letters and symbols
from which I have chosen my own yield me song
beyond all earthly measure, and yet through the glimmer
of sky in your mind you shall find you belong—
while embodied in too-human truth—to a music
your heart’s secret yearning to hear has drawn nigh.
Who am I?  Fast-breathing learner whose lucid
desire has lapsed under this Moon-trodden sky,
all to see itself instantly gathered and gardened
and blossomed and bolted again, quick as thought
through the flow of its courses as longing rehardens
its hold on the dark lunar force that has wrought
every curve, every bow, every pale iridescent
sound-petal whose rising and falling has made
of each word I would show you a most shining lesson
in how constellations are spoken and played
across heaven’s night face high above and far under
the paired feet and hands that must hasten to know—
you are riding the marvel, the blood-woman-wonder,
the song-bearing sea, and I will not go slow.
 

***
 

21 April 2004
 

You Turned to Answer
 

We woke you with shining-wand limbs no weather
of careworn Earth ever danced with; then
we elided long mourning chains whose severed
ends were remet within the ken
of that bright oracular being; then we
called you suddenly.  When you turned
to answer, torrents of words—too many.
Lightning loves you, as you have learned.
 

***
 

22 April 2004
 

Form of Duplicity
 

I rose to the hold of the slow quiet water,
the Moon-Pearl that shone through its innermost eye,
and its murmurings found me the drowned silent daughter
whom I would soon know by the numinous lie
her sly lips would impart as she wavered toward me,
a form of duplicity never conveyed
by plain words but declaimed by the marvels and portents
that issued her:  Who is the light of that shade?
 

***
 

27 April 2004
 

The Blood-Warm Coming Home
 

Shaken unspoken, though told in willful,
strangely laborious gestures through
a haven of grace so warmly silken,
I can scarce place the ghosts I knew
terrestrially in these environs
yet, we are full-Moon-sure to meet
love’s memories—lapping near heart-horizons—
here at this ocean’s blue-white feet.
 

***
 

30 April 2004
 

Joyous Beltane!
 

Surely you know well enough by now to look twice at the word 'leaving'...
 

The Round Midnight Riddle
 

You wrought a most curious ring with a riddle,
a spiraling insight, deep-channeled within
the smooth sides round its secret naught-center, a bit of
abandonment shining all down a pale skin
traced with signal-engravings.  Some-oftimes it murmurs
tree-words through my sighs, spell-unbinding love charms
that like you are most fraught with blue-lustrous wild learning:
the coming Moon rides in the leaving Moon’s arms.