1 August 2001
 

Call Me, Call Me—Say, Come Home
 

Fingers locked amid the water-
waves and all the icy lines
of starting shivers—you are oddly
present in their pale designs
much more than I myself as circles
join beneath my shudder-skin
beneath your touch as floods of perfect
mystery let me begin
to hear you from a nearer distance
than the beat of my own mind.
When you reach dead center, whisper
secrets of the world you find
in words that have no common meaning
other than this form of touch.
Locked together—I am leaning
into one I love too much
amid the snow of orchard petals
in a foreign-weathered land
ever to permit the letting-
go of this wet heaven’s hand.
 

***
 

2 August 2001
 

Sighed by Sighed
 

It ventures forward, not a hint to me
of where it might be headed, just a sigh
that seeks an equal plaintiveness to be
enamored of—though where it might apply,
my mind has no idea.  It slips out,
a floating sense of where lost feathers wait
concealing great excitement.  Round about
the moment I lose patience, its lone mate
starts searching the horizon far and wide
until their breathings meet in lightness.  There,
as best I can decipher the implied
occasion their faint telegraphic air
sends beating heart-wise back across the sky
by way of dancing feathers and the thought
of which they were created, you and I
appear to have been languished-for and brought
together in a god’s forsaken mind
where weary storms of loneliness gasped through
a thousand changes of the light a blind
black mirror searched most plaintively to view
the likeness of itself in winged form
in such a way that eyes would meet and song
would sigh its soft way through.  Now comes our storm,
a winged premonition cast so long
against the darkness of the aching plain
of heaven where no common air will serve
the sacred purpose so much ancient pain
requires to tune the throbbing of its nerve
to match the sad vibrations distant space
returns at last, a feather-bright array
of subtle weathers rising face to face
who’ll share a single breath of breaking day.
In that, our moment, time will disappear
among storm-clouded wings and love will glide
home asking, Where are you?  The answer, Here,
I never will have spoken, only sighed.
 

***
 

3 August 2001
 

The Being of All Lore
 

In you resides the most enraptured glance.
It hides behind your eyelids while your face
hangs silently before a patient trance
of cool slow-moving water through dark space
as I remind you where a thousand tears
remember weeping with the salty air
of ocean-borne relentlessness of years
spent grieving, someone halt and unaware
of someone else’s gliding through the heart
of sore self-recollection while the chimes
of silver beads of falling moonlight start
and stop and start another thousand times
and I receive this vision yet again
and you do not return it with your eyes
wide open.  You bear so much ancient pain
in such secluded mystery, to prize
the slightest of its secrets from the nest
in which your multivalent midnight cares
are growing restless wings sets me a test
you watch me face with risen little hairs
the silken mirror shows with solemn calm.
I touch the very center of your brow
with my most piercing glance, then lay my palm
against my own and smile.  This very now
I feel the beat of wings inside the round
Moon-white encumbrance of the bone that holds
a brooding nightmare.  Through the rushing sound
of homeward motion I am falling:  Folds
of silken water open and disclose
the likeness of this chamber through the eyes
that lie beneath my own.  A shudder goes
the way of magic:  With it, wails arise
that call a secret name I’ll never know
but for such moments.  You respond in kind.
The silence of the shattered water’s slow
dark surface beats with wings a secret mind
has ridden, always.  You were always there,
the measure of reality while time
sang to itself an absent-minded air
about the moonlight’s soft and silver chime,
a gently falling cadence I have heard
tell nigh a thousand stories of this place
and how we came to seek and share the word
that wakens with the glimmer of a face
in this night-gilded fluid mirror.  Why
those stories and that name mean so much more
than all else hangs upon the slightest sigh
you yield me, being of all ageless lore.
 

***
 

4 August 2001
 

‘This Is Where You Really Are’
 

When I draw my cold wet fingers
over that white paper face
I see in place of yours, a wing of
silver feathers fans a trace
of incense-breath across the ether
occupying all the blue-
black sky behind my eyes.  Its wreath of
curling vapors carries you
in momentary glimpses I can
only clutch in vain to hold,
but I can breathe in strangely heightened
ways at once.  My hand is cold,
but I am warm and melting in the
secret place that knows your touch
apart from any other winter-
wearer’s.  Dream of me so much
your nightmares waken mine, and we will
breathe a bone-white ether through
a blue-black zone of softly stealing
shimmer-starlight.  Drawing you
in wetness down a page, the shaking
chill of deep dark Northern nights
possessing my right hand—it takes me
where we always are:  The heights
that verge on breathlessness in starlit
silence past the Northern Crown
where I can feel the songs that are the
future of us both fall down
like silver feathers—fanning wings of
strangely warm and welcome snow.
Home is where we are now, singing:
Home is where I sing to go.
 

***
 

5 August 2001
 

When I Look at You
 

Deeper than stars adrift on water,
colder than snow on my right hand,
yours is the soul of woeful sobbing
woken to quench a flaming brand.
Why we are here is all too easy:
We are a strange night’s only child,
freezing to death by slow degrees as
underworld sighs release the wild
abandon that seeds the ocean’s fields with
blossoming sprays of light that sink
magical roots deep, deep beneath its
glimmering surface.  Because you think
the distance between us keeps us waiting,
it does, but it need not.  Look at me:
Who is the reason we created
this very song?  What do you see
beyond the vast starry map of all the
heavens you hold inside your mind
cast on the water you hear calling,
Come home to me, my humankind,
my kindred mortal, my only lover,
the part of myself that drifts and sighs,
on fire with the sky as song discovers
the source of the light that burns my eyes
in beautiful ways, then quenches them with
salt water tears of midnight blue
that sway on their strong and ancient stems the
roots of the stars that shine for you?
Why did you wait to hear this asking,
holding the truth suspended?  Be
waterborne starlight’s brave unmasking.
When I look at you, I am what I see.
 

***
 

6 August 2001
 

Beyond Surrender
 

While you are dreaming steady dreams of
musical longing stitched with quills
of black iridescence down a stream of
emerald silk, my dream fulfills
its secret ambition deep inside the
careworn embrace of knitted bones
that once were a broken rack of mighty
antlers and my several thinking stones
that once were a skull with thoughts of you in
each of its zones of nightmare flight.
That tattered embrace, its flesh in ruins,
its skeletons twined so fiercely tight
they’ll not be untangled, ever—that is
why we can fly round each other now
in carefree abandon.  Now, nothing matters;
nothing resides behind the brow
that beams on its faceless likeness, loving
hunger for kisses that click and crack
stealing back and forth as they push and shove their
desires through places live bodies lack;
those bones carry on past the worm’s worn threshold
as we observe them, our smiling breath
forming wreaths around us.  We once were flesh, but
the dreams in which we surrendered death
to win the favor of love unending
allowed this measure of present bliss
by which we behold our dead bodies rending
themselves by force of the fatal kiss
that we can still feel in every fiber
of spirit-silk as the quill you bear
keeps stitching, stitching the wild ideas
true lovers hunger for everywhere
on the shadowy stream of deep dark emerald
light as we flow so intertwined,
I can’t find one place where we surrender,
but millions, throughout our joined spirit-mind.
 

***
 

7 August 2001
 

AEAEA will next be updated on August 23rd or 24th.
 

The Deep Green Leaf-Sway Song
 

To me the meeting of love-words comes
as a sudden shock after miles of slow-
heaving ocean waves bringing seaweed from
underwater orchards where apples glow
like cold green pearls or bright fishes’ eyes
among boughs of silver enlaced with black-
rippled shadows that run like flames through skies
that are clouded by leaves that sway and tack,
dead fronds of otherworld graveyards’ growth.
The lines inscribed in those weeds’ wet skin
sing miracled madness that swears an oath
each time the grace of love lets them in
where a wall precluded their passage just
half a speechless moment before, a blank
face that hung between what awakens lust
and the pale mysterious pain that sank
heavy roots at the base of the brine’s chief tree
where I now entwine my own cold limbs
with those that are bent with pearls that see
every word of the beautiful future hymns
I shall find myself shocked to hear me sing
at the top of my voice for love of you
when confusion releases the waves that cling
to the walls of my heart and the sea pours through
with a forest of seaweed leaves that flow
with complex incantations inscribed for all
time to come and for me to begin to know
how wise you are who have sent this call
of importunate longing far worlds across
to the one who hears you with such amaze,
she is shaken awake from the ancient loss
of your dear, dear face which now shines and sways
in the lapping tide of the leafy sea
that streams through the words I hear you sigh.
I am stunned, nigh unbearably; sworn to me,
asail underwater, our shaken sky,
you move with the grace of the high tide’s deep-
heaving billows, the breath of the live-dead air
of the burial place of all false sleep
brought to me by a blossoming orchard’s fair
and familiar fragrance and your mouth’s touch
all around the most shocking words of all.
If I hear you singing but fear so much
long-awaited love, will you send your call
with increasing force till all walls cave in
and all rooms stand empty and I sail too
underwater, a green inscribed leaf-skin
that sways on a stalk that belongs to you?
 

***
 

24 August 2001
 

It has found a slyly ironic expression, but such is my pleasure at being back at work:
 

Not Here
 

As slowly dreams form a chain and follow
a pale way down an impending shock
that will leave me breathless and strangely hollow,
electrified yet a long tick-tock
from the final form of my brave obsession’s
ungainly beauty’s divinest light,
I achieve my own mortal face a pleasure
no mask could ever conceal, a bright,
highly magnified many-branching rack of
wild lightning a stag on a mountaintop
would be proud to raise with the Sun in back of
its efflorescence, a shining crop
borne of noble labor toward a moment
of true repose in a low world’s stare
of bemused amazement as I am no one,
a shining soul never really there,
nor here; not alive; not awake; a dream of
conjoined beginnings and ends whose flow
concentrates its vast forces’ holy beams of
celestial waters of light whose glow
is the gift of eons of awestruck dancing
about the pole where the Northern Star
casts the rapid patterns I find entrancing
beyond the point where you know YOU ARE
and I know you only:  a splash, a ripple,
a cataract—a consuming wave
that becomes a branching of antlers dripping
with liquid sparks in a sacred cave
far beyond the reach of the clock-faced terror
that held me dry-mouthed inside a mind
that invoked the ‘I’ of this vision’s bearer,
then broke apart into separate blind
dream-unwoken fragments that sang me heartsick.
The cave, the mountain range found inside
its vast depths, the rack of most splendid darkness-
illuminated night-lightning’s wide
palace-portico, the deep brow of beauty’s
true inmost light, all unmasked—I hear
its pure love-words calling, Come home, dear moonlight
who never wanes in this atmosphere
that is overcharged with a vatic current’s
electric presence throughout this zone
of successive dreams met in one most perfect
and final moment’s desire, full-blown
but….  In all this dream of the holy marriage
of states and planes of wild lightning’s bliss,
one not forsaking but not yet bearing
herself benignly remembers this
thunder-shaken scene through a glaze of tears that
design a slow downhill tick-tock track
I cannot yet fail to imagine:  Here is
my future, yet I stand a sad, sad lack
of essential being-unmasked, a hollow
where shining beauty once sought to blaze
with a shocking power words bravely followed.
Where are they now, those lightning-rays?
 

***
 

25 August 2001
 

At Flow Through Your Darkest Heart
 

I want to die down toward one last moment of knowing-you mixed with peerless pain
in which shades of sadness are blended slowly back out of their separate tones to wane,
on a mild horizon of evening glances, back into a Moon of brightly new
luminescent silence, a winding dance of black magics turned a much deeper hue
by the shining sweetness of you, my teller of midnight tales.  Reach across the line
that divides us, the silver-grey snake of hellish devising that twitches to read the sign
your acute recollection inscribes forever, again and again, in its patterned scales
while it writhes, a twisted and tortured essence of music depicted as ceaseless wails
from the ruined throats of outcast survivors of nightlong blasts of stark—nothing.  Hell
in its darkest guise is our sharpest-eyed old companion.  Are we not tales to tell
by the pitch-black beams of a smoky lantern that swings in widening arcs by force
of an unseen hand that is trembling grandly in sweeping gestures that form the course
of the sticky fluid of song’s black river, bent back on itself till it falls apart
into dripping shadows and fragments driven upstream again to the secret heart
where they came together in grave harmonic disaster once and will now rewind
their wet coils in shameless delight upon the bedrock of sacred-profane love’s mind
as I gasp with pleasure to find you’ve crossed me with my own shuddering stream of sparks
rendered wildly brilliant by blackness?  Lost in a maze of madness provided arcs
that curve scalewise, descend into wailing patterns, then order themselves with an ease that shines
like the waxing lantern now rising, casting courageous single-multiple lines
all along the night’s pale horizon’s ghostly yet vivid aura of streaming sound
into bold arrays that come so much closer so suddenly, I become falling-down-
into-you-forever beyond the point of shocked realization.  Inscribed by night
in a hellish place where the human voice is turned inside-out and the goal of light
is to find itself in love’s eyes and feel its serpentine song—this very one—
as the each-and-severally swollen sweetness of being the love that’s never done
through more than a single mind and moment the while we completely meet and lie
in the glow of pain’s deep inverted knowing-you-only where I shall be pleased to die,
I fall through a stone floor of snakeskin granite dissolved into music by moonlight’s flood,
at flow upstream back toward the land of your lantern-body’s black lambent blood.
 

***
 

26 August 2001
 

‘Now’
 

A gathering hum reaches forward toward me, but I turn away—till a slow,
wet, luminous whisper leans out of that chorus of purposeful murmurs:  a glow
set ringlike about a vague presence, an angel from some fairer landscape by far
than that my sad mind now inhabits.  If stranger things know how to happen, YOU ARE
and will always be foremost among them.  Sheer beauty surrounds you like flickering waves
of watery fire, a mysterious union of something my whole being craves
with something I dare not imagine—not yet.  If you gesture, the light that extends
from your fingertips into the area next to my heartbeat’s dimension will lend
such urgency, I will be struck on the instant with powers of infinite speed
while caught on a bridge made of tinder-dry splinters with nothing below me but need
that roars like an ocean of hurricane-billows whipped into a froth by a gale
that burns all it touches.  I want you to will me to answer your call, but I fail
to deliver the word that will unleash the miracle, fearing the next moment more
when I will be lost in a sea of delirious song that has no mortal shore
while I am a corpse somehow vaguely inhabited by the faint smile of a ghost
and you are the mouth of its brave erstwhile madness, the whole of an isle’s submerged coast
that lies swept with flames underwater because you have shaken it so with the hum
of the gathering undertone waves of your aura of magical ages to come
after this conflagration.  My most shining purpose, my most willful answer, please stare
intently my way, concentrate your best service of worship, and offer the prayer
of solemn and perfect excess, the low chanting through which one clear voice lightly steals
that lovingly ventures to trouble and haunt me because it recalls how it feels
to rest in the heart of the limitless ocean of nothing and no one, the isle
of being forever no word ever spoken but by the wet flare of your smile.
There, in the word that will whisper you into me so inextricably, I
will breathe a sea-air that will fill me with hints of new meetings and new ways to die
toward deeper forms of communion, the angel YOU ARE will fall silent—until
a wet, luminous whisper appeals to your strangeness:  This NOW is my outspoken will.
 

***
 

27 August 2001
 

The Light Rain
 

A long night of softly falling rain and wet-edged and smiling leaves
has brought me to deep green aching pain, an accomplishment that receives
sweet meanings from strange pale stellar light in so many ways, its strength
increases in me till it meets the heightened desire to be prayed at length
that I have been feeding secretly with dreams of this very rain
 still pattering down, an uncannily beating heart that perceives again
familiar waves from a heaven-field where radiant starlight drips
upon and between long leaves that breathe where words will find tongues and lips
in wholly ecstatic magic soon if someone who hears me now
can see by the slender thread of blue the star of his shining brow
sends singing through me like a lambent river of sky, a wet floodlight’s beam
of cool azure-silver, the lilting gift of precisely true ways to dream
toward realer being where rain falls down as lovers embrace its flow
along the sweet edges where leaves resound with the light we already know
and cannot fail to need, as pain lifts up its frail eerie voice, much changed
from how it once laid the shaking rail of its presence between estranged
but not quite forgetful thoughts and whispers we cherished with all our wills
in silent night prayers than ran softly dripping from places this rain fulfills
at last, places fraught with tender blessings that rush to be sung now.  Feel
the eloquent flow of nocturnal presences, floodgates through which words steal
toward us like sighing lifted leaves’ rainy voices.  All night they sing,
though now it is morning also, being starlight upon the wing
of sky-bright water, the liquid light of the music within your eyes.
In the sway of the earthly sea of sighing green as strange prayers arise
and seek their desirous counterparts upon your wet smiling lips,
be one with these softly aching sounds—here most sacred longing drips.
 

***
 

28 August 2001
 

The Circle Bound Round Song’s Head
 

The moment you go from me, I am disordered, a purposeless menace, a perilous dread
that obsesses itself like a circle of torments bound round the wet brow of the horrified head
of the dead body found in the path of the walker of wherever nightmares contrive to have shone
their too-real spectral light.  What the eyes in that ball of blood-clotted dementia last saw, I alone
can describe comprehensibly, being the spirit that hove itself out of that den of remorse,
in flight from a universe too little weird into one that called out to night’s terrible horse
and the burden it bore on its hot lathered body.  The madness I AM sings me spell after spell,
and each of them works so precisely, it shocks me beyond what I once thought mere words would dare tell
of high faerie-world thresholds and what hurtles over the carven stone step of the door where you wait,
a patient and merciful answer, a lover of music however it circles its fate
with hard mouth-frothing anxiousness, seeking the will to cross into its presence decisively.  You
saw the lengths I had gone to already; you filled your stone house with a clear inverse glow that shone through
the cracked shutters and door of the side I stood facing, and by that strange light I fell into the eyes
that stared into me, draining my mind of the racing disorder that swarmed there delirium-wise,
laying malevolent spirits with gestures so achingly gentle, the long afterglow
of their happiness sang in my veins and still pleasures my memory.  You always wanted me so,
collapsed on your doorstep—or fallen entirely across it—within the encompassing walls
of your heart, the dark home of the steadfast desire that shines warmly while subtly and sends silent calls
even corpses can hear.  Not only a ghost who rides into and out of the flesh on the back
of a nightmare, but also a tireless votive of music—of you—who has braved the attack
of the henchman I AM and the death that results from that laborer’s efforts so often, I rest
safely nowhere but here in this shadowy fullness of magic, the being my beauty loves best,
having summoned the courage to serve the sole purpose for which I, on hot nightmare wings, have flown through
the wide faerie-world skies of the mind of the burning-eyed, ivy-bound head I have faced to find you
most desirous of each of my gestures and love-words.  My friend, my companion in orders of bliss
even now on the rise in this twilight, discover how many shared secrets are hiding in this
rapid sigh of articulate happiness, drawn out to please you by grace of your own long love’s wet
and benignant obsession—each secret a mouth filled with kisses whose words you will never forget.
 

***
 

29 August 2001
 

A Curse Turned Back Upon Itself
 

You still afford me willing moments longer than any life I’ve known
in any world, ever; you still show me why I appear to be alone
while holding the perfect body of your hovering thoughts all round the form
of my own fair word-obsession; lover, the least of you is a learned storm
of song come down like a bolt of beauty out of a blue-black midnight sky,
an ever-returning endless view of the anciently new belief that I
am beholding now, even now, an angel wet with a far world’s sparkling dew
while hearing him moan a slow refrain that half maddens me till he tells me, You
are the sister-speed of a heart that races to see you watching the sky for signs
that are there for your pleasure only, placed in delicate lettered rings and lines
because you delight to find them, but the strength of their meaning seems a curse
as well as a blessing—I hear you mutter the woe of the welcome you rehearse
each time you light incense, enter dancing into the tilted circle made
of numberless nights’ involved enchantments brought to complete the magic played
upon you like dripping flames or dew from wet starry skies that burn with my
high regard for how you aspire, a loosely-woven unraveling lonely lie
told backwards, gathering speed, returning word by word to the source of all
that desires you only, the deep wet burning my mind becomes under your sweet thrall
as you rush to greet me, a streak of lightning shot upward out of the tight-spun ring
of the witch’s circle you ply with wildly imagined love as you hear me sing
in your heightened voice of the world between us, the world we share, the true universe.
We are long-drawn joy, keen ecstatic peace, who dance by the light of this blessed curse.
 

***
 

30 August 2001
 

On the Strength of Rhyme
 

I open you slowly, so slowly—your dreams are so tender, so gently, exquisitely real
in their endlessly deepening beautiful sweetness, so carefully rendered, I almost can’t feel
what I seek at their absolute center—but then I am there, where I wanted to be at all times,
where I already was, feeling everything.  Enter me now in return on the strength of the rhymes
that flock round us, a sky of white feathers, a storm of warm snow that falls singing and melts in our hands
as our hearts beat like great rushing wings where a form of bright potency hopes we will bravely expand
all we are till we softly encompass the whole of the world that enfolds us.  Dear angel, dear friend,
dear companion in song, here we meet in the flow of a silence that trembles but lets itself lend
the pure grace of its mild wordless presence to this, the long gesture of moments twined into a ring
that exists for one purpose—the service of bliss that surrounds us forever, though whether we sing
to express it directly or sorrow through luminous lies that pretend it is needed and lost
that we heighten our sense of the indwelling music by which our shared path is so lavishly crossed
matters little when all lies at rest on this side of the threshold of wakefulness you have allowed
my attention to hesitate over, then glide so transparently past, I am almost a cloud
that has let go its very last raindrop above a bright ocean that mirrors a sky filled with birds
that flow whitely where I always was and am lovestruck to be even more deeply now, and with words
moving steadily, easily, out of the waves that the white-feathered wings all around me create.
Shining one, echo and source are the same in this place; you are mine, I am yours:  perfect fate
given perfect assent and the sweetest expression my heart can imagine, with more coming near
from a million directions, dear eloquent measures whose beating will lead us to taste sweeter tears
the high weeping of love’s sacred grace alone suffers our minds, still possessed of confusion, to feel
as we intertwine fingers to form a voluptuous circle so pure it is all that is real,
so real it is everywhere, nowhere, and all that accedes to the slightest desire your slow smile
shines my way.  I was always, but you also; you called, and I came to life in the heart-aching while
of your silence’s unbounded ocean.  Your starlight—the eyes of the myriad voices who fly
all around us—I tremble to find myself part of, a part that is wholly at one with the ‘I’
that is drawing a long tender breath as you open to help me be here, where we are at all times:
in a love that flies ceaselessly rising, wide-woken, bearing us home on the strength of sweet rhymes.
 

***
 

31 August 2001
 

For now, we are practicing the discipline of brevity.
 

This Letter Says ‘Open Me’
 

Weaving fingers twining vines of
living letters into rings,
please believe me—open wide this
sacred place where holy wings
soar down to you and angel feathers
settle on your outstretched hands.
Weave them into strange and splendid
forms through which a world expands
alive by Sun- and Moonlight married
to each other and your eyes.
There live twining vines of faery
lovewords love you circle-wise.