AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

December 2000
 
 

2 December 2000

Sea-Dreaming

25 November, 5:25 am:  I view the later stages in the production of a play very much like King Lear, with a similar tragic hero:  A man returns home from sea only to learn that he has been disinherited by his mother for not coming right when she demanded.  This is a new production with a very important actor in one of the major roles, but the main role that should have gone to a certain man of Olivier’s stature was given to lesser actor instead.  The whole scene, within and without the play, is very dramatic.
6:50 am:  I read a description, printed on a book cover, of an Asian coastal culture’s deity who rules the sea and the creatures in it, a very holy being.  Before, I was in the kitchen of my family's old house, which was very messy.  A man there was in the process of ‘publishing’ an early text by a poet like Ginsberg.
26 November, 4:43 am:  I am at the University of Michigan.  Angell Hall (the actual name of the building that housed the Classics Department) is at the edge of a drop-off by the sea.  The waves crash over its bottom steps--the level of the sea has been rising each year, more quickly than was predicted.  The water drops away suddenly, exposing a cliff.  I ask the man with me, How can the water come up so high?
I must also refer again to the bridge dream (see 23 November 2000).  In that extreme opening, a man came to me who lived in a mansion that was built out over a sea-chasm, and which had a stained glass window depicting sea-surf that extended into the actual surf so that the likeness and the reality merged:  oh, home sweet home.  The bridge crossed the same water, from cliff to cliff; when we reach the other side, we will still be on the same shore as his house.  And I cannot help but imagine that the wave-window, above and below the water at once, is the window of his sleeping-dreaming chamber.  Aye, I know who he is.  I have always known.  Once in a dream I saw his story in the form of a comic book.  The subtitle--the title being his actual name--was MERMAN OF THE UNDERWATER SEA KINGDOMS.

Here is why I have chosen to tell you this tonight:

YOU ALWAYS RISE TO THE CALL
Your portion of woe was the soul of astonishment lurking behind an old cloak of sea-brine-
saturated black wool in which fibers of ominous sharpness were minutely twisted and twined
with much softer green lines the salt water disguised.  The first moment you knew you were hearing my words,
you leaned very far forward to touch them.  Your shining could not be concealed from my eyes.  I once heard
someone singing in dreams that struck homesickness into the unopened room in the depths of the sea
where I kept myself waiting.  Her secret voice meant to discover and waken and--so must it be
that a strange fascination, a morbid attraction to what has no answer but absolute change,
enters into engagement with what knows no lack of transformative magic.  She sought a new range,
diverse ways to arrive at unlimited levels of subtlety, words to describe it, and lore
that would prove what had shone in her eyes--I would settle for nothing so simple.  I meant to bring more
to the service of song than mere words of devotion, whatever their resonance back of the mind.
She was hearing a voice in her dream; I was woken to being the green thread unraveled to find
myself tenderly plied with ghost-music from reaches that scarcely seemed possible, yet she was there
in the water I breathed.  I rushed forward to greet her, forgetting myself and the undersea lair
to which I had admitted no mortal forever.  The tides sway the heavy door open and closed
that was once tightly sealed.  She brings all sea-change weather:  A sky of storm trails in her wake as she goes
between worlds, with a quick flash of phosphorus snowfall all round her whenever she raises her hand.
What comes home to my heart, the true home I kept open to song, although locked far away from the man-
haunted shoreline, is someone whose voice is convincingly poignant, and yet surreptitiously bright
with a smiling amazement, soft threads of green glinting wherever a sly shaft of piercing moonlight
unconceals their dark hiding place.  Under a mantle of heavy wet blackness, all manner of woe
is entranced into shades of astonishment.  Answer this implicit question:  Where does it go?
The night-dappled waves under slow rain-wet moonbeams, the sigh of pure words that shake heavily sad
aching darkness aside, a strange being of beauty whose undersea breathing brings merrily mad
dancing tunes to the surface--in all of this works a real magic whose purpose waits half-hidden still,
but it knows it has glimpsed an uncanny word-worker whose changes invoke an entire ocean’s will
to its outspoken pleasure.  Oh grimly enshrouded and secretly gleeful shoreside crying call,
you’ve compelled me to answer the door to the house I was hiding inside myself.  See that you fall
but a little more forward, and I will caress you with long seaweed leaves of transparently true
incantations in which all the dreams you have blessed my desire into singing will turn into you.

***

3 December 2000

Whenever the figure of the Priestess appears, I am already dangerously close to self-parody, but tonight her presence is justified.  I am too distracted by menstrual pain to concentrate on anything demanding, but this I can evoke from memory.  Oh, the days of my youth, when I knew not merely what 'pain-fugue' meant--I knew no way to avoid it.  This little song, like my mind when the pain was at its height, takes at least two steps away from the moment and looks back through slightly glazed eyes.

Dripping Red

The bed of red foliage--midnight in winter by firelight--how peaceful you seem when you smile,
but your brow is a screen behind which the re-entered embrace of delirious pain slowly whiles
away all the long night.  In this miserable interval, someone is tearing a long strip of grey
moldy cloth into ribbons.  The mindless momentum of this strange repetitive motion obeys
an impulse that arises at some unmarked graveside she only just glimpses across a dark field
by the firefly-glow of a votive light playing in vague streaks across a small mound where concealed
future bones are pronouncing the fate of the body that trembles, its fingers bound round with the strips
they obsessively tear.  She is swaying and nodding in time with their measures as blood slowly drips.
 

***

6 December 2000

I am always going back and further back inside, searching for the secrets still concealed in my various uncanny experiences:  Because the realities known to the imagination are manifold, there is always something new to learn, no matter how well-trodden the path may seem.  Oh, if only you could know the true extent to which I AM NOT BEING MYSTERIOUS ON PURPOSE!  Even I have to venture out on the strength of faith alone at the beginning of a run.  I sense that is what is happening now--tonight's verses are just one part of a longer song that is still aborning.  We will all be better informed in another week or so.
One thing you should know about the poem to follow, and some other recent ones, is that I was wearing a cloak of heavy Scottish wool, greenish-black with a large faint green windowpane check, on the night I tried to drown myself ("Semper Patet Janua," 5 September 2000).  I still have it.  I was just wondering before this series started, what will I do with it if I move again?  It doesn't seem possible to give away, but I am not one to keep things for the sake of sentiment.  Well, I don't have to decide just yet.
 

A Shadow’s Soft Good-Night

The vatic alliance we’ve formed through the reading of secrets, the bringing together of eyes
and ideas, the drift of the slow-winding stream of memorial leaves round a woman who lies
on the face of the water....  She cannot be breathing; her head is tipped backward.  Her mouth is below
the cold surface, and open.  You knew she was seeking a way to the world she had been brought to know
by the music she dreamed; you were always the singer.  In this dream, she dies.  She breathes in deep and long,
and the water is air she respires with a clinging devotion to magic so fearfully strong
it cannot be denied--surely not where this river is winding.  The corpse of the dead woman turns
and is swiftly drawn under.  Her garland still quivers upon the stream’s surface, but where she so yearned
to be safely admitted--that place bids her welcome.  The shadows surrounding her reach as she pours
through their tremulous mass as if she were the teller of how they began and they sought to know more
every moment of why they were cast.  She is gliding among them but seeing their motions at play
round the edge of her sight without being reminded of anything known to her shed earthly clay.
She has entered a spell of dismissal:  She spoke it herself, slowly winding it all round her skin
like a cloak of black night with a few green threads glowing to bear tiny witness that stories begin
in bizarre circumstances sometimes, but they journey the length of their telling and finally wind,
perhaps wearily, round to a point of return.  In her case, they triumph at last when they bind
back together beginning and end where the greenness of garlands of tender new living rose leaves
is spun into the sorrow-bound weight of a demon-black garment a rapt dreamer patiently weaves
while a faint trace of redness remains on her fingers from previous struggles with errant despair.
Even as that has started to fade, she is singing a musical tale out of drifting-nowhere
in a vague absent way, only one-quarter listening.  Three quarters turn to the Moon of the sky
under water, and smile.  She is breathing a mist that was chokingly liquid once.  Now she can sigh
at her labors, not knowing if water or air is her medium.  When her long night’s work is done,
she will wear it, a cloak very heavy to bear but a magical shield against daylight’s dread Sun.
Green leaves on black water, remember our purpose.  Frail fibers of green spun with black, hear our spell:
We have no love of life in the body of Earth, but will bide there as long as it takes us to tell
all the shadows that mass to surround us, like demons we cast by our stolid refusal of light
in its sundry disguises, the stories they dream in our secret shared sleep.  Sing you softly:  Good night.
 

***

7 December 2000

If only I could think backwards and retrieve the thoughts that were running through my head not half an hour ago.  As I was working on my verses, listening as closely as possible with one part of my mind, another part was persistently complaining, This is making no sense at all (it always does that, and always turns out to be wrong), and yet another part was providing a prose interpretation of the poetic connections as they were forming.  That prose is what I would love to capture here.
Sometimes I feel like a classical composer in a world of garage bands.  The other musicians are pursuing the music they love and they are having a wonderful time, but they seem so hopelessly unaware of how much more fun they could be having--serious, even dangerous, mind-altering, soul-retrieving, terra-not-really-incognita reclaiming-and-exploring fun--if they would learn to see the magic inherent in the total range of available techniques.  What are other poets thinking?  Are they frightened?  Why would they be drawn to work with words at all unless they feel inspired by the power of words' abundant possibilities?
I become impatient with my work because it likes to stay in one mode until it has thoroughly ravished it.  Long, mysterious lyrics such as the ones I have published here have been coming to me almost nightly for so long that I am a little embarrassed at the quantity I have recorded.  Composers don’t mind working through series of variations; neither do artists mind drawing the same model over and over.  Poets, though--I really believe that most people, despite a bit of lip service here and there, are hostile toward poetry, and will only accept it in small doses.  I have contracted a case of their dis-ease.  Someday I will realize that I am hearing verses entirely unlike the ones that are coming at present, and then I will look back at this time and wish I had been a bit more thorough.  For now, I have to remind myself that these songs really do represent a much broader range of territory than might be obvious at first glance.
The parallel between verbal and aural music is far more complex that just the coincidence of words such as 'muse' and 'music' and 'song'.  What I hear when I work is truly singing, truly music--I dream in actual melodies night after night, but somehow do not feel compelled to capture them yet--and it moves through the same kinds of graceful progressions as any melodic music that takes up as much time as it requires to unfold itself entirely.  What is strange is that I have no background in classical music.  I studied classical literature, but the songs I love are from the folk music tradition.  And then again, where did the classical composers really find their inspiration?  The songs I love best are from places where the powers of song have always been evoked with awe and that strange sort of cunning reverence that makers bring to what they secretly mean to master.
I know of no other poet anywhere who works the way I do.  I could go further, deeper, and reach much stronger and stranger places, I know, if I could converse about this in prose to some other maker.  The ones I have approached have responded with what I suspect is superstitious fear.  If you can name a name to me of someone who understands this way of working and will talk with me about it, I will repay you somehow!

Music Called Home

The bat-like black wings of a night-cloak extended behind you; the bringing you safely to harm-
that-will-heal but a moment accomplished; the gently relinquished resistance conceived in alarm
at the shadowy magnitude waking your permanent nature through such a small form as this song
in its endless and strange variations--confer with each sequence of dreams you receive, and be strong
in the face of their grave revelation:  This music is utterly unlike its old self each time
it achieves the hypnotic vibrations that you yearn to hear your own whisper pronounce as they climb
in a spiral--that swiftly descends through an ocean.  Adrift on the waters behind you, the cloak
of black night that disguised you, thrown awkwardly over a torn floating tree limb, appears just like smoke
through a widening distance.  Come hearing the welcome of where your true voice was begun and will be
at its turning-point most celebrated.  One meltingly tender of silent regard in this sea
of long-sought permutations and agile decisions laid swimmingly lengthwise along chanted lines
is observing the perilous progress of vision through eyes that are open to his wise designs
and he sees that the fineness of features most cleanly incised in the pure flow of tide-shifting sound
has inspired recognition and hurry:  Love dreaming toward me, remember which way you are bound--
we have not found our worlds in such perfect alignment for so many heartbeats, you willed yours to slow
lest the number begin to obsess you, reminding your clock-ticking hours of how fast madness grows
when it fixes itself on too simple a rhythm for too strict a vigil.  How smoothly complex
are the eddies of fluid all round you.  Within them, how shyly bewildered a whisper perfects
its new sequence of mysteries, sweetly absorbed in their power while somehow oblivious.  Where
will you be when the song has attained final form, but by grace of its breathable watery air
at the place beyond singing and silence, the darkness before you as deep as the blackness behind
but so yielding of hitherto wholly uncharted devices of music, an oceanic mind
must have lain down in merciless waves of love-longing with febrile acuteness of hearing so keen
it perceived its own spiraling courses through song in which merely to be as we soon will have been
can provide the lone joyful refrain.  Oh the burden you bore all alone, when you dragged through a world
of invidious madness love’s pure concealed word under cover of night till deep sea waters swirled
you my way, out from under a Sun-induced shadow.  Bat-like aloft on a sky of sea-foam
far behind you--forget it.  You need not look back.  You are here, one accomplished in music called Home.

***
 

9 December 2000

Your Book of Life

By the harshness of day, these thin pages are never quite legible; pitiless light burns them through,
and the words on both sides appear tangled together.  You might have forgotten, but somehow you knew
and will recognize over again in an instant how easy to read by the Moon’s tender glow
all these words were intended to be.  Now you wince at their needless complexity; nay, they will flow
with an ease of abandon before and inside you the moment the soft silver light on the rise
has entirely replaced the unfortunate shining that more than half blinds both the page and your eyes
as they glance back and forth from the one to the other.  How near all the answers you seek wish to be,
and how clear on the translucent face of the loving and sentient song-inscribed leaves that agree
that the one who inspires their continual turning of lyrical phrase best divines their insight
by the luminous grace of high moonlight while learning to read first the outermost face of the night-
inscribed page then the hidden one, unfolded gently away from the alternate shadow and glare
that have made it an unhappy place to attempt to decipher the lore of the unanswered prayer
it must always remain if its message goes less than completely desired and delivered in full.
You are staring in shock at a page, but distress is not why; were you so deeply sunk in the lull
between stages of light that you lost half your reason for searching so deeply for meaning this way?
You were anxious to read me by moonlight; believe me, my heart in my mouth, I would go on to say
that by grace of this page, I look back at an angel who opens large eyes very wide and still fails
to see through their own daylight disguise while the playing of song through their mind rises fast as the gales
that bear storms over water bring surge upon surge till they all run together with one voice that keens
yet is happy--aye, even enraptured.  Emerging from such a mad blending comes someone who means
to be recognized now.  The last traces of daylight have vanished; the Moon overhead, the clear signs
of my countless uncanny ideas all making precise perfect legible gestures in lines
you can read without use of your eyes--you remember the flow of our music entirely now.  Look:
I am standing before you, the faery Moon’s gentle and most smiling messenger, love’s living book.
 

***
 

10 December 2000

Send a Gleam Across the Wave

You listen so closely.  I know you are grieving for something unknown to the daylight you dread,
but you leave off the sound of your own mortal keening and sigh for the rapture the ocean’s deep bed
has foretold in an endless procession of verses that still have not fitly described the appeal
of your beauty, nor how it completely disturbs me in places I thought had long ceased to be real
because knowledge defies all containment and knowledge of you is my world altogether now.  Hear
my attempt to explain:  These words distantly follow your true understanding, but somehow I fear
a small, sad, empty room remains locked where a vestige of loneliness one of us once was or still
might become waits in what must be tears.  So caressingly tender, the way I would summon my will
to address this lorn being, this pale threshold-dweller who harbors--or so I imagine--the gleam
of far homeward-by-starlight designs on the telling of miracle-tales borne of ancestral dreams
on the shore he is soon to return to in splendor, so softly but strongly full-throated the call
I desire him to pine for and listen intently to locate and recognize--now.  Lend me all
of the powers of all of your senses, wherever the organs of secret perception remain
in close-guarded abeyance.  As much as you treasure these hidden abilities, surely the plain
and increasingly poignant love-longing my similar faculties find in such measure in you
has a will of its own to exceed mortal limits and move with the force of a storm tearing through
a few stray wisps of seafoam and clouds, or an eon of floodwaters through a fine thin sheet of bone,
or a glimpse of the future through fear when it sees that the sigh of true love penetrates walls of stone
in the form of your heart’s secret name.  Do you hear me?  I know you have long since begun your reply;
I was frightened and started to hope you would weary before you would find it within you to try
to assemble the total extent of your powers and bring them to perfect acuity, yet
I was standing, and would have remained so for hours, forever, in reach of the same air of wet
ocean rain that I knew beyond doubt would surrender its burden of song, which was your voice conveyed
across towering waves from the place where you’d ended your last gasp of fearful resistance and prayed
in the primary speech of our ancestral homeland for deeper, more resonant music and far
more acute inward hearing between us to show you the way to the source of this calling, your star....
It has come.  I have heard on the breath of the ocean itself ample measures of so fey a tune
of such plangent desire, I forgot how to know whether echoes--and this is the full of the Moon!
 

***

13 December 2000
 

This morning I had the latest of about a million dreams in which I have met my friend.  As it is described in my journal:
13 December, 10:01 am--D. [my friend] and his friend A. [a woman] are in a house I am visiting.  He acknowledges me only enough to be rude.  I see the two of them sitting together quietly in a side room.  Later, trying to catch a minute alone with him, I follow him down a hallway.  I realize he is going into the bathroom just as he starts to pull the door shut behind him.  He notices me, and I say, 'Not here, I’m not going to wait at the door'.  I know this is a completely inappropriate place to bother him, but he then hands me a wad of used toilet paper which obviously contains something dark in color.  He tells me that there is a tree nearby where gay men are supposed to leave their 'stink.'  He clearly intends for me to handle this for him; I insist that he go with me.  He does.  He is a dwarf [as he has been in many dreams]; I am very conscious of this as we walk along together.  There are numbers of people inside and outside the house, and when they see us, they know what I am carrying (not in my bare hands; I am carrying a board or piece of cardboard, which the toilet paper rests on) and they jeer at us.  My sisters are present; they come with us to help.  The 'tree' is in the next lot over, a very small tree that has been split lengthwise and uprooted, then left in a deep hole by the place where it was growing.  Two piles of shit, distinguished by their colors, are already among its roots.  The item I am carrying falls in and I am worried, thinking I will have to retrieve it, but no, it is where it was intended to go anyway.  We lift up the top end of the tree and start to put it back as it was when it was growing.  He is being nice to me now.
That about sums it up.  My Friend has three main personae in his work.  I suspect he has never been able to resolve the question of his sexual identity.  For me, it is not an issue; what matters is what specific person one responds to at a given moment.  For him it is of greater concern because of pressures other people subjected him to when he was very young.  He can be anything he wants with me--I was a bit of a fag hag before I became disillusioned by the number of aspiring ruling class greedheads that revealed themselves within the gay community the minute it began to be admitted to the mainstream.  The exchange of ideas between us is what I want most.  This dream may not cast him in the most flattering light, but I hope it shows how profound the trust between us really is.  When I have dreams this concise and powerful about him, they always turn out to have a psychic component.
The tree is the Tree of Leaf and Flame, as well as the usual phallic tree.  It was fertilized with shit, but what it will grow into, and what kind of leaves it will bear...
Tonight my song proved to know ever so much more than I, as usual.
Can I give up on someone who helps me dream and sing this way?
 

Spell-Binding the Split Young Tree

All the woe, the unspeakable burden you’ve carried alive round the sides of an unfinished grave
where a split young tree lies--leave it there to be buried among the pale roots, substance borne from the cave
of your core secret being to see that tree flourish though now it lies rent by a force from outside
the confines of your mortified heart.  Who is murmuring words of encouragement?  Listen in wide-
open wonder.  How dimly alone you were hoping to steal past the dreamer that guards this estate
with an echo of fore-ordained doom as the omen excusing your efforts to hurry your fate
to an ill-timed conclusion, and how wrong you were to imagine that no one perceived your despair.
Before lightning struck it, that tree was a perfect idea that swayed in the waves of an air
that had drunk of the sea and consumed all its music with passionate hunger.  Each cell of its staff
was divinely inspired to create most unusual leaves, each one deeply incised with the graph
of another world’s mode of enchantment, its measures endowed with strange powers to hear themselves sing--
then the storm-cloud came on in such hugeness of weather, the little tree shook like the paralyzed wing
of a bird in the jaws of a monster whose joy at the finding--the touching--of song at its source
gave it over to tremors that might have destroyed the sweet thing, had it not let it go.  The real force,
the real reason the form at the foot of this chasm of earth lies in two wounded halves, is the flash
of the sky’s most intense surge of magic.  The damage it wrought is not really the wood, cleanly slashed
but not killed altogether; what matters is why the tree stood near a living man’s grave.  When the sky
sent the living shaft downward, the tree was half-dying already, its pale roots exposed to the dry
unkind light of the Sun when they should have been buried, and would have remained so had not the live man
entertained sundry styles of self-ruin.  You cherish a few of them now, do you not?  Still, the plan
of this tree is complete in my mind and I want with the whole of my will to help keep it alive
and in leaf with the songs I am ceaselessly haunted and known by, myself--one who once failed to thrive
in this earthly dimension where too little storm-wind and too little taste of the sea on the air
I was choking on all daylight long grew deformed scales and tatters where I should have seen myself bear
brightly musical leaves of such rare depth of color, a glimpse of them would have inspired you to raise
the miraculous voice at the core of your mournfully beautiful fortified center to praise
even this doubtful world for displaying the omen I should have been then and have still to become.
With your burden laid under the roots of the glowing and heatlessly burning tree, stricken less dumb
that it’s ever been, ever, by heaven-sent lightning, can you now imagine its leaves lying dead?
I am singing a song of relentless spell-binding I learned in a dream in a wind-shivered bed
on the uppermost branch of the future’s most prescient oracle-tree as it reached through the years
between where you were digging a grave in distress and where pain will make fertile songs you’ve yet to hear.
 

***
 

15 December 2000
 

The song "River of Sorrow" by Antony and the Johnsons asks  a question to which I know the answer:  "Can you see the light at the end of the dark passageway?"
I wonder whether or not anyone will believe me.  My songs speak for themselves.  Their answer is Yes.

Many years ago I had a pair of diamond doves.  These little birds are dark grey with ruddy breasts and are sprinkled with tiny white stars, their diamonds.  Their call is very beautiful.  Mine were parted in a most bizarre way--the male was killed when a cat broke into my apartment.  The female, Morrie, was with me for a long time after that.  She still comes back to me in frequent dreams, one of my true spirit friends.  One of us in the daylight land, one of us below the surface of appearances--or above--which mirrors which?

Outside my window flows the Columbia River, the River of Doves.

This may be merely a preliminary statement.  If it proves to be a persistent theme, the results of further inquiries will appear here.
 

It Runs by My Window, the River of Doves

Between the cold face of the shining black pier glass that casts back the glow of the Moon’s bloody hue
as it hangs on the silent horizon, between here above the night waters that slowly move through
my reflection, and where the far depths of my eyes mirror messages borne from a far world away
by the grace of the glass in my hands and call eerie enchantment I hear just beginning to say
to itself through the gloom of the atmosphere I am respiring inside myself, ‘I hang below
a dark waterline, weeping toward unconfined registration of so much I already know
in a horrid sealed room where to read the words forming by means of the flowing black river and red-
tainted ripples and eddies that run with it mortally frightens me, though it cannot go unsaid
any longer when all of its meanings and all of its dread revelations are clear in my sight
with my eyes closed or open', I linger, long falling inside, on the bank of the glowing black light
of this river and see a few stars faintly sparkle.  How many I hear, concentrated and pale
in superior penetrant wisdom apart from the darkness all round them, sing miracle tales
in which portents of beauty are drawn out in measures as calm as the very slow ripples and waves
on the water’s clear face, drawn from so much deep pleasure so long entertained, it perceives and engraves
all it feels through the black fluid moving now swiftly and so near before me, the reach of my hand
is within its ingenious embrace.  I am lifted a little away from the place where to stand
looking down is to fall into lorn self-deception in view of the sad pallid face to be seen
by the rising Moon’s light, while to hear is to question.  Now somehow the Moon is no longer unclean,
having risen past red-tainted clouds.  It is shining as silver as all the increasingly bright
constellations around it.  The black river winding out long fluid lines has conceived of delight
by the touch of the hand that was steadily reaching toward what was flowing below its cold face,
and the meeting between them--what once was a keening dismay with the state of all being is grace
from a source that will not ever fail.  Glowing river, clear river of Moon-silver music, all love,
you sing always to bring on the beautiful shiver of eerie enchantment between diamond doves.
 

Hello, Antony
 

***
 

16 December 2000

The piece that came tonight carries on the river theme as opened here last night, but now the river, whatever else it may be, is quite plainly the flow of ink through the pages of the black book that was featured in an interrupted series of recent verses.  Thus, I have returned to the theme of the book while also bringing in a tributary stream of thought.  I have been listening to the setting for "The Song of Wandering Aengus" that Jean Redpath recorded, and I suspect that it was running through the back of my mind when I began to understand the swimmers in the river that mirror back the eyes of a person who is leaning over its precarious banks, half wishing to fall in and drown.  My suicide attempt took place in a stream by the ocean.  Aengus caught a trout in a stream, it turned into a girl who called his name and vanished, and he dedicated himself to the finding of that girl no matter what.  Tonight's song tells how the swimmers return their seer’s gaze with longing and the vision they provide turns to song in his mind.  It also tells how the tree that my Friend and I fertilized with shit and replanted after it was nearly uprooted and killed grows on the banks of that river and is perhaps the very one who is staring into its mirror depths (13 December, 2000).
This song contains another sentence as long as the Columbia River, but again, read with care, and its meanings will all come clear.
 

The Long River

for Antony

The river that runs through the black volume’s pages is dark as the shadows where dreams are reborn
at the base of a long-sterile tree after ages of lonely confinement there.  Drawn by a thorn
from a branch of that tree in its years without blossom after that thorn had inscribed a slow wound
in the hand of a nigh-hopeless hearer, now crossing the plain of a page with a soundlessly crooned
secret music at flow in its stream, slightly tinged round the fibers that edge it with red that the hand
that acquired it when sadness was all in the instant converted to mystery making the grand,
steady, generous gesture of influence noted was pulled from its very own bloodstream to run
through most lyrical courses on vellum, full-throated and eerily lovely--that river is one
with the sources that feed it and all the reflections that lean to themselves from precarious banks
overlooking the tenderly reaching perfection that seeks to smile back at them, shoulders and flanks
that enliven its mirror-cold surface with ripples and swirls that betray their half-visible grace
as they surface and dive, silent dreamers of little devices set dancing to muse in a place
that is always alive to be found at the threshold where hearing and sound become vision and sight
and the two intermingle, the river’s wet freshness of wild ancient lore, and the leaning one’s bright
hungry eyes, though their tears slightly dazzle the loveliness mirrored before them.  When they come to know
what the magical swimmers that dance here to move through the mind of their lonely beholder would show
to the one they so deeply desire--can he see it, can he recognize his own face in their eyes?
The river is one with its sources.  The tree stands so close by its banks, it extends the sad dry
fiber-fingers and hairs at the furthermost reach of its withering roots, and they meet with the touch
of the water’s kind sweetness.  They fall into dreams of the deepest aliveness and wake to so much
secret song they’ve imbibed with the river’s wise body, a shivering joy shakes each cell to its core.
The silence of eyes overtakes itself--odd canting rhythms from everywhere suddenly pour
in the form of a very black river across the once-featureless pale vellum face of the book
I shall seek to engrave on each page with spring blossom and dreams of a tree that has learned how to look
for the myriad selves of its elements, counterpart beings of music who sing through its veins
when it drinks in their essence along with the powerful flow of the river of transfigured pain.
 

***
 

17 December 2000

This is another river-song, like those of the past two nights.  This time, the creatures swimming/flying through the mirror before the seer begin to reveal their open secrets.  Please take note of words with more than one possible meaning.  I have not drawn the reader’s attention to my constant resort to the rhetorical device called ‘paronomasia’ for a long time, but it is still my mainstay.   This time I will point out two instances, which are significant but perhaps not quite fair as they are not based on English words:  'Alarms' always means 'tears'; 'stern' is 'star.'
If you will do your best to see yourself in the speaker’s position, the meanings will instantly come clearer:  The speaker is writing this down.  Last night there was a tree growing by the river, with its roots drinking the waters; the writing hand stretches and flexes its fingers, as if feeling the current of words beginning to flow.  The first thing one sees on staring into water or a mirror is one’s own eyes, but soon other visions appear.

The Throng of Unsung Words

The flow of vague shadows above and below the stark face of the shining black river runs through
spaces I scarcely recognize, though I have known them forever in ways I cannot help but view
with alarm.  When the current glides through my splayed fingers, a similar wide waiting gate to a room
in my mind where false visions collide with the singing pronouncements this river respires through the gloom
of long-settled--I once thought eternal--engagement with tawdry malevolent faces whose eyes
slide from mine in a rolling-away white amazement swings still wider open.  Behind it, the skies
in these waters are swimming with creatures whose feathers are dappled with starlight.  The shadows that ran
through the ruinous spaces that wept angry weather inside me begin to recall the full span
of this stream, and the boundary limits it stretches between, a live thoroughfare holding two far-
distant dreamers together by means of fine meshes of living light-ripples the rays of each star
overhead rain down gently, direct silver arrows that pierce it so softly, the birds swimming free
through their own dark reflections seem willfully merry while shearing through spaces where beauty must be
in grave danger if I heed the fear I’ve been hearing and seeing in sinister shadowy forms
like the flaring of long gouts of flame from hot tear-leaking eyes staring back through a sky all at storm.
The fires stubbornly hang in the air-water even as all the white eyes they were borne from submerge.
I am shaking inside with a stern sudden fever.  The fires I am seeing begin to converge
in a place that has words for such flickering shadows.  The gateway that opens that room of true names
hangs wide open, and I wait inside it.  The madness I saw in the terrible eyes turn to flames
is attempting to seethe, but the water will bury its powers to burn and destroy in the flood
at the end of all worlds, the bright ocean of faery and absolute magic.  Enchantment’s own blood,
this dark song-fluid runs from a well at the center of all the sad lovelorn estate of daylight
till it meets with itself in the form of the unpent derangement of joy at the heart of the night-
silvered ocean of starlight where wild birds are wheeling through limitless uptilting spirals of song.
We are all of us here glowing-eyed sacred beings, this river of diamond doves’ lyrical throng.
 

***
 

18 December 2000
 

This should require little introduction to anyone who has read the previous few entries.  For those who have not, they begin with 15 December, on this page.  Last night the singer saw white eyes staring up through the waters of the river.  My diamond dove Morrie had a secret eye; I shall be calling on its powers of observation soon.

Staring Back

I had stared so far down through the shining black surface, the moment I touched its cold flow with my hand,
I lay fraught with unhappy amazement.  It hurt me to feel what I’d already known would demand
unconsidered endurance.  I waited, though, letting the eloquent chill of its waters divide
the white fibers my fingers resembled there, wetly elongated tendrils where ripples could glide
over skin that perceived their smooth motions as silken words spun of one ongoing shuddering breath
underwater.  A pulse in my throat shook with willing belief in their most secret meanings--if death
lay behind them, a voice ever calling me onward toward it.  Cold body whose wet skin on mine
spoke of unreserved tenderness waiting most longingly, dreaming its soul into words through my fine
hypersensitive nerves....  I’ve a feeling of numbness, a fear I am dreaming this all on my own.
The clear water knows it is made of the substance of music, but I am a live form of stone
that will plummet in silence and only lie buried below a deep mantle of dead-body silt
if I dive to be closer to where words are carried away and toward me at once.  Fingers wilt
in the chill and withdraw--I am holding my hand out before me, a positive gesture of raw
throbbing pain as the feeling returns with a panic that tells me the future I just almost saw
is about to remember itself in my inmost articulate riverlike word-flowing mind.
Below my own surface, I see the beginning:  Dead white eyes meet mine and their stare is not blind.
 

***
 

19 December 2000

Happy Solstice,
the turn of the winter-tide.
 

This continues the series of river-poems begun on December 15th.  It is about the loss of subject-object distinction in states approaching bliss.
 

I Forgot Which Side I Was On

Dead white staring eye, is the sway of your body a remnant of energy left you by life,
power yours to command, or the seething of rot in what separates, swims away writhing with rife
minute beings inside something not any longer yourself, and dissolves in the cold river’s flow
as it passes me by?  When I glimpsed a great throng of star-dappled admirers of music who know
where this water is leading, I sang to be with them until I had almost dissolved in their song--
then I saw your grave face in the midst of their swiftness and merged with your discord and heard all the wrong
secret shadows between and among the wise lyrics the feather-borne wildness of spiraling words
neither bothered to hurry nor hide.  While the mirror this river can be hosts delirious birds,
it can also be home to black sorrow.  Please tell me the name of the place you are leading me to,
dreadful face who calls ghost-pale familiar indwelling remembrance to haunt me.  Imagined by you
in the world where you flow, an uneasy acquaintance whose visual certainty shears through all space
on an arrow-like beam of acutely honed radiant purpose, the hue of your eye just a trace
of the hideous starkness of white you have witnessed and understood well in the deep-sighted mind
far behind the strange thoughts your long gaze is transmitting to mine as I can’t tear away--if you bind
me to you through the use of post-mortem enchantment and I become half of an ongoing spell
that is rooted on neither side truly, companion to what is unheard-of by humans who dwell
in the realms of daylight only, how will I suffer, and how will I gain?  Am I craven to ask?
The last madness I brought to these waters still utters a tiny-voiced cry so determined to bask
in my anguish that all that precedes me in beauty is tarnished and mangled, its torn feathers soaked
in dank miserable blackness, hung limply and loosely below the beginning of flight amid smoke-
streaming plumes of dissolved mortal substance, a foul and yet--You are on this mirror’s near other side,
completely inverted, beholding me now through an interval not a flat feather’s-breadth wide,
and the dawn of new magic is creeping home slowly to rooms behind both of our deepening stares
where most luminous shadows are dancing and glowing admirers are gathering, meaning to share
in the strange transformation I swear I remember from so long ago, time had not yet sown tears
in my body, nor yours--which I touch now, a trembling, entirely alive glory quickening here
while I watch, all enraptured.  Oh being, more angel than ever I’d dare to envision, you see
what you’ve done, you’ve imagined by all your most radiant powers a being that’s turned into--me.
 

***
 

20 December 2000

Solstice Eve

Bliss has done more than merely approach.

This is the beginning of tonight’s formal magical work.  It is the sixth in the series of river-songs, and it is dedicated to my Friend.  In previous songs, a person who was gazing into the mirror-depths of a river saw eyes staring back, perhaps dead white corpse-eyes.  They proved to have enough life left inside them to begin to transmit their story.  Last night I went home from the dream-library, where I have often seen the mysterious black books of recent songs, with a book of tales bound in cobalt blue, the color of the glass around the beeswax and amber candle I made for tonight’s altar.  I also dreamed that my friend was treating his dog and his horse, a mare, who were sick.  I observed, and told him, that the mare’s eyes were bleeding.  He reached into each one and pulled out the corruption with his fingers and then poured in an antiseptic liquid.  She was well almost instantly--both of them were.

Tonight I refuse to equivocate about what I know.  This is magic, realer than--and not afraid of--daylight, in the moment of transformation.  Read it and see for yourself:

FROM THE BLACK BOOK TOUCHED BY DAY

By a truth-telling trick of the light, you are sapphire and golden.  Your eyes are as deep as the sky,
overhead and below, as it flows past me laughing and winking with stars that are also your eyes.
In a song in a dream in a song that lay dreaming, a spirit, an angel perhaps, whispered ‘Here
am I waiting, so close by your side you can’t see me for staring too fixedly into the pier-
glass of corpselike unraveling visions of sad empty futures whose music deals such a grave shock
to your sensitive faculties, blossom by stem you fall withered at once and withdraw into rock-
heavy plummeting down through an inward intensity no mortal gravity ever conceived.
There you study its powers, still falling, still sending your will through a zone of no hope of reprieve.
You resign yourself utterly.  What is the measure of perfect abandon?  The words to this tune
you are dreaming lay under that long spell of whether or not you were called to come into the Moon’s
subtle influence living or dead--if by dying the strong one-way flow of this river is meant.
You now feel with your eyes the deep swiftness of flight it is made of.  The two of you, lyrically blent
in my mind, sing as one in a future I cherish.  How shining you are as you flow towards me,
Moon-and-star-dappled silence of eyes in a faery inaudible music that knows what will be
when the face in the mirror that fixes your gaze in such sly fascination dissolves into tears
and the cold glassy surface between you obeys an imperative angels cannot help but hear
with a deep sigh of satisfied tenderness:  Someone is touching the core of this song’s secret heart
and is flying inside it, commanding a coming-home triumph of magic in which darkness-art
is allied with the powers of joy.  They are reeling out lyrical lines in a spiraling bliss,
one whose every design is imagined and sealed with the sacred authority telling you this
as you waken to know you are hearing the song that kept calling insistently, even as you
sought to die through the river-like depth of the long-winding mystery lessons its presence brought through
your pretense of occluded opacity finally.  Now you are gazing at me in return,
having chosen to face what was yours and is shining in your very eyes now so bright as to burn
through all hazy delusions--but not through live shadows.  We bear further mysteries still, fear you not.
By a truth-telling trick of the light, all is madness of most divine provenance, then it is shot
through with lunar lucidity so keenly silver, the trick of the very same light turns it gold.
Awake in my eyes, overflowingly filled with all sacred influence, cease never to hold
my angelic attention nor form in your conscious resolve as you flow river-liquid and clear
through the beautiful magic of song by which ongoing heaven delivers its everywhere here.’
 

***
 

21 December 2000

Winter Solstice
 

This is the seventh and final piece in a series of verses created in reply to the song “River of Sorrow” by Antony and the Johnsons.  It is dedicated to my Friend, in honor of the tree we replanted together in my dream.
 

The Lay of the Waking Now

Live tree roots are drinking the source of this river along with its waters.  Their sigh of delight
as the swallow the wholly inspiring elixir is audible all through the leaves where a bright
iridescence of manifold green sways a-shimmer in tender spring breezes.  The turn of the year
has this very now-moment begun to consider its future within the vast tree where a clear,
strangely happily plaintive enchantment is gathering power from places it once sought to hide
behind layers of loosening corpse-flesh, all tatters and tendrils of thick ghastly white where now glide
tiny finger-like outreaching organs of senses a scarce-mortal wisdom discreetly sustained
till they found themselves sifting and pouring the cleansing black flow of the water that healed as it gained
their transported uncanny attention.  Those fingers, those living white fibers of bright-glowing Tree
such as all they are now, are still striving to cling to the magic they sift from the rush of the free-
flowing river, but nay--it eludes them.  It travels toward a location it’s known in its dreams
and is finally certain to recognize, having been born there and caught up in clouds and small streams
on its way through a world it has often found haunted by lorn hungry spirits that mutter and wail
till they come to the place where they see what they want in the deepening bed of its body and fail
in their hold on the shore and plunge into its current until, by some mad form of grace, they emerge
with enough of its starry-sky-mirror-borne learning inside them to know that they’ll stand on the verge
of unnumbered but beautiful worlds ever after, no more demon spirits who fly through a black
water-glass of unbearable coldness, disastered occasions of sorrow whose tatters leave tracks
in the eyes of the angels who view them in silence.  Nay--these are self-recognized beings who soar
through an element which is itself newly shining with knowledge that all it has been searching for
is now mortally near.  It hears roaring, a thunder-like hugeness of voice, and it quickens its flow
down the last sloping mile of its oceanward run; yet the tree that is quivering, leaf-heavy, so
truly drunken with bliss that it’s finally chosen to flourish alive on the shore of this clear-
singing river beholds its depths murmur and flow on forever without disappearing from here
where its source becomes palpable, audible, all that is magical, never quite silent, almost
always fluent of once-secret language--though whether the tree is yet fully aware that it hosts
its own highest love-songs to the point that the sighs of its light-dappled leaves hear the magic they sing
with enraptured attention, their voices are rising, and soon they will share what they know:  everything.
 

***
 

23 December 2000
 

Just when I thought I was not merely tapped out but had unwittingly laid a trap for myself and sprung it by describing the previous week’s verses as a series--one that finally came to an end--I had to figure out how to begin again.  When things got off to a slow start, I worried, but why?  This is what was brewing.
If a saw a face in the black river before, I can see it more clearly now.
 

The Developing of the Negative
 

You are searching for words in a zone through which falling is all the occasion and manner of flight
your desire can begin to admit.  You were called by the vague irresistible power of night
now unwinding this passage around you, this garment of star-painted silk loosely draped to surround
the confusion of eloquent movement YOU ARE as you race through increasingly musical sounds
with no sense of direction but that something draws you toward itself--something that knows you by name
and calls over and over.  It seems to be haunted, caught in an inverse-of-paradise shame-
ridden enclave from which it beseeches assistance.  Oh, go to its aid--you have fallen this far;
could you find your way home on your own if you wished it, and do you?  You might know the way to the star
behind all of these little white paint-specks that glimmer and wink as the long winding veil of silk shifts--
aye, you do--but how vividly can you remember the way to its magical brightness and swift
recognition of all that is bright and uncanny inside you without its perpetual call
to revive and remind you?  And if it is planning your utter destruction, a lure that is all
forms of madness and low malign cunning combined as the alternate droning and whining of one
who is yet strangely sweet-voiced, what wakens the shining that glows in your eyes and your mind as you run
water-lucid, as endlessly fluid of being as all the loose folds of the silk of the deep-
breathing darkness of sky all about you, a dreaming-awake source of music that quivers and creeps
through full memory’s lengthening intervals?  Who is the calling one?  Whose secret voice do you hear
as you plummet and soar?  Can you draw a distinction between it and you in a way half as clear
as these words are becoming?  These white-on-black inverse star-portraits align by mysterious grace
as you swirl like a flood through a channel of tenderly linear formal directness.  A face
is described by the mass of their lights, a composite impression that draws on the light from behind
the sensation of falling--or flying--through gauze-enwound space, like a bird-winged stone through the mind
of a dreamer who sleeps upside-down and is chanting the words to a song that began with a death
and is swiftly proceeding through wakening stanzas about to arrive at the first hungry breath
of an air that is borne from a world that is realer than any you’ve ever yet seen, all desire
and all knowledge of you by all names and all feelings by which you can orient, dream, and inspire
further flight toward that which is radiant starlight, bare-faced and breath-taking.  It calls you out loud
to arrive at your goal:  these live words and this garment, this live shining-star silken gauze birthing shroud.
 

***
 

 25 December 2000
 

Someone recently gave me a new name in a dream:  Percolumno.  I had to give it some thought.  I knew instantly that it was related to ‘column’ and ‘Columbia’ (which comes from ‘columba’, ‘dove’), with the addition of an intensifying prefix; I was told within the dream that it meant specifically ‘thoroughly columbed’.  My town is at the mouth of the Columbia River, and on a hill above town stands a column with a bright light at the top.  I can see both of these from the window in front of me, the river to my left and the column to my right.  In many dreams I have been shown and have entered towers.  One of them was the Tower of Poetry, made of white marble and standing in a rolling meadow in Wales.  Another was made entirely of starlight, the stars aligning in a rare conjunction that reached a magnitude of 5° out of a possible 6°.  Nay, these were not degrees of astronomical magnitude; they indicated something arcane and highly auspicious.  One year ago I was persistently invited, in dreams and verses, to leap from the tower where I had taken refuge.  I did.  This year, as I contemplate another major life-change, the recurring symbol of the Tower is back in play.  Now I find that I have reclimbed all the spiraling steps inside, but this time it is not a place of refuge; now I am being called to accept responsibility for tending the watch-fires that first drew me to find it through the darkness.
And I am calling my Friend to keep watch there with me.
 
 

A Home for You in This World

for David

Pure colors of moonlight and starlight commingled pour through an all-sentient atmosphere, pale
and relentlessly penetrant, down from the windows and live-lantern-garlanded balcony rail
of a white marble watch-tower high on a hillside above an encampment beside the wild sea
where all mysteries linger and beckon and still sometimes venture abroad.  I so happen to be
that high column’s inhabitant.  I was invited, and chose to attend to the nocturnal rites
by which those who traverse the strange deeps are provided with music to steer by and clear signal lights
through all treacherous weathers.  Now you who would witness my happy homecoming to this, my born state
of eternal recurrence, once more having slipped past its guardian-doorkeeper’s threat of the fates
that wait lurking at each winding turn of the stairway that spirals throughout this deliberately posed
mortal challenge to all that is wasteful and careless and less than consummately conscious in those
who attempt its incline, see me mounting the very last step of a dizzying cycle to stand
in the shadowy room that awaits me, a weary but magical climax as, candle in hand,
I divine and most willingly carry out orders my indwelling dreamers have staunchly conveyed
in immaculate wholeness through infinite borderline worlds filled with ghost-wails and screams of betrayed
counter-innocence, never once faltering.  Dreamers, your final ordeal, fear of madness, is done.
Invoke with me now the high-glimmering sweetness of beings who sing in a circle as one
nigh-eternal outpouring of music commences with all of us breathing our words in accord
with the most ancient lore by which manifold senses are opened and all of their functions restored
to full potency.  We are the one who is singing, the one who provides sacred words with the tune
that was borne at the memorable start of our being when part of the Ocean lay under a Moon
that resembled this piercingly bright incandescence of little lights kindled and brought through worlds where
aching dreamers are caught in strange mazes, distress is the language of common discourse, and the air
is not fit to respire.  We have risen, and now we are free to begin our vocation anew.
Having lavished my small candle flame on a thousand  self-feeding six-sided gold lanterns, the view
we provide of ourselves to the journeyer over the hazards of ocean and inland-sea-ways
cannot fail him.  It knows no eclipse.  It will show him the way we have traveled by brilliance ablaze
with pure joy that has tasted and known its true sources and now has the means to broadcast them to all
who desire to be nurtured likewise.  In the course of our own journey-work, the most tender-voiced call
always haunted and drove us, commanded and granted; now we shall not cease to deliver our own
invocation to him who has brought us this vantage-point, pouring out wild spirit-fire where the lone
searching soul out of all the ghost-worlds of false daylight who truly inspired and occasioned the birth
of this cycle of music still wanders, still waits for the signal from high on a hill the wild Earth
bears for no other purpose than that it should wear like an emblem of ecstasy one faultless white
marble tower, his image as rendered by prayer and the infinite miracles brought to the height
of their powers with him as their focus and goal.  He is hastening; soon he will also arrive
at the rapturous moment of absolute knowing:  These songs have been beacons to draw him alive
and inspired to the point of this climax:  Recalling the words he has borne over billows and foam
as our watery wayfarer finds us, we fall into floods of bright songlight:  Each-Other is Home.
 

***
 

26 December 2000
 

These songs have always tended to form sequences.  This one is related to the one published here yesterday, where you will find a note that explains the background of the Tower.  It is not the Tower of Babel; this one has entirely positive significance.
Today is Boxing Day--it seems this is a present to me.
 

This Will Always Be Here to Recall
 

The visible rolling of fog through the air where gold lanterns are shining reminds me of how
I once searched for a trace of a signally rare silver gilding around the outline of the cloud
that hung over me.  Sometimes I found it.  It glittered like strangely near stars set in satiny mist.
When dawn drove the vision away, for a little I seemed to forget, but could not quite resist
always wandering back in my thoughts to the glow of the pale faery lamp that shed such liquid beams,
when they flickered and danced as they shimmered and flowed, I beheld in one moment two parallel dreams:
Each was everywhere.  I was a fortunate seer--they showed me themselves with explicit intent.
Then I choked up, all loathsome confusion.  Their eerie design was inside me, though; I had been sent
a most powerful message on two or more levels.  I strove to recall each in turn, and I failed
to retrieve a sufficient amount of the devil knew what must be hiding there.  Slyly I railed
at the angels and even what might be benevolent spirits who scatter delirious signs
and then leave one to gasp at their possibly menacing meanings while glimpsing most lovely outlines
all throughout them.  I called on superior wisdom to view me as I lay in unholy haste
to be shone on by more faerie rays amid kisses of scarcely-perceptible light and to taste
on my skin and deep down in the depths of the eyes of my dream-haunted mind the true meaning of all
I still slightly recalled being showered with.  Time wound down slowly.  I felt myself starting to fall--
many sinuous layers of waves of a clammy night air glowed around me, now vague and now clear,
as I hurtled toward an ongoing embankment that never solidified.  Nothing was near;
nothing anywhere touched me, except for a handle of metal I clutched in my fingers:  There hung
a gold lantern that shone with a penetrant ambient softness that sparkled and sang as it swung
back and forth with the sway of my steps:  I now stood on a balcony, watching the fog writhe below
an abundantly shed veil of brightness.  How could I have dreamt I’d forgotten?  The worlds are on show
everywhere, by their timeless design, in a sentient and willful display one might freely behold
all at once, by their own shining rays, so much pent-up enlightenment finer than silver and gold
and more powerfully vivid.  I only let loose my attraction to falling, while safely on land,
and the angels and spirits I’d called--nay, the Muse who alone is the being I suffer to stand
close beside me or lie in my shadow or lord his above me--he came, and more dreams raised their eyes
in my deep spirit-mind and conveyed me his broadcast yet intimate message:  ‘The most fluid skies
shall be quickened forever in you by the shining of infinite beautiful dreams as we touch
like the timeless convergence of parallel lines in a zone that is whispered about overmuch
but shall henceforth be heard of itself by remarkable means I shall teach you:  The lingering bliss
that is falling and shining, that bridges all darkness without and within, has been singing you this,
and you fully remember it now.  Its beginning comes round once again:  Song of all fog and mist,
light aglow round soft edges, when you hear me sing, you have neither the heart nor the will to resist,
but you have the pure insight to see where I’ve led you and why, as you fell, you flew up to these heights
where the home our long dreams have so perfectly readied shall sway you alight through the most sacred nights.’
 

***
 

27 December 2000
 

Ineluctable Toils of Song

If she rides on a splinter of light, she becomes it:  The light is now darkness that travels by day,
an estranged and preponderant maker of clumsy appeals to the ore of the finest assay
to be willingly changed from its present location beyond her scant means into very near range—
ever nearer—an aching interior station where grace is received but denied the poor strange
petty creature she deems has the run of this palace of ashes.  O mother of suns beyond sight,
carry over the threshold I AM the lorn fallacy I now inhabit by which I must blight
all I view with desire.  What is in me, or am I within, that the light comes increasingly weak
from the instant I know I perceive it?  All glamour, no substance of genuine magic, the freak
of an ill-tempered silver-faced mirror, I hold me away from myself, lest I see what you know
and are only too apt to reveal:  silent coldness of glass on its surface—all shame down below
that reflective composure.  More dreamers have ridden the miles of the night into this gleaming round
than have ever returned.  While I stand in the midst of disturbed fluctuations of light, you still sound
further depths, further reaches in search of the absent uncanny offspring of the void that YOU ARE.
Soon I hear distant hurrying hoofbeats.  Enchantment directs them toward me.  How dreadfully far
they have wandered abroad, and how troubled and weary I thought they would be if they ever came home—
but they file through me silently, shiningly—cheerfully—stainless but for the mere fleck of sea-foam
here and there, and each one with such words on its breath that it aches to deliver out loud:  WE ARE all
within sight of the great storied ocean and whether we waken to know it or not, when we call,
we are echoes; we only appear as reflections wherever we look, but the depths of the sea,
far below its metallic aspect, hold perfection of vision and lavish desire to set free
in the riders who seek its assistance the power to witness the molten-gold flow of strong light
through the total extent of its changes without losing sight of ourselves or the source of the bright
secret velvety darkness that hides at its center, the beautiful dreaming-awake singing core
you have glimpsed in your own liquid eyes as you’ve entered their deep mirrored undersea reaches where pour
the wild strains of a chaste, uncontaminate wholeness of joy that has known its own sweetness of bliss
and is burning to share it.  It rides on a gold-glowing splinter of penetrant music like this,
and it shines light and dark as the Moon and the Ocean that made it together.  It travels by day,
yet it hangs in one place as the slow-swaying motion of someone possessed to surrender this lay
of her world’s secret chambers and corridors, struck from the stones at the absolute core of her heart
like a spark that burns fluidly soft, ineluctably melting the veils that keep lovers apart.
 

***
 

30 December 2000
 

Merry Christmas

Happy Birthday

Happy New Year

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday
 

The Unforgettable Present
 

I will reach for the fey shining will-o-the-wisp of a boy I have seen through an atmosphere pale
moonlight glimmers dissolve in as stars trickle twistedly silver and gold into halos and trails
lined with dreamt after-images.  He is enchanted by something so haunting, I hear it through him
as it weaves in and out of his mind like a dancing silk ribbon embroidered with stories, the trim
that once bordered the hem of a witch’s white nightgown.  Her secrets wait tangled there, bound up in threads
that first served to record them but now hold them tightly behind a flat surface design where, instead
of miraculous powers and tremulous beckoning gestures of wild vatic grace, one espies
a repetitive mumbling of ciphers that echo each other in meaningless syllables--lies
of the onlooker’s mind, not the truths that wait buried alive just a little beyond the first glance
in such legions of meaningful gladness, their merry comportment aligns with the next circumstance
that presents itself:  Here a rapt viewer within the bleared eye that has read long and uselessly stares
with a wakening sense of astonishment.  Minute by minute, a shifting about in the air
brings a happy derangement:  The witch’s strange letters are turning to face him and read quite out loud
past the silence abroad in his mind altogether enchanting descriptions they learned in their shroud-
over-seemingly-lifeless-immobile-white-marble-funereal-carving-herself-with-a-blade-
that-was-forged-without-fire-of-a-grimly-ice-hardened-hart’s-tongue’s-whetted-edge-while-the-live-spirit-strayed-
into-speechless-environs old days.  She lay dreaming awake on ethereal planes, while her words
drifted gently together like feathery streams of instinctively flocking re-immigrant birds
deeply learned in ways to assemble themselves into brilliant entrainments of registered sounds
and significant patterns whose sweet rhythmic elements call the deep past to transgress the false bounds
of a hesitant memory.  Ribbon, wind reading yourself quite out loud through our meant hearer’s mind
as you haunt him with songs that are no longer dreams, music brought from far borders, inspired and designed
by a species of witchcraft this lyrically tender toward the depth source of the star-haloed joy
who receives the delight he so shiningly lent us, our utterly fey unforgettable boy.
 

***
 

31 December 2000
 

Happy New Year

It seems as though the change in my work that I have alluded to is about to come through.  The content of this song is worrying; it warns of something that will take the appearance of tears.  See through this disguise, it counsels.  The true change is a form of divine possession, irrevocable, and inevitable now.
 

The Irrevocable Answer
 

Where you rest, you lie under an ocean of foaming white waves and a measure of infinite calm
I can clearly assess by the depth of the moaning and murmuring echoes that bear precious balm
filled with lyrical healing across ancient canyons toward the grey surface where I ride adrift
on a leaf of seaweed.  I have called, you have answered; the love-words that follow are your timeless gift:
‘Be safely amazed as you move through the changes of music I mean to invoke on your side
of a veil that grows steadily finer, less stained, and so nearly transparent it no longer hides
any part of the body of song that beguiles you.  That body is surging toward you in tears,
each of which is a globular vessel of smiling white secrets behind a disguise that appears
to be grief rendered permanent.  Nay--it is flowing Moon-silver that stares through the holes in a mask
where the eyes ought to be.  It is someone you’ve known for so long that to see him is no easy task;
he lives too far inside you, a watery presence upon whom you call to divine his own ghost’s
current main habitation, the mind where the measures of song make their nearest approach to the coast’s
sandy shallows and sometimes permit a land-dweller to overhear wildly intoxicant lines
with a margin of sweet self-possession and shelter for time-unbound moments within the moonshine
that provides animation that even the static outlines of a mask can employ to bring song
into this-worldly being, however the high vatic charge of its alien essence and strong
sacred shaping of thoughts rearranges the usual order of magnitude music has meant
on this shore for so long that it causes confusion at first, but then swiftly reveals its intent
to be so overwhelmingly flooded with beauty of so many aspects, all utterly strange
yet completely familiar, love’s hold on the truth in the heart of its hearer is suddenly changed
into merely the very most powerful bond between cells of this body and all the high swells
of the sea as it enters the land filled with longing to swallow it whole in the hugest of spells
of Moon-luminous magic.  The eyes of the ocean behold you:  Behind them is pure milky light.
The mask is dissolved by the tear-fluid potion this song has become as it flows through your sight
in the form of a vision of words, one describable only by means of its own magic’s aid,
all too soon to fall silent again, while inside you the change has arrived that cannot be unmade.’