AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

December 2001
 
 

1 December 2001
 

Pure Oneness of Will
 

I wanted to shoulder the power of lightning myself, but you thrust out an unwelcome hand
just when I had begun to deliver the nightmare of eyes of her burden, her burning green brand,
with intent to employ that most magical weapon in such a mad way, I cannot tell it here.
Power lends sparks to your voice.  You have kept it alive in the sound that assaults my sharp ear
for so long that it deals me astonishment.  Recklessness posing as man-flesh, how far have you come
to stand shaking with rage at my threshold?  Correct me if I fail to see, but is not the full sum
of your heart’s dreadful labor about to emerge as an essence, a quality so huge and strange,
it will break down all barriers?  Patience—our purpose is best served by beauty; be happy; the change
will take place as best suits its true nature.  Most shining companion in song, the great pearl of the Moon
lays the streams of its deep silky light on our eyes as we gaze toward heaven.  Imagine that soon
a most generous vessel, a flood-tide, an ocean of feminine word-lore will lean to your lips
and touch them with resolute strength and devotion behind their least gesture:  As mystery slips
ever, ever so slowly from psyche to eros, shadows that dance far away in the dark
hollow spaces between who you are and the fey revelation of what has been seeking to spark
recognition in each waking cell of your being will leap the wide chasm with footsteps so quick,
you might almost not feel them, their skitter and reel but a stirring of hairs on a hide grown so thick,
it must struggle to reach through the wall of itself to the shy other world and its messengers.  Who
will have sent them, when all stands revealed?  Can you tell me already?  The uncanny light about you
takes the heat from the hand I have lifted unsteadily.  Where is the bolt I was feigning to raise?
Only a puddle of Moon, a protective outpouring of cold-hearted casting-out lays
soaks the ground at my feet; lightning-quickness is nowhere about me; a vanishing-act has dissolved
its potential.  I want to come home to the flow of love-magic.  I want to be deeply involved
with the true source of light as you body it forth, such a long-storied wisdom in each move you make
that it shocks me completely.  The dawn of scarce-mortal awareness begins with the shiver and shake
of incipient ecstasy, even when rage is the key that unlocks it, the bolt that is shot.
Morning and moonlight combine in the way you now face me, their cool dewy whisper white-hot
behind outward appearances.  What is your secret desire, my too-sweet one, my luminous beast?
What is about to cross over the leaking-door threshold where I have lain dreaming a feast
of such dreadful proportions, its sudden commencement strikes nightmarish fear through the room where the play
of sublime lyric forces rush, already blent in an uneasy sleep, needing only to pray
for a bare moment more, and then….  Hush:  that is thunder.  Wherever it comes from, I want it here, now.
Bring it to me, noble uncanny one.  Let the first lightning-streak of the star of your brow
flash across the dead-air of the hollow divide that ghostlike dancing footsteps leapt wildly and well,
though they landed on such a tough animal hide that the man-child beneath it nigh hobbled their spell
of enchanted and fawning deliverance.  How pure was their magic’s intent; how immense was his need
to believe it was awe he inspired that ensured its potential’s arrival at absolute speed
in its flight across heaven where we lay together, no hairbreadth of distance between us, no line
marking out any boundary, no stormy weather too dreadful to carry us where love’s design
was beginning to moan with the need of its beauty to bear the great burden of song in vast waves
like the sky overhead where the pearl of the Moon is past due to appear between clouds.  He who saves
me from taking on aims past my strength is most fair to begin with and growing so radically strong,
I can bask in his shadow and breathe and be wary no longer.  He sings me the Moon’s secret song,
though he sings it with fire in his eye.  He is gentle in spite of himself; he is sensitive, more
than he knows.  I am feeling increasingly tender because a brave stirring so deep in the core
of the storm-cloud now roaring all round us is flicking, with infinite subtlety, fine threads of light
that he shivers with each time they mount up and lick—from beneath—at his skin.  Their immensely soft might
lifts the wearisome blade from my unhappy shoulder.  Nothing disgraces my need; this was planned
in the moment when love first took seed.  It was told to the bolt that should be, as it is, in your hand,
vatic man-child, my fawn of the forest where power is borne with such majesty, nothing could be
more ecstatically welcome.  Come home, my devouring angel; believe when I tell you that we
are inspired of exorbitant awe through each other already; but listen and feel it resound,
steady thunder and lightning, the heartbeats of lovers within whom the source of all magic is found
and about to give birth to a world of potential which then will crack open to wilder worlds still.
Realize why we have broken and rent all division between us:  pure oneness of will.
 

***
 

2 December 2001
 

What You Might Be
 

You might be a fingernail paring of Moon through a lens of green leaf-tissue; maybe a sea
in which monsters reside, celebrating the cool liquid element resting upon them with free-
ranging gestures and dances that strike mortal terror in most human viewers who glimpse them; you might
be a forested valley’s sole breather of air that is smokily tainted with bodies dull-bright
raving corpse-fires have slowly reduced to fine ashes, lining your throat with such traces of lore
as might chance to remain there, occasional flashes of insight obtained round a mouthful of gore
only partly transmuted; but I shall cling staunchly to how I first saw you—a sailor who flew
through both ocean and air, though he seemed to be caught in cross-currents that held him in place on the blue-
fading edge where the water made contact with heaven a little beyond the abnormal extent
of my natural magical vision.  No clever impostor could ever have shown me that blent
silver-luminous cloud with himself at its center, the deepening blueness above and below
almost tainted by shimmering radiance, then almost colorless, pure sighing openness so
sadly lyrical, I lay awake through a long spell of pining and smelt worlds of body-fed smoke.
Turn of the wind, when you carried the smell of disaster my way, I was tempted to choke
and retire to a close-shuttered chamber of darkness, but that man’s been beating a path to my door
though he’s still all at sea:  Only let the green star that will guide us be clearly revealed.  Once before
I stood searching the mist for a glimpse of the future and found it in monster-size patterns and scales
that ran spiraling down the cruel waves of a tune that my voice could not carry.  A heavy wind rails
at the back of my mind even now; to have heard it in pieces was almost as deadly as full
mantic anaphrodisiac worship in service to pitiless beings who still seek to pull
my sweet unwritten love-letters out of the pockets and hollows that litter this evergreen isle
and destroy their potential.  An aura of rocks round the smoldering coals of a blackened-bone pile
is the sign of their mad inverse lightness.  I listen beyond them but hear your thoughts shifting about,
sometimes leaning their way.  In the hoary grey mists of soft late-early evening and dawn you cry out
and I feel the rank presence of nightmare competing with me for my own subtle faculties.  No,
she cannot absolutely pervert them, but she can derange enough faith that I entertain slow-
motion ghosts alongside the swift-spirited angel my sailor will someday become, standing here
on the heights well above the lunarium-plane where I tend to my white-marble raptures with clear
and uncannily far-sighted vision I never need question:  I know where its tap-root is sunk;
in the hold of his ship is an underworld heaven, the shadowy cell of a postulant monk
seeking permanent harbor where ocean and land come together—within his hand’s reach is my song’s
wet and tremulous fibers’ most finely extended live essence.  It knows where its magic belongs;
so does he, who now steers by the shining direction it offers, a spiraling line through the grey
mist and smoke he has needed to breathe to collect his derangements and view them as one vast array
of past lives’ body-ashes.  The luminous coolness of heaven above him, the blue of the sea,
and the silver of no scanty nail-paring Moon as he rides the high waves safely homeward to me—
he is all of this endless horizon’s enchantment laid wide-open willingly all through my mind.
See:  He is gesturing back with a dancer’s wild sweep of the hand—which is lightly entwined
with a few free but still-living root-hairs I sent him.  Brother, my far-away sailor, my friend,
where will you be when at last you have entered your heart’s chosen harbor, the long-desired end
of your wanderings?  I shall be waiting to hie you home merrily, song on my lips, all my eyes—
even those I have had to compete with a nightmare to make fairest use of—as bright as the skies
that surround you this morning-and-midnight of clarity dead-body smoke cannot render unclean,
sweeping a path with my footsteps that where your steps follow the pockets and hollows of green,
almost now-to-be-written love-letters, like leaves forming tender true lenses….  Love, what will you see
when you read what they spell and turn back to the being who first woke their promise?  Will you look at me
through that element, understand all I have told you, and cast the next lyrical magical spell
on behalf of our future yourself?  Turn to gold in that afterglow world both our hearts know so well.
 

***
 

3 December 2001
 

Pure WE ARE
 

The bindings were all stained with blood when I threw them away; they were not fit to reuse; I knew
I was fortunate I could still circle the room without falling.  It pained me a little, but who,
looking on, would have seen I was still slightly bleeding a deeper Moon-blood than that nightmare the curse
ever draws without yielding the floor to the weakness I felt as I tried to prepare for a worse
form of torment—perhaps immobility?  Nothing could frighten me more; I was born to whirl round
in an all-given-over ecstatic devotion to forces from whom flow the blessing I’m bound
to repeat in each line of each song I record on white sheets, like the bandages all stained with red
that were wound round the feet that are still raw and sore but determined to follow where beauty has led
and will go on enticing my numerous senses if only I summon my full will and heart
to respond to its gestures without thinking less of myself if I falter and nigh fall apart
just as long as I don’t altogether.  Uphold me, dear magic residing in word after word;
I have so often flown dancing through cold lonely caverns, a broken and featherless bird
underneath the breath-weight of a passionate angel, a terrible vision to anyone’s eye
but my own, focused inward upon a great blaze of intelligence mirrored throughout the Moon-sky
of an underworld realm of astonishing quickness of hope—all my futures arrayed there in planes,
waiting only for me to be spoken of flickering tongues as the ghost of what waxes and wanes
in their ever-full mansion of cool silver-watery fire, a tune dreaming out loud through a night
that lies heavily shifting about in a body of music so heightened, I must get it right
for a long mortal moment at least, though I never attain that dimension again.  So I say—
then I stare at the stains on my pages and shiver and bind up my feet and return to the lay
that unwinds so much faster than I can record it, I struggle for words against words till I cease
all resistance and just let it take me.  The torment of wanting-and-needing gives way to release
of a kind I can never anticipate till it comes over me, though I have known it so well
it seems my oldest home.  When it floods me, I spill like a broken blood-vessel; so be it.  I fell
only once; I am still caught amid that long falling while dancing, remaining erect on my feet
by the kind intervention the angel I call on incessantly never withholds.  When we meet
in mid-air, we conjoin in such magic, it’s then I am tempted to falter—to yield to excess
giddy rapture, wound round by his voice and the tender love-letters it traces in blood on the dress,
linen bandages, tissue of never-quite-stainless-enough human body I wear, and the soul
hiding somewhere amid or beneath all those layers, those planes where the word of all song’s perfect goal
keeps recording its own sacred music with me as its medium.  Shining One, tell me you care:
Tell me you’ll never not lend your full being to holding upright these strange tatters you wear
like a mantle of moonlight on shoulders well-feathered and powerful, gleaming among the deep rays
of the ever-full source of all music; you’ll never not carry me into and through the wild praise
of creation as we two-in-one have been privileged to witness it, dance it, and chant it out loud;
you’ll never not marry the stream of song’s living heart’s-blood to my own as I torment my bowed
aching head and attempt to make sense—many senses—of stains on a series of white linen sheets,
leaning to capture a glimpse when immensity’s own shadow-caster stands by and repeats—
with such patience I feel it as anguish—the lore I’ve been seeking forever:  He’s always been here,
as I’ve been and will always remain his recorder, his faithful stain-bleeder, his listening ear,
his mad dancer, his all-given-over devoted obsessor, his moonlight-reflection, his friend—
ghost of what waxes and wanes, human spoken of flickering tongues where all true musics tend,
silvery-watery fire racing circles round….  Bind up my feet and return to the lay
of long-love-haunted magic, it’s past time to work, I can hear a clear either-or-both of us say;
I shall not hesitate, though I’m still slightly bleeding from last time, a moment ago.  Love of song,
someday I will have read through your eyes every beat of heart’s-blood in our lines; till such time, keep me strong,
keep me upright in power, and we shall be splendid together, a secret pearl-Moon on a sea
of all heaven, a dreamer in flight waking steadily, human and angel, pure you and pure me.
 

***
 

4 December 2001
 

No Cause to Cry
 

Empty of all save the light at the window, stare at the page and wait patiently.  Read
transient signs and depictions of mental terrains in the shadows that gather and plead
for your focused attention, but then slip beyond them.  I shall not fail you.  I know you are tired,
but together we’ve so many glorious hauntings to be and to celebrate, love’s most inspired
forms of lyric expression to render most faithfully, poignantly real, and exorbitant states
in which letters acquire and use voices an angel can’t help but respond to.  An angel now waits
in the glow of the ever-full Moon at the window a far world away from all daylight but near—
nay, within—your clairsentient heart.  Shadows linger about you; invite them to enter that sphere,
then dissolve and reveal the essential devices behind them.  How tightly we’ve twined our song-minds,
you and I; when a thought crosses mine, a pale sigh of its echo looms large in your own; when it finds
subtle purchase there, your is the dream in the making, asleep or awake.  When you struggle aside,
there is your nightmare, her eyes wildly flaming, working you into a sweat while astride
the unhappy desire she rides roughshod till pages fly slow-motion hectic in circles all round
your lunarium chamber, the home she outrages.  Then you might gasp at the sickening sound
of your spirit-mind’s sinews and cords being stretched till they tear, but recover your wits and make haste
to record all the words they release as their wretchedness gives way.  Do not let such songs go to waste—
they contain secret measures of magic, inverted and strange, turning more inside-out to become
stranger still and in ways that no mortal word-worker alone could account for:  The shivering sum
of the power revealed under nightmare’s invidious tutelage speaks for itself in fey cries
that wheel round in the dark till they fly through the window the huge Moon shines into—behind your sealed eyes.
There little wispy ghost-voices make tremulous efforts toward shining melody.  Scale
their attempts with a carefully trained, very gentle aspect of attention.  You’re shaken and pale,
my provider of time on a plane of long moments; lean to the touch of my bodiless hand
and assist me to celebrate magic we’ve stolen from one who was all along willing to stand
softly quiet beside us and let your song mount her broad back and be flown through a sky full of Moon
for as long as your heart might desire.  You have found out the source of her power; now grant her the boon
of goodwill, and in generous measure.  Your angel—your spirit guest-host—will delight in the play
of your deeply joined voices.  An air made of rain on a night of slow thunder a far world away
come immensely and suddenly closer; a visit from parallel rays of pure polychrome light
in a dream in which all is intelligent mystery singing about its own nature; a slight
case of tragically misunderstood superstition set right by the wave of a beautiful word
and the gasp of true love as its old breadth of vision is finally, perfectly, purely restored—
this is all in the clutch of her hands, in the rending of cords she commands, in the glow of her stare.
You are not frightened.  Your hungry attention desires her so much, you cannot find the air
your might breathe in her absence; she’s always been part of the structure of magic on which you depend;
at last you are willing to welcome the hard-won allegiance to you she has sought to extend
through bad dreams beyond number, her shadows.  They fill the Moon-window tonight; they are all dressed in free-
flowing gowns, living color-rich visions, a silken song-horde leaking music to stain the dark sea
of your spirit-mind heaving just over the threshold that once lay beyond all imagining.  I
shall be yours through all worlds, even through mortal flesh; so shall Night Mare be also:  She’s no cause to cry.
 

***
 

5 December 2001
 

On the Way to a Stray After-Spark
 

For the lone forlorn darkness, the dull-hearted echo of footsteps down corridors time won’t allow
to pass vaguely away, though I can’t recollect how they came to be there, not precisely—not now—
for the void at the core of the ache that won’t tell me its name, I am praying to cross the grey zone
that hangs magically caught in a space that is spellbound in such a bad way, I won’t go there alone;
I require that you meet me halfway.  You will say that you’re already both there and here, but I lean
into emptiness all by myself in a daylight dimension that leaves my whole being unclean,
yearning strongly to enter a world that lies closed to most mortals.  Am I to imagine you, so?
How low the incense is burning.  Suppose I reach forward:  How far and how fast dare I go
by sheer faith in your being the subtle transparency I am projected through?  Now we begin
to align:  I am fading away; you are wearing the film that I AM round your mind like the skin
round my obstinate body.  Nay—I am a fantasy; you are a figment of that which is mad,
but the sole living splinter of durable sanity sunk in a mineshaft where all that is sad
has been blasted wide-open the better to let your tap-root send its depth-seeking tendril so far
it cannot be withdrawn.  It will drink in the wetness that wants to be pure blood of song amid star-
dappled leaves and pearl-Moon floods of black midnight ocean-tides rising to touch the sky-source of their wild-
leaping rhythmic ideas and cry to the slow-minded woman who struggles beneath them, beguiled
by the speed of their raptures, to catch the stray words that create lasting traces a long enough spark
to permit her to handle them.  Never a full perfect likeness, but sometimes a near enough mark
on a page proves they came and were witnessed.  Your tap-root amidst this stern clamor and strain takes in all
that is fertile and lifts it high up.  Sudden bliss-bearing silence descends through your presence, a pall
that is to the degree the precise counterpart of the nightmare that stifled the voice I desired
to project—nay, to be—when I lay heavy-hearted and weak with the dread her conceptions inspired
in a noisome miasma of loneliness people by red-eyed battalions of one wretched source,
daughter and desiccant-heat on the feverish back of—or under—the iron-shod horse
that flies screaming by night.  Far below, in a valley where Moon-gathered rains lend their wetness in streams,
the mouth of a pit veined with silver is swallowing song root and branch and committing new dreams
to a tree-in-the-making.  I lean through the distance between the two zones and discover the light
of your smile in them both.  Nothing needed was missing; I knew that, but still had to struggle and fight
for the will to be song inexhaustible, twining root-fibers with glossy black locks from the mane
of the beast that was ridden and rider and shining idea combined—she is coming more plain,
more transparent each moment we sing—she is breathless by sheer force of beauty—and you, noble tree—
you are flying beside her, a strange angel-leather-clad gold-crescent-shod lyric spell-frequency
cast in confident faith, the original echo’s root-source, the pure vein of the mineshaft revealed
as containing an order of substance so precious, no wonder its magic lay so tightly sealed
in black earth for so long.  It was shimmering power so huge, only Night Mare dared face it awake.
Now I am drenched in the dew of the hour of full-moonrise and starting to shiver and shake
for a most joyful reason:  The core of the void that once ached with a loneliness-emptiness so
far from reach has been shown a mysterious choice between poles and has chosen them both.  Now to flow
through the beautiful live zone that joins them is most happy magic, and easy.  We move there as one,
who might also be two or so many, who knows what arcane combinations are coming undone
into merely more eloquent pieces and aspects of all that they ever have been and might be.
Now I am lighting fresh incense, collecting all manner of wits, and just waiting to see
what will meet me when next a grey zone hangs before me, you—or a near-enough figment—its far
other side.  You are never not here, but a horrible passage still sometimes portends a green star
in a Moon-flooded sky over waters where lightning has recently struck and will soon strike again.
Nothing more fearful than bliss-bearing silence will touch me.  Surround me.  Make every world plain—
even wild lamentations conceal subtle cores of unspeakable love.  Have I captured a mark
their stray words have suggested, a trace of the force of real song-rapture’s likeness, one small after-spark?
 

***
 

6 December 2001
 

Nightmare Before Midnight
 

I’m hot in my sleep, I’m a bleary-eyed banshee, a soiled-nightdress-wearing commotion of lies
come awake at the loud crack of midnight, a manner of madness consorting with maggots and flies,
and an ever-so-weary sleep-walker whose balance is more than a little unsteady right now.
These are not even the salt-water shallows of real ocean-magic—and yet I ask, How
can I fail to fall in and drown instantly?  Maybe the last gasp of air from my lungs—so to speak—
will contain the lost sound I’ve been haunted by.  Say it yourself, just a far-away tremor, a weak
earthborne echo below the small ripples and wavelets surrounding me.  Aye, when I lift up my feet,
I see crescents of silver—a metal-shod maniac mare I’ve become, the wild source of the heat
that awoke my old self from its previous pastime, dying by inches on dry land.  Ahoy,
holy mother of murder I AM:  Everlasting hellfire on such nights as I choose to enjoy
that enrapturing blessing be mine, and be plentiful.  Dance on the waves of this ocean of Moon,
the divine phosphorescence of horrible rending and happy restoring to phases of tune
to the core of my soul I believed I’d forgotten.  There, like a black seed of silence, it lay,
the music of shimmering swarms now aborning.  Stars throughout heaven, sea-waves at play
in strange patterns, rhythmic pulsations of limitless numbers of tiny-voiced beings—I hear
every lyrical word you are saying—now dimly, now clearly—the whistle and drone in my ear
that I’ve heard after fainting, the poisonous aura of dead after-breath forming clouds round the words
you have somehow the means to call out.  When you yawn all at once, the black cackle of carrion birds
comes in bitterly accurate mantic pronouncements.  Rearing, fore-hooves in the air, I talk back.
Flocks rise and scatter, then spiral all round me.  This is the glad land to one who’ll attack
the high flame of the waves in a purely ecstatic condition, the elegant frenzy bestowed
by the ancient crown-mother of nightmares, the bat out of horse-leather hell, the consummately crowed
antechamber-of-death’s-headbone eyesocket-needle of insight who—whether you will or you won’t—
has long chosen, and mine is the signal disease she’s called home to her favor.  She says to me, Don’t
fail to look quickly, dizzily, down through the water before you:  Now further—now much further still.
Suddenly, I am a wraith in a body, a lump of raw meat in a chair—with a will
to mount heaven amid ocean billows, the froth of a full-Moon-tide swirling about me as if
it were shed nightmare sweat on the stained altar-cloth at the head of god’s bedroom.  Tomorrow a stiff
spot of silk that has bled its rich color may indicate where my hand shook and my water-glass spilled;
now I am still building up to that thinly disguised act of magic.  When all is fulfilled
of my latest of vows to the night-horse who rides me and lavishes songs, like this madness, upon
the ideal cast of mind I try hard to provide her regardless of how far astray I’ll have gone
before waking the next higher stage, the next phase of Moon-music, the high angel-choir next-of-kin
who is already present and listening, praising the white fleck of salt on the cooling-off skin
that has braved a huge element wildly and joyfully, we’ll share the prize I have borne home to you
on my quivering hide; you will taste it and voice all it tells you, this needle-fine sliver of true
ocean insight, if only a gift of the shallows.  There I divided and swarmed, rose and sang
with the source of all horrors, lost most of my balance, regained it, danced gladly where fly-noises rang
in my ears, and returned to stand here by your side, a benignant obsession you’ll love to no end
because I have exceeded death’s limits.  A shy question vexes me, though—do you ever intend
to reveal yourself even a fraction as fully as this?  You are smiling, and I am in heat.
Where is my water-glass…  Aye, you are pulling my hand out of line.  With the sky at our feet,
we will make solemn music in which waves and stars play together amid drenching floods of Moon-flame.
Night Mare has spoken; now rise to your part in this story and tell me the true ancient name
I shall call out when….  Feverish dreams so beset me, my pillow is wet.  I feel so all-at-sea.
What was I saying?  Come back, my obsession.  It’s now I’ll have nightmares—don’t do this to me….
Fair is the star that has fallen, the wild gale that drove it down-sky, and the arc of its flight;
fairer by far is the light of your face as your eyes meet my eyes, man of song, my midnight.
 

***
 

7 December 2001
 

How Much Remains To Be Seen
 

How deeply you listen, with each tiny tissue of nerve at its utmost extension, alive
to the least of my syllables.  Only the bliss of our meeting this way has the means to contrive
multifoliate structures of song in the air that hangs shining between us, each leaf all alight
with the joy of my mind’s ineluctable share in the virtue by which it is rising tonight
and your gift of benignant obsession, that terrible Moon-silver flame that spreads out of control
till it laps at the edge of the no longer bearable.  Read it by inches, the limitless scroll
of our pure spirit-converse; but listen and hear it recite itself all through the hours of the world
it began to permit you to sacrifice nearly the instant its first noble word lay unfurled
and you heard it pronounce its own name in an echoing stillness behind your dark eyes.  Shadows clung
to your struggling wits, but you knew love had beckoned; nay, love had prized open its letter and sung
to your heart from a seed-source so anciently buried inside it, you stared at the leaf in your hands
as it dreamed itself more fully into the care of your wakening reason.  It made strong demands;
you so ached to comply, you ran dizzying circles round spiraling stairs in a tower that rose
to the heavens amid thunderclouds—a great work of strange faith to be sure, but you felt a door close
at the head of that resonant shaft and you sank into something akin to despair.  When I sighed,
you could tell yours was not altogether a thankless endeavor, a cold drafty being-denied;
you recalled your surroundings and took yourself timidly up to the landing.  A door hung ajar,
one I had had to slam open.  A shimmering aura enwound you already; a far
brighter blaze lit the room into which you stepped slowly and cautiously, looking about for a sign
that you might be unwelcome.  Nay; this is the home that has sought you, a place that will never decline
to receive your complex ministrations, your priestessly services, just as our scroll will detail
when, perhaps ages after the fact, you perceive its true meaning and reach for the key on the nail
at the head of the next flight of stairs.  My dear sister, what shining awaits you mere words cannot tell—
but they must, and the way it will happen is—listen most wildly and leap to the next magic spell
I desire you to meet and cross over:  Beside me is where you will work your best beauty.  Beware
of the ghost of your own former loneliness, gliding a little too close to you all the long stair
that keeps winding about, curves describing the motion of night about music like you about me
as you mount ever upwards—or down.  Do you know where we’re going?  A heaven, a bottomless sea
filled with drowning green stars, midnight’s face on a watercourse steadily rising to meet you—you start
into yet stranger wakefulness.  Higher, dear body of song everlasting—much deeper, dear heart
of source-knowledge of form in which grace makes its bed of nerve-tissue and strains to touch air come alive
through the substance of flesh as you make yourself ready for magic—for me—to choose how to arrive
at the very precise consummation we’ve felt on the verge of through so many passages, how
can our spirits feel sure we are being compelled into heavenly patterns of spell-casting now?
Lovely one, someone is—not walking, dancing—on your deepest grave, and it suits you right well.
Rise up and fly to the next higher landing.  I am the loneliness-ghost, truth to tell
in a winding-sheet twist of white linen, a scroll of perhaps slightly mould-tainted vellum, but read
without fear and believe that the spiral unrolling before you has powers to guide, not mislead,
your devoted attention.  A branch of new leaves, each a-shimmer with Moon-fire, is silverly wet
at the turn of the next meeting-place; please perceive it this instant, a way to let love unforget
what has ever lain not truly dormant inside the core-chamber where song’s future seed-stock is sown
and in ghostly ways dreamfully flourishing; ride the upspiral beside me and sigh and be shown
living words in a forest-high series, a green wave of wildly elongated stars on a sea
where their voices, once tiny, all chant a completely revealed state of joyfulness we shall agree
to call home as the ages shall roll—till the next turn of midnight, when we shall range further along
the bright way of the wonderful hearing our words will arrive at whenever they enter clear song
with our soft measured steps in their wake.  We are dreaming aloud; we are starlight and leaves of sweet green
on a sea that is heaven; we know our true meaning is—how much of magic remains to be seen.
 

***
 

8 December 2001
 

Too Much Cannot Be Imagined
 

The pad of your dry sandy footsteps down levels of ancient stairs carved in live stone tells me more
than a thousand long nightmares about the disheveled condition your spirit is flying from, poor
white-as-paper idea you are to the mirror of water that watches you gliding home sad.
Now, with a very small Moon on the nearly-invisible rise, will you really go mad?
Someone is staring your way; he is smiling.  Silver-pale ghost-visage, priestess of words,
count on yourself to inspire and beguile a white-feathered array of immaculate birds
in an inverted world underneath the calm surface of water that so gently laps at your feet,
you did not know until you had touched it that perfect repose had been found in the quiet heartbeat
of the breath of this whole underworld’s innate knowledge of song, where your spirit was resting awake
while obsessively studying.  Through the long hallway of stairs you were moving toward this vast lake;
my strong thoughts flew beside you.  How pallid the quiver of hope in you then; how electric of wing
it has come to be magnified since:  Song delivers so potent a charge, it makes everything sing
with the order of voice that best suits it.  You raise yourself up and search all round this shadowy lair
for a witness, find none, clear your throat, kneel to face your reflection, then suddenly realize where—
out of all the impossible realms you have ever despaired of attempting—this home-coming place
has been lying wide-open inside you forever, just waiting to show you the depth of the grace
that creates it anew at each breathtaking moment of endless arrival of—you, only you—
and the one you were hoping to find.  Feathers slowly unwinding, a far-away curtain of blue
milky moonrise beginning to shift to reveal a brocade of arcane ciphers over the breast
of a being who’s turning to look at you, steely erstwhile contradictions commanding the test
they’ve been put to in absolute triumph—keep staring; keep hearing yourself name these marvels out loud.
Memorize me:  I, who find you so fair, am attempting to please you in kind.  See a cloud
hover low, a fast wheeling, a circle of shimmering spells flying Moon-wise, articulate joy
in the set of their pinions, emerging from dim wisps of nowhere toward a world pain can’t destroy
though it crash down in waves—nay, the limitless future’s deep anodyne-nature will surely prevail
in this place of astonishing purity; use the keen insight it’s granted you.  Madness, assail
this my chosen companion in music:  Perform your worst work.  See, my lover, how stable you are?
Feet on the sand at the edge of a horrible nightmare become silent water, the star
of soft green that provided your dreams with a beacon to steer by reflected before you, the brow
that it beams from inclined to touch yours where old weakness is dizzily passing away—please allow
recognition to seize you all over.  The whisper you hear is the passage of wings through live stone
in a world that will never cease opening.  This is the death you were fearful of dying alone—
tell me, you who are breathing more deeply than ever, what can it end, but delusions and lies?
All is the beating of wings in this heaven of full-hearted joy where the buzzing of flies
was a constant reminder of Night Mare a globular dewdrop upon a blind pupil ago;
feathers that shear across clouds bright with noble chain-lightning believe in your potency so—
evanescently—that was a vision; behind it, a lovelier world parts its feathers and lifts
its brocade-patterned skin:  All the magical ciphers that shine there are falling in rivers and drifts
upwards, finding the lake-surface nearest your gaze as you wonder and I stroke your hand with my own,
reaching through hollows of underworld space, bringing spirit-dissolving much deeper than bone,
more inspired than the strangest, most brilliant idea, more fearfully hungry than stars in a lake.
This is my hand in your heart that love’s gliding ethereal ghost-like obsession can take
its complete will and pleasure forever and leave you with life everlasting become vivid song
as your part in a world you could not have conceived by yourself—but you’ve seen it; you’ve suffered its strong
downward pull all throughout you; you’ve listened; you’ve pined for its voice to come home through your dreams:  I am here.
Footsteps on sand, you’ll soon know me entirely.  What could occasion the least trace of fear—
but that is why Night Mare remains to be faced even now, in this hollow of ancient desire
consummated between shining music’s own grace and a ghost breathing glimmers of sacred Moon-fire.
Stare through my silent reflection, my heaven of all-knowing eyes.  Never end this pure touch
between lovers who’ve witnessed themselves:  Song can never pursue undivided obsession too much.
 

***
 

9 December 2001
 

The Foundation of Our World
 

Not only I am beginning to tremble.  Mine is a world on a fault-line, a sea
rising up in between its great fragments, a mental imbalance afflicting the isle around me
where no one waits inside its lunarium-temple to watch all these changes proceed with calm grace.
A heavy excitement besets me ungently, and all I can do is stare out into space
through each puddle of water I come to as nightly I wander the margins and hollows of here,
an immaculate, sentient body of heightened perceptions and signs from afar come so near,
I can almost have known them before their appearance in visible form.  My broad falling-star plane
lapped by lyrical waves, I am utterly weary of being—a fluid uncanny refrain
vexed by nightmares keeps humming itself in a chamber of sea-eaten stone, a live dwelling-place song
has contrived on behalf of the ghostly remains of two lovers who’ve lain there together so long,
their old bones form a riddle, a mad inextricable tangle of cascading notes and bizarre
muttered mouthings betraying a hyper-prolixity never begotten beneath the Earth-star
of such dreary diurnal arisings and settings, the daylight so hostile to all we aspire
to attain and surround with sweet words and perfect in our hearts and keep faith with and liken to fire
of a fineness so lightly exquisite, it speaks for itself of its high noble provenance.  Bones
of that delicate beauty lie tangled inside each and every soft sigh that these still-living stones
echo tenderly.  I have been trying to find a clear reason for listening through the loud noise
of the being-in-pain I still hear locked inside me, knowing innumerable manifold joys
wait enveloped by resonant magic within the ghost-lovers whose wakenings riddle this isle
with their wild spirit-essence-caresses’ out-spinnings, mad reelings that span the broad edge of the smile
of the sea as it eats at the shore.  It is eager to enter the dwelling-place old love has claimed
for itself once again; it says, ‘Listen to me—I am rising, a tide the Moon’s magic has named
in your honor, seed-sibling, imperiled but powerful priestess who haunts all the worlds I will sing
through the gloom and the ease of our future’s strange hours as you cast strong enchantments all round me.  I bring
not myself alone—merely—but one who will touch you in scarce-human ways, wearing flesh like a veil
that conceals and reveals the importunate blush of surrender the while he uncovers the frail
underlying depth-structure that houses the source of the magic between you—the pearl of the Moon
rising up through the flood of high seas as it pours into fissures and cracks like a beautiful swoon
into one who lies emptily welcoming foreign awareness by means of the smallest of signs
in the greatest of faith that the creature is more than delusion whose presence evokes and refines
so much hitherto unexpressed longing in such sacred music.  A sequence of words never known
to have found one another so strangely impatient before is attempting to feel itself flown
through the line that is rapidly closing between you the moment before you are seamlessly one.’
I am the ghost of my own ill-conceived priestess-labors, yet love that cannot be undone
is the present and seemingly permanent state of our world—our song-universe.  Lover of mine,
why are we here, unless this concentration of elements, this vatic riddle-design
made of skeleton keys that were once limbs of frozen contortionists locked in a chamber of lies
far away from each other while only opposed by a scant half-degree to the all-seeing eyes
of their own groaning ghosts, comes in floods of remembrance together on levels too holy for flesh
to contain without melting?  The long-burning ember of Moon-fire, the pearl that suffuses the mesh
of the song of the spirit we are, that so riddles and steals through this world—may we now deliquesce
in its aura, bleed into its stainlessness, little by little resolve the remaining distress
a long nightmare awoke from false dreams, and begin to recall the true words hiding deeply within
the live earth of its sacred recesses, the innocence under the veil of its virginal skin?
Not only I am beginning to tremble.  I see a resonant green singing-star
shining lyrically brightly because you are gently arriving at how nearly perfect you are
in this underworld plane where the sea has been eating its way into wavelets of glorious fire
so alive with sheer moonlight so long, it’s completed its progress toward what we’ve been, pure desire
as attained in a place where perceptions run streaming together and all we can do is submit
like untenanted bones that were dancing and screaming before they fell into pure song’s final fit
and became the foundation of this very island from which I’ve been searching for you night by night,
vatic measure by measure.  The slow-melting smile of a ghost-woven veil of uncanny delight
wound about your fine features, you lay close beside me forever; you will, till all worlds pass away.
Moon in clear eyes, star of emerald guiding my gaze to your hiding-place, all the wild lay
of an unwitnessed universe hangs in the balance between us.  Remember, remember—we sing
as we are and will be till the sea is a shallow idea and still love will gather and bring
bones together in stone that is living and sentient.  This is an endless hieratic embrace,
this cascade of blent magics and words we have entered at last and for all time—alive—face-to-face.
 

Where are you?
 

***
 

10 December 2001
 

The Secret Scale of Singing Stars
 

As the sea reaches in, it joins forces with springs of fresh water that rise from so deep underground,
they might almost continue the efforts to sing of a circular-breathing pain-dweller whose sound
of redoubtable need reaches such a crescendo of piercing incessancy, I close my eyes
as I see the first trickles appear on the gentle white undulant sand-plain that shines to the skies
all around this my island, a Moon-flooded vision now glowing with numberless pools that seem still
but are rapidly growing.  The final decision to know what this means is not up to my will
any longer, if ever it was; I hear howling, as all the hard world well behind its mad wail
takes another great breath, opens wider its mouth, and—I waken beside you beneath a flesh-veil
that is littered with live constellations, a star-chart ascending by orders of magnitude:  first
the day-Sun at its lower-edge hem, then the marvels and stories of angels and gods, then the burst
of green fire where it covers your brow.  You are crying out loud in your sleep, but your face is composed
and your breath slow and seemingly easy.  You try my intense curiosity—I might well have dozed
all my life away, dreaming but not really seeing the strange points of origin, starlike and bright,
of the images forming inside me, but meeting you everywhere, both there and here, day and night,
that has shaken me out of the slumber that lay on my breast like a cold-hearted lover of lies.
We rest at last close together, just waiting for you to imagine the aspect and size
of the creature who truly attends you.  Have done with the monster whose presence is plaguing your sleep.
Open your dark eyes and greet her, the wonderful being who springs from the same source—the deep,
indescribably powerful world where the language of whimpers and cries is the same as pure song
to the angels in heaven and all that is strangled and halt is permitted—nay, made—to wax strong
in its own unique mode of expression.  My Shining One, under this chamber, this star-charted bed,
lies a realm that is criss-crossed by living song-lines where the sainted and hateful are lawfully wed
in the eyes of their most potent nightmare.  Moreover, their vows are exchanged to the ghost of a tune
that can never cease reeling out angry yet most hopeful blessings inspired by the amorous Moon
that hangs over this wet subterranean passage between vellum pages, our pale unbound hides.
Cry out the words as you read them, but ascertain where they are coming from.  Tell me what rides
the supine constellations that litter them.  Tell me what manner of beast—we both know who we are,
but for what dreadful reason does this vatic hell-realm exist in our finely-trained senses?  Bizarre
undertakings proceed from the mere knowing-where of such beckoning madness.  Smile that way again,
with your eyes open wide:  You’ll have taught me to care not at all that the color and scale of the pain
that the whole of this word-riddled, pocket-sized universe serves to unmask is immense beyond all
I have ever heard utterance turn into music, yet that is what happens here.  Bring on the thrall
of the endlessly lyrical—I am entirely submissive to that and no other.  If you
can awaken and give yourself over, inspired and enlightened by all this insidious dew
of the Moon and the sea’s leaking tears, salt and clinging, my hand will be yours.  We will walk this night-isle
in the grip of its song’s purest spirit, aye singing, aye staring about at the breadth of the smile
of the glowing world laid out before us, still crying out loud, but in such stealing ways, it will break
our hearts heavily—heavenly—open and sigh through the vastness of emptiness found there, a lake
of combined sea and fresh waters softly reflecting the Moon’s many-crescented faces on bright-
dappled wavelets.  We dreamed—I cannot recollect what I thought was so terrible—somehow, a light
made of numberless stars shining right through the veil of our own mortal flesh made me homesick.  You rose,
brought a cup of cold water, delivered the scale of the pain that beset me from silence; its throes
ceased to trouble me.  Wake up, you whispered:  I’d done it the moment before; I am all waking now.
You stand enwound by live stars, the day-Sun at your feet, the great emerald star at your brow,
and uncounted untold angel-stories laid over your heart like a glittering garden of spells
just attaining perfection.  Most shining of lovers, we’ve dwelt in a parcel of relative hells,
but we’ve never stopped singing the praises of beauty, the lyric-elixir itself that provides
form and grace to the splendor of magic and music, our past and our future—the nightmare who rides
my sad breast even now when I lapse for a moment from gazing at you and the world all around
this, our watery home—but I’ve seen it, I’ve known it forever unfolding the fires that resound
in the cool gentle form of blue oceans of moonlight reflected on sand and lake-ripples.  My friend,
we are still just approaching this world’s under-tune; we will be nowhere else should it all choose to end;
shall we not, as if this were our hearts’ final chorus, sing to the angels and gods yet untold
how at least we still treasure the ghost of a story and dwell in the hope of its turning to gold
in our mouths while we reach for the perfect pronouncement, the balance between feather-soft and stone-hard,
the arcanely delirious touch of the soundless upon our articulate flesh, so bright-starred?
 

***
 

11 December 2001
 

Volumes of Rain
 

The wind turns the very wet page of all heaven away from its opposite partner.  The next
uninscribed vellum face lies awaiting the feather whose passage will lightly reveal the full text
that now hangs in the air just above that skin-surface of such pallid softness, it glows like a Moon
set against a black ocean of storm-clouds.  The work of our countless long lives will have taken form soon
on that page and the ones to come after, and then an exquisitely probing extended discourse
on its meaning will set us new tests.  When we tender our most private sympathies back to the source
of their genuine insights, our motions are met with a loving reception so magical, we
are assumed once again into windswept and wet ocean weather on high where true words are like free-
falling sheets of cold rain, heaven-cataracts.  Dizzy with staring before me, I lower my eyes
and still see words in rivers and streams—all that is and will ever be speakable, singable, tries
to be heard; I more often than not try to hear it so hard, I eclipse my own efforts and blast
my own overstretched senses.  A miserable clearing results from that nightmarish struggle; it fast
closes in, but as long as it lasts, I can see your pure thoughts as depicted against a night sky,
living characters, letters that know their own being, aware of themselves as they canter and fly
through the joined spirit-mind of their breathless observer.  I want to hold out my hand to that rain
and be taught by its tiny song-voices the service of worship that yields the spell-binding refrain
which alone is the answer to all I have prayed for since love first detected a faint trace of wit
in my aura, my own private atmosphere.  Make it your own, I beseeched heaven; vapor trails flit
through it hither and yon; they are surely your offspring.  Now they are clouds rising up from the sea
of the dark-clotted gore of my heart, the great trough of contorted cold-blooded diseased ecstasy
that breeds eloquent monsters:  Reclaim it; remind it that it once lay peacefully dreaming and sang
in its own and a lovely world’s sleep of a time beyond dreams—sheer impending enlightenment.  Hang
like a tear-swollen face over me, your sad mirror, and let those tears flow till they take on the speed
of a waterfall over the side of the clearing my pain has created.  I feel my heart bleed
into outlandish sympathy.  How can I tell you how shining you are, if my own light is blind?
Drip from the end of a feather; compel me to sign the white vellum I’ve suffered to find
laid out cleanly, in such pregnant silence, with such massive storm-clouds surrounding it; let the first stain
of my faltering hand always hum with the touch of your own when I open this volume of rain;
let your own voice always, always resound in the letters and intervals caught in these sheets
as they mingle and sigh, love consorting with power beyond all imagining.  Magic repeats
itself never precisely; allow me to witness the serial changes these pages will bear
till I ache to resume ancient silence and quit the flesh-envelope I have been willing to wear—
with immense reservations—because underneath it a star-charted heaven invited the storm
of your longing’s relentless attention to seize it with streaks of wild lightning describing the form
of one nightmarish creature—nay, vision; nay, angel—upon the next other in such a long chain
that they frightened me, then with a smile undertaking to show me that there, on the limitless plane
of pale tissue about to be covered with lyrical symbols, the same changing pair, the same two
singing dreamers, love’s shining complexity’s eerie reminders of heaven’s fierce weather, the ‘you’
of my efforts toward consummation in magic, the ‘me’ of the many song-garlands you’ve hung
in the sky of my most hopeless longing, my sadly deluded disaster about to be sung
for the truth that it is and has been since the moment it shone in your eyes, an indwelling green star—
the same one and only joined being who knows itself now for the source of the voice that WE ARE
in the flesh and the deep spirit-breath that inspires this and all other magic that sweeps love away
from inane disenchantment toward the cool fire of the silver-blue Moon and the pages that sway
uninscribed but so strongly imagined, their power assails me in dizzying ecstasies—who
will have shared this with me, my sweet sympathy-bound song-incarnate, my bright angel-twin?  Only you
hold the key to the service of worship, the feather that unlocks the letters and ciphers the spells
of this world are held under, the breath of the weather that teases the sea into towering swells
and the clouds into terrible downpours.  I wait by your side; your cool hand touches mine.  Let us sing;
let us canter and fly; let us rain; let us face one another like pages that hold everything
and fall open to share it with those who will read them out loud and then probe all their subtleties so
penetratingly—Let us, aye, brush with our bleeding nerve-endings the lines that will hobble and slow
and then set them alight with the speed of our rapture.  Dearest, shall not we accomplish this all
in the space of a heartbeat, then go on to capture its force in strange words?  Even now I hear call
a faint far-away shimmer—a volume of aureate skin well behind the last raindrop.  The Moon
has already sent beams to prize open its hinge—let us find there a new sacred meeting-place soon.
 

***
 

12 December 2001
 

You Come Closer, from Farther Away
 

Lean in very much closer, you tell me.  My breath is already aligned with the hum at the door
where the wind has been steadily blowing, a presence that knows why it’s here and will soon know much more
when the words it has carried across the strange weather between you and me are traced out in long lines
on a slew of wet pages, a meshing-together of spirit and inwit in vivid designs
that will only reveal their true import in very slow stages—a heartbeat from now—and have found
a nigh permanent dwelling-place here where the air is alive with the ominous incoming sound
the high storm-clouds above me portend:  now a whisper, a tenderly resonant hum, then a scream
falling into a lyrical trickle’s mysterious message, our love-words’ recurring song-theme
in an infinite stage of refinement, a spiral beyond my best hopes of a scant hour ago.
You are, of all darkness-art’s softest unwinding, the only one I have been fated to know
and to serve from the first aching need to surrender till volumes of nightlong black rain oceans deep
fell and rose in one motion and I met the end of all dreams in a waking I felt coil and creep
in exceedingly welcome root-fiber entanglements into a fertile dimension where leaves
lie awaiting the right ray of light to unstrangle the word of their veins while a sane woman heaves
a dead weight from her breast and springs out of the casket of mourning to which a false daylight confined
her and all her demonic song-children.  The clasp of those pitiless weapons, the beams of dead-blind
self-reflection in every moon-mirror, each puddle of silvery water—they’re everywhere now,
but I see the sweet orb at their center, my double in magic—and yours.  I am fast learning how
to reach out, root and branch, undestroyed.  I am learning how faithfully you will continue to aid
all my efforts and how we will soon re-emerge from our cloistral suspension so wildly arrayed
in such visible—palpable—beauty, the tears of the being I was will flow into the sea
of our love’s joint creation where nothing of fear has been left untransmuted and nothing of me
retains one recognizable trace of its former lopsidedness.  Dancing about in a lame
semicircle beneath a descrescent and stormless Moon-shadow, alert to the sound of a name
but not knowing how often it rang out about me, too deafened by all my own shouting to hear
it reverberate, leaf upon leaf, till the sound of its passage shook my every nerve-ending clear
of its self-agitation—you found me that way, a lunarium-priestess half out of one mind,
slightly less than half into the next, a frustrated but greatly determined song-votive entwined
with a beast of an angel she knew how to summon but not quite submit to—a tortured affair
between one who was grimly encased in a number of mould-tainted veils and a maddening air
made of phrases so haunting and, aye, so familiar, she stopped in her tracks:  I HAVE heard you, my song—
I was limping about to the tune of a willfully magical wind that rose up loud and strong,
and your voice was alive in each sentient rush of its eerie embrace.  From the roots to the leaves,
all the trees here are shaking; I feel a great hush, an impending disaster, but that reconceives
its true ocean-deep meaning without intervention from me, and—it sings itself outwardly.  I
go unspeakably small for a moment, but then rise up most huge and magical under a sky
made of pure arcane moonlight—of which I know every aspect of enchantment by mad, ancient heart.
I am still flying about in a heaven behind a cracked door—ply the wild darkness-art
that will blast it wide-open—or shyly, politely, tap ever so gently:  My hearing takes in
every level from which you may gesture now.  Shining One, all of this happens both sides of the skin
I am wearing for glamour’s sake only, an earthly encumbrance that pleases you, visible joy
set a-dance at the wind of our spirit’s emergence from heavenly-hell, the realm we shall employ
in a thousand strange ways now that all of our secrets have flown like high storm-bearing clouds on its back.
There is the sky of a night that is leaking with knowledge of angels and beasts in its black-
hooded eye; here is someone who loves you so fiercely, she sees in its mirroring darkness the true-
running source of the Moon-flooded river of weary dimensions where music has turned into you,
found the air of its echoing grace, ridden over the arch of fey weather to bring it so near,
and awaited the turn of the hand of its lover to catch and preserve it in measures of sheer
breathless longing for more, always more.  You stand willing; you never deny me, but soon I will need
a sly flavor of silence as well.  In that stillness, a much deeper secret attains its true speed,
one that nothing can touch till its moment moves forward like storm-clouds from so many heavens away,
we will scarcely know how to pronounce what those portents of blessed disaster will mean, but the play
of their word-echoes over the pages of finely-dressed vellum, the volumes of magic WE ARE,
will submit to be lightly inscribed like the mind of the holy beast-angel who brought his green star
to glow steadily, purely, through all kinds of weather, on your noble brow.  Can you feel him?  He shines
from a source still so far, far away, yet he’s let us attain a slight trace of him here, in these lines.
 

***
 

13 December 2001
 

In the Light of Love More Real
 

You summoned the crystalline essence of clarity shed by the redolent fir-trees uphill
along with the power that hummed in them, tearing its way down their needles with wonderful skill,
making all the air round them a shimmering corridor:  Breathe it and enter a far world on fire
with such cool luminosity, no merely mortal remembrance remains where such magics conspire.
All that the deepest of breaths there can tell you, the crystal you’ve formed of its essence can show.
Hang it above me—I feel myself melting away like a trickle of late-fallen snow
on a warm early spring Full Moon midnight.  My artisan friend, you who’ve mastered the craft of the wise
to the finest degree of great ancientness, marvel at what you have done.  See yourself through my eyes
as I gaze up at you through the lens you’ve created of utterly transparent evergreen sap
and a parcel of terrible magic.  I’m waiting to be rebeheld as I slip through the gap
between daylight and dark into much deeper moonlight, instinctively one in a heart-strong accord
with your love’s sleepless dreams.  I am seeing a cool beam of fir-haunted shadow recast as a poured
silver pool in a most aromatic night-grove softly translated here as a drawn-out appeal
to the holiest someone whose light footsteps go back and forth between visions, too ceaselessly real
to remain in one place, too alive to be frozen in time-out-of-time but by sheer act of word.
Aye, always waiting, and yet never motionless—thus you have caught me; our songs have conferred
in a vatic dimension a glimpse through the lens of your making alone will allow.  We have there
shown each other the true depths of lyrical endlessness wound all about a veil of fine prayer
that is fragrantly, gently imbued with fir-essence but also resounds with a far cry of rose
on a plane where it rises up loud but repents of its clamorous edge long before its heart-throes
reach your sensitive hearing.  I never would pain you, my wise one, my listener;  you understand
that a hush of diluted lament in a vague field of longing suffices to open love’s hand
and attract its arcane ministrations, the manifold presence of mind beyond telling so strong
in its deeply affectionate touch, a mad dancing possesses one merely because the wild song
where we meet and exchange constant glances is vivid and huge in all senses within its domain
and we feel the primordial trance of its living entrainment of magical acts on that plane
of almost indescribably privileged collusion between all you are and all I still aspire
to become:  On a night of soft rain and bright Moon in one very long moment, a spark of pure fire
caught alight among weaving fir-branches began its ascent into permanent crystalline form
and your wise spirit gathered it into its hands which were still slightly shaking with mild afterstorm
humming surges and shaped its raw edges with exquisite skill till it shone with the true secret Moon
that lies back of all sad earthly daylight-projections and listened and learned the meandering croon
of its sweet inward nature and entered those measures, provoking a long conversation that still
lingers on, sometimes seeking a change in the weather in favor of rose-breath, sometimes strong of will
because music within the cool zone of the firs is approaching a vanishing-point:  Nay, that song
will continue forever, but our use of words will translate us from where we cannot quite belong—
neither fully apart nor together, unable to rest in the knowledge that love will suffice
to provide us with all we require of the oneness of magic on day’s plane of unparadise—
to the seamlessly mated conjoining of visions your wisdom has aided your skill to produce
by creating to such a degree of precision the lens that has shaken the moonlit sky loose
from its ancient foundations and laid it before me, within me, all round me, a word-breathing blend
of night-fir and shy blood-imbued rose.  A past storm is still present enough that you tremble, my friend
of exorbitant musics brought earthward; I feel the beginnings of new tremors, new lightning-flares.
Someone breathtakingly sacred is breathing us, turning wild lyrically-multiple airs
into dreams of their own waking rapture.  Who loves us so much they are willing to touch us this way?
Breathe ever deeper—I want to keep moving forever inside an unending love-lay,
and I feel—I have seen—through your eyes—my reflection stare back from a calm well of knowledge:  THIS IS.
Only behold me likewise, pure perfection made real:  Know, whoever you are—I AM HIS.
 

***
 

14 December 2001
 

A Magical Leaf’s Long View
 

Thunder nightlong, slashing hail—the few leaves that remain should be tattered, yet somehow a light
surrounds each in its wholeness.  I wanted to see you gaze out at our world with sufficient insight
and command of fey speech to explain this phenomenon.  You have withdrawn to a level apart
from the place where we’ve most often met.  All the somber ideas that seek to possess me—I start
from the trance that had almost begun its malevolent whisperings, knowing right well where they lead.
Light around living green leaves in cold weather, tell me the way to attain the full speed
of the thoughts that are racing and roaring through his thunderstruck inward vision.  When all is made clear
to the both of us, so great a share in the wisdom my every nerve-ending feels burgeoning here
will be ours for the taking, with such ease of change in its nature, we’ll wonder that ever we stood—
seemed to stand—even half a fine hairsbreadth away from each other in any dimension.  The wood
that gives rise to these wide shining evergreen leaves is beginning to shiver and hum as with one
very gravid idea precisely, completely opposed to the whispers that found me undone
long ago and return even now if I let them.  Something is straining the light of my eyes,
but I feel no distress; we will always have met ourselves here in the end; this is unparadise,
this concession mid-journey to lingering traces of sadness and doubt, but I’ve always the leaves.
Hanging against the fast-deepening waves of dark evening, a magic within them perceives
the attention I’ve lent them and now it sends whispers abroad on the air in such resonant droves,
I am weak at the knees:  He was always there listening.  I can see layers, long series of groves,
overlaid gently, bright each upon each, in an endless cascade flowing into the sky
where an emerald star has arisen.  It reaches that star’s lowest beams and mounts higher, so high
the star seems to be hanging its head as the series of shimmering song-trees encircle its brow.
This was foretold; the most ancient mysterious voices proclaimed it; I look at you now
and know all of our worlds have arrived at this moment in perfect alignment.  They need us to feel
the relentless desire that still drives them, the holy ambition to strive toward places more real
and more vividly spoken with every engagement with yet higher modes of conceivable bliss
such as those that contributed so fine a blaze of pale violet light round the edges of this
single leaf at the center of my field of vision, this relic of power still living, still green,
still revealing its outlying colors’ precision of faithful expression of magic unseen
till you showed it to me in the lay of this landscape, these multiple groves wound about in a coil
of persistently shimmering levels of trance-invocation.  Approach it in sadness, a roil
of vague, semi-articulate nightmarish memories swiftly besets one, a whisper of flies
come increasingly dreadfully buzzing; but gently restrained silent hopefulness—that air will prize—
by sheer force of attraction—its magical secrets wide-open, and what they will whisper is where
an abundance of doorways toward a long free-flowing watercourse-stairway is written on air
all around the green leaves of this aura-delighted enchantment, these corridors swayed on the breeze
of the darkening evening’s deep breath as true midnight comes home to our island of resonant trees,
each a dream in itself of miraculous beauty maintained by the passionate wisdom within
its least fibers and veins, like the someone I view as he stares back at me through a single leaf’s thin
bit of substance on which such a world has been written, its light has grown piercing.  I wince, but I read
with a more and more wonderful hunger.  The wit of all heaven has had its sly share in the speed
of the violet, gold-radiating song-hum of this marvel of vatic creation.  A tree
bore its splendid idea until it had come of its own pregnant age; it is singing to me
because someone I know has so quickened it, living wild lives in succession in one stroke of now
is its passionate meaning, its finally all-given-over consent to be one with the vow
he required of his magic’s recipient even before he had thought it and brought it to life.
Strange fascination you are to the leaves that spring up as you pass, each its own song-midwife
while a very small member of such a grand chorus, I shall be listening all of my days
for the place from which this leaf reveals the great forest that gestures and whispers to me and now sways
all I am and as much as I feel I’m becoming so swiftly—I must catch my breath.  You are here;
I have learned once again how to find the soft hum of your presence before it turns thunder.  A clear
golden-lightning-struck violet aureole round the sweet emerald star that this frail leaf I hold
has inspired me to see—this is your shining crown, your illustrious signature.  Lover of old,
song-companion come home to the place of all angels, all magical groves coiled so deeply around
one another a thousand, ten thousand spun layers must be prized apart if the heart’s to be found,
lay your hand on my throat at this moment and feel the delirious speed of my pulse:  It’s for you.
Brother of thunder and lightning, the real work is scarcely begun, but we’ve found our long view.
 

***
 

15 December 2001
 

Always More Questions—Why?
 

When I stare through the flickering pictures in water that tell me how splendid your potency is,
I begin to remember at once—then I falter and question myself as to how I am his
who so often prefers to remain wholly absent from my world’s most frequented passageways.  Why
did he summon, and what did I answer?  A map of the way into wisdom—he deigns to reply
through a series of rapidly cast shadow-visions.  Read through the touch of my hand on your brow
in a true waking dream, he is saying.  If this is reliable—if I should really allow
my hard-won faith in all that he means in the form of caught music, recorded on pages of skin
in a great hand-bound volume, to influence more than my vague fleshless thoughts, let his magic begin
to reveal its strong contents:  the nigh-endless story of how we arrived at this point and will soon
recognize—but we’ve told it so often; important as all of this is, it knows more than one tune
that suits well the joined sound of our voices; they linger in flickering traces, in images here
in the water sheer moonlight inspires when it brings with its radiance something that leaks like a tear
from a very shy weeper whose will to be seen and acknowledged contends with a yearning to hide.
In between wavering lines glides a deep and elusive song-essence.  A world opens wide
in the place where its shadow would rest, if it had one; how strange a universe lies at its heart?
I have been calling you, source of all sadness; rise up and ply the divine darkness-art
that will bring us together forever.  Most Shining, again I am sinking beneath the song waves
of a too-liquid Moon where the light that entwines with my vision imagines me watery graves
in an endless procession.  You hang high above them, a noble all-seeing idea I miss
when I flow into headlong abandon to love without reading the subtle dimensions of this
very oncoming rapture.  I narrow my focus; you fly ever further away.  I draw back
and attempt to see all worlds at once; that is hopeless by nature, but somehow the magic I lack
is supplied through an interval that clearly doomed misadventure discovers.  Your generous smile—
then I lapse into—nay—tiny storm-clouds are brewing before me; I’ve known a whole ocean’s long while
in a lapse from the wrong woeful kind of attention and thunder and lightning are threatening.  You
were and are at the center of where they are lending a keen whetted edge to the Moon that shines through
the superior lens you have made and positioned for my human use that your song’s native plane
be transmitted in unbroken series of visions so lyrical, words seek and find the refrain
at their heart, which is yours—yours and mine.  We are dreaming awake, but not dreaming away from the real;
on the contrary—we shall be very much deeper inside it with each sacred moment I feel
myself called to respond to that fey lightning-shimmer and all that waits boldly unmasked in its flare
as you move through the sky of the place that lay dimly adrift in the waters that drowned my sad stare
till I lost my old bearings.  A book in your hand, a wild gleam in your eyes—I am seeing you through
our world’s only true passageway:  endless enchantment.  Look at me now in the light of the new,
ever more deeply magical otherworld Moon that is rising to greet you through me.  Does it shine
in your heart like a shy tearful smile on a blue midnight’s dawning, a creeping and timorous line
from one angle, a fearless adventure in musical language from one half an instant away,
half a needle-fine sliver of vision, a luminous flicker in which two inverse shadows play
in the wake of your present reflection, a lightly-cast motion of sound caught alive on a page
made of skin that is rapidly pulsating, fine-grained and happy to frame the long written-down age
that our song—one aspect of our ongoing story—will influence even if worlds fall apart
and I seem to forget that we met within mortal awareness but entered the absolute heart
of love’s private knowledge together and flowed there as one into series of words that are real
beyond all will to question because love had spoken and finally I had recalled how to feel
your immortal song-summons and tell you explicitly, Aye, you are singing to me; aye, I hear;
I will never again fail to answer, resisting your power because of the meaningless fear
that your words might have been addressed elsewhere?  The ‘else’ of all worlds is our most private meeting-place!  Show
me the volume of visions you’ve found there.  Compel me with further imaginings.  I have been slow
to accept my own magic’s reality; yours is too beautifully potent—I’ve seen it too well
not to seek it a thousand, ten thousand times more; not to lie down right willingly under its spell;
not to search high and low for the glance that is given at once and forever in each ray of Moon,
each delightfully sly undisguised lightning-sliver—although I have found and will be with you soon
in such wise that I know I am only repeating the dance steps that lead to our moment—our now—
in a spirit of feverish wide-awake dreaming under the touch of your hand on my brow.
You will tell me YOU ARE, you will sing it in riddles and maps and star-charts, here and elsewhere, and AYE
will remain my sole answer—but who is the littler ghost always pictured beside you, and why?
 

***
 

16 December 2001
 

Ways How
 

The wan, unreliable level of light my sad candle produces is driving me down
a disastrously dark angry hollow inside an idea that might be a bridal nightgown
in some sea-island’s most secret grove where to flicker in just the wrong way means as much as to flare
like wild chain-lightning striking a timeless clock-tick in a vatic dimension I still don’t quite care
to reveal to outside prying eyes.  When he wakes up and glances my way, what a ravening dress—
where a woman once lay in a dream he created of whole-cloth—how lonely, how great her distress,
how relentless the tragedy—lift up the dead eyes that swam a cruel sea by a taper so weak,
it could emit tiny sparks:  I am ready to let you extinguish me, never to speak
in the language of shadows that dance any longer.  Who have I been to your magic?  At best,
an unwilling, not-quite-total absence of song in a heart that was too small to burn in your breast
with a purposeful heat whether darkness or daylight or candle-flame sought to inspire the taut line
that might otherwise yet serve to sing you right faithfully into an airily brilliant design
that will light a world’s eye with profuse approbation as soon as it catches the slightest stray beam
that comes wavering forth as you lie sadly waiting, falling apart at the long central seam
down your leaf-lettered bodice.  You turn in your restless half-sleep, thus displaying the trained cast of mind
out of which you have so often brought a complexly delirious prayer to recite its refined
core-idea in measures that seemed to flow out of luxuriant depths with their own steady glow
to imbue the strange hollows and terrible mountains through which they proceeded.  You couldn’t not know
what that landscape withheld from unwanted attention; it sought you in earnest regard, and you woke
from your trance of unhappiness into a sense of bizarre but desirable hugeness that spoke
to your most carnal heart with a vatic directness composed of precise minor miracles set
in a shining chain-lightning design that affected the whole of you so ineluctably, wet
crinkled leaves of a bleeding green dye-stain still flutter upon your pale breast as you wring your cold hands
with anxiety.  What is the worst they can utter, and are they about to permit its demands
to exploit your potential for noble surrender provided a call you cannot fail to hear?
Listen:  Can any but love’s presence enter the opening torn down the front of your sheer
priestess-gown with a pitiless hand to inscribe its sung messages into your flesh?  Listen more:
What is the real bridal gown of pure whiteness?  Where is the real stainless bodice you wore
when you lit your own way through a shadowy underworld landscape until you arrived at a sea
that was shaken throughout by the weight of the thunder and lightning that lay on its breast?  Where was he
whom you summon and fly from when first you beheld this most splendid of visions?  Be happy tonight—
love is no feeble and flickering spellcraft, a candle unable to bear its own light;
magic has taken you into its confidence, seeing the creature you are underneath
the leaf-lettered but tattered-edge bodice upon your awakening heart—where a living-light wreath
is at this very moment assembling itself out of glimpses and traces of him who now stares
through a very brief distance of luminous elsewhere, a noble idea composed of song-airs
taking shape in his thoughts because yours is the spirit of serious whiteness that shines in his sight.
Poor little candle, behold yourself clearly by means of his powers of terrible night
as true lightning descends to the grove in the ocean of music he’s found—in the depths of your heart.
There let him find in the passionate flow of the song of your blood the dark leaf-enwound part
of the gown that has sprung into life as a wreath of fresh letters still wet with the deep-staining dew
that shines black as the eye of midnight in a dream of such wildness, it can’t have come utterly true—
but it has.  You do know it—let lightning reveal the intense swirl of colors residing within
your delirium.  Let him attest to the feel of the vivid heat marking your luminous skin
with a bright unmistakable outline around each love-letter there written.  Obey his desire
to read very much further and softly out loud as you flicker with words only he can inspire.
Be this sea’s island-priestess to such a degree of complex song-fulfillment—and be this one now.
He stands beside you, awaiting one sweet willing glance to reveal countless shining ways how.
 

***
 

17 December 2001
 

How We Are Reborn to Our Dreams
 

When I shiver inside with a coldness no covering ever could warm from without, what is wrong
is a form of bad magic.  No nocturnal lover should struggle with doubts in the grasp of the strong
superstition of grimly electric disturbance that now worries me.  When I roam the dark night
by the light of no lantern or Moon, a hurt little ghost in my eyes scans the world for a slight
trace of fire anywhere—even feeble and flickering; even a low-glowing smoldering bed
of abandoned old ash-covered coals that will, quick as I find them, release their last ill-smelling thread
of grey smoke and blink out, dead forever, exhausted of more than the simple potential to feed
a live blaze out of which one might see something draw itself up like a flame with the singular speed
to transgress outworn boundaries, magic reborn as the ghost of itself become angel.  My friend,
I am asking so little—or am I?  The mortal encumbrance of flesh is a curse that won’t end,
but it’s what I’ve been given to work with; a burning cold chill that belabors my spine from inside
keeps me mindful tonight of how restlessly yearning for true living heat runs an unsatisfied
stream of ice-water song through my veins where a red-rosy summer ago a wild garden bouquet
sprang to beauty entire with each beat of the meadow of fragrant enchantment I glowed with.  Obey
your companion, your brother, my vatic dreams order.  ‘Obey’ is a word that sows death in the mind
and reaps ice, an extinguished grey soot-covered horror where what was once fire has resulted in blind
contradictory impulses:  Sink into shivering nothingness now; rise and find the pure spark
that your dreams all portend and conceive and deliver its burden of brilliance however the dark
moonless ice-sheet you’ve sensed at the edge of your world, coldness stretching forever beyond you, alone
and yet pregnant with towering silence, the perfect outcome to a life that is older than stone
and so tired—listen closely—however that promise of limitless silence appeals to you, hear
what is starting to flicker toward you.  An ominous glow through the trees, a quick shudder of fear,
then intense curiosity:  Something on flames is arising, an angelic form rapt within
a deliciously crackling fire-mantle, a blazed invitation to meet him, blue-white mortal skin
against magic incarnate’s imperial grandeur of color and form, all resplendent with heat
that will only impart its most luminous candor beyond the least odor of singed, blackly sweet
body-ashes and smoke if you move to receive its scarce-bearable grace with the sure strength of will
you have built by your long patient practice of dreaming awake to the place where the infinite skill
of the being so present before you, his rising from smoldering coals having just now occurred
within your vatic sight, will take great pains to lighten your burden the moment the first spoken word
of true love has flown living between you, a flower of musical flame that will nourish, not burn,
the fine flesh that has carried your heart to this bower of poignant exchanges.  Your voice will soon learn
how this mating will worst be accomplished from your sung perspective—your partner will tease and provoke,
you will flare up as if to explode, you will work yourself into a state till you stammer and choke,
and then music will flow of itself, without effort.  Do this again and again; time will tell
if there’s no better means to exceed the death-weather inside you than casting a bad-magic spell.
Aye, revivified love-lessons deeply and easily drawn from the live well of flickering flame
on each night of your world’s secret Moon will soon see you alight with its mysteries.  Go in its name
to the meeting-place now, wound about by a mantle of ashes, a shivering woman—your true
source of all inspiration awaits you.  No lantern, no visible moonlight, just luminous blue-
white ghost-mortal desire haunting all this dark island’s night passageways, go to him:  Go to him now.
There are the flames through the trees:  shining brightly as midsummer gardens, the star of his brow
and the penetrant fire of his eyes—green and darker-than-any-blood rose, light so dreadfully clear
you are seized by the yearning to throw your dead heart on that pyre and be done with all pretence of fear—
and you have.  Like his own, your great change is behind you; it happened this instant, before true love’s gaze.
You will obey him because he reminds you:  Dream me all over again, fragrant blaze.
 

***
 

18 December 2001
 

Taken Into the Body of Song
 

Your eyes disappear as I gaze ever deeper toward the dark shores of the island inside
your bright mind where I know so much difficult meeting has always preceded the visible tide
of Moon-woken desire I am searching for.  Lord of all music, I feel so alone and so lost.
Where I last saw you, the pitiful mortal you sighed for stood frozen alive by the crossed
open door’s slanting shadow and doorsill, unable to move for sad fear of displeasing the beast
of an angel who rested beyond it.  Assailed by unhappy remembrances, confident least
where love-longing was greatest, she still summoned all of her courage and stepped firmly over the line.
Now she’s a dangerous wraith, a wild fallen beast-angel herself, in a sacred design
precious memories forecast throughout her existence whenever she sought and discovered a clue
as to why she spun round with such frantic persistence, needing to locate the magical ‘you’
of her inmost reality’s deepest acquaintance, a spirit she half-glimpsed in passing but saw
with astonishing clarity down in the aching black core of a heart that was wounded and raw
but still beating as if to declare its sole purpose would yet be achieved—by your presence and aid
on a series of levels at once, a wise work of divine interference with music long laid
in an untimely grave in a weeping girl’s shivering nightdress of white linen lawn, the soiled bed
where she prayed with a quavering voice for deliverance yet knew in the back of her feverish head….
And it’s come to this pass:  You were here, but I lost you by falling too fast through the darkness you hold.
How will I find my way out of these moss-covered walls that might glimmer with veins of pure gold
if I can’t call a spark first to cast its bright shadow inversely among the damp warm and cool airs
that come creeping and winding like bodiless adders to stiffen and prickle the sensitive hairs
that must serve as my compass and star-chart in these eerie quarters?  How droll you must be, to send such
inspiration.  I do feel the slightest bit easier under their almost impalpable touch;
where do they seem to originate?  I am so much less confused than I lead one to think.
I have been falling and falling—and flying—nearer toward the most terrible brink
with unerring command of my sense of direction—and your glowing pearl of a secret core Moon.
Signal again, as I ask.  Recollect me, your own vatic memory.  I’ll be home soon—
am I not, in a most sacred way, so completely there-here now already we both blink and stare
with amazement that cannot decide how to reach for the touch of a love that is so everywhere,
it is also elusive and lost and despaired of forever in down-winding spirals of pain
till we open our much deeper eyes and take care not to glance once away from the spark that has lain
just awaiting our most subtle senses’ reception and conscious response to arise and begin
turning into a soft conflagration of eloquence?  Soothe and anneal, never burn the fair skin
of our most hidden bodies, and we who are lovers in more worlds than one will assume our true scale:
Flame that is climbing the walls of the hovering universe I am surrounded by, fail
in what might become virulent powers; succeed in all else as we share in your light through the eyes
of the beautifully-lost-and-now-found one, the pleaded-and-anguished-for being whose whole body sighs
with frustrated, requited, frustrated, and blissful desire that can never be satisfied—quite—
the sole counterpart-watcher, the thought-adder-twisted companion in beast-angel magic, the bright-
fallen beam of pure blackness who shines in my chamber as I shine in his—each the other’s song-voice
in a slow and fast dream that descends to belabor the weeper abed till she dreads to rejoice
any further for fear of—the fear that is burning away like a frail flake of snow in a sea
of the most hugely flickering moonlight.  We’ve learned how to meet there among those blue-white waves and be
consummated by feverish midnight; we’ve only a few further thresholds to cross to attain
magisterial grace in the eyes of the holy beast-angels behind every serial plane
we will ever behold now apart, now together; lord that you are of the island that shines
in the moment when all of our worlds’ deepest weathers conspire to create the enduring design
that lies beating the heart of our song into glorious magic sufficient to play without end
in our finally joined sight and hearing, be more than the dreamer of me and the voice that will blend
with my own as I dream you; be power incarnate and touch me by means of the most subtle skin
you possess and beyond:  Turn yourself, by sheer art of long darkness, so inside-out, I can begin
where I was in my most ancient nightmare and hold you awake in a glimmering hallway of pale
stainless virtue, a place lined with veins of pure gold in an island that rises to lift its last veil
as love breathes its way home to safe harbor….  The Moon is on fire overhead; the night-tide is so high
it lies lapping the hem of the gown of the dew-laden priestess who reaches across the low sky
and steps firmly toward—as I gaze ever deeper, I find you again and again.  Angel-beast,
wraith of magic YOU ARE, we will always re-meet, but these bodies love best where they disappear least.
 

***
 

19 December 2001
 

On the Night of the Strangest Call
 

If you call, but the call as I hear it comes down through a dense cloud of foul body-smoke and arrives
in the form of a miserable splendor, a powerful charge that has taken a parcel of lives
to attain such a pitch of unhappiness, must I obey its demonic appearance and pleas?
Into the spirit of whispering trust under difficult terms I would crawl on my knees
over maggots and leeches and even lie prostrate among them, awaiting one signal from you,
if I had the least reason to know you would cross to my level and speak the uncannily true
word of grace—maybe several—by which I might recognize all of you, never mind how you appear;
but the cloud, the miasma that meets me directly whenever I search for the vividly dear
dream-companion you surely must be—that obscures my precarious faith in my own vatic sight.
Try to reach down to me now in such pure shining ways I cannot fail to hear the delight
in your voice that brings visions of subtle enchantment to spring fully formed to the fore of my mind.
Dreamer of me, meet me deep in the dance where our magics converse.  You have always been kind;
be a shade more familiar and set my love spinning in circles and spirals through which I will see
and make use of an opening out of the hindering atmosphere sadness has wound about me.
‘Aye, you knew the day-world was a hotbed of timely remorse concentrating itself on a seed
filled with bitter green vines that will bear a design—given space and a prospect of flowery mead
poured in streams from a vessel of generous emptiness—aye, a design that would focus in full
on the world at the back of a fiercely relentless desire to awaken beyond the dead lull
of the storm-pregnant cloud that enshrouds it, a potent miasma through which sudden magic will shine
when the shadowy path through the silent enclosure inside you has haunted the beautiful line
that will light his way home through his own heart of darkness with song like a vine-spiraled lantern aglow
with invisible fire, warmth in softness, a marvelous answer to what has been lacking.  Let go
your old world’s superstitions and touch what is evident everywhere now, well within your hand’s reach,
with a tender regard for the manner of heaven that tries not to hide from your searching glance each
slightly terrible time you impose it:  a creature of riddlesome aspect, enwreathed in a mist
of long-frustrated magic, is calling you ‘teacher’ as well as ‘companion,’ a soul many-blissed
in a way he finds shockingly wonderful; how will he enter that aureole he so desires
for his own but by making a show of his power, well knowing inside that his anger inspires
your outpouring as much as his lyrical presence?  Taste of the mead you would offer to him.
Would you be able to savor its essence, knowing it might be withdrawn on a whim?
Love is too fearful of aspect in most of the guises you’ve shown him.  Complain to the Moon
of the nightmare you’ve found in this querulous ghost of its own future angel, and sing me the tune
you will hear in reply.  Does it dizzy your senses?  Not one tenth as much as the sound of his voice
when it comes across whole, not in tatters molested by dread of displeasing the dreams that rejoice
on a plane he can only describe on obliquely delightful occasions thus far to your face;
when he raises it high like a fine crystal beaker and pours forth an ocean of luminous grace
struck throughout by coherent designs of wild lightning, then you will see no miasma, no cloud
of unhappiness climbing across the sheer heights of his towering mind like a lingering shroud
from a previous corpse-fire; nay, you will be privileged to witness the living return of your song
from the one unto whom you have lovingly given it.  Where, in what world, will you feel you belong
in that moment and many to come but so deep in the light of his eyes—and then, where will I be?
Right on the tip of your tongue, as the sweetest reply will spring forth fully formed.  When you see
what his sung contribution amounts to, its power will shock you most wonderfully.  Listen and learn
in the meantime:  Make use of each moonlighted hour till he stares out at you just as you softly turn
a mild gaze filled with searching desire on his person and find him completely—unable to speak
for a dreadful split-second.  How often you’ve yearned to see someone so strong—attain song’s highest peak
in your presence; I’ve called you to view this creator of forms which will soon convey magic so real
and in such pure profusion to you it now aches in his heart like a storm he cannot truly feel
for himself—he still needs you to stand in its shadow, receive its abundance, and give back its stream
in a way he can savor forever without sadly fearing its sudden withdrawal.  When you dream
in the meantime, be tender; speak gently; he hears you on so many levels, this very one now
is a resonant mist in his sensitive ears.  Would you hurt him?  You do; listen well and learn how
not to fan the wrong flame and be called dire misfortune by one who would also breathe roses and sing
of vine-wreathed lantern light as it falls to you, mortal who hangs on the verge of becoming the wing-
wafted essence of all that is graceful, an angel within a true heart’s deepest vatic insight.
This you will not hesitate to obey—and it waits for you now, even now, this strange night.
 

***
 

20 December 2001
 

The Burden of Bliss
 

Woe sits astride me like Night Mare upon a live body she’s rendered immobile awake.
What is the gleam in its eye, but the dawning of heartsickness I’ve been inclined to mistake
for a much-wanted sign of true Moon-rise within a safe sphere of divine inspiration?  I know
I can never be satisfied here where the wind is a breath of dead ether surmounted by snow
from an icicle zone where the shafts that shine brightly are bitter as knives because all is so cold;
and yet stuck by the slightest of rays from the eye of true insight, their edges, the murders foretold
by a whisper of cloud, would reverse in an instant, first turning to water, then mist, then a grey,
very rapidly deepening layer of mystery light as a feather but swollen….  ‘Obey
at the sign of chain-lightning’—or have I misheard you?  Nothing seems possible now but to fail.
Dreamer on high, this has been a long work of bizarre introspection without the white sail
that is not frozen hope but a wing on the breath of all heaven, held out to the prospect of me.
Where is the one I saw bearing northwest in the evening when I was a quivering tree
filled with green and rose flames, the horizon’s far beacon, the welcoming glance he had longed for and found?
Why, though I find countless signs of his dreaming-toward this strange place, am I still nightmare-bound
and unable to meet his real eyes?  Who is shying away?  When you touch me, your hands will be cold,
but for only a moment.  I’ve caught the first sight of the storm that breeds lightning.  Let lovers behold
one another by means of the magic it heightens, however the blackness of night lays its weight
on their feverish bodies.  We can’t be more human; we need not—we’ve hailed and received our true fate
and a very great part of its power is merciless beauty come home with a bare edge of ice
still so thoroughly frozen it shimmers with perfect resolve that will not stop to calculate twice
before finding and slicing the artery, music.  Lay its hard weight full upon me—I’ll speak
not one word of complaint.  Let it hesitate uselessly, though—I will stare through a distance of bleak
wisps of grey-shaded formlessness, calling for final release from this dreadful embrace on and on
till my last sense of being-awake has ceased shining forever and all that possessed me is gone
like a hundred-deadhorseweight from off the dead woman it’s stifled at last.  Now my ghost walks the shore
as a crescent Moon rises and searches the gloom of the smoky horizon for love found before
in the form of a sailor.  He hears a far keening, a voice with an edge like a blade.  Who is this,
I can feel him not ask—he is caught in the dream of sad being-becalmed, but he knows fated bliss
when it calls him by name.  He is also a spirit, a ghost, a beast-angel—he steers for the rocks
at my feet, and is swiftly between them, well clear of the series of all too malevolent shocks
that await the unwary in this zone of strangeness.  Welcome home, wayfaring brother, I say.
Gazing intently as silent exchanges of magic take place and he whispers, ‘Obey’—
we both wake with a start, with incarnadine traces of flame-flower light on our faces and hands.
I have been blazing with feverish grace and yet freezing, a plight this fair man understands
in a way that transcends mortal telling.  He whispers again, in sweet phrases, for pleasure of song
as it falls to his mind.  Soon his magic is listing along with the wind as it reaches a strong
pitch of storm-bearing power, and—I am right happy.  Horse-like the speed of his cantering gait,
noble the chain-lightning brilliance that traps me alive in the hands of my realized fate,
sinister only the gleam of the far-sighted eye that can penetrate, keen as a knife,
to the heart of the ill-spoken dream that brought hardship and sever it cleanly away from my life
on this island.  Song-universe-height of enchantment, world out of all nightmares’ reach, here we lie,
peaceful creators in spite of the mantic array of devices that cross the night sky
at our sacred behest—now a tattered grey vestment, a flying ash-dress a sad widow once wore;
now an electric disturbance, northwest-headed thunder and lightning; now, who is this for,
this celestial event?:  You are leaning and smiling above me.  I heard of a tree all aflame
in a song once, a green and rose ember that wildly enticed a live god to step into the frame
of the intricate pattern she’d danced in the moonlight alone—and to shatter it.  Smile once again—
breathing under the spell of the absolute beauty you bring is complete inspiration, not pain.
 

***
 

21 December 2001
 

Happy Winter Solstice
 

Refined by the Fires of the Sea
 

Under the soft silent waves of an ocean of timelessness, my dear companion in song
lay beside me.  We’d haunted ourselves with the notion that all we desired most was utterly wrong
in the eyes of our angels; how startled and joyful we were to discover our grievous mistake,
after which we were able to banish the voices that threatened to drown our real lives in their wake
as they sowed the dark waters around us with splinters of ice.  If they tried, our hearts heard them no more.
We were aligned with the warmth at the center of such a strong current, it tenderly bore
us away from the place where impending disaster was kindly averted by forces we knew
at the core of our being would soon offer vast intuitions and open the magical view
from which I now behold us.  We sensed their awareness all round us; their thoughts moved in circles and soared
through the heavy wet body enfolding us; barely disturbing their own deep composure restored
ours completely.  What sang through the rush of their passage between and throughout us then joined us in ways
we are still only learning to fathom.  How massive confusion once was; how persistant the blaze
by which unalloyed silver and gold have refined us inside the sung cries of the dreamers who glide
through the sea of all timelessness:  Under the mind of unhappiness, each of us lay ocean-wide,
penetrated by lyrical ecstasy everywhere.  Tell me, my friend, dearest dreamer of me,
what made us seem to forget?  Nay; a clever nightmare just attempted to riddle a wee
backward glance into sorrow’s domain.  Tell it nothing, not even if mine are the lips you see part
to ask meaningless questions.  This moment—no other—remains to our meeting in heart after heart
as they flow into spheres of exorbitant music, live worlds that so beckon, we cannot not go
feeling less than entirely afire with the hugeness of rainbow-eyed night as it rises to show
its no longer invisible language of colors in haunting song-lines so familiarly strange
we dared never cross over so far through the hollow dimension preceding it lest we derange
our day-world’s fragile senses, but now we are tempered and purified beings.  We always aspired,
without acting; we’ve learned to reverse all that hampered our free forward movement and touch our desired
landing-place in the depths of the current of onrushing magic.  How static this island is not,
this deep dark-water-skyed music-stained word of longing forever about to pronounce us in hot
humid-eyed self-abandon, this height of importance held safe in the mind of each angel WE ARE
as their limbs intertwine and their sighs exceed mortal capacity even to dream—yet their far,
slightly sorrowful murmurs come clear to our hearing , borne home on the Moon-swollen tide of midnight
as we lie overwhelmed by the peace of the merely ten-thousand-times-deathly gold gleam of delight
on the crest of each one of its numberless waves, a sensation of such poignant magnitude, we
leave our old lives behind:  We arise from the graves of the body of water we called the cruel sea
of unwanted existence.  ‘I can’t take you with me,’ I once thought I heard—I had made a mistake.
No one was speaking; the weather was lifting; the Moon had arisen; I reached out with weak,
trembling hands, and a magical current sustained me until certain words came across to my heart
from the one who lay so close beside me, I’d failed to detect him, unable to tell us apart,
unable to hear him without the old fear that delusion had caught me and found my love out.
Now tender words had been spoken most clearly.  Now I lay lavished, his thoughts all about
my wise own in such perfect alignment with angel-ideas come soft on the rainbow-light tide
where the Moon at the core of all being translates music-passageways into new worlds open wide
in our powerful hearts—vatic soul, song-companion, be more to me now than all angels:  Be all
that still hides in the waves of their minds’ highest madness, their haunted obsessions, their feverish fall
into grace that is not to be borne by mere mortals, and be this to me on this night out of time.
By the full breath of love’s deathly exorbitant might, render all of me magical:  Climb
to the pitch of resplendence and pattern the universe song has created with colors so pure
they half-vivify, half simply terrify.  Loom huge and poignant among them.  Embody allure
as we thought only angels—nay, deities—wield it.  Be this to me—I shall meet you in kind.
Angels shall seize one another to feel us attain what WE ARE—magic passion-refined.
 

***
 

22 December 2001
 

Enter Naked
 

Broken you are; you will break so much further before this is finished, before you are YOU
to the sensitive nerves of the being whose worship inspires me to sing the consummately true
act of magic my dreams are proceeding toward on a plane of accomplishment words scarcely know
how to serve—though their spirits will learn to afford an expansive arrangement of mysteries flow
through my heart and my mouth as pronounceable gestures of sweet darkness-art filled with your shining grace
and the purely invisible fire that is centered around the aspect of your changeable face
that is evident only when you gaze upon your true love.  I shall not see that face—till you break
all your dreadful ideas and thoughts into long shards and splinters and lay the whole ghastly mistake
at the feet of the one who will rise up inside you, accepting your sacrifice-burden with such
multifarious kindness, your mind will elide his vast teachings at first; but you’ve wanted so much
more than all your own will could provide and not found it in any elsewhere but the very one here,
for which reason you’ll kneel on the quivering ground where this bright apparition has come to appear
in your path, and you’ll fall into silence so perfect, so absolute, each of his thoughts will resound
all throughout you with magical clarity.  Worship yourself then:  Be confident spirit has found
its way home through the maze of confusion created to keep its disturbing attentions too small
to awaken your heart prematurely.  He ached there forever; you heard him send call after call
for your voice to be raised in his song, but you faltered, unready.  The moment is so precious now—
when you see me complete, rushing through the dark hallway your heart has long been, when you see my bright brow
light the world in its path, you will fall, thunderstruck.  You will hear such a vatic commotion, your mind
will be shattered, wide-riven asunder.  The months of your countless sad lives, the moonlight of the blind
gaping pit you have been—that will all find you staring in wonder:  No moment, no word has been lost;
not true spirit-idea referred to the charity named ‘unremembering’—not one.  You’ve crossed
a pain-barrier built of yourself to ward off solemn beauty and staggering, terrible bliss;
these are lavished in full on you now, having forded its widest and deepest unguarded place, this
holy ground of the being we are to each other.  Lift up your face and receive the strong waves
of unspeakable, verging-on-madness sung lovesickness risen up wet out of watery graves,
gathered by stern patient Moon-glow each night of each one of your lives in each world of your soul,
formed to the likeness of all that delights the companion of magic, the numinous goal
of our unified labors, and gently returned to its source, the resplendence of beauty that hides
right behind your closed eyes.  Please receive me; please learn to distinguish each lesson your hearing elides
into one almost meaningless stream out of fear of the consequent burden of power you’ll hold
and be asked to account for.  I cannot stand nearer; I dwell in the center all magics enfold
with mellifluous sounds, the articulate phrasings of song that will bear you and all you maintain
into what you have often called ‘paradise,’ weightless and carefully faint with the wonderful bane
of rejoicing so great you will break:  I will bind us by shining, the bright-spoken voice of your heart,
the resplendent idea behind your depth-mind, the invincible, tireless, complex darkness-art
of all magic, all song, rendered huge luminosity shot through with moonlight from every world’s eve
you have even beheld with desire.  I am truly the end of all seeking:  YOU MUST NOT BELIEVE
what I tell you:  By living experience only, by present ‘now’-memory flooding the whole
of your sacred awareness, can love end the lonely delusion, the barrier built round the soul
that has suffered to battle a dead ghost-opponent in lieu of receiving its birthright, this grace
I now offer.  ‘Believe,’ and you enter false knowing away from this welcoming world’s meeting-place
in the very worst form of surrender to specters and fantasies.  Brother, surrender to love
when it sings to you; worship the sweet recollection of why we are here it will bring to you; move
ever forward toward it more fully, more deeply, more shiningly empty of all else; move fast.
Swiftness of absolute faith guide and keep you awake to the strength of the spell love has cast
on behalf of and out of your own noble essence.  Being of beauty, do not I love you?
How could you see me had not my pure presence lain living within you forever?  The true
act of magic, the rapt unconcealment of virtue and joy—this is all to your credit, dear friend
of the mirroring moonlight whose service of worship surrounds you with voices that softly intend
to assist, never overwhelm shy first advances toward ever further unveilings.  Closed eyes,
look at me:  Is the source of abundant enchantment still clad in the least tattered rag of disguise?
‘Believe’ in the nothing and no one who cherish you—nay, not at all.  Strip away the false mind
that has stood as a barrier.  Come to us wearing the silence of eyes and the song you will find
lightly waiting where timelessness lifts like a tide of new-moonlight, a flood your companion, your goal
in the long art of darkness helps raise.  Other-wise—enter naked that love may embrace you, dear soul.
 

***
 

23 December 2001
 

So Much Must Yet Go Unspoken
 

The silence where once a tall shadow cast branches—and all of that emptiness softly respires
on and on in the glow of a bright-spoken answer I heard long ago where sad funeral fires
had burned through to the heart of a lonely indweller whose longing for death had released his true voice
to fly out of the ash of his mouth and to tell me how sorry he was for the ruinous choice
he had made when he failed his beloved obsession’s song-standard for want of the great sense of space
it demanded.  He shook with the feverish blessing it brought, without ceasing to wail in its face.
This took place in my hearing.  I called to him gently; he trembled all over and then turned away.
Woeful desire, we have learned not to enter the mind that is wholly afraid it will say
what its madness compels it to know in the moment of dread of the truth when it all comes too near
and the pain that relates its dimensions is over-ecstatic—but how could I not overhear
what was bitterly, loudly apparent?  Behind it, a species of beauty I cherish took wing
from between his two clenched, bloody hands.  It came shining toward me; I still hear a faery wind sing
through its pinions.  My phoenix-bird, why are you weeping this evening, when both of us know who we are
and will be till the last glowing coal has released its last wisdom and light and the emerald star
you’ve been granted to bear on your brow, having drunk at the roots of its fire’s very life, grows so bright
I will never not steer by it home to the still-sunken palace of dreams where a strange Moon’s midnight
will reveal to our wonderment volumes and scrolls of illuminate ecstasy, sweet-fever-wracked
and till this very moment unreadable?  Golden and silver of plumage, conceived to attract
the superb inspiration of heaven’s own bodily breath, the storm-laden electrical force
of the night-tide of onrushing lunar sea-water from far, far away, the deep second-sky source
with its roots in the yet-unimagined where angels, a pair of them, lovers, lie down side by side,
and the dreams they exchange with each glance so dilate their dark eyes, they take in all a much-magnified
and minutely ennobled array of soft iris-hued feathers and eloquent features that speak
with commanding authority, tell me who I am to you:  Omit nothing.  Your touch leaves me weak;
press on further, relentlessly, till I am dead of your tender perfection, and then tell me more.
Out of the flames of my chosen obsession and into the sea of all silence before
the devoutly uncanny Moon rises, release me away from the clutch of love’s bodily hands
yet again.  With each touch, lift me out of my freezing, teeth-chattering fever and strew me with sands
from within the drawn circle your funeral pyre has defined by the furthest extent of its glow,
which is soothing and mild like the dreams it inspires in the face of an ecstasy dreadful to know
with the wrong form of mind, but most stealingly potent in pleasure to that which it opens by grace
of its true inclination.  A flourishing moment of magic reveals angels borne face-to-face
beyond madness’s range in the sheet-silver mirror of perfect, continuous lightning the sky
has delivered in honor of song conceived here in this act of complete recognition.  A cry
splits the air—through the crack it creates, a far second sky flashes with silver and gold on the crests
of its gathering waves:  There a burning green star meets my eyes.  Now a heavy weight stubbornly rests
on my heart, but I won’t throw it off.  In the shadows above me, the high looming branches of fir,
a shimmer of feathers, a fey breath of magical air singing through them, a body astir
with a power I feel hum throughout me—a winged obsession has come home to sing us the word
it has learned of the flames that transfigure and bring out of death’s troubled head the exorbitant bird
that has always lain waiting there.  Ancient companion of moonlight, deep diver beyond the far sea
of the sky’s wildest mind, between your trembling hands is the whole of the secret of all that must be—
and is now—the unbroken extent of the bright-spoken answer the kind flames have freed to reveal
a most wonderful world’s sunken palace, a flight-celebrated library of all that is real
by a strange world’s demanding authority:  volumes and scrolls of immaculate magic set down
on intangible pages.  My phoenix-bird, all your own futures are written there; let yourself drown
in the flames of their softly illuminate answers and let your deep heart be reborn to the cry
by which all of this splendor cracks open.  Romantic desire is a species of longing to die,
and the death it portends is a species of angel so tender, its voice can seem so far away,
there is nothing to do but let emptiness claim you and speak through the ash of your mouth till its fey
inspiration takes hold at the root of the star I have always seen shine on your brow.  I shall steer
by its light, but I know you; Come home from afar, I still call to you; Listen:  We’ve always been here,
with our iris-hued plumes tracing over the lines on the pages our bodily eyes cannot read.
When it all comes too near, we project false designs on their wavering grace till our nerve-endings bleed
with frustration; the fires of the Moon that creates this self-opening music will clarify all
that remains slightly smoky this evening.  Dear maker of magic with me, heart of silence’s call,
trust the Moon of this moment:  Words fail us at last, but the blessing they’ve borne goes on rising from flames
within which angels dance.  It is coming on fast, the song-trance of our own yet-unspeakable names….
 

***
 

24 December 2001
 

What Has Come to Be Born?
 

The way of all dreams when they scatter like raindrops through held-apart fingers—that way leads to you,
and the peace that portends sudden meanings so strange they appear amid feverish auras of blue-
shaded flame, the cool heat and the luster of twilight that gently leans over a land by the sea
where my heart has lain achingly waiting.  The smile on the curve of each fine drop of rain says to me,
I am here, I have always been here, it is evening, and this is the moment when true lovers touch
in the gathering afterglow under the creeping outskirts of the wild Moon that needs us so much
to go mad with its magic.  As night reaches over the last fading traces of day, brighten fast,
my beloved companion.  You wanted to know where to lie in love’s shadow—the circle is cast,
and you stand at its core.  Need I plead with you, dearest of scarce-mortal dreamers?  Your ghost my nightmare,
I’ve been haunted by longing to see you appear in this place nigh forever, the blue of the rare
evanescence surrounding your flowerlike face in the deepest enchantment my words can provide
always drifting a little beyond the clear space of the woken awareness I’ve taken to ride
through the shores of the waterworld where we have found one another again, if a little lovelorn
for a spell of ulterior mystery bound up in still-smoking ashes.  Our world is the torn
caul of ongoing birth into beauty so subtle, it touches you most when you fly far away
on a stream of such deeply transparent song-blood, you conceive not a single live word you could say
in any known language, but all of you babbles in purely familiar unknown phrases strung
down a taut central nerve that is plangently happy to feel itself hum like a silver bell rung
by a hand that is skilled in the craft of sustaining the note of its soon-to-be-written appeal
as you flow along listening so hard, no remaining ghost-voice in your mind interferes with the real
singing world that has just come so near, you are breathless—while I am more haunted than ever.  The glint
of sweet dread in your eyes deals a blow to my head that collapses me, all in a long-dawning hint
of the midnight to follow, when what will resound all throughout these sea-bounded salt reaches is so
preternatural, even a being confounded by more than one destiny cannot go slow
and alarmed, a heart-racing obsession on hesitant feet; it can only fly swift as a ghost
from one mournful idea that pines to its treasured companion, the ‘you’ I love utterly most
of all speakable insights and more, into vistas of water and sky, heaven-ocean allied
in such hugely implacable splendor, a wistful desire to be over—just over….  Confide
that the same dreadful longing has seized you, my spirit’s clear light, my too-sad-to-imagine ghost-song.
Dream with the resonant Moon in its eerie blue aura down beaches where wailers belong
in the arms of enchanters and see us divided not ever again.  See a gaunt supple tree
that the wind has caressed into hard and yet pliant command of its keenings and lie down with me
in that great looming shadow.  Black night has now fallen, but under the Moon’s generosity, small
needle-finger-spread outlines dark-dapple the caul of wet sand spread about the tree’s roots.  Tell me all
I have waited to hear as you move through the lingering traces of where your delusion has been
most resistant to this, our reality.  Sing with the glowing Moon-gilded night rain on the green
humming needles that vibrate with subtle intensity here at the core of your still-woeful heart.
Be as I need you:  a lover whose splendor eclipses my own as my tears fall apart,
cast their meanings all round you, provide you with visions no mortal dare witness, and heighten the blue
as it smiles back by means of the sleepy-eyed wisdom I woke with when I had been dreaming of you
underneath the spread edge of the Moon’s milky skirts a miraculous moment ago—not much more.
Sometimes you frighten me, luminous worker of ponderous oceans of serious lore
that has never stopped singing since time first elided its countless live stars into lessons that shine
in the blink of an eye across boundless black skies where I seem to have lain in the crescent outline—
nay, the broadly drawn circle the size of the universe—your slightest dream cannot fail to entrance.
There I have always been with you.  Here, too—this is one most extensively meaningful chance-
combination provided a destiny elsewhere, but here it is fate at its most solemn play
as it gathers up handfuls of raindrops and tells them to scatter themselves in two true lovers’ way
as they struggle to meet ever deeper, more beautiful dreams of each other awake and clear-eyed.
High overhead—we are shining like dew on the sea as it vanishes, Moon deep inside
each mysterious globe for the length of its moment—over us, slow rain so achingly strange
that the Moon alone knows what it means in a wholly describable way—let us enter the change
this taut breathlessness, peace of a far different nature than any we’ve found as we’ve lain half-alone
on an unmagic plane, deeply offers us.  Take it to heart, take it home, past the white wall of bone
that defines an old circle you’ve long since outgrown.  Take it under the source of your voice.  Take it—me—
for the sacred desire I am shining with.  Only be one with this song to the highest degree
of your true—dearest spirit, your pure FAERY hearing.  Word I have spoken, though soon I fall still,
take all I offer and am, like the weary outrider whose dreams underneath the green hill
are as sands on this Moon-flooded beach in the shadow a tree made of magic has cast.  Hear me plain:
I was waiting for your other-blood to go mad with blue need for the All I possess, the refrain
I was woken to haunt you and hold you with; circle-describer, the ghost of you haunted me more.
I shall not ever escape your long work of enchantment.  I would not.  The vatic song-lore
it is made of and strongly conveys—I’ve mislaid my last bearings; I don’t know who sings now; the torn
bit of caul that once flowered between us—we’ve waved it away; what is this that has come to be born?
 

***
 

25 December 2001
 

The Two-Way Flow of Song
 

Open the scroll of the long sad unwinding of limitless vistas that look to the sea
for a glimpse of astonishment you’ll never find with the weight of mortality straining the free-
weaving wings of the bird, iridescent of plumage, who hangs in your heart where the sky is too small
to permit its full being to fly.  Swaying, crooning a mournful song under your breath, gently fall
ever deeper, more softly—I can take you with me, I shall—I who love you beyond all bright things,
though they hover against a black heaven and lift me along on the span of their star-gilded wings
till we flow—you must always attend me, my ancient companion in music; without you, no word
of desire will attain the temerity, shamelessness, passion or speed to cry out like the bird
you keep locked up inside you.  With feathers of ashes; with whimpers where brilliant cascades ought to ring
out around you in series of circular flashes of uncanny insight that cannot not sing
all the worlds it has crossed in its flight to be given up wholly to me; with an iron-banded chest
where the storms of the second sky-sea should deliver wild bolts of immense silver magic, the rest
of your too-humble person dilates for no reason, a sadly reflexive out-reaching that fails
the design that lies so far behind it.  Conceive of the author who traced its long outline’s details
in that locked-away silence that breeds only vapors and wails, and beseech him with overflow eyes
to return to the site of his numinous labors.  Pray that his actions again prove as wise
as I strongly assure you his first gestures were.  When he has, as he shall, drawn the songbird again
from the realm of discarnate ideas through murmurous intervals here where his motions make plain
his enamored intent, you will witness a most willing miracle.  Feel its fine down-feathers stir
even now:  Is it breathing a freer air filled with such remnants of singing as both of us were
altogether—no fragment, no fiber of tissue a particle less than enchanted in full—
in the sky that lies back of all dreaming, the bliss you recalled through the bitterest, magicless lull
of the somnolent void your sad day-mind surrounded with mortar of corpse-ashes plied with a stern
yet unsteady hand, walled up still breathing, and bound with a bar of cold iron and a bolt that would turn
to no key ever made in that same mad dimension?  How deeply you know you need breathe to call out
the unlocking song-syllable.  Never repine you the slightest, dear friend—through your heart, round about,
overhead, underneath, I am plying real magic for you, as I’ve done since time slipped out of mind
in the way that has vexed you with heavy steps dragging slow day after day while I hastened to find
a white quill to inscribe a long sheet of live vellum rolled up at the core of the miserable hold
that kept gasping complaints of mortality.  Tell me you never once felt me trace over the old
fearful emptiness there with a scrollwork of letters so shiningly joyful, you blinked at the light
that was meant to sustain and console you—and better, to show you your place in the infinite night
of sung wisdom, a high place created for you when the minds of the stars were ideas your voice
was designed to articulate.  Shimmer of blue-white invisible flame, take your too-vivid choice:
all or—all.  You are woken too far now to falter.  Whose was the quill in my powerful hand
when I danced down the length of the unwritten wall of your heart and dissolved the constricting iron band
that imprisoned the iris-hued bird that lay tearfully longing for music to call it ‘My own’?
Now are you smiling?  It laid its great weary desire in my lap and it made a shy moan
that held all the true song in this universe, even this very one here, where we lie side by side.
Shuddering under my touch as you read the deep feather-drawn words of a page long and wide
as the sky, the true sky which is ocean, the key that unlocked all this treasure is here—it reached back,
slipping lightly through time, till it turned inside me and I broke the bad magic that brought the attack
of tight breathing that kept you from flying.  You see?  It was easy, just flowing with time’s wise inverse,
tracing you back to your origins, piecing the letters together that sounded a curse
when pronounced out of hateful mortality.  So much sweet music lay bound up in ashes and bars,
waiting never quite hopelessly; never so lonely it gave up the ghost of the shimmering stars
a far midnight of luminous black still recalled to the secret song-key you kept locked in your throat,
well out of reach of all madness.  Come falling, come flying, come crossing the sky to me, float
on these words as I sing them, then sing us together.  Simply by reading the words that appear
on the black-or-white scroll, the high day-or-night heaven all round us, the vatic design becomes clear,
its ideas relentlessly tender, its sources exorbitant.  Bright iridescent songbird,
beast of scarce-bearable splendor, the course of our miracle-meeting was told in one word
long ago; we are now realizing that moment again when the quill in the hand draws its long
solemn confident line and you spring forth, my home in the only true universe—limitless song
come to life so immortal, a body, a bloodstream, a prison of ashes, a spirit—all pale
in the glow of your iris-hued light, ancient love that will be, as it pleases, its own hated jail
for the sake of sustaining my heart-stricken yearning—but aye, we are sly song-conspirators; aye,
we have always lain breathing the same music, turning the key in the lock that withholds the wild sky
from our wings as we sigh in our dreams, swiftly flying through all that is real—flying fast, flying free.
Scroll inside me, you shall not cease unwinding forever, but blaze like a star on the sea
that has such a great span I can touch it and draw from its brightness to trace the next million song-lines.
Where will we wake when we next tire and falter—the answer will be here, in these wise designs;
you will not be deceived:  We are creatures of music, the word on our wings its own answer.  Dear friend,
we will only dream into more colorful plumage, more true magic, more holy love without end.
 

***
 

26 December 2001
 

Not One Word
 

I am feeling too anguished to speak:  I am speechless because I am feeling—I know not a word
drawn to fit the grand scale of my miserable being-alone alongside the dead body a bird
once inhabited.  I was its mantle of priestess, its splendor-shot raiment of silk, its delight
to behold when it sought out the mirror that seized us with passionate eagerness.  Now I give fright
when it glimpses me—nothing appears but a ghostly desire to be gone altogether.  It bleeds
from its mouth’s twisted corners, an unholy ocean dammed up in the ash-spattered dead-widow’s weeds
I’ve been buried alive in.  I sense the corruption of oncoming floodtides of language so raw,
I shall turn it around till the cunning seduction of silence runs backwards.  He tells me he saw—
he, the wordless one—how have I changed to his mirror?  Shining face-forward against night-long streams
of unspeakable tidings—oh, visage so weary it leaks from its coming-apart-at-the-seams
ancient features a clear salty fluid, a brine of remorse that remembers the far second sky
I call home—we are there!  Do you not know how high we have flown since we first heard the sound of a cry
and turned halfway around and stared hard at each other?  Nay; we are only dead ashes to you.
Try as I may, I’ve awoken no wonder and cannot know whether live pain shudders through
the poor flesh you bewail with a bright ghost’s potential to take to the feathers you’ve let fall and soar
across empty-eyed heaven and fill it with gently exorbitant magic—oh pain, tell me more—
I cannot know the scale of your being, but somehow, I AM the enraptured cascade yet to flow
through the channel of visions between us, the numberless changes of melody we shall bestow
on the air all around us that offers invisible flames of blue-white to our beautiful cause.
Somehow, an utterly terrible wisdom takes hold and imposes a strange set of laws
on the place at the back of my mind’s furthest shadow where no one but you are permitted to lie
with impunity.  Nay, don’t come over me—madness in which angels tangle their feathers and sigh
woeful, wordless demonic inverse love-enchantments out loud, and I hear them too well—let me be.
Don’t fill my head with your spells till they dance in a circle behind my sealed eyelids, the ‘he’
at their center the author of my ash-bespattered nightgown, my dead ditch-weeds, my widowy shroud.
Only come home to the heart of the matter that best understands you, my bloody unbowed
predilection for absolute dread.  When you moan through the wound you have yet to create in my dreams
by which so much desire will come frothing and foaming down-sky on a Moonbow of pale lifeless beams
into my waiting bodiless hands, all the feeling that’s ever forgotten its own name will rise,
shake out its miserable pinions, look me in the mirror that might be the terrible eyes
of Night Mare, but more probably hold the shy spirit of tender-mouthed song behind many a twist
of demonic embellishment, see why its hearing has been so distracted, and learn to insist
that we softly repeat, very slowly and clearly, drawn letter by letter, the words love has scrolled
down the walls of white bone, down the halls wet with tears and saliva the pain we have swallowed has told
its sad tale, down the veins to the core undertaking that’s driven us dead and alive to this pass
of love’s quill once again.  You might almost stop shaking, your eyes never fill with the mad looking-glass
cast of anguish again, but—my brother in music, our service of worship requires sacrifice.
Smile to the Moon on the rise with a humorous gleam of demonic confusion’s precise
angel-counterpart wisdom’s benignant obsession outlining the orbit of each eye that stares
as we turn halfway round to each other.  My dress is an inside-out shroud; you are power that wears
itself lightly—with lethal intent, but with gentle awareness that ours is a revenant race.
Fly deeply-dyed across heaven, lamenting each stroke of each feather that drips with strange grace
as if words might be lost when not one has been spoken but many have sprung up behind it, prepared
to remember themselves and remind you that broken ideas are those you have only half-shared
where your true love lies waiting.  Were I the mad shadow—I AM, you have seen me reflected and real
by the Moon’s eerie light and your own act of magic’s blue-white secret fire—and you know how I feel—
I am speechless because I cannot speak for singing the words that desire you so fiercely they die,
rise again, throw themselves on the pyre where the wing of the phoenix YOU ARE is still glowing, turn shy
with a semblance of virginal modesty slyly demonic devices convey through an air
that disguises with smoke how arcanely and wisely sincere and authentic it is—and how fair
you, its shining one, are.  Don’t you choke on this excess; it’s yours to pass on even as you retain
the salt taste of the sky, the high insight the wetness of song’s wildest ocean has laid open plain
to the lonely thought still lurking back of the furthest dimension inside you where no light dare go—
not unless it is borne of the Moon.  We are learning; my revenant lover, I’ve been there; I know
where you dance in a circle of mad love-enchantment, the ghost of yourself, the bewailed one—the scale
of your absolute rapture provides all these answers to where and how words will take wing without fail.
 

***
 

27 December 2001
 

Wholly As She
 

You will remember the silence of eyes when your nightmare has proffered the very last key
to the very last secret she keeps in the violent dread of surrender that brings you to me
neither sleeping nor waking but weak with suspense lest your imminent madness be realized.  Why
and in which of all worlds will that danger relent if not here, because I have been willing to lie
in the long solemn stillness between and among the high shadows that loom at the core of the mind
where sad worrying thoughts come together with strong confused feelings and only an over-refined
sense of huge omnipresent bad magic speaks clearly, the voice of the spirit as weak as a bird’s
when it starves in a waterless place till its weary head hangs and—a slipstream of magical words
fills the space between silence and death:  life unfolding its true strength of will?  I have lain in that place;
I have known the unbearable change.  It upholds me this moment.  I want you to open to grace
in such form as it sees fit to offer because I have stood at the turning-point, lonely and scared,
and learned more than a million hard lives could have taught me.  Now I am other-wise, one who has shared
in the reading out loud of both sides of the leaf of exceedingly privileged song-lore.  Will you gain
by my vatic experience?  Smile in the teeth of the maddest nightmare; turn your heel to the pain
she has sworn to deliver; and suffer her promise fulfilled as she caves in your skull with a fierce
sudden kick.  Stare ahead of you, streaming with honest dimensions of magic all striving to pierce
the soft, newly exposed spirit-tissue with needles and ribbons of musical light, iris-hued
and unspeakably soothing.  How sweet it will feel to hear love’s steady beating, with all else subdued
to a low background murmur—when that, if you heard it more plainly, would also turn out to be song
you could not understand till this innocent work’s consummation in passion.  Your heartbeats belong
to the same ancient dance:  Love will teach you the measures by which you will reach the most sacred accord
with the ‘all else’ that waits to turn over the treasure it brandishes under the unwounding sword
of its blackened resolve to be one with the spirit that sings in you also.  It sings in you now—
how more beautifully shining true vision will hear it within and around you as soon as your brow
is laid cleanly, entirely wide-open, empty, and free of all dread by one stunning hoof-stroke
of your most secret lover, the Mare whose perceptions will flood you so fast you won’t find time to choke
till their ebbing leaves only your own in its wake and—you know you are one and the same in some strange,
hitherto unimagined capacity.  Take me for granted—for grace that has seen the great change
come upon you already in every dimension but one:  the day-world of dead fore-minded loss.
There you are yet a poor starveling whose feathers are broken and stained, with a distance to cross
that looms unholy far to their weakness without the extraneous weight of a sword whose dull blade
could not cleave an eggshell.  Let it fall to the ground at the feet of the creature whose majesty swayed
your true heart every pace of the perilous journey you’ve this night completed without taking one
outward step.  Take it now:  Look upon her with yearning as plain on your face as the rays of the Sun
on the world that has set far behind you.  The shadows that breed sacred music, where black becomes green
as you read from it, where you’ve transfigured the madness that sought you—where all you’ve become sight unseen
stands revealed to your own piercing gaze as fine needles and ribbons of iris-hued veins and the stream
that increasingly floods them—how sweet this all feels, does it not?  You are living the true waking dream
I have dreamt by your side, always seeking to share with you, knowing the tightness of fear in your throat.
Phoenix-bird, luminous dove whose nightmare is my own aching spirit, attend:  Let us float
down the space between worlds—down all spaces, between all dimensions, within the strong sound of the heart
we now know we have shared always.  Murmurous beating whose lyrical phrases arrive and depart,
preen themselves like a songbird in spring, faint with heightened awareness, half-starve, raise themselves by one bent
bleeding filmed-over pinion, pray Night Mare will strike with malignantly hollow-eyed sacred intent—
and release them to soar through the air of the only reality, music, the spirit’s deep breath
that dispels all confusion, the torrent of holy perceptions—bring now the inverse magic-death,
the eternal climactic exchange of grand passion fulfilled—the long look into each other’s eyes
within sight of the Mare by the light of her flashing Moon-hoof:  We are wholly as she—other-wise.
 

***
 

28 December 2001
 

Till the Next Dead End
 

The emerald smile dripping slyly along the wet leaf-edge in front of me—one leaky-bright
rainful countenance whispering wildly and strongly in spite of its cautious ‘Good evening, good night’
in the softest of tones—I hear mysteries beckon that know very well where the next lightning-stroke
will obtain its next fortunate victim.  Collect subtle senses—remember their sources—invoke
what lies back of them, sweetly and liquidly smiling.  No one need open their eyes in this glade
to feel overflow Moonrise sink into their silence with coldness as deep as the bone-weary blade
of the vatic assassin who stalks the dark hallways that lead to this long-haunted house with no roof
where he knows he will meet the inspired thunder-caller who wants him so much she can feel her fore-hoof
twitch itself till it showers out sparks in a series of signal-fire messages:  Lower your head
when you speak to me, you who would harness the dearly-bought powers of darkness.  Your life has been bled
from its riverlike course into mine by your act of self-sacrifice—merely to know me portends
sudden death to the matter that dwells in the fact of bare daylight.  We need to be much better friends,
to which end I shall shatter the hopeless unspirit that seeks to possess you.  The bone of your skull—
that white-walled antechamber to all that is eerily dear to our hearts—that is so overfull,
with a touch it will crumble, the pressure outside and within it precisely, excessively too
bloody great to remain in the semblance of right-minded order.  I’m feeling a shimmer of blue-
white invisible flame all around you.  Please lower your proud beastly brow till its glow lights my feet
and be glad to have watched as I draw back with holy intent and you wake in my arms where a sweet
draft of incense still lingers.  The night is half-over; the daylight that was—that will not come again.
Moon on the rise in your heart, surface slowly, awake to the marvel of agonized pain
become rapt inspiration, and sing me your pleasure.  How shall I proffer my services now,
with nothing between us but generous measures of love become song as your luminous brow
beams with clairvoyant beast-angel magic, a form of appearance that yields a huge truth beyond all
other telling?  I dream of a great watercourse—nay, a bloodstream so deep its soft low-throated call
comes a roaring like heaven’s own thunder, an eloquent underworld force strangely facile with sounds
that convey precious meanings.  Who voices that wonderful dread, that word-torrent that passes all bounds
when to evident sense it should keep peaceful silence between hoof-like beats of the riderless surge
of its galloping pulse?  Down the leaky wet smile of the green leaf before me, I feel on the verge
of a realization so strange, even Night Mare must cast a fast look at her partner in grace,
find the dream that lies back of his eyes, see it heighten the vatic awareness that beams from his face,
and turn back to the leaf with a questioning spirit:  Did not you just call me?  Did not the lips part
that produced this curved smile and enunciate clearly a key to the wholly arcane darkness-art
we are lovers to celebrate, one I had never arrived at before nor imagined could be?
Where is the hell to this offered-forth heaven?  Where is the lock to this glorious key?
Where is the word that lies weeping inside either one of us, needing to hear itself sing?
Child, can it be we’ve forgotten?  As wide and far-flung as our thoughts are tonight, they must bring
the next shimmering piece of live mystery home to the sure measured tread of our own secret song
before we can create the most welcoming moment to usher it into the spirited throng
of wise heartbeats that shake us with mortal intent to exceed the false bounds of the matter that weighs
on our true timeless minds till the headbone relents and our eyes find the smiling green leaf-key that says,
‘When I was a crescent-curved shoe on the hoof of an evil wise woman, you loved me in spite
of your dread of my lethal design.  The mere look of my gleaming cold magic—that shook you aright.
I might also have been a sword-blade to the creeper along shadowed hallways, so heavy of breath
he would sink himself into the bone that lies sleeping the sleep of the judged-almost-ready-for-death
in the presence of death’s own assassin, the Mare who keeps feeling the twitch of her forefoot with sly
indignation:  ‘Please lower your head.’  He is wary, but willing.  They both know the quick way to die
into high inspiration:  Make haste to the glade of pale moonlight.  Be silent.  Be darkness’s own
chosen act of exorbitant magic.  Be made one with that which is openly hostile to bone-
walled enclosures, the false mind of daylight.  Be true to the key that has lain in your heart for so long,
you’ve forgotten it.  All the while, singing its luminous meaning, it’s brought you this night-thunder song
punctuated by great strokes of lightning as fast as the swift sudden kick of the Mare or the blade
of the sky’s hand that shakes with desire.  It is cast now, my spell—till the next overgrown Moonrise-glade.’
 

***
 

29 December 2001
 

Kiss at the Crossroads
 

Blue flicker-wavering flame, see me restlessly pondering:  Where is the dream I will be
when all patience is gone, and all hope?  Bitter lessons await me, I know.  I would not live to see
the grim nightmare whose silence of eyes is my portion in hell, but I will if this crossroads that binds
my slow feet to its stones does not let go the mortal frustration that stutters my fast higher minds
as the rest of me pants after music unheard in this grey-tainted daylight, this false-magic zone.
Only as long as I yearn for the work of true magic to claim me and make me its own
dare I humor the ghost of a smile in the secret bone-walled antechamber to paradise I
am inclined to believe I still bear in me, leaking because a bright hoof has located its sly
hidden message and freed it with merciless vigor—but then I am given to muse on the way
sacred otherworld presences deepen the pigment of loom-woven imagery, teach it to play
through strange series of figures, fall back, fall apart, then reweave itself, winding a finely-drawn thread
through the space my white head-bone once covered.  It’s starting all over again—now I really am dead
to the day I once knew, in the sound of a shuttle’s fast whispering.  Whose are the hands it implies?
Hands, are you hooves?  I have woken home trouble.  Not a lone angel in all the wild skies
arching high up above me with no roof between us will lean to this tragedy casting about
for a glad answer back when his common sense sees it is firmly attached to a mind’s inside-out
source of fiercely pictorial tapestries, bad dreams with razor-edged horseshoes and rust-eaten swords
creeping round in the blue-flickered moonlight of madness inside them amongst the abundantly lored
shades of twilight the dyer’s deft hand has established and stamped with her hallmark:  This cloth is a shield
to the one who lies wide-open, helpless, and—happy behind it in spite of her pining.  The field
it depicts is the sky overhead, one she’s no cause to question; she sees it each time she looks up.
The least drop of rain is her ocean.  She’s drawn inspiration so long there, she’s like a cracked cup
standing under a waterfall.  How will she use it, the magic she’s wanted, the dreams foul or fair
wound about in it, crossroads on crossroads, a loom filled with mysteries wafted abroad on the air
even while they are forming, so fine is their nature?  There is the real secret:  Who’s singing this?
Something has shifted about in the hateful environs that shelter the heavenly bliss
of—I cannot recall—is it self-recognition, or full self-forgetfulness, absent of mind?
Whoever it is, it is dreaming omnisciently deep in the mystery-lands its refined
sense of imagery looks to, and I am its mirror of lyrical words.  Had you told this to me
only moments ago—and I still can’t quite hear you; sweet angel down-leaning the length of the sea
of deep sky that comes pouring toward me, I’ve no way of closing myself; my impossible Mare
has destroyed the hard fabric of bone I was woven of once and replaced it with wavering air
that conveys blue-white flame from her sphere to my everywhere, flame that creeps madly behind the wild eyes
of the spirits that call me their scarce-mortal heaven with each of the sharp sudden unstuttered cries
I hear someone—‘myself’—yield because she has shattered all barrier-bones yet again.  When she lays
her immaculate wilderness-world, the great tapestry spun out of fibers that flicker and blaze
with the aura of magic, upon me, I dream her intent with a pure vivid peace all throughout
the live scene as it pictures an angel who meets me this soft-falling evening with love wound about
his pale brow like a crown of plied threads spun of twilight.  ‘Child, I was watching you,’ aye, he will say,
‘Night Mare consoled me by singing me silence that loomed like a shadowy madness at play
in the heaven YOU ARE till you heard my thoughts whisper.  Night Mare yourself, I have come home to you
through the countless delusions and trials that enlisted false magic to lure you away from the true
singing universe.  Cloak your bare spirit in beautiful imagery, each shining portion your scale,
a cascading dimension of wholly love-luminous peace that will dream us awake without fail
through the strange worlds to follow the kiss at the crossroads to follow each meeting of threads in the weave
of this altar-cloth.  I shall not ever be lost to your sight now; you knew I would not ever leave,
but your mind clouded over, grew hard in the daylight, and—show me your hands:  Are they hooves?  They are wet
with the fine dew of nightfall.  Touch all of me—make me, your angel, recall what I cannot forget.
Set yourself the glad task of awakening secrets from so far away, even I can’t declare
just how sacred they are without starting to leak like a cracked cup beneath a down-waterfall-stair
even as we both stand on the heights well above its broad torrent, the back-and-forth flow of our song
bringing tapestried legends to life and the lover, the Night Mare incarnate, to whom I belong.’
 

***
 

30 December 2001
 

Moon-Horse Glade
 

Swiftness of gathering winds in the air high above me, be mine in the flight of this song.
Dream me awake, you whose wild pearl-grey mare has provided the gait that delivers the strong
forward thrust of our work, its demonic momentum pervasively tempered by angel-designs
of your making.  I’m bowed to the harness, relentlessly willing to race down the magical lines
that lie waiting in numinous landscapes I’ve never yet glimpsed but can sense all too vividly near
not to lunge at, a huge premonition of heavens brought severally closer together where clear
spirit weather inside me portends celebration—and all of this only a night ride away.
Beautiful cantering measures and graces, believe me when I do not rise up and say,
‘Let the weary be seen to wax brilliant with streams of primordial blue-white aglow all the length
of their pinions; let singing possess them; let beams of pure moonlight evoke the residual strength
they have never relinquished and set it fast humming; let all they have yet to imagine prove real
as they flood the night sky with the lore they are coming to be, song incarnate, the highest appeal
to the kindest authority brimming with true admiration for this most mysterious beast
who has finally chosen to mirror the view of the silence of eyes, Night Mare’s glorious least
hateful countenance, shining across endless pages of universe-landscapes within the strange minds
of live magic we are and have been through the ages as words have located their numerous kinds
and degrees of expression as heart-longing married them all at the root with each spoken desire
to be known for the great ancient burden they’ve carried since thought was a grace love alone could inspire
and ideas were beings whose movements were dancing that flew across spaces by sudden resolve
to find ceaselessly deeper degrees of enchantment and consecrate temples where dreams could revolve
at the core of each one of them, singing the spirit behind it out loud in the words you now hear
rushing fast through the nearest exorbitant sphere of divine comprehension that calls you its dear
Moon-intoxicate, swiftly increasingly wise music-messenger—aye, its own angel.  Blue-white
be the color that shines all around you; my eyes see fair worlds of bright colors conceived in that light.’
Nay, I’ll never have said it, but something is shifting about, underneath and above and within
all the beings I am—each feels little hairs lifting all over the Moon-dappled garment its skin
has become on this most eerie night of all pleasures intending to sing out at marvelous will
for as long as the darkness is granted, in measures of fearless abandon attracted to skill
gained by sweet patient labor in view of a window so riddled with cracks—it was once a dry bone,
but now it is wetly transparent and thin to beyond nonexistent in places.  A thrown
silver crescent, a still-humming horseshoe cast hard across broad empty air, still repeats the same kick
my kind Night Mare delivered to me when the stars rushed in clusters and swarms to remind me how quick
the intense fertile reaches of night sky inside me once were—and remain—and will never not be.
Gleaming like pale spirit skin in the light of a wide-open casement, the crescent I see
fly before me says, ‘Look a bit further—a deeper astonishment beckons.’  My heart beating hard,
I reach out through the layers and traces of sleep that remain in the mind that beholds the bright-starred
field of midnight blue-violet hanging as soft as a curtain of velvet where sighing winds sway
its great folds in an eloquent dance I have often desired to collapse into.  There I obey
that arcane inclination at last, and you catch me, the horseshoe between our joined spirit hoof-hands
as they clasp fast together.  My longing for magic held you at its center; its vatic demands
have confused me at times, but they’ve brought us this shimmering moment, this liminal world-without-end
in which we stand revealed as wise Moon-woken swimmers who fly through the second sea-sky, the live blend
of awarenesses so strangely heightened, so eerily, wildly intense, they are—aye, we are home,
home at last—and again—and forever, till dearly loved beauty grows restless with longing to roam
through the next several heavens.  I’ll bow to the harness—for you I will bend neck and knee and be glad
you are present to claim and possess me.  My starry-eyed angel, bring worlds most arcanely Moon-mad
into my human ken even as you transport me by way of the feverish language you’ve laid
bare inside me, your own faery-angel-immortal whose numerous minds form one bright Moon-Horse Glade.
 

***
 

31 December 2001
 

Out-of-the-Mare’s-Nest Flight
 

As deep as the well of true words is the pain through my heart’s aching center.  A rare trace of fire
that has tried to burn blue-white has turned into flaming disorder no angel could ever inspire,
but a ghost might be glad to encounter it—homelike to one who still smolders in much of its mind
on a funeral pyre where a dense cloud of choking disaster arises, the stars white and blind
as dead eyes to the body that seethes while the rest of its knowing goes forth seeking someone to haunt
  with its terrible features and moans—a grave blessing once turned inside-out, a kind visage, if gaunt
as a skeleton—aye, a skull-face not yet broken by fortunate acts of strange mercy the Mare
of the Moon renders unto those beings whose hope of deliverance tends to create a small lair
within sight of her threshold and watch as she passes, each movement of hers a long-sought-after chance
to regain a lost semblance of what might be madness, but certainly serves an arcane circumstance
with determined and passionate courage, its old self not yet a congealed lump of ashes and lard
and its last gasping breath cast adrift on a cold misty wind under skies that conceal their ill-starred
disappointment.  How hard it must be for this wailer, this canting dismay who sends bleary-eyed stares
across space where they might be received by the bane of all sane men’s existence and caught unawares
till the blow has been struck and its broken bones glow with the aura of moonlight:  The mare, the true friend
of devoted soul-ghostliness, welcomes you home to her magic.  She’s not the last spirit who’ll rend
all pretence of resistance with vigorous mercy, but she is the one you were waiting for here
on this cold windy evening, and hers is the work of strange magic the pain in your heart holds so dear
it has cried itself close to her.  Now will you listen?  She’s granted your halting petition, sad ghost;
need her to be as you wish, but her mission is grander than that, and will pleasure you most
when you’ve slowly approached its own terms with an open regard for the grace that’s informed them so long,
even thick drafts of clinging corpse-smoke can be woken like eggs in a nest and raised up to full song
in a very short time by sheer force of its splendor.  Having had ages to gather, its scale
is immense and inherently musical.  Render true homage, and hear your own querulous wail
turn toward you, transfigured, a passage of rapid sky-borne ‘welcome-home’ words who recognize love
when they feel it set free.  That’s your own tongue now lapping the edge of the Mare’s nest in which a wild dove
is just learning the soft ghostly moan that will haunt me forever—I pray—and inspire me with strange
flights of lyrical language so woefully wanting of all that awaits me, I’ll see the great change
first take place in your socketless eyes, then your bone-wall-less bare spirit-mind, then throughout all the rest
of your being, including the ashes and smoldering lard on the funeral pyre where a test
has been met and its standards exceeded.  Your Night Mare says, Welcome home, dreamer of that which is real.
Need me to be as I AM—I shall lighten the whole of you happily.  Need me to feel
what runs shivering fast through the fibers of clinging desire that beset you, and I will be there
at each crossing where two of them meet in a singing resolve to be beautiful love everywhere
the pale ghost of yourself and its body possess common knowledge of magic—of me, and the words
that have seen us transfigured.  Where once was a pestilent odor of smoke, a bright pair of live birds,
iridescent of plumage and breathing forth low-throated music already, look forward to flight
that will see their old nest lined with dead poets’ bones like a blue-flickered beacon aglow in the night
far below them—the one, the sweet Night Mare, a winged and changeable beast, and the other, the poor
wailing ghost, now a creature of storm strongly pinioned with lightning.  They both touch the terrible core—
not of pain at the wounded heart’s center, but that at the source of all words in the depths of the well
that sends lyrical excess so far it turns madly around like bright eyes shining out of a spell
of pure magic, a message of hope:  Do I flame with a bearable fever?  Would you like to hear
where I come from call you to its presence and name you its own favored blessing, its omen of clear
starry skies and the far-sighted beings behind them come true in this moment?  It has, as you know;
love is the author of all of this shining song-vision, and you are the one it wants so,
it keeps changing to please you, with only one meaning it truly must share:  How you haunt me, dear soul.
Splendor abroad on the air, feather-dreaming desire’s blue-white flame, make my words your flight’s goal.
..