AEAEA
Recurring
Dream Island
December
2002
2 December 2002
The Chill of Crossing Over
When the wind dies down and the waves fall
still,
then a far sweet whisper—the sound a star
on the rise respires—will attend the chill
creeping swiftly over the ancient bar
to more tender answers to bid it fail
that the Moon might flow, deep and river-wide,
through the place it guarded and—then the
pale
ghost that whispers this will be yours to
guide.
***
7 December 2002
Shoreside
When you smiling say, Turn your gaze toward
the strange silent lake looming cold and black
close behind the deep need to be restored
to the holy being that calls you back,
then I cast my mind—as you tilt your head—
and the mist recedes—and we pale away.
Here a wash of watery reeds has led
to a sacred silence. Here only stay.
***
8 December 2002
At the Mouth of the Well
You will steep awake down the dawn-course mind
of a flying nightmare whose eyes burn tears
into hollow circles where words unwind
hieratic secrets and inverse fears
work a strain of magic no lore on Earth—
mortal only—knows to be ravished by,
but it shines—it shows you the whole of birth
through black midnight. Waver not now,
but fly.
***
11 December 2002
I work with what I am given; I tell the
truth about what I see.
These songs are always essentially impersonal.
I am hearing from an old friend: the
word 'aureole.'
The Warming Lake
Where the course you take takes you fast and
far
out of daylight range, I shall wait, a sign
filled with secret light in the tiny star
formed of fingers laid against lips.
I shine
with an ancient language, its lore awake
in my beaming eyes and the breast I bare
that you read the page of love’s deepest lake
written warmly down in the heartbeat there.
***
13 December 2002
Carved in Living Stone
On the marble face of the altar stone
where I graved the words you were starved
to read
and believed you kept to yourself alone,
I have laid my hand that it softly bleed,
being overburdened by toils of song.
Now those letters open and leak rose-red.
Voices blend: harmonious, deep and strong.
Let us never rest till their words fall dead.
***
***
15 December 2002
To a Tune You Already Know
Where the sparkled air fills your heart with
sound
that so lightly glimmers and dances through
lunar change-of-weather devices bound
to the sky by snow as it whispers you
into drifts of stillness so rich with awe
that you waken under that blanket more
brightly warm than ever—whose sign you saw
while you dreamt is dancing you Moon-fire
lore.
I have had more Teacher dreams, although
I do not wish to post them yet.
***
16 December 2002
In five more nights, my present project,
Quhair,
will be finished.
God Jul!
The Welcome Sign
While you linger, aye, let you weave the wreath
that the door wide open before you wants.
Let you then, your hands dripping green, bequeath
that circular burden no ghost haunts
to our own round-spinning delighted selves
as they venture through into eerie space
where the very shadows, like woodland elves,
dance rings of rooms where our dreams embrace.
This also came tonight. These two
songs are too closely related to be separated:
Do You Know Who You Are?
Wake in haste to journey where worlds like
stairs
lead ever on to strange fields the Moon
whitens into doorways where lacework airs
drape gently about fey words that tune
their resonant centers—heartbeat chimes
laid under meadows of snow a rose
pervades with its scent—to one who climbs
that fragrance to learn what true love knows.
Last night I mentioned that I would like
to share what I have learned about the inward Moon. Today at the
thrift store I found a single moonstone earring. Except that it is
the screw-on type, it is identical to the pair I was given for Christmas
right before my 16th birthday, along with a matching pendant. Several
years later, when I lived alone in a little apartment, one of the earrings
was lost down the bathroom sink drain. I had a jeweler convert the
pendant to an earring so I would still have a pair. They are in the
jewelry box behind me right now. The earring I just bought screws
so tightly shut in back that it can safely hang from a chain—or my mala,
which is made of snow quartz and moonstones. We are having a moonstone
reunion tonight at my house! I take this as an endorsement of my
plan to write about the Moon.
***
17 December 2002
From QUHAIR:
I set out in the dead of night to seek the
reedy-eyelash lake of former visions, and there where once a little island
stood a small ways off amid rippled waters, I knelt down and stared in
the black. Neither in nor out of the water, I soon found the place
of sight. I called, and the creature rose to me, swimming or being
borne along by a current my prickled flesh could feel. I see you
now, and signal to you; you lift a hand in reply. As you drift nearer,
I see—not the man I thought I was coming to know, but a stranger to me,
a half-drowned woman. I lean in to ask, Are you my own reflection?
You smile; I need not ask again. My urge is to sink down into you
and melt to the place of meeting. I give in to this, or assume I
have, but suddenly I am standing, watching the skin—a silken ribbon embroidered
minutely with flowing ancient words—all over your body lift and settle
in back-and-forth lake-waves. Man and woman, woman and man:
A voice sighs, Nightmare transformed.
The Kind Night Mare
Glimmer closer: Show me the lovesick
wave
of the pale right hand to the drowned weak
star
you once thought you were parted from while
brave
persistence shone brightly from afar
and I heard your call and answered.
Were
you calling to me? The shadow-soul
one wave above open water—her
kind nightmare has come to claim its foal.
Come tell me how things are with you, my
friend.
***
20 December 2002
The end of QUHAIR:
108.
There was a mirror—there is no more.
I sewed the disc of it strongly into a white silk scarf and smashed it
to shards with a water-smoothed round white stone. I threw them both,
bundle and stone alike, into the black night river. Touch through
no glass but gently, face to face, the source of the light of the Moon.
On the Return
You will wake one day—even now, right now—
with a will so practiced, your spine will
sway
only at its bidding. And yet, somehow,
you will find the grace to approach the lay
that is music on the return: A Moon
of unopened secrets rests here, with me
in this zone you’ve woken to. Let its
tune—
enter deeply, deeply—there moves—you’ll see….
***
21 December 2002
Happy Winter Solstice!
Epilogue:
The Laden Leaves
Turn the table’s rose-laden altar leaves
under lantern light whose clear silver rays
merge with green-white incense whose scent
perceives
our desire—and set them to feed the blaze
of the nowhere-everywhere blessed round
of our inmost eyes—then toward that light
flow with senses no longer altar-bound
but as strong as flesh and as real as night.
***
24 December 2002
The Good Evening
A Christmas Wish
We will wreathe more words; we will wind more
spindles
that cloud-lace letters and lines of song
pour down from them. We will be instrumental
in acts of magic so fine and strong
that whose who gaze on with eyes that wandered
erstwhile will fix themselves and fill
their senses, faced with their deepest longings’
calling out till we all fall still—
and then we will turn round smiling, holding
out a bright ribbon stained with red.
Sunset is our design—and cold white
moonlight. I wish we lay there dead.
***
26 December 2002
Water-Clear
Moonlight a Verb
Low as the whole desired unrisen
palely imagined unseen orb
moaning toward the place that listens—
there let my mind be quite absorbed—
wavelets of eerie light lap singing.
Sands with a phosphorescent glow
widely receive them. You keep bringing
me to this place. A soft and slow
presentiment glides between the waves and
sand; there we lie in dreamless calm.
Measure the depths my steady gaze has
traveled—two lines across my palm
twine serial lifetimes into letters.
Whisper their signal lostness here.
Moonlight a world’s uncanny weather
over and through me water-clear.
***
28 December 2002
Where It Ends
Will you end it here, where the bleak Moon
glows
like an angled lantern so nearly spent
of its sweet fire’s passionate vatic throes
that the once-was-love of its dreamers’ blent
silver edges…. Nay, it shines on, austere
and melodic, deep as a chasmed glance
out of nowhere. We are its likeness
here,
the receiving ground of its sacred dance,
the reflecting pool of its tear-shed glare
as it softly trickles down pale as dew,
the reminding moan of strange lore we share
as we tangle shadows and flicker through
the dawn-open door of a mind so black,
only deeper silence can run therein.
As the lantern dies, the Moon rises back
to its highest keep—under our one skin.
***
29 December 2002
A Vow
Bleak as a very sorry stream of
musical footfalls’ fading rhymes,
someone is weakly—shining. We are
bound to recall their mind’s strange times,
by which we will feel at last the freight
of
ancientness song has always borne
turn out to have been wild flight, a state
of
grace only slightly stained and torn
about its white edges—into feathers,
mystery-sighing letters laid
all round us, a breath of night-storm weather
lightning-to-be itself first made
when we were a ghostly glimmer back of
nobody’s waking mind. A streak
of what it will sing when we have tracked
it
home—it rhymes now, though all is bleak.
***
31 December 2002
The Threshold of Other Darkness
Eerie rustlings, whispers, a saving glimmer—
moonstruck eyes be my source of light—
lead me over a lake a swimmer’s
breath traverses by mortal fright—
for who behind her is waving branches
laden with storm-wind-thrashing leaves
this far from her world? Oncoming trance
of
naked exhaustion, your shore receives
her being intact, its tongue a trail of
musical tremors leading through
to lunar highlands that run with palely
eloquent streams that once were dew
between her small feet. Unearthly body,
turn your most secret liquid gaze
to—mine. Let us raise more storm-lake
waters
up with our leafy wand, long sprays
of fine silver orbs, Moon-worlds cascading
outward all round which wet lips part
to meet: Let us learn in full the lay
of
love’s other, deeper darkness-art.
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