AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

December 2003
 
 

12 December 2003
 

A sample from the project I am working on with my friend B'.
Visions, and poems for two voices:
 

More Still

Tender the trail of unborn wisdom
leading deep down wet cavern walls
that glitter with crystal starlight twisted
gently about in spiral calls
that dance all untangled:  Premonition
awaiting, you huddle under streams
that lead you a damp bright way in listened
magic, their liquid puddle-gleams
about your still feet.  Let awe apprise you
quietly; let it illustrate
a secret behind your milk-white eyelids;
let the sweet secret’s song relate
how soundlessness finds its edged-with-silver
music the human-being voice
by which it can trickle through, upwelling
strangeness whose subtle ways rejoice
the source of their inmost meaning.  YOU ARE
here, you are hearing; dream your fill.
Borne on the edge of blue-white beauty’s
most lyric Moon, be loved more still.
 

I went to the place at the foot of the pine tree where the promised cavern waited beneath.  The way to enter perplexed me.  I knew it could be done, but how?  The odd humming key was in my hand.  The thought occurred that if I should strike it, it would hum more clearly and I would know what to do.  I rapped it against a ring on my left hand, and aligned a direction inside the hum with a line of inner light just as I had followed a glowing crack of crystal across the dear man’s doorstone.  As my eyes traced that subtle light, a similar crack appeared among the pine needles on the ground at my feet.  I willed myself to move through it.  Just as after a faint, I rose up dizzy, deep within the secret place.  The walls seemed streaming wet until I laid my hand against them; then they were shining wetly with myriad points of light like underground stars.  The cavern room was all alive with light, albeit of a darkly luminous kind.  My sleep would be most restful, I knew; I was hopeful of my dreams.  And I did sleep and dream, but on waking, I realized that the dreams were all preparations and that the one I sought was yet to come.  Most signally, I watched a young man in a large room I where I had been happy once but had not visited for a long time prepare several platforms along the fore-wall where a tableau featuring sailing ships would be placed in illustration of a famous maritime story.  He was kindly and I knew his name.  I awoke without the vision I thought I was seeking—but something as great, perhaps greater, was given:  Distinctly, after waking, I heard the loved man’s singing voice.  Explicitly I prepare myself to re-enter the cavern tonight.
 

Blue-white against deep cavern darkness,
glow in the eyes most closely sealed
the better to see the shining starlight-
moonlight desire not yet revealed
in full to the plain of earthly music,
silver me over; lull my sleep
beyond the strange pale where words turn lucid.
Lead me along that willing deep
that knows neither sky nor ocean only.
Show me—but here I lapse; you sing.
Eliding me, love unmasks the whole of
magic’s domain—all, everything.
 

***
 

18 December 2003
 

I asked for a sign, and this morning I walked out, over a stone-laid path on very Earth while wrapped in the folds of a warm winter cloak and a human skin, and I saw a huge flight of wild geese cross the sky directly above my head.  The left wing of their formation was many times longer than the other.  They wound in a curving way southward, although they will surely not go far at this late date; though this is a flowering seaside place, the time is almost mid-winter.  I stared, aware of the sign’s being given, and then it caught magical fire so wild the blood ran cold in my veins:  With the slice of a waning Moon behind them, the light hit the right wing of every bird and each one shone as brilliantly white as a bolt of lasting lightning.  For as long as I could see them at all, their fires never went out.  As I stared, I felt myself being borne away through expanded space, a rapt reading hearer of vatic texts the sky’s strong hand had drafted.  Later I went to the house in the other world to find the man waiting.  I asked him if I might move a few of my altar wares and other sacred belongings into its rooms, and he told me I should, he would prefer it so, as I had helped him build it.
 

The Story of Endless Return
 

Now you will tell.  I surrender all meaning,
all reason.  Now, lonely-wild-sky state of grace,
by the hold my right hands keeps upon the death-dealing
sliced silvery crescent that rides the pale face
of the place beyond midnight—beyond the bright pole-star—
beyond very lightning however it strikes,
tell me….  High up, a literate wheeling of wholly
illuminate signs finds the breath-sound it likes
to be caught in the throat of the witness who listens,
eyes fixed on the pattern a great mass of birds
in its shifting has brought into being as mists of
immensity lift and they find themselves words
in a sky white as milk where a waning Moon’s eerie
day-radiance matches the Sun on their wings,
then surpasses it.  Faster they fly through the sear of
that ice-tempered brilliance.  A rushing of rings,
live concentric unspeakable magical haloes
laid edgewise together across the blank page
of the unwritten mind I have been, shows my failing
come round in this wild instant’s end to a rage
for implacable—order amid conflagration.
Lady of Night Mares, your mark on my brow,
strike the blackness deep down in me out through the stations
of grace I see stretching the sky of me now.
Tell the way that fulfills of itself the fierce music
of flight to be used by the throat I uphold
to your hoof.  I am shaking with power.  My human
delight in the loneliness linked with the cold
crescent series of secret Moon-letters so spellbound
I could not read otherwise melts as I burn,
casting light upon skywritten birds:  Thus you tell me
the story of how he will always return.
 

***
 

23 December 2003
 

I hope you all had a THOROUGHLY Happy Solstice.
May you have a very Merry Christmas as well!
 

More from our Story:
 

I drew the sailor a map of the way to the house and described its rooms as I have seen them.  And then I showed him more—perhaps too much more.  His coming was uncanny, but do I really know who he is?  I acted on faith, but I shared some of my deepest working secrets, and today I am fraught with concern.  And still, I leaned to listen to the far wind singing, the same wind that filled his sails and brought him here, and it sang me thus:
 

Maker’s Moan
 

Lover, only haunt me always.
Voice set calling down a stream
beneath a hollow arching wall of
stone where we untimely seem
visited with sense-impressions
ghosts pervade, you chill my flesh
wherever it lies shaking.  Test the
courage of that tender mesh
of celebrated stars turned timid
eyes behind a veil of mists
now parting deep in soundless distance
pining for a wind that lists
toward a sail of linen angled
tautly to receive its blast.
Let that wind bear down and tangle
starry tendrils.  Pin them fast
and ply them with uncanny riddle-
answers, air, I ask of you.
All your rising whispers, little
drifts of magic, hint us who
comes thus subtly laden.  I am
listened, tilted, laid at length,
all wanting self-abandon.  Find me
failing till the faery strength
that haunts me—meaning you are coming
closer—moves through breath to song
to be together with the hum of
flesh and blood in love and long
imagination, touching upright
music through its skin of star-
and moonlight.  Haunt me.  Make the lovesick
moan of me the ghost you are—
as what seems hollow stone, our spirits’
threshold, melts in magic.  Sing—
it shudders to receive you, eerie
body-beauty’s wedding ring.
 
 

Thomas of Wales, please write to me.