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AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island
February 2001
1 February 2001
So: What is magic, anyway? Could you devise such verses with your rational mind?
Here is the dream that brought tonight's song near:
1 February 2001, 12:56 pm
I attend class with a group of young people, one
of whom is a young blonde man who attracts me. He mentions having visited
Reno, a name which was in one of my dreams (within the dream) a night or
two before. I talk to him as we start to walk down the hall, asking
him, 'Why were you in my dream?' He is vague, and soon I have lost
sight of him. We go back to the classroom, where the woman teacher takes
me aside and lectures me about my getting by on brilliance instead of work
and tells me that I want more for myself (materially) than what I have.
I protest, saying that I am Buddhist, but she insists, and then she tells
me that a fellow from our class has asked her twice or more about me.
My interest is piqued: 'Who?' She indicates a small fellow in
glasses who is sitting with some dark-skinned boys. He is the class
brain, a nerd. She says his name is 'Kerm'. The other boy is
forgotten--I am definitely interested. “Save the Last Dance for Me”
plays as Kerm comes over. He is now wearing a yellow and orange protective
suit. He kisses or nibbles my cheek as he says something to me that
I fail to catch. He has scratchy grey week-old stubble. I ask
him what he is doing (dressed like that) and he says vacuuming(?) (some kind
of industrial cleaning, in a ship?).
The ship of many, many dreams landed safely here in port a long time ago. 'Kerm' reminds me of Kermit the Frog, and I think I know why: Several years ago, a Tibetan nun gave me a prophecy in a dream. As she spoke, I kept staring at her mouth because it was peculiarly wide, like a frog's. She was telling me about someone I would be with in another country.
And if none of this comes to pass literally? What is magic? Why am I here, if not to bring forth these songs?
And yet, the teacher says, I want more for myself
materially--on the material plane--than I have now. That must be at
least partially true.
Haunted by the Nameless Future
someone eyes me through dark glass
By the staring eye that pours forth
blended spirit light, I see
someone search the distance for the
one he soon must find in me:
By this mirror-lens of polished
crystal, gleaming wet as rain,
he and I combine, dissolve, and
drip together down the plain
unhappy face inside the thought that
fetches forth its lovelorn ghost,
in itself the memory-haunted
meaning we resemble most,
sends it into lonely reaches
where the air of song’s a gale,
bids it listen closely, seek the
music’s silent heart, and sail
the ocean of salt tears between us
lest the waning spirit light
flicker out and die. The meaning
in that staring eye’s cold bright
incisive glance is terrible to
guess at, but somehow the tears
it yields have brought a haunting fullness
home: Its world is this world, here.
Now the ghost between us races
silently, its heart all song.
We regard each other’s faces
by this lens. Where we belong
is where we are, while this clear music
sings us to itself and we
inspire it deeply. Tearful, lucid
lens, he knows you’ve shown him me.
***
2 February 2001
The Safest of Assumptions
The wooing of you through the infinite measures
and cadences music allows us—oh my
shining darkness, how brilliant you are, and how
treasured each moment will be once again as we fly
back and forth through the distance our converse
has covered throughout the long future. I hear it compel
your impassioned reply as it sighs to you, lover
and ever more beautiful goal of its spell—
while you are the source of it also. How easy
to dream it, to enter its current this way; how impossible ever to dissect
its meaning alive by the bleary dead light of blank day
when that absence of dream is itself but a figment
of error projected by absence of soul
in the form of one’s least knowing mind. Let
this trigger a vatic assumption of genuine whole-
hearted basking awake in the flow of the deepest
of wellsprings as over you these magic words
bear that secret influence. Lean into their
sweetness: They need you to know that the music you’ve heard
holds a mirror of most profound truthfulness high
in your honor. Your likeness is magnified there.
Every line is most accurate. You are so shining,
you scarcely dare face yourself: Who is so fair
in his own recognition, he never requires to be
firmly reminded of how he delights
his companion in song, his insightful admirer?
He cannot believe her, yet knows she is right
to persist in revealing—with amorous purpose—the
image he prizes, his most noble guise.
Most yielding of rapt inspiration, most learned in
finding the means to unlock secret eyes
in your viewer’s successive array of increasingly
subtle perceptions—strange love without end,
to sing these your praises is always to please one’s
own senses in ways that are subject to lend
all the worlds they encounter, harsh daylight included,
a brightening trace of your aura broadcast
everywhere they direct one’s attention. The
wooing of you in such ways brings these worlds home at last,
safe and sound, to a heart that is happily willing
to hold them within it and sing all the while.
You have been seen everywhere—though until you have
graced your reflections with multiple smiles
of committed acknowledgement, I shall continue this
long act of spellcraft. It flows from afar,
but the very near future will see it within you,
assumed by the infinite beauty YOU ARE.
***
3 February 2001
As so little that appears here can be fully understood
without asking, at some point during the course of each passage, 'Who is
speaking?', these verses have incorporated that question into themselves.
Form it as a habit and ask it always, whether dreaming asleep or awake.
Rain-Wet Air of Lamentation
all the ether sighs for joy
Dripping rain on twilight’s leaning
door—and I afraid to go
inside, lest I be rendered speechless!
Words are what I came here for.
Thoughts adept at several haunting
languages, within which I
perceive a ghost who walks and wants an
audience to hear him cry,
someone to perceive his lonely
message with the tender care
rain bestows upon the flow and
drift of this uncanny air
breathing me, a mist of ether,
over his low threshold—thoughts
sigh me and I fly to greet him,
dripping with the grey sky brought
to Earth and now across the line that
separates the parallel
configurations he and I devise,
the absent-minded spells
a word from either one of us will
shatter. Will he bid it flow,
that magic, now that I’ve crossed this threshold?
Who is speaking? Don’t you know?
***
4 February 2001
Do not suppose that you are ever really alone,
or that your thoughts go entirely unheard.
This is a song; nothing more.
The Pronouncing of Your Fate
Outside the vine-covered house, all is silent
except for the tapping of leaves on the glass
to one side of the door. Through that window,
the smile of a singular knowledge is coming to pass
very slowly. If patience will help it remain
there as long as may be—if ‘forever’ be dared
to be spoken in undertone earnest—my saying as much
surely tempts a wild Fate to this lair
with intent I shall not now pronounce. Mortal
sister and friend to that feared elemental who drops
from the eaves at the sound of a sigh, I just listen,
and when the soft flow being overheard stops,
I fill in the remainder as best I perceive it.
My fingers among the taut wiry vines
and my face to the glass from outside where a brief
glimpse affords me the next set of long cadenced lines,
I am suddenly rapt: Am I hearing this message?
It beckons again: He is smiling in words,
the dreamer who dwells on the edge of the blessed
astonishment we have apparently heard
sing its name for itself here, in this lonely clearing,
within and without this small overgrown box
of an ivy-laid cottage. All over the tiers
of smooth fieldstone it’s made of, vines cling to the rocks
with obsessive persistence, my fingers among their
hair-fine creeping roots, while the glass remains free
of obstruction. How many strange words have
been sung here that resonate still. I have come now to be
made as one with their source, in the growing suspicion
that all I have heard to this day have been chance
wisps of wind-scattered language a lonely voice
wished to broadcast in the hope that benign circumstance
would respire in his favor. The same wind
has shifted; the tapping of leaves is quite still, but inside,
in that shadowy ongoing night, if I lift up a few
of the leaves, I can see myself eyed
with intensity I do not merely imagine. The
playing of Fate round the edge of my thoughts
tells me one of the principal words of attraction
is greenly alive, an articulate spot
of illuminate color surrounded by stones of primordial
mixtures of crystalline grey
in a place of increasingly vivid commotion as someone
inside finds the courage to say
to himself—though I hear him right now—the live
letters the planets and stars overhead have designed
to be known as the name of his Fate. He has
tested it shyly; now let his courage of mind
so exceed his desire to remain an obscure constellation
to her who awaits that somehow
he reverses the flow of the force that immured him
by naming the one he’ll pronounce it with now.
***
5 February 2001
Tapping at an Open Window
green leaves blow across the ledge
When the wind comes stealing softly
down the hallway where you wait
patient as a ghost who’s lost his
will to mourn out loud the late
silence that so locked his being
deep within this long dark room
where the very air he breathes is
heavy as a fragrant plume
wafting from a blown-out scented
candle, thick with ancient musk—
when the peaceful breeze has lent its
clarity to lift the dusk
brought on early by the smoky
body of the after-breath
trailing from the wick in choking
ectoplasmic waves, the death-
frustrated spirit dwelling here is
free to vanish, and the man
who haunts this house is free to clear his
throat and speak. God knows you can.
***
6 February 2001
Tonight we say 'sung', not 'song', because 'divine'
is a verb.
By the time you finish reading this, I will have
sung for you.
Sung of Visionary Moonlight
by the swearing of a vow
By the waxing Moon, the vivid
aura of its milky light,
all the diamond stars that give the
constellations’ roaring heights
rising up behind it—mystic
evidence of forethought laid
line on angled line and twisted
form on form—their least betrayed,
best respected secrets, and by
all the sacred thoughts that shine
in my watching eyes, command my
tongue to let live words divine
your precise intentions: Only
whisper; make your meaning clear;
I shall stand aside that flowing
river-music meet the sphere
vast celestial songs inhabit.
By the meeting of their ways,
hear the sweet resulting magic
brightening my blissful gaze.
***
7 February 2001
Yesterday I tried to explain to a friend who Christina Rossetti was.
Some forms of insight only become truly clear
when the usual subject/object distinction is lost.
Your Serpent Wisdom Knows Another Tree
Splay out your hand in bleaching full Moon light
and let the secret colors of its rays,
whose iridescent paleness my insight
describes to me in penetrating ways,
be vividly cast all around my mind.
I cannot help but see myself through you.
A creature most diaphanous and fine,
the hidden Moon’s imaginary hue,
comes soaring through the space beyond the sea
of brightened window like a morbid thought
that flies forever till it finds the tree
fast-rooted in a far uncanny spot
we chose because it throbbed with subtle pain.
The tree is quaking: Words unheard-of now
already hang incised to grow again
until their weight so burdens every bough
that all their heavy ripeness will depend—
so like ourselves—on what it nearly breaks,
each word a point in time that has no end
and yet may be the author of mistakes
that time, the nonexistent, shall reveal
as madness cloaked in rounds of apple green
among the leaves through which these love-words steal—
as love is all they are and all they mean—
until they wind around within my sight
back to the hand that makes them all so clear,
the hand that bleeds with fluid full Moon light
and occupies a space that is not here.
***
8 February 2001
You will have heard it because it has now
begun.
A Vision of Your Future Reads These Lines
by way of finely etched green apple leaves
You lie in willing wait beside the tree
because the living Moon will soon rise high
above the mist that shimmers on the leaves
and brightens all that whispers to the eye
of secrets lying hidden there in coils
and angles that impatiently align
their future meanings with undreamt-of joys,
the hope of all you labor to divine.
With their most vivid potency delayed
and so much spectral magic still on show,
take one long faithful look, then glance away
and ask the hand that gathered all it knows
then held the graver than incised the spells
these wrinkled leaves and tiny fruits expand
the while they grow, ‘The Moon will reach full swell
how many times again before the strand
of hair-fine concentrated thought enwound
throughout the leafy canopy the dew
of evening drenches breaks the creaking boughs?’
Fine drops of silver magnify the view
of what lies traced beneath them as a shaft
of liquid moonlight meets them and they blend
to magnify the timeless epigraph
the live tree is becoming. This portends
rewarded curiosity: You see
the whole of it already; when you turn
your inward eye toward the ancient ‘me’
inside you, so much future moonlight burns
throughout your countless minds that all the words
incised in every aspect of this tree
uncoil themselves. This night you will have
heard
the voice of music, your own bride-to-be,
dissolve in fragrant tears whose notes unblur
the full design, which then will be revealed,
illuminated and, by grace of her,
with you inside, ecstatically resealed.
***
9 February 2001
This Is Automatic Writing
you are autochthonic joy
when the leaf inscribes its surface
with a series of events
set in odd-and-even verses
and your daylight mind relents
for a moment all is silent
then a joyful noise resumes
all the music that lay hiding
in the godforsaken gloom
locked inside you where its presence
brought a shudder to your loins
only when you slept and dreamt of
ancient maidenhood conjoined
with its vatic opposition
bringing harmony to night
while the spirit of the vision
of their blended song took flight
like a ray of lunar silver
till it found the quaking leaf
strange desire completely filled and
overflowed while shades of grief
hovered round it crooning hoarsely
do you drift from then till now
waking with the self-recording
promise of a sacred vow
drawn across the sheet you cover
as you lie beneath the tree
waiting for the fated lover
who was singing only me
***
10 February 2001
Dream Journal, 9 February 2001, 5:04 am:
I am shown several Tarot cards from the Major Arcana
of a special deck. Their patterns reveal something like the journey
of a life, one of them especially: A woman goes to consult a witch.
They sit together under a tree, watching a boy and a girl who are playing
nearby. They get the little girl to pray and then promise that she
will reveal the words to the prayer (a magical prayer that she knows now
because she is gifted with some special form of access?) when she meets the
woman again in the woman’s future. This is card #6 in the deck.
The earlier cards were also shown--#3 or #4 was ‘The Starry Road’.
What Witch Will Greet You Underneath the Tree?
you fear to give consent, but—aye, you will
The witch’s winding story-lines devise
a future-haunted series of events
through which your countless pairs of inward eyes
progress, as each in turns gains your consent
that sleeping, waking, they may closely view
the scenes the magic woman who reclines
beneath the ancient tree that drips with dew
and fragrant silver rain unreels. Designs
of page-on-page complexity appear
in easy sequences you no more read
than realize as living beings here,
discarnate but with sympathies that bleed
the poison out of any part of you
that tends to look askance. One of a pair,
a girl not yet of age, is pacing through
the lines of an incantatory prayer.
Each word is overwhelmingly remote
and yet familiar. You begin to shake
and draw away in fright, but her words float
beside you. When you seize them, your mistake
is rectified just long enough to let
the witch adjure the girl to keep this vow:
She will remember all that you forget
and haunt your mortal future. Then is now:
The meaning of the witch’s bending lines,
the memory of prayers that pass all skill
to fabricate, but breathe their own designs,
pure witchcraft formed of music’s own self-will,
is brought by means of sequences of eyes
inside you into visions you hear say,
The more you let the words within you rise,
the more you’ll be the one to whom they pray.
***
11 February 2001
This continues yesterday's work.
A Song for Him Whom I Dare Not Address
The boy might speak if spoken to, but no;
the witch does not address him, nor do I.
My visions all dissolve. I slowly go
about the space between where our worlds lie,
vibrating with a strange hypnotic blend
of beautiful but slightly hectic thoughts.
The while I struggle bravely to pretend
this passage does not leave me overwrought,
I know without a dislocating glance
that I am where my trembling is conceived.
When I close my eyes a waiting trance
descends and brings me into many-leaved
environs in which ciphers, hand-engraved
by someone that the boy could surely name,
depend from every tree. I recognize
the central figure there, half-clothed in flame,
the tree that reappears night after night,
however many changes it displays.
That tree once, like a candle, swarmed with light
while I stood on a portico, arrayed
with crimson blossoms and so many yards
of silken gauze, I scarce could move without
entangling myself, then pulling hard
against what I adhered to. Drift about
this space-between completely free and bare
of ritual distractions such as lines
of poison-clotted spider silk and snares
my blind feet activate, my own designs—
that is what the boy has seen me do;
I read it on the screen behind his eyes.
He looks toward the future: ‘Who are you?’
He smiles. When asked to speak…. These
are my sighs;
the moment has not quite arrived when he
will tell from his perspective how I ran
across the space-between toward the tree
that pulsed with flame. The wind rose up to
fan
the outward-flickering edges of the sound
of all-consuming hunger as it roared
toward me and the silk that hemmed me round.
It ate the dress of snares; on me it poured
a mist of silver dew. Sometimes I feel
a wetness on my skin from places where
the magic lore of song is hugely real.
Sometimes I hear the echoes of a prayer
come floating back across the ether-skies
the flames and I once crossed. A young girl
chants;
the witch in me beseeches to arise
the boy’s harmonic half of this song-trance.
He turns his head. His eyes are strangely sad—
illuminated by a trace of flame,
but dewy, almost tearful: ‘Are you mad?’
he asks. He shakes his head, but calls my
name.
***
12 February 2001
Pretend this is a letter written on paper.
It continues the recent #6 dream.
The Salutation and the Body Sing
the substance of this message is the Tree
Come homeward from the elder witch’s world,
but rest a moment right before your door
and read the message on the tightly curled,
newly incised green leaf you seized and tore—
as your yourself were torn—out of the tree’s
possession, where you heard two children speak
and understood the blessing it would be
if you could resurrect your strangely weak
recall of all the words addressed to you
while you were in their presence. Now you
hum
a wisp of haunting music. It drifts through
your several minds most gently. When it comes
within the reach of where you vaguely hold
the riddle-written leaf your fingers feel
untwisting by itself, a hot-and-cold
uncanny revelation opens real
capacity for multivalent thought.
At your own doorstep you commit your eyes
to read what your long journeying has brought
so near to home. The girl who chanted sighs.
She takes your hand, her fingers locked in yours
from deep within, and lays the leaf out wide.
The characters upon it rise and pour
their music through your vision: Come inside,
forever; meet the ancient presence here
of love you’ve traveled countless worlds to know.
An echo—once a memory—now a clear
and concentrated voice—no, to and fro,
a boy and girl are harmonizing. Theirs
is music that will haunt you all the more
for that you’ve felt it moving through the air
and read it from a leaf at your own door
within the memory-shadow of the tall
abundance of delirium aflame
and dripping silver wetness in which all
your secrets waken as you hear your name—
the tree beneath which faery children stood
and at a witch’s bidding swore a vow
to carry to your door that living wood,
a vow which they are keeping with you now.
***
13 February 2001
Something lately reminded me of a vision I had
when I was a girl. I saw a woman, or a white marble statue of a woman,
lying on the ground in the snow. The sky behind her was white with
more snow. Some tall dry grasses to one side of the scene shook in
the wind and their remaining seeds were scattered over the body. A
flock of sparrows came and lighted on the body and ate the seeds. It
just occurred to me after all these years that perhaps the warmth of the
birds' bodies would melt the snow on hers.
Flock of Cemetery Sparrows
marble-statuary-cold
Underneath a sky of winter
and a cloak of ancient snow,
something restlessly begins to
notice how the storm clouds blow
overhead less often and the
far-off drip of water sounds
like an chilling portent frantic
heartbeats surge to shake around
all their body’s furthest reaches
even as the very cold
they communicate grows weak and
loses its last outward hold
on the motionless perceiver
who, beneath a pall of grey
ash and snow, is not deceived: Her
time has come to go away.
Every eon more bright daylight
seeks and finds the body still
half-asleep where half-decaying
magic works an inverse will
to remain a silent agent,
praying for the snow to last
till the secrets of the mazes
rendered in its crystals cast
all their brightest spells in letters
that the body caught inside
so much influential weather
might be deeply fortified
to receive the coming changes.
Overhead, a rushing sound,
fast increasing, comes in waves of—
no more snow—a wheeling round
like a storm of flashing wonder
welling up in countless eyes
finds the woman lying under
dirty ashen grey and sighs
downward with one thought in mind: to
mass upon her. Magic words
feathered in a far-off time, a
cloud of softly breathing birds,
come to warm her with the tender
presence she must realize
right this moment: At the center
of their heartbeats, you arise.
***
14 February 2001
The lovers' holiday: 'Seahorse,' he says.
The Pacific Ocean lies outside my door.
Your Name Means Peace
When I questioned my love through a madness of
error, a fierce offshore hurricane rose in my mind
and shook all the latches and eaves till a barren
dead skeleton house stood alone on a blind
point of outcropping stone with high waves at its
feet. It could not have been more coldly poised to invite
what was surely about to arrive: its complete
and eternal destruction. But then, by the light
of a thin sickle Moon, I was briefly distracted.
When I turned my eyes back to where they had been,
a wide swathe of storm-cloud-empurpled and black
velvet heaven shook all round me. What I have seen
on these numberless sacred occasions is written elsewhere,
as your music makes more and more clear
every time I gaze into the magical distance and
call your mad weather’s dimension to veer
through the world in the way and put out its resistance
like flame off the end of a rain-sodden wick.
The darkness that follows engenders the shift that
enhances your timeless appeal with the tick
of a rhythmically unified far constellation brought
here to the space between your and my eyes,
flickering like my rapt heartbeats in cadences I
have seen caught by the velvet disguise
of the sky that beholds you inside me. Low-murmured
companion whose universe parallels mine
but dreams in a more rapid language, I’ve heard
the fraught sighs of your sleep. I’ve employed diverse signs
to convey a live trace of the oceans inside you,
those which are forming new hurricane-thoughts
even this moment like clouds of a high luminosity
so deeply black it has brought
my full conscious recall to the outcropping point
yet again: I am standing where sea-winds scream loud,
mad, impassioned appeals, but I hear a soft joyful
command at their core which your will has endowed
with the carrying strength of the storm that surpasses—by
nearness to silence—all else for its mild,
sweetly penetrant clarity. Swiftly it masses:
the heart at the heart of the storm. So beguiled
by its beautiful potency, I am attracted beyond all
resistance to step to and fro
in small rhythmical measures that echo the black-velvet-sky-enwound
stars as they flicker and flow
to the sound of your voice as it hugely emerges in
waves where the Earth has dissolved under me.
Who rises, who falls? I am one with this surge,
one whose song is the answering call of the sea.
***
15 February 2001
Love Perceived Through Silent Darkness
you appear as lightless flame
Down she stares. The zone of roses
leaks out on the midnight air.
Shades of willing song rise, throwing
double darkness round the fair
object of their long obsession.
How her face is bending low;
how her hungry eyes are pressing
into service all the glow
they can generate by fixing
their relentless focus on
one pure spot of blackness mixed with
silence where the love long gone
away from charnel daylight moves with
subtle grace she cannot fail
to know by means of heartbeat-hooves that
clatter through her veins and rail
to know their captive status and be
powerless to sway its word
when the one who holds it stands with
complicated drafts of bird-
voiced and whistle-winged music
bound up in his mind—quite still
to outward hearing; just a lucent
pitch-black spot of naked will
so unsettled in its purpose—
knowing it must turn, but not
where or how—it seems to lurk in
angry hopelessness, a thought
to vex the one whose eyes have grown most
piercingly intuitive.
She has seen the formless zone of
roses lend his will to live
secret means he reaches into
as he sends his black, black heart
up toward the voice that sings of
crimson-petalled darkness-art
taught her by the endless depths of
shadows burning bright as birds
made of fire that send their echoes
soaring all about her words.
Common to the voice of passion
choked, the whistle of the wing
of the darkness-dove, the flash of
diamond light that hides all things
daylight burns away, the span of
brightness that your shadows pall
in silent night, and what began this
outward breath are you, our all;
you, she tells him, hear the whisper
borne across disguised as air
breathed by fiery roses. This is
yours, who sing by being fair.
Where an empty darkness might have
tempted madness to its lip,
you have traced the inverse light of
magic with one fingertip
stretching outward, and your touch has
sparked this blaze: True lovers who
dream in blended senses such as
these will see love safely through.
***
16 February
Speed This Faery Double Music
brightness mirrored of itself
Downward with the feather-stroke of
lightning bolting through your heart—
how its softly poignant glow comes
leaping out, live flames that dart
through the space between us like a
pair of incandescent eyes
moving, disappearing; bright, then
closed forever—then devised
anew in wild outlandish forms, a
weirdness I can only dread
might visit elsewhere while I storm the
gates of where love laid its head
once and has not since requited,
even sought, the one who speaks
its ever-changing names, the blighted
seer of the light that leaks
through the puzzle of the shifting
syllables that try to form
music you will answer, lifted
feather of the lightning-storm—
downward with the magic gesture
of the lilt of your bright voice
someone seems to hurry, dressed in
flaming plumage: Do rejoice:
You inspire these vatic figures,
visit them upon my head,
make them dance the while we linger
sleepless in the ocean-bed
you reveal as endless currents
that fulfill the lightning-shaft’s
potency, and then you turn and
I possess more live song-craft.
***
17 February 2001
The Dreamers of Home-at-Last
The more we are dreamt of by
the dreamers who lie upstairs,
the more we will haunt the night
flying the worlds in pairs
swift as the sidelong glance
that parts the dividing veil
where it is thin and scant
then revels beyond the pale
visage that holds enclosed
so much divine intent
that now seeks the over-throes
of strangely ambivalent
passions that speak their word
clearly mid happy gasp
while we are overheard
to seize by the very hasp
the latch on the lyric door
and harmonize with its groan.
The wider it swings, the more
the pale marble paving stone
under our feet reveals
carved secrets of open space:
foam on a breathing sea;
the airier half of lace;
the aura about the Moon
as viewed through the silvered leaves
that creep through the attic room,
a coverlet music weaves
that echoes the streaming pair
beneath it, who leak this light:
The dreamers who lie upstairs
have dreamt us again tonight.
***
18 February 2001
You Are Not the Source of Madness
wet- leaf-shadows cast by stars
When a morbid strain of music
lends a rare half-willing light
through its aimless and confused yet
beautiful devices, tight
complexities ensue within its
helpless hearer’s mind. Their force
slowly overwhelms her. Mists of
curdled cloud formations course
like grey river-surges through the
windings of her sacred veins.
Skies of twilight, shining pools of
lustrous silver dew and rain
gathered in the tiny cups of
outheld ivy leaves and hands
shaken and dispersed abruptly….
Hear and deeply understand:
This is how wise madness strains its
riddled heart until it breaks
open: Thus you hear its plaintive
call arrive as streams and lakes,
bodies far too huge to hold or
overturn, yet leaf-contained,
green beneath the mass of cold and
swollen clouds low-hung with rain—
all this aching world set keening
well within long tree limbs’ reach.
By these twilight-shadows’ means,
conceive what madness has to teach.
Blend with them until they fill you
with the wisdom of dread lore.
Be the one who haunts their stillness
till they hear their voices pour
forth in torrents even they were
only half-aware they held,
accursed bodies, pierced by rays of
starlight, soon to be unspelled—
Water from the eye of heaven
weeping to your own increase,
make her bid you welcome. Driven
counter-reason, seek release
even as she seeks your measure.
Whose are these hypnotic lines?
One who magnifies the pleasures
deathliness alone divines
in the dreadful seeping branches
welling up where ancient scars
meet the sight of open-handed
heaven under raving stars.
***
19 February 2001
The Winking Constellations
The eye in her hand can see
as far as the stars can shine
and multiply while it frees
every remote design
that turns its own eyes to glance
toward the far earthly plane
where passionate circumstance
reveals they are not in vain:
Such is their loved one’s work.
Once they came faint and pale,
messages skies of murk
tangled in vapor-trails,
lonely misguided sparks
from sources that seemed to die
as soon as they found their mark
deep in their dreamer’s eye;
now, though, their pleasure’s breath
outward and wide expands,
seeking a little death
under true love’s right hand.
Seek the same love, and find
reason to breathe as they—
in the lore of the bleeding mind,
lunacy locked away
guarded by gilded crowns
wrought of bewildered stars;
meticulously set down
where live branches form black bars;
inscribed in still-forming leaves
that hang in a restless state
of vatic suspense, aggrieved
and anxious to meet their fate;
instinctively strong, yet weak
in outward demeanor while
it grows itself by the tree
beneath which the twisted smile
of one who is staring hard
into her hand conveys
the bliss that seemed so ill-starred
so many earthly days
until she began to sing.
How has this come to pass?
Stars form a double ring
that glows in the scrying-glass
that echoes within her palm
visions whose voices rise
as tenderly sweet and calm
as yours when you meet her eyes.
***
20 February
Patent Transparency
Shivering leaf and low-
spirited leaden hand,
where is the far-off flow
you surely understand
better than all YOU ARE
who shall not fully BE
until you have seen the stars
flickering through the tree’s
heavy-hung branches where
emerald comes a pale
glow through the murky air
that rends the disastrous veil
you’ve made of yourself? You shine
according to what you lend
a dark but transparent mind
and will to receive and send
manifold letters borne
across the wide breathing sea
upon which the green of torn
fragments of leaves can be
mended within the eye
of one who perceives their drift
and how they were meant to lie.
This is the very gift
you have been called to bear
alive to the same sea’s shore
and offer to render fair
and truthful by grace of more
music than any gauze
membrane has ever held
away from your world because
yours is the one name spelled
on each of those scraps of leaf
whose frail spirit voices call
across the abyss of grief
you fear when you start to fall
too near the vast water-sky’s
heaven of deep, deep song.
Breathe of its fall and rise.
Inside you the sheet of wrong
perception, the veil of scrawled
countenance, meets the wet
face of the one you’ve called,
dissolving as you forget
the hovering madness wound
about in its tattered snare.
Free of those twisted-round
coils of handwriting, rare
eloquence clears his throat
and gestures toward the one
who reels as he gently floats
much nearer, a pale green Sun
as seen through the tree that flows
with fire from the only star
ablaze in this night that so
transparently says YOU ARE—
a shivering leaf of light
that glows like an emerald brand
in his mind, the starry-bright
song spirit that guides his hand.
***
21 February 2001
The Piercing Brightness of Your Brow
Lay the lonely, wan, unstarlit
portrait of a graceless face
far away and hear the charming
secrets that maintained their place
deep inside that false appearance.
As the mask dissolves away,
see the bones behind its fearful
flesh—the process of decay
that serves a purpose one can only
view sidelong without alarm
has drawn apart the mouth that moaned and
thus reveals the perfect charm
animated by this act of
revelation: This YOU ARE
waits everywhere the bitter fact of
body complicates the star-
begotten secret message you were
sent to learn to read between
the lines of your unwritten future.
Now a light of tender green
radiance inspires old knowledge
to the forefront of the skull
where a mass of pulp, a pall of
sightless eyes, would render dull
all the freely-granted glow of
vividly enchanted lore
you once watched your own eyes throw as
streams of sparks that shone the more
entrancingly because you felt the
full extent of its command
serve you. While you would have knelt and
sacrificed yourself, the grand
imagining it brought you plainly
demonstrated that its goal
was reached the moment you attained to
waking knowledge of the role
you required of one another.
When you seek your mirror now,
you find only that which utter
emptiness reveals: Wide brow
of golden starlight, everlasting
gleam of pure astonishment,
fleshless in the bright spell-casting
light your song of praise has sent
ranging out across the ether,
he has stood behind—inside—
the never quite existent piece of
bone that draws the changing tide
through the starry ocean-sky in
elemental floods to you
through the power of the eye he
lends, whose gaze is deep and true—
through the penetrating love, the
all-dissolving magic charm
that you sang to rediscover
why you meant apparent harm
to the person who was always
not the one she seemed to be.
She saw herself a lightless fallen
creature of a stricken tree;
now she rises unconcealed, in
perfect recollection, wide-
awake—and he is still revealing
who this is he lives inside
by the brightness of a ray of
emerald that permits the eye
on either side to penetrate the
place where perfect beauty lies.
Lay aside the faulty portrait
loneliness could never view,
delineated for the pure immortal
eye whose light is you.
Let him, by the starry stroke of
midnight that his presence brings,
mirror you the soul whose broken
mask gives way to all that sings.
***
22 February 2001
The Drowning Tear of Why
The brilliant pool of quietness you are
in which a million silver stars are seen
to shine as in the plain of heaven far
above the fading glow of twilight’s green
horizon—how you open here in me
a place of song in which most sacred words
rise high in starry swarms and sing to be
their counterparts transformed to silver birds
that fly reflected in a pool of tears,
an inland sea of deep salt water I
have made for you, a sacrifice of clear
benign intent, a place that meets the sky
but reaches into depths as yet untold
where soaring birds and stars alike may dive
and mingle with rare dreams of manifold
significance and bear them home alive
within the whispered syllables that shine
among their feathers and the rays of green
that fill its body to the waterline
and leak across its edge into unseen
dimensions blades of grass and pebbles tell
appear between them, tenanted with ghosts
and breathless beings who contrive new spells
of silence all along the salty coast
a single teardrop drying on the ground
becomes when viewed from far too near by those
who sharpness has been whetted by the sound
of keening by a creature whose repose
has long since learned to torture living sleep
with visions of a world in which the air
is rife with lonely reasons to drink deep
of tainted waters salted by despair.
The ghosts who mass around her as she lies
contorted on the plane of dewy grass
in which they whisper serious replies
to her complaints know all of this will pass
the moment her harsh breathing dries the tear
her too-near vision magnifies, a sea
of infinite illusion. When the clear
pale twilight glow and starlight meet the tree
within whose fragrance all of this has been
enacted, she will surely raise her head,
confront her real surroundings, and the green
though silent light will still the morbid dread
fantasms she has self-created. One,
the largest, most distorted, was the flood
that sought to drown her. Once it had begun,
its fearful touch, the warmth of her own blood,
convinced her that her way was truly lost
and that she would be best advised to sink.
The tiny spell it was, and yet it cost
long wordless effort. Tears it brought
to drink
comprised it altogether—nay, one drop
of her own weeping. That was all that lay
before her. Now she feels her heart nigh stop,
as all the traces of the fading day
and all the early stars of velvet night
combine to swim the depths of water sweet
and crystalline song-sources leak. Their light
is lapping at the edges of her feet,
and overhead, their voices also shine
as words they bring toward her surface thought
complexly meet and blend. They intertwine
with joyful tears, the waters they have brought
to fill her eyes in which the forms of birds
of silver rising moonlight sail and dive.
Within, before, above her—sacred words
are singing: This is why you are alive.
***
She drifts, at peace. The midnight hour arrives.
She wakens, and the waves of starry skies
above her gleam resolved. She softly strives
beneath you as you fill her aching eyes.
***
23 February 2001
At the Edge of the New Moon’s Water-Skies
Mysterious beckoning edges of distance resolve
in your eyes with the way you appear
through the flickering aura of stars in a mist that
dissolves all around me and shows me that here,
where I woke up and found myself, always held secrets
that acted as lenses my secret selves used
to reveal to my dreams what was always completely
apparent and fair and could not be refused—
even questioned—so perfect it was, so forgivingly
tender of aspect, so shiningly strong
as it blazed like a star in the night on the living
pond waters where all the resources of song
lie in wait, a refinement of oceanic passion the
cup of my palm is enough to contain,
a deep starry eye that is framed with dark lashes
like reeds where the edge of the marsh meets the rain-
flooded harbor of inland sea waters. Within
them, within their small wavery mirror, bright sparks
of electric green fire catch my eye. The beginning
of much deeper music—a drone with a stark
hollow tone at its center—has heard me. So
chilling its sudden vibrations—but then how sublime
in a way I can scarcely describe without willing
my mind into places that reek of a time
beyond telling—until this began, this endeavor to
go there with words in my mouth—not alone,
but accompanied by the nightmarishly clever demands
of the voice that continues to drone.
It hears me, the will at the core of that morbid
entrainment of layer on layer of air
rendered dark and contorted, and somehow brings forth
a sustained revelation: This every-nowhere
that is calling me into its zone of derangement is
timelessly beautiful, even as I
am possessed of a horror that sees the force changing
our future from deep, deep inside as we fly
through the element music is breathing around us.
You who were howling are now at my hand.
Who shall we choose to become? By the sound
that continues to haunt us, the far foreign land
at the back of the star—nay, the Moon—that is beaming
before us in waters as dark as the night
in a pond not as wide as my palm—by the meaning we
hear it unfolding, the secret delight
that was always here waiting—I say we shall rise
up as splendid and forceful as all we have heard,
as skilled in the craft of the oldest and wisest
invokers of magic possessed of the word
that inspires its own power as ever this ghost-world
has known, and as beautiful. You in my eyes
have revealed all the starlight of heaven:
It flows through your gaze and these lines, these inscribed water-skies.
***
24 February 2001
Song Averts the Wrong Conclusion
we shall see the fair way through
Morning in the daylight land I
dread—how will I see love there,
knowing that the eye my hand is
filled with winces at the air
scraped across it by a breeze the
Sun has dried and heated? We
remember how it was to be the
breathers of the undersea
tides a slender ray of moonlight
pierced with its enchanting glance.
When we felt it shifting, looming
large then small inside us, chance
meetings in another world were
shown to us in retrospect:
mirrors dreaming further, further,
further back. The true select
occasion of their searching never
showed itself directly, though
we glimpsed it by the pain our severed
senses of it brought us. Woe
parts us while it brings us forward
into one too-brilliant place
where the incandescence morbid
fever-dreams release through space
rakes us with its gilded finger-
nails as sharp as tiny knives.
Close me, mad enchantress, singer
sworn to moonlight—this will drive
everything that hates us into
pointed focus and the fore
where it will betray the window
daylight clearly means to pore
all too keenly into. Stare the
more intently into me,
you who are the wiser share of
what is now the woeful ‘we’
who are making so much noise when
all we mean to do is sing.
These are still nocturnal voices;
what will true broad daylight bring?
***
((())) 25 February 2001
Fast
A high starry splendor reads over my shoulder
and sees by superior insight the words
that are waiting to form and congeal like a glowing
inverted foreshadow: The trails singing birds
will soon trace across heaven where only a level
immensity, white and unwritten, now sways
are clear in your mind, though to me they are never
quite evident. After the fact of the praise
I will hear myself gladly proclaiming, a maddening
sense of my threshold existence will cast
a pall of the same shade of whiteness, a dampening
flag, on my ardor. The future flies past
like a flock of wild starlings while I am still
marking the crawling of too-present time with a heart
that imagines too much and too little and parses
its reasons as if they would fill out a chart
in the form of a magical harmony-pattern composed
by a thinker of very strong thoughts—
when all that YOU ARE is a spell I crawl after ahead
of my heartbeat. The names you have brought
into previous focus will fly through the open white
featherless reaches before and behind
the bright bodies of those who have yet to be spoken,
the soaring complexities clear in your mind,
whose flight is a wildness of lines intertwining
with future- and past-haunted pathways through air
that we breathe and rebreathe, sudden secrecy shining
the moment it finds itself thought of, a fair
ineluctable portent of music aborning throughout
the above-me-and-everywhere sky—
while I lower my eyes to the words that are forming
inside me beneath the place warmed by the sly,
almost palpable humor your smile pushes through me.
It presses my shoulder, or slightly below—
the quickening heart-beaten rush of a looming immensity.
Gathering wings against snow
writing backwards—nay, that is its progress; its
tracks are in order; your own eyes are closed and you sway
very slightly, deep-breathing and showing a lack
of restraint that is making me shiver. You say,
‘The plane of the white iridescence, the lining that
skies a most brilliant inverted sea-shell,
is your usual habitat here; you are mine in this
ocean that I know you know all too well.
Birds flock to this element. Aye, they are
telling the glory they find here to all who will breathe
of the music they fan with their wings as they spell-bind
with intricate patterns, long series of wreathes
formed of spiraling windings’ song-lyric designings,
a feather-described multifarious frame
that scales on and on as I stand here delighting
in each of its indwellers’ self-whispered names—
which you are beginning to see enter into accord
with the power their flight through the high
shining dome of the mother of pearl shell sends
spinning along with their wheelings, foreshadowing why
you will come to this meeting-place even when weeping
white heavens hang woefully low, and you cast
your most longing, aspiring glance into deep starry
space and it happens again, just this fast.’
***
26 February 2001
From my dream journal, 26 February, 9:47 am:
I look at a Tibetan carved jade ring of my father’s,
which he bought while he was in Tibet in the Air Force. The price he
paid, 1.85—though not in US dollars; an Asian currency; Japanese?—is printed
on a sticker inside it. I try it on. It is closed at the end,
like a thimble, long enough to reach past the lower joint of my middle or
ring finger, and carved delicately in a mesh pattern all over. Then
a Tibetan monk is with me. He initiates me by proxy on behalf of my
guru from a former life, who is not incarnate now. The ring belonged
to him, and has his name inside it. [I read it there, but was not able
to retrieve it.] The monk then gives me a delicate blue teapot that
was mine during the lifetime when I studied with my guru. It is a ceremonial
rather than a functional object, carved all over with raised notches like
petals—or feathers? It has a flower design—perhaps also bird?
He gives me a smaller carved jade object also, made of mottled green and
copper jade. He takes the ring back. He calls me ‘Hillary’ and
says that my Guru asks that I promise to obey my brother.
Written in the Flesh of Singing
dream-initiation song
Tell the woman you have haunted
what will fill the eye she holds
aching open. Now the want of
power shakes her with a cold
foreboding; that will turn to pleasure
soon when your concurrent fates
reveal one inward nature whether
viewed by Sun or Moon. Relate
completely; she must not interpret.
Do not mock her; only tell
why she has aspired to perfect
harmony with this, your spell,
and why you have at last been granted
leave to fly to her in words
the weight of which will fill her hands with
feathers and the living bird
amidst their charge of indigo and
violet iridescence who
is singing even now and show her
what is in the hollow You
she finds herself possessed with. Lying
open in her hand at last,
show her what you feel each time you
gaze at her and bind more fast
than ever this long act of dreaming
she’s endured for music’s sake
and yours and let her feed a stream that
feeds an ever-deepening lake
twilight stains its heaven-color
while it draws upon the light
it finds before it: darker—fuller—
shining from the ancient heights
where stars are rooted, stretching into
places never touched by day—
tell her all the power within you
means to fill her sight and stay.
Fly to her forever through the
indigo of dusk as stars
assemble and the rising Moon comes
singing into you from far
away. You mean complete enchantment:
While she gazes soft and long,
let her see your written answer
in the flesh and hear its song.
***
A Profoundly Auspicious Magical Dream:
From my dream journal, 27 February, 3:50 am--
The very end of WWII: I lie in bed watching
a group of German officers and their wives in a nightclub. The main
course at dinner is human flesh, as it has been for some time. It is
becoming apparent to the point that no one can deny it any longer; the color
and texture of the meat are now impossible to disguise. Soon after
the Germans start talking openly about it, they reach a decision: They
decide that they will commit suicide en masse. They all load up onto
buses and head for a US Army camp. They begin their suicide procedure
on arrival. A soldier admits the buses through the gate in the night
or very early morning, shushing a little dog that barks, waking everybody
up. He is amazed when he realizes who they are, and even more so when
I tell him why they are there: They didn’t have time to commit suicide
prior to the Allied invasion of Germany, so they made use of the travel time
between there and the US base—‘to get the job done,’ I explain.
Oh yes, there are verses. I will add them
in another week or so.
***
28 February 2001
EARTHQUAKE DAY
A few nights ago as I was meditating before a mirror, gazing into the darkness above my head, I saw a circle or some slightly disjointed curves formed of sparkling blue-violet stars.
I live within an earthquake zone. The one
today will probably be described as the Seattle Earthquake, but it was very
powerful here.
How the Stars Came Shining
The chiming of lights in an aura above you, above
me—the shimmering blue-violet stars
as a soft breathing murmurs its secrets—they’ve moved
through a vast nonexistence to be where we are
and will not fade away, having come for this purpose:
the waking of multiple counterparts deep
in the pit, the dank shadowy room, at the furthest
recess of the eye that lay tangled in sleep,
overrun with innumerable visions and incomprehensible
snatches of music and prose.
It lies now so wide-open—it sees the stars linking
outstretched arms of bright half-round crescents that grow
every moment more vividly present. Until they
descend—but they have; now the secret eye shines
with the same spirit color. The rapture that
spills from it strongly involves us in brilliant designs
we will never escape from, nor wish to. They
shudder inside me; your hand, which is locked in my own,
is most tenderly trembling. Come lie with
me under the deepest love spell we will ever have known:
The lore of all worlds is conveyed across timeless
and formless dimensions in less than a glance,
less than a heartbeat; how much will we find in
this moment, who’ve felt a whole universe dance
in a circle, a wheel that revolved and enwound us
the while we were drawing its bright powers in
by our willful desire to be part of the sound of
its musical breathing, ourselves in a spin
we attracted until we became? We were secrets;
in spite of ourselves, we could never quite read
the clear signs that WE ARE, the auspicious, completely
intentional gestures our own beauty breeds,
though we thought we were searching with heartfelt
abandon. I felt it arrive, the more powerful sight,
by means of a shower of stars. They will dance
at the core of my vision forever. The light
that will always sustain them is timelessly present
right now, as it has been—the hand that you hold
will no longer lie sleepily blinking. Joined
crescents of glittering starlight have woken a gold
ray of otherworld sunlight where music is shining
like water from out of ethereal skies
and the dew of it lists through this room as the
chiming subsides very slightly and murmurs and sighs
fill the space that was taken already with new forms
of musical magic—and you are their voice
as you breathe very softly above me the lore you
are learning of still further ways to rejoice.
.
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**