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AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island
February 2002
1 February
2002
Yes, You Will
Oh, the most
chilling ray of sunshine
clings to my
eyelids still—I gasp
just to recall
the sad uncanny
magic that bent
the rusty hasp
in prizing the
lock wide-open—now it
never can be
locked tight again.
Shadows of ghastly
fever-frowners,
beings of sundry
styles of pain,
ruins of angels—all
transfigured
instantly:
These attest to great
efforts received
and reconsidered
unto the glare
of very Fate.
You who have
met this moment forming
out of thin air—your
glow sings loud,
shining beyond
the sunbeam-portal
into my soul’s
most secret cloud
where only a
holy host of angels
shaken awake
by fever’s chill
have so far outshone
my day-dreams’ strangeness.
No, you have
not—but yes, you will.
***
The Rescued
Spark
As the dewy
chill of morning
rises into mist
and cloud-
formations, you
behold a stormy
landscape from
a shining-browed
perspective.
While that liquid weather
seethes for rain’s
release, I pine
for something
truly altogether
strange.
Where subtle fires refine
and temper weightless
matter, song is
brewing—I have
heard its hiss
brimming at the
lip belonging
to the author
of the kiss
of magic on the
brow of lightning-
afterglow, the
shield of gold
that yields to
me its haunting brightness.
Deep beneath it,
I am cold
but confident
that this is where the
miracle YOU ARE
will flare
and bring to
fever pitch the faery
gold that
rings through our world’s air.
When I hear it,
I will gesture;
you will nod
and sing me more.
Thus between us
we shall rescue
yet another spark
of lore.
***
2 February
2002
The Blessed
Ones
A baleful weight
once hung inside the heart
you bore toward
its grave like rusted steel
that bled but
did not circulate; that part
now streams with
light. Old scars completely heal
and recent wounds
blush rosy red and sing.
A pasture richly
sown with summer grass
and flowers bounds
a central faery ring
where we will
soon be dancing. Let us pass
beyond a thousand
thresholds deep inside
our mystery’s
defining aureole
and reach the
shining presence you felt glide
alive in you
when you were just a foal
and each of its
clear-spoken words rang wild
and clear to
your heart’s hearing. Let its beat
be yours like
these lines’ message: ‘Shadow-child,
pure magic’s offspring,
weightless on your feet
and happy in
the swiftly streaming round,
a human-blood-stain
woken to a rill
of quickened spirit,
circulate the sound
of song YOU ARE
and send it with a will
to learn the
deeper ways of darkness-art
by means of our
incantatory grace.’
I shall hear
your strongly beating heart
become the voice
of this most hallowed place
and dance beside
you, even to the verge
of silence and
the grave’s collapsing walls—
then far beyond
them. We shall re-emerge
in light when
outer darkness sadly falls—
but our deep
light is shadowy, a Moon
that casts a
secret aureole of dread
about its dearest
worshippers. The tune
it sings, an
invitation to the bed
of beauty’s underlying
strangeness, wails
your name inside
its heart of hearts. You see
what made you
feel so heavy? Those were nails
that hung your
body on the hope of me
when rusty metal
undertook to bleed,
half knowing what
lay waiting here inside:
the magic that
recalls your heart to speed
where we move
lightly, powerfully allied.
This ring comprises
all the living field
of heaven, rich
with blossoms and green blades—
and love's most
sacred everlasting yield,
our Moon's wild
lore. Oh, we are blessed shades.
***
3 February
2002
A Further Way
to Go
Once, when
these bones bore shining feathers,
we lay along
a cold white branch
twining our hands.
Our song was endless.
We were inspired
to dream and dance
awake in a place
of vivid beauty,
truly the home
of our desire.
How could we
leave—and why?—but moonlight
shone on us brightly
while we sighed
our sad lives
away and pined for nightfall’s
wing to withdraw
the heavy breath
from our unwanted
bodies, fan it lightly
away toward home
again, and let
our true senses
re-inspire each other—
oh, and they
have, while we yet live.
Strange that
your faith should call me lover—
bones resume feathers,
flesh the gift
of ecstatic dance,
snow the grace to mantle,
moonlit, the
tender branch that sways
as we entertain
a divine enchantment’s
brightly intensified
embrace
and a wild wind
rises. Though the tree be
riven asunder,
we shall move
swiftly toward
our only meeting-
place—though we
know it now as love
and are home
at its heart, a winter palace
that sparkles
with patient seeds of spring
in each little
snowflake’s silver chalice
of lifted magic.
You fan your wings;
I ride on your
music’s rising current
where numberless
branches interlace.
How shall I dream
such beauty further?
Where is your
yet more shining face….
***
5 February
2002
The Wholly
Naked Ghost
Round and round,
without so much shining
down as profoundly
gleaming within—
further me now.
How dewily I shall
dream you a little
cloak of skin
littered with
stars and snowflakes of moonlight—
beauty so strange
its glance will appeal
deeply and long
to love in its hugely
passionate form—and
then you will feel
the saving grace
of its lorn attention’s
languid ease
as it wavers between
mournful hope
and the Moon’s elemental
magic come beaming,
deeply seen
by the dewy eyes
your fine cloak of darkness
slips away to
reveal—the eyes
of each flake
of snow, each trace of starlight
spiraling home
through the midnight skies
YOU ARE and will
always be—no stranger
here to the face
of beauty most
sacred and wise,
my elevated
dreamer and wholly
naked ghost.
***
6 February
2002
Until You Make
the Sign
Wheeling and
dancing feet keep turning
round in the
subtle cast of mind
where song is
inspired the while the burning
sign of your
halt and almost blind
decision’s reversal
deigns to view me,
holding itself
aloof until
my shocked recognition
feels its truest
wisdom engage
the counter-skill
my spirit possesses
all throughout this
silent dimension
where we glide,
shades among
flames that lightly sound our
own sacred reaches
till the bride
of one of us
turns to face the other,
both of them
wheeling fast, spellbound.
Always, my fey
aspired-to lover,
beckons a strangeness
more profound,
a beauty more
rapt and incandescent—
darkly, in this
lambent shadow-zone.
All my true world
hangs on the blessing
deep in your
eyes, my sacred own.
***
7 February
2002
Subliminal
Wisdom
The quaking
leaves of the cunning mountain
foliage cast
a shadowed way
all the length
of this ancient downhill
landscape where
random sunbeams play
ready confusion
out in glancing
pieces amongst
which you fly fast
until you are
unsurrounded. Dancing
dreams told you
this would lead at last
to where we were
meant to flow together
home through the
age-old riverbed
under the waiting
shadow-lettered
blanket of song’s
self-weaving thread
into the heavy
darkness of the
passageway lying
open there
waiting to call
its erstwhile lover
out of the carefree
mountain air
into the shrouded
hall of shadows
under the dreadful
quaking leaves
haunting you
on all sides. What sadder
morning awaits
you here deceives
your waking-day
senses—such a question
fades in the
distance as you soar
headlong toward
the great love-lesson
darkness has
always held in store
for only the
most intrepid dreamers.
We are among
them now, we two.
What would you
have pure magic teach us
first? My
ambition only you,
I’ve no further
need to study—yet I
shall, with your
shadow by my side
under the mountain’s
softly lettered
mystery, my true
spirit-guide.
When I have made
such great advancement
only the welcome
death I call
out of its ancient
lair can dance me
into a further
state of thrall,
even in that
extreme condition
you will be dancing
with me. Know
only my song,
and death’s—our wisdom
waits to receive
you here below.
***
8 February
2002
Within Your
Heart’s Dark Eyes
Sadly wait
for the drift of sighing
you have heard
in the late and soon
dreaming lake
where your footsteps fly to
take their leave
of an afternoon
pale as watery
sunshine under
heavy cloud layers.
Veil and part
the enchanted
space of your lonely wonder-
lavishing secret
hiding-heart;
prize with delicate
hands and trembling
fingers the being
breathing there
under the lake’s
calm waters; gently
lift it against
the midnight air—
this is the darkness’s
solemn altar
hanging between
the deep and still
places of breathing
air and water.
Happy the little
creeping chill
lifting the hairs
along the surface
of your damp
skin and that upon
the face that
so very plainly murmurs,
Let us be lovers
here and gone….
Happy the falling
stars and drowning
hours as the
Moon sways overhead;
happy the heart
that beats profoundly
woken in flight
and water-wed,
more than a veiled
obsession nearer
that which has
haunted all its dreams,
gazed on in longing
by the weary
burden of sad
pond-lily seams
splitting apart
between white petals:
Open your eyes,
my heart’s dark lair
of infinite ease
of elemental
magic—and I shall
take you there.
***
9 February
2002
Every Day
When the bright
snow melts and the fragile bridge of
ice over which
our spirits fly
to each other’s
arms has become a stitch of
incarnadine thread
among a sly
field of pulsating
fibers—aye, the precious
causeway of warm
and willing life
taken to whet
a dreadful stretch of
realer and realer
flensing knife,
ill-brandished
discernment—then the chill of
too-thorough sight
dissolves the bone
and it runs dead
cold until through a film of
snowlight I struggle
all alone—
then over a bridge
of gleaming whiteness
you rush to meet
me. Where we are
is always a wheel
of ceaseless, timeless
emergency turned
a bit too far.
***
10 February
2002
The Rescued
Page
When you first
ran your dripping fingers
over my skin
at a hectic dance-
of-abandon pace,
I was crumple-winged.
Now I am almost
a circumstance
of surrendered
wisdom, a vile creation
rendered arcane
by a thousand small
but precise attentions.
Clearly stated
knowledge has
drawn about me all
but the few and
fragile remaining flakes of
beautiful snow
that soon will drip
from your out-held
hands at the rapid pace at
which words are
bound to give the slip
to the talking
plane. I am almost singing,
a being whose
wise and steady light
shines as feather-bright
as your own fine fingers,
legible even
while taking flight….
***
12 February 2002
Melted in My Hand
The streaming
hollow where liquid metal
pours from my
hand—is this I say
a vatic piece
of an ancient riddle
echoing down
a mournful way
of erstwhile abandon?
Oh, it shocks me
more than a little,
this is true—
why would I twist
apart a locket,
fraught to regain
a trace of you,
knowing long
bygone nightmares reckon
sadly against
me? Listen on:
We shall transform
the past that beckons
madly and then
in flames is gone,
leaving a stream
of molten silver
bright as a Moon
where love holds sway.
Seek and true
love will lend fulfillment.
Lean and receive
all love will say.
***
13 February
2002
A Soul of Song
Only the ghost
of endless longing
eerily bent beneath
a tree
of Moon-swollen
blossoms knows the song of
pain beyond mortal
mystery
that opens the
world at true enchantment’s
core, where no
body hangs its head;
no word is spoken
prose-wise; dancing
leaps from its
birth-death cradle-bed
and sets its
this-moment bones a reeling:
Such is the ghost
you woke in me.
Now I shall find
the world that feels our
magic and moves
to set it free
to holy degrees
of beauty we could
never attain alone.
Dear soul,
terrible pain
was borne to be you;
now you are song’s
own longed-for goal.
***
14 February 2002
Happy St. Valentine's Day
These are Valentines for two differently-admired
ones.
The first is for the friend who died. The
second is for someone who struck me as utterly beautiful two days ago.
I hope they both receive them.
Breathe Yourself to Me
Secret soul-illuminated
whisper on a wind of far
and glowing darkness, dream of patient
ether wound about a star
of strong potential, beauty rumored
always to arise so near
and yet so hard to find, the soothing
coolness of the lunar sphere
that hangs in song-enchanted space
behind night’s eyes—that night-wind grows
in strength and grace and words take shape
upon its breath because it knows
true love bestows its ghostly crooning
everywhere its song can reach.
Whisper of the glowing Moon where
song is true love’s only speech,
song arises where you cast your
least and rarest spirit-trace.
All my heart there sighs, collapsed and
shaken by the scale of grace
your words command as beauty breathes and
sings a soul that shines so bright.
All I AM is magic seething
softly to receive your light.
***
Winter's Heart Turned Inside-Out
Branches weave a holy forest’s
living leafy page of green
high overhead as more and more
dimensions open up between
the words that light a secret cavern’s
darkness at the page’s heart.
In it, I am dancing. Shadows
cast throughout the deepest part
of winter have arrived at something
very like the ghost of spring.
Where I dream, I AM—I’ve come
to understand the words I sing
as living elemental magic
woven overhead; please feel
the greenly-lettered spell we cast
and know that we are yours and real.
***
15 February 2002
Deeper Than Bone
The plane is cold clay; roads like bone hands
disturb the
wheel bent on its axle with outreaching claws.
How can I help you to wander this world of
delusion where so many riddles and laws
deal out so many heartaches and so few disasters
reverse the unfortunate influence spread
through the morbid ideas that cluster and fasten
malevolent hooks in the back of the head
that hangs fixed, facing into the eyes of its nightmare?
Aye, you have found me at last: Don’t you
know
I am more than a figment—a filament—frightful
to dream in advance, but ecstatic to flow
into gathering thunderstorm visions in tune with
while hovering outside the rim of the wheel
that crawls all rutted Earth like a burden on beauty’s
crushed spine? In my eyes, you are beauty so
real
it must never be sacrificed. Seek your reflection
in me, and within its deep eyes, you will find
the return of the faith that rewards the perfection
of longing you’ve shown. It will hasten to
bind
your most powerful gaze to a source of ideas
so deep in their truthfulness, love will arrive
to inhabit the being who faces you. She dreams
your soul, though she wore a nightmarish disguise
as old as the world that surrounded you even
a moment ago. Dear one, where are you now?
Caught in the web of the dream she’s been weaving,
softly transfixed by the light of her brow,
cloaked in the folds of the love-revealed garment
she’s brought home to you from far heaven—this place
where your spirit now flows close beside her.
This marvel
of love-woken magic is yours to embrace:
She who sings IS—and I AM her voice on this plane
of
apparent disasters whose stars light a sky
of once-terrible shining, reversing the pain of
your being and bringing home joy on the sigh
of the song you inspire. When you traveled
the distance
between looming shadows, you felt so alone,
but whose hands always led you? A nightmare
whose wisdom
has bound you to love that runs deeper than bone.
***
16 February 2002
The Muse of Everywhere
Oh, what a roving eye will get you:
over the twilight billows, grey
mountains of storm-clouds mass, a weather
bringing me very much to say—
and not in plain prose. Most shining streak
of
lightning within those veils of gloom,
why have I not—love-sickness leaking
out of a night-dark eye, a loom
whose shuttle of silver thread goes flying
over my head, a heaven-sea
locketing countless dreams of brightly
molten love-telling mystery—
learned to regard your presence only,
casting no glance aside? My dear,
music is our world’s weather—holy
everywhere always, always here.
***
17 February 2002
Cloaked in Timeless Night
The cloth of uncanny stars
that blossom above your head
unswathes newly mended scars
and tenders a love thought dead.
Luminous eyes upon
the darkness of silent space
decidedly soothe the fond
and delicate dream-embrace
that lingers within your mind’s
primordial central spring
where all that is pure and fine
combines in the song you sing
to call the far loved one home
from where he’s been hiding. Night
shines from his eyes. His soul,
cloaked in song-petaled light,
beams you a path your feet
fly along. Starry sky,
dreamer both strong and sweet,
hear my sung un-goodbye.
Touch me upon the brow
of midnight where high stars flare.
No little-noble ‘now’
curtains this everywhere.
***
18 February 2002
Here Is Where
Where was your hand when your answer—unwilling
and fragmented—sprang half-alive to my lips,
drifted just slightly, then sang itself, filled with
a watery light that escaped? It still drips
off and on through the measures I dream—do you hear
them?
Where is your hand, and the work of its nights?
Only survivor of something so eerie
it shudders me ceaselessly, call from the heights
of your harrowing portion of magic and help me
deliver us both from oblivion’s grin.
No spirit lights its dead eyes; no compelling
engagement with rapture assails its cold skin;
no reunion of opposite voices—resolved and
aligned—sings its emptiness. Where? In
your eyes
hides a spring of wild light. I am gladly involved
in
its shining. It sings through a series of
cries,
and I find myself drawing its likeness all over
a page the pure hue of the ominous Moon
as it struck you and loosened your tongue once forever.
Your hand is in mine as we mingle in tune.
***
19 February 2002
Although It Has Taken So Long
You once wove a story so much longer
than all my old minds could comprehend
that only its scattered bits of song could
stay with me, make, and slowly send
luminous dreams, all snow and moonlight,
into the world before my two
organs of mortal vision. Soon I
caught sight of something swirling—you
were dancing, just out of perfect focus,
singing a few stray—no, intent
and magical—words that found me woken
several degrees nearer full assent
to what I had so acutely wanted
always but feared to call out loud.
When have I ever not been haunted?
You in your snow-white moonlight shroud
steadily move in closer, closer—
I start to shiver. Song of sky
longer than all known worlds, composed by
lovers who need not wonder why
so little music meets the heaven-
breath or the sight of mortal eyes
such beauty alone inspires, please tether
stronger your song’s unwoven ties
to far shining planes and shimmer brighter
into my field of vision. Strands
we’ve yet to sing—but will—hang lightly
out of your magic-brimming hands,
each in its proper key and balance
draping the form of very fate.
All of me comes to focus: All of
you has arrived, and not too late.
***
20 February 2002
It's always there; it's just that sometimes I
am in no fit condition to do it justice. The fever mentioned in this
tiny song is no metaphor. One standard dose of aspirin, and my ears
are ringing like mad. Everything has that shimmery, not-quite-delirious
edge. Other than some slightly aching bones, though, that's all.
Curious but true--ever since I started attending to this work every day, I
almost never become ill.
The Real Question
Hum, oncoming fever—tell me
what it is I need to know:
Why is wonder’s least compelling
reason mine to read and show
to one my Other, while its central
sacredness is so discreet,
it’s left me, or I’ve missed it? When we
faltered, was I off my feet,
sleeping out of dream-reach? Did it
summon me, and I not feel?
Broken to the wholly bitter
language of cold nerves of steel
unstrung like tangled bits of wire that
jangle—hum—then make their way
toward strange music…. Oh, its shining
presence—can I make it stay?
***
21 February 2002
The following is one of the most haunting lyrics
I have ever learned, and one that has never quite left my thoughts since I
first read it. It is by the Irish poet James Stephens. Below it
is what came to me this evening. When I heard the words 'I am searching
everywhere,' I knew it had come round again.
The Snare
I hear a sudden cry of pain!
It is a rabbit in a snare;
Now I hear the cry again,
But I cannot tell from where.
But I cannot tell from where
He is calling out for aid!
Crying on the frightened air,
Making everything afraid!
Making everything afraid!
Wrinkling up his little face!
As he cries again for aid;
—And I cannot find the place!
And I cannot find the place
Where his paw is in the snare!
Little One! Oh, Little One!
I am searching everywhere!
James Stephens
***
The Lost Twins
We are smoky pillars rising,
twining, in a crystal air
that shivers us. A dream entices—
I am searching everywhere—
you are right beside me. When we
meet again, we stare and sigh.
No one out of all the tens of
thousands—and we know not why—
until we do, and then a certain
equipoise rejoins our minds.
Out of dreaming—draw the curtain
wide—what our conclusion finds
is two white twining incense pillars
fading into empty air—
and music, so much music. Children,
I am searching everywhere.
***
22 February 2002
Across Long Mortal Years
Slowly, drenched with leaking meadows’
sly designs, in broad daylight,
I am finding out the weather-
woken reason for the flight
of song across the seasons of the
years that these are clearly now.
You and I, my secret-lover,
need sustain the ancient vow
through which we seek to claim one moment’s
tidal wave of change with one
dramatic angel-gesture. Frozen
vestige of a setting Sun
in underwater chambers, rise to
find me on the edge of bliss
where slipstreams run through fields of shining
increase: Ours forever, this
luxuriance of green and spilling-
over water-splendor, weeds
whose slow designs bear my own will and
yours combined in tiny seeds
of future leafy oceans. Always
reaching to a higher air
by means of living water-hallways
streaming song our secrets share,
I have sought and soon will find a
passageway throughout this field
where solar-lunar music winds its
liquid light about the yield
of sacred weather—you amid its
precious central wave in tears
of subtle ecstasy, a little
stream of song across long years.
***
23 February 2002
The Proof of Mediumship
Little folded-paper locket-
lining, drawn with stars of gold
and silver ink, feel free to mock all
reason while your measures hold
a tangible inquiry caught in
syllables that sight a grace
then run home shining-eyed and fraught with
magic from a lanterned place
to hang around my neck, a molten
dewdrop from a dancing void
through which our glances stream and souls are
gold and silver, unalloyed
yet seamlessly combined. On paper,
knowledge glows with feeble light.
Though you are by these folds misshapen,
don’t I read your soul aright?
***
24 February 2002
Hope Against Hope
I shall always hunger and thirst for winter
in long thin splints of pine-needle light
though I have carried that lantern’s kindred
desire grown a thousand times as bright
without falling down in its flame-rays’ passage
over my corpse’s cerements
to let us become one threshold-message
driven abroad as blended scents,
a breath-conflagration’s blasted landscape
laid over inward banks of snow—
but if such is my angel’s windswept manner
of making the spark within me grow
so hugely inspired it casts a shadow
high as the storm clouds overhead
bearing more singing winter-rapture
home—shall I hope to wake up dead?
***
25 February 2002
Before working yesterday, I learned that an acquaintance
had met with a terrible accident--he was burned when a propane tank exploded
and instead of dropping to the ground and rolling to smother the flames,
he ran. He was still alive at that time, but his propects were poor
because of the extent of third-degree burns over his torso. Yesterday's
work was not 'about' him, but it shows how responsive I am to my environment
in spite of sometimes appearing to work in a vacuum.
Which Side Are You On?
How shadows beat, like a wrist whose thorn-clad
skin bleeds with each and every knock
on a door that hangs lightly open—more than
many a triple-bolted lock
has laid itself open here this midnight.
Witness the best of those who pray—
angels whose long love tokens glitter,
silver-clad thorns alike the fey
Moon-wavering secret spirit-language
dripping from each one’s woken tongue
as we stand deathly silent, hanging
heart-beaten while a river’s sung
down bodies of endless twisted vines whose
leaves amid thorns hold sacred lore
within easy reach. Step forward, shining
darkness, and meet what we are for.
***
26 February 2002
Whirl-Winding Pathway Home
Whirl you are, with a central spiral
cantering down a narrow line
that lightens your way until a final
threshold whose entry-steps define
the first and the second measures of the
ancient remembered presence here
shining as incandescent love-of-
learning before a sudden clear
and utterly blood-desired song-portent
standing upright—a mortal man
in this secret inward fleshless quarter!—
woman, become the one who can—
raise living lightning out of ocean-
reaches, conceive by its flashing stare
a way to reverse long-spiraled motion,
bearing hard into open air,
and face the far counterpart whose meeting-
moment is song’s harmonic key.
This you recall has always been the
address of dreamful mystery;
canter across its threshold into
where an abiding answer dwells.
Resonance lights his lips and skin, all
endlessness couched in counter-spells.
***
27 February 2002
We're working on something like a magickal act
of manifestation....
This Should All Be Yours
How bright you are, while a faint down-hearted
sigh darts across my lower lip—
a demand on sighting a long-departed
luminous angle’s anchored ship
in view of a port of noble entry.
Cunningly fashioned, softly read
in low golden tones, these words commence to
lead you to chase the bloody thread
inwoven throughout the old, old story
laid open here. Oh, come inside
this holy-ghost-ocean’s transitory
resting place laid upon a tide
that serves as its own heart’s bleeding harbor.
Here mingled voices ought to shine
brightly upon its breakers, darkness-
art’s angel-maker’s twisted line
spin out its real glory—rise up—shiver
into my words’ immense domain
where watery shadow-songs deliver
miracles ever more arcane—
and you receive haunting inspiration
over the waves of every sense
that’s ever possessed you. Ghost-forsaken
soul, your innate love-eloquence
sounds clearly across the needless distance.
Where is the touch that draws out sighs
that bleed like a thread of heart’s own essence?
Never between these parted thighs.
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