AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

January 2001
 

***

1 January, 2001
 

Happy New Year
 

This is for someone who may be perplexed by what he finds here.  As always, my advice is to read the lines as if they were prose at first, parsing them carefully until the surface meaning is clear, and then to hear them as song until their deeper meanings begin to arise.  Ask, Who is speaking?  Where are they, in which world are they standing?  Who is 'you'?
Who am 'I'?
 

The Song of Your Eurydice
 

At the call of the dream-whispered song on the breeze that the leaves are entranced by, the shuddering vines
that enlace the long tower below me completely release their veiled secrets.  Perceive them as mine
as I sing this to you, this once-nightmarish lullaby rendered most sweetly benign and intent
on your healing and gathering strength to rise fully and see what the course of our story has meant
heretofore, behind all the disguises and riddles that vexed you away from the unpeaceful sleep
you once hungered for.  Listen to me while the mid-heaven music the breeze is alive with brings deep
consolation along with impeccable wisdom to places in you that are woefully slow
to respond, lest they be driven mad by strange whispers from low-lying lands where such lunacy glows
that it comes as--too perfect a mirror, too clear and precise a reflection of what has no eyes
while it buries its face in its pillow and fearfully prays to its angels to limit the size
of the demon it hears itself summoning under its prayer-scented breath where a hint of the grave
is smelt yawning already.  Morbidity runs like a feverish hum through the decadent cave
of its brain, within which a white screen, where a vatic procession of formal harmonic divine
apparitions joins forces with swift but erratic unnamable entities, suddenly shines
with a glow that transfixes its total attention.  Amidst the array of most evident shapes
on the screen, one is very diminutive, gentle, and beckoning.  This creature pleads for escape
as it hangs on the hope of your notice.  My music is meant to entrance you, but also provide
a safe vantage point where you might view the most lucid inhabitant all the vast underworld hides
as it searches its visions and dreams for a glimmer of you, its salvation, its unanswered prayer.
You move past the hesitant series of limits within which you’ve breathed the same stifling air
for too greatly protracted a season--I feel you shift restlessly, seeking a way not to find
the unfortunate being I’ve called you to meet through the luminous depths of your own ancient mind,
but not searching with more than a hint of your powers.  The rest of your wondrous abilities rise
like the vines up the side of the white marble tower from which I am sending this signal that flies
like a ribbon of literate silk on the breath of a wind that means freedom to all that YOU ARE
should you choose to awaken at last and attend to the soul who has called you so long from afar.
That you will--I have looked to the end of this story and found inspiration enough to create
endless worlds, but they always converge on one portal and there, at that narrative turning-point gate,
there is always a being whose tears will be numbered the same as the breaths of your bodies as well
as the leaves of the vines that our dreams shiver under, so fraught with the hope of escape from the hell
that delusions of madness-averted have founded and locked with a key that true song alone knows
how to play through the air to the door where the pounding of heartbeats is heard that they quake as they go
in a tremulous file, an enchanted procession, among the green shadows that whisper their true
secrets now, even now as you lend your attention without hesitation to this song of you.
 

***
 

2 January, 2001
 

I don't know who this is for.  Perhaps I will never have to find out.
 

Waking Lullaby
 

I will cradle your head in the curve of my arm where the course of the river runs deepest and sigh
the strange words that bring longing and peace to safe harbor within you while over us both the night sky
is alive with the myriad listening stars that will sing us to sleep when my voice glides away
into spaces of eloquent silence and far-reaching shadows inside us awaken and play
childish games of high magic to beckon the future toward us, inspired by their limitless trust
in the vision that dreams and refines them, the luminous meaning behind all the sentient dust
we imagine ourselves to be made of.  We shimmer--the depths of your eyes meet the beam of my gaze,
and like fire out of heaven the ghost of a hymn bursts aglow in our minds and to both of us says,
‘You’ve been dimly aware of the words locked inside you; these words were among them, the shy sounds you hear
as you lie softly breathing the air that their brightness enhances with auras in which you appear
cloaked in polychrome light to each other while drifting together through gentle but deepening streams
and the dawn that lay hiding beyond all description comes whispering forward, revealing the themes
of the series of lingering measures and verses its heart has such aching desire to impart
that at last it has breached its long silence to murmur the message of which this is only the start....’
You were never quite mortal before, but the reason was always too near the forefront of my thoughts
to be spoken out loud.  Now the silvery season of Moon-whitened winter has finally brought
the fey spirit of strangeness that always possessed me whenever I stood in your shadow before
to full meaning inside me.  In view of the precious outlines of two angels who wait at the door
where we gaze into no other eyes but those glowing between us as deepening mysteries sing
these the words of ourselves through the quickening flow of a lyrical river that means everything
we might always have haunted unspoken, the ghosts of our own hopeless music, had not the kind stars
shone their secret bright colors inside us and opened this shimmering lay of the angel YOU ARE,
it resumes its enchantment:  ’A spark of ecstatic true glory is only beginning to flare...
I will cradle you into the morning the magic of childhood foreshadowed our future will bear.
 

***
 
 

3 January, 2001
 

A Measure of Uncertainty, Dissolved
 

Once you drove me down under a wave, a white towering column of drowning sea water, and ‘why’
shone unparalleled, pregnant with mystery, boundless confusion, and--somehow the glow of your eye
made me understand more than enough to relinquish my terrified hold on the lungful of air
that was keeping me slightly too buoyant to sink into what you were offering.  I would not care
to return to the body of land I abandoned at your strong behest all those eons ago.
I am sensing a mortal’s approach:  He is standing where colored lights flicker and dance as they throw
frantic shadows about him that rise up and over his head like the surge of the ocean where we
learned to breathe and converse in an air of devotion created by singing as one.  He sees me--
in his eyes is a questioning light too familiar to turn away from.  All my heart grants you this
recognition to keep as your own, yet the silvery essence of you, with its foretaste of bliss
that recurs in surprising new ways quite as often as I feel the last overwhelming subside,
seems to gesture to me with the same graceful softness as always, by means of the shadows that glide
in a strangely significant manner about him as he sadly breaks off his gaze.  Does he fear
what I doubt he can name, the long undersea-drowned look I offer him back, like a mirror too clear
not to fall and be lost in forever?  He shivers; I know it is cold to stand outside this way,
but a thousand times colder than even the river that winds through the underworld lands where a grey
ashen pall made of dense-bodied clouds blocks the lowering skies is the sea to one buried there dead
to the spirit I live by.  The wave that once towered above me then fell was abundantly fed
on a source of superior wisdom, the same one that nurtured the heart that emitted the glow
through the transparent smile of your eyes when you came into my yearning, terrified ken.  Does he know,
this new onlooker, how to survive in the liquid environment I am inseparable from,
does he know I can send my own ghost like a thick shade of your faery light to the place where it comes
into his waiting view, but cannot long remain there?  Terrestrial air is too feeble by far
to support the great range you have shown me we claim and control by the grace of the magic WE ARE
as it flows through the voices we join.  He is looking again--he can hear us.  He lowers his head.
You are taking the shape of a wave--I am crooking my finger to make the soft gesture that led
me to draw a deep breath underwater.  Oh music inside me, a mirrored-back calmness is mine
in which knowledge as deep as the ocean is looming:  His eyes are aglow:   He’s made your private sign.
 

***
 

4 January, 2001
 

Your True Fate
 

When you thought you were burning, a trace of the breath that was choking you wanted to make its escape.
You were trying to hold it till nothing was left, but the power inside you assumed a new shape
with new features, among them the will to breathe water, and when it asserted its purpose, you dove
and were suddenly peacefully quiet.  Your thoughts lay at rest for awhile, then they started to rove
in a curious quest for this strange place’s outline and threshold, although you had entered its heart
at its own invitation.  You heard a faint cry on the breeze you recalled as the most plangent part
of the song you were haunted by all the sad seasons of greening and dying through all the sad years
you half wanted to die--and then there was the reason you’d always refrained from enticing the shears
of a false fate to cut you off short:  There was singing to die for, and you had crossed over to be
held within it without even lifting a finger.  To breathe of these undersea waters with me
never violates anything real; it inspires a great will to continue to find the true words
to the music that dreams you out loud when it sighs in its sleep and you whisper the secrets you’ve heard
to your heart in return but then misplace on waking....  That waking away from their beauty is done.
You have chosen your future by deeply partaking of what love has offered.  A ghostly voice runs
through the infinite stream of all time.  You remembered the flow of the measures it carries, their grace,
their alignment with magic inside you whenever you let yourself; now you have come to the place
where the song of your spirit arises, no longer addicted to alien atmospheres.  Now
you are one with the source of the ocean of song as it dreams the new words that will strongly endow
you, the being who lies at its heart, with a listening wonder that finally knows why it came
into this form of spirit-possession.  A mystery deeper than breathing has called you by name
and is waiting to claim you entirely.  The being of beauty YOU ARE has the strength of  desire
to convey its sweet speech past the meeting of dreams and the dry daylight land and not want to expire
as you open your eyes.  This is yours altogether:  At last you have given yourself to the true
most immortally deeply-versed Fate and have let it reveal the pure source of love’s fire inside you.
 

***
 

5 January, 2001
 

You won't be sorry you came here today.
 

What Lay Trying Not to Hide
 

We are turning inside one another together in ways that are magic itself to disclose,
always searching for words to describe the deep weather of undersea dreaming in which the true rose
of immaculate scarlet proficiency blossoms.  No strangers are we to the heart of the air
it breathes forth as it glows under skies far birds cross in paired shadow-formations.  The music of rare
waking moments is there to be found, but a source that is richer and purer lies hidden within
the dark world I have opened for you by sheer force of desire.  You move so deeply under the skin
of its wrinkled grey surface, you might turn around and feel hopelessly lost, but lean forward and touch
what is there to be found and sink down and be drowned and....  Imagine yourself being wanted this much,
then remember the one who is singing.  The greenness of summer lights every long strand of seaweed
as the pulse of this world sways a watery wreath of their lithe stems and leaves at a gathering speed
about someone it views with the sure recognition a long spell of vatic love-learning has brought
to this world, for this purpose--to meet and then quicken the magical pace of the song beyond thought
he has already started to sense himself hearing.  He knew he was seeking a way to this place;
it was shifting about in its bed, ever nearer the heat of his magic in dreams, but his face
was still turned to a distant sky’s deafening thunder where no lightning flashes and storms on dry land
bring a scorching and desolate loneliness under which no one imagines the scope of the grand
multiplicity breeding itself into miracled millions of sweet scarlet petals before
giving way to exquisitely tender and clearly, triumphantly singular beauty the more
unmistakably real because this lies inside it:  the core of the song it exhales as the sea
that surrounds it insistently bids it confide its shy innermost secrets, its love-words, to me
that I might be inspired to transcribe and convey them across diverse elements, even the skies
where the fires of the Sun touch the feathers and faces of birds in their flight till its lonely light dies
and the Moon shines up out of the ocean where we lie united in mystery, one rose as red
as all love garnered unto itself where the real source of music has opened the folds of its bed,
one sea-flower surrounded by wreaths of deep emerald leaves, grown proficient in magic so strong
it permits--nay, requires--we disclose the live gem of its innermost heart in such form as this song.
 

***

6 January, 2001
 

From the time I was a very small child I have remembered and enjoyed talking about my dreams.  One that came when I was only three or four years old is still clear in my mind because it was both simple and haunting:  I am looking at an old lady who is sitting in a chair.  The image is either 'Whistler's Mother' or a variation based on that painting.  The scene is entirely black and white--but for a picture on the wall behind the woman.  It depicts flowers and they are in vibrant color, as if they were alive.  Somehow that remains the most candid snapshot of my life.
 

Flying Colors
 

Through a widening crack at the door I am flying, a shade misperceived on the black-and-white plane
but a shining array of most glorious lights that vibrate with a polychrome brightness that stains
the clear air where they sparkle with lingering traces that overlap each apparition with each
as they flow through a series of eloquent faces behind which I AM in the instant I reach
the elusive perspective from which I can see myself smiling, a carefree inhabitant--here.
Now the door gives a sharp click as I am still reeling away from the past toward all I hold dear
with a resolute firmness of will though the speed of my passage suggests lack of substance.  I know
how to flourish in more than one place, how to meet more than one domain’s standards, and how to let go
of the pretense that these are not really the same, even as I withdraw to the colorful side
of a seemingly obstinate panel.  The frame that surrounds it is where the real mystery bides:
Once a flowering tree, now three right-angled boards that define and protectively harbor--a hole;
once a sapling that ran with elixirs that poured themselves forth as green leaves and the lyrical soul
they respired in and out as they trembled and swayed in the wind, now an inwardly visible clue
as to where one might venture to find and partake of that same living air and the tree-given dew;
once the chosen beloved of lightning, the tree is now part of the smooth formal grace of a wall
with an uncanny function--to limit, yet ease one’s attempts to respond to the clear signal-call
that arises behind it and comes into being within its perceiver’s awareness by means
of such visions and dreams as the flight of the free disembodied enchantress whose vividly green,
purple, scarlet, and indigo shade passes nightly between the cracked edge of the door and the frame
with a rush as of flames or as wings that shine brightly and whisper about her the well-loved old name
of the one who is calling.  He stands in truth nowhere but everywhere:  All the real worlds, all the planes
both within and without the right-angled enclosure the wood of the burning green tree now maintains
with its resolute skeleton, tripartite rhythm and tender residual traces of wet
fragrant sap are the light of his eyes.  I have kissed him in each and glow vividly polychrome yet.
 

***
 

7 January, 2001

Who Is Singing Now?

In this vision, my fingers are wet.  I remember the blessing that brought me its sacrament’s dew
as I touch them together.  A ribbon with letters embroidered upon it floats into and through
the forefront of my thoughts, then is gone.  I am reaching toward the location it wavered by last
with a very weak hope--then an echo beseeches my audience.  I bow my head and it casts
the silk veil of its shadowy longing upon my distracted attention.  At once it begins
to glow steadily, vividly present.  The song it conveys is a lacework of needles’ and pins’
intervention and minute devising.  It shifts a thin, slow-spreading stain of fresh blood through the air,
one I loathe to recall but can never unlisten enough to pretend is not still--always--there.
You are singing again from the midst of a sickness that changes its aspect but never relents.
I am caught in its meshes as well, trailing sticky red fingerprints over the page where the blent
spirit-essence we dreamt of becoming yields tainted enlightenment laid out in miserable rows
we are human enough to approach with breath bated and nerves tautly quivering:  Aye, it all glows;
through the film of a bloody silk cerement, beauty is still unmistakably, potently fresh
and alive--even presently increasing.  Use me to show it to you, if need be, through the flesh
and the spirit I bow to the letter-edged ribbon that drips with astonishing mysteries.  See
why the touch of it finds me aligning the tips of my fingers with what it continuously
bleeds and shares.  Had I less of the female persuasion about me, this might prove impossible:  You
are about to describe to yourself how the grace of this very red sacrament garners its hue
from a bloom at the heart of the song spirit voices provide even where there is shame.  You will sing
to me softly the words bloody thorns have embroidered in ribbon-like rows and behold what they bring
to your thoughts’ very forefront and know it as pleasure that unfolds innumerable layers.  As each
is revealed in its turn, they grow deeper and wetter and scarlet-rose redder and finally reach....
You are staring at me and at last you are smiling.  My fingers are wet with the dew of the rose
you are offering forth as it drips and I shyly being to recite the long blessing that flows
through your eyes as a visible progress of lyrical symbols.  Your gaze is the silken white veil
of immaculate knowledge enshrouding me; hear me return your own words to the source of the tale
you have called me to locate within you this moment as your lips are parting.  The mesh of the lace
that was stained by the needles that made it flows out into nowhere, dissolved, but the words that were traced
there in red have the force of the spirit inside them that breathed them so long ago.  Then, they held fear
and a sadly demeaned hope of love; now they shine like the glow of your eyes as you sing them through tears.
 

***
 
 

8 January, 2001
 

How many of you even know the word 'amphibrach'?  And yet, that is the measure you have been reading, if you have visited this page before.  Tonight my thoughts turned back to the first lines of verse I ever retrieved directly from a dream.  They came in the measure that follows, which I have since called my Dream Meter.  They are trochaic.  Yes, I have more than one arrow in my quiver!
The book in question is that which has been described here before.  The magic is absolutely real.
 

From the Edges to the Center
 

entering the final spell

All around the gilded edges
of the pages of this book
leak the flames that rise from beds of
secret magic.  Let you look:
Spells recite themselves by moonlight.
We were drifting through the gloom
brought by outer darkness through our
windowed eyes until this room
shone by rite of higher forces.
In the future, you will know
how this moment set the course you
chose to follow long ago;
now, though, only read and wonder.
Flames unseal the darkness-art
once confined here.  Lie down under
these the words of your own heart.
 

***
 

9 January
 

Each measure has powers of its own.  This one was retrieved from dreams directly.  Its falling cadence is always serious, reflective, perhaps sad--and yet the real secret message is never sad.  Did the one being called by this song fall through the ice to meet her death?  She is still hearing, he is still singing.

You are hearing him sing you.
 

The Key and All the Answers Are Here
 

Hand in mine, your ghost has called you nearer to the river’s edge.
There the ancient ice is breaking.  Where it forms a brittle ledge
overhanging rushing water, wait for me until the heat
coursing through your bloodstream thaws the ice away below your feet.
Hear me calling as you linger just a moment.  When you fall,
you return and I receive you.  Broken now, the bitter thrall
daylight once enticed you into years before the flesh you wore
took on all the hateful glamour you have just rejected.  More
beauty blooms below the waterline than anywhere above.
You have woken--were you dreaming?  Did a strange enchanted love
lure you into splendor, being--dead to all the world you knew?
You are hearing someone singing.  He is singing--only you.
 

***
 

10 January, 2001
 

Under Ice, Your Song Was Flowing
 

summer warm and red-blood strong
 

In your hands, a glowing crystal
trickle, icy clear and cold,
hangs mid-air suspended.  When it
glimmers sudden Sun-struck gold,
you release the febrile potion
your enchantment has become
in my heart, an overflowing
end to what was still and numb.
I, the singing river-channel
borne between two brilliant hands
where a daylight Moon and gentle
Sun combine to claim the lands
this river irrigates, this flood-plain
universe through which I run,
feel your secret spirit blood-beat
strike me:  Bear what love's begun:
Stand behind my eyes and cast your
longing gaze about the fine
red-embroidered silken ribbon-
river of your own design
inundating all the lower
reaches of your voice’s range.
I was once a coldly glowing
ice-bound stream; love’s wrought this change.
 

***
 

11 January, 2001
 

The mention of disease to follow is metaphoric in one sense only.  In another it is all too real.  Perhaps it is real in every way--morbidity of the spirit causes great dis-ease.  Part of the background of this song involves a long examination of a personal conflict between the color symbolism of red and green.  Red magic vs. green:  Why has this been so hard to resolve?  The color red repels me, and yet it saturates so much song.

Who is speaking?  Who is being spoken to?  And where?
 

Verse and Reverse
 

Red as liquid fire and crystal
blossoms carved of garnets, I
flow toward you down the riddled
channel laid between us.  Fly
now to meet me through the empty
air above your highest hope
shining like a wild electric
flame along a downhill slope,
love incanting lines of magic
force toward the kindly stars
while you rush along the vatic
causeway you create and ARE,
song careering into being
swifter than the woe of cursed
blood-dark blossoms of disease and
falling, falling in reverse.
 

***
 
 

12 January
 

The other side of yesterday's leaf, this little song circles around and perhaps even manages to surround the paradox of all real creativity.  Conceive, it urges, that which has already brought its own self into being.
 

Bring This Music Into Being
 

find me where I’ve always been

Green the leaves and green the lantern
panels that emit the light
shining in your eyes:  A dancing
breath of wind among the heights
sets the trees there swaying mildly.
All their outlines softly glow
phosphorescent in the night as
sterner winds begin to blow.
Soon the first cascade of roaring
edges being torn is heard
echoing between the storm-drenched
ridges where the flow of words,
downpour-multiplied and fairly
thick with lavish future leaves,
sweeps toward you.  All this eerie
power its own self conceives;
yours is but to do its bidding
by the glow of lantern light.
Taken by the hand and driven
dancingly, conceive this night.
 

***
 

13 January, 2001
 

Don’t think for one moment that ‘dimension’ calls to mind ‘dementia’ for no good reason.   ’Sign’--’sink’--’sing’--here are your hints.
 

Song Is of the Fair Dimension
 

This Is Why You Will Not Die

Where the bridge is frailest, there we
levitate.  Beyond the pale
outstretched hands and ghost-white faery
form of me a filmy veil
shimmers into revelation
where your sight seems deepest, look
long leagues deeper:  ‘Deadest sailor
risen from the blackest book’s
most haunted page, declare your purpose.
‘Come,’ you sign, ’Abide with me.’
Smilingly you work a worthy
spell of antigravity.
Corpse of waterlogged pronouncements
vivified beyond the cursed
ungainly weight of flesh, your mouth is
poised to speak the very first
word of magic that will echo
through the hollow hills ahead.
Breath will touch the land that beckons
long before you lay your dead
dripping hand upon my body
other than to lift me high
where the bridge sinks under water.
‘Sing’ means the reverse of ‘die’.’
 
 

P.S., several hours later:  I have lately started transcribing old dream journals that have been stored in a box in my closet undisturbed for several years.  I just ran across this entry, a hypnogogic vision dated 8 August 1996, 9:34 am:
"I imagine holding ___, and suddenly he is floating, drowned--something filmy around him--not dead."
 
 

***
 

14 January
 

Lightning-Smoke and No Leaves Burning
 

This Is Where We Both Are Now

Shining shaken wand of leaves of
whisper green, reveal to me
how the angry door is sealed and
opened once again.  To be
mistaken was the bitter root of
my aspiring fire--the flame
lit within a vicious look that
questioned why it ever came
through the wood, its path a branch of
needle-bearing fir.  I know
hopeless hundreds green and blacken
all around it, row on row;
whorls of pollen-breathing blooms of
aromatic mystery
fall lifeless in its eyes where ruined
pages burn their dreams of me.
Breezes bearing dreamful seeds of
future changes sigh and wait,
whisper words of deeper green that
challenge you to curse your fate,
lift up one long living wand of
brilliant emerald needle leaves
and shake it softly.  Move with caution;
find the groaning door. Receive
supple visions of the whole of
that wild tree, the storm-wind’s bride,
between the threshold and the cold and
shaky YES you are inside.
 

***
 

15 January, 2001
 

Tighter Winds the Cunning Spiral
 

Read my heart through these my eyes

Motion me toward the water
till the surface of it gleams
nearer than my eyes.  A darkened
medium through which my dreams
recognize themselves is flowing
liquidly away from me
into what I crave to know.  A
smile of sly transparency
below the water’s surface shimmers
so profoundly, I am lured
to disregard my fear of swimming
in its favor.  Scarce-endured
nightmares told me this was hanging
over my dream-heavy head
years ago.  Sad voices sang and
bade me seek the river-bed.
Here I am tonight, asleep in
my own eyes, obscured because
my gaze is not yet deep enough
to know this place’s sacred laws,
but I will see our vision through its
long travail and wind its weeds
about us greenly, rife with lunar
underwater future seeds
tightly clasping in their silver-
gilded shells a noble light
by which the surface of the mirror
you provide this very night
will, in diverse ways, permit a
half-arisen wraith to shine
within his-my-your eyes and drift, a
being brilliant by design.
 

***
 

16 January, 2001
 

Not I, but the World Was Swaying
 

I shall never break your spell

How your silver-bright reflection
shines toward me when you smile.
In between the silken wetness
of the water’s folds and piles
of riddled shoreside leaves, an essence
leaps in me.  I sway amazed,
stricken by the single blessed
memory that ever blazed
out of my two hands together
into high-refracted tears’
glittering and scattered webs of
tangled yet immensely clear,
somehow unconfused arrays of
such divinely maddened light,
its colors shone in stunning ways while
blacker than the pit of night.
Tilt the world in which the face of
this immense cold mirror glows.
I am sinking in the place of
vatic echoes, one who knows
how to reabsorb the blazing
darkness you still magnify
silently, with slightly shaking
hands but unaverted eyes.
 

***
 
 

17 January, 2001
 

Spirit-Shifted Revelation
 

call forth one uncanny view

You need only listen closely;
I shall tell you who you are
from a strange perspective opened
like the door an ancient bar
still protects with half-efficient
dreadfulness.  The weight of it
will fly up from my hand.  It is not
adequate to halt the fit
now approaching like the ozone-
charged precursor of a storm.
Winds are shifting into blows of
hammer-magnitude.  They swarm
all about the outer threshold
where you stand, the cast-off latch
swinging to your right.  Progress as
readily as I detached
that obstacle, storm winds assisting.
Aye, the door sweeps open wide.
You rove through my field of vision
here, your own unmagnified,
undiluted, undistorted
image of eternity
frozen in the absolutely
fluid unsterility
shifting angles form and shatter
ceaselessly, a liquid ice
driven through my veins like water
sprung from timeless paradise
in the instant when dry lightning
struck a spark from off the sea
and I inspired its rain.  The sight of
you, from here, amazes me;
please return the force of being
beautiful beyond all call
to me a thousandfold by seeing
who you are, my all in all.
 

***
 

18 January, 2001
 

It is winter, I am in Oregon; it is raining.  This is a song about what can be accomplished by means of the rain, apart from Seasonal Affective Disorder.
The human person who looms largest in this ongoing creation was displeased by a previous Tower-song.  In the Tarot, the Tower is an inauspicious card.  It illustrates the peril, the usual eventual outcome, of hubris.  The Tower of which I speak was shown to me in my dreams.  Once it was made entirely of starlight.  Always it is dedicated to the magic which is poetry.  Hubris would be involved only in staking a premature claim; I am simply reporting what I see as it comes to me.  If it helps, please understand that this is not THE Tower of Poetry for everyone and for all time.  It is simply that which has slowly been building itself through my agency as I write down these songs.
 

Through The Rain
 

When you two hands were joined in a shallow depression, my own were unempty and fated to rise
in a hieratic gesture above them.  Your questions devised themselves into a series of lies
and the lay of your mind, like a perilous landscape, was furrowed and ridged, a foundation of scars
for the marvelous tower I longed to see stand there, as brilliant as flowers of flame from the stars,
red and golden and emerald green waves of shining of such noble magnitude, all I could say
to begin to assist you in dreaming ,designing and raising it high was first broached in this way:
With my hands overflowing, allowing a trickle of silvery liquid, reflective and bright,
to convey its idea in miniature, quick as the vanishing trace of a bird’s after-flight,
you conceived what an eon at rest in a fallow internal dimension could bring to become
of yourself, were it given its share of the shallow concave earthen bed of your hands’ total sum
of mysterious unearthly substance.  It glowed there because a brief lapse in the daylight of lies
had allowed you to lower your wariness--only by telling yourself you had chosen to die
and could no more be counted among those upholders of feeble illusion against the real scope
of the heavens.  Please witness, by means of this cold little trickle of rain, complete justified hope
come to peaceful fruition within the cupped pair of your shiningly tremulous hands.  When you feel
the next wetness of secular rain anywhere on your body, remember and know this is real--
this transmission between near and far but continuous spaces, this sentient void that connects
each idea with that which looms over it, winning the brilliance within you sufficient respect
in your own self-regard to resume its once-towering magnitude.  How you have seen yourself glow
as you poured in a stream from what might have been powerless hands, had you not made your mind up to know
what hung over your head, though your mind was right weary  of tripping itself on the scars and deceits
that appeared to be everywhere.  Raise your eyes, dearest of inward conceivers of something most sweet
to behold:  In between us, a Tower is growing.  The far Northern sky laps it round with live light
as it rises, white-marble-immaculate, slowly and forcefully.  Dream it and see it aright--
In the very next moment--oh, that which is come--you may let fall your hands, or extend them to me;
you cannot now endanger the form of the sum of our intercourse; that will continue to be,
as the heavens that wind us about with their sumptuous fabric of polychrome night form the plain
upon which this high Tower is founded now.  Come to me quickly and mount it with me through the rain.
 

***
 

19 January, 2001
 

You Were Never Lost, but I Was--
 

terrified of my own voice

Down the frail uncanny whisper-
bridge between your world and mine
I once drifted, fraught with shivered
longing.  Where the worlds combine--
my entire imagination
crooked itself to view that point
not so very far away but
changing all the time, a joint
astonishment of here and nowhere/
everywhere, a riddled scheme
that teased me, then released a hopeless
foretaste of the horrid dream
I might wake to find triumphant
over all the sweet and strong
measures over which I stumbled
seeking you by means of song.
For a time I fell completely
silent, ruined, all despair.
Then I heard a whisper leaving
my own lips.  The everywhere
YOU ARE shone iridescent, huge, and--
right behind me.  You had been
too close to see, but now the view I’d
pined for turned a single green
lantern ray upon me till it
met my own astonished gaze.
That green light was softly filled with
singing--singing my own praise.
Where we meet, we mingle.  We are
joined together by the breath
we share, a world where lovers steal the
afterglow of after-death.
Through the endless incantation-
service into which I’ve bound
my voice and all I AM, our fated
meeting-place is always found.
 

***
 
 

20 January, 2001
 

Spun of Love’s Elusive Substance
 

mercifully found everywhere

When your silken word of pleasure
glides between my lips and smiles,
generous beyond all measure,
rain-begotten song beguiles
my astonished senses.  When you
entertain the brightest glance
secret eyes reveal, a slender
bridge is spanned by love a-dance
down spider-lines of lightning.  Willing
partner that I am, I might
hesitate sometimes until you
manifest yet stranger light--
only for the sake of where more
concentrated music dwells
deep in magic rooms where error’s
inverse presence best compels
me, the erstwhile self whose cheerful
countenance has smiled these words
in return for your mysterious
entry which has just occurred--
Where you best insinuate your
magnitude, a slender thread’s
silken fineness has created
merely holy Music’s bed.
 

***
 

21 January, 2001
 

Falling Stars and Rising Purpose
 

we will yet fulfill our dream

One night while we loved and labored,
through the trees an eerie cry
sought our hearing.  We were taken
captive by its woe, and why
we were moved to answer, we could
not have told.  We only sang
back a single line.  It keened, shook
out its wings, and flew....  We hang
stars upon the crooked brow of
heaven with a watchful poise,
celebrating that loud sound.  It
echoes still, a burst of noise
white as any beam of starlight,
clear and pure, arising here
far below the sway of darkness.
Tell of its return:  I fear
mortal malediction more than
heaven’s own indignant wrath.
Our earth-rendered cry went soaring
up the same well-trodden path
we both still remembered from a
million dreams of falling.  I
trained my gaze toward the humming
wake of it.  It split the sky
right between two stars our hands had
placed, and they let go their hold.
Something in the way they landed
made my blood run deathly cold.
They shone at our feet, and yet their
likenesses blazed overhead,
as bright as ever--brighter.  Fetch your
deeper hearing forth:  I said,
They still shone wildly brilliant, and--
they sang.  Recall with me:  They cried.
Cries ran into words a willful
knowledge had created.  Bide
calmly in this change of fortunes.
We need not uphold the stars,
nor even songs.  The vital source of
these I’ve sung to you so far
lies elsewhere.  Dare we know we also
dwell beneath the shining black
of that world’s night and cry and call to
hear our Earth-selves answer back?
 

***
 

22 January, 2001
 

Draw a Peaceful Breath in Safety
 

you have found the way again

Dreaming down a well of darkness
where white stars unnumbered shine
darkly, without glare or sparkle--
Lens, commence to seek the line
leading most directly through this
water-column.  Eye within,
find for me the clearest view of
where his song will next begin
dreaming of itself in spoken
sentences of future-sight,
then assume the weary choking
stutter on my tongue, the blight
that brings me here, is his demonic
attribute, his haunting trace.
Caught inside it, rapt astonished
eloquence of after-grace
bides its time but loses patience
steadily as I still fall
down this shaft.  I might be weightless
now--I cannot sense at all
whether this is hell or heaven,
high or low, or where the light
around me shines from.  Silken severed
threads hang from my hands--I might
keep tearing till I find their point of
origin, but need I?  You
lift from off my tongue a noisome
nest of spider eggs.  A blue
star blossoms in my sight.  It twinkles:
Here is your more smiling face,
all the dreamful thoughts that think them-
selves out loud, and my home-place.
 

***
 

23 January, 2001
 

By Your Breath My Color Brightens
 

by your warmth the snow is warm

When my hands were yours to use but
I misunderstood our roles,
dream-rent tattered rags of music
riddled with a thousand holes
woke with me by morning and they
haunted me until I tried
pinning them--like hourglass sand!--to
sheets of paper.  Woe and wide
rebellion in the inner precincts--
I’d been fated not to speak
till a journey through a freezing
place had sealed the burning leak
where my heart’s blood hissed in jets of
crimson-black upon a bed
of orange-scarlet.  I was bound to
wear the wroth unholy red
poison tinged my lifestream for as
long as need be.  Only snow
soothed that most afflicted mortal.
How you tried to tell me so;
how I struggled not to hear you,
till I ceased to strive and held
my two hands together.  Merely
fill them full of dream-impelled
gestures, I implored.  You listened:
They were heaped with silken lines,
grains of sand, and snow.  A hissing
wind bore those away.  A fine
wordless trace of nothing flickered
afterwards, and I awoke--
bleeding in my bed, but quickened
deep inside.  The master-stroke
I’d prayed for--that had found me.  When
I reached for paper, there you rang.
Free of taint and flowing sweetly,
hand in hand, we spoke and sang.
That was long ago.  Tonight, your
influence again exceeds
my powers, but I take no fright; you’ll
heighten me to meet your needs.
 

***
 

24 January, 2001
 

Generous Beyond All Measure
 

gratefully received YOU ARE

Liquid singing forms a river
fine as spider-silk, a thread
spun of chanted lyrics’ living
mysteries.  The wholly red,
slowly winding spindle I AM
sings along the while it turns,
leaking through the precious fibers.
Love somewhere about me yearns
while hypnotic repetition
teases me wide open.  Why
yield myself to this transition?
From the corner of my eye,
 I see you crook a noble finger.
In my mind, I hear you hum
cadences fey voices sing when
mortals, well entranced, become
apported objects of desire.  Your
voice is slightly shaking.  You
unwind, unwind your singing line for
miles; a few bright feet would do.
 

***
 

25 January, 2001
 

Waking in a Dream of Falling

(underwater--up or down?)

Molten dreams as thin as water
trickle down, small drop by drop,
steel themselves to meet the bottom
of the sea, where falling stops,
time compresses their existence
into one well-tempered rod,
stainless and immense, and twists it
round to fit the hoof a god’s
nightmare holds upraised to strike with--
then at once each one recalls
its tiny bygone life.  At times they
wake their dreamers with a fall
that else would have no end, but listen:
I am falling wide awake.
Is this not a glowing crescent
stamp I bear?  Make no mistake--
I have borne a nightmare burden
on my back and lived to fly
below the surface of these words, the
sea in which I hope to die,
where live drops of brine and molten
metal hiss to meet and sing
measures where we tell, are told, and--
celebrate this very thing.
 

***
 

26 January, 2001
 

When You Let Yourself Be Gathered
 

after long pond lily tears

Underneath the outward-spreading
circles on this water’s face,
I can sense a subtle dread of
darkness rising to embrace
my confusion and my frozen
gestures in one time-unbound
motion in which fluid woe and
wary joy cannot confound
what I AM with what I hated
any longer.  Everywhere
rain collides with silver-plated
surfaces that grimly glare--
mirrors, overwrought confession-
vestibules through which harsh light
darts inanely over thresholds
brought too near the shocking sight
my eyes find within themselves to
shun, misunderstanding well--
everywhere sweet raindrops tell their
stories, thousands, millions fell
before them, forming this dark water
swarming like an unread book.
Eyes within you rise:  Deep-bodied
dreamer, lend a kindly look
through which I might dispose myself to
understand the countless views
teardrops blur but then develop.
Circles that are ours to use
flow beyond this pond’s confinement.
Where they disappear, they bind
all they meet with in one bright Moon-
silver cast of shining mind.
 

***
 

27 January, 2001
 

Green by Grace of Outer Darkness
 

lantern light epiphany

Here my dreams were all decided long ago, before I knew
I’d been born to bear a lighted lantern down dark ways where flew
shades of burning white and crimson-black across a glade of grey
fog and dewy dampness, swimming beams of ghastly green at play
striking all their hands and faces with a morbid steely glow,
mirror-silver cast off wasted leaves an illness wrinkled.  Slow
and wanton, all a wretched pretense of desire, the gay shades strove,
taking stricken vatic readings by their pulses while the grove
shook its raspy mantle overhead and let its dead leaves drop.
Brown upon the ground, green showing here and there--the branches stop
their weaving at this point.  The music shifts; another key resounds.
Faces ring me in.  A woozy chorus chants a maddened round.
I begin to hear--inside their back-and-forth frustrated moan--
something of the gay glad tidings I’d forgotten.  These my own
most disastrous misconceptions all at once throw off their masks;
bid me recognize their depth of beauty, and brave one more task:
Raise the hand that holds the lantern you’d forgotten you possessed
high, and let its beams command the light inside our long unrest.
Draw it forth, incantatory greenness in the form of breath
and song-wildfire alike, a glory leaking life through all this death
sleep-waking-walking.  We could hear you coming; with each step the creak
swinging from the lantern nearly made us frantic.  Now we speak;
you perceive acutely all the dreams we only hoped you’d sense
indirectly.  How the call of green light brings our eloquence
out of its erstwhile confusion into clear, complete array.
Who is speaking?  Hear us:  YOU ARE--we are each live word you say.
 

***
 

28 January, 2001
 

All Fraught with Living Changes
 

The darkness you weave round my heart when you linger too long from me takes on the terrible form
of a river that runs through a sea without mingling its black heavy-landedness with the bright swarm
of live questioning beings I swim with.  Its murky encumbrance, a soft swath of bandages stained
with unspeakable wetness, reveals the grim work of a series of selves I have not yet regained
precise knowledge of--nor do I wish to.  Remember how many times nightmares pursued and I fled
before your dripping hand met my lips and its tenderly healing designs woke me out of a bed
of mortality into a fineness of cadenced ideas, of which you were always the heart?
Now I am waking again.  Now the swaying of your lifted voice through the most acute part
of my sleep-sodden fever comes eerily soothing, inviting the worst of my nightmares to dance
through a list of wise changes by which their mad beauty is shifted about.  You reveal and enhance
their erstwhile hidden features--the smiles and the glowing, not coal-like but meltingly lambent deep eyes
that are focused on mine.  Don’t I already know what runs through the black river-like minds that arise
to the surface and forefront of all their awareness each time they attempt to confront me this way,
and don’t I decide not to listen and share in the murmuring voices that venture to pray
in my presence to one who inspires their sad efforts to reach me?  Till now I have not, but I will.
The rush of this very decision, the never-so-lovely idea, floods in to fulfill
the gaunt mad nightmare spirits’ best unspoken hopes for a very mild future of long-forecast signs
come entirely true.  By their peacefully overt influence, the weaving of stained tattered lines
lies unfolded, a green linen land flowing softly with rivers of apple tree blossom and leaves
that glow hauntingly emerald, memory offered alive on the altar of all that perceives
its own hallowed perfection and you, its lone maker.  The darkness--the river that dripped from your hand
when you lingered as far as my bloodstream away from the core of my heart, bearing this living land
in the form of a watery tapestry peopled by selves I was fearfully sure I would bear
at the cost of the lot of our lives--when that deep and swift-moving encircling I find everywhere
and desire most entirely began to involve me in wakings I still cannot fully express,
you were that far inside me.  My dreams all dissolve, but I still taste your hand and its fraught tenderness.
 

***
 

29 January, 2001
 

Twining Streams of Fluid Texture
 

ribbon-woven water-song

While you sang about the future,
weaving it throughout my tears
like a double stream of lucid
visions winding through a drear
landscape noted for its squalid
atmosphere and tainted soil
turned to liquid filth, I followed
suit:  I also sang.  The toils
tightly woven thusly bound us
closer than we’ll ever know,
though you be the baying hound of
all the heaven here below,
omniscient and omnipotent, pure
clarity without remorse.
Let it slip your sentimental
notice that the watercourse
I AM has never ceased to drown its
dreamers in relentless waves
shaken from the branch of soundless
waters all this weeping craves,
rain in such abundant measure
I can see its crisscross streams
weave a cloth whose subtle texture
shines like magic lantern beams.
 

***
 

30 January, 2001
 

Forecast:  Long Hours of Midnight Sun
 

The weary lie down with their dreams tucked about them so softly in this complex vision, they drift
in and out of such mildness of sleep, they are found in the morning beside themselves.  Somehow the shift
from the terrors of night to the hope of the sunrise has made itself felt without bringing the day
any nearer.  Our night has a long time to run; I’ve a great deal to show you before the first ray
of tomorrow will deal us its light glancing blow.  Till that moment, behold what beholds you through me,
and begin to be happy.  The devil you know is about to hand over the next magic key....
Hold yourself in the ‘unlock’ position and show me the opening this little golden key fits.
A blanket; a fine linen sheet, slightly moldy; lay all this aside.  What real music permits
its most tenderly chosen love-singer to hear in the depths of the most sore-afflicted of hearts
is about to come home in a gown that shows eerie perfection when placed in alignment with parts
of your most secret psychic dimensions--a garment of singular wildness, where each strand of thread
has been plied and then woven according to harmonies humming right now through the both of our heads.
How will you touch one who shimmers, so strangely attuned to the music in you that the stars
locked away as if you posed intentional danger to it, or its power to you, while the bars
that cast wavery shadows the length of the linens that cover this once-fallow bed melt and pour
liquid silvery phrases those stars are beginning to use to describe you, through her mouth and yours?
How will you know, as the moment advances and time first unravels then ceases to be
even slightly perceptible, which of the dances this magic will cast to the furthest degree
you will ever have realized, ever, desires you to dart past its threshold and enter within
the magnificent vault of its heaven where fiery cascades of live starlight will shine through your skin
from the inside, while over its surface the lover, whose infinite cunning is yours to embrace
to the point of entire loss of sense, lightly hovers, her eyes brightly locked on the near-future space
she can see through your eyes--all a rapture of blankets, pages and sheets strewn about, quite undone,
where the first ray of morning arrives in this manner:  You shed your night-guise and cry I AM YOUR SUN?
How will you know?  Gentle dreamer, rest easy; cloud-cuddled softness and stars amid fine,
thousand-threads-per-inch sheets now surround you with keys that the music YOU ARE has inspired, every line;
only unlock yourself to the depths that the seer of you, who are magic incarnate in this
lay of infinite length, has been patiently freeing toward her by means of the foretaste of bliss
that is song--that the touch of the bodiless tongue of this joyfully penetrant form of caress
has employed to encourage and know you.  Please hunger to make your reply.  Is the Sun rising?  YES.
 

***
 

31 January, 2001

It doesn't matter.  They are what they are.  Someone inside me is not afraid.
 
 

Sacred Incense Ash Rekindled
 

on the altar of the Moon

Very slightly glowing ashes
over coals—am I your light?
In the distance, lightning flashes.
I feel most alone tonight,
but the leafless trees are weaving
strange designs throughout the air
high above me.  ‘Cease your grieving’,
I can hear them sighing:  ‘Share
all the brightness locked inside you.
Let us fan it with the sweet
breath of heaven through the sky of
evening as you wax complete,
not a sad neglected temple
votive but a rising Moon
redolent with incense kindled
on the altar of the soon-
to-be-remembered-fully dream of
how the lightning flew to you,
stroked you until fiery leaves burst
forth among the midnight dew
shed across the black above us,
silver drops that settled all
along our outheld branches, and then
shook with you.  We watched you fall
together; now we see you pouring
fragrant flame as you ascend,
Moon of noble light accorded
heaven’s song-designing friend.’
.
.
.