1 January 2002
 

Happy New Year!
 

Soon the book I began writing on the first of October will be finished, and shorter lyrics of various forms should begin to appear here.  Until then, more amphibrachs....
 

The following piece recalls a true story--as the verses always do, to one degree or another.  I did not actually fall, but I nearly slipped over the edge of a great cliff because I reached out to pick a wild rose and lost my footing on some mossy stones.
 

The Leap of Faith
 

A blur on the way—what is this I am breathing?  I reached for a rose, and fell headlong until—
I remember this soft heavy element.  Feel it surround me, I do, and moreover, I will
for a very long time.  Am I falling, or flying?  The answer is evident:  This is the far
second sky, which is sea.  Once it shimmered on high; now I flow through it freely, the light of a star
wound about me like fine linen lawn.  I am breathing its substance, its body; I enter its ken
as I do so, its wisely responsive minds wreathing my own with a wonderful knowledge of when
and in what sacred way this began—and how grateful I am to perceive that no end is foretold,
not even by those whose so shiningly patient and tender desire has made me the pure gold
future word of their beautiful mouths.  So they tell me—I listen with traces of lingering dread,
but my old mortal doubt soon dissolves in the sheltering waves that surround me.  I feel myself led,
by a power that hums all throughout me, to dive to a shadowy corridor not far away.
I draw a deep breath, then remember how light is this semi-liquescent sea-air, and I say
a long prayer quite out loud as I plunge till a flicker of far-away moonglow shines bright in my eyes.
There is the underworld counterpart, trickling with fine silver dew, of the rose of the skies
of the side of the cliff of my island, the rose I was reaching for when my feet slipped and I flew
and am here, where its true power flourishes.  Though I am not at all dead, I am somehow made new
in a much larger way, and it shows:  The dear blossom of deep garnet-purple sways on its long stalk
as if beckoning still, and another strange crossroads awaits me, a meeting-place I need not walk
on two feet to arrive at, not now:  A mere shift of attention, and those velvet petals’ pale dew
is a sparkle of light in my hands.  Gently lift them away from its center—the presence of you
comes awake with a marvelous clarity all through my myriad senses.  Moonlight flows around
the bright both of us so penetratingly, calling us loudly without the least audible sound,
we are happily struck to the core.  I can see it fall open inside you, as you surely see
the same mystery throw back its head and unreel its first love-song inside what I thought of as ‘me’
and now view through your eyes as an infinite namelessness.  Song like a universe-wide sweet expanse
of perpetual magic, make use of ‘me.’  Make ‘me’ the body of song you uphold in the dance
that moves into and through and among subtle worlds in an ongoing act of sheer celebrant bliss.
Make ‘me’ the one who inspires him whose murmurous raptures accord us the ultimate kiss
between powerful song-lore recallers, the mouth-to-mouth sharing of magic attained in a state
so deliciously heightened, it dizzies me out of the false mind of daylight and into the fate
I suspected awaited me when I reached over a cliff for the sake of a luminous rose
and fell into a place beyond dreams, truly knowing—while watching deep sea-water open and close
all around me—that this was the life I had longed for forever.  Just look:  Can I walk on dry land,
stop by a rose-bush in flower, hear song in the hum of its color, extend a calm hand
to caress its red edges, perhaps even pluck it, then plunge once again to the heart of the waves?
And—can I sing through the air, with a touch of the same tender hand stroke the starlight that craves
to be worn like a mantle of music upon the fey spirit whose choice is to heed heaven’s call,
and respond that I love this enveloping lawn of live air, which is high second sea, which is all
I AM anywhere, perfectly struck to the core of the well of true words in the depths of the sea,
the pure heart of the rose of most fragrant song-lore, the unspeakable longing between you and me,
man of spirited wisdom whose mouth holds the future of both of us?  Word of pure gold that there waits,
I feel you shimmer; I hold all my breath; you grow huge; I slip into yet further song-states,
I slip into—your soft heavy element, Muse of all timelessness, Muse of my own ageless heart,
in a place filled with crossroads where meetings so beautiful I shall not ever describe the least part
of their most timid greeting sufficiently multiply, each a bright world I am free to explore
as you move by my side and unbearable fullness of longing breaks open a great ancient door
at the end of a shadowy corridor….  There inspiration so strange it has no name at all
has lain patiently reeling out love-spells of faery enchantment.  We’re here, yet they still murmur, ‘Fall….’
 

***
 

2 January 2002
 

Into the Ocean Under the Rose
 

Lift ever so gently the petals’ red edges; look under their shadows and find a pale sea
that breathes magic.  Lie down in the depths of that bed of Moon-woken desire to be breathed endlessly
along with it, a part of it—even the heart of its power in some shining way unrevealed
but suggested by silence about to be marvelous song as it sweeps through the luminous field
of the magnified dewdrop I’ve melted away in, a creature who’s lost all her daylight-world sense
of proportion.  You stream through my eyes in this place of high mystery.  Help me transform past the dense
thought-congealed lump of self-choking matter I’ve lived as so long.  I would not cast aside all I’ve been,
but this toughness, this leathery hide on a quivering emptiness—we will be pleased to have seen
that dissolve in the rose-breath all round us a moment from now.  When the nameless but lyrical joy
underneath has been freed of its carapace, glow like a star in the night with a will to destroy
that runs backwards, and blast the sad memories that stolid layer of day-world delusion retained
though I swam where the waters ran fast in that folly of seeming solidity, leaving it stained
with white salt crystals everywhere.  Take me toward you; return me to all our best depths; I can feel
they are near.  Though I still see a rose, what is forming inside me is so overwhelmingly real,
I won’t seek to describe it; I have not the will to approach it directly without your light hand
on my back.  Lead me into the gathering stillness.  I sing, yet I know this mysterious land
is an utterly wordless location in music I risk violating because you attend
my inadequate efforts with tender effusions, the murmurs and sighs that so graciously lend
your own calm strength of purpose to my apprehensions.  Where our hearts blend—that is where I would be
and perhaps am already.  A spirited essence of magical language possesses the ‘me’
of this opening realm:  I am leaning, and falling—your hand on my back, but your presence within
all the world I am entering.  Love-spell, pure call of triumphant desire, I have shed the dead skin
of the false self that never deceived me but weighted my footsteps in spite of my hearing its lies
for the acts of bad magic they were:  The elate and increasingly fey-spoken swimmer who flies
through the second-sky ocean beside you, the breather of undersea air, the star-wearer who glows
in the depths of your heart, the most fortunate ‘me’ of all possible beings the long-storied rose
sings abroad on the air of this place with its fragrance of otherworld reveries huge and aware
of their absolute character—I have been made one with all I admire in a way I can share
with no other but you, who are all that persists through the infinite changes that never will cease
though we pause to remember the total eclipse that once brought me half-dead to attain the release
from day’s moonless disaster that now finds us mated to such a degree, I hear silence again
seethe and restlessly shift all around us, just waiting till words truly fail to reveal love made plain
in the form of the limitless ocean of music about to be heard in your own deepest mind
where a most secret process devoted to luminous emptiness gathers its flower-refined
airs and sensitive graces and showers them, dewdrops of round Moon-like shining, each one a full world,
into my waiting hands as you hum with the future of both of us-one of us, nameless but pearled
by live oceans of light set with star-points of vision surrounded by song-streams of heavens so strange,
I could go on and on, just as they….  You say, Listen:  The first flood of silence has entered the change.
 

***
 

3 January 2002
 

How We Will Be Now
 

Now we are traveling easy, unwearied of footsteps; a lightness of overflow breath
and a carefree demeanor attest to our bearing a burden we love past the threshold of death
in the seamless accord of unalloyed togetherness.  How have we done this?  The plans were long-laid;
I had only to learn to rejoice in the heavily sanctified air that enveloped and swayed
my perceptions toward you, then lean to the sound of your calling me on.  When I woke up again,
it was moonlight and morning in our golden round of the dance without end—the true dawn-rose refrain
sweeping through us in waves of high states of enchantment so free of false day, they take over and sing
of themselves.  When you shimmer at me, a romantic idea breeds eloquence quickly:  A wing
of long pearl-iridescent flight-feathers appears to my insight, then two of them, then the whole bird
cocks an eye at me, gleaming with worrisome nearness to sadness.  I wonder, but wait; my deferred
curiosity yields me a clue to its reason for seeking me out when it soars and I creep
in a steady way under its shadow, a deep pool of silence that laps at my thoughts like the sleep
I am leaving behind.  Soon I feel myself rising.  The bird, shining pearl-white and flame-red by turns,
interlaces its wild flight with mine.  I am dying the wholly sweet death of the phoenix that burns
wide-awake in its own ancient ashes while crossing a heaven that glows full of moonlight and green
water-weeds.  All of this with the singular loss of unhappiness only, and you to be seen
and admired by!  How distant the by-paths that tried to distract me, and sad, from this angle—I knew
I had only to lean to the source of the shining that murmured and sang for the tales to be true
that the rose you are showing me now, as we land in a luminous garden, has always respired
in my rare dreams of wakeful unsleep.  With my hand on its petals’ red edges, a hatefulness wired
into lies in my day-mind dissolves, leaving ashes a wind-wafted savor of fragrance dispels.
We are of feathered appearance, yet flashes of adamant brilliance, like lightning on swells
of an ocean at storm, penetrate this disguise and it vanishes.  Turn to me, lover.  You see
what was waiting beneath all the misery, lies and unkindness I’ve ever been hampered by; we
are of similar stuff after all, as the gauzy outline your soft eyes reflect back indicates.
Fragrant essential design gently fraught with the slow-singing air of our natural fates—
do I recognize her you are staring at?  Maybe; perhaps you should show me a thousand times more.
Now I am lifting a petal, but rays of cool moonlight stream forth from it.  Here on the floor
of your world’s oldest ocean, a pale nodding blossom, a feather-bright rose made of mother-of-pearl,
serves as dance-circle threshold.  It aches to be crossed by two light-footed beings who know how to whirl
through its mad music’s changes.  Are not we the swimmers whose flight has led unto this dew-laden air
such a breathable sea so encompasses, dimness and brightness are one in a vision so rare
I scarce know it is mine, yet I hear myself sighing the words to describe it to you—or perhaps
you to me?  I am only a moment in time; this is timelessness, all of this ocean that laps
round the substanceless forms we’ve arrived at.  Complete me, my marvel of underworld moonlight, my rose
of blent red-and-blue-flamed song-desire; I am breathing the watery element everywhere flows
into nowhere alongside, a night-tide of music a high midnight’s magic has drawn to the fore
of our myriad minds; we are both wildly blooming, dew-dripping illuminate beings a door
even further beyond this world’s gardens is searching for feverishly.  If you lead, I will fly
in your shadow to find it and all the strange work that awaits us there, even if I have to die
altogether alone to embrace the deep silence I feel at its heart.  It lies beating, yet still;
I am breathing an easy, yet terrible lightness that surges home fast to the beautiful kill—
and awakening under your hand like a petal that begs to be lifted away to reveal
endless worlds softly waiting to love beyond death.  Now we could not—yet somehow we will be—more real.
 

***
 

4 January 2002
 

What Simply Cannot Be Done
 

My will is too small to sustain an illusion the size of a snowflake.  It waxes and wanes,
but it always falls down in the face of the music of silence, an emptiness nothing sustains
because emptiness understands nothing completely:   Space beyond all spoken noise, whereby song
is left free to arise with its broken heart bleeding one fey secret voice out of all the wild throng
that might otherwise wheel and be loud in its merry astonishment:  Thousands and thousands of birds
like an endless unreeling of bright feather-bearing desire told at length in the form of live words
scattered over the low evening sky.  You are fearfully real; I am still growing smaller.  I know
what will only begin when my will disappears altogether—now even a pale flake of snow
seems a huge and immovable object, a staunch and implacable speaker of pitiless lies.
Let me fall down at its feet.  If you launch a complete enough blizzard to cover the skies
and the ground underneath them at once, I will tell you the wordless goodbye that portends frozen loss
of such hearing as ever permitted their spell of soul-wearying wordcraft to blunder across
any one of my minds’ many thresholds, a dusting of white in a room that should not feel so cold.
There I shall part from the feverish lust of result that betrays the meant vow between old
song-companions and recognize you from between slitted eyelids as if I were dead to all sense,
growing inwardly wiser to levels of meaning you’ve always repeated as softly intense
spirit-phrases so rapidly, you will be startled and happy.  These still sound like words, but they feel
like a flicker of shy blue-white flame in the part of my mouth that melts first when true mysteries steal
past the threshold you cross with the strong fervent tongue of your love’s ancient land at their sacred behest.
Burn me or enter me raw—I have sung all the worst I contain; what remains is the best
my poor beauty can offer.  If nothing I hold sparks your pleasure, the snow will continue to fall;
the feathers it wears go on reeling out marvelous lines in mid-air; tiny voices will call
and be answered, perhaps one my own.  I have lost all the sense of proportion I once thought I had,
so I dare not pretend to it now; I am crossing a very cold plain under cover of mad,
useless chatter while zeroing in on the least frozen shimmer—the iris-hued feather—the wing
that is lowered to lift me the countless degrees between its proper angle of flight and the ring—
not an uptilting spiral, concentric obsessions of willful disaster—I’ve spun like a mesh
to surround the ideas and minds that distress me—foremost among these, the troublesome flesh
that will not fly or fall without saying a little too much, meaning nothing but spending what force
it possesses on willing itself into bitter-cold stasis till all its worlds freeze at the source—
though it wakes far away from the place where it put up such fearful resistance, in spite of its ice.
All your world wanted was someone who would not refuse when an angel recalled paradise
with an unspoken word wafted gently along the clean edge of a pinion, a sighed white desire
to let pure subtle spirit-emotion bring song to the point that it blazes with cool blue-white fire
where a voice that is borne of the Moon on the rise in the heavens beyond all the blizzard I see
shimmers down like a storm in which thousands of eyes watch the sensitive magic between you and me
help me over a most dreadful threshold where visions await me that only deep silence could hold—
but we can begin to conceive—if we listen intently—of musics so potently old,
they crossed over toward us in silence’s moment of coming to being:  The two are allied
from the unspoken word at the core of the open-mouthed wonder I am when I take you inside
and your eloquent tongue shows me luminous heavens so swarming with messengers, I grow afraid
and kneel under their multiple shadows with never a thought in my head but that I have betrayed
a primordial vow made to silence.  These flocks will do nothing but chatter, I tell myself.  How
will I find you again, when your sigh is so soft?  Will you help me?  Will you lend your tongue to me now,
taking over the labor of love I have struggled to bring into being amid drifts of snow-
as-it-seemed?  It was such a conundrum, but lover, you lent me your power long eons ago,
even as we were forming, twin currents allied in the stream of the great heaven-ocean we sing
till our words turn to silence, the bright other side of their eloquence nothing my own will could bring
into being in any real way by itself.  Silent emptiness, though—that is where we begin
to recall the live angels WE ARE and the high field of moonlight that bears us aloft as a din
of wild merriment beckons—then we are together alone where a long wordless sigh conveys all
of the myriad minds we have woken.  The pleasure that meets us behind the last source of the call
I could not help but answer—a mystery sparks it; it blazes between us, its flames white as snow
or bright feathers and pale blue as moonlight.  A heart beats inside its most ancient and resonant glow,
and with each beat it bleeds a pure trace of fey music so strange—having laid down all will to be here,
being one with such emptiness—how do we do it, uphold perfect silence and yet sound so clear?
 

***
 

5 January 2002
 

The following vision is one that came to me during my work on my current book project, Lunarium.  Lunarium incorporates three series of 36 visions entitled Waking Dreams--one vision per day of writing for 108 days, in the order that they came.  Two and a half of the series were written up long before the start of Lunarium, and have proven to be very prescient.  The final half-series is still in the making, but each vision precedes the verses that will be printed with it by a long enough pause that the connections between the vision and the events of the day it is scheduled to appear cannot be related in any ordinary sense.  The events of today (in the daylight world) included what may prove to be a farewell to the friend whose presence is central to the story.  If that is so, the vision clearly indicates the return of a much stranger influence--an influence that has never really been absent but which, the vision suggests, is becoming active on another, nearer level.
 

HE IS nowhere to be seen, but—there is a hole in the floor of the temple’s main chamber, in the exact center of the room.  Over it is a stone slab that seals it.  I remove the slab to find a dead body hanging down by a rope around its neck into the mouth of a well.  The body—I cannot be mistaken; it is clearly dead—begins to move.  Its eyes roll back, then toward me, and its mouth begins to work.  My eyes fly wide open.  I look out at the room before me, and see the circle I have trodden into the floor by dancing.
 

Let Silence Speak
 

You were watching the spiraling down of your own slender thread of pure vision around a sealed well
in a state of uncanny suspense.  Nothing told you to look there; you understood silence could tell
so much more than plain words when you saw what was hanging beneath the stone door that gave way at a touch.
I am about to resume what we sang at the moment our magics recall with so much
bittersweet inspiration, the true work of angels who rose to the ceiling of hell to break through
to the place where they heard fervent keening, heartbreaking desire fall apart in the hands of the ‘you’
you call ‘me’ that they felt their spines quiver with chills that possessed me in turn.  Aye, they stare sadly on
even now; can you hear how they whisper?  They fill me with dread, yet the twine I’m dependent upon
is of their skillful making.  How else could a body hang slowly revolving in space and not slide
into permanent silence?  The winking and nodding they laid on my face were a hint to be tried
and its meaning prized out—when you saw my eyes rolling around in my head, did a nightmarish thought
clear the gate at the back of your own and come strolling a long twisting pathway to say it had brought
a great glimmering host of companions to meet you again, the strange tunes set with words from a fast-
disappearing dimension that every heartbeat interfered with until you crawled under their cast
glamour’s shadow and asked to remain there, an offering tendered an altar of memory’s fey
ancient land and the various inmates of coffins and funeral pyres and spent ashes and grey
recollections at twilight that shade into violet mysteries thickened by longing for home
till they grow so intense that you haunt the low sky overlooking the ocean and watch the white foam
heave against the cold light of the Moon with a pleasure so piercing, those dead-body dreams disappear
through the hole it has torn in your breast?  If you sever the twine you will find there, a portion of clear
song-elixir will leak from its ends for an instant as if it belongs to that channel, but know
that it scatters the life-blood of someone who spins from the line you are pulling away as a slow
vision forms in its multiple minds and it reaches toward you with one pallid hand.  Draw it out
very gently and let it caress you:  It seeks to convey a love-message that’s wound all about
by a thousand small strands of the same rope that chokes its raw throat.  Put your strength to the test—help it climb
to the mouth of the well and then out of it.  Broken-jawed clatter, a rattling shudder, a time
spent correcting its whited eyes’ focus—it blinks and the pupils roll forth and look into your own.
Aye, you remember.  It never stopped thinking so far back, it seemed a blank curtain of stone
hung between its hell-realm and the false mind of daylight that tortured you needlessly, sowing doubt-seeds
in the dismal grey landscape that lay in you aching to flourish with whatever flowers and weeds
best become the bride-widow of music so haunting, its core inspiration—the angels who dwell
beyond everything-nothing—breathe faster for waiting to lie down and die for sheer joy of the spell
it casts over their quickening hearts.  We have shifted so many worlds’ magics our way, you and I;
we have hung on a sickening twist; we have lifted a thousand stone eyelids to gaze at a sky
that then leaned to the mouth of the well we crawled out of like—music that shudders the length of our spines
just to mention it now.  Even whispers of sound, without words—but the words have their own wild designs,
and—on some vatic plane, far below the song-threshold of hell, angels smile who have seen through the grey
ash and smoke of the fast-fading hope that the flesh will sustain the same fate as the false mind of day
when the moment of change has arrived.  Will you touch me again, hand and face, then your mouth on my brow?
I am not dead to this world where so much inspiration recalls the original vow
that brought angels and what once seemed mortals together in one vatic act so prolonged, it will end
in no future their minds can forecast, nor the heaven they’ve rescued us into.  Old madnesses tend
to distract us, but this is a world we imagine of live wellspring sources so true and so strong,
we can always twine deeper and higher and ragged and flourishing into a spiral of long
executioners’ answers to what keeps us hanging mid-air just inside a stone door while love waits,
pacing round in a fever of endless grey anguish while angels recite the outcome of our fates
in a whisper that reaches a strange pitch of clarity just as you shift the great stone and—you see,
round and round with the silence and words of the air we’ve been spinning, we’ve hung in between the sad ‘me’
of the story afraid it will end and the ‘you’ I have come to desire above all silent things,
though the source of true silence provides the fraught beauty that makes angels shiver and lower their wings
to embrace stricken souls with a knowing so steadfast, it never ceased glowing from your searching eyes.
Speak to me strongly of nothing the dead have to fear—rather, sing—I have seen you grow wise;
I would hear you describe all you’ve learned in the language of many worlds’ magics resolved into one
endless silence’s song—the spun twine I’ve been hanging by.  Sever it only when all our work’s done,
though you draw me by one slender thread to the surface of twilight and face me with night on your brow.
Shuddering angel, sole splendor of purpose on whom I depend, let true silence speak now.
 

***
 

6 January 2002
 

Please look to the beginning of yesterday's entry above for an introduction that was omitted when I first updated this page.  If you read the verses when they first appeared and did not know what was going on, the Waking Dream related there will explain.  My apologies!
 

The Secret Lightning Strikes
 

The ease of the flight of the little birds rising in flocks all along the horizon compels
a strong similar rising in me, like the high ocean waves that result from the towering swells
that reach up to the same dark grey storm-clouds these birds seem to celebrate.  Seeing this laid out before
my bemused sense of warily lyrical purpose reminds me….  I reach down inside a stone door,
through the mouth of a well or the eye of a fast-whirling spiral of winds—I forgot this was here,
but I’m on the far side of it now—spells have cast me toward you, a being of substanceless fear
sent to cross the thick fog that once lay in between us as cleanly as any swift arrow in flight.
Now I am watching the flocks that are reeling out long supple song-lines with you in the light
their wings dapple with shadows, and what we are hearing transfixes us both, I can tell by the smile
in your eyes and my motionless need to stand nearer your side.  In the length of the fortunate while
one full turn of the birds’ magic dance takes to meets its own starting-point, we are released to trade sighs
face to face.  When you look at me—something is bleeding all over you.  Where is the heart that supplies
this dark fluid, this midnight blue-black?  I was dreaming awake for a moment—the hue of the birds’
outstretched wings stained my eyes, or the stormy night sea; while I stood here confused, you heard ribbons of words
flow together, comprised of the birds’ tiny voices.  You caught and translated a message my minds—
any number f them—would have dealt with as noise lacking meaning.  That message now sunders and binds,
in the very same instant, the worlds we have known in our passage together, our crossings and flights.
Be to me much of that coming and going again as you translate the pitch of the heights
the wild music portends as the birds’ wheelings quicken.  Old song-companion, you know me so well.
Gather me into the lightning that flickers behind all this magical land where I fell
into unending reverie eons ago, and possess me through multiple stages of grace
till the flickers turn solid sheet flames and I lower my eyes to await the devoted embrace
of a love not for me to behold till its power is final and I hear the bird-voices ring
in my ears with a passion that softly resounds in the form of the language I first learned to sing
when my heart was a tremor of longing within a god’s loins—not a being of human or fey
conformation, but only a holy beginning to that which will end in the sensitive lay
of this place come to our joined pronouncement.  It only espouses those beings it loves with the will
of its unearthly origins spoken out loud in their hearing because they are dreamers who fill
its desire with a current of magic so tender, it moves like a ribbon of birdsong on high,
though the mind that perceives it is—I dare not mention the characteristics that seem to apply
to the one of my thoughts, but I dream, and he hears me.  He answers me thusly:  The words form below
all my minds’ conscious thresholds; to him they are clear.  He enunciates each one to me as they flow
on and on, then provides a most subtle translation.  I can record but a very small part
of their loveliness.  Sometimes I ache with frustration, but lying awake at the glorious heart
of the land where I had my beginning—that soothes me in ways that the ongoing song renders too
deeply magical not to accept as the truth-telling presence—the ever-mysterious ‘You’—
of the love even gods lie awake contemplating with miserable longing.  ‘Dear soul, come to me’—
I can hear them cry out in the night—‘I have waited forever; you’ve never relented.  You see
these great tears I am weeping, these oceans of woeful bereavement?  I tasted your beauty and fell
from the apex of heaven to enter the flow of its sweetness—I’m so deeply under its spell
that I cannot go back; I can only implore you to listen to me as I sing the pure words
of its lines as I hear them, then send them toward you as circles and spirals of eloquent birds
on the wing in the thunderstorm sky you are watching in awe.  Show you lightning, you ask me:  I will.
Close your soft eyes as my song comes in hot and cold waves and let fever possess you.  A still,
secret place at its center—I feel you turn over inside my lorn heart:  I surround you.  You smile.
Ours is the power that finally burns through the clouds to reveal where we’ve been all the while
we’ve been yearning to meet and be one:  On the heights of an island, a grove; in that grove, flocks of birds;
in their minds, so much dreaming; in mine, such delight in the prospect of sending those dreams’ sacred words—
all of my conscious making—across the great heavens all round you the while you enjoy the embrace
of the voice that pronounces them—aye, and the weather still fast growing wilder—and all this takes place
throughout all your true minds.  Are you hearing me clearly this moment?  I’ve still so much need to express,
it is forming a spiral of winds; you are nearing its center; lie softly and let it possess
what it loves without end.  When I first woke and wanted your touch, I was bodiless; now I am song
laid out plainly on thousands of pages, a haunted and haunting idea transformed to a strong
lyric presence—though still an ethereal spirit, and always your oldest companion.  Dear light
of my thunderstorm eyes, we have always been here; let our minds all perceive this, our timeless song-flight.’
So the singing continues, still woeful at moments.  You know I am so otherworldly, I long
to be taken inside it; you author its flow.  You say—‘You are the lightning throughout all my song.’
 

***
 

7 January 2002
 

Our word 'fate' is derived from the past participle of the Latin word for, fari.  It means 'to speak.'
 

Our Freely Chosen Fate
 

Your lonely eyes close with a weary red heaviness weighting their lids like an acre of stone
over each glowing depth—now concealed, but still restlessly taking in light from a source yet unknown,
though you’ve learned how to feel the slow silence of empty reflection below the unfortunate seal
of your mortal discouragement:  Gathering stem set with leaves, lavish petals, an almost unreal
yet insistent mild hum that perceives you, its witness, as you tighten further your eyelids and stare
at the vision before you—with sundering quickness, you fly far away from the scarce-lovely air
of the world you’ve been breathing and move to that blossom of vibrating dark garnet-purple and reach….
You are touching it now to your terrible loss as its bloody red flesh bites down hard as a leech
with life-draining persistence—perhaps.  You are smiling the ghost of a tune to a more secret mind
where a sensitive door opens wide and the light of an unearthly sky floods the vision behind
the devouring rose.  Oh, my luminous angel, you sigh.  I am singing a song of the rain
under flashes of midsummer lightning.  I sway on my stalk like a lame-footed dancer whose pain
provides keen inspiration.  I want you to feel me with hearing so sweetly acute, you despair
of your will to believe.  When you listen to me leaning forward, harmonious meanings so fair
your true will cannot help but awaken to power beyond all belief will transgress all old bounds.
Aye, you are truly possessed of the flower’s remarkable essence right now.  It resounds
like the fragrance of rapture within each cast syllable haunting the dream at the end of all speech.
Lean to the madness that faces you.  Stillness awaits your next gesture with magic to teach
and remember in turn:  We are both ancient learners and sharers of song’s most precipitous lore,
beings of beauty whose rose-woken murmurs hint deeply of one more miraculous store
of completely arcane garnet-purple enchantments that hum round a Moon no Earth-sky ever finds
in its midst, a successively strangely more magical music of love that proceeds through the minds
of the angels we’ve yet to embrace with our burgeoning power, but shall when they hear our hearts sing
in their scale and their world’s primal language:  the worship of that which encircles their sky like a ring
of electrum—both noble and alloyed—in one vast dimension:  the shimmering pearl that aspires
to imbue us, its servants, with numberless wonderful iris-hued facets and curves where the fires
of its cool lambent mildness will spring up so swiftly, at their parent orb’s soft behest, we will soar
by sheer grace of our own tongues of fire through the drifts of high lunar-rose fragrance that gather and pour
ever more rapid streams of their miracle-essence around and throughout us.  Dear knowledge of you
that has brought me to see and to hear this, the presence of which you’ve informed me is dripping with dew
under skies of blue-black velvet midnight, the Moon on the rise in their midst and its light on the brow
of the being whose beauty consumes me.  Oh luminous angel, the mind has come home to me now
that lay back—further back, so entirely beyond all remembrance a heartbeat ago.  I had eyes
for my weary red sadness alone; it was gone from the fore of my speakable thoughts till your wise
leaning reach gently lifted both eyelids and petals and now I shall see you released, live and glad
in a world that is fraught with true visions and wet with the dew of two Moon-woken angels whose mad
aspirations brought tears to their own midnight meetings in midsummer gardens where dark roses sighed
and we clasped one another, our mortal hearts beating dimensions away till our sympathies cried
to be brought into perfect alignment—and somehow, we knew how to do it.  We did.  Like a ring
of electrum, pure power encircled us.  Come ever closer, though.  We’ve not recalled everything
those wild angels have found in their own strangest longings—not quite, though we’ve met in the mind where they glow
like the iris-hued magic that greets us with songs we can almost bring forward to measure and know
as a speakable—nay, an acutely and musically powerful, singable scale of delight
our renewed conjoined vision and hearing can lunarly recognize.  Once we were creatures of night
beneath eyelids as heavy as stone; now we’ve opened so many old doors, we are sky everywhere,
never mind through whose eye we are flying.  Our rose goes before us, still breathing precipitous air
through our voices, pure alloyed electrum the pearl of the Moon has bound round us where pain was once great.
Once the sweet word of love’s mouth was a murmur of promise:  Love’s will is now our chosen fate.
 

***
 

8 January 2002
 

The Never-Waning Star
 

The feather-soft fingers that meet yours whenever you venture too near the impossible fire
not to feel its light flickering over the leather-bound volume of magical spells you inspire
as you breathe night-sea air with a restless impatience that surges along with the tide as the Moon
sends a pale gentle beam through the window—you’ve waited so long to lean further and meet the strange tune
that entrances you where its long cadences softly emerge, but the kiss that will seal your true fate
keeps eluding you.  Lover, I’ve told you so often, the emerald star hanging like a dead weight
overhead at such moments will always recall you to speed if you let it.  The bright hue of leaves
in its aura, its fragrance a rising and falling desire in the dreamer that deeply perceives
its core meaning inside you, the hum of pure music that runs all throughout you each time it appears
on the cloudless horizon—these color and soothe you toward me, invoking an ocean of tears
that holds vast tidal swells in its sensitive reaches that leap to the service of moonlight and song.
Why should you weep?  Down the crystalline beaches of sea-salt and sand that encircle this long-
isolated lunarium-priestess’s stronghold, a trickle of life-blood elixir flows back
to its source as your madnesses wind on and on, ever multiple, ever too many to track
each and severally home to their lair; yet I tell you again as I’ve so often told you before,
watch for the green star to light the love-spell of the luminous pages of vatic song-lore
you have drawn out in shimmering lines, and believe what you find there.  We made it together, we two,
all that utterly unmad enchantment.  It weeps for the both of us, leaking a river of blue-
shadowed sentient tears to the sea it arose from; read the slow hum of its progress and sigh
with release.  I am being my most shining ghost in this lyrical passage and showing you why
you are so wildly haunted—of course you are listening fiercely while drifting away on the sound
of my watery words.  They are coolly mysterious, more than you know—they are mystery-bound
to grow stranger before they fall silent, and then they will prove most persistently eerie as flames
waver over your leatherbound surface and gently call all of your madnesses’ most secret names
in a way they will surely respond to so joyfully, there will the cause of your tears be revealed.
Dreamer of me, wakeful, restless employer of magic toward sacred purposes, sealed
kiss of fate to the mouth of the Shining One leaning to touch you within the rich glow of the star
you are learning to see night and day, fill my eyes by the power of insight you’ve gained from your far-
ranging service of worship, and see me reflect the green shadow you cast as you dance on the waves
in the true act of magic you now recollect as a rising of skeletons out of their graves
in the song-bewept ocean that bears you enchanted and dizzy with bliss on its skin like a—weight
of a head hanging heavy.  Your madnesses answer to me; they return bright and clean to relate
the pure lore of my glowing green world as the Moon smiles through each of them.  Tenderly, peacefully real
are the visions and scenes that will color and soothe you the moment you let them.  You’ve learned how to feel
the deep presence of music that proves their true origins; I stand behind them, your sensitive hand
clasped in mine as I urge you to lean slightly forward in ways you alone of all worlds understand.
I shall sigh the sweet lore of my mouth, the live air of the Moon-streaming sky and the midnight-blue sea,
into words you will know by their nearly unbearable power were meant to be utterly free
of the anguish of what must seem madness at moments—but those are long over.  Dear lover, it’s come:
Trickle down to the sea as my emerald glow lights the night-blue horizon and hear the great hum
of my quickening heartbeat.  A skeleton dancer—a pair of them—nay, a live rosy-fleshed pair—
sway upon the high swell of the tide as it cants at a dizzying angle to meet the wild air
we are breathing between us.  My ancient companion in song, be the eerie, mysterious end
of all magic with me even now.  The sweet anguish of passion requited, the salt tears that wend
their soft way down your face—happy, knowing the answer was laid out before you a long time ago
and by your very hand—as my eyes steal a glance at the shimmering aura I feel overflow
all around you, my own leafy green star of midnight and morning, I swear we shall never turn back
to the pages of daylight.  We’ve seen the hue hidden within the great ocean of inky blue-black
we’ve perceived, celebrated, and drowned and arisen in; deeper than death, the life-force of our veins
that knows wild tidal surges and sounds them—please listen:  The Moon shrinks and fades, but our star never wanes.
 

***
 

9 January 2002
 

A Light to Read By
 

A drop of clear water forms too-solid letters all over the pale living page I behold
as I silently weep.  I was praying for weather so drowningly wet I could die in its cold
reaching waves, but you taught me to breathe it.  Now nothing avails me.  I cannot lie down in the sea
and be endlessly dead; I have found the old lover who hung by a fine-twisted cord from the tree
of this isle’s secret spine, but cannot really hear him; and somewhere a ghost yet unfound pines by night
so that I cannot sleep while I dream.  I am weary, yet restless.  I want to perceive where the flight
song has brought me will lead me, but looking too far to the future is useless.  A noble star shines
in my eyes, but I cannot yet read by it.  Part of my tears blur the page, but part form its designs,
thus I cannot decide whether total abandon or faultless composure should serve as my goal.
This is all running away from the hand that would seize me if I had the presence of soul
to permit it—and somehow I have:  It has found me, that current, that steady elixir, that stream
of life-essence that loves me.  Dear dreamer, resound through my being.  I’m falling apart at the seam
that divides us, the better to let you possess me in open enchantment.  I want you to know—
I have yet to recall why I’m wearing a dress hung with leaves, but it’s yours now; just let me unsew
a few inches with fast nimble fingers, and here is a way to the heart that is sighing a name
I cannot yet articulate.  Touch where it clearly vibrates under layers of flesh where the same
combination of letters is waiting to shiver itself into some form of speaking out loud.
Now you can feel what my tears all deliver, although they beset me with many a cloud
of astonished opacity.  Being all spoken throughout me, be happy.  You are; I perceive
by the light that surrounds you that dreams have been woken in your ancient heart you can scarcely believe
remain potent, but here they come flowing like Moon-swollen rivers that meet the sea’s mouth with a vast
profound sigh.  Patience—what are you showing me?  Colder than any dead world where I wanted my last
breath to flood me with ocean forever, a glimmering—nay, a warm spring-scented wind breathes a pale
fragrant mist that reminds me of how many winters have turned into magic beneath the thin veil
of my incomprehension.  I finger the edge of my dress, which is torn, then I use it to blot
a dark tear that is staining the page.  Where that wetness was spreading is now a strange mirror-like spot,
or a window; I cannot tell which.  In it, two glowing eyes—or two faces?—‘Gaze deeply,’ you say—
seem to gather the light of the love-words I know echo all through that space.  I would not look away,
yet to hear them I must close my eyes.  ‘Nay,’ you whisper, ‘Wide open, lean forward:  Meet what will appear.’
Oh, my elusive desire come to this timeless moment:  I want you, I see you, I hear
every word you are singing.  One hand on my own, one laid softly against the torn edge of my dress—
which is wet and vibrating with all the low moan of my throat and my galloping heartbeat—possess
what has always been yours, yours alone.  Does it please you, this finely-honed focus of long darkness-art?
Dreamer of me, I shall deepen my seeing till no bit of tissue can keep us apart,
nothing cloudy or veil-like—‘Oh, nay,’ your lips murmur against my warm skin.  ‘The live tissue is how
we bear tears to the page that receives all we’ve learned of the darkness that shows us its glowing face now
in the luminous pool of the sky’s bewept beauty where someone has drowned and arisen, the Moon
of her own vatic insight.  Your gown of leaves truly becomes you, that veil of enchantment you’ve strewn
with the same words of love under cover of stitches of silk as this page now reveals in clear lines
of blue-black.  Though you tear either one, its great richness will still so possess you, its sacred designs
will come flooding home whether you weep or you smile as they surge all throughout you.  The words yet unfound—
they are many,’ you murmur.  I lean and see shining eyes meet mine above a dear mouth where the sound
of a long pining sigh now emerges.  The many unspoken desires, the long unsung array
of bright heavens and oceans, the green star that dances in all of them—I have a sole word to say;
I am almost about to articulate something I told to the bones in the depths of the sea
when I dreamed they were dancing and I was the one who’d abandoned them, setting their wild spirit free.
That was all a delusion, but now you are present in truth as am I in this flesh as the word
that is turning to music awaits, its strange essence prepared to be spoken—but not to be heard.
A tear blots the page.  I had no time to speak it out loud, but I saw what lay written there.  Bright
star of emerald green, I know well where you’ll lead me.  Love-spells abound to be read by your light.
 

***
 

10 January 2002
 

What I Thought I Heard
 

The ink running over my fingers and wrists and now eyelids and brow is the hue of the sea
on a night of bright stars before moonrise.  I listen acutely—I wish you would wonder to me
what slow secrets it’s borne across eons of magical weather, then pause and be answered that I
might record what I hear you incant with the vatic conviction that shivers my flesh as you fly
between words and ideas with music inside you—then somehow inside me as well.  When you race
like the pulse of my veins, the once very long ride from the Moon to the ocean is seen to take place
in an instant—nay, less:  They were always located together.  Where silvery waves flow as one,
light and water, be mine.  This is all I have waited to tell you.  With this, something ancient is done;
something new can arise; something lovely can linger in phrases as clinging as inkstains, and we
can perceive one another as hearers and singers who understand beauty and what it sets free
when it shines in the night like a beacon on shadowy reaches and all worlds respond with a cry
of divine recognition.  I want to go mad with that ecstasy, feel you increase from a sigh
to a similar volume of joy, and lean forward till all we shall ever become flows to meet
all we’ve been.  Even previous voices and mortal misgivings will find they were always complete
in their moment, the ‘now’ of this magic.  My brother in song, my most sacred companion, appear
to these eyes the night sea has anointed.  Our love is as vivid as this solemn tincture, this tear
of deep joy; let it mark me forever.  I want you to know me at once if I lose you and pine
till you hear me and find me again, the one haunter who’ll wait for the emerald star, the green sign
of your sweet unmistakable being, within the Moon’s aura.  Rise swiftly—the midnight draws nigh
when all need will have vanished away like the skin that now shivers and nothing will serve but to lie
in the timeless embrace of true silence.  I feel its approach with a trace of anxiety; still,
with your mark on my eyelids, yourself in the beat of my heart, I am deeply at one with the real
source of this, our love-song.  It has chosen to teach us directly.  How strange—I can hear a voice call,
though you rest by my side and say nothing.  Repeat what you’ve heard, lover.  Aye:  Perfect silence; that’s all.
 

***
 

11 January 2002
 

It Does Not End With Day
 

In dreams, I’ve been reading, obsessed with a letter, one-third of a syllable hung from a string
of fine tightly-spun silk.  I am feeling much better this morning because a soft wind full of spring
met me waking while still in your presence, still seeing the moonglow that shines from within you, still rapt
in the eerie resplendence of emerald beams the Moon haloes, the starfire that I have been lapped
and pronounced by in changeable magics whose tongues are as many as waves on the limitless sea
from which we were first drawn when the voice of the thunder began the long chant you repeated to me
between flashes of lightning.  I see us in series of numinous landscapes, I hear us in swells
your increasingly vatic command of love’s peerless potential expresses in lyrical spells
as the madness that calls them to rise, the high silver obsession that mounts the great stair of the sky—
the round Moon on the shimmering air—proves its will to possess us most gently and teach us to fly
on the breath of its light where the source of perception reveals its essentially substanceless grace—
which is strong enough nevertheless to bear feathers and bodies of song and the whole of the race
we run homeward together, each meeting the other just over the threshold with ‘Why did you take
such a dreadful forever?  My heartless old lover, I thought I had made the most fatal mistake,
having trusted you…’ all the while smiling and humming with power that knows it has come to its true
shining moment.  The light in your eyes tells me something it seemed I’d forgotten until I fell through
the appearance of flesh and you showed me the treasure you’d kept locked inside you, awaiting the sign
that at last I was ready to dive for the measures that object of beauty portended.  The fine
silken thread it depended on—that remained tied to a water-hewn pillar so deep in your world,
I have only begun to remember the silent inscription I read as a fragrant mist swirled
all around it, both hiding and highlighting figures that formed a great chain of most resonant sounds
when I followed their course with my eyes till your signature ended their uptilted spiraling rounds
and I spoke it at long last out loud:  the one word I have borne all my lives in the pit of my heart,
doing all it required to protect it, no murmur escaping me.  Nothing could force me to part
with the secret I hid so completely, I lost it myself till you woke me and told it again
in a low, soundless voice.  Now I’ve heard my voice cross a bright inward dimension, conveying its plain,
perfect sanctity, pure and intact, to my own waking multiple shadows and minds, and I know
it will not be mislaid.  It hangs here, in the lone golden letter you’ve showed me; a similar glow
sparkles warmly in all the green starlight you bring, and I hear it repeated in each wave of Moon-
woken wonder, the madness that taught me to sing all the music that streams through me.  Carry the tune
of your name’s graceful burden I shall, and forever.  Listen to me as I do, and repeat
the dear secret I’ve hidden within it.  Old lover of lyrical words, I have learned to secrete
a wee drop of uncanny elixir myself in a form no mere mortal has recognized yet.
You, of course, already know where this love-spell is heading, but come—let its shimmering wet
moonlit aura beset you with miracles only the ghostly beast-angel you’ve been in a dream
could begin to evoke.  Hear my magic most clearly pronounce itself under the powerful stream
of your brilliant green starlight and let it possess you.  I have been taken to offer in turn
this desirable gesture, this homecoming-threshold impatience:  You knew I would suffer and burn
in the ravenous flames of the Moon till you told me your true name of power; now, love, I shall sing
it out loud many thousands of times.  Like a golden love-letter that hangs from a fine silken string,
I can cast it abroad on the air without loosing its hold on my heart’s central pillar.  You, too,
can pretend to have left me while still sending music throughout me to help me remember just who
we have been and remain.  I see numinous landscapes where hand-in-hand lovers go chanting these lines
under thunder and lightning, fly down to the strand where the ocean is pale and a secret Moon shines
in the shadowed disguise of a silent black new Moon, and meet us again—the same lovers, the same
chanted fire on their tongues, the same magical beauty possessing the woman to call out the name
I now know I shall never forget as you whisper my own.  It is morning; we’ve woken by day
while yet dreaming.  You tell me, ‘As long as you listen, you’ll hear my heart sing.  This is endless, our lay.’
 

***
 

12 January 2002
 

On the Earthly Sky’s New Moon
 

Dreaming and breathing the same timeless watery element, diving down into its glow
with a will to fly free through its heavenly body where underworld sources of song-magic flow
like the blood of my veins from a heart I have entered in dreams after being requested to sing
in its most silent presence, and feeling relentless imaginings enter me afterwards bring
so much joy to the fore of my thoughts, I drown over and over again in that deep blue-black sea.
Boundless new memories rise to the mouth of the one who stands waiting to whisper to me—
in this world’s sweetest voice—all its miracle-lessons.  I am afraid to attend him just yet.
Something prevents me, some form of distress that believes it will always and never forget
what it cannot conceive by itself.  I kept staring—this color resembles the ink on the page
I was reading before I slipped into a clarity no light of day penetrates.  A long age
seemed to pass, then a thread of pale moonlight crept slowly toward me.  The sky overhead held the same
subtle depth of blue darkness.  I knelt in the holy Moon’s path, then I called out the three-lettered name
I had heard in the dream that turned all my life over to your profound spellbinding power.  The blue
came in waves through my myriad minds, bearing roses upon its soft breath.  When I listen to you,
I begin with the very first love-spoken syllable.  Holding it fast in my heart, I proceed
to record the light fall of ideas until they have filled enough words to let song-magic bleed
past their surfaces’ segments and curves.  I then press them against the live skin of my thoughts where their stains,
being layered beyond saturation, possess an uncanny potential to bleach the remains
of my unhappy past of their hopeless disasters and morbid frustrations.  I honor the skill
and the craft you have so wisely, wonderfully mastered by lending the whole of my sanctified will
to your service in grateful return for the touch that has helped me feel able to venture this far
through the breathable darkness.  Your patient instruction and tender transmission of bliss—oh, you are
of a very high order of song-inspiration, I feel myself vaguely begin to recall—
your command of the beautiful flow of our fey ancient language is slowly dissolving the wall
built of worries and trouble that once stood between us in day-world delusions I hated and kept
close around me because they held things I had seen in my nightmares and all those ideas, bewept
by so many old songs, contained miserable glamour while you were too real to belong on the plane
where they sent up their daylong corporeal clamor and I stared forlornly at oceans of rain
in the sky of my most faithful mind and beseeched you and—now we are here.  You hold no glamour; you
are the pure singing beauty within and between all our words and their meanings.  Your power is true
to its translunar sources and origins.  I am a creature devised to be seen by the light
that flows through you and fills me with mirrored and shining-eyed eloquence.  Darkness of blue-black and bright
thread of silver-pale moonlight, be mine by sheer force of obsession.  You whisper a small simple word
borne across on a rose-scented wind.  I am mortally magnified, hugely desirous, and stirred
to the depths of the ocean of bliss I’ve begun to remember.  This sea is the color of ink,
precious words on a page, but the terrible number of layers set down there—I’m starting to sink
through their depths as their waves rise all round me.  The midnight of Moon-lightning song overhead and below
as we fly through this heaven resounds with a riddlesome echo of love’s ancient language I know
how to answer:  When sadness besets me, it tells me itself, in its own woeful way, how to speak
for the pigmented sky it devises, its spell of unsatisfied longing, its formerly weak
sense of rightful appearance within this fey zone of benignant enchantment, this nightmare-free glade
in an underworld ocean where leaves sigh and moan and the utterly wonderful music is made
that lay back of a wall built of unwanted daylight within only one of my numerous minds—
once a most superstitiously powerful place, now it harbors a thread of pure moonlight that winds
uninhibited, deeply remembered, and present to sing for itself as we both listen hard.
Fly through that deep sea of sky, my obsession, beside me.  A magic abundantly starred
with sweet emerald green sings among the great folds of the velvet blue-black that surrounds us.  This sea
is the color of ink, but its sources are older than time.  On this New-Moon night, shine inside me.
 

***
 

13 January 2002
 

Wild Nights Draw Nigh
 

The flow of swift water like silk moving over my fingers and hands bears a wakening trace
of the light of past days to my eyes as I slowly percieve what is happening now by the grace
of your long act of kindness, this limitless sentence:  confinement to beauty:  dissolving old walls
while transforming the world all around me to gentle love-messages written on time while it crawls
and thin air while it races, a storm-gale along the sky’s spine like your magic along my taut nerves.
This is most happily strange.  I was wrong to anticipate less than your nature deserves,
knowing moonlight was so strong a part of it always.  Now we are lyrical beast-angels:  Hail,
my exotic familiar.  Down luminous hallways together—down reaches where old nightmares wail
and new voices are gathering fast—help me translate their magical elements first, then record
the emphatically heightened designs I feel dancing inside me with each spoken word.  I’ve adored
every aspect you’ve shown me, and now I desire only more of them—more speaking facets, more sly
hints of narrative rapture, more ways to inspire more complex recognition—just more reasons why
I should wait by this wide glassless window for moonlight to wax till its flares fill the casement with song
to its edges, then over them.  You will bring truly unbearable bliss to possess me as long
as I let you—of this you assure me.  The gathering power I feel as I shiver and hum
tells me something arcane has just come to the matter of music that I can dive into and plumb
to its depths in a vivid oracular frenzy—if not this New Moon night, then one very near.
Singer of shadowy eyes which are tenderly shining with darkness, console the blind tear
of song’s all-seeing well as its waves attain lustrous dimensions where ancient inscriptions are laid
highly legibly bare.  Close my eyes with the touch of your sensitive fingers and sing me the shade
of that undersea glade’s atmosphere where the lovers we are and shall always remain sway and sigh.
Read me their words from the pages they’ve covered with dream-inspired language and let the low cry
of their voices be heard very softly between us.  We shall attain perfect memory through
such observances.  I see a shuddering green pulse of starlight combine with the feverish dew
the dark Moon has been shedding by means of ideas in our secret rose-garden:  You are its source—
you, or the magic behind you.  The being of beauty whose velvet blue-black watercourse
is the sky overhead is my ally and mentor.  Moon or beast-angel, I praise the fey child
he has been and in some wise remains.  My intent in divining the roots of his presence is wild
celebration wrought up to a pitch of excessive devotion so potent, it turns right around
and claims me as its mouthpiece and most prized possession.  There will a curious magic be found—
when the change comes upon us and moonlight and starlight wax strongly together below the sea’s face
where we breathe our own shadows and stream through the farthest dance-gestures of song’s ever-widening space
and catch each splendid motion in quotable figures on living-flesh pages and then dead ones too—
then we will know we have finally ridden the nightmare beyond her domain into new
spheres of beauty old shame cannot taint and old silence cannot render void of its truth.  We shall find
the root-source of immaculate wisdom behind her appearance and—somehow I know it is kind
as the waves of rose-fragrance now rising within the Moon-tide as the colorless light of the air
casts a deep if invisible glow round the skin of the substanceless ghosts we project as our fair
real-world counterparts, page after page.  Where they flicker and dance, we shall celebrate always.  We sing
as they tell us, in their timeless language.  Too thick to catch anything all by myself, I must cling
to your words’ every trace, saying, Please omit nothing; widen the casement; flow outward; dear green
ray of starlight, remember the sister and brother who’ve wandered through rose-gardens my-sight unseen
for so long and recall their least sigh to my lonely desire even as you awaken much more.
When I move through the dream you are visibly opening now, I will feel you completely restore
an old magic, a turning-point so finely balanced its ending will be the beginning of song
rooted deeply in such perfect silence, strange talents I’ve never suspected will rise to its strong
subtle calling, and—You will be smilingly splendid, my shining beast-angel, the now of the trace
of the light of past days that is coming to tender emergency.  I shall behold your true face
by your own starlit aura as waves of pure moonlight surround us where we breathe and drown in one sigh.
Well of oracular madness and luminous language, your nights of sweet frenzy draw nigh.
 

***
 

14 January 2002
 

We Shall Follow It Through
 

Remember the path to the heart of the forest beneath the dark waves, through the glade, to the black
cavern’s mouth, through its shadowy entrance and corridors, into the night behind time where the track
spirals outward again into fields wet with morning.  Still under the sea, now behold the calm eye
of a well that brims over with so many stories and songs, silent angels lean down from the sky
of wild water-fired stars and intently recite the enchantments they find there within their pure minds
till they’ve memorized everything.  Here in the heightened suspense of the moment before song unwinds
of its own from their sweet parted lips, the two lovers they are, the beast-angels who pass arm-in-arm
between worlds, be the ghost of all music recovered from slow desolation and needless alarm
and turn sideways to gaze full upon me.  Your spirit is endlessly welcome to lie amid mine
till our old visions blur and new insights come clear.  As we wait to behold the uncanny design
of our future together, the unsettled margin between here and there, where the silence of eyes
meets the self-breathing song of an air filled with starlight beneath a night-ocean’s New-Moon-flooded skies—
or the Moon at bright full, our whole world having turned in its courses to gaze at that splendor in awe—
this arcane intermediate zone also murmurs soft words in a chant that recalls what we saw
in our most sacred dreams before unwelcome daylight disturbed their shy traces and drove them away.
Sometimes they wore nightmare masks on their faces of rose-petal mildness; their echoes still say,
We were all children once, dream-begotten, dream-labored-upon till we sparkled like dew or spring rain;
now we are lovers who marvel:  How strange are our progeny, creatures who whimpered in vain
for our own Mother-Father attention while we were still wailing for power denied us.  Their tears
sparkle wet as the otherworld midnight of leaves they are reading out loud.  They are trembling with fears
we’ve long known are quite empty, dead echoes of cold wordless moans from a hollow grey passageway.  Look
to the end:  No disaster awaits; just two old song-companions who’ve leafed through a shadowy book
in a real but discarnate dimension.  Advise the poor nightmarish children, Your stories will yield
gifts of grace to a world you will soon recognize as your own, while your music will move through unsealed
ocean channels, bright sea-air, resplendent intelligence offering deep inspiration to you
even as you are steeped in it—wherever else did you get this fine veiling of undersea dew
that proclaims your fey heritage?  Lovers and children of moonlight, one emerald star’s steady glow
in your eyes, you were stubbornly blind, sadly filled with bizarre inhibitions that made you not know
your true names any longer or where the location of your first arising awaited you still;
hovering over love’s unwritten pages, the beautiful words that depend on your will
to pronounce your own future shift restlessly, aching to lie side by side on the rose-scented sheets
of song’s wide-open volume, desiring skilled makers of magic to honor the racing heartbeats
each live page resonates with.  Lean close, beastly angel—your eyes’ sudden stare tells me everything:  This
is a volume of lyrical mysteries stranger than any day-world’s; it is written in bliss
from beginning to ending already; our work is to add the drawn lines of our love’s every sigh.
Such is the privilege of pleasure made perfect by long, long immersion within the sea-sky
of our otherworld origins after our waking return to this vatic dimension in full
rapt possession of song’s ancient language.  Forsaking the sad light of day that left sacred dreams null
and apparently lost, enter wide-awake morning by star-fired moonlight while rising up strong
and renewed in the eloquent flesh that’s been borning the length of this movement toward the pure song
that contains all our lives’ deepest stories.  Enchant me, my partner in magic, by reading out loud
from the wreathing green lines that will spiral and dance past your sly sidelong glance as a shimmering cloud
of bright thoughts two fey angels have drawn from the mouth of the well in the zone of the sea’s fertile fields
where our spirits imagine themselves amid sounds only silence’s union with mystery yields
at its moment of moonstruck perfection.  I’ve shown you the way as I know it; proceed there with me
if you will, and at once.  Through the darkness, an emerald star lights the crescentless sky—by its wee
thread of luminous green, see the future awaiting us now:  See us here, in its dewy-eyed gaze:
Angels who’ve memorized everything sacred and sweet by the potent invisible rays
of this midnight’s New Moon.  They have found us a morning so fair and so vividly real, the calm eye
of the well overflowing with so many stories and songs sends their beauty a most profound high-
reaching glance, and they sing it—this world’s heartfelt ‘Welcome home, children.’  Look deep in my eyes, my dear friend.
Find what has passed through the minds of those eloquent angels and follow it through to the end.
 

***
 

15 January 2002
 

Where We Almost Are
 

Most secret New-Moon-light, song’s otherworld mystery’s true home dimension, how palely you shine
in the silence of eyes, and how kindly.  My listening heart is beginning to find the design
that has slowly been forming of starfire and emerald green and your subtle white-rose-petal hue.
Dreamer of me where our magics remember each other, sing tenderly.  Croon the soft dew
that attends our ecstatic reception of this way of knowing.  The feverish glow of your brow
as you look to the breathtaking aura of bliss this sweet vision portends hums with energy now
that will soon become manifest beauty.  Clear light of a Moon that shines always with adamant strength,
deliver us into a more complete sight of your presence.  Reveal your abundance at length,
in enchanting detail, and with lyrical eloquence we will not ever attain but by grace
of the mind that lies far beyond thought, where the spell was first cast that created this time-unbound place
and this meeting of fey-human-angels and power so chaste, so precisely refined, it can speak
through a thin ray of diamond-like light in a shower of seaspray beneath a sky-ocean and leak
heady clues to the way of a much higher meeting, then transport us there, not a word being said—
while between us a vast sigh, a fortunate greeting inspired by the ghost-words who’ve never been laid,
who’ve retained their articulate faculties even while buried alive-in-the-spirit—our sigh
inspires endless song-passages:  These contain leaves that are flourishing fast in the otherworld sky
that this pale light pervades, and their voices are rising—their lines self-pronouncing, their tunes of the air
that is breathing us.  Deep in the quiet of night I can count on one hand the few steps to the lair
that awaits us, the source of the beam that is flowing toward us, the home of the ghosts of the old
unsung powers we most truly are.  We are going to meet ourselves there.  Oh, my hands are so cold,
they are shaking and stiff—I could not hold a candle to light the dark way, but the emerald star
of your brow goes before me, and such strangely lambent moonlight flickers over us both.  We’ve not far
to move forward.  I feel we will best go there singing.  You wrap your warm fingers around mine and raise
the first ghost of a melody out of the clinging miasma that’s shrouded its lips and it sways
to its bodiless feet and incants a vague mumble that soon becomes rhythmically effortless.  When
its first clearly intelligent syllables tumble across its mouth’s threshold, surpassing our ken
for a fraught surprised moment, we stare back in wonder-struck longing, but then understanding proceeds
hand-in-hand with its next flow of words.  We are stunned in a most grateful way.  Its deep confidence leads
our transfixed admiration from image to image till one of them answers a question it’s posed
and takes up the fine diamond-Moon thread without dimming its glow for an instant.  A field many-rosed
and exceedingly fragrant falls open inside me on hearing the song of the heartbroken child
this grave ghost has held under the wings of its white winding-sheet for how aching a silent, beguiled
span of longing, I dare not allow to be asked lest my own sad reflection recall it to tears.
Now it is facing a terrible task with courageous resolve as its few mortal years’
sacred holdings disclose their inverse in the presence of sympathy—ours.  I am diamond-light blind,
overwhelmed, till it shifts to the greater love-essence that seizes and heightens the cast of its mind
before my amazed eyes, and another song follows from out of the next in this holy cascade
of cool-fire-streaming revenant angels.  Down hollows of silver-watery Moon, in the shade
of the leaves we were seeking when first we left daylight behind, we are met all around with such pure
inspiration, such utterly real celebration just reaching the moment when all signs assure
its fulfillment of every degree of expression, the vatic potential of so much arcane
and yet presently opening mystery beckons like oceans of moonlight in gales of wild rain
permeated by diamond-white magic from word one to word-everlasting—from silence to song
even deeper than its final sources’ most perfectly realized vision.  We ought to belong
to this world, this dimension of bliss, without question:  Beloved, we do:  This is our heart of hearts.
Here, in the shadows of leaves but so wet with the luminous dew of the Moon’s darkest arts
come to shining attainment of limitless power—the power to sing to the highest degree
of the most sacred truth from the absolute ground of corporeal being to angels set free
by the fires of refined inspiration, old ghosts given faultless new forms by pure song’s timeless grace
in our eyes as we mirror their light and they shift into beauty so heightened it transcends this place
of long sought-after meetings between ancient lovers and that which best serves the most lyrical lays
of their overflow-homeplace, the ocean that covers us, song’s power signals to our Moon-drenched gaze,
and reveals the sweet well at the core of its sea-breathing depths.  There two dreamers, two ghost-angels fair
beyond silence itself, recognize you and me.  So few measures remain between here and their lair,
so few steps yet untaken.  A host of enchanters, old songs granted magical tongues, fill the air
with true words green as leaves as a lunar light dances among them—a diamond light.  Love, WE ARE there.
 

***
 

16 January 2002
 

The Secret Wedding Ring
 

The story of all the forlornness of beauty that waits alone night after night shares its true
underlying design as a pale thread of dew-laden light from a secret dimension leaks through
the innumerable veil-like enclosures that wind us about with mysterious dreams.  These repeat
tiny parts of the whole; they bring gestures and signs from a source that is trying to prove and complete
our awareness that dreams hold reality even by means of their ongoing changes.  We know
who we are on their echoing plane; we are seeing the way of true magic and how we must go
to catch up with our more wakeful selves in that bourne of oceanic desire come to tentative rest.
When we have done so, with all of our mortal resolve we must face yet another strange test—
then another—as veils fall away and the words that lie nearest the heart of our love-song resound
slightly out of our confident hearing and urgent desire re-arises and nothing is found
that will break the unkindly old spell we suspect has entranced us all over again….  Then the thread
of pale secret New-Moon-light, the diamond-reflected insight it inspires, the deep otherworld bed
of the song-breathing sea where we waken, still dreaming—the fine glowing stream of pure well-water there—
the beings WE ARE to a higher degree with each passionate meeting, the love-words we share
that astonish us both as they flow of their own will and instinct toward the song we cannot sing
by unaided, mere mortal intent—now the moan of its opening measures is starting to bring
ancient memories into our ken where they’ve always belonged, and they tell us, This song still conceals
such exorbitant miracles, so many hallways that run between so many worlds, such ordeals
to be met and exceeded, and such fields of blossom—such oceans of moonlight, such kisses, such faints
that will lead unto so many magical crossroads where such inspired beauty breathes such forlorn plaints
that your spirits will stare about dazed for an instant, then follow the thread into lyrical toils.
There re-perceive one another.  A hint of strange music, like ink spilled in water, uncoils
till it tinges the stream of these very words now, yet its source is that after-faint world many veils
from this place where you listen in wonder.  You’ve found an unusual trace of the stream-light that pales
till it fades like a wraith at the coming of daylight.  To what do you owe this most generous gift?
The beauty that hides in the eyes of true makers of song has permitted enchantment to shift
from its old world away into one better suited to feel it intact and rephrase it in lines
filled with dreamfully wise slants of delicate moonlight by means of the creatures who read its designs
as small glimpses—which yet are complete songs and stories—drawn out of the well where the luminous whole
of the future conceives endless aspects and forms of expression in order to worship the soul
you true makers of song hold in common.  Between you, a single heart beats:  May you marry the wills
of your two and more worlds, all your magics, the dreams of your loneliness, all of the love-gotten skills
that have brought you to this sacred vision, and now the awareness that this is the change that begins
in the shudder of flesh as a sigh moves about you, unwinding the veils of the multiple skins
of the body of song of which you are possessed.  When you rise up together, alive and stripped bare
of all artifice, you will have passed the last test any power can pose.  You will be the sea-air
you now breathe, and which breathes you.  The trickle of diamond-clear light that proceeds from the well’s marble edge
will fulfill and protect you.  Because it is shining inside you already, your spirits will pledge
perfect faith with this place and each other without hesitation, right now.  As a sign that you’ve heard
your shared heart speak its love’s deepest truths in the sound of an eloquent ocean where no single word
yet remains to be formed of pure silence and murmured in low gentle musical tones that are yours
to repeat and transcribe as best pleases you, turn to the span of this world’s curved horizon where shores
glitter brightly, just like the well’s sides in the rising full-Moon-light—the ever-full Moon of true song.
See how the pearl of that Moon rests alike on the ring of the well and the ring of the long
stretch of beach that encircles this island’s lunarium heights:  This is given to you, this bright pair
of concentric engagements with endlessness.  Marry in wisdom and live in the fortunate air
that will only continue to deepen, revealing new powers of grace amid words that will flow
from a place that still yields but a hint of the real song awaiting you there—song you already know.
 

HERE ENDS

LUNARIUM

which is now entitled

MIRAMALA
 

***
 

17 January 2002
 

In the autumn of 1994, I met a very dedicated student of magick whose name was David (not the David referred to here previously).  In response to his interest in my work, and because his was a stimulating if sometimes difficult presence, I soon produced and gave him verses which contained these lines:

How shall I love you when ruin is everywhere
all you can see, in the absence of hope—
The black angel Body will murder himself
in the presence of hate and a very strong rope—

He soon moved away and we lost contact.  Last week, someone who knows a friend of his conveyed the message that David is dead.  He committed suicide between one and two years ago; she thinks the method was hanging.  I think she is right, because this is one of the visions that came weeks ago and was already, before I heard the news, part of the book I just finished:

In the Exact Center

There is a hole in the floor of the temple’s main chamber, in the exact center of the room.  Over it is a stone slab that seals it.  I remove the slab to find a dead body hanging down by a rope around its neck into the mouth of a well.  The body—I cannot be mistaken; it is clearly dead—begins to move.  Its eyes roll back, then toward me, and its mouth begins to work.  My eyes fly wide open.  I look out at the room before me, and see the circle I have trodden into the floor by dancing.

There is so much more.  For now, the following words send the hope that all is well.
 

A Black Angel’s Articulate Fate
 

Wing of white paper, one only, slant outward
along the faint draft a pale moonbeam creates
when it reaches down nightly, and find the bright mouth of
the well of all song—overlaid by a strait
set of Hanging-Man bones.  Child of nightmares, malevolent
angel, I want to remember—and more.
What have you learned in the zone of unheaven,
who’ve opened and then left ajar the death-door?
Ripple of light down the shaft of a missive
that sings incomplete till its partner in verse
reads and sings in return, send him tidings of bliss and
a sweet antidote to an early world’s curse.
Tilt back the skull that is nodding:  The throat that
is choking, that white exposed spine, holds the wail
that will open the opposite wing of the both of us,
soaring us home up the ladder of pale
moonlight bleaching this world of its color of menace.
Black are dead leaves, but this paper is white.
What have you learned, my erstwhile wicked friend?
Track of the skies, solemn Night Mare in flight
between stations of song, my relentless obsession
conveying the scope of their grandeur—relate
your opposed and adjoining song-mystery lessons,
possessor of such an articulate fate.
 

***
 

18 January 2002
 

A Light That Was Lacking Before
 

Out of a thousand snowbound angles
of pale morning light, a single ray
signals to me of a glad enchantment
raising its head.  Along the way
that bright beam portends, I shall meet a moment
so fragile and yet with such full command
of love’s measures, a lull and then we are home at
the water-line where a noble hand
will have stretched forth, touched, and retrieved the only
element lacking in all our song.
Who will have been its faith-keeper?  Won’t we
both have remained where we belong—
on either side of the veiled transmission
of moonlight within which all are blind—
till the morning hour when we cease resisting
and see what compels love’s shining mind?
What did your former mind withhold
that now has its chance to sing out loud?
Only by song is woe consoled
in those of us deeply song-avowed;
we shall attend true song’s least gesture
to and beyond the door of death
and the Moon of bright waterfall-love’s measures.
Here they are—light upon your breath.
 

***
 

19 January 2002
 

By the North Wind’s Rising
 

Soft as the North Wind’s slow arising,
keen as that wind will soon become—
here is a wreath of cold-abiding
blossoms and thorns, the bitter sum
of the world that is turning over on this
blessed occasion:  Look you here—
wonderful recollection dawning
bright in your eyes beside a tear
that glitters like true love’s holy diamond
essence:  The wind upon your face
believes it is what inspires that shining,
and this which is slowly taking place—
the thorns turning into leafy branchlets
bearing new blossoms even now.
Wear it, the crown of true enchantment—
love’s holy light upon your brow.
 

***
 

20 January 2002
 

This Was in Your Night Mare
 

I haunted a stranger; he gazed at the shore
with oceans of tears in his eyes.
I felt in myself a great similar store
behind the enlightened disguise
of Night Mare’s most fertile creation, strange beauty.
Why do you stare at me so?
Only because I have followed the ‘you’ of
the death of the dignified woe
that holds my cold hand in a graveyard of guttering
flames, ruined candles that flicker and die?
Told in an ongoing dream by a muttering
old-woman angel:  These tatters will lie
twisted together like skeins of red leather
under an ocean of clay,
haunting each other forever and ever.
Where is your chosen ‘away’?
 

***
 

21 January 2002
 

Hanging Weather
 

Soft as the wind, with more remembered
magic adrift on every tide
that meets us along a strange world’s endless
margin and feels us open wide
to greet its enchantment, sighing—Children
of more than a dream’s enticing lay,
we only hope that no bewildered
winding-about will make us say
no better word than—When the ocean
melted away between our hands,
who was its tides’ committed woken
wonder?  Who dreams and understands
needs that have not yet met their measure?—
something is shifting deep inside.
Soft as the wind—but hectic weather
hangs on the next-Moon’s-rising tide.
 

***
 

22 January 2002
 

Under the World
 

Where were the thoughtful willows winding
out their long wand-like leaves of green
over a flowing river’s timeless
babble when we were yet-unseen
visitors to their world’s dream-chamber,
revenants from another clime—
spirited means of magic’s labor
of love in a region less sublime
than our ancient home, but one most willing
to feel us invest our fruitful care
in prizing its true heart open, filling
deeply the central river there
with new-risen luminescence, shining
music so rich in sacred lore—
where were these willows then, whose minds were
waiting for us on either shore?
Under the dreaming world that views us
thoughtfully, all a long dark glade
glitters with shafts of midnight music.
Here is the song our world has made.
Here is the reason those sweet willows
sing as they trail their vibrant leaves
in this living water’s timeless brilliance.
Here is what love’s own heart conceives
lyrically, underneath the swirling
play of those long fine shafts of green—
bearing the gift of shining words that
rise out of reaches yet-unseen.
 

***
 

23 January 2002
 

The Learned Wedding Gown
 

The scattered bones and the wrought obsession
that guided them once—or drove them on
as it chose—they have not parted ways; a lesson
remains unlearned; they have never gone
far from its needful starting-point in
otherworld time without a trace
of its slowly opening rose-like voice’s
flame creeping into the hiding-place
that conceals their sadly inelegant level—
singers unlettered in lunar sighs
dreaming beyond their station, heaven-
reaching but wearing the pale disguise
of that left behind when incarnate wisdom
flees to a formless cloud to dwell
out of the omnipresent mission
it took on earth to perform:  to spell
just as the Moon dictates.  Moon shining
now like a wreath of seething mist
all round those bones—and still refining
tormenting ways to dream a twist
of lyrical language even bones will
hear and obey at once and then
desire to hear over—your low moan of
soft lunar light has passed all ken
on either side of a strange transition—
not for the first; the millionth time.
Once more the lesson:  So much wisdom
rattles along in filmy rhyme;
dancer wound round by ancient moonlight,
rise to your bony feet and sing
the lay of the magic ‘you’ that suits it
best as you sway through the rose-like ring
of a petalled zone of roses, aura-
radiant song-obsession.  View
the bright universe laid at length before you;
dance it to death; provide the true
and hitherto yet-unused dimension
deep in your heart with all the grace
that seeks to exceed the fragrant plenty
you’ve already found the strength to face
to such a degree—aye, you will shatter.
Sadly, moreover, you will fall
into the dream, ‘it doesn’t matter.’
Being incarnate is never all;
this is a double-sided lens, the
long view of time that music brings.
Each lunar word awakens senses
that interconnect in locking rings
of living song-light, and ‘you’ are where they
choose to take form.  You leak their pale
dimension:  You in your world are wearing
so soft a wild-rose-fragrant veil,
surely your voice recalls its misty
origins.  Merely breathe again:
Body and soul clasp hands, then twist
together, a single length of chain
that rattles in pleasing ways with sacred
melody-words.  Write all this down.
You are a spellbound pair of angels.
‘You’ are their learned wedding gown.
 

***
 

24 January 2002
 

The First of the Six-Angled Words
 

Your hard hollow eyes hide a secretive laughter
so deeply within them, I stare and grow cold.
How many times have I stood this Hereafter
that glares like a nightmare that’s never been told,
‘Let me hear and grow wise’?  If you need me to listen,
I shall; though it hurts, I shall not turn away.
Now I am only a snowflake that glistens
upon an ice wind.  I have not long to say
what I carry in each of my crystalline angles,
but say it I must.  I strain forward—I tire—
then I dance and look down at the field where the mangled
remains of a hollow-eyed body respire
a faint trace of life still, and that life is aquiver
with laughter.  Your soft eyes meet mine and we swing
round and round, never speaking—just hearing.  A shiver
possesses my spirit.  It laughs, and I sing.
 

***
 

25 January 2002
 

The Sprung Trap
 

The jaws of the trap on my hand may conceal a
fine blood-line of new-leaking red, but I say
such an honor becomes me.  The sacred the ordeal of
a place I can only describe if I sway
to and fro as I pry the teeth open that hold me
as tightly as ever a touch has been laid
on my flesh, I have almost—I have—I’ve unbolted
the latch at the back of this spring-loaded, splayed-
apart weapon of iron—and the blood is a rust-stain.
My unbroken skin is as white as new snow
on a minefield.  A ghost of faint throbbing—I mustn’t
give in to its wailings; it wants me to go
at high speed through this dangerous vale, but I know who
possessed it before me, and him I still trust.
Look—I am not really bleeding.  The ghost of
myself says, This sprung trap was nothing but rust.
 

***
 

26 January 2002
 

You Will Win
 

Snow is all you wear—and wonder
wound about you like a shawl.
I am hearing distant thunder.
Thunder holds me in its thrall.
Snow is filled with tiny lightning;
I am sparks without a flame
flying on a wind of icy
brightness, crying out the name
that hums most magic to my ancient
mystery-believing ways.
Someone winds a shawl of lace
about me and its fineness says,
‘Of the herd of racing horses
overhead, one calls to you.’
Snow is falling.  I shall learn to
wear it, while you wear the blue.
 

***
 

27 January 2002
 

My Other Face
 

White you are and green by nature—
I am black as eiderdown
in this inverted mirror-image
world in which I wear a crown
upon my feet.  I weave like silence
through the deeply fertile murk
of graveyard oceans.  You are wild and
willing to forego the work
of angels to be one with haunted
magic in its shadowed bed.
Where I find your likeness wanting,
I retrace the spun-out thread
of feathered footsteps through a fatal
chasm.  Crowned with verdant grace,
there you are, love’s undertaken
strangeness, my inverted face.