AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

January 2004
 
 

22 January 2004
 

Happy Lunar New Year!
 

This is a very old poem, one which came in response to a piece by Laura Riding.  Her poem was quoted in a review of a biography of Robert Graves which referred to her as 'the real White Goddess.'
 

Words, will you ride me
from border to border?
Mine is the whip hand;
fall into order.
 

I expect to try to work smaller again.
 

Thank you for visiting.
 

***
 

26 January 2004
 

This again is an older piece.  I am reprinting it here as a ritual offering in the hope that the right person will read it in the right way.  The living leaf and vine are an antidote to plastic flowers and leaves that were seen in the dream that inspired this song.  I wish to be very clear that the woman here is myself.
 

26 November 2000
 

The Bridge-Builder’s Song
 

The trembling subsides halfway over the chasm of raging sea breakers.  Immaculate calm
rushes forward to greet you, a full-throated answer you never dreamed tenderness, borne on the balm
of the mild sunset air, could provide.  In its power lie many surprises awaiting their share
of song’s loved one’s devoted attention.  The ‘now’ in which all shall be known has begun over there,
on the opposite shore, which is coming much closer.  With each step we seem to be gathering speed.
In the time that remains, let us view one last ghost who has made this long journey beside you.  He bleeds
for a time on the night of new-moonrise, a weeping apport from a world in which sorrows are men
denied voices because they are numinous keepers of secrets that meet and exceed female ken,
and yet only the woman his music has chosen can know him at all—by the song of his throat.
If she hears it as silence a thousand times over, the humming behind it might learn her by rote,
and find devious means to invite itself in through the door at the foot of her mind’s winding stair,
like a leaf at the tip of a vine through a window that climbs the same spiraling steps with an air
bright with shimmering words that the evening breeze carries away from the trembling vibration it sets
into audible motion along the leaf’s merry outspoken green smile of a lyrical, wet,
almost morbidly sensitive membrane.  That singing arises from most subtle causes, yet grows
in its strength until series of syllables bring themselves forward and—whose lilting measures are those
that have seen her completely transfixed?  She stands waiting, and aye, the next stanza comes round and begins.
The sigh of the mild evening breeze is its maker, and who is behind that?  Her thoughts fairly spin—
nay, what’s spinning is all alike:  vine growing vine-leaf up-spiral, the man singing under his breath,
the music of everything rising and rising, and what is this night of the Moon?  Bloody death
step aside:  He will flow to the best of his powers, this man who is leaving a trail of red drops
up the stairs in his wake—but he’s mounting the tower well knowing the woman would not have him stop,
nor will he, whatever may follow his act of decision.  The woman has already learned
the refrain of his song, and now joins in.  Attracted beyond consequence, round and round they return
to its endless beginning.  Because she has heard it, because the fine hum from the edge of the leaf
borne across on his breath has contacted her nerve of acutely desirous reception, the chief
hope and secret design of his magical effort is hereby entirely enacted.  Bright tears
spring to his and her eyes as she silently gestures and he finds his voice in her presence.  The years
 of frustration and fury dissolve in a heartbeat as perfect alignment between them attunes
all the notes and the words they have only just started to realize never will cease now:  The Moon
will cascade through its plenary phases; the bleeding they share will alike come to wax and then wane;
but their song will end—never.  Ghost-lover, I steal close beside you, the song on the wind that brings rain
from the Ocean as we take these final steps forward.  All trembling subsides.  We are touching the shore
of the once very far shining land.  So much mortally lonely bridge-building—song knows what it’s for.
 

***
 

27 January 2004
 

This very night's work—a wish for B', but also for Thomas, on the off-chance that he might someday care to hear a bit of what I have learned about the Moon.  The title is not a typo.

I don't 'know' why either.  I just follow my intuition.
 

Enchandress
 

Her burgeoning powers obsess and bewilder the poet-companion her lovespells bemuse.
He leaks a long tear-shedding sigh.  A deep stillness comes over him.  How he desires that she use
her uncanny abilities now, he will never betray—not in plain-spoken prose; but the lift
of the down all his shivering spine is the ever- so-delicate answer.  She makes him the gift
of his own subtle inward responses raised achingly nigh the pain-threshold his strength can least bear
and then tenderly slightly beyond it.  A wakening sky in the midnight his mind’s everywhere
kept concealed under shrouds of blue-black linen sprinkled with pinpoints of starlight, reverse-written scrawls
on a field of intently drawn breath hung with mingled wild otherworld voices whose joy scales the walls
of the tented lunarium-temple that mind has disclosed at its center—that wakening sky
has a literate reason for seeking this shining night-daybreak within him whose vibrating sigh
is about to—has all but—has keeningly entered the light she's been leaning to hold to his lips.
High moonrise he sees as a sweetly lamenting design into staining blue-black liquid drips
down a white linen page, his profoundest heart aching with beautifully painful wild peace.  Into tears
he is now leading insight; strange wetness weeps, making him dizzy.  A tower of ten thousand years
of Moon-mad inspiration denied due expression—its tent-walls collapsing, its shroud bleached with light—
for a rapt moment feels itself penetrate blessed obsession she tells him is his by long right,
and he knows she is whispering, singing, a truth he will never betray—not in any wise now.
Silence descends, but he grows more bemused as it echoes:  There lips drink the light of his brow.
 

***
 

28 January 2004
 

The Fan-Folded Book
 

Long lettered sigh on a night wind turning
swiftly to ash what once was snow,
sing the strange song of the soft bright burning
breathing behind you.  Light and show
the lay of the hand that once hung written
starlight in fine-rayed forms on air
before it was lifted up to litter
magical pages greatly rare
in lyrical otherworldly vision
even when first extended wet
and fragile upon a screened decision
neither to cut nor tear the set
of what would become white frames for hand-drawn
mysteries laid in fragrant ink
upon their pale fibers, incense danced to
ash on the faery-altared brink
of syllables never human-uttered.
Render me fast pure magic spell.
Breathe me that lilting wind—for what lie
fanned there themselves alone can tell.
 

***
 

30 January 2004
 

The Ring-Song's Absolute Close
 

I will and will not have contained my ambition to answer at length when the eerie wind blows
and the dance of the magical scales I have listened half-rapt with comes round to its absolute close
in the joining of rings that shone distantly silver scant hours ago but are fast moving near
the occasion of mingled-voice singing the will at the heart of the vision they bring me must hear
and be lifted awake by.  The shimmer their tender vibration sends reaching toward me glows high
with a lyrical polychrome madness that meant me no less than immensity, ever; that sky—
where a pinpoint of starlight, a sentient signal that knows me uncannily well, throbs and bleeds—
now reveals so much lovely potential the liquid response I must yield to its mystery feeds
both the strength it requires to be brought to the outcome its secret design still holds darkly within
and the dream of myself that is rippled with sounds that are echoes of someone I want to let in
should he hint he is even half-willing.  A roundness; a blending of elements far, far away;
a remote silver shining that hangs in the sound that has danced me so fast, I am wild disarray;
a strange gleam that is suddenly almost—behind me—I whirl and now face him wherever I stare.
Uplifted, sheer singing possesses me.  Shining again at the heart of his world’s everywhere,
being blown on a wind that is riddled with voices from mad eerie sources so plaintively sweet
I cannot but be breathed as a sigh a vague moistness remembers as poured from where great oceans meet
on horizons his smile renders human-scale music—or nearly, I catch but a glimpse of his face
before I close my eyes and lapse into a truly inspired outer nowhere that changes the grace
I can hold before hanging half-dead but enraptured entirely.  Oh, never more willing, he shines;
we are silverly mingled; our moment is captured.  I wake and am met with this page of scrawled lines.

.

**