1 July 2001
 

A Glance From a Strange New Land
 

So mournful you thought you wanted to lie with sad-whispering reeds
and linger among their long-haunted environs like one feathered seed,
a dead child of the bloom of their bodies, cast onto the shoreside sand—
what would have become of the water you sifted with cold white hands
had you lain there forever?  Streams of live magic, the high flood’s will,
come seeking you through the dreams you can never entirely still;
the water-world all around you keeps opening wider fields,
and though you are almost drowned, you awaken to one who wields
a slow steady bolt of lightning like none you have ever known.
Though a false sleep beset you, nightmares whose strength has been overthrown
are leaving in streams.  Behind them, the brilliance of starry skies
has been brought to a tight spell-binding collusion of glowing eyes
from either side—world of drifting grey-white streams of deathly mist,
apprised that your curse is lifted, behold a song many-blissed
who stares as he crosses over the fine heartbeat-narrow strand
till he touches you like a lover whose place in the daylight land
is manifold woken silver and gold so entwined, they melt
in his hands of their own high will, these sweet magical streams you’ve felt
lap all round your flowing body that sways with a pulse the tide
of heaven has turned to water and lightning alive inside
a long-silent place where whispers could reach you but you could not
respond.  Had you ceased to listen, your sad solitary thoughts
would still have revolved forever about the place fraught with words
no force anywhere could sever from one who has always heard
the murmurs you felt were dying, the stream that bears you alive
and lightning-struck through the high art of darkness whose songs now arrive
from every direction, lit by a glance from a strange new land—
a lover who sees you sifting his dreams with your small white hands.
 

***
 

2 July 2001
 

The Nightmare Was Singing, ‘The Black Leaf Turns Over Green’
 

for Michael and then some

I know you lie moaning a scant hand’s-breath over the wash of blue water that flows in between
the pale heaven of here and the heaven of knowing the pure outer darkness through which I am seen
to lie drawing a long ragged breath, at your mercy to our complete rapture; how narrow, how wide;
how entirely awful the distance that worries my thoughts like the nightmares an unready bride
goes in passionate dread of inviting to ride her by lapsing, though late, late at night, into sleep
when she might have outlasted temptation and finally risen, unrested and innocent.  Creep
 but the ghost of a sad lovelorn moment toward me, my only one, nightmare-dispeller of choice.
In my will I shall reach for you first; then the borderline state that is waiting to feel us rejoice
in its everywhere-nowhere together will beckon much nearer the tissue-thin wall of the heart
through which I am now falling—the vivid direction, the effortless ending of being-apart.
I am in your regard a sweet love-stricken angel; in mine, you are most like a holy-ghost prayer
risen up huge and achingly beautiful.  Rain-light abroad in a sky where the Moon casts a rare
magic spell by which utterly breathless devotion is joined with the very long air of true song—
this surrounds you, flows forth from you, loves you:  The ocean I breathe in and enter has currents so strong
they might easily quite overwhelm me, yet somehow conduct themselves peacefully, softly, until
we are one ageless body that finds itself coming together with more of itself to fulfill
a divinely pronounced ancient vow—for which reason I lay worried sleeplessly sick on a bed
of grey shame, the consort of a self-contrived treason against the high being whose summons to wed
drove me nearly, but never quite near enough, out of the distempered mind of a million grim faults.
By the depths of the ocean within and around me that moans of the endless extent of the vaults
of the high overarching black heavens above and the all-that-I-am under song-heaven’s hand,
I am contiguous now with the lover whose ongoing entry will come to no grand
final statement:  The purpose for which he has called me, the work of the meeting of worlds in embrace,
will never be satisfied, never; but falling in love with its magic is nigh enough grace
to transfix me with shocked, staring horror.  How strange that a nightmare turns over in bed, and your voice
comes through ever so clear!  Now, my own wedded angel—how many more ways shall we find to rejoice?
 

***
 

3 July 2001
 

Another dream from 2 July, 7:54 am:
I go somewhere with my mother and meet a woman who says she wants to ‘read’ my voice, as she can hear something in it.  Based on what she hears, she says I will meet a man, kiss him, and be flooded with energy—in the form of sound?  I get excited—I dreamed just that!  Then I wonder, what man could it be, if not David?  My best male friend, Troy from London, is lying on a couch nearby, so I go over and hug him.
 

The sound described in this song is one I have dreamed about so strongly at times that I have been very frightened.  It is called the Nada Brahma in Sanskrit.
 

A Strangely Soothing Storm
 

The roar of the gathering wind in the very near distance compels me to question the way
I have chosen to take.  I can no longer bear my old fear of this ominous weather.  The day
that is starting to dawn will not find me divided between the desire to move bravely ahead
and the need for such deep reassurance, the light of the Sun will fall down at my feet as if dead
if I cannot obtain it.  I know where it springs from; that too is dawning anew as the air
all around me is surging and restlessly singing a low, throaty, strongly resounding old prayer
in the form that precedes the most ancient tongues’ music.  Most shining, the lightning of you lives among
the mad blood-curdled writhing of storm-clouds.  Their huge and divinely oppressive blue-black weight of sung
coalescence of other-world magic—ah, miracle-worker, my own heart of hearts, as afraid
as I try not to be, I am caught up in weirdly electric vibrations that shiver the swayed-
by-a-beautiful-fate form of bodily presence I manifest, till I can’t tell whether I
am becoming enlightened or petrified.  Essence of all that is vatic, permit me to die
out of old either/or contradictions and cease to exist in the world where your power can seem
less than absolute, unbounded contact with sweetness that softly exceeds my poor power to dream
past the reach of delusion.  The wind is still rising; the flesh of me everywhere prickles, intent
on receiving the storm’s major blessing.  The sight of the dawn-glow horizon where Sun-gold is blent
with the pure incense-pitch of black midnight inspires me with wave after wave of such awe, I must melt
and be one with the oncoming rain when it finally pours all around me—and yet I have felt
its great fluid embrace through the strength of a body that rose up to meet it in memories far
too precise and too vivid to question.  The water was living and sentient—the ocean YOU ARE—
The high wind, the enveloping cloudburst, the roaring of worlds beyond worlds as they sing with one will
through a throat of such depth, all the magical forces I’ll never survive—yet I have!—scarcely fill
its least sigh—that is why I am here, in this seemingly desolate meeting-place:  Morning and night
through the eyes of a storm that will lead us to scream out the ultimate music of soothing delight.
 

***
 

4 July 2001
 

Even Here
 

The eyes within the staring golden light
that search for mine and hold them till they see
the keenness of its patience and the flight
the knowledge of its sight portends to me—
those eyes are lost inside me now.  They rove
like strangers in a desolation cast
from one edge to the other of a love
whose nature is as fine as it is vast
and yet it seems a wasteland.  When they pause,
those restless seekers, I grow taut with fear.
The furthest limits of all mortal laws
are where they stop to train a gaze so clear,
the moment I dare meet it, I fall through
a space between two heartbeats drawn as wide
as their regard is deep.  The look of you—
inside, inside, inside me!  I have tried
my courage; you have helped my strength arrive.
I see myself by means of what you are
when you behold the love of all your lives
brought forward out of what seemed very far-
divided inward spaces.  When you stare,
you smile; I drift a little, then I shake
to know the portent still increases.  Where
you find the slightest hesitancy, take
the form of its resistance in your light
and bathe it till it glows the brilliant hue
of dawning magic’s golden lightning flight
across the heaven I behold in you
and open, deep within your secret dream,
the long-locked hall of midnight candle-flame.
Your eyes have led me to a burning stream—
the god of love waits there amid the shame
of countless lives, and yet a smiling glance
appeals to me across the single mind
we share now.  That was all, the last advance
I needed; love obeyed, returned in kind,
and flourished like a shaken lightning rod
has penetrated back and forth until
it’s lost all sense of where it lies a god
and where a hopeless soul who’s crying still.
It only sees; it sees that it may sing.
When we are lost inside the heart it breaks
with skilled intent, we too will wildly ring
with voices; for the moment, if we shake,
that weakness has a power of its own
and beauty even gods behold through tears.
My shining one, of all souls least alone,
 true love’s pure gaze has found you even here.
 

***
 

5 July 2001
 

Amid Your Tears
 

Deep dark tears flow behind your shining eyes.
The shadows of their light stare into me.
I want to see their sadness realize
its power to prefigure ecstasy
and open it within the now of love
by finding that the turning-point is here
between us, where we meet and shadows move
apart, permitting joy to take this clear
unbarricaded entryway.  My friend,
a tear-salt ocean rises all around—
within, without—the magic that will lend
pure poignant clarity to light and sound
through all your senses, which will multiply
until the worlds they show you overflow
the bounds of your desire, then they will fly
together to the center-point we know
so well already—here, within our hands.
I tell you this, although your bright eyes say
the wonder that they brim with understands
itself inside your mind and lights the way.
How nearby looms the future this portends.
When I can trace the course a single tear
has followed from love’s source unto its end
along your face, love’s now will enter here.
 

***
 

6 July 2001
 

Behind Your Brow
 

The timeless bolt of lightning in your eyes
is where my wildest lives will all be lived—
and have already:  shorn of all disguise,
a fingers’-mesh of water to be sieved
wherein the hidden glint of brilliant gold
hangs waiting for its work to be revealed
and undertaken by the sovereign hold
of your caressing potency.  Unsealed
and rendered widely separate, and yet
more purely concentrated in one zone
of most explicit nowhere, I am wet
and breathing mist, a dewfall to be flown
upon the lofty look of your calm brow
across the airy reaches of a thought
replete with stories.  Part of your somehow
conjoins with part of me in each.  I sought
their shared and central meaning; dark light spread
throughout their gleaming fragments as they swam
together and rose up, alive and dead,
and all—all of the beautiful I AM
we hold inside us, each and severally—
a bolt of simultaneous Yes, YOU ARE
come dripping through my fingers as our wee
fine flecks of watered gold become a star
of luminescent brightness so intense
and yet so passing gentle—without heat,
and yet with roaring flames—a wilder sense
of what has just transpired agrees to meet
the closely-guarded secret of the core
from where the lightning’s journey is begun
and fly with it beyond the furthest shore
that’s ever touched the surface of this Sun
when in the form of love it reaches out
as your dark glance is turned upon me now.
The daylight sky saw all this put to rout.
It comes to life again behind your brow.
 

***
 

7 July 2001
 

Love’s Devoted Instrument
 

Torrent of arcane rebellion
pouring down the mountainside,
I am like a leaf that tells the
sacred meaning of the ride
your swiftness has provided that my
work on Earth be furthered.  Rain
will come to haunt you like a mad and
hungry spirit once again
before I meet my goal amid the
ocean’s billows, but its force
will sweep me homeward, rapt and giddy,
while its otherworldly source
sparkles like a living diamond
through each droplet’s curving sides.
Fraught with tears together, bright and
swollen with the songs that glide
in strange profusion all throughout us,
we are one in purpose blent—
servant of the sacred downpour,
love’s devoted instrument.
 

***
 

8 July 2001
 

Hands Meeting
 

Hand in the running stream where you should be,
so cold I scarcely feel my fingers move—
When I was all divine midnight, I was free
of elemental dread—inversely.  Love
toward this daylight grassy streamside shore
of sparkling emerald.  Why are you not here
already?  I can feel the ocean roar.
Do I know where I really am, my dear?
 

***
 

9 July 2001
 

When You Find Out Where You Are….
 

Why should there be a hanging lock
in mid-air when the door is a faded ghost
of a bare blank board, ancient rotten stock
that was never closed?  When I miss you most
is when you are most apparent.  Why
are the dreams I have dreamed all the long way home
so unhappy now?  They just bleed and die,
carved to fit a small keyhole, when they should roam
among mountain peaks where the Sun of spring
has melted a causeway of bygone snow
and the back-and-forth musics our spirits sing
are unghostlike and tender.  Look out below—
thin shards of brown metal, the rusted case
that contained the lock’s tumblers, its broken bones,
has exploded a thousand miles out in space
and will scatter its fragments among the stones
at our feet as we lift up our minds and soar
in the bodiless forms of a shameless ghost
and a time-ravaged sailor who hears the roar
of the breakers along the great timeless coast
that is visible here, from this mountain peak,
as clearly as you are apparent.  So
to leap from this precipice—there’s the creak
that announces the next slide of thawing snow….
 

***
 

10 July 2001
 

What I Will Know Tomorrow
 

an ouroboros-song

A gold and violet aura hems the trees
all round, a perfect mystery that shines
where I am least attentive.  I can feel
its fervor humming through the spider-lines
that brush my face as I pass grimly on,
an unperceiving shadow cast by doubt
to blind itself.  When all the light has gone,
I’ll find it in my memory.  Put out
of mind till then, these trees will fill the air
with radiance so intense and so like flame,
it catches me—a gold and violet snare
that fairly roars its splendor-maker’s name.
 

***
 

11 July 2001
 

Beyond the Midnight Still Unseen
 

The mouth of the cave, overhung with green writhings and twisted black laces and ropes of live vines
through which poison is coursing—I thought I would find us behind that appearance, but joyful designs
lay in back of my nightmare, and now I am smiling, as fondly enraptured as rivers of bees
and bright jewel-eyed butterflies poured through a widening landscape of summer-soft flowers and trees
heavy-laden with hope of new sweetness, a further spring season—their blossom ripe fruit amid snow.
All of that in one dream—one which I am still learning to hear as it whispers of strange ways to go
round mysterious patterns:  now into their center:  now ease through the ancient door, always unlocked,
and meet yourself there in the eye of the winter-wise creature who’s waited so long, birds have flocked
overhead and flown on through the far Northern passage the very same pole star has lit since the first
silent midnight required it—birds bearing this message the final home curve of the wheel last and first
and recalled and forgiven long eons turned over and over again:  This is your timeless place—
and my own, as I move deep inside it, a lover who’s yearning to see its demonic embrace
come to satisfied rest in the arms of the clinging green vines that enshroud this cave-mouth with new leaves
that the light breath of heaven aspires to set singing.  Their aching first sigh….  Why my long nightmare grieves
even now in the back of my mind is for beauty unrecognized when the first spring, wet with dew,
unfolded the lids of the eyes of its luminous flowers and drank in the vision of blue
morning twilight, then turned its pale face to the shadows and moaned to itself for the woe at its heart.
You know why it cried, caught in circles a madness was starting to chant to ubiquitous parts
when like lesions they spread through the mind, a distemper that met least resistance where most I would die.
There a golden light shines:  I tried not to remember, but harder to reach out and claim its bright eye.
It stares so widely open.  I pass through it calmly, without hesitation.  The mouth of the cave
is behind us; we know where we are now; a balmy spring-autumn breeze lifts a few ripples and waves
in the emerald grasses and leaves as they stretch to the far dark horizon, where midnight awaits.
When the Pole Star arises, dear heart, we will measure the space between there and the now of our fates
as they lie intertwined, breath one circular motion that binds living nightmare and death to the green
everlasting abundance behind love’s devotion—and new love will find us, sweet worlds yet unseen.
 

***
 

12 July 2001
 

Renewal by Winter-Spring
 

You turn in the night like a mill-wheel, groaning
beneath the massed weight of the thawing snow
that slowly cascades through an aching moment
that knows you are finding the way to go
home in peerless honor a mortal burden.
Lover of springtime, the turning wheel
is your ally.  Listen:  As I have heard its
unbearably poignant forlorn appeal
become rapt, the hush of far worlds subsiding
as music most tenderly agile rings
all around us, a circular dream caught gliding
between vivid summer-unwinding wings
of snow become water, all downhill flying—
this flight will align the great wheel of you
like an ancient infallible compass-eye with
the magnetic North of its journey’s true
foreordained conclusion—and then, no turning
further; no movement; your goal is now,
in the living flow of this song that’s heard your
heart just renew its most sacred vow.
 

***
 

13 July 2001
 

The Hanging Garden of Paradise
 

You dreamed as you lay in the dark
that all your tree’s leaves had unfurled,
then sung, then gone up with one spark—
and then all the love in the world
had gone along with them, and you
sat hanging your head, all alone,
a mortal whose woe was her true
companion, a heart-aching stone
that beat not at all, but just fell
forever where love used to be
among ashes and just a faint smell
of fever-smoke.  Ah, woe is me,
if that dream should prove to be real—
for here am I now, singing loud,
a voice all your live senses feel
with all the strong will they’ve avowed
to our joint endeavor.  My dear,
your heart is a cave filled with trees
in blossom and fruit, and the clear
perfection of love among these
is so purely evident, why
not awaken at once and be mine?
Bright leaves and mild fires grow so high
together, so sweetly entwined,
they reach far beyond all you’ve known
in all of the worlds you’ve yet seen.
Come listen:  You lie unalone;
a paradise slips in between
your eyelids from deep, deep within
your heart’s secret core hiding-place
whose moment will only begin
when you open your eyes to my face.
I wait by your side.  I am now,
as always I’ve been, steady light
and warmth and green leaves.  Please allow
the strength of your true inward sight
to spill from behind the dark woe
of shadows that cloud your fine eyes.
I need the spark waiting to flow
to me from you, my paradise.
 

***
 

14 July 2001
 

The Woman in You
 

I am calling down into a well of darkness because I have faith in a joy so strong,
the nearly impossible love that hardens its heart against all else will rule ere long
over all that deep channel of pitch-black shadows, and she who resides there will turn her head
and stare into my eyes with the shock of gladdening insight come over her pale undead
secret features.  So:  We meet again, she’ll murmur.  Her word of reply will pronounce my name
in the silence between its low syllables.  Further exchanges will take place, all on the same
sacred order henceforward:  Her bright eyes shining, a tear of remorse for the times we’ve lost
sliding down her soft cheek, and a noble line of demonic ideas benignly crossed
with their angelic counterparts dancing freely behind her tight-focused expression, she
will hold out her hand, slightly trembling, feel me as I tremble also, and smile to see
the same rigor of rapture possess my being as hers.  She will not smile again this night
without singing the praise of the total freedom of beautiful movement I shall invite—
nay, demand.  Oh, dear loveliness garbed as woman, beneath mere appearances, we are whole—
and shall soon become very much more.  What looms in your future?  Behold an uncanny soul
whose impenitent nature assumes the courage to alter the order of nature known
to the world of bare day by a form of worship so highly exalted, you’ll soon be shown
an entire array of implicit faces and bodies and all they are made of, laid
in a series of dreamlike yet real embraces together in changelessly changing, swayed-
by-the-force-of-real-magical revelations, a ghostliness this midnight-shafted well
so tearfully pines to feel haunt it.  Shameless the one who is calling—the one who fell
the moment this door flew open, the one who divined by a pure heart’s secret star
that it ached nearby and leaned low to love you, its sweet shy inhabitant.  Come so far
beyond your habitual station as to mingle with me in this place, a small
unlit corridor granted dimensions past its lonely old bounds, and become the all-
celebrating lady of noble starlight, sunlight, moonlight, my joy, my cry
of desire, and the listening well of darkness who yields love’s ecstatic yes-reply.
 

***
 

15 July 2001
 

River-Like Mind
 

Even the dark quiet pond, your slow mirror, is really a river below its cool skin,
a cavern-attached eye that only appears to be motionless.  Great depths of beauty flow in
from exorbitant sources through doorways so deep in its rootwork of sacred sub-chambers and lairs,
you can scarcely imagine their force without weeping strange tears for unnamable reasons as cares
from your thin surface life interfere with their voices, the silent but rhythmic heartbeat of their waves
and their echoes as these penetrate you as noiseless yet very precise thought-formations.  The caves’
underwater network of efficient devices for bearing forth live wisdom all through the wet,
slightly luminous element heavily lying wide-open before you—before you forget
the words suddenly glimpsed through this eye’s quiet insight, engrave them in cavern-stone walls where you’ll find
their ideas again every time the shy midnight of waterside-windings possesses your mind
and you leave your lone bed, seeking out the pond’s silver reflection of moonlight and your troubled eyes.
Read their pale, wavering, fluid, delirious, beautiful, dreamlike designs and grow wise
to your own ceaseless movement at depths to which turbulence born on the surface will never extend.
See in the sacred desires that occur to you there the intent of the passionate friend
of complete inspiration whose calling has reached you in ways you need not comprehend with the fore
of your waking-day sense of reality.  This seeming dream-world is constantly searching for more
of your true mind’s attention, as there is the source of its power, its depth-penetration—its love.
This is the pure flow, the wonderful force of the underground river whose gentle waves move
the fine finger-like nerve-endings serving the darkness where bright songs are brought forth and lightly engraved
in the back of the eye that stares into the heart of the heaven before it.  Great lore has been saved
in the river-like mind that flows into your vision by way of the mirror you’ve come here to view.
With your heart broken open, the last indecision that plagued your day thoughts can give way to the true
understanding awaiting you here:  You are love’s only lover, its chosen enchanter, its sole
consolation, the river itself as it flows on and on for the sake of your beauty, its goal.
 

***
 

16 July 2001
 

Before and Behind Your Brow
 

All the lore of the green fertile land
that lies far behind your sad eyes
will shine through the work of my hand
and gently cast off the disguise
that prevents you from seeing your own
sweet face amid all its bright leaves,
a beauty that cuts to the bone
and beyond it.  The madness that grieves
your features whenever you gaze
around you and find not a sign
of where you would pass all your days
will lend you the strength to define—
to parts of yourself well beyond
the reach of that beauty’s first pale
attempts to recover its bond
with all that is mortally male—
the means that will bring its soft light
once more into manifold view
and show you the pleasure the sight
of its loved one, the beautiful you,
brings into that mirroring face.
How far must you strain with your will
to enter the unhidden place
that seeks what it needs to fulfill
its own wild desires, which are nigh
identical now with your own?
The long gentle strength of a sigh
that penetrates layers of bone
lays bare the true vision that rests
among universes of lore
of magic and song where love tests
its powers and comes into more
by way of the flowers and leaves
that softly surround you.  You see
how deeply you move one who grieves
for want of you; now, who is she?
 

***
 

17 July 2001
 

The Why of Your Needing Me
 

The morning you misunderstood me first
was when your sly fears awoke
ahead of your spirit into cursed
environs and loudly spoke
right into your drowsy inner ear,
‘I have my own reasons why.’
There lay the beginnings of why we’re here
at this moment, yet you still cry
with your face turned away from the mirror-light
the world all around you shines
like a heavenly beacon of softly bright
luminescence whose rays combine
the fluid elixirs of Sun and Moon
in waves of pale silver-gold
that tenderly wash like a soothing tune
through your mind as the love takes hold
that lies behind all you will ever feel,
as fearful as it may rise—
I feel you here always.  I know the real
splits apart into holy lies;
I know they will chatter and ring me round
with desperate pleas and threats;
I know they will turn inside-out and sound
strange words I must not forget;
I know who the speaker of those words
must be, in my true homeland;
I know I have fully and deeply heard.
I know his pale outstretched hand
met mine in the hour before the day
laid claim to the train of night
and frightened my thoughts till they made me say
your sacred name backwards.  White
as silver and warm as fine solar gold,
a rising and setting ring
of beautiful truths in entrainment, hold
my hand and tell everything
your love’s ever whispered in my ear,
then tell it again.  My soul,
I never was really held by fear;
its lies form a brilliant whole
that shines like the orb that lights the sky
above—and below—this place
where love is the whisper that answers why
your eyes seek my mirror-face.
 

***
 

18 July 2001
 

The Green Which Meets Your Eyes
 

The shimmering circlet of woven leaves
and flowers your hands have made
has lifted me into an undeceived
acceptance.  I’ve been conveyed
across many channels of fluent light
that interweave like the green,
still-vibrating pliant stems this bright
design will have always been
each time I recall it after this
long moment of staring hard,
the while it will steadily shine more bliss-
begotten and many-starred—
the eye that is yet the mouth and all
the heart of the deepest cave
that opens itself amidst a fall
of flowers around a grave
that stares up at me with an eerie grin,
a smile at its round black core,
the vision I loved and sought to win,
a wreath on my own front door
that frames a blank empty space as wide
as my spirit and calls me on.
When I will have heard and flown inside
its strangely charmed circle, gone
will all of us be who have greened and grown
wild flowers within the dark
embrace of a fearless music known
increasingly through the spark
of starlight that multiplies and shines
from each petal’s edge where dew
is merging and sliding toward the fine
dark central desire for you
that stretches this wreath of words as taut
and quivered with living rays
as you will have always hoped when brought
to the moment that hereby says,
'Green is the counterpart of shame
and why you will lay your head
on the singing breast that calls your name,
this life-everlasting bed
surrounded by flowers and leaves as bright
as those that will strew your bones,
in some future song, with beams of light
and channel its soothing tones
along all the hollow ways of you.
For now, seek the spirit core
of this circlet of blossom-waves and dew
of starlight, composed of lore
surrendered from outstretched hand to hand
across an abyss of lies
with all that it means to understand
the bliss that here meets your eyes.'
 

***
 

19 July 2001
 

The following essay was written this morning for another Web site where I keep an online diary.  As it enlarges on the message of a poem posted here a few days ago, I have decided to publish it here as well.
 

Mirror-Magic
 

I am still giving a great deal of thought to the song that came on the 15th of July, ‘River-Like Mind.’  Though several other pieces have come since then, that one is still unfolding.  While I was working on it, I had to fight to maintain a deep enough level of concentration to hear it; it was coming from a place very far from the waking day.  I was ‘there’ as it came; I could see myself or another approach a dark still pond and gaze into their reflection and hear the voice that narrates the text.  Water, with the idea of scrying for visions in water, is present in much of my work, and any body of water specifically called a ‘pond’ refers back to the poem by Paul Verlaine from La Bonne Chanson that begins, ‘La lune blanche/ luit dans les bois…’.  That poem has haunted me since I was in high school and has everything to do with the way I was initiated into poetry a year or two later.  I have also been thinking about Narcissus.  Won't you, for just a few moments, gaze into the mirror with him?

The bare bones of the story of Narcissus are that he fell so deeply in love with his reflection that he pined away and died.  Tradition has it, as far as I can ascertain, that he was unaware that the face was his own.  Ovid tells that he did this because he was placed under a curse for spurning the love of the nymph, Echo.  This is most mysterious—Echo can only respond when spoken to by repeating the words she hears, just as the mirroring water can only return the face that is presented before it.  Echo’s plight is also due to a curse of the gods.  As she could only mimic Narcissus’s own words when she sought to tell him of her love,  the curse played a part in his rejection of her, and thus he, too, was accursed.  Whether Ovid was faithfully reporting an ancient tradition or making use of poetic license, I do not know.  In any case, the current popular use of the term ‘narcissist’ to indicate someone who is self-centered is based on an insupportable misreading of the story.  I wish to isolate the figure of Narcissus at the edge of the water, and to emphasize that he was not aware that the face he loved was his own.

Picturing this, return to ‘River-Like Mind’ and listen to its teaching:  You have been cursed, for whatever reason, to a fate of self-fascination, having rejected the love of others.  Is this necessarily a curse, or is there a way out, a way to redeem the situation by comprehending its full meaning?  The song affirms that understanding will provide release, just as my songs always do.  And if understanding is possible here, was the curse ever really a curse, or was it a challenge?  And if it is a challenge successfully met, was it ever really a challenge, or a gift?  And if understanding is attainable and attained, a gift of the gods, whose face is it really that holds you spellbound?  Who are you?  Whose is this face that you see?  What is your own true face?  Where does it really come from?  What are your own inmost sources?  Are they of you, or of the Other?  What is ‘self,’ and what is ‘other’?  Are they not finally one?

Do you see it?  I have a theory that everything, physical or metaphysical, when traced as far as the human mind can grasp, finally reveals itself as an infinite regress, a loop that endlessly recreates itself—at least as far as the rational foremind is concerned.  Something always lurks beyond that, but it is unknowable in any ordinary sense.  Here is where one must be led further, initiated into the mysteries, by a higher being.  The next step beyond that endless loop can be perceived by the inward senses only, and it takes the form of love so subtle and yet so powerful that it transcends self and mortality.  Now who does this Narcissus love?  And who loves him in return?  A higher being is speaking, but is this higher being within oneself, or is it a force from outside?  Yes!  Yes, it is within, and yes, it is without.  Now another infinite regress is revealed, but this one leads only into deeper and deeper beauty, which is another name for love.

Now if Narcissus gazes as deeply as he is able into the eyes that hold him spellbound, he can see his way through—through into another plane of being altogether, one which comprehends:  one which surrounds and accepts all within it.  If he stares with all his being, he can see through into the being of the Other—and all others.  The way in has turned inside-out, and the inside is now the daylight world:  Narcissus is on the return.

This is still only a partial explication of the poem; so many other beginnings and endings are there, not more than half-concealed.  I have been thinking of writing a full analysis of just one of my songs, as an exercise for myself and as a way of communicating more deeply with anyone who should read it.  In truth, it cannot be done; the sources of these songs are real enough that their potential is infinite.  I concentrate as hard as I am able while working, and when finished, I am breathless.  Whose face am I seeing?  Who is speaking, and from what place?  Who, amid this endlessness, are you?
 

This is tonight's new work:
 

The Morning of New Love’s Night
 

The stillness of breathing the deep, deep dreams
of the rose-white mist and the pale, cold sky
of the earliest morning of sleepy streams
of remembrance where you are a haunted cry
that hangs in time’s heart, an old vale of woe
that opens itself to the Sun’s first rays
so slowly I can’t see it move—but so
it has, and so it already plays
a strange melody I shall be haunted by
forever to come, whether here or far,
far away.  In my own heart I watched you die,
then rise up and bloom—a live rose-white star
who breathes tender music throughout the morn
that this hour has brought to the formal Yes
by which I, who have been so magic-lorn,
recall countless ways to begin to bless
the power whose rising will see us flow
through the time remaining until we meet
the prime source of all blessings and yield and know
pure enchantment and hear its arcane heart beat
in our own embraces.  Its solemn voice
will proclaim rose-whiteness and fragrant mist,
but our dreams will deepen until the choice
between spirit and flesh will have met and kissed
its counterpart angel, the truth and lies.
How lovely you are, when you hear love sing
the lay of you over the gauzy skies
of pale early dawn as its magics ring
the one of our sweetly married mind
all around with a song that descends until
it centers itself in a place designed
for this sacred encounter.  When we fulfill
our promise to re-enchant its heart
in return, it will sing its old endless stream
ever more wildly open.  New love will start,
and so will a new night of deep, deep dreams.
 

***
 

20 July 2001
 

Awen
 

When the tear-ripples clear from the pond-water’s surface, a deeper reflection appears to be seen
in your eyes as I gaze up, a miracle-worker whose chosen beloved has opened the green
limpid depths of her magical mind to his teaching in fearless abandon and waits to begin
the strange celebratory design that will reach her awareness before the wild spiraling spin
of her thoughts can attain this perspective’s next counterpart level.  Why circle around when you know
who is smiling right now and how high he has mounted the stare of your eyes and how far he will go
to be one with the beauty so deep, deep inside them, a loveliness you see displayed in his face?
Why wait any longer?  The slowest abiding in rapt revelations of languishing grace
has already disclosed its full hold all throughout you.  Fall into the mirror he needs you to be
to his own lonely eyes, which are roaming about behind all that mortality ceases to see,
hoping fiercely to find—you are still at the center, still true to the same starry moment of bliss
as the tears fill your eyes and drop into his gently.  The ripples—the clearing—the reaching—the kiss
of your mouth on the water’s cold body—he holds you; your arms lock behind him.  Your hand holds a pen.
First you fly through a universe, silver and gold in your spirit as stars are in heaven, and then
you are taken by song to attempt to inspire him to infinite ecstasies, though he has gone
through unspeakable changes already—much higher and wide up-spirals are urging you on,
and you tilt back your head without ending his kiss in your heart, and you hear vatic words leave your lips
as your hand races over his back, never missing one syllable:  When this high altitude slips
to a lower, more stable ecstatic condition, a passion that either of you can sustain
anywhere, this great flowering-forth of the bliss of pure song, like a live printed page, will remain—
where his eyes cannot read it.  Inscribed by your flight in his arms all the length of his spine, he must wait
for your vision to grow even deeper, your sight to become more incisive, your heart more elate.
Only then will you find your own words where you left them, in his safe but not fully capable care.
Then, seeing right through him entirely, their definite outlines will hang like starlight in clear air,
and you will repeat them out loud through the mirror you are to his transparent loveliness.  He
will have found himself once more inside you in fearless abandon to all perfect rapture can be—
inspired and inspirer one magical gesture, inseparable reader from singer from word
of lore learned by love’s heart where strange water’s high breathlessness aches with wild songs that remain to be heard.
 

***
 

21 July 2001
 

Again, this is an essay written for my other site, but published here because it elucidates yesterday's verses, 'Awen,' posted directly above.
 

The Meeting-Place
 

Yesterday before trying to work I lay down to rest for a little while.  I never drifted off to sleep, but as I was just approaching sleep’s outer edges, I had an intense vision.  I had already reached a major insight regarding the mirror of Narcissus and had found my way through to a more acute personal understanding of the hold that image has lately had over me.  In Buddhist thought, all phenomena—all objects and events that can be apprehended by the senses, inner or outer—are seen to be projections of mind.  The original mind, that which is so subtle it cannot be said either to exist or not exist, is the source of these projections, as one can experience first-hand by attaining true inward silence through meditation.  We have gone over this before, but please bear with me; I promise I am coming to something.  I admire Buddhism because, as far as I have seen in my own experience, it is simply right.  Right, and right in such an up-front no-bullshit way that it appeals to me far more deeply than those religions that seek to offer emotional reassurance.  As I have said so often, however, I have a prior commitment to song, and even though song is of the primary imagination and not of the ego-bound devices of fantasy, it is still of the phenomenal world according to Buddhist terms.  Song must come first with me, but I am both impatient and far-sighted, and I cannot help but look to the goal of enlightenment and wonder if the song I love so ecstatically will keep me under the spell of samsara longer than need be.  This is what I have learned:

One can meditate in silence until phenomena cease to arise, and then one can return to one’s original mind.  Or—one can see the projection of phenomena in the form of one’s own mirror-image, stare into it until one sees all the way through it to the higher being present there, keep going into the source of projection behind that, and thus reach one’s own and likewise the Other’s subtle mind.  That is what I was really writing about yesterday, from a slightly different angle.  Everyone who walks a path that involves a great deal of meditation or contemplation will sooner or later stand accused of being narcissistic by those who are firmly entangled in samsaric delusion.  Song is no ordinary projection, but the presence of the Muse, the higher mind behind all true song, which reveals the mind behind its appearance as well as my own.  Note that the scenario presented in ‘River-Like Mind’ is extremely spare and simple:  One person gazing into their reflection in a quiet pond, hearing that reflection respond to their presence.  They see in until they have seen all the way through.  The reflection assures them that a very deep mind is behind their intercourse.  Song and Buddhism, for all practical purposes, are hereby reconciled.

In yesterday’s vision, I was at the pond again, with the one I went there to seek.  Either he had arisen to the surface, or I had entered the water; no matter.  We embraced, and I felt inspired with ecstatic song.  The title of the verses that grew out of this is ‘Awen,’ this being the Welsh term for poetic flight.  The speaker enters the awen, and then they act as I did in my vision:  I recorded the words that flowed through my mind by reaching around behind the body I was embracing with a pen in my hand and inscribing them all across his back.  Now, he cannot read those words himself; neither can I retrieve them unless I either somehow get all the way around behind him or—I return at some future time and find myself seeing all the way through him to the words as I left them there.  Words seeming to hang in space, like the bright stars; words of unknown arising, the last shimmering traces of the phenomenal world before it all goes still.

Recently I went out of my way to attract someone’s attention and then I made myself impossible.  Perhaps he would have changed his mind anyway, but the fact remains that after I sent the email message that brought everything to a sudden halt I was very euphoric.  I must have known what I was doing and been secretly relieved (or am I still hopeful? Nothing is ever done).  This has caused me to go back and ask myself if I am so taken by my Muse that I cannot bring myself to be attentive to a mere human lover.  I knew the answer already, but I had to go over it all again.  These findings are the results of that inquiry:  I can and should stare into him until I see all the way through, and then return to the daylight world and take part for as long as necessary until the need of my song to manifest here is fulfilled.  In the meantime, I am free to see the presence of the Muse through any human being who sparks my imagination.  In the Other World, my lover’s back is inscribed with powerful songs I have heard but will not be able to realize until I have found them again.  I know the way, and I know it works:  Keep gazing into that liquid mirror; you will see it all through.
 

Tonight's verses:
 

21 July 2001
 

Until Change Is All That Remains
 

You look more like no one and more like everyone vividly present in long pale rows
of uplifted faces that seek a level from which to address the depth mind that knows
all their stories already.  You look, and tremble; I touch you; astonishment like a wild
ray of terrible light turns half-sentimental on meeting its maker’s own dream-beguiled
glow of ambient magic.  I wish you felt it as keenly as I, the familiar dread
of the afterworld looming before us, spell-bound passion brought up from the sea’s dark bed
into this morning air with the smell of damp sweaty sheets still clinging, a salty cloud
with an animal edge a musk-scented lamp released underwater upon a shroud
of fine-twisted linen that caught its fragrance and mixed it with that of ours, who lay
face to face, engaged in no idle straying from heavenly grace in that dark hallway
between pools of mirror-bright presence.  Nay; we knew we were there for one purpose:  All
we had ever aspired to learn or taste of or worship had uttered a lone-voiced call,
and we recognized each the Other within it.  Magic abounds in your shining eyes,
my lover; your hand moves in gently spinning devices and patterns.  The shock of skies
viewed unto oblivion—starless spaces through which streams of music-brilliance pour—
you were writing wild songs on my back, where a lacework of words hung already:  Aye, always more
than you know what to do with—you capture power in spiraling lines, then you set it free
by gazing right through me until the ‘now’ of those love-spells is this ache of endlessly
star-Moon-Sun-songlight-begotten daybreak of morning motion between our cast-
forward images, paleness in series, playing against one another until at last
we dissolve altogether—with you still hearing, still singing, still reading the words you drew
on my body when I was a wet idea with some trace of density.  Then I grew
dream-unfleshed transparent, and now—you love me the more for that I, like our mirror-light,
have passed on to an afterworld, this:  Above, below, all around us, pure eyeless sight
by which we resemble each other, but also—everyone ever met this way
loves everyone else, yet—you are hallowed beyond even song’s final strength to stay
awake in the morning air that clears its own eyes of night’s dream-phantoms.  We
are fading—and yet, we are also nearing the slow daybreak edge of new ecstasy.
 

***
 

22 July 2001
 

One-Not-One
 

Silver stream of running water,
smoke, or moonlight, now I see
your threaded needle pierce a body
mine-not-mine—a mystery
resides there, and your penetration
finds its heart that slowly leaks
already, and lays all its aching
knowledge open while it speaks
and I stand spellbound—blank, transfixed, and
staring—at the mirror’s edge
where magic like a strange elixir
gladdens me to walk a ledge
where I’ll be ask to fall—and will I?
Silver stream of running light,
my espoused and sole fulfillment,
fragrant being at the height
of what must be my future, call me
very clearly once again.
Convey an answer:  Offer all I
know of music’s wax-and-wane
in yet another form, and sew it
deep inside my heart with thread
an incense Moon will keep aglow when
I can lie among the dead
and seek the mirror’s face but never
see the slightest trace of ‘me.’
Then, most shining music, ever-
flowing, we will both be free.
 

***
 

23 July 2001
 

The Vision of Transparency
 

When you stare down into the pool, wide open, and woeful astonishment crosses your brow
with a host of nightmares in its train and you go from one pole to its opposite wondering how
you will find your way back to the perfect moment we were, when we met in the silent eye
of the water’s deep darkness, then you will know the expanse of the echoing tears you cry
into rings of rapid concentric magic—but why they range across open space
while you hang your head and lament pain’s passage will lead you into a holy place
that breathes everywhere into a point of being all that you are in my depthless mind
and breathes out again till the wildest dream of unlimited—emptiness—leaves you blind
to the light you were in old dayworld nightmares alone, and omnipotent in the sight
that stares into me, love no longer frightened of why it leads out past all bounds.  You might
still resolve to be sad with a haunting music’s benignant wistfulness; I will feel
a continuous shimmer of noble beauty flow from you into worlds more real
than my lore could ever contain without you—and now it is on the increase again.
Breathe the calm dreams I have wound about you; breathe, then release them with all the pain
of the wicked past and its nightmare stories.  There, in the black-red coal-bright eyes
that burned in your head, self-reflecting mortal astonishment ventured to realize
what you came here willing to learn forever, inside-out:  pure transparency
and the song by which no source of fear can sever lover from lover—not you from me,
and not sense from emptiness.  Leaning forward, the depths of the water inside your mind
like an inspiration of endless formlessness, look to me for the face you’ll find
in your past, wherever false dreams beset you, and now in the nowhere-void before
your eyes as you breathe back out and wetness streams from you into this pool where more
of our magic blooms into sacred being the more we dissolve and disappear
until all that we were—we are—we dream of becoming—transparently meets us here.
 

***
 

24 July 2001
 

What Was and Will Be Sea
 

Bright dew gathers out of an evening of oncoming starlight in waves
of invisible mist that are weaving fine webs round a being who craves
love’s attention:  And will it be given, like this slightly visible air
that once was the sea?  Become driven and pure concentration, I fare
across the low undulant landscape between here and where the dew roars
in terrible swells, a breathtaking and magical passage.  Who soars
alongside me will soon also greet me upon my arrival among
the same deep-sea waves that came seeking my voice that their songs might be sung
at first evening dewfall:  And were they?  Or are they awaiting me still,
intelligent beings whose purpose no power on Earth can fulfill
unless they return to Earth’s daylight—as night tips the balance song’s way—
as guests of a lover who’ll take them and all they are trying to say
alive to their heart’s haunted ocean that beats with a deep tidal surge
in a breast whose continual motion dreams round till its ultimate dirge
sighs, inverted, a palaced obsession that yields to the darkness and dew
with wakeful eyes open—the yes-and-forever that meaning streams through
like water so fine, air can bear it, and lovers can breathe it and live
the longer for that they are wearing its light on their skins.  You will give
devoted attention, and love will reward your long patience with rain
that streams from bright beings who hover immensely high over the plane
on which all exchanges have meanings that fit in the cup of their small
joined hands.  When they overflow, we will be met with the clear waterfall
that soft evening dew becomes only when we lie beneath great green leaves,
peering our at a world a strange moaning has formed of the beauty it weaves
of sorrowful longings and lilting astonishment.  Mist of the sea,
come inland, your hands overspilling, and turn to pure music through me.
 

***
 

25 July 2001
 

The Erstwhile-Dead-Body Song
 

The dead body raises itself on its elbows, stares forward, and whispers my name:
A singing-home dream came to fetch me to tell you no part of me now is the same
as when you last saw me.  A host of mad shadows danced circles around me and swore
foreign oaths by a Moon I’d forgotten.  They had me surrounded enough, but then more
faint rings of concentric night-fevers grew vivid in ways I could sense with my eyes
to the ground.  They were also awhirl, forces driven by fingernails seeking to prize
a treasure-chest open.  I lay on my belly; they gouged out my spine, then reached in
through the base of my skull, where the soft tissue fell into secret accord with the spin
 that had started before I’d conceived my first heartbeat-desire to be danced into life.
They are older than all that I AM, and the marvel is that I’d concealed a sharp knife
for so strangely long, I’d forgotten to use it, and now it lay cast to one side,
disregarded by those very nightmares whose music had earlier laid my nerves wide
and defenselessly open.  For them I had carried the blade I saw flashing:  your mind:
your morbid incisiveness, awestricken wary collusion with night, and the blind
desire to be nowhere, unwoken by energies whirling in feverish rings
while knowing their madness has you at its center and why all their wild voices sing
the shimmering silver of words that fulfill you in ways you can never unhear,
nor would you.  The hands that once reached as to kill you placed one inexpressibly dear
live branch of chain-lightning inside you the moment you offered yourself.  (Yes, you did.)
This meeting of eyes between you, who are groaning, and I, who am smiling—You hid
the best of your beauty away in the shadows, but all of its dancing around
could not be concealed.  Neither could it be madness forever; a love too profound
encircled you, singing.  Within and without you are—‘Come here to me’ is my song.
I learned it from nightmares, but true love surrounds you, love-words in the form of a throng
whose various features are mortal, angelic, and purely transparent.  You see
the shadows that flit through my eyes?  They are telling you, Come back to life and to me.
 

***
 

26 July 2001
 

Light in Redness Here
 

A dove, you trail a ribbon as you fly.
The shadow that depends from your red beak
is concentrated madness growing wise
in syllables whose dreaming leaves me weak,
a faint-with-hunger viewer of your flight
intoxicated by the golden thread
I know conceals the voice of my midnight
designs to solve the riddle still unread
that you have borne across the million skies
between my lover’s lips and this sea-strand,
a gold-embroidered ribbon red as my
long dream of death.  You scarcely understand
the potency of my desire, and yet
you bear it in sweet silence, silken-shy:
a flowing tongue, with music dripping wet;
a liquid streak of lambent scarlet fire
whose liquid frequency shakes half the sky
by grace of you; a line of song that leaks
the riddle-key I reach for—fill my eyes,
then light and let me claim its power to speak.
 

***
 

27 July 2001
 

What Will Be Greater Then
 

I lift my face from the pool of water where I would die
of breathing you in, and blue-cold merciless air streams by
without allowing one gasp of its precious substance to fill
the place in my throat that rasps for want of the lighter will
that song is infused by.  Lift my face, I have done; why then
do I feel the ongoing shift whose ways are beyond all ken
still deepen its hold?  The flow I tried to respire—flows on
all around me, while all I know—or thought I knew—that is gone,
and in its old place, an air that must have been waiting here
returns my own startled stare.  The pool that is not yet clear
of my vexing attention glows, a reflectionless eye of fair
import that already shows bright promises you now bear,
ready to blossom, high over the water’s face—
breathing me like the sky, shifting from place to place,
dreaming me with a will to flow into endless blue
and gold inspiration.  Till their opening moment, you
will study the grace of song, and I will attend, a tear
trying to sing along with the source of the water here
dripping from my wet skin toward its provider.  Let
flowering ways begin dreaming to unforget
the catch in my throat, the rasp that made me afraid to lift
my voice to invite the clasp of love’s all-pervading shift,
and let their light petals hum with colors our eyes will see
in each other’s as all these come to their moment through you to me
and back again—song-fulfilled, our whole world within our ken,
the pond’s waters completely stilled:  Greater strangeness will claim us then.
 

***
 

28 July 2001
 

A Prayer-Scarf Offering
 

The shape of the leaf in your fingers helps me cast back my mind to a pale green day
under violet skies when tall clouds were swelling off to one side of the fields that lay
all around us, an anchor among their billows chaining the thoughts I had not yet told
to the oncoming lightning I prayed would kill me and leave you with memories you’d grow old
likewise without telling.  How else to show the scale of the magic I felt possessed
and sustained and devoured by always?  Hopeless ever to say it; it loves me best
from a hair-fine distance the while it flows in a prescient stream from a formless cloud
behind those arising nearby.  The ghost of a memory waiting to strike out loud
hums a darkly mysterious air amid echoes of our ancient meetings.  You look at me;
I sign with my eyes a long dream-letter and send it across the storm-to-be
to the place in the swirling twilight layers of skyborne ocean that grips the steel
of the anchor’s stanchion where your own chain is attached as well.  I can see you feel
the letter come streaking toward you.  When you open yourself to receive the gift
I have folded in layers of eloquence, you will pale as the flesh and its fine hairs lift
everywhere on the both of us.  Read my message the while you are winding the prize I’ve sent,
the prayer-scarf of white silk, around your neck and stand as the weight of it holds you bent
in a reverent posture a bare half-second before you rise to full height, made strong
by the magic power that hums and crackles throughout my nerves and the wild love-song
you have taken in with your eyes and touched with trembling fingers and felt surround
the pulse of your throat with almost too much eerie passion—but never enough.  I’ve found
the place in my furthest mind where futures wake with the strange green half-world light
that flows through the space before the blue-black ocean of heavy –bodied night
comes home in a surge of humming currents.  Now a pale leaf is in your hand
and all of these words that serve a purpose neither of us can understand
in full swirl all of their own accord through changes of time that reveal the gleam
of the high-polished anchor chain the storm will render one brilliant silver seam
of lightning between us, one shot bolt of a world burned open.  You read it there,
this future, in that live leaf you hold, whose secret form is long white silk prayer.
 

***
 

29 July 2001
 

What Was Going On Behind My Back
 

Turning before the night-dark window,
I caught a vision that made me blink
with astonishment:  Over my shoulder, spindles,
lines, and scrolls drawn in blue-black ink,
reflected between the glass and brilliant
lantern-glow, raced across the skin
of my back, an arched and lyric spill of
entrancing words I could not begin
to decipher.  I stared; they went on singing,
heedless of me.  I had overheard—
with my eyes—the joining of liquid rings of
incisive magic.  When one kind word
gave me leave to hear its voice, the wonder
taught me what I could never learn
till then:  Still inscribing the spell I’m under,
you’re wild to be spellbound in return.
 

***
 

30 July 2001
 

Unsolitary Ways
 

Within one small unmoving circle, ceasing never, I shall spin
a spiral-linking chain of words so luminous, your heart will win
admission to its own locked chamber merely by your being near
the faintest echoes I send shaking through the space between us.  We’re
a consecrated single unit, seemingly divided, on
the verge of breaking brightly through a veil of shadows cast by gone-
to-ashes mental bodies trapped in fenced and guarded burning grounds
in too-real worlds the while we lack a feel for where the silence sounds
by means of slight vibrations made by silver links that meet and cling
together in a spiral dance that comprehends all human things
remaining in the unscorched leaves our tender fingers bear with wet
remembrance streaming through the scene that hangs before us—tears of sweat
along my heaving sides as I am shivering with strangeness—you
aware of sympathetic rising hairs along your neck as new
perceptions pace harmonious measures round and round uphill along
your spine the way the dripping sweat is trickling down my own—a strong
deep shudder meets us in the middle of our work in common.  Touch
your own inmost desire where hidden meanings linger:  Overmuch
means overflow in such a moment.  I am dancing; you can hear
my steps repeat, although they slow until I seem to stand so near
you cannot see me—your fine focus shifts and now the world on view
goes on beyond us both, a golden chain of secrets showing through
the hectic motions of our sacred rite of joining.  Beads of sweat,
uncanny streams of soft vibrating silence-threshold noises—let
these all form words to hold our hearts together till the one they are
in truth—pure love’s bright world apart—releases rising magic far
too wise to see us any way but linked within this circle, this—
of all song’s round of private chambers—most unsolitary bliss.
 

***
 

 31 July 2001
 

Lammas Eve:  A Happy Holiday to You
 

Perhaps this is more spell than song.  Time is far from what it seems.  Blame the rhymes on Dafydd ap Gwilym.
 

The Being Overwound
 

When I, a ghost, laid all my clocks
in one wide ring and wound
them all so overtightly, shocks
of springing motion found
the way to turn the lurching gait
of future time around,
I smiled:  Do not you hesitate
to claim the first bright sound
in what will be the world we knew
last night, tomorrow.  Bound
by yet-unspoken fates to you,
the bed and burial-mound
in which a dream will come to birth
on this world’s threshold crowned
with radiant leaves of sacred Earth
whose ghost reached out and wound
the whispers of their live green wheel
through ripples that resound
about your head—do not you feel
great magic spinning round
in each of these foreshadow sighs
that seek the one they found
before they sang their first good-byes
to where we’ll wake up gowned
in strangeness, wise and more aware
of all the live leaves bound
to bear us on our way to where
more magic will be found
awaiting us with memories
of music whose pure sound
was part of us when leaves were trees
and will be soon, the crowned
and singing ghosts whose reels again
rise up to sing the round
of whirling springs, the sacred pain
of being overwound?
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