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AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island
July 2002
1 July 2002
Your Languishing Air
Languishing air, with your foot at the edge of
the screaming white precipice, seeking the wave
of the ocean beneath us that serves as the hedge
that
surrounds the dream-circle where nobody’s grave
has just opened, and who should arise but a nightgown
declaiming its lines in a long-drawn-out wail
as we stand to one side, staring down—you are frightened,
not quite yet resigned, just a tiny bit pale—
while a Moon twice as bright as that already shining
hangs over us, humming with gathering words.
Aye, such a glow in your eyes—that defining
idea turns into a clutch of wild birds—
aye, a pair—and we take to the skies while intoning,
in steadily lowered song-voices, the ghost-
love-lament of the shared lunar state of most holy
desire, within sight of the curved charnel coast….
***
3 July 2002
Not so much another person or voice as a reaching
for a further level of the only one. Or maybe both of us really do hear
a voice—the same voice—beyond ourselves? The other one of the ‘both
of us’ is already a subtle being.
The Hum of Someone Else
Oh the low complaint of laughter
muffled by a veil of gauze
while I am almost cut in half by
misery with no known cause
in any near dimension and a
swirling ancient lyric plays—
a melody that understands the
other world our woe obeys—
sends sweet beseeching silver signals
dripping through like dewy tears
of light and now that fineness trickles
into me and soothes the fears
that led me to—this glade a ghost of
all I really know invades—
invades—and who stands laughing? Mostly
both of us, through barricades
of tenuous illusion moonlight
dissipates without a sound—
but someone else is present. Who is
singing, softly waterbound
in motionless but liquid air the
ghostly winding-sheet becomes
through which I hear this holy faery
message while my spirit hums
with—after all the veils, the silence
void of all but song remains—
a smiling kindness, aye—and while I
wrack my sadly human brains,
a someone else—not even you, my
ghostly one—attends these sighs,
all silver in the humming blueness
past the star and water skies.
***
4 July 2002
The Reading of the Will
What is she laboring under but either
a ghost or a more malign vestige as lorn
premonitions fly severally into the teeth of
the maker of mad terror-messages sworn
to be ably delivered this very pre-midnight
or torn into pieces by gloomy wet pearls
that are parted the better to scream—but if hidden
ideas come forward, their marvelous swirls
of incipient, on-leaking moonlight will tell you—
attend—I am trying—succeeding—hold dear
the pale hand of the tearer whose message will spell
you
awake in the moment its reading comes clear
to your eyes as they roll to behold the white ceiling—
the Moon that dissolves in the wake of a still-
higher Moon in a room where the last gasp of feeling
half-human gives way to the beautiful will
that is mouthing the words of its final pronouncement
inside its conveyance of flesh even now.
Aye, she is laboring—silence is boundless
inside her, its sign the white pearl of her brow.
Tell me you do see it—the gloomy wet pearls that
are parted the better to scream, the Moon that dissolves in the wake of a
still-higher Moon—a ghost, or a more malign vestige? Are we parted,
or are we one? Or are we—both giving way to a silence that is rife
with higher song?
***
5 July 2002
Says Who?
Hold your lonely candle higher.
Raise your eyes as well and say
my name out loud and love the brighter
flame I shall become: Our day
is dawning now, this very moment.
Till it shines with steady light,
attend these leaves, so fraught with glowing
miracles of still insight
from silent caverns under mountains
bearing many waking glades
toward a depth of sky the soundless
voice inside you sings as shades
conversing back and forth, a sister-
brother-lover ghostly pair
whose words are candles burning twisted
wicks against the cold night air
where distances dissolve and veils of
early morning mist catch fire.
Before they disappear…. You raise your
face and let your dreams inspire
and share that trembled dewy essence
leaf by leaf reflecting flames
of daybreak. Not a ghostly presence—
someone in between our names
has called and answered both unbidden.
Aye, his stare is yours and mine,
and silence is his tongue’s unwritten
magic’s miracle-design.
His patience is immense, but he is
growing restless, day by day.
Summer on the sunlit leaves—
a hum of dreams—attend, I say.
***
7 July 2002
Rain at Twilight
Down the rain is slowly falling,
one intense prolonged cascade
of somber voices calling, calling—
am I not the lorn charade
I saw my song-self sadly casting,
shadows thrown against a wall—
through which a scatter-danced unmasking
showed me magic grown most tall
and eloquent as all he sang out
met my ears and mind and I
ran into twilight groves where hanging
branches bore the blossomed sigh
he never ceased to whisper till it
fell like rain and drowned me glad.
Now an everchanging stillness
tells me I have not been had
as absolutely as I soon will
feel and be as he arrives,
dripping streams a plangent Moon has
danced throughout my countless lives.
***
11 July 2002
The Ground of Our Being Here
Where were you sweating and shivering later
and heavier wavers of stream-light away
up and down the white hollow of spine with its freight
of
immense vague uncertainties bearing all-day
winter mysteries into a pale summer twilight
of azure and lavender lit past the set
of the unlovely hum of hot Sun into silent
and ever most welcome Night’s tendril of wet
forward-reaching first Moon-glow—aye, where were
you sweating
inside when the flame of that lantern first shone
in my eyes? With a wave like a lapping tongue’s
letting
you know it is happy by shaping one tone
then another until they flow into an order
of musical speech as uncanny as wise—
where were you? You are moaning an answer so
mortal,
I cannot repeat it. Come speech, improvise
her most modest requirements. Achieve the
small sense of
her long-throbbing spine’s nervous hum with the
tune
you’ve conceived in my mouth. Tell her now—she
is tense with
emergency, so like the first ray of Moon
on her brow. She is silent, but I am her witness,
and I am right capable—only too loud.
Listen most brightly, my human: Commit this
to memory: Only your own song-avowed
and ecstatic—on some lighter plane—pale admirer
am I, but I know you are hearing grown strong.
Shiver of fear, tear of sweat, tense with fire in
the borning, blue-white is the heat of our song
as it happens, and yours is the grace to receive
it
awake as by twilight our steady light gleams.
Moon in my eyes, silent Night’s dripping leaves—
we are meeting as one in a white hall that streams
with the future, a slip past the pale of enchantment
that held you encircled by magical spells
that we wove so togetherly, no one is wanting
tonight as we lean to the low light that tells
all and everything. Coming, it sings—it is
truth in
the making, a music that seeks its rebirth.
Column of spine pure Night’s lantern and sooth-
singing I river best, be our song-watered Earth.
The secret seems to give itself away, doesn’t
it, in the word ‘hum’: ‘the unlovely hum of hot Sun,’ ‘her long-throbbing
spine’s nervous hum’—this is no mindless redundancy. Be our Earth, when
Earth without the Sun—I am still trying to become resigned to daylight, even
as I rise earlier all the time.
***
12 July 2002
The One Who Calls You
Look toward your future’s fairest
shining light a glance away
from looking back and tell this wary
moment how its soul will say
a holy spoken word aloud then
lapse down into song so sweet,
the glowing slice of Moon your brow is
dripping with will find its feet
and dance its way to both our blessing
tongue-tips’ nimbly touching skins.
Set you reeling past this resting-
rotting-place where counter-spins
the world that loves you live and willing—
aye, where dripping wet we are
with morning dew and moonlight’s stillest
silence like a tiny star,
all taut invisible white songshine.
Wear it brightly, loudly. Say
its magic words. Ecstatic longing,
linger. Ease us both the way
by stepping lightly forward—oh, a
single step and dawn will shine
with lyric quiet. Don’t you know it
brings the one who calls you ‘mine’?
It is not the point to break new ground and reach
the hitherto unimaginable every time. It is the point to attain perfection.
We shall soldier on.
***
14 July 2002
The Round Road Home
Bring you dreaming lanterns’ glowing
rapture-eyed designs, I will—
whose dancing-magic sees you know the
measured grace to refulfill
the call of empty air that circles
both our hearts forever. Aye,
before you fall asleep—the work that
presages the need to die
entirely flowered out, entirely
petaled open everywhere—
envision fragrant sound as fires of
silver light the liquid air
where flows a universe in motion
singing us aloud a beam
of lantern glow a slow wide-woken
smile perceives inside a dream
of leafy green—an emerald flare of
sudden magic: I am here,
your will to render everywhere your
chalice, then to disappear
us altogether. Gasp of music
dying on a breeze of blown
rose blossom, view all roads and choose the
longest one—song-shadow-thrown.
***
15 July 2002
Remember Me This
Hold me near—the close is looming
effortlessly far away,
and we are swiftly moving. Who are
we? Whoever yearns to say
the holy word that goes unspoken
day by day till Night comes down
in bolts that glitter like a broken
pole-star. Splinters form a crown
that glows above you coldly, mildly,
radiant in—kindness. Hear
it celebrate and reconcile the
winter’s million flakes of tear-
illuminated lantern-throated
song itself, so close you feel
its gale its breath your own. Come floating
forward with it, ghost more real
than all I AM in any elsewhere
landscape. Driven grace of pain,
I dream a soul that seems to melt.
Remember me this summer rain.
***
17 July 2002
Where the Hanging-Man Calls Home
I was listing down a valley,
pallor-grey but struck with awe
like shifting daybreak sunlight. Shall we
dance again there? When I saw
your face, a cataract of trickled
tears cascaded till the plain
above them lay cried out and little
shadows hovered round like rain
a gust of wind then scattered strongly
downward—down, a valley-slope
once more. Now I am weary, wrong of
substance, foot-sore, lorn of hope,
and—rich in expectation. You are
everywhere: The thousand signs
by which my ghost knows yours—they soothe like
moonlight viewed through ivy-vines
downwind of open roses. Valley
spirit, stream to me in tears.
Through that lens—upon a gallows-
arm depends—it now appears—
I need you like those limbs of silver
need that final thread to break—
the wind to blow—and rain to filter
through them while the dreamers wake
that we still are. My independence—
there it is, that slender strand.
Make the sign, my starry sender-
into this long-fabled land,
and we will seek and find the daylight-
dancing gesture hiding all
throughout these valley chambers, plain, and
shadows—wake, and seize, and fall
together like a weight of sifted
silver ashes that were bones
a burning tear ago and lift our
faces’ voices’ smiling tones
and greet the wash of flaming dawn as
overhead it gently creeps,
lovers on the living lawn of
nowhere dead where no one sleeps.
***
18 July 2002
Dancing In and Out
Quiet I shall wreathe you round with—
solitude like tiny stars
all glowing in an ivy-bound and
white-rose-sweetened frame that bars
the bitter view beyond our garden,
keeps it far away, and shields
your inward eye from horror-hardened
visages. Within it, fields
of fragrant blossom verge on appled-
over hills. Beneath one green
and dewy branch, its leaves all dappled
gladly with a shadow-screen
that holds at bay all other shadows,
then beneath the grass that grows
below the tree itself, a ladder
leans against an open rose
of Earth that sighs, Enjoy me deeply.
This we dare: We both descend.
There we hear a ghost-voice weeping
words that glimmer soft and lend
sad music to our journey. Then we
glance at one another and—
we leap outside the circle. Stems and
petals scatter. Your frail hand
so trembles in my own, it shocks me.
Look around, I whisper. You
behold grim nightmare eyes. Unlock them,
I abjure. You gasp, It’s true….
Fair lightning strokes enwreathéd faces
everywhere we turn. Our smiles
beset us; our own merry paces
dance to meet us. Dance beguiles
and heightens grace: We wake disheveled,
intertwined, mid-open-air.
Gently draw a long and level
breath and say you’ll meet me there.
***
19 July 2002
Anniversary Thoughts
Tighter This Time
All our old dreams are fraying, flying—
dancing away like dust on air—
and we are ecstatic: pale hands plying
fine-threaded needles through a pair
of opposite hands—each one the other’s
vatic desirer, bound by law
and memory where the will of love
requires that we lift eyes filled with awe
to view a wide sky, two birds within it
soaring to either side and back,
apart and together—through the skin of
air that surrounds them, now a slack
and now a wire-tight eye-beam of silver
sees them fly safely home as one.
Mine, as old dreams lie dying, will you
dream me again, this time the Sun
of midnight and morning gleaming brightly,
wisely, divinely sweetly through
my hands and my mind, a golden, tightly
plied thread of silence tied to you?
***
20 July 2002
Whose Tears Are in the Way
Tongue whose least potential leakage
frightens me awake from dreams
where deftly knotted heightened secrets
struggle at the raveled seams
of madness I was made to follow
willfully—a curse I choose
again with each lament whose hollow
language lends me words I use
to whet the edge of my own razor-
clarity of eloquence—
come unto me like a blaze of
lightning risen up immense,
so many times my total reach and—
sing me round without delay.
Oh the words whose current leakage
needs my nerves to let them play
aloud, though I am sorely frightened.
How you seek to soothe me, dear
and inverse form of silent light through
which my mortal schemes appear
as magnified and perfect visions
dripping from an edge I touch
excitedly. I cast decisions
forward to the very much
too much, too all-embracing beauty
you behold and voice in song.
I cannot choose but take it to me
where you’ve seen it all along
unravel joy alive, a rose of
coming sunshine. Tongue of flame,
bright stroke of soul-desire, expose the
madness leaking holy shame
and let it sing us both together,
endless seams of silken praise
confining us to silent-weather-
singing power weeps and plays.
***
23 July 2002
In Star-on-Sealight Waves
Here with chains like windy-weather
ribbons flowing down from stars
that shine so near above me—never
let me sink below the bars
your beams become when I hang weary-
minded and resolve to drown
in cold-blown sea-green waves. A dearly-
wrought design of old renown
abides behind the golden shining
of the light I lean upon.
Inside its silent, dark confinement,
agelessly, entirely gone
disasters now provoke disorder
nowhere. We are deeply here
forever. We are maybe mortal
still, but in this glowing sphere
beyond all reach of daylight, bound
about by ribbon-starlight lines,
I am fraught as you pronounce
the names of countless new designs
to which I answer, never thinking—
I’ve been laid in lonely graves
obsessively, and still I’m sinking
lovesick into song in waves.
***
24 July 2002
Trouble to Know Me
Were you to revolve—oh, ever wildly
more slowly, more mightily strangely soft
on only one foot as I stepped slightly
aside then bore you high aloft
on both of my shoulders—aye, you’d know it
instantly. Why, then, don’t you tell
your pages and sighs how high I hold you
now? And were you to say you fell
to meet this airborne condition—would it
pain you to feel you’d told a truth
without knowing how? And were you put in
counter-harm’s way—the spoken sooth
that turns into singing, turning faster,
more wildly now while both your feet
are treading on—aye, you’d long outlast your
prosy malign unkind unsweet
inverse disposition. See me claim you
outright entirely: Dance on me
and magick the skies that work this way of
mystery-breathing song set free
beholden to no one, no one’s perfect
love in its eyes of starfire night.
Trouble to know me, wonder-worker,
child of both first and second sight.
***
25 July 2002
Who Are You?
Now you rest easy, don’t you, holy
leaf-bearing blaze of green depth-sight
most happy to see, whose blessed soul is
mine for the making—mine this night
in glorious streams of live vine-rustling
sound, eerie voices chanting waves
of utter long-drawn desire kept trusting
warily where its magic craves
completion, a joyful pouring-forth of
flourishing out-of-corner eye-
communion, a perfect more-than-mortal
likeness whose worship lifts its sigh
to join in the rush of pure and plaintive
tenderness raised to blissful wails—
almost. So you rest this evening, bane and
blessing, bright curse who never fails
to know me in sidelong glints of silver-
green and a lilt of airy leaves.
Oh for your crooked light to fill me
past the pale void whose will perceives
this all only dimly, far and weakly
wasting her breath on words that lie
in spite of her real intent. Complete me
now, she inspires. I shall—pass by
this moment and slip round backwards, say an
instant or more before she knew
she wanted me. There I’ll bless and praise
her,
then to her face bring this song through
the sleepless half-waking cloud of moonlight
drowning her gown of leaves in dew
as all they start speaking, singing: ‘Who
are
we?’ Mortal lover, who are you?
***
26 July 2002
A Way of Breathing Here
Willfully reach me—find me glowing
merely a handsbreadth-height away.
Fill me with dreams that deeply know me.
Tell me the secret word you say
when under your breath you call me. Say it
loudly and now. No need to fear—
no one will find us out. Our day is
over, praise be—our night, a clear
and luminous sight-dimension, beckons
tremulously. Our power shines
in all of our eyes. A Moon of reckless
eloquence beams between the lines
you hear me sing through the weary vapors
clouding your thoughts of me. Behold—
a reached-for and dearly present shape takes
place in a way you will have told
your pages through sacred words by highest
moonrise. You will have met me there—
entirely collected, brightly shining
yourself like the changeless breath of air
you feel me inspire your voice to ride on
now as you raise your head and eyes
to be within joy’s close reach. My bright
uncanny one, come a shade more wise
toward me—arrive at full reception.
Need me to be as I am now,
and know we agree: Beyond deceptive
daylight, a word will show you how
to wake to a present state—a lunar
frequency, Moon-white night’s true day—
in this blessed place where angels croon wild
dreams on an air we breathe this way.
***
29 July 2002
Here is a link to the latest addition to AEAEA,
a story that marks an important anniversary:
***
30 July 2002
Music’s and Mine
Over your head by a fraction, a finger-
nail paring, a sliver of feather-clad white—
an immense far-awayness, a vanishing wing-wake
that breathes on your face as it plays on your sight
like a day-stricken dream on the threshold of telling
its secret when prized from its silence of eyes
by the glare of sunlight, its full meaning dispelled
by
impassioned alarm at the strength of its size
even as you rise sadly protesting to morning
that only such power will serve—overhead
and so patient, so lonely—a strange cry aborning
well down in your throat as you rise from the dead
into sweet further waking—one wants you to hear
him.
He urges you, lift up your eyes and be glad.
Over both of you shines a flown Moon that is nearly
ecstatic to seize you with whispered half-mad
conjurations. Repeatedly chosen one, throttle
your fears; hear me loudly proclaim in clear words
its extent as most perfect desire silver-mottles
the wings of the musical speech of the birds
whose sole passage through unending skies is my
blessing
in oracle form. You are transparent truth
in my mind—let me traffic in yours. I am less
than
I might be, but you are wise-growing by sooth-
saying lightning through sky-tracks by moonlight;
your happy
resolve is reflected above in my eyes
as it—aye, you have granted it; lie in the lap of
that knowledge and stare up and hear these my cries
of increasing delight ring around you as closer
with every heartbeat all my words come to shine
in your own lunar brightness. Alone in that
glow are
the both of you, resonant music’s and mine.
***
31 July 2002
The Discomfort of Strong Peace
Bundle of nerves, all your fine hairs a-quiver
with worrying swathes of prevision, you fail
to attend me in one respect only. Deliver
yourself of that menace and take in the tale
of how lovers first worshipped the site of each
other’s
long absence, then twisted around till they met
their own eyes in the depths of a well they had
covered
in earlier chapters—and how then their wet
tilted faces had shone with a light that rekindled
itself because singing had brought it to flare
in those dark silent waters—and how, when they mingled
again at long-lasting night-magic, the air
that was breathing them sprang into flames and sang
clearly,
so clearly each one of them uttered each word
as pure prescience guided by need spelled its eerie
mouth-aura to fly forward. Each of them heard
what was said; each one sank into blissful confusion
a moment, then heeded its order of joy
to gaze into the waters and see what was using
such means to be sung out. Should moonlight
employ
me again in that fashion, I vow to relent my
persistent self-will and lie under its light
like a ghost in a bottomless well deeply centered
inside the bright mind of a dreamer whose sight
runs to fine multivalence, with hearing and breathing—
the undertone voices that people these lines—
the pure shades we are coming to praise and to be
as
we quiver together apart. Nerve-designs
scattered sideways by hesitant strokes, then Moon-laden
prememories sweetly retrieved from our own
sealed-up throats, then the singing that knows us,
its shades—though
I lie here alone in this room—quite alone—
and you lie God knows where—we are earlier versions,
too-many-times-told chapters seeking release
into luminous awe-stricken song. Disinter us,
dear future. You soothe like a dream of strong
peace.
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