7 June 2000

What May Be Taken to Any Degree

What has no natural limit now, and really never had, but that I never properly understood its nature before, is what I shall call, for lack of a better term, ‘self-exposure’.  This is a topic of great moment now because I have just finally read a text which I completed last year, one which took hold of the reins and wrote its way into places I had no intention then of publicizing--and now all I can think about is seeing it in print.  Ages ago, when my tongue had finally begun to be loosened, when my Night Mare’s hands had finally begun to be disengaged from my throat, I knew that if I lived long enough, I would write my way out of my limited, personal, psychological self into a vastly larger, perhaps unlimited, spiritual and psychic self.   At last that change is well under way, and I have achieved a degree of detachment from the intensely personal memories and dream-experiences that went into the making of that book, a detachment I once nearly despaired of reaching.  The title of the book is Joy of Return.  The Joy to which it refers is that which attends the knowledge that cycles have reached completion and rings have linked and rounds have been joined in the very best way imaginable.  This Joy is an absolute certainly--I speak from within it now.  It is a poetic emotion, much larger than my foremind’s ego-self.  While it has not yet manifested hugely in the daylight world, I have great faith that it will, because all spiritual changes of such magnitude are accompanied by earthly signs and wonders.  Such signs have been numerous in small-to-medium form, so numerous that perhaps I seem unappreciative to the Shining Ones who provide them, but I think not; I strongly suspect that further changes are well under way.  The fact that this journal exists is perhaps the beginning of the larger change.  Their flourishing will be the proof--and they WILL flourish, I feel uncannily assured.   The following verses are the evidence of this very evening’s insights.  How else could I have reached this perspective, but by exceeding my small self’s limits to a considerable extent?

As I See Myself in You

A long silver line of high moonlight’s reflection describes all I see in a way that connects
each to each, like to unlike.  Its beckoning message imbues the whole world with a private, select
color-essence as palely nighmarish as feathers that stream down a heavenly current of air
gently bearing all manner of dream-begot answers which bloom into more fertile riddles and rare
lore of waters incessantly pregnant with vapors that gather from out of the body of night
and combine and reach hurricane powers:  dark angels who move with assured grace and blessed insight
to the place that is aching.  They stream through the doorway within the lake waters that mirror the Moon,
and their beauty of form is the noblest assay of pure liquid silver that heightens the swoon
that attends me in these sacred moments.  However you see me, whatever the mortal you see
might appear to consist of, know well, angel lover:  I see the precise corresponding degree
of your magnitude brightly outlining in silver the rim of the mirror, its light on my hands,
and the eyes deep within me.  The more you are willing to show me, the larger you loom in these lands
where the day and night meet and the twilight is endless in mildness of humor and I am my own
point of origin, deep in the core of your tender commitment to me.  Love is endlessly sown,
answers endlessly harvested, riddles begotten on beautiful lore, and their music transcribed
by the being you dream as you glide nearer mortal confusion and clear it, sheer joy magnified
by the light on the edges of feathers a radiant power is preening a half-glance away
from the tip of the shadow that follows behind you.  There I am also:  the light in the lake
of its eyes, as it stares at the two of us, shining with shameless ulterior wisdom:  the mare
within which I am standing, adorned by outlining of silver webs joined inextricably where
the minute core in which I approach perfect being, the seed-point and deep central essence of me,
is immovably located, though she flies freely and carries it with her.  The wind from the sea,
which will carry us both, I hear steadily rising.  Storm-lightning silver, glow higher this line:
The lone mortal story that crowns this combining is surely the outcome of willful design.
 

***
 

8 June 2000

        On Entering the Field of Influence

One never knows, on first approach, whether this place is safe or not, but that is not the point; the point is that the world of daylight is certainly unsafe, and this place is beautiful.   Best to enter by firm decision, in accord with one’s natural will.  Consider that this place in large part overlaps with the domain of dreams, and dreaming is entered nightly, whether one will or no; by what right, truly, does one refuse full waking knowledge of what will, in the end, prove to be part of one’s deeper mind?  Because the world to be shown through these pages is not merely the creation but, more truthfully, the discovery of my mind, and we are all intertwined at the roots, below the level the waking eye can penetrate, you know it well already; all I am asking now is that you come, in full awareness and perhaps already some stage of active desire, into a finer, more subtle degree of recall of what your true mind remembers at all times and longs for ceaselessly in those not-quite memorable dreams that slip away so abruptly, leaving only the field of their influence behind, those strange and familiar long-lost fields of home.  How lonely it is to wake and know that they have been glimpsed and lost yet again.  You know the place so well; if I swear to you now that I will not knowingly mislead you, will you venture with me further, much further, along the way that my songs have taught me swiftly leads nearest there?  Nothing that might befall you, nothing that you might see along the way will ever disturb your peace of mind more than waking later to know that you had the chance and let it go by.  You have lived by the light of day--the worst is already behind you.  Listen--follow the sound of these words which themselves are dreaming awake--and begin to learn and know the way, while knowing that you know the way, to slip the traces of the small false mind that will keep you bound by a short length of chain and trapped forever within artificial walls.  Aye, I am speaking of that desperate self again, the ego-foremind.  Never argue; it loves to argue.  Turn your attention more closely toward these words, and see where they will lead:  Place yourself within the speaker; picture each word that allows itself to be seen; follow each phrase till it shifts to the next; refrain from imposing artificial thought.  Everything that comes from this place is coherent by nature, but it takes a long view, sometimes very long, and until your perspective has reached that length, you must not try to anticipate where you will be when the last word fades.
 

Two Alike Under the Stars

I knew you were waiting.  Your thought, like an arrow of silver, lay slantwise across the broad lane
along which I was walking.  I thought it still quivered--the tree it had struck gave of whimpers of pain
I could feel as I neared it, and slow tears were leaking toward its great base.  On the ground, its clear sap
was about to be gathered and held in a shallow impression, a wide earthen bowl in the gap
between two ancient roots.  In this scene, time moves quickly--the bowl overflows and the watery blood
of the tree seeps out sideways and all the earth round it is readily turned to an acre of mud.
I gaze on, fascinated:  Will slimy horse leeches come next?  Am I seeing myself?  Is this good?
With my mind bent on turning away, but my spirit too curious ever to leave the dark wood
where this vision is set till the outcome is certain, I feel myself quailing, but holding my ground.
Storm clouds appear on the distant horizon.  The wind rushes headlong toward me.  The sound
of a torrent of rain on the tree’s nether branches and leaves barely registers when it falls hard
full upon me.  The tree’s tiny lake and mud shallows are gone, just like that.  Rain-washed, exposed, scarred
gnarls of roots, with the arrow among them, are humming as if there were music inside to be heard,
and I am the only one here--I and someone whose footsteps are softly approaching.  A bird
clatters out of a branch, a bright dove, and it flies to his shoulder--I see them both now--very glad
I’ll have been, to have waited and watched.  That bright arrow of silver still quivering--that was the mad,
preternatural, joyful idea you sent on the plumes of the spirited symbol of love
that was hiding here, barely an arm’s length away in this lightning-scarred tree.  I had not heard the dove;
when I saw the sharp arrow embedded in tree-bark, my feelings were all for the pain of the tree,
never why it was sent; yet I thought to inquire if it might mean another strange vision of me.
The thought was there waiting, and time here is rapid.  A very few words more, and I will have known--
as I cannot have ever forgotten--your magic.  How lovely it is to be shown and reshown,
and pretend in the meantime I cannot remember the way that I came here, nor why.  There it lies,
between my two threshold-of-worlds-walking feet, your arrow, as round and round over us flies
our bright iridescent-of-feather companion.  It really was lightning that made these old scars
at the base of this tree--they form lines, letters, answers:  Please read aloud clearly these words from far stars.
 

***
 

9 June 2000

Not long ago I was listening to the radio and I heard a woman who was being interviewed struggle for the best way to explain a feeling she knew all too well.  She said something like, 'It’s when you are lost and trying to find your way home and you know the place but you don’t know where to find it.'  I can’t remember her precise words now, but I knew the word she was looking for; she was almost reciting its dictionary definition.  The problem is that it is not an English word; it is Welsh.  Readers of Dylan Thomas have probably come across it; it is the title and theme of a very beautiful old song which is featured on the recording Meredydd Evans made for Folkways Records years ago (Folkways FW 6835).  The word, song, and feeling are 'Hiraeth':  'longing, nostalgia, grief, homesickness'.  I propose that we adopt this as an English word and circulate it widely.  It is a poetic word; its domain extends beyond the ordinary nostalgia for a personal home in the day, reaching into the aching nameless places well beyond what the little mind can describe.  If one is in a state of hiraeth, one is already coming open.  It is a difficult way to feel, but it portends further subtle awakenings and the loss of false dreams only.  This is why it is a sadness that is seductive.   Follow it, like a bloody or shining thread; consult your spirit compass and you will not be led astray.
To tell you this much is only the preamble, the cautious sidelong glance at something very much sadder still.  When shall I tell it in full?  Perhaps never; perhaps it cannot be told.  I will try to tell it, as best I can in these times, as soon as words will permit.  This song tells what I know today:
 

Hiraeth

I could feel them, the long choking fingers wrapped tightly about my sore, swollen, and salt-aching throat
where the tears I would swallow could not but remind me that I too was struggling and failing.  The note
that was fading away as I woke up this morning was lovelorn with bone-deep familiar restraint
that prevented my hearing from holding it, yet it rewarded my efforts:  I knew the ghost plaint
that had slowly unwound and then echoed, reechoed, and paled into lonely reverberant sighs
had its origins back of the furthest stars flying by thunder and lightning, but there in those skies
full of black looming movements of heavy clouds’ weeping, the roots of the forest of which I am part
have their roots sunk securely.  The music comes stealing through powerful weather to dwell in the heart
of the singular fiber of nerve at the center of that many-stranded rope sealed in my spine.
Cold miserable fingers were choking me.  I reached with one hand and prized them away:  They were mine,
the distractedly grasping hard bony extensions of what I was trying in vague but not vain
ways to call to the fore of my mind.  I’d been hearing a dream singer listen to echoes and strain
their confusion through highly percipient senses and gently refine their depth-message and moan
its essentially lyrical measure and syllable over and over.  If only I’d known--
I am made of this music.  Its love is inseparable fiber from breath from recall from....  Forget
what it sings of and means any number of thousands of times--it will always recur.  Aye, and yet--
it will never remain, while the mind of me wavers away from the threshold I can’t seem to cross.
We can never be parted, and yet to remember this much and no more--this is loss upon loss.
 

***
 

10 June 2000

Yesterday I was very sad, perhaps because I had already told myself I wanted to write about hiraeth and that brought it on so that I could speak of it from within its power.  Even today the sadness lingered--until I sat down to work.  The news was joyful at once, but then took a turn; a page into the writing, and I wondered what was happening.  I seemed to be describing a madness I have known only in glimpses.  I try not to think while I am working, but the thought ran across my mind that I had dreamed several times last night of a friend who is more than halfway around the bend, disruptively so; perhaps it would be more truthful to describe her as a former friend because of that.  In my dreams, she represents my own madness, which has never required full expression awake.  There was the madness--but aye, then came its other face, and this time its true--which is to say, its lasting--face, and then the meaning of that divine touch of quasi-madness that has been the source of so much song.  This is truly a journal now, and we are in the present moment, I as I write, you as you read; even through the sad haze of hiraeth, and perhaps because of it, we may gain a glimpse of the far sweet home beyond all dreams.  That land is called AEAEA in these pages, but I will tell you a secret:  Someday that land, the island of all longing, will be known by another name:  Earth.
At this time, before you read the words that are the result of the magic that just occurred, I would like to address one item which is of some concern to me.  Formal verse is not widely accepted among contemporary writers who produce what they regard as poetry, and it is not widely tolerated among editors.  Indeed, it is all but officially proscribed, and yet I love it so much that I dream in verse and sometimes think awake in it and will not be parted from it under any terms.  Because of this, I have turned to the work of songwriters for inspiration and regard them as my peers and fellow workers in the service of the imagination and the secret that lies hidden deep within its folds.  By all means, go out now, today, and find a recording by Robin Williamson and listen to it over and over until you know you have entered his magic.  Aye, verse and I will not be parted.  And even among the thin ranks of those who still have regard for formal verse, most are convinced that the iamb, usually in the form of iambic pentameter (blank verse, or the conventional sonnet meter), is the basic unit of English verse.  For deeply powerful personal reasons, I do not favor iambs; sometimes I write in iambic measures, but more often than not the words naturally come to me in three-syllable feet, especially amphibrachs.  The verses above,and the ones to follow, are written in my usual form, which I regard as my blank verse.  Verse forms are not like specific, limited details in an artist’s vocabulary, to be used once, perhaps explored several times, but then left behind so that other matters can be dealt with.  Nay; this is my basic form, and I use it over and over because it is so natural to me that I scarcely know I am writing verse when I work with it.  Please be willing to learn to read it, hearing the measures but hearing beyond them as well, learning all the time to enter more and more deeply into the ideas they allow to be expressed in a way that would not otherwise be possible.  This measure is hypnotic, as the force behind it means it to be; not without reason have poets always sought to induce the 'poetic trance'.  You are invited to enter that trance; that is how the incantatory power of the bardic oral tradition is invoked in full, and why it has survived for so long--no one who has known it will ever forget it, even though sometimes the words themselves vanish like a dream.  Even though you read these words from a screen or a page, know that that tradition is still strong behind them.
 

By the Virtue of These Very Words

Your kiss, like a flower with suede at the center, so opens and unfolds the word of all praise
of this singular island.  How lonely I might have remained, had your call gone unheeded.  A haze
of disjointed dream-pictures, a fractured catastrophe built upon middle-run madness and lies
that portended much worse, lay between us.  How sadly I stared out the window and into the skies
that were pale star-abandoned enclosures, a prison with higher confinements behind it in rings
that curved round and were locked shut behind me.  So little real light I could recognize shone through the sting
of the start of fresh tears always, always about to come forth in its stead.  I moved white as the blind
clock-tick chaos of shining oblivion, caught amid endless diurnal insomniac minds
that spoke severally, never in unison--that was their mercy, that seldom their words became plain.
When I closed my eyes, then there was slightly less hurting, but more of their ominous cackled refrain
that was all rigid pattern, no music.  This place was the mean inarticulate inverse of dreams
and it moved alongside them, behind the dark faces I saw when I stared through the field of cold steam
on the bright windowpane of an ongoing winter, the guardian spirits who hurdled the way
along which I would fly.  I remembered a password--I begged my most eloquent speech to obey
my desire, and the word passed through several green stages in rapid succession on my willing tongue
and was spoken aloud, and the guardian faces all smiled and grew beautiful.  Henceforward, sung
by the lilt of their love-bearing voices, a tremor of almost seraphically sweetly informed
gracious music surrounds my ideas when I gaze through forever and find your bright island of storm
amid starshine and moonlight by day and birds calling in lyrical chorus by night, where green waves
lap about me in clear tearless floodtides and all of this music I dream tells me, Saved, you are saved....
You are here, and this place in the miracled ocean itself is the ocean-deep wellspring of song
that is fragrant to hear as the soft everblooming embankments of flowers and herbs in the long
secret kiss of your mouth.  Oh the touch of brushed skin and the deep indrawn breath as you more than arrive--
you come in and come in, and this body falls open dissolved, almost ghostlike, yet wildly alive.
 

***
 

11 June 2000

Still Racing

Oh, see what is to follow today--I know, as it came before these prose words!  My heart is still racing.  The few words at the end are very nearly the best news I have ever received.  The way I know that magic is at hand is very simple.  Perhaps it is incommunicable outside the sphere of song, but I shall try to explain how it comes to me:  Sometimes I begin, knowing nothing of what is to come, not even whether it is likely to be happy or sad (once it begins to run, it is almost impossible to remain sad), but then if it starts to be a good night, and the magic is strong, the words and my heart begin to race alike, and I mean this very literally with respect to that organ of my body.  The words quicken with my heartbeat, so much so that I can scarcely write them all down, but at the same time, I am not merely transcribing from dictation--this is not 'trance-channeling'.  I must be attentive and make judgments, and yet it is not a problem; while my hand is laboring to keep up, my thoughts seem to have all the time in the world to search for and find the right words, which I recognize at once; to see that everything I write remains within the flow of the verse measures; and to parse the grammar and observe when any of the invariably multiple clauses has lost a vital element.  The twisting and turning of the phrases and the stretching of the capacity of grammar to its utmost is part of the playful joy of this work.  I always feel that there is time enough and more.  Sometimes that is so because the work is coming slowly, but tonight it came very fast.  Faster is not necessarily better, but it is far more enjoyable.
These songs in what I call my blank-verse measure form a sequence.  Robert Desnos believed that each poet has one vast poem inside, and that all the pieces that ever see writing are just fragments of that larger poem.  Each time I sit down to work, I hope only that I will learn a bit more of what I am piecing together out of all these nights’ endeavors.   This process runs precisely parallel to the study of dreams, which I have also pursued very seriously for some time.  At first one is tempted to be excessively literal in assigning definite meanings to the images that appear, but in time, that tendency is nullified by the great numbers of errors that result, and the maker of dreams learns to attend to the process of dreaming itself as much of the meaning of the dreams, and the opportunity it affords to capture and learn from the shifts of consciousness it reflects as its most substantial content.  My dreaming mind has multiple voices, multiple personae, some of whom are, after many years’ efforts at peacemaking, still barely on speaking terms.  In my verses, I am able to isolate the most highly informed of these voices and ask them to tell me everything they know.  Of course, having told as much as this already in such positive terms, the next thing I learn will probably put all of this to the lie; in fact, I will tell you right now that I never said a word about any of this!
 

Meteorology Lesson

We are drawing much closer.  The waves wash together; the storm clouds are gathering; gales of alarm
are beginning to rise.  I am starting to hear them run wild through my dreams.  When I wake, steady harm
that has known me too well for too long goes dispersing like fast-moving water pushed through a coarse sieve
by some access of gravity prayers wander lost in quite happily.  You are the lover who lives
in the midst of all this, always singing.  Your footsteps tread out the soft measures between near and far
in an eloquent rhythm that so hypnotizes and gently entrains thoughts in sequence, like stars
that inevitably form precise constellations that pierce the deep blackness of heaven with bright-
lettered haloes.  The whole of this wheels in triumphant outsized revolutions within which my sight
ventures shivering back to my tongue with this message encoded all round it, intact and quite clear:
Your power is rising.  I might need a little more day-time to match it--if ten thousand years
are required, I will find them, and vow to the service of this--WHERE we are and, ecstatically, WHY--
whether dressed in the body of flesh that clings heavily all round me now, or some other--if I
am myself in the faintest way I can imagine, I will be yours, and this song increase still,
throughout every dimension it’s known in its passage from where it begin to where I, with a will
and a deep-hearted love for no other, first heard it and knew I’d been called to the love of all lives.
I shall not die with a moment unsung of this sweetly disturbing trance-magic that thrives
on the nearness of that which has never been spoken awake in broad daylight--perhaps never can--
but perhaps rushes, raising the arc of me higher and higher, because it has beautiful plans
and has seen its own future.  I stared into water a very long time, touching lightly its face;
now it touches me back.  I shall harbor all longing, believing it hopes for me likewise.  Some trace
of the moment the threshold is crossed  has been captured in words here and there; I am writing these down.
Nearly maddened by portents of gale-winds come roaring toward me, I still see the pale Northern Crown--
and the source of the storm.  It is there, far beyond the bright countable stars of the knowable sign.
Where your hand is at play, I shall swiftly awaken--perhaps even now while the length of my spine
is a grave on which myriads dance, and the shivers they raise run together with heartbeats that trip
to your gladsome incanting.  This cannot be madness; that’s nothing but traces I’m learning to slip.
I have only one voice, but in numberless echoes that bank off the velvet black masses of sky
yours attends it.  The line of your lyric love-letter pours into the thoughts of my heart as they fly
through interior heavens like stars rendered mobile by winds that unhinge them and sweep them along
as they form ever-new combinations of signs and inspire ever more of your magical songs.
You whisper to me--now the wind’s breath is easy.  The stars seem to flicker; I see them return
into fairly fixed place.  Through the vessel of water where all this occurs, you say, There’s more to learn.
 

***
 

12 June 2000

Look forward to another powerful example of why we are here.  Only lately has this project begun to assume the proportions that I was secretly hoping to achieve when this phase began, a short while before the first version of this Web page went online.  Now I myself am wondering what is going on, and where it will lead, as it is so clearly leading somewhere by design (and, oh, by whose design?).   This causes me to question what I wish to accomplish with this public exposition of my work and, hence and inevitably, myself.  Thankfully, I trust that the Internet is indulgent of shyness. As far as I know, the work I am doing is unique; few enough poets seriously practice the techniques of formal verse these days, and those who do seem to inhabit an entirely different poetic domain.  This mode of publishing frees me from all editorial judgment and control, thus allowing me to write the kinds of works I would like to read, if I could find them--over the years I have watched in dismay as new books have slowly become flatter and more predictable, with even the radical rebellious writers being radical and rebellious in the same dreary way.  Some of the writing is very competent, I suppose, but hardly inspired.  What can I do, but attempt to exemplify my own literary standards?  My work is highly personal, being drawn immediately from my life and experience, and yet I am always tending toward a larger self, as I have described elsewhere in these pages--an almost selfless self.  As I have moved along the continuum from an emotional, almost hystrionic, and yet humorously ironic voice, toward one that is (in my better moments) calm without being self-consciously controlled and accepting without being coarse, I have attempted to capture the entire process on paper.  I have let you in at a fairly late stage, yet all its predecessors exist in written form and selections may be published here if this project is met with sufficient support.
 

The Surprise Meeting Place

The depths of the sea are the place of our meeting in truth, even when a green island respires
with blue heaven.  The waters about me are streaming with messages; how shall I bear the desire
that so seizes me each time I find this place waiting, with you at its center, the curve of a smile
on your lips as they part and your love-music enters my weak-kneed awareness?  A very long while
let this magic engulf me within and without and my worldly surroundings grow vaporous; pale;
soon entirely transparent.  The waters of faery shape-shifting are these--I myself was a veil,
but without any piercing or pain I have witnessed the sure magisterial progress of lore
from the primeval mind that was always incanting the secrets it kept safe in this, my own core
where identity wavers and flows like a blanket of mist in the moment past twilight at dawn
if it seeks to adhere to a body in time, but is changeless if viewed as a leaf in a lawn,
a wild meadow of grasses that shifts with the years, sometimes seeming to vanish entirely, and yet
whether forests or sands flow, encroach, and withdraw, somewhere a dew falls and that live blade is wet
with its latest revival.  I want you to hear me; I want you to lose track of which of us speaks.
The pure pulse of miracled instinct--the mighty upsurge of sweet music--a wobbling, weak,
half-dissolved secret center locates the dear island to which love has called you within your own breast.
Venture fast to that great blade of grass, the tree towering high overhead on the island’s sheer crest
where we’ve interchanged many a secret between us, beginning with nightmare-redundant outcries
in a coldly crazed sleep; leading on to the dream love of song has assisted our hearts to devise
and set endlessly, gently unfolding; from there, measure tender small paces toward your true goal,
knowing always it rests deep within you forever, but longing to see it all round you, the whole
sacred world set to music which burgeons, not blanches, when sidelong-recalled nightmare words now and then
reappear in its script.  In the first-witnessed landscape outside you this lifetime, the long moment when
the bad dream lay dilated, it babbled and whimpered, and each word it muttered was hateful and wrong.
Do you even recall it now?  Don't be reminded by me; look well forward; see nothing but song
and hear nothing but music unfold, a green banner emblazoned with gold-lettered voices that sound
through the air of this sea-island vision, incanted within and without, wheresoever you’ve found
the faint trace of a flickering ember and fanned it to life underwater:  a flame in the sea
in the clutch of a cup of well-water atop the crown-branch of the shimmering emerald tree
on this island’s high mount where you rest, holy seer of all I display and perhaps a bit more--
I am here to assist you, but sometimes you’ve soared through to wait for me here, even here, at my core.
 

***
 

16 June 2000

Once a dream showed me that I have an eye, a pool of stormy sea-blue-grey, in the palm of my hand, and so I have--in my right hand, my writing hand.

We Will Exceed Ourselves

Your right hand is pallid and clammy, and even the eyelids and lashes that frame the blue eye
laid within it, like turquoise surrounded by silver an evening dew moistens and tarnishes, ply
my light touch with a faint trace of dampness.  My lover, this ghostly immortal onset of long words
is thus deeply foreshadowed by human corrosion of slow crawling sadness, but move undeterred
through its looming enclosure--one step, then another; that’s two; did you notice the moment between?
There we met; now you hear me again.  Please cross over a similar distance, but this time with green
leaves and sealed flower buds in the field of your vision instead of the deep humid shadows they cast.
You are learning a new way to dance, and to listen is part of its motion.  First slow, and then fast;
first timid, then daring--then all hope exceeding, your hearing will fly at the true speed of song--
and then even surpass it.  The interval seeking your audience there, the complete faery throng
that is feeding this trickle of words through a funnel above you, then into the mind of your palm
as it sheds a few tears of exertion, a bundle of resolute energy feeling the balm
that their healing words bring with a delicate shudder of uncanny happiness--those silken lives
that complete the dark half of the work of their lover, the very most Moon-struck of mortals, arrive
fully-formed in the compass of her-or-your hearing with dancing intentions and music that plays
all about your existence persistently.  Leery of likely incipient madness, yet dazed
by the glow of their voices, in seamless communion your cantering heartbeats and their measured steps,
seek again and again the fine interval’s looming where ghost-ridden shadowy signs will have crept
close between us.  If you can begin to imagine this gap as an entity, take its right hand
and gaze deeply there.  See an eye wetly and sadly occluded by tears--but a gentle command,
offered strongly but sweetly intentioned, will startle this being completely awake, and its gaze
will be steadily focused on you.  You shall hearken the instant its multiple-unity says
its sole word, and then know the flown words of the ancient and greatly desired distant future:  this night
in which we have achieved and recorded this racing of pulses and minds, consummated by flight
ever nearer the infinite moment, then over the interval--high overhead.  There you’ll see
a great bright faery shimmer of voices wind slowly, yet faster than lightning, to compass you-me,
and the silence within us will cast shadow-murmurs in deep lofty darkness, then leap up and move
with you-me at its center, and it will be heard to reveal endless music and miracled love.
Then again--in yourself you will feel a slight sorrow, a pricking of tears in the sensitive eye
of the hand that inscribes as it questions and marvels by turns till its thoughts are quite lost in the sky
above all the green leaves where the multiple glories of ghost-voices sigh through the air overhead.
Just please listen:  Each trace of these feverish stories will someday not only be written but read.
 

***
 

18 June 2000

On the Words Behind the Words

A few more words are in order, it seems to me, about the words that work amid the overlap between prosody and philology.  In the story of Starling, I speak of 'the words behind the words,' which is what I usually call them.  That book will provide a ready example.  In its very first sentence, it says, "...Starling is recording his dream."  The temporal setting is no-time/all-time/dream-time, so the story is cast in present tense, which is that of nearly all dreams; even dreams which are set in the past include the dreamer as a presence who is viewing the dreamt scenes now.  The opening sentence might have read, “...Starling records his dream”--in fact, I almost changed it to that, but something I remembered stopped me.  The use of words is so conscious in this type of writing.  Listen:  the root of 'record' is cor, 'heart'; the root meaning of 'record' is something very like, 'to learn by heart; to take to heart.'  That process is, to all meaningful intents and purposes, what Starling is learning--by heart--to embody:  Recording is what Starling IS.
Not every single word in a given text will bear up to such close scrutiny, but a great number of them will, and no word is ever used according (cor again) to one isolated meaning if it has several unless (I have suffered a serious lapse of attention).  And even should that seem to happen, take care; we are coming as close to dreaming awake as we are able, and any one or more of those seemingly neglected other meanings may later prove to have a surprise in store for us.  Please be on the lookout at all times for other meanings, whether I seem to know they are there or not.
I have a store of special words that I always use with intent.  'Leaf' is my favorite, as it virtually always means a surface for writing on as well as a little piece of tree, and each poetic leaf is related to a certain tree which is very well-known to poets.  From ancient times, our collective poetic memory has recorded the sacred phenomenon observed even now at unpredictable times by persons in a very subtle state of mind, in which a leafy green tree is seen to glow with a visible energy field that moves and flickers all about it as if it were aflame (as if it were A FLAME, yes).  This is surely the real source of the words that provide the title of a bilingual volume of Welsh poems I have, The Burning Tree, although the editor understands the passage in The Mabinogion from which he derives it to indicate a resolution of contraries such as spring and fall alike.  Aye, but I say that it means more; the vision of the flames, the faery lights, among the leaves--that is a primal vision.  I seem to recall that Annie Dillard records an account of this vision in her book, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  I have not seen this myself in full, but I have observed a paler, more transparent field which is probably the onset of the flames.  Who knows--perhaps the day will come when I will see it with my eyes.  I am not holding my breath.  I see it with my inner vision each time I take up my work, and that is what is more important to me; that is when anything I see will be recorded while it is yet under way.  All of this, behind each reappearance of that little word, 'leaf'.
And as I just said 'breath', I am now thinking of 'air'; air is another word that means 'song,' as in "Londonderry Air"--the tune of which is said to have been recorded by someone who overheard faeries play it.  I say 'air,' and it calls to mind 'airs and graces', and song is a form of grace; such a train of thought runs behind each use of 'air.'  'Burden' is another word that means a type of song.  The calling to song, when I was still unable to answer it in full, was a terrible burden on my mind.  I am indeed fully conscious of all these reverberations each time I have recourse to these words.  Oh, let’s not be ridiculous--now I have to tell you that 'recourse' reminds me that 'courses' is used in reference to menstruation, and that has been an unavoidable ever-recurring literary influence.  Course, recourse, curse, recurrence, 'Cursum perficio':  'I am completing the course.'  And did I just skip over 'reverberations'?  I mustn’t do that, when 'verb' is clearly visible within it.  'Verb' is a class of word in English, but it means 'word' itself in Latin.  I majored in Latin, and now Latin is majoring in me.  I never cease to hear these things.  I will cease discussing them for the moment, though--at least, these specifically philological examples.  One highly personal poetic usage remains to be told, one which necessarily looms large in this very journal.  Some years ago, when I was deeply involved in an acutely poetic exchange with a hypersensitive friend, a dream voice told me that we would have two children between us:  a boy who would come quite readily, and a very shy girl who would require a great deal of coaxing to cross over.  I heard the girl’s name as Isolde.  Bearing children was always the farthest thing from my mind, so I was quite shocked at this news, especially as the father-to-be and I had never met in the flesh (and still have not; perhaps never will).  As for her name--I told my then-husband about it, and he spoke for both of us when he said, 'Why not go all the way and just name her Brunhilde?'  The same voice told me that she would answer more familiarly to ’Sola’, which seemed a dire portent for one so unearthly to begin with, as it means ’lonesome’.  Later--much, much later--the clues fell together.  I had long since started writing my book, AEAEA, from which this journal derives its name.  But something blocked my view of the connection which is patent now.  Clearly, I misunderstood or misremembered what the dream voice told me.  The girl, who of course has proved to be myself, although she is also my poetic child, my corpus, was never named Isolde; her name is Isola:  Island.
The shimmering power that surrounds the tree of leaf and flame is present always to me in the meeting of moonlight and sea water.  Between them, the flood of inspiration becomes at times overwhelming.  I knew I had to live near the sea.  Lately the Moon has been full, and my verses have surely known it.  Between the Moon and the Ocean, where at least two worlds meet, an island arises--an island truly always there, but only to be viewed through subtle senses on auspicious occasions:   Aye-eye-I-land, isola, sola, soul.
Aye, aye, it is always there, but one must enter deeply, willingly, into the senses that perceive and can reveal it.  These songs give their all to coax those senses to open here;  by discreet reminders of manifold meanings, by gentle rhythmic repetitions and variations of sound and  form, the overbearing foremind is led along by-paths so winding that at length it is lulled to rest and the multiple dreamers residing within each one of us can read and listen...and listen....  If you listen to the dreams that follow, you will hear your own voices begin to respond.
 

Sought and Found

Should shelter be sought for and found on this island, it might take the form of a runaway leaf--
very little when viewed from a distance, but nigh half again the expanse of the shivering sheaf
of diverse premonitions of danger beneath it, when viewed from the side of that creature who’s found
it a suitable mansion, however unseemly it might have appeared.  It is green and resounds
with a minute crescendo of infinite voices who might be themselves merely passing on words
that a song finer still has pronounced to them, noises from further away than you’ve ever yet heard
and recorded--and all this beneath a wee terrace of dew-laden emerald green.  Who do you
now suppose has begun wield powers like faery shape-shifting and unearthly tongues?  Tell me, who?
They seem always receding away, like an echo you’ll not hear again, having halted its flight
by the mere fact of mortal attention, but let it rebound unabsorbed, and whatever it might
have revealed will go missing forever what I know--and you, I suspect, have begun to surmise--
was its target before it was sent.  You are likely to suffer and wilt if you miss it; surprise
both yourself and its senders, the voices this dew-dripping house filled with resonant glowing leaf-shade
as alive with, however the time since it flew from its place on the tree at the fore of the glade
which stands guardian, keeping us quite free of menace.  You shelter here truly for love of all song,
always seeking new powers of hearing--receiving--befriending its very invisible throng.
 

***
 

22 June 2000

Be Still-Your There IS Here

You’ll no sooner die than start dying to be here again--you have not lost the love of fine words
and the way they all lead, like a forest of starlings adrift on the main of a grey sky, black birds
that will turn over suddenly--soon--and reveal their green secretive sides, behind which the great limbs
of the trees they are part of--invisible still to your eye, but not absent--are not minor whims
of a strange cast of mind that runs reeling out measures, its dreams laid before you in lofty disguise
to no unearthly purpose--it’s passably clever, if that’s all it means, even so.  Your sad eyes
are like rain falling silent away from the heavens, the deep sea of half-clouded light and the land
that is infinite ocean, a dream forest ghosted by marvelous beings behind the bright hand
that reveals and conceals, shaping symbols and letters and bidding them flock like the sentient poured
flood of birds, dark of feather but brightly coherent, aware of their messages, always restored
to the pattern they carry by instinct whenever a ripple of alien influence splits
their attention and sends some arc-wheeling in sections away from the main mass in stuttering fits
of confusion.  No more than a heartbeat’s duration, the damage contained, the breach mended, the flight
is reminded of where it was heading away from and why.  With no more than the glimmer of white
that precedes a thin sliver of crescent Moon over the edge of the distant horizon, they pour
very steadily into enlightened formation for merely the infinite time.  There’s a door
at the heart of the mass of their singular voices through which you may enter the ocean-tree-sky
with the sum of your powers to seek for the cause of your lingering terrified longing to die,
but you never will find it as long as you venture with more than one mind through a forest of lies,
led astray by the lure of unloneliness, whether you knowingly choose it or not.  Song is why;
even pale as the strange afterglow of a sunset which hasn’t quite faded away from your eyes
while the Moon is scarce-visible yet, they are running through hearing and sight, the dark birds of the wise
secret dream-spoken words of the terrible promise:  If here is the place where true music complies
with the symbols and letters those feathered and ominous beings of song have conveyed from far skies
through the door which hangs open within you this moment--and this IS so, more than you yet realize--
you will rise weightless, knowing this foreign and lonely heart’s door is the lure to which ecstasy flies.
 

***
 

23 June 2000

Else and Other

Last week at the public library, I found a New Age book on the nature of God which made me feel very skeptical at once but which I decided to read because it purported to bring a lot of quantum theory to bear on the question of the (presumed sacred) nature of reality.  The librarian assured me that she had been skeptical too when she first saw it, but had found it so worth reading that she went out and bought a copy.  Well, I will say this much for it and for her--it was far from as bad as it might have been.  It argued for the existence of spiritual or psychic phenomena without much special pleading and laid out a sequence of basic levels according to which people tend to perceive or suppress the experiences that lend credence to the idea of God without projecting a lot of human attributes onto that immense conception.  In short, the book did not put me in an unpleasantly argumentative mood, and it was even slightly reassuring as to the final unreality of the material world--something I know from experience beyond all question, and yet still somehow never so perfectly as to be proof against my foremind’s temptations to doubt.   Such was my opinion when I finished the book--and then I laid it down and the else-and-other thoughts began.
What had I been thinking, reading a book I knew was not for me in the first place?   Sometimes I am just at a loss for anything new to read; that is how it gets started.  All I want is to read about--in the absence of  immediate encounters with--true phenomena that will give me spooky shivers.   I spend so much time searching for clues that will provide the next opening that sometimes I swing a bit far afield.  I know better, and I do understand what I want, but--can you tell that at this moment I am trying and utterly failing to figure out how to say what I mean?  I know it when I see it in another author's work; I most certainly know when it is missing.  So far, it is missing almost entirely from anything that has come my way from the New Age quarter.  It is missing from almost all of the contemporary poetry I have read, and from publications and Web sites related to magic, the paranormal, and the unexplained.  Coleridge knew as much about it as anyone, which is why he is quoted on the Contents page of this journal, but even he lost the thread.  Must I?  All I want is to stand in the presence of, and recognize while I am there, something that is undeniably a creation of the True Imagination, with all its mysterious aura intact.  What I find instead are innumerable objects with the smell and the fingerprints of either the mundane or the fantasy-riddled ego or both all over them.  Both are sad; never more so than when they attempt to be inspiring.  Books on spirituality are seldom actually dishonest; maybe they are in fact life-sustaining for other people.  For me, my only thought as I close such a volume is that the author is talking to someone else.  Not only does what I want not live in their pages, but they don’t even seem to be aware that it exists.
Is it that this mysterious something is all around me, but I have grown insensitive?  Nay; I know it is here.  But I want to experience it on progressively deeper and fuller levels, while to do so is to go beyond, sometimes far beyond, the earthly sources that originally guided me.  The new earthly sources I hope to have found successively disappoint me.  For several years I have studied my dreams faithfully and closely, but even they are now well-trodden ground, and new insights are rare. The Occult used to be an interesting place to loiter, if a somewhat guilty pleasure, because it opened so many windows onto the shadowy side of human nature, but most of those shadows as I have seen them in myself are also now so well-known that they have little power to surprise me.  And as my opening paragraph suggests, any too-direct consideration of religion or spirituality as such is not merely uninspiring; it is an assault on anything that might tend to inspire because it indulges in positive assertions and that which is of the imagination is slippery and shy by nature and will not permit such bold encounters.
The true imagination is at work at all times, everywhere, but so many barriers stand in the way.  The overview that is usually only gained by a lapse of time is the easiest way to find signs of its activities and to trace its footprints.  If only I could see it in the moment, without fail!  I have a sense of its presence; in my verses I hover as close by as I dare and name its secret names over and over, invoking the sacred combinations of syllables that have worked before, searching for every possible untried combination that might produce a new shiver of recognition--a shiver that I feel virtually certain goes both ways.  I know I am searching for something Else--something which, in the face of all known things, always stands as The Other.  Not the shadow, the dark and tainted self; nay, the truest and deepest Self--but is it my self at all?--which is rooted in the absolutely Real.  But there--you see, I’ve missed it again:  I stepped too close, and was immediately diverted by my foremind's making abstract words.  Never mind any philosophical blather.  The shiver goes both ways.  I am searching for any and all clues to the Other--and it is searching for me.
And yet how sad that almost the entire day-world seems to have forgotten all about it.
 

***
 

24 June 2000

This was a sad day, until I sat down to work and was at once swept away.  That is my long-established pattern.  If only a dreary day unfailingly presaged a successful night’s work--it doesn’t happen that way always, but it works as often as not.  When I was married, my then-husband knew the signs.  If I was unbearable to be with and practically kicked him out of the house, all he had to do was stay away long enough, and he would return to a radiant Judith.  Being pregnant with inspiration always makes me mean.
Last night I had to force myself to begin writing about my Else and Other ideas, but I knew I would be glad I did.  I had never really tried to describe such things on paper before.  While I only scratched the surface, even that much of a gesture often provides an opening with the opportunity it has been seeking.
Today I went to the library.  I ended up choosing two books of fairy tales from the children’s section and one on the same theme from the 300s.  I had been reading a thoroughly depressing book of short stories by a serious literary author whose favorite territory seems to be the lack of communication between Europeans and the Americans who travel in their countries.  People can of course seem stingy and deliberately obtuse, but her renderings of such characters were thoroughly (convincingly) oppressive after awhile.  Perhaps I checked out the books of tales to remind myself that the same places that provided such hideous stereotypes for the author of the short stories also have great stores of magical lore.  This is more of Else-and-Other:  I read the depressing book and succumbed to a nasty mood myself, but then I turned my thoughts to my heretofore secret stores of magic and brought out my own radiant face.  I knew it when I saw it; in my verses it turned around and looked at me and sang.
 

Your Latent Powers of Song

I
Your more shining moment is certain to follow whenever your wall of cold granite is blown
on the breath of the wind, a grey leaf; when you swallow your tears for the last time and hear the long moan
of the air as it bears on its quickness the burden you built to surround you, in which you immured
both yourself and the ghost of the music you murdered away from the daylight.  Its spirit’s endured,
as have you--though an eggshell of mineral thickness beyond the frail strength of your fist, the wall stood,
an impervious presence, aloof in the richness of crystalline veins it concealed, its few goods
and possessions worth gaining well-hidden within it.  And you, like the live garnet core of it all,
waited sad, unresistant, nigh-helpless.  A limit to all this was casting a shadow, though--tall
marble wings of a being who, carved out of stone like the walls that encompassed you, rose huge and white
from their center beside you, until he had grown to his natural scale.  Then the smile from the height
of his towering brow and his eyes that shone starlike flew down the great distance between then-and-there
and the here where you’ve waited, a tower of garnet, rose-hearted, unfolding and climbing the air.
You are standing together; your feet tread out measures alike to each other; you both glow within
and increasingly shine a great light through the weather of all worlds around you, each world a frail skin
that transparently seeks to enfold you forever.  But worlds are successive illusions that bide
for a brief space of time, seeming stone walls that feather-light song borne on calm breath can cause to subside.
 

II
More shining, and furthermore, ever-increasingly beautiful--so you will find the bright day
and the Moon-world of evening and night when they easily sway through their motions, apart and away
from the place of their meeting sometimes, then at other and equally numerous phases they glide
into parallel measures and mingle.  Together their voices have powers your Night Mare can ride.
From her back, like a broad steady plain on a planet that swings through the vast starry sky with its breath
full of wonderful words drawn about like a mantle now warming, now shading its skin, love is death
to behold from too near a perspective, unready; yet life everlasting to know and become
when the moment is ripe and the conscience is steady that rushes astride it.  The depths it can plumb
and the heights it can meet and exceed--these are so many measures a being of song can apply
in beginning to dream as they are, who are gaining themselves as the true ground of grace, sky by sky,
Sun and Moon, soul to soul in the meeting-and-parting perpetual rhythm of heartbeat and dance
that you sometimes hear echoed by hooves.  Flocks of storm clouds, a glowing-eyed horse with a withering glance,
and another life-story for every fraught moment that captures and freezes your spirit’s true will
then releases it, all without warning:  you’re going to hear presently what remains unspoken still
and at first you will hardly desire to abide in its presence, but soon rather die than bereave
any heartbeat of all the innumerable lives you will find there awaiting you once, undeceived,
you have taken your place in full knowledge of future communions of this very nature, but more
indescribably shining by towering beautiful measures of brightness.  For you, they are--yours
for the taking, because you have borne with this blessing through so many phases of loneliness, yet
never wavered away from the ultimate wedding to follow.  The door lesser futures forget
will not fail to appear, open wide, when the Night Mare who carries you burns with her far-sighted eyes
through the mists that congeal in the way.  She desires you--she it is singing this moment.  The skies
of the Sun and the Moon achieve seamless conjoining.  Now do you realize--nothing can part--
never has, never will--those whose voices are loyal to the sole endless song they both hear with one heart.
 

***
 

25 June 2000

A suspicion that has been growing for some time was just confirmed by a single glance at this page in printed form.  Lately my verses have been coming faster and longer.  On some evenings they leave me quite breathless, even shaking.  This has happened before and when it does, it always proves to be part of a cycle.  At another time, they will come in brevity and difficulty, but slowly they will wind back around again to where they are now--only with each revolution they come from a slightly more conscious perspective:  more fully conscious, while no more intellectually driven--no more ego-bound.  Mercifully, it has been a very long while since they have refused to come at all.  What I will do if or when I have to face that eventually I do not care to contemplate now--and need not, in this time of near-surfeit.  Nay; a suspicion was growing, and it has been confirmed.  I know its title already.  That is what came first.  And still, it is all just part of a much larger cycle.
I am venturing with a fairly precise intuition--but dim describable foremind knowledge--toward a place which I have attempted to indicate by speaking of hiraeth and the Other and fairy tales.  For a long, long time, my verses have told me that I am drawing near.   Along the way, I have been given tools and powers--a crystal lens behind the lenses of my eyes, an eye in the palm of my writing hand, innumerable finely-etched leaves.  Strangely, my dreams have been confused and vague, and the parts that I can recall upon waking are so mundane that they scarcely seem worth writing down.  My verses are so much stronger than my sleep dreams that I must have reached the point of dreaming awake.  In the past week, I dreamed that a man spoke to me about a process of purgation, which then instantly took place, and I was greatly pleased to learn that it was in no way as protracted and difficult as I had feared it would be.  In fact, no bodily images or sensations--always what I most dread--were associated with this dream at all.  Just this morning, I was a woman truck driver who stopped at a huge truck plaza off the interstate outside the town where I actually grew up.  The dream woman I was came from a far away country--it might have been New Zealand.  She/I chose food from a buffet and then engaged in conversation with some men at a long table.  She tried to tell them about the bees in her country, pink and black bumblebees that come only once a year and are so full of oil that they are collected and burned as fuel.  One of the men had traveled in her land, and showed her a silly cowboy doll he purchased as a souvenir there that he thought represented the place much better than her story.  She then went to a women’s bathroom and bathed in a white tub that was strangely narrow and long.  Two women stood chatting in the doorway.  They could see her body through a slot in the side of the tub, which made her self-conscious so that she washed with particular care.
Tonight my verses assured me not only that I now stand before the threshold I wish to cross over, but that the hand of the being who lives on the other side of it is visible at the edge of the open door, and through the voices of the leaves of the vines that drape the doorway, he bids me step through.
I will do it, of course.  How the change will appear when it happens, I dare not guess.  So often such changes are only apparent in hindsight.  The mere fact of having created this Web page speaks for the fact that I am facing perhaps the major threshold of my life:  This essentially solitary work is going public.  I have always shrunk from the light of day, even literally, because concentration comes so much more easily to me when it is dark and quiet outside.  Not only is there less physical noise and movement, but the psychic atmosphere is quieter and the transmissions that do take place at such times, while they might be disquieting to dedicated daytime souls, are of an order that I find reassuringly homelike, even when they are dark of character.  Now, however, while not at all wishing to leave my old ways behind, I know that I must face the day; I must let the Sun shine into my life, even in the presence of other humans; I must accept the fact that this body is mine both to use and to serve for as long as it lives, inseparable from the consciousness within it while it is active on this Earth.
This spring I agreed to help a neighbor who is in charge of gardening at our local public radio station.  My plot is only a little rectangle, probably not much more than six feet long.  It is not doing well.  I cannot help but see this as significant--other aspects of my life are also being met with frustration.  My own decisions seem to keep turning against me.  I know I have always had one foot in the grave--that is what my garden plot reminds me of.  Do I want its contents to rise up and flourish in the day-world, or wither and disappear?
Tomorrow, unless it is pouring rain--the forecast says warm and clear--I have promised that sad little garden that I will do what I should have done in the first place but failed to do, for lack of knowledge and cash--I will fetch it a load of store-bought dirt.  When I started I naively thought, 'Dig up the ground, sow it with seeds, wait a while, there’s your garden.'  Nay--it grew vegetables last year, but now the soil seems to be spent.  My neighbor added a quantity of peat moss and steer manure to her plots, only a few feet away from mine, and they are a thicket and a jungle.  It is late, my garden is planted with flowers and herbs, with a pink rosebush in the center, but I intend to dig around them as carefully as I can and add manure and moss.  It can hardly hurt.  That this garden is right outside the radio station is fortuitous in a way which was not lost on me at the outset.  Radio and its poor relation, television, always refer to psychic transmissions in my dreams, and this particular radio station (KMUN 91.9 FM, Astoria, Oregon) is a highly active mesh in the synchronicity web that surrounds me.
Aye, I want the garden to grow and bloom.  Any minute now, I am due to cross a threshold.
And now I have taken a step that ensures that it will take place in virtual daylight.
 

***
 

27 June 2000

Honeymoon Night

The scent of the air and the swirling of breezes aloft all about me partake of the sea
and the rose gardens, lilies, and storms I am feeling arise from unspoken dimensions to be
very easily captured in words, very readily spoken and sung.  In this room, starry skies
and high moonlight send floodtides of mild steady penetrant six-angled radiance one can read by
without ceasing to hear true love breathe--without ceasing to follow each breath for the slow-forming words
it will presently utter.  To hear, and to wonder the more for the knowing that all one has heard
and will hear is already familiar, and still a great mystery--this was foreshadowed--foredoomed--
to befall one, and now the wise fate that enlisted the word-loom I AM has brought all this to bloom.
 

***
 

28 June 2000

Why We Dream So Many Times

You waited for me everywhere.  I rose to find you:  Out of step
with day and night, forlorn, a listless twilight creature nothing kept
from choking, I moved all along the weary measures effortless
confusion sang inside me.  Dying, dying all the while, a dress
of rows and rows of fringe and nothing else--no girl inside it--no
demonic spirit, no appeal to midnight’s secrets--nothing showed
outside, and nothing glowed within.  A shaken frame about a space
of emptiness, and that is all--and that is ALL:  Inside my face,
a universe is staring wildly forward with an absent look
of blissful blank expectancy.  I’m dreaming of the time it took
to find me these bizarre locutions spoken of in undertones
by sacred breathers.  Dreams of all we are and know make stares and moans
behind the empty frame this face of mine will likely always be.
A storm is brewing.  All the wailing winds will rise, and all the sea
will leap and meet the air, and all the waves between us--they will spray
apart into a million pieces, each become a bending ray
of liquid where a single tear of light will shine, and I shall hear
it sing--all this a million times.  Thus magnified, already clear
inside, and nought of what I might have seemed to be, I turn to you
and I receive your further word--a million times--all strange, all true,
all different, while the same as ever.  Who you might have seemed to be,
YOU ARE.  Your speech is wild and forward, yet you whisper just to me.
 

***
 

29 June 2000

If I thought I would only recognize the change in hindsight, as has so often been the case, this time I was wrong.  I asked before I slept a few nights ago to know it when it came, and I did.  I have decided not to publish the verses that resulted from that immediate recognition quite yet, if ever; but the two pieces above grew out of it, and the one to follow, which came just this evening, begins to explain the understanding that is surfacing already out of that encounter.  More than anything, I was apprehensive that I would be required to live more of my conscious life by daylight and thus less of it by the twilight that is pleasing and magical to me, and that in order to be a more effective worker, I would in general have to deprive myself of living conditions that I find safe and congenial.  How happy I am to find that I was wrong!  Of course I can partake of the sunlight indirectly, especially through its effect on flowers and green leaves.  Everything we have ever done has always been touched by the Sun.
By the way, I did work on my little garden plot.  I dug up the entire center and around the edges and stirred in a good quantity of organic potting soil, wonderful stuff that consists of bone meal and bat guano and such.  It is not done--a friend is going to bring me some alfalfa pellets to add to the mess, and I think I will throw in a bag of worm castings for good measure.
 

How the Many Lights Resolve

I
The hand at the crack of the door--it is steady and warm.  It is pale, but not sweaty or weak.
It is pressed to the wood--nay; it isn’t:  I tremble, but it reaches out with a calmness that speaks
to my nerves and relaxes them.  Now I am also a fearless, entirely collected assent
to the work that awaits us.  Entranced, my eyes follow a motion the hand makes.  Its fingers are bent
to conceal its palm’s center.  My heart turning over, I stare at the place that the fingers will show
when they open--they do, with a fluttering motion.  Nay--not fingers flutter, but eyelids:  There glows,
in the palm of this gesturing left hand, an ocean-deep, ocean-hued eye so like that of my right
that I open and raise my own hand.  Oh, the lonely and seemingly-endless travail of insight
with no answering glance--that was already finished, that phase of this song’s revolution, I knew;
but I still hadn’t stood till this moment was visited gently upon us and gazed into you
with the full strength of dream-given power.  Now deeply and long you receive and return my eye’s stare
with an answering hand, my right’s complement.  Keep me within your view always, and find everywhere
that a most willing mirror, a pool overwelling with Moon-trodden beauty beyond all compare
will thus yield you yourself.  In the mirror your spell-casting eye holds for me shine the eyes of Night Mare.
 

II
Now it’s climbing and climbing we are up the multiple stairways of this ancient house where we dwell
so together, whenever we mingle in passing, we touch hands and up flares a new ancient spell.
We are wreathers of joy; we are rhymers of power.  The manifold ways of this house of field stone
lead us indoors and out, winding through and about all its stories and grounds.  You, this place, are my own
secret message and music.  I would that forever no one-worldly thought should pass through any mind
I possess for one instant.  I would that the weather surrounding me now should rebreathe and rewind
all this message around me in eloquent ribbons should I ever fail to remember the ride
that conveyed me in state to this mansion of living reflections that mirror back--Nay; woe betide
me, a speaker of meaningful nonsense exceeding myself as I am, only having achieved
this distinction a moment ago at our meeting each side of this door overhung with green-leaved
ancient vines and exchanging most secretive knowledge in one timeless pass of two all-seeing hands
that have viewed the extent of the light of the laurels of all the true doorways of all the live lands
through which music has flown with its dreams full of silver and gold, with the Moon and the stars in its wake
and the Sun in its heart, a redundance of splendor too great to behold without fear it will break
all asunder within one.  Yet here, all this music reverberates eerily softly.  Our eyes--
in our faces and hands--mirror back and forth soothing remembrances.  We are transported.  We fly--
we return to ourselves as we go through the motions of aiding the spell of this place to reclaim
us completely.  We move up and down through the portals and stairways and gardens, possessing the names
of each feature and part as we view them.  When we are quite satisfied all is intact and alive,
we return to the threshold.  We raise up our all-seeing hands and our fingertips touch and we strive
with our unspoken thoughts intertwined, and it happens--between the two halves of the ocean WE ARE,
the pure spell of all spells is recast:  All the magic of light, all the silver moonbeams, all the stars,
all the dreaded and too-burning heat of the sunrise become almost gentle so mingle and flare
in between our hands’ deep-sighted eyes, we grow blind with its beauty, but only an instant; then fair
as I knew you would be, all those seasons of wanting and finding you not for the cast in my eye,
you appear once again.  It is done--all the haunting sad music that called but would not let me die
is returned to its source for the many--the infinite--time.  I will not leave this place; nor will you.
The poor common daylight of Earth alone limits our vision.  We hold it, but far more, we two--
in between our wise hands, all the light of the green leaves of all the true worlds leaps and flares.  We can see--
we can read--we can write--we can live by it, dreaming awake the true words of our song ceaselessly.
 

***
 

30 June 2000

Keep Moving

Beyond question, a powerful change has come.  I am tempted to theorize about it, but I have been through this before, and I have learned.  Can anything meaningful be said about it?  Aye, of course--in song.  Song is its own meaning; that is why it speaks so much more forcefully than prose.  In attempting to move ever closer to its sources, I have mapped as I have explored, and I have compared notes with those of others whose researches have led through the shadows of the subconscious/ unconscious/ collective unconscious/realm of the archetypes/fairyland/occult, etc., etc.  I might be able to make a few statements about it which would not be entirely wrong, but they would seldom be entirely right.  The moment one presumes to ’know’ anything about the place, at that moment it disappears.   I have seen this happen so many times that I no longer believe it is merely a matter of being more careful and accurate.  Nay; I think the sudden disappearance is a quality of the place, one with intent behind it.  Now I have made a presumptuous remark--what was I talking about?
I think it had already crossed my mind that if I had an eye in the palm of my hand, my Other had one also; then I dreamed that my parents and some friends of theirs were not only restoring but had actually moved intact an old Victorian house with lots of gingerbread trim.  It already had one stairway, and they were in the process of adding another, taken from a similar old house.   My dreams continue to be disappointing (but of course, I am dreaming awake now), but at least this time I knew what was up.  My verses have always looked to the old tradition for music and form, but lately I have been worried that they have become intricate to the point of being overripe.  This is something I cannot change, as they are on their way to a goal, and after that another; they always arrive safely, but along the way, I worry.  So there is my gingerbread house--and that is a fairytale image right there, one where a boy and a girl had an adventure with a nightmarish creature.  Night Mare is at the heart of much of my work, but her presence has been so far resolved that she no longer poses an active threat--Starling bears witness to that.  The house had one and now has two stairways--my writing-hand eye is now met and mirrored by its complement, my friend’s left-hand eye.  And nay, this does not mean that he is sinister in the moral sense; anyone with a right hand only is considerably disabled.  What do we see in each Other, he and I?  That is the stuff of song.
The stuff of song is not the stuff of prose, by definition.  That this is so I always knew, as deeply as I knew that song existed and would reward my long act of faith.  What else dare I presume to know?  Not much--only that the foremind, the ego-bound need to KNOW and be RIGHT and always IN CONTROL, is always about to catch up, so--keep moving.  Just keep moving.
 

Restoration

A quavering tone-circle dances around us, composed of an eerie blue glow and a clear,
highly resonant fragrance of light and the magical sound of our own voices blending.  So near
to the true pitch and pulse of remembrance, my darling, WE ARE, with complete recognition and full,
vivid mutual joy, the most singing and shining bright selves we can feel, prone alike to the pull
of the Moon, the dark ocean’s floodtides’ fellow coursers, and that of the Sun when it draws the green leaves
of the old twining vines round our doorway toward it.  Beneath these we stand, perfect shadowy sheaves
of sweet lore that so loves and desires to be spoken, it glitters with sparks, leaps between our wise tongues,
and dissolves there like stars in a river or snowflakes of six-sided radiance.  Once there was sung
broken-heartedness only between us--I listened and heard nothing else.  While my hearing was weak,
it was not altogether confused.  It was partial; perhaps I heard only my loneliness speak.
I knew there was meeting and singing together in places that paralleled those of the day,
but the sunlight cast shadows about me whenever I ventured to trace my way back to them.  Play
through my hearing like ripples of water, like far-echoed birdsong, like uncanny dream-fluent speech
heard in cloud-cotton-quilted sleep chambers, in feather-scrawled messages read through a haze, and still reach
through the maddening spaces-between to the sender and know him with wisdom too deep to permit
the least shy hesitation:  My willing way wending toward you forever, my source of inwit
and the very strange way with the words I would hold all together between us just so, for as long
as required for their hexagon magic to open and flower and flavor this trace of true song....
 With you came the rushing together, the seeking and knowing of all these mild ripples of light;
song arrived, and the daylight and darkness, by meeting themselves once again through our eyes, rose in might
and threw all round our quavering tones this enclosure, this eerie embrace of blue flames, and these words.
We are shown thus through timeless communion the focus of all the faint traces of dream-song we’ve heard
and desired--song that too longed for us, too.  It is magic, and we are ourselves the commingling of all
its bright colorful singing, harmonious happiness ringing us round with this reel’s formless wall.
In its center, a single light glows, a bright tower from which a cascade of sung fragrance is poured
to the bird-voiced and bird-feathered air--its core power WE ARE, to each other completely restored.
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