1 June 2001
 

Even Now, and Even Here

You struggle to keep me from hearing your thoughts, but I listen without the least effort, and know
all your secrets.  You once twisted vainly, so fraught with the lay of your own blasted landscape, the snow
you invoked to conceal its dense mysteries melted away at first feverish touch.  Then you sighed,
and permitted my patient approach.  Let me tell you again how it was in those days:  open wide
on all levels but one, and there all lagging heartache—all festering edges inflamed with sore heat
swollen into a center that wept when I started to touch it—that sang to repine and repeat
formulaic outrages against its true nature.  The heart of that wound was a mouth with a will,
and I knew it was railing against a false fate with my name on the tip of the surgical skill
it was slowly acquiring in spite of the poison that dulled its wits’ edge.  Slowly, sharpness won out,
then apparent exhaustion.  I stifled my joy; it was too soon to tell you the shadow of doubt
had begun its death-throes, while your faint hopes were gasping with gathering strength I could sense before you.
I watched as that shadow drew into a last little blind spot and vanished, then I hurried through
where your heart was still plainly accustomed to suffer an unwanted presence:  intrusive demands
in the person of grey-masquerading Night Mother, a foulness come breathing the lore of lost lands
from beyond the marsh-edge of your own haunted graveyard of hateful ideas.  You mostly recoiled
when she spoke with demonic precision of savors and stains she had lovingly sought out and toiled
to brew into a witchcraft of masterly cunning; the ring on her hand caught your eye, did it not?
A dark fascination took root in you, running at speed underground, growing into a knot
your in no way subliminal mind strove to bury yet deeper in vain—because love was the force
that inspired its profusion, however unfair or unpeaceful, and love also served as the source
of the blissful communion we always partook of in every elsewhere of your spirit and mind.
So much mad hunger that burned in you—look at the wound now, in my eyes’ reflection, and find
where it is I would speak through you, touch you with kisses of clean fever-fire, and attend with a rapt,
anxious keenness of listening wonder.  The bliss of its self-chosen words’ first deliverance….  You trapped
your best beauty’s response to my long willful courtship behind the foul veil of a nightmarish fate’s
baleful fantasy.  I strove to touch you, my mortal desire, but you dreaded the change of your state’s
too-precarious balance, and sank into shadows you knew could not really conceal you.  You knew
you were softly but constantly singing a sad and obsessively amorous melody.  You
were obsessed, and you sang with a soulful devotion—your heart in your mouth—vatic measures of snow.
You envisioned, invoked its concealment, then motioned to me with your secret self’s gesture to know
the whole truth of your strange music’s meaning.  My angel—for so you appear in my mirroring eyes—
see and hear the sweet power you once twisted vainly away from, and breathe of its echoing sighs
with a lightness you once though impossible.  Graveyard miasmas, the blight of the marsh’s wet breath—
these will somehow remain, but the ring I just gave you—above—say you’ll never be wedded to death
in the absence of true heartfelt longing no poison can taint with the savor of sickness.  My dear,
you might not feel a virginal bride, but rejoice, for the marriage of heaven and hell takes place here.
 

***
 

2 June 2001
 

The Temple Surmounted by Doves
 

Bled of their color by too-long rain,
the translucent petals that once were white
and rose cling together.  The holy dread
this vision inspires in me burns so bright;
the marvel that beckons behind the sign
of the wilted leaf hums a cadenced woe
so obsessively—gentle—I can’t define
the word it reminds me of, yet I know
what it means in its own home country.  There,
I am gathering sheaves of flowers time
can only intensify.  Will you care
that the way I have taken, the uphill climb
through an orchard of rain-drenched apple leaves,
has led me to you, bearing rose-white sighs
to erect a live temple where longing grieves
and love is the meaning behind its cries?
 

***
 

3 June 2001
 

Who Is Your Night Mare Now?
 

No little loss of hope
beset the sad nightmare plane
before it invoked the snow
that fell down on you like rain
grown six-sided, deadly sharp,
and bitterly silent.  Say
why your half-broken heart
is still beating here today,
if not for the secret green
face of the twisted thought
that rankled you with its clean
remembrance and slyly brought
its miracled tell-tale sweep
of luminous branches forth
out of the snowy scene
back of the frozen North
Wind of your sleeping soul’s
ongoing dream of days
splendid with leaves and low
rain-bearing clouds that rays
of Sun and Moon’s twilight blend
 pierce with a warm desire.
Why have you sought no end
sufficient to uninspire
that dreaming landscape’s broad
vista of trees that sigh
greenly awake and awed
mightily by the high
brilliance behind the air,
sighing itself with sweet
memories no nightmare
could ever but hear repeat
in musical cycles so
lyrical, she is drawn
helplessly past the cold
barrier that the lawn
of summer once might have been
when winter was in its veins
and ice overlaid the trees
all round it with frozen rain;
and as her slow footsteps pass
everywhere snow has shone
with a cold half-world’s last
splinter of light, the moan
stifled inside your dream’s
darkness becomes a sigh
of longing remembrance.  Please
ask yourself, Who am I
whose soul is this nightmare’s true
and beautiful other face?
 Someone who worships you
has taken that cold soul’s place.
 

***
 

4 June 2001
 

On the Shore Between the Shores
 

My thoughts are pursuing the same ancient strand
as forever, the line of the low misty roar
of the ocean that strains for the dry, sparkling sand
and bemoans its cold loneliness.  Reel a bit more
of this story out for me:  Among its sea-lore
hides a dream of the waves’ saltly feverish land
where I lie at pale length on a mist-shrouded shore
when a hand in the water takes hold of my hand.
You hold an ocean within your command,
whose beauty lies draped in sea-leaves the waves tore
in wide swathes and gave into your care.  Understand
that the tide has now turned in your mind’s very core:
Where you thought you would founder and drown, fraught with sore
and unspoken desire, this strong touch portends grand
states of waking-dream depth—the same love as before,
but enabled to breathe leagues beyond the dry strand.
 

***
 

5 June 2001
 

How Does This Happen?  How?
 

Words through my fingers, fall
into the damp sea wind.
Where you have been, a small,
delicate, silver-finned
watery spirit sings
songs of the secret—me.
Deep in their lines, they bring
bodiless mystery
nearer the touch of dry
skin against wetness.  Strange
lady whose pearl-grey sky
sways with each Moon-tide, change
places with me and tell
why I should not abide
forever within the spell
whose lines leave me salt-tear-eyed,
compliant with magic’s laws,
and lonely for more than words.
There is the salve that draws
the poison out of the blurred
remembrance of ages past—
lives lived below the waves—
reclaims what was almost cast
aside, and restores the grave
importance of breathing deep
floods of ecstatic song
into a world whose sleep
swims with a restless throng
of syllables half-aware
that they contain oceans.  Who
will help me decant the prayer
sealed up in their numbers?  You
are all I will be in time
out of mind, when my tide has turned
and the lore of the twisted rhyme
has been finally, deeply learned;
come now to my longing call
in wakefulness.  Tell me how
I knew you among the fall
of these very words, even now.
 

***
 

6 June 2001
 

You Have a Home in the Ghost-World
 

Home for me is ever haunted—
ghostly forests, hills and streams
peopled by a strangely gaunt and
restless nightmare-bearing beam
of hard persistent moonlight.  Shady
forces deep inside the wood’s
concentric-circled heart have made them-
selves to serve as nests where brood
the musics of this ghost-world’s future
pathways through the flying air
that whistles through the wings of blue and
iridescent jet-black prayers
that speed my words toward a moment
so forbidden now, the ghost
I AM can only haunt this home of
song and hope no soul is lost
forever.  Haunt these weary ashes
walking upright; haunt this zone
of solid moonlight lightning flashes
into; haunt this wood alone,
a restless spirit hearing feathers
dance and whistle as they head
for home and me, as if together
we can resurrect the dead.
 

***
 

7 June 2001
 

The True-North Compass Needle Turns to You
 

You struggled to me through impossible waters—
the tears in your eyes showed refracted by-ways
that unraveled your wits, but you carried an oddly
intuitive sense of the distance in days
and refused to be swayed from their course though their glaring
white haze nearly blinded you.  Somehow you knew
that beyond the pale scope of their rays, an unerring
and signally beautiful message shone through
by a light of its own fine devising.  You needed
this vision to stretch itself forward as far
as your gravely extended command of receiving
and show you yourself as you would be—and are—
now has this not become its own meaning in measures
that turn themselves round with your heart in their glow?
He dreams himself forward—he shines for sheer pleasure
of being the needle that knows its way home.
 

***
 

8 June 2001
 

A Million Miles of Virgin Forest
 

The lovers who were are already forgotten,
although scarce a moment has lapsed.  I have tried
to remind myself over and over, but not one
old meaning will come forth to act as my guide
as I stare at the ominous landscape before me.
Each leaf on each tree hangs dead still, but they know
where it is I am headed.  The next breath of storm will
release a few secrets, and then I will go
the way that first cold rainy wind blows.  When it shivers
my senses wide open, a calm will descend
through a soft inward element I have been given
faint knowledge of since the first trace of the end
of the old haunted world began dreaming new letters
in curved but not twisted incisions and fine,
graceful signatures into the leaves that have met me
already.  Still silent, they tremble and twine
their lithe stems round each other in sacred profusion.
The work of this land’s ancient trees will be strange,
but the element I shall attend through a lucid
array of inscriptions will suffer the change
of primordial weather by growing much greater
in magnitude, just like the circles that hide
in the heart of this wood.  Seas of green leaves await us;
come, lightning, reveal what lies written inside.
 

***
 

9 June 2001

As Soon As.  As Soon As I….

The moment is silence that stretches forever in every direction but one—there a voice
that’s scarce human implores me to hurry toward him as if he were burning.  Fear can’t claim this choice;
I’m determined to listen, then act without thinking.  I sense endless echoes that hem me all round,
then I take the first step that leads….  Love-words are linking together to form a fine chain.  I stand bound,
while I hasten—I nearly take flight.  Rising storm-winds—and yet I suspect the damp air remains still
while I surge through its tender passivity.  More than a voice now awaits me—a towering will
is invoking its counterpart presence within me.  When that has awoken—and now I am whole.
Now I am always the peerless beginning that knows its own end in the storm-clouds that roll
through the sky of song’s mind like the Moon through clear water, a powerful influence reaching throughout
a receptive and passionate medium.  Taught to resist, and yet needful—my casting about
for the trace of the ‘me’ that preceded the knowledge that I had occurred to a half-world of lies
with a vague sense of purpose resulted in folly and error, but not on my part; I am wise
to the turbulent motions that speed the true heavens toward one another, a plane in the way
whose inhabitants largely take great pains to sever their souls from the volumes of words they might say
were they ever to find a clear moment and use it.  The voice I hear calling—I know where it is,
and why it keeps trying to sing into lucid awareness its powerful friend.  I am his
swiftly gathering storm and his heaven of boundless desire to be sung all around with live chains
of immaculate words that vibrate with the sound of his love as the first major downpour of rain
brings this meeting of worlds to the moment of lightning and thunder.  I hear a voice tell me to rush—
I am already there in the glow of his brightness, so near I can hear myself crackle:  The brush
of his beautiful power has brought me to vivid intensity.  Filled with fine clarity, I
turn to stare at my all-knowing maker, this living air’s poet of strangeness so pure, I would die
with the least of his words on my tongue—but he gestures, and I become stillness, an aching extent
of tight breathless expectancy.  His perfect measures will follow—as soon as my last fear relents.
 

***
 

10 June 2001
 

Never a Siren Song
 

The far speck of white on the pale dawn horizon has neither increased nor decreased since I saw
its glad shape for the first time.  I’ve kept a close eye on its brightness, but nothing seals over the raw
wound of high expectation that opened inside me the moment it rippled, alive and aware,
like a flag in my mind—like a dream that keeps biding its time while I tear countless strands of my hair
that have turned to its color—like nothing I ever imagined—not willingly.  Why does it hang
between ocean and sky without changing?  All heaven bears down on it; surely the same winds that rang
in my ears yet again all last night blew it forward but ever so slightly?  The tears that divide
my insight from my external senses say more than one mystery swims in the depths of the wide
blue expanse that lies heaving between us.  To listen and watch is my nature; to wait is my curse.
The far-away sail never moves.  I’m resisting an impulse I’ve no doubt will only grow worse—
if I yield, will they hear me, the crew of that vessel?  Nay, no one need tell me; one sailor alone
mans its stillness.  He means me no harm; all the restless emergency I am become is my own
fault—and splendid potential.  I wish I could use it in beautiful ways, but it needs me to scream.
My hands in my hair and a faint trace of music to guide me, I open my mouth—and a theme
of perlucid intensity shimmers together within and before me.  I fought because cries
from a hideous nightmarish memory, terror-provoking and huge, filled the oceans and skies
of the universe locked in my mind—so I reckoned.  I draw a long breath, and I sing out again.
No weather between us will ever deflect the strong shaft of this arrow, this message of pain
altogether transformed.  It divides the brief distance—the sail is much nearer than first it appeared,
 I now realize; banks of invisible mist fill the low ocean sky, a transparently weird
form of self-woven glamour, a manner of sail in itself which I know I can use to our ends.
Inspired by its strangeness, I feel a great wail full of vatic imaginings—meetings of friends
and immortals within timeless spheres of pure singing that comes without strain and transports all who hear;
distance dissolved in the space of two clinging-together heartbeats that fall into the clear,
simple, effortless pattern of sailing and dancing upon and down into a sea of delight
that transcends even heaven; a peaceful enchantment that yet reawakens a vast appetite
for unspeakable passion, then softly fulfills it with words of an order of eloquence no
form of nightmare could ever devise—all this wills me to yield to its graceful behest.  I shall go
its sweet urging one further, and sail in the body of song out toward the bright ship as it turns
by the aid of the winds I am raising and—god-given insight uphold him the moment he learns
where it is he is headed.  Our meeting, already accomplished in more than one world, will be—love
in the language of flesh upon flesh, unforgetting the mysteries swimming beneath and above
the pure swiftness we two have attained through the voice that enchants us, a voice that no siren could hold.
It was bound to escape—to the endless rejoicing awaiting us now in this dawn’s blue and gold.
 

***
 

11 June 2001
 

A Dream Beyond Your Own
 

I watch your liquid dreams unfold
in shifting layers, blue and green
and grey and somber, heavy gold.
My heart surrounds you like a screen
of variegated colors, tall
and broad.  It complements the scenes
you witness.  You seem oh so small.
I wish you knew what all this means.
 

***
 

12 June 2001
 

From my dream journal, this morning, 1:44 am:
I go through the motions of making the appropriate appreciative sound for a young Tibetan nobleman who has chosen me.  The noise is customary in such situations; it is made by rubbing one’s bare foot in a certain way.  I am not quite capable of producing an audible sound this way yet. First I was at the beach, searching at the edge of the water for a gem or necklace as I saw it in a dream, knowing as I did that it would not come in such an obvious form.  The way I was moving led me among and over some ice-covered stones.  I climbed among them in the darkness—it was day at the beach, but now it is night.  The Tibetan is now present; he goes ahead and I follow him.  He leads me into his private chamber and changes clothes into an outfit that consists mainly of a couple of large pieces of purple tie-dyed cloth wrapped around his upper and lower body.  This is the garment dedicated to a special kind of love ritual, I know; he is indicating that that is what he has planned for us.  I try to perform the proper courtesy in return.
 

The Sparkle of Eyes
 

Through the leaves, at my eye-level, even a little
bit higher, a flash of reflected moonlight
attracts my startled gaze.  I grow dizzy.  This fit will
subside in a moment, I promise.  It might—
or it might take a quiet step forward and tell me
how long it’s been stalking me.  Sparkle of eyes,
behind you a marvel of luminous spellcraft
is working to summon the power that flies
between and within the sweet words music tethers
by strongly imagined devices and airs
to the truth that resides in some wonderful other’s
reciprocal strangeness.  Who presently stares
through a curtain of foliage dappled with shadows
the quarter-Moon casts?  In that resolute beam,
I am only the ghost of a moment of madness,
but gathering light to return its bold beam.
 

***
 

13 June 2001
 

The Preface to the Story
 

This story is riddled with fissures and caverns and what might be emptiness yawning below
every step you so carelessly measure.  You haven’t the slightest idea; that’s why I go
alongside you whenever you venture to gather its marvels.  My latticework fingers aspire
to uphold you and guide by the light I would rather extinguish than hurt you with—vatic foxfire—
each outspiraling wave of the dance that you travel the paths of our multiple world-ways within.
False distance will not fool our eyes.  We’ll unravel our wild senses bodily, wetness of skin
upon skin, almost-gratified yearning for beauty so fraught—overcharged with the power of night—
that it flies through the veins of this island, illuminate magic in search of what love will ignite
to a higher degree of surrender than any you’ve ever imagined.  Your now-waking dreams
know the face that consorts with each world-among-many inside you, unmasked and resplendent with streams
of its own precious being.  Their overflow tells you how sacred you are to its practice of joy,
and how endlessly needful.  The most overwhelming of silences seeks further schemes to employ
its deep learned potential.  It searches; it paces the cell of its emptiness—flashes of eyes
fill the space of its daydream.  It talks, and it tastes every word without making a sound.  It implies
without stating—its knowledge is boundless.  Its future is here, at the turn of this moment-to-be.
It dreams through your mind into someone whose use of enchantment is vividly present—as me—
the long-drawn-out word of the manifestation now only beginning.  Dear power of breath,
please accept sweet incitement by means of the graceful attainments this being has dreamed unto death
and retrieved to the sunlight of Earth.  Listen closely, and know only love in the guise of the isle
of white moonlight—more cavern than surface below its green mantle—a love that has learned to beguile
out of woeful confusion the elements stricken by lightningless storms into wondering why
without daring the breadth of the answer.  Love quickens the song that is magic—the whole of the sky
that envelopes the worlds in their most dreadful glory and sternly mysterious weathers—the song
that surrenders itself to the riddles this story is made of, the caverns where light shines in strong
and yet gentle, mellifluous streams, always finding new passageways, new veins, new ways to the heart
of the one who now feels a new spell deeply binding his world to a joy that will never depart.
 

***
 

14 June 2001

The Sun of Your Being Here

A million useless years, and where you are
 not yet still aches with fever for you.  Please
exhale the tainted breath a low-hung star
of sightless gold respires among the trees
whose sighs provide this music, and breathe in
beneath the understory that is still
untouched by daylong fancies that would spin
a sticky web of glamour with a will
to trap the faded sunshine where its heat
would do the greatest damage.  Lies that whir
like syncopated nightmares skip a beat
in every bloodless pulse their notions stir
abruptly into being, though the veins
through which they make their toxic way have no
connection to the heart whose work sustains
the fragile voice that mounts the spiral glow
of rich and potent magic:  not a charm
spun out of sly delusion; nay, a live
and elemental passion.  Where the harm
inherent to the presence of contrived
and inorganic show-no-mercy light
accumulates most painfully, a fair
and tender balance-point, a heartbeat’s bright
upcurve into the mildness of the air
of this midsummer evening, strives to touch
its true desire, who shines at zenith so
benignly and nearby and sweeps with such
a steady brilliance through the leaves that flow
with tears of peaceful music:  This sweet Sun
provides the moment of the pulse’s most
sublime contraction into worlds that run
as eloquent enchantment through the host
of understory branches these great trees
have kept so well protected for so long.
Their secrets sigh in drawn-out phrases:  Please
remember where your heart first heard this song
and listen all the more enraptured here
well knowing that the light among these trees
is ancient and intelligent, a clear
and vivid love your deepest heart perceives
in its most central chamber.  Hear us send
a million transformed signals that were days
and nights of hollow longing till the end
of uninvited emptiness in rays
of gentle luminescence pulsed within
a network of clairaudient designs
and found the source of light where love begins
to feel the wonder beating in these lines.
Behold us and remember:  What we are
is secret golden light turned into trees
whose greenness is displayed before the star
that lights their singing please and please and please.
The hurry of their heartbeats mounts a stair
that reaches to the sky as it respires
a fragrant breath of never-tainted air.
Breathe in and be your love’s fulfilled desire.
 

***
 

15 June 2001
 

“L’Étang Reflète, Profond Miroir…”
 

Within this pool—so far below its face
of silent silver moonlight not a beam
disturbs the secret circles where a grace
of infinite erotic depth can dream
transcendent universes into life
through perfect introspection—there the flow
of whirling water-witchcraft meets the knife
a mirror-gazer dropped so long ago,
an eon came and went unsatisfied
before its fall resulted in the breach
of modesty it’s just achieved.  It glides
this happy moment—so far out of reach
of all it once imagined—with an air
of shy bemusement priceless to behold.
The center of the known world’s everywhere,
its hitherto unhoped-for molten gold
immortal heart, recirculates a stream
of song whose endless changes prove the point
of motionless perfection as they seem
to twist about the edge their blood anoints
with literate designs in crimson script
that winds about its lunar silver face
in singing lines that kiss its diamond-tipped
precision with a promise:  This embrace
of deepest magic offers you a mind
of infinite desire no love can quench
unless it leaves its shallow self behind
and opens to the waters that will drench
its dreamful understanding with a light
that only shines deep, deep beyond the pale
last glimmers of the day-world’s appetite
for more of what inevitably fails.
Here, at the last extremity of thought,
a dancer flies within the strongest heart
your love could ever let itself be brought
to open.  Most incisive dreamer, start
imagining another time and place
and find the body of your own true song
transfixed and trembling.  Wild erotic grace
surrounds you in this world where you belong.
 

***
 

16 June 2001
 

When the Lightning Strikes
 

At the brush of the storm-lightning’s miracled essence, my body vibrates with a sympathy so
deeply felt, I can only begin to address its least wholly ineffable aspects in slow,
halting measures whose syllables question their meanings the while they are forming.  The word on my tongue
at this moment—but here is the crackle of keen and swift lyrical passages already sung
of themselves long before they are uttered.  Most shining of presences, here is the sound of your light
as it blazes through me with a speed that aligns the most disparate planes of reality quite
without effort on my—or your—part.  In the hand that is held out before me, a network of veins
branches out like the fire of the sky in its grandest display, when it comes down in rivers and chains
and illuminates world upon world in one instant as I strive to capture the flow of the force
that comes rushing toward and beyond me.  I wince at its brilliance, but quickly move into the course
of its purposeful fury headlong.  Once inside it, a quiet descends in which eloquence wells
almost slowly.  A drop of song-blood forms and glides from the tip of my finger.  Its rich color tells
one approach to the heart of the story it carries, and so does the salt of the sea in its taste.
Its soft fluid warmth that congeals—this too bears a perceptible message.  My mind would make haste,
but the vision is stubborn:  just one clotting drop of the most mortal substance.  I shift my long gaze,
and the strange lightning strikes more directly.  The top of a mountain is in its idea; it says,
‘The roundness of these curving sides shows the next level nearer the music that vibrates alone
at the true secret heart of the source of the heavenly gesture that reaches for you then is gone
far away in the background as you have crossed over a threshold you’ve come close to capturing here.
Your own body whispers—this time you have not lost awareness of what it desires as you near
the fair goal of your spirit’s sweet errand this evening.  The leaf-shaded breast of the song-island’s heights
is bleeding a slow carmine tear for the grieving attendant whose lonely lunarium rites
must take place in a shift that is stained by a past in which pain gave no quarter.  The Moon remained new
through a thousand ordeals while a light that would last but an instant by plain day-world reckoning grew
to impossible magnitude, only subsiding in slow graceful waves as your heartbeat turned round
and the fury that brushed you became a confiding affection that blossomed forth rose-red.’  The sound
of its voice in my heart—this is why I am singing.  The lonely lunarium priestess—she—I—
am happy inside to be present to bring this occasion to bear as mere worlds flutter by
in transparent, identical layers.  The ache in this body—this fullness is song that knows all
with a love that exceeds words, and yet it conveys itself here through these lines.  Do you not hear it call?
 

***
 

17 June 2001
 

You Are Air to the Body of Song
 

In the world I shall celebrate, lovers are mortal but love, the immutable essence of song,
the inspired and enlightened one, flows through the course of their changes, devising new meanings and strong
modes of alternate insight by which they may travel through stages of time flesh is wont to recall
as a vestige of shining desire that unravels the moment it seeks to reveal where its all
lies enchanted and wise.  To the ones it would signal with news of its beautiful endlessness, dread
very often attends its appearance and triggers a frantic withdrawal to the semblance of dead
useless tissue, a rank self-deception that festers with secret life-sources within its damp snare.
That seeking to enter this world with a message and that seeking ways not to hear it thus share
a remarkably similar tenuous nature.  A singing voice measures the distance between
these expanding, contracting, most fragile creations.  It gathers a long breath that knows where it’s been:
in the bodies of those who have numbered their series of waking and sleeping dream-lessons as ones
followed closely behind by processions of zeros extending beyond the horizon that runs
through the heart of the universe.  Dizzying figures, these beings that waver through veils of their own
helpless making—until they perceive the song-signal that needs them to hold the least trace of the tone
that precedes its full glory a long enough moment to let dread subside without struggle.  It will,
as the mind whose idea took on that unholy disguise shifts toward its sweet change.  Fair and ill
alike hunger for love’s solemn essence to enter their questioning ken.  This is music, within
and without—the inspired turn of lonely lament into praise of the magic that touches the skin
of the body of infinite dreaming in finite appearances, over and over again—
the music of love that is breathed into shining terrestrial forms as they transmute old pain
into strength that is so finely subtle, so strangely capacious of gentleness, can it recall
the sad network of tissues their mortal derangement once told them comprised their entirety?  All
will be brought within love’s singing compass—all truly resides at all times there.  Delusion feels strong,
but dissolves at the first welcome touch of the beautiful body that breathes you, the body of song.
 

***
 

18 June 2001
 

Roses Foreshadow Song
 

The flow of sweet flowers of endless red longing away from the place where they’ll no more abide
in the darkness and silence of eyes—this, my song, is the terrible grace of their being denied
nothing anywhere now.  They are fruitful in crimson desire, an elixir of life without end
in the instant before it achieves full dominion.  Their pure arcane properties fluently lend
a slight tinge of their nature wherever a passageway opens to welcome their presence and loss
and the change that remains in their wake.  They are asking so little, and yield so much joy as they cross
the foreshadows of mystery, holding a lantern of deeply invisible light in their waves
of slow ecstasy tenderly rising in slant rays of wakening insight.  From out of the cave
of disaster emerges an ordered procession of star-borne reminders of gardens and seas
that are flown on the color and salt taste whose messages run without number toward the rose-trees
of a world that is knowledge in blossom.  Direct and benign in the first overt gaze they allow,
divinely inspired of song’s mind in the second, entirely your own in the third—this is how
you will come into clear understanding by way of their petal-formed lens of strong saturate red.
A far lambent glow through its darkness, the grace of an oncoming quickness that runs through your head
until all inessential intelligence yields to its hugeness of beauty while that which is real
and incisive is rendered much wiser—you steel yourself needlessly, knowing the imminent feel
of its touch will be lovely, as if you would heighten the flood of relief that the moment will bring
in which all your false dreams fall behind you.  A sky of astonishing clarity hears itself sing
through a million fine patterns, the bright constellations of home, where the gardens of real roses flow
in an ocean-wide river—the mortal attainment of layer on layer of petals of slow-
motion fragrance that winds to a soft final heartbeat of such aching depth, love itself must respond
with a power that fades into silence so dark in its brilliance and magnitude, what lies beyond
its soft influence sways, all-pervading and gentle, a seemingly little voice rising in waves
from the throat of a lover whose work of relentless desire has attained you this side of the grave.
 

***
 

19 June 2001
 

The Hue of Heart’s Blood
 

The bead of live blood in the palm of my otherwise empty right hand—as I struggle to tell
how much love I have gained the long while I have suffered uncanny dimensions to enter and dwell
in the widening scope of my heart—that dark blood is a peerless reminder of how I was born
to a world of immaculate wholeness that flooded my senses the moment I knew I’d been torn
from the veil I had clung to, my shield and my tenuous armor against a material curse
of my mind’s tarnished making.  I loved you whenever I could, between lessons and tests that grew worse
over time—that pretense of omnipotence.  Time and the thickening loneliness cast by its lack
of essential enlightenment staggered me.  Finally, I drew a very faint line at the crack
of a doorway, then gathered my courage about me and entered a radiant sphere where the night
shone as sparklingly crimson as one ancient house made of crystalline rose petals flooded with light
that I reperceive now as pure fragrance, an air so alively enveloping, all that it holds
becomes brilliant with promise.  So strongly aware of the meaning of all it portends, vivid golds
and vermilions come singing to life in the body I still carry with me, though flesh is so far
from my thoughts I had almost entirely forgotten it, I feel increasingly near where YOU ARE,
and that feeling allows me to cross the next threshold away from the sad tattered veil I once grasped.
It lies two steps removed from me now.  Shining pleasure you mean to me here, be the one I have clasped
in the most sacred visions and dreams of my being through all of my travels, down all of the ways
I have sought love’s enchantment, among all the leaving and loss that has led to this moment whose praise
I shall never recant.  Be the work of this journey made vividly whole to my heart once again—
as in truth I am rapidly, happily learning to know you cannot have been otherwise.  Pain
once appeared to envelop me; now it is only a ghost fading into a far-away cloud
as beheld from a place beyond time’s hopeless groaning.  Your eyes are my universe.  Touch me aloud
in the words of your love’s most exorbitant power, and I shall be able to echo its flood
in a voice I’ve possessed all unused till this hour:  a song of the beautiful hue of heart’s blood.
 

***
 

20 June 2001
 

Through the Flow of Song
 

A widening circle expands all around you, the work of your purposeful movement through space
with an all-alone air past coronas of flowerlike presences, petals arrayed on the face
of an ocean that swells into silence, a blue-black and diamond-bright purity holding your heart
in its powerful reaches as lightly and coolly as if it were all and not merely a part
of its very own substance.  Flown out of the circle and into the everywhere-nowhere of still
void immensity, why is a little thought lurking about just outside full awareness?  Until
you invite it, it cannot come forward to tell you how lovely it finds you.  Its place in the song
you are slowly beginning to notice has held you within its committed embrace all along
is a moaned sweetness calling you into a deeper and more acute mode of perception in which
its unfolding designs will surround you completely with what you desire as a boundlessly rich
lyric passage flows upward within the procession of tones that are nearing a terrible bliss.
For a moment you feel the onset of distress that might tear you apart, but the song perceives this,
and insinuates gentleness so very softly, its tentative lightness of touch meets with no
real resistance, and you are now joyfully fraught with its being within you, an opening slow-
fading traces of dreams have relinquished entirely and love has surrendered on meeting its own
most impassioned existence’s origins.  Slyly—because the full meaning of this has been known
to your true heart since lyric enchantment first flooded its most sacred chamber, awaking the will
that lay sleeping in formlessness into the blood of a wonderful body where song would distill
its best essence by way of the fire of the hunger for music wherever it happened to find
its uncanny way forward to take on the sung-into-flower-light circles surrounding the mind
of its timeless emergence—oh you, who are nearing the source of my boundless desire for your word,
your passion, your power of seeing, come clear as the diamond-like ocean of all you have heard
and have learned to be one with.  My heart and my reason for singing this night through the widening core
of the love you are now, I shall hold you and be you through wave upon wave of eternity more.
 

***
 

21 June 2001
 

A Joyful Summer Solstice to You
 

The Lay of the Secret Sun
 

Your touch is so wildly electric and yet so elusively melting, the heat of your hand
reaches deep into places I’ve always protected as if they were fragile—but now they expand
all around you like heaven’s own opening vistas, permitting a vantage point I shall enjoy
through your mirroring eyes as the delicate list of my most sacred mind attains true equipoise.
That mind is now seeking to hear the sweet measures whose rising appears in your eyes amid mine.
My love, do you know what this means?  Make a gesture within me, that I may receive the bright sign
of your wakeful desire in a manner so heartfelt, my bloodstream will carry its mark everywhere
all throughout this, my body of song.  I am part of your everywhere now.  We are all that we share
when we mingle, and very much more.  Look around you from where you are touching me furthest inside,
and dream with your eyes locked in mine of the sound of the voices that marry their musics here.  Glide
all along their uprising harmonic devices with soft breathless silence inside you.  The hush
that attends this reception affords greater license to enter new series of chambers where rush
solemn words in which quickness of magic conveys itself, fully developed, toward the degree
of astonishing potency love will attain with your hand in the mystery offered as ‘me’
and confer on your beautiful presence with all-seeing, fervently yea-saying lack of restraint.
You are all that you ever will be, mine completely.  Inside you I hear not one word of complaint.
In the resonant field of our singing thus wildly amid such a noble refinement of fires
of enveloping brightness of sound, a delightfully plangent reply to the one who inspires
indescribable rapture to pass the far threshold of bearable joy may require to be heard,
but its pleading for something like mercy is less a retreat from the heights than an inside-out word
urging deeper, more serious heart-penetration.  To form the next word, draw a very long breath,
fall beyond all return through my eyes, and be sated.  Your love has exceeded the limits of death.
My longing for you and the numberless moments in which we will find ourselves joined in this way
flood through a pure bloodstream I know I have opened and entered forever for you and this lay.
At our heart shines a holiness melted horizon-wide, heaven arrayed where a secret Sun glows
with resplendent assent to cessation of time.  This is love’s secret sign:  Music here has no close
 

***
 

22 June 2001
 

This is the seventh and last--perhaps--in a series of crossing-over songs for someone I know who will die soon.
 

Ease
 

After so many strivings toward a great moment of meeting, a soft pall of weariness flows
all around you—a blanket, a comforter.  Knowing how safely you rest in the heart of the rose
that first opened through several slow stages of redness and heaviness, bending the stem’s pliant spine,
and how gently the love still surrounds you that led you to find your true place in its timeless design
as the stain that would later be petals unfolded—this knowing has carried you into a sleep
in which satisfied longing transmutes into gold all the dreams that were nightmares and shows you their deep,
everlasting nobility.  One with your essence at all seeming ‘times,’ they are visible now
as a volitive grace of the mind that has tested its courage and sought out the luminous brow
of its counterpart dreamer and braved the true mirror its dark eyes provide.  As you drift there, awake
while asleep and completely at rest, you are hearing a silence that you have inspired, a calm lake
in the midst of a universe-ocean that knows you as part of the flow of its purest love-song—
part, yet somehow not less than the whole, as the lake of your being contains it.  Come singing along
the contours of a huge, sweet idea, if such would delight you, and feel it as if it were skin
on the form of a being whose answering touch will awaken a wondrous desire to begin
further lessons in love in this instant, or lie with its presence a peaceful while longer:  Your choice
will be honored before you have made it.  Decide even nothing best pleases you—there is a voice
beyond all comprehension that needs no acknowledgement:  Merely to be and not be as you were
and will always not have to remain is its calling.  The soft zone of roses whose breathings confer
solemn mystery even while gently withdrawing away from their heart-aching blossoming forms
is a substanceless door ever open.  You saw it in visions a world-wind away; you saw storms
that electrified love into limitless passion; you saw and still see what the lingering trace
of desire that might yet in some sweet way unmask you would venture to show you within its own face
should you turn even now and your eyes meet its beauty to find its mild stare drinking in the still sea
of….  Exquisite the flow of this silence’s music where love is so easy to be and not be.
 

***
 

23 June 2001
 

By Way of Song
 

The silent, steady light of which your eyes
have always been a bright foreshadowing
has come to claim its place within the skies
that cover me in reaches where I sing
unceasingly of wonders time alone
betrays when it arises in my mind
by my confused assent.  A mortal zone
of eloquence then serves to help me find
its likeness in the real world, where I dwell
surrounded by the signatures of hope
in graceful windings love too deep to tell
surrenders that their meanings may elope
like secret sweethearts stealing through a night
in which unnumbered eyes lie fast asleep
that otherwise might view their breathless flight
with riddled superstition.  If they keep
true faith with that which binds them to the way
their future steps will lead them, they will mend
the fragments of their dreams of breaking day
in one another’s arms and love will lend
a tear-illuminated sacred glow
to magnify the beauty of their eyes
each time they meet.  Perhaps sad tears will flow,
or only those of joy; to realize
the timeless depths of either is to run
unselfishly toward the common source
of both and there to find the holy one
whose unity of purpose serves the course
that channels so much loveliness by means
of such an all-pervading liquid gaze
in deep embrace with what has always been
provider and recipient of rays
of golden song-light.  Look at me, my friend,
and tell me of the world your words desire
to enter as the whole of you attends
in breathless silence.  Listen to the choir
of dancing lights that fill me when I turn
to touch you and you gasp with sudden awe
to know you have been met where you will learn
to honor an unwritten mortal law
of precious equilibrium with bright
and singing wonder.  Love will flood your eyes
with knowledge—power—sorrow—and delight—
beneath the cover of the summer skies
of now, a moment time cannot destroy.
In such a state of endless ecstasy
I send myself to you by way of joy
that views you with desire by way of me.
 

***
 

24 June 2001
 

'Greet' has an old meaning as well as a new.
 

Greeting
 

Staring forward into greeting
strangeness best becomes my mind.
Like a shining mantle, green and
iridescent silver twined
tightly round about each other,
vines that run from hem to neck,
each complete and yet the brother-
sister opposite whose trek
across the fabric of my vision
meets itself and loved one now
in one protracted instant—this is
my declared vocation.  Vow
yourself to be my partner-seer;
reap the harvest of the far
constellations, noble beings
who attend the souls we are
with a thousand sorrows plied so
inextricably among
the truly countless joys of heightened
insight, each becomes a rung
within a living vine-work’s ladder
that will never break or fail
in any way.  Ascend, one at a….
‘Time’ was my poor spirit’s jail;
now I bear the brilliant future
of the double wreath we’ll weave
out of this green mantle’s truthful
magic.  You will please perceive
how throughout its finely twisted
body, you are half or more
of each light thread that forms its criss-cross
pattern.  Be the one you wore
when this was in the making, and in
fields of supple green and bright
bejeweled silver, take my hand and
climb with me to strange new heights.
 

***
 

25 June 2001
 

Here
 

When the silken threads unravel
and the words are all released
into their familiar channel
there to find that time has ceased,
I will take you through forever’s
aching doorway, all devout
attention.  You will tell me whether
you have found the safe way out,
or if you regret your leaving
daylight’s nightmare land behind
when all that’s brightest in its green and
living light is here to find.
 

***
 

26 June 2001
 

Yes, But When?
 

Singing through the splendid streams of
living iridescence played
in and out of pearl-shell dreams of
meeting with a merman swayed
lightly through my memory—he is
dancing in a tidal swell
into which my faster-beating
pulse would have my steps compel
my dizzy senses, flow of language,
and the vastness of desire
that swim with him.  He always sang of
futures love would so inspire,
their rising daylight rays would pour down
sweetly as the crescent Moon
and bathe us both in streams of morning
magic that would softly croon
of fluid colors singing listens
into our combined love’s ken,
the living proof of who he is:  The
now of which I wondered when.
 

***
 

27 June 2001
 

Here We Monsters Be
 

Green ribbon watery winding over a meadow of wild grass fathoms tall
to my minute eye—I am only a hopeless molecule now, with a very small
but increasingly urgent presence in my own open mind.  When I hear you sing
where the emerald pours its divine elixir upon the whole world, I know everything
is about to come two steps closer and its strangeness a thousand times more loud
than a moment ago.  I am gamely standing my ground while you claim it and me.  My bowed
yet exultant heart—that is in my vision a sheet of sailcloth that shifts and sways
in a gathering wind while the grasses whisper, What manner of water flows this way?
As green as the secret star of twilight burning the brow above Night Mare’s eyes,
deep as the ocean’s cold black brightness below the last beam of the day-world’s skies,
its formless body turns in the heavy restless sleep of the waking dead,
sending a dream-besotted wetness high overland.  Far above my head,
the green magic the leaves of grass are sighing wistfully after is in my world
alive and at last I safely lie fast underneath it, soothed by its color-swirled
array of aquatic seabeam-rainbows.  So many unvoiced hues were here
in these sweetly weedy reaches—take me into their light more deeply, dear
singing tidal wave of the all-black nature held to the beam of the naked eye
that shines on my brow.  I am longing late and soon—you are now, and the sole goodbye
to the dry estate of the when I wanted nothing and held it within my heart.
You were the being of nightmare-haunted tinyness washed overboard.  The chart
I was guided by—that was ribbon-threaded, scrolled with an infinite script of round
awarenesses, head-over-heels love-letters that rolled about till a sudden bound
of oceanic proportions drove them over the ghostly shoreline.  Here we be!—
Monsters together of green wide-open wanderings, inland yet still at sea.
 

***
 

28 June 2001
 

Climbing Midnight
 

High overhead, two voices whisper.
What are they sighing for, and why?
I am confused.  I try to listen.
Over me, endless starry sky
silently hangs, a blue mosaic
set here and there with tiles of pale
diamond-like silver.  I stand waiting.
Tattered-edge webs of cloud set sail;
single-bird wakes criss-cross each other,
lightly invisible threads of flight;
a ripple of wind’s misguided ‘Lover,
enter my dream again tonight’
enter my senses.  I am shaking,
nothing  myself if not a dream.
Surely it came by no mistake, this
one aching-arrow silver beam
of tenderly whispered invitation?
Sky of the now-resplendent Moon,
I will attend if you will take me
nearer the as-yet voiceless tune
these holy words call out for, though they
call not again in all my time.
I shall be singing, loved or lonely.
The bright Moon and I are on the climb.
 

***
 

29 June 2001
 

You Have Found It Now
 

Once in the words you cried
I was the central thought.
Now on the quiet tide
a change of the Moon has brought,
I hear a voice whose pale
afterglow hush breathes words
so tender-bodied, frail
heartbeats as quick as birds’
fluttering wings begin
throbbing below my throat,
making my poor thoughts spin
round where a silent note
listens to hear its mate,
equally quiet, hum
what I anticipate
will almost this moment come
within singing range.  My friend,
nothing will cry me now;
here all our old words end,
but love will remind you how
to carry its timeless will
into an atmosphere
we can both breathe.  Fulfill
what I can almost hear
form of itself where high
floods of white Moon-glow sway,
and I in return will sigh
words I could never say
but sing to your dear deep heart
that races at bird-like speed
because you recall your part
in all of the aching need
that brought the first word to bear
beauty beyond its size
because it had woken where
echoes of love’s sweet cries
carried me through a flood
that rises again, though changed.
You’ve found in your winged blood
a new vatic singing range.
 

***
 

30 June 2001
 

I am still thinking about this powerful dream and wondering why it came to me within a few hours after I contacted another online diarist by email for the first time.  I had dreamed about him in several ways already; is this dream, which is surely related to him somehow, meant for the sake of comparison, or contrast?  All that is Tibetan has an inescapable central point of reference in my life.
 

12 June, 1:44 am:
I go through the motions of making the appropriate appreciative sound for a young Tibetan nobleman who has chosen me.  The noise is customary in such situations; it is made by rubbing one’s bare foot in a certain way.  I am not quite capable of producing an audible sound this way yet. First I was at the beach, searching at the edge of the water for a gem or necklace as I saw it in a dream, knowing as I did that it would not come in such an obvious form.  The way I was moving led me among and over some ice-covered stones.  I climbed among them in the darkness—it was day at the beach, but now it is night.  The Tibetan is now present; he goes ahead and I follow him.  He leads me into his private chamber and changes clothes into an outfit that consists mainly of a couple of large pieces of purple tie-dyed cloth wrapped around his upper and lower body.  This is the garment dedicated to a special kind of love ritual, I know; he is indicating that that is what he has planned for us.  I try to perform the proper courtesy in return.
 

The Approach of the Secret Sun
 

Alone, adrift in water-weeds, a shaft of silver by my hand—
the Moon has slipped away to meet its mortal ally in the land
of day by midnight’s quiet shore.  I draw a long sweet breath of clear
enchantment, then I ask for more and find it granted.  You were here,
a living presence, all along, when I was but a wraith of pain
whose hopeless keening forced a wrong impression to become a stain
of almost everlasting hue because my heart was set on death,
and that was of its nature’s blue-black mystery:  inverted breath
cast out before me, held within, and always deep enough to tinge
the clean air all around its thin insinuating morbid fringe
of eyelash-shadow-darkness on the face of one I dared not find
so close to home.  If he were gone—who never was at all—my mind
might drift away in streams of silver moonlight on the lonely way
that almost meets the sea, a still-reverberating place to play
the dying maiden—while the light that drenches me has drowning force
by grace of him who breathes its brightness here, the deathless watercourse
where we are met together by the strange enchantment we have won
who’ve known the fatal source’s shining orb of gold—the midnight Sun.
.
.
.