1 June 2002
 

As the Waves Meet Over Our Heads
 

Ripples of eerie enchantment and shivers
of delicate lace-like desire to be torn
by the pull of the Moon from the moorings the river
of music will soon quite engulf while the horn
of the waning idea I AM slowly rises
to more-waking consciousness—aye, ripples crawl
all the length of your spine to the tune of surprises
that sing each and severally in the same drawl
that has always portended intoxicant insight
before.  Are the brilliant Moon-shadows that threw
your day-world into sullen eclipse rebeginning
the progress that threatened to overtake you
altogether not long ago over again?  If—
they are—you are smiling—a cry clears my throat.
Higher the Moon’s waters rise.  It is waning,
but still we are starting to shiver and float
in its luminous darkness, a singular burden
of happy reflection.  I know our song’s source
winds around to its inmost desire’s secret working
this way; I have seen it offset the black horse
you have borne to this moment and quicken the measure
of cantering hoofbeats to match the spine’s hum.
So little time waits behind all the pressure,
the nerve-tearing effort, the magic to come
even now, even—suddenly, something is over.
What did you see in the Moon-waters’ eye
as it welcomed your own?  It reflected its lover.
Forward you fell, but how much did you die?
 

***
 

3 June 2002
 

Riddle:  The answer is not ‘lunacy.’
 

Oh, just think about it:
 

madder   n.
1.  a. A southwest Asian perennial plant (Rubia tinctorum) having small yellow flowers, whorled leaves, and a red root.
 b. The root of this plant, formerly an important source of the dye alizarin.
 c. A red dye obtained from the roots of this plant.
 2. A medium to strong red or reddish orange.
[Middle English, from Old English mædere.]
 

Madder
 

Ache-apported crimson globule
taking form not far away,
making wisdom mortal—stop all
argument before you say
a faithless word against this rising
current:  It is rich and strong
in elemental grace.  Baptize my
spirit here, where very long
blood-lamentations—where’s the merit
never looking gains?—let go
all damned inconsequential bearing-
down and melt the elder snow
you wore when in a dream you chose your
pathway home because the choice
was made already:  mine—unclose the
eye that holds the brimming voice
of vision and behold its flowing-
forward in enlightened style.
Solitary wisdom rose,
unfold your final secret smile
and know your pure reflection’s single
purpose through my shining eyes.
None but we—and we are clinging
blossoms on a branch a wise
old tree has borne and soon will let just—
drop to float away downstream.
Fragrant heart, so lunar, wetly
mortal, mine—I hold a dream
untold beneath my flesh of inter-
woven petals riddled by
a crimson truth:  I ache for winter.
Help me find the grace to die
away from this dark secret’s shadow-
magic into where we’ll be
tomorrow dawn:  a globe of madder
rose:  deep-rooted sunlight-sea.
 

I do hope David Bunting reads this.
 

***
 

4 June 2002
 

Morning-Child
 

Whether your light is clearly sending
messages I can hear or no,
I am receiving.  Love is lending
speed to the waves that softly go
over my ice-like lids in little
streams I can feel.  They lap like damp
tongues heat-inscribing melting riddles
into the place I can’t help clamp
when daylight assails it—ah, but can’t help
fluttering open now.  I see
great clouds of ghost-angels’ dripping hands all
hummingly writing into me—
until they resolve and you stand waiting,
smiling.  The Sun behind you shines.
Now I shall hear—as you relay your
message alive, aloud—the lines
I’ve wondered about, those wavelength marvels
crossing far space while growing strong
in clarity.  I am part and parcel—
magnified heart—of all your song,
they sing me, those fragrant tongues that flow like
sanctified fires within one flame
that wakens a vast desire to know my
counterpart grace’s angel-name
in order to call it out precisely—
now, in this hand’s unsteady air.
Where once a creaking sheet of ice love
cantered upon—beware, beware….
I can’t be mistaken where your presence
laps all around; your light burns true
to speed.  It pronounces me—its essence.
Child, I am but a ghost of you.
 

***
 

5 June 2002
 

A certain ten-year anniversary is much on my mind these days.
 

Confession of Faith
 

Whether or not you will its presence,
love leans against your throat and sings,
always a feather-guest whose essence
seeks and reveals all hidden things
through marvelous words in incantations
cast round like countless star-fire gleams.
Diamond insight old reservations
yield to replaces outworn dreams
with each new engagement.  Love, a dewy-
wet elemental stranger—nay,
a deep-eyed familiar—nay, a blue and
luminous feathered flame—holds sway.
The beat of its aching pulse within the
place where you wonder makes you feel—
your tongue become wildly able.  Spin such
sighs as may rush to frame the real,
not dreamt angel’s name who stares inside each
whisper you hear.  Dear love, repeat
each syllable.  Are you willing?  Find the
‘me’ in this riddle-rhyme complete
where rings interlace and moments ramble
round in an endless wheel of Yes.
Whether or not—of course its ample
blessings will heal what must confess.
 

***
 

6 June 2002
 

Crazeless Pages
 

Looking through a broken window’s
bare expanse of burning rays
a fiery eye has caught and kindled
out of moonlight to a blaze,
a flash of lightning laid on silver
skies that now flare up as well,
I venture past my pain-bewildered
sight and breathe the baleful smell
of flesh—not scorched, but not quite healthy
either.  Where it comes from, who
can say.  It moves across the filthy
glass that still remains.  The view
through those blank splinters drives me crazy—
only for an moment.  I
take up a tool and swing it bravely.
Lo, the shards and pages fly—
a song-lore volume serves my endless
liberation yet again.
Outside, silver moonlight sends me
visions and the smell of rain
that tells me you are very close at
hand.  I feel the hum that sighs
our names to one another.  No sharp
edges—only open skies.
 

***
 

9 June 2002
 

So I return to my real senses after another Market day.  I sell hand-bound books and bead and coin chain window decorations at the local Sunday Market.  Today was a disappointment.  What I am really offering is doorways into the Other World, in the form of texts and flashing colors and jingling sounds.  Today’s Market visitors were not receptive.  I began to wonder if the coin items were undermining the seriousness of the books, and if I should stop offering them.  After closing, as I walked down the street, I kept finding coins, especially when I entered the corner bookstore.  There I found two quarters and a dime, just across the threshold.

I also learned that my old friend Vinnie is dead.  It is all right.  The last time I saw him, he was already on borrowed time.  He made it to a place of safety in the mountains and died in the care of nuns.
 

Where Are They Now?
 

How I shall shower you now with fresh kisses
of dew-dripping flowering branches and leaves
that sigh with a wind that is fragrantly blissful,
each breath wide-resounding with song that conceives
endless reasons to linger alive at the threshold
where all that is timeless begins to be seen
by the eye that remains quite embodied in flesh that
commences to burst into flame that is green
as the blades of new grass underfoot and as blue as
the heaven that flares to the fore of its mind.
Where you were tatters and ashes the hue of
sterility, now you are molten refined
iridescence.  How golden their jingle, the coins of
another land’s lyrical minting; how sweet
your own silvery breath as you send it to join with
the petals and blossoms that ring at your feet—
where new flowers unfold every instant.  How merry
this wild ever-changing return to full song—
and all you are thinking—I hear you—is, Where are
they now, the old visions I carried so long?
 

***
 

10 June 2002
 

Where We Rain
 

Where we rain on a cold grey ocean
wailing sheets of wind-driven pain
because we are ghosts whose sole emotion
breathes to beseech the dreadful stain
that vexes their wedding gown to loosen,
lift and dissolve away in green
sea-waves as the low skies open blue and
deeply perceiving eyes, the scene
beneath us—a silver mirror starry-
bright with the constellation-field
of all aching heaven—never far and
silent but here, a plane unsealed
by ceaseless devoted song—hangs shining
under our feet and overhead.
We sing between, two shameless twining
creatures of spirit-flesh well wed.
 

***
 

11 June 2002
 

Outside-In
 

Weary sleepless—astonishment!  I am
shining a ghost of old away,
seemingly left alone in light while
waiting so hard to hear you say—
what suddenly you are saying clearly.
Child, we are nobly clothed in skin
that shimmers intensely.  We are nearing
nobody left at home within
our old shadows’ clinging, hungry compass,
soon to arrive at zephyr skies
inside our own willing flesh.  The lumpen
labor it was—that turns its eyes
toward us, and they are blue-night starshine.
We cease to seem, who’ve all along
conspired to appear as so much garbled
speech:  WE ARE diamond-beauty’s song.
 

***
 

12 June 2002
 

When this first came, I thought, Hasn’t this been said a few too many times before?  The precise words before me gave me pause.  I realized that they amount to an almost clinical description of something that takes place in neurological terms.  As with dreaming, when poetic ideas come more than once, it means, Think again.  Think with a different part of yourself.  We are spirit and flesh.

The probable root meanings of shiver and quiver mean ‘splinter’ and ‘nimble,’ respectively.
 

Coming Relentlessly Clear
 

I shall unshiver the length of you gently,
only to enter the need in your eyes
and there reincite the relentless nerve-center
you can’t quite believe in.  You’ll soon recognize
where my hand’s been at play by a species of eerie
enchantment that now keens away out of reach.
Find what I’m trying to say within hearing
of someone who moves down a splendid night beach
white high moonlight has flooded with pearls whose live quivers
of pale iridescence replace the gooseflesh
that has led you to sigh at my mercy.  I never
will hurt you, though I will surround and enmesh
all you are from this lyrical nerve-center outwards
with clear-spoken words’ rapid fluency sent
through the ether—your own hopeful will as it fountains
through heavens whose power will never relent.
 

***
 

14 June 2002
 

For David Bunting, as always or near enough
 

Sibylings
 

Weave me the length of the azure ribbon
crossing the breadth of the soft blue sky
invisibly.  Wind its frayed ends, like sibling
syllables, round me and make them tie
right over my heart.  Then find me—hanging
mid-heaven, happy enough to see
the formerly unknown worlds that dangle
daringly in the wind-rocked free
expanse of green branches nigh above us:
Aye, even here, the tree of leaves
that sparkle with blue-white flame, the lovely
emblem of all that ribbon weaves
wherever it flies, says I am—you are
tied close beside me—we are song
inaudible till its words of blue soft
air find the place where they belong
in our sacred hearing.  We are makers
over our own enchanted heads,
weaving a wreath of ever-waking
heaven’s own fey nerve-tissue threads.
 

***
 

16 June 2002
 

The Moment You
 

What we are dreaming of, with so much
waking behind us, dream you on
and wisely discover:  I am homing
in on the never really gone
but always inverting and returning
mystery-vision fraught with awe,
dimly reminding all your yearning
heart with the will you almost saw
in action when I looked up and met your
wondering eyes—then disappeared,
apparently.  Now—you’re growing wetter,
warmer, more rich with grace, more teared
with mystery’s younger sister-spirit
soft in your eyes and I, full-grown—
a power of moonlight come to hear your
dream make its deepest, sweetest moan
my new resting place—invite you, dweller
over that threshold:  Waken fast
and finally.  I shall sing, not tell you—
won’t you come over, moment past?
 

***
 

18 June 2002
 

The Haunting of Your Name
 

I was a most untimely presence
ghosting your silent soul by day,
dreaming you vaguely holy lessons,
gesturing so as if to say
your name and ‘forever’ in a single
syllable—just a Moon-wet tongue
keeping true hope alive and clinging
onto the edge of one well-sung
green-lantern-like shroud that swayed and shimmered
into your undernourished ken,
stealing a slow-fire glance where swimming
angels—real words—reached now and then
toward you and—touched the fairest blossom
ever to cross your own ghost’s hands
with trembling desire.  It’s never lost; it’s
here, the wise friend who understands
how lonely the snow-cold trail of tissue-
vapors has been for you sings, Ghost
who haunts me as well, if I seemed to miss you,
why were you never open most
when I was most strongly calling?  Chosen
holiness, this wild tongue’s a flame
about to enwind an erstwhile frozen
soul in a sheet, a shroud, a name
that comes to me through the silence over,
over—forever—yet again.
If I am a ghost, what human lover
sees through me like a Moon-blood-stain
that throws a red veil across all inward
vision?  Such veils subside; you know
who liquidly loves both soul and skin and
burns with an ageless, steady glow.
 

***
 

19 June 2002
 

To Live To Sing
 

You will no more tend to massive rebellion
than I will require total silence of skill
when we lie entwined in the act of dispelling,
by means of sweet language, all passionless will
with a wave of one hand on each side of our joining.
You will no more need to question than I
will seek to deceive you.  A whirlpool of choices
awaits you—and what will you do there but try
each in turn till their mysteries all flow together
as we, forming one stream of liquid insight
that ghost-horribly burns like an old hell-for-leather—
desire—come to quaver with permanent light—
that will surge where its beam meets its clearest reception.
And where will that be?  Silent rebel, sing out.
You will no more need but be the connection
between living stars in a darkness about
to commit itself utterly, finally.  Why is
it waiting to fall, when we both know so much?
This is our world’s heaven-ocean:  desire and
the words to describe the deep flame where we touch.
 

***
 

20 June 2002
 

This will require even closer reading than usual.

Chimed Rigdzin Rinpoche is dead.  He wishes his followers to pray for his swift reincarnation.  Thus I sing to call him back into flesh, but with all understanding that desire is not what it seems.  On your return, Teacher, may you be possessed of the glow of transparency and always fragrant with song.

May all be happy.
 

Beyond All Desire
 

When have I questioned the will of the heavens
with you by my side?  How precise is your claim,
and how precious your lesson?  I tell you, I never
desired—but I have, and I shall, by the name
on my tongue, that exuding a most honeyed essence—
swear I will sing past the limits of time
in the basest dimension.  There, when your pale presence
glows wildly in tune with my own, we shall climb—
rung by rung, word by syllable-sister in glory-
to-be, spell by passion’s most opening spell—
into ever more beautiful meanings the story
WE ARE will unfold to the hope we held well
out of reach of the demon despair that beset us
in long-ago mansions, grim hell’s hiding-place
but our secret rose-garden, divining its petals
where only an inkling, an infernal trace,
of day-moonlight dripped down from the ceiling above the
discreetly entangled embraces it bore
like the radiant musical aura the lovesick
desire we shall soon never need anymore—
having tasted the dew of the air-revealed being
that holds us beyond our poor mysteries’ hum
of confusion—once dreamt me when you seemed unseeing
and I was unhappy and felt no one come
when I called.  You had all but forgotten the future
we rose in the morning to know with our wills
in delighted alignment with that of the beauty
that shows us the powers and sentient skills
by which all of this sung heaven-ocean creates its
own worlds in our minds—which are mansions of song.
You had all—heaven take you for glowingly waiting
beyond all desire to be where we belong.

David, it does not end.
 

***
 

21 June 2002
 

Happy Summer Solstice
 

I have been making little copper lamps all day.  Coins are part of the design.  They burn like magic.
 

Soothsayer
 

Why you sing so sadly, slowly,
only you—will never say.
Fire I bring you:  Praise the holy
moment of the breaking day
awaiting you with premonitions
poised to chant its glow in rhyme.
Feel the day-surrendered vision
joining you fall out of time—
and turn about to face you, smiling.
Know our power strokes a flame
of brilliant sunlight into silent
magic till it shakes the frame
that holds you upright as you move to
welcome it adance.  My dear,
won’t you say the final sooth?  We’ve
caught its latest shining here.
 

From The American Heritage Dictionary:
 

sooth  Archaic
adj.

1. Real; true.
 2. Soft; smooth.

 n.

Truth; reality.

[Middle English, from Old English sth. See es- in Indo-European Roots.]

Indo-European Roots:

es-
To be. Oldest form *1es-, zero-grade *1s-.
Derivatives include yes, soothe, sin1, essence, absent, and proud.

1. Athematic first person singular form *es-mi. am1, from Old English eam, eom, am, from Germanic *izm(i).
2. Athematic third person singular form *es-ti. is, from Old English is, is, from Germanic *ist(i).
3. Optative stem *s-. yes, from Old English gse, yes, from se, may it be (so) (ga, yea; see i-), from Germanic *sijai-.
4. Suffixed zero-grade (participial) form *1s-ont-, becoming *sont-, being, existing, hence real, true.

a. sooth, soothe, from Old English sth, true, from Germanic *santhaz;
b. suffixed (collective) zero-grade form *st-y-, “that which is.” sin1, from Old English synn, sin, from Germanic *sun(d)j, sin (< “it is true,” “the sin is real”);
c. suttee; bodhisattva, Satyagraha, from Sanskrit sat-, sant-, existing, true, virtuous.

5. Basic form *es-. entity, essence; abessive, absent, adessive, essive, improve, inessive, interest, ossia, present1, present2, proud, quintessence, represent, stover, from Latin esse, to be.
6. Basic form *es-. -ont, onto-; -biont, Homoiousian, Parousia, schizont, from Greek einai (present participle ont-, being), to be (in pareinai, to be present).
7. Suffixed form *es-ti-. swastika, from Sanskrit svasti, well-being.
 

***
 

22 June 2002
 

A Window for Exchanging Bays
 

When I unwind silken words with a promise
of flame-dripping pages, what fear you display—
amid manic desire for the beast and the comet
he rides as he throws back his head and the bay—
listen—now his wild mount is a nightmare whose glowing
left eye sights your house as she faces the far
other shore of the sky.  To be where she is going—
with him hard astride—is to bear the pure star
that hangs shiningly over them both and that guides their
precipitous progress.  The goal of their flight—
rises beaming such wildness inside you, the nightmare
YOU ARE leaps across the last fading daylight
slightly over your shoulder—and now you are spinning
in circles, a fast-moving silken resolve
to sing wordlessness into the glow of the skin you
have on while my resonant efforts involve
mind and body as one till you glimpse my calm presence
a little above you—not over your head,
but just slightly beyond the bay window a wetness
of horse-sweat aflame has just now overspread.
 

***
 

24 June 2002
 

The Lamp Before the Mirror
 

Where your resolve runs weakly, slowly,
heavily—I have eyes for you,
and miracle-dreams enough to wholly
clear the deranging outward view
that fails you until it meets and matches
mine in a double flare of sparks,
a halo of bright and clean un-ashes.
Where I discern a few stray marks
and memory-stains right now, a gleaming
flicker will wash the living skin
beneath it with shades and molten streams of
silver our Moon has yet to win
from out of a pearl-grey sky—but stealing
glances are showing through.  So soon,
my shining one—soon, for all the real and
lingering speed that fuels the swoon
from your to my eyes is but a quick and
beautiful change of state away.
Call it—your soul—that flaming liquid
ghost amid eyes of human grey.
 

***
 

25 June 2002
 

Love-Letter
 

Lightly little fingers patter
down the nerve along the side
of where you’ll always feel much better
soon as your no more denied
accompanist comes forward, smiling.
Then and there—and here and now—
a lightning flash against the wild
uncanny scene behind your brow,
and I am home and you are happy—
nay?  Or are you still afraid?
Nothing pleases so the tapping
fingers of the never-laid
and newly risen ghostly singer
seeking deeper solace in
this world where bearing softly clinging
moonlight through a veil of skin
will be my sweetly chosen portion
soon, I say—as soon as we
have learned to dream and wake the forms of
verse that let our ghosts go free
together where the earthly graveyard
all around them leaks the wail
of utterly immortal saving
grace we’ve borne beyond the pale.
Lightly little fingers patter—
down a page’s outward face.
Ours is no one-sided letter.
Write us till our nerves all race.
 

***
 

26 June 2002
 

Overcast Afternoon
 

Under the overhanging leaves of
deep summer green where all you see
vibrates as a slant of Sun-unevil
welcomes the beast you see in me
and I with my premonitions tangled
fast in your head like skeins of wire
attempt to relieve the tainted angle
twisting the leap of flame whose fire
runs liquidly mild and cool, vibrating
carefully while more deeply, more
consolingly—soon I’ll soothe the hateful
glare the old face before you wore
when we were on distant shores of nightmare-
haunted environs.  Now the breeze
resounds with an auraed sigh and I run
calling through shady flaming trees.
 

***
 

29 June 2002
 

Our Relative Positions
 

It stands so near, I can almost see it
peer through a keenly squinted eye
at me, its desired and true believer—
see it—and then it starts to cry—
and I to unravel.  Sharp white ribbons
flare from a sky of silk unwound
from reels of forgotten arts that dribble
down like a plague of rain a round
and wearily overdanced dream-circle
burns through a floor of cloud and light
mid flashes of storm-developed perfect
wisdom whose blinding bolt-insight
says you are—my ever-after reeling
lyrically, lay by splendid lay—
so near I am stormed and shiver, kneeling
bathed by a Moon that shines all day.