1 March 2001
 

From my dream journal, 10 October 1998, 5:03 am--
I am out in the driveway at night (Keathley Drive) with my father when I look up and notice the Moon.  I tell him to look--it comes out from behind a cloud and shines very brightly, with its features all visible in detail, continents with mountain ranges raised up in 3-D on its sides.  Then it circles around us about 2/3-3/4 of a complete turn, coming lower all the time.  I realize it is a 'comet' (sic), and that it will land very near--in fact, in the street in front of our house!  It smashes apart on impact, into chunks and powder and white rock and ice.  I am sitting on the ground writing a letter to Julian Cope in green ink on printed sheets of newspaper, and I start to write a description for him of what is happening in the very moment, but telling myself that I am dedicating the incident and the memory of it to D.  I ask my father if he thinks it will be safe to touch and collect the fragments--or might they be radioactive?  He says it is safe.  Somehow I know there are flower seeds in the rubble, and he says I should plant some in the yard.  Then I am painting with translucent cobalt blue gel paint from a muffin tin, paint which is derived from the seeds in the 'comet'.  The color of the paint tells me that the flowers, when they bloom, will have translucent petals.

The blue flower is hardly original to me--it is a very famous and dearly to be sought-after sign.  I saw it last night while I was meditating.  It took form out of what were sparkling blue-violet stars.
 

Maybe Such Words as These
 

Quivering in your eyes,
so many deep, deep dreams
play through the secret skies
hidden behind the gleams
I see reflected there,
worlds upon worlds revolve
light as the milky air
knowledge of song dissolves
where the dreams’ central star
soon will permit to shine
all that a very far
trace of you told was mine
here, in the silent core
I am about to touch
with wakening wonder more
perceptive for overmuch
putative ‘time’ in tears
while gales of a holy storm
sought our surrender.  Peer
into the lightless form
creeping along the ground
under the word-spun mesh
that sends up a keening sound
begotten upon the flesh
a very reluctant ghost
tempered by means of air
inspired by the charnel coast
of all that is death laid bare
and listen, the more intent
for having once glimpsed its ways.
Whose was the beauty spent
to gain the sole word it says
over and over, each
recurrence a new delight
of shivering gleams that reach
toward deeper dreams’ insight?
Ghost who was gilded, red,
and leathery, each in turn,
let you dissolve.  Instead
of wailing, receive and learn
the lay of this new-old place.
The length of your quivered spine,
the lovely and vatic space
where primordial sounds align
with tenderly sentient rays
of light from a far-world source,
a melting and rising praise
of woes that arrive off-course
but soon find their rightful flow
has chosen its corridor
within you.  Before it glows
a word which achieves its core
pronouncement upon your tongue.
The light fast within your eyes—
from back of the cobwebs hung
between the star-shining skies
and here, where you know the tune
these syllables parallel—
is where you’ll receive me soon.
Deeper than tears can tell
and lovely in ways unknown—
yet wisely predicted—we
have dreamt our last ghostly groan.
Inside it, a breath of free
fresh flowering storm-cloud drenched
illustrious singing shares
the touch that was hidden, clenched
in fingers in hopeless pairs
in long haunted hallways.  Look
from so far behind those forms,
the length of the ‘time’ it took
to traverse them while the storms
shook stanzas of many-blissed
music about your ears
evaporates like the mist
you always mistook for tears
that wept you upon the rack
of bones you were cursed to be.
Now from beyond the back
of all that confusion, see
rising—with all your eyes—
flowers:  one flower:  one
pale violet-blue disguise
upon the compelling Sun
that shines at the secret heart
of all that you are, and sings
from your very tongue.  The art
of sentient love here springs
most visibly clear and bright:
The blossoming core of you—
the clear flame of secret light
that deepens to cobalt blue
here shines, and you mark it well.
Who will we come to be?
More than our tears can tell,
but such words will set it free.
 

***
 

2 March 2001
 
 

The Flowering Pearl-Shell Cradle Lullaby
 
 

I set myself to dream of what you are
and see a radiant tower on a hill
surmounted by a ring of glowing stars
of violet blue.  Enchanted music fills
the space between that vision and these eyes
so weary of the plane of leaden grey.
Somewhere a gleaming ocean meets the skies
and all its elemental voices play
about me as I dizzy with the sound
in which I am immersed and watch the swirl
of blended colors spiraling around
until, out of the essence of the pearl
the sky of grey has yielded, I behold
the centrally displayed translucent hue.
Of all the iridescence that enfolds
the mysteries laid open to my view,
I seek inside that color lights and ways
to reach yet further visions.  Where you drift
above me in what used to be a maze
of monochrome confusion, something shifts,
and countless shining wheels commence to spin
within the single skeletal device
that frames the figure I can now begin
to see take shape before—inside—me—twice—
a being filled with towering resolve
whose pale cold hands are shaking.  On its face,
a film of fine, still-fragrant ash dissolves
beneath a rain of tears that bear its trace
toward the spreading sea at its far feet.
The taste of salt is on my lips.  I know
the peaceful touch of silence and the sweet
outpouring of unspoken words that flow
between this shining being and the one
I find myself becoming.  How inspired
it feels to watch the waters rise and run,
reflecting in their body the desired
pure flame of iridescent blossom, blue
and brilliantly, exquisitely bone-deep
against the pearl-shell heavens where we two
lay singing to each other in our sleep.
I set myself to dream—and so I do:
I see and hear the tower and the star
that yield the blossom of the secret hue:
 the song that celebrates the voice we are
together, one entwined, inspired command
compounded of a thousand violet lights
that crafts the words that soothe the shaking hand
and mounts in flowering form clear heaven’s heights.
That blossom and the force of words it brings
to breathe across the coolness of the deep
blue night bind round with iris-petaled rings
two singing dreamers who are not asleep.
 

***
 

3 March 2001
 

The immediate challenge is to memorize, beyond any possibility of loss, not merely the knowledge that that which is sought is everywhere, but the knowledge of the ways in which it is present and may be known again and again.

Sometimes those things which are too well-known are precisely the most difficult to articulate.
 

The Wheel Where All Roads Meet
 

You quiver with rain like full clouds passing over a zone of thin air while a violet stain
of clear heaven suffuses the mildness that shows in your eyes as you gaze at me.  Never again
will I fail to imagine this moment anew when we meet anywhere at the crossing of roads
and the noise of brown hanging dry leaves in their ruin comes mournful and strange as concealed episodes
from a not-altogether forgotten conjoining of long, long duration arise in my mind
and then fade into distance, obliquely anointed by trickles of rain from the woefully kind
weeping vault overhead.  Such a world all around us—and yet by the light of your wavering gaze,
I can almost begin to be sure of the sound at the center of all the lorn leaves.  Aye—it says,
‘One word of the water that hangs in the ocean above us in what we mistake for thin sky
will always suffice to begin the devotional singing inside us.  Although we are dry
to appearances, can you not hear us regaling each other with music that flows from the sea
we are staring up into?  A beautiful wailing expands what was tightly constricted, and free
circulation between the pure source of all longing requited and thirst as we feel it for more
of the uncanny language that peoples our song with sky beings who tell us they’ve been here before
is the joyful result of our incessant labor to garner a scant drop of all the dry air
that has parched us when swollen low clouds are our neighbors and what they are made of is rain everywhere—
every moment—about to be lavished upon us the while we are already swimming in waves
that will flow from our voices toward you as long as you listen and let sheer astonishment save
your obscure recollection, your much-treasured memory, from the devices intended to guard
and protect it from you, its own maker.  A tremor disturbs the low clouds—nothing now will retard
the awaited downpour.  We were green leaves in hiding; by the soft violet light of the love
that has come so far forward inside you it brightens your eyes like wild starlight, receive this:  Above
your immediate knowledge before, now a perfect imagining, green as new leaves, takes complete
present waking possession:  We sing in a circle, a wheel, the round joining where all our roads meet.’
 

***
 

4 March 2001
 

We know that the word 'flame' means many things to many people.
Tonight it is the aura that glows around the sacred blossom.

The Soft-Burning Shade of You
 

Flame-colored trembling leaf, do you perceive your part
here, where all true roads meet and far stranger journeys start
than any you’ve known before? Why should the timeless light
flickering through the door facing you cause you fright?
Someone you’ve always known shines in the fairest way.
Drenched in that starry glow, seek out the central ray
and follow it to its source.  Mirror of tender fire,
show him the shortest course that leads to fulfilled desire:
Recognize him who stands caught by the sparkling glass,
beauty between his hands in the form of a burning mass
that shows, between flames of gold, traces of every hue
the leaf has aspired to hold, heatless and wet with dew
yet brilliant like all the fast radiance lightning brings
caught on a page and cast forward on slow, slow wings
forever, its voice in tears of passion the while it burns
for loss of the useless years it waited for this return,
aware that its future lay within it, composed and sure.
Flame of the elder day rendered entirely pure,
now is the only time all this will ever be.
Rest in the longing sigh lulling the sight you see;
calm and at peace, yet strong and fearless, look straight ahead;
enter the home of song; waken within its bed.
There in the mirror-gaze facing you will begin
journeys your heart will praise in ravishing words.  Come in,
flame that you bear and are.  Know your own precious hue:
See in my eyes one star’s reflection, pure spirit blue.
 

***
 

5 March 2001
 

For your birthday, Child, Brother, and Father of Song
 

Moon-Mirror’s Shining Round
 

Violet are the tears
trickling down your face,
caught and reflected clear
light from another place—
light your sad eyes can’t see,
lacking the silvered glass
tilted toward you:  Be
present, though all else pass;
shine like the secret Sun
born of the dead of night,
risen where rivers run
violet with its light;
witness this through the round
moonglow that mirrors you
here, while your tears come down
rivers of violet-blue.

~~~
 

You Will Have Read Me Soon
 

Rose-leaf all wet with dew,
breathe in between his hands.
Tell him the lore is true:
Mystical living lands
flourish within the lines
veining your tender green
surface, where dreams divine
celebrant ghosts unseen
but beautiful all the more
for that they go robed in tears
and silence because the door
they know fully well is here
has not yet been opened by
one who beholds your red
profusion with piercing eyes.
Tell him the holy dead
shudder within your veins.
Dew-leaking singing leaf,
let them appear again
here, where their ancient grief
began:  in his lonely mind.
Tell him, Come home through me.
Read down and deeply find
who must these fair ones be.

~~~
 

Sighing, Come Find Me Now
 

Someone within you sighs.
Heart of the song I AM,
is it that you are shy?
Rivers and seas we swam
eons ago still run
deeper than heaven’s gaze.
Very most shining one,
so many words of praise
are waiting that when they pour
through the vast heart of you,
you will want nothing more
than to become the true
being of bliss I feel
moving beneath your skin
sighing to unconceal
that which is held within.
Soon you will recognize
why so much liquid skill
flows from the deepest eyes
beauty will ever fill—
all acquired at your core.
There the immortal star
love has been longing for
sings the pure song YOU ARE.
 

***
 

6 March 2001
 

The Mended-by-Turning Wheel
 

How will you find me now?
Mending a broken round.
So many stars come down.
Beautiful is the sound
sighing throughout the leaves
brushed by their splendid rays.
All I so long to be
flourishes there, its ways
gleaming with that pale light
even as one bright wheel
turns in my hands, a tight
sorrow you surely feel
winding about my wrists
out of the cold black hole
centered inside it.  This
ring is the sacred goal
visions described to me.
Plain as a printed page,
leaking pure mystery,
subtle and yet engaged
with all that I’ve always known,
this broken wheel in my hands
has sung out in golden tones
and spoken of holy lands
it so wants to take me to.
Why will it bring me tears?
My wrists have been bound by you
through this means when all else here
vibrates with the knowledge long
peaceful accord with change
has brought into timeless song.
To you alone we seem strange.
Deep, deep inside your heart
do you not feel the ache
burning my wrists?  Poor star,
please find the will to make
music of all this pain.
Send it on splendid rays.
Let it pour down this day.
Sigh in green leaves’ sweet ways.
Be star-struck and yield bright sounds.
Help ancient words come down
wiser for this bent round.
Mend it and find me now.
 

***
 

7 March 2001
 

Sign Beyond Interpretation
 

Under skies of stormy weather
strange low clouds are forming.  Why
question heaven’s double gesture?
Such a very near ‘on high’
beckons like a velvet aura
plaited round the sky’s pale throat
where the pulse is throbbing for a
sign that will at last denote
rain it need not question.  When the
first drop falls, its fever must
rise.  So shall I softly lend my
will to soothe the mortal dust
WE ARE and offer this minute but
heartfelt word and woken sense
of the cloud’s plain-spoken beauty
and its deep intelligence.
 

***
 

8 March 2001
 

Course of Otherworld Instruction
 

Slow the cold and lonely shiver
down till it refinds the place
that gave it rise.  Your dreams deliver
messages your waking face
overflows with, yet you rarely
recognize the vatic force
they are quite alive with.  Share the
eerie sense of their real source
carefully, in easy stages,
with the one who waits behind
this moment and the million pages
written there already.  Find
reason not to fear in every
letter you will re-perceive
almost—and you have—forever—
waits in all these strange dreams weave.
 

***
 

9 March 2001
 

Circulatory System
 

A woven ribbon painted with fresh blood
by feather-strokes across remote air weaves
of silken words a ghostly rainlike flood
where somehow shimmer softly dappled leaves,
the tree from which they hang, the violet stars
that cast their strange sweet rays by dark of night
and even in the day sing from afar—
and all the tawdry essence of the light
by which they were conceived in me transforms
its heavy, pallid, clammy nature so
completely that the trails of summer storms
that shook and roared there countless years ago
appear again, as vivid and as clear
as ever, even more precisely drawn
for that the strokes of redness that adhere
among their fibers, woven fine as lawn,
are bright and wet.  The sky is almost rain—
the blood will soon run down in slanting bars
and all those sacred words come home again
transfigured by their time among the stars.

~~~
 

The Flow of Wet and Dry Delight
 

The wind bears the fragrance of camphor and leather among its obscure winding wreathes of wet mist.
In dreams from afar, I am wondering whether to tell the you the secret I’ve tried to resist
ever knowing or not.  When the dreams move in closer, the body within the mist trickles away
with the vapors enshrouding it.  All of this flows, but the wind’s scented breath enters into what stays
when they go back to where they were born, the great ocean that roars in my ears when I wake in the night.
There in the darkness a strangely consoling remembrance arises inside me:  a light
that is blacker than jet in the pit of a mineshaft the hour after midnight in winter, and yet
most benignly and brilliantly penetrant, finely incised with erotic inscriptions, and set
with innumerable diamonds—the keen ray of starlight that reaches for me through the hallway one word
of devotion suffices to open—that marvel of timeless intelligence spoken and heard
between galloping heartbeats has found me.  Oh breather of everywhere’s most sacred element, song,
the darker you are, the more you come seething with incense that winds all about you in strong,
heady drafts of increasingly visible auras and afterglow traces that tell where you’ve been
and are most likely going to go—deep restorative drafts of delirious camphor and clean,
very anciently, highly cured flesh.  How you bring this without being seen—but I breathe, and you start
to reveal a faint movable glow, a slight tinge of observable lightness.  Its color imparts
the same quickening surge as the fragrance you carry within you and share just by being the way
that my will to keep breathing desires so to marry.  That deep inspiration repeatedly says
that this nocturnal room is beginning to brighten because you are slowly unwinding the veils
of wet mist from around us and setting them lightly and liquidly on their return to the gales
of the sea that will drive their wet cloud-bodies back into waves in the form of sweet rain while we sigh
here together, less burdened, less heavy of flesh, black as midnight without Moon or stars, yet with eyes
that see into each other forever so clearly, the way we have always been present re-wreathes
all our thoughts in a song of such splendor, our tears become rain become incense we burn as we breathe.
 

***
 

10 March 2001

Dream journal, 10 March, 5:16 am--

‘Look at that tattoo—it’s Shipping Larry’—a woman says, as she holds a baby boy on her lap.  The baby has milk oozing out around its mouth.  Another woman who was her friend when they were teenagers but was long ago estranged over a misunderstanding has sought her out, bringing the baby with her.  He is not her son, but otherwise related to her—her daughter’s son?  As the friend sits holding him, she recognizes him by a mark on his arm as the new incarnation of an old male friend who had a tattoo in the same place.  She also realizes that for her to come into this knowledge was the real reason behind the friends’ reunion.
 

Till They Surpass Themselves
 

The source of all dreams coming closer by inches and miles, you are smiling—the fortunate ways
of the one you are finding inside you are winning you over to new and more beautiful lays
in which words stand revealed as pure magic in sequences greatly increasing the flow of their strength—
and your own.  You are learning to feel and release them with lyrically nonchalant ease and at length.
As simple and deep as the breathing of fragrance as great drafts of incense and rain meet and pour
in a unified stream through the widening gate at the central embrasure of lost-heretofore
secret knowledge acquired through long nights of sweet service to one who was dreaming the darkness inside
the black hall of your heart into passionate service because he desired and you fully complied—
as simple as breathing awake and recalling the presence who sang you through so many tears—
find all of this now and be pleased as it falls into effortless order and shivers you here
into more and more present awareness.  Who are you, within the broad mystery all of this sings
on and on, a bright eye of clairvoyance the star on its brow, and its perfume the rustle of wings
through the sky of unbounded delight that your heart has become, below which a green landscape will soon
come to blossom in which a wild orchard will mark the precise sacred point where the perigee Moon
will come into its nearest alignment with high mortal longing and send the flood-stream of its rays
to fulfill the dear mind that stands forward of time for an instant and hears all these very words say
even as they are forming?  Oh pale lunar vista of flowering meadows and trees, this YOU ARE—
the dream at the source of my heart where I listen and see and remember the darkness, the far
hallowed promise of rain, wafting incense, and measures of potent love-magic that endlessly turn
on the point where we stand and lie down amid pleasure that sings of itself while the ocean-sky burns
all around us, enkindled by moonlight.  How willing you always have been and will always remain—
I have no need to ask if you seek more fulfillment.  Your hearing this now makes your faithfulness plain.
This Moon-and-star hallway alone is the setting—this secret green orchard and sacred hearth-place:
Come into much deeper enchantment.  But let me enfold you in one everlasting embrace
of seemingly breath-taking closeness, and know that within it, new words will fly open and sing
through the soft fragrant air shared between us and flow till ineffable joy takes us under its wing.
 

***
 

11 March 2001
 

A Tiny Tear-Leaking Song
 

Where are the only tears
no one has ever wept
here in this place of fear
without the most closely kept
secret they hold inside
their wettest, most trickling word
refusing to be denied
its right to be told and heard—
where are those tears about
to lead us, who hear their knot
of water fall raveled out
through bitter salt springs and hot
reweavings of shining streaks
that speak for themselves of things
that strangely devise such leaks
through which sacred meanings sing?

~~~
 

What Will Come of One Melting Word
 

When the first plain word falls,
nothing it leaves behind
will fail to begin to call
in beautiful ways the mind
you are hearing has waited long
and lonely uncanny lives
to learn to perceive as song.
Although its intent derives
its sweetness from tainted grace,
it yields so much sacred fire—
the mark of its hiding place—
that miracles it inspires
will soon come as thick and fast
as false words or winter snow
upon a broad landscape, vast
of magic contained below
a mask.  It need only hold
its breath for a moment more
to feel the uncanny cold
dissolve and love’s flames restore
the mildness of liquid heat
that once lit this land with dark
and musical dreams so sweet,
that word—the pure fallen spark
from the brow of the one who burns—
comes home to the woken ear
of the one for whom this return
happens again, right here:
Here in the night of wild
singing one word will break
wide, like the heart a child
hides for its future’s sake,
loosen the winding sheet
white as the face of dread,
reveal what lies there in sweet
desire for the yet-unsaid,
and whisper:  Are you the thought
welling beneath the snow?
Break through the mask I’ve brought
to amuse you:  Who waits below?
Whose is the fragrant name
spoken in undertone
urgency?  Aye, the flame
burning for you alone
calls, and you know the sound
his mouth is about to make
to ring him within the bounds
of your heart, a deep snow-fed lake.
 

***
 

12 March 2001
 

Dying the Little Death of Song
 

I gesture for you, never more than a heartbeat away, a fine hairsbreadth, the length of a thought
from a far holy land just a little too sparse of conceivable substance—but then it is brought
to my wondering notice, the scope of it rendered the size of the space in my mind, and its voice
set in motion to speak of itself and its gentle, benignly attentive designer whose choice
came before I began to awake to my power to summon and know why I longed so to call
the one who had settled on me as the mouth of his burden of music through this darkened hall
from which I am now speaking.  He chose, and I hungered.  He sang from a far world away, and I wept:
‘Why will you keep me in sorrow here under a pall of dread silence’—and then I was swept
with a strange chill that hummed through my body and climbed to the moment of song:  This is you, in the form
that best suits you.  I wanted, the while you were trying to tell me how near and how fragrantly warm
you would be and what ease of perception would follow the first steady glance I was willing to give
would I only give up my illusion of hollow necessity—loneliness tortured to live
in the skin of a sad tainted mortal.  Oh dreamer of miracles rife as the songs you create,
even as you lay sighing alone by a streamside and woke in soft apple-tree shade by the mate
you had called by sheer force of desire to attend you in harmony sprung from the source of your heart’s
steady pounding, I lay asleep in a mental contortion that bound me in spiritless parts
of a place that was myriad-legged with crawling devices of horror—but now I am here,
where I always have been, out of reach of appalling dimensions I make of myself out of fear.
You are present, as always you were.  I gesture—you smile, as you thought of it first.  Then I raise
my pale fingers, still stiff with the chill that possessed me to let myself hum the first far-away lays
that have since come to this sacred moment and, lover, you close your deep eyes and I see through your mind
the world I am always about to discover, remember, create, and acknowledge in kind
with the words that are rising—have since begun flowing—have flown and will always continue to fly
through this hallway where two lovers turn the lights low and dream love-songs that sweep them away till they die.
 

***
 

13 March 2001
 

The Circuit of the Call and Its Return
 

The shifting seas within the stars outside
my window, and the roaring winds around
my house, and all the screaming things that ride
the ends of my shorn hair—the complex sound
they generate together leaves me weak
with over-stimulation, but it brings
a splinter of strange clarity that leaks
out sideways once it pierces me and clings
wherever it finds purchase.  When the rain
pours down on this cacophony of wild
and sentient forces, flowing down the main
flood-tides of air among unreconciled
disasters singing loudly out of tune,
a little voice among the riders calls
the one name they all answer to.  As soon
as they have time to waken, they will fall
together in close order and create
the automatic harmony they knew
before their nightmares made them isolate
themselves from their own hearing.  That lone true-
perceiving being whose small voice gives out
the word of summons—that brave singer hears
the harmony already.  Round about
this very moment, endless million years
of starlight sighing eerily of seas
that shift and flow within it will have met
the wind that carries earthly rain to me
and music will have made the whole world wet,
while here where that fine splinter of strange light
surprised me with the breadth it held inside
and showed me how the secret seas of night
can take the form of starry rays and ride
 across the universe in one complete
thought-circuit in the time it takes to hear
the sound of one’s own name—in one heartbeat—
the name of him who calls me sounds so clear.
 

***
 

14 March 2001
 

Arcana Maiora
 

Deeper than the play of water
flowing through the underground
chamber where the sacred daughter
dances to the liquid sound
old familiar voices echo
through a dripping vaulted room
while her footsteps tread the deck of
cards she’s flung about the tomb
of her beholder—deeper than the
staring eyes that gaze at her
from the ancient minds that dance with
rapture as her features blur
behind their painted faces—deeper
than the lore those ghosts recall
who lie as still as if asleep but
rise up in the secret hall
paralleling this dimension’s
passageway through stubborn stone
which is penetrated gently,
finally, by song alone—
deeper than the holy dread of
celebrating there—she lifts
her voice among the living dead and
names the single priceless gift
shown her by those watchful eerie
visages depicted on
playing cards that speak so clearly
of the lover never gone
half a thought from here except to
enter deeper timeless space:
By their designs, the flow that’s kept her
so entranced reveals the face
before her:  her sole dancing partner.
While she treads his song’s dark wave,
love of him becomes the art of
memory deeper than the grave.
 

***
 

15 March 2001
 

I wrote the piece that follows, I posted it here, and then I went online and visited a Web site that collects strange news stories.  This was the beginning of the first one I read:

*
Religious relics enjoying a comeback
Remains still hold many spellbound
By CANDICE HUGHES
Associated Press

PADUA, Italy -- Each day in St. Anthony's Basilica, thousands of visitors gaze at the tongue, jawbone and vocal chords of the "saint of miracles" or stand by his tomb, palms pressed to the cool marble, eyes closed in prayer.

*

Then I decided to go out for a pint of ice cream.  As I headed down the hallway, my next-door neighbor, a massage therapy student, came out of her apartment carrying a model skeleton.
 

Music Is In Your Bones
 

Your skeleton is showing.  When you tilt
your head just so, a splendid lunar ray
shines through your eyes from deep within.  It lilts
inside your voice and joins the interplay
of forces you can only comprehend
because they drive you till you break and seize
the music well behind the living blend
of flesh and spirit, reaching new degrees
of strangely sober gaiety that runs
throughout the slow unfolding spiral notes
that rise until they clear the tightly spun
beginnings of their presence in your throat
and tender you the smiling little key
they know will turn the tumblers of the lock
that keeps you in the place where you are free
to waste away until the polished rock
the surface of your body clothes—the skull
your never-singing outward self conceals—
betrays the paltry charity of full
compliance with the never-truly-real
that never needs the services the Moon
that shines behind the eyes these words adore
desires to grant by keeping you attuned
to subtle voices lapping at the shore
that forms your smiling landscape’s secret side:
the wetness of the tongue that falls away
beneath the flow that slowly, slowly glides
together with the gold and silver ray
the singing waters seeking you have found
inside you—no resistance.  Aye, at last
their first completely clearly spoken round
of elemental words—I stand aghast
in nightmares for unnumbered ages, then
remember who you are and why you sing
in languages that pass beyond all ken
but hold the magic key to all real things
of which the fleshly garment and the fine,
precisely formed enchanted bones portend
the meaning of the lyrical design
where these words have their origin and end.
To know the truth will break the ancient curse
that locks me up inside a mortal rack
that dreams and dreams and dreams while I rehearse
the passages through which song answers back
in ways that reach beyond the crumbling walls
that sheath the marrow of the sacred word
that hums with beauty, voicing eerie calls
whose fluent lunar themes are deeply heard
by one whose elsewhere spirals in my mind,
a universe within, from where I sing
so deeply seized that all the answers find
 their way back home and this is what they bring.
 

***
 

16 March 2001
 

The zone of the recent Seattle earthquake extended very powerfully to the place where I live.  It was a most remarkable experience.  For thirty seconds I did not know whether or not the tremors would go on mounting, or if they did, whether or not I would lose my few belongings or die.  In that long moment I knew beyond all doubt that I was ready for anything that might happen.  I did not care.  'Lila' or 'Leela' is the round Krishna dance, the play of the universe.
 

Earthquake Leela
 

Rest easy, rest easy—be bathed in assurance that nothing will harm you.  Your place by my side
is the fortunate haven where time is a curious notion, no more, and the length of the ride
we’ll have taken together before this is finished—this sample of songcraft we’ve barely begun—
is already forever as dreamt of and witnessed in action by selves whose eternities run
in contiguous curves till they meet themselves coming around to the point where the first sigh of leaves
gently whispers its word of erotic unnumbing and all of you trembles from doorstep to eaves
with anticipatory delight as the world underneath you gives way and you fall through the sky,
a being whose orbit is no reckless hurtling headlong perdition but rather the shy,
scarcely visible lilt of a figure of strangeness whose soft flow of speech is intended for no
mortal hearing although it is overheard changing its form of address from demotic to so
incandescently vatic, it shines as it follows the tracework of curves of its former ascent
as they mark out the way.  It need only not hobble itself by demanding to know what is meant
to arrive alongside it too early or whether it might somehow reach an endpoint and be found
unacceptable, having a mad hell-for-leather demeanor acquired at some stage of the round
when the rush of its motion attracted disorder precisely because it was so nearly pure
and the wrong combination of measures brought morbid awareness to helpless desire for the lure
it remade of itself every time it passed, sweeping the world’s ancient cobwebs away with the breeze
that was fanned by the folds of its garment.  Safekeeping within my wise heart is your own, should you please
to accept it, in retrograde motion as well as in very fast forward momentum:  All time
being present at once in the sound of my telling these magical secrets to you, only climb
very slightly with each round you dance, and beside you my figure will come incrementally more
real and vividly present, a light that will glide through the universe, world-on-world.  Shivering door
loves slips through sighing quietly, trembling threshold, altar of leaves under eaves that are hurled
through the sky as the ground falls away like the flesh that enfolds you, behold—you are all the real world
I desire to inhabit, and here in the flow of the dance that sustains our long coming-to-bliss,
I shall show you the future you already know, in which we have arrived at love’s meeting-place, this
most protracted of instants, this act of devotion so thoroughly drawn out, reality sighs
in its worshipful grasp as it rides through the ocean of timelessness here where we sing and lock eyes.
 

***
 

17 March 2001
 

This is about words that know each other so well, they no longer have any need to explain--words, and certain other ones.  Who is speaking?  Where do they stand?
 

The Steadily Beating Stream
 

Liltingly idle air
calling me out of dreams,
all that is sweet and fair
flows through the silver stream
plaintively long drawn out
smiling beneath your sigh.
I am perplexed by doubt—
you are the reason why—
loneliness calls my name
then it turns my own voice
into a silver flame
licking a pair of moist
lips I remember well.
Mouth that once sang to me,
never resist the spell
binding this mystery
music that runs between
song-source and sorceress.
Air in which leaves of green
wind themselves round, address
your maker in words whose will
speaks for secret pact:
Under the flow of still-
languishing tears, intact
loveliness hears a heart
beating with quivered sighs.
 Each is a new song’s start.
You are the reason why.
 

***
 

18 March 2001
 

The Widening Here WE ARE
 

Remember me before you lift your hand
and I will still be singing at the end
the lay of all the wide and brilliant strand
that hangs between us swaying.  When you lend
precise attention to my every sigh,
a thousand voices rush to fill the place
inside you that receives it.  You and I
commingle there among them, shifting space
that blurs the fine-drawn line between the sea
of dreamless interpenetrant desire
and sky of oceanic throngs of free,
entirely self-begotten songs.  Respire
in deep and fearless confidence in each
and know you will not ever stray to far
to rest again on this broad strand of beach
we recreate by being who we are.
 

***
 

19 March 2001
 

Equinox Eve
 

The Passage of Time Turned Round
 

You are the hour glass:
all the sweet chime of spells
voiced by the sands that pass
out of the nether hell
now turned toward the sky
while their small worlds, each grain
of crystalline brilliance, fly
rapidly down again.
All this up-ended stream
of memories, thoughts, and black
insights no longer seems
terrible; now its tracks
left in the glass’s throat
sparkle as if to say,
Home is the single note
all our sweet musics play.
 

***
 

20 March 2001
 

Spring Equinox
 

Why the Real Balance-Point Is Free Fall
 

Why your heart is still full though the years lay an empty grey ash-tainted blanket upon it and dark
tattered veils, an uncanny miasma, attempt to deliver it of its last pulse-beat and stark
staring futile dementia waits beckoning everywhere:  Secrets your lover alone can reveal
pour a widening stream of sweet knowledge that never will fail you—not now.  You have stood in the gale
on the furthermost headlands and viewed the bright ocean that hove there below you.  You hungered to fall
and you did and the arms of your darling enfolded and carried you softly from under the pall
of cold tear-swollen clouds to the source of all waters, singing the while of the deeper embrace
there awaiting you.  Breathe once again as she taught you:  Those undersea reaches where melodies race
in exuberant play—there is where you will waken again and again, till your own sole delight
will have taken its role as your guide and your aching desire to be joyful to beautiful heights
where a clear call will find you amid drops of rain and….  How dizzy with falling, her arms all around
the most lyrical body of song made of pain made immortally brilliant of transfigured sound
but still always, beyond all confusion, the being you were when the scope of your world was a hole
that tried not to admit the wrong key and the screaming of blood-rusted tumblers attended the scroll-
work of arrogant skeleton-key forced disclosure—and  pin-points of light through that same little eye
struck a keen nerve of prescient insight:  Compose yourself now for the real, rightful opening:  Why
will you hide under cover of midnight when midnight itself has found voice and your loveliness here
and is calling, Come forward—your features and limbs I am madly enraptured by, all your most dear
singing gestures and strangely magnetic attractions to black circumpolar night wheelings about
an emphatically steady bright star—such climactic designs lie in hiding, and yet all but shout
through your outwardly silent grim lips?  You are smiling in secret, your hand on the pulse of the heart
of the ocean itself as it whirls through beguiling conclusions that lead into much wilder parts
where a much deeper meeting of perilous currents becomes an impossibly wonderful way
to perceive what is suddenly real:  We are merging with all that we know through the magical play
of the complex of spiraling thoughts that beset you when you lay awake, bathed in tears and wet ash.
Come forward and be as you are:  Love will let you fall free of the tainted embrace of the past
as storm-lightning, the gale’s wise companion, divides the bright heavens before you.  Come falling and rise
to my most noble hope.  You need only provide the next foot-fall, and all else will be timeless skies
not distinguished from infinite depths that will fill with the sound of your voice and the pure steady beat
of their heart and your own—pure emergency brilliant with—you, that is all—you, alive and complete.
 

***
 

21 March 2001
 

How Silence Lies Within the Singing Sea
 

The transparent whirl of mad water approaches, a sea risen high upon land with intent
to deliver its dryness of all malign hopelessness, curious weary ill-focus, and blent
sad and angry self-ignorance.  Roaring resplendence, come shimmering bright all about me and sway
the core song that remains when old mournfulness enters new zones of high wisdom and knows what to say
to your glorious fullness as each of us questions and answers, the outcome no longer in doubt.
Come, shimmering:  More of you rises, more wetness enfolds me, more power to turn inside-out
finds me more and more willing to venture completely to where you are rushing and yet—deeply still.
How strange to arrive at this lyrical meeting and fear there is so little left to fulfill
of the dreams that provided incentive when you were a far-distant fable an ancient heart beat
in such slow muffled measures, I never quite knew whether daylight would break upon joy or defeat
when the last dreamscape faded away and the whisper of memory tended to stray alongside
its diminishing shadow.  Who then would I sister in paradise?  Who would my night vision ride?
Most shining, the smallness of you by the candle-light beam that soft-shoulders the darkness all round
this our ancestral cavern—beneath its fine mantle, a likewise illuminate being astounds
my regard at this moment by showing so little desire to observe his own beauty by grace
of the mirror I hold and become as I tilt myself forward to drink in the sight of his face
as it rushes in floods to the same heart within me that once sang so weakly of sources so far
in the past—that is present again and beginning to race through my bloodstream—Importunate star
above great ocean reaches, come tremble much closer toward me as I—as the singing sea roves
through all magic’s vertiginous lore and the ghosts of our own pasts enraptured by all the vast loves
we have made of ourselves always—over and over—before—as we meet the sea’s single embrace
and awaken—and this is the dawn, under cover of knowledge—of tainted false day, not a trace
will remind us—we slept, we lay bound up in nightmares, we heard our hearts pounding, we quickened, we rose—
and there—we are HERE, we have found it, the bright wild transparency, deep urgent brilliance that glows
in our eyes and surrounds us, is huge, and is growing so rapidly—just like my pulse, faster still
every moment, yet not fast enough—you are showing a sign I now recognize:  How to fulfill
its implicit requirement, when all is a rush of exorbitant headlong climactic delight?
A smile in your mirroring eyes brings a blush of most sudden desire to know silence’s heights.
 

***
 

22 March 2001
 

from La Bonne Chanson
 

VI
 

La lune blanche
Luit dans les bois;
De chaque branche
Part une voix
Sous la ramée…

O bien-aimée.

L’étang reflète,
Profond miroir,
La silhouette
Du saule noir
Où le vent pleure…

Rêvons, c’est l’heure.

Un vaste et tender
Apaisement
Semble descendre
Du firmament
Que l’astre irise…

C’est l’heure exquise.
 

Paul Verlaine
 

~~~
 

The Circle of the Joy of Your Return
 

I drink from your joined hands because the wet
requirement of my mind’s most sacred view
lies shining there, the pool I won’t forget
however many lives and times move through
the door of my awareness.  What I see
before me slightly trembles and reflects
a broken beam of light, but still the ‘me’
you hold there recognizes and detects
the person and the counterpart design
that penetrate its surface with a look.
Long-storied celebration, unconfine
the spirit of the water heaven shook
from out of its bright feathers as it flew,
the two of us together on its back
who now stand face-to-face.  This gathered dew,
the offering we need and need not lack,
will sing throughout my veins when I have bowed
my head to taste its ageless mystery
and I will chant its phrases all aloud
for you alone to hear because a key
lies buried in their music that will bring
the vision of the fall of magic night
when cool soft winds on which fey voices ring
turn all to mist and dewy shades of bright-
illuminated darkness.  I will brush
the nearest hanging leaves and let them fill
my hands with what we’ve tasted in the rush
of feathers many times, and then in still
and solemn self-awareness you will bend
toward the liquid ripples where the face
of him to whom all incantations tend
will recognize and drink of his own grace.
 

***
 

23 March 2001
 

The Lay of Secret Love-Songs Each on Each
 

Vast multivalent parallel designs
that lie enfolded, each entwined with each
in endless series—these incanted lines
among them—sweep toward the furthest reach
of dream-directed thought, then further still;
they leave the blinking stars of Earth behind
entirely; they compose themselves until
they meet their alter-images and bind
those ghostly mirror-likenesses again
to where they first arose—the secret hearts
that swell with words that speak of subtle pain
transcended by more hugely subtle arts
in gentle zones that breathe the air of space
within the narrow compass of your breast
and listen as you find this nameless place
within yourself and learn to sing the rest
of all their million most uncanny songs
with rediscovered insight so profound
it ceases to exist amidst the throng
of sentient celebrations that wheel round
and round the edges of the universe
beyond the confines of all mortal thought
the beautiful and eerie blessed curse
that teaches you to be the love you’ve brought
to this high pitch of music by the cast
of your illuminated state of hope
because you see the brilliance of the vast
design that you comprise, the entire scope
of what you were before you drew the breath
that lets you parallel these very lines
with your own voice in which soft-shining death
becomes the driving force that unconfines
their secret powers even as it shifts
their courses gently till they flow as one
and all the holy love your own voice lifts
comes home to you as fast as song can run.
 

***
 

24 March 2001
 

Lately, everywhere I go, I keep walking through clouds of the scent of roses.  I haven't seen any roses in bloom here yet.
 

Borrower, Return My Blessing
 

sing my love-song back to me

Rising with the fall of evening
like the shadows all around,
such a gentle sighing breeze, a
melancholy moaning sound
following behind it faintly
like a whisper from the zone
of no return—and yet its plaintive
melody of morbid tones
reforms itself the while you listen
tenderly, with tilted head
angled to the bright transmission
flowering toward you, led
steadily uphill to find you
waiting—oh, the soul you are
of this shy song that lagged behind till
now, perceiving from afar
why you hung your head for sorrow,
shame, and lonely, weary weight
of endless mortal burdens, borrowed
left and right, the changing freight
consuming from within its bearer
though it also heard the tune
that entranced his footsteps’ careful
motion while the rising Moon
wavered on the near horizon
with the weirdly mounting breeze,
blossom on its breath, and shining
beauty in the one it sees
stationary, fraught with welling
memory of what he hears,
and most inclined to join the spell this
song entwines, rose-petal spheres
located everywhere he listens
ringing him with heartfelt praise—
the elemental source-tradition
circling, circling all the days
and nights to follow his perception
of the music at the heart
of these among the words that kept his
dream alive through darkness-art
as now, this very moment, he lifts
up his choice unspoken word
and joins the round that sets him reeling
skyward, soaring, hearing, heard—
a magical conclusion mortal
dreariness could not foresee
but I—he borrowed, and I swore—
he’d bring this song back home to me!
 

***
 

25 March 2001
 

Footing on Air
 

Your failure to want will not cease to bedevil my circular thoughts as they wind round again
to a place in the pain-sodden past where a level look back has become its own haunting refrain
and the ghost of a notion without present meaning because its sole balance-point tipped when you swayed
my attention away from the literate green-edged silk ribbon where magical ideas played
with a swift rush of forward momentum that promised to lead to a more secure footing on air
than any we’ve ever enjoyed on the calmest of waters or pathways on Earth anywhere
the mad Sun bleached and faded the night-gathered music of starlight and dew and wet Moon on our brows.
You swore you would venture home soon.  I am losing my way through the wearying mazes that house
petty sacrifice-offerings laid upon altars with images dredged from subaquaeous tombs
that convulse as if breathing or trying to call out when all that they are is inanimate wombs
in which pale water-worms are still writhing.  My darling incanter, return them alive to the sea
or let them be sacrificed also by charming your own heart away from such horrors to me.
By retrieving your thoughts from the zone of malefic encounters with very old pockets of dread
parceled out like contortions of time, your long traffic in nightmares will cease and the seeming death-bed
of the altar of sacrifice transform its burden of flesh into that which can breathe on its own
and furthermore sing and be glad you have learned of its use and returned home—at last—all alone—
not a ghost of the trace of the odor of sickness locked deep underwater in festering cells
that were brimming with poison and swam with a thick mass of not-quite-autonomous casters of spells
that sang backwards of ruin disposed to be merciless, general, clever, till time out of mind,
and, moreover, attractively loathsome.  The work we were called here to do never runs to such blind
contradictions of high arcane purpose.  You know this; you stare at the air at your feet and begin
to glow ever so slightly.  You angled for solace in ways that could not fail to waken and win
love’s attention and sympathy.  Now that you’ve done it—devised your own future by leaving the past
where it lies in its own sweat and lymph—join the free-running course of this music that winds round and casts
a precisely desirable spell by which ribbons of live silken language combine the preferred
signs of vatic love-magic with breath and contribute an outspoken oracle’s ocean of words
to the gleam I see grow in your eyes as you listen.  Breathe deeply and lift up your own voice to share,
in your own sacred counterpart patterns, the swiftness that mounts you securely on measures of air.
 

***
 

26 March 2001

Far Players on the Lyre of One Long Line

However dark and somber winds the flow
of starless hours between us, we desire
and find the dearest blessings time can show
by laying on the sole string of that lyre
soft fingertips that tremble as we dance
along the gleaming line that yields beneath
our yearning touch.  Time’s narrowing expanse
is first to hear the interwoven wreath
of pliant stems and moist unfolding blooms
that forms upon the air we breathe apart
but joined by one long hall with separate rooms
at either end in which the sacred art
of blue-black midnight magic comes to be
the force by which strange beauty tells its tale
and summons all its gravid ecstasy
to fill its waiting breathers with the gale
of storm-begotten inspiration flown
across the angel-weeping heavens where
a shining moment pierces the unknown
and shafts of lightning lead our tears to prayer
among the courses of a rapid stream
that sings from shore to shore below a ring
of radiant emerald leaves a black light beam
binds most securely.  Long-drawn ink-light, sing
beneath our fingers till our voices meet
in splendid air.  Respire us back inside
such spiral-winding ways as these that greet
the standers in the doorways open wide
at each end of the huge expanse of hall
where breathing leaves and flowers now surround
our vast amazement:  This was always all
there was, but till we undertook profound
 commitments to the august shifting line
that best expressed itself by dark wet flow
through passageways where time could redesign
the everywhere song lay, how could we know
ourselves from our environs?  Where we fell,
we rose in someone’s expectations—who
was calling when I heard and joined the spell
these very lyre-string lines remember?  New
catastrophes await us even while
we recognize and touch with trembling hands
the still-wet words that leak a teary smile
about their edges, but the silken bands
of deep blue-black will hold the precious store
of wisdom from beyond the farthest star,
the sacred elemental breathing lore
that knows and shows us where and who WE ARE,
and never will it cease to flow between
and round us both, although we meet and blend
in ways beyond description—always green
and flowering, one love-song that has no end.
 

***
 

27 March 2001
 

From a letter to my Friend, dated 22 April 1994:

“This happened when I was about six years old.  One night I was lying in my bed wide awake with my hands out on top of the blankets.  That is important [so my mother could peek in and make sure I was not masturbating].  My spirit guide who was then in my mind Jesus entered the room and we had one of our frequent visits.  When he was about to leave he did something unusual.  He leaned over the bed and kissed the back of my right hand.  I was a little inclined to think I was pretending because I was notorious for talking to invisible people and had been told that they were imaginary.  Yes, I thought, what a wonderful thing to have made up.  And then I noticed that my hand felt wet where his mouth had touched me.  I turned on the light and sure enough there was a shiny wet spot and beneath it was the imprint of his lips in the shape of a Moon.  This is how I acquired my sign.  You have seen it on my letters.  The mark is still visible but very faint.  While I was still a child it was much clearer.”

The mark is still slightly visible; it looks like a thickish crescent superimposed on a full Moon of equal circumference, if one can speak of the ‘circumference’ of a crescent.
 

By the Mark of the Full-Crescent Moon
 

Your mark is upon me forever—much longer than flesh, the imprint of your touch will survive
though my memory fail.  It will only wax stronger as life fades away.  More than tears can contrive
to erase, more than false dreams can bear tainted witness, and more than half-audible words on a page
can begin to describe, I am sure of my fitness to serve you who gave me the key to the cage
that pretends to confine me by way of the print of your lips on my skin, on the back of the hand
that is teasing the long blue-black lyre string that glints of moonlight on sea water alone understand—
the primordial glow of your eyes in receiving the message inspired within me by the sight
of the full-crescent circle that told me your blessing was mine with the power to know you by night
that has since taken hold of me morning and evening, perennial seasons of perfect repose
in your tenderness, always returning and leaving, returning again, recognizing what flows
through the single deep bloodstream we share as it circles between us, and feeling the pulse of it surge
as the spiraling mind of its teaching and learning beholds itself rising and feels itself merge
with the lover whose presence is constant within and yet somehow is also to be wooed and won.
I smile as you sigh in my ear, the beginning of music that always will never have done
and that always will ring through my heart, never more so than when it falls silent.  How much may I know
of this magic that laughed at the mental contortions I once tried to claim it with?  Where will it go
now that I have surrendered and ride it like lightning that blazes a long heatless track through my will
where its touch, so entirely ecstatic it frightened me senseless before, has the power to kill
only blind inhibition and stuttering discourse between empty levels of prose-speaking blank
contradiction of purpose and longing?  Through this portal borne on my hand, all the weight of you sank
into vast fertile realms where it flowered with silver and gold chiming key-notes that formed the great scale
that your agile voice climbs till its joy overfills me—and I am the throat of that voice as it wails
within sight of climactic attainment of music that comes round again as it sang at the start
with your lips on my skin and my hand faintly bruised with your wonderful kiss-print as old darkness-art
flares unbearably strong and I meet it with fervor I once felt impossible ever to touch
and survive to describe—but I have; these are words that you gave me to tell the extent of too-much
become endless perfection of bliss in the peaceful awareness that you have encircled me round
once again with the full-crescent mark of your sweetness that shows me how long you have held me spellbound.
 

***
 

28 March 2001
 

I Felt So Cold in My White Room

for A.

You touch me in so many ways simultaneously where no time can imagine or feel
any presence like yours—or like mine.  I was waiting while you lay inside me, the fated and real
flowing song-source of which I am only a figment—though realer to you than the course of the stars
high above the North Pole.  Love’s amazing indignities gave me the insight that nobody bars
our free intercourse here—not as long as we travel in circles that bound and continue our way
through their spiraling wiles where inaudible babble of prescient clarity shines like the day
we need never fear dawning upon acute hearing we’ve carried so long, it can carry us now.
It shines like the day—I am sensing the nearness of someone who reads by the light of his brow
as I hurriedly scrawl out his soft-intoned message.  It only appeared that I functioned alone
back when all was a struggle to claim the least blessing and bear it with confidence—that danger zone
has grown into a garden as wide as the universe merely because I have twisted the latch
of a place that was marked for the purpose of music and opened its floodgates and learned how to catch
what was already humming and roaring by means of your ominous breathing—oh shiver that sighs
all the length of my spine even now—you were dreaming the stare that possessed me when love met my eyes
in the person of—Who am I really addressing?  Why does he listen and smile and turn round—
as if loath to accept these abundant confessions—out of the carrying range of the sound
of this voice, when he knows it is his just as much as my own?  Steady miracles flow through my veins;
air breathes itself through the senses that touch it with tenderness; nobody waxes and wanes
where we are; though we wake through processions of flowers that season the universe-garden that sings
on and on through our most sacred hearing, our powers increase beyond measure with each word that brings
itself forward—and once having told us its story, no word will again recede into the mist
of apparent forgetfulness.  Sweetness of lore in your mouth in the moment of having been kissed
through perennial changes of blossom forever—the snow of the pole round which all heaven wheels—
I re-witness amidst a great shift as the lever your hand again lifts within mine unconceals
its real nature.  Oh noble indignity, naked as gleaming white bones underneath melted snow,
all the glory my senses receive is love making itself into music that hastens to flow
beyond multiple floodgates as rivers and oceans of roses and apple-tree orchards in bloom
underneath the North Star form the lyrical motions of lovers as one in this song in this room.
 

***
 

29 March 2001
 

This morning I dreamed this dream:
9:34 am—A young blonde woman with an English accent has come to my door.  She is a door-to-door salesperson.  She mentions something about the Beatles.  I warn her that this is a secure building where the tenants do not expect to have to deal with intruders.  I am polite but firm.  I caution her not to try to telephone either.  She says her feelings are hurt by this, and I tell her, You know people don’t like it (dealing with salespeople).  Then I am watching TV.  It shows scenes of horribly mutilated bodies being dragged out of rubble where there have been disasters, especially terrible fires.  One man’s body has had the legs cut off—blood spurts from the stumps as he is lifted up.  Someone clamps their hands around them to stop the gush.  Then the bodies are in a hospital, where they are laid out in troughs dug into the flooring.  One boy who has had part of his body destroyed but who is still standing looks directly at me and says something.

I know who the young woman is.  I don't know yet at what level this was dreamt.  It may have direct and real, it may have been merely a thought-dream, or it may have sprung from genuine communication but slightly out of time.  In any case, she was met with an unwelcoming reception here because she came in a role that made her impossible for me to recognize.  The mutilated bodies explain what really happened:  I used to see horribly damaged faces when I wrote verses before a mirrored altar.  They represented the Guardians of the Doorway.  Any change of state involves gaining the approval of such guardians.  I unwittingly acted as one of their representatives.  She is someone I wish to let in; if the dream involved actual contact, I hope that she will try again and I will recognize her.
 

The word 'greet' has more than one meaning.  This has been a sad day, but sadness is part of change.  New work awaits us all just past the guardians.   Let us all be brave.
 

Who Sings You This Greeting-Song?
 

The ache in the hollow of bones that upholds me will never subside till your knowledge of song
makes its passageway there as one sweetly unfolding occasion of endless enchantment and strong
celebration of magical prowess unbounded by baleful delusions of figures of dread
as they hover not only around but throughout me and call out the names of the patently dead,
superstitiously ghost-riddled madmen of past lives the while I stand silently waiting for true
recognition from only one being to flash by my window and find me inside with no few
means of answering back at my fingertips, aching acutely to reach for the word that will halt
the high speed of his swift comprehension by making a luminous sense that betrays not one fault.
Neither where it was gotten nor where it was quickened nor where it hangs now as it restlessly sighs
and turns over is less than pure music’s elixir of most shining life.  All our own future lies
in this very safe harbor—but why, when its labors of passionate learning have long since begun
to bear blossoms whose richness of wonderful fragrance conveys waking dreams of their provenance?  One
soul alone understands me, and he remains distant—well knowing the fortunate lay of the land
that might rest at his feet, softly flowing with listened-for miracles drawn by the work of my hand
from the most profound sources the pulse of our bloodstream in common runs flooded with now as the roar
of a cataract so far behind and above me I scarce dare imagine it hastens to pour
past elaborate barricade-gestures of troubled personae inside us that might have been lives
had cruel fate so assigned them, but here they are bubbles that break even as they are formed.  What arrives
like an arrow of light through the hopeful wide window I make of myself as I feel so much change
taking place deep inside me is love coming into its own as the vatic emergence of strange
and what I might have called inconceivable glory no very long time ago shifts and appears
fully grown with a gleam in its eye that conforms to my aching unspoken desire amid tears
recognition provokes on both sides.  I am hollow, yet also complete, uncontainable joy
as my senses behold you, the fruit of long calling, the song of reply pain could never destroy.
 

***
 

30 March 2001
 

I was thinking of my human Friend this evening as I lay resting.  I drifted into a hypnogogic trance and had a brief but completely vivid tactile dream that a man was leaning over me and kissing me.  It was so real that I can still feel the clicking of our teeth as they kept meeting.  Often in dreams a man will make an offer and I will reflexively refuse because, sleeping and waking, I have been alone for so long that I know it cannot be right.  But this man—I knew him.  In the dream, I had had the idea to begin writing a book entitled, Who Are You?  It would be all about the one who inspires my verses; the writing of it would be an open-ended invitation to him to tell me all about himself.  I wondered if he would do it.  I don’t know where he ends and my human Friend begins.  I don’t know which one of them I was kissing.
 

Who Are You?
 

Wearer of a thousand faces
dreamt beyond the daylight’s glare
hiding most mysterious graces
even as you lend your fair
comportment to a strange unfolding
spectacle behind my eyes,
someone very shy beholds me
from before.  The cloudy skies
a million mottled waves reflect in
broken brilliance flow between
his gaze and mine, an unprotected
field of visions yet unseen
forming out of rain in torrents
not a drop of which will fall
here but it will feed the current
keeping us in its sweet thrall
already.  You begin unmasking;
morning throws the cloak of black
midnight to the winds.  I ask you,
Back of all those faces, back
so far it winds around until it
meets itself before me, who
lies naked and completely willing
to reveal the final you?
 

***
 

31 March 2001
 

Vigil of Transparent Purpose
 

as you see me even now

As you arc across the heavens,
send a ray of silver light
here to me where I wait ever
so alone this sacred night.
I never want to see it end; I
feel my most awakened heart
beat beneath its shadow, blended
song and silence.  Grace and art
twined together form a spiral
stairway that will reach the Moon
by and by; then I am flying
ghostly pale upon the tune
that moves beneath the surface features
of these words that race to you
breathlessly.  You bend to greet me.
We have seen our vigil through.
.
.
.