AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

March 2003
 
 

1 March 2003
 

Happy My Patron Saint's Day
 

I stand in the midst of a synchronicity whirlwind!
Remind me someday to tell you all about it.
 

Things are always dewy in these pages.
The wetness is the opposite of spiritual aridity.
 

Love-Letter
 

Our parted layers—transparent sheets of
acutely sensitive tissue, fine
as vapor already—are melting, seeping
silvery milk and ancient wine
down the wrists by which they’ve been carried, bearing
gravely the two-fold burden song
amounts to before it tunes its wary
lyre to the nerve-ends’ ache of strong
desire to relinquish merely being
here and begin its words’ great work
of streaming in long wet lyric sequence
even as stranger love-words lurk
between ever deeper pairs of layers,
hands held apart by seas and fields
of milky-pale starlight.  Full-Moon bayers,
bleeding by voiced devotion yields
of overflow music, join by subtle
fibers across a timeless gap
like leaves on each side of tightly shuttered
glass.  In the one wind, branches tap
till the pane’s slow fluid is warmed and quickened—
aye, and the single tree grown tall
on both sides of what was once and thick and
sturdy high-windowed workhouse wall
feels its own leaf-flesh meet through melted
clarity.  As its nerve-song keens
with tender recall, fey silence tells me
I shall require much deeper means
of tuning to hear its future music
wooing the senses I have still
to feel running over.  Silver lunar
light and the wind whose vapors fill
the air with a sea’s faint roaring-breathing
mix and remember songs so strange,
I am a broken wall where beating
mind-tissue feels itself derange
the rubble it was and so dissolve it,
window and all it turns to tree.
Tap-root beneath Earth’s skin, a calling
nourishes what there was of me
through elements freed and so transmuted,
I lift my leafy fingers high
to meet the Moon’s overwhelming beauty.
Sea of the dream-resplendent sky,
gather the flow of singing wetness
I am inspired to be through you.
Breathe of it.  Moon, most strange love-letter,
soon let a greater love come through.
 

***
 

3 March 2003
 

a very soft-voiced song
 

Haloed Round
 

we are gentle overflow stream-drawn sheer
silver traces making Moon-music down
the face of a wind-beweathered mere
a pale willow wet from root to crown
beside it humming and glowing soft
in shifting light born of strange dark eyes
dear love has only to breathe aloft
the haloed source of the mournful cries
between the lovers who move like ghosts
among the leavings of mist and light
for its song to summon the wide lake-coasts
to meet right here—and not yet midnight
 

***
 

4 March 2003
 

The Sign Says, Enter
 

I shall light a softly flowing
singing mirror-river home
the while you ghost a silver-glowing
moonlit glade where spirits roam
along a path that leads toward a
precipice.  As there you fly,
I shall feel my own heart sorely
beating in mid-air.  A sky
of wounded magic wreathes with vapors
breeding evil dreams—but come;
dream to me along the way of
love-words whose increasing hum
reveals the ocean glade:  the clearing
where great magic’s true heart lies
awaiting us.  Its flowings weirdly
future-echo our next cries….
 

***
 

5 March 2003
 

The Sentence of Magic
 

I lean to the source of the words in their wearying rush.  You are smiling, your own source of light—
perfect luminous silence.  Now all I can hear is the scarce-mortal breathing that brings on the flight
out of signified emptiness into the presence of magic so rarefied—glimpse here its end
as I circle you tenderly, spinning a sentence of magic to suit the fine scale we ascend
even as we meet here every Underworld evening.  Trail down the bloodstream toward the white page
with the uncanny orbs of your eyes as the soul dreaming back of them whispers:  Our world’s greatest age
waits a moment from now—not a hairsbreadth or wisp of white incense away.  When our eyes meet again—
there was ever but one holy source.  Where I listened by daylight, I caved into shockwaves of pain;
I draped spiderlines—cobwebs—all round me; I hated the next breath as much as I clung to the last,
never able to cease altogether.  The straining to summon the worst sort of will bound me fast
in a tentacle-dress that pulsed counter-rebellion.  Silk braided cables engorged with life-force
that became a deranged form of grace.  Fevered swelling exerted a pressure that opened a course
I had never permitted myself to acknowledge before—the pale body could breathe by this strength
while the mind traversed oceans of heaven and hollows and copses of tree-shaded strangeness at length,
all in love with the clearly superior tendril that pulsed from my fingertips’ end to your heart.
Fey one—I still always call you—please lend me the will at the core of the full darkness-art
you have only begun to reveal by the curve of your luminous mouth.  As the magic I feel
coming on slips its traces and rises, reverberate there in the way a world hugely more real
opens layer on layer of veils—to unweave and rewind them about me in circles that cling
like immense and acutely perceptive word-wreaths spun of silk summer-issued, its origin-spring
the pale body at rest by me now, the still-smiling deific possessor of all the song-caves
in the sublunar state, the true silence of eyes where we meet the remembrance that steadily paves—
by the footsteps of slow faithful service—a roadway as strong as the spine of all Earth, yet as fine
as the next very hesitant breath.  You are glowing, but darkness must play through your lips’ open line.
 

***
 

6 March 2003
 

Invitation of Fate
 

Come to the foot of the next-higher stairway:  It starts at the eyelid’s wet edge by the door
that invites telling gestures to enter a faery dimension where dreams riddle down to their core
inspiration the mystery-stories that flicker like ghosts in a cloud-crystal ball.  Where its clear
inner surface is whitely disturbed, a bright trickle of sounds from a far-away mouth seeks an ear
with a parallel spiralling passageway.  Tilt it who may—and then climb as the ghost-whispers turn
into lyrical phrases so overtly willing to offer themselves….  Chosen messengers learn
subtle ways to distinguish their hands from the magic that guides them; their breath from the moonlight that glows
round their awestricken faces; their thoughts from the vatic design that enables the singular flows
of apparently numberless cascades of meaning so central to all song-ascent.  Feel us smile,
who stand waiting with strange invitations agleam in the tears we know taste of the very long while
love has lain softly dreaming in places more real than the mind of blank day can encompass.  Like shades,
we drift sometimes among them.  Through serial scenes of awakened departure, the rapture that fades
from the pale eyes of ghosts disenchanted by ripples of too-sudden sunlight across the glass orb
where they struggle to hide quite in vain leaves us lidless against their unhappiness.  Still, they absorb
that most difficult element gracefully once they feel also a cool lunar depth to the breeze
that provides them their breath.  When they meet the warmth humming beside it—no flame of the day’s heat-disease,
but a tenderly damp vital current—clear insight possesses them.  Sighs become words deeply seen
by a sentient music that sets swiftly spinning devices that used to be riddles down green
leafy corridors long sadly silent.  Here silence remains, while revealing ghost-eloquent shades
of unspeakable—gravely primordial—brightness in stunning arrays throughout blossoming glades
of immensely desirous cloud-oceans of petals inscribed in the bud by a lightning-like eye.
 Unriddle its most secret mind as they settle in still-breathing snowfalling waves from a sky
a bright film of pale moonlight surrounds.  Climb the next-higher spiralling stairway—we meet as we sing,
ghosts of the sensuous spirit that echoes down mystery-music where first its words spring
into human-perceptible form.  Have I told you enough—can you trust that to place a foot’s weight—
then another—to let its great vertigo hold you—best suits the truth-speaker love sees as its fate?
 

***
 

7 March 2003
 

Moonlight’s Secret Design
 

The snow—its coldest hallucination’s
vise-like hold on your throat the real
breath of beating spring—will have told you tales of
the inspirations nightmares feel
as their sheets-of-sweat-leather wings sweep arcs of
midnight Moon-shadow bright as day
but deep in subtle derangements far, far
stranger.  Light like an icy spray
depends from each soar and heightened gesture.
How can blackness release such beams?
Touch your face as their pouring pleasure
fountains magic through secret seams
that form invisible letters—on your
outward countenance only; in
between night-layers, the snow’s own longing
mouth breathes sounds the writ underskin
thaws fast to run wet with.  Warming hearer,
measure me the extent of time
it took you to meet the softly eerie
nightmare whose touches crook and climb
the ladder of letters glowing Moon-white
deep in the darkest mind-cave’s close.
Lunar hallucination—you are
growing more real than all worlds’ snows
while I lie beneath, by heart-beat cavern
reading the cracks their crystals hold
to let in the leaking light in patterns
magically wise—in no way cold—
and happily wild to share their secrets
here in the gaze you bend to mine.
Moonlight and I, dear nightmare-meeter,
 seek to betray our own design….
 

***
 

8 March 2003
 

The Meaning Behind This Song
 

Primordial wreathings—ennobled leaf-windings that lay as if lifeless before your eye’s flare
shivered weightlessly through them, producing entwinings that knew they were suddenly, heavily—where?—
their softly dream-lidded reality yearns now to gaze for itself and see beauty gaze back.
Longingly weeping, mysterious burnings aflame in their minds for the magic they lack
in this shifting, irresolute place, they mouth rivers that drench the chill bed where they writhe—unalone.
Where is the hollow-eyed watcher who’ll give them the key that will alter the reason they moan
while you still lie adream, staring into a chamber that echoes like stone—or a one-socket skull?
Lean to the caller who sings the refrain at the back of the magic that brings a strange lull
to the fore of your most tortured thoughts, giving play to the source of the answer that flows even now
like the deep fragrant streams, stealing richness in waves, of the bud in the leaves hanging over your brow
in the caller’s own dream—one which passes all knowing in purity, wonder, and willful desire.
There—where the roots of reality glow with a pale fertile essence that flickers like fire
yet is peaceful as cool silver moonlight, a reason much stronger than thought-by-thought logic arrives
at a self-recognition that shows in the dreams you are fast waking into.  Where rare music thrives
in a mind that is turning to graceful abundance because you are beauty it echoes to please,
being lovingly one with the words swiftly coming together like whispering spirits and trees
in an underworld garden draped greenly, entirely by seasoned intent to bring eloquence well
beyond sleep-dreaming into a species of higher partaking of elements wrought like a spell
through the lips of a warmly benevolent deity, cast sweetly forth with a wave of the hand
that its touch might accompany summons and seeing in one act of magic—you must understand;
you have heard at the roots of your core intuition the words that reverberate here.  Do but look—
and then catch and be captured in turn by the dewy expression where beauty becomes a live brook—
then a river at flood—then a sea, a great ocean—Moon-spirit quickened to shine song in waves.
Someone beside you—the deepest repose of all longing beyond the innumerable graves
in which you have lain sealed, beating fast for this moment—here in the hollow where fine marble glows
by the light of carved leaves’ living twinings—smile open the lips underneath them, the spellbinding rose
breathing memory back to the sight that desires it, fragrant with music for having been seen
by the mirroring eyes of its dreaming inspirer:  Waken to me, being all our songs mean.
 

***
 

9 March 2003
 

The Telling that Falls to Me
 

I strove so to reach you, the face without warning caved in, the great stars flickered down and fell dim,
the ghost whose dark eyes had been lightened by storms on a far-off horizon lay closed, every limb
trailing off in a cold dissolution, a whisper of nightmare abroad in particulate light
as it shone ever weaker.  I haunted the hiss of that dying by listening tears into tight-
spiralled whirlpools of luminous music.  It rang in the ears of a spirit I caught in the still
pool of lyrical water before me.  I sang it its long-ago name, and a feverish chill
spread throughout its pale features.  I felt it.  It shivered with sweet recognition—and song-signaled back.
Shining with new inspiration, delivered of death—though death’s footsteps still followed its track
through the cool liquid element flooding each word of its speech in its primary form, measured grace,
as it moved through the waves of the bloodlessly murmuring heartbeating circle behind the lone face
I had sought and been privileged to find—as it melted away, each ‘away’ became dearer than all
the day-world had to offer.  I had need to tell it, but where to begin—then I heard the words call
of themselves, and the ghost I desired became greater than oceans of stars in a sky of bright rain,
each immaculate globe so reflective, arrays of arcane constellations made magic most plain
with each drop that surrendered its hold and befell me like notes in a coming cascade of sung joy—
magic foresees its own ending and spells it out loud, making clear that it cannot destroy
its own power, nor would it—our love keeps it moving in spirals, in song-water whirlpools that wheel
through dissolvable auras of sound that are hues of a nightmarish rainbow reflected in real
spirit eyes as they flow to the surface of music to stare for a passage by which they can shift
their fey passion entire from perception too lucid to bear to the human who’s learned the true drift
of the spell that now ever so beautifully binds us together—the vision behind the ghost’s gaze
and the self-singing words at the back of my mind as they surge and we melt into meanings that praise
their illustrious origins:  Stars ringing round a wide doorway, wound lightning like leaves’ branching veins
in a wreath that hangs hissing with rushes of sound I remember from dreams when incanted refrains
liquified an invisible barrier, poured forth like waves of acutely refined mists of tears—
and you smile and are there—which is here—and the portal-eyed Moon reaches down and all else disappears.
 

***
 

11 March 2003
 

More Than I Can Bear
 

Hear on the low-sighing wind the faint echo
of voices in series from places no mind
dare pretend to encompass entirely.  They beckon—
the wary aspirant who feels them unwind
the one love-lettered message they bear and who sees it
in silver-gold stitching upon the pale skin
of the air meets the absence of….  Ever so pleasing
though strange and distressingly distant, you spin
in a magical circle from which words like feathers
take flight—acts of birdless, yet purposeful, lift.
I tilt my eyes to the dancing-together
they presage:  Among them, the murmuring drift
of the sole voice I’ve sought trips an isolate tremor
aching down cold profound reaches.  There thought
turns to whirring rejoicing.  The coming-unhemmed of
the message a series of meetings has brought
to the fore of my mind shows me vividly—someone
is pleased to hang weightlessly nowhere, but more
glad to answer and act as the hinge by which coming-
together-again means the dying-flesh door
I once stitched in wet threads to the world laid before me
here flies open wide to a breathed-alive lair
where intent to inspire sweeps the circular core of
a mind that sings more than my poor words can bear.
 

***
 

12 March 2003
 

Rush to This Place
 

I woke entangled and set forth streaming
wet with ribbons that rang like reeds
a mad god breathed into.  I wrote down reams of
the jet-black magic the crimson seeds
of night-blood had blossomed and bolted.  When I
read it back, I was wound up tight
in its toils and voices, but now our blended
magics smile as your mind takes flight
into power great as the joy that binds you
under wing as wild soaring starts.
Rushes raise you up singing:  I shall
find and mouth your uncanny parts.
 

***
 

13 March 2003
 

The Book of the Bloody Prints
 

Words trickle down a vein of burning
want amid flames no mouth can touch,
but under them runs a stain I’m learning
how to engage.  It’s thick with such
arcane illustrations, pages numbered
well in the thousands turn like weeds
at feverish lakeside nightfall under
winds that take up their crimson seeds
where lovers in vivid pairs form series
lullingly sweet, warm music high
above a constrained and lonely hearer’s
reach while the pulse of passion I
incline to consider very nearly
all I will ever know—take heed—
where the words start that hum this eerie
message, a strange heart beats and bleeds.
 

***
 

14 March 2003
 

The Blooded Love
 

Color of graveyard ivy berries
mellowed by constellation-glow
reflected in jet-black glass, a carried-
forward lament from love you know
can only be borne across great distance
terribly softly—auraed light
surrounding twin stars that gaze and glisten,
bounded by pools of wine-dark night
that proves by broad day to flow a sickly
sluggish-blood hue where—mournful one,
why must your cries be faint when quickened
magic awaits the reborn Sun
of midnight—the staring eye, the open
ever-inviting doorway through?
Bloody strange woman-dye of woken
mystery-charged clairvoyant hue,
follow the spark of starlight straight to
silver-sunned lunar seas wherein
love reads the long wild invocation
painted in rays on god’s own skin.
 

***
 

15 March 2003
 

The Living Gate
 

You lay under the leaning branches,
all forlorn, of a willow’s green
and supple ease as a swaying, dancing,
fast-enchanting desire swept clean
the cobwebbed corners and ruined darkened
palace-dungeons where stars by day
sang and shuddered, grew huge with sparks of
strange-omened magic, then sank away,
leaving you with a hanging-headache.
Wonder swiftly possessed you here,
dripping greenness and twining wedding-
wreaths with silvery dew a dear
departed once but returned admirer
brought to please you.  Now wonder more—
a sweeter, eerier star of fiery
midnight through the unearthly core
dimension deep-underlying roots and
branches here has had thought of you
and gone to shining so fast, a shooting
star is how it appears.  Some few
degrees away from a landscape bright as
wild ethereal midnight-dawn,
I hover back of the leaves, mad lightning
flashing all through the breathing lawn
that drapes the body of—now a sister
leans the nearer that love might sing
more clearly.  Mate of all strangeness, listen:
Love possess you with shuddering
down the magical realms of music,
through the star-riven silver seam
surrounding you, till you know and use me—
living gate of your graveyard dream.
 

***
 

16 March 2003
 

The Hosts of Words
 

I woke at home when the snow hung freezing
rainbows of moonbeams round my head.
Shadows came, cold and glancing, seeing
sensory blazes newly dead
desire had changed into—blue-light spirit-
flickers that shook me, heart and mind.
Someone had come to view the hearing
mystery of our two combined
obsessions toward the song a moment
halts in its lunar course and plays
delightedly, though it mourns.  The home of
magic is here, where we appraise
that wakening, lean toward the silver
crack, the split seam where rainbows spill
like rays from a crescent Moon that lilts with
lyrical spells a deadly chill
possesses deep down, and shiver through the
pale single point where greatest strength
of insight attains its apex.  Lunar
silence becomes a voice at length
and leads into lines of nearly timeless—
tireless—music respired by ghosts.
Take us more deeply:  Find, by climbing
word after word, this whole world’s hosts—
who smile as they hang their hearing whispers,
bated of breath, upon our cause.
Swept by desire so vast, so rich with
mystery all this moonlight thaws,
we see them, the leaning lunar powers,
reach to embrace us, each one two
twined vatic obsessions soothed by soundless
magic to let this song come through.
 

***
 

18 March 2003
 

Severed Ventures
 

The things you said—and the way you shivered
the length of time your strange words took root
as I realized—and you changed, you lifted
the living thread of the silver shoot
that came glancing down from the outheld branchlet
above my head, deepest underground—
there I slowly began to dance their
meanings into the gathered sound
I now send everywhere round this dismal
hollow world through the breath I draw
from between the roots of a tree where listened-
into death turns mid-winter thaw
into slow white Moon-laden rain-wet summer
leaves all singing with words I swear
I heard in no dream, no life left humming
down empty blood vessels bleached out fair
as flayed-open Moon-fire-ennobled blossoms.
Then you said—sundry other things—
and the dance reverted and leaves were lost in
a whirl-wind snowstorm—but coldness springs
from the same sweet source in the end as music.
Music hiding between word-sighs
perpetuates hidden meanings.  Use your
own to sort out the leaf that lies
before you, long central vein slit cleanly,
exuding stitches of dew Moon-clear
that trickle down you, a shivered sheen of
half-mirrored magic that makes you hear—
between sighed fragments where dawn hangs heavy—
delayed in coming, horizon pale—
a strange world home to so many severed
ventures that never quite lets ours fail.
 

***
 

19 March 2003
 

Circulatory System
 

To honor music, you send it beating
down blood-black hallways like hollow reeds
all round the circle that clasps my ceaseless
footsteps.  Flow like a wound that bleeds
in chanted rhyme through the sounds a gathered
madness makes in its darkest haunt.
Where that web-spirit throws out shattered
silken splinters of lines I want
to wind all about me, veins of pulsing
moonlight in ribbon-pale array,
there isolate the very fullest
vessel.  The flesh has learned to fray
a sensitive central membrane almost
open—a thin, transparent pane
that seeks a desirous eye by calling
shudders within the sibling vein
that hides in a vision-echo chamber
deep in a most discerning mind.
Bent to his own heart-racing labor,
he hears what he feared he’d left behind
and welcomes its glad return by moving
forward and back at once, a shy
but velvety sweetness rushing through the
channel an inward midnight sky
floods suddenly ocean-deep with lunar
music in liquid waves that climb
in dreadfully gentle steps the coolly
eerie delight that lacework rhyme
subsides into, here and all at once—a
mystery fallen softly clear.
Footsteps that tread a swiftly running
circle attain a place so dear,
so deeply familiar, so enchanted,
still having strength to cast the spell
you’ll never have need to break—this dance is
magic made of the power to tell
the difference—to track the fine distinction
love neither here nor there accepts—
and to leap that gap through the words fast linking
meanings now.  Where the soul selects
the night-offered window, the vessel of its
own design lets its contents pour.
Now it shudders a rich and lovely
lesson wide as the dancing-floor,
ocean tides in a trodden circle,
throbbing music a moonlit heart
bestows in waves on our magic-working.
Bind us close, heart of darkness-art.
 

***
 

20 March 2003
 

Happy Spring!
 

The Nightmare Not To Forget
 

Shower the thick shining leaves with the liquid
appeal they are thirsty—delirious—for.
Drink of their essence the while.  As they quicken,
they leak tiny wordlets that echo the shore
where the roar of high waves comes a crashing rebellion
against all restraint.  As they shiver and sing,
more deeply possess them—nigh drown them.  The spell of
your being enraptured unreels them.  They cling
to a towering tree like a hanging man’s answer
to madness writ finely, minutely, in veins
that are throbbing with green sacred fire set adance to
the faraway sound of a sea where the stains
of corporeal nightmares—for there we were riders
of flesh set against a receding salt wave,
though we sang as we wept out unbearable tidings
that brought us to pause at the edge of the grave
that immense roaring ocean must be to the living
recorders of song who have yet to lie down
by its side and to share the strange stories that quiver
their lips as they wait while a whir at the crown
of the tree sends a rush through the leaves that unfolds their
green lantern-like faces—there stains may be read
in the depths of their shining:  strange tales their beholder
is swept by like rain from a world where the dead
ride on mares down the silver night sky to the sea of
all shimmering being.  Your eyes are in tears;
we reach to the sound of low sighing they leak as
it runs through the lines of the leaves.  Silence hears
every prayer; this is how it sends madness its answer.
The waiting was long, but the magic is—wet
with the nearness of waves of the terrible rapture
of love, you are song I shall never forget.
 

***
 

22 March 2003
 

Channel Crossing
 

The glow took hold of you—lips of scarlet
blossom moist as the Moon’s cold dew
shone black in rivers of falling starlight.
Shiver-spoken, your voice called through
that counter-luminous doorway dimly,
slowly starting to open glints
of far desire, bringing sound a shimmer
closer.  Now it is showing hints
of pallid wandering rays down hollow
paths on which we are two small hands
that signal weakly, I’ll wait; you follow
forward echoes our song demands
to see answered.  Each one lags and pauses,
hoping not to go lost and sad
along the desolate channel crossing
that urges constantly.  Each once had
an overmastering reason; now its
presence hangs, a vague question posed
of the very air—but the breathing power
back of what is no longer closed
has brushed a syllable, wet with living
need, awake with its flesh-warm smile.
Feel its tenderness rush to give you
over—there in the wind’s slow while
behind your own waiting whisper—over
heartbeat-river repeating croons
that seek to lift you, the light they know they
will magic by as a thousand moons
flash brilliant serial scales, pale music
glowing even right now behind—
the rosy ghost of a smile—the you I’ve
journeyed countless black miles to find.
 

***
 

23 March 2003
 

Nightmare Alliance
 

We held you haunted—your yearning footsteps
traced the rounds of a thought our spell
had placed before you.  Our crescent hoofprints
led you down the long way a well
filled with apparitions and spirits crowned with
a living column of vapor birds
inscribed with spiralling flights that wound like
countless wreaths of unspoken words.
At the core of each, like a great heart beating
out dreamful rivers of pulsing light
you perceived by means of a central sheet of
fine lettered linen bound fiercely tight
to the shape and service of nervous tissue,
we perceived you from deep within.
There, a mind’s mouth was working.  Wish you
sweetly under the blue-white skin
of the spirit creatures that haunt the waters’
mirror-face where the Moon through mists
works an eerie magic their countless bodies
resolve with.  Now only one resists
the appeal of absolute transformation.
Whose might that sorry shadow be?
While you reel in the soothing saying
of spiral modes of enchantment, see
yourself surrounded by wild birds winging
their high swift way round a column filled
with a lunar splendor of words that sing of
themselves till many times night-distilled
ecstatic liquid desire fills pages,
sheets, green leaves, and your heart’s long path
round the spirit-well as its mouth engages
with yours to write its live epitaph
in the breath and skin of the midnight heavens’
bright and near iridescent face.
Beneath it—more birds winging, feather-
guests; more hoofprints where nightmares race.
 

***
 

25 March 2003
 

This Song Is a Kiss
 

You shone in my eyes like a host of emphatic, perhaps slightly morbid ideas.  You swam
through the ocean behind them like literal vatic pronouncements from faces that told me I AM
what I since have turned out to be guilty of holding too weakly, too tightly, at half-length away.
Only begin now again the unfolding of words from a sheet of live skin round a grey
evening sky where a night of new-Moon-shine will flourish in soft gravid silence before we fall still.
Only let shadows slip into the murmur of long middle mists to deliver the thrill
of arcane recognition I feel coming over—not quite, but within ghostly thought-distance reach—
the cold dewy earth of the grave deeply cloven in darkness where I was instructed to teach
an inordinate passion for nightmarish wisdom the myriad skills that would quicken its blaze
beyond any containment.  The thought had arisen; with flickers of feverish meaning its rays
had achieved the pale sense of a gloomy horizon; a treeline at either held hand had just shown
an appealing bilateral answer to why I kept staggering this way and that, so alone;
a mad whirlwind appeared and as suddenly vanished—then flames joined the branches and leaves of the green
hosts of quivering trees:  A whole forest was dancing, and we were the shadows that wavered between
the warm flanks of that pulsating body.  Its breathing was even, though swift, as we first heard it; soon
it was tenderly full of a magical seething that gathered deep down in its throat till a croon
borne of terrible, bone-chilling sweetness swept forward, casting wild sounds to the heavens that glowed
where the new Moon’s opaque jet-black eye from the core of unbearable silence sent pulses of code
in the language of telepath dreams to the furrowed idea-drawn brow of the face of the mind
you were frantically signing.  Collapsed into murmuring half-light, I listened at last:  Far behind
the occasion of evening, much less any feeble diurnal distraction, a forest, a world
by an ocean horizon lies steadily breathing enchantments that swarm through the mystery-swirled
breeding-grounds between YOU ARE and I AM.  This heaven—where further desire will hold ever more sway
as it opens more space to more mad lunar weather where skies of dissolvable lowering grey
will turn pearl-shell alive, dewy skin iridescent in beauty that sings, like a sheet whose words drip,
lovers having just learned there the Moon’s strangest lesson—this song is a kiss with not only one lip.