AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

March 2005
 
 

1 March 2005
 

The Tree We Tend
 

I first—when the struggle has taken you—want to
remind you—between lucid visions and scales
rising, falling—how yearningly nothing has haunted
the lost mirror-image that calls and then wails
for so damnably long—all ideas gone silent,
all silvery dream-woven patterns unbound,
and all rapt incantations—their song-bodies wiling
away ceaseless passages—ice in the sound
of their motion toward—from within—you, so shaking
the least living cell from the tree the grim leaf
has ensorcelled as deeply as—How I shall take you
to ride the hard swell of our winter tree’s grief
into what will become the first gush of spring weather,
alive to where we will inbreathe and sing green.
How we shall tend the tree’s memory-meshes,
survivors of all we recall and have been.
 

***
 

4 March 2005
 

Your Back
 

Pale the slow downstroke, the cold breath’s moan-shudder,
the guttering-out hopeless pining for more—
I am lying awake to your misery, under
its meaning, and tracing with fingertips sore
hieroglyphics in flesh.  Frail but steel spinal column,
untwisted but ridden by myriad lines,
I am reading a terrible story, a solemn
emergency grimly prefigured by signs
I once dreamt, a vast knotwork of still-living courses
of power trapped visibly racing.  I swam
in the mists of my most secret eyes till the forces
envisioned there rose and then broke the white dam
that was tissue because I so searched there.  That veil gave
a gratified rending.  I now read aloud—
We are not dreaming.  You are a straddled live lacework
beneath the sly weight of a grave nightmare shroud.
 

***
 

27 March 2005
 

The Healing-Wounded Hand
 

Tedious stitching protected your children,
those wildflower spirits laid under my skin,
secrets sown of your hand.  We lay bowed to the will of
desire till a drift of spun filaments, thin
living fibers, dream-music-suffused roots and branches,
healed wakening, bathed in the liquor love ran.
Our pulse wept for sweetness—and saw the wound vanish.
As eerily lyrical changes began,
I retraced and slow-eased—I and mirror-long patience—
each stitch from its unbleeding furrow.  The seam
of my silver-wet palm now shines open, a lake of
healed sky:  Here your flower-field song-children teem.
 

***
 

29 March 2005
 

The Long Most-Haunted Shore
 

You won’t find the song-spirit wandering, wanting
love’s frail ghost-remembrance to haunt it once more;
you won’t find it pacing dry acres of longing
limp sands all the length of a grey lunar shore
sighing desolate strains to a vague absent angel;
you won’t find it uncanny oceans away
where immense floes and warm currents meet amid changes
of breath into steam into soft fragrant spray
past its sore throat’s slow bleeding; you won’t find it—ever—
by searching.  Its hearing is given—free grace.
Aye, song-spirit, hope of all wanting, unsevered
remembrance—be mirrored, dear most-haunted face.