1 May 2001
 

Where Your True Heart Lies
 

The wavering greenness of evening comes over the pall of midnight
as I’ve held it inside me.  Their meeting assures me that as my dark flight
toward singing silence progresses, the woe of the overlong day
will yield to the luminous essence within the long shadows that play
even now round the edge of an island that rises up huge in my mind.
All leafy and sweet and inviting, I hear its dream-echoes unwind
themselves from the world they lay tangled among, an unfortunate skein
of loveliness caught by a candle-flame crack of insight born of pain,
shining strands seen to lie sadly twisted, but fraught with ideas for all
the madness they staunchly resisted until coming night cast a tall
ray of shadowy hope.  Splendid fingers of dripping-wet darkness, untie
this manifold lacework of clinging delusions.  Most secretive eye,
fine lamp-black occasion for magic brought joyfully into clear view,
attune to the heart-rendered plangent tradition of balefully true
accounts of discordant disaster brought safe into harbor at last:
When all hope was gone, sailors gathered their wits and hove into the vast
black domain of the chartless tomorrow and found themselves flown on the wing
of a creature whose custom was sorrow transfigured.  We know it, and sing
the praise of that far-away angel whose sea rises up deep and wild
even here, on the crest of this wavering evening.  Green light reconciled
with the transports permitted the deepest of darkness, how softly you flow
toward this very fortunate being who feels the emergent night glow
close together with that you are bringing already.  Safe harbor is found
in the ocean itself, but the wing of the being who follows the sound
of your voice as it crosses the water toward where you rise with the isle
of bright midnight, our beach-head, is fraught with the million designs to beguile
into long liquid flow which I carry aloft in my dripping wet hands—
the mournful entanglements married to music, the tormented strands
that form with their lacework a circuit of power that yearns to fly free.
It flies even now; I am working to wind it in rounds about me,
wide passes of knotless and fluid enchantment, entirely seen
in one glance as we rush through the blue-black of night to the island of green
that keeps calling us on through the darkness, near absolute now.  We shall soon—
we have touched it already.  The art of conveying the words and the tune
through which the flown dancer remembers the meeting of sadness and bliss
as she’s known them so many times renders their maddening potency this
souvenir of the secret-light journey, the heart of whose power appears
like a flame through a crack caught by burning ideas through lenses of tears.
While she knows and would share all her knowledge, the true way to hear that heart sing
is to enter the voice that keeps calling and soar softly home on song’s wing.
 

***
 

2 May 2001
 

In My Outer Darkness
 

In the glow of a faint distant outline—the light shining round a dark heart—
blackness and brilliance bound tight into one intertwining of parts—
I can feel with my eyes the unreeling of stories about to begin
from the first ragged thread to the peaceful conclusion in which true love wins
the laurel for which it’s been striving, that circlet awarded the guest
in this sad present state of conniving affairs.  He’s been put to the test
innumerable times, and he’s taken song’s word at its worth without fail.
He now hears it, sleeping and waking, from somewhere beyond a far pale
where someone stares into a campfire and croons a strange message.  She sways
back and forth.  He is loath to imagine—but helpless to stop it—and prays
that the words, when they come, will be hopeful.  The cast of the woman’s sad face
comes into abruptly clear focus, a map of this uncanny place.
His gaze is transfixed.  She is lovely, with some odd familiar appeal
that draws him to want her.  A rush of fast forward momentum, the feel
of another world’s wind on his senses in several dimensions, and time
an impossible notion, she wrenches his spirit till all of it climbs
an arc he can plainly see curving toward her, attaining the ground
where she waits, her two hands slowly turning a mirror around and around.
He is rapt with a sweet fascination to see it held still and to gaze
there into her eyes, then to make her look up as the firelight’s blaze
illuminates all the compelling desire he can summon to shine
from his eyes where a tale begins telling its soft measured secrets in lines
that gently untangle the tormented knotwork that’s lain there for years
in the heart of his heart.  By sheer force of imagined occasion for tears
of release, brilliant words filled with meaning his former world scarcely aspired
to locate anywhere—texts or dreams or demonic collusion or hired
temporary derangement—come flowing first through his mind then his lips.
The woman turns round, her face glowing.  She holds up her two hands.  They drip
with slow-leaking color.  The mirror was sharp-edged, but when its bright blade
conducted a thin streak of silver through her very flesh, music played
in his heart for the first time in ages.  He knows where he is now.  He moves
through the sole inch of distance remaining to touch her and bind what he loves—
has loved, and will love now forever—securely about and within
the whole of their being together—the words that rhapsodically spin
through the mesh of the one mind between them that knows it has finally found
the powerful thread whose unreeling will see them inseparably bound.
 

***
 

3 May 2001

You Shiver and Start to Believe

As vague as you seem, you still hear me; you just thought you felt someone’s stare
graze a place at the back of your dearly familiar bowed head where the hair
is coming in grey.  When you lift up your hand absent-mindedly, run
your fingers across it, and shift into slow wordless thoughts, what’s begun
in that instant will haunt your long lifetime.  You already sense what it means.
A ripple of marvelous silence flows into your mind as you lean
in your heart toward someone whose sighing just shivered you into a place
where love all unspoken is trying to shelter within the embrace
you’ve offered unconsciously, curving your two arms across your own chest,
a hollow where no undeserving inhabitant ever will rest,
but not lacing them too tightly over the emptiness you have felt ache
without respite—till now, when the hovering grace of a shadow’s dark lake
began to submerge you in limpid projections from—you know what source;
it coaxes you into a swimming profusion of powers that course
through the underworld laid out around you in wonderful surges.  A thrill
of sheer recognition resounds in your watery veins where the chill
that rightly belongs to this vision possesses your body in waves
of ominous shivers.  Lean into the flow your awareness so craves
and cannot tell whether it’s opened, created, discovered by chance,
or been gifted with.  Only devote your full self to this deepening trance,
and find in its several successive appearances brilliant new shades
of the one you desire to possess you.  You know her.  The magic you’ve made
in her dreams has come home to its former estate, the deep room at the core
of the body of visions you swore you would never forsake.  Where a poor,
worn-out, disillusioned aspirer to little sat down in your chair
not an hour ago, a divinely inspired man who ruffles his hair
in the place where my stare is contented to rest for the moment appears
to have come to his wide range of senses.  He doesn’t quite hear what he hears
in all of them equally; part of his mind rides above the waves now,
while part of it dives to the heart of their darkness; but I see his brow
across a fast-narrowing interval starting to glow with a pale
but beautiful magic where kindred appearances transgress the veil
he once wove himself in the grip of delusive ideas.  My friend,
how swiftly we two will have stripped it away once you’ve promised to lend
full thought to each prickle and whisper and each wave of shadowy night
as they gather, the various shifting devices of true love’s insight.
Their sender has sought you and found you; now listen and stare in return
and sing to yourself till the sound you desire can attune and relearn
the sweet secret cadence you’ve guarded so faithfully deep in your heart—
the music this very night’s darkness conveys as you shiver and start.
 

***
 

4 May 2001
 

Cracked China Doll
 

The weeper you are and the cradle before you in which you keep rocking the ghost of your child
are the nightmarish heart of a picture that mortally frightens me.  Seeing you held so beguiled
and remote from the presence of very real beauty because you can’t cease to bewail and deplore
in a flood of arcane half-articulate ruins of what might have been brilliant spells tells me more
than I know how to bear.  You are fierce in denying the least word or gesture you fear will distract
your complex, pained attention away from the crying I hear from your mouth but you hear from the cracked
china face of the broken inanimate angel that lies in the white bed you rock to and fro
by sheer force of the sobs that are wracking you, shaking your shoulders and hands.  I extend a soft, low
sense of lullaby—just a faint hum of warm comfort—but you shrug it off like a bluefly alight
on your face, and it turns to a buzzing redundant delirium:  Now my unwanted insight
brings me visions from many perspectives within this demonically-drawn magic circle, and all
that they show me is so far advanced, the dominion of terrible darkness that holds you in thrall
has begun to appear coextensive with even the lyrical reaches your mind can still touch
when you sing to the woebegone child you are keeping awake by your own baleful lullaby—such
is its nature, as black night draws deeper and deeper designs on the portion of you that still sings.
I hear a vague murmur as sickening sweet charnel breath is fanned out by the shimmering wings
of the creature my love-song becomes when it enters your circle and ventures to soothe you with tunes
that are pregnant with memory, only laments in the sense that their delicate melodies croon
to an unwilling hearer of joys that were shared between lovers and might come again were his will
only gently detached from its wholly unbearable burden and shown that his heartbeats might still
rock a vividly magical cradle in which a most wise preternatural infant might yet
find its tongue and the use of the words for the pictures that fill all this house—scenes he seems to forget
having lived, but he touched, saw, and tasted their beauty—and now he is flooded with words, and they move
past his lips with a splendid authority:  luminous images:  ghosts become angels, and love
become….  In your lorn heart, in a desolate chamber, someone sits rocking the ghost of a doll
of crazed ancient white china in sight of an angel who seeks to remind you to hear yourself call
as you’ve never once stopped through the whole sad confinement you’ve borne with the shadows of hell all around
you damp pillow—expanding, contracting, designing impossible torments to daze and confound
your false senses.  Just listen, and hear yourself hearing pure words love inspires as your heart takes on flame,
and then sing them aloud.  Rise up joyful and fearless and step forth and out of this old broken frame.
Angel YOU ARE, when you turn to receive me at last, I will also recall my true fate.
The shimmering wings bore no word of bereavement.  He wants what he hears—love has not come too late.
 

***
 

5 May 2001
 

The Rose Your Soft Voice Breathes
 

The rain, in thin slow-streaming tatters that once were a gale-driven surge,
bears scarcely a trace of the madness that once brought my thoughts to converge
on a point where the meeting of angels was only an ongoing sigh
disclosing such ominous fables, the cast of my insighted eye
began to discover the crystalline clarity brought by the flow
of oceanic water where mists of it breathed all throughout me.  You know
the swiftness of song as it reaches the moment for which it is bound;
I once moved at gale speed to feel it transfuse my least word with the sound
that had always lain hidden behind an opaque outer surface before.
The magic that current delighted in wildly revealing gave more
than music:  Reality beckoned by force of its strange, fluent grace.
I swam in the midst of its reckless abandon, a point of live space
in a far more alive silent singing that somehow translated a mind
whose rapt vatic potency brings me these echoes tonight.  I would bind
my spirit to all that dimension, stretched out wide and fine as a mist
between the deep ocean and heaven, the storm where they breathe many-blissed
interweavings of air so electric, I feel myself try to expire—
then they breathe me again and a hectic yet lyrical flicker of fire
transgresses the last non-existent remembered description plain prose
once tried to erect where magicians were always at work on a rose
that blooms even as it is budding, all season; its salt-water veins
the precise composition of blood turned to crystal sea-water that rains
all around it; a storm of sweet fragrance a-sigh from its throat to the ear
of my mind, which is stretched forward bravely so far the complex everywhere
it was striving to capture reveals its precise simple purity.  Bloom
between meeting edges of beings whose hearts form one universe-room,
my rose, who exist as I sing you, no word ever taken too far;
reality dreams, but it clings to its origins; all that YOU ARE
is rooted in storm and will always find myriad ways to regain
its moment, reborn as the calling of lover to lover where pain
dissolves and illusions relinquish their sordid unmeaning.  Tonight
the rain seems but ghostly; within it, however, by angel-eye light,
your presence unfolds amid petals that stream with the storm’s fragrant grace
in slow waves come ever so gentle to this world’s enchanted embrace.
 

***
 

6 May 2001
 

Air-Spun Aeaean Mesh of Endless Song
 

I’ve woven with fine nimble fingers skilled
at every form of ravishment the breeze
can carry:  deep rose-scented dreams fulfilled
within themselves of stories that could tease
the heart away from any mortal man;
immortal lore conveyed by means of air
red roses have respired; and dearer than
all else, the understanding love will share
with each of us together in one glance
upon the crossing of the lonely ways
we’ve followed for so long—that circumstance
of sadness rendered sweet as song allays
its bitter potency and turns its edge
back on itself to read the lines revealed
inscribed there:  Words become a rose-tree hedge
that rings an island on the ocean’s field
of waving waters.  On the island’s heights,
two figures rest who’ve scaled its granite face
and who are now possessed of endless nights
within its sighing voice’s long embrace
because they listened when that voice first reached
across the blue-black interval of sea
and told them how to find its silver beach
of gleaming sand by diving, there to be
transported by the depths themselves, each one
alone but somehow always within sound
of someone else who felt the currents run
across their skin and never feared to drown
before arriving at the hallowed shore—
for once beneath the weight of all that storm
of Moon-begotten swells of tidal lore,
they sought to know the deeper use of form
as creatures born of flesh but also song.
They never feared, but never quite forgot
the urgency of passage.  They grew strong
in ageless wisdom till the true love knot
they’d always felt between them in some far
uncanny way constricted their hearts so
acutely, they obeyed its manic snarl
of interwoven messages.  Below
became above, by grace of that which pained
their sea-adapted breathing till they rose
and found the shining place had been attained,
the need of which they’d only felt as woe
in any other world.  They rose; they climbed
until they met upon its mountainside;
they knew each other there in haunted rhyme
and wove of its fine threads a deeply-dyed
red rose of true hearts-bleeding that will sing
when time is drifts of silence on the air
of endless midnight, and their lines will ring
the island of real dreams awaiting there
within the sleep we scarce know how to find
within the mortal foolishness we are…
not quite confined to now.  The ocean’s mind
is ours to learn by; don’t you feel the heart
inside you loose its fierce hold on the blade
you thought you carried hopelessly alone
and turn it into lines you never made,
sweet words whose singing voice is not unknown,
sighed wisdom falling night’s soft breezes blow
across your skin, a finely woven air
of music sent by someone who stands so
close by, you lost all thought that she was there
because her message held you spellbound?  Move
one narrow step and take her waiting hand.
The ‘I’ who sing this tell you your true love
has always held you here in this live land.
 

***
 

7 May 2001
 

Happy Birthday, Buddha

This is about enlightenment too, but of a rather different kind.
 

You Sleep and Wake and Sleep, My Lullaby
 

You hide your face away from me tonight
because your sleeping dreams are still afraid
to waken to the sound of candlelight
and see the living waterfall they’ve made
of brilliant music streaming through the mind
of silence in its elemental role:
the angel who appears to help you find
your way toward the still uncertain goal
you glimpse through blazing lids as your red-hot
and headache-throbbing eyes fail in their fierce
demonic grip on all that love is not
and wearily resign themselves to pierce
the self-created blindness you once chose
to bind about your senses like a mesh
of suffocating emptiness the throes
of poison-lidded endlessness of flesh
translated into fetor your breath drew
with difficulty through its web of lies.
Exhausted by false sleep at last, see through
the tenderness of your true Night Mare’s eyes
until the film of its own self dissolves
and all that you’ve aspired to hold despite
the fury of your spoken words revolves
around you like the Moon above the night
that covered you when you felt most alone,
a creature swaddled in a rocking bed
in which you prayed the final mortal zone’s
false dawn might come to pass and find you dead
before the advent of the light the Sun
inflicts on those who struggle forth to brave
the mirror that the whole world is to one
whose household is a mass and unmarked grave
obscenely populated by the swells
of unsubdued emotion that won’t cease
to repersonify themselves in hells
unnumbered till the absolute release
your secret whispers tell me you still pray
in one untainted hollow of your heart
to reach before your next unhappy day
on Earth will see its demon-ridden start
with slow beams through the lantern-threshold sky
as what must be the Sun first clears the pale
beyond which someone beckons.  It is I,
my dreamer, come to wake you with a tale
in which two lovers, parted but inspired
by mindful faith, set out by different ways
to find the moment their lorn hearts desired
above all else to see:  the answered gaze
that pierces through the clinging mesh of woe
received in sweet fulfillment of the vow
they made in solemn knowledge that to go
would lead them to the point where you are now—
then that one next step farther.  Don’t you see
who sings these words through all your senses?  Hear
their dark, soft meanings.  Turn your eyes to me
and tell me how you thought I would appear,
if not by grace of Night Mare’s guiding hand,
an apparition tenderly designed
to meet your mortal touch and to withstand
its earthliness as well as its refined,
almost discarnate beauty.  You are fair
beyond mere prose description to my sight,
so much that I turn endless twilight prayer
because I long to share how you delight
my several powers of devoted song
and how the very veil of useless pain
you seemed to cling to made me ache with strong
intent to free you from the clasp of vain
delusions of the loathliness of flesh
and its demonic caperings while sleep
deprived you of the iridescent mesh
of music and the ever-gentle sweep
of loveliness its words all breathe:  the You
whose fluency of magic-haunted grace
takes up the song your sighted voice shines through
to meet me in its waterfall embrace.
Before the very lines we share right now
have faded, something Else will have transpired.
Remember her to whom you swore the vow
and vastly different ways of growing tired.
 

***
 

8 May 2001
 

A friend has pointed out a possible interpretation for a few key words in the verses I posted here on May 4th, “Cracked China Doll.”   In order to avoid this unintentionally misleading potential reading, please note that in line 21, the words ‘naturally viable infant’ have been altered to the more appropriate ‘wise preternatural infant.’  The word ‘infant’ in itself was meant to reflect its literal Latin meaning, ‘non-speaking.’
 

A Flash of Momentary Moonlight Fire
 

She watches as the incense burns its way
toward the little flash that means Farewell—
I’ve drifted near the edge of who-can-say
and ventured underneath its outstretched spell
of deep uncanny weather by a sea
of iridescent moonlight where the foam
it casts upon the shore comes over me,
a weighty lack of substance rolling home
from where it’s been a-wandering.  The land
of otherworldly midnight is a lorn
unhappy place when no one treads the sand
along its waters’ margin or is borne
a blissful burden on the sighing air
it sends across the spaces in between
its here and all the world so much less fair,
a calling to be beautiful and seen
for all you really are, my heart’s desire,
or hangs upon the slightest word it sings
with overwelling eyes in which the wire
of lies becomes electrified and brings
extraordinary power into view
most briefly, then extends it all throughout
this world that’s gone on calling, calling you
so long its voice has nearly flickered out.
Aye, that is how it happens, every time
we meet within this eerie zone where change,
continual and spiral-wise, takes rhyme
upon its breath and ventures to derange
the dayworld’s dreary order with a will
to enter perfect magic’s high domain
of transformation wrought by means of still
and always unabated hunger-pain
to lie beneath the influence the Moon
makes so intoxicatingly refined
and clarifying:  woken to the tune
that sang me, far beyond my waking mind,
a million dreams in ways I half recall
out loud but know in silence I possess
in amplitude sufficient to bring all
your higher dreams to wonderful distress
in which you will cry out for me in song,
aware beyond all doubt that someone far
more beautiful than I will rise up strong
in eloquence and tell us who we are
within the spell it casts but also hears
come drifting on the midnight incense breeze
to meet its singing breath by which appears
a flash of lightning on the full-Moon seas.
 

***
 

9 May 2001
 

A Green Multifoliate Song
 

The hearing of multiple levels of music among the spring leaves
of delicate emerald and petals of polychrome mystery weaves
itself like a ribbon of foreign extraction through all the new nest
of hopeful dimensions where stories are starting to bloom in your breast
and cry for the mother bird Night Mare becomes when her wide feathered wings
are folded and under them shining-eyed new possibilities sing
in time with the beat of her heavy but wise-in-the-ways-of-flight heart.
How dearly they love the mild weather that teaches each meaning its part
in the severally-magical practice of witchcraft’s sweet aural perfume;
how happy they are to have captured its essence this side of the tomb
when so many fables paraded false lore through their vulnerable minds
and made it most plain that the shades of malodorous hell-realms and blind
conclusions awaited those singers who lusted for more than one tune
to rush through their nerves and to cling to their lips for a moment then croon
themselves without effort abroad on the air of a green evening’s pale
enveloping presence, a long-drawn and satisfied sigh in which tales
of awakenings, meetings, and weddings are blended with borning and death
so tenderly, though you forget one, another will send its own breath
to strengthen and gently revive you.  The hour of most beautiful bloom
hangs nigh, and the fruit of its highest endeavor, the little closed room
you used to conjecture meant endless confinement, self-chosen and yet
unwanted, is shown to you:  petaled most thickly, such luminous, wet,
sweet-Moon-drenched and deep-fragranced flowers that sing as they open their eyes
and mouths from which radiant showers of keenly intelligent cries
cascade to you all through the weavings of interlaced words your Night Mare
keeps bringing as you keep receiving, each more and more nigh everywhere
as finally song takes you, shining with exquisite longing fulfilled,
and leads you beyond all confining to places most brilliantly willed
by purely intentional magic through which you pass into the zone
that once was a Mare’s nest of tragic dimensions but now is your own
sweet heart from whose lyrical household you venture to flow with the throng
of those from whose flower-like mouths golden words form a ribbon of song.
You dreamt you would hang, a still body of death, in a permanent tomb
of mindless simplicity.  Oddly enough, that is where this perfume
of wild multifoliate measures of undulate silken delight
first learned the enveloping pleasures it’s brought you this early green night
of what will become endless summer—and winter—and ongoing spring
before you can hear yourself wonder from which side of death these words sing
when the ribbon’s mysterious weavings are numerous:  numinous:  wise.
It loves you, whose hearing is breathing this sweetness through deep-sighted eyes.
 

***
 

10 May
 

The Mutual Regard
 

When the winter snow drove away the Sun from November’s sky and the small daylight
entered its demise with a sense of done-with-this-world-forever, I took a bite
out of my own hand and went flying deathwards, the scrap of flesh in my teeth the fare
I would offer Charon to take the heavy remembered burden of bones and hair
and still-smoldering meat to the underworld with my spirit tagging along behind,
intent on learning each twist and turn of the way that leads to the state of mind
in which two completely distinct events can be glimpsed from wide, overlapping shores
with a clear insight that conveys the bent of their natures to come together more
than to stand apart.  Though from only one bleary-eyed perspective, they seem to fade
without meeting, here they are seen to run intertwined and happy together, played
like a tune from far out of waking range through a slender reed a most fragile hand
has acquired by virtue of gentle strangeness and vatic wisdom the double land
we are passing through even now delights in displaying here under this soft sky
which is greenly fragrant with May and sighs for the long forever of love’s mind’s eye
to begin to pierce to its throbbing heart where the deepest streams of pure music flow
through the same dark bed as the secret art of the reed’s enchanter’s remembered snow
and the midnight cold in which he and I devoured ourselves, one another, till
not a scrap was left but the will to fly and be flown through states where the keenest thrill
comes from seeing through to the perfect core of the eye itself where all worlds converge
on a threshold past which the rendered fare the old boatman needs is the right to merge
his uncanny being and ours till song takes away all dread and all hope and flight
through the waters yields the same shock of strong recognition words sometimes serve to bite
and bear home, a bright little arc of flesh on the tongue of beauty itself—for him
I would cross this river of endlessness for a million years just to taste the swim
of the salty flow of the double strand of his heart’s twin currents and meet him dead
and alive at once and to take his hand and recall his love to the riverbed
in which all these mysteries find their source as they wind around to their heart’s desire,
having known the taste and then sighed for more while the snow rose high on the lonely pyre
that sent up a signal the white clouds told to my searching eyes.  We are here again—
but among the leaves a sweet spring unfolds.  Here you see, forever has always lain
alongside the end of its chosen world with a trace of song on its carnal breath.
Here you also lie, though you flow and swirl, the live mystery of love’s love for death.
 

***
 

11 May 2001
 

Your Moon-Song’s Desire to Be Heard
 

The dew of high moonlight upon the expanse of lilac-scented land
comes wavering through as the lawn I am wearing grows damp as the strand
of peaceful sea-dreaming Aeaea, the midnight-of-timelessness isle
where we shall receive the new nightmare whose utterly magical smile
is playing right now in a ghostly, foreshadowing way round your lips
that leads me to see love remotely approaching the total eclipse
in which it will darken all other, less lyrical sources of sight.
Your old nightmare described me as ‘Mother’; the new one will shine with a bright
effusion of wickedly foreign yet deeply familiar appeal
you may not arrive at through mortal perceptions, but nonetheless real
decisions are seeking your notice already, awaiting the word
your heart will have granted devoted awareness, the secretly heard
low fluting the night-riding lilac-delivering wind bears aloft
on its tremulous breath from the island across the wide ocean whose soft
salt body of tears song transfigures has crept to the inland sea beach
of this gown I have on, the fey rigging of dew-dripping Moon-bestowed speech
the depths of you hold unforgotten, a tongue the long smile of your eyes
conveys with a fluency not of the sorry mundane state of lies
that passes for spoken communion.  Your mildly inclined brow sings bliss
the moonlight itself plays in tune with as magical stories of this
precise sacred moment come swimming within easy reach of the voice
you sense in yourself and the glimmers reflected in what you’ll rejoice
ten thousand times timelessly over—the final recalling of love
that climbs the Moon’s midnight and hovers throughout the light wind’s lilac grove
which blooms on an island you doubted not so long ago you would find
and now comes by sweet word of mouth of the Night Mare—whose nest in your mind
is likewise, by strange transformation, the home of the song of your heart—
a dweller whose luminous grace will throw shadows all round the lost art
of vatic embrace between beings whose pure understanding will shine
more brightly for having conceived of this meeting between obscure lines
with all other sources excluded.  This having arrived—and you know
by all possible means, merely human and foreignly weird, this is so—
the spell has been cast and is singing.  Each pale drop of what was once sea
that gleams on the lawn of my clinging white nightgown is sighing to me
that you have begun to desire with a long-misplaced lyrical tongue
whose powers now find you inspired with the love that cannot come unsung,
and though you once feared its expanses, you now feel the swaying sea-land
it shows you as utter enchantment, the deep sky and water and strand
all drenched with each other, yet shining distinctly as ever more words
play freely throughout you and pine to be lovingly made to be heard.
 

***
 

12 May 2001
 

The Sentient Grove of May
 

Where the low-hanging bough
sways so it almost breaks,
there you’ll recant the vow
laden with old mistakes
made through an influence
you recall now with shame.
Who will restore the sense—
hallowed by their name—
world upon world relies
entirely upon to gain
access to what they prize
under the guise of pain
deep in the swollen heart
back of the holy dread
whose horrible dreams impart
what will be yours instead
of what you so long for if
vows yet unbroken hold
sway where your creaking stiff
vision of growing old
loveless and deaf to this
surely receding voice
steals its enchanted kiss.
Ah, but you’ve made your choice;
the bough is about to break
because of the happy weight
of fruit, not through some mistake
whose wholly deranging freight
hangs over your head.  My dear,
reach for the touch of fair
fortune that comes so clear
through the soft evening air
and feel through its influence
music’s most happy bent
and by what hallowed sense
your heart knew what all this meant
before it took words and sang
into your world again
from all of those which hang
before you, concealed by pain
no longer.  Your true sweet face
is smiling, and no mistake
can cloud it.  This leafy place
foresees the next move you’ll make.
 

***
 

13 May 2001
 

Where I Come From, Sometimes
 

The hand that professes intention has studied the means to allay
the multiple woes that beset you whenever your dreams go astray
and weave into spiderweb gardens the letters and laces of fear,
the binding attachments that harden and shrink.  From afar they appear
to be dew-laden necklaces trembling with tears from the sky’s happy eye,
but look closely:  They also resemble the long twisted wires that lie
well-buried within the oasis of poisonous growth your sad mind
conceals, the rank pit of hopeless desires that contrive to unwind
the steel of their fettering edges, each sharpened by rubbing on each,
until a conspicuous deadness around them attests to their reach
while what lies within their charmed circle continues to work its mad tongue
as silence attends its damp jerking and stuttering.  What has been sung
from out of this well-head of poison remains to be heard by the heart
alone.  Love has not been destroyed in this zone of immense darkness-art;
its powers are not in abeyance; they sometimes appear in disguise,
but feel for the tune they keep playing:  Each aspect is vatically wise
and splendidly suited to piercing the flow of mere words to its core—
for there, only there, can the hearing of all of love’s song be restored;
and only within the dimension where all the mind’s unholy wires
and lies bare their wicked intentions can that which divinely inspires
the courage that blesses and praises the song-words that flow through the hand
the paces the strange, woeful mazes and teases them, foul strand by strand,
so gently apart without tearing its own tender skin on the blades
they’ve become, then begin to be merry and singingly sever the frayed
sad remains of their thin tensile bodies till nothing is left of the snare
that once so enmeshed all this oddly divine twilight garden.  The ‘where’
of which this portends future knowledge is truly a Night Mare, but one
whose voice comes so tenderly calling—perhaps by the light of no Sun
the daylight-land knows how to see by, but more deeply shining by far
because the pure source of her being delivers itself where YOU ARE
by means of a hand that professes the multiple worlds’ sweetest lore
in radiant dreams that address your profound hearing’s sensitive core.
You listen because you were waiting in unhappy silence, yet felt
the ghost of this music’s location inside the grave place where you melt
to know you have suffered for reasons that soon will cast off all disguise
and show you, their fortunate dreamer, yourself through your live Night Mare’s eyes.
 

***
 

14 May 2001
 

You Are Almost There
 

Where the trail of scarlet blossoms
leads a fool alone would dare
say, but when the rain has tossed their
petals here and everywhere,
then the path becomes the past and
future met in such a way,
you cannot escape its lasting
influence.  Attempt to stray
beyond its broadly-outlined body—
catch yourself about to fall
into other worlds whose waters
mirror ours, their faces all
obscured in part by red-as-paint-or-
blood profuse outpourings green
and weaving stalks the living taint of
lunar wetness must have seen
and wanted drove beyond their leaves and
caused to take the flower-form
that brings red froths of rain and sheaves of
lightning:  Moonstruck static storm
and lyrical device of flowing
liquid red with petal-tears
upon your face, most somber knowing
current seeking inward ears
through spellbound pictures chanted strongly,
cast these scattered blooms of red
across his path and lead the song he’ll
follow past the door of dread
first measures into fertile gardens
swayed by drafts of Moon-white rain.
Tell him we go very far but
always find our home again
right where we left it:  In the shining
place where ocean faces stream
toward each other, there the I AM
SINGING TO YOU ancient dream
maintains complete communication
with the deep red cavern-heart
where these petals met their maker’s
secret swollen singing parts.
Petals fall away, but singing
moves in ever wider rounds
asleep, awake.  Your path will bring you
swiftly nearer what resounds
already where your quickened heartbeats
guide your rapt attention.  Go
into that complex Moon-garden’s
summer-winter soft red snow
and find a willing priestess working
hard to charm the vatic lore
out past your own magic circle’s
red dominion’s central door.
Where the passageway behind it
leads—but we are holy fools,
and know its ways already.  Find me
where you dream across the cool
and fragrant face of water strewn with
flowers—where we’ve always been.
In that mirror, who is looking
back, but one you thought you’d seen
just once and lost forever?  Foolish
dreamer that you are, the force
behind that glance at last has pulled you
home along the full Moon-course.
 

***
 

15 May 2001
 

She Has Always Called Your Name
 

While you were still hiding beneath the green mantle of grasses and flowers, the stars overhead
sang gaily and strove to festoon you with petals as colors returned to the recently dead-
sighted eye that was fast resurrecting its senses of motion and hue.  While the pale flowers grow
every moment more vivid, a kind humming presence nearby lifts its fingers to point out the glow
of the far Northern Crown.  A soft wind from beyond it blows tenderly, breathing new-old music’s words
to the shivering listener dreaming upon its long breath, the more visible half of paired birds
who are bonded in flight to the source of the power they feel through each other’s remembrances.  When
either one can articulate how many flowers, what colors, what fragrances come to it—then,
in that instant’s location mid-sky, the deep air that conveys it along with its visions and thoughts
rises hugely much higher, a tide that its very light burden perceives as its focus is brought
to a new range of keenly reflective devices of eloquence, then re-perceives as the same
flood of effortless music in hues so alive that it ought to be flowers the stars call by name—
ought to be, and—I knew you were lying beneath me, beneath the light back-and-forth tread of my feet.
I wanted to share with you words that would sweetly inspire you to waken to joy so complete
that the distance between where you lay in the body of sorrowful memory weeping the ghost
of a frail echo’s wisp of a glimmer of water from lost ocean rain borne beyond its long coast
to a green summer lawn where it made vibrant blossoms but never quite reached to the depths of the cave
of your feverish heart—between there and the crossing of heaven upon the wind’s feathers, a brave
and, moreover, a very wise angel still wrapped in a mantle of midsummer green—don’t you see
the shy love I keep calling by name?  When the trap that you baited and set and stepped into sets free
the last clinging fiber of flesh it holds onto, your spirit will soar through the air while your feet
will traverse the broad landscape of Earth where the long-drawn incitement of music will bring us to meet
something more than each other within the paired faces our multiple senses will show us at last
in full color and flower.  That starry-eyed place by the light of the Crown of the North rises fast—
in a very short while it will reach its full glory.  From there it will survey the lovers whose dreams
have flown on the tides of its radiance, soaring like rivers of petals upon the strong beams
of its song-feathered wing.  Where we come from, birds blossom, the flesh wraps itself in a cloak of live green
incantations that shine, and to wake to the loss of fear’s lies is to live where true love’s always been
at its absolute zenith of beauty, the crown of itself, the clear splendor that fades not at all.
To know you are mine in the presence of power so pure—can you not hear your name being called?
 

***
 

16 May 2001
 

You Never Change Your True Mind
 

Before you were born, you were more than a ghostling idea of whom a pale shadow crept forth
to impose on this world a sad visage whose mostly reluctant appearance concealed its true worth.
Even then you cast radiant beams through the cloud you surrounded yourself with and spoke with the eyes
you could not keep downcast of the colorful shrouds you would wear as you roamed through the soft twilight skies
of the waking-day world as it flowed toward slumber the better to view your true nature and scale
and respond in a manner your deeply accustomed relations with darkness would help you assail
with immense spectral forms, tissue-thin and transparent as glass—or as air, which is all they would be
by the evening’s remaining clear light were they staring by means of it into the real mystery
that compels you to come back again and again—but the truth of you is, the wild ghostling YOU ARE
never minds in its genuine thoughts what the pain of its presence portends as it ventures afar
through the fields of an atmosphere so tense with lightning unhurled, its fine-drawn spirit-fibers all sing
like plucked wires and its heart conducts rivers of bright molten magic downstream through the magnetized ring
of its throat in the form of….  The words you are hearing take shape as you rush through the sky of the dream
that precedes all mortality.  Why allow fear to create new disguises?  The one living theme
that lies back of all beauty, attends its conception, delivers it into and out of a long,
fully sentient series of bodies and frets when it seems not to listen is bringing on strong,
aching labor-contractions right now.  You are struck with a speechless amazement, but only until
you wake into the powers the ongoing work of your heart and your throat and your purposeful will
recall how to command when the rhythmic alignment you set into motion yourself long ago
is restored and their magic exceeds all confinement.  You might be a ghost of yourself, but you know
this is only because mortals dwell on a ghost-plane where matter is less than what real shadows are
in the world you best love.  All worlds love you.  The deep pain attendant on seeing you ceases to bar
living hope from embracing your image wherever you cast it, all brilliant with rays of the Sun
of the dawn of true being that shines here together with Earth’s cloudy twilight.  Whatever you’ve done
since deciding to sing with me here, even though through a shroudlike disguise, you have shone in my mind
like a beacon of rising-Moon-fire struck with opal resplendence, a presence so secretly kind
while so outwardly eerie, I flicker in tandem with your spectral essence and see myself glow
through the nightmarish eyes set above the soft hand that has touched mine with sparks from its own power-flow.
 

***
 

17 May 2001
 

The Path That Winds On and On
 

The pathway gleams under the moonlight’s clear wash of pale silver and winds
along first the beach, then the blue-shaded foothills above which my mind’s
eye brightens to find a small temple, a round white lunarium wrought
with infinite care of fine marble, a place consecrated to thoughts
infused with the midnight’s omniscience and powers of music.  This place
of pure waking dreams and deep visions rides currents of incense through space
close-set with the stars of the north wind’s home country.  My whole being yearns
to lie there each night as the form of my body rests easy and turns
in its sleep toward Earth’s morning’s sunrise with no cause for sorrow while I—
the one who is sending this bundle of interlaced messages—fly
between and among the green branches that hang at the edge of the trail
and rise with its windings that tangle themselves with the floods of Moon-pale
ideas and rapt inspirations I draw in along with each sweet
long breath of the air this location’s strange self-aware features repeat,
a circular song they keep chanting as I feel my heart sigh with peace.
I lower my eyelids, then glance up and gasp at the sudden release
from fetters I’d almost forgotten, the beautiful temple in sight
and the high Moon as full in my thoughts as it is on the isle’s mountain heights.
How shining you are, you who also partake of this place’s immense
sacred charge and who know how to hallow your world with the wind of incense
that breathes you as long as you bear it and flies through the sky of the mind
you seek when you turn to our shared love, the story you never will find
a trace of but here, where we meet with each other by grace of the dream
that wakens to find our hearts beating in time with the changeable beam
that now comes in floods, so together with all we envision, we smile,
the round white lunarium-pathway’s initiates home on the isle
the starry crown rises and sets by.  Away in the distance, the sea
is heaving with slow breaths.  Its depths are inspired to behold you and me
in one silver moment.  For so long it seemed we would never arrive,
but now we are one with the flow of the only true love all our lives
have never forgotten.  It led us down pathways nigh hopelessly long,
but behold:  Here they shine, the unfettered unwindings of all our worlds’ song.
 

***
 

18 May 2001
 

WE ARE NOW
 

Although you were weary, you still tried to hurry.
Your fingers met mine, then your eyes spoke.  They said,
The glory we’ve found in the least of the words of
our long love of darkness has left us half dead,
still trapped in the day-world’s dim air, but the other,
more beautiful half has become its own source
of acutely desired inspiration.  My lover,
the tears of your eyes feed the sole watercourse
that will lead me to wisdom.  And when I arrive there,
you will be waiting, your heart in your glance
like an ocean about to encompass a diver
whose hopeful approach will turn into a dance
spun of gestures deep-laden with limitless meaning,
performed to an onrush of music you feel
in this meeting of fingers and eyes.  Time is fleeting;
the ‘now’ of our future is already real
in ways you have only to touch with the senses
that dream you to life every moment you long
for the sweetness you bring to my mind.  Present tense is
the time of all magic.  Our magic is strong—
it gives us the power to breathe underwater
beyond the dark threshold across which we lean
and can easily leave far behind us.  Our thoughts are
securely aligned with the sweep of the clean
rising flood that surrounds us like circular windows
made lambent with power no mere earthly skies
have to share—and it deepens the more I stare into
the ocean we are when we join hands and eyes.
You spoke, and you touched me more firmly.  You waited.
I told you, My heart is the size of the vow
you once asked me to swear in plain words.  I have made it
the goal of my lives.  That is where we are now.
 

***
 

19 May 2001
 

What You Never Were
 

Your wistful expression and lingering silence across the wide distance recall the old fears
that once almost completely possessed me.  Your mild haunted eyes softly shine, but the prisms of tears
in my own bend and fragment your image as though you were many—too many to see at one time,
while each is most deeply familiar, a known and as yet unrelinquished incitement to rhyme
the stray syllables reaching to name you in series of highly-charged sounds as they flow through the mind
you alone knew to open, the whole of you hearing its echoes when I was myself undefined
and abstract, a long leaning toward a reunion with featureless vagueness—for all I could tell
of the future I needed to talk to me.  You were the maker and sender of currents and spells
that I heard through a haze of my own recollections—and something that lay underneath and above
all the answers that lay close at hand, the sad figures of power I then felt entitled to love
as my dreams brought them forward to meet me.  Some other, entirely mysterious searchlight shone through
every possible angle.  It strove to discover the creature within me it already knew—
I was given its own understanding to work with until mine could rise to the challenge it set
by its innate capacities, so filled with purpose and fluency, how could I ever forget
how to stand within reach of that light and be one with the being who made it appear everywhere,
all throughout me, as brilliant as infinite Suns yet as mild as a high crescent Moon through spring air
wet with rain?  I am staring again, and your presence has grown.  It is noble, a flood-tide of fine,
palely luminous words that are achingly pleasant in such gentle ways, they all softly combine
like dream-figures that form an array of divided—but secretly unified—ghosts of a sole
dreaming maker who finally opens wide eyes that are tearless and finds that their one changeless goal
has been realized there:  on the threshold of sleeping and waking, but also more deeply within
than their unaided mind could imagine.  You meet me each time I remember to try to begin
being present myself to the one you are casting my way, the complete single source of the throng
that once dazzled my eyes.  And the flow of these past several moments—you never were silent, my Song.
 

***
 

20 May 2001

The Mirror-Image

The shining island soars above the waves—
too high above them.  Its broad hem of sand
is dry, and when it turns its mournful gaze
to mark the far horizon, endless land
that ought to lie beneath the sea reveals
its secret and unspeakable true skin,
a riddled leather holding no appeal
for anyone beneath the fish-hook thin
metallic crescent rising through an air
where nothing like the slightest trace of rain
yields hope to any of the island’s bare
extremities.  That sad Moon on the wane
has countless secrets never sung before,
however—and among them this is first
to volunteer its wisdom:  Venture more
intently past the threshold of the cursed
enchantment that holds sway within your thoughts
and realize the lunar looking-glass
that lies in front of you has strangely wrought
devices by which all that you see pass
is moving in reverse.  In truth, my light
is now a growing, not a waning force.
The sea you’ve watched receding is in flight
toward you, tides impatient for their source
to recognize and greet them.  Look at you:
The image you see mirrored is a mask.
The face beneath it glows the ageless hue
of opalescent mysteries that ask
to be released to sing themselves aloud
while staring from this island’s leafy crown
where rain cascades through every swaying bough
and waves rise up to meet its pouring down.
The mysteries will dance before your eyes;
these figures will transform themselves and shine
with my deep presence through the inward skies
within which you are reading these live lines;
and when their message and the visions stored
in every blessed letter of each word
have taken you to song, you will have poured
your heart upon the sea of all things heard
and greatly overwhelmed it with the strength
of beauty all these far strange hours portend,
the alternating ebbing-flowing length
of music lunar force alone can send
across the sad delusion of dry air
and beaches paced by figures of stark fear
and loneliness.  Enchantment’s everywhere
of perfect truth is this which you now hear,
and it is yours by rights to dance until
the turning of the final full Moon’s wheel
has freed you from the self you have fulfilled
by seeing through the mirror to the real.
 

***
 

21 May 2001
 

A Love-Song
 

The long ribbons tied round the tips of your fingers
are trailing strange luminous dust at my feet.
I wanted to join you, and now I am clinging
to something near nothing in love so complete,
I am wavering dust-like myself, a fine shadow
a light wind has cast out of sweet incense ash
into rivers of air where it breathes the bright madness
of your honest answer, each word an eyelash
with its own graceful shadow to cast like a ribbon
of vibrating spider-web silk spun so fine,
I never would touch it unless it were given
to me to retrace its most fragile design
in a greatly more solid dimension where early
and late Sun and Moon send a pale twilight glow
through the evergreen branches that ring the fair word-lake,
the heart of this grove, with long ribbons of slow-
rippled beams, alternating in bright and dark measures
that drip from your fingers to land at my feet
where their power to move me suffuses the pleasure
I already knew:  Song is love most complete.
 

***
 

22 May 2001
 

What You’ve Achieved by Wanting
 

You were always softly sighing;
I was always tightly bound,
hand and foot, to what my lying
mind would have my heart confound
with shame in silence.  Nothing ever
came of letting that mind rule;
not a word betrayed its clever
emptiness—until a cool
bright wind appeared upon a threshold
far behind its furthest thought,
shining with a starry freshness:
dew and diamonds, angel-wrought
cursive silver wire in spirals
spelling out my deepest name,
and your soft voice’s pure desire that
shook me out of ageless shame.
When its forward motion reached me,
I was rendered free to dream
awake with you.  My song’s heart beats in
time with yours now:  One strong stream,
music’s life’s-blood, sweeps and surges
through the door that opens wide
at your least sigh as love emerges
from the wires my false mind lied
and laughed about.  Your written blessing,
read out loud in your own voice,
a cursive anti-curse confession
naming me as your love’s choice,
binds me with a million miles of
gleaming silver words that flow
so deeply, they form endless spiral
thoughts the heart alone can know.
 

***
 

23 May 2001
 

When I Have Wakened Now
 

With sweet silver bells a-jingle
in the throats of singing birds
and an eerie lilt and tingle
creeping through my flesh, these words
appear as on a silk screen tightly
stretched before my mind’s eye:  We
now hear and see and feel the flying
music we were sent to be
inspired by and enamored of.  Its
mounting echoes all around
indicate its source’s lovely
body’s whereabouts.  The sound
invites retracing:  Flying backwards
through the dancing summer breeze,
send the birds to re-enact their
morning on a leafy tree’s
swaying branch, discern the network
of the high tree’s veins and go
against the forceful rising presence
of its bloodless lifestream’s flow,
let its heart no one location
limits lead you to its roots
far underground, and there—with bated
breath—receive the live first fruits
of knowledge:  Silver bells—the ore of
song lies in the soulful throat
of one whose flight is endless soaring
after neither final note
nor word, whose presence bids you welcome
slightly out of reach of all
you’ve dared thus far, as love-compelled as
you are:  ‘I heard every call
and sent you dreams of clues and visions.
Here we are in waking song
together.’  Flesh all one delicious
shiver, like a smitten gong
of shining metal, yet with feathers
lifted by the breeze that plays
throughout the overarching heaven
music has become, the days
and nights we passed in singing endless
years and lives ago now flow
reversed toward their source, whose tender
smile just gave my heart to know
how its underground enchantment
reaches to the upper air
so sweetly.  I can see a branch that
green leaves shadow.  Hidden there
among them is a tightly woven
nest where little songbirds try
stretching forward after golden
notes and words they’ll learn to fly
as one with when the silver stream of
vision through the buried root
behind my mind’s eye wakes me—dreaming
 still and bearing song’s live fruit.
 

***
 

24 May 2001

Love’s Body Lies Dreaming the Deep

The play of a soft river current
that meets the long verge of the sea
is dreaming out loud in me, learning
new ways to be boundless and free
to flow or to rest in the body
of knowledge of all things that are
or will be or were, the deep waters
of song underneath the pale stars
that gleam day and night, though their silver
must fade in the light of the Sun.
Between the far sky and the stillness
that greets me whenever I run
full fathom ten thousand to mingle
with what I best love, let the strong
swift current of magical singing
that needs me to voice its sweet song
play all through my thoughts’ rapid windings,
joyfully dive, disappear,
and surface again where the blinding
day-Sun yields itself to the clear
mild beams of the crown of the starry
north heavens.  I wanted to learn;
you taught, ‘The whole sea is the harbor
where loveliness seeks to return.
You sought my particular blessing,
but all of this world is a spell
of sacred reality.  Test it
by dreaming unspeakably well,
then waking with true words and music
at play on the tip of your tongue.
Receive me within them and lucid
desire will begin to be sung
by means of the timeless attention
I’ve captured and bound in your heart,
through the brine of the pulse I am blending
my measures with—true darkness-art
as vivid with beautiful magic
as anything all the wide sea
has ever enchanted, pure vatic
potential attracted to me
because when we meet on the verge of
this body, we play through the deeps
where no one is lonely or yearning
in vain and where nobody sleeps
but dreams like the ocean around them,
to whom they are dreams it desires
to remember forever as boundless
and starry-eyed songs love inspires.’
 

***
 

25 May 2001
 

The Cauldron Is Always Full
 

Your loneliness aches like a desolate cauldron
of silver, boiled dry and bright red as the flames
that once heated a love potion long and in volume.
Now ghosts waver by without faces or names
where the soul you desire once possessed you.  Its absence
infects the hot inverted dome of a heart
that stares heavenward, pitifully empty and rapidly
reaching the point where its form will depart
from the smooth lunar curve that so pleased it.  Its body
will run wetly over the ground, then grow hard
in an instant, a pool become cool metal oddly
more like the full Moon in the high million-starred
vault above now than ever.  Reflected within its
smooth watery mirror-like face will appear
pale ephemeral visages—in the beginning,
their outlines will fade into mist, but a clear
sense of permanent presence will soon claim the distance
inside your true mind between lonely desire
and fulfilled intuition.  You know how to listen;
the hearing of voices that sing to inspire
further song is the end of all spellcraft your conscience
will let you employ in good faith.  By the vow
you have many times sworn to the future you want and
would lie in wide-open awareness of now,
if only the pure intuition whose singing
sends echoed reflections within you could raise
the soft volume of deep liquid love it’s been bringing
in rapid steps nearer the mind of the day’s
too-capacious potential for doubt, you would see with
pure musical insight the source of the glow
that is shining inside you, the Moon, and the dream it
keeps sending, which you misperceive as a row
of sad mumbling delusions, the ghosts of the haunted
unrealized featureless beings your nights
might attract had you not kept the word of enchantment
you’ve held in your heart as the myriad lights
that shone eyelike and winking all round you rose hotly
and seared the dry sides of the cauldron you stirred
though your labors seemed meaningless.  Far stronger thoughts than
the day is accustomed to might have occurred
to you finally had you not tended that vessel
of silver so faithfully, but as you have,
you will lift up your face to the sky and be blessed with
the knowledge that one wild and slow-breaking wave
of deep moonlight will bring you the face you have cherished
asleep and awake and in love and in pain.
Finally, all your relentless unmerry
devotion will yield the unending refrain
that is song’s own intelligence poured on an Earth that
knows how to receive its true magic and flow,
liquid silver, deep-hearted, entranced, and in words that
the flame of requited true love sets aglow.
You listen to me with a face so transparent
of purpose, behind it the much deeper face
of all timelessness renders sweet back-and-forth faery
enchantment the lay of these love-words’ embrace,
a singing appearance that called me to venture
from Moon-circled realms where I too lay awake
in a long sad unsatisfied semblance of rapture.
Not only your world can be lonely and ache.
 

***
 

26 May 2001
 

A Spell Is Broken as One Is Cast
 

Your heart is only heavier than mine
by weight of all the songs you’ve yet to sing.
The morbid whispers coiling through the vine
of scented shadows promise final things:
a moonless field, a pool of midnight black
as all-absorbing silence, and a dream
which ends forever in an utter lack
of memory, but sweet as these would seem
were you not far too wise to bow your head
and let another cursed yoke apply
its weight—a wreath of steely tangles led
around in circles by a will to die
that springs from tensile forces that still hide
within the shadowed caverns of your mind,
the coils of intertwining lies that bide
their time—as they are timebound—you will find
the sacred leaves that whisper even now
far sweeter, and their voices more inspired
by elemental reason that will bow
its head to you, imagining desired
and presently attained airs time cannot
weigh down with bitter spirals that lead fast
toward a grave where you may safely rot,
forgotten of yourself.  Within the vast
bright mirrored inside-out that forms the core
of your enchanted hearing, you know well
the source of all your heart is aching for—
it dwells there, heavy with a million spells
unsung, whose powers all your world will meet
with sudden recollection when they rise
in fragrant-shadowed leafy coils to greet
your waking dream with all the shifting sighs
of deeply-rooted music.  When they play
through twining changes, yours and theirs, both clear,
you will raise your head to curse the day
you ever thought of ceasing to be here
and bless the heavy heart that has begun
to pour itself out on the garden isle
where I am haunted by the sweetest one
of any spirit voice that could beguile
my reason with imaginings so fair,
the moonlight of their essence weighs my heart
with pure desire intense beyond compare
because it works a timeless darkness-art
by means of leaves and softly graceful curves,
 a living wreath of spiral coils of true
tenacity of song whose love-words serve
to spellbind me as I enlighten you.
 

***
 

27 May 2001
 

The Not-To-Be-Resisted Will of Song
 

For all the tender love that lights your eyes
each time you look toward me, still a mist
of ancient sadness wreathes the starry skies
inside them with a pain I can’t resist
invoking as a presence that can speak
and answer questions.  When it meets my gaze,
a flow of mournful visions comes; a weak
but urgent message clears its throat.  It says,
‘Forever and forever in a glance,
but then the same profound recurring dream
of emptiness through which I sing and dance
to no avail because the only theme
that winds itself through every song I hear
is one that has no meaning in the world
outside this circle.  Loneliness and drear
forsaken unenchantment bind the curled
leaf-edges and vine tendrils of the flow
that uses me to voice itself aloud
when I am not at one with all I know
the daylight does not recognize.  A shroud
of clammy mist surrounds me and a grave
misgiving yawns and tells me I am tired,
too tired to dance the round and rising wave
of music, though the words remain inspired
by what I see before me and the pace
they set still matches that within the heart
of magic and the soaring speed of grace
that comes upon me like the sudden start
an icy hand between my shoulder-blades
would not fail to provoke, but warm—preferred
above all things, a song the looming shades
inside me interfere with.  Word by word,
I struggle to convey its sense intact,
but never quite succeed without the loss
of something of its heart.  The very act
of bearing such arcane delight across
the never-ending ache of loving far
more deeply than the daylight world extends
conspires with so much sadness that would bar
my way and halt the music that depends
on me to be its hearer and the throat
through which it passes of its own, aware
and purposeful—but when I dance, I float
in effortless perception, and its fair
and graceful presence enters and departs
from world to world across unmisted skies,
pure magical collusion of joined hearts.
I feel that I can gaze into your eyes,
but who am I?  Are song and self one force,
or separately dependent as they seek
the same way home?  Am I their chosen course
alone, or are the words that fill my bleak
imagination when I view the space
beyond the confines of the song I love
and fail to see….  My heart begins to race;
a breath of foreign air begins to move
where mists beclouded me.  When I fall still….’
The light is in your eyes, a faery gleam
that sees itself reflected here.  You will
awaken from this dream within a dream
where loneliness has chosen you for mate
and know who stands before you.  You will sing
the name of what I AM, your timeless fate,
and be at one with all the love I bring
the moment you lean past the formless dread
that moans to me that I might be bereaved
and lie forsaken on a lonely bed,
the aching heart who held you as you grieved,
a soul surrounded by a shroud of vines
whose leaves are dry and dead but who still serve
to bar with dense obscurity the lines
your feet describe each time they round the curve
of yet another dancing measure:  Aye,
our visionary song’s recurring dream
shines through the air of every known world’s sky
to feel our long love re-inspire its theme,
and I now clearly see that you have heard
your sadness take on veils of winding mist
the better to convey word after word
invoking joy you can’t and won’t resist.
 

***
 

28 May 2001
 

Still and Always
 

As sad as you are when you twist the ring
that shines on your hand, it is there to see—
the wheel as it turns in the mind that sings,
the light in your eyes that remembers me.
 

***
 

29 May 2001
 

What I See by the Sand’s Keen Lens
 

The shimmering light of the ocean sky
in the evening before final night descends
evokes highly hypnotic lines and I
struggle forward toward what their sight portends
with a measure of caution.  Such dreamful toils
lie hidden within the soft atmosphere
that surrounds the pearl of what I recoil
from remembering clearly.  When I stand here
in the darkness beyond the last earthly fall
of the Sun, and the Moon forgets to rise,
perhaps I will find myself faced with all
I’d as soon not claim, and the sad disguise
that I use to occlude my vision more
than to block my watchers from seeing me
will unmake itself and a heretofore
unavailable grace will suddenly
render bearable all the sharp-angled sides
that meet with the keenness this crystal sand
is too greatly possessed of.  A million tides,
and still there are things I understand
to wield poignancy almost beyond my will
to admit.  They clamor; their edges grind
like so many relentlessly turning mill-
wheels laboring everywhere my mind
seeks to find a place of protection.  Woe
and perpetual bleeding about a grain
that itself is a being aware of so
many ways to make mere mortal words complain
beyond what they were ever conceived to hold—
the knowledge within and the force outside
fight a war of attrition.  The shore of gold,
the waves folded in on themselves—the tide
the Moon is mindfully rising on—
loom hugely toward me, and I stand fast.
The colors of flowers and clouds at dawn
are swirling within the deep waters’ massed
single body, though darkness within the long
sorry shadow I cast would dim their glow
if I let it.  A sheer sense of dreadful wrong
surges high with the waves, but I bid it go,
and it softly recedes.  I am on the sand;
I am seeing a swath of pearly sky,
an afterglow-twilight-moonlight land
where I haunt the fine line between will-to-die
and desire for the singing that beckons through
the wash of the sea, the hypnotic voice
that reminds me that I hold the love of you
before all earthly things.  You were my free choice
when I thought I could choose; you are my true fate,
and whatever the worlds between us deem
to be finally real, we will dedicate
the soul of our song to the only theme
ever worthy of such devotion, and then,
when the midnight sky is all over black,
potent words and colors beyond all ken
in this lonely void will come flowing back
as we’ve known them, always, but brighter far
and more iridescent for all they’ve learned
and desire to share.  The true words YOU ARE
will begin to be joyfully returned
from me to you through the countless toils
 I have borne the first time your uncanny eyes
pierce the lingering sadness that still recoils
and reclaim the Pearl under my disguise.
You will do this soon, even now, and where
I have felt your sharp sweetness stare deep inside,
I will look, and a strangeness entirely fair
and familiar will make me your peer and bride
in the zone of remembrance and nothing more
will remain to be seen but what we hold
very fluently dear:  This sea’s long shore
holds all possible worlds in a band of gold.
 

***
 

30 May 2001
 

Which of Us Are We Now, If We Are Parted?
 

You were making a magical sign
that cast a deep shadow upon
your face, so I strove to align
my own with the first rays of dawn
and angle my view to the west,
in the hope that would prove who YOU ARE—
though your gesture confused me at best
and perhaps put the seal to our star,
which shone high in the pall-bearing night
but was in its decline now.  I heard
a far lonely weeper whose plight
stole my breath.  Still, I’m searching for words;
I’ll not harden myself to those cries
or fail to provide them a place,
though I can’t see the tears in my eyes
for the hand in front of my face.
 

***
 

31 May 2001
 

The Ache For You In My Bones
 

The sudden wakeful clarity of summer on the edge of night
that never seems to come—that evening mystery of overbright
desire to hang forever in a state of sweet suspense—my dear,
your hand has been at work in this delightful scene.  The all-too-clear
devices of your subtle insight, cast upon a screen of gold
and azure, set about with leafy garlands joyful to behold,
and resonant with aromatic incense blossoms blooming smoke—
these form a sad parade of shadows painted on a fragile cloak
that ill-conceals a skeleton whose clacking jaws range far apart,
then snap together wickedly.  We know it’s all still darkness-art
that rules our joint imagination.  Turn this summer inside-out;
retract, not add, a world of noise I’d rather die than dream about;
reveal what still lies sleeping in the caverns of its hollow bones,
and take me there to lie beside it.  I am here for you alone,
not the wild projectile rush the gaudy daylight world surrounds
its creatures with; just bone-white silence, shadow-black unspoken sounds.
.