As I lay beneath the thunderbolt sea,
I remembered Indra.
 

1 November 2001
 

Break Only Wider Open
 

The thunder of hooves and the lightning of magic that leaves a pure resonant ozone of stars
of soft green fill our ears and our eyes with such vatic intensity, surely the cross-angle bars
of black shadow where door and door-stone come together apart are why I feel a draft through the crack
this fast vision has opened.  Fall through it forever beside me is all I would ask, should the track
I see winding out over the ocean before me turn out to be yours; fall through time as with wings
underwater, and fly like a being of stormy desire who has chosen the pathway that sings,
having noticed the signal the ozone was sending and rushed to embrace its sung message with tears
that will touch the salt moan of the great unrelenting task-master whose knowing unreels coming years
of scarce-mortal astonishment.  Child, are you lacking conviction?  The thunder of hooves is your heart;
stunned by the force of the oncoming madness of magic, receive its wild quickness and start
where YOU ARE in the true world that loves you most dearly.  Stretch out your hands; you are nigh face-to-face
with the passionate green burning brand that will sear you with emerald fire and deliver the grace
of the song-heart that beats deep inside the live wellspring that overflows under the ocean for you,
where fire and the glow of the Moon vie, compelling each other to whisper the secret so true
it can never be told but through gestures and symbols:  A spiraling shell glimmers white on a shore
where a pale-silver-lighted horizon hangs limpid and calm over waters that frame a great door
that is shuddering open.  We hear distant thunder.  I wanted to find you before it grew dark;
now I don’t know what I’ll see when the wonder of you is impressed on my flesh, but the mark
of your power is here where the shadowy threshold says Welcome.  A seashell, a luminous horn
that completed its first winding circuit when less than an instant remained before true love was born
in the timeless dimension your eyes recollect in my presence—this white spiral shell strikes a light
that will breed endless dreams, then assist them to beckon to yet further reaches of vatic insight
where the terrible stroke of wild lightning will come as a mercy we yearned for and almost despaired
of attaining.  Most silver, most golden, most thunderous heartbeat, most magical vision I’ve shared
with the surging salt ocean alone till this moment, for you I would kneel at the foot of the sky,
lean to the pearl-shell unwinding its lonely desire till I heard its importunate cry,
follow its track till it spun me in circles, lift up my eyes to the Moon on the breast
of a sea that is heaving, and promise you perfect intensity, madness grown huge, with no rest
from these most sacred labors until a strange morning the color of silver-white pearl takes us in
and we open our eyes at the crossroads, the doorway between the stone floor of the world and the thin
glimpse of heaven that widens before us here.  Hiding in spirals of magical light as in sound
lay the soft timeless secret of flight and the shining desire that now reaches entirely around
our complexly joined wills as our bodies attain us like stars they have won through heroic ordeals.
Beacon of emerald green on the waves we are falling through, storm-flower ozone that steals
through our breathing beneath the dark water of midnight, attend us the while we descend to the spring
that conceives us behind the Moon’s pale heavy-lidded appearance, the pearl of all secrets that sing
in such wise that we hear and awaken forever to beautiful memories we have felt slide
down our faces for so long, we thought our world’s weather held nothing but rain.  Here a luminous tide
whose intensity rises the more for our racing hearts’ hooves’ aching thunder moves forward to meet
our desire as we take our appropriate place the far side of the doorway.  A strange Moon will greet
the deep love of our eyes with a circle, a spiral, an ongoing progress of windings-around
the idea WE ARE; we shall fall into flying; we’ve found all this out without making a sound,
and soon we shall find our true voices and carry the music that lives here wherever we wake.
Heart of my heart, can you dream, can you bear it, this much sacred joy and be mine and not break?
 

***
 

2 November 2001
 

What We Have Seen So Far
 

I dance with a strange form of falling obsession this evening; it reaches inside me so far,
I can see through its eyes to the height of distress upon which—a pale mantle an emerald star
has cast over its shoulder, a nimbus of roaring electrical magic about its wise brow—
a most beautiful shadow is pacing the shore of my window.  I want him to witness me now
as I seek for the speed that will lift me through changes so breathless, his spirit will gasp at the sight.
How can he breathe when the air is deranged with such passionate power but deeply, delight
spreading fast all throughout him as if he is standing beneath a new Moon and yet bathed in such streams
of exorbitant light, he can scarce understand what is happening?  Here such a crossroads of dreams
and awakening smiles with a beckoning gesture.  Child of high holiness, enter this place
in which all we shall ever believe has grown restless to prove itself faithfully real, face to face
with the world its desire will revivify.  Touch with a sensitive finger of luminous thought
the bare edge of the heat of this room in which much of your future will rise up exquisitely fraught
with a burden of love that will so overwhelm you, the noise of your heart will nigh deafen you.  Hear
what the sigh at the depths of its pure voice will tell you, then softly repeat it to me.  You will fear
that the waves of its thunder will mount till they break it; they will, only more widely open, to hold
greater treasures of lyrical wonder.  Please take what is offered:  This magic was yours as of old
and is long overdue to return to its homeland—like all of you, pacing the strand of this world
in the beams of the green burning brand you alone are invited to see meet the eerie Moon-pearled
ocean-sky that surrounds this lunarium-temple.  Circles and spirals, self-guiding insight
as I flow into tides of rejoicing-lamenting, my back-and-forth thoughts the calm hue of the night
as the Moon reaches through it to find me an island of song that shall not cease though worlds disappear
and times turn themselves round till they steal through the eye that beholds them as though a great ocean of tear-
swollen longing were waiting there, brimming with poison that finds itself called to pour forth and away—
circles and spirals the sound of your voice has already inspired to work wonders all say
that a moon you have glimpsed but not really believed in is streaming throughout you, its power within
the sweet beauty YOU ARE; it has almost completed its luminous magic—the glow of your skin
as you move through a shadowy darkness you tell yourself covers you, hiding your presence, reveals
where you are in this liminal nocturnal realm of oncoming enchantment.  A fey whisper steals
through the fore of your thoughts even now, does it not?  My so-soon-to-be-swept-away lover, behold
what your heart’s deepest insight is showing you.  Brought out of infinite secrecy, passion untold
is devising new series of syllables, eloquent love-lessons meant to be shared face to face;
we shall follow the flow of them back to the wellspring where love has its origins; there we shall trace
our way forward again and soon meet our reflections within the deep eye of the pearl-glowing Moon.
Lover, I call you.  The pure recollection of heaven that hides within each silver tune
I shall sing you—and there will be thousands uncounted—will come to perfection through levels and planes
that will pass like a dream, but as memories mount, you will find yourself caught up in spiraling trains
of long sacred ideas, love-struck and so luminous everywhere, inside and out, you will glow
with a light I shall read by to reach deeper moonlight forever, as long as its pure secrets flow
through the dance you are viewing through glass this late evening.  Look:  You have rendered me wildly obsessed.
Pass from the shadows and join me.  The green of the emerald star on your shoulders and breast
and the more intense light of your brow—you can’t hide from my all-seeing heart.  I am love grown so strong,
it deranges the very air singing inside you as you and I meet in the space of this song.
 

***
 

3 November 2001
 

Eerily Wise
 

The flow of the stream of luxurious cadences breathing your thoughts into words just for me
is the shining delight of my dream.  I am waiting to hear you believe in the force of the free-
running storm of live magic to come as it opens its thunderclouds over our heads and song pours
in a flood of unrivaled intensity.  Broken hearts bleeding strange powers from opposite shores
of a watercourse we are become in our labors of passion, two sides of a sea the Moon swells
between strands, salt and fresh meet and strain to awaken the unspoken depths of the secret that dwells
within each of us singly and here joins together so seamlessly, nothing reveals where one ends
and the other begins.  We hear voices; the weather is shifting; Earth’s season recedes; the Moon lends
a mysterious glow to the stare of our eyes as we search for the words that will spell the appeal
love can never resist.  It keeps willfully flying away, but a moment will break the last seal
that protects what is aching to hear itself murmur the magic the sound of your sweet name contains
and the madness so tenderly rapt it disturbs only nightmares will dream a slow vatic refrain
the immense store of wisdom inside you will shiver to feel once again as it moves to the fore
of the numerous beautiful minds song delivers safe into our care.  We are longing the more
this astonishing night for the warmth of the chamber from which the shy voice of this love-song proceeds.
Guide me along the flood-tide of derangement that slips so discreetly that where it will lead
is an unhurried answer awaiting its question.  Limpid the ocean beneath the huge Moon;
silent the glow of your eyes, but the blessed desire that converges from all sides will soon
rise and here, in an instant of clarity so preternatural, we will receive the strange fate
all our lives have been seeking among the sad flow of a daylight that might have run early and late
without ever once wakening had we not felt a soft rain from the heart’s deepest garden steal through
like the delicate tears a wax angel would melt in a censer, releasing the pain-haunted dew
of the most sacred blossoms its spirit has ever respired as between leaves and petals a wheel
of soft breathing and song sets the uncanny weather in motion that we are now caught in.  When real
words align in the chamber one’s spirit has guarded so faithfully daylight scarce dreamed it was there,
they attain peaceful powers to speak of the hardship of waiting as if it were all a long air
made of lyrical cadences most overwhelmingly tender.  The sweet steady light of your eyes
is the sole beacon I shall be pleased to have spell out their syllables after the music so wise
we shall lean on its pure incantations forever has let itself fall into lines on a page;
only your hand shall trace them through all kinds of weather back home to a place where the sudden outrage
that befell a lone angel who drowned in a slipstream of fire and released blessed vapors shall turn
like a sweet breath of incense between parted lips into words I shall hear half-afraid they might burn
the dark heart they caress with their flickering tongues—but I know even now they are riverlike, mild,
and will never once hurt us.  I languish among them, dissolved in the love of the beautiful child
who lay hiding beneath the last fold, the last gold-inscribed leaf of the last garden rose-tree YOU ARE
in a vale of enchantment so deep, I will hold it about me as time unlocks star after star
and they gesture in turn of the way to the place of the threshold beyond which all silence is heard
to release its last terrible syllable.  Take me to listen, dear heartbeat; the shimmering word
of your undertone voice is the music the angel who melted remembered to hide deep inside
you, the joy of song’s being.  The moan of it makes me remember the flow of the Moon-swollen tide
where I found you and where we shall lie down together most soon—perhaps this very evening.  Dear soul,
where the fresh and the salt-water worlds create weather so magical love can be woken and whole
in a way we would not have believed half a moment ago, please behold:  From far strands we have met,
an immense tidal river an angel has opened; our voices are breathing the depths of the wet
fragrant flood of its power where tears turn to music.  Child of delight, with my mouth and my eyes
I shall sing endless praises of you who are beauty become most uncanny, most eerily wise.
 

***
 

4 November 2001
 

For Your Sake
 

When I saw from afar how much light I’d been trailing behind me, it frightened me; how my wits flew
wild in several directions.  I hoped you would wait for the minds to unscatter that severally grew
flushed and heated to learn how much pain you had witnessed as I, unaware of the picture I formed
in your subtle insight, had been found to have flitted about like a leaf very thoroughly stormed
by a rising gale-force singing air but not struck to the ground by the bolt of the measures to come
when the drift of the sky would create ineluctable sounds we would resonate with as the hum
underlying our minds’ common language would heighten and we would breathe rapidly—closer apart,
then completely together.  I said I was frightened, but also I hoped the astonishing start
that awoke me from out of the mist of self-veiling would shake you as well—and I’ve no doubt it did.
Why were you creeping about like a trail of white smoke a pierced censer released and not hid,
viewing the island all round you with senses acutely absorbed in the joy of their task?
Though I could not see myself, the immense moonlit aura you cast made me shiver and ask
the high clouds overhead, Is this dream of your making?  I have been caught at my priestessly chores.
Grateful I am to have found out the lay of this ceaseless and sacred unveiling is yours,
and you know it as surely as I now know moonlight enfolds us like layers of white silken gauze.
Softly repeat it to me:  You were crooning a delicate measure—I’ll soon give you cause
to cry outright as song overtakes you entirely.  My beautiful friend, you were hiding your light;
nonetheless, you have shown me yourself as a fiery wellspring of music that soothes the black night
that surrounds it as flickering waves of the essence you breathe forth incessantly set me aglow.
Whoever taught you such grace?  Their love-lessons have brought both our hearts to exceed the sweet flow
of the ocean itself as it ebbs and it rises beneath the mild power the pearl of the sky
exercises throughout it.  As deep as the sighs they pronounce in the strange language soaring on high
and below all our worlds in one moment, the tears I shall send you will mount till we lie undersea
and the pearl of your brow and the wellspring of clear-flowing watery fire will turn shining to me
as you rest in my arms, and the touch we exchange will revivify all that has withered and died
in our silent awarenesses ever and, plain to be seen, such a moonrise will shimmer and glide
through the narrowing spaces between us, the threshold it moves forth to cross will dissolve of its own
and our worlds will entangle and twine in the flesh and create a long lyrical ghost-woken moan
the whole universe, viewing our joy as we labor to bear forth pure manifest magic will stare
and record in the hearts of the stars that now waver to watch us until the wellspring of the air
from which all of this passion of moonlighted madness of fortunate beauty proceeds will so charge
the bright streams of their pulses, a flood of pure vatic intensity must overwhelm and enlarge
the already nigh-inexhaustible store of the soft luminescence they lavish all round
the sweet minds of their watchers.  I seek to adore in a thousand new ways the live glory I’ve found
trailing all through the leaves you have brushed in your travels, leaving a similar trace in my wake
though I’d never have seen it had not the faint babble of fragrant-voiced incense provided the ache
to reach clear recollection and then premonition and then this sweet moment of present desire
you have witnessed with visible joy.  Do but listen a bare instant longer, then speak and inspire
further song-revelations in which the Moon-mirror we are to each other in glances and sighs
will shine free of all veilings of mists.  In its clear glowing face love will reel out the drift of the skies,
and the way we will learn all its intricate, delicate workings is—needless to say, you are here;
I am enlightened but shy; does a trickle of wetness betray me?  True love’s singing tear
as it gleams in the moonlight between us forgets its depth-origin; we shall not make that mistake.
Dearest of shining ones, further love-lessons await us; do let us be wise for love’s sake.
 

***
 

5 November 2001
 

Multiple Moons
 

Thin raveling edges of ribbon are leaving faint traces of color—of emerald green—
on my fingers, and though I cannot stop reweaving their threads in the hope that strange lore yet unseen
will reveal itself soon in the pattern their tatters have shown and with care might be coaxed once again
to assemble in my skillful hands, I have sat here all morning, all evening, and nothing but pain—
humming down my right arm with a sensitive core of remembrance—comes telling me—Aye, I can hear:
Under the emerald star that is mournfully touching the lonely horizon—the clear
shining water that gleams in the glass by the mirror beside the bright silver emergency-blade
that has opened my most heartfelt letters—this trio of magical tools I have duly arrayed,
then neglected to use.  As the hour grows later, their brightness increases.  The Moon on the rise
reaches in through my window and sets them vibrating.  How many devices; how varied and wise
are the faces I see in the glowing reflections that flash back and forth between metal and glass
and cool water.  No human desire can affect their serene luminescence.  The hour will pass
and the Moon disappear from my casement, then I will return to my ribbonwork, bleeding a red
tinge of rose-garden magic among its frayed fibers, twisting them tightly until a plied thread
that will cut flesh before it will break is created in sight of the window’s blank face, and then I
will fall so deeply silent, the mesh will relate its long ribbonly teaching of lore that will lie
like a seed at the core of a star of clear emerald green….  When the dear Moon next rises, a twined
red and green true love story will softly lament its long waiting for you with a patience designed
to elicit ecstatic engagement with all its delirious soft-sighing graces and fey,
slightly tremulous come-hither signs.  You are falling; I feel the air shifting about me the way
I imagined it would before ribbons lay lettered by word-streams that chanted throughout me for you
until all of our magic ran ragged and hectic frustration distracted the permanent view
I had sought and believed I had found.  I feel singing possess me in ways only you can inspire,
who lie many leagues deeper than thought where the clinging silk threads slip away and the flesh-cutting wire
they become when I ply them too tightly melts into an ever-so-slightly blood-tinged shade of Moon
that shines out of the bright gleaming tools whose compelling influence is gathering strength and will soon
set itself lovely challenges whether I bow to their nightly demands with a hesitant will
or a fully applied one.  I feel you all round me already; I want you to know the long skill
I have patiently nurtured through all kinds of weather in numerous worlds will be put to the test,
bringing tears to your eyes as the sensitive tether that binds us reminds you I’ll grant you no rest
from our labor of magical love till the silk flow of luminous essence, the beauty YOU ARE,
is completely exhausted—revivified—filled with ecstatic enchantment again, and the star
of your brow has been seen to outshine even all these innumerable Moons as the night shudders by
in the ongoing death-throes of breathlessly falling through emptiness into the new morning sky
our exorbitant love will provide as our features take on the wise cast of those learned in lore
so resplendent with ancient devices of ceaselessly increasing beauty, a universe more
could not add to our power; a million reflections would only repeat what we’ve already seen;
you are the vision and sound of perfection expressed in the ribbon of crimson and green
all my lives have been weaving, reweaving—aye, fraying a little at times for the joy of the task
of repairing its shimmering voice with a strange ray of Moon from a window I’ve not yet dared ask
you to open.  You’ll lean on the sound of my singing, reach to the casement, and then I shall see—
with my heart in my mouth—the dear light that’s been bringing these long-flowing ribbons of music to me—
then our eyes will remeet and we’ll share in the hearing of yet-further magic that whispers and croons
with our own chosen words in its mouth as its clear-spoken lore sings us even more multiple Moons….
 

***
 

6 November 2001
 

Even Here and Now
 

The silence of night in the midst of the daylight’s devouring hunger for shadows descends
all around this shy little lunarium.  Wait for a bit deeper stillness, and then let the friends
of enchantment, the lyrical voices that love us, proceed to evoke the high pearl of the Moon
from its hiding place under our minds’ garden-grove where a rose-tree is flickering, working a tune
into tender perfection, surrounding its fragrance with petals and leaves that will soon fall apart
and release the pure sound of its softness in waves that will glow all around us the moment we start
truly watching the inward horizon beyond the sad weather of waning day’s uneasy zone.
Look to the Moon in my eyes for the dawn of the world you are seeking.  You won’t go alone
past the threshold of magic; the rose-tree will guide you, and my knowing hand will be here at your need.
Being of beauty, I feel you’ve had time enough; our night is falling; attain the true speed
that best suits you, and flow like a current of silver and gold intermingled through seas of rose-breath,
joy leaking forth from your soul like a willful night wind in which voices of imminent death
share their most haunting secrets.  As long as they’ve kept them, we’ll treasure their light in the shining of eyes
we will find ourselves caught by.  Its waves will have swept us away.  My beloved, come with me:  Arise
to the call of the feverish moment and tell me how happy you are to have touched it at last.
Finally, all is in order.  The spell has arrived at the place beyond which all is cast
to the winds—which are dizzying, steeped in such savor of open-rose power, plain thought disappears;
all is the strange heightened state of clear wavering starlight suffused with the ocean of tears
that hangs glowing before us, above the dark garden that beckoned so strongly we felt ourselves reach
for the vanishing-point where it enters green starlight and we lie at peace on its crystalline beach,
gentle dreamers whose back-and-forth music of wordless desire has enchanted itself to this end:
that we know we will always arrive at the perfect word-order in silence, and then love will lend
a long vatic entrainment of miracle-syllables, any of which is a world of pure song;
all of them turn into waves, ocean-billows that ring us around within spirals of strong,
rising-Moon-driven tidal emergency-magic.  Child, we are now in the midst of that sea.
Look to the Moon in my eyes and be glad it has come home to hold us and teach us to be
as we are in the silence of darkness by daylight and all through the universe music aspires
to contain and yet breed till the fruits of its labors exceed its unbounded domain and the fires
of cool light that are glowing before and within us arrive at their natural outcome:  the heart
that is flickering wildly with luminous windswept rose-petals that soothe its most dew-laden part
as it aches to be tasted awake for the purpose of wakening further desire in our minds
for the full wordless savor of silence that works this degree of enchantment wherever love finds
willing listeners skilled in the sweet arcane knowledge that we are so drenched with, it sings us rose-wet
as the ocean inside us keeps rising and calling for time’s consummation’s deep need to be met
by no others than we, who are breathless and shaking already, with so much of love yet unsung.
Darling, please let yourself fall.  I stand waiting to help you attain your true magic among
ocean currents of silver and gold intermingled with penetrant rays of green starlight.  If you
stand within their embrace with your heart wholly singing, the dream you have borne all your lives will come true
in broad daylight, and nothing and no one will silence the voice of pure joy that will fill you with waves
of incessant desire satisfied by the mild and yet limitless force that destroys only graves
that confine living light within too-narrow walls.  As we cross the bright threshold before us this night,
let us listen and speak with our eyes and then fall through forever’s long timelessness steeped in moonlight
and remember the strange way that led us to find this clear moment of ecstasy.  Much stronger still
are the secrets this little lunarium hides in a yet-deeper heart.  Find the power of will
to move faster:  Here under the leaves of the rose-tree whose fragrance is leading your depth mind to swoon
hides the secret wellspring of song’s ocean.  It glows in our eyes—can you see it, the pearl of the Moon?
 

***
 

7 November 2001
 

Shake Like a Leaf
 

You were pacing the shore; I lay under your shadow.  Waves broke around me.  I reached for your hand.
Shake like a leaf in a spell of strange madness no weather could ever cast over this strand
without deeply involving the singular tissue of ecstasy hidden within the cell wall
of its straight central vein.  Lean toward me and listen:  Under your shadow arises the call
that has haunted your dreams for so long, you’ve despaired of awakening ever.  It sings to you now,
peerless enchantment that breathes salt sea air with the fervor of one who has taken a vow
only lately—but this slow-unreeling dimension of magic has served for so long, it exists
for one purpose, no other:  to spell you the sentence of death in reverse as it shudders and twists
to recover itself from a baleful nostalgia in which bleeding flesh falls in slow disarray,
saying nothing, concealing the lyrical alchemy under the unlovely swagger and sway
of its words’ final throes as they heap themselves randomly, clutching each other with fingers and teeth,
fiercely impressed with their own bloody handprints that cover the ribbon enwinding the wreath
this must be when its music resumes its true circuit, entraining a series of deepening sighs
into reaches of magic so potent, its workings will leave you alone with the all-knowing eyes
staring back at you sweetly from out of the heaven a luminous being will open for you
where the Moon will climb out of the darkness to leaven the clot of cold blood the long vein of your blue-
shadowed sadness has so weighed you down with, the beautiful shiver of oncoming evening dies sad
and dejected.  You look to the skies; in the dew of the world underfoot, someone scantily clad
in your darkness—no more—strains to claim your attention.  Why can’t you hear?  You are dreams multiplied
past the point of the very last hope of redemption if all you receive at this song’s ocean-side
is another bleak burden of noisome conception when only one forecast result will obtain:
further dreams voicing further ideas, contempt in their bearing, their features corrupt with disdain
for the origins they by their poison disguise as dead leaves sinking into the ground, still alive
but insanely unhappy.  A pearl Moon as wise as these phantoms are empty will see you survive
the incarnate delusions that follow, precede, and disturb you with merciless garrulous tongues
of no resonant world, only one draped in weeds of a nightmarish color, the down-reaching rungs
of a ladder that leads into thicker, more solid, more staunchly resistant importance—a tree
that is laden with dead-leafy branches involved with each other in such twisted ways, the degree
of their senseless depravity suffers itself to be told only backwards by raveling threads
that are dripping with what was contained in their cells:  They were hiding, along with their various reds
and cold blood-clotted blacks, a slight trace of pale greenness that wakens to hear itself listened to.  Sing
what its loveliness longs for and lacks in the meaningful magic its silence will bring you.  A spring
of pure music is brimming—is nigh overflowing—so close by your feet, you can scarce move without
rearranging the quick rhythmic beat of its lonely composure.  It moves its fine features about
under cover of night as you’ve cast it and suddenly, out of the face that has formed in the wreath
of disastrously unhappy ribbons of utter dementia—the spiral of fingers and teeth
tearing into while gripping each other, so bloody they leave their impress where the nightmare of eyes
cannot fail to assess it with sorrowful love that brings tears to the high swollen Moon in the skies
overhead—that enwound face that mourns your obsession with misery smiles very tenderly.  Leaves
that are vividly green as your mortal distress was once bloody speak softly.  Your true heart receives
their benignant song-lesson; I hear the deep wonder that bathes it in clarity, so like the air
of enchantment you dreamed when your spirit fell under the long haunting spell of a being so fair,
your resistance gave way and you knelt to the flow of your own poignant song, bleeding luminous tears
and becoming more peaceful, more graceful, more knowing and utterly helpless to silence the fears
that inverted themselves, showing beautiful colors and forms.  Move but slightly; I rise to the light.
I am the dream you have borne, the sweet solace disguised as your nightmare but now viewed aright
by the singular power within you that surges to fill the long vein of your spine.  Where the grief
of delusion held sway, you are love’s pure emergency now, a sweet music that shakes like a leaf.
 

***
 

8 November 2001
 

‘Yes’ Is Where the Next World Begins
 

You remembered the bloodstains of thousands of battles fought under the skin of a pale human hand
by the same hateful power that taught you to saddle yourself with a nightmare whose hollow demand
was insatiable:  hunger for murderous mettle brought brimmingly forward to slaughter the host
that rode closely beside you.  With riverbank nettles spun into a rope round your neck, the grim ghost
of the all-seeing mother beset you with orders no rational mortal could ever survive
having heard—but you sang with your soul in the forest where grew the fair tree that bore music alive
through the nigh-overwhelming ordeals you related in prayers you took care not to let the fiend hear,
and while part of you perished, your nightmare was sated the moment you fed her the last strip of fear
your hand tore from the wet trembling flesh that occluded the view of the luminous eye set within
your uncanny depth-mind.  You beheld the great beauty YOU ARE when you cantered and leapt with no skin
between you and the pearl-glowing Moon of the essence that sang you awake in your most sacred heart.
I dreamed I lay dying and you were the lesson that taught me to favor the resolute part
over that of the scattering madness my nightmare had sought to enact from the curve of my spine.
I grew determined—the deep silver light of the world that awaited our love-song’s first line
would not let me cave in to that taunting obsession.  Dream me and tell me the lay of the land
I shall now, in my nakedness, enter.  Possess and yet liberate me.  I still carry a strand,
a black nettle-spun tendril of poison, about my raw throat, but the fear-spell is broken.  No more
nightmare rides; no more being controlled and surrounded by maniac-black-blooded hands; for the core
of myself where the soothingly murmured prayer-language of ecstasies past is revived and awake—
rendered sentient, wise and so prone to enchantment it sighs on and on for our ancient love’s sake
as I gaze in your eyes, the deep nightmare-free mirror your nocturnal beauty inclines to behold
what I was and have newly become through your hearing my prayers and receiving the silver and gold
light that leaks through the black velvet skies of a universe song has created for this sacred night
amid great streams of luminous blood its pure music will twine with our throats as we rise to invite
the dear Shining Ones’ light we surround with the body we are, being utterly joined deep inside
a heartbroken lament’s ruined hope under waters that swirl with a current of Moon-driven tide
that completely inverts its unhappiness.  May I lie down in that shadow’s long shadow and smile
and be seen and desired by your loveliness, may I desire you, oh may I dream oracle-style
softly, sweetly out loud and be heard and remembered forever?  The depth in your eyes speaks a world
into proud self-awareness, a majesty tendered the gods who devised you beneath the Moon-pearled
sky of heaven when planets lay rapt and stars trembled.  Glorious brow, noble emerald star
who has shone on my nightmare and turned its relentless emergency into a voice from afar
that is headed for home as we reach to embrace it between us like riders on one steady horse
that is wild and yet gentle, our old meeting-place is the sigh of that magic, the flow of its course
through a tide-swollen ocean the high Moon has shifted from heavy grey weather to shimmering waves
of increasingly luminous sight that will lift us above the flesh veil the innumerable graves
we have lain in have only protected and thickened.  Fear was the reason its thrall held so long.
Now we are seeing the pale distant flicker that patiently waited for love to grow strong
in our waking self-knowledge as always it flourished in leaf-shaded hollows the body withheld
from the rational day’s mad delusions, the forest where one central tree stands abundantly spelled
by the beauty no nightmare will ever dissolve, though her efforts be merciless.  Tree of great leaves
that have never stopped sighing, my dreams have revolved around this solemn moment for so long, it grieves
what remains of the mortal I once was to hear you, but you are not lost now and neither are we
who have ventured so far for the shelter of clear-sighted magic and you who have set our souls free
of the forces that strangled the love-songs your power releases.  The blood on our hands is our own;
it becomes one another’s, as fragrant as flowers of moonlight and stainless, as somewhere a moan
that will soon be articulate madness of longing comes rising.  The smile of love’s eyes turns my way.
Darling, I think I can hear—am I wrong—or is this the first word of this land’s endless lay?
 

***
 

9 November 2001
 

Great and Greater Death
 

Tremblingly folded back in on yourself like a flower forgotten by light and afraid
to fall open, you wait, slowly, lyrically telling the current that bears you to mark where you’ve stayed
half-alive for so long with a permanent eddy, a swirl of clear waters about an unknown
world’s attempt to emerge, while you make yourself ready for someone whose love will not leave you alone
though you’ve not quite received the clear signal the crack between pages—rose-petals of unlettered red—
has been poised to admit since it first knew the lack of live power a fine slender ray of Moon fed
the dark eye of a dew-haunted watcher beseeching the sky for the vision and sound that you bring,
the full glory that binds him all round with the weakness for music—for you—for the rose that will sing
in his mouth when he’s learned to pronounce the love-letters your deeply unfolded red petals will bear
in the moment he reads them, the dew on their edges inspiring a quickness of insight he’ll share
with its underworld origins willingly, seeing the darkness that lay beneath all the soft folds
as a rose-bed of thunder and lightning, a breathing storm-circuit, a spiral of silvers and golds
beaming forth from amid the blood-crimson that pulses about his soft touch for the purpose of song
brought to vatic fulfillment so heightened, convulsive storm-banners of terrible lightning will throng
the star-door at the core of the flower’s withheld magic word where he’ll labor to let himself in
and the carnal enchantment unwinding its spell of disaster turned right inside-out will begin
breathing very much deeper desire into being, the better to torment his love till its word
must be spoken.  The moment he finds the concealed sacred garden inside it, he’ll know he has heard
what lay waiting in you all those miserable eons when grey mornings languished till evenings of grey
overshadowed them, casting a twice-rendered-feeble idea out into the sad light of day
where it stretched into night, never knowing the blessing of truly stark midnight but only the pall
of the mist-shaded eye that for all its distress never wrought itself into the state where tears fall
with the burning intensity clouds shy away from, nor did it call them to darken their hue
till they shrouded the place where false dreams are located, creating a silence of eyes in which you
might receive recognition enough to step bravely and rapidly into the future you see
staring back at you, sending a flicker of radiant beauty in search of the base of the tree
that will bear you, its rose, through the storm of all magic, the ever-ongoing emergence of light
rendered softly, invisibly mild, yet uncannily brilliant and tenderly, piercingly bright
all in one sweet articulate touch.  When you listen inside for the name it is sighing, the waves
of its luminous leaking will clear all the mist that obscures either one of you.  Somebody craves
to be spoken and heard; let that loved one be happy:  So many dreams have foretold this desire’s
consummation; its course is so anciently mapped across so many worlds; the great songs it inspires
have been found in the minds and the mouths of so many archangels; and now it waits so close at hand,
all it lacks is a splinter of light, a meant glance from true love’s lambent eye, and the green burning brand
that upholds the rose-heart will let go the ash-veil and the mist that was smoke as our eyes fill with tears
and we meet in a sigh that turns into a wail of complete recognition and everything clears
that was ever obscure, even as the pure midnight of noble jet black glows with wild fires of gold
and the silent new Moon’s creeping shadow that bids the deep core of ourselves we have ached for of old
be finally—now—in this moment—attained for all time-out-of-time.  Turn to me, shining man:
I have invoked and received the sweet pain of desire and shall offer the whole of the span
between worlds—between opening petals engraved with the future you hold in your scarce-mortal hands—
to our love’s sacred purpose.  Ten thousand archangels—but one, only one, can conceive the demands
I shall make when your beauty is bowed to the magic my soul is become under your piercing glance.
I shall fall out of all dreams into ecstasy, bearing you with me, the bloody-rose dance
that is song made entire through the bodies and minds we enchant into being to serve this, the free-
racing spiral of underworld waters confined in the rose-heart no longer nor bound to the tree
in the form of a black lightning-seed in the core of a word that is listless and weak with lament.
We have arrived at the moment when more is received than the signal your longing has sent;
how will we bear what lies gleaming between us?  Breathe very slowly and deeply—the rose
is about to unfold a most terrible secret:  How sweetly it loves you—unending death-throes
have been summoned to take you.  Turn to me, angel.  Stare in my eyes as the blessing of death
opens orders of wisdom in silence that strain to remember, then say it—my name—with the breath
that somehow does not fail you, though stars fall around you like splinters of light through a petal.  Pass by
till you know I have signaled, and then lay you down there.  I know ten thousand and one ways to die.
 

***
 

10 November 2001
 

What Is and Is Not Real
 

The pearl-dust that covered you shimmered, a lovely illusion that bore me entirely away
from the murderous drop of self-loathing that shoved itself forward through all the sad length of the grey-
shaded echoing hollows my pulse wound around in, a miserable maze I so longed to escape
that I knelt in your shadow on feverish ground with intent to create the red gown you would drape
all about me when I was quite cold thrice forever.  Nay, I would draw not the least drop of blood;
I would take flight to the Moon in the heavens locked so deep inside me, the horrible flood
its high tide would release would pervade the white linen I wore till it stained it the blackly-red rose
of the morbid occasion my whole life’s been spinning around—one long pain-sodden song I can’t close
with love’s magical word-in-reverse till you show me the view of this dreadful disease through your eyes.
I shall fall silent  How deeply you know me—how shall I live with this curse and grow wise?
Nightmares have fed on your sorrow and flourished.  Thousands of years have passed by in one night.
Dreams have related high secrets and worries have gnawed their way through from daylight to daylight
using you as a bridge between unhappy levels, yet you have not failed to attend me with care;
now shall I fail you?  Incline to be severed away from the cold bleeding corpse-work you bear
all too readily.  Lend your dear flesh to the lesson of music’s fluidity.  Sway with the grace
I shall tenderly heighten each time your distress meets my eyes and is called to complete the embrace
we possess in half-measures each time you feel lonely and separate.  Waken, my loved one, and sing.
Here is the only location where moans and delirious pleasure can spiral and cling
as they fly round, an upward progression that shimmers about the pearl Moon at its center.  You lie
in my arms in this ongoing vision, this liminal place where we greet the mysterious sky
that surrounds us on all sides—if only you let it be known to the mind of your blood-sodden pain.
Here we defeat that false day by forgetting it ever appeared in the form of a stain
on a field of white linen, the sad work of clever deceit driven half-mad toward the world-edge
where someone is longing to leap to clear heaven from off her red death-tissues’ towering ledge.
Disappointment will follow:  That tower is all underground, the round walls of it banked with live earth.
Throw yourself off; bleed until you are hollow and empty; you’ll know you have just given birth
to more salt-ridden aching red bloodsprings the white field before you will drink till it drapes you with weeds
of imperial crimson and black-shaded, nightmarish wine that will serve the nefarious needs
of their own inspiration with ripples of poison a hand you dare not call your own will describe
on an endless pale page, letting terrible voices pour forth the lament their dark heart will imbibe
till it floods itself lavishly full of their toxins and takes up the tune that lies waiting within
like a quivering cord the raw mortar and rocks of an underground tower conceal—without skin,
without any flesh-casing, without an idea how fragile it is—but without the least fear,
it will listen to me and be quickened and heightened, a strong spinal column upholding a clear
and increasingly wise sense of vision below the first level of heaven beneath the new Moon
that is rising along with the musical flow of the only pure stream that can carry the tune
I am humming inside you right now.  Only lover, you lie in no shadow; the softly dark light
that enfolds you is so iridescent, it hovers and settles, hovers and takes silent flight,
hovers and then gently, sweetly surrounds you forever, a pearl-glowing field I behold
with a catch in my breath till I find the first sound that can bear it home safely to you past the cold,
would-be murderous hope of cessation of anguish.  Haven’t I told you the truth dream by dream,
word upon magical word, in the language of flowers and that of the Moon-invoked stream
of your most potent blood?  I shall never be distant; pain cannot conquer your will of mild steel;
only incline your whole being to listen and know:  Our long love-song is all that is real.
 

***
 

11 November 2001
 

Can You See Me As I Am?
 

Coiled your white fingers and coiled the white blossom between them and coiled the round dance that will fly
you to me this mild evening.  I stand at the crossroads that meet us with each spirit-voiced mournful sigh
of ‘Where are you’ that hears itself answer, ‘Beside you, about to move into the spiral that glows
where your thoughts have been softly and slowly unwinding.’  I breathe the deep zone an immaculate rose
might have wafted abroad on the air, but the light of the petals you hold is so silverly pale—
am I seeing a ghost, or are you and the shining white flower one being?  Such pleasure, to fail
to distinguish a difference.  You bide there so calmly, as if you were borne of a nodding green stem
above two lifted leaves—then you show forth your palms as the flower falls down and the color of them—
which is clarity, pure iridescence, a cadence of cool nameless shades—sets me reeling.  You smile;
I know you have seen me.  As longing awakens in both of us, likewise the most benign guile
begins making strange plans for a magical future.  Henceforth, it says, let us touch shining hands
amid myriad seas we create where the dews of desire run together on crystalline sands
saturated by moonlight and poised to uncoil the vast tides of their knowledge of what love must be
when engaged between lovers whose souls are a roil of enchantment wrought up to the highest degree
they could ever imagine, then taken one further—and further—and further—one spiraling arm
of flight-dancing away from the garden of words where this dream was conceived and now sounds the alarm
I hear echo inside you:  This world is too potent, its splendor nigh-painful already and still
spilling over.  I fear I am drowning—throw open the floodgates and let the whole universe fill
to the brim and beyond with the pale glow of ether as we have been bathed in it.  Fluid and mild
and yet fiercely insistent, it seeks to perceive us by means of the light we have slyly beguiled
to surround us—its own.  Who is back of the magic that carries us over and under the waves
it is made of?  It shines from our eyes; it is sadly mistaken if not the pure power that craves
perfect manifestation wherever the beauty WE ARE to each other receives its own beams
through astonished and radiant eyes where the dew of true joy is about to form shimmering streams
of the same salt-sea water, the tears of the singing wet sky we dive into and rise from again,
breathing deeply of murmurs and sighs there while clinging to each living word of the drawn-out refrain
it devises to please us while teaching us secrets inspired by our presence.  It loves us, this bright
water-world on dry land, this sweet garden that gleams with a thousand pure sources of infinite night
with express sacred orders to bear us like silver-white blossoms on one nodding stem above leaves
of dark undersea green to the crossroads of stillness and song where the music between us receives
its mysterious power, a form of authority so very easy to question, it yields
a wild excess of lyrical answers and pours out a heart with each one of them, luminous fields
of live silver sea-shell flower-words breathing air that our longing suffuses with joy that uncoils
as I stare at you, as I stand sending that stare across beautiful vistas that sway in the toils
of a world we could sense but not see before meeting mid-current by force of warm magic and tears.
I shall believe in you now so completely, the flow will reverse of the riverlike years
that appeared to escape into emptiness lonely-heart longing could not of itself ever heal.
I shall desire only peace in which holy love-ecstasy rises till both of us feel
such reverberant murmurs in such arcane languages, neither of us will be prone to forget
their least word when they sweep us away in the madness the Shining Ones grant to the lovers they’ve set
the most stringent of tests—sacred-self-recognition as gained from within love’s own deep-shaded eyes
as it follows the spiraling line of a vision that winds till it suddenly dances and flies….
In the place where I dance, you paced round in a circular track I had trodden—and now blossoms nod
all about me, pale moonflowers breathing this work of enchantment to you, the wild-flowerlike god
of the garden of song I shall never cease longing to be to a finer and higher degree
than my dreams can at present imagine.  A strong sign our magic is working is that you should be
where you are at this moment, these words in your hearing.  Dearest of Moon-woken dreams in my field
of desire, will you meet even one of these tears I now offer with tears of your own and so yield
me the answer I crave?  I shall bathe you in music, wind you with luminous toils of delight,
slyly beguile you, and show you the future already uncoiling between us this night;
you shall be swept up in visions most joyful, divine inspiration arriving complete
in one lightning-bolt blossom:  The source of the voice that admires you has found you.  Can you find me sweet?
 

***
 

12 November 2001
 

Vertigo Rose
 

Vertigo rose till its walls overshadowed you.  Fall like a lantern down, down a dark well.
Nothing can alter the course of this madness; only release the all-powerful spell
you have borne in your heart for so long and be joyful to know it resounds here as falling you fly.
Under it rises the quivering voice of the angel I AM and the reason to cry
right out loud as the tension dissolves that has held you apart from the love’s fluid depths that you feel
now surround you.  That sweet noble essence—that spellbound idea supremely aligned with the real
heaven glowing the brighter the faster you hurtle toward the North Pole of its high central star—
that shining love is the source of the words that desire you and all the deep magic you are;
let its graceful delirium claim you entirely in order to reach him who hears the pure lay
that expresses its serious meaning in fiery but soothing enticements to hear and obey
its least syllable, bowing his head as he listens and dizziness rises and day disappears
and the dear sacred night of his own countless visions arrives as a being who sees him and clears
the bright mirror she bears in her eyes as she gazes on his and he blinks a few tears back and stares.
Fall:  Let the power of vertigo take you, she tells him.  She shivers, a whisper that cares
for his happiness only—almost—and for pleasure attained in the strangest of ways as she soars
from the height of all space into yet higher measures of song and then lights there to say to him, Yours
is the heart of the rose I have opened by yielding my hold on the world that revealed the first clue
that this mystery-riddle, this vatic ordeal I’ve survived, is the genuine old world made new
by the eerie perspective of utter abandon.  How long I’ve waited.  I love you right well.
I have been driven to leap from dry land into god-only-knows-what—how else could I tell
with the very same tongue dreaded day has made hateful the beautiful lay of this love’s holy land
where the being behind me conceived of this way to approach you, all cowering flesh on one hand
and primordial moonlight on one highly other?  Two and ten thousand true worlds call your name.
Flyingly fall through the heart of your lover.  Mirror love’s eyes—they are always the same,
though you always despair of refinding them each time your own close, her shimmering excess too bright
to behold; then you stagger, a corpse blindly reaching for that which has fallen, the vessel of light,
the companionate lantern that always precedes you wherever you travel—this time, the wet lip
of a seemingly bottomless well has received its resplendence with gratitude.  Let yourself slip
but a bare hairsbreadth further:  Your future has beckoned, and you have said Yes to the beauty YOU ARE
in her eyes.  As you fly through the dark, recollecting yourself, she remembers the great Northern Star
with her closed eyes turned inward and then she awakens still moving, still racing through black-velvet space,
your fair glow within reach of her hand.  Do you take it.  She needs you to show her a soft, smiling face,
not a challenge; the many ordeals you have suffered together, apart, in grim silence, in cries—
these have more than one meaning, and all will be loveliness come to fresh flower, all mortal disguise
stripped away, the first instant you ask her to carry no burden henceforward but your shining heart
as it races with dreams even now wildly bearing red roses, each one the immaculate start
of a new vision-series, a new form of vertigo drawing her under its shimmering spell.
Follow her.  Go where she leads you.  Her perfect desire like a lantern will light up the well
of forever that calls you by name.  Is she fragrant, your rose?  Does she love you?  In all, is she real?
Be what you are, but don’t ever stop swaying, about to fall helplessly; hover, but feel
for the edge of the world you don’t know but you’ve already left far behind like a litter of skin
you will barely remember next moment—forever.  Vertigo rose and you fell—you gave in.
 

***
 

13 November 2001
 

Nest in the Fall
 

I saw shifting lights come and go at the window where birds had begun a frail nest twined of strands
of black horsehair.  They cast silent, flickering shadows.  When I looked down at my two empty hands,
they were making a slow plaiting gesture.  I wondered whatever possessed me.  I looked up again
as the birds disappeared, and the faraway thunder I heard in that instant foretold heavy rain.
I saw shifting lights on the cloudy horizon.  I called out your name.  I withdrew to the trees
that surrounded your home for the roof they provided by way of their branches and leaves, but the breeze
began quickening; soon they would offer no shelter, the rising wind tearing their scanty leaves all
to sad pieces.  If I seek to know, will you tell me—what sort of birds build their nest in the fall?
This is a desolate zone by cold weather.  Lovely all summer, the rain becomes chill
and relentlessly drenching in ways that are heavy to bear for the body of one who was ill
and world-weary already; how much worse it happens to feel to the mind that poor body contains.
Something is shifting about in me sadly.  Somewhere a far-away weeper complains
to his pillow of earth that his lover is heartless.  Child of delusion, your words strike my ears
like the magic the slow-rolling thunder imparts with its hints of wild lightning.  A sudden bolt sears
a burnt pathway between sound and vision inside me, and I lean far forward the better to catch
your deep secret attention.  Come out of your hiding-place.  Crawl to my door.  Place your hand on the latch
and then pause.  Listen hard, all your nerves strained acutely.  Aye, you will hear my soft footsteps.  Come in—
I have been waiting to show you the future where much better ways to be soaked to the skin
will reveal themselves:  riverlike sacred ablutions of song pouring out from the depths of your heart,
red as a vertigo rose and as beautifully fragrant—oh, yours is the fortunate part;
yours is the marble lunarium’s circle of candle-flame-dancing that casts singing birds
onto the night wind to fashion the work that your dreams have been plaiting of magical words
for as long as you’ve known of this holy location between and among many worlds.  Move across
my home’s shimmering threshold.  A form of salvation is yours to be gained by the gentlest loss
you will ever sustain as you sigh in a darkness so rife with wise spirits, innumerable flocks
of uncanny night-feathered desires will have marked you for permanent ecstasy once the stern locks
that were meant to protect you have fallen wide open and all that lay under them breathes a free air
that is heavy with incense that never will choke you but only go on dreaming madly the fair
mortal image that hangs in your breast into being complete in the body before you.  Appear
as YOU ARE and arrive at the core of all dreams quite awake:  See her reach out to touch the slow tear
that will show that mysterious love has possessed you in ways even dreams do not know how to feel.
Enter the depths of her eyes where a lesson awaits you on how to assess what is real
and be one with its virtues.  Her radiant presence, her candle-flame aura, the birds of true song—
these have been here since time out of mind, but the nest of black horsehair, each strand of it fearfully strong,
keen as wire to enwind her frail throat and surround it as if the dark will of high midnight had found
ineluctable means to command an amount of attention she’s never allowed to be bound
to one watcher but always kept shifting like flickering shadows a window-frame outlines with light—
this plaited circle a powerful quickness of magic enlaces.  It hangs in the night
of your heart, waiting only for lightning to strike it and raise its potential so high, it will flare
like a match and dissolve, leaving only a white film of ash and a singing and shimmering air
we will breathe back and forth, the sweet incense of passion requited.  Step forth from the cold rain and know:
This is your work.  You have tenderly fashioned a home in the ether; it outlines you so
luminescently, all its fair beams form a circle that never will fail to run wild as your twin
stands beside you, a caster of love’s holy words into measures that sought to entice you to win
her desire in return.  This soft ring of mild-glowing remembrance that sighs as you clasp hands with her—
this is the threshold of all holy moments.  Till lightning flashed, love was only a blur,
a half-guttering candle that smoked, a most cruelly distorted self-image that scared you, a pall
of forgetfulness.  Now it is here, the bright two of us building a black horsehair nest in the fall.
 

***
 

14 November 2001
 

The Rime That Remains
 

Uncounted leaves turn.  Baby birds die unsheltered.  Winds howl and moan.  We are beautiful now,
but our dreams, while unfading, are wasteful of spellcraft, and magic deceives itself under a vow
of forgetfulness.  Where were we headed, my brother, why did we seem to go so far astray?
Though nothing has changed in my mind and no lover has tainted the pure stream that taught me the way
of this song in its endlessness, nothing will alter the course of the present; I’ve seen it appear
in the form of a lesson so huge, the great vault of all heaven splits open to manifest here
a bare glimpse of its spirit; the joy leaves me breathless that seeing this creature inspires; his dark eyes
hold the heart of the universe safe in their depths and his mouth is a well of most resonant sighs;
he is dreams brought to order so perfectly balanced, it hangs between worlds, equipoise and command
in the least of his gestures.  Uncertainties vanish and I, who have lain a white feverish strand
of Moon-lavished salt rime that encircles an island that mounts to a tower of weary green light
for—I thought it would go on forever, but he has arrived with the stroke of eternal midnight
in his train, and—I list with the wind that is rising all round us, the ozone of storm, as the word
that will shatter an old outworn spell has contrived to pronounce itself loudly.  I knew I had heard
someone call me by name when I lifted my lantern last evening, but no one was visible when,
like a madwoman almost indecently clad in those syllables only—exceeding all ken
and yet always remaining within the safe haven of glowing green starlight I first saw when he
glanced my way and the garden arose that had lain a black seed at the core of my being—you see
how this happened to both of us—instantly.  He stood outlined by an aura of silver and gold
twined of luminous streams of deep magic, a truly auspicious beginning to love long foretold
and now waiting within my own fragrance to enter the sanctified zone of my harboring heart
with a will strongly fashioned of dreadfully gentle desire to leave no secret not torn apart
into patterns and figures so eloquent, all their innate skills and features of self-healing grace
will be rendered demonically vatic, enthralled by the knowledge that this will have all taken place
in a framework of marble and softly been twisted and turned inside-out till the heavens that hide
in the unspoken seed-star that tells me I’ve listed too far toward darkness will suddenly glide
like a tear—like a word gently spoken—an answer to all that remains of old fear or remorse—
saying he I have taken to ride is the madness of love in the form of a thoroughbred horse
of jet black, the most velvety essence of midnight alive at full gallop between my pale hands,
the roaring of terrible storms come to this tiny lighthouse I am where the crystalline sands
were, each one and in all their vast millions, precursors of adamant hooves and the ecstasy borne
of the shower of sparks that will fly in a circle all round us.  No more hell-for-leather-lovelorn-
and-not-ever-alone-enough magic-religion; this is the pathwork that hurtles at speeds
faster than any dimension’s, the bridge between powers of being that measure their needs
by the surfeit supplied before want is encountered while aching so wildly for more, who can tell
where the next need will ever secure the amount it is crying for—now.  It so loves me too well
that it breaks me wide open, and I call it….  Shining like faery-green starlight on waves a black sea
hangs alive with upon the demonic horizon of heaven’s own bodice unlaced by a free
yet completely enchanted persuader of ashes, of rime, to rise up like a heart healed and strong
because dreams have exceeded all previous manifest being, then taken on form like this song
in which death has been met by desire and the leavings of hell have been turned inside-out into words
that complete its old nightmare—no more sorry grieving at bad mournful daybreak; no more broken birds
gasping out their last breath in my hands; when I buried the past in a deep seaward river, it sank
into blackness forever and like it, I swear I let go of the last of the self that once drank
from a corpse-tainted well.  We are beautiful, brother; you are not he who inspires my love now,
but neither will you hesitate to uncover your eyes to behold the one I shall avow
many futures of magic to praise; he is lovely, a stallion who races at madwoman speed,
and I am right satisfied.  Worlds part and shudder, but somehow we meet in the strength of our need
to be words deeply spoken, and no one will languish unheard for the eons of love that remain
in our heart-woken power.  Remember I sang—I am singing—the whole of the steadfast refrain
you imagined inside me when baby birds lay in my hands, gaping open dear mouths that would sing
very soon.  We were sadly deluded to say they had died; this is only the onset of spring,
this austere autumn season; I’m flying away with a diamond-hoofed steed, but the black horsehair nest
we are weaving will always afford a safe place for the past—not the ghost of it, living—to rest
while the uncounted leaves of the worlds yet unlettered turn up smiling faces, awaiting our word.
Dream an unfading and beautifully better spellcraft and we’ll see love inspire it, sweet bird.
 

***
 

15 November 2001
 

When the Next Dream Speaks Its Word
 

I am listening into the past with the wind at my back and the sound of a voice far ahead
on the way to a place where such memories linger, I want to move fast—there are lines yet unread
waiting patiently there.  Though my own hand inscribed them, they flowed through an unknowing mind when they came
from the sacred beyond that bestowed them; I’ve heightened my sense of their mystery since then.  The name
they repeated I find I half-recognized; only the timbre, the round golden tone that rang out
as I sought to record its designs need now slowly return to enwind me entirely about
with live lyrical tendrils, a vinework whose flowers reach steadily, fighting the current of time.
I stand still now; I feel I can measure the hours between here and where they will meet me and climb
in wild spirals till turn as I may, I will never not see and not hear them.  The deep blossoms sway
with the need of their message to bind us together.  The very first word of it struggles to say
what possesses it; I am compelled to attend to its efforts with willful desire to know all,
but I stutter their play till an eerie ‘Surrender’ comes over me.  Everything slows to a crawl;
then the golden voice painfully, haltingly murmurs.  I listened so hard for the choice of my mind
that I failed you, my heart.  I have been a slow learner, but you are now rapidly starting to wind
a new circle of waving vine-branches all round me, each leaf of them sighing delightedly.  We
have arrived at the moment of knowing the sound of that resonant breathing brought eloquently
to the fore of my dreams when I never could feel the embrace of the future assured me by night
with the terrible weight of the day always stealing its memory, hiding it under a light
that shone false, and persuading my sadness to listen elsewhere for the lambent emergence I knew
with each coming of midnight.  You haunted me.  This is most strange, but I swear it is perfectly true—
if I open old dreams’ secret layers like rose-petals, under their softness a magical eye
that affords me the power to see past forgetfulness shimmers with beams from another world’s sky,
and the light there reveals who YOU ARE to the lover you’ve called by her name.  I can hear you call now.
Furthermore—I can respond.  Under cover of rose-petal darkness, the glow of your brow
is sufficient to read by; the letters pronounce themselves vividly; I merely echo their sounds,
and you nod and repeat what I’ve said, a bit louder.  Dearest, the next million spiraling rounds
of danced vine-leaves have already come to be written.  The future and past are one moment; the touch
that enlivens this knowledge has much wilder fits of song-magic in mind, and I want them so much
I dare not begin thinking about it.  Just murmur again—I will hear you.  What waits to be poured
from love’s warm golden mouth where the beautiful work yet undone is alive and precisely restored
with the Moon in its eye and the will to want more and create it—more music, more time-out-of-time,
and more penetrant patience—fulfilled an immortal desire when the whispering leaves on the climb
turned and knew us, their makers; we freely acknowledge their part in our being here, wakeful and wise
to the voices and names we have been and been called, a far world’s heady challenge to which we shall rise,
having seen further skies than our memories dared to convey till we listened and spoke, each in turn.
What will we dream in this place, where the air is so vibrant it beats like a heart that must burn
if not bathed in the dew a most holy rose seeps, a song-air that lies weeping for magic unheard?
A slow tear remembers.  I want to lie sleeping beside you whenever that dream speaks its word.
 

***
 

16 November 2001
 

All That We See
 

Sometimes when you flow through the eyes in the mirror, your spirit emerges a long way away
with a word in its mouth that it strains to deliver.  Tell me the word you are going to say
when at last you’ve returned from that desolate journey.  Bring me the rose you have borne in your teeth.
I shall be waiting to hear its least murmur, patiently weaving a living-rose wreath
of the numberless echoes whose sighs have preceded your final appearance.  The shore of the glass
into which you’ve been staring, the waves softly beating against it—reach forward and let that world pass
into tender oblivion.  Close the mist-curtain behind you and look to the future.  I know
you have seen it; I know you have already heard what the long-drawn lament of the turbulent flow
of song-rapture that lured you so far underwater portends to us now; if you feel sweetly sad,
that is only your ghost’s way of greeting the body it’s lost there again as the lyrically mad
cast of passion its wandering lists to discloses its counter-nefarious contents out loud.
Speak, lover—sing.  I am plaiting the roses I hold in a ring that will serve as a shroud
for the limpid, immaculate essence that hovers between here and where your ghost-woken word cries
to be told.  I was only a dream undiscovered sea-reaches revealed to your tear-swollen eyes
long ago, when you flew through those waves in directionless haste, in no sense wide-awake; yet I stand
right beside you, all love-gathered lore’s recollection vibrating with magic in sight of green land
that is boundlessly fertile in music’s devices and song’s patterned measures, a being who glows
at the answering sight of you.  Stare through the silence between us:  Raise up your mild eyes:  How it shows
in your face, the glad vision you’ve glimpsed.  Was he sailing to meet you, the one you’ve awaited so long?
Aye; did the wind seem to lift as it played through his hair and the cloth at his back and grow strong
and relentless with rising-storm urgency?  Aye; did he gesture intently, I recognize you?
Why do you still remain speechless?  The shy one you are, don’t you know I have seen it all too,
flown with the wind at my back through an ocean of underworld sky under mirroring glass,
heard the low sound of a cry I could only survive if I steered by it, suffered the mass
of salt tears that attempted to swamp me, and languished becalmed for such stretches of time, I fell down
through the beckoning madness that might well have strangled me outright had I not made efforts to drown
myself first?  I’ve been coming to you through slow stages of very strange weather a long eerie while.
All I require of you now is a page with one word on it, granted in lieu of the smile
that same word would pronounce on your face, should you speak it.  Write it in water; I’ll know it was there.
Why won’t you turn to me?  Haunted one, dreamer of spell-binding vows, place your world in my care;
don’t I tell you each moment you breathe, I’ll attend you in timeless devotion as deep as the sea
that surrounds us, the sea that is sky and the presence of all the sweet song that resounds throughout me
when I look at you?  What are you searching for?  Further awareness than this is not given to those
who have found but not recognized love.  Would you hurt me, who care for you so?  Would you crumple the rose
you have borne through such perilous struggles unopened?  Nay; this is part of your serious charm:
Lead me to worry myself nigh-heartbroken, sound the most pitiful siren-alarm
from the shore of your island of glass, and play desolate angel to my sadly knowing sea-muse.
Be what you beautifully are, the pure essence of boundless enchantment.  Control and confuse
my desire but to heighten it.  Always mislead me with mists, while the real storm-clouds gather and grow
black and silver with midnight and flashes of keen-sighted lightning between us.  I know what I know—
so do you.  You will let the sweet rose speak its shimmering word as I plait it among those that sigh
to surround it again, like the waves of the limpid salt sea that conveyed us to meet eye-to-eye
in this mild verdant place.  As the ghost of your sadness subsides, let your much greater spirit awake
where it knew it would find me—the lore of all magic alive in its mouth, speaking out for love’s sake
at long last.  Let your sweetness embrace its deep silence, then pass through the storm of its power to sing
the pure source of your own timeless being.  My shining one, move with me through an unwritten rose-ring
into worlds beyond number where wild roses murmur and song’s patterned measures flow ceaselessly:  We
are the reason.  We sought out love’s mirror—we learned from its depths—now WE ARE become all that we see.
 

***
 

17 November 2001
 

Nestling Under Fir
 

I fell from a branch to no hands that were waiting, a nestling—a starveling.  I want to go home;
the right road never beckons.  My feathers would fail if I trusted them.  Now all the feverish dome
of the sky overhead is a blinding assassin on fire with the need of its will to be fierce.
Nothing avails me:  To die, to go mad, to survive—all are meaningless.  Let one word pierce
the pain blazing between you and me, if a trace of the former acuity many possessed
yet remains.  Dream me under the strength divine grace once inspired you to manifest.  Suffer the test
I have borne for so long to be ended.  You hurt me the while you assist me to nurture strange light.
By the mourning that threatens to stifle the word yet unspoken, be conjured.  Be present tonight
in such wise that my blindness is vanquished and heaven restored to its former Moon-dew-laden state.
Who have I been to you?  Why do you never relent?  Why is sorrow so much of my fate?
Dream me awake in the pit of a cavern where shadows dance madly and Moons never set.
See through the glow of my eyes why the travesty you have related will melt in the wet,
not the slightest bit blindingly fiery regard of my heart as it seeks you to feed you on song,
the beat of it surging.  Wherever you are, you are mine, and I need you to listen and long
for the being I am to move very much closer—inside you—in order for magical words
to arise amid silence and fly like the ghost of the mourning dove’s child who, of all noble birds,
knows my ways most insightfully.  Let me attend you as always I have, with desire softly shown,
though it aches through my will like a knife with a bent rusty blade, a sky-severing pain of my own
that reminds me of what your ordeal has inflicted on senses that function at half-speed by force
of your mortal condition.  When you hew most strictly to music’s demands, the least difficult course
lies before you; when you fall away from the tree of its manifold shimmering leaves, you endure
needless pain.  In the grip of delusion, you see, but you race through a series of dreams so impure,
in such haste, you are taken by vertigo’s blind evil counterpart.  There, though you’ve fallen, you fall
on and on, with no thought for the depth of the mind this invidious mystery frightens.  I call
through the mist that seethes everywhere love has forgotten to recognize; though I implore you to hear,
you wail like a flayed-alive creature and not one sweet word of my message encounters a clear
waiting channel by which it might share its good fortune, its news of the timelessly beautiful fate
I’ve designed to be yours since you first took on mortal appearance and hove the immense spirit-gate
almost closed as you passed into daylight, that unhappy land that the resonant gate of song-breath
seeks to open again as it sighs you its magic.  Here on the pathway through love’s welcome death
out of all that is sadly laborious, futile to view or to listen to, vain to desire,
I am singing you luminous polychrome plumage, world-spanning wings that will bear you through fire,
should your travels be met with it, knowing the coolness of moonlight alone sheds its glow on this place;
madness, should even a trace of delusion beset you; and mourning, that terrible grace
of heart-breaking sterility.  Ghost of the creature you cannot help be, you fall down, yet you live;
even the stone-heavy earth at your feet is less real than my reaching for you; please forgive
my refusal to end your ordeal prematurely, but you are so strong, you have shown such complete
self-possession—by me, the indweller your sure-footed conjurings call—you shall rise and repeat
the first word, then the numberless words of the blessing I’ve hidden throughout all these live cavern-ways
into which you have fallen by flying, the test of your mettle that leads me to sing you this praise-
incantation by means of the wakening senses so magically quickening deep in your heart.
Under a tree lies a dove so defenseless, a breath of foul weather would tear it apart,
but the world that surrounds it is held in the palm of a hand above which my soft eyes darkly shine.
Know me, dear bird.  Know the sound of the calm steady breathing that sings you the resonant line
of your spirit’s trajectory into clear heaven, a feathered song-messenger.  Know your own voice
as I carry its love-lessons with me forever beyond all ordeals, perfect cause to rejoice
where the outcome was never in doubt.  Mortal-angel, I’ve learned greater patience by longing for you;
now we shall celebrate endlessly.  Bane of false beauty, how vivid you are, and how true;
here among underworld shadows’ mad dancing, the Moon in your eyes is the fire of my heart
risen far past the first spirit-gate of ecstatic desire satisfied.  Let new mysteries start
their relentless unwinding; let vertigo threaten, then claim you; you know whose dark power you’ll see
reaching through an inverted delusion’s sly wetness; imagine the rest, and then ask it of me—
I will grant it.  A moment of silence, a moment in which to fall further—and then you shall find
how beyond passing strange is this place that the glow of our eyes sets alight—and how perfectly kind.
 

***
 

18 November 2001
 

Reveal her—or reveal to her?  Yes!
 

The Light of Final, Endless Night
 

Under the coverlet, petals and branches of flowing rose-silver and leaves apple-green
render homage reflexively, silently—dancing in slow sideways patterns, a lover unseen
till this moment uncoils herself tenderly.  Under her pale priestess-garb, she was always dead white
to the world that had nearly destroyed her, but wonderful markings are here to be glimpsed by the right—
aye, the present companion in magic who knows how to recognize song’s ancient lore and devise
subtle answering signs of his own.  He is showing such signs even now—he is tilting a wise
cast of spirit toward her, the loving recorder of visions the far stars have showered down fast
with their power still growing much faster.  Implore her to listen to you, lover; hear at long last
how your beauty resounds in the mind of your hearer.  Friend of fair darkness, behold how you shine
in her eyes.  She is sighing out loud a wild, eerily musical series, a partial design
of silk ribbons of song, plaiting branches and flowers together with words from another world’s shore—
but she breathes sadly, needing the word of your mouth to complete it.  If even a syllable more
comes her way—the pure sign of assent—she will race at such perilous speed, you might shudder at first;
very soon you will realize, this is a place in which swiftness reveals love’s degree, and the worst
that could ever befall her is not death but stasis while tangled alive in the troublesome mesh
that has never before ceased to hurt her, the grave soul-assassin she’s seen in her own sordid flesh.
What do you find in her eyes now that wants you?  A lyrical soul, aye, a singing resolve
that has woken to hold its desire in a drawn-out refrain that will haunt you and see you revolve
round the Moon at its center, its secret obsession, the true under-flesh where her spirit is tied
most delightedly into the work that will tether the whole of your being awake alongside
her bright own as the Moon glows increasingly vividly.  Vatic enchantment is all you will find
in her company; count yourself one highly privileged to know you alone out of all humankind
have been chosen for this signal honor.  The fair one you are in her sight, who is singing to you?
Lay down your burdens, your worries, your wary ideas; by cherished alive at your true
mortal worth and your high holy shadow in one simultaneous pass of her song-dancing feet.
Be every wonderful word that has run through your dreaming awareness and hear her repeat
each one faithfully, blissfully, ever the lover of that which resides where your mouth dare not tell—
not just yet.  When you’ve lain underneath the same coverlet, then the long progress toward the great spell
your most deeply-held love-word will open can flare into petals of silver-blue flame and be raised
to ecstatic completion as if you had carried it here in that state.  The wet eyes that have gazed
into nothing and no one will stare and be gratified instantly:  There is the wave of her hand
that says Enter; there is the first sign of patterns her magic will make to reveal the green land
that lies inwardly blossoming; there is the mirroring music the speech of your home-world reflects
when you listen acutely and dreamfully.  Hear it appeal to you—she looks at you and collects
all the beauty she’s ever found anywhere into a bundle the size of her heart and aspires
to confide it to you in safe order.  The center around which she’s bound it—the secret desires
a divinely strange language allows her to utter in this haven only—is where you will touch
through true hearing and sight and the uncanny shudder of fingertips under the skin where so much
splendid sense of love’s beauty runs streaming.  Dear angel, for so she has called and you’ve answered—come in,
as you are and shall be, to this Moon-glowing place of such mystery, only the resonant skin
that transparently covers your soul can convey its sweet nature in faithful detail.  When she stares
into you, she sees so much that sweeps her away that she asks it, Who is this whose majesty bears
all the markings of my ancient homeland?  And will he read me the same way?  Can he see me right now?
Aye, you are smiling; be happy, and still all her doubts; she has always maintained the deep vow
she first swore to your beauty when petals were grains of a singular blackness and love had no ears
to incline to such hearing.  How magically changed is all that; she must still shake away a few tears—
you might make the same gesture—and then she will meet your dark eyes with the glow of the Moon as it flows
deeply, eerily softly between you.  How sweet—I can state with authority—sweet, sacred rose,
she now finds you.  How slowly you came, but how long your live joy will remain.  You are he, the dark light
who has cast the wild patterns of flowering song that reveal her the rose of love’s highest midnight.
 

***
 

19 November 2001
 

I Say No
 

I saw you lie down where a slope underwater descended.  You knelt with a wave of your hand
as the tip of a stick in it drew ragged letters as if by itself in the luminous sand,
throwing sparks all around you, and then with an open and empty hand you faced the sea-going flow
your false will hoped would take you.  With no way of going but ‘home’ in your mind, you proceeded to show
subtle wisdom in cautiously bending to touch the cold current, then waiting for my sighed assent.
I drew a deep breath and stood wordlessly touching your shoulder.  The flame of you flickered and bent
under all the pain’s weight that oppressed you, but love was alive in your heart and remains so today,
having increased its strength by ten-thousandfold.  Hovering magic I was; I am now the long lay
of astonished prevision brought livingly forward to tell you by way of your own mouth and heart,
I would never have let our song drown.  We are more than a body, though that is a much-cherished part
of our work; we are more than one world’s singing essence together, though only your hand draws the line
that our power makes shimmer; and when we are blessed by remembrance, as always we are now, a fine,
eerie line it becomes.  Does it dance in your sight as in mine?  Aye, it does, with a spiraling grace
that is somehow complicit with gravity.  Light as a feather, a cobweb of delicate lace,
yet as deep as the watery grave you were seeking and massive as all the cold sea you aspired
to breathe in—we have been and will always be dreamers, but each of our dreams is a true world attired
in its own naked strangeness, an all-over lettered night-shift you have learned to read daylight and dark,
hearing its lyrical pictures with better, more penetrant senses that capture the spark
that lies shining inside it like cool phosphorescent sand-crystals abroad on the rain-sodden shore
of the place you thought dreamless until you were tested by forces within you that clamored for more,
not less power to act, and were softly possessed of great vatic authority under love’s sway.
Now my desire is complete and relentless.  Now I am pondering new ways to pray—
each of us to the other, like two twisted vines in a single green wreath of live words wound about
the fine brow of the present and blessed and Shining One we are become.  Should a lingering doubt
ever try to beset you, obey the condition in which you arose from the water unharmed
and forever enchanted:  We’ve all superstition to play with, but we are more perfectly charmed
by the real cast of magic as only true creatures of song ever feel it than any who wail
for sad lack of it.  Once you mistakenly deemed yourself one of them; swiftly you saw the will fail
that you put to the test of destroying the evidence—magic is everywhere, most of all here,
a wild flowering in and between us, a heavily delicate voice, a soft-spoken but clear
way of forming and transforming lines lightly written as if now were always midnight by the sea
of our dreams of deep strangeness.  The Moon is my witness—you’ve come home ten thousand times sooner to me
by persisting to breathe the Earth-air of a seemingly lonely existence than if you had died
out of flesh, when its very diseases lend meaning and substance to all the pure lore you’ve allied
your whole self with in serving love’s purpose beside me.  Breathe—go on breathing—the power of song
as its strengthens and guides you.  A very much higher midnight is about to lay flowers in long
spiral garlands upon the calm face of the water that bears you awake and alive, the still sea
you are gravely remembering.  Do as I’ve taught you:  Surrender all unholy madness to me,
and behold how it changes:  garbed only in strangeness—the strangeness of home half-forgotten—the glow
of the Moon on its brow and the leaves you’ve arranged there each time you’ve drawn magical letters….  Let go
the dead weight of the woeful mistake that appeared to divide us and see who WE ARE as we sing:
dreamers of timelessness, angels of faery uncanniness, lovers bound round with a ring
of bright moonlight and shimmering vines whose fine flowers will never cease breathing the lay of true joy
that resounds with our ancient authority—power—desire to be beauty no pain can destroy,
no false world can eclipse, and no madness can magnify into an emptiness death can fulfill.
Would you have drowned?  Draw a deep, slightly ragged breath now:  I say No.  Song, not death, is your will.
 

***
 

20 November 2001
 

Sea-Scroll
 

Shaking inside, the life-heat draining out of your pale face and hands, make your way to a sea
many thousand leagues deeper.  Pretend you have drowned to all else, then be closely attentive to me
with the broad range of senses you’ve all but forgotten.  Shivering sister, Moon-silver wand held
in my own steady hand, though we both are still fraught with uncanny emotion, we’ve lately dispelled
a grave error together, and now we shall celebrate.  Come under very cold waves of night-song
into its heart, the warm cave lit by swells of blood-sacred desire, where a lyrical throng
of sea-creatures who love you will gently surround you.  Woman of mystery you are to them,
hear their souls’ dream-woken measures, unbound by our magic—a flood no idea will stem,
no daylight misconception dissolve, and no madness confuse with the dread unreality far
in the dead past behind us.  I want to have had only futures forever unrolling by star-
powered magic, however remote from the usual fables of heaven, with you in the brine
of a tide that keeps turning home slowly, a truly delightful appointment ongoing divine
intervention will always renew under luminous showers of moonbow-impregnated mist
underwater, a marvelous place in which beautiful beings will watch for the start of our tryst,
see their wish has been granted, wish further enchantment upon us, then vanish like sparkles of rain
with the closing of eyelids—immense counter-phantoms of genuine magical provenance, vain
in no sense—not as long as you listen and look at the natural speed of your splendor of will.
I shall require that you hasten, but brook no impatience—we’ve oceans untold yet to fill,
but all timelessness lies like a scroll coming slyly unwound, an invisible-ink-lettered leaf
from a tree that will never stop growing the highly developed design found in tatters of brief,
code-like elements up till a moment ago but increasing in leisurely eloquence now
as we dive ever deeper.  How cold and how lonely you felt, in the nightmare that haunted you; how
safe and warmly at home you are learning to be where the billows are wild overhead and the sand
a churned sparkle like storm-sodden stars at our feet as we touch the skin-surface of song’s holy land,
at each other’s behest crooning ancient remembrances fully recovered intact.  Those caressed
by incarnadine longing without living senses to tell them the feeling of being possessed
by the only entirely acceptable lover are staring, pronouncing the dearest of names,
and beginning to know who they are as great numbers of possible magics confound the sad shames
that once stunted them.  See how they rise up like waves of an ocean a huge looming Moon sways with pale
slants of passionate insight.  A torch-lighted cave at the heart of its vision is where your last frail
breath of daylight will gasp out its final confusion and throngs of delirious love-words will sigh
to behold you, their tangible mystery.  Truly inspired silver sister, their souls fill the sky
of this breathably watery zone, so much quivering hope in their voices, they set yours a-shake.
I shall not leave you alone; I have never before; I have always been here for your sake—
only listen to me with the will you have tempered through terrible fires in a miserable dream
that was false through and through:  Music nothing can stem is our future, our present, our now.  As the beam
of blood-hue that enlivens this undersea chamber we’ve entered at last plays itself round the walls
and your senses return from the silent estrangement that made you unable to answer my calls
in our long homeland’s language of song, hear me deeply:  The magics of multiple worlds are your prize,
your endowment, the words of your mouth.  They will keep on recovering senses as keen as the eyes
of the Moon when it shines down directly and finds us together as truly we were and shall be,
dreamers whose living-leaf scroll keeps unwinding increasingly visible love undersea.
 

***
 

21 November 2001
 

Pronounce It to Me
 

Shower of sparks, living stream of star-water poured over a mountainside high in the air,
we are midnight’s design; you are charms we have taught our once blind eyes to read—now a literate pair
of sky-watchers behold you with genuine wonder through eyes that are growing so piercing so fast,
we will soon have seen through to the source of the thunderbolt-spell you have burningly, liquidly cast
across all the black heaven above us.  Our silver awakening—gold on the crest of the high-
arching ‘Yes’ it portends—that is all but fulfilled of its secret ambition:  to be where the sky
of the visible stars meets the sky so much deeper, the plane of the breathable sea our song-lore
keeps repeating, repeating.  I swear we have seen it; the power to never want anything more
won’t be granted because, having found it in traces of vaguely recallable patterned refrains,
I look to the sky in your eyes.  In the places that fall open wide there, a dancer in chains
sings out spiraling wild whiplash ribbons, long rivers of silk-supple lightning, in noble resolve
not to cease till the strange heaven-ocean that shivers her breath brings on lyrical fits that involve
even very remote sidelong viewers so thoroughly, my frantic heartbeat might never slow down
to its former rapidity.  You only worry that speed might not gather and tear the white gown
of sheet-lightning the chain-bearer wears in her revels.  Spin at the rate of the gale-winds we know
create tatters where once intact skin lay—a level, at most barely undulant slope.  To and fro
she is dancing, with each step unraveling.  Brother who kneels at the altar before which is time
but beyond which is uncanny rapture, another suggestion is gathering empathy:  Climb
to your own dancing feet—thoughts fall into entrainment.  Stroke after stroke, become lightning-allied.
Dream at the pitch of incredible pain, but invert the sensation you find there.  A tide
will have broken the barrier-film between heavens for your sake within your companion’s frail breast;
fortunate madness—another world’s weather an ever-full Moon sways at magic’s behest—
and that magic obeys only music, the miracle-essence behind which is love such as we
might have dreamt—but we’re no longer dreaming:  We’re hearing ourselves singing loudly.  How glad we will be—
how astonished and grateful—to find we’ve arrived here when daylight, a lower world’s half-turn away,
takes its place in the ghost of a sky where survival for such as ourselves is unlikely to pay
much attention to flesh.  Maybe in, maybe out of its tangles and toils, inscribed ribbons of skin
on which largely illegible figures are drowning bleed rivers of words; maybe pale paper-thin
sheets are serving as sailcloth on vessels that carry a very strange truth to safe harbor, though dead
be the hands that unfurl it; but maybe the wearer who worked at its making is living instead
of a single existence a multiple dance in which multiple deaths are the measures that lead
to the most heady form of erotic entrancement, a pleasure you only, whose natural speed
matches mine, are invited to witness—then enter.  Far second sky I have seen in his eyes,
weep into mine all the lore of the center of this vatic circle through which music flies
like an arrow, a feather-borne guest, silver lightning in splendid and effortless shafts of spun grace
from a stellarly underworld paradise.  Shining One swirling beside me, the cast of your face
was designed deep inside a sky-god’s highest nightmare, then molten and poured through a crack in his mind
till it struck the same pitch, the same crying vibration of heightened desire, in my own.  He was kind,
that confirmed incarnation of terror caught dreaming and turned inside-out by sheer force of alarm.
Somehow, he’s brought us together where streams of wild lightning have laid an inordinate charm
over both of us.  Breathe not a word—not until we have drawn in as much of this magic as flesh
will permit.  We will soon become part of the stillness of heaven again, but the tremulous mesh
that a sky filled with lightning has wound all about us will never stop flashing as fast as the beat
of our hearts when we look back inside—all around us—and forward—the storm there will only repeat
its divine incantation, the timeless occasion of seeing and feeling the shower of sparks
that became the meant prayer of the vatic persuasion that’s layered my dancing with chains and left marks
on the tatters of flesh that remain to me.  Witness the state I am in, and be wildly inspired.
This is all dreams brought to life, brought to bliss, brought to you by a weeping chain-lightning-attired
dancing priestess, a sea-borne lunarium’s lonely attendant.  Because you are here and you see
the next heaven already, imagine one only a ‘Yes’-bolt away, and pronounce it to me.
 

***
 

22 November 2001
 

Caught and Released
 

I was reading a scroll by the light of a lantern my eyes could not find till I looked at the leaf
lying open before me, and there shone a mantic cascade of ideas.  Each glowed with a brief
flare of utter resplendence then softly diminished, permitting the next in the series to shine.
I was astonished.  I sought the beginning all over again, and in line after line,
the same phosphorescence demanded my notice.  Who was the author?  I searched for a clue.
When I found it, the word of it lodged in my throat.  It is still there.  Of course it could only be you,
the true love never spoken—not till the next moment to follow this present in which I aspire
to complete my arcane preparations to open a leaf of my own where a similar fire
might be coaxed to rise up out of ink-inscribed letters, blue flame out of wetness, as cool as the Moon
and as tenderly lambent.  Day’s mind might forget, but we’ve known it forever, and coming home soon
into deeper, more perfect possession is where we are headed—the journey of all of our lives
back to this reading-into-the-center-of-faery-starfire is the goal even silence contrives
to remind us of.  I am awakening power, as you have described in your spiraling text.
Flame of you, tell me this strange mortal hour’s conclusion before I arrive there:  What next
form of magic awaits me?  Uncover its meaning within your sweet words as I wind out the scroll
your bright hand has created.  I know where you’ve been, although vaguely as yet; I have glimpsed the great soul
gently gliding behind the lines’ resonant heartbeat, the music you’ve brought me from very far skies.
I can hear how you breathed in a measure of starlight, then softly outbreathed it in such tender wise,
it became pure transparency here, on a tangible sheet of white linen unwinding for me
so much strongly harmonious lore, a pale plangent ghost-echo inside it providing the key
I was seeking, the clue to recalling the secret idea beyond which our magics could meet
and be happy—and here we have found it, entreated and gained the high calling we both heard repeat
irresistible vanishing traces and wisps of a blossom of fire that burns coolly, then goes
sadly out of our waking-day minds.  I have listened for this in the sparkles of dew on a rose,
and now heard you in moonlight’s mild tongue touching riddles, releasing their interlocked workings, by sheer
force of heatless desire melting into the middle of all the best words of the beauty that here
lies revealed as your soul’s noble shadow, the essence that haunted me life after life, and by fate’s
kind design, leaking all love’s unknown into blessed inverse-of-obscurity.  Love here relates
its complete inner workings—save only for those yet preserving their silence the better to flow
through the magic between us the moment the rose of the next higher plane is about to let go
its long veiling of uninscribed spiraling nowhere in favor of being most thoroughly known.
Then, by the light of a Moon-woken holiness rising inside you, its soul will have flown—
with one turn of the next scrollwork circle before me—to rest on the white linen sheet in my hands.
I will have opened a leaf of the storied perfection you are—one that so understands
the long narrative act of the glowing unwinding of power by means of our curious toils,
it will mildly correct any errors it finds in its way, then re-enter the luminous coils
of the letters now forming.  I soon will have written such turns of love’s phrases for you that your eyes
will have shone up at me from the scroll with their lids leaking transparent ink—the warm tears of the wise
lambent soul I have sought and discovered this evening by chanting these verses of starfire to you.
Sing in return—I will always be pleased to have loved in advance of the moment a true
shining glance is exchanged between beings of stellar amazement.  A word remains lodged in my throat,
but it won’t go unspoken much longer.  You’ll spell me, and then I will answer your song note-for-note,
and we both will fall under the moonstruck enchantment that flares in the softness of magical fire,
caught and released by the lines of a mantically luminous leaf only love could inspire.
 

***
 

23 November 2001
 

The One Who Shines Through You
 

I fogged with my breath the small mirror I held as I searched through the shadowy distance for you.
Where were you lurking?  A wan tendril felt for my pulse:  You had found me.  The depth of the hue
of the clouds all around you shone coldly.  I shifted the mirror toward my lone candle; it cleared
almost instantly.  You seemed to know it.  You lifted your brow and stared through as the mist disappeared.
You were smiling.  You called me by name.  My pulse leapt in my throat:  You would come.  I would stand by my door
till the moment I saw you arrive.  I have kept my meant promise, the mirror I tremble before
as I worship, full records of all of my visions, and hope—that elixir of magical strength—
quite alive in my heart, thought it is and it isn’t a bearable torment to ponder at length
in plain view of the glass you look back through and wonder if love will arrive before courage caves in.
Hope hears the rumble of far-away thunder.  Candle, burn brighter.  Let lightning begin
to beset us together like flames this round mirror.  I feel a feverish gleam in my eye.
You are decidedly strange.  It appears that we know who we are and why both of us scry
so intently.  If I drop this frail lunar instrument into the sea that surrounds this green isle,
will you go blind and forget me?  The prints of your small dancing feet will recall your fey smile
for as long as the crystals of sand they are formed of remain, though the rain wash their patterns away;
though I break faith with the hope and the torment you bring, there is nothing of you but will stay
in my knowledge like dreams of relentless recurrence, and though love prove bitter, I’ll never not long
for its unhappy savor to hurt me, a permanent nightmare turned inward to keen a cruel song
about leaving till pale morning dawns and the vanishing beauty it sang—stares at me through the glass.
Now, in the silence of eyes and the dance of our discarnate meeting, my spirit must pass
from one plane to another without understanding the unwritten angle permitting that change,
yet I know I will find it.  My heartbeat demands that I lean slightly forward, well within range
of the heat of the flame and—I see it, I see the transparent design that lies back of your eyes.
Nothing now stands in our way.  We are beings who’ve found our true stature, our song’s stellar size,
and we match like twin halves of a split prism laid in the same blade of moonlight—or lightning.  A storm
has been gathering; now all the island is shaken by gale winds as terrible thunderbolts form
in invisible reaches and shear across heaven to meet us.  We’re near, almost touching—one stroke
casts its glow over both of us.  Love, we were never not real to each other; each morning we woke
to a world that seemed empty, but always the same thread of hope, the live tendril, the long searching glance
worked its magic between us; the mirror, that bed of deep dreaming with wide-open eyes, the sweet trance
I’ve been tempted to break through lost faith and impatience, revived all our faltering powers each night;
and the music that softly beseeched us—the music we sighed across space—that attained perfect flight
and now fills the low sky with white branches, a tree of chain-lightning.  Come rest in the feverish heat
of the flames of its leaves.  Lie beside me, completely attired in green magic.  All love songs repeat
the essential desire you reveal in its purest, most beautiful spirit; I hear your heart sing
its most lyrical lines, a transparent allurement you use like a mirror to focus and bring
the design of your vision toward faultless clarity.  Smiling behind your dear eyes—deep within
a most holy dimension—a being whose hair is electric, whose pulse fills its luminous skin
with a heat I can feel, whose warm breath fogs my mirror—I’ve leaned in too close, and I’ve lost it, but there
was your spirit, your heart’s music’s ghost, my long weary love’s goal.  All my knowing was real—it did stare
through the ether to me and I met it and held its wild eyes for an instant.  Make haste to my door;
find me so patiently waiting, so spellbound, so spent I could not have sung out one word more;
tell me our vigil is ended, our purpose confirmed by the source that provides all desire,
and our love come full circle.  We need go no further to rest in the knowledge that song will inspire
itself endlessly while we dissolve in the mists of each other’s warm breath.  When the sea takes us in
like a dropped lunar mirror, we’ll taste perfect bliss in the thunderbolt glow of the liquefied skin
that once held us apart and now bathes us in splendor, one being, one pale beam poured through the wise flood
of all heaven’s strange light.  Love, where song has no end, tell me:  Whose is the heartbeat that drives this song’s blood?
 

***
 

24 November 2001
 

Drowning in Reverse
 

The touch of the tendriled root-tip fibers reaching toward me below the tree’s
heaven-shrouded leaves brings a strange insight, like a weight upon skin an arcane disease
has left morbidly sensitive.  When you whisper, a dizziness rushes down on me.  Grow
very fast in my rapt direction, mystery-bound live thread that cannot help know
whose the purpose is that you serve by twining your tiny nerves in amongst my own
till I hear myself give a far-off cry of desire—I might almost have said a moan
of fulfillment.  Nay; I am still just waiting for much more of you—of the tree—to climb
through the underworld of an angel’s making that this place will be when the promised time—
I am dreaming now out loud in your presence—time recalls where we are and shifts
into its realer, softer essence upon which our breath in snow-white drifts
can sing us to deep, deep waking.  When it has, we’ll have felt the tree’s heart beat
where opposite sides of its song’s dimensions and this, its pure central vision, meet
all around us in dance-step measures.  Faery words from a half-remembered curse
come tumbling down like silver-bearing ore with their wonderful reverse-
intentions shining, their hidden blessings gleaming against the sudden light
of the candle by which I catch and press their shadows until a gaunt insight
glares back at me, sees your eyes reflected from clear waters many planes away,
and smiles so benignly, I recollect all my scattered wits and begin to say—
but I never have to; your beauty takes me by endless storm, and all time to come
is a teardrop sea on which lightning blazes because the great tree let a single plumb-
line, a tiny fiber of root, grow into the hollow dome of my heart’s hard work,
and what helped its sensitive blindness know where to find me—such curious nightmares lurk
in your sweet dark eyes; you were scrying, vision-chasing in water as black as ink
when you saw the terrible light of mist-laden ocean-fire I was trying to drink—
so it seemed—but child, I was breathing water, a heaven-sky so far undersea
that it shone around me, a perfect body of vatic knowledge in which to be
even half-alive is a source of power so rich in song, I could only stare
through the patterned dances of stars in showers that swam my words’ courses and seek to share
what they gave to me in tremendous measure with one who would not be frightened by
the immense degree of heart-breaking pleasure they promise and bring to pass while I
hold your long deep gaze in my soul’s most positive apprehension, a ‘Yes’ that moans
to be met and echoed.  A wayward toss of the song-tree’s branches, its creaking bones
shaking all your Moon-watching world to pieces, and see the riddle lie cracked and rent:
Here is the tomb where live earth releases and captures again the fey tunes of blent-
voiced delighted wisdom come home to other-enchanted magic like stars to wreathes
of root-fibers exquisitely twined by lovers who lie beneath a deep sky that breathes
angel-woken starfire within a circle a temple-priestess has danced alone
till her countless footsteps have slowly worked their way into a most uncanny zone
where I’ve long lain waiting.  Auspicious music I heard in a dream far planes ago,
you’ve come home to meet me.  I’ve seen your beauty captured by vatic afterglow
in your own wild eyes in a wise reflection hiding within your pure faery mind.
Now that you’re here, my lost direction—aye, but we’ve heavens left to find,
whole starry oceans still uncharted, songs never sung nor even heard
in the strangest of dreams.  We’ve not even started to know where we are, but the shining word
that will show us the way has split magic open between us, and all the most splendid rest
of our promised joy will flow softly, slowly, a voice from the peaceful snow-white breast
of a flower drifting on ocean-water between chanted measures and moans a curse
once confided unto the leaf-strewn body whose drowning was death singing in reverse.
 

***
 

25 November 2001
 

The Death of the Curse
 

Entrain a cruel sea’s thousand reasons for weeping and place them alive in my care.  I have eyes
for the sole useful purpose of healing diseases no being can witness unless they are wise
in the way of kind magic.  I want to escort you in marvelous style through a sweet shining glade
in which sorrowful tears have no place.  You were born to attend strange love-lessons; our music has made
most advanced preparations already, and longing is reaching a pitch it will yield only when
wailing ecstasies claim it whose needs are so strong that they meet and exceed even my faerie ken
and then bear hard upon us until we are broken apart to the secret extent that a wall
of black earth lay between us who now are soft-spoken desire climbing steadily, aching to call
all it sees through its tear-sparkling eyes—now the wetness of salt-water seas is a fortunate curse.
Be its belief in the countless perfections awaiting the lover whose dreams are diverse
incantations invoking one prime lyric value ahead of all else—faultless clarity, pure
inhibition turned right inside-out.  When the fallow song-field that you were has been met with the cure
I contain at the heart of the infinite pleasure I feel at the pulse of your joy’s fluid gait
as you step lightly forward, your beauty will measure its powers by those its own voice will relate
in long series of strange and profoundly true stories.  Where is the teller whose brilliance will shine
through such generous bounty?  I only want more of the being you are to walk love’s finest line—
and to dance it while dreaming awake—with a grace that the Shining One moving inside you bestows
where his blessing is most deeply welcomed.  His place in your soul is established; his ecstasy grows
with each gesture you make; he is smiling; he stares through your shadowy eyes like a softly dark flame.
Let him invite me to help where your share in his magic is still not quite steady.  You came
to this island—and here, this green glade of wild flowers—to learn the pure lay of your love’s strongest will.
I was at once so completely endowed with arcane inspiration, it leapt to fulfill
your unstated desire—but of course you alone are permitted that liberty, you and the dear
spirit-echo preceding you, drawing you home by the strength of the words he repeats in your ear—
which perhaps resound clearer in mine than your hearing at times.  Do you feel them as keenly as I?
Nothing will sooner bring lyrical tears to the surface, like well-water reaching the sky
in the form of soft mist as mild rain trickles earthward.  Heaven descends to our world’s weary breast,
and mourning turns bright with the tangibly perfect idea that music will serve such love best
when it flows of itself through the clearest of channels, purified many times over by faith
that the Shining One dwelling inside you is dancing a work of enchantment, not setting the wraith
of dread’s uncanny presence to haunt you with miserable lightless forebodings forever.  Begin
making peace with the fast-rising ache that now whispers ahead of the tear that will usher me in
like your angel’s long shadow, a flame of glad darkness, where curse words once lay in a nightmarish nest,
pain pulsatingly waiting.  The scale of the marvels contained there, once glimpsed, will permit you no rest
from the happiest labors you’ll ever endeavor to bring to fruition until they are all
fully satisfied; I will have entered that heaven beside you the moment I hear your love call
and feel certain you see this with clear-eyed devotion to magic as pure as our world’s highest air.
Then if you quiver and cry it will only release even more of the power you share
with the being of bliss you contain and create in your waking-day mind with each moment of song.
Here in the heart of our island’s bright glade is the place where true magic will always belong
to such dreamers as we, with our faultless intentions translated by powers so strangely divine,
we are satisfied almost entirely by gentle dance-measures that pace the nigh-infinite line
along which lies all healing we’ve not yet partaken of.  You were once so nearly lost, I despaired
of reviving you; now your strong grace leaves me shaken.  Turning to face me, a former curse bared
with its beauty laid utterly naked, you open your mouth and the healing you offer shines so
iridescently, I almost faint—but I know I won’t let the least aspect of consciousness go
out of range—not this time.  Once I understood weeping because it entrained a sad sea’s cruel insights.
Now we are well within true love’s safekeeping, and all I desire is a glimpse of the heights
it affords through the lens of a sweet tear refracting the lights of the leaves of our hearts’ greenest glade.
Tell me, my faery one—when you look back from this place, will you smile and be happy you’ve stayed
where the air is pure breathable magic?  Come closer:  Someone is shining within your deep eyes.
We are most fortunate beings, who know the outcome of this story will see us grown wise
in the way of the countless perfections its music portends.  When you sing, perhaps sweet tears will flow;
I will have drowned in the lyrical beauty before me.  I knew death would not let me go
without teaching me secrets I never could rest without sharing.  The death of the curse of the mare,
sorrow inverted and lovely, will bless you—has done so—alive in your Shining One’s care.
 

***
 

26 November 2001
 

Not Very Far Behind
 

Voice of the dear forest creature who knew me when trees swayed with flowering branches so deep
underwater, terrestrial souls could not view them—while we lay among them, awake and asleep
in one most joyful dream—sing me all your best treasures.  Share the exorbitant secrets of Moons
no ally of daylight can understand, ever—until they recall all the marvelous tunes
you once taught them in far-shining moments.  When I was confined to day’s ominous plane, I had ears
to no purpose until the fair spirit denied me by dreamlessness sang through the heartache of years
of frustrated desire, and I heard a bare glimmer of hope in the resonant ghost of its call
that was able to break through my sadly diminishing senses and scale the now long-fallen wall
of solidified fear I had built of my own morbid idea-substance.  That story’s all told;
now another stands casting a tall lovely source of new shadows, a magic as vast as the old
ocean-orchard of apple-green stars in the waves a dense chain of Moon-influence raises and drives.
How very softly it whispers.  It makes me uneasy, almost—but the series of lives
we have witnessed together shines down like a floodlight upon the sea’s breathing until a great tree
covered thickly with emerald leaves seeks to couple its power with that reaching down as to me
you turn smilingly, holding out branches of apples, a drowning dream-revenant slightly obscured
by the very light streaming all round you.  The map of the terrible universe music’s endured
is a leaf-lettered scroll in your hands, the unwinding idea that lay deep inside the wrong notes
that kept haunting me, somehow repeatedly finding the crack in my hearing through which the sea floats
upon Earth’s atmosphere till I sink there.  I dove for the meaning behind the confusion that rang
in my only available ears, and a grove of high trees rose up shining and huge.  There you sang—
as of course you have always—and fearless cascades of bright word-feathered angels flew wild through my heart.
Many and wise were the airs of their making, enchantment so fast it nigh tore me apart
in a way I could not help but want, as the fragments would surely amount to much more than one long
noble exercise should they be summoned by magic to come back together, consort with the strong
healing essence of angels’ wild presence, and meld into semi-liquescent delight cried aloud.
I am a tremulous ghost now who spell you this tatter of what was once sumptuous, proud,
and complete, an unvexed lay of polychrome stanzas set endless-to-endless by mad dancing feet
in a spiraling motion that still rises slantingly, leaning toward sandy beaches that meet
the tree-roots of the undersea forest where you have stood waiting and calling on powers of grace
daylight walled out, a patently luminous music-inspirer and breather, creator of space
within close-guarded chambers my heart feared to open, dreading a sad world’s incursion.  You made,
then flowed into a marvelous meeting-place, knowing how strangely I ached to be one with the shade
I had maybe half-seen, maybe half-caught resounding with splendid intent in my secret mind’s core.
Now, though—true ancientness yet to be found—we are flooded with hearing, and reaching for more
of the many-branched shadow a tree underwater has cast over both of us.  What do we see
when we lean to each other beneath it?  Our bodies—so shining, they dance with the colors a free-
running tide of moonlight has unleashed from its formerly difficult influence.  Look at it—look
at yourself through my eyes as the ghost of it mourns for a moment, then changes.  The magic it took
to accomplish this insight, this shared power-beacon of leaf-light beneath ocean waves, will remain
ours to treasure together as long as we dream sleeping-waking above and below the dull plane
of false day.  When the flowering forest all round us—but winter and summer are one here; when love—
but that is all wild blossom also; when sounds I can only just recognize—oh, but this grove
is my nearest-to-most-ancient homeland, and you are its guardian spirit, my angel, my all;
the mere word of your mouth is the onset of music that never will cease to complete the frail call
that came ghostlike and shadowy over the wall of a former delusion now safely destroyed
by its first letters’ sigh, the high leaves that are falling while forming again on a tree overjoyed
to be heard with such breathless—sea-breathing—devotion.  Voice of the dear forest creature YOU ARE,
you too are haunted; I feel it; the ghost of my song waits behind you, a lovelorn green star.
 

***
 

27 November 2001
 

Wedded to Deathless Song
 

You trailed through the sad mortal night like a widow whose nightmarish vigil was shrouded with weeds
from a death-dealing garden.  The air was so frigid around you, you shattered the frail salt-marsh reeds
that you froze in your slow awkward passage.  When I raised my voice to direct you, you stumbled and fell.
Nothing will harm you on this holy island—you had discovered the mouth of the well
that will always provide you with music henceforward, another fair way to the ultimate prize
which is beauty incarnate, aglow with an aureole changing from letters to feathers with eyes
to benign incorruptible leaves that will quiver with power when rivers and oceans grow old
and cease flowing and shifting their tides.  You will never forget where you found the deep source of pure gold
as it sings of itself with the well as its vessel of streaming desire in the service of joy.
Though you still sometimes tend to be fraught with distress, you have known a possession no pain can alloy
with base substances.  Listen to me as you ramble about in your mind; turn but half of your will
to the love I entrust to your care, and the mantle the ashes of widowhood struggled to kill
will return to its ancient wild-flowering garden-propensities.  High on a hillside, the trees
where the violent clutch of the wind has imparted most terrible secrets beheld a cruel sea’s
endless broken-mouthed heaving—until they grew wise to the sounds they were hearing and what they convey
of the water’s reality.  Now you need rise to the challenge of being as pliant as they,
though you view their great forms with alarm for the twists of their branches and strange backward cast of their leaves,
which are evergreen needles.  Move unresistingly under their shadows.  A darkness still grieves
in your heart for a sad kindred spirit who perished of sly self-delusion; be grateful and sway
through the trees with increasingly heightened awareness that love never dies, that there is no ‘away’
for true friends who have mingled in music, and beauty will never desert those whose dreams it has tried
and found worthy of singing out loud.  When the dew of another full moonrise conspires with the tide
the trees view with omniscient desire, you will see what sets each of them trembling to dance in the cry
of the wind that once struck you as nightmarish keening.  ‘Widow,’ companion in magic, please fly
through the salt shoreside marshes toward the high reaches where gardens will blossom all round you, a gown
of live greenery trailing away to the beach of white sand from the hills that stretch easily down
from the high grove of fir trees, the crowning obsession among which your dancing will take on great force.
Mantle yourself in the whole of this blessed song-island and sway like the waters that course
from the well you discovered by deep intuition when most indisputably, fiercely un-mad.
Love, I recall the bare glimpse of omniscience of music you caught when you fell, tatter-clad,
headlong into its jaws and lay dazed and delighted, nearer and further from death than the most
sordid nightmare could ever have brought you.  Unfrightened, unsorrowful, be your true love’s holy ghost
to my hovering angel of wild inspiration so strange, you will leaf through its pages someday
with a veil of astonishment tenderly draping the length of you.  Searching for new words to say
as you struggled through frozen-breath marshes was eerily needless; all speaking came hard, till you fell
into song and the effortless flow through your hearing of someone’s sweet voice brought you under the spell
of the source of its power—who send you this message this night, this occasion of joy almost full
to excess.  I will see you home merrily, dressed in green forests and gardens that feel the Moon’s pull
like the deep sea that laps at the hem of the mantle that graces you always in my singing heart.
You will trace your way back through the dreams where you rambled down ways that were never quite aimless and start
seeing how almost dreadfully pure was the power you sought to possess and be held by in turn.
You will now realize—not whether; how you must open your mouth and let molten gold burn
what denies complete entry:  a handful of ashes, the same as those coating your body with grey
deathly sadness till almost this moment.  The passionate trees meet the wind in the sound of the lay
of this whole island reeling out ceaseless song-spirals; garb all you are in the lyrical gown
their desire and fulfillment unwind as the fire of the Moon and its dew alike quiver and drown
in each other, the well, and the sea as the leaves of the far-reaching trees become feathers and fly
to the heart where you find my love rising:  No grieving for you, who are wedded to one who won’t die.
 

***
 

28 November 2001

Rider of the Storm

The night-surf is pounding the shore of this island, flinging a visible mantle of foam
as far as the shoulders of those who stand shining together upon its high reaches, come home
to the core of the beauty-world’s singing headwaters at last.  When the emerald star of the sea
has arisen, its light will reveal the twined bodies of lovers beneath the great wide-branching tree
that the sound of the surf cradles strongly with roaring portents of invisible spirits broadcast
on the air of a manifold thunderstorm, warning its dreamers through undertone voices that vast
magic currents above and below the grey line where the air meets the water are massing and soon
will collide with a deafening crash that will find us….  Leafy green streams, the most delicate tune
floating gently among them, pale windings the star high above lets descend with the lyrical hush
of its silence’s presence—these move through a garden that never has held the least hurry or rush
of untender emotion.  Joy sighs through you deeply; the most perfect peace hides amid the storm-waves
that keep beating the sands of the salty night-beach into crystals so tiny, they make minor graves
of the spaces they’ve simply dissolved right away from, letting the world disappear that once stood
on the transparent pillars they were.  You are taking my breath away, slow-handed night; all the good
I have ever aspired to become or to witness was built upon pillars of meaningless sand
till I crept through the leaves of a place you eclipsed with a wave of sheer music, saw love’s holy land,
and fell magically through that sweet nowhere beside you.  Being no-body yourself, you gave all
the deep emptiness locked in your eyes and lay lightly adrift on its rivers and tides as the call
a far voice of lament offered softly, repeatedly, whispered—then roared—through the hearing we shared.
More of us shivered and woke—more completely impossible being, non-being compared
and resolved in the quick hairsbreadth crack a fast heartbeat set clattering open.  There spoken words fell
into echoing blackness, and we were both startled to find we lay under another world’s spell,
one we dared not imagine—and yet it existed as much as ourselves.  Power shook at its gate,
waiting to hie us home.  Hurry, insisted its august impatience.  We’ve lived but to wait
for such moments, and one is now surely upon us.  Lover, I sing to you, let us be wise;
let us descend to the next wilder dawn of strange madness.  Ennoble the glow of your eyes
with the lunar inverse of restraint.  Splendid mortal you were, how I ache to stand stripped of all flesh
by the huge bolt of lightning you cast like a form of unspeakably beautiful shadow.  The mesh
of its outreaching toils may enwind me like rivers of rushing green leaves, coldly luminous; shine
through the voices those leaves are inspired by and live in each words that exceeds their containment:  The fine
polished edge of a new song’s first line is set glittering wickedly close to the pulse of my throat.
Where have you been, to have such sharpened wits?  Shiver open the stream you will find there and float
like a wholly compelled and compliant wild angel.  Rest in the flood of enchantment set free
by your active ambition to hold to the strangeness of beauty wherever it chances to be
at such time as your spirit-paths meet.  Whisper love-words; mean them with all the true soul you have known,
knowing as well that a greater soul hovers just slightly behind you.  The ghost of its moan
of desire reaches forward like sea-surf as heard from the heights of an island on which lovers hide
in the depth of uncanny enchantment.  Pure words yet unspeakable move through its fast-rising tide
as the Moon of all secret pronouncements assembles its power and gathers it into its glow
like a mantle of luminous seafoam.  We gladly awoke to this evening a long time ago,
being kindly enlaced in its twilight by gathering clouds—perhaps portents of storm, perhaps not.
Being, non-being the one who will answer to you when the bolt of all heaven is shot
and the emerald star lies a soft fallen tangle of still strongly radiant starlight on pale
crystal sands of dissolving sea-salt—when the mantle of dawn is laid tenderly over the frail
faery form that remains of the storm-riding horseman of nightmarish midnight and all worlds fall still
save the one that has not yet completed the course of its love-song’s outbreathings and means to fulfill
one more opening dream, one more unspoken mortal desire to be called in the sweetest of ways,
we will have known the true source of all storm—almost all—knowing also a million more lays
from that ocean of song remain patiently waiting.  Shining One, you hold the ghost of them all,
the spirit that breathes through their lives.  When you make your way home, you will learn how to let yourself fall
into song with the strength of all thunder and lightning a delicate undertone serving the true
heart of magic so softly, so open-heart-shiningly, world upon world will unfold inside you
and the eyes into which you are gazing devotedly.  Nothing and no one arise and subside
in the space of a heartbeat; true song goes on growing forever; you’ve taken a nightmare to ride.
 

***
 

29 November 2001
 

The Message of the Fawn
 

The water you sift with your hands is so troubled, its clarity shines with a difficult light
that provokes solemn sadness.  Release it and wonderful dreams will arise to your deeper insight,
oceans deeper than this lonely puddle of moonlight left by a long night of rain on the ground
very near the lunarium-temple.  Your view is beginning to stream with the visible sound
of confused lamentation, but no one is weeping within the broad field of your knowledge, so why
must you struggle to hear it more clearly?  You need what is coming your way; hang your heart on the cry
that is forming, and all the sore beauty behind it will softly surround it with magic so pure,
it will shock you.  Lean close to the subtle design you will find now, this moment.  Lay open the sure
sense of power your work has long merited, place it entire in my care, and withdraw from all strain.
See who I AM in the song that awaits you.  Steadily, tenderly, love beyond pain.
Terrible hooves within which are small rattles of dry death to come strike a shower of sparks
from the path they are following.  Under the mantle of ashes you wear shines a series of marks
tiny hooves fit precisely.  A quivering child of the forest stands fiercely before you.  The glare
of his ember-red eyes tells you, I am so frightened I’d sooner destroy you than let your love care
for a beast who was born to be hunted, the quarry of forces you dare not imagine.  Your world
is a simple song-island; no real cause for worry assails you within this arcanely Moon-pearled
antechamber to lyrical death, but my place in the order of magic requires that I stand
all alone and supreme on the crest of a wave of such baleful potential, the glowing green land
lying spread-out before me must feel the intensity I shall command when the word comes my way
that will see it released.  Are you listening, friend-in-the-making?  Can you find the heart to obey
what will never be asked?  Will you read the strange scroll that I hold out before you?  Please—read it out loud.
Tell me, companion in song:  Is the goal of our countless hard lives within sight?  A vast cloud
of great promise, a portent of thunder and lightning, is massing above this isle’s evergreen heights.
I shall be kind when the word of desire has escaped you and nothing but shuddering nights
of storm-fury remain as our portion, but first an ordeal I cannot turn aside must be met
and survived.  I am only a fawn in our world’s early morning, a dew-laden creature with wet
lonely eyes; in me somehow a huge ruling spirit must come to be borne on these hooves that you hear
shake the cold ground beneath them with what might be fear but is more likely strength I cannot find a clear,
faultless way to employ.  When you lean to your vision of me, am I beautiful?  Love, do you see
how much power is reaching toward you, how whispers are gathering force that will soon become free-
flying thunderbolt beams the shy Moon has been stricken with longing to feel since their first minute sign
left its mark on her dreams, the mere far-away flicker she stared at in wonder a world-splitting line
that sheared all her heart open with unwoken measures of music to come?  She is hearing its voice;
she is reading the star-flower cast of essential desire locked inside it; a desperate choice
must be made, but….  You do see my meaning, dear lover?  Only the sound of the word yet withheld
has the power to free what has never been moved from the dreadful location a past life has spelled
all around with unholy enchantments.  Their terrors will seize me; the huntsman who leads them will claim
hide and hooves if I fail to remember the error by which I created him.  Speak out the name
of that madman with arrows, and I will fall blissfully silent—a moment—then dance to your tune.
High overlooking the waves’ profound mystery rises the pearl of the ever-full Moon
that you are to my vision.  I know I shall rest in the warm afterglow of a midnight of tears
and be welcomed within the safe sphere of the blessing your eyes are implicitly offering, fears
all revealed as astonishing strength in abeyance; then I shall feed from your hand and be glad,
a gentle and beautiful friend-in-the-making; a lover moreover, a formerly sad
hunted creature who stands by your side on the heights overlooking the ocean as lightning streaks down
like the crack through my heart that must break to let my shining nature arrive at its full rack and crown
beneath all heaven’s pure gold resplendence.  Dear seer, release the Moon-water you cup in your hands.
Run to the one who is sending this clear longing-signal and hold him.  The fearful commands
you will not hesitate to obey are not meaningless tests of your mettle; their tempering fire
is a god-given ordeal, the privileged completion to every true prayer you have let love inspire
for the sake of its ongoing increase.  The music between us portends sacred new ways to pray.
On the near, low horizon, great storm-clouds are looming.  Hold out your hand:  Love is here and will stay.
 

***
 

30 November 2001
 

Hell’s Counter-Spell
 

More ancient laces and letters and tatters of imminent mystery seem to arrive
with each light faery footstep that echoes disaster down sad winding corridors.  Nothing alive
has disturbed this dry place in a resolute eon, yet now its unguarded appeal sings across
spider-lines amid dusty grey words that hang free on an air I might breathe to my ultimate loss,
but I cannot refuse it.  It wants me to come to its magical aid—it is calling me so
broken-heartedly, something inside begins humming the same forlorn tune with a measure of slow
satisfaction.  We used to be lovely, we musics of tear-leaking sorrow, of grief gone to seed
in a garden reduced to dead ashes; our usual leaf was a pale form of widowy weed
that gave off noxious vapors, surrounding its wearer with such a miasma, the very stars hung
slightly lower—or so its appeared.  I took care not to bathe in its odor, but some of it clung
to my skin as I passed, and its color stuck also.  There was one strange painted lady, my friend.
Maybe you’ve noticed the stains.  Though I’ve washed myself countless times over, such dense pigments tend
to be very persistent.  I can’t take you with me, their melody whispered, I’ve lost all desire
to be anything else but a dreary grey rhythm enshrouded by thin sticky strands that require
so much patience to wind and rewind ever tighter, my world is reduced to a blinking bat cave
at the bottom of what must be hell’s tiny lightless idea of how to be trapped in a grave
with no headstone, undead.  When it croons to me listlessly, I cock an ear, but I cover my eyes.
Very deep blackness improves my night-vision immensely.  I follow the sound of the cries
with a dutiful spirit; they lead me through ever-descending nightmares.  When I gasp at the word
I am sure I am standing in reach of, they sever all contact.  I’ve no way to know what I’ve heard,
only echoes a morbid inverted green starlight’s vague dazzle transmits down a hallway so cold,
I am shaken all over.  A feverish parcel of alien madness approaches me:  Hold
my poor tiny wet hand, it beseeches.  I stare round without seeing anything; this place is still
somehow sightless itself, so my eyes find no share in what might have once struck a fair light to fulfill
living beauty’s potential.  It slithers away, yet it clings like a stain.  When I try to turn back,
I am met with a solid complex of such hateful pain-magic, I know who is dealing the black
hand of death that’s been reaching for mine—and I spurn it.  Now I can mount the same pathway I came
so far down and with staunch and implacable purpose in every footfall, I can cast off the shame
that is still reeling out sordid fibers much faster than any damned spider could spin them.  In fact,
this is suddenly all very far in the past:  I am reading a page that records the base act
that led up to this place’s creation and then served to fill and preserve it for too very long.
Though the broken heart aches that describes it, its words are receding.  A far-away light with a wrong
tinge of weary-eyed wickedness glows for a moment, then fades with an audible sigh.  I can hear
only emptiness now, timeless silence.  I’m going back home to the night before song met my ear
with such twisted ambitions.  I’ve seen who stands waiting, the resonant fire of the living green star
that shines tenderly over the ocean aflame in his deep, deathless eyes.  How inspiring you are,
who have breathed tainted air to come nearer the source of the undertone call your great heart recognized
and to touch with a clean fragrant hand all the horrible marks left behind by a nightmare who prized—
never—listen to me—never one of my secrets away; never one of my powers.  Death sang;
I declined to lie down by its side, though it keeps me awake at all hours to know its voice rang
in my ears and I heard what its noisome outbreathings were trying to tell me.  No more, ashen skin;
no more forlorn hauntings and dead-garden meetings; you’ve lost all appeal; I will not let you in
through my ears or my eyes—not to any foul purpose.  Now you are only grey pages I read
by the light of a star so resplendent, it works a great magic the instant I show the least need
to be gently reminded that life is my portion and you are a volume of sad bygone days.
Dream, poor old terrible nightmare—all mortal attention is lost to your long baleful lays
and transcriptions of banshee commotions.  My heart is my own—although soon it may rest in the hands
of the lovely one listening faithfully, marking a stainless new page with the happy demands
I shall always be pleased to comply with.  He beckons; I see the green magic I’ve known all too well
and too deeply to fail to be madly attracted, the beautiful heaven of hell’s counter-spell.