AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

November 2003
 
 

1 November 2003
 

The Words Set Free
 

You swam on a warm tide of shadowy moonlight
deep under seawater where salt lilies swayed
in a star-scented breeze that was peacefully lucid
while open-eyed beauty’s soft calling arrayed
rows of tenderly drawn living letters that danced of
themselves through the thoughts a lost mind in you moved
to the sea’s willing surface.  The long silver glance of
the Moon through your eyes knew the strength it behooved
me likewise to display as the strangest of powers
assembled and mounted all round us.  The scent
of the pale lilies entered and raised up great flowers
forbidden or faint until now—then their blent
present musics sang words, vivid rafts of rapt visions
your eyes reflect now as I read their desire.
Move to my hands and my mouth as they bid you,
boundless beyond fallen strands of barbed wire.
 

***
 

5 November 2003
 

The Meaning of Your Song
 

You were a ghost whose most unholy keening
set me a razor’s whet edge, coming quick
to divide the idea I seemed from the meaning
I failed to assign it.  Along the salt lick
of that strong subtle instrument—touch bright as terror,
my mouth all but soundless—ran rivers of dread
I could feel my own night-visage haunting, the air of
their cloudy down-drifting a thickness that bled
through the clot of my throat where a magic lay swallowed
so deeply….  I cease—to be all silence now—
silence sliding the length of your keening.  I follow
the meaning I find there.  If grace will allow—
shining, terrible specter whose huge lantern-swaying
lights all space before me—pale silence no more—
here I AM—YOU ARE leading sweet horror to play us
the music that waits at love’s holiest core.
 

***
 

6 November 2003
 

The Season of New Song
 

Willingness falls to you snowlike, starlike,
eeriness calmly addressing a need
that is hopelessly swollen and hardened.  That part of
your being—that wakefully starving dream-seed—
reaches forward in search of—a touch at the root-tip
of music, and rushes of uncanny song
fairly leap, being made of themselves out of lucid
desires half-conceived in the midst of a throng
of pale six-angled ghosts, each one knowingly keening,
so fraught with the message it bears, the nerves snap
that thus far served to carry it.  Suddenly, green as
vague snow- and star-whiteness turned warm at the lap
of a loving tongue tracing remembered far mornings
where new leaves lay dreaming—by naked root-shine
the long night of full-Moon-music laid out before us,
spring made of dreamed-alive light, be you mine.
 

***
 

7 November 2003
 

The Moon-Hearted Cloud
 

I struggled to tell you the secret, the story,
the hitherto-only-half-hinted-at scheme
I could no longer love to myself, but a form of
delirium leaked through the one living dream
that lay humming with warmth at its pooled lunar center,
cleaving the tongue in my mouth to the way
I kept trying in vain to pronounce it.  I entered
that weirdness; it soothed my disorder; a ray
from the Moon deep inside it sang suddenly, vividly.
Someone came clear to me—someone YOU ARE.
Tell me the story yourself:  The long mystery
leading you insight by insight thus far
holds a well-chosen word at the core of its wonder—
or two or ten thousand—pronounce them aloud
through the dream it keeps presently murmuring under
the breath of our mouths, that shared Moon-hearted cloud.
 

***
 

15 November 2003
 

The Temperature of Time
 

I lean to the eerily soothing love-music
you offer, most molten and cold heart of snow
in a globe that is crystal set flowing, a blue and
illuminate silver whose miracled glow
speaks but softly, so softly I catch myself straining
to shift the cruel stanchion to which I am chained,
the frostbitten time of the waxing and waning
that shivers slick blackness all down a spine drained
of the heat of its blossoming bliss.  That was over
a semblance of lifetimes ago:  so its hiss
interferes with the list of my leaning.  The glow of
the tear-informed world where the sound of white this
trickles little by little—but no one is here to
record it, not now;  fallen under its spray,
I am—this is the silver snow-river round weary
desire taking, singing, its warm eerie way.