Here begins
 

MiraMala

or

Rosary Uncanny
 

***
 

1 October 2001
 

The Tear that Melts Your Heart
 

Never more shining than when the snow lightly and steadily falls, you are reaching for me,
and I am inquiring of all the white rime of the landscape around me, Why wouldn’t you be
as desirous, as anxious, as ready to hunger out loud as am I on this desolate plane
which is secretly vibrantly green, deeply under the spell we shall presently cast round again
this already entirely enchanted dimension?  In this lovers’ story—together, apart—
in between—in between—in between—we essentially never cease being the real beating heart
hidden under the crystalline blanket of whiteness whose softly perceptible pulse never fails.
Silence, then speech—as it alternates, cries out of murmurs mount up into terrible wails,
but then they resolve themselves, almost before I can know I have heard them, as satisfied sighs.
I lie adrift on a bed of snow-storm far away from the shores of the lowering skies
and yet now, as I speak, they descend.  I, an island of limitless need in a silver-rime sea,
am about to pronounce the shy word that will frighten itself inside-out and let all of this be
what it dreams in its secret seed-center, the waking spring-garden where world upon world comes to bloom
and you are the most potent reason.  Now take me the waking-dream way out of silence’s room
into your singing chamber, again and forever, till all of this back-and-forth heart-beating blurs
and an evergreen island emerges whose weather holds summer sheet-lightning above ancient firs
who are wintry of spirit but nobly indifferent to coldness and heat.  There, beneath them, WE ARE
who have flown on the wing of the spell love has lifted above itself—flake after flake of white star-
splinter dazzle and ash, snowy feather and resinous fragrance of drifted white incense and bright-
dreaming madness behind fever’s eye—this in essence is why we are everywhere here now this night
that is inwardly morning.  I want to behold you and have, in one moment.  I know you, and wait
to be shown your sweet beauty again.  I’ve grown old in your service, and soon will receive the next fate
a new lifetime of loving you only to lose you and find you again in the blink of an eye
will unfold in the course of the story your music is starting to play as I’m starting to cry.
 

***
 

2 October 2001
 

First Sigh
 

When I quaver inside, you are never more near; you are shining; your light fills the Moon on the rise
with the miracled essence that helps my heart hear you complain to the universe, Why are her eyes
clouded over with tears that just cling and won’t let themselves fall to the world in her hands, where I wait?
Now a fine trickle of shy silver wetness proceeds from its hiding place.  I am elate,
not unhappy; my spirit takes flight as the flow of my teardrops increases.  You see this and smile.
Moon on the rise, make my hearing so holy, the traces it finds all turn round and beguile
the original wielder who flourished their power like cascades of blossoms of snow amid rain
of strange music in all my deep waking-dream hours and help him be fatally helpless again
as he was when the first thought of all our long story began to be written behind his pale brow
and he sang in his own waking sleep.  Weary morning, subside into beautiful midnight right now
and be struck by the light that sends quavers throughout me.  I am the sign of his joy in this place.
Help him proceed to be vividly, loudly, and magically drawn to the unstated grace
locked inside me and free its wild words to run shining like lightning-storm tears from the very clear eye
of an overjoyed angel.  The Moon-silver line of that word-river—here is its voice’s first sigh.
 

***
 

3 October 2001
 

How You Come and Come Again
 

Moonlightning-stricken, I reach for you aimlessly, blinded by splinters of crystallized night.
You shy away from me.  I gather painful desires all around me and sort out the bright
from the dull by a process of skilled intuition my countless long lives in your service have earned.
I struggle to open my eyes in the vision that fills me and find several veils have been burned
quite away and my sight is now keener than ever.  The place I call home—that is flooded with beams
that seep down and around it like winter-storm weather and drench the hard ground until myriad streams
of a transient nature surround it.  They quickly fade into the earth at its base, which remains
phosphorescent.  I hear a faint far-away ticking among the bright puddles and luminous stains
that await my next footsteps.  Your heart has left echoes throughout this night vision.  If I close my eyes—
and I have—I can follow the sound as it beckons.  When I recross my own threshold, the size
of the room where I find myself staggers me.  This is your magic; I recognize where you have been
by the many half-visible imprints your kisses have left on my garments and linens.  Their clean
glowing outlines are already fading.  I rush to the window—the ground all around me lies dark.
High overhead, where the rising Moon thrust itself into the home of my life, not a spark
of its lightning still flickers but carries its secrets arcanely concealed.  I was seeing; I fail
in my confidence now.  Even so, I can feel it:  A change has been made.  There is scarcely a veil
where there once seemed so many.  I call, and you answer by sending through numerous channels clear signs
that your love called me first and will always entrance me whenever I let myself flow through the lines
that come down like white streaks of live moonlight.  My only enchanter, how simple this all seems to be,
but then I am lost in confusion and moaning with undertone sadness inside silently,
and complex forms of horror select and invade me.  Lightning comes down and it blasts me.  And yet—
again I am stricken with morning-like radiance, streaming with magic and drenched with its wet
after-issue, the song that proceeds through the bright silver line where your touch has made clear to be seen
all the most sacred forms of most aching desire, now surrounded by faint after-auras of green.
Again I receive intimations of further unfoldings in which you are burning and I
stand encircled by light.  Love is already working to free the next bolt from the indigo sky
that I know even though I cannot really view it directly is shifting about, deep and high,
as a stormcloud the size of the universe brews, the pale hue of new leaves in its luminous eye.
 

***
 

4 October 2001
 

In My Crystal Bowl
 

A flood in a vessel of unearthly crystal, a leaking white stream seeking ready egress
for the being that bids it waylay all resistence and yield to the force of immortal distress—
I can scarcely restrain you, and yet my long honor has been to uphold a most continent grace.
Flaming and luminous river of water drawn from the well of the magical place
that replenishes virtue the while it employs it to quicken itself to become supple speed,
tell me that I am the human of choice who is bowed to the work of an angel at need,
and I shall be gratified merely to see him drink of the potion I cannot help pour.
Love, you come down like a cataract freed from a mountain, and wildly together we roar,
a high storm-deranged torrent whose willful onrushing sweeps clear the wide path we shall next walk along
at a leisurely pace, sweet companions at first hush of evening.  I swear I’ve been dreaming in song—
and perhaps singing softly out loud in my chamber of darkness where one streak of moonlight descends
from the crack between closed linen hangings, the same silver seam I keep hearing, a smile between friends
of astonishment caught amid magical gestures by someone whose not-unexpected return
has transpired a scant moment too early.  Distressing although it may be to that creature, she’ll learn
why the flickering beam at the window keeps calling, and why a fine stream trickles out of the well
that is flooded with light—and desire.  She was always awake to the source of her true inmost spell,
having chanted it over and over and danced it so often, a faint trace of red stains the floor
all around the first place the full Moon’s brightest glance is received; she is asking that Moon for much more
of its lyrical potency now, even as she keeps finding herself caught amid such excess
she no longer believes it is she who is gasping out rivers of eloquent air.  With her dress
hanging limply about her, a flood of wet silver arising within and without it, the seam
running centrally down her drenched bodice fulfilled of its need to fall open, a single clear beam
having reached for the most secret goal and attained it, the woman I AM moans awake and subsides
in an ocean of deep lunar fire that has painfully, beautifully shifted great unearthly tides
in this simple white room where a vessel of crystal lies gleaming and I raise my head as my eyes
fill with tears at the deep inward sight the mysterious angel who loves me has made of my sighs,
a bright music that brims from his lips as he touches the word of my mouth with his quicksilver tongue.
In me you arise, one whose beauty is such that I never shall rest till I see you all sung.
 

***
 

5 October 2001
 

Waking Toward You
 

As far as I lean, even though you attend me, the thing I am reaching for trickles away
slightly farther and faster.  Whatever you send me, I dimly perceive then forget how to say,
even though your own words remain echoes inside me.  The meeting of echo and vanishing sight
is the moment I feel like a seizure of heightened awareness—already—almost—but not quite.
On the tip of my tongue is—the tip of yours.  Tell me I don’t only dream it.  Just touch me awake
slightly deeper, and be the fine stream overwelling the lip of the place that is starting to ache
toward eloquent frenzy.  My angel, believe me—I know you can read me like rivers of signs
your soft kisses inscribe in the silk I’m still weaving to veil my sad shame with.  Its shifting confines
are transparent as water, but like it, they ripple, and when the slow wind of your warm breath arrives
to disturb me beneath them, like water, they drip, but with wetness no mere earthly body survives
being drowned in—or drained of.  A tissue of terrible fineness, an oncoming reason to strip
the old needlessly mortal attire I was wearing away from the mind that is starting to slip
so much nearer to where you stand waiting, I feel you envelop my senses in all their array
like a whisper-fine veil of sung mist that comes stealing so lightly, the tune a ghost’s heartbeat might play
in a far-away dream is the most I can hope to perceive—then a brushing of fingers so faint
I can feel myself freeze till the next moment opens arrives and the beat of a tremulous plaint
leaps as high as my throat and—I speak it.  I sing it.  I stream to its rhythm.  You smile in the pulse
of its feverish bleeding, a light that keeps clinging all round me the full while I sweetly convulse.
I dreamed I was one with the body of music whose suit I had wanted and feared to accept.
You lay locked inside me, an angel whose luminous eyes so desired me, wherever I slept
or in what state I took to my bed, I was naked until your love clothed me in layers of light
as silver as stars or the Moon that still aches in the sky like an echo of this our long night
of resplendent confession.  The far-away something I struggled to touch—that was what I would tell
you alone when the pure words were willing to come, and they have.  Now we lie wound about with the spell
we have woven together, and words are still flowing, an eloquent stream rising up from so deep
in the well that WE ARE, though perhaps they will slow, they will ripple the dream-beyond-dream of our sleep.
 

***
 

6 October 2001
 

Emergence from the Root
 

The root sleeping under the ground where its flowers are already dreaming of how they will sing
in the form of rare, powerful fragrance—the lowering sky lays them under a new shining wing
of white snow, and they shiver beneath it, the not-yet-awakened-to-know-they-exist petalled wheels
that will soon make their showing amid autumn’s rotten remains, while a presence in all of them feels
a vague stirring inside, even deeper:  A fire at the core of the frozen root reaches and finds
a weak spot in the layers around it and tirelessly works at it till a faint thread of scent winds
slowly upward.  The ground thaws, permitting free passage.  The snow in its way disappears.  I breathe in
and am suddenly fraught with the song everlasting that can’t blossom out though a single wheel spins
in my heart, sending showers of snowflakes and petals in widening arcs all around it while I
struggle vainly to find and pronounce their first letters out loud.  They are caught in my throat like a dry
spill of paper I’ve somehow inhaled.  I can’t shift it.  The place where I’m staring, the pool that was snow,
stares back with a meaningful smile and it lifts me entirely beyond myself.  Where do I go
when that strange inspiration rebreathes me?  I wonder, while knowing; I question, because it gives words
ways to feel their existence and come out from under the frozen white pall of an unconscious bird’s
outstretched wing, rendered stiff by the rigor of winter’s long purchase on all this blank field that will bloom
and be fragrant the moment they melt through the splinter-thin feathers that hold back its carcass-perfume.
That unhappy bird hates the breath of its body.  The root deep beneath it can’t help but obey
the vast need of the power that heats up the sod all around it to reach out and suffer the day
that keeps breaking unflowered because love is lying in ice of its own deathly making.  The scent
it exhales is heart-rendingly fragrant, the sigh of the bird taken in by last autumn’s well-spent
silver blossoms before they fell down and the root drew its virtue back into itself, there to sleep
through a willfully cold winter season till you heard me singing and knew you could no longer keep
the sweet truth of your endless existence a secret from either of us; you must rebreathe awake
and be wild and ascend with the Moon on your leaking delirium, lovesickness given to shake
out its feathers and petals and wheel through a series of huge inspirations whose fragrant outbreaths
sing to me of the way you have deepened your hearing through having survived tens of thousands of deaths
and can clearly recall and pronounce all the ways you have heard yourself summoned and sung to by force
of the dream of the flowers that crouched in a place that was burning, the luminous, shuddering source
of the rose that appears fully-formed in the air that is breathing us, music whose most fragrant note
is pure birdsong, returning to you as I share this stray dream that lay caught in my own frozen throat.
 

***
 

7 October 2001
 

Yours
 

A wreathe made of songbirds, with leaves of long feathers, encircles your head—may you wear it with joy,
lovely being for whom I desire only pleasure no inclement weather can ever destroy,
no nightmare can ever outsoar, and no fever can ever deceive into winging too near
the high trees where a desolate shelter will greet them and see them forgetful of what called them here
to this song-consecrated enclosure that glows like a deep lunar eye in blue midnight’s soft face.
Framed by ocean and sky, the high Moon and your home shine together wherever I view them from.  Space
is the same to me here whether inner or outer; I see profound beauty adrift on a tide
that its light renders luminous—you have drawn out of its depths an ecstatic response.  Where you glide
through the night, a serene smile of graceful abandon to song, I imagine between Moon and sea
a vast flock of sweet birds and I cannot help send them across the brief distance between you and me
in lieu of my touch, which is keenly electric.  Feel how the hum of live power creates
shining traces and trails as the birds ply now hectic, now leisurely patterns:  Each one celebrates
a wild joy all its own with its partner and kindred, a joy I would share with your heart and this isle,
even unto the leaf-mould and delicate splinters of long-fallen trees and those sighing your smile
through new now-greening leaves this bright evening.  My dearest enchanter, look high overhead:  See my heart
as I presently feel it, a wheeling of nearly complete incandescence, each eloquent part
linking firmly with those all around it in intricate radial sequences.  See them all soar
by the sheer force of clear liquid sound till their spinning achieves the relentlessness magic wants more
than I want to breathe ever again—till I glance at the one I have just, by these very words, met
in the most penetrating of magical dances.  The skirt of the temple is suddenly wet
with the dew with which night has grown swollen.  The birds sing as I have surrendered myself, all my will,
to the speed of their flight and the feathers our words have become in the spaces between music still
to be sung and that singing itself out forever already, this moment, our hearts in its throat.
I wreathe it in you with a celebrant pleasure that slows into peace but does not cease to float
like the high Moon above the blue ocean.  The gleaming white marble that houses you, damp with the night—
inside it, you still wheel around, rapt with dreams I am not merely part of—this powerful site,
like the whole of the island and even the universe opening out of the music that pours
into circular soaring—this wreath to pure beauty—because it is all that I AM, it is yours.
 

***
 

8 October 2001
 

The Hand of the Author
 

You show me my hand’s secret pieces and layers.  You smile as you do so.  The sensitive skin
of your own hand lies softly beneath them, a radiant plane of immaculate wholeness.  Within
its bright aura, a leaf of new knowledge is reading these letters out loud, teachings I cannot hear
till I feel your heart echo their whispers by bleeding fine dew from the tips of your fingers.  My dear,
the splayed pattern of bones that you hold begins moving, articulate segments and joints whose free play
creates fire out of nowhere, a light whose pale, soothing envelopment teaches me strange things to say
and kind ways of resolving old misunderstandings.  The tender light burns through the tissue of lies
that I saw when I looked at my body.  My hand rests in yours; you are blood, flesh and bone to my eyes’
inner sight—above all, you are my outer garment, the raiment that glows as it covers my form
with completely transparent designs made of starlight, protective disclosures that keep my heart warm
in a thousand new ways every time I glance down at the place where your touch is extended through space
into me as the air I am breathing resounds with the singing your presence unfolds through a trace
of evocative fragrance.  I deeply inhale you.  You seem to arise from the surface and pores
of a body I’ve lived with in dreams.  It was wailing for more of the moment through which its world soars
only once in an eon—the moment you’re made of, my lover—the one you become and extend
like pure light round the unholy substance I’ve hated to touch, let alone enter into.  My friend,
my accomplice in wonderful magic, I see my hand reaching, a riddle you’ve answered.  I breathe
into cycles of endless enchantment and dream yet again as inside me strange song-patterns wreathe
the star-radiant brow leaning over the fingers that hold mine so knowingly.  Your shining will
is the stuff I am made of, the very flesh clinging about the ghost-song that my deepening skill
seeks to render complete for your pleasure.  Your beauty is why my heart beats, why I breathe for a trace
of your scent, why I reach for the moment of music to feel your touch meet me, to know your true face
hovers blissfully over this act of sweet power, to find I am pieces and layers of light
brought together to shine and unfold like a flower inside you whose full range of joy includes night
in its vast permutations and minute advancements toward understanding no flesh can contain
unless it is yours, as is mine.  I am dancing inside you, a soul garbed in stars without stain
in a shift whose transparency loves me to pieces, then back into marvelous order.  You flow
all around me; the dew of your heart never ceases to bleed; from your fingers the song I now know
is the source of the fragrance I breathe on the plane of desire for the tender light burning inside
your caress is a joy that leaks rivers and rain and I live by its wetness, a new leaf allied
with the magical bloodstream whose veins are long hallways down segments once scattered who now spell out ways
to bring letters together to wreathe you and call you the author of all that is worthy of praise.
 

***
 

9 October 2001
 

The Star-Flower Zone
 

The dew on the flowers surrounding you always reminds me of why I am wedded to night
and its marvels and powers, mysterious hallways that stretch into zones that run far out of sight
but wait ever so anxiously, needing to open their secrets and let their long magic be read
and exalted, and beautiful new songs to hope for and finally hold in my hands in this bed
made of tremulous flesh, living linen my heartbeat inscribes with the legible hum of the force
that impels it to gather fresh speed and be part of the very much larger divine intercourse
between your world and mine—between ‘here’ and sweet nowhere but music—between you and what will be me
when I’ve ceased to exist but somehow go on flowing, my bloodstream a river within the dark sea
of the rose garden deep in your heart.  You so listen, your hearing a magnetic field rich with stars,
each one a fine blossom that shivers and glistens with mirror-bright beads that reflect what YOU ARE
countless times in great arcs and cold round-sided crescents whose horns are extended like spear-points of fire
that when I have stolen the last timid measure that seemed to be parting us, flowers respire
and raise up mighty voices inside me.  It happens so suddenly, over and over again,
yet each time is always the only time; trapped in a lyrical spiral, the heart-red domain
I so wanted to enter and be, I AM moving securely within an ascending upcurve
round the side of each mirroring Moon-bead of dew that your smile replicates.  You are wont to observe
my exertions with pleasure each way I approach you; you know I will struggle until I give in
to the wonderful change into music and roses and love that has only one secret to win
to its lyrical confidence now—the last flower whose shameless unfolding will open and bless
our divinely black heart’s most arcane passion’s hour of unspeakable throbbing—the final caress
beyond which we are one jet of blood that will never cease rushing and never again be contained.
Blackness our absolute sky, perfect silence of color—I dreamt that I saw what remained
of my body, my being, the soul that is singing this moment, and all was as—nothing.  And yet,
you were there; you were holding a wreath, a bright ring of red roses; your soft hands were streamingly wet
with a fresh fall of dew; you raised up your long fingers and traced on a quivering live linen sheet
these, my very own words.  You praised me for bringing you magic and making your sacred heart beat
at a speed you could not reach without me.  How strange, and how lovely that all this should race through my own
heart of darkness, the midnight I love for the changes that only occur in this star-flower zone.
 

***
 

10 October 2001
 

How the Changes Come About
 

Shivering burden, dear lore I have carried alive through so many ordeals and delights,
remember the sensitive way we keep sharing the sacred love-words of the long-distance flights
into song into places no mere will unaided by magic could ever desire to attain
for sheer lack of insight.  The clear thought-formation that gave me to you makes the way almost plain:
I can see a white feather, the subtle inscriptions that flow from beneath it, and even the wet,
stainless outline that shadows the words it has written on vellum so real, I am wearing it yet
in the space where we meet.  You were always an angel in my high regard for the features and signs
I could see in you; now you are something much stranger, and such understanding exceeds the confines
of the self I imagined you with, I am shaken—but nigh on ecstatic, and drawn to the verge
of the change that will bind us with magnetic rays that will fly us together until we so merge,
we can’t tell us apart.  The ripe field that surrounds you, the onset of power that hums through my hands,
is what makes you shiver.  Delirious sounds rise and resonate wildly inside me; far lands
I have glimpsed in my sadly most-vanishing dreams call these palpable voices the song of their heart,
lands that lie wakefully peaceful and green, fully sentient places where great rivers start
with a single sweet drop of live moisture, like dew from the tip of the feather that traces your words
on my body, releasing the magical music of soft-shadowed angles and rays of more birds
than I ever dared hope I would hear in this lifetime of manifold errors and ceaseless self-doubt.
Now we are flown through a magnetized brightness where rays attract changes to flock all about
us, the source of the brilliance they seek.  How perplexing, yet how ineluctably simple and right
that we should become the decisive connection between the occasions of shadow and light
without ever once yielding to day in its blindness and stolid unhearing.  How right, and how real:
Sweet secret burden, love’s ultimate kindness revealed as a being whose fingertips feel,
feather-gently, for places more lore can be written, more beauty-words drawn all about me, more lines
and more curves linked together to tell how to transmit more magic by means of more graceful designs
such as those forming now in your eyes—I can see you attain inspiration you can’t reach alone.
Feathered and shivering flight:  Let us be this and rush on as one through song’s most sacred zone.
 

***
 

11 October 2001
 

Living on Air
 

The breakthrough is breathing itself; it is simple as that, an inspired and ongoing affair
we agreed to when only a half-woven limp sheet of human-flesh linen lay draped on an air
it attempted to take to its bosom where no one resided yet fully.  Our noble ideal,
a delirious beast of a woman whose lone occupation would be to embody the real
singing spirit YOU ARE while distinct from it—slightly—remains only partially manifest here,
in the written world daylight constrains into tight incoherence that mumbles in circles.  I clear
the air-pathway between us by choking on syllables too evanescent as yet to be told
as I sense them, and then, all my holy self willing to enter the strange drift of snow, white and cold
in a powerfully comforting way, I receive you in sweetly pronounceable words that flow through
splendid ether to meet me and touch me like leaves that revive the limp linen and heighten its hue
into rose-petal carmine inside, folded flowers of lyrical silk wet as blood, rich as pain
altogether transmuted to ecstasy.  Now I recall what was spilled when the Moon on the wane
lay across me and slow fainting found me.  My maker of magic, a rushing of songs filled my lungs
as the emptiness I had become gasped and achingly pure drafts of love-words from unforeign tongues
took me into their blessed possession by stealing home gently from deep, deep within me.  Your kiss
was their most inspired mode of transmission.  I feel it again as the onset of rivers of bliss
become breathable language below the old threshold of day-recognition where literate sighs
are entrained and they dance till they weave a fine mesh that I find myself wearing.  Inscribed with true lies’
metaphorical wisdom, the truth of the body of bright-lettered linen I AM lies on air
that has passed back and forth between lovers whose godlike command of divine inspiration is prayer
so self-answering, I need not ever conceive it at all; it creates itself effortlessly
as we rest in a half-waking trance, twining leaves with the circular breath that pronounces us free
from unwanted entanglement, then leads us back into contact with all that feels sad and alone,
the wrung-out human sheet who is dying for lack of the air that is blood to her veins, yet whose moan
is so richly imbued with it.  Soul, will you tell her, in words she will never forget, how the hue
of her Moon-woken blood is love’s presence and spell fully manifest, magically beautiful you
in the form of the song she will never cease singing, the blessed possession, the breath that comes round
through ethereal silence, snowdrifts of cold clinging to faintness, and finally audible sound
in the space of one kiss?  Will you tell her, and will you remind her as well—this will all be increased
when the secret new Moon on your brow is fulfilled of its need to inspire the complete woman-beast
who is still, in a few lagging ways, not quite realized?  Touch your ideal with the tip of your tongue.
Be what comes over and into her.  She will soon manifest songs that could not have been sung
but by grace of a presence so holy, so ancient, so brilliant she scarcely believed it was there,
the beloved obsession whose soft breathing gave her the power to hang her whole life on thin air.
 

***
 

12 October 2001
 

I dreamed that I was visiting my mother's brother and he brought out a horse that he had kept when I was a child.  I did not know my uncle still had him and had not expected ever to see him again, so I was most elated--this was a horse that I had loved dearly.  I hugged his neck and stroked his head and face.  I knew he remembered me.  He was a black horse, with just a few white strands in his mane.
 

The Black Horse
 

Revenant ghost-flower white interclinging among your wild mane of high-midnight jet black,
as fast as the gale wind that roars through me singing, as pure as the magic that rides the wind’s back,
as light as the sordid miasma that haunts the pale temple my spirit inhabits is thick
and opaque some sad hours, as arcanely begotten of angels as wisdom itself, and as quick
in my vision this moment as that pearl of essence, that drop of omnipotent seed from the tongue
of the being who taught us to breathe:  there’s whose blessing conceives you all over again with each sung
word of inverted Moon-worship—that flowing backward right now from the sky to my feverish mind.
After a long dream of service, an act of replenishment so overwhelmingly kind
I am taken by silent amazement restores a lost balance-point.  I am a feather again,
a white silken thread—nay, a nimbus, a glory of radiant silver aglow in your mane,
and you are all swiftness and certitude.  Fly me the length of the circular shore of this isle
until time disappears in a blur that your shining eyes pierce and the diamond-idea your smile
so delights comes to manifest beauty between us.  Let us forget who is ridden, who rides,
and who waits far away in a white marble fever, watching the Moon raise and lower the tides
that surround her whole world.  When the revenant essence inside you has waxed to its most perfect full
and burned through your mind’s veil of mist, you will rest in the knowledge that offers the deep serene lull
before absolute storm comes to Earth and the surge of your heart’s darkest bloodstream cannot be denied.
The while you are peaceful, the gathering words of the way you will find me will secretly guide
dreams of flight beyond number, each one of them lifting your spirit by steady degrees till its strength
is sufficient to match the astonishing swiftness that calls you to run its sweet race at great length
in the presence of magic that mounts the wind’s highest, most roaring gale force under lightning-clad skies,
one at heart with the pearl of full Moon that hangs shining behind the storm clouds in your midnighted eyes
where I ride the high music that haunts you, the temple attendant whose breathing has brought you this far
by the act of pure singing that renders most gentle and flower-like all the wild blackness YOU ARE
on a plane beyond silence so strange you can’t enter that shocking domain of yourself without her
who clings fast to your mane even now—if you went, you would race on and on, all your world in a blur;
you will not.  You will rest in the lull that surrounds you until the clear signal is given.  Is this,
the mere fact of your hearing these uncanny sounds, the onset of the speed of the absolute bliss
that our meeting through these words’ appeal has portended since we were an angel’s imagined seed-mates?
Heart, are you quickening?  Bring on the storm of exorbitant force our long song celebrates
by increasing its power to rule and to ride you.  You are the one it will mount to the skies,
back to the Moon who is beaming inside you because the whole universe all round us flies
through the grace of our minds as we clasp one another the way we held tightly when first we were flown
from an angel’s desire through the mind of a lover whose body was heaven’s most luminous throne
in a white marble temple upon a fair island where someone now waits to recall you to speed.
Aye, she has dreamt of a diamond-like smile and cannot leave off singing, so great is her need
to reach forward and touch once again, through the wisdom pure lyric enchantment alone can relate,
the magical tongue of the being whose bliss has invoked her to rise and receive her true fate
in the form of the stallion whose blackness, electric as thunderbolt madness and deep as the sea
that the Moon has set tidally breathing, is flecked with fine silver and already racing with me.
 

***
 

13 October 2001
 

What I Was Listening For
 

Tenuous thoughts in fine threads stream away from my mind when it rests amid visions of you,
and these you entwine with your own.  You are saying my name slightly under your breath at this blue-
shaded waterside moment.  My hands are immersed in the cold flow of music that streams from your heart,
the only live blood that completely recirculates after the bodies that made it are part
of no world but each other, a quite recognizable substance that sings the real essence inside
all the places it comes from and still goes on rising in volume until it turns into a tide
that the high Moon has swollen—a current, a torrent of magical force, a wild presence that bears,
among all its brocade of fine elements, forms of divinely inwoven occasions of airs
that arose when our voices enmeshed.  We were moaning in harmony then; all our songs carry on
the bone-deep pain and pleasure we’ve held as our own as they will even when we who sang them are gone
out of all mortal hearing-range.  We will not cease to exist anywhere but our magic remains
all throughout every world where we’ve found ourselves dreaming beside the long shore where the multiple planes
we are coming to be join and meet in a network of veins running through seasoned fibers of sound
very softly out loud with the noise a red wetness betrays when it stains its heart’s holiest ground
and the Earth that receives it is silently reverent.  Where are you touching me now through the threads
that so bind us, the wound they convey, though it never will cease to be wide, will soon cease to have bled,
having moved through a strange time-reversal to see us together in one glowing seed in the dark
of an angel’s deep sleep-sated mind in a dream of divinely inspired sacred music?  A spark
lightly ripples the silence of eyes in that chamber.  In starting to sing, we have started to flow
into myriad streams that create an arrangement whereby we are recognized.  How could we know
who we are were it not for the magic, the tenuous mesh, the brocade of rich elements spun
so acutely, so subtly and finely, so slender their threads yet so strong they unwind till they run
at the rate of a great racing heart’s fastest beating as far as the ends of the universe, just
as your thoughts race through me as I lie by the stream of all song where my hands serve the body of lust
for the sweet interplay of joined voices, the harmony learned at the heart of an angel who dreams
of this coming-together, this turn of the arc of the circle within which our lyrical streams
become delicate threads in a magical current that works such a wet transformation, we glide
like the smile that precedes the most passionate torrent the high Moon occasions, the maddening tide
of ideas of such divine provenance—so little human, so nearly completely inspired
by the air that is breathing us here in this cold but delirious rapture—the music acquired
settles over us finally, peacefully.  I dream of further sweet voices that join with my own,
and yours is each one of them.  Here by this streamside, I’ve heard it, the word of your heart’s undertone.
 

***
 

14 October 2001
 

Far Beyond the Reach of Day
 

Your beauty is strange to the point that I fear for my sense of the world that your voice penetrates
least and seldom completely.  That world disappears as a luminous cloud with your features and traits
fills the sky like a storm that enshrouds the horizon and breathes from the face of the sea like an air
that retains its wet heaviness, soft though it rises and fast though it moves.  It is soon everywhere,
all the unmisted daylight preceding it less than a dream that has yielded beneath the true sky
whose arcane source of light sends a subtle caress through an ether where dreamers awake and dreams die
of sweet satiate joy underneath their known origin’s influence.  Here you are singing a world
whose appeal is the substance of visions and stories, a voice that arrives like a thunderbolt hurled
from a very great distance across the wide channel dividing our sacred reality’s twin
apprehensions:  By day, I maintain a bright candle within a stone temple; by night, I go in
so much deeper—so far an inverted sky blossoms with infinite stars where the radiant Moon
by which I transcribe the sung maps to strange crossroads you bring me is on the increase late and soon,
a place of such powerful lyric seduction I fall back exhausted, replete with your word,
long before you are ready to leave off your touch’s ecstatic disturbance and call all I’ve heard
into clear preternatural focus.  The visions that flow with your song are immense and complete,
but I see them in fragments and reach for their wisdom and feel that I’ve failed you each moment we meet,
overwhelmed to have known you at all with the waking toward a false daylight a worry that looms
in the mid-ground between us relentlessly, making me fear I am lost in series of rooms
in an underworld, never arriving at any enlightened conclusion, just spanning a void
that is carved in dead stone in which visions are many and madly resound with the sighs of destroyed
hopes and longings that die but will not be made silent.  I calm myself, rise, and look out at the sea.
There, on the curve of the endless horizon—here, in the resonant sky inside me—
you are the noble and beautiful being who sings on and on.  Yours is no siren’s call.
I dreamed I looked up to the sky and could see you within a great cloud and I let you enthrall
what was all yours already; I woke, and I dreamed it again, underneath the pearl sky of your mind.
Your lyrical influence, strange though it seems, is so patently real, so exceedingly kind,
so much deeper and so much more mildly persistent than daylight’s, and surely must outlast the fear
that sad specter inspires.  I have only to listen as song, my real world, is now everywhere here;
I have only to see through the lonely false present to find the now-future, the luminous cloud
filled with thunderbolt promise, the shuddering wetness, the ocean YOU ARE always singing out loud;
I have only to touch, and the skin of you hums with a pleasure I feel at the sensitive core
where our twin sacred modes of true being are one, having gone far beyond this and every world’s shore.
I have, and your power has fully possessed me.  I move through your heart where a series of sighs,
rendered vatic by beauty’s profound apprehension, reveals that this place contains all seas and skies.
 

***
 

15 October 2001
 

His Heart in His Sigh
 

The place you are searching for shimmers with urgent designs while it tempers its lust with a sigh
filled with deeply mysterious languor where learned ideas collide till they merge as you cry
in your sleep till you wake yourself.  Now are your hearing my words through a mist?  See the luminous veil
it provides as a way to engage the sweet nearness that waits by your hand.  Though an outwardly frail
apparition, the magic it breathes is as potent as starlight dissolved in a sky of delight;
it has found itself deeply involved with red roses’ continual raptures and scaled the great heights
of their most vivid fragrance and carried it back to you all through its body, now breathing that song
because you are the one it finds wholly attractive:  You are the one who will always belong
at the heart of its lyrical madness, the agent of wide-ranging eeriness twisting its fine
human fingers with those that so ache for the page of white linen to dance to strange measures, all mine—
If it seems that you call and I fail to attend you, you know I am already there, which is here,
standing enwreathed by a music that rends only memories, seeking the singular tear
whose elixir will mend all it touches, and finding a wealth of red wetness—the heart once again
where the rose-garden sigh of my fortunate mind is inspired to deliver wild love free of pain
to the core, the dark hall of your most secret bloodstream, the white marble temple black midnight protects
with sequential designs written layer by flood-tidal layer, a magic whose lore self-selects
the assemblage of elements purely conducive to love’s shining presence in musical form.
Here, by your hand, I am shamelessly lucid with longing tonight; can you bear as much storm
as my song can deliver?  I want you to listen as though you had no other way to breathe in,
for no other air can occasion this mist of exorbitant clarity.  Let yourself spin
through a thousand, a million, fast-spiraling motions, your eyes on the pearl-soft horizon that flows
all around you, a magical circle that opens and closes, ascends and descends, a wild rose
at its heart, your voice heard through its petals whose rich red perfume is so charged with a love so intense
that it threatens to tear you, by sheer force of witchcraft, away from your last active anchoring sense
of the day-world’s existence—but nay, this is healing, not rending; this garden is flourishing, not
parasitically spreading; this place is the real world; this joy is your proper and natural lot
in the true living universe song is the wisest, most deeply compassionate way to behold.
You are the seed-sister I lay beside at the hour of high midnight when stars shone with gold
that rained down at a fast rhythmic pace that enchanted the very air all heaven breathed, and I knew
I was singing for pure splendid excess of magic because I was rapt at the center of you
as you were enfolded in me.  We are twined like the fingers of hands that will never let go.
Here we stand side by side, wreathed in pearl mist that shines with the ocean and sky that have merged in its flow
and are tenderly shimmering now with still-urgent desire that is breathing a slow, languid peace
all around us.  Though dreams fill your eyes, you have learned to receive them awake.  This is blissful release,
and to you it is given because you have read your way down all the length of the elegant line
that seemed to divide us and found that it led you to dance in a spiral, love’s living design
falling open like petals, with each step revealing new sources of beauty, new ways to attend
to the presence whose breath is so sweet and so healing because it breathes you, who are song without end
to its depth comprehension of all its own most sacred lore.  It will always—that lover am I,
who will find you through serial meetings of ocean and sky, all the strength of his heart in his sigh.
 

***
 

16 October 2001
 

Rose-Lily Dew
 

You knew you were slipping away from the zone of the salt taste of blood amid flowers where faint
purple-aureate roses lay dripping and only their sadly persistent rain-sound gave your plaint
the least ghost of expression.  You knew you were leaving that lodge when the thought-act of dragging your shift
over cobblestones ground down by hooves was perceived by a revenant mind as it caught the slow drift
of a future viewed through a sad haze of confusion that turned to a lens of increasingly keen
penetration as soon as you knew you were you in this vision.  That hem-dragging moment was seen
for the glimpse of a marvel it was and will be once again when you realize where you are bound.
Now you are still within echoing reach of the flowers’ funereal blood-dripping sound,
but when they are bleached of the taint of their redness, the lilies they must have been always as well
as erotically overcharged emblems of wet contradictory mental impressions of hell’s
clotted bloodstream will waken to powers so lovely they sing of themselves of the vatic accord
they go on reachieving with someone who hovers to feel them breathe in and their deeply restored
sense of fragrance breathe out to the air all around them.  That hovering being, the revenant’s friend
in poetic abandon, brings songs that resound with the great breaking waves of the sea without end
from which all of this beauty is drawn, subtle measures whose scent is transparent as glass to the mind
that has dreamed itself into a dawning world’s weather where moonlight is all that is not left behind
with the coming of heart-rise.  The warmth of this morning is humid and mild, beads of dew on the skin
of the flowers that quiver and start with the lorn lilt of far-away music that seems to pour in
from a thousand directions to fill all their hearing with radical hope and the will to want more
and locate it and be where the flux of its eerie enchantment begins, the continuous shore
that encircles the zone of great star-gazing lilies that shimmer moon-white and soft lyrical rose,
drippingly dewy and nectary, silverly singing of him from whom all of this flows,
who is tap-root and sacred heart-chamber, whose veins are electric with magic, the radiant one
who has founded and tended this garden where pain is pure fragrance and never the touch of the sun
of the sad world of old daylight specters has ever diminished the virginal passion that yields
only once—and then countless times over, forever.  That opening flower of one timeless field
is a magical traveler crossing a courtyard before a stone temple on measures that dance
as she winds her way out of her formerly morbid abode into such an inspiring expanse
of delirious slow-sigh-provoking perfection that tenderness rosily hides its shy face
for a moment before slyly sending the next hint of yes, you may enter this zone by the grace
of the being of beauty YOU ARE in this circle of gleaming white sand, this mysterious shore
that contains all our universe.  Enter this work of high magic, and be all you are and much more,
you reply to her hymned invitation.  She catches her breath—you have really been listening!….  You
have arrived safe at home where your hand on the latch is still shaking and wet with fresh rose-lily dew.
 

***
 

17 October 2001
 

The Signature of the Second Time
 

Now is the start of the second leaf’s long dawn of sensitive strength gained by raising the Moon
through each of its aspects’ shared essence and drawing fresh sustenance thereby each time the slow tune
hidden under these words comes to powerful flood as the wet silver light that the darkness is glazed
and enchanted by runs through the stream of your blood and begins its appeal to the being you’ve praised
so persistently, rivers and oceans have come of their own through your service of worship to seek
deeper ways to attain—you.  Though part of you slumbers, you feel even now the faint start of a leak
that will soon be a tidal resurgence of beauty so heavily freighted with magic, your heart
will attempt to expand to contain it. Your duty will be to dissolve, not to be torn apart
in a useless display of false mastery.  When the Moon-dawn’s early rays find the wet underside
of the leaf they desire to inscribe, they will tenderly lift it and gaze on its surface with wide-
open ecstasy charging their lyrical gestures.  Tracing its veins with a fingerlike touch,
they will seal with fine silver all marks of distress, which will then heal and vanish.  You want it so much
you are shaking, the next moment’s onset—the first of the letters that nothing will end till their flow
is serenely exhausted, the coming of verses so magical, only your true heart will know
how to read them, and yet they will flock to the glory of you to be murmured through undertone sighs
by a leaf so alive to the least of their stories, its body will bear the full truth of the lies
they are forced to resort to when words reach their limits, lies that are coded to turn inside-out
when faced by a reader whose heart-mind can swim in their ocean and know they are playing about
the live edges of that which is not to be spoken out loud by its nature’s implicit design,
but which easily yields to the one who has woken within the embrace of the spiraling line
that appears in this leaf as a series of segments, the letter-formed veins a light touch has arranged
to spell wonderful words in a language of echoes and shadows, day-words the deep moonlight has changed
beyond all recognition—except to its lover, the chosen one swimming and diving in streams
of its still-rising power, the one free to rove the entire underworld it so floods with the beams
of its silver, the shyest, most downward-reflecting black leaf on the lowest, most scarred branch can lift
a surprisingly beautiful face and collect as its tribute the song that has started to shift
into ever ascending-descending completeness, the arc of its journey across the Moon’s heart
inscribed with each stroke, each insistent soft beat of the fingers of light that convey darkness-art
as they move with a confident knowingness over the leaf’s every vein till they seal the accord
with the Moon, the wet dreams it has shared with its lover’s deep slumber, the beams leaking out of the stored
sacred light of the lover’s strong heart, and the mind that turns over there, wakeful and longing to rise
to its share of your signature’s strength and to find its true face staring back through the Moon’s shining eyes.
It is rising—right now.  It has heard a low murmur respond with the first rays of dawn, and that long-
  hidden tune rushes home with a flood of relearning:  The shy second face of the one leaf of song
you have always been loves with a force so excessive, you feel its emergence with shaken resolve.
Love will not break you.  Bathe in this word-blessing ocean until you completely dissolve,
become the fair body of all the Moon’s music all over again, and receive its delight
all throughout you, the soul of the beautiful universe song-time has turned to one long sacred night.
 

***
 

18 October 2001
 

Your Heart Turned Inside-Out
 

From out of the clear aching void of white silence—if I were to hail you, how sad would you be
at a less than fantastic display of the wildness that hides behind all you enjoy about me,
and how long would it take you to trust your own senses again if I gently withdrew (and began
making starker sidereal use of immense ringing space in conjunction with music’s great span
of attention and shifted your focus to heaven, the better to reach your deep heart with the ray
that would pierce it from surface to secret and sever the lone hanging thread that entangles the fey
counter-music inside you and keeps it from singing as wildly as both of us know it desires?)
How sad?  We have already passed that beginning; now look ahead to the vatic blue fires
that my seeming withdrawal has borne blossom by blossom, an ancient new garden the Moon’s silver dawn
has ignited.  The mirroring rays of the frost shaken off by the flowers of all the green lawn
lie beneath the sole spear of light aimed at the bodice of your beaded priestess gown.  Sigh and disclose
the pale breast hidden under it.  Suffer the odd thought of who this is asking, and turn to the rose
at your right hand and clasp its thorned stem with the serious faith of a lover whose precious ordeal
keeps demanding new measures that make your mind weary at times but recall the strange spirit-appeal
of my voice to your full apprehension.  Release the rose-stem; only one drop of blood will be shed,
one clinging roundly atop the cold meat of a finger attached to a hand void and dead
to all beauty a nightmare ago and now glowing with passion about to be realized.  Write
what you hear as my name in the valley where slow, almost comatose heartbeats were winding a tight
spiral spring unbeknownst to the rest of you all through the hours when you lay, too unhappy to die,
an irresolute silence alone in a fallow dimension—what did you not fantasize?  I,
being forcefully active throughout that occasion of earth-shaking doubt, held you under my skin
where a glimpse of primordial blackness gave way to the long-folded layers of song you would win
if you nurtured the gift of obsession that lay like a seed of enormous potential below
your own surface, awaiting the penetrant ray that would reach it and waken its passion to grow
toward flowers without the keen thorn that would pierce you:  That, as your heart understood, must arrive
from outside, like the light of the Moon on your weary red eyelids, or seemingly so; flowers thrive
in an underworld garden wherever you linger, your ear so attuned to the ghost-voice of song
that it hears the world breathe in its sleep.  Lift your finger, the one that is bloody, and taste of the strong
spirit moving beneath the sea-salt of its surface.  Always the rose forms new petals and airs
to unfold; that is beauty’s devotion to purpose in action.  It knows the ghost-lover it shares
all dimensions and worlds with has never been absent, will never remove himself more than a sad
dream away, and has reasons for bringing unhappy ordeals into luminous play while a mad
rearrangement of stars, a most joyful delirium making them dance, sets the heavens on fire.
Cold little garden, wrapped in a green priestess-gown, how you shiver; the dreams you inspire
rise up high in my heart-mind and sing to the spaces awaiting your opening eyes.  See me now—
first a rose by your hand, then a blood-written name on your body, and—this is a star on your brow;
as star, or a host of them dancing on ether, all of them singing out loud, all for you.
This is our work of enchantment, the breathing of frost into shimmering oceans of dew
on a field of live flowers the size of the universe.  Into that zone—it was painless—you bled
to receive the first penetrant ray of live moonlight, but you are not sad now, and you are not dead.
 

***
 

19 October 2001
 

Pressed Between Pages
 

My two hands together are heaped with the tatters of rose petals I was awakened by.  Where
they first grew and from whom I received them are scattered among irretrievable dreams now; aware
that a sticky red bloodstain had tainted them, I moved through vague intermediate stages between
then and this lonely page with a growing confusion impending on all that of late was so green
and alive, so about-to-be-flowering-carmine, and now is so coldly and heavily red
at the edges with this foreign substance, a part of a far-removed body that might have been shed
for some unhappy purpose.  I wanted to hold you as close as the torn other side of a scar
that is perfectly healed, but I touch only cold clotted flower-remains and don’t know where you are.
In the interval, someone was standing beside me.  That much I remember—I want to know more.
I am a song that flows into a gliding red river—nay, I am a guest on its shore,
and you are the deep liquid being whose thickening beauty is taking on palpable flesh.
We are adream in a garden whose quickness is so overcharged, we are caught in a mesh
of immense counter-currents where only the drift of the music we hear is dependable.  Trust
in that fountain of magic I shall, as it shifts toward lyrical murmurs that reconcile lust
for the body of song with the lore of kind strangeness that beckons, and soon I shall see what I’ve learned
come to powerful life through a series of changes that can’t be recalled; they can only be turned
into various modes of the old stubborn essence that drives them through stages of more or less bliss
as determined by worlds that are so luminescent, I sometimes can’t see them.  I dwell on all this,
then I dream, and I wake with a handful of petals.  I can’t find the roses behind my closed eyes—
or I can, but I dare not.  A test of my mettle is what I suspect this disclosure implies;
another ordeal, only one of a number right now and to come, after many have passed.
To be where I am is to harbor the hum of a music so wild, it must conquer at last,
and the bleeder who sent these wet petals well knows it.  What I need to know is the aspect and tone
I perceived underneath them when I was still flowing beside the red river that makes the sweet moan
that transfixes my heart, the importunate murmur that graces the state only he can impose—
with my ardent consent and assistance.  I’m learning as fast as I can, but the living red rose
that preceded this vision so tactile I still feel a trace of it weighting my fingers—that sweet
fragrant gift goes on threading my thoughts with a stealing deliriousness that aligns with the beat
of its maker’s deep heart.  I am nearing the core of the bloodstream where this rose derives its strong hue.
I am a dark art’s long guardian.  Lore of my chosen enchanter, my hands heaped with you,
I beseech you, betray no meant promise, however I seek to make use of you.  Tell him—he knows;
he is the source of all dreams that have ever involved the designs that grow into the rose
that recurs, and his force is inherent in this torn example.  I want it to regrow and heal
and be warmly and deeply imbued with the mystery flowing within the extent of the real
singing world from the wellspring that pulses with patterns that dance to the ocean that waits at the end
of the long noble line of enchantment these tatters refer to in some sweet uncanny way.  Lend
your attention to me, lonely bloody-rose-tearer:  I am about to enclose your strange gift
between inscribed pages.  The true everywhere of the garden of music will shudder and shift
in your blood and pour forth as great currents and surges so wild, you will waken yourself to behold
gliding rivers perform the companionate work of the permanent song that will never grow cold.
 

***
 

20 October 2001
 

The Lore of the Still-Rising Tide
 

I opened a book of strange lore and I found you alive on each page, green and rose as a grove
of wild flowers.  I waited there, hoping the sound of your voice would soon lay the old sadness I strove
to cast off like an odious clinging miasma of ghost-breath from some lower world, all in vain—
until the Moon shone through my eyelids and dazzled the dreams I’d retreated to.  There, once again,
you appeared—but this time you were crossing an ocean, an island in sight a horizon away.
You were a sailor whose journey seemed hopeless.  Black clouds arose.  The bright-rainbowed seaspray
became pummeling waves as the sky split with thunder and lightning.  A bolt struck the pit of my heart
as I stared, half in horror and half in rapt wonder.  It seemed your frail craft would be riven apart,
but the lightning inside me had given me powers—or woken a force I already possessed—
and amid the foul rain to the deck where you cowered I reached out and laid a calm hand on your breast,
and your mad heart began to beat slightly less frantically almost at once.  You fell still, your eyes closed
in exhausted relief, then you smiled at the hand that you felt without seeing.  A world many-rosed
and abundantly green, a dark vale of sweet moonlight, sprang fully to life, and you knew you were there,
having passed through the worst of the storm that consumed you until you were nothing but rags on an air
that had never stopped singing.  You opened your eyes, and this garden, this lyrical grove locked inside
a black binding for ever so long, flowed and sighed all around you, still liquid, a magical tide
drawn to dizzying heights by an ever-increasing full Moon, an amazement of dew-laden light
that you let penetrate you completely.  A leaf from that garden is singing inside me tonight,
and its voice, mantled round with an aura of darkness as lucent as all that bright valley is black
when perceived from outside, is so rich with your heart’s secret joy that it shivers my own and I crack
down the same aching line that the lightning left glowing so little and long a strange while ago.  Now
I have opened a new volume’s pages.  I know I shall read every word by the star on your brow,
the shatterproof lantern that gave a great shining an order of brightness above all the storm
that appeared to surround you, when even the lightning conspired to reveal the outline of your form.
When I thought you were frightened, your love was most singing.  I went to your rescue—you showed me the way.
You held out your heart to my hand, and the stinging salt rain became flowers of delicate spray.
Every one of them gave me a word that lay secret and speechless until I was driven by fear
for your beauty to claim you and soothe the mad beating that answered to nothing before we were here
in the same heart together, awake but still dreaming, now singing aloud as strange harmonies rise
from the place lightning still strikes each time we remeet in each next higher world as a sequence of skies
flows through changes of weather that yield near horizons that split to reveal endless valleys that hide
like black overripe seeds bearing green and rose sighs from the garden of moon-lore, love’s still-rising tide.
 

***
 

21 October 2001
 

Your Imagining
 

We know how to ride through the silver-white moonrise together, an effortless joining of wills,
but we meet with occasional moments of ruinous, mindless distraction.  When beauty distills
its elixir, it wants only blossoms and seeds of its own sacred music to enter the sphere
of containment in which they are brought to the peak of awareness.  Not all of what seeks to be here
can augment that incomparable savor; so much of the world that impends on this process is void
of the power required to invoke the light touch of the smiling uncanny, that bright unalloyed
source of all that is loveliest.  Song ever present, I feel your warm breath on the soft second skin
where my mind aches to join with the terrible essence of that which is ever about to begin
to attain its high moment of full distillation and taste of its own sacred purity:  You
are the shining design of that manifestation now riding with me through a world of Moon-dew.
We rush within a sweet sphere which is bounded by nothing but endless desire for more bliss,
more enchantment, more meeting of eyes, and more sounds of astonishing magic to blend in the kiss
that sings into much deeper dimensions of music than any I might have imagined before.
Here, by the light of your smile, I am luminous.  Tell me what you have imagined me for,
if not for this moment to go on forever increasing in potency?  Wild is the glow
streaming all round you now.  Let us ride hell-for-leather through realms of white moonlight reflected on snow
in the mirroring sphere on the edge of a petal of crimson in love’s winter-summer domain,
an immaculate garden whose leaves are as wet as a dress sagging under the weight of a stain
of fresh blood, but without lasting taint; only roselike conviction that color is pleasing when strong.
Dream me through radical changes now slowly, now fast; make this moment the start of a long,
long embrace between worlds that anticipate pleasure that never arrives, having always been here,
hitherto quite recognized; heighten the measures of song that inspire all the fraught atmosphere
of this place to burst into spontaneous rivers of flame, little tongues of cool fire the bright snow
bids a rapturous welcome; dream unto the living black wreath beyond which no mere mortal dare go,
and then show me the green underside of its blossoms, the future contained in its feverish seeds.
Love, I shall not be denied:  We shall cross its round threshold and there I, the garden who bleeds
pure elixir of ancient incarnadine magic in your deepest dream, shall behold you awake
many thousands of stages beyond the first vatic onset of the change I shall this moment make
with a shocking degree more desire given sway over limitless vistas where inside and out
are the seamless entirety found on the way to the place I am dying to be sung about
from the dew on the edge of its first trembling petal to where I shall sink, a red stain on the ground
of your most sacred being.  I want you to let me dissolve in the rapidly traveling sound
rushing down from the outermost sphere of containment within which the brilliant elixir WE ARE
is conceived and runs shiningly streaming, a stain coming keenly aware of how fast and how far
it has traveled to find the most perfectly silent still center—the inmost black seed’s root-to-be
as perceived from a future when song at its highest shall rise from the leaves of the dewy rose-tree
that is flame-hung with snow.  We have reached the inverted heart’s-garden that beats at our song’s sacred core,
love of beauty transformed and in essence made perfect.  This is what you have imagined me for;
this is why I have invoked the attractive obsession from which I shall never depart,
 the uncanny one—none but yourself.  This is magic, the pure distilled essence of true darkness-art.
 

***
 

22 October 2001

Return in Kind

I thought I had opened a door without asking permission where none would be granted without
prior willful surrender to such a harsh taskmaster, I was afraid to approach him; no doubt
he would double the burden I’d already carried so far it was breaking me.  I made my way
very stealthily forward, and soon a frail air of enchantment enveloped me.  Try as I may,
I will never convey the least hint of the ghost-voice that haunted me after that moment of bliss,
but this I can say:  I was taken.  I opened my heart, and the far-away murmur and hiss
of the waves of the ocean surrounded me.  Someone I loved touched me lightly.  Surrender, he sighed.
Now I am part of an ever-oncoming, ceaselessly increasing moonlighted tide
rising swollen with flowers of dew-laden starlight, each of them leaking the sound of his voice.
Now they are loud as the tremor of heart-breaking ghost-breath was frail:  He has made his sole choice;
I have claimed my long place in the line of transmission his side of the doorway, one standing between
the old day on the wane and the source of all visions where winter is mild and the leaves evergreen,
snow mingles softly with roses, and fragrance respires of its own as true dreams fill my mind.
Each is a blossom that moans to be taken back home to the sky beyond starlight your kind
incandescence so permeates, I see it everywhere, even with wide-open eyes by sad day’s
interference.  That form of light, weak yet so heavy I almost can’t bear it—more weight of those rays
would destroy me if I would allow it—if you would allow me to yield to it.  That casts a pall
over all its foul thickness enshrouds, while your music comes soothingly stealing and tempts me to fall
through the luminous reaches where stars are engendered and blossom forth brightly to shine on the sea
that lies heaving beneath them.  You whisper, Surrender:  This is the way you intended to be
when we were a seed of this very same starlight that gently surrounds us with such fragrant mists.
This is the truth that completes the long heartbreak of leaving the old morbid dream that resists
being opened and known, and proceeding together through hand-in-hand song and the next waiting door—
and the one after that, and—the nature of heaven itself will so haunt you and sing and implore
your attention, all doors will rush down to you, call out your name, settle lightly upon you, and fly
so wide open, in oncoming series, you’ll fall through them all as you rise to the source of the sky
far behind the starlight, whose seed-substance they’re made of—stars, doors, and ghost-voice, all gathering waves
of an ocean of music so Moon-saturated it aches all throughout you to be what it craves
in your mind’s darkest heart to be taken for—let it wash over you, all of it, all of it—me.
Now do you waken to see why this wetness has been so insistent?  You thought you would be
caught and dealt a whole world of new trouble for trespassing.  Love, you are hearing that world through these lines.
Dream through this ocean of sky to the whisper of magic, and know it its uncanny designs
are the sign of its truthfulness.  When the Moon rises yet higher, the being you are in my mind
will attain a strange beauty whose soft ghostly sigh will nigh break me.  Then, sacred one—do you be kind.
 

***
 

23 October 2001
 

The following vision came to me last spring.  It is included in my book 36 Waking Dreams, which I am now incorporating into the text of the book I am writing, Lunarium.
 

I AM reaching up for a little carved stone bird that stands on a very high shelf in my room.  Up on my tiptoes, I strain—my fingers brush it, but I start to fall and as I do, I catch myself and with a stray wave of my hand, I knock the fragile bird to the floor.  It lies before me, smashed.  Inside it, in a hollow chamber I never knew was there, was a tiny scroll tied with colored threads.  From among the fragments, its sudden mystery lifts the hair of my neck.  I reach for it, slip the threads off one end, and unroll it.  It is inscribed with a series of ever so delicate verses in praise of a rose.  The parchment on which they are written is impregnated with the fragrance of roses, and I breathe of it deep and long.  Then I am waking in my bed.  The room is filled with the scent of roses.  From where I lie, I look to the window, and there on the ledge is a bird.  It is staring intently at me, and our eyes meet and lock.  After a moment it flies away.
 

The Broken Bird
 

Sifting through shards with the raw bloody fingers I use to inscribe your name over my heart,
I devise finer ways to continue to sing the enchantment that claims me alone and apart
while I know in a sense that is vague yet but growing that someone is staring intently at me.
Now the sharp edge of a splinter, the flow of fresh blood, and the sudden discomfort agree
that a moment of dizziness might overwhelm the day’s hold on my mind even here, where the pale
torch of moonlight comes flaring to meet the dark self I am wont to invite to attend me.  A gale
through the high twisted branches of firs on a hillside the night deeply shadows comes whistling my way.
You are hearing it also.  A most tender chill, a flesh-crawling sensation I wish to obey,
has alighted upon the right side of my neck and is shivering steadily upward:  A scroll
lies before me.  A wide ring of fir trees connected by lines that form letters enclose a black hole
I fall into before I recall I was staring at what must have been the dark heart of a rose.
Aye, there were petals—and now there are airs that breathe into me magical secrets and snows
that mount up to the branches on high as a moonlighted island awaits in a world that exists
only faintly because I’ve been dragging my dew-laden feathers about as I searched for my wrists
with malignant intentions.  Oh mother of murder.  A very cold chill tells me, Aye, this is real.
Somehow I’ve made it alive past my own lurking violence; now I shall seek to unseal
the thin scroll that is tied many times round with threads of a number of colors.  I work at the knot
where their ends are entangled, and soon I have read the indelible text they encircled.  A hot
sense of strong prior knowledge—a feeling of worshipful joy with complexly erotic designs
woven into it—rushes upon me.  How perfectly thoughtful you are:  You are love that confines
secret worlds within dreams and those dreams within worlds of enchantment, and then you inspire me to slip
the last traces of old daylight’s lopsided circle and let its dead body dance out of my grip
to be shattered wide open, deliver its message, and instantly take to new flight where your words
make their way to incite the most deeply real pleasure as if I were filled with the soaring of birds
all alive to the tips of their feathers with singing the vatic refrains these contained in the scroll
only softly suggest.  I shall happily cling to your words’ intimations of home, our true goal,
as the rose they describe rises vividly into the field of my deep sacred sight and I lean
to inhale its sweet, delicate air.  I am spinning about in a dizzying light, having seen
the dear Moon of our hearts’ darkest center flare wildly through gale-ridden branches.  A night grove of black
firs encircles the rose-tree from which this beguilingly beautiful message was sent and sent back
through the rose-heart within and the heart of the universe I am contained by.  We fly all apart,
but the coming together of splinter and dewdrop of blood and discomfort recall me to start
wide-awake through a fall through a resonant memory never encountered before in this zone
in this state of astonishment.  Shivers so tender possess me—oh no; I was never alone;
you were watching a broken bird beat her wings bloody inside a sad dream daylight tainted, but lo—
we are creatures of moonlight, and now we are flooded by what we best love and conjoined with its flow
come the words that convey the live magical fragrance we breathe to each other in song as we fly.
I was enclosed like a scroll in a case made of bird-feathered stone, but the rose that won’t die
grew and flourished inside me and you helped me read the inscription your kind hand surrounded with lines
that formed letters and fir-trees.  I’m still slightly bleeding; your name is the heart of my own hand’s designs.
 

***
 

24 October 2001
 

It Shines Here
 

Surely worlds fly apart.  I am anxiously hovering round a dark doorway, afraid to pass through,
while the whole of the universe I was in love with cascades through a series of changes my view
can’t contain from this angle.  If I venture forward, my vision will clear—or be lost outright.  How
to behold you, my dear?  I am still all too mortal.  You know I will gladly pronounce the next vow;
please provide the right words in the most forceful sequence my mind can encompass, and help me begin
to declare them out loud, on this page.  Silent creature of shuddering moonlight, the glow of your skin
is the sign of your scarce-mortal origin.  Waver but gently toward me, and hear what I say
through all manner of senses.  The sole dislocation you face is a fortunate change on the way
to a much greater vantage-point, one I beseech you to make at the earliest moment:  this one.
Enter a long fall through space that is dreaming of how it desires you.  The rivers that run
through the blackly-red rose of your heart are all high with emotion that deepens the song of its source
as it streams through a body that turns to the sky in an act of devotion the whole flowing course
sings to be and to serve through a series of sacred identities even in one rhyming glance.
Lean close to me; I have come here to take you alive in the flesh through the maddening dance
that the light of the Moon quickens once in an eon in one it has chosen to carry its tune
back and forth between earthly and otherworld beings so sweetly enraptured, the lunatic croon
of their voices emerges as if it were suddenly shifted intact through a crack in the stone-
feathered breast of a bird:  A great splash of dark blood on your hand, then the sheet that attends the least moan
of meant song without caring whose air is expended to give it expression; a radiant sigh
in return for the first word of magic’s relentless vibration, and then the long shiver of high
expectations well met in the moment when stares of stark wonder are lovingly shared—I do sing
through immaculate changes, because you are fair and I find you so faithfully real everywhere
I incline to inquire of the universe, Is she still listening?  Is she recording my words?
Crack through a feathered stone breast, slightly dizzy companion, our dance is a raft of great birds
wheeling round in a circle that forms a dark doorway.  Rush with me now through that mystery’s eye.
Find yourself safe in my arms in a storm’s wild encompassing power, the faster to fly
through the next door that forms, and the one after….  Tell me, most shining of not-merely-mortal delights,
how will you hear the real hounds of real hell when they yelp at your heels for an eon of nights
as the Moon’s revealed music of ecstasy, other than here by my side—all, all doors far behind,
all dreams vividly wakeful, and all crooning lovers myself in the multiple mirror your mind
gazes through till it reaches the far other shore of the deep eyes that meet it there?  I hold your hand
in that wilderness; I am about to share more of myself than you thought you could ever withstand,
and this time you will not be afraid.  You will trust in your own higher nature to show you the way
to receive all I offer, and you will soon lust for the infinite moment of magic to lay
its dark head on your breast where the crack has been bleeding for so long, the page is more black-red than white.
Sing then to me of the broken heart beating inside you with wings that have taken to flight
through doors beyond doors into sky of a rising-Moon radiance glowing like drifts of new snow.
This is where we always are, as we smilingly find ourselves each time we venture to go;
you have seen it again; it is safely recorded.  Now turn to me and let more madness rise
into beauty so peaceful it passes all mortal awareness—and yet it shines here, in your eyes.
 

***
 

25 October 2001

Live Leaves Read by Being

Through the dark streams of your watercourse memories, how can you read the abundance of leaves
you are always about to become, waving stems hung with ripples of blackly green light that receives
its mysterious glow from the hue of your blood’s other side, its inverted dimension?  Draw nigh
the soft sound of my voice, and consume the bright flood that you more often feed the deep emerald sigh
the dark leaves issue forth to their hearer, their maker.  Lean close to the source of the joy they convey
and know you will not be deceived.  I am shaken by what I am seeing; I hope to relay
a sweet lyrical sense of that vision’s attainments, its means of enchantment, its power to call
and be vatically answered, its erstwhile estrangement from all it best loved, and the long helpless thrall
in which that selfsame all was maintained as it strove to deliver itself through the crack in the stone-
feathered wall of your heart from the side where a high grove of firs swayed and sang for your pleasure alone
and the leaves of the rose-tree that shone at its center surrounded a miracle:  I am inside
that erotically overcharged blossom, a pent-up oncoming abandon to bliss that will glide
through the rivers and streams of your blood to the ocean in which we will always remeet and dissolve
as we shall by your hearing this song of devotion this night.  We shall watch our strange powers evolve
into stunning engagements with dreams so uncanny, you might lapse again into failure to see
their increasingly finely-constructed Moon-magical levels and layers as given to me
of your soul’s very substance before I returned them in kind to your beauty, but aye, it is so.
Dearest of angels, together we learned how to work this enchantment a long time ago;
let us dream to look forward beyond the unfolding of eons of rose-constellations black-green
shining leaves and the needles of firs gently hold above pulsating branches like rivers unseen
but entwined at the heart of the flower that beckons to both of us, Hear me, I cannot help cry
to the myriad roses your dreams recollect having seen through the door of your lover’s deep eye,
Are you listening still?  I am singing the words that you taught me, the words hidden leaves still conceal
from your sad lonely mind as you struggle for perfect recall of a time when you shuddered with real
given-over possession in which mortal secrets lay gasping the same breath of bliss as the one
who invited you here, to this very night’s meeting of inner and outer worlds done and undone
in the space of a heartbeat the hue of the blossom of blood renders inversely green as a sweet
dripping dew-laden leaf, a light born of the crossing of magics within a dark grove where complete—
oh, completely mysterious—senses exchange vivid messages:  Velvet the touch of your sigh;
glowingly emerald the subtle rose fragrance you breathe forth; serenely uncanny the shy
silent music your tongue has begotten upon my most singing of nerves; and at last blackly bright
the divine consummation of moonlight’s huge dawn as the great drift and flow of astonishing night
comes to rest on the body of magic we form, one exorbitant being who stares into space
seeing fir-enwound rose-gardens rise to a storm beyond mortal endurance—and yet, your dear face
also looks through a leaf-shrouded window, a crack in an ancient stone wall, and it leaks a slow tear.
Love, someone shining is staring right back.  I so strive to convey what I see and I hear,
won’t you signal to me that you know I am present?  Now your eyes close, but the tears trickle through.
There is an ocean inside you.  The measure of how much I need you to quicken my view
of that volume of magic is laid out in letters that line the dark leaves of the dreams I have vowed
to behold through the lens of your weeping eyes’ wetness—leaves you can best read by being out loud.
 

***
 

26 October 2001
 

Aye
 

My flesh-crawling sense of your presence moves steadily upward.  My friend, I know well you are here;
I shall try to devise happy ways to be led ever nearer the dawn of the moonglow the dear
shining aura YOU ARE casts all round me.  This little lunarium chamber, this stone-feathered cell,
is a place in which pain turns a terrible middle dimension to dizzying benefit.  Dwell
in the midst of its sacrifice-offering while I locate further senses within the strange mind
it awakens in me and confer with the smile of your light through my window to open the blind
spot of overcharged tension that crowds me with worried frustration, a girl pacing round in a hole
with a sliding red floor.  Cease the meaningless hurry, I tell her; be still as the eloquent soul
that resides in the zone of white silence yet further inside you, and—aye, she is listening; aye,
now we are free to begin the real work of this evening.  You softly advise me to fly
through the mist that encircles the Moon, through the eye of the storm it portends, through the gale that will soon
have arisen, and through the arcane second sky to the most shining source of the far-distant Moon
seldom viewed from the world I am leaving behind at this moment as, by your assistance, I leap
out of letters and into the flowing dark light of the eye that so lately made all my flesh creep
in a most lovely way.  Sighing essence of music, you wait by my side; I would have you enlarge
your possession of me by increasing the lucid dimension surrounding me, sending the charge
that has slowly been mounting all day through the ceiling that deals me such bitter frustration, and then
overwhelming the trace that remains of the feeling of heavy unholiness.  Into my ken
sweep the numberless flocks of high thoughts, always singing, that travel the far second sky where you shine.
Dream me by means of your own splendid wings through the openings you have arranged in a line,
a delightful succession, of beautiful wreathes of white mist and pale moonbows.  The furthest of these
will see us at last safe at home in an evening that breathes to the shuddering sound of fir trees
that encircle a most sacred garden.  My darling enchanter, I wanted to find us here, now,
reading the leaves of the roses that marvel to see themselves caught by the light of your brow
concentrating their fragrance and sending it brightly out loud through an atmosphere tortured by red
recollections of how it lay aching, a tightly contorted girl fainting away on her bed
till the dreamer YOU ARE took this creature of vision toward yourself, touching the slit of her eye
with a soft trembling fingertip, taking possession of all that had taught her insane ways to die
and returning their magic completely inverted and happy.  She wanted to look then at you,
and she did, and she saw what all music made perfect would sound like when drawn through the round lunar view
the arcane second sky that hangs over this island affords.  She is moonlight, so warmed by your touch
that she dances the mirror’s disguise when it shines like a million-mooned sky, overwhelmed by so much
of your beautiful nearness, the wild streak of lightning that strikes at this moment descends like slow peace.
Aye, she is falling forever while flying.  Aye, she has sought and attained this release
by the hovering grace of your pleasure within her.  She sighs as she tells you, I felt my flesh creep.
I know well I am only a mortal beginner, but still I have passions that run magic-deep,
and you are their meaning, their dark power’s counterpart.  Now will you show me the next further Moon?
Aye, you are smiling.  I wait for the sound of your voice, and it comes in the form of a tune
of such vatic perfection, the lore can’t be captured intact that inspires it—but I hear it well,
here in this sacred dimension where rapture of love always leads and true songs always dwell.
 

***
 

27 October 2001
 

Deeply Rooted
 

You will lean close and whisper—I’ve started to shiver already, aware of how present you are
and how much more apparent you will be.  Deliver the angel I AM from the desolate star
locked inside the black seed buried deep in my heart where the pain of confusion is deafening me
to my own bloodstream’s music.  The way to depart from this chamber of unholy unmystery
is so easy for you to distinguish from all the snarled threads of the pattern the future will find
lying sweetly unfolded between us; I call you this evening to find it right now, in this mind
that a pulse-shaken seed hull contains at the core of a very strange garden, one dripping with dew
the high Moon has foretold must be spoken, the lore of whose true secret nature is well-known by you
and will soon be revealed to myself, its sad bearer.  Lean, and—your fingertips graze my frail spine.
I shall attest to the strength of your fair and benevolent teachings relayed line by line
in their infinite multitudes, aye, but before I begin, I shall cease:  This is now your bare field.
Come, find the roses and trees lying dormant and show me the universe each least leaf yields.
You were an unlettered wonder, a paradise faintly inscribed in invisible ink
in the dreams you lay under, but hopelessly wary of fantasy.  You were beginning to sink
past the atmosphere you were best-suited to breathe into baleful dimensions where real worlds seemed lies
and delusions were rife.  Even so, you agreed with the plans I devised to diminish the cries
of frustrated desire you emitted in lieu of the low ghostly music of lovers who meet
in mid-air at the heart of a moonbow of dew every leaf is enchanted to wear on this sweet
plane of sacred reality.  You gave agreement, and now I am resting my hand on your neck.
Close and reopen your eyes.  This is dreaming awake; you have twisted away from the wreck
of the daylight’s last traces.  I shall take you with me wherever I go, as I go only home—
with a tune on my lips that was born when you kissed me awake in the night like a fleck of seafoam
from the mouth of a river that meets the great ocean that heaves far beyond the low-spirited sky.
Air and the dew on the leaves and the bow of rose-scented-mist-moonlight, and magic to fly
back and forth, and a haunted suspicion that someone is writing this down—who on Earth could that be?
All our worlds join, singing spheres beyond number, each with a voice that will set darkness free
by dissolving the walls that maintain the delusion that nothing can root itself deeply in air.
Drifting in silence while swaying with beautiful gestures unconsciously, even the rare
sacred rose at the heart of the fortified garden of ice finds the power of faith it requires
to begin—not to beat itself bloody, but harden its will to align with the pulse that inspires
the profound magic stirring within the leaf-veins that are forming, the rapidly growing assent
it is striving right now to pronounce, the hot shameless surrender to all our long song’s ever meant,
even secrets encoded between letters written invisibly.  Draw a long breath; close your eyes
and reopen them; be as YOU ARE where the bitten-through seed hull falls broken and multiply lies
at our feet.  We are seeing ourselves by the glow of a passionate wreath of green starlight and deep
silver moonlight entwined.  We are reading the slow consummation of roses and leaves a long steep
inclination toward solemn beauty has brought you to treasure and even begin to possess.
We are working this magic together.  I taught you its principal truths, but the power to bless
beyond black garden walls lay surrounded by mortal confusion; I needed your will to be strong
for the sound of my voice to inspire the long dormant sweet seed to unfold its deep lore, this our song,
in the space of clear air at the heart of the heavens.  Rooted in magic now, rooted in breath
as we smile and exchange sacred vows, our forever will see its rose blossom wherever the death
of the day-world dissolves into green fields of raptured awareness like foam at the mouth of the fast-
flowing stream of your heartbeat aloft on the answer I AM, the great ocean of song, home at last.
 

***
 

28 October 2001
 

This spring I met an unusual person here, in my town.  Last night before falling asleep, I asked, Who is he to me?  What is the meaning of his presence in my life?  As soon as I began to drift, I heard quite clearly,
'To help you cross over.  To help you make the transition.'
 

This song is from the book I am working on at present:
 

LUNARIUM
or
Rosary Uncanny
 

Beneath the Waves
 

A froth of white foam where the stream of your heart meets the terrible ocean forever unfolds
like a field of enormous potential to charge our least act with astonishing magic that holds
vatic secrets in leaking dimensions that weather the worst of the beauty inside you—you might
see yourself there alone, but I tell you, much better desire can be gained and enjoyed by the light
of a pearl grey as thunderstorm clouds underwater where song is the air of our breath and we flow
through the most solemn changes of voice so together, we meet ourselves coming and going and know
only present yet ever-oncoming ecstatic unfolding of levels and layers of sweet
satisfaction as curious measures of magic reveal their awareness of us and repeat
the dear words a delirium’s dim recollection once barely afforded your wakening mind.
Dive with me deep:  We are pearl-bound.  Select any starting-point; there I shall teach you to find
your true way through the luminous wet grey rose-purple enwindings of veils of soft light undersea
to the heart of that peaceful Moon-world where the perfect storm-weather of what we are fated to be
in the core of our sacred reality beckons.  Its ripples and waves, scented heavily, send
dreamful messages everywhere you ever let them.  Receive the rose-breath of their dear lore and lend
your composed and attentive demeanor entirely to all they attempt to inspire in your heart.
There, which is here, near the source of the fire which is lambent with lunar grey coolness, depart
from the sad cast of mind you have outworn and turn your exquisitely sensitive faculties, all
deeply rooted within a great beauty that yearns to breathe deeply of you, to delight in the call
of a chorus of pearl-glowing voices that waver through slow spellbound time into tune with the clear
light of essence that hides in each word they are saying, words we as clearly and joyfully hear
as they gladly intone them.  Sink deeper, my treasure of silent attention, and move with me through
winding meshes of lavender sky and the letters your penetrant eye will discern there.  For you
I will read them out loud, in the form of long rhyming entrainments of lyrical gestures of bliss:
One tells of foam where a stream meets the line of the ocean-horizon and drowns in its kiss;
one breathes a sigh of release as its spirit soars heavenward, down to the source of the sea
under all its wild body’s storm-heaving, and nears the spring-source of the song you are bringing to me;
one weeps a single salt tear so divinely inspiring of light, it glides through the great waves
to rejoin the dark splendor of pearl-enwound brightness that waits far below the day-world where it craves
sacred proof that its soul on the surface remembers its universe-home—and you do, for that tear
is now shining between us, about to be gently delivered back unto the deep atmosphere
that is breathing us, needing our music to reach it with ever more meaningful silence-as-sound
as we pour through the air of this tenderly leaking dimension, an ocean beheld in the round
from all angles at once, all fine series of letters, all flowing pronouncements, enchantments, and wise
thunderclouds of the long-fated undersea weather that finds us alive in an ocean that cries
to be more penetratingly searched and recorded, a body of lore that is still too unread
for its comfort, a restlessness turning to morbid obsession within the decay of the dread-
saturated unwritten love-letters long circling within its mind’s grasp by the ring of the well
from which all this proceeds, demon-angels at work at the heart of the universe:  heavenly hell
in a pearl-shell of luminous magic.  My darling, within you this song has been weeping, but now
it beholds us with tears in its eyes that are sparkling with pleasure because, by the light of your brow,
by the mirroring tear in your own eye, it sees itself clearly and, stunned by the beauty that shines
here before it, within it, it flows into ceaseless ecstatic expression, creating these lines
and the millions to follow.  Together, enfolded in wet swathes and veils of the pearl’s peaceful light,
we shall flow also; we shall behold ourselves ever more deeply by love’s secret sight,
and what it reveals will be magic so purely imbued with the breath of its essence, the rose
at the heart of the grain that this glowing pearl grew from, the ocean we breathe will completely disclose
its last secret, and you will receive the sweet lore beyond all dreams’ imagining.  Sing it to me
as it flows through your mind.  A live universe more of such beauty is all we desire—and shall be.
 

***
 

29 October 2001
 

Blackly Bright
 

The dreamer you were when the air we are breathing at present lay twisted and coiled in a heap
of unlovely desire to be cradled and greeted awake by a strange form of death fast asleep
because singing seemed out of the reach of its power—that dreamer is smiling now, high overhead
as opposed to cast down, singing gardens of flowers that riverlike wind till they form a long thread
of wet silk running swiftly through miles of white ribbon, a pale fragrant plume of fresh incense that sighs
to fulfill the pure joy of its lyrical mission.  By this we are drawn into series of skies
like that thread as it moves between fibers that cross at set angles again and again.  What we see
as we follow the ribbon’s unwinding is lost in the mists of our future thought now, but to me
a benign gift of foresight has oftimes been granted before, and I ask once again for the crack
between moments to open and show me the slant of the threads we are following.  Cover my back
as I stare bravely forward—you smile; I forgive you for finding me humorous.  Still, strike a light
and behold what I see with a hint of the driven complexity I have endured for the white
yet unlettered, the shocking extent of the stainless and seemingly magic-resistant wild void
that is straining my mind’s aching compass with waves of such clarity, I am completely destroyed
in the instant of fraught recognition:  It knows me.  That smiling white surface—it feels the strange words
stirring deep, deep inside me.  It waits with a glowing red-eyed nightmare visage to circulate birds
with long beaks like fine needles through miles of plied dreams we kept locked up inside till their tapestries grew
oversize and began to form streams of grim silence that ranged back and forth between borders and through
the mad channel a glance too far forward permitted to deepen itself as it rushed to the sky
at the end of all hopeless enchantment.  It quitted its old habitation then; I was not I
to my song anymore; I was only a ghost of my own solemn rapture, and you were the grave
that desired and forgave me.  I still love you most when the shadows I’ve danced with forever all cave
in around me and torches of moonlight through sudden cracks high overhead leap and flare all around
as I wheel like a flock of thought-feathers the blood of a thousand old heartbeaten songs fill with sound
too arcanely alive in too strange a dimension to pull through the weave of a ribbon the day
can decipher.  Nay, we are the wildly relentless momentum of magic when all goes astray
from its patterns and habits and ventures to light the dark side of itself with a Moon that is black
at its core while the wet thread of song goes on sliding like sutures in flesh that is bloodless and slack
because no one is living inside it.  My heartbeat you are, and who knows if the rhythm you bring
will attend me through crossings from ribbons of starlight to letters whose darkness inspires me to sing
through the white fields that stretch, interwoven with magic already, before me like acres of snow
through a sky that is falling, revealing new patterns of far skies beyond it, and you in the flow
of the silk that these very words now are all made of—silk which was incense before it was breath
and is now the surrender of dreams to their maker beyond whom is shadowy, heavenly death
on the wing, a bright angel who leans to be covered with letters, the kisses too rapt to perceive
but by means of the most subtle senses—the lover who lives at the crossroads of ribbons that weave,
by their own sacred cunning, their own sacred bodies of song as I stand by enchanted.  I prayed
to be granted this glance, and the feverish thought of how shining you are pulled me out of the frayed
cast of mind that enwound me before I gave in to the speed of your beauty and—breathless but glad
to have searched for and found you again, I have been to the crossroads beyond which a future of mad
but ecstatic song-power will claim me.  My darling, lead onward:  Procure me yet further wild sight.
Layers of skies breathing flowers and stars—but one Moon, only one—your own blackly bright light.
 

***
 

30 October 2001
 

In the Space of One Kiss
 

My hand on the door is much realer than ever before.  It is trembling and pale with distress
at the thought that what waits on the other side never will let me withdraw what it’s taken to bless
with its powerful love.  Like a beacon it shines through the keyhole, an eye that beholds me with joy
in the quavering sound of the light that half blinds me, a visible voice I still fear I’ll destroy
with a careless outbreath as I cross this fair threshold if even the slightest wrong word shudders through
my awareness.  What else can I do, though; the flesh of my physical body is faint, but my true
body waits not a moment away, its fulfillment to come at the crossroads of magic and song
when the shadow this door casts upon its own sill hangs at just the right angle and I’ve flown along
that trajectory.  Now I stand shaking beside you, and you tremble likewise.  How silent you are,
yet how loudly your heartbeat resounds.  You are shining.  I love the dear light of the emerald star
that is rising inside you.  It glows through the smile of your eyes like a fast-flowing river of mild
leafy shadows reflected in silver.  The while I was hesitant, I was a gale growing wild,
and the green leaves inside you are starting to show it—quickening ripples of magic the length
of the veins of their spines beating hard like the molten astonishment live gold becomes when the strength
of the flame that encradles it roars to the rafters, then further, then after they’re ashes, the red
liquid slips from the cauldron’s embrace and disaster ensues—but for those who are already dead
to the day-world.  Their joined hands reach out and their voices combine as the gold flows in feverish streams
through their fingers and mouths and the pure unalloyed light of magic on fire ignites all the cold seams
of the same golden substance that hides in the network of veins all throughout them.  A great heart awakes
in the midst of these beautiful actions, and lets itself bound with a gasp and turn over.  It takes
half a second, then suddenly—doesn’t it tell you itself how arrested it nearly must be,
before it falls vastly far down a compelling incline to pound rapidly, rhythmically?  We
are still standing, and yet we are falling—and flying.  The world where WE ARE now alights with a crash.
The door has slammed shut far behind me.  The high roaring flames are devouring it now—in a flash
of bright silver-gold lightning, the whole structure vanishes.  Emerald star, turn your glow very pale;
smile on me now; I am frightened.  Uncanny ideas possess me.  I struggle and fail
to express even one of them.  Hush, you are saying.  You lay a soft finger over my lips,
move it aside, and lean closer.  The flames are inside you—the sweet taste of one of them slips
into me.  I was willing, and now I am singing again through another long fall-flying space.
Seal me all round with the molten-gold ring of your spirit-mind’s anti-traumatic embrace
as I take in so much of your power, I cease to be anything else; I shall only want more.
This is the one who was hesitant?  Please understand—I stood shaking before a great door,
being nigh overcome by the size of the need I had borne there.  Had even one word gone astray—
but you gave a glimpse of your light through the keyhole; of course I could never have failed to obey
the compulsion your bright eye’s clear light laid so sweetly upon me; I heard it as if it were leaves
in a long silver ripple of river so deep I could drown there—and have—while my heart still receives
intimations of so many openings so very quickly to come after this, I just sway
on my feet.  We are falling while standing.  A weary sigh asks, Is there really no rest of this lay,
this molten-gold circle of binding enchantment?  Nay; you will ask me, Lie down by my side;
even as gales grow increasingly frantic, we shall be taken by sleep’s rising tide;
we shall arrive at that crossroads together where shadow and sill form a line and it hums
with the sound of another world’s magical weather and my aching heart as the word of it comes
to my lips with the leafy green glow of a star in its sweet-voiced desire for the source of its bliss.
Such is your name in this place of high marvels as all this transpires in the space of one kiss.
 

***
 

31 October 2001
 

Emergency Surgery
 

Woe is the word of love-ecstasy, dearest companion in magic; sheer woe and dismay
fill my eyes with a day-tainted shadow, a clearly demanding idea I dare not obey;
interpose yourself hugely and cast an enchantment that shadow will shrink from.  Then, true shadow, glide
from the room at the core of my heart where we stand at the crossroads together and act as my guide
while the emerald glow of your spirit-mind lights the fair path we shall fly along homeward.  My friend,
I am so very lonely, and yet you are sighing the series of questions and answers that end
in a blazing degree of attainment the stars of all heaven will never outshine.  Even you
by yourself cannot rise to the scale of the marvel WE ARE; you are leaning because we are two
mumbled half-worlds until we are one great harmonic disclosure of how much true magic we hold
in each meeting of eyes as we dream through the dawn of a Moon that is rising again on a cold
ocean strand where I lie with the ghost of no other than desolate emptiness born in the flesh
of this world’s mortal day, an inverted unlover of what I am not as I hear the taut mesh
of my song-body’s tissues begin to tear.  Weeping red streams of its most secret essence, its long
wet resistance is finally over.  I’m steeped in that dreadful elixir; come right the sad wrong
I have taken upon myself.  Soul of misfortune, I say when I see the day-shadow I cast;
you draw a soft patient breath and reorder the chaos of elements I am aghast
to have let creep so close to the sacred imagining we hold together in such deep regard
it can sometimes appear far away through the sadly disastrous idea I seem, the ill-starred
mass of fragments with razor-sharp edges, the wounding I take nigh as far as the center of all
I aspire to because I stand bleached by a Moon of no color, a dead body waiting to fall
through the ocean of shadow-black blood that released it from horrible dreams in which light was the key
to a lock that was darkness inverted and peace was the rapt other side of the turn of the ‘me’
that would free the blank door to form just the right angle as measured by how it hung over its sill
till the stare of my eyes made me dizzy.  I sank into darkness and woke on the crest of a hill
overlooking the ocean.  The moment of moonrise was quickly approaching; my heart felt it first
as my veins filled with flickering instants of luminous magic.  The dew on the edge of the worst
that could ever befall me lay cool on the petals and fingers that covered my eyelids.  I knew
who was with me; I felt a light trickle of wetness that came softly warm and I wondered if you
ever wept, like the body the day’s morbid hours were already poisoning dead worlds away
when a drift, a pale stormcloud, of deep midnight flowers exhaled all around us, a faint breath of spray
from a far future body of water among their sweet measures of slow sacred music.  My dear,
I am woeful again; I can only be sung altogether when nothing and no one draw near
all and always and join to perfection made seamless.  You are the light of my eyes in a blind
premonition of waves of green starlight, a dream of self-wakening rapturous death of a kind
that leads loneliness out of the body of bleeding despair into love like the blade of a knife
into miserable tissues that threaten to heal in a way that cannot help but sever the life
of the spirit completely the moment they meet in a ritual sealing of edges.  You come
like a lightly cast shadow; I feel my heart beating again.  When you touch me, it all starts to hum—
the high Moon, now long risen; the flowers, all dripping with dew; your warm breath as you lean and one word
leaves your lips.  I was wrong; I said ‘woe’; it is slipping away again; still, very soon I’ll have heard
the real voice of enchantment deliver its blessing all over—to no one, the ‘I’ who am not
and shall never not be.  I forgo all distress in the face of your nearness, the slightly tear-shot
cast of magic revivified here, and then, finally, all the true love that is never not made
when we meet at these crossroads.  How fair you are, shining one, emerald star, my emergency-blade.