1 October 2002
 

This eight-line lyric form is what I have chosen to use for the verse passages in the book I have begun working on.  It is entitled ‘Quhair.’  Quhair is an antiquated spelling for ‘where,’ as used chiefly in Scotland.  It is also an obsolete alternative for ‘cahier,’ notebook.  The text will consist of pairs of lyrics and waking dreams like those in the file by that name here at AEAEA.
 

The Blue Flame Passes Before
 

What can you give when the least of my efforts
passes the worth of your holdings entire?
Turn back the world that resists; what is left is
sufficient to feed the first tongue of the fire
I am waiting to be swallowed whole by.  The fever
that needs me draws nigh; the long pain of its breath
passes over my body; I drop into seething—
blue moonlight—and peace—stealing light—singing death.
 

***
 

2 October 2002
 

The Dripping-Down
 

Who told me, just as a slow tear trickles
noiselessly down one side, so I
might listen but never hear the little
light you keep dripping?  Let me die
if thus I will sooner understand the
voice I have not yet heard, but hold
my hand till we two have passed the landing
leading downstairs to worlds untold.
 

*

Collapsing Into Itself
 

I shall hold you wholly—distant.
Only here, my two white hands
as empty as they are—a blissful
pallor shimmers down and stands
upright behind my eyes and sees them
overflowing.  You are far
away, but still you know this evening’s
air of blue surrounds one star.
 

***
 

3 October 2002
 

Fly Toward Away
 

You will have woken me soon, won’t you, dearest
of singing obsessions?  True dreams fraught with birds,
an open blue eye-lake to mirror them, eerie
enchantment provided where formerly words
failed in strength to convey—what they will, by your power
of calm multivalency—soon, shall we say?
Feather-drafts forming—a storm-cloud arousing
wild thoughts—song is present:  False dreams, fly away.
 

*
 

The Seed of Silence
 

Only fever reaching forward—
into zones where ghosts abound—
meeting me with dreams so Northern,
I am snow—without a sound,
I fall upon myself and all my
senses:  Hushed and pale as dew
on apple blossoms, coldly calling
aching frost, I shelter—you.
 

***
 

4 October 2002
 

What a strangely tender, oddly,
movingly delightful, wild
incantatory-rhythm-bodied
beast you are, forlorn sweet child
who hides behind a Night Mare’s swollen
tear-wet eyes—or mine:  Come see
your shining help me break the holy
 fainting spell that hobbles me.
 

***
 

5 October 2002
 

Ice crystals form on my fingers.  I warm them
away with my breath, but they soon come again.
I, an idea so cold, yet so swarming
with lucid developments—I feel the rain
of a far-away country hang sheer mist-grey curtains
like gauze round a wound:  At their center, I stand
weeping, softly confused.  Till I melt to the purpose
they mean, I remain my own heart’s foreign land.
 

***
 

6 October 2002
 

During the night I experienced an intense bodily pain.  It grew so strong, so swiftly that it made me dizzy.  I thought, I hope I am not about to faint—and then I found myself waking up on the floor.  For a very long time I remained disoriented.  I remembered the pain, which by that time had ended, but I could not understand where I was or why I was there.  I recognized the window and the light coming in around its edges, but the angle was not quite right.  Finally I understood that I was accustomed to seeing it from my bed, and I was lying a few feet away from it.  I had been walking across the room when I passed out.  For my physical state to return to normal took a very long time.  Perhaps it was because this was so worrying that I was unable to fall asleep for several hours, until well after dawn.  I then dreamed that I was a witch-like woman with long red hair in a braid that I was unbinding and raveling out as I angrily spoke to an older woman.  I told her that others were not, under any circumstances, to be let into the room where I work as I keep it so highly charged.  Evidently, she had suggested that I welcome strangers to visit there.  I was furious, and she acquiesced.  The whole incident was much like the one I reported here in early August—so much that it is unnerving.  Two fainting spells in two months, both of them difficult to revive from, with lasting very low blood pressure—and yet today at the Sunday Market I met a friend who told me that she has had similarly powerful experiences recently.  She agreed with me, citing Pema Chodron as an outside authority, that they all have everything to do with Vajrayana.
 

The Proffered Hand
 

Hold the bewildering hand with a grip that
is fiercely demonstrative:  Aye, you will go
any lengths to meet love where it steadily drips with
a musical ocean’s arcane overflow
as the countenance arched high above you smiles down with
such peaceful intent, sweet and slow warmth pervades
your chilled flesh—which now quivers for reasons you’re bound to
address by wrong name in this place of drawn shades.
 

***
 

7 October 2002
 

Stilly shining out like water
wide as nowhere’s other sky,
cold blue limbs a lunar body
liltingly unfolds—do I
rush forward to embrace that future,
meeting it halfway or more?
Love amid such involutions
holds a hand—and cants a door….
 

***
 
 

8 October 2002
 

This is Quhair's prose passage for yesterday, followed by today's verses:
 

11.

Resting in semi-darkness, I will myself to return to the place from which I awoke after fainting.  As I lie there, in its cloudy greyness, I realize that I have just felt a little hand softly patting my face.  By the time I am fully aware of it, it has already withdrawn.  I slip back into the ether, or so I have begun to think of the place, and he returns and touches me more.  Again, as soon as I can take in his presence, he is already gone.  This happens over and over.  I take note of my surroundings:  I am in a blackish-grey zone that I can only call ‘intermediate,’ a layer of place with little vertical dimension but endless expanses forward and to either side.  I send out a tendril of thought, searching for the little boy.  I gather that he does not live here; he comes from somewhere beyond this place’s furthest forward edge.  Slowly, I realize that I can hear the lapping of waves.  There is a smell as of fresh water—we are near a lake?

Now I can see the words engraved in the edge of the sword blade, or rather, I can feel their presence in my mind:  ‘Sursum deorsum, my shining apparition.’
 
 

The Little Ones
 

Wavering light, little raylets uneasy
grey ghostlings dance into—and not out again—
as you unshade my eyes with a silently pleasing
white pallor like—rubbing against the close grain—
sound comes wafting me into its motion, the wave of
a glimmering hand in reply—when you speak,
living lights fill my mind—I’ve a longing ghost-layer
whose dancing ideas—don’t now leave me weak.
 

***
 

9 October 2002
 

Soon and Not Soon Here
 

You will have spoken too much and too loudly
to come of your own to love’s blessing—see here
how light all around you slips down like the sound of
delirium lisping its own liquid tear
into syllables fragrant with meanings so ancient
you strive to recall them, then lapse into—speech
won’t contain me, but I will have lent you the nameless
desire to lie down within silence’s reach.
 

*
 

Child of Dreaming Song
 

I shall hold you sadly closer.
Only child, please take my hand.
Know me by my gleaming ghostly
aura.  Through it, understand
the words that flow toward you, shining
deep within your own mind’s glow.
Only one, sweet song divining
being, source of me, dream so.
 

***
 

10 October 2002
 

My dreams last night made very clear that the work I am engaged in now is a work of very real magic.  These are magic words.  They are multi-dimensional and speak most clearly to an expanded state of awareness.  Such is the state they come from—perhaps from another mind than the one I call my own.  Perhaps!  Poetry can evoke that state in the reader, if the reader is willing.

The possibilities of grammar, grammaire, grimoire are fascinating in themselves.  Consider the potential of simple present tense in the lines below.  Does it not exemplify the magic of this song?
 

Shiver More Deeply Now
 

Shiver—you see, I still only possess you
a part at a time—now your skin, the white sail
that contains the downwind of your mind.  When it rests in
oblivion, there the inspiring sea-gale
I breathe through your grey world opens woken and willing
remembrance.  Take into your greediest ken
the whole wild sudden windfall of snow that will fill you
with—wisdom.  Successively deepen till then.
 

***
 

11 October 2002
 

Failsafe Tear
 

Darkly grey, yet wholly shining,
quite un-light-reflecting slip
of fragile gauze amid sight-twining
shadow-eyes whose blessed drip
is dreamful magic, when I see the
space of you grow thin and pale—
aye, at length transparent—meet me
there:  This magic cannot fail.
 

***
 

12 October 2002
 

Bleeding Sleeplessness
 

Creature comfort my own closest
ghost-acquaintance lacks and needs,
haunt my deepest eyes.  A most
uncanny aura slowly bleeds
all round his sleepless, weary presence.
Where are you, soft shiver-sigh?
Hover near, that pain grow less.  He
weeps for you; thus so do I.
 

***
 

13 October 2002
 

Work on Quhair is proceeding as well as can be expected under frustrating circumstances.  The new owner of my building wishes to replace all the windows.  He has very little time to do it before the rains set in.  He has chosen a contractor and is waiting on a quote from the window manufacturer.  At some unknown point—but surely within the next three weeks or so—workmen will be in here, tearing the place apart.  I want to throw myself into my book, but I can’t because the thought of several days’ disturbance is too inhibiting.  That is partly why I have chosen to write the book in very short segments.  My experience with visitors to the Sunday Market has also showed me that such writings are more readily accessible than long forms.  So all in all, I don’t know whether I am coming or going, but challenges sometimes spark ingenuity.
 

Sailing Sometimes
 

I only know we were sailing sometimes,
flying along a midnight shore
in sight of a timeless sheet of rumpled
gauze upon which a lady bore
strange thoughts to our world.  Her face was glowing
rapt as the Moon in silver skeins
of rain-filtered water-light.  She showed me
magic through you—my heart still pains.
 

***
 

14 October 2002
 

Foxglove
 

Let us sing back and forth.  Every direction
of criss-crossing pathway now lies in between—
soon we will meet gladly on all of them.  Hectic
with strangeness, a lost face dissolving unseen
as I press deeply forward—I cannot; she calls me,
and I must attend her long word of complaint.
Darling, you know the sad music that follows
this message.  It murmurs—are you growing faint….
 

***
 

15 October 2002
 

Closer than Death
 

Will that brings shining, I want you to wander
toward me right now with a gleam in your pale
open hand.  Hover ever so near, till beyond and
all round us an aura as wild as a gale
off the grey winter ocean runs rushing in circles
of high sacred magic—danced light as a breath—
which then gentles and vanishes.  Drawn to your work of
desire, love has crept to you, closer than death.
 

***
 

16 October 2002
 

What Do They Mean to Do?
 

Open no more sorrow-sighing
doorways, please?  I fear the call
I cannot cease to hear, but I am
hesitant to answer.  All
my past horrific spirit-lessons
gather round me, glistening
with tear-wet—then in sad successive
layers petal-fall—and sing!
 

***
 

17 October 2002
 

Kindertotenlied
 

What if your hand, no longer willing,
turned not a moment’s work my way,
closed round a silent stalk where lilies
never again would nod and sway,
wrote not a word though I went hungry?
Fey, airy questions:  We are still
deathless-though-dead love-ghosts caught under
nightmares.  Our kind is hard to kill.
 

***
 

18 October 2002
 

Face, Metal-Cold Lake Light
 

Drowned with leaves still fraught with falling
down, slow lodestone seasons turn
my haunted heart toward the call that
draws me into dreams that burn
like foxfire round a bone-cold fragment
bleaching in a New Moon’s lack
of light.  Who’ll read the lettered magnet
steel I am cannot hand back?
 

*

Whimper Everywhere
 

Out of the midnight mists a willing
whimper proceeds to tell me why
I and my sacred dreams still fill with
tears underneath a rainless sky,
seek a strange Moon by which to listen
deeply as swirls of words wheel round,
then leak at our edges—till the mist is
everywhere.  Tell me all, sad sound.
 

*

I Begin to Know Where
 

Where will I lead the ghost who follows,
ridden by nightmares of its own,
lost in as vast a shadowed hollow
mountain as any I have known
in any sad elsewhere-world?  It dogs my
footsteps; its breath brings on strange spells.
Where did we change our places?  Fog and
lingering dread—I know full well.
 

***
 

19 October 2002
 

 Summon a beautiful blue conflagration
of infinite wisdom to wave in the shape
of a pale Moon that opens, subsides, recreates its
own elegant presence as bright rays escape
into blackness of sight, and there heightens.  I shudder
up out of the place that’s been watching to find
I can no longer cast the same shadow my blood ran
in love with—just Moon-spells, till time out of mind.
 

*

Torcher by Foxfire
 

Far as the gleam in the eye of a nightmare,
someone is watching me.  Bright is their view.
You always breathe to the sigh of the light of
the Moon as it leads you.  Your foxfire shines through
the grey mist-veil between us; we glow with the knowledge
that lost in its folds lie the dreams we will read
by the light of the next faery magick to follow
this breathing’s.  Burn faster—my eyes are in need!
 

***
 

20 October 2002
 

Torch-Bearer to the Sky
 

See, I can shoulder this gravity easily—
cold as my own shaking hand, its torch-beam
playing over a lakeshore so calm it half freezes
the blood in my veins—these emergencies seem
made of uniform quiet, but somewhere a nightmare
the size of all mind has long screamed herself hoarse
with excitement I need.  I would quicken to flight with
one feather caught high in this floodlight’s deep course.
 

***
 

21 October 2002
 

The Broken Dam
 

Look—a sacred landscape vista
crawling wet with tears full flood,
incense-raining many-misted
ocean-clouds blue-stained with blood,
and rare-earth pigments oozing thick and
heavy over—nowhere.  Stand
beside me; I am cold.  These trickles—
broken dammed, our holy land.
 

***
 

22 October 2002
 

Horse Mother
 

Ghost-solaced heart-companion sister-
dam to a full-blown flood of rose-
wet carmine—the unlocked, unresisting
all-that-I-am through all these woes
of blood-drenched endeavor brought to perfect
silence, surrendered—ravish me
all over again.  I must keep working.
Mother of ashes, let this BE.
 

***
 

23 October 2002
 

the face of the Moon in the bleaching light of the first curve-fragment to enter clear sight
 

Curve of a brittle skull-bone fragment
clutched in my fingers, tell me why
you are still filled with moans.  A magnet-
memory hums beneath your dry
exterior, cupped to hold an ocean.
Drawn to that place I cannot see
but love with a hungry soul, will ghostlight
drown us, and you be dead like me?
 

***
 

30 October 2002
 

Still here—
signs revealed and following—
please stay tuned.
 

Happy Halloween!