AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

October 2003
 
 

10 October 2003
 

The Being Behind the Song
 

A breath-holding moment of utter perfection
ascending a humanly vocal appeal
to love’s severally unfolding senses selects its
affectionate range as my own senses steal—
leaking hitherto-lost blissful glimpses of tear-set
pearl-out-of-Moon-ocean-isle landscapes in mist—
ever nearer the next holy threshold the hearer
who faithfully sings has in heart:  the slow tryst
of imaginings—blent like twin vines bearing flowers
that seethe softly, achingly rose-wise around
in a deeply charmed circle.  Let day-laurel crown this,
but murmuring, more-blossomed beauty is bound
in a sweet living spiral that ripples fast outward
round you, who are hearing its breath-echo now.
How tenderly real is its message:  Be found at
its center—behind the most Shining One’s brow!
 

***
 

11 October 2003
 

The Drowning Voice
 

Shout to the winds, but a voice there is louder;
hail the night rain till its sheets fall as snow;
drown its down-silence with series of sounds of
song turned inside-out; what you need me to know
needs to lean on your listening more.  It keeps plying
us sore with such lyrical riddles, strange
celebrations aborning in each of them, sighing
delightedly reaches to meet the tight range
of lorn insight as each of us holds to that fastness
in sad absentmindedness presently here.
Nearby, a Moon on the rise—a cold vastness
of truth-telling light on the wave a slow tear
changes into when met with its mirror, the ocean—
lonely, its voice without ears—where we stand,
let us hear overcome—dreams deep love into motions
of music it sighs I can hold in your hand.
 

***
 

12 October 2003
 

Increasingly Palpable
 

The snow falls the thickest where holiness beckons
like lovesick illusions fulfilled from within
by the severally threatening croons of the wreck of
a woman who woke with the cloak of her skin
laid across her splayed fingers, outstretched in abandon
to—what scarcely visible man-ghost?  His shade
is a ripple of music come splashing and stranding
down webs where her eyes are still half-overlaid
with luminous portents she can’t tear away from—
but wincing, she faces his genuine glow.
She trembles and trips.  She is mortally shaken.
He beams to her, singing; she answers in slow
contradictions at first, then in paradoxed sweetness:
a rivering aureole Moon-white and warm
where old snow waxes vivid, a coming completeness
revealing attuned and corporeal form.
 

***
 

16 October 2003
 

The Hands Too Full
 

The excess of strength in our hands is their message.
In mountain-lake hollows, sad forests and plains,
aching once-rivered shallows where death’s dead obsession
still sounds and reveals empty vessels, night rains
like cloud-hands come together, too full to quite mingle
as one intertwining device:  thus they leak
at their finely-turned edges a manner of singing
live river-lore bore their fair holders.  They speak
a dimension of silence, a zone of all-knowing
desire for an end in which both can dissolve,
an acute and yet subtle love-blending where slowly
old ghosts shed of substance can softly revolve
round one moment till touch reawakens and listens
to feel shimmered nerve-endings need and be met.
With the holy return of the strength of this trysted
design—we are worlds overflowingly wet.
 

***
 

17 October 2003
 

The Waking Sleep
 

The litter of snowflakes came sifting down lightly.
You stirred but your lids were as heavy as stone
and as silent your mouth as the line an inscribing
desire rounded crescent-wise.  Unearthly moan
that I was, I lay dreamt there, a whisper that lowered
its frequency, lengthened and steadied its spell
till the depth of your sleeping could not fail to know its
ghost-name, and then opened and told precious well
how the tongue of ulterior….  Now you touch power
that suddenly wakens through crystal as ice,
an adamant brightness, while eeriness sounds in
the nearness that steals and dissolves in the twice-
as-emphatic incanting we magic together.
Diamond light on my eyelids, dream deep,
deep inside me.  Desire and be wise.  We lie ever
so near the sung reel of live dreams’ waking sleep.
 

***
 

19 October 2003
 

Found Alive
 

My labor seemed willfully sad.  I so wanted
to wait by a margin of reeds, weak and dim,
and to die of a love-drained, unbearably haunted,
unstaunchably bleedingly weary life-limb
on an endless no-Moon when no flood-beam sustained it
or me—then it twisted beneath me and sang.
The heart in my mouth tasted magic.  A rain of
great in-lighted eyes, and my very skin rang
with a fluid succession of sung counter-measures.
A marginal ghost—lengths of luminous tones
from a shade wise as death, his sly tongue sunk in treasure
unspoken—brought tremors so deep, ancient bones
took on flesh in a seizure of adamant—stillness.
A sudden full-Moon-flood cascade ringed me round
with strange blood-deep desire.  At his lips overspills the
untold into words—that wait now to be found.
 

***
 

21 October 2003
 

Dihelical Flight
 

Bright as a flag on high, your shoulders
dripping with rain-white feathers, be
the meaning behind invoked unfolded
magic.  Most gently madden me—
move to advance your banner’s angle—
meet the occasion face to face
when luminous eyes enchantments’ tangle
high in live air and maze with grace
to spiral twin spines that hold out heightened
promise.  Wind-driven ripples rise
in secretive sky-wet shining.  White is
manifold rainbow-light’s disguise—
as you are its strangest, stillest portent.
Wind fallen silent, feathers soft,
and eyes sealed behind a film where stormclouds—
aye, there are we who mount aloft.
 

***
 

22 October 2003
 

Let It Eat Its Way Out
 

Pressed fast beneath the roof-bone-beams set arcing
across the red level of breath where the chest
of all secrets lies sealed move great efforts of darkness
to sever that silence so deeply, the breast
your kind fingers encircle is wet with the sweat of
writhed agony-ecstasy.  Aye, underneath
the damp heat hangs a steadily working night threat by
the set of its tenderly ravening teeth,
an immaculate smiler whose glinting design is
as crescent and pearl-white as any we’ve seen
from our windowed horizon.  Though only a tiny
idea escapes the tight-stretched silken screen
between where he unwaits and the mirror you shape to
my eyes, we nigh swoon with the long-labored pain
he keeps taking.  He won’t spare us now for the greater
disease we are both soon to suffer-attain.
 

***
 

23 October 2003
 

The Red Wet Grove
 

When I awoke in the bleeding arbor—
trees like a wreath of berries all
arrayed in a strange bright beastly-starry
carnivore ring, a drenched-wet ball
of chillingly fertile near-now future
portents and signs where one seed cracked,
then many another—I knew you were
gathering magic.  There I tracked
the grass the leaves stained a carmine circle,
forming a softly trodden list
your actions could follow.  Aye, a lurking
stormcloud where all had been mere mist
was sharply revealed by flashing silver.
Find me a bleeding leaf all down
the branches that sway me, sodden filmy
vein-lace, a high tree’s wedding gown.
 

***
 

24 October 2003
 

Remember the More
 

Child of the white swollen tide of high moonlight
grieving alone on a beach where the sea
lies desolate, heaving and lapsing as truly
the Moon needs it not, merely happens to be
an idea that dances about it in circles,
swaying its everywhere-wide salt embrace
but not seeming to feel it—can you be the worker
of mysteries called to this death-dreaming place?
The salt of your eyes and their light signal perfect
attunement; in you dreadful powers find peace
in the thrall of deep passion; uncanny winds murmur
the message, great magic has found its release
through your sweet wise attention:  the pale Moon lies blended
with ocean-deep music the glowing waves sing
to the universe-sky as you breathe in and gently—
remember—the more I will magically bring.
 

***
 

26 October 2003
 

The Bedside Lamp
 

From the messenger-bourne beyond time where the wetness
of waves against moonlight breathes mysteries deep
as the mind that inspires them seeps mournful relentless
rain-music so patiently wild through my sleep,
let me just raise my hand—an apported song-creature
lifts heavy wet lids to receive my first touch
with a shudder of lust-understanding.  He greets my
next gesture with one that prefigures as much
of the swiftest white ray shot across the dark ocean
as insight can carry between waves of pain,
bestowing scarce bearable changes lost knowing
receives.  By fraught grace of its coming again
through the film of fine sweat, the soft dampness my fingers
return bearing fragrantly sea-salt and live
to my most shaken breathing—oh lamplight of singing,
I call you—you constantly, deeply arrive.
 

***
 

30 October 2003
 

Dream Over
 

Though it turns like the tide, I had even this moment
the very same dream you were having of me—
a sad rider bearing a scarce holy omen,
a bird flying wearily over a sea,
a pattern of Moons on a swollen horizon
at midnight while under their rays a ghost shone
with lost love in his eyes.  There I searched the pale skies of
their lidlessness.  Wept free of dreams, he alone
sees the true scale and scope of our sorrow and—courage.
Forward, high salt-feathered spirit—your wild
eyes may fix with a heartbroken stare the emerging
now-moment, but know there the holy-ghost child
of the indwelling Moons of the bone-white enclosure
the luminous strength of our meeting this way
has begun to wrest open.  Dream round and dream over.
The ghost will soon speak—‘Found’ is what he will say.
 

***
 

31 October 2003
 

Found Music
 

Whispered from under subtle shining
tearspun desire like waving glass
turned listening inside-out, such finely
realized words whose praises pass
between facing mirrors—oh, the willing
oracle children we must be
once we are the blazing borne of stillness.
Touch-hear the leaking light set free
by love’s brilliant tongue.  The fluent singer
gleaming behind our measured stare
most deeply engages this, the ring of
mystery’s shining’s sudden flare:
Surround us entirely, music whispered
out of the world we know as this
now-moment.  Where will your looming kiss next
take us?  Utter old newfound bliss.