Tonight let me catch his eye again, that ghastly one whose glowing red glare is like a stroke of pitchfork-lightning.  I know he can steal my soul if he wants to—but I trust that he really does not.  I know this in my bones, which I can feel ache and stretch inside my skin whenever I look at the midnight sky and find him riding there.  Inside, outside—am I the only waker in all this village who knows that the two are one and the same?
Something is going to catch me, no matter what I do.  I half wish to hasten that capture by leaning into its cast-forward future-wake.  The ridge of his passage through the skies is becoming a scar through my heart.  Now as I wait for the midnight bells and the soundless sound of hooves on air, my scarred heart is hoof-like pounding:  Oh, let him come tonight.

They all insist it was only four months ago—four months perhaps this very night—but I am certain the visitations began long, long before that.  The few who lay awake or stood at their windows and gazed outside into the still night air were stunned with horror to see a long—a stretched, an elongated—figure swathed in black go riding across the sky on a black and wire-strong skeletal horse.  When they failed to slam their shutters to with great enough speed and the creature caught their eyes, they were fixed by a baleful red stare.  The beams of it cut the cold blackness between their safe houses and the Rider so swiftly it pierced their very nerves.  Or so they say, if they say at all—mostly they keep their superstitious silence, but I know what they mean.  I see the Rider as I see inside their minds.  Sometimes I wish I did not, but I do, and that is my privilege and bane.

Four months and forever the Rider goes rushing by and the night is stopped in its tracks.  I catch his eye and I smile.  The beams of his incandescent regard come flowing like nightmare blood across my pillow and wake me, should I chance to fall asleep before his hour arrives.  I open the window—quietly, quietly, don’t let anyone hear me—and lean on the casement and run my fingers along the crack where the board and wall meet.  There is always a very tiny draft of dewy night to be felt there, and I touch it with febrile fingers.  Although I am not ill, I am as fraught as if I were dying of fever.  You know I wish I were—or I did wish, before this came to happen.
I stare, and the Rider turns his head.  I swear that he can see me.  Why does he always span the sky at this same long slow-fast hour, and never stop although he knows he might, even here, at this very house?  In my thoughts, I call to him.  When the light of his eyes has faded from the sky, and I have returned to my bed, I practice sighing the shape of his name.  No, I have no idea what it is, but the form of it hides in me somewhere.  When I have drawn it out of its hiding place, I will call to him out loud.

***

To bring the taste and shape of his name to the forefront of my mind, I conceive and carry out small ritual acts that conduce to magical wonder.  This afternoon I have gathered a small cut sheaf of graveyard ivy.  Tonight, when the hour is approaching, I will drape it from my window.  Among the leaves, I have tied little shiny beads of faceted glass that will catch the light of his eyes and reflect it back.  And in the middle of this ivy garland, I have hidden a scroll that bears a message in rhyme that I have in part retrieved from my dreams and in part caught wide-awake.  I will not share it here now, but perhaps, once it has cast its spell, I will record it with this story.  I dare not drain its power now by mouthing it again, as I surely would if my hand retraced its letters.

I do not want not to share any spellcraft with these present pages, though; to do so in just the right way will help me feel stronger.  Spirit within me, what have you to say to me in this place?

Shiver unto the windowsill
where the dawn of night is rising still.
The cold Moon gleams on the elder dreams
that will catch you singing and steel your will
to enter the daylight nightmare lands
where your heart has bowed to the stern commands
of the act of grace that will soon take place
when the Rider weeps and you fill your hands.

This place is coming twilight fast.  I am almost not afraid.  So I tell myself, and then I catch it:  ‘Daylight nightmare lands’?  Tomorrow this will be dead ivy.  If I do not hide it away, the morning Sun will curl it dry.  My inkstained hands are full of letters and leaves and they are shaking.

To allay this disturbance, I call on my spirit voice again, by another ritual gesture.  This one is so spontaneous, it is over before I know what signal my flesh is about to make.  From the dresser drawer where I keep my few private treasures, I take a small thick beeswax candle that I have been saving for such a need.  I strike a light and when the candle is burning steadily, I hold it up to the window as if disclosing it to the Rider who is not there, and then—I extinguish it in my mouth.  I feel the wavering shape of the flame against my upper lip as light as a spider’s step as it passes through.  The heat of it is barely there, and then it is gone altogether.  As if I have inhaled live flame, I am strengthened, nearer by ghostly inches the voice who chanted the weeping-Rider spell.

Now when he comes, I will know what I know and not fail to meet his eyes.

***

By the angled light of late afternoon, I decided I wanted fresh greenery for my window, but not ivy again; some grasses growing wild by the roadside had caught my eye, and I went out to choose a great bundle.  Once I started to pick them, I understood that they had attracted me because of their tight round seed-heads.  I plucked some stems and started to plait them, the heads all in a row, thinking to make a rope that would hang to the ground.  But once I started, I quickly ran through the process in my mind until I saw that what I really wanted was to take as many heads as I could find and to pull them apart into tiny seeds.  I did this, although the seeds were green and did not readily separate.  Once I had a good double handful, I turned back for home and, from the outside, piled them up on my window-ledge.

There they are, with a few of the same sparkling beads as before, and it is coming evening.  What I mean to say by all of this—what I mean to say to him—is that—I do not know myself yet.  These gestures are leading toward the brink of something with very compelling force.  I obey—not blindly, but as through a mist.  When the Rider’s eye strikes a spark off the side of one of the glass bead globes, I want to read far words by its flash of light.  And once I have, I want to find the answer to those words on the tip of my tongue and spit it out—or caress it forward and hear its pleasure sing.

Between now and nightfall, I will leave my room, be a member of the household, the family, and serve the unvarying routine that so often has me pining for my grave.  The dinner is largely ready, but the table has yet to be laid; after the food has been consumed, I will wash dishes and sweep the floor and pause on the doorstep, broom in hand, to watch for the first glint of Moon.  I want to feel a small fresh breeze rise and dry the damp edges of my hair.  When all that is done, and never too soon, I will return to my room and ready myself so the day’s—the night’s—real work can begin.  I want it to go like this:

She lights the beeswax candle and places it on her dresser, before the mirror.  Staring down into the mirror-girl’s eyes, she feels herself drawn in and in as if into bottomless black well-water.  Into the darkness, led by a dancing yellow flame from who knows where, she rounds one bend and then another until she is sure she has circled the light entirely, an Earth about a Moon.  Because she is breathing easily—oh, but she is not breathing at all:  Someone is breathing for her.  She feels his heartbeat quicken.  He has been waiting for ever so long.  Why did you leave me? she sighs, the breath of his body in her mouth.  The gust of it upsets the candle, and the whole world goes up in flames.  No—the gust of it puts out the fire, and the darkness is silent as the grave.

No—that isn’t at all what I want, but it is what I get, time after time.  At midnight, if I am not watching too hard, the rush of the Rider will pour in a slow-fast arc across the sky, and I will stare until I have taken him in.  I know he might yet be evil, as all the villagers and my family say, but what else can I do?  I too have a home in far, far world.

***

When I fell asleep as I tried to keep my vigil, I knocked the candle over.  It was on the ledge and burned nothing but a few stray wisps of hair before the unripe green seeds sifted onto the flame and smothered it.  I have gone outside with singed hair from reading too close to the candle before; it won’t be noticed.  I know what happened, though, and I also know that the Rider came and I was asleep and failed to see him.  While I lay drifting, I thought I heard him sigh, or maybe sob in a half-stifled way.

My hope for the night, after this disappointment, was that I might dream a clue as to how to proceed, or even dream him directly.  I did not; I only recall that I saw a roadside where common weeds were somehow growing before my eyes and budding.  When I awoke, the dream had left me with a wordless assurance that the flowers were apt to be such as I had never seen before.  Curiously, my fingers were slightly twitching.  When I let them follow through the course of their intended motions, they seemed to be plaiting hair.

After my accident last night, it seemed unnecessary to worry myself about the loss of a bit more hair, so I pulled some strands and plaited them and now they lie among the seeds.  It occurs to me that I may have been making a ladder to guide me down into the watery blackness where I rounded the curve and felt him close by my side.  Down to the ground below the window, through the deep sea of midnight air, and suddenly I am brought to wonder:  Why, if others have seen the Rider and fear him, am I still able to feel he must be the one I seek?  How can I want what is shared in common, even if they disdain him?  Now I am more than mortally confused, when for a time it all seemed almost clear.

***

How indescribably grateful I am to my dreamers, who as always see and share.  Sometimes I wonder why they cannot tell me everything they know in unequivocal terms and at once, but in a deeper way I understand.  This is a story, and a story must take all the time it needs to unfold.  My dreamers brought me this much of our story last night, after my failed attempt:

A dark, almost black bay colt has escaped from our neighbors’ field and has been running free long enough to have grown quite wild.  No one has attempted or even seems to think it possible to capture him.  I sit outside and he comes running directly to me to be petted.  I stroke his muzzle and neck as he bows his head to give my hand play.  I am slightly worried that he must be very hungry and I don’t have anything to feed him.  The feel of his warm breath and damp nose are so real they remain in my nerves as I wake.

I am in a southern place where workers have been building houses that will sell for a price many times what my family or anyone I know can afford to pay.  They are centered around a small lake.  God lives under the waters there, but just lately he has been showing signs of surfacing.  If he does, no human force will drive him back down.  The air is grey with rain.

***

[If only you could know that this was in the dreams you did not recall:

The Prepositions

Knowing you were luminous
in ways you could not fail to see,
yet somehow did—a ruinous
potential came to call on me
and howled to haunt you also.  You were
needful, and I over-well
supplied with future dewy fruits of
longing underneath a spell
of green, green courage.  As they ripened,
we began to pass in dance
between the several worlds that tighten
love-alliances as glance
by glance we reckon out the hours
and minutes till Midsummer’s Day—
when you will take on dreadful powers.
Meet me under their full sway,
a cylinder of silent heat all
Moon-inspired above us.  We
shall see midsummer, but complete our
magic underneath a tree
whose boughs create a midnight depth of
darkness.  Through that silence, you
will shine like steady foxfire.  Step there
nimbly, dancer—watch me through
the aura you cast round us like a
flare of sunlight’s secret twin.
Claim your power:  Call—invite—let
ruin’s deathly tale begin
to cast its motions backwards.  When it
winds toward its close, a bright
and knowing soul past present ken will
soothe your mind’s excessive might
and you will—by its providential
tenderness—become aware
that it is yours, you howling mental
guardian of love’s star-lair.]

***

After the dreams, I lay on my bed as the night grew pale and the day came on.  The dampness the colt’s touch left still seemed to linger on my skin.  He had seemed to be very fond of me, as if he knew me, and yet I was surprised at his choosing to trust me.  What could I feed him?  I might never see him again—not in the same form—and yet the spirit that created him would return and still be hungry.  I thought of the seeds on the window-ledge, but they were picked too green.

That is why I gathered a handful of the very first wild rose-hips and left them there this evening.  I had to crawl through the vines to reach them, but that I did not mind.  I was so happy to have glimpsed them hiding only a little out of my reach, and ripe so early.  My thought on going to where they grew was to pick the first sweet flowers, but the dreamer behind the foal will be fed before my lust for scent.  You know whose mount that will be when we have finally found our way.  Mine, that is—if I ever live to cross the night-black sky.

After I went to bed early and tried to sleep for a while, intending to wake before midnight to watch again, each oncoming wave of drowsiness was disturbed by the sound of voices from my brother’s room next door.  I could not think who he might be talking to.  As far as I was aware, he was alone; he nearly always was when he was there.  The voice that was alternating with his did not sound like any of his friends, but who else could it have been?  It seemed more like a woman’s voice, but that made no sense at all.  I roused myself each time I heard it, but just then it would fade, so that I never caught any words.

That is why I am still awake, with midnight hours away.  It is just as well, I suppose, as long as I do not become so weary I collapse just before the telling moment.  To occupy myself in the meantime, I have gathered my ritual implements and intend to draft a spell.  This will not be my usual hasty gesture toward whatever magic happens to befall me; that is all my efforts have been so far, my conscience declares.  I am serious about this task, and I wish to carry it out completely.  For that reason, this page must now fall silent.  I will share the results of this night and its labors as soon as I recognize them—or should I say, as soon as they recognize me.
God grant me the power to—supercede all deity as this human mind has dared to conceive it so far.

***

Then there was shouting throughout the house.  I minded my sister’s daughters in the afternoon, and they became annoyed with me and told her stories about me.  They said that I had showed them forbidden things, by which they meant magic; my sister flew off the handle, assuming they meant something far more human and worse, and then there was hell to pay.  I had only taught them how to bind wildflowers and weeds to make a wreath, then leave it on a forgotten grave in the corner of the old churchyard.  When I would not let them sneak round and spy through the window of the disused chapel, as the elder one demanded—though why, as hardly anyone ever went there, I did not know—she evidently resolved to get even, and so she did.  The accusations that came pouring out of my mother’s and sister’s mouths are still resounding in my ears.  So are my counter-recriminations.  I learned that I am corrupted and a degrading influence on all who know me.  Tomorrow I will be merely peculiar again, but as it stands now, I am a blight upon the Earth.

I am wondering why I was so determined not to let that silly child peer through the window.  I told her it was because the glass was broken and the shards on the ground were dangerous, but that was just an excuse.  As we stood there, I had a vaguely shivery feeling, and I wanted to get back home and stare through my own open window and watch the day turn into night.  That will come, but not soon enough, and in the meantime, I am still upset.  I do the best I can to quiet my thoughts, but they are like intruders that have already reached the hidden rooms.  As long as they are my thoughts—but that is just where it goes wrong, for somehow I know that they aren’t—not all of them.

Why did I dream about the horse and not the man?

***

The girls, as it happened, had noticed the presence of a wanderer, a young foreign man who has been camping out near the chapel.  The next day after the quarrel we were all still uneasy around one another, so I went out walking by myself and my steps led me there and I met him.  He is a very striking person, well educated and erudite, and handsome in a dark, lean way although unkempt and road-worn.  We spent a long time talking about the places he has seen.  He kept up a cheerful outward demeanor,  but left me in perplexity.  Surely a person of his background need not travel on foot, apparently penniless.  Difficulty surrounds him like a cloudy aura; why?

That night I went to bed in suspense for more than one reason, thinking of him and still pining to view the Rider with trained insight.  I swept the window-ledge bare of my previous offerings and leaned there as the hour drew near and the moonlight glimmered down.  And aye, I saw him.  The jet-black sweep of the shadow he cast fell over my brow.  The silence of it stilled my mind and soon I was transfixed, a staring beacon of mortal need.  What might have been hot iron stars or planets were certainly eyes, and they struck me through.  The light of us twined in outer darkness—if I am not utterly mad.

Before he was gone, a tear dripped down my cheek that was his, a deliberate message fraught with future confidence.  I saw great streams of tears course down his face, tears that glowed as red as his eyes.  The one that touched me shone as clear as the beads of faceted glass I had left to reflect him on several occasions before.  When I am in my element, I see so many facets join and form a sheet-silver mirror like a stream beneath a clear sky.  When I am as clear as that, I will see him again, and he will not be weeping.

Yesterday I looked for the wanderer, but did not find him; at night I waited for the Rider, and I never saw him either.  I went to bed exhausted and dreamed that I was talking to someone, but I never saw who that was and woke with not a scrap of our lengthy conversation to help me figure it out.  For just a moment, while surfacing, I thought I might have heard voices in my brother’s room again, but it might have been lovers walking outside with the night wind blowing my way.  It barely lasted long enough to be sure it had happened at all.

I have been trying to draft a bit of a spell or perhaps a tiny poem to leave on a slip of paper outside, among the trees or gravestones.  My head is stubbornly empty of all but the most inane word-scraps.  The Rider could be my obsession—I would gladly let him be that—perhaps he is.  But what if my mother and sister are right, and I am trafficking with evil?  Is that why the words I seek are so elusive to me now?   Am I fighting a battle within myself, not knowing which side my true spirit needs to win?

***

[In the midst of your confusion, again I sent you a dream.  You did not recall it, but soon you shall:

When I Let You Go

When I have let your little fingers
let go their hold on how you sing
on paper, having wrought love’s clinging
magic design, the folded wing
that waits in the secret antechamber
outside a room pure storm-brought light
has hollowed with one swift stroke of flame and—
you will attend me there this night—
remains to inhabit—aye, that brilliant
wing will extend its plumes and reach
from portal to distant corner, fill the
air with fine waves of heat with each
significant stroke of each least little
feather, each quill imbued with wit,
and—scatter the very dust this brittle
chamber is made of.  Then I’ll quit
the hold I have long maintained and let you
fly us away, a blazing bird
of magical breadth of lightning-weather,
sky become shining, singing word.]

***

 Today the strangest thing happened.  I am always undergoing strangeness, but this set a higher mark:  I was standing in the kitchen, in the midst of my usual chores, when my scalp began to prickle.  I do not mean a little; it was crawling in shivering waves.  Who is it, I felt myself wonder.  I even started to talk to him—it was most certainly male—in my thoughts, and I ended up thanking him for sending such a vivid sign, although I still was not sure who he was.  Later, around mid-afternoon, I went out to buy a few household items, and I paused to window-shop at the bookseller’s.  There I saw a lovely thick old volume of collected poems, and I could not resist going in to look inside it.  The first page it opened to held a poem that began with ‘alabaster chambers’ and at those words I nearly fell faint.  Further on I found one that started ‘When you seized my throat,’ and it stayed in my mind so firmly, after I came back home I was able to run upstairs and write it all down.  The odd thing is, I cannot recall the poet’s name, or even having seen it.  I know what I will do with it—I will leave the page it is written on on the window-ledge tonight, with the beads in a glass of water.  The notion to do that came as I read the lines.  I thought, The Rider might be thirsty.

After copying out the poem, I went back to work in the kitchen.  Just a few minutes later, my sister came in to tell me I had a gentleman caller.  No one ever visits me; people who know me understand that I go out if I feel like talking.  I quickly washed my hands and smoothed my hair and went out to see who it was.  Of course it was the wanderer; he had watched me home from a distance the day we met, and had come for more conversation.  He knows so much about the world I will never see and I love to question him and hear his stories, but this was unfortunate timing.  All I wanted then was to be alone with the poems as they still resounded, and he was a most insistent distraction.  Finally, I smiled weakly at him and told him I was pleased to see him but that I had so much work yet to do and a headache coming on.  The last part was not true at all, and I know he sensed it.  He apologized and rose to leave, clearly confused and unhappy.  I followed him to the door and assured him I would be most pleased to meet again, but outside, perhaps in the graveyard.  We agreed that I will look for him there two days from now, around mid-day.  I offered to bring a meal to share, and that seemed to smooth his feelings.

***

I saw the Rider again—but I cannot determine whether I saw him waking or sleeping.  I left the items in his sight, just as I said I would, and then I sat by the window, leaning on the ledge and watching the sky.  Later I awoke in my bed, my head filled with dreams of him.  We had been talking; I may have been mounted behind him on his horse in one of the dreams.

After I woke up, I sat here by the light of a candle and wrote down the signal events of the day.  It seemed unlikely that I would sleep again any time soon, so I lay on my bed with the candle still lit and stared at its glowing light on the walls.  Alabaster is something like marble, isn’t it?  A whitish stone, perhaps a little milky or translucent?  Marble is what I have seen and can hold in my thoughts; the walls around me might have been marble, living stone.  It pleased me to pretend that they were, and that the window was a vein of quartz.  When I turned my head to appreciate its flawlessness, a quick red flash ran between the ledge and my eyes.  Rider, drink your fill, I told him.  I knew that he was there.

Becoming drowsy, I put out the candle and fell asleep once more.  This time when I dreamed, I felt his tears run over my hands.  His eyes were redder than ever; he kept reaching into his bag again and again, with convulsive hands.  He made the same gesture over each time—that of a man sowing seed.  His pantomime was pregnant with desperate knowledge that I could not conceive.  At length he hung his head and left.  I heard the pounding of heartbeat-hooves as his night mare crossed the sky.  Now I am writing down these words, and morning is on the horizon.

I have tomorrow to dwell on these things, but even so, already I am inclined to resent the time I promised the wanderer.  He is a most unusual man and under any other circumstances he might almost compel my interest.  For him to seek my attention at just this time, though, disturbs me greatly.  I have always carried the secret deep inside that a far world calls to me.  Just now, when it calls most clearly and I am finding ways to answer and converse with its principal agent, a mortal man threatens to interpose himself.  Then again, he is really very attractive, and I have no admirers here.  And then again—yet again—why ever am I assuming that that is why he came?  He may be merely lonely; of course he is, and this village is not very friendly.  Why must I be confused right now, when everything is so near?

***

[This is a page from my own book of poems for you:

The Sign of When and Where

When I behold your softly stealing
watery light through limpid space,
I shine again, a ghostly being
claiming us time to love and grace
to see it employed most nobly.  Whereas
so little counter-light revolves
about the vague place our voices share in
terrible dreams, it fast dissolves
to leave us alone with this, our proper
magical emblem, endless streams
of peaceful desire like living water
caught in a love-embrace that seems
oceanic—but lo, is much, much larger.
There, when your light shines into me,
I become fields and trees and starlit
canopy-nights and choose to be
immense in your heart myself, a vivid
question turned deathless song whose lush
expanses were always here, a river-
world that retains the solemn rush
of richly emphatic magic though its
music lay faint and weak before
we woke it between us.  I am ghostly
still, but no god could love you more.]

***

A profound and very sacred dream was given to me this morning.  I want to record it just as it came, but I am half afraid:  Afraid that just putting it into words will rob it of some of its power, or deliver it over to the common daylight side of my mind, or expose it to prying eyes if someone here should find these pages.  I am gazing out the window—I must share it, with my future self if for no other reason.  Dreams are so strange that one can never trust them not to disappear, however vivid they seem.

A large group of people, myself included, had gathered in a meeting-place, a spacious room that was made entirely of rough, bare wood.  An honored guest walked into our midst, a very advanced representative of an ancient spirit-path.  He and his female assistant chose me to help them demonstrate a ritual teaching.  He spread a colorful cloth on the floor where I was already lying down and had me shift myself onto it.  He then moved over my body, touching my limbs with his hands to position them and speaking as he did about the meaning of his acts:  I was intended to experience my body as a corpse.  He chided me smilingly for inadvertently assuming a suggestive posture, telling me to offer myself not for love but for meditation.  I explained that I was trying to accommodate the cloth beneath me, which was bunched up in folds.  I raised myself and we laid it out flat, and then we resumed the ritual.  Out of a little leather bag, he took three pieces of three different colors of medicine that looked like rock candy and gave them to me.  He and his assistant ate similar pieces as I ate one of mine.  I saved the other two, which were gold and purple, wondering about their powers.  Before I awoke, I felt myself hoping that the ritual was real and an initiation that would effect a permanent change and that the man would be my teacher and return.  I want that now, and yet I do not know who or where he is.

More than ever, I want to see the Rider tonight.  I cannot help but feel that he and the teacher are allies in a magical change that I am undergoing.  I also want to dream again as I did this morning and learn much more about the meaning of what I was given.  If only I could sleep, and sleep uninterruptedly for as long as I need—but useless even to form the thought.  Life in this household goes on ever the same, early rising and chores and the company of others whether I wish it or not.  I gave my word that tomorrow I will try to meet with the wandering man, and I know I will want that time to think and dream.

Ah, but no—the wanderer has traveled all over this world, and he might recognize my teacher, or at least be able to place him within a tradition.  That is something I would despair of ever being able to do for myself.  If I could meet him—my teacher, that is—within a dream, I can meet him there again, but perhaps I can do much better.  Now I am slightly intrigued, but in sad truth I cannot afford to be more than ever so cautiously hopeful.  I have seen such longing turn into vapors that brought on fits of madness.  What did I eat that was ‘medicine’?  Will it protect me from myself, if I am about to go wrong?

I have gone far enough now that it cannot hurt if I place another small offering on the window-ledge and lean out and look at the stars tonight when midnight draws near.  I was already haunted; now, in spite of what I just said, I am feeling an increase of longing for what I cannot yet name as other than the Rider that we have all seen.  Tell me who you are, who ride with tears streaming from your eyes.  Tell me what urges you on and why I am so strongly drawn to you.  What would we mean to each other if we were to meet, like woman and man?

***

[If I dared call more loudly, night and day your world would resound:

This We Need Must Do

Let me tell you—nothing more is
lacking now to serve the need
of song, love’s magic spell, the sorely
aching pouch of vivid seed
that weighs me down—and you, whose silent
light reflects my own so well.
What we two have found—our style of
vision-dance, the counter-hell
by which we alternate keen anguished
glares with bright but lowered eyes—
neither of us dare let hang.  If
I let go, or you surprise
the quiet of this night by keening
all aloud—aye, we are seed
that must unfold its solemn meaning.
In its proper ground, the weed
of baleful lust will blossom roses,
orchards, dewy wands and pale
transparencies whose green disclosures
tell an else-and-other tale.
Share with me the living letter
sown by love’s enlightened hand.
You will see how darkness sets its
mirrored eyes to view the land
that lies between the—nowhere ever
safe but here, by our joined light.
Hell hangs on the verge of heaven,
needing only that its sight
possess us—you, your mortal features
all aglow, and me, on fire
to bury all my burning secrets
in the place where dreams retire
to be at one with dancing glory,
magic and the orchard glade
of which we are the singing story
nothing mortal ever made.
When they have—and that is why I
turn to you at this late ray
of midnight starlight—we shall find the
need assuaged that aches this way.]

***

In my dreams last night, I was violently ill.   I was in a roomful of people again; it seems I had returned to the scene of the dream in which the spirit-teacher gave me medicine.  What happened last night showed its effects.  He had expressed concern over what I had eaten; well, my body of dreams must be quite empty now.

All afternoon I waited in the graveyard for the wanderer.  He never came.  I paced back and forth among the stones, impatiently, and then I set off down the road to pass the time while remaining in view of our assigned meeting-place.  In a field a little distance away, I saw a bay colt.  He was not running wild, and did not come to me; he was standing quietly under a little tree, grazing placidly, switching his tail now and then.  I wondered, but did not stand there long enough to let my thoughts loop around until they wound back again to the question, Why did someone say he would come and then break his promise?  I tried to tell myself that he simply forgot, but I sensed that it was not true.  It felt more likely to me that he knew the day but not the hour and had lost track and was somewhere asleep.  Maybe, though, he just changed his mind.  I must admit, I was slightly perturbed, but mostly I was glad to have the day to my private musings.

Before returning home, I walked through the village, this time simply to see and be seen.  It won’t do to grow more mysterious to those who think they know me, when they already find me strange and I cannot pretend that they are far wrong.  And though I have not mentioned them, I do have a few friends here.  One of them had made wreaths of ivy and flowers and was wearing one when I saw her.  I had already seen one hanging on the wall inside a shop; she had made that too.  This reminded me of the wreath that I had left on my window-ledge some nights ago, and I walked out toward the graveyard again, gathering flowers and vines as I went.  Midsummer is coming, and everywhere I turned I found more lovely greenery that I could not resist.  At last I had so much more than enough for my single wreath that I made and left three others among the graves.  I chose the oldest, nameless graves; I wished their sleepers good rest, although I doubt they were anywhere within hearing range.

That was all yesterday.  When midnight came, I waited, the fresh first wreath in my hands, and I was not at all disappointed.  Out of nowhere a wind arose, and the young leaves tossed on the apple tree and all the hedgerow bushes.  The air was dewy already and soon a mist came to settle its gentle weight on the ledge and on my skin.  With the breathing sigh of the very sky all around me, I could not tell if the surging beat I heard was my heart or hooves.  I saw him; I saw him look straight at me.  I suddenly understood that he was weeping because the seed he was sowing was doomed not to grow because the salt of his tears had soaked it and rendered it sterile.  I also knew that his tears would soon end because the message he sowed with his seed had fallen on ground that was fertile enough to awaken the seed’s potential in spite of the salt.  This would lighten his mind enough that his dry-eyed ride across the heavens would soon find him sowing and reaping the life of magic all night long.  Rider, I sighed, when the air around you is thick with the leaves and blossoms that I will send climbing to heaven’s heights, will you come near enough to take me with you, there on the night mare you ride, away from this lonely, lonely place?

***

[You nearly knew you heard me this time, didn’t you?  Meet me tonight on your window-ledge—or better still, come to the graveyard at midnight and see what you shall see.

Heaven’s Work in This World

Silver one,  moonlight’s fluent measures
soaking the waiting window ledge,
open the pane through which great pleasure
seeks to re-whet its blunted edge.
A courier long ago disheveled
most of your features.  They remain
as sad as he left them, yet a sever-
gesture toward complete disdain
for anything less than holy lights the
hollows where votive fires burn through
the night that receives their open brightness
greedily.  Drink the dawning dew
of music your heat attracts to settle—
aye, on the ledge your hands are damp,
your hair fairly drips, your face is—little
wonder I want you, votive-lamp.
I was a shadowed sadness only
moments ago; I sought to ride
the heights of clear magic, calling low the
dreams that would see us mystified
in beautiful ways; but disenchanted,
you lay in weary moonlight-stains.
Silver regaled you—aye, enhanced; but
I in its midst went cloaked with chains,
blunted of all my power to use my
passionate voice to call your name
but soundlessly.  Though you saw right through me,
nevertheless the silent flame
behind your deep eyes took years to burn the
edge of my magic sharp and hard.
Tempering fire, you found my yearning
reason to ride through skies ill-starred
and friendly alike, and then you shone forth
silver as moonlight through the pane
that stood in our way.  You shook a lonely
foil of moon-lightning, then the chain
that bound up my throat fell harmless to the
ground.  Now the broken pane falls too,
and the lamp of you glows like rising music—
heaven on fire between us two.]

***

When I awoke from the dream I am about to relate, I thought immediately of the bag of seeds and how they had been rendered infertile by salt tears and how that occasioned more tears:

A woman dies of the stings or bites of millions of baby ‘bees,’ newly hatched spiders floating down through the air from their egg-laying mother on high.  I see the woman from very nearby as they cover her, biting with tiny jaws.  I float back and my view widens to reveal her as a singer alone on a stage.  She was with her parents previously; it was then her father the bee-spider mother intended to kill.  He was arrogant, thinking he had made himself impervious to her fatal power by some piece of trickery; she proved him entirely mistaken by withdrawing out of reach and then sending a rain of hatchlings down.  It is well and good somehow that the woman should die; no hostility was directed at her; the change will bring benefit.

The wanderer was in the graveyard today.  I had felt called back by the wreaths I left, and had to go lest some meaningful power related to the Rider lay behind that call.  In an odd way, I think it did.  I had also had the impulsive foresight to stop at the bookseller’s and buy the book of poems, even though it took nearly all my spending money, which has always been hard to come by.  On seeing the foreign man, I presented him with the book at once, feeling ashamed of the way I had lied to make him go away when he had called on me at home.  He opened it and looked through it as though he knew what he would find there, then asked me to clarify his understanding of several specific lines.  The real meanings seemed apparent to him; he was only confused by a few of our phrases.  We soon parted ways, but later when it began to rain, I felt a suspicion and went back.  Just as I had feared, he had left the book behind.  I say ‘feared’ because fear is what I mean—I thought he might leave it, and then I would not know whether to feel rejected or relieved, and that is just what happened, and now I am worried that there will be assumptions.  I do not wish there to be.  He is a gracious man, but something warns me away and that voice of warning has never been wrong.

Again a night has come and gone, and in my dreams I would almost swear I was riding a night-black mare across the sky.  The Rider is still sowing seeds, and they are blossoming in my mind.  The woman who received them was killed by their bite, however.  The spirit teacher wanted me to experience my body as a corpse.  My forebodings concerning the wanderer, whom I met in the graveyard, tell me that he might not have complete mastery over himself and that our meeting in a secluded place might endanger me.  As it happens, this time I came away with my skin intact, and very much the richer for a book of poems—one I had wanted and not been able to buy for my own self.  So much death is implicit in everything that happens to me these days, and yet I feel strong, stronger than ever, as if I am finally coming into my own.  I have always been uncanny, and I sense no impending physical change.  Am I self-blinded, seeing signs but willfully misreading them?  I ask this in the hope that it will bring the answer to the surface of my dreams.  For the moment, I feel that I am in this world and in this flesh for a purpose that is coming clearer quickly but is far from being fulfilled.

Again I will leave a fresh wreath—and a glass of water, and some sparkling beads, and perhaps a mirror and maybe even a candle—on my window-ledge tonight.  The wanderer is not the man of my dreams, and yet in a way he brought me a book of songs, a bag of very fertile seeds, and left it among the graves for me.  He is a sensitive creature, a messenger; Rider, who are you?  And why have you brought me so persistently lately to the threshold of a subtle Death?

***

[Whether or not you call, I answer; I answer from the place where I hang, the verge of transformation in the heaven between our hearts:

The Only Apparent Threshold

How might you serve a strong purpose forever,
valor and veins in uncanny accord,
the great heart that drives both of them working together
with mine for the reason our dreams have restored
to the effortless primacy it was designed for
by lovers no other than we, in the place
from which all magic flows?  You were lovely and shining,
and shall be—and are—in the timeless embrace
that has never ceased needing our wills to remove the
pale burial windings obscuring its fire
as it dreams us complete in the presence of soothing
ideas no passion on Earth could inspire,
but this cannot help yield in an ongoing series.
Love, a sung fragrance for you has been named.
Summer by winter by summer by eerie
eternity, come taste your share of reclaimed
luminescence within its own flesh where the savor
of flowering magic persists to renew
our alignment through lengthening touch.  Oh, most favored
of mortals, the door of fair death within you
has flown open to show the glad land where the powers
of darkness give over their sway and we reign
like conjoined, unconfused and deep-hearted endowers
of music with strangeness the true central vein
that denotes the drawn line between midnight and sunshine
in more than one world throbs to feel us set free.
Serve one song’s purpose until it is done, and
feel ten million more come to breathe you through me.]

***

The weather was so heavy and sultry yesterday that I knew the height of summer was coming near.  By late afternoon, I could almost feel a trace of gathering storm, but as I feared, it was not quite enough to bring cool rain.  I only just dragged my way through the daylight hours, giving scant attention to my usual chores.  When night arrived, the thought of setting up my—what had almost become an altar at my window displeased me so that I swept it bare of beads and leaves and left my candle and glass on the dresser.  I leaned on the ledge at midnight again, however.  I was not out of temper with my task, only with the formality that was swiftly growing up around it.  Again I thought I heard murmuring voices in my brother’s room, but I knew that I was dozing by then and went to bed, too tired to feel curious.

The weather was heavier still today.  I went out walking in spite of it, and when I returned, my sister told me that the wanderer had stopped by, looking for me.  He had left word with her that he was returning to his home.  In spite of my uncertainties about him, it seemed wrong somehow that he should leave without our saying a proper good-bye.  I also felt obliged to make at least the gesture of offering the book again, in case he had not understood me the first time.  No great amount of time had elapsed, so I set out along the road to the graveyard, hoping that he had gone that way and might still be within sight.  I never found him, but as I turned down the pathway that runs through the graves, the rain began to fall.  With it came the sound of thunder and the smell of storm that I love so well.  I thought to take refuge inside the chapel, but the door was cracked and wedged shut by debris.  Rather than struggle with it, I went to the only mausoleum there, an old white marble cube inscribed with the names of those resting inside.  A huge old ivy vine draped one side entirely, and hung so far over from the roof that it offered a place of shelter.  I crept beneath it and there I found what left me truly thunderstruck.  That old graveyard—I had not the slightest idea that there had been any interments there for years.

The name, which was sharply incised but greening over with tiny moss, was that of another young man, one who lived here only a few years ago.  Not a wanderer, quite, he had moved into rented quarters in town, alone and friendless, and so he largely remained.  We became acquainted, though, and soon were something like friends.  He was as odd and sensitive as I, which drew us together although it also made it hard for us to get along.  We kept inadvertently but infallibly finding each other’s tender nerves and abrading them.  For a while, though, he lent me books and talked to me about magic, which he had studied and tried to practice for years.  How sad it makes me now to have to admit that when we parted, we were on less than trusting terms.  In truth, if both of us had had enough backbone to disregard the talk of others and their efforts to mark us both as the objects of superstitious dread, we might have become true friends and taught one another a great deal.  I am trying to say, I always loved him, although he was difficult and unmistakably slightly mad.  Here he was, returned but dead—he must have left a will requesting this as his body’s only permanent home.

The rain continued; I walked back home through it.  The thunder and lightning lasted only a short time then, but started again at nightfall.  I waited by my window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Rider’s glowing eyes through the swirling sky.  As I searched the heavens, a chill crept up my spine and set my scalp to crawling as every hair of my body stood on end.  The thought of writing a spell right that moment took hold of me and I rushed to take up paper and pen and to work by the charge of the rainy sky-light and the subtle pallor of waxing Moon behind it.
My efforts were premature.  For ever so long I have waited.  I give up; let me take to my bed.

***

[Yes:

Power Flashes Through

We shall conceive in grace that thunders
down, slashing hail and rain of light,
in beautiful time with all our wonder-
laden heartbeats all hours of night
and all morning dewy sunrise also—
partly because it needs us to,
and partly because you’ve neared the hollow
marble recess that sent for you
by means of my ghostly eyes across a
shower of rainless silver stars
to find you and help you know the loss that
yields music.  Though a trickle mars
your own marble face, allow its liquid
whisper to tell your very skin
how we, who long sought, have found this vivid
instant when thundershowers begin
to dream us more wildly waking every
singular glance their torches flare.
Steal ever, ever nearer heaven.
Lightning I am tonight—all prayer,
all brilliant beseeching wanting only
you, a recalled and vatic grace
suffusing your mouth and eyes—my holy
answer, my source, let our powers embrace.]

***

If that revelation seemed to be the final unwinding of something profoundly mysterious, it did not remain final for long.  My sleep was light and filled with dreaming, a dreaming that was soaked like the leaves of the trees with a vivid presence.  It was deeply familiar, and when I drifted awake between visitations, I tried to tell myself it was my dead mad friend, but that did not feel quite right.  In the morning I arose and left the house early, speaking to no one, allowing them no chance to interfere with the errand I had in mind.  The book of poems was in my hand.  I went back along the same road, which was strangely clean and almost gleaming rather than muddy.  My destination was of course the marble mausoleum.  There I bound a wreath of ivy and left it beside my dead friend’s name.  I opened the book at random to read from the first selection my eye fell upon, in dedication to him.  What I found myself chanting out loud were words so hauntingly strange, so eerily familiar, that they threw me back into my dreams.  A few of the phrases—odd ones, not common—were precisely those that had surfaced in my efforts to write a spell.  Why had I not trusted myself to write them down the night before?  I could not say; I had heard them, and yet convinced myself that I had really heard nothing.  They echoed clearly now; their resonance shook me through and through.

The book is a broad selection of lyrics by poets from everywhere our language is spoken.  The subtitle reads ‘Timeless Songs by Poets Old and New,’ a bland enough description.  Who, then, I wondered feverishly, was the author of these, my words?  For so I thought of him, seeing my red-eyed Rider.  I leafed back—one, two pages—and there was his name, and his year—only one.  His given name was that of my dead friend.  His year of birth was the year after mine.  That his birth-year was followed by no second number clearly meant that he was still alive at the time of the book’s publication.  I started from there, and read quickly through the poems that represented his work.  Each one had a shuddering significance that was deeply private to me and was evidently as privately real to him—indeed, compelling, as his stream of song kept naming itself as need.  He needed someone—and he seemed to be sending that need to her from afar.

I fell through a thousand doorways down and upward in one long instant.  I had to mark the shock of knowing, and the only way that would serve was to scrawl the first lines that sang themselves into my thoughts on the flyleaf of the book.  I had brought a pen and a slip of paper, thinking to write a message to my friend and hide it among the vines, but I wanted my words and those of my poet to rest close together forever, and this was my way of telling us so on the pages where I recognized him at last.  Rider, I sang to him, nightmare-mounted weeper across the skies….

Evening, not yet sunset, and I am waiting, leaning against my window-ledge, and the sunset streams of color are glowing in my eyes.  I am so possessed by magic that I can see across the lands that lie between us—but no worlds stand in our way; the many worlds, and chief among them the one truly known to poets only, bring us together by sending winds that are the moving breath of our common and living atmosphere.  I call to him.  Soon I shall write my words on paper and fold it and inscribe it with his name.  He will know me when he reads my thoughts by my signal turns of phrase.  He knows me now; he merely does not seem to know where my body lies.  Tonight it will lie in a sea of dreams, and he will lie singing beside me.

He does already; he always has.  If my flesh remains alone all its lifetime, I will have seen this through:  A specter of dread appeared to us.  I heeded the voice that told me to watch and listen and understand.  Now I sway on the threshold of a change that is not death—not bodily death, though death was present and gently showed us the way.  Now I am singing come to shiver in between the twilight spaces and the first rays of dawn, and I trust that love will bid me stay.

***

This I knew him by:

The Only Death That Waits for You Here

You shall lie shining brightly by my
side, with a noble lilt of flare
that widens your wondrous eyes and finds me
reaching for praise:  ‘Beyond compare’
I’ll falter and then fall short, a would-be
spirit-enchanter garbed in bliss.
Tell me you see beyond the hooded
night-apparition sending this
from far worlds away, for we are merely
instants from magic’s kiss of flame.
Suffer the dreams we’ve known to sear their
edges against the blazing name
I need you to mouth—oh now, oh say it
hotly out loud—oh, call to me.
Through heaven’s most ghostly moan my aching
song reaches out to murmur, We
are syllables clothed in vatic darkness
softly inverted, sighed as one,
and known to our souls as passion’s marveled
madness:  A million brilliant suns,
and all of them streaming through the lilt of
your sweetly breathing under-voice.
Sing me inside you.  Find my willing
words.  Read them all and take your choice,
but share forth your own this very moment.
I shall be—I am shining too,
brighter than air about a glowing
coal fanned aflame by need of you
that soon must be satisfied.  Oh, feel the
touch of my own mouth’s deepest breath
grow suddenly mild and moon-wet:  We are
love come to life by means of death.