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AEAEA
Recurring
Dream Island
September
2000
1 September 2000
A song from Alban:
No Very Long Holding of Breath
for David
Through grey water-shadows I see you before
me, as fair as you ever were, ever, elsewhere--
and much nearer. The color of water,
but warmer and deeper, your eyes search the gloom of despair
that I carry about me and gently disperse
it. A bandage of layer on layer of gauze
slides away from the places I dreamt were
still hurt, and reveals them as all fully healed. If I pause
while regarding the vision YOU ARE through
the flow of invisible watery windows and walls
and do not seem to know how to reach you,
please know that a very slow dawning is dreaming the halls
and high staircases through the great otherwise
emptiness I recognize every day as the mind
I am known by myself to inhabit, both unkempt
and sterile, light hyper-reactive and blind,
and confused and possessed of unspeakable
clarity. No word that ever will find me can say
I have not seen myself or refused to be very
outspoken in infinite resolute ways,
but the soul of all genuine song still eludes
me--for now. For a little while longer, I’ll glide
through the channels and streams of these
places that brood and behold the slow-gathering blossoms that hide
in the heart of each cluster of leaves I have
gathered and openly offered to one still desired
and no longer despaired of. Conceiving
the matter of which secret petals are formed made me tired
of my sordid surroundings, the gauze that
enwound me. A bleeding red line underneath it once flowed
so excessively, all I could do was slow down
its profusion of gestures that stain with a code
I devised to be half-comprehended by me but
entirely transparent to you. Now the clear
and yet shadowy ghost of an ocean between
us interprets those ciphers in ways I can hear
without bleeding again--without tingeing the
petals that layer on layer have gently transferred
what was borne in the heart of the secret
that settled through infinite levels until it grew words
in a trench in the depths of the ocean you
oversee tenderly. There I am waking within
a green garden-enclosed house of rooms full
of roses of which I am alone am the ghost, in new skin
that is painlessly supple and real, as the
loving expression you send me across the small space
of these depths’ seeming time bespeaks endless
approval and promises more of the vatic embrace
that was once, very long ago, why I was bleeding.
How fair you have been and will always remain.
How near you are coming. How much I
still need you. I shan’t breathe until you have touched me again.
***
5 September 2000
The night after I wrote the verses above, I
learned that the friend for whom that song and all of my work here was
written had been taken seriously ill and had undergone emergency surgery.
If you care for the work that has appeared in these pages, you cannot help
but care for my friend. Please pray for him. Your prayers will
reach him through what you know of him by these songs.
Semper Patet Janua
The door is always open, just as the potential
for ecstasy is everywhere always. To know it, though, requires
experience that can only spring from knowing it, so how does one begin?
I forced my way through. One night, I insisted to my then-husband
that I had to be alone on the beach. It was already late, and he
had to go to work the next day, but something in the urgency of my request
convinced him to do as I asked. He drove me 25 miles down the coast
through the rainy night, and then slowly paced off the two or three miles
to the next town and back as I prepared to kill myself. I sat in
a sea cave until I felt I understood why I was there, and then I walked
out into the open sand. Though the sky was overcast and raining,
the Moon was so bright behind the clouds that the landscape around me was
plain. A magical phosphorescence in the sand jumped forth in showers
of sparks when I dragged my feet through it. With a stick of driftwood,
I wrote my farewell in the flashing sand, a variation on the Latin words
at the end of Marlowe’s Faust:
O cite, cite currite mortis equi: Horses
of death, run swiftly, swiftly.
I was addressing the horses that draw the
Moon: I wanted to advance in time to the very near future, when I
would be dead.
The night was cold, but I was not. I
was wearing a long black skirt with green ivy vines and leaves stitched
onto it which, like most of my clothes, I had made, and a purple silk blouse
that I still own and have not worn since. I was wrapped in a greenish-black
cloak of wool from Scotland, which likewise I still keep unworn.
I wanted to rush out into the ocean and I meant for the weight of the wool
to help me drown, but the ocean here is so bitterly cold that as I stood
looking out at it, I knew I just couldn’t do it. Perhaps that was
when my decision was made, but I did not admit as much to myself.
Instead, I walked into a stream that flowed oceanwards. It was also
very cold, but somehow less disturbingly so. When I sat in it, the
frigid November rainswollen torrent reached to my waist or a little above.
I had counted all evening on the presence of a hand that I could feel all
but palpably, a hand that would merely push forward when I was ready and
would help me let myself drown. I sat in the stream with my forehead
and the tip of my nose immersed, waiting for the pressure that would collapse
me forward, when I would fiercely breathe in. I waited--and waited--wondering
how long I would have to stay there before I would have my answer.
Where are you, hand that was so insistent all evening? When will
my steadily increasing sense of ridiculousness overtake my expressed intent
to die? How long is long enough to sit here, quite alive and beginning
to be very cold, to have learned the lesson that will let me emerge, as
it seems fairly likely I will, with a shred of dignity?
The magic of the night itself was my answer.
I had never seen phosphorescent sand, nor the Moon so bright through such
heavy rainclouds. These beautiful things felt so deeply, from such
an extreme state of mind, within the rush of the sea--these had entered
me in the place of Death: In the place where I had thought to die,
where I had thought to breathe in Death, I had breathed in magic as magic
surrounded me. Now I live in magic.
My offer to give my life was heartfelt; I
would have done it gladly. That is not what the power that brought
me to make the gesture of death wanted from me. I believe it only
wanted to show me where the threshold within me lay, and how open it was.
I saw the threshold; I stood upon it and paused long enough to take in
the lay of the land before me, on the other side--which is also here.
That night was the opening of my life, and I will spend the rest of this
lifetime celebrating the knowledge that began to move through me consciously
then. Much more work awaited me before the flow of song began to
come easily, but I never despaired of song again. And when I recognized
my friend, I was ready to sing his praises.
My friend has just stood in that doorway,
but he made the gesture of death on a scale that hugely overshadows mine.
Eleven years older than I was then, vastly more experienced as a maker
of song, infinitely more aware of the innumerable realms of hell, and always
more capable of feeling and expressing love for the daylight land, he gave
his body over twice: to the process of death, and to the skill of
human healers. When he so easily might have made the crossing and
remained with death, having gauged the extent of the beauty of the lay
of that near-far land, he chose to return to live on in this world.
No one knows better than I that he has made
a sacrifice; no one trusts him more deeply to share what he has learned
in ways that will help us realize the presence of that doorway and the
true extent of its openness without devastating those who care for us.
What would become of me without him? Would I be forced to reconceive
my work, always so full of desire and hope, as an endless elegy?
I will not have to answer that question; not now. My friend has chosen
to live. I am inexpressibly grateful. The verses to follow
were written for him tonight.
Semper patet janua is a Roman motto
that means, The door is always open. It was taught to me in
school as meaning, One may always choose to die. The Romans did not
hesitate to commit suicide if they felt dishonored. These words
so appealed to me then that I dreamed of having them tattooed over my heart.
I very nearly did it, carried out first the tattoo and then the suicide.
Now the words mean something altogether different: The door between
the worlds is always open. No one need die to go there. There
is Here.
On Your Way Home
A song from Alban, for David
Your footsteps are weary yet light, and the
mild wistful smile on your face tells me everything moves
through the sky of your heart as with wings
where a peaceful breath sighs through their feathers. Green orchards
and groves
have sprung out of the secrets you’ve borne
deep inside you and scented the air with their blossoming call
for true love to return from the shadowed
environs where bodiless voices no longer enthrall
nor entreat you to stay. Did they really
desire you? Did anyone there in the gloom bring the tight-
clasping arms of the tentacled hollow-eyed
hider inside you together behind you and fight
to retain you within the domain of the hopeless?
No more need we wonder; your face is aglow
with the splendid array of new dreams love
has shown you and all it has given you wholly to know
and they spell out one answer in unison.
Please speak it, ever so softly. We tend to be shy
with each other, but this is a rare time of
healing deliverance from traces of times long gone by,
and a moment of opening. Seize it, and
tell me the secret you’ve learned that eclipses all else.
Quickly convey it across overwhelming emotions
that soon will seize us in their spell.
Share it before a new series of questions
can riddle your path with confusion that lies
by its very existence. Your will has
been tested, and reached the decision to thrive and grow wise--
tell me what it inspires you to feel while
the music of where you have been still resounds in your mind
and the wheeling of many-hued birds sweetly
wooing each other flows freely through space where a blind
opaque screen once betrayed the design of
clear insight by showing its maker, yourself, sundry views
of primordial chaos imbued with the frightening
power to transfer the wits it would use
to cruel lodgings, if you would but yield
and allow it. The length of that sirening nightmarish ledge
you have ventured, and now you are safely
outside the last gasp of its gravity. Stand at the edge
of the universe-home you have merited solely
by being a creature of beauty who sings,
and perceive how you both fall and rise as
your holy conviction of virtue accedes to bright wings
and a rainbow-arc ray of wild birds in a perfect
high flood-tide of where you have been and will be
joins your very long future of movement through
surges of ever-increasing song-sweetness to me.
Thank You.
***
22 September 2000
In Celebration of the Autumn Equinox: We Are Touching a Turning-Point
Turn of Praise
Through the depth in your eyes, I have reached
a dark center inside me that nothing can touch but I choke.
You are smiling. You say, Move ahead
with me. Enter that secret enclosure. Proceed to invoke
what is waiting there. Listen, and when
it has spoken, hold as your own the strange lore it has shared.
Listen--its words are beginning to flow.
When you next raise your head, something secretly there
will be openly, candidly here, where we mingle,
a merriment more concentrated and wise
than you might have imagined could offer to
bring you its heart on a green leaf of sumptuous size,
an ever-unwinding design of the flavor and
style of its underworld provenance. Feel
very near to me now. Please attend;
do not waver the least space away from that now to unreel...
You stand by a lake with your hands filled
with ashes of incense that burned by full moonlight on stones
altar-wide and abundantly candled. Bright
flashes of wide-branching lightning surround this high zone
of pure dream-woken magic. You touch
without flinching a shaft of the penetrant substance of bliss
that appears everywhere as through cracks
that run inch-wide and countless-miles-long through the air. Meeting
this
undiluted device of acutely charged current,
the ashes you hold spring to fully inspired
fragrant life, and you breathe of their sweetness,
a burning and blossoming ember yourself, so desired
by the power within the white arc of still
lightning that hangs from the sky unretracted that when
you receive its admixture of beauties inside
the sealed room it alone knows to search for--oh, then
you will know you’ve arrived at your most
ghostly essence, the radiant graveyard-escaping nightmare
of eternal recurrence: no flame-eyed
unblessed destroyer; no horrid contrivance; a fair
and, moreover, a faery apport of unwicked
significance, never to close what’s begun
when word one of her tale has been spoken.
Depict her as all that is lovely, and let her voice run
through the night that no Sun overarches entirely.
Her speech and her song flow alike from the Moon
and her presence means storm-clouds are forming
and fiery bolts of wild lightning will hurtle down soon
and her hands, as she stands on the shore
of deep inland sea waters--her hands heaped with ashes will yield
fragrant billows of sweet incense smoke.
This beginning, these words from the edge of the true power-field
flying open inside you beneath song’s devices
of brilliantly mild-tempered lightning, will lead
one by one unto currently quite indescribable
depths without secrets, all bliss. Call at need
and be gratified instantly, sister and daughter
and soul of Night Mare, my own self in the form
of relentlessness tilting her head to be taught
all I offer: to take the long kiss that brings storm
to all song, and to take it to infinite depths
without quaking or even inclining to choke.
Oh my smoldering brand, fragrant hands of
incense, it is you we have met here to praise and invoke.
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