1 September 2002
 

After the following piece was complete, only an hour or so ago, I thought I had some idea what it was about.  For a long time, I have been zeroing in on the place where the distinction between subject and object disappears.  Most recently, this distinction was a window pane which had to be passed through somehow.  Tonight, it is a landscape seen as angel wings which is available to be inhabited by the one who, whether knowingly or not, creates it by the breath of song.

But because verses come from a very psychic threshold-state, they are routinely precognitive.  Often I recognize their future sources afterwards, but I usually let that recognition pass without comment.  Tonight it is so striking that I wish to share it.  When I started seeing angels and wings, I thought, Oh, we are doing that sly-wink thing again, playing with sentimentality to get at something that lies far beyond it.  Well, no—or at least not only.  After updating this site with the new verses, I visited Arts and Letters Daily and then followed a link from there to Salon.com.  There I read a piece by a woman named Robin Wallace whose son died at birth.  Her story is entitled “A mother without child.”  She writes,  “We honored him with a formal funeral, and laid him to rest in a small white casket covered in downy feathers like angel wings.”

Other images in the poem could as easily refer back to the story.  And yet, it still means what I supposed it did as it was coming.
 

Past Oral
 

Show me your woken regard for the angels
who cluster like butterfly wings clipped away
from their creaturely origins, muffle the strangest
of moans in their scales, and career round to play
sundry tricks with perception before being led to
the pen that will hold them till, summoned to sing
the fey truth of their nature, they break out in dread of
the vague revelation that waits in the wing
many orders above—and its partner in music,
unfolding a pastoral landscape so wide,
every tree, every leaf, every seed is a lucid
daydream of the angel who hangs by your side
slowly aching to flower out loud as its eerie
and beautiful secret regard shines your way.
Show me you know my design.  I am merely
alive to this world to hear what you will say—
only say it in song that I might make an answer
in kind.  All the wing-width of vision we bear
bright between us—we people that excellent landscape
all over each time we partake of its air.
 

***
 

2 September 2002
 

After yesterday, you see why I try to write down what I hear without meddling with it too much.  Tonight I went back to learn more about a curious phrase I heard a few nights ago.
 

Eye-Oceans
 

Nothing beats beneath your supple
skin but grim and empty lies.
Love, I will not let such trouble
enter into these keen eyes—
much less the mind behind them.  Tell me
your right name again—it sails
a black and blind way backwards.  Helter-
skelter all along it rails
a cackle-chorus.  Woe is why we
hammer at you, all they chant.
Cast your spell, you rain of sly-eyed
yammers so extravagant,
my wander-mind flies strangely—open.
Aye—a cold sea-vista’s stare
returns my grey-eyed own.  I’d know its
understanding anywhere—
now I would.  A pounding surf, a
tidal surge, a dirge of—bright
desire begins unfolding.  Earth was
never certain; now this light
entirely apprehends the moment
after next and yields it me.
Such a sailor’s chant—and lo, it
sounds the depths where flesh turns sea.
 

***
 

4 September 2002
 

I feel a book coming on.  All I want is to lock myself in and work.  I can’t yet.  It is making me grumpy.
 

Aspiration
 

While you were staring so carefully, wearily
folding the bones of your silver-white hands,
and I stood enraptured, entranced—aye, the eeriest
whisper of winds driven over dry lands
by a wild bitter spirit came echoing hints of
a growing astonishment born far away—
and now slowly reviving.  That glowing white splinter,
your forefinger, lifts like a snow-crystal ray
of pale moonlight the lids of my eyes as I shiver
to know they were shuttered within.  Now they see
and are trying to understand luminous rivers
of hugeness of song, a long wind blowing free
and fulfilled of intent as you stare further forward
and all the deep eyes of this night vision meet
on the shores of a clairvoyant sea.  It is storming
on high, but such thunder and lightning comes sweet
after eons of dread in the grip of a summons
to ever-inspiraling circle-work cast
round its own weary eye.  White hands aching with numbness
of idleness, rise with the blood beating fast
far beyond the idea that whispers emergence
to tender the services love will demand
very soon.  Cold unblinding white Moon, cast a circle
sea-wide.  We still only aspire to love’s hand.
 

***
 

5 September 2002
 

I am pining for the story-to-be.

If anyone visiting these pages still does not realize that deeper than mortal mysteries have been singing for themselves here for a very long time—

WAKE UP
 

Silver Hoof Raised High
 

Corpse of yourself, are you prowling and snarling
about in a narrowing orbit of mind
while a whirlwind of nightmarish luminous darkness
stands watching you only a shadow-defined
handsbreadth measure of wholly eccentric confusion
away, eyes as deep as the midnight they plumb
when they stare into you?  I am riddled with hugely
delighted desire to begin to succumb
to their baleful necessity, aye.  You are blinking
back tears at the edge of a bottomless grave.
Jump for it.  Why must I weather such thinking
all round what we already know we both crave
more than peace and sweet slumber?  Move forward.  Reach into
that yawning abyss with a firm steady hand—
and be vitally swept into bliss, mind and skin, as
forever sinks into a spell of well-planned
and impatiently circling enveloping fateful….
Tomorrow shines deep in your eyes, bright and now.
Razor-sharp crescent, strike fiercely and break it—
the winding-sheet thread, the black hanging man’s bough.
 

***
 

6 September 2002
 

This is another gesture toward the waking of the Other within oneself, or the Higher Self within the daylight self, or the self within the Other.  Call it what you will; it is traditional for poets to speak of the Other World for very strong reasons.  I know many, many ways to enter that world.  I can take any sensitive reader with me across that border, and will do so, if only they choose to attend.  To note in the following piece:  See how tense and aspect are used throughout, from future perfect to future to present perfect to simple present tense, leading you steadily closer to a present moment in another place.  There is breath, a mystery-air—‘air’ always means ‘song’ here.  First it touches you from the outside, against your fingers; soon you are within the mysterious breather’s mind; at last that song-air moves within your own breath.  By this point, you have entered ‘entire and intact’—even though ‘intact’ means ‘untouched’ and the breath has touched you because—again, whose breath is it?  And is it you or the song of its history that is ‘stainless and whole for the only time ever’—the only time there has ever been?  Yes!  You are ‘embodied’ because you are now in the daylight land and the Other World, wide awake in both and still in your skin, looking out through both worlds’ eyes.
 

Does it help if I explain such things?
 

Breath of the Mystery-Air
 

You will have willingly spoken to no one
out loud for as long as the course of this air
over water and land has transpired; you will only
have known a great secret’s increasingly rare
silver stillness against the white flesh of your fingers
as breath cold as snow with a world in its zone
that desires you entire and intact.  Enter singing
inside it.  You won’t find yourself there alone;
you will feel, as you move without any restriction
at all, a great opening mind meet your gaze
with delight.  When it touches and soothes the old sickness
of which you have died, you will peer through the haze
between stations of insight and fly swiftly into
the depths of that watcher’s regard, heart and soul.
Embodied there—aye, you will find yourself spinning
the song of its history, stainless and whole
for the only time ever—till time flies to meet you
in ceaseless return:  It is all over now—
and again and again—over, over, repeating
the dream you have been behind love’s very brow
as its pleadings enchanted you on, past the bounds of
one world into this where all faery light shines
in your eyes.  Do you see how your soft voice resounds with
the mystery-air between these silent lines?
 

***
 

7 September 2002
 

My friend Garthe said it all years ago.  He was speaking in reference to my disembodied poetic friendship with an artist in England, but his words might be expanded to cover all my work.  He said, You have to understand that everybody has that dream, but most people don’t have the guts to do anything about it.  So of course they have to pretend that you are a little psychotic.

When I say Reach through—Be present—I mean, Do it in the flesh.
 

The Shivered Pane
 

Fine hairline crack that spreads faster than lightning
can cleave a clock crystal—how wide and how bright
the fair land laid behind you.  How eerily shining
with what a profusion of pale lunar light
very cleanly divided to form vibrant shades of
melodious color—one, driven apart
into sly subtle tones?—nay, a swirling array of
wild polychrome shudders—but all darkness-art
tinged and mournfully hollowed.  A crack—I am viewing
a yet-further scene through a line—an eyelash-
in-reverse—a transparency I follow through to
the sign of intent that now quick as a flash
from a stormcloud moves forward:  I knew this was waiting;
I heard its long wailing, its call filled with tears.
You might almost be mortal, so warm, so vibrating
with heartache….  Before all this world disappears,
reach across the divide—between thoughts, between stations
of mind—and be present entirely to view
the cracked crystal that greets you in kind.  Who lay waiting
for whom?  Sighing always, There’s only one you.
 

***
 

8 September 2002
 

The Meaning of the Signs
 

Though you feel you’ve only known me
distantly, you’ll soon have seen
my cold and eerie misty-snowlit
features glowing through a screen
so fraught with symbol-shadows, distance
figures in it like a stretch
of hangman’s rope from here to….  Listen
softly:  let this whisper etch
the membrane of all thought, that hairsbreadth
veil a single cell-wall wide.
What does it resemble?  Where have
you imagined me?  Inside
a bridal gown tinged fleshly rose, a
breath I took within you hums
with sweet designs—but out of clothes, the
mist of melted snow that comes
in stealing clouds must first obscure then
wash in waves the lens you view
this whole world by as down a pure and
faithful light the strangely true,
profoundly human ghost who will have
broken through the final trace
of offset hope to breathe the stillness
shining through your very face
sings now a welcome-song.  Believing
only in the moment—nay,
in nothing—here is perfect seeing.
Touch the old remembered way
and know the lonely coldness clinging
yet is ghost-breath sweetness drawn
from deepest wells of snow to bring you
through the crease of early dawn
and into timeless zones where dripping
leaves and branches sway above
a stretch of rope.  The soul that’s slipped its
traces waits.  It means you love.
 

***
 

9 September 2002
 
 

eyes touching
surface dissolving
tongues wet
 

Aye, that’s right, ‘eyes touching.’
 

***
 

10 September 2002
 

The story begins many years ago.  When I was a teenage girl, I tried to learn to read Tarot cards.  I did not make much progress, but I began to learn to see into some of the archetypal figures there.   Over the years, I kept looking at my cards and wondering, never able to forget about them but still unable to ‘read’ them.  Then, after moving to Oregon, making the acquaintance of the santos ninos, the sacred mushrooms, and making a ritual suicide offering, I was taken in a vision to the place where the Tarot archetypes dwell.  They were all there, living and moving, but the one who signaled to me and to whom I would have felt attracted in any case was the Hanging Man.  In all the decks I am familiar with, he is called the Hanged Man—he himself corrected this usage:  He is the Hanging Man, both slayer and slain, active in his fate.  On a very low level, he represents the stasis of indecision, but he has a much more powerful meaning on many higher levels.  He hangs between worlds, his vision turned inward into any of them, detached but entirely aware.  Odin is one of his mythological masks; so is Christ.  He is my friend and ally in song, a form frequently assumed by my Muse.

The adversary-friend who committed suicide a few years ago hanged himself.  I was working on a book in which the Hanging Man kept returning in visions when I received the news.  It is already evident that he will figure largely in the book to come.  Last night I attended a dharma-group meeting for the first time.  It might mean sacrificing my literary work on Mondays and on a few other occasions as well.  I felt indecisive before going, but now my feeling is Aye, it is the right thing to do.  Tibetan Buddhism is Mahayana Buddhism of the Vajra path combined with shamanism.  What this means is that it is very congenial to persons of imagination like me.  At the Vajrayana level, what the Hanging Man speaks to most directly is non-duality.  The worlds he hangs between, like himself, neither exist nor do not exist.  This all makes such perfect sense to me that I feel even now, while writing this, a sense of falling and flying and endlessness of space that is not space.  Such a feeling is song itself, with or without words.

The song that follows is set to the tune of the heavy pavement-laying equipment directly outside.  They took a couple of weeks off, but last night they returned with a will.

May all sentient beings be happy!
 

After Hanging for So Long
 

I will have noted your slowly, slowly,
slowly descending grace and air
as if it were somehow less than wholly
dependent on one fine strand of hair
about the cold throat of a hanging body
choked of its life-stream long ago.
Why, we of course well know:  The odd and
uncanny dream-I-told-you-so
pours forth from its mouth, a slip of idle
beauty recalled for one split-stroke
of untimely silence—then elided
murmurs of words a page once spoke
out loud in a vision—then an empty
eyesocket gaze—and I will sing
the sadness that roars between the temples
vacated by the tight-wound swing
of scavenger-feasted no-more-flesh-than-
I-am-the-queen-of-timeless-night.
Snap of fine hair and soaring pressure
upward—our eyes have entered flight
together, and yet we rest in pieces
rent on a ground where mouths bear lies.
How I shall love you now, dear feast of
white marble dreams behind dead eyes.
 

P.S., one-half hour after first posting this entry:

Such is synchronicity in my world:  I just found this picture online.  I had never seen it before.  It was taken on 9-11 and shows a man falling from one of the Twin Towers.  The essay that adjoins it is also pertinent.  Before clicking on the link to it, try to find a Rider-Waite Tarot deck and look at The Hanged Man, if you cannot already picture the card in your mind.

http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020909&s=diarist090902
 

***
 

11 September 2002
 

This is a dharma-song.
My Friend will understand which particular dependency it refers to.
 

Depending on the Secrets You Still Keep
 

Woe of great force, an apported assassin,
hove into my view, swaying somehow a-sail
and a-dangle at once.  Roaring storm-waves were massing
below, a cold ocean of clouds and a gale
filled with unearthly music that whistled and weirdly
vibrated above.  He just twisted, a slack
heavy beautiful burden I loved.  This most eerie
development struck at my eyes: an attack
on forgetfulness only, all failure of subtle
devices and faculties fell, deftly slain,
at my feet.  So much shining, a vibrating double
emergency, strove to be mine.  As complete
as our long understanding rests now, a frail fiber
a sail’s edge unraveled to furnish still keeps
a few secrets.  To end that dependency, tighten
your hold on the infinite waves of the deeps
that surround you, swing hard in the wind that’s still rising,
gaze through my eyes from no distance at all,
and sing with the luminous sounds fiercely flying
to help you ease into the fast-soothing fall
that seems deathly precipitate now, from your angle.
Enter the passionate noise of the cries
on the wind, which are mine.  So much loveliness hanging
weird weather among, such strange joy in its eyes,
so much laughter from so far away:  We have landed
on every side, viewing its progress in waves.
Flow of those wise liquid drafts, understanding
come home to us, show us the watery graves
you’ve laid open—then all the green worlds deep below them,
the beauty we’ll enter when, fallen, we’ve flown
through this present funereal ocean whose knowing
attests to full endlessness loved not alone.
 

***
 

12 September 2002
 

If you have read the previous postings for this month, you will recognize the angel wings in this song.

Recently I have dreamed so many times of meetings with my Friend.  Last night he came to take me home.
During the dharma group meeting on Monday night, I had a brief but intense vision of the whole of our story.  I cannot help but recommit myself—to the story, if nothing else.  I go through this again and again, but each time on a more subtle level.  Sometimes I pretend to try to break free, but I am only testing the limits.

To the best of my constantly increasing knowledge, there are no limits here.
 

Reconceived
 

Stillness dripping down like streaks of
silver moonlight on a pane—
a broken mirror—aye, a piece of
crazy crystal midnight rain
dissolves like winter snow—an icy
liquid flowing earthward fast—
how can I be cold inside?  The
ghost has called me home at last
who knows me for his past and future.
Through the melting ruined hall
of marble I once haunted, moon- and
starlight rush to meet me.  All
YOU ARE comes running forward.  Pane of
error, nowhere to be found,
your tears will bathe the feet of flaming
angels with the sighing sound
of liquid music touching flesh of
blue-white fire so softly cool,
it soothes the way you were when pressure
formed you to a diamond-pool
of self-aware elixir trapped in
flowless reaches.  Your long state
is now unfrozen.  Now you lap the
praise of angels at the rate
of holy converse.  Round us rise up
smooth transparent marble walls
with paneless windows.  Shuttered eyes fly
open, seeing shining.  Calls
reverberate here—living trees all
silver-moonlight-misted sing
beside, within us.  Perfect season
NOW, your downy angel-wing—
aye, silken pair—foreshadowed this mild
paradise, then flew away—
with us rapt deep inside.  By bliss of
error-free desire, this day
is ours, this never-setting midnight
Moon of steady sweetness.  Shine
through gentle further meetings.  Bid us
rest, yet labor on:  Your sign
is on our brows, and we are weary
not at all.  The rain you pour
throughout us—oh, those ghostly tears are
joy’s own voice’s rising roar
as it too seeks and finds the change of
state that serves its heart’s desire:
We emerge as stealing strangeness
reconceived as blue-white fire.
 

***
 

Friday the 13th September 2002
 

I wrote and posted a new introduction today.
Tonight, as befits this occasion, let us take a slightly Gothic turn:
 

The Wooing of Song’s Ghost-Bride
 

We will have woven the ghostliest story
of such eerie passages, your slender thread
will groan under its glow, tightly twined with the glory
that once wound about a most magical head
as an aura of visible words, fair and fragrant
to hear and be breathed of as well as to see.
Whose?  Do you know he is now in the play of
the wind that is whispering, Come home to me—
and yet also beside you already?  A hint of
his presence runs over your skin, a sweet chill.
Only a last feeble line where the glint of
his magic seems absent obscures the free will
that is gathering strength at the core of your vision,
a force that will swiftly reveal your desire
in the moment you’ve followed its tender precision
to places where watery cool blue-white fire
flowers outward in every direction and lights up
the whole of the pattern you’ve lived like a Moon
of innate arcane wisdom.  A sound reaches, shining—
Come home, he is asking.  Come faster than soon—
come before the beginning of time and move lightwise
beside me, as blue as the depths of midnight
and as silent—yet luminous, singing, and vibrant
with mystery.  Ray of the sole signal height
where our threads run together, your glory has led me
to waken and hasten to be the pure song
of the dream that has served as your guiding obsession.
Waxing and waning, but never less strong
than the heartbeat of all the live universe seen as
the wavering fullness of joy without end,
marvel to see your own part in the weaving
where hanging-man’s rope becomes feathers that blend,
soft melodious shades, into ghost-ridden angels’
dream-memories.  Sing with me, rapt to recall
night’s dawn-world that won’t fade, a bright story whose strangeness
still waits to be told though you’ve lived through it all
countless times.  In the blink of an eye, streak of lightning,
dream-whisper regained, window-pane cracked and wide,
you will see, you will hear, you will sing, you will shine—my
sweet woven-unraveled swayed-branch-burden bride….
Aye, magic spells me.  I turn to what flickers
a weft-thread away, a fine hairsbreadth—a breath—
a wet stitch in love’s side.  There the next moment quickens—
and instantly bears our twined ghosts beyond death.
 

***
 

14 September 2002
 

Read as much lewdness into every word of this as you know how—and aye, it is still sacred.
This is what I have been trying to tell you for so long.
 

The Crack Shot
 

The flame, the crack shot, the blue-whiteness, the lover
that was form one mystical line of complaint
that desires but to conjure more terrible shudders
to course through my being by thousands:  The saint
that exceeds me has heightened and strengthened my vision
so fiercely, it seems I must break—and I do.
The gate stretches wide.  I am great with incision—
nay; only the space twixt its edges, where dew
gathered out of the mists that once clouded my person
congeals on an—emptiness.  Crystallize fast,
I suggest—and it does.  No one wanted it worse or
more thorough—and now it is all in the past
as the Moon rises into a sphere of clear singing
inside an idea’s brave shadow.  I sigh
and swim into that pale cloudless mirror.  It brings me
the coolness of sheer focused will:  I shall die
to the world I was not and will never be, ever
again.  Deeper breath, deeper sigh, deeper song—
you take aim at my mind—arrow shot across heaven—
split second—fine crack—this is where we belong
as it soars beyond time, music weeping for pleasure
of ecstasy’s anguish as liquid tears rise
and turn diamond.  Lean to me, lunar love-measure
incanted to shadow the vale where my eyes
lock with yours till we know we are hopelessly nowhere
and happy.  The ‘when’ of us wanted to pray
on and on and it has and it will.  We will open
much stranger eyes hearing its high holy lay
as our own names pronounce themselves over and over
inside it—between words that mouth the long kiss
that gives rise to this dew-laden music.  Dear lover,
forever is measured in one moment—this.
 

***
 

15 September 2002
 

This morning I woke up from a horrible dream.  I was watching a film, and yet I was in the film; my character was a man.  He/I went to a hotel in a great city and asked for accomodations.  We were shown a private room on the ground floor, but it was rather expensive.  We asked if there was anything cheaper, and were taken to the top floor, where there was a sort of dormitory filled with scruffy urban beatnik-poetish men.  One lay sick on a bed; his doctor friend came and, with his teeth, removed a bloody knife from his head.  I cringed as I saw the red-tainted blade slide out of his skull.  Then all sorts of violence began, with numbers of men ultimately being crushed against a section of chain-link fence that lay horizontally over a void.  Their heads were smashed in; their brains dripped out.  I stared in horror—and then I woke and recognized it:  a Vajrayana dream.  It was signed with Night Mare’s famous hoof-stroke.

My entry here for August 7th will tell you more, if you don’t already know what I mean.
 

Why We Were Bound to Love
 

You will recognize whose hoofprint smolders there among the scars
decorating you—a rooftop vigil under cold black stars
invisible before, and you are bending back to view the form
you wore until a crescent Moon of blue-white heat predicted storm
and aye, one cracked wide-open.  In that moment—now you see the work
of Night Mare on your ghostly skin, but what lay there before will lurk
about you, nigh as grimly haunted as it—soon will be again.
Next, slow new Moons rise.  You wanted more; attend:  They form a chain
like summer lightning, concentrated fever-bliss.  Each deathly stroke
proceeds to stun the heated pain of mysteries that never broke
before but now lie rent in series.  Hover over each, the Moon
of your own sky-clad mind.  The eerie landscape underneath the tune
you hear your secret love-voice crooning softens, melts, and flows like rain
toward a nowhere so close-looming, music heaves a woeful plain
then lapses into silence.  Lightning strikes again; yet more Moons rise.
You are shining deeply.  I can feel the floodlights of your eyes
divide me from all past-confusion wonderment—then brighter still—
and I am shining back.  The music heightens.  On an island hill
a thousand miles away, a shred of rope caught on a branch lets go
its hold.  The sound of thunder echoes everywhere.  I want to know
what led me to this place.  The question forms; you touch my wrist and sigh.
Over head, one silver crescent watches countless lives go by
as slowly we turn round to face each other.  Aye, you recognize….
A plume of smoke, a breath of gravely-incensed flesh, and death who dies
inside your mind and mine together instantly forever-past
say Night Mare’s smoking hell-for-leather hoofprint-scars have bound us fast.
 

***
 

16 September 2002
 

The Minute Alteration
 

Now the sly gleam you’ve been sending can alter
the long eerie hallways and caves of the heart
that lies open to high woken dreaming.  You called and
I shone to you.  We are no further apart
now than light overlapping leaf-shadows beneath a
great tree where a body once hung—yours or mine?
Aye, it is always a matter of seeing
whose eyes penetrate the uneasy design
first and fastest and lay bare its secrets in series,
withholding the last with a shiver of sly
spirit-irony.  Shine to the one who is hearing
this message’s cold lyric whispers with dry-
mouthed foreboding:  She knows she is standing beside a
high precipice, staring down into the grave
from you which are calling right now.  You are bright as
the underworld orb at the core of the cave
full of orchards where apple trees list to the sway of
the song of the hanging man.  High apples, drop
to my hands.  When we know we have woken, a day of
Moon-midnight will break and your song never stop
dancing circles all round endless worlds without motion
while we—only lapping tongues dripping with awe,
ripe and ready sweet magical murmurs—lie open,
the serial secrets this moment just saw.
 

***
 

17 September 2002
 

This is almost an actual waking-dream song:  I was overflowing with physical energy before I sat down to work, to the point that I wondered if I would be able to sit still.  At once the first line came, and with it a great drowsiness.  Of course, the energy did not disappear; it only transmuted itself.

‘Aye’ echoes ‘eye’ and ‘I' on purpose.  ‘Nay’ is a reminder of Night Mare.

 In this place, you not only may but should peer under and inside everything you find.
 

Glory Rose
 

The closer you come to the surface that ceases
to matter the moment you swim into view
in my world—I am only a crack that releases
the ghost of a sigh, but it signals to you
as it passes and then—nay, it circles, and places
without name or number sing ‘here’ to the mind
that is all you remember to be.  You are facing
the source of the flow of such knowledge, a kind
of illuminate self-precognition springs forward
to tender a willingness love has inspired.
Aye, this is all our own singing.  Where sources
once faltered and breathing came watery-tired,
it crept nigh, unbelabored—song borne of a current
that surfaces here for the infinite time.
Let us perform the long work of its service
by meeting the ease of its efforts to climb
into much deeper view by sheer grace of the transparent
openness facing us here.  As it stares
any not-quite-revealed secrets through, let it carry
the eeriness with it that tenderly bears
fragrant flowerlike new secrets—those beyond telling
where anything matters but love, which is clear
in our eyes and our faces—a deep overwelling
desire to be more than all magics appear
as appearances cease to make noise and their shadows
glide silently into our song’s open flow.
Though they remind us at times of the sadness
of seeming alone, even ghost-voices know
they are swimming in space round a thought so relentless
in beauty, an ocean of soft-breathing blooms
meets the air of a lunar night sky amid endless
resolve to keep finding and opening rooms
in the mind that is dreaming the whole of the story
this love-music sings as its silver Moon glows
through a pale hairline seam.  So much yearning for more as
it aches to receive you, an undersea rose
of immense crimson power.  The sound of its breathing
pure ocean meets storm-clouds that thunder as far
enters close.  In this most private mind, perfect being
comes home:  Let it show you the glory YOU ARE.
 

***
 

18 September 2002
 

In meditation, I have tended to experience a great deal of painful tension in the center of my back.  When I visualize this pain, I see a great silvery Sun with streaming rays.  It gets caught just below my heart because something is blocking the way.  When it moves past that point and rises freely as far as it needs to rejoin its source in a light beyond, new levels of song will break free.  I know a part of me is interfering with its progress by a thousand tiny devices, afraid that the change will come too quickly, but a larger part is willing it forward.  Something more substantial is causing the real blockage, though—the presence of a person who is damming his own light.  On Monday morning, I dreamed that I was sharing a bed with an old woman who removed 12 steel rings, like the ones I have been using to make maille jewelry, from the painful part of my back:  four rows of three, a design based on a sacred number.  When I saw her once before, she was wearing a robe printed with a square-and-triangle design; I understand that design to be a reference to our favored poetic measure.  Since the dream, the pain has been greatly less.  I sense that rays of the inner-Sun-light are already reaching my heart.  They are not like diurnal sunlight; they are cool and silvery, and might not ultimately be distinct from the light of the inward Moon.  When they reach as high as my throat—

There will be the next story.  Will it come in time for this autumn’s work?
 

Why They Do It So Often
 

I am awash in the wavering light of
a day that exceeds my unspoken demands,
fast acquiring a vast range of speeds that are highly
desirous of visions of outlying lands
viewed from high, high above—and now scrutinized closely
from very nearby:  perhaps deep underground.
Suddenly I am quite shy.  Broken rows of
old apple trees blossom with glorious sound
as a cloudburst of bright-feathered songbirds fly past me—
at speeds I can overtake easily.  See
how they cluster, then scatter.  Perceive them as faster
than all my old thoughts, and the mind in the free-
soaring dance of their midst a swift glimpse of the mirror
in which their first ordered reflection was thrown
into visible being.  How unearthly clearly
it shines to me now, an inordinate moan
of high-speed recognition, sub-threshold forever
till this lasting ray—no more wavering light;
I am as I see, a sound massing round heaven’s
low unfulfilled source, the tap-root of deep Night
where it most strangely flourishes, seeking new reaches
of wise mortal insight with subtlety borne
on the rushing of feathers beyond incompleteness
toward the low branch where a thin shred of torn
spirit-flesh still remains to be made independent
of all that preceded its present estate.
Cloud-forms fall open; songbird-throats all tender
clear praise to the ways of the real spirit-gate
this dimension has been and revealed and subsided
to open anew; you are shining bright, here
in the midst of true love’s only moment.  Delighted
we are—but the next looming world will appear
before this one has ceased altogether, and in it
pale apple-tree petals and feathers will glow
like a dream without end.  Now it sings through our skin of
its potency—however else could we know
of its nearness?  Wild birds circle back; apples drip with
fine dew; in the long grass of leaf-shadows, lie
by my side.  Love is still beyond telling, but this is
a foretaste of why lovers so often die.
 

***
 

19 September 2002
 

Find as many multiple meanings as you can.  Consider the potential of each use of tense and aspect.  The ‘curse’ has its usual female significance.  I went in to learn more about the streaming ball of light in my back, the old woman in my dream, and the silvery metal rings she removed.
 

Leave This Stain
 

Glowing coolly like a lunar
water-stain, wet in reverse
with light that only grows as through a
weave it spreads its rays, a curse
of finely gilded spirit-matter,
heartstream music ghostly pale—
a very whitely looming patterned
emptiness that seeks the wail
that serves its secret purpose—aye, it
sets to waiting patiently
while making active plans.  That highly
silvered presence turns to me
through dancing songs’ concentric circles
endless-thousandfold.  The weave
spins round in spiraled motions, working
magically to see me leave
the ancient half-lit lunar landscape
laid beneath my feet and climb
upon its blissful understanding
into altared other time,
myself a glowing candle casting
silver rays so wide and clear
they turn to watered moonlight basking
in an ocean-atmosphere
too rarefied for this obsessive
secret-harbored mortal mind—
But when I woke, I found a blessed
curse had left me redefined
entirely outward—spoken, sung and
silent—all transfigured pain.
Thus I found the leaking tongue whose
shining waters leave this stain.
 

***
 

20 September 2002
 

Spirit throws off body-heat.
 

The Picture of Silence
 

Picture me a tiny ball of
concentrated silver light
that sings inside a narrow hallway.
Now it is the dead of night,
but I am wildly beaming—in a
eerie phosphorescent way.
Empty as a dreamless skin, an
arrowlike arcane array
of splendid pinings rooted out of
what they used to feed on, plied
like countless lightnings shooting down a
midnight sky a hairsbreadth wide,
and aimed along a shadowed cavern’s
central corridor—you see
the picture you are going to have to
live with soon.  It captures me
in vivid strokes, a great untainted
future in its cunning glow—
a lovely, long wet lunar play of
timeless, tightly focused flow—
forever’s clinging moment—nigh to
never-was.  And yet, as bright
as all it sings, it holds love’s shining
silence in the dead of night.
 

***
 

21 September 2002
 

Harvest Moon
 

Lines Still Falling from a Dead Man’s Pocket
 

You were beside me.  My right hand was vibrating,
quietly humming—my scalp moved as well.
Nobody answered my call.  I kept waiting.
Now all-over crawling—a faint sense of smell
through a patterned glass window that melts—I can hear you
as if in reply, but no words cross the air;
just the fragrance of cold camphored roses.  My eerie
inspirer, when I am a wraith and a tear
in the fabric that still hangs between us, that shimmer
of splayed silken noose-fibers wafted upon
a prolonged sense of indwelling miracle—dimmer
then brighter, but never entirely gone—
tell me then I’ll have learned how to pierce the illusion
that I am not air you yourself breathe in deep
fragrant waves of pure song, sweet uncanny love-music
that falls from a grave into timeless unsleep
in a mind that is dreaming awake of dead roses
revived in live hands as wet lips part and speak
in the language of constantly full lunar oceans
of light and my eyes and your thoughts gently leak
and the prickle of tears becomes one with the mesh of
vibrations, the soft second skin—nay, the sole
and delightful all-over investment, the flesh of
sustained adulation where love renders whole
the fine meeting-place glimpsed between states and attained as
precisely and soundly as—words enter song.
Breathe in and out.  I will not be the bane of
the beauty to which we both seek to belong
by betraying its faith in a presence where perfect
resolve meets and mingles with focus of mind.
Loveliness humming deep dream-music, further
the falling a hanging-man’s noose used to bind.
 

***
 

22 September 2002
 

Equinox Eve
 

In Transit
 

We will river further downstream
faster now.  Behold, the star
that lights this living water’s sound and
rapid source; ahead, a far
but swiftly growing larger ray of
moonlight meets our starry beams
and river-lappings loudly.  Great with
miracle YOU ARE, and dreams
entwined—and all but inside-out.  In
tremble-time, as traces flow
through parallel designs, the ground on
which sweet liquid blossoms grow—
deep river-moonlight, dreaming face of
angel-cast reflection, ray
of starlight, tongue that leaks with grace from
aching air so near away
I feel it breathe me into panic—
almost—then breathe riverlike
in peace and gentle strangeness—hand in
mine, a sense of lightning-strike
amid these fluent marvels presses
urgently behind my eyes.
See a Moon of steady blessing
working words through ocean skies
where petals rest in drifts and scattered
orchard-avalanche remains.
Light it comes down floating—gladly
answer it with woken plains
of eerie song, somniloquent and
water-borne—at deep, deep rest
in longing as it clearly enters
speed, a very welcome guest
who crosses ancient thresholds granted
passageways unasked-for.  Be
at grace with blossom-orchards dancing:
Hear the racing river we.
 

***
 

23 September 2002
 

Happy Equinox
 

Someone close to me over the past ten years of verses has struggled with an addiction.  His struggle has influenced this work as a vastly extended metaphor that serves for all that is introverted, retiring, shy of daylight but deeply of the essence, in its efforts to decide finally whether or not to cross the barriers in its way and to become fully present to the daylight land.  What does a person seek from oblivion, really?  Aye, to shut out noise and pain, the better to enter more deeply into their dream—but the real source of that dream is surely the Mundus Imaginalis, a reality, not an escape.  We all wish to suffer less, but that is not all; we also long to form a closer bond with whatever we find most beautiful.  The presence of that most-beautiful, in its truest sense, is what I am forever trying to convey here at AEAEA.  The safe bearing of it home through the middle passage between worlds—more is involved, of course, but I am inclined to the thought that to secure that passage authentically will ultimately quell the need for false forms of enchantment.

This Equinox song remembers all that—but of course it holds so much more.
 

What’s Come Over You
 

You will only rain the more when
shadows leak their eerie slide
along a lovesick wall that shores up
ivy vines against a tide
of creeping inspiration—Moon-white
whispers, waves that carry sands
they picked up far away where blue and
heavy rains washed foreign lands
toward the sea and some lapsed over.
Time, which you were clouded by
in far frustrated shallow coves when
speeches ground against the sky
brought no release from inanition
shadow-grey as mirror-blank
desire caught dead between a wishful-
thinking void and rigid bank
of ashes—aye, that sole defensive
barrier by which to fail
remains the safer choice, no end in
sight—forgot the blue-white sail
that rode the beach-sand-whelming waters
bearing lore alive and sure
to know and to transgress the body-
boundaries that stained the pure
high inland reaches of this island
altar-zone with crawling grey
oblivion.  You shone a smile’s mad
influence against the play
of hazy nothing, turned the mirror
inside-out, and brought the Moon
that raised the tide that laid the clear white
sand that echoes with the tune
it learned in foreign places, under-
water and above.  It rains
and you shine all the more.  You’ve done your
journey-work; I’ve wet my stains
with tears—the same salt ocean waters—
seen the green beneath them rise
as walls dissolve and fragments caught in
ivy-vines breathe forth a wise
seductive air of recognition:
Aye, this took place long ago.
Dreamful dripping love-transmission
crawling like the ebb and flow
but mostly forward movement of the
ocean underfoot—we knew
you’d find your welcome home, the lovely
lore of what’s-come-over-you.
 

***
 

24 September 2002
 

Again all day I have been thinking about the Other place, the place from which the most haunting feelings leak through—the place they call home.  I have written about hiraeth before, that homesickness for what cannot be again and perhaps never was.  Some are more sensitive to this feeling and its place of origin than others.  For me it is intensely vivid, but rather than follow its call into possible oblivion, I am concerned with finding its traces everywhere I can and bringing them closely together by daylight until the pattern they surely bear is revealed.  The task is huge and for the most part it can only be dealt with piece-meal.  Still, the goal, though far-off, is real and reachable and a presence within the fragments is interested and willing to help.  I do not say that this eerie place is anything other than mental; I do say that—knock wood as much as you like—mind is all there is.

In these songs, each leaf is absolutely an actual living green leaf on an earthly tree, but just as reliably a piece of paper with words written on it.  Either way, a cell of strangeness there aches to bursting with wisdom.  When it is a leafy page, the pen that writes the words both brings a foreign voice to the leaf and frees a native voice within it.
 

The Secret Place
 

Will you hover, blackly shining,
turning on a spindled ray
of brightly thundered midnight lightning
poised to burn my dreams away
from where they’ve lain so long and weakly,
willing me to claim the voice
I need and want, the storm at sea we’ve
learned to call our only choice—
from out of countless apparitions
shaking out of splendor’s sole
delight a spirit-fire, an issue
drawn down heaven’s central pole,
a stationary moving essence
frozen in a molten—aye,
now covered by your ghostly presence,
I shall resurrect the cry
that followed me down earthly hallways
serving sacred flesh with tears
all tainted red, a lonely small on-
aching pain against the years
a single season held me spellbound.
I shall make that cry again
a living leaf of green an elder
knowledge shines to make more plain
by blackest silence.  Hovered meeter,
riser high at midnight’s gate,
strike that I may crack completely
wide and thus attain the state
of grace YOU ARE within this secret
cell of leaf-green plenitude,
the place to which all longing, leaking-
strangeness living dreams allude.
 

***
 

25 September 2002
 

Something still feels tiny and half-asleep, but very strong.
That is how this came:
 

Utterly transparent descaled wing
shed by a night-blown moth off course,
now certainly dead—the word you bring
reminds a long sightless shaft a force
from too far away to face held wide
to meet where a black sealed mouth once moaned
the lore you have never cast aside
 grown scalelessly, finely human-boned.
 

***
 

26 September 2002
 

It is this simple:  A dancing foot comes down and snaps a dry twig.  The twig releases a pent-up fragrance.  Someone sighs-in the radiance that fragrance brings.  Did not the twig fall just there according to some secret purpose?  Now if only…the ozone of storm-lightning blends magically well with that scent where I come from.  Lightning, flashing down like the foot of the dancer….

‘Feet’ are still measures of song, and mine.
 

A Crack Between Worlds
 

A CRACK I hear—a danced dry twig, brittle
and sapless, leaks forth a fragrance still
filled with magic.  Sigh in its light a little,
its rose-leaf aura and thorn-bent will
to be harmless, fallen before it lay under-
foot with a voluntary air.
It riddle-haunts with a zone great thunder
ought to and soon will come to share.
 

***
 

27 September 2002
 

All I did was follow the advice of my poet elders and gather all the clues I could retrieve from my dreams and stay the course and write it all down and now here I am.  And it is pretty fucking scary because where are you?
 

It’s twisting between my own fingers now
this miserable fiber of flesh I am.
It deserves to hang—from the Moon-white brow
where the midnight hour meets the good god damn
that I might give over till streams abound
that were downcast rays out of skin undone—
by a sly-beamed light.  Oh it spins me round—
into space taken up by the Shining One.
 

***
 

28 September 2002
 

Still in the Film
 

Still in the film of dirt the earthly
graveyard high overhead shifts down,
willfully placed to learn the worth of
waiting beneath a lacework gown
of living white fibers’ coldly clinging
fingers—aye me, that I should hang
where underworld winds blow through me singing
love-songs they know because I sang.
 

***
 

29 September 2002
 

The Forming of the Loop
 

There—you are forming a loop of fine fiber
and binding it tightly with little white strands
drawn out like a new sort of horrible—nightmare:
What does it want, as your pale trembling hands
rest between its two own, and its eyes glow with fervor?
Moon-fire between estranged worlds, a wise ray
that hurts once but then opens sweet stillness—dear worker
of wonders, let us let ourselves feel its sway.
 

***
 

30 September 2002
 

QUHAIR
 

From an elder tongue:
 

The too-tightly-twisted white scroll of fine paper
snaps from its branch and uncoils right now.
An image engraved there looks out, elated:
‘Gladly I’ll tell you the where and how
and why of my hanging thus depicted,
swaying by means of a horsehair braid
from an apple tree branch with a voice like liquid…’
running so fast the words all fade.
 

*

Pale Face Staring Back
 

Where will you go with the staring fury
leading you at a break-neck pace,
hoar-maned and swift as ashes purely
scattered by winds your eyes disgrace
by seeing them merely?  Blow across her
path like a counter-wind:  Perforce
your speed will attain to hers.  Pale-blossomed
death, mount desire, your nightmare horse.
.
.
.
.