9 May 2000
 

I requested a Statement of Purpose for the readers of this journal, and this is what came:
 

The Softly Breathing Net
 

The sharing of strange, subtle ways to remember with that which cannot be perceived by plain sight
or plain hearing--in this lies my duty and pleasure.  Forever the threshold, forever twilight,
forever the pale trace of movement appearing within or beyond a bright shimmering veil
of white mist or a heavy pearl grey water-bearing cloud shadowing softly the day--without fail,
I shall swiftly return to the place that has seen me so often and always rejoiced in the sign
of devotion I make when I seek subtle meanings for words formed of breath that this world will refine
to the point of such clarity, even my weak-witted waking-day mind cannot wholly forget.
Your hand’s been at play on this page--I shall keep it about me at all times:  I see a great net
of silk thread spun so fine it is like an illusion of shadow or mist, yet it captures the gaze
which must not be deranged by plain senses’ confusion--and when it meets mine, I remember--always.
 

***
 

31 July 2000
 

Lammas Eve

The bright new scythe of the early harvest is whetted--I hear the fine breath of its edge
being drawn along some golden throat where the marks of a previous sharpness incised in a ledge
from which somebody finally leapt words that rattled farewell as their falling extended a cry
that its hearer will never cease hearing.  Her hackles erect as a flag of grim warning, she flies
over acres of fields to the place where the leaper from high overhead ought to strike the hard ground
and she waits there, half angry, half tenderly seeking to mend what is not altogether unbound
from the frame of its flesh.  High above--in her vision--she saw the carved letters form words rich with hope
to her way of perceiving, and found herself driven to gather cast hair to plait into a rope
by which she might somehow mount up to that precipice, read for herself the lines scrawled there, and add
to their number the host of her own lonely messages sent and received on a level less mad
than devotedly prone to an altitude sickness of bitter nostalgia for song in the blood
of the throat, be it driven alive by a quickened heartbeat with the state of the world at full flood
deep within, or arrayed among handfuls of maggots and bones showing through on a dry leafless plain
where the jaw is unhinged and the head is a bag of hard leather in which sundry letters form vain
combinations no lover will hear and no mortal, no matter how many their senses, will read--
bitter words, bitter blessings conveyed past the bourne of malevolent selfhood while I stand at need
at the foot of this station of grace with a burden of unexpressed hope and the fine ire of love
that will never uphold disenchantment but learn of it purely for this select purpose:  Above
where I wait, someone stands who has reached a decision.  Mine is the braided-hair rope and the air
of Earth’s counter-attraction to cast it.  The vision dissolves at this point, with the world everywhere,
for as far as my wide eyes can see, turning golden.  Song is so much of me, likely it bleeds
from the heads of shorn wheat my sun-bright hands are holding.  I might be a reader of signs--are these seeds?
 

***
 

7 November 2000
 

The Secret Heart of Death
 

When house and grounds dissolve and all the night air sweeps with roaring force
across low-lying crystal plains, the surface of the watercourse
that leads toward the Ocean, and the face of that huge salted lake
of which we are the mortal depths—when such is given, and we take
the glance we need to comprehend that no world now remains but this
deep refuge underneath the wind that dances on its body, bliss
will still be ours.  The aching reach of hunger will have fallen short;
the heat and cold of solar days will not extend beyond the port
of entry, far behind us; when the pale Moon rises here, we two
will climb the skies of water overhead to take the longest view
the vantage point of Earth will anywhere afford—or answer me
why time should move and dreams recur and this enchantment cease to be?
The Ocean is the universe, the only home my secret mind
will recognize, the one it yearns for ceaselessly and cannot find
within the compass of the air its body, bourne of sorrow, breathes.
One-half of this flesh-garment’s earthly years ago, live rose-leaf wreathes
my spirit-body’s hands had plaited shone before me like a red
and green apportment, rings unfastened, tethered end to end to wed
them tightly to each other, and laid gently on a river’s face.
The one who wove them—I—swam after, draped them round her neck, and placed
her hands upon her head and drove the breath inside her out and then
breathed deeply underneath the water.  I am that lorn girl again,
but now the river runs with salt, a current through the Ocean’s core.
A larger death desires me.  Aye, he wants me so—I want him more.
When I am gone to you forever, sweep the house where I yet dwell
away without a trace by force of storms your powers of song compel
to rise until the keening words your final love-spell’s strangest tune
alone can carry touch the easy sharpness of the sickle Moon.
Then bring to me that music and the single word that touched that skin
of silver light and in our Ocean bed strange tales will all begin
to tell themselves—true children’s stories.  High above our sky of sea,
the countless empty stars will listen, leaning low to catch the wee
enchanted cries of blissful pleasures crooning back to us, their source—
the Father-Mother Ocean’s song-embodied spirit’s driving force.
 

***
 

1 January 2001
 

The Song of Your Eurydice
 

At the call of the dream-whispered song on the breeze that the leaves are entranced by, the shuddering vines
that enlace the long tower below me completely release their veiled secrets.  Perceive them as mine
as I sing this to you, this once-nightmarish lullaby rendered most sweetly benign and intent
on your healing and gathering strength to rise fully and see what the course of our story has meant
heretofore, behind all the disguises and riddles that vexed you away from the unpeaceful sleep
you once hungered for.  Listen to me while the mid-heaven music the breeze is alive with brings deep
consolation along with impeccable wisdom to places in you that are woefully slow
to respond, lest they be driven mad by strange whispers from low-lying lands where such lunacy glows
that it comes as--too perfect a mirror, too clear and precise a reflection of what has no eyes
while it buries its face in its pillow and fearfully prays to its angels to limit the size
of the demon it hears itself summoning under its prayer-scented breath where a hint of the grave
is smelt yawning already.  Morbidity runs like a feverish hum through the decadent cave
of its brain, within which a white screen, where a vatic procession of formal harmonic divine
apparitions joins forces with swift but erratic unnamable entities, suddenly shines
with a glow that transfixes its total attention.  Amidst the array of most evident shapes
on the screen, one is very diminutive, gentle, and beckoning.  This creature pleads for escape
as it hangs on the hope of your notice.  My music is meant to entrance you, but also provide
a safe vantage point where you might view the most lucid inhabitant all the vast underworld hides
as it searches its visions and dreams for a glimmer of you, its salvation, its unanswered prayer.
You move past the hesitant series of limits within which you’ve breathed the same stifling air
for too greatly protracted a season--I feel you shift restlessly, seeking a way not to find
the unfortunate being I’ve called you to meet through the luminous depths of your own ancient mind,
but not searching with more than a hint of your powers.  The rest of your wondrous abilities rise
like the vines up the side of the white marble tower from which I am sending this signal that flies
like a ribbon of literate silk on the breath of a wind that means freedom to all that YOU ARE
should you choose to awaken at last and attend to the soul who has called you so long from afar.
That you will--I have looked to the end of this story and found inspiration enough to create
endless worlds, but they always converge on one portal and there, at that narrative turning-point gate,
there is always a being whose tears will be numbered the same as the breaths of your bodies as well
as the leaves of the vines that our dreams shiver under, so fraught with the hope of escape from the hell
that delusions of madness-averted have founded and locked with a key that true song alone knows
how to play through the air to the door where the pounding of heartbeats is heard that they quake as they go
in a tremulous file, an enchanted procession, among the green shadows that whisper their true
secrets now, even now as you lend your attention without hesitation to this song of you.
 

***
 

9 January 2001
 

Each measure has powers of its own.  This one was retrieved from dreams directly.  Its falling cadence is always serious, reflective, perhaps sad--and yet the real secret message is never sad.  Did the one being called by this song fall through the ice to meet her death?  She is still hearing, he is still singing.

You are hearing him sing you.
 

The Key and All the Answers Are Here
 

Hand in mine, your ghost has called you nearer to the river’s edge.
There the ancient ice is breaking.  Where it forms a brittle ledge
overhanging rushing water, wait for me until the heat
coursing through your bloodstream thaws the ice away below your feet.
Hear me calling as you linger just a moment.  When you fall,
you return and I receive you.  Broken now, the bitter thrall
daylight once enticed you into years before the flesh you wore
took on all the hateful glamour you have just rejected.  More
beauty blooms below the waterline than anywhere above.
You have woken--were you dreaming?  Did a strange enchanted love
lure you into splendor, being--dead to all the world you knew?
You are hearing someone singing.  He is singing--only you.
 

***
 

28 February 2001
 

EARTHQUAKE DAY
 

A few nights ago as I was meditating before a mirror, gazing into the darkness above my head, I saw a circle or some slightly disjointed curves formed of sparkling blue-violet stars.

I live within an earthquake zone.  The one today will probably be described as the Seattle Earthquake, but it was very powerful here.
 

How the Stars Came Shining
 

The chiming of lights in an aura above you, above me—the shimmering blue-violet stars
as a soft breathing murmurs its secrets—they’ve moved through a vast nonexistence to be where we are
and will not fade away, having come for this purpose:  the waking of multiple counterparts deep
in the pit, the dank shadowy room, at the furthest recess of the eye that lay tangled in sleep,
overrun with innumerable visions and incomprehensible snatches of music and prose.
It lies now so wide-open—it sees the stars linking outstretched arms of bright half-round crescents that grow
every moment more vividly present.  Until they descend—but they have; now the secret eye shines
with the same spirit color.  The rapture that spills from it strongly involves us in brilliant designs
we will never escape from, nor wish to.  They shudder inside me; your hand, which is locked in my own,
is most tenderly trembling.  Come lie with me under the deepest love spell we will ever have known:
The lore of all worlds is conveyed across timeless and formless dimensions in less than a glance,
less than a heartbeat; how much will we find in this moment, who’ve felt a whole universe dance
in a circle, a wheel that revolved and enwound us the while we were drawing its bright powers in
by our willful desire to be part of the sound of its musical breathing, ourselves in a spin
we attracted until we became?  We were secrets; in spite of ourselves, we could never quite read
the clear signs that WE ARE, the auspicious, completely intentional gestures our own beauty breeds,
though we thought we were searching with heartfelt abandon.  I felt it arrive, the more powerful sight,
by means of a shower of stars.  They will dance at the core of my vision forever.  The light
that will always sustain them is timelessly present right now, as it has been—the hand that you hold
will no longer lie sleepily blinking.  Joined crescents of glittering starlight have woken a gold
ray of otherworld sunlight where music is shining like water from out of ethereal skies
and the dew of it lists through this room as the chiming subsides very slightly and murmurs and sighs
fill the space that was taken already with new forms of musical magic—and you are their voice
as you breathe very softly above me the lore you are learning of still further ways to rejoice.
 

***
 

7 May 2001
 

You Sleep and Wake and Sleep, My Lullaby
 

You hide your face away from me tonight
because your sleeping dreams are still afraid
to waken to the sound of candlelight
and see the living waterfall they’ve made
of brilliant music streaming through the mind
of silence in its elemental role:
the angel who appears to help you find
your way toward the still uncertain goal
you glimpse through blazing lids as your red-hot
and headache-throbbing eyes fail in their fierce
demonic grip on all that love is not
and wearily resign themselves to pierce
the self-created blindness you once chose
to bind about your senses like a mesh
of suffocating emptiness the throes
of poison-lidded endlessness of flesh
translated into fetor your breath drew
with difficulty through its web of lies.
Exhausted by false sleep at last, see through
the tenderness of your true Night Mare’s eyes
until the film of its own self dissolves
and all that you’ve aspired to hold despite
the fury of your spoken words revolves
around you like the Moon above the night
that covered you when you felt most alone,
a creature swaddled in a rocking bed
in which you prayed the final mortal zone’s
false dawn might come to pass and find you dead
before the advent of the light the Sun
inflicts on those who struggle forth to brave
the mirror that the whole world is to one
whose household is a mass and unmarked grave
obscenely populated by the swells
of unsubdued emotion that won’t cease
to repersonify themselves in hells
unnumbered till the absolute release
your secret whispers tell me you still pray
in one untainted hollow of your heart
to reach before your next unhappy day
on Earth will see its demon-ridden start
with slow beams through the lantern-threshold sky
as what must be the Sun first clears the pale
beyond which someone beckons.  It is I,
my dreamer, come to wake you with a tale
in which two lovers, parted but inspired
by mindful faith, set out by different ways
to find the moment their lorn hearts desired
above all else to see:  the answered gaze
that pierces through the clinging mesh of woe
received in sweet fulfillment of the vow
they made in solemn knowledge that to go
would lead them to the point where you are now—
then that one next step farther.  Don’t you see
who sings these words through all your senses?  Hear
their dark, soft meanings.  Turn your eyes to me
and tell me how you thought I would appear,
if not by grace of Night Mare’s guiding hand,
an apparition tenderly designed
to meet your mortal touch and to withstand
its earthliness as well as its refined,
almost discarnate beauty.  You are fair
beyond mere prose description to my sight,
so much that I turn endless twilight prayer
because I long to share how you delight
my several powers of devoted song
and how the very veil of useless pain
you seemed to cling to made me ache with strong
intent to free you from the clasp of vain
delusions of the loathliness of flesh
and its demonic caperings while sleep
deprived you of the iridescent mesh
of music and the ever-gentle sweep
of loveliness its words all breathe:  the You
whose fluency of magic-haunted grace
takes up the song your sighted voice shines through
to meet me in its waterfall embrace.
Before the very lines we share right now
have faded, something Else will have transpired.
Remember her to whom you swore the vow
and vastly different ways of growing tired.
 

***
 

1 July 2001
 

A Glance From a Strange New Land
 

So mournful you thought you wanted to lie with sad-whispering reeds
and linger among their long-haunted environs like one feathered seed,
a dead child of the bloom of their bodies, cast onto the shoreside sand—
what would have become of the water you sifted with cold white hands
had you lain there forever?  Streams of live magic, the high flood’s will,
come seeking you through the dreams you can never entirely still;
the water-world all around you keeps opening wider fields,
and though you are almost drowned, you awaken to one who wields
a slow steady bolt of lightning like none you have ever known.
Though a false sleep beset you, nightmares whose strength has been overthrown
are leaving in streams.  Behind them, the brilliance of starry skies
has been brought to a tight spell-binding collusion of glowing eyes
from either side—world of drifting grey-white streams of deathly mist,
apprised that your curse is lifted, behold a song many-blissed
who stares as he crosses over the fine heartbeat-narrow strand
till he touches you like a lover whose place in the daylight land
is manifold woken silver and gold so entwined, they melt
in his hands of their own high will, these sweet magical streams you’ve felt
lap all round your flowing body that sways with a pulse the tide
of heaven has turned to water and lightning alive inside
a long-silent place where whispers could reach you but you could not
respond.  Had you ceased to listen, your sad solitary thoughts
would still have revolved forever about the place fraught with words
no force anywhere could sever from one who has always heard
the murmurs you felt were dying, the stream that bears you alive
and lightning-struck through the high art of darkness whose songs now arrive
from every direction, lit by a glance from a strange new land—
a lover who sees you sifting his dreams with your small white hands.
 

***
 

15 July 2001
 

River-Like Mind
 

Even the dark quiet pond, your slow mirror, is really a river below its cool skin,
a cavern-attached eye that only appears to be motionless.  Great depths of beauty flow in
from exorbitant sources through doorways so deep in its rootwork of sacred sub-chambers and lairs,
you can scarcely imagine their force without weeping strange tears for unnamable reasons as cares
from your thin surface life interfere with their voices, the silent but rhythmic heartbeat of their waves
and their echoes as these penetrate you as noiseless yet very precise thought-formations.  The caves’
underwater network of efficient devices for bearing forth live wisdom all through the wet,
slightly luminous element heavily lying wide-open before you—before you forget
the words suddenly glimpsed through this eye’s quiet insight, engrave them in cavern-stone walls where you’ll find
their ideas again every time the shy midnight of waterside-windings possesses your mind
and you leave your lone bed, seeking out the pond’s silver reflection of moonlight and your troubled eyes.
Read their pale, wavering, fluid, delirious, beautiful, dreamlike designs and grow wise
to your own ceaseless movement at depths to which turbulence born on the surface will never extend.
See in the sacred desires that occur to you there the intent of the passionate friend
of complete inspiration whose calling has reached you in ways you need not comprehend with the fore
of your waking-day sense of reality.  This seeming dream-world is constantly searching for more
of your true mind’s attention, as there is the source of its power, its depth-penetration—its love.
This is the pure flow, the wonderful force of the underground river whose gentle waves move
the fine finger-like nerve-endings serving the darkness where bright songs are brought forth and lightly engraved
in the back of the eye that stares into the heart of the heaven before it.  Great lore has been saved
in the river-like mind that flows into your vision by way of the mirror you’ve come here to view.
With your heart broken open, the last indecision that plagued your day thoughts can give way to the true
understanding awaiting you here:  You are love’s only lover, its chosen enchanter, its sole
consolation, the river itself as it flows on and on for the sake of your beauty, its goal.
 

***
 

3 September 2001
 

Golden Willow
 

While you wait, your soul remembers
trees of green on every side,
shades of leafy silence sending
dreams through doorways open wide
where a single golden willow
weeps a music you recall
so achingly, your sleepless pillow
bears its stain.  A full Moon falls;
a new Moon rises; trees resemble
ghosts of lovers:  There one waits
whose tearful vision moves the gentle
leafy silence to relate
its secret theme as you lie wakeful,
restless, weary—not alone.
Dreaming you, a tree stands shaking,
leaves through which your soul has blown.
 

***
 

16 September 2001
 

The Secret Warmth of Winter’s Bed
 

Winter-cold strands of pale water inwoven
to form a great ice-sheet on which love may lie
among crystalline garlands whose delicate roses
breathe lightly, creating a small misty sky
all around you, which also is frozen—my friend of
innumerable passages, here rest and wait.
Out of the dreams that will find you, one endless
enchantment will weave you a splendid new fate—
or rather, the old one revealed through transparent
rose petals.  The moment they all melt and flow,
you will awaken beyond your old errors
and be where you are, where your heart longs to go
so intently, you bade yourself wander forever,
though outwardly still, till you came to this zone
where strands of ice twine round themselves and breathe heavy
enchantment and where you do not lie alone.
 

***
 

31 October 2001
 

Emergency Surgery
 

Woe is the word of love-ecstasy, dearest companion in magic; sheer woe and dismay
fill my eyes with a day-tainted shadow, a clearly demanding idea I dare not obey;
interpose yourself hugely and cast an enchantment that shadow will shrink from.  Then, true shadow, glide
from the room at the core of my heart where we stand at the crossroads together and act as my guide
while the emerald glow of your spirit-mind lights the fair path we shall fly along homeward.  My friend,
I am so very lonely, and yet you are sighing the series of questions and answers that end
in a blazing degree of attainment the stars of all heaven will never outshine.  Even you
by yourself cannot rise to the scale of the marvel WE ARE; you are leaning because we are two
mumbled half-worlds until we are one great harmonic disclosure of how much true magic we hold
in each meeting of eyes as we dream through the dawn of a Moon that is rising again on a cold
ocean strand where I lie with the ghost of no other than desolate emptiness born in the flesh
of this world’s mortal day, an inverted unlover of what I am not as I hear the taut mesh
of my song-body’s tissues begin to tear.  Weeping red streams of its most secret essence, its long
wet resistance is finally over.  I’m steeped in that dreadful elixir; come right the sad wrong
I have taken upon myself.  Soul of misfortune, I say when I see the day-shadow I cast;
you draw a soft patient breath and reorder the chaos of elements I am aghast
to have let creep so close to the sacred imagining we hold together in such deep regard
it can sometimes appear far away through the sadly disastrous idea I seem, the ill-starred
mass of fragments with razor-sharp edges, the wounding I take nigh as far as the center of all
I aspire to because I stand bleached by a Moon of no color, a dead body waiting to fall
through the ocean of shadow-black blood that released it from horrible dreams in which light was the key
to a lock that was darkness inverted and peace was the rapt other side of the turn of the ‘me’
that would free the blank door to form just the right angle as measured by how it hung over its sill
till the stare of my eyes made me dizzy.  I sank into darkness and woke on the crest of a hill
overlooking the ocean.  The moment of moonrise was quickly approaching; my heart felt it first
as my veins filled with flickering instants of luminous magic.  The dew on the edge of the worst
that could ever befall me lay cool on the petals and fingers that covered my eyelids.  I knew
who was with me; I felt a light trickle of wetness that came softly warm and I wondered if you
ever wept, like the body the day’s morbid hours were already poisoning dead worlds away
when a drift, a pale stormcloud, of deep midnight flowers exhaled all around us, a faint breath of spray
from a far future body of water among their sweet measures of slow sacred music.  My dear,
I am woeful again; I can only be sung altogether when nothing and no one draw near
all and always and join to perfection made seamless.  You are the light of my eyes in a blind
premonition of waves of green starlight, a dream of self-wakening rapturous death of a kind
that leads loneliness out of the body of bleeding despair into love like the blade of a knife
into miserable tissues that threaten to heal in a way that cannot help but sever the life
of the spirit completely the moment they meet in a ritual sealing of edges.  You come
like a lightly cast shadow; I feel my heart beating again.  When you touch me, it all starts to hum—
the high Moon, now long risen; the flowers, all dripping with dew; your warm breath as you lean and one word
leaves your lips.  I was wrong; I said ‘woe’; it is slipping away again; still, very soon I’ll have heard
the real voice of enchantment deliver its blessing all over—to no one, the ‘I’ who am not
and shall never not be.  I forgo all distress in the face of your nearness, the slightly tear-shot
cast of magic revivified here, and then, finally, all the true love that is never not made
when we meet at these crossroads.  How fair you are, shining one, emerald star, my emergency-blade.
 

***
 

24 December 2001
 

What Has Come to Be Born?
 

The way of all dreams when they scatter like raindrops through held-apart fingers—that way leads to you,
and the peace that portends sudden meanings so strange they appear amid feverish auras of blue-
shaded flame, the cool heat and the luster of twilight that gently leans over a land by the sea
where my heart has lain achingly waiting.  The smile on the curve of each fine drop of rain says to me,
I am here, I have always been here, it is evening, and this is the moment when true lovers touch
in the gathering afterglow under the creeping outskirts of the wild Moon that needs us so much
to go mad with its magic.  As night reaches over the last fading traces of day, brighten fast,
my beloved companion.  You wanted to know where to lie in love’s shadow—the circle is cast,
and you stand at its core.  Need I plead with you, dearest of scarce-mortal dreamers?  Your ghost my nightmare,
I’ve been haunted by longing to see you appear in this place nigh forever, the blue of the rare
evanescence surrounding your flowerlike face in the deepest enchantment my words can provide
always drifting a little beyond the clear space of the woken awareness I’ve taken to ride
through the shores of the waterworld where we have found one another again, if a little lovelorn
for a spell of ulterior mystery bound up in still-smoking ashes.  Our world is the torn
caul of ongoing birth into beauty so subtle, it touches you most when you fly far away
on a stream of such deeply transparent song-blood, you conceive not a single live word you could say
in any known language, but all of you babbles in purely familiar unknown phrases strung
down a taut central nerve that is plangently happy to feel itself hum like a silver bell rung
by a hand that is skilled in the craft of sustaining the note of its soon-to-be-written appeal
as you flow along listening so hard, no remaining ghost-voice in your mind interferes with the real
singing world that has just come so near, you are breathless—while I am more haunted than ever.  The glint
of sweet dread in your eyes deals a blow to my head that collapses me, all in a long-dawning hint
of the midnight to follow, when what will resound all throughout these sea-bounded salt reaches is so
preternatural, even a being confounded by more than one destiny cannot go slow
and alarmed, a heart-racing obsession on hesitant feet; it can only fly swift as a ghost
from one mournful idea that pines to its treasured companion, the ‘you’ I love utterly most
of all speakable insights and more, into vistas of water and sky, heaven-ocean allied
in such hugely implacable splendor, a wistful desire to be over—just over….  Confide
that the same dreadful longing has seized you, my spirit’s clear light, my too-sad-to-imagine ghost-song.
Dream with the resonant Moon in its eerie blue aura down beaches where wailers belong
in the arms of enchanters and see us divided not ever again.  See a gaunt supple tree
that the wind has caressed into hard and yet pliant command of its keenings and lie down with me
in that great looming shadow.  Black night has now fallen, but under the Moon’s generosity, small
needle-finger-spread outlines dark-dapple the caul of wet sand spread about the tree’s roots.  Tell me all
I have waited to hear as you move through the lingering traces of where your delusion has been
most resistant to this, our reality.  Sing with the glowing Moon-gilded night rain on the green
humming needles that vibrate with subtle intensity here at the core of your still-woeful heart.
Be as I need you:  a lover whose splendor eclipses my own as my tears fall apart,
cast their meanings all round you, provide you with visions no mortal dare witness, and heighten the blue
as it smiles back by means of the sleepy-eyed wisdom I woke with when I had been dreaming of you
underneath the spread edge of the Moon’s milky skirts a miraculous moment ago—not much more.
Sometimes you frighten me, luminous worker of ponderous oceans of serious lore
that has never stopped singing since time first elided its countless live stars into lessons that shine
in the blink of an eye across boundless black skies where I seem to have lain in the crescent outline—
nay, the broadly drawn circle the size of the universe—your slightest dream cannot fail to entrance.
There I have always been with you.  Here, too—this is one most extensively meaningful chance-
combination provided a destiny elsewhere, but here it is fate at its most solemn play
as it gathers up handfuls of raindrops and tells them to scatter themselves in two true lovers’ way
as they struggle to meet ever deeper, more beautiful dreams of each other awake and clear-eyed.
High overhead—we are shining like dew on the sea as it vanishes, Moon deep inside
each mysterious globe for the length of its moment—over us, slow rain so achingly strange
that the Moon alone knows what it means in a wholly describable way—let us enter the change
this taut breathlessness, peace of a far different nature than any we’ve found as we’ve lain half-alone
on an unmagic plane, deeply offers us.  Take it to heart, take it home, past the white wall of bone
that defines an old circle you’ve long since outgrown.  Take it under the source of your voice.  Take it—me—
for the sacred desire I am shining with.  Only be one with this song to the highest degree
of your true—dearest spirit, your pure FAERY hearing.  Word I have spoken, though soon I fall still,
take all I offer and am, like the weary outrider whose dreams underneath the green hill
are as sands on this Moon-flooded beach in the shadow a tree made of magic has cast.  Hear me plain:
I was waiting for your other-blood to go mad with blue need for the All I possess, the refrain
I was woken to haunt you and hold you with; circle-describer, the ghost of you haunted me more.
I shall not ever escape your long work of enchantment.  I would not.  The vatic song-lore
it is made of and strongly conveys—I’ve mislaid my last bearings; I don’t know who sings now; the torn
bit of caul that once flowered between us—we’ve waved it away; what is this that has come to be born?
 

***
 

12 February 2002
 

Melted in My Hand
 

The streaming hollow where liquid metal
pours from my hand—is this I say
a vatic piece of an ancient riddle
echoing down a mournful way
of erstwhile abandon?  Oh, it shocks me
more than a little, this is true—
why would I twist apart a locket,
fraught to regain a trace of you,
knowing long bygone nightmares reckon
sadly against me?  Listen on:
We shall transform the past that beckons
madly and then in flames is gone,
leaving a stream of molten silver
bright as a Moon where love holds sway.
Seek and true love will lend fulfillment.
Lean and receive all love will say.
 

***
 

13 February 2002
 

A Soul of Song
 

Only the ghost of endless longing
eerily bent beneath a tree
of Moon-swollen blossoms knows the song of
pain beyond mortal mystery
that opens the world at true enchantment’s
core, where no body hangs its head;
no word is spoken prose-wise; dancing
leaps from its birth-death cradle-bed
and sets its this-moment bones a reeling:
Such is the ghost you woke in me.
Now I shall find the world that feels our
magic and moves to set it free
to holy degrees of beauty we could
never attain alone.  Dear soul,
terrible pain was borne to be you;
now you are song’s own longed-for goal.
 

***
 

14 February 2002
 

Winter's Heart Turned Inside-Out
 

Branches weave a holy forest’s
living leafy page of green
high overhead as more and more
dimensions open up between
the words that light a secret cavern’s
darkness at the page’s heart.
In it, I am dancing.  Shadows
cast throughout the deepest part
of winter have arrived at something
very like the ghost of spring.
Where I dream, I AM—I’ve come
to understand the words I sing
as living elemental magic
woven overhead; please feel
the greenly-lettered spell we cast
and know that we are yours and real.
 

***
 

6 March 2002
 

Why She Is Shorn
 

I wound my long hair round my sensitive hands till
it snapped in bewildering tangles, and let
the great mass of its strands scatter down and be danced to
a magical end.  Let our souls unforget
where we are, what we look like—alone and together
in one clear perception—as one and apart
in a transient act that will call love’s perfection
to dwell in the sphere of the dear darkness-art
we have practiced toward the next moment for so long,
the nerves at the tips of our fingers and tongues
are alert to its least predilection.  Dream-woken
beast-angel, dance fast all the spiraling rungs
of the strong braided ladder my magic has fashioned
of fallen long hair.  It is no noose of dread—
it will lead you to lie in a nest of live passion,
the song of true secrets wound round your bright head.
 

***
 

27 March 2002
 

Apple Blossom, Globe of Snow
 

Under a tree whose snowy blossoms
mingle with apples darkly red,
you were first ghost among the lost and
found reawakened shades of dead
danced dreams on the grown, not woven carpet
green underfoot as one pale star
high above our heads.  Once we seemed parted—
now we shall dance the dream we are
and watch as that whirl of vivid motion
casts a bright shadow-halo round
what lay locked within a shaken snow-globe
melting on elemental ground
prepared long ago for this enchantment’s
next signal gesture.  Midnight air,
frame a dear face.  Enwreathe it.  Glanced and
glimmering wisps of angel-hair,
aureole-eye within a veil of
rising Full Moon-light, look:  You knew
your way to this very dewy place of
deep underleaves, and they knew you—
were already here by signs and portents
they were themselves composed to lend
this shining world’s air of endless orchard-
sighs.  Welcome home, scarce-mortal friend.