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AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island
November 2000
4 November 2000
All-Day Darkness-Art
A very low hum on the wind brings me smiling recall
of the ghost of a tune I once heard
on the lips of a man in a dream who was biding his
time while the voice of his heart’s secret bird--
a most musical creature of polychrome plumage and
wildly remarkable graces and airs--
overflowed from his mouth. All the while, he
was moving with light patterned steps up a long flight of stairs.
He was joyful of countenance. I, just to hear
him, was almost in tears, and I prayed, ‘Never cease
to be real, nor to sing. Venture steadily nearer
to me’--though where might that have been? No release
from the bourne of forever-bad tidings seemed likely
for me; as for him, had he form anywhere?
I had lain awake tremulous all through the night;
I had nowhere to wake from. The Sun in the stare
of my hypnotized eyes from an indirect angle shone
tenderly brilliant, without excess heat
or unbearable sharpness. The rays of it tangled
among the green vines that exuded a sweet
fragrant moisture all round me, through wide paneless
windows. The dew of it damp on my skin, I respired
with soft aching ideas that sprang from an inward
conjoining between the live scent and my tired
heavy-lidded tranquility. Someone was singing--I
heard the low rustle of feathers inside
strangely eloquent syllables. Someone was
bringing new knowledge my way, in the form of the pried-
apart feathers that glowed on the breast of a being
of beauty, beneath which their wide-open heart
sang in birdsong of terrible truthfulness fleeting
but memorable passages born at the start
of their climb up the stairway to where they were
going to view--wreathed by living green leaves, without glass
in the way--an unbounded expanse of free-flowing
and all but unsounded sea waters. We pass
even now, back and forth, as we tread the same measures,
the very same hesitant stair-mounting gait
with the indirect Sun in our eyes and a weather of
fresh dewy mildness within the shared state
of our dream-aching minds. We are liberal angels
who move through song freely, a deep feather-guest
and an indolent creature of sleepless unwaking who
house one another in each other’s breast
in a deeply mysterious form of shared dwelling.
The core of our house of translucent green stone
is a ceaselessly frequented stairway, a well through
which most haunting music is heard to have flown.
Only one of those infinite songs, though, possesses
my inmost attention tonight as the drip
of wild sea-on-land weather contorts its confession
of ready intentions to rise till it slips
to the very last step before being outspoken, the
word of the man who brings birdsong to smile
in a lyrically tremulous way. I am open; behold
through me vine-leaves and sing to beguile
into nearness the knowledge that when you’ve enchanted
the lingering weariness out of my heart,
I won’t be deceived into dreaming I’m haunted--the
bird of you dwells there, all-day darkness-art.
***
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.
***
8 November 2000
Incarnadine
Inside the soft patter of rain hides the treading
of bodiless dancers that waft to and fro
on the wind with incredible lightness yet steady
perceptible pulse-beats a marvelous woe
has contrived to be told through the music of water.
Their substanceless feet weave in time with the drip
of the eaves high above me. Their motions have
brought me to know in a moment my thoughts will have slipped
their old moorings and slyly gone gliding down-river,
away from this place of the day-world’s dark lies.
It seems love has finally, finally given assent to
the forces that bid me to rise
and be carried the length of the river’s long breathing
away from the throat of the flesh that despairs
of its portion of joy and surrenders to grieving
farewells turned hello: Silent land of soft airs
saturated with rain and the words that traverse the
increasingly easy to hear measured tread
of the dance that sways everywhere under this merciful
watery sky, in this song it is said
that the will to lie down and rise up huge and fertile
with dreams of immaculate provenance springs
from the same source as rain amid darkness.
In perfect collusion with you and the Ocean you bring
to my heart’s very doorstep by means of the steady
encroachment of sea-on-land whispers and sighs,
I have danced my way into a surfeit of ready compliance
with all that your songs might advise,
knowing already, far beyond question, your primary
order will poignantly urge that I stay
where I am, an ongoing incarnadine nightmare, however
my will to be carried away.
***
11 November 2000
In many recurring dreams, I go back to the public
library of the town where I grew up. As a girl, I spent as much time
there as possible; eventually, I worked there for several years, in the Blind
and Physically Handicapped Department in the basement. In my dreams,
I see myself reaching for one of two or more large, thick volumes, very old
books bound in dark leather and stamped in gilt in the ornate style of books
from the end of the 19th century. They are on a top shelf, in an area
I knew well: the 100s, where the books on psychology and psychic phenomena
were kept.
This evening I thought of those dreams when I lay
down to rest before working because I have recently dreamed of the books
again. Those very volumes did not exist in waking life, but tonight
I remembered what books actually were kept on the shelf that corresponded
to the one in my dream. There was a two-volume set, bound in age-darkened
beige cloth, a 1930s edition of a work originally published several decades
earlier. I checked them out and devoured them several times.
In the dreams, there is usually one particular black
leatherbound volume that I am intent on reaching and sometimes do reach,
but never open, before awakening. That volume is what I saw when I
understood that a new sequence of songs was about to begin.
The Book of Living Lore
Just out of the reach of the tautly extended white
claw of a girl who has lost all desire
for more orthodox lore waits the ancient compendium
dreamt of repeatedly, bound to inspire
its sole reader to peer into deeper imaginings each
time its sequence of pages is turned
from another bright angle. Her head fills
with vatic and wild premonitions. How long she has yearned
for the touch of its leather. The gold-leaf
is falling away from its spine--she would find the least flake
on the tip of her finger a starburst of calling demanded
of angels: Lorn dreamer, awake!
She would tremble at night in her bed, eyes stretched
open, acutely aware of the shadows around
her hot virginal sheets. She would weep to
be spoken aloud by just one of the words to be found
in that volume of all-perverse silence. She
reaches--the book stands just out of her fingertips’ range.
No help is at hand, but she knows she is keeping
a vigil for knowledge that one night will change
from a vague premonition of powers unstated but
palpably present to memory sure
as the coming moonrise, comprehended by grace of
its words’ ancient author whose eloquence--pure
as the dew on the bud of the bloody-red rose tree
that soon will attain to its most sacred bloom,
the supernal mortality whispered of closely imagined
words read on no page in the room
where the sweating girl sighs in a half-waking nightmare--his
eloquence calls her by name, but his book,
where the blood of his heart still goes on reinscribing
live secrets on vellum, returns her long look
with the semblance of eyeless black emptiness.
Sadly she lowers her aching wet eyes to the floor--
where a wide flake of gold meets her gaze.
She is standing beneath it: Her feet have been brushed by its lore.
***
12 November 2000
More Wakefully She Dreams
When I dreamed we were dancing, the swiftest of
measures desired to be part of me, body and soul,
and I knew with a sudden amazement the treasure I’d
ached for had torn a minute ragged hole
through the grey space between us, or rather, the
tip of the flake of gold-leaf that had touched me had shone
through a natural channel, and now I was tripping
about in a spiraling dance--as alone
as I’d ever been, that much precisely: Not
ever had I drawn a breath either side of the veil
of grey fog that appears to obscure and to sever
one mind from another without the green gale
of all heaven contained in a cry wildly playing behind
the white screen where the dream of one world
overlaid all the rest like a pall of decaying black
leaves from a winter that’s seen them all curled
into withered forgetfulness, heaped in a garden of
mud, and ignited, a smoldering mess
burning only reluctantly, leaving a shard of gold
resin behind all the smoky distress
so provoked in the eyes of its unhappy viewer.
When she--who am I--reaches forward to touch
in return that reminder, that possibly useful by-product
of countless dead leaves, just how much
still surviving, still glowing, still green-golden
music sends shivering echoes throughout her? And how
many senses rise up in her minds and the lucid green
world at the core of her secret heart now
and describe themselves, flowing through spiraling
gestures the delicate touch of their counterpart gold
has inspired, as she treads out the lyrical measures
she’s longed for and secretly knew she must hold?
***
16 November 2000
From my dream journal, 16 November, 11:02 am--I
am with Sean Lennon. He turns into John Lennon as we speak. I
am at school, early on a Monday morning. I have three classes today,
beginning with Chinese. My teacher is Mao Tse Tung. I am concerned
with getting some homework done before class as I am not prepared. Sean/John
is interested in talking to me, however, so I put off the work. He
gives me his ear, literally--the second one; I recall that the first was
cut off long ago, like Van Gogh’s. Now somehow I am in possession of
both of them--a signal honor. Todd K. (someone I worked with at the
library I mentioned in a previous entry) is vaguely present as I look at
the second severed ear lying on the table. It resembles a slice of
greasy salami. Todd reaches over and takes some of the grease on his
hand and urges me to do likewise. I understand; I will be sure to get
a bit to anoint myself with before we go. I look at Sean/John, and
notice that he has a few sparse long whiskers under his chin--he is growing
up. Now he is John, and he tells me he cannot believe I don’t already
have a full house; he has to remind himself that things look different from
the side where he is now. From afar, I can see a slightly shabby little
white house that I have been concerned with. Now I am there, in the
basement. Several people I know, including my father, are on the ground
floor. Yes, John says, at least you’ll be dry (I assume he means, I
will have at least a roof over my head). He says he knows I’ve been
concerned with '___ -light'; I know he means dancing, having a place to dance.
I ask him please not to listen to Blane’s (a former housemate’s) gossip.
We dance together there in the basement, holding each other close, swaying
around and around. Others might see us, but I don’t think they will
notice. Now I have missed my Chinese class; so what.
What makes this dream even more special is that
when I went online today, a picture of John Lennon was on the MSN home page.
This dream has a slightly poignant significance, as when I was very young
I had a major crush on both John and Yoko. They were, to my way of
thinking when I was eleven years old, the ideal couple, both artists and
uncommonly vivid characters.
I just took the longest vacation of the entire past
year--three whole days without writing verse! I was afraid I might
have forgotten how. The thread I am following is still that of the
top-shelf library books. Todd was present in my dream to ensure that
I relate it to this theme. I had a good reason to take some time off,
but I am very glad to be back at it.
The Voice That Reads Out Loud
I wake with a fine film of greyness that smudges
the dream journal pages beside me upon
my outstretched-in-bewilderment hand: neither
bloody, nor would it be now; fingers, what have you done?
I can vaguely recall the last scene before waking:
On tiptoe, with yearning so urgent I half
wept aloud, I was reaching. I saw the word
‘lake’ by a flash of far lightning inside me. A staff
that was spiraled around with a serpentine briar
which bore three green leaves at the knob of its head
appeared just for an instant behind the book I was
intent on retrieving. I started and fled.
Very quickly I found out my error and halted.
I feared I had ruined my hope’s only chance,
but the anguish that hope had become had exalted
my subtle perceptions. This changed circumstance
surely pleased the live leaf-wand’s invisible bearer.
It nudged the black volume, the book shelf’s high prize,
which then fell to my hands. I was suddenly
carried awake to my bed in my room with my eyes
fixed in wonderment on the dark smudges the ancient
black binding had left on my hands’ lily skin.
When I wrote down these lines in my journal, it
stained them a trace of its color, a dream locked within
these apparently innocent pages forever revealing
the cast of its content through signs
I would not have been patient or stubbornly clever
enough to have recognized otherwise. Twine
living vines with delirium-whispering leaves round
my throat and remind me I’ve not woken yet.
The smudges of black on the hand I perceive to be
writing these lines are dissolving in wet
crooked slashes of rain through a bare window casement
to which broken slivers of angry glass cling.
The wind comes a gale and it drenches my face and
my eyes close and then I awaken. You sing
on forever on strong timeless pages of vellum while
I come and go like the shadow around
a live wand that’s been planted upright in a sheltered
unvisited garden protectively bound
in a gold-inscribed hide. Where the Sun seldom
enters, a shadow is challenged to form--or are we,
in the absence of daylight, all shadow? Moon-blent
before reaching us, some fertile light finds the tree
upon which you were hanging before you delivered
the magical motion that sent the black book
to my hand in a memorable dream; now please give
me the words it contains through a long steady look
at its lines or their legible images mirrored within
the still pools of your beautiful eyes.
I hear the word ‘lake’ spoken somewhere most clearly;
begin to imagine me serpently wise.
***
17 November 2000
As I worked at my verses tonight, I began to feel
a mysterious glimmering inside that told me I knew what I was writing about.
No, that is nothing unusual in itself, but this time it was a glimmering
of something that was so utterly strange at the time when it befell me that
it still makes me shiver. This took place during the summer of ecstasy
over the rediscovery of my Friend, when the energy that led to that breakthrough
was building but had not yet broken open. The following words
are from the notes I wrote to myself before I started working that night:
"I will work tonight because I woke up today singing
in my head.
"Last night I turned on the TV to look for videos
just as a brilliant comedian was on--and I do mean ON--he was improvising
very funny rhymes about individuals in the audience. Very like my work,
but much faster.
"So later when I fell asleep I dreamed I was talking
like that, and my friends were watching in amazement."
I wish I knew that name of that comedian. According
to my (fluid, poetic) memory, he was very tall, had dark curly or frizzy
hair, and looked like a cross between Al Franken and Frankenstein. He
used to talk about the bizarre implications of theoretical physics, especially
'molides' (sp?).
That night was a grand night for singing indeed.
The quantity of work I produced was not exceptional, but the quality was.
At last I was exhausted, and the wine I had been drinking hit me. I
stumbled off to bed, but in the morning, I found an extra page of verse in
my notebook. I was not sure whether I remembered crawling back out
to the front room and writing it down or not. The handwriting is quite
different from my usual, although it bears traces of my style. I certainly
did not recognize a single one of the actual words when I read it with astonishment.
This is the text:
we wanted its sweetness to mar us
as sweetness aligned with one breath
drawn out of the mourning before us
drawn out of the way we face west
drawn out of the skull of wide vision
drawn out of the skull of desire
my love I still know how to haunt you
and love I still pay for wilde (sic) fire
we wanted to be hard of hearing
we wanted to be hard to know
but gods know how to possess one
whether she falter or flow
These are tonight's verses:
Between and Still Further Between
In the evening, I turned to my dream journal’s
pages. I sought a clear sign from the staff-bearer’s hand.
I found what I searched for between the amazement
my dream recollected and all the unplanned
reminiscences I was confronted with suddenly.
Whose imitation of my sleepy scrawl
was this, running so cleanly across like a flood
of Moon-tide waters, sweeping the page free of all
but its own revelations? What visiting angel...but
there was the dream in itself, coming true
between words of empyreal provenance strangely delivered
alive through a doorway of dew-
dripping vines where there once was a shattered-glass
casement, the gale through which boded no heavenly weal
though it washed me right clean of the lingering
traces of what I had touched by a rain no more real
than the shadow that loomed in my mind when I turned
from the one I desired in the heart of the night.
On the page here before me, my long love of learning
through music’s devices joins secret insight
just as I, when I gathered my courage and spun in
my tracks and regained the brief distance between
where I’d paused and the book that had started
to tumble toward me, conspired with the three leaves of green
that informed me that his was a still-living branch
of the tree where the lore of my heart’s secret voice
is forever in flower and fruit. I stand planted
where I can best gather the words that rejoice
who I AM with immeasurable music in pulses that
mimic its rhythms with confident grace.
I am merely a girl in this dream, but one full to
the eyes’ very brim of the sight of your face
as I see it arise on this page. Someone woke
me between night and day. With his hand guiding mine,
I began to transcribe the black book till the choking
vines bound round my throat bade me cease. Still, these lines
stand inscribed in indelible ink on the paper of
wood pulp upon which I capture the fine,
all too rapidly fading devices that shape what are
not so much dreams as your love’s willful signs.
***
18 November 2000
This continues the story of the mysterious black books on the top shelf of the library of my dreams and my longing to read and understand their secrets.
Many Ways to Lie Open
Fall down on it, swallow it, open a vein with
a shining sharp fragment of windowpane glass,
one of many that litter the carpet, bright stains
over which we have danced to this terrible pass
untogether: with you formed of bodiless ether,
coagulate only enough for the eyes
of my mind to describe as a vision of sweetly benignant
perdition, and me as a wise
but increasingly weary old girl with a vestige of
memory starting to grow out of shape
into something of scandalous magnitude. Lest
you remind me of further outrages, the rape
of all sentience tacitly offered by each bit of
cold sparkling glass seems to whisper your name,
asking, When and to whom will you yield just a little
life’s blood? Whose unearthly romance will you claim
as your own, in this turning-point scene of a story
that cannot unfold but by grace of your hand?
I am staring with fraught indecision. A gory
but brief episode, daylight’s thankless demands
well avoided, and maybe the touch of your spirit
on mine with no barrier flesh in between,
but perhaps--I am already silent. You hear
this aspirant to emptiness strive through unseen
but perceived unavoidable levels of perfectly evident,
pure, undeniable lore
of which song is the body incarnate. It hurts
you to feel on the tip of my tongue the wet store
of red life-force, the first heavy drop as it glistens
between the sharp point my unsteady hand holds
and where I have invited its keenness to visit, a
foretaste of feeling increasingly cold
until coldness and silence are one. But the
window was always wide open: No pane ever shone
in the way. When the sky above rained, it
poured into my room, and my floor was a field of seeds sown
by the hand of an inland sea storm-clouded body
of song that arrived here to ask me to dance
through its sparkling raindrops and to lie where
its waters might sweeten the flow of the tearful romance
we have labored at nightly that you might inscribe
it in heavy black volumes of magical spells
and that I, your familiar enchantress, might sigh
into gestures the pen in my hand knows full well
how to capture. I lean toward pain, you dissolve
it. I glimpse a lorn future, you shine everywhere
through an infinite series of worlds and resolve
their outlines until they and I thrive in your care.
I lapse into nightmares, but you always wake me
through further and further devices and signs
that true love is the name of the way you will take
me, the way of long windings of living green lines.
***
21 November 2000
This continues the exploration of the contents of the black books on the dream-library's top shelf. Yesterday the memory of a vision sparked a long, deep look into the phenomena of sleep paralysis and sleep catalepsy in which bizarre spontaneous perceptions and thoughts arise, sometimes despite very strong conscious efforts to restrict them. This particular space-between is 'demonic' in the sense that it is both morbid and non-volitive. It seems to be a mysterious inversion of, and perhaps necessary counterpart to, more blissful states.
The Test Voice
The far tiny cry that arises inside me astride
the drawn line between your world and mine
is of vaguely known origin--someone is shining a
blinding white light where unreasoning signs
disappear, and a voice I try not to remember weeps
forth an appeal I perceive all too well.
A brandishing angel, a staff in his tender white
fingers, directs me towards... Who can tell
where the ‘real’ world begins and the one that is
ashes, still smoking but never to flare up again,
comes a crimson design in my mind under flashes of
what were once towering walls of live pain.
I am caught in between: there, the space in
which passion is basely perceived as a mask upon woe
and the fire of its dread inspiration a gasping for
dissolute atmospheres one cannot know
without seeing the world it reveals as a thousand
dead layers of snakeskin-embossed paper scales,
and there, the live face that eludes all my mouthing
of petty-voiced prayers and smiles into the veil
made of flesh in which I, its unfortunate maker,
forever regretfully struggle to rout
the obscene mechanism by which it has taken control
of the body that won’t let me out
but for these unpredictable, uncanny moments:
the space between worlds. I can hear a far cry,
and I know whose it is, but I don’t know how open
my spirit can be to the real reason why
it keeps lingering so at this level of anguish by
me, who have lain wide awake everywhere
with my hand brought against my taut lips and a
banging-door resolute angry refusal to share
what I know about world upon world with the slightest
emotion. I have not the heart to express
what I know; I have ample self-will to deny it a
voice. I keep dreaming of real tenderness--
but not at the cost of exposure. No weeping;
no sighing in this, my demonic black page.
When you lie close beside me, I won’t have been
sleeping with tears in my eyes. I am song come of age
with the clearness of insight a torn silver vapor
that might have been smoke or a veil of my own
seeping-tears-of-blood flesh, laid wide-open but
aching within my command to be silent, has shown--
by its final consent to withdraw--how bizarrely yet
fruitfully parallel all our worlds rest,
even when they are nearly inverted by faraway song
that imposes a terrible test.
***
23 November 2000
The Bridge Dream
When I was a child, the talk of the women around me was sometimes so fearfully disgusting that I thought to be female was truly to be accursed. I have been trying to break that evil spell ever since. This dream is important because it holds the key to the spell, the unbinding of the spell, and the transition that is in progress in both my inner and outer life--and because it is remarkably free of rage. In many other recent dreams, I have met men who were in each case implicitly presented as my partner, someone who has clearly been through troubles of his own. Following my dream journal account is an interpretation, and then a song that arose from the same source today.
22 November, 2000, 11:30 am: I tour a sort
of women’s medical clinic/beauty spa, where a woman (more or less identified
with myself) is about to check in. The special feature of the house
is a type of bed that is rigged up to a continuous colonic irrigation device.
We walk past many of these, which are situated in semi-private rooms that
are open in front. The woman begins to falter as she comes closer to
admitting herself. The room reserved for her is shadowy and the
bed is covered with a blanket of a very restful deep blue. The
machinery, set up at the foot of the bed, is automatic. It has safety
devices, but--the woman wonders--what if they fail? Few attendants
are available. We also view an attached room, a very large bathhouse
area where women, some with their small children, are drawing large tubs
full of water and preparing to soak in them. The atmosphere is sinister--something
other than ordinary bathing is clearly going on. I see one small boy,
maybe three years old, next to a tub. A poster on the wall changes
as it shows a woman’s loss of weight during the course of her treatment here.
The tone is more and more disturbing and I do not want to stay.
The scene shifts. Now I am with a strange man,
a sort of attractively odd Anthony Perkins type, a principal surviving member
of the old family that owns a huge seacoast mansion which is famous for its
enormous stained-glass windows of landscape scenes. The house is built
over a sea-cliff chasm, with the middle part of two wings forming a bridge
with waves crashing underneath. At that point a huge window panel extends
out into the water. It shows a coastal scene; actual surf blends with
the depicted glass surf. The man is now my partner, as we both seem
to understand without stating. He was a specially selected student
of Robert Graves. He talks about how hard Graves sometimes found it
to speak about his work. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but he had
to deal with the fact that he had only been granted 17 productive years of
writing and had to use his time carefully. The man and I go into a
building at the foot of a massive bridge that is still under construction.
There the workers are indulging in some mean-spirited horseplay, trying to
trip each other with power cables. Among mostly men, one young woman
worker is there who treats it like a game of jump rope and manages to stay
on her feet. The construction site is also a carnival, with people
milling about, there for the rides. We move beyond this area onto the
bridge itself, where I anticipate that we are about to commit suicide together
by jumping off. I only hope the bridge is high enough that we will
be killed instantly. I lose sight of the man and go back inside the
building. I find him sitting on a bench next to a young woman who is
holding a slightly shabby old 1950s straw purse that is decorated with leaf
and flower designs in green plastic beads. I am not sure I recognize
him at first, as he has had his hair cut and is wearing a different suit
of old but not worn vintage-style clothes that were in storage at his house.
The house is visible behind us. The light from the setting Sun
is coming through it, through the stained-glass windows. I urge him
to come along and talk with me--I know he needs to wake from his long dreaming.
He gets up and we walk forward together.
***
26 November 2000
The Bridge Dream Revisited
The dream begins in a place that is part beauty
spa, a place of feminine ritual and female bonding, normally a place of pleasurable
self-indulgence; and part hospital, which should be self-explanatory.
The woman who represents me has been encouraged to admit herself, but she
finds that the atmosphere is disturbing, the machines (always a sign of the
demonic, the complexes of suppressed energy that have acquired the power
to run themselves) are potentially dangerous, and responsible supervision
is lacking. Even the baths, which should be harmless, share in the same
sinister energy. There women have brought their children, including
one little boy, and are introducing them by stages into the rituals of this
place.
Apparently the woman realizes that she cannot stay,
because there is an abrupt shift and now she, I myself, am in a building which
is still under construction but which serves as the base of a huge bridge.
There I meet a man who is perhaps the little boy of the previous scene, all
grown up. His house is visible behind us. The light of the sunset
is shining through huge stained-glass windows of extraordinary beauty, as
if the house were someone's attempt to merge with the sky. If the Sun
is shining through it in the evening, then it is on the fabled Western Shore,
just like the town where I live. The house itself is a bridge that
spans a sea-chasm or sea-going river where it meets the crashing surf--again,
like this coastal river town, although there are no cliffs or chasms here.
The man and I join together in immediate accord and begin to walk out onto
the bridge. My understanding, however, is that we are about to commit
suicide. The man knows that this must not happen, just as my Muse has
warned me so many times. Thus he disappears, and I must go back inside
and find him again. He is with a young woman who is holding a straw
purse. I described the Mare's Nest in another piece of writing very
recently as containing twigs and straw, purses being typical dream-representations
of female genitals. Her purse is of '50s origin, like me, and is decorated
with green beads--beadwork is an ongoing metaphor for prosodical devices
in my dreams, and green leaves and flowers are ubiquitous positive images
in my songs. He leaves her behind to come with me, however--I have
changed, and the 50s purse with its plastic beadwork no longer suffices to
contain my understanding of the true depths of song. He is odd, slightly
awkward, but unhesitating, an eccentric member of an eccentric old family
only just leaving the confines of the beautiful mansion that has been his
home but also a place of loneliness. He is more than ready to walk
with me again out onto that long high bridge--and this time, we will cross
it safely and very soon find ourselves on the other shore.
The Bridge-Builder’s Song
The trembling subsides halfway over the chasm
of raging sea breakers. Perpetual calm
rushes forward to greet you, a full-throated answer
you never dreamed tenderness, borne on the balm
of the mild sunset air, could provide. In
its power lie many surprises awaiting their share
of song’s loved one’s devoted attention. The
‘now’ in which all shall be known has begun over there,
on the opposite shore, which is coming much closer.
With each step we seem to be gathering speed.
In the time that remains, let us view one last ghost
who has made this long journey beside you. He bleeds
for a time on the night of new-moonrise, a weeping
apport from a world in which sorrows are men
denied voices because they are numinous keepers of
secrets that meet and exceed female ken,
and yet only the woman his music has chosen can
know him at all--by the song of his throat.
If she hears it as silence a thousand times over,
the humming behind it might learn her by rote,
and find devious means to invite itself in through
the door at the foot of her mind’s winding stair,
like a leaf at the tip of a vine through a window
that climbs the same spiraling steps with an air
bright with shimmering words that the evening breeze
carries away from the trembling vibration it sets
into audible motion along the leaf’s merry outspoken
green smile of a lyrical wet
almost morbidly sensitive membrane. That singing
arises from most subtle causes, yet grows
in its strength until series of syllables bring
themselves forward and--whose lilting measures are those
that have seen her completely transfixed? She
stands waiting, and aye, the next stanza comes round and begins.
The sigh of the mild evening breeze is its maker,
and who is behind that? Her thoughts fairly spin--
nay, what’s spinning is all alike: vine growing
vine-leaf up-spiral, the man singing under his breath,
the music of everything rising and rising, and what
is this night of the Moon? Bloody death
step aside: He will flow to the best of his
powers, this man who is leaving a trail of red drops
up the stairs in his wake--but he’s mounting the
tower well knowing the woman would not have him stop,
nor will he, whatever may follow his act of decision.
The woman has already learned
the refrain of his song, and now joins in.
Attracted beyond consequence, round and round they return
to its endless beginning. Because she has
heard it, because the fine hum from the edge of the leaf
borne across on his breath has contacted her nerve
of acutely desirous reception, the chief
hope and secret design of his magical effort is
hereby entirely enacted. Bright tears
spring to his and her eyes as she silently gestures
and he finds his voice in her presence. The years
of frustration and fury dissolve in a heartbeat
as perfect alignment between them attunes
all the notes and the words they have only just
started to realize never will cease now: The Moon
will cascade through its plenary phases; the bleeding
they share will alike come to wax and then wane;
but their song will end--never. Ghost-lover,
I steal close beside you, the song on the wind that brings rain
from the Ocean as we take these final steps forward.
All trembling subsides. We are touching the shore
of the once very far shining land. So much
mortally lonely bridge-building--song knows what it’s for.
***
29 November 2000
Whatever possessed me! This evening I read the latest entry in one of my favorite online diaries, Chaos Node by Magnus Itland (I don't suppose he will mind if I tell you that his address is home.online.no/~itlandm ), and he had written there about the strange coldness from within he sometimes feels when a warning is in order. I am always on the lookout for the germ of an idea. This is what happened next. I actually copied it and sent it to him via email.
Reader, you may be next!
Like the Modulations of Sound
When you shiver inside from an unknown location
in eerie presentiment, what is the flow
through which such heightened strangeness arises?
What makes it, what substance conveys it, and where does it go
when the shaking inside you diminishes? Whose
is the voice that addresses these questions to you?
By all mortal means, do but listen. A soothing
development might be implied--or a new
form of madness. No true curiosity, sated
although it may rest for the moment, will stay
in that placid condition for long. Celebrated
inquirer who hungers for all that the grey
twilight spaces each side of a shadowy threshold
might only just barely contain, shudder still.
I shall lead you much further away from the flesh-haunted
daylight toward the true home of the will
that impels you to seek perfect magic. In
green sleep of dark dappled leaves tell your dream to lie down.
Damp is the hand on your brow, unconcealing the
visions awash there. Mer-people, undrown
the apparently lifeless lost sailor who dove into
perilous waters and chose to remain.
You were the reason he foundered; he knows all your
secrets now. Bring him to lead the refrain
that runs all through our shivering hearer’s divinely
apported perceptions. The cold of the sea
of the far Northwest moves through the music the
shining-eyed, rainbow-scaled shades of remote memory
chant in lyrical measures that spiral, upwinding
cadenzas that drip with deep green seaweed leaves
and the cold arcane knowledge in which lies the
timeless desire to be done with a dry world that grieves
him who shudders relentlessly everywhere changes
of daylight to dark into daylight again
cannot happen but that they bring heat to the ancient
and mindless production of pure mortal pain
by the torment of new forms of carnal confinement.
Command the pale sailor to name the desire
that possesses him now that he’s cut all the lines
that once tied him to life by the glow of the fire
of the pitiless Sun of dry land. He will tell
you; he has: All this song has been his, which is mine.
I am breathing an air of sea-secrets’ respiring,
a lonely half-mortal whose deepest designs
have been realized only by means of the flow of
bright rainbow-hued scales in the arc of a song
as it rises and leaps from its undersea home as
I shiver with cold but wax fearfully strong.
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