AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

November 2002
 
 

1 November 2002
 

Death’s-head Reflected
 

Its tears, their bewildering rhythmic betrayal
of pain’s eerie depths in this place of no time—
they fill me with—while they are leaving, a staying-
far-out-of-eye-range hollow discordant chime
like clock-strokes against a slow midnight, late coming
but woeful—relentless—in love and in dread—
I can’t find the sight; I so fear it, the running
of blood beats me senseless throughout this death’s-head.
 

***
 

2 November 2002
 

Sight Overflowing
 

Quiver where morbidly open senses
flay from within the nerve-flesh where
we must perceive us through a lens a
too-little-moonlit mind impairs
while tears ripple all its pane-wide surface.
Touch through that anguish, aye, and know:
Nerve-end to end, we serve a purpose
pulsing toward great overflow.
 
 

***
 

3 November 2002
 

Visionary Voice
 

Teeming with melodies, graceful encounters
with clarity’s sweet elder sibling, the round
silver wheel—nay, the sphere of all radiance, boundless
in tenderness, leaking forth all that is sound—
this nigh-self-fulfilling abundance of beautiful
serial—deaths—it is staring in awe,
and I am its foresight.  I question its lunar
authority:  Which was the first word I saw?
 

***
 

6 November 2002
 

Radical Dissolution
 

You will have flown where all frequencies gather
like fast-rhythmed heartbeats, one inrush of speed
where I cannot—but shall, I am prone to—one feather
derides me; it knows how much madness I need
before I can bring myself waking to meet you.
Aye, but you always attend as I fledge
and fly out that time-window to welcome you, beating
like mad to have chosen the ghost-riven edge.
 

***
 

17 November 2002
 

His Silver Wheel
 

Weather, come down to me, heaven surrounding me
softly as rivers of stars pace their flow
upon a broad moonbeam that knows it can see me
so dizzily dancing the ghost-name I know
has always been part of each fiber and tendril
of living nerve-tissue my spirit can feel
weaving round in a circle, a spiral, an endless
half-transparent presence, the prayer of this wheel.
 

***
 

19 November 2002
 

Chaste as a Flower of Ink
 

Down by the flow where blue water in moonlight
reflects ancient stars in its numinous glow,
now I shall know you much—wetter—as through you
I reach to the moment that chastens me so,
I faint and wake pallid.  I bow to its uses;
it teaches me beauty—the where I belong:
dyed in this grave place of soundless ablutions,
soothed by the tincture of lingering song.
 

***
 

30 November 2002
 

Three very recent dreams:
 

19 November

My teacher comes to visit me at my family's house.  I greet him in the family room.  He gives me a brown paper bag containing three bottles of herbal tinctures.  The one I pull out to look at is labeled 'UEEI.'  I want to tell him what I have learned about consciousness and psi.  He does not give me a chance but quickly becomes amorous, kissing me and saying very suggestive things such as, I could sleep on top of you.  I teasingly scold him, Fine, talk like that right in front of my mother, as she and my sisters are also present.  He and I decide to walk outside, but first I go up to my bedroom to change clothes.  I have a hard time deciding what to wear, which causes a delay.  I am holding up my probable choice, a sleeveless tie-dyed dress and tie-dyed leggings, when he pokes his head in through the window and asks, Are you coming to me?  I tell him, Yes.

22 November

I am in Tibet with an unseen male friend who is my traveling companion.  We are in a temple.  We are introduced to a young Tibetan man with long hair who is a full-time religious and who, although he is very young for the honor, already occupies a high office in his order.  He looks at me directly and clearly shows interest.  He pulls aside the front of his robe to show his breasts, which have ordinary masculine nipples but very large rosy-gold aureoles.  Through gestures and finally words he signals that he is interested in pursuing a Tantric partnership with me.  He consults an oracle.  It seems to provide a negative answer, which he then shows to me in the form of an ink drawing.  I ask him if that means it will not happen, and he says, It’s up to you!  It’s a poetry day!  A Tibetan woman with long hair is now beside me.  She advises me that, because of distractions in my mind, the likely outcome of such a partnership for him would be disastrous, resulting in his being cast out of the order and left destitute.

24 November

Clive Barker is a guest speaker in a class I attend.  Sparks fly between us; soon he is standing close to me with his arm around my shoulders.  He asks another student who has brought one of his books, a long complex novel, to show me the verses that are included in the text.  I knew he also wrote verses.  He says, asking me to confirm it, that he understands that I care for others?  In a semi-official care-taker role, I assume he means, and I say Yes, although only in certain cases.  I am thinking of my Friend.  He comes home with me to spend the night.  He says Good night at 11:30 because he has to drive to Portland to the airport in the morning, but I am pretty sure he will be sleeping with me.
 

This is essentially the same dream three times:  After the first time, I asked for clarification; the second and third are responses to my request.  The answer was there all along in the tie-dyed dress I was about to put on.  The Tibetan nobleman who came in a dream to offer Tantric instruction over a year and a half ago was dressed in two long pieces of tie-dyed cloth.  He came this time as my human teacher, a man of prodigious powers who was recognized while still quite young and who holds a position of high authority in a kind of secular 'order.'
 

Sending this kata, this Tibetan prayer-scarf, is my way of recognizing the sender of the dreams.  This poem first came on 28 July 2001.
 

A Prayer-Scarf Offering

The shape of the leaf in your fingers helps me cast back my mind to a pale green day
under violet skies when tall clouds were swelling off to one side of the fields that lay
all around us, an anchor among their billows chaining the thoughts I had not yet told
to the oncoming lightning I prayed would kill me and leave you with memories you’d grow old
likewise without telling.  How else to show the scale of the magic I felt possessed
and sustained and devoured by always?  Hopeless ever to say it; it loves me best
from a hair-fine distance the while it flows in a prescient stream from a formless cloud
behind those arising nearby.  The ghost of a memory waiting to strike out loud
hums a darkly mysterious air amid echoes of our ancient meetings.  You look at me;
I sign with my eyes a long dream-letter and send it across the storm-to-be
to the place in the swirling twilight layers of skyborne ocean that grips the steel
of the anchor’s stanchion where your own chain is attached as well.  I can see you feel
the letter come streaking toward you.  When you open yourself to receive the gift
I have folded in layers of eloquence, you will pale as the flesh and its fine hairs lift
everywhere on the both of us.  Read my message the while you are winding the prize I’ve sent,
the prayer-scarf of white silk, around your neck and stand as the weight of it holds you bent
in a reverent posture a bare half-second before you rise to full height, made strong
by the magic power that hums and crackles throughout my nerves and the wild love-song
you have taken in with your eyes and touched with trembling fingers and felt surround
the pulse of your throat with almost too much eerie passion—but never enough.  I’ve found
the place in my furthest mind where futures wake with the strange green half-world light
that flows through the space before the blue-black ocean of heavy–bodied night
comes home in a surge of humming currents.  Now a pale leaf is in your hand
and all of these words that serve a purpose neither of us can understand
in full swirl, all of their own accord, through changes of time that reveal the gleam
of the high-polished anchor chain the storm will render one brilliant silver seam
of lightning between us, one shot bolt of a world burned open:  You read it there,
that future, in this live leaf you hold, whose secret form is long white silk prayer.
 

I see all of this on multiple levels.  When the one it concerns most reads this, he must ask me for any needed clarification.  This is far too important to leave hanging.