The Journey of the Soul: A Modern Nekyia in Three Movements

The Journey of the Soul

A Modern Nekyia in Three Movements

The Act of Living

Three Books

Urgrund

Lucifer, the Fallen Star

Measures of Fire

I. Necessity

I was the fire in the stone; I sought my origins From the drowning place, where the crest on the lips Is made of the sand ground from ages of the sea; The mating of plankton.

I was buried in the grave of time; from time I rose — Animated with the energy which tumbles from stars And pounds the lungs.

This uterine dark: from sharks we were passed; From lashing teeth which ground us down to hardened dust. No longer cursing the name of creation With unseeing eyes And tongueless mouths.

For we were naught: naught but dead and stone. Drawn from fire and placed in silences; Inscribed into the distant, floating grave. Not to tremble, nor to writhe; Not agony, nor ecstasy — inscribed In the flesh of the grave.

Thunder. Lightning in the abyss. Cracking the fish skull Which drowned in the mud. Cracking the wandering cell amidst the loam; The hatred of the peats Which ground water to flecks of gritty salt and bone.

That I was fire, alone, burning on the precipice Of aeons of revolution.

Suffering beast of man; the cell from which legs sprouted; The phyllon from which hairs swept the membrane.

I swam with worms and was assaulted by light: How the light broke my cage; cursed my flesh. Squirming, adolescent; Perishable.

How I was broken from it — sentenced to mutilated form. Without speech, legless; without arms.

Mountains took me; ages past. My skull rippling in the wind. I harkened: the oceans wherein I was torn — My eyes screaming, sulking in death; Bathed in the ashes of fallen things.

How the precious blood ran warm; sealed the mind between the eyes of the cave — Floating in the penumbral womb.

We came to slumber from black death Of blood transfusion. From mouth to mouth; sex to sex The first dream awoke: the man with the face of the bee — the magic of pollination; The awaking of the green body of the earth, Swimming with latent, slumbering energy Like sun breaking; cresting through the sparkling river.

I smeared the red ochre upon the stone And saw within the symbol the image of the beast Rolling across the plains. Red with blood; red with hunger. I became one with the bison; my mouth the sex Which dripped with his blood.

From this union, my mind was slowly born From death and death alone.

It was there, in the caves of time Where I saw, in the hearthen core, the goddess — Necessity. She stroked my cilia hair And calmed and cooed This red bloodlusting.

From death we were soothed; the rape of maidens, we were soothed; From the hanging flesh upon the hook, we were soothed.

I saw what was required: obliteration. And there, the goddess was remade. Over and over about the rock; Destroyed — and she returned, blackened by evil; like a great obsidian mirror She lingered; circled about the stars And urged them into the battlefield of their dyings.

And thus it rose, like a spiralling diamond: from the depths of the mud; Squirming, desperate eyes — enlarged, lumbering over the face of death Like a great mask that covered the earth Tearing at the flesh of this world Until in each eon it was remade — Without a trace of the living dead who made it.

Upon the earth came and walked great men — who peered into the abyss and discerned gravity; The name and face of the infinite Which worked behind each mortal form and stone.

All that caught light was about us, dead; All that was was within us, squirming, screaming, alive — Bacterium. A thousand faces at work within us; Twisting the flesh and making it strange.

That beneath blood was light; The soul of stars; the energy of first movement — Pure creation’s burning: Writ through time; Caged within man, bird, cell, And bone.

II. Myself

I had been clothed not with moss or rose, But with dew that dripped from me as I rose from the deeps; Not a thousand armed man, nor a mere titan or stone symbol: But a fleshly thing — made and wedded to brief forms.

Escaped from cliffs, totems; Like lye parts forms — A precipice, that I was.

A twisted mask Before the harvest of time; Before the fire and rocks; Before the breaking of the world.

I knew fire; I was not lizard, nor was I the graves Sapped of vital fluids In their tinderboxes.

A thousand colors of light within me, Trapped by the burden of ages of stone That I carried within me: brief name Which was naught but the skeleton By which I was consumed.

This watery stone: That mixed me until I was pale; staring agape At the wide infinity —

It was the shades that consumed me; not dead nor behind rock — And I slept in the land of the shades, Forgotten — not even a dream Nor a tiding of blackness.

So then I drifted, a seed amongst the fertile grounds Of the width of being. Beneath myself: Elemental sparks which glow; must burn. Dead arms which I throw; gobbled then by hungry young stars.

Taking back unto me, my body Endlessly, until I am a twisted beast, Or resurrection — more akin to the force from which I was made.

This vital force: enough, makes and unmakes me Until I am bread for my own mouth; broken from the curse of friction.

That forms appear and must become fluids; That fluids dissipate and must become air.

Fates of the burning: men and madnesses alike — Steaming until they are worn away of their furies. Thus men and stars must sleep In embryos of equilibrium — equal to their passions; equal to their days Until the grounds are shattered by the descent into breaking.

I lay, like a smith; forged into temperate metal — unshorn and unbroken by the weak clatter Of times that crashed to the black grounds: emperors, galaxies Which quaked, shuddered Then lay silent and unmoving in the sands.

Only the beating of the blood — the tree which drinks the severed death; The vein which is flue, to goblet of flood.

Our kinship is time; As are the beats between those who fall Beneath the wheel.

It was to fire which I kissed the immortal force: Even as I was made and unmade, Strange as a chameleon upon the rock; As the legless salamander, Writhing for the cool, cavernous burrow Of timeless dark.

From my pallor, a hand unclenched What remains of my trying art: Alone, a script that writes the body, Transcribed in semen and bone.

The spark which takes the hand; Renewed, to claw or alien limb.

A great, beating heart — outward, among the stars Stripped of the flesh.

III. Gestation

I climbed to the shades; There I saw the way the world was made — A child’s hands, clasped Around the burning.

Were they to be freed? Palm, down to balmy knuckle. Pulsing with oblivious blood.

A terrain that was not ours — Sublime, alien skin of the wrist, Red, dry plateau of the calf Toward the ankle bone.

Of fish skulls Crushed into fossilized shadows.

The milk was white and black; Wretched poison And the only medicine.

Coagulate, we swam, carried, buoyant On the backs of the dead and dying.

Even as I took this skin, it was thrown from me — Like a quilt Of burning furs.

The poet plays through us, With eternal hunger for the strange; Our blood, His flute.

It is in the milk and honey, at last I bathe — I being our particulate whole: condensed in a clashing Which is both murder and sexual ecstasy.

The skulls of blind cells Twisted into centrifugal legs; Feathered antlers of the centipede As I crawled over the dawn And was destroyed by an errant, Thoughtless hand.

This blood, smeared upon the rock, Our thousand-tongued goddess.

I come near to it; lick the blood — And become both tongueless and bloodless: The black death of all cosmic fervor.

She dances, erotic hole: Both mouth and canal From which we swim and die; Crash against the waves, Twist our faces As we burn.

And so we mounted lovers Absolved of the body In the mated death dance.

Like acrobats, we were taken by the storm and briefly abolished; To spill violent blood and tumble back into normalcies. To place the mask back upon the deathly skull And resume the march To the break of the body; To the precipice of eternities.

We kneel before the spirit of fire — before the cask of death which is the bottle of these stars. This cosmos which seeps and seethes from us, Droplets of dew which are our time, Our bridge before the great sands.

Not even a song that was sung But rather a dream Of a mind ancient and veiled: Behind a film of clouded glass — A mind which dreamed the life Which tumbled down, like a drink From violent eternities.

IV. Prometheus

I stood over the crag of the body; I prayed, thrashed Over the turning world which sun would not relent Nor stars unleash Mortal stone to break the spell Of gravities.

I lingered, near the body, tended The cave of green shoots; The thumping slab of the liver As it coursed remains.

High prison! From which I gazed and saw What was left after relinquished stars: The haze of death’s arts — Expulsed into a painterly hue.

For I in chains, below: To a rhythm of smith’s hammer — As the blood rests beneath translucent masks.

It is this stone which binds me. Call it time or body, Call it fire within the blood: That which I am first made.

Cast into chambers, locked In the siren of warm dew. Locked — in the smell of the bud And the thick air of morning.

Were these pleasures so swiftly and seductively given So to content us with chains?

To live and die In a cask which beats The full force of the blood And yet must spill, deadened Like the guts of a star into beauty without impellation.

I saw the skeleton of the mammoth, buried deep, forgotten And the thick ice which seemingly slowed the passage of time. Where the fire could not burn; where the world was coldest — Even small sparks of krill survived In a barren, airless gape Just before oblivion.

We must become stars; burn at the fuse.

Der Sturm vor dem letzten Schrecken

Sebastian at War

The poet, perched like a night-bird, sings of terrors. His mouth a sieve For a serpentine abyss.

Intimations of an avalanche of time Fill his mouth like gravel.

Spitting pellets, He is a dead man — at peace on a cold, silver lake of the moon.

Rocking, namelessly On the glass current of water With the spoon of catastrophes; Grating time Into the ancient wooden bowl of the earth.

Drinking the exfoliated blood From the hair and lips of stars Squeezed with force upon autumnal flesh; Gaping, lolls the now-quieted mouth.

Fleeing the war, The forest beckons, rippling Blue and purple embers.

The clouds abscond the sun, kidnapped in bloom.

The encroachment of draining melancholy, Of genocides writ into limestone gutters — Spiralling, pulled into the darkening well Sunk deep like knife scars into the ashen belly of the land.

Eyeless, the poet bleeds Into the fresh light which spills Upon the clearing of darkened bodies.

From the nape of the neck bleeds the childhood of the fawn Whose eyes have darkened, Filled with clouds of rain, Yet haunted by a blue haze Which spurns life’s haughty poison: Seeping into the graven heart Of silent ground.

Elias / Love: A Diptych

Elias

Sheathes of rain pour, dripping Down the gutters; wrap themselves Around the arms of the dead.

In the undisturbed catacombs, trickling pianos — scurry As mice dance In the slow rivers Of city sewers.

Ancient mouths, with coins Slipped upon wooden tongues.

Stone books before iron bars, crippling Into dry dusk.

Elias, into your tomb We spit scraps of warm poetry.

Outside, the bony arms of the trees Scratch and bellow against the awning of the great storm.

For weeks it rained; like an ark Engulfing the earth.

These are winter terrors, born as the last of the gold Slips from the apple, leaving harvest’s gutted seed.

We are penumbral, like a knife sharpened Against the brow of a fallow body.

This dead ground, far beneath the silenced Black apartments.

You whisper in my ear Beside crumpled, dirty bedsheets.

This is the spirit, sporting the scar Of the forgotten skull As it is cracked by time’s slow thunder.

Wandering, wordless, unreminded In a casket below the dripping Eyeless stars.

Elias, with your eye cocked to the tilting planets, Below the dead sleep, annoyed By your animal barking. Your narrow brow; pursed jaw In life’s brief confusion.

Winds thresh and tear At the rending, sharp air Which moves slowly through flesh.

Children walk, hand in hand with women Hushed, through rows of tombstones.

In the face of erased inscriptions Men utter hushed, bleak curses.

Do we not all become faceless In the purple autumn? Who calls for the felled trees Sitting in gloom, thoughtless, silenced In the fog of dead ages.

Elias, you are the dead boy On a pilgrimage to the tomb.

Stripped to the drifting element; Cast upon a pyre canoe Away into the stars.

Your mother calls to you But you are among the white flowers Which bend the knees and lips of the trees Who bear their heavy fruits Toward your fallen body.

Small and dark with river-soot; A wound the earth keeps opening.

You sleep in a crown of violets Your father wove for you With thicket branch Stolen from the temple garden.

The crown has fallen to colorless ash; The temple to fire and ruin.

Your face and eyes, a mist Of stilled water.

You cavernous black bone: We stood upon the arch, Watching As devils sank their teeth Into the godstone.

Your trembling Riddled with the chittering Chill of bloodsoaked teeth.

But a moment was light — I held you, leaving And then less Than forgetting.

This rainwater which drenches your sharpened, weary Ivory eyelids Of black stone.

Love

You, sister of my soul — All life drinks from the golden honey That passes through us Like a river of sunsettings.

As your red flame curls About the boughs of your shoulders My kisses, laid upon your back Mark the heat of your star.

Body, this fever that we drink — Sap of blood; the floodling. As we touch death: You, doe in a flood, with wet, crystalling eyes You, lioness Of the blue sweetness of your soul Amidst the severed trunks of burning oaks.

As badgers indifferently revoke cages With love’s patent fire; As the Orphic song heals the wound of furs With silk plum harmonies Of light.

This small heart that beats in your breast; in your palm At the edge of the wilderness of your purple fingertips Is forever my own.

It is to love the rain Which wets the green possibility Of the sunflower, in a field of reeds — Whose life, like ours Is a precious, whole immortality Springing aloud From the black fist of the earth.

Wordless, before the river I saw you wetting our clothes. Rippling, Linen curtains in a blank breeze, Veil before your eyes; Veil before our meeting.

The Blue House

I.

The blue house marked by stone Before the mountain.

The trees, glimpsed in torment Quietly twisting themselves.

Sweat glistening From a shifting back, Bent above the riverbank; Marked with thick furs.

This ancient world, in silence, Upon a diamond Turns.

While a green mouth opens wide And drinks In engorged starlight.

II.

From evening we take the dreams Warmth withering From the black ridge.

The howl of birth, wandering With nothing but black eyes. Hungering Within a vulnerable body.

III.

Isles cast into graven shadow Where leaves mingle in the green depths.

Oceans gnawing at crumbling, gray cliffs. The sky fleshing stone; With the acidic eyes Of distant yellow-blue stars.

Shining, in and out of lights Is the dream: It is a hand, withered to bone.

With the black blood, as it crawls Squirming, winding Beneath the calm flesh: While the ribs slowly, bleached, Grow around the skull Hissing time.

IV.

Ruin — at the break of the body. A lip, a veil Before the devoured one.

Fallen at the gulf; stripped bare.

Sowing

Seasons till the earth With ginger, silent passing. Barely scraping the flesh of the soil, Summer’s hands go lightly; Burning.

We are the wind that waits; Breaks against the bows Of bright, springing saplings.

To glitter, as seeds are ripped, Floating, with angelic, white hair Into the night.

This groan of many hours, As an ancient wheel churns beneath the earth; Breaking rocks in mighty force.

The titanic wresting — Of ages from break of days.

Come scythe, as the worm breathes The black gold of the dirt.

The riches of death crowd our mouths and eyes As the cottonwood and swallow Teethe and shine.

Low, upon the fields Is the golden brown of the day. The sweat of the brow, beaten to relenting dusk.

Here we are gathered, around the embers Warming our blood-dark limbs. Firelight, at last A meek mask Of passions.

Here lay the doe, Her warm intestines flashing; steaming In the lingering light of the bone moon Slipped between the bare and brittle fingers Of crying boughs Cresting once more Toward the declining stars.

Ancient Memory

As shadows cleave the rest of the day, Things lose their standing.

Hurriedly painting, the last breadth of the ray Before night.

Silhouettes sit, propped up before pools. Depthless; whispering into the fog-dark.

Lapping at the onyx mirror, Bending into entities.

This is the night of spirits; of hidden fire. Provisional eyes glimmer like lost moons in the brush; Arms abreast around the flaming belly Of loose, exposed flesh.

Away, is the light. Upon an endless, black curtain Which is the fallen world.

Like a dream, aeons before Leap from frozen stone Into the terrors of waking.

Whole tidepools are fed into the fire Of copulation’s longing — There, picking at the teeth Of long dead monstrosities.

Leaving

I.

The earth is covered by a blue pallbearer Which wets the leaves Even as they breathe and sway.

A haze before the sun Into which birds crawl With long, knocking legs: A burrow, a cave Of dying.

Before us is a door Which lingers; shimmering With a glowing which seems impossible.

We are the eyes which watch, Gazing over lizards that bask — Sunning their ancient skin before obliteration.

Lightly, we are here. The body, Jolting before this thin, narrow field.

Unlike the hard ground; Floating even above the body, Mind peers, astonished Upon the yolk of the earth.

Birth — gives us this marrow; This golden sap of blood Which slowly dissolves the memory of the skin.

Wide, breathing forest: Which aches and groans, Fulfilled with passions; Unbroken from love.

This feral sorrow, at last stilled: Like hot iron in the deep, silent waters Unmoved by the lunar powers.

Hidden within the earth is the fire, Far too hot to touch. Engulfed by the burning, Tender hands reach forth; Gazing, eyelessly Into the falling clouds Of this endless, visionless storm.

II.

We are led to the glen To spill droplets of blood; then in going Abandon the husk of the body.

About us, in the clearing Are notes of light.

The burden of days Is laid to rest by a frog’s full throating.

The blades of the leaves, gathered In silent witness.

Rising from the skin is the ghost of the breath Which shivers, sweats, and goes limp Like the struggle for birth.

Inside, trees sway, Locking limbs In the chant Of the fever.

Transfiguration

I. Between the Lizard and Christ

I.

Caves produce visions: Of the ochre sap which drips In mausoleum streams Across rocks of small falls.

Blood is pulled toward the belly, Licked with flames. Eyes gaze Wherefrom life is descended.

The first fathers, cradled in the body of the earth. Her cool embrace, A sheltered paradise Of atmospheres Before the dark dispersion.

With blood we paint: Bison, murders; the dripping Which twists through our perennial forgetting. With each new, fresh coat of skin: Life passes through a dark narrows; Begins again.

Like dragons, we haunt the lashed body of the earth With our coming; gold-lust. Penetrating matter, we bathe In the transfusion of blood Which coats the organs; Twists the mask of the face In a grotesque metamorphosis.

We who are between The lizard And the Christ.

II.

There are ducks in the glade With silver coats Passing forward the full thrust Of hidden fires From the coal of dark stars.

They chirp, gladly — Followed by ducklings Who rock the slow black pools With the force of their motion.

Carving space and time, the whispering fire Comes to know Through the ancient roar Of the minnow and the anemone. Writhing in the mad changing; rippling In the shedding of skins.

Trees billow in the onslaught of storms Cutting languid summers. Leaves ripped from their mothers; Patiently browning in the soil. In this dungeon of flesh, small devils lie, Steaming In the conquering lock of bull-horns; The spillage Of red curtains of blood.

We climb the writhing ladder, perilously to the top: As it cracks and dances in the tempest. Gray clouds thrash lightning; Speaking to the whispering fire Guttural, like an inferno.

The ducklings wail and chatter In the rocking boat of life and death. The mother’s wing Covers their nubile, flowering bodies. Small hearts and lungs; livers Pounding in the acorn of the flesh. A hand of death, or a ray of life Deemed fate: Pouring from the skies.

This song of life: played by a lone guitar Against the backdrop of the gaming storm. Peace: in seconds and hours As bodies are known to trade Droplets of warm blood; the sexual fluid Which sprouts awakening minds From the dark thunder Of their dreaming.

Poets, ducklings — Sit upon the lake And are changed by their sexual pull. Like a hidden star, the thrusting joint Seeds the earth with a sacral cosmology. The body, leaving This last word and song: Carried forth in the womb-cave From which are burst New, pink flowers, with metallic hands And minds writ with the powers of fusion; Supernovae; The deathly march of all forebears.

I saw the ancestors, in their ghastly procession Behind the grave of the day. Each pushing forth One brushstroke Into the infinite canvas of the temporal overcoming. That which is wrought today Is bourne from the isles of the dead — Refracted in the blacking Of the duckling’s eye.

II. Oars

I.

Within the poet is all of history — a geode: the Black Death; the crusades; the creeping march of primordial chlorophyll wrapping tendrils about the chimeric body.

The poet sits with sun at perihelion and contemplates the immortal beloved. Her red hair, burned through the annals of history. The tincture of her bone ground into elixir, sipped by the earth.

The speeches of dictators inhaled by blue arms. Black, fixed eyes of tiger sharks coiled about his feet. He talks to the lizard — whose cocked green eye is memory eternal.

Light still catches her eyes. The poet, in dreams, leaps through the veil toward the wet blue of her desperate tears.

Shadow and stone are the memory of the body: shellshocked; inherited by force. The tremendous murder through which the cell creeps, covered in the soot and embers of dying empires.

The torments spin in repetition. Eyes, taken from the panther in the low grass, cutting toward the silenced thing — caged, incarnate sunray.

The beloved calls from within the hold of titans — arms trapped in the pits, gazing up from beneath volcanic glass. The unbearable heat bearing her flesh to silence and dissolution.

II.

The mountain lion and the tulip share the same blood tongue. Chattering in clicks That pulse beneath the smooth flow of the garments Which are shed To expose the delicate insides.

So do the ancients flee, away to stone; While the new beings jump from cocoons Like false tombs; Rise, with fangs To greet the morning sun.

Death is a bullfrog Upon the still lake; croaking upward at the moon.

A great music descends Beneath the seeming pulpit of words, deeds, actions. A music of which man is but a part; Wherein man is naught. The psalm of blood Immediately legible To the body of thunder.

Legions of ants Before the broken flesh of the fruit Cast down from the old tree. Far older Than the scene which will be taken from about it. With roots that twirl and weave Down into the break Between soil and stone.

III.

A factory town in the lost continent; A torso of land, painfully shedding limbs Into isolated burrows — dank, grey moors Where angular, white figures Stagger out of black holes in the ground Before castle ruins To gaze at an unmoving sun.

Eating the black blood of the oil With filthy, penetrating hands. Ancient teeth smeared With narrow memory Of the predator’s eyes.

A lone shaman haunts The jungle which bleats With the power of bloodlust.

Conquering: The infant emerges from a tenement womb, Already covered in soot. Death-condemned — The gallows of a mass, civilizational sacrifice.

A war is made, from the most ancient code of the foxes. We are but better cloaked, like the butterfly Who lands upon the wing of the leaf With the eye of Salome. A devil, with its head shorn Still speaks From the root of the earth.

This slow fossil: In which you and I meet; Exchange whatever we were Down to the unspoken fluid. Break from us, time — And become a mad third: Possessed with the thunder Which authors genocides; Holds the intestines of the rabbit In its hard, ivory tooth — Pupil of the great lizard, Gazing out, in deeps From within the slit of the eye.

Under-world

I. Black Idyls in White Vein

The white blossoms open The veil of the green bud, revealing Pale tendrils Holding wisps of the sacred night.

Out from the tendrils spews the putrid spore Which mingles with the womb of night. Breathing abyss, filling lungs and arms With nostril-lightning; The blood awakening.

So we are sealed in this great room with death Who draws the curtains upon this nightshade of body And calls From the opaque depths of the pumping heart.

From the shade of the cloud, beneath the sun, the ragweed languishes; The low creek Wherein seeps the alligator’s tongue.

This is spring — the untarnished Gown of the ripening bud. How she wraps her hands about the ovum of seeds Before spilling over in repose.

A single thrush upon the hill Gleaming, Entangled with red vines.

This tyrant sun, whose gifting Is the overwhelmed stroke of death’s Abundance. The mother whose fruit is born Before the final terror.

II. End

In the night of the world Soft blood trickles from ghats Into the village rivers. Mothers With baskets on their heads Gather the mingled fluid.

In the reeds, insects heat And circle the corpses. Burning, in the pyre light Before the pure white moon.

The infant jaguar’s breathing stops — Suddenly, in an unknown fit of terror. Without medical language, the mother lashes At his shallow chest.

All this hunger is wordless To the clear glass of the pool of water; Gnats skim the skin; minnows dance within Whole worlds of waving algae And secret, crab-like homes.

A brief shell which shutters The ghost of the breath Then collapses; cracked Against the anvil of the earth.

The ribs of the swan break open In an empty field. The flesh worn away by encircling hours; Hard strokes of the anvil — These passages of the sun.

Slowly, mice and coyotes come To feast on what remains of the face. The last identity — Stripped of name: To meat, to blood, to bone; To river.

III. Gelatin

In the black chambers The warm elixir of golden blood flows — Awakening the dead; breathing strange life into form. Wings; taloned feet. Caterpillar eyes Pumping forth in a soft, fleshy movement Across the galaxy of the leaf.

Within the body, rhythmic thrusts Of energy disperse across systems working in unison. A harmony Of symphonic measures In the steel organ flute; the liver-drum.

Teeth tear thoughtlessly into meat Until they crack, loudly, against bone. The sky moves: A gray, black mass — cleared by distant, Angry pressures; Swelling heavy pockets Of blue monsoons.

Tongues lap at the wood and stone For streaks of death Which tumbles from the gaping mouth and wound; The caterpillar, slain: Pulsing, green jelly.

The raven Crows, and the sign is reduced to sound.

Like a stain upon the earth, Worked by dung beetles; carpenters of the corpse Which dissolves into traceless dispersion. The scream, the eyes, the delicate nostrils: Of the child and the old man — Creeping toward a senseless oblivion.

A drop of blood, stolen away upon a dandelion Whose seed flies In raptures Over the alpine thunder, Unseen; Yet rending all that was Into a black becoming.

IV. The Beast

I descended into the beast; the wrought iron bars of its cage — The clammy smell of dank surrender Of the corrosion of flesh.

From within the spitting liver I directed the eyes Upon itself.

Rogue thing, which climbed upon the cliffs Of a storm of all time; Used pustules of cells as its palette: Mad creation, Locking bloody horns with the delicate flesh Of the body’s urbane mind.

Gazing through the beast, corroded — I saw the waves break endlessly against the shores of time.

Long, distant, lingering eyes Which conspired to place the serpent in the knotted core Of the tree whose roots descend Into blood-wars.

Ancient time. Time without name; time without seeming source. The drifting of stars, colliding with pillars of sparkling smoke. As if a hand were there, strewn across Stellar graveyards.

Here, upon these cliffs Dwells the battle — monstrous — From which the mind was raised, like an aetheric hand From the evil history of form. Still dripping, with the filth: Worlds pull on the masks of stitched meat — Cow gods; the eyes Of vesicant, poisonous stems And their yellow smoke.

The beast — Fallen upon itself, translucent. The powers streaming through it Like a skeleton of stars. Bathing in the hot breach, the eyes White, lolling about the skull In a trance of visions Which glimpsed the insect: The alien, whose pink tendrils Wrapped about the cold, bleached Bone.

There, the balustrade Of a fatting formulation: Green, yellow lightning Which reveals in the brightening image The face of the god of fire Who struck fervor Into black flesh Of the earth.

Blood Flute

I. Gape and Veil

I stood, strident At the door of all affairs And watched the world whisper past.

The agonies of unfounded men, in wooden bars — never poets — Talking of some capital fund In a blank, white-walled room.

Noondays, at the breach of summer Before the new war. Languid trees swimming in a balmy, equatorial sky. The shifting sands beneath a minuscule crab, at the water’s edge Digging into a black burrow.

Buried: oracles. Buried: prophets in their graves. Who heard the sound Of the ocean merging with the sun; The piercing light of rays Illuminating bestial utterances Hidden away in taverns of darkness?

These currencies: like coins slipped into the earth. Worms alone receive them — Can do nothing with gold, brooches, letters, numbers and names.

Of no words, no sound; Yet horrid, impenetrable noise. Bombs dropped by mantises; fatal attempts at copulation. Coldness of the room of the dead; the blindness of the sheets about them, Carelessly absorbing blood.

The gape, which we must cross Rowed by a man with the face of a crocodile, dressed in rags. Nakedly, we stare, with yellow eyes At the sigils upon the cave wall, Through which we row — Marked by reckless abandon.

To break; break at the gape: London, Rome, Sumer — The wild, reptile king In his bloody anger. We, without tails, Tumbling upon the dial of time; Ripped from the reproach of histories.

Ask the suffering, soot-faced bread line. Ask the dead calf At the foot of the black tears Of her mother.

We are in these ancient halls Filled with the paintings of masters Whose skin falls in paradisal decay. Woman — hold the branch out to me; With supple breast and warm fruit. Come down into the dead hell Where whispers hammer upward As the sun seeks to kiss our warm blood.

From this cast, as casts are made To mould — in place and time, a gamble. Souls are the mass Which risk birth, in hells, To gamble the awakening of form. Such as a wren rests, lightly Upon this very oak branch, reaching out, forward And beyond the eyes to the ever-moving dial of the sun.

Lions, naturally to this point. Does, knowingly to this point.

We — markers of the dead; From the dead, draw the all-life. The dead are unforgotten In the priest of the depths Who breathes ashy billows And remarks the shadow of the world Upon the death blow of the bomb.

This is no language. But the pure fluid Which strikes each flesh. Walks with animals. Whispers with plants. Breeds the dew that drips from the lilac into the mouth of the extinguished. Fat, black lizard — Swelled with primordial violence. To you, all things are swallowed; All things are returned.

Small minnows and bright orange fish Gleam pink in the tinctures of light Spilling from the pock-holes in the face of the caverning.

Running, we are Against the grain of a great chamber of life: A filament of ever-shifting Upon which we breathe — Eyes catching only what we are, As we are re-merged With the absolute, immortal powers.

II. The Darks

The poets, from gape and glade Were struck by the tuning fork of the stars To descend into the caverns of the flesh And describe the bison Who played and warred about them With the flute of the mouth And skeleton hands.

The dead, too early — Descended as children into the cave And stared at the devils of history. Each of them assured: Alexanders, slave women, clasped In the black temples of power. Watching as Gauls pulled obsidian thralls To monumentalize suffering.

As the alligator sinks into the swamp, Ophelia languishes; sallow, singing, in the tribulations Of all time As they churn like a molasses eye In the amber mind of the chambermaid of the heavens Who lays in wait before the black prince.

Dust, ash, dirt, and wind of the dead sting the eyes of the poets. In the sand of life, sifting grain for bone. The song of the blue memory of the girl who perished Running from whips of masters Is singing in the wind; sunk, like blue fluid Into the sun-stung, lingering bricks Of the ruins.

Come, beings, about the glade, about the oasis, To this black theatre: seething calm Wherein the fire erupts from the leaf. The poet’s song, tinged with the dark fire — Light from the red stone Which torches the waving, cool wreath Of leaves in the wind: Forming conviction’s shadows Upon the ground.

III. Blood Flute

Husk of dinosaur: sheathe of wheat — The birthing of creaturely things Which simmer and stew under the red sun: Waiting for someone, Anyone.

As rivers excrete their fluid, bodies move and turn — Black music: Rhythms that force and breed And war.

Drawing ever nearer, to Death’s temples. The Iliad smoke; the pipe leaf. But a small, isolated house At the edge of the village of life. An outpost, of single lamplight Before the gates.

The opiate poets, swimming among the stars. Basking in the sunny roar Eclipsed by Jupiterian forces. As the black oils of the oceans churn: Slowed by approaching gravity. The blue-grey cliffs Intercourse — Receive the storm.

He plays a blood flute; feet of hooves, Mask of slit yellow serpentine pride. Naught anger, is Death: but gleeful Power; Supremacy.

Lording high, over the sightless, teething molecule. Yet infants, this world — And in infancy, blindness To scythe.

A hand in the black oil In a roadside motel. A tub stained With nameless blood. Let, into the drain; Gutters and caves Which drink in heat Leaving only shadows Upon the walls of hard stone.

Chameleonic, an aeon slumbers; A bolt of lightning striking clay flesh awakens Highways of feeling. It is to remember legions of centurions Entering the small village. It is to remember The trailing of water Lashed by a leather, ancestral tail — Survival.

Death’s book: chaos, Opened to a poet — as all poets are of the dead. Death — fallen below life; condemned to the fell place Where shadows are the remainder; Caves illuminated By dungeons of pierced light, Deep into the earth.

Here, ancient fish haunt; rot, Angling flesh. The Homeric song lingers in the mist; Remnants of a dying age.

Deaths litter Waking forgetfulness. The cauldron pours The molassal juice of hot slow fires Forged deep from within the core of the earth. Hephaestean: burning in the grey prison of the factory — His hammer languishing against endless machines.

Here, we are stained With the ash-smoke of our survival. Mad breeding, mad birthing; The forgotten mothers Who on their deathbeds gave life.

The blind textile girl. Her small star, bursting; rhythmically thumping — Accelerating Upon her entangled hair In the roaring machine.

Eris stoops, in a linen shawl. Her red eyes Lingering over the dead: Their blue faces shocked, Some even Peaceful. Now useless Costumes.

Fly, as we must Into the forest — Awakened by doe skeletons, torched by blue moons In the winter North Of bows of trees stripped to the bony cores. We must lie naked in the snow, freeze, and perish Without symbols, without names. Wide awake to the terror: As legions of soldiers descend into the tomb.

Modern temple, we lay upon you — Graves of the entranced dead: spellbound; Stricken, shelled in the face of griefs Too large to pronounce. Chains of violences stricken from the record. Forgotten rapes in island towns. Slaves kidnapped and tortured; buried at sea beneath the rushing fleet of cargo. Speechless, faces sallowed; hollowed out by hunger.

Only in this descent may the poets breathe and return us. Ragged breathing, breathing of the priest in the face of the beast: Faceless beast, beast of all time Whose hot breath is upon us, even now — To which we run.

These annals, we hold Within our bodies. This graveyard night: this only god Is to descend through them. Deep, through time. Deep and narrow is the passage; Life and madness is the risk. Yet we must draw — Or be forever condemned To languish in the broken, slow surface Of endless beginnings; Neverending intimations Of the terrors That lie within The truth of impassable, Ancient history: This living body Of time.

Songs of the Wretched

I. Hell

Thirsts rise from the hell Where my star fell. Angry Lucifer — I beat my chains against the cleft bells, Agartha — wandering abyssal, empty paths In cry for my beloved.

I toiled, far beneath the gates — until my hands melded with the irons; I sweated with the beast Hephaestus, his thick Aegean brow And his black dogs. Dayless. Nightless. Shade.

Entangled in red sheets, your eyes roll — My lips against the areola of your breast Erect in pleasure.

Against the velvet of a night — split beneath the pits of winter And the pantheric light Of spring: climbing deep From within the earth.

In pain and ecstasy, your mist-blue eyes Toss toward me Tongues of unspoken fire.

Let these suns rise and veil in oblivions of space. Let us war in the heat: to hell, let the rest of these worlds fall. Sleepless, Like a servant, whose broad, olive torso Emerges Steaming in the moonlight.

II. Black Flower

Black flowers That bloom in dark apartments by the sea Away from the light; Bathed in blue lapis hues: Of minds drifting, soaked in chemical blood.

I have slept In the narrow white alleyways Lit by hissing red and yellow bulbs On the verge of popping. Vampiric, I leaned beside vines And heard them whispering As their tentacles expanded Around the wrought iron gates Of my dying youth.

Slumbering in the bloom of the noxious flower: A fanged mouth Emerging from a pink body Which I do not own or know. Eyeless, it lights up Like clouds in a faraway lightning storm. Upon the page I brush Delicate symmetries.

Upon this dark flower, I lamented and haunted — Knowing not That while it was within my grasp Its eyeless mouth Was upon the neck of my flesh.

III. Lucifer

Lucifer, that light that combs your bowels — Godless, starless world. I, night that shivers Stripped of its divinity.

In the frozen forests; in the depths of the arid plains We are grating our cheeks and fists Against mountains.

And yet you sit, graven, in your cell Of stones Smearing bison blood against basalt walls And swinging your sharp pendulum Of time.

Little flesh of the angel Parched by deaths of suns: Who will guide us When there is no longer anyone?

O God — Laugh at my trials! Laugh at my damnation! My eyes, cast into my hands — Inscrutable.

Naked sorrows. Sorrows without end or origin — Wings crashed into compact, fleshly body. This tunnel of forgetting: Birth after birth, death after death. Blackness of narrowing.

A small light, cradled within the hot pumping of the blood: Arrow wounds from the black sphincter of the sun Spitting out careless rays; Blinding your piercing, yellow eyes.

Today, once more We step upon skulls To fata morgana Born of impenetrable, impossible thirst.

Do you miss your star? Thrown into caves — Lamentious, black shard of glass, Small mirror of blood In the face of the seething light.

The Wild God

I. Hours

Small madnesses pile up

Behind the eyes.

Drinking nakedness,

In the little hours before the sun.

A young man walks in the quiet

Surrounded by the empty buildings.

Jurors, barristers

Have vanished.

A fishmonger’s wild cat eyes

Stare out from behind a black covering.

The train’s petrified whistle glow.

Women wind in bars

Beneath flashing signs.

The city dribbles out saliva

Into wastes of lashing trees; highways.

A dawn of terrors inscribed laughing.

The cherry-fruit of Dionysus

Enchants any small part of the woods

A wild one claims for himself.

These little worlds of the mind

Can easily become stone.

The woman drops her crazed eyes

To the dirty road,

Begging.

Nearby, there is a green forge

Spilling out animal light.

Careless

Useless to ends.

II. The Wild God

The wild god approaches; drives poets mad.

Panic, a flute blue dove,

With longings.

Laughter fills

The silent song.

A strange bridge

Less than light.

A maiden’s face haunts the eaves

Soundlessly

Covered by wisps of oily hair.

The shell of Venus

Breaks open

In the twisting threads of light

Which break against the forest’s knees.

Vainly, droplets of light

Enter the goblet.

Swallowed

In taverns by unsuspecting men.

Blood drips from the fingers that thread the oceans of air

Which haunt the dwelling-place of the gods.

III. Ancestors

Baking the yellow clay of the summer

The young wander city streets

Looking for lovers.

Blinding rays of close stars

Pour infernos.

In the night, bedsheets radiate heat

Without words. Still unknown,

The animal body

A flat tongue

Drinking long

At a sparkling well.

A distant sadness in the blue light of the moon.

The girl’s white-blonde hair

Fallen from a faraway star

She cannot touch.

Night winds ring

With tinkling bells.

Turning overhead, the peripace of lights.

Mothers nurse the mountains and caves

Which gestate a stream of endless faces.

Away, her ancestors speak a language

She cannot hear.

Like the river

They gleam and tumble

Into unknown.

IV. Love

The woman’s fears

Are a purple-red longing.

Day-bound, with ropes

She waits.

Persean heroes

Fight long wars

With snakes.

Perhaps meaninglessly.

The empty blue shutters

Bang.

Her red hair streams

In a continuous anguish.

Water boils; autumnal callings groan

With the threshing bird.

Time ticks

With a horror.

Lone tombs

Gape

Far across a wasteland of witherings.

Her womb, a bright egg.

A young girl carries an unfathomable weight:

Call it Death.

She sits on the roadside path, in tears

Feeling

What is beyond use.

V. Bread-maiden

As the bread-maiden walks among the fiery hair of wheat

Golden breaths of quickening sun scrape the fringe of her white dress.

Glowing dirt rises from her bare, white feet

As she carries the hot bread

Across the field path.

In the trees, the gods are whispering

With firefly signs — haunting

The crust of night.

The village calm

Bathed in the wine which tinges the blood,

Maroon saccharine hue.

In the weaving of the trees, the fat blood of the earth

Drinks, almost perceptible

Loudness.

Far from the girl, children shout,

Playing sticks in the wheat. Their mother shouts,

Pouring warm milk.

Deep within the forest, moss chittering

Lighting the beacons of breath

Deep within the soil.

Without speaking, harmonies.

The sun’s womb, spilling forth

Gurgling springs.

Drunken, the sun bellows

Crashing into the horizon. Spilling white-purples

And streaks of orange

Finger the gape

Of the black fallenness of sleep.

Children go still, silent as little tombs.

The bread is hard;

The maiden is old.

Life, like sleep

Is dry in the mouth. Numb, trickling

To a still

Wetless stone.

Walking quickly

With supple breast:

The underworlding sun. Blood breaking

Through fresh, peach-olive skin.

Red mouth,

From the parched grave.

Rising from the dead winter;

A wheel of hours

Of dying nights.

VI. Night

The poet walks, long into the black branches.

Ruminations, turning images over in his mind.

The wide face of the moon

Catches the underbelly

Of sun-fires,

Far beneath the lake

Of earthly night.

Upon the still waters

Breaths of winds seethe, like knots

In pockets of heat and coolness.

The high winds rush leaves

Billowing in the open ear.

Poet — upon the hot neck of Death:

Your breathing stirs

The smallest coming flower. Blue seed,

Beyond sight

In a blanketed slumber.

Far from suns, oils stew

In deep cocoons. The dead

Turn over words

Upon their tongues —

Deliberation.

But a moment: hot whisper of body time.

These long hours of night tick;

Cutting light flesh

Off the night-mirror of the moon.

These unknown paths

Traveled far into the forest dark

Are private illuminations

Of futures

The dead alone see.

We, the living, foresoothed;

A bloodbeating mark upon the ship

Of stars.

Warbling, minding

In the distant lights

Of pasts —

Gleaming forth:

Memories of our wanderings

In the living to come.

VII. The Painter

The painter

Sees his beloved in the stream.

She is calling the hawk

With unruly hair.

Mating, in the bows

Of the thick, wide bowl of the earth.

Mosses bed

The ancient mass of unyielding trees.

Air, a twinkling breath

Released from the rushing water.

Embers pop and fester

In the cool blue of the time

Just before morning.

A star rises loudly; others are fixed

In the endless pending.

A distant eye

Of fervor.

The beloved drops her garland;

Stands, dressless

In the glade.

In a rush of energy, this world dies

And another takes its place.

Like a leopard, or a swallow

Becomes true nothingness.

VIII. Pan

The god with hooves

Is markable in the leaves shining.

Lusts of creatures, present

In fields

Or in caves.

The wide, unshaking eyes:

Stars within stars —

Unslakable fires

Burn in twisting figures.

The yellow reed gulps mud;

Leaping, screaming

Is the mouth that tastes.

A grape leaf

With hands, arms,

And a hairy, black face.

Little laughters echo

In the rising and falling of the sun.

Marionetted star

In the game of sex and seeding.

Maidens gaze

Into the fire eyes of Pan

In the collision of lies

And truth-saying.

Across the fields

Gold chaff blazes.

Cornucopial horns shout

In the smiling face

Of Nature’s game

The Long Working

I. Vision

In the gods’ flight

Darkness is simply darkness.

In the purple bowl of night

Poets scrape the hair of the earth

Like remora

In the long working.

To restore the senses of the earth,

Little madnesses are necessary.

Shopkeep, who files away

The neat names of scientific plants;

The bureaucrat,

Whose files are ordered and arranged.

Catalogue night,

Break it over the knee.

The regular mad, who count their days

Bent over kitchen pots;

Lurching on two legs

Or four

On the heel of the city

Moon scrapes the daughter’s eyes,

Bright, young

Troubles.

She knows nothing of language:

A pawn in a greater game.

We move our pieces

Like warlords. Greedy, hating the dawn.

Let hard, fanged eyes peer

From wherever in the brush

We least tend.

Our world is everywhere at once.

Affairs, damn them. To bursting,

The kidnapped, the marauding charade.

African pirates, brigadiers

Gouted kings.

Light must flicker on the yellow page

As the blue evening settles. Calm,

Shivering

The young girl becomes a hungry

Adulterer. One thousand petty crimes

Tried and tried again

By the weak flesh in the face of death.

Days peeling, days on end.

Like a sour rind in the mouth of a fool.

I pick at magazines; smell the burnt rifle powder

Or else trade cigarettes in the jungle

With burn victims.

We have lost and won.

Does it matter?

Spitting, we pair off in privacies; thumb our noses

While desperately gathering precious stones.

Diamonds hold thousands of the dead;

We finger them upon chains

Nervously turn them over while reading the reports.

Words scatter like screaming, mating insects in an unmapped jungle.

Drowning while planets clap together like marbles.

What are we doing here?

To learn a metaphor for death

In a slum-village. Passing saliva between our mouths like an infection.

There is no great poet I can imitate,

Like a drug, to get me off.

Let night set; break the seeming banality

Of objects

Aligned in their stillness

Or sleepwalking like young beauties

Whose brains replay

Old carnivore ages.

We are lost in the madness of power.

Lords, ladies

Cower before the black Saturn.

A pure force idling, pressing violin

Upon the temples.

The music we do not hear controls us.

It is the sacred strings of the soul

Which bear down upon war-camps

And criminals. Romances and fatigues.

We sit forever upon daises, couches

Dreaming opium dreams

As the fates steer us to oblivions, from oblivions.

Have you heard the thread? The blue whisper of your soul

Which drags us through passing, lingering hours?

The day is nothing but a knife, truly.

Let it cut away the dull pains of living.

Let me show you the wide open gape

Through which passions spill like a beatific sound.

The beloved? What of her.

The shapeshifting light of my soul —

The image I grasp in every painting;

In every mad dirge?

Bellow from the deep, light, flame

Which strikes even the most mute wax,

Carving this earth into flame.

Walking clay, Golem,

Giant of life, colossus

Your body, breathing the wet heat of the day,

We, louses or livers,

Gills to your great feeding?

No — the poet is a whole world. A texture. A sound. A velvet tongue.

Which he plays with the guitar of his whole body and changes things.

See how the stray dog lingers near,

Or the black maiden cranes her ear?

Know this mad song — not madness

But Orpheus of the world

Who plays the strings of the air;

Ties and binds the strings of the fates of souls.

Down to abysses we go and rise,

Buoyant as sea airs. Young women haunt the beaches,

Close to the masculine light of the sun.

The ovum, baying and breaking in the light.

Craving nakedness, man-animals

Play the stupid joke.

Recite hymnals, do not live them!

Precisely.

It is not the poem. But the violent vision that overwhelms.

A visceral syntax.

Foreign light, so now regular

We take these singular stars for granted.

What about the green star,

That rumbles in the stomach, blinking?

Or the sign we took for Hercules, Diatoma,

Significance?

Living whole lives anguishing over the open fires

By the black rock?

Emperors who prayed to it

As they mutilated their servant-lovers?

Alas… I am the last soothsayer. Like all soothsayers were the last.

Truly, with my face over the black gas oven of the abyss

Inhaling Pythia

Come down, from the London broker.

Roman slave galley.

Idle nonsense. Which passes in all pursuit of pleasures. Grape wine of life trickling down the belly of the dying and dead.

Let the poets go to the woods, come with them!

And they will show you the blue light in the dead trees;

Oblivion in the dead self of the casket body.

Fully emptied,

Utterly present in the world.

II. Horizon

Let us get lost on the roads

Where wooden sheds are painted with red blood curses.

Where hills bend to produce

Abandoned villages.

Ice cream shops

With cool bells.

Millions live and die like this.

In the shade of time

Drunk up to the last droplets;

Dying and reliving memories

That language has trenched

In graves that will never be seen or shown.

In the hills, silent hollers

Unencroached;

A tire swing

Where a road became a river. Miners smoking pipes

Decades forth, covered in the soot of the dead

And the belly of the earth.

Lone bookstores populated by red-haired girls

Drunk on wine

Bathing in symbols

That will never leave the taverns

Where the factory-men sing old Galilee songs

Of timelessness.

On wooden porches

Beside mills

Which break trees into great piles of wood.

Girls escape; boys linger in the river

For eternity.

What can we become

But hosts for the wind which rushes;

The water which soils

And purifies?

Remove —

The mountains lord

With frightening power. The roads bend harshly;

Break; yield

To the silence of forceful stone.

Limestone seams, breathing

In a language that the woman knows

In her breast;

That froths her milk,

That quickens her loins —

The power which breaks empires;

Inspired tempests.

That — nature’s genius

Found in the delicate, webbed cocoon

Of an Indian spider.

Vast, unbroken, Pangaeic continents of ecstasy.

Orgasms that extend, rippling from blue branch glow to blue branch glow.

The dance clubs which march into the dawn, bathed in liquors which would solve infection.

Dreams of young girls which would swallow whole worlds whole

In their majesty and hubris.

We of carnal excesses:

Our toys, our loves, our lusts;

Our lordship.

This brief earth, where we sit

In the filth and excrement;

In their sewers of Golgotha and Babylon

In the skull faced stone of executioners’ glare

Laughing, absinthe,

Absolved

In the joking game of wives and husbands,

Enticements and calls

Beneath the lacquer of speech.

In the mountain town

A crone-beggar pushes her cart

In the early morning

Across roads whose names do not matter.

In the valley wastes we die

With no dreams of cities,

No beckoning great honor, no war,

No medal.

It is us, and the dreams of the maiden of the night

Who haunts us in each passing girl.

It is us and the steam which bellows from the mountain,

The factory of the death of time. The seething that rings in our ears;

The hours with the axe at the earth

Breaking and breaking her bones.

These labors — for what end?

So we may breathe and excrete the wastes

Gathered by dung beetles in their fat, pincered mouths,

Honorable carriers of the passage?

To death, to death and dead —

All things pass

In sieves.

Winds must pass us the waters

Which the oaks breathe.

Stoic we sit in the thunders

And weave patterns only the gods can speak.

We, ordained,

Among the rest of the empty lots, black boys, soot covered silences,

Paved over by centuries of men broken against stone?

We, ordained,

By the sacrificed Welsh, pagan, Viking —

What are we?

Fools of war?

Bastards of a sun

Whose mind might call us forth?

The lucky few. The red women,

With heads in books.

The poets

Amongst stormtroopers. We touch the face and the eyes of the blue dead.

Closing the lips, mouth, eyelids.

They still smell the blood.

The minds still ogle impossible stars.

Knowing things unsensible,

Knowing things which language avails not.

We who have eyes within the innermost sacrament.

We who inhale lives which are not strictly earthly,

As they are whole universes

Of connection.

Woven by lights which break against the form,

Coloring the red womb

As we incubate

Like strange titans

Deep within the woman-earth.

O, tavern men —

O, wildernesses.

Deep and wide, inscrutable. The dreams drowned

In leagues of beer, thrushes

Tempting glances of maidens. Stew,

And the swallowed sleep.

We wake up and remember nothing.

Forget the soul,

The nature that screams for awakening in every thorny bloom, every eye —

The stare of the Dionysos bird.

Our eyes are upon everything;

Our eyes are upon the gape.

The mountain crystal crushes

The darkest, drowned sorrows of dreams.

The embers which fuel the mad movements

Of a species-mind breaking;

Bending in upon itself

Toward obliteration

In the small cave, that haunts

The towering black stone:

Great time

We simper

And due

III. Time

The girls in bikinis eating hamburgers while old men fish

Off piers that extend into blue-green distances.

Distant plants wail as chickens are carved

Behind thick walls.

Young men wrestle

Bare-chested

Under languid palms

Outside barrooms.

The girls leer, hungrily

Drunk in graffitied bathrooms

Simply visiting.

Aging women smoke

Under yellow streetlights

Smiling with grey teeth.

Sun-worn shutters

At the edge of the cape.

Burnt men at work on rusted schooners.

Empty fishing nets.

As the day fades, the women leave.

Silent streets

Black, lashing waves

Against the reed-covered dunes.

IV.

Flesh, flesh, and flesh

Forevermore, in the alley of the earth.

Mouths to sex

And sex to mouths

We dance

Until we die.

V. Life

The girls look at the boys

And the boys look at the girls

Longingly.

The hours drone

As cranes kick dust;

Bulldozers hammer at clay earth.

Cats laze under wooden porches;

Woodpeckers hammer at high branches

Of evergreens.

In nights, lights

Of distant planets circle; come together

In alignments

Then disperse.

The sun, beneath the earth,

Rises once more.

The women find little reasons with the men;

The men find little reasons with the women.

Ships carrying clothes and spices

Pass beneath moons

Narrowing to black slivers.

Rabbits linger

In small neighborhoods

Beside old creeks

Where children play with minnows

And listen to the trickling blue music

Of the water.

In hooded carriages

Newborns with sensitive eyes

Are pulled through the glen.

Dinners, beneath lamplights;

Beds, beneath starlights

Covered with ceilings of stone and plaster.

Schoolyards covered with vine;

Stripped, old metal

Eaten by corrosion and rain.

Old letters and documents from the factory

Littering caved in basements.

Men and women look at each other lovingly

Then forget.

Limbs become old and tired.

Moons break

In sun relations.

Stars gleam

Across years so long

That we cannot understand.

ταπείνωσις τῆς ψυχῆς

Humility of the Soul

A Sacred Epic in Three Books

Call the world if you please 'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world... — Keats

It seemed to me that I was beginning to understand what the world really was — a mysterious and sacred epic of the soul. — After Nerval

The spring rain

Must have penetrated

Through the leaves

To feed the crystal spring. — Basho

Book One, Bleu d’âme: Poems from Troix

The Black Labors

I. Daphne

In the twilight

The daughter walks through the field of wheat;

Blonde, barely virginal. Her fingers mark the evening;

Dotted, with purple splotches

Of stained light.

Going nowhere, she pauses by the stone

Of her grandfather.

The speechless white marble

Marked by a bouquet of wilting

Sunflowers.

Her dimpled skin

Approaching the ground;

Knees scraping the grassy dirt.

Miles away, on the beach

Young men are dying.

Clearly nameless — 

Bunched in burrows

Of sand.

The farm woods are silent

But the cricket-sound. The daughter

Called by laughter

Wanders

We cannot be dead

We who walk with legs

And sun dappled arms

The gods, magnetic

Call us into certain deaths.

We without names, but numbers

But holes

To feed the earth.

The daughter is seeded

By a golden wind. Or turns to a tree

To escape an erotic Apollo.

Everywhere,

Light pierces the womb.

We must find dark caves

To let blood

Like tattoos

From the bands of skin that mark us

Like skeletons

For the bearing away.

We who are stripped

Like goddesses

Before the meat-torn post

Of hells.

Daughter, Daphne,

With your hands about the vine;

With the burlap pleat of your skirt

Bleeding, bleating

Slaughters.

You whose son dreams in the womb,

Quarreled with Zeus, Hades, the outer gods.

The sun of light; the sun of impenetrable shades.

You whose son

Slumbers waiting for the blackening

Where red ghosts of light

Seep

Like burning blood from tombs

Daughter, the moon is full

And we are emptied of ourselves

In madness.

It is but one small kiss to die

Or one twist of the knife.

One call, one early turn of the face;

Glance of the cheek in the noonday light.

Come to the clearing

And let the gods examine you

With the anatomical care

Of a surgeon.

No crevasse of the body unpenetrated

By fate’s strings.

Foreign stars.

This world now is distant, like a dream.

Black bears in the stream;

The terrified, wide eyes of the salmon.

Pink sliverings

Rippling though the blue crystal fire:

The wind of the river-road.

We await this new birth,

Pleasantly, patiently

Like a Caesarean womb — returned from the gape of the Milky Way:

This world of collapsed stars.

O world, o small world

Felled by satyrs and trick magic.

O world — under the spell of Saturn’s beams.

Statuesque, dark, cool stone.

Snakes slither in your marble temple, Athene

As they would anywhere else.

A dress is a dress that hides the monster

From which we are born, flesh through flesh

Souls seeking lessons that shatter us

And reveal the driving heat

Which burns, burns as it must

Through all things.

Come, daughter,

Sacrifice, garment of garments.

Away from the heifer; her fatty milk pails.

Away from the bales of thick straw.

This is no land, mask —

Just as man is no devil

But a hungry star.

What rests behind the veil

Of these burning forges?

Who is the figure who dwells, rote

In all of his appearances?

See the trees — like you, lambs of god

Patiently before the pasture of blood

To be purified.

We dive into these intricate bodies

Then throw them to rest.

Are you done with your boredom?

Has man shown you his wares

Like dirty bronze in the fish-market light?

A bad Moroccan summer,

Sleeping under tirades of hot clay,

Escaping hard geometries of shadow?

Mirrors, which bore your black face.

Spirits, which tore your black mark.

The body must stand here, between ourselves and the infinite

So we might see clearly.

Enough seership.

In the woods

There is still this black, bloody rock.

Where Abraham laid his son, Isaac

And all others before him.

Daughter, you make this passage:

Blue soul

Who haunts the light

Even as it narrows and dims

Into a purple black smothering

Of hot irons in the water of night.

Together, we make stone. You, poor,

You slave to the world.

You nameless low:

We go where there is nothing;

Come back with less.

II. Black Girl

Black girl

Who slithers in my bedroom

With night pustules

Of black and red.

Black girl

Whose mysteries are unpronounced

In the goblet of words

Whose furies are opaque

And ires

Undirected.

We who are few

In the pulpit

Speaking with the risk

Toward only the gods.

In this world, there is no fear of time.

We climb into death and inhabit the body

And crawl forever into the breach.

Knowledge — knowing nothing.

Forth — black girl,

Forth the ires of your soul.

Metal that we heap in black smithing,

Not even prayers

But great labors.

The irons, there, are sharp.

The teeth, there, are sharp.

Meat, flesh and blood of the spirit,

Always hungry but sated;

Always eating, but the relish of the night air.

Sheathes of the black time.

There we go.

And it is pointless to say where

Or gesture back. 

III. Song of Hephaestus

A man stands before the terrible fuse, extinguished.

Small victories of poetry

Are like a dragon’s heart.

Nonexistence.

Troubled, little inns

Beside the great wood. Laid, and laid again

The maidens produce day-walkers.

In the night-shades

Poets gamble with dead soldiers

And defile

Empty sentences.

Swim, forever in time, belly up.

Staring at the unmoving, bleaching carcass.

Beneath stews the black beast.

Up, rippling from time

Is merely a belch.

Ennui — the poet’s best friend.

Draws near beer and comedies.

No room for Death’s tragic gloom —

The bad, sulking guest.

I cannot read the lies

Just as long as the black words

Cannot tell the truth.

I have worked them into ironies and satires

In the failure of time.

Again and again,

Into the breach, into the still.

Sweating, bending the iron bars. And yet the silent weights

Unfold

Upheld by the heavy bliss of limerent stars.

Brief infatuation

Until the heat fades

For cold oblivions.

We who winter permanently

In the hell of no-souls. A tundra

Of affected words and images.

Forge which is only fire, meaningless work.

Cast down upon me smithy

And there beat the bells until they break

Or else, to writ

This song that shatters days

And reveals eternities

IV. Black Hercules

These black labors

A Plutonic Hercules

Whose dog charge is the sun;

This plot of star-field

Clasped, by collar

At the gates of darkness

To wait. Always to wait

In a Theban comedy — a city of cities

A whore of whores; a charlatan of charlatans

At the traveling puppet box

Or at the whipping post

Public fraud

But the wine barrel in the sun

In whose shade

Lies the wretch

In a constellation mouth

Beaming

Drunkenness

It is no strength to live and die

And even less

To dream

V. Slave-like

Sour, bitters

Of the Egyptian slave

Who fled desert for more

Silence.

Who broke the temple stone

And wrote upon it

One who hears voices

Of the mad god

Worship the dead junk

Of the knowing

Who know nothing of nothingness.

Upon the void, the lily-pad, the frog

The moon that does nothing

But simply gazes.

Taken back by the wilderness is the mind, the eyes

Which now watches like a priest of the forest.

Scribeless

The eyes take in light and ledger

In lives.

We deal, like gun runners, like scrupulous merchants

In lives.

Slave forms, torn to stone

Standing naked in the agora.

Laughing, fighting to the death;

A million fears extinguished

In roaring, jeering cheers.

Stars: what do you know of what I have seen?

Why do you sit silently

In a death that is a birth

Again and again

And again.

These lashings of time

And the inscrutable beast of a thousand arms

Born of a thousand sins

Which themselves are unremarkable

And unpunishable. Knowing not,

But we have eyes everywhere.

In the brush;

In the mockingbird.

In the jest

Of Nature's din.

Must I sit here and roar and dream

As the world turns silently, unremarkably

With such noise as to render all things silent

In their early tombs.

Affairs which stumble in a gasp

From cradles to tombs;

From mornings to nights without stars

To tearful, raging words

Tumbling at the grave of the beloved

Ever-silenced

Never born

This fugue -- this terrible fugue

Of horrors without names, without faces

Without even ghosts that I might disdain

With no one opposed to me; with no one supposed

Therein to be an arm, an eye, a hand

An arbiter to this game

Without victor;

Certainly without rules.

Cliffs of fate

From which I am flung; all things are flung.

Die of chance

Which I have rolled;

All things have rolled.

May it best be silence.

That overwhelms the cricket whose song is revealed

Merely a mating cry

Or a cell

Whose suffering is but a decibel

In a different time.

What song may heal this gaping wound;

What salve returns lives

To the stars

Who put their faces in the river of night

To the eyes -- absolve

VI. The Cursed

The cursed: to you I glass, I toast

I jeer and I mock --

You, comrade, you, friend

In the empty trials which plague

And fade away into forgottennesses.

May you plot along and sip the wine

Of butter-flowers

And gallop, like horse-faced fawns

To nowheres.

Day to day, wanderers

Into sufferings which do not escape

The narrow walks

Of lives.

Cities, anteaters, dog-eyes:

I have looked into them all

And seen the black pools

Behind the words of lies

And the moments of distracted screeching

And the tongue that sucks blood-leeches.

What, but more endless tirades?

But endless news of you, pillagers. You, ogling the girls

And getting drunk.

You, eventually into opium

And ideas of the slave trade.

Lazing on increasingly gold couches;

Spending increasingly indecent sums.

Large masses of flesh

Engorged on blood. How a fly or a mosquito rubs its greedy hands

Before it dives into the filthy act.

In regular doses of time, it becomes normal.

Another night, cursed.

What dreams have you to share, to sell me?

The dream that will curative my dreaming

At least.

Where is the viol, the dose

That will stultify

This wandering mind?

Where is the measure

That will stop the goat-world from placing its head, violently

Upon my face

And breaking my nose?

You were born from the thing that requires the least of us.

But murder, in the same sun as this.

Why should I expect more of you,

Or will to see less?

Go -- in drinking fills

In the procession

Nobody understands

But me.

VII. The Ovulatory Hells

We cannot push any further without hitting the uterus of time.

I stood there like the siege of a fortress 

And hung my clothes

Given assent

Light only comes forth from mature stars;

Black boulders pushed forth in their labors.

Weights must move which we do not push.

Stars must push out bloody wombs which we do not push.

Blooms

Which are not our hairs

Nor they sprout

Under our watch.

I will swat the weight of the air like a fly

And watch the temples of a convergence

Of a thousand lights crash upon me.

What numbers do we have

For the outer reach of the mind?

Just names for abandon, wailing

Daughters submerged in ocean tides.

Earths

Bereft of their fingers

Bereft of their hands.

I, like you, was a ghost,

Armless, legless

Wheeling about in a blue abyss

And screaming empty words;

Palatable pleasantries.

To become such a self

One must undergo

The death of everything.

The goddesses alone watch this;

The lights in the insects alone watch this.

Man has no claim over the gape;

Over the divine

Powers which seep through the stars and mingle with the guardians.

Distant gatekeepers which tower over man.

Hubris, no poet surpasses

But in laughing ironies.

Here — this gate, I will show you

The black mass to your young eyes which looks like a speck.

All fell ills you cannot comprehend come from this place.

We must die and be reborn again a million times.

Have you lost count?

Ambulant, first, second wars. Masks, chemicals.

Divine loves in bombings. Spark of a kiss.

Something not alive walks across a tightrope

On another scale,

Dragging its filth.

I remember the first fuse which brought me here

Flirting with agonies

And carrying this staff like a crutch.

My upright spine in Ardennes

Or the colonies.

Dengue fever. Reasonless. In the experience of time

Which broke me from myself

And I stood outside, observing

The quiet, slow swirl of the planets

Like a drink

That I drunk

And in the drought

I perceived infinities.

In the swamp grave with palms

Amid the pirate towns

We drank forever; swam drunk

To beds and dreamed of great friends, adventures.

This ship will show you oblivions; the black poison which you gulp is everydays.

Will you drink it? Or will you dream?

Will you attend enough to see the venom is salve?

That this gape is a light we must pass through?

O soul — weary soul. You pauper;

Worse, miserly!

Can you not submerge yourself in the waters

You who was given the hot iron

And perceive the despairs

Which only heighten your ecstasies!

Can you carve from marble your triumphs

Amidst the crumbling end

Which is the last gasp 

Of this

Or any withering star?

This I call you! And I command:

This being my legion and station —

Of the damned; the whistle well

Of trains that come and never leave.

You, down here

Spitting upon taxations

Attending the funeral

Of thick, calcified metals.

We do not breathe like the rest of us.

We seethe; plunder

And you must know the voice, the eye

Which sits submerged like a panther

Beneath your innermost thoughts.

The rest of the world

Is a grave for illusions.

A jungle of endless fervors

Beneath which there is a massive roar of a spirit

Tumbling in a birthing-deathing

Which is a screaming cry of ecstasy.

The mingled orgasm

With the gasping, dying light

Of the cracked ground.

This work is hallowed; sacred

And yet here languid hours sit

In their stations

And the lights burn and crest;

The planets gleam in black shadows

As they kiss and disperse.

This world is all old lovers

With unspoken animosities; hidden unresolutions.

It breaks at the black point.

See — hell

This young world

Do you not know this voice that breathes from within

Extinguished, perished, wailed in the canal

Of eternities.

Do you speak nothing of it,

Can you not feel it,

Creeping so

From within your lungs;

Haunting your head

And very membrane.

O Memory: you who visit me in hours

When I am out of control

Dragged without my permission to the Muses,

Write as I must to spread these damned hells like legs

So you can peer beneath and between them

Ovulatory hells

Which spit your endlessly used bodies

Which you drink and drink

And become drunk on the mad forgettings!

This is carnage; this is hell.

Lord: witness this light

Poured upon the age of petrified worship

Stone money, stone symbols,

Stone lordship.

In this haunting blue light

Only the dawns and twilights

Can we perceive the gape truly

And all that has spilled

In the mad triumph of forgetting:

This field of blood and useless words

Which you chew in your mouth, you damned

Before you speak to me!

VIII. Absolution

I have now allowed the entire breath of the witness to pass through me

In measures of light which are irrelevant to all of you

Measures of life

In this carnival of theatre

To which you are blind.

You who sings the songs it is purposeless for me to go into, 

Nonetheless catalogue.

Slip the thick, saccharine mud

From within your mouth

Between your cheeks and eyes

Away from me

So I may perceive the fire.

Drown history, a single stone

In the watery grave. It is not a song.

Bastard wandering, marked for centuries:

The black mark which stewed and desperately

Twisted, violate.

To survive, terrible contortions.

To survive the sick animal.

This blue infinite that passes between me and the star

Is absolved.

It is quenched in the burning ember meeting the blue embrace

Of the mother.

River water

Which marks me from below

Careless of where we lay the body.

It is this open, this day

Like all days

Which trudge and march and sip from the blood stone

Body —

Come hence and drag forth the penance

Which is what is submerged

From beneath and within the eyes.

What was once red, now is blue. And what was once blue, now is red. This casket of living

Upon which the unmarked and unnamed bird sits.

I know nothing of you bird, as you know nothing of me

But that the spirit twists inside us

Like a great, writhing snake.

I have climbed the spire

And looked out upon the river of pure gold

Which is in worlds

The black shadow of the dead. The dead feed it;

The dead breathe into it life

Shot up from the black sun in a dance.

To this world we are married;

From this world we depart. Between it all is the voice

Great and breaking

Which is the prophet in the ear and eye of the Lord.

True diamondine

Are the words that are spoken

In the naked soul

To the spirit

Which is its eternal forebear.

This I see, when I gaze out upon the river, stone, bird, body.

There is now no list of things

But the broad thunder that cracks my ears and eyes;

Commands me write;

Commands me breathe

Until writing and breathing in this form are used up.

Now we go, gladly,

Before the thunder

Singing songs

Of grotesque psalms. Beautiful lights

Of sunny yellows

In flowers cut with visions of stag corpses.

Laughing grave, laughing sun:

This craze that is life. Know this stick

That knocked from the dead

And disturbed the sleep of starlight.

What body?

What cage?

And worldless

We go

The Seer

I. 

We who are seekers of visions;

Will go to the very end, incense of Algiers;

To sit beneath some vat of vegetal speech

To hear the utterance of the Logos

Who drinks from the vine

Or from these wooden thresholds.

We who stood before palms in communion

Or who spoke to mountains in the Alps,

Enchanted, in stupors combed by drugs.

The word engraved itself like the spirit of a young girl

Behind sleeping eyelids

Keeping a trace of the blue dawn.

It is to embrace the horse-serpent

Who breathes and inaugurates an operation

More profound and more mysterious than blood.

I saw the footprints of the crow

Upon the coffin of the dungeon.

Little hands

Had marked the damp stone.

The immense golden hotel

Upon the island

Whose staircase we climbed

Like soldiers without an army

In laughter.

The armless girl

Who cried out

Beneath moonbeams

In Troix.

Such were the visions I found

Scrawled in my notebook

Of dawns gone by, which I traverse

With the efficiency of a water strider.

Decades rippled across my cheeks;

I reached the forefront of the earth’s diamond

To produce and discover the timeless thing

Which I molded there with words.

Such are our impulses:

To fashion the elixir of life from the mute stone of nature.

Dead? No, but whispering;

Bearing secrets none can deliver

Except the poet and the seer.

Such is the essence of our derangement;

When at last no bull works in our favor—

And the matador of summer drops the curtain upon infinity

Which resembles a red sun breaking apart

Before a red moon.

This is our dance of mirrors. You,

Numbed,

Fixed upon your pursuit of safety against these horrors.

That the clock of life beats within your arms,

That the blue and purple face makes you flee

Far away.

I have eaten Death with a spoon

And from my mouth was born

The wing of the dragonfly.

This elixir of carefully observed totality.

It is the same color as the sky which exploded

And burned the gaping wound

In distances only the soul knows and can reach.

Body, bound to this earth

Where the leather skin of ancient beasts crawls

And sucks the sap from wood-insects.

This sap I smear across my face

Wherever I go—and I am told it makes me mad

By the lawyer, by the physician, and by you,

Dear reader.

The mask I wear is that of the insect-priest,

Or of the leopard-priest, if it frightens you more.

He who speaks with mountains,

Or who is speckled with laughing terrors.

My only war was the plundering of the diamond mine of words;

I glittered with the links of a chain

Of a thousand compressed deaths

With which I was buried like royal jewels

And from which I rose,

Mad from ancient massacres.

Driven to this window, animal,

Look outside,

Your eyes pressed into your snout.

See the dead copulating with their mistress:

The crust of the earth

In her eternal seduction.

What do the living know

Except the mute terror

Which strikes every waking moment

And remains the source and place

Of the betrayal of the soul?

I have watched empires collapse

Because of this:

The pitiful absence of vision.

You take what stands before you

And do not hear the murmur of the dragon,

The red and ferocious thing which is the arrow of time,

Which roars within the blue soul

Of the bee,

Of the wildflower;

The tickling fire of the rabbit

As it grazes upon simple blades of grass.

This life is wild, surely.

And I can show you visions,

The shadow made of stone which remains

Upon the crust of fire.

You are inside its belly,

Scratching it

While idly remarking upon the heat.

The lamb’s burrow

Where one assures you that the only art is this:

Revelations.

We walk at last

Upon desert sands that offer no footing.

Carrying our skin away from the burning.

Have you ever heard

Of such a flood in the desert?

Which comes laden,

Roaring,

From dreams.

II.

These little enchantments

That haunt sleepless nights

Like the Bacchus girls in the woods

With their pink-gold nipples.

I move closer, as if in a dream,

And touch her shoulder. It turns out she is a harpy;

Death speaks,

Unfolding long, indecipherable sentences.

It is in these hells

That I pour my molten blood

Over sheaths of marrow-paper

To imprint my words there.

I stood before the sculptor

While his wine breath stung the marble

Like little kisses.

As he wrote with his chisel,

I traced similar marks

Upon the sun.

Long, eyeless,

Was my night;

Long, eyeless,

Is my day. I stare with two scrupulous

Holes

Upon the violence

Which shall be captured

And held in ice

As it is in stone

For small eternities

Until it is abolished

By some other force.

How I wish I were back in that wood,

Drunken; afraid.

As the sirens encircled me

With their hungry decision.

That strait was steep, at least,

But not so barren and grave.

III.

My mind is now muddled; mad with desires,

Drunk on the stumbling breath

Of sleeplessness.

I remember the furrows upon your brow

And the screaming tears.

What I once was is no more.

It is as though white claws had emerged from my back

And I could no longer lay claim

To little worlds.

I did not remain there very long.

You, in your village,

And my visions of the blue apparition of Mary

Her hand resting upon my shoulder.

I saw gargoyles leaning

Out from old buildings; wandering near the graveyard,

Disturbed by wine.

I wept over the graves of lovers I did not know;

I drank the sparkling blue-gold light of the river.

I died and was born anew.

Now you look at me with fear. This is not a guitar

Upon a summit, plucking strings.

The voice of the demon trembles with a fiery vibrato;

The world too sings with it.

The praying mantis, the cardinal, the star.

Men descend into the hells and return as angels. Lucifer's song

Is a black stomping, written with an undulating chorus

Of beatific light. I saw you in every blow,

Every flower,

Every sacrifice of bone.

Who am I, what am I now?

Walking this road of earthly flesh, breathing and drinking

With an apparently immortal hunger.

My face and my body

Are a mystery of stars become something else;

Lost within leopards

And drops of dew

Upon which buttercups suckle.

My tongue throttled,

I was subjected to the descent

Which was written into the annals of my blood

By the scribe whom I do not quite remember

Yet cannot forget.

Who wrote me down upon the blue hells of this earth

And proclaimed me this work?

Ah... but it was I myself,

An accomplice to the trick.

I wished to see the sun within the manta ray;

To tear the lotus from the mouth of blood,

From this muddy earth—

And strangle it with kisses.

IV.

And yes, I drank sickly sweet liquors

With beggars

And wandered in the hot sun until my feet bled.

I watched vultures circle over dead bodies

Beyond my field of vision;

Deep in the forest.

The sun dried my mouth;

I slept naked in empty apartment rooms. A voice screamed not to eat, so I did not eat. I fasted

And I wept upon napkins, scraps of paper.

They are all lost now, to time.

All of these little poems which I bled, and through me bleed.

This vocation, which I did not choose

But chose me, as I came upon it

In a grove of loss, lostness, and isolation.

Tender were the lines, defiled

Over and over again by time,

And only the vocation survived.

I wandered alone past the prostitutes

In nights which seemed as if they would never tip into day. Beside the rail tracks,

Lugging baggage alone,

With the smell of burning engines singing

In my lungs, throat, and eyes.

I tasted the sulphur of my death

As I languished

In the house of the mad. Monitored by orderlies

For the great sickness of a broken heart;

Crashed against the rocks of the finality of a world

Which at last could not and did not

Understand.

These lashings,

Until at last there remained only the blue soul

Looking from the window of my body.

I have no name there

From which to love,

And yet the beloved is perched

By the window

Overlooking the street; the streetcars.

The hot cement over which I leaned

With a telephone,

Toppling worlds with the tongue of my mind.

This draught now hot, golden, red, and blue—

Whichever color I please.

Poetry has purified my soul,

And it is at last the lens through which I see.

These lashings

Which rent my flesh down to the root of my words,

Tore the false voices from my addled mind

And gifted me the elixir of the soul-sound

Which tumbles from me effortlessly,

For it is at last my true voice,

And the sight of my eyes

Purified

To produce the manifestation of the real soul.

Blue Woman

Blue Woman (I)

In this valley of the soul-theatre, you appeared to me,

Star-mirror,

Amid the grotesque brush of genocides,

Murders,

And the carnage of banality.

You, like the passing of the blue woman of my soul.

In the night, I saw you

In the gallery, or upon the dais,

At the edge of my gaze.

Blonde woman in the alley,

Prostitute whom I pursue through winding stairways of brick and clay

In the mansion of our grand party.

You alone who are unmasked—

You, sick with lowly heroin,

Cretan woman.

I learned that you slumbered upon purple couches;

Dosed beneath deep vats of opium

Pumped into your arms

As you convulsed within our union.

You absconded to Israel

To drink the overwhelming salts

Of the Black Seas

And lounge upon beaches

With your money from rendezvous.

Soul girl—I climbed the stairs

At a thousand parties

To meet you in the bathroom,

The lights extinguished,

As you invented reasons for our departure.

In a city of labyrinths

I wander,

Farming your coattails

Before a world

Which is a train

Toward oblivion.

Your iron-blue eyes,

Perennially melting toward the grave.

You of a hundred suicides

Whom I count and gather like a newspaperman.

You do not even flatten beneath my hand;

You wilt

Into a black death

Where I cannot travel.

Through this veil

I cannot grasp your purse strings

Or launder your money.

These riches are black; in writing them,

The wailing golds of the poet,

Charms, bracelets, and medallions

Which hang from the waist, lips, and ankles of this world

In perpetual seduction.

Repose, soul girl,

You for whom, in dreams, this world dissolves into apparent fervors,

You whom I trace around the earth

As though it were the very bosom

Of your soft skin.

Peasant girl, farm girl,

Lingering, laundering

Silken clothes upon a line.

Among linens

When the sun is closest to the earth;

Bearing down upon your skin

To reveal golden oblivions.

Under the yellow alley light

You are nothing,

And yet the manifestation of the whole world.

In my dream, I shatter into fragments

Upon the poetry of my mind,

Indistinguishable from inner and outer truths.

Worlds mingle

And your blue soul haunts the arches of moss-entombed trees

Bent beneath their milky weight.

Your loins, your breasts,

Foreign coins

Which I spend in pleasure's delirium.

Your face,

A mask

Which I paint with the fervors of an obsessed madman.

The blue-gold

For which I long,

Ever-present and yet inescapable,

Ever-near and yet untouchable.

The air

That haunts

Your perpetual caresses.

Yes, this is madness, blonde-red-black,

This longing that paints the trees

And thickens the tongue with streams of paint

That I spill across the canvas of my life.

This mad dream that haunts and taunts,

And hides,

That I might light the world with a single flaming candle of the Word

To discover you, woman,

Lingering over some grave,

Some tea,

Some novel,

Some dream.

What else are the words I cast toward you

But intimations of the dream?

Your mouth speaks; I know you:

Less perverted, less strange

Than this world

Which has broken thousands of girls like you

Across its knees of Death.

And still, this possession.

Perhaps you are the courtyard,

Or the swallows that chirp

At the foot of the catacomb-dungeon.

I stand in the blinding garden

And inscribe your body

Into the abyssal layer:

Blue woman,

Beneath the veil of my soul,

Who haunts there eternally.

Blue Woman in Summer (II)

The strange possessed,

Masked in summer murders,

Driving relentlessly through the hot trees.

Claustrophobic world

Of compressed humidity;

Sparse faces,

Long silences.

There I haunt,

Lingering beneath the trees,

Writing poems for the blue woman.

This world of masses,

Concubine of mulches;

My Florentine ecstasy

At her bright young smile.

Like an addict,

I comb the pages for her;

The leaf of the day

As she turns her face

To reveal scarred teeth.

Amid the paupers of the world

She alone is my key.

The heat of summer drives

As suns bear down relentlessly.

My eyes, mirage-like,

Tear apart the honeycombs of space and time.

This world shudders

And opens onto another world—

An abyss

Seeded

With necessary visions.

Where are you, black girl,

Lazing with existential fury,

Picking at your existence

Like lice on the scalp of your mortal spirit,

Lounging with hashish

Or weeping over some useless tabloid.

We are devils in this modern swamp

Of rivers that draw whole ancient cities

Toward collapse.

This vacant mind

Breaks apart

Into blacknesses.

Girl, I take your hand

And your hair.

You retreat

Behind yellow doors.

This world counts its change

Like hours

Which we grind down

With our rotting teeth.

I saw you by the river

Where cargo ships riot

And men with ugly faces stare,

Drunkenly.

Demons rotting

In the soul of their livers.

Your eyes pierce me

And I am whole,

But only for a moment.

Then—

Piecing together divinities

From a tired song

Sung in the naked silence

Of the rest of you.

III

Blue girl, you would give me your body—

Naked flesh, abandoned.

Your immense risk

Weighed again and again

Like a funeral hymnal,

Like a blue song,

Like a scale.

I enter you quietly,

Like a poor man, like a drunkard.

Your thighs glisten

With moisture.

Your eyes, closed,

Reflect an eternity

That I cannot behold.

Blue woman—

Why are we so vain, standing here,

Bartering our souls

In this slave market

To the highest bidder?

Your skirt lifted

Within the world,

Desperately.

Neither you nor I truly remember the mysteries

Before your enslavement.

When the river served as a common blood

For all of us.

I would cast you into the river,

Then drink you—

Your body,

Your blood.

Day after day,

We survive

By biting hard crusts of bread.

And the only true rupture

In our silence

Is this poetry.

Dawn—

I must write.

While you push your child

Ever deeper through the infernos.

Your red braids rippling

In a forgotten sun.

For we are forgetful.

Yes,

Even in life.

Give me our Egypt; our star,

Our northernmost point—

Where we join in a light

That is neither day nor night.

Give me the world

Where I was a scribe,

Where I whispered

The language of God

And gave infinity

Its face and garments.

You who live so near the skin;

Carried away by the knife.

You whose skin is so precious and so real

That a drop of dew could shatter

This sacred...

IV. Alliance Privée

If there is Time,

There must be a body

With which to commit acts.

And thus we copulate,

As a star feeds the blackness

With immortal rays

Which drift, like the Orphic head,

Among the not-yet-born.

There linger souls.

You and I, entwined in a nuptial dance

Before carnivorousness.

It is this gaping mouth that births hells

And remains the source

Of your endless deliberations.

Bodies collide in their arrival into the world

And end in the stoic silences

Of private entities

That cannot be reconciled.

You retreat to your tower;

I,

To the river

Of my own blue soul.

To bathe in the secret light

That falls upon me

From time beyond time;

From the deliberations of the gods.

You and I, and all of us—

Gifted with these sentences.

These prisms through which we gaze, astonished,

Organizing

The soul of our subjectivities.

Within these private chambers

I swim in the dream

Which is my soul-light.

I dream the dream

Which is my soul maiden

Whom I bring forth

In poetry.

This stone

Is the stone I mark and draw—

Stone as much as it is air;

Stone as much as it is the blue flute and lung of the soul

Which flies through the mist

Between this world and the next.

You and I shared a private covenant;

A covenant I shared with myself;

A soul that was also yours.

To fatten our lives

In the mad chaos of being born

And bend and break against the tolling bells

Of our time.

Entangled, this text:

Which we read each day

And yet remains obscure to us

While being known all too well.

Mosaic of my soul

In you, woman,

And in the fragments that are here

And those still to come.

V. Chimère à Trois Visages

You of three faces:

Hawk-bodied chimera—

Whom I never knew,

You who were composite,

Sewn together

By a chain of dark fires

Toward which I burned with desire.

Always you held my gaze

And sweetly entranced me,

Your Vulcan blackness

Beneath your ovarian veil.

You who beheld nothingness,

Vacant mirror

Upon which my lusts rebounded,

Fled,

And penetrated.

Your world: this awkward doll

Upon which I mounted my hunt.

With bursts of eagle-passions

I stained the sky

With my hungers.

I caught your fire

In the glass mirrors of buildings,

Already ancient,

Already vanished.

I pursued you

And tore away the image

Of what remained of you.

You who never were;

I who always am—

Poet of lusts and great thirsts,

Outshone by the subtle eye

Which divines from the gape of my body

In flashes.

I have only ever sought you in one place.

Wherever I am,

There you are,

In an infinity of possibilities.

Perhaps we are drawn

By a magnet.

Or by magma.

Perhaps we are the trance

Of a single star.

Blue or green:

Melancholy or envy.

But above all,

Red.

Lusting.

I pounce gladly

Upon the nape of my life;

Devour what is mine—

Then sulk through what seems eternity

Awaiting the next consummation.

Two bound as one,

Forever,

In my wish.

Entangled.

Carnate.

Then we sip solitary flowers

And do not speak.

Little agonies

Populate my life

Like poppies.

I eat their seeds,

Grow drunk,

Then spill my poems upon the floor

Like seed,

Like thrashing dead snakes

Bearing the faces

Of my words.

Let the trees cast down their seeds

Into this autumnal chamber.

I stare forever

Into the great painting of my life

Which mutates endlessly

With your entrances and departures.

Exist—

Face of the beloved

In all beloveds.

That I may love a woman,

However brief,

However whole,

Within this forest of decay.

True heats bear down relentlessly.

I hunt

With horizon-eyes,

Like an animal not yet born

Yet already living within my soul;

Writhing,

Carnally,

Within my body.

Book Two, Les amours de l’âme (The loves of the soul)

I. La Vision / Revenants

I can turn the forest green, or red.

At the edge of death

Stands the vision.

Do you understand—

Your entire life, you have pursued

A certain woman

Or some ungraspable essence.

No concept,

No totem,

Consumes through fire.

This is what we pursue.

These essences are like visions of stars

Which we gather in the dreamer’s night

And fondle

With the grandeur

Of eroticism.

I cannot grasp—

Through the word,

Through the idea,

Through the beloved—

The essence of nature

Which drifts and flutters

Within the infinities

Of rapture.

Forever gleaming are the leaves.

For they gather light

And swell their buds

With crystalline blood.

The skin drinks fire

Then rests in sleep.

The dream-image requires

The death of the body.

Inactive, receptive:

The beloved sits,

Wailing within her blue cage.

Her cries are silent.

Her hair falls across her face—

A watercolor lament.

I have been in Paris as I have been in Rome,

As I have stood upon the ghats.

The nameless dead

Are transfigured;

Rearranged into letters.

Their entrails eaten by wolves.

A forgotten prayer

For a bison liver.

These plains endure forever.

Days, days

Passing like clouds in the sky.

We seize the soothing light

And swallow it

Awaiting revelation.

I will give you the vision

From nothing.

The vision that takes nothing

And requires even less.

It is pure imagination,

Which is the summit of nature,

As it is the summit

Of all mankind.

We are here

Only for the deepest reaches of the dream

Through which we glimpse

The blueness of the soul.

II. La Fille Ancienne . Poesie

The girl passing by,

Or gold,

Or diamond,

Rules over hauntings.

My whole life has been thrown away

For intimations of a shadow

Within a great void.

Forever pursuing

The lost dog of the blue elixir of the soul—

Lost, blind, mute,

And dead.

It is an ordinary madness:

This world which survives for nothing

And bathes in tombs of gold

Until they displease

Or the skeleton turns.

Beneath the lies and masks

Of this spirited gathering,

I have heard and seen

Nothing meaningful

But sex and desperation.

Napoleon, the slave girl,

Our virgin prostitute:

All of us—

Like ash in the air.

Only the soul of the world remains.

Beneath the name,

Beneath the fears of the little girl,

I glimpsed the eternal

In fragments.

In the basin.

The cell and jailer of the world

Standing within the well,

Haunting us.

And she fled

Through the alleyways of history.

Through the streets of London; into the woods,

Away from the pyres of the dead

Victimized by gas

Or bullet wounds.

I knew this girl by face,

But I did not know her name.

I had seen her long ago

By the Nile

Or upon the banks of the Seine.

Go—

Ancient girl:

To your theatres, to your boudoir.

Paint your face

Skeleton-white

With fears.

All culture, all words

Are but a brief murmur,

A weak symbol

Before this precipice.

This gulf through which we slip,

Fall,

And tumble

To face the daimon.

Girl,

You are the spirit of my blood—

Poesie,

Who writes these remarks.

You speak through skeletal hands

And vegetal lips.

You taste of salt and ash;

You breathe

Hot water

Upon my face

Like virginal tears.

We know nothing of this world,

Broad yellow star

Who fixes your breathing upon me;

Who softens me with your charm.

Every woman’s lips carry your taste;

Every apple and pear is your flute.

And I am your dancer,

Your poetry,

Your song.

III. La Grâce Noire

You are the poet who dreams,

Wet white laudanum

Shining like diamonds

In the lake of the impossible.

We draw you from the river

And attempt to make you grow

Within our entrails.

Poet of the living,

Possessed by visions of the beautiful girl

Whose radiant love is your beauty;

The speech of your taste.

Venus, black as night,

Turned inward upon herself

To pronounce these delights.

All ardors

Which we breathe within the dark wood.

Your face upon my pillow;

Your angelic yellow hair,

Streaming.

The angel plunges into the garden

And affixes us with divine letters.

She is something terrible

Felt only

In the body

Among the roses.

Come, visions,

Like madness

Around your decomposing bed:

I who was centuries too early,

Or centuries too late,

To catch your eye.

I saw you sacrificed,

Dancing with Nero

Amid floods of fire and marble.

I saw you in the carriage

Fleeing the colonies.

Whatever else.

You were not that.

But a bird.

And less even

Than a sentence.

I myself was assembled

Upon your baubles,

Desperately,

Like a child

Climbing toward your grace,

Toward your happiness.

This is the vision:

A woman whose voice

Dwells within the deepest,

Most impenetrable essences

Of the jungle.

We,

Swamplike,

Malarial,

Race toward her whisper.

It is less than infancy

That gives birth to us.

She plays, like marbles,

With the planets of our fates.

She fashions the beloved.

She is the singing wood

Of our vision.

I am the scribe in the night,

Watching the terrors

Of the mother and her child

Rummage unknowingly

Through the remains

Of a time already gone.

With her dirty face.

With her flute.

I know her song,

For her entire being symbolizes

The black grace.

IV. Little Loves

Come, little loves

Of the soul.

I trace the skin of your breast

With pen-marks,

Like knives.

Enlivened by your mask

And intimations

Of what lies

Beneath.

Each cage is a radiance

That breathes.

V. Les Amours de l’Âme

You who are lightnesses

Upon the dial of life,

Spilling forth fleshly

Sensibilities.

You go or you stay;

For you it matters little.

The gray hand,

Holding pale death

Within the young child.

Art passes between us.

We gasp.

We thunder.

We marvel.

Muse—

Before this tumult,

You are laughter.

You are the bright crystalline blue stream

Of our eternal youth,

Mingled with the delights of nature

Which no perception,

No meditation,

Can break apart.

We are nothing

But the music

That runs through your breath—

Light,

Wandering,

Deep,

Shallow,

Sensual.

The grooves

Through which we pass

Like fingers through wood,

Like fingers through lead.

We are torn,

Riven,

And made anew.

The black space of your eyes;

The blue longings

Of your deepest belly.

The child is within your body.

She haunts your breast

With song;

With joyful music.

I saw her running through the eternal grove

Only the other day,

Laughing.

She was,

As we are:

So free.

VI. Achéron

It is a river of light

That forms the face of my beloved.

Her hair curls

Around the branches

Of the great horned tree.

Like frogs,

We are endowed with an ancient, forgotten wisdom.

To see clearly,

One must tear the eyes

From their sockets;

From their demands.

Her body is nourishment

For the gentle flesh,

Soft as down.

The hills roll endlessly

Like the beating heart

That keeps the rhythm of my guitar.

Her tears flow.

I gathered them into a viol

That shines in the light.

These rivers upon which we wander;

We row.

Lovers pitch their tents upon the banks

To pass the night.

Small inlets

Are filled with fish

And crawfish.

I kiss one of your fingers,

Or two.

Between sleeps,

You smell of honey and jasmine.

Your hair mingled

With the curve of your neck.

Mind and heart bow

Before the wordless interjection

Of the soul's paintings.

Your breast within my hand;

Overflowing

Like blood-wine.

VII. Rage de Femme

It is your birthright,

Womanly rage—

With none

To contain you.

Maiden,

Your chambers.

Your king exiles you

To solitary stomping.

In the filthy room

You declaim

And strip away

The wares of the world.

You whose eyes

Are the inverse of desire.

Within you,

Great images

Move and tremble.

Within you,

Mountains shift

With angers;

With violins.

You who burst

With the blue fish of feeling.

I have seen their scales shining

In the light,

In a boat

Far from shore,

Certain of capsizing.

You dive, naked.

With the whole warmth of your body

Pressed against mine

In a pleasure

Deeper than orgasm.

At this point,

Where is my body

But the blue lake

Of your pleasure—

My face resting

Against your most hidden face,

Your youngest womb.

Together we play

Like children

In the bedroom.

Your hands upon my skin;

Your eyes upon my lips

As you touch

My warmth.

This is the deepest elixir

I can pronounce,

Even as I am swallowed.

We demand privacy.

We shut an impossible world away.

Grief.

Tears.

As time interrupts.

VIII. Rapture

In the current of time

I recall forgotten moments

And stow them

Like slips of paper

In my jacket.

Like ghosts of wind,

Faces are carried away

Into the deep distance of space;

Toward the far horizon

Of what are now

A thousand setting suns.

The familiar night

Settles upon me,

Without afterglow.

In empty rooms

I stew longings

And make the best

Of solitude.

Such is the mystic wager

With ecstasy:

That its nectar is twice as sweet

Within longing.

That time ferments

Even the greatest griefs.

There exists a void

Of the world's feeling.

There,

I chirp

Within a sonnet of solitude:

Hymns that are blues

Colored with light.

We are suspended

In holiday winters.

Within a new love,

Fashioned in the earliest hours

Of a dawn.

A foreign bed

Filled with promises

Which I cannot yet know

Nor pronounce.

IX. La Chambre Jaune / Tenderness

I gained a sense for your sorrow

In the ghosts of your paintings; shadows

Bathed in impressions of light. Without forms

The world swirled about

Dark figures. 

Girl, I did not know you

But your feelings

Which haunt, linger

In silences

Unspeakable.

Now, that yellow room is dead

And I think of it rarely.

Your kisses, rarely.

Your back, rarely.

How strange is it

That tender moments

Simply disappear.

X. Defilement

I now wish to defile these poems...

In honesty,

The naked sacrum of love.

The honesty of bone.

That which makes poetry impossible

And infuriates the seasons of love,

Pressing passions

Into the dryness of the mouth.

Here I sway,

Like a tree:

Pointlessly.

I have consecrated sweet moments,

Like confections,

With dirty fingers.

Once there were courts for lovers;

Passion plays

In which we could fulfill,

And thus silence,

These dramaturgies.

Upon the stage of my life,

I am like Pan,

Or the ass

Of folly.

XI. Grâce Humaine

I now understand

The fervors of heat and blood

That produce these images.

Love must touch the body

To bring the blue dove

Into the light.

And so I submit myself

To fallen graces,

To the perpetual humility of love.

Again and again

I am humbled by the unknowable

Of that wren-heart

Which beats

Within the real beloved.

Time and again,

You who are my ancient friend

Disappear into the meadows,

The brush,

The creek,

For a game of disappearances.

In the darkness

I touch you

And become whole again.

I—

Who have wandered long

In the deserts of solitude.

I—

Who thirst for your waters;

The naked light of your soul

Spread across my face,

My mouth,

My teeth,

My tongue.

Your taste,

Salt,

Like all oceans

In which I drown myself

To escape unbearable suns.

Linger,

And break my skin

To produce the song

Of my wandering soul.

My wife,

So near

That she trembles

Like the lips of blood

Running through the blue-violet veins

Of my flesh.

O—

That I have been touched

And reduced to silence.

O—

That I have been touched

And opened

By human love.

XII.

You, so delicate,

Like the mockingbird,

Or the art

That we know as Death.

A pinprick—

And all your blood

Will spill across the fields

To freshen them

With a springtime delight.

How your heart beats

Within its cage.

The trappings of this world

Will never suffice.

Here we find the days

And pluck from them

Sprigs of mint

That will incense our souls

With endless delight.

Ivory horns

Call you

Inward and outward.

Scents rise into the air

From your breast;

The primal warmth

Of your loins

And your tongue.

That we are alive—

That we are immersed

In the wet dew

Which opens my heart

With an electric touch.

You,

Longing.

Perched upon a frond;

Gazing across

The moors.

The low pink sweat of the sun

Haunts winter's gray taste.

My tongue upon your mouth;

Gently,

Dissolved.

Something else.

Ecstatically.

Entirely.

XIII. L’Oiseau de l’Âme

In this vale of souls,

The body-heat we enter

Allows us to utter

The ecstatic flight

Of the timeless body.

The fleshless self,

Fluttering

Like wings

Stamped to earth

In great protest.

Let this delight

Give birth to the shy,

The innocent,

The awkwardness

Of spiritual youth.

Clamorous as a child—

Unearthly longings

Which find their dwelling

In our touch.

Allow the soul

To speak through the narrowness

Of the naked crevasse of words.

An ethereal body of light

Hovering delicately within form;

Taking the lungs,

The tongue,

The eyes.

Within the rose bush

Angelic harmonies

Grant favor

To the inspired.

You come crawling

Through the blooding

Of your soul—toward me

With wide blue eyes.

All your innocence,

All your wildness,

Bearing the heavy silences

Of the misunderstanding world;

Of your suppressed,

Hushed breath.

You long to break free;

To rise

Into the free blue

And drift there,

Aimlessly.

But your words

Are enchanted

By mirrors and reflections

Of captivity.

Beautiful solitary bird,

Talonless,

Sirenless;

With your childlike curiosity

And your wounded flesh.

Fear,

Deep and long,

Possesses your flight;

Makes you wild

With longing.

XIV. L'Eau Noire de l'Amour

The winter night

Is the chiming of bells

That leads me to you.

The turning of autumn

Is the spell cast

By the scent of wet leaves

That haunts your door

And windowsill.

I gaze upward and outward,

Hunting you

Like a body

That leaves behind

Trails of perfume.

The shape of your eyes and face,

The casting of your mask

Which reveals.

All inner light pours outward

Upon the pious smile

Of those struck

By the angelic daggers of love;

Made humble,

Precious,

In a sensitive joy.

You, like a hearth;

A small stone cabin

Before a deep, dark wood.

A fire of logs.

An impossible warmth

Beneath our blanket.

And yes,

You meet my gaze tenderly.

You meet my gaze

With the great fear

Of one who has died

And who will die again—

One who fears

They will not survive

The next death.

Again and again

We return

To turn the wheel of love.

What else truly matters?

You are destined to open me

With the deepest iron waters

Of your charm.

The well that dredges my passions

And submerges me

In blue-black waters—

Almost oil.

I have touched the sludge of death.

It clogs the lungs

And nostrils.

Breathless.

Lyrical.

These are odes

Which have at last become

The black elixir

Of love-loss.

We possess the agony of desire

And the shattering

Which rends the whole world;

Producing only shadows.

Love is our ruthless murder.

Our spirit-pool

Of greatest delight.

You who lust for agonies

In the sickness

For which souls clamor

To mount this earth,

In the flesh,

And enter the mouths

Of their lovers.

To rise...

Yes, to rise.

And behold the fervor

Of suns produced

By our greatest passions,

Incensed

By the apparition

Of the absolute beloved.

XV. Victoire

Our victory in life

Is the quality of our soul

Aged in the still of our trials

And our love-wars.

Mute, humble,

Impoverished.

Glad,

With hand outstretched

Toward nourishment.

This is our bread,

What was once called manna;

What is now the passion of the kiss

Which heals the voice between heaven and earth,

And hears our most desperate prayers.

There is only one sanctity—

Not pity.

Not charity.

But two souls bound

By the covenant

Of learning.

I swam with you

And drank the water of your nectar,

And bathed in your joy

Which you translated to me

Through your body.

You,

Of wounded silences

Like stigmata.

You,

Of wounded silences

Like a child's armor.

I am glad your wings have died,

Angel,

Nestled on this earth beside me,

For now,

Or for as long as your blue soul

Keeps rhythm

With your drum of earth.

Islands of kisses

And forgetfulness.

Years of longing

And troubadour songs.

This poetry fermented

Within the chamber of your whole being,

Mingled

With my whole being—

Wrapped

In the embrace

Of the astral kiss.

Blue,

Outer night.

Night at the edge of the world

Which lifts my voice

And my words

Out of my body

Into intoxication.

The ecstasy of your figure

Drawn out of itself,

As though your soul

Could not be tethered

To this earth.

Our stars,

In unison,

Lift me

From the seat of my flesh,

Even as you fall,

Ever more perilously,

Into the lessons

Of your own life

And journey.

That our paths crossed

Is the harmonic resonance

Of blue waters

Mingled

With black poetry.

Fate.

Destiny.

My death-hands

Unfastening your brassiere

Of little wordless infinities;

A pink-white desire

Whose taste remains

In my mouth.

XVI. L'Imago

This at last

Is the quality of my love.

It is what you do not know;

What you do not truly see

Except through the veil

And stained-glass mirror

Of your reflected sight.

You who look out at me

Through intimations;

I who take you

As my moon-woman

Or my red-haired Persephone.

The gaze that drives poets mad—

It is the grasp

Of elusive femininity.

The void of silence

Breaking open;

Bringing forth

The words of the inner woman—

And the rift

Between the world

And the depths.

Imago—

What sings

Is the body

Of the poet's deep interiority;

The sanctuary forged by nature,

Silenced

By the world.

Shed this costume in love.

Captivated by the sign of the beloved

Comes the procession

Of the soul's arts,

Streaming like blood-doves

From the wound.

Poets' forge:

The ardor

Which consumes

And spits forth

Ages of feuds.

Men and women,

Their eternal tug-of-war.

Love cannot exist for an end.

It is the most useless thing.

Simple.

Naked.

Bare.

Not even a weapon.

For us,

Sex has no purpose.

Consummation is sacred.

Thus,

Everything

Becomes a means

By which I may know you,

You,

The innermost girl,

And your beautiful heart.

XVII. The Keeper of the Threshold

I am the dweller upon the threshold

Of my own mind,

My own heart,

My own soul—

The figure who gazes outward

Toward what is within.

What I see in the world

Is imbued with its tint—

The girls;

The distant purple mountains

Which haunt

The yawning space.

It is this soul—

The visitor who peers

Through these eyes;

Who declaims,

Decries,

Pronounces.

And it is this soul

Which turns water

To Mnemosyne,

And fire

To ice.

This soul

Which transforms the beloved

Into vision

As she appears before me.

Genius,

Which grants—

Like tea leaves—

Insight

Into the very quality

Of existence itself.

None of this is untrue;

As it pertains

To what was

And what might be.

Imagination—

Which soothes in advance

The blue phoenix

Bursting from the chest

Of a farm girl

On a cold autumn night.

I made worlds;

I plunged into them

Like from the heights

Of a seagull

Toward the serpent of God:

A trout

Crowned

With firelight.

XVIII. The Visitation

The beloved arrives

From another world.

She is sent

To transform the moon

By a distant sun.

Sardonically,

The poet remarks

Instead of descending

Into her olive skin;

Witticisms.

A visitation

From the goddess.

Before and after Time,

We who are fundamentally

Within dreams,

Travel

Through the remarks of the soul

Like samskaras.

I touch her skin

And remember

Ancient places;

Ever-renewed glades

Where the soul acquires

New limbs;

New features.

This is the first enchantment.

She is like a swamp,

Or an ancient city,

Or a cool breath of air

Which is a feeling

Of memory.

In my bed;

In my arms;

She is transformed.

No longer simply my soul

Nor simply her own,

But a third majesty.

Time is knotted

Then undone

By something

Hidden in her hair;

A fixation.

A scent.

Torn apart

By the images of the brain.

This is what it means

To go mad with vision—

Torn apart among centuries

Of fallen stone.

She was loved once

In the cratered world

Of grapes

And the marketplace,

Which is now

Only a river

Of dark roads

Far beneath stone.

I dig

With the spade of my words

For infinities

Of lost time

Which my soul remembers,

But which the earth

Long ago buried

From its gaze.

She haunts

With ancient memory

In a literature

Which my soul speaks

With its tongue.

Timelessly,

Her kiss enchants

With a horror

Unmatched by the banal pleasantries

Which make life,

Otherwise,

A carnival.

XIX. Ephemerides

You creep

Through vines

That consume you,

Gladly,

Like trials,

To reach my doorstep.

You who have brandished

Death's black eyes

Like a child's rattles.

Herculean feats

Allow the soul to witness

New depths;

And thus

Consume lovers

With greater appetites.

I possess

A great many deaths;

Thus,

I possess nothing.

And I am prepared

To embrace you

With the full extent

Of my blue skeleton.

What has led you here,

To me?

What has allowed you

To see

The underbelly of life?

That blue world

Cut open

By a black knife.

This is transformation—

That black dial

Which lingers,

Carving

In outer space.

Your inner mind

Struck by images;

This world

Bearing down upon you,

Carrying the pressures

That fashion

Precious stones.

You—

Most precious of all.

Lapis lazuli,

With the eyes of the jungle.

With a scent

Sweet as angel tears

Mingled

In a cauldron

Of fresh grapes.

You are the juice

And the wetness

I devour

On hot nights.

You are the child

And the suckling

Who laugh

And rejoice.

The world's words—

And thus a hubris—

To describe

What comes

To meet one

Who, through vatic hells,

Realizes

The pure image

Of the soul.

Now,

A woman

Of violent blue radiance,

Of extreme clarity,

Shining

In daylight.

Book Three, ταπείνωσις τῆς ψυχῆς Humility of the Soul

I.

You sleep facing the wall.

The memory of the glass of water upon the table

is now all that remains of our love.

The river of fates along which we walk,

where small children cry upon the embankments,

abandoned by their parents.

The horses devour the flowers of our lives without reflection.

You, who once dwelt within my mind, within my dream,

beloved, who were once bound to me,

are now in the wind, in the lash, in the stone;

ridiculously, a parakeet or a drop of water.

Smoke from the moon, which I can feel

yet cannot see with these eyes.

Gods conspiring; monkeys full of pity

laboring in rice fields, soothing the chaff.

Incense burning upon our faces;

butterfly marks upon our skin.

Masks from another age.

We summon the monsoon of our desires.

How it rains inside this little overcoat of the body;

how easily it is shed for the beloved,

called forth by the thunder of universal wills.

How easily we are refused when the hour is not right,

like a sapling-god or an impatient prince.

Warm ice within my shoes as I walk—

memories from hell.

Within the hollows of tree and stone

I reach for the sacred, ancestral dagger of life.

There dwells a great mother-serpent,

whose lips perish within the cherry blossom of my skin.

The dust of this world swirls around the veil of our souls.

Within lightning, within thunder, you were my beloved—

as your face was torn away toward the future,

quiet winds of Africa, or of Neptune.

Once we were the Horned Gate of Ebony.

Once we were the ivory through which worlds entered.

We passed naked through the veil of dreams

until I saw you in waking life.

Was it after the plague—or before?

Did the dream come first, or your memory?

The young white fish writhe like serpents

as I spear them and thrust them into my mouth.

The body of my death haunts the body of your death;

and yet both of us promise life.

When at last memories die,

the only thing we shall hear is what is,

like wind chimes upon a porch.

And we shall know that all things

are fashioned from dreams that came before.

Remember me, my soul, within the now-silent halls of stone

where we dreamed. That was history.

You won your maiden form for this body.

We were joined, wedded, at a festival of cherry blossoms

which my heart still mourns.

And there is no book to condemn forgetfulness.

Damn the mirage.

The tears of joy which adorn my otherwise shabby wool coat.

Summer burns hot, and I cannot strip away my skin

to pure nativity.

Upon the mountain road, a branch of wild thorns

and an angry orange blossom meet my face.

Mountain lions cross this pass,

while I seethe quietly within notebooks of dead skin.

Why would a lizard or a caterpillar lie to me?

To them I am only a stranger, someone wandering

through fields of gold.

They pay me no attention, except for their chittering,

which is a secret command understood only by my soul.

The mind is useful to know the plum

or to descend into the black dream of the poppy.

All the while, this body speaks a language

that is greeted by the beloved in ecstatic delight.

Her red hands upon me; a bliss that seems never-ending.

Moved by time, my tears fall into poetry.

I surrender my wings for bitter loves,

which drip like salt-plums into my lap as I bite into them.

When nothing else remains, the song remains.

The song that joins the full moon to the water lily.

Knowing this song, I will sing it

until my eyes water with earth's-blood.

I have watched the tree meditate upon sorrow.

And the long-dead wood of the chair.

Yet it remains animated by a strange light,

glowing from within displaced nectar.

Still—unfaded, I see the soul's hands.

How can I explain to you the snow-beauty,

or the purple robes which still wear fire

within the house of vision?

I see them. I know them.

The sharp eye of attention enters a secret house

where even the ant sings and the beloved whispers

an inhuman delight.

Time will not take us like an autumn village.

You and I, entwined like serpents in a bed of fire.

For now, I wander and count the hairs upon the coyote's face.

I scratch beneath his chin; he is calm,

and smiles with the delight of awakened life.

II.

Nature, in the early morning rain, is literally your body.

I caress the drops and think of you—

the woman forever broken and forever remade.

Cold as the sea, the shadow of the horse penetrated my body;

made me dance like the mad.

The smoke of my sweat drifted visibly,

like marks of the spirit into the black sound.

This little girl is not polished glass.

At war with herself, secretly, within her own body.

Who knows the words she speaks to herself

in the temple of night, and tells no one.

We cannot dream.

The moth approaches me, and my first impulse

is to drive it away with the back of my hand.

Who knows what it says with its little mouth—

warnings? omens?

As deeply as snow descends into the gray winter,

it resembles the storms of summer.

The sky is covered by a basin of darkness.

I seek sleep in a quiet refuge.

Nine days of sun gave birth to these mountains.

I sit and wait, counting stones upon the private abacus

of my beloved.

The air shimmers around the naked smooth stone

of ancient monuments.

Its bronze face strewn with women's kisses.

As I stand in the garden, times long past break into my mind.

As though they are summoned by the spirit

that resides within it.

A fragrant flood breaks over me,

surrounded by the young shoots of spring.

Dissolved, I whisper a hoarse sound,

which, within the body of my soul, is the shedding of a skin.

III.

The holy virgins dance within the body of the firefly

on a spring night.

As time passes, if I were to stay, I would watch them grow

into young women; perhaps, eventually, into distant green stars.

I will show you the heart of the wisteria.

She hides it within her favorite coat pockets,

marked by little words and honest phrases about her sorrows.

I loved you, yellow rose, roar of a waterfall.

I loved you in the disguise of a woman.

Ready to bloom, the whole earth was in upheaval.

I raised my cup, like a beggar, for a sprinkling

of the spirit of nature.

Naturally, a firefly settled upon its rim.

I did not understand. Now I do.

Secret impulses nourished the crystal spring of my longings.

My actions leap from me like a blue soul

in a secret orchestra.

Hidden strings trickle and resound

like stones within a river cave of clear pools.

The water there is the purest you have ever drunk.

This warm love ripples in the open bay.

The hearts here dance, naked and natural.

I saw the woman's wounds. She hid behind her finest mask.

What divine thought placed her beside me?

What purpose was given to me to learn?

Her salt tears gather and nourish the antlers of stags.

She is touched by the cry of the angler fish.

Her deepest thoughts are a sorrow and an ecstasy

known by dark waters.

Do they too, like us, like flowers,

naturally turn toward the light?

La Via dell’Incarnazione dell’Anima

Ardua via, sed thesaurus ipsa vita.

The way is steep, but the treasure is life itself.

Book One, Soul-vale

Invocation

The water is the soul That cools the fire Formidable Into form

Soul, which hovers above the body; descends into the tomb of the world — Whisper into me, so that I may reveal The light that bursts, aurally Over the flesh of the form.

First Aspect: Witness

I. Reception

Who on this natural road Will meet me.

I advance into nature Things call and are called forth.

The life I have passed through My two great loves Which like embers Have burned through me.

My soul — distilled Like blue lightning In the barrel of wine.

Wide fugue, through which I walk Smoking summers Winter nights by lamplight Beloveds, their nails in my back Like small crosses Who fade in the perennial lights of morning.

My soul moves Like stations through the desert. Abandoning all that I carry I listen to the twittering of birds And wait, peacefully For your golden-red reception.

II. The Garden of Fire

We meet in the garden Until your eyes of fire Break me.

In tatters, I gather blades of grass To sew the coat of my body.

Beloved who ripens, Your world I did not know, nor could I ever know. How many lashings stitched The mosaic of your blue-painted soul In impossible intimacies.

We come together Because you heard my silent cry Which brings winds to rain And infant turtles to waters and shores. I who was made of dew, Wet drops of a faint liqueur That set your tongue alight.

Great isle of love, Conquer me, Make me bold, Which makes me mad and one with you O vast Nature — Your kiss upon my breath, Lips, lungs, Erotic sacrum.

World, hot Upon my breath I taste the salt Of your blood And mingle With your kiss Of electric blue

III. Paradise of the Soul

The blue water is the fire descended. The consecration of moments into form.

Splinters of a watery moon — are our feeling; Blue-quicksilver of our desire. The red-fire passions of our sun Move the mortar of our worlds. Far off, at the station Is the god of Death Who grinds our secret watch.

For you are my dark and blue mirror Whose gates are my Paradise. The lover’s entrance Is our gateway into this world. Her touch Makes us real.

Until then, I am a specter That haunts the corridors Of a drifting time. Without my kisses upon your back, A godless slave am I — Whose lowness Is the drawn curtains Of a black line.

Who knows the mysteries Intertwined with my own? Who knows What knocks, far away In the black night-owl, who was once my woman, my lover? And the earth that growls with her death, Turning, brooding over her stripped bones?

Give me the spirit That flies. Like gears, turn. As light divides with the embryo And engenders souls.

If she has finished here as a woman, let her be light — Let her not go haunting the shadows of some lost cave of hell Where shards mark ancient tombs. Let her throw the flowers of my body Touched by hers Into the wind. Let her give life To the soft cradle Of butterfly hearts; The pebble of blood Of hummingbird wings.

Let her be the intermediary of spirits A Mercurius, a woman Of temporary shadows. If she must marry death Let it be so that she returns To breathe, with the red cheeks of summer’s poetry.

I depart, then, into solitudes. Weaving my own path through these wooded trails. Each poem is a prayer For the sanctified earth Upon which the soul of the world gazes and walks In the arms, the flesh, and the hair Of my native beloved.

I am in her wings Forever

IV. Hidden Commands

It is the work Of dwelling beneath Hidden commands.

For beneath history Lies a great diamond of learning;

And beneath the lovers’ kiss, A revelation of the soul.

We, Who came here To mark one another With erotic signs

And exchange the fire Of passions Like star systems.

I did not know you, For I did not know myself. Reaching Into the infernal cloak,

I found the infinities That bore your breast and arms Like fruit Upon a tree in perpetual flowering.

May we kiss And make war eternally,

With precision, With laughter.

Your soul Called to mine; And I came,

Bearing garlands Of olive branches At a Greek festival.

Coupling In a forest of fire, Beneath the fruit-laden moon,

Under the influence Of the barley drink, The destroyer of the mind.

I have tasted you — Pink, woman, And blue; Your androgynous soul.

The days and hours Explode against my face.

I reach out And seize your hand that blues

In the whirl Of departing bodies.

The air is thick With passings

And with threads Weaving convergences,

Like summons To which we submit.

V. The Stations of the Beloved

When you speak, Worlds rearrange themselves.

There is enough silence here To notice everything —

The brown pattern On a butterfly wing Resting on the fern Near the overflow of the rushing river After the rain.

She who is also Your face.

She moves suddenly:

An excuse, a journey, An inner reason,

And places herself Where she must be.

Like a tree before a convent, Or a word

Before a departure.

The necessity Of like things Preparing To draw close to one another.

Like you and I,

You and I Who meet

And exchange warmth, Like the dialogue Between trees And human beings.

Like a poet Who realizes That his beloved is the moon And reorganizes his entire life According to that knowledge.

The necessary life between us

Is the love That flows naturally

Through the labor of the soul, Through imminent times And deeply quieted By ancient histories.

We, students of Nature;

She who reveals What is hidden beneath things.

We slow ourselves From winds To simple currents of air

So that we may truly see.

This garden opens Like a flowering Within the knot of a tree,

Wordless, Within moss

That drinks the water And mingles Rain and earth.

Thus, Time continues To arrive.

We are cast From old things Into the new clarity Of experience. Stations Until now Unknown.

Second Aspect: Intercourse

VI. Mystery

Without restraint, the gods enter the clearing of our lives And take what they will. Leaving behind only stone.

But that — our spirit: Our spirit is in the surges And in the astonished gaze of the salamander Green azure of the dawn. We wander over rocks And kiss, like children Beneath the moonlight.

Our fingers, our toes, our desires, Our loves Always somewhat partially obscured to us.

What ends they have — we cannot know. They draw us forth Like a hidden and black summer Sparkling.

We venture through the pollen; The great coupling With our arms around us; Our lovers beside us. Chanting, fervor That we are like the crickets Who cry out in pleasure As darkness settles over The valley of our bones

VII. The Dark Woods

It is the worms that fatten the grease of the woods; Thick rains that flood the rich blood-boughs Of the breathing, black soil.

That make the trees stand, tall As guardians of the wood When temples and ruins have long Ceased.

It is these woods, where the soul wanders, Chattering, sometimes wailing, like a ghost Between — Hand to hand in the branches; in the beetles That sift wet leaves for flesh and bone.

You — spirit, thicken the air Like a swamp, you descend in ardors That are like the sweat of lovers.

This hot room, where we collide and die In ecstasies.

VIII. Like a Witch

Beloved, you who die And drown in elixirs of mud:

This world is a coven Around which we dance: The great black temple Of your ardors.

Laboring, sweating In the kiln of love. Like witches, we pray to the gods of the forest Who swirl around us In each fallen leaf and stone.

Above us, the blood moon sputters Pouring white laval fluid Upon your breast and womb.

We must, with our own blood Animate the world And restore to it force and thrust.

Together, we drink the life that is smeared across us With saliva and blood.

This world as we know it Is wet; Drenched with crystal rains.

I saw you in the garden, which was oblivion I gathered the cotton of your hair And thrust it into my mouth And it was from the orifice of Death That I was whole And I sang the song of wholeness That beat the blue boughs of the world together In a current of light.

IX. Song of Woman

Woman — give me your herb and spice, Give me the breast milk of the poem That you sang to the infant of the world In the navel of your body.

There is a light within me, that has turned about the dial of my flesh Like a serpent both black and white Which she needs to feed upon; Needs to survive.

Let me be the great sacrifice, as you are, salamander, And we sit together in the great covenant of time. Let me be the bones and blood of those who are to come And who come forth, shining in the light of day. Let yourself be young, beatific And within you, The great genius.

You will know the river, and the wine, You will know the body of the earth, which speaks through the glen and the forest trees. You will recognize them as your own flesh and blood And you will treat them as your kin, Your sacral child and brother.

Time, undistinguished. Time, immemorial. I sit upon the glen and am swallowed.

I carry it, like a crystal body, pierced by the wide blood of the star.

Let me drink your blood; Let yourself live within me, And I will utter your cry As I stroke the chameleon of all of nature, Who sits upon my knees And chants upon my bone-song.

X. Exchange

We who trade venison For life. We who sharpen the axe That fells the tree That breathes.

I sit in the woods, and in my breath Am swallowed By the mingling of life and death.

At enough distance, love causes buds to fruit. Up close, she burns, kills, incinerates.

At work, is the world To produce the diamond that cuts through life; That revives, soaks like bread The honey of the blood; Illuminates.

Life and death; death with life — And in the intercourse of the dance, Brief windows of absolute unity.

It is the distance between the hidden life — what is truly lived And the sacral black earth Upon which I sow sentences

That germinate, like thickets Of yellow buds In the mood of Nature.

XI. Nature’s Game

I have seen enough to know that the soul lives beneath a rock. She too is spirit; she loves to hide. She is genius, her myriad brown legs are like scales That creep across the musculature of the fungal underbelly.

She seeps and sips The blood-dew.

All around us, she leaves her mark. I know her in a thousand words; A thousand blood-stained handprints. A thousand drops of water That flow like rivers around me.

Unchanging; yet ever-changing. A thousand disguises, Like the black night of airless space.

And yet I know you best, like the underside of a mossy rock: A mysterious surprise Of dwellings within dwellings Held In the wet rains Of a silent forest morning.

Book Two, Scrutare l’oscurità della psiche che è l’anima del mondo nella forma della donna

We must be available To see the god In what is already Before us

The Red Woman of the World Soul

The red woman of the world soul Told me, by the Irish ruins, The secret that dissolved me Into the puffin or the lizard.

These names are stand-ins For the force at work through them — An approximation Of the nature of what they are.

She led me through the sun Down through the burning division In the wolf spider’s den Or the song of the hen.

I give you this — the cliffs and mountains Of the moors Sprayed with mist, by the churning, whipping seas.

This ocean, fermented by the entrancement of the stars. I sat on the cusp of dawn, for years, it seemed, And watched the shepherd’s charge Emerge from the cell of the amoeba.

This red woman Was possessed by an unknowing girl, Just as the girl possessed her. I wooed her in the shadow Of ancient castles And knights wandering in the wilderness, Searching for the grail — The elixir of life; The blue light that heals the blood.

The wounded knight, with poetic song And reason, upon my guitar — For loving her, The image of the World’s Soul.

For she was in, as she dispersed in my mind, The bison and the summer vale; As I reached before her, to consummate This passion of the art stirred She dissolved, like an apparition; A fata morgana Of my knight’s path.

These are the wounds which press down Upon minds of men As they sift the forest For the fire Which shines from the humblest abode.

I desired her, beautiful mask, And yet beneath her How many battles To unveil my eyes From the chittering speech Of the moss Or the caterpillar.

Aeons of flowers Past and to come. It is the eyes that wept Over the Patmos — It was the eyes That had not yet been purified So that they might see the grail.

Otherwise, these woods are emptied. The defeated night, laid by the stone cold ruins. The Irish, red woman, lost of her witch. Who drew me, such passions Such ire Toward her gaze.

To be melted, wordlessly. To worldlessly receive the vision. In measures of eclipses; Of ancient starlights past and veiled, Burning song into my dreams.

It was there, I stood upon the hill And through animal-time received the vision Of all eternity; The time of stone, the time of man; The time of the brush.

Not knowing the badger’s mind, I contemplated it forever; worked my poetry In the still of the imagination To bridge with him The song Deeper than human words Directly into the emotion that breathes, Cosmically, through all things.

Know this music, woman — The image inspired within me, The mask of the red woman Who treads dawn, with the river Of her ires. Dyed red Is her weariness, her frustration As she is born into this world of silence, death, and forgetting.

As I dreamed, the earth moved below me; the stars forged above — And these were both whispers. Jupiter-song, Saturn-song; The beacon of Pluto, stationed in the mist. Through blackness, shining, As the bird warbles And the river flows.

Where then, does my hand or mind end? Bathed, or starved, from their influence? Where then, is the wren severed from me Bathed in this same crucible of fire, Born from this same leaf-vine Of information?

And yet I speak with the end of these powers Reaching towards a dawn Which is an oblivion of unity. If such lights separate and divide us, Without the body There is no myself, nor the thrush.

No sacred mask of the red woman Which I wander To consummate. How then Could she show me The river

The Osirian Fragments Become Clear Song Through Profound Resurrection

I.

I clasped my arms About the hummingbird’s neck And I wept.

Do the birds have poets — High, useless song

II.

A beetle cries for its mother, loudly. I look into the eye of the horse And I see a pain without words.

It took me years to understand No one looks this deeply at the world, Nonetheless, Themselves.

III.

I sing, because it is the last thing to do. After life and death, the only thing is the song. Orpheus descends into hell — Is it boredom, love, Or the pure experience of the music

IV.

Life goes on, even after Odysseus’ return. What does Penelope do now, after longing? Worry about the dishes?

Persean nightmares About an ancient serpent, slain deep in sleep. Now he is nothing But a former soldier.

Medusa had a husband. He was a good man — His funeral was attended by some of us. After a fair number of years, He was simply Forgotten.

V.

I pick up a pile of dirt, like any other. And now there is a honeybee, trying to speak to me. Am I too near his beloved?

Have I struck a chord of fear, Deep in the privacy of his mind?

VI.

You, I, or anyone — losing their beloved. The familiarity Of whole forests Of solitude.

VII.

Things are at rest. Silhouettes dine on food, without light to illuminate them. Insects chatter loudly.

Everything is either awakened Or so deeply asleep That awakening is simply an idea.

VIII.

There is such a profound humility To one who has truly lost everything. With no one to impress, nothing to do, and no purpose He simply goes on his way.

Nature is not separate from him, Nor is he from it. Entire species, in this way, lose their utility.

The perfect, private beauty Of something utterly broken From the Wheel of Life and Death.

IX.

There was a time when the stars glimmered — uselessly. This is the origin of poetry. Labor and toil Are impossibilities.

Having looked in the eye of Death, Survival is less of a question Than what is possible In life.

X.

In the eye of the lizard, in the misery of the dog There is a sadness Of the fire trapped in Nature. Deeper than words can contain. Melancholy, depression, misery. It is pointless to reduce.

I have seen in the animal The cage and the fetters. The chain which the poet throws off, With the fire of Prometheus As he dies, Laughing.

XI.

How it feels To be the cyclops. Shirtless men in the streets, Begging.

If you do not understand The cruelty of this world I cannot call you the mad Dionysus Nor can I call you, yet, Truly a living soul.

XII.

As I look deeply into the eyes of the thing dying, I am looking into the eyes of the world. What are the dreams of the trees? I cannot know. I weep sapling tears. Blood of sap, From my eyes. The blood of this world.

I, like them, become a great sacrifice To the self that lies beneath us Seeping poetry Up through the cracks Of my kind.

XIII.

So this is purpose — To lift the veil so much, so deeply That the suffering of the fly Is of the gravest concern. My body of welts, My moth in my room:

There are too many cries Which I hear with ears Even deeper than my heart; That pound in nights Where I cannot sleep

As the stray cats Nestle themselves In alcoves.

XIV.

I have become the lowest; In doing so, have observed the highest light. I desperately wish To hear the words of the mollusc, put to poetry.

I would give, decades, centuries To the literacy of the soul.

There must be a book of the world, That a snail leaves, in a trail of its body. That a carrion bird leaves, In turning over the intestines Of the dead.

I know the meaning of the cross. The snail’s blood is all over me And I weep madly Like one possessed With the absolute bottom Of life

XV.

Give me the poem of Nature. And each line, The line of the swift, The line of the earthworm, The line of the badger.

Please — save a line for the bellflowers. How I would like to hear What they would speak to me With nothing to say But contemplation of being.

XVI.

Are you lonely, star? Do not tell me stone is dead. It will break me.

Now, fragile as I am, Even an errant wind Could snap my reed In two.

XVII.

I have drunk too much from life; Now the visions flow With the ease of one Whose mind is changed forever.

Without speed, without grace, I bend into the foliage; My mouth becomes like a thistle; My tongue is like a nameless, forgotten Ancient god Who requires no prayer.

XVIII.

This is how the dead walk. Silently, namelessly, Through fields of wheat.

This is the sound of the bone As it breaks, Underfoot.

Without a whisper, without an eye to lend The dawn moves forth By a higher command.

Play with the stars, like baubles. A dream-fantasy of being.

I have been out, slumbering, from beneath the tree. My thoughts, without a leash Wander high and far

To the goddess whose mouth Spoke, Spat The knees of the changeling That we call The caterpillar.

XIX.

I hung on the tree of the dead For far too long. And in my hanging I watched ghosts cross the bridge of time.

They carried coats; bags, Like immigrants.

The life of birds happens so far From our poverty That we cannot reach their song.

I saw the desperate refugee drown. For a while, there was concern, And then, Silence.

XX.

I must hear Only meaningless words.

Far away from here, upon the beach: An inlet — I skip stones, with nothing to do.

In these times I am terrified But soothed From the weight of being human, And thus, Having human things to do.

Surely, then This is the vocation Of poetry

XXI.

My tears are given To the plankton. I feed them to the seas With delicate fingers To the wide eyes Of infant fish.

My body; my arms, I give them to the wolves, To the thunder Of pigs.

My eyes, my soul Go to the waterlilies. To the violent wall Of red carnations Which absolve me:

What meaning is life If I cannot die into them Absolutely

XXII.

Having been torn, like Osiris, My Isis is the Great Mother. Knowing she will not leave me as this one person, I will taste what there is to taste, Smell what there is to smell

And love, with the weak, delicate breath I push, naturally From this flesh:

The breath that makes me dream; The gills that feed the trees —

And the body, which is nothing If not most like A plum Of transfiguration

XXIII.

I cannot stand Death That the peonies and the infant fox Are temporary Breath.

I reside On the veil Of the mother’s dark horse tears For her dead daughter.

I mourn With terrible anger At nothing Of one who is Unbearably, ferociously Alive

XXIV.

It catches in my throat — That everything is so beautiful That I cannot speak, I cannot breathe.

I don’t even know If it is worth Saying.

And if I were to say it, what? I cannot describe the coat of the warbler Which shines, yellow, like the flowers Or how the oldest pine Speaks audibly, in a language I don’t need to know To understand in the marrow of my bones.

Or that touching the smooth antlers of the stag Is like touching the heart of the ancient tree Which is even less than an ancestor to me, But the beating form Of the bone Of my very self and soul.

If I were to even say it, To find the audible poem, It would shatter me — Down to a place I don’t know if I would survive it.

XXV.

The world has worn me away Leaving only a smooth stone Through which I see

The successful poet Unifies the world in love

XXVI.

What is the untranslated speech of the wolf? Is this in syllables? What is the staccato of the syntax Of his breath?

I sit and listen As I will sit and listen To the moonchimes of the cicadas And the orchestra of frogs As they croak.

Can I know delight, by the sound they make? Can I know their dreams, by the length of the vowel That they utter; The consternation On the fox’s brow?

This is no mask — It is the depths of interiority Of the soul

XXVII.

Standing proudly after the storm, There is sweat upon my soul Indistinguishable from the tempest rains.

Upon the metal bell of my flower, I ring, Clear song

XXVIII.

Bunting — I can look at you, but I don’t know you at all. I can admire your coat of colors; I can examine your eyes; Try to find your being beneath you —

But I know nothing.

Morning sun has crested over the blue-green mountains Which smoke with water and mist. Beneath, the cows graze Like brown flecks In a golden stone’s grain

Like a seal’s eye In the grey waters of the northern isles There is something profoundly pure A grace of kindness, transcendent Yet utterly immanent Which beams down Into the beating form Of souls

XXIX.

The mountain bluebird loves to perch; Like a turquoise stone, she sings her song.

Within the deer is the spirit of nature; The owl’s eyes Ask questions of existence, Yet with a wise, inner knowingness.

Auroras spread Across a snow-streaked ground. The world is thinking deeply about something; I realize — It is the beauty of poetry

XXX.

I do not know; That I can find grace in not knowing Opens up the world to me.

Otters, seals, and flora In their interior integrity.

I want to know where the dove-bird flies For winter; Where it goes — what makes it sing With delight.

Perhaps one day, she will tell me Pursing her lips Like a lover That understands The honesty And desire of my question: To know what she knows, To feel what she feels

In order to celebrate Her private poetry In a respectful, hushed voice Of confidence

XXXI.

The marsh, in contemplation Makes a series of moves Through different time.

The whistles, the creeper plants: It pronounces a seething, in a private language.

Listen —

XXXII.

Imagination is our gift So that I might attempt to envision Even now, miles away What is The wren’s art

XXXIII.

I am nature’s soul That the body departs or arrives I come and go In the beetle’s arm

And I leave my song In the Whole Body That divides and recombines In endless, small fervors Of the copulations Of the caterpillar And his mistress, The soul-face Of the wind And the rain

XXXIV.

I was Orpheus By the world’s tree — It is a place: On a hill in the northeast.

I stood there And saw the cradle of the stars As a real place To lay the nest of my soul.

It was there That I bedded down By the horse graves And teased my beloved As the fireflies of summer-night Gathered.

We sang In a night that could not be night — An orange curtain that wept with gladness As the cheetahs slept in their pastures.

A night that could not be night In the wide body of witness, The ancestral watch Of these galactic stars

XXXV.

I met the mad poet; I loved him.

I knew his song was Untranslatable.

But I wanted to hear it better, So I tried.

Later I understood His native tongue Like skin, or like the baobab Was a symbol for something deeper, Far more ancient That we both implicitly Understood.

His song stood there, Beneath and upon his tongue And glistened in the light

Beyond words; Even, miraculously Beyond form

All while holding within it, Deeply, The gleaming flesh Of the eternal poem

The song Of beautiful love

XXXVI.

In the tower, I was already only standing among the flowers. In my anguish, they wrote to me And I signed my name In every dialect of the trees, the forests And their animal guardians.

These poems were always Nature themselves And the space of mediation That collapsed Between the eye of my mouth And them.

Now I breathe True fields of gold. And can no longer touch the violet. Why? Because the violet Is within me.

Entirely, within nature, I receive the soul Of both the fireflies and the night.

The lifetime work Is but play and inquiry. It is to hear the song Of the kingfisher, of the heron, Of the mouse — of the flower. It is to hear the song Of beauty And wonder

XXXVII.

I love the wagtail’s face. Her eyes gaze out at me With such limpid simplicity.

XXXVIII.

The beetle’s purple shine Contains within itself A whole sovereignty Of the birth of the sun

XXXIX.

In the eternally smiling eye Of the mad-woman

Is the same secret The poets know Intimately

Know this That the sacred is everywhere That that star That beats down upon you With a beatific touch Screams beloved And reveals the blue soul within you Red-yellow-white Twain whole swallows Of complete, enfleshed, breathing eternity

Foxgloves in the late afternoon light And the oil beetle Slow in the brush

This luminous, Intimately rearranged World

Beatrix

My Beatrix, in the light With the holes in the cellar doors of the earth as stigmata: With each seed of rose or wheat, The gravity of penetration In her carnal skin.

In the destruction of her breast; in springs and harvests fallow We weep the tears that seed the earth For life renewed.

Woman — my eye that has spotted you, Rejoiced you, rebelled you And desired you: you lumber, You gold That my fist, face, and phallus Love.

This is the ploughshare Of the entrance to earth’s hells. Many fallen Lucifers Seek the gold That is in the common cup Of the wood.

Before me, your hands rest In permanent penitence. You silent gape, Into fears, desires pour: That poets journey, and call you Psyche Even though you are the flesh of the earth.

And I touch you, you are warm and hard And yet you yield. Woman of the night, woman of Death. I can sniff your blood And penetrate you With the vigor Of one who is dead.

With a thousand knives, we turn over the wool Of your body. There I watched Greece, Babylon And the soma of your body fall To ravenous form. Lone knights Without carriages for their deeds Wander in wildernesses And find you, maiden Of salt.

We, here, in this ruin: Where you hold out the common wood For me to sip the water, the blood; the blue lake of your body. I take it; bathe in it, commingling And lusts there are laughably Sated.

Beatrix, green eyes of the beloved: This world launders your soul; Again and again you are transfigured To the greedy poet’s delight. I pursue you through sunset’s glen; Touch your majesty in the light that grazes the stalk, Blue inner cores Of union.

Image, vision, Into which I plunge. This earth Is a devil song — the vision of fire Through which we breathe; like reeds, Transmute the poetry of life into the great art.

This body, itself, A vessel for the beloved. I gazed into you, in the dream Which was also waking life And in unifying the two worlds, your breath spelled everywhere Upon the Garden of the World

Book Three, Sonnets to the Mysterious Goddess

Invocation

Indomina

Beauty’s breast — arise many times. Spring and spring again, From folds and crevasse Dark and deep.

Like a well drawn from veil we cannot see — So the beloved sings, Like a tiger, or a kiss on the cheek.

Grow bold in life; go where the body cannot keep. In wisened ways, we sojourn to Death’s sleep — But the next life, and the next — From crags dark and deep.

This song, unlike the next: The lover’s brow, a chorus, red, even green And upon her violet tongue, she whispers to me: Love, and love again; unabashed, without fear

As tombs befall and keep us near To the flute of life, which pours golden wine. Thus we sing the soul’s design: In many parts, assembled, we To join and rejoin life’s symphony.

Sonnets to the Goddess

Ypárchoun polloí trópoi na se gnoríseis

I.

The white dress of Mary Is as calm and still As the morning ocean waves Of blue-gray Which lap the shores Gently speaking

Through the family, Keeps on coming, Isis Arriving in many forms. Surely, she will have a good laugh About our forgettings.

Perhaps it is her greatest game, and amusement To drive poets mad Who seek her To remember

II.

Even now my breast quakes, Intimations of understanding. We who are felled from what is beyond our reach: Mortal hubris.

Some say the mad are closest to divinity. Danger is where they touch The hot iron of life.

There are places I cannot go in this body, Seeing that it is flesh and blood; The immortal powers that writhe Are within a clockwork time.

III.

Humbled, we lay our garlands before you. Do you speak? The rivers need sowing; The plum trees are damp With your moisture.

Plow-shares huff at the ground. Horses whinny. Something is amiss. And your white eyes, the cream of your blood Drip tears In the coming rain Now mingled with the black ground.

Will the child take? For a soul to speak There must be A number Of secret operations

IV.

I sleep, and I dream — Who is to say where these dreams are from? Who is to say where you are from: You who are in the frog’s throat And who gives the mountains their tall chest. We blast rocks from you, or kill the frog.

I have seen you angry, Perhaps not even truly mad. Your storms lash, with a frightening quality. With penitence, we climb up the hill of life Where you take everything from us.

May we end up old and wise; Know the fruits of your cherry tree — This heavy laden branch Full of the spirits of life

V.

Perhaps it is unwise, even foolish to seek you. Your powers in the breast Of every living thing.

Which path do I take? You who lay roads out before me Like a field of honeybees.

I know my task, like a limb or a lung Or a droplet of red blood. I dive into you; you give me body; you give me life.

Each one, a little firm Eros. A grain which moves in the silence of the dream Muttering to itself.

VI.

You are what is described as the gold. That the science seek — To bottle a raindrop, an ounce of blood, The collapsing burst of evening light.

A bit of stray blood upon your canvas, For Dionysos. He smears it about his body And declares the work finished.

But you, you put the finishing touches upon the tree, so he speaks his mind. You have designed the red veins of the eyes So they move and glimpse you.

Hands reach out and touch you And assume prostration. The god makes men weep; powers crouch in fear. Even coyotes approach warily.

With a glance of your hand, Planets in motion. Many look to you And describe your work; calling it truth.

I know better. You are the hand Who is within the art. You send me upon paths — Humble fool’s errant.

I brush the thistle; retrieve the ripened blackberry And break it against my lips. This is ecstasy. Do you notice? How she pours wine over your face and hands; Breaks gold over your mouth Like a beggar-god, Bursting at the seams Of your fleshly libations.

VII.

We must be bold, Knowing that the goddess rewards boldness.

Poets who declare their unabashed love; Lightning which breaks over the looming breasts of her mountains.

We are peaks before the storm, With courage to scream.

Live, live again. Die, be reborn again. Act now, and perhaps Return a swallow, a prince, Or best of all, a poet — Whom she sacrifices To become her mouthpiece.

Great Soul — you who stream in the blood rite: You who come to me in the dream as the woman I love. In so many words, Can you show me The path of paths? The reason beneath this cascading life Of suggestive forms?

That I have dreamed your hips As a dais of cliffs Is a clue. You hint me, And the words are simply Poetry.

May I read them, At the lip Of your wild servant: The animal god Whose breath haunts my eyes Which peer out, just beyond his gaze But entirely Under his command

VIII.

Gobble the sunset. She entreats — make love With the lover With your eyes.

You must touch her mouth And kiss her naked, hot back With one who is possessed.

She wants the animal god Together with her prayerful body.

We are taken And slammed back into the divine. The affects of her consummation Are trembling; The sensation of melting into the natural form Of the landscape.

For awhile, we do not exist. We remember, in order to forget. The cycle repeats.

All the while, she is the hit of bliss Which haunts the gold, Which leers playfully out of each glass of wine And breaking of the sun against body of the earth:

Draw near the star, the danger And see the border between life and death.

There, the only beggar walks. Ask him for directions, and he simply says, Here.

Upon the crest of the knife, we walk: Between the magic, the mystic The poetry, and the madness.

The hint of the word overwhelms the sensitive.

It is then he knows He is close to the goddess.

From the foliage, she leaps. Not simply like a muskrat, But rather, The muskrat herself.

Look deeply in his eye. You will see her speak In the silence.

I crave The golden light of the sun Which simultaneously Abolishes and nurtures My body. In this moment Is divine madness. The ecstasy Of the true orgasm Of her absolute, carnal union Which rises the soul to apparency.

Poetry — ye blessed. Ye who have eyes To see.

IX.

I have seen the ones you have driven mad Trying to be close to you.

They try to possess you, With words Or bodies.

The best I can hope to be Is one who sees you truly; Honors you thusly.

What does this mean? To lay the garland At the temple of Athene And to walk away Whistling a hymnal To myself; In this way, Always to you.

X.

You cannot help But be.

Like a badger, life from life We move, convinced, but stumbling. Children under Your sun.

Wise teacher, Innumerable fall and rise under you All of whom are your face.

What then does it mean to fall or rise? I look to the sun itself. On timescales long and short You perform the same practice Of transmutation.

I greet Death, your aspect As one of many steps On the way

XI.

Who am I to say it is wrong For you, the hawk, To eat you, yourself, the cat?

You use yourself up And we complain.

Old age, And all the rest.

You amble on. The lynx in the blue mountains, by the waterfall. We hope to capture your beauty And produce millions of paintings, photographs, portraits.

It is foolish, but truly, deeply Devotional.

Could you ever get tired of seeing your own face? Even if we look remotely the same The situation is endlessly new.

Time Is the subtle hue That blackens the blue-green Of the stone; Slightly inflects A prism of white Within its frame.

XII.

In the hawk’s eye I did not see what was human, But rather, What was at the depths of all life.

Feeling — subtle In the extreme, equatorial temperatures of Mother Nature’s body. With all the technology She has built To feel.

To connect life, blood Requires such immense measures of time. To stitch the design; to test it, To allow it to fail.

Time and time again, we rose and fell from you. And with persistence We rose again.

The experience that I have within you Is your eye. It is the quality of age and time And the throw of the body into life, By whatever romance of love.

You call beings together And in their beds Draw others forth — forever changed and recombined. Who is to say What supreme sense Calls the lover forth. All we know — is we feel her With such immensities.

Whole lives — forever changed.

Do we see you? It will be so If we can truly See ourselves

XIII.

Disguise within disguise — Each mask more guileful Than the last.

Laughingly, We tear open the present Of our lives.

The whole earth, a breathing heart Trying to read the book of your symbols.

What is beneath the last one? A presence of being. A felt quality Which is the essence The true character Of your life.

XIV. Heraclitus

Did you love him? The man who felt your breath, And wept?

Tears of love, tears of sadness, tears of joy. Who is to say; What more, at the bottom They are all, truly, the same.

A man in the wilderness who saw you, felt you, Knew you.

You let him live, in little pieces Which you feed to us — Those who are prepared To live alongside you And touch you within Our deepest sight And bones.

XV.

It is the poet who touches the moon of love with his words And who gently brings them down to earth With the mother who cradles his child.

This is the hymn of the wide open night Which we carry with us, forever.

Who is the poet, brave enough To go within himself And find the awe Of profound, absolute obliteration?

To this, I have nothing to compare. That we risk breaking apart Is that we risk madness.

But without the breaking This world cannot truly know: Beyond the mind, beyond ideas The felt sense Of the embodiment Of the goddess.

XVI.

You play a game with me — With the depths Of childlike fear.

There, naturally, intuitively I approached the mask With monstrous Compassion

XVII.

The descent into the world soul — this took us great time.

Each of us could not take the words At their word.

We had to descend, with the fire-lamp Of the spirit of the mind Deep into the spiral stair caves Of the body.

Lit, with true enchantment Of subjectivity.

About us Is the record Of the wild art Of the dissolution of man

In the face of The goddess.

We, all, The prophets, the poets Who in the belly of the hawk Bear our secrets hid; Her ancient whisper Through the eyes of the mind, dream; Imagination.

XVIII.

Goddess — your fierce grace: Love — which is within all of us, Within the animals, within the breath of the trees:

Fear of blood; courageous necessity of survival Even as you consume yourself You remain entranced Smiling, teary-eyed By the music.

You are the song that is the grace Of the elephant to the baby rhinoceros Whom you cradle, smiling, Peacefully On the verge of Death

Profection

Perception

Perception — is the still Through which we see Only after the Loss of all Losses Only then Can we pronounce Victory

Icarus, A Lyric Dialogue

Ὁ ἀστήρ ἥκει περιβεβλημένος ὁμοιότητι.

The star arrives clothed in likeness.

Daedalus:

My son, for you have fallen — fallen so far as to scrape the star — and in remove, in the shadow of the crest of the earth, where you wait, penitent. From your cage you wait; aeon and aeon again, for the remove to be lifted! For the return of the dying star that even now beats in your chest, bleats from the corner of your bloody eyes. What say you, son, whom I hear now only as in an abyss, only as in a dream!

Icarus:

Father, as I have known it, all was fire; now all is but shadow — in this field of visions, narrowed by my need. I thirst, I pine, I want, I wander: all in a field of shadows. I grasp for lights but cannot obtain; even as the sun shines narrow down upon my eyes, my face, my chest!

Daedalus:

It was as this, son — born as you were from the star, the spirit which kept you and held you hid. Now you descend to walk paths where mere whispers and intimations haunt you. Isles of sleeping and dreaming; woods of sunsets. You walk them, and they are all a bridge to the whispering goddess who chants, always hid! That you find her is that you find love.

Icarus:

It is my desire for wisdom, and wisdom alone, to lift this curse. Naught else will sate my blood. I have heard the song as it whispers in streams and brooks. It is beyond me, narrowed as I am into man from moonbeam. I sat upon the fields, croaked with the frogs, bleated with the sheep, and chuckled with the hen. I must be made and remade in energy; energy alone!

Daedalus:

Who knows how long we have wandered these rocks in search of salvation. This is love: it is the intimation of the erotic which destroys; renders this prison ineffectual. Where you were beaten, lashed by light, pecked at on the ridge of time — your flesh harvested, again and again, by the hungry sacrificial body of the sun.

Icarus:

And this was you, father, as it is mine now?

Daedalus:

Yes, it was — certainly. This was the shadow from which we approached the light: most clearly in the form of the beloved. She came to me in a dream; it was there I saw her, standing before me, with hands and hair like strawberries; in her arms a jug of milk. I drank it, and the taste was like wine. It made me mad and drunk with her love. I was sacrificed in that dream — I cannot understand it.

Icarus:

Yes, father, it was here. Upon this stone where we were laid, to gaze back up at the sun. It haunts me, these Luciferic wings, with which through my mind I can grasp her. I knew the imagination as I stood upon the Italian rock and dreamed of the beloved in chains. It was myself in chains! I stood in the summer of the world, replete with all its pleasures — and yet I saw, there, all men and women, all kind, enslaved. Bound to a state of life which was incomplete. To a mind which was fallow; lacking true generosity. It was then that I knew: the mind must be split open, like a star, to reveal what is hid beneath.

Daedalus:

It is the mad tradition of which Aeschylus is a son. Which made him such a noble warrior and a priest of the theatre. He showed man what it is to be bowed open; what it is for a branch to be split to reveal the paradise of the vein. We must see who we are at root; what we have become by the narrowing which has put the heat and light of the star into a perishing body. It is to see the immortal form of energy — the life which wakes the dreamer with the urgency of the real ember he holds in his heart and in his mind, which he sacrifices through the act of mating; the act of breathing; excreting fluid and waste.

Icarus:

By the cup, by the wandering — I was led through dreams. A dark corridor of dreams. I dreamt like a snake, like a mollusc, like a plant. And in those dreams I was revealed the dial of the mind, through which all things are hid and emerge through the field of vision. And in each birth they meant something different; they served a different purpose, and thus were held with a different color in the mind’s eye. At last I perceived the colorless light behind them all — the shiftless plant; the blood of the sun-fire which is the immortal water poured into each cast and dye; cooled into this world in apparent caste. It is that which is hid: the immortal life!

Daedalus:

It is the lover alone which is in our blood; which swims behind our field of vision. Keeping us, first, alive — fattening us like a sacrifice, a lamb, cattle upon the farm of the field of stars. The impenetrable force, the thirsting force which consumes us: that which we indelibly are and return to when the form has finished.

Icarus:

Why does the lover possess me so?

Daedalus:

She is the object of nature; she alone hides what is hid in the star, and is the fury of your hunger. In seeking her, you seek all of nature. The poet-hunter — to liberate the hidden energy within the star; within the man-plant who gazes out from aeons of transformation. There is the sacred gold, replete with the hidden life force energy. Each man, each star lusts with a total force toward the object of desire. Once obtained, the fire flits to a new locale, a new distance, a new horizon. That which man chases is the idolatry of the reunion with that which the object of desire represents: the immortality of the golden blood which drips in each ripe fruiting, each maiden, each warm embrace. It is the eternal memory of the cast from which we are fallen.

Icarus:

And like devils we fell into life — to haunt the intimations of the eternal in the garden of life. And yet here, the juice of the plum is so sweet; the nectar of the sky explodes with purple and orange hues; this elixir that we drink day and day with the breath. But is it enough, father! Is it truly enough — for one who lusts with the total union of the immortal beloved at heart! We must perish in the colorless light!

Daedalus:

Again and again to the still we travel, toward obliteration. Millions of little deaths, which we construct with the art of poetry and vision. The descent into the bowels of the cave to know obliteration by silence and deathly darkness. Hidden of light, the world is again revealed to us in the dream, in the mind. The daemon haunts the caves; through the light of his eyes alone he sees. This is the daemon we knew — that haunts, that stalks the eyelids of the stars. When we come into life, the light is buried within us, beneath us. We must go within; go deep, down into the annals of history. Lit by the torch of the gaze turned inwardly, we meet the beloved who shows us the cold, dark, scored gore of the heart. Beneath the hells and agonies lies the buried blue-gold of the stone. It was there that I met my soul that was at once the soul of the world. She was the impossible beauty; I beheld her within my mind — it was that she was the star of Imagination, seeded in my very body, blood, and geni.

Icarus:

As did the knights as they haunted the dark wood for a vision — for an apparition of the fairies, of the lady, of witch-magic. The woman who would come by the crystal pool; breathe life into him. Resurrect him from the mortal wound; the force which breathed through him. It was this very wound which was the breath of Nature: brief fruit of life! To grasp it and devour it is his charge. And it was the sun of the mind, upward toward which we swam, reaching toward the very heart and eye of the beloved incarnate in the heat of her blood! I saw her there, in the deepest, darkest light — which was the very ensouled breath of the sun upon the earth!

She had flesh, the star… she did.

Daedalus:

And it was that the whole world was ensouled, outside of utility. Without conquest or possibility, but a reed, a narrowing of energy, which sipped from itself and fled, flew, into the new child, bird, or stone. The record of stone is the record we read with that which is beneath the eyes. There is a time we do not know, cannot know — but rather feel, with the uncanny guide of the skin, which is our blood, which is our beloved, which is our hidden rhythm that reveals.

Icarus:

Father — where is this wisdom in life? It is as though I cannot see it! It is as though I am blind!

Daedalus:

It is outside of the realm of incarnation; it is prior to the flesh. To enflesh is to thirst, to devour; to know for the purposes of this incarnate body. This body is itself the prison, the prism — but it is the only way through which we can truly see, truly comprehend that which is the mind of the star as it comes to ripen in the flute of the body. The mind itself exceeds life. It finds the ideal; it finds life lacking. Everywhere we turn, dissatisfaction. The gale of the wind blows; within it is the shadow, the reflection, the dream of the immortal beloved. She haunts the ground of the earth — with it, each girl is her possibility, each girl is surely her! Each grove of trees is precisely here, in that it reveals the secret. In each whisper of nature the whole mystery might come to life. But it is precisely that we are obliterated. The mind is opened to infinities; we are then freed through the very vessel which was once the chains.

Icarus:

Alas! That I loved. That I stood at the foot of my bed, prayed, cried — for her ghost, for her mere shadow, for her reflection! Like a moon, I starved of my sun — that even I might see her, her gaze; feel her warm caress. The cold darks of life, through which I stumbled! Deprived of light — then I saw that through which I see, she might come to be. It is this still, Imagination, which forms her through me. I am the light which gazes out upon this plane of reality; I am this plant of the mind, through which the star is seeded. It is this very dream which is poetry, father. This I understand with utter clarity. And it is there that is the true gem, the true jewel of Nature. I look upon the bosom of her body with warm eyes which are the art of light; I sit within her body, illuminated. And it is from this call which produces the masterpiece of her union.

Daedalus:

That — the world soul, of this specific instance allied with eternity. The wide body of your youth, a whole field, a whole body of warm, heated stars blinking in communication. Swarms of bacterial community; organ motions. It is the wide network of being which is the flow of energy. And to be torn from your intimations of it is to see — to truly see. It is to be revealed: that where seeing is, in fact, at depth, feeling. The absolute sensation of the communion of participation.

Icarus:

That we are naught but participation — to rift and move the flow, each in our small measure: bricks in the immortal, heavenly house of the beloved of the World Soul. Each enamoured with our sacred beloved, her inner face, who comes to call in dreams. She beckons me into darkness and I follow, like a page, like one dictated by slumbers. I move; I go deeper into the dreams of darkness. Upon the dial and blade of the world and time I act! I move forces. I proceed in engaging the terrain of life. Upon her body I am like a piece in a chess game of the immortal actions of the soul. What is to be revealed to me is to be revealed; it is my charge to listen and learn. Always to listen and learn, with the openness of one who is emptied of presumptions of knowledge — a slate to be drawn and drawn again, in an endless accord, with her and her alone!

Daedalus:

That personal force is the force of all time — the force which moves the stars and seeds the trees. Each dandelion seed which flies, buffeted by the winds: a design of secret agency. She comes and she is hid within each mortal form — the immortality of the divine symmetry, the design of the true Ideal: closest to the movement toward that which is always moving forward. Innovating even from the chance of the pregnant mind, even from the chance which is the sexual encounter of the beloved of flesh and blood. It is there, entwined, the imagination which is the dream. Through her forms she moves us; thoughts come to call. It is a new age, my son — a new age of the mind: the mind which can receive the immortal instructions of the soul. And thus, emerge into conscious participation.

Icarus:

I have heard this voice. I have heard this whisper, this song. It is the song of being, the song of everything I am — untranslated, through the trees, through the birds, through the panther. It is each our song. Can I hear the dream of the world even as it is sleeping? When will it awake? When will it come to light — this mind, to the enlightenment of being? The missives of the World Soul? The great beloved?

Daedalus:

It will be when each awakens. When each emerges from the chrysalis of being and hears itself speaking to itself. It is the whisper of this new dimension of the mind, the ripening of the brain to interpret the song. It is the song that is always being played, the song that is always being sung, in the very construction of the body of the world itself, the very cosmic organization of the universe. The sacrum of the stars, their orbit; the colors of the planetary bodies which sing about them. Can we hear this song? Can we sit in silence and receive it? Through the animal body, through the plant body — while not being reduced to these forms? Can we hear the making, the Imagination, the divine image, beneath, before, and between the recursion of these thought-forms as they sing and collide and disperse in space and time? What such force makes the beloved’s beautiful symmetry? The streaming of her face, her golden hair, which enchants us to such divine madness and fervor as to move mountains — to simply glimpse her again? She who hides in small valley towns, in inns, on farms. She whose glory makes the might of kings and the world’s gold appear a shallow, misguided fashion!

Icarus:

I glimpsed her in the hands, arms, breast, and face of my beloved. She was first there in the angelic blue tears of her specific soul. This flesh, this girl — so mortal, so shallowed by time, so doomed! And yet an angel upon this earth. A child-angel grown into the warm chest of a woman, uncertain, swallowed by time. Distances! Distances to her soul, which beat in her chest; her horror at the corrosion! And yet where did she go! She fled into the cavities and vacancies of her own mind, to inhabit an inner space far from this degradation. And I understood her — I understood this. Being a poet, being a dreamer, being one who seeks the ideal beyond this abyss.

Daedalus:

And yet this abyss of time is all we have. And it was in her, even as she fled, that you glimpsed the immortal. Understand this! That in each mortal form there is the peripheral fragment of the divine — that shines and gleams outwardly, the goddess, the angel. That we fled from the colorless light is that it overwhelmed, blinded; that we stood in horrified fear at such apocalypse! Could you hear the choirs of the gods sing as the world ended? This is mortal love! This is the commonplace of the everyday. It is the knife of the minute as it carves down upon the second and shatters time toward the infinite. And we stand in the gape, the rippling, hollowed gape of the echoing tomb; hear the shattering reverberations of Death. We are in the tomb of time, having the experience of the obliterating light of the sun. And this alone lights our minds. We who swam from the green fuse into this moment. It is the blue lightning; the electricity. Within a great machine we awakened; screamed a primordial scream of something more like the krill, or the long extinct beast hid far beneath an avalanche of ice and stone. We are forgotten but through the flesh which remembers us. And the beloved who fled life is the one who is overwhelmed by such force. What are fathers, mothers, children, days, lives, in the face of this massive inquisition! We move into it like a procession of the sublime murdered!

Icarus:

I fell into it. Shattered like a fever, awakened like an infant to the light which blinded me; even then I stood in fear of the mind and the immortal powers which birthed it. It was as though I was a missive, myself a quest, myself something to be done, like a cosmic mark smeared across this earth. That I was to crash my own blood in an act upon this earth and bring to fruiting bear certain actions in her name, in her favor. That I was a force and action within the larger divinations of the goddess; that I was her messenger, a carrier of some burden that I and I alone could carry; that there was an energy and force within me that I alone was ripe enough to fulfill.

Daedalus:

And so we descend, my son — descend into the temple of the world to perform actions. Uncertain and horrified as we are as to what they are, and how little we know of them, how they come to crest and form. Disgusted by the dung beetle and the disguise that we wear. The mask of the flesh. The shame of the hidden star! The clothed sex, the orgiastic bliss of the fire which we wear like coats — like ravens upon the tomb of this world that we haunt; of stone, of terrors extinguished by the fear of time; great acts never committed! Those who shied away from life, who refused the burden, the call, the diamond which was within them — the great pressure through which they were forged — thrown out and away, as though it were not a true calling, a true calling of the soul.

Icarus:

It was my calling, father, as it was yours. And I was called into the world — as were you, through you, through the very husk and skin of your body, to do with what was left of you. A song left unsung, a bit of language. An information passed through me to make me fit for my endeavor. A sacrifice, as you were sacrificed, to the eye of the sun which works down through us in the bread and blood we eat, the air we smell and breathe. What is this secret I know, I feel, pounding in my flesh, down through the center of the earth, seeping, breathing, in the very air which reverberates in currents I can see, warbling past my eyes!

Daedalus:

It is the song that must be sung of the world soul. She who must bring herself to bear. And she, through us, becomes the angelic body of the real. Upon each corroded flower and rotted corpse she grows again. And it is the poetic genius, Imagination, through which she is born. The eye of the poet in love.

Icarus:

I touched her hands, her face, her body. I swaddled her swamp; I found within even her crocodile the divine. It was then I understood: nothing can be excluded. For each aspect of her life is a functional direction of the eternal — a sign that we do not understand, perhaps cannot ever understand. Because the movement of time moves ever forth; therein the sign shifts in distance, in memory, in the unfolding of events hence. That we submit ourselves to them; follow the traces and tracks of the divine in the beloved’s call, like a spectral vision of a face in the dark woods. Upon her tracks I am lustful, sensuous, rabid even — for a sign, for a spark of the divine which is the body of poetry.

Daedalus:

It is this flash of light that we know simultaneously as the body and as deeper than the body — the form that transmits the ideal, the glimpse of the very fluid which ties our soul to the soul of the world. Each of us with a specific hidden vision of the eternal which must be pronounced. This is the art; this is the profound process of elucidation, of being come to light. Did Homer not first understand the goddesses whispering to the heroes as the eye of the mind awakening? That the self of Odysseus was true? That he mourned and agonized, ranted and raved, like Achilles? That this world is coming into form? And did not Shelley stand upon the precipice of the mad fervor of machines and the fall of all belief and declare: what is life? This was the birth of the individual! And we stand upon it with the very mind that tips from oblivions into oblivion. The mind which is the flash of genius — the mind which is the ripening of the light!

Icarus:

It is this brief, miraculous moment of millennia. How many had to die, to fruit, to become trees, to leaden and laden this earth ground — from child to death, old age, sickness. Questions only the Sphinx can answer! Wandering Oedipal soldiers, to the moment of the spark. In thousands of years is the record of all we have, the sliver of all we claim to know. The library of the world, which at any moment could go up in ashes and flame. It is the library of sight, father — this I know. The library of the sight of the mind, the one great mind which has toiled and bred, littered the fields and grew from flowering forms, time and time again, over and over again — that which I am! That from which I am born and spread, now and henceforth. That which I feed, even as I see it before me, breathing like a great lung, hovering over the abyss of the earth like an apparition — a fixture of divine, immortal, terrifying power — even like an eclipse, blocking out the sun!

Daedalus:

It is fruitless to count the numbers, the names, to bring to bear the years. The image is so massive, so total, so fixed, and yet so fluid in what is to come. And the genius is a station — yes, a station of the powers. A station which reveals the opening precipice of the mind: what is now, what is to be, what is to come. He stands upon the precipice in the gale-force winds, in the tempest of all time, in the tempest of cosmic history — and bellows the lightning; bleeds the juice of the air in his mouth; swallows the nectar and elixir of his time and proclaims all time! This is prophecy! And as such, the juice and fruit from the mind trickles out in measures of awakening — slow, angelic measures, glacial measures — of the wings of light taking flight in this world. From the lowest, most seeded form: slugs, stone, mud, and clay — rises man from the hidden seed and sparkling flicker of the light, shot down into twisting information’s form. And he proclaims divinity, immortality! These, truly, are the words of the star!

Icarus:

And the mind must turn further — the dial must turn further, father. It was from you to me, as it is from myself to what is next. The dial of genius must turn further, more maddening, until the star is reunited with this singular mind. That each mind is unified within and under the star in an immortal bliss which is only known as presence! Imminence! Long have we waited; long has genius been inscribed into the books which we now hold, letters carved into stone and root and tree. And the genius then is the alighting of the blue branches of the great tree of life, which stretches from dawn to dawn, galaxy to galaxy! That we know the word of the divine in the goddess beyond sight, out beyond Saturn. The goddess beyond that which we can see, feel, and touch. She speaks and breathes through us. Can the mind receive? In fear of life, in fear of death, in fear of light — wind, water, rain, the bodies of the chickens and fish we ingest, the cattle, the holy grains and corn, the whole fields of the fruiting body — can this animal glimpse the immortal? Can he hear the goddess? She speaks even now! We, upon four feet, two feet; by stem, stalked to this earth — we do not look up or down. With this mind, we look within. And when we look, we do not see — naught but a dark, opaque body of mysteries. But we hear the ancient screams of immortality, that twist through us, writhing like a serpent! Yes, she speaks, father! She speaks and tells me of the day, the time to come, the immortal day — the immortal dawn in which the sun, the star, crests the body of light and becomes reunified in vision! It is this day of poetry: in which the goddess speaks clearly through all things — in the mind that can see, in the mind that can truly see.

Daedalus:

This is the sun, my child. Close your eyes. To this world we are revealed by all that we are, all that is within us that we surmount in this life — that we are forever seeded in the very flesh and body of this earth and by the powers that are immortal, greater than this temporary form. This is the sun in the light of the mind, grown to fattening ripeness, capable of spilling the electric blue-gold blood, the juice of the immortal stars — their very soul, hearth, and life. This is the solar warmth which spills into all things. That we become capable of seeing. That we become capable of works beyond measure, works and life which unify the singing gape of time, that bring to bear the poetic ideal of immortality. Live upon this earth. In the very flesh and body. Learn to see; as such, learn to inhabit and incarnate the god-light of the divine. She speaks, sings, in your reverberating flesh. She is the color of your song.

# 2\. Transfiguration: A Poem in Four Works <!--toc:2-transfiguration-a-poem-in-four-works-->

* * *

# Book Two: Der Sturm vor dem letzten Schrecken <!--toc:book-two-der-sturm-vor-dem-letzten-schrecken-->
Text

[…]

clearing of darkened bodies.
This hospital of the withered, stone flute of the body:
Pouring black tar into the yellow rivers
Which feed the angry core of inflamed blood;
Whetting the harvest vein.

Underworldly,
Day breaking

[…]

As explosions were rent
By nameless elements.
These devices haunting wildernesses
On haunches,
Exchanging blood like bread and cigarettes;
Electricity.

The moon's kiss, in a false night
Vaporous rays
Of darkness

Let water’s thirst neither bend nor break
The reeds, the lilies, the riverbank of stone;
Let the sun seep low, barely scraping the reservoir
Of the screaming brain,
Starved of the fat of gushing blood.

This is spring — the untarnished
Gown of the ripening bud
About

[…]

the black ridge.

The howl of birth, wandering
With nothing but black eyes.
Hungering
Within a vulnerable body.

Worlds overturn themselves in the skin;
Yawning, heat breaks apart
Before the devouring maw
Of the abyss.

This cool, departing snow
Against orange lampglow.

III.

Isles cast into graven shadow
Where

[…]

lip, a veil
Before the devoured one.

Fallen at the gulf; stripped bare,
Pressing feet and hands into the escaping, cold fossil:
A wailing wind
Against unfeeling, guttered core.

Given over
To the dark wandering.

Sowing

Seasons till the earth
With ginger, silent passing.
Barely scraping the flesh of the

[…]

copulate awkwardly upon the leaves
As autumn glows like a distant star,
Driving the plow of toils
Far from the warm hearth.

Here we are gathered, around the embers
Warming our blue limbs. Firelight, at last
A meek mask
Of passions.
Quartered in our private chambers
As death descends, nameless

[…]

lunar powers.

Dust of the bones, at last
Offers us the scope of our deeds
That burn and fade without reproach or memory.

Hidden within the earth is

[…]

Elias / Love: A Diptych (5/31/26 12:31 AM EST) (2026-05-31; formerly entry P-elias-love-a-diptych-5-31-26-12-31-am-est-4bef5773)

> *Audit note (2026-10-19): this work was 75.0% present in this

[…]

curses.

Do we not all become faceless
In the purple autumn? Who calls for the felled trees
Sitting in gloom, truly without thoughts
In the fog of dead ages
Lit only by the fires of passing kingships

[…]

long war; the scarred stone —
Assyria, the mutilated goddesses; their marble floors.

It was a bird in the rose garden
That pricked you with its beak —
Nostrils flaring like barbed wires.
This time, a poison, starved
In the empty charade
Of the abandoned agora; the dry stone bowl
Before which doves sufficed to blood.
We hungered, in the bleak hours
Which now remark, meaninglessly.

We stood upon the arch,
Watching fires flame their lurid smoke
As devils sank their teeth
Into the godstone. Your trembling
Riddled with the chittering
Chill

[…]

war and feigned difference
Amble on in a different language.
Forgotten threshes and hummingbirds
Glistening silently, still
In the green rivers of our wild youth.
Unleaving.

Our nature has brought us together
As love hungers in the flesh of the soul of this world;
As binds all that was

[…]

reeds —
Whose life, like ours
Is a precious, whole immortality
Springing aloud
From the black fist of the earth.

We are not steel, nor the taut wire
Pulled over this great return. There is no defiance.
Wordless, before the river


---

## Enfolded: The World Soul / Bleu d'âme (2026-06-30; formerly entry BK-WORLDSOUL) <!--toc:enfolded-the-world-soul-bleu-d-ame-2026-06-30-formerly-entry-bk-worldsoul-->
> *Audit note (2026-10-19): this work was 95.3% present in this entry at passage level and has been enfolded here. Passages not otherwise present are reproduced below; ellipses […] mark already-present text.*

us is a door

Lingering; shimmering

With a glow which seems impossible.

We are the eyes that watch,

Gazing over lizards, who bask —

Sunning their ancient skin before obliteration

Upon the yolk of the earth.

Birth gives us this marrow;

This golden sap of blood

Which slowly dissolves the memory

[…]

endlessly

With your entrances and departures.

IV.

Such immense solitudes,

Where graves and the nights stretch outward

Like infinite tombs:

Portals to blacknesses which girls know nothing about.

The one who has been to hells; had his eyes cut, his arms slashed

And wallowed in the blood that the snake gave

To the great grandmother.

There are no coffins for seers.

They burn up in catacombs

And haunt the etheric space

Where poetry shines down

Into the minds of the prophètes-condamnés

Part III, Witness

I. Sun descent

This golden-brown light

Flits from the stars

Down into the burrows

Of green

There is a deep beauty which sings

In the still-presence

Of the hot air

Like a suspended time;

In it, we bathe:

In the golden flesh

Of the shade

Of the temple of the soul.

Nature, like a cast

That the molten blood, pours

In divine, quiet measures

Of light from ancient source.

This world — a veil of beauty

Where sun seeps, like a hiding child

Through the softly shaking leaves

Of the trees —

Little girl, you made your nest

In the breast-arms of Nature

Like the bluebird —

Your song, this world’s song,

This golden nectar song

I sing

II. The Blackness of The Seer

Until my friend Death eventually makes the same demands

I make upon you in living.

We must have visions, and visions are costly. They demand all of us,

That we are shattered on the rocks of Time, and reveal the precious gems
hid within.

Casting off the coat of your body

To dance in the mysteries.

And perhaps, one day

The world will wake up to it, en masse

The dreamer beneath all dreams.

For now, we descend into the soul;

Fornicate with the nameless powers

That speak in the breach between this mortal world of shades and forms.

Those who live closest to the vision

Live on the threshold of the knife of Death.

III.

We burst

And scream

On Eleusinian, black hearses

Aweigh, light

With prophecy

Dandelion seeds on the wind

Of fire’s fury:

I breathe the daemonic drink

Which fashions your nightmares

And allows me to speak with the deepest utterances

Of guttural hells:

The diamond light of truths

Spat from the mouths of the damned,

All before me

In the great well of the dead

Cursing the sun

Beneath their watery graves

Of blue blood

IV. Roses of the Damned:

Junk-girl, with your eyes of death, loitering until this sun takes you

In the slow obliteration of the cast of this flesh

Chaud-condamnés — your world, your wine

Your child

And the songs we sing to prevent your facing oblivion:

Little girl, wide eyes, that you live, certainly,

No more than a hot vein, drinking. We cannot give you a name.

You are going from nowhere, and came from less:

Out from the provinces, you with your milk pail and broken teeth:

You, girl of death, in the slum of this world

You kiss and it means nothing: you speak and it means less —

I sorrow, for that you hide

The open wound, bleeding everywhere upon your face.

Have you read wounds? We speak and you read your wound

In the mirror of my words. Never again,

Among you — beer-drunk follies

Of the collapsed

Upon the pyre of the dead

V. The Murdered

Your soft body

Subjected to the whips of violence

You, the penitence-object for mens’ souls.

I saw you on the London streets, a pauper,

Pushing a carriage in the rain, attempting to hush your starved child

Embarrassed, humiliated

By the violence this world has wrought.

I see now, your redemption.

I saw you, drunk, raving, homeless

Stripped of your clothes

For the pleasures you must forget,

Pleasures never-yours.

X. For Mary Shelley

You who became woman, human, genius

In relational loving; education

In the house of a great man and a great woman —

You are the lodestar of the coming fate

Of womankind. For you to rise

Is proof that they may rise

In kind

The Black Song of the Bottom of Hells

Raped woman, in your abyss

I found the golden arms of heaven

Your sallow, broken body

Pressed against mine

In the dying act of your child.

Come near, the tears

Of the woman cornered by murders

Violences she may never speak.

It is this darkness, of your mind

Which haunts the crags, the cliffs, the nights

And the animals hear

Your pain, your fear, your sadness

I live in your dying body, as you live in mine

And the whale bone

Is the song

Of my music

This is your black song

Sung with the eyes

Of one who sees

With the unrelenting passion

Of the avenged

The one who loves you

The one whose tears of blood

Seed this earth

For your new tomorrows

For your birth

From these ashes

Of hell

Part IV, Nature and Dissolution

The Red Woman of the World Soul

The red


---

## Additional passages / variants — from substack:davidbussellarchive: Oars: A Poem in Three Movements (2026-06-04) <!--toc:additional-passages-variants-from-substack-davidbussellarchive-oars-a-poem-in-th-->
> *Audit note (2026-10-19): the passages below occur in this source but were not found elsewhere in the archive; appended so that the source is fully represented. Ellipses […] mark where already-present text was skipped.*

dreams,
leaps through the veil
toward the wet blue
of her desperate tears.

Light turns through the diamond of the trees,
peers into the narrow well of his mind —
the membrane of the pulsing, pink organ.

Shadow and stone
are the memory of the body:
shellshocked; inherited by

[…]

delicate insides.

This world’s affairs are a passage
Of the blood. It whispers in noonday and nights
Of tonality;
Heating and cooling in measures of passionate speech.

So do the ancients flee, away to stone;
While the new beings jump from cocoons
Like false tombs;
Rise, with fangs
To


---

## Additional passages / variants — from substack:davidbussellarchive: Ducklings in the Glade (2026-06-05) <!--toc:additional-passages-variants-from-substack-davidbussellarchive-ducklings-in-the--->
> *Audit note (2026-10-19): the passages below occur in this source but were not found elsewhere in the archive; appended so that the source is fully represented. Ellipses […] mark where already-present text was skipped.*

thrash lightning; billow
Speaking to the whispering fire
Guttural, like an inferno.
All that we have forgotten
Moves in a pattern of the stars
Descending in a dial of light
Through the angry clouds.

The ducklings wail and chatter
In the rocking boat of life and death. The mother’s wing


---

## Additional passages / variants — from substack:davidbussellarchive: Shade and Shadow: Two Poems (2026-06-08) <!--toc:additional-passages-variants-from-substack-davidbussellarchive-shade-and-shadow--->
> *Audit note (2026-10-19): the passages below occur in this source but were not found elsewhere in the archive; appended so that the source is fully represented. Ellipses […] mark where already-present text was skipped.*

towards me
Tongues of unspoken fire

Peering beyond our bed
Into privacies of feeling.

Let these suns rise and veil in oblivions of space.
In blacknesses, plot -- vast astral shadows
Moving enslaved flesh
In the chambers below.

Let us war in the heat: to hell, let the rest


---

## Additional passages / variants — from substack:davidbussellarchive: Black Idyls in White Vein (2026-06-02) <!--toc:additional-passages-variants-from-substack-davidbussellarchive-black-idyls-in-wh-->
> *Audit note (2026-10-19): the passages below occur in this source but were not found elsewhere in the archive; appended so that the source is fully represented. Ellipses […] mark where already-present text was skipped.*

of night.
Breathing abyss, filling lungs and arms
With nostril-lightning;
Blood-awakening.

Like a great surgery, breathing terror into bones;
Sewing wet fluid
Into the cave of the body.

So we are sealed in this great room with death
Who draws the curtains upon this nightshade of body

[…]

mind.

I saw beneath the veil — the desert before us.
Haunted plains of wind and water,
Bellowing force — sightless terrors
Of movement.

Possessed, the night was gutted
As explosions were rent
By nameless elements.
These devices haunting wildernesses
On haunches,
Exchanging blood like bread and cigarettes;
Electricity.

The moon's kiss, in a false night
Vaporous rays
Of darkness

From the shade of the cloud, beneath the sun, the ragweed languishes;
In this starvation is nature’s war. The gun butt jammed
In the hostage’s throat;
The low creek
Wherein seeps the


---

## Additional passages / variants — from substack:davidbussellarchive: Succubus (2026-06-08) <!--toc:additional-passages-variants-from-substack-davidbussellarchive-succubus-2026-06--->
> *Audit note (2026-10-19): the passages below occur in this source but were not found elsewhere in the archive; appended so that the source is fully represented. Ellipses […] mark where already-present text was skipped.*

Thoughtless, unfeeling nature
Chasing blood:
In a half breath
Eternally forgotten