Water is the soul That cools the fire Dread-like Into form

Soul, which hovers over the body; descends into world’s tomb — Whisper into me, so I can reveal The light that breaks, aurally Over the flesh of the form.

And there, I saw the great beast, The fire within the stone And I grasped it: And its talons wrangled my soul; There, I became one with the angel Of the World's Soul

I. Reception

Who on this natural road Will meet me.

I step out into nature And like a vision Things call and are called forth.

My soul vibrates with a certain quality. The life I have moved through My two great loves Which like embers Have burned through me.

My soul — distilled With a certain quality Like blue lightning In the barrel of wine.

Mysteries seep with age And combine delicate qualities Which are unspeakable But only through experience Design.

Wide fugue, through which I walk Smoking summers Lamplit winter nights Beloveds, with their nails in my back Like little crosses Who fade in perennial morning lights.

My soul moves Like stations through the wilderness. Relinquishing all that I carry Or have ever carried I listen to the twittering bird-song And await, peacefully Your golden-red reception.

II. Otherworld

The beloved moves As nature moves With the soul of the mind.

That we change and are changed Is that we deepen in the blue Beyond worlds.

III. The Garden of Fire

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

In tatters, I pick up blades of grass To stitch the coat of my body.

Frantically, souls swirl And intercourse this world.

Beloved ripening, Your world I never knew, nor could ever know. How many lashings stitched The mosaic of your blue painted soul In impossible privacies That escape language.

We come together Because you heard my silent cry Which brings winds to rain And child-turtles to waters and shores. I who was made of dew, Wet drops of faint liquor Which spark your tongue.

Grand isle of love, Conquer me, Make me bold, Your precious drink Which I drink to the last drop Which makes me mad and one with you O wide Nature — Your kiss upon my breath, Lips, lungs, Erotic sacrum.

Tangle me in your vines And birth my erotic Stupor.

An orgasm Erupts From my soul And touches my throat and genitals. The heat Breaks my wound And spills My hot seed In your ovum.

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

IV. Paradise of the Soul

The blue water is the fire descended. Soul attributes of corporeal light; The consecration of moments in form.

This is the marriage of the flesh In consummation.

Slivers of a watery moon — are our feeling; Blue-quicksilver of our desire. Fiery red passions of our sun Move the mortar of our worlds. Far, in the station Is the god of Death Who grinds our secret watch.

Through me, all light divine As you are my dark, blue mirror Whose gates are my Paradise. The lover’s entrance Are our gates to this world. Her touch Makes us real.

Until then, I am a specter Which haunts the halls 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.

Star, lonely, Who has dropped to your knees And unfurled your gifts before my body. I, who stand inwardly, watching As you whip the world past In sacral designs.

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 dirt which growls with her death, Churning, mulling over her stripped bones?

Give me the spirit That flies In each moment’s incremental design. Like gears, churn In the sacred machine. As light sects with the embryo And breeds souls.

This seed is the water Which we work with hands Threadbare with woes; speaking with silent passions.

If she is done here as a woman, let her be light — Not to haunt the shadows of some lost cave of hell Where potsherd mark ancient graves. Let her toss the flowers of my body Touched with hers In the wind. Let her give life To the soft cradle Of butterfly hearts; The blood-pebble Of hummingbird wings.

Let her be the go between of the spirits A Mercurius, a woman Of temporary shades. If she must marry death Let it be so that she returns To breathe, with red cheeks of summer’s poetry — Such measures of light.

I go, then, in solitudes. Weaving my own way through these wooded paths. Each poem is a prayer For the sanctified ground Upon which the world’s soul gazes and walks In the arms, flesh, and hair — too Of my native beloved.

I am in her wings Evermore

V. Hidden Commands

It is the work Of dwelling beneath changing circumstances;

It is the work Of dwelling beneath Hidden commands.

For beneath history There 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.

Each of us With our own great sphere of gravity—

Let us call it The art Of necessary egoism.

Each of us, Stripped naked to the soul,

Is an endless river of delights; Dream impressions.

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 an ever-flowering tree.

May we kiss And wage war eternally,

With precision, With laughter.

Your soul Called to mine; And I came,

Bearing garlands Of olive branches At a Greek festival.

Mating In a forest of fire, Beneath the fruit-bearing moon,

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

I have tasted you—

An impossible taste, Which I can describe only As pink, woman,

And blue; Your androgynous soul.

What would we be If we cast off these fetters?

Nothing.

What would we be If I kissed your dark bruise That no one can see?

If I reached Into your tongue

And drew forth the phantom That possesses you With fears of death?

Longing.

Days and hours Explode against my face.

I am the infernal thing That twists

Within the womb of history, Even as the die is cast.

I reach out And seize your bluing hand

Within the whirl Of departing bodies.

The air is thick With passings

And with threads Drawing convergences,

Like summons We obey Without fully understanding Their hidden consequences.

VI. The Stations of the Beloved

The air is your mouth; Your lips are the seas.

Your hair Is the golden light Of the stars.

When you speak, Worlds rearrange themselves.

By this I mean— The stations of the beloved.

There is enough silence here To notice everything—

The brown pattern Upon a butterfly wing Resting on the fern Beside the rushing river's overflow After the rain.

She who is also Your face.

She moves suddenly:

An excuse, a journey, An inward reason,

And places herself Where she must be.

Like a tree before a convent, Or a word

Before a departure.

The hidden secret of nature Lies in the necessity Of like things,

Preparing To draw near one another.

Like you and I,

As it shall be, And as it has always been, For time immemorial.

You and I Who meet

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

Like a poet Who realizes His beloved is the moon And rearranges 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 times imminent And deeply quieted By ancient histories.

We, students of Nature;

She who reveals Bright lights And great intelligences 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.

The weight and song of the soul Shift;

The balance and scale of the world Respond in turn.

We are thrown From old things, From old worlds,

Into the bright newness Of experience,

Born From shifts Within the phases Of the light of the soul;

Stations Hitherto Unknown And unexplored.

VII. Mystery

Without remove, the gods enter the clearing of our lives And take what we will. We are sacramental, holy ghosts Which linger over this world’s affairs — Leaving behind only stone.

But that — our spirit: Our spirit is in the thrusts And in the astonished gaze of the green azure Salamander of the dawn. We amble over rocks And kiss, like children Over moonlight.

We supper, here. In this beautiful mystery. Our fingers, our toes, our longings, Our loves Always somewhat partially obscured to us.

What ends they have — we cannot know. They drag us forth Like a hidden, black summer Sparkling In a suspended time.

We venture through the pollen; The great coupling With our arms about us; Our lovers besides. Chanting, fervor That we are like the crickets Who scream in pleasure As dark settles over The valley of our bones

VIII. The Dark Woods

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

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

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

You — spirit, thicken the air Like a swamp, you descend in ardors Which is like the lovers’ sweat.

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

IX. Witchlike

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 ardours.

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

Chant, enchantment: And break this spell Of times rotted, corroded Into the flat dial of slavery.

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

This is the dance which seeds the death Of stone, no longer beatific, Aeons of dead creation Rotting in the tomb.

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

The beauty which fills your eyes; The pink frills of your cheeks; the young, warm fate Upon your bones.

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

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

Away, with the flood Go the ideas, which, mind-chains Bound the world In a stupor Of false agonies.

I saw you in the garden, which was oblivion I picked the cotton of your hair And shoved it into my mouth And it was from the orifice of Death That I was whole And I sung the song of wholeness Which beat the blue boughs of the world together, In a current of the light Which is seen by the eyes Of the mystic flesh Foresoothed, in the awakening of time To the song beneath it; All worlds.

X. Woman-song

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

Drink the milk That passes from bloodbough to bloodbough We who are in a stupor Fed by the witchmother goddess In a tree of blinding light.

Descendent to descendent We feast on the flesh of flesh; drink the blood of milk Go fat, and spill our seeds of the body Upon the living stone.

This world, a die upon which we roll the sacrum of blood And mingle it with a beloved. Let her go feast on me And drink my information. Let her go feast on me And drink my bones of blood.

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

Let me be the great sacrifice, as are you, salamander, And we sit together in the great covenant of time. You and I, the blood-murdered In a state of glad peace. Let me be the bones and blood of you who are to come And come forth, shining in the light of day. Let you be young, beatific And within you, The great genius Of the world soul.

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

Time, indistinguished. Time, immemorial. I sit upon the glen and am swallowed by the mystery Which is everpresent, and sits within each stone In a state of profound meditation. I, with you, know centuries. I, with you, know the wide millennia, And all that it has bourne within me.

I carry it, like a crystal body, pierced with the wide blood of the star. I drink it, I sip it, I devour it madly. Craven, I laze and roll about my skull Like a demon who must feast upon flesh.

Aloud, I hear your murder. The gull-chant At the forest’s threshing; the forest’s dying. Let me drink your blood; Let you live within me, And I will utter your scream As I pet the chameleon of all of nature, Who sits upon my lap And chants upon my bone-song.

XI. Exchange

We who trade deer meat For life. We who grind the axe That fells the tree That breathes.

I sit in the woods, and in my breath Am swallowed By the comingling of life and death. Long before, and long after

Is the blood-fat of the plant body Enriched by the scalding sun.

At enough distance, love fruits the buds. Closely, she scalds, kills, incinerates.

Great heat, bearing down upon me Like the summer songs of my soul. I sing them; in the sound I am a transparent majesty, much like you, Purple tongue; Throat of the mountain In all of your diseased arduorious Comingling.

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

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

You, who totalize yourself in the poem; The space between language Absolves.

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

Which sprout, like thickets Of yellow buds In Nature’s mood.

XII. Nature's Game

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

She seeps and sips The dew-blood.

All about us, she leaves her mark. I know her in a thousand words; A thousand blood-stained handprints. A thousand drops of water Which flow like rivers about me In the time-airs.

Changeless; yet everchanging. 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.

XIII. God-fluid

I have within me The necessary madness To hear the wild scream Of the sun

I cloud it, within me With rains So as to burrow And sleep.

Within water — Is the information you seek.

Awakened, the total mystery Courses Out of range and earshot. So — this is the common business Which moves units of blood About the great veins Of god.

Sleeping, I dream about you — A vivid memory, Of times past and yet to come. You were an embryo, phonetic, yellow Forming the language Of the poetry of your body.

Today, I trace its curves And realize the forever-youth of your soul. You know nothing And in your peace You collapse into the earth, impregnated With its deep ancestral fire.

The dew upon your face, I lick. The tears of your blood, I caress. This body of the earth Is a child of something ancient Who sings with the strings Of great living corpses.

This is the paradox that births children; It is the shock of Death That you see Burning within my eyes

XIV. Black Horns of the Centipede

We are the stewards Of a wider voice Which shines With Dionysian eyes Out from everywhere.

The warbler birdsong is in the centipede’s feet; Together, they make the noise Of the nose-face Of the chimera of a woman. Her talons Of Necessity.

O Mystery — we who are nothing But the horns That penetrate The divine.

Feeling about, as the eyeless Use hands In a black mist Of sensations.

All about, you roost Speaking in a song Only poets can hear.

We, who are low to the ground For such whispers As the rumbling Of Death And his beloved, The force of Will — Which we call, simply, Light

XV. The Tree of Starry Psyche

This is the presence of the Soul: A wider form In too many languages to count. Moths, clothed in silk fineries Knock on mirrors of watery glass To gain entrance into this world.

In poetry, we are divined; Sprung forth From lineal encounters Too small to remember with the conscious mind.

Aided on by black bears; Conspired by fireflies.

It is the great tree, upon the hill Bathed in starry silences. Where the light is clear And the horizon breathes into the blue starlight Of space In a gradient of yellow-orange purpling Of the dying light.

This star into another — is our creed. And thus we bathe In the Mysteries; Drunk on the wine Which crashes down upon daylight And reveals the agape fluid Rushing through our veins And tremulum Brain

XVI. Ant-consciousness

Everything draws us back to the womb With ant-consciousness.

By small bodies, bourne in pollenic flights To and from Unknowing

This great majesty — Soul Forge Throws off sparks By which we see.

Ushers the wind in the trees To ears and eyes So it may be received.

What does mind remember and forget — Far past pages Ripped from leaves by man:

That words That sparked our minds Were remnants Of electricity.

Carries the current, Dutifully. As all do In the procession Of timeless infinity.

The words themselves, residue That art where we are artless Which does not need speech To confirm