mare imbrium, ii

Grandmother Moon hide me in the snowy
blanket of your light, but let me see the
secret life of the woman who walks with golden
candles in this the city
of my discontent. Let me know her stories
& her songs: the girl triumphant in
her monologue, the young woman's careful
choice, the maiden taking account of her
truth, not trusting the slick solutions
of the paranormer players like this
would-be Magus.

Good for you.

Mitred corners enclose me, in this frame,
I look and suddenly, she is there, Eleanor
of Aquitane, that tapestry at the Cloisters,
fair Annalise under the boughs of the holy oak,
Kimberly, smiling that knowing sacred grin
across her desk.

"Later you."

My heart is drumming her lyric self
each cycle greater than the last
the notes describe the melody of this life
Grandmother Moon help me be
worthy of Her song.

This piece was written before Kimberly and myself started living together in late 1996. I was deep in the knowledge of the Lady by then. Graves' The White Goddess rested on my bed table. It had suddenly come to me that Kimb and I knew the same sorts of things about the nature of being, the universe itself. We both had adopted the prism of the Lady in how to approach and live our lives. And, I was totally falling in love with her. That pretty blonde woman in the editor's office, who smiled at me when I walked by. Every day I still strive to be worthy of Her song, the Lady's and Kimb's. This is still the most remarkable event of my life: Kimb's love.

griddlecakes, redux

Sometimes she is the mirror, bright!
But oh what might lie behind her silvered laughter?
Only the dissolution of the mission,
only the one chance to run from the final
dismembering of who we were originally.
Smells like buttered toast here today.
I yearn for sausages bursting with fat,
surrounded by the pickled cabbage, a strange
bread the manger for this sacrifice. I see
clearly now the way I hid this entire time,
with smoke and bourbon and too much vodka,
too many years. Nothing remains of that
once possible cartographer;
he threw his compass away and watched
the woman's graceless destruction.
Which one you ask, the mirror bright?
No, that version of myself became
someone valuable in her own game
and so divined her place outside
of time and space. Lucky bitch. Or
worse now, living with a child but not
the one that was to be the gate, does
she know the memory of her plan
detailed in dream song the red haired
priestess below the tree and me
screaming as I bleed and burn,
the harvest king returned to her
in the night, where she can still
feel my face and know the minutes
passing? Or, rather, past? And is
that howling the blank recognition
of our banal and ordinary pain?


I think I wrote this in 2005 and put it on the blog somewhere along the way. Slowly turning into a version of Whitman, re-writing the pieces over and over, trying to carve the meaning out more clearly. Still struggling for grace, of course. Of late the darkness of that time is lessened for me, but the way I changed because of these things becomes clearer. So, I see now how I let myself attenuate, if you will, in those years of complacent expectation that this woman would eventually come to me. That simply was a version of everything else I did wrong. It's hard not to simply see my life and choices as being essentially those of a lazy person, afraid to confront his own failure and just accepting of it. Banal and ordinary pain. See you at the checkout line.

Thanks to Jane Morrel for the strange breads and sour pickles images from one of her hospital poems. I seem to miss Jane the most of the writers that I knew in Springfield. And, she has been gone the longest.

desire

desire is a busted coin
don't kid yourself
you bless the days in a reverie
desire a toy-like candy
waiting for the signal this short
story is over the iron chef
has three quite distinct dishes
none of them a total con
but certainly the sauce
is a k-y special fingering
the source, deep along alignments
you thought you never felt
perhaps it is all a lie
or a memory