Moon's Lady, 1977

Mark me well Moon's Lady
as you sit on your gold throne
wearing your ghost tiara
ovular like your womb
My hands have sharpened the blade
during the passage of a
thousand days
and you may occupy
the turned away face of the lunar
sphere, and I may not understand
what I cannot see
but your murder has come to me
as a sacred act
I only do what I do out of
the love you have misplaced

and though it may not come to you
this way, I know I am
magician/warrior, divine bear,
occupier of these words
discoverer-murderer of
you in your lunar pose


This piece features the first use of "divine bear" in my work. I discovered the phrase while perusing a book of names in Knoepfle's office at SSU one day. I looked in the OED and got the same info there. Of course I told Knoepf about it and he was impressed with the implications. Poets you know. The poem is clearly another round in the Alison/Tim story, the one where we talked about sex as violence, because, as catholics, it certainly was violent for us. I think a lot of people in the D/s world (dominance/submission for you innocents) come from a catholic background. Always trying to figure out how to live in a world where pain is method of achieving grace.

Lunar references are meant to point to the feminine, to the "other" as Simone deBeauvoir writes in the Second Sex, a book that had a profound effect on me. With that in mind, the last line posits a masculine sense for the "victim" here, implying her feminine self was a "pose" which needed to be murdered. Early goddess religion stuff wandering through there, as well. That comes from Alison's repeated dreams about red-headed priestess doing human sacrifice. There is some sense of that in early celtic archeaology. Certainly the celts did sacrifice humans (peat bog people). And it is quite probable they had priestesses doing the sacrificing. The red-headed part is also interesting. Alison herself was a striking blonde in the old days. I'm sure her hair has darkened somewhat, though being a classicly vain woman she probably colors it. Clearly Alison's real roots come through Ireland, but probably, genetically she came from the Vikings that conquered and ruled Ireland and who brought the blue eyed blonde genes into that pool. I've been reading Cadfael's Summer of the Danes, and there is much reference to the blonde nordic viking women from Ireland. No surprise then. AsBjorn is certainly Danish, through northern england (the Danelaw, 850-1060 roughly). So far enough back we probably had ancestral stroking going on. My feelings for Alison seemed to come from deep inside, so I suppose racial memory is a possibility. Or reincarnation. Or some damn thing. I just hope I don't go through this in another lifetime. That's a desperate concept.

secret arrangement

now that you're disappearing
for another time
my secret arrangement
has begun to collapse

the unspent poems
come out as distillate
the things I swore
not to say
for both our sakes

now that you'll be
in that other land
older with its hints
of your first life
I become free and afraid
your leaves fallen in my attic
your lycanthropic eyes
peering from unused pages
the ones in the white box
which serves as a coffin
for this secret
arrangement


Alison Gaughan went to Ireland with her sister in the mid 1970s. When the chapbook, LNFS, was first printed and put together Knoepfle decided that certain things in it had to be fixed and he had three signatures reprinted, including one for Alison who had thought better about an image that apparently identified her own father ("the amputated man"). These changes were wrought and there was a party at Scarritt to take apart the chapbook, collate in the new signatures, and then re-bind them. Afterward there was a box of the replaced signatures that I couldn't bear to throw away. I put them in the attic on Scarritt where they stayed pretty much until we moved and then I disposed of them, but not in a bunch. I burned them in the backyard at 223 East Scarritt, one sheet at a time, for a couple of hours. Lakebrink was sorely amused.