—To me, a dream, in which she came: Mistwalker
—And I, a vessel, rose in her womb, bear this, to me, a dream.
Say, on this, untoward, the spiced breezes with salt
Came, if all, the light enkindled like whetted steel
Morning star through the mournful faces above
Rejected, yes, by their mothers, of past and now,
A cold came ashore, ancient besieged accounts
Wilted the pregnant vines of yesterday, sure to
The next, as gods turn to myths, stories to the dying young.
She stared, of memorials in print
Off into the terrible morning, gossamer filament
Swaddled at the breast, a tight form slack
In the great divorce of sea and sky,
Standing, contemplative, shouts and echoes crack
Unheard, discarded: sweets to the profane
Sedately, to that dark curve: a canvas was lain
Adrift on aether, drowned bones of Atlas,
Emerge on drift of the everlasting, there at world’s end
In curved states between:
Hell broods in the burgs of ice, Providence
Forsaken of she who becks on the entombing sands.
Thus, prayers come whetted
With none to brush the stray hairs from those astray
Men conceiving valleys, their mountains,
Structures, are we, to eternally pass the course of solitude
Under cross-borne tuitions, marbled elders’ auspice
Embossed of the very tongue spoken
Once in high infant chambers, Omnis Ipse?
I, too, was born beneath the hero’s breath,
Taken by the glimmering sheath and steeds
To the awful wiles of merciful truth,
She to the enemy of standing beyond, within.
If ever a summer had kissed the city where cold descends
Or snow reminisced stars in the eve,
I, I—she hurts in the mists—have only tasted, bitter,
Sketches, between them, the finitude of their light,
That of warmth, of compassion
Man fall distracted from, therefrom grace,
A beast shed of its other back, hubris of its wing—
Am I the maiden of its song? But it’s maiden?—
One season, ever-aged, harbinger of this isolation
What is the ****** ewe years of searching for I,
Is sacrifice, thus becomes the phantom, the slave
Of that distant black, the sullied mark, consumptive
Unremitting arms of purpose, of man’s calling.
These hands are spelled, veined by charcoal dust
Adversarial oaths kept close, of myself, in idle play
Where what I will, wills but a will
Where none are to come, but the mast of a hero
Whom she is tied, of those winds
Seminal of her words—I shall be the breath
The cusp of every storm which blights the high waves,
The knife of sheer walls of stone,
Moments of oblivion which rend the heroes, ill-stayed.
Eyes burned holes for the starlight of awe
Pouring o’er the wastes of her paper skin
But, that she overturns the rueful words
Again, again, again, cycled in the oceans,
Where gardens of kelp revile the current
Strands, becoming of the arms she wishes to hold—
To write myself out of comprehension
Is to risk the very marrow has I obeisant,
These lusts of the greater body, those of the Mother
Clad in jewels and customs, as wave desires sky;
A journal I’ve become.
Mist came, froth, the spiral of wars inside the heart
They inveigled her, to my dismay, to the blind air
No longer, the sweet tine of imperfection of voice,
Inspired of spoken word, recent memory took leave,
Ambivalent joys came raining on a pen,
Reluctant to write homage to freedom,
Caught in the morphless air, calcified transformations
Odes to let go. But.
