Textures and Patterns

 from a recent trip to Blackwater Falls Nat'l Park:

    

"I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.”

- Annie Dillard, 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'

Who Can Ride the Dragon?

like a death, this is the true beginning

drag your body to the altar

quality of sweetness, rooted in sacrifice

drop down into the silence

healing by fire

eludes language

the doorkeeper

together in the woods

at the root of our own

she is the passion

swept away in a hurricane

visions in detail

all who dwell

the sacred balance

the sun goes down

and celebration

something in it, offering

chance to let go

return to the sacred

laid down her yarn.

This, the first day of the rest of our lives

and as I swatted at the fly
it was as if sliced through spacetime
breaking it into a kaleidoscope of many
I usually do not like to kill things
but this death brought more
and the more was good.

And so our story begins

I closed my eyes
it was as though illuminated from within
darkness did not fall as usual
with the falling of my lids
but rather light
and the more I looked
I began to see
my own eye looking back at me
and it blinked
and looked around
seeing me from within
seeing everything at all.

A myriad of bug bites
had appeared overnight
itching up a storm
like mystical pinpoints of union with the divine
infecting me with an awakened fury
recalling a time, that as a child
I had that fever
and that fleeting glimpse

The song, it played for me,
and I for it.

Oh the muse
from whence does she go
to where does she come

All of our knowing
is built on a foundation
of indigeneity -
no matter how far we have strayed

it’s there
at the root
our core churning
out the truth
ineffable though it is
it calls to us on the wind…

The Queen, She is reborn.

My kind of lunatic fringe.

  The Luna Moth sees me

with her antennae and eye spots too

likewise I see her back with my sensual body

my antennae and eye spots cast and open.

Antennae - feathered and astounding sensorial receptors

Eye spots like velvet alert snakes.

What pray tell is put before me ...

may I know this relationship that has summoned.

My kind of lunatic fringe.

Bedtime Gallop

 

 Starlight     wrested from its mooring of day. 

Night-weary cloak upon me

                    the leaden weight    

                                        of joy

                                weighs heavy with the knowledge

                                the scales tip as deep 

           in the other direction.

Sleep        a diamond mine trawled through

    longing for relief

                a thousand points of light.

The sullen waning Moon        running rough-trod through my fears.

With each settling

the words

they come

insistent on my recording.

My hand     furious     in attempt at catching

                                                        the mind's flight of fancy

                                                        the heart's embrace

                                                            of a moment    undone.

Vine and bracken        scrawled across the page

    painstaking indulgence

    stirred by cricket hymn.

Spring's unfolding

    redemption and torment

                        a banquet    laden with fruits

            soon enough to rot.

Not every bird caught in hand,

not every stone cast,

    we set out.

Full and empty.

Clutching at pearls

    of loss and longing

words slip by

    many lost to the night...

(Photos:  Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker Holes in a decades-old landscape Holly)