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March is like love
one soft kiss to the cheek, warm on the lips
or the harshest of gray skies, disappointing
no wonder
spring is the season of lovers

Green Man calling

the voice in the woods craggy and rich

oak leaves fallen, deep gulleys filled with brown

dark eyes gazing out from behind trees, breath in the branches.

calling me to come closer

to be where the Earth welcomes me

among the protective rocks, trees bending around

a shield of bare branches

like bones

And

wrapping my legs around you, listening to your voice

your breath against my skin

Night falling in the sweetest moment

your form against candied skies

and then the quiet darkness and starry sky

I know your smell, love your eyes drinking me in.

And kneeling down in the deep leaves with your heat

is like coming home

In Winter

the mourning mother.

When grey skies swaddle us and chill air embraces the land

a young woman descends into the arms of the dark man

her lover, because she was promised to him,

her lover – because she chose him.

thinking of him, imagining his nearness, fear strangles breath

Because He knows the outskirts of life, the intricacies of pain and surrender

complete and infinite in his understanding, his mastery of the darkness.

His only desire  comes to him delicate,

the most fragrant lily trembling in his presence

Salvation

And with every gift, a sacrifice:

The goddess-mother mourning her loss

my tender heart journeying to places beyond my protection, beyond

my reach,

and I, a blackened flower fallen into winter’s repose.

Gray above and all around us

heavy and soft like the down of a duvet

the entrance to the great hall of the dead, a kind of comfort

November sky

like Arawn the grey man

so full of inviting sleep.

Wind blew through bare branches as we made our way home from the dinner party.  Our bellies full of rich food and drink, we walked through fallen, drying leaves kicking up their pungent smell around us.  The road was of packed dirt and had a whitish glow in the moonlight.  Five girls in costume, we’d been to a halloween party and were walking to Cassie’s house, were we planned to spend the night.
“I thought the mummy costume was fantastic,” Mona said, wobbling in her high-heeled boots.  “Yeah, and the werewolf was incredible,” Cassie said.  “Who was that, anyway?”  Noone knew.  “He was tall.  I didn’t recognize him,” she added.

We rounded a bend in the road and just caught sight of a large dog as it bounded into the bushes along the road, it’s bushy tail a tawny silver color.  We gazed ahead, and a cold wind blew against our faces.  The sounds of our boots on the road seemed amplified.   Trees swayed, creaking.

“Wow,” said Robin.  “It’s creepy here.”

It was creepy.

“Halloween night, girls!” shrieked Kate, letting out her best mad scientist laugh and spinning around in the moonlight, her arms held up in the air above her head.  We all laughed half-heartedly.   The woods surrounded us and stretched on ahead into blackness.  Kate seemed to be the only one us that wasn’t scared.

Just then, there was howling, first from the spot in the road the dog had been, and then a chorus of yips and bays joined the first howl, seeming to surround us.
We stopped in the road, spooked. And as suddenly as it started, the howling stopped.
We gazed at each other in stunned silence. Kate was the first to speak. “That was crazy,” she said, trying to sound cavalier. But her voice was unsteady.  None of us answered her.  But at the sound of her voice, a figure stepped from the side of the road. He seemed to come from nowhere.
“Kate. It’s been a long time,” he said, smiling and gazing across the road at her. She froze, and then slowly, her head shaking no, began to back away from the stranger. He advanced, holding out a hand to her. “Darling don’t you recognize me?”  he asked with a quizzical grin.  His voice had an echo, but his tone and manner were warm, solicitous.

“No,” was all Kate said, continuing to back toward the other side of the road.

“Kate, who is it?” I asked.  The stranger kept coming, moving toward us with his hand out toward Kate.

“No!” she screamed this time.  “It’s not possible ….”  she whimpered.

“Kate,” I asked again – “Kate for the love of God who is he?”  I demanded, the pitch of my voice rising.  The other girls all stood stock still, mesmerized by the scene unfolding in front of them.

“You can’t be here…” she whimpered, reaching the side of the road now, her boots sinking into a bed of leaves, twigs cracking under her weight.

“Darling, I know it’s been a long time, but it’s really me – I’ve come back for you,”  he advanced quickly toward her now, circling her waist with his arm and stepping forward into the trees and bushes that stood behind her.  “I’m taking you home,” we heard him say, as they disappeared into the woods, Kate in his arms.

We stood staring after them.  Moonlight shone on bare trunks and limbs, the forest floor a carpet of leaves shining in the moonlight.  We could see clearly by moonlight into the woods, past low brush and fallen trees.  We could see clearly that Kate was gone.

Twenty years move like water
rushing along momentum building until somehow diverted
into a swirling eddy we circle
and
return to the crush, our friends faces there for a moment
frozen in a a smile, and gone

I learned to reach out and take hold of what I could reach
twig jutting out over the water promisingly
held in friendship or mutual need

Some people stay a while
resting in the curve of my heart there is knowing
Or

like stars in the night sky, light a way ahead,
then wander off to seek treasure in different waters

We gaze together into the the annihilation that promises us
that where the world ends we find desire
waiting to hold us

If you carry a blade

Nothing can be more alluring than

         the Grail

Brimming with sweetness, intoxicating fluid in a sparkling vessel – keeper of release, rest, sweet love

A Treasure sought by those who wish to have it hoard it keep it 

But it remains and will remain

Hidden from those who do not understand it

yielding it’s secrets delicious only to those who understand and love it.

The cup of life is kept by those who gaurd the light

Priceless, it cannot be bought.  Ephemeral, it cannot be captured and held.  Invisible to those who are blind it is protected, lasting,

                sacred.

Pushkin on society and the individual in Eugene Onegin (Johnson Translation):
Is it that we’ve become officious
and prone to censure in our thought;
that fiery souls’ headstrong enthusing
appears offensive or amusing
to the complacent and the null;
that wit embarrasses the dull;
that we enjoy equating chatter
with deeds; that dunces now and then
take wing on spite; that serious men
find, in the trivial, serious matter;
that mediocre dress alone
fits us as if it were our own?
X

Blest he who in his youth was truly
youthful, who ripened in his time,
and, as the years went by, who duly
grew hardened to life’s frosty clime;
who never learnt how dreamers babble;
who never scorned the social rabble;
at twenty, was a fop inbred,
at thirty, lucratively wed;
at fifty, would prolong the story
by clearing every sort of debt;
who, in good time, would calmly get
fortune, and dignity, and glory,
who all his life would garner praise
as the perfection of our days!

Pushkin was an Incredible poet.

I was thinking, in response to this passage (likely this is the affect he intended) that if we aspire to mediocrity for the sake of comfort, acceptance, even admiration (a pity, that, but I suppose out of context, creative brilliance is nearly blinding), it may be that for some the small sacrifice of the soul, of one’s creativity, is the price.  (Oh, drat!  Where did I leave that dream of myself lying about … ?)
Not for everyone, though. There are the managers among us, people who thrive on arranging, categorizing, doing.  So sublime in competence, so seemingly self-assured in the execution of things business, social, boundary related.  Alas…

it seems there is no comfort or welcome in the world for the artists – except amongst themselves.  Odd-balls is the technical term, I think …

…  it’s true that the socially able among us, the serious-minded masters of all that is important in politics, of all that is “right” and profitable, when faced with a swelling tide of passion, a brewing poetic tempest,  a brooding raincloud spattering unswept pavement … are sometimes caustic, jealous, disdainful.

They

are not skillful – rarely on time, barely present for the lesson.  And they are often dissheveled, spattered with paint, puffed up in defense or depressed by the sheer force of expectation foisted on them by

the skillful, shiny sleeping with credit card companies and marketing people.

We are too dull to perceive

a brightly lit (drugged or mad?)   watery-eyed (under-rested) , disjointed dreamy (unfinished),  sympathetic (undisciplined) , deeply invested (immature) rendering

of some moment, place, being, perception  … glimpse.    Glimpses don’t pay much.  They are so fleeting, nearly unmanifest, hard to market.  They pay when, completed and polished until dull,  you can mass produce them.  Then they are like cartoons.  Many glimpses in a row, taken together, in order they make a picture everyone can understand.  Uniformly.

It’s all mad rambling.

This is my first time wading into the waters of russian lit and (in translation) I find them remarkably welcoming.

Five is unaffected

An ocean of desire and curiosity flowing through her small body

catapulting through the world in pursuit of

toads

candy

eyeball kisses

Not like butterflies or suction cups

Lips grasping my eyelid and planting a kiss there

There is no love like the trusting love of five.

All is new, all is need.  And I am it’s object

artless and thoroughly invested, as love should be

a shower of tempests, a storm of independence and feigned indifference

alternating with a desperate petition for sustence, reassurance, and eyeball kisses.