Poetry

Tonight I had wanted the moon to be milky
But she came to me with teeth instead
Small and serrated
In a porcelain dish
That girl: she took the sharp young things in her silver hands and left them right on my doorstep, laughing,
So I had to sigh and swallow them down into the dampness of my home with gratitude
(One does not deny the moon her gifts, even when they come with teeth.)
It is the first hot moon of summer and the grass is only beginning to know itself after all the pillage of winter.
It is only timidly blue, in the way that birds sometimes hide a color beneath a brown fold of feather, flirting with themselves, I suppose,
And only small packs of crickets minstrel about, in the moon-basked city of blue blades.
They uncross their long creaking legs, always in a dance with death, and gasp forward into scattered filaments of song.
There is no time for silence under the first hot summer moon,
And the rain strokes down across the old sleeping mountains in harps and waves.
Some of the drops get snagged on the thick lights of old stars as they fall, and are fated to spend eternity in their ancient arms, listening as their creased silver mouths give the history of everything, in the Stoney old language shared by only very old stars and by whales.
The moon is dancing high around the world, all thighs and spirit.
She always laughs when I ask her for a song, and she fills my bones with gifts that don’t know that they’re gifts til much later.
I think, next moon, I will leave out a tea candle and some wine for her. A string of white bells.
I will barter her gladly for stories, for dance, for the soft words of old stars.
I will ask her for a love who speaks my language. For a thimble, and a soap dish of light.
For now I drink the sharp rays in, catching snippets of down-drifting whale song, and their hostage drops of rain, strung like cats-cradle throughout the sky.
I think maybe that’s what makes the net, holding up all the stars.

What is the Thing that calls you through night?
Your soul will never rest
Until you drink it’s light.
this space is carved for you out of First Mother’s bone.
The symbols are steepled and written in stone.
purple where the heart of an animal beat
Now Lost to dust-rhythm, your starcrusted feet
Call you back into the heart-temple-home.
Return to the path
Reopen the tome
Unravel your wrath
And the books in your bones.

Pluck through thickets of stars
And through deep-needled trees
With your arms outstretched like galaxies.
Take up your scepter
fall to your knees
Be humbled again by your own destiny.
Return to the path
Drink deep of the tea.
Moonsteeped
stardrenched
and found at sea. ((The honey held sky
The new eyes to see.))
The beat
The pulse
Returns to me.

The sun was too much mirror
So I pressed into the wood
Where something sacred pooled in rust and busted diamond shells
From the sun-punched bones of old trees and the quick love songs of dragonflies,
The folds of hot feathers are scratching out a broken psalm.
I feel lost to the paper song of
Book spines hugging open
In painful bursts of light.
And my bones can hardly hold the hooks of stars that burn beneath all things.
I feel the song of blood, and the sudden war of bloom
Chewing quickly through
Some lame grey twine I’d bound them to.
I wonder again
How flowers survive in this world.
With its hot sky hinging on their halos
And the dust- mouths of catacombs sipping at their roots.
We are alone, so I let my lips graze against the sweet pulse of a thistle
Our shared electricity pulling me from filagree to spine.
My toes are folded into the story of a stream
Falling Through the web of dust pretending to hold me.
In a moment, we are bones.
Pages dipped in flaming ink.
Stories told through Starry teeth.
Time worn hands cats-cradle us
in a basket more moonlight than matter.
And I somehow feel safe here, in the dynamite of everything.
And the great human hurt.
I know that the thistle will hold to my kiss, that the stream will fold my stories into her emerald skirt.

Before I coiled into this body
And fell onto the earth,
I was buoyed by a sack of stars
Afloat between my death and birth.
my spirit was a timetorn milk…
the sky was black and folded silk…
I trickled from one dark room to the sweet next, ((Dancing))
From deep sweet musky mystery to the beating drum of breast… .((Alive)).
I cross the threshold into this place of terrible beauty,
And I forget the sharp eternity of my own name.
Everything is gorgeous pain,
And Still my soul remains the same.
As I grow and shed and dance and grieve
Still,
The Night
Is my reprieve.
As my skin moves into beautiful decay
alight in my eternity,
All this sameness stays.

When I die
May I unyoke myself
And slip off this tight shoe
may my soul dance up and bloom away,
and my memories fade to blue.
Still, may all my sameness stay
may all be me;
May we be you.

I was born in the untame wild
And the night taught me one thing:
The home I hold is Deep and Deep
Its blue and bold and moonbeam-steeped.
I built it up with sticks and stones
And ocean bones
And heart debris.
And no small force
Could come in here
and break the lamp,
and take the things.
The moon is singing in my ear.
I build my home.
I grow my wings.

the mothers of my mother’s mothers
are rising up from pregnant dirt
hand to hand and breast to breast
in heart and bones,
in pain and hurt:
these women who are stories who are circles,
who are Holy Dirt.
The Ancient words of ancestors are sewn into the hoops of skirts
These people who are poems who are tangled in this web of dreams
they are wrinkled stars that burn in beams.
They are ancient wise who bleed on trees.
They are dead and rot, and birth and breeze.
They are well and healed, and whole and free.
They are all revealed
And sing to me.

I was of the trees
Hotly, fully, soot-soaked woman.

Bearing lips and knees
Slow feet sliding across night-cobbled streets
Through silty swamps and constellations;
Starkly naked in the drinking dark.

My blind steps straying off the course,
My lips: not braced for strike,
and saying all of the vulnerable things
To glasses of water, and thieves alike.

A white-hot bud of useless thunder rumpled loudly through me.
I was softly smoldering,
Before I gave birth to me:

I wandered, hips and knees and grace and and map-less, somehow,
Came to this place.

I have so many unwritten letters:
You could pluck me from a winter vine
And intertwine with me.
But if you leave me,
Warmly, fiercely free
I will grow
Into a glowing apple.

Hold the bowl of your hips
mouthward, toward the moon

Howl out tenderness (Death is just a room)

Scrape stars from your lips
Sunrise: coming soon.

Dew drops drape your hips
Pull off your cocoon

give up your wolf kiss
To the fading night:
Perfect tender lips
Take up luscious light
Sky skims off the black,
Throws off starry shawl
moon lace at your back,
now you’re standing tall.

Stand up naked now:
Shake this world down right
ripple party-pray
At the fading night

Walk your own footsteps
String your own high-moon
Hold the dome of sky
read the sacred runes.

Thread the needle with this: liquid-love-desire.
Climb your homespun rope,
Let it take you higher.

Crawl back into this:
Wet earth,
mother dune:
whispering fierce and whole,
brown and bathed in moon.

Take your little home: breasts and teeth and bones
Bent armed praying tome
Slide slow back into
Womb-dune torn with tombs

Look death in her eyes;
darkness always looms

Find yourself within:
Holy
Body room
house of skin and hips
Tender temple boom
Soul that tears and rips;
Heart that calls and Blooms.

This morning I woke with some peace in my bones,

And smiled around at the chorus of souls

All feathered and furled in their small human homes,

tied together and curled up with sinew and stones,

All walking the world and drinking the air

With lungs on loan

And hearts that tear.

All blinking at birth,

All singing death’s moan,

All tethered to earth,

And never alone.

Something in you is changed,
Something wild and right.
The part of you that is animal shines
Out wetly
In the dew tonight.
You howl
and drink the midnight sap,
held holy, up, in ancient laps
of ash and elm
and dewy realms//
you rise and sink in cold and inky moon glow.
you call out in a voice that only Crow knows.
You unfold your head and dance,
entranced with your own shadows.

In the beginning, there was a fury of noise

Black cloaked maidens spat ribbons of gray stars,

Arcing into brilliant rivers,

And shaking off their casings,

They fell across the empty blackness;

Fell

into a white, etheric dance.

In the beginning,

Ancient spirits peaked through invisible doors and

Plucked through thickets of stars

They pulled their black hems across the threshold-

They came: solemn, dark, demonic, godlike, gross, and gay-

The sorceress of night, the grandmother of Fae

They came one after another

With long and timeworn faces

To watch the unfurling of the Great Spiral.

In the beginning, you were there-

And I.

We sat dewy-lipped with silent smiles

In the center of a great seed,

Watching as All-Everything snaked across the sky:

The greatest drum pounded proud songs out into new ears

And the first tears were formed and fell across the face of the night,

Watering the seeds that would sprout into All-Life

We held our hearts and whispered songs

Into new and unborn palms

Breathing in and out anew

In the sacred tongue that filled our lungs and slipped from lips before the dawn of time.

It was there waiting for us,

And written in the sky:

The secret language of everything.

It is there still

It lingers silent in the center, waiting

To breathe fresh stars

Into the spiral anew.

Fashion an altar of the souls of your feet:
Sticks and stones and ocean bones//
Save the thickest tears for the center.

Let your roots roll out from underneath you
Until you find the perfect place (you will know it)

It is untouched by the wind.

This is the place where you are tethered.

Lay your stories down here
Lay down all your wind and rain.

Pluck a twig from the right tree and lay it across just so.
Bleach your bones in the sun

One deep scream
Three drops of rich umber blood

It is finished.

I am making soft and purple waves in this world; I am drinking in tarot and tea,
I am slicing my stories on silver slivers of Moon.
I am seducing myself
Back into Self Love,
Basking in a new womb.
Sliding into One Rhythm with my slow hips-
My twisted spine, my stained fingertips,
And all the stories spilling through my skin in black ink.

There is peace in the space between and breath in the stones
There is sun in your lungs and song in your bones.

Be still child

And listen to the sounds of the stars

You came naked on the backs of the celestial storks

Writing fresh folklore with every foot step

You crept over the blue threshold

Through manifest and manifold

Through tumbleweed and milky way,

Starspray, and mothers milk.

You grew through eyes of needles and bundles of sage

You knew through rings of trees, through wings of bees

through amber sap and rage

You came upon this moment in the golden age,

Smoulder cheeked and comet eyed

And that

was just the start

you lit a fire inside your heart

and crept through fields of sleeping stars

to hang your moon on the back of a mountain

and open up all your eyes with a gasp

clasping all the impossible moments with tiny hands

you drew a circle in the sand and

somehow, it saved you,

As you gazed through the grey dew

and gawked at all the silver strings

strung out between the mundane things;

shoeboxes full of dustmites and eternity

and me

somewhere, in some imagination

as every layer of time pealed back

I was you and you were her and all the hands were dust to dust

And ether to ether

Grass and earth and stones beneath her

Ancestors and bones to teach her

Be still child

And know the nectar of nothingness

In the beginning times when you and I were seeds of stars our heartbeat was a future memory and the melody that the sun tells to the sky

Let this momentary lull within your skull be your long lost lullaby

Let the sun slide down your tongue

Let the moon be your window

Let the river run through you

The water is alive.

Now I lay me down to sleep

The will of the goddess, mine to keep

She holds our lulling heads at night

And speaks through stars and firelight

I pray the mother gives me sight

And lifts my lips to drink in light

She emboldens the weak

And visits those who seek

and leak moonspeak through peaking slits in milky eyes

She rumbles in the echoes of your cries and mumbles through the gentle music of your thighs

She tumbles with your tears and bleeds with your births

We walk upon her, as the earth

she lies always across the threshold

just beyond the veil

In the long green country of dreams

Where the moon hangs boldly on the boughs of the trees

Her lips are wet with pearls and moss

She whispers her tidings into wanting ears

And soothes those who have loved and lost

At times she rises up; a burning light to behold

These times she stands on crumbling ground

Her long grey glances profound and old

She pears through silver eyes with primordial sight

She is our long lost guiding light

A wavering lantern

An impossible flame

As ancient as any sun

She remembers the days when her daughters and sons were as one

And beheld her their mother, the witch and the bitch, the number thirteen and the howling pitch

the early earth tone, that rakes your bones, and lifts the fog

have we all but forgotten the rotting of our cities? the people cry out and the wastelands burn

styrafoam castles melt into small impossibilities and a few muses muse and seek to believe

the last little embers can still make so much steam

The great mother bleeds, she sings and she seethes, the stars and seeds whisper of her return

The music of the spheres is ringing in your ears

A memory that is not your own passes silently into the marrow of your bones

And suddenly you know her, you’re born of her, her children all are your brothers and sisters

And she beheld them, her little children, standing in their own feet

She wore many faces

And striding the earth, her feet touched many places

she loved the world across all of the races

She strode across the magic lines that encircle the globe and bade blades of grass to bow down to her and the wind to whisper her many names

And even today she silently reigns

And we build skyscrapers and strip malls across her war-worn face

But in the nights, in the country of dreams,

Still all of us bow down and worship in the language of bones

And meet in secret circles of ancient stones

And when we intuit or empathize

her light peaks in through the tiniest window of our eyes

Into the paper plastic world of today

And slowly, as seeds sprout and cities burn

We transmute

And we reclaim

And she returns

Long may she reign.