…not have told me this.

My mind dreams asleep, awake, and my spirit is always singing. This world, this earthly world in which I live, each September is rife with young new animals and food and, although we know the winter is going to nearly destroy them, should we not love them now?

The young crows and sparrows in my town, and my few favorite doves–this would be such a poor world without them, but it can’t be, because spirit loves them more than it loves us, its clever liars. That is what our songs sing me, the while I cannot keep from singing them out loud, in clear public daylight.

Who here owes a debt to the knowing spirits of birds and their songs? Even embodied human souls might be of value far from this seemingly too embodied place.

7 September 2016

7

You Can Never, Never Have Told Me This

There’s been in front of us one way to be, and it’s dreadful uneasy; we’ll go there alone
unless we remember each other and tender a new sense of magic’s wee place by the throne
where angels will wave their high banners and spirits will rise till they can’t rise no more, and they faint.
Then we will fall into arms that were always outheld, but they held off the least horrid saint,

and since then, I’ve seen you sometimes round the village, but life here’s been hard, and I’m always afraid.
Angels are often the ones we love worst, and when they love us back, love is grandly unmade.
Long after hours of pale sundown and twilight take hold of the land, I’ll take hold of my own
sense of love making music and magic—brought straight out of timelessness. I know I’m no good alone,

but I am the least-alone woman amongst the great lot of them angels have loved and still hold.
Maybe I’ll faint for not eating too long or dancing too much in such heat—When I’ve told
the one I love so, who is dead now, but never will ever leave off singing beauty to me—
That’s only one way. I’m still a live woman. I’m only one limb on the most brilliant tree

whose leaves are all shimmering brighter than angels, each one deeply etched by our prayers before death.
Child, when I knew we were pale earthly birthmates, I told you a tale of the sails the least breath
from far, far away would just billow out, billow like waves on a sea that’s our love’s marriage-bed—
Child. When I loved you too much, I felt sure in my soul we would suddenly know why we’d wed—

and then fall asleep, and lie lightly, with tremulous dreams setting out little pieces of lace
punched through piles of white paper, all dusted with sugar, and someone who smiles, who’s the queen of the face
you knew before birth, before first breath, before you were told your new name—and she’s here; she’s still here.
I’m still a ghost from the loneliest province where beauty is born because death loves in fear.

Beauty is beautiful everywhere; dreams are ennobled by time, if time only recalls
the ones it has loved, leaving off lovers’ shame of themselves. Till that happens, it’s always high walls,
children who know they are dying the while they lie waiting outside the worst gates ever built—
and you, who’ll have never not smiled, having seen me, and heard the next words—that lie buried in silt.