Still feeling a bit reflective, having realized how many people I have lost in recent years, and how much I still feel their presences. My late partner was a poet, storyteller, all around literary person, and had a much more directly spiritual background than I. We met online, through our blogs–there were obvious correspondences happening in our compositions before we we ever aware of each other.

Something of great significance was already going on with him. He was having amazing Big Dreams and getting poems out of them from very familiar places. We communicated several times a week via email and blog posts, and were trying to figure out how to meet in real life when he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He died nine months later. We met in between, when he was in hospital. That was where I still was, in my mind, when I started this blog.

Part of me has never come home, but I am not sure it needs to. The place was Ireland, which has always sent me messages. I have no Irish ancestry, but my most important real life Teacher is Irish, and so many numinous glimpses that have come to me seemingly by chance have a connection there. However–my partner was born in Scotland, and lived there for a long time first. We seem to be becoming Pan-Celtic. Fair enough, I guess; although I really only work with what comes to me directly, and then later sometimes locate it in a cultural setting.

There was a selkie story that wove itself in and out of lyrics for a long time before I met my partner. And then, when I did, there were seal/sea lion synchronicities and signs more vivid than any I have ever experienced. The same was happening to him. That was years ago, and I don’t dwell on it knowingly, but a bond that strong does not go away; it just goes quiet enough to let life unfold its future.

He’ll be there, as he is anyway, when all is said and done. There might be others to greet us–we are part of a poetic family. Where are the others? I know of one or two.

Today’s piece has conventional punctuation because I feel postings here need to be easier to make sense of. My formatting gets stripped out when I copy and paste them here from LibreOffice, and I am still a technophobe who doesn’t know how to fix it. Please don’t let any possible meanings be limited by a few little marks on the page!

4 March 2021

4

Hoy Alloy

I tore up the letter, and then I reread it–

I found it was burned on the eye of my mind.

Find an alternative flame that glows better–

but nay, there is none–not in all mortalkind.

It’s looming a little way down in the water.

The water ran clear till it started to rain.

Now I see only a shadowy part of

the creature who visited now and again–

in the vision remaining, a fresh-water dragon

or warm-blooded selkie–a Moon in its mouth,

and a pearl of a swiveling eye that keeps batting

its terrible lashes and staring dead South–

where a strange weather pattern is visibly forming.

Poor wounded creature, whose tears are red blood,

how did you find me? The skies all at storm are

so present to mind, when they rise to high flood

they will drown all they find in their path–skies of witness

committing the act we omitted to share.

Lightning and thunder and hard hail that hits us–

don’t look again till you’ve seen the lens flare

of your own clearing future: The Moonlight is shining–

a far better flame in the luminous night

than the usual cause of the pain in your eyes and

the mind that demands you put out that small light

before it can rest in the beams of her glory

as if in the times before time went awry.

Lady once seen between lashes, your story

has drawn out of mine–through the satellite-sky–

the tracings of vast flights of literate winging

toward and away. Underwater, a seal–

singing warm underbreath, Keep the ghost of you clinging–

and read me: Don’t tear out the part we most feel.