I have spoken of kundalini–that is what runs through all this work. The following pieces are very special to me because of the circumstances that brought them. Pamela was a local midwife who had never had children. I first heard of her when friends spoke in front of me about her recent diagnosis of uterine cancer. She had just had her uterus removed, with a tumor that was ‘just huge.’ After that, she had quasi-menstrual bleeding. We became friends through the same mutual friends, and as she neared death, I thought of her and this work resulted. She seemed to be at the focal point of so many intensely female functions and experiences, including the worst and hardest. And to be a medically vulnerable woman in such a misogynistic world is to know and experience far too much.

What could be powerful enough to approach such a situation? Nothing ordinary. I danced into as much energy as I could, and let myself hear what I would want to hear someone saying at a fully fraught time. Orgasm is ‘la petite mort.’ I saw the Lovers approaching La Grande Mort, and eavesdropped as I am wont to do. The process took one week, hence the title of the sequence. Please read very slowly.

One Week of Nights and Days

16 June 2001

When the Lightning Strikes

At the brush of the storm-lightning’s miracled essence, my body vibrates with a sympathy so

deeply felt, I can only begin to address its least wholly ineffable aspects in slow,

halting measures whose syllables question their meanings the while they are forming. The word on my tongue

at this moment—but here is the crackle of keen and swift lyrical passages already sung

of themselves long before they are uttered. Most shining of presences, here is the sound of your light

as it blazes through me with a speed that aligns the most disparate planes of reality quite

without effort on my—or your—part. In the hand that is held out before me, a network of veins

branches out like the fire of the sky in its grandest display, when it comes down in rivers and chains

and illuminates world upon world in one instant as I strive to capture the flow of the force

that comes rushing toward and beyond me. I wince at its brilliance, but quickly move into the course

of its purposeful fury headlong. Once inside it, a quiet descends in which eloquence wells

almost slowly. A drop of song-blood forms and glides from the tip of my finger. Its rich color tells

one approach to the heart of the story it carries, and so does the salt of the sea in its taste.

Its soft fluid warmth that congeals—this too bears a perceptible message. My mind would make haste,

but the vision is stubborn: just one clotting drop of the most mortal substance. I shift my long gaze,

and the strange lightning strikes more directly. The top of a mountain is in its idea; it says,

‘The roundness of these curving sides shows the next level nearer the music that vibrates alone

at the true secret heart of the source of the heavenly gesture that reaches for you then is gone

far away in the background as you have crossed over a threshold you’ve come close to capturing here.

Your own body whispers—this time you have not lost awareness of what it desires as you near

the fair goal of your spirit’s sweet errand this evening. The leaf-shaded breast of the song-island’s heights

is bleeding a slow carmine tear for the grieving attendant whose lonely lunarium rites

must take place in a shift that is stained by a past in which pain gave no quarter. The Moon remained new

through a thousand ordeals while a light that would last but an instant by plain day-world reckoning grew

to impossible magnitude, only subsiding in slow graceful waves as your heartbeat turned round

and the fury that brushed you became a confiding affection that blossomed forth rose-red.’ The sound

of its voice in my heart—this is why I am singing. The lonely lunarium priestess—she—I—

am happy inside to be present to bring this occasion to bear as mere worlds flutter by

in transparent, identical layers. The ache in this body—this fullness is song that knows all

with a love that exceeds words, and yet it conveys itself here through these lines. Do you not hear it call?

17 June 2001

You Are Air to the Body of Song

In the world I shall celebrate, lovers are mortal but love, the immutable essence of song,

the inspired and enlightened one, flows through the course of their changes, devising new meanings and strong

modes of alternate insight by which they may travel through stages of time flesh is wont to recall

as a vestige of shining desire that unravels the moment it seeks to reveal where its all

lies enchanted and wise. To the ones it would signal with news of its beautiful endlessness, dread

very often attends its appearance and triggers a frantic withdrawal to the semblance of dead

useless tissue, a rank self-deception that festers with secret life-sources within its damp snare.

That seeking to enter this world with a message and that seeking ways not to hear it thus share

a remarkably similar tenuous nature. A singing voice measures the distance between

these expanding, contracting, most fragile creations. It gathers a long breath that knows where it’s been:

in the bodies of those who have numbered their series of waking and sleeping dream-lessons as ones

followed closely behind by processions of zeros extending beyond the horizon that runs

through the heart of the universe. Dizzying figures, these beings that waver through veils of their own

helpless making—until they perceive the song-signal that needs them to hold the least trace of the tone

that precedes its full glory a long enough moment to let dread subside without struggle. It will,

as the mind whose idea took on that unholy disguise shifts toward its sweet change. Fair and ill

alike hunger for love’s solemn essence to enter their questioning ken. This is music, within

and without—the inspired turn of lonely lament into praise of the magic that touches the skin

of the body of infinite dreaming in finite appearances, over and over again—

the music of love that is breathed into shining terrestrial forms as they transmute old pain

into strength that is so finely subtle, so strangely capacious of gentleness, can it recall

the sad network of tissues their mortal derangement once told them comprised their entirety? All

will be brought within love’s singing compass—all truly resides at all times there. Delusion feels strong,

but dissolves at the first welcome touch of the beautiful body that breathes you, the body of song.

18 June 2001

Roses Foreshadow Song

The flow of sweet flowers of endless red longing away from the place where they’ll no more abide

in the darkness and silence of eyes—this, my song, is the terrible grace of their being denied

nothing anywhere now. They are fruitful in crimson desire, an elixir of life without end

in the instant before it achieves full dominion. Their pure arcane properties fluently lend

a slight tinge of their nature wherever a passageway opens to welcome their presence and loss

and the change that remains in their wake. They are asking so little, and yield so much joy as they cross

the foreshadows of mystery, holding a lantern of deeply invisible light in their waves

of slow ecstasy tenderly rising in slant rays of wakening insight. From out of the cave

of disaster emerges an ordered procession of star-borne reminders of gardens and seas

that are flown on the color and salt taste whose messages run without number toward the rose-trees

of a world that is knowledge in blossom. Direct and benign in the first overt gaze they allow,

divinely inspired of song’s mind in the second, entirely your own in the third—this is how

you will come into clear understanding by way of their petal-formed lens of strong saturate red.

A far lambent glow through its darkness, the grace of an oncoming quickness that runs through your head

until all inessential intelligence yields to its hugeness of beauty while that which is real

and incisive is rendered much wiser—you steel yourself needlessly, knowing the imminent feel

of its touch will be lovely, as if you would heighten the flood of relief that the moment will bring

in which all your false dreams fall behind you. A sky of astonishing clarity hears itself sing

through a million fine patterns, the bright constellations of home, where the gardens of real roses flow

in an ocean-wide river—the mortal attainment of layer on layer of petals of slow-

motion fragrance that winds to a soft final heartbeat of such aching depth, love itself must respond

with a power that fades into silence so dark in its brilliance and magnitude, what lies beyond

its soft influence sways, all-pervading and gentle, a seemingly little voice rising in waves

from the throat of a lover whose work of relentless desire has attained you this side of the grave.

19 June 2001

The Hue of Heart’s Blood

The bead of live blood in the palm of my otherwise empty right hand—as I struggle to tell

how much love I have gained the long while I have suffered uncanny dimensions to enter and dwell

in the widening scope of my heart—that dark blood is a peerless reminder of how I was born

to a world of immaculate wholeness that flooded my senses the moment I knew I’d been torn

from the veil I had clung to, my shield and my tenuous armor against a material curse

of my mind’s tarnished making. I loved you whenever I could, between lessons and tests that grew worse

over time—that pretense of omnipotence. Time and the thickening loneliness cast by its lack

of essential enlightenment staggered me. Finally, I drew a very faint line at the crack

of a doorway, then gathered my courage about me and entered a radiant sphere where the night

shone as sparklingly crimson as one ancient house made of crystalline rose petals flooded with light

that I reperceive now as pure fragrance, an air so alively enveloping, all that it holds

becomes brilliant with promise. So strongly aware of the meaning of all it portends, vivid golds

and vermilions come singing to life in the body I still carry with me, though flesh is so far

from my thoughts I had almost entirely forgotten it, I feel increasingly near where YOU ARE,

and that feeling allows me to cross the next threshold away from the sad tattered veil I once grasped.

It lies two steps removed from me now. Shining pleasure you mean to me here, be the one I have clasped

in the most sacred visions and dreams of my being through all of my travels, down all of the ways

I have sought love’s enchantment, among all the leaving and loss that has led to this moment whose praise

I shall never recant. Be the work of this journey made vividly whole to my heart once again—

as in truth I am rapidly, happily learning to know you cannot have been otherwise. Pain

once appeared to envelop me; now it is only a ghost fading into a far-away cloud

as beheld from a place beyond time’s hopeless groaning. Your eyes are my universe. Touch me aloud

in the words of your love’s most exorbitant power, and I shall be able to echo its flood

in a voice I’ve possessed all unused till this hour: a song of the beautiful hue of heart’s blood.

20 June 2001

Through the Flow of Song

A widening circle expands all around you, the work of your purposeful movement through space

with an all-alone air past coronas of flowerlike presences, petals arrayed on the face

of an ocean that swells into silence, a blue-black and diamond-bright purity holding your heart

in its powerful reaches as lightly and coolly as if it were all and not merely a part

of its very own substance. Flown out of the circle and into the everywhere-nowhere of still

void immensity, why is a little thought lurking about just outside full awareness? Until

you invite it, it cannot come forward to tell you how lovely it finds you. Its place in the song

you are slowly beginning to notice has held you within its committed embrace all along

is a moaned sweetness calling you into a deeper and more acute mode of perception in which

its unfolding designs will surround you completely with what you desire as a boundlessly rich

lyric passage flows upward within the procession of tones that are nearing a terrible bliss.

For a moment you feel the onset of distress that might tear you apart, but the song perceives this,

and insinuates gentleness so very softly, its tentative lightness of touch meets with no

real resistance, and you are now joyfully fraught with its being within you, an opening slow-

fading traces of dreams have relinquished entirely and love has surrendered on meeting its own

most impassioned existence’s origins. Slyly—because the full meaning of this has been known

to your true heart since lyric enchantment first flooded its most sacred chamber, awaking the will

that lay sleeping in formlessness into the blood of a wonderful body where song would distill

its best essence by way of the fire of the hunger for music wherever it happened to find

its uncanny way forward to take on the sung-into-flower-light circles surrounding the mind

of its timeless emergence—oh you, who are nearing the source of my boundless desire for your word,

your passion, your power of seeing, come clear as the diamond-like ocean of all you have heard

and have learned to be one with. My heart and my reason for singing this night through the widening core

of the love you are now, I shall hold you and be you through wave upon wave of eternity more.

21 June 2001

The Lay of the Secret Sun

Your touch is so wildly electric and yet so elusively melting, the heat of your hand

reaches deep into places I’ve always protected as if they were fragile—but now they expand

all around you like heaven’s own opening vistas, permitting a vantage point I shall enjoy

through your mirroring eyes as the delicate list of my most sacred mind attains true equipoise.

That mind is now seeking to hear the sweet measures whose rising appears in your eyes amid mine.

My love, do you know what this means? Make a gesture within me, that I may receive the bright sign

of your wakeful desire in a manner so heartfelt, my bloodstream will carry its mark everywhere

all throughout this, my body of song. I am part of your everywhere now. We are all that we share

when we mingle, and very much more. Look around you from where you are touching me furthest inside,

and dream with your eyes locked in mine of the sound of the voices that marry their musics here. Glide

all along their uprising harmonic devices with soft breathless silence inside you. The hush

that attends this reception affords greater license to enter new series of chambers where rush

solemn words in which quickness of magic conveys itself, fully developed, toward the degree

of astonishing potency love will attain with your hand in the mystery offered as ‘me’

and confer on your beautiful presence with all-seeing, fervently yea-saying lack of restraint.

You are all that you ever will be, mine completely. Inside you I hear not one word of complaint.

In the resonant field of our singing thus wildly amid such a noble refinement of fires

of enveloping brightness of sound, a delightfully plangent reply to the one who inspires

indescribable rapture to pass the far threshold of bearable joy may require to be heard,

but its pleading for something like mercy is less a retreat from the heights than an inside-out word

urging deeper, more serious heart-penetration. To form the next word, draw a very long breath,

fall beyond all return through my eyes, and be sated. Your love has exceeded the limits of death.

My longing for you and the numberless moments in which we will find ourselves joined in this way

flood through a pure bloodstream I know I have opened and entered forever for you and this lay.

At our heart shines a holiness melted horizon-wide, heaven arrayed where a secret Sun glows

with resplendent assent to cessation of time. This is love’s secret sign: Music here has no close

22 June 2001

Ease

After so many strivings toward a great moment of meeting, a soft pall of weariness flows

all around you—a blanket, a comforter. Knowing how safely you rest in the heart of the rose

that first opened through several slow stages of redness and heaviness, bending the stem’s pliant spine,

and how gently the love still surrounds you that led you to find your true place in its timeless design

as the stain that would later be petals unfolded—this knowing has carried you into a sleep

in which satisfied longing transmutes into gold all the dreams that were nightmares and shows you their deep,

everlasting nobility. One with your essence at all seeming ‘times,’ they are visible now

as a volitive grace of the mind that has tested its courage and sought out the luminous brow

of its counterpart dreamer and braved the true mirror its dark eyes provide. As you drift there, awake

while asleep and completely at rest, you are hearing a silence that you have inspired, a calm lake

in the midst of a universe-ocean that knows you as part of the flow of its purest love-song—

part, yet somehow not less than the whole, as the lake of your being contains it. Come singing along

the contours of a huge, sweet idea, if such would delight you, and feel it as if it were skin

on the form of a being whose answering touch will awaken a wondrous desire to begin

further lessons in love in this instant, or lie with its presence a peaceful while longer: Your choice

will be honored before you have made it. Decide even nothing best pleases you—there is a voice

beyond all comprehension that needs no acknowledgement: Merely to be and not be as you were

and will always not have to remain is its calling. The soft zone of roses whose breathings confer

solemn mystery even while gently withdrawing away from their heart-aching blossoming forms

is a substanceless door ever open. You saw it in visions a world-wind away; you saw storms

that electrified love into limitless passion; you saw and still see what the lingering trace

of desire that might yet in some sweet way unmask you would venture to show you within its own face

should you turn even now and your eyes meet its beauty to find its mild stare drinking in the still sea

of…Exquisite the flow of this silence’s music where love is so easy to be and not be.