My Rain Harper

Posted on June 28, 2014 by J

28 June 2014

My Rain Harper

When the name ‘Rain Harp’ first came to me, I thought of my friend B’ee. He not only plays real harps, he also makes them. He lives in Germany most of the time now, and I rarely see him, but he was just in town. We went for a walk today, prior to his leaving. I gave him a small Rain Harp, and we caught up with each other’s lives. I hadn’t seen him since February 2013, and so much has happened since then. On my part, the news is seemingly entirely sad, and yet that cannot be, because if B’ee is still my friend, the world is good.

He won’t mind if I share a little more about who he is:
Birch Book
In Gowan Ring

27 June 2014

22

Written New Spring Leaves

Unfold these fine little fans—made by fingers so small, they’re still lovingly half-trapped within.
Wonder at length at the knowledge they hold fast within them, the mind in and over their skin,
the fierce tiny veins pushing upstream the very particular life-force their future requires,
and—much more than all of this—love yet to come, although we will mark it with funeral fires.
Tomorrow, my love, will not dawn. Please don’t brace for it; maybe it’s life’s own last breath, maybe not;
it cannot be known like a lowered red curtain, but neither of us was enamoured with thought
over spirited music, and neither would give over singing to hear a dull sermon preached flat.
I’m quite alone for the moment, but even if I were in heaven—I’d leave even that—
open, you know, it will always—but always—fly open—and there you will be, hat in hand.
My door’s a little but colorful bit of wild paper, fine-folded, brought out from a land
I wanted to see in my dreams because someone I loved and who loved me lived there, and I did.
Now I shall fall asleep, maybe forever, but not till I’ve done something sense might forbid,
but love more than anything else wants to consecrate—that’s what I know, and you well know it too.
Small little fans made of air—lovely weather—and songs written there where they first formed and grew.

 

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Blue-Hot

Posted on June 24, 2014 by J

24 June 2014

Blue-Hot

Little blog, I’m trying. Encouraging news reached me today, from an old friend valued but not yet mentioned, and for that I’m going to get all brave and crazy and post this poem I finished about five seconds ago. It’s not about him or anyone I could name, really; they always turn out in the end to have an agenda of their own, but it is one always kind in nature. Thank the very source itself for that, for swiftness is how it comes through, in a place of flow where continued motion is all.

24 June 2014

20

Stranger, Welcome Home

There will have been the rain-swollen warm season, then there right after—low mists filled with cold.
Mine is the glorious gain of the message the magic of autumn will ply you with; fold
all our hand-lettered leaves in a pale vellum envelope, write very simply upon it again,
then lay it aside and call home the long wandering lover who’s fallen on fields of no rain,
but can’t weep enough for the courage it cost her to go there at all. And she did it; she did.
Now you will understand truly, forever, the reason she loved well, but loved and then hid.
In a particular arc of clear Moonlight, shadows are cast that come straight to the point.
When any number are marked as they come so together, we know it means love will annoint
its successor within the next moment—in fact, you’ve already felt at the back of your mind
who it is, and you, aye, you—you’ve always been prescient, and this time you’re right, and the stars have aligned
with the dimmest of senses we still retain use of, as littlest shining afar reaches eyes
that seek for it willingly, often, and hoping for even a glimpse of a truth beyond lies.
Night after night while the seasons wheel round, I lie down and wake up alone, though I sleep
with the strongest of far-sighted beautiful gods, the one who brings love-songs impossibly deep
from out of sea waters so crystalline, lenses they are, yet when he dives for magical air,
I write down what I cannot see as he sings me it, far far away, yet so forceful and fair.
We have worked long, long and hard, yet it all comes to nothing because we are weightless with change.
When we’re both dead, all our shifting of weight will change places. There—humans are real, and we’re strange.

 

 

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The Lonely Blog

Posted on June 23, 2014 by J

23 June 2014

The Lonely Blog

The last time I had a blog, I also had a correspondence with a wonderful poet far away. We read each other’s blogs, and their content became part of our conversation. I no longer hear from him, and will not, due to serious illness—his ability to read and write was the first thing he lost. I miss him every day, and yet it took time for me to realize that I can’t seem to get this blog properly up and running because my friend is not there to read and respond.

During our time, we passed two Solstices together, while apart. The first, December 2012, was the night after a very beloved cousin of mine died of cancer; the second, June 2013, was just a few weeks before his own diagnosis. Last December I was alone, and so suicidal that I made the intent of my Solstice ritual my own protection. It worked; the thought of my continued existence was very deeply shadowed, but I did not succumb. Last week, with all of this trying to sort itself out in my head, I asked a friend to celebrate the Summer Solstice with me. Things are feeling much lighter now than last year, and I wanted to mark the shift and celebrate it.

My birds are pigeons, rock doves. The come to my window and eat from my hands. They’ve been bringing their babies to me for weeks now.

 

20 June 2014

17

Solstice Eve

Open the door, and hold the door open

dedicated to my birds

Open the long-standing door till its transparent crack is a smile through the clouds of the sky.
Where was the jailor who sold you its solidness? Hasn’t he been a long while gone, and why?
Wasn’t that miser a liar the while, and has he not since seen his own face and paled?
Open the door! You’ve a place in the sky; sky’s a place in your mind; land’s sad last ship has sailed.
Who am I sighing for, anyway, waiting alone, night on night, footsteps tiptoeing by,
but mind on the range asking questions my dreams are so fraught with, why won’t they let a soul lie
just quietly, when the last judgment’s been passed, but footsteps keep needing to tread back and forth?
Let them be happy grey dove cocks and hens if you please, needle-beaks all aligning due North,
desiring to rest on your window-ledge; just leave the glass lifted high, and give open air free
range to come, go, and stay. If it will, it’s so lovely; you know birds are angels; well, angels-to-be.
Open a little more eyesight, mere human; ours is as brilliant as diamonds in skies,
and as swift as your musical sense of love willing to die for it. We come together so wise.

 

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Lunacy

Posted on June 15, 2014 by J

 15 June 2014

Friday was a mighty special day for lunatics like me.

13 June 2014

Full Moon Friday the 13th

11

The Night Beach

it seemed a fantasy, then

If I were still waters, though rain kept on falling, I know I would rise to the slow lip of spill.
Just trail your hand as you move through the shadows the branches above are so heavy with; fill
the pale cup you have formed with your palm and the magic that sifts through you willingly, while patterns form.
Still waters—rain—kept on falling—as madness increased in our hearing, and rose up to storm.
Love woken early, full Moon still on-shining, my mind in my hand, and your hand in my own,
this was the salt silent stretch of kind beach we had sought out forever, and only just known
last half-night, in our dreams. Here we are, met more gently than ever before, though we still cannot see.
I am invisible, shining not even the slightest in eyes trained where I cannot be.
Tarry sidelong, trailing hands in cold water; sift it with fingers that feel the tide turn.
The real rain must meet with the strange rain, demented by ghosts we all were where our lot ceased to learn.
Waters must flow on and on, like the ghosts in our veins, and our offspring, those reading us through.
If you had not turned the page, we might just as well—Cry out for death, and then die. Have you true
honest knowledge of sad little shadows beneath dying branches where lorn children seek shelter man
cannot damage, nor wrest hard away by bad magic, nor penetrate ever? I’m dead, yet I can—
stop this being from casting the hatefullest shadow—from touching the farthest-away turn of phrase—
if only I unlock my mind in the presence of kindness, and hear out what love’s prayer word says.

The night beach lies silent, a sweet stretch of Moon-glowed immaculate whiteness—on black basalt sand.
I lie alone as I never have, ever. You’ve always stayed close. We’re half ocean, half land.

 

 

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Elder Lore

Posted on June 9, 2014 by J

8 June 2014

The Elder Lore

Tonight, while dancing, I entered a delicious state of carried-awayness, flinging my hands about and swaying my back and singing. My solar plexus lit up like the sky. I had discovered some new and excellent beer, and was feeling no pain—literally. Dancing is the backbone of my life, but I have many autoimmune disorders, including arthritis. Add in repetitive-motion injuries, and I am in some degree of pain at all times. My dancing days are numbered. That might be a grim outlook, but then again—for the first time in my life, if I should cease to dance, I could live anywhere. The only reason I pay as much rent as I do is to have my own dance floor.

The real choice is between life and death now, isn’t it, really? So many of us have to face that choice each day.

I spent a large portion of my day, this day, dancing and making song. I want this for everyone, all of us. What are we to do?

I am the ghost-child of all wild true love’s elder lore; thus you hear me sing.

8 June 2014

7

The Skating of Backwards Ice

They wait outside my window from the break of day. They call for me.
They wing so wildly all around, that’s who my soul most wants to be
the moment it is quit of this sad sack of skin that scribes these words.
I’ve fallen on the downed desire that once transfigured mortal herds
and flocks and azure acres into wings across a limpid sky—
I realize—and yet I dreamt I’d only sought to ask you why,
and every inch and bridge between us flooded out and sank and failed.
When the waters rose yet higher, someone said, that ship has sailed,
and then my eyelids fluttered, and the sails were petals dreamt in air.
I’m still a sort of falling all night long, a sinking Sun, a fair
admonishment to watermen through changing currents, and a sign—
the vertigo that bears us on just skates like love’s last lifetime’s wine
remembered through a haze of songs we’ve only just begun to sing.
I’m skating now myself, right backwards, fast, love’s falling everything.
See, as if from far away, the angel raise her wings, and soar.
You knew you meant as much to me. We learnt it in the elder lore.

 

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Welcome News

Posted on June 9, 2014 by J

8 June 2014

Welcome News

This Rain Harp endeavor feels blessed from the outset. I’m not ready to weave too much of it together yet, but I can share some of the many good signs. I do love to wonder about such things:

The theme I used for my previous blog was simple and I liked it, so I used it again for this one. Before, the stock photo in the header was of a tree with white blossoms, which suited me, so I just kept it. This time, the stock photo is what you see above. It first turned up when I posted a blog briefly some time ago to commemorate a death in the family, and was so appropriate it immediately became part of the spookiness of that passage. Lo and behold, here it is again, and still just as good. I will soon be posting photos of my non-literary work, the real Rain Harps. They are meant to be reminiscent of branches and blossoms in rain. And even curiouser, see the two sheep off to the left? I live in town, but from my window I can see a yard where two sheep are grazing even now. I work to the sound of their calls.

Last week, on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I was sat at my work-table making beaded chain-links when seemingly the same large, noisy bee flew in through the open window, explored my front room thoroughly, including me, then flew out again. I don’t recall this ever happening before. Bees that chance to fly in usually seem confused and stay by the window. This seemed almost purposeful. It frightened me a little, because it was so forward. This morning, I awoke to email from a friend called Bee, the first news I’ve had from him in many months. He’ll be visiting my town in a week or two. He usually lives somewhere in Europe, and hasn’t been here in I don’t know how long. We have collaborated on projects before; I’ve been thinking of trying to find someone to work with again.

Not that I intend to post everything, but this is what came last night:

 
7 June 2014

6

The Spring from which Songbirds Arise

As all the old waltzes wheel round in our memories, all the dear rock doves wheel round in near flight.
Calling all day, and then waiting on ledges for evening to fall and for songs to play night,
their lyrical wings whistle music through magical spiralling-upward designs while I stare.
Sometimes I turn to a pillar of stone, far too frightened to move, but when asked if I care,
I know I would die many thousand times over if love worked its will and it left me alone.
Rough morbid music, perhaps; ancient magic, forgotten at times; bodies turned to grey stone,
but with very strange beauty alight in each countenance dreams ferry back from their burial place.
I shall have sat here forever, as long as you’ve known you exist, and I’ll keep weaving lace
as long as the dear souls around you keep breeding. Music and laughter and all flesh to come—
that’s how you’ll catch us and keep us. You love us; we’ve learned how to weep where the strangest words hum
like a cordon whose eerie electrified sacred enclosure is this, as you hear all I sing.
Aye, we’ve all waltzed round and round; this time is the birds’s. It’s their blossoming, aye, and their spring.

(and then before the end begins:)

A little, sacred, ancient piece of very precious word-lore girls
were given so they’d never have to turn their eyes aside—Who twirls
her life away, behind your eyelids, dancing as if life could end,
but smiling just to show you it will not? You know your lives-long friend.

 

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Sotry Here

Posted on June 6, 2014 by J

6 June 6 2014

There’s a story here, and it is dedicated to someone I very deeply love—someone I will not see again. This won’t be spun for drama; it is sorrow that is already in many ways well sung.

There’s always going to be a deeper story weaving through the lines. (There’s always going to be a deeper sotry, I first wrote.) The first sign that passed between my mortal lover and my poetic mind was a seal, a creature of the salt sea deeps and islands, seen by him far landward in warm fresh water. He saw it in the river by which he went out walking, and posted an image online. I, coastal-dwelling hearer of multitudes of sea-lions and seals, recognized the creature by its very face, and sent its cast metal image, in the form of a seal-face pin from my leather ‘selkie-skin’ jacket, back. My friend was magnified, as was our friendship from that moment. When I saw him, he was very much changed from what he had recently been, and the image of the seal was clearly imprinted on his face when we were quietly together and I could see him through my soul. We had very little time for this, but it was beautiful while it lasted, and its imprint lasts very strongly and beautifully now. Many songs have come of our friendship, and many, many more will come, until we both hang up our harps.

The song to follow is mine and yours. The Muse is with me always, and so are you.

6 June 2014

5

Deeper, Deeper Dance

Then, there the old rose glowed with such demonic apparitions, light
took leave of her, and let her sway, a head above a stalk, all night,
but then again, an angel showed the sap within her why he came,
and how she need not die alone, but merely call his old, old name.
I’d have perished long ago, but something in my mind took hold
like little shoots from off a tree inestimably, nobly gold
each autumn, and alike as gold as fresh new dawn each dawning’s break.
Now I’m knowing why I hold in either hand a sad live snake—
I’m knowing, and the oracle I just became allowed you in
the little partial moment you require to play the mortal sin
you carried with you when I heard you first pronounce your name to me.
We were swaying round and round a ghostly dance floor, just we three,
where roses threw themselves on lapping waves to die of utter bliss.
When we’re dead, my angel, we—will die, for having swallowed this,
but fresh sweet roses—watch them now—will rise up, bloom, and breathe forth song.
Trouble comes to haunt you. Turn it into where we all belong.
Snake so closely coiled about a set of braided roots, kind sleep
is what you need, and you shall have it. Meanwhile, dance thrives in love’s keep.

My poems are dated for the sake of any sort of later record-keeping. I number them in sequence, month by month. They are nearly always started and finished within an hour or so; they must reflect the very subtle state of mind they were conceived within throughout, as if their composition takes too long, mind will interfere, and make up nonsense, and talk itself out of trusting in music and love. A lover of song just cannot let that happen—thus you see how hard I am willing to work to keep it from happening to you!

 

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My Friendlinesses

Posted on June 6, 2014 by J

6 June 2014

My Friendlinesses

This blog is approximately one day old, and yet it has been visited and liked by a number of readers. Several have opted to follow. I am grateful, because knowing that others are reading makes it so much easier to keep sitting down to do the work. As much as I love it, it never ceases to be hard. I am also very grateful, even delighted, that those who have responded to my two small posts are so literary and so diverse. You include poets with very sensitive ears and really easy, organic rhythms—‘easy’ in practice meaning either automatic or dastardly impossible. No few of you are within small years of my age, which I hope means you are picking up on clues of experience.

Spending a huge proportion of my waking hours between the worlds, and of course pretty much all of my sleeping ones, I have had to learn to be slippery. To think and speak on multiple levels, although I am only comfortable with this verbally, and to maintain a fierce hatred of human duplicity and dishonesty. I’ve got the erstwhile Aspergian quality of being already so overwhelmed with extraneous sensory data that if I have to deal with one more hint of social bullshit, I will mount an unforgettable meltdown. I never do, because it’s not that severe a condition, but the tendency, the too-near approach to the screaming theshold, is always there. So I choose to spend as much of my human-being time as possible with those who are honest with and about themselves, and who are willing to work to have one identity only, even if it shows considerable flux. One honest Other-anyperson is better company than a ‘normal’ who must live behind a mask.

The songs come from entrainment of associated words and images, with the real inspiration slightly behind the scenes, coordinating the action. I had to learn to trust that it meant me well, genuinely wanted me to be a poet, and would not play me false. Here we are today:

5 June 2014

4

Is, but Need Not Be

The woken howls through all-night rain sang all around me, long nights long,
but then subsided as the pain began to reach its peak. The strong
desire it had alluded to became in very truth the wing
the silence of the cold dark past depended on. It bade me sing
through all the many layers, wounds, and pains—and intervals of false,
incessant mental wanderings where fertile feet fell into waltz,
swayed over every inch and acre ice held out before them, then
turned round, still shining, smiling, white as angels from a poet’s pen
when paper means the mortal world that lies before us dead and black.
There’s a signal silence in that darkness; lore has known attack,
but lore has also dealt its pain a blow as mortal in its way
as anything a thundercloud can blast with lightning’s sword’s array
of elemental magickings that flow like rivers down wet steel.
Howls of rain that sang, I’m dead already; this need not be real;
if my flesh lay where dead souls lie, and still I sang, would you incline
to render me sad ill-attention, still? Who sang this sad design?

I shall weave us all again, on either side the selvedge marge.
Howls and pain, both wild and well-contained, in hard steel lines writ large.

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A Sad Rain Song

Posted on June 6, 2014 by J

5 June 2014

Last night I was thinking of my Rain Harp and how much I love it already, when this song—sad, perhaps—came through:

4 June 2014

3

Plangent

Countless, all the nightlong hours and waves of restless, anguished rain.
Look outside—the sky is dark, but somewhere, light will shine again
without revealing wounds and fresh new flows that will not stanch. Just stare
toward the window where the dawn will break a little bit, and glare
as if it meant to frighten you, but really, it just comes to please.
All around you, birds are waking, leaves are green on pliant trees,
and someone who arose a ghost last night will rise a vapor now,
gaze up from one bent elbow, scry in water, and withdraw a vow—
and you will hear that hissing voice as if from back of fields of grass
just slithering, and feel the fear that lets the form of true love pass
unnoticed—and that’s where it has you. That’s black magic, silent loss
that happens in a wink of time where paths that meant to never cross.
Cursed inattention, though all will was summoned and enjoined—
Now it’s over, all is lost, and he goes grey and empty-loined
toward the very grave’s edge first who reads these words and knows they’re true,
but tells himself they’re not for him. They are; he’s mine, by morning’s dew
and evening’s early starrise, unless all I’ve ever been is—dead.
Then I rose. Outside, so fair and fresh—I’d been—how long abed?

Plangent were the strings the angels played, within which voices rang.
When I wake alone again, I’ll think, I’ll hear them if I hang.

Nothing can ever, in the end, be sad for us because we know too much. When I see ahead, for myself or anyone else, I can never even tell if I am seeing us alive or dead, because the line that runs between is so thin and fragile, and we are so much stronger. The songs keep coming. As long as they do, it seems that all is well, or at least on track. That would be the track of entrainment, the process that makes all this possible.

I have to hang between the worlds to hear the sources of song. Of course sometimes I think of hanging just once more, forever.

 

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Welcome to Rain Harp

Posted on June 6, 2014 by J

RAIN HARP

Last year, I endured my own personal inferno. It may be ongoing. In the hope that I am wrong, and that the disasters are approaching their end, I am blogging again. When it all began, I had a blog that I loved, but dealing with an online stalker drove me to shut it down. It was gone before events in my world got really heavy, and I missed having it, and the presence of thoughtful followers, of which I was privileged to have quite a few. I have new lyrics, new projects, and new hopes. The Mundus Imaginalis—which we will no doubt be considering at length here—is still my main source, but increasingly, the ‘real’ world inspires me as well. The name of this new blog is Rain Harp because I live in a very rainy and beautiful place, and while I am not literally a harpist, I am a lyricist, a maker of lyric poems and beaded chains inspired by rainy forests. Mist and fog accompany me, and the voices and wings of birds.

22 April 2014

12

Madness, Setting Forth

The field itself had wandered far before it met our eyes at length.
We’d laid down lorn and lonely, far beyond our elemental strength,
yet filled with roiling questions ancient starlight stirred with living twigs
from off a branch from off a rivered tree of petals someday sprigs
of living lyrics might descend from, here to us, as we meet eyes
with who we were and want to be—as meeting shows one eye that cries
a little bit too long each night to let rest take its shining place.
Hours after dark, stars risen high above, a lake of lace
laid out before me like a linen altarcloth so finely sewn—
and then the hand so clasped in mine, like magic, yet much more my own.
All the field of living wonder worshipped what it watched, as we
felt transient love madness, then subsided as it set us free.

Godspeed to all of us. May this Rain Harp make song long.

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