Rhiannon Singing

You are as one already dead.

Give yourself to me and I will sing, 

call back your shredded self from the eight corners of the underworld.

I will form you anew out of loam and leaves,

my blood your mortar,
magic-making your immortality as
the man who fell in love and lived.
 
  

The Vulture Queen

Let me be your dissolution.

Let me swallow your orgasm’s light.

Let me follow your woodsy stag scent and danger-blow cry.

Let me catch you in the night of swollen hunger,

taking you, there amidst the dark erotic soil of your soul,

Let me root, fibers piercing your thorn-ridden mountain face.

Let me devour, crack, break with teeth, rhizome, bone, snarl, and stare.

Let me love you in sharp-beaked ways,

with sweet ocean-blooded love, salivaed fangs,

with hail that beats down the green-eyed crops.

I want all that you were and are and will never be now.

Let the fear in you and the death in you be mine
and I will engulf like the sea taking back what is hers. 

Symbiosis

Come, Symbiosis! 
Come, evolutionary lightning!
Strike our counterpoint and set free the cosmic tide,
carried forth by waves of void
back to the center,
back where being is unmade and remade anew.
What new designs, systems, and laws will you birth
from the black-holed Madonna?
All is destroyed.
All is recycled
and lives on through You.

Appalachian Native

Into the Appalachian wilderness,
no rules but the rule of the wild,
no god but the god of presence.

My nest is amidst dead leaves
where-ever I stop for sleep,
wandering all day to feed on nuts,
bitter fruit and sweet mountain waters.

Shedding my shell,
shedding the shackles of all I thought I knew,

here the human creature
sinks back into the soil,
merging into bark texture,
mushroom, green leaf and bird.

Plans rot down,
expectations wear away like riverbanks,
while a mountain of thoughts
      transform
           into trees.
 
 
 

Midsummer Hunt

Humid air comes rolling in,
hair-curling moisture,
fine dew upon my face,
                 inhaling the scents of
another world
    a summer world
a world heavily pregnant
amidst dark forest floors.

I have walked this Way
      every year
hunting for the hooded one
                   the hidden one
his name unnamable
save by midsummer trees.

Humidity makes me drowsy,
mind on the ground
under a stupor of heat
panting, licking cracked lips,
even the Shade is heavy–

    

then a voice on the wind! 

     his his his ... the hunted one now hunting

   hunting hard for blood and bone

  hunter down upon me
 my skin to buckskin,

hand in hand, hoof in hoof,
                     penetrating from his darkness,
all knife stare and death kiss.

Humidity swelling,
I can hardly breathe
hardly move
for the weight of him
the weight of air
weight of the world

holding me here,
heaving doe
in mud and rotten leaves,

pressing down until
    clouds burst forth with rain

all that weight
      falling
                  piercing
                                 plummeting
to the earth,
sky       rent       apart,
by lightning’s blind arrow,

hearts heave, earth growls,

wind blows back the dark endless hood
and I am his

 heart his harvest,

 soul his own. 

  

 

Breathing Towards Birth

Wind,
strong wind,
tell me,

are you
my true nature? –

heart dispersing
like pollen
on the breeze

and every thought
a flutter,
leaves at evening

even my body
this earthen animal thing
bending
unbending
to the currents

as here

invisible
becomes
visible

swelling up,
lungs a balloon,
full bull frog throat,

I am swollen with spirit
and feel as though I might explode

and in the same

moment
of fullness,
tension,
expansion,

the exhale arrives,
emptiness,
space,
a void unfurled.

I am not …
yet I am.

I cannot express
the fullness
of this being-ness
this such-ness.

Impregnated
by presence,
I am a dandelion gone to seed,

each breath
a step
towards birth.

Wind,

strong wind,
tell me,

when my last breath
rejoins
you,

will I finally
be
born?

 
 

She Arises

Blood thumps in my ears,
a drum I cannot drown out
for all my drinks and devilment.

Quivers my body, an arrow ready strung,
aimed at the bulls-eye of knowing
there is no escape from her,
the woman crying alone in the bathroom,
sick at the cycled sight of vomit,
even her own body rejecting her.

How did the mind go crazy?
Nothing sensible, sense blown to dust,
am I who? —
–- ”Another shot, double quick.”

In the shrunken horror of a glimpse,
I cannot do this anymore.
Hands paralytic, the glass no longer rises,
as heaviness insults my suicidal hopes,
a flame fueled by recollection,
spark in my dimming sight screams

“You can do it … just … let … go.”

Whiskey medicine wasted on the floor,
glass like diamonds cuts away my fears
as I fall 

falling into the street, panting, breath eludes the lungs,
homeless, drifting, warmth ungrips his hand from my head

I am cold, so so cold
on these cobblestones, crying tears I'm beginning to feel,
running down my face into the gutter
  lips pressed into the bottom of the world,
kissing, blue, crawling, face a-light

like a toddling child
who has just discovered world as mother

and above me, oh above -–
there are stars, thousands of stars,
pinpricks of light arising from death’s drunken maw.

Mother, help me live again.

   

   

 

My Great-Grandmother's House is Gone

My great-grandmother's house is gone now.
Nothing left but farmland
     returning to old habits,
and a few outbuildings as vague reminders
           of once-human habitation.
The fallow fields emerge,
                                a mandala of sweet pea and poppy,
      summer scents swaying
               with the delight of their own pollen      
and everywhere there are saplings,
a silent people moving slowly.

In search of heirlooms,
                              I enter an outbuilding subsumed in kudzu
 and find a box--          
                          empty
  soaked through with rain
          and the floor’s damp compost.

Hands clutching soil,
                     I walk out into the sun,
mind like milkweed

I take off my clothes and sit
in the waiting grass.