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. 

  

 

Todd Triad

Copyright Jack Brauer, Mountain Photography

"Todd" --  24th January 2010

It’s enough,
his laughing eyes to melt with mine
as he walks past me uninhibited.
“See me,” his sleek perfection demands.

It’s enough,
to be a woman alone with him,
in a wild, long-forgotten place
of all things, to find him waiting.

It’s enough,
his face a full moon of recognition
and my mind unsettled by his desire.
“You’re mine,” his smiling fangs declare.

More than enough,
his bold attempts at wooing, enough
to make me fall in love forever,
my soul caught naked by a fox.

  

"Kitsune Todd" -- 26th January 2010

He was going about fox business
when I met him again.

The trees were thick and he wore that
hunter’s grin on long black lips.

And when I asked him of the day,
he said,
“Kiss me quick.”

My heart ached like fangs sunk deep–
stealing the wind, a desert in drought.

I placed my lips to his cold wet nose
as he breathed in my vital breath.

No sound but the fire burning within,
now igniting in me as we breathed as one.

Heart sat stuck, stuck in my throat,
choking on care, desire, and whim.

He ate my heart with that fatal kiss,
devoured it bloodied red and raw.

My heart burned up in the belly of a fox,
I did not know love could empty the self.

The universe seeps in this hole for a heart,
pulse-pulse-pulsing with the beat of stars.

Note: ”kitsune” is the Japanese word for a fox, but in Eastern culture, the fox is so much more than “just” a fox. They are shapeshifters who, like many other cultures’ Otherworld inhabitants, fall in love with humans, mete out justice, trick the greedy and foolish, etc. The fox who has kept appearing to me in my border dreams is very much a kind of Otherworld fox … and his name “Todd” is linked to my animus. This poem comes from an actual dream-body experience.

 "Love is a Hungry Fox" -- 27th January 2010

Last night, a dove cried on my window.
She wept for her lover in the fox’s belly,
her mourning woke me to moonless night.

“Little one,” I whispered across the sill,
“Come in and rest your tears somewhere safe.”

But she would not come near.
“You’re the wife of the fox who ate my man,
and your love is hot in him. If you feel sorrow,
then so will he, the one who ate your heart.”

Then I wept for her and for myself.
I shook with tears for all the loves
stolen and maimed in the world.

My Todd came home at first light,
his eyes a trickster laugh.

I wore my anger like a coat,
my hair a flaming red.

But he laughed at me and kissed my hands.
“Don’t be angry with me who holds your heart,”
he said with a toothy smile.

“I exist to make the little birds faster and the
sleek hares nimbler,
without me
they’d grow lazy and die, and where would be
the food in that?”

“I exist to make you, you, and
without me, you’d never learn
to be more than who you are now.
I am your longing and I will devour
until there is nothing left but an empty cup
filling up with the tears of the world.”

   

   

  

Another Faith

Speak into the darkness
like a child praying.
Age does not lessen
your need for faith.

I don’t mean
blindly binding soul to dogma
or sacrificing intuition at devotion’s hands.

There is another faith
that lives beyond these,
waiting for you–
not on the mountain top of wonder
but beyond,

                    in valleys
deep with yew, oak and hazel,
moss, cress, mushroom and stone,
fine leg, hoof, snout, fin and tail,
hiding behind the mask of many.

It is faithful love
who dares look straight into the
Heart of God
and mist-melt into that morning sun, again and again.

To feast at the table of faith is
  but opening your mind
to human vulnerability, 

like fruit, long fermented.

Admit without shame:
you can never live 

  your own expectations.

Instead, faith is setting free
the subtle fear
that makes you believe
every other power but your own.

When you tread with faith
up the spiral milky Way,
you are a star in the night
a naked light without agenda
or any other feat but to
shine.

Only when the inner heat of longing
burns away the clothes
of what you thought you knew
and all the loves undeserving of you,

Only when there is nothing left
between body and darkness
can you make love,
skin to skin and breath to breath,
with the Heart in all hearts.

Only then does faith become
another word for “know.”