This Body, Lush Apple Blossom

This body, lush apple blossom pouring her sweetness out into the spring

Longing every moment to envelop bees, take their honeyed nectar into my pink folds.

Where is my fulfillment?

The delight of being used, filled, my petals crushed so that they seep out warm summer fragrance.

Will I ever become an apple, fattened, round, juicy and ready to drop life?

What creature will devour me, ingest me, imbibe me to his core, intoxicated?

I can't stop myself, can't stop this process of unfolding my fecund depths,

It's as inevitable as the seasons.

Then I realize:

My body is blooming

but not for you, 

not for anyone but because I can,

because I am who I am,

orchard queen seducing the world into fullness.

This Body, Full Moon Bliss

This body, full moon bliss glowing in the room. 

Shadow of sand and tide, I am awash as luminescent pearl, 

splendor seeping in to the dark watered night. 

I touch my breasts, two mountains of clam pearl light 

and feel the foam soft lushness of my pale form, 

the succulent wetness that floods in and out like a tide. 

I am white fire. I am a winter dawn come at last. 

I am this body of pale fruit flesh and redwood bark hair. 

I am the Diana of darkness, and my presence breeds life.

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. 

Eireann's Lovers

Ireland Sings To Her Emigrants:

I am lovesick.
My fields are empty with sorrow
and my wealth dissipates with depression.
No laughing children fill my woods.
They are all gone out into the world.

But I am a woman in love!
And her lovers have turned away.
Return from the far off lands
to me, your ain true love.

Hag no more, I am young,
my breasts as firm as mountain hills
my valley as wet as the Boyne
my hair is soft and long and sweet
and my lips are red with lust.

I am a woman crying out to be loved:
Love me! Love me! Oh love me!
It is the hooded owl's night-call,
refusing to be ignored in the dark.

Come back to your childhood home
where we played outside time or care.
I was a bird and you my song,
laughter raised to the seven heavens.

Re-enter my pleasant lands:
they are fragrant with meadowsweet and gorse,
elderflower, hawthorn and wild rose.

I have prepared a bed for our lovemaking.
It is strewn with petals and grasses and silk,
out on the hills amidst the heather.

There I will reveal to you the secrets of power
best learned from a woman's hot thighs.

Forget the old stories and traditions!
They are not who I am today.
You were in love with a different woman.

Lie with me instead,
my soul spread naked before you.
In that embrace, we will make a new mythology of love.

Kiss me hard on the mouth,
and from our pillow I will whisper a new tradition for life.

Dwell with me
See me as I am

not your mother or grandmother
not Maeve or Grainne or Deirdre,
although I have been all of those and more

but see me without projection:
a small fair woman,
island unto herself
but sister to the world,
fierce and independent
yet vulnerable, lovelorn, battle-weary.

I have claimed my power anew,
sexuality, sovereignty, my soul,
seeking out new priests for the religion of love
and new politicians for the freedom of life.

Now penetrate my depths!
Let us make sighs of fulfillment together,
let everything burn away in passion's fire,
let nothing remain but you and I
and the love between a land and her people.

  

  

Autopoiesis

The Cailleach Speaks Her Mind

Hag no longer hostage,
I dance
naked hailstone
electric emerald heart
lightning struck down to ground
as hill and mountain crack,
thunder rending apart.

Exposed am I, revealed!
Vagina the opened mound,
burial tomb no more
but black earth womb.

Oh Life, fuck me and fuck me deep.
Make love to your lover, the land.
Penetrate your power to my core.

I am wet as the rain for you,
heavy as the clouds for you,
aching as the wind for you,

and demand your ravaging fire
strike open stone into soil,
hail hag no more, but girl queen

priestess in a new fertility rite
where I stand, the Self-Regenerating One.
  

   

The Salmon Soul Speaks

 written from the spring of Life that flows through Ireland as a river of Love

I will live as a river flows,
carried by the delight of my own unfolding.
I will swim the milky Way of Love
out to sea and back again.
Salmon in cycle, my soul,
soul as return, river, rebirth
into the matter of spirit --
unfettered
bursting banks
clearing the land
shaping stone into star
and egg into fire.
I am the current of GOD that remains
ever changing but ever unchanged. 

   

Heart

Little wild song bird,
love is not a cage
but a nest
to which you return
day after day.

Tattoo

Elvis Barukcic/AFP/Getty Images

  

  

Your touch
is like pen to paper
indelible on my skin,
a language of belonging
pressed deep into cells
and soul,
tattoo
forever marking me
as loved.

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. 

  

 

Carolina Spring

dogwood and chinese wisteria along the Eno

Four years
since I saw a Carolina spring,

Four years
since I saw the dogwood in bridal white
next to the redbud tree or woodland drifts of
daffodils perfuming the air with honey while
wild wisteria hangs like Dionysian fruit,
intoxicating the senses, heaven-on-earth.

Four years
since I kissed the faces of field pansies,
fingers aroused by mouse tail buds and silky
river flags, lady’s slipper and pussy-toes,
tasting the tingly tang of winter-cress,
cherry birch and woodland sorrel.

Four years
since I walked through a Carolina spring,
everything so … green!
greener than all earthly memory,
wanting to spend every moment out in the woods
or meadows along the Eno, or on Occoneechee Mountain,
staring as pine trees turn the world yellow with pollen.

Four years
since I heard the cadence of tree frogs
and birds gone mad with springtime–
robins vying for love,
eastern blue bird warbling out his relief that winter is past
as the Carolina chickadee cries in fast succession
“chick-a-dee-dee-dee!”
nuthatches stealing old woodpecker holes for homes
while blue-black grackles and crows argue for limb space.

This is the season for sparrow song and goldfinch,
tufted titmouse, red bird, and the meadowlark’s
“Spring-is-here! Spring-is-here!”
Oh there are birds, more birds than I could name,
birds in search of nests and safe havens,
who know their voice in the greater song of things.

My heart is like the sweet spring birds,
opening forth into full-throated rapture,
mind abandoning winter’s house,
gone feral, naked in the sunshine,
lapping up penumbral rain until
I am drunk, soul splayed out like
apple blossoms before the bee.

Four years,
and I’ve awoken as
Carolina spring.

  

 

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.”

    

 

Sliabh na mBan

“Climb with me to the top”,
picking berries in autumnal sun,
warm and sticky, hot breathed wind
carries her promise of love.

We wend our way in curves,
dizzy with lust, that untamed bird,
leading us up the hill of pleasure,
shy but laughing, intending more.

I chase you, feet wild in pursuit,
rampant in my longing like
Grainne demanding of Diarmuid
unbreakable vows  … or else.

Tumbling, you fall, into the bosom
of the earth, a heather bed made
ready for two eager-mouthed youths,
our legs already a lover’s knot.

Not even the gods of this place,
could come between our bond,
as I share with you my fruit,
a marriage feast for two hearts.

Juice explodes in our mouths,
sweet hunger for more and more,
dripping with red-lipped desire
and stained by a heavy harvest.

We are two wild things, two
blackbirds starved to madness,
two waves rolling into the other,
as we heave our delight to heaven.

“Climb with me to the top”,
to the height of heady dreams,
where even Sliabh na mBan
becomes inflamed with our love.

Note: Sliabh na mBan is a place in Co. Tipperary, Ireland, where Grainne (one of the most beautiful women in Irish myth) fell in love with Diarmuid instead of her older and rather elderly betrothed Fionn (a bit like Trystan and Isyllt). It was traditional in both Ireland and Wales for young couples to go ‘berry picking’ in late summer, early autumn on the hillsides, but of course, it was also a euphemism for so much more! I know in Welsh, there is a close tie between the words for ’sex’ and for ‘hill’ (they are almost identical) showing how ancient the practice of lovemaking on hillsides was. It's still done too. :)
 

Love Even More

There is such a yearning in me tonight,
a burning to look into the
face of another
and reaffirm my own humanity.

It’s as if the whole world
is being born
in the darkest confines of
my heart

until I am left
with no other choice
but to

love even more.

Nesting

I should have known
all along that
it wasn’t about him or
you.

It was about winter versus summer,
the way a storm fills the air with terror and
pure electric joy,
and how my heart could not contain

two dreams, two loves, two futures
without a future of my own.

Shadow danced with sunshine
until I hardly knew which was which–
love has a funny way of blurring all the edges

and making psychosis the unconscious hero.

You were me and I was him and we three were one, then two, then none.

Crazed with longing, I
abandoned the border of half-felt dreams
and journeyed to a far country,
red and fair,
until I found my face in the water and the wind.

Then I knew
it wasn’t about him or
you.

It was the cry of one lonely owl hunting for her nest
before being caught by the rising dawn.

  

 

The Edge You Are

I love you like the edge you are,
hard and breathless, senses intimate with disaster,
and hung half way between heaven and earth.

If I just let go of your precipice,
then I would fall heart-first into the ocean of love,
overwhelmed in waves, un-making my soul.











  

Almost A God

to my lover

You're a stranger to me,
crazy vast man, almost a god,
a universe inhaled with your thoughts,
so that each day I remain
astounded and undone,
the circle of my knowledge lost to the stars,
as the heavens in your heart rise 

untouchable to these searching fingers.
No matter how long I love you or how deep,
your magic remains the same,
a mystery to my mind.

   

   

A Prayer for Love

Goddess, hear my prayer
as I lay my soul bare:
Give me a man maimed . . .
. . . for me to heal.
Give me a man tamed . . .
. . . self-controlled will.
Give me a man afeared . . .
. . . of he himself.
Give me a man endeared . . .
. . . by his heart's wealth.
Give me a man who seeks . . .
. . . after Your ways.
Give me a man so meek . . .
. . . I will obey.
Give me a man quite wise . . .
. . . beyond his years.
Give me a man with eyes . . .
. . . that ease my tears.
Give me a man of Thine own choice:
Let he and I share heart and voice.
He and I forever entwined--
unexpected as divined,
But merry and married, one being:
He'll be my eyes; I'll be his seeing.

So mote it be, as You decree.