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.

Red Mountain Mind

Red your pine needles, your rusty clay and woodpeckers,
Red the dawn about your head, and squirrels who sleep in hollow beds.
Red the river with your mud, tinged with blue, green, brown and gold.
Red your ants, emboldened by flesh, and red your buds in spring's first blush.
Red the cardinal, mulberries, raspberries, blackberries, holly and red maple, red oak, rhodedendron.

Red too am I, rolling in mud and water, hair like flame, and skin now re-formed with your own.

You call to me through creaking trunk and woodland scent:
"Sink back into the mud
back into pine needles and redbird song.
A new clothing fashion from
dust and feathers, twigs and elderberries."

I will don Red Mountain as it dons me,
but a thread of thought in the mind of its song.

Woven, re-patterned,
my mouth becomes beak and eyes like a fox,
two antlers grow from a sharpened brain
as mud dries into skin bark, textured, all curves,
with tree knobs and boles for knees and elbows,
and this heart, now quartz stone
purified, pressed into form by the weight of 6.5 billion years
and the great river of time that wears away at the universe
like water carves canyons, caves, new creatures,

pooling deep in the cosmic belly,
it carries the seeds of life,
erosion of dreams now scattered to the winds,
impregnating the darkness like embers or stars,
galaxies fed by the compost of planets and long dead suns,
recycled, reborn, as tree, rock, snout and smile.

Human too, more stardust and water than creed or law.
Red mud for blood, these Homo sapien creatures.

Sun carries me back
back to Red Mountain.
Woodpecker overhead, drumming on my mind,
a resonant bowl for the wind

as thought drops to earth, an autumn leaf,
red blood turned purple, deep maroon, black,
feeding the soil of all that lives in the world.

The Old Traditions

Ireland Speaks of Tradition

Burn these traditions, O Fire!

May Medb and Deirdre, Grainne and Lugh, 

Amergin and Brid, Padraig and Colm Cille,

burn like a pyre boat sent to sea. 

Love not the old traditions but Tradition.

Rivers dry up. Springs empty.

But the Well of Life overflows!

Let the old groves decompose, the old stones dissolve.

Give over Newgrange and Tara, Emain Macha and Knocknarea.

They are but soil long borrowed from my heart, ready to reincarnate anew. 

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. 

   

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.
 
 
 

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?

 
 

The Cure Lies in the Curse

I am Lot’s wife
having looked back
became a frozen stone,
a statue of salt,

but now
having stood all these years
with the rain and desert storms,
world dropping down
to the ground,
my rigid silence
dissolves into tears.

This has demanded time
and the sure-rhythmed seasons of life
to cast my eyes forward again,

knowing that 

release 

is the eventual way of all things.

  

  

 

Red Birds Laughing

Something drew me out
from a long unsensing sleep
into the woods behind my house.

Maybe it was the snow melting into sunshine
or the blue morning deepening into noon.
Maybe it was the red birds laughing outside my window

or perhaps it was the silence
between their songs giving way
to another world awakening from seed.

 
 

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.