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.

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.

  

  

Waking After the Storm

Morning after rain,
Earth rests in reverie,
Soaking up jeweled silence.

 

Eno River Walking

Eno River in Durham, NC

 

This place with birds calling to one another,

the slow whir of river walking upon

age-worn rocks from another life,

red clay sinks down, accepts, slides,

green thorns covered with promises of spring,

snow like winter’s ghost melts into the earth.

The river runs and walks, then runs again,

as quiet eyes of trees observe

passing of time

passing of years

dropping their leaves down

sap rising

budding

shooting forth into fullness

the color and splendor of death

as falling leaves come anew.

But now, now their blood,

their heartbeat pumps stronger

after long, unconscious sleep.

The deer have eaten at bark and branch

during winter’s starving bite,

but now, now from roots

spread forth green blades,

speared desires for sun and air.

This place is open

and intimate

the pebbles and small shells

mingle together like brothers and sisters

at the river edge,

each stone a story past, each shell a life long gone.

This place with its tall trees,

buckeye and oak: white, blackjack and laurel.

This place with holly, rhododendron, sycamore,

white ash, maple and beech, the trembling beech,

walnut, pecan, wild thorn, alder and dogwood,

sourwood and ironwood, honeysuckle,

a thick array of river birch, cedar and hemlock.

This place with grasses, grasses and grasses,

moss and lichen, ivy, sumac and creepers,

shooting bulbs wild with spring’s coming day.

And pine trees, who could not mention the pine trees,

short-leafed pine in bunches with loblolly pine drooping down,

long-leaf pine that needs fire to seed, fire to be freed,

ancient giants that covered this place long ago,

pine-cones everywhere before deciduous trees took root.

A sparrow peers at me now,

querying my intentions in this place,

then carries on, moves along feeding off the ground,

dancing with a hop in his step,

his lover nearby,

their white breasts glimmering

beneath brown wings and

gleaming eyes.

I am breathless,

breathless

at this place,

at its rolling sides rising up into blue sky,

this valley, this river course,

this place of cosmic lineage,

about to awaken to Spring again

like all other years — yet unlike ever before.

The joy that fills me

reminds me of home,

tells me I’m home,

tells me to walk softly on this clay,

to slip with it and slide with it,

to feel the leaves, the bark, the dead grass, new grass,

smooth stone, volcanic etrusions,

woodpecker in the distance amidst creaking trunks.

I know this place in my dreams,

have known it for many years,

but this place is real,

this place breathes,

it lives,

carries with it memories

sinking in,

sinking into me,

seeping in like blood and breath,

like scent on the wind.

In this moment,

there is no me.

Woods, river, birds, shore,

the silent white-footed mouse staring at me from his hole

as he melts into grey rock light,

blurring his edges,

not mouse, but stone,

not stone, but mouse.

So too I melt

dissolve

blend into hues of green and brown.

I am earth and wind,

murmur of water as it kisses stones,

tree-creeper hopping, moving up bark paths,

wren in the distance shrieking his warning,

rising rocks emerge from the hillside,

winding their way along a river’s long walk

all this I am,

all this flows in me and through me,

the Eno River walking and running, then walking again,

part and whole,

whole and part.

This place is real.

This place is home.

Note: The Eno River is my native North Carolina watershed … the rocks here stretch back 600 million years and are very deep, not only in my mind, but in this place's psyche too.

  

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.”

    

 

Mountain Storm

storm brewing in Snowdonia, N. Wales -- Mynydd Mawr is nearby

There is rain tonight in the valley,
     rivers running off course
and even the wind has missed its directions,
          leaves stuck in my hair,

eyelashes kept open to the gale,
     forced breath, light dip but no depth
          beneath the panting weight of
               slanting
cloud come down around the very feet of
Mynydd Mawr, the Great Mountain,

roads washed out into fields,
barring the way instead of leading home,

while black cattle hang their calls
     on a hawthorn--little shelter in its spines,
     while my refuge is the gorse, golden but
hardly more protection than the forlorn thorn in the field.

Bare foot, shivering, soaked to my very spirit,
there is no turning back for even the wild things,
no relief until the relentlessness slackens with its own
weariness, wondering that perhaps it has had enough
of itself, just as a child cries out its woe
until there are no more tears to be had.

     Until then, I will wait,
struck by the adamant intent of a landscape to survive,
even in the face of a storm which knows no difference
between fence and field, woodland or mountain heath,
only its own release into the world
     like my words now dropping on all alike,

tawny owl taking what belongs to it,
each poem agile in stealth, waiting for you
     in the dark night of dissolution
to steal you beyond death into

          clouds parting, sun gleaming,
and the whole world glistening anew
on fire from
        seeing itself once more. 

  

  

 

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.