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.

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. 

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.
  

   

Magicicada tredecim

In the thirteenth year they came,

fat caramel bodies tymbolling at noon, 

one month to molt, mate, birth and die.

Summer arrives from under ground.

This brood of lovers

like lightning discharged through a storm of sound.
  

Vibrant cicada hum, lust without shame:
so too my heart hums, a low throaty tune,
and feels the sky's reverberant reply.

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. :)
 

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.











  

August Blackberries

The children are picking blackberries
     and so am I,
basking in the sticky haze of out-reached brambles,
tempting and wooing those with open mouths
          and patient eyes to its side.

I am surrounded by dark deliciousness,

lost in a wilderness of simple joy,
     everything just as it should be,
the blackbirds singing with ease
while bees find heather blossoms
to make sweet what good they have,
just as I reach into the prickles, glad,
     hands bleeding berry and blood,
to fill these hours with a heavy harvest.

          Each berry is a heart,
exuding fecund life that carries on,
each summer's end a frenzied beat in time
until the next cycle gives out its
                         blessings.

                         These little gifts
hum with the sun, perfected
     by a thousand warm rays
     and the wild welsh wind that
whips across this ancient mountain side,
     once a glacier's path to sleep,
now a grassland of gorse and heather,
     broom and blackthorn.

The rain has been kind and also fierce,
     awakening the earth to her softer side,
          and I had forgotten the delight
     of standing quiet with ten thousand fruits,
listening to each murmured story

     rise up from the roots like sap in spring,

singing the earth and me into deeper life.

I cannot forget this moment
as life holds out both hands,

all bright with child-like pleasure.