THE MAJOR ARCANUM
“If by tomorrow morning early
you have not spun this straw into gold,
you must die.” -Rumpelstiltskin
“Where but in the transparency of the solar moth,
does stranger desire blur the limitations of the sexes
in their juggling shadows, illumine and liberate...” -Unknown
Out in the street a violin was distilling the dancing jackal of secret passwords glowing in the dark, like horses fading into memory the way lovers do, fierce and galloping… or moths bigger than life, both here and there, like simultaneous computations in other dimensions, grooming themselves, and seized by forests many years from now…
*
You are all nights ever imagined, unfolding through her nebulous seizures of intuition. She dawns on you, and you are drawing flesh out of roots, igniting leaves and doorways that attract solar threads and dream cells, you are the only labyrinth that secretes the joy of its own mystery in the form of a tongue dripping honey through a mouth of pure savagery…
*
A rendezvous with weapons and other caresses of liberation... A dazzling life-on-the-edge flight that always unravels the aurora from the nape of your neck with a hair-raising shimmer of unearthly sounds. Self-forms and thought-shapes of shadows dancing in the ulterior motives, just a little to the right, above the evening lamps and (below) the tiny winged bears foraging for the childish red chrysalis of some obscure wisdom. Is your blood not the light itself hanging in clusters, driven by the intelligence of an echo that never sleeps? An echo that never wakes...
*
The unbearable transparency of the lunatic was in proportion to the beauty of the alchemist’s wife, who sews up the golden mummy in a nebulous cat’s cradle for the hidden desires of the onlookers, who have long since departed in the eyes of moths.
*
A body of dawn in a swarm of light and blood, stretched out as far as the eye can see, and beyond that even, where the turbulent apparatus of the bride’s gown passes unnoticed through the leopard’s gift of magnetic attractions. She is dousing for monkshood and mandragora in the nuptials of the sleepwalkers, dressed in psychological particles, alchemical pigments and dark embryos of movement. She is dangerous; she will lick you drawing stars and other feverish thoughts.
*
In through the windows, the light is breeding. The hour is shaped across many years, in many guises. The wind is a hopscotch of dwarves. There are galaxies inside, memories of fire, fog and crystal. Life is spreading...
*
I kiss you, only once, while the mimicry of light rains on your body, in those places you disperse your sexes, your heretic motors of language, and the charming javelins of discord... the fleece of a night vision rushes ahead to seize the angry forest, and weld it into precise moments of intoxication...
*
The moth spells your name in candle wax made of twilight, and your clothing scrolled out of three white feathers x-rayed with kisses of curare, revealing the premonitions of transition from one mirror to the next, from one breath, one ablution, one sinister approach to another, and all numbered according to the pathos of each vanishing object, each object fashioned by dreams and stalked by jewelers and daughters in black, and hung from the rafters like a feverish embrace that goes on forever...
*
The body changing it’s shape when acted upon by opposing forces, and the ascension of Luna moths through her jasmine shaped eyes, those shimmering locksmith eyes darker than pleasure, and dislodged with anarchy in the wave of a hand… Your bones are glowing and there’s no escape, you are fading into air with the antidote of desire, your language is forming... Your words are foaming at the mouth, becoming real. You are dreaming yourself...
*
Out on the evening terrace, the High Priestess consults with the Magician for the return of the goldsmith and his sister, to encircle the wedding of the Orchid and the Wolf, and dipped in the iodine of only one of many imaginary moments more trembling than either predator or prey. The rectangular shapes of perception are being jammed into doorways, and in those semi-automatic fusions of all or nothing where the propeller of communicating dust spins a tale of hunger and metamorphosis...
*
To see you by owl light and perceive you with talons, licking your watery locks and shimmering circulatory system, more phantom friction than the Middles Ages spinning threads of gold, and dripping with haunted gestures, is to enliven the roots of an incendiary compass. Once to the left, a little off-center and several inches to the right, your marvelous body begins to glow as I move through it, pausing only for a taste...
*
“We will take these steps to undo the confusion of balances and pointless dualities, pulling the tresses of an inkling through the minds’ Milky Way, and purified by the slash of darkness in the fire of an outrageous triangle, spreading its nearly invisible keys, its breathing vessels and naked hinges of hallucinating glances... for the woman and her psyche, the vowel and it’s veil, and for the major mask of the witch’s nocturnal feast. The owl passes silently through your face... “
*
An abacus of female liquid at the end of time shimmers like another dimension, another vehicle of rapid departure, and a splendid design marked with the breath of a ghostly body, a body singing with light and astrological arcs, and a dark flame in the psyche, fluid and tender as a shark without form. Touch it, speak to it and tell it your name, see yourself through its eyes like rain...
*
In the Library of Rare Chemicals I love the way the brightness of your blood in the moonlight is the vanishing cream that ignites the pathology of doorways, and the way those ancient secrets in the halo of your mythical pose tilt the altimeter along the carnivorous necklace of shadows and unheard-of departures. You bathe in the eyelids of dawn, swim through the mercury of light, and the bones of those in your shadow are the guardians of tomorrow’s bodice of fireflies in a conference of wolves.
*
You unwind the seeing-eye trees and the transparent fruit of excited neurological sparks that lead the way for thought to trowel itself into the rampant hives of dream, into breath, into streams of thought, beneath the surface of a mannequin’s guilt buried like a treasure in the earth.
*
In the doorway there revolves the magician and his lover, the beautiful grand-daughter of that one who has always fascinated the joyous tics of the tapestry forgers, the messengers who are always too bright to see across the shadow’s table, or the chairs howling for their eggs of starlight...
*
It is not the plume nor the lamp of the spirit’s revolt that emits the central staircase, but the hysterical river of glowing bodies meeting for the very first time. The chain reaction of singing bones. Their mouths of buzzing, and the magnetics of their moth-like thirst. Their tuning forks, their seeds, and the shimmer of their molecules...
*
In the bride’s fabric of vision without the rigging of magical numbers or ladders fleeing, only love as violently pure as the phoenix of crucial and emanated evening glass, will find her in her crystal form, waterized and insouciant, emitting bright and savage medicines... When I see you finally in your illusion, I will know the charms of your haunting, and the sirens in your pleasure-yielding streams. No one is immune. The bell is rung. The candles are dripping...
*
For the prime motives of your barely recognizable cognition, the ghostly principles of matter are spinning in ever-increasing circles. The aerodynamics of desire and romance channel the water of light and dark. The tower of a single stone is cut from the translucent air of a bloody battle, and from the teeth of many warriors. In the smoke of your glance, there remains the hound of the zookeeper’s watch, the enchanted timepiece with the ramparts of unreason and the widow’s vials of devoted presence more trance-like than flesh over bones. Her body in sleep resembles the petals of sunlight, scattered by the wind to the four corners...
*
The woman in the darkness of her mirror is propelled by the jugglers carnal strategies, and the seers leaving quickly without the trace of an inkling that burns down cities, milks space for the pools of each unhinged rendezvous that severs your connection to any given time gone up in smoke and in space. It is an inkling distilled in the air with its demonic celebrations of Chinese acrobats and other means of transportation, fueled by giants in the guise of pygmies.
*
The square root of phantom landscapes traversed by golden pebbles reflects your face in the moonlight, and ignites the circumference of three times the color of life, three tigers hunting and three knives thrown in the silence of an amazing escape. You survive by pulling stars out of the earth that rise upwards through you...
*
There is, in the final analysis, the intelligence of your intricate and astounding scent, your outré origins and your obscure race, startling in the various realities that keep you fluid, that know you and guide you through the aboriginal images that wake you and take your breath away...
The black sun is a luminous target, an ancient signaling device made solvent with caresses of all that is not you, and all that waits for you in the furnace of your reflection.
SEEING IN THE DARK
“How else to explain the presence of luminous receptacles...
in the revelation of light occupying space...” Al Razutis
The sadness of the gem-cutters in the early morning through your eyes, is what transpires in the heretic pollination of your luminous anatomy, in the humming transparency that rushes ahead of your desire, throwing footsteps backwards and burning everything in your shadow with the little spyglass of sinister delight. The loom of embers, your sister...
CEREMONIES OF WATER
“You have need only of one thing, which at any stage of our
experiment can be changed into another nature.” Unknown.
The dark sun in the darkest room is a mirror between reflections, a body more transparent than the black night when it unravels the thinking metals and the whispering light, and slips into the ravenous water. Behind you the gloves of mercury are fluttering about the last dream, caressing it and changing it’s gestures, while the bleeding of aurora directs your footsteps, through the growling of the table where your eyes are growing their light-inducing and timeless machines... there you are, assembled with the savage beasts that elucidate the principle gestures of the dream that beguiles you. There you are, always faithfully resurrected each morning, the flesh of light, and the blinding key in the clamor of the moth.
ATHANOR
“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have
read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved;
all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors...” Jorge Luis Borges
The hollow amulets of joy and the poison’s brightest hummingbird relate to their struggles and their inevitable balancing act as twins in the ghostly fields. When they cover their tracks and scatter their spores in attractive kisses passed from one cartographer’s child to another, from one map to one designated site of actuality, to another’s bright scattering, it is time to wake and weave the fire of your breath. The guardian’s dream, the stones of ecstasy and the useless beauty...
SUDDEN EXPECTATIONS
“Soon it appears the movable phantom, red beauty that
clears every day to me...” Alejandro Puga
The slender orgasm that forms the vessel of night’s breathless molecules is not your ecstasy taking shape, nor the vessel of your undoing, but the slow moving flower of night that drugs you in your sleep and sends your layers in the thought-bright air to the forest that shapes your name and devours you.
We kiss there, and we are lathed across centuries like an oracle that stains everything in the bed of night when it lights up the shadow of your consciousness, as it hums and clones the aura and the shadows of mayhem from the lost cabal of women burning out the central core, and the heliotropic tides passing unnoticed through the sentry gates of wild whistling.
THE WATCHMAN’S GLANCE
"Remember me as a handful of golden dust tossed into the air..."
One look turns fire into water, blood into whispers, and psychology into aleatory interruptions more beautiful than the gift of arson in the middle of the night, when you rush naked through the streets with the lover’s tenuous grasp on reality, when you precede the eclipse and the salamander ’s revenge, when the lilacs ignite the corpse of ruby and the sea-faring perception of consciousness beguiles you and tosses aside your reason for being less than your enchantment... when the filaments of unreason teach you how to sleep and move with the glow and precision of a conjurer's smile... The leopard’s kiss is everything you’ll ever need.
* * *
The architecture of the psyche pervades outwards and surrounding the actual thought that emits it, and it moves with you like a scent, or a glow that lights up everything within your reach, and if you study it, without really looking at it, you will recognize your simultaneous lives, as shadows and as splendid lights caught up in an interrupted thought. Your mythologies and personas all wrapped up in the space of your breath passing through numerous dimensions, and they arouse you, seduce you and scatter your eggs. Moon-mad offerings...
The text of Aurora was written two years before beginning work on the poems of the The Mirror Held Up In Darkness, and is thus perhaps a precursor to them, or an indication of these future explorations.
AURORA
Early in the morning, how I love the glow of bathing lunatics,
the strange dance of the sleepwalker, and the sweet scent
of the dreamer shedding their skin in the mirror...
There are spirit vessels at the entrance; the bone doorway beckons with the silence of navigational diagrams. In the darkness, (the hidden world), she is a dance of hissing and crackling that resembles in all aspects, both here and there, a luminous presence like mercury in gold... She is whispering in her sleep, "The blue, the insurmountable blue... strike me with the blue..." Could it be the whirlwind that shapes the spires that pierce the fabric, or merely her eyelids flickering madly?She poses an x number of analogies, and my own personal choice would be the ape wrestling with its shadow. I am her analogy when she dreams, her shadow when she cries out.
In the depths of which can be seen...
In the rush to secure the visible language, with its glowing rivers in the albino tint of "All Hallows Eve", there is the passage through music, if it can be called music (that startling gel), and then for a moment it takes you off-balance... She is beside you still, all weapon, all enchantment... with a visionary looking through.
Beings of lighted water...
There is finally, in her glance, looking both ways, a twin stare, a bathing pool draped over the dark world architecture, the spirit scaffolding of history's agonizing death. To her the butterfly is flesh, and bones are for lacerating the drum of breath like a savage. Blood swims in the night with its devoted candles, and pulls the moon inward like a whip across the central membrane of consciousness... Only the howling can be seen, with its rubies unthreaded... emerging as a flash in the center.The otherness renders me transparent. The archives of alchemy and the occult are pounding at the door with the wolves (saturated with bells). If my breath can be sucked out and I am instantly solarized, there can be transparent eggs for the "little ones", the dwarves of daylight in the storm cradle. We are propelled by a tide-bearing synthesis, evolving and lighted from inside...
It is said, in the Golden Bough, that we (you) are "a source of danger as well as a blessing... not only to be guarded, but also guarded against... (this) sacred organism so delicate that a touch may disorder it, is also magnetically charged with a powerful spiritual and magical force which may ignite itself with fatal effect on whatever comes in contact with it".
Under the watchful glow of a mason's trowel...There is always the tension of a robbery scene, when she arrives, when her gestures seem to mimic the Invisible Ones, when she is acutely aware of the unfolding web-like symbols of air when it approaches that exquisite tenderness of emeralds cut to the O of the 8th degree, on the brink of the psyche... the inclusions making the green whimper like a stabbed child.
Blood swims in the night with its devoted candles...
*
Spread out on the table before me are: the sparkling apex of a triangle disguised as a pure black flame, an obscene mannequin licking itself, theories of the dream-body, a salamander the color of dawn, a milky white substance that hums and changes shape at the sound of my voice, three tiny reindeer bound together with the sunflower's daughter, the soul of a wolf in a cobalt-colored vial, long flowing tresses coiled... in the depths of which can be seen the twinkling of distant stars, a transparent pickax worthy of a lover's sex, the arc of a dive at its highest point, a large silk-like insect that emits strange clicking sounds... its wings entangled in everything else (often making it hard to work in this manner), a celestial chart in some obscure hypnotic language of snakes, an even more mysterious manuscript and a coat of ashes...
*
There is also (and that which forms the central timing-devise), a rare flower called "Le Cle Infernale": the slender flower of a ghost (that kills only for pleasure and resurrects only out of pure joy), with its honeycomb tracery of starlight calculations embedded with shadows that softly hum, and smeared with bright owls... a voodoo clock in the female form.
*
Arson and sabotage are gifts of the spirit and not to be taken lightly. Desire lights its fires everywhere. The dream leaves your body and wanders in search of its shadow, its twin... sometimes one cannot be seen, while the other is twice as bright. You see, they are often like children and they attract each each other, like water attracts fire when its eyes are closed.
The "twins"... they eat, sleep and live out their lives in your presence. They are called "the spark-gathering dolls". Keep your eyes open for them, or they will knock the daylights out of you...
^^
She is not the charred axolotl stuffed with crystals, nor can she be seen as the clairvoyance of antlers dripping with blood in the moonlit cave; she is not the whirlwind that makes and unmakes the lovers bed, nor is she the mushroom geometry in the "dress made of dawn"; she is not the "madness of arcs and golden means"; she is not... but she is constantly mistaken for all of these, and more. She resembles a dream, but is not... You see, she is only the darkness in the light around us, a shadow of her former self. She is almost real. (You) feed on her and become dark like her; you exhale her and begin to dream like her. You slowly begin to fade... like her...
She surrounds herself with an aura of bewilderment, with her gestures (that glistening web of saliva, pulled slowly from the mouth during a dream), her animal veils (the fighting knives...), her disturbing juices (belladonna and silver) and the constellations that come to feed in her shadow (the droning is unbearable)...
The entrances change their shapes to soothe the witches. The solar eclipse can be either plant, mineral or animal...*
"Wait for me in the happiness of the hound licking its prey..."
"But for the otherwise slender bodies, above, left, where the bees communicate their evening desires; and below, where the golden hour flickers... a timepiece..."
"Knowledge, hunger and transparency..."
"Touch me, here, where the bones of this dimension grow deeper, glow and whisper..."
"Teeth touching, almost breaking..."
*
In the otherwise languid serenity of a lover's mouth when it opens to feed, the shimmer of earthly fluids is a permutation of power, an unbreakable bond, eyes in the wilderness when the light strikes them...
You, yourself, are poised somewhere, between dancing and sleeping, a precious revelation if apprehended in time, for those who are always leaving, and always returning too late. What is the sense of it then, in any speculative dialectic, that perhaps there is very little discernible difference between the gestures of actual humans as we know them, and humans more farfetched then we as products of pure fiction, hearsay, fable and myth. I see you in the doorway, and am always touched, as much by you as by all that is not you... and not knowing you, I am drawn to you by your absence as much by your presence...
We are an obscure part of the history of fire, and the dance that keeps that fire alive... In the tenuous concept of time, by that paradigm of FLOOD with APE, there is always the handful of golden dust tossed into the air, and the unmistakable sensation of being drawn up by the stars...
