Blue

“The dark blue of the Madonna’s robe bears many shadows, and these give her depths of understanding, just as the mind made on the moon has lived with Lilith so that its thought can never be naive, never cease to strike deep toward shadows.  Blue protects white from innocence.”

—James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology

“The soul spans geological time, discerning and detached . . .”

            —John Clarke, “The Bridge”

i.

She returns from dream—draws

me into the blue I

hadn’t seen before

    stands there still

in brittle winter night, 

hooded face turned to the Moon

etched in black sky,

enveloped in a cloak white

as snow-covered earth

    nothing

stirs, no

animal scratch

no howl or hoot

no wind clatter

in naked trees, the cast

of light from the fat moon

blued with shadow

clings to hieroglyphic

branches between them, sacred

writ of sun, storm, twiggy

nets of Time’s mystery

scrawled across black sky

She knows the Moon,

      cold January Moon,

She and the Moon

are one thought

of this deep yearning

toward frigid night’s

mute blue rapture

ii.

The mystery of the blue moon echoes

through stories of stories and fun

in the face of Truth’s rectitudunal restoration

of volcanic emission’s hard particulate

matter to the place of honour in Hall

of Knowledge, leaves tales of excess 

lunar measure to languish beyond the pale,

then mystery slips into mastery and the jig

is up for the trees, etc., the jig itself,

a mystery of dancing measure, stumbles

into shadow

They say a squirrel

could stroll from Lake Erie

to the Louisiana bayou and never touch

the ground before we abandoned cosmos

for Nature, left it belly up by the side of the road

so why not cut it up, wrap it in plastic

post it for sale in Facebook marketplace

though if you listen with care

                      once in a blue moon

still opens into mist shrouded

forest floor, shroud an unexpected

entrance of deah into moon’s muted light, 

Artemesian revelation 

in monthly intervals aperiodic

surplus whose rhythm is beatitude,

this excited repose

Down

Introduction: Down

“It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying, ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say, ‘Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up — if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else’ — but, oh, dear!”

—Lewis Carroll, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland

“Is there still any up or down?”

—Mark C. Taylor, Erring

The drain yawns in a clock-wise swirl,

faces out of dark claim, clamour, hoary

pain beyond child’s petulant insistence

on wronged, woven through the marrow

of each explicated world in lightning

flashed coherence swallowed by time’s

maw, imperfectible beauty of down’s

endless throat

You have to start somewhere

some clutch at the whirl of junk—prophetic

images, random poems, initiation

rituals, green eyes through the fog

of love, a cloaked woman in winter

woods, betrayal’s sting, saffron gifts

and the surprise shock of a young heart’s

passion pulsing (the reddest

rose unfolds) in old flesh

Down is not so much

direction as up likes to think, its own

who am I

a fact of the matter, a calm down

after a stormy crossing, 4th and

2 yards to go, or being in a hole, take your

pick, a certain associational

dark renders a cast to the feeling of down

a coldhot black jewel throbbing

in your solar plexus which of course

is a metaphor though I claims to have

seen it himself

If it wasn’t down what wouldn’t be

its different story, and in the end some other

union though unionizing it grasps

at the whirl seeks to clear up the shower

of necessary cardiac shards left behind in wake

of duplicitous colloquium on the return

to 2000-year-old salvational

undertaking (while in the midst of history’s

furious rush past progress’s pale

into a further of yet to be determined

downs

Just try to leave the crazy

syntax to its devices designed to other

direction where other is a verb and neither

up nor a situation wants to know

who you are when pretty soon

no one will know Sophia, neither

Novalis’s squeeze nor Loren in this cosmos

of incarnated eros formations

and who she meant

tho Aphrodite will endure and I

will roll in and break on Folly Beach arrived

from lord knows where

a restless pattern moving through some

medium till the crash when world ends

and long-ago words

wash up at my feet—

fact of wave

moving through

sea water words, too,  

where this began nothing moves

but what's not there

True, up is

usually half the deal, a ritual touching

in fresh light, each morning reaching out, if only

with electrons disguised as words along a wire

of desire

pulled up and up until the coaster climbs

to the highest ridge of dark where story

has it a sailor stood up at the summit

got his head sliced off by the big

sign at the top and then it’s just

hands up and scream

all the way down

Inaugurational Shenanigans

Compostable Monuments — A Collaboration