About the way we made our gracious farewells into works of art that would go on hurting forever.
We had a genius back then for making death seem more beautiful than it is because we lived on the edge of things
and not their surfaces and o if we'd only felt all those things
that made us weep at the end
Dying in doorways that were more cruel than any threshold we had to cross to stand there.
If only we could have felt those immensity of goodbye from the very beginning ...
what reason would we have had to cry like candles, when the wine turned back into water and the roses wiped their lipstick off on their leaves ..?
One goes out. One goes in.
Because severance, no less than the dance takes two to make a difference and as the years go by the silver flakes off the memory of the mirror and you can see clear through to the other side .. experience is just another log you throw on the stars to keep yourself warm on a cold winter night .. by a small fire out in the open, where it's easier to sublimate
the intensities of fate by opening the cages you keep them in
and burning your love feelings,
like the flightfeathers of half forgotten songs,
to spread their wings in the flames
and give them the freedom to rise higher than the nest of ashes they were born in.
History isn't the muse the immeasurable mystery is and if you don't learn to let things go .. you'll never know
how to live lyrically alone in the wild unbounded by your solitude by the side of a river whose flowers are dying.
The green bough hisses and blisters in the fire .. but the cracks in the heartwood burn far into the night and give off way more heat in the autumn than the preemptive lightning strikes of spring.
It's a rite of passage as old as migrating geese .. mournfully bearing souls south, whose bones have turned to dust
to take all my prophetic skulls like moon rocks out of the house of the dead and arranging them into the ring of a firepit stand in the middle like the eternal flame of an unrepentant heretic to rekindle the dance, even among the skeletal shadows of a persecuted romance.
Even in sorrow.
Even in the silence of the great distances
that add their aerial perspective to time.
Not to call ghosts back to a seance as if they could tell me anymore about death than I've already lived through
but every year at the second full moon in October
after the harvest is in and the scarecrow has come down off my cross
and left it to the ravens of nevermore as a church
I stretch my heart out like a skin on a drum.
Dressed in the plumage of solar flares
I enter a trance of firebirds that have long since disappeared back into the sun and like Icarus in eclipse or the last grasshopper who didn't take the advice of the ants to drag the leaves and wings of things piecemeal into a shelter to prepare for deeper separations yet to come.
I take my chances by the hand out here in the open and I dance.
I dance with heresy.
I dance with the angels and the demons that were martyred in the name of what is unforgiveable about my human nature
and yet more sacred than the rain I dance for to put the war I dance for out.
I dance with whole asylums of noetic visionaries who went insane trying to explain me to myself like the origins of life on another planet.
And I dance again to the music of the women I've loved
whether in pain or bliss
whether I was hung by the tail
like a plague rat over the abyss of my cannibalized emotions
like a famished snakepit or I fell sidereally under the spell of the fragrance of summer stars in their hair
I dance not as if it were all worth it in the end but something inestimable to celebrate that gives the chartered undertakers pause about what they do for a living when they see how a poet can dance to the picture music of the crazy wisdom
that sings the dead up out of the earth to their feet
without looking down from the mountaintops or back at the valleys behind ...
to take the measure of their heart
to see if it's empty or full.
I let the new moon feel the old moon's arms around it again
like the bright vacancy and dark abundance of what's joyfully absurd and playful about life whether it's doing a sword dance with words or dancing in blue heron feathers like a shaman among waterbirds longing for enlightenment like a tantric star map to break the jinx of their prayer wheels.
Or dancing to bullets like a greenhorn in the main street of nineteenth century .. or like me out here in the desert dark
alone with six thousand visible stars eleven miles outside of Westport spreading my wings under the sign of the Eagle and the Scorpion going down in the west
to add my phoenix to the feathers of the burning sumac and grabbing the lightning lance of the thunderbirds
like a serpent from their talons hold it up to the stars to the east and the west, like the wavelength of a crazy insight
into the dark word of the living light that makes me dance my way ..
out of time
out of place
out of my mind
without leaving anyone or anything behind.
Canto Della Terra
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