Oran's Well

Joint to joint of it, sinew to sinew …

The places I dream paint a landscape
of griefs near and far, labored and
puckered by the dead, the lost
and what was too barren to forget.
My two brothers often, one long dead,
the other quite recent, accompanying
me on streets so late in the evernight.
Haunting the rooms where I’m young again
making eye contact from vigorish tombs.

Often I’m back at work in that corporate HR
job in the newspaper I left 30 years ago
before it shrank beyond ruin’s Rome.
My old boss Mary the empress of that,
smirking at how my labors are dirt.
She’s still alive, I think, but gone in
dreams the same as my dead,
my excarnate career living on as
Dame Memory trudges me to the exits.
I wish her well, as I do my mother whose
name she shares as do the mother
and lover of Jesus, all them somehow
that shadowy smile back of the cave
ever turning so wearily to go.

A landscape of lamentation then,
my narrow bed a cursus for parading
past memorials of the dead.
Last night I was back in the bed of
my second great love, the one who
broke my yearning heart hardest
and taught me first things about
grief. How wondrous strange to be
that close again, intimately caressing
every bloody thorn she offered
consubstantial with losing love.

She didn’t have time for me,
couldn’t talk even fleetingly,
wouldn’t yield nipple or kiss
or even breath to liven my dread.
Besides, her mother was in the
next room and sure to wake
from hankypanky by the dead.
The two shared the same name
so I couldn’t tell if it was the past
or my fate addling that lost furtive
berth which my ancestors were
hubbubing from below, trying
to remember what fucking felt like
and crying for one nip of lost love.

But morning was approaching and
I had to get back to my mother’s house
to get ready to work and have morning
coffee with my wife of thirty years.
It broke my heart leaving that room
again after fifty years, emerging
from their house with first light
defining a passage grave’s entrance
up on a hill overlooking the Boyne.

My shoes rotted, awful conveyance
for ski-poling home. The sun rising
just like it did up from the Atlantic
when that woman and I walked on
Cocoa Beach in late August 1982,
up from our greatest night, leaving
behind a motel room’s sweaty ruin
of tossed bedsheets, emptied Bud
bottles and a flaccid litter of Fourex.
One must have leaked because
a 3-year-old boy taunted me as I left,
jeering my poling sadness and throwing
sand from that buried beach.

Maybe she did get pregnant if
she had then that toddler would have
been her fifth abortion — weary host —
or maybe he was everling proof
of our forsaken embrace, just
like 42 year old man I found through
DNA testing who became my older
brother’s unknown son. They had
a chance to meet and talk out their
lost life for a weekend before my
brother died of the cancer. With dreams,

you never quite know: But I find rich
company with my grief when I dream —
all those shadowy wounded figures
lucent and gazing from their dimmed sill
until I wake, adrift on sunny sides still.
With every stone silent up on Tomb Hill.

January 2026

An additional response to Sanaa’s Dream Interpretation challenge,
this one submitted to Open Link Night #400 at D’Verse.

Notes

1. The epigraph is a charm used by Míach, son of the great Tuatha da Danann physician Dian Cecht. After Núadu loses his arm in  of the Battle of Mag Tuired and with it his right to rule as king, Dian Cecht fashioned a silver arm for the king. His son Míach, also a physician, actually heals the arm of Nuadú over a period of three days, using herbs and charms and assisted by his sister Airmid. In a fit of jealous rage, Dian Cecht struck Míach three times in the head, eventually killing him. Included in the medieval Gaelic tale Cath Maige Tuired, the charm may have an ancestry dating back to Neolithic rites for the dead.

2. Joanna Huckins MacGugan writes in “Lamentation and Landscape: constructing commemorated space in three Irish texts,”

Death, burial and ritual lamentation create sacred spaces. Lamentation texts both commemorate these sacred spaces and commit them to cultural memory. This sacred burial landscape need not always be Christian, or even religious, for burial spaces may exist in an otherwise ‘profane’ realm and are venerated as sacred simply because they are the locus for commemoration and lamentation.

… The Old Irish term neimed orginally described consecrated places, probably sacred groves. The term came to classify the temporary “sacred” social and legal status of a person mourning a death in the family in the Old Irish legal texts. The terminology applied to this state of “otherness” explicitly recognizes the sacred status of one who laments the death of kin. The sense of the sacred connected to the moment of death is a liminal state, existing beyond the boundaries of the ordinary.

… The pathetic fallacy of the grieving landscape that finds its fullest expression in Géisid Cúan became a commonplace in classic Bardic convention ((of the mid-to-latter medieval period of Irish Gaelic poetry) and, as elegiac themes became formalized over time, persisted well into the modern period. This motif suggests that lamentation is not contained by a single sacred space … Instead, the entire natural world, connected by a moment of death, participates in the sacred ritual lament. The possible locations for constructing sacred space are thus opened to the entire landscape of Ireland.

3. James Hillman writes in The Dream and The Underworld:

The movement ((in dreams)) from three-dimensional physical perception to the two dimension of psychical reflection is first felt as a loss: thymos gone, we hunger, bewailing, paralyzed, repetitive. We want blood. Loss does characterize underworld experiences, from mourning to the dream with its peculiar feeling of incompleteness, as if there is still more to come that we didn’t get, always a concealment within it, a lost bit. A life that is lived in close connection with the psyche does indeed have an ongoing feeling of loss. It would be noble to believe this to be the enduring sacrifice that the soul required, but it does not feel so noble. Instead we experience the humiliating inferiority of uncertainty and an impairment of potential. … A sense of inferiority goes with soul, which does not mean taking the loss literally … (escaping) the soul’s work by identifying with it. … Loss is not the whole of it, however, because the dimension sensed as loss is actually the presence of a void. Actually, we are experiencing a different dimension, and the price of admission to it is the loss of a material viewpoint. From one perspective, a dimension is given up, but this is to gain Hades and the chambering echoes are his halls. … Here we gain contact with the soul of all that is lost in life and with the souls of the lost.  (52-3)

I’ll never understand dreams
nor will I ever write a poem
all the way through. But each
keeps inviting in its old voice,
high and fleeting on cold reaches
of thought. A pale face drifts by
windows séanced in frost.
Her call foreign but familiar.
Perhaps translatable if it’s true
that the mystery welcomes
our work as its cowled nave.

If the poem can get that close
to those January nights
I sat on the heat grate of
my apartment in Spokane,
huddled and drinking and
grieving to Bach. Measuring
the dream of her with iced water
and praying for the courage to fail.
Still combing my words against
that coldest window of them all.
Waking all these years later
hearing her silver echo still.

Dream Interpretations at D’Verse

It seemed like awful tresspass — showing
up at the dream’s workplace with my latest
study journal of blackwell truths in hand —:
Ole Mary Dolorossa (my boss and mother,
sergeant wife & Goddess too) took
and flipped its pages saying Huh,
flippantly or flappingly I couldn’t then
nor now quite fully say. She kept
the book and bid me get to work
taking hard candy round to every
worker on that shift ahead of
Independence Day, which strikes
me now as Death (but whose?
This country’s? Mine? My mother’s
long over and yet again?) Sure, I said,
wondering how involved that task
might be but then the dream said
No: Instead, scrape every baseboard
in the building ahead of Painting Day,
which I take now as the whiteout of
every excrescence I have scibbled
diddling or riddling the Awesome or
Awful Muse, I still cannot say. Her
words made me sullen. Really?
With what? She pointed to a scraper
by the baseboard in her office which
clearly had no proper oomph for
combing off old coatings: But then
I turned the fucker round and pressed down
as hard as the machines of old (remember
those hundred-ton Goss presses churning
printed dreams profound?). And like
wow, I’m in business now! Heading off
to Advertising, first offices in the
immense circuit, saying ‘Scuse Me
to a secretary as I got down on
my tired old knees to scrape dead scrip.
Lord the circumference I have yet to toil
traipsing free the life! No wonder I woke
with such a monster migraine — impossible
such strife! And yet Your work midwives
this dying to perpetuals. Same flint knife
different day, helping balder stones survive.

January 2026

Note

The ninth-century Cain Adamanan tells the story of how Adamnan, ninth abbot of Iona and biographer of Saint Columba, came to advocate for the creation of a law protecting women and the young from being sent into battle. The lex innocentium or “Law of the Innocents,” passed in 693AD by the Synod of Birr, was an extraordinary accommodation between native Irish law which had been handled by druids and the new Christian dispensation with its adoption of Roman law.

Setting up the saint’s reason for advocating for this law, there is a curious forestory of a near-shamanic or druidic initiation of the saint which empowers him to argue even against God for the creation of the law.

Picking up on the “shamanic” episode, in this translation from Kuno Meyer:

Once Adamnan and his mother were wending their way by Ath Drochait in Uaithne in Ui Aido Odba in the south of Bregia. “Come upon my back, dear mother!” saith he. “I shall not go,” saith she. “What is this? what ails you?’” saith he. “Because you are not a dutiful son,” saith she.

“Who is more dutiful than I am? since I put a girdle over my breast, carrying you about from place to place, keeping you from dirt and wet. I know of no duty which a son of man could do to his mother that I do not do for you, except the humming tune which women perform. Because I cannot perform that tune, I will have a sweet-sounding harp made for you, to play to you, with a strap of bronze out of it.”

“Even so;,” she said. “Your dutifulness were good; however, that is not the duty I desire, but that you should free women for me from encounter, from camping, from fighting, from hosting, from wounding, from slaying, from the bondage of the caldron.”

Then she went upon her son’s back until they chanced to come upon a battlefield. Such was the thickness of the slaughter into which they came that the soles of one woman would touch the neck of another. Though they beheld the battlefield, they saw nothing more touching or more pitiful than the head of a woman in one place and the body in another, and her little babe upon the breasts of the corpse, a stream of milk upon one of its cheeks, and a stream of blood upon the other.

“That is a touching and a pitiful sight,” said Ronnat, the mother of Adamnan, “what I see under thy feet, my good cleric!! Why dost  thou not let me down upon the ground that I may give it my breast? However, it is long since my breasts have run dry! Nothing would be found in them. “Why dost thou not prove thy clerkship for us upon yon wretched body, to see whether the Lord will resuscitate it for thee?’ (Hence is the ancient saw: ‘”Beautiful is every pup under its dam.”)

At the word of his mother Adamnan turned aside, adjusted the head upon the neck, and made the sign of the cross with his staff across the breast of the woman. And the woman rose up.

“Alas! O my great Lord of the elements!” said she. “What makes you say alas?’” said Adamnan. “My being put to the sword on the battlefield and thrown into the torments of Hell. I know no one here or yonder who would do a kindness or show mercy to me save Adamnan, the Virgin Mary urging him thereto on behalf of the host of Heaven.”

And the woman who was there resuscitated at the word of Adamnan was Smirgat daughter of Aed Finn king of the Brefni of Connaught, wife of the king of the Luaigni of Tara. For the women of the Ui Aido Odba and of the south of Bregia and of the Luaigni of Tara had met around the ford, so that not a soul of them had come away abiding in its body, but they had fallen sole to sole. 

“Well now, Adamnan,” said she, “ to thee henceforward it is given to free the women of the western world. Neither drink nor food shall go into thy mouth until women have been freed by thee.”

“No living creature can be without food,” said Adamnan. “If my eyes see it, I shall stretch out my hands for it.’ ‘But thine eyes shall wot see and thine hands shall zo? reach it.”

Then Ronnat turned aside to Brugach son of Deda and brought a chain from him, which she put around her son’s neck at the Bridge of the Swilly in Tirconnell. …  And she takes a stone which filled her hand. It was used for striking fire. She puts it into one of her son’s cheeks, so that in it! he had his fill both of food and drink.

Then, at the end of eight months, his mother came to visit him, and she beheld the crown of his head. “My dear son yonder,” said she, “is like an apple upon a wave. Little is his hold on the earth, he has no prayer in Heaven.  But salt water has scorched him, the gulls of the sea have dropped filth upon his head. I see women have not yet been freed by him.”

“It is the Lord that ought to be blamed, dear mother,” said he. “For Christ’s sake, change my torture!”

This is the change of torture that she made for him, and not many women would do so to their sons: she buried him in a stone chest at Raphoe in Tirconnell, so that worms devoured the root of his tongue, so that the slime of his head broke forth through his ears. Thereafter she took him to Carric in Chulinn, where he stayed another eight months.

At the end of four years God’s angels came from Heaven to converse with him. And Adamnan was lifted out of his stone chest and taken to the plain of Birr at the confines of the Ui Neill and Munster.

“Arise now out of thy hiding-place,” said an angel to Adamnan.

“I will not arise,” said Adamnan, “until women are freed for me.”

It is then the angel said: ‘All things that you will ask from the Lord on account of your labor, you will have.”

 

I doubt I understood Jung all that much
those first years of getting sober and digging
down into the vast cathedral catcacomb
sprawling beneath my Sober Town
but my thirst for what he poured
into modernity was almost a drown:
Devoured four or five of his collected
works (checked out from the public library),
writing what I read from them line by line
in large college-ruled spiral journals
like some copyist erasing gospel lime
to find a corpus of the dead, intimate
with strategems forming in my writing head.

I had no real reference to it but that
my learning him was complicit with my
getting well, the road to recovery paved
with AA meetings and matin hours
attending a sick spirit he seemed to
understand and physic well. Also in
that work was some ley my father and I
had found together back in the winter
of 1977 while unearthing or re-birthing
what the legend of St. Oran would unbound,
radically questing and replacing masks
of Christian self with darks profound.

We could come up with no better name
for it back then than Being, a salience
so much more vast in the primal order
than Becoming, the Maker’s magnitude
beyond the sere of heaven’s rule over
the Earth. Who wouldn’t take such insights
personally, albeit poisonally too? He
took up raising megaliths while I  spooked
rock n roll graveyards until they died
in me and then awakened differently,
reborn in bone ragas strolling verse.

By the time I started reading Jung
I was convinced I had been fooled almost
to death by the godlike mask I’d found
hanging on the stage-front glitterpole,
mistaking the power-chording magnitude
of amps cranked to 10 for the river’s
awesome roaring source itself: And
for such foolery exiled myself to its
hammered winter, wandering in ever-
emptier nights through bottles, beds
and drunk-tank sheds will either kill
a soul or humble it enough for truth,
taken in those measures recovery
to modern self prescribes — AA meetings,
therapy, self-help books & New Age
music & the service worker’s bonhomie.

Those were enough to keep me employed
& married & graced enough in the ordinary
ways to proffer a use for the little room
just off my marriage bed to stock with
desk & shelves & books for an hour and
a half of deep study and poetry late
the last third of every night. I had no idea
what I was about or where the need
was coming from, but I suspected a well
of some figuration might be involved,
at least initially the one down which
I’d lost or cast my last guitar, up which
now came some prior occupation
far older than the studied rigor of my
dingdong college years. Making up for
lost time (beyond the last decade of
drunken chords)— centuries, it felt,
all the way back to somewhere in
the Middle Ages when something
more than time got lost. It’s pattern,
without which all became a heaven
too imperial and in love with frost.

Anyway, it felt like getting to true work
at last. But first, some naming needed
to be done, and I sensed that reading
Jung might help get a handle on my
ripened thought.  I wrote him out
verbatim but missed most of what
it seems now I needed from him.
Or maybe that’s how truths of the dead
by the living come to be known.
And when such truths are spoken
Oran-wise, they travel ear to dark
and trampled heart to mind.

Back then it felt like destiny — my
father’s equal growing tall — But
three exhausted fountain pen nibs,
dozens of journals bursting with
knowledge and a nearly fatal six-
year relapse made a proper fool
of such notions. I was just leveling
the mystery with my own improper
verbs, trying to mortar an edifice
centuries too old for cleffing with
like chords. Just like my father and
you, dear Reader, making whatever
attempt in faint and far resonance you
call this moment trying to make sense
of words trying to remain faithful to
backassed singsong ghosts. You are
both witness and judge of such attempts
in the springtime of this world’s late
and perhaps last attempt to have a
human sound revolving in cold black
starry empty silent voided space
even if it’s just this rhyming trace.

I took the echo of that with me to
bed last night & she came to me
in all her traceries, first as the secret
father of my great great grandfather,
a man’s name but surely her, implying
that my quest of naming him is for
the sake of unquiet whispers back of time,
altering the intonation of prayer
into an attenuation of the deepest ear
to receive the well’s next dream
a name what can’t be understood.
It’s Jung’s work, really, described
by him and carried further by
the likes of Rilke and Hillman
beneath and inside every word
writ in exalt matin explicate.

From my absent deep ur-father
speaks a soror’s daughter’s voice,
a dream I wrote down decades ago
and beds my meaning’s cast of
sudden light in wombs of indigo
which birth this song’s spring day.
That work is Your work , isn’t it?
Waking up from dreams & writing
those shapes on angel snow. It is
by vanishing that our dead endow.

 

April 2024

 

Submitted to D’Verse “New Year Snow”

… I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat …

— Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish”

Winter 1978, a bad, mad time, 21 years
old & living in a Spokane apartment shared
with my bass player Dave as our desire
to play in bands was freezing down and far,
obsolescent in the ferally cold weather as
happy hour in any bar. Mid-December, a
dissociation creeping some looseness in
the over-partied brain pried wide by darkness,
the shaman’s introductory moraine. Evenings
after work in the JC Penney stockroom
when Dave was over in his girlfriend’s
warmer bed, I’d sit on the heat grate
drinking beer and spinning albums watching
snowghosts swirl in blackened windows.
My sanity leeching fast away as swarms
of petit mal seizures preyed on my
conscious victual, a bit of Thou in every
bloodied beak. Help me I cried, but only
the blackest mothers’ scarred legs I could
pry seeking fleeting refuge from I, I, I.
Like the Mexican heroin addict I scarfed
from some downtown bar with the
promise of a warm room and beer.
Got back to the apartment in a taxi
at 2 AM only to find my roommate
already bedded down with someone
in the bedroom we had split in two.
So I fucked her on the carpeted floor
of the living room, her ravaged addict
body like a cross long nailed for familiar
sins which surely, sourly reeled back
generations, perhaps the entire history
of my lustful chromosome. Who knows.
I slept maybe an hour there on the floor
next to her, waking to hear her talking
on the phone to her connection, face
half in a shadow whose materia and source
was devouring me. Fucked her again
then forked up twenty bucks to pay
for a taxi to elsewhere in death’s main
and she was gone, devoured by the
frozen blue of dawn’s bloatware.
We’d hardly said a word to the other
except what was necessary for the
destined dance masking the cruel
romance, Necessity’s schooling fish
consuming all in greed of flooding
legion sperm toward one lost egg.
Lay back on the carpet watching
dawn scrawl a frosty scrimshaw on
the window — hoping for one hour’s
sleep before dragging up and back
to work — I dreamed the seminal
complete, a woman standing at my
bedroom door half in and out, her
face lost in shadow and blue water
flowing past her feet to flood my room
with all that’s crystal blue and silent.
Made a poem of that, one of just
a few that’s lasted all these decades.
Praising an elegy for the dead’s lament,
carrying on the work of Dionysus
who resides now with his uncle Hades
My dire sexual porpoise and purpose his,
careening wildly toward the small death
which echoes from grander darker rooms
the lament which ferries now my tune.
“Imago Dominus” I titled that poem,
hotcha nun with the whips to prove it,
intiatrix of the bleakest season which
ovummed the song in all its half-lives
swarming in buckets up the Well.
From the scant look I had at her nakedness
she had mothered — stretch marks on
her thighs, breasts hanging with chawed
nipples — perhaps many times exchanging
fuck for dope. Her eyes so blackly brown,
abysms which grabbed my drunken gaze
and held it fast while I pumped my seed
even though I’d screwed them shut, imagining
my first love Becky crooning fairly and
come-hithering behind this ravaged crone.
Another son come home through heartless
pleasures — that unmeasured drone which
dully scours the evening hours while pouring
drunk and getting some. Maybe she indeed
hatched the maddest season in my psyche’s
nest, a primal unnamed Cailleach who gulfed
my cock and balls and made of sex sea-water,
the imago’s birth-caul of madness divine
as the spells rocked me again and again and
again, sometimes three score in one day.
Help me, I cried sitting every January night
on that heat vent, remitting the crone’s flight
from bed to bed on opioids which train
the sot’s delight. None came, and so
I harrowed through the belly of the icewhale
alone as every death-made man must learn.
Last night I dreamed a weird profusion of
little fish swarming some tapestry or layout
gouting where other mordents crowed and
crowded too — a tryptich of hells in
full hosannahs of hullabaloo.  I knew it
was about that woman, unmasked by
reading an old poem upside and rearing
the snake now its divinity, blue waters
dripping off its reflective grievous drone.
I survived the worst winter of my life
to become a changeling in dirty jeans,
fit at last for playing big night guitar and
the Beloved’s addict man, tethered to
the chariot which stampedes its means.
Imago Dominus, I amend my themes
for the prefecture your gift marines.
Flooding lament with dead fluorenes,
penumbral rainbows the caught fish screams.

Submitted to “Borrowing Bishop” at D’Verse Poets

Your work is my work, my work is Ours
in the transliterations of blood and time
loosely-stoned in rhyme — is that it?
Fundaments all of a life’s latter work
ham-handedly naming more closely
just what was so fucking daunting
about circle upon circle of stones
manly dancing toward an isle’s north end.
And that in an odd bend not of my life
but further back in ancestral strife,
my father’s or his, or their druid
composite, fish-tailed, star-bright:

Not quite a vision but far more
than a dream in that milky cold mist
midnighting one’s life inner theme,
upending everything a proper
church education and vocation
prayed for and worked and sailored.

All wrong! —: Up from the depths
cried that Voice — Upside down
and backwards of heavenly course
still bidden by its 21^st century corpse,
ridden with the rigor and salver of
relics too long drained of source.

I get it Dad, the whole fundamental
break in the only pattern left for
homo sapiens in the old sapience
of absence and presence in cold
sexual – magical – magisterial signs.
Upended, you went to the stones
where they bid you miscreate Rome,

your Pope a backhoe with a front-end
loader and the next upright crone
lifted from geology’s star-chart
and placed exactly where the old
moonlight burst whatever it shone.
Breaking well-water, giving birth,
mangering and mantling with stone.

Funny your first visit to Iona was
the same year I was born: Two
years from now that will be 70
years ago, the age you were
went you went back there to die
just not in the way you thought to
at all. That’s when the real mindfuck
fratricide began and the work
I now call Ours  laid its first apparency
in the Oran-shaped well-bucket
I drew for you in full adulthood
from my sot-noodle brainpan.

I wrote that monograph whose
cosmic duo of Oran and Columba
still whoops and troops through
the living room this Christmas morning
in the Year of Our Lordship 2025,
5:19 AM, my wife up with a headache
making coffee while I wrap this
life-sucker up, praying to old gods
that it sill whatever is still stirring,
next lamentation of the dead.

Maybe by its tinsel tintinnabulation
the argument can be discerned
enough for Your moonlight to be read.
Something is sure clawing in the weir,
jawing enough of the leapt salmon
to demand court and truth, canon, air.

Such work demands apt wetware,
fodder majescule and Oran’s mare.
So zip up and giddyup, pards, the babe
year’s a-bawl and nascent as prayer.

December 2025

Your work continues while I ordain
what’s left behind, decrypting gambols
writ slant in megalithic terrain. So much
more continues within and shrined,
down the passage from your cist
in the chapel floor, freed of bone’s
breadth and supplement to converse
with fish about powers you couldn’t explain,
much less Vatican with pig-Latin names.

Plopped into the greater waters,
the spiral wave dances round
a druid drain: Such is the augment
and argument of the dead,
the symbol’s further explication
on walls only those who breathe
the starlight are allowed to read.

Those passage graves are yours now,
resumed now in their old riposte.
Building Navans of the mystery,        
pipe smoking mason of cold ghosts.
Me, I just work the near side’s sill.
Glossing panes with frosted quill
unroofed starries on Sidhe Hill.

December 2025

Submitted to D’Verse Open Link Night

Note

George Nash writes in “Megalithic Art: A Visual Repertoire for the Dead” (Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2000): “There are a small number of passage graves where megalithic art is carved externally, either onto kerb stones or within the fascade, for example, the three Boyne Valley passage grave complexes of Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth. Here, the art appears to act as a point of reference between space that is known and the fore boding of the long dark passage and the unknown spaces beyond. These public expressions of ritualized rock art production are, however, few in number. The carved art is generally strategically placed within the inner passage and chamber areas where visual access would have been restricted to possibly elites or religious actors within the community. With some monuments, the art faces into the mound or is carved onto the back wall of the ante chamber where its intentional positioning appears to be reserved for the incoming dead and for the ancestors (e.g., the passage graves of D’Er Grahand Gavrinis, Brittany). The carvings within the inner passage and chamber may have represented physical markers where by the art played a vital role in how the dead changed physically and metaphysically as they moved from one area of the monument to another. The position of such art would have also had an impact on those people allowed to accompany the dead to their resting place. “

Difficult it is sourcing poetry
in dreams — such wells and
weirs of the infinite are like to
matinee patrons of a theater
where movies are the myths
and the plot walks blithe
from screen to audience and
memory while chasing old
themes. I can’t say now
which tale my ticket vended
but I sure was earnest in
that shadow-show’s theater
occupation, picking and choosing
among the spirit patrons
in whose midst I was seated
One was a harried blithe
older woman prowling for sex
with a vagina called Poetry.
We departed left the theater
through a back door, walking
into the forest brake where
my first sins had been Edened.
The two of us colliding
erotic hearses in a smash of
arch steroidal verse. She told me
of her fourth husband
& how much old anger
she had wed and now nursed:
I was relieved to hear
no unfaithful sauciness
was demanded of me
in this latter vatic burst.
Her eyes were Sappho’s,
I think, Plath long survived
from her Januarial oven sink;
her manner mature though
still too fired for the crone’s
bitter frost-tit beseech.
Opportune: That word and
its work I can resume in
this darker speech, meant
only for that dead theater,
they who sing beseeched.

December 2025

A road then, like any other — call it Jackson Street
if you like — hidden or hard to find in the usual
means of reference: memory fails, the route is hard
to explain, maps fragment the truth. I tried
mouthing directions to this street to co-workers
of a job that died 30 years ago in last night’s
verseyhearse resurrection, placed in the position
of knowing and not, trying to be more than who
I was and caught in fragrante delecto, my vanity‘s
errant understanding having a hard go telling these
folks what I thought I knew was so much lame
dream lard. I searched mental maps, went on Google
Earth looking  down on 1989 Orlando and those
neighborhoods I walked every day for years
forth and back from a doomed industry’s career.
Peered harder and tslowly began to see that
Jackson Street was really in Chicago 25 years
before that and was the last block of a long street
leading to Lake Michigan. My dreaming it so
the latest expression down the long road of souls,
that cursus of primal mystery ever voweling
up past its brink to the next living ones. Yep,
there was Jackson Street, found it, writ plain
as the eternal Day on the streetmap of a life
which was young and near to roar, back
when I was in high school walking and walking
from New Town down to the condo of
some girl’s parents on near north of downtown
— a long fucking trek getting just the faintest
remembrance of a kiss, maybe one touch of tit.
But there I was on Jackston Street, me climbing
out of one car with my care (ghosts, ambients,
coworker-shaped purses of mystery), while
from a second car emerged the HR Director.
She walked up while I fumbled introductions,
trying to remember a generation of dead names.
She pointed to a tall standing stone by the
shore whose name was Biast — the half-woman,
half fish who rose from prehistory’s
midnight tide to demand blood for the
reconsecration of Iona’s grave stones.
It was she who was ensouled by buried
St. Otteran at the far end of the cursus
whose lysis woke me astounded from dreams.
Columbanus of Bobbio denied the idea
that mortal life was just a road leading
to the eternal, a street walking
memory’s side street to lakeside pussy:
Quod enim sum non fui, et non ero,
et unaquaque hora aliud sum, et
numquam sto: ‘I am what I have not been,
and will not be; and every hour I am
something else, and never stand still”
Or, as Oran saith, the way I think it is
is what dreams posthaste backfill.
Blooding my history in the name of
cursus so the mystery wets its gills.
Columba didn’t ban woman and cow
for the temptation they illed: Threw
‘em both in a pit with Otteran’s spill
so that covering over inks a blue quill.

November 2025

What the dead mean to tell us
by the stones which buried them
we may never know: But death
is the grand intelligible by which
us lighter folks are darkly sown.

The stones’ dead are my dead too.
Both occupy a speechless, moonlit
frostbit bourne, eloquent only
in the lonely, wind-whipped eaves,
murmurring lost languages in
the spiral-fall of bony leaves.

Our dead are the empty vale and
wintry brace of nothings evermore,
my father paused between last breaths
praying Jesus Oran Starlight free us all,
my mother walking absent down
her beloved shore, near where
where we spread her ashes between
sea oats and a shrugged mortal shell.

Their essence makes true and prime
the ancient sacred landscape of
the dead, a vast array of grey stone
barrow cists and cenotaphs spread
far and vast as the old gods whose
teeth the stones still standing in
the circles display, jagged grins and
grimaces of the eternal night and day.

They are all there when I am here
remembering all my dead, my
brothers and co-workers, sponsees
and lovers who could not stay
as long as I so one would remember
them walking the familiar way.

That cursus down to the lake
which remembers death like dreams —
familiar yet not and darkly conversant,
like the waking birds who braid
my soul measure into thirds
of laughter, weeping, sleep.

I walk with all of time remembering
adding this sum with treading feet.

December 2025