A blood lid lowers on a full moon far west, glowering the arc with a heavier mass, a glutted, drunk and drowning blood feast. Last night I dreamed my Yesterdays wished me godspeed – childhood pals and first girlfriends, college peckerwoods and old bandmates, et cetera ad nauseum the motleyed of my past. As their bon voyage faded I crossed over to the next building on a skyway bridge and gangplank, utterly open yet clearly a river with two sides bank to bank. Once across, I came upon my mother and father who said I’d be dead soon. Desperate, I told them that my laptop was sitting on a desk I hadn’t worked in 40 years, and they could read my life’s work from a folder they could find on the upper left of its desktop — all yours, I told them. Inexpressible futility shadowed their faces when I remembered they were dead. Theirs wasn’t a farewell from my past but a stilled and chill welcome to the barrow where nothing more is done. I realized how little time was left to finish all my business but the measure was moony — was it days or milliseconds before that final midnight chime from which no traveler ever echoes a return? And where was my wife and neighbors, folks from my AA meetings, our cats, all that living loving legerdemain? Panic poured icewater and I woke, 1:30 am, the bedroom shade black in the middle and pale all around, full moonlight’s hymnal singing its lines. Bood time acumen, already filled, the passageway Oran’s and yet mine still to distill this short time. Blood moon setting: My work becomes yours, sooner than I care in the forever of shores. A volume reddening with severed rhyme.
Even when things are sweetly vernal ours is a lonely land, what’s present and blooming looming too with the absent’s emptying low tide. The young oak in the front yard has dropped its leaves and budded out, its shade grown wider for petunias we planted round its trunk. A vital figure on the fruiting plain, but surging from a spring whose source is cankered with the cancelled out. Polluted with beholden things taken long ago by the devout. That’s the trouble with sacred landscapes raised within: Pilgrimage is a coffin road when the journey and its destination are lonely cairns. They tend to blur the rapture of warm and breezy days in their stilled nigh frozen poise, nigh immortal as my yesterdays. Maybe there’s a candle for that, a frail flicker’s contra in the poetry. You know it’s spring there too on the sacred isle in my heart, an everliving augment for the heather and bog asphodel bestride the fallen stones and chapel ruins which undulate vast graveyards of the dead. Purely present too – awake and scything harvests when I sleep. My mother and father greet me at the door beneath the hill. Back together and in love, with my two brothers at their side. Waving me in. Handing my ghost a glass of water freshest from the well which rises graves to glory. The draught of it so springlike, so vanishingly quelled. Candle that if you can: A happiness growing two worlds embracing all it vales. Two sheets for the starlit journey which begins and ends unveiled. And if you believe all that, I have a bridge in Lonelyland for sale; I’ll throw in some lowtide candles, flickerworks for lonely trails.
A late contribution to Dora’s “Embodying a Landscape” challenge from this past Tuesday and with an accidental nod to Sanaa’s “low tide” mini-challenge, which somehow found its way into the poem before I read it.
In the old lit, a king spent All Hallows Eve on the mound with the lord of the sidhe, learning where lost treasures were bound & hearing old stories of that sacred ground. Come Christian time, saints raised heroes from the dead to speak of ancient things offering baptism from wells and a Heaven. Lifting old tales from the cairns and court tombs for the scribes to write in lines of gold leaven. Who knew the encounter of these traditions would light two fires from one feathered quill, flinting mouth-music on vellum while willing the mind’s eye into things familiar yet strange. Lamping a sidhe under and behind every page, a liminal vale swarming with faery archange. Lit proved more potent than the high gates it once loudly proclaimed — more durable too. Tucking the Newgrange riddle in the tender of that choo-choo skytrain. Took fifteen centuries to shovel it entire in the firebox but how that kah-blooey now downward rains! Now we get the shatter of Oran’s grave shout, lit that can’t matter churching the sky’s rout. Uncowling Patrick to peer in Crom’s snout to spy odysseys deepwrit on ocean veneer. Lit is the goddess whose shade sings that pier.
If the God ceases to be the way of the zenith, he must fall secretly.
— Liber Novus
Not writing many poems these days because its precinct is so spare: the unread medium of turning’s gaze, a breath of fatal noctal urning air.
Shadows are all that’s left to mine when verses write illegible, when dreams are unintelligible and digs in dirt too sepulchral for the sufficient’s fallow court.
Skeletal of culture, faith & brain I grow elemental on the stem of rootbound shadow, a canopy of lost truths pilloring the dust of holy pallors. It sure makes
for narrow reading, the blander simile in unheated tombs, rooms molting the drag hotel of turning’s dim queen. Her As If not labial nor labile or much labeled anymore but shines verses barrowing the sublime sound love once made harrowing art with its truth.
The old ghost bedsprings creak ghost Yahweh’s rheumy freight, commanding too much, demanding & damning all it nadirs to more’s punchdrunk, basalt, dimming score.
When a literal godhood fails, the littoral clitoral becomes its insufficient jail, a clatter-masque of nails board-scraping what once seemed bullion — mythos-real.
No wonder I now dream of aliens in libraries bowling metal balls of lurid doom. Absence is the rhetoric of the cathedrally-emptied room where I fail writing poems:
I still blight that feckless tomb, the echo of epitaphs where the dust of darkness had once bloomed. Who needs hocus in writ focus when the given note is spume, wavechant spectrally strewn?
Hello Kay, I hope I haven’t disturbed you in the low caul of the ages, dead now perhaps or simply gone from all reference in the tides of living time. Long time no speak — not since that September night in 1981 when you tore from my car and walked back into the house where you lived with your sister. Not looking back, leaving me to this ever without, at once and hence the severed man. I don’t even have a picture of you, just blood inked in journals which later poems traced the barest contours of, trying to recall the insides of falling in and out of drunkfuck love. The wild grief and sour oblivion which followed your walk out of my life I always blamed on you so I never thought to make amends which now seem necessary to the dead.
Sorry. It isn’t the same shame of keeping buried bad night friends who disturbed the marital peace. And for that it’s worse, pointing the finger of fateful blame so steadily at your ghost like a willfulness ossified to stone because everything that felt reborn merging with you suddenly groaned an abyss where you turned away.
And O the dreadful gears of resentment that soon plowed my days and nights, against you and Real Love Herself, me hound-howling and bitch-pounding while glubbing unmerciful fifths drowning our ghost tryst. A supple steely motion I’ve embraced and traced now for years, down to this very morning trying to make such late amends to remembered summer moonlit airs while my wife of 30 years sleeps upstairs.
Your echoing in that translucence sobered eventually into me trying to stop mistaking literal conductions for Salome’s verse jive, seamstress of dreams and abductor of your file from my heart-vault to finally process and recess in this dark and murkier self-truth-berserk latter-amends style .
But I digress — sorry. For decades now I’ve done this sort of talking to the wall of colossal fuckups of my fate erected and put you on the far side of, a condition I can’t stop thinking you might hearken if I just said a few things rightfully if self-frightfully fucking true.
For whatever confoundings of your own tale which leapt so momentarily into mine — four abortions with your previous boyfriend, your hopes cracked and greatly blooded mistaking my drunken aura for the true beguine — Falling in love, I gave you clout of a goddess crossed by wiles of the snake, all the shit I yearned and feared ramped toward an infinity which could never be invested in any real woman’s 1981. For all that mythic monstrance I millstoned our brief encounter with, I am truly sorry, for everyone else I hurt lugging the unforgiven freight of your ghost name.
Those fleet six weeks might surely have taken root and even blossomed into time had they not been so scoured and soured by the collapsing sense of my failure at understanding just who you were and could never be. God how infinite the rays of that August sun at Cocoa Beach, rising just behind your regnant silhouette and you smiling so deeply, long and sweetly fucked all the night before: Your imago right then branded my heart’s zenith as if atop summer’s true Everest, the purest rebirth with no further height mortal lovers can go. How foolish I was to worship our three-night grail of fucking at such dazzling cliff-heights! How grateful I should have been for what I learned about heights with the subsequent barrel-fall back into one’s finite lonely self, nursing all that grief with endless boozing!
And why should I blame you for all I subsequently broke those sodden years so determined to chain your ghost to a falling, failed despair? While you delved so briefly in me and (I assume) became free. Well, like they say, resentment is drinking poison wishing someone else would die. A long life’s interim has passed — what, 44 years? I like to think you settled down to find what made you happy, that you finally brought a child or three to birth and raised them long enough to become the grandmother of hope by now.
For whatever blame I bid you heap on your mirror and might kept you thirsty, heartsore or drearier —sorry. I know face-to-ghost amends can only go a certain distance healing hearts either living or dead with latter truth, but it’s all I can offer in this poem, standing apart from all the others brained, pulped and/or eviscerate in your name. I set all those down, take off this mask and hold my naked heart up to this wailing wall’s to say:
Sorry I didn’t add up to the man you so dreamed I was at first, whoever he might have been. How far I drifted from him in your gaze and ears, bent over you sweaty and defensive, raving much I needed you — pleading nigh insane. Your eyes behind dark sunglasses, already seeing tomorrows with me happily unendured.
In lieu of more direct amends here are the one I made to the living with all my sins with you in mind. I believe I’m closer now to the man you rejected me for hoping some better love might have spanned my broken bridge’s imago.
I don’t wear Speedos to the beach and stopped requesting Journey from DJ Death’s bone choir.
I don’t yearn from all ends wishing to torch love and then pour that yearning like a booze on fuming pyres.
I got a vasectomy — no more inseminate errors to terror the bedded soire terroir!
And grief of losing you has taught me magnitude and beauty and a chance to work for better things.
I sobered up and got married — twice — this time for 30 years of a real woman humbling me and keeping me on sure ground.
Buried my mother and father, two brothers, two nephews, a cousin, three AA sponsees and so many cats learning what salt serves in tears.
And of that serpent sexuality who feasted so wildly upon us all I can say is that she and I abide and remember you with neither pride nor shame — cliffs of touch I never need bleed again.
All that from your not turning around, bidding me envowel this ghostly garden sound!
What Thou I so mistook in you has slowly made me understand that we were fierce but temporary puppets romancing grails furthest inside, our touch electrifying ghostly ingots buried before we were born, lifting with a kiss shadowy gildings of the tide, dolphin laments I here ride no woman’s love presides.
I’m still rowing I to Thou but the promised island’s my own and the only place where any God’s temple may be found and Oran peeps underground.
And from all that, this: I’ve learned that happiness isn’t getting what I wanted so in you but wanting what I found after you turned.
So, shade: Is there anything else you’d add to the ways I hurt you blundering badly in that distant age? And how is it, my brightest of night friends, still simmering penumbral rage, you might yet be fully repaid?
I shuddup with ear to stone and listen: Come with your ban sidhe creel of wounded tales. Croon to me your widow’s song. Moon this shadow garden tomb.
Walking gets me near wild mind. It suggests that pace and rhythm can flush the full embrace, returning the poem, if only for fleet moments, to the greener vales of pagan grace.
But I walk home to resume my day, forfeiting every awe I’ve gained beholding edges of that ecstasy. Resuming the myriad betrayals of all I had been walking to.
Unless the mind stays wild its stain claims kin to wonder, a soot that buys up all the shine and hangs it like wallpaper, patterns of gold on green fit for the breakfast nook: A bowl of cornflake canopy.
Maybe walking without going home is the only path to feral circuitry, crooked lines in pathless woods inking jolts of verdant poetry, seeming greens be damned. So that meters may yet match Pan’s earthy tread, vital matters sung sans comfort, stay or stead.
The music of that survival sounds far different when I’m rounding last blocks home. My eyes intent on ending’s one address, with its porchlike stair and ultimate door. Wild words soon grave deep in too-familiar once-more sleep.
Let’s get lost then, you and I, in raspy tempos of the awfuller voice, a forest moist, hungry and darkling for those who walk in feral poise without indulgence or choice in that poetry a home destroys.
Jung thought Christian law might complete itself accepting the lament of the dead. But that would mean refuting History for a lighter scan, more bladder, less nail. A sacrificial lamb of a different color to bear the summed misery of latter time, returning the dead from Hell by refusing to pay the boatman coign of Christian fate.
Sending that bleating throat-cut Zevah back down among the shades to hearken where Jesus only preached. Such humility was not invested in the King of Fisheries and is doubtful even now, extinction being the far smoother, shorter course for saving Mother Earth from upswept human bane, a straight shot’s snap of senex History.
Jung was hearing the dead’s ripe organum but its Latin translation could only go so far. That’s not to say I found no benefit growing up and through and outward from the Church; it made me literate, drunk & somewhat kinder. Smoothed my bluey Pict war-feathers for preenings in the alcove of a sweeter love. I had to learn how my sips of eternity were fraudulent without the wonder, grace, and fateless luck. A fucking education for sure, albeit greatly mistaken and barely understood: Redressing the pagan takes plumage, myth and lamentation evicting damnation from its wood.
Worshipping the echo of old wells deeper and diviner than dystopia’s blicker rood. Fitting blacker batteries under time’s battered hood. I mean, what else am I gonna do, dragging shallows of corrupt Christian grail condemned with all modernity to sop its emptied, bitter, ghostly ale?
I wear burnt Rome for candled harrow, churching death where all domes fail. Picking up the stones that were rejected and placing them where they most appall, in blood and starlight’s next birth brawl. I’ll be dead soon, so here’s to girthing shores, hailing the arks which pagan Jesu oars.
“I believe I have learned that no one is allowed to avoid the mysteries of the Christian religion unpunished. I repeat, he whose heart has not been broken over the Lord Jesus Christ drags a pagan around with in himself, who holds him back from the best.” (Carl Jung. The Black Books, Kindle Edition, p. 239).
Cold as loveless fuck in Florida tonight, 24 degrees at a full moon’s five AM, lustral Brigit now white waste, the sundered Arctic casting long its vortex wraiths. The wind picked up midafternoon with titan gale, Edmonton berserkers of ripped-wide sail, tensing and frenzying my every bulwark of domestic scale. Pinning billows of freeze fabric over the petunias gardened round the oak tree, padding PVC pipes in foam and duct-taped tighter than any simile’s sealed smite, setting outdoor spigots to the slightest drip, ticktocks dripping down the twelve predicted hours of unlikened cold. How whipped the foxhole prayers tonight to Holocene-era themes, as worthy as iceboxes to the icehole fisher who uses Krampus shit for bait. Life in sunny Florida, meet the frostbit moocher of your sweet-as-candypanty dreams. ‘Tis the era of the rarer fortune now, extremity of heat and cold become the local taint, a jammed foot-pedal speeding fast and nasty while signposts of the once-beloved scatters unsemblanced to what’s fled and bled and vast, the “feels like” abyssal scribed by this coldbrite blast.
I know, bitching about cold weather Florida-style is like carving ice sculptures with a blunt simile, but there you go. The heating Arctic is making for wobblier polar vortexes and equatorial frost. Last weekend’s blast broke low temperature records in my area that have held for 50 years.
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)
Oran's Well 
