Talking with Taueret

Last night Taueret was quizzing me about my invocation (I use one that I extemporized clear back as a kid, after fasting the weekend). She had me explaining it line by line. I got to the part where I say “I am the conduit between the worlds”.

She asked what I meant by that, and I answered, “I’m touching the nodes of being, of earth and sky, gods and self. She got this wonderful Bruce-Willis-smirk-on-hippo-face, and asked “What part of me are you touching?” I answered “Your belly.”

She looked at me again with that funny closed smile and then she guided my vision outward and showed me the galaxy, then other distant galaxies, and then she said “These are my ovaries. Did you think you were even born yet?”

This simple evening light

Light like amber pouring through the leaves, cicadas and birdsong, goldfinches in spattered olive flying like sparks from tree to tree. I can hear the meadowlark singing up the hill.

Sky is that perfect, autumnal blue, as heartbreaking as the first greening grass is in spring, because each heralds the change of season. Woodsmoke scents the air, apple and oak and burning leaves.

Want to sit here on this swing, holding your hand as the cooling evening light deepens and draws the warmth from the air, feel the warmth of your body, benediction and protection and reward, through the sleeve of your sweater.

White Sky At Night

 

Shape  your body between my hands, and shiver.

Light fading from the white-pink sky, world bleached to one wash of gold-sparked green.

Hair rises on my arms, your hand around my heart.  If you let go, it will stop beating.

Want you so.

 

Bite my arm to the bone, keep your name inside. 

Fuck here comes the night again.

 

Wish I could refine my longing and my fear, and make something beautiful of them.

Give them to you… or hide them away… 

But all I can do is make this night, and another, and yet another.

And love you more in the morning than I did when darkness fell.

 

Touch not

 

I am cipher, one

 

broken nothing electrons

on the wind the wires 

nothing ghosts and dust and howling

 

this empty inhalation longs

for flesh, eternally denied no

credit no

dawn no

heat.

 

Rest

Each fingertip tells the story of your labor, your palm cradles the essence of your strength;
Golden eyes retired safe behind your eyelids, lines in the corner testament to laughter;
And that laughter is wicked, rich and strong, the lilt that signs the right road taken.

We are both gentle, and awkward, and made of steel,
Lives spent tending the crucible of logic and emotion,
Rage forged and tempered in tender otherness,
Voiceless yearning to be heard before we scream.

I hate the weekend

Like swimming in deep ocean, way out in the Atlantic —  you pass through the warm sunny parts, and the places where the shadows come up from below you, dark and unbearably cold, and something taps at your feet… and you’re back in the sun again.

I hate long weekends.

Controlled Burn

 

Before they reach the paper the words shatter, and glitter into dust, meaningless abrasion.

I wear the black and red weight of them, an ugly scarf to mock my clumsy cowardice.

My raw, naive, intent tangles and snags in the fragile silk of you.

Love scribes the fire-line on the chaos of our circumstance.

Your beauty consumes me, but I am no phoenix.

I regret my stolid density I once called strength.

 

Lughnasadh

 

Lugh forged my knife.

Lugh cast my cup.

 

The ale dribbled down my chin, to be caught by the hound pup at my feet.

We sang for joy under the grail of the silver moon, Lugh’s cup dripping wine.

Edged and hammered and girdled in hops.

So drunk I am that they turn ‘neath my fingers, wine spatters my stallion’s shoulders.

Wasps butt drunken against lips and fingers, the cream horse sidles restive.

 

Cicadas and crickets, toad-song and wine rise up my blood to my head,

Our horses spar and almost unseat us, I kick at you and we giggle.

You won all the races handily, your stallion is seasoned, mine young and silly.

His wooly ears flatten now to try that race again.

But this night we’ll ride home, side by side, companionable and aching with desire

And glad for the horses, coats wooly as bears against the coming cold.

 

Sing first fruits and ribbons, silver and silk.

Sing roses like blood of the coming harvest.

This harvest sweet — the next often bitter.

Sing joy for the smith.

And race me home.

 

For the sake of touching you in passing

Think of this as one of those small touches that would happen so often if we were in the same house — the passing gentle stroke or pat across the small of your back, the cupped squeeze on your butt as you stand at the sink, swift kiss on the nape of your neck when you’re reading.

Oh, I want to be in your bed, in your arms, and sometimes at night it eats me alive… But a thousand little twisted, snapping aches happen every day, minute by minute, from that desire for the passing touch.

My old mentor stood beside me, stroking a horse — swift, gentle hands, rhythmic and flowing, one after another – pass after pass. And he said, “You shape a horse with your touch. Every time you bring that light and passing comfort of pressure to bear, you bring that horse more fully into being.”

Relationships are like horses. You know my voice, and my mind, and I know and love and value yours above all things.

But we don’t know each others hands, and we haven’t had the chance to shape those small touches into what we are, or what we will become for each other.

Oh Seosamh, before you, I’ve never had a lover who understood me when I said things like this.

So I would go and tell it to the horses. With my hands.

 

Beltane Risen

Idling, rolling the blade between my palms
watching the blood well up and slide,
thick as garnets on the fire-washed, oily plane.
Fireflies, like sullen sparks distract me
Smoke brought on these tears, not pain.

Kneeling in the spice of earth and death,
I paint your name in runes upon my forearm,
a brand too plain, too simple to be missed
sign and stigmata, testament to my sentence,
your name unanswered, my familiar pain unfelt.

The wind lofts flaring incense of the burning oak
plaques of ash inscribed, our names in tandem
unfettered rise to ride another woman’s sobs into the sky
Resolute, I glare down at my feet, I’ll meet no other eyes
in fire or in shadow, between here and home.

Oh, life began again tonight and resonates
hollow as my doumbek, hollow as my heart,
and chill as maeve always is before the rising sun
I cast my cupped hand to the fire and hear it sizzle
the richness of my own flesh rising in the smoke
Would that you were here and I were whole.