"Man Is a Hole in the Heart of God"

     As we are each an emptiness in the occult heart of culture, a gap through which it drains its vortices, as this one spinning now through you as you read, you, you, not entirely aware that already this is you, before you read it, because you know, you knew, you were the words, you are the words, the spell passed down through you is you, is us, is me, whispering into being, new old thing of external becoming inside you.

     The watch on the heath is a clue, yes. It's a clue that the processes that produced the highly improbable watch are alien to the processes that produced both the heath and the individual beast crossing it, startled at the glint of the watch in the moss.

Wail's Idiom

     But here I am, anyway, Master Owl, not properly asleep, no, and not properly dead nor dreaming, but certainly, through these phrases others formed so many times before me, with only a slight rearrangement, like the tic of an unsteady scrawl, the twitch of an old shawl, passing both into and out of my mind. No one ever truly invented a language. Heirs, all of us, rich or poor, to the grounds of these estates that lie around us, follies and ponds, sheds and meadows, the neglected, the abandoned, and the well-kept as well, their novelties and antiquities equally alien and familiar, ours for now, as we little things who walk among them, ants in their kitchens, peepers in their wells, tourists in their bedrooms, are theirs. This is occult, Master Owl. Eery human occupation and utterance, every little product of every little subculture is occult.
     And in this chaste sense only, I am. Among the nothings that have made me and make me as I touch them I am. We are such things as dreams alone have never made, as beds have never denned, although we come from them, forgetful of every thing except that we remember, surprising ourselves three times: I am. I am nothing. Here I am.

Sodality

     And is there nothing? Dark rollers breaking out of a moonless, cloud-choked night? Other romantic doggerel like that? Or is there a greenwood, an oasis, a Lubberland, a peach-tree blossom spring? No, you know you don't think so. What's untouchable, what's never been approached, is unlikely to look or to not look like any happy or unhappy story you've composed or entertained awake before.
     Shall we go, anyway? Try, anyway? It wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't that no one can go together. Death has more companionable aspects than the lived loss of memory dealt out in consciousness crushing hammer blows throughout any ordinary night's naughts of sleep.
     Worse, no good story goes alone. There is no story in it, not even for a castaway, not without contrived companions. The islands of the dark are large and uninhibited as to being uninhabited, and no bad or good drama goes on there among them.
    Yes, now you guess.
    All this preamble of "we" and "uncertainty," of "you" and "me," delivered as if we shared the same apprehension of a barely perceivable outline, of Aristotle's ship sinking hull-first into the horizon of a sea-girt world, into another we'd never really know up close, not us: fake. Forged fellow feeling. I forged it.
    Yes, you're correct. I've been there. I haven't only just reasoned or speculated wildly at my scholarly leisure in my study. I've been there. I can tell you. Yes, you're correct. I remember.
     No, no, I apologize. I lie. No awareness goes down unaware below the horizon, however alive, to return, however alive, with anything other than imaginations in hold. We are all visitors, you and I, all alike, and not one of us has ever arrived.

Swed-yo

     There are two worlds, one we have explored, mapped, and come to know well and one the existence of which we have only been able to infer from our explorations of the first. Occasionally, we have argued about those inferences and the plausibility of that other world's existence or have told a few fantastic stories about it. When we do think about it, we try to reason out its strangeness, but only end up shuffling likenesses to the world we know. Mostly, we haven't given this real, second world much thought at all and have preferred making up worlds entirely of our own contesting imaginations--heavens and hells, alien planets, fairy kingdoms, utopias, dystopias, endless silliness. Of course, it's hard to know, given there's reason for uncertainty and nothing much to help it except imagination, whether an unvisited world is real or nonsense like all the rest of our foolishness.
     But there is a world. We visit it every night. We know, don't we? But we never bring back the proof. We never document the news of discovery. We forget. All our waking lives or almost, all we do is forget. We take the flotsam of dreams we find washed up on our waking awareness for the whole of the other world, a weirdness we barely try to explain except as more weirdness within the world we already know so well. At best we turn it over as evidence. What is this? Where did this disjointed monstrosity half washed away and rotting quickly in the morning sun come from?
     Past the dreaming and the nonsense, the theories, the electrodes, the fluorescing images, and the bon mots about our nightly lunacies, who dares to set sail into a total darkness? Who would want to try to go there to where that must be but where there may be nothing?

The Greatest of We Is

The thing we seem to have
Too much crushing
Trouble remembering

While we're busy with marrying,
Parenting, burying, hungering,
Categorizing this relationship or that

Is that all human relationships,
Being human, depend
And revolve on nothing

More nor one single thing less,
Not sex, nor blood, nor death, beyond
Pure friendship in the end, the test.

The Underworkings of Life

I'm fifty one. There's still time
For me to die young, if not
Any longer in my prime.

Keep that in mind. You could look
Back on this old man today
As a childhood picture book

Of what an old man looked like,
Once, before you grew older
Than that picture in low light .

Who Are the Wind

Blow hard from lungs shrunk
Down to grains of bluest blood
Knowing no blood to be blue
That wants to do its work.

My father, my father, weak man
In his end times, small man
In his vanities, as I am in mine,
Knew his peasant blood blued.

Is mine? Is mine not yet red?
Are the lines in my mind
Still singing with lust in my head? 
In a bright time, when blue shines.