Friday, October 28, 2005

Dark Suite: Four Movements

I

Your face
came howling
from the nightmare dark
eyes screaming streams of cold light
like every balefire of hell.


II

The sparse scrubby brush
is no shelter in
this bare rock place
this desert
where there is no sand
only the icy touch
of wind's love
carrying a distant tang
of evergreens
too far to the south
and the bite of crystal ice
that must have shed from the aurora
because it so tastes
of the cold
of dark space.


III

The rocks are frozen
in the dark
the north wind
rakes its breasts and belly
over them
and bleeds down
into thin crevices
where I try to hide.


IV

In my time of healing
I remember
endless arctic sky
long thin clouds
like snow covered ice floes
floating
in gray whiteness.
Ice edged wind
drifted snow
against my face
hissed
as it caressed my body
whispered imperceptible secrets
through the dreams
of my frozen sleep.

When I wakened
the dim red rage
of a sunrise
flared through the gray
just beyond my grasp.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know that eerie feeling when you sit down to a cup of tea at the end of the day, switch on the radio and bam! the song that's been playing for the last 34 seconds, echoes your thoughts to the T?
That's what happened just now to me. Dark Suite: Four Movements I, was that song.

coyote said...

If you want to try to build a case for eerie, I suppose we could start with the fact that you and I live on almost precisely opposite sides of this big round rock we share. But I think ley lines run over its surface, not through it. Shall we call it coincidence, or perhaps Jungian shared unconscious, and remember that I'm (usually, most often) writing about universal experience?

Anonymous said...

Surely this writing about universal experience has its roots in personal experience? I do not ask about those experiences, per se; I am here only to compliment you for being able to achieve that universality. If it isn't that, then what else would explain, the relation I feel with words written half-way over this big rock we share.

coyote said...

I think we may be saying the same thing, just in different ways.