note:

Bean sidhe: gaelic; pr. Ban - shee; from Bean = Woman & Sidhe = Faery: sometimes known as bean chaointe (keening woman); a woman of the Fae, sometimes appearing in her animal form of weasel, stoat, or crow, who’s cry or keening presages and marks a death.

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I

Do you know
how does it feel
what does it mean
Do you



I.2

November blows in late this year. Sails in on a low cover of gray cloud, sweeps in with a mist of cold rain. November blows in late this year, with roses still blooming

and wet winds swirl
up from the valley
to strip these hillsides bare

with roses still blooming

Tonight
the sky
is dominated by a great halo
half as big as the sky itself

Tonight the sky
whirls around a dark conjunction
the full Moon and Mars dance in a silent pas de deux
in Taurus opposing the Scorpio Sun

I know how to read mystic signs
it’s never done me any good



II

to dance on the edge
the precipice of being
to sing the secret songs
and not understand the words
to remember
and not know it as a memory


the gravity of spirit binds
the particulate matter of soul
and mass does not equal
speed
or energy
or light

or any combination thereof


the physics of the unreal
the quantum mechanics of the irrational
the calculus of insanity
this is why they are wrong
they draw the map and mistake it for the territory



III

Question:
Do the dead know our secrets?
Question:
Do they forgive us if they do?
Wondering:
if they have the answers to that which haunts our lives
Question:
No question.



IV

Today
November wraps itself in unseasonable warmth
lingering at a distance
hands behind its back
face hidden from view

These woods, skies, leaves on the ground
this place
shrouded in mist


Winter is a quiet season

but not this

Autumn is a riot of noise
restless, raucous
fitful, loud

a bean sidhe cry behind soft grey cloud
alien hoofbeats and crackling static
and the herald of death to come

this deceptive time of veils and mists
and the whispered promise
in a language I can’t understand
this whispered promise
in words I only know in dreams


this whispering darkness
that sustains me
and destroys me
this gentle grey veil is sharper yet for all that
it pierces me
drawing blood the color of fog


the whispered lies that promise
peace or
simple silence or simply
closure to this howling wound


something in the darkest part of me
vibrates at the frequency of Autumn



V

This is the time they say we can reach
through the corridors of bones
this is the time they say we can read
the mystic weave, the tapestry of souls
reach through like water, like air as thick as thought
to what we hope, pray, and fear
is waiting
to take us Home.

And what does it mean?
How does it feel?
Do you?
Do you know?
To dance on the edge?
To sing the songs you cannot know?
Do you know?
Do I?
How can I not?


But I am not a dancer
and I don’t know how to sing
What does it mean?
To walk the edge of time
the precipice of being?
Do you know?
Do you?

warp and woof, weave and weft
This is sacred work
this weaving
this is a holy work
this tapestry
this insubstantial tapestry of
filaments and wheel-spun dust
a holy thing
and I would unmake it
if only I knew how

it undoes me
unravels me



VI

And what does it mean?

To dance along the precipice means to seek a certain truth
which, once achieved,
you soon learn to regret
Autumnal truth
stripped down to jagged black bones against
low-lying, scudding clouds
cold glistening moisture
on a piecemeal carpet of broken brown flesh
and a lingering kiss of descending mist
the exact consistency
of a lost and foundering heart.




Epilogue: The End of the World is Greatly Overrated


Because I dare to embrace my Shadow
Because I know how to feel joy
Because I eat pain for breakfast every day
Because I weep at beauty
Because I swim in a sea of sorrow without drowning
Because I’m tough enough to love without being broken by it
Because the finish line of this here race is death,
but to win you’ve got to get there without killing yourself first,
and I’m a dark horse who’s beating the odds.


So far.


And so far is good enough


So far.

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The (Heat) Wave Breaks


I’ve been walking the dog early in the morning, because of the heat wave. The days, once they get up to full force, are steaming pressure-cookers, the air thick and viscous, leaving everything from skin to clothing feeling damp, oily, grimy. Nothing dries out, and moving itself becomes more of an effort than seems worth making.

During the heat wave, even the nights are thick and cloying, and difficult to sleep. I catch my sleep in fits and starts, short naps, taken when I can take them, or when narcolepsy drags me down like a millstone tied to my neck, into a turbulent deep.

And so I find myself waking in the hour before dawn, up most of the night, my brief sleep dissolving at just that perfect time. And so, being up, I get dressed and leave with the dog, out into the best part of the day, when the woods are just light enough to see, when the sky is the purple-blue of twilight, and when the air is as night-cooled and as removed from the full blast of day as it is going to get. If I’m vigilant about it, we are out and on our way before 5 am, only the earliest of the early birds beginning their songs as the night bleeds away in the face of the growing light.

On this day, I get out of the house late; some time after five o’clock, and I am resigned to the fate of having the day heat up while we are still out walking the woods. But right now, the air is still pleasantly cool, and the dew even cooler as I walk down through the meadow toward the woods, the long grasses brushing my bare legs with moisture; cool and wet. Here, the meadow is beneath a brightening sky, but ahead the woods still hold shadow, blue and deep. Because this - these woods – this is the place to which the twilight flees when the sun threatens the sky again. And for a time, it will linger, cool and dim, a diluted draught of night with which to begin the day.

Through the spaces made by the interweaving of the branches and leaves of the trees, the sun makes its appearance. Today it is clear, with only a few pink-tinged clouds in the east and little haze in the air. The sun is already brighter and paler than its usual crimson-tinged fire of the hot and hazy mornings. And in spite of my fears, the air retains that deliciously col edge to it. It’s drier, I realize, so in spite of the clear skies and growing light of the rising sun, things are not cranking up like a steam bath. But the kicker is this: above me, the tree tops sway, the leaves shimmy, and the air that moves them sneaks down to ground level and caresses me – there is no other word for it – it is a caress, soft and sweet. There is a breeze today, a beautiful, cool, fresh breeze, stirring the air and making its own music in the trees.

And I become aware of what I had already instinctively known since starting out today: the heat wave has broken.




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Good Things in a Bad Day


Looking at yet another house for sale sucks, for any number of reasons. But walking through the woods around the house is a good thing, mostly. This house is an A-Frame that should be ashamed to call itself a year-round residence, but the land is a beautiful thing, thick with pines and shade and moss, and a short walk brings us to the banks of a meandering stream, water making that rushing noise that it does when cascading down time-carved steps of exposed rock, spilling along its course and around it’s curves, where shadow predominates and sunlight exists only to throw random sparks off the water to illuminate the branches of a low-hanging tree.

At the A-Frame, while everybody else is gabbing, I am apart as usual, spacing out as usual, losing myself in the tangle of roots from a partially upturned white pine, and the tiny cavern created underneath it. And so I notice the large bird dropping to the ground from a tree nearby, silent and nearly invisible, you miss the motion, and you don’t even know it’s there, but I see it, and so I wait and watch, thinking it’s a hawk and wondering what it is up to.

But when it flies up again to a low-lying branch, and I can see better it’s broad wings and thick body and large head, I know I am seeing an owl in the daytime, and so I sneak up slowly to get a better look. And there it is, this huge Barn Owl, its beautiful, white, heart-shaped face watching intently with black eyes, and as soon as it sees me it turns its face away as if not wanting me to read it, and then it takes off, flying off through the trees to a distant part of the woods. But it is now a part of my day; a good thing in a bad day, something to hold onto.

And then later, by the banks of that meandering stream, in a patch of sunlight something really astounding. Dragonflies, with black wings, but instead of zipping back and forth like dragonflies do, they are fluttering, like butterflies, drifting in the air, fluttering up to the branches of the tree in the sunlight, and then, like a bonus prize to something already extraordinary, their needle-like bodies become iridescent electric blue, the color so intense in the sunlight that it can’t really be real, and what are these creatures, that look like dragonflies and flutter like moths, like butterflies, their wings black as velvet and their bodies the electric blue of twilight, as though the night itself had coalesced into a swarm and slipped through into the day?

A blessing, is what they are. Another good thing in a bad day. This is the way we walk through life.

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A Ghost Story, Of Sorts

What feels like a long time ago, but really not so long after all

I opened the front door to a September morning and a black dog on the doorstep, starved to what might have been a few heartbeats or ragged breaths from death. Skin and fur contracted against a washboard of ribs, the bones of his legs in perfect delineation. His eyes full of the dullness that comes from more pain than one should ever need to endure, distant eyes, the faint shadow of hope in them more terrifying and heartbreaking than they would be of they reflected nothing but utter hopelessness.

I fed him, gave him water. Feeling the kind of helplessness one feels at the sight of tragedy inevitable. He ate and drank and pulled himself up onto the chair by the front door, hen looked up at me as though defying me to make him leave. I didn’t of course.

What I did was to leave to run some errands, wondering the whole time I was gone what I was going to do about him, even thinking that he might be dead on my doorstep when I got back. But when I returned home, he was gone, and I never saw him again.

That was in a September; the beginning of a bad year. The beginning of a year of extended loss. But it wasn’t until well into the aftermath of that loss; after the deaths by suicide, aneurysm, kidney failure, old age, heart failure and abortion; the raging fires of grief died down to white-hot embers no less searing for all that, not until then did I remember my visitation that September that seemed so long ago but was not so long after all, and never would be. That black spectre of death to come, there on my doorstep. A threat? A warning? Or just the shadow of the future, cast backward onto my feet, devoid of meaning and purpose, only the cold darkness blotting out the terrible light that waits on the road ahead?

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A Bad End to a Bad Day


My cat, Pirate is hurt, but it takes me a while to realize it. I have been home for hours already, but busy with other things so I am only now down in my room, putting out food for the two cats. This is when I see; Pirate struggling to come down from his perch on top of the upended couch that is now an aerial sleeping platform. He makes it down to the desk, and he is staggering, nearly falling over, and my first thought is that he is terrible sick, perhaps even dying, and the chill of that particular shadow from days to come seems to touch me.

But he makes it down to his food dish and that’s when I see that he is limping, barely walking on his right rear leg. But it’s dark in the room and I still can’t see well, so I get a flashlight to shine it on, and that’s when I see the large, ugly gash, the skin and fur pulled back and edged with black blood, the exposed muscle and fat underneath. And my heart tears, some; all the more for his being so stoic about it, not crying, simply enduring what must be terrible pain.

And so it begins; what should have been the end of a bad day become the next long stretch of another ordeal; waiting for the Vet on call to get back to me (an hour for that) only to have him tell me he’s too far away and direct me to the local all-night emergency clinic, only to have them tell me they have hours of bigger emergencies to deal with, and then to finally bring him in, and more hours go by...

...and this is the way it goes, with every emergency and ordeal and crisis, the fear and the worry, the waiting and the empathetic pain, and this is always the way it goes, this is what’s always waiting in the shadows that you didn’t know were there. And sometimes it’s a manageable crisis, a lot of waiting and worry and coming away having spent far, far more money than can be reasonably afforded, feeling guilty for the material cost of love, much less the emotional cost, but still, a reasonably decent outcome to a bad ending to a bad day; it’s damaged flesh, it’s broken bone, but it’s fixable. By now it’s 1 in the morning, we’re exhausted and I’m in some kind of emotional shell-shock, too many disappointments in a day, too many things to feel bad about, too many mitigating it-could-have-been-worse rationalizations, and it’s been a bad day all around, and you can somehow deal with the greedy people and the impractical possibilities and the leering face of hopelessness snickering from behind a tree or badly insulated wall, but you don’t want to deal with this, this silkily whispered promise of worse to come, this guarantee that this time wasn’t so bad but just you wait, my pretty, I’ll get you, and your little dog too, and your little cat, and your little loves and your big loves and your friends and family and all that you care about, yes my pretty, I’ll get them all, and then I’ll get you, but not before I make you suffer good. Real good. Good for me, bad for you.

A bad ending to a bad day.

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The Wave Breaks,
or,
The Butterfly Flaps its Wings, and a Hurricane is Born


Another beautiful morning, cool and wet, but I missed this one today. Not that I didn’t get up; I did get up, ten or fifteen times. Up, and groggily looking around with a head full of weighted cares and the chemistry of a saddened heart, went back to a restless sleep, and dreams of magic gone awry, and houses that are ours but only in the dream world, and underground passages and blocked exits, and things stolen but I don’t know from whom.

Another bit of bad news, when I went to see the surgeon who will operate on me this week; as I suspected, I do have another hernia that has cropped up, and so I get to have two incisions made to patch me up this time. I suppose I don’t mind; just two more battle scars to show I’m still fighting this damned war, this war of life that we all end up losing in the end. Still here, dammit. Still fucking here.

Pirate is lethargic this morning; sleeping heavily and not wanting to get up even when I open a can of food for him. I can’t let him outside because of his bandages, and he was pacing like a tiger in a cage for most of yesterday, full of restless energy, and so now I’m worried all over again. Could it be that his injuries are worse than everyone thought? I get up again and again to watch him, and if he sleeps too still I look for his breathing, and if that is hard to see I shove him awake, just to see him move, to know that he is still alive, that he hasn’t abandoned me just yet. I have too, too much fear in me, of the world and the things is has to offer.

But then, I am lethargic too, suddenly sleeping heavily and far too much, and not wanting to get up even when the cool and dark and moist morning calls to me. The air in this room is even heavier because of the screen over the open window, and none of my work this week has gotten done. I still don’t even know if I will manage.

There is too much to worry about here, and too much unhappiness, the animals all kept inside, and all of our efforts stifled and stymied and stalemated and squashed. I’m caught in the crossfire of too many emotions; pain and frustration and a terrible sense of betrayal and deception, and none of these even my own. Empathy is a curse; it is the power to feel suffering you have no power over at all. And then you have your own shit to deal with. Just to ice the cake.

Little things add up; that’s the insidious truth of it all. You don’t need a boulder. A landslide of pebbles will do the job just as well.

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I Am Not Supposed to Think These Things


I am not supposed to be thinking these thoughts. Not supposed to think about how the things that I love, the things that make living tolerable, are the very things that will inflict hurt upon me in ways that my worst enemy could never do. I’m not supposed to think these things. To reflect on the ways that the world will conspire with the things I love to betray me and work to destroy me.

That they will suffer pain that I will be powerless to assuage. That they will be unreachable when they need most to be reached, and beyond comfort when comfort is all I have left to give. That they will ultimately abandon me, through no fault of their own; abandon me and betray me through loss and calamity and finally death.

I am not supposed to think of these things. I am not supposed to allow these thoughts to color the present moment. But if there really is nothing but the present moment, then every atom of the future and past are a part of that moment, too. It is the molecular structure of time. Every moment is connected as one. I do not make reality. All I can do is see it, or be blind to it, or some selective combination therein. Like memory, and the process of forgetting, selective blindness is one of the essential survival tools in life. We must forget the future, as we learn to forget the past.

But the future is the light of reality, and it casts its shadow backward into the past, and we must walk in it every day as we plod onward toward our inevitable end, and I have yet to find a way to not know this. I am not supposed to think these things, and I do not, I do not, know how.

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5:19, up all night, still can’t sleep, so I write instead

Outside, light without sun, pre-dawn light, shadowless light. This is light I could live with. Light like this all day. But not the eternal winter kind. Oh, hell; whatever you want, the price is always wrong.

But the birds. I stand out there in my bare feet, the air cool and the ground cooler, and the birds all going at it, and I pick them out, one by one, each separate song, until I’m not hearing the symphony anymore, I’m hearing each separate melody line, each harmony, each counterpoint. I don’t know who they are – except for the crows of course, and I love them for their raucous squawks and for their boldness at interjecting into all that twittering piping sweetness. But I love them all. Even the ones I don’t hear, the ones there by their absence. The whip-poor-wills that abandoned our woods for some other place. The beautiful, melancholy song that some bird sang every morning in the days after Kat died. That song is burned into my brain, yet I’ve never heard it again. Some psychopomp come to carry Kat’s spirit off to wherever it was meant to go, singing it’s passage through the worlds and then gone, and never come back again.

I’ll never get used to all the heartbreak. And yet if I could choose not to love, I wouldn’t. The thing that makes it all worth putting up with is the same thing that makes you want to slit your wrists. Well; gotta have something to write stories and sing songs about. Do you think that’s what the birds are doing? Singing all the songs of sadness since the dawn of Bird?

I do love that pre-dawn, shadowless half-light. The closest I can get to it during the day is in the woods, in late spring and in summer; walking in that green shade. And after the sun sinks behind the hills, late afternoon. Though there is truly nothing like the light that slides around the curve of the world into the nightside, filling up the darkness like some bright liquid. Nothing else like it anywhere.

The other day, when I was driving home from the Doctor appointment, I came back on the back roads, through the town I used to live in before living where I do now. I turned up the road we lived on, the one that ran along the creek, and stopped at the head of the driveway that used to be ours. Almost everything was changed; shrubbery gone, trees cut down; the house next door that had been owned by the fading alcoholic artist with the dog and cat that we had adopted and taken care of because he was too out of it, now fixed up, the yard cleaned out, the house painted, the artist maybe dead or insane, his dog and cat both dead by the time we moved out.

And there was the house we lived in, remarkably the same amidst all of the change. And suddenly, my heart was seized by such a terrible crush of sadness and grief, that it was a physical pressure in my chest, so profound that I could barely breathe, and I had to drive away before my soul exploded. Drive up the road so different now, myself so different now, my life so different, with my bank account so filled with deposits of pain I had barely been able to conceive when I lived here, and this was the place where I finally grew up, by which I mean that I came to the inner knowledge that I had finally left my childhood behind. The place where I began to come to the understanding that there is nothing to achieve, nothing to want, because if the moment is good then that is all there is, and that is all there ever is, and nothing can be better and nothing will ever be better than that moment. I had that moment, and that awareness, that perfect awareness here, for the first time in my life.

And as for leaving childhood behind; no sadness over that, no grief for the passing of it. Because while I lost my childhood by growing up, I was glad to let it go. Because I had never lost the one thing worth keeping from that first time of my life. I have never stopped believing in magic. Everything else, I could let go of with no regrets. That belief was the only thing I needed to take with me into adulthood.

But I buried my first pet here; the alcoholic artist’s white cat who came to love me, and whom I came to love, I buried her by the banks of the creek that I watched freeze every winter and flood every spring and where I sat and watched the trees dip their leaves into it’s slow-moving surface and thought to myself for the very first time: this is as good as it ever gets, and really, really meant it. I think I could have died at that moment. Everything since then has been extra. And I still don’t think it’s ever worth the pain.

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Today.

Today hasn’t begun yet. Or is just beginning.

Today will be known as the Day After The Floods.

Today is Monday.

Saturday we had the rains, which were supposed to end by Sunday, but didn’t. Sunday we had the floods. There are four directions one can go when driving from my home, and yesterday, three of them were impassable, due to the floods.

Yesterday I had a bad day. I’m sleeping badly again, but I don’t know why. Yesterday I managed only; three hours of sleep, and was tired and unhappy and feeling sick all day long. I managed small naps, none of which helped. Last night I slept maybe four, four and a half hours. But at least I feel a little more rested. Maybe I can get a little more sleep before we have to go out. We have more houses to drive by, be shown by realtors, wonder about trying to purchase. For me, more irrational despair to try and block, push away, ignore, pretend isn’t there. Or at least try to keep to myself, if all else fails. Which it usually does.

I’m taking an over the counter pill that is supposed to giev the body what it needs to make Serotonin. This as opposed to the prescription drugs that interfere with the body’s re-uptake mechanism. It’s supposed to be better, supposed to be more natural, supposed to be...

It’s supposed to take two weeks to fully take effect, but for me the effects, and results, were nearly instantaneous. An acute awareness of something going on in my body, and my brain. A calm and muting of the constant anger and rage in me. I liked the loss of the rage, which seems to be so much an intrinsic part of myself, and which I hate. But I was surprised to find that I asn’t quite so sure how I felt about the calm. To find that perhaps I might not like being calm so much after all. Being calm feels too much like letting my guard down. Being calm feels too much like trusting in the world. I consider that a bad thing. A terrible thing.

It’s supposed to take two weeks for the effects to be fully felt. For me, the effects were almost instantaneous. Now, after two weeks, they seem to be already wearing off.

I’m doubling my dosage. If this calm is only a temporary effect anyway, then I might as well enjoy it as long as I can make it last. I have always said I prefer the sadness to the rage. Even if the sadness make me want to be dead. The rage makes me worse.

Friday night I dreamt that I was in a Hospice, sharing a room willed with beds and other people. Some folks were visiting the man wh was in the bed next to mine. Out in the hallway, I heard them talking about him, talking about how he wasn’t going to be getting better. I said to them, “Everybody here is going to be getting better,” and when they looked at me with strange, odd expressions, I added, “in a manner of speaking...”

In the last week or so, every morning has become a symphony of bird song. With the last day and a half of rain, only the most intransigent piles of snow and ice have managed to hold on, and only in the places shadowed from sun and high on the hills where the air is still cold. Otherwise, I have come to accept that Spring has once again descended upon the earth. Change and the turning of the wheel has begun again. Nothing good can come of it.

And it’s all so beautiful. What a terrible paradox. Yesterday was vast grey skies and rolling dark clouds, Canadian Geese swimming in fields turned to lakes, and whitecaps and churning brown water rushing between banks that usually contain slow, meandering creeks, making their way slowly down to the river.

On Saturday we walked through the rain and slogged through old wet snow and climbed down a slope as soggy as a sponge to the Mettacahonts creek, so swollen with floodwaters that it was raging through it’s curving, twisting track. And I., complaining every step of the way, finally stood in awe in the invisible river of energy that only the Spring floods can provide. Feeling it course through me like electricity, an energy that was the equal to the power of the water beneath my feet, a howl of force and power and quickening. If I could become insubstantial enough, it would shred me like a drifting cloud of mist, and take me along with it. Now that’s a fate I could live with.

There is a sound in the air today like the wind in the trees. But that is only because the wind is like the sound of rushing waters. Today; it is the real thing.

But I still can’t look at the things I love, and not wish that this were all over already. They say one should live in the present, but what if it is all just one moment, what if it is all one overwhelming Present? Birth, life and death; beauty, joy, and the tragedy and horror they that tie together like sinew? What if it’s all the same moment, all crowding in, all compressed into a single atom of consciousness? There’s no escape from it. The things that make life tolerable, the things that I love so much it makes my heart ache, are the things that make me want to end it all forever.

I’ve never seen the virtue in such a world of pain.

It’s going to be another bad day, I think. I can never get enough sleep any more.

Everything about me feels skewed, out of joint. I think it’s been that way all my life. This is what I believe: that somewhere in the faded distance of my past, something happened that perhaps wasn’t meant to. Some dark fate that I was destined for got somehow derailed, jumped track, shoved by some unknown force into some other course of direction. Something bad, something dictated by the badness of my own being, some evil psychic DNA got a hole punched in it, and everything got twisted out of shape. Somewhere in the early part of my life, somehow I cheated some terrible, awful fate that was the result of the badness in my own heart. Like the dream I had as a child, of walking the Rosebud Path into a distance of impenetrable mist, and coming out into some parallel world where everything was different, and everything was the same. And how I have wondered, in all those subsequent years, if it had really been a dream after all.

Something happened; some thread got twisted or pulled, and a path of dark light got dimmed. Who was I then, who am I now, what was meant to be? Sometimes I think this averted path, this cheated fate, is the core Mystery of my existence. Sometimes I wonder if I should even [i]be[/i] at all. I feel less [i]in[/i] the world than some intrinsic part [i]of[/i] it, yanked loose and set adrift, with only invisible threads like gossamer veins flowing into me and out again. Yanked out of my shell, I’m like a nerve without its sheathing. Everything hurts so damned much. Sometimes I wonder what terrible price I’m going to have to pay for all of this. I know the worst is yet to come.

Today. Today hasn’t begun yet. Today is just beginning.

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Monday.

Snow today.

I wasn’t going to go out into the woods; was going to pass it
up this day. It had already become treacherous out there; what with
repeated thaws, rains, and then hard freezes, the snow cover, what was
left of it, has become encased in a hard, frozen glaze; impossible to
break through even if you stomped your boot hard on it, and easy to
slip and lose your footing on otherwise. Meanwhile, the trail that I
had so meticulously created by breaking through the earlier snowpack,
until it has become a pathway of packed, granular crystal easy to
traverse, had become a narrow road of solid ice, even more dangerous
than the glazed snow in the rest of the woods. With fresh snow on top
of all of that, it seemed to much of a risk to try walking on today.

I'm having those recurring bad dreams again; the ones where I've done
something so terrible that even if I was to escape detection for it I
don't think I could live the rest of my life with the guilt of it.
They're so vivid, these dreams. Not necessarily the mundane events of
them, but the emotions of them; so clear, so imminent. Thinking about
them, I've come to understand one of the major themes: that there
is a line that we come to, a line that we can step back from even as
we stand with our toes on it, and that once we step over that line we
have gone there forever, and that we can never go back again.

But so what? This is something I don't know? I know it. The
dreams are full of anguish and guilt, and despair. The circumstances
differ but the basics are always the same, as are the emotional
content. These are true nightmares; the kind that can never be
portrayed in a movie, because they are not about what happens, they
are about what is, on the inside.

I think they might be memories. Memories of my own evil. And
once again; I am left to wonder; what is the point of it all? What is
there left for me to learn?

It snowed most of the day today; an unexpected snowfall,
after the thaws and hard freezes that have left tire tracks and
bootprints sculpted in frozen mud. By late afternoon it had stopped,
and I had already decided I wasn't going out in it, but the dog looked
at me with such anticipation for his walk in the woods that I
relented, and got dressed, and went out in it for him.

A new snowfall is a moment in time, and space. It is fresh
like hot biscuits straight from the oven, fresh like newly whipped
cream still in peaks and whorls in the mixing bowl. To wait a day is
to miss the lightness of it, the purity and pristineness of it, to
walk in snow settled closer to the ground, dripped off branches,
tracked through and flattened by gravity below and light and heat
above.

The new snow is an entirety, it is a universal; it cushions
and coats, it softens and absorbs. Boughs green with pine needles hang
heavy with it, the uneven ground is smoothed and leveled by it. To
walk through the woods of a fresh snowfall is to walk through a world
transformed, for just this day. Tomorrow time and the weight of the
world will have already begun to work it's decay upon it. For now; the
world is a new place, all white and dark chiaroscuro, under smooth
grey skies and above the gently rolling rise and fall of white. It is a majesty; to be in a forest dressed in the virgin white of a brand-new snow. It is the awe of being in a holy place. It is that strong; it touches that deep.

Today I didn't even try to climb the steep slope to the
ridge-top where me and the dog usually walk. Walking up top there has
been hard enough, but the climb up there is nearly impossible without
a fresh blanket of white hiding the slick ice of the path. Today, we
took a new trail; one I've only walked on once before, that follows
the same direction a little beneath the level where we usually walk.

Which seemed appropriate, for this day when the woods are
transformed into something new, anyway.

In the past couple of weeks I've found a way to negotiate the
newly treacherous ice left by the fickle melt-and-freeze of this
unusual February. During the warmer days, when the snow and trail had
turned into a veritable slush, I had left deep footprints in the
thawed and runny snow. After the freeze, those footprints had hardened
into something akin to plaster molds of the bottoms of my feet, and in
the slick, glassy ice, and become perfect foothold for me to place my
boots into. If I place my feet just right, my boots fit in like a
manufactured footpath in the snow. Which it is, I suppose. To cross
the treacherous ice, I must follow in my own footsteps. Stepping
carefully, like a Moonwalker on a gantry, every step fully conscious,
every forward motion an intensity of thought and purpose. While my
four-legged friend races across the ice, and up and down slopes that
would have my neck if they could. I let him go, calling him back only
when he seems so far I fear he will forget that he has left me far
behind. Then he comes racing back, leaping up when he reaches me for
the inevitable doggie biscuit bribe.

Today the going is slow, but because I have forsaken my usual
route there is nothing but more snow beneath the fresh, or perhaps
this is one of those areas that had already gone to bare ground before
today's snowfall. Unlikely; this slope is thick with pine, which makes
it especially fantastical on this day of visual transformation. The
trees are heavy with their white frosting, the laden boughs hanging
across my path. I push one aside and am showered with cold powder;
after that, I use my walking stick to knock the snow off ahead of me.
They spring back upward when freed of their burden, clearing the way
for me to walk without having to duck.

Last night I went out to the all-night drug store. Lightbulbs
and Ibuprofen, some chocolate and a little plastic dolphin that lights
up from within by a tiny blue LED just because it appealed to me, the
batteries on it now already going dim, and a new wristwatch for K because it's
cheaper to just buy a new one than get the old one back up and running again, and me lost and numbed by the stuff, the stuff, the stuff on
the shelves, which is why I hate going into any store anymore these
days, and there's a rack with 10 dollar CD's and I take a quick look
and right n top of the stack is a re-issue of Joni Mitchell's Blue
album, and I buy it without a thought. And now as I listen to it as I
write I'm taken back to that time in October of 1980 when my life was
crumbling and I was desperately trying to save it by moving out of the
city and sharing an apartment in my old college town with a crazy gal
that I seemed to know without knowing how, and listening to Joni's
sweet laments; even the upbeat sings full of sadness, and how that
music sustained me through that dark and disorienting time. How much I
have changed since then. How much better I know myself now. To my
everlasting despair. Awareness is so overrated.

I think about a lot of different things when I'm out walking
in the woods, and I listen to a lot of different music. It all depends
on my mood, I suppose. Right now I'm in that strange grey zone of
post-completion of a particularly difficult piece of art; this time
the dark and disturbing diorama/collage/photomanipulation I just
finished; Beyond the Outer Wall. This was a tough one, not only in terms of the work involved but in the emotional toll on me, forcing me to dredge up
something from the black muck at the bottom of my unconscious below to create it. There was a certain satisfaction to completing it, but also a sense of relief. All that, of course, is quickly supplanted by the emptiness I am left with when one work is done and another has yet to begin.

And my continuing difficulty in expressing myself, my inability to force myself to get back to the work already in progress, the graphic novel, now languishing for two too-long months, only makes things worse.

Which is why I find myself writing rambling disconnections like this. To try and get something moving that has frozen and rusted shut.

Now when I walk in the woods my mind turns to a strange idea
whose concept, if not form, has sprung nearly fully formed into my mind, for no particular reason, and completely unbidden. A song cycle, to be called The Secret of Diamonds. Its essence unarticulated, and yet an understanding of what it is and what it means so deep in my bones that it might have been spun out of my own marrow.

And today lines speak themselves to me, voices by something,
my muse or wood sprites or my own vaguely disturbed unconscious; lines, and thoughts of The Snow Queen, living in her palace of eternal winter, stealing away Gerda's playmate because he has caught a splinter of the evil mirror in his eye, and so sees the Snow Queen as Beautiful. Stealing him away to be a mirror of her own. An all-too clear consciousness of our own distorted selves.

Awakening from a dream of being beautiful
Into a Springtime of Despair

There are places on this new trail where I have to walk very
carefully; pressing my feet down to compress the fresh snow into a
solid platform on which to walk along the slanted ground. Everywhere
around me, the ground rises up, the trees tower, the snow hangs so
still. Here are the tracks of deer; here two spaces where they had
slept; keeping the snow from the ground; here is the trails they left
when they set off on their day of searching for food enough to make it
until tomorrow. And finally the slope here becomes too steep and
although Merlyn would keep racing along with no sense of the danger of
falling, I have to turn around. And so I head back, keeping to the new
trail I have made in virgin snow, once again following in my own
footsteps to make it safely home.

I'm glad for the snow and the cold. Too much talk from people
about things feeling like Spring. Spring will come soon enough. This
is winter.



Ice melts,
the world unlocks
water flows
like the blood
from a recently thawed heart
winter ends
death dies


At the far end of my walk in the woods, I can see the distant peaks
of the Catskills through the winterbare trees. The sun sets far to the
south, and the slopes there have been melted down to brown earth until
today. Now the molded and re-frozen mud and ice has been covered once
again, for a little while. It's still winter, for a little while.


I opened my eyes and was cursed with sight
Awakening from a dream of being beautiful
into a Springtime of Despair
Now I would swallow the shards of this shattered mirror
in the hopes that it would shred my heart
or freeze it forever
with crystals of ice
cold and still, and as perfectly untouched as a frozen rose
I sought the secret of diamonds
And was cursed with finding the answer