Where Else Could I Belong?

The pyramidal desert peaks of West Wendover, Nevada/ Photo by the author

(S, one isn't all there is)

I scrambled
Over the rocks
Digging into my flesh
Lit from within
By a sacral fire
Carrying the Spirits with me
Bleeding on the open earth
Parched, yet believing in love
Where else could I go?

Mysteries
I made a fine coat of you
To enfold me from the storms
Mother, you forgot
To wrap me up
As mothers wrap
Their children tight
But father stripped me
Your god left me out
In the tide
Washing cold over my bones
Exposed
Where else could I go?

Midnight came
Black brocade
Enthused with gilded threads
Of starlight
Generations of stars
Burning, burned out
Rising and falling down
Through the Ether
Where else could they go?

Did I become
A prophet
For our family story
Carrying with me
Father's transgressions
Mother's weaknesses
I pity both
Harbor no vengeance
For I have given them over
As an offering
To the sky
Where else could I give them?

I raged like a wounded animal
Stripped of its claws
Lovers were my fodder
Undressing them one by one
Stripping them of their frailties

One by one
I left behind me
A trail of water
In the burning and open
Desert
What else could I have left
Behind me?

I came
To your shrine
Open with offerings
Carrying my heart
In my hand
On fire and stripped
Naked
Without peers
Without family or tribe

The drum of your spirit
Sounded a regular beat
Through me
Dancing, whirling
A hand towards heaven
Fingers towards the earth

Your soil
Your fragrance
Your knowledge
Planted like a seed
In the empty soil
I became your devotee
What else could I become?

Fresh from your kiss
I gathered the water
I had left behind me
I nourished thirst
And fed the hungry spirits
All belong to me
I belong to all of them

There is not one
Never one
Not one god, not one heart
Single or demanding
Only the All
Where else could I belong?
 

A Doorway To My Heart

Natural cave-like formations in West Wendover, Nevada/ Photo by the author

Alone in a desert land
Not abandoned
Not left for dead
Yet finding solitude
In a barren land

Tucked high in the bosom
Of ruddy cliffs
Piercing the flank
Of a turquoise sky
Cloudless
The sky drifts by
My eyes
Drinking, drinking
Drinking deeply
Of the turquoise fountain
Flowing above my head

Security waits
Even in lonely valleys
Where rams rut
And bleached bones
Tell a tale of life's fragile struggle

I find a purpose
For life to continue
Far outside the temporary veil
Of mortal existence

This is a doorway to my heart
Worn into the ancient rock
Where my ancient memories
Wait
Clad in the ages
Of lives lived before
This body came into
My mother's womb

My real mother is above
Stretched out in Her turquoise body
Kissed by the shards of sharp sunlight
Tumbling down
Over the empty landscape

There is a doorway to my heart
Where one finds a portal
Into the spectral world
A ladder to heaven
The doors of the sky
Sheltered by monoliths
Raising the hot earth
Skyward
Up and into the etheric vastness

You cannot help
But make pilgrimage here
To the place where my heart
Has hallowed a shrine
To the near-forgotten Gods
But Their voices linger
Here where the one gives way
To the Ones who went before him
Their spirit lights
Calling down lightning
Given from a bare sky

Heaven calls from above
Earth makes love to my feet
And open up
Before me
At the doorway to my heart

I leave behind
All I thought I knew
And give way to
The company of spirits
Who, in silence, bestow
The Wisdom of millions of years

My real father is below
My feet firm planted
In his sacral history
His battles
His deaths
His resurrection
I gather up his bones
And call him to my counsel
At the doorway to my heart
Where the Ancestors
Make quiet pilgrimage
To speak without language
To initiate without action

Gratefully I receive
The spectral lights
Emerging from darkness
Where every seed grows
Before it flourishes
In the Light

And I too came from darkness
Into the world of light
From between my sacred mother's thighs
Like the sun
In the rosy mantle
Of the dawn sky
Renewed beyond death

If you travel here
To meet me
You must give up
All that you thought you knew
To enter the sacred portal
Burrowed deep
In the desert shrine
Where the Ancestors
traverse
To make communion
With their kin

Hear the drum
The awesome heights
Of my heart
Secreted in the ruddy mountains
Where a trail of light
Moves like quicksilver
Through a lens of spirit
Cutting through flesh

This is where I meet you
Again
This is where
You pick up the pieces
And love again
This is where
We begin again
Here at the doorway to my heart

Spell For Raising the Dead

A child's tombstone in the historic mining town of Bodie, California/ Photo by the author

Come, o voice I have loved

Let me hear you again

For I am the worthy listener

Clad in the dawn

Possessor of the spectral light

Come, fine notes

Heralding the rising sun

Warming your bones

Surpassing the cold earth

Slumber, I will have no more of you

When the swallows return

When the conversation of morning

Puts a swift end to silence

Music unbound, I am your composer

Lover in my youth, hear again

The music my heart has woven

Come, flesh

Renew your vigor

Let me touch you

With the quickly approaching

Dawn

Jasmine, whose dew-embraced petals

Caress my nose

Whose senses are alive

Beneath my hard moving body

I summon you to please

To touch

To invigorate

Your renewal is felt by the bees

Returning to gather

By the sun

Enticed to shed its grace

By the earth

Clad in green stems

And wild carpets of lavender

By this lover

Whose skin, both hard and soft,

Is waiting to be filled

Come, sun

Come fragrant morning light

And dappled mountains

Rising with tender illumination

Whose shadows are long departing

I summon your resilience

Your strength

As the power of arms

Encircling the resurrected child

Of the sun

Come, lips

On a silent morning

You break the stillness

Of my heart

Because silence is momentary

But you are an infinite melody

Harmonizing on the dawn's northern breeze

There in the north

Your voice is quick

Like the sails of ships

Returning

Your face in the east

Tied to the glory

Of the rising sun

Come, dew

Falling on my thighs

Dappling my navel

Stroking my back

Opening my lips

Kissing, kissing

Setting fire to the secret places

Of my heart's desire

You know no rest

In the confines of the earth's

Darkness

You know no solitude

No gestation

No confinement

I will not have you

For my passions are quick

Lit by a flame of Eternal source

And impotence, I know not your name

Nor feel you in my blood

Come, youth

Softness again

A rosy light flushing

Skin soft to the touch

Upon whose sentiment

My tender touches play

I cannot abide you

To languish in the earth

For the sun refuses

To set forever

And he knows

His return is imminent

I will capture

His illumination

On my face

My eyes will blaze

In the splendor

Of an eastern fire

Sleep, I deny you

Rest, you are unknown to the excitement

Coursing through my hungry veins

Earth, I alight

Upon your weary mountains

Injecting new vigor

Red hot touches

From the tips of my fingers

Lips that speak in melodies

Haunting

I am your benefactor

Come back, o beauty mine

I receive you

As the earth has received you

But heaven cannot have you

Earth cannot hold you

Nor gods possess your soul

As I do now

Come, and listen

Lover of my youth

Hear again

The music my heart has woven

Ophelia

Blue Lake, outside Wendover Nevada/ Photo by the author

(For Brent, omnipresent in my heart)

If ever you leave me
I will go down to the lonely edge
Of water
Where the day and night meet
In unwatched embrace
And I too will embrace the water

My face to the sky
I see not sun
My back to the depths
No limb finds rest or rescue
My eyes open to the clouds
They see nothing beautiful
My blood settles
In my veins
There is no breath
To fuel my battered heart

I cannot breathe
When you leave the room
I hold my breath
And wish the Gods had not
Granted you free will
How terrible is freedom
And how daunting
The changes of the seasons

I warned you
Of my intemperance
Sweeping in like the blustery days
Of Fall
Covering the mountains
With a penetrating chill
This is what happens
When you leave me alone
The flame is deprived of oxygen
Lungs of breath

How I am drawn
To water
And fear cannot placate me
My greater fear is the absence
Of your flesh
Your brawny legs
Thighs built like monoliths

To be alone and strangled
Between those thighs
I would condemn my soul
To everlasting purgatory
Never fearing God's displeasure

If you ever leave me
I will go down
To the very bottom
And never come up again
For air
And when they find
My body
Wet and disheveled
And without life
They will say that in the end
I could not be deprived
Of your life in my lover's veins

Icon

(S, light a candle)


Unlock the Light
While clinging to your darkness
Searching beneath the stones
Incandescent with hope
This is what Spirit has promised us

So do not give up hope
Even when stumbling, stumbling
Reaching so hard
Deep down inside despair
You will find me there
Tucked away beside
Your darkness

A little Light
Like a sparrow
Hidden in the eaves
Somewhere just passed
Sundown

Fragrant night jasmine
The incense always finds you
Beside me
Hidden away, secreted beyond
Despair's hungry clutches

In a museum, perhaps
But sparkling in a holy place
All its own
Where there is an eternal youth
A texture that will not crumble
An ancient language
Whose voice dapples
With light
Falling from a window high above

Clerestory
Bringing down heaven
Isn't this what Spirit promised
On the tips of my fingers
Alone and unsullied
For you

To capture your pain
And send it back to heaven
With the swallows
Across the shining sea
Which eats all darkness

I am your icon
Alone in a dark place
Yet suffused with a light
Of my own
Steadily flickering
From within

Your lips have never touched me
Yet in Spirit we have kissed
Your fingers have never undressed
My gilt edges
Yet in Spirit we have met
Naked and liberated
In a realm beyond time's dictates
And delicately you have absorbed
My glorious light-radiance
Taking it away with you
Into your darkness

Can despair touch you
When a candle lifts sorrow
And kisses its fingers
Into silence?
Has the Veil ever descended
Never to part again?

Can darkness have you
As I have had you
When, in the loudest silence
Of the night,
My golden face
Called you back
From the Other Side
Of the night
To be reborn in the rosy-gold crown
Of daybreak's new
Incarnation

All of these things
I have given to you
Without wanting so much
As a thread of your hair
In return
So still beat my heart
For fear of startling you away
In this lonely monument
Lit only by a high window

Reach up to me
And find
Your prayers answered
When the footfall of despair
Draws near
Call to me, and pray
Light a candle, and pray
For my name is a prayer
A dark companion to the Light
And Light's answer to
Dark's enchantments

Time cannot wipe away
My gilt edges
Nor tarnish the glittering
Pigments
Sealed tight by an amber
Varnish
Somewhere in time
Where you shall find me
Again, and again, and again....

Pink Triangle

(To the memory of all those souls incinerated in the Holocaust.  May we remember and cherish their humanity, together with our own)

I try to remember
Our humanity
Which once decorated the sky
With Shabbat candles
The soul
Flickering, flickering, flickering

I try to remain constant
In my love for Hashem
Lingering, lingering, lingering
But where were You?
Where were You
When the night fell upon us
Like bricks
Stamping, stamping, stamping

Kristallnacht
Burned bright into our memory
And where was Your humanity then
O Hashem
Who made us chosen
And then chose us for
Extermination

Broken glass
So many shattered lives
The Shabbat candles
Would never burn, never burn
Never burn

He held my hand
Still  warm with sweat
Lips that had prayed
Had kissed
Had tasted
The forbidden fruit

This, Hashem
Is finer than Your justice
For wherever You are
Life cannot be good
Never good, never good

Your silence, deafeningly loud
Was the answer to our enemies
And that silence was the sentence
Of our death

Come now
The black, white and red
Stretching your talons
To the four points
Of the compass
Hurling starved and broken bodies
To the four points of the globe
Come power, constant
Religious in its irreligious fervor
Casting a stone, a stone
A stone

Take me away
From his body
This forbidden knowledge
You fear as degenerate
But feel not so secure
So self-righteous, so indignant
For this too can happen
To you, to you, to you

My love
Denounced by the black, white and red
Becomes a pink triangle
Laughing at me
From the hole in my heart
This grants them a prison
To lock us away, away, away

Cattle cars are for cattle
And what are we now?
Under Kristallnacht's skies
Where glass is cutting, cutting, cutting
The fires of Shabbat candles
No longer burn still
And their eyes have been blinded
By their own fists

Think not for a moment
That you and yours
Are safe, are free
For what happened to us
Can happen to you, to you
To you

Take my heart, and his
And around it wrap a wire
Whose barbs and electric smile
Conceal the promise of annihilation
Let the fences shut us in
And let love die
One bright and yellow star
At a time

What light shines
In the terror of the frozen nights
But the fires of chimneys
Sinister synagogues
Replacing the warmth of my home
In your bed

Bed, your degenerate bed
Within whose white sheets
I found the purity of humanity
Loving only for its own sake
Giving pleasure more natural
Than the dawn's certain light
Now gone, gone, gone

And the fires
Work night and day
Casting a dance of ash
Swirling humanity upon a breeze
Blowing them all away, away
Away

The chimneys haunt the grey sky
Where once Hashem reigned
And who has power now?
Not Your good word
Not Your Shabbat candles
Not Your Torah
Not the nations You founded
For the eagle has clutched them
All in its talons
A fight to the death
Without mercy, mercy
Mercy

In their place
The skies burn
Churning out ashes
In the place of the stars
Whose lights we may
Never behold again

How many men can you burn
How many Jews can light
The sky by day and by night
Dark or light
The chimneys burn

Auschwitz burns
Birkenau burns
Chelmo and Belzek burn
Sobibor burns
Treblinka burns

The human heart burns
Faith burns
And Hashem Himself
Burns, burns, burns

Our purification has been
A trial by fire
Our spirit
Our humanity
Our dignity
Are gone, humankind incinerated
Love consumed
The black and the white and the red
Cast their eagle's shadow
Over the burning, stinking fields

How many souls can you burn
Burn, burn

I try to remember
Their humanity
That their pleasure and laughter
And pain
Was equal to mine
They prayed beneath the same sky
They loved the life I loved
They breathed the air
We breathed
What difference was there
Between us?

We try to remember
What it was like
To feel humanity
Between us
To light the Shabbat candles
From one to the other
Do we still carry the Light
That men pass between their souls
Even though the darkest night
Has transfixed us
And we are now marked forever

We must remember
Our humanity
That the air we breathe
Is the same air
That the love we feel 
Between us
Is the same love
That the light we pass
Between us
Is the same light
That daylight shines equally
Upon us
What difference is there
Between us?