A Spell For Freedom

 

A Spell for Freedom

 

By the gods of Ink and Bone and blue sky up above.

By gods that see us drink and break what’s left of love.

 

by the streams we wandered in the summer, then in snow

By the time we squandered, fearing, dreading growing old

 

By the light that from your face lit songs of hope in me

By the Oceans, by the Grace, by the ruins in the sea

 

By the candles that we lit, by the deepest scars

By the starry skies that tried to show me who you are.

 

By the fairies and their coin, by ravens and by the crows

By the seasons where we danced through worlds they’ll never know

 

By the flowers, by the stones, by the graves of birds

By the paintings, by the hikes and by the tower of words

 

By the blue wall, the white room and by the black raven’s door

By your pain, by your strength and by your haunted shore

 

By your hair, and by your face, and by your wounded hand

By your oils and by your baths and by your living lands

 

By the love I had and have for you, and everything

That came from you, and let me live, and yet may still bring

 

The two of us to some new spring, or cave, or van or yard

Or river bed, or road or room or prison we must guard

 

By the spells and by the signs and by the strength of fate

By the cards, and by the wards… it is not too late.

 

You are beautiful and still my muse, but mostly you’re my souls friend.

I love you Freedom.  have no fear.  This is not the end.

A history and a dream

 We are not here.  This all happened so long ago, and it happened in the sense that we are listening to the story we are telling ourselves, about who we thought we were, and how we hoped it would be.  But we are somewhere else, watching, listening, to the Deep past while never really being here in the first place.

How do I get to you.  Beyond the reflections, beyond the mirrors that hold my own face, the lights that phantasm otherness, witness me, apparently live.  How do I find you in the horror of my own mind, hold those things there, well or poorly built, but still, efably not you.

The stars are heavy, heavier than all.  Would I find you there?  At the bottom of everything, if I dig, into each fiery heart, forget freedom, let go, fall into where you might be, dive into suns to find you.  I keep the light so distant, not even a breath on my wrist.  I have climbed far to get here alone.

The Starless Sea

A letter to Erin Morgenstern

Erin.

Freedom and I fight about the boy.  I do not believe he reached for the door.  She says he did, that you said he did.  I say you said no such thing, I say that the narrator said he did.  I say that the narrator lied.  I tell her that the narrator, like the rest of the people helping that boy forward through his own failure as a person, also needs to help him, to hide a conceit in their desire for him to succeed.  That “IT” is what makes him a great villain; that he not only does not know that he is one, but that he also does not believe it, and how important it is for those around him to also believe that he is not.

I tell Freedom there is someone else in the basement.  She says there is not.  I tell her of course there is, that it is also probably not completely honest to call that place a basement, but I guess it feels like one at times.  We argue, a lot.  I see the plaster on the walls, she sees gray stone.  We hope we will understand which parts of our worlds our broken, and which are just air, neither of us wanting to be right, just to understand.

Freedom and I go there together, to the starless sea, on our intentions alone.  When she reads, she is pulled this way and that by the most beautiful and most tragic things about you.  She closes her eyes and reads, and in three words is as light as the air.  When we read together I am always stopping her, telling her why the door to his dorm room might be the most important door in his life, why I knew the door to that one place had a chain bolt on it before she read that the door had a chain bolt on it, and how strongly I felt about the evil of a chain bolt on a door, how anti-magic it is, how some dark thing invented a way to neither open or close a door..  We argue about how perfect a villain the boy is.  She says that he is not a villain.  And while with my entire life I have tried to put down the mirror in front of me to see it for the glass it could be, clear and complete, I still just see myself.

 

I am the other man in the cell.  I have watched the pirate for so long, and seen so many come down, afraid or full of longing but all just mirrors offering the same reflection.  I have watched how he does not care and how she does not care that he does not care.  How long I have spent down there in the hay and the dark, not seen.  How a strong voice could have kept me there.  How I thought my silence was a good thing, or perhaps a thing that could increase my worth, how I thought a question asked was for a question to be answered, and my whole life, how wrong I have been.

We argue about how the ducks have to be pulled around the pond not moved.  How everyone is a villain.  How well you shaded them with a pain they caused you or a hope they left unfulfilled.  We manage a paragraph an hour, maybe, and that is after rereading it, at least twice, when she will put up with me for that long.  There is more, as you know, there always is.  My heart breaks for the door that opened one last time.  I see you all over the story.  You are a great writer like she is. 

We are about a quarter inch along.   She reads ahead.  Of course she does, it’s the right thing to do, her hand outstretched, pulled this way and that, lovingly, thoughtfully by your words, made more beautiful in the trust of her reading.  Well spent time.  And then the two of us sit, and she reads aloud for the both of us, words she has heard before and enjoys again, words I hear for the first time.  I put down my brush and I stop her and tell her that’s not true, he did not reach for the door, that is not who he is, and then we fight back through long pages, as with wild eyes I try to prove a thing only I can see, to an audience just trying to close their eyes, trust your words and go where you have asked to take them.  We study it.  We weigh words.  I try to puzzle out where the bodies are taken after their ritual prick through the heart.  How well do the ones who chose the failure, wear their own failure?  And does a cold prick await them after the body is laid, undressed, used to decorate a dark place, and fulfill some new symbol.  Is there a symbol for a mirror, or for a boy who just is not there?   

She has said she could not read a book like that, take it apart and dismantle it as a writer.  I suppose she thinks that is what writers do.  It is what I think she wants to do with the poems I write to her, quite literally, and that is fine.  Off with the wedding dress, a poke here or there, then off with the skin, look for the big bones, the major organs, you know, the heart, the soul, the marrow, as I know in some room somewhere I sit and cry and hold the dress I made, red now in the blood of having to explain things I complicated intentionally.  “What does that mean?”  “What are you trying to say?”  “I don’t understand.” this is what she says.  “You must kill this.”  “We must eat it together.” “There is only blood.” this is what I hear.  I try to explain that I do not do that in the starless sea.  That I look, and touch too much, and stare too long, and take notes, and haunt the darkness between the words.  I recognize my life, my pain, and the pain of others, of loneliness, a longing for hair to be twirled through bars in a beautiful basement, or impossibly for a place beyond them that could be unlike what is behind them.  Like watching your lover read a book instead of your soul, while I sit and twist blood from the pages. 

I would rise and try the bars, but I am not there, and I don’t scream because the narrator would ignore it, and my agony would waste a woman’s time and void my guard’s abdication.  And we must not awaken the guard, for his eyes are closed and he is soaring with the aid of your wings, and it is not he who keeps me here, in the hay, beside the pirate, in the dark, nor is it my ignorance that keeps me from reaching for the door.

Justin.

The Lady and the Spring

     He woke to the sound of her feet on pine needles, or a sound before that, fallen upon him sleeping, and gone now as if not existed, a thing in her alone, a greeting perhaps, a word or a cough, something she alone could know as he woke, stirring, standing, and soon awake, where before what were her words had woken him as a spell, to bring him back to this place, their place, the waking world.

     And he, in the first of the day, cold, shirtless, unguarded and numb from the magic wound of that same sleep, rose to see her there in the red of her clothing and the black of her sword that she carried in word filled silence where she stood, not settling the rope which held the sac and the things in it that she would, with him, bring to the spring high in the hills today, with Him, on their path, their journey, now in the blessing of their visible breath and dawns warning, headed now to where a way would be found, into that mountain, and where without those words, they both must go.

     She stood as a gift, and a warning.  Come as a storm displaced bird, or a deer from those crowded woods higher up, were it not for her calm and capable face, the hair brown, long and wound with red linen, her travel worn clothes, her skirt as if made from the earths gifts itself and her bare feet dressed in old paints and the new brown of these good low lands.  Seeing her there and he just awoken, he was back in the pains of the histories of days and years and times that live now only in the scars that cross his legs and back.  For there is a courage that arises in weakness only, born when the failure of the sword of night is revealed in the strength of some greater sword, the will of the day, not here, but coming, as a threat of death, even his death, is on its way, and near, and the almost lost, and the nearly defeated, and the weak beyond repair, and even the broken, find that thing that is repair, amelioration from a deeper wound; the fear of night, and what night is, and what night brings, and for a word, it is healing. 

     He followed her, and in it they walked, as though on new feet, though a flood of the old worlds demons worked slowly from them, down from drowning, to the touch of foot on stone where no stone thought could be, to where he was now, behind her in the failing dark, sewn with morning and that mornings light with that old darkness moving down to his waist, his knees and some strength returned, until that boot that had rested on his neck for the stones in his hands, was the damp earth now alone, as he walked past with as much love as he was able to hold for a world, following after her.  On they walked resting only when that failure of fear became the victory of some greater thing, a new courage or forgetfulness, a tardiness of vows, a work rested from too soon, and now too bright to see clearly and too warm to be real in this cold womb become their dawn.  A gift beyond the imagining of sleep is the sun on dew chilled skin.  And the world of things that woke also, standing, they too brought through what to him was a great and natural evil, and they without feet to flee a storm had been washed over by it, emerging with him, on standing feet, past and through the horror of darkness to live again, and he saw the world this way. 

     On a clearer place, some ways up the lower parts of the mountain that held the spring, she stopped them, and with small efforts a fire lit and a small pot boiled, and in it was placed a bag, tied tight with string, of herbs, of powders and soon, there was a tea.  And with it and her hand, his shaking stopped, and that dark blanket that was his wound so cruelly lain in him, was for that time, lifted away as a pain can be lifted away, and a deep rest filled him, and his breath slowed, deepened, and his shoulders fell, and his voice now able to be spoken thanked her.

     The scars on his back hurt now in some strange trade between pain and suffering.  The gourd looked warm in her hands, an offering, hers to him and for drinking it, him to himself.  A supplication.  The medicine calmed him from those things and sat him on an older stone, there at the small fire beside her. 

     We go to the weep and the well, he said to her, as if woken at last, as if the hour they had walked and all the time that had flowed between them since she woke him up, was also a part of that dream.

She nodded and smiled to herself, though he saw it.

     I don’t deserve this, he said and waited for her to see him.  She nodded and said that She did not deserve this, that everything was a gift in a way that made him, for a moment, grateful, even for the tears he now cried, impossibly.  I mean that it is wasted on Me, he continued.  She paused, relaxed, and said that, It was not wasted, if She did not waste it.  It is only wasted if You waste it, she said again, and rose pouring the warmed water on the bare earth, moving other earth over the embers and looked at him and placed her hand on his shoulder, and saw his grief.

     At the weep she knelt.  The words she said he could not hear.  He rested by a tree grown white with the vapors of that place for being there, and he thought of how the sun could stain a thing and how life giving waters could drown, and remembered how the torches back then had crazed the light across the hay wild field, where he had stood with others, tried to stand, stronger and weaker for as many reasons as there were men.  The weight of his regret was all that was left to stand with him now.  That fear had melted away with time, and in its place a sadness and a love came, and filled up every scar and hole the fear of that night had wrought.  Heavier was the sadness then the whole terror of night, and though his pain alone might take the horns from the demons and fold and put away their wings.  If there was only one place, one real place, one place where he truly was, it was there, always, the memory of the field, that field, that night, when his failure to save, to try to save, to offer his own life up, to take another, all those decision’s who’s agency he felt divorced from by time now, and fate or possibility then, had found their only way to live on, to live in him.  Pain. 

     At the spring, high in the mountain, from under the those living white shingles of the tree, he could see her arms raised, the smoke from incense rising and swirling into the mist, the power of that place awaking to her, and then without climax, without a booming voice or show of form, she rose, turned and came down to him and brought him the water and painted his face with glowing loam, and said the words.  And he closed his eyes, and he healed.

     There is a spirit of the air, she said as he traced her steps slowly backwards around him.  And she loves a spirit of the water, but time passes and the things that do not stay the same will change.  He loves her and keeps her there inside this mountain.  His love is a love of holding, hiding and resting.  When he sleeps, she begins to forget that love, and she, in the silence of dark caves, begins to return to herself, and who she was, a queen of winds and airs, a confounder of treetops, a thief of kites, a maiden of ice covered peaks.  Though she is now a wind inside water, she was herself once, a wave of only air, alone, and though he drinks her now, he cannot swallow, and his love of her makes many selves out of the one, and those shatters of her immortal soul, shiver and rise through his depths, and up they run through the smallest cracks in the stone, to finally burst the surface of this spring of his forgetting, to leap into the air, a leave his spring, and meet with the sky again, and though they yearn and lean into the remembered winds, the greater winds break them, and take them in, and they are devoured, even the smallest of faces, and they are lost and are gone.  She stops to breath, her hand still on his chest.  He creaks inside as though he himself stretched up into the wind and was bent by it.  He thought she cried but not all pains can bloom, and may drown by their weight of themselves, lost within a heart that is too frail to feel them completely.

     She continued.  Deep below, he wakes, and before she herself is able to rise and escape, he loves her, and holds her and in loving drowns her again.  And she drowns, in him, until she remembers him, and her love for him, and in him rests again, and on and on again until in time, again, he sleeps, and she, a thing of air left alone in a world without it, walks, then wonders, and in his long sleep, begins to forget she is loved.

     Did you heal me, he asked.  She stops her slow tracing of a circle around him and turns to him.  His voice is deeper, his face somber, and no longer tortured, and a fatigue lays on him like knowing.

I did not heal you, she said, and her face betrayed her surprise that he did not know it.  It is the water that heals, and the prince of that spring that healed you.  But I heard you make your offering to the air, he said, as his arms chilled and leaves scintillated and shivered in a breeze now cold, as though the spirit of wind was loosed, and her domain was there above him now, and he held a gift that was taken from her without blessing.  A warning rose in him.  I would not stir the lover of the healing waters, she said.  We take but what is spilled, to be well again, is a symptom of his grace.  The gift I gave was for the queen of air, trapped by her love and by her lover.  Her lovers home and her prison is to forget, trespassed by my feet.  We take the cup, and drink from it to avoid her wrath, and we praise her beauty.  She leaned against him as though he could not fall.  His head was spinning, her hand, a wonder,came upon him again.  We kneel at her thrown to worship and to despair, she said, then began to walk away. 

     I don’t understand, he said.  She smiled, and turned back to him, putting her arms around him, and bark for skin he knew, seeing her tears, he knew how her sword was the world, the journey was a hope, and as all words are, they were not meant for him.  And standing he fell inside though standing still as a tree, he saw her, saw how he was, who he was, how he was there, still, standing, and how he never left, how he had grown there, a tree, and how she did not pass by but came to him, and for her hand and her smile and her words, he was for that time, that short time, a man, and she with some great sadness only he might for a moment take away, for being there, and who he was, and the beauty she saw in him, and his sadness, alone now for too many years, the last in what was now a clearing, at the foot of where, she had made her way past him, upward, alone, and to that ancient spring.  And she sang there with her eyes closed, crying, on her knees by the tree who might have been a man if love could have lasted long enough, and if the sun was bright enough and the water strong enough and if the queen of air had been released and had reached down and pulled him into the world as a man, as he longed for as he pray to the prince of the waters for, as her voice longed for and he stood there, still as that stone, and he listened forever, to her, to her voice to her singing to that song, and he came home. 

Who can love what I can love

Who can say what I have seen

Who can sleep within his arms

Who can be where I have been

Who can hold him only I

who wept and fought and died

Who can fear him only I

who loved and lived then said goodbye

Who can tell me where I’ve been

and will they wonder why

Below the ground I live with him

though all I am is sky

Nowhere To Go and The Cave of the Old Offering

You were standing below me somehow, on the bent'ness of the falling stones, no longer falling, but reclined in a descent that must take years for them, to reach the egress of yearning, to requite the love of that slow strong arm of the deeper earth, pulling always, down, down, down. 

 And while with some effort, you retied your shoe, and repacked your bag after retrieving some article of comfort from it, I stood a little higher up, closer to the entry to the cave, frozen by it, and I could not enter.

The weight of its dark mouth, the terror of the nearness of that roof of stone piled so impossibly high and stung by an opening that would have otherwise been hidden by the rush and force of falling waters, I stood, with that cold curtain gone now, and that river that hung it long ago dried, diverted or just stopped from being altogether.  It was just a trail up to a cave now that you and I ended by reaching it, a bit of cliff, and hole beneath it.  The inside of it terrifies me, like death, like suffocation, and I am the one that wanted to come.

I stand as I always have now, at its mouth, at the beginning, having my guts pulled from me and thrown by those forces into the whirling wind, into the void of the cave, into some other world beginning here, inside of myself, and going where on such a pitiless wind?

I am just standing there.

I try to look around, look for old handholds for what must have been a hard climb when this was a river, worlds of time ago.  What could still be seen?  What could still be here? 

“This is it” you asked and said.  Your voice was more a taste in my mouth than an interpretation of those shaking hands, the tongue of dark children.  I could barely see, and could not escape the feeling of pissing myself, though I had no proof of it.

I could not walk into the cave, could not pass the mouth.  I could only stand out front, balanced and leaned against a peculiarity of rocks, too small to be climbed, too large to be disregarded.  Hampered by the sliding and shifting sand and dirt and gravels of the world dissolving, always dissolving and never done.

“There’s a place here, it’s like a shelf” you tell me.  You tell me that it is mostly flat and that he could have lain there or sat.  That it was a very low ceiling, that there were no bones, of animals of anything, that they were all gone.  You told me that is all there is, there is no other place, no deeper entry, no greater room.

What would proof look like?  What would the sign be if the thing I thought had been there, had been there, and gone now surely, but a hint remaining intact, to be seen by the careful eye, looking for just that, but I cannot go in.  I turn and face the way we came, my back the you and the cave, crouch to sit, and when hunched in that great direction that is down, feel a piece of myself again, return from the howling void in the mouth of that impossible cave, and for the briefest of moments, I am there. 

You found things of course, a weird shape in the sand of the cave, a jutting of a rock the size of your arm, an ant lion colony, all natural wonders and beauties of their own.  Mostly the cave smelled of unsettled dirt almost dust.

For all the convenience and wonder of our ship, we have no flashlight, and no cameras.  And after letting that thing go which is right before me, un-touched though the desire to do so brought me here with you, from unverifiable distances, I stepped back, and stepped down, and put that thing away that brought us here across time, to see, to hope, to wonder.  And though I was turned and sitting, I turned and sat again, and the thing that is not tears, but is still tears, was upon me, and I was tired, having met that thing inside myself that I had hoped would be found in a cave; a proof against the impossibility of it, an idol of a thing not man, but not different from one.  A desire to live, to not pass like memories from a world where i was, where we were, from the failure of its own authority over us, from the mouth of the cave I could not enter nor the threshold within myself that I could not cross, here on St. Anne, or in my bunk on the ship, when tears alone come to my own defense, against the evil of time, its way with us here, and me now, dying on a rock beside a door I will not open, a cave I will not enter, and under a truth I cannot honor with words.

There is tea on the ship and we drink it.  Hours pass in silence.  At times, the soft plinking of projectiles on the hull of our ship become a light rain, a natural wonder made common in the experience of it.  The violent skies, just lights that cannot hurt us now. 

I see it.  I see it always.  I cannot turn away.  It is as though I have taken the mouth of that place within, and am struck dumb by it, and all of language is but an itch, all ideas a turn of the head, a meaningless focus of attention upon the starboard panel, a cushioned seat, where you sit, curled, reading, observing a vast emptiness filled with wonders, while I cannot tell the difference between all times, and this cooling cup of tea.