I’m awakened not once, but at least twice or thrice from unnamable dreams in this eclipsed moon night
with a sense of overlap, edges, glazed boundaries,
nebulous border lines….
Relentless attempts at communication failed…
or not.
Questions never to be answered.
Overlap
An ecotone of longings for connection,
the verdant swamplands of Others reaching for one another
Willing mergence.
A full blue blood moon obscured now by earth shadow
and even now
by the granite boulders on the ragged rock hillside behind my house,
is here…though her light is barely seen now.
We draw lines in the sand but sands shift and
grains sift over the limiting sides we take.
It is the last day of a month,
The dark just before dawn,
The blur between dream and awake,
The last shine of the fullness of moon.
I live in the swale where the numinous rain of what cannot be explained washes into the science of minds confined by facts…
I live on the edge of a community where the animal world mingles, surreptitiously with the human world…
I live with voices from the other worlds singing in blanketed dreams, unrecognized but whose eros slides in.
When I was just 18, on the edge of a becoming
I went with friends to the Boundary Waters to canoe and camp…
Boundary Waters, those chains of lakes that are the necklace of gems on the shoulders between one country and another…
I was unprepared for the mystery I would be captured by there and still to this day so many decades later, it is not an event my mind can name or even fully recall…
but my cells contain its wild way.
Caught in my blue irised portals
I watched immense antlered mammals
lumber slowly into the depths of lake waters,
disappearing below that mirrored surface
only to, with just as much adagioc ease and prehistoric grace,
reappear to the light with antlers now draped in vibrant green grasses..
its crown from the Otherworlds.
My intricate shell bowl ears received
the piercing chimerical song of loons in love,
and wolves elegiac wail for his mated pack.
My nubile body lay on earth damp and
warmed by firey stories while skies reflect its colors unborn,
receiving the ancient whispers of way of living
On edges,
Boundaries,
Leaning one way and then the other,
Tipping toes into disparate mysteries
and allowing the sway to soak in.
Forty years later
my heart witnesses the confined and fearful minds of a boy-men
warring from a very white house,
shouldering the shimmering crown of misplaced power
and calling for walls to be built, guns to be raised, labels to be writ,
borders to be placed…
Lines to be drawn on papers to crush, define and imprison the world,
by keeping Others out.
Impenetrable boundaries make us smaller, less fertile, less alive.
The tidal influx of difference seeping into our
effort to separate,
ushers in the magnificence of complexity, wonder and mystery…
gifts us with not knowing and languages we must listen deeply to and invite…
feelings undefined that we must welcome and come to know.
It opens us and erases the labels we think we understand.
The moon is eclipsed now
Is it still the moon?
Strip the name off of the Other
and welcome intimacy.
Invite your heart to translate the penetration of the whale song that has
escorted immense intelligent families of distance and depth for eons?
What do we lose when we run from the liminal lands?
When we fall in fear when our lines in the sand shift?
When we go deaf to foreign voices calling us out?
When we close the door to what is different…?
The prison door slams and we grow backwards
just a little.
A crack of light now lies on the eastern horizon.
Border lands of invitation.