Not a dream poem but a phrase that came into my head while in the in between state between waking and sleeping:

I guess blood found me cold
by the time it found me

New Vision

I was walking into my apartment building and at the top of the stairs in the entryway, for a second I saw a man, black, in shadow, and then he was gone. He was at the inbetween place, a threshold place between the stairs that lead to the foyer and the stairs that lead upstairs to my apartment. Something is being returned, the self is being returned, I am being returned. And for these things to happen there are certain other things that must be gently let go of. I took an Anusara yoga class today and there was a lot of emphasis on gently opening the heart and when you move out of poses to do it gently, emphazing gentleness of movement, slightly connected to the ashtanga flow vibe, let it flow, don't grasp or throw it down! just gently let go of that which you do not need anymore, it doesn't have to be violently or angrily left, but gently, no one gets quite hurt that way.

I don't care about a stupid lawyer dying but Robert Creeley!! NO!!! FUCK!! Its the end of the world now...

From my commonplace book:

Brick

Have I bricked up unbricked what
perspective hole break of eye
seen what glowing place what
flower so close grows from a
tiny brown seed or was it what
I wanted this after imaged green
round sun faints under blue sky
or outer space that place no
one knows but for this echo of
sketched in color the stems of
the voluptuous flowers patient
myself inside looking still out.

I think the combination of this never-ending flu and livejournal being down is a sign to write in here after I don't know how long it's been. The flu has been teaching me how to live in my new apartment. Living with 4 others for the past 3 years is a very different lifestyle. I know longer know how to be alone, to just be at home. But slowly this illness has taught me how to just be slow and reading and writing in bed and meditating and all the slow paced things I used to love. When I lived with others I had to escape so I lost the ability to meditate from being constantly escaping, always being in public view, always "busy". When you are always reading in public you cannot read 12 books at once because you cannot carry them all. Yes, I am reading 12 books concurrently! It is good having so many more ideas coming in at you, I am having so many more ideas, writing ideas, journaling pieces come out of me, I've regained myself but still miss the "public life," reading and writing in public is somehow proof that I am a writer and a reader, an intellectual. How do I prove it now? By creating great works, I suppose. I am no longer a student in cafes but a real writer and intellectual who writes at home. Professional writers mostly do not write in public. The real work is done in privacy where you can eccentrically throw paper and books around in a mad rash of creativity.

This flu has also gotten me in touch with god a little bit more, and this constant coldness in my hands and feet have gotten me back to meditation, it fixes it! God sometimes does want you to go to dark places, dark nights of the soul are a necessary phase in the spiritual life and unfortunately, it is not a linear path, one where step 3 will be over and done with, no it is circular and you repeat all the steps over and over, like reincarnation, I'm not sure you really understand something after you've solved it once, sometimes you will but not everything, you have to keep reliving a situation until you really get it.

My 12 books are: 1 novel: The Girl in the Swing, 3 books of poems: Cummings' Collected Poems, Harjo's The Woman Who Fell From the Sky and Killian's Argento Series, 3 spirituality related books: 2 yoga books and a book called Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by the seminarian John O'Donohue, 4 literary criticism books: 2 on Robert Duncan, Whorf's Language, Thought, and Reality, and G. Stein's How to Write, which I'm counting as lit crit because I don't understand her and it goes much more slowly, and an H.D. book of novellas: Kora and Ka.

I had a vision of many faces in the trees, or in a tree, on my 10 o'clock walk tonight, and then I saw two men pissing in the street.

It Is A Purple Speak

 
Delia will crave you, carve you, carry you
through the stain
 
elegant yesterday sees
me here again, nauseous again,
here again, breaking apart
again, breaking apart but
more solidly this time.   
  
                                                   Delia what ribbons do you let fall on the ground?
Sordid salad stains
I am with you
in the meantime
always in the meantime,
dreamtime, between something
and something is there nothing//
 
I am in the nothing-time, and
secrets keep us distant, so
far away from the something,
secrets keep us trapped in the between
 
I am sordid with it and salad fresh
with garbanzo beans, pine nuts, small secrets,
stained joy, stained spring.
I am here, am something. 
  
                                                  (It is if I say it is)
 
I am here, something, stained and singing:
 
“Do you see what I see?”
 
                                                 What ribbons have you let fall, Delia?
 
delia delia what what what have you done?
 
like a fish out of water
sailor sailor take warning
 
my panic and                his screamings are mine
my silent screamings voiced by him
fruit flies and orange juice and how could he at 2 am
and I could not ever            “FUCK!!!”        I would not ever
 
and
 
“Do you hear what I hear”
 
but I am not here and I can not hear
if I am not here.
 
It does not exist if I am not present///
 
I stare at your eyes (what color are his eyes?)
blink blink emptiness I pretend emptiness
everything is breaking inside
everything is broken
How is the weather outside?
I look in his eyes I don’t see his eyes
I look afraid of looking
 
“A star, a star, dancing in the night”
 
Delia, Delia, where have you gone,
what have you done, who have
you become now, in the mysteries, the mysteries
that I cannot access, where have you gone?
 
Malodorousness of where have you gone
I might not be here when you come back
I am here if I say I am and I am not-I am not
If I don’t.  elephants elephants hiding away, do
                                                                                    you see
 
“what I see////way up in the sky”

Vision of god

I had a vision last Friday while at work -- I thought I saw someone sitting, waiting to be helped and when I looked again there was no one there... My first interpretation was that god was waiting for me to be ready for him, but when I asked the oracle that night, it said something about a watery going with the flow quality was needed from me, not to desire anything particular to happen, but just see and watch what does happen. But maybe that does correspond to my initial impression, watery flowiness is related to recognizing god, maybe one usually doesn't notice that god is sitting there waiting for us to notice him, perhaps I did access that flowiness and that is why I saw it/him.

My friend in Texas told me he had a vision, he saw an angel... He had just woken up and looked out the kitchen window and saw someone standing at the bus stop with wings. He passed the window and said to himself, "that's an angel" and then kept walking and then went "oh! That's an angel!" He went back to look and the wings were huge like in Renaissance paintings. He told me he asked for a sign of an angel or a guide 2 or 3 weeks ago and then forgot about it. An angel at the bus stop. If you really really need a sign you will get one, I think. I had between 10 and 12 visions when I lived in Texas because I think I needed them to survive. Now I don't usually have visions. Maybe I have had three in SF. When I first moved here I saw St Francis, I think a welcoming vision from the patron saint of the City. Then I saw a vision of a bull and then an owl on top of a roof nearby, that had something to do with falling in love and having patience. Then I had a vision of a man who was really a hawk questioning my impeccability. That is all in 3 years. I don't know if the number has gone down because I don't need them or because I am putting so much intense energy into school that the energy for my spiritual life is in withdrawal, hibernating for a while until I come around to thinking about my spirituality more intensely. It comes in cycles perhaps, like my sex drive, like love...like everything.

"For when the poet wakens from the dream the Presence is 'there more than ever, / as if she had miraculously / related herself to time here'" -- Albert Gelpi quoting and discussing H.D. in "Re-membering the Mother" in the Anthology Signets. The Prescence from the dream that stays after the dream has evaporated -- part of the dream but beyond the dream. The Harlem flapper was the Presence, she was the beginning of an alchemical transformative time. She ushered it in perhaps, if the alchemy-time was not part and parcel of the love devastation that preceded it...it was Her, pushing it through, ensuring that the work is not evaded.

Easter

Easter: rebirth, transformation. The alchemy of love.
The alchemy of love, the alchemy of love,
how it changes you, morphs you from the inside,
turns you inside out nothing but heart. gooey warm
pulsing on the outside now. eggs and rabbits -- fertility
and sex. Transcendence of death. Love is its own
alchemical purifying process, it is its own initiation.

Easter epiphanies come but it is no longer easter, perhaps the epiphany is Gift from beyond and does not necessarily come at what one would see as the perfect time, or the appropriate time. In the gift economy, the gift is returned to one much later than it is issued forth. Not a linear progression, but in the words of Adalaide Morris:

"In the exchanges characteristic of a gift culture... the bestowals [are] not simultaneous or even predictably related in time" and "before the return donation, the gift leaves the boundary of the ego and circles into mystery" (From the essay "A Relay of Power and Peace: H.D. and the Spirit of Gift" by Adalaide Morris in Signets ed. by Friedman/Duplessis).

Sometimes it stays within mystery for a time before issuing out to find its recipient. The heart that resides itself within mystery has much more of a chance of finding the gift, the epiphany. We remind it what its purpose was when it was issued forth and lost its way daydreaming in the clouds. It sees us, recognizes us, and remembers.

Krishna with his flute: not a vision but an actual experience. Perhaps vision is initiation into the inexplicable, preparing the way for a reality to come. The visions happen less and less the more the soul can accept it and integrate it into their experience of reality. A cycle of seven years preparing the body, seven years it has been since the first vision. The first vision: a Harlem Flapper with a tambourine and bob haircut, dancing -- she had been a dream image but upon waking she is still there. From that point on until now, life has been a preparation of meeting Krishna, meeting actual myth in waking life. All the terrors, fears, shaking angers, orgasms, and even depressions and numbnesses, preparing, making way for a new reality, a reality fully integrated with myth.

MY BLOGGING INTENTION

I'm joining the blogging craze but I don't want my blog to be mundane random thoughts, I have my livejournal for that. I want to talk about my visions, my dreams that have a visionary or oracular quality to them and I will post only my poems that have to do with vision and oracle. I will also post poems from others that I come across that have these qualities and write prose posts about my research and thoughts on the oracular poetries of others, espcially H.D., E.D., and R.D. (Doolittle, Dickinson, Duncan) and maybe later revisit Blake and look at his visionary qualities...

Someone is calling in the mist
a white foam stills the shadows.
The boat putters slowly. There is nothing
to see – each moment produces more
of the previous moment. Moments
become undifferentiated – all moments
are the same. In every moment the same
piece of seaweed brushes against my hand
floating in the water. The seaweed is
an oracle of the future. The seaweed is meaningless,
predicting only the present. This present moment
opens my heart
and the future seeps into it, moment by moment.

The future becomes an oracle of the present.

I forget about the mist I remember
I am the mist.