Diane di Prima

you are my bread and the hairline noise of my bones you are almost the sea you are not stone or molten sound I think you have no hands this kind of bird flies backward and this love breaks on a windowpane where no light talks this is not time for crossing tongues (the sand here never shifts) I think tomorrow turned you with his toe and you will shine and shine unspent and underground

Sweetheart when you break thru you’ll find a poet here not quite what one would choose. I won’t promise you’ll never go hungry or that you won’t be sad on this gutted breaking globe but I can show you baby enough to love to break your heart forever

Extract the juice which is itself a Light. Pulp,   manna,   gentle Theriasin, ergot like mold on flame, these red leaves bursting from mesquite by the side of dry creekbed.         Extract the tar, the sticky substance heart of things (each plant a star,        extract the juice of stars by circular stillation smear the inner man w/the coction till he burn like worms of light in quicksilver not the false puffballs of marshfire,      extract the heart of the empty heart it is full of the star soul that paces fierce in the deeps of earth the Red Man, healer in furs who carries a club who carries the pale homunculus in his belly. For you are angel, you call the soul from plants or pearls of ambergris out of the grudging sea. Extract arcanum.  Separate true Archeus from the false the bitter is not less potent—nor does clarity bespeak truth. Out of the heart of the ineffable draw the black flecks of matter & from these the cold, blue fire. Dry water.   Immerse yourself though it be but a drop. This Iliaster flowers like the wind. Out of the ash, the Eidolon of the world Crystalline. Perfect.

for Alan This, then, is the gift the world has given me (you have given me) softly the snow cupped in hollows lying on the surface of the pond matching my long white candles which stand at the window which will burn at dusk while the snow fills up our valley this hollow no friend will wander down no one arriving brown from Mexico from the sunfields of California, bearing pot they are scattered now, dead or silent or blasted to madness by the howling brightness of our once common vision and this gift of yours— white silence filling the contours of my life.

for Jackson Allen My friend wears my scarf at his waist I give him moonstones He gives me shell & seaweeds He comes from a distant city & I meet him We will plant eggplants & celery together He weaves me cloth Many have brought the gifts I use for his pleasure silk, & green hills & heron the color of dawn My friend walks soft as a weaving on the wind He backlights my dreams He has built altars beside my bed I awake in the smell of his hair & cannot remember his name, or my own.

I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves seated in front of a fireplace, our house made somehow more gracious, and you said “There are stars in your hair”— it was truth I brought down with me to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature, and it is truth, that we came here, I told you, from other planets where we were lords, we were sent here, for some purpose the golden mask I had seen before, that fitted so beautifully over your face, did not return nor did that face of a bull you had acquired amid northern peoples, nomads, the Gobi desert I did not see those tents again, nor the wagons infinitely slow on the infinitely windy plains, so cold, every star in the sky was a different color the sky itself a tangled tapestry, glowing but almost, I could see the planet from which we had come I could not remember (then) what our purpose was but remembered the name Mahakala, in the dawn in the dawn confronted Shiva, the cold light revealed the “mindborn” worlds, as simply that, I watched them propagated, flowing out, or, more simply, one mirror reflecting another. then broke the mirrors, you were no longer in sight nor any purpose, stared at this new blackness the mindborn worlds fled, and the mind turned off: a madness, or a beginning?