coming up from the underworld
I recovered a lost language,
animal-tongue,
the endless dance of water
sailing through the notes
of a lyre,
illusion
too much I had wanted,
too much I gave up
solace of night sky,
the hardly moving face of time
I am alone
the night is errant,
a wounded place
the stars
like the torches of horsemen
riding in
to every distance
the yellow-eyed light
of a darker fear
why should I be
forced to remember?
creature, dressed,
undressed
earth tells her: return
here is your sorrow
the red curve of a seamless sea,
open with the thousand eyes
summer’s streams
the deep privacy of woods
where the spirit horses drink
how sweet the night now seems,
how silent
stirring the lilies
with a lingering white dream
the infinite within me
veiled world, great darkness
silver ships darn under a moon
swelling in ivory
sickle-sweet,
the withdrawal of colour
the unmapped terrain of the
inconsolable, unknown life
a raven-dark flutter
in the gut of the woods
earth-smell, silence, the
memory
of a loss
timeless doors of earth,
where will you take me?
I am changed
by blue distance
red, uncertain waters
the unholdable heart
that is
wed to
a death
the treatise of swans,
that move like dark summers
against the lily-waters
old love,
our lost worlds flow
through unspeakable others
and are gone
in the sea, the diaphanous ring
of sirens, the aubade of
empty-eyed birds
the rush of shadow-hooves,
and mares wearing the forests of
the mother's body
the otherness of conviction,
the nobility of solitude,
you say now
you do not know me
but still, the stars bloom pale
and soft
in a night of ashes
a tunnel I pass through,
I do not pass
but keep you,
otherwhere,
a twilight of cellos
a caw caught in the belly
of a starved sky
before the vulnerability of
the precious, quiet things
that wait, and linger
spilling silver
in a language which
forsakes me
come now,
I am sung towards
birdless ruins, thestral shores,
the magisterial wisdom
of a nightshade
garden
the name
of your waters
which you have
forgotten
we are
what lovers die
Haley Wooning writes: I am co-founder and editor of Figroot Press, and have had poems published in Bird's Thumb, Hypertrophic, Lit Cat, ArLiJo, Mangrove, Rose Red, Seen & Heard Journal and Cosmographia.