text from Letters from the Asylum

you are a “mansion of hearts and flowers”

where old lovers go to die.

those women were immersed in magic,

they haunted the streets at night like aliens roaming foreign lands,

you kept them careful company,

devoured the fruit they bore.

well trained in the love arts

we were witches dancing

the dance of the bereft,

in the temple for anointed poets

learning to speak in tongues,

you tore out our hearts,

stole our language, cursed our bones,

--sacred bones/sacred language,

forgotten hymns to the forgotten earth.

rites to call and name, to love, to die,

rights of hope in a famished land, rites to call our own. I remember

those magnificent dark angels

inhaling sunrises, and winds

off the Salish seas in the mornings,

sorcerers, and daughters of god,

bright earths lit from within,

I watched you following my poems,

I understand

your pulsating silences,

your ghost hovering

over every line trying

to grasp the unspeakable.

be careful, I’m walking along the fault lines.