the orchard
wild, wondrous, weird ... and wicked

The Voices of Women
The Orchard
Cymbals and seasons
2003

First roots (05/03)

2004

Sowing seeds (08/04)

Turning trees (09/04)

Underground? (10/04)

2005

Bursting out from below (03/05)

Cruel deception? (04/05)

Flower power (05/05)

Knuckle down (06/05)

Of Apple trees and synching feelings (07/05)

Eclipsed and ablaze (08/05)

Of light beyond clouds (09/05)

Harvest and rot (10/05)

Defrosting the fountains (11/05)

Difficult digging (12/05)

2006

The Janus month (01/06)

Manuals and mud (02/06)

The people, the pitfalls... (03/06)

...the peaks, and the river (04/06)

Unclouded confessionals (05/06)

Riding the roller-coaster (06/06)

Precipitate plunge (07/06)


 

taliesin's log (voices of women)

dimanche 26 septembre 2004
 

So you too feel it coming.
In speaking of it, your gaze on the dead sky, you wing me
from glade to Ring, from touching wood
to touchstone.

waiting"Be patient," breathes the rock king.
"Watch still. Wait still.
Be still."

To find the Ring,
you must cross the burial ground;
better to fly, safer to shape shift,
suit form to fit autumn, winter, spring,
highest summer,
each in its instant: best leave no tracks.
To brush a single spearhead in the grass,
one blade alone,
would be to send a message
swifter than sudden thought
coursing down through root and earth,
down to life beneath the mound,
down through resonating rock.
Nobody should touch the clock.
The sleepers here must not be roused ahead of time.

pledgeYou have no map,
but you alone
could go into the passage
wrought with that breath you caught,
eyeing the rumour
of winter's coming -- cloud without cracks...

Old and sick, she wanted food.
You asked about your fruit, the birth
of a gift in mind, a sound
idea, hesitating... I brood
a while when you are gone:
"She has a generous heart.
Has she the art to solve a riddle locked in rhyme?"

visitorsThe notion of "reality bleed" intrigues me -- a theme of 'eXistenZ' -- but it alarms me when it starts happening deep in the garden.
"Stop it," I tell myself, "don't break the rules."
Oh, but it's so very hard.
Each time I see you, especially in places that must remain walled out of here, the joy in it gives me the strength of deceit and dissimulation, but there's no hiding from myself...
So the garden grows, seeded by that joy, warmed by simple pleasures, watered by every storm sparked by the quick stab of sorrow that comes with each farewell.

Will it ever get any easier, Ellie ...... my forever love?

How can I make it so?
The sadness evaporates soon enough.
But not the rest.
Especially now I'm sure you share the fear I have of the lead heaviness of skies so unlike those of which you told me.
I don't expect you to answer such questions; you're an expert in the silence of the things we should not say!
But dare I, who talk too much already, hope that part of what this game's about is helping each other find our answers in the only place we'll find them?
Ourselves.

dancefallEnough of that.
I've come to need this place, often well away from your flight path, a quiet space to write down the thoughts and fancies that I can't allow my heart to voice when I work and talk and walk the streets with you.
Today, after all, is no day for such a stroll; your time was already set to be busy and you're best off with your other friends, so I changed my mind.

I think, too, that my brief visit tonight is best spent readying the garden for the cold months.
If "reality bleed" means anything, it means there'll be little time to tend the plants in the weeks to come.
That, perhaps, is a change for the better!
I shan't name the artists here. To do so is to invite intruders.
But I can say that the last one invites us to dance the autumn.


6:55:54 PM    your views? []

mardi 14 septembre 2004
 

asphomachCome. Please say "I'll come"...
You're far down a road where I should not, ought not, must not follow.
Your way, only yours.
I cannot close the gate, I shall not lock the door.
Once you were a stranger, Ellie. Once upon a time when that was then, but now that's changed,
I dare not, would not, will not lock you out again.
However sad, no dream is hollow.

Ω  Ω  Ω

Sometimes so wrong,
almost too hard to bear alone,
a fragmented heart fights with my head,
crystal shards, fiercer than diamond, stabbing, cutting, scratching
stone.
Our worlds, our own, each in our own, each to our private interlace
of universes, nothing shared.
I read your words, read them again, bleak beneath the smiling public face.
Then my verses
come unbidden,
weak lines, yes, but stronger than nightmares ridden
for far too long.

daffy bugleNerves of steel.
That's what they want, outside.
Iron, here, is otherwise; it fertilises.
Armour melts away from me. Dali clocks drip
to nothing. Tonight's
puddles
reflect an absent moon.
A ghost brings Asian asphodels,
neglected senses. Soon
the brazen host, spring daffodils
in early fall.
"Unwise! Too soon it rises,
before it's mended," a tall bloom whispers,
"untimely bells are clamouring for
silence."

Ω  Ω  Ω

after imageVenus smiles, she disappears behind that absent moon and Pluto nears.
Though warned of change, this "revolution", still I dread the notion.
Our souls estranged? I fear my fears, the enemies within.
Let no self-appointed preacher say such loving is a sin.
Any man who loves and flies but cannot reach her, his forever, tries to challenge deviant fate: hands, bone, naked skin and racing blood tear through time, sunder atoms, make of radiant skies eternal summers out of season.
Oh yes, the language of the heart should speak with reason, tempered by sense, take root in more than treacherous sand;
"Shakespeare," remembered, "said it all!"
And it will not. My trickster's heart denied your truths, seeing life in art, and cast out thought.
"Take fear," it thundered, "end it all. Open your eyes to know what's right."
Were these heart's lies?

When I surrendered, started to mend the wall, play the game by the rules, our normal, ordinary laws, life became so hard again...
My dangerous heart defies those codes, leaves me without intelligence, too distant from the brain that tells,
"Love you still, then love in vain."
I trace a new line on my hand, I don't know what it spells;
unexpected flowers are here.
Thus normal, ordinary wars break out in me, things slide apart.
Such secret struggles scare me, could being your friend prove too difficult? I took your being
for a revelation; I found instead a novel bend in that sign:
Revolution.
Dayglo hopeWhere I had hope, life becomes occult with shadows, but while I have a hand it must reach out.
The gate's wide open, a stargate now.
I cannot fathom why it leans this way, not that,
where thou are that, when all is one.
When the lightning's flashed and gone, times are less frightening
and what's undone may yet be set to mend a heart.
Just not the way that I had thought.
So what I wrought moves on anew. Now yang is yin; where claws were out and fangs were in, you remain, Ellie, fairest muse, surely a fine place to begin, where what I used and so abused has come together, quantum leapt.
Still then I'm woken where I slept.
Why do I fear winter so when all it takes is to let flow?
Your flight, my track, different roads, no looking back. While I don't know what loads they bring, I pray for light from fall to spring.

Ω  Ω  Ω

Can you relent then, Ellie,
However rarely, always welcome? If I repent then, Ellie,
please say, sometimes, you'll come.


2:29:54 PM    your views? []

vendredi 10 septembre 2004
 

After such a long journey, it's good to find how well the place has kept.
All on its own, unless friendly phantoms have swept up the leaves and are burning them.
Even the house is fine.
The ice crystals, the sheets over all the furniture straight out of 'Doctor Zhivago'.

What's it been?
Half a century? Maybe more, maybe less.
It scarcely matters. One mystery is bigger tonight than others:
what is, when is, how comes the "revolution"? Perhaps it's past. Happy to be unsure for now, I'll lie down a little, watch smoke spiral off the bonfire, up into your sky.
This much we know: the sky is your domain, the wild earth my own.
Yet to fly, you must land, a streak diving down among sheep.
While I, to run, must take to the air, since that's what is always in the balance.


8:02:44 PM    your views? []


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