OCTOBER SONG

“I sing you this October song.” The Incredible String Band

 

one

 

Come walk these wounded streets with me, where maple trees leak sap in regimental lines.
Where leaves the colors of blood are taken by wind
and carried to the fire.
I am the wounded and the fire in which we burn.

But now the clear plastic over this world has been torn away,
enough that I can breathe.
Now everything is breathing and even the dead are alive!
Up and down the ladder of my spine, grandmothers carry baskets
of flame fruit,
their long hair coiled in a bun and covered with a sequined net.
Listen and you will hear even the dead
are breathing.

 

two

 

If you are crying, open your eyes and let them widen
til they contain the whole of the prairie sky.
A sky will open in your heart and the sound of wings
be like a river.

I say you will never be born again, never beat another child just because she cried.
You will not die of cancer.
If you are crying, let your tears fall into the simplicity of fire.

 

three

 

I am crying now.
People tell me I have the rounded shoulders of a man who labors in the dark.
My hands may be hidden by the blue gloves of a working man
but even while they hold a paper hanger’s knife,
my hands are worshiping the one I love.

Sometimes the moon looks like a puckered scar in a blue fog.
Sometimes the cool of night touches the bald spot on the back of my head
where an emptiness is shaped like the morning star.
I feel the cold of this world but when I can let the night be all there is,
the moon with a cloud across it white as a wedding veil
can make me weak with joy.

I carry a hundred thousand years of light across my shoulders!
The round stone of this world drops down through me
and I laugh like a river with gravel in its throat.
I am loving the dark face of the sky,
loving her painted circus eyes, her carnival lips!

 

four

 

For years I walked through mountains sharp as teeth broken under the skin.
Hungry enough to eat stones, a stranger even to myself,
I swallowed anything that would keep me warm,
put on religions like long blue overcoats.
And I loved women as if they were spun of wool,
born only to maintain my heat.

Trying to be what a man should be.

Failing that, I would lie down on the ground
waiting for a star to fall into the plowed furrows of my heart.
Spent bullets, knives, teeth fashioned into arrow heads
began to rise up through me!
Tomahawks, missiles, war poisons were brought to the surface
by the cleansing action of the earth.

So I was brought to the surface of this world and made ready
to step into the sky.

 

five

 

I wore the sky across my shoulders,
all the colors of a troubled Gulf, the gaudy archetypes of the end of time.
I could feel a sky come down over me
dung colored, river throated, green and heavy with hair.
I was crying, my voice ragged as a gull’s.

Then a dove exploded from my heart!

What had been a thorn tree where sparrows hid in fear of the hawk
became a simple heart again, white doves

flying out of it!

 

six

 

Sacrifice is not blood running down a cross of locust wood,
nor hands full of thorns.
It is looking at my own face in the river and seeing
your eyes, your smile.

I hear a voice whispering my secret name,
a voice made of Brazos water and a name made of light that falls blue as rain.
You tell me we have started digging a river and that the river will flow.
But however difficult it might be,
we must endure the bite of the pick, the shoveling out of everything
that is not bloody with love.

There is a fire that starts in the marrow and burns outward
through hands red as maple leaves.
There is a wound in all of us, red as a mouth that won’t stop crying,
not until its tongue is a tongue of fire.

When fears cease, this world shines like one drop of rain among a billion others.
The sky folds down across each drop like a Mother’s shawl.

 

seven

 

Let me tell you about the night I married Jesus.
It was in a cinder block church that smelled of mold, trapped gas and chewing gum.
It was the summer I turned fifteen and there was just enough breeze
to keep pastures from bursting into flames.

I put on white overalls and stepped with my Grandfather
into a galvanized tank of baptismal water.
While the congregation sang
“In the arms of my dear Savior O there are 10,000 charms.”,
I went down into water full of stars!

In that water Jesus lifted the bridal veil and showed me one glimpse
of my own face.
In that water he betrayed this world with his kiss.

When I returned to the one I pretend now to be,
answering to his name,
there was still the imprint of a place where we have no beginning.
Where there is not a single breath of air and no focused love,
only love delighting in itself alone.

If you are thirsty, kneel down in this water.
If you are covered in wounds, bleed into this fire.
If you are crying, let your tears be tears of joy!

.