Behind the days,

are windows of time,

you tell me, and I wonder

into what they open.

Sit, I tell you, on the steps,

feel the breezes, and hear the night, the World,

belongs not beyond our door, but within.

Let the crickets murmur you

and cicada's song hear, the sweet sursurras,

and let it be hot or cool, and the fan and window blow it in.

Ours is not the waking sleep of sheep,

the deathly doze of slaves, not you with

the artisan's fine hands strong, sensitive.

Porches, verandas, and dark nights,

which no current can lift, and leave world

to darkness and to Mystery- let it heal.

Not long will World withstand

the intrusions, soon, She will again

bury Her green breast beneath Night's dark cloak.

And we go back in- the streetlight off your fair hair

from windows and streets out near,

"someday," you say, "we will live nearer to nature, after.."

You have made me think of all the afters,

but my love, life is not lived in the afters after our

conditions are met, are we situated- no!

It is now only that the window of Time opens

to our view

and if we but see it, the vision will let us renew.

Yes, perhaps we are trite, but want, as all do,

the cabin in the woods, and stars for theatre,

under Northern Lights. Yes, work to get there, we must,

but for the present moment live, also;

for living is in the margins and between

the lines, lines of duty,

and the margins of time.

Now sip the tea that we have brewed,

from herbs that we have grown,

rough hands on cups we crafted

from the smooth patient earth.

Hear the cicadas, feel the sultry breeze, and be healed.

They programmed you, night after night,

ritual obeisance to the magical colored lights,

that your fair kind must find the "tall, dark" man.

They showed my comic strip heroes

with exotic women, too,

and you bought it for a while, whom you were told to want-

that we might breed out of being.

So, what, now that you're conscious?

Women are so much more herdable, you tell me.

and you may be correct, but, you say, "There are too many years and lovers between us and were, even since first we met."

And I can't know how one decides such things, "It is,"

you say, "but a partnership of theatres, beds, and

chores to be done." yes, together, and that is all, an alliance

against time- that is how our age defines us.

At our age, romance is but a memory of an illusion,

believed with fervor at the time,

later disproven. Do they parade over my shoulder, the shades

of lovers past the sweet whispers of intimacies breathed by open windows,

beneath soft sheets or mellow wines?

I wonder aloud, as my path is struggle, the age a shell upon the back,

warrior, diplomat, scientist, secret agent, struggling to right itself through

the few, who know the palladin's passion, to make a mark upon the whole

of it, to rend the fabric of time, and you are not taken

with the lesser passion, that I would have voiced your thoughts,

or you mine, merely to mark it upon a personal calendar

the meaning, which like a hedgehog, is a private thing,

that knots itself into a ball, and lives in margins of those fields of

doings, diaries, notes, half-hung sentences in surprising calls

meant only for the special one- no- I have not known it-

only imagined, what faded-rose self-importance,

and how Hollywood and other illusion weavers

were quick to make it the mark of our parent's day, the easier

to turn their eyes from conspiracies woven in stock exchanges,

and bombs in endless tumble of ruin on the nursery of civilization.

Perhaps companioning, itself, is taught

in image, and there is no fear,

in wrinkling and stiffening alone.

Or maybe we are hard-wired

for another warm sleeper,

a rub, a touch, a smile, a known

voice in the morning.

Oh, this is madness, Demeter,

if my sideburns are gray, it is

that I am complete.

I do not need you, though the sound

of cicadas would less be sweet,

were you not here.

Oh, I have given, Kore, yes I have

of time, concern, and warmth, that

your perfect shape, your lovely face, at once

Alpine and Nordic, your sea-green eyes

would be fixed in some stellar place about me.

Hair that gave off brown of earth, red to Sun, and

the touch of Viking gold, illuminated your blouse,

as easily as a toga, folds falling about your form, I drank in,

but of the inner essence, comes the hour, mind's buffer,

holds no more, and is born to page, connection.

Her large, strong, regular hands, grasp me,

the face both Alpine and Nordic - at once warrior and queen.

Hands of an artisan, the tall lithe form-

you are of the earth, yet of the air and

you were always with me.

Why travel together? Man alone, ever youthful,

stepping about the threshold to reinvent himself now and then,

by grace of the Fates, so mote it be,

amber drops of time once fallen like the

perfect tear, from a perfect face, now less so

yet careworn, wraps the chrysalis of soul,

odd play of time worn and time-less

this journey home to wholeness.

Did I re-become in a field of fire far away,

or distant dusty journeys alone and the murky glass of cheap lodgings?

Was it the Quest made me young or reinvented itself as

Cause and Faith?

Or did the same energy, the motive force, lift and drive

always to the novel, yet-to-be-known?

One fears becoming the trim old man, fabric worn thin by the life

of shabby loves,

loving only Novelty, taking nothing of Within,

learning one's own inner universe, only inferenced

as the Other.

The cat stirs in my lap, the child in the bed.

I have thought and written again too long- he makes no sense of it,

comes dawn soon and take to sword on dew-soaked grass,

to trace ancestral patterns in cool air,

but in the fire of rune and star, it stirs, the dance of lives.

Acceptance of the passions,

what they do stir in the sacred fire

and there is sense enough- there is connection,

in that place that's Still, where All is known.

Well yet the dance commence with passion, lively glide,

but still, remain, reflect the while; detach, although in motion,

the Aryan mind always onto many realities,

the mind, the heart- look always to the end of things, the start, motive

force, while within great cycles of time.

There is no wisdom to open

the window of time, if a secret,

it is only This,

that I am complete,

need no near body to fulfill.

Ariadne, one prays without kneeling, proudly rail at Orion's belt,

after long years alone, send her the work, and one from prior times

a soulmate, know all requests ascend on slender beams of light. ..

I assure you they do, you add, like rays, some thin, some broad-

in Asgard, all are heard.

I know her now, though set within a life, and with dark child,

know who she is, must leave until another wave of time,

but I can nod across the expanse, though each too far apart

to catch the glimpse, but wave, to write, to know.

At our age, you say, life has no secrets left,

and all we know is that there is much that we would not do.

You are wise -there is much we have learned of what

cannot be explored- the world shrinks so in five decades,

accept limits without buying them at all,

shrugging to accept a smaller scope of things.

Are there secrets, I ask you, and we have stopped

having to know?

Night holds Her magic, and the earth Her own,

as do you

in the dark, wet feminine thought

that wraps my own blond flesh

Your hands are those of artisans and

philosophers, long, strong, and delicate

for fine tasks or glyphs and I

somehow would feel strange were they

to grip me; I am a tool

of the Gods in a wobbly age,

pure act- no one to grasp

At our age, you say, it is silly to love,

and I agree,

or is it preposterous at any age?

but Nature's stage-trick managed

to couple out new forms that

the dance might last another

card or two?

No, you interject, old loves

are no more strange than new-

you set a frame about;

into it walks the portait-

What when you carry your frame always

not caring to be portrayed?

You ask, and I know it

aggravates; I am always packed

to leave and believe only what is

before me now, the Fates decreed,

in other ways than love be remarkable,

or not, yet even this is no ultimate meaning.

The Pole Star beckons

I must pray

Life is all necessity and moments of

response to needful things.

Yet even in every busy moment

one can be mindful, mindful,

and hear the humming of patterns,

in the busy loom of the Fates.

Sip the tea of roots, of bark,

of leaves that we have dried in the April sun,

and of those I dug, you washed, we roasted brown/

pleasing, is it not? And you are here-

Well, I can imagine if you came my way. . .

[Demeter wd not do with the curtesy of her reply.]

Seasons of the Soul

by Mark A. Wren

Why am I downcast, despondent, sad,

when I'd rather be joyous, vibrant, glad?

Why is the heart of unfathomable weight,

as I try to escape this soul-saddened state?

I ask myself often, "what makes life this way?"

Why is the song silenced in a heart that was gay?

And with Odin's help it all becomes clear,

The soul has its seasons just the same as the year.

I, too, must pass though life's Autumn of dying,

a desolate period, hurt and crying.

Followed by Winter in whose frosty hand,

the heart is chilled like snow-bitten land.

Yes, man too must pass through the seasons,

content in the knowledge that everything ends.

And what comfort to know that there are seasons,

and to know that our souls must, too,

be bounteous or barren as Nature will do.

Times to rejoice and times to be downcast-

pain or pleasure- neither will last.

But meeting the seasons of dark desolation

with strength born of anticipation-

that comes from knowing that Autumnal sadness

is soon swept away by a springtime of gladness.