keeping time

My message today from the Oracle. I’ve been thinking a lot about time. It gets more confusing every day.

each moment is filled
with more asking

if never comes,
will we find out
where we belong?

in dreams
spirit dances between
language and music–
stars growing wings
inside your heart

The Oracle also seems attuned to the collage book I’ve been working on lately.

sun moon earth

Laura at dVerse provided lists of word-threesomes to choose from to write a sequence of three poems. Sun, moon, earth jumped out at me and the Oracle seemed the right place to go to construct verse using those three words.

1
ask the sun
if dusk feels as full
as the dawn

2
ask the moon
if dark is as deep
as always

3
ask the earth
if between grows roots
with seedsong

extended

Even though paint, tint and grey do not exist in the Oracle tiles, those were words that I kept seeing this morning. After I figured out how to make them, the rest of the words fell into place.

When I was looking for art, I came across the above drawing, misfiled among some old collages. It seemed just right, and I went looking for the right folder, which contains a series of landscapes I did inspired by some landscapes I had seen by Georg Baselitz, which had black lines and spare use of color. The one above is colored pencil on an ink marker drawing I did as one of my original black and white ideas. That uncolored drawing is below.

Later on I painted the landscape without black lines, in gouache (the top landscape). I thought this sequence, backwards, contained the feeling in the Oracle’s words today.

the black-tinted shadow
of sleep
paints an ache
swimming through the whisper
of stilled sunlight

a grey language lies
beneath the early sky

as a raw mist plays
with the bare bones of time
you say less and less

the stillness of why

I was looking at the High Priestess yesterday, which I have hanging in my office, and thinking about the strange journeys I’m taking in my dreams lately. Of course, the Oracle sees all.

water sings of how
the goddess ship shines
through the seashadow
of the moon

the language of sleep
swims beneath the skin
of time–
recalling mothermusic
in wind-whispered light

dreaming is free (part 3)

My message from the Oracle. It made me think of two collages (based on a painting by Ilya Repin) I did for one of Jane’s long-ago prompts, but when I went searching I could only find one of them.

can you bring stars
to awaken my ghosts
into the eye of morning?

I am longing for magic sails
to open me out from myself
like a window of liquid time

so I can remember how the ocean
became unbroken—a healing breath
reborn—surrounded by salty air

in the midst

My message this morning from the Oracle. I woke once again to clouds, but the sun is shining now.

spring winters
deep beneath the riverpath–
a dark season
thicker than dusk

did you fall moonwandering
into the long night?

or were you too bird-rooted
and windwild to see?  that
earth also breathes light–
full of treesong, growing in-between

The art is from NaPoWriMo 2018, when all my accompanying artwork was inspired by painter Joan Mitchell. I haven’t thought that far ahead this year; this April, I’ll just be visiting the archives for art I think.