The darkest hours of night are when I fear for you the most; knowing his smarmy touch seeks your skin and he seeks to isolate you from your rightful place at my side as Queen.
And yet here, locked away on my mountain, so far away from you there is so little I can do. I hammer at the gates of heaven with incense and prayer.
I am trapped without you held in my arms in a world lit only by candlelight and dreams. of a future just an instant away; so close, our fingertips brush against it;
A world soft and fine as silk, where we stand tall against the sky drinking deeply of one other like the desert in the monsoon rains, of the love we have for one another, and walk hand in hand.
I worry his words will tear down all that we've risen up to build in the light of the Resurrection, and his indifferent clumsiness will lead you to that fatal knife... And I'll be too far away
To save you from Yourself. But I can't say this to you. Because you need me to be your mountaintop fortress; the lighthouse in stormy seas.
And so I throw my prayers at the gates of heaven like a battering ram in a siege. Christ once said that The Kingdom of God shall be taken only by force.
I used to wonder what that meant. in my terror, I ponder this no more. I look forward to the age yet to come where we can hold vigil in darkest night together, with your hand in mine.
In the deep watches of the night I prayed for you As the rich scent of beeswax and incense Filled the darkness in my life And the omnipresent wind rustled Outside, like whispers. I worried about cutting words And the attack of your enemies. While brooding with my mind Perched upon worries. Lord, set a watch over my lips So that my tongue speaks no fearful words.
For the world is arrayed against Those who seek us. Tonight was bad, But remember: Tomorrow is a whole other country. And we will walk it together.
On nights like this with bitter sangiovese in the glass as I sit waiting for your replies I realize when I fall in love I sometimes fall too hard.
I fall like a thunder from the sky obliterating everything and driving those away whom I love and if I don’t I still fear it anyway for when i feel, it’s intense.
sometimes too intense for words and it manifests as me worrying about every little thing and misinterpreting based on past lenses kind of like how I
assumed that this sangiovese would be delicious because, hey, who ever encountered a bad wine made with the blood of jove? well, shit. it’s as acidic as my past.
all i ever do is screw up good things because I’ve had so many bad things; bad romances in my life that I don’t know how to react when someone actually cares for me
and isn’t using me for some purpose, like a pawn in some sort of game. and now I worry that all I’ll do is make you cry and hurt you just like all the others
and what i really want to do is hold you in my arms and heal all your wounds in a way I can’t do with this wine. I want to tell you every day
that it is going to always be okay. But we are going to be drinking an entirely different vintage together. I’m going to pour this wine from my deck and grab a seyval blanc from the cellar for the promise of better nights.
Willcox days are like Willcox nights; Filled with wine, But the harsh sun on the high plains Illuminates all flaws, And drives away hopes With the brightness of reality. While stars bring comfort, The day brings harsh truths. Nobody wants me in their co-ferment.
We seek to blend, toil, taste our alchemy at the end, seeking perfection, With enzymes and additives and other grapes To achieve perfection.
But that best wine at the end of the day Was a viognier. All alone. No additions, No modifications.
Just on its own, Toughened up by a little new oak. Just like how life has beaten me up a little around the ears.
Maybe after all I shouldn't seek you Or anyone else as a companion. Maybe I'm best on my own after all With all my hurt, my pain, my sorrow. As much as I love you, I know the ending-- you'll leave me in the night Finding me lacking. Unwanted. Unloved.
You speak of tenderness now But how do I know that your words Have True Meaning, and aren't just said Because you know what I want to hear?
Every time I declare That i am all in I am cast out back Into the darkness.
Maybe I should tell you to go away now And leave me alone So I can nurse the pain alone Like I always have Under the harsh sun of Willcox days, Before you cast me aside to drift In the high desert breezes Like tumbleweeds into oblivion.
But maybe I misunderstand As my heart tries to slam shut gates in terror of the siege. I can't flee, despite my fears, For I am dug in too deep My roots reaching Towards distant water tables Within the bones of ancient seas. So I wait for you to bring the pruners And cut me out of your life... Just in case you decide not to.
"Great Unconformity" I look, and see a pale rose pleasing to behold from a distant land growing in a crack of stone that spans a billion years of deep time, lost memories, and forgotten landscapes, and I wonder how this will end.
Because as a rule I either fall in love quickly Like a meteorite Plummeting to earth from on high, Destroying myself in the process...
Or not at all: as resistant as the Matazals; Those thrice-island quartzite mountains almost as old as time, Lashed both by monsoon storm and ancient wave, And she breaks... and leaves in silence.
And when I fall it's usually for those who plot to destroy me and all I stand for, Who seek to manipulate me into oblivion, killing me slowly and I end up writing angry poetry At the end of all things, adding them to the list of those who have come before: A litany of damnatio memoriae.
Now I stand at the edge, staring at this Great Unconformity of thought between my two reactions, At this lovely pale rose in an unexpected place. I feel abject terror, unsure, uncertain whether to reach or run, nervous about endings while butterflies wielding wings of obsidian knives are fluttering in my stomach. Why her? Why me? Why now? Why... anything?
Your silence cuts me like a million grains of sand whipped to a frenzy by an ill wind, cutting down all in it's path tearing and uprooting trees in the once lush oasis.
It cuts me like obsidian knives black as moonlight, reaching into my skin and heart like some forsaken priest of a dead, starving Aztec god in colors of crows and peacocks.
It sours me inside like wine in a barrel gone bad with brett; dreams of laughter and the joy of good company now to be poured down the drain.
Your silence howls at me like hungry coyotes in the night and I lay awake, in fear. I miss your words; I miss your laughter. I miss you, my friend. I am sorry for all I have done.
Driving across the desert at night alone is like driving with a time machine Straight lines, straight paths across billions of years through tortured Precambrian schists upon which Miocene fires once uneasily flowed, and the bones of seas which grew in between, covered with cacti and memories.
I drive through skies emptied of friendly stars by a malevolent full moon. I wish you were with me --that anyone worthy was with me-- But there is nobody, and the air lies about the coming spring, and so I return to my Skellig in the sky alone.
I thought time would heal all my wounds but I find, the older I get, and the more time passes, the wounds just turn into scabs painful for all to see. They scar my face, they scar my heart, and nobody wants to come close to see how my eyes view the world.
Not since you left for the sea. Since you left, I have tried to fill the void in a thousand lonely ways with other people and other things and all they do is rummage around in the open cellar and steal the good wine which you laid down to age, leaving me empty and without soul.
I am alone now, upon the mountain with my glass of bitter Chenin Noir and the fact is: I don't know if I can love anymore, without you; how can the land fill the gaping hole left by the abandonment of the lost sea which once covered it like a warm blanket and left it to dream of wonder.
How do I open myself up, when all those who come seek to destroy that which I have laboriously tried to build and maintain? What was so wrong with my land that you found you abandoned me for the sea?
The atheists I've slept with have all cried out the name of God in the nights of lovemaking but such is irrelevant in this tale--
The fact is that I've kissed a lot of princesses and polywogs, and only encountered two queens, and both live in far lands, by the living seas beyond the grasp of my desert.
"Thoughts while drinking Petit Verdot on a Fall Night"
The cold bite of fall nibbles at my legs and the future season is foretold by the wheeling of the stars far above my head While the Petit Verdot in my glass swirls like the galaxies in the abyss of mind and all possible universes.
The wine is dark as the sinful hearts of men; Bitter like a jilted lover, brooding as a poet, as tannic as the moonless night. The grape came from across the sea from Bordeaux to grow rich under the foreign sun of California.
The spices and earth on the nose make me think of the women across the ocean whom I adore and she who lives across the tombs of the sea, beyond the mountains, the ancient land buried underneath the dismembered remains of glaciers and rivers,. I think of the Lady who is Queen Across the Skies enthroned wearing a cloak crimson as royalty, red like an Arizona sunset.
I think of the bones of the sea that reach towards the clouds to drink their living water, to quench the insatiable thirst created by the dark, never-ending tannins, Quenched with cassis and cinnamon intermingled with mullberry, black tea, and the fertile earth of distant spring.
The finish lasts deep into the night, with tannins and limestone drying out my lips as the minutes pass, while Orion emerges above the distant horizon of the Mogollon Rim.
And I dream of the ebb and flow of time, of lost seas and ancient mountains and pillars of fire and smoke, and your hand in mine someday.
I drink Mourvèdre amidst the ashes and the bones of the forgotten dead All buried in the corpse of the lost sea. The Mountain is crowned with the first of the snows, While Persephone's nibbled pomegranate lays upon the ground, Cast aside like so much trash as she makes her decent into the underworld, casting the harvest aside.
I remember then... How a man, a writer far wiser than myself, and but recently in his tomb once said: "What can the harvest hope for if not the care of the Reaper man?"
I thought of his words often, as I worked in the early sunrise, with the ancient fountains of fire frozen in time at my back, and the last Black Hawks of summer screaming high overhead in the fall sun, while petite sirah stained my hands like sticky black ink.
I found myself wondering if perhaps we are all reapers and winnowers, just not of grape or grain, but of souls, sorrows, and joy, and our words for future generations.
I think now of the joys the souls buried under my feet must have experienced in life. I pour the dregs of my glass upon the thirsty graves for them and the dead skulls grin for the reaper man under the earth.
