Welcome back to the land of good night, she said in a dream as I slept.
And welcome back to the helm of good lies, waiting for what seems
will never be.  I am the Indian style quicksilver for your veins.

Behold, she wears a hat, and on it a black feather, she's saying words with
gums frozen cold and moving in sacred meditation, I've got the drug for
you she says, my friend.  Go; go; go, it is the plastic encephalitic
bleeding black of stars, go and hear the witches' weirs singing up
through the grates beneath the street.  Go, she says, go, pushing her
finger into my chest, changing the symbols that lie there like cuddled
puppies wet and struggling back into the inalterable stillbirth like
sleeveless coats, hands struggling even beyond the beginning of life.

Welcome to the land of good rewards, she says as her fingers catch in
my jawbone; her lips taste of sage, and so I wake:

Dark.  What is dark, what, where, headless Ramses cast in the airless
tombs until the end of dust?  No, a light, ah, light, and such it was.
She was the ghost of the mirror of night, the lark with no color but
white eyes, tree rings upon black tree rings, as free as the deserter's
heart and deep as the pool where an elk has died; she was the Saturn of
some other sun, and reddish like the coming of dawn thence; burning holes
in the skies and reliving the screaming empty air of the youthful waiting
for years; she was solitary in her lair and rested there
till she forgot the words to thought.

She says nothing and lights the oil wick; caged doves flutter in her
white soulless frame as the Sumerians sacrifice her arms and teeth
on the barrier between here and the South.  And yet no response as she
stares at me quiet as the bastion of revolting orderliness restoring
order with the bellowed voice and the cane.  White eyes, circles in
circles in skies.  My Saturn, what have I lost, my Khafre and Sun
brick hut buried in sand, she speaks:

Marvels, you sight, minder of lies.  I say: hi, my love, my love, my
love, I speak silently as the stone beneath her feet.  And so her paean
trickles like glass through my head: Heaven, haven, are you not possessed?
There is no solvent in the Gethsemane, she says; who was born out to
darkness and consumed, who, who was your night, who was your morning
call, and all now born into the leaden frame of the essre.  There is
no Sun, no Moon, no stars my fatherless loverless raveling history,
thunder over you has broken, and now only the night and her chill eyes remain,
sometimes I hear the birds call in the echoes of your sensation, what
earthly lies whittled from the shell of your heart; I am the night and
the queen of night, and were you not here I would be fled unto nothing,
I reveal but you and the zenith of your lie, and you taste of nothing
in the jaws of my sensation.

O love, do not say, do not speak, I said.  My vale, my sentience, my
wedding veil, O suffering love, do not sunder, do not sink, open your
heart with love, open with the flashing eyes and hidden heart of
Khafre, open the gates of Qibli, O lost city, O hungered spouse, O
porter of veils, open, O sameness and Cercis and hidden lusters in
tents of silence, cast above the vitriol and breeding, killing, e'er
expending men, herding thine providence; play him no notes on the
piano when you are enslaved as his wife; O Lucéan O my silent queen
O night O dreams O.

Some things you never remember, she said; who was the hungry child
who grew within me and ate my life, who was the Sun who shone on
when I slept in the wet cold of a cave, who the man with the staff
who sent you the head of your wife, who was the caretaker in the
night if not me, nothing sleeps here and nothing weeps here but
silence and the virtues of shade, of hale dispassion, and then in
crept the bailiff strumming the closing notes and what was there but
nothing, no derelicts even would take me home, till the dogs came
and stole my body from the rock of my home.

O Setià, I said, no king could come between us, you are my wife, I'll
hear no talk now from you of nothings and vanished selves, hidden lives
crumbled and fomented in dark or run to the end of the thread and
fallen all away, no what is your voice, your condemnation but a
secret smile and a longing for a kiss?

O Lord, you say I am Setià but I say I am Set.  O Minder, O Raynite,
I am the failure of your conception, I am the imagination that you
would not signal as true, I am the correspondence with the silent
window, waiting, I am the loneliness minus one, I am but a vision
expired, and in your heart you feel but the pain of the bubbles in
unopened wine, saved forever, a thing that is not, and was not,
and never will be.

O Queen!  O Queen of night!  Say naught but truth!  Say you are my
love, my one, my only one.

What ails you Wëyse?  I am and I am and I am and I am not.  How
much have you been taught, fool, that you cannot see blood, the
prideful dead, and their flesh made into shit by worms and drunk
by trees till our whole land sung like omnivores fighting over
meaningless liturgies, self-devouring, man, you are no man, maid.

Calm your compass, Lucéan, you were as you were, and as you are,
and as you will be.  You say you are Set, no, you are the falconeer,
the sphinx of Horus stands between your names, oh what can happen
now, Lucéan, my heart is yours, I can't recede from you.  O, give me
your hand, O naught but night and naught but my queen.

Take my hand; then you will taste nothing.  The end of the end, and night
dwelling ever-after, a thunder where is heard no crash, no saving hopes
and no more surfs on the sea, no more you, no more me.  Take my hand,
and there is no more, my love.

You are such a puzzle, I said, clasping her hand to my heart.

 - "the land of good night," connelly barnes 2007-01-25