Here, Everything Is Dreaming

Poems and Stories

Robert Moss

• Publisher: Excelsior Editions
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438447155
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Our earliest poets were shamans. Today as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal. They understand that the right words open pathways between the worlds and draw closer the gods and goddesses who wish to live through us. Robert Moss brings this ancient bardic tradition to life in this collection of poems and stories that stream directly from dreams and shamanic adventures in the world-behind-the-world. You'll be carried into a reality where everything is alive and conscious, where tigers and bears can lend you their forms and raven and hawk can give you their sight, where the ancestors are talking, talking, and the gates to the Otherworld open from wherever you are. You'll awaken, through these pages, to how shamans use poetic speech to call the soul back home, into the bodies of those who have lost vital energy through pain or trauma or heartbreak. You'll travel to the Island of No Pain where lost boys and girls are kept safe. And you'll learn to make the return journey, and sing the lost soul back into the body where it belongs.

PART I

SELECTED POEMS 1992–2012

HUNTING POWER

You say you are hunting your power,

but your power is hunting you.

I'll go up to the mountain, you say

I'll fast and live on seaweed

I'll hang myself on a meathook

under the hot sun. I'll give up sex

and wine and my sense of humor.

What are you thinking of?

For you to go hunting your power

is as smart as the mouse hunting the cat.

Go out in the garden any night,

step one inch outside the tame land

and you are near what you seek.

Open the window of your soul

any night and your guide may come in.

The issue is whether you'll run away

when you see what it is. To make sure

you succeed, tether yourself like a goat

at the edge of the tiger wood that breathes

right beside your bed. He'll come.

—August 16, 2009

CHINABERRY GLEAM

Gentle soul, the Spirit caught you up as a raptor

beating wings, and tore your flesh

and drew you through the night worlds

and hurled you into deeps where no sun shines

and the moon is a blind pulse, a drum unheard,

so you would learn to shine in your own light

so you would steer by your inner sun

so you could unwrite the Book of Fate

so that, remembering, you move as a dancer among your kind,

in the world but not of it, not different and not the same,

sharing what you have lived at your heart's core:

love, and courage, the flash of the sea-horse racing waves,

the gleam of rain on a chinaberry tree.

—March 10, 1992

A FLASH OF BLUE

You see a flash of blue in the air at midnight,

that blue, the blue of kingfisher's wings,

and you take flight from the seen to the unseen.

Poor strategy: the unseen is my home.

You hide from me where I live.

—August 9, 1998

THE FIRE IN THE WOOD

When you thought the fire was out,

flame leaps from the heart of the wood

so strong you're surprised it is safely contained

in what you supposed was a cold hearth.

There is nothing to warn you when it flares up.

Know this: tended or untended, the fire lives.

It will consume you. As fire lives in wood,

I live in you.

—August 9, 1998

TO THE DEER OF THE MOUNTAIN

—

Deepheart, mountain guardian

who harries the hunter

and knows what belongs to us

and what does not,

give us your speed,

your ability to read the land,

to see what is behind us and around us.

—

May we grow with the seasons

into your branching wisdom,

putting up antlers as taproots into the sky

to draw down the power of heaven,

reaching into the wounded places

to heal and make whole,

walking as living candelabra,

crowned with light,

crowning each other with light.

—November 6, 1999

A WAY OF CREATING

The buried city

bursts from the earth

as Van Gogh sunflowers.

The stem sustains the fruit.

This is a way of magic:

to write names of power

in the dust of the curio shop

and let them walk, ring doorbells

and instruct that old souls

inspire young ones, across time.

This is a way of begetting:

to turn in the cycle of creation,

to breathe clouds into the air,

colors into the fields,

and paint the sun into the sky.

—June 23, 2001

ROSE GATE

There's a garden among the stars

where flowers are gates to other worlds.

Try the pink rosebud that opens shyly,

plunge through its smooth and fragrant folds

into the Victorian garden where tea is laid

and sweet girls play and show a blushing priest

a bunny hole that leads to Wonderland

and a ginger cat issues opaque directions.

Take the dare of the “Drink Me” bottle

and you'll become inconceivably small

even faster than Alice, so fast you won't see

a grass blade rear into a royal palm

and ants t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• I. Selected Poems 1992–2012
• II. Tales from the Imaginal Realm
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author