No Direction Home

As long as there is a direction,
There can always be a direction home
Twisting through a bend between Illinois and Alpha Centauri
the galaxies shifted and upon a black river
where the fog rose up, my black magic was spun.
I can’t say it’s been easy being me
for very long or over the miles
But I hung in there like an anchor
off a freightliner plodding the sea,
edging toward heaven or Tangiers, or
I was like the neck of a Morroccan asp
dodging the hawk and the mongoose.
Having sunk down so low, bunkered
in the briar so I might once again return
to my nest, hunch down in the bush
under dark weeds so no man nor
animal nor fear can find my weakness.
But it was more than survival
which kept my colors cloaked and
my brain on fevered alert, the fiery kernel
within my mind ablaze and shielded–
there in the bogs and mist-covered forests
which reflected nothing but the calm dark
that patiently awaits for a stunned prey.
There was love, indeed which burned
deep within my chest, a love fair white
and snow, pristine which twinkled
like the stars before my eyes, that soft
fire, so small and pulsing in the midnight sky
amid the deep azure pool of yesterday
and now in this ether– that love, a compass,
pointing north and I would see her face,
her radiance and my heart would be dragged
back in that direction. and my direction
was found and yet but stumbled upon
as if I were the tendriled catfish, dwindling
through the river; my eyes dull and visionless,
like my cousin the bat, blind & weak,
dumbsensed and mundane, looking for
sensual food in the brackish waters so foreign
but with my craving needing to be appeased,
instead I became martyred by her sinkline,
yanked and pulled until reality stang that life
as once lived would no longer be.
This love, this hungry love where you are
reeled by the song from your heart,
released upon the sea or creek or stream
but does the fish ever seek to be caught
once again by his captor, does he long
to be sucked back into the smooth fingers
of something which suddenly has his rapture.
Directions are our states of fever, they are
imagined and they are determined, which
course will run us back upstream, knock us
two farmhouses and light years from where
we want to be– if our hearts burn and our
hands remain steady, the direction will cease
to have power, our course becomes steady.
Our hearts at last filled with the glory of our human blood.