The Heather Garden Poem by Barry Van Asten

I dream of a garden I don't know,
It's mystery blossoms through the seasons.
And here, I wander where the unknown root grows;
Where pathways are words written over hills and streams.

I

Dark Journey

O dark witch of my heart, retreat
Into your fabled land of dreams,
Where I await your icy mythology
Galloping through this emptiness of skin.
Come out and speak of your Northern past
And the tales that have been handed down.
Come out and weave for me, my love,
For here in the heartland I don't want
To be folded away by the garden gate
And unable to see beyond the glass
Where a roomful of cat-magic lies within,
Undisturbed in a grey-powdered mist.

I know her and she will not wait;
She has promises that she cannot keep.
But I imagine her always close to me,
Thinking in secrets while she weeps.
Veiled Aurora - unfathomable,
And changeless where sorcery sleeps.
With hair as dark as the dreamless grave
And crystal orbs glowing from the seventh sphere
Show shades of an incredible past. I know
We will embrace in the fiery red planet's wake
For the first time and the last;
We will walk through the midnight garden,
Through it's silhouettes and shades
Till our voices no longer strain to utter
All the hurt that love no longer hides.

But unknowable in her lamplit gloom,
She desires the forceful sway of the sea:
Perhaps she was born of it's foamy spray
Somewhere in a Northern bay? But
Winter brings new ordeals and sadness
Like a visitor, flowerless and unwelcome,
With a fist pushed firm into your mouth.

And from her dark room she gazes out
To the broken railings round the pond;
To the black remains of the mill, and beyond,
To the sunlight on the silver stream
That reveals the mayflies breaking free:
How I envy their short lives, she said,
Dreams on Neptune's weary wave...
A trout twists and spins in the pools of shade,
Drawn to a dry-fly in the sun's haze;
Magnified by a ghostly fish eye,
Snatched from dimensions of black sanctuary, again.

Two figures stood gazing into the pond:
He loved her once...long ago, one said,
Like something beyond the living and the dead.
And now, she won't leave the house, she won't leave,
And death has become a recurring theme
Now that there is blood in words once again.

A white mist has descended upon the house
Like a blanket spread over it's awful hold,
And I can't see beyond the smoky glass.
But I imagine her cocooned inside, somehow,
Wrapt up tightly as a moth,
Awaiting the end of her labyrinth of sleep
And the end of her wordless universe.

Yet the garden remains to her tender touch;
Full of love, though dark as the night.
She is the whispered wind in the swaying boughs
And the autumn leaves upon my face.
She's there in the gentle air that soothes
And sweeps across this lonesome place.
But no memory of sleep nor it's release
Can give these pale bones what they need.
For I am lost because I cannot keep
The one that I desire inside, the most.

Come and embrace the darkling wound
That you have wrought upon my flesh.
It glows in the interminable shame of night,
In the brightness of these sufferings.
Yet who is it that walks in the garden
By night and remains unseen?
Who is it that hurts my endless heart
When each night I awake to find
That love has walked with nothing more to say?

Seen from the mill pond, nothing moves;
The old gate hangs on it's rusty hinge.
Yet the dark windows speak of lives
Falling away...forever away, inside.
And a presence lingers to be loved
Where the riddle of the garden soothes.
A tree grows across it's dim threshold,
And here will be an eternity, I thought,
Now that the spell is cast.

II

Conifer Dreaming

Black witch of all my days, afraid
To come out of the house again.
Trapped between the threshold and
The surface of the skin.
A darkness through which we cannot pass,
Closes around and over us;
An immense mass, pushing forwards,
Separating our frontiers into afterlife,
Where nameless, we shuffle closer to the grave.

Heel me into the disused summerhouse
Where I can become part of it's genealogy,
Living among the dry seeds that hang
From the wooden struts like rococo beams.
There, amongst the old papers and rusting tools
With the smell of sawdust, oil and wood preserver
Rushing like alchemy through my nostrils.
I shall see the house from this dwelling place;
See when lights go on in rooms:
Is that your spectre descending the stair
Like a mannequin in tears?

Behind the fence, I'll stretch and sigh
And straighten my crooked, mossy fingers
Upon the cracked glass of the window pane,
Warmed by the early morning sun.
But here, I won't grow beyond the glass,
I'll dissolve into new constellations
That are forever looking back.

Alone, I'll lie beside the lavender path
Where you will forget me in time, I know...
But still I'll listen for the sweep of your dress
Brushing past in the night like a great lunar wing.
In the long summer evenings, I will sigh
Because I will not hear you come,
Saddened by the drone of bees
Blundering through the undergrowth,
To map the last regions of heart and brain,
Soon honeycombed into a perfect chamber
that makes a snug home for a fat queen.

Hidden in my breast is a black root
That spears through my heart and shoots,
To spiral ever downwards, through
Spine and soil, where blood becomes clay.
Trapped in the watery wheelbarrow tracks:
My life flows in these rivers of rain,
Where the garden has held me, spellbound,
But there are things in this place I cannot say.

In the woods as the sun went down,
I came here to remember her:

A July day...
Walking through the dark rooms
Where other worlds come close and listen.
Inside, the atmosphere's electric,
It crackles under my inspection.
And so I slipped out, unable to turn
Those pages filled with thunder.
I thought: Am I an invisible intruder here?
Does no one see I have come to this place?
They sit so close, yet do not see.
They don't see me. There is no answer.
But I have come here often, yes,
Many times I have come here before death,
And so I almost think it a shrine for my pilgrimage.

Nearby the buried monks in the playing field ache
To hear the close woods call to them;
I know that call and I know that ache
And it's insufferable.

As the years pass
I am wrapt in the wild ways;
streams cut through my inside
And I become part of it's flow.
Nettle and laurel seed from my palms
Towards the sunlight I fear now.
The rain, with it's ancient anger, stirs
And hammers on my brow again.
For here, no one can know the ache of the grave
And the crime that lies so deep within.
I hear the wind whisper and I wake,
Thinking your soft lips are near;
I call out and suddenly I remember
Only sad things whisper here.

A winter night and in the wood
A fire is burning down below
The steep bank that meets the road.
Figures are flickering in the flames
And far-away voices, laugh and shout.
Smoke is rising up the bank,
Winding through the broken fence,
And the air is damp with woodland smells.

Do you look at me and think of the wild places?
I am as ancient as all the world and all it's sorceries.

Beneath the rolling acres - beyond,
Corpses have no time to command;
They listen to the crumbling hearts, like mine,
And laugh beneath the decaying woodland.
But your face looks out from the window pane
With it's ghostly mask, devoid of life.
Those eyes are afraid to look on the world again,
Or perhaps they just died too long ago.

In the green pools of the bog
Those corpses gasp and remember death,
As the sunlight shifts above their heads,
Skimming over the water's surface.
At night between the trunks, they walk,
Crisp, to the snapping of twigs;
Between the submerged mass of roots,
Caught in the striking yellow light
Upon the shallow water's shoots:
A story is unfolding of my youth.
I opened my heart's sadness, and thought:
Here I will wander for eternity.
There are no names, there are no stones,
But lives have fallen to the wayside woods.

III

Walking through the White Wire

Witch of all the world, awake,
The woods have rung, but it's too late
To rid me of this elegiacal imprint
That reduces me to the furniture of the grave.
There's a dance of death between the boughs
That calls her name and winds away...
You're here, and you're here now, to stay,
Not even my silence will turn your heart
From loving me for all eternity.
And I saw all the centuries and celebrations pass,
Marching before me, yet I turned away,
wanting only to see the one who leaves me
In the final moments of the year.

I did not summon you, yet you came,
And all those dreams...I let them go,
Like afterthoughts weaving through my veins
Only to glimpse - Ullysses, in female form.
I remember those long, sleepless nights
When through my tears I ached for you:
Nothing seemed impossible, I thought,
I'll weave my flame into your heart
And make a universe of your name.

Seen in the garden is spectacled Death,
Not quite whole, but sure to manifest
His loathsome shape in the nothingness.
In the space of his predatory motions
His vaporous step is incomplete.
Between thumb and forefinger, I measure his pace:
Four days to reach the end of the fence.
While in the woods a darkness grows
Around the limitations of my heart.

My intestines dropp from the trees in coils,
Bronzing in the morning sun.
And here I have widened the margin of love
To include the garden that's wrapt in death.
My insides are clay, and I am dumb;
My lungs are ballooning in my breast.
My eyes which once sparkled, are now dull
And lie at the bottom of a dry well,
Inside a half-buried porcelain pot:
It's cracked spout is my telescope
Where I'm blinded by the language of the stars.

Come to me, this dark evening,
Now that December's ghost is near;
I have fallen to pieces inside with thinking
Of your soft flesh and this divide,
In the garden's winter beauty, where
I weep in the place where love has died.
But love is a ghastly business,
It corrodes one's soul from the inside,
Depriving one's self of the entity within.

My body shall yield to spring blossoms,
To cover acres in it's wide search.
But my sick heart will always remain
Locked in the sentences of your dreams.
But your heart is darker than buried bones,
And I can do no more than pass through time
Singing of the name I love.

This is how I imagined the end:
You cannot cross and I cannot leave;
Between shadow and light, unable to release
Our hold upon the worlds we know.
Still, the wind tells me of all you used to be,
And the dark house hides what you are now.

Perhaps she won't stay, but the garden remains
True to her identity, and I can never leave
This place where we were parallel in our make-believe.
But how can she not say what's in her heart
When I am sick with thinking of love?
While passion's ghost is fleeting, I know,
To be near her now is all of my world.

Across the water, words pass
Down the silent waves of change,
But I am beyond reason, and less of man,
Drilled into the hillside once again -
I am nothing in nature's infinite way.
And Death has won his timeless reign,
But I turn to the dark secrets of the house
Where the whispered heart has turned to stone
And the love it held has turned to dust.

I hear the voices that I dread,
Speaking of the past again -
They are a bridge to worlds unknown.
And here, the white lines of death are near,
Constant and caged by the twilight oaks;
A storm is gathering with cathedral fear
As the intricacies of sleep unfolds
The stages of our lives, retold.

Embrace me in the confusion of white death;
I linger on in after-worlds,
Bound only by the starry perimeters
And it's soliloquy of dreams, that yields
A space for dying. I heave with seasons:
You are part of my world,
And I, yours, for always.