Continued from here:
http://www.spiritplants.org/forums/the-library/many-musics-eighth-series- (http://www.spiritplants.org/forums/the-library/many-musics-eighth-series-)*part-2-of-4*/
The Architect Remembers the Boy
They say the boy's waxy wings melted &
betrayed him when he too neared the sun.
They say the boy was my son. They say
the boy was an ordinary boy. They say
The Tangled Gate is just a maze-prison
with a hungry Beast-bastard within.
He was hungry when I found him, terrified
of me, neither Beast nor boy. I fed him
from my bag, he calmed, he studied its color,
the sky's, though I thought him half-blind.
We talked by touch & I learned it was not
The Tangled Gate which he feared, but the voices.
They spoke in words but he received them
as clicks & noises he could not run from.
We listened together, & he understood,
& he smiled. Yes. They had brought me to him
& now we would leave. Eventually, for him,
the Island itself too. This wasn't his home.
The voices led us from the Gate &
I taught him the human tongue. He lived
with me in the Tower, & I schooled him,
though not in the dull samely histories of
men's wars & gods. I taught him how to let
& release to those voices. Steer through many worlds.
And other ways to reach The Tangled Gate.
A day too soon & it was time for us to go there
again. The King prepared to take the mainland,
& he commanded every boy & man clapped in steel.
Though this boy could have fought & ended the war
for either side himself, we left before dawn.
We flew together many places that day,
I showed him the beautiful world of trees,
& mountains, the many seas, even the works
of men. Many pointed, later made statues
& songs. When the sun approached its fiercest hour,
I signaled to him to rise & to rise.
There were feathers & waxy drops all around me
for a moment. He touched my mind & said goodbye.
I dreamed for years of his final plunge,
perfect sexless body. All I had taught him,
what he would learn. They say this boy was my son.
But men still clap for war, & say many foolish things.
******
The Architect Watches from His Tower
It's really true men once grew from
spasm & spit, from the awkward twist
of torsos, the fevered collide of breast
& pelvis, suddenly the prick a catalytic
bomb, suddenly the cunt to which sought
& resisted & sought for its planting ground.
How did we finally stop? Was it the wisdom
desperation contrives with a conceding cry?
I don't know, nor why I am here among
these men. Negotiating for other outcomes.
I was sent to serve a King whose lusts
are boring & easily filled. A bed & a torso.
Where she comes from, suddenly, I am aware.
She is no daughter of this King. Her dreams
are not dreams by any reckoning. Brought
to the Island, kept to her chambers,
her singing to rags & flower vases, she finds
the Gate immediately. She enters.
Night after night, I watch her dreams
from my chamber, watch her enter
the Gate deeper & deeper, no maps,
not the tools I have for its feistier,
slipperier places. She makes within &
the Gate responds, smooths & opens to her.
I don't intend for her to meet me but
when her brother's dead body is returned,
we honor him as one. Though I alone
know the boy's intent was not victory
in games but peace making, I put on
my robes, share the chants & the ground breaking.
She spies me from among her grieving parents.
We exchange nothing, no nod, no smile,
but thereafter I haunt her Gate wanderings.
Like I was the answer to a question
she didn't have, & now it consumes us both.
Across stars & centuries we will ask this question.
******
The Architect in Exile
I wake up in a dank tent to the noise
of departure. Recognized, not knowing
even my name, I nod inly & begin
to assemble my facts. We'd lost the last
key battle, & are going. Our enemies
are blood-close, the worst kind, but
are allowing us a war-less path to exile.
There are several hundred of us, though
there'd been many more. They are grim
but strangely not hardy. They are leaving
because the army is gone. Like a pretty head
with no body, unable to compensate, to be other
than a pretty head. The King makes them hurry.
When I enter his tent, he starts, wonders
why I am not gone to the Island.
My new life solidifies in that space,
I am here to survey & ready our new home.
I pack my bag, full of tools from a nameless
future, & arrive before nightfall.
When I see the Gate, I nod, unhappy.
The time beyond time is crumbling back
through these centuries, it makes no sense,
but here I am again, here is the Gate,
I am trudging through summer mud
toward what I know I will find.
In myths, the Tower is portrayed as
my prison, where the King kept me
in punishment & service. This is a hole
in the story, & the truth is absent
within its absence. It is no prison
but my home in every place & time.
I do not serve the King but he wants something
from me. I am his necromancer &
he believes the Gate will prove his
best weapon. This greed gives me time
while I contrive a way to fuse the cracks.
I am tired of tools & travel. I wish
only for my tree revealed, a day & a night
without end. She will help me find
what I need. She will inherit my tools
as reward & join me in the Gate.
******
The Architect is Her Teacher, Her Hummingbird
I first appear to you in the Gate as an invitation
to believe. Your dreams of this place are still new,
a game you half-remember by morning, seeing
as you have been trained to see, that there is no hole
in your chamber's wall. I invite you to accept two truths
about one thing. There isn't a hole. There is.
You have a picture book, a simple telling
of the hummingbird story, he who gave men
music & taught them to sing. You breathe this book
through many days, memorize its few words
& many strange pictures. I see my chance
to twine with your path, & softly take it.
One spring day you return to your paints &
large sheets to find the hummingbird on
your page gone, as though never made.
Waking next morning you discover it flitting
upon your chamber wall, as though always.
In later days, moved again, the Queen's half-wild garden.
You ask the King your father but his smile above
his maps is mirthless, a thing of abstract love.
You even ask your friends behind the wall
but they do not know what a hummingbird is.
Strangely, they do not care to try. As a child,
you nearly leave this strange mystery quickly as it came.
I let you but one. You are walking the path
in the Tangled Gate to the place you call
the Carnival Room. You are singing the hummingbird's
song, about how one day mankind will remember
its first song again, & fly away. As you make
the last turn, I appear before you, set upon the air.
You gasp. You look. I am my question to you.
This is your test. You hold out your finger to me,
half-smiling. I accept & you walk along, no words,
just the potent of touch. As we both wake,
I am humming for you, & then we share this too.
My bedchamber is as dark as yours is plush
with light. We each nod, & know. You now twice believe.
******
The Architect's Record of the Time Beyond Time
You found, you read: "The storms became constant, wordlessly violent; the daily life of men & markets, ideologies competing mostly benignly, churches vaguely explaining their fences & roofs to the cattle within, new seers smiling with fresh ancient visions of humanity waking & rising as one, was over.
"What remained for most was the leash & a stingy bowl at nightfall. Hope was a little more light in the day's grey sky, less snaggling wind at night. Where possibility still lay, at least for a few, was far below ground, in the great darkened halls of the sleepers, thousands of them clicking song, fed by tubes & awake less than an hour a day.
"The men of science, magick, & spirit had joined with the men of Art to contrive a solution. What remained unfouled of the seas & mountains & forests had been blended into this work, not to save the world but undo it, find the place beyond the Dreaming, by scavenging through history for the clue all believed was there, the thread out of time.
"If this all sounds lunatic, or a beautiful plan but far too late, or you dubious wonder that such diverse men were able to work together even at the end, you are right, you have read well. The minds of men did not contrive this plan, but others whose own world had been lost. They had tried & failed to convince, to help, for centuries, & it wasn't working now. More sleepers would wake up dead, or simply disappear."
What you did not read is what I did not write in those pages. I came back not intending to return. You are the thread. You are the clue. The Tangled Gate will seal the world, close its cracks, & those back then will not live nor die. My Tower has snapped the link back to them. You are the chance I follow.
******
The Architect Sees Her, & Again
At first we dreamers traveled history like shadows.
There were few of us, drinking the foul potions
to cross beyond the Dreaming.
We scattered through times & lands,
& returned to report the details.
What we found was morass, not pattern.
The lives of men are governed as much by chance
as will. By blood's strange inheritance,
& the way desires will twist & deepen & half-rabid
survive the years, by shell after shell.
Wars were fought over land, women, cankerous
want for power & control in a world that
buries or blows to breeze every large man &
his castle, every pauvre & his cup, every God-thing
& its statues & its followers & its very name.
More of us joined the first few sleepers,
& the chemicals got stronger. We slept more hours
of the day, surrendered lives & loves for this obsession.
We began to invade & maul history, but nothing above improved.
Powerful men built grander edifices over dead soil,
ranged greater seas of armies against each other,
queered mortal desperation into frenzied faiths.
We below were forgotten. Didn't matter.
This is why I've chosen not to return,
to meet you at the Fountain near the entrance
to the Tangled Gate. I see you approach
& keep my cover until you enter. You still carry
the blue bag I gave you. You never change
through the centuries. I still shudder as
you hesitate, kick the golden leaves at your feet.
Your breathing quicks, mine does too, & you enter.
******
*** Many Musics, VIII, (xxxi) - The Architect Remembers the Boy - Now the story shifts to telling the story of the Architect, & an immediate shift away from the original myth's story regarding him & his son
*** Many Musics, VIII, (xxxii) - The Architect Watches from the Tower - The relation between the Architect & the Princess is crucial to this myth . . . it develops poem by poem . . .
*** Many Musics, VIII, (xxxiii) - The Architect in Exile - We learn the Architect is from a future time, and that the Tangled Gate is a powerful tool, possibly a weapon . . .
*** Many Musics, VIII, (xxxvi) - The Architect is Her Teacher, Her Hummingbird - the Hummingbird story recurs through the myth, I'm not sure what it means but it is tantalizing . . .
*** Many Musics, VIII, (xxxv) - The Architect's Record of the Time Beyond Time - The future is a calamitous thing, and the response of men is too slow . . . the Architect seems to be abandoning the failed tries to save the world . . . there is also the question of those from another, lost world, helping somehow . . . to be told of more . . .
*** Many Musics, VIII, (xxxvi) - The Architect Sees Her, & Again - Description of the Sleepers and their failed mission to "fix" history . . .
Continued here:
http://www.spiritplants.org/forums/the-library/many-musics-eighth-series-*part-4-of-4*/