Directions for Travel through a Snail Shell

Which way is the direction of love?
Choose carefully before you turn the spiral key;
worlds within worlds are waiting.
The Blue Lady reminds you that to be great
you may need to become inconceivably small.

The sea snail gives you a pattern
you saw long ago in the eyes of a goddess.
An austere time lord who cannot be bribed
may explain it to you by drawing lines
in soft powder from a termite mound.

Turning and turning you enter a universe
where mountain spirits whisper like grasshoppers.
To follow the true direction of love
you must speak in the language of smells and tastes,
and make every nerve ending an organ of delight.

You must create the door and the keyhole
to fit the spiral key you now turn the other way.
Aphrodite was born on a half shell.
You must do better. You must play the shell game
in the foam of worlds in the making.

A place to write from (Red Ink)

Write from the place that is raw
from the night when you lost your skin.
Write of the time in the war-torn city
when your heart was a quivering bird in your palm
and the blood pool kept filling, and you knew
no doctor could heal this wound
though the world would end if you failed
to keep the wounded lover alive for three days more.

Write from the night you wished yourself dead
and spirit flew from your heart, winged by your desire,
down to the lightless lands of the dead
that no one escapes without help.
Write from the day when, incredibly,
there was enough of you topside
to bribe the ferryman with the ribcage boat
and carry home the part of you that married Death.

Remember the promises you made her:

"You'll never be hurt again." "Every day you'll make poetry."

Write from the night you could not keep those promises
and had to hold the young lover in you by force,
rough as a jailer's armlock, soft as lambskin,
when she thought the one you were losing now
was the one she lost before. And when your heart
breaks again, hold her fast, willing a greater power
to embrace and join you, and write from that.

Dip your pen in the blood pool. This is the time for red ink.

Note
Comments on my recent post "Ready to Paint it Red" lead me to re-post this poem, written in 2011 and included in my collection Here, Everything is Dreaming.

"Deer Sacrifice" (c) Robert Moss