I wake in the night as a dream
ghostlike slithers into darkness.
A quivering lattice of silence reaches
out in fluttering waves through the room
into the fully awakened night.

From within the fluid dark feminine flow
come resonant echoes wave after wave
sounding as alarms on ships at sea
caught in opaque swirls, spiraling eddies
churning in a storms wake – tossed
taunted, haunted and lost.

My night voyage on high seas
without guidance of moon or stars
under a blanket of deepening mystery
woven by sinewy hands, thread by thread,
out of the deep warm wool of night.

Portland, Oregon – January 31, 2018

“Yin is feminine, black, dark, north, water (transformation), passive, moon (weakness and the goddess Changxi), earth, cold, old, even numbers, valleys, poor, soft, and provides spirit to all things. Yin reaches it’s height of influence with the winter solstice. Yin may also be represented by the tiger, the colour orange and a broken line in the trigrams of the I Ching (or Book of Changes). (https://www.ancient.eu/Yin_and_Yang/)

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