The Cambion's Tale

Dear  Readers and Blogging Friends: I had intended to take this month off anyway, but after some setbacks in the lumbar department, it really looks like it may be some time before I am well enough to manage much here. Please bear with me as I mend, and eventually I'm sure I shall return. I will leave you with this little favorite of mine to chew on, and thanks, as always for everyone's concern and support. It means a great deal to me.

The Cambion's Tale

The north wind is in the wildwood

tonight, calling the last 

specklings of summer’s regret

from the moon-dripping trees,

fragmented friable tongues of 

henna and ochre milled to a dusty haze

that blots future and past, dead voices

rustling the song that calls me to you

my hell born babe, heart’s delight

soul’s inquistor.

Changeling and demiurge,

furred with frosted moss and mist

horned with bone, poised always 

to run; you regard me blinkless,

hermetic as a wild thing, gaze of

opals burning through the veil where

I pretend to be protected invisible

as Niniane, everlost instead

fate-tangled and resistless to 

the beckon of that blue unicorn eye.

So I come out of the night

for your lichen'd kiss, rain

cold, full of the taste of rust

yet sweeter than any vintage

pressed from the sun's full flaunt. We're

as fallen as Rome remembered, love,

all my smooth green weight leaning

on the colonnade of whispers

you pull from some pocket in
the heart’s shallow grave.

My breath is gone again;

you’ve whistled for it; lost

dog of my hollowed lungs it lopes,

at your heel, leashed 
with your brimstone binding

tighter than the chest that

knows the next gasp is last.

The night wind blows hellfire

around us where the idol burns

our fading sandalwood smoke

bolted with blood, spiced with loss.

O there’s nothing wrong with us

that reincarnation won’t cure.

~October 2011

revised, February 2016

cambion: According to the Malleus Maleficarum, the offspring of a human male and a succubus, or a human female and an incubus. Caliban and Merlin are both assigned this dubious distinction.

*The last two lines are extrapolated from an anonymous saying passed around in the 60's.

Image: Tamara and the Demon, by Mikhail Vrubel, watercolor, 1891

Public Domain, via Wikipaintings.org