EARTH: HARVEST

Day Four
Moon in Virgo


In the Fountain
Soaking up the energy
Of Earth

You laugh as you remember
The dialogue propelling you here
Before the altar of the Earth Goddess

Five mounds of peat infused with Salt
Purified relics of the journey
Pieces of La Parca
Your Goddess dresses

The word Goddess is
Forbidden in the art world
Gae told you
As you sat before her new creation
A breakthrough

The self-contained Vesta
Who doesn’t give a damn whether she is
Called a Goddess

You repeated Heyo’s expression
The face of the feminine
Yes, she liked that

Today is Day 4
The Summer Solstice
Moon in Virgo opposing Uranus
Charged atmosphere
Of dissemination

Harvest
Arrived early
Due to necessity
The urgent message of the Summer Solstice
Accompanied by magic

You found a paperwork with two masks
One in metal
The other in feathers
With it is an invitation from Christopher Knight
To attend a wild party on the Solar Eclipse (1994)
Which required wearing a mask

You created Mask, an art piece
As a reminder of your colossal impatience
You wrote that you refused to wear a mask
You expected the face to emerge
On the Solar Eclipse!

Little did you know that it would take another 14 years
Two more turns on the pentacle!
How many masks you would have to wear!

You brought Mask to complete the dialogue
Returning it to the source
Your Virgin flight to England
In search of Her
At Stonehenge
Bath
Solsbury Hill
With its flattened mound

It is time
To celebrate the authentic face of the feminine in public
The Summer Solstice
Ruled by Venus
Elevated in Leo
Approaching Saturn
Opposing Neptune

A boomerang across the sky
Shouts a message
She arrives in a new art form
Mirroring a 21st century cosmology
Heaven &Earth

What makes you so confident?
The Solstice sunrise delivered a gift
News of a discovery
Hubble images of the two largest asteroids
Ceres and Vesta
Now holding their own
With Pluto

Ceres is thought to have a layered interior like the Earth
A rocky core, icy mantle and thin dusky crust
How fitting that Ceres, the Earth Mother
Has a body like Earth
And Vesta, with her face
Revealing a huge crater
From the explosion
Vestoids are born
Priestesses in training

Before the Greeks made her a vestal virgin
Vest was sacred prostitute
Her intercourse with the King
Assured legitimacy
Fertility for a New Earth cycle

You guided a performance under the Solar Eclipse
A day before the 2006 Fall Equinox
To honor the Sacred Marriage
Of Pluto and Persephone

An equal partnership
An archetypal couple
Sharing power equally
Made possible
By Pluto’s controversial demotion
Into an asteroid

A vote among astronomers
Who don’t believe in astrology
For the most part
Reflecting a change in cosmology
Men no longer steal the female power
They honor it
And so, this confirmation of your path
A gift from the Goddess

The universe is using you
To disseminate this message
Of equal partnership

You are in the tub now
Still under red lights
Awaiting the green stream
Heart energy
You earned it
By containing the energy
You used to pour so freely
Into the mouths of hungry men

You feel like a completely different person now
Unified
Strong
Purified by fasting and mud
Aware the universe is using you
To disseminate this message
Of equal partnership
Where women will be valued as creative partners


On your passage to the Lab
Now a sacred space
You put out a call
For a priestess to assist you

A wish placed before the Goddess
On the day of the Harvest
Someone to reap with you
Someone eager to learn

Having completed this call of necessity
You focused on a ceremony
Honoring the face of the feminine

Majesty
Appears at the door

Wearing a bright lime green shirt and tiny shorts
Long hair pulled away from her face
Hoop earrings
And the face of the feminine
Soft and strong
Contained and open

She appears at the door
As if she knew you were expecting her
And you let her in
She is stunning
A loveliness that radiates from the inside
Big oval eyes
A sweetness that is incandescent
She wants to know how to honor the Goddess
Ripe for priestess training

She tells you of the struggles
Young women have today
Not knowing what to do with this power
So vulnerable

She is frank about her needs
No seduction
No manipulation
Young & innocent
They mistake my kindness for weakness, she says
And you feel her strength
You realize she is a gift
From the Goddess

A surprise for the Harvest
You have just finished the Solstice Chart
And are making a crown of flowers
In celebration of the maidens of Summer
Persephone’s turnaround

When she appears at the door
Like an omen
You continue bending and weaving the flowers
As you talk
You are making a crown
A Solstice crown

This is the ritual
That could not have been planned
To weave while bestowing wisdom
The projection happens quite naturally
The omen in the Venus mirror with the handle
You were guided to place before a three way mirror

You came out of the sweat lodge and would see Her
The face of the feminine
Little did you know that it would take ten years
To put that energy in your body

Now
Sitting in the tub with the crown on your head
You are Queen!
Remembering the words of Heyo
So long ago
They are Goddesses, all of them
But do they know it?

On the wall you are talking about the wisdom
Of the Third Eye
Majesty asks about the Third Eye
That is where you need to keep your energy
You tell her
This way you will be able to see the patterns
Pluto’s methods of stealing power

You realized at that moment
How much young women need this knowledge
How to be goddesses honored by men
As you are in the gallery

You are grateful for her presence
The young and innocent face
Your voice exclaiming outside the window:
I was wearing that dress!!!!
The dress you are looking at now

In the corner
At last, sitting in Earth
Listening to Peter Gabriel
Digging in the dirt
Stay with me I need support
The light bulbs have been changed from red to green
Relief!
Sexual potency no longer dominating the space
Now, it is filled with streaming heart energy
Of the conjunctio
Where you arrived yesterday
The flowering

What compassion you feel for this young woman
So much to offer the world
No support for the development of her Goddess given gifts
You resolve to help her
You ask her to write down her birthday

It is a fated moment
You both feel it
Your heart and mind at one
You glance at her birthday
The chart in your hand
The Boomerang at work
Under the eclipse influence

The threshold she has crossed
Closing doors and opening others
A budding priestess ready to be trained
You invite her into the Mandala
And give her a primary lesson
You tell her about the four directions
The four elements
Of transformation

You instruct her to sit in the south
The Pine
Place of rest and repose
You sit opposite
On Hemlock
A reminder that too much wattage can kill
You hold your energy

You tell her to let go of the past
Those who have tried to steal her energy
When Pluto was still a planet
And you ask her about her self-expression

You invite her to the Venus altar
The Goddess speaks through you
In the form of a prayer
That she will honor this power
By committing to contain it
in her body

North is the place of the Earth Goddess
Capricorn, the sign ruling the Venus cycle
Coming to a close
The north empowers the Queen
Consolidation
You feel the Coagulatio
In this installation

Where an impromptu visit is performance
Yet real
A shift of archetypes
Determined by the cosmology
An entryway over the Threshold
To Real World

You perform a ritual
By channeling the Solstice Chart
Just completed but unread
When she appears at the door
You are focused on the boomerang
Drawn on the chart like a peace sign

Moon opposed Uranus
The unpredictable
Crucible appears on the wall
Before you
Yes, this is a transformational moment
For you both

Writing this
In the tub
It is nearly dusk
Images are clearer
The chart

Saturn opposing Neptune
Nearly exact
Integrating the supreme creative act
Delivering art to its religious origins
In the vast ocean where
We are all one

The time has come
The face of the feminine
Has arrived

Majesty
Has this announcement written
On her stunning face

What is this?
A young man asks at the door
What do you think it is?
He shrugs
Read the statement
He does
Looks even more bewildered

In a moment
You turn
He is before the front window now
With a woman
Reading the statement
She is nodding
See, she understands
I’ll tell him later, she says

Women get what is going on
Men do too, but most of them have
A base question
Usually made with gestures
Is that your body projected nude on the wall?

A man in uniform yesterday
Smiling and nodding at the window
Thumbs up

Perhaps they are happy
To see a real woman’s body
Projected larger than life
You are huge
In a state of pregnancy
Indeed, you needed all that extra weight
To endure the labor

Oh, now you see
The planting on Monday
Honoring the Venus Moon conjunction
Gifted you with the detachment
To write through this

And so we honor the Goddess
Expressed by the movement of the planets
And prepare our body
To receive Her message

You have a vision of women
Dragging their men
To the 47th Street altar
So beautifully timed to the Summer Solstice
As a means of starting up a dialogue
Of a new religion

One the nourishes and forgives
And here you are on the wall
In birth position
Giving birth to this new religion

Your stomach looks huge
In these images
Amazing how the Goddess
So instantaneously expands your body
Federico’s voice so soothing
Let the Goddess tell you what to do

The message has become urgent
Even white men in government understand
The necessity of caring for the Earth
Least we all become extinct

And so, as you sat mesmerized by the dignity
Of Gae’s self-determined Goddess
Who will not go forth by that name
You resolved to bring the dialogue to the art world
The face of the feminine

Missing from every gallery
Every museum
How can such a colossal omission
Go unnoticed?

So right there you resolved
To bring the dialogue into the art world
You took photos of Gae with her faceless creation
Crafted from Asian fabric and plastic hair accessories

I want to make up your face, she declared
And you realized even then
That you had been launched into performance
Without the video to record it
Damn!

You surrendered
To a new face
You are wearing it now
Thick eyebrows
White in the corner of the eye
It makes them pop
She said

She taught you how to pose
Shoulder forward
Head thrust back
A bold expression for your new face

You agreed to bring the face of the feminine
Into an art world dialectic
Or so you thought

A few days later
You meet her
The woman with a face
From Crete
The last location of Goddess worship
In the Meditteranean
Before she was eclipsed

You encounter this extraordinary face
At a truly wacky event
The Warhol Superstar Banquet
Honoring the 20th anniversary
Of the Pop star’s death

Federico arrives
And now you are pointing down the street
The site of the Silver Factory
The origin of the Sky Goddess
In Pop
This synchronicity is caught on camera

Federico says the green light is much better
Yes, not nearly so erotic
That is the idea
Of the Alchemy of Love
Bringing the energy up to the heart

A loud rapping at the window
They all want to know the same thing
These men that knock on the window
They want to know if you Her
That face so made up
Face a mask
And body nude in birthing position
Except for purple lipstick on the nipples

You ay this out loud to Federico
As you write
Don’t tell them, says Federico
Who is shooting you Me now in the tub

The dialogue with Gae was prelude
To the convergence of superstar faces
At the Andy Warhol Superstar Banquet
But you find the face
Not in the camera ready names
But a critic, like yourself
A scholar from Crete
With a style to match your own

Robert Heide tells a story
Andy Warhol
Asking him to write a play about Edie
Committing suicide
Devil or angel?
You ask
But you know the answer
Both!

You meet Penny Arcade
The downtown performance artist
Performing nude since the eighties
You discuss the young female performer
Written up in the newspaper of record
Who sells photographs of faces
She makes on her vagina
Ugh!

She is my student, says Penny
Lamenting that young performance artists
Products of art schools
Lack personal material for their art form
Which comes with experience
And can only appropriate from others
Which gives their art an easy handle
Indeed

Despite all your private performances
Before the Cosmos
You never dreamed
You would be a performance artist

There is just this terrible urge
To tell your story
To remove the burden
Of this wisdom
From your breast

So much attention given to denigrating the female
In the art world
Is there no room for the Goddess
Who delights in her body?

Penny says when she performed nude
She would fatten her body
The intention was not to show off the body
In other words
But establish an individual expression

Your nude performance was totally natural
As in the desert when you came alive
With the connection to the Cosmos
And it can only come as a ritual
Imbued with meaning
In the words of the Alchemists
As above, so below

You would run off to Joshua Tree
Sleep on the picnic table
In the campground
To avoid the snakes
Climb a rock at sunrise
Strip off your clothes
And dance

Dancing naked before the universe
That was the most ecstasy
You ever knew
And of course, these dances were timed
To the cosmology
Openings to the sacred

Like today
This extraordinary Summer Solstice
You will perform a ritual to the music
That inspired you to strip down
Peter Gabriel’s Passion
Perform your passion, John said to you
Before Solutio began
Well, you did it for him for Nurturing
And you may do it again tonight

The oldest dance in the world
Dancing to the rhythms
Of the Universe

Walls of mylar
At the Gershwin
Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn
Above the silver door
The biggest superstar of them all

They can’t seem to get enough of her
An entire issue of a literary journal
Devoted to her image, her mask
Robert Heide at the reading
And you only wanted to talk about Edie

Behind the silver door
The smoking room
At the Gershwin Hotel
Quite a spread
Of food
And character
Missing from NYC
These days

A silver mylar chamber
For the superstars to relive
Their glory
Recreating the factory image
Those who didn’t die young
Aged well
Great cheekbones

Sally Kellerman
Mistress of Ceremonies
Regretting that she refused to appear
In the Warhol films
Because she was a Hollywood actress

Taylor Mead claiming that Warhol
Tried to rape him in a seedy motel room
And seriously still angry because the Pop Star
Still owes him payment

Andy Warhol selected his superstar
In his own image
But better
For his superstars
Fine bones that never go away
Like this cult
Bowing down to Andy
Midwife to the Superstar

And in the midst of this struggle to recreate
The Warhol era
You make a new friend
A Ph.D candidate in Women’s Pop Art
Her name is Kalliope

Days later
A passionate e-mail exchange
She tells you her name means
Beautiful of face
Well named, she is

And well timed her entrance into your life
A sign
The face of the feminine is emerging

You invited her today to celebrate
The Emergence
Venus coagulating through Saturn’s fixity
Before going retrograde in Leo
The sign of your new friend
Beautiful of face
People taking pictures outside the window

Control your expression girl!
Yes, that is it!
The message of Saturn conjunct Venus
Control of personal expression

One thing you can say about yourself
Who can’t manage to get a job
Or get published
Or get a lover
You are quite a magician
Marsilio Ficino would be proud
Of your fortitude
Ruled by Saturn as he was

Amazing how many good-looking guys pass by
A Manhattan midtown window!
And now you hear an accent
Suggesting the Celts
A neo-pagan from the British aisles, perhaps?
Here to celebrate a major holiday
Which Americans ignore

I think it is funny, he says
That catches your attention
The perfect thing to say
Because you nearly fell on the floor
Laughing
When you first saw the video

You put down your computer
And stand erect in the tub
Asking where he is from
Dublin, he says

He enters the space
Evidence of the magic
Writing about the good looking men
Through the window
And this man with the power
Of engagement
Does more than pass by
He enters

You are Irish, you say
You must celebrate the Summer Solstice
He stands before your naked body
On the way
But looking directly at you
In your virginal maiden dress
A crown of flowers in your hair

And tells you about how earth worshippers
Are all over the place in the British aisles
You tell him that this performance will take you
Back there

He apologizes for interrupting
Oh, no!
This is part of the performance
(it is all caught on camera)
You engage in a passionate discussion
About art and spirituality and literature

So, just by writing about good looking guys
Through the window
You pulled one in
Writing is magic!!!

Wow!
You realize now this ritual is about going
Back to Britain
Back to the origins
After suffering so long in Connecticut

The mask you discovered this morning
Connected to an invitation
Christopher Knight insisting you must wear a mask
To his wild Solstice party in 1994
And you insisting that you would not wear a mask
And here on the wall is your mask



With your declaration
To get behind all the masks
To find the face of the feminine
And so you remained committed
To the labyrinth walk
Making masks into art
Rather than wearing them

Which pays off now
Thirteen years from your wild flight to Britain
You celebrate Her entrance to Manhattan
Down the street from the original Factory
Where Superstars were manufactured from Mylar

You are ready to perform
The Harvest ritual
Confronting the face as she arises
And sending her on the way out of the gallery
Through the spiral
Made of the four directions
Pine, Hemlock, Cedar and Cow Manure

Writers never need to worry about their face
Except for publicity photos
They sit at home
Making faces at their computer
Not expecting to have them photographed
In the act of grimacing
Like now

Underground writers, like myself, you think
A man in the window telling you to get naked
With his hands
Behind your, your face covered in Peat Mosss
You wear the maks of Earth women
Two nights of primitive journeys
In volcanic mud
Under red lights

Now you feel completely
Cleansed
As good as a sweat lodge
Kundalini pouring into the heart
Federico provides the image
Streaming green light

You felt more serene yesterday
Than even in your life
Finally in your own space
Not at all interested in jumping
Out of the body
To see what else is going on
This is it!!

Time to celebrate the Harvest
20 years of nonstop spiritual growth
Digging in the dirt
To reach your core
The grounding of your being
In the alchemical fountain

Comforted by Pine
Emboldened by Cedar
Protected by Hemlock
Renewed by cow manure
Kundalini charged by the Iron Maiden

You have arrived
At the center
A truck outside the window
With a sign mirroring
The Liberty Coin
On the wall

Lady Liberty
You are free!