First it was a panther    menacing my path
to the house in the woods an old friend guarded,
but soon it found its prey    small deer or other
woods beasts    though my terrified foot-fall retarded
approach to the door.

Then it was no such thing but a creature
I ought to have recognized from the story
we'd been told   FROM   OUT   OF   SPACE

composed of something matter proved
irresistant to
—its banana bunches and scythe-arching gestures
passed through the  screens and glass
of all-protecting cabin walls.

A—cult.     And now I think—THE cult—
the one that laces my ancestry—my father's
blood cult line song I met
one figure from in my “Dark Retreat's” last day's
dream—it was of Outside—"Not
a figment of the blood only"—though three
women wished me to be their partners
for the night or always—I felt that they as members of
the actual group or cult that I attended—they were there for real—
for all it was worth—possessed identities by being there. But for me
there was another matter in my concern that brought me
to these meetings and I felt the falseness
of my situation a hindrance to response.

I could fly, certainly—easily sustain
the mental concentration on the locus
to which I wished to elevate my body
and BE there BEFORE I discoverd myself
to be there    projected by a will
I must anticipate and open to—passively receive.

These skills were noticed by the members
of the cult group and perhaps, it occurs to me now,
this was the sign they saw that I
was of them. 

		I wasn't of them—
for the secret they sought and saw
I held in the place in me they
took for being one with them—was
(and is this not the secret of all secrecy, all cultic mystery?)
knowledge of the in-existence of the very thing
that most they thought bestowed true being on them—that I saw
the empty cannister where their research projected elixer—
and in that in-existence
traversed a different space
with a deeper if less gladsome luminosity.

But the thing we saw at the banister
with banana arms and alien almond eyes
was of a totally different ideo-ontology—not given
by the insight I already had attained. The acts
appropriate to its initiation of us
were neither in my repetoire nor theirs.
But they possessed a narrative
to align themselves upon its strange intent
—or so their practice eased them—
while I could barely urge myself
to remember the story at all.

Yet they (the creatures? the members?) had come to me
in my ignorance and emptiness.
And, I am now certain, will come again.