Pocket Socketry
(On Ecstasy and Poetry)
THE DANCING SORCERER
OF THE ATLANTIC TRENCH
Forever out of view
down the shelves
and canyons of
primal stone,
deeper than
the sperm whale
fears to dive --
there on a wall
as black as
death's emptying
gaze you'll find
my truest image,
crouched in
surprise to be
seen at all,
my antlers
spread high
and wide,
this lion's tail taut
for the hunt,
my horse-hooves
ready for full gallop
and inside all
that the man
dancing on the
wave of the
blood for the
spear-soar
of the next line.
My eyes stare
back at you
in black swirls of
honed abyss,
sucking so greedily
at the marrow of
each wave with
such consummate bliss.
***
Again from Erich Neumann's "On the Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness":
The way in which an idea, an inspiration, or an intoxication arising from the unconscious seizes a personality as if by a sudden, violent assault -- driving it to ecstasy, insanity, poetry or prophecy -- represents one part of the spirit's working. The corresponding trait of matriarchal consciousness is its dependence for every intuition and inspiration upon what emerges from the unconscious, mysteriously and almost beyond influence, when, where, and how it will.
From this point of view, all shamanism, including prophesy, is a passive sufference. Its activity is more that of conceiving than of a willed act; and the essential contribution of the ego consists in a readiness to accept the emerging unconscious content and to come to harmony with it.
***
So I do not so much as write as yowl in the bite of lower teeth; or sigh, or ululate, or bemoan; or somehow all of those buttery expressions, thick in the blue bouree of something so much like a dream that it is, the dream of life's darkest socketry wholly expressed on the bright page; in a language between worlds, my words a demi-veld where the boundaries are soft and the seams are witchy, leaking, watered with something infinitely close to booze but not, the Sidhe side of whiskey that was never hooch but nipples She sorors, making all this verbiage my greedy mouth battening there, each line a gorgeous jet of sweet abyss arousing words as the lactate wavelets descend something much like my throat but not quite, rather a well with feet securely in the grid of dark amplitude -- not the unconscious but close, heaven maybe, Her desire for me perhaps: But whatever the case what I've called "the daily vowel movement" are nuggets quarried from that depth, pocket socketry in which it is my job to dip my pen and Her's, truly and shockingly, to writhe and sashay as I write. That's the deal we made when I was 3 years old staring at the ocean wash wave by wave at my feet as my mother said something over me, a pact between me and deep mother and far other, to say something sufficient for oceans, for the sound of that deep voice over me.
BLACK BATTERY
I don't so much write
poems these days
as power the hour's poetics.
At 4:23 a.m. I find so much
wattage swank in
the night's roots,
a noctilucence burning
out in the garden
just out of sight,
invisible in all that seems
only dead or aswoon
or bitterly revenant.
There I find black leys
of a power worth plugging
my poems into, supple
cords of moon-blossom bone
gripping down hard
in the loam. They surge
with yesterday's sun
in black surging riptides
as regnant as anything
crowned by that day's
lost fire. Here is dark
measure in equal
amplitude to that day,
coursing electrons
of an unseen
magneto between
everything line I write here.
I don't know what
a poem like this powers
or whose cunning engines
fin and wing wild from
these gibbers; I
just write on and on
while some great lower
mouth drinks every
word I pour, getting
stronger and longer
and darker, regnant
in lake's starless source
down the lees of abyss.
Just what deity resides
there I can never quite say
though I ferry his depths
deeper each line
quarried here, each
trope caught singing in
the dark at this hour.
Surely there are many other
powers at play in the world
but they are for other poetics,
other batteries of verb.
My job here is just
to build sufficient enough
cells of black juice for
this hour, coiling
yesterday's last dying wave
round its infinite
black-tiding wash,
cabling the whole dreaming
word to the ghosts of
its margins and every
titan power bellowing below.
Black fins and deep hooves
ramp up a brilliant
dark bulb's black-saturate
glow, a poem both night
and wild garden
both fang and rich flow.
***
Meanwhile topside and far inland we struggle through the hottest days of the year. With tropical storms Franklin to the east and Gert far to the west, all the moisture is spreading away from the state, like thighs, rendering Florida a cloudless blaze of mid-90s days. It's menacing and sickly, this heat; stepping out into it from my office yesterday was like diving into oppressive waters, no lake of fire but too thick, too addled to sum much good in the perky, touristy, suburban-quenched way. I developed a migraine yesterday afternoon (a typical Monday malaise, who knows why) which dug hard down with its rusty nails, making the task of Photoshopping the weekly graphics package pure uphill noxiousness, head thundering, stomach weak, my whole body like a wilted flower tumbling back into dirt, light shrieking through the shades. Took a Frova, which helped, and the late-afternoon Yoga class dispelled it further, releasing tension from my neck and shoulders, my whole body stretching out from its oppressed shores. But I woke up with it at 2:30 this morning, bang bang bang, so the climb through a day of heavy labors has been given a steeper grade.
But who am I to bitch? I have a coworker whose wife's grandmother died, mother broke a leg, father just suffering a stroke blinding him in one eye, and both my coworker and his wife are down with bad colds while their 2 year old son suffers a bad ear infection. Try to ferry your weekly load amid that.
And then it's hot up north and out west, 100-plus temps in Chicago, homeless people dying of exposure in Phoenix, and all of those wildfires raging across the West. Up in Florida's Panhandle power is still being restored two weeks after its mauling by Hurricane Dennis. So it's not like this is a solitary anguish.
And it's not like any of this is of any concern to the Sorcerer of the Atlantic Trench, or my garden muse, or her fretful dream which limns my words, or the ten thousand songs spouted from these lips which lie at the bottom of the well like so many tossed votives, each reaching and failing to quite nail the Her lacunae which, like some inverted serpent's teeth, form the dark socket whose wattage keeps the sperm cells swimming and the sperm whales diving all the way to the bottom of things. Not a bit, though I suspect She would love a good bite of such fruit. Just to feel its juice fill Her mouth and run down Her chin. Just to know I watch with eyes wide as full moons.
RED JAMMIES
The dream is the
penultimate truth
about the dreamer,
of which all his
experience is the
temporal reflection.
-- Joseph Campbell
My wife came to bed
last night wearing
red pajama bottoms
& a white t-shirt --
new stuff she'd bought --
I was asleep & saw
her in them with
a half-submerged eye:
Hey, I murmured from
a sleepy tide-pool,
check out those
red jammies --
then dozed on down.
I dreamed of writing
a poem about a thin
red-headed woman
& then sketched her
in full color on the
same page; then I
signed & dated it
& turned it in
to my boss for payment
like an invoice, along
with more ordinary
workplace bills:
She reminded me
of a woman who
worked at my old
job many years
before, a marketing
assistant who
was thin and pale
with hair like ironed
copper -- all fashion
and cool, too young for
me, of an age I'd passed
but would not release:
Oh how I desired her
red hair and thin hips,
tasting in my heart's
red mouth the strawbs
of her nipples, bright
on such pale, split-
apple skin: Juice and
more juice brimming
a cup I never held in
these real hands: That
memory was drowned
for years & must
somehow been stirred
when my wife came to
bed in those red jammies,
rising real and surreal
on one blue wave:
The sleeping woman
next to me & the
woman swimming
far below, her red
hair down there
faintly glowing in
waterworld, writing
this poem unrepentant
& insatiable & as
doomed as ever:
Soon I go upstairs
to wake my wife, &
imagine myself hugging
her close, my hips
against those red jammies,
my mouth whispering
ocean ocean ocean
in my wife's softest ear.
THE DANCING SORCERER
OF THE ATLANTIC TRENCH
Forever out of view
down the shelves
and canyons of
primal stone,
deeper than
the sperm whale
fears to dive --
there on a wall
as black as
death's emptying
gaze you'll find
my truest image,
crouched in
surprise to be
seen at all,
my antlers
spread high
and wide,
this lion's tail taut
for the hunt,
my horse-hooves
ready for full gallop
and inside all
that the man
dancing on the
wave of the
blood for the
spear-soar
of the next line.
My eyes stare
back at you
in black swirls of
honed abyss,
sucking so greedily
at the marrow of
each wave with
such consummate bliss.
***
Again from Erich Neumann's "On the Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness":
The way in which an idea, an inspiration, or an intoxication arising from the unconscious seizes a personality as if by a sudden, violent assault -- driving it to ecstasy, insanity, poetry or prophecy -- represents one part of the spirit's working. The corresponding trait of matriarchal consciousness is its dependence for every intuition and inspiration upon what emerges from the unconscious, mysteriously and almost beyond influence, when, where, and how it will.
From this point of view, all shamanism, including prophesy, is a passive sufference. Its activity is more that of conceiving than of a willed act; and the essential contribution of the ego consists in a readiness to accept the emerging unconscious content and to come to harmony with it.
***
So I do not so much as write as yowl in the bite of lower teeth; or sigh, or ululate, or bemoan; or somehow all of those buttery expressions, thick in the blue bouree of something so much like a dream that it is, the dream of life's darkest socketry wholly expressed on the bright page; in a language between worlds, my words a demi-veld where the boundaries are soft and the seams are witchy, leaking, watered with something infinitely close to booze but not, the Sidhe side of whiskey that was never hooch but nipples She sorors, making all this verbiage my greedy mouth battening there, each line a gorgeous jet of sweet abyss arousing words as the lactate wavelets descend something much like my throat but not quite, rather a well with feet securely in the grid of dark amplitude -- not the unconscious but close, heaven maybe, Her desire for me perhaps: But whatever the case what I've called "the daily vowel movement" are nuggets quarried from that depth, pocket socketry in which it is my job to dip my pen and Her's, truly and shockingly, to writhe and sashay as I write. That's the deal we made when I was 3 years old staring at the ocean wash wave by wave at my feet as my mother said something over me, a pact between me and deep mother and far other, to say something sufficient for oceans, for the sound of that deep voice over me.
BLACK BATTERY
I don't so much write
poems these days
as power the hour's poetics.
At 4:23 a.m. I find so much
wattage swank in
the night's roots,
a noctilucence burning
out in the garden
just out of sight,
invisible in all that seems
only dead or aswoon
or bitterly revenant.
There I find black leys
of a power worth plugging
my poems into, supple
cords of moon-blossom bone
gripping down hard
in the loam. They surge
with yesterday's sun
in black surging riptides
as regnant as anything
crowned by that day's
lost fire. Here is dark
measure in equal
amplitude to that day,
coursing electrons
of an unseen
magneto between
everything line I write here.
I don't know what
a poem like this powers
or whose cunning engines
fin and wing wild from
these gibbers; I
just write on and on
while some great lower
mouth drinks every
word I pour, getting
stronger and longer
and darker, regnant
in lake's starless source
down the lees of abyss.
Just what deity resides
there I can never quite say
though I ferry his depths
deeper each line
quarried here, each
trope caught singing in
the dark at this hour.
Surely there are many other
powers at play in the world
but they are for other poetics,
other batteries of verb.
My job here is just
to build sufficient enough
cells of black juice for
this hour, coiling
yesterday's last dying wave
round its infinite
black-tiding wash,
cabling the whole dreaming
word to the ghosts of
its margins and every
titan power bellowing below.
Black fins and deep hooves
ramp up a brilliant
dark bulb's black-saturate
glow, a poem both night
and wild garden
both fang and rich flow.
***
Meanwhile topside and far inland we struggle through the hottest days of the year. With tropical storms Franklin to the east and Gert far to the west, all the moisture is spreading away from the state, like thighs, rendering Florida a cloudless blaze of mid-90s days. It's menacing and sickly, this heat; stepping out into it from my office yesterday was like diving into oppressive waters, no lake of fire but too thick, too addled to sum much good in the perky, touristy, suburban-quenched way. I developed a migraine yesterday afternoon (a typical Monday malaise, who knows why) which dug hard down with its rusty nails, making the task of Photoshopping the weekly graphics package pure uphill noxiousness, head thundering, stomach weak, my whole body like a wilted flower tumbling back into dirt, light shrieking through the shades. Took a Frova, which helped, and the late-afternoon Yoga class dispelled it further, releasing tension from my neck and shoulders, my whole body stretching out from its oppressed shores. But I woke up with it at 2:30 this morning, bang bang bang, so the climb through a day of heavy labors has been given a steeper grade.
But who am I to bitch? I have a coworker whose wife's grandmother died, mother broke a leg, father just suffering a stroke blinding him in one eye, and both my coworker and his wife are down with bad colds while their 2 year old son suffers a bad ear infection. Try to ferry your weekly load amid that.
And then it's hot up north and out west, 100-plus temps in Chicago, homeless people dying of exposure in Phoenix, and all of those wildfires raging across the West. Up in Florida's Panhandle power is still being restored two weeks after its mauling by Hurricane Dennis. So it's not like this is a solitary anguish.
And it's not like any of this is of any concern to the Sorcerer of the Atlantic Trench, or my garden muse, or her fretful dream which limns my words, or the ten thousand songs spouted from these lips which lie at the bottom of the well like so many tossed votives, each reaching and failing to quite nail the Her lacunae which, like some inverted serpent's teeth, form the dark socket whose wattage keeps the sperm cells swimming and the sperm whales diving all the way to the bottom of things. Not a bit, though I suspect She would love a good bite of such fruit. Just to feel its juice fill Her mouth and run down Her chin. Just to know I watch with eyes wide as full moons.
RED JAMMIES
The dream is the
penultimate truth
about the dreamer,
of which all his
experience is the
temporal reflection.
-- Joseph Campbell
My wife came to bed
last night wearing
red pajama bottoms
& a white t-shirt --
new stuff she'd bought --
I was asleep & saw
her in them with
a half-submerged eye:
Hey, I murmured from
a sleepy tide-pool,
check out those
red jammies --
then dozed on down.
I dreamed of writing
a poem about a thin
red-headed woman
& then sketched her
in full color on the
same page; then I
signed & dated it
& turned it in
to my boss for payment
like an invoice, along
with more ordinary
workplace bills:
She reminded me
of a woman who
worked at my old
job many years
before, a marketing
assistant who
was thin and pale
with hair like ironed
copper -- all fashion
and cool, too young for
me, of an age I'd passed
but would not release:
Oh how I desired her
red hair and thin hips,
tasting in my heart's
red mouth the strawbs
of her nipples, bright
on such pale, split-
apple skin: Juice and
more juice brimming
a cup I never held in
these real hands: That
memory was drowned
for years & must
somehow been stirred
when my wife came to
bed in those red jammies,
rising real and surreal
on one blue wave:
The sleeping woman
next to me & the
woman swimming
far below, her red
hair down there
faintly glowing in
waterworld, writing
this poem unrepentant
& insatiable & as
doomed as ever:
Soon I go upstairs
to wake my wife, &
imagine myself hugging
her close, my hips
against those red jammies,
my mouth whispering
ocean ocean ocean
in my wife's softest ear.
posted by Brendan MacOdrum at 6:43 AM
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