Egg Head, Crackin'

... We make, although inside an egg,
variations on the words spread sail.

The morning-glories grow in the egg.
It is full of the myrrh and camphor of summer

And Adirondack glittering. The cat hawks it
And the hawk cats it and we say spread sail,

Spread sail, and say spread white, spread way.
The shell is a shore. The egg of the sea

And the egg of the sky are in shells, in walls, in skins
And the egg of the earth lies deep within an egg.

Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.
Have liberty not as the air within a grave.

Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh my native,
In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.

-- Wallace Stevens, "Things of August," II

***

As the hero's labors to expiate guilt are surficial actions of the ego to compensate for the darker tropings of sublime inferiores -- the shadow which knows, eternally, what the hero is forever doomed to throw --

So the hero's sights are set on a goal which seems identical in every surface way to the lost or dreaming princess of his underworld. He is sighted by anima and sees here everywhere in the day's surfaces -- everywhere she cannot be found -- old and new loves, swellings and crests of blue water mantled with hot foam.

Thus shadow and anima are the unknowable and invisible mastheads of the hero's noble brow, a tandem of watery personalities, inchoate and irrational as the unconscious depths they thrive in, demon brother and faery queen of ever labor filial to the day's difficult cause and all that must be sacrificed to make a marriage work.

All lives suffer this tandem, and each is a narrative, for better or ill, of what what learns of them in the harrowing. -- Madness, drunkenness, disease, gross materialism, porn addiction, corpulence, meth decapitation, divorce & etc. run wild in the dark woods we all have to make our way through. -- As well as equally dangerous Charybdal compensations such as sterotypy, literalism, compulsive ordering, exercise addiction, perfectionism, fundamentalist witch-burning or other acts of Republican fascism.

Yet make our way through we do, wounds welling fantastical, older and wiser (maybe): And this sum, this late-August pause between labors, this gestation of knowns, this torpid boob-thirsty suckle on the the thousand erotikons of heavage and cleavage -- this daily wick I light and flicker in the far reaches of cybersapce is like a candle held to a cave wall for the first time in millennia, lamping glyphs of old soul which is wakening, slowly, from an egg.



COMFORT

These poems are breasts
of comfort: plashing waves
on a soft-focus beach. No one
else seems to hear them
though I swear they're real.

As a kid I moved inside
when others played too rough.
There I found the words
for what was missing in the world,
writing over sorrows with blue silk.

Not much has changed these years.
I'm lyric and romantic
in the worst ways, my ironies
lost in sweet sounds which,
like mother's milk, sustain.

This is the banner
I lift in these poems,
a cheery hoist to a bitter wind,
a bonfire by a booming surf
I never found much welcome in.

LUNAR BETRAYALS

How many times have I betrayed you
by the light of that full moon, my oh-
so sea-deep sweetness, exchanging
your reflective swash for that louder-
plashing fire? Such lamps were lit
to find you; and yet my torch replaced
your passage as I ravelled through
the world's desperate, unyielding heart.
The curves and cleavage of those
beginnings became my only end, my
star-tarred greed to plunge what you
only meant as billowy invitation
to drowse toward more richly lucent
shores. Not that you didn't conspire
in part with my betrayal, in thrall
yourself with the signage in my ever-
outward zeal, my heart's frantic
egressing heat the zionist
who pays back every loss of you
by settling on every slickslide same
in all the ways you won't, no,
can't be fully entered.

That moony autumn night
when I was 14 & sat behind Sue
on a parked motorbike no one
was old enough to ride: Surely
you sighed all those honey
bells when when my hands
crept under her t-shirt to
ring those hafts of startlingly-
wobbly warm flesh; surely you
were beaconing me when I
dialed those hard pubescent nipples
-- islands trilling danger in your
equinoctal seas. I squeezed those breasts
in terror and pure desire, flooding
with all the brilliance of that harvest
moon which arched so high above,
its light tolling from an unseen cathedral
where for 30 years now I've daily
prayed and counted out your beads
& feasted on the host.

Not that you didn't lead me
here to fall hopelessly in love
with insides I've never found a way
to enter. My longing is like a wave that
never crosses all the waters
you remit and shore. You've
kept me forever here adrift,
searching for that naked
strand where you wait and
sigh and welcome moons in every tide.

This morning going on 5 a.m.
that big moon is lost to cloud,
the sky a drossy net of blueblack milk
which hides even the itch of my desire
in abyssal folds of paling ink.
Sweet temptress beyond
all tempting sights, I have always
sought to shape a face according
to the ache I felt, believing you
would finally appear on the horizon
when I finally found the shape
your song desired.

See? Even now I'm burning in the
prow of this descending boat down the
deepest fissures of sea cold gloom,
belling all the way down your
wavelike sound, that echo at
the end of every line which
seal-barks in the dark
the siren-warble of infinity
which my most naked love bestows.

For even love is just another
further door into the your
downward-plunging dream, a
bed conjugal to that thrall
which births a darker,
unknowable and unforgettable
gleam. There is a bell-note to this
world, a single deep resound,
the sum of all the waves which
pulse outward from this heart,
which reach, collapse, and
pound in sad returns: A drone
deep on the basalt bed which
aches for the moon we found
and lifted with our kiss.

I want to end this poem right
here and go up and hold my
wife, and squeeze her
incommensurate curves
with hands as trembling as
the ones that ventured
under that young girl's shirt
a hundred lives ago
beneath the silent belling roar
of the one exiling door.
Surely I will lose your there
again, but that's the dance
you love most: Me hearing
wild music everywhere
and not a single coast.



TINCTURE OF ABYSS

... Four-and-twenty from Munster who
went with Ailbe upon the sea to find
the land which Christians never dwell ...

... The confessor who Brendan met in
the promised land, with all the saints
who have perished in the isles of the ocean ...

from "The Litany of Oengus," 6th century

Ferry that tincture here, muse
of equinoctal silk. Ladle black
lactissima from those heavy
breasts barely obscured by
an unbuttoned and bottomless
blouse. Pour in my ear those
three degrees between deep
night and first light. May
my pen refrain that booming
choir which sings night and
day in the Cathedral of
the Sea, a lavish organum
of wave and boulder
on shores no man has walked
nor named, much less
scant dreamed. Throat
that sea-black color
in my voice that I
may sing the wildest
isling of them all,
the one with cliffs
no one has climbed
and a well within
of such sweet silver
that one drink sates
300 years of desire.
I peer in that blueblack
mirror and the fishtailed
man stares back, his
seal-eyes pent on cod
and raven, his smile
like a bell proclaiming
every hoof and fin
that steeples holy hell.
Salt Ys, strike that blue
noir note from the
hard prong aching
in the sea's vast legs
-- that boom in every
wave's orgasmic crash
resounding down the shore
of this life between
the massings of
consonantal stone
and the liquid plash
of what cannot in
words be known. The trick
is not to follow Lycidas
to the hollows of that
wild sound; to brew
sea trouble in a vat
or skull for ages long
enough to tincture
3 drops here: Enough to
shod each wave's resound
with lines hooved loud enough
to reach at last your ears.