The Great Bells of Heaven (2)

THALASSA

Travel down the monkey's ass &
You'll find a fish's tail, finned for
Sailing the biggest womb of all.
Beyond foolery, these motions
Are more riven, nigh desperate
To swim and fuck and eat. That's all.
That road is five hundred million
Years long; and deep, too, sounding some
thirty thousand leagues of salt blue.
The fish's tail hangs from my own a
Very long ways back and down; that's
Good comfort as I fan ahead
With my tribe, who think their brains have
Brighter synapses than the sea's.
May all I fling swim deep in thee.

***

Doomed to repeat the story: that's culture, our backwards-yearning, womb-entranced surf-splashed yearn to journey home to the Mother, foregoing balls along the way. (There's Attis, castrato devotee, hung on a tree for Cybele; there's Aphrodite, rising from the sea exactly where the father's balls were lost.)

And there's civilization, manned in consciousness, sharp as a tack, devious, outraging Mother Nature with its contra-natural devices, replacing nature with forges, brass angels, iron lungs. The civilizing hero struggles to be free of that homewarding impulse: he voyages, lays claim to territory, builds cities with high walls against the dark. He is defiant of the gods, steals their fire, he tosses them into the ditch, he becomes the father, he replicates the world with words and then makes words the world of his supremacy. Why else write? Why else keep writing? What am I expecting to find, there beyond the last line of the last poem?

So I strive to complete (or best??) my father's work, to ratify my elders and then rarify beyond them. I build on their ediface; I radicalize their foundations. Thus the work proceeds. And as the work proceeds it nuances, hefts, flavors with depths it engages. What are balls, anyway, but kettledrums of spirit, the light which is ferried and wombed and delved from darkness, the way the sun wakes every day from the sea? Out there history and mystery mix, like a marge, of shore and sea composed, infinitely close to the mother but of a different order. "Forget that passionate music," Rilke tells us in his Third Sonnet to Orpheus -- it is not about merging with a beloved, not even The Beloved -- "that will end. / True singing is about nothing / A gust inside the god / A wind." (transl. Mitchell).

I've quoted that same phrase here recently -- indeed, it's been a sort of mantra for the production of poems over the past 6 years, leading me on the bow of bios out from home and back to a semblance of that story though spiritualized, internalized, moved to a different chakra, I dunno -- transformed by its fire. Spirit -- the semen of the father -- radicalizes the world from its roots, tears loose, breaks free, lifts and soars the imagination, even as it arches the interior spaces of the Queen of Heaven. Hercules -- or Herakles, meaning "The Glory of Hera" -- is the birth of every child, every new thought, every next moon, the pure futurity of fate, doomed to look with backwards-longing eyes upon a gate it takes great balls to progress through.

***

Xvarenah is represented as a sacred, seminal, luminous and fiery fluid ... (it) is not only "holy" (divine, superterrestrial), "powerful" (it really "makes" the kings and heroes), "spiritual" (it engenders intelligence, bestows wisdom) and "solar" (and thus "fiery" and iridescent); but it is also "creative."

-Mercea Eliade, "Spirit, Light, and Seed"


***

PATRI ARCHON

Pray to paper and paper
will delve rams of blue fire
which real lips may never suck
and that's OK with me, though
the sweaty peripheries would
be nice too. The sun god's car
is real enough, growing restless
in the Atlantic hours to the east;
I can sense its yolk-like visage
breaking at the margins
of this black early satch
of eternal sweet dreamtime,
a phallic brute in his 3-wheeled
hot car, erect & straining to hatch.
The principals were named here
long ago. When I was 18 and
visiting my newly outed father
in New York City, he took
me round the gay bars one night
at the depths and rough edges,
as much to show me his world
as to show his world me,
tall blonde youth just barely
cracked from his virginal shell,
childhood & God on this
shore behind & the readiness all,
ready to spill or receive all
that dark gold. I recall a bartender
with a face like cement hung
with a heavy black moustache,
wearing overbulgy jeans &
a black leather vest showing off
biceps and tattoos -- no fauning
foppery there or in my father,
a man's man showing his son
the secret turbines of a sex
turned wholly on itself, enthralled
with that muscular dark horse
pounding fast and loose with
clappering clobbers of hooves.
I was terrified to take a piss,
much less admit the old male
mojo hanging like incense
in that joint. Still it was an
ennobling jaunt, empowering
somehow, for soon after
I grooved my wheels toward
every woman's thighs to
shore the catalogue of my
own nocturnal rows. I didn't
quite become the man my
father found in that wood
but the fish-god patriarch
who sailed him on to vitaller
more fructive gods
of wind and stone,
that salted divinity
nailed the son but good
to shores beyond
the rails of simple lust
into a dappled and
more perplex ire,
with rays of spermatic fire
soon to gild the surf's dark foam.
Whatever my father
showed me that night now
30 years lost with the tide
is coming home again --
a father now myself
to a burning book
I delve on paper sands.


CAPE BLUE BALLS

O nymph, loveliest of all the ocean,
though my existence gave you no joy,
what did it cost you to beguile me
with mountain, cloud, dream or void?

-- Adamastor, titan-spirit of the Cape
of Good Hope in Camoes' "The Lusiads"


Love drew You here -- OK, desire,
that full ache of wave in gale,
a blueballed bull frenzy which cannot
think of higher things till the lower
ones get done, bull balls to walls
of salty hoochacha, thighs
flung like shores of a roaring
deep-contessa sea. A woman I was
dating tentatively after my first
marriage smiled when I at last
proposed that we make love;
you mean you want to fuck me,
she said with an evilly
complicit sigh, and the whole
space we'd built shifted and
went tumbling down the red maw
of the wave which hurled itself again
and again and again between us
the lovers become the cry of surf
relentless on wild shores. We both
wanted it bad that hot summer
of hurled storms, but what that
was could not be slaked with what
our sexes marshalled to the task
-- cock in cunt, tongue to clit
or slathering sperm foam,
teeth nailing sharp desire
to screamed nipples, balls drumming
on asscheeks, no: None
of those red permutations would
equate, and that was where I
found You, my yowling Cape,
the awe in every awesome clinch
augmenting every futile Yes!
my love and I kept shouting
at each other as we teased the
fragrant sprite from each others'
loins. You never recovered from
the lust which betrayed You
to rock and shore and storms
to nth infernity; here at this
quietest hour, love and age
distill me to I yet war on
with dry eternity, choosing
still to roger on, the old sea-bull
between my knees, his horns
ramming toward the pure
puerile wilderness of swelter,
panties dangling from the lees.
Desire drew You here, but
love of that hard ache is what
is loudest on this page
and is the bawling rage
of every angel jism to
splash the harrows of Your Cape.
Here where nothing ever quite
gets done will nothing else quite do.
Red in royal amplitude
and every wild a smiling blue.


THE WAY THROUGH

The polarity of the Earth shifts
every ten thousand years or so,
north to south, causing all maps
to invert their orients, what's
true turned upside down. Similarly
the sex of our God swings from
her to him and back, carrying our
sacreds in the tide. The dancing
man of Trois Freres was surely
father to the hunt, the Great
Mother the auguress of grain
planters. Then the sun chariots
rolled in and through with their
glorious heroic horses and
then the cult of Mary, Queen
of Heaven, whose womb could
grow a Christ & whose heart
was portalled in the great
rose windows of cathedrals.
Our rabid technical age spins
on the wheels which crushed
her, with furious haunches
speeding ever faster. Whatever
we would further must go
into the bog, to propitiate
and arouse the virility of sames.
We think it's duration we
desire but only so we can
throw our seed deep enough
to engender our secret other,
the shadowy spouse whose embrace
slakes our god til he drowns,
til nothing is left but a
slow egressing sound of
hearts turning the other way
around, praising not the
resonance but an emptiness
which fills the other way.
Here's the fire I stole
from your fertillist womb,
now the digital aura
of Northern Lights underground.
All I shout I remit here
at the southern end of the world,
at Your Cape Blue. And thus sail through.