The Hero's Guilt (4)

ULTIMA THULE

Every voyage has its furthest
shore, its Ultima Thule
beyond which no prow
has ever beached. Upon
that iciest strand my
heart loses its last heat
for your and,
wearied and grieved
beyond its pale,
turns to look
back fondly on the
courses home, embracing
not your salt absence
but the welcome
of those knowns, the simple
grounds on which I
built a home
after you at last were
gone -- today
it's chair and
blanket, the writing pad,
window opened to
that singular
view on cool garden
and street still too
darkened by night
for more than some
streetlight up there,
a light over a red
door across the street.
Every morning at
this time, my matins
tolled out, I yawn
and yearn to get
back in bed with my
wife and slip away
into the transit that
will take me home.
If only your music
like a tidal weren't
still ringing in my
ear when I slip back
to sleep for for that
hour before the real
day starts, waking me
with lines too dark
and dripping with the deep
to flow sensibly
from my pen. If only
the sand of that
ultimate shore were not
still grained between
my toes, perhaps
forever, driving my
thoughts yet again
from here to your
blue there, making
this pen ache to
blade again that
salt infernity. Fool.
No matter what I find
out beyond the marge
of this known bourne,
I always find myself
alone & looking back
to this safe harbor.
Each time I've
docked and tethered,
I look back out
and wonder
if the next voyage
will take me further
still. This rhythm is
my master, guide and
curved lacunae,
my metier and in
a cupless bacchanal
composed between
those ever distant isles
and my wife first
waking, sleep-soaked smile.

NEKYIA

Without a prayer,
these falls are cruel;
without ritual wraps,
the cold is killingly
dark, stripping and
flaying the coracle
of my ass like
the houndage of Hell.
I've found it dangerous
to sail sans pen and
book, drowning down
a bottles neck in search
not of dark truths
but their uteral burn,
their cold fire. What's
an addict but a monk
whose tossed his book
to the sea, babbling
a blue inpropriety?
The chaos sings to
of a killing plunge,
of upturned asses on
sheets of blue stain,
of dreamlike hellbent
furrows past God,
past love, past this
noisy, chilblained
chainage to life.
No more of that
black winging for me --
Now I dip my feathers
here at the same
predawn hour, the
cat always in the window
the dark soaking
into this page,
exhuming all I
wish I could say
but can't, though I must.
Maybe its just lack of
balls that rivets me here
on the chalice dipping
the Well, hauling up
waters cold as hell
for your thirst, absent
reader, beloved I'll
never truly see: But
at least I know that
now, and trade the
old jackal jaw gildings
for this singing geldage.
My questing for
real grails always left
me bankrupt & on
the iron ledge of the
tallest bridge with only
one word left--leap.
None of that here folks,
no sirree; just dutiful
descriptions of what
it feels like stepping
out onto the feathers
of the wind soaring
up at me, angels of
that hard north wind
where all the devils
go, buckets of banshee
riot jissomed up from
the Well which allows
me today another story
to tell of one more
harrowing of a
common and fructive
and nougating hell.


TWO AT THE WELL

A well requires four hands
to ward its mortal
and immortal
doors -- priest and
goddess, man,
mermaid. See: My hand
at this bucket turns
pale and webbed when
it dips the blue,
then resumes its hairy
rigor when I toss
it back to you on this page.
What you feed is yours
it's said when you
put food out for strays.
That momma cat and
her kittens now romping
on our back porch are
our charge now, and so
we must do what we can
to catch, examine,
treat, neuter and spay,
acts which war with their
ferally free moods.
Real love draws from
deeper down, where
waters run both cold
and too clear. So in
this well: I dug down
here and tapped a source
which brims old skulls
with song. Each day
I come to the edge
and halloo on down,
my ears a bell for
what comes up. Does
it matter that no one
cares to hear? Not when
I'm God's left ear,
writing down distaff
and rear, the darker
harmonies which chorale
inside this next,
wakening day. And always
a dark waits below, my
underworld betrothed,
jealous now and jaded
from all my fickle,
dilletantish dives.
I think back to the
summer of '94 when,
believing myself freed
from dry surface chains,
flung myself into writing
poems in a well which proved
too real. During that torrid
season I found a woman
whose waters called me
far away. I recall long nights
in late July when we'd thresh
and thrash on my again-
bachelor bed, sucking
til we nearly drowned
in what rose too freely
from the other. Outside
the last of storms ebbed
into a late-night, moist
hush, a mist equal in
thickness to the air
in our room. Night
and nocturne in mutual
soak. However, as votives
of real waters, though,
that purely mortal cup
could not fill up enough.
Such love never springs
eternal, not when greed
so drowns us all.
There is a Welsh well
that was bounded by
a door: Each draw
was done with care
because some depth
so wanted out. And then
one night someone left
the door ajar, and all
that water crept out.
By morning the field
had become a small lake.
Another version of the tale
has it that a mermaid
ruled the well, and that
she herself forgot to close
the door, and so lost
her home -- all drowned.
Some say late at night
she walks high grounds,
near the lake, grieving
her luckless fate. I fucked
up those summer nights
ten years ago, the properly
imagined well inside
abandoned for a
treacherously living one,
the poem I wrote of it
doused to hilt in salt.
Poor fool me. Nowadays
I keep the worlds apart,
faithful to this well
at the darkest of A.M.s,
and when its time
I clasp the books
and go upstairs into
a dark bedroom and
climb in bed with
my wife, gently
stroking her feet,
calling to what I know
is there, ignoring what is
not. And she who stays
within the well trusts me
now only as far as she
should, and keeps to her
side of the door, revealing
her face to me far within
this sweet rich summer mist.