Infernal Metres

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!

-- Dante Inferno I.1-5
transl. John Ciardi

***

Yesterday afternoon as Hurricane Katrina unloaded her bursting skirts on Miama-Ft. Lauderdale, up this way the sky revolved widdershins around that vortex, turgid, raining in bursts, quelling, laying still but empurpled with menace. Mother of a migraine crept up my neck as I drove home, surely from the plummeting millebars I thought: but when I got home my wife, who usually suffers headaches in stereo with me when hurricanes approach, was fine, perky even from a call to do some custom work. Hallelujah. I settled on the couch after dinner with an icepack to my neck as we watched "Daily Show" and then part of the rouge Bond movie "Never Say Never" (Connery out of spy retirement for this singular reprise, almost a spoof while doing the best of Bond's moves, interesting harrow of the theme) and the rains quelled to stillness.

I woke in that stillness, almost of a witchy sort, migraine still throbbing in my skull but receding as I began my day's labors here. Checked on the TV before I left for work and saw that Katrina was moving southwesterly into the gulf, away from us: and the drive in to work was immaculate, sunny in the first archons of day, though far to the south I could see a border of cumulus, all the way across the sky, the far rim of that whirling hell.

***

It's important to keep in view (for my work, anyway), these arrivals which drive this time of reiterating sources and feeling out the deeper leys of forward movement, what is to follow:

1. This is a fallow time, bereft of the production of poems that has for long been the primary verbal engine of my day. It coincides with the death-in-late-summer pattern of my history, a void-of-course hinge between one furious season and one of transformation. So there is mortis and sterility and stereotopy, a sense of exhaustion, of having said it all and not knowing what more to add.

2. Yet it is also an exceedingly fertile time, for I dip these daily well-buckets into hidden waters, trying drink from hidden vitalities. It is a time for seeing in the dark with dark eyes, for finding darkness in the light, for sensing the vital undersides, for dowsing and ley-reading, for skull-phrenelogy and harupuscry of vowels. There, in the black abysms of my cerebral folds, my future awaits, finger yet to her lips but swelling with a Name.

3. Thus it is a time for morbid reflection, for mooning and ululating, for letting the balls speak, the cock crow, the unsatisfied heart cry out; a time for standing with Orpheus at the crags of Hades watching the forever unrequieted love forever vanish in a gasp of human failure, expasperation and ringing curse at all the gods. A time for bleeding the hero, allowing his ironclad vigor to fester where it is most blind, to expose the black mother's infernal blue tit and recoinnoiter where that milk still stains my face, healed and whole and productive though I seem (at least to myself).

4. It is thus an attempt to go beyond the sterile bounds of reiteration, to sense and emulate what the heart and mind metamorphoses out in the wilderness, out beyond the last frontier of all the species has struggled to become. Thus I renunciate of harrowed gods and divorce dead traditions, harrowing and blasphemous and soul-chilling that may seem. It is to leave Dante at the ninth circle and descend even further, down and out the puckered anus of Hell, becoming that huge turd Jung saw in his childhood falling on a brilliant church.

5. I do so while still praying on my knees every day for sobriety, and still working hard in the tilled fields of marriage and mortgage and the difficulty of The Life. It is to craft sentences even while I doubt their ends. It is to place ellipses between petting of purring cats on the porch at feeding time and pitching my head into the grinning maw of darkmotherscream. It is to get on my knees at day's end to give thanks for another sober day while a hand trails in the water of the wake of what is closest to the dream, inserting a finger into the wildest cunt of all, casting my fate by Virgilian oracle, obeying whatever part of the text my finger falls on, for better or verse.

***

SETTING OUT

Wendell Berry

Even love must pass through loneliness,
the husbandman become again
the long Hunter, and set out
not to the familiar woods of home
but to the forest of the night,
the true wilderness, where renewal
is found, the lay of the ground
a premonition of the unknown.
Blowing leaf and flying wren
lead him on. He can no longer be at home,
he cannot return, unless he begin
the circle that first will carry him away.



UNDERTOW

1988

My stepdaughter and I body-surf
at Melbourne beach: late midafternoon,
the sun angling lower, a cirrus gauze
across the sky. Vacant condos run for miles.
We battle water out toward the waves:
first a tricky drop-off, then a sand bar.
Small waves break forcefully into us.

She giggles each time a wave hauls
her back, screams for me to take
her hand. We fight to a deep place
up to her shoulders. Here the bigger
waves jostle in, sloppy humps breaking with
little curl but good enough for body surfing.

So I leap into a wave. There's a
a second's hesitation, and then
I'm caught! foaming and battering,
dumped finally at the sand bar. Getting up,
my ears ajangle, I see her
ten yards out and screaming something
lost in the hard salt breeze. She's
ten years old now, struggling to keep
her tiny bikini on, shrieking with joy
each time a wave smacks her.

When the waves recede there's
a hard tug, an undertow not strong enough
to drag us out but I feel it in my ankles,
insistent and calling. She faces
a wave that falls over her, and for
a moment she's gone, there's only the
sea that for years I looked at
with no thought of daughters --

A tiny fist raises out of the turmoil, followed
by her face, sputtering, two fingers pinching
her nose, flashing a huge grin jammed
with teeth. Another wave catches
her from behind. When she comes up
she's coughing, spitting water, a claw hand
searching for me. I can't get there fast enough,
ever. We connect, and she scampers up my chest.
I try to stand strong as the wave hauls bitterly back.

Angie wants more, she pleads
for bigger waves, her fear forgotten
in prepubescent thrall. I'm getting tired,
the sea jostles too hard.
She bounds up and down, waiting for
the next wave to collapse on her.
I watch the horizon for what
I know is there, for what I know
I can't protect her from. And wait.

***

A STEP-FATHER'S FAREWELL

1992

I.

In the summer of 1974 -20 years ago-
my parents separated for the last time.
It was horrible: a rip none of my family
could bear, though we did, and today
each of us is some fruit of that wound,
a healing that continues to ripen.

My father preached back then,
but his words were old like the city we lived in,
worn out like the marriage he had too
long tried to fit into. If he was a
man of the cloth, his had been cut
with strange shears. Priest, father,
husband: none of those roles quite fit him.

My mother-well, she could only be
my mother, a simple married woman.
Home and children and the church
were as far as her heart could embrace.
No more, no less. So when my father
asked to go further my mother cried she
could not. She gathered up my younger brother
and sister and moved forever south to Florida.

I was sixteen that summer, the same age
as you are now. After they left, my father
and my older brother and I worked our jobs
and drank. Drank and worked and drank.
There were so many empty spaces in our houses,
so many empty bottles. I moved to keep
moving, sure I would drown if I stopped.
Yet I never seemed to get anywhere: always
running into what I ran from, haunted by
the possibility of love and the threat of losing it.

II.

You found out this week that your mom and I
are separating-for good, not like our talk from
last summer. I have started to pack my books
and search the neighborhoods for an apartment.
The silence between your mom and I is something
new in six years of marriage. We had been happy,
we had been distant: but never so stiff with each
other as to drive out every sound in the house.

These days you say you just get through.
There are moments you chatter and smile,
laugh about some boy at school who's crazy
about you; but mostly you hide in a cocoon
of hurt. Yesterday I came in your room
to say goodnight and you said nothing in return,
just lay there on your bed staring at the ceiling fan
while music on your radio droned on and on.

And I know its not me, not just me,
not just another separation by your mother-
you and your boyfriend have broken up, too.
He is with another girl. So you say your whole
world has shattered-not only the past
that your mom and I tried to form but also
the future you wanted to move toward.

Thinking of you makes me remember too well
when I was sixteen. The devastation on your face
rises in me undigested from twenty years ago.
How do you keep the wildness down? Does each
day loom ahead as if to swallow you whole?

III.

I write this morning to tell you
that hurting you this way hurts me
more than I will ever be able to find words for.
The last, the very last thing I wanted
to do was to shed fresh blood on my parents'
crime. Trying to do better, am I not
repeating it all, only worse?
How humbling to rise no further than their fall.

Yet I also write to you today to tell you that
all the love, all the joy lies ahead, there is rich milk
pooled in that deep hurting place, its gall sweetens
over time as you take possession of it, when you
suffer the hurt and then walk on, suffer it more
and walk still further. I don't know why,
but sometimes dreams must shatter to come true.

So please remember, step-daughter, young
woman, daughter, friend, buddy of so many
Saturday afternoon matinees, there are no
failures in this world, only mistakes we choose
to either learn from or become imprisoned to.
Your mother and I love you beyond our knowing
ever how to do it right. We are here for you, so
differently than before: each in our own way,
now separately, yet forever united in our love for you.

Balloons to you, lovely one, who once ran up
the hill to me with your arms wide and singing,
"Daddydaddy!" Your smile that day stretches
across my years to heal the place I swore I
could never father. You have turned my heart
into a richer, riper place, a house of sunshine and promise
brushed with the sweet watercolor of our tears.


MISSED CHANCES

Steven Dobyns


In the city of missed chances, the streetlights
always flicker, the second hand clothing shops
stay open all night and used furniture stores
employ famous greeters. This is where you
are sent after that moment of hesitation.
You were too slow to act, too afraid to jump,
too shy or uncertain to speak up. Do you recall
the moment? Your finger was raised, your mouth
open, and then, strangely, silence. Now you walk
past men and women wrapped in the memory
of the speeches they should have uttered-
Over my dead body. Sure, I'd be happy with
ten thousand. If you walk out, don't come back-
past dogs practicing faster bites, cowboys
with faster draws, where even the cockroach
knows that next time he'll jump to the left.
You were simply going to say, Don't go, or words
to that effect-Don't go, don't leave, don't walk
out of my life. Nothing fancy, nothing to stutter
about. Now you're shouting it every ten seconds.
In the city of missed chances, it is always just past
sunset and the freeways are jammed with people
driving to homes they regret ever choosing,
where wives or helpmates have burned the dinner,
where the TV's blown a fuse and even the dog,
tied to a post in the backyard, feels confused,
uncertain, and makes tentative barks at the moon.
How easy to say it-Don't go, don't leave, don't
disappear. Now you've said it a million times.
You even stroll over to the Never-Too-Late
Tattoo Parlor and have it burned into the back
of your hand, right after the guy who had
Don't shoot, Madge, printed big on his forehead.
Then you go town to the park, where you discover
a crowd of losers, your partners in hesitation,
standing nose to nose with the bronze statues
repeating the phrases engraved on their hearts-
Let me kiss you. Don't hit me. I love you-
while the moon pretends to take it all in.
Let's get this straight once and for all:
is that a face up there or is it a rabbit, and if
it's a face, then why does it hold itself back,
why doesn't it take control and say, Who made
this mess, who's responsible? But this is no time
for rebellion, you must line up with the others,
then really start to holler, Don't go, don't go-
like a hammer sinking chains into concrete,
like doors slamming and locking one after another,
like a heart beats when it's scared half to death.

(Cemetary Nights)


PERIL

1994

I have traveled here
casting most of my heart
to the voracious sea
racing a black catamaran
so fast and smart and cruel
slicing the surge
as no family man could,
or would
A lover forever
reaching for the door

They say great poems
require an even greater silence
midnight margins
to write St. Elmo's fire
But my ghosts
are whispering ice
in this tin cup of a night
leaking ichor from my pen
like the spoor of a bad dream

In this tiresome feud
between the art and the heart,
I'm less sure every day
which is the greater peril:
these sails so billowed
with guilt and guile
or the siren swells of a sea
that reach out to
seduce it all back to this.




JOURNAL: DISORDER AND IMPENDING MARRIAGE

July 1996

So much transforms into something
else these days -- a personal culture
whispering new exfoliation --
but the new shoots are so less obvious
than all the dying dead ones,
a crazy-quilt disorder in the everyday
frightening in both pitch and tempo.

This apartment, what a mess,
tub grimed for six weeks now,
a grotto of old dirt and sweat
that may never be wholly scoured,
my bedroom a blizzard
of clothes cast helter-skelter,
the kitchen table littered
with due bills and muffincrumbs.

All the needs of an every day residence
tossed into the certainty
of my other residence in
that more settled life.

And those sexual fevers? maybe its
just those Male Fuel supplements I take
for better hardons but I can't stop
thinking about pussy,
crave my beloved's body and get
the measure of a settled relationship,
not her fault, I know our
primary needs are scored
differently, but my needs
howl and how much I fantasize
jerking off to High Society
fuckbabes and waste those
odd productive moments at
work perusing X-sites on
the World Wide Web,
thrilled by the danger of
leaving so red a trail of
mouse-click -- those footprints
could get me fired --

but the risk, the secrecy,
the excess, the thrill -- heady
excursions are the bane
of potency's balm, heady whiffs
in the drinking, too,
that new permission to
a highly dangerous past,
still surprised by the buzz,
unfamiliar with that gold
dislocation of the moment,
afraid of more than a glass or two,
or a stiff Stoli and cranberry juice.
But the easing, the loosening,
is part of this course, libations taken
for no extraordinarily new pressure,
jut another part of a new landscape,
the next life.

How do all of these sum
in the purchase of a house, an upcoming
marriage, relocation, change
of career? Taking deep possession
of my life, my body possesses me with
these midlife furies!

For now I only speak of these things to you,
verse journal, for speaking truly
is so dangerous and complicated.
Perhaps there is truth in beauty: at least
I come to believe that eloquence
marries madness to clarity,
both ascent and fall
finding resonance and love
in silvery scroll
of these hot clouds raging the moon.

***


Dark life. Confused. Tormented, incomprehensible and fabulously rich and beautiful.

- Tennessee Williams on sex

***

William Carlos Willliams agreed fully with the idea that art must tap the dark anachronistic elements of the self. The artist must not reply in kind when he is criticized by the orderly minded; instead, he must go on composing in a condition which is "a sort of night ... except to himself where, within, there burns a fiery light, too fiery for logical statement."

-- James Guimond

***

FORGETTING IS NOT FORGOING

late August 2000

Forgetting that passionate music
does not mean forgoing timbrel
and thrysus. You cannot learn
to forget ferocity any more than
learn to lean on wind. Look: The day
is shot, mortgaged to labors which
mortar high imprisonment.
That's age: Vapors inside dry
vapidity. Who wouldn't rage?
Or dream of wave and tackle,
groaning spurs, the foam of
sigh and sough? Some self-revenant
unrepentant hunger collapses
the jugular of the rest of this life.
An ache to hurl as widely
and wildly as this late and
aging summer sky. Something right
here destroys the dream
of love back home. On this inexorable
desk fatally cluttered with the same hubris.
Consequence nailing the hours
as surely as any riven passion
which once called you away.
You must change your life,
that much is clear: But everything
right now is in a thunderstorm
blowing everywhere at once
with nothing near that you'd call shelter
much less home.

***

THE FLOOD

2000

Your house by the sea
is not a married one.
You are lonely for your wife
remembering how soft
and open she sleeps,
her pale body curving
and falling around
a green silk nightdress.
There is a girl inside
that woman damaged
perhaps too much
by your careens.
Your heart breaks
thinking of her
and so you call her
saying, I'm coming home.
She does not respond,
her silence both still
and oceanic.
You head to the
bedroom to start
packing a suitcase
when you notice
sea-water mashed
against the window
and rising fast.
Safe where you are
but desperate to
go home to her
you chance the door.
Cold water falls
down on you
in a thundering cascade.
You think you
will drown but in the
next scene you stand
in a room harrowed
but dry: The couch
and table with its
telephone just
the way you
remembered them
from the day before
when all was well
but now ruined and
dangerous to touch.
It is a room haunted
by its drowning,
unliveable and fell.
You wake with a
start to a ringing
telephone. Your wife now
hates you for what
you let in that door
trying to get back to her.




SOME LOVER

2000

you know for someone who
professes to be such a romantic
you aren't much of a lover
she said in one of the angry
exchanges of late when departure
seemed inevitable I like little
gifts that say you're thinking of me
I like men who are animated
and go at things with gusto
who know when to rip my
bra off and take me Hell you
don't even talk much when
we're having sex or eating dinner
I have to fill in those gaps
you don't seem to want love
much at all so passive so wishy washy
not much a man at all

And I thought how true
looking back over years of this
resenting her lack of passion for me
and wild for the trills and purrs
of secret places I hid from her
being a lover inside love is
the blind spot of eros to gallop
inside the curl of the wave
inside the house of the one
woman you have sworn to love
for the rest of your life well now
we're trying at least and she is
begging me to take her yearning
it seems for me inside her
and I feel this big wind fresh
with sea salt slapping and washing
over me I want to yell Hell Yes
not here on the page but right at her
on her in her with her etc cetera
but it's daunting bewildering too
to stand right in the middle of the life
and the wife you love and draw blanks
to feel so silent and passive I hope
therapy will help me take possession
of this love and ride it fiercely inside this life
for now I keep praying and swinging
at every pitch trying to see all the
moist shadows in her trying to learn
the language of love inside love
but I'm like Violet our cat who can't
stand to be hauled up on the bed
unless she's in her box when she
is lifted up in that box and set down
she lets me pet and pet and pet her
and she just purrs away will let
me look at her through a hole
in the box just inches from her face
and she stares so openly and pure
but only when there's a box between us
that's me gotta have a page between
us filled with words in order
to exult in running so wordlessly in love
some lover

***

GOD'S BALLS

2000

like eyes of
blue fire
and lightning
everywhere: Eve
of destruction
on her bed
her white thighs
opening to receive
me. No one may
live in this red
seam between
the fin and foam.
Some frenzies
invoke, others
provoke. Naked
and screaming,
I enter


***

BINDINGS

The etymology
of the word "religion"
suggests a ligament
(ligare) which binds
us back (re) to God: The
Christian binding sucks,
tut-tutting with a
threat of hell loose
gambols in cherrycoke
tits & rye: But the
Church has continued
to provide community
for many, its faith
wrapping the bone
and sinew of strong
& committed good:
For me, the Church
has long died,
sacrificed perhaps at
the altar which
broke my parents'
marriage: But the
notion of religare
is still potent:
Marriage has provided
such a ligament for
me for ten of the
past 12 years: Held
in place there, I've been
free to roam here:
I've launched so
many poems
from the stability of
my study in a house
with a wife asleep
upstairs & a cat
purring at my feet:
Poems which tested
and questioned the
bindings of a marriage
though I always shut the book
and headed upstairs
to stroke my wife awake
when it was time, taking
solace & comfort in
that mutual breathing warmth:
Now I'm separated from my
wife and these lines
sound like a torn ligament:
The spaces are now
too wide and wild
to get on the page:
Free to roam, I don't
know how or where
to start or even if
I want to: There is only
the rages of emotion
in my torn heart:
Well, these poems may
be bad and worse
until I can find the
ligament below or
inside this ruptured one:
I've got to find rituals
and nuptials and
ablutions devout enough
for the stronger
rivers I now flounder in:
Maker, renew
me in the binds
where truth and craft
are sworn and further.

***

Whether "he" be god, priest, or mere mortal man, in order to approach the sacrificial fire, through which alone the heavens can be conquered, he must wrap himself "in the metres." It's good advice. The real punishment of Dante's damned is not this or that torture-many in Purgatory face similar sufferings-but the fact that the torture can know no end ... (Hell) is a place of obsession, a place where time has stopped and thought has become its own prison. To get through it, we must wrap ourself in the metres, for metre obliges us to keep moving. Now we see why Dante chooses as a guide a poet (Virgil) renowned for the perfection of his verse.

- John Hollander

***

METRES FOR HELL

When you're going
through hell, don't stop,
they told me in AA.
Virgil's meters kept
Dante afoot through
all those fuming circles,
but what have I?
Surely not these lines,
though I crank 'em
anyway. Sotted with
Bea's tits bluelit
by an obstinate moon.
Ooh ooh ooh.
Now the salt sting
of love lost, the tidal
ache of a woman
I once loved well
and a life I worked
once so hard for.
All gone now because
I couldn't set still-
Asking stones to
unbind untruths and
so forth. Oh well:
A narrow
path now traces
a third transit, perhaps
a way out. Alone
and working
hard on just one
or two poems.
A little meter inches
me forward. It there
an honest life
devoid of love?
Is that good
enough? Good God,
enough at least
of this bonehacking saw.


BEYOND THE SICK PERSONAL

2001

Drank hard and long
Saturday night trying
not to hurt one woman
with another. Hurt both
with shrill absence.
Fool. Dropping 10-spots
in the laps of curvy
schnapps and grooving
to bands I'll never hear
again. Even met a
third woman fresh from
a 15 year marriage
who readies soon to
leave all this. Defeat,
meet defeat. In the
same place I met my
wife fer Chrissakes.
And O God I was
sick yesterday vomiting
the wrack of excess.
Feeble light, pale classical
musics, my head
a wounded sump
of desire. Couldn't
read a thing til after
3 p.m. Then on a
deck chair on the
porch in the halcyon
calm of a fair winter
day, 72 degrees, sky
perfect and the air
redolent with barking
dogs and neighbors
at their yards. Reading
poems by Wallace Stevens
and wondering why I
write at all when every
penstroke hurts someone
somewhere. Well I had to
write about the outer
dance didn't I. Now remorse
and guilt are inside the
pen before I lift it.
How can I proceed? It's
time to find a new ink,
a different page. Time
to stop this caterwaul
of knowns. Instead
let's do a little strange:
let's dip the pen in
that dark moon mist
which resides and nourishes
beyond the sick personal.


WEDDING RING

2001

"By the Rock of Saint Columba sworn"
reads the inscription on my wedding ring.
But Oran was that slipppery plinth.
the serpent keystone, watery and dark,
bridged between Formorian depths
and churchly ambitons.
Build your house here if you dare.
If some suitable appeasement
can be buried here.
What did I plant for you, my love?
I tried to forget that passionate singing
by resurrecting a bunny hop
of guitars. I wailed on 'em one last time
before laying one by one to rest,
bone by singing-no, shrieking-bone.
But that infernal music lured me away.
I put my head in Oran's mouth
leaving you just an ass
that ended up crapping over paradise.
I keep that ring now by my single bed.
It attends my every rise and fall.
At odd times during the day
I feel a ghost-weight on my finger,
like a stone, and remember all.
Enough apologies, sufficient truth.
"In your heart, my own reborn"
was the part to be inscribed inside the band,
but it wouldn't fit. I still live
in the infernal ring of it.


WORKING IN THE RAIN

2001

1.
We spent the day in the back yard
about chores: you tried to paint a
chest of drawers while I moved
plants about the landscaping
& other odd yard chores. The day
had other plans, though, with the
first rain falling hard at 11 a.m. and
intermittent through the rest of
the afternoon. Still, it was good
to be outside working around this
house we love, working close to the rain.
It sheathes the June sun, falls
so musically over all, and
sweetly blesses what it rinses. While
it rained we sat on the porch with
our feet hanging out. Looking out
at the yard, you said, It's days like this
when I realize how sad I've been. When
I realize how much I don't want to lose this.
And I thought, me too, though I didn't
say it then, because I have done so much
to force us to let this go. I want to
work my way back here if I can.
I have to go down into the labyrinth
and face myself first and figure
out how to return with all of me.
I have to pay an enormous debt.
I have to zip it up and change the tune.
Can I? Sitting with you in the rain
on that fine day, I wonder now
how I could do anything less and live.


2.
There was a blessing in that rain,
history washed clean and you
out in it, a child dancing with joy
at the center of her love, the
life you had returned to and gained
at last until I made you let go.
I was out there too, for a moment,
without a mask or bone of contention,
back to that garden at last,
freer than ever to live my own life
making these poems unnecessary
and moot. We didn't get much work done
though we did linger a good while
in that rain, where everything is
simple and good and waits for us to return.


3.
Formidable challenge:
you and I sitting on the
back porch as it rains
looking at all we have
worked on and for
now spreading its arms
to the sky for that
benediction of storm.
Whatever grabbed me
that moment with wonder
ache and joy now
makes holding this pen
an excruciating task-
As if there was only one
poem more to write
and, failing to catch it well,
there was never a poem
worth writing. Love perhaps
is stronger than any lyric;
love certainly is more
brute and basic than any
verbal ruse I employ
against it. All of it washing
away in that rain when I
just wanted to be home and
back at work on what furthers
the two of us and this poem
merely a puddle after the storm
soaking fast into the ground.
I must write this poem
however I can and know
it could be the last
poem, the water of silence
that blesses as it falls.


A HOMECOMING

Wendell Berry

One faith is bondage. Two
are free. In the trust
of old love, cultivation shows
a dark graceful wilderness
at its heart. Wild
in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds
of what we know. O love,
open. Show me
my country. Take me home.