On Love, Death, and Writing

So here I am in 2005 rousing and writing a Theme which is both new and very old for me, next in the sense that my mind has moved in this direction, yet again in the sense that I keep revolving around a central event now many years in my past. My meditations evolve and exfoliate from wounds, my history in them, my wombing of them in words (which are, according to Emerson, the tomb of the muses).

I wrote A Breviary of Guitars over 18 months from early 1999 into 2000, starting a few weeks after my wife's 19-year-old nephew was killed in a car wreck. The incident reminded me of how Rilke wrote his Sonnets to Orpheus after the death of a 19-year old woman he somewhat knew. In his verses the woman came to be Eurydice, the measure of loss which is the throat of every poet's song. The poem cycle I wrote then -- a sort of verse autobiography, a memoir of music in my life (thus all of those guitars). But as I wrote the poem centered deeper into the women who prompted those songs, or my anguish of every retrieving her back from the dust of time.

And so this poem, written in 2000, looking back on the summer/fall of 1981, somehow fits as the inaugural writing for today's exegesis on the theme of love and death.

SOUL OF MY SOUL

James I do not
know if you lived
long enough
to be nailed so
keenly by the
shaft of Eros:
you were not
much younger
than I and
by the number
of crying pretties
who each lay
a rose on
your silver
coffin surely you
had rode like
the dolphin man
your sea of
desire: But
were you ever
transfixed out
of nowhere into
holy silence?
And rose
afterward
altered forever?
I think not:
Your principle
was what
What Me Worry?
& you ran
happy go lucky
heedless into
the wave that
smashed you on
that forever
distant shore?
Going For It
was your love
and short life's
short work,
heedless of
thought or
consequence: As
a kid that's fine
you can chase
bugs or scream
down the sidewalk
& arrive mostly
unscathed but
as an adult with
money and
substances that
fire and slay
in the same
swig & toys
that go over
100 mph, well,
Cupid's boy
joys are perilous
in the life
& death coil
of Eros: James
I can imagine
not living but
how infernal
it must be
not to desire?
Not to rest
my face in the
warm bellows
of my wife's ample
chest: To come
to one last
white page and
know my pen
will not flow
down further:
Yikes: My boy
toys all hearkened
me toward the
sweet dark of
a woman's body:
Playing doctor
or Ringmaster
Ned or the
Patient in
the Woods:
Alone I playacted
Bond to whup
the archvirile
shadow of
the world &
get the girl
in the final
triumphant
credits: Sketch
pad, journal,
guitar, fretboard,
all received
my aches and
arches like
wadded Kleenex
of soul
but safely:
Eventually I
always find my
way out
beyond the
thorns to
a woman's
naked vale
& I have always
taken what
I though I
could: Was
shocked wide
open by a
scant week of
Becky's pillow
sighs & for
3 years wandered
through some
purgatory of
the low tide
she washed
away on:
Down in
Florida I
exhausted every
avenue I thought
she'd disappeared
down & had
grown utterly
cynical of the
search: Just
when I said
fugettaboutit
I bump into
Kay and this
royal wave
rose up outta
nothing and
washed every
notion I had
of love away:
A couple of
nights after
that first long
night I drove
into south
Orlando to
see Kay where
she lived
with her parents,
she rebounding
from a 4 year
stint with some
soccer star and
working nights
as a programmer
for ABC Liquors:
When she
opened the door
for me I
nearly collapsed,
seeing her just
as I'd left
her -- wide
open to me
in her smile
inviting me
in: I greeted
the folks like
I usually do,
wooing them
with sweet
charm (the
parents always
love me, to
the girls'
dismay): Kay
and I drive
off into the
last gold light
of the day,
lawn sprinklers
hissing and heat
rising into night
in expectation
and slow
ululation:
Over untouched
drinks at some
fern bar I
try to play
it cool as
we exchange
data which hardly
has anything
to do with this--
how I write
(maybe a novel
someday) and
would like to
get a band
going again --
Kay tells me
about working
nights and hoping
to move in with
her sister --
but all of
this is just
a drone in
front of what's
shouting in
her green eyes
& smiles:
The riptide
is inexorable:
& so soon
I'm out there
blurting how
I'm falling so
deeply in love
with her & can't
stand to be
a second away
from her &
she closes her eyes
& sighs yes
o yes
& we're outta
there & driving
in my car
anywhere her
fingers tugging
at my zipper
& pulling out
& kneading my
rockhard cock
& I can hardly
see the road
& then we're
behind some
bank in a parking
lot & Kay
astraddle me
pumping for
all she's worth
mashing her
breasts in
my face &
crying I
want to have
your baby
& it's minutes
before we
hear the
security guard
knocking at
the window:
Lord it's been
almost 20
years since those
nights when
the knot of fire
raged between
us & still my
pen gallops ahead
heedless of
the strain urgently
trying to write
the words down
as they fly:
Nothing approximates
those few moments
of arrival and
erasure in the
hot alembic of
perfect
chemistry: Kay
surely was one
of the most
seamless unions
I have ever
known: At
least for one
two maybe
three nights:
But I know
now it wasn't
Kay who
transfixed me
on my cross
of desire:
her green
eyes shouting
yes o yes
in the dark
of that parking
lot were just
the nails:
The ancient
Greek lyric
poet Meleager
said it right
when he wrote
"In my heart
Eros himself
created sweet
voiced Melissa,
the soul of
my soul": For
a time Kay
was the soul
of my soul,
sent by Eros
as a doublebarbed
arrow of sweet
and bitter and
grace and curse
and ocean
and eternal pit:
That music
deafened my
rock rages
with roses
and nipples:
"I swear, I
swear it
by Eros," I /
Would rather
hear her whisper
in / my ear
than listen
to Apollo
playing his lyre,"
quoth Meleager
again, a
startling statement
for a poet
of the ages
but infernally
true: Do you
think you
prefer to sit
here writing of
lost loves and
not-so-timeless
rock n roll
when I
could instead
be yet riding
that wave, the
shape of pure
dolphin abandon?
Ah but who
ever gets to
choose such
things: Cupid is
whimsical and
scattershot:
Adult Eros
marries Psyche
& trades his
wings for the
daily labors of
earthbound
love: Yet he
never stops
being a lover:
And that old
magic music
entrances me
still: It winds
throughout
and down this
descending
stair of
memory which
I call Breviary:
I chase old
loves in the
Otherworld of
crafted dream
& return with
a ring of
fire within
my gold wedding
ring: A sulphurous
lion mates the
vernal queen:
At week's end
Kay and I
drove out
to New Smyrna
Beach where
we registered
at some surfside
hotel as a
married couple
and climbed at
last into
the cool sheets
of a bed:
Labial folds
of naked
softly plashing
surf in
a darkened
room and the
two of us
clenched in
our coil
of immortal
fire, panting
rising spasming
& littering sleeve
after sleeve
of Fourex on
the floor: The
next morning
we walked on
the beach --
me in shorts
and Kay in a
bikini which
fit her loosely
(relics of
a past season,
of an old
passion) --
The sun just
up from an
eastern marl
of cloud, soft
801⁄4 breezes, the
sea a quilt
of coral
and cerulean
folds with
crest of spermlike
foam, sandpipers
flittering by
our feet:
Kay had stopped
to pick up
a shell and
when she rose
up again to
look at me
with her back to
the sea &
the sun flooding
her every
hair and soft
full curve
with the
richest ripest
most pernicious
gold & in
that instant
she was Thetis
or Circe
or Aphrodite
herself just
off the
foam of the
old father's
balls: Freeze
that moment
and fire it
from the
bow of bios
right through my
birthmark &
deep into my
soul to
pierce the soul
of my soul,
harrowing me
with an
utter presence-
in-absence
I will
forever sing:



ISIS RISING


From The Golden Ass: The Transformations Lucius by Apuleius, transl. Kennedy (1998)

'It was not yet midnight when I awoke with a sudden start to see the full moon just rising from the sea-waves and shining with unusual brilliance. Now, in the silent secrecy of night, was my opportunity. Knowing that his greatest of goddesses was supremely powerful; that all human life was ruled by her Providence; that not only all animals, both tame and wild, but even lifeless things were animated by the divine power of her light and might; that as she waxed and waned, so in sympathy and obedience every creature on earth or in the heavens or in the sea was increased or diminished; and seeing that Fate was now seemingly satiated with my long tale of suffering and was offering me a hope, however late in the day, of rescue: I decided to beg for mercy from the awesome manifestation of the goddess that I now beheld. At once, shaking off my sluggish repose, I jumped up happily and briskly, and eager to purify myself I plunged into the sea. Seven times I immersed my head, since that is the number which the godlike Pythagoras has told us is most appropriate in religious rituals, and then weeping I uttered my silent prayer to the all-powerful goddess.

"Queen of heaven, whether you are Ceres, nurturing mother and creatrix of crops, who in your joy at finding your daughter again set aside the ancient acorn, fodder for wild beasts, and taught man the use of civilized food, and now fructify the ploughlands of Eleusis; or whether you are Venus Urania, who in the first beginnings of the world by giving birth to Love brought together the opposite sexes and so with never-ending regeneration perpetuated the human race, and now are worshipped in the sanctuary of sea-girt Paphos; or whether you are Phoebus' sister, who by relieving women in labour with your soothing remedies have raised up many peoples, and now are venerated in your shrine at Ephesus; or whether you are Proserpine of the fearful night-howling and triple countenance, you who hold back the attacks of ghosts and control the gates of hell, who pass at will among the sacred groves and are propitiated with many different rites; you who brighten cities everywhere with your female light and nourish the fertile seeds with your moist warmth and dispense according to the motions of the Sun an ever-changing radiance; by whatever name, in whatever manner, in whatever guise it is permitted to call on you: do you now at last help me in this extremity of tribulation, do you rebuild the wreck of my fortunes, do you grant peace and respite from the cruel misfortunes that I have endured: let there be an end of toils, an end of perils. Banish this loathsome animal shape, return me to the sight of my friends and family, restore Lucius to himself; or if I have offended some power that still pursues me with its savagery and will not be appeased, then at last let me die if I may not live."

Such were the prayers that I poured forth, accompanied with pitiful lamentations; then sleep once more enveloped my fainting senses and overcame me in the same resting place as before. I had scarcely closed my eyes when out of the sea there emerged the head of the goddess, turning on me that face revered even by the gods; then her radiant likeness seemed by degree to take shape in its entirety and stand, shaking off the brine, before my eyes. Let me try to convey to you too the wonderful sight that she presented, that is if the poverty of human language will afford me the means of doing so or the goddess herself will furnish me with superabundance of expressive eloquence.

First, her hair: long, abundant, and gently curling, it fell caressingly in spreading waves over her divine neck and builders. Her head was crowned with a diadem variegated with many different flowers; in its centre, above her forehead, a disc like a mirror or rather an image of the moon shone with a white radiance. This was flanked on either side by a viper rising sinuously erect; and over all was a wreath of ears of corn. Her dress was of all colours, woven of the finest linen, now brilliant white, now saffron yellow, now a flaming rose-red. But what above all made me stare and stare again was her mantle. This was jet-black and shone with a dark resplendence; it passed right round her, under her right arm and up to her left shoulder, where it was bunched and hung down in a series of many folds to the tasselled fringes of its surface shone a scattered pattern of stars, and in the middle of them the full moon radiated flames of fire. Around the circumference of this splendid garment there ran one continuous garland all made up of flowers and fruits. Quite different were the symbols that she held. In her right hand was a bronze sistrum, a narrow strip of metal curved back on itself like a sword-belt and pierced by a number of thin rods, which when shaken in triple time gave off a rattling sound. From her left hand hung a gold pitcher, the upper part of its handle in the form of a rampant asp with head held aloft and neck puffed out. Her ambrosial feet were shod with sandals woven from palm-leaves, the sign of victory. In this awesome shape the goddess, wafting over me all the blessed perfumes of Arabia, deigned to answer me in her own voice.

"I come, Lucius, moved by your entreaties: I, mother of the universe, mistress of all the elements, first-born of the ages, highest of the gods, queen of the shades, first of those who dwell in heaven, representing in one shape all gods and goddesses. My will controls the shining heights of heaven, the health-giving sea-winds, and the mournful silences of hell; the entire world worships my single godhead in a thousand gods; the native Athenians the Cecropian Minerva; the island-dwelling Cypriots Paphian Venus; the archer Cretans Dictynnan Diana; the triple-tongued Sicilians Stygian Proserpine; the ancient Eleusinians Actaean Ceres; some call me Juno, some Bellona, those on whom the rising and those on whom the setting sun shines, and the Egyptians who excel in ancient learning, honour me with the worship which is truly mine and call me by my true name: Queen Isis."'






In their desire to retrieve what was lost to them Demeter and Dionysos both prostitute themselves, bargaining for entry into the land of Hades. Their desire is deep -- Demeter longs for her daugher Persephone, and Dionysos wishes to resurrect his mother Semele -- greater perhaps than the loss of Orpheus, the mortal, who loses his wife Eurydice on their wedding day (before even love is consummated).

These two gods offer a sexual sacrifice to gain entry to Hell. Demeter gives herself to the mortal Celeus -- king of Eleusis -- in gratitude for his revealing the secret of where Persephone has been abducted to. And Dionysos violates himself with a fig branch tied to a gravestone. They each allow the finite to penetrate their infinite essence; thus their entry into Hell is sacri-orificial, the portal down into the realm of the loss is through their own violation and diminishment of essence.

The bargain with Hades which frees Persephone and Semele occurs later in the narrative; first, the sexual wounding, the sacred prostitution. (So too with Orpheus; the fangs of the underworld serpent penetrate the foot of Eurydice, causing her to fall into the springtime grasses of a field. This causes him to take his song, which caused all of living creation to circle him in wonder, down into the realm of death.)

The return of beloveds is conditional, and has great import on days that remain. Demeter may return to life to the degree which she has taken sustenance in the realm of death, but since she has eaten seven pomegranate seeds, she may only resurface for five months. Hades promises Dionysos to let his mother Semele go on the condition that he give up something dear to him. Dionysos considers for a while, then offers up the myrtle, once the plant of fragrant sex sacred to Aphrodite. By giving it to Hades, the myrtle is imbued with something other than wild sex --- that certain scent of forever lost love.

In both cases, what results is an admixture of love and death, something bittersweet, fragrant and acrid at the same time, hot and cold, wild and remote, soft and hard as rigormortis. The year now is a mixture now of spring-summer and autumn-winter, light and dark seasons which anchor the human heart to its mortality. And love is sweet as a rose with all the bloody thorns rounding it, hot with a passion which immortally dies. Eros and thantaos become faces of one coin, the one we desire which spends us endlessly. Poppies bloom wildly at this borderland, rich with our fantasies of endless love, embowering at their core the dark undertow of Hades' rippling arms, hauling all that sweetness down to the land beneath the land beneath the wave.




Something of this divine prostitution occurs whenever we seek to bring life to our sentences. Writing is a homonym for both the writhing of the chthonic snake as well as whitening of alchemical tort, a putrefying and calcinating process which deadens and ghosts and revitiates my experience in words which are set on paper. I want to arouse you, the reader, to experience the same paradox of death-in-life I have found on my road to hell and back.

The stories of the Gods were passed on as central ineffables, mysteries of wonder and awfulness which represented our extremes, great for stories but tragic when personal magnitudes swept us from normal days into the fires of personal hells. Living the story is to stray into inferno; telling the story provides a sufficient altar of ever-burning flame as to keep surface days safe.

Creative exegesis -- my perambulation to my past and back -- thus is Orphic, delving back to the beach she and I walked on that day lives ago, the day Isis rose from the Ocean and Death gripped my mortal love's heart, turning her face forever away from me. I try my best to show you how I was pierced by that loss, invulnerable young man no more, and how my passion to get her back took me down a blackened road of abysms, room after ghastly room of sexual offerings, trying to find her face again in all the lovers who weren't, who couldn't mirror both rising moon and falling sun.

My paragraphs (or poetic stanzas) descend down the page in the manner of what harrowed me down there, what I lost forever and what I thus gained, a floating embrace at the bottom of things, a gaze which now permeates the dark of this hour and the light soon to come. Exegesis as peristalsis, a lifeblood's circulation out and back, the wave's long immrama from the hole in my heart I furrowed trying to find her again out to distant empty shores, the fading echo of Eurydice's voice as she fades forever from view.

Soon when I head upstairs to get back in bed with my wife and slowly stroke her feet the way she loves, my fingers on her soles will ferry on all I can't quite say here, an infinite gentleness calyxed in the white rose I must lay on the coffin of Persephone, she who lives below and ever returns, if just for this short while.


(note: Much of the source material on the sexual sacrifice of Demeter and Dionysos as part of their desire to return loved ones from death is taken from Chapter 7 of Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony


MACODRUM

It is given to them (the seal-
tribe of MacOdrum) that their
sea-longing shall be land-longing
and their land-longing shall
be sea-longing.
-- South Uist farmer

Shall I forever row
this rock which flaunts
below so brute a tail
and brogues the wind
like wings? Standing
here do I ride the wave
which answers every
shore with a hallowed
blue recede? I was just
the next nude nallie
to lose his skin to
your embrace, doomed
to build the lives ashore
with the greater half
of the three hearts
forever pursed in blue.
Half-man, half fish,
between the worlds I
weave my three songs
of fin and breast and
thrall, that music
riven as the tide
which pounds these
rocky cliffs where
you are least of all.
Will you ever give
me back my skin,
that oiled black coat
which I must wear
to dive full back to
the single world,
free of doubletalk at last?
Shall I woo you or connive,
do I ravage the verses
or mount the mare I ride?
Such strategems
I dream atop this lonely
rock which is my writing
chair, reaching out as
far as I know how
to kiss the cross still
burning there, inscribed
aeons ago when love
was young and I woke
in your arms, a naked,
fresh-borne man 18 miles
out to sea with no
way ever to go home.
Your breath has
stayed in my ear
for all these lives,
like the sea inside
a shell, a shining
blue tide my song
has slowly pickled in.
Three cups, three
heavens, three purgatories
here beyond the ninth
wave you folded and
crashed over me --
a charnel house of
every thrill and thrall
to fade from blue to black.
I hear the selkies singing
on moony nights as
this an hour from
first light: I write
their sealskins down.
Inside this oratory
on high rock I
nail that strange music
to my own, a revenant
still revenant of
the blue which
drowned my bones.



CAMELLIAS

Dave Smith

Something with claws, with trap-spring teeth
honed, shining where leaves peel
back from midnight's folds,
is intent and desperate beyond
the imagination where I look,
howled awake: a few
luscious petals suddenly are shaken,
so I think guilt always
keeps just behind the heart.
In beauty something is jerking a small other
apart, breaking the slight bones,
the cross-stitched sinews,
its tongue drawn like a shaving knife, abandoned
where it hunches. Nothing answers
either, only the silence hiding
the scream that came,
pitiful as the nightmare in the ear
of the lover. It is
no decent hour but I ease from my bed's cool,
step down the blind corridor
with my nakedness swaying, then
paw for the switch. Harms I might do rise
like a fester of wings when I throw
the light of revelation over our backyards,
into bedrooms. What makes me
heave it as indifferently as a hunting sun?
Instantly something clenches
the earth, digs in, doesn't
bolt, lifts itself to see, mouth partly open,
the tiny tongue in throat-black,
and throat as well, disguised but pink
as the unfolded, dewy crenellations
of camellias uncountably opening
themselves in seasons
pure as Florida. It is all framed
by the flawless black meat and fur coiled
upon itself like night-after-night.




Song of Myself
Section 8

Walt Whitman

The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with
my hand.

the youngster and the redfaced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.

The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bathroom,
It is so . . . . I witnessed the corpse . . . . there the pistol had fallen.

The blab of the pave . . . . the tires of carts and sluff of bootsoles and talk
of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb,
the clank of the shod ;horses on the granite floor,
The carnival of sleighs, the clinking and shouted jokes and pelts of
snowballs;
The hurrahs for popular favorites . . . . the fury of roused mobs,
The flap of the curtained litter - the sick man inside, borne to
the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd - the policeman with his star quickly
working his passage to the center of the crowd;
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
The souls moving along . . . . are they visible while the least
atom of the stones is visible?
What groans of overfed or half-starved who fell on the flags
sunstruck or in fits,


What exclamations of women taken suddenly, who scurry
home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here ...
What howls restrained by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances,
rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the resonance of them . . . . I come again and again.