The Peace of Dark, Wild Things

DARK MOON, MIDSUMMER

A dark moon heralds
the deepest mordents
of this wild summer.
The stillness of this black
hour is now a knell,
the sable intermezzo
singing from a lush,
sea-bottomed night.
Surely this is
the shadowy nadir of
recent days rousing
hot and hotter still,
their burning augments
the sulfurous apogee
of this lost-mooned soak.
What poem shores
both spear-hurled days
and their furthest marks
down the swell
of noctal, blickered seas?
I wait; I listen; I move
my hand ruddered by
the next blue canto
I'll not quell or understand
til the dark-mooned
hallows of early summer
have been harrowed, til
every hellish feather
of its swooning wings
has been notched and
arrowed back to the author
of its inky majescule.
Here's the first one,
too black to find much
contour of, a jet of
blindest spoor
which may be a door
through the bottom of a night
which burns and sings and
oh so preternaturally rings.
Hearken if you can listen
with darkmooned ears,
the very holes in God's heart
where nothing tides
so gorgeously in and out,
so rich and dark that
no page can ever sustain
that sound that does not
also drown. And thus proceed.



I soak this daily meditations in the deepest dark of the night, my mind a moon swimming in the murk of the heart, not so much seeking as soaking phosphor through the verbal gills, like oxygen from water.

Erich Neumann, in "On the Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness":

"It is not under the burning rays of the sun but in the cool, reflected light of the moon, when the darkness of unconsciousness is at the full, the the creative process fulfills itself; the night, not the day, is the time of procreation. It wants darkness and quiet, secrecy, muteness, and hiddenness. Therefore, the moon is lord of life and growth in opposition to the lethal, devouring sun. The moist night time is the time of sleep but also of healing and recovery. ... It is the regenerating power of the unconscious that in nocturnal darkness or by the light of the moon it performs its task, a mysterium in a mysterium, working from out of itself, out of nature, and with no aid from the head-ego. This is why healing pills and herbs are ascribed to the moon and their secrets guarded by women or, better, by womanliness, which belongs to the moon."

There's a lucency to dead hours, an amperage of black batteries which surely drives the hooves of Hades' car, dark knowledge which groins and flowers in dark uterals, not so much conceiving and arising from black revels reset with a difference, like the lover in this story:

THE CHILDREN OF WATER

"O hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon"
-Archolochus of Paros

... Long ago, when Manannan, the god of wind and sea, offspring of Lir, the Ocearius of the Gael, lay once by weedy shores, he heard a man and a woman talking. The woman was a woman of the sea, and some say that she was a seal: but that is no matter, for it was in the time when the divine race and the human race and the soulless race and the dumb races that are near to man were all one race. And Manannan heard the man say: "I will give you love and home and peace." The sea-woman listened to that, and said: "And I will bring you the homelessness of the sea, and the peace of the restless wave, and love like the wandering wind." At that the man chided her and said she could be no woman, though she had his love. She laughed, and slid into green water. Then Manannan took the shape of a youth, and appeared to the man. "You are a strange love for a seawoman," he said: "and why do you go putting your earth-heart to her sea-heart?" The man said he did not know, but that he had no pleasure in looking at women who were all the same. At that Manannan laughed a low laugh. "Go back," he said, and take one you'll meet singing on the heather. She's white and fair. But because of your lost love in the water, I'll give you a gift." And with that Manannan took a wave of the sea and threw it into the man's heart. He went back, and wedded, and, when his hour came, he died. But he, and the children he had, and all the unnumbered clan that came of them, knew by day and by night a love that was tameless and changeable as the wandering wind, and a longing that was unquiet as the restless wave, and the homelessness of the sea. And that is why they are called the Sliochd-na-mara, the clan of the waters, or the Treud-na-thonn, the tribe of the sea-wave.
And of that clan are some who have turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind--the wind that would overtake the waves of thought and dream, and gather them and lift them into clouds of beauty drifting in the blue glens of the sky.
How are these ever to be satisfied, children of water?



Indeed. Yet once baptized in the sea-wave, there is no ever leaving that surf, that beach, that day of sexual-spiritual awakening. Not ever. A marriage-pact is enacted in dark and dark waters, my hand clasped with a woman's hand up from the sea, and the life which proceeded from my baptisms has drowned me in that troth, for better or better verse.


BAPTISM

At 13 I was baptized in the Atlantic
off Melbourne Beach by pentacostals,
an occasion which was strangely
perfect in its timing. Months earlier
I'd been given a tract which showed
the hells of sin: a blue novella of once-

good people deceived by pleasure into
grave of boozy sex and all the fanged
conceits which fork there, ending up
in the halls of pitch and apostate ire.
It scared the Bejezus into me just when
I was ready at last for the world: puberty

had just slammed its flaming wreck into
me, adding three inches of height, burning
off my childhood fat, curling out a brimstone
beard pubic hairs, lowering my voice a
gravelly half-octave.Poised at last for the
eternal pleasures of youth, their infernal

consequences bared their canines wide,
revealing an endless maw. Terrified of
punishment I fell on my knees and gave
myself to the God of the group who'd
passed the track. It was with these people
that I now drove out to Melbourne Beach

on a warm morning in early June, two months
from my 14th birthday. We sang Christian
songs in that packed station wagon, the windows
rolled to a predawn lurid Florida smelling of
citrus, death, and the sea. I was flanked by two
virginal girls, a chaste inch between our bathing

suited bottoms, literally just enough to spare
the devil's bray. Still, when the car rolled over
a dead mole or 'dillo, the jot caused the left girl's
left breast to bounce against my arm, and
the chorus in the car turned to a drone while
I felt that deeper music thrum, the hard rock

of rages which was all thirst, all sweet, all
consummation. Parked on the beach at last
we exploded from the car like colts, sprinting
in joy toward a surf which curled and broke
in the glass of first light. Somehow I managed
to leap and come down on the very spot where

some manowars were buried, leeching my soles
in ocean fire. For an hour while the others romped
and bodysurfed I lay on a picnic table in pure
agony. I prayed God forgive me for the imp inside
me and gave thanks that I didn't have the chance
fall further in that surf. When I was well enough

to walk, I was led to the surf where the service
began - standing waist high in cerulean, warm
surf with the sun just up from the east, still red
with first birth, the pastor next to me with eyes
shut tight, praying in tongues and then shifting
to English to say God bless this new son. He then
he tipped me back into the water and held me there -

only for a second or so - but while I was under
a cleansing wave passed over and through me, calm
and eternal and silently true. To this day, I swear
it was one of the closest moments I've had with God.
Or gods, since the wave passed under me as well,
washing me of every wrong and blessing of my darkest,

deepest joys - angel and imp, agape and eros, spirit
and soul married in that douse which washed through
and then passed and I was hauled back up spluttering
while the others clapped and praised God. The sun
continued to climb in the sky, hot and beckoning,
as the rollers sprawled in again and again and again,

curving and smashing and hauling back our blent blood,
waxing and ebbing, cleansing us in the sea's feral mud.


antithesis

Spring 1978

you wake me with a smile
I wake up from a smile
a dream dissolving
into sheets and your hair
the sad-eyed woman
standing smiling in the river
in the rivers of your smile
white wet rapids spraying in my ear
calling back my blood
my words drowning in your eyes

washed ashore drunk and empty
I dream sunrise sunset at the ocean
I Ching changes no blame
the light born and dying
your Fiat backing over gravel
backing out into silence
I walk the garden run my fingers
through a grass tuft feel your hair
the sky an ocean rain and tears
the day turning dark and cold
no blame

call it passion call it love
when you smiled
it was all the same
springtime autumn
bedspring tantra
dream within a dream
Great Wheel spinning
a game for fools
demiurge
water bearing light

wordless
I speak of love
all day long your ocean held me
sparkling on a smile
dissolving the page
no blame




This is a dark-mooned season, void-of-course (after five years of writing a matin poem -- my "daily vowel movement" -- I've written only a couple of poems in the past three weeks), a time of soaking in my sources, prosy assays down lanes of old blue poesies. Waiting. Dayside summer is an awesome and awful regnum, fiercely hot with wild seabreeze storms now hardcocking Central Florida in the late afternoons (I drive home between bolts, slogging over flooded patches of road, the sky greeny-grey, malevolent for a mile then overbrilliant as the sun bores through to ignite the glisten and gleam). Yesterday the National Weather Service bloated the hurricane prediction for the season to 20 storms, which means that the coming couple of months are going to be ever-nastier, fretful and wild.

Over the weekend a huge branch from one of the oaks in our backyard tumbled onto the fence and shed of neighbors who, luckily, live in Ft. Lauderdale most of the time. I axed and snipped and chainsawed what I could on Sunday, drenched in sweat and sawdust; but the branch was still attached to a limb 20 feet up. The result, after all of my parsing, was a 300 pound log pointing straight down at the fence. Couldn't get it loose no matter how much I rocked the thing.

Then my wife calls me at work yesterday to say that it had fallen, taking out the fence and leaning on the neighbor's tool shed. Shit. So I get back from the gym after work in the first tremors of a bad storm, swinging an axe like a madman to remove several lengths of limb which were anchoring it the wrong way; and then pushed from the other side with all of my might, finally getting the fucker to creak, groan, then topple over into my yard with a deep-bellied thomp. Thanking God for no major destruction to property or body, I headed inside as the rain began falling hard and bolts flashed around the compass and the ground shook with other thunders. Thanking God again for holding back on the deluge until my last day's labor was done.

So far this summer, we've discovered our house has drywood termites, again (they swarmed our bed for two weeks in June), my wife was hospitalized with food poisoning up in Lake City during a bad vacation with her sister (her first in years), the foundation on the west side of the house seems to be slipping again, perhaps from all of the rain, we've had the near-wettest June and near-hottest July on record.
Can I still praise God in the ever-wilder tooth of the summer yet to come?





OUT IN THE DARK

September 2004, as Hurricane Jeanne
passed over

Now we are back in the world
I thought as my wife and I
stepped out of our house
into a wild windy dark.
Armed with flashlight
and screwdriver, our
task was to unscrew
the plywood sheet over
our guest bedroom window
so my mother could
get enough air to sleep.
Powerful gusts from
Jeanne's slow spiralling
pass bumped us into each
other as we worked
in a darkness
rich and burning with
its saturations and crests.
The world without
our power at night
is wholly dark, amped
by black houses, its bulb
powered by a long-
lost dominion, shouting
praises while our
neighborhood lay
empty and near dead.
No moon but a greeny
grey phosphor in what
swirled above,
each immoderate breeze
fisted with an agency
far, far bigger than any
we could name. My wife
kept flashing the light
away from the screw I was
trying to work free,
pointing toward some
dark sound in the
distance, reading creaks
in the wind's wreakage
as personal and
approaching. Let it go
I gritted, trying to lure
back the small circle
of our light, impatient
to be done with this
last chore of a long long
day now lost to our power.
Later upstairs in
bed as we fell fitfully
asleep, the sky worked
the trees in a constant
thrashing chorus which
rose in fisted peals
like the shouts of deacons
in a church up in the sky,
up where matronas and
mastodons of wind
praised their god,
were more alive
and vital than every
socket of humanity
in Central Florida
this bad night. Oh
what joy they took
in our cower, yodeling
like cowboys on the backs
of huge whales coursing
over our heads, thumping
and walloping the sky,
spouting their wildness
in black gouts of joy.
And oh how that dark
loved wrapping its wings
round us as it dived
down and down and down.


***

Yet did I tell you how I love this hour, its dark, the abyss which nourishes my words with Her salt amniotics, the wash of blue lactates? Have I said how much overflows in a tide like joy as I realize how vital and alive and in love this life is? How holy the wilderness is for which I have lost all boundary stones? Like the wave of Manannan, the soak of blue augments have uprooted my tongue, have made a bell of my skull, an oak of the tendon which runs beneath my testicles up through my arm and into this pen, something green and stout and unbreaking even when words seem pale and bloodless on a too-bleached page.

At 2 a.m. I woke to the sound of cats facing off, that low, tense, girly ululation which bares fang and claw. Was it Red again getting into it with one of the herd of perpheral strays who smell food on our back porch? My mind still deep asleep I came downstairs to peek out the back door and saw Red curled up on on one of the chairs by the metal table on the porch, nose curled into body, shaggy tail drooping down in sleep. Safe, if just for that moment. I stumbled back upstairs to bed and lay there in the dark next to my wife, trying to woo back the sleep, but the dark was nudging me, calling me to get back to work at this dark quarto between night and day. I am bathed in a lucency I cannot name nor quite dream, praising the wave which called me back to a history as old as the world's first love.



THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

Wendell Berry

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.