The Soul Forges

SONG SMITHY

Shine a light in here and
you'll find a formerly
gearless Hell churning now
in a labyrinth tooled to
proceed to the always
next and never final shore:
A shire of beds and deep
blue wells where she smiled
and turned away: A viaduct
or proscenium inlaid
with skulls and hooves
and the gilded gossamer
of verbal wings: A siege
machine of oak and
hide on infernal wheels
bruting forth a ram
resembling the Cerne
Giant's 40-foot cock:
A vault stuffed with
drawn pussies and asses
warded by monster models
I built at seven: A work
table piled high with drafts
of poems, designs for transit
and a bounty of shells
-- conches and whelks
and a cunningly wrought nautilus:
A gullet of fire which
consumes all this and
belches the next eager flame:
Roads carved in basalt
totems, circuits and
cul-de-sacs, spiral staircases
and oubliettes: Labial doors
and keyed to spermatic
oars: Dragon ships by the
thousand, each with green
plundering eyes: Missals
of gold hidden behind
a blue baptismal font, their
pages scribed in the
blood of Oran buried
further down: A room
stuffed with all the guitars
I once strapped on and flew:
A bar (now under lock and key)
where I sat rooted to a
stool milking dread
infinity: Gardens of richly
manured furrows and distant
hilltops where Uffington
wilds: Cups of exquisitely
fashioned silver and inlaid
with red gems, filled with
ink, sea-waves, mare's blood,
well-waters cold as the Pole:
The Gundestrup Cauldron
and the Book of Kells and
the Willendorf Venus, each
in a room with a scholar
and a poet enlarging their
charms: A library older
than Alexandria filled with
well-thumbed volumes filled
with shore-lined marginalia:
A bone scriptorium where
sixth-century hands
ink all the texts that were
and are or could be:
Merry beds of bobulous
boobery slickplunging
derricks of blue oh so
blue tarrying joys: A cafe
where Rilke Joyce
Melville Jack Gilbert
James Hillman and Tom
Pynchon ululate all night
about the women who
matter and the materia
they write: A ripening
kitchen where Jung
pens his alchemy, tending
a vat of imagined
soul: Dante and Shakespeare
like titans of stone
or iron standing in the
sea looking over my head:
A restroom where someone
shits mightily what can't
be used: A tank for Moby
Dick larger than any sea
& nursing a port for
the errant moon: A green-
leaf esplumoir which
towered Merlin's mad
molting spell: Three
beaches -- Sandymount,
raw as spring where
the bird-woman first
flew; Iona's Beach of
the Coracles, brutal,
wild; and Cocoa, so
dazzlingly white and
south of every dreamed
love: A bog further
out where all of this
cerebration bloats
and slows: Still further
out a bald strand where
all my bad ends click their
teeth like Norns: over
every crest Manannan's
gray-blue island where every
voyage aims: Circe's
rock too, delicious as
peach brandy-sticky
nipples: A pale table in
a bare room on which
the head of Orpheus
dreams of Eurydice
in the wedding bed of song:
A real-time ballast
lifting these keels -- cold
again this morning, wife
now in the shower,
news on TV of a bomb
in Jerusalem ripping
open a bus like bloody fruit:
A cave behind and under
the labyrinth with its whole
story painted on the walls
thirty thousand years
before you never read these
words: All of that you'll find
between these lines,
west of first light
and east of the the tide:
And all of it muscles
and fins this pale hand
as it moves margin to
margin like a ravening mouth,
devouring the next promise,
the next voluptuous way in
to Your blue brassiered
bower where tomorrow
I begin: Every time I
enter here I ramp that
spinning wheel which
cycles through the ages
to bring God to view:
A vantage on a motion
which repeats the ocean's,
waves of verbal blue
which fill the well with You:



Darkmotherscream: dark honey is in the raging mother's womb, sweetest and most briared to the son's return. Thus Herakles is both the Glory of Hera and her bee-stung apogee, the visage of pure male strength wardened to a life within pussy walls of one grip or another. The hero belongs to the mother, much as he battles to be free of her. What he runs from is exactly what he runs to.

***

Spill that over this 4:12 am, Thursday, the usual big weekly production day ahead with all the labors of the Day Job, tasked by love of a woman and my heroic striving to make a living for and in that world. There is an impossible blend of ideal 'n' real vatted in Another Day -- my neck and wrist and shoulder sore from the cumulative wear of those labors, years of computer work, the road-weariness of endless keyboarding, the fret of labyrinthine system bombs, extension conflicts, software upgrades, tweaks, redesigns, cost-cuttings, new tools (web marketing, RSS feeds, blogs), another new promotion still hot from the kiln, blazing with what I hope will be a fructive glaze ...

Yes, all that's ahead, while ebbing moonlight still reigns at this hour on the garden, ghosting distant towers of cloud, each a hermit praising the God of approaching tropical storm/hurricane Katrina. Everyone else sleeps but I ply on here, eyes wide, working the verbal forge, hammering out steel cruel enough to cut the scaly iron tendons of my past, my torpor, my dalliance amid breasts of no avail, my futureless fatherless figureless fugues, phrenologicizing wave after wave of uteral aplomb. Behind me, Sathan, Demiurge, Gorgon, Mom, Wife, Mistress, Muse, Siren, Drone of Habitual Beachside Returns!




The hero's battle for deliverance is aided with the cunning tools of the smith. Mercea Eliade writes in The Forge and The Crucible,

"... In contrast to pre-agricultural and pre-metallurgical mythologies, where, as a natural prerogative, God is the possessor of the thunderbolt and all the other meteorological epiphanies, in the myths of the heroic peoples, on the other hand (Egypt, the Near East and the Indo-Europeans), the god of the hurricane receives these weapons -- lightning and thunder -- from a divine smith. It is difficult to avoid seeing in this the mythological victory of homo faber a victory which presages his supremacy in the industrial ages to come. What clearly emerges from all these myths concerning smiths who assist the gods to secure their supremacy is the extraordinary importance accorded to the fabrication of a tool."

Shield of Achilles, Thunder-Hammer of Thor, Manannan's blade Answerer, Excalibur delved to the hero Arthur by the Lady of the Lake: the instrument of victory is hammered out of the mother's procreative womb (symbolized in the forge) and employed to defeat her, in one way or another. Technology is how we defeat nature, or master her, gain regnancy over the planet, assert the divine will of God. (The family motto of James Bond is "The World Is Not Enough," similar in vein and spleen to my father's primal family motto -- Non Providentia Sed Victoria, "Not by Providence but Victory.")

Whole peoples have been mown into the grave by one innovation or another -- bronze blades, siege engines, Gatlin guns, thermonuclears. Species and ecosystems too have vanished by swipes of that techne -- I think here of dodoes exterminated by blunderbusses by the Dutch on the island of Mauritius, whales nearly exterminated by harpoon guns, the hissing of pitspray loosing ozone-gobbling flurocarbons. (Yesterday a fuel tanker on I-95 overturned in a heavy rainstorm, causing a dozen vehicles trying to get out of the way to enter nine different collision, killing a child.)



So the talents of the smith are bright and dark. His weapons spell victory for his chosen, and damn the opposition. The Pax Romana was bolstered on bronze, roads and tactics -- great for the plebians of the citidel, but also enslaving half the world. The victory fist cast a long shadow.

So join dark and light to the aura of that brute smith hammering away at his anvil, the muscled arm rising and falling in a parabola of boon and harm: our tools are paradoxical, they forward civilization while wounding the culture. Now hold that image of the divine smith a moment longer --- archangel of bronze, devil of infernal smoke, archetype of every innovation that has mastered the world and eased our way, sound of every durable connection snapping and flittering away -- And fit that image into visage of the hero who fights all his life to be free of the mother and thus is her glory. The two images align perfectly.

Thus our massively conflicted, complected present, modernity struggling to emerge from tradition, tradition fighting back with all the spleen of Grendel's mother, Wired Magazine a cornocopeia of gadgets fresh from the smith's alchemical kitchen, Pat Robertson praying fervently for God to remove a few more Supreme Court justices and, while He's at it, inspire some government agency to assassinate Hugo Chavez of Argentina and prevent the spread of godless communism and A-rab fundamentalism.
The debate on stem-cell research and evolution vs. intelligent design are the topmost examples of Beowulf battling Grendel's mam at the bottom of the mere or Apollo nailing the Python at noon or St. George defeating the Dragon Uffington: progression nailing regression to a cross which hangs between the breasts of progression's wife.



Is this work any different? Do words contend for mastery of world, do they charm nature (like the song of Orpheus), woo thighs into a honeyed spread, become a virtual enough reality so the real isn't necessary any more? Eliade, again from The Forge and The Crucible:

"The identification of smith-craft with song is clearly indicated in the semitic vocabulary; the Arab q-y-n, 'to forge,' 'to be a smith,' is related to the Hebrew, Syriac and Ethiopian terms denoting the act of 'singing,' 'intoning a funeral lament.' There is, too, the well-known etymological connection between poet and the Greek poietes, meaning 'creator,' 'maker,' and the semantic resemblance between 'artisan' and 'artist.' The Sanskrit taksh, meaning 'to create,' is employed to express the composition of Rig Veda songs ... The Old-Scandinavian lotha-smithr, meaning 'smith-song,' and the Rhenish term reimschmied, meaning 'poetaster' or 'rhymster,' underline even more closely the close connections between the profession of smith and the art of the poet and musician ... According to Snorri, Odin and his priests were called 'forgers of song' ..." & etc.

So fit the poet onto fused image of smith and hero and now we get a hologram of brilliance and bondage, like moonlight at this hour, reflecting the sun but not besting it, doomed to repeat the old natural rhythms til the world itself is dead. My words come from the mother, much as Beowulf killed Grendel's mam with a sword found in the drowned castle at the bottom of the mere, but how much do they get beyond her?

Not a hopeful paradigm for the survival of the species (or this world), but it does underscore the need to get around the hero somehow, to dig into his archetype, fester in his wounds, doctor his story, get on down the road with less of him, thus find a way beyond the maternal hills which rim and rhyme this enterprise.

DARKMOTHERSCREAM

Andrei Voznesnsky
transl. Robert Bly and Vera Dunham

Darkmotherscream is a Siberian dance,
cry from prison or a yell for help,
or, perhaps, God has another word for it --
ominous little grin -- darkmotherscream.

Darkmotherscream is the ecstasy of the sexual gut;
We let the past sink into darkmotherscream also.
You, we -- ooh with her eyes closed
woman moans in ecstasy -- darkmother, darkmotherscream.

Darkmotherscream is the original mother of languages.
It is silly to trust mind, silly to argue against it.
Prognosticating by computers
We leave out darkmotherscream.

"How's it going?" Darkmotherscream.
"Motherscream! Motherscream!"
"OK, we'll do it, we'll do it."

The teachers can't handle darkmotherscream.
That is why Lermontov is untranslatable.
When the storm sang in Yelabuga,
What did it say to her? Darkmotherscream.

Meanwhile go on dancing, drunker and drunker.
"Shagadam magadam -- darkmotherscream."
Don't forget -- Rome fell
not having grasped the phrase: darkmotherscream.


The Fall of Rome

We have grown too ripe
in this brassy noon.
Can feel the seams
frazzle like a fuse?

The old ones
raised alabaster
walls against the moon.
Their arrogance became
this jar the night
now pours us from.

Pagan hours return.
The marauder closes
his day-book and washes
our blood from its covers.
Wolves bay from
wooly margins.

How good it feels
to lift this glass
after so many years
of empire.
Something torn
like ecstasy
leaps through
me like a spear.

Dark things now
chirr from the rents.
hungry and inviolable.

No longer terrible
in this torrid light,
something blossoms
in a shower of blades.

Red enough to gild
a new tyranny.
Swelling the apples of
the next millennium.

The bite of future
so swift and sure,
a sweetness cold
and endlessly wild.




THE DREAM FORGE

If work is our yoga, our dreams dark
labors are its sutra, lessons of
unsheathable fire plunged deep
in awfulness. There is a furnace in the
basement of my heart, a hell
where imps grease old gears
and maul the presses where
my life is published, day after difficult
day, each a sum of hope and woe
balled tight and tossed into the
maelstrom, sustaining the engines
which roll me back here once again
for the next long daily fray.
Love's torture is also racked there,
desire's jezebells heaving their
cleavage in motions that cut me
raw and clean, their lips always just
beyond the ache of my kiss, their voices
taunting, swooning, accusing, their
sweet abysms always walking away,
finding me in my love faulty and
with means far short and droopy
of their own penetrate depths.
Each wave's folds and crash booms
down those metal halls in full
augment of ebb, descending miles
and fathoms down. Endless are the toils
and smarts here in the forges of that smith,
maker and renewer of what is both art
and its heart, all my bright gleaming
shores fabricated here by a brute
ugly man who will never see the
hosannahs of day, much less the
beloved I dream. Each night my day's
labors are sent down an oubliette
to plunge in the vat of acids
which tears me apart, limb from
bloody limb, to know the depths of
desire and God, where seven bright
swords steadily rise and fall,
gashing and dismembering and
setting me at last free. When I wake
there is no trace of blood on my lips,
only the faint salt staining the last
gossamer of fast-fading dream. -- What
wildness, what awfulness, what tender
perfection was there in that room?
I wonder, as I drag my ass out of bed
in the dark and stumble on down here
to stroke up the day fires and
do it all over again.



SURFSIDE SOLUTIONS

Long ago my mother set me
like a shell upon the strand.
Her voice tides in my ear-
warm milk for worried brow,
pink rooms which soft resound
the drench of drain and draw.
I love to mound my words
inside that nautilus of surf
-a useless carpentry,
you say, to castle heart
in walls of hammered grain-
No matter. Sonorous physic,
wave-songs I curl my mornings
to, you are a cat's solution,
the sweeter nous. Like the
town that solved its water
shortage by showering in twos.
That's what you'll find here,
a vault of curved additions
which fall too fast to count,
shapes which fail in every way
except to greet those great rooms
she carved with her salt voice,
bright mansions left on wet sand
for your own hands to hoist.