Synecdochals

SILENUS

Just which cocktail pickles
a rumpy young satyr into
horrid old goat?
Our cocksman doesn't
know, but the nagging
suspicion that he crossed
that line too many years
ago is one he tries to
drown harder every day.
The drill is by now
is so ancient as to be almost
rusted out: drive home from
work with the radio playing
contemporary hits he can't stand,
crack a cold beer in his trailer,
slam a Swanson's in the microwave,
watch sitcoms on syndication
as Florida in the window
roughs up Lake Fairview
and the semis whoosh
up and down 441 like
basso deacons. Shower,
second shave of the day,
do the thinning hair but
good, slap on the old Aramis
and dress carefully in the
cracked floor-to-ceiling mirror
& trying to ignore the
wrinkles around his eyes
and the flecks of grey
like whitecaps in his hair.
What the hell -- and he's
out again by 8 to head
to his warm-up bar, knocking
back shots & beers &
bullshitting Gloria the
barmaid who he's known
for years; he's never gotten
her to come home with
him, but he still thinks that
some day she'll come to
her senses and see what's
she's been missing all along
--and man, will there ever
be some serious fucking
that night! Only she
better hurry up and
come to, he thinks
for the ten thousandth
time, knocking back a
shot of Old Granddad
and the refocusing on
his image in the mirror
across the bar. Surely
he'll be outta this
drab circle of losers soon.
He pays, she pours, they
bullshit as they usually do
about nothing in particular
the way old spouses do
and then he's off again
on his usual commute
to the standard round of
bars, thinking as he
usually does that tonight,
oh tonight will surely
be different: That the
woman he might meet
(for years now a slowly
thinning possibility, so
slowly but surely that
he cannot see the thread's
long been cut) who might
go home with him who
upon waking might turn
out otherwise than
all the others and they
will give it that try
that works where
the couple others failed
and they'd make it
to Love, Marriage,
Family, The Works.
He sighs. Why does
he bother? He's 46
and the bottom that he's
been ravening on
is near impossible
to hide from anyone,
even himself. He's
partying this night
on a credit card with
barely enough air in
it to float the evening's
tab -- there's maybe one
more night in it, if he
doesn't pay for anyone
else. The ex-wife is
screaming louder for
child support,
some judgement is
in the works. He
drives a '93 Camaro,
no babe car anymore,
it lurches epileptically
through its gears and
is still faintly redolent
of the night he shit
his pants in a blackout.
The last women
he's scored (two in
the past six weeks)
were real jackals,
horrible, bottle-club
closing-time crackhead
drunks, gals he'd had
to wait til they'd
done all their drugs
& passed out before
roughing down their
jeans & turning 'em
over to fuck 'em from
behind, almost flaccid
in their neardry cunts
& trying not to think
of that girl from the
Christmas party
who called to say
she'd tested HIV
positive. Awful.
Yet here he is again,
somehow further
on down that ladder
of diminished prinicples
and expectations,
switching the channel
to the oldies station
where they're playing
Journey's "Don't Stop
(Believing)", and it's
just the shot of hope
he needs, and he rows
down the his drivers
side window to let
some of the summer
night air in, post-storm,
wild and humid and
rich with ions, and
he feels all of the
possibilities rising
within him just as
pure and unequivocal
as the touched him
when he was fourteen
years old at his first
high school dance,
the band onstage
playing Grand Funk
Railroad's "Are You
Ready" and all of him
shouting Yes and the
girl in front of him smiling
Yes. Up ahead he can see the
bar is hopping, lotta babes
heading in, all ripe for
the picking, and surely
among them there is just
the one for him, sultry
and salty and ripe for
the plucking, her heart
made of feathers and
blue gin, spread to receive
his eternal thirst
for someone else's heat
and heart and motion
-- six deep inches of
sufficient-enough ocean.





An odd time, potent and empty, silencing as something large, it seems, starts to rise, wavelike. Whether I should pay attention to the yet-dark wave or toward what next shore it heralds, there is the sense of gestation having grown toward a unnamed fullness, preparing to break waters, groan, deliver ... What mewling boon is out there in this predawn darkness which today is so still and barely trembling, flattened with sleep and the toxicity of age and weariness and detumescence?

How did I arrive at this silence? The long poem-cycles -- guitar, well, crannog, cathedral summer, road of dreams, immrama, Cape Blue, dark drowse -- each soaked in a Theme till words harrowed the nooks and doors, slept with all the river-nymphs and rode every black horse both on and offshore. Arriving, exhausted of means, on a next shore with its next Theme.

I dunno if I regressed or progressed through the poems, if I found myself any closer to a God or beloved or apt image or simply washed deeper in the resonance of their absence, a mysterious organum which always returned me to the same white writing chair at the hour of rising and all daily demands.

Sometimes it just seemed that I'd written my way down into the same singsong noodlewhack of a poem, groovin' in the same old same old, the greased muse of dead ends. How many times can I say She's ever on the next shore I can't reach? Is that just masturbation, one of my stock reveries, the shape of eternal love standing naked in the surf with her ass pointed my way in the ligature of wave-ebbing departure? Is that pose sufficient for all dark ages?



Certainly there are more productive and useful tropes in a writing life. I've written my way almost out of poetry -- years of daily drafts, not much revision, no real hope for publication, no real interest in that either. The inner turbine which gets me up at such a silly early hour is not octaned that way, driving instead toward an invisible, eternally belayed or simply lost shore, one that vanished years ago when I put penis to vagina and then pen to paper trying to capture a wild fleeting thrall. What is the couplet that always finds its way into the poem? --

... I'll never quite find you,
though again I try ...

-- A sense of hopelessness married to an indomitable will which demands that I keep trying. Like those 1001 nights I headed out to get drunk and find love: futile and rigorous, as if I were inking penis with whiskey the poems I later wrote. Which now seem pregnant with something not poetry at all, maybe not even writing. I don't trust any words to be specific enough in directing me on but I do trust the process, for better or verse.




FIRST, LAST, EVER

Each poem sails toward You as first and
Last and ever, singing in the
Surgency of Now's blue curl, wild
Smash, pale sigh. The cavern of my
Isolde reveals its secret door
In drowned Ys only this once,
When hot words plunge deep in stone.
A kiss to waken sleep, blue light
To see deep: The wings which my song
Lifts and fans are feathered in moon
Milk and whale jets, cold Thor, orange
Bloom. And when the spasm ebbs all trace
Of you away, it joins the other
First and only songs on the beach,
The sum of Yous I'll never reach.

***

Jung names the process well in his essay "Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation" in CW9.1:

We call the unconscious "nothing," and yet it is a reality "in potentia". The thought we shall think, the deed we shall do, even the fate we shall lament tomorrow, all lie unconscious in us today. The unknown in us which the affect uncovers was always there and sooner or later would have presented itself to consciousness. Here we must always reckon with the presence of things not yet discovered.

These, as I have said, may be unknown quirks of character. But possibilities of future development may also come to light this way, perhaps in just such an outburst or affect which sometimes radically alters the whole situation.

The unconscious has a Janus-face; on one side, its contents point back to a preconscious, prehistoric world of instinct, while on the other side it potentially anticipates the future -- precisely because of the instinctive readiness for action of the factors which determine a man's fate. (par 498)

***

Animals in dreams lately, a great silver bear crossing our yard with our stray idiot cat Red nipping too boldly at her heels ... a cat on a porch with huge translucent eyes, apt for seeing a greater dark than mere dark ...




BLUE LANTERN

June 2005

... all that you need to find poetry
is to look for it with a lantern.
-- Charles Wright, "The Secret of Poetry"

Here in the dead of night
I'm writing maps and copying
psalters, looking for old leys in
dark folds by which to
lamp my pen as I wind
my way into the heart of
that stillness. I'm like a
child playing hopscotch,
nine steps in nine steps out,
quarrying (here) the darkest
minerals I found down and in
the resounding cavern with
its canopy of cold, timeless drips.
It makes for long sentences,
sea-crossings and love-bowers,
each line pushing some limit
like stones falling all the way down
into the exclamation of silt
to disturb everything lost or
tossed there, a skull or
Prospero's little black book
or an ancient sword my
Lady of Meres haunts
like a sheath. Even down
(here) the world above
has a say; some cankerous low in
Georgia or the Carolinas
keeps sucking huge draughts
of the Gulf of Mexico,
dropping hasty thick washes
of rain in its wake -- the
fifth day now of this crap.
Such storms make the
garden outside at this
black hour loll and snore
like a lover in those first months
of abandon when the sex drowns
everything else, shower upon
shower and the sun ever more pent
and stout and gilded from those
glidings, a brilliant horse galloping
in a sighing singing dark. Quench
me O Lord but never let the thirst
be expired -- that's the sound of
first lovers, of the garden in June,
of this rapacious pen rising and
falling down the page when all
else drifts in a dark swoon.
Blue lantern, moon of my harrows,
shine just enough for me to see
when I've come to the last step
of the song (here) furthest
and down. Grant me blue lysis.
I pause for a moment (here)
to soak the full nougat
of the prima materia, this
blackest of hours; and then
turn back and round, jumping
from stone to stone
toward the last singing line,
door back to day paling far
under the east, this next poem
in hand still dripping with
the lucence of that now fading land.