Uteral Contemplation

I wait; I soak; I rest here at this dark hour, perhaps void of course, but also a reverse, filling in the slow latency of all I have at depth and breadth perused, my history and its mysteries, the thrilling curve and splash of the eternal internal wave, its demiurgic infernity, its delightfully benippled durnity. A pregnancy of all my words now sloshing and regenerating in the dark.

"Matriarchal consciousness reflects unconscious processes, sums them up, and guides itself by them; that is, it behavess more or less passively without willed ego-intentions. It functions as a kind of total realization in which the whole psyche participates and in which the ego has the task of turning the libido toward a particular psychic event and intensifying its effect, rather than using the experience as a basis for abstract conclusions and an expansion of consciousness. The typical activity of this observing consciousness is contemplation. In contemplation, the energies are directed toward an emotionally colored content, event, or center, with which the ego establishes a relation and by which it allows itself to be filled and permeated; from this it never withdraws or abstracts, as in an extremely patriarchal consciousness."

-- Erich Neumann, "On the Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness"


THE SWAN

Mary Oliver

Across the wide waters
something comes
floating-a slim
and delicate

ship, filled
with white flowers-
and it moves
on its miraculous muscles

as though time didn't exist,
as though bringing such gifts
to the dry shore
was a happiness

almost beyond bearing.
And now it turns its dark eyes,
it rearranges
the clouds of its wings,

it trails
an elaborate webbed foot,
the color of charcoal.
Soon it will be here.

Oh, what shall I do
when that poppy colored beak
rests in my hand?
Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:

I miss my husband's company-
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! the path to heaven

doesn't lie down in flat miles.
It's in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,

and the gestures
with which you honor it.
Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those
white wings
touch the shore?




Indeed. What adequate words can there be? Rilke stared hard at the visage of the god in "Archaic Torso of Apollo" and declared, "You must change your life." But seeing was only the half of it, and the saying an ocean he was always crossing. Have my Themes become a drone? Am I stuck here in one language, one myth, one circular narrative, grounding myself on the same reefs just offshore the same naked beach? Is saying only the half of it, as I found that playing the songs to be hooves without saddle?

So I rest; I wait; I assay the known strand with an eye to what approaches in the dark swells appearing over the horizon. How will I leave here? On the wings of a prayer? Or shall I dive exactly here, sands parting like halves of the Red Sea, providing deep passage into a wilderness of blossom and nipple and sweetness which everything I have said so far is but the surface of?


FULL MOON AT COCOA BEACH

1995


The surf was pounding
the air when we climbed
out of my car, hurling
sea mist toward
a full moon now
breaking from clouds.

The pier was closing early
that night, swarmed
by the high surf
of a hurricane's
turbulent pass
many miles to sea.
The guard said
an advisory was out
for a high tide come morning
with fifteen foot waves.

We leaned on a rail
halfway down the pier
and watched the night.
The horizon a wash of
foam and darkness.
Shards of moon
scattering like silver fish
in the glassy curl
of a wave before tumbling
into foam and thunder
and rocking the pier.

You leaned to watch
a wave pass under,
your dress fanning
wild in the breeze.
The wave I felt
curved that satin and
the mystery beneath
into moon and sea.

Later we walked on
the beach, found
a place to sit
and talked a long while,
telling our stories
as warming strangers do
who find the distance
between them narrowing
to less than tissue.

It was after midnight.
The beach, the sea,
the moon took us
somewhere
on a silver stream.

It was a gift
that rose unhurried
from the depths of
some heart which must have
always known these things,
recalled from old loves
or the salt soundings of the womb
or perhaps the full store
of ineffable moments
a man and a woman
have ever stumbled on together,
a silver strand of DNA
pulsing and receiving
this tide.

Having forgotten joy
for so long on a road
of deaths small and large,
having gotten so lost amid
hurry and complication
and complacence,
that night slapped
me back to life.

Warmed by something
I can never name,
we opened our arms
to one embrace
and then walked away.




OAK MOON

2000

Oak moon
cleft in dark
now barrowed
in the sea,
pale fire of
noctilucent bone,
my knees are
wavelets capped
with your foam
knocking on the
scarred and
barnacled haunches
of an old sea mare.
A mane of ant moss
blowing on this
changeling breeze
leads me here
into this oak heart
unfolding to a beach.
A conch gleams
wet and pink
and pale pure blue
here where the moon
is always full.
Pick it up,
close your eyes,
and listen:
I'll be waiting
patient as forever's tide.





WHAT MOON

2002


Poet of surfside washes,
some moon hauls these words
in its brute train-silver
brother of the savage day, pale fire
soaked in dark-Yet this moon
is both track and tide,
its feral countenance
hanging over the wash
like a maddened bear.
For days I sit here mute
and stretched, whispering
banalities and tripe
for the mere discipline of it,
pouring the same glass of
sea-water all the way down
a numbed beach.
On those days I'm empty
and despairingly minor;
then something shifts or
aligns-mind to God,
balls to tongue, word to world,
heart to heat I don't know-
but look out!
The lines now hurl and nail
in a blanketing surge.
I mark these rhythms
weekly, some times in days:
for the past two or three years,
I've been in a general hard
tide of making which makes
of revision sadly incomplete;
I can't slow down to work
and rework one poem, not
with this next salt breaker
foaming across the page.
Alignment seems the key,
though it's also pure mystery,
since I'll never know to what
allegiance I must swear.
There's a feral moon
in every making,
a silver salt to tooth all
water back to brine.
I cannot know what
wakens here except
in glimmers and dark gleam;
the hour and day are no compass
for the track it scours;
my job is just to stand
faithfully on this beach
and sing how high the marges
reach. This page is my
hydrographer, a hand
ridden by the surly one
who writes the angry sea.


ST. ORAN'S MOON

Eve of St. Oran's 2004

Last night the harvest moon
burnt full inside eclipse,
as if Saint Oran himself
bore on his feast night
the earth's voyaging shade.
His boat indeed is dark
inside that red-burning
silver, mined from every
shore he torches deep within.
When I woke that harrowing
was over & the moon burnt
icily above the west,
a white skull turning the
sky into wild milk, so hot
with noctilucence that it
almost hurt to stare.
Reliquary of the sea's old
song, vox organum belling
high the narhwals'
sonar choir, crown for us
what sails our deepest soul,
isle for isle through all loves,
all lives: you are the music
inside the tomb, the man
in the boat who throats
the aria of every wave's
collapsing boom. Moon
which wombs this no-time,
toll that sea-torn note which by
rising and falling all tides
and songs and bell towers thrive.





CAPE OF BLUE FIRE

Spring 2005

Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.
-- Jack Gilbert, "The Great Fires"

At this beach of wind and wave
hard boiled to high awfulness
no one would dare to light a fire;
But you, my Cape, are still and
ever burning, burning evanescent
with blue fire, a roar of flaming angels
inside the wet world's awesome pour.
In my prime years -- a savage
span of high-angst lust lit
nightly by Your dream -- I sought
You everywhere I needed more than
any man is due, more than any boy
afraid to live could spark and tend
within. Cut free of childhood &
parents & the great white Christian god,
the booze which came first in
the narrative seemed magical,
freeing my tongue and goosing me
from my room and hurl me
into women's rooms late at night,
my breath whiskey-warmed
sweet-soured. Drunk at some
party on a layover in Chicago
before my sophomore year
in college, I walked
home a young woman I had known
in high school, our talk slurred
and giggly, our path narrowing
to her door at which we kissed
and didn't stop, backing through
one room into the bedroom and
thence down on her bed, my
hands a blur inside her
clothes and hers yanking
hard at mine until I was
on and in her and through,
coming in one dazed collapsing
wave of boozy heat. Amazing
how that fire water could
pry a woman's legs from her
smile in just one night, cracking
the alien shell of strangers to
spill the yolk of messiness & greed,
my ache beyond her walls before
first light. And then when I plugged
my guitar into an amp a big night spread
in me wings of pagan fire, the minor
man become a magus of amplitude
inside minor-seventh chords, his ax-swings
fit for the Cerne giant's club and cock.
I'll never forget that first song of the
first set onstage of one band or another
during my failed career,
some months of half-assed
preparations delved up in that
first initial pour of sound, three short
taps of the drumsticks unleashing
the whole of us in a fusillade of
sound that fanned out on the crowd
in a wave of blueballed lust, enraging
and enrapturing the beer-tamped
libidos assembled in that basement
or grange hall. And later still
when love woke at last in a vernal blast
of green, I found myself forever miles from shore
in just three days and one night.
There the deepest forge in your blue
wash roaring equally within me as without,
Yes to Yes in hymenal tenderness,
fish rider swum up the stream inside
his beloved's long-forestalled embrace.
The wild startled joyful font of sperm
unleashed that night bore a dragon
freight of your fire, fructifying some
deeper soul than I have yet to know,
much less name. But I never had
much patience with any of those crafts,
greedy for the height and depth
of burn but lazy in my means,
hoping that your crazy fire would
well up where and whenever I
should deign to taunt the wicker
seams. And so I got to be a drunken
garage-band player with big hair
no money and spent dreams,
thirsting toward that end for
pure and puerile yearning,
burning just to burn, my
big night music down to
the ashes of an occasional
jam session in rooms too littered
with broken strings & empties
& the howl of ever-broken things.
For all the loudness of your fire,
I got it down best in those final
days when I knocked off for
the night and laid my blue
Hamer Phantom back into its
case to rest in blue velour
and clicked black covers shut.
I didn't know shit about great
fires, not then nor now,
no matter how much I sing
on about You, my Cape.
I never got much for your blue
lucre, not in any way I drank
or chorded or swooned.
But then maybe our human
hands were never meant
for Your greater fires. I suspect
You know this as you
watch each ship careen
down the worst of coasts
into Your boiling wilderness.
Try as we might, You are
about a work we can
only mimic and thieve.
Oh well. Those years were
like a nursemaid to this nursery.
Every day now I milk
the paps of hell for just three
drops of Cape Blue swoon,
lucent and malefic and
sidereally rich in blue spleen,
killing these lines inside
an early morning forge
beneath this chair inside
the horse which ferries
shore heart to distant shore's
desire. May all my augments choir
the crash and burn of my Cape of blue fire.


FULL MOON NEXT
TO SUMMER SOLSTICE

June 2005

This noctal morning's bloated moon
moors astride the sun's high-tidings
and still this hour is as black as tombs
and abyssal trenches go. I write
this poem in a little boat on
a river of black ink, its tiny eye
a torch casting dim light over
ancient banks, like the pale pall
of St. Elmo's Fire, dowsing verbal leys
which have power only in the dark,
inside fire's downward-draining gleam.
It rained late last night, the dark
inversed in flash floods of phosphor
a millisecond long, ebbing back
in silver-ghosted waves on the eye;
the thunders which tolled in that
trough were as low as titan tritons go.
Oh the murmur of the garden as
the skies loosed long and slow rains,
marbling this 4 a.m. with satch and swoon,
bewitching every blossom with a
simple elven sprawl, flung petals
forming bowls now filling with that
dreaming moon's milky light. Yes,
all of it is praising God's darkest thall,
black throats mewling faint and silvery,
a sound and hue as far from the summer
solstice as a heart may go and yet
I hear and see it all right here, next
to the highest sun wave of the year
soon to crash and smash the tallest
light we'll see. Shall we then move on,
my dark-robed listener paused in
the garden just outside? What office
rouses from the living dead of this night?