The Wounded Heel (Part One)

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name.:
This appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

-- Tao Te Ching (#1, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English)


MILKING THE MONKEY

How to milk blue shadows without
Falling into them? That's the rub and goad
Of every surfer's curl. To plow
The naked secret in its rude
Rawest silk without noosing in
Those hot imps of more. Indulgence
Bred the worst of times, yet drydock
Was somehow its worse father, a
Desert sun of cracked bone welling
Sand as from a clock's wound. No: there
Has to be a different poise
Between wild and world, a night-like
Nougat for the tongue which can ride
Between white shores the bluest brogue.
May this page milk my ape and rogue.

***

Days of high heat and no rain (again), a swelter of molten mercuries which causes everything in the heart and garden to droop. We go on with yardwork, house details, love, meals, in a fine sheen of sweat and bitchiness. Whatcha gonna do? 4:30 a.m. on a Monday with the sprinklers on in the garden in front, my wife already yawning and rising (she meets someone on a custom job this morning), me trying here to button up three days of varied writings on wounds, laming, and the nailing of spirit to earth.

***

In the first fifteen or so years that I pickled myself in drink [roughly between the ages 15 and 30; I would later pick it up again between the ages of 40 and 46], it seems I nightly shot myself in the foot with my foolishness, allowing the fang of booze to bite down hard, releasing a black venom of release, sordid inclinations, and oblivion. It was a paradigm of erasure which kept drowning life in its dregs.

I was young and viral and vital, smooth and hard with plenty of oomph in the hooves -- you know, twentysomething in the eternal afternoon of unfettered young adulthood. Of course, I was also eternally stuck, forever standing at the door of Beginning A Life and then running back, nightly, into the securer arms of an oblivate dark. All those one-night stands along the way were part of the snake-dance I couldn't get out of, some Eleusinian misery mythic only in proportion, the breadth of encounters all so perilously shallow. Each stand proved my inability to begin, my fear of intimate depths.



THE STAND

I don't much recall how I got
into those rooms-at closing
time all doors are dark-though
waking seems in memory always
the same, bedside in rooms lost
in suburbs you know are out there
yet pray you'll never see, and wouldn't,
if only you stuck to your own life,
if you knew just how to turn
that heart of yours into a home.

Coming to in still-drunk degrees
I'd scan those random bedrooms of
those women who'd lost their way too:
The bed queen-sized with a heavy duvet
and a half-dozen pillows (where I
had just one). The other pieces
of a bedroom showed old veneer
-haulage from a bad divorce,
fag ends of once-hopeful store.

The room was always too warm,
the slowly waking day sealed
by thick curtains. The closets were
stuffed with a party girl's Circean wares
(padded shoulders, spangles, belts,
boots); and on the walls
large dopey fans, or worse, those
awful ceramic masks, ghoul-
symbolons of lust's carnival.

The clock radio played smooth
jazz or country songs, spooning up
sugared bliss and rue-as if true love
ever danced in the wounded light
of such remaindered days.
Dreadful, dreadful, those room-sized
riffs on longing, hurled from a
wholly opposite heart:

And all of it narrowing down
to the groaning figure who was always
reaching out to hit the snooze button,
her back to me, the naked curve
of a freckled shoulder, ribs and hips
like the strange bay of an island
I had stumbled into from a bad sea.
Her face was always hidden by hair
and that too-early hour of awfulness.
One more fuck and I'd go go go.

Love is not lucky, but lust may be,
harboring for one night that clench
my dayside hands could never shape,
no more than I could stop drinking
once the first drink of the night got poured.
There was a terribly familiar shape
to it all as I tried again and again
to get it right, ending up back in
my own bed staring at the ceiling
cursing my name or worse, rising
from huge hungover beds not mine.

This morning I sit in my home at the
usual early hour as cold rains slowly
fall outside, remembering those polar
beds of a heart now settled in itself,
struggling forward in a marriage I worked
hard as hell to keep. What's familiar here?
Everything. It must be, else that sad
wanderlust return, seeking those damned
distant empty rooms where no light enters
and everything in darkness burns.

***

When I quit drinking and got my life in gear -- getting married (twice), learning how to earn a good living, finishing off my college degree at night, learning along the way about daily loving, its responsibilities, agonies and ten thousand small delights -- all of that stuff that wasn't found in the delightful hot top inches of the sea.

The paradigm reversed itself with the Evernight morphing into The One Day, a day of many labors, digging down through its many repetitions into the substance of the lived life, at the same time nailing me into an ever-deeper resonance -- my interest in myth and poetry flowering as I studied and studied an studied.

Such is progress, right? But the snake remained, working in the reverse, my surfaces suffering all manner of woundings. Thus all of the injuries to the body, the seasons of malaise. I threw my back out when I got married the first time, working out too hard & merging households of a that first, ill-fated union. Back pain hounded me constantly for a year and half as I suffered my newly over-responsible life -- sobriety, marriage, step-fatherhood, a career-style job. I was constantly reinjuring my back by trying to resume ferocities in the gym (my old stallion youth) too soon, suffering from the sudden reversal of style. Bereft of the old hammers of oblivion, what was I to do but suffer on and down?

But as I said, the deep work continued.




SECOND LIFE

... I know there is room in me
for a second huge and timeless life.
- Rilke, "Book Of Hours - 4"
tranl. Robert Bly

From such wakened
inwardness tunnelled halls
became tower walls,
one after another after another.
A great energy siloed
throughout my sad disapora
sufficient to raise a personal
Stonehenge no one may ever see.
I copied out Jung's Symbols
of Transformation and Hillman's
Re-Visioning Psychology. Read
Finnegans Wake (twice). Hurled
into Shakespeare's depths
with a paper on the mythic
parallels woven into The Tempest.
Another paper brooding on
addictive adders in black Macbeth.
Wrote on male initiation patterns
and fancied myths around the
naked dolphin rider which crests
my father's battered coat of arms.
I wondered aloud at the time
that I was trying to raise on paper
what my father was lifting in huge
stone; now I believe it was causes
and not the effects we shared
from some common heart. Each
of my efforts pitched me
into a frenzied coil of attention
and duress while I worked
my corporate job and played
at father and husband
and professed my surrender
to a Higher Power at my
AA meetings. I'd rise at
3:30 a.m. (just as now) to
wrestle with my angels and
pin some more of them down
on paper-And for who?
I never cared much if
anyone read what I created-
whether it seemed too much
of a burden or was hardly
intended for human eyes,
I cannot say. I'm not sure
now that any of it was as
much creation as a vaster
exhalation, bleeding fire
to make room for more.
Like these daily drafts
which move from heart
to pen to page and then
get typed in a hard drive,
print out for two or
three revisions and then
get booked in a notebook,
joining the common
unpublished loam.
What has changed at all
these 15 years? There's
no art in this, it's just
consumption, wave after wave
of a sea in the blurred meter
of gray-green immensity
and I the pounded shore
whose only option
is to get smashed up
once more. When I look
back over the dizzy
Pyrenees of such
unconsolable work, I despair
of the general poverty,
the paucity of octane.
Maybe all this is the
booze still talking
through some backwards rent,
an inner shade equal to
the outer range which I
so heedlessly spent.
And thus this nonsense.
Could I drop this pen
for once and all,
cease dirtying silence
and prettifying the pale?
The last time I willed
such an act I was 21
years old, madly in
love, deserted, offering
alms before dropping
out of school. I wished
to learn a different language
from the bleary courts
of night. I vowed not to
write one more word
until I had been breasted
in the world's tongue.
And it was a girl, almost ...
Lord, you make sense
of these paper boats
bereft of keels. I'm not
smarter for the freight
you stored up in me.
I'm chasing my tail now,
unable to find an end.
Dervish me on or off the page:
This hand is your cross,
this pen yet your rage.
Maybe I'm just passing
the buck, but I heard
once that humility is
simply giving credit
where it's due. The song
tore from my lips
when I yet dallied
in the crib;
this poem another rib
you bid me use
to write that music down,
my loss the reed
which sings the world.

***

The wounds too continued: my first marriage was afflicted with bad bouts of insomnia and bowels which backed up for months; in the season after my divorce I suffered a flu-like disorder that left me almost too exhausted to work. As I worked into my second marriage I suffered a shoulder injury (impingement with bursitis and tendonitis) which took forever to qualm. I had to lay off all upper body work for about two years. In recent years its been tendonitis in the right wrist, punctuating with pain the ten thousand keystrokes these days require. And also about three years of migraine headaches with great regularity, fuckers which drop an anvil on my day, nothing to do but take Frova and go on.

MIGRAINE VIGIL

2003

3:30 a.m. and the migraine is roving in
bands across my head, trampling my temples
with bloody hooves, ranging in back to
clang the base of my skull with a dull
heavy clapper. Ugh. So through I've promised
my wife to try to sleep in later (in the name
of more rest and fewer migraines), I stir,
turn off the alarm, kiss her on the forehead
(she sighs), and get up. Violet is waiting
for me downstairs, sitting in Siamese
perfection under the piano bench, waiting
for me to pour out four Double Delights
next to the chair I kneel in front of to
say my prayers. Here you go little girl
I whisper, as she bends to sniff then chew
and I pray: May I do Thy will today, May I
do my best today, May all this serve the living
today, Be with the suffering drunk today,
I pray safe passage for my loved ones today.
Then I fill an ice pack and watch TV awhile
with the sound off, trying to soothe and scatter
head wolves. Flipping channels in the great
void of too-early-morning TV: election results
on CNN (Kerry in five states, Edwards in
South Carolina, looks like Clark beat
Edwards by a nose in Oklahoma), a war movie
on AMC -- Tommy Lee Jones staring grimly down
on hostile territory from his attack helicopter --
booty tunes on MTV, someone frying something
on Food TV, and a score of infommercials hyping
male enhancement formulas, fitness, tax and
investment advice, kitchen implements which
wow the paid audience. Yawn. I let it all play
silently out in a mobile wash, clicking from 02 to
99 and around again, dimly wishing a woman
would bare her breasts or flash some ass as
the ice hardens the tundra of my skull. Just trying
to nurse my way back here, folks, doing what I
gotta do, prodding the daily dragon boat out of the
harbor of the next good day. This has been a season
of migraines, day after day, doctor after doctor,
with not much changing in the general dolor of
pain-in-the-ass gray headache pain -- never too much
to keep me from work, but sufficient to raise the
gradient to a more gritty trudge. I've stopped asking
why and try to keep doing my job, both here
and in the life -- lots to accomplish today before
tomorrow's flight up to Boston for the New England
Press Association conference & trade show, where
I hawk my corporate wares: an eye appointment
first thing (another way in to the migraine riddle),
knock out the weekly package & TV grids, get
cash & pick up dry cleaning, come home to pack
and try to have a good night with my wife and
our cats. My wife last night was worrying about
so much breast cancer everywhere, a second aunt
having just gone under the knife for a mastectomy.
Not good she sighed as we watched inept
teenagers belt their dreams on "American Idol."
And nothing to do about it either, no preventative
medicine, no change in diet, just get the annual
mammogram and keep your fingers crossed. Nothing
I could say to her except we do the best we can
baby and I love you. And pray silently It's in
Your hands God. I try to stay awake and clear
for the while we're together last night; and when
we climbed in bed I lay there holding her, whispering
in her ear that we're in it together for the long
haul & that all I want is to love her & build a home
worth staying in & plan for the future & take care
of the cats & be of help for our families & put
something back into life. Common vows for the
real lived life, apropos of our years and the ways
they found and mortar our hearts. All I attempt here
is part of those vows: to have something to do
that counts, if to no one else but myself,
making it count most inside the margins
of my actual day, life, home, love. This is art
in the service of heart -- suspect I'm sure but
who's gonna take me to task, singing alone
here at 5:30 a.m., long before anyone else
is up? And I'll be long gone before anyone
discovers I was here in the first place. I've
tried art the other way and failed at the task.
Couldn't hold the big music in my mouth,
couldn't say it well enough. Now I just skinny-
dip in that wild crashing blue, loving the foam
and crash over me, the salt sting of someone
else's eternity. Time to go type all these words
in and toss 'em later in my Well. Then I
must feed Mamacita outside on the porch
and make my way back home to my wife.

***

And now the shoulder is at it again, five years after things had quieted down, damaged perhaps from all that idiotic swinging of the axe last weekend after my neighbor's chainsaw failed to do the job on a big limb that had fallen off one of the backyard oaks. Dull fire, aching range of motion, the constant aggravations from working and writing, jerking off and mowing the yard.

Again the mortality, the finitude, while the deep work rows on. I've been on a poetry hiatus of sorts (it took me three years after the last poem was written to come to an end of daily writing poems), and the life is ever difficult -- money the tightest it has been in years, work piled awfully high, sleeping lightly, migraines always in the wings. Yet how fertile the serenity and contentment of days, how satisfactory the work here, how sweet the love in this house!

What is this motif of laming, the wounded body while the spirit deepens, soars?