The Boob Tube

UPON JULIA'S BREASTS

Robert Herrick

DISPLAY thy breasts, my Julia—there let me
Behold that circummortal purity,
Between whose glories there my lips I'll lay,
Ravish'd in that fair via lactea.


***

To the extent that conscious knowledge necessitates the suppression of emotional components, it is typical of an only advantageous to noncreative work. Creative processes, on the other hand, cannot and must not exclude powerful emotional, and even excitory, components; indeed they seem to be a necessary ingredient here. Every new conception and every creative idea comprise elements which up to that point were unconcsious, and the inclsuion of the emotional components associated with unconscious contents provides an excitation. The connection of the conscious system with the emotionally-toned substrata of the unconscious alone makes creativity possible.

-- Neuman, The Origins and History of Consciousness



Here is a defining primary sexual fantasy of mine. Of course, at age six I didn’t know was sexual at all, just immensely riveting, so much so that I repeated it again and again, my faced pressed to a pillow like it was a television set, my greedy eyes staring into that dark screen, desperate to repeat the scenario once again:

I am walking with a girl in some wooded place, along a path. We come to a small pond or lake at the center of the woods. The girl walks incautiously along the edge of the pond, while I try to cajole her to safety. But she pays me no heed, walks with delight along some sort of precipice (like the pond has a brick wall around it, two or three feet high); then falls into the water. Desperate to save her, I dive in and down into the warm dark murk, unable to see. It seems hopeless but then my hand grasps another hand and I haul her up and out of the water. She is so grateful to be resuced that she hugs me, and that clench closes the fantasy.

In reflection this tale has always seemed like a presexual fantasy to me, and much of my personal history--especially its darker, more driven turns--would appear to be an attempt to act out its dreamlike exposition and lysis. There are the woods, the wilderness, where she and I are alone together, beyond attention and disapproval of parents; there is the girl/woman who stands close to dark water, divinely attractive and utterly (uterally, abysmally?) dangerous; there is the wall around the water, built by human hands, which I fear and stay clear of, though my attraction is riveted to is ramparts where the girl is unafraid to walk. Then there is the fall, the maid tumbling into the dragonish drink, the hero diving in to save her, the rescue. And there is the girl’s embrace of me in open-hearted (thighed) gratitude. My hero.

As primal scenes go, it sure is fateful, the very nougat of all that has lured me into my history. Eve’s beckoningg smile, of apple and snake composed.

And like all tales of Otherworld escapade, attempts to literalize it with real girls and women have been disastrous. I know I will never truly understand the difference between the fantasy and the reality, not in that compulsed, besotted, rebellious, hellbent Mordor of my imaginal gut which refuses to love God or be sober or stay married, not in the biological red depths of the spectrum which only knows how to swim and devour.

I’m stuck with that fantasy and my greed for it. My eyes are still pressed to a downy pillow, seeking to bathe in the inside wash of a woman’s body, and revel in a testicular rant about women’s desire and greed and need for me, shouting my name as I pump brimstone and brine by the salt acre into her.

At least I’ve learned, operationally enough, to keep the worlds separate. How to indulge between safe covers. How to harness the revery to the page. How to love the wife without secrets or infidelity with that blue pillow underneath and inside.

Most of the time. There are distractions. Reveries can overstay their welcome. Stray images from the day unhorse me onto worser ones. The devil holds intercourse with the angels in a confusing murk. I bless and damn what’s foul and fair. Give the addict an inch and he’s pouring a shot of Pinch. Ever there is the peril of that wall around the lake.

Yet as the writing and imagining progresses, that primal scene slowly loses its tentacles to the real. The personal elements lose their importance, and bluer, transpersonal ones bob slowly to to the surface. Always an attractive shape lures me to the dangerous water; always it falters there and falls, causing me to dive into where I dared never go; always the descent and retrieve with the treasure I will never attain; always the lysis of the kiss, the bliss of reverie’s song at the coda, that infinite expanse which loosens as it clenchs, sustains as it ends.



It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his posessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privace of power as an individual man, there is a great public power on which he can draqw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligivel as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or “with the flower of the mind;” not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its directdion from its celestial life; or as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone but with the intellectd inebriated by nectar.

-- Emerson, “The Poet”

***

HE GETS THE GIRL

2002

As a kid I changed the world
by going into my room
and acting out James Bond:
Killing evil Blofeld
at the crack of worldwide doom
then lounging in lazy billows
with his yeasty girl.
The James Bond theme
would ease my steps
back into the real world,
a little while: Before all
the cold winds conspired
to blow me back to smithereens.
I could turn tin to gold
by placing my face
to a pillow, changing
the channel to David
Gets The Girl. I watched
a pretty girl edge round
a deep pond then fall:
I dove in and hauled
her back, her gratitude
flooding me with this
sweet, presexual warmth,
like milk straight from
gold-knockered Pussy Galore.
When the real leaves you
homeless, there’s always the peel,
the pith and rind of surface cool.
I yearned and learned to
glide there lubed by
cool quaffs of Bond and
my own bouncing balls,
chasing the Laylas of La-La.
—a mystic of moments,
a bra unclasping its double
wealth, the shoosh of
jeans sliding down
their white daughters.
O splendid crucifix,
crying for immortal nails.
—That was the dance, those
Penthouse Letter-moments
where, Dear Reader, I found
what I never thought
I would personally ever
encounter. I dropped out
of the monastic mill
of college to play rock n roll,
hurling the delights
of a few nights with Becky
into the coiffed frenzies
of boogie brawn, each song
another dive in her rocking,
ululate bed— holding my guitar
like a surf-pole, casting
out these chord progressions,
humming a while, then
hauling up a solo that was
at once glittering, fierce, and
wild. At least, that’s what
I sure hoped for, and tried
to live for, amid a howling
ruin of wasted hours,
initiate and annihilate
twinned in a 25-year
old boy. Rightburn, I called it,
that perfect balance
of opiates (booze, pot,
speed or coke) carrying
me out on the coracle of song,
a triangulation of
wish fulfillment, drunkenness
and balls, unsheathing a
bright blade after the
second chorus, tempered
cruel and swift and
eternally sharp. Such moments
came as frequently as
the perfect babes. Dear Reader,
it never happened, some guy
on staff wrote all that crap,
the whole fantasy of sex
and drugs and rocknroll,
knowing exactly what we all
wanted, what we prayed
for each night we walked
into a crowded bar. It
was the entire exception
to the rule that I prized
above all else, thus dooming
me to the quest for a chalice
which in truth proved
the millstone of my years.
It seems I’m always
investing in fictions
and pay dearly for them all.
Has much really changed?
Here I labor away
on this overlong, overly
autobiographical lyric
meditation, earnest as ever
to ink a gleaming fish
on white pages, the mirror
of a life deemed greater
than what it can only refract.
I’m entertaining at best
a troop of ghosts in my
own head, bandmates,
lovers, all the guys
who played James Bond,
the solemn poets. Having
written this far it’s a struggle
to shift back to the day slowly
waking outside, now washes
of blue warbling along
with scattered birds.
My face always felt strange
lifting from the heavy warmth
of that pillow-TV, protesting
the effort of returns to the real.
What can you say of a life
spent voyaging the top feet of the sea?
What have I learned
but to ink obliquity?
No matter: I’m hard wired
to the James Bond theme,
walking round that deep pool
whose waters shake only what’s stirred.





TALL TALE

2004

The hermit described in Episode
19 of the Immram Mael Duin ...
is clothed in his own hair (and)
lives on a small island. Many trees
grow there, and each tree is full of
birds. He tells Mael Duin and his
company that, having set on a
pilgrimage from Ireland, his
small boat split in two under him.
He returned to the coast, positioned
himself on a sod and on this
piece of turf set out into the
waves again. God allowed the sod
to remain motionless in the
place where he now is, and adds
some turf to the sod each year,
as well as a tree. The birds in
the trees are the souls of his
relatives, who await Doomsday there.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

I set out in my little boat
so many years ago, my heart
full of its quest for you
like a wave dreaming distant shores,
full and high and curved close
to crash. Yet God willed my
ways otherwise, splitting my
purpose on hidden rocks below
and delving me back to home
shores, a spluttering, half-
ruined man, one for whom
the sea became both longing
and its cross. The bit of strand
I settled on became both chapel
and isle, its walls of
pale cocquina faith
brilliant by day.
But the hull below
is not seen by any,
its mast my spine,
its sails woven from
gossamering dreams
of finding you
and not. My course
is a wild immrama
of blue words, mouthed
from this pew where
the sound of the
uniting surf is never far.
Years now I’ve remained
here to voyage far
beyond the beds I
never found you in,
clothed only in my hair
& this patch of pale
sand the very fabric
of my white writing chair.
Blue is everywhere
my mind’s eye now navigates,
as if you were looking
back over your shoulder
when you left the room
for good. How can a song
be both choir and quest
I’ll never know, but
mine is just to altar
that surf here, writing
down all that love still
distantly yet urgently
demands. My poems
are like the lover’s hands
dressing a with the
greatest of haste, grooming
something in the mirror
and hurrying on out
to find and woo
a destiny before
the night is forever
hence too late.
Far I have travelled
on the same soul-
remitting sea, always
lost and ever charmed
by the strange music
just ahead of the next
swell, just before the
the spill of light which
foams and forms the day --
sounds which ink this
pen and rudder
its travail down and
down to the last line
which buttons to a kiss --
an island of a singular
desire torn from
the bridal doom of Ys.



BLUE BOOK

2005

Each day I write a poem to
press in Your blue book,
my salt scrivener, so that
angel brogue of wildest seas
may once again be
heard inside pale days.
That’s all. In my dream I
found glass cabinet in a lost
corridor of a pressroom,
the metal frame long oxidized
by salt & the glass almost
blurred from all the years of
ink hurled from this pen.
Inside I saw upon a shelf
three shapes of glass, chalices
or hurricane lamps or glass
reliquaries like miniature
cathedrals. All of it is
worth saving here, each
a host, a wave, a belfry.
Yesterday started with every
engine of spring at full pour
with warm sun and breezes
suggesting something more
as I planted salvia and pentas
and kalanchoe in the garden,
my hands happiest to sing
in dirt without the pen.
The front came through
quickly and by one p.m.
I was hurrying in the last
plants in full rain with
thunder cracking overhead.
My wife cursing in the back
yard, all her painting
projects spoiled. Later
that afternoon I was
in my study typing in the
day’s poem when my wife
walked up behind to mock
what I’d just said; I turned
and grabbed her as she
giggled and fought to get
away & I buried my face
in her breasts biting on
a hardened nipple which
surpised us both. Some
Godawful Christian concert
somewhere in town, a singer’s
operatic steeple yowling
“How Great Thou Art”
so loud I could barely
feed the cats on the
back porch. My wife went
to bed early, zonked
on a PM sinus pill &
me joining her not long
after to our bedroom
blue with hard moonlight,
our Siamese curled into
my wife’s behind & purring
loudly as I petted her
and my wife, listening
to the sounds of Saturday
night near and far, voices
from a neighbor’s house
talking about something
indistinct and further
out some party music
weaving in faint roars
of cars and cycles
seeped in testosterone.
All of it liquifying &
draining down into
those glass vessels I
praise here in the last
lines of this poem
which is Yours to publish
in Your book or feed it
to the fish in abysses
far below or feather that
angel’s wing that will
fly when I am done.