Blue Fishes

Blue Moon,
You saw me standing alone,
Without a dream in my heart,
Without a love of my own.

Blue Moon,
You know just what I was there for,
You heard me saying a prayer for,
Someone I really could care for.

And then there suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will hold.
I heard somebody whisper please adore me
And when I looked to the Moon it turned to gold.

Blue Moon,
Now I'm no longer alone,
Without a dream in my heart,
Without a love of my own...

-- “Blue Moon”

***


Oh the wild lucency of an October full moon on a cloudless night! Coming down this morning at the usual darkest a.m. -- migrained clanging in my skull, my love abed upstairs so strung with worry, cat happily careening by my feet to wait, by my big white writing chair, for her morning treats -- the window in the hall was a blue magnitude, a heat, a phosphor, a sea-bright candescence: and looking out the night was dark and bright, like those rooms from my puberty lamped with blacklights that made teeth elven and nipples black: my Toyota Matrix in the driveway like a cresting or beached fish, its sliver blue paint morphing back into the silver blue waters covering all in a monochrome quintessence, blonde on blonde in the bed of eternal fire, same to same, blonde pubis mashed against blonde pubis, wet exhalations mutual: a union or communion or rapture of sames, complete even though the day half is banned from the ritual, barred from mystery.

***

Where there is no love, there is no art.

-- Paracelsus


The physician is the means by which nature is put to work. What the physician does is not his work. “The practice of this art lies in the heart; if your heart is false, the physician within you will be false.”

- Marie Louse von Franz, commenting on Jung’s paper “Paracelsus the Physician” in Carl Jung: His Myth in Our Time


DOLORIOUS BLOW

Oct. 15, 2005

It is when I tore Her veil
that I was wounded so,
lance in thigh, fang in heel,
Eden gained and lost:
With one thrust I
tossed Paradise to
bluer wave, finding thus
a ballsier rudder
astride that wild desire
which never heals nor dies.
A child no more and
greedy in my lust,
I tore the fruit from
every awful branch,
savoring that sweet
and terrible flesh
that broke upon my lips,
spilling a slicksweet
liquor I’d drink forever
if I could.
There I found and
foundered in vast blue
acreage, Pandora’s curves
hard-venomed with
Promethean fire,
a merry surge of
cleavages and clefts.
Delightful, yes, spiralling
fire, the exhalant Yes
a spume amid malt
endlessness: But beware
the darkness inside white fire!
Every other and nether
world was loosed from those
uplifted skirts as I plunged
my way on through, a welling
gout from Dis and Ys and
Dante’s pit howling in
in one upsurgent jeer.
Whether it rose from her
to me or flung from me in her,
I do not know. Perhaps that
darkness belongs to God,
a black throat salted in that
sea which knows every bedded
thrall the dream of sex conceives.
Oh the worlds
now covered by that
pour, aswoon and rapt,
tolling ghostly blickers
in the vespers of the night!
Ferrymen cross themselves
as they sail over my
black realm’s faery candles
and strange bells.
Now I am so pierced and
drained my realm is empty
as leather sack debauched
of vatic freight and left to
brown and wither on the shore.
And yet the bleeding does
not stop but empties me
still further each time
a man plunges down
the hellbent sluices of Amor.
Who will save me from this
dungeon where I’m chained
to carnal knowledge where
I’m petrifying into stone?
Upon the starry fundament
of my savage Grail that fate
is written, a codex for
all aging men with
drowning blue intents.
There comes inside
the narrative the one
who rides not waves
but fishes, his heart so pure
of God’s decrees as to
Eden every revel, proferring
bright and brighter
apples to the orb of
every one-eyed devil.
His quest relentlessly
pursues that shore where
I am found at last, his
journey not so much
toward beaches as from
each collapsing wave.
His visage is that
stubborn query which
sums the world almost
yet always fails, asking
every god to free me from
this longing chair I
too long ago enthroned,
loosening with each quest
the lock of fixed desires.
Our dance -- lost king,
washed son -- is both the
cause and effect of
all strange years
in which a wounding
is made whole by quests
to deep and darker
shores, away from
what is known, toward
saltier more savage
and untidy enquiries.
And we are
just the half of it, the
brighter upper surge of
that blue alchemy which
may one day delve in fire
and foam upon the final
fatal shore beyond departing
sighs. That day we’ll
all get on to her we loved
and lost and chapelled here,
queen mother wife and whore
of every well of white hot fires
we rappelled down in search of she
whom God in us desires.





Fascinating that the early fabulators of our literatures -- the writers of the romances and the Troubadours -- worked so creatively from old source material. They wrote new myths from old, vibrantly, deeply, wildly. It was a new experience, not retelling old myths but singing new ones from their bones; and that tradition they established was one of defiance against authority, reverence for the bliss, and a sort of serial chorus where one picked up where the last one left off and continued to create what we see as one vast myth.

Chretien de Troyes dies before his narrative is Perceval is finished; his story ends where he learns from an uncle -- now a hermit living in a trackless forest -- tells him the whole story of the wounding of the Fisher King and the consequent enchantment of his realm. Wolfram von Eschenbach then dreams the tale onward, with Perceval returning to the Grail Castle, asking the question, healing the king. He learns thus that the Fisher King is his grandfather (other versions have him as uncle), making him heir to the Grail. The tale is then picked up by others who focus on Galahad, the perfect knight, man where Perceval is forever boy, son of Lancelot and who would never fail in any quest. Galahad reaches the Grail Castle, achieves the Grail -- and disappears, going out in a blaze of glory.

Myths are genes of being, memes of conceiving, tales of parabolic vaults and falls, descents and returns: a vocabulary of mystery and wonder which still sings inside hammered prose and narrow poetics. They are instructive and fructive of this fray. Praise to every old song and singer, may they harrow my voice and amplify Your theme!

***


These selections are from Wolfram’s Parzival (transl. Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage). By this time in the tale, Parzival has already blundered into the Grail Castle, is revealed the Hallows of the Grail (the broken sword, the silver platter, the bleeding lance and the Grail), but, heeding his mother’s admonition not to be so forward as to ask questions, remains silent, thus failing to heal the Fisher King of his wound. He wakes the next day and the castle has vanished. He returns to the court of Arthur where he is mocked by a crone for failing in his duty. He swears to not fail again and quests long in the world, meeting every challenge but not getting closer to the Grail Castle. A few bits of narrative and exposition, and then some insights from the Hermit he meets in the woods, who tells him more about the Fisher King and his wound.

***

The sword which Anfortas had given (Parzifal) snapped, as was prophesied, in the first encounter; but the spring which rises near Karnant, whose name is Lac, made it new and whole. That sword brought him many a triumph.

***

(Parzifal tells the Hermit) My chief need is for the Graal, after that, for my own wife -- no fairer creature ever drew suck from its mother’s breast. My heart yearns for them both.

***

(The Hermit tells Parzifal) The knights which defend the Graal are nourished by) a stone most precious: its name is lapsit exillis. By the power of that stone the phoenix, lighting upon it, is burnt to ashes; but the ashes then quicken it back to life. When with bright new wings, it springs from the pyre revived and beautified. There was never a man so ill, but on whatever day he beheld the stone, for the space of the whole week following he cannot die. Nor shall his colour fade. Be it maid or man, whoso beholds that stone shall keep the freshness of life’s prime. If one looked at that stone for two hundred year, but for the hair grown grey, no other sign of age would appear. Such power comes from the stone that flesh and bones are made young by it. It other name is the Graal.

***

They who took neither side, when Lucifer and the Trinity joined battle, those fair high angels were sent down to earth, to have charge of that stone. I know not if forgave them in the end or condemned them further.

***

(Of Anfortas -- the Fisher King -- the Hermit says) You and I, poor though I be, should never cease to pity from our hearts his sad affliction, which was the reward of pride. His youth and princely pride turned to his hurt, and to the world’s grief concerning him, because he set his desire on love unchartered. (italics mine)

“That way runs counter to the Graal’s decree. Under this, both knight and squire are pledged to resist all wantonness ...

“Amor was his battle cry! But that watchword does not go far to correct and humble.

“One day the king rode out alone (much did his people rue it), in quest of adventure, in the hope of love’s guerdon. Love’s desire pricked him to it. Then he was wounded by an envenomed spear, was thy sweet uncle, smitten in combat through the privy parts with hurt so sore that it has never healed ...”

(After every physic and folk-remedy has been attempted to heal the king) “Then we fell on our knees before the Graal. All at once we saw written thereon that a knight should come thither, from whose lips a question heard would end our trouble, but if anyone, child, maid, or man, warned him at all, his question would give no help, we should be in ill case as before, our hearts the sadder. The writing said: ‘Do you understand? Your warning may turn to hurt. If he does not question the first night here, the question will lose its power. But if in the right hour that word is spoken, he shall be king, and an end shall be made of your cumber by God’s high hand. Then Anfortas shall be healed, shall rule no longer.’”

***

“The king shall neither ride nor walk, nor stand nor lie. He leans, without sitting, as sore experience has taught him. When the moon change,s he suffers much. There is a lake called Brumbane: thither, when the wound grows noisome, they bear the king, that the sweet air may cleanse it. He calls that his fishing day, whence the tale grew that he was a fisherman! That name has clung to him, howbeit scarce likely it is that he, in his suffering state, can catch salmon or lamphreys or ply any sport at all, to cheer his sorrow.:

***

“He who has pledged himself to serve the Graal must forego love towards women. Only the King is allowed in single purity a wife by law; others are sent to rule over lordless lands.”


***

***

Segue here back to Campbell’s Creative Mythology, as he examines the figure of a fisherman who appears on an Orphic sacramental bowl of gold, dating to the third century AD -- stuff in the floorboards of the Christian tradition which gave birth to this demonic opposite, this wild individual howl:

“Orpheus the Fisherman is here shown with his fishing pole, the line wound around it, a mesh bag in his elevated hand, and a fish lying at his feet. One thinks of Christ’s words to his fishermen apostles, Peter, James, and John: “I shall make you fishers of men”; but also of the Fisher King of the legends of the Grail: and with this latter comes the idea that the central figure of the vessel, seated with a chalice in her hands, may be the prototype of the Grail Maiden in the castle to which the questing knight was directed by the Fisher King. A very early model of the mystic fisherman appears on Babylonian seals in a figure known as the “warden of the Fish”, while the most significant current reference is on the ring worn by the Pope, the “Fisherman’s Ring,” which is engraved with a representation of the miraculous draft of fishes that afforded the occasion of Christ’s words.

For the early fishing image was appropriate in a special way for the early Christian community, where in baptism the neophyte was drawn from the water like a fish. ... The Hindu legend of the birth of the great sage Vyasa from a fish-born virgin nicknamed Fishy Smell (whose proper name, however, was Truth) may recur to the mind at this point; and one thinks also of Jonah reborn from the whale -- of whom it is said in the MIdrash that in the belly of the fish he typifies the soul of man swallowed by Sheol. Christ himself is symbolized by a fish, and on Friday a fish meal is consumed.

Evidently we have here broken into a context of considerable antiquity, referring to a plunge into abyssal waters, to emerge as though reborn; of which spiritual experience perhaps the best-known ancient legend is of the plunge of the Babylonian King Gilgamensh to pluck the plant of immortality from the cosmic ocean. ... An Assyrian cylinder seal of c. 700 B.C. (the period to which the prophet Jonah is commonly assigned), shows a worshipper with outstretched arms arriving at this immortal plant on the floor of the abyss, where it is found guarded by two fish-men. (12-13)

***

Let us also remember that Melville sources whaling in this deepest ancestor:

When Bramha, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodic dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensible to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate as a whale, and sending down to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whalemen, then? ever as a man rides a horse is called a horseman?”

(“The Honor and Glory of Whaling” chapter of Moby Dick)

***

Thus our Fisher King composes a modern dream of an old myth; and he, too, rides naked on the back of a fish atop my family crest; he is lord of this next beach, this subsequent song, this wilder room of the dream.






FISH TALE

Feb. 2005

I have made of that old
adventure wooing
you a fish-tale,
the bedded bliss
become an isle that
walked or swam but
most certainly got
full away. The story has
grown fins then flukes
in its retellings,
found a wavelike
slap-and-sloshing resonance,
the sound of crashing
shores I only dreamed
back then, tidally
awakened in your arms
at last. All that remains
is that sound -- a semblance
of wild love which is both
spring river and trembling
bridge, both love and
lover pouring forth in
one gout of song the
three hearts which no
actual kiss may staunch,
much less damn, the
way sea-walls may jetty
sand chapels for a time
but the sea swells
tide the ends of every
ocean to full blue.
Of that short time
that broke all my clocks
I now endlessly return,
and walk, like a shore,
up and down its ghostly
reaches, performing
stations of devotion
on the way. Here fresh
on the beach I drove
off into the night
an emptied, riven man --
Here by this stump of
broken mast I stood
at the bar, pounding
down three shots of
blue lactissima -- Here
by the moonlit mash
of waves I met you,
your face averted to
the band, your breasts
rising from a lacy blouse
to imprison me between
the ocean and its heavings,
the high heart’s saltiest
retrievings. And here
on a stretch of
shattered whelks and
scattered, sprawled weeds
is where we thrashed
together in one wilding
spume, a shout which
rang the bells of heaven
and returned, forever
seared and scarred by
your lips, or mine, or
some wakened pair,
delivered by the sea
and ghosting every each
and croon inside every
tidal day long since.
My fish-tale has made of
me the tunny, elusive
and sea-wise, the slipperiest
half of soul no man
may mount and vaunt,
the prize more priceless
every time I reel the
telling out. The one
that got away became
the tail in every wave,
a sea-wife who sings
below, our children in
these darkling verses,
swans of riven undertow,
a dark gleam of moonlight
on massed waters, the
brilliant folded crash
we found and woke together
that one night, now
every night to wash
the shores I dream.
My myth grows deeper
every time I sing
that mythic night,
like the ocean filling
everything the moon
left in its wake.
Have I told you about
that night when
from the deepest sea
a woman roused
the depths of me?



THE SOUL FISH

May 2005

... The soul is ambitious
for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament
that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.
-- Jack Gilbert, “A Walk Blossoming”

Wisdom consists in keeping the soul
liquid. There must be the Abyss, Nyx,
and Chaos, out of which all things come,
and they must never be far off. Cut off
the connection between any of your works
and this dread origin, and the work is shallow
and unsatisfying.
— Emerson, Journal (1842)

In rural Ireland -- where the men who
remain often fail to marry and then
go mad -- there is a stubborn folk belief
that the soul is a fish located under
the arm. It’s a slippery, untrustworthy
presence, this scaly soul, prone to
errant nonsense, whispering all night
from those men’s ancient pillows
to sell the farm and seeking love
across the banished oceans
of the earth. Pure foolishness, that
a fish would swim that far, just to
expire between some cuspate thighs,
when pints and pipesmoke are
almost enough tamp the grieving down.
Still, there’s something noble to
them about that fish’s travail, so bold
and burning that it knocks down every
church in the parish, leaving turds
in the chalice. Soul begone! is the
prayer for too-clenched teeth -- not the
soul we pray Michael row to heaven
but its fraught freezing sea, all waves and
salt liquor and fluked beasts who
loll and haul the tide like the
fifty cows of Tethys. It is the lurching
part of every desire that must betray
the long-denied bed. No wonder
schizophrenia runs rife in the poor
counties of western Ireland,
too close perhaps to those tall cliffs
of Moher where the distance to the
doomed sea is measured the ache luring
and leaping in the chest, somewhere
beneath the arm that pushes back
with a man’s failing strength. Their
churches too long ago banned that
fish from the liturgy, and now those
churches fade to ruin, ossuaries of
Latin embalmed in a hoarse brogue.
The crash of North Sea surf against
those cliffs will eat the heart of God
away and all the fish will tumble
down at last into the reign of foam
and fire. And then the good aged
crofters of Clare and Kerry will
quit their bruited turf and join
hands out there to dance and
then fan out to fey the bed
of every maid matron and crone,
a school of salmon leaping
from the lakes to barge their
way on home. And all the
gals will sing Amen my man.


FISHY COMMUTE

April 2005

According to Glaber, Brendan
is taken to an island paradise
by the whale, while the Vita St.
Davidis states that the saint was
“leading a wondrous life on the
back of a sea-monster” and
was heading for Wales.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

I’ve grown so used to days and
nights aboard a fish that his
commutes are a suburb I’ve lived
in for years, at home on waters
he whorls deep while
I work in the garden in
the paper-whirl of butterflies.
Last night driving home
from the poetry event,
fine language sounding in
my ear without translation,
I drove roads I rarely
see so late -- I-4, Maitland
Boulevard, long lonely
SR-441. Night scenes
of broadened emptiness
and tired urgency ghosted
up from under and without,
flukes of the same whale
though darker. Billy Stayhorn
ballads on the jazz station,
the pianist stepping delicately
down his vertebrae as
I drive home to my
beloved wife and You,
my shrieking blue Cape
of verse matins miles
away from first light. Such
gentility I found on the
back of ancient night, sweet
tidals bearing a wreckage
within sight of the next shore.