The Fisher King (5)

ABYSSAL PLAINSONG

2002

There is a God (some say),
A deep, but dazzling darkness.
—Henry Vaughan

While we sleep
the night hauls us
through deep billows,
cold and ever-black,
tiding us in surges
we can’t hold onto
or name, just dream.

Lost in the marges
of that boneless toil,
we ferry the dead
in St. Elmo’s Fire,
our pulse lucent
in their basalt veins.

Seals fan the
cold waters of our
oblivions, their
long-lashed eyes
weeping like beloveds
in lost windows
or children carried
off in dark hands.

We wander through
floorless rooms all night
as the centuries
glow from split
whalers and the
spires of lost towns.

No wonder when
the alarm clock
hauls us back
we’re like someone
rescued from a riptide
who must sit awhile
dazed on the shore:

To him our day
is strange, almost painful,
as infinity ebbs
in scowling thunder,
leaving this scrawled
manowar—our
only plunder.


CIRCE

2004

It’s been so many years
since I left you on that first
bed, drowsing while I
crept out. -- Or had
you already abandoned
me before I thought
to leave you there?
Did you flit out
the window like the
dream I could
not keep, leaving
behind the part of love
I thought was booty
but later found
that sack slack
and empty in
the shadows of
the bow as it kissed
the next shore.
Circean wares don’t
ever leave the bedding
of their wiles: My longing
is just the snout she
gave me for scenting her
ahead, wild for her
dusky immortelles,
my blue eyes cursed
in the ocean’s fixed gaze
ever beyond the bounds
toward that whatever
next gambol where
she forever next resides.
Where curves are rounded
most the moist-eyed lover
knows no night can ever be
long enough, no tale
an ocean too wild
to voyage across.
The next shore simply
dresses now in
the same oldschool
debauch. Will I ever
write another poem?
Someone deliver me
from this whale of swoon
who thrones and altars
and rudders this bliss.
Connive for me to
clear the reefs which
shores my soul’s soul kiss.



EROS

2000


Eros, the god of love, emerged
to create the earth. Before, all
was silent, bare, and motionless.
Now all was life, joy, and motion.
-- Early Greek Myth

That passionate music: How it flings
us, joyous, toward her sweet body
and beyond. Til death do we fall.
Why is it that the thought of
the ripened curves of her breasts
and lutelike bottom grips me like
a paradigm? My lust is like
a burning fiddle in a field of split corn.
Desire though is something different.
A heedless integer halving itself in another.
Eros reaching like Orpheus
for the eternally dead bride.
A music which goes under
to rise in one wave
like a breath inside stone.
A man riding a dolphin toward
the next glittery wave.
A trope of Thalassa, inside,
dark, and free. Strangeness forever
ripening at the first tentative
shock of what so gorgeously
and fatally blooms.



SALOME

2004

Man cannot make it; on the contrary,
it is always the a priorielement in
his moods, reactions, impulses,
and whatever else is spontaneous
in psychic life. It is something
that lives in itself, that makes us live.
-- Carl Jung on anima

I build and launch
these boats of ink
on paper, but you bid
me sail the next sea
toward the next isle
where, you whisper,
you await the motions
of my keel and kiss
and clench. Before
I even set this pen
to write you swirl
up from the blue
of my morning-
making brain, arising
and arousing from
a line of text I’ve
read somewhere
that sights a passage
once more here,
sufficient ache and
shore enough to
try here once again
to bed you here
at last. Something that
I read sights you
in between the lines
& then leaps in
after you with me
sailing fast behind.
That something
is a bit of soul
I was born with
which tore out from
you, as son from
womb and moon
from sea; a narrow
acre of ocean bloom
which leaps and
widens to every sound
and seem of you
and begs to hurl
that music back.
Of course I know
you don’t walk
any island I will
ever shore, and yet
no shore will
do that doesn’t fold
and crash a more
actualler you.
You lace and wiggle
just out of sight
to make
a leaping salmon
out of me, my heart’s
fins coursing
full against the
flow beyond every
noun or verb
I’ve ever found,
wild to taste what
I can’t know on lips
that smile widest
in their welcome
when fully vanishing.
I come to guess
at a physics of
the heart where you
are sine and wave at
once, deepest here and
furthest beyond, salmon
dancing high and
down-pouring Salome,
Ultima Thule and my
wife upstairs.
You’re none of them but
all their strange sweet
majesties in one tide.
Such perplex dapplement
ensures me years of
boating thus to you,
a guarantee of wave
and wash in
salt perplexity.
May all these motions
round the breasts
I found in you
and be homeward most
between the vast
so moist and bluest
I to Thou.


NAXOS

2001

Eros is a mighty daimon
but an army of lovers
can be beaten here
with just a word: No.
Desire ends where it
begins, at that
honeyed source just
beyond my lips,
in a name I know
but cannot say,
not yet, its
brilliant beach
and blue surf dropped
from rounded hips
so casually, with
such killing grace.
As soon as I say Yes
or Come she then
departs, as if along
a loosening and
diffuse spray of surf,
receding like a
tide as I approach,
forever just out
of reach, silencing
me down to this.
And when I say
No or Go I hear
the rise and fold
and tumescent crash
welcoming me with
open arms of crazy
foam, pleading all
the words I meant
to say but lost.
so it goes between
the word and its beloved,
forever here and gone,
an icy sweet peramble
which melts the names
back down the well,
though raise them here
somehow I’ll try.
She will not come
unless I refuse her,
she will not stay
unless I let her go.
And so I’ve learned
to assault love from
the rear, marrying
the verses to its
wavelike curve and
crash by loosening
the cincture of my
sense, merging
noun and sound
and then horsing
them upon both
sine and wave
where you and I
are one bedraggled
castaway upon
this rock, this tiny
island in God’s stream
where what we know
we copulate
and what we don’t
we dream.


ONLY THE SONG

2002


Music is the memory of what never happened.
— Jack Gilbert

Only to the humble does the dream come,
and contained in the dream, there is only the song.
— Papago saying

As a poem dips in dark waters
to ink seal-ichors,
God’s wild nib
unharbors the ocean
from these ribs.
I held that blue music dear
bellowing down the
wine-press of bitter nights.
He seeks the ocean
whose kisses parch and bleach.
I didn’t ask to end up here
but I give thanks every day
for the next draft,
the next siphoning prayer.
Such psaltery is
my daily sump, your alms,
our merry brine: oblations
of whatever fins there,
fish or mammal,
man or Manannan.
Sirena of this restless tide,
your errant son returns
to fight this losing fray,
epically crossing out
all but the music
which crashed all night
and remains. Clasp this
to your breast
like a locket or a cross
or a lover’s tired head.
This song is conched
from your deep bed
and dropped on a pink shore.
Marry your ear to my making:
inside these curved lines
your dark womb calls — no,
demands — for more,
even though it’s just one song,
even though I always get it wrong.



THE POEM AS
A BEACH BEFORE DAWN

2004

The ancient image of Our Lady in
the Lady Chapel in the Church of
Notre Dame at Granville in Normandy
was found on the shore of Cap Lihoo.
It was set up in its own chapel, and is
still the focus of a pardon on the last
Sunday in July called “Grand Pardon
des Corporations et de la Mer.”
-- Nigel Pennick,
Celtic Sacred Landscapes

My job as I see it is to vigil the matins
of this waking summer shore and receive
what the sea deigns to return to me:
To sing each day’s arrival with the tide,
building a white chapel in which a
freight grows sacred and is altared,
incensed, believed, hosanna’d. I never
know just what I’ll find here -- a dream
perhaps, or some memory loosed
from the well, or a resonant bit of story.
I let the sea decide. I just walk here
on the moony sound while the surf
crashes silver milk at my feet, nursing
my inner ears and eyes. And even that’s
imagined as I sit in this chair in my
house squat in town, the dark outside
a cat’s attentive drowse. My job is to
make of that a beach I walk, and believe
I’ll find down its sandy lane the very
shape the next song needs. See: there
ahead a clump winnowing a receding
wave: the beached masthead of
a long-split ship, trailing in her hair,
a bit of barnacle kissing her faded lip.
She was carved two centuries ago
from the likeness of Our Lady in
which was washed ashore two centuries
before, a rebirth of the mother of the
Celtic gods, herself found in a tide-pool
three thousand years before, delved
from goddesses whose names drowned
many thousand years further back.
But their tidings all remain, as well
the shore which here washes down
the lengths of journal-paper. My job
is to hear that surf inside and give it
here a beach where devotees like me still
walk in the nuptials of the coming day,
my pen across the page the wet part
of the sea, what she bids shore in me.