Harper of the Thrall

TROUBADOUR

2004

One kiss forever changed me — not the
First but the one love at last deemed
Me ready for, an hour before
Spring woke the world with urgent green
And torrid rivers. Her song then
Found my mouth and since has never
Ceased babbling of blue skies and rafts
Floating over drowned suburbs and
Churches I once prayed in. Merry
In mind yet desperate of heart,
That music is my sea-horse,
My life from shore to shore. Heaven
Knows where that woman fled to
Affrighted by this strange throat’s roar:
In that slough I sing her soar.

***

TAPESTRY

2004

In my father’s
bastard history
there are harpists
who entertained the
Norman kings in the
south of Ireland: And
when those courts
washed back into
sea, our minstrels
wandered forth, seeking
patronage in whatever
semblance of royalty
that sad country
could provide. A
family singer of the
17th century lamented,
“who will buy a poem?”
and concluded, “I’m
a ship with a ruined
cargo/now the famous
Fitzgeralds are gone./
No answer. A terrible case./
It is all in vain that I ask.”
Surely that is why
one of my fathers
boarded the Sea Sprite in
1779, carrying that
broken harp to
Boston Harbor.
But when were Your
songs ever safe, praising
the rise of kings who
always fell, revelling
in love’s wild delights
beyond the pale of
papal decree and
the prying eyes of
royal husbands? Such
blasphemy and scandal
have always pleased You
well, even if Your
mortal lovers all found
sorrow at the far ends
of their verses. No matter.
All those years I wandered
and blundered learning
how not to drink from
those three cups of song
which festoon my father’s
crest: a delight only to
You. Certainly not for
my mortal loves; nor
even much in my
long education in
singing mortal songs about love.
The rise and fall of
every wave to You
is holy and florid,
no matter how wet
and scraggly my
leaps become in them.
That naked man
astride the mean-
looking dolphin atop
the crest — he’s not
giving up the song.
That’s plain from
the motto — Not by
Providence but Victory! —
which is written under
wall like a labia
buzzing a Bronx cheer
to every noble aim
and their chaste remains.
You love this sweet
cacophony of lost
and lonely songs
forever hitting shores
you’ve just left behind.
Whatever I set to paper
here was lifted from
that sweet air
drifting in from
the absence You hurl,
like perfume, everywhere
you’ve been: A high
strange music which
my lyrics dare complete
or at least ferry to
the next wild shore
flapping in the breeze
like Your dress
just out of sight.
Libraries and chapels
and writing chairs
are just our way
of trying to mount You,
as men build dams
and bulwarks against
the sea. But the music
like a tide is crashing
down the shore
where you are close,
oh, closer than the
margin of a kiss.
You have made of me
a brine-soaked harp
which sings of You
everywhere there’s
moonlight on the strings
and blue dazzle in the springs.

***




October moon’s howl in wane, clear skies clouding, turbidity to the south and west where Wilma whirls ‘n’ turns, rolling pin in hand, eyeing Florida’s long offending member askance with warm-water-roiled spleen. Doofus Fred Flintstone surely is our state father, dozing on the Florida platform amid all that sedimental hubris, aeons of repose, accumulating the detritus of eroding mountains, tourist legions composed of snoozy oolites and snoring granitics, wefts of sleepy limestone and sand, all that’s left of so much wind and wave. As we, current residents of this old weary thrall, sleepwalk through the suburban routines of ecstasy, immune to distant disasters, our Edens lamped by the glow of worried TV weathercasters, tracing an angry red arc of possibiltiy across the state, path of wrath, red on the inside, wild all about ... Thus we prepare for this next hurricane, the fury at the end of one alphabet, muse of the next -- Alpha, Beta, all the Greek titans of storm ...

My wife sleeps upstairs in a caul of increasing worry, back to the doc today and then to Mayo Clinic next week for a second opinion on the likelihood of laproscopy to remove a large cyst on one of her ovaries. It’s always the female wonderworks, she laments, fibroid tumors removed 5 years ago in a hysterectomy (“bigger than three Mr. Potato Heads” was how the doc described them), a suspicious mass on a breast (shadowy and malignant-looking due to a messy mammogram). Now this. I don’t think the surgery will be that difficult, but my wife is grown terrifed of operations, hates the invasiveness of an absolutely other knife, the cold flourescence, the sickly-sour hospital ambience, the nausea and headaches blooming like bad anaesthesia, the off-setting of one’s plans, the sense of starting over again from the centrality of a wound.

Who am I to judge? My job is to finish this writing, clean up, and get back in bed with her, stroking slow and sure her feet, listening, consoling, commiserating, savoring with her a moment with our cat (retrieving Violet from her chair in the closet and then setting her on the bed), cooing, delighting, laughing, listening, sighing, shoring, salving as best as I can with a loving presence alongside her anger and worry ...



CALMING THE MERMAID

The story is told by a John Corley to Lady August Gregory and included in her Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, 1920:

There is no luck if you meet a mermaid and you out at sea, but storms will come, or some ill will happen.
There was a ship on the way to America, and a mermaid was seen following it, and the bad weather began to come. And the captain said, “It must be some man in the ship she’s following, and if we knew which one it was, we’d put him out to her and save ourselves.” So they drew lots, and the lot fell on one man, and then the captain was sorry for him, and said he’d give him a chance till tomorrow. And the next day she was following them still, and they drew lots again, and the lot fell on the same man. But the captain said he’d give him a third chance, but the third day the lot fell on him again. And when they were going to throw him out he said, “Let me alone for a while.” And he went to the end of the ship and he began to sing a song in Irish, and when he sang, the mermaid began to be quiet and rock like as if she was alseep. So he went on singing till they came to America, and just as they got to the land the ship was thrown up into the air, and came down on the water again. There’s a man told me that was surely true.

***

St. Julian’s Well, within the precincts of the Austin Friars at Ludlow (Co. Rutland, England), is, I imagine, like St. Julian’s Church, Shewsbury, dedicated in honor of St. Juliana, the virgin martyr of Nocodemia, who was bound and scourged her demon-tempter, but quenched the fire prepared to burn her with her tears, and arose unurt and refreshed from a boiling cauldron, and thus may have been considered a patroness of healing waters.

-- Robert Charles Hope, The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England 1893





If the sea teaches any lesson, it thunders this through the throat of all its winds: “There is no knowledge that is not valuable.”

— Emerson at sea, in his Journal of 1833


***

ONE LOVE, ONE SONG

My love for you and this song
are one in this singular travail
across an empty so gorgeous sea.
Though my ways seem
pathless, I follow my heart
because it alone knows
the way through the
wilderness of waves,
seeing with darker eyes
the deeper path of love,
compassed by that
silver ache the moon
hangs over the tide.
Our love cannot be
requited though
nothing else will do;
on a forever-waylaid
night we’ll merge at last
and dream and drift
off together into an
endless, clear blue space.
No matter all these
quests that failed
to find you. No matter
all the instruments I’ve
blunted in my dowse
and reach for you — penis,
guitar, pen, boat-prow.
No matter this ocean
of ink that grows
between us, filling
the hallows of your
every departure (or
were they all mine?)
with angel-burning tears.
All that matters is
the pure note welling
in my throat with
clarion and halcyon
desire, lofted over that
crystal thalassa like
a breast of pale blue milk
or the lucence of that
afterglow which brimmed
a few beds on a few
nights along this lifelong
row to you. I’m just
another luckless troubadour
marked from birth to
ache and sing to you,
my lady of royal blue seem.
Perchance today I
sing well enough of you
to stir you from your dream.
Smile for me just once
on whatever shore you
now walk. Bless these
penny verses with with
glint of your pure silver.
Kiss me once just over
the crest of the wave
I send to you from
the bottom of this art.