Malingerings of an Outre Season

Indian Summer in Florida: Days wretchedly still and humid, overwarm, migrainous with a cloudish swirl that will neither rain nor dissipate. The sky presses down with surgencies and worries, making all feel sere, sorrowing, sore.

Surely some of this gnarl works in from grander events. The death toll from the earthquake in Pakistan now estimates toward 35,000, another black angelus to add to the gulf coast devastation of Hurricane Katrina, mounting death in Iraq, the tsunami last year in Southeast Asia, four hurricanes here in Florida last year, ice melting at torrid pace in the poles.

Some of it too is merely personal, my wife getting confirmation after an ultrasound on Monday that she has a large cyst on one of her ovaries, her obgyn saying flatly it has to come out and then hurrying off to other patients, leaving her to spiral down into THAT awfulness, having had a hysterectomy five years ago, a scare with a cyst on one her breasts two years ago. All of these troubling growths in the inner garden, none definately cancerous but erring that way, tuberous malignancies of worry and delays in the work. Yesterday (the day after she got the test results) she was sick and sicker with a horrid headache, going back to bed at noon after taking PM sinus pills. Up, sort of, when I got home at 7 p.m., still bad with headache but awake. We watched whatever on tv and then bedded down for the night, talking late about getting a second opinion, not letting this get in the way of her fledgling business, etc. She’s still venting the anger and worry, maybe today or tomorrow she’ll get her game face, accept and get back to work: but who am I to judge, whose internal plumbing and furnace seems to keep on keepin’ on free of malaise, all of it wardened to this skull of mine (migraine after migraine after migraine these days, for weeks now, perhaps efflorence of the dismally late season, or the sum of so much work, all of this wick-littin’ round every productive moment ....)

Factor back into these hellish-regent days that foment, light inside pain, the exfloliations of a beautiful strange terrible blue tree, the Unnamable perplex which clings to that trellis descending brain to shoulders to furnace heart to aching back to fustian testicles to calloused ass to heavycabled legs all the way down to the soul of the soles, my bottommost desire, reaching ever lower like a backassed periscope into the sweet black noctal abyss, sketching first maps, cateloguing the weird specimins, harpuscaping the tophairs of the beast who strides below me, my totem father who fucks my totem mother standing up, their unitive coil the spiralling dream I am, calling me back, hurling me forward, like so much sperm, or spermacetti oil, or spermatakoi logos: hot words for this overlong darkening season, praise for the devil perhaps, or his praise for me. Much engendered this summer, for good and ill: let its bells clamor this while in hard news and aching skulls.




OUTRE

2003

Who am I to
catechise mere dawn?
As if this first light
which eases in
like some hightiding
reach of blue
were the eyes of
Cuchillin himself
as he hacked off
the head of the
Queen of Skye
in revenge for
spearing his true
love through her
breasts. No one
wants to hear
such time-worn
tropes -- Classicism
is SO outre a prof
once scrawled on
a poem I’d written
about some crazy
who trudged up
the hill by my house
like some Sisyphus.
Out of style,
extra-academic
to that postmodernist
hell where all the
poets must now claim
their butt of sack.
Indeed. Yet I have
found the high
perfections of that
place dead
of thirst, like a
fine house too high
above the sea
to hear the sound
of its desire.
Oran’s head rises
from the well he
was buried in,
singing of ice
floes and narwhaled
gods, the roar
of the ages rising
from his toes:
My space age
poetry’s cast
in old stone
and epigrams from
dark Lascogne --
antlered men dancing
herds of meat in
motion. Those
brilliant bones of time
shine in this too-new
dark, holding back
the tide that ebbs
this heart. Outre
in my ogres,
strumming ogham harps
in lonely old fields,
I stand here faithful
to first light, quarrying
cold lucence from
the bottom of this
world which has
forgotten almost
all of its songs I spill
here, bucket after
bucket of balefile,
bone dross and
low blues. My
book’s a severed head
floating between
first light and
last line,
brimming with
the next upwelling,
oh-so-outre news.