Postcard from the Abyss

MY PERSONAL FAUST

October 4, 2005


Nothing so sweet as magic is to him,
which he prefers before his chiefest bliss.
And this the man in his study sits.
-- Chorus in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

He’s the shadow ache beneath
each page I turn, the greed inside
each line I write, that hand
both his and mine reaching
up Sophia’s skirt to finger every
whorled nebulae the starry heavens hide
beyond its lucent angel pride.
He does not content to name
my catelogue of knowns;
his mind is that rolodex of rhetorics
I toss to the brutallest wave
in the name of such impure humility
that the bottoms of all seas are damned,
their abyssal vaults all vandalized
in the name of our leagueless desire.
One day I’ll pay dearly for harboring
his eyes, for peering with his beyond;
I’ll find myself beyond all shores
without a paddle boat or sea
and nothing but the pure white scree
of empty pages never to be writ by me,
remitting every wave I loomed
with a last, savage, far-too-satisfying,
final, judgmental boom. Sayanara.
Fools who must laugh on earth
will weep in hell -- Mephisto’s
wit, my furious blood epitaph
scrawled onto the last known wall,
his way of saying Kilroy was here,
not that it mattered anywhere at all.
But for now, it’s party time,
astride the broomstick which
scoots the Christian angels out,
& mocks the pontiff till his
distaff’s stout, & roils a rabble
of black-toasted imps on
winging books which flap and fan
the furnace flame in which alembic
shall be cooked and served for all:
the little man in his studious boat
cursing high heaven’s rout
in one blue pure orgasmic gout.

***


ANGELUS

Jack Gilbert

Obsidian. Sturgeon. Infatuated angels.
Which only we can translate into flesh.
The language to which we alone are native.
Our own bait. We are spirits housed in meat,
instantly opaque to the Lord. As Jesus.
We go into the deadfall of the body,
our hearts in their marvelous cases,
and discover new belfries everywhere.

I continued toward the Minotaur to keep
the thread taut. And suddenly, now, immense flowers are coloring all my stalked body.
Making wine of me. As bells get music of metal
un the rain. The prey I am willingly prospers.
The exile that comes on comes too late.
I go to it as Adam, singing across paradise.

***

from “Dry Salvages,”
Four Quartets
by T.S. Eliot:

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our loses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
the distant note in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs The bell.


***



POSTCARD FROM THE ABYSS


“What’s a drunken man
like, fool?”

“Like a drowned man,
a fool, and a madman.
One draught above heat
makes him a fool, the
second mads him, and
the third drowns him.”

--Olivia and Feste,
Twelfth Night

Some lakes within
are pure abyss, wells
I once thought to
drink to dregs
only to get hauled
down by some
grim hand to where
real horrors nurse.
In my worst boozing
I always loosed abyssal
seasons which drowned
all other purpose
but to drown drunk.
When I was 27
my girlfriend threw
me out of our apartment,
saying her heart had
been leeched dry by all
my failures to fight
the way she loved.
It was a Friday night,
and Halloween: surely
I rode out on a dead tide
of severed tendons,
sworded heart and
cracked balls, all
pickled in a brine
of raw pain. I stayed
that first night
at the Bran Motor Court,
my suitcase packed
with the cotton ephedra
of my former selves
(musician, lover, man).
Got roaring drunk that
night & with an ex-bandmate
remembering well
and loud all we had
so bitterly lost.
With no love to stay
my hand, I drank freely
from the well, its water
that night unusually dark
and cold, like freezing
schnapps: tiny sickles
sweeping away all
that mattered and
so hurt. Around us ghouls
and French maids chased
and fled, their laughter
high and steely, their
couplings like stiletto
silhouettes of an
impaled heart.
The next morning
I woke more terrified
and alone than ever,
and there was
nothing to do
but drink beer and
watch college football
in that darkened room
til dark. That was the
ochre of free-fall, all
duties pushed away,
the hours rolling toward
nothing in a soulless tide.
There’s an old
Barbara Streisand
song I hear when
I think of those days:
“Free again,” she’d sing,
“lucky lucky me, free
again.” My father spun
that song round us
like a crown as he drank
Scotch in his 48th story
apartment in downtown
Chicago. “Time to raise the
roof again, shout out
loud and long again, time
to have a party, a party --”
The irony in her voice was
so thick any fool would
grimace, but for me the
song was both totemic
and blue, tanked
on boozed-up, historic
glee. I moved on to the
Flamingo Court
later that day, my dregs
in tow, pooling down
where it was cheaper by
the week and apt
for travellers with
nowhere to go.
My room was like
the inside of a dead
man’s eye, its gloom
furnished by a
million bad vacations:
a scarred dresser
missing half its handles,
greasy dark green
carpet, smoke-smelling
curtains, a half-dozen
roaches bigger than my
thumb spawled beneath
my lumpy single bed.
I set my suitcase on
the floor, pulled out
my electric guitar
from its pretty case
and sat on the bed
noodling old songs.
The notes were
thin and high, miming
that big night music and
all the stages I’d never
have the balls to mine.
But later come happy
hour I sure looked
the part in parachute
pants, layered shirts
and red leather shoes,
clothes my ex
had try to fit me to.
I dressed for my
own desire; surely
she primped my
hair up in the mirror.
That night I drank
at Bailey’s long and late,
befriending Kim, a big-
breasted, -hearted
waitress. She followed me
back to my room at
night’s end, maternally
sweet, holding my head
between her fine full
breasts while I nursed
and came and cried
for the woman
I’d lost. She gave me
her number the next
morning, said, call,
we can talk: But I
was blind those nights
to what she offered,
my sights lowered
toward the darkest
cleavage of them all.
And so the next night I
was back to the well
again to the dankest
a.m.’s, searching in
sparser bar-crowds
for some the next ear
to croon my songs
into. Seven of those
nights later I followed
some girl into Bailey’s
back disco, passing
Kim in my wake.
“Whore puppy,” she
hissed, but I just smiled
and walked on in
to that devil’s maw.
And so I free-fell
in that obliviate hell,
fall hardening into winter
and cold nights of
abuse ruling all. Today
I think what made that
time an abyss was not
that I fell so far,
but rather that I chose
to fall over all the other
ways my life could
still go -- join a band,
get a new girlfriend,
change jobs -- I couldn’t
let go of that boy who
drowned chasing a
lost woman down
a boozy, dark well.
Surely a con distills
into compulsion;
Eurydice might
be found again down
there-- perfect as the
night she first told me
she loved me, curled
close on that bed we’d
call our own--but
she’d hardly ever
welcome me back.
I said I was getting on,
but really I was just
going down that
abyss which yawns
when we can’t let go
of life’s infernal No.
I look back on those
hoary drunken
months like
a sailor recalling his
days hauling through
Cape Hope, where
the sea churned both
night and day to
devour its own wake.
It was a bad, bad season
which I ended up
repeating many times,
turning away from
life’s eluvial hurts
to hanker back to
that dark water’s edge,
rest my arms on the bar,
singing, bartender,
pour me some of
that fiery black
mama, I’m in need of
nipples to nurse this
mad, bad thirst.
I’d draw hard on that
first drink and stare at
the face in the mirror
who stared back
handsome and
lost -- the image
still wavers in
memory’s chilled glass:
now I see behind him
that other man, the
lord of abyss,
his fangs long, almost
eternal, curving down
below those long
nights’ undertow.




LOG

2005

There can be no doubt that the Navagatio
is presented as a search for the Terra
Repromisionis Sanctorum, but when
Brendan and his monks have reached this
Island of the Saints at long last, having
been at sea for seven years, the angel
who greets Brendan says: There before
you lies the land which you have sought
for a long time. You could not find it
immediately because God wanted to show
you his varied secrets in the great ocean
(diversa sua secreta in oceano magno).

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

“Every time I open my mouth a
bone falls out,” confessed some guy
in AA about his moral inventory.
The rest of us sighed and nodded
our heads, feeling most at home
among the fallen singers. O to be
so full, my blue log, spilling azimuths
and sprung tides and gales the
breadth of eras! My book is now
ten thousand matins long (or deep)
and still I’ve barely wet my
tongue in Your salty so old
savor -- strange fruit from
deeper orchards & the nature
of blue breastings, that nectar
which nipples sweetness
from pure terror in a wrench
of angel-devil ire. In this log of
logs the full blue bestiary
will be named, giant squid
and spermacetti, pubic
mastodons and galloping sea-
horses up from the abyss
of old nights and wanton cups,
fresh fervor on strange lips,
the nether kiss puckered where
no one has yet to mine or ferry,
much less sing. Each day
these nets haul up a wriggling
catch not seen on decks before:
always when I open my mouth
some raw new fin falls out --
fare enough to slake the waves
my log may number but cannot rout.