Realm

5:30 a.m. Sunday. Violet was scampering around at 3 a.m. so I got up & gave her treats to quiet her down (sucker) and came back to bed, enveloping myself in my wife’s warm sleep. Woke again an hour later with Violet back at it and came down get started with the day’s work (sucker), perusing texts, dreaming of milky thighs and tautologically tautochromatic swelling & fair-welling ta-tas. Show me the way, via lactissima.

***

But I err, too astounded with the image, slackjawed like a hormonally enrapt teen. I want to sweeten every world with that cream; I ache to lap my world to dregs of it. As daddy bars the next big door, mommy’s nursing just inside; if I could barge past the ogre standing there, who would want to trespass further than Her embrace?

But that is the task; to leave the personal and spelunk down into the Realm of the Mothers, deeper than any personal fuck or thrall or nippled gall I have had the pluck or fate to suck.

Ah, but far indeed I rappel. Is there no bottom to that bottomless dancer onstage, universally indifferent to the lust of men, her candescence wholly fired by the boundless intemperance of men? Globes of sun and moon, cleavaged for me; Pearly Gates a-dripping with my sperm; Otherworldly Door with the browneye of Hades staring back; every entrance I desire both departure and descent, darker and deeper and wilder than I have wits or nougat in my pits to go.

But some feral sense tells me that I must, ere I die, or dry, which for aging men is worse.

I have to some degree learned to forget the first music of a real woman’s sighs; those passions are, for the most part, now Otherworldly rants, pants down the ankles of a buried boy-man. Behind and under the woman I love, behind and under the woman I dream inside here, behind and down the woman of my dreams, draining like an effluvia of lust down archetypally female plumbing, is the Realm of Ubermothers, far off all the maps, where Charybdis and Lamia churn the the wake to male choad, ululating down from Gaia to Urania to the universal cunt sealed even from God, before his biggangbang Event. They are all in the sexual invocation, which I better understood at age six than I do now, before I called it sex and lost the better, darker, deeper half. (What they call, in AA, the wet part of the ocean.) That fructive naiad rabble cries for these words, that worlds may be furrowed with starry fires.

***

Can I be entrusted to ferry such fire, so foolish and mortal and bound to feel this way which so tweaks and fondles what it will must not fuck? I can no more harbor eros between these margins as name the masterless sea: My work is ever tentative, apt to be blown over at night by winds I fear yet welcome as long I have that outrage in my balls which I here translate, though words fail utterly. Thus dreams go in the end of poems, and there’s a lacunae in the pattern which allows the ghost to retreat, and there’s another shore tomorrow in which the choir sings of final shores.

And thus I write on here, adrift on that merciless magical sea, my lines in the water, dowsing for numens deeper than water, fishing for the big one, like Ahab, come hell or water higher than all.

***


FISH TAIL

2003

A fish-tail
churns the tide
of this poem --
vital pulse or
angst, blue-red
mirror, a moon
-cauled fury
without eyes
furiously abed:

Sometimes I
think the motion’s
holy, an ache
for God in world;
that these lines
are plainsong, an
honest chant
as I furrow the tide
with seeds of psalm:

Other times its
all suspect, my
mere thirst
an addict greed for
pussy lounges
of the Lord,
pouring what is
not into way-too
empty glass, purring
for what I’ll never find:

Perhaps both
are true in the
true in the
in the ocean
sense of things,
that salt
demesne where
grace is battened
on red death,
the glory of
my lunge to
God resulting
in so much
carrion rain
and bone ruin.

An ambivalent
enquiry then,
something I’ll
always carve,
never the smarter
for all the ink
I spoor, whatever
I could save
tossed so dreamily
on the next nameless,
fishtailing wave.

***


BRAVURA

2003

The sea of spuming thought
foists up again
The radiant bubble that
she was. And then
A deep up-pouring from
some saltier well
Within me, bursts
its watery syllable.

... Where shall I find
Bravura adequate for
this great hymn?

-- Wallace Stevens,
“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”

The horses know their
hooved gallop from
first kiss to wavelike
smash on far shores.
The well draws deep
the stored cold keep
of her blue gray eyes.
I am old and older
in these lines, never
wiser for the thrill
of her long-sipped sashay
into the sea from
the packed angst
of all the beaches I
have walked. There is
an autumnal dearth
to these Julys
when storms late
afternoon like sky
crones brogue high
summer, tonguing
for that spermlike ardor
pent in evaporation’s
gauzy thigh. I drove
home on a shore near
her wild billows last
night, a high and wide
storm hiding the western
sun in a white halo at
the crest; deep within,
marled shadows
of sea-like grays
pearled into the
most tortured blue.
There was dearth
in the overbaked
arras of suburb and
field, cracked and split
beneath high heels
of heat, passion’s Lent
a long furrow absent
of sense or bearing,
as lovers wake on
the third day far out
to sea, knowing they
must somehow find
stray socks and zip
back up the standard
fascia of our necessarily
separate lives. Cored
of world by its hottest
days, somehow we
manage jobs and gym
and the long drive home
amid the day’s thinning
traffic with this big
storm ahead like a
sibyl of sea-angst,
guiding the way toward
that house in which
all dreams smash
and die and grow into
the life we always
dreamed we’d some day
share. Slow salvos
of thunder from far away
as I got out of my car
into the late day’s heat,
inspecting the pentas
in the front yard for
too much sun, noting how
much the grass has
yet to grow this
week of little rain.
Inside you cook
up ham and corn, all
cats fed, medicines
dispensed, a cooking show
on TV, our day’s stories
unfraught of drama or
spice, just work and
some distant contentment
that nothing at least
went wrong. How far this
tired end of day bouree
of real love from the sleek
shatter of our first kiss
which seems now at
least 3 lifetimes ago --
The wave subsides into
the groan and wrinkle
and deep bliss of
being at last home, small
though it be, and fraught
so with difficulty. This
tide now turns the other
way to wash toward
distant shores, cresting
with a different horse’s
mane, though the sea, the sea,
the sea tides endlessly.


***

BATED

July 2005

This morning the dark is too hot
in its stillness, like a bated breath,
like the long ebb of the pretidal wave
which backdraws miles out toward
the sea, exposing reefs and wrecks
not seen for ages, if ever. Out in the
Gulf Hurricane Dennis is gathering
strength, tracking towards Haiti
in spreading white spiral,
ultimately toward some coast of
Florida by next Monday.
All of the air in the region is
getting sucked that way, leaving
us breathless and headachey,
and all sounds hollow, like
the knocking of bones in a tree.
At 4:15 a.m. the hush is just
too deep for lush, bereft of
rains yesterday and temps soaring
up close to 100. A sort of slugged
sleepwalker’s calm pervades
the garden, eerie and prescient,
its swoon now druggy, stilled
to an underwater calm because
there is no breeze. My hand
is amped by that arch absence
today and thus shrills toward
infernity, a jabberwock
of baleful pulses which
thread and weave the dark,
like neurons in the skull of
a dirt-devil who’s clutching
the hem of my muse’s
cloak of salvia and rose
as she receives this staticky,
ion-starved pour. I submit
the awe of such awfulness,
aswarm in bees which hive
far down the sacral column
of the pen, its ink juciest
when drawn from the lees.
Thus ecstatic lovers are
mooning in my hips as
I write, cursing and praising
God as they tear at the
gooey sweetness of
His hive; the woman
astride with her
eyes screwed tight
hissing Holy Shit as she
shudders and then floods
a drowning delight
with starry gouts of sea
slather, the most heavenly
acre to be ferried from hell.
Satch my morning thus,
a hard horny ache which
cannot quell or slake
the black amperage
jabbering across
and down the page.
A baleen ire, a basalt rage
exposed like fanning teeth
of a bated mouth below
in the Gulf which may
or may not devour us
but sure makes high summer
grip both legs round the
poem, arching spirelike as it
grinds on its hips this
blundering sweet bliss.


***

How can we not complete then with Ahab, repeating here his speech from “The Candles” chapter of Moby Dick, in full water-wild stride, rollers proud in the it was meant to be shouted. (Not by providence, but Victory!)

Ahab stands cursing the heavens flashing over the Pequod, thus initiating the doomed crew into their three-days’ hunt for Moby Dick, the biggest one to always get away. I imagine the heights of this fiery speech mined from the very depths of its quarry -- Oh brave foolish Melville, to mine such abysmal gold, thy defiant exultation lamps the way for me!

***

Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire,
whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship,
till in the sacramental act so burned by thee,
that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee,
thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right
worship is defiance.

To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind;
and e’en for hat thou canst but kill;
and all are killed.

No fearless fool now fronts thee.
I own thy speechless, placeless power;
but to the last gasp of my earthquake life
will dispute its unconditional,
unitegral mastery in me. In the midst
of the peronsified impersonal,
a personality stands here.
Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came;
wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live,
the queenly personality lives in me,
and feels her royals rights.

But war is pain, and hate is woe.
Come in thy lowest form of love,
and I will kneel and kiss thee;
but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power;
and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds,
there’s that in here that still remains indifferent.
Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me,
and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”

(Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames
leap lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest,
closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.)

“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so?
Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links.
Thou canst blind; but I can then grope.
Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes.
Take the homage of these poorer eyes, and shutter-hands.
I would not take it.
The lightning flashes through my skull;
mine eyeballs ache and ache;
my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded,
and rolling on some stunning ground.
Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee.

Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness,
but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!

Oh, thou magnanimous! Now do I glory in my geneology.
But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not.
Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her?
There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater.
Thou knowest not how came ye,
hence callest they self unbegotten;
certainly knowest not thy beginning,
hence callest thyself unbegun.
I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself,
oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing
beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity
is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical.
Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes
do dimly see it.

Oh, thou founding fire, thou hermit immemorial,
thou too has thy incommunicable riddle,
thy unparticipated grief.
Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire.
Leap! leap up, and lick the sky!
I leap with thee; I burn with thee;
would fain be welded with thee;
defyingly I worship thee!”

***

Amen!