Flaming Love (Hierophany)

It is important to bring out this notion of singularity conferred by an unusual or abnormal experience. For, properly considered, singularization as such depends upon the very dialectic of the sacred. Most elementary hierophanies, that is, are nothing but a radical ontological separation of some object from the surrounding cosmic zone; some tree, some stone, some place, by the mere fact that it reveals that it is sacred, that it has been, as it were, “chosen” as the receptacle for a manifestation of the sacred, is thereby ontologically separated from all other stones, trees, places, and occupies a different, a supernatural plane.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy, 32

HIEROPHANY

Nov. 24, 2005

Every few seasons it seems I’m back at
this, combing my history for blue-boned
sooth the way one walks a morning’s
beach searching for what shells the
sea bequeathes. What am I looking for?
What do You bid me see inside those
rounds of time You ground on down
in tides of blue eternity? The poems of
late have all focused on the upwellings
of my teenaged years -- puberty being,
it is said, the trysting-ground where
white and blacker shamans grow their
wings -- the fonts are singular: A white
big white bra swinging on a high
branch of an oak tree, my father’s
loving boozy smile, the heft of a red
Fender Mustang guitar as I played that
Grand Funky music back -- Luminaries
on the darkened wake behind which
catch my eye and then begin to sing
like well-buckets of blue silver spilled
and ebbing back across my iambs’ naked feet.
It’s like a tide, this backward glance
on personal, profaner time, where deities
are merely fealties to surficial gobs
of gleam: Like that afternoon in my
fourteenth year when my friend Sue
changed in front of me in her bedroom,
sliding down her jeans revealing panties
stitched with”Flaming Love” across
the crotch between her skinny
legs. That sight -- just for a second
or two -- speared me clean and true
all the way to here, 34 years down this
salty strand, though she quickly
turned away to yank another pair of
jeans from a dresser drawer ( was
that turn from me in which her pantied
butt stared back at me the undertow
which had the surer hold on my thrall?)
and zipped them blithely up. The end.
What had I seen, what had been revealed
which elected me right then to sing
forever of that wild tide till I had seen
and later sung it all, until the entire
panoply of the naked world was
spread fully to view? Nothing supernatural
in such eagerness for eye-candy; what
randy boy doesn’t jam an eye to the
keyhole, praying for just one glimpse?
And Lord, all I did to count that coup
for all those nights, notching my
headboard with each pubic scalp
my eyes offered up to You -- so adolescent
and in adulthood wrong, so tediously
irreprehensible; so many bottles emptied
to fill those beds just to get full-frontal
for ten minutes with Artemis -- Oh
the dogs unleashed by looking, the hells
I’ve paid to spread those pages just to
read that singular line! Shame on me, so
madly predictable ... And are these poems
just gouts of long-counted cunts an
attempt to squeeze the last blue voltage
from that juice which used to amp
my balls past all limits of all sanity?
Certainly and perhaps: My intent here
is not imprurient: I offer a peek at
pubescent pantied snatch because You
knifed me so that way right then.
It took me years to write that moment
down, but once I had -- five years or
so ago -- the constellation I call
“Flaming Love” whirled its nova
into into my early pantheon,
a name for fate which
is that wave’s shout which rises at
the shore and careens into a
collapsed roar delving to my feet
a precious whelk -- smoothed and
broke and almost fully faded, to
be sure. Those two or three seconds
when, getting up from her bed where
we were talking about the misery
of classes and parent(s) and the
dream of running free, Sue unbuttoned
unzipped and shimmied down her
jeans, kicked one leg free then
the other, and paused for just
one second in front of me, looking
some other way, like a Venus
off the half-shell to my shore:
an me agape and staring hard,
my heart hammering, my desire
drowning every other nautilus
inside my soul for good, drowning
every high heaven’s white-washed
wings which only fly as they
should, drowning every word I
sing here in a sea of Flaming Love,
a silky blue oh-so thinnest pause between
the wildest world and You. Upon the mantel
of my verbally hot heart I put these shells
on view, each an eye a sight a song,
a nether wending way in which
the beach I dream I’ll never reach
will welcome me at last
when the last shell swoons me down.