The Iron Angel

It is unnecessary to dwell at length on the
question of hereditary transmission or
spontaneous vocation in the case of the
magician or medicine man. In general, the
situation is the same everywhere: the two
ways of access to magico-religious powers
coexist.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy, 21

You cannot be my disciple unless you
carry your own cross and come with me.

-- Luke 12:27

I.

You got me by hook and by crook:
a song in my nature grew loud
by hard nurture, my fathers
careening on waves which
came from no sea I have sounded,
if You get what I mean. My schooling
took me far down in that sea
only to throw me spluttering back
to try again and again and again. Of
nature and nurture my song’s thus
composed, one salt’s bliss through
that awful Cape my mother warned me
about when I was but 12:
Son, she said with steely intent,
there’s more to life than a bed,
a babe, a bottle of booze.
Those words echo here like chant
before first light, primary like a wash
of song off walls of resonanting
stone. My words here are wet in that
water and dreamy in their drowned sense,
hard harrowed like the fisherman who
was hauled down to the seal-city
to atone for his wild lust for seal-skins.
Nothing in my Bible and later Plato
quite prepared me for Your smile
spread in sprawled legs, You winked
at me from inside such darkness,
dripping with unknowns I plunged to
the hilt. “Fallen” was a mint of the old
nomenclaturing, a word insufficient
of both heat and heart for the depths
which rose as I dove. “Fallen” is what
you call too Other to break bread with,
much less spume into loins with such joy.
I once thought the participation mystique
was for real words and drums, something
of essence literal and grippable, the
the moon-silvered bum of a May-Queen
hard-slathered like the devil’s spittoon:
You know, a place just like the heaven
I once thought I would one life see
if I prayed long and hacked off enough
offending memberage. But Your savage
rite was something else, an election
both tutored and mauled, of equal parts
what got burned in searing heaven
and what I learned falling hard,
its mystery writ with an underground pen,
a souterrain history of all my mother
damned, released in a merry flow,
arterial and artesian, daft and crafty
and bottomless, a sluice with out a roof
R-rated for peeks gouts and spoof ---
Yes, well. On to my dream:




II.

I am walking with others round a lake
in a suburb was somehow both mine
and my dad’s, a mash of College Park
(where I once wooed my wife and now
daily cut through on the way to work)
and Cedar Rapids (where my father
grew up). The group I walked
with was a blend of college and
AA, one schooled in the words of
the ages & the other speaking the
sages of heart; as one presence
suturing the divide between hard
thoughts and harder knocks:

We were telling things about
ourselves from way down deep,
in part to debone our locked closets,
in part to give hope to the newcomer
whose every ache we live to
rescind. I shared how I pray each
morning on my knees trothing my will
to my God’s; and that I went on my
day believing so, no matter how much
I dunked and doubted and
daunted dulled divines.

(A strange statement perhaps
but true: I do pray with
all my heart to that visage
of a lost God -- childlike
there in measure to the
liberties I here dare --
praying to be a good
citizen of His world in
every thought and deed
and then trusting that
what words spill forth
are token of that faith.
So as the class was also
AA, our high reading and
wild bleeding was a wyrd
of bright and dark songs,
one mashed colloquy
between the voices whose
dream I think I am.)

When I finish sharing
about devoted rituals
I discover something under
me which I’m either standing on
or next to: Looking down I see
in an excavated pit
a huge black iron sculpture
of a man half-buried, half-rising
in the dirt. Massive, ugly,
revenant yet revered, I felt
as if standing on the whale
Brendan housed his Easter Mass
upon; the class I was in
excavating him somehow
for better and for worse.

Was I speaking him
forth, or was he making a priest
out of me, shaman of the
militant domain that God and I
both share? A fallen angel
perhaps or the one who bound him,
awful to behold, awesome in
his beauty, terrible yet delicate in
the polished beams and filigree
of hoary ancient iron, heavier
than all the churches in the world
and ready to take wing.

There was a woman from my
AA group who sat somewhere
nearby, perhaps on a girder
which defined the iron man’s
brow or ear; I couldn’t see her
but I heard sure her voice as
I have so many times before,
a womanish sing-song like
pure surf in my ear, weaving words
mellifluous and wild, each line
a foam-backed merry ride.
It was a voice out there which I
hear much at home, as when
my wife still half-asleep sighs
Thank You when I finish softly
stroking her bare feet; I hear it
when our cat mews for a treat,
balleting round this writing chair.
A ravishing sweet sound which
all words cannot propound.

Yet folded too in it or nearby
(as I was on or near the iron man)
in a darkened vestibule was
secreted a following older man,
furtively espying with great
menace my deep sweet
mise en scene: A Nazi perhaps,
a Don or aged Republican, one
who has much to lose from the
truths I disclosed. He stepped behind
a screen of sorts in the shadows of
a darkened cafe, only one eye peering
out from the pearled inlay, as if
through a monocle or a mask.

Who is that one-eyed devil whom
I dreamed, and what has he do to
with the iron angelus buried in and
birthing from the words I know
so far? There was a dread in me
to know him there, as if to sense
that he would stop at nothing to
shut me up for good, cementing
hard my meters & chucking me
back in sea-whiskey -- Is he the
drunk in my brain who plots
my eventual confusion of my
will and God’s for good? or is he
the dark god I can’t refuse
who has more education for
me below? The dream ended
there, with his eye trained on
me, reading everything thing
I write like a prospector panning
for fool’s gold, or my mother
harpuscaping my young brow
for signs of servitude to the
blackened trinity of bed and
babe and booze.


III.

You take greatest pleasure
in all I refuse and yet dare,
honeying the hymen of that dark
descending stair with snatch-
sounding susurrations (“the soft
slish of honey on silk” was how
Henry Miller put it) before
revealing Your ironworks
where my every wounded wing
was forged. And so I write and
write on crossed infirmities
of lack/wrack ache/break
word/world, yowling infinities
You vowel with one hymeneal sigh.
Every book and bed I’ve tread
is tossed in that dream’s lake,
an abyssal pile of fructive
fricatives which You here bid
me slake, line after line, day
after day, somewhere offshore
that first kneed prayer and
the wild sea it thus wakes. I see that figure
rising below, stern and terribly old, like
fragged iron -- or is he everything new,
like black steel? The rising sun only
obscures him further from view.
Suffice to say here he’s waking and walking
and talking like a heathen giant
on shore leave. When he sighs with
her voice the whole ocean here heaves.