The Northern Lights

A zone between seasons, indeterminate, somewhat warm yet cool, intimating changes up and down the thermometer, humid, windy, fronts blowing down at the same time Tropical Storm Gamma charges north. No compass or sextant I know can accurately say where this time lies; no named latitudes mark which hemisphere of heart I’m in, no longitudes to say how far south or north. A moment betwixt the feeling and the name.

Hard hooves of a migraine still in my skull after double doses of Frova yesterday, a pain pill before bed with the Depakote, more Frova and the last Prednisone this morning after getting up at 4 a.m. Sheesh. All of it precipitated by a weary Saturday helping my mother in her yard sale, or rather a sale of stuff moved out of her friend’s trailer after the woman went into a Medicare nursing home. The wares of an unknown and mostly forgotten life on display to the incurious and mildly appetitive folk of dayside revenance, glutting in the suburban way on stuff and more stuff. How much to price jewelry bought but never worn? How to distinguish any of it from anything else, cleaved from life which once inhabited it in dwindling solitude? Just price it all cheap and sell it all off.

The day warm and then cool, breezy with clouds which threatened to rain but failed to, surging with urgencies known to none of us, my migraine wakening somewhere amid what that day represented to Its agencies, refusing to admit or confess its presence as I tried to keep my mother from working too hard and getting things finished up (packing and sorting and putting away, folding tables and returning them across the street or into my car). About then it started to rain, not heavily but dreamily, more of a vaguely purposeful mist, intuiting changes which could go bad or clear up.

Driving home I took the first Frova but it was too late by then, hell had broken loose, and the drive was miserable and long, got caught in a huge slowdown near the Tangerine Bowl just before kickoff of the FAMU-BCC game, sort of a reunion of African-American youth in their dream of bling Caddies with the huge spinning hubcaps and thundering buh-buh-bass systems, all of it slowed to a murderous crawl and the rider of pain on a real jag in my skull, cawing over the frightened ramparts of my brain, firing at will --

But I bitch. My father gave the best advice on malaise I’ve heard yet, which I share here: “Don’t let yourself get sucked into it, there’s no way out.” He should know, what with his baffling weight loss & high cholesterol & quadruple bypassed heart having trouble with its pig valve & bum feet from walking on stony terrain all these years (several toes now amputated) & the threat of diabetes always in the wings & teeth all replaced & now a biopsy due on his upper gum, fruit probably of forty years of smoking a pipe. You sail shore to shore of dream with the measly armada you’ve got.

(Later) Talking on the phone with him on our usual Sunday morning chat, his voice sounding reedier than ever, almost wheezy, though he was engaged with our talk, animated about Eliade’s book on shamanism (I’d sent him a copy), excited about seeing his 86-year-old sister for Thanksgiving (though he groused about his niece making her travel at her age), reflecting how, earlier in the week, he realized it was 30 years to the day that he took occupancy of that 1820-era shack of ancient oak beams with its 20-plus acres of half-assed forest; and that, just a couple of days later, he had been in Washington to congratulate his old pal Don Rumsfeld on being appointed Secretary of State under the Ford Administration, he and Don and another buddy of theirs from Chicago schmoozing in Don’s new office with its red telephone, wondering how they had come that far ... My father sad how he disappeared from that world’s view, digging down to the foundations of the stars, raising stones to the moon; I told him that maybe his Oran and Thor are vaster principalities than Republican rule, and besides, 500 years hence, only his stones will remain of whatever this age tried to say ...




I could say to him what Faust told the Emperor in Goethe’s Faust Part Two (transl. George Madison Priest)

Treasuries in superfluity still sleep
Within your borders, buried deep,
And lie unused. Thought in its widest measure
Give the most meagre bounds to such a treasure.
Imagination in its highest flight,
Strain as it may, can’t soar to such a height.
Yet spirits, fit to fathom the unsounded,
Have boundless confidence in the unbounded. (6111-18)

Spirit of the dream, perhaps. Of late (in this latest season of these words) there is a matrix (or patrix?) of dreams & poems & meditations on shamanism & thoughts of my father, all of that rounding something below the center of all that, whatever next is in the chute for birth or rebirth on my tongue. “Shamanic Letters” indeed, though I don’t know who’s writing or reading them, who’s sending or who’s receiving them. It’s all indeterminate and unitive like the dreams that bid me write them down with a sound.

But certainly something’s up, or about or round or down: Writing a poem about one dream produced another dream, producing another poem, rousing the next deepest dream reflected in the next wilder poem, etc. An alchemical series, cooking room to room through a dream? A trancelike dance whose steps are purely known in the meters? I don’t know; or rather, I have lots of things I do know which might guess at what I don’t. So I write, trusting the correspondence to make matter clear enough, at least for the song.

I call this latest process shamanic in both origin and goal because its madness bears such semblance to these wings. “The available documents on shamanic dreams,” Eliade writes in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, “clearly show that they involve an initiation whose structure is well known in the history of religions. In any case, there is no question of anarchial hallucinations and of a purely individual plot and dramatis personae; the hallucinations and the mise en scene follow traditional models that are perfectly consistent and possess and amazingly rich theoretical content.” (14)

So I dream and I write, trusting the deepest God that the process is holy; that down its holes are the wholes, whales of song whose bellows I am in the organum of the tribe.

Carl Jung writes in Civilization in Transition,

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses in the psyche, opening into that cosmic night which was the psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and will remain psyche no matter how far our ego consciousness may extend. ... All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood.” (144-5)

How to dream down to him but through my father, through his dreams, or what those dreams still resonate when they bid me to sing.

So ... maestro ... :





NORTHERN LIGHTS

Nov. 18, 2005

I.

My father loves to walk his land
at night; he’s most at home amid
the gleam of moon and star upon
those stones he hauled out from
Blue Mountain’s heart then raised,
like sails, to north-windward lords.
To me those walks always seemed
both cold and old, winter-solsticial
no matter what time of year;
there was always something distant
and wounded in that ambient light
too close in some proximity of heart
to the night’s New Jersey, the land
sad from our pillage (the old forest
clear-cut some 40 years ago), Lenai
Lenapi ghosts in spooring mist
still grieving children murdered
two hundred years ago, nearby
trailers a canned misery of drunks
dead at the wheel and crops
failing to yield more than rocks
and ruin and the incessant
evictions leading to the poorest
of the last doors down the road.
That high frigate moonlight seemed
freighted to me with sins and wounds
which ferries them far beyond their
graves, baptizing sons and stones
in the cold blue waters of death.
How could my father feel thus
so at home, most loved, exactly
where I felt the worst of worlds
was tombed? But I sense now how
wide of the point I was in those walks.
The extremity of those wounds
and the terrible sum amped by
that moon are exactly what
charged what he saw in the
land with pregnant power, as
if to find one’s true north
you must look to the place
where losses have fallen hardest,
dowsing down a sea of grief
to the wild heart of old Lir,
the whale who swims beneath
all durables. Thor’s hammer
struck the world just so and
fell to Lir’s court in our core,
adding thunder and ecstasy
to Leviathan’s sub-continental
roar. There’s a merriment to
Northern Lights, a strangely
wondrous gleam, hovering like sails
of light above the bruited ice,
sheets torn from the moon’s
own missal and hung on the line
which defines what’s too
coldly north of what survives
by day. You taught me that
if I want to build an abbey,
I must bury myself to
to the neck where the
oldest energies lay bound.

II.

So in my dream I try to
cook a pot of what looks
like Swedish meatballs or
testicles or horse-turds,
deciding that slow-cooking’s
best. But that process
is quickly doomed, the liquid
steaming off too soon, perhaps
because I start too early or
some mysterious other (You,
I presume) removes the lid
when I wasn’t watching.
I search the cupboards
for some liquid in the
kitchen of a house as bad
as I ever lived in
in the worst of my bad
days, a hovel or crack-house,
party hell beneath martini
seas, a dive where diseased
rats were loath to shelter
on so bad a night as mine.
Onion soup? Lemon juice?
Urine swirled with sperm? I
wonder, rummaging rotten
boxes and rusted tins.
I found nothing in that
bad house to salvage
the stuff inside the cauldron
which I’m always cooking
wrong. The dream thus
turns to sex as I walk
from kitchen to bedroom
where a foursome’s about to
begin, two coeds offered
cockage from two randy college
boys, pair to pair unzipping
down to damp ‘n’ swole
thunderwear. But rather than
get some through them the
dream then bid me leave,
begging a ride to the
sea from one of those cock-
aching arch studs
so I could walk with my
father once again. I pay
the dude good money
and we drive and drive
beyond the night end
of every town I know,
arriving the next day
at some major port
where ships are built
and harbored for great
passage. I get out of the car
& am suddenly assaulted
by a wintry highblown
day & my father standing
there in welcome, his arms
and smile wide. We walk and
talk they way we always do
along those bitter wharves,
inside the wildness of a day
so cold & mauled by hard
northern winds, the sun adazzle
on the sea as if heaven’s vault
had been cracked and scattered
for us on limitless treasury
of glittering waves. And it
came to me that he had
at last become the man
that he admired most, the
elemental guardian of
what’s northernmost in
every windy seaside day.
The dream ended there
but I here I linger, not
quite finished with this
missive of a poem. I imagine
us walking a while further on
to find the Sea Sprite
docked next to a pier,
that frigate which brought
our grandsire John
across the sea from Cobh
Harbor 228 years ago,
its masts straight as ever, its
rigging cocksure, the canvas
reams wild aglow with
my father’s imprurient
sky- and shore-wide
Northern Lights, like balls
fresh discharged of their
immortally bright freight.
That’s the moonlight I’m walking
in wonder of this day,
the ghost of every builder’s
broken heart, his stones and my
words the sons of those fires
burning hottest in ice and
earning nothing but what it sires.



Let us further peruse and abuse and bemuse the underworld sea of dream:

***

I searched my Mac for poems with Dream in it and this caught my eye right away: I share it without comment though it surely founds the previous poem:

MY FATHER’S DREAMS

My father has always oared life
With dreams. Strange compass, those pole-jaunts
In blue! They led him from church and
Marriage into the woods, where stones
Lifted his heart from its cage and
Rung it deeply, like an old bell.
Tiger jumping roofs house to house,
Wind-god laughing wild distant gales:
Those dreams were the engines which hauled
A work over half-lives and hedged
Knowns, that bald sea of defeats which
Most found and fold to. Old now,
He still walks with his dream, lets it
Scent the way to that hidden room
Where blue light furls the next wild bloom.