The Song Heals the Singer

Like the sick man, the religious man is projected onto a vital plane that shows him the fundamental data of human existence, that is, solitude, danger, hostility of the surrounding world. But the primitive magician, the medicine man, or the shaman is not only a sick man; he is, above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself. Often when the shaman’s or medicine man’s vocation is revealed through an illness of an epileptoid attack, the initiation of the candidate is equivalent to cure.

The famous Yakut shaman Tusput (that is, “fallen from the sky”) had been ill at the age of twenty; he began to sing, and felt better. When Sieroszowski met him, he was sixty and displayed tireless energy. “If necessary he can drum, dance, jump all night.” In addition, he was a man who had travelled; he had even worked in the Siberian gold mines. But he needed to shamanize; if he went for a long time without doing so, he did not feel well.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 27-8




THE SONG
HEALS THE SINGER

Nov. 22, 2005

December 1973: I’m 16 and walking
home from school and work through
New Town on a late afternoon that’s
frozen in the old Chicago way, by
a ferocity more certain in its
hard blue curtaining than death.
The cold seems freighted directly
from the North Pole as I hug
my peacoat tight, hands jammed into
its pockets, a cigarette in my lips
with its tiny bead of fire like a single
orange life-vest lost in a towering
Arctic sea. When I turn right at Fullerton
the wind slaps at me hard like a wolf-
pack sprung with red joy; it mauls and
tears to free the last of heat from me
which I try to shield like a throat.
The light to the west is minted from those
canines, an angry red leaping high at blue
then blacker truths. I could die out here
and no one would care nor even notice
amid the city’s grey decrepitude which
devours whole whatever morsels its
battered citizens provide by failing and
falling hard. Not that much awaits me
at home a few blocks further on, my parents
imploding into an unspoken doom, the
eyes of my siblings too bright with
rage and fear, even the dogs yapping
hysterically at every next wrong sound
coming off the street ten feet from our
front door, sounds we hear and pray
only the safest registers of. I’m walking
there anyway, because where else would
a boy-man like me go? It’s all ending
in the brutal precis of a winter afternoon
very close to the dead end of my sixteenth
year: So why am I just then hearing
Billy Paul’s “Me And Mrs. Jones” in my head?
That sappy Philly soul tune played on
so sweet and tender despite ghetto
arrears which freezes every bud to
stillness on the stem, dooming me
in the end. Stolen love and fragile dreams
which cannot survive another day --
that’s the hottest and most eternal
shaman-puerile flame, and it kept me
walking happily bittersweet on that day
& in fixed in my memory every since,
above the miseries of being 16
in the maul of a Chicago winter, with
neither Jesus nor any bottle of sufficient
proof to poof those dogs away. Like
a choirboy I sang along with that
divine song in my head, thus getting
all of that sweet stuff too. My ears were
burning ice but I still heard the song;
my hands were numb yet ached
to hold my guitar once again; my heart
was empty of any lover’s smile but
was alight on Mrs. Jones smile in that
sad cafe, holding her hand, making up plans.
I burned to write and sing what warmed
that frozen city playing from every
radio and juke in town, creating a music
of my own that boated me spoon-fashion
to that song away from that hard afternoon
down some moony river to this pre-dawn
sub-tropic middle-aging swoon.
I’m still singing bluesy love back
in the face of hard-fought days: Florida
and marriage and a switch from pick
to pen have changed perhaps the singer
but not at all the song; it’s still the
soundtrack of all walks through arctic
fields, delighted to see her once again
albeit in the northern lights of my
conceit splashed upon the page;
thrilled the way she loves me too,
dancing there inside the frozen world
slow and sweetly over all the bones
fallen to the bottom of a life. “Me
And Mrs. Jones” is still in my ear
and I’m still walking that cold road home,
singing along with Your song’s mojo
and singing back my own songs,
getting to every healing inside of
what it means to Get the Girl,
even when love is nowhere to
be found or flung, even when it
freezes to hard ice. Dante harrowed
hell wrapped in the meters of his song,
the whole passage down the way he
found that heart where Beatrice
waited for him. Whatever I hummed
as a baby I’m still trying to sing here,
her kiss the welcome of each page
I stain in sea-wrack and foam,
still trying to walk those last blocks home.


THE GREAT FIRES

Jack Gilbert

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.



WALKIN' ... IN THE RAIN

from A Breviary of
Guitars, 2000

Perhaps what
happened in
early spring ‘79
was a trial
adjudicated by
Eros or Dionysos
to see if I
was worthy of
Rock’s bitter
blistering
cornucopia:
I believed
-- who in the cups
does not? --
but would I pay?
The Spokane
river by April
a swollen
dangerous
thing as it
hurled the blood
of meltpack
into town,
tumbling over
the falls in
a crash and a
rumble & the
night awash
in spray and mist:
I stood on
a bridge over
those falls feeling
the river inside
a love drowned
down further:
I was cold
and lonely and
more than
half-mad,
scarred with
hoarfrost and
rock dreams:
Flash In the Pan’s
“Walking in the Rain”
is the song
for that season,
swelling synths
and footsteps
on wet pavement
as a voice in
a tube intoned
the passion
of dislocation:
Walking, Walking,
In the Rain:
There I go,
2 a.m. after the
Aquarius had
closed, hugging
my jacket in
the raw spring
night & the
river nearby
surging with
nothing &
my feet the
only way home,
my heart filled
with everything
but the girl
who loves my song;
That music
a lute strung
from river to
my sodden
empty bed,
a sidewalk
glistening with
moon and rain
as all the world
sleeps without me:




WIND AND SURF


Melbourne Beach
March 1996

Cold rags of sky
whip sand and froth
down the beach,
blasting away
all signs of spring:

but inside
our hotel room
you and I
bower that dream
between our bodies,
my chest rapt
in the billows
of your breasts.

Beat silly
in the maul
of wind and surf
at the windows
we sleep,
curled into
the vernals
of love,

never quite solitary

or solid again.





SINGING HEART

April 2004


Today I sight this singing heart
below behind and between
as a crannog built by You
for a dark and wild bell’s ringing.
In previous years
I’ve seen otherwise
in a well’s cold drench,
in whale and girl astride
toward every beach
worth dreaming,
guitar and Bible buried
there when their time
had run Your curse,
amid the manowars
and other boats
I built just for such beaching.
Ten thousand poems
I’ve launched from here,
their verbal engines
tooled for salt abandon’s
blue overreaching, a
name for every isle
in the dark archipelago
of ten thousand teachings.
Here to the tide contains
the kiss and curve of
every woman who smiled
and shared with me
the secret of her blue
beseechings, both
bottomless and more,
that samba sambaltique
I found there and lost, one
foot now citizen of
every wave’s collapsing,
each bed’s undinally
pale pure enlacing.
Winds now work the
trees outside, a late
spring front to wash clean
the humid heat of the
past few days, and with
it bring a clearer blue
for our refreshing,
tiding in perhaps
another take on You --
Heron? Psalter?
Mother, Father River?
Some other vantage
on this dark which
does not bear explaining
but requires of me these
three wetmost things:
apt saddle for deranging;
the will to ride heart
all the way to naming;
and the sense of ages --
God’s and Your’s
conjoined in mine --
to let this crannog
fade to waves
so I can go where
blue ends send me,
bereft of any real
sail or bone rudder,
adrift in the next
draught of a room in
a dream, without a way
of ever arriving
or truly knowing.
Ah! but what songs
ahead are glowing!