Arch, Ache, Ark

THE ARCH

(2004)

There is evidently more to soul than Venus, and more to Venus than soul.

— James Hillman, Anima

***

You are throned in my first shouts,
oh queen of mere beginnings.
So much more comes after that
in the building and the tillage
that I forget the aquamarine
dolor of your first humid sighs.
Marriage leaves you far behind
like a fading, dripping arch-
a fabling archon of salty depths
which every birth requires
and then forgets, or exiles
to the gauzy otherworld
of all I’ve yet to dream.
You are that descending stair
which I fell down in wild,
so desperate love, careening
from surficial knowns
into the blue sweet of
sea raptures deep between
your thighs. Who holds
on to any whit of self
in that wild saline glissade
from wave-height down
to world-collapsing boom?
Yet waking in that other
world abed adrift at sea,
we cannot help but begin
at once to self infinity
with words and names,
recollecting jobs, ex-wives,
unfinished business and real
needs beyond the bed
like a world around the sea.
Thus the bitterness of salt,
those tears of awfulness
and ire, riptides of woe
and upwelling loss
which always tears us
back in two and makes
love taste so bottomless
and utterly undrinkable.
It’s then you step back on
your wave to ebb away
and leave us wondering
what you began, and
proceed to house and
garden like altars or
metaphors of the fading
echo of our first
milky ejaculate shouts.
All love begins down
your mad billows
one rapturous and raging
night: All lovers awake
as from undersea
upon a dazzling beach
fused now to each other
no matter how far that
first big night music
recedes. Your work
completes in that
next day’s first so
gentle and lingering
heraldic kiss, so soft
as if to dream two
futures in the measure
of one shared breath.
Now comes the hard
part, the one that
lasts the mortal reach
of days. Now comes
the difficulty of real
men and women who,
named by that welcoming kiss,
must build their house
of love with blood and
shit for mortar, & pay
mortgage on your ocean’s thrall
til tombs remit the bliss.

***

From Eileen Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels:

Marcus,(a) student of Valetinus ((c. 150AD)), who went on to become a teacher himself, tells how he came to his own firsthand knowledge of the truth. He says that a vision “descended upon him ... in the form of a woman ... and expounded to him alone its own nature, and the origin of things, which it had never revealed to anyone, divine or human. The presence then said to him, ‘I wish to show you truth herself; for I have brought her down from above, so that you may see her without a veil, and understand her beauty.’”



The statue of Eleuthereus ((Dionysos)) was carried back and forth on a ship equipped with wheels ... The ship places the arrival of the strange procession in the perspective of the sea, which is no more than a day’s journey for an animal-drawn vehicle from any point on the Greek island. The wheels show that the journey to Athens was made over land, but the ship took on a ritual significance which the vase painters easily raised to the level of myth.

— Carl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life

***

METAPHOR: A HYMN

You are the ache in my words
for salt symmetry, for
rudders and wheels
both wave and
road for the god in his
ship-car who freights us,
island by day by poem,
from outermost to home.
Always your blue mordents
inside these daily tides
which is so like something else,
of no day I have seen
nor of any night I’ve dreamed.
For every purchase
I make here on one
named shore, you
at once sight its
haunting beyond, the
image as real as life itself
and is. Though you and
I will never kiss, our
puckerings are all:
the boom of a
remembered wave’s
collapse is like sky
horses at full thunder,
and both are hooves
of that wild heave
of me inside the woman
who is so much like
you. And in that swoosh
erasing all, you ferry
the god in his device
the distance of two souls,
arriving at that
shore where
we are one broken
wave of salt and
foamed surrender.
My wife’s sleeping
shape upstairs is like
that mound in Wales
where to spend one
night invokes a mist
dissolving one life
into some strangely
shining other,
the old commotions
simply gone.
Beneath those sheets
are nymphs and
naiads, Ariadne
in her gloom
and Iris on
her pool, the
Lady of my wells
descending far
and still farther
in a gossamer
of fading smile.
In a mole’s breeze-
ruffled white fur
where it lay dead
yesterday on the
road next
to huge Lake
Dora (savagely
brilliant and blue)
is every
soft cheek I’ve
ever glanced, every
pale breast
that swung
up to my lips.
What would this be
without your
other’s stain and echo
which no words of mine
will ever quite name,
much less bed?
Like an unseen
shore’s faint-foaming
rumble, my every verse
peramble stumbles
everywhere in search
of you, unaware it
is your own soft singing
in tree and wave,
in sleeping wife
and road-killed mole.
Wrap all my ends
in your fish tales.
Be the keel too
heavy with the one
that got away,
the god who comes
inside your ebbings,
the thirst you
slake in every breast
I squeeze and suck
with these othering lips.