Brigid's Well

Nascence seems the theme of these first days of the next year, the next song, the next immrama. Delved from the womb like a fish from the sea, my thirst and thyrsus aching for surfside susurrations at first light. My words sing in a womb of salt empyreia, loosened verbals of the polymorphose perverse, an erotic spume of ten thousand glottals swimming back to the source, each a mythologem of pure world.

Fire spat into water: the primal engagement and thrall, the viscous mystery of all. Sanskrit agni, “fire,” covalent with Latin ignis, from which Latin gigno proceeds, “I bear a child”: the the choring seed lamps a numen of fire.

Thus fire in water equals birth, the beginning of all knowledge. Latin nascor, “I am born,” cognoso, “I know,” the prefix co signalling contact with the world: what I write of is what I find here in remembrance of that first union and deliverance, and everything I reach for reaches back into a woman who lays down in the sand next to the sea. Each sand castle of words mounds up from her into an approximation of the belly which held me and the breast which feeds mem. Words are a milky sweet blueish pour from a fat worldly nipple.

It’s wet work, for sure. Here’s Sandor Ferenczi in Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (transl. Henry Alden Bunker, MD):

"What if the entire intrauterine period of the higher mammals were only a replica of the type of existence which characterized the aboriginal piscene period, and birth itself nothing but a recapitulation on the part of the individual of the great catastrophe which at the time of the recession of the ocean forced so many animals, and certainly our own animal ancestors, to adapt themselves to a land existence, above all to renounce gill-breathing and provide themselves with organs for the respiration of air?

"... If the fish swimming in the water signifies, as in so many fertility charms, the child in the mother’s womb, and if in a multiplicity of dreams we are forced to interpret the child as a symbol of the penis, the penis signification of the fish on the one hand, and on the other the fish signification of the penis, become more self-evident — in other words, the penis in coitus enacts not only the natal and antenatal mode of existence of the human species, but likewise the struggles of that primal creature among its ancestors which suffered the great catastrophe of the drying up of the sea."

***

Is my labor here the world’s, dazed on the shore, trying what to do next? Do I sleep, do I dream, do write, do I love? Boundaries are confusing, perhaps pointless here, though always agonizing. The other night I dreamt I was laying down somewhere in this house, talking to a woman on the phone who was not a lover but was, whom I intended only platonic love for but was enthralled with the sexual undertones -- not the other woman but another woman, a woman of salt dimensions, only inside, only a numen, anima, yet shapely and sensual enough to be threatening. We talk about poetry and myth, the high deep meaningful stuff that’s beyond sexual impurities, but that stuff has sexual wings I don’t want to recognize. I don't’ want to be unfaithful to my wife, but how much does she know of this, how much am I willing to tell her? She’s outside working in the yard (outside my ribcage, in the outer regions of the heart?), engaged in some domestic duty, some ritual of the actual; I couldn’t see her through the window but knew she was out there, and worried for her when I saw some huge animal lumber by, like a giant mole or possum, big as a colt, this ugly brute night-mottled creature looking like a bared penis in the light of day. Then my wife came in and saw me talking on the phone, and asks me if we’re OK (as she usually does when she’s worried about my fidelity, which has in the past been poor). I put the phone on my chest and say of course we are, I love you, deeply, desperately, need so much for us to make love, be passionate, hold each other tight. We talk a good while, making clear to all where my sympathies lie; but I don’t hang up the phone, leave it there on my chest where the other can hear - my conversation, or how it resounds in my heart? I should have hung up the telephone in the name of that fidelity but don’t, I can’t or won’t. Back on the phone, I resume my conversation with the woman along the usual lines but there is a darkened saddened grieving note to her voice, our relationship taking a turn there. Outside, I hear my wife say, “We’re in trouble” -- So both worlds, inner and outer, have been compromised by my compulsive emotional needs for boundaries and boundlessness.

***

Even so, there’s a belligerence in maintaining faithfulness to blue words. I won’t hang up, or can’t, so deeply I’ve been drawn into this, sung down this far, sailed so far north, poem after poem an illicit liaison with an underworld woman. Mythology is stubborn in its reversals: like a man’s libido, it will never give up the hardwired ache for communions with the wave, where one drop of true blue drowns me and there’s not an ocean big enough to sustain me. I keep high and low in my purpose and porpoise, Brendan the Navigator in the bow and MacOdrum of Uist clutching the keel from below, sailor and merman like the heart- and cock-halves of my overweening mind, love and lust, poetry and bawd-house song, nipplage and endless cunt, nourishment and addict plunge, shore-sighter and night-blighter, dry wit and blue brogue, Columba and Oran, right and left hand tap tapping at this keyboard in cojunct cognitions of birthing fire, the ignis fatuus which gleams my pen’s length in puerile phosphor, chilling seed of the daemon lover hugging the undersides of each angelic aria arcing over the sky.

As the I Ching sez, the Creative morphs into The Receptive: yang engorges upon the fantasy of all it’s not yet is, and in its passion to return to that other clenches and spumes pure light into deep blue, Moby Dick spiralling down to the bottom of the sea, and collapses, spent, all that hurtling hooved energy suddenly inversed, becomes soft, mewling, pure baby, pure mother ... this time, as augured by the I Ching, is the nascence of that collapse, one year’s furious drive finished, perhaps with the Shamanic Letters, perhaps on a level I only intuited dimly there, opening into a deeper chamber, a far older myth ... cavern of the Mothers, not a proud pecker in sight, no dads allowed, not in this seamless salt quintessence, pure Venus, all soak ...

In these first days, nothing is distinct, its just light and less light, nameless shapes hovering nearby -- my hand? mother’s breast? dolphins spinning on a mobile? Though I have been delved from a womb the amniotic light still surrounds me, a paradisal float which I would in early adulthood rediscover in the arms of first love, when I finally escaped from the young man I had become. I altar and further that sweet light here, gossamer and gauzy as a white curtain rustling on a summer’s breeze through and opened widow on a sleepy afternoon where my wife and I doze naked together, hard passions exhausted in each other, ridding our thorns and edges and broken perphieries in the pure soak of what sex pours us into -- I dream, but I know, having been there a few times in my life: I won’t hang up the phone, but I’m not going anywhere, my love:





BODY OF A WOMAN

Pablo Neruda

Trans. Robert Bly


Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
when you surrender, you stretch out like the world.
My body, savage and peasant, undermines you
and makes a son leap in the bottom of the earth.

I was lonely as a tunnel. Birds flew from me.
And night invaded me with her powerful army.
To survive I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow for my bow, or a stone for my sling.

But now the hour of revenge falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of firm and thirsty milk!
And the cups of your breasts! And your eyes full of absence!
And the roses of your mound! And your voice slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will live on through your marvelousness.
My thirst, my desire without end, m wavering road!
Dark river beds down which the eternal thirst is flowing,
and the fatigue is flowing, and the grief without shore.


“OH IN CHILDHOOD, GOD,
HOW EASY YOU WERE …”

Ranier Maria Rilke
transl. Franz Wright

Oh, in childhood, God, how easy you were:
you, whom I cannot take hold of now, anywhere:
One smiled on the things one loved to have around;
they came half way: and you were already in reach.
And no, my God, where should I travel to find you?
Where do I enter? What mountain must I climb?
If someone asks for you: where should I point?
Where is your rustling grove? Where does your animal wander?
Where am I to find the fresh water to wash
my face and sex: I have never been clean.
Where do you reduce the holy things to ash
with the fiery radiance of your eye?
Doesn’t the scent of all our depravities
incite your rage? What are you waiting for?
Why don’t you change the ravenous to fasters
and hurl an angel at them
until they writhe in their own blood?
Lord do not be good: be lordly --, refuse
the hearsay of their praise:
tear down the house, destroy the bridge,
unleash monstrosities
in the path of those who try to flee.

For we’re so enslaved to contemptible needs
we go on believing in, year after year --
if someone holds out their hands to us,
we think that’s what God is. You red night of agony,
you fire-lit sky, you war, you hunger: kill:
for you are the danger we’re in.

Not until we place our dying in you
once again, and not simply our preservation,
will everything be yours: solitude and intercourse,
defeat and exaltation.
For the peace you finally bring to come into the world,
first you must fall on us, ambush us, tear us limb from limb;
for nothing has the power to so utterly destroy
as the way you use us, when you want to set us free.



FALLING IN LOVE

May 2005

At first love arrived in
random gouts of deep pure blue,
stumbling into her at a bar at
an hour I did not so much earn
as simply drink my way too --
an accomplishment perhaps in
the soul’s beerier travail --; and
there she was, standing in a
light which caused worlds to
push away, leaving us alone
and suddenly fragrant and
bee-like falling deep into each other,
drowning through a soggy week of
rapturous nights into a Cape of
wildest blue, our bodies bewitched
with the matchless perfection
of the other, her every curve
and groove so fitted to my
cup and thrust as to seal
the primal rift in our hearts
O, for an hour, one clench
or two, one night’s recede,
our organs drained and filled,
winding wrapped together out
on a wavelike recede and hiss
of a last, predawn, gentle
expiring kiss. -- That was love,
or all I could assess of it
those years; how I loved love
for the way it trooped in
with thrysus and timbrel,
a shriek of maenad amplitude
as to free me from a
self-imposed imprisonment
into a bottomless deranging bliss.
I was a sucker for such thralls,
broken as I was in all the usual
ways men of this age are, left to
figure things out on my own
& maybe score some nookie on the way
before getting down to whatever
work we do till days are done.
Falling in love was like finding God
again; -- not that He had moved, but
certainly was far removed those
rebellious years, when all the churches
seemed bone-dry, like headstones
of a faith that had failed to
marry and died a spinster all alone.
He was far too from my daily
fare in my young fool’s arrogance
to go it alone, a mile-high nonsense
about flying angel routes without
any sense of blessed wings.
What woke and stirred me so
about those brief islands of
great (well, loud) love was their
wild humility, to find myself
blessed with all I had dreamed
and diddled so alone for years,
just by hanging out on the
interface (a sidhe of sort, the
bar, the hour, the boozed
permission), waiting for love’s
return, a shape of short duration
that redeemed ten thousand
nights of waste with two peerless
legs around my waist. -- Fool,
but rapture was worlds sweet
and dreams deep, its music
growing louder and more
refulgent the longer from my
last, great, brief love affair
to rise and break and fail then
ebb. During those sad years
I came to know that my heart’s libido
was more strange and feral than
the stallion hoove harrumphing further down.
With each swart brilliant plunge
I learned that the power of love
was never mine to amp,
and that any love I won in this
life could never heal my heart for
long, whose halves and cleaves
are so confused with goddesses
witches mothers soror and wives
as to muse awe’s awfulness,
the mess of the life I lived while
dreaming toward pure shores.
How can this heart ever be
complete, where angels and devils
weave its upwelling wave in
a rich dark mineral flow,
and every rising blue desire
has that heart-rich undertow
which may lead to hell
or just the sound of that bell
at the bottom of the lake where
love has its drowned cathedral,
a wraith that hauls the rope
but hard every time I see her face.
My heart is my umbilical to You,
beloved, God, shore I’ll never reach,
two shades of blue far down the beach.



CROSS BETWEEN
A WOMAN’S BREASTS

2001


Bright martyr,
you’re perfect
hanging there,
fusing me
to this song.

Grace note at
the center of
a dark pond.

Gold cup
brimming my gaze.

Compass
of insurrection
and grief.

Hammer for
a distant gong.

Nails at nether
and nadir
of this surf.

Ferryboat
and sherpa.

Crossroads
altar to making
and slaking.

You’re a bright aria
to the woman
I’ll never know
sitting across from
me in every room,

blessing my day
with one glint
of paradise.

Thank you, Lord,
for hanging
me here.

KIMBERLEY BLUE

1995

She is a blue stream
winding through
the smoke and booze
long brown hair
and blue blue eyes
the high tide of her body
straining against
the shore of her dress
blue spandex sparkling
like morning water
in this jaded light

She stops before me
with all night behind
all winter outside
all broken hearted
somehow eclipsed
a black aura in
this sapphire's halo
she smiles on me
sweetly & asks
would you like a dance
and I say
Oh yes

She lifts her dress
lays it on my lap
reaches behind
to unleash blue lace
and begins to
wave and weave her body
round rich jazz

I inhale her deeply
a musk of jasmine and orchid
and I am only here
in this brilliant shadow
captive to blue billows
dreaming in my balls

Something too strong
for words not a wave
but more than a sigh
washes out of me and
climbs the salmon run
of her dance
Up knees up thighs
to hips whispering
whiskey saxophones and lace
Up smooth belly
to breasts so proud
they startle me
even here
even at such a naked price

When my eyes
rise all the way
I find her
watching me
watching her
for one two three beats
and we're in some other room
too foolish to question
too swollen to ignore
too soon swept away

She smiles and looks
off into the mirror
to admire my lust
glowing on her skin
and devotes her motions
to a deeper blue

and that is that

Around the bar
other women repeat
this dance for other men
each pair a room where
a man tries to drink
deeper than a woman goes
and the night
is an empty glass
on any beach
where just one sip
would surely drown us all



WOMBS

2003

... a tight knitting of
defensive fantasy and
external reality is what
builds the second womb,
the marsupial pouch that
we call society.
-- Joseph Campbell

Beware the womb you
get to choose having
shed at last the first.
Dried now in the
breezes off that crashing
surf, which way do
you go? You can remain
there only if you paint
all your houses in
a boozy salt wash,
accepting that your
bones will ebb to sand:
tend bar at some
seaside dive, brown
and wrinkle to a
hoary grain, forever
tumble your driftglass
eyes from sea to sea
to sea, a cobalt premise
no harboring thighs
can hold longer than
the tide. You can choose
the womb of suburbs,
hanging yourself on
some corporate tit,
& grow like weeds
in some fenced-off
paradise where pool-
waters knife and knuckle
the sun and comfort
is the sleep you caul
down into, never to quite
stir from. You can
womb yourself in Love
and dream of blurry
Beloveds the rest of
your days; womb in
cement trucks pouring
concrete walls to
moat the sea; womb
your jisms in an
ear-conch and drift
forever on a single
tiding drone. No one
can criticize you for
hunkering down in
such wombs as these,
it’s a species thrall:
But know that long
after the next brine
dries on your pale
aging flesh, her voice
resounds deep within,
commanding you
from your heart of
hearts to never leave.
But you must. Beach,
suburb, bed, conch-song,
your life in them
excites the wildest
throng of sportive fins,
a welling of departures,
uprisings and betrayals,
straining you toward
birth & making every
bliss a grave. Those
winds are grave-sheets,
gray tatters of cold
sky, wave-sweeping
augurs which sing the
salty dog of your demise,
that cutthroat sigh
between the thou and I.


ST. BRIGID’S
MILK-PAIL WELL

2004


Your crannog is pure
teat, a well of milky-blue;
this spring hurls every
blessed name for You,
the morning’s sweetness
in freshened cool is
poured from Your pitcher
forever just out of view.
Brigit of the fertile gasp,
candle in every womb,
arouse my words to
spark the waters to
spread a fecund news.
This page is your
pale milch-cow: my
hands work tender
teats below. Geyser
here your white dictates;
may this pen nurse
your sacred flow.



BLUE OFFICES

2004

For years I searched for you
in the worst of sodden ways,
embarking night by night
with hopes deep-salted
ennui and booze. Each
night I sailed through
all the bars where you
once revealed yourself
in this or that blue flame.
For a thousand
and one nights the immrama
was the same, my eyes
expectant on the crowd
dancing to heavy metal
or disco or new wave,
the shots and beers hazing
all the edges into a
hyperborean blur. My
face then was an
open book, a prow
of sorry ass lust
mortared to that craggy
wanderer’s visage,
shaped just so for
shoring needs as bad as mine.
Those beds I woke in
with those huge hangovers
-- stumps of oak poking
up from drowned suburbia,
fortune’s next nereid
snoring fast and deep,
her hair like so much
flotsom scattered mid
the wreckage -- those beds
all whispered Not Here
in your sad voice,
each one a vesper
which had crashed
again to wildly stilled
emptiness. Eventually
like a sailor harrowed by
some final isle I gave
up that futile chase —
or perhaps you gave up on
me, my gaze too finite
and my heart a halfwit
too addicted to
the brine to ever sail
into that salt wilderness
you’ve always waited
for me in. I came home
to let the horses go
and roam those fallow
seas while I got down
on aging knees to
pray and read
and dream the ribs
of what slowly
woke an abler ship.
For a thousand and
one mornings now I’ve
matinned my love
for you in these coracles
of ink and seem,
writing down every isle
you are closest to,
the ones I walk
but never wake. For
years now I’ve voyaged
thus; I can’t say that I’ve
learned much, though I
sure have seen more
wonder than I did before
when I needed so to
believe in what I saw,
when there was no
thaw for frozen,
wandering bones
than a woman’s warmer
ones. I have a wife now
and a working life,
a garden and scriptorium,
whale flukes in
plenitude on
every passing page.
The old high rage
has settled down
to till between these
faint blue lines,
distilling that old
whiskey down
until it’s Thrill of you
is now blue.
Same boat, different
hour, old vespers
poured to matins,
with you and I as
constant as the
vulgate isles of sea Latin

WHITE ON GREEN

2003

It is only when I’m home sick
lying gut-cramped in our bed
upstairs that I realize what
wild artistry you bring to
every surface of home: The
wan spring morning breezing
in cool through an opened
window across the room
and everything either white
or the palest green, white
linen walls and furniture
so balanced with plants
and jadeite glass that the
eye doesn’t even see the
whole perfection, but rather
floats in it as on a tide,
the ivy tumbling from
white iron planters, the
chairs and dressers
moved so many times
that the absolute correctness
of their placement contains
all the energy of a poem
revised down to three pure
words which you would
never say, and refuse
to call an art. “Just
another woman’s
gift for home,” you
might concede, though
such craft is the very
hearth I can’t ignite
in the cold demense of
my lake-bottom dives.
If a room could wash
a votive heart clean,
it’s here in the room
which you devised, the
one which you say
you can never get
quite right, what with
this sloping ceiling, crooked
walls and ill-placed a/c
vents. Orchids on either
nightstand wake the purity
with tiny violet blossoms,
like the eyes of our cat
half-lidded in her chair
in the closet, drowsing
down as I now do laying
in the bedroom you
composed in the upper
room of our life. The
poem you never wrote,
the art you swear
is simply banal, lulls
me beyond all I
would say to exactly
where I most desire
to be. Those three words?
You are here.