Grip

... Before becoming a shaman, the
candidate must be sick for a very
long time; the souls of his shaman
ancestors then surround him, torture
him, strike him, cut his body with
knives, and so on. During this operation
the future shaman remains inanimate;
his face and hands are blue, his heart
scarcely beats. According to another
Buryat shaman, Bulagat Buchacheyev,
the ancestral spirits carry the candidate’s
soul before the “Assembly of the
Saaytani” in the sky, and there he is
instructed. After his initiation his flesh
is cooked to teach him the art of
shamanizing. It is during this initiatory
torture that the shaman remains for
seven days and nights as if dead.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 43-4


Surely Your hand grips me from below
and hauls me down into the vast
abysm of my wounds. It is an iron grip
which won’t let go and is utterly
defiant of all “cures” this brighter
world affords. It is that hole I try
to fill which You always find
fresh ways to drill. As my first marriage
soured in a sop of slowly more
hopeless gall my bowels once
turned to stone, cemented
tracks which would not budge as
the days and weeks progressed.
I tried everything from the drug
store’s shelves -- laxatives, Mucinex,
Fleet enemas, essence of citrine --
whatever depth charge that I lobbed
just caused You to grip harder,
fossilizing me further, an
awful weed in plain sight of
every flower of sobriety.
I became this dulled iron man,
impregnable to the angry
vicissitudes I could not fend
inside the brute steppes of that
home. One month, two, three
lunar cycles without a dump,
until my doctor said I’d soon
need surgery: And then at last
You slowly ungripped, for reasons
I can only paraphrase the
sketchiest of guesses. Did
You convince me that my
marriage was too fused
to see the light of day?
Was something augured in
my ear as I read Finnegans
Wake in two to four page
sacraments on that daily
stoppered siege? Or was
I hearing You differently
in the words I began writing down,
attuned to the leaden mordents
dragging me beneath the sea?
Each is plausible but
not enough to convince me
in any way; both affliction
and cure are drowned in You.
Some years later I got that
wearying flu which did not,
could not abate, a four-month
tumble down weary ravines
which taxed me to a pall
in which I didn’t want to
do anything but lay and
dream and divest myself
of every calling of my daily
life. My marriage was then
over and I was in arrears
with the girlfriend whose
sexual welcome was wild
but not enough to salve
what had halved me;
I was guilty as hell for
over all that wreckage in
the name of love and
mooned desire in
full amplitude of that loss.
I was also floating tits up
on the surges of
my day job’s corporate
abysms, each week a
gallop through too-
endless tasks with no
shore ever in sight.
Yes, the causes seem
obvious enough, but
the sickness seemed
defiant even of those
names, so harrowing
its chills. It was full
summer, in widest
sea-cunt blast of feral summer,
and yet I could never
quite get warm, my
inner body swarmed
by bitter blasts of
wind up from some
blackened house of
blues. Weariness made
of days a cross I mounted
with heavy-hearted gall,
rendering my hours into
dreck and drudgery and
slackly dragging balls.
Eventually I was too
tired go to the gym
-- the greatest defeat
of that malaise, not
to gallop off the day’s
stresses in my haunches’
wildest fury. For a month I
just went home after work
and lay stunned upon the
couch, late afternoon
roaring through my second-
floor window as I
compressed my brow
with bouncy boobs on
Playboy TV, fully expended
of all vatic virile goatiness,
spoored down in viral spleen.
You had me deeply in a
cave where I lay in deathly
swoon, singing Your hard
indigoes in a voice too
deep for me to hear, even
now. Eventually I took
a week off and headed to
the beach where I stayed
at my aunt and uncle’s condo,
sleeping late and walking
the beach and drinking gallons
of carrot juice (my soon-to-
be-ex-girlfriend’s adamant
palliative). Was it rest and
root soma that allowed You
to complete your dream?
Or was it reading Jack
Gilbert’s The Great Fires
as I lounged on the
second floor deck, whipped
by winds off from autumnal
seas? Something found
an interface outside Your
grip, a tiny bridge of
wilderness which allowed
me to resume my
continued history.
Your bag of spells is crammed
with symptoms, I believe,
each an oubliette of downward-
winding trials, tenacious
and voracious, untenable
and invulnerable. Must I
learn them all? For years
now its been migraines --
dread hammers behind
my skull -- which You’ve
pounded like a drummer
at the bottom of all things.
I can sense Your fingers
approaching when that
odd high ringing in my
ears grows louder, like
a siren on the surface
while something subtler
shifts inside the antlers
of my sense, pressure
building as Your fingers
grip that black road
in my skull where every
migraine crows: And then
I’m full down into the
drowning scour of pain’s
skull-wide drown, offended
by both light and sound,
my stomach for the daily
ground full soured to
something close to retching
though that never happens.
I’ve tried a dozen different
meds, taken Yoga, had
a CAT scan, applied the
ice pack, had transfusions,
and still You’re with me
(today, alas, today), brute
hammer in one hand,
blood-dipped quill in this
other. Yes, work’s difficult as
hell, with always too much
to fucking get done; and yes,
though love is strong its strange
in its arrears, the sex now
for reasons known and not
is halved and equidistant
to desire, unsalved by paper dollies
and reveries of old beds.
Everywhere the mordents
of the age are blaring a
hard dark blue, my parents
aging ever older, the world
Republican-corrupt,
my million words
unacquiescent of the fact
that I’ve yet to say just
one shore true enough
to wash the rest away.
So why I migraine is as usual
unsurprising, while When
I’ll stop is an even more
occluded than before,
this malaise more toxic
and durable and worrisome,
lacing greater cement shoes.
Will You ever let me go?
I’m like Ahab lashed to
his barbed white whale,
staring at widening doom
as the dreadful fish
descends on down to
dark and dimmer rooms.
I just bear witness to
all You bid me see,
down the dregs of
whatever cup of disease
You bid me drink. The
sexual thrall, my dark
love of endless bottles
even this compulsion
to write too many words --
Your signature’s in all those
grips which have me by
the balls of my deepest
life’s intent. Is this healing?
To suffer nails til You are
finished driving them,
allowing You to tear some
errant ghost from my
ruptured flesh, allowing
me to stumble on my
way into the next affrighted
wound, grateful to be
free for just one day
between those grips which
tide between my day
or undertows my foolish
will? To shamanize is to
die and dive in noctal
seas to the malted depths of
badness, harrowing the
black lucence of that swoon.
There’s not a damn thing I
can to pull the pall up from
Your grip’s black thrall
except to surrender;
that’s the art, if one could
call it that, my song’s welcome
of the gloom’s entombing
at the sepulchral bottom
of it all. To dream is to die,
and to die is to beat
a frankly different drum,
brutally inside the other
one I’ll never lived in very
well in every surface way.
Thus I learn the marrow
of the shell I found the
morning after I found love,
hearing all the voices of
the sea in pinkblue disarray,
diapsons sung in perfect
harmony to the surf You spell
up from that black chapel on
the last torn shore in hell.