The Ice Whale

The earliest mention of a Perilous Cemetery, as distinct from a Chapel, appears to being in the Chastel Orguellous section of the Perceval, a section probably derived from a very early stratum of Arthurian romantic tradition. Here Arthur and his knights, on their way to the siege of Chastel Orguello, come to the Vergier des Seupltures, where they eat with the Hermits, of whom there are a hundred or more.

“There is none could ever tell
Of the graveyard’s marvellous spell.
Its wonders so diverse and great
No one alive could now relate
Ore even dream that there could be
Such things as these for men to see.”

...

Originally high importance seems to have been attached to it [The Perilous Chapel]. If we turn back to the first version given, that of which Gawain is the hero, we shall find that special stress is laid on this adventure, as being part of the “secret of the Grail,” of which no man may speak without grave danger. We are told that, but for Gawain’s loyalty and courtesy, he would not have survived the perils of that night.

--Jessie Weston, from “The Perilous Chapel” in From Ritual to Romance, 179-80

***


ICE NEKYIA

Nov. 29, 2005

Father, it was that hard winter
in Spokane -- now 26 years ago --
that Your darker hands tore
me full well apart, offering
all my former chunks of
day-soaked sense to those
black mouths which
vault the full cathedral
of Your sea. A January
of such infernal
cold and dark that my
naked mind -- stripped
of all I once believed --
could only yield to that
boreal cross, pierced
by icicles of night I
feel the fangs of to this
day. Nailed thus, I
was wild and split enough
to receive Your instructive
bolts, those jags of
insane fire which burned
the starry tops of me
in a blue ecstatic pyre.
Three nights a week
I’d walk down to the
Aquarius Tavern next
to the Spokane River’s
empty gouge, listening
to three sets of biker
rock n roll and drinking
all the beer I could afford.
The loudness of those
bands warmed me in
a way that left my insides
numb, physic enough in
those days; the beer
poured coldly down
the falls of that loud
icy sound, carrying me
to free far Northern steppes
where You waited,
flint knife in hand, for me.
Instead of chasing skirts
I just mooned for a waitress
who smiled whenever she
filled me up, a smile fraught
with the froth of yearning
and rectitude, promised
as she was for some asshole
she half-despised but was
faithful in the way of bad
love -- well, You know how
barroom romances go,
all dream, pure gall.
After three hours of
pickling my devouring
miseries in more of
them it was closing time:
too late for sanity
yet too soon to die,
when you realize that you
didn’t get enough to drink
that night, not then,
nor ever. And with a
bouncer’s glare I was
thrown out into the
darkest deepsea winter’s
night, one which no jacket
made on earth can ever
protect you from the
full abysms of. Full
drunk, swerving and
half-stumbling, I walked
two miles back to my
apartment on sidewalks
of great peril, iced over
with black winter dreams
of icy abysmalness.
Thus I steered my
toddering rudder home,
drunk but never
enough, directly into
the jaws of an
icy noctal whale,
walking through a
gullet of deadened
neighborhoods,
past houses where love
was locked safely inside,
in beds I could not reach,
much less with any
clarity quite name, so
frozen were my lips.
Those awful nekyias
back to my apartment
were jaunts I routinely
suffered in the name of
my guitar’s song of love,
forlorn as they were
passionate, both hardblue
and sea-malt sweet. The
stars above me burned
so preternaturally bright,
like eyes intently marking
how I left such bloody
tracks behind me on
the ice, reverent and
revenant at the brutallest
of hours where I alone
walked on through a
dead man’s purgatory
through the stations
of pure loss. Somehow
I got home, or what
remained of me, lighting
a fire in the kitchen
fireplace and trying
to thaw enough to
cry my way to bed.
One night I fed pages
from Roethke’s Straw
for the Fire notes,
offering back to Your
wild pyre what I
once believed most
true. Yes, I was fully
then your fool, your
votive angst, your mad
perambulator of full
winter’s night, cracking
with that ice. When I
came to on Saturdays
I settled on the heat
grate spinning Eno and
Bach on the stereo,
nursing a quart of beer
between my legs
and there fell fully out
of view, into the feral
instruction which recast
me in hard blue.
Far indeed are those
winter nights from this
predawn one in Florida,
barely cool now as a front
washes weakly through,
my pages rich and dark
with the ichor of an
ice-whale’s spume who
is my huge hard familiar
and upon whose back
I ride, line after line,
shore after shore of a
song which is the mystery
part of my history, the
wet part of black seas.
I’m inside love’s house
now and work it daily
and so hard. The booze
is just ouside tapping
icy fingers against the
window, but its a horse
I don’t have to ride
to pour the wild part
of wilderness to the
dregs of this next page.
Brute father, I’m still
not sure what I was
broken into those
winter nights in ‘79,
but the whale oil
there distilled for me
gives this morning
lamp its lustre, its
weird spermacetti shine:
the tincture of
abyssal desires which
wells pure water
from old wine.



LONGING

2002

I sometimes wonder whether longing
can’t radiate out from someone so
powerfully, like a storm, that nothing
can come to him from the opposite
direction. Perhaps William Blake
has somewhere drawn that?
— Rilke, letter, 1912

There is a longing in us which
grows from sigh to starry shriek.
Perhaps comets are charred furies
of that pain, a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears to God’s porch
and back, insatiable and unanswered.
Perhaps. All I know is that
it’s infinitely perilous to think
that longing has a human end.
In my cups I once believed
a woman mooned for me,
her longing a white welcome
over my million nights alone.
I met and passed her many times
those hard years, blinded by the aura
of her unvowled name.
Surely when two longings touch
it’s like when great waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
Our deeper thirst can never sate:
as each draught of booze
was never enough, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.
I recall a young man
walking home drunk on a
frozen night long ago,
his beloved nowhere
to be found in the chalice
he had named. Winds hurled
steel axes through the
Western sky, failing to clear
the cruel foliage of fate.
In his defeat he was greater
than any angel beckoned
by that night: his heart so
hollowed by longing
as to chance in pure cathedral,
her absence the clabber of a bell
shattering the frozen air,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.



WINTERED

2002

Thy shrunk voice sounds too
calmly, sanely woeful to me.
In no Paradise myself, I am
impatient of all misery in others
that is not mad ... Do the heavens
yet hate thee, that thou canst not
go mad?
— Ahab, Moby Dick


Wintered beyond
all Decembering, the hard man
lounges on a perfect beach
sipping his whiskey
as the sea crashes
all the bones of the world.
His eyes, which are of that
whorled sea (but icier),
are hidden behind lenses
dark as lead. We cannot
see his polarized day, where
beach, sea, sky, birds, babes
in nearby bikinis remain
hoar-frosted in place, dead-
wintered. He’s just another
hard man on a beach amid
thousands, each in
nondescript trunks
sipping from a vein
of the merciless sea.
They’re all deeply tanned
and tattooed, come early
and leave late. Their sport cars
gleam in the parking lot like
burning fruit, their condos
line the beach like the molars
of a whale jaw. They’ll live forever,
you know, sipping to the dregs,
rattling the cubes which ice
them everywhere they go.


COLD DREAM

2002

I dreamt a cold wind
blowing ever more fierce
against a house
I lived in long ago,
each gust a gale
of surprising intensity,
blasting westward off
an unknown, winter sea.

Would those frail
walls stand? Where
did I put my
old travelling clothes?
And what on earth
was that stench
coming a locked door?

I woke with my
dream swimming
off into the cloyed
heaviness
of our quilted bed
where the you and
I and the cat
struggling like fish in
a mud for purchase,
for room to breathe.

Time to get up. The house
cold as winters in Florida
go, no big deal but
enough to turn the heat
on downstairs for a while
& drape a blanket over
my legs while I drink
coffee and begin.

When I write of it
I submit to its
washings and gale,
going down
as a pen into ink.