Nixie Dust

GALLOP

Dec. 12, 2005


... Pre-eminently the funerary animal and
psychopomp, the “horse” is employed
by the shaman, in various contexts, as
a means of achieving ecstasy, that is, the
“coming out of oneself” that makes the
mystical journey possible. This mystical
journey -- to repeat -- is not necessarily
in the infernal direction. The “horse”
enables the shaman to fly through the
air, to reach the heavens. The dominant
aspect of the mythology of the horse is
not infernal but funerary; the horse is
a mythical image of death and hence is
incorporated into the ideologies and
techniques of ecstasy. The horse carries
the deceased into the beyond; it produces
the “breakthrough in plane,” the passage
from this world to other worlds.

***

V. Blum (records this) ritual among the
Muria of Bastar. In his sanctuary at
Semurgaoin the great Gond god Lingo
Pen has several wooden “horses.” At
the time of the god’s festival these
“horses” are carried by a medium and
used both to induce ecstatic trance
and for divination. “At Metawand I
watched for several hours the antics
of a medium who was carrying on
his shoulders the wooden horse of his
clan god and at Bandopal a medium
carrying an imaginary horse on his
shoulders “ambled, caracoled, pranced
and plunged” for two miles before
my slow-moving car as we made our
way into the jungle for the Marka
Pandum (ceremonial eating of mangoes).
“The god rides upon him,” they told
me, “and we cannot stop him dancing
for days at a time.”

-- Eliade, Shamanism 467, 468

Atop my father’s crest
You ride a magic fish
which rides an iron helmet
like the funerary boat
of a fallen warrior-god.
You’re holding on, it
seems, for dear life
(or lives), your grip
fantastic and
merciless as that angry
water-horse hooves
hard the ages of
my history and
destiny and ecstasy.
That wild fish’s strides
are invisible to
our naked eye, churning
in a marge which
pours the darker
sources of my song
into the three cups
displayed below.
You’re on my father’
crest and on my fathers’
headstones; Your
image is carved cravenly
atop the headboard
of every bed I’ve
surged through; it
crowns my skull’s
descent to every world
You ravished in Your
dream. I write as
You ride, ever toward
a shore just off the
page, my hand Your
tireless haunches fused
with the sea’s blue fire
which we mortals only
ferry to our last shore
where we suspire, leaving
saddle and rein to the
next fool in the surf.
Such power mounts and
thunders in perfect three-
part harmony of head
and heart and balls
in hooves, dancing on
the ocean the way
an ecstasy so blithely
rips the roofs off
every house of God.
So effortless is Your
charmed motion that
I could sing for days
and barely carve
the first foam-maned
wave of Your sea-
wide curvature. Is
that crashing surf the
drumbeat of Your hooves
inside my darker heart?
How many lives have
Your crossed to get
me here? Shall I number
all the waves in
the annals of that ride?
Surely You harrow me
as I ride these paper
rollers toward the
same incessant shore,
where all I say dissembles
in the surf’s collapsing
pour: Could I have
sung this any differently
had You not been thundering
in my ear? I doubt it --
but whatever I think today
is by tomorrow not the
way it is at all
when you rumble full-tilt
to hilt across your
steppes of brine. It
suffices just to amp
that sound to its
current magnitude
and leave all talk
of goals and wetter shoes
to the magic thunder of
Your galloping wild hooves.





COLD FRONT

1988

All day long I have desired you.
A cold front has arrived, muscular,
driving jagged clouds on a hard sea of air.
Sunlight flashes in the kitchen window
then flips to darkness, like a closing
eye. I cup a mug of coffee in
my hand. It is smooth and round and
hot to the touch.

The kitchen is still. I want you,
as an alcoholic who gives up on
his sobriety and hurries for a drink.
If I touch you, I will not stop.
A tree outside erupts in wind.

Your breast is pressed to my ear,
filling it, I'm sure I can hear your
heart, incessant. . . but you're at work.
I eat an apple in the kitchen, sitting
on a stool by the window. Each bite
is crisp cold sweetness. They say
it's going to chill into the thirties
tonight. The moon will be full.
We've talked on the phone of travelling
to the beach tonight, of walking along
the shore in the stiff wind. We
say we will share a room.

I have lost control of my desire for
you, I am afraid. Part of me has already
made love to you, during a kiss I
mounted you and looked into your eyes
and came, my temples pounding. . .

Over two rooftops I see the tops of
three palm trees bend far, their leaves
flapping furiously, lashed by the tidal
air. I strap on an electric guitar
and crank up the amplifier. I play
wild rock and roll, I sweat and lurch,
my fingers attack the frets, I make
the notes squeal, I pillage.

My room fills with stampeding horses.
They have angry eyes, they have wild
manes that flutter like the devil's cape.
My hand clutches the hard guitar neck.
I'm searching for your thighs.

It grows colder out, and colder still.
The sky turns mercilessly blue. I pack
my guitar away, bury it in the thick
red plush, lock the case and slideäit beneath my bed.
Kneeling, I finally give it to God, it's too much,
I can't wait any longer, I must have
her. . .

A moment of silence, then another.
Could this be grace? I sit at my desk.
Lamplight is warm but austere. My
face in the window hangs there, mute,
no wolf or good timer. A blast of
wind rocks the window. This pen hefts,
fills with ink, it turns its mouth
on virgin paper.

And hungers.


COWBOY LEAR'S COMPLAINT


April 1994

Since you left
the land grows wider and wilder.
These days are an aerie
woven of brambles and rage.
Horses pound the turf,
their black manes electric,
their eyes like huge knobs
cranked to the hilt.

Since you left
Indian summer races back to spring,
a river roaring up the mountains.
These days are like corn stalks
pleading harvest, staves bent
with split ears, seedlings ripped
away by the wind like mice
in the keening talons of eagles.

Since you left
my heart is like the snout
of a stallion, smooth
and extravagantly long.
There's thunder on the highway
these days, and though the
road arrows west into the sun,
no one knows where this storm
came from nor when the
land splits if it can ever heal.

But what truly terrifies
in the days since you left
is the absence of crescendo:
storms swelter greenblack
but surrender no rain,
horse balls hammer brass
against steel haunches,
swollen corn ears ache at the sun,
eagles shear the sky
with their unslakable blades
and the horizon burns all night.

Dammit, why do these days
offer all you ever wanted,
all you ever asked from me,
these days having waited so patiently
for you to finally walk away?



DOLPHIN RIDER

2000


He is both meat
and motion of
my darkest
pure joys,
a figure carving
one wave
with his weight
then leaping
over the next
in a shower
of full-mooned
spray. It doesn't
matter what I
say here, how
I praise or damn
him: He just
rides that
bigass fish
on and on,
every night
and nightside
of my life singing
those big
brassy songs.
He's my
totem curse,
an archetype of
ruin which has
hammered every
swingin' dick
in my clan.
Like my
great great
grandfather
O'Riley who
burned his fiddle
to atone
for all the
drunk fiddling
haystack-fucking
the fish god
demanded of
him. The last
time my father
saw him he
was 72
and in hot
shit for offering
the neighbor
lady a quarter
for a toss.
The music
never ends:
tail and tooth
and cock
and voice are
all flames of
an eloquent fire
born on God's
abyssal plains,
awful or
awesome
depending on how
you survive
that music.
Today I say
he rides to
protect and
border and greet
us just beyond
whatever solace
we call harbor.
Singing is just
surrender you know
to what rises
and burns
as much as
to the dark waters
you carry.
A white flag
for dolphins
at midnight.
Your voice alone
singing her name.


HORSE TATTOO

2001

By some defect of soul
I’ve got it all reversed:
my downs appeal,
forward steps appall.
For my first three years
I carried a strange birthmark,
a red heart with an arrow
through it, right over my heart.
Cute, eh? A woman who
babysat for me back then
once remarked to my mother,
he aint gonna be nuthin’
but a lover.. Only the mark
was upside down. A backwards love.
May that’s why I like tattoos.
I got my first one of
a man riding a dolphin
etched on my left upper
arm in a greeny blue
right after my first marriage.
It replicates a figure from
my father’s chosen coat
of arms (fanciful at best),
some rebel spirit who
cruises between love and
iniquity. Years later
after a split with my second
wife a second tattoo
seemed necessary. I’d
always like the Uffington
Horse, that huge figure
carved into a chalk hillside
in England. It looks like a
horse, though locals swear
it represents the dragon
Saint George slew nearby.
Somehow that was apt:
having left home in a funk
of desire and drunkenness,
I had that careening spirit
carved into my right arm
not in red—as dragons go—
but instead in black, the
negative of that white ichor
which illuminates that
hill horse’s bones.
Well, I didn’t die of that
spirit—not yet—and I’m
working my way slowly
home again to my wife.
So the tattoo, I guess, is
an irony, the road eventually
not taken which only leads
to ruin. I’m branded by
the fires which drove me here:
Are they good or ill, or
simply mine? Am I some
inwarding beast mined
from love’s reversals?
I will never know for sure.
Today, I’m proud and fearful
of those markings: They light
the way ahead for me
with their weird, otherworldly glow,
balled makings with nowhere
right now to go.




HORSE

2002

At the gym yesterday
working on the
elliptical machine
& watching prim riders
hurl horses through
a jumping course:

A pure joy
raced like adrenaline
through me as
I watched, making
me happy to
pump my hardest too,
my heart so wanting
to gallop away
from permanent grief.

The ocean god
Manannan on his
horse Wave Sweeper
takes me where I
do not know.
I’m trusting this dark
fire with its
wild loud hooves
and wave high leaps—
Nothing to know,
no nature but my own.

Only this gallop
across sea ridges
and suburban roofs,
through the wind and wrack
heaving this horse song,
this banshee joy.


THE UFFINGTON HORSE

2003

The locals say I am the beast
St. George slew, his white sword nailing
The heart of this hill. Well, time weaves
Tales around the hearts of men, but
I am no altar to the need
To kill the winged insides of
Every kiss. Recall how kings of
Old were taken up the hill to
Mount a pure white mare, his flesh in
Hers turned sceptre beneath the white
Applause of stars. I Rhiannon
Ride this high ground like the crest of
The ninth wave. My saddle is a
High hard throne — mount me, if you dare.
Plunge your song in salt everywhere.



RHIANNON

2003

I could never catch her,
though all these years I’ve
tried. When I was three
years old I’d run to the
window whenever my
mother cried, “pretty girls
passing by.” Whatever
made me race flat-out
got me to the window
always a nick too late,
my eyes catching a
jot of hair or passing
smile, but nothing that
would hold: just my
hammering heart and
that rearward, shrinking
view I love these days
too much. In later years,
when in the tightest inches
of encounter, some verge
of touch would always
race by just out of reach,
leaving something like
a scent in the air,
sweet and strangely
dimming, a halo above
that final collapsing light.
How could I coil in the
limbs of some woman
I more or less knew and
wake next to her
no closer than when I began,
months, years before?
For years I’ve ridden at
full gallop, my hands reaching,
my fingertips just outside
the outermost glow of
blonde or auburn or black
hair -- Who could have guessed
by any wisdom of this world
that it was she who was
seeking me? Years ago my
father woke on an Iona
where Thor still walked,
brute and ugly, the
churl on the road to
Corco Duibne. Yet my
father only felt love for
the apparition. The monster
said to him, “your work
is our work and our work
is yours,” and for the next
20 years my father has
proved him right. My quest
is hers and hers is ours
in this no-world of a
well’s wold, spring for the
white mare who steps
down nightly from her
hill to drink deeply here
in shade, her foal beside
her (the one we never see),
daughter of these years
plunging an absence who
was there all the time,
receiving each forward
motion with soft, undinal,
irretrievably roomy sighs.


SURF SADDLE

2004


Of course I blew it. Mistook you
for the woman who was
only meant to reveal you.
Tried to fuck my way through
her to you. It’s what young fools
do. It’s how I found a purchase
on the narrow path to you.
When all the grief bit down
and through. Those bitter
departures, the mooing heart,
the endless ululations
in the petulance of booze:
As if something so poetic
must also be so literally
true as to return with
risen nipples from the grave.
All that passionate flinging
tried to sing the hallows
you absent -- nice beat,
steady wavelike rhythm, all
the horses loosed & me
growing hoarse shouting
across dark waters beyond,
transgressing every bed
for you. But desire never
changes without a moulting
god; I’m too hard wired
as a fool for that, and you,
you are no god.
Only after having nailed
myself for so many
years to that stone bone
cross did the the wounds
seek abbots, those
dactyls who surrender
by translating the
desire, hammering
a shape of seem upon
a beach of paler fire.
Forging a relation from
all those farewells. To make
a bliss of resonance after
the wave’s certain collapse.
It’s hard to put this into
words, but when has loving
you ever been easy?
In this weave I hone
an ear attuned to that
surf wilderness that swells
and washes just beyond
or under a life’s laboring
to make love real and last.
I hold that music up
an inch above the tide,
praising those foam fillies
and curved lamias I
was never meant to ride.
Each poem is a saddle
for that gallop all the way
almost to you which I’ll
never mount enough.
The music of each
one’s making is the song
that beds you here,
for just a second,
in the wash. That’s what
I figure on the island
that I walk today,
surrounded by that
ocean whispering
which shells and bells
your name.


CENTAUR

2003

The centaur filled
the whole doorway
of my night -- huge
and hair, brutally
hooved, his eyes like
pitchers poured from
the worst of winter
seas. And when he
bid me climb up
that great back I knew
somehow I must,
though I might die,
or die of all the
waves I could not
ride myself, much
less sing. He made
the beach in three
great strides, crossing
over orchard and lake
and shopping mall
like a full moon in
fast-mo reverse.
The sea at 2 a.m.
was alien and huge,
each wave an
empire smashing
at our feet. He waded
out and began to
swim, and sing in
the voice of sea-bulls,
tolling over the graves
of lusty sailors,
reddening the barbs
hurled far below.
A man-beast older
than the sum of
all my fathers, he
bid me strip naked
and stride out
past the merry lappers
of my metaphors,
beyond even the
weepy salt iniquity
of my own history
out into the real
raw heaving brine
of heart I can never
fully serve or master,
much less sing
in his ripe baritone.
Crabs and ‘cuda
bumped their
menace at my ankles
while weed-drift
wove my chest
and cock and balls
like the soft hair
of all the women I
have loved -- he
bid me beyond
all that, stepping
into a riptide that
hauled me miles
out to sea where all
was milky heavens
high above and
all below the dark
heave of her darker
thrall. And I was
alone -- the centaur
gone within, leaving
me just one command:
Ride. And so I
began the rest of
my life, catching
wild combers in
from Cornwall
and Iceland, climbing
on their frigate
back and clutching
the reins of turgid
foam, riding sweet
emotions toward that
shore I’ll never reach.
I hear him laughing
up ahead in the
surf’s incessant roar,
delighting in the big
night music which
fills the next boy’s door.

FISHY COMMUTE

According to Glaber, Brendan
is taken to an island paradise
by the whale, while the Vita St.
Davidis states that the saint was
“leading a wondrous life on the
back of a sea-monster” and
was heading for Wales.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

I’ve grown so used to days and
nights aboard a fish that his
commutes are a suburb I’ve lived
in for years, at home on waters
he whorls deep while
I work in the garden in
the paper-whirl of butterflies.
Last night driving home
from the poetry event,
fine language sounding in
my ear without translation,
I drove roads I rarely
see so late -- I-4, Maitland
Boulevard, long lonely
SR-441. Night scenes
of broadened emptiness
and tired urgency ghosted
up from under and without,
flukes of the same whale
though darker. Billy Stayhorn
ballads on the jazz station,
the pianist stepping delicately
down his vertebrae as
I drive home to my
beloved wife and You,
my shrieking blue Cape
of verse matins miles
away from first light. Such
gentility I found on the
back of ancient night, sweet
tidals bearing a wreckage
within sight of the next shore.