Perilous Chapel

... In the dark backward and abysm of time ...

-- Shakespeare, The Tempest


History is Mystery’s thong: the thrall of lost thrills dowses my backward glance back over every past upturned ass into what I could not quite plunge the full depths of with my errant, ululant-blue equipage. Even the bliss had darker wings than I could then see -- had I known then just what abysm was offering its nipples to me, I would have fled, screaming, from that bed ... But how else would have I been fattened for the fall which You battened on with such blue gall?

***

Students of the Grail romances will remember that in many of the versions the hero -- sometimes a heroine -- meets with a strange and terrifying adventure which, we are given to understand, is fraught with extreme peril to life. The details vary: sometimes there is a Dead Body laid on the altar; sometimes a Black Hand extinguishes the tapers; there are strange and threatening voices, and the general impression is that this is an adventure in which supernatural, and evil, forces are engaged.

Such an adventure befalls Gawain on his way to the Grail castle. He is overtaken by a terrible storm, and coming to the Chapel, standing at a crossways in the middle of a forest, enters for shelter. the altar is bare, with no cloth, or covering, nothing is there but a great golden candlestick with a tall taper burning within it. Behind the altar is a window, and as Gawain looks a Hand, black and hideous, comes through the window, and extinguishes the taper, while a voice makes lamentation loud and dire, beneath which the very building rocks. Gawain’s horse shies for terror, and the knight, making the sign of the Cross, rides out of the Chapel, to find the storm abated, and the great wind fallen. Thereafter the night was calm thereafter.

-- Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance



The stone called Clach-Bratha [is a] large stone slab [which] lies beside the door of the St. Oran’s Chapel on the island of Iona (Strathclyde: Argyll). It has three hollows in its upper surface, in which rested three white marble stones, and every one who visited the island was expected to turn each stone round three times in a sunward direction. Failure to do this would bring about the Day of Judgment.

There is also a belief that when a hole was worn right through the stone as the result of friction caused by the continual turning of the stone, then the burning of the world would come.

it is interesting that taken together, the two prophesies are somewhat at odds: If you don’t turn the stone, the Day of Judgment, i.e., the end of the world, will come. If you do turn the stones, the slab will eventually wear through, bringing the burning of the world.

-- Janet and Colin Bord, The Secret Country

***


PERILOUS CHAPEL

Nov. 28, 2005

On my way through the blue draughts
of Your grail there was always a
lacuna of fraught peril, sometimes
a chapel, others a grave, always
a bed in its deepest darkest plush.
At Iona Oran’s Chapel stands like
a door between the abbey
and its boneyard, also named
after that saint whose bones
lie rigored in the abbey’s
footers as that door to
angels bright and wild.
You never know what will
irrupt at the border sacristy
(well, You do, though our
knowledge forever remains
dark); altars and graves
are wells for alter histories,
those truths much darker
than we have the guts to name,
much less believe, or worst,
revere. For me, the siege
is four-postered, a bed
of bowered delights which
always drowsed down into
something deeper than
the sex, the surface
sheet-staining narrative
of knight and yielding queen
dowsing in their motions
some mantic and preter-
romantic pantomime
of unfolding oceans
far wilder and incessant
than a young man’s boozy
susurrations in the loins
of a booze-complicit
maid. It wasn’t like I woke
from those nights so brined
in those vaster realms below
that I knew any better or
wiser of my plight; for
years I just stumbled on out
mumbling grey endearments
with my underpants in hand,
words I never meant to
whisper in that past queen’s
bed again. (Is that one
function of this verbal
drone, my call back
at last to a plunged and
farewelled catalogue?)
Soon enough back then
I’d ache her smile
forward toward my future
queen and quest back out
into the bars, pouring
blonde and saucy grails
my greedy and incessant
throat. Those many
nights eventually just
fell behind and vaulted in
a place which came to
sum much later into
a Peril I could comprehend,
a mixed oil of bad
history and its mythically
bad mordents further
down where drunks
and whale-shit pound
the bar for one last round.
Of perils then I was
blind drunk, heedless as
I was unsighted: As I look
back now I wonder just
what dark hand so gripped
me by the balls, hauling
me on a cold deep wave
which broke on shores
at the bottom of the sea.
Bed to bed I raveled
down into a dark and
darker realm, each one
a chapel of what I dreamed
and ossuary for the
next boner tossed into
the usual wrong well.
All that came to an end
when I entered time at
last to marry and get
to work up on the surface
and down here, excavating
my strange and wild
past. My history’s a mystery
only worth retelling here
in the footers of Your
blue dream: My every
dance with bliss Your
bid to gout a darker cream
which I now pour
upon the Peril’s wound,
a dram of wrong-headed
juice which may yet
anoint Your woumb enough
to birth the real words
on my tongue for
whatever fangs that swoon.




The trick is to properly name which angels or imps are inside the wings of narrative: what gig they’re about. Pyschopathology only goes so far, and masturbation’s moot. If there’s a shaman orifice in this rant -- perhaps, in sooth, a mouth -- my story is both mine and Yours, a semiteternal supernumerary gout.

***

(The) tendency to reduce all transpersonal contents to personalistic terms is the most extreme form of secondary personalization. The exhaustion of emotional components and secondary personalization have an important historical function to fulfill, in so far as they help to extricate ego consciousness and the individual from the clutches of the unconscious. That explains why they always appear during the transition from the prepersonal and suprapersonal to the personal. But when secondary personalization seeks to assert itself by devaluing the transpersonal forces, it produces a dangerous overvaluation of the ego. It is a typical false constellation of the modern mind, which is no longer capable of seeing anything that transcends the personal sphere of ego consciousness.

Much as the wild and treacherous Black Sea was euphemistically called the “Euxines,” the “hospitable sea,” or the Erinnyes were renamed the Eumenides, and the abysmal unknowableness of Godhead become the “All-loving and Merciful Father” and the “eiapopeia of children,” so now we mistake the transpersonal for the merely personal. The primordial divinity of the Creator and the fierce, infinitely strange, ancestral totem-animal that dwells in the human soul have been so garbled that they now purport to derive from a prehistoric gorlla father or from a deposit of many such fathers, who have not conducted themselves well toward their “children.”

— -- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness




SEA FOREST

2003

Dark life. Confused. Tormented,
incomprehensible and fabulously
rich and beautiful.

-- Tennessee Williams

Suddenly as he peered down
and down into its depths, he
profoundly saw a white living
spot no bigger than a white
weasel, with wonderful celerity
rising, and magnifying as it
rose, till it turned, and then
there were plainly revealed
two long crooked rows of white,
glistening teeth, floating up
From the undiscoverable bottom.

-- Melville, Moby Dick

Huge wood I can neither
resist nor enter. Danger
and wrong the petals
of a heavy blue orchid.
My breakage an artery
hurling toward your breasts.
Elusive verb radiating nouns
like scent. Milky hour of
beachside enactment leading
to death & that float
in blue waters of we.
Ink which disappears
the closer I get to writing
the actual bed. Itch and fever
of the violate child. My war
with the gods of no and without.
Summer afternoons
which build and slake are
still distant; for now, this
high heat which has too
much pressure, like bright
balls clanging against
off every pendulate roll,
heave, sashay. All of it zipped
yet pent, waiting,
plotting, grinding teeth
as the day groins on.
Most difficult angel, You
belong most to the God
inside these raw words. The
poem about sex is a water
horse at noon: the fleet
shade of shadows narrowed
to that hour’s high drone.
A roar like a wave like
a wound like a man
at his meat, grilling over
an unrepentent fire
burning everywhere at once.
A door opens, the blue
mystery resumes
as I tumble down and down
what’s under the heart,
the sky, the summer,
the page, one fin to write
with endless teeth below.




DIONYSOUSE ROCKS

From A Breviary of
Guitars,, 2000

(Picking up the
narrative here from
Autumn 1978

On those who enter the same rivers,
ever different waters flow
-- and souls are exhaled
from moist ((dark)) things.

-- Heraclitus (B12)


My rock n
roll heart
birthed that
autumn under
the star of
fell Dionysos,
Loosener,
least and
last respected
of all gods:
Cruelty and
delight upon
the cusp of
a power chord
& loose living
drunk and
dunking my
head up to
the hilt
her mad brine:
The rapture
and terror
of life are
so profound
because they
are intoxicated
with death.
Life which has
become sterile
totters to
meet its end,
but love and
death have
welcomed and
cling to each
other passionately
from the
beginning,
writes Walter
Otto in Dionysos
Myth & Cult:
The music
of Dionysos
was pure rock
n roll a clash
of bright brass
timbrels &
drums, hot
thyrsus
spearpoints
glinting with
bloodied sun:
The scythe of
love cut me
clean in half:
Gone all
of my austere
new agey
clarities in
the clarion
maw of a wave:
No metaphor
of her could
suffice out
in the weed
fields I now
found myself
mowing: returned
to Spokane
after summer:
She was gone:
The river some
small paltry
trickle, barely
a sip of her
there but I
drank it for
all she was worth:
Dave and I
jammed on
Stones and Roxy
tunes after
no luck running
ads for bandmates,
heating up
that cold tiny
house with our
rockballs while
the clutter of
bills and empties
piled up round
us & Dionysos
opened the night
to us in all
her terrible
swoon: loveless
& broke I
swam out
toward those
who were
drowning, out
where delight
and death are
sides of the
same song:
Sweet Karla
whose boyfriend
was in the pen
for murder
who said little
though her
body was a
cathedral of
pert breasts
and trim belly,
white panties
with a small
purple ribbon
that pulled down
to reveal a
wildjuiced pussy
hauling me
in to pink
sacraments
her ass bucking
so hot and
fast I always
came in just
two dunks
which sourced
her real fast
on my rock
lobster: Old
loves Landi
and Terri
a night each
friendly amid
the grim needs
of the grind,
Landi rubbing
my sperm into
her grand breasts
(nipples glistening
bluebrown) &
Terri sucking
up my nacht
nougat & then
grinding on
me till her
mouth opened
in operatic
Ah Ohs:
Dionysos
washing me
back ashore come
morning, alone
and festering:
A guitar is
the jaw of an
ass sweeping
down Ninevah
and New York:
Saturdays I
practiced and
practiced, nailing
Tom Petty’s
“Breakdown” and
Foreigner
“Hot Blooded” and
the Cars “Just
What I Needed”:
cracked open
a beer and sucked
hard on her
ciderish moon
boob, thirsting
wilder in the
deepening cold:
Karen a half
crazed mother
who shrieked
of disorder locked
in a house with
a son & the
heat cranked
too high: But
her cunt clutched
and clenched
my cock like
the fist of
Venus herself,
milking my hard
harder penis
with a shrill
shattered joy:
And as I
collapsed on her
splattering and
spluttering
she erupted
in tears crying
so hard I thought
she’d die of grief:
I got the fuck
outta all those
places leaving
behind a
banshee bouree:
Hungover and
pissy went
back to the
JC Penney
stockroom busting
ass & bitching
how the day
steals every
dram of delight,
cardboard cartons
drying the river
from my fingers
(cracking and
then bleeding):
The stockroom
was a theater
of all I was not:
O how I
wanted a band
& the road &
stages high above
this basement
drudgery: Heard
crowds roaring
for me in those
cluttered aisles
of stock: there
was even a girl
Chris who checked
in & priced
stock to remind
me how far
the sea had
receeded: She
looked like
Becky & looked
at me with
the same eyes
but she had
a man and
a kid and
languished in
despair pricing
baby jumpers
and ugly sweaters:
No hope for me
with her though
I ranted and
raged for her
every day,
safe from the
suffrage of love:
Oh how I
took it all back
to the music,
mad now in
the dessication
of summer with
cold dark
biting down from
everywhere:
I was warm
only wearing
a guitar or
plunging in some
her & chilled
to freeze bone
so fast fresh
out of whatever
clench & worn
out & down
from booze &
pot & speed
& no sleep &
addicted to
the scythe
which sharpens
as it loosens
heads from
all sense:
Bull-roarer
Bromios,
tearing me
down to the
real rock music:

THE EXTRA BONE

2003

(My ancestors) stood
me up like a block
of wood and shot
at me with their
bows until I lost
consciousness. They
cut up my flesh,
then separated my
bones and counted
them; and they ate
my flesh raw.
When they counted
my bones they found
that there was
one too many.
Had there not been
enough I would
not have been able to
become a shaman.
-- Tungus shaman

God saw fit to grant
me one too many throats
for my choir, a
strange thin bone
that shirks and flouts
all I was meant
to sing at first light.
It’s eye is devout
for lower heavens
than any I can descend.
Mornings I rise and
that bone is stout,
aching to arc sea
gold from my hips.
Once sieved it then
shrinks, muttering
dribbly amens,
falling asleep while
my mind begins
its hunt for hot meat.
Sometimes I think
though my mind is
its dream, rowing me
away from the page
toward islands of
women whose breasts
milk my white heavens,
a surf so impudent
and greedy that it sticks
to whatever it lathers.
The extra bone God
threw to me is the
eternal source of my
troubles, an irreverent
motley of wrong desires,
disrupting the peace
with reveries of goat
sport. Too often I
have gored my good sense
plunging away in
blind joy. All my fathers
have suffered the same
bone; sometimes I think
it is a trumpet of fire
handed up from the
grave, a fish no one
may ride, though
we’ve careened lives
in its hard saddle.
We’ve all died
in its thrall,
collapsing at
cloudburst to snore like
a baby? Surely my years
have been inked from
its horn, clinging to
nonsense and singing
blue matins to the
eternal annoyance
of fixed stars.
Yet what can I do?
The extra bone is my
third wing, a black fin
for night’s deep, the
angel’s cleft foot
clabbering the kyries
of mint-early spring.
Fool am I in its
maddening thrill,
counting coups on
a icy cave wall
deep down in my fathers,
drumming with that bone
the heart pressed
to our thighs.




ABYSS

2003

“What’s a drunken man
like, fool?”

“Like a drowned man,
a fool, and a madman.
One draught above heat
makes him a fool, the
second mads him, and
the third drowns him.”

Olivia and Feste,
Twelfth Night

Some lakes within
are pure abyss, wells
I once thought to
drink to dregs
only to get hauled
down by some
grim hand to where
real horrors nurse.
In my worst boozing
I always loosed abyssal
seasons which drowned
all other purpose
but to drown drunk.
When I was 27
my girlfriend threw
me out of our apartment,
saying her heart had
been leeched dry by all
my failures to fight
the way she loved.
It was a Friday night,
and Halloween: surely
I rode out on a dead tide
of severed tendons,
sworded heart and
cracked balls, all
pickled in a brine
of raw pain. I stayed
that first night
at the Bran Motor Court,
my suitcase packed
with the cotton ephedra
of my former selves
(musician, lover, man).
Got roaring drunk that
night & with an ex-bandmate
remembering well
and loud all we had
so bitterly lost.
With no love to stay
my hand, I drank freely
from the well, its water
that night unusually dark
and cold, like freezing
schnapps: tiny sickles
sweeping away all
that mattered and
so hurt. Around us ghouls
and French maids chased
and fled, their laughter
high and steely, their
couplings like stiletto
silhouettes of an
impaled heart.
The next morning
I woke more terrified
and alone than ever,
and there was
nothing to do
but drink beer and
watch college football
in that darkened room
til dark. That was the
ochre of free-fall, all
duties pushed away,
the hours rolling toward
nothing in a soulless tide.
There’s an old
Barbara Streisand
song I hear when
I think of those days:
“Free again,” she’d sing,
“lucky lucky me, free
again.” My father spun
that song round us
like a crown as he drank
Scotch in his 48th story
apartment in downtown
Chicago. “Time to raise the
roof again, shout out
loud and long again, time
to have a party, a party --”
The irony in her voice was
so thick any fool would
grimace, but for me the
song was both totemic
and blue, tanked
on boozed-up, historic
glee. I moved on to the
Flamingo Court
later that day, my dregs
in tow, pooling down
where it was cheaper by
the week and apt
for travellers with
nowhere to go.
My room was like
the inside of a dead
man’s eye, its gloom
furnished by a
million bad vacations:
a scarred dresser
missing half its handles,
greasy dark green
carpet, smoke-smelling
curtains, a half-dozen
roaches bigger than my
thumb spawled beneath
my lumpy single bed.
I set my suitcase on
the floor, pulled out
my electric guitar
from its pretty case
and sat on the bed
noodling old songs.
The notes were
thin and high, miming
that big night music and
all the stages I’d never
have the balls to mine.
But later come happy
hour I sure looked
the part in parachute
pants, layered shirts
and red leather shoes,
clothes my ex
had try to fit me to.
I dressed for my
own desire; surely
she primped my
hair up in the mirror.
That night I drank
at Bailey’s long and late,
befriending Kim, a big-
breasted, -hearted
waitress. She followed me
back to my room at
night’s end, maternally
sweet, holding my head
between her fine full
breasts while I nursed
and came and cried
for the woman
I’d lost. She gave me
her number the next
morning, said, call,
we can talk: But I
was blind those nights
to what she offered,
my sights lowered
toward the darkest
cleavage of them all.
And so the next night I
was back to the well
again to the dankest
a.m.’s, searching in
sparser bar-crowds
for some the next ear
to croon my songs
into. Seven of those
nights later I followed
some girl into Bailey’s
back disco, passing
Kim in my wake.
“Whore puppy,” she
hissed,but I just smiled
and walked on in
to that devil’s maw.
And so I free-fell
in that obliviate hell,
fall hardening into winter
and cold nights of
abuse ruling all. Today
I think what made that
time an abyss was not
that I fell so far,
but rather that I chose
to fall over all the other
ways my life could
still go -- join a band,
get a new girlfriend,
change jobs -- I couldn’t
let go of that boy who
drowned chasing a
lost woman down
a boozy, dark well.
Surely a con distills
into compulsion;
Eurydice might
be found again down
there-- perfect as the
night she first told me
she loved me, curled
close on that bed we’d
call our own--but
she’d hardly ever
welcome me back.
I said I was getting on,
but really I was just
going down that
abyss which yawns
when we can’t let go
of life’s infernal No.
I look back on those
hoary drunken
months like
a sailor recalling his
days hauling through
Cape Hope, where
the sea churned both
night and day to
devour its own wake.
It was a bad, bad season
which I ended up
repeating many times,
turning away from
life’s eluvial hurts
to hanker back to
that dark water’s edge,
rest my arms on the bar,
singing, bartender,
pour me some of
that fiery black
mama, I’m in need of
nipples to nurse this
mad, bad thirst.
I’d draw hard on that
first drink and stare at
the face in the mirror
who stared back
handsome and
lost -- the image
still wavers in
memory’s chilled glass:
now I see behind him
that other man, the
lord of abyss,
his fangs long, almost
eternal, curving down
below those long
nights’ undertow.




PERIL DE MER

2005

The 15th-century Melker Physiologus
... has the story that the sea-creatures
sira, half-maiden, half-fish, leads
the sailors away, after which they
drown.

According to the Bestiare by Phillipe
da Thaon, the serra obstructs the ships
in a very special manner, the creature
raises its wings and, by proceeding in
front of the ship and depriving it of
wind, does great harm.

... In his Besitare, Guillam le Clerc
defines the serra simply as a
peril de mer, feared by sailors for
its propensity for sinking ships.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The
Seafaring Saint

Every voyage has its squalls,
and she is every sailor’s
honeyed nightmare, an
abscissa riding butt-naked
on the wave-mare of abyss.
Desire fraught with peril
bound her waist with
flesh above and scales
below, the sweet dive
down from her roseate
breasts trapped by
screeching terror
in the depths. Who can
resist, who would dare
to dive into that
wilding wave, which rises
twice the height of
a man’s main mast?
A sailor is composed
of such fraught foamings,
when the apparition
rises from the foggy
aft of sleep, almost
a girl, certainly
a reaper of every
throb and leap
inside my hips,
her voice almost
a surflike croon,
her blue eyes pale
and icier than
the high scimitar of
the moon. Oh what
halves sweet heaven
into shrieking hell
than those thighs
which never quite
appear above the
wave’s wild crest,
thighs which have
gripped the keels
of galleons & split
them with a sigh?
Travail here carefully,
you who would ever
shore again. She is
every drink you must
think all the way
from glow to basement
doom; you do so
by reading between
the lines of her aria,
to see the skulls
piled high amid
the whales and squid
and split mast-heads.
That breasts so close
could fan so far those
frozen depths below
is the peril de mer
you must embrace
if your would live
to write the voyage
down. I draw her
shape to the right
of the last page, or
house her in parenthesis
(here) like that conch
on every shore which
set to ear splits wide
the door where nothing
but your sighs like
whiskey pours. Listen
too long to that music
at your peril, friend:
sails of gossamer and
lace will ice and ghost
the mast, prelude to
the foam which
covers it at last.