Sand Chapel

My mysteries and meanings have animal roots for which biography provides harness but not hoof. Maybe that’s why sex so figures into angelic shadows, rooting and roostering what seems so high-flung. Why childhood and first events to charm the imagination, the sleepy manger child of the new age surrounded by doting sheep. Why nurture and nature swell and crash the next poem.

There was a ritual we nightly did with our cat Violet for a season which gets toward my point:

CAT IN THE BOX

November 2002

We don’t know why, but our cat
loves her loving in a box.
We set one on the floor
and she hops right in,
deigning to be lifted to
our bed as if on a ski-lift
and then demurring to long strokes,
her sapphire eyes misting,
milky, culled in kittenlike
memories of long ago.
Normally she can’t stand to
be held, but with only a
box between us she’ll take
all the love we can give.
I guess sometimes love
requires an inch of buffer,
a frontier absence making of
not enough quite more.
A beach between sea and
land brocades the
safest most pure caress.

***

That beach is the ground for this verbal iniquity, a sanctuary for play, for building sand castles at first light with my mother’s voice and the sea’s blending together, where my wife is mounded over the bodies of all the other women I have loved, a sandbox which quarters off my white writing chair, its sands the clean white journal pages in which I write of old pleasures and wild forays safe from the margins of the real.

“The child god, prototype of the wonderful orphan child, feeling quite at home in the primal element, reveals his full significance when the scene his epiphany is water,” Carl Kerenyi writes in “The Primordial Child in Primordial Times,” and so it seems moot to meet this nascent hour of the coming year from the ground of both my own history and the mystery of the world’s. Kerenyi again:

The world tells us what is in the world and what is true in the world. A “symbol” is not an “allegory,” not just another way of speaking, it is an image presented to the world itself. In the image of The Primordial Child the world tells of its own childhood, and of everything that sunrise and the birth of the child mean for, and say about, the world.”

So ... Maestro ...




MOTHER OF PEARLS

for my mother
on Mother’s Day, 2002


Brilliant sands reach back
toward a distant shimmer
where I recall white afternoons
and your voice above the sea’s.
Weaned in that bright music,
I have always loved words
which sing pure susurration,
each line a surf between
you and I, cresting and curving
into us in foaming chords of joy.
Each poem I write is a pearl
sown from that cerulean wash,
a beach of adulation.
No wonder I ate all that sand.
I’m a voice now of that
restless, crashing land,
reaping your white songs
grain by patient grain,
the rest of my life long.


THE NEXT ANGEL

Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

— Ranier Maria Rilke

Yes, surrender was good,
the grace that followed
was a sea wind
and the shore
sparkled fresh
with all we became.

But you must know
that surrender also writes
a darker angel into the sky.
Today we walk a troubled
strand, naked of wish or will
our torrid meters swelling
harsh against the sea.

Just how do we
steady between curl
and plunge? How to
walk here, when desire's
riptide so dreamily
hauls at our ankles?

Thunder summons the
next angel. Later we may
believe that grace returned
in this spiralling air,
but for now, we are only
walking in rain on
the shore of a kiss,
wrestling the next
angel to a fall.


SAND CHAPEL

12/27/05

I keep on writing here
because I’m learning
line by line to build
on letting go, carving
paper ledges to
the brink of blue
from which something
next and new
may rise like gold
from vastly crashing seas.
A daily conjuration,
if you will, in advance
of the real sunrise
at real shores so
many miles from here.
Which tides the other,
I wonder, here at
4:30 a.m., cold dark
outside in which
the garden stills
in pulse and breath,
old dark inside,
the oldest that I’ve
yet to find in the
caves I’m writing down.
Last night I dreamt
of building sand
castles on some
hazy summer shore,
shovelling sand
from the vagina
of a woman spread
below me. Every
subsequent
attempt to build
wide or deep
kept tiding me back
to that first enterprise
when I was five
going on fifty
-- All latter work
subsumed in one
primary rise
between my mother
and the sea. I tried
in my dream to
buy a car, to find
a men’s room in
my old high school,
to compete with
a hoary diver for
the depths of You:
Yet still I’m mounding
epiphantic breasts
to waves upon a
nascent summer’s day.
I’m still plundering
a womb of shatter whelks
and drunks
smashed down by
love on love, my
hand daring left to
right into ten thousand
cunts, each delving
each next line.
Suffice there’s beach
enough to keep me
busy here for this
poem, perhaps
another, perhaps more
-- who knows? I’ll
write as long as seas
crash embracing shores,
as long as she’s singing
in my ear, as long as this
craw in my gut
crows to glut on more,
as long as this hand
loves doors to
every bluer amplitude
inside ecstatic reams.
Do I write? Or dream?
Or sing that brutal
womb which delved
Dylan Tor to waves
in a brogue no
song will ever seam,
much less drown
the depths of?
Who cares? Surf’s up!





FLESHTONE

2000


Milky-sweet
acre of nougat,
when I dream of you
flowers open wide
to heaven’s
blazing horns
and my heart burns
dark purplepeach
to ultramarine.
When I reach for you
summer oceans sparkle
and sigh in curve and curl,
nippling toward
my trembling hand.
Flesh is an orchard
kissed by the
moon, each tree
bursting with
the sweet wash
of heavy fruit.
I nestle my
face in you
and am planted
too. Touching you
is almost fatal
and never quite
what my dream
implies, but touch
I will, excessively
and hard,
a drunk in a wine barrel,
a lout with his lard.
Color me fleshtone, that
crayon I can’t
let go from my hand,
with no lines to
stay within
and every page
scrawled to the rim.



SAND CASTLE

2000

Sigh down the long runnels of foam
which line the heart-road of this shore,
now soft in the gauzy drift
of a late summer afternoon,
the sun far to the west, it’s fierce
maul now fleece, pale on the backs
of two boys building the same sand castle
you built against the tide so long ago.
Each measured handful
of packed sand is angled
so close to the water’s edge
it’s understood a that sand castles
are an invitation to what
washes it all away.
The arrival of each wave
in its final exhausted spread
is exhilarating, filling the moat past brim
and tearing down with singing foam
what you too would release
if you knew what, or how:
You watched those walls tremble and fall
to the sea’s mute caress
and when you walked away
you forgot what was so earnest
about it all almost before the sea
erased it anyway. Now it’s too late
on one beach to save your life
though there’s still time on this other.


DRUNKS ON THE BEACH

Spring 1980

They tilt and todder
over seaweed clumps
'n' broken shells.
"Mother of whores,"
snarls the tall one,
kicking back a wave;
sea birds shit on them.
The short one finds
a beached loggerhead,
long dead and half-buried
in the sand.
"My turn," he bawled,
and eloquently spat
on all the women
he had known.
They belch and caterwaul
the tide, two drunks on the beach,
two wobbly wonders
the sea has room for:
She floats their driftglass
eyes away, and off they go,
two true sons, their curses
lost on the surf,
their tiny fists beating the wind.


NAMES IN THE SAND

2001

Deep in one night’s blue ink
we took a dip, then wrote our names
on the white sands spread
between us: Signatures of
cabernet and citrus and mint
which may already prove illegible
to you two days later, or not.
Even “we” is suspect, perhaps
a tad too hopeful,
damnable for all the usual reasons
flesh gets shared in passing.
But all day yesterday in my fatigue
and hurts (nubs of a hangover, an
elbow rubbed raw) I stopped to linger
at the embers recalling the way
you’d smile so dreamily saying
you wanted all of me — and hard —
or how you tasted — so sweet and fine —
or how I lay behind you at last,
breathing satiate vowels
softly on your neck.
O blue delight, inconsolable,
pure paradox of ice which divides
and fire tearing every bind.
If for that once, then yet saved,
a beach bonfire indelibly
writing this poem
with long whipping flames
and coals now more bright.
Now after all this drought, now rain,
miles away from you,
sweet and incessant and sure,
erasing the flame
but not quite yet your name.


TUMULT

2000

I heave up on this red stallion
kick his haunches hard
and let the world hurl forward in
tumult: Racing down a flat strand
by the sea, great waves crashing
in a calamity of foam and the sky
bearing down hard in thunder and storm.
The horse bears down on his gallop
with all the fury I can summon,
his muscular haunches almost leaping
and his black hooves hammering the sand.
I’m holding on for dear life, surrendered
to these motions, author or victim
of a hellbent horse on a heaven sent beach,
sea and sky in mutual foment
and me within it all and in you,
your face between sunset and moonrise
crepuscular red and dangerous blue,
your eyes half closed in wide wild invitation
and the whole world aching to burst in
what I once thought you were.


AT LEAST A BEACH

2001

There is at least a beach
in this, desolate perhaps,
whose surf sighs almost
wretchedly, folding and rumbling
disconsolate down the shore,
then drolly recedes, sucking
it in as you must for another day,
another exhalation. Merwin
writes, “if the night it long
remember your
unimportance/sleep.”
Console yourself that you
cannot stop singing even when
the music is so sad.
Red notes shoot through
me like a lonely beachside
walk because I invite them
and they render me alone.
Which is far better than
hurting someone else with
what always gets mistaken
as love. Let the beach
remain and sing sadly
sweetly of its salt tossle
through the heart.
Find comfort in that.
Woo the mystery.
Sleep.
Toward morning the angels
will come in their gauzy
matins and touch you
once with their wings,
enough for another day
another beach
another song
of love’s troubled surf.


THE POPE OF
PLAYALINDA BEACH

2003

The Pope of Playalinda
Beach stands at the
surf’s edge swaddled
in white and gold
brocade, his long
train dissembling in the
wash. His crozier
posts the sand like a
surf caster turned the
other way, bejeweled
with summer oceans
and the eyes of
rapturous women.
And those eyes --
so serene as they
scan our naked
congregation,
shepherding us
to the utmost wings
of this crashing
surfside day.
Above his head
the sun is a belfry
of summer fire,
pealing sanctus
over a shadeless choir.
Who is saved
and who gets damned
by such ordained
bliss? The surf thunders
and recedes down
the shore,
no crest not a prayer,
every crash
an eternal door,
the long ebb like
plainsong, censers,
egress to the back
-- a cathedral pour
the flesh adores.

SHAKER OF THE SANDS

2002

Last night I tossed late,
not quite sleepless, not released
into the routine deeper dark.
Probably a prickly ebb
of some pill I took earlier
in the day, trying to stay
alert and in motion through
the usual tangled brake.
Now I turned on a restless,
weary, moody tide, frustrated,
my half-sleeping brain engaged
in a sadly old familiar spin,
rewalking old blind alleys,
retasting mad old blood,
recalling old enmities
at God. I thought how all made
things come to naught, my
best poems like that horrid
soapbox derby car I carved
from balsa without my father’s
help, a misshapen, laughable
little thing, over-carved on the
hood (to a thin whittled strip)
and lumpy in the rear.
Poems to naught just like
my attempts to love
or make of myself a berth
in the oblivious world.
I checked the clock —
still the red tines held
me round midnight —
and so descended on, smelling
that old revolting smell
of worthless self when the
other kids scowled
to find they’d inherited
me on their dodge ball team.
And then I sank into
a weave of thoughts so
exasperated with themselves that
extinction seemed a wiser turn;
felt the weariness of
Macbeth too long harrowed
by the gules of high-falutin’
gambits, reduced to my own
state, to that bitter taste
of knowing that I never got around
to living any life because
a child failed to so very long ago.
And then at last I fell at last
into the hidden dark,
a stiff-limbed sound down
the canyons of the dead,
my hair like the tassels of
a jellyfish, my eyes frozen
wide to that abyssal vale ...
I found the house of my first
marriage and decided to go in,
through someone else had long
lived there, cleaning all former
residue of old love away.
An empty house at 3 a.m.,
even though some presence
slept in the next room.
My curiosity was greeted by this
huge sense of not living there
anymore, nor welcome back —
And so I retreated back out
onto blackened streets
where revenants and addicts
drove bruised clots of cars
on the city’s inverted
arteries. A heart’s history,
my home town, 20 fathoms
beneath this one. A friend
I lost to pride 20 years ago
then recited to me his epic poem
through lips cracked with blood
and dust— Homeric, pure,
simple as the sands of
Cocoa Beach, and lost
to me now, though the dream
poured inexhaustibly
through my ears, a torrent
of sea gold, sands now
ineluctably lost down
the hourglass’s prim flue.
No wonder this morning
I’m so weary, foggy, and blue.
I’m glad I slept on through
all that, but today I’m numbed,
perhaps like sea glass,
certainly humbled as anyone who
tries to make any ocean do.
Oh well. It’s time now to
knock back the last dram
of cold coffee in the mug,
stretch in to the whisper
of sprinklers in the dark,
and find the last line of this poem,
neither to propound or console,
but simply to shake the sands
from the mat at this next door
that opened to me. Welcome, friend.
I know it’s not much but
it’s where the words are found today,
like a school in a far shoal,
not the ones I’d ever care to write
but a man has to eat his heart
as best as he can.

OCEAN HEART

2001

Ah brig, good night,
to crew and you:
the ocean's heart too smooth, too blue
to break for you.

-- Emily Dickinson (LI)

After 20 years adrift in modern paradise
the heart grows burnished, like sea glass,
of its malt obliquities. I remember
my first summer down here walking Cocoa Beach
after drinking all night, my jeans rolled,
the morning a sweet diapson of swelling joy,
my head singing that old Bob Marley tune
is this love is this love is this love that I’m feelin
to tiny Atlantic rollers which broke and scattered
all the sunlight just before my feet. How I hoped
for some Venus to sashay butt-naked off
those waves and fuck my emptiness
with porno-cum-motherly abandon.
Ah me. I drove as always home empty-handed,
my need for love conched inside that brilliant beach.
The years were not without their tide of vestals,
boozy and half-spread devotees of things
I way too partially represented. Our bodies
clanged like clabbers of a weary fog bell,
our hearts nacreous with bitters which would appall
any god, much more twenty-somethings
reaching for the golden ring inside the other’s thighs.
I tried, they tried, we all tried to make a go
of something which had small Michelangelo.
Then came the wives, who joined hands with me
in houses built on time, earnest sorors who sought
to reconcile their history with mine. Both wives
attacked the task with a feral openness I fell far
short of matching. We never made it together
much to any beach, what with daily tasks so far inland,
removed from those yeasty beams of ocean light,
our earnest labors wearying us from every sou
of drippy fun. No wonder I dreamed
of nipply naiads scampering red-rumped
in the surf just out of reach, their beach towels
dropping like moot fig leaves in the scree
— Nor any surprise that I plunged from
those briared ridges into sweet, descending,
horrific billows. I’ve just begun to right
those rumpy arrears. What’s next?
I’ll not go forward without reaching for
the hand I know, surf or no, toward
the best or worst years of love. Sadly
she may not reach back. We’ve new waters to face,
beached, if you will, where there are the
most difficult of surf conditions, full of riptides
and dark harbors: Yet face it together we must,
paradise or no, or never know which hands
the white heat rinsed in those white sands.

RUDDER, ROOT, ROAR

Feb. 2005

Without these soaks in
your old blue, I’d surely
die of dry futurity,
a three-world man
planed flat of all his
lumps and sags. Ahead
like a shimmering runway
lies the long workday
in the life I found
when I made my
grief of you a song,
an inland road
shy of shores or
even the faint thunder
of the surf, having
fading and long dried
to relic dunes
my wheels sigh over
on the way to work.
Nowhere in that
furious hive of forwarding
labors is there time
or room to stray
or curve, so this scant
hour here must fall
anchorlike down the
shelves of silted rue,
salvaging the flukes
and spume of those
drowned mordents
which are the sighing
depths of you, or me,
or what you and I
hurled long ago. The
greater half of the
bright day ahead
roots down in cold
abysms to grip
and suck rootlike
that mouldered bed
in which we once
cooked the very
devil in a spasm of Yes
which broke my
every shore in one
loud booming crash
then ebbed in such
angelic bliss to
haunt the rowing here
in predawn depths,
haunting every line
with a hallowed
harrowed sound,
weaving like a
siren’s hair around
this pale white
writing chair.
Forward now I
must row, to complete
the tasks assigned
by love of the life
which rose treelike
from that bed, a faith
and purpose married
to your own. Daily
I mouth these prayers
inside a chapel
on the shore, built
over what is known
about the mysteries
of that ancient
unquiet blue, its floor
and footers ruddered
by old urgent and
betsotted bones which
mouth the ever tide.
Ahead the road to the rest
of my life, bright for
the trudging and arrowed
like a western sun
directly toward the strife.
Praise to the shells
which you delve and roar
hard pounded in the
asphalt, ferrying that
deluge into all dry
hours far ahead.


BEACH GRACE

2003


A good day. A few sentences.
One that almost has the feel of the true.
—Flaubert

My reward for Being, was This.
— Emily Dickenson


When I get lost in the day’s
infinite lack of gain,
I stop at a moment’s pauses
and walk onto a beach
that’s always there and
sit a while, a nothing about
nothing & asking less,
cupping what I can in these
hands and carrying it back
to a dry, desperate world
hurrying through so much
paradise. My hands only
hold so much: I spilled
some on my knees giving thanks,
some more on this page
(here and less there); the
rest I’ll take upstairs to
my wife to rub salt traces
onto her feet, light and
gentle as the sea’s blue sashay
under this waking, perfect day.


THE SANDBOX

Dec. 29, 2005

In this play of gods and queens
I am forever between shores
of real and seem, of both composed,
yet never more than a figment
for air and water, a paper boat
on a sea of words more numerous
than the grains of sand I once
munched in lieu of sea or mother,
sands which now fill this daily
box I sit so happily inside
of, at work, at play, building
out of nothing bell towers and
drowned chapels, labyrinths
of half-lit swoon, City of God,
isle of Sycorax, tomb guardians
like a fleet of boners between
swells of florid bosamage
sure to milk all shores in
sweet sweet lactates, nippling
the world -- all in this in pious
driven play: my daily exercise
in abandonment to things.
When I’m in the box I wing
at will to every aerie in blue heaven
and fin the depths of meres
which haunt green wilds far
outside this sleepy town,
riding a mare of dreamlike sound,
hooves hammering the strand
in wild harmony to that music
I recall from beaches long ago,
each stride a wave’s loud crash.
Inside the box I’m by the sea,
I’m in the bushes playing
Let Me Thee See, I’m in the
basement at infernal chemistry,
I’m Mr. Ned conducting the
Dean girls naked bed-bouncing
glee: Outside the box it’s 2006
and our country sucks a sucky
world & my wife is far away,
as close as real love gets in
the big world of aches and smarts.
Outside the box is where
it all gets lost and hardens down
in rooms of stone, all sadness
permanent and ruin sure
and nothing much more to
say about it. Outside the box
this is poetry beneath the grade,
the dalliance of a working
man who suffers us the ennui
of things turning out the
other ways, tamed and cowed
by love’s mortgage-book,
a pulse mortared by bills
and pills and long-lost thrills.
Here I set to frolic in the surf
of sex-drenched summer days,
my naked length and depth
seduced into a merry crash
of warm hissing foam, all
thirsts roused and slakened
the way a shore is pounded
for ages by a wild collapsing
surf. Here is wonder and
enchantment, the thrall of
nascent hours, first light
glowing on the immortally
gratified pair in the bower
at the garden’s center,
green buds lifting from
dead loam in ripe hosannahs,
the air clear and startling,
all knowledge fragrant
finding out how close a kiss
is to that angel’s flowered breath
which blossoms in our hearts,
how much a song is like the
selkie queen who sings of God
offshore: -- Who’d ever care to
leave this box, which doesn’t
quite exist yet is the greatest
part of the life we life if only
on the pages in these latter-day
arrears. This sandbox is a
solitary enterprise for fools
and puerile sons, the very lap
of heaven poured by that
surf-mill which delves the
day its sun. Watch the words
pour from my mind, like
sand from cupped hands,
like gold dust on the world
you’ll never get to see
unless you climb in this box with me.