Seasonal Intercoursings

Christmas Eve -- 5 a.m.

Cold again, not as cold as the past few nights but definitely winter in paradise: temps in the upper 40s, Red and Blue curled in boxes lined with towels out on the back porch, Violet curled up against my wife’s rear (while I sleep she corrals in my groin, my legs spread around her), furnace going upstairs and down, this house seeping the unaccustomed chill as if directly from northern vents.

Outside the Christmas tree in the center of the garden burns brightly, brilliant in the deep night, an augment not explicitly Christian but sharing its paradoxes, in solitude praising, strong through a vital dependence, edenic in the promise of future certainties grounded in past ones. Something like that, here at 5:17 a.m., the newspaper van grumbling up the street, a certain toxicity in the aether, probably just the exhaustion of holiday shopping and cry-beneath-the-tree blues, kids tanked on expectations and the rest of us solidiering on, if not for the kids for each other, for the cats, for the shadows of others heavier and more resonant absent of their beloved owners, disappeared beneath gifts that will never make it to the tree.

In this the lull which borders the madness of preparation with the absolute stillness of the holiday -- few and fewer hours to get the last-minute details done, kitchens frantic with baking, the malls engorged with desperate husbands and sons, anything left on the shelfs ravened and plundered, weary wives and mothers bemoaning exhaustion, resolving never to do it this way come next year -- it’s Simplify, Simplify, no one needs this crap, the kids are much older, too much money flies from wallets to appease gods that have small relation to the holiday it seems, some triune entity called Manna, Moolah, and Maxed-Out, a year-end glut like a commercial carnival on the frozen borders of Austerity ...

Yes, a border approaches ... all this frenzy like the ninth wave which ends the tide, collapsing on the absolute stillness of the holiday - Silent Night, traffic light on the streets, neighborhoods empty with everyone elsewhere, some houses decked out with city-states of lights, others empty and dark, kids dreaming of X-boxes and i-Tunes, parents getting the last touches under the tree, never feeling it quite enough, trying not to think of credit card statements and check-book balances blickered with red ink ... solitaries drinking in single-watt kitchens, staring at nothing at all ... homeless crack addicts shuffling behind the 7-11, praying for luck, a john, a forgotten scratch-off-ticket, anything to fuse one more connection ... cars of the complicated peeling off from ill houses, leaving behind wreckage, hauling ass toward even more ... senators having a brandy before bed, forgetting their naught ... illegal aliens cramped in small rooms, clutching photos of families they won’t see for a year, maybe more, hoping what money they’ve sent home will make some nth bit more difference in the lives they’ve been dealt ... corporate execs and basketball stars lost in 10,000-foot houses, surrounded with every toy in the world, their holiday perfect, stellar, almost .... My family in their houses near and far, my wife’s family in theirs, and every anonymous and never-to-be-known abode inbetween: Such the chorus assembled at the border, just a hair’s breath from crossing Over, an angel’s sense of eternity, a berserker’s fuse, a child’s list of reasons why Santa should not stop by this year:

And all the world’s quiet at this border, stilled to a hush, lulled by angels we know so little anymore, if ever, their soft choiring from just over the whole spread tableaux, praising so bittersweetly the labor of this night we can’t see, just what is being delved and from where, just what we’ll find of ourselves under the tree, the next incarnation of all that must be ...

Christmas Day

6:32 a.m., my wife up and at it already, the matriarchal nest-compulsions fidgeting and stressing her into action -- last gifts to wrap for her family’s affair (mine with my mother and sister and her kids was last night), a cake to bake (vowing to show her mother and sister this time), spraypainting flowerpots for flowers going to her sister, etc., etc., ad celestium nauseum. Baroque Christmas music on the stereo, Violet aflutter with the morning’s activity and a wet front muscling through outside, alternating wind and rains, Christmas ‘05 through a wet dark lens. I dreamt last night of an all-night nekyia with some friend, us having a long dialogue through the stations of the night, talking a while outside an apartment complex while bar patrons shuffled home, a bright yellow car with all sorts of NASCAR paraphenelia plastered on it, high-amperage testosterone, a girl in a bathroom (the haul of that driver), us just lingering outside that scene, observing (I touch one finger to the car), moving on, ending up at my aunt and uncle’s house as they are first getting up, my aunt yawning, turning on lights in the kitchen while I apologize for being early, my brother-in-law (on my sister’s side), feeding a huge steak to the grill (we are to barbecue steaks as part of the coming event at my wife’s parents’ house), the day too early, already about its courses, seamless with the night’s long abuses, peramble, discourse ...

***

“Among the Ammasalik Eskimo” we are told by Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,, “the disciple does not go to the old angalok ... to be initiated; the shaman himself chooses the candidate in early childhood. From among boys from six to eight the shaman selects those whom he considers most gifted for shamanism, ‘in order that a knowledge of the highest powers in existence may be preserved for the coming generation.’”

Does that selection yet continue, even now, even though the physical shamans have mostly disappeared, or now wear such elaborate masks that we never can see them, or that our own conscious equipage has made our heads too brilliant a bulb to see them approaching in the dark? To me it seems that They’re there, fingering us from the undersides of our emotions, drawing us out on the mojo of nipples and blues and fairytale finnfolk. Every strangeness and wild thus archangelic and initiatory, for those who would let imagined senses fly ...

“Only certain especially gifted souls, dreamers, visionaries of hysterical temperament, can be chosen,” Eliade continues. “An old angalok finds a pupil, and the teaching is conducted in the deepest secrecy, far fro the hut, in the he mountains. The angalok teaches him to isolate himself in a lonely place -- besides and old grave, by a lake -- and there to rub two stones together while waiting for the significant event. ‘Then the bear of the lake or the inland glacier will come out, he will devour all your flesh and make you skeleton, and you will die. But you will recover your flesh, and you will awaken, and your clothes will come rushing to you.’” (58-9)

Indeed. This day -- having crossed the Border, through regions of culture and nature and sleep -- seems to be one of awakening with a new order of bones, fleshed in what organ of sense this skin and skein of words presents to the page.

(It’s now 9 a.m., my wife and I watching the rag ends of “A Christmas Story” as we breakfasted on waffles and bacon, reveling in the archetype of American Christmas, part of it in our own cultural way, exchanging a few gifts -- things are tight this year (Count Basie CD from the ‘30s, peppermint truffles and the first volume of Bob Dylan’s autobiography for my wife, Anthony Delbanco’s new biography of Herman Melville, shaving lotion, sox and a meat thermometer for me) while Violet romped amid ribbons and crepe paper. Now my wife is in earnest with her family Christmas labors and I write here, a man happy and grateful for what endures, at great cost, and albeit with no guarantees for more than this moment, this prayer of joy ...)




At the solstice I cast an I-Ching, an occasional ritual for that time of year -- several years now since the last one -- and the hexagram was #2, The Receptive, six yielding lines offering the great Yin, the perfect complement of The Creative, the Yang ... Image here the earth in devotion to the sky, space against time, the female-maternal against the male paternal. Not opposition but a hierarchy, things in their place, and when in accord most powerful and vital.

So sd. the Judgment:

The Receptive brings about sublime success,
Furthering through the perserverence of a mare.
If the superior man undertakes something and tries to lead,
He goes astray;
But if he follows, he finds guidance ...

Comments Helmut Wilhelm: “The receptive connotes spatial reality in contrast to the spiritual potentiality of Creative. The potential becomes real and the spiritual becomes spatial through a specifically qualifying definition. The horse belongs to earth just as the dragon belongs to heaven. Its tireless roaming over the plains is taken as a symbol of the vast expanse of the earth. Only because nature in its myriad forms corresponds with the myriad impulses of the Creative can it make those impulses real. Nature’s richness lies in it is power to give them beauty and splendor. ... It is the Creative that begets things, but they are brought to birth by the Receptive ...

“The superior man lets himself be guided; he does not go ahead blindly, but learns from the situation what is demanded of him and then follows the intimation from fate.”

And later, from the Image: “The superior man who has breadth of character carries the outer world.”

***

Odd that in this forum (of flickers in a bone scriptorium) so dedicated to the fructifying hot seed of pneuma, to spermatakoi logos,, to dat old debbil jism that lights the night afire; Odd that the I Ching would augur so resoundingly its other, the page not the rage. Initially I think here that the job for the coming year is to support and nourish what has already been planted, bringing things to fruition, maybe publishing, or maybe just assembling the writings in more articulated shape. The fury of production over these past few years, can it, should it be sustained? Or does the work shift to making real what was imagined, real-ish, given more of a proper paper prairie to roam over?

Perhaps. Rain now, the morning drowsing back. I want to go read some of that Melville biography, call both of my parents in their separate worlds and thank them for this inheritance, sleep maybe a while on the couch, just let the change carry over and through ...


1:21 p.m.

As my wife wearily showers & primps for her family event, which we leave for in an hour or so. Breezy, sometimes sunny, sometimes not, still haunched with a cold front’s muscularity though there’s not much sight of rain, not for now. The bleary sunlight of Christmas Day, the early-morning resonance of present-opening glut ebbed back to dulled nothing, what to do now? Too soon to think about bills, too late to go back over any of that prior pre-Christmas territory which amplified magic and hope through monster speakers in the mind. A torpor, sleepy, nothing much to do but eat, drink, grow sour ... Not looking forward to SR-46 on Christmas Night (we drive it both ways toward my wife’s parents), a two-lane rural nightmare that’s become crowded with development, always a wreck somewhere along its 20 mile length, huge black scars in the pavement every quarter mile, tiny roadside crosses of fake flowers that flash in the headlights a nanosecond of someone else’s mortality and then are gone. What’s that swing-era cry-in-your beer song, “Blue Christmas”? Indeed. Hard to stay out of the way of such misery. Hopefully the roads won’t be too wet, too sloshed, too riven ...

I keep dipping in here coming up with empty buckets, brimming with words that don’t say much. Void of course. What does one do in the interim between getting new bones and having your clothes fly back toward you? Having travelled, on paper at least, past one border far enough to wonder what the next defines? Standing here in the great resonant emptiness of a world-wide prairie, hearing horses gallop somewhere just out of sight, the wind like the last dying breath of the Gaul, the God, the sentence? And without even the comfort of art, which presupposes a design to the mystery of nothing? A breath inside the empty crypt, indeed ... a wind ...

Am I just sailing along with the “polar wind” which steered Melville on the damned courses of “Moby-Dick”? And justly so? Delbanco, from Melville: His World and Work

***

Even before the last vestiges of what William James called “tender-minded” faith in “the great universe of God” drained out of nineteenth-century thought, Melville had surveyed with twentieth-century suspicion all claims of metaphysical warrant for any idea or ideology. Long before the existentialist movement, he composed what Albert Camus called an “Odyssey beneath an empty sky, in which there came forth, out of endless darkness ... the visages of foam and night” -- not only in Moby-Dick but in a series of works that seemed to anticipate the angst of modern life. (13-14)

***

And again:

***

“I love all men who dive,” Melville once said of Emerson, whom he counted among the “corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.” But writing of those (including himself) who dream of penetrating to the depths of things, he gave vent to a feeling somewhere between eulogy and mockery that marks him as a fellow traveller in our post-theistic world. Consider this passage from Pierre, which can be read as a retort to the Romantic faith -- still very much alive in Melville’s time -- that at the core of each of us there is some form or germ or spark or trace of God, if we could only find it:

“{As} far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to be nothing but surface stratified on surface, to its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains, we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcaphagus; but we lift the lid -- and no body is there! -- appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of man!”

There is in that last sentence an antic, even cruel view of man driving himself through an arduous quest only to discover at the climactic moment that in fact there is nothing to be unearthed -- nothing but more mud, rock, dirt -- and that the self, like the universe, is devoid of meaning except for the meanings we project onto it for the sake of reassuring ourselves ... (13-14)

***

Paper comforts, perhaps, but resonant and vital and real nonetheless. As Tony Tanner suggested, there is presence even in absence ... harrowing the empty belltower, now that’s the task ... ringing ghost bells ... offering these conceits tit, blue nourishment, fertilizer, time ... are the roots starting to grip down into the next room of the dream, the land beyond the past border, the next song cycle, the breviary of seas?

December 26 (Monday)

Blowing hard and cold outside, old regnancies rolling, like heads, helter-skelter across the sky, greenknightwise, boulder-sized knockers blickering gibberish gales through the camphor and oaks, an inordinate peripheral commotions which causes the cats to twitch their ears and shy as they feed on the back porch, alert to predators or prey, the ghostly dyspepsia thereof, an attenuation brought on by weather, by appetite, by rag-ends of old, perhaps ancient memories whipped up on a breeze ...

Eh tu, Kahoutek? Last night I stepped out from my wife’s parents’ house, everyone else jabbering away in whorls of family remembrance I am too peripheral to, the house bright and warm, glutted with food and sweets, a beaming torpor, the talk a languid, cooing drone ... Outside in the vast alternate night it’s windy but not cool, last of the day spooring down to a singular rooks far to the west, purple night blossoming into black, a bright planet high in the sky and the traceries of stars opening their eyes, beginning to burn, too dark for the angels to sing “White Christmas,” too Floridian still for the guzzlers of misery to hymn “Blue Christmas,” or both, maybe, perplex, contemporary, striated with too much holiday freight long soured ...

And I wondered: If the meaningful God is to nights just a resonance, does Lover so suffer too? The Beloved aging into the bell-tower of what could never be more than unrequitable ache ... Worth considering, I thought as I ambled down from house to the lake, admiring the Christmas tree lights on three houses scattered around Lake Charm, a sprinkling of cheer amid the other houses all dark, the lake waters ripply in the breeze, lights fractured on the surface, sounds of busy traffic just beyond the marge of wealthy houses.

Well, what if, or if not? My wife inside chattering on as usual with her sister, exhausted from so much earnest preparation for this matriarchal high mass of home, hearth and horticulture, ignoring me mostly as she usually does when with her nuclear family, so tight that radus of gestations for better and ill: No real matter -- long seasoning makes me grateful for just what is, and besides, it’s a slight chill I can accommodate, even welcome, providing enough distance to allow me to slip out the door and walk alone in the night, wondering if Love, too, is an empty chamber at the deep center of the heart, unoccupied, unoccupiable, even when the participants are most present ...

Not that I was bitching. My belly full, my hours harrowed by all of this family engagement, this life affords the world, days enthusiastically lived, the saturate glow of efforts harvested by day’s end, weary, aging, so grateful to be at home, here, in world like this. I’ve learned to keep sexual fevers bound between paper margins, and my faith, and my dream of the Beloved: all wild and free here, freeing me to live real days in durable ardor, nothing to really earn but nothing to significantly lose, either, such magnitudes repealed from the day’s faces and surfaces. I can still pray to be of service to God and my fellows, to try to love rather than be loved (a la the prayer of St. Francis), to head back into the house and have a rich time with the proceedings, laughing my head off during the Chinese gift exchange and when my wife served up the cake she’d so carefully and earnestly tried to perfect, which somehow was filled with bits of doily that had migrated from the plate all through the moist cake, adding a surprise element which no one could understand ... Laughing with this assortment of people I would never come in contact with if I hadn’t married my wife, stayed with my wife, came back to my wife, worked hard with my wife, come to this day with my wife throughout nine years of hard work and frustration and gratitude: My wife sitting across from me in the den for the last hour of the night’s proceedings, pretty, shapely, her face alight with laughter, showing a youth in her, perhaps the daughter and sister of old, in full merriment, allowing herself to be the butt of jokes, her cake scandalous, her coming operation she melodramatically anticipated (“Oh IF I get up from that slab”), not a whit of Melville in those sweet bluegreen eyes, doesn’t give a shit about anything I write passionately about except that she’s glad I enjoy myself when at these mindful pleasures, the sea I ride and dive and drown in so incessantly crashing on shores she’ll never hear, the woman’s voice I hear in that surf so tangential to my wife’s that they only have timbre in common, an upper cleff lilt, their modes and keys and lyrics equidistant as the shores of the sea which gave birth to the moon:

Can I call this a vitality, a courage, more primary and primal even though I’m just ruminating by a lake just beyond dusk in a wealthy little neighborhood of a huge vacant suburb? Is the Beloved nowhere to be found in the mortal bourne, the same as the Deity isn’t, except in the sound of the words I tide in longing and ravishment daily across pages no one will read? Is there the satisfaction of deity (albeit a lost one) in that I get to say amen right here, shut down the damn computer and then trudge upstairs back to Paradise, leaving angst and saw and brutally hard winds behind me at the proscenium I cross back over at the top of the stairs into real time, my blackened Thor’s countenance faded into that of a weary husband in need of the soft warm shape of his wife under massed covers with the indoors cat nudged up close, first light always Edenic, tearing every apple from the tree to describe the pale white and green environment she created with linens and ceramics and plants, the widest welcome that woman can give me, whispering You Are Here as I climb back in bed? Can such a peramble between worlds be adult and vital and true enough?

Actually, today, I’m letting my wife sleep as long as she cares to, without disturbance from me: She’s wholly spent from two days of family events, desperate for rest. I got up at 3:30 with a raging migraine, took a Frova, fed Violet her treats, lay on the couch with the heat on and a blanket wrapped round me, listening to the night’s wind and imagining my wife sucking me off or offering her breasts for me to suckle and then fuck, falling off to dream of a graduate rooming house comprised of tiny “floors,” each with two desks and two beds, spiralling up or down or both: I was trying to find one with room for me, but all seemed occupied, owned by others, even though each room was empty ... Then I was in a house where my wife or mother slept upstairs, and I was trying to work my way into a romance going on between two young people, trying to inhale that old torrid fragrance, but my father showed up and I had to somehow entertain and talk with him while still stealing whiffs of passion and worrying about waking my wife upstairs. I wake around 5, make coffee, take another Frova (bad fucker, bad), try to focus on studies though I’m tired, horny, lonely, getting up frequently to check to see if the cats are out back for their morning feeding (Blue and Mamacita weren’t around when we got back last night around 11 p.m.), nothing much appearing on the page, though there was resonance enough in the following passage from Eliade:

****

( At the end of an Eskimo shaman’s initiation)

... the master obtains the angakoq for him, also called quamaneq, that is, the disciple’s “lightning” or “enlightenment,” for the angakoq consists of a mysterious light which the shaman suddenly feels inside his body, inside his head, within the brain, an inexplicable searchlight, a luminous fire, which enables him to see into the dark, both literally and metaphorically speaking, for he can now, even with closed eyes, see through darkness and perceive things and coming events which are hidden from others; thus they look into the future and into the secrets of others.

... The candidate obtains this mystical light after long hours of waiting, sitting on a bench in his hut and invoking the spirits. When he experiences it for the first time “it is as if the house in which he is suddenly rises; he sees far ahead of him, through mountains, exactly as if the earth were one great plain, and his eyes could reach to the ned of the earth. Nothing is hidden from him any longer; not only can he see things far, far away, but he can also discover souls, stolen souls, that are either kept concealed in far, strange lands or have been taken up or down to the land of the Dead.” (Shamanism 60-1)

***

A resonance which I wrote down and here, in drafting the next ghost yodel of a post, write down again, using if to empower my eyes to lift high over all I’ve stained with words here, and say there’s a method to this mad rant, this venting, this babbling skull, this cockadoodlediddling over pinkpuckered butts and howitzering hooters, this noctal postprelapsarian growl round an eternally iced vent. The method is one I learned as a kid in the bushes, the first part being I’ll Show You Mine -- all of it, the whole verbal rant, as if I were couchant to Freud and free-associating wherever the sick boy deigns to ramble, free-writing, wave-horse riding to shores I’ll never understand, much less name, in augment and majesty to the forever-waylaid expectation

That You, audience of none, my God, my Beloved, my infernally lost Reader, that hence,

having Shown You Mine,

You will, in turn,

Show Me Yours,

Please open wide the barred door,

Reply with blue roar for this white journal’s pour;
deliver me the Green Knight’s greater night’s noggin for all the yolk I poured from Gawain’s Christian noodle; give me salt sass for this verbatim sea mass, malt brine for red swine, sibylline slither in precise repayment for the incessant plunge of these words in she-diving sea sounds. ...



See? I’ve plopped my primary organ of preterite gnosis verbally plump and quivering and slick and empurply-enraged right here on the page on the screen, the black shaman who chants God’s song from the dong, my trout of truth back from the eternally lost wave: Here I am, God, girl in the black polka dot dress, numen of unbreachable shores, Here is what You made of me in the undertowing vicissitudes of night and its later revisions:

Take me or no, but grant me

A Show, just A Peek,

(Not a real one, don’t call or write, don’t blight my mortal days with any actual sight of real shores, but show me ones more real than the peel, the venereal verdure inside the fisherman’s creel),

A parted feather, A garter, The thinnest pantied border at the top of a leg, or a bit farther, Just one pubic hair, The barest outlines of pubis against panty cotton, The first infinitesimal parting of wet expectant lips, Oh just the tippytop gloss of patina on the little man in the boat’s head, The first velvet chamber inside the crack of sweet doom, An ear of the horse god etched on the first cavern wall, A single drip of that ocean crashing here, The very first sigh of that surf which repeats my name over and and over in the the foam wilderness of Yes ...

***

This infernal discourse has a purpose, a porpoise to ride, a dolphinned port to pore, a porous pour from the white whale’s well, verbal contingencies all of life beyond one Border, into the polymorphose perversities of this Next, pouring an endless blue bladders of versific prose ...

What souls are imprisoned here, crying to be freed from their cages? Hers? My own? That quarto of augments whose ledgerdemain caterwauled into cats?

SHADDUP! they yowl. If there’s one thing nature abhors, its a vacuum. But see how big and long I get, sticking my head all the way in!



Tuesday, 12/26, 4:18 a.m.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

-- T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” from Four Quartets


Coldest night of the near-lost year, though all is bright enough. My wife sleeps off a terrible headache upstairs with a window open and the cats are sleeping elsewhere, foregoing the towel-lined boxes we set on chairs on the back porch for them, one box even with a heating pad set on low -- preferring the cold as dint of wilderness? Their pelts what separates this mind from their claws? And the teeth of late-year weather, cold enough long enough to rip the throat of warmer occlusions, leaving me bareassed & shivering Here, where all things end and begin.

And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.


Bright enough, because so lost, tossed on a sea great verbals do name, for the very liquid element of this derange is salty brogue, cock buried to the balls in pinkvelvet organum, plunging and withdrawing a naked stone angel til every nerve-end is You ... and the entire surf pounds the ritual in rise and foam and crash and boom down eternity’s white-assed shore, again and forever, requieted ever in the saying ...

‘Twas a baptism back of sorts, crossing that Border this time, back through Gehenna’s brilliant difference into the old similitude, back into the brine, as a selkie shods himself in seal, and dives, with a shout, from sands he will never return to as a man ...

A reverse baptism, perhaps, passing back all the way through Justin Martyr (d. 140 AD), the Church Father who found in baptism what he failed to find in philosophy: “This washing we call illumination; because those who learn these things become illuminated in their meaning” -- a baptism which demonized the daimones, condemning pagan pieties where “the old gods have the beauty and goodness of the sun, the sea, the wind, the mountains, great wild animals; splendid, powerful and dangerous realities that do not come within the sphere of morality, and are in no way concerned about the human race” (A.H. Armstrong, quoted in Pagels’ The Origin of Satan)

-- Passing through the waters of Justin’s baptism as part of a third baptism, back into the cold venereal sea of Leviathan, born again back to more primary gods, the Christian illumination washed from my face, that old condemnation of the earth and the body, the satire and the stout penis, demons renounced for daimons, Manannan invited back to Iona’s shores, or Oran allowed entry to the old sea-gods spiral castle at the bottom of the sea, some critical mass of culture now swinging back the other way, Church fathers back into Black Mothers, potentiae into terra firma,, dragon back to mare, desire welled beneath what’s beneath the Beloved’s ever-sleeping frame, on that distant island Love will never name ...

Some minister of this prays over me as I stand in the waters of the Atlantic on a summer’s morn equidistant yet quintessential of this morning, praying in tongues for my reverting soul, Celtic or Roman, Greek or Scythian, I dunno, a flood-tide of dead vitalities in utter praise of lost gods, whirling in my ear the way the imagined sea tides across my hips, warm and dark and infinite:

And leans me back into the plooff and and dark settling down into this watery prehistory, this amniotic soak, this drowse beyond my Beloved’s Yes Oh Yes, not dreaming nor singing nor fucking but writing in blue augment of all three, inside and down and still, six feet down in the water while the Minister passes me back to the Wave which washes all the way through me in that dark, washing clean my one-Christian soul, returning my sight to the dark’s peculiar strange and wild lucency, back to the gutteral ball-spume of original language, first songs, lasting ends:

Even the Minister’s different now, morphed in that blue transit into Aphrodite’s first son, the puerile eros obedient to waves, tipping gold and leaden the barbs of exult, ferrying a quiver of awe and awfulness through every love and life: It is He who lifts me here, spluttering and dazed and bewildered as a child delved from Her wave, newborn, or newly borne on first shores, the light here milky and sweet, a taste of honey on my nipple-sucked tongue, nothing yet known, yet certain, though it’s certain this ain’t Kansas where intelligent design trumps science, nor 2005 shotgunning ‘06, nor dumped in a wild frozen waste down a porcelain postmodern pout-potty: No:

It’s as sweet and summery as the day I played by the sea on a beach near Jacksonville when I was three, digging up sand with a toy shovel while the sea pounded in one ear and my mother’s voice sang into the other, mixing and blending a salt sweetness into the mortar of that sand castle I was heaping, sand I would eat in dazed reverence, glutting on the substantial host, the present divinity, the actual God of real days: Thus my baptism here returns me to that beach, to the wide earth of the fructifying life, the Creative come home to roost in the nest of the Receptive, to get this party started, this bouree of bossa nova rum booty, this imp-angelic discourse on the intercoursal arousings of the devouring white sea ...

Host of beloveds, wine of whale’s blood: baptismal communions of the adventure Oran now dreams ...

Anyhoo: Time to get ready to go back to work, plan the day while I linger in the hot soak of the shower, for there is lots to get done: a wife to wake with my hands and cats to stroke and feed; miles and miles to drive in the dreary blur of the working damned; this post to upload and emails to check; turbines of the weekly production to fire up, short week, my assistant out today, our proofreader out too, compressing deadlines and turnarounds into a geoligical smash; sponsees to check on, prayers to say to them, prayers for whatever words they most need to hear; the office needs cleaning in advance of the visit from the NY suits next week (gotta see of my dress pants still fit, oy vey); pictures to finalize for my wife’s portfolio, tweaks to her brochure, careful eye on the checkbook, money’s so tight; get on to the gym later this afternoon to work down some of this holiday lardage; et cetera. The Day. Oatmeal finished over the course of this paragraph, 6:04 a.m., time to head upstairs, let this surf fade away into the surer susurrations of a blue I cannot hear or heal or write or love or pray to, though that deep’s my earth, my mer mare, my liquid bones, my star-shelled firmament, my pouring plain ...


We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.