Three Drum Songs

RAGNAROK
The Werid fo the Gods

Poets are in the beginning
hypotheses, in the middle
facts, and in the end values.
-- Randall Jarrell


Each of us
completes our history
and History's.

Or tries to.

There was a time
when the river
in springtime
was such a wild flow,
bursting over
the falls the way
I wanted to collapse
inside a woman's
embrace. I played
guitar that way too,
trying to loose
all the horses inside
a loud song. Instead
it was I who was
trampled, a suburban
door ripped from
the floor.

Then I learned
to forget such passionate
music. I turned into
that votive who buries
his old self in the
foundations of its tale,
reading about songs
& entering the hard
world of pedigrees
& senex greed
& slow publication.

Or tried to. But by
the time I got there
the learned music
had blown through
and was gone,
leaving stone viaducts
in the words
to arch emptiness
and gall and
endless sand.

Truly there was
nothing left for me
to do but retrace
my steps through a
back door and down
cold rotting steps
until I found the stone
which covered this well
and pried it loose.

First my old head
floated up
and then his totem,
a naked man riding
a fish (I loosed
them here). Soon
the others rose
in a raw torrent,
giants and dwarves,
the dog Garma
the wolf Fenris, even
the Midgard Serpent
stretched the
length of a 5000
page poem.

O how the sea
rose up through that
hole, a sea of seas,
up to devour every
trace of the scholar
I once was: Every
trace of that bone
was soon lost inside
a raging and
ripening foam.

And now this
third song, risen
from that river
and the cathedrals
that it mortared
and then fled.
My mouth now is
flung wide like some
Leviathan's maw,
spilling the oldest
treasures inside
a raw but sacred brine.

Now I must forget
all that I learned,
or make of it some
onward, inward thing
-- A dashed heaven
far beneath the sea
where my blue
familiars sing.

Watch my hand
now cross the page
-- A Ouiji boat which
shores on runes
in Neolithic caves
and writes of a rage:
Counting the fangs,
ferrying loud staves
from the darkest tunes.




RUDE CHAIR

2004

The fact is that I'm rooted
here in this word-woven chair
peeking through the tide of night,
by choice or fate or nature.
My hand moving across the page
is one exempla of the rule
of that starved ghost who
launched a thousand ships,
marched ten thousand armies,
drove me through a million
nights in chase of darkling thrills,
each isle the scent of cleavage.
Desire's old two-step of ache
and quench has faithfully
steered and wrecked me
yet again at this lonely hour
when no one waits on
the next pale page, though
I doggedly I still believe
this time I'll coil to rest
around the blue she left behind.
A crannog is God's
erected throne inside me,
a stiffie ten millennia long
and three billion achings deep
thrust into my care
from the caves of Lascaux
and Dorgonne where
beasts were scrawled
by hands as pale as mine.
And so this poem
is His next rude head
poking through the hour's shorts,
strangely round and soft
and chivalrous
for all the angry horses
clamoring in belfries
drowned below. This
isle an hour from dawn
was driven and is risen
by the God I named
through clenched teeth
when He was loosed at
last, the stars sea-horses
swirled on sky-tides.
This crannog is the water-
house of kings who married
water-mares for kingdoms
down that mere.
Each line I write logs
the aching shape,
thrusting as it cries
for mother Uffington
in her nocturne's bed,
her milk the silence
of the itch full fed.
Oh I'm old as stone in
this rude crannog,
as hard as the diamond
stars still burning at this
hour with the same
white desire that cut me
so clean and true
ten thousand lives ago,
when every wild cried Yes
and empty shores sighed No.




THE WORLD TREE

2003

Talons gripped me
rude and strong
and lifted me high
in this tree which
rises through the
sea & whose roots
are fed by my
verbal ancestry.
Plopped into a
nest of straw
and told to sit there
and wait. Ages passed.
I returned to work
and build a house
-- labors the world
owns, not wings but
what we do while
the spirit molts above.
I married a woman
and then another,
trying to get Love
right despite all the
ways Love wants to
fly but can't. I put
pen to paper many
years & watched my
hatchlings flutter
and all die, land-locked,
ground-level, no wind
to lift their wings.
History passed and
then I stirred, jabbed
by some angel's claw.
I opened my eyes
to see the vast sky
like a breast pressed
to my face, and opened
my mouth and began
to sing the milk
of pure beginning.
O time now to fly.