Two Whirls

VORTEX

Dec. 10, 2005

“Nature first ‘disintegrates’
you and then ‘integrates’ you
to her as one of its elements.
In the first stage it would seem
that you were going to disappear,
some do perish, and in the
second, you are reborn with a
new vigor, so that perhaps
nature selects and destroys
whatever suits it best.”

— “Lord Of Oblivion,” a short
story in Francisco Coloane’s
collection Cape Horn and
Other Stories from the End
of the World, transl. David
A. Petreman


In an 11th Century anecdote
about St. Bridget, a connection
is made between an anchor
which cannot be raised, a church,
and a powerful force under water.
In the anecdote a blind boy goes
down into the sea after the anchor,
which the sailors dropped on
account of a gale, and which
has become entangled in the
roof of a church. A year later
the blind boy returns,
carrying the church’s order
of mass and a handbell.

-- Clara Strijbosch,
The Seafaring Saint

The rhythms I write here
are motions You whirled hard
around and through my
deforming mind, a wind
without of such blue fury
that I could only shout
as I fell down some
oubliette within, like a
sword tossed in the oldest
mere on earth. My swooning
had a swirl to it, my
arms and legs by which
I played guitar and walked
all night in fatal mimicry
of Your twisting gale,
puerile motions which
unleashed the worst of
what I tried to cure.
Each drink I lifted to my
lips stirred salt and sorrow
into my wound’s abyss;
I swallowed it all down
to the dregs of awfulness.
Yes, my defenses
were all self-destructive
as I free-falled down,
wrongheaded, childish,
and moot: Yet in them
I now see how I repeated
my tribe’s old sacrificial beat,
half-conscious of the
magnitude beyond and
under chants and alms.
Drowning in a mojo
I thought bottled and
brassiered, I learned
the darkly falling mode
where You plucked
my carriage clean. Each
swipe of my guitar with
a power chord ripped free
a bit more soul, each thrust
into the next night’s mate
raising me high to the
sickle of the wind,
my cries of pent release
the grease which turned
Your infernal wheels.
When I hit the bottom of
my battles with bum bottles
You handed me a sword
and bid me turn to lift
it high: And thus began
these countermatins
where all that fell
found wings to fly,
the darks I once defended
to the death the very
marrow of my song, the
blood of all those self-
infected wounds congealing
into the mortar which
sustains this writing chair.
I sing now of those dark
nights as truths to gild
my age, and write the
old cold organum as
darkly as I can and twice
as deep, inside the throat
I share the uppermost
registers with You. Each
song’s a spinning emblem
of those spiral falls of
old, replete in all their
awful motions as the
sanctus of St. Brendan
sang Easter on the whale.
Call me thus MacOdrum,
the seal-man of Scots Uist,
he who married a woman
of the South and set up
house between all lands
and seas, of neither and
both composed, for a
a thousand strange and
dark and yet so godly
years. Or were they songs?
Oh the whirling of my
mind as I write these
lines on down the mere
of all beginnings giving
birth to all I sound!
There is the sword-hilt
just beyond the straining
sense of things, where
You and I are closest
in our worlds. Did
You hand me the brand
or did I take it thus
from You? Down here it’s
all the same. Suffice
to say now that I’m
gripping sure the
rigor of a long, blue-
whetted iron bone, and
ballasting my way up
and up and up the
marges of the known.
First light now outside
the window, cold and
late-year blue, the cats
now mewling at the
back door for their food
and my wife upstairs
coming to for the next
full day of our life.
And so I end the song
here with a splutter
and gasp, and break
the surface of my
dream with this
sword sure in my grasp,
ready at last to swing
that blade around
in a whirl of magic sound.




TROIS FRERES

Dec. 11, 2005

Among the Smith Sounds Eskimo
the aspirant must go at night to a cliff
containing caves and walk straight
ahead in darkness. If he is predestined
to become a shaman, he will enter a
cave; if not, he will bump into the
cliff. As soon as he has entered the cave,
it closes around him and does not
open until some time later. The
candidate must seize the moment
when it reopens and hasten out;
otherwise he may remain shut up
in the cave forever.

— Eliade, ibid. 51-2

It was a miracle that I found the
way out of that cavernous
night which wound me widdershins
round and down sub-basement
wounds. My only sense back then
was just to party on to the
end, come hell or high water,
which, in time, arrived, though
the end was worse, or so
it seemed. Dark waters
deepened as I dug those
nightly graves of swoon,
a horror-show cathedral
of carnivalling ghouls, jackals
yapping in the disco
lights with fangs the
size of hardons and dixies
in their bottomless cups
lifting polka dotted
dress-hems to me in waves
of starry, tarry silk.
When I cast an I Ching back
in those blackout months of ‘86,
the oracle declared Abysm
Doubled: Chilly depths outside
poured by my own hands onto
deadlier ones inside. Surrender
is the only escape it augured,
a method I did not try until
the others fully tanked and
went tits up. One January
I set pen to paper with
the aim of Figuring Out
the screw-heads of my
downward plunge and,
thus enlightened, have no
need to lift the night’s
third glass which always
poured the rest. I wrote
and wrote and then rewarded
myself with a tall cold
Stoli, dissolving Why
into the vastly more
compelling thought
of Why Not, sending
me out again to jackal
those wild skirts.
Knowledge and futility
paired like canines
in my appetite for
what I could and
wouldn’t know of just
where I was headed down;
but in the end it was
just another shotglass
which conked me for
good, one night in
April ‘87 in the blackout
blur of the Crocodile
Room, earning me
that DUI which carved
the hexagram so
completely in my bones.
I came to in some greeny
sepulchre beneath the
bottom of that glass. The
33d Street Jail’s drunk
tank at 5 a.m. was so
cold, so eerie in its
ghoulish ambience that
I felt I was coming to at
last from a bender that
had plundered me for
years. What door ever
opens without that
nadir, without those
creaking hinges of surrender?
There were two other guys
with me in the cell: One was
passed out on the floor amid
the gouts of his own vomit
and the other was rocking
on the bench across from me,
crying inconsolably. We
were just three bums
hauled from one night’s
bad streets, thrown in
to one real hell.
Yet we were also Trois
Freres, those French
brothers who in the 40’s
stumbled on a hole
out on their father’s
estate and rappelled down,
discovering a grand old
labyrinth of ritual caverns
not used for thousands
of years. Those young men
climbed down as we
three drunks lurched up,
descending just as we
surrendered to the only
ladder in the only
ways we can --
to die, go mad, or
let go the bottle
reaching for a white chip.
That ladder is an old
stone affair which I
mount each day
by getting on my
knees, praying
Not my will but Thine
and finding thus
my wings. I’m
grateful that You chose
me to fall into a
labyrinth of nights
and then graced my
way out. My hangover
and the phosphor of that
greeny old drunk tank
is the amniotic I swim
in here at the bottom of this
song, soma in its awfullest
proof, womb of the inside
of all things to ever
noumenally wing. Who’d
have thought that heaven
was really just beyond
the bottom of
that whiskey glass
we somehow someday
let go, life or madness
or death willing?
All the rest is merely
swilling, killing spills
of every liquid doom,
the full grotesquerie
of Trois Freres’s bottle club
in its worst and darkest room.