Lunar Communion

Mine, Thine, Yours and Ours

High moon this morning at 3 a.m., leaking past full, one night past the blare which burnt all noctal surfaces with unforgettable gleam. It makes me think of other full moons, from all lunar seasons. To wit, this one:

MOONLIGHT

Enter with me
the archways
of this moon

A glittering path
over the sea
we darken to

The blue white
sheets on which
we curve and curl
like waves

The round milk
of your flesh in
my grateful
greedy hands

My white length
hard and deep
in you plunging
shining wet and
proud and urgent

The pearls of
white fire I
plant in you
and the white
and green welcome
which rises
when you tense
and sigh:

This pale boat
we drift down
the night wrapped
together,
dissolved in
each other

Join with
me in this
seam of silver
just beyond
all words
pulling us
so gently
and permanently
beyond
what we know
of love

Each day covers
the tracks of
this trail
But we will
find it again
when the moon
opens its fragrant
arch over
our welcome,
our surrender,
this dream.


Would you steal that blue fire from me? To spark what engines? I post pseudonymnotically, so this is so much spilled coin for You to scoop and hoard or spend as You please. Most of the traffic to my poetry blogs has come by way of x-rated searches. (The most hits to Immrama, I think,come from searches for "glory hole," a phrase that turned up in my verse recollection of a wild Memorial Day weekend in 1982.) .

Who am I talking to, anyway? Most of this is mediated or meditative prayer; conversations with dead writers, my Beloved, my God. What I make of this mess is Mine; or Thine with My difference. Meaning the material is archetypal, but the garden I grow from it is fertilized by a huge amount of personal experience and articulation. it. "A primordial image is evidently determined as to its contents only when it is conscious," write Jung, "hence filled out with the material of conscious experience." (from "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype").So the gods carouse with present-day faces.

That I share that conversation here is based on a hunch that it is also part of Your prayer, Dear Reader, part of your symposia with moons and seas and skies. What you do with this stuff, ferried or derricked from depths which we all share, is Your business. a business which, of course, in the big picture, is Ours. So the circle completes itself, old voices I hear which speak with my voice which goes out and comes back in voices which sound like my own and God's.

But what do I know, how do I say it with any certainty, when I have no trust in the knowledge I already possess? It's what I don't know that I pine for, or knowledge I have that I cannot speak with any dayside certainty. This is what I mean:


I KNOW

David St. John

The definition of beauty is easy;
it is what leads to desperation.
-Valery


I know the moon is troubling.

Its pale eloquence is always such a meddling,
Intrusive lie. I know the pearl sheen of the sheets
Remains the screen I'll draw back against the night;

I know all of these silences invented for me approximate
Those real silences I cannot lose to daylight ...
I know the orchid smell of your skin

The way I know the blackened path to the marina,
When gathering clouds obscure the summer moon --
Just as I know the chambered heart where I begin.

I know the lacquered jewel box, its obsidian,
The sexual trumpeting of the diving, sweeping loons ...
I know the slow combinations of the night, & the glow

Of fireflies, deepening the shadows of all I do not know.


from Merlin: New Poems

Maybe the question of what sort of knowledge I'm talking about has to do with the difference between archetype and stereotype. Symbols that get fixed to any one meaning freeze, ossify, petrify. They become blocks to growth rather than gradients. Institutionalized symbols become religions, safe structures in which a limited range of human existence can flourish. Stereotypical regimes are old and defensive, at war with the vital barbarians at the gate.

Their success is always our demise. The gnostic, revolutionary Christ was excised in large part from the Scriptures, morphing into that softglow bearded guy who loves the little children and blesses the cheesemakers.. The sword in his words was sheathed. As flag rather than firebrand, the Cross cannot show the way into the changing and perplex dark of Self which the age of the Fish was supposed to inititate.

For a symbol to live, it has to stand the test of daily apotheosis. Symbols which I have adopted as my own -- well, wave-rider, blue horizons sweet and wild -- must augment rather than dispel the day's storms. A bigger God requires a larger heart, and a growing symbol is the best -- and perhaps the only -- way to connect the two.

Heaven knows, modernity's a bitch. Free artistry of the self seems to be the litany, but it's just so damn easy to fall off the road every which way. Pluralities of meaning, complicate amassing harmonies, polyrhythmic motions, who ya gonna call? Far safer to adopt the stereotype of fundamentalism, with its certainties and shaking finger pointed at the devil's perplex details.

But how to proceed without sure definition? Without a ritual structure, a sacred container, a myth, the peramble becomes a constant oopsing through a Swiss-cheese-shaped terrain of lacunae and abysms..

Ergo the symbol. Anne Carson in "Eros the Bittersweet" notes that originally the symbol was a "symbolon," one half of a knucklebone. The other, missing half was the invisible, unspeakable meaning. So a symbol joints self and Self, I and Thou, humankind and its animal/divine orders.

And if our language for meaning keeps evolving, then the symbols must necessarily move on, too. In their history they suffer anathemata: they invert, revert, subvert and convert. Cross of the abbey-builder becomes burning cross of those who fear change; breasts are sweet and gall-filled; the phallus fructifier then fool's flopper then phallocism's phuckwonger then firebrand of the Phalangiist then nib of the fibber who lies to say all. Round and round it must go, and where it stops we must never know.

Though that way is perilous (uncertain, perplex, meandering, obfuscate, prone to error, foolery, weakness, hot flashes and cold boners), I think the greater danger is to try to fix lucent symbols which to dayside certainties, to think too rigidly of them with our logical and rhetorical minds. It's always wise to plant by the moon, and grow under the sun; I say let the symbols remain dark, like roots, and tend whatever grows from that dark.

Back to the symbolon: what is the other half of the knucklebone I here revere? A blue eyed mute virgin weaving days at the bottom of the sea? A shore beyond all shores? The God who reads this whether you ever do or not?

MOONWHALE

The tide in which you welcomed me
and spilt my heavens with a sigh
was greater still when it ebbed out,
leaving me upon a beach more wounded
than I knew wounds could go.
The hurt was like that Pacific breech
which delved the moon ages ago
to cross our nights in sky tidals
as love's cold luminary, singing
whale-like in its coracle of basaltic,
borrowed bone. That wild wounding
woke every pulse of God and verse
that swims so hard in me today
as I sit in my great white writing chair
astride the darkling, well-spouting
whale of that old wound. Loss is
the bittersweetmost fruit
to ripen in love's orchard, it's fall
and split of raw red heart revealing
fruit I never dreamed to feel so
sea-widely, so deeply beneath
the merry blue. In those months
after you left me once again
I walked and drove so slowly,
taking in ripe autumn days
& amazed at their perfections,
my grief gilding the hours
with a melancholy booze,
each oak and dog and child
God's supernumerary coin,
spilled from a purse which
swelled great and greater
every day you walked yet
further away. It was not your
kiss but the abyss it left behind
that hauled this boat from shore
to sail a thousand moony nights
in search of ampler calyx, for
that nippled swoon which could
milked the dregs of that cathedral
room I found beneath the marges
of desire. Its sea-deep ache burns
yet today, incessant as the moon.
A wild chatter of angelic teeth
inside the falling, tidal croon.

The Pornography Box

Is it only naughty boys and girls who ferret away their self-incriminating evidence? -- The box of porn mags hidden in the attic, the bundle of Polaroids in an envelope stashed in a file cabinet, a disk containing torrid e-mail exchanges, defty inserted into all those backup disks... stuff any fool would rightly burn, but we hold on to the evidence, treasuring in our secret heart of hearts those relics of old passion and thrall.

What is that wildness we're terrified of falling back into and yet desperate never to lose? -- Grainy, out-of-focus shots of an old girlfriend who, on a dare, allowed a camera to catch her with her legs spread wide ... glossy pages of commercial lust, the million fauna of desires poses and demure smiles .... faint-smelling panties and love-letters still ringed with a shade of lipstick decades out of fashion.

All that eye nose and heart-candy retains its headiest flavor hidden away from the disapproving view of wives, mothers and children, like booty stolen from our sea-witchy nights. A creepy, peeping-tom naughty-boy effluvia piles in a fertile loam down in the most secret antechambers of the heart, more permanent, for weird reasons, than stone.

We know there will be hell to pay if all that stuff gets discovered, but how can we let it go? Without that pornography box I've nowhere to go to re-unburden all of my unspeakably hot desires, they portal the house of one thousand fantasies, slake just a small part of the unslakable thirst--just a daily furtive sip and I can be that perfect son husband brother coworker who should not, must not, does not have any secrets.

That's why those things keep turning up in dead men's attics, behind walls torn down years later, are fished up from some deep where they are most treasured, and we most damned. Why did he keep those pictures? And who is he really, when the truth be fully told? What wife or mother hasn't suddenly felt like they've been living with someone who had a secret citizenship in an inacessible world?

Secret fetishes are like a yet-discovered language for love, may be the Eleusinian Mysteries of our age. Of all ages ... Vault of desire, burning, the invisible reflection of a face in your window. If it isn't in a box, it's beneath the tongue, or buried under these words.

For when shadows are shuttered for the good of the tribe, it's not to say that a dark lens still revels in jezebels and brothels. Some lens must see it all in hard blue, all angles included, no wishes declined.

Pidgin

This is my adaptive tongue, my blue pidgin -- words once grooved in song making do in a newly colonized world. Harnessed to a next master, I'm learning how to say it all again in a strangely local land, a poetic moulted into rhetoric, dark words up from the hallows of the ear now harrowing the eye, a sense moved inland to dryer shores. I can't say why but there's nothing new to that; nor the need for deeper enquiry though my words are flatter and fleeter here, inflecting old depths in order to accommodate new breadth. Ages are changing before my eyes, too fast to read much sense in it. Dark amperage by day: now that's a dawn-blue horse! I'm like a coolie at the wharf, wearing cone hat & loincloth as I load these massive boats with gold meant for greater kings than I have wits to name.

But will.

Process

So I've been thinking about the daily process of writing poems -- combined with reading of source materials which at the time seemed especially resonant -- as a dialogue between conscious and dark selves, I and Thou, I dunno, ego and higher -- or deeper -- power, with poems as the vehicle, the conduit for some fructive spark.

But I've seen it mainly as what gets hauled up from the well, and not what gets sent down; that whatever I think I've benefitted from the process, there was a dark, unknowable benefit, too. And balanced against my purpose a greater porpoise, as if carrying me along.

Erich Neumann again from The Origins and History of Consciousness:

"The grasping and assimilation of the content by consciousness are an expression of its enrichment with libido. But by no means the whole libido charge can be absorbed. Simultaneously with the alteration and enrichment of consciousness, the splitting up of the content leads very frequently, if not always, to an activation of the unconscious as well."

Lets translate "libido" as "dark amperage" here, the energy which I cannot know but try to flow with in the process of writing poems (if they could be properly called poems; that may just have been a convenient enough handle for a much darker, noctilucent activity).


(O.K., it's sexual too, but too hot to handle directly.)

Image the dolphin-rider Arion, one of the first great singers. He had been thrown overboard by pirates and a dolphin who had always in the past admired the sound of his singing then scooped him up and ferried him back to shore. Arion sings, but does so riding naked on the back of a dolphin.

Anyway, the point here is that things get into gear, creatively, when conscious mind tries to pay attention to sub- or unconscious. I sit down to write, saying, I'm LISTENING! and the next image forms.

It reminds me of the time about 15 years ago when I was reading a lot of Jung and was faithful about writing down my dreams. I sure remembered a lot more of them! Almost every day I could retrieve the previous night's happenings in the Shadow House. To me, the math was simple: I'm listening = You speak.

Makes sense, but listen to what Neumann then goes on to say:

"We may explain the mechanism as follows: a certain proportion of the liberated libido cannot be absorbed by consciousness, and flows off into the unconscious where it 'libidinizes" associated groups of complexes or archetypal contents. these contents are then brought up by associations and are produced as random ideas, etc. -- in so far as they appear at all -- or else a new unconscious constellation is effected. the combination of this new constellation with the original activity of realization is what constitutes the continuity of all creative work, the essential elements of which are always prepared in advance by the unconscious, and are there elaborated and enriched before being produced."

So I really have been led along in this process, from image to image, Theme after Theme: well, trail, voyage, cape, dark, each has been another way to name the relation of one guy's mind at work several hours before dawn and the wild deep dark substratum that is offering up the next thing to work on.

So what happens when the process stops? I haven't been sleeping well, waking up each morning at around 2 a.m. and fighting to get some sleep afterward. It's like I'm being hauled up from sleep to get to work when there really isn't anything to do (or I'm refusing to do it). There seems to be a surplus of sexual energy fizzling about, definitely more than when I was pouring eros into poems. And without the daily vowel movement, well, there hasn't been much of a daily bowel movement, either.

Yet it doesn't seem right to write different poems. I'm void of course, stuck for now on an isle of prose, where the going seems too bright, too sayable, too known. If this is something served up by the Deeparoo, it's the strangest device so far

The next amperage may have a lucence I haven't eyes yet to see, words sufficient to say.

Or I could be hiding in a bright belly, terrified of an even darker call.