I Seek the Darkness in the Light

Bronze deathless days, what a blade you conceal in your shrill augments! Summer now is at high mass, a towering spell of sun which burns the tops of every living thing. The world’s skull splits in the whack of you daily overbright ax-blade of hosannah, welling forth the dark fruit you have long ripened in caulish brute undertow.

They say I should seek the light in the darkness, but it is richer to seek the darkness hidden in the light. My soul’s essential travail is most frenetic there, groping the sun’s yellow underwear, my belling ache bleaching exactly where its spire consumes with fire. Burn me in your demon womb. Conflagrate these words that ten thousand shady numens choir in their amens. Here me at this darkest hour remit what you surfeit. Spear this lust into that black wake which rims the lake of fire your carve. Hammer hard this bronze. Shatter what resounds. Appeal no dreams which drown.

***


JUICE

I turned 13 during my first summer
in Florida, hard-ripped from my
Chicago home when my parents split.
We moved into a new subdivision near
Winter Haven that had been torn from
an orange grove. Just beyond our house
the streets unpaved themselves into thickets
where bulldozers jawed whole trees, eager
to uproot slow makings for a fast buck.

My wounds and the grove’s grafted into
each other through a season of fire,
my parents crossed like swords over
my puberty, old Florida parceled in
fruit bags of Eden. Loss and desire mingled,
sugared, swelled: then burst from every
pore in sweetly mutinous grog.

There were six orange trees in our
yard to plunder; I must have picked
and squeezed two quarts of fresh juice
every day, greedy for its slicksweet pour.
The first gulp always surprised me
with its sharp ardor, thick and loose,
springing a thirst inside mere parch.

That first summer was archangel-
ically hot, a humid blear which called
all earthborn things to high heaven.
I sent my dreams that way as I
hurled baseballs at a pitchback
screen, my wild pitches thonking
like heads on the wood fence.
To dive later into the pool was like
a belt of that juice: delirium plunged in
joy, the pool’s bottom a glade of bright
glitters shushed in blue. I swam lengths
underwater then perched at the edge,
head and shoulders resting on hot concrete
with my legs drifting below. Lulled by
Carole King on the radio and high soaring
crickets, I drowsed in an undulate weave
of ripening girls peeled from their swimsuits,
their nipples pealing a red roar.

Every afternoon it rained hard,
big boomers in from Tampa sweeping
through in great wet sheets which left
me the rest of the day feeling somehow
unslaked. At twilight, the remaining grove
on the other side of the fence grew fierce
with frogs and whatever else pulsed out there,
mounds of a sugar silk-saturate and dark.

On a small radio I listened to hard rock bands
in the black-lit eeriness of my room; eyewhites
and lint burned like hot moons while the
thickening night heaved on my windows in
a rich, purring growl. Oh the sharp tooth I
felt in those songs by Mountain and Cream,
trillingly pure, loud as thirst, raw as plunder.

Thirty years later, that first summer in Florida
chirrs loud in my veins. I sit here in this house
with the windows wide to the humid heat of 5 a.m.
Outside in this small town never far from a fast
Florida buck, sprinkler heads and crickets saw over
that old beast who sleeps only in the linear sense.
Some untamed thirst prowls here as ever, ripened
deep within. My hands ache for the heft of those
oranges warm from ghost orchards; to cleave their
nude fire; to squeeze them down hard on a mount
of ridged whirl, filling this glass past the brim with
remembered gold, spilling juice over all.

***

A MEMORABLE FANCY

William Blake

from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793

Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud, and the Devil utter’d these words:

“The worship of God is: Honoring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God: for there is no other God.”

The Angel hearing this became almost blue; but mastering himself he grew yellow, & at last white, pink, & smiling, and then replied:

“Thou Idolater! is not God One? & is not he visible in Jesus Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law of the ten commandments? and are not all other men fools, sinners, & nothings?”

The Devil answer’d: “Bray a fool in a mortar with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him; if Jesus is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath and so mock the sabbath’s God? murder those who were murder’d because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defense before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.”

When he had so spoken,I beheld the Angel, who stretched out his arms, embracing the flame of fire, & he was consumed and arose as Elijah.

NOTE:This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.

I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no.



One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.

***


Theos, the indeterminate divine, was an invasion of body and mind. It was our becoming intimate with what is most alien.

-- Robert Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

***

FIRE SPRITE FLORIDA

Indeed some fire-sprite may
be at work, spawn of every sun
which aches to rise and
languish above the Western
gulf, refusing to go down.
He darts across the state
igniting the souls of pine
& subdivisions & sleeping lakes
like paper boats then
dances round their flame.
Out on the beaches the
young worship him, sprawled
on towels & hip-hop smashing
from car radios. Browning
in his orisons. In the bars
the dactyls serve his ire,
pouring out fistfulls
of gasoline while on the
TV brightly-colored street
cars go round and round
and round in a calyx of
white-hot speed.
The alligators feel him in their
gut edging from perch to shore
to raven on poodles and
the noggins of boys
too foolish not to dive in.
And the eyes of crazed
suburban mothers
kilned in debt and misery
are hottest in him,
their irises like fangs
as they cooly scan
sons and daughters crying
everywhere. What hour
of my summer day
is not some precipice of him,
an invitation in the brilliant
door to strip raw the hungry
hymn and glut on pipes of fire.
His cartel’s more potent than
every pulpit in the state
which crows brimstone taboos,
the one eternal in its fires,
the other right here right now
in purest puerile pyre,
merry and malicious
and so in infernally salacious.
Bask and dream in it if you will,
backyard Sunday snoozer:
He’s whispering to those
basking cells on tits and
nose to rise and riot
while you drowse.
Your heart on his
barbie, his fork in
your meat of carouse.


***

But even fire has its attenuation, a beach beyond desire. Love burns inside Eros for Psyche, warming even the heart its Hades. It sates by not quenching, by delving seas which only seem blue, whetting not passions but a passionate embrace of surrender. Great fires burn hottest where the sun can’t shine.

***

THE GREAT FIRES

Jack Gilbert

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.
“

***


SABBATHS 1980 VI

Wendell Berry

The intellect so ravenous to know
And in knowing hold the very light,
Disclosing what is so and what not so,

Must finally know the dark, which is its right
And liberty; it’s blind in what it sees.
Bend down, go in by this low door, despite

The thorn and briar that bar the way. The trees
Are young here in the heavy undergrowth
Upon an old field worn out by disease

Of human understanding; greed and sloth
Did bad work that this thicket now conceals,
Work lost to rain or ignorance or both.

The young tree makes a darkness here that heals,
And here the forms of human though dissolve
Into the living shadow that reveals

All orders made by mortal hand or love
Or thought come to a margin of their kind,
Are lost in order we are ignorant of,

Which stirs great fear and sorrow in the mind.
The field, if it will thrive, must do so by
Exactitude of thought, by skill of hand,

And by the clouded mercy of the sky;
It is a mortal clarity between
Two darks, of Heaven and of earth. The why

Of it is our measure. Seen and unseen,
Its causes shape it as it is, a while.
O bent by fear and sorrow, now bend down,

Leave word and argument, be dark and still,
And come into the joy of healing shade.
Rest from your work. Be still and dark until

You grow as unopposing, unafraid
As the young trees, without thought or belief;
Until the shadow Sabbath light has made

Shudders, breaks open, shines on every leaf.

It's All Persephone on the Black Jukebox

What is that music I hear, drifting in from the black seams of this 4:42 a.m? From the garden, awoon from the rainless heat of the past week? From my wife's dream, drifitng down from upstairs? From my dream of love, siging from the tangled brake of my history, from the ineffable shore dividing I from Thou? From She who haunts my every word? Persephone, the one who still lives among my lost shades, who is their summa, their blue breasting augment, their wild stormy music from every melusine rock cresting the black sea?

***

Sonnets to Orpheus, I.ii

Ranier Maria Rilke
transl. Stephen Mitchell

And it was almost a girl and came to be
out of this single joy of song and lyre
and through her green veils shone forth radiantly
and made herself a bed inside my ear.

And slept there. And her sleep was everything:
the awesome trees, the distances I had felt
so deeply that I could touch them, meadows in spring:
all wonders that had ever seized my heart.

She slept the world. Singing god, how was that first
sleep so perfect that she had no desire
ever to wake? See: she arose and slept.

Where is her death now? Ah will you discover
this theme before your song consumes itself? --
Where is she vanishing? ... A girl almost ...

***

... Matriarchal consciousness is dependent upon mood, upon harmony with the unconscious. This moon-dependency can be viewed as instability or craprice, lyet it provides a backdrop which acts like a sounding-board, endowing matriarchal consciousness with a special and positive character. Its response to rhythm, the times and tides of waxing and waning, of crescendo and decrescendo, grives it something of the quality of music. Therefore, music and dance, because of their accented rehythm, play an important role in creating and activating matriarchal consciousness and establishing a consonance between the ego and femininity and its ruler, the moon-spirit.

A musical character of an intoxicating, orgiastic nature appertains to the deepest involvements and greatest heights of feminine being. Here, as in music, an emotion driving toward distintegration and a simulteaneous, irrational experience of harmony combine together, according to an inner, invisible law. The source of seduction and transport ranges from the fascinans of a singing voice or the Pied Piper's flute to the ecstatic music of the Dionysian mysteries, the dissolving power of music in orgiastic ritual, and the effect of music on modern woman.

-- Erich Neumann, "On The Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness"



If they did not make a procession for Dionysos and sing a paean to the penis, they would act most shamelessly, and Hades is the same as Dionysos for whom they reave and celebrate their rites.

-- Heraclitus

***

The Hades within Dionysos says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for the soul in the phallic parade, that all our life force, including the polymorphous and pornographic desires of the psyches, refer to the underworld of images ... Soul is made of the rout of the world ... The other side of the mysterious identity, the Dionysos within Hades, says that there is a zoe, a vitality in all underworld phenomena. The realm of the dead is not as dead as we expext it. Hades too can rape and also seize the psyche through sexual fantasies. Although without thymos, body, or voice, there is a hidden libido in the shadows ... There is an imagination below the earth that abounds in animal forms, that revels and makes music. There is a dance in death.

-- James Hillman, Dream and the Underworld

Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things which ye possess and contain. But they possess and contain you: for they are powerful daemons, manifestations of the gods, and are, therefore, things which reach beyond you, existing in themselves. No man hath a spirituality unto himself, or a sexuality unto himself. But he standeth under the law of spirituality and sexuality.

- Carl Jung, Sermons to the Dead V


***

Among the folk of vocal and instrumental music in Ireland, only the harpist could aspire to the ranks of freeman -- and he only on condition that he "accompanies nobility." A gloss in the Laws defines the unfree musicians as singers of cronan. The cronan is also used of the buzzing of a fly (perhaps An Chron, Hell or a dread female resident there). In Wales, minstrels were called cler, and a homonym cler means "flies." ... The word was used in reference to poets in general and contemptuous references to low-grade entertainers.

At the bottom of the social scale in Ireland were the disreputable crossain, lewd, ribald rhymers or buffoons who went about in bands. There is an account of a band of nine of them, jet-black and hairy, chanting from nightfall till dawn upon the grave of a king after his burial. They are likened to demons from hell, and when they are dispersed by Mass and holy water they appear in the air above in the form of jet-black birds. Though satire was permissible to all poets, the satirist as such classed with "the sons of death and bad men" -- fools, jesters, buffoons, outlaws, heathens, harlots -- who hold demon banquets.



BLACK LES PAUL

From the verse memoir
"A Breviary of Guitars," 2000. This poem dives to the summer of 1983:

As the summer
& the songs
& the wings
we found there
climbed up
like cumulus
inside us, we
found ourselves
demanding more:
Not enough to
jam on Stones
songs, we found:
Not enough
to merely
party: Not
enough volume:
Not enough horses:
Not enough
Florida for
the 3 cups
of our song:
Not enough to
bang on 2
acoustic guitars
in some smelly
sweaty room
on a work night:
Not enough,
never enough:
Neti, neti,
sang the
sassy via
negativa, not
for the arrow
which has ripped
through ripened
silk: That's what
we started
calling ourselves,
Rip the Silk:
Not enough to
get the girl
but to have
your rages
with her too:
A balancing
act between
the usual
abysms, perhaps,
but new in
our songs: Such
heavenly tasks
call for cunning
blades: So
Norman bought
a bass Telecaster
& I a black
Les Paul Custom,
recent vintage,
with mother-of-
pearl inlay in
the frets &
gold gears: Les
Pauls are hefty
mothers, the
body dense with
the mountain
gravities from
which they're
mined: Their
necks ample and
flat, an interstate
with no speed
limit: Surely
some dwarves
in the Smokies
warrened deep
to hack such
black ore which
they then
melted in a
pot & leavened
with dragon
sperm: Because
my solos were
suddenly out
of the pack,
a precise hammer
of wail, the
notes nailed just
the way our
passions cried:
Tasty licks
a la Brinsley
Schwartz of
Graham Parker
round the edges
of "Nobody
Hurts You" which
showed me
how to spur
the beast from
the obliques:
Or in our
song "The Rip"
building a
quick rondo
in Em singing
"God and devil
dancin / Lovin the
spoor of our eyes /
Day and night
romancin / Beneath
the cover of
the sky / We love
a deadly wonder /
& hide beneath
love's thunder /
With a dagger
on our lips /
Livin in the Rip"
Tearin it up
after the bridge
with a streak
of lightning
(well, to me
anyway) out
of nowhere,
sliding through
the notes like
sharpened steel
through lingerie:
We finish the
song and stand
there wildeyed
with our new
axes dripping
sea salts and
a different world
coming into
focus, somewhere
somehow between
Florida's wild
summer & the
perilous nights
we were enslaved
to: At those
moments my
heart was
sunburned, wind-
whipped, raw
like a skipper
holding forth a
new catch of
antidiluvean
treasure in
a glittering
rail of spray:
And it was
not enough to
simply high five
Norman there in
the great American
basement: We
knew we had
to take it to
the streets
of the stage:
Not so we'd get
more pussy (but
hopefully we'd
get more of
that than what
money we knew
we would make)
but because cruel
engines require
mean streets:
For that season
at least our
profane song
was holy,
anethemata
in the hall
where the
warrior gods
caroused round
dragon kill: A
guitar is a
hammer forged
in fire and
flung wild at
the night:
When I hammered
the last power
Em chord on
"The Rip" something
shattered just
ahead revealing
a sharper sword
bridge: I dreamed
one night of
flying over my
father's stone
house to a
beach filled with
angelic orders,
flying beings
becoming women
in the becalmed
and dancing to
my guitar solos,
each note thrusting
the next blue swoon:
Dreamed another
night I met
this girl Jennifer
from junior high
who I carpooled
with, a perfect
Florida girl with
fine tan & wide
white smile &
blue eyes &
button nose &
perky breasts
forever out of
reach of my
fat sweaty
Yankee fingers:
In the dream
I meet her at
a Purchasing
Association
meeting where
I'm professionally
respected but
Jen cares nil
for that, she
just wants my
Rip The Silk
guitar body: I
take her to some
pagan penis
garden where
wooden phalli
sprout from bushes
in a devout circle:
Try to kiss her
but she says
that's not what
I want from you:
Pull down her
panties &
suck long her
oozing sweet
citrus grove pussy
then grab a
woodcock from
the circle & start
working it up
slow into her
greased pussy
as she sighs
sighs sighs like
a breeze over
a shimmering
swimming pool:
I peer up her
cunt to see
a great hollow
cavity up to
her ribs: A guitar
is not a phallus
and song is
no woman's swoon:
Such energies
fool the magician
I was but
apprentice to:
A great practice
didn't give us
license to go
out & conquer
the night but
we raced out
to the dregs:
Fire's wealth is
built on
penurious care:
I knew I could
save enough money
from not drinking
to buy a decent
amp and some
PA: O cunning
energies, manning
us hard and fast
with power chords
& then demanding
we sheathe
the fury: Greater
men played in
greater bands
because they knew
the difference
twist stellar song
& falling stars:
While we were
more in love
with wild cusps
& unblinkered
gallops &
uncounted cups:
More in love
with our
possibilities than
with the work
of making them
in any way
real: "Energy
Fools the Magician"
is an Eno song
and he should
know: Our
miscalculations
were brazen
and perhaps true
too for it: For
the master of
song obeys when
he oversteps: You
just have to
accept that the
hard rain that
gotta fall: Today
is April Fools
Day & like one
I rose at 4 a.m.
to didle & work
again here: Slave
to forges at the
bottom level of
my day: Infernal
plashing in the
foundation of
so dry & dutiful
a life: Soon I
wake my wife &
pray for a handjob
& then foray out
into the day,
shopping & yardwork
& finish taxes &
format the hard
drive of my old
Compaq PC which
I'm giving to
my mother: Gotta
somehow finish
that review of
Bellow's new book
& I promised my
dad I'd start
back into the St.
Oran monograph:
Yadda Yadda
Yadda, Yoda
what's mah quota:
I couldn't
play the big
music for long
but I sure can
write on about
the fringes I
inhabited there
where I was
manned &
unmanned
by an axe:
Doesn't make
me one iota
better as a
husband or
worker: Ebbs
an energy which
may one day
wipe clean my
hard drive (they
say lack of
sleep can kill):
As I was a
fool prince on
guitar so I
dance here on
a conduit of
foolscap: No
street to take
this to, no breasts
to wean the
burden: I'm just
a gnome in
the dark dank
bowels of a
Breviary of
guitars, crafting
this thing laid
up from dead
things once holy
then profane then
holy then profaned
& buried &
excavated with
a lotta wood dicks
and a crumpled
picture of a
girl long ago
who smiled so
sweetly for me:






MY NIGHT WITH PERSEPHONE

Dear Satan, you who
delight so in a writer's
inability to describe
or inform -- watch me
tear a few terrible leaves
from my book of the damned.
-- Rimbaud

Marge and marginalia
complete all I cannot
say here -- that blue-in-
white infirmity which
beckons the loves I
cannot voice yet must.
Their deep saturation
in that song is my salt
dementia, a horse I
must somehow ride,
perilous though his
wild haunches and
hooves. Each day the
portal shifts in changing
surf, no one entry
spread quite the same.
Of course, it may
be I whose sight
has altered, my leap
from some shore
changed by slight
degrees from all
I've written here before.
Today composes from
normalities, the 5 a.m.
perch in this white
chair, Cat Violet in
the window casting her
eyes out to the dark
like nets, and all that's
dark appearing still
and sleepy, though
something inside suggests
that's just a ruse,
drowsing out an ocean
more wild than any
poem can saddle or
harbor or -- fait accomlit!
-- complete. Still that's
the yoga of this hand's
motion, repeating line
for line surf-like emulsion,
dragging up to view
some naked altar
with dark nipples
and eyes so sapphire blue.
Today though she's more
Persephone than some
Triple-X wavelette,
sex in its deepest
sublimation, gone down
under long ago
to queen the coldest
flow of my imaginings,
ever restless to come
home again to where
mortal mothers thresh
the mortal grain--the
house I call love.
I pray today for all those
sad girls who rowed with
me for just one night
inside their bed, giving
up their bodies for
some metaphor for
marriage that fed the
ache like the worst
sort of well-brand booze.
I vaguely recall a
woman from one
night whom I met
in a local fern-bar
round midnight
in the early 1980s, the
both of us quite drunk,
spilling our sad repertoire
of loss into the other's
ear as we drank on.
I told her about the
woman whom I thought
would lead my starry
band, our love and loud
metal guitars housed
in a surfside hut
where all was hot and
cool and going places
to be sure. But (I told
this woman in a
slurry monotone)
we could not because
she could or would
not stay--my heat
not hot enough--and
my life since then
(four months behind)
had been some
a bad specie of
descending doom,
an every emptying
glass of a farewell
she cared little to hear.
The woman I spoke
to was dark-haired,
framing a tanned
face with deep blue
eyes, an even darker tan:
a scorched beauty
with wild eyes, the woman
I could only reach
through drunk stumblings
onto accidental beaches
far from anything
real or true. She
then told me of a live-
in boyfriend who booked
bands and owned a
titty bar, a guy with
killer looks and flush
with all the cash the
night could soak. Love
for him was always too
difficult, she said,
obscured by his greater
love of himself and
his appetites for coke,
strange nookie
and fast cars. He'd
dumped her a
month ago in some
maniacally drugged
episode and was far
too proud to chance
a look back. -- Since
then she'd been
on a binge, ravening
on the loss, taking
men home every night
because she couldn't
stand her bed alone.
Booze and boys were
adding up a toll;
just the previous
night she'd been busted
for indecent exposure
at Daytona Beach,
her bare footprints
against the window
of a Camaro, the cop
hitting on her as he
drove her off to jail.
Yet even after such
sobering arrears,
there she sat again,
settling tonight on me,
the rock pauper
with the endless thirst
for rock fantasy.
I was so drunk that
night that by closing
time I could hardly
speak; and yet she took
me by the hand and
led me out the door,
driving me to her
apartment somewhere
beneath the wicked
sea, and sat me on
her bed saying there
will be no sex tonight
though we'll share
this big bed. I
watched her undress
-- a truly holy moment,
this truly beautiful
woman slowly and
dutifully peeling off
blue silk blouse and
white brassiere, her
small breasts swimming
out fully tanned,
her nipples like darker
eyes on a darker
lower face. She unzipped
her jeans and wriggled
free, pulling down
red silk panties,
revealing only the
thinnest pure white
tan-lines, a thong-
road leading to a
dark brown bush, all
secrets hidden there
in a proud thick lush.
There was none of
that for me in that
night, but in truth
I was almost too drunk
to care, and almost
grateful just to be
held there in that
bed, beneath covers
so heavy we seemed
to tumble down a
sea into the void
of voided souls. The
next morning we groaned
up to the sound of
ZZ Top on a tinny
small radio. She kissed
me on the forehead
and got up to hit
the john, leaving me
there to come to
in another far-too-distant
room, like an island
without a name
and by day proved
for too harsh and real.
Time to go. She drove
me back to my car
and that was that.
I never saw her again.
That night was almost
20 years down the
well I call my history,
and surely she lives on
in my Persephone,
throned in my worst
sort of falling and
forever roaming there,
unquenched of the
life she couldn't live
on her own, her
addict-greed for warmth
married to my own
that single night
for all time. Who knows,
she's probably dead
by now, if all that
awfulness failed to
find a healing shore.
Or she could be
truly married to some
other Lord of Hell,
whatever emptiness inside
that beautiful carriage
in thrall with a bad
man's hearse and hard
hooves. I could have
meant something far
different to her back then:
I could have said
a word or two of real
solace had I not been
too drunk to speak,
told her to get help: I
could have stuck around
a little longer with
no intent for sex
just to help ferry another
human being back
to shore: Hell, I could
have rowed on with her
toward some truly
engaged and vital life
-- Dream on, oh Kore
wheatfield of a heart.
The only reason I ended
up with her that night
was because I was so
lost in hell, my self-
inflicted wound bleeding
just the way she
needed so to drink.
She would not that
night have wanted
the man that I became,
sitting here in this
married house two
hours before dawn,
my real life chiseled
from hard work where
love is so much about
not getting what
you want, but wanting
what you got -- however
short of shored blue tidals
it forever must be.
No: she is lost down
there, as all the dead
are in their oblivions,
combing their hair
in vacant mirrors,
crying in the empty
rooms of one vast
apartment complex
at the bottom of
the sea. My reverie
of her here is now
near an end -- Violet
has jumped down to
join my wife in
bed, and the dark
outside the window
is slowly paling
toward first blue.
It's time I joined
my day. Still, I can
light a votive for
her at the tidal end of
all this verse -- and
say a prayer for one
of the darkest saddest
and most beautiful
woman I ever met
in the long night of
my personal curse.
She was dark in
every way -- black
hair, almost black tan,
a black narrative
heading for the
darkest of all ends:
Yet her blue eyes
almost sang in the
dark of that darkest
room -- minted from
ice for sure, but
also somehow some
daughter's pure
sea-glass, the lost
child who never
stops staring up
in all the ways I
stare back down
for news of where
she's gone. She and
I are shore today
to this poem of
hubris and amends.
I don't know where
you are today, sweet
lady of worst sorrow,
but I pray you've
found a way to
escape the hell you
chose. I wish you
better, I pray thee well.
Now send this
poem on to endless blue
upon your bitter swell.
My marriage hauls
you like bilge and
ballast; may I never
err again in finding you.



Our garden, summer 2004

Waking, remembering only music

There between the pillow and the dream
I heard a music rising from the seam
mellifluous as oboes a soft and wistful mood
breezing through the boughs of an ever darkened wood
It was late at night and in the sill
a blue moon heaved its lucent gill
gilding our bodies in a silver mane
cleansing our hearts of all the workday strain
caressing us down an long and winding stream
where all the reasons we married flicker and gleam
When I woke nothing but the tune remained
like the ebbing sound of the sea's blue dream
I marry it to you with that kiss that has no name
just the music of a distant heaven we make today again

Persephone's Soul Road

On the archetype of death-in-life within abuse, madness, sexual mania and addiction)



The mythic is always personal; it must be, because the personal material is what provides its garb and gab, something literary and linear to hold on to (but hopefully not too literally).

Archetypes are buried, like Pluto’s wealth, in our experience; mining personal history is thus instructive. Of course, the eye needs to be trained to see the invisible within the visible.

Our personal flair in the telling, the relish we get from the iota of our own personal landfills, may indeed be directed by invisible desires. “The kind of experience we shall have is prescribed by the archetypes,” writes Erich Neumann, “but what we experience is always individual.” So there is a doubling of archetypal features and individual motley, making our encounters with archetypes but universal and unique. Maybe my experience resonates in yours, maybe not: IMO the best we can hope for is a constant peripheral resonance, like a waves on a shore, where we meet and greet the gods.

***

That said, this personal reverie:

***


Persephone, Persephone, how you rule and augment and chill my soul’s marrow in the harrows of your depths! According to Robert Graves, your name derives from “phero” and “phonos” -- “she who brings destruction”; your name in Athens (this also from Graves) was Persephatta, from “ptersis” and “ephato” -- “she who fixes destruction.” Are you in the bad woman’s pheromes rising from a cleavage I love the too much? In the heavenly phonograph of Hell, whose music deranges as it delights? Are you the pterodactyl wing of dark desire, the oomph of ephedra and darker hooves ramped by crystal meph?

Where does you darkness wind down to? Your father is Zeus and yet he is also the father of your son Iacchus, the first Dionysos (according to Robert Calasso in “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”); Zeus came to you in the form of a snake and left you with a bull destined to be torn apart. Sick shit, eh? Are you an altar to every violated child, for all the youths sacrificed to one pederast or another?

And how is it that eros gets wrapped in such darkness, and becomes a thirst for more dark couplings of that first inky ilk? When Persephone is abducted, she’s admiring a narcissus, the yellow flower which was gathered in garlands for Eros as well as hung on the dead. What is the poppy allure of such destructive sex? Why does the abused child so often go on to a destiny in bottomless porn or addiction’s bottomless cups? If it’s happened to you, have you sensed that wyrd wild attraction to the darkest haunts, the evillest lovers, in the most hellish of seasons, not meant to be survived ... much less praised.

In my story, there’s the Man in The Car who picked me up at age 6 one school day and then let me out, dazed and bewildered, everything different to the sky afterward though I remember nothing of what happened sitting next to him in the car. (Was he a Hades, driving that chariot, his purposes dark, fixed, burning, immobile?) ... And then there was the Girl in the Woods from about the same time, a prepubescent who took me into the woods near our houses to a clearing she had fashioned into a home of sorts, demanding that I do various things that a Daddy would do, telling me that if I told anyone she would hit her sister and be prevented from my ever seeing her again. I was terrified to go through with her requests, in love with her though I was. What darkness was she playing out that I responded to so well? How did I manage to develop such a radar for it in girls and women much later, knowing they were bent my way, and .... liked ... it ...

Pathological shit, and yet ... (taking exception, do I side with Hades?)

Calasso also sees a quality in Persephone’s abduction which was quintessentially (archetypally?) spiritual: the assault of the invisible on the the known. “‘Theos,’ the indeterminate divine, was an invasion of body and mind. It was our becoming intimate with what is most alien.”

Thus (Calasso continues,)

“When Hades asked to carry of Kore, Zeus sensed that the time had come for a new ring to be added to the knot of the snakes. But this time it wasn’t up to him to act. He would be a consenting witness. The invisible world would now reassert its rights over the body of the visible more strictly than before; their dealings with each other, long diluted and mingled together in life on earth, would find a new centre of gravity.”

Further down, because we were further along. If the Jungian axiom that “the bigger the front, the bigger the back,” is true, then it reads truly the other way around: Hades’ abduction of Persephone puts a new augment to sexuality and love; death and life get married, and the universe has to adjust. Thus the Eleusinian Mysteries emerge, just when the psychic ground, the hymeneal bed, the spring-time field of flowers is ripe for the plucking.

***

I had bad winters when I was in my younger 20’s -- perhaps the result of those earlier bad (or alien) encounters, bereft of any psychic equipage I might have gained from therapy or any semblance of healthy relationships along the way, and deepening into my own addiction. I’d sit by a heat grate in my apartment in Spokane and drink quarts of beer, watching winter’s white bones pile up against the window. It felt like I was in the belly of an ice whale, the last of my warmth slowly leeching out of my heart, rendering me into a mortis, my days like nails in a coffin. Nights I drank and hard, taking lots of speed and smoking pot to keep me to slow the descent (like aerolons for a meteor fallen into the sea).

Petit mal seizures multiplied into a constant, screaming mezzo; utter breakdown or suicide were the only options I could see. But those winters ended in a thaw, and I always managed back up to a surface of sorts, not quite the same for my harrowing. Was Persephone my dark Queen of those black winter days, my thrall with oblivion music to her ears? Who called me back to life there at the rims, causing me to fade away from death in some mirror-reverse of Eurydice’s loosening from the gaze of Orpheus? Did Orpheus fail to revive his dead wife because his spirit was not ready? Did Persephone release me because I was not meant to die, only to be harrowed by winter as a way of opening me to the invisible infinites of life?

***

The Mexican poet Homero Aridjis wrote a verse novel a ways back titled “Persephone,” about a man’s love affair with a whore who worked in some awful Tiajuana brothel that stayed open all night. The narrator harrows a long season with her in that darkness, drawn in every addictive way (to the sex, the booze, the darkness, the saxophone solos of tincup jazz quartet scraping together a living from that bottom of the barrel (“merde, bad gig”). Drawn to the beauty and thrall of oblivion. The poetry of that thrall is exquisite. I read the book after getting sober, and in it I read my own addict winters as distilled from the same depths, wallowing in honky-tonks mooning for one vixen or another, desperate in the fool’s hope to rescue Persephone from those dives -- and thus myself. Ha ha.

Remember that Theseus attempts to rescue Persephone from hell -- to abduct her back to life. Why is the ultimate heroic labor tantamount to walking in darkness, coldcocking Death and then hauling ass back to the crib with his squeaking wife over one shoulder?

Ah but we are mortals, and such attempts are meant to fail. Theseus was received by Hades, who knew (being a god) what T. was up to, and, ever the hospitable host, bid him sit down in at the banquet table in the Chair of Forgetfulness at the banquet table -- a chair of fire which T. was not able to free himself from.

And didn’t I also turn to some sulfurous stone, fixed to a barstool, drinking from the fiery paps of the black mother? My rescue attempts all failed, and finally I had to surrender to the fact that I would never rescue Persephone from her void. (Anyone who has married or loved a Persephone knows there’s no fishing the Queen of Hell back from the deep). I also had to recognize that Persephone was never the sea-witch serving up shots of tequila on the other side of the bar but the anima projecting all of those sylphs and sirens as part of her song to weave me into the depths, into the indeterminate land of imagination (of which fantasy is the too-literal, sexualized border).

In my own spiritual education, Persephone required an altar in my own darkness, beyond madness and lust, beyond the particulars of bad history, beyond my every refusal to give death its due with my own pound of mortal flesh. Her education bids me see with an e ye trained on borders where the veil is thin, where visible and invisible are flower and bee, where dark amplitude pours up through my beloved’s sleeping face, where brilliance limns the dark like hoarfrost in winter, where my history and our infinite mysteries share the same bed deep in my mind my ear my heart my gut my balls.


***

Rilke came to terms with Death late in his life. His “Duino Elegies” and “Sonnets To Orpheus” can be read as meditations from that porous border where death and life exist together.

The problem, as he saw it, was that we push Death so far away, refusing it any place in our days. But really, Death is “our intimate companion”; the invisible is always wound in the visible, and the dark music of history and mystery belong side by side with every glory and ecstasy of our days.

In a letter to Countess Margo Sizzo-Noris-Crouy dated Jan. 6, 1923, he put it this way:

“We should not be afraid that our strength is insufficient to endure any experience of death, even the closest and most terrifying. Death is not beyond our strength; it is the measuring-line at the vessel’s brim; we are full whenever we reach it -- and being full means (for us) being heavy. -- I am not saying that we should love death; but we should love life so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we involuntarily come to include, and to love, death too (life’s averted half); this is in fact what always happens in the great turmoils of love, which cannot be held back or defined. Only because we exclude death, when it suddenly enters our thoughts, has it become more and more of a stranger to us; and because we have kept it a stranger, it has become our enemy. It is conceivable that it is infinitely closer to us than life itself --. What do we know of it?

“Prejudiced as we are against death, we do not manage to release it from all its distorted images. It is a friend, our deepest friend, perhaps the only one who can never be misled by our attitudes and vacillations -- and this, you must understand, not in the sentimental-romantic sense of life’s opposite, a denial of life; but our friend precisely when we most passionately, most vehemently, assent to being here, to living and working on earth, to Nature, to love. Life simultaneously says Yes and No. Death (I implore you to believe this!) is the true Yes-sayer. It says only Yes. In the presence of eternity.” (transl. Stephen Mitchell)

Pocket Socketry

(On Ecstasy and Poetry)



THE DANCING SORCERER
OF THE ATLANTIC TRENCH

Forever out of view
down the shelves
and canyons of
primal stone,
deeper than
the sperm whale
fears to dive --
there on a wall
as black as
death's emptying
gaze you'll find
my truest image,
crouched in
surprise to be
seen at all,
my antlers
spread high
and wide,
this lion's tail taut
for the hunt,
my horse-hooves
ready for full gallop
and inside all
that the man
dancing on the
wave of the
blood for the
spear-soar
of the next line.
My eyes stare
back at you
in black swirls of
honed abyss,
sucking so greedily
at the marrow of
each wave with
such consummate bliss.

***

Again from Erich Neumann's "On the Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness":

The way in which an idea, an inspiration, or an intoxication arising from the unconscious seizes a personality as if by a sudden, violent assault -- driving it to ecstasy, insanity, poetry or prophecy -- represents one part of the spirit's working. The corresponding trait of matriarchal consciousness is its dependence for every intuition and inspiration upon what emerges from the unconscious, mysteriously and almost beyond influence, when, where, and how it will.

From this point of view, all shamanism, including prophesy, is a passive sufference. Its activity is more that of conceiving than of a willed act; and the essential contribution of the ego consists in a readiness to accept the emerging unconscious content and to come to harmony with it.


***

So I do not so much as write as yowl in the bite of lower teeth; or sigh, or ululate, or bemoan; or somehow all of those buttery expressions, thick in the blue bouree of something so much like a dream that it is, the dream of life's darkest socketry wholly expressed on the bright page; in a language between worlds, my words a demi-veld where the boundaries are soft and the seams are witchy, leaking, watered with something infinitely close to booze but not, the Sidhe side of whiskey that was never hooch but nipples She sorors, making all this verbiage my greedy mouth battening there, each line a gorgeous jet of sweet abyss arousing words as the lactate wavelets descend something much like my throat but not quite, rather a well with feet securely in the grid of dark amplitude -- not the unconscious but close, heaven maybe, Her desire for me perhaps: But whatever the case what I've called "the daily vowel movement" are nuggets quarried from that depth, pocket socketry in which it is my job to dip my pen and Her's, truly and shockingly, to writhe and sashay as I write. That's the deal we made when I was 3 years old staring at the ocean wash wave by wave at my feet as my mother said something over me, a pact between me and deep mother and far other, to say something sufficient for oceans, for the sound of that deep voice over me.


BLACK BATTERY

I don't so much write
poems these days
as power the hour's poetics.
At 4:23 a.m. I find so much
wattage swank in
the night's roots,
a noctilucence burning
out in the garden
just out of sight,
invisible in all that seems
only dead or aswoon
or bitterly revenant.
There I find black leys
of a power worth plugging
my poems into, supple
cords of moon-blossom bone
gripping down hard
in the loam. They surge
with yesterday's sun
in black surging riptides
as regnant as anything
crowned by that day's
lost fire. Here is dark
measure in equal
amplitude to that day,
coursing electrons
of an unseen
magneto between
everything line I write here.
I don't know what
a poem like this powers
or whose cunning engines
fin and wing wild from
these gibbers; I
just write on and on
while some great lower
mouth drinks every
word I pour, getting
stronger and longer
and darker, regnant
in lake's starless source
down the lees of abyss.
Just what deity resides
there I can never quite say
though I ferry his depths
deeper each line
quarried here, each
trope caught singing in
the dark at this hour.
Surely there are many other
powers at play in the world
but they are for other poetics,
other batteries of verb.
My job here is just
to build sufficient enough
cells of black juice for
this hour, coiling
yesterday's last dying wave
round its infinite
black-tiding wash,
cabling the whole dreaming
word to the ghosts of
its margins and every
titan power bellowing below.
Black fins and deep hooves
ramp up a brilliant
dark bulb's black-saturate
glow, a poem both night
and wild garden
both fang and rich flow.

***

Meanwhile topside and far inland we struggle through the hottest days of the year. With tropical storms Franklin to the east and Gert far to the west, all the moisture is spreading away from the state, like thighs, rendering Florida a cloudless blaze of mid-90s days. It's menacing and sickly, this heat; stepping out into it from my office yesterday was like diving into oppressive waters, no lake of fire but too thick, too addled to sum much good in the perky, touristy, suburban-quenched way. I developed a migraine yesterday afternoon (a typical Monday malaise, who knows why) which dug hard down with its rusty nails, making the task of Photoshopping the weekly graphics package pure uphill noxiousness, head thundering, stomach weak, my whole body like a wilted flower tumbling back into dirt, light shrieking through the shades. Took a Frova, which helped, and the late-afternoon Yoga class dispelled it further, releasing tension from my neck and shoulders, my whole body stretching out from its oppressed shores. But I woke up with it at 2:30 this morning, bang bang bang, so the climb through a day of heavy labors has been given a steeper grade.

But who am I to bitch? I have a coworker whose wife's grandmother died, mother broke a leg, father just suffering a stroke blinding him in one eye, and both my coworker and his wife are down with bad colds while their 2 year old son suffers a bad ear infection. Try to ferry your weekly load amid that.

And then it's hot up north and out west, 100-plus temps in Chicago, homeless people dying of exposure in Phoenix, and all of those wildfires raging across the West. Up in Florida's Panhandle power is still being restored two weeks after its mauling by Hurricane Dennis. So it's not like this is a solitary anguish.

And it's not like any of this is of any concern to the Sorcerer of the Atlantic Trench, or my garden muse, or her fretful dream which limns my words, or the ten thousand songs spouted from these lips which lie at the bottom of the well like so many tossed votives, each reaching and failing to quite nail the Her lacunae which, like some inverted serpent's teeth, form the dark socket whose wattage keeps the sperm cells swimming and the sperm whales diving all the way to the bottom of things. Not a bit, though I suspect She would love a good bite of such fruit. Just to feel its juice fill Her mouth and run down Her chin. Just to know I watch with eyes wide as full moons.



RED JAMMIES

The dream is the
penultimate truth
about the dreamer,
of which all his
experience is the
temporal reflection.
-- Joseph Campbell

My wife came to bed
last night wearing
red pajama bottoms
& a white t-shirt --
new stuff she'd bought --
I was asleep & saw
her in them with
a half-submerged eye:
Hey, I murmured from
a sleepy tide-pool,
check out those
red jammies --
then dozed on down.
I dreamed of writing
a poem about a thin
red-headed woman
& then sketched her
in full color on the
same page; then I
signed & dated it
& turned it in
to my boss for payment
like an invoice, along
with more ordinary
workplace bills:
She reminded me
of a woman who
worked at my old
job many years
before, a marketing
assistant who
was thin and pale
with hair like ironed
copper -- all fashion
and cool, too young for
me, of an age I'd passed
but would not release:
Oh how I desired her
red hair and thin hips,
tasting in my heart's
red mouth the strawbs
of her nipples, bright
on such pale, split-
apple skin: Juice and
more juice brimming
a cup I never held in
these real hands: That
memory was drowned
for years & must
somehow been stirred
when my wife came to
bed in those red jammies,
rising real and surreal
on one blue wave:
The sleeping woman
next to me & the
woman swimming
far below, her red
hair down there
faintly glowing in
waterworld, writing
this poem unrepentant
& insatiable & as
doomed as ever:
Soon I go upstairs
to wake my wife, &
imagine myself hugging
her close, my hips
against those red jammies,
my mouth whispering
ocean ocean ocean
in my wife's softest ear.

Moon-Doze

I met her as a blossom on a stem
Before she ever breathed, and in that dream
The mind remembers from a deeper sleep;
Eye learned from eye, cold lip from sensual lip.
My dream divided on a point of fire;
Light hardened on the water where we were;
A bird sang low; the moonlight sifted in;
The water rippled, and she rippled on.

-- Theodore Roethke, from "The Dream"

***

Sometimes when I can't sleep I try to woo the waters back by imagining various sexual encounters, varied women in lost rooms who yielded their softness and sweetness and curves to my fire. Pleasure comes in waves, like a tide, each riding on a crest of breaking foam, carrying in the fold and crash breasts freed from brassieres, hips astraddle mine, the rocking and plunging and ululation of sex as it breaks open from bad nights and bad bars and all of the bad ways I sought oblivion from who knows what, an urge which maddened me -- not with horniness, that was, with booze, the emollient -- but with the sense of a task which I was not ready to take on. And so like Jonah the bellyflops into night waters, all those beds stations in the intestine of the whale.

Or something ... anyway the other night, 5 a.m. after being up for 3 hours, trying to get a couple more in the dissolving peace of sleep, downstairs on the couch with a window still open to the carillon of moonlight and deep summer's insatiate heat, I wound back down the labyrinthine recall of not lovers but loves, the women who I tried to stay with, make love to, give what I desperately needed to be given: what a sad bossa nova in that reverie, wives with all of their complicate woes for which I was just one affliction (though bad enough), girlfriends of half-year or some months' duration, even women I tried to see a few nights beyond the first: Tried to stay with the sex of each, their own practiced hands, known rhythms and preferred positions, a sable sheen in the cleavage of one, fine buttocks against my plunging hips, mouths which sucked so far, hands which finished the duty, dutifully, furtively, rarely with gusto but a certain permanence, a sustaining rhythm.

Oh but how hard it was to imagine the sex, the frames kept sloshing with bitterer colder waters, the difficulty of calibrating my desire with my beloved's the awkwardness of truly trying. Maybe that reverie was simply stained by the real history of my love in and out of those women, the real wounds I suffered and caused, making those water slides of sexual joy fraught with the broken glass of hurt feelings, the horrible sense of wrongness, of the distance which grows the more I try to love:

Yet, while hanging with the memories of mammaries and too-infrequent comings -- trying to keep the old moon music roaring through lost time, broken attempts to truly love -- from that flotsom of fumbles and fiascos I got the sense of what was wrong in all of that, that each of those women were a shore I which I got close to the Beloved in whom none of those women may ever reside, the mortal and immortal parallax ever distorted, most off-kilter the closer we view 'em; so that it while the parade of true loves and actual threshings was bittersweet and rueful, not so much soothing the sexual imagination which wanted to be rocked to sleep as to do homage at the altar sex is merely the sorceror's apprentice of, the unconscious thrall which isn't about sex at all, or about sex with equipage that can only be gained through its decimations in the arms of real beloveds.

I didn't get back to sleep that night -- hovered on the rims of the deep as I praised all those women I said farewell to -- and around 6 a.m. with first light's palest blue amping the filaments of dark, I got up and went out to feed our outdoor cats, Mama and Blue and Red, letting them mew and rub against me as I poured out dry food and cracked tins of wet food and spooned the heaps of faux prey, chicken for the boys and beef for Mama: And sat there in the music of their tiny tongues working the bowls, their eyes gazing forward at the rims, the first of day like a love departing on a boat as reality slowly, surely, inevitably resumes its regnancy over the actual way a life goes.

And then it was time to brush the teeth and go join my wife in bed, and lay there while the first stirrings of waking turned her to me, one hand on my belly and working slowly, surely, and gorgeously south.

***

"Moon-consciousness, as matriarchal consciousness might be called, is never divorced from the unconscious, for it is a phase, a spiritual phase, of the unconscious itself. The ego of matriarchal consciousness possesses no free, independent activity of its own; it waits passively, attuned to the spirit impulse carried toward it by the unconscious.

"... Matriarchal consciousness is dependent upon mood, upon harmony with the unconscious. This moon-dependency can be viewed as instability or caprice. Yet it provides a backdrop which acts like a sounding board, endowing matriarchal consciousness with a special and positive character. Its response to rhythm, the times and tides of waxing and waning, of crescendo and decrescendo, gives it something of the quality of music. Therefore, music and dance, because of their accented rhythm, play an important role in creating and activating matriarchal consciousness and in establishing a consonance between the ego and femininity and its ruler, the moon-spirit."

-- Erich Neumann, "On The Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness"

***

WEEKEND AT MELBOURNE BEACH

Our first night here was wild.
A full moon tore from the sea
faint and bloody as storms
approached from inland,
lacing the dark with hot bolts.
A sea turtle dragged her burden
of eggs across the sand.
You and I watched from our hotel window,
our bodies trilling with thunder
and salt. I leaned you back on
the table and pulled down your shorts.
Buried my face in your lap.
Sweat and cunt and coconut oil
ripening the sharp ions of beach storm.
You tore wet gasps from
the night, startling the darkness
as much as each lightning bolt
slicing from outside.
Coming again to that third
body that waits for us
beneath the basso billows of surf.
This morning you sleep,
still far off in that sea
of primal soak. The day so
brilliant white, dazed with itself.
I eat a nectarine at the table
and watch maddened dragonflies
hover and hurl in tall dune grass.
Flattened waves break
at the shore in weak curlicues.
The smell of our riot rises
from the table. All we do
these days is surrender.
Swelling for you again,
I return. A blue sheet
ripples over your breasts in a wave.

***


MOONER

Description is an element,
like air or water.
-- Charles Wright

After the four poets read I was
jazzed on words, their brilliant
beams helterskelter in my ear's
uteral dark, like moons firing
water from every upwelling seam.
The sky driving home was
the pushed-back remains
of our summer's stacked plate,
hosannahs which rushed
through the windows
in a post-fuck fetor of
evaporate rain and exhaust
and the tang of far-off cut grass
ripe with ardor and ruin, ions
tasting like wet pennies,
augurs I brush here like
a chimney sweep
at the other end of the night.
Stayed up late with my wife
bemoaning George Bush
and laughing about the grand
dames who still write for
my business, tough crones
drilled so deep in their
work that their obsolescence
is moot, the fire part of
time's mortis. Four hours
later and it wasn't the cat
awakening me with her
scampers-for-treats but slaps
of blue moonlight sloshing
the gunwales of our bed. What
boneyard brilliance crooned
to me as I stumbled downstairs,
the garage out the back
window split between
hard black and endless milk.
I just wanted to stick my face
out there and go buh buh buh buh buh!
like a drunk slapping his
face between the saggy boobs
of a bored lapdancer, my greed
for description so aroused
by those four quarrying voices
still echoing in my ears from
last night. Sometimes I drink
from the fountain at the center
of a black garden, and sometimes
it drinks me, guzzling the
hottest blue notes to squonk
at this hour from this pen
which not so much writes as
write me. Oh I feel an upwelling
so cold and mineral as
to set all my angels into
a frenzy of mouths, the poem
all teeth and jubilant stained lips
and spout-desperate hips.
I'm the ass-man of all nights
today, my poem a black
thong which stretches its
silk between moon and
silvered garden, between
this state of summer-wild
excitation and saturate reams.
I'm jammed to the hilt of
blackened blue, ripening
here the cock's first doodledoo
when dark blossoms lose
their lunar hue. Drink deep, my
gardenish muse, from this
split cask of a boat, its whiskey
distilled from four burning throats
which mooned me but good.

More Lunar Stenography

A high, later moon at this hour, past full, ferrying the bloat of fullness, revved on an anticipation of decline, a recession of that bone blue light: regnant, but old.

It's been wildly hot the past couple of days, no significant rain, humidity high: inferno in the calyx of summer. We worked in the garden from around 11 a.m. til 1 p.m., moving plants around, pulling out dead ones, trying to imagine what the garden wants to grow into. Taking breaks every 20 minutes or so, sitting on the front steps, drinking water or Gatorade, stunned really by the heaviness and fullness of the heat. (Today I read in the paper that the heat index was up around 108. No shirt, Sherlock.)

When we finally knocked off for the day -- drenched, exhausted, covered with dirt (well, I was, at least, transplanting all of those flowers) I took a cool shower, washing off all the filth and then just letting water sing back against the day's fire; later I napped upstairs naked, our bedroom warm despite the full blast of a/c, our cat dozing dazed in the closet, distant thunder trembling the horizon of the sea I fell into as I slept, pure as a summer day can get.


***

-- In his monograph "On the Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness," Erich Neumann suggests that moon magic represents the first flickers of our waking spirit:

"The appearance of spiritual contents which thrust themselves into consciousness with sufficient convincing force to fascinate and control it probably represents the first form of the emergence of the spirit in man.

"While, with an expanded consciousness and a stronger ego, this emerging factor is introjected and thought of as an inner psychic manifestation, in the beginning it appears to approach the psyche from outside as a sacred revelation and a numinous message from the "powers," or Gods.

"The ego, experiencing these contents as arriving from without, even when it calls them intuitions or inspirations, meets the spontaneous spiritual phenomenon with the attitude characteristic of the ego of matriarchal consciousness.

"For it is still as true as ever that the revelations of the moon-spirit are more easily received when night animates the unconscious and brings introversion then in the bright light of day."


***


MOON SCRIBE

This moment -- 4 a.m., deep summer,
still-full moon burning the black
garden with cold milk -- is sacred
and wild, a saucer for lips
darker than mine to plunge.
My hand in the light of this hour
is online with death and moves
like a Ouija board planjet, each
letter shored another vowel to Her name.
Surely She writes with that moon,
between brilliant ice and cold mortis,
a miniscule of swoon tracing
a dazzle of light on the water like
the zipper She lowers as I fin
harder and longer than ever before,
spouting ink and hosannahs
between thighs of that sigh
which erases you and I into
the deepest sleep of all, pure float
in soft blue. What I know of
the moon is hauled from an old well,
the deep throat of history's
husbands and sons, lovers and
rogues, priests and scribes
and madmen too, up from
every man's impenetrable heart.
She waits there, you know,
for each of us batter down that pale door
up in the sky sailing far to the west.
Every virgin yields to a king
and every dream flashes
below then is gone, leaving we
sleepers troubled at first light,
our hearts still paned with the
frost of old moon magic, the
thrill of it all. O heave deep,
wild summer, hot at this hour
as a storm blunders around
in the Atlantic and a few trucks
lumber the highway which drains from
the sky the last of that moon-magic,
ever the last, leaving me here with
sea-boned scriptures, sargassum
and manowars pressed in the pages,
empty shells scattered at the shore
still burning over with that old
moon's first silky, cyanotic
effervescent wild roar.

***

Indeed, what to do with this sweet inner magic which we share with the world? And why do we keep trying to translate it into words? Yesterday afternoon I read from three voices from the American Renaissance -- Dickinson, Hawthorne and Melville -- and each offered a blue perspective.

***

First, this from a letter by Emily Dickinson to Joseph Sweetster in 1858. It is one of the first acknowledgements she makes to others that she has found a mystery and intends to keep it within, sharing it only with whatever God she had named:

"There is a smiling summer here, which rouses birds to sing, and sets the bees in motion.

"Strange blooms arise on many stalks, and trees receive their tenants.

"I would that you saw what I can see, and imbibed this music. The day went down, long time ago, and still a simple Choir bear the canto on.

"I don't know who it is, that sings, nor did I, would I tell!"

***

She did tell, though only to the poem and that poem's God: wrote all those pocket hurricanes and then neatly wrote 'em out on pages which she carefully sewed together and never showed anyone, ever. (She was free in sending individual poems to friends, but the grand product, the cathedral, was one she raised beneath the surface.

***
In "Birds and Bird Voices," collected in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Mosses From An Old Manse (1845), we find that same urgent mystery, but the challenge here is to say it afresh, over the bones of everything said before. Yet that is ever the creative challenge, and the act of saying it anew is ever the Romantic's ambition and conceit. (Note, the "manse" Hawthorne refers to here is Emerson's grandfather's house, where H. stayed for 3 years writing these stories.)

***

... How invariably, throughout all the forms of life, do we find these intermingled memorials of death! On the soul of thought and in the garden of the heart, as well as in the sensual world, lie withered leaves -- the ideas and feelings that we have done with. There is no wind strong enough to sweep them away; infinite space will not garner them from our sight. What mean they? Why may we not be permitted to live and enjoy, as if this were the first life and our own the primal enjoyment, instead of treading always on these dry bones and mouldering relics, from the aged accumulation of what springs all that now appears so young and new? Sweet must have been the springtime of Eden, when no earlier year had strewn its decay upon the virgin turf and no former experiences had ripened into summer and faded into autumn in the hearts of its inhabitants! That was a world worth living in.

O thou murmurer, it is out of the very wantonness of such a life that thou feignest these idle lamentations. There is no decay. Each human soul is the first-created inhabitant of its own Eden,. We dwell in an old moss-covered mansion, and tread in the worn footprints of the past, and have a gray clergyman's ghost for our daily and nightly inmate; yet all these outward circumstances are made less than visionary by the renewing power of the spirit. Should the spirit ever lose this power, -- should the withered leaves, and the rotten branches, and the moss-covered house, and the ghost of the grey past ever become its realities, and the verdure and the freshness merely its faint dream, -- then let it pray to be released from earth. It will need the air of heaven to revive its pristine energies.

***

Ah, but even death has its divine right, its primal regnancy, its dark lucency. The dead deserve their thrones, and our creations are best knowing where they stand. In Moby Dick he describes the apparition of the stripped corpse of a sperm whale once the crew of the Pequod have finished harvesting all of its blubber and set it free:

***

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting ponniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

... Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log -- shoals, rocks and breakers hereabouts; beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air. There's orthodoxy!

Thus, while in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death the ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.

-- from Ch. 69, "The Funeral"

***

I read all of those passages late yesterday afternoon after my nap, drinking coffee & listening to Rodrigo's Concierto De Aranjuez while a storm blew in and stalled, leaving everything beclouded, heavy; not much rain though and I thought I could feel the garden's pent tongue arcing skyward, praying. Yet I felt happy, my wife making up a bed in the guest room, Blue and Red sleeping on the table on the back porch, the old voices making all of this holy but I don't know why.