So What

THIS MEANS WAR

I'll never move to new
enough ground hanging
on her sweet blue paps.
Feed me milk to sleep
but wake me fresh with
a slap of GI Joe. Not salt
havens in the wave but
a torc of fire hammered
round my heart, the Cerne
Giant shadowing my stance.
Not by providence of hour
but victory of tongue
does he crest and clear
the annihilating wave.
Wake up asshole, it's time
to move on out.
Better be alert 'cause
your next poem may be
your last, its gauzy reach
so surf-softened you
may not hear the springing
blade before it fangs your
throat. Wise up, feather-man.
Sulphur is a grunt's best
friend when the fife and drum
strolls by. This ain't no
rock 'n' roll show, no
versey horsey undertow.
If you would live the day,
understand the suburb
stops here. Inside every thong-
thralled Thoth's a rout-loud Thor.
Forestall your meters no more,
asshole, 'cause This Means War.


***


Juxtopose these dark dreamy wombtombed conceivings slowly coming to fruit in the night's deepest garden to frag days in overbright Iraq. Twenty-five US Marines have been killed this week fighting insurgents in Anabar Provence, the far-western seam through which a torrent of Saudis bent on jihad are pouring. Whose God is hotter in the clash of bomb and steel, flesh and flesh? All of that young-man's testosterone amped by desert heat and personal artillery, steroids and rank body odors, the river stench of death more powerful than the Euphrates. We're stuck there in rhetoric of a fundamentalist Administration in love with pre-modern Puritanism and oil, Teddy Roosevelt with his big stick of a horsecock sprouting from the pug of an Abrams M1 tank and all of that highflying technology which has never convinced the locals of a superior ideology.

Reveries of war -- is that oxymoronic? Does the enflamed heart leap to action, leaving behind the contemplative, mother-hugging, slow-gestating, dark revolvings of the morning muse? Action is a slap of vigorish, a balm for the sedated suburbanites, pussy's alternate goad, Ares and Aphrodite linked in the twin turbines which race bellbent into the meaningless red fray in which men are made and broken and rewarded with miserable pensions and the life-long arbitration of shattered wings. Well, if poverty (read a penury of Pluto's depths) drive young men (and women) to war, that booze will drive 'em back here eventually.

Not to dis the effort, the sacrifice. We send 'em off to fight a war we wholly ignore at home. Little yellow ribbon decals on the bumpers of gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles (in an age of high gas prices due to tight supplies from the Iraq war) are the supremest ikon of our complicity and ignorance and awful hubris, every sulphuric toxin jissomed from the ball of angry Mars. It ain't no rock n roll show.




HOUNDS OF THE
DEMOCRATIC IDEAL

After the victorious
engagement of
invincible ordnance
the bloat.
Who dwells on
those swollen
body parts blooming
southeast of Baghdad
with the sweet-sour
fume of death?
Not I. Instead
the camera pans
beyond into the city,
the final objective,
tank shells fired
at the Palestine
Hotel where the
snipers crosshair
American might.
The fear transmuted
into something worse,
a bloodlust soaring
to brink the sky.
An Abrams tank,
steel Hannibal,
squeezes throuh
the streets
like a rapist.
In the steel
guts a corpsmen
sweats over yellow
monitors hearing Creed
and Nickelback
in the hoarse grind
of gears & the
vehicle crawls
over a white Toyota
pickup, the screech
of metal mixing
with a dying scream
& the machine gun
mounted in its bed
snapping like teeth
in a vise.
I mean the glee of it
in the permission
of war which
exceeds itself
& renders us
blooded with our
ancient curse.
Short days left before
some civility
reasserts itself
& the muzzles
coolly wilt.
But for now, we're
going after the last
pockets of resistance,
unstoppable,
American, our
ideals finishing
the job, licking
the blade til its clean.
I flick between CNN
and Fox and CSNBC,
hungry for footage,
slow rain falling outside
now & cooler here,
no sheath for that
brilliant day of killing
over there, where
we only believe.



KNIGHT OF SWORDS


The wrath of the lion
is the wisdom of God.

-- William Blake, "Proverbs
of Hell"

The warrior god of summer now
stirs in his greaves, his heat
rising at this dark early hour,
the night sweaty, chirring,
humming with air conditioners.
In summer the sun not so much
rises as unsheathes from the sea,
swording up and across the sky
pealing a brilliance which
cauls summer storms,
those fronts of risen air
lumbering and pouring
pent water over all.
Do not err in calling this
blade sweet -- that's for
the spring of orange blossoms
carried on soft breezes.
No. Something wilder hooves
in this hour, like the sound
of an army massing beyond
a ridge of warm soak.
A principle of bronze
spearing sea into sky,
marauding high angels
spilling gold from the wounds.

***

The earth is where the dead live, and the soul of a people's history. John Lee Anderson talks with an Iraqi doctor, who says: "The sandstorm is coming back ... You can smell it. It smells like earth ... Whenever I smell this, it reminds me of dead people. Think about it. Think of Iraq's history. What is that history but thousands of years of wars and killings ... right back to Sumerian and Babylonian times. Millions of people ahve died on this earth and become part of it. Their bodies are part of the land, the earth we are breathing."

Below the events are the ancestors drawing new history into old patterns. Northern France is an example, drawing down victims not merely from old buried land mines, but because the dead in the underworld of Hades thrist for blood.

-- James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War



REILIG SADDAM

Circles and right lines
limit and close all
bodies, and the mortall
right-lined circle must
conclude and shut up all.

-- Sir Thomas Browne,
"Urne Buriall"


Over in Iraq's more
terrible peacetime,
while military experts
search in vain for
WMDs, a more desperate
sifting goes on in blank
fields within Baghdad's
shade. The shovels
don't have far to go before
whonking against bone --
tibia, rib, skull, some
dull remant of life
knocks back. A legion
of Iraqis attend this
shoveling, old gnarly
mothers and aging brothers,
sons and nieces too:
they're all holding
photographs, praying
some sign of that face
remains there in the dirt.
How will they know?
The skeletons have
shreds of clothing
which ligament them
together. See how the
man stares down at the
bones piled at some guess
at what's complete
enough to bury right.
The man is reading
the tale backwards,
blowing sand from
the occipital ridges
of skull, trying to
blow back the flesh
which once wrinkled
and grinned from an
old joke. Another man
watches these motions
by the greiving in despair,
for too much eagerness
in the handling destroys
the needed "line of
control" which might
some day bring
some justice to all this.
He's with a human
rights group & is trying
to create a larger
narrative from these
bones, an indictable
tale that could hold
in court -- blindfolds
on the skulls, shell
casings, the bones of
women and children.
When interviewed, he
said how well these
living relatives received
him, inviting him into
their homes for food
or tea. Sure, we're talking
about tragedy, he
said, but that's what
makes us human.
This well may be filled
with tears, a sum of
loss greater than the
entire world's heart.
I throw in this tale
just to tone the ear
to what's crammed
so badly in the rear.




THIS COMPOST

Walt Whitman
from Autumn Rivulets

1.
Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceived,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2.
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person-yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,

The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow,
the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata
of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea
which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves
in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard,
that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises
out of what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions
of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.

Uteral Contemplation

I wait; I soak; I rest here at this dark hour, perhaps void of course, but also a reverse, filling in the slow latency of all I have at depth and breadth perused, my history and its mysteries, the thrilling curve and splash of the eternal internal wave, its demiurgic infernity, its delightfully benippled durnity. A pregnancy of all my words now sloshing and regenerating in the dark.

"Matriarchal consciousness reflects unconscious processes, sums them up, and guides itself by them; that is, it behavess more or less passively without willed ego-intentions. It functions as a kind of total realization in which the whole psyche participates and in which the ego has the task of turning the libido toward a particular psychic event and intensifying its effect, rather than using the experience as a basis for abstract conclusions and an expansion of consciousness. The typical activity of this observing consciousness is contemplation. In contemplation, the energies are directed toward an emotionally colored content, event, or center, with which the ego establishes a relation and by which it allows itself to be filled and permeated; from this it never withdraws or abstracts, as in an extremely patriarchal consciousness."

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


THE SWAN

Mary Oliver

Across the wide waters
something comes
floating-a slim
and delicate

ship, filled
with white flowers-
and it moves
on its miraculous muscles

as though time didn't exist,
as though bringing such gifts
to the dry shore
was a happiness

almost beyond bearing.
And now it turns its dark eyes,
it rearranges
the clouds of its wings,

it trails
an elaborate webbed foot,
the color of charcoal.
Soon it will be here.

Oh, what shall I do
when that poppy colored beak
rests in my hand?
Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:

I miss my husband's company-
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! the path to heaven

doesn't lie down in flat miles.
It's in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,

and the gestures
with which you honor it.
Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those
white wings
touch the shore?




Indeed. What adequate words can there be? Rilke stared hard at the visage of the god in "Archaic Torso of Apollo" and declared, "You must change your life." But seeing was only the half of it, and the saying an ocean he was always crossing. Have my Themes become a drone? Am I stuck here in one language, one myth, one circular narrative, grounding myself on the same reefs just offshore the same naked beach? Is saying only the half of it, as I found that playing the songs to be hooves without saddle?

So I rest; I wait; I assay the known strand with an eye to what approaches in the dark swells appearing over the horizon. How will I leave here? On the wings of a prayer? Or shall I dive exactly here, sands parting like halves of the Red Sea, providing deep passage into a wilderness of blossom and nipple and sweetness which everything I have said so far is but the surface of?


FULL MOON AT COCOA BEACH

1995


The surf was pounding
the air when we climbed
out of my car, hurling
sea mist toward
a full moon now
breaking from clouds.

The pier was closing early
that night, swarmed
by the high surf
of a hurricane's
turbulent pass
many miles to sea.
The guard said
an advisory was out
for a high tide come morning
with fifteen foot waves.

We leaned on a rail
halfway down the pier
and watched the night.
The horizon a wash of
foam and darkness.
Shards of moon
scattering like silver fish
in the glassy curl
of a wave before tumbling
into foam and thunder
and rocking the pier.

You leaned to watch
a wave pass under,
your dress fanning
wild in the breeze.
The wave I felt
curved that satin and
the mystery beneath
into moon and sea.

Later we walked on
the beach, found
a place to sit
and talked a long while,
telling our stories
as warming strangers do
who find the distance
between them narrowing
to less than tissue.

It was after midnight.
The beach, the sea,
the moon took us
somewhere
on a silver stream.

It was a gift
that rose unhurried
from the depths of
some heart which must have
always known these things,
recalled from old loves
or the salt soundings of the womb
or perhaps the full store
of ineffable moments
a man and a woman
have ever stumbled on together,
a silver strand of DNA
pulsing and receiving
this tide.

Having forgotten joy
for so long on a road
of deaths small and large,
having gotten so lost amid
hurry and complication
and complacence,
that night slapped
me back to life.

Warmed by something
I can never name,
we opened our arms
to one embrace
and then walked away.




OAK MOON

2000

Oak moon
cleft in dark
now barrowed
in the sea,
pale fire of
noctilucent bone,
my knees are
wavelets capped
with your foam
knocking on the
scarred and
barnacled haunches
of an old sea mare.
A mane of ant moss
blowing on this
changeling breeze
leads me here
into this oak heart
unfolding to a beach.
A conch gleams
wet and pink
and pale pure blue
here where the moon
is always full.
Pick it up,
close your eyes,
and listen:
I'll be waiting
patient as forever's tide.





WHAT MOON

2002


Poet of surfside washes,
some moon hauls these words
in its brute train-silver
brother of the savage day, pale fire
soaked in dark-Yet this moon
is both track and tide,
its feral countenance
hanging over the wash
like a maddened bear.
For days I sit here mute
and stretched, whispering
banalities and tripe
for the mere discipline of it,
pouring the same glass of
sea-water all the way down
a numbed beach.
On those days I'm empty
and despairingly minor;
then something shifts or
aligns-mind to God,
balls to tongue, word to world,
heart to heat I don't know-
but look out!
The lines now hurl and nail
in a blanketing surge.
I mark these rhythms
weekly, some times in days:
for the past two or three years,
I've been in a general hard
tide of making which makes
of revision sadly incomplete;
I can't slow down to work
and rework one poem, not
with this next salt breaker
foaming across the page.
Alignment seems the key,
though it's also pure mystery,
since I'll never know to what
allegiance I must swear.
There's a feral moon
in every making,
a silver salt to tooth all
water back to brine.
I cannot know what
wakens here except
in glimmers and dark gleam;
the hour and day are no compass
for the track it scours;
my job is just to stand
faithfully on this beach
and sing how high the marges
reach. This page is my
hydrographer, a hand
ridden by the surly one
who writes the angry sea.


ST. ORAN'S MOON

Eve of St. Oran's 2004

Last night the harvest moon
burnt full inside eclipse,
as if Saint Oran himself
bore on his feast night
the earth's voyaging shade.
His boat indeed is dark
inside that red-burning
silver, mined from every
shore he torches deep within.
When I woke that harrowing
was over & the moon burnt
icily above the west,
a white skull turning the
sky into wild milk, so hot
with noctilucence that it
almost hurt to stare.
Reliquary of the sea's old
song, vox organum belling
high the narhwals'
sonar choir, crown for us
what sails our deepest soul,
isle for isle through all loves,
all lives: you are the music
inside the tomb, the man
in the boat who throats
the aria of every wave's
collapsing boom. Moon
which wombs this no-time,
toll that sea-torn note which by
rising and falling all tides
and songs and bell towers thrive.





CAPE OF BLUE FIRE

Spring 2005

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.
-- Jack Gilbert, "The Great Fires"

At this beach of wind and wave
hard boiled to high awfulness
no one would dare to light a fire;
But you, my Cape, are still and
ever burning, burning evanescent
with blue fire, a roar of flaming angels
inside the wet world's awesome pour.
In my prime years -- a savage
span of high-angst lust lit
nightly by Your dream -- I sought
You everywhere I needed more than
any man is due, more than any boy
afraid to live could spark and tend
within. Cut free of childhood &
parents & the great white Christian god,
the booze which came first in
the narrative seemed magical,
freeing my tongue and goosing me
from my room and hurl me
into women's rooms late at night,
my breath whiskey-warmed
sweet-soured. Drunk at some
party on a layover in Chicago
before my sophomore year
in college, I walked
home a young woman I had known
in high school, our talk slurred
and giggly, our path narrowing
to her door at which we kissed
and didn't stop, backing through
one room into the bedroom and
thence down on her bed, my
hands a blur inside her
clothes and hers yanking
hard at mine until I was
on and in her and through,
coming in one dazed collapsing
wave of boozy heat. Amazing
how that fire water could
pry a woman's legs from her
smile in just one night, cracking
the alien shell of strangers to
spill the yolk of messiness & greed,
my ache beyond her walls before
first light. And then when I plugged
my guitar into an amp a big night spread
in me wings of pagan fire, the minor
man become a magus of amplitude
inside minor-seventh chords, his ax-swings
fit for the Cerne giant's club and cock.
I'll never forget that first song of the
first set onstage of one band or another
during my failed career,
some months of half-assed
preparations delved up in that
first initial pour of sound, three short
taps of the drumsticks unleashing
the whole of us in a fusillade of
sound that fanned out on the crowd
in a wave of blueballed lust, enraging
and enrapturing the beer-tamped
libidos assembled in that basement
or grange hall. And later still
when love woke at last in a vernal blast
of green, I found myself forever miles from shore
in just three days and one night.
There the deepest forge in your blue
wash roaring equally within me as without,
Yes to Yes in hymenal tenderness,
fish rider swum up the stream inside
his beloved's long-forestalled embrace.
The wild startled joyful font of sperm
unleashed that night bore a dragon
freight of your fire, fructifying some
deeper soul than I have yet to know,
much less name. But I never had
much patience with any of those crafts,
greedy for the height and depth
of burn but lazy in my means,
hoping that your crazy fire would
well up where and whenever I
should deign to taunt the wicker
seams. And so I got to be a drunken
garage-band player with big hair
no money and spent dreams,
thirsting toward that end for
pure and puerile yearning,
burning just to burn, my
big night music down to
the ashes of an occasional
jam session in rooms too littered
with broken strings & empties
& the howl of ever-broken things.
For all the loudness of your fire,
I got it down best in those final
days when I knocked off for
the night and laid my blue
Hamer Phantom back into its
case to rest in blue velour
and clicked black covers shut.
I didn't know shit about great
fires, not then nor now,
no matter how much I sing
on about You, my Cape.
I never got much for your blue
lucre, not in any way I drank
or chorded or swooned.
But then maybe our human
hands were never meant
for Your greater fires. I suspect
You know this as you
watch each ship careen
down the worst of coasts
into Your boiling wilderness.
Try as we might, You are
about a work we can
only mimic and thieve.
Oh well. Those years were
like a nursemaid to this nursery.
Every day now I milk
the paps of hell for just three
drops of Cape Blue swoon,
lucent and malefic and
sidereally rich in blue spleen,
killing these lines inside
an early morning forge
beneath this chair inside
the horse which ferries
shore heart to distant shore's
desire. May all my augments choir
the crash and burn of my Cape of blue fire.


FULL MOON NEXT
TO SUMMER SOLSTICE

June 2005

This noctal morning's bloated moon
moors astride the sun's high-tidings
and still this hour is as black as tombs
and abyssal trenches go. I write
this poem in a little boat on
a river of black ink, its tiny eye
a torch casting dim light over
ancient banks, like the pale pall
of St. Elmo's Fire, dowsing verbal leys
which have power only in the dark,
inside fire's downward-draining gleam.
It rained late last night, the dark
inversed in flash floods of phosphor
a millisecond long, ebbing back
in silver-ghosted waves on the eye;
the thunders which tolled in that
trough were as low as titan tritons go.
Oh the murmur of the garden as
the skies loosed long and slow rains,
marbling this 4 a.m. with satch and swoon,
bewitching every blossom with a
simple elven sprawl, flung petals
forming bowls now filling with that
dreaming moon's milky light. Yes,
all of it is praising God's darkest thall,
black throats mewling faint and silvery,
a sound and hue as far from the summer
solstice as a heart may go and yet
I hear and see it all right here, next
to the highest sun wave of the year
soon to crash and smash the tallest
light we'll see. Shall we then move on,
my dark-robed listener paused in
the garden just outside? What office
rouses from the living dead of this night?

The Peace of Dark, Wild Things

DARK MOON, MIDSUMMER

A dark moon heralds
the deepest mordents
of this wild summer.
The stillness of this black
hour is now a knell,
the sable intermezzo
singing from a lush,
sea-bottomed night.
Surely this is
the shadowy nadir of
recent days rousing
hot and hotter still,
their burning augments
the sulfurous apogee
of this lost-mooned soak.
What poem shores
both spear-hurled days
and their furthest marks
down the swell
of noctal, blickered seas?
I wait; I listen; I move
my hand ruddered by
the next blue canto
I'll not quell or understand
til the dark-mooned
hallows of early summer
have been harrowed, til
every hellish feather
of its swooning wings
has been notched and
arrowed back to the author
of its inky majescule.
Here's the first one,
too black to find much
contour of, a jet of
blindest spoor
which may be a door
through the bottom of a night
which burns and sings and
oh so preternaturally rings.
Hearken if you can listen
with darkmooned ears,
the very holes in God's heart
where nothing tides
so gorgeously in and out,
so rich and dark that
no page can ever sustain
that sound that does not
also drown. And thus proceed.



I soak this daily meditations in the deepest dark of the night, my mind a moon swimming in the murk of the heart, not so much seeking as soaking phosphor through the verbal gills, like oxygen from water.

Erich Neumann, in "On the Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness":

"It is not under the burning rays of the sun but in the cool, reflected light of the moon, when the darkness of unconsciousness is at the full, the the creative process fulfills itself; the night, not the day, is the time of procreation. It wants darkness and quiet, secrecy, muteness, and hiddenness. Therefore, the moon is lord of life and growth in opposition to the lethal, devouring sun. The moist night time is the time of sleep but also of healing and recovery. ... It is the regenerating power of the unconscious that in nocturnal darkness or by the light of the moon it performs its task, a mysterium in a mysterium, working from out of itself, out of nature, and with no aid from the head-ego. This is why healing pills and herbs are ascribed to the moon and their secrets guarded by women or, better, by womanliness, which belongs to the moon."

There's a lucency to dead hours, an amperage of black batteries which surely drives the hooves of Hades' car, dark knowledge which groins and flowers in dark uterals, not so much conceiving and arising from black revels reset with a difference, like the lover in this story:

THE CHILDREN OF WATER

"O hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon"
-Archolochus of Paros

... Long ago, when Manannan, the god of wind and sea, offspring of Lir, the Ocearius of the Gael, lay once by weedy shores, he heard a man and a woman talking. The woman was a woman of the sea, and some say that she was a seal: but that is no matter, for it was in the time when the divine race and the human race and the soulless race and the dumb races that are near to man were all one race. And Manannan heard the man say: "I will give you love and home and peace." The sea-woman listened to that, and said: "And I will bring you the homelessness of the sea, and the peace of the restless wave, and love like the wandering wind." At that the man chided her and said she could be no woman, though she had his love. She laughed, and slid into green water. Then Manannan took the shape of a youth, and appeared to the man. "You are a strange love for a seawoman," he said: "and why do you go putting your earth-heart to her sea-heart?" The man said he did not know, but that he had no pleasure in looking at women who were all the same. At that Manannan laughed a low laugh. "Go back," he said, and take one you'll meet singing on the heather. She's white and fair. But because of your lost love in the water, I'll give you a gift." And with that Manannan took a wave of the sea and threw it into the man's heart. He went back, and wedded, and, when his hour came, he died. But he, and the children he had, and all the unnumbered clan that came of them, knew by day and by night a love that was tameless and changeable as the wandering wind, and a longing that was unquiet as the restless wave, and the homelessness of the sea. And that is why they are called the Sliochd-na-mara, the clan of the waters, or the Treud-na-thonn, the tribe of the sea-wave.
And of that clan are some who have turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind--the wind that would overtake the waves of thought and dream, and gather them and lift them into clouds of beauty drifting in the blue glens of the sky.
How are these ever to be satisfied, children of water?



Indeed. Yet once baptized in the sea-wave, there is no ever leaving that surf, that beach, that day of sexual-spiritual awakening. Not ever. A marriage-pact is enacted in dark and dark waters, my hand clasped with a woman's hand up from the sea, and the life which proceeded from my baptisms has drowned me in that troth, for better or better verse.


BAPTISM

At 13 I was baptized in the Atlantic
off Melbourne Beach by pentacostals,
an occasion which was strangely
perfect in its timing. Months earlier
I'd been given a tract which showed
the hells of sin: a blue novella of once-

good people deceived by pleasure into
grave of boozy sex and all the fanged
conceits which fork there, ending up
in the halls of pitch and apostate ire.
It scared the Bejezus into me just when
I was ready at last for the world: puberty

had just slammed its flaming wreck into
me, adding three inches of height, burning
off my childhood fat, curling out a brimstone
beard pubic hairs, lowering my voice a
gravelly half-octave.Poised at last for the
eternal pleasures of youth, their infernal

consequences bared their canines wide,
revealing an endless maw. Terrified of
punishment I fell on my knees and gave
myself to the God of the group who'd
passed the track. It was with these people
that I now drove out to Melbourne Beach

on a warm morning in early June, two months
from my 14th birthday. We sang Christian
songs in that packed station wagon, the windows
rolled to a predawn lurid Florida smelling of
citrus, death, and the sea. I was flanked by two
virginal girls, a chaste inch between our bathing

suited bottoms, literally just enough to spare
the devil's bray. Still, when the car rolled over
a dead mole or 'dillo, the jot caused the left girl's
left breast to bounce against my arm, and
the chorus in the car turned to a drone while
I felt that deeper music thrum, the hard rock

of rages which was all thirst, all sweet, all
consummation. Parked on the beach at last
we exploded from the car like colts, sprinting
in joy toward a surf which curled and broke
in the glass of first light. Somehow I managed
to leap and come down on the very spot where

some manowars were buried, leeching my soles
in ocean fire. For an hour while the others romped
and bodysurfed I lay on a picnic table in pure
agony. I prayed God forgive me for the imp inside
me and gave thanks that I didn't have the chance
fall further in that surf. When I was well enough

to walk, I was led to the surf where the service
began - standing waist high in cerulean, warm
surf with the sun just up from the east, still red
with first birth, the pastor next to me with eyes
shut tight, praying in tongues and then shifting
to English to say God bless this new son. He then
he tipped me back into the water and held me there -

only for a second or so - but while I was under
a cleansing wave passed over and through me, calm
and eternal and silently true. To this day, I swear
it was one of the closest moments I've had with God.
Or gods, since the wave passed under me as well,
washing me of every wrong and blessing of my darkest,

deepest joys - angel and imp, agape and eros, spirit
and soul married in that douse which washed through
and then passed and I was hauled back up spluttering
while the others clapped and praised God. The sun
continued to climb in the sky, hot and beckoning,
as the rollers sprawled in again and again and again,

curving and smashing and hauling back our blent blood,
waxing and ebbing, cleansing us in the sea's feral mud.


antithesis

Spring 1978

you wake me with a smile
I wake up from a smile
a dream dissolving
into sheets and your hair
the sad-eyed woman
standing smiling in the river
in the rivers of your smile
white wet rapids spraying in my ear
calling back my blood
my words drowning in your eyes

washed ashore drunk and empty
I dream sunrise sunset at the ocean
I Ching changes no blame
the light born and dying
your Fiat backing over gravel
backing out into silence
I walk the garden run my fingers
through a grass tuft feel your hair
the sky an ocean rain and tears
the day turning dark and cold
no blame

call it passion call it love
when you smiled
it was all the same
springtime autumn
bedspring tantra
dream within a dream
Great Wheel spinning
a game for fools
demiurge
water bearing light

wordless
I speak of love
all day long your ocean held me
sparkling on a smile
dissolving the page
no blame




This is a dark-mooned season, void-of-course (after five years of writing a matin poem -- my "daily vowel movement" -- I've written only a couple of poems in the past three weeks), a time of soaking in my sources, prosy assays down lanes of old blue poesies. Waiting. Dayside summer is an awesome and awful regnum, fiercely hot with wild seabreeze storms now hardcocking Central Florida in the late afternoons (I drive home between bolts, slogging over flooded patches of road, the sky greeny-grey, malevolent for a mile then overbrilliant as the sun bores through to ignite the glisten and gleam). Yesterday the National Weather Service bloated the hurricane prediction for the season to 20 storms, which means that the coming couple of months are going to be ever-nastier, fretful and wild.

Over the weekend a huge branch from one of the oaks in our backyard tumbled onto the fence and shed of neighbors who, luckily, live in Ft. Lauderdale most of the time. I axed and snipped and chainsawed what I could on Sunday, drenched in sweat and sawdust; but the branch was still attached to a limb 20 feet up. The result, after all of my parsing, was a 300 pound log pointing straight down at the fence. Couldn't get it loose no matter how much I rocked the thing.

Then my wife calls me at work yesterday to say that it had fallen, taking out the fence and leaning on the neighbor's tool shed. Shit. So I get back from the gym after work in the first tremors of a bad storm, swinging an axe like a madman to remove several lengths of limb which were anchoring it the wrong way; and then pushed from the other side with all of my might, finally getting the fucker to creak, groan, then topple over into my yard with a deep-bellied thomp. Thanking God for no major destruction to property or body, I headed inside as the rain began falling hard and bolts flashed around the compass and the ground shook with other thunders. Thanking God again for holding back on the deluge until my last day's labor was done.

So far this summer, we've discovered our house has drywood termites, again (they swarmed our bed for two weeks in June), my wife was hospitalized with food poisoning up in Lake City during a bad vacation with her sister (her first in years), the foundation on the west side of the house seems to be slipping again, perhaps from all of the rain, we've had the near-wettest June and near-hottest July on record.
Can I still praise God in the ever-wilder tooth of the summer yet to come?





OUT IN THE DARK

September 2004, as Hurricane Jeanne
passed over

Now we are back in the world
I thought as my wife and I
stepped out of our house
into a wild windy dark.
Armed with flashlight
and screwdriver, our
task was to unscrew
the plywood sheet over
our guest bedroom window
so my mother could
get enough air to sleep.
Powerful gusts from
Jeanne's slow spiralling
pass bumped us into each
other as we worked
in a darkness
rich and burning with
its saturations and crests.
The world without
our power at night
is wholly dark, amped
by black houses, its bulb
powered by a long-
lost dominion, shouting
praises while our
neighborhood lay
empty and near dead.
No moon but a greeny
grey phosphor in what
swirled above,
each immoderate breeze
fisted with an agency
far, far bigger than any
we could name. My wife
kept flashing the light
away from the screw I was
trying to work free,
pointing toward some
dark sound in the
distance, reading creaks
in the wind's wreakage
as personal and
approaching. Let it go
I gritted, trying to lure
back the small circle
of our light, impatient
to be done with this
last chore of a long long
day now lost to our power.
Later upstairs in
bed as we fell fitfully
asleep, the sky worked
the trees in a constant
thrashing chorus which
rose in fisted peals
like the shouts of deacons
in a church up in the sky,
up where matronas and
mastodons of wind
praised their god,
were more alive
and vital than every
socket of humanity
in Central Florida
this bad night. Oh
what joy they took
in our cower, yodeling
like cowboys on the backs
of huge whales coursing
over our heads, thumping
and walloping the sky,
spouting their wildness
in black gouts of joy.
And oh how that dark
loved wrapping its wings
round us as it dived
down and down and down.


***

Yet did I tell you how I love this hour, its dark, the abyss which nourishes my words with Her salt amniotics, the wash of blue lactates? Have I said how much overflows in a tide like joy as I realize how vital and alive and in love this life is? How holy the wilderness is for which I have lost all boundary stones? Like the wave of Manannan, the soak of blue augments have uprooted my tongue, have made a bell of my skull, an oak of the tendon which runs beneath my testicles up through my arm and into this pen, something green and stout and unbreaking even when words seem pale and bloodless on a too-bleached page.

At 2 a.m. I woke to the sound of cats facing off, that low, tense, girly ululation which bares fang and claw. Was it Red again getting into it with one of the herd of perpheral strays who smell food on our back porch? My mind still deep asleep I came downstairs to peek out the back door and saw Red curled up on on one of the chairs by the metal table on the porch, nose curled into body, shaggy tail drooping down in sleep. Safe, if just for that moment. I stumbled back upstairs to bed and lay there in the dark next to my wife, trying to woo back the sleep, but the dark was nudging me, calling me to get back to work at this dark quarto between night and day. I am bathed in a lucency I cannot name nor quite dream, praising the wave which called me back to a history as old as the world's first love.



THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

Wendell Berry

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

On Love, Death, and Writing

So here I am in 2005 rousing and writing a Theme which is both new and very old for me, next in the sense that my mind has moved in this direction, yet again in the sense that I keep revolving around a central event now many years in my past. My meditations evolve and exfoliate from wounds, my history in them, my wombing of them in words (which are, according to Emerson, the tomb of the muses).

I wrote A Breviary of Guitars over 18 months from early 1999 into 2000, starting a few weeks after my wife's 19-year-old nephew was killed in a car wreck. The incident reminded me of how Rilke wrote his Sonnets to Orpheus after the death of a 19-year old woman he somewhat knew. In his verses the woman came to be Eurydice, the measure of loss which is the throat of every poet's song. The poem cycle I wrote then -- a sort of verse autobiography, a memoir of music in my life (thus all of those guitars). But as I wrote the poem centered deeper into the women who prompted those songs, or my anguish of every retrieving her back from the dust of time.

And so this poem, written in 2000, looking back on the summer/fall of 1981, somehow fits as the inaugural writing for today's exegesis on the theme of love and death.

SOUL OF MY SOUL

James I do not
know if you lived
long enough
to be nailed so
keenly by the
shaft of Eros:
you were not
much younger
than I and
by the number
of crying pretties
who each lay
a rose on
your silver
coffin surely you
had rode like
the dolphin man
your sea of
desire: But
were you ever
transfixed out
of nowhere into
holy silence?
And rose
afterward
altered forever?
I think not:
Your principle
was what
What Me Worry?
& you ran
happy go lucky
heedless into
the wave that
smashed you on
that forever
distant shore?
Going For It
was your love
and short life's
short work,
heedless of
thought or
consequence: As
a kid that's fine
you can chase
bugs or scream
down the sidewalk
& arrive mostly
unscathed but
as an adult with
money and
substances that
fire and slay
in the same
swig & toys
that go over
100 mph, well,
Cupid's boy
joys are perilous
in the life
& death coil
of Eros: James
I can imagine
not living but
how infernal
it must be
not to desire?
Not to rest
my face in the
warm bellows
of my wife's ample
chest: To come
to one last
white page and
know my pen
will not flow
down further:
Yikes: My boy
toys all hearkened
me toward the
sweet dark of
a woman's body:
Playing doctor
or Ringmaster
Ned or the
Patient in
the Woods:
Alone I playacted
Bond to whup
the archvirile
shadow of
the world &
get the girl
in the final
triumphant
credits: Sketch
pad, journal,
guitar, fretboard,
all received
my aches and
arches like
wadded Kleenex
of soul
but safely:
Eventually I
always find my
way out
beyond the
thorns to
a woman's
naked vale
& I have always
taken what
I though I
could: Was
shocked wide
open by a
scant week of
Becky's pillow
sighs & for
3 years wandered
through some
purgatory of
the low tide
she washed
away on:
Down in
Florida I
exhausted every
avenue I thought
she'd disappeared
down & had
grown utterly
cynical of the
search: Just
when I said
fugettaboutit
I bump into
Kay and this
royal wave
rose up outta
nothing and
washed every
notion I had
of love away:
A couple of
nights after
that first long
night I drove
into south
Orlando to
see Kay where
she lived
with her parents,
she rebounding
from a 4 year
stint with some
soccer star and
working nights
as a programmer
for ABC Liquors:
When she
opened the door
for me I
nearly collapsed,
seeing her just
as I'd left
her -- wide
open to me
in her smile
inviting me
in: I greeted
the folks like
I usually do,
wooing them
with sweet
charm (the
parents always
love me, to
the girls'
dismay): Kay
and I drive
off into the
last gold light
of the day,
lawn sprinklers
hissing and heat
rising into night
in expectation
and slow
ululation:
Over untouched
drinks at some
fern bar I
try to play
it cool as
we exchange
data which hardly
has anything
to do with this--
how I write
(maybe a novel
someday) and
would like to
get a band
going again --
Kay tells me
about working
nights and hoping
to move in with
her sister --
but all of
this is just
a drone in
front of what's
shouting in
her green eyes
& smiles:
The riptide
is inexorable:
& so soon
I'm out there
blurting how
I'm falling so
deeply in love
with her & can't
stand to be
a second away
from her &
she closes her eyes
& sighs yes
o yes
& we're outta
there & driving
in my car
anywhere her
fingers tugging
at my zipper
& pulling out
& kneading my
rockhard cock
& I can hardly
see the road
& then we're
behind some
bank in a parking
lot & Kay
astraddle me
pumping for
all she's worth
mashing her
breasts in
my face &
crying I
want to have
your baby
& it's minutes
before we
hear the
security guard
knocking at
the window:
Lord it's been
almost 20
years since those
nights when
the knot of fire
raged between
us & still my
pen gallops ahead
heedless of
the strain urgently
trying to write
the words down
as they fly:
Nothing approximates
those few moments
of arrival and
erasure in the
hot alembic of
perfect
chemistry: Kay
surely was one
of the most
seamless unions
I have ever
known: At
least for one
two maybe
three nights:
But I know
now it wasn't
Kay who
transfixed me
on my cross
of desire:
her green
eyes shouting
yes o yes
in the dark
of that parking
lot were just
the nails:
The ancient
Greek lyric
poet Meleager
said it right
when he wrote
"In my heart
Eros himself
created sweet
voiced Melissa,
the soul of
my soul": For
a time Kay
was the soul
of my soul,
sent by Eros
as a doublebarbed
arrow of sweet
and bitter and
grace and curse
and ocean
and eternal pit:
That music
deafened my
rock rages
with roses
and nipples:
"I swear, I
swear it
by Eros," I /
Would rather
hear her whisper
in / my ear
than listen
to Apollo
playing his lyre,"
quoth Meleager
again, a
startling statement
for a poet
of the ages
but infernally
true: Do you
think you
prefer to sit
here writing of
lost loves and
not-so-timeless
rock n roll
when I
could instead
be yet riding
that wave, the
shape of pure
dolphin abandon?
Ah but who
ever gets to
choose such
things: Cupid is
whimsical and
scattershot:
Adult Eros
marries Psyche
& trades his
wings for the
daily labors of
earthbound
love: Yet he
never stops
being a lover:
And that old
magic music
entrances me
still: It winds
throughout
and down this
descending
stair of
memory which
I call Breviary:
I chase old
loves in the
Otherworld of
crafted dream
& return with
a ring of
fire within
my gold wedding
ring: A sulphurous
lion mates the
vernal queen:
At week's end
Kay and I
drove out
to New Smyrna
Beach where
we registered
at some surfside
hotel as a
married couple
and climbed at
last into
the cool sheets
of a bed:
Labial folds
of naked
softly plashing
surf in
a darkened
room and the
two of us
clenched in
our coil
of immortal
fire, panting
rising spasming
& littering sleeve
after sleeve
of Fourex on
the floor: The
next morning
we walked on
the beach --
me in shorts
and Kay in a
bikini which
fit her loosely
(relics of
a past season,
of an old
passion) --
The sun just
up from an
eastern marl
of cloud, soft
801⁄4 breezes, the
sea a quilt
of coral
and cerulean
folds with
crest of spermlike
foam, sandpipers
flittering by
our feet:
Kay had stopped
to pick up
a shell and
when she rose
up again to
look at me
with her back to
the sea &
the sun flooding
her every
hair and soft
full curve
with the
richest ripest
most pernicious
gold & in
that instant
she was Thetis
or Circe
or Aphrodite
herself just
off the
foam of the
old father's
balls: Freeze
that moment
and fire it
from the
bow of bios
right through my
birthmark &
deep into my
soul to
pierce the soul
of my soul,
harrowing me
with an
utter presence-
in-absence
I will
forever sing:



ISIS RISING


From The Golden Ass: The Transformations Lucius by Apuleius, transl. Kennedy (1998)

'It was not yet midnight when I awoke with a sudden start to see the full moon just rising from the sea-waves and shining with unusual brilliance. Now, in the silent secrecy of night, was my opportunity. Knowing that his greatest of goddesses was supremely powerful; that all human life was ruled by her Providence; that not only all animals, both tame and wild, but even lifeless things were animated by the divine power of her light and might; that as she waxed and waned, so in sympathy and obedience every creature on earth or in the heavens or in the sea was increased or diminished; and seeing that Fate was now seemingly satiated with my long tale of suffering and was offering me a hope, however late in the day, of rescue: I decided to beg for mercy from the awesome manifestation of the goddess that I now beheld. At once, shaking off my sluggish repose, I jumped up happily and briskly, and eager to purify myself I plunged into the sea. Seven times I immersed my head, since that is the number which the godlike Pythagoras has told us is most appropriate in religious rituals, and then weeping I uttered my silent prayer to the all-powerful goddess.

"Queen of heaven, whether you are Ceres, nurturing mother and creatrix of crops, who in your joy at finding your daughter again set aside the ancient acorn, fodder for wild beasts, and taught man the use of civilized food, and now fructify the ploughlands of Eleusis; or whether you are Venus Urania, who in the first beginnings of the world by giving birth to Love brought together the opposite sexes and so with never-ending regeneration perpetuated the human race, and now are worshipped in the sanctuary of sea-girt Paphos; or whether you are Phoebus' sister, who by relieving women in labour with your soothing remedies have raised up many peoples, and now are venerated in your shrine at Ephesus; or whether you are Proserpine of the fearful night-howling and triple countenance, you who hold back the attacks of ghosts and control the gates of hell, who pass at will among the sacred groves and are propitiated with many different rites; you who brighten cities everywhere with your female light and nourish the fertile seeds with your moist warmth and dispense according to the motions of the Sun an ever-changing radiance; by whatever name, in whatever manner, in whatever guise it is permitted to call on you: do you now at last help me in this extremity of tribulation, do you rebuild the wreck of my fortunes, do you grant peace and respite from the cruel misfortunes that I have endured: let there be an end of toils, an end of perils. Banish this loathsome animal shape, return me to the sight of my friends and family, restore Lucius to himself; or if I have offended some power that still pursues me with its savagery and will not be appeased, then at last let me die if I may not live."

Such were the prayers that I poured forth, accompanied with pitiful lamentations; then sleep once more enveloped my fainting senses and overcame me in the same resting place as before. I had scarcely closed my eyes when out of the sea there emerged the head of the goddess, turning on me that face revered even by the gods; then her radiant likeness seemed by degree to take shape in its entirety and stand, shaking off the brine, before my eyes. Let me try to convey to you too the wonderful sight that she presented, that is if the poverty of human language will afford me the means of doing so or the goddess herself will furnish me with superabundance of expressive eloquence.

First, her hair: long, abundant, and gently curling, it fell caressingly in spreading waves over her divine neck and builders. Her head was crowned with a diadem variegated with many different flowers; in its centre, above her forehead, a disc like a mirror or rather an image of the moon shone with a white radiance. This was flanked on either side by a viper rising sinuously erect; and over all was a wreath of ears of corn. Her dress was of all colours, woven of the finest linen, now brilliant white, now saffron yellow, now a flaming rose-red. But what above all made me stare and stare again was her mantle. This was jet-black and shone with a dark resplendence; it passed right round her, under her right arm and up to her left shoulder, where it was bunched and hung down in a series of many folds to the tasselled fringes of its surface shone a scattered pattern of stars, and in the middle of them the full moon radiated flames of fire. Around the circumference of this splendid garment there ran one continuous garland all made up of flowers and fruits. Quite different were the symbols that she held. In her right hand was a bronze sistrum, a narrow strip of metal curved back on itself like a sword-belt and pierced by a number of thin rods, which when shaken in triple time gave off a rattling sound. From her left hand hung a gold pitcher, the upper part of its handle in the form of a rampant asp with head held aloft and neck puffed out. Her ambrosial feet were shod with sandals woven from palm-leaves, the sign of victory. In this awesome shape the goddess, wafting over me all the blessed perfumes of Arabia, deigned to answer me in her own voice.

"I come, Lucius, moved by your entreaties: I, mother of the universe, mistress of all the elements, first-born of the ages, highest of the gods, queen of the shades, first of those who dwell in heaven, representing in one shape all gods and goddesses. My will controls the shining heights of heaven, the health-giving sea-winds, and the mournful silences of hell; the entire world worships my single godhead in a thousand gods; the native Athenians the Cecropian Minerva; the island-dwelling Cypriots Paphian Venus; the archer Cretans Dictynnan Diana; the triple-tongued Sicilians Stygian Proserpine; the ancient Eleusinians Actaean Ceres; some call me Juno, some Bellona, those on whom the rising and those on whom the setting sun shines, and the Egyptians who excel in ancient learning, honour me with the worship which is truly mine and call me by my true name: Queen Isis."'






In their desire to retrieve what was lost to them Demeter and Dionysos both prostitute themselves, bargaining for entry into the land of Hades. Their desire is deep -- Demeter longs for her daugher Persephone, and Dionysos wishes to resurrect his mother Semele -- greater perhaps than the loss of Orpheus, the mortal, who loses his wife Eurydice on their wedding day (before even love is consummated).

These two gods offer a sexual sacrifice to gain entry to Hell. Demeter gives herself to the mortal Celeus -- king of Eleusis -- in gratitude for his revealing the secret of where Persephone has been abducted to. And Dionysos violates himself with a fig branch tied to a gravestone. They each allow the finite to penetrate their infinite essence; thus their entry into Hell is sacri-orificial, the portal down into the realm of the loss is through their own violation and diminishment of essence.

The bargain with Hades which frees Persephone and Semele occurs later in the narrative; first, the sexual wounding, the sacred prostitution. (So too with Orpheus; the fangs of the underworld serpent penetrate the foot of Eurydice, causing her to fall into the springtime grasses of a field. This causes him to take his song, which caused all of living creation to circle him in wonder, down into the realm of death.)

The return of beloveds is conditional, and has great import on days that remain. Demeter may return to life to the degree which she has taken sustenance in the realm of death, but since she has eaten seven pomegranate seeds, she may only resurface for five months. Hades promises Dionysos to let his mother Semele go on the condition that he give up something dear to him. Dionysos considers for a while, then offers up the myrtle, once the plant of fragrant sex sacred to Aphrodite. By giving it to Hades, the myrtle is imbued with something other than wild sex --- that certain scent of forever lost love.

In both cases, what results is an admixture of love and death, something bittersweet, fragrant and acrid at the same time, hot and cold, wild and remote, soft and hard as rigormortis. The year now is a mixture now of spring-summer and autumn-winter, light and dark seasons which anchor the human heart to its mortality. And love is sweet as a rose with all the bloody thorns rounding it, hot with a passion which immortally dies. Eros and thantaos become faces of one coin, the one we desire which spends us endlessly. Poppies bloom wildly at this borderland, rich with our fantasies of endless love, embowering at their core the dark undertow of Hades' rippling arms, hauling all that sweetness down to the land beneath the land beneath the wave.




Something of this divine prostitution occurs whenever we seek to bring life to our sentences. Writing is a homonym for both the writhing of the chthonic snake as well as whitening of alchemical tort, a putrefying and calcinating process which deadens and ghosts and revitiates my experience in words which are set on paper. I want to arouse you, the reader, to experience the same paradox of death-in-life I have found on my road to hell and back.

The stories of the Gods were passed on as central ineffables, mysteries of wonder and awfulness which represented our extremes, great for stories but tragic when personal magnitudes swept us from normal days into the fires of personal hells. Living the story is to stray into inferno; telling the story provides a sufficient altar of ever-burning flame as to keep surface days safe.

Creative exegesis -- my perambulation to my past and back -- thus is Orphic, delving back to the beach she and I walked on that day lives ago, the day Isis rose from the Ocean and Death gripped my mortal love's heart, turning her face forever away from me. I try my best to show you how I was pierced by that loss, invulnerable young man no more, and how my passion to get her back took me down a blackened road of abysms, room after ghastly room of sexual offerings, trying to find her face again in all the lovers who weren't, who couldn't mirror both rising moon and falling sun.

My paragraphs (or poetic stanzas) descend down the page in the manner of what harrowed me down there, what I lost forever and what I thus gained, a floating embrace at the bottom of things, a gaze which now permeates the dark of this hour and the light soon to come. Exegesis as peristalsis, a lifeblood's circulation out and back, the wave's long immrama from the hole in my heart I furrowed trying to find her again out to distant empty shores, the fading echo of Eurydice's voice as she fades forever from view.

Soon when I head upstairs to get back in bed with my wife and slowly stroke her feet the way she loves, my fingers on her soles will ferry on all I can't quite say here, an infinite gentleness calyxed in the white rose I must lay on the coffin of Persephone, she who lives below and ever returns, if just for this short while.


(note: Much of the source material on the sexual sacrifice of Demeter and Dionysos as part of their desire to return loved ones from death is taken from Chapter 7 of Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony


MACODRUM

It is given to them (the seal-
tribe of MacOdrum) that their
sea-longing shall be land-longing
and their land-longing shall
be sea-longing.
-- South Uist farmer

Shall I forever row
this rock which flaunts
below so brute a tail
and brogues the wind
like wings? Standing
here do I ride the wave
which answers every
shore with a hallowed
blue recede? I was just
the next nude nallie
to lose his skin to
your embrace, doomed
to build the lives ashore
with the greater half
of the three hearts
forever pursed in blue.
Half-man, half fish,
between the worlds I
weave my three songs
of fin and breast and
thrall, that music
riven as the tide
which pounds these
rocky cliffs where
you are least of all.
Will you ever give
me back my skin,
that oiled black coat
which I must wear
to dive full back to
the single world,
free of doubletalk at last?
Shall I woo you or connive,
do I ravage the verses
or mount the mare I ride?
Such strategems
I dream atop this lonely
rock which is my writing
chair, reaching out as
far as I know how
to kiss the cross still
burning there, inscribed
aeons ago when love
was young and I woke
in your arms, a naked,
fresh-borne man 18 miles
out to sea with no
way ever to go home.
Your breath has
stayed in my ear
for all these lives,
like the sea inside
a shell, a shining
blue tide my song
has slowly pickled in.
Three cups, three
heavens, three purgatories
here beyond the ninth
wave you folded and
crashed over me --
a charnel house of
every thrill and thrall
to fade from blue to black.
I hear the selkies singing
on moony nights as
this an hour from
first light: I write
their sealskins down.
Inside this oratory
on high rock I
nail that strange music
to my own, a revenant
still revenant of
the blue which
drowned my bones.



CAMELLIAS

Dave Smith

Something with claws, with trap-spring teeth
honed, shining where leaves peel
back from midnight's folds,
is intent and desperate beyond
the imagination where I look,
howled awake: a few
luscious petals suddenly are shaken,
so I think guilt always
keeps just behind the heart.
In beauty something is jerking a small other
apart, breaking the slight bones,
the cross-stitched sinews,
its tongue drawn like a shaving knife, abandoned
where it hunches. Nothing answers
either, only the silence hiding
the scream that came,
pitiful as the nightmare in the ear
of the lover. It is
no decent hour but I ease from my bed's cool,
step down the blind corridor
with my nakedness swaying, then
paw for the switch. Harms I might do rise
like a fester of wings when I throw
the light of revelation over our backyards,
into bedrooms. What makes me
heave it as indifferently as a hunting sun?
Instantly something clenches
the earth, digs in, doesn't
bolt, lifts itself to see, mouth partly open,
the tiny tongue in throat-black,
and throat as well, disguised but pink
as the unfolded, dewy crenellations
of camellias uncountably opening
themselves in seasons
pure as Florida. It is all framed
by the flawless black meat and fur coiled
upon itself like night-after-night.




Song of Myself
Section 8

Walt Whitman

The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with
my hand.

the youngster and the redfaced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.

The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bathroom,
It is so . . . . I witnessed the corpse . . . . there the pistol had fallen.

The blab of the pave . . . . the tires of carts and sluff of bootsoles and talk
of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb,
the clank of the shod ;horses on the granite floor,
The carnival of sleighs, the clinking and shouted jokes and pelts of
snowballs;
The hurrahs for popular favorites . . . . the fury of roused mobs,
The flap of the curtained litter - the sick man inside, borne to
the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd - the policeman with his star quickly
working his passage to the center of the crowd;
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
The souls moving along . . . . are they visible while the least
atom of the stones is visible?
What groans of overfed or half-starved who fell on the flags
sunstruck or in fits,


What exclamations of women taken suddenly, who scurry
home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here ...
What howls restrained by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances,
rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the resonance of them . . . . I come again and again.

Polyhymneals

Praise the dark heavens for the sweet balm of heavy rains falling for two nights in a row, seabreeze fronts stalling over our dry city and pouring, pouring, pouring their blue lactate over garden and house and oaks with the heavy torrent of long-pent, mightily-spent loins. When it rains that way the 3 a.m. which follows is especially rich and rowdy, frogs barking from the marges, a luxuriant hush addling the garden, the surfeit of fullness now in feral receipt, emboldening every blade and petal to lift and hurl with every iota of those skies now marrowing their green bones.

***

Mornings as these are heavy with sweetness, the mind dipped in lush darkness and rising, full-mooned, with the insides of oceans and woumbs, wholly voweled, a crescendo of every morning spent penetrating a Theme ... Fucking it from every position, lavishing my tongue over every swell and crevice, mixing my spume in Her oils, ferrying that dark appasionata here.


WATER SERPENTS

David St. John

Beneath the lit silk of your naked body

When you move your bones move like nervous water snakes
A complicated Medusan nest of rippling eels

Currents in the dawn river

My own body littered by broken limbs of almond sunlight
As your breath uncoils its music & anxious histories of sexual pride

Echo from the hotel room next door

As our own pasts rise through the water like sacred filaments
& in our dead lovers' eyes we can recall

Woman upon woman upon man swirling in a pool of memorylessness

& upon the shore the day arrives entwined in its sisterly mass of red hair
Those brash & roiling fields of ruby kelp where

The dark sailor's body is found



Neumann, in "The Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness," says that the creative mind -- which he associates with the older, "matriarchal" style of consciousness -- knows and grows through a process of conception and birth:

"For matriarchal consciousness, understanding is not an act of the intellect, functioning as an organ for swift registration, development and organization; rather, it has the meaning of a 'conception.' Whatever is to be understood must first enter matriarchacl conscousess in the full, sexual, symbolic meaning of a fructification.

But this feminine symbolism does not stop here, for that which has entered must come forth. The phrase 'to come forth' marvelousely expresses the double aspect of matriarchal consciousness, whcih experiences the light of consciousness like seed that has sprouted. But when something enters and then comes forth again, this something involves the whole psyche, which is now permeated through and through with the full grown perception that it must realize, must make real, with its full self. This means that the conceiving and understanding have brought about a personality change. The new content has seized and stirred the whole being, whereas in patriarchal consciousness it would be too often only have been filled in one intellectual pigeon-hole or another."

***

My dream last night perhaps was cauled in the post-drench hallows of the night's rapt garden, a sort of high-summer mass or massing or deliverance of some version of saturated arising which Neumann mentions above:

I'm "back in school," though the year is indeterminate. I'm younger yet also older or fuller somehow, the first day of classes striated with several spectra of psyche: the fear and anticipation I felt as a kid; my history of dreams of going back to school, which always seemed fraught with frustration and addlement (having to go back, not knowing clearly why I was there or what I was to do; often I'd realize there was a class I had "forgotten" to attend for months, and had to prepare for a final exam); and finally something else, as if going back to school was something essential and core-driven, part of my nature, always a next step steeped in old and oldest things--my most natural, albeit fraught, activity ...

Anyway, I couldn't find the class -- there was a row of rooms down a hall and I couldn't find classroom No. 2, the number printed on my class schedule. The rooms were 1, 9, 3, 4, etc. I walk back and forth as the hours and days and years progress, an eternal vigil not knowing where I was to enter. Stuck at the threshold.

Finally I ask someone -- a pair of older women, I think, though they may have been lovers from my past, or simply old classmates or cowokers. One of them smiles (shadowy, like a woman of the well holding a finger to her lips), walks up to room #9, and tilts the number the other way: 2. Oh.

Inside I sit down at a cramped desk (they always seem so small, as if I'd outgrown them by many years) smelling cigarette smoke, Seems that my Teacher doesn't play by Their rules. She's an art instructor of sorts, rebellious though in her mid-40s, not so much a person as an attitude. I'm working on a cigarette myself, smoking the last of a butt, trying to get in my fistful of nicotene before class starts. (I quit a heavy smoking habit twenty years ago.)

The Teacher is going on with the class and I realize that I'm in media res, mid-course, having missed the first half. Can I catch up? She tells me that I need to know Adobe InDesign for coursework, a desktop layout program I don't know. She seems to think that a forbidding requirement but I smile, because I know I have more than 10 years of graphic design experience doing layout work in Quark.

And when she hands out the next writing assignment, I smile again: one of the topics is to write about St. Oran of Iona, an otherworldly figure I have studied and written at great length about over the years, so much so that I wonder if I should purposely write about something else this time.

Yet the Teacher and I strike up a conversation about St. Oran. We both have read Fiona MacLeod's wonderful accounts of him in Iona, and that story makes me think of aquatic qualities which the Teacher may not have read, like "The Children In the Sea." I tell her about my blog (the one you're reading). Here the dream seems to confect the communication as occuring over the phone; I read off the URL and she repeats it, typing it into a computer on the other end of the line. She sees my online name -- Brendan MacOdrum -- and sighs. I then tell her about my father's first experience with the mysteries of Iona and how that led him to raise huge stones on his property in the shadow of Blue Mountain in eastern Pennsylvania, and without going on she understands that I have written about Oran at such length for the reason that I stand in the shadows of those stones he raised, or something like that. That's where the dream sort of dissembles into this waking.





THE MAKING
St. Oran's Day, 1995

Here in the days of seed
words turn back to soil
in a darkening gold forest.
On these late afternoons
the sky is so hard and blue
you can almost reach out
and cup the far indigoes.

The last leaves of the oaks
are whispers of that
approaching dark as they
unhook and fall,
each spiral so slow
and inexpressibly sure.

My father's stones
fling their long shadows
toward the pooling dusk.
They are sturdy enough
to survive the growing
winter stillness of his face.

So walk with him gratefully today,
son of all his making:
For that white season
that soon enough arrives
is like a page turned to cold moon,
more empty and frozen
and still than any night.

All trails grown over,
the stones muted back
to fertile mystery,
his smile among them
never to be seen again,
his making will become
all yours at last.

And then
what will you say
of those cold stones
that gleamed and danced
for him tonight
beneath the brilliant
harvest moon?

***

Indeed. In the dream my dialogue with Teacher is shadowy yet lucent, defined by historic channels yet indeterminate. Who is addressing whom? Does She instruct me, or do I have things to tell Her? Is that the way a fullness emerges -- wombed in the world, made real with words? And where does the dream place me today, trying to assess where to head next?


***

BLACK ANGUS, ST. COLUMBA
AND THE SEA-WITCH

On a cold and windy night on the island of Iona, Fiona Macleod (pen name of the 19th century writer William Sharp) hears this tale of Black Angus from the islander Ivor Macrae:

***

On a day of the days, Colum was walking alone by the sea-shore. The monks were at the hoe or the spade, and some milking the kye, and some at the fishing. They say it was on the first day of the Faoilleach Geamhraidh, the day that is called Am Fhoill Brighde, and that they call Candlemas over yonder.

The holy man had wandered on to where the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He was praying and praying; and it is said that whenever he prayed aloud, the barren egg in the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud unfold, and the butterfly break its shroud.

Of a sudden he came upon a great black seal, lying silent on the rocks, with wicked eyes.

"My blessing upon you, O Ron," he said, with the good kind courteousness that was his. "Droch spadadh ort," answered the seal, "A bad end to you, Colum of the Gown."

"Sure now," said Colum angrily, "I am knowing by that curse that you are no friend of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of the north. For here I am known ever as Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint; and it is only the Picts and the wanton Normen who deride me because of the holy white robe I wear."

"Well, well," replied the seal, speaking the good Gaelic as though it were the tongue of the deep sea, as God knows it may be for all you, I, or the blind wind can say; "well, well, let that thing be: it's a wave-way here or a wave-way there. But now, if it is a druid you are, whether of fire or of Christ, be telling me where my woman is, and where my little daughter."

At this, Colum looked at him for a long while. Then he knew.

"It is a man you were once, O Ron?"

"Maybe ay and maybe no."

"And with that thick Gaelic that you have, it will be out of the north isles you come?"

"That is a true thing."

"Now I am for knowing at last who and what you are. You are one of the race of Odrum the Pagan?"

"Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And what is more, I am Angus MacOdrum, Aonghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name I am known by is Black Angus."

"A fitting name too," said Colum the Holy, "because of the black sin in your heart, and the black end God has in store for you."

At that Black Angus laughed.

"Why is the laughter upon you, Man-Seal?"

"Well, it is because of the good company I'll be having. But, now, give me the word: Are you for having seen or heard of a woman called Kirsteen M'Vurich?"

"Kirsteen-Kirsteen-that is the good name of a nun it is, and no sea-wanton!"

"O, a name here or a name there s soft sand. And so you cannot be for telling me where my woman is?"

"No."

"Then a stake for your belly, and nails through your hands, thirst on your tongue, and the corbies at your eyne!"

And, with that, Black Angus leaped into the green water, and the hoarse wild laugh of him sprang into the air and fell dead upon the shore like a wind-spent mew.

Colum went slowly back to the brethren, brooding deep. "God is good," he said in a low voice, again and again; and each time that he spoke there came a daisy into the grass, or a bird rose, with song to it for the first time, wonderful and sweet to hear.

As he drew near to the House of God he met Murtagh, an old monk of the ancient race of the isles.

"Who is Kirsteen M'Vurich, Murtagh?" he asked.

"She was a good servant of Christ, she was, in the south isles, O Colum, till Black Angus won her to the sea."

And when was that?"

"Nigh upon a thousand years ago."

"But can mortal sin live as long as that?"

"Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before Oisin sang, before Fionn, before Cuchullin, was a glorious great prince, and in the days when the Tuatha-de-Danann were sole lords in all green Banba, Black Angus made the woman Kirsteen M'Vurich leave the place of prayer and go down to the sea-shore, and there he leaped upon her and made her his prey, and she followed him into the sea."

"And is death above her now?"

"No. She is the woman that weaves the sea-spells at the wild place out yonder that is known as Earraid: she that is called the seawitch."

"Then why was Black Angus for the seeking her here and the seeking her there?"

"It is the Doom. It is Adam's first wife she is, that sea-witch over there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks."

"And who will he be?"

His body is the body of Angus, the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum, for all that a seal be is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas."

"Black Judas, Murtagh?"

"Ay, Black Judas, Colum."

But with that, Ivor Macrae rose abruptly from before the fire, saying that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a seamew that was like a human thing.

So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes and said, "God be with us"; and then I opened the door, and the salt smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness of the night.

- Fiona MacLeod, Iona




"Just as Persephone let herself be carried off by the king of the dead, so Dionysos ties a fig branch to a gravestone and lets it penetrate him, and Demeter gives herself to the mortal Celeus. The memory of this divine prostitution was buried deep in the mysteries.

"... [There is] a complicity between Dionysos and Demeter vis a vis their love affairs on the road to Hades.

***

"[According to Plato} Polyhymnia is one of the muses, patron of intimate lyric song. But in the Symposium Plato tells us that Polyhymnia is a fearful muse, not devoted to "fine love" at all, "which is of the heavens and the realm of the Muse Urania," but to eros pandemos, the love that grants itself to all and sundry. Divine prositituion and lyric song are linked together in the shadows."

-- Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

***

That maddening muse of fleeting lovers with their insatiable mouths, naming the god in every mortal they meet: does she not proclaim, as Blake, that "everything that lives is holy"? And though that fire destroy them, does it not also rim this waking summer day, filling all that is to follow with a marrow of eternal delight?

***

MUSE OF FLEETING BEDS

I am the whore Polyhymnia, the song
scattered wide through endless couplings,
the thresh of the ten thousand tongues
which nightly name and damn one
God in ten thousand maddened ways,
the rapture of enraging, surf-crashed loins.
My song resounds in every nether world
sex torches all the way down into,
the glassy pour of every stricken pair's
slide out the back door of the honkytonk
on Friday night, out into the
bushes just beyond the dumpster
at the wildest border of the dark.
I am the sound of nether lips
sliding up and down the
hottest stone of all, a lyrich
which beseeches fire
to quench all fire in the
blackest folds of night. My song
burns all lovers' throats
and blows the top off their
collective skulls, drenching
every trysting-place with the
greasy juice of ecstasy,
a foetal foetid greasy musk
deeper than sea in pheromes,
anemones which haunt the mind
like blue-breasted sirens
singing to all the saps of Doom.
A cheap and easy barrow-dance
to every song in the juke,
that's me, old hits forever stained
with sweat and oil and spume,
the music of a frenzied wood
which parties down but good,
spilling every drop the night
has poured into the sky
'til all is blue, and fair, and waking
except the lovers now fast asleep.
I am at last the lullabye which
closes their eyes at last,
the sound of passion emptied
from every furrow of the heart.
My song at last finished with them,
I depart in the stillness of immortal
engines which I fire come the
next night when love again
is worlds apart. Muse of ten
thousand such beginnings,
I complete the gape from ache
to that bewildered, windblown shore
where all lovers must depart together
or wander on more alone than ever.
My name's in every crashing wave
repeating down the strand,
each one complete and vanquished
as revising fully in the next:
the infernal quatrain of big water
washing every other bed away.

***

Why is sex a transaction with death? Our minds can't comprehend the similitude, not in any literal, linear way. How could that brilliance of fructive light share a bed with the cold mordents of death? How could Persephone, spring maiden, also be Queen of Hell?



Hades had to rape Persephone to bring her to His realm. She was a sexual sacrifice, the sanctification which allowed her to pass over was sexual. Other Gods have given themselves sexually to gain entry to the inviisible world below. Robert Calasso again in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:

"Having gone down to the underworld to ransom his mother, Dionysos found himself face to face with Hades, as though looking in a mirror. the eyes staring at him were his own. Hades told him he would let Semele go, but only on condition that Dionysos gave up something very dear to him. Dionysos thought. Then he offered a twig of myrtle to the lord of the invisible. Hades accepted.

"How is it that that humble plant could settle such a portentious deal? Myrtle was the plant young spouses were crowned with on earth. And Hades couldn't get enough of spouses and their nuptials. He wanted the kingdom of the dead to be mingled with the realm of eros. Not so as to conquer it or subdue it. In fact, Hades agreed to let Zeus's lover, the mortal Semele, ascend to the heavens, 'having been granted permission by the Parcae.'

"No, what he really wanted was to mix the two kingdoms together. The myrtle was Aphrodite's plant before it was Dionysos's, and until his visit to the underworld it had been just the casual, fleeting fragrance of lovemaking. But from now on it would spread the fragrance of another world as well, the unknown. Thus the myrtle became the plant of both eros and mourning."

***

The homonymneonic link between womb and tomb keeps our ear's sense close, a resonant, tide-washed cavern which fills and empties again and again with some new receipt of vigorish, all I hurled in the sea seeking Her recognition, just as I empty every engine at my disposal trying to bring Her back from the dead. The lover clenches and sighs, "I dye," expiring every dram of virility into his love, and the song of Polyhymnia completes itself, leaving the fragrance of the myrtle, musk of every hot-soiled bed, reeking of the riot and rot of the world.

***

THE RED LEAVES OF NIGHT

David St. John

In my dream we are walking together

Through a forest of blanched birch & ragged beech perhaps
I know only that the trunks reflect their mottled

& luminous white bodies in the moonlight

& as we walk to some destination we seem not to know
I notice that the forest floor is matted again

With a blanked of fallen red leaves each as narrow as a finger

Thin pages torn from a pilgrim's book & some
Seem to have scrawled upon them sentences that themselves

Are written in the sticky red of blood entries

In the journal I heard you promise God you will burn tomorrow
& as we walk I can feel beneath my bare feet how soft

& cushioned by such fallenness this passage has become

This journey through the forest of the night
Along a path of red sorrows leading us together to some newly solitary

& distant home