The Great Bells of Heaven (1)

The rounds -- away and back home -- which have defined my most crucial engagements in The Life, my marriages, my endless labors in the service of Love, my hardest work, my most foolish gambits, my nobility, my errancy, the endless reforging of the sentences -- these rounds follow the hero archetype, or are grooved in him.

Perhaps damned by him, at least in any sense of a modernity emerging from traditionalism, for there is only so far he can go, a zenith to his strivings which necessarily must return back to earth, back to mater, the mother, in all of the forms I've reiterated here. The hero ALMOST breaks free, that's his strength, yet he ALWAYS returns home -- that's secret source and end of his strength, harbored in his heart of hearts.


HERO

actually a new poem

His strength comes from a father
no one has the balls to know.
Instead he wrestles waves
and harrows maids with mothers.
No living thing on earth can best him
unless you count the figure in
his heart, that blue wave-back
which loves a shirt of fire. When hot,
he shoots his arrows at the sun,
arousing torment doubly dire.


Wallace Stevens suggests, poetry is the act of an intelligence which resists reality ALMOST successfully -- that ALMOST being the difference between the sublime and the mad (or dead).

Ah but how to calibrate the distance? How far can one go to discover the unknown, the new? Who reconnoiters the territory beyond the hero's sacred and tenacious poetic? How many gods and mothers and academic faculties must be outraged? Do I have the tooth to do it? Do I have the

BALLS

2002

The greatest things I've cared to do
I couldn't for lack of balls.

Standing at the arch
of something bold and real

sharp with the salt whiff
of an unsponsored fling,

I wimped out, returning a halved man
to safe and known, less scathing pursuits.

I left my own Christian God
behind but could not fission

the emptiness into a new divine
spark. And so sanctified mere hunger.

Couldn't hold on to that guitar
savagely enough to hack away

the useless ties of love and fame.
Sober for a while, I couldn't leave

it behind, and so spoiled every
next drink I tried. I left my wife

but couldn't fuck like a yahoo
due to remorse and a useless conscience.

In every way I've failed as a passionate
man, seeing what I could be

and then, biting my nails, returned
to what I simply was. Told to shit

or get off the pot, I lumbered away,
sorry to have even tried. Cronos had

the balls to sickle his father's off,
making him the Dude of Time.

Having failed myself, I became
time's motleyed food, a plate of

steaming huevos rancheros fresh
clipped from the bull who stood

at his real life and couldn't,
each I can't a clangorous snip.

I became a map bordered by all
I wouldn't, a safe land, perhaps,

certainly one fit for marriage and
sobriety and long slow accomplishment.

Where might I be had I more balls?
Surely a bright clangorous place of

bronze and steel blades, piled high
with trophies, notched belts, prizes

and booty, the long stain of burnt
bridges and homes with no way

to look back. Having become the
Knight of Time, ceaseless, unburdened,

up to the knees in blood and lime.


Yes, well you can blame it on the personal pathology, me growing up the weaker second son, always getting pinned by my bigger older brother, always losing to his might, his brute anger. Words were they way I fought back with him, calling him the most hurtful name I could stew in my spleen, throwing it like a dagger between his shoulders as he walked off from pinning me again ...

And there's the boy desperately in need of a father, his father's approval, the father busy with career, careening in his own hurtful woods, all love and smiles when he was home, in those moments we had together, and then gone, vamoosed into the wilderness of his closet, his fallen father, his own fatherless voyage, trying to sail free of every mother. Instruction I didn't get from him, especially in the practical arts, like how to carve a decent balsawood car for the Cub Scout soapbox derby, he was out of town, conversing with Thor on Iona I guess, so I have to carve the fucker myself and the result was miserable, a weak flaccid tiny ridiculous-looking knockoff of a real race car, I was so embarrassed by the thing I didn't even enter it into the contest, how could I? I can't the shadow which dreams of the perfect hero, the Bond, the one who knows all and does all, who beats the brutal evil other and gets the girl.

The hero is fatherless -- Cronos cuts off his father Uranus' balls with a sickle, Herakles never meets his father Zeus, the Irish Lugh is sired by a faery king and born from a virgin -- so his myth may be the quintessential fantasy of the fatherless son, the one who imagines what might and potency might be in the form of human -- his antithesis -- or the hero archetype is what wakens in the dearth of the father, the unconscious compensation for fatherlessness. (Indeed, Jung says that consciousness is the son of the mother unconscious, though its paternity is a mystery).

The older hero figures -- Herakles with his club, the Cerne giant flaunting both club and clublike dick -- are figures of brute strength. This figure is a mental midget but a titan of feeling; he's all heart, sulphuric in passion, equally loving and fatal. The wily hero seems to have come later, strength replaced by intelligence, hammerlike club morphed into empurpled consciousness. This guy has balls -- not big swollen ones like Herakles, but the sort of boundary-breaking audacity which has always pushed things forward in our civilization. Sez Goethe: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."

But personal psychology only carries things so far, its history far too literal to read its literate (and metaphorical) underpinnings. My history has had so many errant gambits of the hero, confusing jaunts in the wild blue, battles with projected dragons, pure stupidity (the tenacious heart which will not let go of a desire, even when it knows it to be false). When I recount the labors of my life -- my errancies and gambols down in the soul-forges -- I do so anonymously, hoping to render my history fictive, mythic, moot in the courts of the real but tenderable in the hothouse of psyche. I dunno if it helps me to live a better life -- it does provide some transparency to it, helps me to see through my own foolishess into its fuel-rich dark dominions -- And I don't know if it will help me to write my way out of the rounds which have so far limited my writing, taunting me to risk while at the same time calling me back to the crashing strand of my mother the sea.

As I loose history into the waters of mystery, so I try to loosen other literalisms. The hero isn't just a male myth, but an gnomon of the male part of my psyche; I'm entranced with him perhaps in a womanly way, impressed with his strenth & gusto & potency (my oh my, what big balls you have ...) He looks the way I think women like to see men, his muscles hauling in their attention; yet I've always fooled myself trying to appear the way women seem to desire that hero; women have often told me they desire far other strengths.

And yet the hero serves women, he is their darling, the glorious child, the stunning youth, the protector of the realm. My wife needs a hero to make our home safe, provide a living, keep the grass from growing in through the back door. She also has her own heroic strivings, battling free of the mother, creating a nest wholly her own, a trade that sells; she too battles unconscious demands and urges and compulsions and fears, wielding a sword as hefty as my own; she brandishes a club heavier than mine when we face off in a conflict, surer in the way of she-lion protecting her brood. So the gender-specific read gets lost in polysexual mix, a mix so confusing it's better just to adopt the attitude of big 'n' dumb Herakles and just blunder on with the work.

The Great Bells of Heaven (2)

THALASSA

Travel down the monkey's ass &
You'll find a fish's tail, finned for
Sailing the biggest womb of all.
Beyond foolery, these motions
Are more riven, nigh desperate
To swim and fuck and eat. That's all.
That road is five hundred million
Years long; and deep, too, sounding some
thirty thousand leagues of salt blue.
The fish's tail hangs from my own a
Very long ways back and down; that's
Good comfort as I fan ahead
With my tribe, who think their brains have
Brighter synapses than the sea's.
May all I fling swim deep in thee.

***

Doomed to repeat the story: that's culture, our backwards-yearning, womb-entranced surf-splashed yearn to journey home to the Mother, foregoing balls along the way. (There's Attis, castrato devotee, hung on a tree for Cybele; there's Aphrodite, rising from the sea exactly where the father's balls were lost.)

And there's civilization, manned in consciousness, sharp as a tack, devious, outraging Mother Nature with its contra-natural devices, replacing nature with forges, brass angels, iron lungs. The civilizing hero struggles to be free of that homewarding impulse: he voyages, lays claim to territory, builds cities with high walls against the dark. He is defiant of the gods, steals their fire, he tosses them into the ditch, he becomes the father, he replicates the world with words and then makes words the world of his supremacy. Why else write? Why else keep writing? What am I expecting to find, there beyond the last line of the last poem?

So I strive to complete (or best??) my father's work, to ratify my elders and then rarify beyond them. I build on their ediface; I radicalize their foundations. Thus the work proceeds. And as the work proceeds it nuances, hefts, flavors with depths it engages. What are balls, anyway, but kettledrums of spirit, the light which is ferried and wombed and delved from darkness, the way the sun wakes every day from the sea? Out there history and mystery mix, like a marge, of shore and sea composed, infinitely close to the mother but of a different order. "Forget that passionate music," Rilke tells us in his Third Sonnet to Orpheus -- it is not about merging with a beloved, not even The Beloved -- "that will end. / True singing is about nothing / A gust inside the god / A wind." (transl. Mitchell).

I've quoted that same phrase here recently -- indeed, it's been a sort of mantra for the production of poems over the past 6 years, leading me on the bow of bios out from home and back to a semblance of that story though spiritualized, internalized, moved to a different chakra, I dunno -- transformed by its fire. Spirit -- the semen of the father -- radicalizes the world from its roots, tears loose, breaks free, lifts and soars the imagination, even as it arches the interior spaces of the Queen of Heaven. Hercules -- or Herakles, meaning "The Glory of Hera" -- is the birth of every child, every new thought, every next moon, the pure futurity of fate, doomed to look with backwards-longing eyes upon a gate it takes great balls to progress through.

***

Xvarenah is represented as a sacred, seminal, luminous and fiery fluid ... (it) is not only "holy" (divine, superterrestrial), "powerful" (it really "makes" the kings and heroes), "spiritual" (it engenders intelligence, bestows wisdom) and "solar" (and thus "fiery" and iridescent); but it is also "creative."

-Mercea Eliade, "Spirit, Light, and Seed"


***

PATRI ARCHON

Pray to paper and paper
will delve rams of blue fire
which real lips may never suck
and that's OK with me, though
the sweaty peripheries would
be nice too. The sun god's car
is real enough, growing restless
in the Atlantic hours to the east;
I can sense its yolk-like visage
breaking at the margins
of this black early satch
of eternal sweet dreamtime,
a phallic brute in his 3-wheeled
hot car, erect & straining to hatch.
The principals were named here
long ago. When I was 18 and
visiting my newly outed father
in New York City, he took
me round the gay bars one night
at the depths and rough edges,
as much to show me his world
as to show his world me,
tall blonde youth just barely
cracked from his virginal shell,
childhood & God on this
shore behind & the readiness all,
ready to spill or receive all
that dark gold. I recall a bartender
with a face like cement hung
with a heavy black moustache,
wearing overbulgy jeans &
a black leather vest showing off
biceps and tattoos -- no fauning
foppery there or in my father,
a man's man showing his son
the secret turbines of a sex
turned wholly on itself, enthralled
with that muscular dark horse
pounding fast and loose with
clappering clobbers of hooves.
I was terrified to take a piss,
much less admit the old male
mojo hanging like incense
in that joint. Still it was an
ennobling jaunt, empowering
somehow, for soon after
I grooved my wheels toward
every woman's thighs to
shore the catalogue of my
own nocturnal rows. I didn't
quite become the man my
father found in that wood
but the fish-god patriarch
who sailed him on to vitaller
more fructive gods
of wind and stone,
that salted divinity
nailed the son but good
to shores beyond
the rails of simple lust
into a dappled and
more perplex ire,
with rays of spermatic fire
soon to gild the surf's dark foam.
Whatever my father
showed me that night now
30 years lost with the tide
is coming home again --
a father now myself
to a burning book
I delve on paper sands.


CAPE BLUE BALLS

O nymph, loveliest of all the ocean,
though my existence gave you no joy,
what did it cost you to beguile me
with mountain, cloud, dream or void?

-- Adamastor, titan-spirit of the Cape
of Good Hope in Camoes' "The Lusiads"


Love drew You here -- OK, desire,
that full ache of wave in gale,
a blueballed bull frenzy which cannot
think of higher things till the lower
ones get done, bull balls to walls
of salty hoochacha, thighs
flung like shores of a roaring
deep-contessa sea. A woman I was
dating tentatively after my first
marriage smiled when I at last
proposed that we make love;
you mean you want to fuck me,
she said with an evilly
complicit sigh, and the whole
space we'd built shifted and
went tumbling down the red maw
of the wave which hurled itself again
and again and again between us
the lovers become the cry of surf
relentless on wild shores. We both
wanted it bad that hot summer
of hurled storms, but what that
was could not be slaked with what
our sexes marshalled to the task
-- cock in cunt, tongue to clit
or slathering sperm foam,
teeth nailing sharp desire
to screamed nipples, balls drumming
on asscheeks, no: None
of those red permutations would
equate, and that was where I
found You, my yowling Cape,
the awe in every awesome clinch
augmenting every futile Yes!
my love and I kept shouting
at each other as we teased the
fragrant sprite from each others'
loins. You never recovered from
the lust which betrayed You
to rock and shore and storms
to nth infernity; here at this
quietest hour, love and age
distill me to I yet war on
with dry eternity, choosing
still to roger on, the old sea-bull
between my knees, his horns
ramming toward the pure
puerile wilderness of swelter,
panties dangling from the lees.
Desire drew You here, but
love of that hard ache is what
is loudest on this page
and is the bawling rage
of every angel jism to
splash the harrows of Your Cape.
Here where nothing ever quite
gets done will nothing else quite do.
Red in royal amplitude
and every wild a smiling blue.


THE WAY THROUGH

The polarity of the Earth shifts
every ten thousand years or so,
north to south, causing all maps
to invert their orients, what's
true turned upside down. Similarly
the sex of our God swings from
her to him and back, carrying our
sacreds in the tide. The dancing
man of Trois Freres was surely
father to the hunt, the Great
Mother the auguress of grain
planters. Then the sun chariots
rolled in and through with their
glorious heroic horses and
then the cult of Mary, Queen
of Heaven, whose womb could
grow a Christ & whose heart
was portalled in the great
rose windows of cathedrals.
Our rabid technical age spins
on the wheels which crushed
her, with furious haunches
speeding ever faster. Whatever
we would further must go
into the bog, to propitiate
and arouse the virility of sames.
We think it's duration we
desire but only so we can
throw our seed deep enough
to engender our secret other,
the shadowy spouse whose embrace
slakes our god til he drowns,
til nothing is left but a
slow egressing sound of
hearts turning the other way
around, praising not the
resonance but an emptiness
which fills the other way.
Here's the fire I stole
from your fertillist womb,
now the digital aura
of Northern Lights underground.
All I shout I remit here
at the southern end of the world,
at Your Cape Blue. And thus sail through.

Infernal Metres

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!

-- Dante Inferno I.1-5
transl. John Ciardi

***

Yesterday afternoon as Hurricane Katrina unloaded her bursting skirts on Miama-Ft. Lauderdale, up this way the sky revolved widdershins around that vortex, turgid, raining in bursts, quelling, laying still but empurpled with menace. Mother of a migraine crept up my neck as I drove home, surely from the plummeting millebars I thought: but when I got home my wife, who usually suffers headaches in stereo with me when hurricanes approach, was fine, perky even from a call to do some custom work. Hallelujah. I settled on the couch after dinner with an icepack to my neck as we watched "Daily Show" and then part of the rouge Bond movie "Never Say Never" (Connery out of spy retirement for this singular reprise, almost a spoof while doing the best of Bond's moves, interesting harrow of the theme) and the rains quelled to stillness.

I woke in that stillness, almost of a witchy sort, migraine still throbbing in my skull but receding as I began my day's labors here. Checked on the TV before I left for work and saw that Katrina was moving southwesterly into the gulf, away from us: and the drive in to work was immaculate, sunny in the first archons of day, though far to the south I could see a border of cumulus, all the way across the sky, the far rim of that whirling hell.

***

It's important to keep in view (for my work, anyway), these arrivals which drive this time of reiterating sources and feeling out the deeper leys of forward movement, what is to follow:

1. This is a fallow time, bereft of the production of poems that has for long been the primary verbal engine of my day. It coincides with the death-in-late-summer pattern of my history, a void-of-course hinge between one furious season and one of transformation. So there is mortis and sterility and stereotopy, a sense of exhaustion, of having said it all and not knowing what more to add.

2. Yet it is also an exceedingly fertile time, for I dip these daily well-buckets into hidden waters, trying drink from hidden vitalities. It is a time for seeing in the dark with dark eyes, for finding darkness in the light, for sensing the vital undersides, for dowsing and ley-reading, for skull-phrenelogy and harupuscry of vowels. There, in the black abysms of my cerebral folds, my future awaits, finger yet to her lips but swelling with a Name.

3. Thus it is a time for morbid reflection, for mooning and ululating, for letting the balls speak, the cock crow, the unsatisfied heart cry out; a time for standing with Orpheus at the crags of Hades watching the forever unrequieted love forever vanish in a gasp of human failure, expasperation and ringing curse at all the gods. A time for bleeding the hero, allowing his ironclad vigor to fester where it is most blind, to expose the black mother's infernal blue tit and recoinnoiter where that milk still stains my face, healed and whole and productive though I seem (at least to myself).

4. It is thus an attempt to go beyond the sterile bounds of reiteration, to sense and emulate what the heart and mind metamorphoses out in the wilderness, out beyond the last frontier of all the species has struggled to become. Thus I renunciate of harrowed gods and divorce dead traditions, harrowing and blasphemous and soul-chilling that may seem. It is to leave Dante at the ninth circle and descend even further, down and out the puckered anus of Hell, becoming that huge turd Jung saw in his childhood falling on a brilliant church.

5. I do so while still praying on my knees every day for sobriety, and still working hard in the tilled fields of marriage and mortgage and the difficulty of The Life. It is to craft sentences even while I doubt their ends. It is to place ellipses between petting of purring cats on the porch at feeding time and pitching my head into the grinning maw of darkmotherscream. It is to get on my knees at day's end to give thanks for another sober day while a hand trails in the water of the wake of what is closest to the dream, inserting a finger into the wildest cunt of all, casting my fate by Virgilian oracle, obeying whatever part of the text my finger falls on, for better or verse.

***

SETTING OUT

Wendell Berry

Even love must pass through loneliness,
the husbandman become again
the long Hunter, and set out
not to the familiar woods of home
but to the forest of the night,
the true wilderness, where renewal
is found, the lay of the ground
a premonition of the unknown.
Blowing leaf and flying wren
lead him on. He can no longer be at home,
he cannot return, unless he begin
the circle that first will carry him away.



UNDERTOW

1988

My stepdaughter and I body-surf
at Melbourne beach: late midafternoon,
the sun angling lower, a cirrus gauze
across the sky. Vacant condos run for miles.
We battle water out toward the waves:
first a tricky drop-off, then a sand bar.
Small waves break forcefully into us.

She giggles each time a wave hauls
her back, screams for me to take
her hand. We fight to a deep place
up to her shoulders. Here the bigger
waves jostle in, sloppy humps breaking with
little curl but good enough for body surfing.

So I leap into a wave. There's a
a second's hesitation, and then
I'm caught! foaming and battering,
dumped finally at the sand bar. Getting up,
my ears ajangle, I see her
ten yards out and screaming something
lost in the hard salt breeze. She's
ten years old now, struggling to keep
her tiny bikini on, shrieking with joy
each time a wave smacks her.

When the waves recede there's
a hard tug, an undertow not strong enough
to drag us out but I feel it in my ankles,
insistent and calling. She faces
a wave that falls over her, and for
a moment she's gone, there's only the
sea that for years I looked at
with no thought of daughters --

A tiny fist raises out of the turmoil, followed
by her face, sputtering, two fingers pinching
her nose, flashing a huge grin jammed
with teeth. Another wave catches
her from behind. When she comes up
she's coughing, spitting water, a claw hand
searching for me. I can't get there fast enough,
ever. We connect, and she scampers up my chest.
I try to stand strong as the wave hauls bitterly back.

Angie wants more, she pleads
for bigger waves, her fear forgotten
in prepubescent thrall. I'm getting tired,
the sea jostles too hard.
She bounds up and down, waiting for
the next wave to collapse on her.
I watch the horizon for what
I know is there, for what I know
I can't protect her from. And wait.

***

A STEP-FATHER'S FAREWELL

1992

I.

In the summer of 1974 -20 years ago-
my parents separated for the last time.
It was horrible: a rip none of my family
could bear, though we did, and today
each of us is some fruit of that wound,
a healing that continues to ripen.

My father preached back then,
but his words were old like the city we lived in,
worn out like the marriage he had too
long tried to fit into. If he was a
man of the cloth, his had been cut
with strange shears. Priest, father,
husband: none of those roles quite fit him.

My mother-well, she could only be
my mother, a simple married woman.
Home and children and the church
were as far as her heart could embrace.
No more, no less. So when my father
asked to go further my mother cried she
could not. She gathered up my younger brother
and sister and moved forever south to Florida.

I was sixteen that summer, the same age
as you are now. After they left, my father
and my older brother and I worked our jobs
and drank. Drank and worked and drank.
There were so many empty spaces in our houses,
so many empty bottles. I moved to keep
moving, sure I would drown if I stopped.
Yet I never seemed to get anywhere: always
running into what I ran from, haunted by
the possibility of love and the threat of losing it.

II.

You found out this week that your mom and I
are separating-for good, not like our talk from
last summer. I have started to pack my books
and search the neighborhoods for an apartment.
The silence between your mom and I is something
new in six years of marriage. We had been happy,
we had been distant: but never so stiff with each
other as to drive out every sound in the house.

These days you say you just get through.
There are moments you chatter and smile,
laugh about some boy at school who's crazy
about you; but mostly you hide in a cocoon
of hurt. Yesterday I came in your room
to say goodnight and you said nothing in return,
just lay there on your bed staring at the ceiling fan
while music on your radio droned on and on.

And I know its not me, not just me,
not just another separation by your mother-
you and your boyfriend have broken up, too.
He is with another girl. So you say your whole
world has shattered-not only the past
that your mom and I tried to form but also
the future you wanted to move toward.

Thinking of you makes me remember too well
when I was sixteen. The devastation on your face
rises in me undigested from twenty years ago.
How do you keep the wildness down? Does each
day loom ahead as if to swallow you whole?

III.

I write this morning to tell you
that hurting you this way hurts me
more than I will ever be able to find words for.
The last, the very last thing I wanted
to do was to shed fresh blood on my parents'
crime. Trying to do better, am I not
repeating it all, only worse?
How humbling to rise no further than their fall.

Yet I also write to you today to tell you that
all the love, all the joy lies ahead, there is rich milk
pooled in that deep hurting place, its gall sweetens
over time as you take possession of it, when you
suffer the hurt and then walk on, suffer it more
and walk still further. I don't know why,
but sometimes dreams must shatter to come true.

So please remember, step-daughter, young
woman, daughter, friend, buddy of so many
Saturday afternoon matinees, there are no
failures in this world, only mistakes we choose
to either learn from or become imprisoned to.
Your mother and I love you beyond our knowing
ever how to do it right. We are here for you, so
differently than before: each in our own way,
now separately, yet forever united in our love for you.

Balloons to you, lovely one, who once ran up
the hill to me with your arms wide and singing,
"Daddydaddy!" Your smile that day stretches
across my years to heal the place I swore I
could never father. You have turned my heart
into a richer, riper place, a house of sunshine and promise
brushed with the sweet watercolor of our tears.


MISSED CHANCES

Steven Dobyns


In the city of missed chances, the streetlights
always flicker, the second hand clothing shops
stay open all night and used furniture stores
employ famous greeters. This is where you
are sent after that moment of hesitation.
You were too slow to act, too afraid to jump,
too shy or uncertain to speak up. Do you recall
the moment? Your finger was raised, your mouth
open, and then, strangely, silence. Now you walk
past men and women wrapped in the memory
of the speeches they should have uttered-
Over my dead body. Sure, I'd be happy with
ten thousand. If you walk out, don't come back-
past dogs practicing faster bites, cowboys
with faster draws, where even the cockroach
knows that next time he'll jump to the left.
You were simply going to say, Don't go, or words
to that effect-Don't go, don't leave, don't walk
out of my life. Nothing fancy, nothing to stutter
about. Now you're shouting it every ten seconds.
In the city of missed chances, it is always just past
sunset and the freeways are jammed with people
driving to homes they regret ever choosing,
where wives or helpmates have burned the dinner,
where the TV's blown a fuse and even the dog,
tied to a post in the backyard, feels confused,
uncertain, and makes tentative barks at the moon.
How easy to say it-Don't go, don't leave, don't
disappear. Now you've said it a million times.
You even stroll over to the Never-Too-Late
Tattoo Parlor and have it burned into the back
of your hand, right after the guy who had
Don't shoot, Madge, printed big on his forehead.
Then you go town to the park, where you discover
a crowd of losers, your partners in hesitation,
standing nose to nose with the bronze statues
repeating the phrases engraved on their hearts-
Let me kiss you. Don't hit me. I love you-
while the moon pretends to take it all in.
Let's get this straight once and for all:
is that a face up there or is it a rabbit, and if
it's a face, then why does it hold itself back,
why doesn't it take control and say, Who made
this mess, who's responsible? But this is no time
for rebellion, you must line up with the others,
then really start to holler, Don't go, don't go-
like a hammer sinking chains into concrete,
like doors slamming and locking one after another,
like a heart beats when it's scared half to death.

(Cemetary Nights)


PERIL

1994

I have traveled here
casting most of my heart
to the voracious sea
racing a black catamaran
so fast and smart and cruel
slicing the surge
as no family man could,
or would
A lover forever
reaching for the door

They say great poems
require an even greater silence
midnight margins
to write St. Elmo's fire
But my ghosts
are whispering ice
in this tin cup of a night
leaking ichor from my pen
like the spoor of a bad dream

In this tiresome feud
between the art and the heart,
I'm less sure every day
which is the greater peril:
these sails so billowed
with guilt and guile
or the siren swells of a sea
that reach out to
seduce it all back to this.




JOURNAL: DISORDER AND IMPENDING MARRIAGE

July 1996

So much transforms into something
else these days -- a personal culture
whispering new exfoliation --
but the new shoots are so less obvious
than all the dying dead ones,
a crazy-quilt disorder in the everyday
frightening in both pitch and tempo.

This apartment, what a mess,
tub grimed for six weeks now,
a grotto of old dirt and sweat
that may never be wholly scoured,
my bedroom a blizzard
of clothes cast helter-skelter,
the kitchen table littered
with due bills and muffincrumbs.

All the needs of an every day residence
tossed into the certainty
of my other residence in
that more settled life.

And those sexual fevers? maybe its
just those Male Fuel supplements I take
for better hardons but I can't stop
thinking about pussy,
crave my beloved's body and get
the measure of a settled relationship,
not her fault, I know our
primary needs are scored
differently, but my needs
howl and how much I fantasize
jerking off to High Society
fuckbabes and waste those
odd productive moments at
work perusing X-sites on
the World Wide Web,
thrilled by the danger of
leaving so red a trail of
mouse-click -- those footprints
could get me fired --

but the risk, the secrecy,
the excess, the thrill -- heady
excursions are the bane
of potency's balm, heady whiffs
in the drinking, too,
that new permission to
a highly dangerous past,
still surprised by the buzz,
unfamiliar with that gold
dislocation of the moment,
afraid of more than a glass or two,
or a stiff Stoli and cranberry juice.
But the easing, the loosening,
is part of this course, libations taken
for no extraordinarily new pressure,
jut another part of a new landscape,
the next life.

How do all of these sum
in the purchase of a house, an upcoming
marriage, relocation, change
of career? Taking deep possession
of my life, my body possesses me with
these midlife furies!

For now I only speak of these things to you,
verse journal, for speaking truly
is so dangerous and complicated.
Perhaps there is truth in beauty: at least
I come to believe that eloquence
marries madness to clarity,
both ascent and fall
finding resonance and love
in silvery scroll
of these hot clouds raging the moon.

***


Dark life. Confused. Tormented, incomprehensible and fabulously rich and beautiful.

- Tennessee Williams on sex

***

William Carlos Willliams agreed fully with the idea that art must tap the dark anachronistic elements of the self. The artist must not reply in kind when he is criticized by the orderly minded; instead, he must go on composing in a condition which is "a sort of night ... except to himself where, within, there burns a fiery light, too fiery for logical statement."

-- James Guimond

***

FORGETTING IS NOT FORGOING

late August 2000

Forgetting that passionate music
does not mean forgoing timbrel
and thrysus. You cannot learn
to forget ferocity any more than
learn to lean on wind. Look: The day
is shot, mortgaged to labors which
mortar high imprisonment.
That's age: Vapors inside dry
vapidity. Who wouldn't rage?
Or dream of wave and tackle,
groaning spurs, the foam of
sigh and sough? Some self-revenant
unrepentant hunger collapses
the jugular of the rest of this life.
An ache to hurl as widely
and wildly as this late and
aging summer sky. Something right
here destroys the dream
of love back home. On this inexorable
desk fatally cluttered with the same hubris.
Consequence nailing the hours
as surely as any riven passion
which once called you away.
You must change your life,
that much is clear: But everything
right now is in a thunderstorm
blowing everywhere at once
with nothing near that you'd call shelter
much less home.

***

THE FLOOD

2000

Your house by the sea
is not a married one.
You are lonely for your wife
remembering how soft
and open she sleeps,
her pale body curving
and falling around
a green silk nightdress.
There is a girl inside
that woman damaged
perhaps too much
by your careens.
Your heart breaks
thinking of her
and so you call her
saying, I'm coming home.
She does not respond,
her silence both still
and oceanic.
You head to the
bedroom to start
packing a suitcase
when you notice
sea-water mashed
against the window
and rising fast.
Safe where you are
but desperate to
go home to her
you chance the door.
Cold water falls
down on you
in a thundering cascade.
You think you
will drown but in the
next scene you stand
in a room harrowed
but dry: The couch
and table with its
telephone just
the way you
remembered them
from the day before
when all was well
but now ruined and
dangerous to touch.
It is a room haunted
by its drowning,
unliveable and fell.
You wake with a
start to a ringing
telephone. Your wife now
hates you for what
you let in that door
trying to get back to her.




SOME LOVER

2000

you know for someone who
professes to be such a romantic
you aren't much of a lover
she said in one of the angry
exchanges of late when departure
seemed inevitable I like little
gifts that say you're thinking of me
I like men who are animated
and go at things with gusto
who know when to rip my
bra off and take me Hell you
don't even talk much when
we're having sex or eating dinner
I have to fill in those gaps
you don't seem to want love
much at all so passive so wishy washy
not much a man at all

And I thought how true
looking back over years of this
resenting her lack of passion for me
and wild for the trills and purrs
of secret places I hid from her
being a lover inside love is
the blind spot of eros to gallop
inside the curl of the wave
inside the house of the one
woman you have sworn to love
for the rest of your life well now
we're trying at least and she is
begging me to take her yearning
it seems for me inside her
and I feel this big wind fresh
with sea salt slapping and washing
over me I want to yell Hell Yes
not here on the page but right at her
on her in her with her etc cetera
but it's daunting bewildering too
to stand right in the middle of the life
and the wife you love and draw blanks
to feel so silent and passive I hope
therapy will help me take possession
of this love and ride it fiercely inside this life
for now I keep praying and swinging
at every pitch trying to see all the
moist shadows in her trying to learn
the language of love inside love
but I'm like Violet our cat who can't
stand to be hauled up on the bed
unless she's in her box when she
is lifted up in that box and set down
she lets me pet and pet and pet her
and she just purrs away will let
me look at her through a hole
in the box just inches from her face
and she stares so openly and pure
but only when there's a box between us
that's me gotta have a page between
us filled with words in order
to exult in running so wordlessly in love
some lover

***

GOD'S BALLS

2000

like eyes of
blue fire
and lightning
everywhere: Eve
of destruction
on her bed
her white thighs
opening to receive
me. No one may
live in this red
seam between
the fin and foam.
Some frenzies
invoke, others
provoke. Naked
and screaming,
I enter


***

BINDINGS

The etymology
of the word "religion"
suggests a ligament
(ligare) which binds
us back (re) to God: The
Christian binding sucks,
tut-tutting with a
threat of hell loose
gambols in cherrycoke
tits & rye: But the
Church has continued
to provide community
for many, its faith
wrapping the bone
and sinew of strong
& committed good:
For me, the Church
has long died,
sacrificed perhaps at
the altar which
broke my parents'
marriage: But the
notion of religare
is still potent:
Marriage has provided
such a ligament for
me for ten of the
past 12 years: Held
in place there, I've been
free to roam here:
I've launched so
many poems
from the stability of
my study in a house
with a wife asleep
upstairs & a cat
purring at my feet:
Poems which tested
and questioned the
bindings of a marriage
though I always shut the book
and headed upstairs
to stroke my wife awake
when it was time, taking
solace & comfort in
that mutual breathing warmth:
Now I'm separated from my
wife and these lines
sound like a torn ligament:
The spaces are now
too wide and wild
to get on the page:
Free to roam, I don't
know how or where
to start or even if
I want to: There is only
the rages of emotion
in my torn heart:
Well, these poems may
be bad and worse
until I can find the
ligament below or
inside this ruptured one:
I've got to find rituals
and nuptials and
ablutions devout enough
for the stronger
rivers I now flounder in:
Maker, renew
me in the binds
where truth and craft
are sworn and further.

***

Whether "he" be god, priest, or mere mortal man, in order to approach the sacrificial fire, through which alone the heavens can be conquered, he must wrap himself "in the metres." It's good advice. The real punishment of Dante's damned is not this or that torture-many in Purgatory face similar sufferings-but the fact that the torture can know no end ... (Hell) is a place of obsession, a place where time has stopped and thought has become its own prison. To get through it, we must wrap ourself in the metres, for metre obliges us to keep moving. Now we see why Dante chooses as a guide a poet (Virgil) renowned for the perfection of his verse.

- John Hollander

***

METRES FOR HELL

When you're going
through hell, don't stop,
they told me in AA.
Virgil's meters kept
Dante afoot through
all those fuming circles,
but what have I?
Surely not these lines,
though I crank 'em
anyway. Sotted with
Bea's tits bluelit
by an obstinate moon.
Ooh ooh ooh.
Now the salt sting
of love lost, the tidal
ache of a woman
I once loved well
and a life I worked
once so hard for.
All gone now because
I couldn't set still-
Asking stones to
unbind untruths and
so forth. Oh well:
A narrow
path now traces
a third transit, perhaps
a way out. Alone
and working
hard on just one
or two poems.
A little meter inches
me forward. It there
an honest life
devoid of love?
Is that good
enough? Good God,
enough at least
of this bonehacking saw.


BEYOND THE SICK PERSONAL

2001

Drank hard and long
Saturday night trying
not to hurt one woman
with another. Hurt both
with shrill absence.
Fool. Dropping 10-spots
in the laps of curvy
schnapps and grooving
to bands I'll never hear
again. Even met a
third woman fresh from
a 15 year marriage
who readies soon to
leave all this. Defeat,
meet defeat. In the
same place I met my
wife fer Chrissakes.
And O God I was
sick yesterday vomiting
the wrack of excess.
Feeble light, pale classical
musics, my head
a wounded sump
of desire. Couldn't
read a thing til after
3 p.m. Then on a
deck chair on the
porch in the halcyon
calm of a fair winter
day, 72 degrees, sky
perfect and the air
redolent with barking
dogs and neighbors
at their yards. Reading
poems by Wallace Stevens
and wondering why I
write at all when every
penstroke hurts someone
somewhere. Well I had to
write about the outer
dance didn't I. Now remorse
and guilt are inside the
pen before I lift it.
How can I proceed? It's
time to find a new ink,
a different page. Time
to stop this caterwaul
of knowns. Instead
let's do a little strange:
let's dip the pen in
that dark moon mist
which resides and nourishes
beyond the sick personal.


WEDDING RING

2001

"By the Rock of Saint Columba sworn"
reads the inscription on my wedding ring.
But Oran was that slipppery plinth.
the serpent keystone, watery and dark,
bridged between Formorian depths
and churchly ambitons.
Build your house here if you dare.
If some suitable appeasement
can be buried here.
What did I plant for you, my love?
I tried to forget that passionate singing
by resurrecting a bunny hop
of guitars. I wailed on 'em one last time
before laying one by one to rest,
bone by singing-no, shrieking-bone.
But that infernal music lured me away.
I put my head in Oran's mouth
leaving you just an ass
that ended up crapping over paradise.
I keep that ring now by my single bed.
It attends my every rise and fall.
At odd times during the day
I feel a ghost-weight on my finger,
like a stone, and remember all.
Enough apologies, sufficient truth.
"In your heart, my own reborn"
was the part to be inscribed inside the band,
but it wouldn't fit. I still live
in the infernal ring of it.


WORKING IN THE RAIN

2001

1.
We spent the day in the back yard
about chores: you tried to paint a
chest of drawers while I moved
plants about the landscaping
& other odd yard chores. The day
had other plans, though, with the
first rain falling hard at 11 a.m. and
intermittent through the rest of
the afternoon. Still, it was good
to be outside working around this
house we love, working close to the rain.
It sheathes the June sun, falls
so musically over all, and
sweetly blesses what it rinses. While
it rained we sat on the porch with
our feet hanging out. Looking out
at the yard, you said, It's days like this
when I realize how sad I've been. When
I realize how much I don't want to lose this.
And I thought, me too, though I didn't
say it then, because I have done so much
to force us to let this go. I want to
work my way back here if I can.
I have to go down into the labyrinth
and face myself first and figure
out how to return with all of me.
I have to pay an enormous debt.
I have to zip it up and change the tune.
Can I? Sitting with you in the rain
on that fine day, I wonder now
how I could do anything less and live.


2.
There was a blessing in that rain,
history washed clean and you
out in it, a child dancing with joy
at the center of her love, the
life you had returned to and gained
at last until I made you let go.
I was out there too, for a moment,
without a mask or bone of contention,
back to that garden at last,
freer than ever to live my own life
making these poems unnecessary
and moot. We didn't get much work done
though we did linger a good while
in that rain, where everything is
simple and good and waits for us to return.


3.
Formidable challenge:
you and I sitting on the
back porch as it rains
looking at all we have
worked on and for
now spreading its arms
to the sky for that
benediction of storm.
Whatever grabbed me
that moment with wonder
ache and joy now
makes holding this pen
an excruciating task-
As if there was only one
poem more to write
and, failing to catch it well,
there was never a poem
worth writing. Love perhaps
is stronger than any lyric;
love certainly is more
brute and basic than any
verbal ruse I employ
against it. All of it washing
away in that rain when I
just wanted to be home and
back at work on what furthers
the two of us and this poem
merely a puddle after the storm
soaking fast into the ground.
I must write this poem
however I can and know
it could be the last
poem, the water of silence
that blesses as it falls.


A HOMECOMING

Wendell Berry

One faith is bondage. Two
are free. In the trust
of old love, cultivation shows
a dark graceful wilderness
at its heart. Wild
in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds
of what we know. O love,
open. Show me
my country. Take me home.

The Soul Forges

SONG SMITHY

Shine a light in here and
you'll find a formerly
gearless Hell churning now
in a labyrinth tooled to
proceed to the always
next and never final shore:
A shire of beds and deep
blue wells where she smiled
and turned away: A viaduct
or proscenium inlaid
with skulls and hooves
and the gilded gossamer
of verbal wings: A siege
machine of oak and
hide on infernal wheels
bruting forth a ram
resembling the Cerne
Giant's 40-foot cock:
A vault stuffed with
drawn pussies and asses
warded by monster models
I built at seven: A work
table piled high with drafts
of poems, designs for transit
and a bounty of shells
-- conches and whelks
and a cunningly wrought nautilus:
A gullet of fire which
consumes all this and
belches the next eager flame:
Roads carved in basalt
totems, circuits and
cul-de-sacs, spiral staircases
and oubliettes: Labial doors
and keyed to spermatic
oars: Dragon ships by the
thousand, each with green
plundering eyes: Missals
of gold hidden behind
a blue baptismal font, their
pages scribed in the
blood of Oran buried
further down: A room
stuffed with all the guitars
I once strapped on and flew:
A bar (now under lock and key)
where I sat rooted to a
stool milking dread
infinity: Gardens of richly
manured furrows and distant
hilltops where Uffington
wilds: Cups of exquisitely
fashioned silver and inlaid
with red gems, filled with
ink, sea-waves, mare's blood,
well-waters cold as the Pole:
The Gundestrup Cauldron
and the Book of Kells and
the Willendorf Venus, each
in a room with a scholar
and a poet enlarging their
charms: A library older
than Alexandria filled with
well-thumbed volumes filled
with shore-lined marginalia:
A bone scriptorium where
sixth-century hands
ink all the texts that were
and are or could be:
Merry beds of bobulous
boobery slickplunging
derricks of blue oh so
blue tarrying joys: A cafe
where Rilke Joyce
Melville Jack Gilbert
James Hillman and Tom
Pynchon ululate all night
about the women who
matter and the materia
they write: A ripening
kitchen where Jung
pens his alchemy, tending
a vat of imagined
soul: Dante and Shakespeare
like titans of stone
or iron standing in the
sea looking over my head:
A restroom where someone
shits mightily what can't
be used: A tank for Moby
Dick larger than any sea
& nursing a port for
the errant moon: A green-
leaf esplumoir which
towered Merlin's mad
molting spell: Three
beaches -- Sandymount,
raw as spring where
the bird-woman first
flew; Iona's Beach of
the Coracles, brutal,
wild; and Cocoa, so
dazzlingly white and
south of every dreamed
love: A bog further
out where all of this
cerebration bloats
and slows: Still further
out a bald strand where
all my bad ends click their
teeth like Norns: over
every crest Manannan's
gray-blue island where every
voyage aims: Circe's
rock too, delicious as
peach brandy-sticky
nipples: A pale table in
a bare room on which
the head of Orpheus
dreams of Eurydice
in the wedding bed of song:
A real-time ballast
lifting these keels -- cold
again this morning, wife
now in the shower,
news on TV of a bomb
in Jerusalem ripping
open a bus like bloody fruit:
A cave behind and under
the labyrinth with its whole
story painted on the walls
thirty thousand years
before you never read these
words: All of that you'll find
between these lines,
west of first light
and east of the the tide:
And all of it muscles
and fins this pale hand
as it moves margin to
margin like a ravening mouth,
devouring the next promise,
the next voluptuous way in
to Your blue brassiered
bower where tomorrow
I begin: Every time I
enter here I ramp that
spinning wheel which
cycles through the ages
to bring God to view:
A vantage on a motion
which repeats the ocean's,
waves of verbal blue
which fill the well with You:



Darkmotherscream: dark honey is in the raging mother's womb, sweetest and most briared to the son's return. Thus Herakles is both the Glory of Hera and her bee-stung apogee, the visage of pure male strength wardened to a life within pussy walls of one grip or another. The hero belongs to the mother, much as he battles to be free of her. What he runs from is exactly what he runs to.

***

Spill that over this 4:12 am, Thursday, the usual big weekly production day ahead with all the labors of the Day Job, tasked by love of a woman and my heroic striving to make a living for and in that world. There is an impossible blend of ideal 'n' real vatted in Another Day -- my neck and wrist and shoulder sore from the cumulative wear of those labors, years of computer work, the road-weariness of endless keyboarding, the fret of labyrinthine system bombs, extension conflicts, software upgrades, tweaks, redesigns, cost-cuttings, new tools (web marketing, RSS feeds, blogs), another new promotion still hot from the kiln, blazing with what I hope will be a fructive glaze ...

Yes, all that's ahead, while ebbing moonlight still reigns at this hour on the garden, ghosting distant towers of cloud, each a hermit praising the God of approaching tropical storm/hurricane Katrina. Everyone else sleeps but I ply on here, eyes wide, working the verbal forge, hammering out steel cruel enough to cut the scaly iron tendons of my past, my torpor, my dalliance amid breasts of no avail, my futureless fatherless figureless fugues, phrenologicizing wave after wave of uteral aplomb. Behind me, Sathan, Demiurge, Gorgon, Mom, Wife, Mistress, Muse, Siren, Drone of Habitual Beachside Returns!




The hero's battle for deliverance is aided with the cunning tools of the smith. Mercea Eliade writes in The Forge and The Crucible,

"... In contrast to pre-agricultural and pre-metallurgical mythologies, where, as a natural prerogative, God is the possessor of the thunderbolt and all the other meteorological epiphanies, in the myths of the heroic peoples, on the other hand (Egypt, the Near East and the Indo-Europeans), the god of the hurricane receives these weapons -- lightning and thunder -- from a divine smith. It is difficult to avoid seeing in this the mythological victory of homo faber a victory which presages his supremacy in the industrial ages to come. What clearly emerges from all these myths concerning smiths who assist the gods to secure their supremacy is the extraordinary importance accorded to the fabrication of a tool."

Shield of Achilles, Thunder-Hammer of Thor, Manannan's blade Answerer, Excalibur delved to the hero Arthur by the Lady of the Lake: the instrument of victory is hammered out of the mother's procreative womb (symbolized in the forge) and employed to defeat her, in one way or another. Technology is how we defeat nature, or master her, gain regnancy over the planet, assert the divine will of God. (The family motto of James Bond is "The World Is Not Enough," similar in vein and spleen to my father's primal family motto -- Non Providentia Sed Victoria, "Not by Providence but Victory.")

Whole peoples have been mown into the grave by one innovation or another -- bronze blades, siege engines, Gatlin guns, thermonuclears. Species and ecosystems too have vanished by swipes of that techne -- I think here of dodoes exterminated by blunderbusses by the Dutch on the island of Mauritius, whales nearly exterminated by harpoon guns, the hissing of pitspray loosing ozone-gobbling flurocarbons. (Yesterday a fuel tanker on I-95 overturned in a heavy rainstorm, causing a dozen vehicles trying to get out of the way to enter nine different collision, killing a child.)



So the talents of the smith are bright and dark. His weapons spell victory for his chosen, and damn the opposition. The Pax Romana was bolstered on bronze, roads and tactics -- great for the plebians of the citidel, but also enslaving half the world. The victory fist cast a long shadow.

So join dark and light to the aura of that brute smith hammering away at his anvil, the muscled arm rising and falling in a parabola of boon and harm: our tools are paradoxical, they forward civilization while wounding the culture. Now hold that image of the divine smith a moment longer --- archangel of bronze, devil of infernal smoke, archetype of every innovation that has mastered the world and eased our way, sound of every durable connection snapping and flittering away -- And fit that image into visage of the hero who fights all his life to be free of the mother and thus is her glory. The two images align perfectly.

Thus our massively conflicted, complected present, modernity struggling to emerge from tradition, tradition fighting back with all the spleen of Grendel's mother, Wired Magazine a cornocopeia of gadgets fresh from the smith's alchemical kitchen, Pat Robertson praying fervently for God to remove a few more Supreme Court justices and, while He's at it, inspire some government agency to assassinate Hugo Chavez of Argentina and prevent the spread of godless communism and A-rab fundamentalism.
The debate on stem-cell research and evolution vs. intelligent design are the topmost examples of Beowulf battling Grendel's mam at the bottom of the mere or Apollo nailing the Python at noon or St. George defeating the Dragon Uffington: progression nailing regression to a cross which hangs between the breasts of progression's wife.



Is this work any different? Do words contend for mastery of world, do they charm nature (like the song of Orpheus), woo thighs into a honeyed spread, become a virtual enough reality so the real isn't necessary any more? Eliade, again from The Forge and The Crucible:

"The identification of smith-craft with song is clearly indicated in the semitic vocabulary; the Arab q-y-n, 'to forge,' 'to be a smith,' is related to the Hebrew, Syriac and Ethiopian terms denoting the act of 'singing,' 'intoning a funeral lament.' There is, too, the well-known etymological connection between poet and the Greek poietes, meaning 'creator,' 'maker,' and the semantic resemblance between 'artisan' and 'artist.' The Sanskrit taksh, meaning 'to create,' is employed to express the composition of Rig Veda songs ... The Old-Scandinavian lotha-smithr, meaning 'smith-song,' and the Rhenish term reimschmied, meaning 'poetaster' or 'rhymster,' underline even more closely the close connections between the profession of smith and the art of the poet and musician ... According to Snorri, Odin and his priests were called 'forgers of song' ..." & etc.

So fit the poet onto fused image of smith and hero and now we get a hologram of brilliance and bondage, like moonlight at this hour, reflecting the sun but not besting it, doomed to repeat the old natural rhythms til the world itself is dead. My words come from the mother, much as Beowulf killed Grendel's mam with a sword found in the drowned castle at the bottom of the mere, but how much do they get beyond her?

Not a hopeful paradigm for the survival of the species (or this world), but it does underscore the need to get around the hero somehow, to dig into his archetype, fester in his wounds, doctor his story, get on down the road with less of him, thus find a way beyond the maternal hills which rim and rhyme this enterprise.

DARKMOTHERSCREAM

Andrei Voznesnsky
transl. Robert Bly and Vera Dunham

Darkmotherscream is a Siberian dance,
cry from prison or a yell for help,
or, perhaps, God has another word for it --
ominous little grin -- darkmotherscream.

Darkmotherscream is the ecstasy of the sexual gut;
We let the past sink into darkmotherscream also.
You, we -- ooh with her eyes closed
woman moans in ecstasy -- darkmother, darkmotherscream.

Darkmotherscream is the original mother of languages.
It is silly to trust mind, silly to argue against it.
Prognosticating by computers
We leave out darkmotherscream.

"How's it going?" Darkmotherscream.
"Motherscream! Motherscream!"
"OK, we'll do it, we'll do it."

The teachers can't handle darkmotherscream.
That is why Lermontov is untranslatable.
When the storm sang in Yelabuga,
What did it say to her? Darkmotherscream.

Meanwhile go on dancing, drunker and drunker.
"Shagadam magadam -- darkmotherscream."
Don't forget -- Rome fell
not having grasped the phrase: darkmotherscream.


The Fall of Rome

We have grown too ripe
in this brassy noon.
Can feel the seams
frazzle like a fuse?

The old ones
raised alabaster
walls against the moon.
Their arrogance became
this jar the night
now pours us from.

Pagan hours return.
The marauder closes
his day-book and washes
our blood from its covers.
Wolves bay from
wooly margins.

How good it feels
to lift this glass
after so many years
of empire.
Something torn
like ecstasy
leaps through
me like a spear.

Dark things now
chirr from the rents.
hungry and inviolable.

No longer terrible
in this torrid light,
something blossoms
in a shower of blades.

Red enough to gild
a new tyranny.
Swelling the apples of
the next millennium.

The bite of future
so swift and sure,
a sweetness cold
and endlessly wild.




THE DREAM FORGE

If work is our yoga, our dreams dark
labors are its sutra, lessons of
unsheathable fire plunged deep
in awfulness. There is a furnace in the
basement of my heart, a hell
where imps grease old gears
and maul the presses where
my life is published, day after difficult
day, each a sum of hope and woe
balled tight and tossed into the
maelstrom, sustaining the engines
which roll me back here once again
for the next long daily fray.
Love's torture is also racked there,
desire's jezebells heaving their
cleavage in motions that cut me
raw and clean, their lips always just
beyond the ache of my kiss, their voices
taunting, swooning, accusing, their
sweet abysms always walking away,
finding me in my love faulty and
with means far short and droopy
of their own penetrate depths.
Each wave's folds and crash booms
down those metal halls in full
augment of ebb, descending miles
and fathoms down. Endless are the toils
and smarts here in the forges of that smith,
maker and renewer of what is both art
and its heart, all my bright gleaming
shores fabricated here by a brute
ugly man who will never see the
hosannahs of day, much less the
beloved I dream. Each night my day's
labors are sent down an oubliette
to plunge in the vat of acids
which tears me apart, limb from
bloody limb, to know the depths of
desire and God, where seven bright
swords steadily rise and fall,
gashing and dismembering and
setting me at last free. When I wake
there is no trace of blood on my lips,
only the faint salt staining the last
gossamer of fast-fading dream. -- What
wildness, what awfulness, what tender
perfection was there in that room?
I wonder, as I drag my ass out of bed
in the dark and stumble on down here
to stroke up the day fires and
do it all over again.



SURFSIDE SOLUTIONS

Long ago my mother set me
like a shell upon the strand.
Her voice tides in my ear-
warm milk for worried brow,
pink rooms which soft resound
the drench of drain and draw.
I love to mound my words
inside that nautilus of surf
-a useless carpentry,
you say, to castle heart
in walls of hammered grain-
No matter. Sonorous physic,
wave-songs I curl my mornings
to, you are a cat's solution,
the sweeter nous. Like the
town that solved its water
shortage by showering in twos.
That's what you'll find here,
a vault of curved additions
which fall too fast to count,
shapes which fail in every way
except to greet those great rooms
she carved with her salt voice,
bright mansions left on wet sand
for your own hands to hoist.

Dark Honey

Let's descend into the dream of the huge hungry bear who blocks my way to the singing room -- a tower of fur and fury, hot for the dark honey hived in my heart. Surely there is terror, but there is also awe, the awesome strength and vitality of Mother Nature -- this is a she-bear -- and a shaggy sexuality, pubic hair soppy with female fluids, striated with the spunk of my own spume.

What door does she block, thus guard, thus warden, thus invite me into?

(For details of the dream, see the post "Homer Simpson in Hell," from a couple of days ago.)

***

WILD

... to be wild
means nothing you do or have done
needs to be explained.
- Stephen Dunn, "Hawk"

Words that feather
and fur, seldom seen
and darkly souled.

Motions allowed
their caterwaul
without a victor.

Not a poetics
of meaning
but a true wind.

A geometry of
reversals and
descents.

Blue tatters
of silk flapping
on a dead oak.

Cold clear water
up to my chest
and rising.

Great hooves of
thunder this
a daily roof.

Grand exception
to the house I
wait outside of

with no key,
all proof of residence
long rotted in the rain.

Ape of my former
life, thumping one
bone against another.

Ecstasy's rictus,
plenitude's wrath.
Horse you'll never

tether much less ride
though each poem
keeps leaping,

keeps missing.




I CANNOT FORGET THE WOMAN IN THE MIRROR

Sharon Olds

Backwards and upside down in the twilight, that
woman on all fours, her head
dangling and suffused, her lean
haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and
ass narrow and pale as a deer's and those
breasts hanging down toward the center of the earth
like plummets, when I
swayed from side to side they swayed, it
was so dark I couldn't tell if they were gold or
plum or rose. I cannot get over her
moving toward him upside down in the mirror like a
fly on the ceiling, her head hanging down and her
tongue long and black as an anteater s
going toward his body, she was so clearly an
animal, she was an Iroquois scout creeping
naked and noiseless, and when I looked at her
she looked at me so directly, her eyes so
dark, her stare said to me I
belong here, this is mine, I am living out my
true life on this earth.


****

I swim in a lake, dark murky waters: and see a white fin huge in the water, arrowing towards me -- a shape of annihilation and hunger, predatory, after human flesh. The shark seems sure to get me but plunges by, or goes through me. I escape or resurrected after having been eaten. I'm on the shore, wildly screaming for swimmers to get out of the water, but no one heeds me and the shark opens profane jaws and chomps away, swallowing children whole, then turns on a young woman, feasting ugly and lustily on she-flesh. An older woman hauls a red-wagon-load of babies down to the water, wholly ignorant of the danger, the terror. Into the water they go. I watch from a dune, way away from the danger, flapping my arms, screaming "get out, get out!" The old woman turns in the water, trying to figure out what I'm saying, and I can see behind her a whiteness materialize, sharpen into gaping jaws like a door about to suck her in. The shore proves no protection; the shark swims out onto the sand to catch prey, tail thrashing in ecstasy.

-- Nightmare, 1993



Rilke distinguished between the river and the woman, the desire and the beloved - and the distinction is cruel, a blade:


... what does she know
of the lord of desire, who often, from the depths of his solitude,
even before she could soothe him, as though she didn't exist,
held his head, ah, dripping with the unknown,
erect, and summoned the night to an endless uproar.
Oh the Neptune in our blood, with his appalling trident.
On the dark wind from his breast out of that spiralled conch
Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow ...

from the "Third Duino Elegy," transl. Stephen Mitchell


***

LETTER TO JOHN KEATS

Jack Gilbert

The Spanish Steps - Feb. 23, 1961

What can I do with these people?
They come to the risk so dutifully,
Are delighted by anecdotes that give
Them Poetry. Are grateful to be told
Of diagonals that give them Painting.
Good people. But stubborn when warned
The beast is not domestic.
How can I persuade them
That the dark, soulful Keats
Was five feet one?
Liked fighting and bear-baiting?
I can't explain the red hair:
Nor say how you died so full
Of lust for Fanny Browne.
I will tell them of Semele.

from Views of Jeapordy (1962)





THE BURNING BUSH

Men build strong roofs
& lock their doors & windows
seeking to prevent those
shafts from Cupid
but (and because) let
that puff pastry
guzzled on Venus milk
find an opening
in the phalanx
(of course he can)
& watch a man
shot by fire
exhaust and ruin
his mortal days
trying to fuck her
(or him) (or it)
but good, if only
for just once.
You'd think
that gold barb
sails straight
between the ears
to see those fools
gambit and gamble
for just one lucky
roll, pushing all
their chips to the
center of the felt.
Amazing how their
fire burns a city
down to fumes &
ennui just to
hasten the inch
of one kiss, one
clench, one sweet
soaring rail of
of unholy,
uncompromising ire.
And then it's gone,
freighted off in
that suckling's quiver
to zap some other fool
through the next
Achilles heel.
Nothing of that fire
remains in the chill
of first raw light
where waken empty
and stilled, bankrupt,
all former intimacies
frozen, tossed, dead.
And the men
(or women) wander
through what's left
like lamps without
a wick or fuel,
their eyes harrowed,
hallowed maybe,
by shadows of
that brilliance
which presumed
to ride the sun
for just a second,
maybe two, long
enough to kiss that
fire & melt and
then come to
watching the world
take shape again
in a dark spot
at the tough end
of one long horrifying
fall. O that we could
be like the bush
that God enveloped
in a voice balloon
of flame and yet
stayed green when
He had said His fill.
That our wick dipped
ever in that pure fuel
welled from our
former nights.
That each
poem I launch here
could burn paper mast
and keel all the way
across to you, and
yet still unfold
in your pale hands
enough to spill
wind and wave
all over every shore
burning beyond
this I and Thou.




BURNING


1.
she sits at the computer
he stands behind her
afraid to touch her hair
unable to resist the fire

his fingers are matches
stroking her smooth cheek
she accepts the touch
eyes closed to all
but the music of the fire
opening unfocused
fluttering on wings of a bliss
she must cage

he breathes her in
like a man underwater
for too long
like it is his first
and last breath
(it is, you know)
he smells cocoa butter
and spice in her hair
he smells something
deeper than smell
and his cock leaps
up into his heart
on a dolphin spouting flame

They have worked so hard
to resist this moment
she willed to another
he willed to himself
but their kiss burns
with a third will
violating everything
affirming only
that they
passionately care

A kiss is a word
only here; when lips
part slightly and soften
all language dissolves
in the wet hot touch
of the unspeakable other
their breath is
the space of a vowel
a room a moon a sigh
a wave of unbearable sweet
sweeping away
every reason they
have to resist


2.
I'm writing this poem
desperate and drowning
in a desire which
never reaches shore
never exhausts in foam
between your thighs

I knew full well the price
I wrote this poem
in that kiss
knew where
this slick slide
of letting go would lead:
to everywhere and
nowhere; to this
page with its leaky
singing bloody words;
to yet another
morning's long walk
back to silence.
I knew, I knew
you couldn't stay,
couldn't let go.
So fucking what.
How could I resist.

I asked for this
chalice of flame
when my hand
reached down
your jeans to
cup your ass
I knew I'd burn
into cinders and soot
this is my sulfur road race
pumping hellbent again
from surrender to sorrow
what a way to burn
what a way to learn

she sits on the shores of the world
her red hair the wild sunset
I sail toward without hope
the sea a foam of writhing fury
the sky so blue
like her eyes
I'm trying so hard to see
in the dark of this morning

when I touch you
I am a poem
of burning poppy
exhaling your sweet fuck musk
down every dark corridor
singing through the lonely night
that stole into this room

when you pulled back
when you walked out
I'm burning baby
a pyre of pure beginning




THE DAZZLING DARK

If it blazes, it has worth.
- Rilke

There is a God (some say),
A deep,but dazzling darkness.
- Henry Vaughan

The upwelling sea carries
in its cold hands a
mineral haul
beyond all price.
That fraught wealth
was minted in a cold
deeper than ice,
from compressions
of sky on sea
and sea on rock.

Old certainties
never die, just fall
to lower ones
Below our knowledge
truth teems in
the ghostlike teem
of lost myths and deaths
-ensoulings which dart
and trigger the
cracks of doom.

And when the sea lifts
up these martyr wolds
in the mineshaft of its
deepest currents,
the feeding is richest
-plankton on
celestial whorls of mineral,
a million seafowl
on ten million fish.

So I must trust haulings
as this bone hooked
from abyssal heaps;
mineral and glittery
as cold Moby's eye,
a poem as this is
surely not ours to keep,
no family jewel, not
even a totem sire,
unfit for anthology
or canonic ire.

This poem is
the wave which
ferries a book
discarded long ago,
a seal-breviary
embedded with hard
gems and inscribed
with squid inks
by hands long vanished.

"There's a divinity
that shapes our ends,
hew them how we will,"*-
the wave is deeper than any
I tried to swive or swill,
richer ensoulings than
any entrusted to heaven's
keep or jail or till.

* Hamlet vii 9-10


***

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS (OH MY!)

from A Breviary of Guitars

"My hope has been
that I might fetch /
Reproaches from
my former years,
whose / Power may
spur me on,
in manhood /
Now mature, to
honorable toil":
Billy Wordsworth
again, "Two Preludes":
An apt jingle
for this wrangle
perhaps: Outing
the damned spot
in a 3-part
harmony composed
of testicle,
vesicle & ink:
Of muscle,
pustule & spume:
Of past errancies
amid present
lunacies hatching
future perdition:
Anyway I take
all of that thrash
and smash which
has been long
down under &
haul it up with
4 beat buckets
& spread it on
a narrow white
beach: A
postmodern
zeitgeist giggles
at calling this
"honorable toil"
or even poetry
(forget compression
economy &
similar horses
which should have
reined all this
to one hundred
HA one thousand
pages): But I've
been far more
attentive in
writing about
those guitars
than I ever
was at playing
'em: Song, at least
as Rilke calls it,
had a power
then which dove
underground &
nourished long in
darkness like a
cicada: It rose
5 years or so
ago & tried to
find expression
in "poems" whose
tightly angled nooks
all lacked
accommodation
of the wave:
And so this
daily hour
standing on a
ledge with my
pants round my
ankles looking
out and down
into a guitar-
shaped valley
with alcoholic
mists and
shockingly
naked nymphets
still calling me
into the darkened
weeds down there:
Aren't you glad
I decided to let
all that rip here
in the words of
a middleaged sex-
sappy happy guy
working the salt
mines beneath
them thar foothills
of decline? Hip
hip hooray! The
critics and
publishers all
cheer, bearing me
on their shoulders
to six-figured
full-time poethood
and a berth
in unmouldering
canon: Of course
how can that
be so in this
unpublishable
and necessarily
anonymous work:
You can't! That's the
joy of this:
It's an absolutely
impossible foray
into literate
seaweed: The
ultimate sandbox:
The perfect memoir:
My biggest gift
to the world given
to no one at all:
Jam on that oh
dirty white boy
as you peel off
hot licks on your
blue blue Phantom
guitar: William
Logan said
recently in
The Paris Review
that a great poem
leaves wounds
every time you read
it and scars long
after: Though he
also said, some wounds
make you laugh
("It would take a
heart of stone
not to laugh at
the Inferno"):
Well at least
I don't go
through the door
marked "Lecture
on Wounds" do
I? Nothing but scabs
& scabies &
rabies here:
Lions & tigers &
bears oh my:
Triple-mooned
ululation in
the silver gray
break of an
astoundingly dark
wave: Surf's up dude:
Time to party:

***

TUTORIAL

Ted Hughes

Like a propped skull,
his humor is medieval.

What are all those tomes? Tomb-boards
Pressing the drying remains of men.
He brings some out, we stew them up to a
dark amber and start sipping.

His is fat, this burst bearskin, but his
mind is an electric mantis
Plucking the heads and legs off words, the homunculi.
I am thin but I can hardly move my bulk,
I go round and round numbly under the ice
of the North Pole.

This scholar dribbling tea
Onto his tie, straining pipe-gargle
Through the wharf-weed that ennobles

The mask of enquiry, advancing into the
depths like a harbor,
Like a sphinx cliff,
Like the papery skull of a fish

Lodged in a sand dune, with a few straws,
Rifled by dry cold.
His words

Twitch and rustle, twitch
And rustle.
The scarred world looks through their gaps.

I listen
with bleak eyeholes.

***


After having caught their first sperm whale, the crew of the Peqoud cuts the head off, chaining it to the side of the boat, and begins the work of removing blubber from the body. In a lull, when the crew are retired below deck, Ahab comes upon on the deck and looks on the head of the sperm whale which had been severed and chained alongside; and looks upon it, reflecting morbidly, seeing into its darkened doorway:

It was a black and hooded head, and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet hear and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is within thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. The head upon which now the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the world's foundations, where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot, where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned. There, in the awful water land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went, hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insensate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to make an infidel of Abraham, and no syllable is thine!"

-- Melville, Moby Dick




WILD SIDE

Priapus is said to have
been both father and
son to Hermes.

-- Karl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

Along the Trail
there is a border
beyond which
you dare not go
hence cannot resist:
It's that wild side
you drive over to
to cut loose & freak out
& dance with the moon.
Astride all of the Trail's
plebian concoursings
toward work & home
there are illicit lacunae
of wild juice, Circean
nipples, rough and
dark interfascia
of concupiscence shrill
with the hot ejaculate
of self-evaucation.
Sure, there are plenty
of places around town
for vice, but the Trail
is its queen, is mythic
(hence proper for
my poem) for
that daring and danger
which like china white
sprinkles round the
proferred mouth of a
vast bottle whose
bottom, cors delecti,
can never upon entry
be fathomed. Take
the Fairvilla Superstore
near Princeton, a sort
of Wal-Mart of porn
offering vault after
vault of sexual sugar,
leather corsets & whips,
& vibrators & dildos &
flavored creams & cockrings,
& a three-story warehouse
of magazines DVDS and
videos to slake every crotch
thirst -- straight or gay, S&M,
tit-fanciers and butt-fuckers,
groupsexers, cherrypoppers,
cross-racial lust, bestial
burdeners, faux-rapists,
gonzos, all-girlie revues,
redheads, midgets, the shaved
and unshorn -- whatever
coupling of I and Thou
between heaven or hell
that could be sieved through
the sump of the mind and
the heart can be rented there,
The light throughout has
a lewd sickly cast, perhaps
it's porn's bottomless greed for
no hole barred to the eye,
or maybe it's just or the glint
of all that gold stolen from the
hapless helplessly-sex
sotted fucks who slap their
plastic down as they file again
out the door. The cars re-enter
traffic on 441 discreetly
or not; only God's watching
after all, that Lord of
remorseful desire, whose
angels weave blue ice
round the sense of men,
confusing heart with heat
and souls with balls. Drive
on, altaring boys, and
drain the cup well.
Further on down the Trail
about a mile south
of Colonial Drive
in the real urban squalor
is the Parliament House,
that rollicking gay
nightclub and motel. It's been
scythed of much of its
meat since the '80s
by AIDS, yet it's still
amazingly loud, the all-
male reviews like
nightly big bangs of
crossover and put-out
and git-down and shout.
Bewigged and slithery
in dresses of gold lame,
the svelte girlboys croon
faux-Beyoncee and Pink
shaking souled derrieres
more strikingly pure
than the originals, these
freakish nougats of desire,
pure show on the surface
& all man where it counts.
And the crowd of fags
and fag hags and a
surprisingly large number
of just folks inbetween
are just loving it, cutting
loose on the tumescent wings
of disco and poppers and booze,
foraying far beyond those
reaches straight men will
go in their narrow rooms
of straight fucking straight
women -- god the stony
cold silences of
fern bars and titty
bars where sex is served
the cold stony drop dead way.
Their loss, sigh the soft swishy
freakshow boys, riding up
on Priapus' huge phallus
tip like the Trail's true
buckaroos, getting sucked
off in every dark corner
or royally raked in those
ripe-smelling rooms fore
and aft. Praise to
the grinning freak god
up from his savage dark
garden which grows thick
mid this Trail, Lord of
bad desire with his lewd
tongue, gross belly and
arm's length dick saluting
his mother Aphrodite's
milky boobs, the tip glowing
with something like
pink neon, the balls down
at the base bigger than
grapefruit, full of that
awful sweet juice meant
only for spilling again
and again and again.
I got both of my tattoos
at a parlor on the Trail
at different ends of
two marriages --
the dolphin rider in
'93 after I divorced
my first wife, the
Uffington Horse when
I was separated from
my second in '01:
Some imprint of that
Trail's darker hooves
when a wild unquellable
spirit seemed totemic,
could no longer be
hidden or shamed.
And yet Thank God
I found my way back home
this way up 441, far away
from that part of town.
Here an aging man
can grow something
fertile and useful
in the garden. The mind,
the summer, the Trail
keeps it savage.
I woke at 4 a.m. this Sunday
morning with strobes
of blue and red on
my eyelids and the wall --
a cop had stopped
some car in front of
our house -- Got up &
made coffee & said
my prayers on my
knees & sat down here
to begin, grateful
to write this poem
instead of getting
busted by it.
There was a catfight
somewhere in the dark,
short & vicious & then
quiet. The garden
dark & soaked from
last night's rain. A
distant thunder like
falling on their
ass far far away,
Priapus laughing low and
lewd just to the
east as some floozie
from the Zellwood
Tavern kneels in the
weeds just off the
highway, her eyes just
slits of pearled moon,
her mouth wide
as you will go.



MEDEA


Surveyor, sausage
deliveryman, retired cop,
state agent, parts store
owner, unemployed laborer:

all must have thought twice
before turning back to
pick her up: but lust is such a
common stay against the

dreary bloodings of age,
trumping all the suits
we thought to wear. Lust
is that lens which made her

so lurid for the press:
We see the bastards waiting
for her to catch up and climb
in, fingers drumming on

the wheel: feel the indecision
between forking up twenty bucks
for ten minutes of hateful sex
or peeling rubber back to

that job or wife where life belongs:
Feel the false privilege in the cab
of the truck as she climbs
up and in with heavy sigh,

country songs on K92
and a pint of Jack Daniels
now empty on the seat:
She palms the sawbucks

and then pointing back in
the woods where all the
action takes place: Feel
the goatish glee sour-mashed

with dread as they wind past
pine and palmetto to the spot
where a whore gets fucked
but good in the broad,

scadling light of a day
which unzips and rips:
The sense of enactment
is so precise that it takes a

moment to see .22's snout
in her hands: To see beyond lust
to what's really there, those pig
eyes meant to plead now

burning with a different
desire: To hear the gun's
sudden yawps, two, four
times, maybe the entire clip:

Or what follows after all lust
collapses, the rapine
complete in the dripping
cab with the sharp smell

of cordite like sperm in
the air: To feel at last the
sense of justice, in turning the
whole perverse script of lust

on its hairy, indignant ass.
We loved the story which emerged
from the trial, reliving the passion
of her spree. Taking both sides.

Rooting for her one way,
in some other shadowing her
every bad step toward her end.
Everyone got what they deserved:

The rubes get rubbed out, the whore
our prick in the end. Someone
has to do the job. Mornings driving
in on 441 I pass a highway hooker

who's worked that stretch for years.
She stands out from the dark
as if waiting for me in particular.
Our eyes lock for just one

second - I'm moving fast-
but it's enough to feel that
ancient heat inside the
unkempt, thumbs-out gaze.

Inside every mark's a Medea,
a cistern for paired lusts and
there for the taking, raking
hell on any hot, dreary

afternoon between here
and the next town, the next
enactment flipping its coin,
her tale, our fate.




CONDUCTUS

For centuries the church owned song's
High blue heaven - its psalms intoned
as on the backs of angels who
Finned sea zeniths with their wings, whose
Unearthly fire was for God's heart.
To sing lower risked sulphur's ire.
Then a minstrel risked a new song
Which trothed church airs to a maid's cunt.
No one could resist that devil bray
Which rollicked street to court. Later
Songs pearled hymns to love, courtly tales
Of noblesse silk. The new cathedral
Rose stone by singing stone. These poems
Once obeyed what old angels taught.
They sing now from this funky cot.

***

The triplet form is an exact imitation of one of the conductus, strophic compositions in Latin which had been developed at the monetary of St. Martial, an important musical centre in Guilhem's own dominions. The conductus were more elaborate than the older hymnody for one or more voices. A man like Guilhem would delight in taking over a more religious form and turning it to bawdy uses.

-- Jack Lindsay, The Troubadours and Their World

***

Comrades, I'll make a song - refined, no less.
The only sense it owns is foolishness.
Love, Joy and Youth are all mixed in, I must confess.

Who fails to understand it, a peasant is he:
who in his heart won't learn it deep. We see,
if a man finds the things he wants, he holds it steadfastly ...

Listen, and my dislikes I'll here unlatch:
a guarded cunt; a pond - no fish to catch;
the brags of worthless men, with which no deeds they match.

Lord God, King, Ruler of the Universe,
why not on the first cunt-guard set your curse?
No servant or protector ever served a lady worse.

Well, here's the law of cunt and how it goes.
I speak who suffer through it many woes.
Other things, taken from, grow less. Not so with cunt. It grows.


- Ribald song of Gilhem of Poitou, transl. Jack Lindsay.



MINNE'S CAVE

Hands as big as my lust for You
Surely built this love grotto, deep
Under this hill where sheep graze and
Slumber. The stones which vault Your bed
Could raise cathedrals, but instead
The Old Ones hid them far from view
Beneath the turf, to barrow old
Ferocities of star and sea.
They are gone but we remain, fresh
Heart inside stone ribs. Only here
Can we let ourselves go in the
Star and sea frenzy that first kiss
Unleashed. Here, my love, here we will
Coil on crystal linen and sail
Verbatim into wild blue hell.

MERLIN'S CAVE

(At Tintagel in Cornwall, Merlin's Cave
penetrates the neck of the peninsula
where the castle ruins remain, 250 feet
above the sea. At low tide one may enter
it and walk through to the beach on
the other side, but at the night tide the
sea enters and becomes impenetrable.
Merlin's Cave is an example of a
paradoxical place, where it is dark during
daytime and where the sea is beneath
the earth. - Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes)

You'll find me far beneath the ruins
Of Arthur's double court: A cave
Which by day leads dark and cold to a
Blue-foamed, crashing shore, and by night
Is drowned in ocean, a door to
Under kingdoms of driftglass and
Coral queens. Step down from high
Ambition to learn what crowns and
Treasures are tides of: Here dream
Dark's plunder of the regent sun,
The sea's upwelling of high ground.
Here I said farewell to men to
Bed my fair feathered Niniane.
Under every throne there's a mouth,
Blues singer of the royal South.


SEA-WITCHERY

And what of the sea-witch,
my thousand-year bride?
She was once the nun
who prayed matins
like a shore but I
lured her to the dark
waters with the music
of the tide between
these protean hips,
ensnaring her white
calves with a bony laugh
& dragging her all the
way out and down. I
had my way with her
but good, the envy
of every narwhal bull
and deep-diving
spermacetti ram.
And then I lost her in
that keep, & become
an exile of love's spleen
on a hard-smashing shore
of basalt ruins, searching
every wave for a trace
of her seem amid the
drifting dozing
manes of low sea-grass.
I know she's there
but I've lost the way
I used to see her,
or she has simply
wearied of my eyes
and now fins the
arteries of a darker,
deeper man than
I have balls to go.
The news each day
washes in the
battered corpses
of her undinal ways,
naked cyanotic sailors
with still-red lips
pursed to kiss what
you keep drawing
5 more fathoms down.
Look at all the pumpkins
we carve recalling your
raw pudenda's ire.
And oh the darkened
forest spreading round
the heart of he
who finds you nightly,
black stumps creaking
in a cold autumn
night's breeze, a
bonier sound knocking
from your last soiree
into the noirish
tableaux of bars
and cars you dreamed.
I should have rid my
loins of this thirst
for you so many lives
ago -- divorced the
demiurge, renounced
the sea, bled white
my salt iniquities:
Yet this muse of
darkness I call my
own, albeit for
bitter and perverse,
the moony incandescence
inside my every wave's
dying sigh. I am here
for her declision
on shores of nascent
white pages gleaming
white as bone. Her
name is Kirsteen M'Vurich
and she is that much
further out, sprawled
on a bed of chorda filum,
staring in the silver mirror
in which she sees me
in its gleam. I can hear
a high and ghastly laughter
beyond the booming stones,
a twittering of teeth
that picks the pelvis clean
and blots its lips with foam.



LUCERNA EXTINCTA

Few are witness to the
magick of this hour -- a
Mt. Dora cop car patrolling
up the street, Violet our
Siamese who danced tippytoe
for her treats & now
haunts the looming window,
me on my great white writing
chair with its endless
Dick & teeth below.
O but what revels and
reveals at this dead
a.m., the world's infernal
-- internal, at least --
watchworks interred,
crowing loud hell's bells.
Angels above and below flit
to and fro in this dark,
ferrying stones to the
secret sacred island
where churches are
never meant to go.
Eight-ton stones from
Somerset and Orkney
lumber and grind
their heavy loafers
down the street, on
their way to Lake Dora
for a drink at Jack
O' Beard's. Covens like
shadowy scribes furrow
into the garden, lift
the birdbath and go
underground (in loco
subterraneo) to write
the devil's secret book
of love, dancing round
the chambered tomb on
broomsticks til the lights
go out (lucerna extincta)
and the real fucking
commences in royal
majescule, the Horned One
plunging every slot gone
sloppy with black seas.
Who would know?
Few have observed
this nocturnal congress
and thus miss the
world at its wildest blue;
the dreaming suburb
around me is like a corpse
upon a table, draped in
the pale winding sheet of
sleep which lifts,
miraculously, come dawn.
We deem this hour dead,
a zombie zone for blackouts
and insomniacs and
insatiable greenwood lovers.
And while that's true--4 a.m.'s
a flag for every navy
to drown in its desires--
still the night is so much more
than that. It's a secret
world that thrives when
we are lowest, its wattage
rich and fertile when ours
dim most, very old
and much alive, perhaps
more so than we'll
ever know. At least vigils
like these offer a peek. See?
Outside a sole streetlight
bastes a pale yellow what
sticks up out of the waters
of pure dark -- tree boughs,
asphalt, the dimmest shade of
house across the street -- ears
and vertebrae and a flash of
tail of the dragon I here ride,
winging from three bells to five
the devil's stones from mount
to mere, my pen alive, pouring
ink down the blackest throat
to come this way to beg a drink.