Saturday, September 10, 2005

Thresholdin'

Storm Ophelia finally picked up her skirts yesterday and fluttered away east and north, leaving not much behind but a couple of day’s dark hiatus from the brilliant heat of late summer. (Beaches in Flagler county may have all washed away.) Her visitation was a ponderous and meditative one, no real threat though everyone wondered why she lingered so long just offshore, did little, then left ... Overnight a front of sorts washed clean the sky and today it’s been clear and joyfully calm, gorgeous really, the sky of a blue not seen since the spring, hued in the ichor of transformation, if only for a day ... Such a joy to work in the garden this Saturday, pulling the inevitable weeds, trimming some, getting my fingers but good into the dirt, blackening my fingernails, washing clean the keyboarding malaise, the bloat of fluorescence. And that gentling breeze, absent of Ophelia, or of her reborn countenance, the spring of sighs she once meant to the prince of awfullest I ...

***


What orients a study of the past but our own? We may not have a great amount of room to be “original” in our speculations about how civilizations arose, due to the fixed origins our our brainpans. To me the distinction between “civilization” and “culture” has more to do with our relationship to history —”civilization” progresses in measure to our creations, and speeds as those creations accumulate. “Culture” looks backward, has roots in the million-year dreamtime of our preconscious development. They’re like Janus faces, looking in opposite directions.

Are there thresholds where one way of thinking passes over into another, an interface where sine becomes wave, a shift of ages where the proportion of a small but waxing lucency then leaps over to an age characterized by waning darkness?

It’s not that we were savage and then suddenly civilized, but there came an interim where we were too civilized to be truly savage again.


I speculate on that face which lifted towards the cosmos in the 4th millennium BC, a mind prepared by long evolution from wonder to calibration, the exegesis of heaven into its grand calender, the attempt to know Time’s most massive wheel, its ebb and flow through the aeons. That same gaze is in the scientist of our day, her gaze continues the work of that older one, writing down the high dominion, counting the ages back through human to geologic to stellar reaches of Time, along the backward parabola of narrative, out to the staid outer reaches of Infinity, no essential different in that outward, upwards look which homo faber, man the maker, turns toward its future.


And once that threshold has been passed, is there any true going back? Can our contemporary brains think with mind of the fourth millennium BC?

Certainly there are cultural empathies for that lost (or buried) psyche, symbolic matrix which survives in our language, our hearts -- our primary longings -- which haven’t aged a day: grand sympathies for Mater, uroburos, the erasure of deep uteral waters. But there’s no way to go back, not now, inside our phalanx of technologies wrought to defeat Mother Nature, surfeited on all of the progress which has resulted.


INTERVIEW WITH THE NEW TECHNOLOGY MANAGER

1995

Humankind is co-evolving with its artifacts,
and the genes that can't cope with that new reality
will not survive into future millennia.

-- Michael Schrage, Wired magazine

The new technology manager sat in my office
the other day to complete an interview
for the employee newsletter.
"You cannot manage the new technology,"
he said, tapping his laptop for emphasis.
"You can only fall into its flame
and pray to burn profitably."

This guy's worked
70-hour weeks for more than a decade
to arrive exactly here.
He's a good Puritan, a Christian family man,
balding and squinty and rumpled,
his eyes sad like Einstein's but
fixed on a more frenzied horizon.
He recently won our company's
top management award
for attending the birth
of complex advertising system
that will exchange its data
with other systems
easily, efficiently, and fast,
eventually driving dozens
of jobs off the flow chart
into Whatever.

He continued.

"All we are is a sieve,
frail impediments
in a torrid runoff
we call change.
That force is madness.
The only surety
is a greater, more efficient madness.
We pan neck deep
in the cold foam of
accumulating knowledge,
more likely swept
onto the rocks
than toward any
semblance of home."

I asked him,
what about us,
so many business bees
clustered in this
whirling hive of stress?
He looked away.
Wrong question.
His voice was bolstered
with long surrendered agonies.

"Reconcile your chains," he said.
"Your liver must be plucked
by ever-new systems of god.
Forget that passionate music of career.
In the new organware,
connectedness runs
so deep that one life exists
only to support countless others.
We exist in a supple, cognite web,
a glowing complexity
deep in a belly
we can never rise from."

I shifted in my chair.
The room was too warm,
too crowded with machines.
Coworkers hacked away
in stale fluorescence.
Phones kept ringing
for the dead.

I asked, then how
to find a foothold
on so slippery a future?

"Forget trying to understand
your job, our company, this business," he said.
"Tomorrow careens away too fast.
Your job survives only
as chance surrender
to quicksilver evolutions
too manic to name.
Bury the old algorhythms
that once composed the chart.
A new jazz thrums
with polyrhythms and pluck,
pumped on the sugar of teams.
The individual dies
in a swelter of irritation
and grief forever waylaid."

"You see," he said, scratching
his thin gray beard,
smoothing the few hairs
left on his head,
"We have become efficient
succubi, technic and rabid
for the lucre of rubes
to swathe the
beds of stockholders.
We are potent
only in defiance of
the life we leave behind."

"Do not despair," he smiled,
gentle, dangerous,
"There is no going back.
Gently and reverently profess
the Change which blows you
to smithereens.
Your anger is obsolete
and conspires to thwart the work
that must be done by all.
Please do not rock the boat;
the waves are fickle and ignorant
and have already caught the best of us.
We must pull together.
Accept there is no alternative.
No one can help you."

He stood. "Such are the
laws of the future
buried in all I really said."

I thanked him for his time
and pressed an f-key on my keyboard.
The image of the new technology manager
flickered in a wave of pixels
and was gone.

A threshold perhaps again, where symbolic work has passed a critical mass and become a center of identity with the binary 1 and 0 as the screws of a turbine which no longer whirl toward but overrun all shores. It is a liquid freedom chained to a hyper-reality, dispensing with the ground itself, with Mater, creating a cathedral inside the cathedral, a womb inside the mother’s womb, so virtually and literally Inside that we may never find our way out again.

Who is being left behind? Seems to me that it’s the individual. Net consciousness -- internet consciousness, the sum of all that brightness poured into one larger cognition -- is slowly deleting the self. Sven Birkerts wrote a few years back: “If you take all our technological innovations of the past two decades, -- certainly those in the fields of computing and communications -- you cannot fail to see that their collective tendency is to breach the wall of selfhood and to swamp us in an element of connectedness” The threshold divides the monk and the meme, St. Columba at his farthest shore become the hypertext he copied, plainsong of the tonsured become the polyphonic organum of the hive.

A natural progression, wouldn’t you say?

Perhaps. But that “progression” is tricky, because it seems every rise has a fall, every departure aches for a return. We may have invented computers and networks which rival the brain, but they are still wired to act like human brains. What else could they think of but that what we dream? Networks reflect a hard-wiring in human nature from simple to complex; all our inventions are merely intentions of soul. There is an archetypal complexity in that uplifted, outward gaze, making connections, founding sciences, building cities, charting heavens, stringing lyres tuned to the music of the spheres: older complexities of no essential difference from newer ones -- they maze, they progress -- the Mayan calendar as Byzantine as the Hindu pantheon, those dizzy spirals like archetypal synapses of the scientist who today harpuscape the genome, unscrolling the Milky Way of DNA which rules our genetics, our million-year history, adding one more life to the tale — our own.

And what is that gaze looking for anyway? Our distant future is cauled in the same amniotic as our distant past; at some threshold, whatever we are gazing for sees the arrival of an older, more perplex, darker, deeper face. Rilke once wrote to his wife Clara, “ Looking is such a marvellous thing, of which we know little; as we look, we are directed wholly outside ourselves --— but, even when we are at our most outward, things seem to happen within us which have been waiting longingly for the moment when they should be unobserved, and while they take their course, intact and strangely anonymous, their significance grows in the object outside, a more convincing, more powerful name, their only possible name, in which we happily and reverently recognize the happenings within us.”

When Columba desires to look upon the face of Oran one last time -- Oran so representative of the fading oral culture of the Gael, the seal-child Odrum who could not survive into the future -- he perhaps is at such a threshold. Columba would become the white knight of scholarship, poetry and history, championing the cause of writing all the old stories down at the same time spreading the light of Christianity throughout the Hebrides. He was a man of the future, and perhaps because of that he desired so to look once more on the face of his friend, on the past he would build over. At that threshold of old and new dominions, Columba turns to look back, and is affrighted by news he receives out of the mouth of Oran -- “everything you say about God and man and heaven and earth is WRONG!”

Should he not have bothered that backwards glance? Could he have done otherwise? I wonder now about Orpheus, who so desired to look upon the face of Eurydice that he turned back right at the threshold and broke the taboo which conditioned her release from the dead. Orpheus’ future took shape in that backwards glance; the spectral drowning of Eurydice back into mist (Ophelia drifting below the wave to where she would no longer be seen) fated the rest of his story. His future leapt out of that backwards glance.

***

Thresholds: As before, so now: when we were ready to map the heavens, were we really simply ready to to gaze more truly on the on the face of our dark other, in its extraconscious, burning blue totality— collective unconscious, self, beloved, mother sea, father of heavens, God? Wielding an abacus at the dread lip of madness, tallying all of the names which stand like mile-markers between I and Thou? Each song a calculation for trajectory, the angle of the dangle, calibrating how far I must rise before I properly fall —And what lies at the end of calendar but the next day of the round?

Are we talking narrative here or of a spiral which always returns to a center? A threshold, the answer is yes, though there is a tincuturing difference. Howard Nemerov puts it this way in “Because You Asked About The Line Between Prose and Poetry:”

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

A symbol -- snow which falls but flies --is what both defines and animates a threshold, helping us to approach it and then understand a dimensional shift. Symbols are the mind’s paddle and sea, allowing our bicameral minds the rare opportunity for synthesising two thoughts into one. Neumann writes,

In early cultures, everyday habit is simply the unconscious existence of primitive man, the habitual clinging of his libido to the world in participation mystique, in which state his natural life is spent. Through the symbol, the energy is freed from this attachment and becomes available for conscious activity and work. The symbol is the transformer of energy, converting into other forms the libido which alone enbles primitive man to achieve anything at all. That is why any activity of his has to be initiated and accompanied by a variety of religious and symbolic measures, whether it be farming, hunting, fishing, or any other ‘unaccustomed’ work not done every day. Only with the help of the fascinating, libido-catching, and ego-absorbing affect of the symbol can the ‘unaccustomed’ activity be undertaken.

The myths are always primal, original, prior to civilization; they are numinous because they gleam with original fire; they exist outside of our cities, beyond our knowns, and no amount of analysis, exegesis or excavation can dig deep enough into their primary psychic essence.(O tho we try! ).

The mind that has evolved is deeply paired with mind it evolved from, as with every biologic geologic and stellar iota it has laddered from; we build for the future yet yearn for the past; we create new worlds out of the old ones, using the same stuff; we thrive, imaginatively at least, at that threshold where the veil was once thin, when 6 was 9 and vice versa, going at in like a couple engaged in 69, feasting on the otherness. We were once less conscious, we are now more conscious; once unconscious mana tyrrannized our thoughts and behavior, now conscious beams threaten to blicker the landscape with brightness. Temperance of the systems, of both composed and nourished, seems to be the next door of the dream; the tools are found in the threshold, at the moment when energy leaps from synapse to synapse, when snowflakes falling suddenly fly.

The paradox is that the very thing which has helped us progress -- our symbol-making facility -- is the very thing which turns us back to sources. Symbols, minted in the dream, rouse us from a sleep bounded by a sleep, inspiring us to build better wombs that are never more than that. If this has you as dizzy as it has made me this afternoon -- feeling that I’ve gone round and round wasting many words -- then perhaps I’ve succeeded in staying at the threshold, and given the chance for the next face to be born.

***


THE CLINGING

1988


Why are we always clinging to whatever we can?
Such a useless gesture ... Remember birth? How we
were squeezed down those gripless, unrelenting walls?
Was that the essential lesson? And have we ever
stopped sliding since? It just goes on and on, one long
hilarious tumble into the grave's sudden mitt.

Our hero has been a champion at clinging
for all his life. He grew up in a Depression home
where to have was to hold, a destiny beyond
a boy's serial adventure, high in the polished mansions
where Gable and Stewart wooed gowns more
glittery with coin than silk-full of breast.
Damn, he whispered over popcorn, his heart
grasping the ankles of his fancy, never to let go.

Now 50, he's appropriated well: a long successful
rise at selling cars, living in jazzy new house
in the ritziest suburb north of town, his many
investments ringing up many returns. He drives about
in a red convertible Jag, flashing a new, young,
pretty, and thoroughly manageable wife.
He knows how envy makes his clutch of
these things so sweet. Banking the world's desire.

He once thought his hunger would eventually
sate on enough big-ticket meals, but every morning
he wakes more starved than ever. If age has taught
him anything is to cling sublimely, on substance
with context--country club exclusiveness, political
contributions, lifetime subscriptions, zoning pecadillos.
Haunting his having with spirit and soul.

He's true capitalist of the heart, his passions
grabbing and grubbing every shot of life.
To keep his grip firm he makes airtight deals,
cementing things into place with shit and blood
and sperm. Sign on the dotted line and
zip it all away. His lawyer and accountant can have
their slice of his ass so long as they keep him
presentable. His pretty wife can shop on Gold
and Platinum cards all day while he's in
the office, just so long as she neither loves or leaves him.

All in place!
Every autumn he rides with busloads of boosters
to attend Gator home games. They all dress in
cartoon blues and oranges, reverently sweeping
their arms in the Gator Growl. Biting off a chunk
of that real stuff. On the way home he tells his
drunk buddies about his secretary who can't type
worth a damn but boy can she sure take that
ole dick-tation! He hauls from his hoard the
memory of laying on the conference table with
her legs clenched around his pumping ass,
urging him on in a sing-song voice. Daddy,
he said. Daddy. Damn, he thinks, as the
memory fades into his own reflection in the
darkened bus window. He fired her when her
clinging no longer made his own much fun.

On late Sunday afternoons our hero barbecues
steaks in his back yard. His new wife lounges
by the pool in haze of fashion magazines and
s dewy glass of Chardonnay. He sips vodka and turns
the spits of meat. Fat hisses and smokes, rising
to no god. Surely this is an arrival of sorts--

But our hero knows no epiphanies of letting be
or letting go. Not with the sun falling fat and red
in the west like a nubile cherry for the plucking.
Damn, he thinks, and though we can't see it,
we know his line is cast again at the horizon,
ever after the sweetest prize of all.

TRANSFORMER

2000

Sitting by an opened window
five floors up in a distant city
waking to dawn traffic.
Hungover and queasy
facing a last day of
pitches to editors.
Desperate to lie in bed
with my wife cupping her
breasts as she sighs.
My lonliness taking
the measure of Jack Gilbert’s
poetry there. Astounded
that so much courses
through words and nipples
to feed poem and body,
impossible to contain
or remain or betray.
Outside the window
hums a huge transformer
of gray girders and
wired pots, powering this
25-story hotel with
enough juice to ink
every deal. But it’s barely
a firefly’s pulse a half mile
down a dirt road at sunset
compared to my wife
lays on me slowly rubbing
her hips against mine,
arching and collapsing in a sigh.
Her blue eyes lucent with
enough juice to light God.
Jack Gilbert’s poems reminding
me how much God needs the help.


ROSES

(2002)

...you were rich enough to be yourself
a hundred times in just one flower;
that’s the condition of the lover ...
But you never did think otherwise.
- Rilke, “The Roses” IV,
transl. A. Poulin Jr.

When I first read those lines
I was walking to my high-stress
newspaper job more than a decade ago:
And then I read them aloud
a second time, astonished ...
“The Roses” are these simple
8-line poems Rilke wrote in French
and seem inexhaustible
in their purity, presence,
and power; reading them aloud
world and word calyxed in the bed
of my ear, sounding so much
with so little, awakening a return,
affirming at last what
I always somehow knew.
I’ve read those poems
again and again over
the years, from so many
different stations of the life.
Some poems are desert island
songs, artifacts of art’s
autobiography which
we could not live without
and which never cease sprouting
within. Few things now slow
our inward whirl; vacancy
spreads through the culture
like a fog, deadening
and deafening all it envelopes.
Just to speak of what is
worth praising seems noble,
when it is only doing
as we should, like breathing.
Lost in the whirl of days,
the space between gasp
and sigh narrows to one
droning vowel-Until one
of Rilke’s roses open
like a mouth and a heavenly
wind hurls through me
its strange and wild perfume.
Suddenly I can’t breathe
in or out enough
and the bell is
ringing, ringing, ringing!


METAPHOR (A HYMN)

Anima-consciousness favors a
protective mimicry, an attachment,
to something or someone else to
which it is echo. Here we see
the wood-nymphs that belong
to trees, the souls which hover
over waters, speak from dells
or caves, or sing from
sea-rocks and whirlpools —
and, most, vividly, the succubus.


-- James Hillman, “Anima: Anatomy
of A Personified Archetype”

The statue of Eleuthereus
((Dionysos)) was carried back
and forth on a ship equipped with
wheels ... The ship places the
arrival of the strange procession in the
perspective of the sea, which is
no more than a day’s journey
for an animal-drawn vehicle
from any point on the Greek
island. The wheels show that the
journey to Athens was made over
land, but the ship took on a ritual
significance which the vase painters
easily raised to the level of myth.


-- Carl Kerenyi, “Dionysos: Archetypal
Image of Indestructible Life”

When Pryderi returned ((to Dyfed))
he and Manawydan feasted and took
their ease. They began the feast at
Arberth, since that was the chief
court where every celebration
began, and after the evening’s first
sitting, while the servants were eating,
the four companions arose and went to
Gorsedd Arberth ((a fairy mound)),
taking company with them. As
they were sitting on the mound
they heard thunder, and with
the loudness of the thunder a mist
fell, so that no one could see
his companions. When the mist
lifted it was bright everywhere,
and when they looked out
at where they had once seen
their flocks and herds and dwellings
they now saw nothing, no animal,
no smoke, no fire, no man,
no dwelling -- only the
houses of the court empty,
deserted, uninhabited, without man
or beast in them; their own
company was lost too, and they
understood that only the four
of them alone remained.


-- “Manawydan son of Llyr,” from
The Mabinogion, transl. Jeffrey Gantz


You are the ache in my words
for salt symmetry, for
rudders and wheels
both wave and
road for the god in his
ship-car who freights us,
island by day by poem,
from outermost to home.
Always your blue mordents
inside these daily tides
which is so like something else,
of no day I have seen
nor of any night I’ve dreamed.
For every purchase
I make here on one
named shore, you
at once sight its
haunting beyond, the
image as real as life itself
and is. Though you and
I will never kiss, our
puckerings are all:
the boom of a
remembered wave’s
collapse is like sky
horses at full thunder,
and both are hooves
of that wild heave
of me inside the woman
who is so much like
you. And in that swoosh
erasing all, you ferry
the god in his device
the distance of two souls,
arriving at that
shore where
we are one broken
wave of salt and
foamed surrender.
My wife’s sleeping
shape upstairs is like
that mound in Wales
where to spend one
night invokes a mist
dissolving one life
into some strangely
shining other,
the old commotions
simply gone.
Beneath those sheets
are nymphs and
naiads, Ariadne
in her gloom
and Iris on
her pool, the
Lady of my wells
descending far
and still farther
in a gossamer
of fading smile.
In a mole’s breeze-
ruffled white fur
where it lay dead
yesterday on the
road next
to huge Lake
Dora (savagely
brilliant and blue)
is every
soft cheek I’ve
ever glanced, every
pale breast
that swung
up to my lips.
What would this be
without your
other’s stain and echo
which no words of mine
will ever quite name,
much less bed?
Like an unseen
shore’s faint-foaming
rumble, my every verse
peramble stumbles
everywhere in search
of you, unaware it
is your own soft singing
in tree and wave,
in sleeping wife
and road-killed mole.
Wrap all my ends
in your fish tales.
Be the keel too
heavy with the one
that got away,
the god who comes
inside your ebbings,
the thirst you
slake in every breast
I squeeze and suck
with these othering lips.


CULTURED IN ORAN


I have been
cultured in Oran:
seeped in his soil
a stone's duration
holding a steady
note over cold
waters until
I changed to
that tenor.
Sing long and
low that old
brute plainsong -
the singer changes
to accord with
the song. As we
do not dream
but are sieved
through nature's
wild milk,
so old songs
heal their singers
of their daily
routs, pouts,
& exceptional
blood. God doesn't
care so much
for your circumstances
as He does for
your character,

it's said in AA;
This life’s groans
and labors simply
teach the fork
to hold steady.
Oran's skull
is the well-socket
for these poems,
round which
all pages revolve.
My faith consists
in this: to dip
my pen daily
into the blue of
his eyes, &
write down
that sea sound
on the beach
of every island
he found under
the surf's soiled
& soulish thunder.


THRESHOLD

September 10, 2005

This threshold has been
so present I’ve sensed it
everywhere but couldn’t find
a name. Summer climaxing
into the first ebb of autumn
with receding light, breezes
tinged with gold. One work
seeming finished, no sense
of what to do next. But
the days have just hung
there, swollen, aching like
a pregnant woman for
the darkest waters to break.
And then in my dream
last night I found our next house
in a secret neighborhood
I’d never seen before,
archaic, on a street
which dead-ended
in a mound. The house
itself was nothing,
bland and small and
shadowy, though next
to it was a castle of sorts,
the witch-house my wife
has always loved, great and
obvious, the cream of men’s
desire poured inside
a woman’s hips, her
circlet of rooms. The house
I would enter is one I
cannot own, its door a vowel
far left and down from all
I know, pale orange like a
pumpkin in a patch of
autumnally gold but darkening
verdure: A dangerous, yes,
frightening door, lamped like
a jack-o’-lantern skull
inviting me in, only if I dare,
if I promise to write down all
that I find without apology
or comment, if I will be
the mouth of whatever god
is in there, to loose
his waters full, come hell
or high watering derange.
For weeks I’ve seen that door
everywhere, in every tableaux
of the day, but never quite the handle,
refusing I guess to see or say
that far. And now -- at nearly 6 a.m
on cooler darker morning in
September -- I write here sensing
that the door is everywhere
behind me, smiling the other way,
the seeker dead, frozen in his
chair like a buried king whose
name is still ebbing on the stream
like starlight draining from the
now once-darkest blue of skies.
My prow loves to cleave of such
fresh water, is overjoyed to be
voyaging at last. Good Lord,
make my eyes keen and hunger wild.
Compass the rudder of this hand
to the far orisons of this nascent land.

Friday, September 09, 2005

Querying The Ghoul

At this dead, revenant, occultically black hour of 4 a.m.-- affrighted neck of the vampyre’s killing spree, lonely sanctus of long-lost matins -- here I am alive and happy in the depths of a wild world, waving my blue flag at the far tresses of Hurricane (or Tropical Storm) Ophelia swirling overhead. The sky slowly, undangerously but with great prescience swirls something of her her vacant smile into my thoughts today, or lifts my thoughts into her bittersweet bower, querying of love in the beyond. Are we at last one there, on that final, unshored bed? The sky not dangerous, not yet, they don’t know where Ophelia is to track, she just lingers offshore Cape Canaveral, the growing ghost of loves lost, present and to come, waves of that impossible bourne crashing on the shores of Flagler County, jostling the pier with harder certainties, washing much away ...

***

Dan Barry queries the dead in “Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street,” posted on yesterday’s NYTimes online:

In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering “early bird” rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.

Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.

Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.

Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week’s hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet. ...


***

“Everyone has a dead guy story,” sd. an NPR reporter as he related his own, about seeing a dead guy on the porch of a Creole cottage where there was no sound but that of the wind chimes on the porch. Query the dead, that silence: In this pause between awful events and their dread, eventual consquence, let us take those corpses as spectral, potent, eloquent, strange: the dread face of the the times, of an awfulness we can neither accept nor refuse. And as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, murdered king of Denmark, stalks the frozen ramparts of black-watch three-bells Elsinore, so I observe those blue residents of drowned New Awleans, floating like the hair of Ophelia; and, as Horatio would of such prescient visitations, declare them “... harbiners preceding still the fates / And prologue to the omen coming on.” (Hamlet I, i).

Neumann: “The world of symbols forms the bridge between a consciousness struggling to emancipate and systemize itself, and the collective unconscious with its transpersonal contents. So long as the world exists and continues to operate through the various rituals, cults, myths, religion, and art, it prevents the two worlds from falling apart, partly because, owing to the effect of the symbol, one side of the psychic system continually influences the other side and sets up a dialectical relationship between the two.” (Origins and History of Consciousness, 365)

Yes, but what happens when that bridge falters and fails? Is too weak, having lost the tenons of language and an identifiable culture? When the religion has no vitality, when the angels are mute? When the father dies, burdening mothers with the impossible task of raising sons up by their jockstraps out of the fury of rut?

Bridge yes, “of harp and altar fused” (Hart Crane); naked spine of the mediatrix, that heart-shaped ass, walking out of the room into the blue morents of infinte night. But an infernal bridge, not literal, not linear, not even a likeable one: awful and awesome, a dread passage which demands more than I have ever had the balls to do, to say.

Bonier, perhaps. Anne Carson, in her daringly evanescent Eros The Bittersweet: “The English word ‘symbol’ is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone
carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover.” Bony truths jointed by their impossible, other-warding hearts, “whole and not whole, connected-separate, consonant-dissonant.” (Heraclitus)

One of the etymological Gaelic roots of pal Oran is Jodras, to query: the mythologem of Columba digging up the head of his buried friend after three days in the foundations of his abbey is the image here -- Columba is curious to know of what really lies below, or beyond; despite his deep grounding in scripture, he wants to hear the words from his friend Oran’s mouth. But like Orpheus who is too needy for the sound of his dead wife, emerging from Tartarus with him, so the words Columba receives from the ghoul are not what he desires or expects. Do we really want to know, or do we just want comfort?

We query the dead for news of what’s ahead, both in the invisible bourne beyond the grave as well as omen of our own times. Last night my wife and I watched the National Geographic special on 9/11 on videotape -- her father taped it for us -- and we were nailed to our seats as the harrowing narrative was icily retold. (Well, almost retold, my father in law caught the special a half an hour late and then the tape ended abruptly before the two towers fell). Anyway, there was a shot of a fireman coming up the stairs of one of the Towers -- the photographer obviously headed the other way, to safety -- and the look on the young man’s face was one of determined fear -- heading up to the fiery embrace of fate, perhaps, I dunno. But it was a look of a man we know had only a few more minutes to live. The look of a person on the iciest ledge of the living.

Did he also bear the look of our much more uncertain and dangerous future? Did he see not only Iraq but also the face-down corpses brimming the dread bayou soup of New Awleans? That affrighted look of the soon-to-be-newly-dead as prologue to this? I heard that 25,000 body bags being are sent to New Orleans as the waters recede & reveal what could not be saved. My wife sees not much else but emptiness on the other side of these images, as if the tissue holding the knucklebone together had been sundered.

What do we know, though? Should we not ask our dead as Horatio would entreat the ghost of Hamlet’s father?:

I’ll cross it, though it blast me.—Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me:
If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease, and, race to me,
Speak to me:
If thou art privy to thy country’s fate,
Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid,
O, speak!
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death,
[The cock crows.]
Speak of it:—stay, and speak! (I, i)

***

So speak, dead voices ... what news is there of the infinite world? does it resemble the wild promontory of these words, ferried from the wildest half of the heart?

***

... seldom the laurel wreath is seen
Unmixed with pensive poppies dark;
There’s a light and a shadow in every man
Who at last attains his lifted mark --
Nursing through night the ethereal spark.

Elate he never can be;
He feels that spirits which glad had hailed his worth,
Sleep in oblivion. -- The shark
Glides white through the phosphorous sea.

-- Melville, "Commemoration of A Naval Victory"
__

FRANKLIN JONES

Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology

If I could have lived another year
I could have finished my flying machine,
And become rich and famous.
Hence it is fitting the workman
Who tried to chisel a dove for me
Made it look more like a chicken.
For what is it all but being hatched
And running about the yard
To the day of the block?
Save that a man has an angel’s brain,
And sees the ax from the start?


EPITAPH FOR THE MASTER

Two thirds the way
through an older edition
of Spoon River Anthology
(purchased at an
old bookstore outside Ocala)
I found a newspaper
clipping wedged within:
"Edgar Lee Masters,
81, Famous Poet, Dead."
I’ve used that shred
to mark my progress
through his sanctified
cemetery, each poem
a headstone, the verses
a paragraph of ends. Masters’s
own obit stained the pages
for "Henry Tripp"
and "Glanville Calhoun":
"How could they ever
forget my face at my
bedroom window, sitting
helpless amid my golden
cages of singing canaries,
looking at the old court-house?"
Indeed. Even as that book’s
tired cover fades, so dies
a history cooked up
between the River Spoon
and an ordinary, cold hill.
So it went, master, friend,
you who sang so variously
toward that same end.
Sing on, clear river blue,
let me remember his for you.


SKULL MUSIC

My head is also Yours, rude stone,
Bone petra: A vault of verbal
Coins and blue booty, the old slush
Pile of all my days and what You
Make of them. I now believe that
Each event enfolds three cups here:
The tale, its bedding, and the dream
It opens like a door. It’s no
wonder that skulls were set in the
Lintels of barrows, and pitched down
Wells. Nor that I’ve found so many
Here. Each poem is but a tongue both
Back and forward of Your own, my
Totem father, my old stone cross.
May Your bone summit bless this toss.


BLUE BONE BRIDGE

The strong, inwardly quivering bridge
of the mediator has meaning
only where the abyss between God
and us is admitted—:but this very
abyss is full of the darkness of God,
and where someone experiences it,
let him climb down and howl away
inside it (that is more necessary
than crossing it.)


— Rilke, letter to Ilse Jahr, 2/22/23
transl. Stephen Mitchell

When I was 5 my mother took me
to a matinee of “Puss And Boots.”
Two images forever twined in my mind:
in the first, a terrible night thunderstorm
caused a tree to fall on the hero in
an overloud, horrific crash.
In the second a boy jumped
bare-assed into a smiling summer pond.
Terror from the first scene leapt up
in a strange howl, made huge and
loud by the weight of that savage trunk;
a warm delight of the second scene
to lathe my fear in a rich white goo.
On many nights thereafter I’d wake
from nightmares of crashing thunder,
only to press my face to the pillow
and watch myself jump into
warm waters to save a girl.
For all the simple carefree days
which composed my early years—
nurtured and loved by my parents,
safe in suburban neighborhoods—
that dark sweet imagining
kept seizing me like a claw up
from the floor which flicked
me in a pool.
My friend and I built monster
models—Creature From The
Black Lagoon, Dracula, The
Forgotten Prisoner—the two of
us in thrall with the dripping
caverns and rotted cells of
revenants and skeletons.
I found in actual woods
near home and school
a dark sexual joy of
peeking and revealing,
play-acting Mommy and
Daddy not as I knew
but thrilled to guess.
As a child I only guessed at
that blue bone-latticed
land, walking as I did in
relative safety, knowing I
was but a hand away from
some parent’s hand.
Far different was the night
which called me from home into
the tropic lush of my 14th year:
bolder and colder that moon,
wild and intoxicate,
sexual with swollen glands
and aching fingers.
Growing up meant straying
far into that insatiable wood;
a self’s composed from paths
far from home and God.
The musk of crushed oranges
seared up from the rot of ruin
which came on a stormy night
much longer ago, when my God
decreed I craft these craven
images from what I bleed
and perilously need.
How I bandage myself up
from that horrid land
and link back—to the living again
and to a loving hand—is
a complicate return
to a forest night
where a thunder merges
with all the joys down under.

SEA FOREST

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

-- Tennessee Williams

Huge wood I can neither
resist nor enter. Danger
and wrong the petals
of a heavy blue orchid.
My breakage an artery
hurling toward your breasts.
Elusive verb radiating nouns
like scent. Milky hour of
beachside enactment leading
to death & that float
in blue waters of we.
Ink which disappears
the closer I get to writing
the actual bed. Itch and fever
of the violate child. My war
with the gods of no and without.
Summer afternoons
which build and slake are
still distant; for now, this
high heat which has too
much pressure, like bright
balls clanging against
off every pendulate roll,
heave, sashay. All of it zipped
yet pent, waiting,
plotting, grinding teeth
as the day groins on.
Most difficult angel, You
belong most to the God
inside these raw words. The
poem about sex is a water
horse at noon: the fleet
shade of shadows narrowed
to that hour’s high drone.
A roar like a wave like
a wound like a man
at his meat, grilling over
an unrepentent fire
burning everywhere at once.
A door opens, the blue
mystery resumes
as I tumble down and down
what’s under the heart,
the sky, the summer,
the page, one fin to write
with and endless teeth below.

BOOT BOAT
BOOK BONE


So here I am again,
Lord, astride a falling
surf, riding barebacked
out to you on an
ossuary of white foam:

One night you walked
away from me, “not here”
is inscribed on your
sweet curved ass.
That lass is my taboo and tide,

my voyaging for silk
to white-peaked islands
absent of your pent
and pert, so barbarous
and frothy milk.

Breviary, bestiary,
book in ocean thrown:
each wave I well here
vowels ocean bone,
no line completes the dash--

each blue curved plash
hisses through the motions
of a lover’s foreign tongue,
the first line her last kiss,
the last one all it rung.

OUR DEAD

... Don’t believe that fruits and flowers
consume the numberless unsatisfied dead;
of bitterness and sweetness there remains
a floating infinity around us ...


— Rilke, “The Dead,” transl. A. Poulin Jr.

Our dead line our pockets
with small blue coins;
one side of them bears the
dear mother, the other
a dread skull. If we
could flip the moon
we wouldn’t find a door
or a bared bottom;
rather that eye patiently
counts our days’
undersides pouring
like grains down a glass
and into the world’s
infinite grave. Living our
one day we don’t look back
or forward too far
because the murmurings
rise like a black tongues
from a well we almost
recognize, like dreams.
Hands steady on
the steering wheel, foot not
too heavy on the gas pedal,
we course through the day
from task to task, earning
our bread, finding small
disconsolate pleasures
along the way. The cat in
the window knows our dead
in a different way—less
and more intimately. I doubt
she recalls Buster now
sands in a white jar, that
Himalayan who bulled
about this house
in a continuous yawl
demanding love and food
and berth like a mogul
or a don. Violet occupies
his kingdom not as
a successor but as one
who blooms from the
narrow paths she was
granted, queen now
of the entire house.
I don’t believe she thinks
on Buster the way
my wife recalls how
much he demanded his love,
how frailly constititued
he was so that she had
to watch him so carefully;
Nor as I recall how he’d blithely
leave a nut of shit on
the hallway floor where
I was sure to skid barefooted
at 4 a.m. in the dark on
the way to make coffee.
Where the cat in the window
simply moves in to that absence,
my wife hauls about
a reliquary of desperate love
which hasn’t changed much
in the year since Buster died.
Those blue coins are minted
of the heaviest gold,
invaluable and desperate
and ours forever. Oblivion
only ferries those riches
into the soil, where, like
offal and oil, we pace our
incessant feet across the
relentless day, that rich
dark our breaded way.


DEAD TREE

The dead stay
dead: ghoulish
fancy passes:
Halloween night
revels in spooky
candles in
dark windows
like a sweet
nougat inside
Horror: fine
for kids and
good for
game adults
but the night
passes into
winter’s yew
month: Beth
at James’s
grave yesterday
with her
sister setting
small pumpkins
inscribed
Happy Halloween
James
onto
pale hard turf:
Death for them
so hard and
flat, impenetrable,
nothing coming
up and every
thing in them
going down:
Beth furious
that death
takes all
from her family,
her sister
gone all gray
& unkempt
in her banshee
grief & her
mother there
too looking old,
so terribly
fucking old:
An oak in
our back yard
got hit
by lightning
last summer
in the middle
of the night
jolting us
up in terror
from sleep
& setting
off the alarm
& sending
the cats ass
overteakettle
under the bed:
We didn’t know
the bolt hit
the tree back
then but came
to slowly
as the tree
dropped its
nuts & leaves
and eventually
went bare
as bone: It’s
become this
sad fact
towering
in our back
yard: A
thousand bucks
to cut down
Dan says
so we have
to leave it
there: A
bone cathedral:
I talked
yesterday
with Norman
my old bassplayer
from the
early ‘80s
who took a
$20 thou
paycut to
move back
to Chicago
& help his
stepmother
die from
breast cancer:
He told me
that she
finally died
in late
September
just before
he left for
a week in France:
Now he’s pissed
at his dad
for taking up
with his
wife’s best
friend scant
weeks after
the funeral:
Awash too
with all the
finalities of
death you
just don’t
consider till
it washes
over you
(I never thought
about them
coming form
the morgue
to pick up
the body,
stuffing her
into that
black bag...
Now I can’t
get it out
of my mind):

He’s now
facing Chicago
winter hating
his wineseller
gig & missing
California
& trying to
decide if
he should stay
with his
new girlfriend
whose father
just died too
or flee West:
We laughed
about how
it used to
be when
our greatest worry
was over who
we could get
to suck our
cock next:
O death how
you compose
these days:
The dolphin
one a
cuculattus
cresting dark
headstones:
The kids
came calling
when it got
dark (so much
earlier): Little
ones in dinosaur
hats & pink
princess frillies
barely squeaking
trickertreat:
Many boys in
the latest
Star Wars garb:
A couple of
fat teenage
girls who said
they were
Millennium Barbies:
We didn’t get
any black kids
for a long while,
strange because
they have
so earnestly
& faithfully
plundered
our candy filled
pumpkins in the
past: we wondered
if the murders
here in Mount
Dora last winter
set a chill
on their
venturing forth
to white folks
houses: But
eventually
they came,
young kids with
KMart masks
and slathered
makeup, others
with hasty
costumes (maybe
a mask, maybe
a cape) or
none at all
opening Publix
plastic sacks
& saying more
please more:
I fell asleep
by 9 p.m.
as we watched
“House of Wax”
my revenant
days long dead:
We went to
bed & lay
there for a
moment while
Buster tugged
at the sheets
-- some nipple
ritual from his
earliest days:
O god how
weary we are
of so much
haunting by
old Blicker:
The both of
us feeling
old & weary
like the
dying year:

GUY’S WALL

... Less than a billow of the sea
That at the last do no more roam,
Less than a wave, less than a wave,
This thing that hath no home,
This thing that hath no grave ...

— Fiona MacCleod, “In the Night”


Tonight I sit beneath
a naked mulberry tree
on the stone bench where
Guy’s ashes were interred
a quarter century ago.
Long chimes in that
tree knock their sad sweet
bones, while the moon
swings brilliant over all,
though coldly, prowing
across a raw spring night.
Sitting here is a vantage
on the productions
of myth and mystery,
not so much cynical
as peripheral, bluesy,
bittersweet. Age becalms
the spirit’s buoyant fire
as surely as death
inks a darker fluid
in the pen, a weight
which does not rise
so readily. I do not mean
to criticize the night:
rather, this seat befits
a threshold half in
wonder while the
other half’s cold
with rawer truths.
The bell tower and
standing stones are
all so beautiful, sheeted
as they are in such
blue-white silk-
lovely, yes, even
evanescent, engaged
in one of the oldest,
most fertile dances
the mind can imagine,
can hope, can dream ...

So why then carve a
poem from cold hollows,
brooding over the ashes
of a long-lost, scantily
remembered person I but
briefly called a friend?
Who will know this
bench serves also
as a crypt in
another 25 years?
Who will care? The stones
I sit on which cask
that dark oil
tell me nothing
of the man who once
sat up in the limbs
of this mulberry tree
as the rest of us progressed
below heading for the field,
sending down over us the deep
bass of our childhood God,
reminding—no, telling-us
to be good. The stones cannot
(or won’t) explain to me
why Guy died of cancer
before age 30, scant months
after his wife Judy gave birth
to Jennifer. Stones are honest
but most times mute:
And so I must scan
the edges of the far field
where the wood gets darker
and memories are faulty
but a certain truth
can only be found there ...

I knew Guy but a season
two years before he left us all.
He taught me a little about
tuning a piano. One day we
were up in someone’s hot
attic sweating under the hood
of an old upright. You have
to feel the pitch, Guy
told me. If you think about
whether the string you’ve
plucked is sharp or flat,
you’ll never get it tuned.
And then he showed
me how, weaving his tuning
hammer up and down
the loom of strings
like a sonorous Thor.
He couldn’t really explain
it-never enough for me
to learn—but he always got
it right. And when he
finished he played Billy Joel’s
“The Piano Man,” grandly,
rolling up and down the keys
with authority, harmonizing
the bent quiver of the piano
to the arrows of that song.

Guy had a frantic pulse
for life, for making everything
count. Some ambivalent
genius drove him to seek
the spirit’s moony suburbs
halfway between nirvana
and New Jersey. One night
we walked in the woods
over there smoking pot
and talking New Age
phantasmagoria.
He showed me a railway
tunnel which had
long collapsed. We
crept into that dark
until we came upon
a rubble pile. Anybody
home? He boomed to
the devas on the other side.
Surely we’d manifest
a potato god or the
queen of cherry bloom.
Instead there was a crash
of glass and a terrible,
ball-curdling shriek;
we hauled ass out of there
terrified and giggling,
the air behind us shredded
by the nails of whatever
was and was not back in there.
It really happened, though
I doubt tonight it could have.
Only Guy can concur with me,
and he is in the stone.

Guy argued long that summer
about whether the formal
event we were planning
should be called a party or a festival.
The distinction would decide
how much much booze
would be allowed, and when:
perhaps it was a silly point,
but Guy took it to the lists
as fiercely as he whirled
that tuning hammer. Maybe
he just wanted to win the
argument, but he seemed
struck by a certainty none of
us quite fathomed. I surely
didn’t know, just turned 21,
half of my father’s making,
half of a something far from home
which strummed its blue guitar.
Guy lost that argument,
at least in the first sense
of things; that hot midsummer
day was the first of many
festivals celebrated here
round and down the years.
We set a wood tripod in
the middle of the field and
laced it round with bright ribbons.
I played guitar and my buddy
Dave mandolin as revelers jigged
their best in clouds of gnats
beneath a feral, summer sun.
What else transpired? Why
does that day dim so fast
and what followed stay in
focus in this sere, cold light?
At dusk we drank May
wine with wild strawberries
up in the house, listening
to Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
It was all we thought a festival
should be and none of what
we knew, a culmination of
adjacent, airy enough dreams,
formalized into a dance
beneath the hottest,
brightest light of all. Over
the years the tripod was
replaced by standing stones,
and the festivals got bigger
and somehow sweeter:
equinoxes and solstices,
from Samhain to May Day
and back, attended by hundreds,
each devotee of a different
spectra of our faith:
neo-pagan, neo-Christian,
wiccan, vegan, Buddhist,
tattooist, biker, blancher,
blickerer, blueist, each
blaring their reformed
taboos, bedecked
in robes and wreaths and
and cha-cha-cha tutus.

This place has become
a capital of bucolic
whims whirling round
the eminently silent stone:
But you and I, Guy, we
were there for the first one,
peripheral to what my father made
but central to its darker twin.
For as good as all festivals go,
you had wanted more-
something closer to the
world’s more fecund crotch—
and madly, so did I. The day had
been too church-like, too blanched
in that too-bright summer sun.
Two glasses of May wine
couldn’t do the job:
Some other, redder impulse
was needed for our fire,
an ire which only could be found
long after the white one
went down. And so a
dissident faction of that festival
drove over to Guy’s house
to do the party part,
blasting Bruce Springsteen
on the stereo, pounding
shots of Rebel Yell with
our tall-necked Buds. As we
hooted and hammered
and blasted that party jive,
Guy’s brown eyes were like
ebonies of that other music
beyond the ribboned field,
burning, perhaps, with
the soul’s pagan fire.
Or maybe it was cancer.
Whatever Guy might say
of that night, or how
I might remember it,
tonight I believe I’d seen
my patient, my dark mentor.

For I wanted more.
And so later that night Guy
passed me to a crazed cousin
who lived in a house
on the Delaware. I don’t
remember much of what followed
except she was dark in some
folded-in, sad way, and
that her welcome had
to it a sort of ritual clench,
the birth-grapple of
the dark-hottest booze.
The next day as I made
my retreat — shrill trumpets
of a hangover blaring
in my brain pan —
I looked out a window
on the porch to see
black water flowing
almost under the house.
River house, river
witch, bestowing on
me a dark river’s blessing,
carrying me away
at the end of that summer
25 years ago. I was
not ready for the New Age,
not with the big night
music playing so loudly
in my ears. The party kept me
from the festivals for many
years; tonight, again, I
try to return, and end up
here in the borderlands.
I thank you, Guy,
wherever you are among
this night’s windy shades,
for teaching me about what’s
been tempered between the
two faces of the dance.
We yearn and burn,
our sight is split; the view
can kill us or bless us,
be coffin to our ecstasies
or currah us to shore. I’m
not sure you had a choice,
Guy, but I thank you for
making one possible for me,
your shade my trusty door ...

Yes my friend, tonight things
are good. Before me the pond
stares back at the moon with
its black mirror and the standing
stones choir pale homages
in the field. Up in the house my
father and the others are drinking
a Scotch before heading to the field
to celebrate Wesak, the Buddhist
festival of the high Taurus moon.
Tonight, only a few folks are here
— smaller even than the baker’s
dozen of New Age hopefuls
who tried with us to manifest
the sea from a glass of May wine
back in ‘78—but enough.
For wherever two or more
gather to plead human alms
from immensity, a least
a spark of it wilds through
into the mortal bone.
Soon, Guy, I must go and
join my ragged voice to
that prayer, but before
then I want to tell you a few
things, since it will be awhile
before I sit with you again.
I’ve heard your daughter is
now out of college and Judy
is happy in her way down
in Miami-No Jersey charms
for her! Second, my wife
and I emerge from our dark
hours slowly, perhaps toward
a happy enough future; my party
now at end, perhaps that
festival can begin. Her cat
Buster died last year but
appeared in a dream, saying,
I’m OK now, just wanted
to let you know I had
a good life but I won’t be
coming back again.
—Did you ever let your wife know?
—And finally, my father grouses
at 75 years old that he can’t stop
coming back, long after the day
five years ago he was so certain
he would die. In your time
I’m sure that time comes
soon, too very soon.

That’s about all. We don’t
hardly know how
to tell our stories, Guy,
much less brave an end.
I’m not sure how this poem
will get there. As I listen
to those chimes beating against
each other first calm then wild,
I know they’re all I really
have of you. I wish I
could see half of what I
dream is here, but I’m
grateful you and I
remain where we are, citizens
on either side of a stone wall.
As a cold wind blows indifferently
over us, I think of all the others
whose ashes are also buried here -
AIDS victims, earth mamas,
prodigal boys who couldn’t quite
get home, my dad’s dog Lancelot
beneath a small dolmen next
to the house. There are crypts
beneath the chapel floor
waiting for my father and Fred,
for Albertine who’s just entered hospice,
for the hopefully mixed ashes of
my brother and his wife.
There are plenty of memorials
on this land, too, heaps of stones
in the forest, feathers slung
from limbs, trees planted to
grow where we stopped,
like the weeping cherry
put in last week for a young
woman who killed herself.
So many dead limn this land
with you Guy, fading into the
moon-cast shadows of
oblivion, silent witnesses to
the horde of living who come
back every season to beat drums,
swing crystals, and troop the wood
in search of what, I suspect,
only ashes find by scattering.
Some day I’ll look into that
bell tower door searching
the space my father departed
through, sniffing for a trace
of Borkum Riff or Scotch whiskey,
straining my eyes for a glint
of his laughing blues.
I suspect I won’t see
anything but stones and field
and the wood’s black umbers,
all awash in and resonant with
this same old brilliant bonelight.
And I suspect I will say then
to him as I say to you tonight:
friend, fare thee well, the real world
is carved from your strange hallows.
Your music’s in my bones.
Play me a song Mister Piano Man,
grandly on the ivories
of those chimes.
Sing to me about the wild
betweens and how to love
the living wonder there. Voices
are now weaving in the bell
tower; the ceremony’s
begun. Will you play Buddha
for me tonight, old friend,
high up in that mulberry tree,
and you add your deep voice
to our still-human weave?
Will you bless us with
what you’ve earned
among the ancient stone?
And will you keep tuning
this heart of mine with
what’s strung between
the cold embrace of this stone
and the dream which praises all?

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Vantage




Here is an early poem -- 1976 -- written for my first poetry class, during my freshman semester at Whitworth College in far, dry, dark-in-winter Spokane Washington.

I was fresh from highschool harrows in Chicago, a dismal urban tableau, post-Watergate, post Nixon, deep in the oil crisis of that age; my family sundered once again, this time for good, father heading to New York City, mother and younger siblings to Florida, an older brother to California; my futile first love for a classmate washed away, lost to her indifference, drowned; and finally I was in the undertow of rejecting my Christian faith, harrowing in that lonely awful season the big empty hole Christian certainty one resided in, leaving me to fill the gap as best as I could, or with infernal internal resources that were at hand -- studies in world history and Western culture, the dim candle of poetry.

Anyway, the poem is set neck-deep in that awful water. Surely it’s juvenile emulation of Roethke’s “The Waking,” certainly that rhythm and voice and paternity was in my ear (weird, hmmm, that lonely son’s voice singing in my deep fatherlessness), but I thought of the poem yesterday driving to work before I uploaded yesterday’s post (“Oh Lonely Rock”). Let’s call it an archetypal fathering and mothering in a rude-winded, sea-salt-wracked sentience, oh so bittersweet, gorgeous and, eventually, the home I reside in here. An essential, original text.

THE ABANDONED DEEP

(begun 1974; tweaked over the years)

A wet wind brushed my face:
those jagged clouds are not angels:
Mother, I long for a bleaker space,

free to roam with grey eyes
among the grim legion of dead
November trees where voices cry

For the darkening coils of a sea
Reaching for the petrel moon.
Such deaths as mine cannot be grieved

By the ticking of a clock
Or the payment of a sum.
Abandoned souls cannot dock

In garden or bay. Instead let winds
lash and hurl their furies on me:
wave-weary boulders are my closest kin.

***

O sad and destructive years as sea and shore composed their feral dominions in me! Today I sit on the granite shoulders of fathers, my face glazed with the savage blue milk of mothers, in my element of the mythological wind and wave, here as I daily read and then write in a predawn soak of paper wilderness, imagined jolly rogering and lacy glossolalia -- The mythic method of reaching back to proceed, diving down to rise. Crassly, it’s an articulation of restlessly porous conscious and unconscious systems, in an equilibrium of sorts (infernal or divine) which resulted from so many years of mortis and savagery and desperate wakenings, the leaden transit of dissolution and madness in the neon cunt of a giantess called Desire: wild horses eventually reined, fire and foam held at arms’ length, young man chastened, prodigal, getting to work eventually in the father’s fields, learning to leave the bright bowls of fruit at the doors of the dead, learning and leaving tales of blood oranges here in the dark labyrinth of words -- blogosphere, noosphere, blue spheroid defined by the sine wave lapping between I and Thou.

Neumann, in The Origins and History of Consciousness: “The integration of the personality is equivalent to an integration of the world. Just as an uncentered psyche which is dispersed in participations see only a diffuse and chaotic world, so the world constellates in a hierarchical order about an integrated personality. The correspondence between one’s view of the world and the formation of the personality extends from lowest level to the highest.”

Ah but which world? Which voice? My affinity with St. Oran over St. Columba is perhaps mythological, but I side with the sea-soaked skull of Oran that St. Columba uncovered after three days in the foundations of his abbey (Oran dispatched there to appease an angry water-lord, perhaps Manannan), that blackend maw suddenly animate and singing, “all you say about God and man and heaven and earth is WRONG!” Western civilization built forward from the grave of Oran, but I choose to build there, farther out toward the sea, working a crannog just offshore, in a sea scriptorium amid the singing, brine-broguing skulls, rassling the waves, writing down that big night music.




REGIS MARINUS

I ran from my old man
and took to a dark sea
of strange women and
malt whiskey, becoming
in that nekyia the little
man in the boat, an
old man tossed on
Your sea. Years of
spiralling round that
singular tide, seeking
rebirth, or at least
a dolphin enough
name for my purpose
which could ride
me to shore at last.
But as such waters
devour as they embrace,
my tutelage was
infernal, wraith-like,
and finny, all my arts
foundering between
huge waves. That night
lasted for 300 years,
it seemed, until at
last, until I found
a way to build a chapel
of voyaging stone,
a house which gave
my errancy an oar.
Daily now I row those
dark brine haunts
which I once thought
dove between my
love’s sweet breasts:
fructive poems whose
mortar is ferried
from the sea inside
that ancient sea,
jotted in squid ink.
A different dad might
have made a different
son -- bank president
or father of eight,
a builder or foundryman:
But, sired himself
in Oran’s perplex cry
and milked in
Onan’s shade, that
old wild man loved me
only as he knew how.
Which meant while he
was raising stones
I was skipping town, in
love with the feel of water
on my feet below, the night
sea huge and potent
and a riven swart blue,
sweet and dangerous
as every woman I found
out there who nursed
me to the same steely
glare my father
basks upon the space
his absent son
cries for old stone.

***

GIANTESS

I am Cupid’s WMD, a
Catapult of blue breasts. The skulls
Of my scooped-out lovers line the
Mazes of my cave, far beneath
The rolling sea. By day I dream
Of your cock and balls in this mouth
Of stone; by night I feed, tapping
O so gently my suckered limbs
Against your window panes, calling
You out to drown my way. My rule
Has lasted here some four hundred
Million years, yet every dusk which
Darkens abyss I wake afresh,
Starved wet in uncoiling desire,
Beak snapping for your milk of fire.

ST. ORAN AND THE GIANTESS

You found her sleeping in that cave
Which fonts the western sea, below
All depths I dream. Kissed her gently
As a shade and watched her stir and
Sigh and slowly open her deep
Eyes. She whispered your name as you
Climbed in next to her, singing
All the while. What happened next you
Would not say, except to smile that
Dolphins and sea horses pranced round
The bed while sea-blooms widened to
Hurl wavelike a wild blue perfume.
You drank in draughts the distillate
Of her salt souterrain, till dawn
Awoke me startled here, blank page
Beneath, and pen like her in hand.
My joy’s your shore, this crashing land.


YOUR VANTAGE

History has no stipulatable
subject matter uniquely its own;
it is always written as part of
a contest between contending
poetic figurations of what the past
might consist of.


-- H. White, “The Historical
Text as a Literary Artefact”

O my crannog, I resurrect
you from the briny murk
of erasure exactly where
you once seamed shore
to dream—because
there is a vantage in me
I can only see sitting here in
your drowned bower.

There is a history which
Oran bids me write
that requires a perch
in this esplumoir
which arches up within
ten feet of every day,
my eyes trained
on that undertow
where angels sing
salt praises riding seals
and wilder men than I can
name inscribe their
finny majescule.
Time winnows
through these branches
like mercury, gobbets
which sustain in a coda
for one hour of an age
and then scatter, racing
on and down the flow
which greets tomorrow’s
perch. From here the
occasional car at 5 a.m.
ferries Saint Libern to
Inis Cathaigh where
he was buried standing up
to bulwark boneyard walls
from river and time and sea.
He stands on the ground which
is both sky and marge,
touching the rubble of abbeys
and galleons and the World
Trade Center. His bones
bell death from a deeper,
surer glow, pealing from
bronze cast long long ago.
At this altitude the blue
current is a jet-stream
of sorts, greater than any man’s
solitary jaunts in verse.
No rudder upon vellum’s
apt enough for crossing at
this height, this depth.
From here I see the feet
of Libern and Oran and every
other man sacrificed standing
up to appease the colder gods
of brine and basalt: Each pale
toe and heel tears through
the parchment page. From
here I see the butt-ends of
all crosses which burdened
faith with history. From
here I see the hoary shoes
of Stonehenge, arranged like
boots of some far older army
which sank there when
swords crossed. Odd the
reception at this
height which is yet
the depth and the breadth of
time; the insides of ages
attenuate that rhyme
which rises from the
first Book of Swells
which the master tossed
down Oran’s Well. Inside
and down there’s
a hoary Pleistocene
whose huge hand hauls
mine across the page,
inscribing strange and
stranger lines, blurring
history in mystery
till all arrives in you,
my crannog, my tower
of blue Babelogue,
my white moulting ground,
my pulpit where wilder
psalms are flung wide
to the night which will
soon pulse pale light.
Soon I must rejoin
the row of my day
using oars which cannot
find this depth. Soon
I must return to all the
songs now past their prime.
My life drones on above,
a squeak in the squawk
of a billion-fold throats
boating from A to B.
And happily I’ll
go, in this house
where love survived
its rages to build a
durable enough home
for love’s ages.
At least, that’s the plan.
Cancer and cloaked
terrorist are also mixed
in this tide, age with
its spigot turned so wide.
If I did not have this hour
on your porch, how strange my
feet would feel as they break
on through, as they usually
do, the crust of all a life
can’t support, much less rise.
How terrible that sudden
blue emptiness of wild
clutchless sprawls
for all those years I
didn’t know that You’re
spread further down
to catch every angel that falls.

The Ninth Wave




It is the hero’s nature to fool Mother Nature and offend the gods with overweening arrogance -- a crime which our guilty conscience tells us deserves punishment. So it's no wonder then when a hurricane drowns New Orleans that the fault seems ours -- who were we kidding anyway, goes the lament, pretending to be gods. The destruction of Babel, the grand confusion of our tongues, is wrought by venegeant winds; bad things are sent in punishment, the childlike magical thinking goes. I wonder how many Islamic fundamentalists are praising Allah to the highest desert heavens today for adjudicating land of Evil Bush in a whirlwind of wrath.

I’m not preaching Luddism here — technology has improved much of our living by a millionfold — and there’s no way to curb it, that I can see -- it’s just that such achievement casts a long, slowly ripening shadow.

The bigger the front, the bigger the back: the further we walk away from our primordial seas, the deeper it sings to us, the greater its fascinating and deadly undertow. No matter what sand towers we build, we know the sea will reclaim them all. That knowledge is a hard, ocherous area of the heart, locked and dammed and chained by the heroes of the day.

Fiona Macleod has a wonderful tale of how the mother sea reclaims her own with her ninth wave, last and greatest of the infernal set, the fate of heroes (and of our civilization) ordained in her blue abacus. I think of drowned New Orleans with its thousands of stiff residents bumping about beneath the surface and hear the crooning of that ninth wave - shadow of civilization, resonant choir of all beginnings and ends ... faces fished from that feral murk, blank, mute, eyes now travelled on beyond their ends, heeding the call of the final wave which claims us all. Anyway, let Fiona -- feminine Gaelic page persona of the Anglo Saxon writer William Sharp -- tell the tale.

THE NINTH WAVE

Fiona McLeod

—from The Works of Fiona McLeod, Volume II

... On the last Sabbath, old McAlpin had held a prayer-meeting in his little house in the “ street,” in Balliemore of Iona. At the end of his discourse he told his hearers that the voice of God was terrible only to the evil-doer but beautiful to the righteous man, and that this voice was even now among them, speaking in a thousand ways and yet in one way. And at this moment, that elfin granddaughter of his, who was in the byre close by, let go upon the pipes with so long and weary a whine that the collies by the fire whimpered, and would have howled outright but for the Word of God that still lay open on the big stool in front of old Peter. For it was in this way that the dogs knew when the Sabbath readings were over; and there was not one that would dare to bark or howl, much less rise and go out, till the Book was closed with a loud, solemn bang. Well, again and again that weary quavering moan went up and down the room, till even old McAlpin smiled, though he was fair angry with Elsie. But he made the sign of silence, and began: “ My brethren, even in this trial it may be the Almighty has a message for us “ —when at that moment Elsie was kicked by a cow, and fell against the board with the pipes, and squeezed out so wild a wail that McAlpin, started up and cried, in the Lowland way that he had won out of his wife, “Hoots, havers, an’ a! come oot o’ that, ye Devil’s spunkie!”

So it was this memory that made Padruig and Ivor smile. Suddenly Ivor, began with a long rising and falling cadence, an old Gaelic rune of
the Faring of the Tide.

Athair, A mhic, A Spioraid Naoimh,
Biodh an Tri-aon leinn, a la’s a dh’oidhche;
S’air, chul nan tonn, no air thaobh nam beann!
O Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Be the Three-in-One with us day and night,
On the crested wave, when waves run high!
And out of the place in the West
Where Tir-nan-Og, the Land of Youth
Is, the Land of Youth everlasting,
Send the great Tide that carries the sea-weed
And brings the birds, out of the North:
And bid it wind as a snake through the bracken,
As a great snake through the heather of the sea,
The fair blooming heather of the sunlit sea.
And may it bring the fish to our nets,
And the great fish to our lines:
And may it sweep away the sea-hounds
That devour the herring:
And may it drown the heavy pollack
That respect not our nets
But fall into and tear them and ruin them wholly.
And may I, or any that is of my blood,
Behold not the Wave-Haunter who comes in with the Tide,
Or the Maighdeann-mˆra who broods in the shallows,
Where the sea-caves are, in the ebb:
And fair may my fishing be, and the of those near to me,
And good may this Tide be, and good may it bring:
And may there be no calling in the Flow, this Sr?thmˆra,
And may there be no burden in the Ebb! Ochone!
An ainm an Athar, s’an Mhic, s’ an Spioraid Naoimh, Biodh an Tri-aon
leinn, a la’s a dh’ oidhche,
S’air chul nan tonn, no air thaobh nam beann!
Ochone! arone!

Both men sang the closing lines with loudly swelling voices and with a wailing fervour which no words of mine could convey.

Runes of this kind prevail all over the isles, from the Butt of Lewis to the Rhinns of Islay: identical in spirit, though varying in lines and phrases, according to the mood and temperament of the rannaiche or singer, the local or peculiar physiognomy of nature, the instinctive yielding to hereditary wonder-words, and other compelling circumstances of the outer and inner life. Almost needless to say, the sea-maid or sea-witch and the Wave-Haunter occur in many of those wild runes, particularly in those that are impromptu. In the Outer Hebrides, the runes are wild natural hymns rather than Pagan chants; though marked distinctions prevail there also-for in Harris and the Lews the folk are Protestant almost to a man, while in Benbecula and the Southern Hebrides the Catholics are in a like ascendancy. But all are at one in the common Brotherhood of Sorrow.

The only lines in Ivor McLean’s wailing song which puzzled me were the two last which came before “the good words,” in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit,” etc.

“Tell me, in English, Ivor,” I said, after a silence, wherein I pondered the Gaelic words, “ what is the meaning of-

‘And may there be no calling in the Flow, this Srothmˆra,

And may there be no burden in the Ebb?’”

“ Yes, I will be telling you what is the meaning of that. When the great tide that wells out of the hollow of the sea, and sweeps toward all the coasts of the world, first stirs, when she will be knowing that the Ebb is not any more moving at all, she sends out nine long waves. And I will be forgetting what these waves are: but one will be to shepherd the sea-weed that is for the blessing of man, and another is for to wake the fish that sleep in the deeps, and another is for this, and another will be for that, and the seventh is to rouse the Wave-Haunter and all the creatures of the water that fear and bate man, and the eighth no man knows, though the priests say it is to carry the Whisper of Mary, and the ninth—”

“ And the ninth, Ivor?”

“ May it be far from us, from you and from me and from those of us! An’ I will be sayin’ nothing against it, not I; nor against anything that is in the sea! An’ you will be noting that!

“ Well, this ninth wave goes through the water on the forehead of the tide. An’ wherever it will be going it calls. An’ the call of it is, ‘ Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow! . . . Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!’ An’ whoever hears that must arise and go, whether he be fish or pollack, or seal or otter, or great skua or small tern, or bird or beast ofthe shore, or bird or beast of the sea, or whether it be man or woman or child, or any of the others.”

“ Any of the others, Ivor? “

“ I will not be saying anything about that,” replied McLean, gravely; “ you will be knowing well what I mean, and if you do not it is not for me to talk of that which is not to be talked about.

“ Well, as I was for saying: that calling of the ninth wave of the Tide is what Ian-Mor of the hill speaks of as ‘the whisper of the snow that falls on the hair, the whisper of the frost that lies on the cold face of him that will never be waking again.”’

“ Death? “

“ It is you that will be saying it.

“ Well,” he resumed after a moment’s hush, “ a man may live by the sea for five score years and never hear that ninth wave call in any Sroth- mˆra, but soon or late he will bear it. An’ many is the Flood that will be silent for all of us: but there will be one Flood for each of us that will be a dreadful Voice, a voice of terror and of dreadfulness. And whoever hears that Voice, he for sure will be the burden in the Ebb.”

“ Has any heard that Voice, and lived?

McLean looked at me, but said nothing. Padruig Macrae rose, tautened a rope, and made a sign to me to put the helm alee. Then, looking into the green water slipping by—for the tide was feeling our keel, and a stronger breath from the sea lay against the hollow that was growing in the sail—he said to Ivor:

“You should be telling her of Ivor MacIvor mhic Niall.”

“Who was Ivor MacNeil?” I said.

“He was the father of my mother,” answered McLean, “ and was known throughout the north isles as Ivor Carminish, for he had a farm on the eastern lands of Carminish which lie between the hills called Strondeval and Rondeval, that are in the far south of the northern Hebrides, and near what will be known to you as the Obb of Harris.

“ And I will now be telling you about him in the Gaelic, for it is more easy to me, and more pleasant for us all.

“ When Ivor MacEachainn Carminish, that was Ivor’s father, died, he left the farm to his elder son and to his second son, Seumas. By this time, Ivor was married, and had the daughter who is my mother. But he was a lonely man, and an islesman to the heart’s core. So . . . but you will be knowing the isles that lie off the Obb of Harris-the Saghay, and Ensay, and Killegray, and farther west, Berneray and, north-west, Pabaidh, and beyond that again, Shillaidh? “

For the moment I was confused, for these names are so common: and I was thinking of the big isle of Berneray that lies in huge Loch Roag that has swallowed so great a mouthful of Western Lewis, to the seaward of which also are the two Pabbays, Pabaidh M?r and Pabaidh Beag. But when McLean added,” and other isles of the Caolas Harrish “ (the Sound of Harris), I remembered aright; and indeed I knew both, though the nor’ isles better, for I had lived near Callernish on the inner waters of Roag.

“ Well, Carminish had sheep-runs upon some of these. One summer the gloom came upon him, and he left Seumas to take care of the farm and of Morag his wife, and of Sheen their daughter; and he went to live upon Pabbay, near the old castle that is by the Rua Dune on the southeast of the isle. There he stayed for three months. But on the last night of each month he heard the sea calling in his sleep; and what he heard was like ‘Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow . . . Come away, co e away, the sea waits! Follow!’ And he knew the voice of the ninth wave; and that it would not be there in the darkness of sleep if it were not already moving toward him through the dark ways of An Dˆn (Destiny). So, thinking to pass away from a place doomed for him, and that he might be safe elsewhere, he sailed north to a kinsman’s croft on Aird-Vanish in the island of Taransay. But at the end of that month he heard in his sleep the noise of tidal waters, and at the gathering of the ebb he heard

‘ Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!’ Then once more, when the November heat-spell had come, he sailed farther northward still. He stopped a while at Eilean Mhealastaidh, which is under the morning shadow of high Griomabhal on the mainland, and at other places, till he settled, in the third week, at his cousin Eachainn MacEachainn’s bothy, near Callernish, where the Great Stones of old stand by the sea, and hear nothing forever but the noise of the waves of the North Sea and the cry of the sea-wind.

“ And when the last night of November had come and gone, and he had heard in his sleep no calling of the ninth wave of the Flowing Tide, he took heart of grace. All through that next day he went in peace. Eachainn wondered often with slant eyes when he saw the morose man smile, and heard his silence give way now and again to a short, mirthless laugh.

“ The two were at the porridge, and Eachainn was muttering his Buich- eas dha’it Ti, the Thanks to the Being, when Carminish suddenly leaped to his feet, and, with white face, stood shaking like a rope in the wind.

“ ‘ In the name of the Son, what is it, Ivor mhic Ivor? What is it, Carminish?’ cried Eachainn..

“ But the stricken man could scarce speak. At last, with a long sigh, he turned and looked at his kinsman, and that look went down into the shivering heart like the polar wind into a crofter’s hut.

“ ‘ What will be that? ‘ said Carminish, in a hoarse whisper.

“ Eachainn listened, but he could hear no wailing beann-sith, no unwonted sound. “ ‘ Sure, I hear nothing but the wind moaning through the Great Stones, an’ beyond them the noise of the Flowin’ Tide. ‘
“ ‘ The Flowing Tide! The Flowing Tide! ‘ cried Carminish, and no longer with the hush in the voice. ‘An’ what is it you hear in the Flowing Tide?’

“ Eachainn looked in silence. What was the thing he could say? For now he knew.

“ Ah, och, och, ochone, you may well sigh, Eachainn mhic Eachainn! For the ninth wave o’ the Flowing Tide is coming out o’ the North Sea upon this shore, an’ already I can hear it calling, ‘ Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow! . . . Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!’

And with that Carminish dashed out the light that was upon the table, and leaped upon Eachainn, and dinged him to the floor and would have killed him but for the growing noise of the sea beyond the Stannin’ Stones o’ Callanish, and the woe-weary sough o’ the wind, an’ the calling, calling, ‘Come, come away! Come, come away!’

“ And so he rose and staggered to the door, and flung himself out into the night, while Eachainn lay upon the floor and gasped for breath, and then crawled to his knees, an’ took the Book from the shelf by his fern-straw mattress, an’ put his cheek against it, an’ moaned to God, an’ cried like a child for the doom that was upon Ivor Maclvor mhic Niall, who was of his own blood, and his own fosterbrother at that.

“ And while he moaned, Carminish was stalking through the great, gaunt, looming Stones of the Druids, that were here before St. Colum and his Shona came, and laughing wild. And all the time the tide was coming in, and the tide and the deep sea and the waves of the shore and the wind in the salt grass and the weary reeds and the black-pool gale made a noise of a dreadful hymn, that was the death-hymn, the going-rune, of Ivor the son of Ivor of the kindred of Niall.

“ And it was there that they found his body in the grey dawn, wet and stiff with the salt ooze. For the soul that was in him had heard the call of the ninth wave that was for him. So, and may the Being keep back that hour for us, there was a burden upon that Ebb on the morning of that day.

“ Also, there is this thing for the hearing. In the dim dark before the curlew cried at dawn, Eachainn heard a voice about the house, a voice going like a thing blind and baffled,

‘Cha till, cha till, cha till mi tuille!
I return, I return, I return never more!

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Oh Lonely Rock




Rains starting up in the dark again, pulses of Ophelia a hundred or so miles off of Cape Canaveral, a tropical depression which is trying to work itself up into a tropical storm or hurricane by the weekend -- she rouses like Katrina, just a bit of disturbance in the air, salted by numens no one takes much account of, till it starts raining this way, o shit, and the weather forecasters say we may be in for as much as 15 inches of rain -- tresses of the drowned virgin, a sad history of deranging love, the annihilate bliss of water’s blue kiss --

***

In Sunday’s New York Times Richard Ford provided one of the great pieces in the Op-Ed Section (Frank Rich is sublime in “Falluja Floods the Superdome,” Anne Rice serves the gumbo of New Orleans culture in “Do You Know What it Means to Lose New Orleans?” and David Brooks makes a definitive turn away from Bush conservatism in “The Bursting Point,” foreseeing a sea change in American politics from what broke with the levees of New Orleans). In “A City Beyond the Reach of Empathy” he files, from East Boothbay, Maine, this plea for words for which there are yet no sufficient words:

“Who can write about New Orleans now? Tell us what it’s like there. Bring us near to what people are experiencing, to their loss, to what will survive. People who are close should write that. Only they’re in the city, or they’re on a bus, or they’re seeking shelter. We don’t know where they are.

“It’s just a keyhole, and a small one, onto this great civic tragedy. The people who should be writing of it can’t be found. An attempt to set out a vocabulary for empathy and for reckoning is frustrated in a moment of sorest need by the plain terms of the tragedy that wants telling. There are many such keyholes.”

Keyholes: small vantage upon a vast and yet-nameless tragedy. The images only take us so far; the vocabulary is lost in the waters, is subsumed in the gross quota of misery.

But words we do find, or die trying. American satiety makes articulation difficult; all of our successes, all of our comforts, every technical contrivance which serves to buffer us from what we increasingly refuse to look at rip the words from our vocal chords. Tragedies give us back the vocabulary, even as all words fall short, lost in the immensity of the wind and the crash of the waves, the rude paternity which has stranded us here.

***


THE IRISH CLIFFS OF MOHER

Wallace Stevens
(from The Rock his final series of poems)

Who is my father in this world, in this house,
At the spirit’s base?

My father’s father, his father’s father, his --
Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,
At the head of the past.

They go back to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,
Above the real,

Rising out of present time and place, above
The wet, green grass.

This is not landscape, full of the somnamulations
Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air.

***

Erich Neumann, from The Origins and History of Consciousness:

“The likeness between ego consciousness and the uroboros is the fundamental ‘family likeness’ between ego and self, which corresponds mythologically between father and son. Because, psychologically, ego and consciousness are organs of centroversion, the ego rightly emphasizes its central position. this basic fact of the human situation has its mythological equivalent in the divine birth of the hero and his filiation to ‘heaven.’ What we are prone to call the ‘anthropocentric’ believe of the primitive, that the existence of the world depends on his magical performances and his rituals control the coursing of the sun, is in reality one of the deepest truths of mankind. The father-son likeness between self and ego is manifest not only in the martial exploits of the hero-son, but in the synthetic power of consciousness to create a new spiritual world of human culture in the likeness of the divine.”

***

OK, stay with me for another paragraph by Neumann, ‘tis important:

***

“This synthetic function, taking its place alongside the analytical one, presupposes a faculty to which we have repeatedly drawn attention: the faculty for objectification. Ego consciousness, poised between the outer and inner world of objects and driven to unceasing acts of introjection, is by virtue of its registering and balancing functions ever compelled to keep its distance, until it finally reaches a point where it becomes detached even from itself. This produces a kind of self-relativization which, as skepticism, humor, irony, and a sense of one’s own relativity, promotes a higher form of psychic objectivity.” (Italics mine.)

***

Well, there’s your Hamlet, who’s swallowed rotten Denmark whole and hovers over the abyss of the infinite. He wants us to remember his story, or rather Shakespeare lodges it between the ribs of our thought like a knife -- Harold Bloom again, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:

“Why does Hamlet care about his posthumous reputation? He is never more passionate that when he commands Horatio to go on living, not for pleasure and despite the pain of existence, only in order to ensure that his prince not bear a wounded name. Not until the end does the audience matter to Hamlet, he needs us to give honor and meaning to his death. His story must be told, and not just to Fortinbras, and it must be reported by Horatio, who alone knows it truly. Does Horatio then understand what we do not? Hamlet, as he dies, loves nobody -- not father or mother, Ophelia or Yorick -- but he knows that Horatio loves him. The story can only be told by someone who accepts Hamlet totally, beyond judgment. And despite the moral protests of some critics, Hamlet has had his way. It is we who are Horatio, and the world mostly has agreed to love Hamlet, despite his crimes and blunders, despite even his brutal, pragmatically murderous treatment of Ophelia. We forgive Hamlet precisely as we forgive ourselves, though we know we are not Hamlet, since our consciousness cannot extend as far as he does. Yet we worship (in a secular way) this all-but-infinite consciousness, what we have called Romanticism was engendered by Hamlet, though it required two centuries before the prince’s self-consciousness became universally prevalent, and almost a third century before Nietzsche declared that Hamlet possessed ‘true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth,’ which is the abyss between the mundane reality and the Dionysian rapture of an endlessly ongoing consciousness.” {italics are the author’s}

***

Swear to remember your father, know that thou are not God, and curse the sea for it: savage prows always at the deeper work, going further, deeper, longer, louder, extending the borders, founding greater centers, then questioning the whole enterprise. What a difficult voice that is ...

***

Over the weekend we watched “The Edge of the Sea” by Michael Powers (1937), a British film premiering on Turner Classics; what a great flick, about the slow ebb of the last residents from Hinba Island, 20 miles off the western coast of Scotland, in the 1930s. Powell had wanted to make the film since he was young, and located on so remote a setting it offered him his first opportunity to create a film in pure independence, albeit with all of the mishaps and horrors that would attend attempting to create something on such remote and formidable ground. Great images of this monster rock jutting hundreds of feet out from the sea, a raw jaw of cracked granite where only the hardiest of souls would attempt a living raising sheep and fishing. The exodus from those bleak islands the result of modernity, competition from the mainland, gasoline-powered trawlers outfishing what boats they rowed, none of the mainland conveniences to be had -- electricity, running water, radio, films, access to doctors. Just the human in an element of extremity, cruel sea, vast rock, what life is made and celebrated and lost there. An ancient tradition dying in the arms of more recent, also dying, one. The movie begins with two former residents (we don’t know they are until the story unfolds the earlier tale) coming ashore and walking the desolation of empty houses, pens without sheep, no sound of dogs barking, only the deep sighs of the heaving sea and the keening of the wind. The dead most present in that wild absence, that fullness of what remains.

Some of that longer, colder, sea-mirrored light filters here, autumnally, ferried on breezes which clear the humid underbrush, its oppressive stillness; yesterday afternoon I sat on the floor of the back deck while feeding the cats, Mamacita to my left, Blue and Red eating to my right, my legs spread forward to separate former mother from still-needy sons (if either of the boys decides to encroach on her, she’ll hiss and spit, sometimes vomit her meal): and watched the play of light at 6 p.m. through our battered backyard oaks, clouds puffy and white and strolling, the boughs of the tree rocking and sighing to that breeze & the sky of a tincture of blue we haven’t seen in many months, if not cooling the aether at least drying it, sharpening the outlines, opening the heart. Tiny mouths wetly at work in their separate bowls of food, the simple millionfold gratitude for being alive, here, even now, when a cruel paradox is at work further up the Gulf, where neither light nor darkness, summer nor fall, can resuscitate the drowned soul of a city.

****

The inside name of the movie is Ultima Thule, a phrase coined by Pytheas, a Greek voyager who sailed north through the Pillars of Hercules in the fourth century BC in search of the prized sources of tin and amber. He would provide a remarkably accurate account of the coasts of France and Britain, including the Orkney and Shetland islands, and may have sailed as far as Iceland, which he gave the name of Ultima Thule, or “furthest island.” The book of his travels, On The Ocean, was lost, and no one was able to confirm its existence. (See John Gillis, Islands of the Mind; Barry Cunliffe has an account of the voyage of Pytheas in The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek)

The image of Ultima Thule -- the farthest extent of conquest -- lingered in the imagination of the Roman empire, the opposite end of the fixed center of civilization and power: how far can that will extend? Does it lap at the final shores of the world? Yet it doesn’t; the British Isles were the extent, and no further north than Hadrian’s Wall; beyond, up into Scotland and Ireland, further still to those wild islands jutting up like fists in the mist, were lands outside the rule, unconquerable, not even by the sea.

Those same sort of islands -- beyond sight of the mainland, mysterious havens of God’s wilderness -- became the sacred isles of Christian monasticism in the 6th to 8th centuries, brute havens of wilderness, far from the corrupted centers of power, out on the branch which hangs over the precipice, closest to God -- thus Skellig Micheal off the southwestern coast of Ireland and Iona off the southwestern coast of Scotland (Columba was told to found his monestary -- a penance for killing thousands over a psalter he copied in secret -- on the first bit of land he reached that he could not see the shores of Ireland from) and St. Brendan’s islands of wonder, each a bead on a rosary that was to end in the Island of the Blessed, the final island of the Western Sea, where the souls of the saved gathered and sang praises to God. Each island a wonder to inscribe in his holy book (he had burned the original book of wonders, claiming such accounts to be untrue; in penance he is dispatched by God to see all of those wonders for himself -- thus his Voyage -- and then write them down), each closer to that final island but never quite close enough -- Thus we try to get closer to the Source, reaching farther and farther out.

I’ve repeated the story before, but one variant of the Oran story has him voyaging out from his grave in the footers of the Iona abbey in search of Manannan, sailing or swimming down from the chapel footers into the watery abyss of the old Celtic hell (infrann), a cold region of ice either beneath this world or in the arctic regions of the north. This occurs in the three-day period leading up to All Hallows on 10/31. He travels from island to island, but each time he is given the message, in some form or another, “not here.” Arriving at some high-cliffed island, he searches the beach, when a note is lowered down the cliff face. Not here.

Ah that mighty rock of all we say and do, unimpressed, still at war and at one with the sea, bidding us to reach farther & deeper for the skull of the father, the Bard, the words I have yet to find sea enough to say!


href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7553/94/1600/0907ophelia1.jpg">

ON VISITING STAFFA

John Keats

{Staffa is an island next to Iona
in the Hebrides off the southeastern
coast of Scotland}


No Aladdin magian
Ever such a work began;
Not the wizard of the Dee
Ever such a dream could see;
Not St John, in Patmos’ Isle,
In the passion of his toil,
When he saw the churches seven,
Golden-aisled, built up in heaven,
Gazed at such a rugged wonder,
As I stood its roofing under.
Lo! I saw one sleeping there,
On the marble cold and bare;
While the surges wash’d his feet,
And his garments white did beat
Drench’d about the sombre rocks;
On his neck his well-grown locks,
Lifted dry above the main,
Were upon the curl again.
“What is this? and what art thou?”
Whisper’d I, and touch’d his brow;
“What art thou? and what is this?”
Whisper’d I, and strove to kiss
The spirit’s hand, to wake his eyes;
Up he started in a trice:
“I am Lycidas,” said he,
“Fam’d in funeral minstrelsy!
This was architectured thus
By the great Oceanus!-
Here his mighty waters play
Hollow organs all the day;
Here, by turns, his dolphins all,
Finny palmers, great and small,
Come to pay devotion due,-
Each a mouth of pearls must strew!
Many a mortal of these days,
Dares to pass our sacred ways;
Dares to touch, audaciously,
This cathedral of the sea!
I have been the pontiff- priest,
Where the waters never rest,
Where a fledgy sea-bird choir
Soars for ever! Holy fire
I have hid from mortal man;
Proteus is my Sacristan!
But the dulled eye of mortal
Hath pass’d beyond the rocky portal:
So for ever will I leave
Such a taint, and soon unweave
All the magic of the place.”
So saying, with a Spirit’s glance
He dived!


THE HOUSE OF DONN

This high rock beyond
the ninth wave off Ireland
is where the Head of Donn
dreams for all time,
interned there so
the Sons of Mil could
take possession
of green love
in the deeper half
of my heart. In the
Christian age which
wrote over that old
myth, it was said
that souls of the
dead were sent there
and chaffed, the
damned blessing Donn
from the height of
Skellig before being
pitched into abyss,
while the saved
viewed that rock from
aloft as they were
carried by angels
to high heaven.
Michael’s rock indeed
if Skellig’s Michael
is to be believed,
a door for all dead
souls beyond which
all kissed the cross
of their fated fires.
How is it then
that you bid me live
here, Lord of
dazzling dark seas,
forever offshore the
beloved embrace,
tending the terrible
paths where souls
and penitents wind
and writhe? What music
charms these cliffs
with such blue
and cold delight? Far
and strange indeed
though I’m still in my
white writing chair
as dawn starts to limn
the night with its
seethe of polar blue,
ten minutes from
feeding all the cats
outside & then heading
up to wake my love
to our Sunday. How
did all those worlds
come to marry here on
the lip of a page and
its past, a shore where
ghostly numens walk
and tides curve breasts
and smash all bones?
Who would guess such
a place exists just
outside this house
of love, just over
the marge of our
beyond the garden
but before the day’s
news and labors
and leakage? A
shore translated from
my father at 78
fading among his stones
and my mother fading,
like an ink, from all
the scriptures she keeps
writing down while
behind the words I write?
A shore where Melville
at age 37 was already
finished by
his great work &
falling into the mouth
of his great words
never quite to return.
Where Rilke walks
the grounds of Muzot
with his Elegies full
smashed and ebbed,
a gaunt and tired man,
bearing not a trace of his
words — loves all
failed, his daughter
Ruth estranged, disease
blooming in the blood.
House of Donn indeed,
this rock breaking far
millennia into the sea,
remnant of a shore
fallen miles back out
of sight. The only poem
worth writing, the only
one you still invite
dreaming in that bed
a thousand leagues below
where Michael’s in his boat
ferrying it all back home.


SKELLIG MICHAEL

Looking back from the great civilizations
of 12th-century France or 17th-century
Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite
a long time -- almost a hundred years --
Wester Christianity survived by clinging
to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle
of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast,
rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.


-- Kenneth Clark

Here is your most desolate
shore of rock, southwest
of all we build and till
and love: What a brutal
bed it is, O Lord,
500 feet of stone perched
above a sea-blast
which choirs below
all dreams with the
blessed thunder
of salt’s destiny.
You bid me build
this oratory beyond
all ears, joining my
voice to mashing waves
and a legion of gales,
each note not so
much offered as ripped
from my lips. Here
the oldest gods are
ravenous and raw,
their bones knocking
like boulders against
first rock, fucking
and dismembering
and roaring pure blue
riot, foaling water-dragons
of the tongue I dare not
speak but must because
this hour derives its
gospel from such abyss.
O God it’s lonely here
between angel wing
and heartless tide,
my song a rock
gnawed by appetites
which have no human
end, or, at least
for which few people
I have known would
care to bend their
inner ear. So be it,
ten waves I daily row:
I will make of this
mote in the sea’s
eternal eye a chapel
for every selkie and
child of Lir to lose
their wits on their
way here, long ago
today and perhaps
tomorrow, perhaps
as long as this rock
remains at the last
shore of the heart.

***

What of Shakespeare’s isles, further than we could or would go?

***

watching “king lear”

All the readings
of this play
& all the arias of critics
who sang its greatness
(lately reading
Bloom's dark pearl)
bring me here tonight
to watch King Lear on PBS
but shelter me no better
from this wild crack
in our skull with
its blood torrent
of grief and rage
thrilling eye and ear
with the eternal death
of fathers, nations, kings,
and millennia at the
hands of what
we love so deep and dear.

Perhaps it makes
no difference what
was crucified here,
which nail pierced
the caul or whose
blood washed the stage:
This pain is
primal, geologic,
chiseled into
the heart's basalt
as rivers mourn valleys
and days shrink to
zero and love always
loses to night,
a bier strolling
offstage into what's
forever empty.

Will those words
suffice, deeper and darker
and more divinely
terrible than
all our common deaths?
Don't ask Will:
he's less than dust
and none of his children
were survived by
their own. All that
remains is this
pyre of words
which burned
for hours in every sinew
and nerve as I failed
to sleep that night,
desperate to wrap
myself in warm
loving things,
stroking old mean
ass Buster cat
where he curled on
the bed and watching
my wife as she slept.
Wishing I could
hold them forever
without Lear.

And then --
would you believe it?
A storm gusted
over round 3 a.m.
I listened to its
slow approach
from sighs to troubled
breeze breaking in
a flurry of wet gusts
that slapped and
dashed the roof a

few times, made
one vicious swipe
that made my heart
leap and then fled.
How I loved this
house right then
for holding steady
against that storm,
our bed like a bridge
in a great ship
crossing the night,
wrapping us warm
in all Lear lost,
drowning his voice
in down.

Let the future come
and wash away
what Will. Ghosts, like gods,
fall from ripeness into
the dark we coffer.
Heaven wakes
every dawn upon our
fluttering lids.
This isle of heart
and home between
life and Shakespeare
is pearl enough.

If only "King Lear"
were not echo
and shade
of the day's first kiss.

***

Thus the measure of my mortal is that when I feel the depths of Will, it is my response to look back the other way, and breathe a sigh of relief: to shut the TV off, close the covers of the text, and row back the center -- which the next day bids me sail even further into the mist ...

ULTIMA THULE

Every voyage has its furthest
shore, its Ultima Thule
beyond which no prow
has ever beached. Upon
that iciest strand my
heart loses its last heat
for Your promised land,
wearied and grieved
beyond its pale,
turns to look
back fondly on the
courses home, embracing
not your salt absence
but the welcome
of those knowns, the simple
grounds on which I
built a home
after you at last were
gone -- today
it’s chair and
blanket, the writing pad,
window opened to
that singular
view on cool garden
and street still too
darkened by night
for more than some
streetlight up there,
a light over a red
door across the street.
Every morning at
this time, my matins
tolled out, I yawn
and yearn to get
back in bed with my
wife and slip away
into the transit that
will take me home.
If only your music
like a tidal weren’t
still ringing in my
ear when I slip back
to sleep for for that
hour before the real
day starts, waking me
with lines too dark
and dripping with the deep
to flow sensibly
from my pen. If only
the sand of that
penultimate shore were not
still grained between
my toes, perhaps
forever, driving my
thoughts yet again
from here to your
blue there, making
this pen ache to
blade again that
salt infernity. Fool.
No matter what I find
out beyond the marge
of this known bourne,
I always find myself
alone & looking back
to this safe harbor.
Each time I’ve
docked and tethered,
I look back out
and wonder
if the next voyage
will take me further
still. This rhythm is
my master, guide and
curved lacunae,
my metier and in
a cupless bacchanal
composed between
those ever distant isles
and my wife first
waking, sleep-soaked smile.