Back To Work

First time all week I’ve wakened without the hooves of a migraine bloodying up my matins. Thank you Jeezus. Air through the windows of this 4 a.m. not as clotted with heat, crickets weaving lower registers, the dark in the window not so labored nor heavy nor oppressive.

But the moon in the westward-facing windows, near full, seems heavy with blood; it makes me recall the sun lifting in the east yesterday morning (over traintracks which thread through Orlando’s downtown) was regally swamped in gules, a great big blood cherry or fire nipple or queen of sulphur athrone a torrid swath of cloud. Stasis after the cool refreshing breeze, what comes after wildness, Bush addressing the country last night in the surer hands of his scriptwriters (who allow no presence of the President’s actual mind), Ophelia slowly skirting the North Carolina coast to wind spectrally north and east toward nunneries of Atlantic depths none of us will sound. I’m just grateful for a hiatus between migraines, though it’s hard not to have much surer ground, the country plunging deeper into debt, into the consequences of its hubris and arrogance and jones for greater and lesser bling. Besides, its still hurricane season, and there is talk on the weather channel of distant disturbances whorling this way.

***

After the anniversary -- the manifesto of my totem desire, high mass in its blue cathedral, communion with its naughty Queen -- the work resumes. Invocation blesses the mortar which follows. The motion is crucial: backwards glance, nekyia, apotheosis; or, subsumation, sublimation, summation. A round from which permits the next voyage on an ever-wider & wilder globe. A spiralling psalter up and down the dominions, greater and lesser, looking back and forward at once, building cities, naming shores, performing votive ablutions at the altar the travail names.

***

This is not work for hire.
By this expenditure
You make yourself a place;
You make yourself a way
For love to reach the ground.
In its ambition and
Its greed, its violence,
The world is turned against
This possibility,
And yet the world survives
By the survival of
This kindly working love.

-- Wendell Berry, "The Farm"

***

Rilke wrote in a letter to Ellen Delp on 10/27/1915:

"Working after Nature" has in such a high degree made that which is into a task for me, that only very rarely now, as by mistake, does a thing speak to me, granting and giving without demanding that I reproduce it equivalently and significantly in myself. The Spanish landscape ... Toledo - drove this attitude of mine to its extreme: Since there the eternal thing itself -- tower, hill, bridge -- already possessed the incredible, unsurpassable intensity of the inner equivalents through which one might have been able to represent it. External world and vision everywhere coincided as it were in the object; in each a whole inner world was displayed, as though an angel who embraces spaces were blind and gazing into himself. This world, seen no longer with the eyes of men, but in the angel, is perhaps my real task -- at least all my earlier experiments would come together in it; but to begin that task, Ellen, how protected and resolved one would have to be!

***

Indeed. Which world replicates the other? Do we experience in Nature only what exists in the heart, as it is, with every organ of sense? Is the “angelic” sense Rilke refers that vision which confers the seamless identity of outer and inner, so that we praise one world with the devout throat of the other?

What then erases in such a task? What surely dies? What of I and Thou? Shore and sea? What of the fantastic sums hoarded in deep vaults? Do they turn to seaweeds? Will imps and angels kiss? Will Republicans renounce, will Democrats profess? Will the cat in the window become Taras on his dolphin, cup and trident in hand, a whiskered god for every wave?




Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness:

The hero or Great Individual is always and preeminently the man with immediate inner experience who, as seer, artist, prophet, or revolutionary, sees, formulates, sets forth, and realizes the new values, the “new images.” His orientation comes from the “voice,” from the unique inner utterance of the self, which has all the immediacy of a dictate. Herein lies the extraordinary orientation of this type of individual. Not only is the canon always “founded,” so far as we can judge, in accordance with the revelations enunciated by the voice, but to have experience of the voice often becomes an integral part of the canon as in the case of the guardian spirits of the American Indians, or when the individual has to acquire his own particular totem. (p. 375-6)

***


DARK LETTER

July 2005

God sends His letter to me
at 4:52 a.m. in a rich black simmer,
a dark epistle written by
a hand neither asleep nor quite
awake. It ferries a music from
far in the rear, a singing
nacre we don’t so much
as hear as oar, like
a water, as we struggle to the
next shore. The news is older
than I can gird with these
constructs of ink and
and looping vowels
and yet it blooms the
freshest pale blue gauze
to rim the measure
of the moon. It is rounded
three times by the muse
who loves to hear me sigh
of dirt and rain
and pent, dissembling foam.
God’s missive today is this
rich black loam where
yesterday has broken
down to every freest
fin and gill, the ink
from which every
next said thing spills.
The message he has
bottled here? O consequence,
attend! Make it darkly,
divinely, devouringly dear!

***

Jung, from “On The Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” quoted in Neumann, 376:

In this lies the social significance of art: It labors without cease to educate the spirit of the age, bringing to birth those forms in which the age is most lacking. Recoiling from the discontents of the present, the yearning of the artist reaches back to that primordial image of the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the insufficiency and one-sidedness of the spirit of the age. The artist seizes this image and in the work of raising it from deepest unconsciousness and bringing it nearer to consciousness, he transforms its shape, until it can be accepted by his contemporaries according to their capacities.

***

Ah perhaps so, in greater days of less shatter ... now that voice is just another tiny filament in the white noise of plenitude, the massa confusa of the soul when a light suddenly extinguishes. Our age is between ages, of hinges and interfascia composed, not satisfying to anyone, in harmony with neither the failing canon nor the one articulated enough to replace it.

Certainly there is vitality and wildness, ennui galore, and a confusion of divine images: a threshold energy which infuses an ardor for death-in-life (the fin de siecle float of Ophelia in the drowned cathedral) as well as life-in-death (the resurrected Eurydice in every filling moon). Such hours are renascent, stirring, soaked in origin and fulsome in futurity; it marks the leap of energy between fully dead and wholly alive, a transformation of the sources, the animation of a canon.

Such is Renaissance. As Hillman has said somewhere (Re-Visioning Psychology, I believe), the artistic hothouse of Renaissance is the bloom which unfurls wildest amid death. The flowering of Greece in the 6th century BC, the Venetian renaissance of the 15th century, the American renaissance of the mid-19th century, the Irish renaissance (or Celtic Awakening) -- all florid masques amid some great death. (Greece: the death of oral culture, awakening of the written word; Venice, death of the middle ages, emergence of the modern world; American, death of the Christian church and the emergence of the American artist; Irish, death of Catholic Church and reaching back to more primary, pre-Christian sources).

So if the days are deadly, thus nearer to our next deeper God we go ...



A GODLY BALEEN

June 2005

This dark night of loving fire, as it purges
in the darkness, so also in the darkness
enkindles the soul.
-- St. John of the Cross

He hat sent fire into my bones, and
hath taught me fire.
-- Lamentations i.13

This dark hour is my altar to
that dark night in which I plunged
too deep in you and died, the way
silver is killed in fire without
mercy so that it may shine
forever with the tooth of brilliant
moons. I’ll not return to those
whiskey-wardened nights of
bone carousal though I
light a candle for them here,
for their inward tooth of
yearn-and-burn, that savage bite
which goes all the way down
into the god of noctal seas.
It’s been hot and hotter of late,
yesterday 95 degrees,
and the seabreeze storms
trooped over selectively and fast,
dumping three inches over the
airport but just a smatter here.
Storms have been merciless
and without mercy elsewhere
all week -- over Seminole
county on Thursday with
lightning strikes burning two
houses to the ground,
and on Wednesday a bad
muthah lingered over the
University of Central Florida
in a two-hour assault, dumping
eight inches of rain and
peppering the land with
lightning strikes so perilous
that the National Weather Service
issued a special warning for all
to stay in. But none of that
massed here, and so an unsated
heat simmers at this 4 a.m.
thick as the sour breath of
that lupine revenant at
the bottle club right now
who will never score another
woman, ever, damned to burn
ever hotter every night
henceforth. Even the crickets
seem scorched into silence,
flattened down by the wake
of a sun which split the sky
a few hours ago. All that fire
here is dark and makes the
the night especially so, cauling
a weight in me of those
years I was the nightly
martyr of my eros, arrow
burning arrow barbing
right through my gut
into every flank of the sea
to curl towards my shore.
It is not the result of those
nights which still matters
but the noctilucent thrall
which sailed me nightly onto
a blackening tide, chasing glimmers
and mermaids in an
orchestrally salty stink.
Don’t get me wrong -- the
tunnies all mattered, their
revealings and succorings pressed
like pornographic leaves in
a book I pray never to burn
for fear its god bid me burn
my life all over again, filling
those pages back up. But after
all those years the undersides
of that night have blossomed,
like a sea garden, at the
deadest hours of the day
when I’m called to black matins,
by long drowned fairy bells --
a lost city of lust which
on nights like this, when
all is so silenced by big heat,
I can hear the faint music
from the few bars still open
and the jackal-like laughter
of the few damned carousers
to sing the last lines of
their vespers, words I
remember well. This was
the hour I finally ran out of fuel,
lack of booze or money or
consciousness dropping the
a heavy black curtain
on that next burning bouree.
Here and now I am what rises
from that drowse,
unslakables harrowed by that
god-decreed souse in which
I lost her but good and ever
& dreamt down and through
burnt chapels at the bottom
of the sea. I came thus to tonsure
my verses in the offices of a
mild infernity -- blue in dolor,
solar red to the lees. I’m on my
knees and praying hard, my
face buried in loins only found
under blackened spires
swathed in godly baleen.
My ink is derricked from
the darkest breasts revealed
at this hour years ago;
I set these saucers of
black milk at the window
for that old totem sea-wolf
that his thirst engine my reels.

Arias For An Anniversary

A long, migraine-plagued, hot-but-not-humid, intensively software-challenged week, Ophelia strolled north now singing to dead loves further on, John Roberts the stealth justice-to-be droining like an unresponsive autmatom to queries from Democrats, bodies slowly being dredged and bagged in New Orleans, Bush the isolate American king addressing the United Nations, extolling the virtues of unanimity of purpose (his), my wife working many hours on a custom job, praying it will seed more jobs to come, our cat Violet friskier in the ebbing of light, sensing A Change before it does much to the mercury, some of the plants in the garden of a paler, receding, tired green, & me here tired, worn out, productive, happy ...

These attempts at literate writing -- making worlds out of words, rowing toward origins, singing of love and its bluer baptisms into a longing deep as the sea -- are founded upon a sacred history: the myth inside the story. Being mythic, that history is both narrative and primal, linear yet circular, milking a heavenly sweetness from the shore where memory found blue mammaries, where I and Thou came together, O, only for three nights of eternal love on that crashing land beneath the wave.

As myths go, it’s pre-Christian, arriving after my crisis in faith in which I threw out the baby Jesus but kept the bathwater of Mary. (That’s my mothers name, as was His.) As myths go, its also pre-Christian, a way forward that travels further back. As myths grow, it is the circumference of an age which is trying to birth out of a dated Christian heritage into a later primitive origin, out of Columba back into Oran, now with icier eyes, more sabled harmonies.

Over and again I press my face to that rounded template, saying the words again and again, repeating the story, shouting again its hosannahs, washing my day-wearied mind in its saline noctilucence, readying my day by hooking up that ghostly matin umbilicus, part ocean, part mother, part God, part lover, all anima, so that exaltation may permeate my dry, aging, mortar, that I never lose the blues which bittersweetly saved me from the eternal internal, which bid me sail forever in search of that lost numen who occupies with each transit a greater and greater whole of my heart.

September 15 is an anniversary of sorts that I have marked over the years--it’s when one of my great passions said goodbye to me (in 1982), turning and walking away from me, slamming the door on my love, stranding me far far out to sea of a feeling which baptised and compulsed and shattered my shores ... That event reprised an earlier love which ended the same way, disastrously for the heart which said yes so wantonly and essentially, foolishly (as every young soul is) and stubbornly nailing the inward goddess to a mortal frame, a fellow human who could only be errant and capricious and self-mired and gone.

Each year at this time I stand in the belfry, hauling on the ropes of my sacred history, tolling sweet and bitter bells at once; that clamor comprises the wave’s incredible rise and smash in orgasmically annihilate foam erasing my every boundary and limitation, and then the entire ebb of that wave leaving me broke and raw and eternally infernally empty and alone, a cathedral echo-chamber of the sea which choired loudest in losing her for good. So a music attends this story, gorgeous and terrible, too sweet for human lips and unmitigated in its perilous gall, like a booze, like the kiss of a goddess, like every word which comes within a gossamer breadth of finding her again only to turn and watcher her fade forever away once more.

The song which framed my grief, like a template, back in ‘82 was "September 15" by the Pat Matheny group (from As Witchita Falls, So Falls Witchita) Lyle Mays the keyboardist dedicating the song to the memory of the great(er) jazz pianist Bill Evans, who had died the year before -- on Sept. 15. So the song I fell in love with and took as my anthem for those grief-stricken, achingly beautiful days of loss was itself totemic of masters who had gone before, a sacred history of one song flowing from many hearts. That’s poetry, or what I choose to think of it today, and here are the ones which herald the sacred half of my tale.

***


DREAM GAL

2002

Only the simple things aren’t as good—
the smiles, the kisses, showers, hugs.
And I don’t dream. — Journal 1978

Can you arch a life out
of one embrace, the parabola
so brilliant to half-life even
here, 22 years later? I doubt it.
For whatever reasons,that
first love opened me to
my wilder, harsher, greedier
self, terrifying in its
freedoms & witchings.
I knew Becky for so short a time—
just a weeklong tryst—
I can’t even see her face
though every atom in me
pled for years to look on it
again and hence. Blonde hair
parted in 70’s fashion—yes—
brown eyes, not blue—
that voice of Southern honey
descending into molasses,
lazy, pure hammock — yes, yes—
her Buster Brown shoes stepping
over a wet curb in downtown
Spokane as we walked to
a restaraunt by the river.
None of that however adds up
to what streamed round her
into me, as if she were standing
in that river we watched as we ate,
yanking all my salmon chains.
Can eternity fit in the softest
and most temporary brush of lips
on some cold dawn, a sleepy
heat rising from two bodies still
glued together from the previous
night’s clench? It must, because
something of that last morning
we woke together before she
drove off to LA wakes here—
not the passion, not the take
on love a loveless, 20-year-old
boy could possibly imagine
waking at last in the arms of
a true Beloved—a clear blue space
I woke to that March morning
with every impossibility strewn
around the room. I was no longer
a solitary, wolf-torn of winter nights,
but reborn to summer waters
which have never drained away.



THE NAKED TRUTH

2004

Marcus, a student of the gnostic
Velentinus (c. 150), relates that
a vision "descended upon him ..
in the form of a woman ... and
expounded to him alone its own
nature, and the origin of things, which
it had never revealed to anyone,
divine or human."

-- Eileen Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

My birthday in the summer
of ‘82. She appeared at the upper bar
out of nowhere, fanning through
the smoke and blaring rock
as if stepping from that wave
ordained to drown me with
every blue fury in the lap
and chest of Love. We talked
a while nursing beers in
the wild din, her voice and
mine forming a bower
in which some goddess awoke,
aroused, and laid hands
on us, ushering us into woods
to sacred for a name.
And left us there, in
reverence for a secret
only we could reveal
and revel when all
our clothes fell like
angels to the floor.
Much later that night --
in fact well into the
next morning’s too-
bright hot summer light --
She smiled unbuttoning
her tropic blue blouse,
and unhooked her bra with
that hidden gesture,
freeing her full, pink-
nippled breasts, startling
me more awake than
I had ever been: And with
eyes locked on mine
came close, to softly
weave her chest against
mine, whispering O
make love to me. O
indeed: And so I did,
a half dozen times or
more that too-late-night
which had crashed
so dreamily on the next
day’s shore, licking her
to sweet moans once
then twice, getting sucked
off, fucking slow and
long in rhythmus
to a secret beat
which was new even
to God. We could not
stop entering and
collapsing in each
other, leaving selves
and hours far behind;
thus we drifted
so far offshore as to
never quite return.
Ever. But as a
mortal pair we fared
quite poorly, and in
weeks she jilted
the needy, greedy,
angst-ridden boy
I had become, walking
back into the night
for good. After all
these years, I mark
this day -- Sept. 15 --
as the tolling of
her wavelike recede
from the ecstasy of
my life, my feet forever
thence half in a surf
which once proclaimed
our naked name. Fare
thee well, lost lover.
The child you said you
begged of my seed
our second night
would now be 23,
and perhaps he
or she is here,
cuculattus of that
high blue wave
which crests in every
"Yes!" God gives
me truth to shout.
Whenever I hear those
old Journey songs
from 1982, I go back
to that first unveiling
hour, in thrall
and surrender to
the whole fantasy
of love and lust,
believing it more
than Truth itself. That
fictive beach where she
and I came hard
calling each other’s name
remains here, built
up with the ground
bones of every other
love I’ve sung,
sustained now by
the long, perhaps
my life’s remaining
duration with the woman
I call my wife by
day and blue welling
deep down the
pike of night.
Our hearts are
more naked now
than our bodies
may be allowed to
go: Mere angels
can’t fly this naked reach
which is part dream,
part ocean beach,
part clear blue sky
inside you and I.



ANNIVERSARY

Sept. 15 2002

Today it’s been twenty years
since I lost the second woman
I hardly knew yet I loved
in full, stupid, jealous & greedy.
In losing her I became
so desperately and infernally
alive as to beg silence: her shade.

All I remember of her today
is that morning we walked
on Cocoa Beach after fucking
most of the night. We were
making small talk in our
dreamy exhaustion—laughing
at the way sandpipers scurry
like tiny execs— when she
paused and smiling at me
in front of dawning sea.
The whole package I recall—
that smile, the blue eyes streaming,
the curly blond hair in a halo
of sun, her breasts full
and straining against
a year-old bikini top, the
sea crashing light foam
at her ankles like cream,
that evanescent breeze—
all of that was greater than
any morning, a finally found key.
Yet that was only true
in reverse, when she told
me at last to go to hell.
but in reverse. I recall
how I hurt bad enough
in the proceeding months
to see beyond the heat
into caring at last about
how I lived love.
How the days slowed
in the viscosity of grief,
a sludge both anguished
and gorgeous, slowing
the day to a wave-crawl,
the sunlight lengthening
across the lakes.
That image spoiled my drinking
for the next 4 years
though I tried, reaching
for her on every tree.
to care last about how
Eventually I came to
marry that shape,
sacrificing the wild
night of making love
for long hard days
of patient making.
Love doesn’t teach us
how much there is to
gain in love, only
how much there is to lose
by not loving, or failing
to love well enough.
Today I recall those long
burnished days in September
when grief was a tide
tolling a sea
I’d been born to in losing.
Stupid, jealous, greedy,
it’s true, but also the wound
which eventually bled me real.
I sit in the house I prayed
that day to inhabit,
the sum of every surrender
I made to love’s brine,
it’s awfullest, most
incompetent son,
each smile a wine
so much more difficult now
so much more
what she only kissed.



THE KISS


...Alpha continues to begin,
Omega is refreshed at every end.

-- Wallace Stevens,
"An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven"

Orpheus didn’t lose his
beloved in hell,
he failed to retrieve
his song of her.
The music which hallowed
her pale hair for all time
turned hollow inside
him, the night turning
rude and cold as
brute winds whistled
tunelessly through her
ribs. Rilke went down
there for years in
search of his Elegies,
lost in 1914: a sudden
great flapping lost just
a beat and then disappeared,
his poems turning
weary and poor, none
he carved after
cathedral enough
to recapture her sound.
How was it she smiled
one day in the full
wonderment of wheat
and unveil to a kiss
in the hymeneals of
spring and just
falter that brush,
withering and draining
to a bold blotchy
winter filled with those
bad nights no
other oblivion can
garrot enough.Insomniac,
lonely, horny, with
history whispering
up from the vents --
How could it all
end right there on
the iciest banks of Hell?
My cap and bells are lined
with red velour, scarlet
like the bright satin maw
of a vampire’s black cape.
I chase every poem’s
fancy to the highest
sea-cliff where she always
get lost in the wind’s wail
and roar of the surf too
far below. The sea mauls
and mashes the end
of every love song.
We never get her back
though we die trying.
I sail forever toward her
turn to me that spring day,
singer and song cupping
the shapes of her bliss,
our forfeit that quatrain
which ends with a kiss.





THAT STRANGE,
SWEET MUSIC

I heard that strange sweet music
between my mother and the sea
and was thus called to voyage
toward a happy ever island
where the women and the harps
weave one lasting song,
inside and behind and under
this ordinary strand of trials.
An apple branch was seared
across my heart’s dream
so far away on salt wave-backs
of seem which margin fields
of wheat, each dolphin in the
foam a horse on high steppes
leading me toward that home
I’ll never fully live in, though
each poem shapes both prow and
hoof. Surely I am only sitting
here in the blue washes of early
Sunday light, the cats now
restless to be let out and
my wife stirring upstairs:
Surely I am only scratching
in a composition book yet again
waves of ink across the page,
faithful in the foolery which
tries to make of words a whirl
of hair and breasts and eyes
which also surely call me from
a distant beach only my heart
has ripened ears to hear:
Surely she begs me compose
the sand and breakers
and strangely singing sky
which frames her standing
there with the tide ebbs
over her feet and pulls
the moonlight to the branch
she’s holding out to me, a
glittery branch of silver fire,
the one white blossom changing
as I watch into one red apple
which is both kiss and nipple,
hull and prayer, sea and shore
which I must name here best as
I can: Surely though all words
fail me and I age from these
years of fruitless and bittersweet
enquiry, never quite reaching that
happy isle though my well
is filling the song she wove in me
when I was born, when I heard
my mother call me at the beach,
when I saw a girl playing in the
yard of a house down the street,
when I first lifted a young woman’s
blouse when we were in our teens,
her breasts like pale soft fruit
of that glowing silver branch
which hangs over me just out
of reach no matter how much
I row or rage or ever revise.
Surely she’s the music which
haunts the curving wave I am,
and this poem is that song
which no church or science
can ever save, her white beach
the psalm curls heaven in
a bed I always almost reach:
Surely at least and only here,
on these fading paper sheets
which in my ending
we’re allowed to faintly greet:
lips to her lips I here press
in the infernal ocean of our undress.



LYLE MAYS

Listening to Lyle Mays
as I have these past
20 years has frequently
been like swimming in
sweet waters: immersion
in a uteral plenitude
with all the time in
the world: Yet his
gorgeous keyboard
arias turn bittersweet
in the sad knowledge
of how little
they truly move or
matter or rescind
the human day:
His ripened ecstasies
are almost deadly so:
Music for the lover you
dreamed of all these years,
with soft sea eyes
and impeccably spread hair:
Drops of lost mother’s
milk dribbling
from the notes:
Pure, inconsolable
nourishment. Of late
I’ve popped the "Solo"
(1998) CD into the
player of my rental
Grand Am and driven
to work and back
inside a lush, becalmed
sheath. Sometimes
I feel stilled as a baby
returned to her
eternal beach: Other times
I want the other tit,
with its dark juice
anticipating perfectly
met desires. I don’t know
whether his music
blesses or braces
the life I choose:
Completes or collapses:
Breaks me open
like a rash of sweet
jasmine or caulks
me shut in a calyx
of ice: Both I
suppose: It’s my best
and worst music,
the way I listen
to Lyle Mays,
so sadly earnest,
so resigned to
an ineffably
impotent sigh:
My wife can’t stand
to listen to it,
says it depresses
her to no end:
Can there be a goodness
in the music of falling
angels? In the heart’s
impeccable and
unbreachable desires?
Is there any truth
to narcotized traffic,
to the Florida day
infused with an
aural hoar? Does such
Longing ever finish
braiding her Lament?
I don’t know, but
this music is surely
one of my names,
the sum perhaps
of what is in every day
that can’t be touched
though we wish to,
oh, infinitely so.
Pandora’s box
locked in the roots
of my ear-heart
with its one
consoling content
singing back to
Lyle’s sweet piano
washes: my glittering,
terrible tide
with it’s too wide,
too dark mirror.



LYLE MAYS (2)

I heard your music in the
Ruin of my days -- that sad time when
I’d drunk to dregs what wasn’t there,
No draught deep enough, no bed my
Own. Lost in an ever-souring
Night, your second solo album
Came into my hearing like a green
Sprig on a changing wave -- hope at
Last of land. No, that’s not quite it:
More like uncorking a note from
An old, perhaps infinite bliss
Which resembles the wild blue sea
But isn’t. Men die every day
For lack of your sweet so dire salt.
Your soft keys sprang my ear’s deep vault.



CONCERT IN PARIS

2003

Bill Evans sounded
the ocean in
a piano’s keys. Played
them like a man
holding on to his
totem fish for dear life.
Each song was
chaliced from a tide
so full of sweetness
there that just
one thimble could
smash down a
cathedral of pale
singers in its wake.
Those keyboard washes
killed Evans for sure --
a career OD on
infinitely pure and
purer chords composed
of bitter minors
and collapsing major
sevenths, pouring
in the ear the sounds
of angels in bed
praising God with
sexual wings.
Addiction was
his only defense --
who does not numb
what only God
can fully hear? The
powdered horse
post-gig, plugging
the ears with that
whiteness else
sirens swallow the sea ...
Was he any kind of
man away from those
wild keys? Could he
ever walk on dry land
with feet grown
so skilled at the waves?
Perhaps art is just
a migraine of soul,
a smoky torch wrapped
in a falling angel's wings,
surrender to the wave's
collapsing half, limned
in that cloak of mist
and foam which thunders
down a life's short shore,
forever in tumult, always
demanding more of
exactly what can never
be sustained. Every time
he found those gorgeous
places (composed of
two or three of the
same piano keys a
million players also
played but never
could sound), you
sense how beauty
shoots inward as it
reaches achingly out,
each fingered ecstasy
an arrow through
its own ripened heart.
At the Paris Concert
in '79 Evans played
with his last trio,
aged 50 and looking
much worse: he bent
over those keys the
way the moon works
the tide -- a power
above soothing
forces below. He
would be dead soon
enough from all the years
harrowed by that song,
damping down the voice
of God in every wave,
his hands obeying what
hauled him too far out,
into places more
savagely sweet than
the very sea -- "Minha"
thonged with so many
curved vowels of ocean
bliss, capping a
career careering just
offshore, just out of
reach, just where all
the angels lean against
the bar long after closing
time and try, oh try,
to shut the door
with just one more,
my friend, just one more
& all the while
cawing in the booming
hiss, flinging wide the
wild startle of the next
kiss from that piano
on a stage beside the sea,
an ecstasy whose
bottom is bottomless.


ANTITHESIS

Spring 1978

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

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

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

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

HEART MUSIC

Spring 1978. Approaching
20 years old.
Winter freezes me because
I can’t find a heat vent
in my heart. Too isolated.
Trying to sound eloquent
but the words were all mashed
in my head. Explicating
what proved a drone. Nigh
suicidal. I knew it
but had no ladder up.
Or so I thought.
I will not die until I touch
another face, I wrote
one February night
polishing off a bottle of
burgundy & listening to
Yes revolve aerie sugars
round a brute winter night.
Later I dreamed of a
sad-eyed woman standing
in a river: the desire I felt for
her drove salmon through
her legs to die. Days later
I met a woman at a party
who became the actual
face of that woman in the
river, or it’s first human flake.
She kissed me all night.
I fell in love for the first time,
in the way of one who
comes deep in a welcome.
She left in a week. The
desire I felt all alone
kept me from writing poems
for ten years. I flapped
an finned a watery dark.
One raw spring day
soon after she left I wrote:
I will not die now that
I’ve touched another face.
I became the energy of all art
which could not plant a garden
nor revel an entire summer day
without whispering a word.
The heart a salmon too brutal,
too beautiful, too ripe
for the river. Leaping wherever it falls.



HOMECOMING

2002


We were having our anniversary dinner
at a restaurant we’d remembered
fondly from a previous visit—an elegant
meal artfully served—yet this time it suffered
from singularity: same place, all changed.
The bread was cold, the veal tough
and hunkered in over-brassy sauce,
the service humdrum, halfassed.

Still, you were beautiful, wearing
a simple pants suit and white blouse,
a turquoise necklace arching your neck,
your hair a perfect auburn sweep.
That night you were relaxed and
confident in our marriage, so much so
that a pricey so-so meal did not
mar all we had and meant to celebrate.

There must have been 20 highschool
girls in the room, dolled, we guessed,
for homecoming. All were in spaghetti
strap gowns, piled-up hair and triple
lards of warpaint. Distracted from
your filet mignon, your eyes were both
amused and paternal, watching girls
rise in twos and threes from their tables
to head for bathroom, walking past us
giggly and flushed in the grandeur
of all first wave-steps to the world.

Neither of us went to homecomings when
we we were young, nor cared much to;
nor will we ever send a child of our own
off to such a night. But still it was a treat
to watch this high mass of dressing fine
by women still too much girls ashine
with possibility, the night brushed with
only the faintest blue of every bruise to come.

Well—interesting for a while, but youth
too quickly makes a drone of its spree,
and you can only linger for a short while
around nostalgia’s flame. We ordered
tiramisu to go and drove home, climbing
into bedclothes to watch "Trading Spaces"
—those pinch-a-penny makeovers

a guilty, minor pleasure in the later
duration of our married life, sustained now
by all we slowly painted over when wooed
nights slipped from view, trading a host
of first-blush hopes for this house
which filled with what we thought we
were, then lost, and what despite us grew.



ONLY THE SONG

2002

Music is the memory of what never happened.
— Jack Gilbert

Only to the humble does the dream come,
and contained in the dream, there is only the song.
— Papago saying

As a poem dips in dark waters
to ink seal-ichors,
God’s wild nib
unharbors the ocean
from these ribs.
I held that blue music dear
bellowing down the
wine-press of bitter nights.
He seeks the ocean
whose kisses parch and bleach.
I didn’t ask to end up here
but I give thanks every day
for the next draft,
the next siphoning prayer.
Such psaltery is
my daily sump, your alms,
our merry brine: oblations
of whatever fins there,
fish or mammal,
man or Manannan.
Sirena of this restless tide,
your errant son returns
to fight this losing fray,
epically crossing out
all but the music
which crashed all night
and remains. Clasp this
to your breast
like a locket or a cross
or a lover’s tired head.
This song is conched
from your deep bed
and dropped on a pink shore.
Marry your ear to my making:
inside these curved lines
your dark womb calls — no,
demands — for more,
even though it’s just one song,
even though I always get it wrong.

The Drear-So-Dear Rear View

So to reiterate: the symbol or numen -- the imago of my thrall, in all Her yeasty breasted blue-swelled cresting crashing wild to foam my lees -- captivates the mind with its raw power, holding it thus til it has been fucked and flung and hooved and hoovered, til its thrill is You, the articulated to the ends of the sacred cartography, every island nacred, every shore shellacked with the ambergris of my spermacetti ire. Once baptised by the numen, the only way out is through. The tale here is a sort of psychic bildungsroman, looking in the rear view mirror to divine my forward compass. What is it in that backwards glance of Orpheus, so filled with desire, so doomed to lose the heart’s own shade? Why does St. Columba desire so to look upon the face of buried St. Oran one last time -- news of death, or desire to see with Oran’s eyes the future he was building?

Let us spend a while in that backwards glance, in the back ward of chained repressions, amid all I lost to find this work here

....



THE THRILL OF IT ALL

from "A Breviary of Guitars"

spring 1978

The music of
what followed
had a harder
beat: The
season was
overtaken by
Roxy Music,
those stylin’
rock romantics
trolling at
the ragged edge
of disco,
a cocktail shaken
(not stirred)
from to
the urgent beat
of savior faire:

The time has come
It’s getting late
It’s now or never
Don’t hesitate or stall
When I call
Don’t spoil
The Thrill of It All

That’s from
"The Thrill of
It All, Roxy anthem
off Country Living,
their fourth album:
the import version
shows two
Eurobabes in
panties caught
in the flash
by some bushes
(The domestic
cover was purged
of titillation’s
angels: just
nocturnal bush.
Which still
sufficed, if
you knew
what it troped.)
My buddy Dave
was back on
spring break
raw in his
erotic angst,
eager to fly
again: We
spun that song
like a prayer
to open us:
a driving
rhythm of
doublebass drum
and mantic bass
like hooves
at full gallop:
it’s fusillade
of romantic angst
not so much
marshalled
as hurled against
the night,
desire tempered
to the keenest
edge by rage
and fear that
our precious
small chance
for love will be
forever lost:
Opportunity
is that second’s
gap in the
enemy’s defense
through which
we must loose
our arrows NOW:
The opening
is that small
forgotten air
vent in the Death
Star through which
Luke Skywalker
in the first
"Star Wars"
launched his bomb,
not with the
aid of any
computer
but a
triangulation of
desire and
necessity in Heart:
Dave and I
would hear
that song,
look at each
other, then
head to our
rooms to
change into
the finest
somewhat
clean rags we
could find:
We’d down
a round or
two of Blue Jesuses
then climb
in Dave’s Mustang
(which started
up like the
sportscar in
"Love Is The Drug")
to drive not
to the rock club
filled with luckless
rock zombies
but to the disco
at the Sheraton
where girls were
dancing to
a jaded Top 40
touring band
within the red
sugary whorls
of glitterlight
and Long
Island Iced Teas:
The band
confected
local coke-snoots
of Average White Band
& Bee Gees,
& Donna Summer
wearing white leisure
suits with shirts
opened wide:
Dave & I
downed one
tequila-challenged
marguerita
and asked every
girl in the club
to dance till
closing time.
Always luckless,
we’d climb back
in Dave’s Mustang
hearing that
distant surge and
haul of the river,
the night
streets glistening
with spring rain
promising all
and empty of
sweet Becky:

Everywhere I look
I see your face
I hear your name
It’s all over the place
Hey girl
Tho you’ve gone
Still I recall
The Thrill of It All

We never scored
at that club,
but that never
seemed the point:
The kick was
in hearing "The
Thrill of It All"
and responding
to its thrown
gauntlet,
heading out
heedless of
the hour or
budget (none)
or any other
of the superego's
sober duties,
feeling only
possibility,
our hungers
fuelled like those
Blue Jesuses
with desire’s
holy flame:
We became
Astarte’s temple
jackals with
tuxes rented
from the moon:
And I swore
I would find
Becky again
no matter what
the cost, no matter
where I would
go, no matter how
far I must fall:

I can’t see
I can’t speak
I couldn’t take more than another week
Without you -- oh no
So I will drink my fill
Till the Thrill Is You




Thrill indeed: enter the abyss of love’s enchantment and shatter, chasing the dream, trying to find her again in the next or the next or maybe the next bed. Ah but how the desire is so bent backwards, trying to reclaim what was taken from me in that outward-flinging embrace, it now in the possession of a woman who walked away. No wonder I became such an

***


ASS MAN

Summer 2000

A man is
geared by the
triangulation
of his history
with and desire
for a woman’s
body: Focus
tightens on
a locus of
such keen interest
you’d think the
throne &
altar of our
world was there:
(It is:) There
are smut mags
and Web sites
zoned to the
empires of
our bottomless
need: Boobs:
Teens: Redheads:
Hardcore: Facials:
Oral: Anal: Mature:
HeShes: Lactating:
Bondage: Water
Sports: Gay: Some
guys thrill at
the sight of
a woman’s breasts
above all: Some
come at the
sight of a
gartered legs:
Others
keel the depths
with blonde
or red hair
especially down
below: While
all these parts
can poof my
prong, (hammer
my hoses, wake
the hearsed dolphin,
scream my guitar
boat to every
aerie of naught)
I’d have to say
above all
I’m an Ass Man:
Love — I mean
LOVE — the
sight of a
woman walking
away: Those
sweet full curves
house the motions
of departure
and call: I love
it when one
of those jockettes
at the gym
bends over
to retrieve a
towel or to
tie her shoes
and up and
out goes her
tight sweet
ass: It would
be so easy
to just mosey
over behind
her behind
& corral myself
there: Yeee
Haw: I love to
get back in bed
in the morning
after these
perusals in old
panties & lay
naked next to
my wife with
her back to me:
Feel my cock
nestle against
the sleepy warmth
of her ass
and then thrust
my hips against
her slowly, not
hardening but
savoring each
inch of contact
& the sweet glow
of my loins
there: When I
leaf through
one of those
onehanded mags
admiring &
lusting for
a woman’s
full naked clench
there is one
shot which nails
me clean through:
She’s kneeling
at a bed or
couch facing
way from the
camera &
her butthole
& cunt tucked
in the split
moon of her
ass facing
directly at me
like a face from
down under:
Perhaps just a
hint of
her face or
breasts showing
waiting silently
expectantly for
my approach
& ravage:
Oh man: I
want to just
nestle my face
there & go
booogabooga
booga, lick
& kiss & bathe
& dream in all
that sweet
exude, that
musky dusky
oily roily
fishwater: Or
grab her hips
in my hands
& plung my
cock into
her cunt &
ass up and in
& in and out
& up and
up and up
and awayyyy
we go: I don’t
find any ass
memories down
there where I
fucked a true
love from behind:
At least the
love-memory
isn’t connected
there: Rather
those glosses
are all looking
into her face
at the moment
of arrival my
cock hard as
granite & my
nuts spasming
in a total loss
of control & she
smiling deeply
with her eyes
closed & whispering
come baby come
home to me:
Ocean beaches
& crashing surf
& all of
my wildly
emptying into
her: Yes those
are potent
memories but
the ass dreams
are more so:
Perhaps they’re
inflected
or infected with
nether truths
of evacuation,
departure, loss:
Desire defines
along an edge
of refusal: Little
Kim on the
playground when
I was 9 walking
away after
refusing my
bouquet of
dandelions — ooh
see that sweet
& pert little
butt dancing
away into the
hazy oblivion —
I store that
image in a
vault of sights:
Big and little
crossed O’s:
The Bigger
O focuses that
forever between
longing’s fingertips
& Eurydice’s
disappearing
shade: (Nice
butt, eh?)
But who really
leaves who
I wonder? Isn’t
the chase after
human moons
defined by sheer
fabrics & a line
of panty a call
for self-departure,
a leave of
my own sense?
I swore I would
never marry again
but when I
first saw my
future second
wife at the Sapphire
Supper Club in
October ‘96
she was leaning
over the bar
to order a
drink: She
wore a white
pants suit that
perfectly cupped
her ass as she
leaned over
& that was it:
I do & I
Will & I Must
& I Shall: "The
one thing we
seek with
insatiable
desire is
to forget ourselves,
to be surprised
out of our
propriety, to
lose our
sepiternal memory
and to do
something without
knowing how or why;
in short, to
draw a new
circle," Emerson
writes in his
heavenly
sphere of an
essay "Circles":
Certainly my
future wife and
partner’s bottom
raising
just an inch
as she strained
to hear the
bartender drew
me into a
new circle: It
was an
invitation,
wholly unconscious
and accidental,
forming a new
circle which
cycles me here:
Yet Butt is also
But, the
exception, the
prohibited No
my mother so
tartly scolded
me for: There’s
a naughtiness
which draws me
darkly toward
a woman’s ass
in ways I’ll
never be able
to frontally
confess to ‘em:
I would love
to fuck my wife
up the ass but
she would never
allow such
pilllage of control:
No woman would,
I think, not
willingly, though
the notion that
every one secretly
would love me
up there is
eternally arousing:
Not that I
relish dipping
my dick into
a woman’s
stinky sludge:
Rather it’s
the notion of
trespass &
the lotion of
taboo: Crossing
border heedless
of what others
dare not attempt:
"Nothing great
is ever achieved
without enthusiasm,"
Emerson again,
end of "Circles":
"The way of
life is wonderful;
it is by
abandonment:"
And ooh how
sweet those cheeks
of departure,
cleft for meeee:
Nothing like
a naughty girl
who savors
dirty games:
Like the bad
girl who took
me into the
woods at 6
& used me every
way: There’s
a smell close
to shit in
molestation,
disturbing,
uncontrollable,
wholly addictive:
I can smell
it in a bad
girl’s husky
voice: It’s part
terror, part
invitation: Oh
the Queen of
Love and the
Evil Princess
Whore are split
evenly in my
desires just
like every other
guy: Love and
its desecration
are like 2
fillies ill-
harnessed to the
same flying chair:
Love builds
strong walls &
save houses in
which passion
falls asleep but
the love works
on forever: Desire
lurks the boundaries
of late afternoon
shadows that
play across a
strange woman’s
ass seeking &
fearing & edging
up to edge &
retreating in
fear: It’s fire,
bubblebutted
fire: Across all
Florida wildfires
now burst into
multiacre blossoms
of bad drought:
A state of
danger close
to the high
noon of summer:
Even the storms
which we pray
for bear dangerous
tongues of sudden
fire: Ooh I
can look but not
touch the next
pale curve on
a strong of moon
beads walking
by busily
ignorant of me:
Revel here if
you must: Grab
her here &
yank down her
shorts & panties
& lean her
against a chair
with her ass
& pussy looking
at you like
a face of wonder
in perfect
alignment with
the stars which
have fated me
here & ask,
what now,
dolphin plow:
Can a midlife
crisis truly
burn out of
control &
then out
completely here?
Can I forget
one note of
that passionate
music by
singing so
helplessly
about it?


***

Oh sublimate, sublimate, such wildfires tinder souls, you know, always end in sufficient ruin ... forego the imperious urge Out There, even Upstairs, act your age, find decent work to be about, fuel the hands that tap away here with saucy blue squeezy squishy blissy octane, that words be "wild and whirling," a lover penultimate in Her thighs-wide invitation, transgressing every border and orifice of the underotherworldly brothel between all lines, where She has come to exist, On Paper, symbolically most evanescently and effervescently Real, endlessly devoured by my desire.

***



IT’S MY GEHENNA
(AND I’LL CRY IF I WANT TO)

2004

There are easier ways to go
than this unrequited,
ever-off-the-shore travail
between the islands of
Your washing bliss.
I could just go numb
inside the free-fall
of days; zip up the
itch and say no more
of that tantalizing
blue so full and not
of what you are
always nougating through.
A sturdier keel of
less sensate wood would
surely cut the swath
of wave with drier
purpose and surer
compass, I mean
should it ever rue
to leave the harbor
which it would not.
Moored fast to the
world’s known dock,
that boat would
rock all night on soft
dazed sleep, impregnable
to the breasts of dream.
But you are much too
sweet upon that crashing
shore no boat or song
can reach for me to
even wish to fling
the burn of those high
frozen stars which augured
my voyage long ago we
first met and kissed.
Such ancient lamps
are much too oiled
from our first bliss
to dare physic a
damping down by sleeping
through to first light.
Instead I war on
with my gods
here on my
devout knees,
beseeching the wide
dark tide to show
your face at last,
a least one smootch
of curve and smash.
for these curve
smashing eyes.
And so I vigil here
again and again and
again, lighting candles
in these votive boats
of paper and incessant
ink, writing down
every squid and
sperm-whale tussle
in the depths of all
I dream to know of
you. Futile and fruitless
perhaps to the waking
day, but the nails
are inextricable
and have fused me
to a burning tree that
lamps each matin
with a wild candesdcent
longing for the next
words I can say
of how you stood
and smiled in the
milky new day’s light
with sleep blue in
your eyes and pulled
me once again into that
voluptuous song
that ever deepens
because it never dies.


***

Consumed by an archetype, consuming it whole ... thus the water-nymph who woke me from a sleep drowned me in deeper waters than I ever dared to find her when I thought she waited for me in some actual harborage or bar or bed. My chances for getting laid these days are finite, wardened and walled by the life I have willed and deemed good and give thanks for on my knees every day; ah but the liaisons are infinite in the gauzy diapsons of the word, astride the feral dolphin who makes literal sex seem so symbolic, upside down the topmost sense of things, plunging waves like upturned asses, singing all the darkest names of God to be chanted by the climactic choir of time. Cerne Giant striding thus, cock a straight road from hips to lips, spearing the heart of things dead-on, spouting the milky quintessence across the pendulous pale breasts I imagine you the reader proffer.

Music to whose ears? Thus Orpheus must lead Love out from Hell on the sound of soles alone. The eternal enthrallment of the symbol means there’s no real exhausting it; fucking on paper is still fucking, ainit? I’ll never let that ocean motion go. So my backwards glance in aching fondness for what I lost when I said No -- No to literal sashays, No to the indolence of LaLaLand, No to dalliance, No to dreams of perfection and endless satiety, No to defying my mother’s old admonition that there’s more to life than A Bed, A Babe and A Bottle of Booze -- the thrall of the symbol is spectral and lucent, like a moon, the boneyard bonelight resonance of the grave I buried all of those immature dreams in, all of those scintillant Scyllas of the unrepentent heart --

Yes -- so my backwards glance, desiring to look upon the face of Oran one last time, impatient to see my love Eurydice in the land I lost her to -- my fondness for watching a woman walk from the room, ass waving to me in pure departure -- my backassed upside down Otherworldly thrall which makes all things true on paper which could never be in life --

My backwards glance is reverent of the symbol which led me here into futurity, into the Orphic poems of experience, into Irish Christian church of the 6th century, into later middle age with so much work to do that getting up at 3:30 a.m. just doesn’t cut it, makes my verbals explode in a wave-smash of blue ardor, in a prose to poetic for its own good, throwing in poems to prosaic to be of any good to the art.

Hopeless and futile and divine, that’s what She renders in her wild pale son, riding the wavebacks till every song has been sung.



HARVEST

2002

I.

During that summer
in Pennsylvania in ‘78
—a bridge between first
love and long winter—
I scythed a field
behind my father’s house.

The field was ringed
by oak and beech
and maple, puritans
all of wild nature.
Over us the sun
wrote hyperboles
of desire, lathering
us in its swoon.

I loved the motions
of faux harvest,
lifting high that
long blade, carving
off a shank of sun
before sweeping down
in a muscular arc
through shin-high
tapers of weed.

Each return of
the blade seemed
to reach for the
woman I’d lost,
sweeping into the
void she’d driven
off into: But the
blade returned naked
into the bright air
with a long, lonely swish.

Working down the field
I recalled how she smiled
as we stood over the Spokane
River, the spring runoff
pounding chords into mist.
How all that rose to
a hammering release
and then floated
for miles in a drowse.

All lost. I could have made
of that scythe a tillage,
clearing away love’s ruin
to plant something good,
at least useful; maybe
learn something, too.
I was for that hour good
and simple, poised to begin:

But I wasn’t ready to let go
what I’d had lost. I was
too young and stewed
in the sun’s bullish ire.
I mowed that field down
to summer’s end,
set scythe in the barn,
then boarded a train headed
West to find her again.


II.

On a cold autumn night
hedged by the striate
foliage of pot and speed
and booze, I picked up
a guitar and plugged
into a riverish roar.
I loved the weight
of that Fender Strat,
a heftier blade, equine
and amped, cranked to
the berserkeries of love.

What did I know? I was
far afield in foolish ends,
caught in a big night music
which screamed to the
nadir of her. Each swing
of that guitar at song’s
end hauled a sickle moon
down through loud falls
as hard as I could,
arcing back fever-bright
with the ghost of her smile.

Gone, but not lost.
It took me the worst years
to get back to those weeds.
To welcome emptiness
as a field you could scythe.
To celebrate the motions
which complete every kiss,
harvesting what falls
in that long, lonely,
brilliant swish.

Imago: Evolution of A Symbol

IMAGO DOMINUS

1978

She stands at the bedroom door,
half in, half out,
shadow cupping breast and belly,
a half moon smile on her face,
fine mist hanging in the air
between us, darkest night behind,
and water coursing everywhere,
crystal blue and deep and silent.


***

"Because primitive man projects his unconscious contents onto the world and its objects, these appear to him as drenched in symbolism and charged with mana, and his interest is thereby focused on the world. His consciousness and will are weak and hard to move; his libido is suspended in the unconscious and is available to the ego only in small amounts. But the symbol, as an object animated in projection, fascinates, and to the extent that it "grips" and "stirs" him, sets his libido in motion and with it the whole man. This activating affect of the symbol is, as Jung has pointed out, an important element in every cult. It was only through symbolic animation of the earth that the drudgery of agriculture was overcome, just as symbolic possession in the rites d'entree makes possible an activity requiring large amounts of libido."

-- Erich Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness, 368

***

Hence, I engage in no great work which does not have the sea in its curvature, heaving breasts and sweet foaming nipples, calling me further and deeper out than I have dared before.


***


INFATUATION

2004

... I gave you bright teeth,
immeasurable longing.
So it's just that you should give
your love in the same measure.

- anonymous Irish love poem,
15th century (transl. Thomas Kinsella)

I wrote my first secular words
in longing for she who
ferried you from antiquity
into my tongue, my taste,
my impossible irrepressible
undeniable savor for
this song to you.
We were both juniors at
the makeshift high school
at my father's church in
Chicago & it was 1972.
I fell for her at first sight,
but she always had eyes
for others, mostly those
darkling dapper Puerto
Ricans whom city life
had sharpened to a bladelike
gleam. Alas, my edge
was soft and buttery,
nursed by overheated
orange-groves down south
into a pulpy twang.
I was just some lanky
dorky dirtyblonde kid
who said the words of
God and heaven and
their promised eternities
too often: all spirit and
no wave-dipped cock,
virgin that I was. Oh
how I burned and yearned
for her in her swank flesh
- soft blonde hair
and icy blue eyes, full lips
and fuller breasts which
always seemed in insurrection
against blouse and sweater
in the manifesto which
was slowly building in
my desire. Sitting next
to me in History or on
the bench outside
smoking cigarettes in
the cold, she was my
pal of sorts, confidante
to every agony save the
one that burnt me
worst; she confided
to me in every
detail her ache for
Eddie who had one
night danced her
into a lather,
swept her off then
nailed her in some dark,
only to flick her off
soon after, like the
butt of a Winston.
Months, a year of desire
built in me as I watched her
watching everywhere
else but toward me.
Nightly I prayed on my
knees to my
pentecostal God
for deliverance from
that cross which burned
so much hotter and
powerfully than Him;
and later, underneath
the sheets, I'd dial her
up, wrapping my length
around her curves and
milking the hot honey
of her smile in one kiss,
our bliss, at my loneliest
and furthest and too
abstract last. Such
reveries only made days
worse, a jailhouse of
blueballsy ache where
I was ever walking a
dark cold shore alone
calling, calling out her
name amid the emptiness.
One day I sat by Lake
Michigan in the heightening
cold of late autumn, and
sang to that minor key
of waves and the high angels
of northern wind-singing
much as I once sang
at three years old
to Big Toe my toad
in her yellow pail;
emptying the ache and
burn in a lyric turn
about sailing across
great waters to her,
of finding and embracing
her at last. I wrote
a lot of lyrics that
way those days,
and in those first
raw moments of
singing pen on paper
the old music arose
again in your salt vassal,
your next endlessly
requited knight of
riven blue. It was such
dorky iambic drivel
filled with loves and doves
descending from above
into another freezing
day: Songs I wrote
down in my first journal
more than 30 years
and 300,000 pages
of paeans ago. Eventually
she and I did kiss,
out on a group date
where everyone dropped
angel dust and she
got way too high,
finding her desire for
me at last and least
up on those high
aeries where I searched
for her. A reach of her
hand to mine at the
back of a darkened
movie theater and
then her face turned
my way - I could
not see it as I had
so dreamed, but I felt
some shift of strange
honey toward me -
and then that one
long kiss, sixteen months
after I first yearned
for it, 380 nightly
railings at God to
deliver me or her to me.
How shocked I was to
feel so little in the
actuarials of delight,
as if the angels who
brought us together
had suddenly dived
beneath the main-
her lips against mine
in one swift connect
and then that susurration
of entwining tongues
& a wash of heat
nougating huge darkness.
Then I opened my
eyes to watch that
stranger's closed face,
not my beloved,
which never for
the duration of that
kiss acknowledged
me there, not the
way I thought that
long-waylaid kiss
at long last would
welcome me home.
No, she kept her eyes
closed the whole time:
And then, like someone
who'd just gassed up
their car, she pulled
away and focused on the
movie, giving my hand
a squeeze, another,
and one last before
letting me go for good.
And that was it.
We remained friends
through that last
senior year, but in lieu
of finding more in
that final kiss, I felt released
to go after other girls
with the darker intent
of getting laid at long
last. The high bells
would not ring again
for years. Delivered thus,
I also left that faith
which had scourged me so
those nights of deeper
ache. Requital, hell:
I was all about ponying
up to that darkling mare
with the wild curlyhairs
& yankable underwear.
Jongleur now of a
harder lyric, I preened
myself for communions
out-of-doors, in glades
the old gods sported
sprawled and spurted
in hot praise. My voice
here is still lost in that
wilderness of song,
desperate to cross the
waters and shore you
here at last, on the page
at least, having long
learned not bedded
sheets will ever yield
that kiss inside requital.
Still today, I'm infatuated
with the sound of
every pretty girl's laugh
as she walks by -
a merry tinsel sort of sea
I mimic with this minstrelsy.
That's as close as we
will ever get, my lady
of cathedral song:
A verse in thrall
with your sashay
down every naked shore,
desperate to light
one look in your blue eyes,
perhaps the faintest
of all smiles, the opening
of all doors & all the
bells between God's heaven
and your sweeter hell
ringing, ringing, ringing.


***

"When man, terrified by no laws and no furious fanatics or prophets, allows the incestuous libido full play, and does not liberate it for higher purposes, then he is under the influence of unconscious compulsion. For compulsion is the unconscious wish. (Freud.) He is under the dominance of the libido {a Greek word here meaning "fate"} and his destiny does not lie in his own hand; his adventures ... fall from the stars. His unconscious incestuous libido, which is thus applied in its most primitive form, fixes the man, as regards his love type, in a corresponding primitive state, the stage of ungovernableness and surrender to the emotions.

"Such was the psychologi situation of the passing antiquity, and the Redeemer and Physician of that time was he who endeavored to educate man to the sublimation of the incestuous libido. The destruction of slavery was the necessary condition of that sublimation, for antiquity had not yet recognized the duty of work and work as a duty as a social need of fundamental importance. Slave labor was compulsory work, the counterpart of the equally disastrous compulsion of the libido of the privileged.

"It was only the obligation of the individual to work which made possible in the long run that regular "drainage" of the unconscious, which was inundated by the the continual regression of the libido. Indolence is the beginning of all vice, because in a condition of slothful dreaming the libido has abundant opportunity for sinking into itself, in order to create compulsory obligations by means of regressively reanimated incestuous bonds.

"The best liberation is through regular work. Work , however, is salvation only when it is a free act, and has in itself nothing of infantile compulsion. In this respect, religious ceremony appears in a high degree as organized inactivity, and at the same time as the forerunner of modern work."

-- C.G. Jung, "The Sacrifice," in The Psychology of the Unconscious, transl. Hinkle
(this was later translated by RFC Hull and retitled Symbols of Transformation




BEAUTIFUL TEMPTERS

2004

Since you left ... I have dared
to do strange things-bold things,
and have asked no advice from any-
I have heeded beautiful tempters,
yet do not think I am wrong.

-- Emily Dickinson, letter to Jane
Humphries in 1850

The legitimate Venus is mundana
musica {the music of the world} ...
But the shameful Venus ... we call ...
the mother of all fornication.

- Alan of Lille (12th century)
De planctu naturae

I should have reined these
waves in long ago-shut
the door your walked out
and labored on. Instead
and to great detriment
I remain here at that
shore imploring seas
in every foment of ink
and tongue to delve you
up at last in ocean equal
to that kiss. Think of all
the other poems I might
have clabbered from
the day's milk: the mortal
fracas I might have entered,
my fortunes visible and
tenable in the fray,
my themes varied
and important, my
couplets hooved and potent.
But here the gold glints
like worn doubloons
in sands you poured through
my ears from so many
authors they've lost
their names. Song here
is every kiss I never got
plus all the ones I lost
and a few the tide tossed
in from far away
and the one I most hope to
receive, come first light,
when I wake my wife
back in our bed. Such
singing is just foolery
perhaps, but exactly
the way the shore
demands on this
pale-as-down assay
between the marges
of a life. There's much
to damn this as drollery
and drool, a moat of moot-
the pathology perhaps
of a boy's blue tongue,
a puerile dive from reality
into the polymorphous
pervese of swoon
and swagger, postpost
modernistic, a syntactic
horror rising like
a ziggaruat ababble
on the teat. Certainly
nothing your mother or
father or wife would
care to read, nor anyone
else for any matter
in the silence you
left behind. But what
gorgeous errancy!
Wrong in every
way where the ground
is too firm or known
and sweet dilirium on
the noirblue back
of the salt-tracked whale.
My tongue's the
very cock of God,
plunged in your
every sweet vale
and swale, my every
trope and verb and
metaphor squishing
from that sound.
That music now
is like a wilder marge
that crashes all night
just outside a window
I once saw you through-
an infernal, outre and
riven tune, rumpussing
the rollicking sea
of our royal blue redundancy.
Now forsworn of the
rest, let's get down
to its abyssal best.

BONING THE GHOUL

2003

An appalling sweetness
slipped into view
when I lost the last
wet curvature of you:

Well, "lost" is landfill
for all tossed verbs,
numens of that last kiss
trucked from dead suburbs.

Atop that dread mound
an eerie twattage glows
as ghoul cockage choirs
in solemn, bony rows.

That chorus sings to me
the beat-to-hell old news
that I'll not find her again
not even in rear views.

Who knows why forsaking
me was for her so easy,
why she drained the glass;
Or why her sleazy

voidings like a vacuum
in me yet clench,
a vertigo in all makings
with a familiar stench,

deigned to rule a wold
of cold and moony nights
with thorn plecturings of
strings no longer white,

their amperage sucked dry.
What's horniness if it
douses not in fire
but bone-dry recit,

unbuttoning not blouses
but stone lips of banshee
rue-burning wicker men
because some dame decreed

my hands anon away?
Who wants to fornicate
unnippled sprites of ire?
Let's banish hope, excoriate

the lust: debone the ghoul
who haunts the ossuary
of every stiffie lost:
let's remit the actuary

before tits up it tanks.
She rose up from a wave
of breaking blue joy;
and then without a wave

she disappeared, willing me
this stale and sour undertow.
I'll not find her on this
beach again: It's time go:

Time to rearrange
into less salty, surer show:
time for bright diurnals
where fresher boners grow

beneath the fertile loam
of an untroubled sleep.
I'll plunge on alone now
on waters twice as deep,

ghost-captain of a boat
destined for dryer shores,
calmer nights, no matter
how she always gores.

***

"The symbol, however, is also an expression of the spiritual side, of the formative principle dwelling in the unconscious, for 'the sprit appears in the psyche as instinct" as a 'principle sui generis.' {Jung} So far as the development of human consciousness is concerned, this spiritual side of the symbol is the decisive factor over and above its "gripping" aspect' it is more than a sign; it assigns meaning; it signifies something and demands interpretation."

-- Neumann, ibid

***

LONGING

Summer 2002

I sometimes wonder whether longing
can't radiate out from someone so
powerfully, like a storm, that nothing
can come to him from the opposite
direction. Perhaps William Blake
has somewhere drawn that?
- Rilke, letter, 1912

There is a longing in us which
grows from sigh to starry shriek.
Perhaps comets are charred furies
of that pain, a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears to God's porch
and back, insatiable and unanswered.
Perhaps. All I know is that
it's infinitely perilous to think
that longing has a human end.
In my cups I once believed
a woman mooned for me,
her longing a white welcome
over my million nights alone.
I met and passed her many times
those hard years, blinded by the aura
of her unvowled name.
Surely when two longings touch
it's like when great waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
Our deeper thirst can never sate:
as each draught of booze
was never enough, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.
I recall a young man
walking home drunk on a
frozen night long ago,
his beloved nowhere
to be found in the chalice
he had named. Winds hurled
steel axes through the
Western sky, failing to clear
the cruel foliage of fate.
In his defeat he was greater
than any angel beckoned
by that night: his heart so
hollowed by longing
as to chance in pure cathedral,
her absence the clabber of a bell
shattering the frozen air,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.

***

Thus the old Man of the Sea is behind or Venus of the voluptuous surf, never determinate though always calling the mind to the next shore. It is Manannan whom Oran seeks, isle by isle by isle.

***


GOD AND LOVE

2005

This truth is recalled by me:
God and Love do well agree.
God loves honour and courtesy;
and love they please most thoroughly.
God hates disdain and falsity;
lOve holds them base in every way.
God hearkens to those who truly pray
And Love won't turn from such away.

-- LaLei d l'Oiselet(13th century)

God and Love found their white shore
where you and I once met and danced,
a strand where wind and wave embraced
around our kiss and then smashed us
to blue smithereens. And though
I woke more alone than ever, I was
yet never quite alone again, the better half
of me freed to roam unruddered in your womb.
The impress of her hips on mine has
lingered, like a a shadowy faith;
the fish tail I've grown is scaled
in that wilder half of ocean
I'll never fan the full fiefdoms of,
much less with these lips ever come
to kiss and know again. God and Love
now ride the waves like Arion on
his dolphin, their song for every shore
which translates in transit to hosannas
of abyss, the moon's gleam distilled
from the ache of pure basalt, your
smile in distant regions altared and
lamped right here. Rude pagan rogering
the tunnies, yahwist hurling reams
of fire: both met and mingled in our kiss,
becoming some malt of awfulness
no confabulist would dare to pour
and live; nor could I much mouth these
words till I'd pounded my last shot
at the bar, and let go black wings that
were never meant to fly, much less soar.
All my wounds were washed in that
salt blue, burning every orifice I tried
to fill my depths with you. As I slept
I turned and twisted down the darkest tide,
all my expletives brine-whelmed and
pustulent, a blackening acre of old bones
sailing south to that port where Davy
is the harbormaster, vaulting Moby's
Dick and every awfulness I've ever yowled
inside my semen's tide. I woke at ebb
with every joint intact, full harrowed
by the voyage, alone on a great white shore
where wind and wave wire in full motion
the ocean now inside my mouth, my words
all salted a godly blue. God and Love
are in the choir which rises from a throat
which reaches from drowned Ys to
fair high heaven, with every note and all
poems between sufficient space, I'd say,
to weave whale roads and wing the
greater halves of God. Cerulean is
the color of my wash, the mash and
foam of my Boolean search for you
between the waves of AS and IS.

***

"It is this aspect that speaks to our understanding and rouses us to reflection, not just to feeling and emotionality. These two aspects working together in the symbol constitute its specific nature, unlike the sign or allegory which have fixed meanings. so long as the symbol is a living and effective force, it transcends the capacity of the experiencing consciousness and 'formulates an essential unconscious component' -- the very reason why it is so attractive and disturbing. Consciousness keeps on returning to it and circles round it, fascinated, meditating and cogitation, thus completing the circumnambulatio which recurs in so many dramatically enacted rites and religious ceremonies."

-- Neumann ibid 368-9

***


BAPTISED AT EBB TIDE

2005

I was baptised at ebb-tide
on the last day of my childhood;
the receding wave which
caught me there has ferried
me at last to here, a man
both of the shore-walking world
and of waters brined by God
with salt's hard misery,
stinging every bliss with
a bottomless undrinkable.
Your ebbings have defined
my ways, always leaving
me alone to name the flood
which drowned every bed
I'd shored on nights before,
filling my mornings with
that empty dripping soft
blue door still resonant
with the cantakerous roar
which wakened in our kiss.
Each beach-song I
carve here is a nautilus
of your curvelike curse,
woven in the rounded way
you turned to me then
turned away; curvelike
the song rounds down
through the misery of
dry and drier nights
grinding down, like old
sand poured through
a wave-smoothed glass,
into these roundelays
of surflike refrains
upon a paper strand
where verbals wash, leaving
me at last again at the far
white end of every beach
you woke me on. On those
fragile magic sands
I leave this shell-seeming shell
for you to find again,
long after I have washed
out to ring the bronze of hell.
How best to return
the wave that bittersweetened
all with its cathedral
rise and smash
careening wild in foam
than to harrow full
the quiet draw in
every pre-dawn dark,
recalling every man
baptised at ebb who
drowned in love's
reclaiming wave?
Such dead are like
seaweed at low tide,
green glyphs of
what remains, drained
and flattened of
their former flout
of spermatic equine fire:
Read me in that wild
blue latinate the
same tenor which
the selkies sing from
their black rocks,
of sea and shore
dreams inked. I am
a man long ebbed
from North Sea smash
where just the song
of foam remains,
stingingly unrepentant
in the wilderness
of that recede which
wombs the next blue
to drown the likes of me
in you.
≈

WHITE ON GREEN

2004

It is only when I'm home sick
lying gut-cramped in our bed
upstairs that I realize what
wild artistry you bring to
every surface of home: The
wan spring morning breezing
in cool through an opened
window across the room
and everything either white
or the palest green, white
linen walls and furniture
so balanced with plants
and jadeite glass that the
eye doesn't even see the
whole perfection, but rather
floats in it as on a tide,
the ivy tumbling from
white iron planters, the
chairs and dressers
moved so many times
that the absolute correctness
of their placement contains
all the energy of a poem
revised down to three pure
words which you would
never say, and refuse
to call an art. "Just
another woman's
gift for home," you
might concede, though
such craft is the very
hearth I can't ignite
in the cold demense of
my lake-bottom dives.
If a room could wash
a votive heart clean,
it's here in the room
which you devised, the
one which you say
you can never get
quite right, what with
this sloping ceiling, crooked
walls and ill-placed a/c
vents. Orchids on either
nightstand wake the purity
with tiny violet blossoms,
like the eyes of our cat
half-lidded in her chair
in the closet, drowsing
down as I now do laying
in the bedroom you
composed in the upper
room of our life. The
poem you never wrote,
the art you swear
is simply banal, lulls
me beyond all I
would say to exactly
where I most desire
to be. Those three words?
You are here.

Sanctuary, Threshold

TEAJACK

September 2005

Salt and foam careen the surge
which carries me toward You
upon this lurch of fin and tooth
and pale white spermacetti fire.
Teajack is my name, tar of
every Southern coast, a brawn
of blue maraud. In my cup
of passage I was brined
in whiskey’s womb, then
hung a year upon a sea-dam’s
stake where noctals washed my
mind for good; wakened
like a conch upon a shattered beach,
I began these spiral sing-songs home.
I ride from shore to shore upon
the backs of uddered waves,
a stone skipped across the sea
from bed to bed to bed of blue.
Each night torn from Your abyss
sings the starry depth of God
before He ripped his name
pure from Your vocal chords.
Each morning wakes with
dew on these hands, the sweat
of sweet breasts which milked
now brighten this next shore
with a pearly, sated light.
Here is the undiscovered
country I never thought I’d find, that
home inside the wildest heart
I always meant to ride but feared.
I begin here, a bluer salt, to harrow
all found in that water, even to the
ninth most fatal wave.
The crash of surf booms
down the shore like the welcome
of an old friend at the door,
of shark and queen composed:
the womb inside my pen’s blue sense
now shouting in wild resonance.

***

Sunday-Monday, fairer winds holding Sunday in a halcyon and crisp frame of quietude and bliss, my wife working steadily on her custom job, happiest to be at that work, me happiest to see her that way. Cats in every perhiphery, dozing, scrounging for treats, a game, a pet. News of the world ebbed thus far, agonies at a drone, the whitecapped fears of loss washed over, through, leaving behind a sort of gratitude for this day only, prayers for the next, a steeling of the will to do the work that’s required. Reading Hamlet, an essay by Marjorie Garber on the play, Moby Dick.

And finding sanctuary there, in those dark seas. Weird, eh? To find comfort in those outermost reaches of “wild and whirling words” (Horatio)? But I do. In Dick, the whale-boats of the Pequod close in on a stampeding herd of sperm whales, and the cluster that Ishmael’s boat finds themselves in is comprised of bull males on the inside and expecting mothers on the inside. He comments,

“And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight.”

And from that observation, this, which I take as my own: “But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for every centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe in eternal mildness of joy.” (425)

Paradoxically, the sanctuary Ishamael finds -- in the midst of a murderous hunt -- is the one Melville found in diving into such darkness. After Moby Dick was completed, he wrote to Hawthorne, “I have written a wicket book, and feel spotless as a lamb.” Sanctuary may have no meaning without its catastrophic outer marge; were the sea elsewise, the work of harboring would not have such bittersweet beauty.

***

In the threshold bright and dark faces meet: conscious and unconscious faces, known and unknown halves of the knucklebone, the symbolon, threshold as gnosis, irruption of dark waters, penetration of bright thought, marrying of the worlds in on a restless, porous, crashing marge, of shore and sea composed. Erich Neumann, in Origins and History of Consciousness: “Like the individual symbol, the social symbol valid for the group is ‘never of exclusively conscious or exclusively unconscious origin,’ but is produced by the ‘equal collaboration of both.’ The symbol therefore has a rational side ‘which accords with reason,’ and another side which is ‘inaccessible to reason, since it is composed not only of data of a rational nature, but of irrational data of pure inward or outward perception.’’ (His quotes are from Jung’s Psychological Types..)

Over our history, the symbol has mediated psychic growth and transformation, but changes in function as species and individual in emulation grows; it inverts, it reverses. “Generally speaking, the symbol works in opposite ways for primitive and modern man,” Neumann writes (op cit), adding this footnote: “For modern man the emergence of symbols on the ‘way inward’ has a different meaning and function. Here, the mediatory position of the symbol, which is due to its being in combination with conscious and unconscious elements, is proved by the fact the the link back of conscious to unconscious proceeds via the symbol, just as with the dawn of man the development went in the reverse direction from unconscious to conscious.”

The symbol led us here; now the symbol leads us back. Perhaps its function is one of growth toward equilibrium. Certainly equilibrium is crucial to our wholeness -- a temperance of conscious and unconscious systems -- yet the symbol’s shifting polarity keeps us sawing back and forth, learning one way, then the other, then back again. Maybe the 3D image really is that of the spiral, a linear circle which drives away from the center only to return to a center is transformed by the motion out and round, transformed sufficiently to desire further higher ground by spiralling out again, through the other region, gleaning greater then deeper augments through each whorl.

I think of how the earth’s polarity shifts every 8,000 years or so. As I understand it, a northern polarity is now shifting southward. “True North” will in some time point southward, all our maps readable only in reverse.

So too the symbol switches polarity. We were less conscious and became conscious, a walled city with ever-more fixed borders; we are now too conscious and need to become less so, to become more a shore and less of a citadel. Its not a rigid pendulum -- ripping from one state into its other like binaries or bicamerals, always at war, tearing down the edifaces of the conquered, pillaging and raping what is found there never the wiser -- but rather each time there’s a shift its toward “higher” yet “deeper” ground. My more unconscious state becomes articulated by a more conscious state, those dark energies the fuel of growth; and then my more conscious state is fed to the waters that the center may mature, all those heights become depths, consonants vowels, winds become waters. The center is harrowed by each shift of polarity: it’s still the same place but greater, deeper, resonant with futurity and the past.

***

Neumann, op cit: “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, because, owing to the effect of the symbols, one side of the psychic system continually influences the other and sets up a dialectical relationship between them.”

“As Jung has shown [in Symbols of Transformation], the symbol mediates the passage of psychic energy from the unconscious, in order that it may be applied consciously and turned to practical account. He describes the symbol as a ‘psychological machine’ which ‘transforms energy.’”

***

So that forward-striving solar car of the culture hero gets its octanes from the introjectors of centroversion, hauling up the black buckets of water to mix in the mortar of the rising tower.

And when the edifice has aged past its midpoint, grown over-conscious, selfish, goaty, sterile, then all Denmark stinks, the wrong king sits on the throne and the true prince must resort to foolishness and madness. Reading Hamlet is precipitating in me much querying into thresholds, how infernal symbols can seem, topsy-turvy, leading the hero out of the solar castle up into the frozen ramparts. Claudius the usurper-king, whom Hamlet distrusts, ascending to the throne of Denmark and the bed of his mother Gertrude after the untimely death of Hamlet’s father, brother of Claudius. And when Claudius admonishes Hamlet Jr. not to languish so in “unmanly grief,” false king and over-conscious superego (conscience does a son little good when society is corrupt), then it’s time to follow the ghost of Hamlet’s father out to the most frightening threshold of living and dead.

Is this a play, or ancient ritual? Are those words on paper, or the utterance of souls? Is that Denmark or the high-tide of everyman’s brutal ambition, fired by all the platitudes which allow a man to kill his brother? Marjorie Garber writes in Shakespeare After All,

“Like a series of Russian dolls, nested one inside another, or the infinite regress of a theatrical or pictorial illusion (the man on the trademark Quaker Oats box, holding a box on which there is a man holding a box), the plays and fictions of Hamlet nest inside one another, until we are no longer sure where to place the boundaries of reality and illusion. Hamlet’s story becomes the story of a confrontation with consciousness, and it is a story that becomes the haunting chronicle Horatio must live to retell.”

So the hyperconscious hero -- Bloom calls Hamlet our absolute zenith -- turns to the Ghostly interface, that farthest edge between mortality and the dead, to lead him to safety. A perilous and mad course, perhaps, but that is where the symbol leads our hero, and we in turn. Gardner again:

“In suggesting that ... the world of Hamlet’s mind and imagination; the physical, political and ‘historical’ world of Denmark; and the world of dramatic fiction and play -- are parallel to and superimposed upon one another, I am suggesting, also that the play is about the whole question of boundaries, thresholds, and liminality or border crossing; boundary disputes between Norway and Denmark, boundaries between youth and age, boundaries between reality and imagination, between audience and actor. The most inexorable boundary possible would seem to be that between life and death, yet the play opens with the appearance of a ghost, a spirit come from the grave.”

One infinitely dangerous to have congress with, owing to the threat of repossession by that infinitely wild dark. Horatio warns Hamlet:

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason,
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fadoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath. (I, iii)

Ah, there is that sea again, the sound inside the Ghost, calling us back to certain doom and perdition: the very source which creates the story itself! As Melville, as Keats looked back to primary literary sources in the sea, so Shakespeare looked back to the sea itself, heading all the way back in order to proceed.

***

Hart Crane’s "The Bridge" faces those two worlds, willing a man-made shape over an inchoate, watery power. These lines are from the introductory poem of that sequence:

... O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could more toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry, --

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path -- condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year ...

O sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometimes sweep, descent,
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

***

Those blent faces, curving toward each other into a furious, fructive, fruity, feral God: thresholding. And our backwards glance is what engenders the bridge, the harp, as if by reaching back into that first fire we would retrieve the blade that saves us.

***

DOUBLE OUTBOARD

For two-headed
double-edged turbo-rollers
of wild blue, we’ll need
some elbow room. Dear
Pal Rilke, if we
are the bees of the invisible
we are not indivisible
but a complex
and dappling
emulsion, congregate
and appellate in our
eruditions. See: I’ve loosed
my polysyllables from
their stables today, all
the ones who could
or would not
roam set-sized hawkers
of sooth: So ease back
and buckle up, roll down
the windows, enjoy
the ride ...
Today I
think of Cary Grant
who would be 100 years
and a day today. What
a polished archon of
noblesse! — Handsomest
of all & almost the
funniest too. His genius
may have been to keep
those whirls in
paired motion: Strolling
in in black-tied
perfection, then from
that vantage stealing every
scene with a rear-guard
wit and thus revealing
some whole
other man who didn’t
give a shit about the
minted glamour boy.
Always at his sartorial
best with a motley grin
to boot: together they
formed the summa of
a style, a blent
quintessence which
no woman and few men
could resist. — Rest
thee well, good man.
- Tough act to follow!
Yet his example serves
this next poem well,
where shaft and shore
sing the harmony of
a strange yet nearby
key, of stone
and sea composed.
We’ll see. Cary Grant’s
trick was to wow ‘em
with one face and then
loose a zinger with that other,
providing the rudest and
unassailable permission —
So well practiced that
he never won an Oscar
(his roles must have seemed
too easy). Lord knows
I’ll never wow my wife’s
undies to the thundertow
that way: Nor will I
gain a nod from fathers
everywhere with
this conceit: Still I’ve
roamed wide and deep
in ink here, so it’s time
to yoke both to task.
Alpha my bucket,
Omega my oar: Ripe
contrarians, it’s time to roar
where idols heap outside
my city’s walls. Let wounds
in tongues of ocean
plumage soar. Perplex blue,
hang your strange pale
light above the next
dashing, devilish shore.


DEEP-SEA COMPASS

A compass soaked in deep-sea salt
bournes a ghoulie orient, the world
it tongues abyssal, wild, and strange,
drawing my north-borne eyes to
points way south, to fix as home’s
most golden port a pass of high-
blown awfulness, its blue what
angels howl from heavens
farthest down. That compass
steers this hand over the page
along a gradient of wind and
wave pitched to awe’s infernity,
its line of sight that lime-spread
road of revenance and spleen
where my evil twin’s every
bad night bouree has been
plowed over by now sober
years of sitting in this daily
chair singing on to more
revenant and greater bones.
Look: The year now turns to
early summer when days are
hottest of them all, May
in Central Florida a soaring
spear of sun-drenched hours
which nails an eros to its heart,
greedy in thirst and winging
far to drink days to the dregs
in soaring amplitude. The manic
monkey here is born of that
hot pulse, plunging his nib
to pale as my beloved’s ass;
every drop of ink he flings
is in measure to the milk
she never poured for me
but may yet -- or so he hopes
and thus writes down the liquid
pealings of high suck, draught
for draught of creamy blue.
A deep-sea compass points
me ever and most here
though I see no Cape
inside the coming day, not
with eyes set on the world’s
suburban panoply. I don’t
even know who I’m singing to anymore,
nor can say what agency
employs my voice this structure
hour. My job -- as best as I surmise
in the finny way of escaping
dreams -- my job is just to
ferry this strange instrument
to shores I’ll always hear the
sound of but never reach,
and in such failure pass its
salty freightage on, harrowed
by my attempt just enough
to make it gleam still worse.
Your compass is that tuba in
the angel troop that honks
in whalish brogue, one of
the deeper bassos in the choir
that human ears can heard,
though baser ones resound
in my wife’s sleepy first kiss.
Someone’s got to hold the low
end down. Your compass in
my throat sails me ever
toward those deep blue waters’
wounding wildest sound.


THE DARK SEA SKY

Maps endure beyond their makers
and sworn otherworlds. Unknown
islands and shores out there become
someone’s civil coast, the black-fraught
blue of dragon screech my neighbor’s
homeward glance. Strange distance
becomes known terrain, a humdrum
shape sleeping down its former daunting
thrall to naught. Even so, the Dark Sea
still thrashes and toils beyond the margins
of any page I have turned, flashing now
and then flukes which no beast in the
catalogue could possibly haul, mauling deep
currents no one has yet to name,
much less decanted. That sea tides
the shore of every extremity,
bound not even by blue waters.
Last night walking out of the gym,
the day was ebbing fast and the sky
was smeared by long high contrails
of cirrus whipped by vast winds,
smears of cloud in high dashed traceries,
like surf-foam upon the backs of
that wind pouring south from the world’s
frozen height. The wisps and rushes
of grey against the deepening blue sky
were like dollops of cloud hurled from
some monstrous brush, wings of
angels dragged by their dark devices
in a chorale-like howl on South. Awe and
not a little terror was in that sky where
the Dark Sea spumed and thrashed
for half an hour or so the death
of the next day, cold and salted and huge
and not a drop to savor here, as if
oceans like mountains have ebbed full away
yet live on beyond even their own dreams,
blacker than the evernight and mashed
against the visible seams of all I know.
But who am I, that late sky sang as I
drove home, in a voice so high and distant,
an etherially drawn sigh, a deep dark
waveless drone ...

... who but Thou am I ...

... I