The Ogress Just Offshore

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia.

-- Laertes, Hamlet

***

Picking up the previous post “The Boob Tube,” I have been sighted, or insighted, not as much by my history (that perhaps is compass or rudder) but by the inside history, the one I fancy or the one which is the shore I fantasize: sexual fantasy seems permanent in the psyche, the rocky substratum which refuses to let go of its thrall. Its gambols and raids out in the wilderness of infinite night are endlessly retold round the hearth which excludes them; though the life gets saner and safer the thrill of the thrall remains, just as the octanes of whiskey will always hunt and haunt and harbor the swigger of a dried booze-hound.

Yes, as I wondered in that last post, who is she I fancy anyway? She was a girl walking around the rim of forest pond, so much like Paula who led me into the forest when I was 3 (she was 4) to hunt for worms. The same? My backward glance still gets excited, in a dark sweet strange way, at the memory of that reverie which so bowered my early sexual history; yet is there a difference when I see that girl as Paula, or all of the Paulas I have desired, as some verboten voracious Maid of the Pool a la Salamacis or Artemis, or something darker, stranger, whom my root sexuality understands with a consciousness most differentiated to abyss, the way my meditative ruminating studious aesthetic mind runs a brick ediface around the raw sexual pool? There is a strangeness to the fantasy which is extra-human, transpersonal, which I appropriate (fuck) at some extra-mortal peril.



MELUSINE

October 1995

She is the dark startle
of a dream staining
my first thoughts today—
a drowning dare
in black velvet underwear.

A melusine dripping on
the shores of my crashing world,
she spoke my name with a kiss.
How could I resist the winds
which keened round her bed,
older than the surf itself
which crushes boulders to sand?

All night she wove her
seal-sleek body around
the aching acre of my
half-submerging song.
I wake this morning
bleeding honey from every
pore she kissed.
All that now remains
of her are these lines
dripping seaweed on the page.

Some spillage of that swoon
has me thinking of you
so like and unlike her,
now far too many
dreams away. Some
ink too dreadful writes your
shadow into her name.

Today my heart's bed
refuses to warm me
from the sweet smash
of that bitterly fading surf
in which the two of you
wrapped your arms
around me in a wave
and then sent me away
wilder than wind.


***

(The) tendency to reduce all transpersonal contents to personalistic terms is the most extreme form of secondary personalization. The exhaustion of emotional components and secondary personalization have an important historical function to fulfill, in so far as they help to extricate ego consciousness and the individual from the clutches of the unconscious. That explains why they always appear during the transition from the prepersonal and suprapersonal to the personal. But when secondary personalization seeks to assert itself by devaluing the transpersonal forces, it produces a dangerous overvaluation of the ego. It is a typical false constellation of the modern mind, which is no longer capable of seeing anything that transcends the personal sphere of ego consciousness.

n Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

***

THERE’S MORE TO LIFE

2003

When I was twelve my mother told
Me, Son, there’s more to life than a
Bed, a babe, and a bottle of
Booze. Lord knows I drank enough years
Trying to prove her wrong. But for
Every bed I found spread with downy
Billows, a sterner beach was what
I always woke to, the surf not
Gentle, with winds far north of her
Sweet kiss. My mother has proved
Right, but only as I made her
Wrong, my nights a legion of leaps
From lap to lap until I came
To this salt of wild derange.
The More’s not hers to swell or change.


***

Much as the wild and treacherous Black Sea was euphemistically called the “Euxines,” the “hospitable sea,” or the Erinnyes were renamed the Eumenides, and the abysmal unknowableness of Godhead become the “All-loving and Merciful Father” and the “eiapopeia of children,” so now we mistake the transpersonal for the merely personal. The primordial divinity of the Creator and the fierce, infinitely strange, ancestral totem-animal that dwells in the human soul have been so garbled that they now purport to derive from a prehistoric gorlla father or from a deposit of many such fathers, who have not conducted themselves well toward their “children.”

-- Neumann, ibid 388



***


LATE AUTUMN, PORT ORANGE

1994

There are virilities
you cannot ride
in your sleep.
Your urban morning
has no saddle for
this wild sea, nor
will such winds as these
rein to any corporate task.

No.
Something irresistible
stays here.

Watching storms batter
the tide, it's clear:
Like that raw rock
Rilke saw in Apollo's
marbled brow,
this sea's day churns
dark and urgent and cold:

You must derange
your life to save it.

***

Even the exaggerations of secondary personalization are expressions of man’s efforts to regain possession of exteriorized psychic contents by introjecting them. But the necessary consequence of this process, whereby contents that before seemed to be outside are diagnosed as inside, is that transpersonal forces now appear in the human psyche and are recognized as “psychic factors.” When this happens, partially in the psychology of instinct, and quite consciously in Jung’s theory of archetypes, it means that an adequate assimilation has been achieved. But when secondary personalization is perverted, it leads to an overexpansion of the ego, which thereupon tries to demolish the transpersonal by calling it mere illusion and reducing it to personalistic ego data.


OGRE ON THE ROAD

2001

Perhaps the minotaur
is a poet. Is Poetry.
A hoary hammer, like sex.
Didn’t the Irish bard
Senachen once meet
a churl on the road
whose hellmouth
was the gate of all song?
Why are sweet words
suddenly so loathsome
on this road we
must all travel some night?

In the Irish tales
the lord of the South
was a harper-changeling,
a green giant who’d
as soon sing as lose
his head (or yours)
at the solstice. (And oh
what a pretty wife had
he, wearing only that
green pubic sash...)
Horrid lug was just
one his guises. A signal
that you’ve hit the
mid-point of the barrow.

Question is, what then?
Senachen could have
turned back and trudged
home as Senachen,
but instead he got past
and went on to become
a Taleissin. Will I eventually
write poems too, after all
this posing and posing
in poisoned trash heaps?

The problem is, a lyric
is not a tale. No stripper
here with nipples to offer
in ripened sequence: this
is flashing: not fiction,
but close. Poets play fast
with truths but from the
other side: We dip the day’s
pewter turds into moonwater
and —voila!—pull out a
silvery bone of spirit.
Preter-truths, a peel more
real than the real itself.

But who cares for such
jugglery today? Poems for
a penny, a dozen for two!
Least of all cares this oaf,
burdened with this
bushel of rancid poems.
I would rather sneakeypete
around this beast of sweet
utterance just to get home again.
To what at least is liveably real.

But I wrote my way here and
must write my way through.
For now these satires,
black-pelted raillery at
the ogre on the road.
I’m a king’s fool, worthy only
in reverse, offering for your
pleasure ugly words on a page
of foul brine, a bitterroot
inked with all that somehow
must be said before there’s
any going on or going home.


***

As a result, the whole meaning of secondary personalization as a prerequisite for conscious assimilation is done away with, because the transpersonal is now in fact repressed. It can no longer be consciously assimilated, and proceeds to work negatively as a vague and powerful “unconscious” factor inside the psyche, just as it did outside at the beginning of man’s development. The problematical thing about this turn of events is that in itself it is legitimate and necessary, and only leads to absurdity and danger if exaggerated.

-- Neumann, ibid. 389



THE OGRESS JUST OFFSHORE

Oct 1, 2005

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia.
-- Laertes, Hamlet

As always, my history assumes
Your mystery, insolving seas
inside my mother’s voice
as she sang over silk-brutal waves.
She and it You meant to pair,
but on a shore of infinite degree
which one step right or left
was witchery or science,
both doomed to boil my bones.
The ogre on the road of souls
may loom like my father’s height
inside the door I could not pass,
and surely the monster got
his basso and berserker cock
from my six-year-old’s lack
of both; but he is not there
at the crossroads to teach me
how to sing, even though
he’s Poetry and more. Redder
jousts than satire are in his throat
and I’m a fool to margin all
he ravages and cancels out.
It isn’t Providence but Victory
the fish-man shouts on his wave,
smashing every naked shore
with his starry, sperm-foamed gore.
How else can I say it? There is
my father’s dream or vision
of meeting Thor on the northern-
most wild of Iona years ago,
turning round to face that
huge misshapen churl of
Hebridean gale, the soul
of every bruited cliff
devoured by wind and wave.
Was it passion that burst his
heart in love for that cruel
knight of Northern winds? Did
that first song alone bid my
father turn his backward gaze
around and cross seas to his
home in Pennsylvanian velds
where he lifted that god’s skeleton
stone by massive cold stone?
Or was it enough of the second
song which does not huff and blow
the footers down in any
appeasable way, but is wind itself,
unmixed of any abbey’s mortared mould,
defiant even of the words themselves?
How to build a chapel fit
to sing of him whom pronouns quit,
who is instead that dancing fit
which spiralling choirs sea and sky?
Build on water, yes; but tower
in no wise semblant to the backward
glance which mints its empire
on a selfish penury, a dime a dance,
vaulting the dervish in mere pedigree,
my resume which overwrites the mystery
into the majescule of history,
nippling seas and crowning winds.
Oh the shore is ever dangerous
which walks between dominions:
Not to drown or fully ebb
nor even say which sands I stride on
-- not quite a page, nor sheeted
from that windy rage which grinds
the mortal shell of the earth
to infinitesimals of cosmic dust.
And we just oxidizers and rust,
corrosive as the salty seas,
& uncoagulent as loosened skies,
never one but many throats
professing gorgeous dooms
every time a wave curls high
and rides the poem to hell
in one long shore’s hard boom.

The Boob Tube

UPON JULIA'S BREASTS

Robert Herrick

DISPLAY thy breasts, my Julia—there let me
Behold that circummortal purity,
Between whose glories there my lips I'll lay,
Ravish'd in that fair via lactea.


***

To the extent that conscious knowledge necessitates the suppression of emotional components, it is typical of an only advantageous to noncreative work. Creative processes, on the other hand, cannot and must not exclude powerful emotional, and even excitory, components; indeed they seem to be a necessary ingredient here. Every new conception and every creative idea comprise elements which up to that point were unconcsious, and the inclsuion of the emotional components associated with unconscious contents provides an excitation. The connection of the conscious system with the emotionally-toned substrata of the unconscious alone makes creativity possible.

-- Neuman, The Origins and History of Consciousness



Here is a defining primary sexual fantasy of mine. Of course, at age six I didn’t know was sexual at all, just immensely riveting, so much so that I repeated it again and again, my faced pressed to a pillow like it was a television set, my greedy eyes staring into that dark screen, desperate to repeat the scenario once again:

I am walking with a girl in some wooded place, along a path. We come to a small pond or lake at the center of the woods. The girl walks incautiously along the edge of the pond, while I try to cajole her to safety. But she pays me no heed, walks with delight along some sort of precipice (like the pond has a brick wall around it, two or three feet high); then falls into the water. Desperate to save her, I dive in and down into the warm dark murk, unable to see. It seems hopeless but then my hand grasps another hand and I haul her up and out of the water. She is so grateful to be resuced that she hugs me, and that clench closes the fantasy.

In reflection this tale has always seemed like a presexual fantasy to me, and much of my personal history--especially its darker, more driven turns--would appear to be an attempt to act out its dreamlike exposition and lysis. There are the woods, the wilderness, where she and I are alone together, beyond attention and disapproval of parents; there is the girl/woman who stands close to dark water, divinely attractive and utterly (uterally, abysmally?) dangerous; there is the wall around the water, built by human hands, which I fear and stay clear of, though my attraction is riveted to is ramparts where the girl is unafraid to walk. Then there is the fall, the maid tumbling into the dragonish drink, the hero diving in to save her, the rescue. And there is the girl’s embrace of me in open-hearted (thighed) gratitude. My hero.

As primal scenes go, it sure is fateful, the very nougat of all that has lured me into my history. Eve’s beckoningg smile, of apple and snake composed.

And like all tales of Otherworld escapade, attempts to literalize it with real girls and women have been disastrous. I know I will never truly understand the difference between the fantasy and the reality, not in that compulsed, besotted, rebellious, hellbent Mordor of my imaginal gut which refuses to love God or be sober or stay married, not in the biological red depths of the spectrum which only knows how to swim and devour.

I’m stuck with that fantasy and my greed for it. My eyes are still pressed to a downy pillow, seeking to bathe in the inside wash of a woman’s body, and revel in a testicular rant about women’s desire and greed and need for me, shouting my name as I pump brimstone and brine by the salt acre into her.

At least I’ve learned, operationally enough, to keep the worlds separate. How to indulge between safe covers. How to harness the revery to the page. How to love the wife without secrets or infidelity with that blue pillow underneath and inside.

Most of the time. There are distractions. Reveries can overstay their welcome. Stray images from the day unhorse me onto worser ones. The devil holds intercourse with the angels in a confusing murk. I bless and damn what’s foul and fair. Give the addict an inch and he’s pouring a shot of Pinch. Ever there is the peril of that wall around the lake.

Yet as the writing and imagining progresses, that primal scene slowly loses its tentacles to the real. The personal elements lose their importance, and bluer, transpersonal ones bob slowly to to the surface. Always an attractive shape lures me to the dangerous water; always it falters there and falls, causing me to dive into where I dared never go; always the descent and retrieve with the treasure I will never attain; always the lysis of the kiss, the bliss of reverie’s song at the coda, that infinite expanse which loosens as it clenchs, sustains as it ends.



It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his posessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privace of power as an individual man, there is a great public power on which he can draqw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligivel as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or “with the flower of the mind;” not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its directdion from its celestial life; or as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone but with the intellectd inebriated by nectar.

-- Emerson, “The Poet”

***

HE GETS THE GIRL

2002

As a kid I changed the world
by going into my room
and acting out James Bond:
Killing evil Blofeld
at the crack of worldwide doom
then lounging in lazy billows
with his yeasty girl.
The James Bond theme
would ease my steps
back into the real world,
a little while: Before all
the cold winds conspired
to blow me back to smithereens.
I could turn tin to gold
by placing my face
to a pillow, changing
the channel to David
Gets The Girl. I watched
a pretty girl edge round
a deep pond then fall:
I dove in and hauled
her back, her gratitude
flooding me with this
sweet, presexual warmth,
like milk straight from
gold-knockered Pussy Galore.
When the real leaves you
homeless, there’s always the peel,
the pith and rind of surface cool.
I yearned and learned to
glide there lubed by
cool quaffs of Bond and
my own bouncing balls,
chasing the Laylas of La-La.
—a mystic of moments,
a bra unclasping its double
wealth, the shoosh of
jeans sliding down
their white daughters.
O splendid crucifix,
crying for immortal nails.
—That was the dance, those
Penthouse Letter-moments
where, Dear Reader, I found
what I never thought
I would personally ever
encounter. I dropped out
of the monastic mill
of college to play rock n roll,
hurling the delights
of a few nights with Becky
into the coiffed frenzies
of boogie brawn, each song
another dive in her rocking,
ululate bed— holding my guitar
like a surf-pole, casting
out these chord progressions,
humming a while, then
hauling up a solo that was
at once glittering, fierce, and
wild. At least, that’s what
I sure hoped for, and tried
to live for, amid a howling
ruin of wasted hours,
initiate and annihilate
twinned in a 25-year
old boy. Rightburn, I called it,
that perfect balance
of opiates (booze, pot,
speed or coke) carrying
me out on the coracle of song,
a triangulation of
wish fulfillment, drunkenness
and balls, unsheathing a
bright blade after the
second chorus, tempered
cruel and swift and
eternally sharp. Such moments
came as frequently as
the perfect babes. Dear Reader,
it never happened, some guy
on staff wrote all that crap,
the whole fantasy of sex
and drugs and rocknroll,
knowing exactly what we all
wanted, what we prayed
for each night we walked
into a crowded bar. It
was the entire exception
to the rule that I prized
above all else, thus dooming
me to the quest for a chalice
which in truth proved
the millstone of my years.
It seems I’m always
investing in fictions
and pay dearly for them all.
Has much really changed?
Here I labor away
on this overlong, overly
autobiographical lyric
meditation, earnest as ever
to ink a gleaming fish
on white pages, the mirror
of a life deemed greater
than what it can only refract.
I’m entertaining at best
a troop of ghosts in my
own head, bandmates,
lovers, all the guys
who played James Bond,
the solemn poets. Having
written this far it’s a struggle
to shift back to the day slowly
waking outside, now washes
of blue warbling along
with scattered birds.
My face always felt strange
lifting from the heavy warmth
of that pillow-TV, protesting
the effort of returns to the real.
What can you say of a life
spent voyaging the top feet of the sea?
What have I learned
but to ink obliquity?
No matter: I’m hard wired
to the James Bond theme,
walking round that deep pool
whose waters shake only what’s stirred.





TALL TALE

2004

The hermit described in Episode
19 of the Immram Mael Duin ...
is clothed in his own hair (and)
lives on a small island. Many trees
grow there, and each tree is full of
birds. He tells Mael Duin and his
company that, having set on a
pilgrimage from Ireland, his
small boat split in two under him.
He returned to the coast, positioned
himself on a sod and on this
piece of turf set out into the
waves again. God allowed the sod
to remain motionless in the
place where he now is, and adds
some turf to the sod each year,
as well as a tree. The birds in
the trees are the souls of his
relatives, who await Doomsday there.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

I set out in my little boat
so many years ago, my heart
full of its quest for you
like a wave dreaming distant shores,
full and high and curved close
to crash. Yet God willed my
ways otherwise, splitting my
purpose on hidden rocks below
and delving me back to home
shores, a spluttering, half-
ruined man, one for whom
the sea became both longing
and its cross. The bit of strand
I settled on became both chapel
and isle, its walls of
pale cocquina faith
brilliant by day.
But the hull below
is not seen by any,
its mast my spine,
its sails woven from
gossamering dreams
of finding you
and not. My course
is a wild immrama
of blue words, mouthed
from this pew where
the sound of the
uniting surf is never far.
Years now I’ve remained
here to voyage far
beyond the beds I
never found you in,
clothed only in my hair
& this patch of pale
sand the very fabric
of my white writing chair.
Blue is everywhere
my mind’s eye now navigates,
as if you were looking
back over your shoulder
when you left the room
for good. How can a song
be both choir and quest
I’ll never know, but
mine is just to altar
that surf here, writing
down all that love still
distantly yet urgently
demands. My poems
are like the lover’s hands
dressing a with the
greatest of haste, grooming
something in the mirror
and hurrying on out
to find and woo
a destiny before
the night is forever
hence too late.
Far I have travelled
on the same soul-
remitting sea, always
lost and ever charmed
by the strange music
just ahead of the next
swell, just before the
the spill of light which
foams and forms the day --
sounds which ink this
pen and rudder
its travail down and
down to the last line
which buttons to a kiss --
an island of a singular
desire torn from
the bridal doom of Ys.



BLUE BOOK

2005

Each day I write a poem to
press in Your blue book,
my salt scrivener, so that
angel brogue of wildest seas
may once again be
heard inside pale days.
That’s all. In my dream I
found glass cabinet in a lost
corridor of a pressroom,
the metal frame long oxidized
by salt & the glass almost
blurred from all the years of
ink hurled from this pen.
Inside I saw upon a shelf
three shapes of glass, chalices
or hurricane lamps or glass
reliquaries like miniature
cathedrals. All of it is
worth saving here, each
a host, a wave, a belfry.
Yesterday started with every
engine of spring at full pour
with warm sun and breezes
suggesting something more
as I planted salvia and pentas
and kalanchoe in the garden,
my hands happiest to sing
in dirt without the pen.
The front came through
quickly and by one p.m.
I was hurrying in the last
plants in full rain with
thunder cracking overhead.
My wife cursing in the back
yard, all her painting
projects spoiled. Later
that afternoon I was
in my study typing in the
day’s poem when my wife
walked up behind to mock
what I’d just said; I turned
and grabbed her as she
giggled and fought to get
away & I buried my face
in her breasts biting on
a hardened nipple which
surpised us both. Some
Godawful Christian concert
somewhere in town, a singer’s
operatic steeple yowling
“How Great Thou Art”
so loud I could barely
feed the cats on the
back porch. My wife went
to bed early, zonked
on a PM sinus pill &
me joining her not long
after to our bedroom
blue with hard moonlight,
our Siamese curled into
my wife’s behind & purring
loudly as I petted her
and my wife, listening
to the sounds of Saturday
night near and far, voices
from a neighbor’s house
talking about something
indistinct and further
out some party music
weaving in faint roars
of cars and cycles
seeped in testosterone.
All of it liquifying &
draining down into
those glass vessels I
praise here in the last
lines of this poem
which is Yours to publish
in Your book or feed it
to the fish in abysses
far below or feather that
angel’s wing that will
fly when I am done.

The Copyist

COPYIST

2004

A reader is a writer
moved to emulation.
-- Saul Bellow

Each day I write down lines I find
In books which sound of Oran, a
Blue lucence which old words retain.
The words sail to me from him, or
God, or some deep resonance I’ve
Yet to find apt name. Copying
Is both rigorous and charmed: these
Migraines are the cost of years of
Writing down so much high angelic
Song -- And yet I bear those sharp hooves
Gladly on my skull, for birth is
Always red and wild. Today I
Copied the last lines of a saint’s
Life -- a plea and a prayer to copy well.
That done, I write down blue hell.



Some turbidity awakened a few days back in the middle aether between home and star, fomenting clouds and, blessedly, storms which blow hard and rain long. We missed the first front on Tuesday night (much staccato brilliance of bluewhite lightning to the south, the faintest ebbs of a rumbling surf). Yesterday the edges of storm again ran out somewhere north of Apopka, leaving us to think we would go wet-supperless again. But as we ate dinner watching “The Daily Show” the dark outside began to writhe, and blow, and then spume rain in every direction, a torrent which our dry garden must have received like a parched lover, crying Yes and More to her demon gallant’s unleashing. Hosannah and amen.

It was a night for gratitude, my wife delivering her first custom job to the utter delight of her client, a second job immediately referred; me with no migraine for the day, feeling exquisite delight for simple normalcy; Violet getting a snootful of premium tuna fish from the cans my wife opened while preparing our dinner of stuffed tomatoes. (Our little girl pacing in the kitchen, mewling with urgency, huge Siamese fangs exposed in her crosseyed cries.)

All of us graced in what counts in the daily score, none of it ever more than occasional yet in such congress together is a pure gift, a divine shore, and balmed us all in sweet sleep. So what if I wake with a fresh migraine steeling up my neck, when there is good work to do and the early morning blows fresh through the windows, repleted as we, ready to begin ...



Picking up from Neumann’s chapter “The Balance and Crisis of Consciousness” in his book The Origins and History of Consciousness, let’s delve into the cultural substratum of a world in which creativity oversteps itself, challenging the law of cultural paternity on the outside and effectively bridging into primal chaos on the inside:

***

... the hero, like the ego, stands between two worlds: the inner world that threatens to overwhelm him, and the outer world that wants to liquidate him for breaking the old laws. Only the hero can stand his ground against these collective forces, because he is the exemplar of individuality and possess the light of consciousness.

Notwithstanding its original hostility the collective later accepts the hero into its pantheon, and his creative quality lives on--at least in the Western canon--as a value. The paradox that the breaker of the old canon is incorporated into the canon itself is typical of the creative character of Western consciousness whose special position we have repeatedly stressed. The tradition in which the ego is brought up demands emulation of the hero in so far as he has created the canon of current values. That is to say, consciousness, moral responsibility, freedom, etc., count as the supreme good. The individual is educated up to them, but woe to any who dares flout the cultural values, for he will instantly be outlawed by the collective as the breaker of the old tablets.

Only the hero can destroy the old and extricate himself from the toils of his culture by a creative assault upon it, but normally its compensatory structure must be preserved at all costs by the collective. Its resistance to the hero and its expulsion of him are justifiable as a defense against immanent collapse. For a collapse such as the innovations of the Great Individual bring with them is a portentous event for millions of people. When an old cultural canon is demolished, there follows a period of chaos and destruction which may last for centuries, and in which hecatombs of victims are sacrificed until a new, stable canon is established, with a compensatory structure strong enough to guarantee a modicum of security to the collective and the individual.

***

So culture is a yolky pleroma in which our blisses gestate, commanding our gestalts, oaring our adventuring minds into the next room of the dream. It is the prima materia of imagination, its salt sea, its umbilicus into the realm of chaos and foment and endlessly wicked delight. The articulation of any creative work is a head which has been doused in that wave, like a baptism, and rises, ah, dripping with unknowns (I keep stealing that image from Rilke’s Third Elegy). And, thus whet on the tempering stone of abyss, the articulation strikes a clean thrust at the sky, arrogant and proud and daring and cruel, swiping off the balls of the father and gate-keeper of the divine mother’s sacred bower. We con a way back into that vault that we may plunge and succor its sweetness without restraint. Every articulation an assault on the past which both deepens and furthers the pleroma.

***

This time seems to have the resonance of a corrupt cultural canon; if anything we are adrift and befogged in the white noise of technology, and the old cultural commodities of reading and singing and painting all seem bankrupt, sterile, drowning in that white tide. The academies are productive for the sciences but are mere degree mills for the arts, churning out literate PhDs with no hope for tenure and a combative rhetoric which no real ties to a canon, that canon having dessicated to dust by modernity and pluralism.

Ah but this is boring, ain’t it? The mere sound of my voice here is tired, a drone. All of this is so known as to grow rote. It is the tenor of exhaustion, is sown into the tenor of cultural wasteland, haunts the dread centuries which interface old and new canons. Like they say in AA, “‘Why’ is not important”; suffice that we can either hang out on the crumbling bridge of the drowned Titanic, ideating icebergs and arrogance large enough to sink a world, or we get out of the icy water somehow and hitch a ride on whatever floating ships are in the vicinity.

These posts -- dark confections of prose and poetry, history and mystery, sexual whiskey and diviner nipplage -- are coracles of that diaspora, trusting the deeper older sources to rudder the song on to those eventual shores where abbeys survive their offending footers and the hecatombs of futurity get written down.




The ley lines of such a work can be traced from a far older work -- surely by now you know where I look -- observe carefully how a futurity was constructed in the Dark Ages. This from Thomas Cahill’s How The Irish Saved Civilization

The Irish received literacy in their own way, as something to play with. The only alphabet they’d ever known was prehistoric Ogham, a cumbersome set of lines based on the Roman alphabet, which they incised laboriously into the corners of standing stones to turn them into memorials. These runelike inscriptions, which continued to appear in the early years of the Christian period, hardly suggested what would happen next, for within a generation the Irish had mastered Latin and even Greek and, as best they could, were picking up some Hebrew. As we have seen already, they devised Irish grammars, and copied out the whole of their native oral literature. All this was fairly straightforward, too straightforward once they’d got the hang of it. They began to make up languages. The members of a far-flung secret society, formed as early as the late fifth century (barely a generation after the Irish had become literate), could write to one another in impenetrably erudite, neverbefore-spoken patterns of Latin, called Hisperica Famina, not unlike the dream-language of “Finnegans Wake” or even the languages J. R. R. Tolkien would one day make up for his hobbits and elves.

Nothing brought out Irish playfulness more than the copying of the books themselves, a task no reader of the ancient world could entirely neglect. At the outset there were in Ireland no scriptoria to speak of, just individual hermits and monks, each in his little beehive cell or sitting outside in fine weather, copying a needed text from a borrowed book, old book on one knee, fresh sheepskin pages on the other. Even at their grandest, these were simple, out-of-doors people. (As late as the ninth century an Irish annotator describes himself as writing under a greenwood tree while listening to a clearvoiced cuckoo hopping from bush to bush.)

But they found the shapes of letters magical. Why, they asked themselves, did a B look the way it did? Could it look some other way? Was there an essential B-ness? The result of such why-is-the-skyblue questions was a new kind of book, the Irish codex; and one after another, Ireland began to produce the most spectacular, magical books the world had ever seen.

From its earliest manifestations literacy had a decorative aspect. How could it be otherwise, since implicit in all pictograms, hieroglyphs, and letters is some cultural esthetic, some answer to the question, What is most beautiful? The Mesoamerican answer lies in looped and bulbous rock carvings, the Chinese answer in vibrantly minimalist brush strokes, the ancient Egyptian answer in stately picture puzzles. Even alphabets, those most abstract and frozen forms of communication, embody an esthetic, which changes depending on the culture of its user. How unlike one another the carved, unyielding Roman alphabet of Augustus’s triumphal arches and the idiosyncratically homely Romano-Germanic alphabet of Gutenberg’s Bible.

For their part, the Irish combined the stately letters of the Greek and Roman alphabets with the talismanic, spellbinding simplicity of Ogham to produce initial capitals and headings that rivet one’s eyes to the page and hold the reader in awe. As late as the twelfth century, Geraldus Cambrensis was forced to conclude that the Book of Kells was “the work of an angel, not of a man.” Even today, Nicolete Gray in A History of Lettering can say of its great “Chi-Rho” page that the three Greek characters-the monogram of Christ-are “more presences than letters. “

For the body of the text, the Irish developed two hands, one a dignified but rounded script called Irish half-uncial, the other an easy-to-write script called Irish minuscule that was more readable, more fluid, and, well, happier than anything devised by the Romans. Recommended by its ease and readability, this second hand would be adopted by a great many scribes far beyond the borders of Ireland, becoming the common script of the Middle Ages.

As decoration for the texts of their most precious books, the Irish instinctively found their models not in the crude lines of Ogham, but in their own prehistoric mathematics and their own most ancient evidence of the human spirit-the megalithic tombs of the Boyne Valley. These tombs had been constructed in Ireland about 3000 B.C. in the same eon that Stonehenge was built in Britain. just as mysterious as Stonehenge, both for their provenance and the complexity of their engineering, these great barrow graves are Ireland’s earliest architecture and are faced by the indecipherable spirals, zigzags, and lozenges of Ireland’s earliest art. These massive tumuli, telling a story we can now only speculate on,” had long provided Irish smiths with their artistic inspiration. For in the sweeping lines of the Boyne’s intriguing carvings, we can discern the ultimate sources of the magnificent metal jewelry and other objects that were being made at the outset of the Patrician period by smiths who, in Irish society, had the status of seers.

Brooches, boxes, discs, scabbards, clips, and horse trappings of the time all proclaim their devotion to the models of the Boyne Valley carvings. But this intricate riot of metalwork, allowing for subtleties impossible in stone, is like a series of riffs on the original theme. What was that theme? Balance in imbalance. Take, for instance, the witty cover on the bronze box that is part of the Somerset Hoard from Galway: precisely mathematical yet deliberately (one might almost say perversely) off-center, forged by a smith of expert compass and twinkling eye. It is endlessly fascinating because, as a riff on circularity, it has no end. It seems to say, with the spirals of Newgrange, “There is no circle; there is only the spiral, the endlessly reconfigurable spiral. There are no straight lines, only curved ones.” Or, to recall the most characteristic of all Irish responses when faced with the demand for a plain, unequivocal answer: “Well, it is, and it isn’t.” “She does, and she doesn’t.” “You will, and you won’t. “

This sense of balance in imbalance, of riotous complexity moving swiftly within a basic unity, would now find its most extravagant expression in Irish Christian art-in the monumental high crosses, in miraculous liturgical vessels such as the Ardagh Chalice, and, most delicately of all, in the art of the Irish codex.

“Codex” was used originally to distinguish a book, as we know it today, from its ancestor, the scroll. By Patrick’s time the codex had almost universally displaced the scroll, because a codex was so much easier to dip into and peruse than a cumbersome scroll, which had the distinct disadvantage of snapping back into a roll the moment one became too absorbed in the text. The pages of most books were of mottled parchment, that is, dried sheepskin, which was universally available—and nowhere more abundant than in Ireland, whose bright green fields still host each April an explosion of new white lambs. Vellum, or calfskin, which was more uniformly white when dried, was used more sparingly for the most honored texts. (The “white Gospel page” of “The Hermit’s Song” is undoubtedly vellum.) It is interesting to consider that the shape of the modern book, taller than wide, was determined by the dimensions of a sheepskin, which could most economically be cut into double pages that yield our modern book shape when folded. The scribe transcribed the text onto pages gathered into a booklet called a quire, later stitched with other quires into a larger volume, which was then sometimes bound between protecting covers. Books and pamphlets of less consequence were often left unbound. Thus, a form of the “cheap paperback” was known even in the fifth century.

The most famous Irish codex is the Book of Kells, kept in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, but dozens of others survive, their names-the Book of Echternach, for instance, or the Book of Maihingen—sometimes giving us an idea of how far they traveled from the Irish scriptoria that were their primeval source. Astonishingly decorated Irish manuscripts of the early medieval period are today the great jewels of libraries in England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and even Russia.

(pp 164-169)

***


BLACK KELLS

2003

A page torn from the
night’s black book
of Kells, drunk at some
music club a lifetime ago
& chasing a fattish
Icelandic gal, whose
eyes were blue as blindness:
Pawned angels dance
to phat jazz, their huge
black wings scraping
the backs of deacons
who stand at the bar
pounding back their
wasted genius, work and lust
in tiny shots of Jaegermeister.
Down down down
burns the the
black fuse of white
thirst no poured
heaven can allay
or alloy, minting
balled fists of
desire unclinched
nowhere, not even
in the grave.
Even the eventual
bed is a fraud,
apportioned from
a business-class
hotel close to
downtown, adrift
in the deep a.m.’s
of blackout, TV,
and sex, cold and nearly
sick, the slick inches
narrowed & grit
& flubbed then
jawed whole. Cho Ri
page of my demon
gospel, face of the
Savior inverted,
limed, or drowned,
the glow too far
to swim safely to,
too faintly red
to matter,
the last bubbles
drifting up past her
ice blue eyes
fixed over my
shoulder at what
passed back then
for day, out toward
the esplanade where
children riffle
crack vials & a
wind blows
your last dream away.
Not all pages
of Kells were saved:
Two gospel title
pages are hidden
still, or lost,
evangels of a night
there is no ink
dark enough to
write & jaws
the copyist entire.

TITANIC

2002

Lave a whale a while
in a whillbarrow ... to
have fins and flippers
that shimmy and shake.
— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

You say you egressed
here through the best
poems, but rather
you’ve sunk here
reaching for the
starlingest gleam
of stellarmost truth.

Your best descends
like a fat Bismarck
three miles down
to a cold grave.
It fails even to
fin that chill absence
at the bottom of the blue.

But what did you expect,
singing there on the
beach? Did you think
she could actually
return to you there,
stepping from some wave?

All that’s just a door
into this salt cellar
of dark savagery.
From her narrow waist
these whale roads where
the music of what falls
is what her smile calls.


SCRINIUM

2004

The word scrinium denotes in
classical Latin a letter-case or
book box, or any chest in which
papers are kept ... More generally,
scrinium was a synonym for
thesaurus or fiscus, the treasury
or mint, but in Christian usage
it seems to have been associated
with the keeping of all valuable
ecclesiastical items, including
records, books, and relics --
things for remembering.

-- Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory

God made this world from
a word, but I compose
my words from the world
He vaults in me.
My song is a box walled
of unquiet wings and piercing
beams, the nuclear heat
which burns like a wilderness
around every singular
image -- cat in the window,
woman sewing in lamplight,
a trailer crushed beneath
the sprawled mass
of a southern oak. I press
those leaves here, each fallen
from some angel, a relic
handprint of gold or gules,
nails of the invisible
furrowing a road in
my palm. My wife
came back from her shop
yesterday looking whipped,
the downtown district of
Sanford torn up in
some developer’s dream
of better bigger bucks
than what the antique malls
and sandwich shops
provide, keeping all the
customers away from the
place she hopes to launch
her next better
commercial dream. She’s
been happier these past
few weeks than she’s been in
years, sewing her sheets
full-time, stitching her days
together into a fabric she
swears is worth the world.
What to say to her last night
as she placed earrings back
into the gauzy order of
our upstairs bedroom, the
late afternoon looking stormy
yet tided over, no rain for
the garden tonight, no real
evidence that yet she’ll ever turn
a real buck at this -- Violet
our cat on a bench at the
foot of the bed, half-addled
by our weary talk, one paw
extended, a gesture we construe as
contentment. Nothing really
to say to her but you just
keep working on the sheets
and take a turn with her
petting Violet, praising
her simple soft demure
perfection, finding physic
in that touch, as if that cat
warded the gates to brilliant
chambers down below
where every anguish nightly
goes and is washed three times
in some deep blue well
and is returned to us the next
day, freshened for next day’s labors,
this craft of cobbling a Paradise
from strewn leaves and stray gleams,
the camphor-balm of similes
we take as God’s smile here.
I will set each day here
as worthy of the till, the telling,
the gold fragments in that dirt
the sudden spill of what pours
from God’s pocket heavens,
his crashing, cashiering wave,
risen amid difficulty and
weariness, tangled in the
world’s broken sum,
and set the mint of
such gleams of bliss like
a coin on my eyes
and pay my passage back.

Latter-Season Baptismals

The moment he is baptised Dylan (twin of Lleu or Lug) makes for the sea and receives the sea’s nature, swimming well as any fish, and because of this he is called Dylan Eil Ton, "Sea Son of Wave." No wave ever broke beneath him.

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage



THE STONE FONT

At the north end of the isle I
Found the cave entrance, or thought to,
Tight as a virgin’s oath to be
Merry this once, for me striding
In from the sea. I wedged through the
Red lips of cold granite into
A dark chamber, huge with the tide’s
Boom -- an angelic organum
Somehow vaster than the sea’s. Then
The sound went low as the sea ebbed
And I found the stone basin which was
Carved by God in the rearward wall.
Water dripped into it from the world
Above, slow as milk from earth’s dug.
My ear pressed here takes the next tug.

***

Cusp of the eventual season: days still humid and hot, mostly cloudless, the rigor of summer mortissed hard in its late beams. How long, O Lord? Our is an Injun autumn, each morning breaking later, wafting up from an increasing dark, causing the heart to psalm the halcyon waxy golden wan light which saturates the musk rose with infinite tenderness -- but not, yet, for us, for soon all that burns off and it’s Business As Usual in the Mickey’s Witched Realm, Caterpillars ‘n’ dump trucks eviscerating wilderness in a pentecost of suburban blight, thickening cords of traffic gooping back down the byways to service industry jobs (three of ‘em, for many), advertorial lust blazoned on every skyward glance (blimps, biplanes hauling beach signage, angels wingjacked and gussied up with cleavage-peeking nipplage).

At work the hammers lift and fall ever heavier, cracking the surficial stillness God wreathes with hard drive failures, migraines, data loss. While the tech on to salvage what he could, a hole opened up in my eye & I was speared by blinding light, a spear of pain, an epiphany of software corruption, Moby’s white visage smithereened into my hull, the crochety interregnum of withered Summer self-nailed to his paradisal throne. Nothing could save that hard drive; nothing has softened that migraine, not excessive doses of Frova, not ice on the neck nor a microwaved wet rag over the eyes--not for several days, at least. Today it’s there though decently ebbed, after coming home early last night (skipping the gym) and trying to keep my eyes closed.

All of this writing, all of that jackhammering Opportunity at work, so much to do here at home and money tight, post-hurricane mid-Iraq pre-confirmation hearing USA weary & bitchy and fearing the pumps -- everything going at once--: what surprise is there to this sum sump of pain, this shriekage? No duh.

But the season does ebb, infinitesimally, by scorched degrees; and salves of greater nougat than I can name are richest in such lees. My wife’s been sweet and caring despite her own angst and woes, even coming up out of sleep yesterday morning as I lay wounded & groaning & wondering how to get the forward engines going; she reached down and pushed me on my back (I had been stroking her feet) and invoked all the ocean graces to wash my migraine in bliss. Thanks sweetie, thanks God. And the cats outside hovered and purred and rubbed against me as I got their meals ready, each as desperate for touch as for food, perhaps identically so; and the morning spreading up from the east, just the faintest tincture of blue ebbing hard dark, the lavish emptiness of night still rich and fragrant, composing in my hearted mind a hosannah which itself offered passage through the day. Always the meditative, mediated Amen, saturated in the most ancient meanders behind, finds the door which provides enough blue median through every salt mine and desert migraine a day has yet deposed to me. I may have lost my bookmarks, but I blunder deeper beyond their shores.




WATCHER OF THE SKIES

2002

One later afternoon in the summer
of 1976 I stood on the balcony
of my father’s 39th floor apartment
overlooking the Hudson
watching barges and tugs work
the hard-glittering blue. Far below
me the faint incessant clatter
of traffic on the West Side Highway,
that drum and fife of a daily purpose
I so reviled. I was listening
to “Watcher of the Skies,”
an art-rock anthem by a band
called Genesis, a song of
synth grooves rising
from symphonic hooves
of drums and hard guitar
an a steady, psalming voice.
Even farther below me
sad days and child and teen,
family days long tossed,
my faith in Christ tangled
in that sinking wreck,
—all lost, I prayed high
in my father’s tower,
sipping an Orange Blossom
Special and lifting
my eyes with the music
toward the glorious West
where the sun held court
as evening spread orgasmic
shivers of liquor pink and blue.
At that moment I sensed
a vatic way to redeem
a life, a charm invoked
through sound and word
to wake heaven from the knells
of dusk. A song or poem
constructed well would take me
to a better home, I swore.
I drank my gin and orange juice
dreaming mytho-tropic dreams,
mouthing the vows, playing
the song again and again.
I was 18 and I didn’t know shit,
but I sure loved the eternal
stink of it. I’ve spent the rest of my life
getting down to exactly what I heard
when I stood there watching the skies,
believing I’d find up there or in
a woman’s starry, gin-soaked stare
what waited patiently for me inside.


***

from Mark 1:1-13, King James Version:

John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.

And there went out unto him all the land of Judea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins.

And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey;

And he preached, saying, There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose.

I indeed have baptized you with water; but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.

And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan.

And straightaway coming up out of the water, he saw that the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descended upon him:

And there came a voice from heaven, saying, “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness.

And there he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.



Nietzsche’s Zarathustra returns from that wild and brinous deep desert deep in Jesus’ spirit-watered soul, speaking to the assembly these words by which I work and row and sing:


Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an
abyss.

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a
dangerous trembling and halting.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is
lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.

I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are
the over-goers.

I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows
of longing for the other shore.

I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down
and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth
of the Superman may hereafter arrive.

I love him who liveth in order to know, and seeketh to know in order that
the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeketh he his own down-going.

I love him who laboureth and inventeth, that he may build the house for the
Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeketh
he his own down-going.

I love him who loveth his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going,
and an arrow of longing.

I love him who reserveth no share of spirit for himself, but wanteth to be
wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walketh he as spirit over the
bridge.

I love him who maketh his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for
the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.

I love him who desireth not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a
virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one’s destiny to cling
to.

I love him whose soul is lavish, who wanteth no thanks and doth not give
back: for he always bestoweth, and desireth not to keep for himself.

I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour, and who then
asketh: “Am I a dishonest player?”—for he is willing to succumb.

I love him who scattereth golden words in advance of his deeds, and always
doeth more than he promiseth: for he seeketh his own down-going.

I love him who justifieth the future ones, and redeemeth the past ones:
for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.

I love him who chasteneth his God, because he loveth his God: for he must
succumb through the wrath of his God.

I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through
a small matter: thus goeth he willingly over the bridge.

I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgetteth himself, and all
things are in him: thus all things become his down-going.

I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only
the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causeth his down-going.

I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark
cloud that lowereth over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and
succumb as heralds.

Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the
lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.—

***

... Long ago, when Manannan, the god of wind and sea, offspring of Lir, the Ocearius of the Gael, lay once by weedy shores, he heard a man and a woman talking. The woman was a woman of the sea, and some say that she was a seal: but that is no matter, for it was in the time when the divine race and the human race and the soulless race and the dumb races that are near to man were all one race.

And Manannan heard the man say: “I will give you love and home and peace.” The sea-woman listened to that, and said: “And I will bring you the homelessness of the sea, and the peace of the restless wave, and love like the wandering wind.” At that the man chided her and said she could be no woman, though she had his love. She laughed, and slid into green water.

Then Manannan took the shape of a youth, and appeared to the man. “You are a strange love for a seawoman,” he said: “and why do you go putting your earth-heart to her sea-heart?” The man said he did not know, but that he had no pleasure in looking at women who were all the same. At that Manannan laughed a low laugh. “Go back,” he said, and take one you’ll meet singing on the heather. She’s white and fair. But because of your lost love in the water, I’ll give you a gift.”

And with that Manannan took a wave of the sea and threw it into the man’s heart. He went back, and wedded, and, when his hour came, he died. But he, and the children he had, and all the unnumbered clan that came of them, knew by day and by night a love that was tameless and changeable as the wandering wind, and a longing that was unquiet as the restless wave, and the homelessness of the sea. And that is why they are called the Sliochd-na-mara, the clan of the waters, or the Treud-na-thonn, the tribe of the sea-wave.
And of that clan are some who have turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind—the wind that would overtake the waves of thought and dream, and gather them and lift them into clouds of beauty drifting in the blue glens of the sky.

How are these ever to be satisfied, children of water?

-- “The Children of Water”
Fiona MacLeod




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.

Peeping Thomas

To seek in the brine what is promised in heaven
— anyone with sense can plainly see the madness of it.
— Vitae Sanctorum II, 293

Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve,
was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So
the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”
But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks
in his hands and put my finger where the nails
were, and put my hand into his side, I will
not believe it.”
-- John 20:24-25

Eye to the keyhole I spy the naked
world, enthralled with every curvature
which collapses my desire, like
waves. The ban on peeking is
from the world of fathers who
sternly point us the other way
toward aching labors in light-soaked
fields, yelling loud and drear
to leave breasts behind, exchanging
milk for something bitterer, less clear.
But also in their stern advice
they suspect their sons’ desire
is more fructive in their wives’
more perplex hearts than their own.
Observe the mother walking to
the gym with son held to her shoulder
and she talking to him as if
into a perfected world which
had no need of husbands again.
But what does she really know?
She may queen the boy’s high heaven,
but we all know his cock is stout
for that and more, aching for what’s
under and hidden in the rear. His
desire is an augment of delight
that’s amped by guilt and fear
as much as puerile, native lust.
I am set upon by those dogs
whenever I stray beyond
my daily sinecure of tasks
and peer beyond those walls
into her glade of greeny languor,
my eyes drinking springs au natural
like shots of high-proof liquor.
Oh well: the keyhole may be on my
mother’s bedroom door, but
the nude naughtiness inside belongs
to me, scanned from regions
both internal and infernal, its
thirst for waters welled within
this teeming, sulfurous brain.
My attention slathers every peek
with that immortal soulish juice,
for which the profane and nipple
blue is both holy grail and sluice,
the marauding muse my side of shores.
Each poem strains to glimpse
one more naked inch than before,
engaged in sacred naughtiness
more wild than yet believed.
I know there’s hell to pay for
these ritual outrages on the taboo
world, even when broken on paper.
This knowledge I hold secret
and vault in books shelved far from view.
You’ve got to tunnel in the darkest
voids I dream to find the blasted heath
where stands the red lacquered bookcase
lined with brimming texts of wildest thrills,
that wing of the library with the flaming
door and liquid walls. There you’ll find
both breviary and bestiary of love’s
catalogue, every blonde and redhead
numen in the world reveled, retold.
Every angle of the heart and balls and
mind a man in life sells his soul for
just one peek. I’ve supped that world
full tilt in words which whirled and
hurled communion back. That damned
keyhole will be the death of me,
I’m sure. But o what other way is
there to go but in the wave’s last
curve and smash to wash these orbs,
carrying them down the blue uteral flow?

Forbidden Knowledge (1)

A wild dream the other night -- I move into a tall row house in Boston (“northern” city), taking over the house from my aunt & uncle (distaff connection). We are visiting, we are renting, we are buying, we are inheriting: the terms of tenure is fused that way, tentative, uncertain.

My room is on the very top floor, a dark sort of attic space though hugely roomy, more than enough space for all of my stuff. I eye a long wall space that would be wonderful for shelving all of my books (which in the waking world are too plentiful to shelve, are boxed in the far reaches of the upstairs crawl space & in are piled in the closet of this study). My father and I walk around the room, dreaming of possibilities.

We are supposed to come down to the first floor for dinner soon, but I want to explore further dark crooks above & in the perimeter which intimate more spaces even higher. I poke my head through a hole in the ceiling at the south end of the room, peering into a huge dark space above -- a whole another floor, a super-attic! Who would have thought? No one, it seems, not for a long time.

Then I realize that floor can be accessed from dusty forgotten stairs at the north end of the house. I head up there alone (my father disappears from the dream). I climb around detritus and clutter and trash into a small room filled with books, a library of sorts. I want to pore over the volumes but time is short and there’s another room ahead, so I explore on. The next room is furnished along a theme -- exquisite bedroom furniture including a bureau of mohagany inlaid with jade. In the next room there are shelves of self-help books for every personal mania and malaise. Again I want to pore over the titles but there’s yet another room ahead, who would have thought? a bedroom suite antimacassared with white chenille (geez, I think, my wife would love this, and am sorry she didn’t come on this trip with me).

The rooms thus unscroll with wonder and tension (always I’m expecting that cry to dinner, or maybe the pinging of the alarm clock), each with a Theme -- an art nouveau room willed with exquisite small books of prints and fin de siecle typography proclaiming the devastating primacy of Art, then a room that is wall-to-wall Nazi memorabilia, a perfect German flag, lamps with skin-sewn shades, riding whips, laminated posters crying Raus or Maus (apparently arranged by Jews in vicious memory of the Holocaust) ... another room filled with books of poetry, titles I would desperately love. My hands tremble as I open them, read ancient titles of stuff by Shakespeare (original printing), wondering how much of the canon is lost in this room; I take as many as I can, piling them along my arm from palm to shoulder.

I am travelling a circuit of rooms beyond the known top of this house, as from some outermost last knowable through a labyrinthine meander of rooms piled with old lost or forgotten stuff, my eyes greedy for the next sight, my heart pounding, wondering what the next room will reveal, feeling the meander will never end--when I hear my voice called from far below. Dinner.

***

I wonder about that quest for lost or forbidden knowledge. Columba wanted to know about that Celtic otherworld; he queries the skull of sacrificed Oran. But the news is catastrophic, antithetical, apostasy, heretical -- a refutation of every fibre of the saint’s mission. One derivation of Oran is jodras or “query,” and it is ever dangerous to query the dead. Knowledge of this world is one thing -- the names of every creature -- but knowledge of the Other is damnable, hence most delightful, hence my Theme today of Secret Knowledge.

***

From Roger Shattuck’s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography:

(A) haunting cluster of ancient stories from both Hebrew scripture and pagan myth concerns a ... prohibition laid upon the human faculty of sight. In these tales, sigh stands for the human need for evidence of the senses to bolster a flagging faith. The results are often fatal. Lot’s wife, escaping the destruction of Sodom, hears the injunction, “Look not behind thee.” (Genesis 19:17). When she turns to look at the horrible scene of fire and brimstone, “she became a pillar of salt.” (Genesis 19:26)

... Told not to look at the horrible Gorgon’s head of Medusa, Perseus obeys orders, escapes petrification by looking only at Medusa’s reflection on his shield, and uses other magic accouterments to behead the monster. He can contain whatever curiosity he feels to behold Medusa’s ultimate ugliness directly, a temptation that might lead others of us to meet the fate of Lot’s wife.

.... (In Apulieus’ tale of Eros and Psyche in The Golden Ass, Psyche is married to Eros under the condition that she never look upon his face. When she betrays the ban and holds a candle over his sleeping form, a drop of wax falls and scorches the god’s shoulder. He flees, murmuring, “Love cannot last without trust.” She then seeks him everywhere, “submitting to and surviving (with the help of nature’s creatures” the cruel trials imposed on her by Cupid’s still-jealous mother, Venus. The last trial sends Psyche to the underworld to fetch a box containing a token of Proserpina’s beauty in order to restore Venus’ splendor. Told not to pry into the box, Psyche again cannot repress her curiosity and she peeps into the box and is immediately overcome by a Stygian sleep. The story ends happily when Cupid rescues Psyche, intervenes with Jupiter to have her immortalized into a goddess, and establishes their union in the heavens. Psyche twice destroys her potential happiness by wishing to know more than she should.

... Banished from the turbulent public life of 14th century Florence and immersed in the theological disputes of the waning Middle Ages, Dante gave in the Divine Comedy an imaginary account of himself a an upstart pilgrim accorded a specially authorized tour of the most restricted zones of Hell and Purgatory and Heaven. The horrors and marvels that Dante/Pilgrim beholds nudge him toward disbelief. But first Virgil and then Beatrice keep him on the path of faith, and he miraculously survives the lengthy journey through territory forbidden to mortals.

... (In Paradiso Dante comes “blindingly near his final goal,” boldly asking a man who had descended a golden ladder to receive him. When Dante asks why this man -- a humble sinner who became a reforming cardinal -- has been chosen for the task of welcoming him, the secret of Providence is suddenly cut short of being revealed “by some disciplinary fireworks” and Peter Damien sends Dante back to earth “with a preemptory message about forbidden knowledge:”

The truth you seek to fathom lies so deep
in the abyss of the eternal law,
it is cut off from every creature’s sight.

And tell the mortal world when you return
what I told you, to that no man presume
to try to reach a goal as high as this.

Forbidden Knowledge (2)

It’s always knowledge of the Otherworld, of the infernal regions as well as Heaven, that is forbidden us. Death separates seeker from that gnosis, or seems to; we sin to trespass the boundary, when we seek to know more than humans were meant to.

Dante in Purgatorio declares infernal knowledge damned:

Content yourself with quia, son of Eve,
For had you power to see the whole truth plain
No need had been for Mary to conceive.

“Quia” meaning finite knowledge of effects, not final knowledge of essences. To know the whole truth would be devastating to the entire scheme of salvation, which demands a Jesus as corrective for the error of our views and ways. We sin out of ignorance, but sin itself comes from knowledge, the apple delved by the serpent in the shade of the world tree.

The quest for secret knowledge is inside our mortal coil, in the voyage of our days. Clara Strijbosch writes in The Seafaring Saint, “According to The Voyage of St. Brendan, Brendan burned a book containing stories about the wonders of God’s creation out of disbelief. For this reason he is sent on a voyage so as to see with his own eyes certain divine manifestations which earlier he had refused to credit. In this way he is to recover the book by refilling it with the wonders which he witnesses on his voyage. The majority of the phenomena which he comes across are related to man’s actions and behaviour in this life and the circumstances consequent upon them in the Afterlife. Brendan encounters souls in hell, heaven and paradise. The astonishing and sometimes frightening experiences restore his belief.”

Ergo, we are meant to take the physical evidence as our proof of eternal truths. But something in us cries to see more than the surficials. Why settle for lucency of the god when there is His visage instead? We overstep our human boundaries attempting to peer back into the abyss, but peer we must, because we were made curious, and curiosity is the flint of all our making. The fire which Prometheus steals is in our noodles, a guilty desire to imagine more than we were meant to see in our routine lives; and the punishment of Zeus was not only to have Prometheus forever chained to a rock and pecked by eagles -- a labor of Hell -- but he gave us Pandora, “gift of all,” whose curiosity sprung the lids on the box which brought evil in to our lives.

We know we dare not look -- we know must.

And so when Ahab curses the heavens flashing over the Pequod on the eve of their doomed three-days hunt of the White Whale, he dares to look behind the Christian veil into the rawest visage imagined by a modern mind:

“There is some suffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou founding fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too has thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”

Infernal knowledge indeed. Ahab is willing to crucify himself upon the whale in that defiant stare, and act which Faulkner once commented, “a sort of Golgotha of the heart become immutable in the sonority of its plunging ruin. There’s a death for a man, now.”

Ahab knows the cost of his madness and spends it willingly and thrillingly. Did Melville? He is content to let that story be fictional. Ishmael, the Horatio who survives to tell Ahab’s tale, finds words which harness the desire for secret knowledge with a counterbalancing will which prevents from drowning in it--an eagle of the mind, so to speak. This from “The Try-Works” chapter:

***

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp -- all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s dismal swam, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of the earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, the mortal man who hat more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be ture -- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the finest hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world has not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cooper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a carefree lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; -- not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomly wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, “The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i.e., even while living) “in the congregation of the the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to the fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for a time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and be invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

Forbidden Knowledge (3)

FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

Sept. 25, 2005

Beyond the center shore of my dread sea
there is a dark grove, supple and hoary
in the maenad desire which I will
write over. It compasses my song
with the drowsy mewl of deep-thighed lust,
and though it is a certain death
to peek I must, head turned back
upon the sea which salts my gaze
in saucy blue infinity. I dare not
but I must; I am commanded
by a supernal and subversive thrall;
I am scrotummed by the will,
my face its muzzle to those cheeks.
Thus my creator compensates
for corpse he coprophiliously devours
down the gullet of his bourne.
Always a whiff of death inside that
savage view, as if the curvature of all delight
crashed upon an olfact shore
and every peek is pure olibanum
wafted to the dream which shelves
my words for good.
Almost. So dare I must, ere
all words fail, and peer I do,
upon that dancing muse inside
the grove astride the house where
all books pour their reams,
like spermactetti gobs on lactate
orbs, the eyes of God’s own lust
staring back at me. Surely
the view has frozen me here
and the book I fill is like a pillar
of salt, witness to the awe
and awfulness of dread origin,
two shots of whiskey and a fifth
of sin, pure malt friskiness
I’ll never fully say much less swim in,
though here I try. Dare I say the
words which smash on through?
Will I ever thence return? Does
that even matter now, when
every sea and moon doth burn
blue and lucent and bewitched
like congealing cables in a mind
which now builds a bridgelike abbey
back and down inside the soul?
The hour’s late: soon light will blue
the noctal frieze which cheeks
my song: my task today’s at end:
soon I must go feed the cats
and wake the wife apsalm across
her feet. Soon I must cap this
pen and toss this book to that
last unsounded wave so
so my day thus dark-grounded,
may begin. Will I burn in hell
for such outrageous peeks at
pantyankled truth, or do horned
angels fan their wings in wild
applause for this next sum
of burning pages? And can
the work ever be quite done
when the butter’s always on the bun
& steaming her desire my way,
tickling my sense for one
last view before the curtains
lower and clump for good?


NOTHIN BUT A LOVER

from A Breviary of Guitars
2000


1.

I’ve always been
drawn to women,
fascinated
by their bodies,
their curves
my heart’s
round welcome,
their soft voices
like cat’s fur
or the surf’s
susurration:
I’ve hummed
their tune since
birth: When I was
three or so
the maid in
our Pittsburgh
home would
yell to me
Pretty girls
passing by!
and I would
scamper to the
window to catch
the faintest curve
of departing
wonder: The
maid would say
to my mother,
He ain’t gonna
be nothin’ but
a lover, and
it’s true,
no matter how
many words I
throw into
the smoke,
no matter how
many times
I lose my
way to her:
I have always
been finding then
losing then finding
them again:
Like Paula
who I played
with when
I was three.
Paula was 4
and lived across
the street,
a jolly Jill
who refused to
wear a top
when it got
hot: One day
she led me
far away from
home to search
for worms in
the park: We
ambled on
and on until
I had to
go to the
bathroom: We
crossed a
highway overpass
& knocked
on some row
house door: A
woman whose
knee I faced
let us in &
led me to
the bathroom
& then fed
us cookies &
called the cops:
My parents were
frantic when
we drove up
in the police
care — sure
we had been
lost — But
all their squabble
just faded when
When Paula’s
mom hauled her
home away
from me: O
watch her
walk down the
street taking
with her all
song: When we
moved away
to Illinois
all I had of her
was a wallet
photo that I
carried everywhere
until my brother
ripped it up
in a rage at
me: Somewhere
I’m still
inconsolable,
searching and
searching through
the oldest plumes
of memory
for her in
her wading
pool, smiling
at me:
I am fascinated
with how a
female draws
me to her
on some
current toward
the sweet
prong between
her legs like
a widdershin
dowse: In first
grade Alan Fausel
and I hiked
into the woods
at recess
in search of girls
who walked alone
or in pairs:
We’d spring
up at them
and propose
I’ll Show You
Mine if You Show
Me Yours:
O it was
perilous business:
There were these
two who always
ripped us off,
gettin us to
hike down
our pants
and underwear
and stand there
aflop in the
breeze: They’d
flash their skirts
up then down
& shriek happily
away: But I also
remember this one
Susie cute as a
button with dark
brown eyes and
short brown hair
who would lower
her undies gently
down to her
Buster Browns
& lift her skirt,
& close her eyes
and smile, smile,
smile: At home
I drew a house
to store my
visual coups:
One room stacked
high with large
crossed O’s
for bottoms &
another room
filled with smaller
crossed O’s for
vaginas: I
understand
this now as
the basic song
of male worship
for a female’s
body: It’s not
something that
women reciporcate:
They don’t stare
at men the way
we do at them,
gape-jawed, stunned
into mute
reverence for
nature’s fertile
fuckable founts:
My wife never ceases
to wow me when
she emerges from
the bathroom
at night dressed
for bed in her
white Calvin Klein
gown: How it
clings to her,
so sinuously
sweet, so richly
awarble: I know
I make her
nervous staring
so at her, but I
can’t help it:
She’s voluptuous
in every way I
have ever dreamed
women could be:
I never tire of
running my hand
gently oh so
gently down her arms,
her legs, her back
and bottom,
her breasts -- softly,
so softly, the
way she loves
being touched:
Then cupping
and squeezing her
breast as if to
fill some
undrenchable
cup: It never ends:
The vault is
never full:
And it’s more
than mere
horniness,
that urge which
stiffens sates
and drains: Rather
my love of
women is a bath
from uterus
to grave:
An eternal river
the dolphin sports
in where the
music of Ariel
drifts like smoke,
my dream of
her heaven between
the waking and
the wake:


SCYLLA & CHARYBDIS

Early nightmare: civil war in
First grade. The boy who ratted on
Me and Alan to our teacher
For playing Show Me Yours I’ll Show
You Mine in the back woods during
Recess played Michael to my itch,
Pitching me and my kind to fire.
I crept along the school-house walls
Trying not to get caught: But then
Some kid aflame edged around the
Corner in a scream I could not
Avoid, and I watched my small bones
Smoulder in a sorry pile. For
Months I woke from that awful dream
The ruins of what my lust had seen.

***

PERIL DE MER

David Cohea

The 15th-century Melker Physiologus
... has the story that the sea-creatures
sira, half-maiden, half-fish, leads
the sailors away, after which they
drown.

According to the Bestiare by Phillipe
da Thaon, the serra obstructs the ships
in a very special manner, the creature
raises its wings and, by proceeding in
front of the ship and depriving it of
wind, does great harm.

... In his Besitare, Guillam le Clerc
defines the serra simply as a
peril de mer, feared by sailors for
its propensity for sinking ships.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The
Seafaring Saint

Every voyage has its squalls,
and she is every sailor’s
honeyed nightmare, an
abscissa riding butt-naked
on the wave-mare of abyss.
Desire fraught with peril
bound her waist with
flesh above and scales
below, the sweet dive
down from her roseate
breasts trapped by
screeching terror
in the depths. Who can
resist, who would dare
to dive into that
wilding wave, which rises
twice the height of
a man’s main mast?
A sailor is composed
of such fraught foamings,
when the apparition
rises from the foggy
aft of sleep, almost
a girl, certainly
a reaper of every
throb and leap
inside my hips,
her voice almost
a surflike croon,
her blue eyes pale
and icier than
the high scimitar of
the moon. Oh what
halves sweet heaven
into shrieking hell
than those thighs
which never quite
appear above the
wave’s wild crest,
thighs which have
gripped the keels
of galleons & split
them with a sigh?
Travail here carefully,
you who would ever
shore again. She is
every drink you must
think all the way
from glow to basement
doom; you do so
by reading between
the lines of her aria,
to see the skulls
piled high amid
the whales and squid
and split mast-heads.
That breasts so close
could fan so far those
frozen depths below
is the peril de mer
you must embrace
if your would live
to write the voyage
down. I draw her
shape to the right
of the last page, or
house her in parenthesis
(here) like that conch
on every shore which
set to ear splits wide
the door where nothing
but your sighs like
whiskey pours. Listen
too long to that music
at your peril, friend:
sails of gossamer and
lace will ice and ghost
the mast, prelude to
the foam which
covers it at last.


SELF KNOWLEDGE

2002

But the actual or potential alcoholic,
with hardly an exception, will be
absolutely unable to stop on the basis
of self-knowledge.
— Alcoholics Anonymous

May 26, 1996 — the day after
my brother’s fine wedding
in Pennsylvania, so bright
and fair a day, all my family
there from all around the country,
my fiancee gorgeous and
so happy to be there with me,
staking our own future together

— The day after I stood in line
where they served wine
and near wine, where the cups
were confused, and
what I lifted to my lips
was not near, not by a
long shot, but instead
the real thing, a sweet
draught of what I swore
to never drink again, an
eight-year drunkard’s drought
relieved by a first
gentle kiss, like a wild
strawberry plunked in
my life’s good glass

—The day after I did not
hesitate, but swallowed,
swallowed all, receiving
the communion with a
simple “well, what of it?”,
feeling not at all changed,
no sudden roar of
the bull god, no terrible
deadly thirst, no sense
of helter-skelter spree
grabbing me in its magic
carpet folds, none of that,
just a slight warm relief
spreading through me:

— After a night when
I thought, hell,
where’s the harm in that?
, the reception
proceeding on, family and
friends smiling over plates of
good food, the music happy,
smooth, content, the last
bright beams of day
shouting over the mountain
into me with grand tidings
of a different life, no dark
eddies, nothing of a knell
in any of it, the drinkers
in the room not much different
than those who didn’t,
and me in between,
successful and happy just
like them all, why not me?

— I drank no more that night,
proof the next drink was
no longer an axiom of the first,
not for me, not any more,
not after long years of
practiced sobriety, after
so many days begun
and ended on my knees
asking for help with
a drink problem which
eventually I solved:

— And so, the next day,
while everyone was out
hiking or reveling elsewhere,
I sat at a piano in the
lodge staring at a glass
of wine I had poured for
myself, in private, like
a secret oath: stared at it
a while, only six ounces
of May wine, nothing hard
in this at all, no threat
to one who long ago
had buried all the horrors
of the alcoholic night,
who had build from
those ruins a good
disciplined life — I had
done it, hadn’t I?
Now 38, wasn’t it time
to enjoy life as I
hadn’t been able to before,
not as a perilous drunk,
not as a zealot of sober days?

—It’s my turn, I thought,
brimming glass now in hand,
staring down that narrow
well into the face I
didn’t see staring back
so patiently. I can do
this thing, I swore,
and drank that wine
down in one long draught.
Just a sip, no more,
I vowed as sunlight
in the room
rearranged itself to
the tenor of what I drank.
Profounder angels I
once knew wrapped their
wings in one descending
sigh and bid me pour
another for one more try.
—Just one more
they whispered from
a flue of tumbling wings.
Whatever we once
promised you, one
more more will be enough.


third cup

It doesn’t matter if you’re
looking for God or true wilderness
or the insides of your love:
you’ve got to search
at least three ways.
Query the same engine
and the same pages result.
First you rowed forth seeking
island to island the
descending rooms of a vault,
finding Orpheus astride
gray fishes and a sea god’s
house ribbed with whalebones.
Then you entered the forest
of your desire where it
was darkest, with only
your red hunger to
light the way. Now it’s
time to take the guided path
back from annihilation,
returning to the world
a simple boon. That chalice
that you found out there
heals itself returning
to the lips of those who
need it most. Actually,
the third way isn’t a
search at all: rather we translate
what we found in letting go,
filling the page with
loaves and fishes
from heaven’s deep.