Foundering Fathers

Muggy and beclouded morning -- when will all this get blown free by Northern winds? An ache for that Change, tempered as it must be in these temperate climes, for halcyon blue and stirring cool. Not yet, bucko. Remants of Tropical Storm Tammy in rococco cumulus spread round the compass of the sky, ragged storms which drift overhead, like bad dreams, loose a torrid swath of rain, then drift on, rootless ghosts of an ebbing angst. Still, my wife and I had a great day driving about town, browsing through thrift malls & bookstores, picking up this and that (several cheap vases and a mirror for my wife, Carl Kerenyi’s The Gods of the Greeks for me. Dinner at Coq au Vin to celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary, the food a falter short of perfect this time (slow service resulting in food that was cooled somewhat), but still a bliss we rare afford but do celebrate. Good to finally get home around 9 p.m., feed ansty cats, tumble quickly to sleep watching an old episode of “The King of Queens” on the tube. Nightynocht, Eden of the real, grace we scarce deserve but so richly give thanks for ...

***


We get glimpses of first conditions off the bridge which is Mercurius, our curious spirit (Mephisto hugs the shadows under that bridge, he’s in it for the power and the pussy and every soul’s remittance in hell for such earthly delights); what scholar does not have an altar to him in the study, there between the printer and the monitor? I have a skull coffee-mug in which sits a stone from my father’s Iona a strange smooth grey oval stone -- granite, I imagine, stricken from some long subsumed coast -- in the center of which is a curved dragonish shape of quartz.

This enquiry has a mercurial center to it, tintured with mojo and coochie, my father’s dream distilled in me, all of his fathers’ paroxyms ferried to this moment, my fingers tapping at the keyboard tribal, totemic, banging out a semaphore discernible to the first fish-rider, father of my fathers, now on the final shore I can’t reach. Something emanates from his old angst, his passion, his song: it grows louder as I listen and invoke and altar it. Oh that a book, a good great dark book, could truly lamp all the way down that winding stair of a well of a source of a dream! Oh Faust, with your appalling angelus!

All lives have their center, that resonant lacunae inside a personal life which booms to distant shores some verb, some naming.

It isn’t necessarily verbal -- and when it isn’t, it doesn’t resemble this in the least -- evidence my wife’s passion for her custom sewing, how she is so desperate to make it a business, because that work is so clear in her, having emerged from so many useless layers (all of those jobs on someone else’s clock, all of those wares she tried to sell that weren’t her wares at all). No: she’ll have none of this dialouge, this enquiry, other than to agree that there’s a center whose outlines are hidden and whose circumference reaches out to every shore of a life.

Carl Kerenyi writes about this wonderfully in his Prologomena to Essays on a Science of Mythology:

***

According to the most detailed account of Roman city-founding, Plutarch’s biography of Romulus, there is mention of a circle which, described from a centre, is then drawn with a plough. The centre then takes the form of a circular pit called a mundus. Ovid, in his poetical account of a primitive city-founding (Fasti, iv, 819), speaks of a fossa that was filled in again after the sacrifice. An altar, equally simple, was built over it.

Other sources describe the mundus of the historical Roman metropolis as a building whose lower part was consecrated to Di Manes, the spirits of the ancestors and of the Underworld. Those admitted int it stated that seen from inside it was shaped like a vault of heaven.

Whether in its primitive form as used in the founding ceremony or as a solid bit of architecture, the mundus is arcg ((a Greek work here meaning “beginnings or first principles”)) into which the older world of the ancestors, the subterranean storehouse of everything that will ever grow or come to birth, opens. The mundus is at once the relative arcg and the absolute arcg, and from it the world of “Rome” radiates in all directions, like a circle from a centre. (11)

***

The stories of the Titans are about gods who belong to such a distant past that we know them only from tales of a particular kind and only a exercising a particular function. The name Titan has, since the most ancient times, been deeply associated with the divinity of
the Sun, and seems originally to have been the supreme title of beings who were, indeed, celestial gods, but gods of very long ago, still savage and subject to no laws. We did not regard them as being in any way worthy of worship; with the single exception, perhaps, of Kronos; and with the exception also of Helios, if we identify the latter with the wilder, primordial Sun-God. The Titans were gods of a sort that have no function
except in mythology. Their function is that of the defeated: even when they win seeming victories -- before the stories come to their inexorable conclusion. These defeated ones bear the characteristics of ancestors whose dangerous qualities appear in their posterity.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks


THE VILLAS OF HELIOS

October 8, 2005


There are fathers so ancient
only their shoulders remain
on the coasts, grey and worn,
that and all of their sunlight.
Their sons are men of obscene
power and wealth who keep
building villas of Helios,
off Ibizia and Mustique and
Villefranche-sur-Mer,
immense brilliant porticos
grander than the glittering tableau
of blue seas and skies, jewels
big enough to drown a nereid
not destined to be queen.
Their yachts are huge, they
freight enormous testicles
which hang just below the
waterline, ever on the
verge of exploding into Europa.
The men smile like boys
with teeth brilliant
as the bleached sands, aging
men with greased dark hair
and loosening bellies. They
smile full of the contempt
and arrogance of every
old father they burnt in
lust for their mothers.
Their women are
so dazzling they seem to lounge
not on chairs but the half-shell,
miracles of flesh and composure,
their naked breasts staring
back at the paparazzis like
Medusae, staring coolly
straight into the face of the sun.
Roman pillars quarried from
Northern Italy still stand
by the pool overlooking it all,
forelocks of those miserable
first men who raged and
rampaged and fell, utterly,
to uteral dooms. These sons
are so godlike their aristocrat
world exists off all the known
maps, beyond every sea to salt
the likes of you or me.
And like their shameful
ancestors, they don’t even
know it. They prate on cellphones
and wave off children. Their
eyes are blank as they scratch
at crossword puzzles in silken
cabanas which partake of them
more than they ever will of them.
No, they’ll never quite get it
that the starry infinitude of
their gold is chump change down
below where the only wealth
that matters is what’s piled
in the ruins, stripped from
the corpses as they float round
down the gullet of drowned
Helios, delicates of clout
Dis shits in abyss.
No matter: the wine today
is indescribably
smooth--a vintage of
vineyards more than three
thousand years old--and
the married sister of
his wife is smiling
back from the pool, her
eyes all of Europe's stepping
not safely to shore, oh
so ravishingly blue,
her breasts at the waterline
burning above with
every shadow of wickedness
below out of view. She’s
every shore worth assaulting,
every other man’s sworn bride
like heavy fruit for the taking.
The whole outrage of this single
sea day was baked in visage
of Helios so very long ago:
Nothing can stop him now,
ever, though he’s falling
ever back down. Atreus,
Medici, Rothschild, DeLaurentis,
with all of the bankers between,
having bought their world
and now fully in its leisure,
in Tuscan palaces of burning white
pleasure, pure testes, hammered gold,
bright gouts of red wine
spilled over and over on the
grave of wild Helios,
spots which never quite dry,
being sons themselves
of the sun which never dies.

The Work

9:30 a.m Friday morning, day off (using up vacation time I’m not free to take in sequence), my wife in the shower upstairs readying for a day out together (culminating, we plan we hope, with dinner at Coq Au Vin, a meal we’ve delayed from our anniversary last year, from Valentine’s of this year, from my wife’s birthday in June), Berlioz’s “Le Carnival romain,” op. 9 on the stereo in honor of the sorcery of recent posts, the day outside drippy, promising more rain from Tropical storm Tammy’s far-whirling skirts, cooler in the house, light less, vintage, sere, reflective, utterly delighted to leave summer wildness behind ...

***

Perhaps Faust-Mephisto are the upper and lower halves of that daimon who presides and rides the slow collapse of the Western cultural canon: a blent antichirst or anti-archetypal shadow who has been rebelling against earthly and heavenly fathers since Lucifer got tossed out of Heaven, since Adam yanked the apple from him through Eve and his serpent for single quintessential bite, since Oran’s mouth refused to shut up and every artist’s mouth since has welled blue oceans of something more primary and futuristic than the Christian articulation of human being. Faust/Mephisto blend desire and ambition with imaginary powers -- familiars of air and fire -- in a slowly rising wave which will drown the last cathedral.

In their wake our day, the massa confusa, cultural disorder, rabblement and carousing, the merriment of the wake, so much damn foolishness spent on so much surficial gleam. Britney Spears astride the throne of Mary, batting her lascivious lashes & threatening to burst the levees of a blue busier, swarming us all in pure yeastiness, incessant pornographic Yes.

In their wake canon-fodderers like Harold Bloom attempting to hold the center with his own memory; and canon-fools like President Bush, the Christian fascist who warns the world about the threat of Islamic fascists.

In their wake you get the drone and white noise of indifference in every quarter, the sense of people eking out an existence in the ruins of meaning, battening the hatches, drinking tea in fearful rooms and narrow similes.

What then awakens Faust/Mephisto’s wake? The doom of one order, yes, but also the wavelike boom of the Next? Writing in 1949, at a time when there was much to despair in the world(such as the sudden cold fact of thermonuclear annihilation), Erich Neumann wrote:


“The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious -- or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies — is, however, only a passing phenomenon.

Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look. The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the possible “rapproachement” of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future..

No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built. Until they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace.

But the preparation for this rapproachement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious. (pp 393-4, italics mine)

***

Ergo, we are the cathedrals of the new canon, their new psalmody, their strange new constructions! -- The soil through which the depths delve their bright coins -- Pure futurity soaked in primal abysms. And our guiding light is a darkness, he who proclaims as Mephistopheles to Faust in his study,

I speak the modest truth. though man,
that silly little mircocosm,
commonly thinks himself an entity,
I am a part of the part that first was all,
part of the darkness which gave birth to light,
that supercilious light which now disputes
with Mother Night her ancient rank and space,
and yet cannot succeed; no matter how it struggles,
it sticks to matter and can't get free.
light flows from substance, makes it beautiful;
solids can check its path, so I hope it won't be long
till light and the world-stuff are destroyed together.

-- Goethe's Faust, Part One, transl. Carlyle F. MacIntyre

Destroyer of light, magician of night - Mephistopheles and Faust are riding that sea-beast atop my primal crest, Sayer and Namer of all that cannot, must not be known. Some totem, eh.


THE WORK


The dark is trying to work it out,
draft by noctilucent draft.
Observe the man at study in his
chair at 4 a.m. beneath a single
pool of lamplight: His mind
bends down beyond the words
to finger the dark which loams
them; a dirt of time both his and ours
fecund in its death and growth,
the sustaining garden of the verb
which ferries god through every
age from dark to light to dark.
That’s how abyssal numens
will be known--they signal us,
flashing in the surf like breasts
or a shattered mast of Ahab bone,
delved from deep to margins
just offshore, a silvered gleam
which is the moon’s and all the
inside lucre of the dream.
The man in his study hauls
up buckets of a black
lucidity, splashes of cold
brine which braces and
makes bold his downward-
plunging mind. He thinks
he’s got a hold on things,
the darker sense of them
at least, though in sooth
his thoughts are just a
sieve for bursting grapes,
an ink which fills lines
on paper with a wine not
his but of their darkest labor,
the truth he’ll never fully
harbor, much less in any
clear way name. No matter:
The dark will work it out
long after all his pages dust
the fading visage of his bones.
Nothing will remain of that
patient slow enquiry
lamped high before first light
but the dark’s own assay
through our kind, dark eyes staring
up at the next ones peering down
perhaps with half the clutter,
half the frown, half the verbiage
of the last attempt. Half
the wattage, too, because
the half-lit margins are
where the dark things
arise and flicker into view.
That’s how the dark will work
it out, out of us I mean,
by marginal scans in scant degrees,
insolvent life after insolvent life,
getting right the angle of the
dangle, the mortis of the view,
til eye to eye the parallax
is pure heaven salted full with
seas, where every hellish
bell in drowned Ys begin
to dully ring, all primal gods
of north and south
chapelled in the voice
where light in darkness sings.

A Faustian Joust

The story of Faust resonates deeply for me, for my imagination is at its deepest and clearest essence Faustian; it is the organum of the inward eye which sees all it desires, espying every sacred glade, reveling in every profane text, divining every sacred secret, diving with the sperm whale to every hoary depth the abysm.

Why do we revel so to follow Faust through the acts of his rise and fall, cheering his every audacity, jeering at his damnation? What is it that so trills the imagining sense when we hear the scholar make his infernal pact, declaring (in Marlowe’s version) to Mephistopheles, that greasy courier of Hell,

Go, bear these tidings to great Lucifer:
Seeing Faustus hath incurred eternal death
By desperate thoughts against Jove’s deity,
Say he surrenders up to him his soul
So he will spare him four and twenty years,
Letting him live in all voluptuousness,
Having thee ever attend on me:
To give me whatsoever I ask,
To tell me whatsoever I demand,
To slay mine enemies and aid my friends,
And always be obedient to my will. (III 95-105)

What balls! -- Or, to be more gender neutral, What audacity! Imagine the English rabble assembled to hear those words, high and low, all united in a pornographic glee, stepping joyfully out of the tyrannies of the day if only in the imagination to roger and rut and rout and rule with Faust, if only for an hour! It was pure whiskey for the mind, 100 proof cupidity, a miraculous island of revolt against the Christian state superego. Something of the carnival here, the Twelfth Night saturnalia inverting the dayside order into its sprightly sprung nigredo, a yeasty foment of forbidden delight. Yee-hah.

Of course the parabola winds high through forbidden delights then down to everlasting damnation; the crowd which cheered Faust’s crown of magic is the same one crowing his demise, jeering as he is ushered off by imps at midnight on the eve of his contract’s end. The dramatic sheath allows us to enter and revel with the hero and safely retreat and mock his foolishness and criminality. He pays the piper, and we go whistling home. The imagination provides through its faux-incantations of “what-if” and “let’s pretend” a Faustian romp of criminal license that we never have to pay for; we get to sit in the theater at the grisly end repeating, “it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie,” and live to walk out into the brilliant day alive and well and safe from all we so evilly dreamed.

Well, almost. Literalists of the imagination still abound. Unfettered imagination may be deep in our nature, but so are the wardens of it. The certainly are everywhere in this country. I would venture that there are few places in the world accorded such free access to whatever one fancies; nor is there any place where such Puritanism damns such license.

We are told there are good reasons for such shackles. How many children have become schoolyard snipers after spending too many hours shooting monsters and villains inside the virtual killing-grounds of video games? What unbridled, techno-sugared fancy has spawned our sexual preditors? What abrogations of our nature are fanned by fantasies of necrophilia and gang-rape, of coprophilia and golden showers, of double-anal penetration and fisting and the snuff epic? How far do we let it go? How far can it go? Whatever legislation or judgment or regulation our culture tries to put out there, the flood isn’t tamping down much; the channels of Faustian delight are more sophisticated and powerful than ever (witness that the twenty most-visited websites are all pornographic; the revenue from sales of pornographic DVDs is around 7 billion dollars a year, which far exceeds the revenues of Hollywood).

Faust has become the Mephisto of our imagination, the gravitas of a world too empowered by our arts. His desire drowns out so much else in the milky white noise of endless glut and surfeit; he is what makes so much of our culture noxious and fallen, a consumer paradise gone rabid into suburban hell. We can dial up heaven if we choose, but the fingers err too readily to the darker frequencies: I mean to Google “divine aura” but instead I type in “big nipples” and press my face to the monitor, dreaming not of transcendence but immersion in the actual paps of danger, aw hell, why not doom.

The problem, IMO, isn’t centered in the imagination -- I can just as easily imagine Heaven as Hell -- but in that agency which wardens and ordains it. Faust is a Christian creation, the personification of errancy from God’s will; like a black puppet in an early morality play, Faust was set out for us to unlearn evil by drubbing our noses in it. To taste the whisky of sin and then experience all of its consequences.

But those early Christian re-creators of the drama missed a crucial theatrical point. By allowing us entry into the savage garden of Faust’s mind, we are freed to raven in it, if only for a time, and no threat of damnation is strong enough to lure the imagination once sprung. We identify not with the angels who escort Faust to doom but with the fallen hero, because he is us.

What is odd about the present is that despite the abundant aids to the imagination we have today (proliferating at a technological warp speed), its products are so two-dimensional -- howlingly banal planes of repeated sex and violence. There’s no inside to the narratives, they’re rote and flat and predictable. Given the chance to glut our fancy, we go for the same old same old same old same, conjuringg up the half-dozen .mgs of ecstasy we don’t get enough in the real, gunning the usual suspects as we quest through the stone labyrinth of the prince of Doom. The nuance is missing, the heft and flavor of depths, the wilderness spectra: all of the insides of delight which are always outside the safe and the known.

These regions of the imagination can’t be accessed, IMO, without disciplines. License keeps us in imagination’s kindergarten, playing the same schoolyard games; schooling is necessary, plus practice and sacrifice. What Faust renounces is exactly that; he gives up on his years of patient ordained study for his walk on the wild side; he gets what every starving student ogles in his cups, but none of what that yearning represents beyond literal consumption.

Mephisto is the intermediary between Faust and the Devil; he offers the pen with which Faust signs his bloody pact; he becomes like Ariel to Prospero, the wings of every wish. Too bad Faust’s desires are so predictable. Faust and Mephisto -- his black imagination -- are shadows of Mercurius, the sacred magician, the inside angel every alchemical cooking-pot, brewing not gold but golden realms of psyche. Our culture is stuck in the old parental Christian tale -- verbs of amplitude at war with stony verbotens.

We have a lot of growing up to do. There’s plenty of room for sex and drugs and rock n roll in alchemy -- innumerable pairings, transgressions of gender, role-playing, romps and thefts, cocksure struttings and screaming forays, indulging in all crimes of nature against our nature -- all of those fumes arise from the vat of imagination. The trick is to keep the container solidly between real walls, in a wholly imagined place. There is no payoff in any worldly term to this: no queen of the Green Knight to proffer her charms, no actual inventory of the treasure-rooms of Hell, no actual top-floor job bestowed by Donald Trump/Mephisto for this Apprenticeship -- No: Those walls must be firm in order for all of the magic to brew forth. Our imagination doesn’t make us better people or more successful. It won’t beat Death. Those certainties are difficult to accept, but once that work is done, the really fun stuff can begin.

The Brain Game

Wet day: a tropical wave doing it’s thang off the Atlantic coast, swirling in huge archons of dowse, droopy drippy breezy acreage of pissing cumulus, wave after wave. Glub glub. The day’s 20-mile inward commute a crawl but the gardens of the land must be mightily pleased.

***

All knowledge is dicey, it has a Mephistophelean scent of wet poodle fur, black, musty, faintly redolent of buggary, of sex and shit and dirtiness ... It goes back to our first crime, the bite of divinely sweet fruit (apple or Eve), the flooding bright awareness which followed that where there is good there is also evil, a duplicity in nature where once there was unity, the seamless sexless undifferentiated unknowable Eden. We are always tempted to know more, curiosity is our bane, our delight, our sine qua non reach for that which we are forbidden to see.

The knowledge of good and evil created the need to fork our knowledge into the bidden and verboten, right application of the mind and the infernal errancies. Roger Bacon wrote in “The Advancement of Learning,” “God has framed the mind like a glass, capable of the image of the universe. Let no one weakly imagine that men can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, and works, divinity, and philosophy.” Nothing wrong, no limit to how much we may divine the well of God in this world.

But the sacred territory becomes too known; it dries, becomes moot, a bore. All of those medieval scholars with their heads in the starry heavens, taking a census of angels from the head of every pin. (Had those scholars become pinheads?) A gap began to form between study and exegesis of canonical texts and the really interesting stuff off the margins, in the unsanctioned applications of the mind. Or did the mind which became lamped by the official knowledge thus learn about the margins it was fated to egress into? What do we desire to know, anyway, but what we don’t? What is more desired than the thing we can’t know, or must not know?

I imagine Marlowe’s Faust brooding in his study like the figure in Durer’s Melancholy, surrounded with all of his books, athrone his writing-chair, dejected with his life’s work, none of it enervating any more, a summa of exhaustion. This is the scholar at the end of the Middle Ages, no longer content with sanctioned work, aware of a flood of new texts coming in from the unsanctioned quarters -- myriad translations of Classical texts, new treatises on the nature of Nature, pre-scientific alchemical texts.

These texts are adders in his mind, alluring as Eve, promising all of the delights which sacred study denies -- earthly pleasures, carnal delights, empowerment, mastery.

Thus Marlowe’s Faust makes the break with his past, daring to proclaim what was on the minds of so many:

Philosophy is odious and obscure,
Both law and physic are for petty wits.
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile;
‘Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me! (I.105-9)

He sends for two alchemist/magicians, Cornelius and Valdes, for instruction in his new course of study. Good and Evil Angels poof into clarity on either side of his ears, the one admonishing him to stick to the Lord’s scriptures -- the surest passage into the better afterlife -- the other whispering of pagan clout in the here and now, hell be damned. But Faust’s mind is already made up: he wants to know all, convinced such knowledge would make him all powerful:

How I am glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I’ll have them read me strange philosophy
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings ... (1.78-87)

Yes: This is knowledge of a very different order, not of God’s world through the immaterial transcendent nouminous Word, but knowledge of this world, employing those blacker words which lift every hammer of fructive fire. Science would develop exactly here, from the arcane incantations of the alchemist, rooting down from that first blasphemy down into the profane world of certifiable data, the turbine of enquiry which powers our day ever faster. But perhaps in a stranger, stronger, more essential way, the infernal arts of the alchemist/magus opened up our minds into the real of unfettered imagination, the dream of surfeit with its ten thousand breasts and crowns.

The magus Cornelius promises Faust a good return on his immortal investment. The pitch is not to common sense or reason but to a wilder wetter place in our mind, the masterless imagination:

The miracles that magic will perform
Will make thee vow to study nothing else.
He that is grounded in astrology,
Enriched with tongues, well seen in minerals,
Hath all the principles magic doth require.
Then doubt not, Faustus, but to be renowned
And more frequented for this mystery
Than heretofore the Delphian oracle.
The spirits tell me they can dry the sea
And fetch the treasure of all foreign wrecks --
Ay, all the wealth that our forefathers hid
Within the massy entrails of the earth. (1.136-147)

Yes, all of it revealed and delved, every secret hidden nook of Mother Nature’s cranny cracked open like a book and read to every desire’s surfeit: Isn’t that what we always wanted to know? To unlock all of those doors which our fathers long have barred, to swim freely out of the dismal study of all They said were priceless for the soul: To rebel against high heaven to glut in the voluptuous flame: Which would you choose, fellow scholar, given ample chance?

There are risks. The safer course is always the proscribed one, and there is still enough of a cultural center for that. While third world economies like India and China are transforming themselves into technological and manufacturing powerhouses, this silly country is dead in the water, deafened by the cultural discourse on sacred and profane knowledge. Witness the trial in Pennsylvania over the teaching of elegant design alongside evolution in the schools and the Supreme Court case being argued today over assisted suicide in Oregon. Knowledge must have a divine purpose and brain to it, else we go the way of Faust to our own specie of damnation. Where does a young person find encouragement to develop the technical skills essential to vie in a 21st century information economy when those very skills are suspect, liable, cursed?

The solution from that besieged and, in my opinion, falling culture is to emasculate and scar the offending mind; a beheading of the imagination, so to speak. The notion goes back to Jesus of Mark 9:43-44: “And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched: Where the worm dieth and the fire is not quenched.”

Its ironic that our fiercest competitor on the emerging world market is a country that has fiercer centrality than we do: China does more to harness the mind and morals of its population than America. Yet they don’t quibble with progress, and are hellbent on getting all of the skills & tricks needed to master the world. There is an enthusiasm among the Chinese people about their nation and its prospects; they’re dreamers and doers while we seem to be whiners and losers. Their imaginations seem to me to be fired up where ours are flattened. How much of Faust’s desire that country can collectively employ without straying into its darker applications remains to be seen. Internet porn is tightly controlled there, but what happens when they go wi-fi?

Perhaps that collective imagination -- and desire -- is amped all the way because so little of the actual possession yet exists. We’re had the surfeit of success for a generation or two by now, and culturally we’re bored with it. Offered boundless benefits by our technology, we’ve focussed instead on the toys, the Blackberries and iPods and cellphones. We are Durer’s bored-as-shit summa, pampered, supreme, sequestered deep in suburban Eden, with not a thing in the word to do but watch reality TV and drone on the phone.

Ergo, surfeit is never the point; it’s never what we already have, already know, but rather what we dream, what there is still to find out. Thus on one hand we continue to develop the tools, and on the other we keep flexing and finning the imagination. Such a posture keeps us close to the copyists of the sixth century AD, glorying in the works of God, penning dragons beyond the margins.

Ergo (2), one should always pursue their bliss; this study is for rogering and plunging, for bursting bodices and downy billows, for bawdy bricoglage, biblical buggaries. The whole She-bang. Why else crack a book, if it doesn’t woo our quest?



This from James Hillman’s Anima: Anatomy of a Personified Notion:

If anima is defined as the eros factor, then we are always bound to assume that sexual excitation is a soul-message and cannot be denied — who would deny the call of his soul? And we are bound to assume that active human relationships and uplifting enthusiasms are anima-inspired, whereas in truth they are less promoted by the reflective moisture of the soul than by eros captivating the soul. For here we must concede that, though anima is not eros, her first inclination is toward love. So she seduces in order to be turned on, set afire, illumined. So she makes advances in order to move pure reflection into connecting. So she commands an incredible range of voluptuous imagery in order to draw eros down upon her for what Plato calls “generation,” or soul-making. Nevertheless, though love be essential to soul, theology insists and psychotherapy affirms, and though soul be that by which we receive love, soul is not love.

***

If Not Here, Where?

Dec. 2002

If not here, where?
I gasped, my hand
half down her jeans,
almost there, almost free-
But we were sitting
round folding tables
in my ninth grade
English class (I’m not
dreaming here folks
this is history)
discussing Homer’s
Odyssey.
What time or room
had we to proceeed?
She hissed Not Here,
to which I could only
gulp the lava and
fire back Where?
Well, she never said,
& so in a day or two
my lust ravened
on toward other
nippled fonts.
That’s Poetry. Today
this entreaty, this wave,
tomorrow some other
vexing scree. But today,
this mount: why pair
verse with that 14
year old nurse of
my budding lust?
Sweating at some table
while voice above droned
round Circe’s isle and
below my hand inched
closer to a mons of fire.
The sense of desire
mounting possibility
against the certainty
of refusal, heights
grown slippery,
perilous, penultimate,
as if only the gasp
of yes could ever do,
and it worth the
entire predictable
tumble hair nose and
eyeballs to the
gorges of this page,
end of the poem,
another failed ingress.
But who cares! For
three seconds I was so
close, the air tense
and bright, my fingers
under the softest
fabric and brushing
fine hairs steaming
with white fire.
O evanescence,
my trellis rising
and falling from
a sound, the scent
of the sea.
Tomorrow I’ll be back.



BOOT BOAT
BOOK BONE

2003

Here i am again
striding in the surf
& riding out to you
writing it all down
on an ossuary of foam.

You walked away:
“not here” is inscribed
on a pouty angel’s ass,
taboo and tide

my voyaging silk
to absent tart islands
and their galling,
gorgeous milk.

Breviary, bestiary,
book in ocean thrown:
each wave I well here
is a vowel of the
sea’s blue bone,

curving plash to hiss:
the motions of a
lover’s tongue,
last line first kiss.


HARNESS

Nov. 2004

When did these elements
stop hounding me, and,
like some Actaeon in reverse,
befriend and prow my course?
Perhaps a heart must
is schooled to proper ends
by their darker woods.
Surely I entered them
aching for release
and welcome, not
surrender: The fleeing
quarry so curved
and dapple, focusing
my eyes on a hot
liquidity that made my
ever burning arrow
leap like hounds
from their quiver.
Gale and storm-surge
surely master every
pale pink shore, but
such uses always
drown their makers,
I mean those who
presume to write
their own names
on wind and wild water.
For no matter how
big the pulse of sky
or sea arousing in
my loins, no night
was ever long enough
to reach what I thought
I saw ahead, what I
needed far more than
any beach or bed
could bless. And
the endless fleet
of stricken boats
I captained on nights
long ago, each collapsing
on the rocks offshore,
my cries flying up to God
as I careened on down
a blueblackening, godless ire.
Wind and wave, I’ve learned,
have no masters, none
at least we can mortally
presume. I am just two to
three sheets of paper folded
so to fly or float whither
their own high/deep augments
will. Each morning I
harness this white writing
chair to wet so windy hooves
with every intent of finding
you upon the next pale shore,
though I’m equally as sure
I’ll not find you there
or anywhere these coursers
deem to ferry me.
Wind and wave are
harnessed not to the
man but his making,
and race not toward
his heart but its breaking.
There she is altared
and survives whatever
names I tide on in
on ever-falling sand.
See: the hourglass
is empty and another
poem’s been loosed
with news of my old welcome
which you’ll find on that
shore I’ll never reach.
Unfold and read it
like a letter from the heart
you left behind that
night so many years ago.
These words are carried
to you on that wind and
wave in which you’ll always find
the sweet and bitter traces
of my ever grateful smile.

Postcard from the Abyss

MY PERSONAL FAUST

October 4, 2005


Nothing so sweet as magic is to him,
which he prefers before his chiefest bliss.
And this the man in his study sits.
-- Chorus in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

He’s the shadow ache beneath
each page I turn, the greed inside
each line I write, that hand
both his and mine reaching
up Sophia’s skirt to finger every
whorled nebulae the starry heavens hide
beyond its lucent angel pride.
He does not content to name
my catelogue of knowns;
his mind is that rolodex of rhetorics
I toss to the brutallest wave
in the name of such impure humility
that the bottoms of all seas are damned,
their abyssal vaults all vandalized
in the name of our leagueless desire.
One day I’ll pay dearly for harboring
his eyes, for peering with his beyond;
I’ll find myself beyond all shores
without a paddle boat or sea
and nothing but the pure white scree
of empty pages never to be writ by me,
remitting every wave I loomed
with a last, savage, far-too-satisfying,
final, judgmental boom. Sayanara.
Fools who must laugh on earth
will weep in hell -- Mephisto’s
wit, my furious blood epitaph
scrawled onto the last known wall,
his way of saying Kilroy was here,
not that it mattered anywhere at all.
But for now, it’s party time,
astride the broomstick which
scoots the Christian angels out,
& mocks the pontiff till his
distaff’s stout, & roils a rabble
of black-toasted imps on
winging books which flap and fan
the furnace flame in which alembic
shall be cooked and served for all:
the little man in his studious boat
cursing high heaven’s rout
in one blue pure orgasmic gout.

***


ANGELUS

Jack Gilbert

Obsidian. Sturgeon. Infatuated angels.
Which only we can translate into flesh.
The language to which we alone are native.
Our own bait. We are spirits housed in meat,
instantly opaque to the Lord. As Jesus.
We go into the deadfall of the body,
our hearts in their marvelous cases,
and discover new belfries everywhere.

I continued toward the Minotaur to keep
the thread taut. And suddenly, now, immense flowers are coloring all my stalked body.
Making wine of me. As bells get music of metal
un the rain. The prey I am willingly prospers.
The exile that comes on comes too late.
I go to it as Adam, singing across paradise.

***

from “Dry Salvages,”
Four Quartets
by T.S. Eliot:

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our loses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
the distant note in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs The bell.


***



POSTCARD FROM THE ABYSS


“What’s a drunken man
like, fool?”

“Like a drowned man,
a fool, and a madman.
One draught above heat
makes him a fool, the
second mads him, and
the third drowns him.”

--Olivia and Feste,
Twelfth Night

Some lakes within
are pure abyss, wells
I once thought to
drink to dregs
only to get hauled
down by some
grim hand to where
real horrors nurse.
In my worst boozing
I always loosed abyssal
seasons which drowned
all other purpose
but to drown drunk.
When I was 27
my girlfriend threw
me out of our apartment,
saying her heart had
been leeched dry by all
my failures to fight
the way she loved.
It was a Friday night,
and Halloween: surely
I rode out on a dead tide
of severed tendons,
sworded heart and
cracked balls, all
pickled in a brine
of raw pain. I stayed
that first night
at the Bran Motor Court,
my suitcase packed
with the cotton ephedra
of my former selves
(musician, lover, man).
Got roaring drunk that
night & with an ex-bandmate
remembering well
and loud all we had
so bitterly lost.
With no love to stay
my hand, I drank freely
from the well, its water
that night unusually dark
and cold, like freezing
schnapps: tiny sickles
sweeping away all
that mattered and
so hurt. Around us ghouls
and French maids chased
and fled, their laughter
high and steely, their
couplings like stiletto
silhouettes of an
impaled heart.
The next morning
I woke more terrified
and alone than ever,
and there was
nothing to do
but drink beer and
watch college football
in that darkened room
til dark. That was the
ochre of free-fall, all
duties pushed away,
the hours rolling toward
nothing in a soulless tide.
There’s an old
Barbara Streisand
song I hear when
I think of those days:
“Free again,” she’d sing,
“lucky lucky me, free
again.” My father spun
that song round us
like a crown as he drank
Scotch in his 48th story
apartment in downtown
Chicago. “Time to raise the
roof again, shout out
loud and long again, time
to have a party, a party --”
The irony in her voice was
so thick any fool would
grimace, but for me the
song was both totemic
and blue, tanked
on boozed-up, historic
glee. I moved on to the
Flamingo Court
later that day, my dregs
in tow, pooling down
where it was cheaper by
the week and apt
for travellers with
nowhere to go.
My room was like
the inside of a dead
man’s eye, its gloom
furnished by a
million bad vacations:
a scarred dresser
missing half its handles,
greasy dark green
carpet, smoke-smelling
curtains, a half-dozen
roaches bigger than my
thumb spawled beneath
my lumpy single bed.
I set my suitcase on
the floor, pulled out
my electric guitar
from its pretty case
and sat on the bed
noodling old songs.
The notes were
thin and high, miming
that big night music and
all the stages I’d never
have the balls to mine.
But later come happy
hour I sure looked
the part in parachute
pants, layered shirts
and red leather shoes,
clothes my ex
had try to fit me to.
I dressed for my
own desire; surely
she primped my
hair up in the mirror.
That night I drank
at Bailey’s long and late,
befriending Kim, a big-
breasted, -hearted
waitress. She followed me
back to my room at
night’s end, maternally
sweet, holding my head
between her fine full
breasts while I nursed
and came and cried
for the woman
I’d lost. She gave me
her number the next
morning, said, call,
we can talk: But I
was blind those nights
to what she offered,
my sights lowered
toward the darkest
cleavage of them all.
And so the next night I
was back to the well
again to the dankest
a.m.’s, searching in
sparser bar-crowds
for some the next ear
to croon my songs
into. Seven of those
nights later I followed
some girl into Bailey’s
back disco, passing
Kim in my wake.
“Whore puppy,” she
hissed, but I just smiled
and walked on in
to that devil’s maw.
And so I free-fell
in that obliviate hell,
fall hardening into winter
and cold nights of
abuse ruling all. Today
I think what made that
time an abyss was not
that I fell so far,
but rather that I chose
to fall over all the other
ways my life could
still go -- join a band,
get a new girlfriend,
change jobs -- I couldn’t
let go of that boy who
drowned chasing a
lost woman down
a boozy, dark well.
Surely a con distills
into compulsion;
Eurydice might
be found again down
there-- perfect as the
night she first told me
she loved me, curled
close on that bed we’d
call our own--but
she’d hardly ever
welcome me back.
I said I was getting on,
but really I was just
going down that
abyss which yawns
when we can’t let go
of life’s infernal No.
I look back on those
hoary drunken
months like
a sailor recalling his
days hauling through
Cape Hope, where
the sea churned both
night and day to
devour its own wake.
It was a bad, bad season
which I ended up
repeating many times,
turning away from
life’s eluvial hurts
to hanker back to
that dark water’s edge,
rest my arms on the bar,
singing, bartender,
pour me some of
that fiery black
mama, I’m in need of
nipples to nurse this
mad, bad thirst.
I’d draw hard on that
first drink and stare at
the face in the mirror
who stared back
handsome and
lost -- the image
still wavers in
memory’s chilled glass:
now I see behind him
that other man, the
lord of abyss,
his fangs long, almost
eternal, curving down
below those long
nights’ undertow.




LOG

2005

There can be no doubt that the Navagatio
is presented as a search for the Terra
Repromisionis Sanctorum, but when
Brendan and his monks have reached this
Island of the Saints at long last, having
been at sea for seven years, the angel
who greets Brendan says: There before
you lies the land which you have sought
for a long time. You could not find it
immediately because God wanted to show
you his varied secrets in the great ocean
(diversa sua secreta in oceano magno).

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

“Every time I open my mouth a
bone falls out,” confessed some guy
in AA about his moral inventory.
The rest of us sighed and nodded
our heads, feeling most at home
among the fallen singers. O to be
so full, my blue log, spilling azimuths
and sprung tides and gales the
breadth of eras! My book is now
ten thousand matins long (or deep)
and still I’ve barely wet my
tongue in Your salty so old
savor -- strange fruit from
deeper orchards & the nature
of blue breastings, that nectar
which nipples sweetness
from pure terror in a wrench
of angel-devil ire. In this log of
logs the full blue bestiary
will be named, giant squid
and spermacetti, pubic
mastodons and galloping sea-
horses up from the abyss
of old nights and wanton cups,
fresh fervor on strange lips,
the nether kiss puckered where
no one has yet to mine or ferry,
much less sing. Each day
these nets haul up a wriggling
catch not seen on decks before:
always when I open my mouth
some raw new fin falls out --
fare enough to slake the waves
my log may number but cannot rout.

Faust Deluxe (On techno-porno potencies)

Euen as a boate, tost by contrary winde,
So with this loue, and that, wauers my minde.
Venus, why doublest thou my endlesse smart?

--Ovid Amores II, 10
transl. Christopher Marlowe

***

Spirit of the age, this outrage: doors flung wide and pouring creamy cold blue, seas of knowledge and iniquity, their every illimitable possibility. Is there any parallel to the doublings of knowledge in short and shorter cycles, the explosion of pornography and a bling-bling modernity which is pure puerile materialism, a love of things with which there can be no relation, having no depth beneath their starry lustre?

Thus old savageries consume the center but from the other direction, not as primitives struggling into consciousness but modernities wiggling out of its $100 jeans. Inviting the dark in back through a once-forbidden door.

I keep thinking techonology not only enabled the dissemination of pornography, but there’s something more directly linked between the two, a shared, guiding spirit who may be the sea-witch came to St. Columba in the night and told him how to get his abbey built. Manipulation of nature through opus contra naturuum is a crime; the gift of fire is a theft punishable by the fires of godly damnation. So is peeking under the dress of the mother when you’re not a child anymore (ask Pentheus or Actaeon). Transgression rules our progress, thus our noctal regress. We would harness the sea-witch’s tides the same way we would halter her in leather and a black thong thinner than the tendril of a jellyfish.

Back during the French Revolution, pornographic texts helped foment and spread insurrection. Roger Shattuck here in Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography:

“The works of Nerciat, Mirabeau, and Restif de la Bretoone and many anonymous titles such as Therese Philosophe (1748) combine philosophical exposition and sex stories to eliven readers of the new libertinism of mind and body. Books devoted to erotic behavior becamse a graphic demonstration of revolutionary ideas, and also earned good money. This outburst of pornography served as a vehicle for attacks on religion, the monarchy, and the aristocracy and provided a form of sex education along with a bit of entertainment.”

What evolved from that pornography is interesting here: “After the Revolution, pornography was in part replaced by other institutions and entertainments, such as novels and the theatre.” First the naughty words, then the haughtier ones.

Of course, all of that was ejaculate of the Enlightenment, the Grand Awakening, an arousal of intellect into pursuits under the skirts of Mother Nature. The sense of opportunity -- boundless riches exposed between those thighs, nothing hidden or forbidden from view -- surely kept the hammers of industry rising and falling into the evansecent clamor which has steeled this contemporary one. And in tandem with those leaps of knowledge, the sweep of the articulated, civilized eye backward into the sweet impurient blue, as if to douse its burning sense in pure bottomlessness.

But we were not build for such boundless intemperance; that in our nature is a tyranny. The unrooted savagery we have for technology and pornography are the dogs of Jacobin libertinism, devouring us like Actaeon for indulging too sweetly desires which were never truly our own.

This dilemma is Faust’s, the Mad Paracelsan of the Renaissance, inheritor and totem of our twined thirst for technology and pornography. Chasing helter-skelter his desires across the globe, the hero of Doctor Faustus makes a fool of himself while wreaking a heroic havoc. Faustus burns to know what he cannot name. His imagination is torn by contrary desires to reach an end and prevent the end: once given boundless freedom, Faustus continually limits it. Empowered to plunge the depths, hastiness prevents him from truly entering them. For all his passion, narcissistic Faustus loves no one, and self-love surfeits only through self-damnation. Lastly, desire erases the contours of his character, reducing him to a shadowy, demonic power drive.

BLUE GUITAR

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

Summer 1984


Dana turned from
me ineluctably
as a summer day
turns from sun
to storm: There
was no fictive
guitar to space us,
no other band
to woo me from:
I was broke &
in debt from
taking my old
stockroom job
back for a
sizable pay cut:
Nights I noodled
and riffed mainstream
things on my
Gibson Jaguar
while watching
MTV & imagining
myself a stud
guitar hero
like Steve Sax
of Billy Idol
or Dale Bozzio:
While Dana
worked nights
at Thee Doll House,
ferrying Buds
on a tray in
the hooting
fracas of
wobbling boobies
& barely
concealed pussy
as fat dope
peddlers & other
yahoo high
rollers out on
the town peeled
of C notes like
rubbers & cast
them to the
girls: The money
was great but the
smoke ruined her
voice: Surely more
potent & monied
studs plied her
as best they
could night after
night: I never
thought much
about that though,
foolishly sure
of her need
& desire for
me, fierce as
as the day’s heat
that it was
not slipping fast:
She knew it
though and felt
guilty as hell
— I’ll grant her
that — One
night she woke out
of a nightmare
where I tried
to touch her &
in a rage she
drove her car
repeatedly over
my hands: Guilt
surely fuelled
the birthday she
lavished on me,
spending all of
our PA savings
on a complete
wardrobe for
me — 4 pairs
of pants, 20 shirts,
red leather
sneakers, black
boots, sox,
shorts, vests, you
name it: The
coolest threads:
Leopard prints,
black on
purple, black
on red, puffy
white, military
green: Astounding
really and the gift
was not yet
complete: Beneath
our bed was a sleek
black case &
inside a new
guitar, a
Hamer Phantom,
midnight blue,
the top axe
of ‘84, Eddie
Van’s du jour
guitar before
he bedded down
with Kramer: It
had double
humbuckers,
a keylock
tuner, whammy
bar, meaty neck,
substantial and
full where the
Jaguar was just
skinny, rich on
the the treble
aeries: A
workhorse fit
for an A list
player: Dana
dolled me up
that night in
her new threads,
spiking up my
hair & lining
my eyes with
black mascara
& then herself
dressed for an
hour in black
leather & jazzy
t & boots &
hair in huge
fusillades of
red curls &
makeup to
die for: We
drove up to
Fern Park
Station & hung
out a while,
the perfect
rock pair: But
what to do
after showing
up? Dana didn’t
drink & I
couldn’t chase
down shots
& pussy: We
left after just
one set, bored
already: Headed
down the Trail
to an xxx
theater to watch
Linda Lovelace
wolf down 14
inches in
“Deep Throat”
and this other
flick “Temptations”
where a sister
goaded a boy’s
hairy hardon
into her bigtitted
somewhat fat
sister’s slickened
twat & then
“For Richer or
Poorer” where some
stiffed wife took
a strangers dick
up her ass in
the park: We
came home riled
by all the sex
we couldn’t
make ourselves
& tore our
clothes off to
fuck like
monkeys for
one night, Dana
curving & curling
round my
pistoning polack
heart until
we cum & cum
& cum in this
shower of
brilliant clarity
O for that night
& descend for
that night into
clear blue
satiation & sleep
sleep nestled
together: But then
Monday rolls
around & it’s back
to all we hate
& all that pulls
us apart: And
we return to
our distancing
ways: The cooler
Dana grows for
me the more I
desire her, an
inverse relation
bleakly parallel
to the previous
summer: What
I relented for
her she kept
turning away from,
offering me only
her back in sleep
& pushing my
hand away from
any tender
caress: My blue
blue Hamer guitar
was a gift of
her guilt, what
she offered up
when she
sacrificed our
dreams & looked
away: That guitar
was like the
skull of a
hallowed enemy,
lined with gold
& filled with
the best wine
which at my
lips turned to
rotgut:

STRIPPER

2003

She slowly beaches
what we wish revealed,
and in so disclosing
tills the greater toll.

Each article she
removes—white glove,
sequined dress,
lime brassiere—
gets us no closer
to that staunchly
distant isle,
since nakedness
is forbidden here.
What we get
instead is no
harbor but how
an inch is the vast
distance we always
feel to it.

And how we settle
for these sordidly
sashaying lies:
as if thong and
nipple-tape were
grail enough of what
cannot (or won’t)
reveal enough to
keep us coming back
night after night,
set in the undying
hope that this
next lost night
next to a neon stage
with a basket of
popcorn and
seven dollar Buds
will be different—

Surely she’ll show
it all at last,
right here and now,
smiling at us from
behind with a wiggle
& a stare, offering
to our salmon lunge
home enough,
rest at last for
our crusading
crucifix bone.

As if any eyeful
were fraught enough
with what we
die to see.

THE GREEN DOOR

June 23, 2003

If I don’t shut the
door of this well
a herd of water horses
will get out,
drowning this life.
What if every lake
in Central Florida has
at its bottom an open
door? We’d boast a
spoor of low scholars,
their truths long drowned,
their every rage and
page washed clean.
How would we know?
All we see now are
gators and boaters
contending on the
surface. My lust for
knowledge -- charnel
or carnal -- demands
a lid of stone; daily I
remove it for this one
long bracing sip, then
secure it back until
this time tomorrow.
Time has taught me how.
Back in ‘73, when I
was 16, me and Al
took the El downtown
to watch "Behind the
Green Door" -- my first
XXX feature. The
theater was too dark
and smelled of
overripe desire; shadowy
men sat equidistant from
each other, and,
like stones in moonlight,
seemed awash in the
onscreen frenzy
of cocks and cunts
and hurled jism.
What could I do
but also stare, slack
jawed inside
a rigid prayer
to one day pry that
ferally green door?
Later that day
I learned the cost;
when we got home
I felt almost sick
from all that loosened,
inchoate sex.
And when
my mother served
up some meat in a
mushroom sauce and
I nearly hurled.
God keep all this from
rising up, I prayed,
a porcelain prayer I’ve
repeated many times
over the years trying
to keep the spirits down.
Yet now that I had
seen the deed in every
green detail, how could
I not want to harvest
it all? And so my jaunts
in sex became the reversed
face of all the bibles
and books I had read,
staring away high ground
into a bottomless thirst.
Eventually -- after long
abuse -- I learned to
cap the well, to keep
the swirl sufficiently
contained to water
the next day’s use.
I married, bought
a house, aged. These
days it rains, almost
like there’s no tomorrow.
The grass now tickles
my shins; if we don’t
dry soon, I may need to
cut the lawn with a scythe.
Who up there will
set the sky’s stone back
in place? Me, my job’s
to tend this well:
to draw as much
water as one poem will
hold, give thanks for that,
then set the mossy green
stone back in place, and
face the rest of the day
with my roots safely
stored away. Come
hell or high water,
I'll keep this life away
from those narrow
swoons in darkened rooms
beneath this drowning June.


ACTAEON

2004

Remote in my hand,
I gambol glade to
glade in the poured
darkness of my room,
hungry for football,
pussy, real crime,
real teeth, nothing
to add of myself
to those scenes,
my glassy eyeballs
just a mirror
of that need
to bare all, that wish
to be watching
when the towel
falls like a tower
and the paradise
is a pair of
digitally blurred tits,
flashing like the
skin of adder
drying in the sun.
Dazzling as the
participant stands
naked before
Howard Stern
at 11:30 p.m.,
the boys all
joking & making
fast food of
the fare, the poor
bitch so eager
to get on TV she’d
stand bareassed
for 2 million
men like me
tonight, my eyes
devouring the skin
in bloody yawps
and lunges, not
much of me left
except for my
left hand and
the remote, clicking
and clicking,
ravenous still,
perhaps forever.

Realm

5:30 a.m. Sunday. Violet was scampering around at 3 a.m. so I got up & gave her treats to quiet her down (sucker) and came back to bed, enveloping myself in my wife’s warm sleep. Woke again an hour later with Violet back at it and came down get started with the day’s work (sucker), perusing texts, dreaming of milky thighs and tautologically tautochromatic swelling & fair-welling ta-tas. Show me the way, via lactissima.

***

But I err, too astounded with the image, slackjawed like a hormonally enrapt teen. I want to sweeten every world with that cream; I ache to lap my world to dregs of it. As daddy bars the next big door, mommy’s nursing just inside; if I could barge past the ogre standing there, who would want to trespass further than Her embrace?

But that is the task; to leave the personal and spelunk down into the Realm of the Mothers, deeper than any personal fuck or thrall or nippled gall I have had the pluck or fate to suck.

Ah, but far indeed I rappel. Is there no bottom to that bottomless dancer onstage, universally indifferent to the lust of men, her candescence wholly fired by the boundless intemperance of men? Globes of sun and moon, cleavaged for me; Pearly Gates a-dripping with my sperm; Otherworldly Door with the browneye of Hades staring back; every entrance I desire both departure and descent, darker and deeper and wilder than I have wits or nougat in my pits to go.

But some feral sense tells me that I must, ere I die, or dry, which for aging men is worse.

I have to some degree learned to forget the first music of a real woman’s sighs; those passions are, for the most part, now Otherworldly rants, pants down the ankles of a buried boy-man. Behind and under the woman I love, behind and under the woman I dream inside here, behind and down the woman of my dreams, draining like an effluvia of lust down archetypally female plumbing, is the Realm of Ubermothers, far off all the maps, where Charybdis and Lamia churn the the wake to male choad, ululating down from Gaia to Urania to the universal cunt sealed even from God, before his biggangbang Event. They are all in the sexual invocation, which I better understood at age six than I do now, before I called it sex and lost the better, darker, deeper half. (What they call, in AA, the wet part of the ocean.) That fructive naiad rabble cries for these words, that worlds may be furrowed with starry fires.

***

Can I be entrusted to ferry such fire, so foolish and mortal and bound to feel this way which so tweaks and fondles what it will must not fuck? I can no more harbor eros between these margins as name the masterless sea: My work is ever tentative, apt to be blown over at night by winds I fear yet welcome as long I have that outrage in my balls which I here translate, though words fail utterly. Thus dreams go in the end of poems, and there’s a lacunae in the pattern which allows the ghost to retreat, and there’s another shore tomorrow in which the choir sings of final shores.

And thus I write on here, adrift on that merciless magical sea, my lines in the water, dowsing for numens deeper than water, fishing for the big one, like Ahab, come hell or water higher than all.

***


FISH TAIL

2003

A fish-tail
churns the tide
of this poem --
vital pulse or
angst, blue-red
mirror, a moon
-cauled fury
without eyes
furiously abed:

Sometimes I
think the motion’s
holy, an ache
for God in world;
that these lines
are plainsong, an
honest chant
as I furrow the tide
with seeds of psalm:

Other times its
all suspect, my
mere thirst
an addict greed for
pussy lounges
of the Lord,
pouring what is
not into way-too
empty glass, purring
for what I’ll never find:

Perhaps both
are true in the
true in the
in the ocean
sense of things,
that salt
demesne where
grace is battened
on red death,
the glory of
my lunge to
God resulting
in so much
carrion rain
and bone ruin.

An ambivalent
enquiry then,
something I’ll
always carve,
never the smarter
for all the ink
I spoor, whatever
I could save
tossed so dreamily
on the next nameless,
fishtailing wave.

***


BRAVURA

2003

The sea of spuming thought
foists up again
The radiant bubble that
she was. And then
A deep up-pouring from
some saltier well
Within me, bursts
its watery syllable.

... Where shall I find
Bravura adequate for
this great hymn?

-- Wallace Stevens,
“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”

The horses know their
hooved gallop from
first kiss to wavelike
smash on far shores.
The well draws deep
the stored cold keep
of her blue gray eyes.
I am old and older
in these lines, never
wiser for the thrill
of her long-sipped sashay
into the sea from
the packed angst
of all the beaches I
have walked. There is
an autumnal dearth
to these Julys
when storms late
afternoon like sky
crones brogue high
summer, tonguing
for that spermlike ardor
pent in evaporation’s
gauzy thigh. I drove
home on a shore near
her wild billows last
night, a high and wide
storm hiding the western
sun in a white halo at
the crest; deep within,
marled shadows
of sea-like grays
pearled into the
most tortured blue.
There was dearth
in the overbaked
arras of suburb and
field, cracked and split
beneath high heels
of heat, passion’s Lent
a long furrow absent
of sense or bearing,
as lovers wake on
the third day far out
to sea, knowing they
must somehow find
stray socks and zip
back up the standard
fascia of our necessarily
separate lives. Cored
of world by its hottest
days, somehow we
manage jobs and gym
and the long drive home
amid the day’s thinning
traffic with this big
storm ahead like a
sibyl of sea-angst,
guiding the way toward
that house in which
all dreams smash
and die and grow into
the life we always
dreamed we’d some day
share. Slow salvos
of thunder from far away
as I got out of my car
into the late day’s heat,
inspecting the pentas
in the front yard for
too much sun, noting how
much the grass has
yet to grow this
week of little rain.
Inside you cook
up ham and corn, all
cats fed, medicines
dispensed, a cooking show
on TV, our day’s stories
unfraught of drama or
spice, just work and
some distant contentment
that nothing at least
went wrong. How far this
tired end of day bouree
of real love from the sleek
shatter of our first kiss
which seems now at
least 3 lifetimes ago --
The wave subsides into
the groan and wrinkle
and deep bliss of
being at last home, small
though it be, and fraught
so with difficulty. This
tide now turns the other
way to wash toward
distant shores, cresting
with a different horse’s
mane, though the sea, the sea,
the sea tides endlessly.


***

BATED

July 2005

This morning the dark is too hot
in its stillness, like a bated breath,
like the long ebb of the pretidal wave
which backdraws miles out toward
the sea, exposing reefs and wrecks
not seen for ages, if ever. Out in the
Gulf Hurricane Dennis is gathering
strength, tracking towards Haiti
in spreading white spiral,
ultimately toward some coast of
Florida by next Monday.
All of the air in the region is
getting sucked that way, leaving
us breathless and headachey,
and all sounds hollow, like
the knocking of bones in a tree.
At 4:15 a.m. the hush is just
too deep for lush, bereft of
rains yesterday and temps soaring
up close to 100. A sort of slugged
sleepwalker’s calm pervades
the garden, eerie and prescient,
its swoon now druggy, stilled
to an underwater calm because
there is no breeze. My hand
is amped by that arch absence
today and thus shrills toward
infernity, a jabberwock
of baleful pulses which
thread and weave the dark,
like neurons in the skull of
a dirt-devil who’s clutching
the hem of my muse’s
cloak of salvia and rose
as she receives this staticky,
ion-starved pour. I submit
the awe of such awfulness,
aswarm in bees which hive
far down the sacral column
of the pen, its ink juciest
when drawn from the lees.
Thus ecstatic lovers are
mooning in my hips as
I write, cursing and praising
God as they tear at the
gooey sweetness of
His hive; the woman
astride with her
eyes screwed tight
hissing Holy Shit as she
shudders and then floods
a drowning delight
with starry gouts of sea
slather, the most heavenly
acre to be ferried from hell.
Satch my morning thus,
a hard horny ache which
cannot quell or slake
the black amperage
jabbering across
and down the page.
A baleen ire, a basalt rage
exposed like fanning teeth
of a bated mouth below
in the Gulf which may
or may not devour us
but sure makes high summer
grip both legs round the
poem, arching spirelike as it
grinds on its hips this
blundering sweet bliss.


***

How can we not complete then with Ahab, repeating here his speech from “The Candles” chapter of Moby Dick, in full water-wild stride, rollers proud in the it was meant to be shouted. (Not by providence, but Victory!)

Ahab stands cursing the heavens flashing over the Pequod, thus initiating the doomed crew into their three-days’ hunt for Moby Dick, the biggest one to always get away. I imagine the heights of this fiery speech mined from the very depths of its quarry -- Oh brave foolish Melville, to mine such abysmal gold, thy defiant exultation lamps the way for me!

***

Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire,
whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship,
till in the sacramental act so burned by thee,
that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee,
thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right
worship is defiance.

To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind;
and e’en for hat thou canst but kill;
and all are killed.

No fearless fool now fronts thee.
I own thy speechless, placeless power;
but to the last gasp of my earthquake life
will dispute its unconditional,
unitegral mastery in me. In the midst
of the peronsified impersonal,
a personality stands here.
Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came;
wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live,
the queenly personality lives in me,
and feels her royals rights.

But war is pain, and hate is woe.
Come in thy lowest form of love,
and I will kneel and kiss thee;
but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power;
and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds,
there’s that in here that still remains indifferent.
Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me,
and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”

(Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames
leap lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest,
closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.)

“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so?
Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links.
Thou canst blind; but I can then grope.
Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes.
Take the homage of these poorer eyes, and shutter-hands.
I would not take it.
The lightning flashes through my skull;
mine eyeballs ache and ache;
my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded,
and rolling on some stunning ground.
Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee.

Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness,
but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!

Oh, thou magnanimous! Now do I glory in my geneology.
But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not.
Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her?
There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater.
Thou knowest not how came ye,
hence callest they self unbegotten;
certainly knowest not thy beginning,
hence callest thyself unbegun.
I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself,
oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing 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!”

***

Amen!