The Fisher King (1)

Wrong in the beginning, wrong in the middle, wrong in the end: god in the beginning, man in the middle, dog in the end: beginning over, dong in her middle, god in the end: Such rondos prescribe our endless cycles through what’s essential, building on and nesting in our heart of hearts, that garden inside the garden where all creation begins and ends.

Carl Kerenyi: “‘Origin’ means two things in mythology. As the content of a story or mythology it is the ‘giving of grounds’ (Begundung): as the content of an act it is the ‘founding’ (Gundung) of a city or the world. In either case, it means man’s return to his own origins and consequently the emergence of something original, so far as accessible to him, in the form of primordial images, mythologems, ceremonies. (“Prolegomena” in Essays on a Science of Mythology)

So the myths locate a circle of origin, and then proceed to build “something original,” which here means something soaked in first sources yet wholly new. Ah, the fructive backward glance.

We need the origin stories, though our need for them changes over time; thus they are impermeable in one sense and utterly fructive in another, literal in the sense that the narrative is fixed (our history) but the reading ever changes.

Our Judeo-Christian myth begins with Genesis, the original ground, creating the world in six days and on the seventh crowning creation with a garden called Eden in which our primal drama, the parentage of every human knowledge and passion and error, is enacted. Our fall taught us of the ways of man and God.

Yet the readings of this story from the margins -- the gnostic account, the babbling of Oran up from the grave and a three-night soaking of the ancient pagan sea of Manannan -- would turn the tale upside down. “When gnostic and orthodox Christians disagreed, each reach back to the Scriptures they revered in common, and each claimed the Scripture’s support, writes Eileen Pagels in Adam, Even, and The Serpent. “But gnostic and orthodox Christians read the same Scriptures in radically different ways; to borrow the words of ... William Blake, “Both read the Bible every day and night; but you read black where I read white!”

She continues:

(Gnostic interpreters of the story of Adam and Eve contended) that (it) was never meant to be taken literally but should be understood as spiritual allegory -- not so much history with a moral as myth with meaning. Those gnostics took each line of the Scriptures as an enigma, a riddle pointing to deep meaning. Read this way, the text became a shimmering surface of symbols, inviting the spiritually adventurous to explore its hidden depths, to draw upon their own inner experience -- what artists call the creative imagination -- to interpret the story. Irenaeus describes various gnostic interpretations of the creation story and then complains the “while they claim such things as these concerning the creation, every one of them generates something new every day, according to his ability; for, among them, no one is considered mature [or “initiated’] who does not develop some enormous fictions.” Consequently, gnostic Christians neither sought nor found any consensus concerning what the story means but regarded Genesis 1-3 rather like a fugal melody upon which they continually improve new variations, all of which, Bishop Irenaeus said, were “full of blasphemy.” (64)

So the fabulator, my gnostic gnomon Oran, adventure of the dreaming mind, questor for sources, delver in origins, profanation in the midst of fundamentals, sings on in his skull-boat, merrily, bawdily, embodied in water, his song unquiet, ever-changing, bridging every shore I’ve reached with one incessant bliss.

***


THE FISHER KING

October 13, 2005

That’s me on a bier of sand,
prone to every crashing wave
to wound and womb a man.
How many years now has
it been since I blundered
on this charmed and brutal
beach? I still feel a piercing
jolt far down recalling
the sight of her emerging
from that summer’s
bossa nova sea like an
epiphany of dooms, her eyes
so dangerously blue,
her breasts startling
a wave’s cerulean wild foam.
She took me by the hand
and laid me down where
surf exhausts on sand
in spread and plunging sighs,
the lance I struck in her
returned by her every kiss.
Throughout she never said a
word though I implored her
name and land, her silence
looming great and greater
amid each booming wave.
I came; I swooned; I slept
beneath the dead: And when
I woke the next bright day
she was gone for good.
But I was jailed forever there,
nailed to that beach through
a crowning wound of bliss.
I thus became the lord of every
beach where love its lovers fold and crash,
my tears the wasteland
salting every kiss.
I rule the part of every wave
which ebbs with an aching hiss,
my domain the wetter half of seas,
the darker taste of lees.
For years I’ve lain and dreamt
of loves both great and small,
combing beds and biers for
one pure and wild and blue enough
derange to cure this wounded thrall.
Though I’m struck and still
my mind enquires without rest
for a love so of the sea as to
cure its rude infinity,
a balm for severed loins
by whatever they forsook me for
that night of nights so long ago.
What were the words that
woman never said, holding
a finger to her lips as she
faded from my shore
into a drowning wave?
Those words I seek
are hidden deep inside
this ancient sexual gouge,
tossed like a chalice down
a well which none may sip
but that immortal child we
spawned that night who
one day will wash ashore
here and in my brow,
astride that wave or the next.
I lie; I wait; I comb the swells
amid an endless summer breeze.
I chaff the blue for one jot of fire
to delve me from her knees,
healed at last of what hath
made me dream of wholes.

The Fisher King (2)

MOTHER OF PEARLS

for Mary on Mother’s Day, 2002

Brilliant sands reach back
toward a distant shimmer
where I recall white afternoons
and your voice above the sea’s.
Weaned in that bright music,
I have always loved words
which sing of that relation,
each line a surf between
you and I, cresting and curving
into us in foaming chords of joy.
Each poem I write is a pearl
sown from that cerulean wash,
a beach of adulation.
No wonder I ate all that sand.
I’m a voice now of that
restless, crashing land,
reaping your white songs
grain by patient grain,
the rest of my life long.


BLUE BONE BRIDGE

The strong, inwardly quivering bridge
of the mediator has meaning
only where the abyss between God
and us is admitted—:but this very
abyss is full of the darkness of God,
and where someone experiences it,
let him climb down and howl away
inside it (that is more necessary
than crossing it.)
— Rilke, letter to Ilse Jahr, 2/22/23
transl. Stephen Mitchell

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


COLLOQUY
WITH BICKY BOUSE

When I was 14 I’d ride my
Schwinn Stingray out from
our development & down
a long country road to
the next subdivision, this
one even balder than ours
not a single tree about
to shade suburban
lives from the over-brilliant
Florida sun. I’d call on
my friend Becky who
was 17 & in love with
a boy back in Texas
& wise in the ways of
smoking dope and
being in love so much
as to fuck with utmost
zeal -- things I knew
nothing about
but was eager unto
death to learn, as if that
knowledge would at last
molt me from the
badlands of my wormy
insufficient self.
Usually there were
a half-dozen kids getting
high in the living room
during those empty
afternoon hours before
her mother got back
from work. The Moody
Blues or Yes
always seemed to
alternate with Alice
Cooper and Led
Zepplin on the record
player, the A and B
sides of our early
‘70’s counterculture,
a soup of stoner bliss
with more raffish
chunks of meat
thrown in, perplexing the
entire broth. Her
younger brother (a year
older than I) would
be in that circle
of defiant children’s
faces, passing the
next joint & bragging
about how much
pussy he was getting,
fucking his girlfriend
twice a day & even
going to Mazola parties
where a dozen
boys & girls got naked
& sloshed pudendas
in a common ooze.
Even then I knew
it was all talk
but whenever
after school
I’d see his girlfriend
climb behind him
on his motorcycle
in a miniskirt and
combat boots &
spreading for him
from behind, I’d
watch them zoom
off in seething envy
and rage at my lot
of bad luck, strict
faith, and that brilliant
wall of fear that
always stayed my
hand from the zippers
of the neighborhood
girls just when it was
time to furrow on.
How long oh Lord!
I’d pray, teeth bared
at mirror and heaven.
While the party
wallowed deeper
in its daily trough
of high, Becky would
lead me out of the
house and down
to a stream of sorts
out back, a drainage
ditch really, where we’d
sit and laze and
watch the water
tinkle merry in its
foil, the Florida sun
of those spring
afternoons passing
slow and breezy and
fair and bright.
Flooding us (me,
at least) with that
high light that was
its own pure invitation
to a way of love
I could not then quite
fathom, nor ever
since fully name
(though once again,
I try). We’d pass
a roach back and
forth on tweezers,
wheezing full the
last of dope, while
Becky -- blonde,
a faint mottle of
acne redding her
face, with eyes
as blue as that
Florida sky --
instructed me in
all that she
had learned about
getting high and
fucking with a ripened
heart. She’s tell
me that you never
bogart a joint but
share and share
it full until its
fully gone. How
you hold that sweet
leaf’s smoke
in your lungs
as if you were
travelling underwater;
and that the longer
that you held
the smoke the
further you would go.
I did as she
said, lips working
the pulsing roach,
inhaling hard
and long. Dazed,
our senses runneling
out in a dozen wavelike
paths, we’d fantasize
about a Dopers Paradise
on some island
across the sea
you boated to
while smoking joints,
sails filled with
each harsh exhalation.
The island was verdant
with poppies and
peyote, ‘shrooms
and cannabis
plants so high that
you felled them
with an axe and
one plant was sufficient
to stone the tribe
for a year. She told
me about all the
drugs -- dropping
acid (carefully, with
friends), the bitter
taste of mushrooms
& the carnival palette
which followed, the
vroom in hashish
and the harrowing
wildness of PCP --
She’d done ‘em all
and I was greedy
to hear of it all,
virgin as I was to
this doper’s swoony
veld far outside
the rigor of my
days, my God, my
past. I smoked my
first joint with her,
I think -- where and
when, I can’t remember,
nor the conditions
of how we would
ever meet, of such
different ages and
afternoons -- Maybe
she had lingered
to talk when I was
handing out tracts
at school & invited
me to try her
doper’s heaven as
an alternate to
the cold cirrus
of Jesus’ arms.
In that circle I
had too much to
say, but when alone
with Becky I was
all ears, the eagerest
of students.
I was virgin too to
love, and so I
plied her like
a prosecutor to
tell me all she’d
learned. She rambled
on staring at the
water about the
boy she loved back
in Texas, whom she
had to leave when
her mother got
divorced and fled
this way. How she
met him at a kegger
when she was 15
& how he produced
a joint from a shirt
pocket, lighting up
& inviting her to
the welcome
of that cloud -- her
first time getting high.
How it hurt like hell
when he busted her
cherry (those words
are etched deepest
in my memory)
and all the sweetness
that had followed from
that burst fruit, in
all the subsequent
nights of fucking
that had followed,
whenever and wherever
they could, and
however they desired.
How she was saving
her money -- each
visit she’d update
the count -- for
next fall when she
was 18 and fly as
fast as she wished
back to the sweaty
arms of her man.
She’d lapse then
into silence and
we’d watch the water
for a while (or I’d
watch her watching
that glide, savoring
the flow of her eyes
in reverie as much
as she did water).
Those afternoon
stoned reveries
were of things
too far from us
to ever be fully kissed
-- doper isles,
bowers of love. My
love for her was
of that ilk -- all
of it impossible,
just stolen time
& dreams & this
fully ripened woman
exuding love from
every pore, like a
high, full sailing moon,
though that love
was not for me.
Come 5 o’clock
I’d groan and swear
and say I had to
be getting home,
& leave Becky
to her own
nightly cup of ills.
I’d ride my Stingray
home, trolling slow
along that mile-long
lane where cows
beyond barbed fences
swished their taILS
& shat, the afternoon
sloshing dulled bronze
from all its rims.
Home for me was
chores & homework
& mandated Bible
study & prayers
(intercessions on
my behalf for
Becky’s lips & breasts).
My mother in her
black habit of
sadness & the
floors all pins
& needles veined
with furtive,
impossible desires.
In two months
I’d be gone from
all thing Florida,
flown north to
save souls at
my father’s church
in northside
Chicago. Dope
and sex were
both forestalled a
few years more
while I got a better
hand of my miseries
inside the Bible’s
walls. My high
school yearbook
from ‘72 has a
note from Bicky
Bouse (that I guess
her dopester’s handle) --
“If you can’t be good,
be careful! Remember me!”
Not a note inside
that scrawl of the
thrall I felt for her
which has seeped,
like honey or sea-water,
into all these later
words. Oh well.
I never found that
doper’s isle as I
voyaged down my
years -- my booze was
always sighted on
a much saucier,
sleazy shore -- but
of love I think I
got closer to the
place her eyes
saw looking at that
stream. Surely she
instructed and guided
me into all the
boat’s I’ve sunk.
She taught me
to hold onto the
dream until it
nearly bursts the
lungs: & then
let go of it in
one dazed flow
& savor what
dreams mine.
Thanks to Bicky
Bouse I found
a warm spot
out of my
accustomed walls --
not with her drugs
or as her lover
but down that
wilding stream
between her
eyes and voice.
My next muse
and second mother.

DIADALE

For Homer there were many
diadala, even apart from Daidalos.
Every skillfully performed piece
of workmanship was a diadalon.
This adjective, applied to objects
made with skill, preceded the
other forms of the word.
The masculine and feminine,
daidalos and diadale, are derived
from it.

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

A girl-woman named Diadale
used to wander down to
that ugly rented house in
Spokane where my wings
were forged and we’d smoke
a lot of dope and fuck. She
was dark-haired (low currency
in ‘77), 20-ish to my 20,
a friend of someone’s friend
who come down to party
one night and ended up
with me in bed for a half
dozen or so more nights
before she wandered off.
She wasn’t interested in
the high hosannas of
my art-rock tastes; for
her, getting high was
something physical and
sweet, not orchestral
and dour. “No mind
at its worst!” I’d written
in my journal one next day,
carelessly leaving the book
open on the coffee table
for her to read. She hauled
on a joint the way she
sucked me off -- full lips
working full round, her
pale blushing cheeks
working up a passion
full of weedy smoke
or seed, swallowing
every bit of what was
offered, whether out
of need or greed
or something more
inlaid than I, dumb
fool, had eyes to see.
I think now of how
she’d get up from my
cramped single bed
on cold mornings to
go pee, reaching for
a towel to wrap around
her as she headed
for the loo. -- Tall and
pale & of a beauty
that astonishes me
today, leaving me to
wonder what starry
ass my head was so
stuck in that I just
turned towards the wall.
She was easy, I was
horny, there wasn’t
much else to it back
then, and I was always
the day after my
night of black excesses
desperate to sweep
the wastage under the
bed, away, behind me,
vowing to get on with
the real thing, the real
work, perhaps whatever
next day. When she smiled
her mouth stretched
ear to ear, pure winsome
invitation: and her bare
ass as the towel went
round was pure as curved
honey. Why is it that
youth is so wasted on
the young, as wealth
is lost upon the rich?
I let that royal towel
go round and sweep
her out as I turned
back to my sleep,
hazed from all the pot,
balls emptied, my
heart miserable as
I prayed to some
day fly south enough
to find the grand
beach I so dreamed
when I came in
Diadale’s mouth. And
so over the years
I built this dancing
ground which kissed
and flew from her
on wings she gave to
me. I remember
the hardness of
that overbright
February mornings, just
wishing she would go
so I could get on with
her ripe revolvings
in the music, on the
page. Mistress of my
labyrinth a mile
forever out to sea,
each time I wind these
words through song,
it’s like weaving through
that conch that washed
up and away so many
years ago. I weave my
words in the motions
of that lost allure
and congress, each
matin buttoning to
a kiss. May what I write
today resound in all
I might have found
just beyond that turn
toward the wall
that wrote her off to floor.

The Fisher King (3)

ANTITHESIS

Spring 1978

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

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

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

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


IMAGO DOMINUS

Fall 1978

she stands at the bedroom door,
half in, half out,
shadow cupping breast and belly,
smiling at me across the room,
a fine mist in her eyes, night behind,
and water coursing over her feet,
crystal blue and deep and silent



THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO


1988


I've been fucking the Madonna
in a frenzy of beds and sweat,
mounted to a crucifix of immortal desire,
unharbored, unholy, messiah and nail --


1.
I met her when I was thirteen.
Back then her name was Sue.
We swam in the pool
in my back yard.
Her body flashed wet
and dazzling in a neon
bikini as she giggled out
of my reach. How my cock
leapt after her, month after
masturbating month, hurling
a joyous fury of sperm into the water.


2.
It is years later and very late at night.
A woman holds my cock in her hand,
pistoning its floral head in her mouth.
I fuck her later on my mother's bed,
her heavy breasts heaving as I thrust.
Salmon leap over us, trailing gin-tasting
waters. There is a half-empty bottle
on a nightstand; inside, a full moon rises.

I hunt on the moon.
Behind me vultures peck at bloody,
glistening eggs. They croak and caw,
sounding like high school buddies trying to
scrabble out of their lockers.
I reach for a magnificent staff in the dust.
Neon signs blink in craters.
I am crying, for I have been
re-united with my foreskin.

Winds pick up and maul the father desert.
Tumbleweeds bound past trailing
shreds of red satin and panty hose.
I approach a bleached shack.
The door is open but women guard the entrance.
I can't remember the words to say and the women
curse me, pitching dead rats at me.
I flee.


3.
The moon is the screen
of a nine inch b&w TV
several feet from this bed.
It is 3 a.m.; a 70's comedy
babbles canned laughter.
I lay on hair, long, long hair
that flows like water
from my head, my face, my
chest, my crotch, my legs.

It has tangled some struggling thing
that makes muffled feminine protests:
what if the kids hear, I'm on my period,
I don't have any protection,
don't you think we should wait
to get to know each other better?

The woman's ass protrudes from all
this hair, framed in scant black panties.
Darling fig leaf, what a beacon her shame!
I run my fingers under the cool material,
over pliant, soft skin, dipping my finger
into swimming lava. The bed hardens,
plunging me into the red cavern.
Here the air is hot and smells of the distant sea.

Tears fill me: home!
I watch the woman's face as I shudder then spasm.
Her smile melts and becomes a snake that
tightens round my throat, becomes an
umbilical cord knotting me in the ground.

A stone man crashes out of the forest
swinging an axe and severing the snake's head.
The head rolls along down a hill and into a boat.
I chase after it but the boat slips free
and floats out into Chinese waters.
Tall cliffs hump above dense mist.
I swim after the boat, calling out my own name.


4.
More years pass. Spring arrives.
I walk with a woman I call my love.
She holds my hand and smiles
although it's a cold day, dark and damp.
We walk out on a bridge
that spans a pounding river.
Its roar encloses us as we kiss.
I lean her back:.
Her eyes widen into moons when she falls.
We will meet again, I call . . .
The mist is alcoholic, turning
to hard squall which batters down the bridge.
I wash away in tears.


5.
Summer.
I swim in an Olympic pool.
The water is blue.
I stroke slowly, counting off laps.
Sunlight wrinkles on the pool floor
in a mosaic of delight.

Sweet with exhausting,
I climb out and lay on a deck chair.
My towel is blue. The sky is blue.
Blue water coils through my blood.

A smiling blonde in a black string bikini
straddles my chest. Her eyes are ocean.
She smells of cocoa butter and is very, very tanned.
She rocks on my hips, moaning her name.
Bossa nova fills the air.
I sip dark rum mixed with her vaginal fluids.


There is diving board a hundred feet
above a glass of water.
Everyone from the bar is on the ladder,
joking and pitching cherries at each other.
Couples giggle and hold hands mock-solemn,
then bounce off me and fall
smashing like melons on the concrete below..



6.
I am in a drunk blackout at Daytona Beach.
It is late at night. Motley Crue
blasts from the windows
of passing Firebirds and 'Vettes.
Around my neck I wear a necklace
of withered, bloody nipples.
The crotch of my shorts has been cut out.

Bartenders work in the surf, dipping up shots.
I have no more money so I offer my car,
rolling it into the water. Everyone cheers.
Topless dancers fandango for me,
their fangs brilliant in the moonlight.
I thrash and moan and hump the air.
Bouncers snort like bulls and race toward me.

At some dead a.m. I wake, rolling onto
the concrete in some parking lot.
My face is bloody my hands are bruised.
I am in a graveyard of lost sons
howling from patrol cars sleek as barracuda.


7.
Dawn.
I'm in bed with a woman I take
from time to time, usually after all the bars
have closed and every other woman I can think of
has refused me. My last-ditch fuck.

She lives in an old house.
A corrupt smell rises from the basement.
Candles burn in every window.
The woman is plain, ass and belly flaccid,
her face too homely for the lava I seek.
She falls far to welcome me.

I drink a beer, smoke a joint. She waits.
I push her down onto her couch.
Fantasy women sashay on MTV.
I fuck her snatch; too bored to come,
I try fucking her tits.
There is no warmth, no wet,
but the motion is cruel enough
to keep me hard. Finally I jam
my cock in her mouth and force her
o swallow my come.
There is nothing in the moment,
no delight, no crooning melt.

She runs to the john to retch
and smoke fills the room, thick and black.
I fall asleep, finished at last,
mounted by flames.


DARK SAUCER

1990


Sweetface the stray cat we feed is in heat.
Three tomcats surround her, like mangy lions,
waiting for her to tire. Then they take turns on her.
They've been feasting on sore Sweetface for three days now.
Caterwauling yowls tear into our dinner.

My wife runs outside with stones she's collected, and
the tensed cincture of fur scatters. Pale eyes stare
patiently from under car and house, behind the garage.
When my wife sits back down she glares at me.
I say look, hon, Sweetface isn't neutered, they can't help it.
Our daughter tries to watch the action in the window.

Later I walk to the corner store for milk.
As I open the door a woman exits: black dress,
blonde hair lifting in the draft, pallor, perfume.
Our eyes lock for one departing second. Reaching
for the cooler my hand is pale and calm as bone.

I swing the cold jug of milk as I walk back.
It's a warm night, humming and sweet. On our porch
my daughter dances to music on a small radio.
She's 12, barely innocent in the porchlight.
A Chevy roars past, and the cats are at it again, pelting
the night with howls, lapping their dark saucer of milk.


SOROR


soror drains away the fire
and fills me with a thirst
for another absence
two tides beyond the wind
that blows beneath the sea

soror means heart of sorrow
twin who died at birth
sister in the woman I love
commending my name to silence
the rest of my days

I will love you
and leave you
and love you
and leave you

a perpetual comet
shedding brilliant
ice across the night


DIFFERENT FICTIONS

1995

Divorce raises
a sail once more to
an errant wind
and days that
rush by unmoored,
the sun hard as copper
on the bay,
the shore a blur.

Indian summer
brings fantasies of
new love, binges
on fresh credit,
smiles in the
mirror worldly and keen.

It was like exchanging
bronze for paper,
sapling for seeds,
only actual for
only possible.

Exchanging the adult
cage of age and wear
for the ruse of
adolescent thrills,
the silly lea
and surfer music
of women
ten years younger.

Yet it's really all
the same stuff, you
know, only woven
from different fictions.


Father and feather
are only a matter
of intonation,
curve versus knuckleball
from the same hand
crossing the same old plate.

In the gambol
of divorce, there are
only so many swords:
guilt, abandon,
repatrimony, thrill.

The fiercest blade
of all is the once
that finally appears
long past court
in the eventual release
of self-sundering.

So many long
afternoons are required
to slow then stop
the guillotine's fall,
weary of the same
old crime's long
guilty shadow.

Today I'm mumbling
rosaries to that
pig god who eats
her dead to scent
something wild
in the dirt,
who turns
the dead's shuffle
into sudden truffles.


THE NEXT ANGEL

1994


Yes, surrender was good,
the grace that followed
was a sea wind
and the shore
sparkeled fresh
with all we became.

But you must know
that surrender also writes
a darker angel into the sky.
Today we walk a troubled
strand, naked of wish or will
our torrid meters swelling
harsh against the sea.

Just how do we
steady between curl
and plunge? How to
walk here, when desire's
riptide so dreamily
hauls at our ankles?

When shattered whelks
take us deeper into sand?

Thunder summons the
next angel. Later we may
believe that grace returned
in this spiralling air,
but for now, we are only
walking in rain on
the shore of a kiss,
wrestling the next
angel to a fall.


LONER

1994

Excoriating nail:
my heart a dick in the rain,
salty prong for her unsate.
She will suffer no
poem unswilled in night
& inks me jagged on
that sordid page.
So where are the words
to reach that woman
across the bar
so hotly abloom
in busty blue satin
and red curls aswarm?
It seems right -- water to
water, spike of fire between --
yet there seems no way
to speak her plural
name without the old
boneyard honey.
To sane to rage
into her fragrant swells,
there is no way
to cross from iron scrap
to blue slumber.
Nights like this
bereave in silence home
to a muffin and TV and
my hand around the god,
riding in an empty harbor
on the least of dolphin waves,
writing the words at last.

The Fisher King (4)

JACK GILBERT AGAIN
BY THE SEA

1999

Reading Jack Gilbert
again by the sea,
this time at Longboat Key
on holiday with my second wife.
We lay in the shade of
a blue umbrella, so dazed
with heat we can barely breathe.

The Gulf beach so white,
an sheet ironed by the sun.
Far from that stormy beach
on the Atlantic three years ago
where I tried to get well
in a raging surge.

Yet today as then I read
Jack Gilbert's poems and find
the balm I need, his lines
washing me in waves
of indolent truth.

How I've searched for words
like his to say to water.

He looked down over
the sleepy Aegean
and saw an ocean inside
the making of his life.
So much must have seemed
the same: glitters spread
across the aching blue,
breezes clean and
supple as gauze.

In so few words he found
the exact sense of his
day at the ocean,
concealing how much
time and craft and courage
it takes to write on water.
Erasing all that is not heart
from seascape and day.

Today his poems
remind me that
the sea is only a page
impatient to turn and the
sun a shield
against all the things
we learn or else.

Unscroll the heart
in the gull slowly
crossing the scree.
Breathe the gently
passing day like a prayer
or the memory of grace.
Now grasp the pen lightly
and curve words into surf.



CUPID

2000

Well, you asked for this
or thought you did.
Staring out at the combers
of a moon-fraught night
with the hard salt breeze
so fresh & the wide sea
singing of beds and drowse.
You just stood there
like a door with the
waves runneling sweetly
over your naked feet.
So I shot you clear through,
barbed you balls to brain.
I knew I’d hit my mark
when the ocean leapt
into your eyes.
All of the nouns which
anchored you in one harbor
now scuttling loose on the
seabed and your boat
far far away
with no oar you trust,
no sail you understand
how to unfurl. No way to
stop the night now
streaming through
your protests and denials.
Well, you asked for it,
you belong to me now.
Not that I have the least
interest in what happens
next. I’m off: Tell the wind
if you must how your
poems blow like loosened sails.
Explain your sorrow
and guilt to the
million shattered
whelks you call sand.
Me, I’ve sighted some
other sucker twenty
yards down the shore
standing like you did,
staring at the swells
agape like a boy
who doesn’t know
he’s all trussed up
for a turkey shoot.
See the arrow
I’ve pulled from my quiver?
So long and elegant
and barbed so sharp
he won’t know
what began in him
til he’s finished.
Just like you,
lover boy.


SO FUCK IT

2000

So fuck it he said,
striding down the beach
ignoring the sprawled
bodies of love lost,
the wives dying of betrayal
and the others who
just loved elsewhere.
Fuck it. I followed him
because there wasn’t much to do,
the hours now lame
and decrepit with easy guilt
and irks. Fuck it! It seemed
like such a casual way
to rebel through the walls
of this self-condemning, ululate fate,
and so I followed him back
to the ocean which boomed
its annihilate welcome.
He waded on out
like a stone man in a liquid kiss,
his shoulders all sinew and bone,
the back of his head like a
bulging eye or nutsack:
Paused there a moment
to summon a great blue
dolphin which surfaced
with a whinny of pure joy.
He mounted the bone saddle
of the beast and turned
to stare at me with all the
fury and folly of the sea:
Green blue eyes open
not in invitation but
command, for better or ill:
to walk on through
the broken bodies of love
and the hell on outta here:
And just two words
to keep me from
kicking any bucket,
a pearl set inside a
brute iron socket,
a brine saddle
to ride to hell
and pluck it:
A prayer for
all the graveless
whalers who
didn’t make it
back to Nantucket:
Say it and let’s be gone:



PENELOPE

2000

"Hello?" She said when I dialed
our number, surprising me
because I thought she was
at work and had only meant
to leave a message. Her voice
in the word a blue bell
which rang with all the
resonance of the life I
had left behind, musical
and lively inside a home
we had made and earned:
I had to hang up on her,
not knowing what to say,
sitting in my other woman's
lviing room, hungover,
sexed to a rich weak glow,
a cool rain falling &
boding more cold.
Her voice repeating that
one word throughout my day
like a hammer that finds
its nail or a swan
diving repeatedly on a lake
never to be seen again.



STILL A BEACH

2001

A few knowns remain
to call this yet a beach:
a single jet of moonlight
coursing through your hair,
the reaches of your back
pale as sand at Longboat Key,
my fingers wave enough
to wander steadily there
... intimacies I’ve shattered
with a shuttering,
bole-stricken heart.
Yet after all we’ve said
and less some dark demands
one gentle good-night kiss:
a bivalved, gleaming door
just a few steps down
eternity’s sweet
astonishing and
ungovernable shore.



MARSYAS

2001

Why do you tear me from myself?
Oh, I repent! Oh, a flute
is not worth such a price!
— Marsyas, Ovid Metamorphoses


My god’s a blue Mohican,
a virtuoso of swoon.
He slides round moonlit trees
like strings of a black lyre.

I tried my pipes against him,
playing a song tapped
from dark suburbs.
Played it well too, soulful
and true—so sure I’d win!

But then the god reversed
his lyre and played it
from below. Oh how the
Muses raved! He tore the ivy
crown from their hands
like a blade from its sheath.

Next I was stumbling down
city streets at 2 a.m. with
techno blasting out every door.
Girls in faux lame clattered
through me like beads from
a broken strand.

A god left me hanging from
this wild tree like a trophy,
a red acre at last pure song.



THE SHORES OF ITHACA

May 2002

Thursday afternoon,
l93 degrees in 5 p.m.
traffic as I head up
shimmery 441,
the car windows rolled
down because the
a/c causes the engine
to stall in heat like this.
Some asshole swerves
suddenly into my lane
going 45 and my
homecoming slows
to an angry simmer.
This is part of what
resumes: the day’s
grade made higher
and longer in love’s
surer labors and
consequence. On
the radio they’re
not sure where
to send the Thirteen
Palestinian Gunmen
in the Church of
the Nativity. I
wonder what you’ll
want to eat tonight.

Home at last, you’re
not back from your
trip to St. Augustine.
The house has baked
all day in this, but
Violet doesn’t seem
to mind, sprawled sideways
beside the phone table.
I crank up the A/C,
strip to my shorts,
and sit a while leafing
through Food and Wine
magazine hunting for
one good recipe.

Is this my spot?
I pray to find it
and relax well here,
no matter how much
work there is to do,
no matter how much
we have yet to decide.
For me, who has been
half of a home for too long,
this is home enough—
this sweaty, tired hour.

When you get home
a while later, you
look just as fagged
by the heat and the road—
pissy and tired.
Wearily we resume
the strange ways of
the familiar: talk,
an exchange over
a busted sink drain,
spaghetti with meat
sauce, TV—too tired
to acknowledge the
miracle in doing it
all again, ever.

But as we lay in bed
side by side whispering
our faint good-nights,
we’re back home in
the home we always
should have had
had so much life not happened.
We grew this way, into
the hardest work of all,
the reality of homecoming.
I’m grateful to be
at it again at last.

The Fisher King (5)

ABYSSAL PLAINSONG

2002

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

While we sleep
the night hauls us
through deep billows,
cold and ever-black,
tiding us in surges
we can’t hold onto
or name, just dream.

Lost in the marges
of that boneless toil,
we ferry the dead
in St. Elmo’s Fire,
our pulse lucent
in their basalt veins.

Seals fan the
cold waters of our
oblivions, their
long-lashed eyes
weeping like beloveds
in lost windows
or children carried
off in dark hands.

We wander through
floorless rooms all night
as the centuries
glow from split
whalers and the
spires of lost towns.

No wonder when
the alarm clock
hauls us back
we’re like someone
rescued from a riptide
who must sit awhile
dazed on the shore:

To him our day
is strange, almost painful,
as infinity ebbs
in scowling thunder,
leaving this scrawled
manowar—our
only plunder.


CIRCE

2004

It’s been so many years
since I left you on that first
bed, drowsing while I
crept out. -- Or had
you already abandoned
me before I thought
to leave you there?
Did you flit out
the window like the
dream I could
not keep, leaving
behind the part of love
I thought was booty
but later found
that sack slack
and empty in
the shadows of
the bow as it kissed
the next shore.
Circean wares don’t
ever leave the bedding
of their wiles: My longing
is just the snout she
gave me for scenting her
ahead, wild for her
dusky immortelles,
my blue eyes cursed
in the ocean’s fixed gaze
ever beyond the bounds
toward that whatever
next gambol where
she forever next resides.
Where curves are rounded
most the moist-eyed lover
knows no night can ever be
long enough, no tale
an ocean too wild
to voyage across.
The next shore simply
dresses now in
the same oldschool
debauch. Will I ever
write another poem?
Someone deliver me
from this whale of swoon
who thrones and altars
and rudders this bliss.
Connive for me to
clear the reefs which
shores my soul’s soul kiss.



EROS

2000


Eros, the god of love, emerged
to create the earth. Before, all
was silent, bare, and motionless.
Now all was life, joy, and motion.
-- Early Greek Myth

That passionate music: How it flings
us, joyous, toward her sweet body
and beyond. Til death do we fall.
Why is it that the thought of
the ripened curves of her breasts
and lutelike bottom grips me like
a paradigm? My lust is like
a burning fiddle in a field of split corn.
Desire though is something different.
A heedless integer halving itself in another.
Eros reaching like Orpheus
for the eternally dead bride.
A music which goes under
to rise in one wave
like a breath inside stone.
A man riding a dolphin toward
the next glittery wave.
A trope of Thalassa, inside,
dark, and free. Strangeness forever
ripening at the first tentative
shock of what so gorgeously
and fatally blooms.



SALOME

2004

Man cannot make it; on the contrary,
it is always the a priorielement in
his moods, reactions, impulses,
and whatever else is spontaneous
in psychic life. It is something
that lives in itself, that makes us live.
-- Carl Jung on anima

I build and launch
these boats of ink
on paper, but you bid
me sail the next sea
toward the next isle
where, you whisper,
you await the motions
of my keel and kiss
and clench. Before
I even set this pen
to write you swirl
up from the blue
of my morning-
making brain, arising
and arousing from
a line of text I’ve
read somewhere
that sights a passage
once more here,
sufficient ache and
shore enough to
try here once again
to bed you here
at last. Something that
I read sights you
in between the lines
& then leaps in
after you with me
sailing fast behind.
That something
is a bit of soul
I was born with
which tore out from
you, as son from
womb and moon
from sea; a narrow
acre of ocean bloom
which leaps and
widens to every sound
and seem of you
and begs to hurl
that music back.
Of course I know
you don’t walk
any island I will
ever shore, and yet
no shore will
do that doesn’t fold
and crash a more
actualler you.
You lace and wiggle
just out of sight
to make
a leaping salmon
out of me, my heart’s
fins coursing
full against the
flow beyond every
noun or verb
I’ve ever found,
wild to taste what
I can’t know on lips
that smile widest
in their welcome
when fully vanishing.
I come to guess
at a physics of
the heart where you
are sine and wave at
once, deepest here and
furthest beyond, salmon
dancing high and
down-pouring Salome,
Ultima Thule and my
wife upstairs.
You’re none of them but
all their strange sweet
majesties in one tide.
Such perplex dapplement
ensures me years of
boating thus to you,
a guarantee of wave
and wash in
salt perplexity.
May all these motions
round the breasts
I found in you
and be homeward most
between the vast
so moist and bluest
I to Thou.


NAXOS

2001

Eros is a mighty daimon
but an army of lovers
can be beaten here
with just a word: No.
Desire ends where it
begins, at that
honeyed source just
beyond my lips,
in a name I know
but cannot say,
not yet, its
brilliant beach
and blue surf dropped
from rounded hips
so casually, with
such killing grace.
As soon as I say Yes
or Come she then
departs, as if along
a loosening and
diffuse spray of surf,
receding like a
tide as I approach,
forever just out
of reach, silencing
me down to this.
And when I say
No or Go I hear
the rise and fold
and tumescent crash
welcoming me with
open arms of crazy
foam, pleading all
the words I meant
to say but lost.
so it goes between
the word and its beloved,
forever here and gone,
an icy sweet peramble
which melts the names
back down the well,
though raise them here
somehow I’ll try.
She will not come
unless I refuse her,
she will not stay
unless I let her go.
And so I’ve learned
to assault love from
the rear, marrying
the verses to its
wavelike curve and
crash by loosening
the cincture of my
sense, merging
noun and sound
and then horsing
them upon both
sine and wave
where you and I
are one bedraggled
castaway upon
this rock, this tiny
island in God’s stream
where what we know
we copulate
and what we don’t
we dream.


ONLY THE SONG

2002


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

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

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



THE POEM AS
A BEACH BEFORE DAWN

2004

The ancient image of Our Lady in
the Lady Chapel in the Church of
Notre Dame at Granville in Normandy
was found on the shore of Cap Lihoo.
It was set up in its own chapel, and is
still the focus of a pardon on the last
Sunday in July called “Grand Pardon
des Corporations et de la Mer.”
-- Nigel Pennick,
Celtic Sacred Landscapes

My job as I see it is to vigil the matins
of this waking summer shore and receive
what the sea deigns to return to me:
To sing each day’s arrival with the tide,
building a white chapel in which a
freight grows sacred and is altared,
incensed, believed, hosanna’d. I never
know just what I’ll find here -- a dream
perhaps, or some memory loosed
from the well, or a resonant bit of story.
I let the sea decide. I just walk here
on the moony sound while the surf
crashes silver milk at my feet, nursing
my inner ears and eyes. And even that’s
imagined as I sit in this chair in my
house squat in town, the dark outside
a cat’s attentive drowse. My job is to
make of that a beach I walk, and believe
I’ll find down its sandy lane the very
shape the next song needs. See: there
ahead a clump winnowing a receding
wave: the beached masthead of
a long-split ship, trailing in her hair,
a bit of barnacle kissing her faded lip.
She was carved two centuries ago
from the likeness of Our Lady in
which was washed ashore two centuries
before, a rebirth of the mother of the
Celtic gods, herself found in a tide-pool
three thousand years before, delved
from goddesses whose names drowned
many thousand years further back.
But their tidings all remain, as well
the shore which here washes down
the lengths of journal-paper. My job
is to hear that surf inside and give it
here a beach where devotees like me still
walk in the nuptials of the coming day,
my pen across the page the wet part
of the sea, what she bids shore in me.

Knight Errant

Lord, I do not know
how I err so wide
riding the back
of so narrow a pen:
How, when I attempt
to describe the vaults
you have filled
in my day -- feverish
spring, the drift
a nap on the courses
of a breeze, dreams
of breasty valences
breaking yeasty waves --
You resound in my
yesses with such
echoing egresses,
your refusal of home
in a wave’s recessional
pale foam. Striving for
a precision of alms
I keep confusing the ends
-- are you over or
under the great water,
inside or beyond the
the next room I dream?
Are those fragrant bells
of orange blossom now
tolling through revery
window your envoys,
or are they augurs
of fullness whose kiss
shrieks of dregs down
the bottommost plunge
of abysm? How would
I know, O Lord, without
Your blue graces
sprinkled over me in
the trough between
the lines, east of good
porpoise and west of
divine shoals -- salt
ablutions You sieved
from texts housed under
the North Sea’s
northernmost wash,
revealing the other’s
undermost ravines,
maulings of basalt
which somehow
balance the wings of
every cloud-harping
stooge of empyriea.
Your corrective croaks
from the dirt of every
cathedral I have presumed
to build. Song strung
with human wires still
taut with heart balls
& mouth, it all seems
so half-understood
flapping here on the page,
still wet with salt
infinity, the eyes I see
with draining of
undervaults into the
blindness of day: A
cockeyed organum
for wind, wooer and wave,
harrowing a threshold
that moves every day,
like a barrier island
or itinerant god whose
name tides the sea.
Make fragrant and
wild, O Lord, this
aging man’s music
in Your surf’s choired skulls.

Malingerings of an Outre Season

Indian Summer in Florida: Days wretchedly still and humid, overwarm, migrainous with a cloudish swirl that will neither rain nor dissipate. The sky presses down with surgencies and worries, making all feel sere, sorrowing, sore.

Surely some of this gnarl works in from grander events. The death toll from the earthquake in Pakistan now estimates toward 35,000, another black angelus to add to the gulf coast devastation of Hurricane Katrina, mounting death in Iraq, the tsunami last year in Southeast Asia, four hurricanes here in Florida last year, ice melting at torrid pace in the poles.

Some of it too is merely personal, my wife getting confirmation after an ultrasound on Monday that she has a large cyst on one of her ovaries, her obgyn saying flatly it has to come out and then hurrying off to other patients, leaving her to spiral down into THAT awfulness, having had a hysterectomy five years ago, a scare with a cyst on one her breasts two years ago. All of these troubling growths in the inner garden, none definately cancerous but erring that way, tuberous malignancies of worry and delays in the work. Yesterday (the day after she got the test results) she was sick and sicker with a horrid headache, going back to bed at noon after taking PM sinus pills. Up, sort of, when I got home at 7 p.m., still bad with headache but awake. We watched whatever on tv and then bedded down for the night, talking late about getting a second opinion, not letting this get in the way of her fledgling business, etc. She’s still venting the anger and worry, maybe today or tomorrow she’ll get her game face, accept and get back to work: but who am I to judge, whose internal plumbing and furnace seems to keep on keepin’ on free of malaise, all of it wardened to this skull of mine (migraine after migraine after migraine these days, for weeks now, perhaps efflorence of the dismally late season, or the sum of so much work, all of this wick-littin’ round every productive moment ....)

Factor back into these hellish-regent days that foment, light inside pain, the exfloliations of a beautiful strange terrible blue tree, the Unnamable perplex which clings to that trellis descending brain to shoulders to furnace heart to aching back to fustian testicles to calloused ass to heavycabled legs all the way down to the soul of the soles, my bottommost desire, reaching ever lower like a backassed periscope into the sweet black noctal abyss, sketching first maps, cateloguing the weird specimins, harpuscaping the tophairs of the beast who strides below me, my totem father who fucks my totem mother standing up, their unitive coil the spiralling dream I am, calling me back, hurling me forward, like so much sperm, or spermacetti oil, or spermatakoi logos: hot words for this overlong darkening season, praise for the devil perhaps, or his praise for me. Much engendered this summer, for good and ill: let its bells clamor this while in hard news and aching skulls.




OUTRE

2003

Who am I to
catechise mere dawn?
As if this first light
which eases in
like some hightiding
reach of blue
were the eyes of
Cuchillin himself
as he hacked off
the head of the
Queen of Skye
in revenge for
spearing his true
love through her
breasts. No one
wants to hear
such time-worn
tropes -- Classicism
is SO outre a prof
once scrawled on
a poem I’d written
about some crazy
who trudged up
the hill by my house
like some Sisyphus.
Out of style,
extra-academic
to that postmodernist
hell where all the
poets must now claim
their butt of sack.
Indeed. Yet I have
found the high
perfections of that
place dead
of thirst, like a
fine house too high
above the sea
to hear the sound
of its desire.
Oran’s head rises
from the well he
was buried in,
singing of ice
floes and narwhaled
gods, the roar
of the ages rising
from his toes:
My space age
poetry’s cast
in old stone
and epigrams from
dark Lascogne --
antlered men dancing
herds of meat in
motion. Those
brilliant bones of time
shine in this too-new
dark, holding back
the tide that ebbs
this heart. Outre
in my ogres,
strumming ogham harps
in lonely old fields,
I stand here faithful
to first light, quarrying
cold lucence from
the bottom of this
world which has
forgotten almost
all of its songs I spill
here, bucket after
bucket of balefile,
bone dross and
low blues. My
book’s a severed head
floating between
first light and
last line,
brimming with
the next upwelling,
oh-so-outre news.

The Tropes of Desire

Here is a research from 1993, performed when I thought there might be a future for me in academia; I lost that ambition long ago, but that piece harrows a depth of our Faust, worth sharing at last with a world here.


DOCTOR FAUSTUS
AND THE TROPES OF DESIRE

December 8, 1993


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


Hell-bent passions forge the tragic parabola of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Eros and logos confound into a single galloping impulse so potent that Faustus is willing to broker his soul for a free rein. But the raging scholar discovers nothing sufficient to sate his hungers. Only when an end appears final will Faustus begin to develop a wholly different relation to his desires, and by then it is too late.
There’s fruitful study examining the tropes of desire in the play. These tropes develop many critical inroads: they locate the pulse that gives the play its insuppressible vigor, successfully resist a rigid milieu, suggest some of Marlowe’s deeper intents, and finally offer a self-renewing vision of literature.

Since the roads are plural, this paper will take a winding course to its end. I’ll first examine how desire tropes many ends and many meanings; next, suggest why Doctor Faustus engages passionate study; third, show how Faustus’ desires are paradigms of resitance to official discourse; and finally, explore the new territory that desire leads Faustus, its author, the reader and our criticism into.

Desire’s Meanings

Desire is its own paradox: to satisfy desire is to end it. Desire fixes on an object, projecting fulfillment or closure in its embrace. Faustus desires “joies in full possession” (179) — power, knowledge, lasciviousness — but once “glutted,” these objects of happiness become “externall trash” (62). The object, once consumed, loses an essential otherness that made it attractive in the first place. This otherness relocates in some other object, some other end. Desire eternally leaps toward what it is not.

The energia of desire is achieved in language through tropes. Desire transforms its object into something else, a meaning, a goal, a completion of some internal lack. Desire transforms the inert and insensible into a numinous presence. Rhetorical devices such as metonymy, metaphor, synechdoche, hyperbole or irony “turn” or transmute what is hard and fixed in objects into a sinuous, shimmering otherness.

While accepting that desire is part of our nature, the tropes produced by desire are troublesome. Ends are never satisfactory, and excess of desire proves tragic for both individual and society. Desire gouges the self’s imagined unity, generating affective agonies of loss, emptiness, and need. Passionate acts are criminal because they betray the self and violate the boundaries of the desired object. Desire confuses: by its logic, human beings are booty, objects exalt. Without rein, desire is tyrannous; too rigorously suppressed, desire glows potent, recklessly seeking purchase or vent.

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.

What makes the tragedy so powerful is that the audience (or reader) becomes ensnared in these passions, too. We rise and fall with Faustus, afforded a view of his follies that might have saved him. If passion is that paradox of possession with a view to deliverance, then his passion is our catharsis. That doesn’t spare us from our readerly passions, as Aristotle believed; we do not engage texts to merely to purge our foolish love of them. Rather, the text sanctions my passionate embrace. Reading is a religious act when when a text so exquisitely nails our mania.
If Aristotle is thus in question, so perhaps some critical assumptions. Traditional criticism has sought for meanings in the text, for pathologies with a view to exegical exorcism. Yet if passion has no satisfactory end, so there are no consummate meanings in criticism. Theories are as myriad and changeful as readers. Writing on Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Jonathan Goldberg suggests that desire prevents literature from petrification:

The gloss on the meaning of desire is, ultimately, the desire of the text — ultimately, that is, textual desire. Admittedly, this is to maintain that we cannot go further than the text and its self-reflection. That is not, however, a limiting statement; it really suggests how open this endless text is. (75)

Finally, there is Marlowe to consider. Are his own passions revealed in the text, which arrives to us fragmented from censorship and altered by the hands of others? Is Faustus Marlowe? Is it meaningful that he is, or is not? What are his meanings behind his hero’s passions, and do they satisfy?

Marlowe’s Tattered Text

Despite failings that would send any other work into obscurity, Doctor Faustus oddly remains secure in the canon of Elizabethan tragedy. Artistically it’s sketchy, nowhere as complete as most of Shakespeare’s work. That’s hardly the fault of Marlowe, who wrote the play in his late 20’s and surely would have matured had not his outrageous public manners gotten him murdered. Others would develop his passionate themes: Shakespeare in Macbeth and The Tempest; Milton in Paradise Lost.

Marlowe’s play ran into immediate difficulties. William Empson conjectures it ran for about ten performances in 1589 or 1590 before arousing the ire of the Queen’s censor. A transcript of the play was summoned for review, and as a result about a quarter of the length was hacked out (52). There wasn’t enough of a play left to continue the London production.

Next, the authenticity of the text we now have is highly questionable. Hoping to cash in on the notoriety of the mutilated product, the play was re-assembled for traveling production. The original order of the scenes may have been confused by an actor called on to develop a workable script. The first quarto published in 1604 was written from the memories of actors. This “A” version is generally accepted as more faithful to Marlowe than a 1616 quarto which added back about a quarter of the play’s length with passages heavily darkening the theme of Faustus’ damnation. Empson comments in a note, “(Marlowe) would feel bitterly ashamed, on high moral grounds, if he knew that just after his death his play was being twisted into recommending eternal torture” (41). With all this, it’s impossible to say with certainty what Marlowe’s original intents were. The textual trails leading back to him are hopelessly confused.

But the remnant still trembles with power. Although it would be interesting (and so postmodern) to argue the effect is accidental, the power may actually reside in what’s missing: those gaps and loose ends. A bandage interests; the wound enthralls. What was censored, and why? Spies were everywhere; Marlowe subtly greets them late in the play when Faustus tells his fellow scholars to look on Helen in silence, “for danger is in words” (1696). The emotional impact of the original performances, the physical shading of meaning through gesture and intonation are lost to the reader. The face of the text portrays a Christian tale of pride and fall, but there is greater power in the looming shadows. The absence of those hacked-out sections is yet a presence.

Perhaps because these mysteries surrounding the play may never be resolved, I felt a strong, strange desire to engage and complete the text. Its wounds became my own; those lacunae heat and focus desire. To quote Roland Barthes, “Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?” (Moriarty, 152)


“... more than heavenly power permits”

Tradition declares that art should entertain and instruct, and Elizabethan theater was a fair disciple. While providing idle amusement for a burgeoning middle class, the theater was also a primer in culture. According to Stephen Greenblatt, “...patterns exist in the history of individuals or nations in order to inculcate crucial moral lessons, passing them from generation to generation” (51). Theatrical education was not unique to the stage. Anglican churches were required by the Queen to include a canon of orthodox homilies in their sermons. Unfortunately, the populace proved to be notoriously slow in their lessons, and occasionally more brutal instruction was necessary. Public executions were a theater of “reiterated terror”:

Each branding or hanging or disemboweling was theatrical in conception and performance, a repeatable admonitory drama enacted on a scaffold before a rapt audience. This idea of the “notable spectacle,” the “theater of God’s judgments,” extended quite naturally to the drama itself and, indeed, to all of literature, which thus takes its rightful place as part of a vast, interlocking system of repetitions, embracing homilies and hangings, royal progresses and rote learning. (51)

Whoever commissioned Marlowe to write Doctor Faustus must have imagined such instructive potential in the recently published English translation of the Faust story. The story’s homiletic gloss on the dangers of desire, of overreaching, of curiositas (the desire for knowledge merely for its own sake, not as a proof of God) and of devil-dealing would serve as a powerful public reinforcement of state and religious orthodoxy.

Yet Marlowe, fallen Catholic, taken to public denunciations of the faith, was a bad choice for such a commission. “Marlowe seems to have regarded the notion of drama as admonitory fiction, and the moral order upon which this notion was based with a blend of fascination, contemptuous amusement, and loathing” (Greenblatt, 51). This must have been immediately evident in the original play. Empson conjectures that Marlowe somehow devised a way in the end for Faustus to escape both hell and heaven (177). Wicked and delightful entertainment, perhaps, but dangerous teaching.

Even in the hands of a more timorous author, the Faust story is by nature problematic, troping orthodoxy into criminal license. Against the “homiletic” instruction of society, Faustus enacts a “diabolic” reversal of such constraint. Elizabethan theater constantly tested the line on how much it could get away with. The ambition of Doctor Faustus and its imitators were too high: for their excesses the Puritans finally revoked theatrical license in 1642.

The reversal begins in the opening soliloquy with Faustus’ rejection of traditional learning for the power of “negromancie.” Faustus is “ravished” by what he may not legally or morally possess; nothing he already owns gives him satisfaction. His medical training is worthless, his legal studies are “Mercenarie drudge” (61) that only litigate ends, and his divinity degree cannot reverse the doom of “everlasting death” (73). Faustus hungers for the forbidden immortal fruit:

These Metaphisicks of Magitians,
And Negromantick bookes are heavenly.
Lines, Circles, Signes, Letters, and Characters,
I these are those that Faustus most desires. (76-9)

In a reverse alchemy, the scholar pitches his golden academic reputation into darkness. By taking up the black arts, Faustus appropriates a creative feminine power, a sinister matrix he desires but cannot naturally produce. He makes an illicit purchase on the “massy entrailes” of the earth, steals the fire of creation from the womb, and forges a writ with hellish powers — criminal activities all, against the society of man and the sacred power of woman. Faustus’ demonic self-impregnation causes him to swell “with cunning of a self-conceit” (20). The end of his art is an opus contra naturum.

This potent and forbidden magic reverses every constriction of his heretofore banal mortality. But rather than soaring unfettered, Faustus is dogged by contradictions. When he wonders how he is “glutted with conceit of this” (105) he refers to the contradictory desires of wanting to scratch the itch (making “spirits fetch me what I please” (106)) versus banishing it altogether (“resolve me of all ambiguities” (107)). Odd, isn’t it, how he gleefully crams his imagination with treasure:

I’le have them flie to India for gold;
Ransacke the Ocean for Orient Pearle,
And search all corners of the new-found-world
For pleasant fruites, and Princely delicates.
I’le have them read me strange Philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all forraine Kings:
I’le have them wall all Germany with Brasse,
and make swifte Rhine, circle faire Wittenberge:
I’le have them fill the publique Schools with silke... (108-16)

But then balks by declaring that “mine owne fantasie ... will receive no object ...” (130-1).

When Faustus does get around to actually doing something, this same contradiction bedevils him: no sooner does he stretch his horizon than he counters by naming its boundary. He sells his soul for unlimited power, yet then limits his freedom to a 24-year term. Completing the writ that flings wide the door of possibility, he declares, “Consummatum est” (It is finished). Demanding to know the secrets of the underworld, he rebuts Mephistopheles’ response by saying, “I thinke Hel’s a fable” (515). Empowered to sate his “wanton and lascivious” (530) lust on any and every woman, Faustus asks for a wife.

Desire also causes Faustus to trope authority into rebellion. Faustus rejects all paternal figures: he would become a “Demi-god” (89) with powers that exceed “Emperors and Kings” (84). In his antics, Faustus apes the Holy Communion, mocks the spiritual power of the Pope, rescues the heretic Bruno, conjures cuckold’s horns onto the knight Benvolio and sicks a horde of ravening devils onto the kindly Old Man.

Critics have read this pattern of paternal reversal as literal pathology. Constance Brown Kuriyama sees the play as “still another re-enactment of the Marlovian son’s confrontation with the hostile, threatening father” (116). Kay Stockbroker suggests that Faustus has no sense of his sexuality except through the desire to commit patricide: “Since the idea of God extends from an image of paternal authority, Faustus has his glimpse of sexuality only when he declares himself in prideful rebellion from that authority” (209). Such anatomizing is a critical orthodox, but I think these critics mistakenly examine Faustus’ ends rather than his desires. The questions raised by Faustus’ dilemmas are far more engaging than the “answers” these critics provide.

The comic interludes are a third diabolic reversal. A tradition of carnival-parodic reversals reach back through the Fools’ Mass of the Middle Ages, Roman saturnalia, Greek satyr plays and the tricksters and shamans of primitive societies. The dogged popularity of these practices suggest that desire will always find shady places beneath the sun-stricken canons of official culture.

Such comedy also tropes dramatic action into something else, making possible alternate readings and further meanings. According to Mikhail Bakhtin,

For any and every straightforward genre, any and every direct discourse — epic, tragic, lyric, philosophical — may and indeed must itself become the object of representation, the object of a parodic travestying “mimicry.” It is as if such mimicry rips the word away from its object, disunifies the two, shows that a given straightforward generic word — epic or tragic — is one-sided, bounded, incapable of exhausting the object; the process of parodying forces us to experience those sides of the object that are not otherwise included in a given genre or a given style. (55)

The comic scenes turn Faustus fustian, his high-minded seriousness into mere foolishness. When the servants get hold of his magic books, Faustus’ desire for knowledge is used for bacchanal swiving and swilling. Celestial and carnal knowledge, high ambition and bucolic folly reveal two faces of the coin of desire.


Beyond the Ends of Desire

Again and again someone in the crowd wakes up, he has no ground in the crowd, and he emerges according to much broader laws. He carries strange customs with him and demands room for bold gestures. The future speaks ruthlessly through him.

-- Rilke

Doctor Faustus ends with a powerful homily. At midnight of his twenty-fourth year of license, the scholar yields to Mephistopheles’ physical and spiritual ravishment. One of the Scholars remarks to his companions,

... twixt the houres of twelve and one, me thought
I heard him shreeke and call aloud for helpe;
At which time the house seem’d all on fire,
With dreadful horror of these damned fiends. (1991-4)

The Chorus soberly instructs:
Faustus is gone, regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendfull fortune may exhort the wise
Onely to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepenesse doth intice such forward wits,
To practise more than heavenly power permits. (2005-9)

This statement frames an appropriate end for a tragedy: the audience is sent home with a sober warning against criminal desires.

Read this way, Doctor Faustus serves the orthodoxy well, although there’s no lasting art in such melodrama. Neither is there much substance to a diabolic reading, since the unorthodox merely apes the orthodox. For most of the play, Faustus’ desires are defined by the theology he rebels against. Faustus may only founder in a marginal state contradicted by desire and damnation. Greenblatt writes,

If the heart of Renaissance orthodoxy is a vast system of repetitions in which paradigms are established and men gradually learn what to desire and what to fear, the skeptics, Barabas and Faustus, remain embedded within this orthodoxy: they simply reverse the paradigms and embrace what the society brands as evil. In so doing, they imagine themselves in diametrical opposition to their society where in fact they have already unwittingly accepted its crucial structural elements. For the issue is not man’s power to disobey, but the characteristic modes of desire and fear produced by a given society, and the rebellious heroes never depart from these modes. (54)

Is there yet a third relation to desire outside the Christian boundary that Marlowe sensed but could not realize? I think there is, and I believe it is this other desire which engages readers in the text today.

Marlowe was deeply influenced by the influx of classical thought. It is not mere braggadoacio that leads Faustus to declare to Mephistopheles:

This word Damnation, terrifies not me,
For I confound hell in Elizium:
My Ghost be with the old Philosophers. (286-88)

And when Faustus suffers despairing thoughts of his eventual damnation, he counters the effects with the consolation of art:

Have not I made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexanders love, and Oenons death?
And hath not he that built the walles of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious Harpe,
Mad musicke with my Mephistopheles?
Why should I die then, or basely despaire? (576-84)

There are other classical allusions: he re-visits the curse of Diana on the knight Benvolio by sprouting antlers on the man’s head; imitates the Green Knight when the enraged knight cuts off Faustus (false) head; re-creates Alexander and Helen to delight his fellows. Faustus’ soliloquy to Helen declares a faith in desire greater than the Christianity he rejects:

Come Helen, come, give me my soule again,
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lippes,
And all is dross that is not Helena... (1772-4)

All this suggests that Marlowe was reaching beyond his historical horizon for spiritual nurture.

Toward the end of the play Faustus begins to find a different relation to desire. Aware that “the restlesse course that time doth runne with calme and silent foot” is shortening his “thred of vitall life,” Faustus decides to return to Wittenburg and his beginnings. It is odd that the acknowledgement of his end does not intensify a desire to glut on new and greater delights. Instead, Faustus begins to enjoy things, walking with leisure through a “fair and pleasant green,” falling asleep in his chair, “quiet in conceit” (1484). Faustus begins to discover that pleasure is something that emanates from within, not appropriated from without. In these rare moments, Faustus may experience a secular grace.

Marlowe may be suggesting an alternate end for his hero. Rather than a Christian reconciliation, freedom for Faustus lies between heaven and hell. Faustus’ mortality is paradoxically his salvation. The tropes of desire turn life — finite, fickle, fustian, fantastical, free mortality — into something holy. Faustus’ end is his beginning.

* * *

If Faustus experiences moments of grace, they are only moments. His fate is tragically orthodox. The price for one kiss from Helen is dismemberment and damnation. Like Pentheus in Euripides’ The Bacchae, Faustus sacrifices himself to a god of passion he poorly understood.

But there remains in the text one last, devilish conceit. “Faustus is gone,” intones the Chorus while the Scholars gather up his scattered limbs. Then there is that curious final line: Terminat hora diem, Terminat Author opus. — “As the last hour ends the day, so the Author ends this work” (2010). The line’s unnecessary for an ending — why this intrusion by Marlowe? The metaphor is simple: the end of a play is like the end of a day. Perhaps Marlowe is suggesting that the coming of the next day begins the beginning of the Author’s next work. This last line then is a trope: in Faustus’ end is Marlowe’s beginning.

Herein also lies this paper’s final trope on desire. An open reading of that last line indicates that desire is self-renewing. Desire warms the hand, fills the inkwell, blots the page, forces the mouth open to speak: registering across the void, this reader hears a voice in the words on the page, and transits desire from author to reader to writer. The tropes of desire produce endless cycles around an unknowable, tantalizing core. Emerson saw this as the foundation of a living literature:
The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always a residum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility. (231)

Desire may be the genius in language struggling to stay afloat on the wave that is time; its tropes guarantee a meaningful future for literature as long as words delight in their rise and fall.



W O R K S C I T E D

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Circles.” The Portable Emerson. Ed. Carl Bode in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley. New edition. New York: Viking Penguin, 1981.

Empson, William. The English Faust-book and Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus.” Recovered, Ed. Introd. and PS John Henry Jones. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Friedenreich, Kenneth, Gill, Roma, and Kuriyama, Constance B., Ed. “A Poet and a filthy Play-maker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe. New York: AMS Press, 1988.

Goldberg, Jonathan. Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Marlowe and Renaissance Self-Fashioning.” Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Ed. Alvin Kernan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977.

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1973.

Moriarty, Michael. Roland Barthes. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Rabkin, Norman. “Marlowe’s Mind and the Heart of Darkness.” Friedenreich, Gill, and Kuriyama 13-22.

Stockbroker, Kay. “‘Within the massy entrailes of the earth’”: Faustus’ Relation to Women.” Friedenreich, Gill, and Kuriyama 203-219.

The Burning Book

MY BOOK OF DEAD HOURS

July 2005

I’ve filled two score journals
with the same sort of harrow,
late-late-night after night,
at an hour when the rest
of the world has died, returning
to the same underground door,
the same boat, the same drift
down these pages, writing a
soulish travail which no one
else may ever read, much
much less care to. It’s 4:05 a.m.
and I’ve been up since 2 today,
turning slow on a spit of
dubious flame while my wife’s
in a Lake City hospital yet
another night, stricken with
some deep gut-sickness the
docs can’t quite explain.
Outside at this day and hour
it’s just a sour-mashed swoon,
the faintest filament of crickets
in a vast black stillness
which may simply be the
haunt of lonliness or whisper
of some next gate going down.
There comes a time in the journey
below when a man’s heart is
weighed against a feather from
the headdress of Maat, Goddess
of Truth; if I’ve erred in all this
my pan will fall, taking with
it this book of dead nights.
Maybe the grip will relent
and I’ll be freed to write real
poems again, freed too to sleep
all the way through to the
first blueing of the sky,
hell, maybe even wake after
my wife does, for the first
time in all these years -- maybe
all that after all of these books
tossed page by page to the
night’s blackest tide. Maybe
this pen will name the last
warden of the last door and
wing my way through to the
end of all words, and then
I’ll go on with life like Saint
Brendan back from the sea,
the book of wonders he
burnt in disbelief finally
re-scored, its pages filled
with all he himself found
on the blue desert of God’s main.
Freed to love, plant a garden,
die -- my book of blue harrows
goes on and on and on
in the black ink of burnt angels,
a tide of their blood. We’re
deep into summer, the cruel
ecstasy of wild skies, poorer
and itchier and more fearful
by turns, like pages the
augments have yet to fully burn.
Augments which ghost here
in surges and shrieks,
in stillness so deep I
can cut it with the life
which woke on this page
which no one will read.


***


MEPHISTOPHELES.
Hold, Take this book: peruse it thoroughly.
The iterating of these lines brings gold,
The framing of this circle on the ground
Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder and lightning;
Pronounce this thrice devoutly to thyself
And men in armor shall appear to thee,
Ready to execute what thou desirest.

FAUST.
Thanks, Mephistopheles, yet fain would I
have a book wherein I might behold all
spells and incantations, that I might raise
up spirits when I please.

MEPH.
Here they are in this book

They turn to them.

FAUST.
Now would i have a book where
I might see all characters and planets
of the heavens, that I might know
their motions and dispositions.

MEPH.
Here they are too.

Turn to them.

FAUST.
Nay, let me have one book more,
and then I have cone, wherein
I might see all plants, herbs,
and trees that grow upon the earth.

MEPH.
Here they be.

FAUST.
O thou art deceived!

MEPH.
Tut, I warrant thee.

Turn to them.

-- Marlowe Doctor Faustus, VI, 1-22

***

Turn to them: Behold the book which contains all, knows all, sees all: for such a book empowers the deepest darkest glance, and so sighted, hauls up the ancient words of power. According to Emerson, language is “fossil poetry,” Man Reading is a miner of first fire, ferryman of the original outrage, and the Book is a ball of fire. In our once-literate culture, all of the sources moulder in its books. You just have to be willing to go down in them.

***

THE LIBRARY AND
THE WORK DOWN UNDER

April 2002, while visiting
my father

Overnight the rains eased in,
pressing gray hands down
over this house like a monk’s hood.
Yesterday’s outer wonder
is now an inward bliss,
opening doors downward
in a passage grave lined with books.
I always spend time scanning
titles on the shelves of my father’s
library when I’m here, turning up
new finds like root-vegetables.
The names are not important,
only that I look and I find.
It’s as if this library were my
own, or my totem’s. Steady rains
in the blurred green gray window,
my father humming as he
makes his first coffee, oak beams
dark - two centuries old -
and a thousand books murmuring
me to me, on shelves around
and within me, calling me,
urgent to unfold something
I don’t know yet, or won’t ever,
a thousand spines I must sever
to get to the one book
which has grown long enough.

***




From Adamnan’s Life of Columba, Book II, Chap.viii:

Of a volume of a book in the Saint's handwriting which could not be destroyed by water.

I CANNOT think of leaving unnoticed another miracle which once took place by means of the opposite element. For many years after the holy man had departed to the Lord, a certain youth fell from his horse into the river which in Scotic is called Boend (the Boyne), and, being drowned, was for twenty days under the water. When he fell he had a number of books packed up in a leathern satchel under his arm; and so, when he was found after the above-mentioned number of days, he still had the satchel of books pressed between his arm and side. When the body was brought out to the dry ground, and the satchel opened, it was found to contain, among the volumes of other books, which were not only injured, but even rotten, a volume written by the sacred fingers of St. Columba; and it was as dry and wholly uninjured as if it had been enclosed in a desk.

Of another Miracle in similar circumstances.

AT another time a book of hymns for the office of every day in the week, and in the handwriting of St. Columba, having slips, with the leathern satchel which contained it, from the shoulder of a boy who fell from a bridge, was immersed in a certain river in the province of the Lagenians (Leinster). This very book lay in the water from the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord till the end of the Paschal season, and was afterwards found on the bank of the river by some women who were walking there: it was brought by them in the same satchel, which was not only soaked, but even rotten, to a certain priest named Iogenan, a Pict by race, to whom it formerly belonged. On opening the satchel himself, Iogenan found his book uninjured, and as clean and dry as if it had been as long a time in his desk, and had never fallen into the water. And we have ascertained, as undoubted truth, from those who were well informed in the matter, that the like things happened in several places with regard to books written by the hands of St. Columba namely, that the books could suffer no injury from being immersed in water. But the account we have given of the above-mentioned book of Iogenan we have received from certain truthful excellent, and honourable men, who saw the book itself, perfectly white and beautiful, after a submersion of so many days, as we have stated.

These two miracles, though wrought in matters of small moment, and shown in opposite elements namely, fire and water, redound to the honour of the blessed man, and prove his great and singular merits before the Lord.


***


What to do with that Voice which does not die, like Orpheus’ singing mouth and Oran’s mud-caked ebullient throat, like the words of the Saint which cannot be eradicated from his paper, his calligraphy impermeable to fire and water? Daunting influence. Writers continually kill their fathers to get to their Themes; they have to slay the father-dragon to get to the gold hoarded in the uterus owned by paternity. And the longer we hang around words, the more difficult it is to say anything with the breadth and depth boomed by our sires.

On Saturday, getting a solid block of rest watching college football on TV and reading a rondo of Bates’ biography of Keats, Goethe’s Faust and Moby Dick, yet again I was brought back to this theme of contending with literary fathers in the process of engendering first fire.

Thus in Bates I read how Keats returns in “Sleep and Poetry,” one of his first really “strong” (dragon-slaying) effort, he returned to the verse letter form to write a poem about Poetry: foundational work, but also repetitive, since he had already been successful in the form in three previous verse epistles. How could such repetition yet prove so revolutionary? Bates suggests that reiteration of origins in a spirit of reverence and joy kept the young poet’s verses growing exponentially and radically, where others simply beat themselves upon a wall:

“In a sense, he was to retread that ground until the end. But because the concern was primary and universal, the return to it proved increasingly valuable. that concern was nothing less than the use of poetry itself -- and it was a concern that could easily paralyze endeavor and confidence. It was precisely this large, high-minded absorption in the past monuments of literature that was to inhibit Matthew Arnold and so many who followed Arnold. Yet Keats’s poetic achievement offers no greater interest than in the remarkable success with which he by-passes these inhibitions by constantly reverting to basic premises and generous ideals. He was to feel every qualm in doing so; naivites sprouted like mushrooms; and he quickly knew them to be naivites, and suffered accordingly. But single-mindedly in this one way (however open he was in other ways) he kept reverting to the larger aims of the great poets of the past -- scorning to manicure their details, and seeking instead to receive their spirit.” (italics mine)

Keats stuck to his backward glance, welcoming the father’s voice in his own: an accommodation which requires not only great facility (to have mastered the craft on a par with one’s predecessors) but also to have balls the size of a founding father. Perhaps if Keats’s father had not died when he was young, perhaps if he himself was not such a wild instinctual reader and lusty to boot, there could not have been the sort of upwelling of old waters to spring from his throat.

***

This, from the end of Keats’s “Sleep and Poetry”:

... Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green,
Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean
His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they!
For over them was seen a free display
Of out-spread wings, and from between them shone
The face of Poesy: from off her throne
She overlook’d things that I scarce could tell.
The very sense of where I was might well
Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came
Thought after thought to nourish up the flame
Within my breast; so that the morning light
Surprised me even from a sleepless night;
And up I rose refresh’d, and glad, and gay,
Resolving to begin that very day
These lines; and howsoever they be done,
I leave them as a father does his son.

***

Fathering, indeed. And what are we to do with him, our most adventurous sire?

***

LETTER TO JOHN KEATS

The Spanish Steps -- Feb. 23, 1961

Jack Gilbert


What can I do with these people?
They come to the risk so dutifully,
Are delighted by anecdotes that give
Them Poetry. Are grateful to be told
Of diagonals that give them Painting.
Good people. But stubborn when warned
The beast is not domestic.

How can I persuade them
That the dark, soulful Keats
Was five feet one?
Liked fighting and bear-baiting?
I can’t explain the red hair:
Nor say how you died so full
Of lust for Fanny Browne.

I will tell them of Semele.

from Views of Jeopardy (1962)

***

Melville attacks the father with a side-step -- off to sea; and though sea-tales are commonplace, no one had told a story of whaling, a very low station of employment in the order of the mid-19th century. Yet Melville knew his Theme to be great, and decided to tell it on sea-roads, and abroad the back of a whale, no less. In the chapter “The Fossil Whale” Melville again sounds the depths of his charge, marshalling the full extent of language and knowledge, gaining heft from the girth of the sea and the massed aons of Time:

***

From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measured about the waist; only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.

Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan- to an ant or a flea--such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

... by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels ...

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over ...

***

Oh indeedy. Here is is, 5:23 a.m. on a Monday morning, back to a five-day roaring bender of labors, the dark outside foggy with humidity, fat ass of Uranos pressing down from above, squeezing us bugeyed with heat frustration. Here I begin shutting the book, typing the last lines, inserting a final poem: soon to S,S & S, gobble some breakfast cereal, see if the kitties have assembled yet on the porch to eat, head upstairs to hold my wife, stroke her feet, tell her everything will be OK when she visits her OBGYN this morning for an ultrasound on an ovarian cyst which showed accidentally on a test earlier this summer. Whispering to her how this is only a followup, nothing to worry, her business ripe and ready to roar, get through this and back to the great work: words from my book of love which I delve wholeheartedly, whether they’re true or not, whether words have any greater import than the touch of my fingertips along the topsoles of her feet, that soul-keyboarding which has nothing and everything to do with this, the life inside the work I mean, all that protects and bowers and engenders my waking, as the work empowers and inspires and deepens the life. The work and the life, the art and the heart, they are not exclusives but concatenates, sea and shore of the same song, til death do us part ...



SONS OF STARRY URANOS

Oct. 9, 2005

Sons will have their mothers
come hell’s every ball-high-water,
that flood unleashed by
one swipe of a hoar grey sickle
by which all mothers bid
their son replace old noctal
passions with the new.
Thus ages succeed each other
in motherly vengeance
and a child’s guilt-soggy greed,
bridged by cruel inventions
and newer rapt conceptions,
lesser powers, greater gains,
puerile gambols, ungartered rains.
And old dads never die,
their roar of outrage unfading
in the thunders which ejaculate
new dooms, the risen nippled
Venus wave-stepping on each
bedded shore with such graceful
fuckability you sense his
ancient ardor in every evil
lash she bats. Her smile is so
slight, so devious, barely
concealing in its demure
so hesitant upcurve
the massive cock
and balls within which
alchemized salt water
into pure empyriea,
fire water thieved from
the Maker of all fires.
Her eyes are filled
with his incessant drive
to bliss, starry as the sky
which each night for
an etern fell on earth to
raven plunge & furrow
all the Titan rhymes
spring-locked in our
concupiscent too-conscious brow,
concatenate in mind and soul
-- yowling Iapetos, wave-tressed
Thetis, bookish Mnemosyne,
Time. All were freed to plague
our breast because that feral
sickle dared to rise and slice
offending members free, ending
five million years of noctal
same old same old fucks,
begetting daily rise and falls,
their proscribed pistionings
in rhythmus to our time.
Womb to grave we race, trying
to fit somehow in both
cunts of origin and future ore
we’ll never harrow nor mine well,
not like the archon Daddy
who penumbrates the depths
of hell with insatiate desire.
Always the sands beat us through
that narrow isthmus of glass
between the tits and ass,
the one substantial embrace that
we seek not found in time’s
one then other space, that
doppler curvature descending from
one fullness and plopping out
the other with no more than
a grain of heaven’s shore,
our O-mouths mewling
forever of her and more.
And all this while sons of
ours take steady aim at
cutting us forever off from
her clam, our claim to it I mean.
That’s the way it goes if you buy
the tale that endless night
was ended in one’s day’s
curve from thought to deed,
one sweep from cock to balls
and through. A sickle moon
hangs to the west this morning,
singing over that ancient
tumulus where every lust and ire
fonts so wicked and so bottomless
a starry hell-hot cream,
quintessence of the dad I’ll always dream
inside the mom I cannot mean.