Shamanic Letter (2)

Among the Buryat of Southern Siberia shamanism is usually herditary, but sometimes one becomes a shaman after a divine election or an accident; for example, the gods choose the future shaman by striking him with lightning or showing him their will through stones fallen from the sky; one who has chanced to drink tarasun in which there was such a stone was transformed into a shaman. But these shamans chosen by the gods must also be guided and taught by old shamans.

The role of lightning in designating the shaman is important; it shows the celestial origin of shamanic powers. The case is not unique; among the Soyot, too, one who is touched by lightning becomes a shaman, and lightning is sometimes portrayed on the shaman’s costume.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 19


BOLT

Nov. 11, 2005

Again and again the bolts jolted
me from a sky I couldn’t see,
much less comprehend. I’d sit by
the heat grate in that apartment
in Spokane now 28 years in the past,
nursing a beer & listening
to Eno’s devolved arch-Pachelbel,
his variations splitting my brain
& tearing pieces off in disynchronous
waves of sound, there in the
placid and feral whiteout of
hard winter. Petit-mal spells --
jabs without a knockout punch --
would fire again and again
and again between my ears,
each unfolding in a bolt
of black dazzle, careening me
further and further down that
season’s most frozen soul forges.
In January as I sat there I
was torn open by ice forceps
and flint knives, jolly voices
merrily eviscerating the last
heat of God and father from
my heart and gut and balls.
Help me I cried as I sat nailed
to the grate, beseeching
my first and ever lost love
to find and rescue me from
this last roof of my snowbound
sanity. I was 19 years old and
one night short of breaking
completely down, travelling
through deepest winter in
the plush heart of an ice whale.
Was it Your hoary hand that
shielded me from the actual
consequence of my slack
and overrich expense of spirit
in all the booze and drugs,
preventing the Big One --
grand mal seizure, madness,
death, I dunno -- from finishing
the job just then. That’s how
I come to read that history,
my much-later and awakening
sense perhaps the sum of all
these totem songs having
feathered such strange and wild
wings. Last night I dreamt a company
of men were eating breakfast
in that apartment -- my father
(who seemed my age, or the age
he’d be when I was then 19) holding
court with the other bums, all
of them rough-looking, ungroomed,
and coarse, their clothes unwashed,
pee- and sperm- and blood-stains
mottling my father’s rumpled grey
pants. All of them were waiting
for a bus (which I always rode
back then, too broke from partying
to afford one). To catch the bus,
the dream made clear, was Death.
And then the bus was right outside
that old apartment and the men
were all hurrying off: There was no time
to say goodbye to my father: Some
older god (whoever You are) pried
him from my soul that winter
long ago. He simply was gone,
leaving me to pick up the
breakfast dishes and clean
the room before I myself had
to head off to Work. In truth,
while I wintered by that heat
grate at the furthest western shore,
my father was soon to meet Thor
at Iona in some factual figment
of a dream.) Before I left
I found a box in which
a few porn mags were
sandwiched amid a thick
stack of photocopied research,
stuff I hadn’t glommed in years:
Hatchlings all of the man
who stirred from that grate on a day
less icebound than before,
sure only that I had
somehow survived and must
get to work with pen and
penis and climb aboard
that dragon who marauds
every sea beneath heat
grates of nipple, beer and
amp, each a verb with dragon
scales. World and word
once tore me almost
full apart: Ever since I’ve
been trying to bolt them
all back almost together
again, always just offshore
the place where Your
thunder cracks and roars.
I was born with an odd birthmark,
a red heart with an arrow
through it, upside down over
my heart: You fired that shaft
from up and down, its soar
and thwock from heaven or
its hell, and made this mess an art.

Shamanic Letter

Among the Alarsk Buryat studied by Sandschejew shamanism is transmitted in the paternal or maternal line. But it is also spontaneous. In either case vocation is manifested by dreams and convulsions, both provided by ancestral spirits (utcha). A shamanic vocation is obligatory; one cannot refuse it. If there are no suitable candidates, the ancestral spirits torture children, who cry in their sleep, become nervous and dreamy, and at 13 are designated for the profession. The preparatory period involves a long series of ecstatic experiences which are at the same time initiatory; the ancestral spirits appear in dreams and sometimes carry the candidate down to the underworld. Meanwhile the youth continues to study under the shamans and the elders; he learns the clan genealogy and traditions, the shamanic mythology and vocabulary. The teacher is called the Father Shaman. During his ecstasy the candidate sings shamanic hymns. This is the sign that contact with the Beyond has finally been established.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

I.

(Wednesday)

Father, I’ve been writing you a while
on shores stronger and stranger even
than the man who cried me forth,
though that paternity mustered sufficient
libido and its mystery in my brain
to ache me on toward you, out there
on the next great shore of vibrant
swimming dark. Last night I dreamt
of planning Halloween in our yard though
it belonged to richer folks than us,
large house & big yard like my wealthy
uncle’s, lots of stations to spook up.
Though also with that magnitude the
difficulty increased, with big rutty holes
in the asphalt sure to gobble kids, with
blatant steel girders from some older
ruined enterprise jutting out like rude
iron phalli, malefic, more than kiddie
stuff. As I let go my plans I mused upon
a red-capped devil’s tale, the song
I must have heard a bit of when I wrote
“Red Dragon” yesterday; something burrowed
down and deep into the inner sea of
my singing ear, down into that wild-water
resonance which bounce whale-songs
from shore to shore. I don’t now recall
his words which in my dream were so
harrowing and pure, but in the dream
I thought to publish his song instead
of my own, dark psalms instead of
childishly spooked-up palms with paper
ghouls and too-dim ghastly lights.
And so I here continue down that
red-capped shaman song which pulses
ugly in an angry vein astride some
engorged cock inside my addered tongue,
ferrying back the harrowed blood in
some infernal circuitry: I rouse to flap
his blackened wings and write this
dragon singing down. And as my left
hand writes these words my right forearm’s
wrapped in medical tape, concealing the
IV font I’ve been plugged thrice to
in receipt of a stiffer migraine cure
than all the physic hurled before
trying to quell that beast at last. There’s
been great relief -- three more doses
left to go -- though today I woke from
my dream with my eyes sealed fast
with that irritating goop that doesn’t
have a name (I squeeze Alrex drops
to knock it back) & that old infernal
hammer at it again in the base of my
skull, knocking at Hell’s Gate. I write
because I dream and because the hour’s
mean: I write because You complete
a work louder in my ear than a
mere falling angel’s world-wide scream.

II.

Those early migraines that hit me with a
waking dream and then split my skull in
two: I was in seventh grade, 1969 I believe,
my parent’s marriage burning up and
world outside of it also on fire, no where
wet enough to stand without one foot
becoming a pyre. It was always in Math--
that subject which always made a fool
of my lazy, dreaming mind with its ticking,
dreadful sums -- that the pillow in my head
would suddenly lamp up and I watched the
same deja-vu-swamped scene where some oily
salesman compared one appliance to another,
expressing the logic of a sale I also could
not fathom, pitching me from its summa
down a dizzy oubliette of sense, whirling
toward a blackness I always cracked just
short of as my skull, it, seemed, split wide.
The headache was sudden and blinding
and short-lived, dulling in the drone of
pencils scratching formulas, erased with
a rubberlike ferocity till I was me again.
Were those the hours when You first arose
in me, Your bald red skull dripping with
the O-shape of infinity, the roaring in my
ears your own, a surf collapsing my sanity
in white foam? My first seizures were thus
headaches too, that malaise which so
tormented my latter youth becoming
this other which so shadows these
early latter days, both perhaps circulating
from that massy growth on my brain
above one temple which was revealed
in a CAT scan three years ago. Is that
Your temple, and this banging in my head
today (a migraine, in the midst of such
massive treatment of late, no less) like
a gong, defiant of every shrink and doc
to come along with dayside remedies?
Who was that dweeby guy in the waking
dream, selling dross yet fundamental
merchandise -- a dishwasher no less,
with its riot of cleansing blue? He was
no one I ever spied in the pantheon,
just a character actor iconic in his
oiliness, his eyes ringed with weariness
or worry, his staccato delivery which
acted like a strobe in my diseased brain,
signalling the waking dream to torment
and haul me down again: was he hermaneut
or some dissociative warlord of my
bruised and shitty life, winging me off
and away from my day but good? Who
knows? I just let him now crow on the
wires of my historic pulse to You, those
veins which freight the harrowed juice,
the marrow of these daily chats with God.

III.

Or did you initiate me in a swarm of
lust when I saw that big bra hanging
in a tree outside the public school I so
feared? I was 13 by then, living in Florida
with my maritally sundered so wounded
mom and three siblings who were just
as bruised as I; and all I wanted in the
world after seeing that booby trap swinging
cup-heavy in the breeze was whatever
swelled girls wild and saucy just that
way. No matter I had no ideas what
teeth were hidden there between
the smiles and the underwear, on
that road from a t-shirt’s hem up under
all the way to what that goofy bra
disclosed slung high into a tree
You planted just for me. My entire
miserable childhood tore in torrent loose
in the single moment of that sight: right
then I was no longer in but in and
desperately wanting out, or suddenly
so out and wanting in. Sugared by the
works which spun cotton brassieres
round the slather of my brain, I jerked off
every night with that high bra held in
sight, rubbing my newly-wakened cock
against the sheets til they were soaked
in sperm and blood. (Heavens, what did
my mother think? Were You thus satyrizing
her as You were plecturing me?) Sometimes
I wonder if the booze was just the surest
conduit to pussy, to that catastrophically
sweet swirl in the soft curves and musk oils
of a willing enough, bra-freed girl. Which
was booze and whence the bottle but from
Your cabinet of thrills, red master? And
whose worm swirled at the bottom of
my endlessness cry for more -- me or Your
latent now wakening desire for those
bloody lines of sperm ink I wrote on
those first white sheets? Though the medium
has changed, I’m still gouting all I think
about that primary bliss; that white bra’s
still turning on a summery and warm
too-noctal breeze, flashing like a smile
in the dark where all lovers climax in
a spark which burns the matter down
once more -- No, there’s no escaping this
tonsured shirt of fire. Father, your head
is reddest with the depths of it, and I am
just another aching pent baritone in
one huge randy, forever famished choir.

IV

(Thursday)

As usual, there’s not enough time to sing
things full enough -- the day I choose
intrudes with the bright wings of Your
morning star staircasing into dawn. I
always shut Your book and head upstairs
to wake a second time with my wife,
stroking her feet slow and light with
fingertips still glowing with Your gules.
Does she sense at all the heat of our
dialogue, this ecstasy transcribed for her
in the angel’s touch she understands?
Does any of this ever remain topside?
I do not tell her much of where You
and I have flown, nor of what depths of
bliss we found descending pages in such
heedless flux of verbal sooth: The words
just seem acrid, self-musked, the strange
smell of a husband’s life one tolerates
for reasons known only for love of house
and garden love bestowes. For her its
all about what follows, not precedes, the
kiss; her strand’s far up from mine, inland
from where waves crash and fold the
lovers’ psalmody. Night and day this beach-
wild song and my fingers on her soles,
yet its still just the one long day I love
and live and work to death. It’s 4 a.m. here,
night leaking a thick fog from its vents,
too warm for November (though tonight
its supposed to cool down a great deal).
Another hellbent day ahead, with my last
infusion of DHE and Toradol and some
anti-nauseating drug at 9 a.m. (I’m dosing
twice a day for three days in this latest
big-gun assault on knocking migraines out);
then its in to work for a day of fast and
hard production finishing off the weekly
package in time to mail everything off
today since tomorrow is Vets Day.
My eyes are feeling glutinous and tacked
with whatever’s ailing them -- too much
of what’s to do in sight? -- and I’m weary,
not having slept well despite the increased
dose of Depakote. As usual You fight
the medicines, the way you battled therapy
when it was so hard to yield to EMDR.
You’re as stubborn as a rude hardon which
no amount of feathered talk can hide,
much less deny. Well, this song’s Your
chance to vent but good. To every devil
His due, and Your’s it seems, is wildest blue.

V.

In my dream last night You might have
surfaced once again as that bald fat
aging criminal whose heart was pure
lust for larceny, stealing what he could and
then challenging a pretty girl to a rassling
match in the center of my brain. He looked
a bit like I imagine Judge Holden in Blood
Meridian, a godless godlike man of such
hard intelligence he was primed to fuck
the world in every way, especially all its
softest maids. But the dream didn’t give
that naked brute a chance, instead switching
channels to the house I lived in when
my first marriage ended. I stood in my
study at the back of the house looking
out on the back yard where I saw a
young man naked as the day with
a long thin hardon crowing proud,
curved like a sexual scimitar. He was
thrusting away at the hindquarters of
a fattish crone, someone the brute
equivalent of the earlier fat man, perhaps
the sort of woman inside that sort of
man. Anyway the young guy was just
pumping away while the woman grunted
and yowled her ecstasy, demanding of him
his all, from crown to hilt of bouncing
balls. Is that how all this passes on
down to here, each page a blasted heath
so foul and fair as to smirch the
Mother’s underwear with the blood-
spermed spume of Your white whale?
In 5,000 poems lost to this thrall
which no one hardly cares to read,
have I yet waded half across the sea
of her undinal sighs? Far indeed from
actual hips the plunging of this membered
sense, now 2000 words or worse long.
Yet when did You ever have any need
for that sweet pink cusp of Venusian mons,
a labial littoral shored by swirly pubic hair?
It now seems to me that that just kept
on the singer’s tongue enough taste of the sea
as to rudder metaphoricals toward the beach
where You made this man out of me.
What am I now but the son of an infernal
scree, about a totem Father’s tide?
See: I’m nothing now but waves, all surge
and salt-coiled clench, collapsing verbs
in foam. My singing is forever half offshore,
of one wet world winged with the other’s
drydocked feather. New bucks are horning
up Your wood. May ever song of salt derange
show them how to plunge the depths but good.
And if a cracked head keeps Your door flung wide,
then may this migraine fog the wildest wood.

Sea Magic

By Fiona Macleod

"Manan mil air sloigh..."

In one of the remotest islands of the Hebrides I landed on a late afternoon in October a year ago. There was no one on the island except an old man, who was shepherd for the fourscore sheep which ate the sweet sea-grass from Beltane till Samhain (1st May till 31st October): one sheep for each year of his life, he told me, "forby one, and that will he right between them an' me come Candlemas next." He gave me water and oatcake, and offered to make me tea, which I would not have. I gave him the messages I had brought from the distant main-land of the Lews, and other things; and some small gifts of my own to supplement the few needs and fewer luxuries of the old islander. Murdo MacIan was grateful, with the brief and simple gladness of a child. By mistake a little mouth-organ, one of those small untuneful instruments which children delight in and can buy for a few pence, was in my package, along with a "poke" of carvies, those little white sweets for buttered bread dear to both young and old-though even they, like all genuine products of the west, great and small, are falling away in disuse! The two had been intended by me for a small lass, the grandchild of a crofter of Loch Roag in the westerside of the Lews ; but when the yacht put in at the weedy haven, where scart and gillie-breed and tern screamed at the break of silence, I heard that little Morag had "taken a longing to be gone," and after a brief ailing had in truth returned whence she had come.

And for the moment neither snuff nor tobacco, neither woollen comforter nor knitted hose, could hold Murdo as did that packet of carvies (for the paper had loosened, and the sugary contents had swarmed like white ants) and still more that sixpenny mouth-organ. I saw what the old man eagerly desired, but was too courteous and well-bred even to hint: and when I gave him the two things of his longing my pleasure was not less than his. I asked him why he wanted the "cruit-bheul," which was the nearest I could put the Gaelic for the foreign toy, and he said simply that it was because he was so much alone, and often at nights heard a music he would rather not be hearing. "What would that be?" I asked. After some hesitation he answered that a woman often came out of the sea and said strange foreign words at the back of his door, and these, he added, in a whinnying voice like that of a foal ; came, white as foam ; and went away grey as rain. And then, he added, "she would go to that stroked rock yonder, and put songs against me, till my heart shook like a tallow-flaucht in the wind."

Was there auy other music? I asked. Yes, he said. When the wind was in the west, and rose quickly, coming across the sea, he had heard a hundred feet running through the wet grass and making the clover breathe a breath. "When it's a long way off I hear the snatch of an air, that I think I know and yet can never put name to. Then it's near, an' there's names called on the wind, an' whishts an' all. Then they sing an' laugh. I've seen the sheep standing-their forelegs on the slit rocks that crop up here like stony weeds-staring, and listening. Then after a bit they'd go on at the grass again. But Luath, my dog, he'd sit close to me, with his eyes big, an' growling low. Then I wouldn't he hearing anything: no more at all. But, whiles, somebody would follow me home, piping, and till the very door, and then go off laughing. Once, a three-week back or so, I came home in a thin noiseless rain, and heard a woman-voice singing by the fire-flaucht, and stole up soft to the house-side ; but she heard the beat of my pulse and went out at the door, not looking once behind her. She was tall and white, with red hair, and though I didn't see her face I know it was like a rock in rain, with tears streaming on it. She was a woman till she was at the shore there, then she threw her arms into the wind an' was a gull, an' flew away in the lowness of a cloud.

+++

While I was on the island the wind had veered with that suddenness known to all who sail these seas. A wet eddy swirled up from the south-east, and the west greyed, and rain fell. In a few minutes clouds shaped themselves out of mists I had not seen and out of travelling vapours and the salt rising breaths of the sea. A long wind moved from east to west, high, but with its sough falling to me look a wood-echo where I was. Then a cloudy rain let loose a chill air, and sighed with a moan in it: in a moment or two after, great sluices were opened, and the water came down with a noise like the tide coursing the iynns of narrow sea-lochs.

To go back in that falling flood would be to be half-drowned, and was needless too: so I was the more glad, with the howling wind and sudden gloom of darkness and thick rain, to go in to Murdo's cabin, for it was no more than that, and sit by the comfortable glow of the peats, while the old man, happy in that doing, made tea for me.

He was smiling and busy, when I saw his face cloud.

"Will you be hearing that?" he said looking round.

"What was it?" I answered, for I thought I had heard the long scream of the gannet against the waves of the wind high above us.

Having no answer, I asked Murdo if it was the bird it meant. "Ay, he might be a bird. Sometimes it's a bird, sometimes it's a seal, sometimes it's a creature of the sea pulling itself up the shore an' makin' a hoarse raughlin like a boat being dragged over pebbles. But when it comes in at the door there it is always the same, a tall man, with the great beauty on him, his hands hidden in the white cloak he wears, a bright, cold, curling flame under the soles of his feet, and a crest like a bird's on his head."

I looked instinctively at the door, but no one stood there.

"Was the crest of feathers, Murdo?" I asked, remembering an old tale of a messenger of the Hidden People who is known by the crest of cuckoo-feathers that he wears.

" No," he said, " it wasn't. It was more like white canna blowing in the wind, but with a blueness in it."

"And what does he say to you?"

"His say is the say of good Gaelic, but with old words in it that I have forgotten. The mother of my mother had great wisdom, and I've heard her using the same when she was out speaking in the moonlight to them that were talking to her."

"What does he tell you, Murdo?"

"Sure, seldom he has anything to say. He just looks in the fire a long time, an' then goes away smiling."

"And who did you think it was?"

"Well, I thought it might be Mr. Macalister, him as was drowned on St. Bride's day, the minister over at Uiseader of Harris; I've heard he was a tall, fine man, an' a scholar, an' of great goodness an' fineness. And so I asked him, the second time he came, if may be he would be Mr. Macalister. - He said no, an' laughed the bit of a laugh, and then said that good man's bones were now lying in a great pool with three arches to it, deep in the sea about seven swims of a seal from Eilean Mhealastaidh, the island that lies under the shadow of Griomaval on the mainland of the Lews.'

"An' at that," added Murdo, "I asked him how he would be knowing that."

"'How do you know you are a man, and that the name on you is the name you have?' he said. An' at that I laughed, and said it was more than he could say, for he did not seem to have the way of a man an' he kept his name in his pocket."

"With that he touched me an' I fell into an aisling. And though I saw the red peats before me, I knew I was out on the sea, and was a wave herded by the wind an' lifted an' shaken by the tide-an' a great skua flyin' over saw my name floating like a dead fish an' sank to it an' swallowed it an' flew away. An' when I sat up, I was here on this stool before the peats, an' no one beside me. But the door was open, an' though there was no rain the flagstone was wet, an' there was a heavy wetness in the room, an' it was salt. It was like a spilt wave, it was."

"' Seven swims of a seal." A seal is supposed to swim a mile on one side without effort, without twist ; and then to change to the other side and swim in the same way the next mile ; and so on.

I was silent for a time, listening to the howling of the wind and the stumbling rush of the rain. Then I spoke.

"But tell me, Murdo, how you know this was not all a dream?"

"Because of what I saw when he touched me."

"And what was that?"

"I have the fear of it still," he said simply. "His arms were like water, and I saw the sea-weed floating among the bones in his hand. And so I knew him to be a 'morar-mhara,' a lord of the sea."

"And did you see him after that?"

"Yes."

"And did he say anything to you then?"

"Yes. He said to me after he had sat a long time staring in the fire: 'Murdo, what age have you?' An' I told him. I said I would have eighty years come Candlemas. He said, 'You've got a clean heart: an' you'll have three times eighty years of youth an' joy before you have your long sleep. An' that is a true word. It will be when the wild geese fly north again.' An' then he rose and went away. There was a mist on the sea, an' creep-in' up the rocks. I watched him go into it, an' I heard him hurling great stones an' dashing them. 'These are the kingdoms of the world,' I heard him crying in the mist. No, I have not been seeing him any more at all: not once since that day. An' that's all, Ban Morar."

That was many months ago. There is no one on the island now: no sheep even, for the pastures are changed. When the wild geese flew north this year, the soul of Murdo MacIan went with them. Or if he did not go with them, he went where Manan promised him he should go. For who can doubt that it was Manan, in the body or vision, he the living prince of the waters, the son of the most ancient god, who, crested as with snow-white canna with a blueness in it, and foot-circt with cold curling flame-the uplifted wave and the wandering sea-fire-appeared to the old islander? And if it were he, be sure the promise is now joy and peace to him to whom it was made.

Murdo must have soothed his last hours of weakness with the cruit-bheul, the little mouth-organ, for it was by the side of his pillow. In these childish things have we our delight, even those few of us who, simple of heart and poor in all things save faith and wonder, can, like Murdo MacIan, make a brief happiness out of a little formless music with our passing breath, and contentedly put it away at last for the deep music of immortal things.

Red Dragon

Lucifer (“Fire-bearer”) in Hebrew is Helel ben Sahar, “Bright Son of the Morning.” Later tradition has linked him to the planet Venus and, somewhat ambiguously, to other fiery falling figures: Hephaestus, Prometheus, Phaeton, Icarus. The pride that made him sit “in the seat of God” led to his fall; this is the Greek hubris so often punished by cosmic justice. The final battle of Revelation was also interpreted as a primal battle, the war in Heaven between Lucifer's forces and those of St. Michael at the beginning of time. After the fall, Lucifer, identified with the red dragon, becomes as hideous a he had become beautiful -- and changed his name to Satan.

-- Alice K. Turner, A History of Hell


RED DRAGON

November 8, 2005

Oh you should have seen me back then
as I ravened starry heavens in
my silver Rolls convertible, my black
hair like a mane wild in courses of the
night, my hands more perfect than
poured marble at the wheel. There wasn’t
an angelette in all eternity who could
resist my warm smile and icy eyes;
I could plunge a phallus of pure blue fire
right through ‘em with a glance. All those
downy wings spread wide in hot delight
of me! The O-mouths of ecstasy like
black holes birthing a legion suns with
each new name of God they called me
as I plunged and pumped the rebel fire.
I nailed ‘em all in the aeons of my youth,
each a campaign to mount the Master’s throne.
So many followed after me like whorls
of musky afterburn, cupping starlight
from the pools of sweat I left behind
between their ravished breasts, that cold
fire small comfort for eternity yet
infinitely far too much for life The rosewood
inlay above the backseat of that beastly Rolls
toward my end was notched ten billion
times, each scar and angel star, the
only true map of the horny heavens.
That fabled car is now smashed into the rocks
at the bottom of an abyss of black fire.
That’s where me and my element and
vampiric brood were hurled to when the Master
decreed I’d hurled rebellious oats around
the gables of his mansions long enough.
Every way I once shone bright is now
a hellish underglow; the smile I once
reaped angels with in a flash is now
this dragon’s snarl. I once was Lucifer
but that was long ago, before every thrill
heisted from the Master’s lap returned
to me, crying, Satan. Every delight I halved
from His light is now a scale heaped on my flesh,
a coil which circles now the undersides of the
earth’s own mortal plunge to smoking ruin.
But don’t be scared, my friend: I don’t
reveal the visage of desire’s fate till long
after you have fallen through the last bed
of your ding dong dorking life. By day you
only see this middle-aging man who shows
not an inkling of his former years. Who would
guess that the bland man driving in traffic
next to you was once the rapture of an angel’s
crease, the feral pillage of gossamer skirts
in the back seat of a hot car at the darkest
edge of town? No one: that’s the Master’s
curse, to burn the wings off every ache to
romp and roger His high heaven. That outer
fire burned wholly down and in, hurling
in its fumes that tell-all-book of big-night
drives to a place where none will ever
read it. My hell’s found in what burned from
my smile when the tide turned the other
way: when she at last refused to get in
and walked demurely off, leaving me with
this endless ache which no thrust skyward
could ever again slake. Forever now I am
the road not taken by every good impulse,
the shadow of infernal lust which no longer
must compulse maturing virgins of the heart
toward bad and worser ends. The hood
ornament of my Rolls was once the ikon
of my war with God is now all that remains
of my desire, washed on some faraway beach:
I am he who all put behind to start their
histories, the forever middle-aging man
between God and His procreative mysteries.



ENTER THE DRAGON

Jan 2005

The Dark -- felt beautiful.
-- Emily Dickinson (Fr. 627)

Beware the scented bed of
Love: it rides upon the
dragon’s back who swims
abyssal realms. Drowse
there and you’ll wake
a molted man of fire,
enrapt inside the rupture
of the devil of deep
welcome. Your wings
will lift you into nights
the size of titan ire,
your eyes whet and keen
for any trace of blue
embroilment to fall,
silklike, from yet
knowable breasts
ripe and leaking
dragon’s milk, booze
poured from paps
of doom. Ride such
nights at your peril,
son of ancient smiles:
Do not presume you
have tooth or troth
sufficient for that dark
demanding angel ride
into the chasm which
splits the fundaments.
Just hold on for your
immortal soul
and let heavens collide
and smash down
every shore. Let every
numen reveal the bestial
depths below, like buoys
singing on blackened tides,
rippled by deep waves
fanning deeper lands
than undreamt Love can go.





MASTER OF FIRE

May 2005

Appetite is barely the half of it.
Anyone can ache for the arch of
a lover’s welcoming spasm
and fan that gluttony to such
amplitude that he eats his
beloved’s body entire, leaving only
her blue aura to lamp that hell
inside his heat, a hole the
size of whale’s gobble. Mastering
the fire that way turns kings into
fools and smiths into the anvil they
keep hammering themselves upon
forever freezing desire with killed fire.
Merlin could charm his lord
Uther to look like the king’s rival
and charge full into the man’s
wife like the demon twin of
a cuckold. Such were the employs
of men with his dark talent,
his magic a soapstone to rub
steely ambitions to a gleam.
Merlin may have been lord
of Stonehenge, but when
Viviane smiled with those fey
so blue eyes he, he showed
his metier by singing her name
out of history into a meander
of stone. It took 3 times
to kill that first fool of fire,
but when it was done the
story took wing from its
aerie like dragons awakened
from the foundations of
an old tower, one beast white
the other one red, like cells
of a blood which
burns its blue flood, hot
for all it can’t have and yet is.
A master of fire has his
ashes as proof, the greater
half of his heart that cathedral-
sized pyre raised to you, my
Cape Blue, a story strung
from my broken lyre,
my book of drowning charms.

"There Lies the Fiddler, Lies the Gold"

You feel the secret operation
Of Nature’s endless ruling might,
And from earth’s undermost foundation
A living trace steals up to light.
When in your limbs you’re feeling twitches,
When something lays uncanny hold,
Be swift to delve, dig up the riches,
There lies the fiddler, lies the gold!

-- Mephistopheles, Goethe Faust II, 4985-92

***

Archaeologists have discovered mummies in a Bronze Age site in Scotland, showing this form of ancestor worship extends far beyond previously known cultures practiced in Egypt and South America.

In the Sept. 2005 issue of Antiquity,, Mike Parker Peterson reports the find from a dig at Cladh Hallan, located on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. The settlement consists of at least four residential structures called brochs or roundhouses, built during the Late Bronze Age and used through the Iron Age (ca 1100-200 BC).

Roundhouses are in small groups often sharing walls and with typically subterranean floors. The floors of Cladh Hallan extend about a meter below the current surface.

Immediately beneath the floors of the Cladh Hallan roundhouses were found several human and dog burials, interpreted by Pearson and company as representing pre-construction ritual offerings, a not uncommon characteristic of Bronze Age roundhouses.

So was Columba’s sacrifice of Oran in the footers of his abbey a mythological completion, one of the labors necessary for assuming tuletary rule over the island?

***
Coming up and out of a two-day Category 7 migraine, never had one so bad as that, as to cripple any activity, thought ... Maestro ... this from Saturday a.m., Day 2:

For years now migraines have
tortured my days with their iron
stakes thrust in my skull, wallowing
seas down over my brow like
the brute weight of Poseidon,
bloody hooves tearing bone
and brain. They come, they go,
shrieking of Michealangelo,
no matter how much aspirin
or Aleve or Excedrin Migraine
or Nortiptyline or Pregnisone
or Topamax or Imatrex or
Toprol or Pameior or
or Depakote or Frova
I take; I’ve been told to take
or not to. I just soldier on,
freighting my own cross of
pain into th day. Sometimes
I’ve felt in their black wings
the presence of something not
quite angelic or of the devil
but powerful and creative:
That the pain was fructively
dark, synapsing words which
would not have been borne
otherwise, for better or ill.
Today I’m in worst arrears,
a migraine having blossomed
ugly in my work day
yesterday which crept
and rose to a magnitude
of pain which was high-
tidal in awesome awfulness,
spearing me through the eyes
& galloping over the top
& hammering away in back.
My doc has me off the
palliatives & told me now
just to take pain meds
& nausea pills, If this
doesn’t break soon
he says he wants
me admitted
to the hospital, for who
knows what surficial
ends -- a breakage in
the works? tumor? -- and
God knows what effects
(can I work? work out?
have sex? write?). It’s
too much to consider here,
where only the undersides
are found lounging
in their black underwear,
drying their ragged,
horrid wings. The
tintinnabulation in my ears
has an impish frequency,
a malice which yet
is purposeful: This shit
is hauling me down.
Dear god of love
and life, decapitate
me as you will and
pull out of me the
next man for the job.
I pray for willingness
to go beneath dark
tides where nothing
much is left to bob.



Well, I could adopt the ditty of Starbuck, sung in “The Candles” when a typhoon threatened to split the ship:

Oh! Jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale,
A’ flourishin’ his tail, --

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, jokey, hokey-pokey lad, is the Ocean, oh!

The scud all a flyin’,
That’s his flip only foamin’;
When he stirs in the spicin’, --

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, jokey, hokey-pokey lad, is the Ocean, oh!

Thunder splits the ships,
But he only smacks his lips,
A tastin’ of this flip, --

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, jokey, hokey-pokey lad, is the Ocean, oh!


***

Well, we get it in the thick of things -- deep in the soak; so this antiphon to Starbuck, up out of the maelstrom:


***

In the tides of life, in action’s storm,
Up and down I wave,
To and fro weave free
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A varied weaving,
A radiant living,
Thus at Time’s humming loom
It’s my hand that prepares
The robe ever-living the Deity wears.

-- Spirit invoked by Faust, I, 500-509

***

Among the Siberian Samoyed and the Ostyak, shamanism is hereditary. On the shaman’s death, his son fashions a wooden image of his father’s hand and through this symbol inherits his powers. But being the son of a shaman is not enough; the neophyte must also be accepted and approved by the spirits.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

...

Shall I fashion a votive skull? Is that the drum my familiars are beating on so mercilessly?

***

Well, today (Sunday) things are definitely better, the worst of that fucking migraine bone -- ears still ringing, still a knot of pain in the back of my skull -- but the howling has ebbed. Whew. Detox from too many wrong meds? A momentary reprieve? Hoo knows -- for know, this work can wake up from the footers and get back to its peregrination through the seas between my ears.

***

What he (John Ashbery) is trying to do (and here the metaphors get a little screwy, but these are the pictures that come to him) is jump-start a poem by lowering a bucket down into what feels like a kind of underground stream flowing through his mind -- a stream of continuously flowing poetry, or perhaps poetic stuff would be a better way to put it. Whatever the bucket brings up will be his poem. (This image was suggested to him by the Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer, a contemporary of Musil and rather like him.) Since he is always dipping the bucket into the same stream his poems will resemble one another, but because the stream varies according to climactic conditions -- what’s on his mind, the weather, interruptions -- they will also be different.

-- Larissa MacFarquhar, “Present Waking Life: Becoming John Ashbery,” in the Nov. 7 2005 New Yorker

I don’t understand Ashbery’s poetry one whit but I heartily agree with his description of the process ... Postmodern interpretation of the ancient water tongue.

I take more comfort in David Jones’s description of the process, from his preface to his long poem “The Anathemata”:

***

... the particular quarry that the mind of the poet seeks to capture is a very elusive beast indeed. Perhaps we can say that the country to be hautned, the habitat of that quarry, where the "forms" lurk that he’s after, will be found to be of vast, densely wooded, inherited and entailed domains. It is in that "sacred wood" that the spoor of those "forms" is to be tracked. The "specific factor" to be captured will be pungent with the smell of, asperged with the dew of those thickets. The venerator poeta cannot escape that tangled break. It is within such a topography that he will feel forward, from a find to a check, from a check to a view, from a view to a possible kill: in the morning certainty, but also in the lengthening shadows.

Or, to leave analogy and to speak plain: I believe that there is in the principle that forms the poetic art, a something which cannot be disengaged from the mythus, deposits, matiere, ethos, whole res of which the poet is himself the deposit.

***

Yes ... and the process of raising up that gold, hauling up these daily buckets, in a manner that does not destroy the hauler nor infect the wood with the stink of self, that’s the ticket ...


***


Mephistopheles.

Where in this world does not some lack appear?
Here this, there that, but money’s lacking here.
One can not pick it off the floor, that’s sure.
But what lies deepest, wisdom can procure.
In veins of mountains, walls far underground,
Gold coined and uncoined can be found:
And do you ask me who’ll bring it to light?
A man endowed with Mind’s and Nature’s might!

Chancellor.

Nature and Mind -- don’t talk to Christians thus!
Men burn up atheists, fittingly,
Because such speeches are most dangerous.
Nature is sin, and Mind is devil,
They nurture doubt, in doubt they revel,
Their hybrid, monstrous progeny.
That’s not for us! -- Our Emperor’s ancient land
Has seen two castes alone
Who worthily uphold his throne:
The saints and knights. Firm do they stand,
Defying every tempest day by day
And taking church and state in pay.
In rabble minds that breed confusion
Revolt arises like a tide.
Heretics, wizards! Imps of delusion!
They ruin town and countryside,
Them will you now with brazen juggle
Into this lofty circle smuggle,
While in a heart depraved you snuggle.
Fools, wizards, heretics are near allied.

Mephistopheles.

I see the learned man in what you say!
What you don’t touch, for you lies miles away;
What you don’t grasp, is wholly lost to you;
What you don’t reckon, you behave not true;
What you don’t weigh, that has for you no weight;
What you don’t coin, you’re sure is counterfeit.

(4889-4916)


***

“An ancient giant stands in the mountain’s core.
He keeps his shoulders turned toward Damietta,
and looks toward Rome as if it were his mirror.
His head is made of gold; of silverwork
his breast and both his arms, of polished brass
the rest of his great torso to the fork.
He is of chosen iron from there on down,
except that his right foot is terra cotta;
it is the foot he rests more weight upon.
Each part except the gold is split
by a great fissure from which endless tears
drip down and hollow out the mountain’s pit.”


-- Virgil explains the source of all the rivers in Hell to Dante, Inferno 97ff, transl. Ciardi

***

Monday. Woke at 3 a.m. with the clappers of a migraine tolling dully at the base of my skull. Back to work today, who knows how much this beast will enrage and flower, how much of this is just toxic residuals, taking early morning due (yesterday a.m. I had been suffering but the ‘graine eased as the day wore on). I come to this work (at 4:30 a.m. now) somehow erased, voided, the creative dragon not so much muzzled as drowned: So I sit here doing what I do without a lot of high and low harmonies from the Other World. Least, not that I can hear. But then the drone in my ear may be occluding all.

***


Mephistopheles.

The farmer, ploughing furrows with his share,
Turns with the clods a pot of gold;
He seeks saltpetre in a clay wall, and
He finds a golden, golden roll to hold,
Scared and rejoiced, in his own wretched hand.
Who would explore the earth-hid wonder,
What vaultings he must burst asunder,
What dark ways burrow through and under
Near neighboring or the world below!
In cellars vast, prserved of old,
Plates, dishes, beakers too, of gold
He sees displayed there, row on row.
There goblets, made of rubies, stand,
And if he’ll put them to a use,
Beside them is an ancient juice.
Yet -- you’ll belive my master-hand --
The wooden staves are long since rotten,
A cask of tartar has the wine begotten.
Not only gold and jewels rare,
Proud wines of noble essences are there,
Enveiled in horror and in gloom.
The wise seek here without dismay.
A fool can recognize a thing by day;
In darkness mysteries are at home.

-- II, 5008-32

***

Rilke writes in this letter to Emil Baron von Gebsattel on Jan. 14, 1912:


... I know all is not well with me, and you, dear friend, have also observed it -- but, believe me, I am struck by nothing so much as the incomprehensible, incredible wonderfulness of my existence, which from the very beginning was so impossibly disposed, and advanced nevertheless from salvation to salvation, as though always through the hardest stone; so that when i think of no longer writing, practically the only thing that upsetms me is not to have recorded the utterly wonderful line of this life so strangely carried through .... Can you understand, my friend, that I am afraid of disturbing by any classification or survey, be it never so relieving, a much higher order whose right, after all that has happened, I would have to acknoweldge, even if it were to destroy me?

(Transl. Jane Bannard Greene & MD Herter Norton)

***

So soldier on in this bone scriptorium, harrow through, singing every dark and bright name of God ...

***

MATINS

Feb. 2004

3, 4, 5. I got up. Fog like
A fat angel wallowing down,
Dreaming of our errant hearts the
Way amputees dream of ghost hands
Cupping lost breasts. An owl in that
Wash, her hoots a buoy of sound
I row toward in my half hour of
Quiet pressing an ice pack to
My neck and flipping channels
On void TV. Strange matins but the
Angel of migraines bid me nurse
Sour pain with ice and she-curves, the
Sound of fellow pilgrims to
This hour. Add this strange downwards quirk
To the motions I call God’s work.

THE STUPOR

Feb. 2004

Boston


... something of great constancy
But, howsoever, is strange and admirable.
-- Hippolyta on poetry in
"A Midsummer Night's Dream"

5 a.m.: I woke at 3 with the migraine
back, its iron tide fouling my
sleep with sharp rollers piercing the
back of my head. Bum shore to greet
this day. Groaned out of bed to get
on my knees, say prayers, then
wander down the hall to the ice
machine, hoping no one would see me
with my hair everywhere & wearing
these too-short sleep pants &
radiating the frazzled aura of another
short night). Took an Imatrex & settled
back on the bed to flip the dozen channels
on this hotel TV, waiting for the pain
to quell enough so I can get to work here.
Boston twelve stories down is stilled
after yesterday's snow and rain, traffic
at low ebb, only one police siren knifing
the quiet around 3:30 a.m. The hush
of winter sleep perhaps, hibernatorial,
the city demobbed to plush titty beaches
where the sun cauls its dreamers
in wombs of warm light. Not for me.
I'm too tired to start work,but there
isn't much else I can do, ice pack mostly
melted, bad movie on HBO, "Three's
Company" and a half-hour phone sex
commercial for Las Vegas after Dark
(where Hot Girls are Up All Night
dancing to savage saxophones, drink
in one hand, phone in the other,
waiting desperately for me). My wife,
on the other hand, is quite content to
wait for my call til after she's gotten
her sleep, far south in the real Florida,
though she says she misses me greatly,
though she understands well why I’m
far away for this week. So returning
to work here is just starting our day;
and though today's halved by a thousand
long miles, she's still just asleep upstairs
in our room while I fret and fritter here.
And my work here is the same as
at the same hours at home, and is
a fidelity of sorts to our marriage,
carrying on with it because it's who
I've become in this world, and my
poems are part of the work I do, apart
from though next to her, as a beach
is bordered by infinite motions
restrained to a land. Good day in
the booth yesterday, many publishers
and editors stopped by to pick up samples
of the weekly package & the new
TV grid project, stuffing them into
our bright yellow plastic dittybags
with a pair of bright yellow sunglasses
thrown in as a coda. A steady good
flow of interest even though I never
know if any of that will result in a sale.
Over slow patches I yakked with the
vendors around me, a guy selling HR
consulting who loves to ice-fish, another
selling equipment which prints promo
inserts, who talked of keeping his
reputation as a salesman by standing
firm on his principles. We were just
filling time between the next visit
to our booths, chewing the fat, eyeing
the girlie cub reporterettas who
fluttered past, far too young for
any of us and whom we eyed idly
then looked around to see if the others
were looking too. Later in the ebb
of the flow I read from The Poet's Dante
an essay by Charles Williams, who
pointed out that Dante's real experience
of seeing Beatrice was the main engine
of his work to exalt and delve: "In
the Convivio (Dante) says that the
young are subject to a 'stupor' or
astonishment of the mind which falls
on them at the awareness of great
and wonderful things. Such a stupor
produces two results -- a sense of
reverence and a desire to know more.
A noble aw and a noble curiosity come
to life. That is what happened to him at
the sight of the Florentine girl, and all
his work consists, one way or another,
in the increase of that worship and
that knowledge." I paused there, writing
the passage in my Oran's Well notebook,
hot beneath the brilliant lights of my
display with its wild primary colors.
That;s what all this is about: Drinking
my fill of words "till the Thrill is You,"
as the old Roxy anthem hymned in
my veins during those days after
my first love drove off into the
permanent and wild silence. Every
song here shapes her body again
the way it looked when I first pulled
her clothes off: Rhymes with every
foam and crash that washed from our
thresh all the way through me,
drowning God and intellect, even
music, all poetry. It's all been about
singing Eurydice back, though long ago
I came to realize that she can only
return in the singing. Beatrice died
years before Dante wrote his Commedia,
though the whole of it motions a
way back to her. As these thoughts
were playing through my mind, a
publisher walked by and I shut the
books to flip into game mode, Hi
Howeareya Do you buy any features
for your newspaper & Here's what we
offer: Doing my job, speaking from
the mask which provides handsomely
for the love of life a woman long ago
woke in me, and tides still in my wife's
real and earnest and humanly faulted
love of me, a love which doesn't give
a shit for any words I might carve or
plow or row or hoove in invitation to
her. Do you use TV listings, Have you
any need for sports agate or Spanish
language content? All of it, and
yesterday the work was good, lots of
leads, lots of interest in the things
we do. The luck of Hermes and the
deal, perhaps some maturing on my
part -- I did a good job redesigning
the booth, I think -- But then all the
rest of it is the grace of how things
actually go, which I choose to call
the will of God. And so at day's end
(after slogging out in the snow-slushy
sleet to find a bookstore and then
a Thai restaurant to eat alone in
an overheated empty dark basement
with old 70’s rock on the radio), I got
on my knees to give thanks to that God
for all of the day: Its good work both
inside and out; for the day's safe
passage for my loved ones; and then
prayed for those who were as lost as
I was in that inferno of desires which
cannot have an end, having been made
infinite through greed and all the
lacunae of bright emptiness; Be with
the suffering drunk I prayed, then
let it go, and began my way to sleep.
p.s.: Late in the afternoon one of the
vendors said he had a pet theory that
everyone has one thing they always
remember; the trouble is, he said,
is that most people don't know what
that is. He said he remembered every
joke he had heard; his wife remembered
every recipe that she'd cooked. The
Post-It note manufacturer's rep said
he remembered most conversations
word-for-word. For me, I felt like one
of the clueless. What did I recall best?
Not songs, not the words I write down;
names I'm terrible at, and I recall one
out of a hundred jokes I've heard.
As I write these lines at going-on-six,
the only thing that comes to mind is
the nakedness of every woman I've
bedded -- Becky's rich pubic thatch,
Donna's perfectly round ass & that
overbite which was so coated with
my come when she lifted from me
on that lonely stretch of New Smyrna
Beach so many lifetimes ago. (Of
my wife's nakedness I'll lower a
modesty panel here.) Dunno if this
is at all special -- or even most true --
but those hoarded views go way back
in me, and vault in catacombs deeper
than any church or library or buried
skull. To revere the thrill, and know
its deep well: Knowledge roots in
cognere, "to be born," and each page
I stain here with the ink of desire
finds a way back into that blue blue
space I dreamt in arms to long ago --
Far down under here, composing
every tide. Am I love's knight now?
Or wed to its king? Or simply the
motley of its ring in the belfry
in the deep midland of my life?
Dunno, but this long session here
was like permission to a night
of many curved plunges.
Thank you God for this bliss
though it pales to that kiss
in the dark so long ago.




BETWEEN

Jan 2004

Only what is actually loved
and known can be seen
sub specie aeternitati.
-- David Jones

My giant straddles ages
firmaments & dolors.
Between is his one stance,
of well and shore
composed. Compress
in the poem
this Friday morning
and his uncertain
seward gaze.
Both the migraine-
weary stale-coffee-
taste of 5 a.m.
and a tidal angelus
of a vast enacting sleep.
Both the cat in the
window shaped
like a bell or floret
against the cold
dark morning
and the ache in his
balls to hurl
hammers and hooves
on the highest rollers
of salt verse.
Both the missals
no one has seen
for a thousand
years breaking
open in my mind
like fresh bread
and the drawl of
our President telling us
what we want to
hear in that spit-shine
that walks right over
just about everyone.
Both my wife asleep
upstairs beneath
a heavy duvet with
those warm naked
legs I desperately
need to wrap round
these glottals
and the pale wanton
throned under, who
milks my longing
with verbs & verities
& the dark blue velvet
lining of whatever.
It takes a big man
to make tillage of
between, to shire
that shore half-seen,
half-dreamed. To know
I’ll never know more
than this gait instructs.
He seeds these
shorelike ambles
with a welling bliss.
His old steps echo
my next near-miss.
Between my rages,
master, in your blue fork.



MIGRAINE OF SOUL (BILL EVANS)

August 2003

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