Blue Guitar

Twilight on the eve of the winter solstice: the sky filled with death, blood seeping west, heartbreaker blues deepening above into purple. It will be terribly cold tonight. Winds race down from the father’s north like fierce angels. The mountains to the east of town look like tomb guardians as they catch the last splashes of sun, granite bathed red, mute under their vast snow crowns.

In the valley, it’s already dark. The city’s lights glitter in the hard cold air, a lower sea of stars. The moon rises over a river that cuts through a black canyon of stone. The river is only a trickle, since except for the mountains no snow has fallen all winter. Everything’s bone-dry in the subfreezing maul of the wind. Pines bend and whisper: long night, long night.

Duke sits by the heating grate in the house he sleeps in and his band practices at. A quart of beer nestles between his legs. He riffs stiff arpeggios on his Strat, trying to work some life into his cold fingers. The guitar is midnight blue and in mint condition. When Duke holds his guitar he feels somehow safe from the cold that invades every precinct of his heart.
A pickup truck pulls up outside, followed the screech of a ‘52 Chevy skidding to a stop. Duke’s door flies open, blasting away the room’s warmth. Paco and Vincent stomp in carrying guitar cases, followed by drum devil Meatball, two sticks poking out the rear pocket of his jeans.

“Fucking cold,” says Paco, stashing beer in the fridge. A transplant from California, Paco like Duke will never acclime to the winter.

“Fucking bitch,” Vincent adds. His girlfriend took off with his car last night with two guys who came over to look at one of Vincent’s guitars and hasn’t called. He stoically pulls out pipe and dope.

“Fucking JOB!” Meatball bellows, kicking over a chair. Paco and Vincent roar back their agreement and give other furniture equally vitriolic kicks. It’s a miracle they ever have anything to sit on.

Duke remains next to the heat vent, nestling closer, trying to believe there will ever be enough heat to warm him. “Fucking fuckoids,” he mutters.

But everyone’s in a good mood, as good as ever: pissed, and hungry for pillage. Tonight they’ll run through the second set, drinkabuncha beers, check out a party way out in the valley.

It’s cold in the basement as they set up. Worse, they haven’t practiced for three days. They launch into the set sounding like an epileptic ‘Vette, sputtering, coughing then dying in a cacophonous saw into silence.

“Motherfuck.” Meatball glares axe death at Paco, who’s flubbed the middle eight of “Murder in Disguise” on bass.

They go on. Vincent forgets the lyrics to “Sin City” and Duke breaks a string during his solo on “The Thrill of it All”. “Shit!” Meatball fumes. “Why did I ever exchange the New Barbarians for this toilet of garageholes?” No matter that little incident of arson that immolated the Barbarians’ tour van. Meatball may be a felon, but what a drummer. He warms up this way, limbering up along a rising gradient of fury.

They crack open beers, pass a joint, curse the winter’s grip on everything. For Duke, moments like these are like when a woman holds him too long. The bare ceiling light gives everyone massive brows and dark eye sockets.

Volume in check, they start again. They go slow and measured. Duke fidgets endlessly with controls on his amp and guitar. Meatball inches a highhat closer, hawks spit into a corner. Vincent’s mouth sets, coolly cruel. They’re all getting set, closing their eyes. Aiming.

Two songs, three, then they find it, the whitewaters of the Conduit. Meatball smiles, ferally, and nods to the band. Time to hit it, boys, pedal to the metal and balls to the walls: and Paco sings,

God and Devil dancing
loving the spoor of our eyes
Day and night romancing
beneath the roof of the sky
We love a deadly wonder
and hide beneath love’s cover
With a dagger on our lips

Living in the rip

And the room isn’t cold anymore and they aren’t a bunch of dickheads working shit jobs who can barely afford payments on all this fucking equipment;

Tearin it up
Living in the rip

Duke swings his guitar like a scythe, cutting in broad angelic sweeps everything that doesn’t count or is too hard to work for or can’t be easily found, oh terrible blue bladed wind, and suddenly the band is home now, plugged in, spring’s river pounding blood in their hearts, everyone struggling to stay loose and cool in a typhoon:

The hourglass is empty
The shutters have all blown away
The moon has filled our eyes
It’s time we made our way
We love a deadly wonder
And howl beneath its thunder
With a dagger between our hips

Livin in the rip

Last song of the set, anthem time, Meatball thrashing his kit, Paco staying with him on bass, Vincent and Duke trading solos,

Livin in the rip
Tearin it up
Livin in the rip
Livin it up

and Duke finds it in those final bars of that last song, while they hold the last chord and choke the sweet motherfucking jesus out of it, while plaster dust falls from of the ceiling and beer bottles dance like crazed elves on their amps,

Tearin it up
Beggars at the cup

he finds it in the floodwaters drowning his desert heart with a pure fury, finds a homecoming for the lost child, roaring into the blue robes of the Madonna, Queen of Heavenly Night,

Livin in the rip.

. . .

It’s around ten-thirty when they leave for the party. Duke rides out with Paco. They pass a joint, take some speed known as Blue Fire, pick up a sixpack to hold them over.

Duke watches black fields of wheat and remembers a dream: he’s walking on the moon, a far isolated zone with a terrible cold he can’t feel. He’s naked and painted blue like a Pict. Dark black birds circle above. It seems they’re bizarre entropies of human beings, vulturous, envious of Duke’s tender flesh. At the end of the dream, Duke recognizes on the birds the faces of Meatball, Vincent and Paco.

Paco speedbabbles as he drives: “So it’s just another night with the squeezaroo, the Prima Donna, but tonight see she’s got on these red lace garters, something I have the fondest affection for you know, ever since high school when I played in the church band and Elaine Quiggen’s blouse snapped open during her sax solo and I got a tour of black lace Tetons...” Paco’s feasting at this verbal smorgasbord, gobbling any thought that rises. “Anyway how’dya like them new bass strings they’re called Ground Rounds, real fat and meaty sound huh...Did I tell ya the union organizers were by the plant again today? Said we were being strapped over a barrel and raped! Like to try that with Prima Donna sometime...Hey, check out these sneakers, black with red laces, whadda cool stage look...Oh yeah, Prima Donna’s got a new roommate, this darkhaired bitch named Lilith, sez she’s a witch, she’s got chicken blood in the fridge and a goddam bullwhip, no shit.”

Duke watches his breath steam. “This is the death of the year,” he says, almost too softly. His hands are jammed in his leather jacket but he feels no cold. “If only I could always be here, forever Heading Out on the final night of the year, numb except for this red blade of hunger to razor the blue.”

Paco looks over, pained. “Get a grip, willya. Pass me a beer.” Duke’s always pulling this wierdo shit.

Paco’s off again as Duke rummages in a bag, pulls out two cans. They crack open in wet spouts. Duke pulls hard on his. “Here’s blood in your eyes,” he says to the moon.

. . .

The house is a ways out from town, alone at the end of several miles of dirt road and scrubrush. Cars jam everywhere, Godzilla teeth. Paco and Duke hear the band playing a quarter of a mile away. The house wobbles with inner frenzy. It’s door is a dark mouth that sucks them into mayhem. Inside, all the furniture is jammed against a wall and a vicious mess writhes, jerks, downs, catcalls, drags, hollers in murky, almost viscous light. Duke is terrified: proximities kill. He recognizes the band, friends of his, jamming to a bunch of old Stones tunes. A conga line of revenants have just paraded onto the stage wearing multicolored panties on their heads.

“Have you seen Meatball and Vincent yet?” Paco screams at the host, some guy in flight jacket, aviator’s glasses and black silk scarf, clutching a quarter-full bottle of Jack Daniels.

He hands Duke the bottle. “They’re out in the kitchen, I think.” Duke takes a slug of whiskey, sighs. When Meatball and Vincent head for the kitchen that means chicken with switchblades and lupine assaults on everything and everybody edible. Duke knows already they won’t be invited back.

“Beer!” Paco screams.

“Out in back,” the host hollers, turning away to follow three very drunk, giggling women, triplets, all in blue silk dresses and red stiletto heels.

A wall of party hyena flesh separates Paco and Duke from beer. Paco charges, cutting through the crowd like the prow of a ship. Duke follows, head down, trying not to be seen, trying not to notice.

But Duke’s eye strays, and he sees her close to the kegs: leaning towards another woman, trying to listen, smoking a cigarette. He knows he’s never seen her before, but some recognition shouts within. Blonde hair in curls, pale freckled skin, blue eyes, tall and wearing a denim jacket and miniskirt. Her eyes are half-closed, winnowing through the crowd like channels on cable tv. She looks by him, then returns in lazy focus. She smiles faintly. At that moment Duke wants to die more than he wants her.

The harder he presses toward her, the more tightly bodies knot the distance. She remains still, in freezeframe, looking at him with that slightest smile. He tries to get past the last person separating them, some asshole who’s recognized him and wants the girl he’s trying to pick up know that he’s a friend of the band, when Duke hears his name shouted over the p.a. where are ya Duke, c’mon give us a song. He turns to figure out what the fuck, and when he turns back, desperation hammering in him amid the harsh cacophony of cheers, he sees the woman walk away into blue veils of smoke.
. . .

They launch into their set, a bit sloppy from their collective buzz and unfamiliar instruments. But the crowd is a mean surf: their dark hunger pumps into the band like shotgun kisses.

Soon all is abandoned to the sheer violence of the song. The animals Vincent, Meatball and Paco find their anger’s zenith onstage: they erupt, go mad, flail, wail, rage, horsecock the crowd. And oh how the crowd widens to it, leads with the chin, begging for the pure parabola of the knockout punch.

But Duke’s heart pelts in its cage, trapped by the attention of the crowd, a pretty puer with long blonde curls, puppeting their desire with a cherry-red Flying V guitar. He feels terribly exposed up here, yet he too delights, if in the absolute terror of it. The front row jailbait scream for him - they’d probably tear him apart if they could get their maenad’s fingernails into him - for the pretty poppy of hair, the blonde hovel of Eros. Duke smiles sweetly. He knows the stage is both his only defense and personal guillotine. He shakes serenely to the violent grinding that towers around him.

. . .

The last chord crashes down, and with it tumbles a stack of Marshall amps; then the drum kit splinters in every direction. Duke’s outraged ex-friends storm onstage to humbug with Vincent and Meatball. Paco dives, swan-style, into the audience, mike still in hand, his cup of beer splashing a glittering amber trail into twenty gape-mouthed faces of crowd. Soon fights break out everywhere.

Duke crouches behind the stage with a beer, ducking a cymbal whistling overhead. Oddjob’s high-hat. The room is a frenzy of howls, shattering glass, breaking furniture, girlish shrieks. Beer and blood pools into glistening eddies on the floor. Duke watches it all quietly, fascinated with the savage ballet of things falling apart.
. . .

It’s 3 a.m. and Duke smokes a cigarette in a bed not his own. Blankets heap everywhere. Sweat dries on his chest, horizontal passions of bed layered on vertical paroxysms of stage. Candlelight flickers on the far wall. A radio on a nearby bedstand plays stuff you never hear during the day, songs for the far at sea. Flotsam of passage litter the room: cocaine dust in a hand mirror, beer cans jumbled like failed depth charges on the floor. Duke’s been up since six in the morning, beyond weary yet further from sleep.

“It isn’t like I meant to run away,” Duke whispers, blowing blue smoke rings into the gloom, “it just happened, I woke up three thousand miles away with an empty suitcase and blue guitar. The summer had passed and autumn meant too much alcohol at night and colder mornings, the rot and rout of the year, wind in the pines sounding like a oboes or a woman moaning alone in a room.” Turning on his side, Duke stares out a window where moonlight bathes the pines in cyanotic, arch sadness. “I looked for the river but it had dried up, the spring runoff had long boiled to sea, virgin greens yellowed and cankered, the rock and roll bars were empty, no connection formed a smile, nothing to suffer waste and boredom with but a blue guitar and these harbors...”

A toilet flushes, the bedroom door opens. The woman is lit from behind by the bathroom light. She pauses there, shadow cupping breast and belly, one hand on the door, the other running through a tangle of curls that falls over half her face. Nineteen, twenty? Duke’s getting old for this shit.

He knows it’s just his intoxication and the tricky light, but water seems to be flowing silently over her feet. Crystal heartbreaking blue water. He can hardly see her but she looks so familiar! Maybe a song he wrote once, when he believed. She walks toward him like the river once in him, dangerous, smiling, surging.

Duke can’t think of any real words to say to her. She smiles, nestles into him, his hand works through her curls. Moonlight sings in the window. Soon the bed rocks gently, a boat on deepest night.
. . .

The girl sleeps, unaware Duke walks home. It is nearing dawn and bitterly cold. Close to zero. The moon has set behind a western ridge. Stars burn, preternaturally bright. Duke’s walked a couple miles already and has a ways yet to go. His blue suede boots beat a tattoo on the sidewalk.

These neighborhoods tell him nothing he wants to know: windows black, dead hulks sleeping dutifully, wholly mortgaged to the day. Families live in these split-levels and white clapboards, husbands and wives, parents with children, television-watchers, people who own cars, pay bills and make monthly savings deposits. Duke walks spectrally through these streets, breath-mist tearing from him, disturbing the dreams of dogs.

His steps, lighter than air, carry him the only way he knows how to go: away.

. . .

Duke doesn’t know why, but he finds himself turning down streets not his own. Soon he’s standing at the door of Prima Donna’s apartment. He knows Prima Donna’s not there, since Paco likes to postgig in a huge, heart-shaped bathtub filled with bubble bath in the basement of his house.

It must be 5 a.m. The door opens a crack. Dark eyes peer at Duke. “What the fuck you want.”

“Don’t know. Cold. This winter’s killing me.”

“So why don’t you go play your silly rock and roll songs till you get warm, or fucked, or fucked up.”

“Doesn’t work. Need more.”

“Ha. Who doesn’t.”

“Please.” Duke looks pale and old.

Lilith pauses. “Another fucking mendicant,” she sighs, unhitching the chain.

Duke follows Lilith into her dark apartment. After his walk, it’s warm as a womb. Candles light the hall. She floats ahead of him, wearing a blue robe, not that cheap velour but real velvet, with a dark satin collar. The rich robe slides sinuously over her body, gathering in dark folds. Black hair falls heavily down her back. More candles flicker in the living room, where there’s a couple of chairs, a coffee table on which sits a pentagram of votive candles, and along a wall a fireplace where a log burns deliciously. Duke hurries over to bathe his legs and chest in firelight.

“Tonight is the winter solstice,” she says, rummaging through a wooden box sitting on one of the chairs. “Not one of our High Sabbats, but important for you men. In the old days, the King of the Waning Year finished off his half-year term tethered to an oak altar on the night of the winter solstice. He was hacked to pieces by twelve merry men who drank his blood and scattered the rest to fructify the land. They packed his head and genitals on a boat to float the underworld river. Six months later, at the summer solstice, he was reborn at the ritual murder of the Waxing Year king. The eternal round, two sons warring for the favor of the Goddess.” She says this in a practiced, almost disinterested monotone. “Much harder to find kings in those days.” Wind whistles around eaves of the building.

“I want to be king,” Duke whispers. He’s taken off his jacket and shirt, dropped them in an abandoned heap next to the flames. Waits, shivering.

“Lovely fool,” Lilith smiles, so faintly, holding her bullwhip. “You aren’t alone, really. Others have come tonight. Donna sure gets around.”

Duke places his hands on the mantle. He sees her in a mirror: Lilith’s robe has opened and she’s naked, her flesh a shocking white in the dark blue folds of the robe. The bullwhip coils black and tense in one hand.

A flush rises to Lilith’s face and chest. “You will have your dark mother’s kisses. I will paint pretty flowers on your perfect flesh. Here is your Grail at last.” Lilith’s eyes are huge, like an owl’s, and gleam firelight. She smiles, so full of lust, her teeth dazzling.

Duke sobs quietly, his gratitude leaping into the mothernight with each strike of the snake.
. . .

Duke watches the paling east as he limps final blocks. Can he truly be coming home? He winces in his shirt of flame, beyond exhaustion, beyond drunkenness. Beyond. Is dawn truly a door? His breath is jagged. Blood has frozen on curls of his hair.

A bare light bulb burns in the window of his house. Duke walks in his door to find a catastrophe: those intrepid partiers Paco, Vincent and Meatball have trashed the place. Fridge on its side, spaghetti leftovers spattered on the wall, beer cans thrown everywhere. A record plays the same three words over and over and over and over and. Chairs legs splay helplessly, like toppled cockroaches. And on the floor is an amazing loam of stuff, broken potato chips, ebony shards of jazz records, shattered pint-bottles of vodka and bourbon, a deck of pornographic playing cards scattered in fifty-two positions, baggies with only seeds and stems left, a torn Polaroid of those two Idaho cowgirls the band rode herd on last summer, a mutilated sneaker (Paco’s, stuffed with what Duke hopes is bean dip), guitar picks, crusts of pizza, a flat tire (off Meatball’s Chevy) and the entire contents of Duke’s underwear drawer laid over the mess to spell “S.O.S.” In the bathroom someone has written “Dukie till ya Pukie” in lipstick on the mirror. There’s vomit all over the toilet.

Amazingly, Duke finds a beer in the toppled fridge. It’s covered with a red Day-Glo condom. Duke grabs it by the condom. His guitar is tied by a brassiere to the ceiling lamp. Duke turns off the light, frees his guitar, carries beer and guitar over to the heat grate.

Duke sits slowly, heavily. He kicks the clutter away to form a rough semicircle around him. He feels nothing rising through the heat grate. Duke holds his guitar, runs his fingers over the worn frets. Sweat has dried on the dark blue finish. His fingers are blue, too, frostbitten maybe.

But it doesn’t matter. He watches the room fill with pale blue light, like water, washing away the night’s putrefaction. How beautiful, he wonders, how noble. The sun will soon arrive to shatter the dream, but no matter: only now counts, that final beer, holding his blue guitar so lightly and playing so soulfully with fingers no longer capable of error, his heart purged of the longing at last, a dying ember in the rigor of blue.

(1993)

Sub- Sub- Sub-Arctic Hysterics

The last investigator to favor explaining shamanism by arctic hysteria, A. Ohlmarks, is even led to distinguish between an Arctic and a sub-Arctic shamanism, according to degrees of neuropathy exhibited by their representatives. In his view, shamanism was an originally exclusively Arctic phenomenon, due in the first place ot the influence of the cosmic milieu in the polar regions. The extreme cold, the long nights, the desert solitude, the lack of vitamins, etc., influenced the nervous constitution of the Arctic peoples, giving rise to mental illnesses ... or to the shamanic trance. The only difference between a shaman and an epileptic is that the latter cannot deliberately enter into trance. In the Arctic the shamanic ecstasy is a spontaneous and organic phenomenon and it is only in this zone that one can properly speak of a “great shamanizing”; that is, of the ceremony that ends with a real cataleptic trance, during which the soul is supposed to have left the body and to be journeying in the sky or the underworld. but in the sub-Arctic the shaman, no longer the victim of cosmic oppression, does not spontaneously obtain a real trance and is obliged to induce a semitrance with the help of narcotics to mime the journey of the soul in dramatic form.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 24


ORAN’S VOYAGE TO THE NORTH

(From Iona, Fiona McCleod(William Sharp), London: William Heinemann, 1912)


It is commonly said that the People of the Sìdhe dwell within the hills, or in the underworld. In some of the isles their home, now, is spoken of as Tir-na-thonn, the Land of the Wave, or Tir-fo-Tuinn, the Land under the Sea.

But from a friend, an Islander of Iona, I have learned many things, and among them, that the Shee no longer dwell within the inland hills, and that though many of them inhabit the lonelier isles of the west, and in particular The Seven Hunters, their Kingdom is in the North.

Some say it is among the pathless mountains of Iceland. But my friend spoke to an Iceland man, and he said he had never seen them. There were Secret People there, but not the Gaelic Sìdhe.

Their Kingdom is in the North, under the Fir-Chlisneach, the Dancing Men, as the Hebrideans call the polar aurora. They are always young there. Their bodies are white as the wild swan, their hair yellow as honey, their eyes blue as ice. Their feet leave no mark on the snow. The women are white as milk, with eyes like sloes, and lips like red rowans. They fight with shadows, and are glad; but the shadows are not shadows to them. The Shee slay great numbers at the full moon, but never hunt on moonless nights, or at the rising of the moon, or when the dew is falling. Their lances are made of reeds that glitter like shafts of ice, and it is ill for a mortal to find one of these lances, for it is tipped with the salt of a wave that no living thing has touched, neither the wailing mew nor the finned sgAdan nor his tribe, nor the narwhal. There are no men of the human clans there, and no shores, and the tides are forbidden.

Long ago one of the monks of Columba sailed there. He sailed for thrice seven days till he lost the rocks of the north; and for thrice thirty days, till Iceland in the south was like a small bluebell in a great grey plain; and for thrice three years among bergs. For the first three years the finned things of the sea brought him food; for the second three years he knew the kindness of the creatures of the air; in the last three years angels fed him. He lived among the Sidhe for three hundred years. When he came back to Iona, he was asked where he had been all that long night since evensong to matins. The monks had sought him everywhere, and at dawn had found him lying in the hollow of the long wave that washes Iona on the north. He laughed at that, and said he had been on the tops of the billows for nine years and three months and twenty-one days, and for three hundred years had lived among a deathless people. He had drunk sweet ale every day, and every day had known love among flowers and green bushes, and at dusk had sung old beautiful forgotten songs, and with star-flame had lit strange fires, and at the full of the moon had gone forth laughing to slay. It was heaven, there, under the Lights of the North. When he was asked how that people might be known, he said that away from there they had a cold, cold hand, a cold, still voice, and cold ice-blue eyes. They had four cities at the four ends of the green diamond that is the world. That in the north was made of earth; that in the east, of air; that in the south, of fire; that in the west, of water. In the middle of the green diamond that is the world is the Glen of Precious Stones. It is in the shape of a heart, and glows like a ruby, though all stones and gems are there. It is there the Sìdhe go to refresh their deathless life.

The holy monks said that this kingdom was certainly Ifurin, the Gaelic Hell. So they put their comrade alive in a grave in the sand, and stamped the sand down upon his head, and sang hymns so that mayhap even yet his soul might be saved, or, at least, that when he went back to that place he might remember other songs than those sung by the milk-white women with eyes like sloes and lips red as rowans. “Tell that honey-mouthed cruel people they are in Hell,” said the abbot, and give them my ban and my curse unless they will cease laughing and loving sinfully and slaying with bright lances, and will come out of their secret places and be baptized.”

They have not yet come.

This adventurer of the dreaming mind is another Oran, that fabulous Oran of whom the later Columban legends tell. I think that other Orans go out, even yet, to the Country of the Sidhe. But few come again. It must be hard to find that glen at the heart of the green diamond that is the world; but, when found, harder to return by the way one came.

***

THE VODKA STEPPES

Nov. 18, 2005

Hitting bottom was not the worst of it.
Living in unfathomed nights was close.
It was when time itself bottomed out
in abyssal cold that I was ready at last
to compass my heart there, allowing
me at last a bead on what had to go
and enough soul-sickness to be
willing to bleed the antifreeze.
There is a music to such hopeless
doom, wistful and ethereal,
the sound of ice cubes choring blues
in empty glasses; it sings wild and
high outside the bars at 2 a.m.
and whistles in the dogs of winter
to tear your face apart and glut on
down to what remains of what you
once called a heart. I moved to
Florida to flee those wolves, but
they just followed me inside the
frozen tundra of my thirst. A full
moon in November is hard blue
in any sky, sealing palm fronds
in ice just as surely as the masts
of ice-bound whalers. The bottom
of it all was when the glacier of my
heart cracked the whole continent,
revealing the worst of what’s below,
an empty sea of utter dark where
no imps or angels go, so bereft of
human sense. It was 3 a.m. on a
January night in 1985, and I
was driving home drunk some
rock club in Kissimmee watching
others fly where I fell and fell,
my rock dreams nightmarish in
the lock of vodka tonics. It was
the twelfth night in a row that
I had drunk that way to blackout,
commiserating with my misery
over a love I’d lost for good now
months and months ago. Winds
mauled the windshield of my car,
savage crests surged from the
prow of an Edmonton Clipper
cold front which was hard-freezing
orange groves as I drove toward
the room in a friend’s dad’s house
which was all I could call home.
Van Halen on the radio playing
summery hard-rock dreams
in the depths of that immortally
cold night as I drove on and on,
the lane-stripes multiplying
at the borders of the worlds,
everything narrowing to a drone.
I rolled down my car windows
desperate to stay awake, cold
howling through them & tearing
at my face. That night I drank
the nadir or it at last swilled me
and I became the belly of the whale,
the ice in every empty glass which
will never melt, no matter how
much you pour and pour.
Having run for years from the
North Wind’s mad necessity
I became at last it’s door,
ready at last to begin to roar.





TRIPTYCH: THE LOST SON

1988

I. At The Father's House

What air he could not breathe:
the shoes he would not wear:
father chases son into the wild,
shouting his name, his voice
blurred with Scotch.
He who once spoke so well with the father
turns mute, a son swinging his
scythe in the field,
wholly a rhythm, only a motion,
a whistling bladed thing
wounding the noontime sun.

II. Prince of Solstice

Far down the year's descent
the western valley darkens.
Black hills muscle in.
The sun dies on the high spires
of firs lined on the ridge.
Then the eye closes.

I bleed too far west,
too deep in the north,
too late in the year,
a terror too pure for ambition,
too deaf to any but
the most brutal percussions.
I am the son of a greater loss.

The night turns colder, colder still.
Horsecock winds batter a tumbleweed
over empty frozen streets.
I stand out on a bridge.
The river trickles
through a black canyon of ice.

Tonight, all the river's absence is mine.
No one is out. Fierce stars burn now
in the sky, preternaturally bright,
old souls psalming in the evernight.
I walk off the bridge into the park,
empty river to empty esplanade.
Freezing winds slice my face.
Lamplight peers into the night sea.

A victim of ennui, I walk.
Captive between rage and lust, I walk.
Sidewalks into ice arcades of night,
Steps slipping on faces of glass,
Jaws of the whale where streets disappear,
I walk.

The Prince of Solstice hugs his jacket tight.
This will be a very, very long night.




THE STANDOFF

(A photo in the paper -
a man in a doorway holds a gun
to his head with one hand, in the other a beer;
two police face him behind a shield)

I stand at the door, half-in, half-out,
the winter morning jagged and cold
like the snout of this .38 jammed in my ear.
This beer’s cold too, each swig
falls slow and mean like Harlem sleet.
But my trigger finger’s colder. Frozen.

Funny, how my defeat arrests the street:
the two cops cowering behind their shield,
squad cars phalanxed on the sidewalk,
radios squawking, lights strobing bluered bluered,
sunglasses and shotguns glittering
like broken glass in the hard morning sun,
beyond them camera crews edging closer
with the crowd, fighting for a gape at my splatter.
Bored paramedics smoke by the ambulance.

The shield before me talks like a TV daddy,
muffled, asking me about my sons, my wife,
but the dull plate looks like my old man,
a shadow in steel that can’t be
shattered like a heart by my rage.
Drunk father, dark father, take no prisoners, rage.
How long? An hour, two? It isn’t up to me.
I just stand here, letting
deathrap sing in my blood. It keeps getting
louder, louder, then stops. Silence.
A wind off the lake sweeps in, it
swirls litter up in frail funnels,
then a backfiring truck startles the crowd:

and it’s happening, my wife screams Do It, Fucker,
cameras click and whirl like startled pigeons,
the guys behind the shield cower holy Jesus,
and blood erupts in the stone of my finger,
screaming nothing’s getting in, man
I take no prisoners

I squeeze my eyes shut and shut and shut and




MY FATHER’S CHAPEL

1992

In a black-and-white photograph
my father stands before his chapel.
His face is set hard and grey
like the standing stone he rests a hand on.
The sky behind is troubled.

This is my altar to him.

My father’s chapel is hidden in the woods,
assembled from stone rows that grew from
generations of field-clearing.
Inside the chapel it is damp, dark, cool,
a descent into old regions of the world.

A quartz-veined, granite boulder
ten feet round fills the center of the chapel.
It is a heart forged in brimstone and eternal cold.
It was in my father for years before he dug it up.

My father says he is a steward of ancient spirits
he calls The Guardians. He met their chief at Iona:
Thor, the black blasted warrior of the Hebridean wind,
How my father’s heart burst with love for him. . .

One winter solstice, my father’s chapel
was bitterly cold. Frail candles flickered in
the windows, sad winds bent the bones
of trees. The death of the year.

My father and I sang together that solstice night,
our voices deepened by the resonance
of stone walls. We sang a plainchant of loss
and of infant hope. That was the dream of my father,
That is the shadow of my heart.

Tonight, on this winter solstice, I raise my
voice in song to my father’s bitter sea
that blusters deep in the conch of my ear,
a song forever trapped in the chapel of these bones.




THE ICEBERG

2000

A dark room
brushed the
faintest blue
by a full moon
far to the west,
revealing only
what’s outermost.
Like the delicate
ridges and rills
of an iceburg
floating silent
and serene
in a blackened
sea, a pale semaphore
of what hauls so
massively below
in my dream of
death, or you.


MARTINI SONG

2001


A cold clear vodka martini
widens a soft envelope
against walking or waking.

It suffices when the ex-wife
can hardly speak to you
and Republicans rule.

When no poem I write
blossoms, much less
bears any sugar in its fruit.

Another one, bartender,
while I stand here as usual
not speaking or moving at all,

a blonde pillar in black
bereft of all but this
cold fire, this one bed.

Who would want such a
poppy grown from nothing?
What compost would not

fail to turn over this half-moon,
twice-tomb? And yet bone music
drowses and dreams here,

song enough, when there’s
little else I would be about,
when there’s no other heat

in the room. Oh how
wickedly sweet this booze
on a night so bottomless.




MANGER SCENE II


Up he rises from the dumpster
Behind the Pink Pussycat, the
Full receipt of every lost and
Forlorn ache which you deigned not
To receive. Amid the empty
Buds and butts and vomit-
Smelling rags he’s the crown prince,
Mewling (OK, groaning) as
Any babe would arising from
Such death. Well, he and I begin
Here, amid Her sordid trash.
The sour light proclaims a cracked and
Bleeding dawn -- poor afterbirth
Indeed though the psalm proclaim
New motion where old salt was lain.



HOMELESS FOR CHRISTMAS

2001

There were plenty
of homeless guys
walking the downtown
streets on Christmas Day,
a trudge of coats
and shabby boots and
faces turned in from
cold rain — fellas
who couldn’t hold on
as they fell through us,
addicted, insane,
criminally resentful,
down on their
fickle and fruitless luck,
cut loose from all they
couldn’t work for.
One crossed in
front of my car
(slow wipers, bluesy
Christmas jazz,
heater warm at my knees)
as I headed home
like a dark dream
exposed to cold light,
his eyes holding mine
for just one moment,
providing a chill sounding
from a deeper bottom of things
and a reminder that
there’s a place reserved
for me down and out there,
no matter how yesterday went.




NEKYIA

2003

Without a prayer,
these falls are cruel;
without ritual wraps,
the cold is killingly
dark, stripping and
flaying the coracle
of my ass like
the houndage of Hell.
I’ve found it dangerous
to sail sans pen and
book, drowning down
a bottles neck in search
not of dark truths
but their uteral burn,
their cold fire. What’s
an addict but a monk
whose tossed his book
to the sea, babbling
a blue inpropriety?
The chaos sings to
of a killing plunge,
of upturned asses on
sheets of blue stain,
of dreamlike hellbent
furrows past God,
past love, past this
noisy, chilblained
chainage to life.
No more of that
black winging for me --
Now I dip my feathers
here at the same
predawn hour, the
cat always in the window
the dark soaking
into this page,
exhuming all I
wish I could say
but can’t, though I must.
Maybe its just lack of
balls that rivets me here
on the chalice dipping
the Well, hauling up
waters cold as hell
for your thirst, absent
reader, beloved I’ll
never truly see: But
at least I know that
now, and trade the
old jackal jaw gildings
for this singing geldage.
My questing for
real grails always left
me bankrupt & on
the iron ledge of the
tallest bridge with only
one word left--leap.
None of that here folks,
no sirree; just dutiful
descriptions of what
it feels like stepping
out onto the feathers
of the wind soaring
up at me, angels of
that hard north wind
where all the devils
go, buckets of banshee
riot jissomed up from
the Well which allows
me today another story
to tell of one more
harrowing of a
common and fructive
and nougating hell.



COLD SONG

This song is hauled up from a cold well
Nearby — Oran’s, I sense, though
His skull is just the topmost phosphor
In the darkened flow. From this chair
In sleepy Florida I taste
The salt of Hebrides — brutal,
Male, like iron on the tongue, wild
As the orca-rollers which smash
The Orkney coast. I tried this sea-
Chantey strapped to a guitar, but
The roar would not be amped or staged
or spermed in nereid blue. All
that puerile wattage drowned the song.
I threw my guitar down a well.
Oran sings from that falling shell.

Quest

The office of medicine man is not hereditary
among a considerable number of primitive
peoples ... This means that all over the world
magico-religious powers are held to be
obtainable either spontaneously (sickness,
dream, chance encounter with a source of
“power,” etc.) or deliberately (quest).

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy, 22

When Minos, judge of souls in Dante’s
Inferno, warns Virgil and Dante
about entering Hell, Virgil replies,

... “That is not your concern
It is his fate to enter every door.
(Inferno, V 21-2, transl. Ciardi)

***

For half of my life the quest flowed
underground, its ends unknown
to me, its means so upside-down,
the way a fool inverts a king’s gold
crown into a potty of mired sounds.
Untimely ripped from my parents’
God, I salvaged those tossed angels
as best I could, plundering every bed
from which it seemed they’d fled,
like a blue moon falling on blood-western
waves. For years the quest was what I
failed to wing, a magnitude I was too
busy barreling down to utter, much
less for more than one night sustain
But when I’d had enough of what
I never could quite find enough,
the quest appeared in opened books,
in that thirst which slaked in
reading them, each book an isle
of sufficient blue to praise new
Gods with freshened lips. In surfacing
the quest exchanged one lucre for
a next, the clout of former nights
smelt down to unfiltered umbrage
which hums low a wild humility,
the sense of who rules what below
and how little my shape counts in
the swirl of years I’m lent. The quest
topside has woven my days into
a productive, fertile loom,
jaunting across and down the inside
pages of a life which I can only
seam, my voice astride the power
chords of dragons far below
the range of human throats,
beings no moat or ramparts will
ever full challenge, much less name.
That quest I daily name as if a shore,
and, thus hallowed, free its keel
once more to harrow what it once revelled,
crossing oceans whose marge I am.
Who knows just what I’ll say
tomorrow, what strange sooth
will brogue my tongue with salt?
For years the quest rode me
underground on swells of big-night
sound: For more years now I’ve
saddled Uffington with verbs
to gallop back across those
ancient mating grounds,
singing here all that I found.
And this I suspect is just two
thirds of it, the quest I mean:
just what wings will grow
from the last lines of these poems
some night I’ll drown and dream.




THE SECRETS OF THE SEA

— Lady Gregory, A Book of Saints and Wonders, 1906, Chapter 5: “Great Wonders of the Olden Time”

There are three waters of the sea now around the world, The first of them is a seven-shaped sea under the belly of the world, and against that sea hell is roaring and raising up a shout in die valley. The second is a sea green and bright round about the earth on every side; ebbing and flood it has and casting up of fruits. The third sea is a sea aflame, nine winds are let out of the heavens to call it from its sleep; three score and ten and four hundred songs its eaves sing, and it awakened; a noise of thunder comes roaring out of its wave-voice; flooding and ever flooding it is from the beginning of the world, and with all that it is never full but of a Sunday. In its sleep it is till the thunders of the winds are awakened by the coming of God’s Sunday from heaven, and by the music of the angels. Along with those there are many kinds of seas around the earth on every side; a red sea having many precious stones, bright as Flood, well coloured, golden, between the lands of Egypt and the lands of India. A sea bright, many-sanded, of the colour of snow, in the north around the islands of Sabarn. So great is the strength of its waves that they break and scatter to the height of the clouds. Then a sea waveless, black as a beetle; no ship reaching it has escaped from it again but one boat only by the lightness of its going and the strength of its sails; shoals of beasts there are lying in that sea. A sea there is in the ocean to the south of the island of Ebian. At the first of the summer it rises in flood till it ebbs at the coming of winter; half the year it is in flood it is, and half the year always ebbing. Its beasts and its monsters mourn at the time of its ebbing and they fall into sadness and sleep. They awake and welcome its flooding, and the wells and the streams of the world increase; going and coming again they are through its valleys.



THE SINGERS CHANGE,
THE MUSIC GOES ON

Linda Gregg

No one really dies in the myths.
No world is lost in the stories.
Everything is lost in the retelling,
in being wondered at. We grow up
and grow old in our land of grass
and blood moons, birth and goneness.
A place of absolutes. Of returning.
We live our myth in the recurrence,
pretending we will return another day.
Like this morning coming every morning.
The truth is we come back as a choir.
Otherwise Eurydice would be forever
in the dark. Our singing brings her
back. Our dying keeps her alive.

- from The Best American Poetry 2001,
orig. published in AGNI


UFFINGTON HORSE

2003

The locals say I am the beast
St. George slew, his white sword nailing
My heart to this hill. Well, time weaves
Tales around the hearts of men, but
I am no altar to the need
To kill the winged insides of
Every kiss. Recall how kings of
Old were taken up the hill to
Mount a pure white mare, his flesh in
Hers turned sceptre beneath the white
Applause of stars. I Rhiannon
Ride this high ground like the crest of
The ninth wave. My saddle is a
High hard throne -- mount me, if you dare.
Plunge your song in salt everywhere.





BADASS ANGELS

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 1999

Summer 1983:
What music we
made in that
tiny hot room
on acoustic
guitars was
combustible in
a way no
prior or further
flights of song
could light:
As the sun
rose behind Kay
at the ocean
after a night
of delicious
surrender to
oceans along
the isthmus
of our bodies,
so what a
song like “Savage
Hearts” struck
flint to the
composite tinder
of our lives:
Two guys in
their mid 20s
embittered by
lost love & now
ready to howl
it loud & hard:
Rightburn in
the passion that
gripped our
guitars and
teased the flame
of songs up
from fallen
timbers, the
same old chords
from a million
same old songs
finding a new
gradient within
the music, a
beat which pounds
down and rises,
not hurrying
not stopping
but pleasuring
if you will a
center which
burns blue to
red: A killer
song, if you
will, at least
when we played
it with hearts
slapped awake
by possibility,
rising from
suburban
ordinaries on
hawk wings
up the towering
cloudbank aeries
of summer up
where the air
is thin and
cold and clear
as ice and
the archangels
glow blue and
red and the
final chorus is
a sheer swoop
down at 300
miles per hour
fixed on that
prey of lost
love: Badass
angels with
spurs & stallions
riding the
narrow edge
of anger between
loss and fury
with only the
hooves of song
to find safe
passage through
the night we
invoked:
Everything else
we added —
singer, drums,
a name, gigs —
Were all mere
accoutrement:
We both knew
the forges where
we crossed guitars:
Just not how
to tend them:
For as soon
as we crashed
down the last
chord & high
fived the future
we heard there,
the wax on our
wings kissed an
subtle urgent
fire: After practice
the nights that
unfolded were easy
because we’d
already stormed their
walls in song: Our
hearts knuckled and
muscular as we
slap some cologne
over the sweat
and rooster up the hair
and speed off
to the bars: O
we were young
and angry and
horny, our hearts
sure in the howl
of the edge: Take
some speed, smoke
a couple of bowls
of pot, pour down
a bunch of
Bud longnecks
with shots of
Old Bushmills:
That was the
correct way
to triangulate
and maze the night,
our eyes burning
behind heavy sensual
lids, as if one
glint of something
pure would burn
us to cinders:
Just a couple
of the boys
in the band
cutting into the
crowd at
Fern Park Station
like 2 blades
of moon, partying
a while before
plucking what
hung heavy and
ripe from the
pussy tree: It was
easy to score
when you
had already soared:
Four In Legion
onstage rocking
the Stones’ “Start
Me Up” and George
Thorogood’s “Bad
to the Bone” &
Ziggy walloping
his Strat like
a 19 year old
girl drunk in the
back of his van:
For what’s fire
but a bridge
between fury
and doom? Forget
finery: The
makers toil deep
in the sulphur
of their forges
grimed with sweat
and char: I
was tethered to
horses long
turned to salt
by my past: Cindy
a cipher of
other losses I
refused to read
by any light
of day: Kept
running into
her in varied
Winter Park bars
& we’d smile say
hello & then all
the walls came
tumblin’ down
between us:
The next day
shoveling purchase
orders into the
corporate forge
my heart hammering
for fear of losing
what had long
fled: And I
wonder how song
could ever suffice
for swoon: Out
in the bars
at night feeling the
ice of other
rages, the long
winter passages
in Spokane where
the song had died
in an otherwise
trackless waste,
my nights then
walking isolate
& alone through
a frozen dead
city of sleeping
citizens & dead
drunks & dead
fucks & madness
gripping down
from the north
with its bower
of absolute
zero: Draughts
of that in the
iced Stoli I
knocked back
listening to bands
overplay and strut
on other wings:
Cover songs
covering it all
up: The new songs
I was finding
(or which found
me) dipped in
that cold past
like a pen:
That’s the breath
of art: A wind
from inside
zero: It walks
the far boundary
& calls it
a homeland: Outside
summer a night
in full humid
fury, streets still
glistening with
eddies of storm
distant lightning
trilling violent
& aghast at
this order of
things & the
song making all
of that anew
& dangerous &
wildly critical
of my every
waste &
dalliance: So
when I went
out again with
Cathy to dance
again I was
hostile to her
endearments, as
if dancing were
a drowse into
love’s dungeon:
She gets drunk
real fast & I
tow her back
to my place to
nibble her clit
on the living
room floor &
Graham Parker’s
“Squeezing Out
Sparks” on the
stereo & she
falls asleep
while all the
blades are flashing
above: Next day
we hit a
matinee while storms
wrack the city
& it’s a love
scene from
a movie I recoil
from: Back at
her apartment
she pulls me from
door to bed in
one long motion
yanking down
my pants & hauling
my cock up
into her dark
furrow: I slam
away as she
grips my ass
grunting & her
big breasts mashed
against my
chest & then
bouncing every
which way
abandoning
herself to what’s
hard and harder
and thus crueler
in me: I harden
& shout or
bark this
bright angry
brass angel
which peals white
from the top
of my skull
then lets it
pour jazzy and
hot, a syrup
filling & spilling
all over her
thighs: I want
to go but for
her the sex just
opens the door
to more real
stuff, endearments
in late afternoon
& baby talk with
the cat & get
me outta here
as I fling out
at 6 p.m. enraged
& ready to
sing about it:



DRAGON’S TAIL

2003

For arrested drunks like me, there
Are only two ways to live -- The
One astride the dragon’s tail, the
Other rowing lifelong here. When
I’m riding red I’m far afield
Burning cities, hearts, and sense to
Char, backwarding on the blade which
Slices off my own ass, grabbing
All I cannot have. Off tail I’m
Pure drollery, the sea before dawn,
Nothing in my moves to catch the
Torching eye. Drunks climb on that wild
Thirst and never wake; their nightmare
Flies for life. Let them sear in soar.
My living’s calm though words here roar.



ST. BRENDAN AND THE HEATHEN GIANT

(In episode 4 of The Voyage of St. Brendan) Brendan, having had a ship built for him, finds the exceptionally large head of a dead man on the beach. Its forehead measures five feet across. When Brendan asks what kind of life he has led, the man’s head answers that he was a hundred feet tall and very strong. He was a heathen who waded through the sea to rob ships. This he did for a living. In a heavy storm which whipped up the waves to extreme heights he was drowned. Brendan offers to pray for the giant, and to beg God to revive him so that he may be baptized. Once that is done, the giant may even, if he lives to praise God, find forgiveness for his sins, and eventually ascend to paradise. The giant refuses; his is afraid that in his new life he might not be able to withstand the temptation of sin. What if he started robbing again? He would be a lot worse off then as, according to the giant, Christians are punished much more severely in hell than pagans. Moreover, the prospect of having to suffer the pain of death as second time frightens him. He wants to go back to his torments / poor companions in the place of darkness. He departs with Brendan’s best wishes. Brendan then proceeds on his way.



BLACK ANGUS AND THE SAINT

The Works of Fiona Macleod, Volume IV, Iona

Elsewhere I have told how a good man of Iona sailed along the coast one Sabbath afternoon with the Holy Book, and put the Word upon the seals of Soa: and, in another tale, how a lonely man fought with a sea-woman that was a seal: as, again, how two fishermen strove with the sea-witch of Earraid: and, in “The Dan-nan-Ron,” of a man who went mad with the sea-madness, because of the seal-blood that was in his veins, he being a MacOdrum of Uist, and one of the Sliochd nan Ron, the Tribe of the Seal. And those who have read the tale, twice printed, once as “The Annir Choille,” and again as “Cathal of the Woods,” will remember how, at the end, the good hermit Molios, when near death in his sea-cave of Arran, called the seals to come out of the wave and listen to him, so that he might tell them the white story of Christ; and how in the moonshine, with the flowing tide stealing from his feet to his knees, the old saint preached the gospel of love, while the seals crouched upon the rocks, with their brown eyes filled with glad tears: and how, before his death at dawn, he was comforted by hearing them splashing to and fro in the moon-dazzle, and calling one to the other, “We, too, are of the sons of God.”

What has so often been written about is a reflection of what is in the mind: and though stories of the seals may be heard from the Rhinns of Islay to the Seven Hunters (and I first heard that of the MacOdrums, the seal-folk, from a Uist man), I think, that it was because of what I heard of the sea-people on Iona, when I was a child, that they have been so much with me in remembrance.

In the short tale of the Moon-child, I told how two seals that had been wronged by a curse which had been put upon them by Columba, forgave the saint. and gave him a sore-won peace. I recall another (unpublished) tale, where a seal called Domnhuil Dhu—a name of evil omen—was heard laughing one Hallowe’en on the rocks below the ruined abbey, and calling to the creatures of the sea that God was dead: and how the man who heard him laughed, and was therewith stricken with paralysis, and so fell sidelong from the rocks into the deep wave, and was afterwards found beaten as with hammers and shredded as with sharp fangs.

But, as most characteristic, I would rather tell here the story of Black Angus, though the longer tale of which it forms a part has been printed before.

One night, a dark rainy night it was, with an uplift wind battering as with the palms of savage hands the heavy clouds that hid the moon, I went to the cottage near Spanish Port, where my friend Ivor Maclean lived with his old deaf mother. He had reluctantly promised to tell me the legend of Black Angus, a request he had ignored in a sullen silence when he and Padruic Macrae and I were on the Sound that day. No tales of the kind should be told upon the water.

When I entered, he was sitting before the flaming coal-fire; for on Iona now, by decree of MacCailein Mòr, there is no more peat burned.

“You will tell me now, Ivor?” was all I said.

“Yes; I will be telling you now. And the reason why I never told you before was because it is not a wise or a good thing to tell ancient stories about the sea while still on the running wave. Macrae should not have done that thing. It may be we shall suffer for it when next we go out with the nets. We were to go to-night; but, no, not I, no, no, for sure, not for all the herring in the Sound.”

“Is it an ancient sgeul, Ivor?”

“Ay. I am not for knowing the age of these things. It may be as old as the days of the Féinn, for all I know. It has come down to us. Alasdair MacAlasdair of Tiree, him that used to boast of having all the stories of Colum and Brigdhe, it was he told it to the mother of my mother, and she, to me.”

“What is it called?”

“Well, this and that; but there is no harm in saying it is called the Dark Nameless One.”

“The Dark Nameless One!

“It is this way. But will you ever have heard of the MacOdrums of Uist?

“Ay; the Sliochd-nan-ròn.

“That is so. God knows. The Sliochd nan-ròn . . . the progeny of the Seal. . . . Well, well , no man knows what moves in the shadow of life. And now I will be telling you that old ancient tale, as it was given to me by the mother of my mother.”

On a day of the days, Colum was walking alone by the sea-shore. The monks were at the hoe or the spade, and some milking the kye, and some at the fishing. They say it was on the first day of the Faoilleach Geamhraidh, the day that is called Am Fhéill Brighde, and that they call Candlemas over yonder.

The holy man had wandered on to where the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He was praying and praying; and it is said that whenever he prayed aloud, the barren egg in the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud unfold, and the butterfly break its shroud.

Of a sudden he came upon a great black seal, lying silent on the rocks, with wicked eyes.

“My blessing upon you, O Ròn,” he said, with the good kind courteousness that was his. “Droch spadadh ort,” answered the seal, “A bad end to you, Colum of the Gown.”

“Sure now,” said Colum angrily, “I am knowing by that curse that you are no friend of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of the north. For here I am known ever as Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint; and it is only the Picts and the wanton Normen who deride me because of the holy white robe I wear.”

“Well, well,” replied the seal, speaking the good Gaelic as though it were the tongue of the deep sea, as God knows it may be for all you, I, or the blind wind can say; “well, well, let that thing be: it’s a wave-way here or a wave-way there. But now, if it is a druid you are, whether of fire or of Christ, be telling me where my woman is, and where my little daughter.”

At this, Colum looked at him for a long while. Then he knew.

“It is a man you were once, O Ron?”

“Maybe ay and maybe no.”

“And with that thick Gaelic that you have, it will be out of the north isles you come?”

“That is a true thing.”

“Now I am for knowing at last who and what you are. You are one of the race of Odrum the Pagan?”

“Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And what is more, I am Angus MacOdrum, Aonghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name I am known by is Black Angus.”

“A fitting name too,” said Colum the Holy, “because of the black sin in your heart, and the black end God has in store for you.”

At that Black Angus laughed.

“Why is the laughter upon you, Man-Seal?”

“Well, it is because of the good company I’ll be having. But, now, give me the word: Are you for having seen or heard of a woman called Kirsteen M’Vurich?”

“Kirsteen—Kirsteen—that is the good name of a nun it is, and no sea-wanton!”

“O, a name here or a name there s soft sand. And so you cannot be for telling me where my woman is?”

“No.”

“Then a stake for your belly, and nails through your hands, thirst on your tongue, and the corbies at your eyne!”

And, with that, Black Angus louped into the green water, and the hoarse wild laugh of him sprang into the air and fell dead upon the shore like a wind-spent mew.

Colum went slowly back to the brethren, brooding deep. “God is good,” he said in a low voice, again and again; and each time that he spoke there came a daisy into the grass, or a bird rose, with song to it for the first time, wonderful and sweet to hear.

As he drew near to the House of God he met Murtagh, an old monk of the ancient race of the isles.

“Who is Kirsteen M’Vurich, Murtagh?” he asked.

“She was a good servant of Christ, she was, in the south isles, O Colum, till Black Angus won her to the sea.”

And when was that?”

“Nigh upon a thousand years ago.”

“But can mortal sin live as long as that?”

“Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before Oisin sang, before Fionn, before Cuchullin, was a glorious great prince, and in the days when the Tuatha-de-Danann were sole lords in all green Banba, Black Angus made the woman Kirsteen M’Vurich leave the place of prayer and go down to the sea-sbore, and there he leaped upon her and made her his prey, and she followed him into the sea.”

“And is death above her now?”

“No. She is the woman that weaves the sea-spells at the wild place out yonder that is known as Earraid: she that is called the seawitch.”

“Then why was Black Angus for the seeking her here and the seeking her there?”

“It is the Doom. It is Adam’s first wife she is, that sea-witch over there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks.”

“And who will he be?”

His body is the body of Angus, the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum, for all that a seal be is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas.”

“Black Judas, Murtagh?”

“Ay, Black Judas, Colum.”

But with that, Ivor Macrae rose abruptly from before the fire, saying that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a seamew that was like a human thing.

So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes and said, “God be with us”; and then I opened the door, and the salt smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness of the night.

The Iron Angel

It is unnecessary to dwell at length on the
question of hereditary transmission or
spontaneous vocation in the case of the
magician or medicine man. In general, the
situation is the same everywhere: the two
ways of access to magico-religious powers
coexist.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy, 21

You cannot be my disciple unless you
carry your own cross and come with me.

-- Luke 12:27

I.

You got me by hook and by crook:
a song in my nature grew loud
by hard nurture, my fathers
careening on waves which
came from no sea I have sounded,
if You get what I mean. My schooling
took me far down in that sea
only to throw me spluttering back
to try again and again and again. Of
nature and nurture my song’s thus
composed, one salt’s bliss through
that awful Cape my mother warned me
about when I was but 12:
Son, she said with steely intent,
there’s more to life than a bed,
a babe, a bottle of booze.
Those words echo here like chant
before first light, primary like a wash
of song off walls of resonanting
stone. My words here are wet in that
water and dreamy in their drowned sense,
hard harrowed like the fisherman who
was hauled down to the seal-city
to atone for his wild lust for seal-skins.
Nothing in my Bible and later Plato
quite prepared me for Your smile
spread in sprawled legs, You winked
at me from inside such darkness,
dripping with unknowns I plunged to
the hilt. “Fallen” was a mint of the old
nomenclaturing, a word insufficient
of both heat and heart for the depths
which rose as I dove. “Fallen” is what
you call too Other to break bread with,
much less spume into loins with such joy.
I once thought the participation mystique
was for real words and drums, something
of essence literal and grippable, the
the moon-silvered bum of a May-Queen
hard-slathered like the devil’s spittoon:
You know, a place just like the heaven
I once thought I would one life see
if I prayed long and hacked off enough
offending memberage. But Your savage
rite was something else, an election
both tutored and mauled, of equal parts
what got burned in searing heaven
and what I learned falling hard,
its mystery writ with an underground pen,
a souterrain history of all my mother
damned, released in a merry flow,
arterial and artesian, daft and crafty
and bottomless, a sluice with out a roof
R-rated for peeks gouts and spoof ---
Yes, well. On to my dream:




II.

I am walking with others round a lake
in a suburb was somehow both mine
and my dad’s, a mash of College Park
(where I once wooed my wife and now
daily cut through on the way to work)
and Cedar Rapids (where my father
grew up). The group I walked
with was a blend of college and
AA, one schooled in the words of
the ages & the other speaking the
sages of heart; as one presence
suturing the divide between hard
thoughts and harder knocks:

We were telling things about
ourselves from way down deep,
in part to debone our locked closets,
in part to give hope to the newcomer
whose every ache we live to
rescind. I shared how I pray each
morning on my knees trothing my will
to my God’s; and that I went on my
day believing so, no matter how much
I dunked and doubted and
daunted dulled divines.

(A strange statement perhaps
but true: I do pray with
all my heart to that visage
of a lost God -- childlike
there in measure to the
liberties I here dare --
praying to be a good
citizen of His world in
every thought and deed
and then trusting that
what words spill forth
are token of that faith.
So as the class was also
AA, our high reading and
wild bleeding was a wyrd
of bright and dark songs,
one mashed colloquy
between the voices whose
dream I think I am.)

When I finish sharing
about devoted rituals
I discover something under
me which I’m either standing on
or next to: Looking down I see
in an excavated pit
a huge black iron sculpture
of a man half-buried, half-rising
in the dirt. Massive, ugly,
revenant yet revered, I felt
as if standing on the whale
Brendan housed his Easter Mass
upon; the class I was in
excavating him somehow
for better and for worse.

Was I speaking him
forth, or was he making a priest
out of me, shaman of the
militant domain that God and I
both share? A fallen angel
perhaps or the one who bound him,
awful to behold, awesome in
his beauty, terrible yet delicate in
the polished beams and filigree
of hoary ancient iron, heavier
than all the churches in the world
and ready to take wing.

There was a woman from my
AA group who sat somewhere
nearby, perhaps on a girder
which defined the iron man’s
brow or ear; I couldn’t see her
but I heard sure her voice as
I have so many times before,
a womanish sing-song like
pure surf in my ear, weaving words
mellifluous and wild, each line
a foam-backed merry ride.
It was a voice out there which I
hear much at home, as when
my wife still half-asleep sighs
Thank You when I finish softly
stroking her bare feet; I hear it
when our cat mews for a treat,
balleting round this writing chair.
A ravishing sweet sound which
all words cannot propound.

Yet folded too in it or nearby
(as I was on or near the iron man)
in a darkened vestibule was
secreted a following older man,
furtively espying with great
menace my deep sweet
mise en scene: A Nazi perhaps,
a Don or aged Republican, one
who has much to lose from the
truths I disclosed. He stepped behind
a screen of sorts in the shadows of
a darkened cafe, only one eye peering
out from the pearled inlay, as if
through a monocle or a mask.

Who is that one-eyed devil whom
I dreamed, and what has he do to
with the iron angelus buried in and
birthing from the words I know
so far? There was a dread in me
to know him there, as if to sense
that he would stop at nothing to
shut me up for good, cementing
hard my meters & chucking me
back in sea-whiskey -- Is he the
drunk in my brain who plots
my eventual confusion of my
will and God’s for good? or is he
the dark god I can’t refuse
who has more education for
me below? The dream ended
there, with his eye trained on
me, reading everything thing
I write like a prospector panning
for fool’s gold, or my mother
harpuscaping my young brow
for signs of servitude to the
blackened trinity of bed and
babe and booze.


III.

You take greatest pleasure
in all I refuse and yet dare,
honeying the hymen of that dark
descending stair with snatch-
sounding susurrations (“the soft
slish of honey on silk” was how
Henry Miller put it) before
revealing Your ironworks
where my every wounded wing
was forged. And so I write and
write on crossed infirmities
of lack/wrack ache/break
word/world, yowling infinities
You vowel with one hymeneal sigh.
Every book and bed I’ve tread
is tossed in that dream’s lake,
an abyssal pile of fructive
fricatives which You here bid
me slake, line after line, day
after day, somewhere offshore
that first kneed prayer and
the wild sea it thus wakes. I see that figure
rising below, stern and terribly old, like
fragged iron -- or is he everything new,
like black steel? The rising sun only
obscures him further from view.
Suffice to say here he’s waking and walking
and talking like a heathen giant
on shore leave. When he sighs with
her voice the whole ocean here heaves.

Blue Grammar

I SUPPOSE

James Laughlin

the rhetoricians might call this
a variety of the pathetic fallacy
but when we talk on the telephone
I imagine I hear cunt in your voice
the soft slish of honey on silk as
Henry Miller used to describe it.

***

SHAMAN SONG

2003

Every shaman has his song that
takes him away. There have been
descriptions of how a person first
hears his or her song, walking
along a seashore or being in a
forest. There’s this experience and
from then on he’s overtaken.
-- Joseph Campbell

Gaelic oran,
A song; this is for auran, from the
correct and still existing form
amhran, Middle
Irish ambrán, Manx arrane; from
amb, i.e. mu, about, and rann?
Irish amhar, Early Irish amor,
music. Cf. Irish amhra, eulogy,
especially in verse. Cf. amra
Cholumcille), panegyric.

-- MacAllister’s Gaelic Dictionary

I first recall the song on
Jacksonville Beach when I
was three years old, sitting
between the sea and my mother
& rapt in a strange middle
music between her voice and
the surf’s, a soft drone warm
and moist and smiling overhead
with miles of blue beyond
and below. The birthmark was
still visible then, that heart
with an arrow through it red
above my left nipple: that
beach day was his altar, as
he played in his mother’s lap
and rode the waves on a
tunny’s back and sang of salt
immersions on a brilliant
plashing bed. David -- the name
I use to grasp the day --
means “son of love,” and I
was fathered by that water-boy,
at least in part. The full moon
was in my father’s eyes as
he spread my mother on some
night in ‘56: Their marriage
was brittle and doomed, but
useful to that old progenitor
throned in the sea who came
back to claim me on that
summer beach in 1960.
Actually, his (her?) song was
on my lips when I was born
-- so my parents say -- a smiling
humming tune: water music,
the sound a fountain makes
spilling depths in the merriment
of the sun. The Well I found
beneath my ear and behind
the facts of history is His:
The lover who went under
to sing of chasms and
bright scree between our
isle and eternity’s. Such
music cannot pay my
mortgage nor help a drunk
nor mint a better husbandry
of this home: But like a
breeze, it courses through
all the topside motions
of a life in 2003, a song
whose words are just out
of reach, lost in the sea’s
collapse behind my mother
on a summer’s day so
long ago. I’ll name them
yet, or their strange wet
fossils of salt revelry.
Forget all calls to poetry,
that warped & silly career.
This is ball-soak, day-shit,
everything lost to all
we now can’t help but see.
A well’s deep plumage
is this song’s old voyage
a birthmark’s long throat
doing brine homage.




NOTHIN BUT A LOVER

from A Breviary of Guitars, 1999

1.

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


A GUITAR IS NOT A WOMAN

From A Breviary of Guitars

1.

The present (1999)

A guitar is not
a woman
but it’s awful
damned close:
It’s curves are
stolen from the
lucent pool of
Artemis & blown
huge with every
boyman’s ache
for vavavoom:
My heart reels
of a guitar solo
exactly the way
my fingers tremble
when I touch
a woman for the
first time: All
the songs I’ve
ever written
are inked from
the well she
departs down:
chords mortared
in the doors
and deeps of
desire: But it
is stupid and
perilous to
confuse a guitar
with a woman:
I’ve known a
million players
who went to bed
with a woman
and none of ‘em
took their axe
along for the
ride. A woman is
about something
becoming inside
you and a guitar
the difficult amazing
distance you must
travel to
prevent that from
happening: Oh how
long, how difficult,
how important
it is to finally
bloodily accept
this truth:


2.

Spring 1978

I typed my poems
and papers on
an electric
typewriter using
erasable bond
paper, each draft
supremely more
precious than
the today’s flash
of printouts
so easily erased:
I made far
fewer scribbles
in my journals
too, still unfamiliar
with living long
on the page:
A few lines now
and then
before whoever
I was resumed
whatever I did.
Just think: six
lines of verse
in time
cashing out to
this Breviary:

first cigarette
the haunting music
adrenaline mauls the stomach
why won’t the eyes open
I will not die
until I’ve touched another face.

I read back
over those lines
as if probing
my heart’s DNA:
The pages of
that journal
that captured
the Spring of ‘78
is worn now from
my many returns
to it, in my
many attempts
to learn and write
my story in
so many forms:
A faithful
pilgrim to that nova
that flared soon
after the night
in March when
I went to a party
put on by
some girl at work
and met this
girl named Becky,
a pretty blonde
browneyed doe
who was leaving
for LA in a
week. She was up
from Florida
and didn’t
like winter a bit:
I told her I
was a guitar player
and poet sans
band or book:
that impressed
her nada:
I could have told
her I played
on the Whitworth
College basketball
team or dug
worms in the
park: Becky
preferred her
stuff simple,
not much to
say about it:
simple stuff.
I, who had
walked for years
deep inside and
apart from the
women I yearned for,
was bug-eyed
startled to find
myself so calmly there
beside her simply
chatting, the party
eddying about
us almost
unnoticed: A
A virgin dreams
of what sex
is like so
deeply that
the first time
passes almost
unnoticed: That
was meeting
Becky: She got
to me before I
knew she’d gotten
in: We talked
till one or so
in the morning
until my ride
yawned and said
we had to go:
I don’t remember
if I slept much
that night --
so much happened
so fast in one
week that
I wrote almost
nothing in the
thick of it,
a couple pages
of tortured verse,
hot jots of
amazement
at what erupted:
I think I
got her number
from her friend
and called
her the next day
to make a date:
She said yes,
oh she said yes:
We met downtown
for lunch on a
raw waking wet
spring day,
temps in the
mid-50s, the Spokane
river muscling
into a roar
with melted
snowpack carried
a dozen miles
down from the
western Spokane
mountains: I
remember Becky’s
brown eyes,
her easy smile,
her southern
voice, and
red-brown shoes
that fastened
with a buckle:
We ate a
restaurant
by the river &
drank a bottle
of wine & told
our life stories
as we could
tell them then,
our heads filling
with a sort
of boozy drowse
that nestled
in the boom
and hiss of
the nearby river:
Where that river
ended and
we began is
the utter mystery
to this day:
We ambled on
through that day
into the the night,
kissing in some
cold wet shelter
in the park where
spring’s raw fuse
burned weirdly
in the cold:
bought more
wine and munchies
and headed back
to my house
to smoke dope
& drink wine
& listen to my
Genesis (sounding
so distant: do
you have any
Journey? she
asked) & on
carrots and peanut
butter: She climbed
on my lap
facing me and
we began to kiss,
my heart pounding
with surprise
and surrender:
After a while
I asked weakly
(almost apologetically)
if she would like
to spend the night
and she just smiled
and led me to
my room by the
hand: We climbed
beneath the covers
n the cold cold
dark of that room,
finding heat
quickly between us
as we wrestled
from our clothes:
I tried to make
love to her
but fear kept
if from happening
at first: We fell
asleep for a
couple hours
and I woke on
her fucking slow
and languid,
the bedsprings
creaking and
squawking
with each dreamy
thrust which
she welcomed,
welcomed:
I came and
drifted off
still in her &
then dreamed
of an incredibly
clear blue space
like a morning
in early summer
by the ocean
in Florida:
Woke with crystalline
waters stretching
miles around that
bed and Becky
sleeping curled
into me like some
blessing I did not
deserve: You
never do: She
woke and we
began it all
again: I kissed
her all over
down to her
cunt which smelled
ripe like armpit
& she was
embarrassed
tried to push
me away but
I butted my
face past her
hand and bathed
my mouth and
face in deep
womanhood which
a day or so ago
was the faintest
constellation
at the furthers
corner of the night:
When she went
home that day
in her yellow
Fiat I wrote
of my surrender
to my birthmark:

O pulse of blood quickened by light
O heart reborn and squinting at the sun
O core bled clean and drying by the pool:
I have held her face beneath my eyes
O love o damnable love. (3/6/78)




CHILDREN OF WATER

From The Collected Works of Fiona McLeod, Vol. 4
London: William Heinemann, 1912

"O hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon"
—Archolochus of Paros

… Long ago, when Manannan, the god of wind and sea, offspring of Lir, the Ocearius of the Gael, lay once by weedy shores, he heard a man and a woman talking. The woman was a woman of the sea, and some say that she was a seal: but that is no matter, for it was in the time when the divine race and the human race and the soulless race and the dumb races that are near to man were all one race. And Manannan heard the man say: "I will give you love and home and peace." The sea-woman listened to that, and said: "And I will bring you the homelessness of the sea, and the peace of the restless wave, and love like the wandering wind." At that the man chided her and said she could be no woman, though she had his love. She laughed, and slid into green water. Then Manannan took the shape of a youth, and appeared to the man. "You are a strange love for a seawoman," he said: "and why do you go putting your earth-heart to her sea-heart?" The man said he did not know, but that he had no pleasure in looking at women who were all the same. At that Manannan laughed a low laugh. "Go back," he said, and take one you'll meet singing on the heather. She's white and fair. But because of your lost love in the water, I'll give you a gift." And with that Manannan took a wave of the sea and threw it into the man's heart. He went back, and wedded, and, when his hour came, he died. But he, and the children he had, and all the unnumbered clan that came of them, knew by day and by night a love that was tameless and changeable as the wandering wind, and a longing that was unquiet as the restless wave, and the homelessness of the sea. And that is why they are called the Sliochd-na-mara, the clan of the waters, or the Treud-na-thonn, the tribe of the sea-wave.

And of that clan are some who have turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind--the wind that would overtake the waves of thought and dream, and gather them and lift them into clouds of beauty drifting in the blue glens of the sky.

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



BLUE GRAMMAR

2003

The most ancient witness to
grammatical teaching in Ireland
is to be found in the little manual
called Ars Asporii
... (this book), in stark contrast
to the wholly secular tone of its
model (the Ars Minor of Donatus)),
derives from the ascetic world
of sixth-century Irish monasticism.
- Daibhi O Croinin,
Early Irish Monasticism

While I sat in classrooms
pickling in the drone
of American grammar
-- the official Latin of
verb-subject agreements
and modifiers rescued
from their dangling
precipices -- She was
writing it down in my
ear some other way,
a brogue inside my
writing’s new arches and
tenons, turning nouns
into nipples jazzing motions
I couldn’t master, only
ride. Before me all the
fixtures of learning
were composed and steady --
my book opened wide,
a #2 pencil in my hand
copying down the forms
on lined paper in a rough
miniscule, the late-
morning hush striated
with boredom and
hunger and a free-floating
toothed angst. On one
level it was all a
cultural Latin the way
it must be learned,
line after line, correct
and succinct, either
to be admired or strafed
with red ink: Yet further
down I wrote in Vulgate
about the places I
dreamed or sought
or would but dare not go:
My hands round the back
of the girl sitting in front
of me cupping new breasts,
fighting the evil one in
his lab far at sea,
swaggering nude
in the locker room
with a cock twice as
big as my own, three
times, no, four, shaming
all they boys with my
hammerlike stylus.
She was re-writing
the story the world
bid me learn
in a grammar which
shattered those schoolhouse
walls. There, in the midst
of such strict schooling
(if strict it ever was)
an infernal ars was
copied on the ass
of truer love -- forms I’ll
never quite learn,
swimming away on
every sweet wave, a
language always just
out of reach, laughing,
cajoling, calling me home.
Of it I here write
in rooms far below
the cathedral which
pays for everything else.



POEMS OVER THE PHONE

1994

for Kelle

These oblique passes of spirit
are all that words can muster:
my love of poetry courting yours
in the poems we read each night

to each other over the telephone.
These shared soliloquies seem
more in need of a warm tub
than any cold pedestal of truth.

Perhaps lovers can never share
one room of a poem, gender scoring
my yes with your resonant no.
The opiate cusp is only a door.

And surely love assigns her craziest
child to us, the one who whispers in
our poems that love is too important
to mention the bitter thorns which are

its tower and sword. But I suspect
it is that unvowled goad that keeps
us reading poems to each other
across the night through the cold

plastic conch of a phone; that my sigh
which ends your poem is so marbled
with honey and gall that love can
only be poetry's most brutal talion,

returning us here night after night
and poem after poem to try once again
to find adequate words for a tidal hymn
sighing ever on the wires of a distant wind

long after you and I long came to our end.




GHOST VOICE

1995

for Traci

When my thoughts
wander over to you
as they frequently
do these days,
the image that appears
begins with warm
details of a face:
blue eyes, red hair,
freckles, a mouth
wide enough for all
you have to say --

And then I hear
a voice that is
yours but also
is another's
a girlfriend
I left long ago
to move to Florida.
I thought back then
that I could leave
the heart's winter
behind and erase
my emptiness
in blue waters
and blonde ambition.

The voice is husky
and strong and lifted
that small woman
to a pugnacious
height, making
her fragility
somehow fierce.
She was such
a sucker for
the calamity of
drugs and boys
like me
and yet she
always found
a way around defeat.

She once called me
in the middle
of the night
some months after
I moved here.
Her voice
and the dark
were an echo
of the void
I left her to
on another,
distant night.

I wanted to
let you know
I just killed
your daughter,
that last word
spit like venom
from a snake bite.
Her voice rasped
over three thousand
miles of wire
into the milky
shadows of the room
like a claw
and then clicked
into nothing.

I had long forgotten
the sound of that
voice, and then
a dozen years later
it creeps into
my affection for you.


Now I don't think
a poem can make
sufficient amends
to a ghost,
but I do think
these lines
help me open
the door to you
with more care
and respect than
I had when I was
so brutally young,
so viciously free,
so convinced
that love
was an exit
with no door.

hello?

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.


sad girl

2001

There’s a sad girl
inside me—my sister,
my wife, my mother’s
blue history, perhaps
her hurt mother too:
A well of sad girls
crying deep in me
or all they lost,
for the little
yet to be taken
—just so sad.

Each day in this
long Florida summer
is symphonic with
heat and cloud,
an early humid
brilliance freighting
in storms by
midafternoon,
armadas and
colossi booming,
unburdening
their long arias.
Somehow that too
is sad, equivalent
to what now
reveals within.

Sometimes at night
I wake to a
woman’s quiet voice
speaking my name
once. Who is it?
Is my wife in trouble?
Is my mother calling
me from the next
room? What can I
do? Sleep wrestles
me back down just
as I reach for
her hand, the mirror
now water covering
us all. OK, begin from
here, let this sadness
be the key to the
door that opens home.


SURFSIDE SOLUTIONS

2002

Long ago my mother set me
like a shell upon the strand.
Her voice tides in my ear—
warm milk for worried brow,
pink rooms which soft resound
the drench of drain and draw.
I love to mound my words
inside that nautilus of surf
—a useless carpentry,
you say, to castle heart
in walls of hammered grain—
No matter. Sonorous physic,
wave-songs I curl my mornings
to, you are a cat’s solution,
the sweeter nous. Like the
town that solved its water
shortage by showering in twos.
That’s what you’ll find here,
a vault of curved additions
which fall too fast to count,
shapes which fail in every way
except to greet those great rooms
she carved with her salt voice,
bright mansions left on wet sand
for her blue hands to hoist.