A Song Is Not A Poem

While it may be true, as Joseph Campbell has asserted that much of the shaman’s function has been translated into that of the artist in our culture, I think the artist is far too narrow a mediator to handle the job. Pop-shamanism, perhaps, transformation via the numbers: it’s all about divining and defending an aesthetic code. The familiars and genii of art aren’t sure-footed enough to leap tree to tree all the way to the Under or Otherworld. Why? My guess is that though art can fly and fall with the baddest of angels, it is more about juggling the materials than adding to them. Consciousness has robbed us of our primal connections, giving us instead reflections of depths and tidy doors marked “Wilderness.”

Maybe the artist is what will have to do in these times, but I don’t expect much from them. Maybe there’s a peripheral madness to art, something with more fins on the backside, more terror to it ... the shaman’s song is the inside identity of the illness, without singing the song he would die ... maybe all the craft we have learned dams the ocean in our throat.

Not the artist but perhaps the whaler, or the midwife, or the addict, or the roadie, or the narcoleptic, or commuter who never quite gets home ... someone never quite solitary or solid again ...

***
Beyond the artist is “one who journeys;” IMO, that’s a much better handle on the contemporary similitudes to shamanism. Journeys to the underworld, to the heart of hearts, to the land beneath the sea, to everything betwixt I and Thou ...

But one must be unwilling to step too far into the spearing light for an apter definition. Whatever truly names it will have a sound but not a sense. Present but not, like faerie phosphor on a canvas which is painted and not. Dreams which are parallel yet serial, poking fish-heads out of the carpet and pouring silver through the ear waking when we sleep. And the threat, the menace, the malice in its recesses, observing, laughing low and steely, shadowing the enterprise like slow-winging mantas. The old horror of religion with all of that dismally pierced flesh. The rending of bone and the heaping of viscera onto the weighing-pan. The raw suturing with hands stained in gore. Time piecemeal and place viscous. Ancestors playing with children out back. Nothing linear enough to sustain longer than one sentence. The drum sounding not one’s heartbeat but its song, beating against the ribs like hooves, defiant of thunder and salt but not of the shrieking of wolves. How could one properly map where such a one has journeyed?

***

A recent NY Times article on new research into hypnosis shows that, as Blake said, “as the eye is formed, so are it’s powers.” We see what we believe, not vice versa. To quote from the article,

***

"... new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function.

"One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs.

"For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower’s identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.

"The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top.

"Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up.

These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call “top down processing.” What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face. ..."

***

OK: so there’s evidence shows that consciousness is feedback from primary sources, an eye focusing and interpreting what is seen out there. The circuit routes from world to word and back.

The mantic arts -- hypnotism, the talking cure, prayer, votive activities -- all shamanic in their way -- does something to that circuitry, so that word affect world.

Or perhaps there’s an inside to that circuitry, a deeper, perhaps more infernal conduit. There is a chironic flux of etheric energy which blueprints all physical form; practitioners of that form of healing intuit the ley lines of the world’s energy in the patient and attempt to get the grid back in sync with the world

The shaman does something similar, working from the lower regions up. Is this a conduit counter to the one described in the NY Times article, healing the upper regions with the lower wings of what might properly be called song though we have no such current proof of such a song. We are healed by what we know we don’t know. The greater power may be in the inferior conduit - from down up — drawing those complex and myriad conscious attentions downwards. The depths engage and infuriate Faust! All that brain power squeezing the world for its gold and a framework of golded expectation bedeviling every quest into perdition.

Since we can’t possess such knowledge, we have to barter for it, exchanging darker older bones for newer broken ones, doing time beyond to balance sums.

What derisive gifts are offered from below —wounds and sexual frenzy and freezing waters! The shaman WILLINGLY goes back down there, out of generosity, yes, out of self-healing, yes, but also, simply, because there is no other place to properly fall. Not madness but oh so infinitely close, the difference no wider than a virgin’s pube: possessed and in possession of it, as if one could master a thrall any more than the North Wind ...





A SONG IS NOT A POEM

Nov. 22, 2005


According to the testimony of
Belyavsky and others ... the Vogul
shaman displays keen intelligence,
a perfectly supple body, and an energy
which seems unbounded. His very
preparation for his future work leads
the neophyte to strengthen his body
and perfect his intellectual capabilities.

Among the Buryat the shamans are
the principal guardians of the rich
oral historic literature. The poetic
vocabulary of a Yakut shaman contains
12,000 words, whereas the ordinary
language -- the only language known
to the rest of the community -- has
only 4,000. Among the Kazak Kirgiz,
the baqca, “singer”, poet, musician,
diviner, priest, and doctor, appears
to be the guardian of religious and
popular traditions, preserver of legends
several centuries old.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy 30

I.

There’s a hard windy froth
to this late night, wracked
by a winter front stronger
than any subtropic dream
of sweetly curved orchard,
As I write the breezes tear
this way then that in hordes
of lone angst, tossing the
boughs of oaks and maples like
berserkers on black horses,
hacking this pale suburb
to so much cooling meat.
I do not own or control
such winds but I can write
of them at will, sustaining
their nor’eastering assault
in a tenor of fury bassed
by my father’s best ass-
to-the-pulpit voice,
a basso descending all
the way down past the
sea god to his sire, he
who first stitched together
Manannan’s crane-bag
of feral winds. It’s not art
as such and not poetry at
all, though the song rides
that vatic ship: the means
are poetic but rows further
out where a wilder god
than verse can can name
waits for me It’s too
impoverished and mad
to be rightly called a poem,
yet in fuller possession
too, since it’s only meant
for my walk through
every winter’s night to
You. These aching verbs
are not meant to woo
any woman of this earth
yet are immaculate
exactly in what I
sperm in them, remaking
the world the way real lovers
break like surf at Your
white shore shouting
“Holy Shit!” at the top
of their lungs. Of old there
were madmen and shamans
who were similar and not:
Suffering was the crossroads
where they met then diverged,
the one faring left to fall
from cliffs and drown
down the leagues of hell,
the other annealing every
toxic kiss with song,
suturing every wound
it had opened in the name
of sweet wombs. The
shaman’s suffering was
meant, I mean, not
simply marauded,
productive of the song
which culls cream from
the churn of all extremes,
buttering the buttcheeks
of every raw impulse
with divining seed, that
signature which also
bestows. The artist suffers
for art and never returns;
I get the feeling what You’re
thinking of is close but
not quite -- right wing
wrong dragon, right sepulchre
wrong haul, right meander
wrong lurch at the
center of night. The dream
is a part of sleep but only
shares the top leagues
of its swoon, diverging
from the deathlike descent
to open blue doors
further down where
everything riots revenant
in old and later colors
clefts and sounds.

II.

To wit, this next dream in
the tow: I opened my eyes
in sleep and found myself
at a beachside town I
once harrowed long ago
when I fell so deeply in
love with a woman’s wild
shape, arising and arousing,
it seemed back then,
from the ocean at first
light. I returned in the
the far beams of that sun,
now married and with
children; I wanted to
show them what marvels
I had once found there
but everything had changed,
gravel roads paved over,
small cottages of lust
with their sea-deepened cots
demolished for towering
condos which dammed
off the wild sea, salmon
and lime green walls
of a lost beachy ennui
thoroughly whitewashed
over. It seemed that
decades or centuries
had passed since I
last lost myself to a
woman from the sea,
and nothing remained of
those stolen hours but
prime real estate.
I thought I could meander
the dives and gravel streets
wearing a blindfold, so
familiar those old beach
days in my heart: But
wideyed I kept bumping
into walls where there
once there were halls,
all the while wondering
what became of the sea.
The lesson here, I guess,
in the infernal sense
of the rubrics You teach, is
that the way I thought it
was is not the way the
past turned out to be:
Ergo, as the heart so
believes, so what we
cherish occludes
the sea. Outside and safely
off this page the winds
blow on, hardly my
brothers at all, badass
hombres smashing down
the tiny shore that You
and I and She share,
wreaking what no poem
fully dares to altar, fuck,
or pour. The bulldozers
are waiting at the edge
of this small town, their
orange motors purring,
their riders in black with
wings like red sails ablood
and dripping in the wind:
They can’t wait to
publish these motions
in a white suburb so
large as to blot the
horizon of the sea
past every marge I know.
Aye, there’s the crossroads,
where art and this singing
diverge, the one lost to
Faustian romp and rapture,
and this one whole
spent, draining to a close,
every windy enough roar
now quieting to a dribble,
the last skull at last quiet,
my day in need of starting,
the sea its own white riot
which no poem can
every name.

Flaming Love (Hierophany)

It is important to bring out this notion of singularity conferred by an unusual or abnormal experience. For, properly considered, singularization as such depends upon the very dialectic of the sacred. Most elementary hierophanies, that is, are nothing but a radical ontological separation of some object from the surrounding cosmic zone; some tree, some stone, some place, by the mere fact that it reveals that it is sacred, that it has been, as it were, “chosen” as the receptacle for a manifestation of the sacred, is thereby ontologically separated from all other stones, trees, places, and occupies a different, a supernatural plane.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy, 32

HIEROPHANY

Nov. 24, 2005

Every few seasons it seems I’m back at
this, combing my history for blue-boned
sooth the way one walks a morning’s
beach searching for what shells the
sea bequeathes. What am I looking for?
What do You bid me see inside those
rounds of time You ground on down
in tides of blue eternity? The poems of
late have all focused on the upwellings
of my teenaged years -- puberty being,
it is said, the trysting-ground where
white and blacker shamans grow their
wings -- the fonts are singular: A white
big white bra swinging on a high
branch of an oak tree, my father’s
loving boozy smile, the heft of a red
Fender Mustang guitar as I played that
Grand Funky music back -- Luminaries
on the darkened wake behind which
catch my eye and then begin to sing
like well-buckets of blue silver spilled
and ebbing back across my iambs’ naked feet.
It’s like a tide, this backward glance
on personal, profaner time, where deities
are merely fealties to surficial gobs
of gleam: Like that afternoon in my
fourteenth year when my friend Sue
changed in front of me in her bedroom,
sliding down her jeans revealing panties
stitched with”Flaming Love” across
the crotch between her skinny
legs. That sight -- just for a second
or two -- speared me clean and true
all the way to here, 34 years down this
salty strand, though she quickly
turned away to yank another pair of
jeans from a dresser drawer ( was
that turn from me in which her pantied
butt stared back at me the undertow
which had the surer hold on my thrall?)
and zipped them blithely up. The end.
What had I seen, what had been revealed
which elected me right then to sing
forever of that wild tide till I had seen
and later sung it all, until the entire
panoply of the naked world was
spread fully to view? Nothing supernatural
in such eagerness for eye-candy; what
randy boy doesn’t jam an eye to the
keyhole, praying for just one glimpse?
And Lord, all I did to count that coup
for all those nights, notching my
headboard with each pubic scalp
my eyes offered up to You -- so adolescent
and in adulthood wrong, so tediously
irreprehensible; so many bottles emptied
to fill those beds just to get full-frontal
for ten minutes with Artemis -- Oh
the dogs unleashed by looking, the hells
I’ve paid to spread those pages just to
read that singular line! Shame on me, so
madly predictable ... And are these poems
just gouts of long-counted cunts an
attempt to squeeze the last blue voltage
from that juice which used to amp
my balls past all limits of all sanity?
Certainly and perhaps: My intent here
is not imprurient: I offer a peek at
pubescent pantied snatch because You
knifed me so that way right then.
It took me years to write that moment
down, but once I had -- five years or
so ago -- the constellation I call
“Flaming Love” whirled its nova
into into my early pantheon,
a name for fate which
is that wave’s shout which rises at
the shore and careens into a
collapsed roar delving to my feet
a precious whelk -- smoothed and
broke and almost fully faded, to
be sure. Those two or three seconds
when, getting up from her bed where
we were talking about the misery
of classes and parent(s) and the
dream of running free, Sue unbuttoned
unzipped and shimmied down her
jeans, kicked one leg free then
the other, and paused for just
one second in front of me, looking
some other way, like a Venus
off the half-shell to my shore:
an me agape and staring hard,
my heart hammering, my desire
drowning every other nautilus
inside my soul for good, drowning
every high heaven’s white-washed
wings which only fly as they
should, drowning every word I
sing here in a sea of Flaming Love,
a silky blue oh-so thinnest pause between
the wildest world and You. Upon the mantel
of my verbally hot heart I put these shells
on view, each an eye a sight a song,
a nether wending way in which
the beach I dream I’ll never reach
will welcome me at last
when the last shell swoons me down.

The Song Heals the Singer

Like the sick man, the religious man is projected onto a vital plane that shows him the fundamental data of human existence, that is, solitude, danger, hostility of the surrounding world. But the primitive magician, the medicine man, or the shaman is not only a sick man; he is, above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself. Often when the shaman’s or medicine man’s vocation is revealed through an illness of an epileptoid attack, the initiation of the candidate is equivalent to cure.

The famous Yakut shaman Tusput (that is, “fallen from the sky”) had been ill at the age of twenty; he began to sing, and felt better. When Sieroszowski met him, he was sixty and displayed tireless energy. “If necessary he can drum, dance, jump all night.” In addition, he was a man who had travelled; he had even worked in the Siberian gold mines. But he needed to shamanize; if he went for a long time without doing so, he did not feel well.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 27-8




THE SONG
HEALS THE SINGER

Nov. 22, 2005

December 1973: I’m 16 and walking
home from school and work through
New Town on a late afternoon that’s
frozen in the old Chicago way, by
a ferocity more certain in its
hard blue curtaining than death.
The cold seems freighted directly
from the North Pole as I hug
my peacoat tight, hands jammed into
its pockets, a cigarette in my lips
with its tiny bead of fire like a single
orange life-vest lost in a towering
Arctic sea. When I turn right at Fullerton
the wind slaps at me hard like a wolf-
pack sprung with red joy; it mauls and
tears to free the last of heat from me
which I try to shield like a throat.
The light to the west is minted from those
canines, an angry red leaping high at blue
then blacker truths. I could die out here
and no one would care nor even notice
amid the city’s grey decrepitude which
devours whole whatever morsels its
battered citizens provide by failing and
falling hard. Not that much awaits me
at home a few blocks further on, my parents
imploding into an unspoken doom, the
eyes of my siblings too bright with
rage and fear, even the dogs yapping
hysterically at every next wrong sound
coming off the street ten feet from our
front door, sounds we hear and pray
only the safest registers of. I’m walking
there anyway, because where else would
a boy-man like me go? It’s all ending
in the brutal precis of a winter afternoon
very close to the dead end of my sixteenth
year: So why am I just then hearing
Billy Paul’s “Me And Mrs. Jones” in my head?
That sappy Philly soul tune played on
so sweet and tender despite ghetto
arrears which freezes every bud to
stillness on the stem, dooming me
in the end. Stolen love and fragile dreams
which cannot survive another day --
that’s the hottest and most eternal
shaman-puerile flame, and it kept me
walking happily bittersweet on that day
& in fixed in my memory every since,
above the miseries of being 16
in the maul of a Chicago winter, with
neither Jesus nor any bottle of sufficient
proof to poof those dogs away. Like
a choirboy I sang along with that
divine song in my head, thus getting
all of that sweet stuff too. My ears were
burning ice but I still heard the song;
my hands were numb yet ached
to hold my guitar once again; my heart
was empty of any lover’s smile but
was alight on Mrs. Jones smile in that
sad cafe, holding her hand, making up plans.
I burned to write and sing what warmed
that frozen city playing from every
radio and juke in town, creating a music
of my own that boated me spoon-fashion
to that song away from that hard afternoon
down some moony river to this pre-dawn
sub-tropic middle-aging swoon.
I’m still singing bluesy love back
in the face of hard-fought days: Florida
and marriage and a switch from pick
to pen have changed perhaps the singer
but not at all the song; it’s still the
soundtrack of all walks through arctic
fields, delighted to see her once again
albeit in the northern lights of my
conceit splashed upon the page;
thrilled the way she loves me too,
dancing there inside the frozen world
slow and sweetly over all the bones
fallen to the bottom of a life. “Me
And Mrs. Jones” is still in my ear
and I’m still walking that cold road home,
singing along with Your song’s mojo
and singing back my own songs,
getting to every healing inside of
what it means to Get the Girl,
even when love is nowhere to
be found or flung, even when it
freezes to hard ice. Dante harrowed
hell wrapped in the meters of his song,
the whole passage down the way he
found that heart where Beatrice
waited for him. Whatever I hummed
as a baby I’m still trying to sing here,
her kiss the welcome of each page
I stain in sea-wrack and foam,
still trying to walk those last blocks home.


THE GREAT FIRES

Jack Gilbert

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.



WALKIN' ... IN THE RAIN

from A Breviary of
Guitars, 2000

Perhaps what
happened in
early spring ‘79
was a trial
adjudicated by
Eros or Dionysos
to see if I
was worthy of
Rock’s bitter
blistering
cornucopia:
I believed
-- who in the cups
does not? --
but would I pay?
The Spokane
river by April
a swollen
dangerous
thing as it
hurled the blood
of meltpack
into town,
tumbling over
the falls in
a crash and a
rumble & the
night awash
in spray and mist:
I stood on
a bridge over
those falls feeling
the river inside
a love drowned
down further:
I was cold
and lonely and
more than
half-mad,
scarred with
hoarfrost and
rock dreams:
Flash In the Pan’s
“Walking in the Rain”
is the song
for that season,
swelling synths
and footsteps
on wet pavement
as a voice in
a tube intoned
the passion
of dislocation:
Walking, Walking,
In the Rain:
There I go,
2 a.m. after the
Aquarius had
closed, hugging
my jacket in
the raw spring
night & the
river nearby
surging with
nothing &
my feet the
only way home,
my heart filled
with everything
but the girl
who loves my song;
That music
a lute strung
from river to
my sodden
empty bed,
a sidewalk
glistening with
moon and rain
as all the world
sleeps without me:




WIND AND SURF


Melbourne Beach
March 1996

Cold rags of sky
whip sand and froth
down the beach,
blasting away
all signs of spring:

but inside
our hotel room
you and I
bower that dream
between our bodies,
my chest rapt
in the billows
of your breasts.

Beat silly
in the maul
of wind and surf
at the windows
we sleep,
curled into
the vernals
of love,

never quite solitary

or solid again.





SINGING HEART

April 2004


Today I sight this singing heart
below behind and between
as a crannog built by You
for a dark and wild bell’s ringing.
In previous years
I’ve seen otherwise
in a well’s cold drench,
in whale and girl astride
toward every beach
worth dreaming,
guitar and Bible buried
there when their time
had run Your curse,
amid the manowars
and other boats
I built just for such beaching.
Ten thousand poems
I’ve launched from here,
their verbal engines
tooled for salt abandon’s
blue overreaching, a
name for every isle
in the dark archipelago
of ten thousand teachings.
Here to the tide contains
the kiss and curve of
every woman who smiled
and shared with me
the secret of her blue
beseechings, both
bottomless and more,
that samba sambaltique
I found there and lost, one
foot now citizen of
every wave’s collapsing,
each bed’s undinally
pale pure enlacing.
Winds now work the
trees outside, a late
spring front to wash clean
the humid heat of the
past few days, and with
it bring a clearer blue
for our refreshing,
tiding in perhaps
another take on You --
Heron? Psalter?
Mother, Father River?
Some other vantage
on this dark which
does not bear explaining
but requires of me these
three wetmost things:
apt saddle for deranging;
the will to ride heart
all the way to naming;
and the sense of ages --
God’s and Your’s
conjoined in mine --
to let this crannog
fade to waves
so I can go where
blue ends send me,
bereft of any real
sail or bone rudder,
adrift in the next
draught of a room in
a dream, without a way
of ever arriving
or truly knowing.
Ah! but what songs
ahead are glowing!

Perchance, To Dream

What we take out of dreams, what we get to use from dreams, what we bring up from dreams, is all to the surface. Depth is the invisible connection; and it is in working with our hands on the invisible connections where we cannot see, deep in the body of the night, penetrating, assembling and differentiating, debriding, stirring, churning, kneading -- this constitutes the work on dreams. Always we are doing precision work, but with invisibilities, with ambiguities, and with moving materials.

-- James HIllman, Dream and Underworld

***

ABYSSAL PLAINSONG

2002


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

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

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

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

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

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

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



THE SEA AND THE BELLS

Pablo Neruda

Forgive me if my eyes see
no more clearly than sea foam,
please forgive me that my form
grows outward without license
and never stops:
monotony is my song,
my word is a shadow bird,
fauna of stone and sea, the grief
of a winter planet, incorruptible,
of rock, of foam, of the tide's
delirium: this is my loneliness:
salt in sudden leaps against the walls
of my secret being, in such a way
that I am a part of water,
of the same flat expanse that repeats
from bell to bell, in wave after wave
and from a silence like a woman's hair,
a silence of seaweed, a sunken song.

(Transl. Wm. O'Daly)

***

The folk tradition of the insular Celts seems to present to the mind a half-aquatic world ... It introduces a feeling of transparency and interpenetration of one element with another; of transposition and metamorphosis.

-- David Jones



Among the Graeco-Roman peoples of the Mediterranean, it was believed that contact could be made with the underworld by means of ritual shafts dug into the ground. The Greeks called such an excavation a bothros, while in Latin it was a mundus. The Celts seem to have held to a similar concept ...

One of the best known examples of a religious complex containing shafts was found in Holzhausen in Bavaria, where a rectangular earthwork, presumably a ritual enclosure, preceded by timber palisades of the same plan, contained three shafts of which the largest was about forty meters deep. In one of the shallower shafts, eight meters deep, the excavators found a wooden pole, set upright in the bottom of the pit, surrounded by an organic substance which, according to subsequent analysis, resulted from the decomposition of flesh and blood.

-- Barry Cunliffe, The Celtic World p. 92


***


TERRA SUB UNDA

From Oran's Well, 2003

You killed off all my
horses and then gave me
back just one, a huge
nag fresh from the hill
of Uffington. You
stood at the gate of
your mansion on
the Boyne and told
me to place all my
belongings on him
and ride on. I did,
and wandered far into
lands I'd never seen
before. But men who
journey long at last
for home, and short
of that become settlers:
in a valley between
wars I said whoa
and got off that horse
to rest a while. I
unloaded my life from
that broad back
and slept: when I
awoke, however,
the equine had
disappeared, leaving
behind an aquine
stair leading deep
into the earth. I know
to tend that well
carefully, and placed
it in the charge of
my feminine. Alas,
she loved me but
was wild, and one
day for a drink of
eternity forgot her
charge. That night
the well rose up
full force and galloped
out a lake. At the bottom
of every dream is a door
which looses all -- a
cork to green
infinities. I think of
the horse whose
back ferries us across
and whose hooves
clop gods below.
Might mare, font,
undermere, her
brown haunches stride
this poem to regions
I've yet to name,
much less swim. Braying
turbine, your eyes
looking ahead are
huge, like moons
seeking out the sea.
These waters are
your daughters,
the font of our ride.
I hold your mane
as the cold lake creep
to my knees. Ferryman,
take me home.




In our sleep and in our dreams we pass through the whole thought of earlier humanity. I mean, in the same way that man reasons in his dreams, he reasoned when in the waking state many thousands of years ago. The first causa which occurred to his mind in reference to anything that needed explanation, satisfied him an dpassed for truth. In the dream this atavistic relic of humanity manifests its existence within us, for it is the foundation upon which the higher rational faculty developed, and which is still developing in every individual. The dream carries us back into earlier states of human culture, and affords us a means of understanding it better.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Human, All Too Human"

***

The myth is a sustained, still-remaining fragment from the infantile soul-life of the people, and the dream is the myth of the individual.

-- Abraham, "Dreams and Myths"




THE DREAM FORGE

March 2005

If work is our yoga, our dreams dark
labors are its sutra, lessons of
unsheathable fire plunged deep
in awfulness. There is a furnace in the
basement of my heart, a hell
where imps grease old gears
and maul the presses where
my life is published, day after difficult
day, each a sum of hope and woe
balled tight and tossed into the
maelstrom, sustaining the engines
which roll me back here once again
for the next long daily fray.
Love's torture is also racked there,
desire's jezebells heaving their
cleavage in motions that cut me
raw and clean, their lips always just
beyond the ache of my kiss, their voices
taunting, swooning, accusing, their
sweet abysms always walking away,
finding me in my love faulty and
with means far short and droopy
of their own penetrate depths.
Each wave's folds and crash booms
down those metal halls in full
augment of ebb, descending miles
and fathoms down. Endless are the toils
and smarts here in the forges of that smith,
maker and renewer of what is both art
and its heart, all my bright gleaming
shores fabricated here by a brute
ugly man who will never see the
hosannahs of day, much less the
beloved I dream. Each night my day's
labors are sent down an oubliette
to plunge in the vat of acids
which tears me apart, limb from
bloody limb, to know the depths of
desire and God, where seven bright
swords steadily rise and fall,
gashing and dismembering and
setting me at last free. When I wake
there is no trace of blood on my lips,
only the faint salt staining the last
gossamer of fast-fading dream. - What
wildness, what awfulness, what tender
perfection was there in that room?
I wonder, as I drag my ass out of bed
in the dark and stumble on down here
to stroke up the day fires and
do it all over again.


***

... We have two forms of thinking -- directed thinking and dream or phantasy thinking The first, working for communication with speech elements is troublesome and exhausting; the latter, to the contrary, goes without trouble, working spontaneously, so to speak, with reminiscences. The first creates innovations, adaptations, imitates reality and seeks to act upon it. The latter, on the contrary, turns away from reality, sets free subjective wishes, and is, in regards to adaptation, wholly unproductive.

-- Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious





THE STOCKROOM

Jan. 2004

Deep down beneath the heavy
covers of sleep while night birds
sigh regurgitate and sing
the blackened trees outside
I return again to that dream
of working in a stockroom
I haven't worked for years.
The dream boss has His
own reasons for returning
me to that that ever more
distant land, a lost
room which grows ever
stranger each time I return.
Last night I trudged through
yards of an old nearby
suburb, stopping in one to
freight off an old console
stereo - or was it a jukebox?
I'd hauled it to my car
when I remembered
to ask the homeowner
if I could have it so
I knocked on a white door.
A middleaged redhead
soccer-mom appeared
looking flustered to be
disturbed from whatever
she herself dreamed. "Taking
the stereo out back," I said,
and she waved me on
as if to fend far music.
I packed the thing in
the back of my new
Toyota Matrix and drove
on to the newspaper plant
I haven't seen the insides
of for at least five years,
& unloaded that musical
vault into a stockroom I
haven't seen in 15.
But the dimensions of that
room I knew instantly,
like an old song, its length
and girth whalelike, the tall
shelving units packed with
stick pens and staples
and X-acto knives and tape,
boxes of printed envelopes stacked
high, pallets of copy paper,
yes, yes: but this time
other things were stored
there - a huge coffee
percolator on feet,
roofing materials, a mud-
encased anchor, boxes of
dirty magazines arranged
by publication date, bins of
broken combination locks
and carburetors. What's
all this shit? I wondered
as I plugged the stereo
in a rummaged for something
to play on it, finding at
last an old Pat Matheny cassette
in a box on that scarred long
work desk I used to fill orders
on. The music was gutteral
and scratchy and wobbled
as if rising from abyss.
I could easily see out of the
stockroom, for all security
doors had been removed.
The Production Center was less
newspaper inserting facility
than smelter, with huge vats
of molt steel steaming
and shimmering a few
yards away. Third shifters -
always the most dubious
characters in a corporation
you know, working furthest
from the eyes of the Dayside
Management - smoked and
generally fucked off, moving
in shoals between the my
room and theirs. A young
woman with short blond hair
- like Pink or Gwen Stefani
of No Doubt, or someone
older perhaps, that wistful
waifish singer of The Plasmatics? -
eyed me cynically as she
talked with a co-worker of
streetside seductions, ripping
off johns while shimmying
through their hungry teeth.
I wanted to follow her but
could not, not in last night's
dream, what with two
auditors walking in unannounced
carrying clipboards and
a secret, boardroom intent.
I felt foolish, almost naked,
what with things in that stockroom
so long unattended and so
piled in helter-skelter disarray.
What could I do but let them
scrabble every nook like beetles,
counting every paper clip and
question mark gathering dust
on those shelves, scratching
their pens like pincers through
paper. I sat at my desk wondering
just what I'm to do in that vault
where my days slowly and
surely rain down, the receipt
of all I couldn't quite say
here though account there
I guess I must. It's been years
since I last did inventory
in that room, and the patch
has grown wild, perhaps
forever so. "Are You Going
With Me" pulsing and moody
in slow bossa firma on that
dredged stereo, the music
spilling a vein which returns
spent platelets and nouns
back to the source where
all the old stuff's retired
or renewed for the next time,
operating supplies for the cause.
What else was there? Busted
monster models, a cherry-
red Fender Mustang guitar;
pictures of girlfriends tacked
to a bulletin board; oars and
saddles and broken horseshoes
up in the mezzanine; spermed-
up wads of Kleenex and empty
beer bottles; the keys to all my
cars on a ring: Each had their
own shelf & wing & sub sub floor.
Nothing's ever quite lost;
all of it's needed in that
blue factory below where
today's new poem last
night was poured. The auditors
reported up to the Boss
and I woke up remembering
the dream and that stockroom
filled now with so much strange
crap - especially that big-ass
stereo playing songs I once
loved, and that pouty
impossible girl standing
in a halo of poured fire,
leading me on, drawing me
back in, never catchable,
never quelled, her eyes of
a blue neither shored nor
shelled though well her I will.

***

Beyond both the fear and desire, the black and white of the dream, is Hades of incomparable intelligence. Work with dreams is to get at the hidden intelligence, to communicate with the God in the dream ... Because the dream is black and white, its intelligence is neither altogether obscure nor altogether clear.

- Hillman, Dream and Underworld



The Boy-Charioteer in Faust Part Two leads the car of Pluto, or Hades; he is like the genius in Roman art, the fish-rider of inspiration; the cuculattus on grave-stones which guided the souls of the dead to the Otherworld; his is the vatic voice of the dream, black and white, for better and ill, speaking in higher and lowest sounds:

I am Profusion, I am Poesy!
The poet who's attained his goal
When he's poured out his inmost soul.
I too am rich with untold pelf
And value me the peer of Plutus' self,
Adorn, enliven, and make his revels glow;
And what he lacks, that I bestow. (5573-9)

***


WAKING DREAM

2003

The English word "symbol"
is the Greek word "symbolon"
which meant, in the ancient
world, one half of a knucklebone
carried as a token of identity
to someone who has the
other half. Together the
two halves compose one
meaning. A metaphor is
a species of symbol. So
is a lover.

- Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

The fizzing half we
hold is the ocean's;
only dreams now seem
true. Looking out with
driftglass eyes, the
inland world seems
strange and ill-used,
scattered and scuttled,
ravaged by flame.
Voice balloons clash
loosened from mouths,
the landfills are
gorged with trash gods.
We wonder what could
ensoul such a mess,
and jail the votives
in vandal shrines
- TV, titties, tail.
These angels have their
wings dipped in blood
before they lift in song.
Their devils cure the tides
by quelling every wave
they used to ride.
Cathedral spires lay
jagged at our feet, like
unhoused clock arms
or compass needles
pointing to the wisdom
of the disorient.
It's certainly a raw time,
not neat like any knowing
that binds orders; yet
for us in our lifetimes
it's always been so.
We're used to this
nincompooping bliss.
This new scripture
inks upon a waking dream,
whose blue pages reveal
today a reversal or
inversion of the knucklebone
we once held - intangibles
are what we now know
best, while the certain
is that doomed Mariner
who'll never shore to rest.
I write my praises
on a sand of smashed
history - where chapels
and libraries and continents
of white cities have all
been ground to grains
in the faith of a raw tide,
in days of raw footing
& roars from every side.
Rise from this beach,
O Jonah, spewed from
yesterday's white whale.
Make of this vandal motion
God's weirding of his jail.

***


CAPE OF DEEPER DREAMS

April 2005

My dreams are more random
now, faded harps my angels
used to play for me in
brilliant strolling waves of blue
fret and ache and bluster.
Now I frequently dream in verse,
the angle of the descent and
discourse with shades pure
glossalalia, my inside tongue
all eyes and mouth. I know I'm
dreaming because I wake
ravished by a genius I can
only remember the sound of,
like a murmuring of a surf
beyond day-brightened dunes.
I wonder if I've voyaged
beyond one sort of dream
into its wilder terrain, a thrall
of sound whose sense is
aural, product perhaps of
all this listening and writing
each wave down. So when
I dream in the older way
I try to pay attention
in the old-school ways.
Last night I dreamed I was
sober no more, or was bent
on that ravishment, perambling
old bars of a lost great city,
each bar a tap assembled
from all the ones I drank
through for too many years.
Only I was walking bar to
bar in search not of booze or
even pussy, but rather
their salt integument,
trying to find a way to
enter and find a stool
that was right for the thirst
inside the old unslakable
greed; for James Bond-like
entries, all eyes on
me, violins sawing tense
and gorgeous lower
tones about my feet like
water, and ahead beneath
a single lamp the barstool
assigned to me by God
and a perfectly poured
martini on the bar,
gleaming a glacial, hard
blue undertow to all
I've since built over.
First it was a hotel
bar at 5 a.m., or several
of them in one swank
complex -- a convention
center perhaps -- the work
day's furies still fresh
in me and the first drink
of happy hour after years
without fraught enough
to require the right bar,
stool, bartender, crowd,
first drink, I dunno, but
such angst wove me through
two or three without tasting
booze. None was quite right,
the sought for god missing
on his shore, the one-night
stand sleeping naked next
to me in the ghastly
hour of first light so wrong
I couldn't wait to leave,
wrong for all the reasons
that sent me toward
the beacon of all wrongness
burning in the night.
And so I left that place
and ventured out into
a spring-seeming night
of city neon and hoary air
not winter any more
but far from summer,
a dewy fragrance hanging
in the eaves of stores
I walked under, like
some promised or
forever lost perfume,
as I made my ghost
peramble through all
the old, toothy bars.
I entered a dark
pool hall where I stood
next to the bar waiting
for a Budweiser and
wondering if I should
stay to romance
the barmaid, a conflicted
pretty-but-worn gal
in tight jeans and a
white t-shirt which
suggested weary, over-
weaning breasts which
were sore from nursing
too many men like me,
boys who'd gained
an appetite for their
long-lost mothers'
nipples. But in the
press of that hour
too many jerks were
jostling at the bar,
waving fivers like
fins of a school
of boy-men on a field
trip to salt's breasty
planetarium where every
heavenly body is put
on view. -- So I got
outta there and walked
cooled midnight streets
wondering where next
to go to slake my riven
needs, scanning through
my faulty memory a
rolodex of eateries
and nightclubs, bars
of every stripe -- not
to rock at the Aquarius
Tavern in Spokane or CBGB
in New York City or Fern
Park Station in Orlando
where all the bands I
never got to play in rocked
the rafters and then died.
Not to dance at JJ Whispers
or Park Avenue amid
disco divas and New Wave
wastrels who danced
like Sufis of bad flame,
whirls I could not drink
to any sufficient depth.
Then I recalled some
restaurant bars of long
ago a few streets over
that had a certain,
Scotch-ambered glow,
a possibility of drinking
and receiving what
the pickled half of my
heart will always dream
of in its desire for
the perfect buzz, for
drink without the
drunkenness and love
in endless bloom: a
tipsy free-fall through downy
rooms where all the
women know my name
and trade it guilelessly
from night to bed to night
to bed, hosannah and amen.
And so I ventured out
toward streets I barely
recalled, stretching a long
night out still further to
its remotest periphery
close to dawn, that hazy
edge of blackout and
deep sleep inside the bottle
of a body I never quite
could find. I peeped an
eyelid open to find our
bedroom washed pale blue
by a hot moon hanging
in the western windows,
a migraine gonging in
my skull, our cat scrambling
around the room, trying
to rouse me downstairs
to feed her treats. Sometimes
a dream allows my Cape
blue folds, plashes of old
angst and vitreous desire
which no one may hold
as they boat through.
The sound of those
lost years is both revenant
and resonant, a vintage of
naked peramble for
which these words are
scat and scrabble.
Cape of my wrecked
hopes for perfect booze,
horned Cape of waters
deeper than old dreams:
Narrow down for me
what passed through with
me on those nights
of wild blue screams.
Name for me the totem
which redeems that history.



And now that the hour bids me end, leaving dreams behind in their sea and turn to my day, I end with a dream, which is where dreams belong in a poem, according to Robert Bly:

DREAM

2002

In my dream some hard-
learned instruction is spoken
in a dear room, making perfect
sense. And lost when I woke.
I keep peering under a
migraine to recover what
seemed a so ripened truth
but I can't even get a hold
of the fish's tail. So I let it go.
Instead I read Keats and Rilke
and feel the fist of dawn
slowly unclench in the dark,
exhaling so softly what eventually ignites.
A first bird, then another,
contribute their audible degrees.
I'm home now, back in
your tidy green esplumoir, Master,
cresting the dark thermals
like verbs in a cawing wave.
Then the dream swims through me
and I lift it whole from the water,
but it no longer glitters and gleams.
"Just keep coming back,"
I recall the voice saying
as I lost the whole thing in my pillow.
I don't know if it was the alarm
or a tail or this song that slapped me awake.

The Northern Lights

A zone between seasons, indeterminate, somewhat warm yet cool, intimating changes up and down the thermometer, humid, windy, fronts blowing down at the same time Tropical Storm Gamma charges north. No compass or sextant I know can accurately say where this time lies; no named latitudes mark which hemisphere of heart I’m in, no longitudes to say how far south or north. A moment betwixt the feeling and the name.

Hard hooves of a migraine still in my skull after double doses of Frova yesterday, a pain pill before bed with the Depakote, more Frova and the last Prednisone this morning after getting up at 4 a.m. Sheesh. All of it precipitated by a weary Saturday helping my mother in her yard sale, or rather a sale of stuff moved out of her friend’s trailer after the woman went into a Medicare nursing home. The wares of an unknown and mostly forgotten life on display to the incurious and mildly appetitive folk of dayside revenance, glutting in the suburban way on stuff and more stuff. How much to price jewelry bought but never worn? How to distinguish any of it from anything else, cleaved from life which once inhabited it in dwindling solitude? Just price it all cheap and sell it all off.

The day warm and then cool, breezy with clouds which threatened to rain but failed to, surging with urgencies known to none of us, my migraine wakening somewhere amid what that day represented to Its agencies, refusing to admit or confess its presence as I tried to keep my mother from working too hard and getting things finished up (packing and sorting and putting away, folding tables and returning them across the street or into my car). About then it started to rain, not heavily but dreamily, more of a vaguely purposeful mist, intuiting changes which could go bad or clear up.

Driving home I took the first Frova but it was too late by then, hell had broken loose, and the drive was miserable and long, got caught in a huge slowdown near the Tangerine Bowl just before kickoff of the FAMU-BCC game, sort of a reunion of African-American youth in their dream of bling Caddies with the huge spinning hubcaps and thundering buh-buh-bass systems, all of it slowed to a murderous crawl and the rider of pain on a real jag in my skull, cawing over the frightened ramparts of my brain, firing at will --

But I bitch. My father gave the best advice on malaise I’ve heard yet, which I share here: “Don’t let yourself get sucked into it, there’s no way out.” He should know, what with his baffling weight loss & high cholesterol & quadruple bypassed heart having trouble with its pig valve & bum feet from walking on stony terrain all these years (several toes now amputated) & the threat of diabetes always in the wings & teeth all replaced & now a biopsy due on his upper gum, fruit probably of forty years of smoking a pipe. You sail shore to shore of dream with the measly armada you’ve got.

(Later) Talking on the phone with him on our usual Sunday morning chat, his voice sounding reedier than ever, almost wheezy, though he was engaged with our talk, animated about Eliade’s book on shamanism (I’d sent him a copy), excited about seeing his 86-year-old sister for Thanksgiving (though he groused about his niece making her travel at her age), reflecting how, earlier in the week, he realized it was 30 years to the day that he took occupancy of that 1820-era shack of ancient oak beams with its 20-plus acres of half-assed forest; and that, just a couple of days later, he had been in Washington to congratulate his old pal Don Rumsfeld on being appointed Secretary of State under the Ford Administration, he and Don and another buddy of theirs from Chicago schmoozing in Don’s new office with its red telephone, wondering how they had come that far ... My father sad how he disappeared from that world’s view, digging down to the foundations of the stars, raising stones to the moon; I told him that maybe his Oran and Thor are vaster principalities than Republican rule, and besides, 500 years hence, only his stones will remain of whatever this age tried to say ...




I could say to him what Faust told the Emperor in Goethe’s Faust Part Two (transl. George Madison Priest)

Treasuries in superfluity still sleep
Within your borders, buried deep,
And lie unused. Thought in its widest measure
Give the most meagre bounds to such a treasure.
Imagination in its highest flight,
Strain as it may, can’t soar to such a height.
Yet spirits, fit to fathom the unsounded,
Have boundless confidence in the unbounded. (6111-18)

Spirit of the dream, perhaps. Of late (in this latest season of these words) there is a matrix (or patrix?) of dreams & poems & meditations on shamanism & thoughts of my father, all of that rounding something below the center of all that, whatever next is in the chute for birth or rebirth on my tongue. “Shamanic Letters” indeed, though I don’t know who’s writing or reading them, who’s sending or who’s receiving them. It’s all indeterminate and unitive like the dreams that bid me write them down with a sound.

But certainly something’s up, or about or round or down: Writing a poem about one dream produced another dream, producing another poem, rousing the next deepest dream reflected in the next wilder poem, etc. An alchemical series, cooking room to room through a dream? A trancelike dance whose steps are purely known in the meters? I don’t know; or rather, I have lots of things I do know which might guess at what I don’t. So I write, trusting the correspondence to make matter clear enough, at least for the song.

I call this latest process shamanic in both origin and goal because its madness bears such semblance to these wings. “The available documents on shamanic dreams,” Eliade writes in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, “clearly show that they involve an initiation whose structure is well known in the history of religions. In any case, there is no question of anarchial hallucinations and of a purely individual plot and dramatis personae; the hallucinations and the mise en scene follow traditional models that are perfectly consistent and possess and amazingly rich theoretical content.” (14)

So I dream and I write, trusting the deepest God that the process is holy; that down its holes are the wholes, whales of song whose bellows I am in the organum of the tribe.

Carl Jung writes in Civilization in Transition,

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses in the psyche, opening into that cosmic night which was the psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and will remain psyche no matter how far our ego consciousness may extend. ... All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood.” (144-5)

How to dream down to him but through my father, through his dreams, or what those dreams still resonate when they bid me to sing.

So ... maestro ... :





NORTHERN LIGHTS

Nov. 18, 2005

I.

My father loves to walk his land
at night; he’s most at home amid
the gleam of moon and star upon
those stones he hauled out from
Blue Mountain’s heart then raised,
like sails, to north-windward lords.
To me those walks always seemed
both cold and old, winter-solsticial
no matter what time of year;
there was always something distant
and wounded in that ambient light
too close in some proximity of heart
to the night’s New Jersey, the land
sad from our pillage (the old forest
clear-cut some 40 years ago), Lenai
Lenapi ghosts in spooring mist
still grieving children murdered
two hundred years ago, nearby
trailers a canned misery of drunks
dead at the wheel and crops
failing to yield more than rocks
and ruin and the incessant
evictions leading to the poorest
of the last doors down the road.
That high frigate moonlight seemed
freighted to me with sins and wounds
which ferries them far beyond their
graves, baptizing sons and stones
in the cold blue waters of death.
How could my father feel thus
so at home, most loved, exactly
where I felt the worst of worlds
was tombed? But I sense now how
wide of the point I was in those walks.
The extremity of those wounds
and the terrible sum amped by
that moon are exactly what
charged what he saw in the
land with pregnant power, as
if to find one’s true north
you must look to the place
where losses have fallen hardest,
dowsing down a sea of grief
to the wild heart of old Lir,
the whale who swims beneath
all durables. Thor’s hammer
struck the world just so and
fell to Lir’s court in our core,
adding thunder and ecstasy
to Leviathan’s sub-continental
roar. There’s a merriment to
Northern Lights, a strangely
wondrous gleam, hovering like sails
of light above the bruited ice,
sheets torn from the moon’s
own missal and hung on the line
which defines what’s too
coldly north of what survives
by day. You taught me that
if I want to build an abbey,
I must bury myself to
to the neck where the
oldest energies lay bound.

II.

So in my dream I try to
cook a pot of what looks
like Swedish meatballs or
testicles or horse-turds,
deciding that slow-cooking’s
best. But that process
is quickly doomed, the liquid
steaming off too soon, perhaps
because I start too early or
some mysterious other (You,
I presume) removes the lid
when I wasn’t watching.
I search the cupboards
for some liquid in the
kitchen of a house as bad
as I ever lived in
in the worst of my bad
days, a hovel or crack-house,
party hell beneath martini
seas, a dive where diseased
rats were loath to shelter
on so bad a night as mine.
Onion soup? Lemon juice?
Urine swirled with sperm? I
wonder, rummaging rotten
boxes and rusted tins.
I found nothing in that
bad house to salvage
the stuff inside the cauldron
which I’m always cooking
wrong. The dream thus
turns to sex as I walk
from kitchen to bedroom
where a foursome’s about to
begin, two coeds offered
cockage from two randy college
boys, pair to pair unzipping
down to damp ‘n’ swole
thunderwear. But rather than
get some through them the
dream then bid me leave,
begging a ride to the
sea from one of those cock-
aching arch studs
so I could walk with my
father once again. I pay
the dude good money
and we drive and drive
beyond the night end
of every town I know,
arriving the next day
at some major port
where ships are built
and harbored for great
passage. I get out of the car
& am suddenly assaulted
by a wintry highblown
day & my father standing
there in welcome, his arms
and smile wide. We walk and
talk they way we always do
along those bitter wharves,
inside the wildness of a day
so cold & mauled by hard
northern winds, the sun adazzle
on the sea as if heaven’s vault
had been cracked and scattered
for us on limitless treasury
of glittering waves. And it
came to me that he had
at last become the man
that he admired most, the
elemental guardian of
what’s northernmost in
every windy seaside day.
The dream ended there
but I here I linger, not
quite finished with this
missive of a poem. I imagine
us walking a while further on
to find the Sea Sprite
docked next to a pier,
that frigate which brought
our grandsire John
across the sea from Cobh
Harbor 228 years ago,
its masts straight as ever, its
rigging cocksure, the canvas
reams wild aglow with
my father’s imprurient
sky- and shore-wide
Northern Lights, like balls
fresh discharged of their
immortally bright freight.
That’s the moonlight I’m walking
in wonder of this day,
the ghost of every builder’s
broken heart, his stones and my
words the sons of those fires
burning hottest in ice and
earning nothing but what it sires.



Let us further peruse and abuse and bemuse the underworld sea of dream:

***

I searched my Mac for poems with Dream in it and this caught my eye right away: I share it without comment though it surely founds the previous poem:

MY FATHER’S DREAMS

My father has always oared life
With dreams. Strange compass, those pole-jaunts
In blue! They led him from church and
Marriage into the woods, where stones
Lifted his heart from its cage and
Rung it deeply, like an old bell.
Tiger jumping roofs house to house,
Wind-god laughing wild distant gales:
Those dreams were the engines which hauled
A work over half-lives and hedged
Knowns, that bald sea of defeats which
Most found and fold to. Old now,
He still walks with his dream, lets it
Scent the way to that hidden room
Where blue light furls the next wild bloom.