The Ice Whale

The earliest mention of a Perilous Cemetery, as distinct from a Chapel, appears to being in the Chastel Orguellous section of the Perceval, a section probably derived from a very early stratum of Arthurian romantic tradition. Here Arthur and his knights, on their way to the siege of Chastel Orguello, come to the Vergier des Seupltures, where they eat with the Hermits, of whom there are a hundred or more.

“There is none could ever tell
Of the graveyard’s marvellous spell.
Its wonders so diverse and great
No one alive could now relate
Ore even dream that there could be
Such things as these for men to see.”

...

Originally high importance seems to have been attached to it [The Perilous Chapel]. If we turn back to the first version given, that of which Gawain is the hero, we shall find that special stress is laid on this adventure, as being part of the “secret of the Grail,” of which no man may speak without grave danger. We are told that, but for Gawain’s loyalty and courtesy, he would not have survived the perils of that night.

--Jessie Weston, from “The Perilous Chapel” in From Ritual to Romance, 179-80

***


ICE NEKYIA

Nov. 29, 2005

Father, it was that hard winter
in Spokane -- now 26 years ago --
that Your darker hands tore
me full well apart, offering
all my former chunks of
day-soaked sense to those
black mouths which
vault the full cathedral
of Your sea. A January
of such infernal
cold and dark that my
naked mind -- stripped
of all I once believed --
could only yield to that
boreal cross, pierced
by icicles of night I
feel the fangs of to this
day. Nailed thus, I
was wild and split enough
to receive Your instructive
bolts, those jags of
insane fire which burned
the starry tops of me
in a blue ecstatic pyre.
Three nights a week
I’d walk down to the
Aquarius Tavern next
to the Spokane River’s
empty gouge, listening
to three sets of biker
rock n roll and drinking
all the beer I could afford.
The loudness of those
bands warmed me in
a way that left my insides
numb, physic enough in
those days; the beer
poured coldly down
the falls of that loud
icy sound, carrying me
to free far Northern steppes
where You waited,
flint knife in hand, for me.
Instead of chasing skirts
I just mooned for a waitress
who smiled whenever she
filled me up, a smile fraught
with the froth of yearning
and rectitude, promised
as she was for some asshole
she half-despised but was
faithful in the way of bad
love -- well, You know how
barroom romances go,
all dream, pure gall.
After three hours of
pickling my devouring
miseries in more of
them it was closing time:
too late for sanity
yet too soon to die,
when you realize that you
didn’t get enough to drink
that night, not then,
nor ever. And with a
bouncer’s glare I was
thrown out into the
darkest deepsea winter’s
night, one which no jacket
made on earth can ever
protect you from the
full abysms of. Full
drunk, swerving and
half-stumbling, I walked
two miles back to my
apartment on sidewalks
of great peril, iced over
with black winter dreams
of icy abysmalness.
Thus I steered my
toddering rudder home,
drunk but never
enough, directly into
the jaws of an
icy noctal whale,
walking through a
gullet of deadened
neighborhoods,
past houses where love
was locked safely inside,
in beds I could not reach,
much less with any
clarity quite name, so
frozen were my lips.
Those awful nekyias
back to my apartment
were jaunts I routinely
suffered in the name of
my guitar’s song of love,
forlorn as they were
passionate, both hardblue
and sea-malt sweet. The
stars above me burned
so preternaturally bright,
like eyes intently marking
how I left such bloody
tracks behind me on
the ice, reverent and
revenant at the brutallest
of hours where I alone
walked on through a
dead man’s purgatory
through the stations
of pure loss. Somehow
I got home, or what
remained of me, lighting
a fire in the kitchen
fireplace and trying
to thaw enough to
cry my way to bed.
One night I fed pages
from Roethke’s Straw
for the Fire notes,
offering back to Your
wild pyre what I
once believed most
true. Yes, I was fully
then your fool, your
votive angst, your mad
perambulator of full
winter’s night, cracking
with that ice. When I
came to on Saturdays
I settled on the heat
grate spinning Eno and
Bach on the stereo,
nursing a quart of beer
between my legs
and there fell fully out
of view, into the feral
instruction which recast
me in hard blue.
Far indeed are those
winter nights from this
predawn one in Florida,
barely cool now as a front
washes weakly through,
my pages rich and dark
with the ichor of an
ice-whale’s spume who
is my huge hard familiar
and upon whose back
I ride, line after line,
shore after shore of a
song which is the mystery
part of my history, the
wet part of black seas.
I’m inside love’s house
now and work it daily
and so hard. The booze
is just ouside tapping
icy fingers against the
window, but its a horse
I don’t have to ride
to pour the wild part
of wilderness to the
dregs of this next page.
Brute father, I’m still
not sure what I was
broken into those
winter nights in ‘79,
but the whale oil
there distilled for me
gives this morning
lamp its lustre, its
weird spermacetti shine:
the tincture of
abyssal desires which
wells pure water
from old wine.



LONGING

2002

I sometimes wonder whether longing
can’t radiate out from someone so
powerfully, like a storm, that nothing
can come to him from the opposite
direction. Perhaps William Blake
has somewhere drawn that?
— Rilke, letter, 1912

There is a longing in us which
grows from sigh to starry shriek.
Perhaps comets are charred furies
of that pain, a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears to God’s porch
and back, insatiable and unanswered.
Perhaps. All I know is that
it’s infinitely perilous to think
that longing has a human end.
In my cups I once believed
a woman mooned for me,
her longing a white welcome
over my million nights alone.
I met and passed her many times
those hard years, blinded by the aura
of her unvowled name.
Surely when two longings touch
it’s like when great waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
Our deeper thirst can never sate:
as each draught of booze
was never enough, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.
I recall a young man
walking home drunk on a
frozen night long ago,
his beloved nowhere
to be found in the chalice
he had named. Winds hurled
steel axes through the
Western sky, failing to clear
the cruel foliage of fate.
In his defeat he was greater
than any angel beckoned
by that night: his heart so
hollowed by longing
as to chance in pure cathedral,
her absence the clabber of a bell
shattering the frozen air,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.



WINTERED

2002

Thy shrunk voice sounds too
calmly, sanely woeful to me.
In no Paradise myself, I am
impatient of all misery in others
that is not mad ... Do the heavens
yet hate thee, that thou canst not
go mad?
— Ahab, Moby Dick


Wintered beyond
all Decembering, the hard man
lounges on a perfect beach
sipping his whiskey
as the sea crashes
all the bones of the world.
His eyes, which are of that
whorled sea (but icier),
are hidden behind lenses
dark as lead. We cannot
see his polarized day, where
beach, sea, sky, birds, babes
in nearby bikinis remain
hoar-frosted in place, dead-
wintered. He’s just another
hard man on a beach amid
thousands, each in
nondescript trunks
sipping from a vein
of the merciless sea.
They’re all deeply tanned
and tattooed, come early
and leave late. Their sport cars
gleam in the parking lot like
burning fruit, their condos
line the beach like the molars
of a whale jaw. They’ll live forever,
you know, sipping to the dregs,
rattling the cubes which ice
them everywhere they go.


COLD DREAM

2002

I dreamt a cold wind
blowing ever more fierce
against a house
I lived in long ago,
each gust a gale
of surprising intensity,
blasting westward off
an unknown, winter sea.

Would those frail
walls stand? Where
did I put my
old travelling clothes?
And what on earth
was that stench
coming a locked door?

I woke with my
dream swimming
off into the cloyed
heaviness
of our quilted bed
where the you and
I and the cat
struggling like fish in
a mud for purchase,
for room to breathe.

Time to get up. The house
cold as winters in Florida
go, no big deal but
enough to turn the heat
on downstairs for a while
& drape a blanket over
my legs while I drink
coffee and begin.

When I write of it
I submit to its
washings and gale,
going down
as a pen into ink.

Perilous Chapel

... In the dark backward and abysm of time ...

-- Shakespeare, The Tempest


History is Mystery’s thong: the thrall of lost thrills dowses my backward glance back over every past upturned ass into what I could not quite plunge the full depths of with my errant, ululant-blue equipage. Even the bliss had darker wings than I could then see -- had I known then just what abysm was offering its nipples to me, I would have fled, screaming, from that bed ... But how else would have I been fattened for the fall which You battened on with such blue gall?

***

Students of the Grail romances will remember that in many of the versions the hero -- sometimes a heroine -- meets with a strange and terrifying adventure which, we are given to understand, is fraught with extreme peril to life. The details vary: sometimes there is a Dead Body laid on the altar; sometimes a Black Hand extinguishes the tapers; there are strange and threatening voices, and the general impression is that this is an adventure in which supernatural, and evil, forces are engaged.

Such an adventure befalls Gawain on his way to the Grail castle. He is overtaken by a terrible storm, and coming to the Chapel, standing at a crossways in the middle of a forest, enters for shelter. the altar is bare, with no cloth, or covering, nothing is there but a great golden candlestick with a tall taper burning within it. Behind the altar is a window, and as Gawain looks a Hand, black and hideous, comes through the window, and extinguishes the taper, while a voice makes lamentation loud and dire, beneath which the very building rocks. Gawain’s horse shies for terror, and the knight, making the sign of the Cross, rides out of the Chapel, to find the storm abated, and the great wind fallen. Thereafter the night was calm thereafter.

-- Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance



The stone called Clach-Bratha [is a] large stone slab [which] lies beside the door of the St. Oran’s Chapel on the island of Iona (Strathclyde: Argyll). It has three hollows in its upper surface, in which rested three white marble stones, and every one who visited the island was expected to turn each stone round three times in a sunward direction. Failure to do this would bring about the Day of Judgment.

There is also a belief that when a hole was worn right through the stone as the result of friction caused by the continual turning of the stone, then the burning of the world would come.

it is interesting that taken together, the two prophesies are somewhat at odds: If you don’t turn the stone, the Day of Judgment, i.e., the end of the world, will come. If you do turn the stones, the slab will eventually wear through, bringing the burning of the world.

-- Janet and Colin Bord, The Secret Country

***


PERILOUS CHAPEL

Nov. 28, 2005

On my way through the blue draughts
of Your grail there was always a
lacuna of fraught peril, sometimes
a chapel, others a grave, always
a bed in its deepest darkest plush.
At Iona Oran’s Chapel stands like
a door between the abbey
and its boneyard, also named
after that saint whose bones
lie rigored in the abbey’s
footers as that door to
angels bright and wild.
You never know what will
irrupt at the border sacristy
(well, You do, though our
knowledge forever remains
dark); altars and graves
are wells for alter histories,
those truths much darker
than we have the guts to name,
much less believe, or worst,
revere. For me, the siege
is four-postered, a bed
of bowered delights which
always drowsed down into
something deeper than
the sex, the surface
sheet-staining narrative
of knight and yielding queen
dowsing in their motions
some mantic and preter-
romantic pantomime
of unfolding oceans
far wilder and incessant
than a young man’s boozy
susurrations in the loins
of a booze-complicit
maid. It wasn’t like I woke
from those nights so brined
in those vaster realms below
that I knew any better or
wiser of my plight; for
years I just stumbled on out
mumbling grey endearments
with my underpants in hand,
words I never meant to
whisper in that past queen’s
bed again. (Is that one
function of this verbal
drone, my call back
at last to a plunged and
farewelled catalogue?)
Soon enough back then
I’d ache her smile
forward toward my future
queen and quest back out
into the bars, pouring
blonde and saucy grails
my greedy and incessant
throat. Those many
nights eventually just
fell behind and vaulted in
a place which came to
sum much later into
a Peril I could comprehend,
a mixed oil of bad
history and its mythically
bad mordents further
down where drunks
and whale-shit pound
the bar for one last round.
Of perils then I was
blind drunk, heedless as
I was unsighted: As I look
back now I wonder just
what dark hand so gripped
me by the balls, hauling
me on a cold deep wave
which broke on shores
at the bottom of the sea.
Bed to bed I raveled
down into a dark and
darker realm, each one
a chapel of what I dreamed
and ossuary for the
next boner tossed into
the usual wrong well.
All that came to an end
when I entered time at
last to marry and get
to work up on the surface
and down here, excavating
my strange and wild
past. My history’s a mystery
only worth retelling here
in the footers of Your
blue dream: My every
dance with bliss Your
bid to gout a darker cream
which I now pour
upon the Peril’s wound,
a dram of wrong-headed
juice which may yet
anoint Your woumb enough
to birth the real words
on my tongue for
whatever fangs that swoon.




The trick is to properly name which angels or imps are inside the wings of narrative: what gig they’re about. Pyschopathology only goes so far, and masturbation’s moot. If there’s a shaman orifice in this rant -- perhaps, in sooth, a mouth -- my story is both mine and Yours, a semiteternal supernumerary gout.

***

(The) tendency to reduce all transpersonal contents to personalistic terms is the most extreme form of secondary personalization. The exhaustion of emotional components and secondary personalization have an important historical function to fulfill, in so far as they help to extricate ego consciousness and the individual from the clutches of the unconscious. That explains why they always appear during the transition from the prepersonal and suprapersonal to the personal. But when secondary personalization seeks to assert itself by devaluing the transpersonal forces, it produces a dangerous overvaluation of the ego. It is a typical false constellation of the modern mind, which is no longer capable of seeing anything that transcends the personal sphere of ego consciousness.

Much as the wild and treacherous Black Sea was euphemistically called the “Euxines,” the “hospitable sea,” or the Erinnyes were renamed the Eumenides, and the abysmal unknowableness of Godhead become the “All-loving and Merciful Father” and the “eiapopeia of children,” so now we mistake the transpersonal for the merely personal. The primordial divinity of the Creator and the fierce, infinitely strange, ancestral totem-animal that dwells in the human soul have been so garbled that they now purport to derive from a prehistoric gorlla father or from a deposit of many such fathers, who have not conducted themselves well toward their “children.”

— -- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness




SEA FOREST

2003

Dark life. Confused. Tormented,
incomprehensible and fabulously
rich and beautiful.

-- Tennessee Williams

Suddenly as he peered down
and down into its depths, he
profoundly saw a white living
spot no bigger than a white
weasel, with wonderful celerity
rising, and magnifying as it
rose, till it turned, and then
there were plainly revealed
two long crooked rows of white,
glistening teeth, floating up
From the undiscoverable bottom.

-- Melville, Moby Dick

Huge wood I can neither
resist nor enter. Danger
and wrong the petals
of a heavy blue orchid.
My breakage an artery
hurling toward your breasts.
Elusive verb radiating nouns
like scent. Milky hour of
beachside enactment leading
to death & that float
in blue waters of we.
Ink which disappears
the closer I get to writing
the actual bed. Itch and fever
of the violate child. My war
with the gods of no and without.
Summer afternoons
which build and slake are
still distant; for now, this
high heat which has too
much pressure, like bright
balls clanging against
off every pendulate roll,
heave, sashay. All of it zipped
yet pent, waiting,
plotting, grinding teeth
as the day groins on.
Most difficult angel, You
belong most to the God
inside these raw words. The
poem about sex is a water
horse at noon: the fleet
shade of shadows narrowed
to that hour’s high drone.
A roar like a wave like
a wound like a man
at his meat, grilling over
an unrepentent fire
burning everywhere at once.
A door opens, the blue
mystery resumes
as I tumble down and down
what’s under the heart,
the sky, the summer,
the page, one fin to write
with endless teeth below.




DIONYSOUSE ROCKS

From A Breviary of
Guitars,, 2000

(Picking up the
narrative here from
Autumn 1978

On those who enter the same rivers,
ever different waters flow
-- and souls are exhaled
from moist ((dark)) things.

-- Heraclitus (B12)


My rock n
roll heart
birthed that
autumn under
the star of
fell Dionysos,
Loosener,
least and
last respected
of all gods:
Cruelty and
delight upon
the cusp of
a power chord
& loose living
drunk and
dunking my
head up to
the hilt
her mad brine:
The rapture
and terror
of life are
so profound
because they
are intoxicated
with death.
Life which has
become sterile
totters to
meet its end,
but love and
death have
welcomed and
cling to each
other passionately
from the
beginning,
writes Walter
Otto in Dionysos
Myth & Cult:
The music
of Dionysos
was pure rock
n roll a clash
of bright brass
timbrels &
drums, hot
thyrsus
spearpoints
glinting with
bloodied sun:
The scythe of
love cut me
clean in half:
Gone all
of my austere
new agey
clarities in
the clarion
maw of a wave:
No metaphor
of her could
suffice out
in the weed
fields I now
found myself
mowing: returned
to Spokane
after summer:
She was gone:
The river some
small paltry
trickle, barely
a sip of her
there but I
drank it for
all she was worth:
Dave and I
jammed on
Stones and Roxy
tunes after
no luck running
ads for bandmates,
heating up
that cold tiny
house with our
rockballs while
the clutter of
bills and empties
piled up round
us & Dionysos
opened the night
to us in all
her terrible
swoon: loveless
& broke I
swam out
toward those
who were
drowning, out
where delight
and death are
sides of the
same song:
Sweet Karla
whose boyfriend
was in the pen
for murder
who said little
though her
body was a
cathedral of
pert breasts
and trim belly,
white panties
with a small
purple ribbon
that pulled down
to reveal a
wildjuiced pussy
hauling me
in to pink
sacraments
her ass bucking
so hot and
fast I always
came in just
two dunks
which sourced
her real fast
on my rock
lobster: Old
loves Landi
and Terri
a night each
friendly amid
the grim needs
of the grind,
Landi rubbing
my sperm into
her grand breasts
(nipples glistening
bluebrown) &
Terri sucking
up my nacht
nougat & then
grinding on
me till her
mouth opened
in operatic
Ah Ohs:
Dionysos
washing me
back ashore come
morning, alone
and festering:
A guitar is
the jaw of an
ass sweeping
down Ninevah
and New York:
Saturdays I
practiced and
practiced, nailing
Tom Petty’s
“Breakdown” and
Foreigner
“Hot Blooded” and
the Cars “Just
What I Needed”:
cracked open
a beer and sucked
hard on her
ciderish moon
boob, thirsting
wilder in the
deepening cold:
Karen a half
crazed mother
who shrieked
of disorder locked
in a house with
a son & the
heat cranked
too high: But
her cunt clutched
and clenched
my cock like
the fist of
Venus herself,
milking my hard
harder penis
with a shrill
shattered joy:
And as I
collapsed on her
splattering and
spluttering
she erupted
in tears crying
so hard I thought
she’d die of grief:
I got the fuck
outta all those
places leaving
behind a
banshee bouree:
Hungover and
pissy went
back to the
JC Penney
stockroom busting
ass & bitching
how the day
steals every
dram of delight,
cardboard cartons
drying the river
from my fingers
(cracking and
then bleeding):
The stockroom
was a theater
of all I was not:
O how I
wanted a band
& the road &
stages high above
this basement
drudgery: Heard
crowds roaring
for me in those
cluttered aisles
of stock: there
was even a girl
Chris who checked
in & priced
stock to remind
me how far
the sea had
receeded: She
looked like
Becky & looked
at me with
the same eyes
but she had
a man and
a kid and
languished in
despair pricing
baby jumpers
and ugly sweaters:
No hope for me
with her though
I ranted and
raged for her
every day,
safe from the
suffrage of love:
Oh how I
took it all back
to the music,
mad now in
the dessication
of summer with
cold dark
biting down from
everywhere:
I was warm
only wearing
a guitar or
plunging in some
her & chilled
to freeze bone
so fast fresh
out of whatever
clench & worn
out & down
from booze &
pot & speed
& no sleep &
addicted to
the scythe
which sharpens
as it loosens
heads from
all sense:
Bull-roarer
Bromios,
tearing me
down to the
real rock music:

THE EXTRA BONE

2003

(My ancestors) stood
me up like a block
of wood and shot
at me with their
bows until I lost
consciousness. They
cut up my flesh,
then separated my
bones and counted
them; and they ate
my flesh raw.
When they counted
my bones they found
that there was
one too many.
Had there not been
enough I would
not have been able to
become a shaman.
-- Tungus shaman

God saw fit to grant
me one too many throats
for my choir, a
strange thin bone
that shirks and flouts
all I was meant
to sing at first light.
It’s eye is devout
for lower heavens
than any I can descend.
Mornings I rise and
that bone is stout,
aching to arc sea
gold from my hips.
Once sieved it then
shrinks, muttering
dribbly amens,
falling asleep while
my mind begins
its hunt for hot meat.
Sometimes I think
though my mind is
its dream, rowing me
away from the page
toward islands of
women whose breasts
milk my white heavens,
a surf so impudent
and greedy that it sticks
to whatever it lathers.
The extra bone God
threw to me is the
eternal source of my
troubles, an irreverent
motley of wrong desires,
disrupting the peace
with reveries of goat
sport. Too often I
have gored my good sense
plunging away in
blind joy. All my fathers
have suffered the same
bone; sometimes I think
it is a trumpet of fire
handed up from the
grave, a fish no one
may ride, though
we’ve careened lives
in its hard saddle.
We’ve all died
in its thrall,
collapsing at
cloudburst to snore like
a baby? Surely my years
have been inked from
its horn, clinging to
nonsense and singing
blue matins to the
eternal annoyance
of fixed stars.
Yet what can I do?
The extra bone is my
third wing, a black fin
for night’s deep, the
angel’s cleft foot
clabbering the kyries
of mint-early spring.
Fool am I in its
maddening thrill,
counting coups on
a icy cave wall
deep down in my fathers,
drumming with that bone
the heart pressed
to our thighs.




ABYSS

2003

“What’s a drunken man
like, fool?”

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

Olivia and Feste,
Twelfth Night

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




PERIL DE MER

2005

The 15th-century Melker Physiologus
... has the story that the sea-creatures
sira, half-maiden, half-fish, leads
the sailors away, after which they
drown.

According to the Bestiare by Phillipe
da Thaon, the serra obstructs the ships
in a very special manner, the creature
raises its wings and, by proceeding in
front of the ship and depriving it of
wind, does great harm.

... In his Besitare, Guillam le Clerc
defines the serra simply as a
peril de mer, feared by sailors for
its propensity for sinking ships.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The
Seafaring Saint

Every voyage has its squalls,
and she is every sailor’s
honeyed nightmare, an
abscissa riding butt-naked
on the wave-mare of abyss.
Desire fraught with peril
bound her waist with
flesh above and scales
below, the sweet dive
down from her roseate
breasts trapped by
screeching terror
in the depths. Who can
resist, who would dare
to dive into that
wilding wave, which rises
twice the height of
a man’s main mast?
A sailor is composed
of such fraught foamings,
when the apparition
rises from the foggy
aft of sleep, almost
a girl, certainly
a reaper of every
throb and leap
inside my hips,
her voice almost
a surflike croon,
her blue eyes pale
and icier than
the high scimitar of
the moon. Oh what
halves sweet heaven
into shrieking hell
than those thighs
which never quite
appear above the
wave’s wild crest,
thighs which have
gripped the keels
of galleons & split
them with a sigh?
Travail here carefully,
you who would ever
shore again. She is
every drink you must
think all the way
from glow to basement
doom; you do so
by reading between
the lines of her aria,
to see the skulls
piled high amid
the whales and squid
and split mast-heads.
That breasts so close
could fan so far those
frozen depths below
is the peril de mer
you must embrace
if your would live
to write the voyage
down. I draw her
shape to the right
of the last page, or
house her in parenthesis
(here) like that conch
on every shore which
set to ear splits wide
the door where nothing
but your sighs like
whiskey pours. Listen
too long to that music
at your peril, friend:
sails of gossamer and
lace will ice and ghost
the mast, prelude to
the foam which
covers it at last.

Blue Fosterage, Queen's Knight

Sometimes there is not exactly an illness but rather a progressive change in behavior. the candidate becomes meditative, seeks solitude, sleeps a great deal, seems absent-minded, has prophetic dreams and sometimes seizures. All these symptoms are only the prelude to a new life that awaits the unwitting candidate.

But there are also “sicknesses,” attacks, dreams and hallucinations that determine a shaman’s career in a very short time. We are not concerned with whether these pathogenic ecstasies have really been experienced, or have really been imagined, or at least later enriched by folkloric motifs, to end by being integrated into the frame of the traditional shamanic vocabulary. Essential is the fact that these experiences justify the vocation and the magico-religious power of the shaman, that they are invoked as possible validations for a radical change in religious practice.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 35-6


BLUE RHETORICS

December 2003

We have seen that the fili
Amargin is also represented
in the Leabhar na Gabhala
as reciting a set of rhetorics
immediately on landing
in Ireland. Presumably,
therefore, he had acquired
them elsewhere.

-- Nora Chadwick,
“Imbas Forosnai”

I am the wind that blows
upon the sea; I am the ocean wave;
I am the murmur of the surges ...

-- from “The Song of Amergin,”
attr. to the early Welsh poet Taleissin


She held my face
in her white hands
that night and
as I slept the
sea slipped into
me, wave after
wave after wave,
filling me with her
wild curvature.
Ah how I drank
Her as I slept,
free at last from
a long drought
of driest words,
her level rising
topmost in my brain.
When I woke
my eyes flew open
and my mouth
began to move,
spilling blue rhetorics
which to this day
I don’t understand,
just sing. It was as
if my tongue had
been pickled in
sea brogue, a
language both
so bitter and too
sweet, its numens
full of beach
bosomage spilling
wavelike from
their brilliant cups.
Cups I would drink
more than my fill
of if I could, but
I was already drowned
and washed back
to that shore where
She was every
wave’s farewelling
kiss, dissolved
and trailing back
to mute eternity.
The words could
only phrase what
never quite got
said between the
plunge and drying
spume, a low echo
of the sea’s wide
weeping when each
night the moon hauls
free a million miles
from Her womb.
I too must sing
in those blue
rhetorics, my tongue
now not of fire
but of the sea.
One day I woke
two thousand miles
north of that sea
I was once baptized
in, reborn to the
God who quells and
purifies Her primal
rough and raucous
ire: My eyes opened
and I saw then
not Him but Her,
curled close to me,
her shape the receipt
of all that foaming
wave which crashed
over me pregnant
with rooms He
might name but
never roam. My
mouth began to
move in ways
never again quite
my own, cerulean
and hooved, professing
a history dredged
up from the abyss,
old lost still gleaming
portents which are
worthless inland
or upstairs, a mother-
of-pearl inlay which
fades to blue
if you stare too hard.
Yet each saying here
rows me further back
to home -- so many
years after that
drowning embrace,
more years down
the road from that
first embracing wave,
so long as to lose
both her and history
to this blue argument
which still washes
wavelike from this
hand and now fades
in a drawling,
shorelike, rhetorical hiss
-- her voice inside
my own, a sea
inside the poem.





From Bullfinch’s Mythology, The Age of Chivalry, Chapter 6: Launcelot of the Lake”

KING BAN, of Brittany, the faithful ally of Arthur, was attacked by his enemy Claudas, and, after a long war, saw himself reduced to the possession of a single fortress, where he was besieged by his enemy. In this extremity he determined to solicit the assistance of Arthur, and escaped in a dark night, with his wife Helen and his infant son Launcelot, leaving his castle in the hands of his seneschal, who immediately surrendered the place to Claudas. The flames of his burning citadel reached the eyes of the unfortunate monarch during his flight, and he expired with grief. The wretched Helen, leaving her child on the brink of a lake, flew to receive the last sighs of her husband, and on returning perceived the little Launcelot in the arms of a nymph, who, on the approach of the queen, threw herself into the lake with the child. This nymph was Viviane, mistress of the enchanter Merlin, better known by the name of the Lady of the Lake.

Launcelot received his appellation from having been educated at the court of this enchantress, whose palace was situated in the midst, not of a real, but, like the appearance which deceives the African traveller, of an imaginary lake, whose deluding resemblance served as a barrier to her residence. Here she dwelt not alone, but in the midst of a numerous retinue, and a splendid court of knights and damsels.

The queen, after her double loss, retired to a convent, where she was joined by the widow of Bohort, for this good king had died of grief on hearing of the death of his brother Ban. His two sons, Lionel and Bohort, were rescued by a faithful knight, and arrived in the shape of greyhounds at the palace of the lake, where, having resumed their natural form, they were educated along with their cousin Launcelot.

The fairy, when her pupil had attained the age of eighteen, conveyed him to the court of Arthur, for the purpose of demanding his admission to the honor of knighthood; and at the first appearance of the youthful candidate the graces of his person, which were not inferior to his courage and skill in arms, made an instantaneous and indelible impression on the heart of Guenever, while her charms inspired him with an equally ardent and constant passion. The mutual attachment of these lovers exerted, from that time forth, an influence over the whole history of Arthur. For the sake of Guenever Launcelot achieved the conquest of Northumberland, defeated Gallehaut, King of the Marches, who afterwards become his most faithful friend and ally, exposed himself in numberless encounters, and brought hosts of prisoners to the feet of his sovereign.




CHAMPION

Nov. 27, 2005

Behind every queen you’ll find a mere of
welled and walled desire, not mine but Yours
for which no quest will ever slake
the lowest leagues of thirsty fire.
Behind the actual shape of love in
her daily cottons is the more difficult
gossamer she is, an individual as alien
to everything inside a suitor as any
next too-mortal bride. One marries
the surfaces one’s heart needs to see
and prays the rest in her abide.
Her king is you, in ordinary troth
and husbandry, a love requited in
shared work and weariness beyond the bed,
in the ramparts of a home it takes years
of surrender to that work to build.
At least, that’s what I’ve learned
about sustaining love, a young man no
more who yet still shares with that first
prince a wild thrall for the sea’s blue
pour inside each wave’s collapsing roar.
My moment here was ferried forth
by him, or him inside Your thrall.
For years I sought nocturnal lists of
revelry, seeking in every quest to gain
a queenly savor to next days, that bit
of sea hard-drenched in blue where
loved reeked the sea’s full flavor:
Yet in my errand I was always denied,
my thrust parried by a troth which
the women looking somewhere else.
I was looking for them to fill my heart,
and so in turn were they; how could
anyone be satisfied drinking
from a lake of fire which the other
cupped in someone else? Always
my wild hope affixed its wings to this
or that shape of faux heaven, flying
to the height of love’s vault to pull
that ring which unleashed abysms.
Always then the crash and burn
inside the wake she left behind,
a burning brand chucked back into
the mere, my dream of queens and
courts remitted in the mire of
my bottomed-out desire. In that
waste of mud her darker shade
arose from depths to cobble
me back together all again,
teaching me the art of unhorsed
arisings, glueing back my broken balls.
Rearmored thus in her salt rectitude,
I rose again to woo and win afresh
the same old wounds. Odd rhythmus,
to be so driven to the same leaping
falls, and foolish, so damn foolish too:
But what’s a knight of cups to do?
Every suitor’s defined by the suit
which starred his water’s birth,
and mine was blazoned in the
birthmark of a heart pierced by
an arrow: lance and cup are both
mine to pour full and empty out.
Behind all courts you’ll find the woods,
a castle in the mere: Behind my
starry venturing a deeper quest
worked the other way, handing me a pen
exactly where that woman’s shape
could never fully welcome me.
By days I am her husband, the king
of my life’s queen: By night (well, early
morning) I am the depths’ salt
champion, a knight of bluest meres,
the thrall of every queen to ride the
lists requiting all that never was
beyond the shimmer and the sheen.





WATER BRIDE

Dec 2002

The water bride returned
in the silted waters
of night: She was weary

of wearing this or that
woman’s face, so she
came blind as the sea.

I was once desperate
to claim her for life
& so kept losing her

in comic motions,
shaping my body for her,
shouting into waves.

None of it worked: She
lapsed on back into surf,
leaving this bald shore,

even her smile erased
in the boneless wash.
But not lost. She curves

every line down this page,
across and down down
down, nothing I’ll kiss

again but deeper, a wave
washed through, forever
afoot in wastes of this heart.

I have been pickled in
her brine: I am that dawn
where she’ll always shine,

that scree of white
slippers dancing where
I pull my every breath.

It’s 5:30 a.m. on Christmas
Eve, the windows open
to a restlessness which

later will pour rain
then turn cold. I am that year
at birth once again:

son and lover of a
uteral gulf which streams
through the day

like the sheets of her
gauze bower, cell and
boudoir, well and tower,

ring to middle finger,
trothed to the wave’s
forever breaking smile.


MARRIAGE OF THE VERSES

May 2002


There’s a marriage
also in this making:
vowels here sworn
in sea-vows
and to the sky,
my consonants carved
to earthly rounds.
I’m married these
ways too: true
to what’s difficult
and eye-level, tempted
by old metaphors,
eloquence, and self-pitying
spleen; faithful
at the cost
of secrets, fame,
and one more hour’s sleep.
Each day I rise
to consummate
this fire, red ichors
of the heart burning
what I find here
on white sheets.
Yet it’s never easy.
I spend too much time
fretting whether I’m
good enough (or at all).
Mid verse I dream
of glissades outside
the ring which horses
me to this pen and
paper every dingdong day.
For weeks, this love
is too dutiful
and nothing sounds
quite right: the effort
seems dilletantish
and silly -- c’mon,
writing poems past
the age of 45 with hardly
a one of ‘em in print!
And when there are
so many more readers
in more golden veins
to bleed. But then
I get up one morning
and the pen sways
and lifts and swoops
in sweet
chariosco, all I
would ever fly on
a day in the life. My
Eden. Love now has
an ecstatic, true ring to it,
not the sum of all
I bring to it, but
rather a door open wide
like husband eyes
at first sight of the
naked bride,
all oceans stilled
to one backdrawing sigh.

Guinnevere

Guinnevere had green eyes
Like yours, mi'lady like yours
When she'd walk down
Through the garden
In the morning after it rained
Peacocks wandered aimlessly
Underneath an orange tree
Why can't she see me?

-- David Crosby, “Guinnevere”
from Crosby Stills and Nash, 1969


“GUINNEVERE”

Nov. 26, 2005

... usually sickness, dreams, and ecstasies
in themselves constitute an initiation,
that is, they transform the profane,
pre-“choice” individual into a technician
of the sacred. Naturally, this ecstatic
type of experience is always and everywhere
followed by theoretical and practical
instruction at the hands of the old
masters; but that does not make it any
less determinative, for it is the ecstatic
experience that radially changes the
religious status of the “chosen” person.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy, 33

... Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:

I miss my husband’s company—
he is so often
in paradise. ...

-- Mary Oliver, “The Swan”

The man befits the woman, their fates
ordained by You, blue Pastor, married
through an augment which is rarely true,
much less for any time on earth both
hips and lips engrooved. So I’m at work
yesterday afternoon, costing out revisions
to our editorial package & listening
via i-Tunes to co-worker’s vault of
songs--mostly stuff from the 70s which
I don’t much care for--but scrolling down
the list I find “Crosby Stills & Nash”
(1969), and let that album oar again the
inside boat You bid me build and launch
and ride to the bottom of all shores.
I hadn’t heard those songs, hell, for
half of my waking life, but when “Guinnevere”
strums gently from the speaker of my
Mac I’m gone from my desk of latter-day
arrears, full back in the spring of
1975 when I was seventeen. It was
toward the end of my freshman year of
college, deep in those two weeks or
so in which I fell hard for and then
lost a gal named Leslie, a golden redhead
with blue eyes and freckles who proffered
me a passing glance once day in World
History, Part Two. Amid the fall of
Your old world I watched a new one
awaken in form sitting in front of
my desk, no real beauty but slim
and curved, her hair Arthurian,
a tapestry of spun red gold, the
roundness of the back of her head
so complete it suggested how all worlds
begin and end in a curtsy which
commands. It’s a curve I’ve married
each day since that short and failed
bouree in bliss; these days I get back
in bed in reverence to that curve,
stroking our cat curled at our feet
from nose round to tail close by;
then run my fingertips from my wife’s
hip and butt and thighs and soles
rising and falling in that sacred
land I border but cannot fully marry,
shored next to Your watered world
the surf forever choirs. Play
“Guinnevere” along a beach
of sweetly resounding falls.
Oh how desperate I was to love that
girl far down my history, for her to love
me back! How ready I was to
drown whatever of my monkish
scholar’s world that kept me from
getting back to that hour of pure float
beyond the booze where we kissed
and kissed and undressed Your mystery,
where seas disclosed the secret name
inside a crashing, world-dissolving bliss.
She loved Crobsy Stills and Nash
so I did too, even though I was
utterly estranged from that band’s
Californian roots, their earth-mothering
appeal so equidistant from my tundra-
frozen ears. I was Led Zep and Tull
and ELP, loud and hard, my taste
a Tartar riding Uffington from hell
to hell and back: But it was her record
that we spun and spun in my dorm room
as we made out and more. And “Guinnevere”
was the nougat of that float where I found
the clear blue space at last, or when it
awakened me to every boat I’ve launched
toward her always foreign shores. This
is the moment: It’s afternoon the next
day, my homework stacked high on my
desk (a term paper on the modern
world’s rouse from Gothic slumber soon
due), spring raw in my basement window
where a single beer stood proud in a final
drift of snow, remnant of the late-night
drunkalogue that ended with her kiss,
first one and then an other, both queen
of hearts and naiad stave which stove
me cleanly through. I’m laying on my bed
the next day, hungover, smoking cigarettes
lit from the last, staring at the grim dorm
ceiling (with its large wound where
the showers on the next floor drained):
And I’m floating far on the waters
of “Guinnevere,” the song which she
so patently revered, as respinning that
bittersweet tune could resume me
to her late-night kiss, drifting us
together in that once and present bed
into a sealed history I knew, sadly,
would never come to pass. My hand
felt still warm with the the shape
of Leslie’s head as she kissed south,
trying to suck me off but good
before blowing me off for good.
She’d said it just before she left, tucking
my limp cock back into my briefs with
a last, late-night nurse’s kiss: said in
that conch-whispering voice (I’ll always
remember how she said soft with an
avacado-textured middle) in the dark
that she really loved another guy, this
asshole in my dorm who Arthur in
function only, a doofus of the Theatre
who loved those stages she loved
more than I, the shy retiring minimally
handsome monkish mostly bookish
knight of a suitor, whose early ‘70’s
desire was sweet but nothing next to
the courtly cum-romantic fire she felt
for someone else. She’d said goodnight
in that goodbye sort of way and crept on
out, believing me at last asleep, leaving
me to stare in the dark so lost and broken
in the sweetest swarm of sound I’d ever
heard. What was that crashing magic
land that still resonated in my ears as
I lay on abed far into the next afternoon,
spinning and spinning that album side?
How could it be so present and permanent
inside when I knew she’d left for good?
I lingered in that lapse of sense, refusing
to wake up, slow dancing with my love
in some Camelot of starry wine inside
a lost, late-60’s song, refusing to let
go; amazed, too that I didn’t have to,
not then, nor ever. Yesterday outside my
window at work it was a cheery autumn
afternoon, traffic light the day after
Thanksgiving, an easy day for working
ahead, no phones ringing, hard commerce
at a pause; a good day to crunch the numbers
and hear again that tune, the anthem of
a place beyond the kiss and clench,
inside their hard farewelling. That’s the place
I’ve lived in for the deeper half of
my good life; was there when I drove
home later in the day, pulling up
to our house where my wife inside
was pricing stuff to sell in the actuals
of her own dream. I live there here
inside my own fool’s written paradise,
this weave of a song’s crashing bliss,
the love I married between all that
and this. You brought me to that kiss
which mortal lips can’t slake: Proferred
to me their nipples which no thirst
on earth can slake: And poured on
rich that creamy shoreline afterglow
which washes clean again my bones.
So for You, blue master, I hold that
song high inside my heart like a sword
drawn from a lake -- cock-straight and
proud as any guitar-neck, incessant
as the pen which gallops line for line
across and down the page. It was the
back of a woman’s head in class some
30 years ago that sang me to this
curvature which coats my arms in blue.
I’m stuck here at an ending that won’t --
or I can’t -- let go, long after “Guinnevere”
slipped out the door. The music is too sweet
and empyrean, full adrift in the metres
of wild song: my ear’s hard-wired with it now,
like a shell which pours the sea. I’ve chucked
everything into the drink -- even now
the drink -- to remain here just a while
longer, still staring at the ceiling from
that bed, amazed at what I’d shored
at the bottom of all seas. “Guinnevere”
is the anthem of my every salt expense,
these sheets a balance of her blue and You.
Each lover since has been another bead
to sling across the abacus, summing
in this broken heart every sou of gold
You tossed to me from her round head’s hold.




Guinnevere
Drew pentagrams
Like yours, mi'lady like yours
Late at night
When she thought
that no one was watching at all
She shall be free
As she turns her gaze
Down the slope
to the harbor where I lay
Anchored for a day

-- “Guennivere,” David Crosby

***

WHERE LOVERS MEET

1978

There was an evening, once,
Long before the summer’s end,
When we sat by the river
Eating grapes and cheese,
Smoking hash at sunset.
You were talking,
But all I heard were whispers
From the swirling falls,
Climbing up the devoured cliffs,
Spraying mist on our faces
Like a blessing--

we will meet again
in that water
water
wine
water
we will meet again
in the age of summer


FULL MOON AT COCOA BEACH

1995


The surf was pounding
the air when we climbed
out of my car, hurling
sea mist toward
a full moon now
breaking from clouds.

The pier was closing early
that night, swarmed
by the high surf
of a hurricane's
turbulent pass
many miles to sea.
The guard said
an advisory was out
for a high tide come morning
with fifteen foot waves.

We leaned on a rail
halfway down the pier
and watched the night.
The horizon a wash of
foam and darkness.
Shards of moon
scattering like silver fish
in the glassy curl
of a wave before tumbling
into foam and thunder
and rocking the pier.

You leaned to watch
a wave pass under,
your dress fanning
wild in the breeze.
The wave I felt
curved that satin and
the mystery beneath
into moon and sea.

Later we walked on
the beach, found
a place to sit
and talked a long while,
telling our stories
as warming strangers do
who find the distance
between them narrowing
to less than tissue.

It was after midnight.
The beach, the sea,
the moon took us
somewhere
on a silver stream.

It was a gift
that rose unhurried
from the depths of
some heart which must have
always known these things,
recalled from old loves
or the salt soundings of the womb
or perhaps the full store
of ineffable moments
a man and a woman
have ever stumbled on together,
a silver strand of DNA
pulsing and receiving
this tide.

Having forgotten joy
for so long on a road
of deaths small and large,
having gotten so lost amid
hurry and complication
and complacence,
that night slapped
me back to life.

Warmed by something
I can never name,
we opened our arms
to one embrace
and then walked away.


Guinnevere
Had golden hair
Like yours, mi'lady like yours
Streaming out when we'd ride
Through the warm wind down by the bay
Yesterday
Seagulls circle endlessly
I sing in silent harmony
We shall be free

-- “Guinnevere,” David Crosby





DESIRE

1998


Aching stars:
this hopeless longing
for the forever-withheld,
miasmically-waylaid clench
of all you offered in one glance.
Arrival and departure
the same portal.
Desire a wild
gallop through fields
of strawberry wheat
in early autumn,
riding harder toward
your absence.
There it pulses,
beacon to strange
and reckless waters,
open wide and forever
deaf to consequence,
shining faintly on
the next door, the next room,
the next blue bed where you
in all your faces wait,
out beyond the breakers
of any moon-struck beach,
dangerous and darker
and wilder than
this heart has ever
dreamt. But will.

The Deep End of the Pool

O God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through!

-- Ahab, Moby Dick, 567

***

Must we soak in the brine before our bones calyx the sea’s deepest music? Here it’s late Sunday afternoon in light-ebbing suburbia, middle-aged ex-football players hooting for the Jags a couple of doors down, my wife vacuuming upstairs, Violet in the window soaking up the satch of early evening, her eyes bluer than the darkest cyans arousing from dusk. I’m here, quintessentially, while the ravelling goes on below, my mentors all drowned to time, my love lost on the marge where an incessant surf sings of God ...

***

DEEP-SEA COMPASS

May 2005

A compass soaked in deep-sea salt
bournes a ghoulie orient, the world
it tongues abyssal, wild, and strange,
drawing my north-borne eyes to
points way south, to fix as home’s
most golden port a pass of high-
blown awfulness, its blue what
angels howl from heavens
farthest down. That compass
steers this hand over the page
along a gradient of wind and
wave pitched to awe’s infernity,
its line of sight that lime-spread
road of revenance and spleen
where my evil twin’s every
bad night bouree has been
plowed over by now sober
years of sitting in this daily
chair singing on to more
revenant and greater bones.
Look: The year now turns to
early summer when days are
hottest of them all, May
in Central Florida a soaring
spear of sun-drenched hours
which nails an eros to its heart,
greedy in thirst and winging
far to drink days to the dregs
in soaring amplitude. The manic
monkey here is born of that
hot pulse, plunging his nib
across pages pale as
my beloved’s ass;
every drop of ink he flings
is in measure to the milk
she never poured for me
but may yet -- or so he hopes
and thus writes down the liquid
pealings of high suck, draught
for draught of creamy blue.
A deep-sea compass points
me ever and most here
though I see no Cape
inside the coming day, not
with eyes set on the world’s
suburban panoply. I don’t
even know who I’m singing to anymore,
nor can say what agency
employs my voice this structure
hour. My job -- as best as I surmise
in the finny way of escaping
dreams -- my job is just to
ferry this strange instrument
to shores I’ll always hear the
sound of but never reach,
and in such failure pass its
salty freightage on, harrowed
by my attempt just enough
to make it gleam still worse.
Your compass is that tuba in
the angel troop that honks
in whalish brogue, one of
the deeper bassos in the choir
that human ears can heard,
though baser ones resound
in my wife’s sleepy first kiss.
Someone’s got to hold the low
end down. Your compass in
my throat sails me ever
toward those deep blue waters’
wounding wildest sound.




The Papago say that the vision only comes to ones who are worthy. “Only to the humble does the dream come, and contained in the dream, there is always the song.

Each subsequent singing becomes a reenactment of that powerful transforming event ... From the field of primary inspiration, he or she “sings into life” those who are plagued with those who are facing death. ...

... The song word is powerful; it names a thing, it stands at the sacred center, drawing all toward it. The word exists and does not exist. I both awakens an image and is an awakened image. The word disappears, the poetry is gone, but the imaginal form persists within the mind and works on the soul. Poesis, then, is an action and an interaction in its primary sense, is the process it creates.

-- Joan Halifax, Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives, 1979




In Chapter 93 of Moby Dick, Pip, the young black steward of The Pequod, lands in one of the whale-boats when one of its regular hands is injured, and, as the chase is engaged, is hauled from the boat when the whale-line snaps against the chest. The line is cut, freeing the whale, and Pip is rescued with a stern warning from Stubb not to let that happen again. The narrative here picks up:

***

But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day! the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb's inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea- mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had leeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

***

Ergo the maddening soak ...Pip never recovers from his madness, though it is instructive to Ahab, who takes the poor boy, once recovered, under his wing. He says to Pip, “There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel to curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.”




Shamanic initiation proper includes not only an ecstatic experience but ... a course in theoretical and practical instruction too complicated to be within the grasp of a neurotic. Whether they still are or are not subject to real attacks of epilepsy or hysteria, shamans, sorcerors, and medicine men in general cannot be regarded as merely sick; their psychopathic experience has a theoretical content. For if they have cured themselves and are able to cure others, it is, among other things, because they know the mechanisms, or rather, the theory of illness.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 31



THE DEEP END
OF THE POOL

Nov. 24, 2005

I.

Dear dark father far down under every
shape of the one I’ve known, I write to you
now in a letter that began when I was
delved up to the world on a wave of
bawling song: That water eddied and
swole slowly through my childhood,
cresting to a wave of malefic oh-o-swoony
height when its sexual semblance waxed
in my cresting teens, baptising me in its
blue augment long before I literally
became a man, if You know what I mean,
or I get properly now what You spleen
in my dream. Between events and our
knowledge of them is all that gets diseased
and mauled down into their awful wake,
years of twisting down abyms in a sprawl
of futile bubbles, dying in every bright
way to the dark underside which demand
descent before revealing what all mantas
shade, that gospel which You bid me
read at last beyond the lowest floating
lines which yesterday I wrote, leaving
me here to start again. But it’s all the same
event, the wound and its womb I mean,
with all the years between just peramabling
bubbles of a dream which is the real event,
its mundo, its shoving-off and every far
shore, the whole damn cathedral of
carouse at the bottom of God’s drowse.
Hell, what I see now might actually be
invoking its history, as if later reflection
could actually rouse percipient blue deeds.
Thus my ends beyond are just the oldest
rooms of a house I’ve yet to dig all full
down to, Trois-Freres that shore where
all I’ve sung matches Your voice enough
to join me amid the herd upon cave
walls, rescinding their plural deaths
in the resonance of my dust, sands
one day scattered on that one long beach
which crashes in my ear and in the shape
of every woman I loved too much to reach.

II.

Wing with me back to Chicago in the
Summer of 1974 to visit my last months
in that urban blight before taking leave
for good for college. Here is where my family
bone is broken the worst, the deep end
of that pool I call Intimacy which since
I’ve so loathed and bungled and yearned
the greatest depths of. You were spinning
fate’s wheels hard with all betters losing
worse: My father could no longer live inside
the closet of his life, and with an at-last
honest groan came out, telling my mother
me and my older brother that he was gay,
no husband of any ilk, nor much again
a father. Thus their marriage was finally
thrown in the drink and our family life
it once contained allowed to spout blood
and bloat and slowly turn over, giving up
the ghost which had darkened every
door we lived in with a closet’s gloom for
so many years. My mother, confirmed at
last of what she always knew, took my
younger brother and sister and moved south
for good to city- north- and husband-less
Orlando; my father, older brother and myself,
we lived as remnants for a while in that
now too-empty house on Fullerton
as summer cracked the Chicago in an
infernal runny roar. My father planned
to quit the church and move to New York
City’s; my brother was to move to California
where a new life might help him work
afar; and I was headed to Spokane for
school: So that last season in Chicago
was all for ending things but good, for
stumbling round the wounds like ghouls,
and pouring on the booze but good, our
thirst expanding exponentially
as Your dark mouth formed a deep end
to the hurt, a house at the bottom of
all things where bad spirits come to roar.
The echoes in that house those months
were hard and loud, each creak of a chair
around our emptied dining table sounding
in a percussive snap, beats of Your
shaman drum I guess. Scotch made
those noises mellow, even desirable,
as if the louder pain gave cause to amp
the imps of whiskey poured on ice,
one finger for divorce, two for silence
round the dinner table, three for the
sound of fast hooves away across a
frozen tundra of high emptiness. We drank
like fish that summer, my father no longer
caring much to be a father in the old way,
always there to talk and care but in no mood to warden
how much booze we drank, or sheriff
us for pouring every other octane on our
self-evicting flames. I frame that fire in Your
tinderbox dark Father, though the saying’s
hard, feral as all educations down under
I have learned must soddenly go.
Graduates of high school, family,
Christianity, and hope of saner
upper worlds, we became a drinker’s
mad fraternity, pouring booze on all that’s
spilled when faith’s been killed, when
what lives on in love’s hardest paternity.


III.

I spent some hot afternoons that summer
up on the roof of Ruth’s row house
across from our with she and her friend
Cathy, acting like soon-to-be-fully minted
adults, splayed half naked in folding chairs
beneath a turgid sun, listening to Pink Floyd
and the Doobie Brothers on rock radio &
talking about the glistening world through
a sheen of baby oil. Our desire was just
barely offshore of remittance, our good
Christianity losing the last of its embracure;
we bitched about our shitty lives and
dreamed of all we’d one day imbibe
once we figured out how to pop the cork
jammed hard in each of our young heads.
It was one of the season’s insanities, those
fleshy colloquies up high which could only
talk but never fly: a high-dive symposia
which taught that when you stand up
there long enough admiring the view,
the deep end of the pool just gets deeper and wilder and
more fierce, more quintessentially wild bllue.
We’d take turns reading from porno books
which Cathy had lifted from a brother’s stash, our voices quavering,
an infernal stillness in the air as we dared
to mouth words like cock and cunt in
so languid and labial a relish, tonguing
thrust and heaving breasts, some region
of our brains parted to spiralling orgasm
and ribbons of hot spurting come,
the three of us calm as toast upon those
folding chairs, the music tinny in its
upmost registers, while such deep bassos
roared between us, Cathy's big boobs in
in a blue bikini top bursting my every
seam, Ruth’s mouth a berry pucker saying
suck and balls and glans. It would be
a year before I dove into all that with
Ruth in splash of cerulean nitro; six months
later when, passing through Chicago in
deep winter, I plunged Cathy to the hilt
after a party in about the three seconds
it took to dive all the way at last from
that roof. Maybe now you’ll write me,
she said as I kissed her rumpled, fresh-
fucked visage at the door; I smiled and
walked forever out into the silence of her
life. That summer we just burnt our soulage
on the roof, tindering wings for later flight
when eventually and on our own we each
leapt off and flew down to our separate
histories. It was all just talk then, the
first departure from God’s higher word,
the bridge to every later ecstasy when
words became their labials. We talked
our ways off of that roof for sex, then
love, then family: But first we sang the songs,
as if by singing them at least and last
the deep end found us willing votives
when You ordained to break your Your fast.

IV.

One day I got a spider bite up near my groin
--or was that really You? The venom fanged
something which cause a riot in my flesh,
hives and bumps swelling left and right
until my groin was swelling fire. I grew
hysterical and then passed out -- perhaps
that feint my first big seizure -- coming up
from dark to fog, fumbling to the phone
to call my dad for help. Things were
indistinct a while and then I was on a
gurney in the emergency room, receiving
a shot of antihistimines. Dazed in that
freezing room of steel, I seemed only
halfway there, the other part lost in
a tundra space where merciless black horses
thundered north, their eyes so wild
with wind as to gaze on me forever there,
even as I recovered slowly from that bite.
I was welcomed back to consciousness
by a gaggle of interns and residents
led by a doc who lifted my hospital gown
to offer them all a peek at my strange
malady: they mmmmm’d as one to see
the tortured tundra round my cock. Ever
since I’ve never been much afraid of
insect bites, nor ever had another
reaction to spiders ants or wasps. Maybe
that was my only encounter yet with a bug of
true awfulness, or maybe I was simply
ripe and plucked for passage down to You,
my upper wounds like a mouth spread
wide for the host you venomed into me,
opening the way to wounds much further
down the darkest blues Fat City horned
in the hot streets of its summer.

IV.

The last month of that season before
I flew away was where, truly, I was
brined in Your pool’s deepest leagues.
We moved out of the house on Fullerton
into the church manse next to Wrigley Field,
a dirtier and more risky neighborhood
with Latin Eagles pounding tympanis
in the playground across the street
and poor white Appalachians growing
poorer up and down that sad old street.
But it was free and temporary, a good
springboard for taking our leave of the
city for good. Weekdays that August
I worked downtown in the basement of
a bank, processing checks amid a hive
of faceless clerks. The sums were vast
and tough to reconcile against the checks
that fled through my hands; the sums
were everywhere when I walked out at
dusk, gold blood painted on every downtown
dive, as if the setting sun was Hades’ coin.
(Someone else’s wealth amid our
destitution: another of the season’s
fell dichotomies.) Riding the El home
after work I watched the windows blur
on by, catching the eyes for just a flash of
some poor fuck worse off than I,
dressed in BVDs and weaving unsteadily
in a room forever far too close to the tracks.
His eyes bored into mine with every fraught
futurity I feared, but what else could I do
but drink? And so once home I happy
houred with my father and my brother,
our Scotches poured to nudge the rim,
the roars from Wrigley where the
Cubs were losing somehow approving
each hard pull which fell and fell
and fell inside. My father then was
between two augments, the church behind
him like some contemporary pagan age,
some older vision forming up ahead
where stones were bidding him to raise
old archetectures in new vision: But
that season there was only the blood
of what’s between, too clouded by
pain and fresh desire, so he drank
and hard. And my brother? Well, he was
all high-proof angst and lust, a party boy
who drove his days as if inside a burning
demo derby car, pinning foolish women
with strong hands that later came to heal
with an uncanny strength. But to get there
he too had far too much to drink. I’d
talk with them awhile getting three
Scotches down and then heading down
into the basement with three or four
beers in hand, setting them on an
Ampeg tubeless amp that was rounded
a hard glittery blue plastic plush.
I’d strap on a homemade guitar
that had given to me a year before
by the leader of hard-rocking Christian
band, when I was still devout and
white in Christ-like fealty. He gave
me the axe -- not much of one
except for the humbucker pickup
which really made the fucker squeal --
on the condition that I only play God’s
song’s, making me promise to burn
the ax if I ever wanted to play it
the devil’s way. Well, that was what I
thought to wing when You first
blew through me at fourteen; but
You obviously had other plans for me,
because by the summer I turned
seventeen I was riding wild the other
way, heading down in the profaner
song of playing loud and wild.
I’d pull on those beers and smoke my butts
and wail away on that guitar but loud,
no child or Christian or folk-guitarist
any more, winging out on boozy riffs
beyond all sight of home, to lands
I’d make a later haunted wreckage of
in the name of my slow education
in the ways of your hardest, deepest
songs. I drank and wailed upon that
cheap guitar until the song was spent
at that summer’s end, climbing on a
DC-10 to fly far west where You
you took my soul and taught it how
to break what cannot bend.

V.

Of that too-loud later immrama
I save for other songs: suffice to say
the music drowned me good before
it washed me on to here. Look: I’m still
here at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day 2005,
31 years after that summer which You
perched above the amps of Hell,
sitting in the same white chair I’ve sat
in for years now every morning
before first light, doing what I always do
in the center of this life. I got to this
that older way --- so wrongly, hurtfully,
and wild -- but now I come to think that
every bruise’s bruiting was meant:
Every hangover, clap, sunburn,
split finger, hysteria, swoon, seizure, and
migraine writes the miniscule You
bid me cry aloud while the deeper
majescule went on instructing me
about darker bliss of what’s remiss
and fallen and oh-so-bottomless in
the deep end of the pool. Every woman
that I’ve pressed onto as if to drink
her sex to dregs has had the same
surficial sooth, like nipplage of darker
oceans which now learn to drink
without a single curve in sight. That I’m
writing you this letter only means
I get what was written there so long
ago, or perhaps only that I’ve glimpsed
the faintest title of the work I’ve left
to do. I feel I’ve nearly finished all that
I can say about that now: whatever journeys
forth seems zipped, like the woman falling
back into the wave with a finger of kelp
obscuring what her mouth would say.
The word “shaman” may be lost as
well, its port and purpose expendable,
a coin to toss the ferryman: We’ll see.
Suffice to say here, Father, that I now
thank You for dropping me in the deep
end that summer long ago. May I carry
down still further what you bid me find there
in the undertowing tones I come to sing.