Three Drum Songs

RAGNAROK
The Werid fo the Gods

Poets are in the beginning
hypotheses, in the middle
facts, and in the end values.
-- Randall Jarrell


Each of us
completes our history
and History's.

Or tries to.

There was a time
when the river
in springtime
was such a wild flow,
bursting over
the falls the way
I wanted to collapse
inside a woman's
embrace. I played
guitar that way too,
trying to loose
all the horses inside
a loud song. Instead
it was I who was
trampled, a suburban
door ripped from
the floor.

Then I learned
to forget such passionate
music. I turned into
that votive who buries
his old self in the
foundations of its tale,
reading about songs
& entering the hard
world of pedigrees
& senex greed
& slow publication.

Or tried to. But by
the time I got there
the learned music
had blown through
and was gone,
leaving stone viaducts
in the words
to arch emptiness
and gall and
endless sand.

Truly there was
nothing left for me
to do but retrace
my steps through a
back door and down
cold rotting steps
until I found the stone
which covered this well
and pried it loose.

First my old head
floated up
and then his totem,
a naked man riding
a fish (I loosed
them here). Soon
the others rose
in a raw torrent,
giants and dwarves,
the dog Garma
the wolf Fenris, even
the Midgard Serpent
stretched the
length of a 5000
page poem.

O how the sea
rose up through that
hole, a sea of seas,
up to devour every
trace of the scholar
I once was: Every
trace of that bone
was soon lost inside
a raging and
ripening foam.

And now this
third song, risen
from that river
and the cathedrals
that it mortared
and then fled.
My mouth now is
flung wide like some
Leviathan's maw,
spilling the oldest
treasures inside
a raw but sacred brine.

Now I must forget
all that I learned,
or make of it some
onward, inward thing
-- A dashed heaven
far beneath the sea
where my blue
familiars sing.

Watch my hand
now cross the page
-- A Ouiji boat which
shores on runes
in Neolithic caves
and writes of a rage:
Counting the fangs,
ferrying loud staves
from the darkest tunes.




RUDE CHAIR

2004

The fact is that I'm rooted
here in this word-woven chair
peeking through the tide of night,
by choice or fate or nature.
My hand moving across the page
is one exempla of the rule
of that starved ghost who
launched a thousand ships,
marched ten thousand armies,
drove me through a million
nights in chase of darkling thrills,
each isle the scent of cleavage.
Desire's old two-step of ache
and quench has faithfully
steered and wrecked me
yet again at this lonely hour
when no one waits on
the next pale page, though
I doggedly I still believe
this time I'll coil to rest
around the blue she left behind.
A crannog is God's
erected throne inside me,
a stiffie ten millennia long
and three billion achings deep
thrust into my care
from the caves of Lascaux
and Dorgonne where
beasts were scrawled
by hands as pale as mine.
And so this poem
is His next rude head
poking through the hour's shorts,
strangely round and soft
and chivalrous
for all the angry horses
clamoring in belfries
drowned below. This
isle an hour from dawn
was driven and is risen
by the God I named
through clenched teeth
when He was loosed at
last, the stars sea-horses
swirled on sky-tides.
This crannog is the water-
house of kings who married
water-mares for kingdoms
down that mere.
Each line I write logs
the aching shape,
thrusting as it cries
for mother Uffington
in her nocturne's bed,
her milk the silence
of the itch full fed.
Oh I'm old as stone in
this rude crannog,
as hard as the diamond
stars still burning at this
hour with the same
white desire that cut me
so clean and true
ten thousand lives ago,
when every wild cried Yes
and empty shores sighed No.




THE WORLD TREE

2003

Talons gripped me
rude and strong
and lifted me high
in this tree which
rises through the
sea & whose roots
are fed by my
verbal ancestry.
Plopped into a
nest of straw
and told to sit there
and wait. Ages passed.
I returned to work
and build a house
-- labors the world
owns, not wings but
what we do while
the spirit molts above.
I married a woman
and then another,
trying to get Love
right despite all the
ways Love wants to
fly but can't. I put
pen to paper many
years & watched my
hatchlings flutter
and all die, land-locked,
ground-level, no wind
to lift their wings.
History passed and
then I stirred, jabbed
by some angel's claw.
I opened my eyes
to see the vast sky
like a breast pressed
to my face, and opened
my mouth and began
to sing the milk
of pure beginning.
O time now to fly.

Cave Painter

No less than fifty-five ((shamanic)) figures .. have been identified among the teeming herds and grazing beasts of the various
caves. These make it practically certain that in that remote period of our species the arts of the wizard, shaman or magician were already well developed, in fact, the paintings themselves clearly were an adjunct of those arts, perhaps even the central sacrament; for it is certain that they were associated with the magic of the hunt, and that, in the spirit of that principle of mythic participation ... their appearance on the walls amounted to a conjuration of the timeless principle, essence, noumenal
image, or idea of the herd into the sanctuary, where it might be acted upon by a rite.

-- Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology

CAVE PAINTER

We enter here at nothing --
-- a blank page at 4:05 a.m.,
the night outside dazing back
into a chill, the darkness
dozing so stilly as if entranced,
dreaming, or dead. I wind
down line for line
through a daily catelogue
of thrills ‘n’ thralls,
descending hall for hall
of a history darkening
into Yours, each room
a depth only words
can fancy, the next
womb of the dream
until we’re here, in the
most ancient counting-
room of all, where kills
and quests are written
down as bulls and foxes
with me there too, the
prone man dreaming
with his drawing-stick,
dowsing heavens with
an engendering spark
of procreation and appetite,
shouting all their praises
loud. Again and again I
travel down the page to
get to here, to this conjugal
bed of stone no longer
preterit of starry motions,
all limbs and labias slathered
in the limbo organum
of oceans, age-old hosannahs
unhosiered to their
spent ‘n’ dribbly amens.
I started this work long
ago -- or You began it in me --
when, back home after
a day in my first-grade
school, I pulled a secret
page from beneath my bed
and crayoned in the next
butt and pussy that I’d
seen playing I’ll Show
You Mine if You Show Me
Yours at recess -- bigs O’s
for asses, small ones for cunts,
each bisected with a line
which signified a goodly
crack through which
to peer deeper into
the cavern of my thrall.
The house was drawn
simple and with clear
intent, divided into
two big rooms; into each
I’d daily stack my coins
-- one room for remembered
asses, the other for cunts,
nickels and dimes banked
back to their origin.
After adding my coups,
I’d stare at the emerging
work in something close
to reverence, but savager,
more like the pride of
a hunter in his hall
of kills, antlers hung in
the rafters and furs piled
everywhere. Is that pride
and joy like incense to
You, wafting between the
worlds on a breeze which
I call lust and You deem
swell? No one taught
me to draw that house --
sure, I learned the craft of
crayoning in class, but
there I drew the outsides
of houses, beamed by a
yellow or blue sun.
Someone else instructed
me to draw the vulgar
insides of that day,
and make of it a shrine.
Lascaux, if I may call you
that old Father, was Your
hand inside my own
as I piled my trophies
high? That tremble of
delight, of equal parts
desire and shame -- Were
You fusing them in
me those furtive afternoons
Were You welling the
pure dark heat of passions
which so enthralled me
and would not let me go?
So who sent into the
drama that kid who
ratted to the Teacher
on my in-the-bushes game?
She called me to the front
of class and, in a hoarse
and raging whisper, told
me if she ever heard of
my shenanagnas again
she would tell (pause eternally
here and ring the bell of
doom) my mother.
Yikes! Throw the votives
in the shaft and seal the
cover tight! Caught
in flagrante delectio by
the day I did as every
mama’s boy would do
and closed down the magic
show, tearing up the
evidence and going back
to crayonning pretty days
with blue or purplish suns.
When I hit puberty eight
years later the fuse was
torched sgain inside the dark
with Your wild candlepower.
The sight of some
12-year-old’s girls budding
nubs in class would return
into my mind at night
as I lay in bed before sleep;
and there I painted that
sight but large inside
a black cathedral of desire
with one hand in my
shorts, stroking in that
magic rhythm that swirled
those nubile nubs in
Vistavision across my
teeming brain, lavishing
upon that day’s sight
a godlike magnitude,
filling my dark bedroom
with blue watery moonlight,
blacklit from starry balls,
til I burst in one held groan
drowning said nub in
a collapsing surf of foam.
Who needed actual girls
with consolations bluer
than their blue-eyed demure?
Oh I’d try and try again
to angle every one
I found into the welcome
of a kiss, but my wanker’s
mojo was the more sustaining
bliss, gilding the day’s
small truths into fancied
conquests, carrying
booty forward beyond
what never happened
toward ends I could only
imagine. Sex was one
thing, its thrall another:
fantasies were always
so much more satisfying
in their terribly removed
ways than whatever
actually transpired, the
actual clench so quickly
disappearing from view,
whatever magic that it
promised dispelled by
logistics and compromise,
the stony difference of
another’s desire always
looking over my shoulder.
It was as if the sex
I imagined was something
darker and deeper than
real sex, a faint
similitude which always
made me wonder if
my problem was one of
reach: Right ocean, wrong
beach. In my eventual
settling down to something
like adulthood I’ve written
down my dreams, at least
the wilder ones, those
which beacon frucatives
my dayside eyes glom over.
The other night I visited
a house I hadn’t seen
for 30 years, the one
I had lived in just off
my college campus
in Spokane, a place long
condemned for its bum
roof and hard use by
so many extracurricular
yahoos like me.
In my dream some woman
lived there with her cult,
a queen of old disease.
She warned me to avoid
those rooms where the
chance of getting sick
was worst -- a 20 percent
syphilis in one, 36 percent
of AIDS in that. Were those rooms
the ones I filled up long ago,
their cargo of cracked butts
and cunts devolving all
the way to here? She and
her crew were wary
of us, having survived so
much exposure and criticism
in the press for being
criminal and rebellious
and nigh-infernal in their
dark experiments,
squatting in hippie squalor
over the vents of
magic time. I said to her
that history has darks
and depths worth
writing down and she
agreed, muse of my
own, perhaps, the softly
sighing voice ahead
which so deftly squeezes
all the ink from my winging
penis pen. Saul Bellow
once said that a writer
is a writer moved to emulation,
but to me that’s far too
pat. A writer is a painter
of Your blueblack bestiary
on the depths of paper
walls, writing down what
You sound inside the conch
shells of the world, with
their whorls of pucker-
pink abyss. It’s raining
softly now outside at
this 5 a.m., a sign from
the dark to blow the
candle on this matin-
hour and return back
to the world, leaving behind
for only God to read
all I’ve seen of Him
in pussies and asses,
the whole beastly crew
summed in one view.

Cave Diver

Ever have one of those dreams that unscolls forever down into the depths? And wonder whose hands pull you down into it? And wonder what instruction you there received, even as the detals of the dream seem to fin away back into the murk?

In Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, a long initiatory dream of a Avam Samoyed shaman is recounted by A. A. Popov. (pp. 38-42). It is a tale and a song and a incredible voyage to Lascaux's soul-forges, deep in a chamber where all beginnings and endings are etched on primal walls.


***

Sick with smallpox, the future shaman remained unconscious for three days and so nearly dead that on the third day he was almost buried. His initiation took place during this time. He remembered having been carried into the middle of a sea. There he heard his Sickness (that is, smallpox), speak, saying to him: “From the Lords of the Water you will receive the gift of shamanizing. Your name as a shaman will be Huottarie (Diver).”

Then the Sickness troubled the water of the sea. The candidate came out and climbed a mountain. There he met a naked woman and began to suckle her breast. The woman, who was probably the Lady of the Water, said to him: “You are my child; that is why I let you suckle at my breast. You will meet many hardships and be greatly wearied.”

The husband of the Lady of the Water, the Lord of the Underworld, then gave him two guides, an ermine and a mouse, to lead him to the underworld. When they came to a high place, the guides showed him seven tents with torn roofs. he entered the first and there found the inhabitants of the underworld and the men of the Great Sickness (syphilis). These men tore out his heart and threw it into a pot. In other tents he met the Lord of Madness and the Lords of all the nervous disorders, as well as the evil shamans. Thus he learned the various diseases that torment mankind.

Still preceded by his guides, the candidate then came to the Land of the Shamanesses, who strengthened his throat and his voice. He was then carried to the shores of the Nine Seas. In the middle of one of them was an island, and in the middle of the island a young birch tree rose to the sky. It was the Tree of the Lord of the Earth. Beside it grew nine herbs, the ancestors of all plants on earth. The tree was surrounded by seas, and in each of these swam a species of bird with its young. There were several kinds of ducks, a swan, and a sparrow-haw. The candidate visited all these seas; some of them were salt, others so hot he could not go near the shore.

After visiting the seas, the candidate raised his head an, in the top of the tree, saw men of various nations; Tavgi Samoyed, Russians, Dolgan, Yakut, and Tungus. He heard voices: “It has been decided that you shall have a drum (that is, the body of a drum) from the branches of this tree.” He began to fly with the birds of the seas. As he left the shore, the Lord of the Tree called to him: “My branch has just fallen; take it and make a drum of it that will serve you all your life.” The branch had three forks, and the Lord of the Tree bade him make three drums from it, to be kept by three women, each drum being for a special ceremony -- the first for shamanizing women in childbirth, the second for curing the sick, the third for finding men lost in the snow.

The Lord of the Tree also gave branches to all the men who were in the top of the tree. But, appearing from the tree up to the chest in human form, he added: “One branch only I give not to the shamans, for I keep it for the rest of mankind. They can make dwellings from it and so use it for their needs. I am the Tree that gives life to all men.” Clasping the branch, the candidate was ready to resume his flight when again he heard a human voice, this time revealing to him the medicinal virtues of the seven plants and giving him certain instructions concerning the art of shamanizing. But, the voice added, he must marry three women (which, in fact, he later did by marrying three orphan girls whom he had cured of smallpox).

After that he came to an endless sea and there he found trees and seven stones. The stones spoke to him one after the other. The first had teeth like bears’ teeth and a basket-shaped cavity, and it revealed to him that it was the earth’s holding sone; it pressed on the fields with its weight, so that they should not be carried away by the wind. The second served to melt iron. He remained with these stones for seven days and so learned how they could be of use to men.

Then his two guides, the ermine and the mouse, led him to a high, rounded mountain. He saw an opening before him and entered a bright cave, covered with mirrors, in the middle of which there was something like a fire. Then he saw that there was no fire burning but that the light came from above, through an opening. One of the women told him that she was pregnant and would give birth to two reindeer; one would be the sacrificial animal of the Dolgan and Evenki, the other that of the Tavgi. She also have him a hair, which was to be useful to him when he shamanized for reindeer. the other woman also gave birth to two reindeer, symbols of the animals that would aid man in all his works and also supply his food. The cave had two openings, toward the north and toward the south; through each of them the young women sent a reindeer to serve the forest people (Dolgan and Evenki). The second woman, too, gave him a hair. When he shamanizes, he mentally turns toward the cave.

Then the candidate came to a desert and saw a distant mountain. After three days’ travel he reached it, entered an opening, and came to a naked man working a bellows. On the fire was a cauldron “as big as half the earth.” The naked man saw him and caught him with a huge pair of tongs. The novice had time to think, “I am dead!” The man cut off his head, chopped his body into bits, and put everything into the cauldron. There he boiled his body for three years. There were also three anvils, and the naked man forged the candidate’s head on the third, which was the one on which the best shamans were forged. Then he threw the head into one of the three pots and stood there, the one in which the water was the coldest. He now revealed to the candidate that, when he was called to cure someone, if the water in the ritual pot was very hot, it would be useless to shamanize, for the man was already lost; if the water was warm, he was sick but would recover; cold water denoted a healthy man.

The blacksmith then fished the candidate’s bones out of a river, in which they were floating, put them together, and covered them with flesh again. He counted them and told him that he had three too many; he was therefore to procure three shaman’s costumes. He forged his head and taught him how to read the letters that are inside it. He changed his eye; and that is why, when he shamanizes, he does not see with his bodily eyes but with these mystical eyes. Then the candidate found himself on the summit of a mountain, and finally he woke in the yurt, among his family. Now he can sing and shamanize indefinitely, without ever growing tired.

The Green Chapel of Lascaux

Gawain comes to the hidden location of the Green Knight’s chapel, a year and a day after he was issued a challenge by that knight at Camelot -- to strike each other’s heads off:

***

He strikes spurs into Gringolet, starts on the path;
By a bank a the side a small wood he pushes in,
Rides down the rugged slope right into the dale.
The about him he looks and the land seems wild,
And nowhere he sees any sign of shelter,
But slopes on each side of him, high and steep,
And the rocks, gnarled and rough and right rugged.
The clouds there seemed to him scraped by the crags.
Then he halted and held back his horse at that time,
And spied on all sides in search of the chapel;
Such nowhere he saw, but soon, what seemed strange,
In the midst of a glade a mound, as it might be,
A smooth, swelling knoll by the side of the water,
In its banks the brook bubbled as though it were boiling.
The knight urged on Gringolet, came to the glade,
There leaped down lightly and tied to the limb
Of a tree, right rugged, the reins of his noble steed,
Went to the mound, and walked all around it,
Debating what manner of thing it might be:
On the end and on each side an opening; everywhere
Over it grass was growing in patches,
All hollow inside, it seemed an old cave
Or a crag’s old cleft: what he could not decide.

Said the knight,
“Is this the chapel here?
Alas, dear Lord! here might
The fiend, when midnight’s clear,
His matin prayers recite.”

(Gawain and The Green Knight 2160-89, rendered into modernized English by Roger Sherman Loomis in Medieval English Verse and Prose, Appleton-Century-Crost, Inc., 1948)

***

Does Gawain quest for his fate, or does he fare back towards it? Or both? Jessie Weston sees in the figure of Gawain a distant ancient chapel of healing, faded greatly in the version which survives in his tales:

“No other knight, save Gawain, has the reputation of a Healer, yet Gawain, the Maidens’ Knight, the ‘fair father of Nature’ is, at first sight, hardly the personage one might expect to possess such skull. Why he should be so persistently connected with healing was for long a problem to me; recently, however, I have begun to suspect that we have in this apparently motiveless attribution the survival of an early stage of tradition in which not only did Gawain cure the Grail King, but he did so, not by means of a question, or by the wielding of a broken sword, but by more obvious and natural means, the administration of a healing herb. Gawain’s character of Healer belongs to him in his role of Grail winner.

-- From Ritual to Romance 108

***

A medicine man, dealer of green mojo, older than the hills he rides through in search of the Green Chapel. A Green Knight rode into Arthur’s court and issued an otherworldly challenge: A head for a head: An otherworldly enchantress gives Gawain the boon of a green silk girdle to wear under his armor as amulet against that hoary axe: Gawain rides on past the borders of sense, arrivng at last at a mound at the bottom a dale which crags down into doom. What crosses in Gawain’s nature that is both lover and healer, for better and for ill? And why must he find or return to the Green Chapel for the dreadest test of all?

How else could he learn to love or heal? Why else sing these strange grand darkly-vaulting songs of blue swoon?



LASCAUX

December 1, 2005

In most of the caves the animals are
inscribed on top of the other, with no
regard for aesthetic effect. Obviously
the aim was not art, as we understand
it, but magic. And for reasons that we
now cannot guess, the necromantic
pictures were thought to be effective
only in certain caves and in certain
parts of those caves. ... And without
exception these magical spot occur far
from the natural entrances of the
grottoes, deep within the dark,
wandering, chill corridors and vast
chambers; so that before reaching
them one has to experience the full
force of the mystery of the cave itself.
Some of the labyrinths are more than
half a mile in depth; all abound in
deceptive and blind passages, and
dangerous, sudden drops.

Their absolute, cosmic dark, their
silence, their unmeasured remoteness
from every concern and requirement
of the normal, waking field of human
consciousness can be felt even today—when
the light of the guide goes out. The senses,
suddenly, are wiped out; the millenniums
drop away; and the mind is stilled in
a recognition of the mystery beyond
thought that asks for no comment
and was always known (and feared)
though never quite so solidly experienced
before. And the, suddenly, a surprise,
a visual shock, a never-to-be-forgotten
imprint ...

-- Joseph Campbell on the sacred grotto deep inside the cave at Lascaux, in Primitive Mythology


I.

So why these bruising perambles
on iron wings of hardest song,
each line any icy feather dipped
and nibbed in my own
irreligious uncongealing blood?
What man embered from that
caul of too-rough magic
and how is he about Your
wild totemic hoohah, if
anywhere at all? A cold
morning this, temps in
the mid-40s at last,
blanket round my feet,
window shut against the
maul; maybe now those
bastard ‘skeeters will abate
when I go out on the
back porch to feed
those strays we call
our own. They’ve been
voracious of late, the
mosquitoes I mean, the
cats too, or the so the
tapeworms belling loud
inside ‘em. Appetite and
sustenance, that’s the iron
drone the topside drums
intone, so loud it’s
hard not to ache to
eat the world. My wife sleeps
deep after sewing half the
night in thrall and woe
of opportunities at last
which may yet help
provide the funds we
desperately lack--perhaps.
And I have been about
these rigors far too early,
this Thursday now hard-
weary with a long day
of weekly production ahead.
Yesterday throughout my
workday there was a dulled,
bluish bruise of malaise
in my mood, jointing all
all my tasks with a
cartilage of surf so
sexual its seemed
bruited in a much
colder sea. As if all
my talk of wings
was hauling Yours up
enough for me to feel
their too-wild undersides,
a proximity which
darkened past desire
with lead shoes. As I
focused on a layout
of an online version
of our main product
a slew of womens’ asses
bent to view, thong panties
slid to right or left like
Eve’s leaf which some
savager goddess hungrily
removed, profferring
cunts and assholes with
such incessant gapes
I saw orchards of wild
sweetness, ten thousand
bites of apple consecrate
in a doom of actual days.
I could almost taste
that whiskey at my lips,
poured from pale
chalices curved my
way from the moon.
Oh it was an old and
hard-worn surf that
pounded at my hips
as I tried to put
in a decent day’s work,
enough to make me
question You here:
Am I just weary of my
job, stuck there for the
income with little real
new interest in the
tasks, a worn-out drone
in an ever-more complected
hive of never quite
lucrative enterprise,
the greatest part of my
dingdong days subsumed
in moolah’s cerulean
occlude of heart and
heat and depth and song?
Is this the man You
forged such wings
inside those broken nights?
Just what’s shamanic
about a married
mortgaged aging man who’s
treading time like water,
working his ass and
getting nowhere,
fattening and wearying
in the rigor of so many
working days?
I see a whorl of blue
inside lost days, the
awful augurs of Your
brogue which thickened
on my tongue like blood:
But that infernal
conception did not birth
in actual time; it only
breaks its waters here,
line after spilled line
down a distant page
to vault of songs writ
large that no one but You,
it seems, has willing
eyes to read. I’m stuck
in a surf-like maul of
personally important
wounds, the way the
puerile life-enfearing
boy moons for years
upon a mirror’s blood,
spilling it forever for
a mother he’ll never need
the way he needs to heal.
The awful all-consuming
bliss of that still-stuck
boy keeps me riveted
here inside a corral of
fixed rhythms and cheap
rhymes. Shamanic rides
a dime! Is that the rant
You’re propounding into
me, up from my
drunkalogues? Perhaps
that was the menace I
felt yesterday, the weariness
of labors high and low
which have nowhere
else to go, my lesser motions
down the great world’s tree
ordaining me to mediocrity
at best, at worst a fatuous
foolishness which bids me
drone on till all this seals
me fast inside a fossil
cage of drowning bone
lost beneath the sea.
How can I not feel stuck?
How can any man of
starry means enough
be fashioned from such muck?




II.


The supernatural suitor
seems to correspond to the
Indian Gandharva, whose
presence is necessary for
conception. At weddings,
the Gandharva is a kind of rival
who, to the last, disputes the
bridegroom’s possession of the
bride. The few references
to the Gandharvas (in the plural)
in the Rig Veda show them
to be spirits of the air or
of the waters, but other
texts associate them with
mountains, caves, and forests,
with the world of the dead,
and with animals. They are
half-men and half-bird.
Their wives or mistresses,
the Apsaras, appear as
water nymphs. The Gandharvas
have charge of Soma, or they
steal Soma; they are skilled
in medicine and they
are fond of women. They
also appear as singers
and musicians who attend
the feasts of the gods,
while from the time of the
Mahabharata their
name also denotes
human musicians.

-- Rees and Rees,
Celtic Heritage p. 276

My tanist here is a booze-soaked
soul about its noctal worst:
I mean the blackout man
who wakes at 3 a.m., having
waited till enough shots of
whiskey had been gulped in
my pig greed to buccaneer
at last my sense, whacking me
but good with his bone mallet
and creaking up the stone
crypt door at the bottom
of my lame-brained skull;
and thus scrabbled out
into the midnight of my days
in his black cape lined with
red velvet, wielding his iron
cudgel of a cock of a cane.
His malefic rock-bottomness,
Sir Hyde, the man beyond all
yoke or harness, whose full
intent was to party down
further than I was wont to
go, freed even of waking
nonsense of a slurry superego.
My account of the blackout
man comes from others
who were there when I was
out; they told me some
next day what I cared
not at all to hear, my ears
burning red for shame.
He/I laughed, we jabbered
to the patrons at the bar,
and danced a trio rumba
with every pretty on the
dane floor, the dead man
with his blacklit shade,
romancing with a smile
that could carve a moon
in two. Our motions were
manic and mantic in
my swoon, eyes closed
beneath the disco lights,
hips thrusting sheward
on the boomboom beat.
The blackout man partied
on when I wend down like
a zombie of my days, saying
all I couldn’t and doing more,
carrying on where I left off
with his special equipage,
a bone I didn’t have the
balls to use. Once I closed
down the Point After and
drove home with him at
the wheel. There was a pop
in the murk and it came
to me I’d gotten a flat tire,
but the blackout man
decided to drive on.
Then is was shrieking day
and I was struggling up
from bed, late o so late
for work, my girlfriend
cursing me from top to bottom
for being such an asshole.
Huh? I thickly asked,
stumbling into shirt and tie.
When I tried to leave
I found the bumper of my
car lodged next to the front
door, a long scar down
the yard to the street
gouged by what was left
of my front right wheel.
A guy who lived across
the street later told me
(in one of those dread
accounts of me when I
wasn’t anywhere) that
he had wakened at 3 a.m.
hearing a dreadful
scraping coming down
the street; he looked out
and saw my car lunging down
the street with flashes and
sparks flying from one
corner. My girlfriend said
she’d heard that noise
abruptly turn and chew
loudly up the yard of our
duplex; coming to the
door she saw me lurch
out of my car and then flip
over across the hood
demanding in a loud
hoarse voice a kiss,
some pussy, then begged
to kiss her pussy.
The blackout man
drove me home that night
and so many others
I’ll never recall, a far older
man by twenty five
millennia or so, about
Your work in its direst mojo,
its blue blackest augment
which I’ve always feared
to fully row to the wildest
shores of. And out there
before he finished with me
at last he laid me in a
a huge stone chamber at
the bottom of all bottles,
and grafted on the extra
bone, this fluke of
salt frothernity. I ride him
here, that abcissa of my
dread history I pray to
never again endure.
Something tells me that
this work is part
of keeping him down
there where he belongs,
my visits to his barroom
depths nekyias which harrow
the tongue of the full
taste of booze-wild emptiness,
the abysms of desire
which no thrust can full
requite, much less suspire.
Or perhaps he’s happy
now to ride me home
in the salt empyrieia
which is my singing bone.


III.

According to Lehtisalo’s
Yurak-Samoyed informants,
initiation proper begins with
learning to drum; it is on this
occasion that the candidate
is able to see the spirits. The
shaman Ganykka told him that
once when he was beating his
drum the spirits came down
and cut him to pieces, also
chopping off his hands. For
seven days and nights he
remained unconscious, stretched
out on the ground. During
this time his soul was in
the sky, journeying with
the spirit of Thunder and
visiting the god Mikkula.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism:
Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 38


History is Mystery’s thong:
the thrall of lost thrills
dowses my backward glance
over every once-upturned
ass into what I could not
quite plunge the full depths
of with my errant, too-
spiritually 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
every bed ... But how else
would have I been fattened
for the fall after which You
battened on my viscera
with red thrall? Remembering
those motions here across
and down the page is like
drumming on the edge of night
until the night awakens wings,
wings which take me where
I never could get to in all
those bad nights, a destination
beyond the ache which
poured me into all those
ill-fated drunken beds.
I had a sense of it but not
the words for what’s inside
that surf between a a woman’s
thighs which cries my name
booming welcome: before
the name there was a motion,
a drumbeat, if you will,
the infernal metronome
which scatters worlds until
none are left quite whole again.

I closed my eyes when
I soloed on my guitars,
reaching out to fin the
bluest marges of the notes,
getting beyond the brutal
facts -- another night of
half-assed band practice in
some too-cold practice room --
to arrive at a stage
in the vastest room where
applause and pleasure
sounded back, the grail
of ten thousand woman
etched upon those darkly
echoing walls. I never got
to real stages in any troth
though the licks were
surely true: if only in
the playing, my wings
were blue. The bands
didn’t matter, whether
I was in them or not:
I never succeeded in that
way I wished but instead
I learned about the
register of a big-night
music which booms,
whale-like, from shore to
shore of song. It was all
about the singing, the
way You heal by winging,
wing-bone to shoulder
welded with a gossamer
belief along the interfascias
of heart and heat and
the hurt which is inconsolable
and deeper than the deep sea sky.

Take also the hundred
nocturnes in strange women’s
beds I only pillaged once:
They too were of a motion
You taught me, one in which
I learned of You by drumming
of my hips against another’s,
in the crest of desire
along a gradient of wilds
which explodes in cleansing
light somewhere in
O-cry of all cresting seas.
Observe the lover engaged
in that salty blue bouree,
closest to me in the facts
of proximity, stripped
and spread and plunged,
breasts heaving and wobbling
against my hairy shore,
her cunt receiving me
stroke for stroke in
steady slowly speeding
rhythmus: How come our
eyes are not guzzling the
local facts of raw nudity
but are instead screwed tight,
gazing off in pleasure’s
spirit-flight, reaching
for some orgasmic place
inside and yet offshore,
a place which evicts
us from our solitary
houses and dumps us
way out there with a
shout and a gout,
collapsing in warm seas
where all defining
edges have been lost
at last in the clear blue
float of Your purest
and most far realm,
inside the thalmus
of what frees us most,
if only for an hour
on a night so wanton
in its disease? In my
sexual immramas You were
boating me toward a shore
where, thus harrowed
by the routes, I was at
last able to build a house
on feral ground, married
to a real woman and
to her familiar safely
underground, whoever
that archangel is, muse
or fancyfuck or anima
of doors opening all the
way inside to central
chamber where all bowered
bliss is etched on the
walls, not in pride or
poetry but reverence,
for the mojo I could
never mount by day
and rode those nights
like a sea-horse into the
wildest waters of them all.

And a third instance: for
years now I’ve gotten up
too early every day to sit
in this white writing chair,
drumming in a chickenscrath
tenor across the page down
into abyssal deeps which
have taken plural shapes
and names-- a well, a
crannog, a Cape, a beach,
a road of waking dreams,
the drowned and lost
rooms of my own history,
now this unbound
packet of letters to
the shaman who wings
beneath my own story
into its purest song:
And though the names
have changed the motions
have remained, as true
as when I played guitar
or drummed my balls
against the pale white
bottom of a woman.
The rigor of pen on paper
are the wings and hooves
and fins of thought that
reaches with its eyes
closed, staring through
the words toward an aerie
far below where something
in a ancient nest is
hatching every slow,
a huge malefic bird of
prey with iron feathers
tipped in sharpened
flint, his beak (Yours?)
dipped in the blood I
freely pour from my pen.
For years I’ve dipped
my quills in an ancestral
abyss, writing inks of
brutal ichor brined in
blood’s oldest communion,
older than any wine
to spill from chalice depths.
I come to believe it
wells from a totem tongue
who bids me speak his
name--Yours, dark
father--in the resonant
chapel of stone far inside
these verbal ribs of bone
descending down the page.
The end has never been
for art though there’s
quite an art to learn
in how to say it right
enough, a knack You’re
teaching me poem after
poem after poem. I stare
at the page as the words
fly forth and then I’m
riding inside of them
on a high blue swollen
wave of desire and its
precedents inside my
heart and mind and balls.

IV.

For twenty five thousand
years priest-shamans led
trembling votives down
the passageways of Lascaux,
descending into the earth’s
cold halls of cunt inside
the mind, a frightening passage
filled with every dread
and peril of the harrow,
ending at last and suddenly
in the vast central hall:
And there unleashed
a sudden fire which revealed
Your gospelled plenitude
of sacred beasts and men
and demiurgic theurges --
bird-men with penises
of stone who stared full
back with eyes of whorled
abyss. That panoply of
wild-wrought shapes
flashed You into view at last
and forever those far
millennia of startled
hearts, a gorge of awe
and awfulness which
ladders up to me each
time I’ve headed down
these many ways
over the years. What have
all my wild motions been
but the same enquiry
of initiate into a vault
of fire beneath the darkest
sea? And here I am again,
bumping at the bottom
of this next song, etching
here an end of sort on
the same old brutal walls,
a coup from the Infinite’s
starry count: My name--
or Yours--as an antlered
man with stout cock
and blue balls dancing
in the teem of fuck-
and hunt-desire, staring
hard exactly where I’m
staring through these lines.
What I see there I ferry here
in this boat of rough-hewn
verse: Then shut the book
like the cover of a well
and head back upstairs
to warm my body next
to my sleepy wife, and
let the real life wake
from this dream. Lascaux
was harrowed for ten
million nights in the same
quest to Your chapel: It’s so
deeply grooved inside
my mind that pick and
prick and pen can only
wing that way on down
though infinitely desired
waters, down where song
and love and saying
wed eternal vows in
rhyme. Yes, history
is indeed mystery’s
thong, revealing most
what it conceals, the
thinnest bridge— a
sword, perhaps—into
the vastest keep where
You, dead king, forever
sleep at the bottom
wrappings of my soul.
Some day perhaps I’ll
fully wake You with
a note, a countercockward
twist, or a word; but
that may just be the
booze talking beyond
its bottles, a thrall which
counts for nothing and doesn’t
matter at all to the worlds,
not even Yours. It dooms
me to a solitary enterprise,
committal to a labyrinth
which has no turn up
and out. It makes planning
hard and endings moot,
since descending is the
only boot apt for its feet,
stomping down in cement
pentameters. I just go on
and on and on in the
only way I can, repeating
the blue motions in
the same old starry way,
winging toward the song
which undertows my
ding dong days, this
life-long ache for
enduring shores.
Your music assures me
that I’ll get there yet,
even if I have to mount
a hundred different horses
in the ride. A hundred
different discourses,
a hundred malts inside
the ones I’ve long poured
out, a hundred salty
rhetorics each with
ten thousand gospels
buried far down inside
their bones, buried lower
from view than words
or notes or sperm can
ever reach. It’s cold again
this morning, crisp as
a Hesperidean apple
plucked from Orkney shores.
My wife plans to work on
custom jobs while I work
some in the garden & then
nap & watch some football
reading the last of Moby
Dick. That’s the plan, though
this is an awful age we
life in, with something
bad always in the news
and the telephone always
threatening to ring in tones
so fraught with bad news
far closer to our home;
perhaps, at worst, inside.
Always a black hand is
rapping at the window
in the ligature of doom,
threatening to drown
these rooms of work and
love we have daily fought
so hard to live in. Is
that You that’s pounding
there just beyond what
I’ll never dare to say, much
less embrace? Does my
scratching here somehow
make faint that darker,
deeper sound? Perhaps.
But all I know is that
when I’m done here
the man who goes upstairs
has blue feet surer
than blue balls, done
in one sense enough
to stop pleading for
this world to drench
me in what it has
no sea for. Our world
upstairs is safer when
Yours is secure down
here: And so I write
these lines between
where imps and angels
have no tread, harrowing
a space for us which is
hell and heaven enough
for one life, one man and
his wife. And that, my
father and far friend, is
all of thrall and gall
I can drum today. Bless
it with your sigh which
all oceans at their edges fly
and welcome me home at last
to the last line I here cry.