Heaven's Gate

Heaven always hides itself,
like a spinning spiral castle
with a gate that lowers only
thrice in all our lives. It
showers light somewhere
behind my beloved;
I know it’s there but she fills the
doorway with that sad
familiar strangeness I’m so
enthralled with that I
forget she’s just the raiment and daily gold
hosannah of the goddess
I’ll never get to love though
she’s always calling my name.
Another cold front is changing
Florida back into its
bruited cousin, ravaged
and windswept, the 4 a.m.
sky a cloud-mottled cooling
augur of the solstitial dark
ahead. Our cats sleeping
in their curl outside and in,
noses down, eyes sealed
in the pleasure of cat dreams.
Wounds got me here, in my
battening and betterment
of them I mean: they
were inside augments
of that heaven’s phatom
wavering beyond bad days
and nights. Your physic was
horrific as I learned to fall but
good, taking comfort
in false heavens as the
only havens this world
affords. That spreading
glow of whiskey which
tranced the flighty
brain, the wholesale
revival of the sacred
in my whoring, settling
for love’s obverse,
moon instead of Earth,
down some drunken
woman’s drenched
ravines: In these
my old wounds
became cathedrals
of awe and awfulness
in which the toll of
nightly masses damn
near killed me. I
in sotted funk,
bellowing my orisons
as the sea belched
all its moons. I did
not die but for years
was worse, the blackout
revenant in a blacklit
tableaux of rude indigo,
God’s curse on every
woman I got close to,
my need too freighted
with high greed to
be much of a lover,
much someone a
woman cared to call
beloved. Well, that
song is by now a
tattered old standard
which muzak stations
leak like syrup from
the speakers of every
elevator going down.
I got off before I
hit The bottom, got
therapy, joined
AA and worked the
steps, pouring oceans
of salt verbiage into
those old-school wounds,
eating all the scum
I scattered wide
while beating this
blue drum which I’ll
never understand,
much less mint or
mortgage. Years are
now passing with me
down another way,
reverent of the depths
in which I once
was revenant and fell,
hallowing that harrowing
by ringing the same
old ding-dong bell
cast in the blackout
abysms of Your hell.
Is each migraine’s
hooves the white wings
of old hangovers, blue
echoes of black drums?
Is each song a gripping
back down the gradient
You once reached up
to grab me by the
balls, my going down here
like Beowulf in the mere
to where M’am Grendel’s
tending bar at that
tavern ghosting the
bottom of my nights, her
teats squirting the milk
of all I leaked in her,
her ghostly smiles
dragging every line I write
down to the same dark
rumpled beds? Heaven
hides itself even here,
where a life survived
to build a bright chapel
of love exactly where
old wounds fell, the
same old music of
rapine and rapture
evanescent and horrific
in the wings, distilling
quaffs I cannot drink
but think the depths of here.
To shamanize is to keep
wounds open when all
the bars are closed
and my wife sleeps deeply
in her life somewhere,
always, upstairs. You
bid me bang the bejeezus
out of a drum that’s both
ventricle and testicle
of dreams of heaven’s wash
and hiss, a shore which
hears my feet as I gallop
down a life crying blue
heaven, blue moon’s name.
It’s a scarring motion,
a door of flame, a warring
lover no salt or swoon
can tame, much less blame.

Grip

... Before becoming a shaman, the
candidate must be sick for a very
long time; the souls of his shaman
ancestors then surround him, torture
him, strike him, cut his body with
knives, and so on. During this operation
the future shaman remains inanimate;
his face and hands are blue, his heart
scarcely beats. According to another
Buryat shaman, Bulagat Buchacheyev,
the ancestral spirits carry the candidate’s
soul before the “Assembly of the
Saaytani” in the sky, and there he is
instructed. After his initiation his flesh
is cooked to teach him the art of
shamanizing. It is during this initiatory
torture that the shaman remains for
seven days and nights as if dead.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 43-4


Surely Your hand grips me from below
and hauls me down into the vast
abysm of my wounds. It is an iron grip
which won’t let go and is utterly
defiant of all “cures” this brighter
world affords. It is that hole I try
to fill which You always find
fresh ways to drill. As my first marriage
soured in a sop of slowly more
hopeless gall my bowels once
turned to stone, cemented
tracks which would not budge as
the days and weeks progressed.
I tried everything from the drug
store’s shelves -- laxatives, Mucinex,
Fleet enemas, essence of citrine --
whatever depth charge that I lobbed
just caused You to grip harder,
fossilizing me further, an
awful weed in plain sight of
every flower of sobriety.
I became this dulled iron man,
impregnable to the angry
vicissitudes I could not fend
inside the brute steppes of that
home. One month, two, three
lunar cycles without a dump,
until my doctor said I’d soon
need surgery: And then at last
You slowly ungripped, for reasons
I can only paraphrase the
sketchiest of guesses. Did
You convince me that my
marriage was too fused
to see the light of day?
Was something augured in
my ear as I read Finnegans
Wake in two to four page
sacraments on that daily
stoppered siege? Or was
I hearing You differently
in the words I began writing down,
attuned to the leaden mordents
dragging me beneath the sea?
Each is plausible but
not enough to convince me
in any way; both affliction
and cure are drowned in You.
Some years later I got that
wearying flu which did not,
could not abate, a four-month
tumble down weary ravines
which taxed me to a pall
in which I didn’t want to
do anything but lay and
dream and divest myself
of every calling of my daily
life. My marriage was then
over and I was in arrears
with the girlfriend whose
sexual welcome was wild
but not enough to salve
what had halved me;
I was guilty as hell for
over all that wreckage in
the name of love and
mooned desire in
full amplitude of that loss.
I was also floating tits up
on the surges of
my day job’s corporate
abysms, each week a
gallop through too-
endless tasks with no
shore ever in sight.
Yes, the causes seem
obvious enough, but
the sickness seemed
defiant even of those
names, so harrowing
its chills. It was full
summer, in widest
sea-cunt blast of feral summer,
and yet I could never
quite get warm, my
inner body swarmed
by bitter blasts of
wind up from some
blackened house of
blues. Weariness made
of days a cross I mounted
with heavy-hearted gall,
rendering my hours into
dreck and drudgery and
slackly dragging balls.
Eventually I was too
tired go to the gym
-- the greatest defeat
of that malaise, not
to gallop off the day’s
stresses in my haunches’
wildest fury. For a month I
just went home after work
and lay stunned upon the
couch, late afternoon
roaring through my second-
floor window as I
compressed my brow
with bouncy boobs on
Playboy TV, fully expended
of all vatic virile goatiness,
spoored down in viral spleen.
You had me deeply in a
cave where I lay in deathly
swoon, singing Your hard
indigoes in a voice too
deep for me to hear, even
now. Eventually I took
a week off and headed to
the beach where I stayed
at my aunt and uncle’s condo,
sleeping late and walking
the beach and drinking gallons
of carrot juice (my soon-to-
be-ex-girlfriend’s adamant
palliative). Was it rest and
root soma that allowed You
to complete your dream?
Or was it reading Jack
Gilbert’s The Great Fires
as I lounged on the
second floor deck, whipped
by winds off from autumnal
seas? Something found
an interface outside Your
grip, a tiny bridge of
wilderness which allowed
me to resume my
continued history.
Your bag of spells is crammed
with symptoms, I believe,
each an oubliette of downward-
winding trials, tenacious
and voracious, untenable
and invulnerable. Must I
learn them all? For years
now its been migraines --
dread hammers behind
my skull -- which You’ve
pounded like a drummer
at the bottom of all things.
I can sense Your fingers
approaching when that
odd high ringing in my
ears grows louder, like
a siren on the surface
while something subtler
shifts inside the antlers
of my sense, pressure
building as Your fingers
grip that black road
in my skull where every
migraine crows: And then
I’m full down into the
drowning scour of pain’s
skull-wide drown, offended
by both light and sound,
my stomach for the daily
ground full soured to
something close to retching
though that never happens.
I’ve tried a dozen different
meds, taken Yoga, had
a CAT scan, applied the
ice pack, had transfusions,
and still You’re with me
(today, alas, today), brute
hammer in one hand,
blood-dipped quill in this
other. Yes, work’s difficult as
hell, with always too much
to fucking get done; and yes,
though love is strong its strange
in its arrears, the sex now
for reasons known and not
is halved and equidistant
to desire, unsalved by paper dollies
and reveries of old beds.
Everywhere the mordents
of the age are blaring a
hard dark blue, my parents
aging ever older, the world
Republican-corrupt,
my million words
unacquiescent of the fact
that I’ve yet to say just
one shore true enough
to wash the rest away.
So why I migraine is as usual
unsurprising, while When
I’ll stop is an even more
occluded than before,
this malaise more toxic
and durable and worrisome,
lacing greater cement shoes.
Will You ever let me go?
I’m like Ahab lashed to
his barbed white whale,
staring at widening doom
as the dreadful fish
descends on down to
dark and dimmer rooms.
I just bear witness to
all You bid me see,
down the dregs of
whatever cup of disease
You bid me drink. The
sexual thrall, my dark
love of endless bottles
even this compulsion
to write too many words --
Your signature’s in all those
grips which have me by
the balls of my deepest
life’s intent. Is this healing?
To suffer nails til You are
finished driving them,
allowing You to tear some
errant ghost from my
ruptured flesh, allowing
me to stumble on my
way into the next affrighted
wound, grateful to be
free for just one day
between those grips which
tide between my day
or undertows my foolish
will? To shamanize is to
die and dive in noctal
seas to the malted depths of
badness, harrowing the
black lucence of that swoon.
There’s not a damn thing I
can to pull the pall up from
Your grip’s black thrall
except to surrender;
that’s the art, if one could
call it that, my song’s welcome
of the gloom’s entombing
at the sepulchral bottom
of it all. To dream is to die,
and to die is to beat
a frankly different drum,
brutally inside the other
one I’ll never lived in very
well in every surface way.
Thus I learn the marrow
of the shell I found the
morning after I found love,
hearing all the voices of
the sea in pinkblue disarray,
diapsons sung in perfect
harmony to the surf You spell
up from that black chapel on
the last torn shore in hell.

Nixie Dust

GALLOP

Dec. 12, 2005


... Pre-eminently the funerary animal and
psychopomp, the “horse” is employed
by the shaman, in various contexts, as
a means of achieving ecstasy, that is, the
“coming out of oneself” that makes the
mystical journey possible. This mystical
journey -- to repeat -- is not necessarily
in the infernal direction. The “horse”
enables the shaman to fly through the
air, to reach the heavens. The dominant
aspect of the mythology of the horse is
not infernal but funerary; the horse is
a mythical image of death and hence is
incorporated into the ideologies and
techniques of ecstasy. The horse carries
the deceased into the beyond; it produces
the “breakthrough in plane,” the passage
from this world to other worlds.

***

V. Blum (records this) ritual among the
Muria of Bastar. In his sanctuary at
Semurgaoin the great Gond god Lingo
Pen has several wooden “horses.” At
the time of the god’s festival these
“horses” are carried by a medium and
used both to induce ecstatic trance
and for divination. “At Metawand I
watched for several hours the antics
of a medium who was carrying on
his shoulders the wooden horse of his
clan god and at Bandopal a medium
carrying an imaginary horse on his
shoulders “ambled, caracoled, pranced
and plunged” for two miles before
my slow-moving car as we made our
way into the jungle for the Marka
Pandum (ceremonial eating of mangoes).
“The god rides upon him,” they told
me, “and we cannot stop him dancing
for days at a time.”

-- Eliade, Shamanism 467, 468

Atop my father’s crest
You ride a magic fish
which rides an iron helmet
like the funerary boat
of a fallen warrior-god.
You’re holding on, it
seems, for dear life
(or lives), your grip
fantastic and
merciless as that angry
water-horse hooves
hard the ages of
my history and
destiny and ecstasy.
That wild fish’s strides
are invisible to
our naked eye, churning
in a marge which
pours the darker
sources of my song
into the three cups
displayed below.
You’re on my father’
crest and on my fathers’
headstones; Your
image is carved cravenly
atop the headboard
of every bed I’ve
surged through; it
crowns my skull’s
descent to every world
You ravished in Your
dream. I write as
You ride, ever toward
a shore just off the
page, my hand Your
tireless haunches fused
with the sea’s blue fire
which we mortals only
ferry to our last shore
where we suspire, leaving
saddle and rein to the
next fool in the surf.
Such power mounts and
thunders in perfect three-
part harmony of head
and heart and balls
in hooves, dancing on
the ocean the way
an ecstasy so blithely
rips the roofs off
every house of God.
So effortless is Your
charmed motion that
I could sing for days
and barely carve
the first foam-maned
wave of Your sea-
wide curvature. Is
that crashing surf the
drumbeat of Your hooves
inside my darker heart?
How many lives have
Your crossed to get
me here? Shall I number
all the waves in
the annals of that ride?
Surely You harrow me
as I ride these paper
rollers toward the
same incessant shore,
where all I say dissembles
in the surf’s collapsing
pour: Could I have
sung this any differently
had You not been thundering
in my ear? I doubt it --
but whatever I think today
is by tomorrow not the
way it is at all
when you rumble full-tilt
to hilt across your
steppes of brine. It
suffices just to amp
that sound to its
current magnitude
and leave all talk
of goals and wetter shoes
to the magic thunder of
Your galloping wild hooves.





COLD FRONT

1988

All day long I have desired you.
A cold front has arrived, muscular,
driving jagged clouds on a hard sea of air.
Sunlight flashes in the kitchen window
then flips to darkness, like a closing
eye. I cup a mug of coffee in
my hand. It is smooth and round and
hot to the touch.

The kitchen is still. I want you,
as an alcoholic who gives up on
his sobriety and hurries for a drink.
If I touch you, I will not stop.
A tree outside erupts in wind.

Your breast is pressed to my ear,
filling it, I'm sure I can hear your
heart, incessant. . . but you're at work.
I eat an apple in the kitchen, sitting
on a stool by the window. Each bite
is crisp cold sweetness. They say
it's going to chill into the thirties
tonight. The moon will be full.
We've talked on the phone of travelling
to the beach tonight, of walking along
the shore in the stiff wind. We
say we will share a room.

I have lost control of my desire for
you, I am afraid. Part of me has already
made love to you, during a kiss I
mounted you and looked into your eyes
and came, my temples pounding. . .

Over two rooftops I see the tops of
three palm trees bend far, their leaves
flapping furiously, lashed by the tidal
air. I strap on an electric guitar
and crank up the amplifier. I play
wild rock and roll, I sweat and lurch,
my fingers attack the frets, I make
the notes squeal, I pillage.

My room fills with stampeding horses.
They have angry eyes, they have wild
manes that flutter like the devil's cape.
My hand clutches the hard guitar neck.
I'm searching for your thighs.

It grows colder out, and colder still.
The sky turns mercilessly blue. I pack
my guitar away, bury it in the thick
red plush, lock the case and slideäit beneath my bed.
Kneeling, I finally give it to God, it's too much,
I can't wait any longer, I must have
her. . .

A moment of silence, then another.
Could this be grace? I sit at my desk.
Lamplight is warm but austere. My
face in the window hangs there, mute,
no wolf or good timer. A blast of
wind rocks the window. This pen hefts,
fills with ink, it turns its mouth
on virgin paper.

And hungers.


COWBOY LEAR'S COMPLAINT


April 1994

Since you left
the land grows wider and wilder.
These days are an aerie
woven of brambles and rage.
Horses pound the turf,
their black manes electric,
their eyes like huge knobs
cranked to the hilt.

Since you left
Indian summer races back to spring,
a river roaring up the mountains.
These days are like corn stalks
pleading harvest, staves bent
with split ears, seedlings ripped
away by the wind like mice
in the keening talons of eagles.

Since you left
my heart is like the snout
of a stallion, smooth
and extravagantly long.
There's thunder on the highway
these days, and though the
road arrows west into the sun,
no one knows where this storm
came from nor when the
land splits if it can ever heal.

But what truly terrifies
in the days since you left
is the absence of crescendo:
storms swelter greenblack
but surrender no rain,
horse balls hammer brass
against steel haunches,
swollen corn ears ache at the sun,
eagles shear the sky
with their unslakable blades
and the horizon burns all night.

Dammit, why do these days
offer all you ever wanted,
all you ever asked from me,
these days having waited so patiently
for you to finally walk away?



DOLPHIN RIDER

2000


He is both meat
and motion of
my darkest
pure joys,
a figure carving
one wave
with his weight
then leaping
over the next
in a shower
of full-mooned
spray. It doesn't
matter what I
say here, how
I praise or damn
him: He just
rides that
bigass fish
on and on,
every night
and nightside
of my life singing
those big
brassy songs.
He's my
totem curse,
an archetype of
ruin which has
hammered every
swingin' dick
in my clan.
Like my
great great
grandfather
O'Riley who
burned his fiddle
to atone
for all the
drunk fiddling
haystack-fucking
the fish god
demanded of
him. The last
time my father
saw him he
was 72
and in hot
shit for offering
the neighbor
lady a quarter
for a toss.
The music
never ends:
tail and tooth
and cock
and voice are
all flames of
an eloquent fire
born on God's
abyssal plains,
awful or
awesome
depending on how
you survive
that music.
Today I say
he rides to
protect and
border and greet
us just beyond
whatever solace
we call harbor.
Singing is just
surrender you know
to what rises
and burns
as much as
to the dark waters
you carry.
A white flag
for dolphins
at midnight.
Your voice alone
singing her name.


HORSE TATTOO

2001

By some defect of soul
I’ve got it all reversed:
my downs appeal,
forward steps appall.
For my first three years
I carried a strange birthmark,
a red heart with an arrow
through it, right over my heart.
Cute, eh? A woman who
babysat for me back then
once remarked to my mother,
he aint gonna be nuthin’
but a lover.. Only the mark
was upside down. A backwards love.
May that’s why I like tattoos.
I got my first one of
a man riding a dolphin
etched on my left upper
arm in a greeny blue
right after my first marriage.
It replicates a figure from
my father’s chosen coat
of arms (fanciful at best),
some rebel spirit who
cruises between love and
iniquity. Years later
after a split with my second
wife a second tattoo
seemed necessary. I’d
always like the Uffington
Horse, that huge figure
carved into a chalk hillside
in England. It looks like a
horse, though locals swear
it represents the dragon
Saint George slew nearby.
Somehow that was apt:
having left home in a funk
of desire and drunkenness,
I had that careening spirit
carved into my right arm
not in red—as dragons go—
but instead in black, the
negative of that white ichor
which illuminates that
hill horse’s bones.
Well, I didn’t die of that
spirit—not yet—and I’m
working my way slowly
home again to my wife.
So the tattoo, I guess, is
an irony, the road eventually
not taken which only leads
to ruin. I’m branded by
the fires which drove me here:
Are they good or ill, or
simply mine? Am I some
inwarding beast mined
from love’s reversals?
I will never know for sure.
Today, I’m proud and fearful
of those markings: They light
the way ahead for me
with their weird, otherworldly glow,
balled makings with nowhere
right now to go.




HORSE

2002

At the gym yesterday
working on the
elliptical machine
& watching prim riders
hurl horses through
a jumping course:

A pure joy
raced like adrenaline
through me as
I watched, making
me happy to
pump my hardest too,
my heart so wanting
to gallop away
from permanent grief.

The ocean god
Manannan on his
horse Wave Sweeper
takes me where I
do not know.
I’m trusting this dark
fire with its
wild loud hooves
and wave high leaps—
Nothing to know,
no nature but my own.

Only this gallop
across sea ridges
and suburban roofs,
through the wind and wrack
heaving this horse song,
this banshee joy.


THE UFFINGTON HORSE

2003

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



RHIANNON

2003

I could never catch her,
though all these years I’ve
tried. When I was three
years old I’d run to the
window whenever my
mother cried, “pretty girls
passing by.” Whatever
made me race flat-out
got me to the window
always a nick too late,
my eyes catching a
jot of hair or passing
smile, but nothing that
would hold: just my
hammering heart and
that rearward, shrinking
view I love these days
too much. In later years,
when in the tightest inches
of encounter, some verge
of touch would always
race by just out of reach,
leaving something like
a scent in the air,
sweet and strangely
dimming, a halo above
that final collapsing light.
How could I coil in the
limbs of some woman
I more or less knew and
wake next to her
no closer than when I began,
months, years before?
For years I’ve ridden at
full gallop, my hands reaching,
my fingertips just outside
the outermost glow of
blonde or auburn or black
hair -- Who could have guessed
by any wisdom of this world
that it was she who was
seeking me? Years ago my
father woke on an Iona
where Thor still walked,
brute and ugly, the
churl on the road to
Corco Duibne. Yet my
father only felt love for
the apparition. The monster
said to him, “your work
is our work and our work
is yours,” and for the next
20 years my father has
proved him right. My quest
is hers and hers is ours
in this no-world of a
well’s wold, spring for the
white mare who steps
down nightly from her
hill to drink deeply here
in shade, her foal beside
her (the one we never see),
daughter of these years
plunging an absence who
was there all the time,
receiving each forward
motion with soft, undinal,
irretrievably roomy sighs.


SURF SADDLE

2004


Of course I blew it. Mistook you
for the woman who was
only meant to reveal you.
Tried to fuck my way through
her to you. It’s what young fools
do. It’s how I found a purchase
on the narrow path to you.
When all the grief bit down
and through. Those bitter
departures, the mooing heart,
the endless ululations
in the petulance of booze:
As if something so poetic
must also be so literally
true as to return with
risen nipples from the grave.
All that passionate flinging
tried to sing the hallows
you absent -- nice beat,
steady wavelike rhythm, all
the horses loosed & me
growing hoarse shouting
across dark waters beyond,
transgressing every bed
for you. But desire never
changes without a moulting
god; I’m too hard wired
as a fool for that, and you,
you are no god.
Only after having nailed
myself for so many
years to that stone bone
cross did the the wounds
seek abbots, those
dactyls who surrender
by translating the
desire, hammering
a shape of seem upon
a beach of paler fire.
Forging a relation from
all those farewells. To make
a bliss of resonance after
the wave’s certain collapse.
It’s hard to put this into
words, but when has loving
you ever been easy?
In this weave I hone
an ear attuned to that
surf wilderness that swells
and washes just beyond
or under a life’s laboring
to make love real and last.
I hold that music up
an inch above the tide,
praising those foam fillies
and curved lamias I
was never meant to ride.
Each poem is a saddle
for that gallop all the way
almost to you which I’ll
never mount enough.
The music of each
one’s making is the song
that beds you here,
for just a second,
in the wash. That’s what
I figure on the island
that I walk today,
surrounded by that
ocean whispering
which shells and bells
your name.


CENTAUR

2003

The centaur filled
the whole doorway
of my night -- huge
and hair, brutally
hooved, his eyes like
pitchers poured from
the worst of winter
seas. And when he
bid me climb up
that great back I knew
somehow I must,
though I might die,
or die of all the
waves I could not
ride myself, much
less sing. He made
the beach in three
great strides, crossing
over orchard and lake
and shopping mall
like a full moon in
fast-mo reverse.
The sea at 2 a.m.
was alien and huge,
each wave an
empire smashing
at our feet. He waded
out and began to
swim, and sing in
the voice of sea-bulls,
tolling over the graves
of lusty sailors,
reddening the barbs
hurled far below.
A man-beast older
than the sum of
all my fathers, he
bid me strip naked
and stride out
past the merry lappers
of my metaphors,
beyond even the
weepy salt iniquity
of my own history
out into the real
raw heaving brine
of heart I can never
fully serve or master,
much less sing
in his ripe baritone.
Crabs and ‘cuda
bumped their
menace at my ankles
while weed-drift
wove my chest
and cock and balls
like the soft hair
of all the women I
have loved -- he
bid me beyond
all that, stepping
into a riptide that
hauled me miles
out to sea where all
was milky heavens
high above and
all below the dark
heave of her darker
thrall. And I was
alone -- the centaur
gone within, leaving
me just one command:
Ride. And so I
began the rest of
my life, catching
wild combers in
from Cornwall
and Iceland, climbing
on their frigate
back and clutching
the reins of turgid
foam, riding sweet
emotions toward that
shore I’ll never reach.
I hear him laughing
up ahead in the
surf’s incessant roar,
delighting in the big
night music which
fills the next boy’s door.

FISHY COMMUTE

According to Glaber, Brendan
is taken to an island paradise
by the whale, while the Vita St.
Davidis states that the saint was
“leading a wondrous life on the
back of a sea-monster” and
was heading for Wales.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

I’ve grown so used to days and
nights aboard a fish that his
commutes are a suburb I’ve lived
in for years, at home on waters
he whorls deep while
I work in the garden in
the paper-whirl of butterflies.
Last night driving home
from the poetry event,
fine language sounding in
my ear without translation,
I drove roads I rarely
see so late -- I-4, Maitland
Boulevard, long lonely
SR-441. Night scenes
of broadened emptiness
and tired urgency ghosted
up from under and without,
flukes of the same whale
though darker. Billy Stayhorn
ballads on the jazz station,
the pianist stepping delicately
down his vertebrae as
I drive home to my
beloved wife and You,
my shrieking blue Cape
of verse matins miles
away from first light. Such
gentility I found on the
back of ancient night, sweet
tidals bearing a wreckage
within sight of the next shore.

Two Whirls

VORTEX

Dec. 10, 2005

“Nature first ‘disintegrates’
you and then ‘integrates’ you
to her as one of its elements.
In the first stage it would seem
that you were going to disappear,
some do perish, and in the
second, you are reborn with a
new vigor, so that perhaps
nature selects and destroys
whatever suits it best.”

— “Lord Of Oblivion,” a short
story in Francisco Coloane’s
collection Cape Horn and
Other Stories from the End
of the World, transl. David
A. Petreman


In an 11th Century anecdote
about St. Bridget, a connection
is made between an anchor
which cannot be raised, a church,
and a powerful force under water.
In the anecdote a blind boy goes
down into the sea after the anchor,
which the sailors dropped on
account of a gale, and which
has become entangled in the
roof of a church. A year later
the blind boy returns,
carrying the church’s order
of mass and a handbell.

-- Clara Strijbosch,
The Seafaring Saint

The rhythms I write here
are motions You whirled hard
around and through my
deforming mind, a wind
without of such blue fury
that I could only shout
as I fell down some
oubliette within, like a
sword tossed in the oldest
mere on earth. My swooning
had a swirl to it, my
arms and legs by which
I played guitar and walked
all night in fatal mimicry
of Your twisting gale,
puerile motions which
unleashed the worst of
what I tried to cure.
Each drink I lifted to my
lips stirred salt and sorrow
into my wound’s abyss;
I swallowed it all down
to the dregs of awfulness.
Yes, my defenses
were all self-destructive
as I free-falled down,
wrongheaded, childish,
and moot: Yet in them
I now see how I repeated
my tribe’s old sacrificial beat,
half-conscious of the
magnitude beyond and
under chants and alms.
Drowning in a mojo
I thought bottled and
brassiered, I learned
the darkly falling mode
where You plucked
my carriage clean. Each
swipe of my guitar with
a power chord ripped free
a bit more soul, each thrust
into the next night’s mate
raising me high to the
sickle of the wind,
my cries of pent release
the grease which turned
Your infernal wheels.
When I hit the bottom of
my battles with bum bottles
You handed me a sword
and bid me turn to lift
it high: And thus began
these countermatins
where all that fell
found wings to fly,
the darks I once defended
to the death the very
marrow of my song, the
blood of all those self-
infected wounds congealing
into the mortar which
sustains this writing chair.
I sing now of those dark
nights as truths to gild
my age, and write the
old cold organum as
darkly as I can and twice
as deep, inside the throat
I share the uppermost
registers with You. Each
song’s a spinning emblem
of those spiral falls of
old, replete in all their
awful motions as the
sanctus of St. Brendan
sang Easter on the whale.
Call me thus MacOdrum,
the seal-man of Scots Uist,
he who married a woman
of the South and set up
house between all lands
and seas, of neither and
both composed, for a
a thousand strange and
dark and yet so godly
years. Or were they songs?
Oh the whirling of my
mind as I write these
lines on down the mere
of all beginnings giving
birth to all I sound!
There is the sword-hilt
just beyond the straining
sense of things, where
You and I are closest
in our worlds. Did
You hand me the brand
or did I take it thus
from You? Down here it’s
all the same. Suffice
to say now that I’m
gripping sure the
rigor of a long, blue-
whetted iron bone, and
ballasting my way up
and up and up the
marges of the known.
First light now outside
the window, cold and
late-year blue, the cats
now mewling at the
back door for their food
and my wife upstairs
coming to for the next
full day of our life.
And so I end the song
here with a splutter
and gasp, and break
the surface of my
dream with this
sword sure in my grasp,
ready at last to swing
that blade around
in a whirl of magic sound.




TROIS FRERES

Dec. 11, 2005

Among the Smith Sounds Eskimo
the aspirant must go at night to a cliff
containing caves and walk straight
ahead in darkness. If he is predestined
to become a shaman, he will enter a
cave; if not, he will bump into the
cliff. As soon as he has entered the cave,
it closes around him and does not
open until some time later. The
candidate must seize the moment
when it reopens and hasten out;
otherwise he may remain shut up
in the cave forever.

— Eliade, ibid. 51-2

It was a miracle that I found the
way out of that cavernous
night which wound me widdershins
round and down sub-basement
wounds. My only sense back then
was just to party on to the
end, come hell or high water,
which, in time, arrived, though
the end was worse, or so
it seemed. Dark waters
deepened as I dug those
nightly graves of swoon,
a horror-show cathedral
of carnivalling ghouls, jackals
yapping in the disco
lights with fangs the
size of hardons and dixies
in their bottomless cups
lifting polka dotted
dress-hems to me in waves
of starry, tarry silk.
When I cast an I Ching back
in those blackout months of ‘86,
the oracle declared Abysm
Doubled: Chilly depths outside
poured by my own hands onto
deadlier ones inside. Surrender
is the only escape it augured,
a method I did not try until
the others fully tanked and
went tits up. One January
I set pen to paper with
the aim of Figuring Out
the screw-heads of my
downward plunge and,
thus enlightened, have no
need to lift the night’s
third glass which always
poured the rest. I wrote
and wrote and then rewarded
myself with a tall cold
Stoli, dissolving Why
into the vastly more
compelling thought
of Why Not, sending
me out again to jackal
those wild skirts.
Knowledge and futility
paired like canines
in my appetite for
what I could and
wouldn’t know of just
where I was headed down;
but in the end it was
just another shotglass
which conked me for
good, one night in
April ‘87 in the blackout
blur of the Crocodile
Room, earning me
that DUI which carved
the hexagram so
completely in my bones.
I came to in some greeny
sepulchre beneath the
bottom of that glass. The
33d Street Jail’s drunk
tank at 5 a.m. was so
cold, so eerie in its
ghoulish ambience that
I felt I was coming to at
last from a bender that
had plundered me for
years. What door ever
opens without that
nadir, without those
creaking hinges of surrender?
There were two other guys
with me in the cell: One was
passed out on the floor amid
the gouts of his own vomit
and the other was rocking
on the bench across from me,
crying inconsolably. We
were just three bums
hauled from one night’s
bad streets, thrown in
to one real hell.
Yet we were also Trois
Freres, those French
brothers who in the 40’s
stumbled on a hole
out on their father’s
estate and rappelled down,
discovering a grand old
labyrinth of ritual caverns
not used for thousands
of years. Those young men
climbed down as we
three drunks lurched up,
descending just as we
surrendered to the only
ladder in the only
ways we can --
to die, go mad, or
let go the bottle
reaching for a white chip.
That ladder is an old
stone affair which I
mount each day
by getting on my
knees, praying
Not my will but Thine
and finding thus
my wings. I’m
grateful that You chose
me to fall into a
labyrinth of nights
and then graced my
way out. My hangover
and the phosphor of that
greeny old drunk tank
is the amniotic I swim
in here at the bottom of this
song, soma in its awfullest
proof, womb of the inside
of all things to ever
noumenally wing. Who’d
have thought that heaven
was really just beyond
the bottom of
that whiskey glass
we somehow someday
let go, life or madness
or death willing?
All the rest is merely
swilling, killing spills
of every liquid doom,
the full grotesquerie
of Trois Freres’s bottle club
in its worst and darkest room.

Election

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

Did You elect me for
these blueblack forges
far down under
or did I choose You?
The answer I believe is not
knowable in any enough way,
and even more, perhaps, the
question’s moot, as all quests
are less decided by their
ends than by the ache
inside the questor’s boots.
No one chooses the killing
swoon so necessary to
preface every magic
room which grails
the mojo of wild passage,
but now I hold those
dread wounds dear,
the essence of this Theme.
My bad history comes to
light as the harrows
of a cavernous magnitude
in which I found two
extra bones of lead
soldered on back,
the only ones which
You could hammer wings
onto and use to fin the
depths of night into
toward the sweetest physic
of them all, the inside
sooth of blue arrears.
My catalogue of smarts
was once a map of scarred
nights, scoured with all
the holes I fell so greedily
in. That book I now read as
skeletal and scoured, the
stripped bones of awfulness
which were reforged with
a cartilage of an awe which
I’ll never find or own
but still ride, like waves,
to You, my whole life long.
It’s a still and drippy
this morning as a dreary
maul of Gulf moisture
commingles with a weak
cold front, producing a
gruel of incessant rain,
a pall both miserable
and fructive, depending
on which rear window
I choose to peer through.
The roads of my commute
were pure miasma yesterday
in that soupy soak, two
semis jacknifing into
each other on I-4 like
dead bikers sprawled
into each other’s knives,
a tanker on 441 tumbling
on the roll and spreading
fuel for blocks, and dozens
of smaller scrapes ‘n’
benders around town,
like hives on the body
of our daily grind. Can’t
do nothing about that:
Nor can I do much to
heal our suburban blight
in its viralish malaise,
where greed and self and
fear sots the land with
an insatiate thirst for
more. How could this
drone of chanting lines
on paper charm and rout
the such grand illness
in our tribe? It can’t;
but perhaps You never
could either beyond
the fakey incantations
of your imp-ravaged
and salvaged brain.
That You existed
at all beyond Your cave
only meant that wounds
might have an exit in the
magic of Your songs;
That actual wounds would
or would not seal to Your
rattles and etched
swastikas was never
the point of the whole
dance. My job here is
just to try to see all You
did when You feathered
and fell and returned
in that harrowed swoon.
And so I hinge the tropes
of transformation here
behind the paper heart
and lungs which ached to
breathe the sweetest air.
My job, as I see it today,
here at 5 a.m. on a Friday
off from work & with my
wife now groaning up
from sleep to sew curtains
all day long, with us near
broke and worried and
never happier, with
the cats hungry for love
and food in incessant
pour: My job here is to sing
back and down and back
again the wild shapes
heaven takes in its
demon amplitude: To be
as loud ‘n’ proud as
a whale on the wave,
beyond all shores and
‘burbs: To muse the
wounds inside my years
and pan Your nuggets
from my mess, ingots
gold heaved by the stars’
own cleavage, silver
chalices delved from
chthonic loins under
the underwearing tow.
Celebrant of blue spittle
I hawk and hurl these
lines back into my day,
not for eyes that will
ever read them but
for the joy of daily rides
upon the back of Moby
Dick, who may have
come here as You wish,
or simply rose when
I peeked down into
the lavish blue. I splash
my mornings with a
daily jolt of the coldest
waters in the world,
to bless and brace what
still remains of all that fell
thus flew.

Smoke Signals

Colonel Collins (who published
his impressions in 1798) reports
that among the Port Jackson
((Australia)) tribes, one becomes
a medicine man if one slept on
a grave. “The spirit of the deceased
would visit him, seize him by the
throat, and opening him, take out
his bowels, which he replaced,
and the wound closed up.”

-- Eliade, Shamanism

When I was 9 or 10 my brother
and I would alternate our daily
fisticuffs with combat of another
sort, playing games like Battleship
and Stratego. The latter took
forever to complete, competing
armies in a world-wide campaign,
emulating our century’s worst
and our familial curse
on a brutal field of dreams.
We’d always play in my brother’s
room, listening to mid-60’s
rock-n-roll on WLS, the family
dog Shep (really my brother’s)
curled in a corner with one eye
trained on us as brother and
brother had it out the abstracter
way, our infernal proximity
writ on the world’s crass stage.
Being both my mother’s sons
--well fed on healthy but
colonic foods--one us was sure
to fart but good during the long
courses of that game, a
really bad one which we came
to call Stratego, eponymous
gas for the piled corpses
of ancient battlefield. Those
farts seemed ripped from hell,
scattering our armies in
a gassy rout for a good five
minutes, chasing us from
the room. Stratego thus became
a code for us, a rare alliance
between two sons who
fought for our whole
childhoods for a champ’s
portion that was spoiled
by the bum conditions
of our home and time.
Whoever nosed the
affront first would declare
Stratego to the other,
offering fair warning
of the presence of a
swarming mushroom cloud.
Old father, is a problem
named thus solved, or are
names just masks for
a greater perplexity’s assault
up from deeper ground?
The Sibyl’s sooth was
was just a swoon on sulphuric
gas up from a fissure in
the Delphic cave; her
stricken gibberish (she
was not permitted to
leave the room as we were)
in some broke-bowelled
torrent was a scat only
the priests could interpret
and pass as doom or
boon of Delphi’s
upper lower god.
Are farts like sneezes
irruptions of Your harsh
black pale into our days,
rude whinnies of a
horse we ride we
rarely know we’re riding?
There’s a priesthood
for all the body’s rants--
interpreters of dreams,
phlebotomers of the
the body’s brute terrain,
hapuscribes of death-throes
and dowsers of the sneeze:
As if all the body’s
orifices fissured and
fizzed forth troths
beneath self-knowledge
and control. When I was
having my first seizures
I sometimes smelled a
draft of something worse
even than farts, a dead-
man’s rot-soup smell,
spooring from the undersides
of whatever frame
stuck and held in my
downward-whirling mind --
It came to me once in
Boy Scout Camp; I sniffed
around the tent at the bland
green cots trying to figure
where came the smell
as the horrid vertigo
began to grip my mind.
That smell was like a
sudden black hand with
a palm of votive rot,
corrupting me for good.
Why must Your ecstasies
all fly with wings of shit?
Why must we root in
graves to whiff the
eternal sense of it?
Why the dismembering of
sense with so brutal hammer
and tongs, despoiling one
life intro pieces, flesh
cooked from bone in
cauldrons burning at
the bottom of the world?
Why are agony and
horror and disgust
the three cups embroidered
on the tabard of Your
tribe, filled with the dregs
of every yearn and ache
to go rotten in the world?
Years later, when my sister
got married, during a very
rare reunion of my family,
my two brothers and I
stepped outside to stretch
our legs a bit and safely
loose a rash of reechy
farts. “Mom’s cooking does
it every time,” my older
brother said as he klaxoned,
and we each sublimely
smiled at that one utter
truth between us.
But it’s really not my mother’s
fault, not that way; bread
and water from any table
makes us each shout
our Strategoes. We walked
down that dark suburban
street a ways and back,
sons of a demon opera,
singing all the names
our darker filitude from
those vents beneath all
proper mention, three tubas
blatting from three
corners of the orchestra,
three whales spouting in
bass-cleff harmony. The
dissonance which rudders
us in such assy gasses
keeps us here on earth
where hell’s just a fart
away and your ephiphany
makes me wonder about
the integrity of the ego
when those voices
far below are hollering
in unison Stratego!