The night which is Solstice Eve winters deepest with the misery and solitude of this time of year. At least, that’s how I sense the hour. Just how personal that vibe is -- the resonant eddies of bum fortune -- and how collective? To me the bells of Christmas ring hollow, far across a frozen land, announcing an old liturgy which has mostly lost all warmth -- and yet that hard sound is reverent. “In my end is my beginning,” said Eliot in “Four Quartets,” a poem more wintry in its way than “The Wasteland.”
Is this the sum of my self-evictions from a tradition, throwing out the baby Jesus to immerse myself in that bathwater? The chill wasn’t there in my childhood, or it was greatly bowered by my parents’ love, difficult though that was for each other. They damn near killed themselves to do everything they could for us. Only outside it was cold and infernally dark; those winds whipped the eaves of that big house in Evanston like wolves, but I slept deep down into “The Nutcracker Suite,” dancing with sugarcoated and tutu’d elvenettes sporting nipples of blue ice.
How did I get evicted? Was there a choice, or did I just grow up into my world? Came and left the faith in Christian Christ; out I went into the solace of a mythically poisoned night; came the years of hard drinking and ravening about for some font of always-insufficient warmth. The music of Christmas grew hollow and deep, as much about absence and solitude as comforts lost.
A pregnant solitude: isn’t that the aegis of Christmas? That hope is greatest exactly where it is most lost? That sentiment I named in the poem “Longing”:
.. 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.
That’s me in 2002 writing about me in 1977, learning to hallow the hollowness of those nights with the words that ripened somewhere out on those lost walks in the dead of winter.
Years later -- in 1986, I think, very close to the end of my first drinking career -- I dreamed of walking a winter waste somewhere in the Harst Mountains of Germany or some such deep-frozen locale, on a moony night which shone dully of vast acreage of snow, all dead and still beneath that burning moon and the angel fire of far stars. There was a farmhouse that I came upon, and, looking through a window, I saw a couple by the fire, the woman pregnant, sitting in a chair, the husband bearded, tending the scene, the room vastly aglow and impossible for one such as me to enter. So I trudged back to the night and winter and ghastly moonlight: back to the wolves.
I woke back to my awfulness, but certainly something was entering labor, for soon came the events which caused me to quit drinking and start living, finding in sobriety a way of building and sustaining a house of warmth -- the place I live in today. Much reading and writing has made cathedral the small nook of excavation and celebration I attend every early morning here.
Still the music echoes in such a sad and lonely way -- especially ny unaccompanied vocal music of the season, Gregorian Chant, Palestrina, Vaughan Williams -- but bittersweet is a strange nuance, comforting even as it freezes. Again, a personal or mythic resonance? When I’ve asked around, no one quite gets the same feeling.
Maybe its part of that old unrequieted longing, towering as equally in the stumbling drunk youth trying to walk home as the bumbling senex going over and over the routes. Old and new year kings at their trysting ground, Green Knight and Gawain, Oran and Columba, winter solstice and Christmas: Faces of dominions staring at each other in such an ancient way that it has an archetypal sound to it, saddling our responses with primary riders and first causes.
Commenting on the Finnish tale “The Boy Born of An Egg,” where a sorely neglected and abused orphan emerges a triumphant god, Karl Kerenyi notes, “this material is undoubtedly the primal stuff of mythology, and not of biography; a stuff from which the life of gods, and not the life of men, is formed. What, from the purely human point of view, is an unusually tragic situation -- the orphan’s exposure and persecution -- appears in mythology in quite another light. It simply shows up in the lonelienss and solitude of elemental beings -- a loneliness peculiar to the primordial element.
“If anything, the fate of the orphaned Kullervo, delivered up to every force of destruction exposed to all the elements, must be
the orphan’s fate in the fullest sense of the word, exposure and prosecution. But at the same time this fate is the triumph of the elemental nature of the wonder-child. The
human fate of the orphan does not truly express the fate of such miraculous beings, is only secondary. Yet it is just their symbolical orphanhood that gives them their significance: it expresses the
primal solitude which alone is appropriate to such beings in such a situation, namely in mythology.” (“The Primordial Child in Primordial Times”)
Is the loneliness of Christmas that of every child abandoned by God to fare forth on this earth, as every uteral fish must leave its sea to blunder past all shores? What homesickness, what hopelessness, faces of divine mother and father always behind the masks of personal parents, the elusive mystery somewhere deeper in the history. I still think the divine bastard is cultural too, God absented from our altars for too many centuries now, so that absence is god, calling us to matins and vespers ...
Eliot looked hard into the face of that cruel adulthood, and, looking to survive his Wasteland, chose to return to the Christian fold, that womb which seeks to remit time and the pain of our adulthood: He quailed, though so perfectly. This from “The Dry Salvages” of Four Quartets, written during the darkest years of World War II:
II
Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.
There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.
Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.
We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.
There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.
It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence-
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness-not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination-
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations-not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in our own.
For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
***
So my gall and pall over what I hear as sad bells in a frozen waste have a backwards and forwards tide to them, surging from primacy to crashing futurity and thus ebbing back. I love those voices, the lonely chant of the matin hour, deep inside the petrified ribs of the world, or its God: a difficult hour but and ecstasy worth adding my assent to, my voice.
***
OK, foax, now to harrow the hour with these solstitial readings:
CHRISTMAS TREE
IN THE GARDENDec. 21, 2005
All night we’ve kept the lights
burning on the Christmas tree
in the garden, and at 4 a.m.
it’s pure candlepower, a fir
of stars. The fire which sustains
every dream of the year
both ending and soon to wake
is bowered on that tree,
at least for this night.
There is nothing greater
in the world than its
uncomplicated light,
nothing under it which
could be a greater gift
than what such soft
brilliance bowers and
affords on a night like this,
at this hour of our world.
Such light hinges all
beginnings and their
ends, auguring what
plants will flourish in
the garden come the
sunny months, what new
augment of the heart
will unfold its wings
and soar or dive
in perpetually summer
skies. But for now
this grace, this quiet
fortitude of small white
lights on a fir set in
the middle of the garden
with a bright red bow
tied to its upper boughs
and a single star atop its
steeple, beaming welcome
deep into the year, pointing
the way to this small
rustic manger in which
I write of all that counts
for nothing and thus
means everything with
its tiny freight now breathing
slow and sweet in the
countenance of pre-dawn
sleep and the heavens
beaming, praising, getting
to work.
***
The confection of that moment arises from a hard blue loam; witness, if you will,
***
THE BAD YEARSDec. 17, 2003
My bad years were a
sleep I could not wake
from. She held
me from below
pressing her blue
thirst to my lips,
a honey milk
with a threat
of gall through which
She poured her angels
and devils in.
Poured them all.
Yesterday I
remembered a
Christmas at my
father’s place in
1977 when I
thought I would
abandon my useless
and unworthy
and broken life out
West and come
to live at last
with him, partaking
there of a New Age
dream of devas
rousing winter
gardens and raising
ley-lords from
their witchy rooks
in the stone
foundations never
far below. We drank
his B&B Scotch
(cheap and plentiful)
next to the fire
that late December
hashing out David
Spangler’s “Principles
of Manifestation,”
those quantum
mechanae of the
soul which, as
we boiled them down,
seemed only to
say, To Be Is Being’s
Be-All: So Be.
Dry ends indeed
to such high yeasty
talk, but we kept
on talking and drinking.
Up the road in a
double-wide trailer
lived drunk Karol and
his even drunker
son Randy, both
catastrophes of
the same booze
we thought we caged
with all that high
talk. The father was
a Polish refugee
from World War II’s
boneyard of atrocity.
He hated the Germans
but despised the
Russians worse, who
one hoary winter’s day
rounded up he and
his fellow villagers
into a cattle car
and chugged into
deep woods, where
they disembarked
the men and lined
them up along a ridge,
and solved all seed
of feared insurgency
by emptying their
ratatats into Karol
and his tribe.
He fell in sync
with the rest, miraculously
free of shot, and
faked his death
sprawled in that
pile of cooling meat.
After dusk he crawled
up and out, a revenant
who had only in the
coldest sense of
things survived.
Hid out til war’s
end then worked
his way this way,
setting up at last
in that trailer
up the road to work
his days like a bull
and drink his nights
like the worst whale.
My father loved
Karol’s workhorse
ways, hiring him
now and then for
some or other
big job on his land,
which back then
was a total mess,
years from becoming
something fine,
a Yankee Piccu
shored between
high rhetorics and
a damn fine, soul-
rich ground. Back
then it was only
guesswork and
long long hours of
work, days and years
of it. Those early
times required a titan’s
back and hands,
and Karol for some
while was the
best of that. By
day, at least; they’d
drunk some Scotch
together but the
beast who emerged
in the third pour
was no man my
father cared to house,
and told Karol he’d
had to drink elsewhere.
By the time I
had gotten there,
Karol was mostly
a story, his sweat
and swath something
reserved for spring
days down the road.
A day or so
before Christmas
my brother roared
into town, a party
boy like me in full
bored merriment,
on fire just as I
but lacking my
dad’s approval,
mostly because the
words were not in
his mouth but
further down in
his hands. It would
be years before he’d
find use for them;
back then they were
most adept at
chugging and charging
at the night. He linked
up somehow his
Randy and Randy’s
sister and drove
off with them to
party wild and long,
fucking the sister
in the back seat while
Randy cheered,
the station wagon’s
interior a furnace
for a winter’s night.
My brother told me
off all this the next
day as he came
to with coffee and
some snuck-in shots
of Scotch, his eyes
like black holes,
a dark sad woman
staying back
far far far below.
A week later Randy
invited us up to
his father’s trailer
to celebrate the New
Year’s. Karol was
already roaring drunk,
one meaty fist
choking the life
out of a half-gallon
of vodka, the other
keeping time to
a polka band on
the stereo, his eyes
red with all he still
could see too well.
The trailer was decked
with streamers and
glitter, too sickly-bright,
too campy, composing
a merriment almost
infernal in its gleam.
Ilsa the mother
back then stayed far
from sight, clucking her
tongue at all the
errancy her men
brought to this small
house perched on doom.
Randy came falling
through the door
with a case of
champagne -- tumbled
through the threshold
then collapsed, shattering
half the bottles
on the floor in a
wavelike, bright
careen of sound.
Randy lay there
swearing but the
father just roared
with glee; that’s
when I got the
hell on outta there,
backing out shouting
Happy New Year’s!
and wheeling into
a cold cold frozen
Pennsylvania night,
slipping helter
skelter on icy
asphalt, sure that
every bat in hell
was wheeling overhead.
Back in my father’s
house all was settled
and noble and
warm -- my father
smoking his pipe
reading in a chair,
Pachelbel’s “Canon
in D” on his stereo,
a big cross over
the mantel blessing
for sure this
enterprise. It was
exactly where I
wished to be:
though I knew
somehow it was
exactly the place
it was somehow
most dangerous
to remain. One
of those nights
the dreams began --
a horrible parade of
desperate scenes,
as if some warning
was shrieking from
a sidhe that bound
my sleep. In one
dream I was trapped
inside some
motherish castle,
a feminine keep,
while some fatherish
light assaulted
from without, promising
to annihilate every
living presence with
the audacity to
keep the door tight.
In another dream
I voyaged in a balloon
into mystic China
with a strange stone
man who bore
inscriptions on his
neck in no language
I yet could understand.
As we began the most
dangerous passage,
the stone man
scrambled out of
the basked and
fell like stone below,
leaving me alone
just when the
clouds were thickest
and the strangeness
most intent. I’d
belt awake from
those dreams,
my heart hammering
hard, certain only
that my promise
to stay on at
my father’s place
was not at all
concurred with
from below; that
not matter how much
I wished to stay,
I had only one
way to go and
survive -- away, back
west to my own meager
awful limited life.
My dad was hurt
and perplexed when
I eventually announced
that as much as I
loved all there, it
was not mine nor
what I must build.
I said those words
to my father in
January 1978, and
I have never since
been able to stay
there for very long.
At the end of
that month I flew
back to Spokane
to that cold house
I rented, entering
the spring semester
of my junior year
in college, which
turned out to be
the last full-time
school effort I
could manage. It
was the semester
of good poetry
at last and a woman
who emerged from
the blue dark
corners of some
party who eventually
took me by the
hand and drowned me
in my own bed.
That I guess was
the fate sealed on
the stone man’s lips
when he followed
a deeper instinct
and left the air
with its New Agey
wisps and aetherizing.
He dove into what I
followed and here
keep sinking to -- Mystic
rivers and oceans
which will never
quite do, a harpuscry
or hagiography or
mantic musings of
some blue I could never
find on my father’s
higher ground.
Sometime soon after
I returned out West
my father called
to tell me that
Karol was dead.
One night he’d
gotten roaring drunk
as usual and then
drove home on
quite icy roads.
He didn’t make
it round that big
curve behind my
father’s house
and sailed off the road
and down the
ravine, catching
a broad tree right
between the eyes.
Finis. That story
didn’t really surprise
me -- you saw bad
ends hanging all over
that Christmas tree
in his doublewide
up the road -- And
we both agreed that
the roar of rage
at old wounds could
only be quieted in
the grave. Hearing
that story way back
then didn’t change
my ways at all, for I
was young and much
smarter than all
that, with all my
history ahead, and
my words of such
a finer distillation
as to keep me
wide of those
widest curves.
Ha ha. That I survived
and have lived to
tell the story is
somehow Her
prerogative, as if I
am now not the
mantic but one
gifted by God or Goddess
to read his stony
lips, a pen dipped
in deep old ink
now asked to write
it out. Many years
later in my first
round of sobriety,
I heard from the son
Randy who had
seemed sealed into
his father’s aphotic
shoes. But instead
he had gotten sober
in AA and found a
way into the live
above and beyond
that grave, working
as a nurse and going
still further to love.
The man I saw in ‘92
was like a sailor
who’d been lost
for years but somehow
returned, much aged,
his face almost
completely changed, like
a stone worn
smooth washed
long in blue. We
didn’t really have
much to say to
each other, but
just seeing us
both on the other shore
from so many bad
years was satisfaction
enough, like twins
separated at some
brutal birth will
recognize the
other instantly though
there’s nothing else
to say. We lived on
beyond those black
and revenant years,
to begin our lives
at last. We said
farewell, and that
was that. Years later,
in an AA meeting
yesterday, the story
came bubbling up
to view in my mind,
much covered with
weeds and barnacles
and faded to a greyish-
brown: Yet as
the others told Christmas
memories of their
drinking worst, this
one for me began to
gleam and unfold its
strange wings at last,
an oracle, if you
will, from the grave
of bad years lost.
The voice reminded
me to be thankful
with the rest of my life
to be sitting here
and not back there
where the moon
over Christmas
wore the devil’s
ice pegnior, and my
thirst for darkness
was so endless:
And to be thankful
too exactly for
that way in which
She grabbed and held
me long below,
whispering those
strange blue words
which makes every
poem now go
and glow and make
all ripened curves
on dark road show.
***
Survival of that winter required a pose, an angle toward the wind, which I interpreted as
***
THE SOLSTICE DUDE1991
Out in the land of purple twilight,
There in death valley of solsticeville,
I met the Solstice Dude by a frozen river.
He had a ‘56 Telecaster over one shoulder
and wore black jeans, black leather jacket,
black night boots with a moon buckle.
The night was cold, cold as shit
leached from a witch’s tit:
All my absence hugged me like a grave.
The Solstice Dude came at me with ice licks
that spun like shirrikins.
His eyes were tiny floodlights of blood,
his hair cascading falls, his smile, celestial.
What could I do? How could I resist?
A boy shivering in a jean jacket,
afraid of women, fleeing from his father.
I tried to dodge his chops
but one caught me in the shoulder.
I fell beneath a totem pole. . .
blizzard-clouds obscured the eagle at the top,
my angel in the snow fell far.
The poison crept slow, insidious as that
winter of ‘79, as I sat at the heat-grate,
sucking my beer like a tit of no avail.
I just got colder and colder.
Who was dying?
Thighs of night to no avail.
At practice my fingers had no fire,
I blew my solos, lost the end of songs.
In the mirror I saw a mad boy
possessed by the Solstice Dude,
gripped by an ancient in contemporary threads.
Controlled by the spirit, addicted to
spirits, soul of no avail,
winter tit, ice-whale belly -
No snow fell. The wind in the pines,
eternal, bending and breaking their backs.
Deep in the forest woumb, the Solstice Dude
stands on a rack of Marshall amps.
Blood’s all over the ancient Tele neck.
Antlers rise above his head.
The world tree reaches far below.
A snake nooses his neck: he jumps:
A madman, an addict, alcoholic,
wanderer over all forgotten streets,
patron of the dead a.m.s,
poison luminary of the mothernight deep,
forever zoned in twilight,
a skip at the record’s end:
the Solstice Dude lives within
those who fail to murder him.
Finally, I walked onstage,
held my guitar high:
my fingers bled and I sweated rivers.
The band died there, on a night,
I impaled the Solstice Dude with
an unglamorous Music Man Sabre
as we crashed to the end of
the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”.
The antlers were heavy, my mouth twisted,
and the Solstice Dude fell
into a jade pool and drowned.
***
Rock dreams indeed. Far into that long winter’s night, around 1977, I read Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow (1974), that great postmodern gospel which served then as my Book of the Dead during the darkest hours of personal solstice. The book is set in England during the worst years of WWII, as the German V2 rockets came screaming across the sea. In the following passage it is winter, a time like this, close to Christmas. It is utterly aborbed with the sense of loss which Eliot could not sustain, raising it to an nth power, cathedral in its own right, housing a God of night, perhaps, or opening the door to the darkest lucency below: the sacred resonance of absence.
***
Advent blows from the sea, which at sunset tonight shone green and smooth as iron-rich glass: blows daily upon us, all the sky above pregnant with saints and slender heralds’ trumpets. Another year of wedding dresses abandoned in the heart of winter, never called for, hanging in quiet satin ranks now, their white-crumpled veils begun to yellow, rippling slightly only at your passing, spectator . . . visitor to the city at all the dead ends. . . . Glimpsing in the gowns your own reflection once or twice, halfway from shadow, only blurred flesh-colors across the peau de soie, urging you in to where you can smell the mildew’s first horrible touch, which was really the idea—covering all trace of her own smell, middleclass bride-to-be perspiring, genteel soap and powder. But virgin in, her heart, in her hopes. None of your bright-Swiss or crystalline season here, but darkly billowed in the day with cloud and the snow falling like gowns in the country, gowns of the winter, gentle at night, a nearly windless breathing around you. in the stations of the city the prisoners are back from Indo-China, wandering their poor visible bones, light as dreamers or men on the moon, among chrome-sprung prams of black hide resonant as drumheads, blonde wood high-chairs pink and blue with scraped and mush-spattered floral decals, folding-cots and bears with red felt tongues, baby-blankets making bright pastel clouds in the coal and steam smells, the metal spaces, among the queued, the drifting, the warily asleep, come by their hundreds in for the holidays, despite the warnings, the gravity of Mr. Morrison, the tube under the river a German rocket may pierce now, even now as the words are set down, the absences that may be waiting them, the city addresses that surely can no longer exist. The eyes from Burma, from Tonkin, watch these women at their hundred perseverances-stare out of blued orbits, through headaches no Alasils can ease. Italian P/Ws curse underneatb the mail sacks that are puffing, echo-clanking in now each hour, in seasonal swell, clogging the snowy trainloads like mushrooms, as if the trains have been all night underground, passing through the country of the dead. If these Eyeties sing now and then you can bet it’s not “Giovinezza” but something probably from Rigoletto or La Boheme—indeed the Post Office is considering issuing a list of Nonacceptable Songs, with ukulele chords as an aid to ready identification. Their cheer and songful ness, this lot, is genuine up to a point-but as the days pile up, as this orgy of Christmas greeting grows daily beyond healthy limits, with no containment in sight before Boxing Day, they settle, themselves, for being more professionally Italian, rolling the odd eye at the lady evacuees, finding techniques of balancing the sack with one hand whilst the other goes playing “dead”—
cioe, conditionally alive—where the crowds thicken most feminine, directionless . . . well, most promising. Life has to go on. Both kinds of prisoner recognize that, but there’s no
mano morto for the Englishmen back from CBI, no leap from dead to living at mere permission from a likely haunch or thigh-no play, for God’s sake, about life-and-death! They want no more adventures: only the old dutch fussing over the old stove or warming the old bed, cricketers in the wintertime, they want the semi-detached Sunday dead-leaf somnolence of a dried garden. If the brave new world should also come about, a kind of windfall, why there’ll be time to adjust certainly to that. . . .But they want the nearly postwar luxury this week of buying an electric train set for the kid, trying that way each to light his own set of sleek little faces here, calibrating his strangeness, well-known photographs all, brought to life now, oohs and aahs but not yet, not here in the station, any of the moves most necessary: the War has shunted them, earthed them, those heedless destroying signalings of love. The children have unfolded last year’s toys and found reincarnated Spam tins, they’re hep this may be the other and, who knows, unavoidable side to the Christ mas game. In the months between-country springs and summers—they played with real Spam tins-tanks, tank-destroyers, pillboxes, dreadnoughts deploying meat-pink, yellow- and blue about the dusty floors of lumber-rooms or butteries, under the cots or couches of their exile. Now it’s time again. The plaster baby, the oxen frosted with gold leaf and the human-eyed sheep are turning real again, paint quickens to flesh. To believe is not a price they pay-it happens all by itself. He is the New Baby. On the magic night before, the animals will talk, and the sky will be milk. The grandparents, who’ve waited each week for the Radio Doctor asking, What Are Piles? What Is Emphysema? What Is A Heart Attack? will wait, up beyond insomnia, watching again for the yearly impossible not to occur, but with some mean residue-this is the hillside, the sky can show us a light-like a thrill, a good time you wanted too much, not a complete loss but still too far short of a miracle . . . keeping their sweatered and shawled vigils, theatrically bitter, but with the residue inside going through a new winter fermentation every year, each time a bit less, but always good for a revival at this season. . . . All but naked now, the shiny suits and gowns of their pubcrawling primes long torn to strips for lagging the hot-water pipes and heaters of landlords, strangers, for holding the houses’ identities against the w inter. The War needs coal. They have taken the next-to-last steps, at tended the Radio Doctor’s certifications of what they knew in their bodies, and at Christmas they are naked as geese under this woolen, murky, cheap old-people’s swaddling. Their electric clocks run fast, even Big Ben will be fast now until the new spring’s run in, all fast, and no one else seems to understand or to care. The War needs electricity. It’s alively game, Electric Monopoly, among the power companies, the Central Electricity Board, and other War agencies, to keep Grid Time synchronized with Greenwich Mean Time. In the night, the deepest concrete wells of night, dynamos whose locations are classified spin faster, and so, responding, the clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless eyes, gathering in their minutes whining, pitching higher toward the vertigo of a siren. It is the Night’s Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals. The power companies speak of loads, war-drains so vast the clocks will slow again unless this nighttime march is stolen, but the loads expected daily do not occur, and the Grid runs inching ever faster, and the old faces turn to the clock faces, thinking
plot, and the numbers go whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are. But over the sea the fog tonight still is quietly scalloped pearl. Up in the city the arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up the centerlines of the streets, too ice-colored for candles, too chill-dropleted for holocaust . . . the tall red busses sway, all the headlamps by regulation newly unmasked now parry, cross, traverse and blind, torn great fistfuls of wetness blow by, desolate as the beaches beneath the nacre fog, whose barbed wire that never knew the inward sting of current, that only lay passive, oxidizing in the night, now weaves like underwater grass, looped, bitter cold, sharp as the scorpion, all the printless sand miles past cruisers abandoned in the last summers of peacetime that once holidayed the old world away, wine and olive-grove and pipesmoke evenings away the other side of the War, stripped now to rust axles and brackets and smelling inside of the same brine as this beach you cannot really walk, because of the War. Up across the downs, past the spotlights where the migrant birds in autumn choked the beams night after night, fatally held till they dropped exhausted out of the sky, a shower, of dead birds, the compline worshipers sit in the unheated church, shivering, voiceless as the choir asks: where are the joys? Where else but there where the Angels sing new songs and the bells ring out in the court of the King. “Eia” — strange thousand-year sigh-”eia, warn wir da!”, “were we but there”. . . . The tired men and their black bellwether reaching as far as they can, as far from their sheeps’ clothing as the year will let them stray. Come then. Leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion with it. All day it’s been at you, coercing, jiving, claiming your belief in so much that isn’t true. Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell-or maybe just left behind with your heart, at the Stage Door Canteen, where they’re counting the night’s take, the NAAFI girls, the girls named Eileen, carefully sorting into refrigerated compartments the rubbery maroon organs with their yellow garnishes of fat-oh Linda come here feel this one, put your finger down in the ventricle here, isn’t it swoony, it’s still going. . . . Everybody you don’t suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home Service programme, let’s not forget Mr. Noel Coward so stylish and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty’s wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell-what do you think, it’s a children’s story? There aren’t any. The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it’s Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 6o miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It’s a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one-something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only .the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there’s too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody’s around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who’re naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in the capital they’re wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a number, yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping ... and Herod or Hitler, fellas (the chaplains out in the Bulge are manly, haggard, hard drinkers), what kind of a world is it (“You forgot Roosevelt, padre,” come the voices from the back, the good father can never see them, they harass him, these tempters, even into his dreams: “Wendell Willkiel” “How about Churchill?” “‘Arry Pollitt!”) for a baby to come in tippin’ those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin’ he’s gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined. . . .But on the way home tonight, you wish you’d picked him up, held him a bit. just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, some how, save him caring who you’re supposed to be registered as. For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.
0 Jesu parvule,
Nach dir ist mir so weh . . .So this pickup group, these exiles and horny kids, sullen civilians called up in their middle age, men fattening despite their hunger, flatulent because of it, pre-ulcerous, hoarse, runny-nosed, red-eyed sorethroated, piss-swollen men suffering from acute lower backs and all-day hangovers, wishing death on officers they truly hate, men you have seen on foot and smileless in the cities but forgot, men who, don’t remember YOU either, knowing they ought to be grabbing a little sleep, not out here performing for strangers, give you this evensong, climaxing now with its rising fragment of some ancient scale, voices overlapping threeand fourfold, up, echoing, filling the entire hollow of the church-no counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom, not even a try at warming or lighting this terrible night, only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little cry, our maximum reach outward —
praise be to God! — for you to take back to your war-address, your war-identity, across the snow’s footprints and tire tracks finally to the past you must create for yourself, alone in the dark. Whether you want it or not, whatever seas you have crossed, the way home ...
***
So now I had a language for my dark, a way of reading and saying it, and those words led me slowly deeper and out the labyrinth I have come to celebrate, especially at this time of year.
Shamanic Letters is finished, I packaged 25 of them and FedX’d them yesterday to my father for his solstice, father of mine, tuletary father of the deep father shaman who rides and whips these words.
Anyway, to resume the narrative:
***
SOLSTICE CHANTfrom “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000
Winter 1984:
I fly up to
my father’s
Columcille
in the Poconos
of Pennsylvania
for the Christmas
holiday, arriving
ebbed with
flu, burnt out,
hungover, weary
to death, my
heart raged
down to char:
And crossing
my father’s
threshold is
like stepping
over a boundary
into other
time: By then
the place had
grown to the
Celtic digs which
had inspired
the name: Inside
it’s all stone
& wood and
candles, glowing
and warm where
outside it’s
bitter cold,
naked, chilled with
a foggy sleet:
& of course as
I always do I
fall in love
with the place
& its making,
the part of me
which belongs
to my father
shouting its
welcome across
the long waters
which separate
father from son:
By then the
Saint Oran
story had grown
into the timbers
of conversation
& work: A bell
tower named
for him down
in one corner
of the field
raising a few
rows of stone
a year: Some
tandem between
that building
and Oran’s
travels down
under facing
the Saint Columba
chapel in the
woods & that
saint’s white
certainty: You
walked through
one toward the
other in the
daily procession
to vespers: On
the winter
solstice after
dinner we
walked out from
the warm house
wrapped tight
in heavy clothes
into a sleeting
windy cold
night, the sky
the color of
a turgid purple
sea, icy rain
pelting our faces
slow &
incessant, the
bones of sumac
& elm & oak
creaking badly
in the hard
breeze: We
walk down from
the house round
a pond they
had dug from
the Garden of
Life the summer
before, now
black waters
like the pupil
of a huge eye
staring at us
from some
unspeakable
depth: Into the
Saint Oran
bell tower & stand
in that narrow
round chamber
watching clouds
mash and swirl
above: Light a
candle & set
it in a bitter
nook of icy
stone: Then walk
out the other
door which empties
into the eternally
descending time:
A circle of
boulders glazed
with sleet huddled
like the grim
council of
energies my
father invited
back from Iona:
A tripod of
long branches
down at the
southern end
of the field a
totem of
triune invitation:
Axis angel
of song, angry
angel of sex,
aegis angel
of work:
Into the woods
where it is
dark and
darker, creepy
with ancient
ghosts maybe
American
Indian maybe
Pict, certainly
aching: And
into the Saint
Columba chapel
built in ‘79,
an octagon
of stone walls
with a tall
pitched roof
of timber:s:
Creak open
a heavy door
of oak with
a long iron
bolster &
shuffle into
a cold so
deep it marks
the naked
boundary of
our tiny fire:
Light candles
to hoar the g
gloom & stand
round that
huge red boulder
in the center:
Rock of ages,
cleft in me:
All I have sought
elsewhere docked
somehow there,
inversed &
unreadable but
certain as stone:
Years later when
Beth & I came
up for my
brother Will’s
wedding to
Sarah we knelt
together by
that stone &
vowed our love
forever: “By
the rock of
Saint Columba
sworn” is
inscribed on the
rim of my
wedding ring
which is also
inscribed with
three Celtic
doublespirals:
I don’t know for
sure what that
oath means because
Columba’s rock
is Oran’s head,
shrouded in
mystery &
unveiled at
terrifying to
unbury: At
that solstice
I make some
sort of peace
with my wandering
affliction: As
we gather our
voices & sing
into that chilling
resonance I
join the chorus
of ages and know
somehow I
can sing those
songs & mine
as well: To that
rock I was
led by the
dearth of Columba’s
Christ & from
that rock I fled
to ramble &
rage in a
personal poisoned
dark & of
that rock I’ve
read & wrote
my own chapel
dolmen tower
& ring: On
that rock I’ve
bled my tangled
besotted horny
heart certain
only of what
I do not know:
My father has
six cremain
crypts beneath
the flagstones
round that boulder:
Grandmother
Nana fills one
of them & my
father & Fred
have dibs on
two others: I’m
welcome to join
them some day
so perhaps by
that stone one
day I’ll be
dead: Back on
the winter
solstice of
1984 standing
in the chapel
with my father
& Fred &
invoking Angels
of Rebirth and
Angels of Song
& Angels of
Being I rejoin
the dark gleaming
waters that flow
from lost aeons
into my father
and thence into
me and thus
into thee: I
still have miles
to row in
my Hamer
Phantom, much
yet to scream,
many futile
ports whose
skirts lifted
revealing that
pubic scrawl
which reads “Not
Here:” But
after that night
Oran’s music
was in the
singing of
all the ghosts
of my heart:
That stone altar
a buoy in
my depth,
compass in
whatever dark
I’ve wandered
blundered
sought &
thundered since:
***
Here the formal version of that poem:
***
MY FATHER’S CHAPEL1988
In a black-and-white photograph
my father stands before his chapel.
His face is set hard and grey
like the standing stone he rests a hand on.
The sky behind is troubled.
This is my altar to him.
My father’s chapel is hidden in the woods,
assembled from stone rows that grew from
generations of field-clearing.
Inside the chapel it is damp, dark, cool,
a descent into old regions of the world.
A quartz-veined, granite boulder
ten feet round fills the center of the chapel.
It is a heart forged in brimstone and eternal cold.
It was in my father for years before he dug it up.
My father says he is a steward of ancient spirits
he calls The Guardians. He met their chief at Iona:
Thor, the black blasted warrior of the Hebridean wind,
How my father’s heart burst with love for him. . .
One winter solstice, my father’s chapel
was bitterly cold. Frail candles flickered in
the windows, sad winds bent the bones
of trees. The death of the year.
My father and I sang together that solstice night,
our voices deepened by the resonance
of stone walls. We sang a plainchant of loss
and of infant hope. That was the dream of my father,
That is the shadow of my heart.
Tonight, on this winter solstice, I raise my
voice in song to my father’s bitter sea
that blusters deep in the conch of my ear,
a song forever trapped in the chapel of these bones.
***
And to finish with these solstice celebrations:
MANGER SCENE1994
The chill completes what
the torrid Easter bull
began: a spume of angels
breaking the virgin
into this solstice.
So few witness
the birth: two sheep,
the family mutt,
a boy on a crutch.
Three kings swoon
on straw beds
a league away,
dreaming of
starry treasure.
A palm tree spears
this morning's caul
of exhausted night.
Sunlight runnels
down the trunk
like an iron age
passing into steel.
WINTER SOLSTICE1996
Season of darkness
round a tiny garland
of light, the winter
solstice is both lovely
and lonely in its
long wake
for the day's return.
How rich the inward
comfort it affords,
its darkness rich
as the deepest cyan
in a crushed velvet
cape, urging us down
to find each other
in what we lost
so long ago, seed to soil,
son to father to son,
the tiniest hold
there upon
all losing, all
hopelessness,
tenuous and fragile
as every baby Jesus,
so weak and mewling,
thrilling the universe
one tiny heartbeat
at a time.
CHRISTMAS 1998This house has never been more our home, love,
and this poem is for the life you now unfold
each day in it, waking and working within it
going about the task in the manner you know
is the right way to go in a life.
Those company jobs never were more than
a bitter pill for you, and you have suffered
long enough in someone else's yoke of duty.
What a delight to see your eyes so lit
with eagerness and expectation as you drink
coffee in the living room, Christmas music
on the stereo, the cats gathered around you like
a shawl and cool morning air streaming in
from open windows, promising a winter yet.
I pray good luck to all your ventures,
the antique booth and refinishing trade,
the joint venture of making with your
sister, and whatever else can earn you
rite of passage forever away from
these fluorescent mills of wrong living.
Thank you for the gift of making a life
worthy for living, and for doing it with a smile.
AWAY IN A MANGER2003
New life burns here in this caul
Of coldest, year’s-end dark, an hour
No friend of love that I can name
Breaking, like a heart, this birth water;
And here, where so much already
Has been said of deep ways’ deep ends
In ripened blue, when there is nothing
More to say or sing, here we find
A tiny form at peace and sleeping
Swaddled in this humble paper shack
Far from cities, schools or spires,
A child not of any known gland
-- Oh praise the mewling vocable
Born of verses from Oran’s Well --
Bright star behind the eastern swell!
MANGER SCENE II2003
Up he rises from the dumpster
Behind the Pink Pussycat, the
Full receipt of every lost and
Forlorn ache which you deigned not
To receive. Amid the empty
Buds and butts and vomit-
Smelling rags he’s the crown prince,
Mewling (OK, groaning) as
Any babe would arising from
Such death. Well, he and I begin
Here, amid Her sordid trash.
The sour light proclaims a cracked and
Bleeding dawn -- poor afterbirth
Indeed though the psalm proclaim
New motion where old salt was lain.
