Brigid's Well

Nascence seems the theme of these first days of the next year, the next song, the next immrama. Delved from the womb like a fish from the sea, my thirst and thyrsus aching for surfside susurrations at first light. My words sing in a womb of salt empyreia, loosened verbals of the polymorphose perverse, an erotic spume of ten thousand glottals swimming back to the source, each a mythologem of pure world.

Fire spat into water: the primal engagement and thrall, the viscous mystery of all. Sanskrit agni, “fire,” covalent with Latin ignis, from which Latin gigno proceeds, “I bear a child”: the the choring seed lamps a numen of fire.

Thus fire in water equals birth, the beginning of all knowledge. Latin nascor, “I am born,” cognoso, “I know,” the prefix co signalling contact with the world: what I write of is what I find here in remembrance of that first union and deliverance, and everything I reach for reaches back into a woman who lays down in the sand next to the sea. Each sand castle of words mounds up from her into an approximation of the belly which held me and the breast which feeds mem. Words are a milky sweet blueish pour from a fat worldly nipple.

It’s wet work, for sure. Here’s Sandor Ferenczi in Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (transl. Henry Alden Bunker, MD):

"What if the entire intrauterine period of the higher mammals were only a replica of the type of existence which characterized the aboriginal piscene period, and birth itself nothing but a recapitulation on the part of the individual of the great catastrophe which at the time of the recession of the ocean forced so many animals, and certainly our own animal ancestors, to adapt themselves to a land existence, above all to renounce gill-breathing and provide themselves with organs for the respiration of air?

"... If the fish swimming in the water signifies, as in so many fertility charms, the child in the mother’s womb, and if in a multiplicity of dreams we are forced to interpret the child as a symbol of the penis, the penis signification of the fish on the one hand, and on the other the fish signification of the penis, become more self-evident — in other words, the penis in coitus enacts not only the natal and antenatal mode of existence of the human species, but likewise the struggles of that primal creature among its ancestors which suffered the great catastrophe of the drying up of the sea."

***

Is my labor here the world’s, dazed on the shore, trying what to do next? Do I sleep, do I dream, do write, do I love? Boundaries are confusing, perhaps pointless here, though always agonizing. The other night I dreamt I was laying down somewhere in this house, talking to a woman on the phone who was not a lover but was, whom I intended only platonic love for but was enthralled with the sexual undertones -- not the other woman but another woman, a woman of salt dimensions, only inside, only a numen, anima, yet shapely and sensual enough to be threatening. We talk about poetry and myth, the high deep meaningful stuff that’s beyond sexual impurities, but that stuff has sexual wings I don’t want to recognize. I don't’ want to be unfaithful to my wife, but how much does she know of this, how much am I willing to tell her? She’s outside working in the yard (outside my ribcage, in the outer regions of the heart?), engaged in some domestic duty, some ritual of the actual; I couldn’t see her through the window but knew she was out there, and worried for her when I saw some huge animal lumber by, like a giant mole or possum, big as a colt, this ugly brute night-mottled creature looking like a bared penis in the light of day. Then my wife came in and saw me talking on the phone, and asks me if we’re OK (as she usually does when she’s worried about my fidelity, which has in the past been poor). I put the phone on my chest and say of course we are, I love you, deeply, desperately, need so much for us to make love, be passionate, hold each other tight. We talk a good while, making clear to all where my sympathies lie; but I don’t hang up the phone, leave it there on my chest where the other can hear - my conversation, or how it resounds in my heart? I should have hung up the telephone in the name of that fidelity but don’t, I can’t or won’t. Back on the phone, I resume my conversation with the woman along the usual lines but there is a darkened saddened grieving note to her voice, our relationship taking a turn there. Outside, I hear my wife say, “We’re in trouble” -- So both worlds, inner and outer, have been compromised by my compulsive emotional needs for boundaries and boundlessness.

***

Even so, there’s a belligerence in maintaining faithfulness to blue words. I won’t hang up, or can’t, so deeply I’ve been drawn into this, sung down this far, sailed so far north, poem after poem an illicit liaison with an underworld woman. Mythology is stubborn in its reversals: like a man’s libido, it will never give up the hardwired ache for communions with the wave, where one drop of true blue drowns me and there’s not an ocean big enough to sustain me. I keep high and low in my purpose and porpoise, Brendan the Navigator in the bow and MacOdrum of Uist clutching the keel from below, sailor and merman like the heart- and cock-halves of my overweening mind, love and lust, poetry and bawd-house song, nipplage and endless cunt, nourishment and addict plunge, shore-sighter and night-blighter, dry wit and blue brogue, Columba and Oran, right and left hand tap tapping at this keyboard in cojunct cognitions of birthing fire, the ignis fatuus which gleams my pen’s length in puerile phosphor, chilling seed of the daemon lover hugging the undersides of each angelic aria arcing over the sky.

As the I Ching sez, the Creative morphs into The Receptive: yang engorges upon the fantasy of all it’s not yet is, and in its passion to return to that other clenches and spumes pure light into deep blue, Moby Dick spiralling down to the bottom of the sea, and collapses, spent, all that hurtling hooved energy suddenly inversed, becomes soft, mewling, pure baby, pure mother ... this time, as augured by the I Ching, is the nascence of that collapse, one year’s furious drive finished, perhaps with the Shamanic Letters, perhaps on a level I only intuited dimly there, opening into a deeper chamber, a far older myth ... cavern of the Mothers, not a proud pecker in sight, no dads allowed, not in this seamless salt quintessence, pure Venus, all soak ...

In these first days, nothing is distinct, its just light and less light, nameless shapes hovering nearby -- my hand? mother’s breast? dolphins spinning on a mobile? Though I have been delved from a womb the amniotic light still surrounds me, a paradisal float which I would in early adulthood rediscover in the arms of first love, when I finally escaped from the young man I had become. I altar and further that sweet light here, gossamer and gauzy as a white curtain rustling on a summer’s breeze through and opened widow on a sleepy afternoon where my wife and I doze naked together, hard passions exhausted in each other, ridding our thorns and edges and broken perphieries in the pure soak of what sex pours us into -- I dream, but I know, having been there a few times in my life: I won’t hang up the phone, but I’m not going anywhere, my love:





BODY OF A WOMAN

Pablo Neruda

Trans. Robert Bly


Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
when you surrender, you stretch out like the world.
My body, savage and peasant, undermines you
and makes a son leap in the bottom of the earth.

I was lonely as a tunnel. Birds flew from me.
And night invaded me with her powerful army.
To survive I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow for my bow, or a stone for my sling.

But now the hour of revenge falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of firm and thirsty milk!
And the cups of your breasts! And your eyes full of absence!
And the roses of your mound! And your voice slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will live on through your marvelousness.
My thirst, my desire without end, m wavering road!
Dark river beds down which the eternal thirst is flowing,
and the fatigue is flowing, and the grief without shore.


“OH IN CHILDHOOD, GOD,
HOW EASY YOU WERE …”

Ranier Maria Rilke
transl. Franz Wright

Oh, in childhood, God, how easy you were:
you, whom I cannot take hold of now, anywhere:
One smiled on the things one loved to have around;
they came half way: and you were already in reach.
And no, my God, where should I travel to find you?
Where do I enter? What mountain must I climb?
If someone asks for you: where should I point?
Where is your rustling grove? Where does your animal wander?
Where am I to find the fresh water to wash
my face and sex: I have never been clean.
Where do you reduce the holy things to ash
with the fiery radiance of your eye?
Doesn’t the scent of all our depravities
incite your rage? What are you waiting for?
Why don’t you change the ravenous to fasters
and hurl an angel at them
until they writhe in their own blood?
Lord do not be good: be lordly --, refuse
the hearsay of their praise:
tear down the house, destroy the bridge,
unleash monstrosities
in the path of those who try to flee.

For we’re so enslaved to contemptible needs
we go on believing in, year after year --
if someone holds out their hands to us,
we think that’s what God is. You red night of agony,
you fire-lit sky, you war, you hunger: kill:
for you are the danger we’re in.

Not until we place our dying in you
once again, and not simply our preservation,
will everything be yours: solitude and intercourse,
defeat and exaltation.
For the peace you finally bring to come into the world,
first you must fall on us, ambush us, tear us limb from limb;
for nothing has the power to so utterly destroy
as the way you use us, when you want to set us free.



FALLING IN LOVE

May 2005

At first love arrived in
random gouts of deep pure blue,
stumbling into her at a bar at
an hour I did not so much earn
as simply drink my way too --
an accomplishment perhaps in
the soul’s beerier travail --; and
there she was, standing in a
light which caused worlds to
push away, leaving us alone
and suddenly fragrant and
bee-like falling deep into each other,
drowning through a soggy week of
rapturous nights into a Cape of
wildest blue, our bodies bewitched
with the matchless perfection
of the other, her every curve
and groove so fitted to my
cup and thrust as to seal
the primal rift in our hearts
O, for an hour, one clench
or two, one night’s recede,
our organs drained and filled,
winding wrapped together out
on a wavelike recede and hiss
of a last, predawn, gentle
expiring kiss. -- That was love,
or all I could assess of it
those years; how I loved love
for the way it trooped in
with thrysus and timbrel,
a shriek of maenad amplitude
as to free me from a
self-imposed imprisonment
into a bottomless deranging bliss.
I was a sucker for such thralls,
broken as I was in all the usual
ways men of this age are, left to
figure things out on my own
& maybe score some nookie on the way
before getting down to whatever
work we do till days are done.
Falling in love was like finding God
again; -- not that He had moved, but
certainly was far removed those
rebellious years, when all the churches
seemed bone-dry, like headstones
of a faith that had failed to
marry and died a spinster all alone.
He was far too from my daily
fare in my young fool’s arrogance
to go it alone, a mile-high nonsense
about flying angel routes without
any sense of blessed wings.
What woke and stirred me so
about those brief islands of
great (well, loud) love was their
wild humility, to find myself
blessed with all I had dreamed
and diddled so alone for years,
just by hanging out on the
interface (a sidhe of sort, the
bar, the hour, the boozed
permission), waiting for love’s
return, a shape of short duration
that redeemed ten thousand
nights of waste with two peerless
legs around my waist. -- Fool,
but rapture was worlds sweet
and dreams deep, its music
growing louder and more
refulgent the longer from my
last, great, brief love affair
to rise and break and fail then
ebb. During those sad years
I came to know that my heart’s libido
was more strange and feral than
the stallion hoove harrumphing further down.
With each swart brilliant plunge
I learned that the power of love
was never mine to amp,
and that any love I won in this
life could never heal my heart for
long, whose halves and cleaves
are so confused with goddesses
witches mothers soror and wives
as to muse awe’s awfulness,
the mess of the life I lived while
dreaming toward pure shores.
How can this heart ever be
complete, where angels and devils
weave its upwelling wave in
a rich dark mineral flow,
and every rising blue desire
has that heart-rich undertow
which may lead to hell
or just the sound of that bell
at the bottom of the lake where
love has its drowned cathedral,
a wraith that hauls the rope
but hard every time I see her face.
My heart is my umbilical to You,
beloved, God, shore I’ll never reach,
two shades of blue far down the beach.



CROSS BETWEEN
A WOMAN’S BREASTS

2001


Bright martyr,
you’re perfect
hanging there,
fusing me
to this song.

Grace note at
the center of
a dark pond.

Gold cup
brimming my gaze.

Compass
of insurrection
and grief.

Hammer for
a distant gong.

Nails at nether
and nadir
of this surf.

Ferryboat
and sherpa.

Crossroads
altar to making
and slaking.

You’re a bright aria
to the woman
I’ll never know
sitting across from
me in every room,

blessing my day
with one glint
of paradise.

Thank you, Lord,
for hanging
me here.

KIMBERLEY BLUE

1995

She is a blue stream
winding through
the smoke and booze
long brown hair
and blue blue eyes
the high tide of her body
straining against
the shore of her dress
blue spandex sparkling
like morning water
in this jaded light

She stops before me
with all night behind
all winter outside
all broken hearted
somehow eclipsed
a black aura in
this sapphire's halo
she smiles on me
sweetly & asks
would you like a dance
and I say
Oh yes

She lifts her dress
lays it on my lap
reaches behind
to unleash blue lace
and begins to
wave and weave her body
round rich jazz

I inhale her deeply
a musk of jasmine and orchid
and I am only here
in this brilliant shadow
captive to blue billows
dreaming in my balls

Something too strong
for words not a wave
but more than a sigh
washes out of me and
climbs the salmon run
of her dance
Up knees up thighs
to hips whispering
whiskey saxophones and lace
Up smooth belly
to breasts so proud
they startle me
even here
even at such a naked price

When my eyes
rise all the way
I find her
watching me
watching her
for one two three beats
and we're in some other room
too foolish to question
too swollen to ignore
too soon swept away

She smiles and looks
off into the mirror
to admire my lust
glowing on her skin
and devotes her motions
to a deeper blue

and that is that

Around the bar
other women repeat
this dance for other men
each pair a room where
a man tries to drink
deeper than a woman goes
and the night
is an empty glass
on any beach
where just one sip
would surely drown us all



WOMBS

2003

... a tight knitting of
defensive fantasy and
external reality is what
builds the second womb,
the marsupial pouch that
we call society.
-- Joseph Campbell

Beware the womb you
get to choose having
shed at last the first.
Dried now in the
breezes off that crashing
surf, which way do
you go? You can remain
there only if you paint
all your houses in
a boozy salt wash,
accepting that your
bones will ebb to sand:
tend bar at some
seaside dive, brown
and wrinkle to a
hoary grain, forever
tumble your driftglass
eyes from sea to sea
to sea, a cobalt premise
no harboring thighs
can hold longer than
the tide. You can choose
the womb of suburbs,
hanging yourself on
some corporate tit,
& grow like weeds
in some fenced-off
paradise where pool-
waters knife and knuckle
the sun and comfort
is the sleep you caul
down into, never to quite
stir from. You can
womb yourself in Love
and dream of blurry
Beloveds the rest of
your days; womb in
cement trucks pouring
concrete walls to
moat the sea; womb
your jisms in an
ear-conch and drift
forever on a single
tiding drone. No one
can criticize you for
hunkering down in
such wombs as these,
it’s a species thrall:
But know that long
after the next brine
dries on your pale
aging flesh, her voice
resounds deep within,
commanding you
from your heart of
hearts to never leave.
But you must. Beach,
suburb, bed, conch-song,
your life in them
excites the wildest
throng of sportive fins,
a welling of departures,
uprisings and betrayals,
straining you toward
birth & making every
bliss a grave. Those
winds are grave-sheets,
gray tatters of cold
sky, wave-sweeping
augurs which sing the
salty dog of your demise,
that cutthroat sigh
between the thou and I.


ST. BRIGID’S
MILK-PAIL WELL

2004


Your crannog is pure
teat, a well of milky-blue;
this spring hurls every
blessed name for You,
the morning’s sweetness
in freshened cool is
poured from Your pitcher
forever just out of view.
Brigit of the fertile gasp,
candle in every womb,
arouse my words to
spark the waters to
spread a fecund news.
This page is your
pale milch-cow: my
hands work tender
teats below. Geyser
here your white dictates;
may this pen nurse
your sacred flow.



BLUE OFFICES

2004

For years I searched for you
in the worst of sodden ways,
embarking night by night
with hopes deep-salted
ennui and booze. Each
night I sailed through
all the bars where you
once revealed yourself
in this or that blue flame.
For a thousand
and one nights the immrama
was the same, my eyes
expectant on the crowd
dancing to heavy metal
or disco or new wave,
the shots and beers hazing
all the edges into a
hyperborean blur. My
face then was an
open book, a prow
of sorry ass lust
mortared to that craggy
wanderer’s visage,
shaped just so for
shoring needs as bad as mine.
Those beds I woke in
with those huge hangovers
-- stumps of oak poking
up from drowned suburbia,
fortune’s next nereid
snoring fast and deep,
her hair like so much
flotsom scattered mid
the wreckage -- those beds
all whispered Not Here
in your sad voice,
each one a vesper
which had crashed
again to wildly stilled
emptiness. Eventually
like a sailor harrowed by
some final isle I gave
up that futile chase —
or perhaps you gave up on
me, my gaze too finite
and my heart a halfwit
too addicted to
the brine to ever sail
into that salt wilderness
you’ve always waited
for me in. I came home
to let the horses go
and roam those fallow
seas while I got down
on aging knees to
pray and read
and dream the ribs
of what slowly
woke an abler ship.
For a thousand and
one mornings now I’ve
matinned my love
for you in these coracles
of ink and seem,
writing down every isle
you are closest to,
the ones I walk
but never wake. For
years now I’ve voyaged
thus; I can’t say that I’ve
learned much, though I
sure have seen more
wonder than I did before
when I needed so to
believe in what I saw,
when there was no
thaw for frozen,
wandering bones
than a woman’s warmer
ones. I have a wife now
and a working life,
a garden and scriptorium,
whale flukes in
plenitude on
every passing page.
The old high rage
has settled down
to till between these
faint blue lines,
distilling that old
whiskey down
until it’s Thrill of you
is now blue.
Same boat, different
hour, old vespers
poured to matins,
with you and I as
constant as the
vulgate isles of sea Latin

WHITE ON GREEN

2003

It is only when I’m home sick
lying gut-cramped in our bed
upstairs that I realize what
wild artistry you bring to
every surface of home: The
wan spring morning breezing
in cool through an opened
window across the room
and everything either white
or the palest green, white
linen walls and furniture
so balanced with plants
and jadeite glass that the
eye doesn’t even see the
whole perfection, but rather
floats in it as on a tide,
the ivy tumbling from
white iron planters, the
chairs and dressers
moved so many times
that the absolute correctness
of their placement contains
all the energy of a poem
revised down to three pure
words which you would
never say, and refuse
to call an art. “Just
another woman’s
gift for home,” you
might concede, though
such craft is the very
hearth I can’t ignite
in the cold demense of
my lake-bottom dives.
If a room could wash
a votive heart clean,
it’s here in the room
which you devised, the
one which you say
you can never get
quite right, what with
this sloping ceiling, crooked
walls and ill-placed a/c
vents. Orchids on either
nightstand wake the purity
with tiny violet blossoms,
like the eyes of our cat
half-lidded in her chair
in the closet, drowsing
down as I now do laying
in the bedroom you
composed in the upper
room of our life. The
poem you never wrote,
the art you swear
is simply banal, lulls
me beyond all I
would say to exactly
where I most desire
to be. Those three words?
You are here.

Sand Chapel

My mysteries and meanings have animal roots for which biography provides harness but not hoof. Maybe that’s why sex so figures into angelic shadows, rooting and roostering what seems so high-flung. Why childhood and first events to charm the imagination, the sleepy manger child of the new age surrounded by doting sheep. Why nurture and nature swell and crash the next poem.

There was a ritual we nightly did with our cat Violet for a season which gets toward my point:

CAT IN THE BOX

November 2002

We don’t know why, but our cat
loves her loving in a box.
We set one on the floor
and she hops right in,
deigning to be lifted to
our bed as if on a ski-lift
and then demurring to long strokes,
her sapphire eyes misting,
milky, culled in kittenlike
memories of long ago.
Normally she can’t stand to
be held, but with only a
box between us she’ll take
all the love we can give.
I guess sometimes love
requires an inch of buffer,
a frontier absence making of
not enough quite more.
A beach between sea and
land brocades the
safest most pure caress.

***

That beach is the ground for this verbal iniquity, a sanctuary for play, for building sand castles at first light with my mother’s voice and the sea’s blending together, where my wife is mounded over the bodies of all the other women I have loved, a sandbox which quarters off my white writing chair, its sands the clean white journal pages in which I write of old pleasures and wild forays safe from the margins of the real.

“The child god, prototype of the wonderful orphan child, feeling quite at home in the primal element, reveals his full significance when the scene his epiphany is water,” Carl Kerenyi writes in “The Primordial Child in Primordial Times,” and so it seems moot to meet this nascent hour of the coming year from the ground of both my own history and the mystery of the world’s. Kerenyi again:

The world tells us what is in the world and what is true in the world. A “symbol” is not an “allegory,” not just another way of speaking, it is an image presented to the world itself. In the image of The Primordial Child the world tells of its own childhood, and of everything that sunrise and the birth of the child mean for, and say about, the world.”

So ... Maestro ...




MOTHER OF PEARLS

for my mother
on Mother’s Day, 2002


Brilliant sands reach back
toward a distant shimmer
where I recall white afternoons
and your voice above the sea’s.
Weaned in that bright music,
I have always loved words
which sing pure susurration,
each line a surf between
you and I, cresting and curving
into us in foaming chords of joy.
Each poem I write is a pearl
sown from that cerulean wash,
a beach of adulation.
No wonder I ate all that sand.
I’m a voice now of that
restless, crashing land,
reaping your white songs
grain by patient grain,
the rest of my life long.


THE NEXT ANGEL

Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

— Ranier Maria Rilke

Yes, surrender was good,
the grace that followed
was a sea wind
and the shore
sparkled fresh
with all we became.

But you must know
that surrender also writes
a darker angel into the sky.
Today we walk a troubled
strand, naked of wish or will
our torrid meters swelling
harsh against the sea.

Just how do we
steady between curl
and plunge? How to
walk here, when desire's
riptide so dreamily
hauls at our ankles?

Thunder summons the
next angel. Later we may
believe that grace returned
in this spiralling air,
but for now, we are only
walking in rain on
the shore of a kiss,
wrestling the next
angel to a fall.


SAND CHAPEL

12/27/05

I keep on writing here
because I’m learning
line by line to build
on letting go, carving
paper ledges to
the brink of blue
from which something
next and new
may rise like gold
from vastly crashing seas.
A daily conjuration,
if you will, in advance
of the real sunrise
at real shores so
many miles from here.
Which tides the other,
I wonder, here at
4:30 a.m., cold dark
outside in which
the garden stills
in pulse and breath,
old dark inside,
the oldest that I’ve
yet to find in the
caves I’m writing down.
Last night I dreamt
of building sand
castles on some
hazy summer shore,
shovelling sand
from the vagina
of a woman spread
below me. Every
subsequent
attempt to build
wide or deep
kept tiding me back
to that first enterprise
when I was five
going on fifty
-- All latter work
subsumed in one
primary rise
between my mother
and the sea. I tried
in my dream to
buy a car, to find
a men’s room in
my old high school,
to compete with
a hoary diver for
the depths of You:
Yet still I’m mounding
epiphantic breasts
to waves upon a
nascent summer’s day.
I’m still plundering
a womb of shatter whelks
and drunks
smashed down by
love on love, my
hand daring left to
right into ten thousand
cunts, each delving
each next line.
Suffice there’s beach
enough to keep me
busy here for this
poem, perhaps
another, perhaps more
-- who knows? I’ll
write as long as seas
crash embracing shores,
as long as she’s singing
in my ear, as long as this
craw in my gut
crows to glut on more,
as long as this hand
loves doors to
every bluer amplitude
inside ecstatic reams.
Do I write? Or dream?
Or sing that brutal
womb which delved
Dylan Tor to waves
in a brogue no
song will ever seam,
much less drown
the depths of?
Who cares? Surf’s up!





FLESHTONE

2000


Milky-sweet
acre of nougat,
when I dream of you
flowers open wide
to heaven’s
blazing horns
and my heart burns
dark purplepeach
to ultramarine.
When I reach for you
summer oceans sparkle
and sigh in curve and curl,
nippling toward
my trembling hand.
Flesh is an orchard
kissed by the
moon, each tree
bursting with
the sweet wash
of heavy fruit.
I nestle my
face in you
and am planted
too. Touching you
is almost fatal
and never quite
what my dream
implies, but touch
I will, excessively
and hard,
a drunk in a wine barrel,
a lout with his lard.
Color me fleshtone, that
crayon I can’t
let go from my hand,
with no lines to
stay within
and every page
scrawled to the rim.



SAND CASTLE

2000

Sigh down the long runnels of foam
which line the heart-road of this shore,
now soft in the gauzy drift
of a late summer afternoon,
the sun far to the west, it’s fierce
maul now fleece, pale on the backs
of two boys building the same sand castle
you built against the tide so long ago.
Each measured handful
of packed sand is angled
so close to the water’s edge
it’s understood a that sand castles
are an invitation to what
washes it all away.
The arrival of each wave
in its final exhausted spread
is exhilarating, filling the moat past brim
and tearing down with singing foam
what you too would release
if you knew what, or how:
You watched those walls tremble and fall
to the sea’s mute caress
and when you walked away
you forgot what was so earnest
about it all almost before the sea
erased it anyway. Now it’s too late
on one beach to save your life
though there’s still time on this other.


DRUNKS ON THE BEACH

Spring 1980

They tilt and todder
over seaweed clumps
'n' broken shells.
"Mother of whores,"
snarls the tall one,
kicking back a wave;
sea birds shit on them.
The short one finds
a beached loggerhead,
long dead and half-buried
in the sand.
"My turn," he bawled,
and eloquently spat
on all the women
he had known.
They belch and caterwaul
the tide, two drunks on the beach,
two wobbly wonders
the sea has room for:
She floats their driftglass
eyes away, and off they go,
two true sons, their curses
lost on the surf,
their tiny fists beating the wind.


NAMES IN THE SAND

2001

Deep in one night’s blue ink
we took a dip, then wrote our names
on the white sands spread
between us: Signatures of
cabernet and citrus and mint
which may already prove illegible
to you two days later, or not.
Even “we” is suspect, perhaps
a tad too hopeful,
damnable for all the usual reasons
flesh gets shared in passing.
But all day yesterday in my fatigue
and hurts (nubs of a hangover, an
elbow rubbed raw) I stopped to linger
at the embers recalling the way
you’d smile so dreamily saying
you wanted all of me — and hard —
or how you tasted — so sweet and fine —
or how I lay behind you at last,
breathing satiate vowels
softly on your neck.
O blue delight, inconsolable,
pure paradox of ice which divides
and fire tearing every bind.
If for that once, then yet saved,
a beach bonfire indelibly
writing this poem
with long whipping flames
and coals now more bright.
Now after all this drought, now rain,
miles away from you,
sweet and incessant and sure,
erasing the flame
but not quite yet your name.


TUMULT

2000

I heave up on this red stallion
kick his haunches hard
and let the world hurl forward in
tumult: Racing down a flat strand
by the sea, great waves crashing
in a calamity of foam and the sky
bearing down hard in thunder and storm.
The horse bears down on his gallop
with all the fury I can summon,
his muscular haunches almost leaping
and his black hooves hammering the sand.
I’m holding on for dear life, surrendered
to these motions, author or victim
of a hellbent horse on a heaven sent beach,
sea and sky in mutual foment
and me within it all and in you,
your face between sunset and moonrise
crepuscular red and dangerous blue,
your eyes half closed in wide wild invitation
and the whole world aching to burst in
what I once thought you were.


AT LEAST A BEACH

2001

There is at least a beach
in this, desolate perhaps,
whose surf sighs almost
wretchedly, folding and rumbling
disconsolate down the shore,
then drolly recedes, sucking
it in as you must for another day,
another exhalation. Merwin
writes, “if the night it long
remember your
unimportance/sleep.”
Console yourself that you
cannot stop singing even when
the music is so sad.
Red notes shoot through
me like a lonely beachside
walk because I invite them
and they render me alone.
Which is far better than
hurting someone else with
what always gets mistaken
as love. Let the beach
remain and sing sadly
sweetly of its salt tossle
through the heart.
Find comfort in that.
Woo the mystery.
Sleep.
Toward morning the angels
will come in their gauzy
matins and touch you
once with their wings,
enough for another day
another beach
another song
of love’s troubled surf.


THE POPE OF
PLAYALINDA BEACH

2003

The Pope of Playalinda
Beach stands at the
surf’s edge swaddled
in white and gold
brocade, his long
train dissembling in the
wash. His crozier
posts the sand like a
surf caster turned the
other way, bejeweled
with summer oceans
and the eyes of
rapturous women.
And those eyes --
so serene as they
scan our naked
congregation,
shepherding us
to the utmost wings
of this crashing
surfside day.
Above his head
the sun is a belfry
of summer fire,
pealing sanctus
over a shadeless choir.
Who is saved
and who gets damned
by such ordained
bliss? The surf thunders
and recedes down
the shore,
no crest not a prayer,
every crash
an eternal door,
the long ebb like
plainsong, censers,
egress to the back
-- a cathedral pour
the flesh adores.

SHAKER OF THE SANDS

2002

Last night I tossed late,
not quite sleepless, not released
into the routine deeper dark.
Probably a prickly ebb
of some pill I took earlier
in the day, trying to stay
alert and in motion through
the usual tangled brake.
Now I turned on a restless,
weary, moody tide, frustrated,
my half-sleeping brain engaged
in a sadly old familiar spin,
rewalking old blind alleys,
retasting mad old blood,
recalling old enmities
at God. I thought how all made
things come to naught, my
best poems like that horrid
soapbox derby car I carved
from balsa without my father’s
help, a misshapen, laughable
little thing, over-carved on the
hood (to a thin whittled strip)
and lumpy in the rear.
Poems to naught just like
my attempts to love
or make of myself a berth
in the oblivious world.
I checked the clock —
still the red tines held
me round midnight —
and so descended on, smelling
that old revolting smell
of worthless self when the
other kids scowled
to find they’d inherited
me on their dodge ball team.
And then I sank into
a weave of thoughts so
exasperated with themselves that
extinction seemed a wiser turn;
felt the weariness of
Macbeth too long harrowed
by the gules of high-falutin’
gambits, reduced to my own
state, to that bitter taste
of knowing that I never got around
to living any life because
a child failed to so very long ago.
And then at last I fell at last
into the hidden dark,
a stiff-limbed sound down
the canyons of the dead,
my hair like the tassels of
a jellyfish, my eyes frozen
wide to that abyssal vale ...
I found the house of my first
marriage and decided to go in,
through someone else had long
lived there, cleaning all former
residue of old love away.
An empty house at 3 a.m.,
even though some presence
slept in the next room.
My curiosity was greeted by this
huge sense of not living there
anymore, nor welcome back —
And so I retreated back out
onto blackened streets
where revenants and addicts
drove bruised clots of cars
on the city’s inverted
arteries. A heart’s history,
my home town, 20 fathoms
beneath this one. A friend
I lost to pride 20 years ago
then recited to me his epic poem
through lips cracked with blood
and dust— Homeric, pure,
simple as the sands of
Cocoa Beach, and lost
to me now, though the dream
poured inexhaustibly
through my ears, a torrent
of sea gold, sands now
ineluctably lost down
the hourglass’s prim flue.
No wonder this morning
I’m so weary, foggy, and blue.
I’m glad I slept on through
all that, but today I’m numbed,
perhaps like sea glass,
certainly humbled as anyone who
tries to make any ocean do.
Oh well. It’s time now to
knock back the last dram
of cold coffee in the mug,
stretch in to the whisper
of sprinklers in the dark,
and find the last line of this poem,
neither to propound or console,
but simply to shake the sands
from the mat at this next door
that opened to me. Welcome, friend.
I know it’s not much but
it’s where the words are found today,
like a school in a far shoal,
not the ones I’d ever care to write
but a man has to eat his heart
as best as he can.

OCEAN HEART

2001

Ah brig, good night,
to crew and you:
the ocean's heart too smooth, too blue
to break for you.

-- Emily Dickinson (LI)

After 20 years adrift in modern paradise
the heart grows burnished, like sea glass,
of its malt obliquities. I remember
my first summer down here walking Cocoa Beach
after drinking all night, my jeans rolled,
the morning a sweet diapson of swelling joy,
my head singing that old Bob Marley tune
is this love is this love is this love that I’m feelin
to tiny Atlantic rollers which broke and scattered
all the sunlight just before my feet. How I hoped
for some Venus to sashay butt-naked off
those waves and fuck my emptiness
with porno-cum-motherly abandon.
Ah me. I drove as always home empty-handed,
my need for love conched inside that brilliant beach.
The years were not without their tide of vestals,
boozy and half-spread devotees of things
I way too partially represented. Our bodies
clanged like clabbers of a weary fog bell,
our hearts nacreous with bitters which would appall
any god, much more twenty-somethings
reaching for the golden ring inside the other’s thighs.
I tried, they tried, we all tried to make a go
of something which had small Michelangelo.
Then came the wives, who joined hands with me
in houses built on time, earnest sorors who sought
to reconcile their history with mine. Both wives
attacked the task with a feral openness I fell far
short of matching. We never made it together
much to any beach, what with daily tasks so far inland,
removed from those yeasty beams of ocean light,
our earnest labors wearying us from every sou
of drippy fun. No wonder I dreamed
of nipply naiads scampering red-rumped
in the surf just out of reach, their beach towels
dropping like moot fig leaves in the scree
— Nor any surprise that I plunged from
those briared ridges into sweet, descending,
horrific billows. I’ve just begun to right
those rumpy arrears. What’s next?
I’ll not go forward without reaching for
the hand I know, surf or no, toward
the best or worst years of love. Sadly
she may not reach back. We’ve new waters to face,
beached, if you will, where there are the
most difficult of surf conditions, full of riptides
and dark harbors: Yet face it together we must,
paradise or no, or never know which hands
the white heat rinsed in those white sands.

RUDDER, ROOT, ROAR

Feb. 2005

Without these soaks in
your old blue, I’d surely
die of dry futurity,
a three-world man
planed flat of all his
lumps and sags. Ahead
like a shimmering runway
lies the long workday
in the life I found
when I made my
grief of you a song,
an inland road
shy of shores or
even the faint thunder
of the surf, having
fading and long dried
to relic dunes
my wheels sigh over
on the way to work.
Nowhere in that
furious hive of forwarding
labors is there time
or room to stray
or curve, so this scant
hour here must fall
anchorlike down the
shelves of silted rue,
salvaging the flukes
and spume of those
drowned mordents
which are the sighing
depths of you, or me,
or what you and I
hurled long ago. The
greater half of the
bright day ahead
roots down in cold
abysms to grip
and suck rootlike
that mouldered bed
in which we once
cooked the very
devil in a spasm of Yes
which broke my
every shore in one
loud booming crash
then ebbed in such
angelic bliss to
haunt the rowing here
in predawn depths,
haunting every line
with a hallowed
harrowed sound,
weaving like a
siren’s hair around
this pale white
writing chair.
Forward now I
must row, to complete
the tasks assigned
by love of the life
which rose treelike
from that bed, a faith
and purpose married
to your own. Daily
I mouth these prayers
inside a chapel
on the shore, built
over what is known
about the mysteries
of that ancient
unquiet blue, its floor
and footers ruddered
by old urgent and
betsotted bones which
mouth the ever tide.
Ahead the road to the rest
of my life, bright for
the trudging and arrowed
like a western sun
directly toward the strife.
Praise to the shells
which you delve and roar
hard pounded in the
asphalt, ferrying that
deluge into all dry
hours far ahead.


BEACH GRACE

2003


A good day. A few sentences.
One that almost has the feel of the true.
—Flaubert

My reward for Being, was This.
— Emily Dickenson


When I get lost in the day’s
infinite lack of gain,
I stop at a moment’s pauses
and walk onto a beach
that’s always there and
sit a while, a nothing about
nothing & asking less,
cupping what I can in these
hands and carrying it back
to a dry, desperate world
hurrying through so much
paradise. My hands only
hold so much: I spilled
some on my knees giving thanks,
some more on this page
(here and less there); the
rest I’ll take upstairs to
my wife to rub salt traces
onto her feet, light and
gentle as the sea’s blue sashay
under this waking, perfect day.


THE SANDBOX

Dec. 29, 2005

In this play of gods and queens
I am forever between shores
of real and seem, of both composed,
yet never more than a figment
for air and water, a paper boat
on a sea of words more numerous
than the grains of sand I once
munched in lieu of sea or mother,
sands which now fill this daily
box I sit so happily inside
of, at work, at play, building
out of nothing bell towers and
drowned chapels, labyrinths
of half-lit swoon, City of God,
isle of Sycorax, tomb guardians
like a fleet of boners between
swells of florid bosamage
sure to milk all shores in
sweet sweet lactates, nippling
the world -- all in this in pious
driven play: my daily exercise
in abandonment to things.
When I’m in the box I wing
at will to every aerie in blue heaven
and fin the depths of meres
which haunt green wilds far
outside this sleepy town,
riding a mare of dreamlike sound,
hooves hammering the strand
in wild harmony to that music
I recall from beaches long ago,
each stride a wave’s loud crash.
Inside the box I’m by the sea,
I’m in the bushes playing
Let Me Thee See, I’m in the
basement at infernal chemistry,
I’m Mr. Ned conducting the
Dean girls naked bed-bouncing
glee: Outside the box it’s 2006
and our country sucks a sucky
world & my wife is far away,
as close as real love gets in
the big world of aches and smarts.
Outside the box is where
it all gets lost and hardens down
in rooms of stone, all sadness
permanent and ruin sure
and nothing much more to
say about it. Outside the box
this is poetry beneath the grade,
the dalliance of a working
man who suffers us the ennui
of things turning out the
other ways, tamed and cowed
by love’s mortgage-book,
a pulse mortared by bills
and pills and long-lost thrills.
Here I set to frolic in the surf
of sex-drenched summer days,
my naked length and depth
seduced into a merry crash
of warm hissing foam, all
thirsts roused and slakened
the way a shore is pounded
for ages by a wild collapsing
surf. Here is wonder and
enchantment, the thrall of
nascent hours, first light
glowing on the immortally
gratified pair in the bower
at the garden’s center,
green buds lifting from
dead loam in ripe hosannahs,
the air clear and startling,
all knowledge fragrant
finding out how close a kiss
is to that angel’s flowered breath
which blossoms in our hearts,
how much a song is like the
selkie queen who sings of God
offshore: -- Who’d ever care to
leave this box, which doesn’t
quite exist yet is the greatest
part of the life we life if only
on the pages in these latter-day
arrears. This sandbox is a
solitary enterprise for fools
and puerile sons, the very lap
of heaven poured by that
surf-mill which delves the
day its sun. Watch the words
pour from my mind, like
sand from cupped hands,
like gold dust on the world
you’ll never get to see
unless you climb in this box with me.

Arch, Ache, Ark

THE ARCH

(2004)

There is evidently more to soul than Venus, and more to Venus than soul.

— James Hillman, Anima

***

You are throned in my first shouts,
oh queen of mere beginnings.
So much more comes after that
in the building and the tillage
that I forget the aquamarine
dolor of your first humid sighs.
Marriage leaves you far behind
like a fading, dripping arch-
a fabling archon of salty depths
which every birth requires
and then forgets, or exiles
to the gauzy otherworld
of all I’ve yet to dream.
You are that descending stair
which I fell down in wild,
so desperate love, careening
from surficial knowns
into the blue sweet of
sea raptures deep between
your thighs. Who holds
on to any whit of self
in that wild saline glissade
from wave-height down
to world-collapsing boom?
Yet waking in that other
world abed adrift at sea,
we cannot help but begin
at once to self infinity
with words and names,
recollecting jobs, ex-wives,
unfinished business and real
needs beyond the bed
like a world around the sea.
Thus the bitterness of salt,
those tears of awfulness
and ire, riptides of woe
and upwelling loss
which always tears us
back in two and makes
love taste so bottomless
and utterly undrinkable.
It’s then you step back on
your wave to ebb away
and leave us wondering
what you began, and
proceed to house and
garden like altars or
metaphors of the fading
echo of our first
milky ejaculate shouts.
All love begins down
your mad billows
one rapturous and raging
night: All lovers awake
as from undersea
upon a dazzling beach
fused now to each other
no matter how far that
first big night music
recedes. Your work
completes in that
next day’s first so
gentle and lingering
heraldic kiss, so soft
as if to dream two
futures in the measure
of one shared breath.
Now comes the hard
part, the one that
lasts the mortal reach
of days. Now comes
the difficulty of real
men and women who,
named by that welcoming kiss,
must build their house
of love with blood and
shit for mortar, & pay
mortgage on your ocean’s thrall
til tombs remit the bliss.

***

From Eileen Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels:

Marcus,(a) student of Valetinus ((c. 150AD)), who went on to become a teacher himself, tells how he came to his own firsthand knowledge of the truth. He says that a vision “descended upon him ... in the form of a woman ... and expounded to him alone its own nature, and the origin of things, which it had never revealed to anyone, divine or human. The presence then said to him, ‘I wish to show you truth herself; for I have brought her down from above, so that you may see her without a veil, and understand her beauty.’”



The statue of Eleuthereus ((Dionysos)) was carried back and forth on a ship equipped with wheels ... The ship places the arrival of the strange procession in the perspective of the sea, which is no more than a day’s journey for an animal-drawn vehicle from any point on the Greek island. The wheels show that the journey to Athens was made over land, but the ship took on a ritual significance which the vase painters easily raised to the level of myth.

— Carl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life

***

METAPHOR: A HYMN

You are the ache in my words
for salt symmetry, for
rudders and wheels
both wave and
road for the god in his
ship-car who freights us,
island by day by poem,
from outermost to home.
Always your blue mordents
inside these daily tides
which is so like something else,
of no day I have seen
nor of any night I’ve dreamed.
For every purchase
I make here on one
named shore, you
at once sight its
haunting beyond, the
image as real as life itself
and is. Though you and
I will never kiss, our
puckerings are all:
the boom of a
remembered wave’s
collapse is like sky
horses at full thunder,
and both are hooves
of that wild heave
of me inside the woman
who is so much like
you. And in that swoosh
erasing all, you ferry
the god in his device
the distance of two souls,
arriving at that
shore where
we are one broken
wave of salt and
foamed surrender.
My wife’s sleeping
shape upstairs is like
that mound in Wales
where to spend one
night invokes a mist
dissolving one life
into some strangely
shining other,
the old commotions
simply gone.
Beneath those sheets
are nymphs and
naiads, Ariadne
in her gloom
and Iris on
her pool, the
Lady of my wells
descending far
and still farther
in a gossamer
of fading smile.
In a mole’s breeze-
ruffled white fur
where it lay dead
yesterday on the
road next
to huge Lake
Dora (savagely
brilliant and blue)
is every
soft cheek I’ve
ever glanced, every
pale breast
that swung
up to my lips.
What would this be
without your
other’s stain and echo
which no words of mine
will ever quite name,
much less bed?
Like an unseen
shore’s faint-foaming
rumble, my every verse
peramble stumbles
everywhere in search
of you, unaware it
is your own soft singing
in tree and wave,
in sleeping wife
and road-killed mole.
Wrap all my ends
in your fish tales.
Be the keel too
heavy with the one
that got away,
the god who comes
inside your ebbings,
the thirst you
slake in every breast
I squeeze and suck
with these othering lips.

Seasonal Intercoursings

Christmas Eve -- 5 a.m.

Cold again, not as cold as the past few nights but definitely winter in paradise: temps in the upper 40s, Red and Blue curled in boxes lined with towels out on the back porch, Violet curled up against my wife’s rear (while I sleep she corrals in my groin, my legs spread around her), furnace going upstairs and down, this house seeping the unaccustomed chill as if directly from northern vents.

Outside the Christmas tree in the center of the garden burns brightly, brilliant in the deep night, an augment not explicitly Christian but sharing its paradoxes, in solitude praising, strong through a vital dependence, edenic in the promise of future certainties grounded in past ones. Something like that, here at 5:17 a.m., the newspaper van grumbling up the street, a certain toxicity in the aether, probably just the exhaustion of holiday shopping and cry-beneath-the-tree blues, kids tanked on expectations and the rest of us solidiering on, if not for the kids for each other, for the cats, for the shadows of others heavier and more resonant absent of their beloved owners, disappeared beneath gifts that will never make it to the tree.

In this the lull which borders the madness of preparation with the absolute stillness of the holiday -- few and fewer hours to get the last-minute details done, kitchens frantic with baking, the malls engorged with desperate husbands and sons, anything left on the shelfs ravened and plundered, weary wives and mothers bemoaning exhaustion, resolving never to do it this way come next year -- it’s Simplify, Simplify, no one needs this crap, the kids are much older, too much money flies from wallets to appease gods that have small relation to the holiday it seems, some triune entity called Manna, Moolah, and Maxed-Out, a year-end glut like a commercial carnival on the frozen borders of Austerity ...

Yes, a border approaches ... all this frenzy like the ninth wave which ends the tide, collapsing on the absolute stillness of the holiday - Silent Night, traffic light on the streets, neighborhoods empty with everyone elsewhere, some houses decked out with city-states of lights, others empty and dark, kids dreaming of X-boxes and i-Tunes, parents getting the last touches under the tree, never feeling it quite enough, trying not to think of credit card statements and check-book balances blickered with red ink ... solitaries drinking in single-watt kitchens, staring at nothing at all ... homeless crack addicts shuffling behind the 7-11, praying for luck, a john, a forgotten scratch-off-ticket, anything to fuse one more connection ... cars of the complicated peeling off from ill houses, leaving behind wreckage, hauling ass toward even more ... senators having a brandy before bed, forgetting their naught ... illegal aliens cramped in small rooms, clutching photos of families they won’t see for a year, maybe more, hoping what money they’ve sent home will make some nth bit more difference in the lives they’ve been dealt ... corporate execs and basketball stars lost in 10,000-foot houses, surrounded with every toy in the world, their holiday perfect, stellar, almost .... My family in their houses near and far, my wife’s family in theirs, and every anonymous and never-to-be-known abode inbetween: Such the chorus assembled at the border, just a hair’s breath from crossing Over, an angel’s sense of eternity, a berserker’s fuse, a child’s list of reasons why Santa should not stop by this year:

And all the world’s quiet at this border, stilled to a hush, lulled by angels we know so little anymore, if ever, their soft choiring from just over the whole spread tableaux, praising so bittersweetly the labor of this night we can’t see, just what is being delved and from where, just what we’ll find of ourselves under the tree, the next incarnation of all that must be ...

Christmas Day

6:32 a.m., my wife up and at it already, the matriarchal nest-compulsions fidgeting and stressing her into action -- last gifts to wrap for her family’s affair (mine with my mother and sister and her kids was last night), a cake to bake (vowing to show her mother and sister this time), spraypainting flowerpots for flowers going to her sister, etc., etc., ad celestium nauseum. Baroque Christmas music on the stereo, Violet aflutter with the morning’s activity and a wet front muscling through outside, alternating wind and rains, Christmas ‘05 through a wet dark lens. I dreamt last night of an all-night nekyia with some friend, us having a long dialogue through the stations of the night, talking a while outside an apartment complex while bar patrons shuffled home, a bright yellow car with all sorts of NASCAR paraphenelia plastered on it, high-amperage testosterone, a girl in a bathroom (the haul of that driver), us just lingering outside that scene, observing (I touch one finger to the car), moving on, ending up at my aunt and uncle’s house as they are first getting up, my aunt yawning, turning on lights in the kitchen while I apologize for being early, my brother-in-law (on my sister’s side), feeding a huge steak to the grill (we are to barbecue steaks as part of the coming event at my wife’s parents’ house), the day too early, already about its courses, seamless with the night’s long abuses, peramble, discourse ...

***

“Among the Ammasalik Eskimo” we are told by Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,, “the disciple does not go to the old angalok ... to be initiated; the shaman himself chooses the candidate in early childhood. From among boys from six to eight the shaman selects those whom he considers most gifted for shamanism, ‘in order that a knowledge of the highest powers in existence may be preserved for the coming generation.’”

Does that selection yet continue, even now, even though the physical shamans have mostly disappeared, or now wear such elaborate masks that we never can see them, or that our own conscious equipage has made our heads too brilliant a bulb to see them approaching in the dark? To me it seems that They’re there, fingering us from the undersides of our emotions, drawing us out on the mojo of nipples and blues and fairytale finnfolk. Every strangeness and wild thus archangelic and initiatory, for those who would let imagined senses fly ...

“Only certain especially gifted souls, dreamers, visionaries of hysterical temperament, can be chosen,” Eliade continues. “An old angalok finds a pupil, and the teaching is conducted in the deepest secrecy, far fro the hut, in the he mountains. The angalok teaches him to isolate himself in a lonely place -- besides and old grave, by a lake -- and there to rub two stones together while waiting for the significant event. ‘Then the bear of the lake or the inland glacier will come out, he will devour all your flesh and make you skeleton, and you will die. But you will recover your flesh, and you will awaken, and your clothes will come rushing to you.’” (58-9)

Indeed. This day -- having crossed the Border, through regions of culture and nature and sleep -- seems to be one of awakening with a new order of bones, fleshed in what organ of sense this skin and skein of words presents to the page.

(It’s now 9 a.m., my wife and I watching the rag ends of “A Christmas Story” as we breakfasted on waffles and bacon, reveling in the archetype of American Christmas, part of it in our own cultural way, exchanging a few gifts -- things are tight this year (Count Basie CD from the ‘30s, peppermint truffles and the first volume of Bob Dylan’s autobiography for my wife, Anthony Delbanco’s new biography of Herman Melville, shaving lotion, sox and a meat thermometer for me) while Violet romped amid ribbons and crepe paper. Now my wife is in earnest with her family Christmas labors and I write here, a man happy and grateful for what endures, at great cost, and albeit with no guarantees for more than this moment, this prayer of joy ...)




At the solstice I cast an I-Ching, an occasional ritual for that time of year -- several years now since the last one -- and the hexagram was #2, The Receptive, six yielding lines offering the great Yin, the perfect complement of The Creative, the Yang ... Image here the earth in devotion to the sky, space against time, the female-maternal against the male paternal. Not opposition but a hierarchy, things in their place, and when in accord most powerful and vital.

So sd. the Judgment:

The Receptive brings about sublime success,
Furthering through the perserverence of a mare.
If the superior man undertakes something and tries to lead,
He goes astray;
But if he follows, he finds guidance ...

Comments Helmut Wilhelm: “The receptive connotes spatial reality in contrast to the spiritual potentiality of Creative. The potential becomes real and the spiritual becomes spatial through a specifically qualifying definition. The horse belongs to earth just as the dragon belongs to heaven. Its tireless roaming over the plains is taken as a symbol of the vast expanse of the earth. Only because nature in its myriad forms corresponds with the myriad impulses of the Creative can it make those impulses real. Nature’s richness lies in it is power to give them beauty and splendor. ... It is the Creative that begets things, but they are brought to birth by the Receptive ...

“The superior man lets himself be guided; he does not go ahead blindly, but learns from the situation what is demanded of him and then follows the intimation from fate.”

And later, from the Image: “The superior man who has breadth of character carries the outer world.”

***

Odd that in this forum (of flickers in a bone scriptorium) so dedicated to the fructifying hot seed of pneuma, to spermatakoi logos,, to dat old debbil jism that lights the night afire; Odd that the I Ching would augur so resoundingly its other, the page not the rage. Initially I think here that the job for the coming year is to support and nourish what has already been planted, bringing things to fruition, maybe publishing, or maybe just assembling the writings in more articulated shape. The fury of production over these past few years, can it, should it be sustained? Or does the work shift to making real what was imagined, real-ish, given more of a proper paper prairie to roam over?

Perhaps. Rain now, the morning drowsing back. I want to go read some of that Melville biography, call both of my parents in their separate worlds and thank them for this inheritance, sleep maybe a while on the couch, just let the change carry over and through ...


1:21 p.m.

As my wife wearily showers & primps for her family event, which we leave for in an hour or so. Breezy, sometimes sunny, sometimes not, still haunched with a cold front’s muscularity though there’s not much sight of rain, not for now. The bleary sunlight of Christmas Day, the early-morning resonance of present-opening glut ebbed back to dulled nothing, what to do now? Too soon to think about bills, too late to go back over any of that prior pre-Christmas territory which amplified magic and hope through monster speakers in the mind. A torpor, sleepy, nothing much to do but eat, drink, grow sour ... Not looking forward to SR-46 on Christmas Night (we drive it both ways toward my wife’s parents), a two-lane rural nightmare that’s become crowded with development, always a wreck somewhere along its 20 mile length, huge black scars in the pavement every quarter mile, tiny roadside crosses of fake flowers that flash in the headlights a nanosecond of someone else’s mortality and then are gone. What’s that swing-era cry-in-your beer song, “Blue Christmas”? Indeed. Hard to stay out of the way of such misery. Hopefully the roads won’t be too wet, too sloshed, too riven ...

I keep dipping in here coming up with empty buckets, brimming with words that don’t say much. Void of course. What does one do in the interim between getting new bones and having your clothes fly back toward you? Having travelled, on paper at least, past one border far enough to wonder what the next defines? Standing here in the great resonant emptiness of a world-wide prairie, hearing horses gallop somewhere just out of sight, the wind like the last dying breath of the Gaul, the God, the sentence? And without even the comfort of art, which presupposes a design to the mystery of nothing? A breath inside the empty crypt, indeed ... a wind ...

Am I just sailing along with the “polar wind” which steered Melville on the damned courses of “Moby-Dick”? And justly so? Delbanco, from Melville: His World and Work

***

Even before the last vestiges of what William James called “tender-minded” faith in “the great universe of God” drained out of nineteenth-century thought, Melville had surveyed with twentieth-century suspicion all claims of metaphysical warrant for any idea or ideology. Long before the existentialist movement, he composed what Albert Camus called an “Odyssey beneath an empty sky, in which there came forth, out of endless darkness ... the visages of foam and night” -- not only in Moby-Dick but in a series of works that seemed to anticipate the angst of modern life. (13-14)

***

And again:

***

“I love all men who dive,” Melville once said of Emerson, whom he counted among the “corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.” But writing of those (including himself) who dream of penetrating to the depths of things, he gave vent to a feeling somewhere between eulogy and mockery that marks him as a fellow traveller in our post-theistic world. Consider this passage from Pierre, which can be read as a retort to the Romantic faith -- still very much alive in Melville’s time -- that at the core of each of us there is some form or germ or spark or trace of God, if we could only find it:

“{As} far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to be nothing but surface stratified on surface, to its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains, we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcaphagus; but we lift the lid -- and no body is there! -- appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of man!”

There is in that last sentence an antic, even cruel view of man driving himself through an arduous quest only to discover at the climactic moment that in fact there is nothing to be unearthed -- nothing but more mud, rock, dirt -- and that the self, like the universe, is devoid of meaning except for the meanings we project onto it for the sake of reassuring ourselves ... (13-14)

***

Paper comforts, perhaps, but resonant and vital and real nonetheless. As Tony Tanner suggested, there is presence even in absence ... harrowing the empty belltower, now that’s the task ... ringing ghost bells ... offering these conceits tit, blue nourishment, fertilizer, time ... are the roots starting to grip down into the next room of the dream, the land beyond the past border, the next song cycle, the breviary of seas?

December 26 (Monday)

Blowing hard and cold outside, old regnancies rolling, like heads, helter-skelter across the sky, greenknightwise, boulder-sized knockers blickering gibberish gales through the camphor and oaks, an inordinate peripheral commotions which causes the cats to twitch their ears and shy as they feed on the back porch, alert to predators or prey, the ghostly dyspepsia thereof, an attenuation brought on by weather, by appetite, by rag-ends of old, perhaps ancient memories whipped up on a breeze ...

Eh tu, Kahoutek? Last night I stepped out from my wife’s parents’ house, everyone else jabbering away in whorls of family remembrance I am too peripheral to, the house bright and warm, glutted with food and sweets, a beaming torpor, the talk a languid, cooing drone ... Outside in the vast alternate night it’s windy but not cool, last of the day spooring down to a singular rooks far to the west, purple night blossoming into black, a bright planet high in the sky and the traceries of stars opening their eyes, beginning to burn, too dark for the angels to sing “White Christmas,” too Floridian still for the guzzlers of misery to hymn “Blue Christmas,” or both, maybe, perplex, contemporary, striated with too much holiday freight long soured ...

And I wondered: If the meaningful God is to nights just a resonance, does Lover so suffer too? The Beloved aging into the bell-tower of what could never be more than unrequitable ache ... Worth considering, I thought as I ambled down from house to the lake, admiring the Christmas tree lights on three houses scattered around Lake Charm, a sprinkling of cheer amid the other houses all dark, the lake waters ripply in the breeze, lights fractured on the surface, sounds of busy traffic just beyond the marge of wealthy houses.

Well, what if, or if not? My wife inside chattering on as usual with her sister, exhausted from so much earnest preparation for this matriarchal high mass of home, hearth and horticulture, ignoring me mostly as she usually does when with her nuclear family, so tight that radus of gestations for better and ill: No real matter -- long seasoning makes me grateful for just what is, and besides, it’s a slight chill I can accommodate, even welcome, providing enough distance to allow me to slip out the door and walk alone in the night, wondering if Love, too, is an empty chamber at the deep center of the heart, unoccupied, unoccupiable, even when the participants are most present ...

Not that I was bitching. My belly full, my hours harrowed by all of this family engagement, this life affords the world, days enthusiastically lived, the saturate glow of efforts harvested by day’s end, weary, aging, so grateful to be at home, here, in world like this. I’ve learned to keep sexual fevers bound between paper margins, and my faith, and my dream of the Beloved: all wild and free here, freeing me to live real days in durable ardor, nothing to really earn but nothing to significantly lose, either, such magnitudes repealed from the day’s faces and surfaces. I can still pray to be of service to God and my fellows, to try to love rather than be loved (a la the prayer of St. Francis), to head back into the house and have a rich time with the proceedings, laughing my head off during the Chinese gift exchange and when my wife served up the cake she’d so carefully and earnestly tried to perfect, which somehow was filled with bits of doily that had migrated from the plate all through the moist cake, adding a surprise element which no one could understand ... Laughing with this assortment of people I would never come in contact with if I hadn’t married my wife, stayed with my wife, came back to my wife, worked hard with my wife, come to this day with my wife throughout nine years of hard work and frustration and gratitude: My wife sitting across from me in the den for the last hour of the night’s proceedings, pretty, shapely, her face alight with laughter, showing a youth in her, perhaps the daughter and sister of old, in full merriment, allowing herself to be the butt of jokes, her cake scandalous, her coming operation she melodramatically anticipated (“Oh IF I get up from that slab”), not a whit of Melville in those sweet bluegreen eyes, doesn’t give a shit about anything I write passionately about except that she’s glad I enjoy myself when at these mindful pleasures, the sea I ride and dive and drown in so incessantly crashing on shores she’ll never hear, the woman’s voice I hear in that surf so tangential to my wife’s that they only have timbre in common, an upper cleff lilt, their modes and keys and lyrics equidistant as the shores of the sea which gave birth to the moon:

Can I call this a vitality, a courage, more primary and primal even though I’m just ruminating by a lake just beyond dusk in a wealthy little neighborhood of a huge vacant suburb? Is the Beloved nowhere to be found in the mortal bourne, the same as the Deity isn’t, except in the sound of the words I tide in longing and ravishment daily across pages no one will read? Is there the satisfaction of deity (albeit a lost one) in that I get to say amen right here, shut down the damn computer and then trudge upstairs back to Paradise, leaving angst and saw and brutally hard winds behind me at the proscenium I cross back over at the top of the stairs into real time, my blackened Thor’s countenance faded into that of a weary husband in need of the soft warm shape of his wife under massed covers with the indoors cat nudged up close, first light always Edenic, tearing every apple from the tree to describe the pale white and green environment she created with linens and ceramics and plants, the widest welcome that woman can give me, whispering You Are Here as I climb back in bed? Can such a peramble between worlds be adult and vital and true enough?

Actually, today, I’m letting my wife sleep as long as she cares to, without disturbance from me: She’s wholly spent from two days of family events, desperate for rest. I got up at 3:30 with a raging migraine, took a Frova, fed Violet her treats, lay on the couch with the heat on and a blanket wrapped round me, listening to the night’s wind and imagining my wife sucking me off or offering her breasts for me to suckle and then fuck, falling off to dream of a graduate rooming house comprised of tiny “floors,” each with two desks and two beds, spiralling up or down or both: I was trying to find one with room for me, but all seemed occupied, owned by others, even though each room was empty ... Then I was in a house where my wife or mother slept upstairs, and I was trying to work my way into a romance going on between two young people, trying to inhale that old torrid fragrance, but my father showed up and I had to somehow entertain and talk with him while still stealing whiffs of passion and worrying about waking my wife upstairs. I wake around 5, make coffee, take another Frova (bad fucker, bad), try to focus on studies though I’m tired, horny, lonely, getting up frequently to check to see if the cats are out back for their morning feeding (Blue and Mamacita weren’t around when we got back last night around 11 p.m.), nothing much appearing on the page, though there was resonance enough in the following passage from Eliade:

****

( At the end of an Eskimo shaman’s initiation)

... the master obtains the angakoq for him, also called quamaneq, that is, the disciple’s “lightning” or “enlightenment,” for the angakoq consists of a mysterious light which the shaman suddenly feels inside his body, inside his head, within the brain, an inexplicable searchlight, a luminous fire, which enables him to see into the dark, both literally and metaphorically speaking, for he can now, even with closed eyes, see through darkness and perceive things and coming events which are hidden from others; thus they look into the future and into the secrets of others.

... The candidate obtains this mystical light after long hours of waiting, sitting on a bench in his hut and invoking the spirits. When he experiences it for the first time “it is as if the house in which he is suddenly rises; he sees far ahead of him, through mountains, exactly as if the earth were one great plain, and his eyes could reach to the ned of the earth. Nothing is hidden from him any longer; not only can he see things far, far away, but he can also discover souls, stolen souls, that are either kept concealed in far, strange lands or have been taken up or down to the land of the Dead.” (Shamanism 60-1)

***

A resonance which I wrote down and here, in drafting the next ghost yodel of a post, write down again, using if to empower my eyes to lift high over all I’ve stained with words here, and say there’s a method to this mad rant, this venting, this babbling skull, this cockadoodlediddling over pinkpuckered butts and howitzering hooters, this noctal postprelapsarian growl round an eternally iced vent. The method is one I learned as a kid in the bushes, the first part being I’ll Show You Mine -- all of it, the whole verbal rant, as if I were couchant to Freud and free-associating wherever the sick boy deigns to ramble, free-writing, wave-horse riding to shores I’ll never understand, much less name, in augment and majesty to the forever-waylaid expectation

That You, audience of none, my God, my Beloved, my infernally lost Reader, that hence,

having Shown You Mine,

You will, in turn,

Show Me Yours,

Please open wide the barred door,

Reply with blue roar for this white journal’s pour;
deliver me the Green Knight’s greater night’s noggin for all the yolk I poured from Gawain’s Christian noodle; give me salt sass for this verbatim sea mass, malt brine for red swine, sibylline slither in precise repayment for the incessant plunge of these words in she-diving sea sounds. ...



See? I’ve plopped my primary organ of preterite gnosis verbally plump and quivering and slick and empurply-enraged right here on the page on the screen, the black shaman who chants God’s song from the dong, my trout of truth back from the eternally lost wave: Here I am, God, girl in the black polka dot dress, numen of unbreachable shores, Here is what You made of me in the undertowing vicissitudes of night and its later revisions:

Take me or no, but grant me

A Show, just A Peek,

(Not a real one, don’t call or write, don’t blight my mortal days with any actual sight of real shores, but show me ones more real than the peel, the venereal verdure inside the fisherman’s creel),

A parted feather, A garter, The thinnest pantied border at the top of a leg, or a bit farther, Just one pubic hair, The barest outlines of pubis against panty cotton, The first infinitesimal parting of wet expectant lips, Oh just the tippytop gloss of patina on the little man in the boat’s head, The first velvet chamber inside the crack of sweet doom, An ear of the horse god etched on the first cavern wall, A single drip of that ocean crashing here, The very first sigh of that surf which repeats my name over and and over in the the foam wilderness of Yes ...

***

This infernal discourse has a purpose, a porpoise to ride, a dolphinned port to pore, a porous pour from the white whale’s well, verbal contingencies all of life beyond one Border, into the polymorphose perversities of this Next, pouring an endless blue bladders of versific prose ...

What souls are imprisoned here, crying to be freed from their cages? Hers? My own? That quarto of augments whose ledgerdemain caterwauled into cats?

SHADDUP! they yowl. If there’s one thing nature abhors, its a vacuum. But see how big and long I get, sticking my head all the way in!



Tuesday, 12/26, 4:18 a.m.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

-- T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” from Four Quartets


Coldest night of the near-lost year, though all is bright enough. My wife sleeps off a terrible headache upstairs with a window open and the cats are sleeping elsewhere, foregoing the towel-lined boxes we set on chairs on the back porch for them, one box even with a heating pad set on low -- preferring the cold as dint of wilderness? Their pelts what separates this mind from their claws? And the teeth of late-year weather, cold enough long enough to rip the throat of warmer occlusions, leaving me bareassed & shivering Here, where all things end and begin.

And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.


Bright enough, because so lost, tossed on a sea great verbals do name, for the very liquid element of this derange is salty brogue, cock buried to the balls in pinkvelvet organum, plunging and withdrawing a naked stone angel til every nerve-end is You ... and the entire surf pounds the ritual in rise and foam and crash and boom down eternity’s white-assed shore, again and forever, requieted ever in the saying ...

‘Twas a baptism back of sorts, crossing that Border this time, back through Gehenna’s brilliant difference into the old similitude, back into the brine, as a selkie shods himself in seal, and dives, with a shout, from sands he will never return to as a man ...

A reverse baptism, perhaps, passing back all the way through Justin Martyr (d. 140 AD), the Church Father who found in baptism what he failed to find in philosophy: “This washing we call illumination; because those who learn these things become illuminated in their meaning” -- a baptism which demonized the daimones, condemning pagan pieties where “the old gods have the beauty and goodness of the sun, the sea, the wind, the mountains, great wild animals; splendid, powerful and dangerous realities that do not come within the sphere of morality, and are in no way concerned about the human race” (A.H. Armstrong, quoted in Pagels’ The Origin of Satan)

-- Passing through the waters of Justin’s baptism as part of a third baptism, back into the cold venereal sea of Leviathan, born again back to more primary gods, the Christian illumination washed from my face, that old condemnation of the earth and the body, the satire and the stout penis, demons renounced for daimons, Manannan invited back to Iona’s shores, or Oran allowed entry to the old sea-gods spiral castle at the bottom of the sea, some critical mass of culture now swinging back the other way, Church fathers back into Black Mothers, potentiae into terra firma,, dragon back to mare, desire welled beneath what’s beneath the Beloved’s ever-sleeping frame, on that distant island Love will never name ...

Some minister of this prays over me as I stand in the waters of the Atlantic on a summer’s morn equidistant yet quintessential of this morning, praying in tongues for my reverting soul, Celtic or Roman, Greek or Scythian, I dunno, a flood-tide of dead vitalities in utter praise of lost gods, whirling in my ear the way the imagined sea tides across my hips, warm and dark and infinite:

And leans me back into the plooff and and dark settling down into this watery prehistory, this amniotic soak, this drowse beyond my Beloved’s Yes Oh Yes, not dreaming nor singing nor fucking but writing in blue augment of all three, inside and down and still, six feet down in the water while the Minister passes me back to the Wave which washes all the way through me in that dark, washing clean my one-Christian soul, returning my sight to the dark’s peculiar strange and wild lucency, back to the gutteral ball-spume of original language, first songs, lasting ends:

Even the Minister’s different now, morphed in that blue transit into Aphrodite’s first son, the puerile eros obedient to waves, tipping gold and leaden the barbs of exult, ferrying a quiver of awe and awfulness through every love and life: It is He who lifts me here, spluttering and dazed and bewildered as a child delved from Her wave, newborn, or newly borne on first shores, the light here milky and sweet, a taste of honey on my nipple-sucked tongue, nothing yet known, yet certain, though it’s certain this ain’t Kansas where intelligent design trumps science, nor 2005 shotgunning ‘06, nor dumped in a wild frozen waste down a porcelain postmodern pout-potty: No:

It’s as sweet and summery as the day I played by the sea on a beach near Jacksonville when I was three, digging up sand with a toy shovel while the sea pounded in one ear and my mother’s voice sang into the other, mixing and blending a salt sweetness into the mortar of that sand castle I was heaping, sand I would eat in dazed reverence, glutting on the substantial host, the present divinity, the actual God of real days: Thus my baptism here returns me to that beach, to the wide earth of the fructifying life, the Creative come home to roost in the nest of the Receptive, to get this party started, this bouree of bossa nova rum booty, this imp-angelic discourse on the intercoursal arousings of the devouring white sea ...

Host of beloveds, wine of whale’s blood: baptismal communions of the adventure Oran now dreams ...

Anyhoo: Time to get ready to go back to work, plan the day while I linger in the hot soak of the shower, for there is lots to get done: a wife to wake with my hands and cats to stroke and feed; miles and miles to drive in the dreary blur of the working damned; this post to upload and emails to check; turbines of the weekly production to fire up, short week, my assistant out today, our proofreader out too, compressing deadlines and turnarounds into a geoligical smash; sponsees to check on, prayers to say to them, prayers for whatever words they most need to hear; the office needs cleaning in advance of the visit from the NY suits next week (gotta see of my dress pants still fit, oy vey); pictures to finalize for my wife’s portfolio, tweaks to her brochure, careful eye on the checkbook, money’s so tight; get on to the gym later this afternoon to work down some of this holiday lardage; et cetera. The Day. Oatmeal finished over the course of this paragraph, 6:04 a.m., time to head upstairs, let this surf fade away into the surer susurrations of a blue I cannot hear or heal or write or love or pray to, though that deep’s my earth, my mer mare, my liquid bones, my star-shelled firmament, my pouring plain ...


We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.