Big Wind, Deep Wave

... Young man,
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
has forced wide open by your own voice--learn

to forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

-- Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I.3
transl. Stephen Mitchell

***

I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as a lamb. It is not a piece of feminine Spitalfields silk -- but it is of the horrbile texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.

-- Melville on Moby Dick in a letter to Hawthorne, ca. 1853

***

Groaning up a-weary & so sleepy this 3:15 a.m., weekend sleep (later beddings and wakings) making of the hour a dense sludge, rising zomboid from our bed into the cold blue moonlight which fills the room with lucent viscosities not meant for us to name, making my way wearily downstairs to this white writing chair with its stack of books to the right, Violet sitting patiently awaiting treats & the garden outside in the dark dead and huge in mid-winter’s gestative swoon.

A front came through on Friday night with massive rollers of winds that surely loosed from Arctic shores, making of somewhat cold night a nasty chill-factor, rocking the eaves of the house and whipping the oaks and camphor tree like the heads of drowning sailors, like those primal sexual passions which overwhelmed me into flattened surrender to agencies somehow inside and beyond the sexual thrall,

To wit,



RUDE PSALTER

Jan. 15, 2005

It is in such a mythical horizon that
we must place the relations of shamans
with their “celestial wives”; it is not
they who, properly speaking, consecrate
the shaman; they help him either in his
instruction or his ecstatic experience.
It is natural that the “celestial wife’s”
intervention in the shaman’s mystical
experience should be accompanied
by sexual emotion; every ecstatic experience
is subject to such deviations, and
the close relations between mystical
and carnal love are too well known for
the mechanisms of this shift in plane
to be misunderstood.

Then, too, it must not be overlooked
that the erotic elements present in
shamanic rites exceed the mere
relationship with the shaman and his
“celestial wife.” Among the Kumandin
of the Tomsk region the horse sacrifice
includes an exhibition of wooden
masks and phalli, carried by three
young men; they gallop with the
phallus between their legs “like a
stallion” and touch the spectators.
The song sung on this occasion is
distinctly erotic.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, p. 79

For every woman I fell through
crying rude and louder names
was a song born here
for flying low through
so blue and bolder heavens?
Were all those beds
like drums which beat
in carnal waves against doors
which opened for later,
like gestated wombs, to
paper shores where
the big night music found
wings and fins and hooves,
some inside yogi’s sense
slickened in the narrows
of those sum cunts
to font and yell these laster songs?
A hard cold front
wracks the night outside
with horse-wild winds,
smashing through our town
like some wicked storm surge,
a polar berserker’s cock
plunged all the way to here,
huge balls primed with
narwhal fire and sea ice.
I can see his face now
jammed against the window,
its one horrid eye or mouth
gaping rude down the
corridors of time, a visage
hard as granitic stone,
seeing and saying all
that rock first foamed
in magmatic spew, an ire
which foments on the page
in paper faux-angelic fire.
He is the marrow of my
plunging nights, the spine
of this incessant plunge
across and down the page,
the consort of the Queen
Of Beasts, eager as all
death with the surging song
I cry ejaculate and wild
right here, harbored home at last.
Those real nights are
now memories -- far perhaps
for the real cock and ball
show others must vault through,
but all these paper
nights require to dream
sufficient strength to leap
upstream in faith and
fury of far older things
than a poet’s history
or a man’s receipt,
leaping and muscling
a tide of songs in a
spermatazoic spoor,
the quick and loosened
jism of the lord marauding
through this darkly
sweet-loined night. The
songs of vicious summer
are gestated here, thrust
like seeds into the garden
by a horsecock that seems
ten thousand miles long
and twice yet as hard as
any song I’ve yet to swell
from those old cantankerous
desires. One hundred sixty
one years to the night Sire
Melville was born, I headed
out to celebrate my birth
and found a woman in
a bar who smiled and
leaned in close in the
roar of rock and roll
and invited me
to roam the plashing
steppes between her thighs;
a few hours later I
found myself more
enrapt and harder
than I’d ever been before,
a bone length of salmon
iron which no amount
of savage all-night fucking
could requite as we
yelped and squawked
the names of gods
I never heard again,
expiring of at last
our unquenched souls
on the pyre of a
pale midday white bed.
That night’s now gone
to dust amid the
gritty white crust
which glued us fast
as we slept deep into
the hungover afternoon,
gone with the color
of her eyes which
too soon said farewell
to me -- blue like the
summer ocean I
thought was home, lamped
by a golden ecstasy
which was never about
me or my cock
and survived that affair
to romp inside this
morning’s horse-cocked
winds. My words are
pregnant with the soar of
Thor-Mephisto winds I’ll
never ride the wildest
heavens of inside
the fleshy margins of,
though I try, here
and upstairs where
I soon enough will
go to wake my wife. Suffice
that these pages whip
and flutter and
turn fast to primal songs
breathed from the
spout of the lewd
orifice jammed hard
against the windows
of this yet-awakened
day. Enthrall my words,
o bluebelling master, with
what Your earth and sky
require. And I will ride
my keening orcas into
the blackest billows
of your savage choir.

***

When I talked to my father on Sunday morning he said they were in the midst of a bad windstorm, 14 degree temps on the thermometer whipped to subzero depths by gales which had arrived in the night and were still raging in mid-morning, knocking over trees with winds gusting up to 60 mph. Same Thor? A paternal or perhaps totem brutality, the angelic maul which stampedes overhead in measure to something which batters and battens within, under what’s under sex.


THE WINDBLOWN

April 2004

“I’m back again: the fast wind
spinning over wheat-top,
the faceless tumbleweed bouncing
over an earthen lyric,
the sky twirling tinctures
of black in a cloudy bowl...”

I wrote those lines two and
a half decades ago in one
of those half-poems I
suffered which seem to rise
with such urgency only to
end in half-finished ellipses.
Still I always remember
the power I felt with those
words announcing that
spring more than one year’s
vernals had broken free
from my history’s boreal funk,
an alarum of wind smelling of
fresh blooms and blood-metal
with the force of a stampede.
My own heart in the heat
of my hand was riding that pack,
or greeting it with the widest
welcome I could name.
At that moment I felt like one
finished grieving the dead,
one done to the gills with
the mordents of inwardness.
I’m back shouts the soul
and an arousing thunder
cracks open the sky.
Give me that urgency
which young lovers feel with
every sharpened sense,
slapping their moist bodies at the
other like clapping hands,
like rain at last at night
in a forest of cock and cunt.
My eyes, my eyes:
chasing down the long horizon
for a sleek shape. My ears, my
ears: where is she?
I wrote, and two weeks later
I did meet her. Invocation
preceded the frenzied pneuma,
as the high white ache and
break of winter cliffs
foments that spring runoff
which massively hurls toward
the sea, foaming the falls,
deranging the mind.
There’s still enough scent in
the jasmine this morning
to guide my hand back
there to here, even when
days are hardly young and worse.
My wife came home from
the hospital yesterday a wreck,
crying inconsolably after she
told me her father couldn’t
say who she was. In that hour
I ferried all the consolation
my God provides -- called my
uncle (a retired neurosurgeon)
and parlayed his equal take
on the situation -- difficult,
yes, but no cause for alarm--,
poured water from a red
bucket on all the new plants
in the garden, fed all the cats &
made us a simple dinner,
reduced all to a quiet drone which
cradled my wife at last into
the heaviest sleep. Let her
sleep long and well, Lord,
while I return to unsheathing,
honing this blade I found inside
and against an old grinding stone.
Each line here passes
this way then that,
narrowing the sword’s edge
to the sharpest second
where the wind suddenly
wakes from the dark mess
of time, cutting the wheatfield
like the fin of a great fish whose
saddle I here mount
till the Thrill is You,
a split till pouring blue coinage,
booty at last. Lord grant me fury
to campaign all the way south.
Shoe these wild verses
for their charge from my mouth.
I’m back again—
Please send the big winds.



My wife and I took a walk on Saturday morning while that huge sky was at work, wrapped in several layers of sweats, hugging coats tight as we leaned into our forward progress through neighborhoods bright but empty, everyone shut inside. Lake Dora was whitecapped and strolling briskly toward the boat ramp, the gates to the sky fully opened and all that northern impetus flooding at and through us. Shit, we muttered, hurrying around that windy moat, our talk of meals for the week and worries about one or other parent and equally heated commentaries about a wayward friend and the Bush administration tucked away until we could get out of the assault of the wind. My wife was certainly being brave that day -- she hates the wind -- while it was brutal good fun for me, loving for whatever reasons as I do the totem pleasures of such regent air. Maybe Montaigne fished out the essence when he wrote, “We are all wind. And even the wind, more wisely than we, loves to make a noise and move about, and is content with its own functions without wishing for stability and solidity, qualities that do not belong to it.”

Or are not content with those qualities, sensing what washes not from without but within?

***

The front wore itself out through Saturday until it was just cold, the following night still and blue with lunar otherlight -- oh not that cold, maybe 38 or so -- while we dined on slowcooked ribs & watched a video of 70’s-vintage flick, “The Parallax View” or some shit like that, not very good, faux-artsy, a Statement by some director who’s now long gone, lots of long-view long-shots of industrial corporate and big-school interiors,
the menace of The Organization, the thrall of conspiracy theories, Warren Beatty looking way too cute-lipped to be convincing as a hard-boiled investigative reporter fighting and fucking his way to The Truth ... Maybe the movie’s conceit was new back in the ‘70s but we’re jaded in our knowledge of corporate malfeasance, and have long spiralled the labyrinths of conspiracy, sped hilariously in shot-lenth, movies now edited in a be-bop tempos, the wired end of the indoctrination slideshow the Parallax Company used to bless the dark passions of those deviants it recruited for company sanctions. It’s not really worth much mention, bad movie, maybe by old standards as well as current ones. But it was diversion enough for us, my wife’s operation looming a week from now, cold night outside, the routine of dinner & TV & a warm bed creaturely enough comfort against middle-age wearies, worries, meditations on


THE WHITENESS OF
THE WHALE

Sunday, Jan. 16

This elusive quality it is, which causes
the thought of whiteness, when
divorced from more kindly associations,
and coupled with any object terrible
in itself, to brighten that terror to the
furthest bounds.

-- Melville, “The Whiteness of The Whale,”
Moby-Dick

(Robert) Frost believed that individual
venture and vision arose as a creative
defense against emptiness, and that it
was therefore always possible that
relapse into emptiness would be
the ultimate destiny of consciousness.

-- Seamus Heaney

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

-- Moby Dick

..the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

— WH Auden, “The Sea and the Mirror”

Light though thou be, thou leapest
out of darkness; but I am darkness
leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!

-- Ahab, “The Candles,” Moby-Dick

Every morning I sit here
at the deep end of the night
with an ear pressed to a
great sea-wall, hearkening
to white voices in their
papered cum-liquid thrall.
I’ve spent years at this
listening post and
I’ve yet to yield more
than ghostly washing
sounds -- a few skulls
knocking from the other side,
a headboard’s metronome
in sum of remembered
nights of thumping bones,
the clang of a lost church-
bell tolling those
drowned sailors who
file like churchmen
in blue moonlight through
the garden just outside.
Not much of an education
but enough to tune my ears
to the washing sound
the angels tide, deep waves
against the wall of words
which holds me here
at 6 a.m. this Sunday
in the 48th Year of
the sea-lord who’s
poured my mortal coil.
I’ve listened at that wall
so long I can’t tell which
is the sea and what it
has behooved in this
bluer me, a water-riding one
who dives whale-like
into the darkest trenches
of the heart a man
of words can blubber.
The difference may be
moot by now (like shades
of bone-gleam starlight),
as if the ear I press here
is tuned exactly to
the one pressed back
in liquid harmony.
This song is what perhaps
we both hear inside
this porcelain chapel
of pink and blue, a conch
of winding rooms that
opens here and there
where all shores receipt
the pain of so much
pounded bone. Last night
I dreamed of wandering
with wife all night in
search of some beachside
house we once enjoyed
but we got lost in all that
night, my compass wrong,
my sextant fallen.
We ended up at 4 a.m.
in some charnel project
at the shore’s worst ghetto
where dopers and dickheads
breathed hot blades upon
our backs, eager for my
black wallet and my wife’s
white ass. Seeing
the way so unsafe I
cycled us back to first light
in some a beachside town
which was near but still
between the home I
sought to get us to
and the dream’s unfailing
snarl. We settled in a
rude cafe where
citizens on welfare
smacked down eggs
and grits with steaming
carafes of black whale oil.
I asked around for directions
to Daytona Beach,
the next named shore
on down the map,
borrowing a cellphone
from some fat patroness
and getting a cab company
of sorts on the line.
The dispatcher was
some black woman who
I could barely understand,
husking that help was on the way
though she couldn’t say
just when. You just believe
that hep is on the way
she slurred and then rung off,
leaving us to stare out
the large plate glass window
at no streets that I could
name, much less decide
the towns they might barb.
It’s cold again this morning,
Red in the back window
at 5 a.m. looking hungry
and miserable, a sad nth
to this winter’s night in
Paradise. The winds have
slowed to mournful stirrings
which deep waters wear
like a crown of white foam,
the out and inside brutality
of incessant paper seas.
I’m drifting off to sleep
here, too washed to
make much sense of
what’s washing back,
though I perceive a
wetter wall is hard
against the wet
words I’ve been writing
down. I can’t see or
name it though I feel
it hail below, melting
every wakeful line
into the white washes of
what’ I’ll never grow
as long as I keep writing
in this way --
a whiteness
enrapt and jawing
wide what’s ending
here