Code Noir

We are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time and its creatures floweth and are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty ..

-- Emerson, “The Poet”

“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poorer eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee.

-- Ahab, “The Candles,” in Melville's Moby Dick


CODE NOIR

Jan. 11, 2006

When Louisiana was first
colonized by the French,
intermarriage between whites
and their black slaves was
encouraged to create a buffer
class of Creoles who might
prevent insurrection.

The image of my hexagram
shows Emerson astride fish
Melville, the deep-diving man
astride a unknown darker purpose.
Both dominate the thinking
song which tides deep in my ear,
lashed together like Ahab to
Saint Moby, a drowned sound
deep inside the words I pour
out here. If my poems were
doubloons, you’d see on one
face Emerson’s “infinitude
of the private man” reversed by
Melville’s “ungodly godlike” heart.
Code Noir keeps me from
drying or dying of too much
of either, my highs baleened,
the black ship steered clear
of its own self-killing ground.
Emerson affirms the throne-
like augments of this writing
chair while Melville kicks
me up and out of it
to join the working fray.
I once believed I could
burrow all the way to God
right here until the depths
grew chill and dense as
silence, ten atmospheres
of Me in fraught degrees
and starry adjectives
and yet no closer in
the quest. Older now
in my enquiries, it suffices
to marvel at all the blue
such depths propound
and leave it on the page
as some paper godhood’s rage
for orders no one can name,
much less corner and
barb clean through. I always
paddle back to shore
clinging to the covers
of this book, finding enough
ballast in the bombast
of “placard capitals” for
naught to ride on through
the rest of my indifferent
so incessant day. That
day belongs to Melville,
in the mystery of word
and world, where art
and heart are so confused
that seas are songs
for sots and dreamers
in the drone of fat machines,
allowing history to
fail and fall in golden
clatters right into
the pockets of the rich.
Code Noir makes
Emerson’s “The Poet’”
my theme astride
Melville’s Moby Dick,
that gnostic counter-meme,
rising and falling
these daily waves toward
first-light’s drastic shore:
Blue heaven anchored to
abyss, a measured margelessness
which sings in such
salty loquaciousness
that a wild sea rounds
all I’ll never lose nor reach
and bids me keep writing down
what those still rapturous
gods confound. Code Noir’s
my psalm, their greed, our bond.





ORAN’S SINK

Sept. 2004

Taurus dracomen genuit
et taurum draco

“The bull is father to the snake
and the snake to the bull”

-- Cretan symbolon

Coin the motions
I bell here a
Doubloon: On one
face blue Oran,
that dark raveller,
his mouth welling
antiphons of primal
cold: Turn the
coin over and you’ll
see me in this white
writing chair atop
a treelike esplumoir,
his dark book in one
hand,a gold pen in
the other, writing
down Oran’s slither
round and tween
the lines.
I found and fathered
him on this page,
though it is his
words which
engendered all of
mine -- “The way
you think it is is
not the way it is at
all!” -- a truth which
by its unknowableness
is by nature recessional,
bidding all who seek
to travel further down
and cross the page,
island to island,
poem to poem.
I have written down
what I found,
and what I found
has forged this song,
mortaring poem
by poem this
singing house
in buried blue.
The mystery is
as simple two
halves of symbolon,
a knucklebone
split in two and
shared by two parties.
One half is shaped by
lines on paper down
to here: The other
half is what lies
inside those lines,
or what comes after
them in a sheer
drop of white space
off the page -- what
I’ll never know fully
upside down,
though each next poem
I surely try. Each
day I flip the coin
and watch it rise
then splash and
tumble down in
gold and black
revolvings, articulate
and not, tumbling
line by line down
the shelves of
ancient dark
til it disappears
from sight, surely
to rest at last
in Oran’s skull,
atop a pile of
prior poems. That
bowl of bone is coffer
to these coigns which
have no vantage but
their salt surrender,
at home and free to
whirl the sea-god’s
sky which only
seems a wetter darker
blue. Suburban
angel of that
winged descent, I
ride this writing
chair astride the
white flanks of a
dolphin with a dragon’s
tail and hooves of
raging bull: A modern
man troping
an ancient rage,
illuminating a black
page which only seems
as pale as bone. I
count my words carefully
into that lost half
buried purse at the
bottom of a wishing
well no one may drink:
For every breath
I squander here
here fresh bubbles
rise from Oran’s
cathedral sink.




BLUE NOIR

Nov. 2004

Each day I mount this
pale white writing chair
and comment my verbal
self to waters wild and wide
with no oar nor paddle
or compass or sail.
This pen voyages where
you bid, or where I
fancy you remain as
I shut my eyes and
recall a trace of you.
Today I think of the night
I followed a busty
redhead home after
the bar closed down
in the year when I
had left my wife behind
and made my way
back home. Let’s color
that sinular night blue
noir, its saxophones
sexual and evil,
transgressing waht I
knew was wrong
and flinging myself anyway
in the name of revels
I could neither submit
to wihtou a wedding ring
tight around my heart,
nor resist as any
more sober man might
have. We drank burgundy
a while in that monied
professional apartment
and then she left to
go pee, leaving me alone
to stare out at the
streetlamped night
of 3 a.m., into that
maw of lost darkness
in the belly of the
whale. Everything
thick with drunkenness
and fatigue, Joe
Jackson on the stereo
& the door not far away.
So much in me still
demanding that I just
get up and go but then
she came out of
the loo wearing just a
half-buttoned shirt,
her huge breasts swaying
darkly in and down.
The embrace that soon
followed was like a boat
offshore at last on waters
profoundly deep and
wild. Oh how we went
out in the pure salt
of abandon, this way then
that, never fucking --
I didn’t have condom --
but going at it every
other way. Exhausted
spent & glistening with
all our expended oils,
we unclenched around
5:30 a.m. when she
told me I had to go
(she needed to write
a paper the next day).
And so I got zipped
and shod and kissed
her on the cheek as
she slept quenched
and sated, never to speak
to me again. I drove carefully
and raggedly back to
my mother’s house where
I was sleeping in a spare
room, aware at once
of such keen delight
amid the ruin of real love.
My wife in our house
20 miles away alone
in our queen-sized bed
with our cat curled
nearby, she believing
that I was gone for
good. A few months
later I told her I wanted
bgack, to somehow
find a way home.
A year later I moved
back home, sober,
sobered, all my errancies
named and laid at the
altar of a love
that promised nothing
but the love. It was
an evil voyage into
that blue noir night:
hurtful and expensive
& damn near ending
all thepoems that I’d
yet to write. But god
the satisfaction of just
reaching into that
gal’s unbuttoned blouse,
to clasp and hold those
huge warm breasts.
How good that evil,
how warm that demon
spray at the the shore
I pray never to return
to nor ever fully forget.
My song here is pure
in the second sense of
things, not orderly
or moral but complete
as the sea is full
of angels with big
teeth. Whatever
shore I ache and
dream here, the
sea gods intend
their own beach.
In the spectrum
of my love there’s
a blue-black isle
washed in booze.
The ink that
flows from my
pen today is
pours freely that
salt ooze--a bit
of ichor of your
cape which
spreads this
waking dawn
with words
I’d rather write
than lose.