The Eagle

Here is the story that the Buryat tell: In the beginning there were only the gods (tengri) in the west and the evil spirits in the east. The gods created man, and he lived happily until the time when the evil spirits spread sickness over the earth. The gods decided to give mankind a shaman to combat disease and death, and they sent the eagle. But men did not understand its language; besides they had no confidence in a mere bird. The eagle returned to the gods and asked them to give him the gift of speech, or else to send a Buryat shaman to men. The gods sent him back with an order to grant the gift of shamanizing to the first person he should meet on earth. Returned to earth, the eagle saw a woman asleep under a tree, and had intercourse with her. Some time later the woman gave birth to a son, who became the “first shaman.” According to another variant, the woman, after her connection with the eagle, saw spirits and herself became a shamaness.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 69

***

I had no idea an eagle
was flying there inside the
white soar of my desire
that night now long ago.
I barely understood what
that woman was saying
as she straddled me
rocking on my hips,
breasts swinging in
strict sexual metronome,
her eyes screwed tight
toward distant loves,
long red hair eclipsing
half her face and every
memory I have of drunken
one-night stands: Was it
my name or his or hers
or God’s that spilled fresh
from her lips to wash
down over me as I
thrust away in
a salmon’s heat for
high and deeper seas?
Something in those
distant words gripped my
heart like claws and tore
it free as I came in her
and then she on me,
collapsing in a wave
of breasts and hair,
quivering, still mouthing
all those names. I crept
out from that room in the
pink folds of first light,
the well-fucked hungover
boy retreating back from
another stolen heaven,
whistling throughout the
day that music she chirred
on my hips, a ditty
arch and sweet whose words
were wholly lost to me
all those years
I barged from bed to bed.
Only now I slowly come to hear
the rustling of brute feathers
in that feeding need,
the wingspan roar of blublack
augments no bottle bed
or balls could pour
the sixteenth heaven of.
All those years
spent ravening through
beds of no avail and it
turns out that he
was winging me to aeries
bright and far, my heart
tight in his grip of white fire.
When I was younger I
thought sex had me by
the balls, and though I
still think that’s true enough,
I’ve come to hear
what the eagle whispered
in my ear as he flew
me on through wicked
nights, a language composed
of two nameless lovers
and the vast expanse between
their drumming hips. There was
only the slick inches of
my cock (stumbling drunk
at that hour, struggling
to hoove home) but it was
somehow long enough to
sound an ocean with salt
verbs and their million shores,
a squirting bestiary of squid and
shark and sperm whales
in vast miniscule fleets.
Enough wet enquiry to
fill ten drowned Alexandrias,
all whispered in my ear
by that eagle who taught
to me first things
in all a floozied night still brings.
When I remember here
the way that that night’s
catch expired at last --
crawling wearily up my
chest to curl her breasts to me
and fall deep asleep
still murmuring words inside
a sea of soft red hair --
not much of a shore for
her, I’m sure, just
the next drunk stallion
coralled at the end
of whiskey’s charms --
I think with world-wide
beats of wing, lifting up to God
another pail of heart to drink.