Lyre of Hermes

FROM UNDERNEATH

Steven Dunn

A giant sea turtle saved the life
of a 52 year old woman lost at sea
for two days after a shipwreck
in the Southern Philippines. She rode
on the turtle’s back.

—Syracuse Post-Standard

When her arms were no longer
strong enough to tread water
it came up beneath her, hard
and immense, and she thought
this is how death comes,
something large between your legs
and then the plunge.
She dived off instinctively,
but it got beneath her again
and when she realized what it was
she soiled herself, held on.

God would have sent something winged,
she thought. This came from beneath,
a piece of hell that killed a turtle
on the way and took its shape.
How many hours passed?
She didn’t know, but it was night
and the waves were higher. The
thing swam easily in the dark.

She swooned into sleep.
When she woke it was morning,
the sea calm, her strange raft
still moving. She noticed the elaborate
pattern of its shell, map-like,
the leathery neck and head
as if she’d come up behind
an old longshoreman
in a hard-backed chair.
She wanted and was afraid to touch
the head—one finger
just above the eyes—
the way she could touch her cat
and make it hers.
The more it swam a steady course
the more she spoke to it
the jibberish of the lost.
And then the laughter
located at the bottom
of oneself, unstoppable.

The call went from sailor to sailor
on the fishing boat: A woman
riding an “oil drum”
off the starboard side.
But the turtle was already swimming
toward the prow
with its hysterical, foreign cargo
and when it came up alongside
it stopped until she could be hoisted off.
Then it circled three times
and went down.
The woman was beyond all language
the captain reported;
the crew was afraid of her
for a long, long time.

***

Hermes meets a tortoise, a primeval-looking creature, for even the youngest tortoise could, by the looks of it, be described as the most ancient creature in the world. It is one of the oldest animals known to mythology. The Chinese see in it the mother, the venerable mother of all animals. The Hindus hold Kasyapa in honour, the “tortoise-man,” father of their eldest gods, and say that the world rests on the back of a tortoise, a manifestation of Vishnu: dwelling in the nethermost regions, it supports the whole body of the world. The Italian name tartaruga keeps alive a designation dating from late antiquity, according to which the tortoise holds up the lowest layer of the universe, namely Tartarus.

Further, although in less striking a manner, the tortoise like the dolphin is one of the shapes of Apollo. In the Homeric hymn ((to Hermes)) it appears only as a most innocuous beast, the plaything and sacrificial victim of an ingenious child, albeit divine. The tortoise seems to be no more “cosmic” than the playthings of gods generally are, when the gods happen to be Greek gods and do not trespass beyond the natural order of things. The tortoise merely undergoes a Homeric miracle. Something divine glimmers through, the chance for a divine game: Hermes makes it into a lyre.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “The Primordial Child in Primordial Times”




POWER CHORDALS

Jan. 18 (version 2)

I choose now to arch back
cocksure and proud
into the assault of big night
music on the surflike pound
of power chords, the guitar
in my remembered hands
smashing blue waves chocked
with sea ice in snarled wallops
mean sound, exhilirant in
gales of Thor loosed in
that savage arc as I swung
that Phantom hammer down,
down all the way to
what was under that undertowing
sound. A shrieking god’s will
was wired to my own inside
that 100-watt amp atop a
squalling Peavey rack
cranked to blue max;
I’d smack a chord and
it whacked back, a
strolling thunder like
a rogue wave’s plunder,
tiding me to dark
and danker caverns
under the floor of
that dark basement
where one night
toward the end of
Summer 1979 my band
Slick Richard played
a party gig, the
boys so eager at the
bit to rock the room
that I still feel the
whale-deep urgency
of those power chords,
a surge which survives
to this distant day and
age so frenzied that my
lines leap like a salmon
against the stream of time,
trying to get back inside
that song we were playing
— “Repectable” by the
Stones, I think, though it
may have been “Dirty
White Boy” by Foreigner
or “Sweet Emotion” by
Aerosmith—riding
again steel stallion hammers
through the midsection
of a all desire, that
room where lovers
clench and come
surrendering pent
angels in a collapse
of heaving lees.
But it wasn’t something
I could choose back then,
not something I could
climb in and savor: it
was much to hot and wild
in its presence, a savagery
which I did not so much
ride as it ferried me toward
the evernight’s jade shores
on swollen black rollers;
huge hands were working
mine as I slammed those power
chords, demanding every
foaming crest of my
expendable youth, feasting on
it like a fishhead sticking
out the soul-hollow beneath
my arm as I lifted it up in
glory and supplication
and gory lust, cupping fire
not meant for mortals in
my hand as I drove the
next chord down.
It sure felt like arrival to
be rocking that party room
after so many months of
saggy droll practice,
all those hours mortaring
venom and bitchery into
wavelike shapes of sound,
a tumult made weird and
wretched by the ringing
silence at songs’ end
where triumph should have
meant applause. So many
nights lost in the gears
of an infernal machine
which had no employ,
no battlefield, no surfeit
that to stand there playing
to a crowd was surreal
and almost hurtful, all
our dreams stripped bare
and the bitch matrix
we loudly suited purring
show me what you got there boy ...
Those two barely legal teens
dancing in front of me
lamped almost too fully
all I mooned those months
of cold basement practice,
their eyes half-closed,
swaying tits and asses
in lewd undulation
as I fucked them
with those power chords,
cunts cocked wide for
all I horsed inside my
swingin’ guitar, fire and
desire finding in blue amplitude
the frenzy of a song’s shared
shore. And it sure felt more
real than anything my
dim working days could delve
when at the bridge of
“Respectable” by the
Stones and I launched
into my solo--no whiz
but respectable enough,
ballsy and bluesy and
spitting fire at the girl
dancing closest to me,
an assault which caught
her wide open as she
cried >Yes Yes with a dreamy
smile, a shout of
recognition or acceptance
which was the sound I
needed to hear so badly
back then that no amp
was loud enough to
shout the need full back.
I knew in that loose
certainty a good song
seems to delve that
she and I would complete
the tune on a bed or
floor or in some shower
stall—I was absolutely
certain of it as the
sparked arpeggios
my plectrum ripped
across my guitar’s
strings marauded back
down to the chorus
where we all yelled
“Respectable” at
our mikes, as if we
wrote the words
ourselves, which we
did, that night at least,
inside a smoky
beer-drenched room
three doors up from Hell.
But enjoyment was not
in the mix back then;
rather the big night
music was what the martyr
feels when the fatal
arrows thwock through
his chest and groin
one-two-three, ending
one story in operatic gouts
of world-ending pain.
The big night music
wore me like an iron shoe
which gave its hooves
full resonance as they
stampeded through
our songs, finding
true magnitude
as I hammered
on my blue guitar
all the mordents of
late-night suburban
angst and misspent youth,
a sound so loud and
hard and hellbent
that chords were trio
ecstasies of which I
was the minor third,
the hapless fish
squeezed between
sea dominant and
the god of fifths,
a drowning ecstasy,
a wind..
Hard chunky hammers
chording A to D to A
and then squalling down
to dive the rims of E
for that choral antiphon
to what those chicks
danced back as the
sacrificial tits of
the larger crowd wasted
on beer and pot and
rock n roll on
a late August night
almost 30 years ago.
The big night music
rode me but good
that rare, almost
cathedral night when
at last we actually gigged
—our band would end
soon enough, unable
to hold such malefic
majesties for long in
our too-eager hands—
and I was faithful to
the end, playing all
three sets sweaty
and loose, a Marlboro
hanging from my lips,
eyes squinty, Corcidin
bottle on my finger
for a slide, a plastic
cup of beer half-empty
on my rig, burning
everywhere I waved
my Music Man guitar.
All that proceeded
hence—the post-gig
drinking with boys
and chosen girls,
the room I languished
into, led by the hand
by that dancing girl,
the way she kept on
dancing as she lifted
up her t and bra, shaking
full breasts in my
face as if to milk
not my thirst but
the god inside those
cross-heavy songs.
There I exchanged
axe for cock and
played my power
chords fucking her
from behind as she
writhed and smiled,
taking every stroke
and wave and chord
til I or it was done at last,
every drop of big sound
cascaded in brute falls
down the slide of her
singing womb. And slept.
That music in its salt-
thalassic swale, brine-brutal
and deep waving, drowned
me full in its wild wake
as all those years of
fruitless bands squalled
down to a shutting
guitar case -- And yet
all that failed history
gives rise to what I
elect here, no longer
serf in big-night fields
but lord of its inmost
thrall, a sound I choose
for having dried of
all hope of actual
wet-chorded days.
I am the big night music
now, its brutal wings
my own inside the
aging simple visage of
a life descended into stone.
Power chords still
romp the ecstasy of
gods and I am free to
harness them and ride
hell-bent their augmental
dooms, on paper lengths
at least, approximate of
all the cunts I plunged
astride real sounds.
Horsecock winds outside
again today, another front
making maenads of the trees
and garden, a thrash of
passions which is fully the
world’s. When I patch here
into its words, each line
is a chord of that pagan fire
no amount of history can
douse or house or grow
fully up and out from, ever.
Here it is baby, all you
need to make the spirits scream.
I choose to play that song
because blue hell churns
the richest cream.

***

.... (the Hungarian scholar) D. Kovendi showed how for the Greeks, the birth of the divine child, in his capacity as Eros Proteurhythmos, signified the rhythmical-musical creation of the universe. The lyre in the hand of the Primordial Child expresses the musical quality of the world quite apart from the poet’s invention. It is first and foremost characteristic of Hermes himself. The Homeric poet sensed the musical nature of the universe as essentially Hermetic and located it in the Hermes colour-band of the world spectrum. In all probability the poet was not seeking this primeval music, but its higher, Apollonian form. If, however, the boy riding a dolphin (who sometimes bears the name of Phalanthos) has a lyre in his hand, we are driven to think not merely of his relations with Apollo Delphinios, but of a more general, primary connection that existed before all specific names: the connection of water, child, and music.

-- Kerenyi, ibid.

***

THE CHAPEL
GUARDIAN STIRS

2003

Up from disturbed ground an ancient
Turtle crawled, and in the center
Fixed his hoary bulk: and slept. By
Dawn the shell had hardened down to
A great red stone. The hands she dreamed
Built a chapel round and over
Her, as if to shell her breath in
Walls of stone and a high-pitched roof.
Years passed around that head within
To bud and hurl, drop leaves to snow,
Amid the murmur of human throats
Pouring out sweet and bitter aches.
Then something deeper stirred in her,
Flexed, sighed: A crystal boat touched shore.
She bids us find then build a deeper door.