Mining for God

As newcomers, many of us have indulged in spiritual intoxication. Like a gaunt prospector, belt drawn over the last ounce of food, we saw our pick strike gold Joy at our release from a lifetime of frustration knew no bounds.

The newcomer feels he has struck something better than gold. He may not see at once that he has barely scratched a limitless lode which will pay dividends only if he mines it for the rest of his life and insists on giving away the entire product.

-- Alcoholics Anonymous

***



META-LITURGY

The ore is here. Getting to it is one
problem. Smelting it is another.
Then there’s minting and then
leveraging it wisely, exponents
only wizened labials can pour.
The veins run vast and wild and
dark beneath so much that is
gross and broken, hidden in
Alpine miasmas of gloss
and cant. You can’t see them
in the daily rounds of home and work
and weary commutes though
each is the surest vent to rich
caverns below. I say “room”
and something flukes in that sound,
a glint of phosphor bouncing off
deeper bones, names sounding
stranger and stronger in brogue.
You learn to dowse with the
undersides of the words, trusting
their roots to grip lodes. And
you do so with with radical glee,
hungering for depths at their
worst, pulling the whole lump up
with dirty hands, like a red
radish gritty wet and hot on
the tongue (from Latin radix,
“root.”) Thus you must trust the
sine waves of dark seem,
dearth dead in earth the surest
mine to the underworld dream,
every depth a door to the
treasure hard to attain.
Whence comes this the faith
that words in an order of wild sound
can burrow down under
into the barrows of wonder
packed high the the signets
and crowns of old kings?
It comes with each nugget
caught in the pan I hold here
as the early morning’s stream
plows powerfully through, waters
without face or history, no
more than a wild blue plash
in hard hammering motion
toward oceans singing their roots.
See: I’ve found another here
a full hour from dawn on a
cool Sunday morning in 2006,
a chunk of rude gold amid the
usual iota of dross, almost lewd
to be so revealed, like a 7-11
clerk suddenly exposing a boob
while you pay for chewing gum
or the long pecker of the mailman
flopping through the slot where
you expected a rain of bills -- This
is the surprise of good fortune,
lucre from dross, the wheel of
banalaties turned round to new
markets, vast sums flooding the
checking account. Last night I
dreamed of licking my wife’s cunt
through her panties, then of flash cards
with formulas on one side and
secret emails on the other
& finally of a game with poker chips
faintly etched with Tarot suits,
the most fortuitious minted
in pale blue. Some teacher
showed me how to “play” or
“read” the chips, no real suit
to look for as you would
in Poker nor any numerical
sequence as in an I Ching
or trellis of arcana but
rather simply the sum of
blue, the one in the game
who had amassed the most
blue chips regardless of what
else was spread to view.
The highest-blue person was
the one elected by blue
to invest full in the market,
the thinking I guess being
that the luckiest should be
the one elected to lower pan
to waters. The teacher said if
I followed his method I
could make for my family
a half million bucks the first year
alone -- Amazing, though now
as I read back over the dream
that was far less so than
that second scene, where
I risked dealing like a Tarot those
cards of deep converse with
my starry venomous animae;
and the high-river’s font
I loved most in the dream
was that first part, where
I was allowed to pan my
face in the labials of the real
woman I love, savoring real
the real wash these words
can only imply. What I write
here is just the salt of a
dreaming prospector, shining
my dazed and drifting thalamus,
but it flashes here like something
strange, delved -- or offered --
from below. And thus gleams
mineral and pagan in the facts
of first fire from that random
fleeting angel. There’s coin enough
here to invest something lavishly,
to compound the offices of gold
in the orifascia of my day,
the way the ancients lay coins
on the eyes of their dead,
offering pay for passage
over those dark waters which
lap on the other side of the grave
we dream. Blue voltage and
wet panties are enough to make
me feel wealthy today though
I’m still just sitting here
gripping down through the floor
for the gold roots of a door.



In his autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Jung relates his seminal encounter with the unconscious, a waking-dream experience or nekyia where he has the sensation of falling far down and then encounters several figures, personifications of that dark and deepest water:

Later, Philemon became relativized by the appearance of yet another figure, whom I called Ka. In ancient Egypt the “King’s Ka” was his earthly form, the embodied soul. In my fantasy the Ka-soul came from below, out of the earth as if out of a deep shaft. I did a painting of him, showing him in his earth-bound form, as a herm with a base of stone and an upper part of bronze. High up in the painting appears a kingfisher’s wing, and between it and the head of Ka floats a round glowing nebula of stars. Ka’s expression has something demonic about it -- one might also say, Mephistophelean. In one hand he holds something like a colored pagoda, or reliquary, and in the other a stylus with which he is working on the reliquary. He is saying, “I am he who buries the gods in gold in gems.” (184-5)

***


MINING FOR GOD

2003

God won’t be lived like some light morning.
Whoever climbs down the shaft must give up
earth’s repleteness for the craft of mining:
stand hunched and pry him loose in tunnels.

-- Rilke, Uncollected Poems (1919)
transl. Edward Snow

Little did I know I was mining for God,
spelunking down that grand Florida night,
clappering the narrow hips of belles
by the sea. Back then it was just a gallop
out of my ruined sense of self towards
some mythic Ys of sighs. The ore that
chipped loose there -- mineral horrors
of neon and glass -- gleamed otherworldly
in the lamps of absence, a cave- or
womb-infusion of light from within
the other, that light I could never
summon, anneal, or sustain.
The God within us worships God,
wrote Emerson; my deeps and darks
embowel holy hues and flues in
angelic tide-pools. Last night I dreamed
that my first wife and her daughter
were killed in some terrible, drunken
crash of cars at 3 a.m. at the crossroads
of a old neighborhood. I had been
in the car too but survived, and had
no memory of the impact. I was
trying to figure out whether anyone
had tried to call her folks in Idaho
with the news. Such as sad burden
that caller must bear, I thought,
waking to the most mournful cry of
a cat in the dark. I got up to check
and found her standing on the stairs
peering out the window at something
in the back yard. We’re all in this
together, our darker selves I mean,
untroubled by borders & familiar in
the deep where God keeps breaking
loose in our hands, untroubled too
that we see but cannot fully name
all the wonders found there, so many
oceans lapping just one beach, and me
in You, breathing hard, ripe to burst
a thousand more seas, sighs, waves
of a wild mineral psalm, loose at last
in Your hands, a gleaming gem of
what’s under the undertow’s soft sucking hiss.


GUNDESTRUP

May 18, 2005

The Gundestrup Cauldron is a religious vessel
found in Himmerland, Denmark, 1891. It was
deposited in a dry section of a peat bog,
dismantled with its five long rectangular
plates, seven short ones and one round
plate. Each plate is made of 97% pure silver
and filled with various motifs of animals,
plants and pagan deities.

***

In my dream’s swoon I fell to a shelf
I never meant to remember, a one
night stand tossed 20 years ago
behind me into the bog.
The bedroom was like an
orchid opened after all those years,
belling from a dark branch of
Florida’s night orchard, opening
like a grave suddenly awake.
The woman was unlovely but quite
fuckable in my old calculations
of lust, but in the dream she
was surrounded with
a sort of syrupy dark lucence,
bog-sap perhaps, enriched on
the liquor of so many lost or
tossed nights. Anyway she wonders
why I have come again to her room,
why I would leave my marriage
bed on the surface of dream
to call upon her, especially
after the way I had so blithely
strolled through on that night
long ago, randomly, faux-feelingly
enough to get her to
press her breasts together
while I came on them
& then tried to sneak out while
she feigned satisfied sleep.
I confess to her that I don’t know
but I there I was, sounding
much the way I usually
propositioned my need back
then, my voice ghosted
by echoes from the cruellest
vitals of my heart. It was
the sound of a mind chaffing
persons from bodies, hearts
from the outer equipage of
wombs which was feeling
enough for my intents.
To that she smiled,
perhaps pleased to receive any
notice from the land of the
living, being a dead memory
herself, a bent and discolored
plate from a cauldron whose
story I am. Yes, she smiled
and began the bouree, the
sweet low and dissolving
drawl of sure sex,
no more questions to
ask of myself.
She kneeled admiring
my chest, drawing her
cold hands over pecs
beginning to sag and
hairs turning grey, lowering
down the bed to gaze
at the white boxer shorts I
was sleeping in, fishing
a hand into the crotch
for the tunny
which grows into stone.
I closed my eyes and
saw the room in a warehouse
I worked in long ago, the
bed on a shelf, part of an
inventory I take in deep hours
when desire reassembles all
the plates and then overfills
the bowl with sea-water poured
from its ancient heavy heart,
wherever that may be found.
I opened my eyes and it was
bright morning in June, a
happy prod for the waking
world but the smoking fag
end of my nights spending
all for a Yes, just one, in
the absence of my own.
Closed my eyes once again
and she was exactly who
she was, 23 and unlovely
and mostly unloved by men
— at least back then, may
the gods have smiled on
her since — an undine of
undress under my pillow,
under the pillow
I once placed my face into
when I was 6 years old
watching me dive into
a pond to save a pretty girl.
I thought she should have been
sad or angry but the woman
in my dream was smiling
like a saint and humming
like a whore who loves her
night job, adoring the smell
of sex rising from my body,
mixing with hers at a
shore of brilliant blue waves.
She lay next to me to
continue the dance on to
the next plate they fished
from the bog in 1891 on
a cold Danish morning —
her shape next to me like
a fish I wanted to climb
and swim far back to my
wife but she was already
there next to me, the dream
woman’s voice ebbing with
a wave into my wife’s own,
which I dreamed was saying
the woman’s words — So you
want to fuck me and sighing
O Yes and Please Do. Blue
hands in the dark descending,
arousing, pleading, pleasuring
me in a blue orchid found
in the cauldron spinning
round the center of it,
happy to be lost, or tossed,
in a the peat pit of it all
where the divine metallurgist
casts plates of pure silver
in the bog heart of pure thrall.
And the face on that panel-
a woman’s, far and close-
the shaman or trickster,
my shadow’s deep gaze.
I don’t know his name
and hardly understand his
theme — though like a
woodland is still thick
in my genes. I can’t help
but enact his old pagan game,
scenes from a greenwood
marriage buried under
this house where love
came home to blossom at last.

***

According to a tradition from County Mayo in Ireland, [there is] as stone-built giant’s grave on a wild mountainside (location not given). If anyone were to dig into the grave, the mouhntainside would immediately be changed into a fertile plain, and a key buried in the tomb would open the gate of a beautiful city at the bottom of a nearby lake. Also the discoverer would have at his disposal “a great golden treasure.”

-- Janet and Colin Bord, The Secret Country

HEAVY METAL

2003

Hell’s thunder is
a team of four black
horses, their iron
hooves hauling us down
from virginally
bright metals into a
leaden, ore-like
flow. My desire’s
barbed into the
bottom sides of
things, low and
lewd, urging me
down toward
underground cities
where bar-lights
and bad girls glow,
under pants and
sheets and toward
upturned assses,
a carnal undertow
which defeats the
best of dayside
swims. Walking in
the mall with my
wife yesterday
looking for new
shoes, my eyes
kept leaping down
on comelies, their
breasts stretching
up and out to me,
calling me from the
places down below
for rescue, release,
rapine, milkings &
the lather of the
jism which hangs
in my balls like lead.
So I grabbed my
wife’s hand, and smiled
for the couple we are
and become -- and
let those wavelets
pass wholly unaware
of me. Heavy metal
has a wattage in
its song, loud and
nigh-pornographic,
maddening the horses
galloping the moon.
Have I not been
always mauled by
that surf toward
some settled shore,
out of my puerlike
sport at sea?
I first saw my
wife 8 years ago
in a club where we’d
separately gone to
hear folk music;
she was wearing
a white pantsuit
and had leaned across
the bar to shout
her drink order in --
Fine auburn hair,
a long lean white
stretch of white
curving over a
perfect ass -- Surely
I was hooked. Down
I plunged that night
into her smile as we
said hello, her voice
like water from a
well: And the next
night her kiss, which
was all merriment
and foam -- We tumbled
down from there to
the floating island
of her bed on Sunday
mornings in the dreamlit
float after sex, our
former lives far
above on a lonely
field where words
in dry stalks beat
like brittle bones.
-- Oh her bed
was fluffed with
pillows whiter than
any white I’d known,
and the billows
of her breasts were
soft and full yet firm.
the waters round us
were gauzy-azure,
soft-focus, demure,
and bridally pure:
So much so I
couldn’t see the
iron keel just below
that bed, falling fast
like some split
Bismarck, down
and down to a place
of heart which housed
me at last in place
and held me fast
til the roots locked
in place and my life
began at last. Those
bright merry cupids
on the sportive wave ---
such babes, the fruit
of surely joyful woumbs --
have eyes as cold
as basalt slag, and
take aim carefully;
there’s threat of steel
in each wave’s mane;
and just below the
waves big sex boom
an iron carriage waits
to ferry us down
to those dark and
darker rooms where
one-night orchids
crush in swoon
and perennial loves
in our house bloom.



[At a] church at Maughbold on the Isle of Man, it was decided to make two steps up to the communion rails instead of one steep one. During their excavations, the laborers found bones buried beneath the step. These were dug up and left exposed at lunch-time, and one labourer who stayed in the church heard distinct sounds of whispering or murmuring in the church. The bones were reinterred promptly, and the whispering stopped.

-- Bord and Bord, ibid.

***

GREAT WHITE

2003

Last week 100 rock fans
died in a fire at The Station
nightclub in Rhode Island.
Great White was the band,
a dinosaur from the 80’s
whose hits “Rock Me”
and “Once Bitten Twice
Shy” could still bang
metal-headed ecstasies.

A video survives from
the short, fatal start
of the show — there
is a flourish of drums,
a bright flash, the band
pounding into the song.
Standard metal pomp
—but behind the
band we see
two spires of flame
rising fast along
the wall, fangs
I guess of of rock
angst, real at last.

The camera pans
back into the crowd
a moment — you see
typical rockers, some
young, some only
trying to be young
— then back to the stage
where the bass player
at the rear of the
stage looks over
his shoulder at
the sudden mess
of fire and smoke.
The tape shown
on the networks
ends here.

They say people
had only 30 seconds
to get out, and in 3
minutes the entire building
was aflame. The fire
department got there
fast (a result of
9/11 awareness) but
there was nothing
they could do.

Many bodies were
found the next day
packed at the main door
(there were other exits
but no way to see them,
so quickly had the smoke spread)
and many more in the
bathrooms. Screams, smoke,
great white heat, gone.

One who escaped
was typical: a 23-year old
guitar player of sorts
who hoped to one day
find a stage door out
from his job at Wal-Mart.
He’d travelled with 2
friends across from
Massachusetts for
a night of dreams.

Caught in a knot
by the main door,
he pulled himself
through by grabbing
onto a white-hot
emergency exit rail
on the door. Then
despite 3-degree burns
on his hands, he
turned to grab for
a young mother
stuck in a pile.

Great White frontman
Jack Russell (described
by others as a pyro)
survived the blaze;
guitar player Ty Longley
did not. He later told
reporters that the club
had given the band
permission to light
the flashpots.

His lawyer is seeking
immunity for him
in return for testimony
against the club owners.
How old he looks
on camera, a rocker with
long hair and a puffy,
aged face, a wreck of
real stages long past
new hope.

I wonder what he now
begins—versus the kid
with the ruined hands
just released from
the hospital, who must
stare now across
his room at a guitar
he may never play
again: soot and
burnt flesh still
packed in the
rafters of his head,
that chapel of rock
dreams still ringing
with high and
higher octave screams.

***

And finally this from a great story by Christopher Rush titled “The Woman and the Waves” (Scottish Sea Stories, ed. Glen Murray, Polygon, 1996):

“He dipped into his deep blue pockets and brought out a handful of foreign gold. The coins burned in his palm like the suns of strange countries. He had been among mermaids and monks and winters and whales such as I had scarcely dreamed of. I had never seen further than the lights of the Lothians across the Forth, like fallen stars at midnight. Now this man was telling me of the secrets that lay beyond the horizon’s brow, and I was telling him that I would marry him.

We flowed into one another with long fulfillment, he into the quiet harbor of my arms, I into the running tide of his strange coming, a mingling of milk and honey, of sweetness and salt. Above us the stars blew their silver trumpets and no one heard them on the earth except ourselves.

(Yes, but he’s a whaler, and he never returns from his next voyage into the Arctic. Froze to death when the ship locked in ice. The woman does re-marry but this one drowns in the bay outside her town in a sudden storm, along with their son. At story’s end she looks out on the sea, which is her true lover:)

***

... At nights I dream of those other folk of mine that lie hidden in the sea. There are whelks on their hands and seaweeds in their hair. And the cold green fingers of the waves strum over their bones.

Or I hirple down to the pier and look over the harbor wall. I stand there for hours sometimes, thinking of their bonny heads still tossing with the turning tangles, out there somewhere. Sometimes I see them.

All I have loved is turned to coral and to kirkyard clay. Ah, the weariness of time and sea! They have taken from me everything I had, and left me an old empty shell. And yet, time and the sea are all I have ever known.

Death, as I approach it, is the wash of the waves inside my skull.