Pluto's Teller

There is a whole series of Greek coins showing a dolphin carrying a boy or youth on its back. Eros is another such boyish figure, (a) winged child ... Then we have Phalanthos and Taras, the last-named being the legendary founder and name-giver of the city of Tarentum. The boy riding on a dolphin often wears a flower in his hair, and this seems to indicate a creature midway between fish and bud. Another numismatic figure approximates very closely in type--though without being dependent on it -- to the Indian picture of a child asleep on a sea-mount, and this is Palaimon, alias Melikertes, lying dead or asleep on a dolphin, a child god who deserves special study from our point of view. There are Greek legends, translations of the mythological theme into purely human language, which tell how dolphins rescued their mortal favourites or carried the dead safely to shore. But the names of those favoured of the dolphins are unmistakably mythological, such as Koiranos (“Master”), or Enhalos (“he of the sea”). The story of Arion the Singer, who was rescued from the clutches of pirates by a dolphin, is the best-known example of these legends, proving at the same time that we are in the sphere of influence of Apollo, the lord-protector of poets. The second part of the Homeric hymn to Apollo, held by many to be a second hymn on its own, relates the epiphany of Apollo Delphinios. In the form of a dolphin the god conducts his first priests to Krisa, the bay on which his shrine has just been founded. His epiphany is an epiphany on a ship: this delphiform Apollo makes a place for himself on the ship of his future priests--a proof here ... (that) “fish” and “ship” are equivalent mythical images. As variants of the same theme they mean the same when combined in one.

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

CROWN OF LIR

He is forever young astride
that sleek so wild blue dolphin,
zyeehawing over the foaming
waves or dead asleep -- enwombed
still in first bliss -- or perhaps
even dead, ferried homeward
on Thalassa's hearse. In all
the flower tucked behind
his ear bespeaks a listening
which trumpets back in
the antiphons of full bloom,
hurling such perfume
that the entire sea swoons
enrapt, sending curve
after curve his way
to plunge and riot
and plow under to
the source where all
life begins. No wonder
he appeared on so many
ancient coins -- the poster
boy for fortune's pluck,
the gilded lucre through
which old men get
maids to fuck,
a way to duck death's
swash by minting back
the eyes with youth.
Always a sea and shore
between his romp,
as he and fish are
merged in the marge
of tidal marches which
pulse a God's blue
augments as they crash
and ebb the heart:
Always a fish-tail for
ship's rudder, a song
for wet travail, a course
both known and
abyssal toward ends
both gold and bone.
And though the visage
of this tale is young
-- both boy and fish
careen in puppy glee --
it masks a far far
older man's dark face,
that brooder
of the first horrific
sea, bull-ravager of
Europa, the wolfish
sharps and flats of
Apollo's golden lyre
keyed from Hypoborean
depths. That old man is
Uranos, cleft of his
huge balls, dreaming
Aphrodite from the
froth of that first wound:
He's the ghost of the
singer Arion, doomed to sing
to a court of whale-
and ship-ribs
two hundred leagues
below the wake he
was ditched by pirates in,
singing of rescue
to dry shores by the
dolphin not found
outside of songs:
He is Poseidon
inside his stallion
hooves which you
hear bestride the waves'
stampede to shore, a
thunder which grows
loud the more both sea
and land agree to share the
augments of a strand's
so liquid rocky roar.
Behind or under that
puerile sweet of song's first
crash and plunge
wakes first man of the sea,
a giant walking just beneath
the boy we care to see.
The boy astride the dolphin
crests so much that's far
under me, ruddering his
courses in this hand which
writes his emblem down.



The Manx word for giant is foawr, in which a vowel-flanked "m" has been spirited away, as shown by the mordern Irish spelling, fomharsubmarini but no more are they invariably connected with the sea. So another etymoloygy recommmends itself, one which comes from Dr. Whitley Stokes, and makes the morin fomori to be of the same origin as the mare in the English nightmare ...

- John Rhys, "Celtic Folklore"

So I wonder if the dolphin-rider emblem on the my father's family crest to that of a naked giant riding on the back of a whale, or Manannan astride his grey horse "Wave Sweeper" ...


THE DOLPHIN RIDER

1993

All the world's a whisper,
Where ocean margins cry,
I ride my fevered fishes there
Between the breakers and the sky.

Cities lie beneath the flood,
The sun king sleeps below.
But I croon darkly in your blood,
With brine and brawl and brogue.

A woman waits for you on a shore
No course you chart can reach.
Only storms can take you there
To wreck you on her beach.

I am the Dylan of your fathers,
Galloping the nine-wave brute,
I call you from your harbor, boy,
Into the darkness of all truth.

MASTERY

2002

Glenn Gould launched a brilliant career
as a pianist at age 24 when he recorded
Bach's Goldberg Variations. Shortly before
he died at age 50 he recorded them again.
He told an interviewer that he recognized
his style in the earlier recording-wild
runs and trills, bright surfacings-yet
its heart seemed unfamiliar. The material
was the same-he'd always loved the Master's
genius for exploding many ideas at once-
but his own way of riding that music had
deepened so much that the earlier talent
sounded strange, like the sound of
someone walking outside a dark, wet window.

On the later recording you can hear
Gould humming along as he played.
He hated the habit he'd formed over the years,
and it made hard work for the engineers:
Yet he knew he always played better
dancing along with his voice. Imagine painting
while you dreamed, or making love in a storm.
There is a mastery which finds the heart
of the heart and learns how to stay there.
None of that was apparent to the younger man.
It took decades for Gould to find the
deeper handles of mastery. I think of him
walking outside that house trying to go home.
Of one day finding a door, not in what he knew,
nor in the brilliance of his hands, but by
abandoning himself to what opened when
the keys of the piano ceasing running; and flew.



"You are growing wiser than I am," ((Emily Dickinson wrote to Abiah Root in late 1850)), "and nipping in the bud fancies I let blossom." Leaving Abiah to hug the shore, Emily chose "to buffet the sea-I can count the bitter wrecks in these pleasant waters, anda hear the murmuring of the winds, but Oh I love the danger!"

- Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, 250


EROS

2000

Eros, the god of love, emerged
to create the earth. Before, all
was silent, bare, and motionless.
Now all was life, joy, and motion.
-- Early Greek Myth

That passionate music: How it flings
us, joyous, toward her sweet body
and beyond. Til death do we fall.
Why is it that the thought of
the ripened curves of her breasts
and lutelike bottom grips me like
a paradigm? My lust is like
a burning fiddle in a field of split corn.
Desire though is something different.
A heedless integer halving itself in another.
Eros reaching like Orpheus
for the eternally dead bride.
A music which goes under
to rise in one wave
like a breath inside stone.
A man riding a dolphin toward
the next glittery wave.
A trope of Thalassa, inside,
dark, and free. Strangeness forever
ripening at the first tentative
shock of what so gorgeously
and fatally blooms.


CUCULATTUS OF SPRING

2001

A cuculattus of spring
is in this day's color,
a blue-green ache
rising in spray ...
Yet still there is
much that is night
and misery, the dolor
of winter's long
vacancy, cold
and starving
memories of
my ex wife in
an ex house with
ex cats. No way
forward from
that dark cell
that doesn't lead
back again. My
poems all brittle
and first draft,
no epiphanies
unmuddied
by the guilt
of their gleam:

But oh how
the dolphin
breeched the
sea last night
when Jeanette
pulled off her gown
to dance full glory
for me,
tall and blonde,
breasts like fake
grapefruit o'erswollen
on the bough
& her eyes
an icy blue
adrift in the
beyonds (back
yard, beach
strand, watery grave).

I said thank you
and paid up then
watched her swim
on to the next bone
dowsing for what
poises as truth these
days. Left her there
til I was in the
dark of my bed,
harness to great
fish, getting
her where I could
name her sleep.
Blonde hair falling
across the back end
of a history going blue
to black
and now blue
green in this vernal
rise which I suspect
may never bloom.
Planes descending
one by one with
their freight of
rubes, that low
hum steady
in the day like
a rash or a wash of
diesel oil. Reminding
us how far
there is to travel
in our own skins,
o cuculattus,
oh miserable sheen
of this raw spring.


DOLPHIN RIDER

2000

He is both meat
and motion of
my darkest
pure joys,
a figure carving
one wave
with his weight
then leaping
over the next
in a shower
of full-mooned
spray. It doesn't
matter what I
say here, how
I praise or damn
him: He just
rides that
bigass fish
on and on,
every night
and nightside
of my life singing
those big
brassy songs.
He's my
totem curse,
an archetype of
ruin which has
hammered every
swingin' dick
in my clan.
Like my
great great
grandfather
O'Riley who
burned his fiddle
to atone
for all the
drunk fiddling
haystack-fucking
the fish god
demanded of
him. The last
time my father
saw him he
was 72
and in hot
shit for offering
the neighbor
lady a quarter
for a toss.
The music
never ends:
tail and tooth
and cock
and voice are
all flames of
an eloquent fire
born on God's
abyssal plains,
awful or
awesome
depending on how
you survive
that music.
Today I say
he rides to
protect and
border and greet
us just beyond
whatever solace
we call harbor.
Singing is just
surrender you know
to what rises
and burns
as much as
to the dark waters
you carry.
A white flag
for dolphins
at midnight.
Your voice alone
singing her name.




HERALDRY

Nov. 2004

In the story of my father's
name (a bastard relic
now at best) there are
harpists in our history
who entertained the
Norman kings in the
south of Ireland: And
when those kings and
their courts washed
back into the Irish
sea, their minstrelsy
wandered forth, seeking
patronage in whatever
semblance of a court
that sad country
could provide. A
family singer of the
17th century lamented,
"who will buy a poem?"
and concluded, "I'm
a ship with a ruined
cargo/now the famous
Fitzgeralds are gone./
No answer. A terrible case./
It is all in vain that I ask."
Perhaps that's why
one of ours boarded
the Sea Sprite in
1779, carrying that
music to Boston Harbor.
But when were your
songs ever safe, praising
the rise of kings who
always fell, revelling
in love's wild delights
beyond the pale of
papal decree and
the prying eyes of
royal husbands? Such
blasphemy and scandal
have always pleased you
well, even if your
mortal lovers all found
sorrow at the far ends
of their verses. No matter.
All those years I wandered
and blundered learning
how not to drink from
those three cups of song
which festoon my father's
crest: a delight only to
you. Certainly not for
my mortal loves; nor
even much in my
long education in
singing mortal songs about love.
The rise and fall of
every wave to you
is holy and florid,
no matter how wet
and scraggly my
leaps become in them.
That naked man
astride the mean-
looking dolphin atop
the crest - he's not
giving up the song.
That's plain from
the motto - Not by
Providence but Victory! -
which is written under
wall like a labia
buzzing a Bronx cheer
to every noble aim
and their chaste remains.
You love this sweet
cacophony of lost
and lonely songs
forever hitting shores
you've just left behind.
Whatever I set to paper
here was lifted from
that sweet air
drifting in from
the absence you hurl,
like perfume, everywhere
you've been: A high
strange music which
my lyrics dare complete
or at least ferry to
the next wild shore
flapping in the breeze
like your dress
just out of sight.
Libraries and chapels
and writing chairs
are just our way
of trying to master you,
as men build dams
and bulwarks against
the sea. But the music
like a tide is crashing
down the shore
where you are close,
oh, closer than the
margin of a kiss.
You have made of me
a brine-soaked harp
which sings of you
everywhere there's
moonlight on the strings
and blue dazzle in the springs.




ST. BRENDAN AND THE BIG SKULL

Brendan and his monks find the head of a dead man by the seashore. The head is very large, its forehead measuring five feet across. At Brendan’s request, the giant tells him that he was a heathen, who for his own profit waded through the sea. He was big and strong, and stood a hundred feet tall. He waylaid sailors and took their goods. For all his outsize proportions he was drowned in a flood. Brendan offers to resucitate and baptize him, so as to give him the possibility of obtaining remission for his sins and afterwards going to paradise. The giant refuses because he is afraid he will not be able to resist the temptation of sin. This would be worse, for, as he says, baptized souls are tormented much worse in hell than heathens are. Besides, he has a terrible fear of dying once again. He wants to go back to his torments in the darkness. He takes his leave, with Brendan’s good wishes. Brendan departs in his ship.

— from Clara Strijbosch, “The Heathen Giant in The Voyage of St. Brendan”

BETWEEN

2004

Only what is actually loved
and known can be seen
sub specie aeternitati.

— David Jones

My giant straddles ages
firmaments & dolors.
Between is his one stance,
of well and shore
composed. Compress
in the poem
this Friday morning
and his uncertain
seward gaze.
Both the migraine-
weary stale-coffee-
taste of 5 a.m.
and a tidal angelus
of a vast enacting sleep.
Both the cat in the
window shaped
like a bell or floret
against the cold
dark morning
and the ache in his
balls to hurl
hammers and hooves
on the highest rollers
of salt verse.
Both the missals
no one has seen
for a thousand
years breaking
open in my mind
like fresh bread
and the drawl of
our President telling us
what we want to
hear in that spit-shine
that walks right over
just about everyone.
Both my wife asleep
upstairs beneath
a heavy duvet with
those warm naked
legs I desperately
need to wrap round
these glottals
and the pale wanton
throned under, who
milks my longing
with verbs & verities
& the dark blue velvet
lining of whatever.
It takes a big man
to make tillage of
between, to shire
that shore half-seen,
half-dreamed. To know
I’ll never know more
than this gait instructs.
He seeds these
shorelike ambles
with a welling bliss.
His old steps echo
my next near-miss.
Between my rages,
master, in your blue fork.

BERMANUS

2004

Bermanus, or Borvo, was a deity
who presided over seething,
turbulent waters, especially hot
springs. A ceramic image from
Vichy shows him attended by a
horned serpent and a dolphin.
His indwelling well-goddess was
Damona (or Burmana). As in the
case of Diano Abnoba, Bumanus
was identified with a larger
sacred forest area, the Lucus
Burmani, around Cervo in Liguria.

- Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes

Addiction took me deep into
a forest of night naughtiness.
Days were fired by the energy
of those spent secrets, and had
the zeal and mania of a boy-man
with too much to hide, night music
welling and bleeding from every
purposeful seam. Lousy way to live
but I had to, for reasons known
to God: In every arc of drink to mouth
was the complicit desire which
turned every itch to a rabid south,
attempting egress of a magic shire
known in the parley of the season
as Good Times. Years I tossed
down that black well now resurface
here, gleaming silvery and blue,
distilled into an older man's abandonment
to the verbal way the dark sings.
That wild wood I once ravened
was too alien to be called my heart
- I the eternally early riser plying
the dead a.m.s between midnight
and three - yet that wild is
tethered here, reconnoitered,
compassed in every bad way
the errant knight of booze
in his quest descends. That
harrowed hell lies close to this
hour like a lost or buried shrine
to the god of hot bubbly springs
who lorded over the forest
with every well-surge released.
He's in this one pale hand
which rides across the page
beneath the only lamp stirred
to this hour-too early for most,
too late in all the bottle clubs
when most wallets bottles
and last-gasp enterprise are spent.
At this loneliest and most savage
hour of my past I write, each
page torn from the heart of a
sacred dark wilderness, fresh,
still beating, still bare as a
jackal's greedy tooth. I recall
a night in the winter of '86
when I steered a too-drunk
wealthy Winter Park girl
from the Crocodile Club
into the jaws of my torn
and stained bed, working down
her bright white pants
while she snored face-down.
Some of that white calcination
of pant and panty and flabby
asscheeks which I spread
and furrowed is here in this
white crannog just above
a black and cold and ancient
tide - in the towel I drape
over one arm to ward off
coffee-spills, in the writing desk
in my lap, in this spread
of pages with its dark blue
seam which calls me still
to all between desire and
its dark-hooved mordents,
the marauding futile jaunt.
This crannog was mortgaged
by all those horrid years
of one bad long carouse,
each night a black tree
felled and sawed and hammered
into this shrine atop so
much below. All that passed
so I can sit here and
observe the night without
the empty glasses. I paid
for this residence with
a greedy coin, vaulted in
a hundred pale white loins:
And the motion which kept
all concealed now hauls
me from shore to shore,
down wells and on to
crannogs - at least upon
this page. In the alchemy
of nights this one still lolls
the tongue of the fire-lizard
who crawled through all
that darkness to make
an apt home here. O Lord,
keep my glottals smoking,
and fill my pen with
blackwash of gin
and blue-finned aqua,
wild shorage for that satyr
You still see to ferry in.



SUN AND SEA

2004

The sun rolled westward
in its golden car
where it met then mated
the great sea's coilage,
their child this ire
of new and old blue fire.
The poet I know works
well at this depth,
surrounded by the sea's
submergings at this
deep station before dawn,
light over my shoulder,
books sprawled in my lap,
eyes wide open
to the fins which rise
and winnow by.
This poem wings
best below the bower
of its parentage, singing
of that dazzling soak
which wombs the next
great day. Wheels of
that car turning slow but
inside wifely blue
sighs, furrowing the
marge which shouts
in birthing exultation
the firmament of sky
with its huge hoary sun
astride a dolphin's back.
What more need I say?
Two cultures wooed and
won the whale roads
of this swiving heart:
one emerges here singing
astride a blue shining cart.