Whalin'

DOWN, UNDERr

Jan. 13

I grow down, I go under,
I flow back to row onward:
Behind Christ on His cross
grins Priapus in his groin
of hard gardened wood, beloved
of Mary’s mother, queen
of betoken lusts I am the
bother of, my druther’s drench
in big-night gouts I must
somehow pour the dregs of
getting beyond all dugs & bottles.
I barge on brute and bare
like a dervish devolving
Ariadne’s dancing floor,
refuting her alabaster charms
which so harms a hero’s soar,
her mazes grooves of wild
no one fazes any more, much
less expires in Mintaurish roar.
Under her labyrinth’s flat
minarets an older Moorish
capital spirals round and
down, age before age, down
to a cavern’s painted sounds
of flint and fire, to first thefts
new gods perplex in my hand into
as it crosses the desending page
with Priapal Christlike rage.
Those gods sing to me ahead in
the darkest haunts a diving
mind can assuage or gauge
or savage with a pen, yet on I
write, saddled to a diving
fish astride the courses
of a dream, three million years
of me and less and 500 milllion
more less hand and foot til
all is fin dazed on the first white
shore, where heaven broke
from hell’s blue liquidity
to weave the delphic coracle
I row, an oracle wattled of
both womb and tomb,
that full salt sensuousness
where I and Thou become
the world’s only tune, the first
one Hermes sang into
Apollo’s lyric room. Having
lowered thus I am now free
to fling my meters wide
as wings and flukes and hooves
can rings the bells of primal fire,
my motions cauled in the very
ire which dreams history like
an ore through mystery’s
core callosum, populating
this dark suburb with houses
and cats and rhubarb patches
with proud ears pent toward
the sugarded sun which soon
rises, roused to brilliant augment
and argument by the departure
of this song I hang on the coattails
of the moon falling into the hips
of the far hills I have at last begun
with a lust for ends’ pink rims.


WHALE’S WELL

2003

No mercy, no power but
its own controls it. Panting
and snorting like a mad
battle steed that has lost
its rider, the masterless
ocean overruns the globe.

- Melville

Surely this well’s dugs
are equal to that whale
which spouts desire
for breadth and depth
and salt dementia. Vestal
snow and temple whore
suffice the need and greed
of lust for the everyday’s
sea-roads, orifical hours
for spermacetti dives.
When I get careless
with the stone that covers
this narrow wild, all hell
breaks loose, drowning
life, wife and work. The
line is only so long, the
girth of a white whim
which diddles down and
down the only acceptable
furrow in my chosen way.
Besides, within such bounded
walls the sea will crash the
loudest, the beast descend
the farthest. This is my
pocket marge, my paper
tide, a cold barrow carved
with words down into the
hottest blood of all. A
wavelike sound holds
eternity in thrall
-- mine at least,
and only for a short
and lonely gambol long
before first light blinks:
Cat in the window,
wife asleep upstairs,
there’s a hoard of booty
splendor gleaming far
down here, which the sun
will soon nudge it’s
auric nose into.
I’m going bowels to the
vowels here in Her
ancient sacral deep,
a mere’s Moby in the
halls of pagan fire:
This motion between
waking and working
is all my heart requires,
hard hooves across white
paper, lowering my well
bucket to dip an inch
of frenzy, returning
to the waking day
dazed and praising
the tide which sobs away.


WHALES WEEP NOT!

DH Lawrence


They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm whales, the hammer heads, the
killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out
of the sea!
And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of
whale blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she whale’s
fathomless body.
And over the bridge of the whale’s strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid ocean, suspended in the waves of
the sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.

And bull~whales gather their women and whale calves in a ring when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea,
in the salt where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea she is the female tunny fish, round and happy among the males and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.