Abacus

ORCHARD OCEAN GROOVE

Feb. 21, 2006

Out of the spirit of the holy temples,
Empty and grandiose, let us make hymns
And sing them in secrecy as lovers do.

-- Wallace Stevens

According to P.I. Tretyakov, the Samoyed and
Ostyak of the Turukhansk region go about
initiating the new shaman as follows: The
candidate turns to face the west, and the
master prays the Spirit of Darkness to help
the novice and give him a guide. He then
intones a hymn to the Spirit of Darkness,
and the candidate repeats it. Finally come
the ordeals that the Spirit inflicts on the
novice, demanding his wife, his son, his
goods, etc.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy

I welcomed my dark master
for all the wrong reasons
though the invocation has
proved a powerfully dark wood.
At 14 I stood next to an orange
grove smoking a cigarette
in the last of late winter light
& breathed deep the pussy
whiskey pale perfume
of sweet orange blossoms
& wanted all of it, scenting
in such endless depth
a way to cast off
the the broken finitudes
of my life til then.
A breeze rippled out
of the motley of that grove,
carrying me into the
years of pure addition,
a thrall amped wild and blue,
stereos roaring and bras upclasping
to a milky flood of
the dark’s familiars,
a tide of booze and
rumped-waved boogaloos.
A dark joy welcomed
me those years to
its noctal Eden
of heavy fruit, made
even more pendulous
by the danger of the reach.
When I had waded hip deep
into that surf & lost all
words for anything else,
I felt the faint
prescience of evil
haul harder from
below, signalling in
the subtractions,
those years of
empty gestures and
savage repetitions
on an endlessly
emptier and harder bed.
Whatever I gained from
the dark I lost far more to it,
far more than any
life can ever presume
to redeem. My failings
ever at that door
she disappeared from
have proved me
worthy and meet
to speak blue addlement
drowned on the lips
of love’s paraclete,
the soror solus which
completes by emptying
the barrel of wild verbs.
I lean these rickety
tall ladders against
a descending wild bliss,
festooning each
step with a bauble
of bright timbrel sound
no one but the
dark can quite hear
much less read, each
a proof of my pickling
in the vats of a black
brine’s brogue. To sing
of the dark these days
is to with great
humility and thrall
resume that sound’s ever
more precarious sums
inside a groove cut
in me long ago
when I turned to
that grove and welcomed
the scent of a sound
of wild waters, letting
my thrill be thus shod
in blueblack master’s
half-hooved,
full-finned throttle
through a sweet wood’s
candescent thick burning
like a black candle deep
in my life where love
is the feral equation
song must sum somehow
with an abacus beaded
orange blossoms and
smiles in the dark
and beds sinking in
a singing blue tide.


***


LOVE IS GREEN

2002

“Lately I’ve been proving
quite eloquently that
poetry is not the way
to get to what I'm
feeling.” I wrote that
in a cheap composition
book back in the spring
of 1978 as I readied
to quit school for a
rock ‘n’ roll careen.
It was a farewell to
verbal charms, final
words before ceasing
to turn the page:
For at last I’d come
upon something no
words I panned from
that stream could either
adaquately describe
nor return -- A woman
I’d found earlier
that spring standing
in a river that had
flooded my every
sense and then ebbed
south into the tropic
Sidhe of my dreams.
Not that that I hadn’t
tried to say it right -
A week after she’d
left I wrote, “She
delighted in my
eyes/I learned to dance
in her delight;/long
before the first thaw,
I knew/a greening of
these bones.” Indeed.
Roethke was my
tyrant voice back
then, his voice
singing from the
grave about the
ecstasies of love
which doom the
surface oaf of man
— heroics I no longer
wished to drown
my ear again. Instead
there was music
without words, which
seemed closer to that
bed we shared.
I recall one day
sitting in a chair
of my rented house
listening to Jeff Beck's
“Love Is Green” on the
stereo, the song
and title fusing
the marrow of a
rage which echoes
still today, 25 years
down that river’s
wash. It was the
music of those
few nights awash
with my beloved,
simple, sweet and
pure. Now washed back
ashore more lonely
than I’d ever been,
I stared out at the
windows upon spring
days which blessed
yet couldn’t suffice --
the amply aflame buds
burning white bells
of fragrant noise
into that blue blue
Northwestern
sky, the grass
between pale virgin
green and something
surer -- harder too.
Beck's guitar work
swam or flew to those
places I just couldn't
name, my pen far short
of fin and win,
the journal sitting
closed at my feet as
I sucked a beer
& smoked & thought
ahead -- not to the
writing self I
eventually became,
but into summer
greens I pled to row
and riff and scythe.
Feed the words like
straw to the fire --
that was Roethke’s
voice in the lyric
grave of my ear. As if
by emptying myself
of all my words there
might be page enough
inside me for her
to bed me once
again. “Wordless
I speak of love/
All day long your
ocean held me/
Drowning the
page/No blame”
I wrote on those
now quite-stained
and fragile pages,
words which rise
to me this day
25 years later, that
book open in my
lap as I sit in a chair
that views a lush
Florida dark swimming
with the seem of her.
I stare out at the
pupilled dark and
recall stubbing out
at last cigarette
and dozing a while
in that other chair,
lulled by breezes softly
sighing in the pines,
drifting down that
salt blue tide
she augmented
with a few
faint cries and
then bid my hand
negate the pen
for a surer, abler
oar - a guitar,
I thought. For a
long night and a
day I swung that
axe, trying to clear
a ground out there
for her smile
in here. But that
guitar drowned in
its messy tide, and
I went on to write
down the bubbles
which rose from its wake,
line by line in
stream through the
next composition book.
Soon the day wakens
from blue to softest
green, and I will
go upstairs to wake
my love & stroke
her feet with all
love means
till I hear the
world sigh green.