Blue Scholar

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where.

-- Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower”

Among the Mohave and the Yuma power comes from the mythical beings who transmitted it to shamans at the beginning of the world. Transmission takes place in dreams and includes an initiatory scenario. In his dreams, the Yuma shaman witnesses the beginnings of the world and lives in mythical times.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

***

The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness, -- he has always the resource to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act.

... Time shall teach him, that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives ... Not out of those, whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of handselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred or Shakespeare.

-- Emerson, "The American Scholar"

The university was a medieval invention. The Latin word universitas, meaning “the totality” or “whole,” was a legal term applied in the twelfth century to guilds and corporations. When theological instructors established schools at cathedrals for the instruction of the future clergy, they began to copy the tradesman’s concept of universitas to their own organizations. By the end of the century, the masters of a university were considered to belong to a guildlike body, the universitas magistororum. Each faculty was more or less independent; indeed, each was essentially considered to comprise its own “university.” There was not necessarily even a physical establishment as to unify these parties; at some 13th-century universities such as Paris the teaching was done in the private homes of the masters, or in rented properties, or even, it is said, in brothels.

-- Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science


SCHOLAR'S PROGRESS

A multiversal education

Feb. 4, 2006

Lord how I’ve wandered in my
educations all these years, so many shores,
each a bench in some vaster writing-hut
some day I’ll name, though I doubt
I’ll live long enough to sing my way out of.
So many texts have steered me in their thrall,
composing in their litanies a man
of distinctly blue articulations which
I see sometimes as dead-ended -- the peril of
all who teach themselves -- and other
times as serving thought of which I am the
feebler nous, my voice a conch the sea
pours its crashing litanies through.
I am just a sweaty laborer in a writing
chair, heaving shovels of cobalt ore
into some furnace under all my words
which fires some papal scholia
enrapt in blue encyclicals. My work thus
is an ink to ghoul and wild, in miniscule,
those garish capitals far older hands
are adorning, over millennia, on the title
page of a distant chapel’s gospel.
I have been schooled too errantly
to mint in any more real -- 20 years of
in-out classes was what it took to
earn the first degree -- And as I aged
in these studies I’ve proved too
outre for the ranks of academe,
combative with every teacher who
did not swoon Your depths with me.
So I’ve carried on my studies
faithfully quite far from living
peers and mentors, a citizen
of wetter lands than schools
of this age can matin, though
secretly I’m desperate to write
one line of dry enough perfection
to beg some reconnection with
a world I know only heat the
heart of. -- Ah well. By now I’ve lost
all sight of ever shoring this
leaky coracle of blue verbs
in the company of human ends.
I’ve come to share the sea’s
eternal wash of numens through
surficial gleams of delight
and abysmal enquiries, secure
in that boneless angel’s toil
which is all and ever free
to begin or end or simply
and with wild singularity
forever wend its theme,
a scholar of the multiverse
five leagues down from
every known legit.
Maybe we’re all washing this
way, careened from our
culture’s sinking capital,
astride a ruined canon,
drowning in ten thousand
tongues of difference like the
clabbers of hell’s bells, the tolling
of one perdition. But perhaps
this just belies a deeper education,
the fog that’s thickest here
exactly at drift’s epicenter,
that hole we once knew too well
the circumference of it’s own hell.
Perhaps there’s a larger round
of mind beyond the warring names
and theorems, a blue cloacalineation
if you will, a wilder canonic thrall
which still incites invites us all.
How could one err in this education,
no matter how wide of course one falls
or fails? Heaven and hell both are
bournes of of God, and so this day’s
sea-sounding salt symposia
furthers an obscurity
which may one day reveal
vast libraries beneath the blotto
leagues, ten million monks in
sacred murk still writing down
that ancient godlike sound.

***

The world, -- this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult.

... (the world) is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours.

-- Emerson, "The American Scholar”

***

A student {of Paracelsus’ time} did not simply enroll at a nearby university. Rather, he wandered from one institution to another, following his nose for the best teachers or for the most conducive environment. Every university had open doors to students, and indeed there was some competition to attract them. It testifies to the conservatism and uniformity of the academic canon that such an itinerant education could still leave students in a position to qualify at the end of it all.

-- Ball, ibid.




BLUE GRAMMAR

2003

The most ancient witness to
grammatical teaching in Ireland
is to be found in the little manual
called Ars Asporii (or Apseri)
... ((this book)), in stark contrast
to the wholly secular tone of its
model ((the Ars Minor of Donatus)),
derives from the ascetic world
of sixth-century Irish monasticism.

- Daibhi O Croinin,
Early Irish Monasticism

While I sat in classrooms
pickling in the drone
of American grammar
-- the official Latin of
verb-subject agreements
and modifiers rescued
from their dangling
precipices -- She was
writing it down in my
ear some other way,
a brogue inside my
writing’s new arches and
tenons, turning nouns
into nipples jazzing motions
I couldn’t master, only
ride. Before me all the
fixtures of learning
were composed and steady --
my book opened wide,
a #2 pencil in my hand
copying down the forms
on lined paper in a rough
miniscule, the late-
morning hush striated
with boredom and
hunger and a free-floating
toothed angst. On one
level it was all a
cultural Latin the way
it must be learned,
line after line, correct
and succinct, either
to be admired or strafed
with red ink: Yet further
down I wrote in Vulgate
about the places I
dreamed or sought
or would but dare not go:
My hands round the back
of the girl sitting in front
of me cupping new breasts,
fighting the evil one in
his lab far at sea,
swaggering nude
in the locker room
with a cock twice as
big as my own, three
times, no, four, shaming
all they boys with my
hammerlike stylus.
She was re-writing
the story the world
bid me learn
in a grammar which
shattered those schoolhouse
walls. There, in the midst
of such strict schooling
(if strict it ever was)
an infernal ars was
copied from the ass
of true love -- forms I’ll
never quite learn,
swimming away on
every sweet wave, a
language always just
out of reach, laughing,
cajoling, calling me home.
Of it I here write
in rooms far below
the cathedral which
pays for everything else.

DOLPHIN

Robert Lowell

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself—
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting
my eyes have seen what my hand did.




DOCTOR

from “Shamanic Letters,” 2006

Faust.
You speak as of all mystogogues the chief
Whoever brought neophytes to grief;
Only reversed. Into the Void I’m sent
That art and power I may there argument.
You treat me like the cat’s paw you desire
To snatch the chestnuts for you from the fire.
Come, let us fathom it, whatever may befall.
In this your Naught I hope to find my All.

Mephistopheles.
I praise you truly, ere you part from me,
Since that you understand the Devil I can see.
Here, take this key.

—Faust before descending into the Realm
of the Mothers to retrieve Helen,
Goethe Faust Part II, 6249-59,
transl. George Madison Priest)

***

A Frova, Prednasone, two Tegretols,
a cup of Cuban coffee, some AA
literature, a bit of sexual reverie,
doses of Faust Part II and Eliade
and Jessie Weston & I’m off:
Here at 5:15 on a Sunday morning,
exhausted from all the work we put
into a our so-so yard sale (enough to help
pay the next round of bills) but feeling
well enough to sing here again, the way
I do when I’m not feeling well at all,
only less pained to do be so verbally
pained. Does that matter at all to You?
Will my tongue actually become too
clotted with its joy to swirl the milky
depths of Soma’s awful truths buried
deeper in these words for a rougher
wilder world than I alone could not
have lived, much less sung to all the
gods? An owl hoots from a dark
tree in our dark neighborhood and
yet again, scaring off Hamlet’s Ghost
in his fatherly equipage. A third time
yet, holding my mind to that edge
between this waking world and
Your wet thundering surge
of all abyssal blissful ends. I’ve come
to trust this hour’s mood of matin chant,
the charm of sound between the lobes
of aging brain and bone, staircasing down
the foam of waters which drowned
You a thousand singers’ songs ago.
Is there a physic of the word which
knits wounds with verbal herbs
plucked from the blackest hedge beyond
the last lights of nighttown? When I
left for college I planned to study to
become a doctor of some sort, of
medicine or divinity for sure (as all
fools and adolescents swear), healing
the world of my own vast wounds, of
my parents’ and their parents’ more
vast and vaster woundings too. But
one course in human biology revealed
a nature in those wounds which refused
taxonomy; in all the catalogue of doors
that might have opened them at last
—muscular-skeletal doors, digestive ones,
circulatory labyrinths opening and closing
not that heart, endrocrinal egresses,
the royal road of neurons rising a spine
which was no arch I knew inside, beyond
those sterile names -- None of that seemed
wild or wet enough to shore that seeming
sea that sucked my toes at night and
drowned me with my dreams. My father
saw me as a Princeton man, packing
me onto my westbound flight decked in
a blue blazer he thought a future man
of God would be desired by every
monied pulpit in the realm; yet I
stepped off that plane far west of home
and was aghast to see my peers in
ratty jeans and hippie shirts, the girls
all Californian, so mephistophelean bright
I swore their smiles had roots in
tie-died thunderwear. Divinity adieu!
I swore, hanging up that blue blazer
for good. New older gods were singing
to me from a blue, blacker wood,
half-pecker, half trunk wild-hurling
ache, a forest of guitar necks stained
in hooch. Topside by day I was just
a dorky college freshman with a
nowhere kind of face, blundering
from dorm to class amid such freshening
tits and ass weaving, like fog, through
all those cathedralling pines. Further
down, far from topside view, the freshly
unGodded man sought infernal solace
in the words. I loved history and
Western Civ and writing poetry the
way I loved and hated solitude,
tearing into texts like meat and bleeding
inharmoniously as I tried to write poems,
line after sing-song line, page after silly
page. In Your tutorage I was wholly blind
to the nurture of its nocturned source;
dark breasts swole unseen to books
lending to my greedy lips all that coffee
coffee and those cigarettes in long hours
of riven study where I proved nothing
to the world but a raging, distant solitude.
Each line I read and wrote was like
a suture on my lips, sealing me tight
into a darkened room far so fucking
far below. Savage boobs by day
denied by every passing blouse sure
put the hurt in thirst as I guzzled
later beers by night, cans secreted
in my basement window and packed
in snow as the fall fell all the way.
I drank a sixpack every night while
my monkish ink dried on the page,
spinning Jethro Tull and Led Zep III
on my tiny tinny stereo, my hands
twitching as Jimmy Page led the way
on “Since I Been Lovin You” down
perdition’s 12-bar road of blues,
riffing astride the dragon of that red Gibson
ES-335. I wanted none of it and all it,
the word and world I mean: I would
have given my entire soul for one night
free of books and poems as their
awful consequence in me, the IsoSoul,
the gray-faced scholist with with the
tiny pen that spewed such feral ire.
And that’s just what You offered me a
ways on further down that winter’s
hoary night: A woman walked out of
that pinewood mist to grip my penis
tight inside her half-looped mouth.
I couldn’t come for the life of me,
not even for my soul, though I traded
it any way -- too shocked to be so
naked of all words, I guess -- lost my
spermal virginity months later on
a stopvoer in Chicago -- But
from that night my studies found a
tooth to them, turning every ivory
tower into an alabaster cock to pluck
and shove down all the wells of Her --
Her/Your -- conspiratorial blue dolor.
Thus my truer education thrust me down
the ramps of fire, soon plugged into
an amplifier & wielding an electric
blue guitar, burning every word I know
between Persephone’s own thighs,
good-time queen in that honky tonk
at the bottom of every night’s too
fathomed wild desire. Doctor indeed
I am, of petrel cry beyond all waking
surf, my bag stuffed with starfish and
sand dubbloons and sea-kelp and moss
and man o wars. My physic still drips here
from every soggy word I cried between
a mother’s thighs I fell out and back for good.

***


Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice; but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose do not.

-- Emerson, "The American Scholar"



BLUE RHETORICS

2003

We have seen that the fili
Amargin is also represented
in the Leabhar na Gabhala
as reciting a set of rhetorics
immediately on landing
in Ireland.Presumably,
therefore, he had acquired
them elsewhere.

-- Nora Chadwick,
“Imbas Forosnai”

I am the wind that blows upon the sea;
I am the ocean wave;
I am the murmur of the surges ..
-- from “The Song of
Amergin,” attr. to
Taleissin


She held my face
in her white hands
that night and
as I slept the
sea slipped into
me, wave after
wave after wave,
filling me with her
wild curvature.
Ah how I drank
Her as I slept,
free at last from
a long drought
of driest words,
her level rising
topmost in my brain.
When I woke
my eyes flew open
and my mouth
began to move,
spilling blue rhetorics
which to this day
I don’t understand,
just sing. It was as
if my tongue had
been pickled in
sea brogue, a
language both
so bitter and too
sweet, its numens
full of beach
bosomage spilling
wavelike from
their brilliant cups.
Cups I would drink
more than my fill
of if I could, but
I was already drowned
and washed back
to that shore where
She was every
wave’s farewelling
kiss, dissolved
and trailing back
to mute eternity.
The words could
only phrase what
never quite got
said between the
plunge and drying
spume, a low echo
of the sea’s wide
weeping when each
night the moon hauls
free a million miles
from Her womb.
I too must sing
in those blue
rhetorics, my tongue
now not of fire
but of the sea.
One day I woke
two thousand miles
north of that sea
I was once baptized
in, reborn to the
God who quells and
purifies Her primal
rough and raucous
ire: My eyes opened
and I saw then
not Him but Her,
curled close to me,
her shape the receipt
of all that foaming
wave which crashed
over me pregnant
with rooms He
might name but
never roam. My
mouth began to
move in ways
never again quite
my own, cerulean
and hooved, professing
a history dredged
up from the abyss,
old lost still gleaming
portents which are
worthless inland
or upstairs, a mother-
of-pearl inlay which
fades to blue
if you stare too hard.
Yet each saying here
rows me further back
to home -- so many
years after that
drowning embrace,
more years down
the road from that
first embracing wave,
so long as to lose
both her and history
to this blue argument
which still washes
wavelike from this
hand and now fades
in a drawling,
shorelike, rhetorical hiss
-- her voice inside
my own, a sea
inside the poem.




I do not know how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.
-- Emerson, "The American Scholar"


Living the life of a traveler, students surely had to grow up quickly -- or at least, they needed to become quickly inured to the harships of a wandering life, which is not quite the same thing. We may assume that the young Theophrasus {Paracelsus} took to this itinerant life, for there is soon no sign of the sickly child from Einsiedeln, and once he let Villach he was never to settle anywhere for as long as he lived. But if travel hardened a young scholar, it was also apt to coarsen him. Students had to develpo a certain brash confidence in order to survive; some earned a few coins by pulling teeth, or selling medical remedies, telling fortunes, singing at inns. At the universities, students had a reputation for unruliness -- someone forced to cultivate independence may not then easily submit to the yoke of academic authories. Students had sex in public, they threw stones or dung at their lecturers (whose own mudslinging was generally confined to the verbal), they drank and fought. In Vienna, battles between the students and the town guildsmen were serious enough to become known as the “Latin War.” Many cities did not particularly appreciate the status a university gave them, feeling that this was hardly sufficient compensation for the trouble it caused.

Yet it was not all a life of libertine debauchery. At the University of Paris, work began at six in the morning in winter and an hour earlier in summer. Examinations could be marathons the key test, the Cardinal Thesis, ran from five in the morning until noon. As if that were not bad enough, the student found himself confronted by such gnomic questions as “Is the loud voice warm?” and “Is it healthy to get drunk once a month?” Healthy or not, students rarely limited themselves so abstemiously; they were in fact obliged to attend many expensive celebratory banquets during the year, which could leave them nursing crippling debts as well as headaches.

--Baill, ibid.


EDUCATION

2003


There were a lot of things I
didn’t learn how to do --
my father was turned to himself
& I was just too wounded
by whatever to seek help elsewhere.
And yet, the knowledge
rose up in me anyway,
brute and shining blue,
a devil I couldn’t name,
much less ride. For all
those years that I drank
too much wishing a woman
would bathe my heart
I learned about solitude
and self-making, back-
assedly, my labors unripened
and unnecessarily long.
Years of scribbling a few lines
in a spiral notebook believing
I wa a poet. Years swept
under the same abused bed,
hoping that the next night’s
iron aria of self-medication
would breech Her walls
at last. Years of waking
with a woman seeing how
real sex is just a hangover
of too much midnight grape,
and every harbor just
so much spilled drink.
Such a humbling education,
schooled undoggedly
in wolfish bane. Had I ears
for other than the big
night music, I might have
listened to the news
that no one’s anything
but conditional makings,
ad lib all the way, far
better surrendered than
suicidally sundered.
But I had to go that latter,
down-laddering way,
down to the nadir,
that coldest dawn
when holding on
became a form of letting go.
For me the learning came
long after the yearn
and burn and icy bouree:
What each heart turns
into a pliant mud
for the shaping
and re-making.
It made my beginning
late, that’s all - late
and still in thrall.



THE REAL WORDS

2003

Though every line laid here
sails and burrows and builds
a bold cathedral blue unlike
any seen before; and though
I think sometimes at poem’s
end that my path to You
unfolds like a string-theory
of universal sprawl, with
each next starry wave exploding
in an orgasmic foam of galaxies
more numerous that the
sands You walk away on
in butter-bossa-nude sashay,
still no work I’ve ever tried
here can compare to those
long hard nights when my
wife and I fought so hard
to find a middle ground between
Your roaring and white shores,
with me one foot out the door
carrying closet full of distilled
ecstasies I would or could
not share with her, and her
refusing to let me go but
still standing there at the door
a step inside the life we
worked so hard to build,
angry and hurt and wild
not to lose this thing I’d
so long abused, and me
discovering at that exit
that what I was leaving
was the worst form of
self-exiling roam, a suicide, if
you will, to drown in excess
no adult has any sense or cause
to indulge. The words we exchanged
in those worst of hours, at opened
doors, on too-late nights, over
telephones strung too many miles
apart, those words were certainly
the awfullest ore a tongue could
excavate, hauled up from the
deepest chasms of a heart: Not
poetry at all and hardly recordable
here, so private it would be a
form of murder even to try to
share them on the page. Suffice
today that I try to tell you
that these wavelike succors of
history and mystery and blue
I call poetry have not a single breath
or drop of blood or inch of shit
or piss or migraine or skin cancer
or nameless dying malaise -- nothing
to make them so urgently real
-- without those words we spoke
to each other several years
ago, in the worst of times
which we did not relinquish
though there seemed no hope
for a paired solution, words we
kept on saying til somehow
we’d broken through -- beyond
the reefs of hurt and loss to
find the simplest word in which
we could both board and row
our way back to -- home.
And so today it’s bitter cold
again and dark as winter solstices
go -- all that is surely outside
in the argot of hard ends --
while all the inside stuff --
decked Christmas tree, three
cats asleep in padded boxes
underneath the guest bed and
the fourth curled up next
to my wife who’s deep asleep
but soon to rise with me for
a day together and then to
her folks for their Christmas
ways. The inside stuff is merry
and warm and grateful most to
the few words we found which
steered us through our coldest
time, hauled up from regions of
love it is death to enter and
fate or grace or love itself
to somehow survive then rise.
Surely You know all this in
the womb which sings today
where the next year soon
must wake, and walk on down
the shore, as good marriages
in good lives do, over the next
brace of sandy hills, come what
will, for better poems than
you’ll see here, in houses
warmer than every winter chill.


QUEST

from “Shamanic Letters,” 2005

When Minos, judge of souls in Dante’s
Inferno, warns Virgil and Dante
about entering Hell, Virgil replies,

“That is not your concern
It is his fate to enter every door.”

—Dante Inferno V 21-2,
transl. John Ciardi


For half of my life the quest flowed
underground, its ends unknown
to me, its means so upside-down,
the way a fool inverts a king’s gold
crown into a potty of mired sounds.
Untimely ripped from my parents’
God, I salvaged those tossed angels
as best I could, plundering every bed
from which it seemed they’d fled,
like a blue moon falling on blood-western
waves. For years the quest was what I
failed to wing, a magnitude I was too
busy barreling down to utter, much
less for more than one night sustain
But when I’d had enough of what
I never could quite find enough,
the quest appeared in opened books,
in that thirst which slaked in
reading them, each book an isle
of sufficient blue to praise new
Gods with freshened lips. In surfacing
the quest exchanged one lucre for
a next, the clout of former nights
smelt down to unfiltered umbrage
which hums low a wild humility,
the sense of who rules what below
and how little my shape counts in
the swirl of years I’m lent. The quest
topside has woven my days into
a productive, fertile loom,
jaunting across and down the inside
pages of a life which I can only
seam, my voice astride the power
chords of dragons far below
the range of human throats,
beings no moat or ramparts will
ever full challenge, much less name.
That quest I daily name as if a shore,
and, thus hallowed, free its keel
once more to harrow what it once revelled,
crossing oceans whose marge I am.
Who knows just what I’ll say
tomorrow, what strange sooth
will brogue my tongue with salt?
For years the quest rode me
underground on swells of big-night
sound: For more years now I’ve
saddled Uffington with verbs
to gallop back across those
ancient mating grounds,
singing here all that I found.
And this I suspect is just two
thirds of it, the quest I mean:
just what wings will grow
from the last lines of these poems
some night I’ll drown and dream.



THE LIBRARY
AND THE WORK DOWN UNDER

2002

Overnight the rains eased in,
pressing gray hands down
over this house like a monk’s hood.
Yesterday’s outer wonder
is now an inward bliss,
opening doors downward
in a passage grave lined with books.
I always spend time scanning
titles on the shelves of my father’s
library when I’m here, turning up
new finds like root-vegetables.
The names are not important,
only that I look and I find.
It’s as if this libarary were my
own, or my totem’s. Steady rains
in the blurred green gray window,
my father humming as he
makes his first coffee, oak beams
dark - two centuries old -
and a thousand books murmuring
me to me, on shelves around
and within me, calling me,
urgent to unfold something
I don’t know yet, or won’t ever,
a thousand spines I must sever
to get to the one book
which has grown long enough.


SALT’S GRAMMARIAN

I am her berry O-mouth,
her silvering tongue,
blue grammarian
of the salt-tiding blue:
I turned and touched
her on some foreign
night, and she began
to sing, up from
the throat of my
every heaven-flung
nerve. Sing she did,
ever louder as
some woman smiled
and bid me mount
and ride wave
dazzle to the moon,
each foaming plunge
a construct of
arch and ache,
each stout article
of my faith
received in her
voweled sighs, her
Os and Ahs,
her sibilant, soft
Yes ... And so she
wrote her blue flamelets
down in the burning
book whose leaves
were torn from my
mind and heart and
balls; wrote them
down loin for line
in a wavelike sine
from one white startle
to the next, bed
to bed a voyage
like ravening, her
thirst the moon
hung high in the
window, gleaming
one white road
through all that
blackening blue.
She wrote the story
down and called
it my life, a
saltier hagiography
than I would choose
to write, but hey!
I am just the
hand in her
scriptorium,
transcribing the
next song, dipping
this pen into
her dark and then
scratching for a while.
She works out the
genitives, the syntax
and style of the
tale told so. My job
is just to chord
the mordents and
mellifluents of
her faux-angelic ire,
a vocalissimus
of beachside wonder
one poem short
of the surf’s one choir.


GLOSS

2004

Irish manuscripts of the
early medieval period
generally are famous for
their glosses. These were
sporadic entries, penned
by the scribe or by sub-
sequent readers, sometimes
between the lines, sometimes
in the margins.

-- Daibhi O Croinin, Early Medieval Ireland

The sea-music was not
text enough: upon its pale
dark margins I enameled
its sound within my words,
emending a higher gloss
to that sweeping, folding
and foam-crashing mess.
I was was fool enough
to believe some wave-borne
woman bid me so,
her voice inside that surf
as I once thought I heard
her in the drowsy drift
which followed my
first love’s first smash,
a pounding which carried
me like spring runoff.
I thought -- believed --
there was a blue inside
that frenzy which named
me lover, son, and singer;
and so made my from
there like a scholar in
a surf scriptorium,
reading wet texts aloud,
talking back in words I
believed she would hear
and receive and reward
with more of that blue-in-
white drowse. --- Two beds,
three perhaps, were woven
of such silk, and then?
The rest of what I’ve lived
has not been that ocean
but the motions of belief,
a salt religion where the
words became the liturgy
inside passion, my comp
books pale sand chapels
left like conches on the scree,
washed not by actual
waters, nor by
the amniotic distillations
of that blue glee, but
these leftmost
twists of that original
sound, a widdershins
transit fully round
the curving shapes I
thought I saw in that
dreamlike warm tide
inside the canticle
of a woman’s sveltest
sighs. None of that has
ever proved true in
the raw and realest sense:
Not in this world,
nor in this life -- But the
words I wove found and
find her in full receipt
of all the treasures drowned
in the ocean’s keep. All
there, all mine, inside the
transept of each line
I hoove and fin here,
shaping all the ecstasies
she (or she in me) finds
dear -- And so the blue
bower I’ll never find again
lies hidden in the glosses
I scrawl here -- peripheries
of heaven in words
of sea abandonment,
each poem a block
toward her cathedral,
a marginal construction
at best, since each misses
by that silk degree where
she sighed once and then
was gone. Each end here
add to the mortar
which holds her
smile intact, through
never, ever won: And
when I leave all this
to wake my wife,
stroking her feet just so,
the whole paper effort
is mere margin to
the work that really counts
-- my hands like stele
tracing angels on her sole,
the lowest motion I
can summon that will
wake her only so.


HORSES OF INSTRUCTION

2004

Last night as I approached
my home -- a mile from the
turn off Highway 441 into
Mount Dora -- a storm was
brewing ill, sudden and stark
against the calm folds of
late late summer’s afternoon.
The mass was like a boil
or a wen, the clouds a
motley of angry grays, lightning
vipering in thick, jazzy bolts.
The rain intensified in the
last streets to home into a
pocket tempest, strafing my
car so loud I lost the sound
of Republicans and Democrats
shouting at each other
from the radio, their
meaningless words and insults
drowned out in this far more
local an substantial
vent of God or nature
or real singing. In our garden
the plastic cat-in-a-pumpkin
had blown over, the witch
up on the front steps now
kiltered on the grass beyond
the azalea bush, her scorn
now helpless and sad. I set
them both back up then
ran inside -- drowned rat
to house -- where I was
greeted with woe by my
wife, so sick with the flu.
She lay on the couch
coughing up her
lungs, cursing every
doc to prescribe such
expensive ineffectual crap.
The storm blew harder
outside our darkening
house -- a whirling gale
of sheeted rain through
which the lightning
pillared here and there
in exclamation bolts
of thunder, like strafes
of sniper fire from
high howitzers. One cracked
so fast and hard next
to our house that the
lights were out before
the boom and then returned
as the noise scrolled
out of town. Jim Lehrer
flashed back on the set
with the day’s hard news
and my wife intensified
her tirade against her flu
and Violet our Siamese
squatted low in a the
study door, terrified
even more of this next
storm. I was exhausted
from too little sleep,
a migraine & a too-long
day of knocking out
too many layouts with
too little clock. --Quite
a night but we got through,
eating leftovers by TV
& watching taped
sitcoms, the storm
raining hard for another
hour before floating
slowly east. Eventually
the strays came by
for love and dinner
and I sat with them awhile
on the porch, their tiny
mouths greedy in their
bowls, the flashing distant
but still pure white.
When I came back in
my wife was fast asleep
on the couch, zonked on
PM Tylenols she had taken
for the headache which
topped the rest of her misery.
I cleaned the cats’ dishes
and readied coffee for
this next morning’s row.
As I stood at the sink
looking out on sodden
night, I thought how
the horses of instruction
must gallop hard
to pound their homilies
full home. Without
such difficulty on the plate
there’s not much flavor
to the soup, no grateful
savor to the meat, no
linger to the spuds’
unfolding wings of
soft white soil.
Bed me here each
night in the better
of the worse. Such
labors for love of
enduring days
are the secret
and blue-roaring
hooves of my
far-stampeding bliss.



CLOSING THE BOOK

Almost dawn again, and cold. A
Weak bruise of blue now in the east.
Christmas lights on houses across the
Street, a futile sprinkler next door,
The cats mewling for exit, some grub.
I pin this moment to the page
To let you know it pulls me now
Away from well and beach, to haul
Water and wave across the day
I live in, for better and ill.
I’t time to loose the cats and type
Poems in, then slowly wake my wife.
It’s time to make a world from words.
The birds now fling their bright halloo,
The day tides slow sure rising blue.