Dark Bridge

The Black Death swept out of Asia in late 1347, and in the following two years it killed as much as a third of the populatoin of the continent. This unspeakable terror transformed Western culture, dislocating the social structures of Medieval Eutorpe and leaving the Christian world traumatized and more than a little deranged. Death and decay were embraced and celebrated even while they bred deep terror. The stone carvings of dead nobles on their tombs no longer showed dignified kinghts lying in their armor, but bodies crawling with worms, their flesh peeling from the bone. Artists like Hans Holbein celebrated the dance of death, in which skeletal demons preyed gleefully on popes and beggars alike.

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

***

Furseus’ vision is dated to 633 by {the Venerable} Bede He was an Irish preacher who had established a mission in East Anglia as a consequence of his first vision and had heard angelic choirs in another. His third vision was much more frightening. In it, he was borne aloft by angels over a dark valley, then saw four fires in the air. The angels told him that these punished respectively liars, the covetous, creators of strife and discord, and the pitless and the fraudulent. {The judgment of all Republicans?} Then the four flames joined together in one big flame, in which he saw devils flying. One demon threw a tortured sinner at him, a man from whom Furseus had inherited som emoney. When Furseus was restored to his body, he carried a burn mark from this experience on his jaw and shoulder for the rest of his life. And Bede tells us that a very old monk of his acquaintance had heard this story told in the dead of winter -- yet Furseus was sitting in a thin garment and sweating ast though it was a mid-summer day.

-- Alice Turner, The History of Hell


DARK BRIDGE

Feb. 7, 2006

There’s a gold bridge arcing
over blue mysterium
which these bluer songs sustain;
over it a distant
insubstantial woman listens,
paused in silk brocades,
that high sweet music
embossing in her ear
the memory of my name.
But to there is an
awful bridge of blasted stone
across those burning waters
which moat the assy
brunt of things--hell, if you
will, the loo of my bad
history and the world’s
which weights all songs
with direr harmonies,
cracking cleffs and keys
with death’s black hammer
& making all seas a peril
if not succinctly evil.
Observe the strata
of all those bad nights I
ferry like dogpoop on the
footsole of my meters
or a corspelike fetor
nailed to my back ward,
gouting a tarry rant
of routs and rapines
I have managed to claw
my way up out of
by the grace of that God
I long ago refuted. That deep
strata of cold sleaze
weights these paper
longings for blue heaven
with chilly clamors
further down, the
infernal knowledge I
gained those nights
dredging a heavy nougat,
like black gold, onto my tongue,
piercing my labials with
plunge and suck and shriek
as I mouth the matins of
soft psalm, a ferocity,
if you will, not seen in
brighter lands, in starrier amens.
A lewd guitarists struts
beneath the oceans I
here stage, holding the
high slag of a hardon
like a guitar in his hand,
gouting a doggodful yawp
of caninical lupines,
battening a deep name’s
augment against all shores
I write down here. Survivor
of that man, I attempt
to make amends to the world
by walking every day
with far kinder things to say
and try to make waves plush.
Europe wears a horrific belt
woven of the Black Plagues
crawling worms, that ravening
which killed a full third
of its citizens six centuries
ago. Vision like Dante’s
were scented by that godawful
rot, a whiff of ghoulish death
fanned by a million corpses
dancing cross that plunging
black bridge. Every bright
guilder of Renaissance delight
shines strange against that
brutal dark, Medieval man
finding forward edges to his
Maker’s Thou Shalt Not,
in an eerie combine of lust
and death, delight and
damnation stouting
cods like high and higher
churchbell spires, too hot,
too blue, to pent to
pray old ways return.
Physic be damned; Europe
seethed to slam the hips of all
a world full round now bassoed.
And how can any song not glow
fell and wild, orisioned by
the moon which tore the
all lucene of God
from Earth so long ago,
causing a vast blue sea to
abysm land with salt
supernity? Oh the bloodlike
measure of that depth beneath
Pacific breadth, six miles
of falling angels’ breath
drowned in descending choirs!
My song has bridges
I dare not know to cross
but must; its next vision
points a bony finger
where I rummaged so
much underwear, trying
to name a sundered love
always to no avail. Such
nights were miniscule
to the world’s more massive
script in which more than
panties were ripped away
getting to the stone-cold
roots of things, those
abyssal tombs where every
song wombs and scalds
and scatters a sea-sounding
benediction which might be
praise or conflagration
or simply the meagerest
bridge over to a return’s
annihilation, seared and grateful
and darkly reminded
of how much there is to lose
in all there is to love.
Ask the moon there hauling
tides above about the bridge
it’s crossing, between the
stars we see and the greater
one we can’t for all
their dark embossing.



A GODLY BALEEN

June 2005

This dark night of loving fire, as it purges
in the darkness, so also in the darkness
enkindles the soul.

-- St. John of the Cross

He hat sent fire into my bones, and
hath taught me fire.

-- Lamentations i.13

This dark hour is my altar to
that dark night in which I plunged
too deep in you and died, the way
silver is killed in fire without
mercy so that it may shine
forever with the tooth of brilliant
moons. I’ll not return to those
whiskey-wardened nights of
bone carousal though I
light a candle for them here,
for their inward tooth of
yearn-and-burn, that savage bite
which goes all the way down
into the god of noctal seas.
It’s been hot and hotter of late,
yesterday 95 degrees,
and the seabreeze storms
trooped over selectively and fast,
dumping three inches over the
airport but just a smatter here.
Storms have been merciless
and without mercy elsewhere
all week -- over Seminole
county on Thursday with
lightning strikes burning two
houses to the ground,
and on Wednesday a bad
muthah lingered over the
University of Central Florida
in a two-hour assault, dumping
eight inches of rain and
peppering the land with
lightning strikes so perilous
that the National Weather Service
issued a special warning for all
to stay in. But none of that
massed here, and so an unsated
heat simmers at this 4 a.m.
thick as the sour breath of
that lupine revenant at
the bottle club right now
who will never score another
woman, ever, damned to burn
ever hotter every night
henceforth. Even the crickets
seem scorched into silence,
flattened down by the wake
of a sun which split the sky
a few hours ago. All that fire
here is dark and makes the
the night especially so, cauling
a weight in me of those
years I was the nightly
martyr of my eros, arrow
burning arrow barbing
right through my gut
into every flank of the sea
to curl towards my shore.
It is not the result of those
nights which still matters
but the noctilucent thrall
which sailed me nightly onto
a blackening tide, chasing glimmers
and mermaids in an
orchestrally salty stink.
Don’t get me wrong -- the
tunnies all mattered, their
revealings and succorings pressed
like pornographic leaves in
a book I pray never to burn
for fear its god bid me burn
my life all over again, filling
those pages back up. But after
all those years the undersides
of that night have blossomed,
like a sea garden, at the
deadest hours of the day
when I’m called to black matins,
by long drowned fairy bells --
a lost city of lust which
on nights like this, when
all is so silenced by big heat,
I can hear the faint music
from the few bars still open
and the jackal-like laughter
of the few damned carousers
to sing the last lines of
their vespers, words I
remember well. This was
the hour I finally ran out of fuel,
lack of booze or money or
consciousness dropping the
a heavy black curtain
on that next burning bouree.
Here and now I am what rises
from that drowse,
unslakables harrowed by that
god-decreed souse in which
I lost her but good and ever
& dreamt down and through
burnt chapels at the bottom
of the sea. I came thus to tonsure
my verses in the offices of a
mild infernity -- blue in dolor,
solar red to the lees. I’m on my
knees and praying hard, my
face buried in loins only found
under blackened spires
swathed in godly baleen.
My ink is derricked from
the darkest breasts revealed
at this hour years ago;
I set these saucers of
black milk at the window
for that old totem sea-wolf
that his thirst spire revealed.