Pains

Music is a feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music,

-- Wallace Stevens, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”


There are also the “pains,” which are thought of both as sources of power and causes of illness. These “pains” appear to be animated and sometimes even have a certain personality. They do not have human forms, but they are thought of as concrete. Among the Hupa, for example, there are “pains” of every color; one is like a piece of raw flesh, others resemble crabs, small deer, arrowheads, and so on. Belief in “pains” is general among the tribes of Northern California, but is rare or unknown in other parts of North America.

The damagoni of the Achomawi are at once guardian spirits and “pains.” A shamaness, Old Dixie, relates how she received the call. She was already married, when, one day, “my first damagoni came to find me. I still have it. It is a little black thing, you can hardly see it. When it came the first time it made a great noise. It was at night. It told me that I must go see it in the mountains. So I went. I was very frightened. I hardly dared go. Later I had others. I caught them. They were damagoni that had belonged to other shamans and that had been sent to poison people on other shamanic errands.” Old Dixie sent out one of her own damagoni and caught them. In this way she had come to have over fifty damagoni, whereas a young shaman has only three or four. The shamans feed them on the blood that they suck during their cures. According to Jaime de Angulo these damagoni are at once real (bone and flesh) and fantasies. When the shaman wants to poison someone he sends a damagoni. “Go find So-and-so. Enter him. Make him sick. Don’t kill him at once. Make him die in a month.”

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy


DUOTONE

Feb. 11, 2006

If you’re going to write this properly
you’d better be prepared to sing it
both ways, as tone and archetypal
drone, as music cauled in conceit.
Call it a duotone of thought and heart,
black inkings of a blue’s deep skein.
A poem is thus pain and cure,
a wound’s own physic retelling
the up- and downsides of life’s
onswelling surf, where loves
and losses join in matrimony
to the strange interior lands
they took you to while you sat
imprisoned in the very self
which ligaments inside to out
as I to Thou. Here memory
finds flesh again the way first light
warmed her hair three decades ago,
so sure as delvings of creation’s
fire that my hand is stabled to
trace her properly all over again
both there in spring’s first exult
and roaming the dark cold
garden outside as I sit
here in a much later,
no less enraptured chair.
Something leapt across the gap
on those glowing strands of hair
scattered wantonly on my thin
pillow, the orchid bounty of
a belling thrall, sadly bellied by the
steely undertow of a fate,
pains I’ll never fully recover from
having altared them so high with
every blue abysm to surge the
siegings of my blood’s receipt of air.
The poem is the eventual name
for that bridge and the shores
it joined at last which bears a
blue infernal traffic in the ballsy
Gaelic brogue of an intercourse
no love can fully scree, much
less domain. Love is just the half
of it, the visible ventricles of
a heart which is much wilder
and dark-lucent and incessant
in its weave inside beneath my
swimming tongue. Sundered psalmist,
defiant weaver of white flags,
marauder whose tines I winnow
like an ancient pilot fish,
this song is betweening’s master,
ever both world and words for it,
never resting, never sated, always
cresting fresh-salted by old
wounds’ superations keeping noun
and verb at odds, ever praising
the difference in which I and Thou
become the fascia of a delight
which never quits or quells or
quakelike thunders and comes hard.



THIS IS MY BOX

Feb. 12, 2006

I loved Menotti’s “Amahl
and The Night Visitors”
when I was a kid, faux-
directing the Pittsburgh
Symphony on TV when I
was three, lounging by
the stereo in my father’s
study when I was ten or
so, reveling in the aching
pathos of a poor shepherd
boy’s night, lamed, fatherless,
tending his meager flock
in wide desert scrabble
as eternal as the desertions
that can kill a heart.
Amahl’s boy fusion of loss and
yearning was surely mine,
starry and cold and powerfully
linked to the infant mewling
in a nearby manger —a
feeling blent of grief and
beauty which was somehow
stronger than all
of the shadows in his house
and mine, millennia away
in fat Evanston where our
family got thoroughly mauled
by each other and God and sex
and The Sixties. I especially
loved that song by Caspar
the silly third wise man—almost
a Stooge—about the box he’d
carried all his years and which
he would offer the child,
a box filled with everything startling
and wonderful in the world.
“This is my box, this is my box,
I never travel without my box,”
Caspar sang, each verse
opening drawers laden with
strangeness and pleasure, lapis
lazuli eggs and dinosaur tears
encased in amber, fragrant dried
flowers and enormous shark
teeth, rude stone goddesses and
jewelled tweezers for plucking
the burning plumage of gold geese
What a collection! I always wanted
a box like that, some treasure
chest of oddities and ardors and
devices not vaulted anywhere
else in the world, at least
not in that peculiar way I
most desired, whatever that
was. That ache was probably
why I was so fascinated with
the devious cigarette lighter
used by the spy hero in “In
Like Flint,” which had,
according to James Coburn,
“87 different uses—
88, if you need a light.”
One day I tried to reverse-
engineer that contraption
on paper, drawing 87 rectangles
in a big rectangle and then
trying to name each one.
What an exercise
in desire’s floral consummations,
impossible and permanently
inked! I believed back then
that plural uses were
necessary if you planned
to win in the world; a hero
required all the mojos he
could muster if he was
to beat his evil adversary,
blowing up the monster’s
island laboratory with
all his goons; surely
the 47th or 59th use
of that Zippo was exactly
how the hero could
escape such devastation
with such harrowing
hair’s-breadth (cunt-hair?)
precision, leaping over
the falls with 5 half-naked
girls in bobbing drums.
Savagery, cunning,
balls, and ire: to light
the fire you need a Flint
and I sure wanted to
be one, paused, flicking
the wheel to say
“88, if you need a light.”
Now I read how shamans
collected damagoni in their
rucksack of ills ‘n’ cures,
each both guardian spirit
and sheer pain, a singular
employ in the choir with
with a two-faced purpose,
as to cure a cold and freeze an
enemy’s pent smile.
A shamaness named Old Dixie
said she had over 50 damagoni
in her truck, queening over
all the young buck magicos
who could only muster
two or three salvos with
their tongues. All that makes
me wonder just what
verbal sprites are cabinned
here inside this trusty
somewhat rusty steamer
of steely verse, yowling and
harrumphing in the engine
room’s hellish mash of
gleaming oiled gears, keeping
these songs chugging along
through a sea of dark mornings,
There’s Oran down his well
decanting old sea gods,
and Roethke sweeting his field
of brually-blowing wheat.
There's Cupid on his high
hard horse cuckolding waves
of their siphoning wives,
there’s Shakespeare booming
through to galaxies beyond
the words we thought
we knew. Some redheaded
siren is raking blue waters
with the nails of her song,
urging every salmon of
fire to leap to the lees
of her hips; and further
out you’ll find the leaky nips
of a dark blue madonna
who delves my every
ejaculation with ululations
of pale shores; and there
in the rip current rides
the hard-galloping gent
whose blue eyes are pure
ice glinting not of any
light borne of days but
belongs to God’s spectra anyway,
far right of violet perhaps
or under the cleft in
Persephone’s red fruit, lending
a cold metallish sound
to these worked-up hooves.
All of those numens -- call ‘em
sprites or jinns or dervish
whirls of verbal moods ---
all of them jackal and jest
the days wash these lines,
vaulted somewhere under
my tongue behind my ear
and under my balls in
the darker vaults of my heart,
the greater half of a heat
which names all it believes
but remains itself unseen,
unridden, urn-bidden to lean
daft against the wind.
This is my box, my
hurlyburly juke of songs,
ferried from a hundred
distant shores:
It is my gift to you,
my unsaved Beloved, my
unsounded depth, my
unslakable destination
for which my soles will
never quite shore. Now
you’ve heard of all
I keep in the first drawer:
you will surely dream
what’s kept in the second.
But what is in the
third drawer I sing?
Here I keep the depths
of my world, the heart
of that lonely shepherd
boy who raptured mine
playing in in a minor key
of major third harmony
on his desert flute,
lit by that perfect
abandoned night where I walk
walk without meters
or crutch, where I store
the most sacred blunts
of all— “Licorice!” the
third wise man sang
and here I refrain,
Black sweet licorish
Black sweet licorish

— Have some!