Pants on Fire

The abbot of the Benedictine Monestary at Sponhiem, Johannes Heidenberg of Trittenheim, known as Trithemius, turned the humble community into a renowned center of learning, boasting a library of 2,000 volumes, many of which were concerned with arcan and occult matters that would have disconcerted other ecclesiastics.

... In his claims of astounding powers and revelations, Trithemius surpasses anything even Paracelsus subsequently wrote. He says in a letter in 1499 that he is working on a marvellous book called Steganographia that is full of profound secrets, stupendous and incredible things. It will explain, for example, how “I may express my thought to another while eating, sitting, or walking, without words, signs, or nods,” and how these thoughts could be sent “by fire” over distances of a hundred miles or more, even into deep dungeons. This is done, the book reveals, through the assistance of angels.”

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


BOOK (PANTS) ON FIRE

Feb. 4, 2006

A book in the hand
should be a ball of fire.

-- Emerson

My reading magicked
the booze abyss into
descending bliss, the old
jones for reckless dives
toward paps of no avail
become an inside job of
metaphorical descents.
I found my lost God’s
exalts in the brinous salts
of archetype and dream
and verse, wandering
from Jung to Campbell
and Hillman and from
Homer through Rilke
on a fertile promontory
of pure Shakespeare.
A book-to-book assay built
this downward tower into
dark divines, and strung
a eustachian tube of surf
from an angel’s ear to mine.
My feast of saints are shelved
in a burning aviary of books,
a vault of diving boards all
squealing Yippee down the
leagues I follow as I write across
and down the page. Image here
the hungry lover’s pants
collapsing at his feet
and you read the sense I sing,
the urgency of the burning
sun for seas, my words
enflamed, engorged by my
texts’ sea-smelling lacunae,
so consumed by thoughts of blue
that only romping to the
depths of them will do,
each line so hastily wrought
the ladder’s burning too,
chasing the poem down
to its smoking end.
If a heart can think,
so the mind full aches,
its high harrumphings
hooved by a libido
schooled in humping
every naiad numen
to crest the foam
proferring pink deliria.
My book’s too hot to hold,
much less full savor
unless you’re deep at sea
down under any sooth
or certainty that
fills those joyous canyons
a singing voice gestalt,
carving heaven in basaltic
floors of stone. All tides
are margined here, my
sources shared by the
moon and wombs alike,
the cry of first beginnings
in which I shouted full awake
and which no blue assay
can slake, though I’ll ever
try, astride these waves
of ink no angel dares to drink
the fullest measure of.
Oh my pants are on fire
and there’s never page enough
to drop them all the way
before I’m mounted full
upon the fishlike diving one,
plunging in salt exult.
Just like this poem, that
book will never end, the
seas it dreams so nude,
so bottomless, I must
content myself with shelves,
these daily islands like
library wings which harbor
me for just one poem
before the next conflagration
of arcane lyric swings
me further out and down
toward the ankles of delight
and I am fused again
in heaven’s deepest fire
where its words at last suspire
in choiring exalt Amen.





PANTS ON FIRE

2004

When I was a kid my mother
always knew when I lied
because I’d stick my tongue
into a cheek as I fibbed.
A dead giveaway.
Liar liar -- Now no one
can tell until my pants
are on fire. I fiddle in the
middle of desire
rounded by flames & ruin.
I don’t just mean
the sexual deceit --
bad though that is --
but that the commission
of every sin has its
base in appetite,
a short-cut back to
origin. The deceit is
the res of all receipt,
the mother’s body
all breast-milk
and uteral swash,
her penultimate
backwards embrace.
Who doesn’t want to
go back to sweeter
hours, the wave-born
dream? No wonder I
deceived even myself,
tongue in cheek,
exposing every lie
which blocked the exits
of all those lonely
forays out into the
isolate self. Self-betrayed,
I stayed close to home.
But like the heart-shaped
birthmark which slowly
disappeared from my
chest, my knack for
self-evident deceit
receded back and I
joined the lonely
lying fray, less schooled
than others perhaps in that
hermetic art, a fool
and blunderer who
was a good boy
and sure acted smart.
Even the milk of
goodness has its
sour undertow -- look
at me here on this
declaiming chair, astute
and educated, still
trying to forge my
passage into heaven,
albeit through matters
more sea-weedy,
nereid-strange. Did I
get the goods? Did I
rescue the girl
and get my grateful kiss?
In this mockery of
a poem can I vaunt
or vault the wave’s
receding hiss & me
caught here per usual
with my pants at my
ankles and some
feline laughter at all
my sins revealed,
so pale and small,
not a man of words
at all. Against such
mockery I cuckold
every poem, my
tongue pressed in
that other cheek
no one need see
to know. Holy mana,
free me from this
rhyming, platudinous
mire. Bless these
burning shorts
with one more
salt blue cavort.

***

Many years after the holy man had departed to the Lord, a certain youth fell from his horse into the river which in Scotic is called Boend (the Boyne), and, being drowned, was for twenty days under the water. When he fell he had a number of books packed up in a leathern satchel under his arm; and so, when he was found after the above-mentioned number of days, he still had the satchel of books pressed between his arm and side. When the body was brought out to the dry ground, and the satchel opened, it was found to contain, among the volumes of other books, which were not only injured, but even rotten, a volume written by the sacred fingers of St. Columba; and it was as dry and wholly uninjured as if it had been enclosed in a desk.

-- Adamnan, Life of St. Columba

SCYLLA & CHARYBDIS

Early nightmare: civil war in
First grade. The boy who ratted on
Me and Alan to our teacher
For playing Show Me Yours I’ll Show
You Mine in the back woods during
Recess played Michael to my itch,
Pitching me and my kind to fire.
I crept along the school-house walls
Trying not to get caught: But then
Some kid aflame edged around the
Corner in a scream I could not
Avoid, and I watched my small bones
Smoulder in a sorry pile. For
Months I woke from that awful dream
The ruins of what my lust had seen.


CENTAUR

2003

The centaur filled
the whole doorway
of my night -- huge
and hair, brutally
hooved, his eyes like
pitchers poured from
the worst of winter
seas. And when he
bid me climb up
that great back I knew
somehow I must,
though I might die,
or die of all the
waves I could not
ride myself, much
less sing. He made
the beach in three
great strides, crossing
over orchard and lake
and shopping mall
like a full moon in
fast-mo reverse.
The sea at 2 a.m.
was alien and huge,
each wave an
empire smashing
at our feet. He waded
out and began to
swim, singing in
the voice of sea-bulls,
tolling over the graves
of lusty sailors,
reddening the barbs
hurled far below.
A man-beast older
than the sum of
all my fathers, he
bid me strip naked
and stride out
past the merry lappers
of my metaphors,
beyond even the
weepy salt iniquity
of my own history
out into the real
raw heaving brine
of heart I can never
fully serve or master,
much less sing
in his ripe baritone.
Crabs and ‘cuda
bumped their
menace at my ankles
while weed-drift
wove my chest
and cock and balls
like the soft hair
of all the women I
have loved -- he
bid me beyond
all that, stepping
into a riptide that
hauled me miles
out to sea where
the stars above
burned like
a million white
pilot lights of
heaven’s Marshall
Stack, while death
spread out beneath
me for miles
in the heave
of Her darker
thrall. And I was
alone -- the centaur
gone within, leaving
me just one command:
Ride. And so I
began the rest of
my life, catching
wild combers in
from Cornwall
and Iceland, climbing
on their frigate
backs and clutching
the reins of turgid
foam: Riding sweet
emotions toward that
shore I’ll never reach.
I hear him laughing
up ahead in the
surf’s incessant roar,
delighting in the big
night music which
fills the next boy’s door.




TALES OF THE MAD MONKS

2002

Ireland’s mad monks
of the 7th Century
dipped their quills
in black blood &
wrote down old tales
in wild calligraphy.

What they purported
to be true (or amended
to new faith) was
fantastical and strange,
oral gods and heroes
flattened into
florid scribbles down
the page.

By then it had
been 900
years since the last
man of action dueled
the sea three days:
Since the heroes
lived in voice balloons
over the cooking fire,
a map of mind
framed in a distant song.

The archaeologists
who now dig Irish peat
and walk off radar
soundings at Mag Ruath
and Tara tell us
that we know little
of such stories’ actual
bones: The current
task is to map
a backwards land
old, older, older still,
reconstructing thrones
from bent brooch-pins
and sonograms of
ancient, soft mounds.

Yet for all they
can now describe
of how the royal
sacred stones aligned,
their mouths are
silent round the
ineffable why.
The bones suggest
a frame but not
the bloody, feral
heart which moved
‘em so. And so
the scientists
must return to
those dusty graves
of tales, for the
rubbing of arterial
flush, for gleams
in bleak gloamings.

And so the brightest
minds cobble
in conjecture
a fitting pair of shoes,
then conjure up
delighted feet
to leap the bonfire’s hues.

According to "The Voyage of St. Brendan," Brendan burned a book containing stories about the wonders of God's creation out of disbelief. For this reason he is sent on a voyage so as to see with his own eyes certain divine manifestations which earlier he had refused to credit. In this way he is to recover the book by refilling it with the wonders which he witnesses on his voyage. The majority of the phenomena which he comes across are related to man's actions and behaviour in this life and the circumstances consequent upon them in the Afterlife. Brendan encounters souls in hell, heaven and paradise. The astonishing and sometimes frightening experiences restore his belief.

-- Clara Strijbosch, "The Heathen Giant in the Voyage of St. Brendan"
(School of Celtic Studies DIAS 1999, p. 369)


MY BOOK OF DEAD HOURS

I’ve filled two score journals
with the same sort of harrow,
late-late-night after night,
at an hour when the rest
of the world has died, returning
to the same underground door,
the same boat, the same drift
down these pages, writing a
soulish travail which no one
else may ever read, much
much less care to. It’s 4:05 a.m.
and I’ve been up since 2 today,
turning slow on a spit of
dubious flame while my wife’s
in a Lake City hospital yet
another night, stricken with
some deep gut-sickness the
docs can’t quite explain.
Outside at this day and hour
it’s just a sour-mashed swoon,
the faintest filament of crickets
in a vast black stillness
which may simply be the
haunt of lonliness or whisper
of some next gate going down.
There comes a time in the journey
below when a man’s heart is
weighed against a feather from
the headdress of Maat, Goddess
of Truth; if I’ve erred in all this
my pan will fall, taking with
it this book of dead nights.
Maybe the grip will relent
and I’ll be freed to write real
poems again, freed too to sleep
all the way through to the
first blueing of the sky,
hell, maybe even wake after
my wife does, for the first
time in all these years -- maybe
all that after all of these books
tossed page by page to the
night’s blackest tide. Maybe
this pen will name the last
warden of the last door and
wing my way through to the
end of all words, and then
I’ll go on with life like Saint
Brendan back from the sea,
the book of wonders he
burnt in disbelief finally
re-scored, its pages filled
with all he himself found
on the blue desert of God’s main.
Freed to love, plant a garden,
die -- my book of blue harrows
goes on and on and on
in the black ink of burnt angels,
a tide of their blood. We’re
deep into summer, the cruel
ecstasy of wild skies, poorer
and itchier and more fearful
by turns, like pages the
augments have yet to fully burn.
Augments which ghost here
in surges and shrieks,
in stillness so deep I
can cut it with the life
which woke on this page
which no one will read.


SCRIPTORIUM

2002


The scriptorium of the Sixth Century
was a cold, dark and brute room
where copyists inked their ecstasies
amid the bitterest rigors—reeking
sheepskin, claw-hand so carefully
moving across the page, each line
a curragh voyage from I to Thou.
Each copy of a book exacted a
raw chunk of someone’s life.
Nothing’s changed though
conditions have much improved:
I sit in an easy chair in the soft
augers of the early day, bright lamp
over one shoulder, cup of coffee
to my left; but it’s still pen in
hand and the next blank line
in this journal, embellishing
a text whispered in my ear
by one of those dirty angels
gone to dust long ago
when from so little came
ineffably more: voices like
a soundboard rising
from an invisible floor,
from a distant, gnashing shore.
The huts of the copyists
were built that way,
according to the lines of
the more ancient Poet’s House,
rooms of total darkness
where the master inscribed
all history in the
ears of his craftsmen,
line by patient line,
tale by tale,
life after life.
This hand is freighted
by a thousand older hands,
this ink an hourglass measure
of far immenser sands.