Spoonin'

Shamans do not differ from other members of the collectivity by their quest for the sacred -- which is normal and universal human behavior -- but by their capacity for ecstatic experience, which, for the most part, is equivalent to a vocation.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

***

... In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and to behold.

... Just to be there, to beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

ONe likes to practice the ting. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. ...

-- Wallace Stevens, from “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu”

***

Both in North Asia and elsewhere in the world, ecstatic election is usually followed by a period of instruction, during which the neophyte is duly initated by an old shaman. At this time the future shaman is supposed to master his mystical techniques and learn the religious and mythological traditions of his tribe, often, though not always, the preparatory stage culminated in a series of cermonies that are commonly referred to as the initiation of a new shaman.

But as Shirokogoroff rightly remarks in respect to the Tungus and the Manchu, we cannot properly speak of an initiation, since the candidates have actually been initiated. Long before their formal recognition by the master shamans and the commmunity. Moreover, the same thing is true almost everywhere in Siberia and Central Asia, even where there is a public ceremony (e.g., among the Buryat), it only confirms and validates the real ecstatic and secret initiation, which, as we saw, is the work of the spirits (sickensses, dreams, etc.), completed by apprenticeship to a master shaman.

-- Eliade, ibid.

***

SPOONING THE SEA

Feb. 16, 2006

The poem comes long after
the disease of shouting light,
serving its hard-learned
and -ridden tail fresh from
still-fuming kiln of
consummation. I shall never
say what her sweet booty
mdde of me in the curvatures
of a night which shipwrecked
me here for good in a beauty’s
pure unmarged quintessence.
Her Yes was a rogue wave
that came at me out
of uncompassed dark,
folding and crashing over
me in a wall of sheer blue
shattering exalt of tumbling
foam, malting my own
forever-pent and -belfried
Yes exult exactly where that
water ebbed to silence
and was gone. Brute waters
in their purest pale curve
left me to precis their
epiphany through those
closing doors, departures
which excised my soul
from one world forever
into a salt-seeming next
with these verbal jaunts
of such baleful imprecision.
First the bliss and then
its employ gear this
poem, as both
turbine and keel,
ground and figure
rounding all the bassos
to score the winning run
by which my ever-losing
team is finally redeemed,
pennant and confetti
hurling the the lissome
spray of a homebound whale
diving all the way to here.
These saltish emulsions
are the motion’s of a heart’s
own clarifying as it
washes back and forth
that first gestalting night,
verbal propulsions which
name by islanding,
one by next by other,
all the depths her Yes
could bound if it were
ever found again.
I have learned
to make wild absence
a presence worth full savor,
as if bliss were not
a nougat but the flavor
which abounds on every
shore my shape can spoon
nudging every curvature
in this book of cheeks and
clefts, my hips and lips
and nips arraigned to
whatever next arrears,
coming to an end curled
close to her who’s here
at last at least in words,
my thrall deflated yet
still deep in her surf’s
shore-wide resound,
my hand curved round
her breast which milks
the matter by slaking
every night I slept
dreaming of her
down the loveliest of seas.
A poem is the diving board
by which I run and jump
and spring high as hurt
over a spooned sea’s
strange and glittery hard blue,
falling once again in
wild delight line by league
by salt-mine mile into
a depth which is her
pure proximity to You.





THE HUNDRED ROOTS

My God is dark, and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

—Rilke, “Book Of Hours - 2” (transl. Bly)

2002

I underwent some transformation
when I turned 30 (in1987):
quit drinking, joined AA, got married,
settled into a family, promoted to
a professional-grade job, created
a study in a back room and began
to delve deeply into poetry and
archetypal psychoanalysis and myth.
Perhaps the tumult of change
was in proportion to the readiness
to begin which had built up like
a deep loam from so many years
of waste and longing and outer futility.
My eagerness had the cayenne
bark of zeal, slashing fast and deep,
learning slow and late.
The poetry I had set aside
for almost ten years leapt up
from roots which ad grown
without my knowing it.
Bly’s translations of Rilke’s
early poems ignited an
utterly transmuted way
of seeing within and out.
How I loved the oak trees
arching over me as I walked
to work each morning: for the
first time I felt them stretching
below in equal measure to
their apparent spread above:
Such duple plumage of seen
and known had a sexual
fusing at ground level,
thick trunk plunged in
soft earth, aching length
rising skyward ... My higher
power proved a deeper one,
a sea for which I was a pale
margin, one ecstatic beach
bum of a voice. It seemed
so strange and wild and limitless—
those first two or three years
I filled journals with huge
passages of Rilke, Bly, Hillman
and Jung, my thirst for
countervaling depths so
greedy and rapacious ...
And wrongheaded—wrong-
hearted too. My marriage
seemed impossible from
the start: our fault for
not heeding wiser voices
in AA who told us to wait
and change and grow first
before presuming to know
who we should settle with.
Old ills contended inside
and between us so fast
and hot it felt like sniper fire.
My wife fought bulimia,
the kid entered
a toothsome puberty
and I fled to my study
rather than get angry or try
to articulate better
sexual needs I didn’t know
I had any right to possess
much less express.
My job was high-anx
nitro, in the maw
of a brute corporation
eating all its young.
On my lunch hour
I’d retreat to the mezzanine
in the cafeteria or
to the patio by a
fountain when it wasn’t
too hot and then read
Antonio Machado
and Graves’ White Goddess
and Ulysses—clutching
roots which empowered me
to see far within but
could not help me
fight or cry or fuck.
I was as doomed as young
Rilke in Prague, who
walked about dressed
all in black and clutching
a pale lilac to his chest,
the young poet with
everything to say and
nothing do do about it.
I stayed on, grew, wrote:
entered therapy, joined
a men’s co-dependency group,
got divorced, then sick,
then better: wooed one
woman, then another,
then my current wife.
All the time I wrote,
most of it terrible,
but what else could I do?
The roots were in each shoe.


SECOND LIFE

... I know there is room in me
for a second huge and timeless life.

— Rilke, “Book Of Hours - 4”
(transl. Bly)


From such wakened
inwardness tunnelled halls
became tower walls,
one after another after another.
A great energy siloed
throughout my sad disapora
sufficient to raise a personal
Stonehenge no one may ever see.
I copied out Jung’s Symbols
of Transformation and Hillman’s
Re-Visioning Psychology. Read
Finnegans Wake (twice). Hurled
into Shakespeare’s depths
with a paper on the mythic
parallels woven into The Tempest.
Another paper brooding on
addictive adders in black Macbeth.
Wrote on male initiation patterns
and fancied myths around the
naked dolphin rider which crests
my father’s battered coat of arms.
I wondered aloud at the time
that I was trying to raise on paper
what my father was lifting in huge
stone; now I believe it was causes
and not the effects we shared
from some common heart. Each
of my efforts pitched me
into a frenzied coil of attention
and duress while I worked
my corporate job and played
at father and husband
and professed my surrender
to a Higher Power at my
AA meetings. I’d rise at
3:30 a.m. (just as now) to
wrestle with my angels and
pin some more of them down
on paper—And for who?
I never cared much if
anyone read what I created—
whether it seemed too much
of a burden or was hardly
intended for human eyes,
I cannot say. I’m not sure
now that any of it was as
much creation as a vaster
exhalation, bleeding fire
to make room for more.
Like these daily drafts
which move from heart
to pen to page and then
get typed in a hard drive,
print out for two or
three revisions and then
get booked in a notebook,
joining the common
unpublished loam.
What has changed at all
these 15 years? There’s
no art in this, it’s just
consumption, wave after wave
of a sea in the blurred meter
of gray-green immensity
and I the pounded shore
whose only option
is to get smashed up
once more. When I look
back over the dizzy
Pyranees of such
unconsolable work, I despair
of the general poverty,
the paucity of octane.
Maybe all this is the
booze still talking
through some backwards rent,
an inner shade equal to
the outer range which I
so heedlessly spent.
And thus this nonsense.
Could I drop this pen
for once and all,
cease dirtying silence
and prettifying the pale?
The last time I willed
such an act I was 21
years old, madly in
love, deserted, offering
alms before dropping
out of school. I wished
to learn a different language
from the bleary courts
of night. I vowed not to
write one more word
until I had been breasted
in the world’s tongue.
And it was a girl, almost ...
Lord, you make sense
of these paper boats
bereft of keels. I’m not
smarter for the freight
you stored up in me.
I’m chasing my tail now,
unable to find an end.
Dervish me on or off the page:
This hand is your cross,
this pen yet your rage.
Maybe I’m just passing
the buck, but I heard
once that humility is
simply giving credit
where it’s due. The song
tore from my lips
when I yet dallied
in the crib;
this poem another rib
you bid me use
to write that music down,
my loss the reed
which sings the world.


SWEET INDULGENCE

As I now re-read
Rilke’s Elegies and Sonnets
placing myself more
fully into the context
and weave of his singing
(just today I discover
that the whole first part
of the Sonnets was
written in 3 days,
hardly a line changed
and coming just when
his thought was most
focused elsewhere—
on finishing his Elegies).
I recall reading Rilke
the first time a dozen
years ago, from Bly’s
ham-handed translation
(like an overlush,
Romantic version
of Pachelbel’s Canon
in D)—in the first year
or so of my first
sobriety, out of the
wild brake of night
for the first time,
newly married, new
at looking inside,
astonished at the
undiscovered country
opening within: Walking
those ten blocks from
house to job in
downtown Orlando,
briefcase in one hand,
Bly’s volume in the other,
pouring into my morning
brian the music of
the Sonnets: It was a girl,
almost... that line
rearranging the entire
interface between word
and world into a simple
and articulate abandonment
to the insides of the
beautiful, the sayable:
It was a tidal shift from prose
to poetry, from words
about to music of.
How autumnal and still
I recall those ever-warming
mornings, my disastrous
nights receding in the
simple dawn, replaced by
bird and oak tree, a listening
which altared the clear
rising fountain of Rilke’s
poems. I was world
and Rilke my Orpheus,
my heart grown
superabundant in that
gauzy first light in
which my own poetry
would wake and take hold,
like the first grip of
a seedling. Five years I
walked to work with that
briefcase in one hand
and a book of poetry
in the other, reading the lines
out loud, instructing the
inner world—Heaney,
Gluck, Goethe, Lorca,
Aridjis, Shakespeare,
Transtormer, Oliver,
Wright, Hall, Ammons,
Auden, Blake, Nemerov,
Roethke, Dunn, Mallarme—
storing up the music
til it broke in my own voice
this way. Who knows
what’s to come of this
savagely sweet indulgence.
That is not my business.
Mine is today’s reading
of Rilke or Keats or Jack
Gilbert or someone new
to me, tolled to the fresh
turn of first light,
and the click of my pen
as I return what I heard here.
The motion has never changed
since I found my feet at last.





CHANGE YOUR LIFE

News of a tropical
storm wore down on
us yet it hardly rained —
no huge sky hammers as
forecasted. The day instead
was like all of summer’s,
bright and hot with a
slow accumulation of
late-afternoon cloud
which darkened, threatened,
grew skyward in
volcano-like hurls of bent air
and then rained elsewhere.
One distant rumble of thunder
close to evening and that was all.
We turned our attention back
to TV and slowly fell asleep,
spared the weather we
were so warned of when we woke.
Oh well: predictions of weather
are fickle as prognosticatoins
of self: we think we know
where we go but then we
find it isn’t the way we
thought to go at all.
Back in the fall of ‘94
I was sick, sick to death
though I knew not what from.
Weary to my bones with
some infernal eternal malaise,
everything slowed way down.
I could hardly make it
through the royal rages
of my corporate day;
had stopped working out;
bid my girlfriend go away;
wearied so of the depression
over my divorce that my
mood grew tidally black,
a chilling darkness which
soaked my waking bone.
Sick sick sick.
So in late October I took
a week off from my job
and from my life
and fled to my aunt
and uncle’s condo at
Port St. John just south
of New Smyrna Beach.
And commenced searching
for a root to grasp by which
I could start to pull myself up.
Some Northeaster was working
the sea further out, rendering
the surf into a hard crash
of big hooves and the sky
a mash of pewter grays.
Warm wet winds, the occasional
scarf of sunlight breaking through
no longer sharp with summer,
autumn in Florida settling in at
last. I slept late, drank quarts
of fresh squeezed carrot juice,
took long walks on a beach
narrowed by the storm’s erosion,
and journalled long about my
days and what might have illed ‘em.
Pulling up the same old dirty linen
I knew too well and going back
over every inch. I was 38 in
the full roar of my next, post-divorce
live, and utterly out of gas.
Worked so hard to end up there.
Afternoons I sat on a chaise
on the upper deck looking out
over that harsh sea, reading poems
aloud from Jack Gilbert’s The Great
Fires and wilding in them, my
attention like a gong and each
poem a new sally, a newly-shaped
mallet. But what I remember most
of that week is a single line from
Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.”
The poet staring at the holy madness
of that old marble (perhaps in
some museum, it leapt up at him
from a dark center: Du mußt dein
Leben ändern, “You must change
your life.” Confronted by what you
see, you must live in accordance.
Only the line came up in me this
way: “You must derange your life.”
For though I was sure to get
well if I could just remain
forever on that sea-balcony,
reading Jack Gilbert and firing
back my lines of praise,
I knew I had to drive back
to Orlando and resume my
actual life. The sea-music had
to travel along, but how? Not
simply by inhabiting a pretty
postcard-poem, but to somehow
anchor within in some regnant
phrase. I wrote the poem
“Late Autumn, Port Orange” when
I got back to town, positing
that sea-wilderness as some
motion within away from the
supreme orders and arrangements
which compose a life.
The derangement came
when I slowly stepped from bell
to hammer, warping the weave
which had steadily sickened me.
I got better by getting worse.
I went home and slowly got rid
of the girlfriend. Finished crying
my heart out over the marriage.
Started going to bars at night
drinking near-beer, listening
to music and wishing I were
drunk enough to pick up a
strange woman. Peeked at XX
websites in my cube at work.
The sickness went away,
at least that sort: I got
better deciding to take a
more dangerous fall,
as if a procreation flared
from the darkest center of it all.

Late Autumn, Port Orange

1994


There are virilities
you cannot ride
in your sleep.
Your urban moming
has no saddle for
this wild sea, nor
will such winds as these
rein to any corporate task.

No.
Something irresistible
stays here.

Watching storms batter
the tide, it's clear:
Like that raw rock
Rilke saw in Apollo's
marbled brow,
this sea's day churns
dark and urgent and cold:

You must derange
your life to save it.




ROSE IN A VASE

... And if she lifts her arms
to tie her hair, tender vase:
how much our loss gains
a sudden emphasis,
our sadness brilliance!

— Rilke, “The Windows” #1
transl. A. Poulin Jr.

Last night I dreamed
the ghost or angel of
my greatest longing
returned, or I to her.
Our tryst occurred
on some vast vacant
terrace of night—a
shoddily familiar house,
my verbs unbuckled
from too much booze,
a sense of damnation
as I pressed her back
on a blue conched bed.
O moment where wave
is tallest and ready
at last to break!
To fully believe
and wholly receive that
mad sumpage of a heart!
How foolish and wrong,
how infernally sweet!
When she vanished
I was left to succor
a wild emptiness,
my only trace of her
a pile of poems
I composed in that dark,
each line like blood
from a wound too florid
to congeal, too gorgeous to refuse.
I woke on a spit of misery,
my cock hard as history,
my wife upstairs asleep.
There was nothing to do
but get on my knees
and pray God help me
find words for what is
yet can never be.
Let some dram of that
blue wild balm
my chosen real life
of suburban difficulty.
Help me love a real woman
in all the complex
briars of old wounds.
O harpy heart, do not
abandon me to mere regret.
Help me to live in
that perpetual door
which opened when
I thought she lay back
to receive me at last.
Make of this longing
a rose in a vase
in a window. Shed
me like the blood
of that unworldly
and disastrous
perfume.