A Book to the Wave

Here just after the equinox and quiet, on par with the ambience of the hour and day of the year in this small Florida town; panther and developer both sleep in the depths of these waters, dreaming of prey and pleasure, while I sit here naming their marrow and harrow. It’s just what I do, habitual to the point of inhabited by shore-to-shore and down-the-shore-and-back rounds, faithful that words from deep waters wash something essential here, in this way, even today. But I may just be droning on.

Some ebbing of the verses has me in prose today, standing in starlight at low tide and walking unaccustomed without the narrow line breaks. Something else seems to be gathering in me as in the garden, tensing. It seems time for a change, maybe just for today, maybe for a cycle, or for ever. There came a time when the music of guitars faded in me, fell: I could still play the songs but the heat of the heart had disappeared. Songs became old songs and thence ditties, dribbles of an old flood fully poured.

Letting go is hard, the acceptance bitter a long time before it becomes sweet; my wife’s going through it now with her business, deciding at long last that she just isn’t going to sell enough doing what she love’s most, that there is retirement to save for and projects on the house that need to get done and it would sure be nice to take a vacation after all of these years. But the disappointment is sour and leaden, another loss to swallow, very sad: I came home yesterday and she was quite blue, having spent the day ironing vintage fabrics she’d collected, so many of them, so little real expectation that they might sell for any reasonable equivalent of what they’re worth. What could I say? I see how they’re gorgeous and exquisite and are fit for the bed of one’s dreams, and yet I’ve also been here in the precarious todder of our ledger, not quite broke but check to check to check breathing carefully. I sure hate to see her go work in some office, to the utter abasement of what she does so well here: but what else to do?

After so many years of writing poems, having long ago given up the ambition and then hope of publishing them, content to drone on with my muse in the deadest hours of the night, casting them here as some basalt floor of the act, I come to a sound-point, many fathoms down, that I can’t say much else that doesn’t repeat all I’ve said before. When the tropes become rusty, then the ropes aren’t trusty any more for hauling up strange dripping numens — gods, lovers, blue thrall — lost long ago.

Or so it seems, today. It may be equinoctal energies at play, the dead of winter sequestering behind the fresh certitude of light. What’s gone is gone and there’s energy to play a different way. I’ve been tempted to lose the versifier for some time now; began this blog last summer thinking that a prosaic voice might emerge, and then finding another cycle of poems in need of exhumation (“Shamanic Voices”). That had an afterlife which seems to have thinned from all hearing, so here I am.

The year progresses; a softer lighter equipage is required for the heat which arrives; a new pair of shoes, loose shirts for the breeze, a gob of SPF40 to blunt the knives of the sun; and fresh words to that effect, or no words at all, savoring and savioring through that absence apt motions of spring.

Hand me those clippers, it’s time to prune ...


TAKAMIME ACOUSTIC

(My last guitar)

From “A Breviary of
Gutars,” 2000

Fall 1986: That
blue Hamer guitar
died oh so slowly
but surely, like
a dream that
had run out of
further rooms
or a man who
can’t find any
new ways to
believe his song
could yet be
both pretty and
true. I towed the
Hamer with
me from mother’s
house to roommate’s
house, but hardly
ever played it.
The old riffs so
heavy with what
could not go
forward.

Nor could I
gambol any
more in those
henhouses of
eternal beginning
So I began to
take stock of
things in my
journal, accounting
less frequently
the previous night’s
desertions of sense
as looking back
over the past
as at a world
that never knew
its day. An
Orpheus looking
back on his
life’s fade. When
a puer enters his
own history
he is said
to finally find
substance in the
world, his blue
hops in the
aether grounded,
his heart slowing,
his dreams
digesting insoluble
agonies.

I put pen to paper
and the ink
flowed like blood.
Open wounds cast
on the page
became the
coagulates of
that old rage.

Ah but slowly.
There were more
bad nights foraging
badly for bad
women or simply
drinking badly
until a blackout
night in April
1987 when I came
to in jail for
DUI. The rock god
found his peerage
at the bottom of
his cups. Some guy
vomiting in a
toilet, another
mumbling prayers
within a sodden
hood. Such was the
beginning I grew
through. The judge
prescribed community
service and AA.
I taught English
at a vo-tech for
a season, my
AA nights lasted
8 years. In that
span I woke,
or sort of.
Thousands of
cramped rooms
confessing sins
big and small,
learning how
to walk and talk
from others
who’d earned their
wise words.
I married
unsuccessfully.
I entered therapy
and began unlocking
doors which opened
to psychology
and myth and
poetry. Through
all this I entered
time at last, finding
that substance
can only come
with time.
Surrendering
to the nails.

I traded my
amp for a
Takamime acoustic,
my blue Hamer
for a synthesizer
I’ve never played.
Tried to make
new music but
nothing assembled
or sang: ditties a
nd progressions
played on the porch,
none ending,
one dithering
into the next
like the bottom
of a halved
worm writhing
brainlessly.

I still dreamt
of stages and
fantastical
guitars, schmoozing
with David Bowie
or Peter Gabriel,
dallying with
groupies, but
I always woke
sober and eager
to get back to
work in the
study for an hour
or two before
heading to my
job. I listened to
jazz, classical,
new age, pumping
to rock anthems
only when
I lifted weights,
when testosterone
cocksurety blossoms
from the body’s
gallop and preen.


2.

I dreamed also
of pianos, rich
sonorous baby
grands of cherry
and mahagony
and teak which
turned up
everywhere ---
in forgotten rooms
of my childhood
house, in stockrooms,
by the sea,
squat in the
middle of a bayou.
Usually a woman
was nearby,
not young but
not old,
mysterious and
fair, not so much
sexy as deeply
loved. Was she
the mediatrix
bridging song
to poetry, her
body a cathedral
of the world’s
music I came
to know only
by dying to my
own music?
Eliot saw her
in the “A Game
of Chess” section
of “The Wasteland,”
a Dido like a lush
crown in an ornate
throne room,
jewelled with the
sea of ancient
myth, Thetis
ringed with gold
cupidon and ivory
viols of perfume.
He knew her well.
The same woman
and her pianos
drew me into
this history, ever
at the margins
of my verse
journal, always
flashing a smile
just beyond my
last line of the day.
And somehow
inaccessible from
the guitar I threw like
a hammer. “Forget that
passionate music,”
said Rilke’s Orpheus.
“ It will end.
True singing is
a different breath,
about nothing.
A gust inside
the god. A wind.”


3.

I’m still not sure
who the dolphin rider,
my totem guide
and logo, serves.
I can name many
candidates: Eros
attendant of Aphrodite,
Apollo Delphinus
guide of souls
to the heavenly
spheres, Dionysos who turned a rabble
of pirates into dolphins, saving the
navigator to become a priest of
doom to mind-blind Pentheus.
I was born with a tattoo of
a heart with an arrow through it
and the dolphin man rides there
somehow, lover and lyre like strands of
a helix wrapped around my heart,
both pierced by some need
for reaching a vanished Beloved.
So it’s somehow important
to ask the waters even though
I know I’ll never truly know.

Cupid’s darts were dipped
in gold or lead. Which metal
is buried in my birthmark?
Perhaps fool’s gold, since
the simplest lessons
have been so difficult.
You can seduce a woman in
a night and learn to play
a song in less than that time
and such beginnings make
you soar, delight in making love
and making song a gallop over
the yeastiest, fomenting waves.
But to truly make love? To truly
sing? Forget that passionate music.
Three years withmy wife and I’m
still working on the harmonies,
loving her for just who she cares to be
and trying to find the courage
to let her know my fully dappled desires.
And the poetry, well, as my friend
Peter Meinke once told me,
It takes decades. So I’m doomed
to shuffle these words many times
before they tell me much more.

I liken the rider to Manannan,
the Irish sea-god whose ripe valleys
looked like sea-crests to voyaging Bran.
The way you think it is is not
the way it is at all -- that’s a Celtic
promise, delivered from the Otherworld
through the mouth of just unearthed
Oran when Saint Columba decided
he needed to look upon the martyr’s
face once more, up out of the
abbey foundations he’d been sacrificed
to on hard-winded, heavy-oceaned Iona.
Oran had voyaged with Manannan,
and his truth is this: when you think
you’ve arrived at the the nut-busting
uttery of truth, this sign lowers down
from nowhere saying Not Here,
meaning the ripeness on the other
side of the wall is everything
and we can never know it:
So for us the troping’s all:
and just when my metaphors
of love and lyre seemed sweetly true
the song dove elsewhere,
drowning this rider.

A few years back, soon
after my first marriage died,
I had the dolphin rider
tattooed high on my left arm.
(Stole the image from Riverside
Editions). The location was
appropriate: Pelop’s shoulder,
shank of dolphin, a hero’s portion.
Many princes were imaged riding
what was oncecalled The Lion of the Sea --
Arion, Cadmus, Enalus,
Theseus, Coeranus, Taras,
Phalanthus -- and it makes for
a popular tale, as my tale of
the guitar hero kept me warm
on the many mornings of its telling.
Take Arion, a great musician
whose song saved him from
drowning when he was thrown
to the sea by pirates. A dolphin
in love with the music bore
him back to shore. That’s
just one of the stories. I’ve learned
that each life is rammed with
many lives, many tales.
Don’t think you ever come
to rest. Pelops means “dusky faced,”
shadowy and indistinct, as
Manannan was in his grey
cloak of invisibility. Pelops was
served up in a stew by Tantalus, his
father, up to the gods; the gods
realized the taboo and restored
Pelops to life. Only the shoulder
had been eaten and the gods
restored that part with the shoulder
of a dolphin. A sea beast god ruled Pelops
tribal Peloponnese, a lusty beast
of strength charging up the river
Styx.
Proteus tended the herds
of Poseidon the mare-tamer, and is
identified with Pallas, sea beast.
Proteus, misty faced changeling,
is both Callas and Salmoneus, the
human oak-king, as Llew Llaw Giffes
the Welsh antecedent of Irish Lug,
master of many crafts and somehow
son of Manannan ...

Are you weary
yet of the transformations? I get
lost too. That’s why I have the tattoo.
(Looks cool, too.) Lusty young man
on his ocean steed racing from the sea
up the river of the mother, singing
his gorgeous tune. Now there’s a metaphor
for the guitar man, the lover, the man
now poet and married man. Gorgeous
enough and true? We’ll see. The tales
continue to spin and transform.
What’s next? Ask the rider and
don’t be surprised if it doesn’t
make any sense until the present
dives into the next transformation.


4.

It’s raining now and
I must close this journal and head
to the john to ready for work.
Buster ansy at the door and
my wife coughing in her sleep.
This house so richly affords all we love, and
makes itself a home as we make
love and life within it. A story
of its own which has been patient
while I complete an older story
of guitars. I still have that Takamime
guitar: it’s tombed in my closet.
Will it ever wake? Will the ink dry
some day and that old music
rise and crest the surface
in a glitter of spray? Who knows.
Listen now to the rain’s soft
sursurrations, sighing
wait ... there is this ...


THE SINGING WELL

2003

I’ve dug a well
almost every day
for four years now,
my hand top left
of the next white
space, nib in motion
spading down, the
words like ink crowing
the depths mined
here. Call it just
a habit of mind
and hand and
prayer, solitary
throats in the one
or two foot of
page I daily plumb,
as if the pen
were a thorn
pressed on
my birdlike heart,
loosing songs
my dayside tongue
can’t quite sing,
not with so much
suburban prose
in the way. I’d
been writing poems
for a decade or
so, occasional riffs
on My Day or
Her sway: then in
‘99 I discovered
a well at which
I daily returned,
its troth and trust
my hands duly obeyed.
I started out
telling music’s story
in me, the bow of bios
cutting across
history’s bittersweet
remembered tide:
Retelling my
loves and losses
down the neck
of a guitar’s
big night music,
that savage
sound which
held me in thrall
for too many years
and then got lost,
its horselike thrall
sounded somewhere
in me never to return.
The words came in
daily waves, my hand
racing 12 pages to
name the next
fist clenching
in my heart,
balls, mind, all
of it along some
infernal ledge
where words said
just so become
more than their
straight suits,
growing poppy-
florid in a water-
lily dark. Eighteen
months and several
thousand pages
later, that
poem was done:
Yet I wasn’t finished
singing, or rather
the song was not
yet done in me.
Hardly. Having
loosed the waters
they flowed on,
above or within
some breakage that
occurred in me,
singing on as
I went dark for
a season, breaking a
home, chasing
nothings, drinking
on til mad, hammering
myself upon a
cross of remorse,
surrendering,
grieving, ranting,
eventually coming
home. Through
all that I wrote,
each day a fresh
page, some next
mouth opening round
5 a.m. in skull-
shaped, cold-water
O’s. Today’s no
different: I’ve worked
my way down the
depth of a thought
rising from below;
I’ve offered here
what I found there
as best I can.
And if the effort
failed -- who cares
but God, Oran
and myself? Oh sure,
I write for your
eyes, Beloved
Reader, and pray
you find my wells
compelling, wild
and well-made:
but I will never
live to see you,
and accept
Your descent
here is not love
but archaeology,
continuing the
work of finding
wells abandoned
long ago by
gods and fishes
and golden
throats). Having
found a level
deep enough
(or beyond which
I will or cannot
go), I wrap
things up or try
to, rubbing
Oran’s nose in
some thrice
widdershins way,
& button the final
lines with a rhyme
for the hour’s change
to ocean gray,
coloring in that
surf-like recede
from down there
to this beach
between, pausing
to wave farewell,
before I shut the
book and get on
with the day. The
motion’s ripe
in me, me hand
is sea foam: May
the next day’s recit
at the well prove
for God Oran and
me prove the
next lasting chapel,
oar, and home.


THIRD WELL

If you look too long
and too hard
into the forest,
eventually you’ll see
deer everywhere.
-- Hunter’s saying

A well is not a whale.
Nor is every poem
ripened from that gut.
Look: The last day
of verse to fit into
this 100 page composition
book, and what powers
are left to evoke from
a narrow throat of cold?
Eventually the whale
vomits the hero onto
the shore & swims off.
We walk back home
and get to work.
Have I rung well enough
the diving bell in this
bale of bluey matins?
Long and deep enough
in the Oran-marrowed
trough? In the Mabinogion
Manannan and Pryderi
travel through 3 towns
perfecting 3 crafts --
saddles in one, shields
in another, gold shoes
in a third -- once
they’ve mastered the
craft & raise the ire
of their fellow craftsmen.
Exhausting all the
possibilities of one
name of God, they
move on. Is a creative
life one well, or the
sum of many? The
singing fills a metaphor
til it’s soaked --
home, sea-roads, well --
and moves on. For
years I played guitar,
for more years I’ve
written poems. Perhaps
there is a third cup
yet to fill & spill --
an art for old age,
explorations distilled
from the first two.
It’s up to the God
of Oran’s talky sod,
to that tiller of the
loam of singsong
erectile bone. Me?
I just move the pen,
praying for the wisdom
and willingness to know
when one door closes
and its time to make
the next door open
and when the work
has simply dreamed
into the third room
further down.