The Cobalt Metronome

The writing life, that silvery skein through the inside darkness between I and Thou, re-creates a myth or mythology, makes old numens live and breathe and walk thunderously, re-energizing the too-safe and too-known perambles of the waking day which threaten to drown a soul in its occluding, indifferent white noise.

It is faithful to origins even as it writes them over, troping or turning them just enough to leave original surface to walk on, like a shore, fresh juice to rim the orificial plunges of entry. My history provides ample material for the written mysterium, foreground or foreskin behind and beneath is a pagan dark tumescence, hungry and vital and perilous and sacred. Papered genitalia cannot fructify real wombs nor bear true children, but they serve a sort of synecdochal initiation, where seem and sound are foundation enough to raise the inward cathedral. Prior acts become apostles, deacons of God-sounding wind, tolling bells from the inside bottom of that sea where the past dreams, bowered with every love lost and still throbbing with every pent orgasm in which I touched and lost and reveranced whatever holiness was in the comminglings of the flesh.

First Dionysos, then Orpheus: the raw before the cooked, the deed before its capitalled Verb, bloodied Titan giving birth to Hesiod’s throat. This is the archetypal swing from penis to pen, the education of a life from reflection over its living. We can go back quite a way, all back to the emergence of writing, to see what function it served. I quote here from Carl Kerenyi’s Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life:

***

Orphism has been termed “a religious-philosophical-literary tradition movement that cannot be defined with precision,” but within its own setting, the Dionysian religion, it can be summed up and characterized. It was a masculine, speculative tendency within a religion having women’s cults as its core. Omomakritos embodied this tendency. In the light of its initiations, through which individuals made atonement and strove for apotheosis, Orphism may be characterized as a kind of private religious exercise. The mythical prototype expressive of this tendency was the figure of Orpheus, who was not only a solitary strolling singer but also an initiator of men and youths. Another feature of Orphism was its predilection for archaic elements of myth and cult, which it sought to preserve in writing. The Orphics wrote sacred books, linked myths together, and created a mythology of Dionysos.

They did not divulge the women’s cult secrets. Rather, they covered them with a cloak that was transparent enough to those in the know, and they constructed a mythical history of the world in such a way that everything on which the Dionysian religion was based had already happened before either the women’s cults or the Orphics’ cults made their appearance. In so doing they observed the spirit of the living myth, whose function was precisely this ...
(262-3, italics mine)

***

An old communion, written anew, made living or kept living, bound in safe margins, incessantly wild within ... at least for and in the writing.

Is that enough?

***

Last night I dreamt of visiting a museum/crime scene/tourist attraction, the scene of a horrific crime, set deep in the woods, out where you would expect such pagan nastiness to occur. A sort of clearing -- at least the trees weren’t so thick -- on a gently sloping knoll heavily strewn with leaves. The crime scene is cordoned off from the initial approach, you walk around it wondering just what the hell happened there, though there look to be clumps which could be bodies or clothed skeletons. We walked around that perimeter into a cave where the story is engraved on the walls, some low-bottomed guys were out in the woods, vagrants or criminals, sharing a stolen watermelon, when all hell broke loose ... a knife flashed, swung, dove, splattered gore over tree stump and watermelon slices ... the central facts seem occluded, not seeable or readable on the walls, as what is out there on the knoll is difficult to ascertain, even when we walk out there ... Is the light bad? too old? to aquaeous? It’s a horror felt if not fully seen, is not colored in, as if the eye was trying to compose what the dream dictated and decided to leave much to imagination. So there’s the sundered watermelon, stained with a sepia ink (maybe I’m dreaming in mono or duo chrome) ... there’s a clump half-covered in leaves, and what looks like a clenched hand sticking up, attached to a fibula wrapped in tatters ... There are other Horrors but I can’t really see them, or won’t, swimming back to the surface of my waking morning with a few baubles of dream in my creel, lucent but worthless, or of a price which is far from becoming known ... Somehow, if I write on, perhaps that will become more clear ...

A Maenad sunder of male desire? An Orphic text? These pages like leaves covering old crimes, first soundings of God? Site of myth, ensouled in dream sight? Cordoned off here, as I hold the image in my mind’s hands, settling it back into its deep pond, watching the last of it drift back out of sight?


***

THE POEM AS
A CRUSTACEAN
SCUTTLING ACROSS
THE BOTTOM OF
GOD’S HEART

March 26, 2006

This cobalt metronome
has gone everywhere
my life has seeped
though its mostly been
from here, a fixed
daily writing chair
hours before the
warmings of dawn.
I remember flying
to Salt Lake City
thirteen years ago
with my first wife
& her daughter
to visit her family,
driving a rented
Chevy Lumina
into southern Idaho
& the majestics
of that sprawled
wild land, watching
my wife’s forsaken
history unspiel
from a thatch
of thorns and stones.
Along the way
I read Campbell’s
Primitive Mythology
and wrote in my
verse journal
something between
travelogue and geology.
One morning I
sat on a picnic
bench behind
her father’s house
watching sunlight
play across huge
hills across the valley,
changing their
primal folds and
lifts from cold grey
to steely
aquamarine, then
something warmer
in the summer day,
washed bright then
dark by passing
clouds. The day,
the place, that family
for that time
inside my own
were in the words
I wrote down,
spiralling on verbal
coils like DNA
toward something
newly resonant
of something I
was finding vastly
old. I had never
been that way but
that savage breadth
of Western day
was like an airy
sea which welcomed
some great depth
in me, stirring
in my hand a
crustacean at
the bottom of
the earth’s own
memory, praising
what I saw
as vastly old
and new. When
I checked back
on that journal
today the words
I read are not
what I recall
about the sense
of writing them down
though a visual
orchestra strikes
up inside them,
enthralled, slo-mo,
those mountains
receiving tinctures
from the sky
was it washed
once and forever
over them &
the valley &
my hand as it
crossed from edge
to binding then
returned to write
again one line lower
toward a heart
reaching up to me
with news of God,
each back and
forth wash of lines
the palpitus or
heartbeat of a
cobalt metronome
inside what
can’t be known.



SINGING HEART

April 2004

Today I sight this singing heart
below behind and between
as a crannog built by You
for a dark and wild bell’s ringing.
In previous years
I’ve seen otherwise
in a well’s cold drench,
in whale and girl astride
toward every beach
worth dreaming,
guitar and Bible buried
there when their time
had run Your curse,
amid the manowars
and other boats
I built just for such beaching.
Ten thousand poems
I’ve launched from here,
their verbal engines
tooled for salt abandon’s
blue overreaching, a
name for every isle
in the dark archipelago
of ten thousand teachings.
Here to the tide contains
the kiss and curve of
every woman who smiled
and shared with me
the secret of her blue
beseechings, both
bottomless and more,
that samba sambaltique
I found there and lost, one
foot now citizen of
every wave’s collapsing,
each bed’s undinally
pale pure enlacing.
Winds now work the
trees outside, a late
spring front to wash clean
the humid heat of the
past few days, and with
it bring a clearer blue
for our refreshing,
tiding in perhaps
another take on You --
Heron? Psalter?
Mother, Father River?
Some other vantage
on this dark which
does not bear explaining
but requires of me these
three wetmost things:
apt saddle for deranging;
the will to ride heart
all the way to naming;
and the sense of ages --
God’s and Your’s
conjoined in mine --
to let this crannog
fade to waves
so I can go where
blue ends send me,
bereft of any real
sail or bone rudder,
adrift in the next
draught of a room in
a dream, without a way
of ever arriving
or truly knowing.
Ah! but what songs
ahead are glowing!



ODYSSEY

2004

That which love works upon
is not love but soul.

-- James Hillman, Anima: Anatomy
of Personified Notion.

Ah, the torch enkindled by your eyes
was the lamp by which I voyaged through
my nights. When I was younger I thought
it helped me see you out beyond my walls.
That light was faint and strange, as if
beaconed by some low-candled moon n.
It spluttered often and went out. And
so I sailed through an infinity of nights..
In lieu of any archipelago that I
could name, the beds were mythic,
islands in a stream of boozed-up chaos,
dunes of shores where the tides were
terrible in alternation of booming
wave and utter, ebbed silence. It was always
strange when you were lying close to me
in our next naked tryst, whomever
fortune poured my way that night
passed out under me or turned,
in a post-coil frieze, to be the wall
of all those foreign regions
I swore you were beyond.
Those curves and crevasses were
so faintly lit by your lucence,
either as moonlight through
the window or a hall light in
the door, like an iceberg’s blue-
veined tracery, a magic image
between starry black
bolts of universe above and
that mountain of massed darkness
hidden underneath the bed,
hauling through waters so black
and cold as to drown the gods.
There you were again, making
my heart catch for an instant
in the hope that we might at last
begin a love that had been so
long quested and frustrated, stalled --
Yet always at that last micron’s
separation between my lips and
the cleavage of your breasts I
was reaching for, you leapt
into a sudden wave
flashing a fish tail so alien as to
mock the moon and tide and
every shore I’d ever dreamed
you on. No trace of you ever
remained by first light, leaving
just a groggy woman drained of
every lucent rill and ridge,
hungover and bitchy and leaden
with remorse at having let
her hair down to a sailor
so short of his promised tides.
The sun shrieking round
the edges of those
window-shades was fierce
and terrible, etching in pure
ire all the hard and fast
edges of my isolation, searing
brutal truths into that bed
and utterly dismissive of the
nougats I searched for there.
And so I’d get the hell
on outta there, promising
to call as I hurried out
the door, whispering “man,
that was close” to the gaunt
pig-man in the rear-view
mirror as I sailed away.
In the blazing foolishness
of my youth I believed
one night my luck would change,
that given the right night
in the right bar drinking
the right cruel booze I’d
find you sitting in a pool
of lamplight like the
right island at last, revealing
your true blue face to me at last.
How many times does a heart
need breaking before love’s
real purpose can clear the reefs
at last? I’m not sure how it
happened, but there came a time
when, harrowed perhaps by all those
luckless gambols on the night’s
dark stream, I came to see
you in a different light, not
as the shape of all I’ll never reach
-- not some bossa nova numen
walking forever off from me,
down some naked crashing beach --
but the inward shores between
heart and its ache, my beloved
a soul awake and winding me
like a skein through all those
darkened rooms and halls which
sprawl the eterne internal, the
chambered vault down under the
iceberg’s secret bulk.
The light in your smile
took me out to the world’s last
edge where I found at last
the walls of a sacred room
both womb and tomb of
every lover’s song. Love lit
your smile like a fuse in me,
burning through all loves
to ignite its other, this soul
which sees itself at last,
though ever faintly. At least,
that’s the writing on the
walls today, as the mythic
wanderer and adventurer
clears the harbor reefs at last
and the real woman stirs
at her loom, suddenly mindful
to set fresh linens on the bed
and pull the curtains wide.



HAGIOGRAPHY

December 2003

Old lives float along
in the high masts of
that frigate moon,
spiritous and cold,
a blue-washed psalter
whispering lost
hagiography through
the eerie moony night.
Long, long ago the
poet covered his face
with her palms and
sailed three nights
below, his song tumbling
like a severed head down
her dark blue well, his
thumb dipped in
her sidhe-mound and
tasted rich with
the honey of prophecy.
The moon sails
on in that ancient
enterprise, seeing all
in death and sleep
what we only dream,
eyes wide where we
can or dare not see.
Oran’s high up in
that mast with
Amergin and Merlin,
Billy Shakespeare
Blake & Whitman too,
vatic votives all
singing high in their
deepest burials,
their deadliest falls
into her silver arms.
Old songs are still
streaming from that
ever-westward moon,
thin and distant
as the mewling stars,
in registers the dead
intently listen to
under all the waves of
this world -- Chunts
and chanteys, lays
and lives, a high sky
stream gleaming on
the cheeks of that
magic moon, the one
I found beneath
my pillow as I slept,
and which now at
5 a.m. dully fills
the yard with blue
milk, the moon which
somehow is the song
inside my own.
A silver marrow
of wild sea bone
whispers soft and
high and thin
inside this pen:

O let me tell you
of my dance with her
in the merrow-milk
of a high December moon ...


***

FIRST, LAST, EVER

Feb. 2004

Each poem sails toward You as first and
Last and ever, singing in the
Surgency of Now’s blue curl, wild
Smash, pale sigh. The cavern of my
Isolde reveals its secret door
In drowned Ys only this once,
When hot words plunge deep in stone.
A kiss to waken sleep, blue light
To see deep: The wings which my song
Lifts and fans are feathered in moon
Milk and whale jets, cold Thor and orange
Bloom. And when the spasm ebbs all trace
Of You away, it joins the other
First and only songs on the beach,
The sum of Yous I’ll never reach.