The Next

THE NEXT ANGEL

1994


Yes, surrender was good,
the grace that followed
was a sea wind
and the shore
sparkeled fresh
with all we became.

But you must know
that surrender also writes
a darker angel into the sky.
Today we walk a troubled
strand, naked of wish or will
our torrid meters swelling
harsh against the sea.

Just how do we
steady between curl
and plunge? How to
walk here, when desire's
riptide so dreamily
hauls at our ankles?

Thunder summons the
next angel. Later we may
believe that grace returned
in this spiralling air,
but for now, we are only
walking in rain on
the shore of a kiss,
wrestling the next
angel to a fall.



LET THE OCEAN GO

2002

O bed of silk,
lie back on your prairies of blackness
your fields of sunlight
that I may look at you.

I am happy to be home.
— Mary Oliver, “The Return”

If my home is a restless
shore, then my job’s to
turn the page: it’s time I
let the ocean go. I’ve written
its blue marges long
and deep enough,
harrowed in that surge
the way an analysand
emerges from past
badlands reframed
and widened
for the flow. Of late the poems
seem trite, cliche,
their motions too rhythmic
and rhymed, in need of
fresh curvature, voweled day.
Eventually the page is more,
its beach a whitely widened door:
Go on or you’ll get lost
in all the crashing,
a wrinkled old man
a metal detector
scanning the eternities for trash
and pennies, never again
more than beeps
on a once wealthy, fructive shore.




THE NEXT YOGI

2003


The word “shaman”
itself, which is from the
language of the Siberian
Tungus, has been thought
to some to be derived from
the Sanskrit “samana”
meaning “monk,” “yogi,”
and “acetic.”
-- Joseph Campbell

For years booze was
my yogi, a blurry wild
man perched higher
than every good time
I couldn’t surmount.
While my days
down below burnt
to a self-immolated char,
he just on from his
ledge, singing, relax pal,
let go, get down,
pouring horn and hoof
and hickory club
into the bright
glass of my eyes.
For years I gamboled
in his arrears, some
loosening letterless
thing, wide in short
in my draft a man for
whom a bed and a babe
and a bottle of booze
was the purest
sum of desires.
But of what use
to the world was a life
inches thick, and
spongy with abysms
to boot? No wonder
things are so bad;
millions are bound
to the vespers of hooch,
spending their lives
in farewell down a
a life’s falling stair.
I was the drunk who
could only enjoy or
control his drinking --
not both -- and so
swung between miseries
like the clapper of a bell,
intoning wild yabbers
of descent, then crawling
back in the rigors of
a gentleman who also,
incidentally, drinks.
I never climbed out of
the canyon I cut with
my thirst, and nearly
drowned in abyss.
For me surrender was
the only escape, so I let
go all hope that I
could reach that truly
savage man -- And was
freed from the thrall
of that chill lunar gall.
The next yogi sits
inside and between
housed and hearthless men,
mediating with words
salt/sulphur extremes.
He teaches me how
to hold court with closed
eyes; to build and let go;
and to keep whatever I
give wholly away.
The next yogi, you know,
was inside the first --
I could not have found
him any other way.
The first yogi’s soma
dissolved me down
to scant bones; his
brittle low laughter
haunts the high stones
I lift today for the man
who surrendered and
went down below
so that song could rise
and nourish the world
in its flow. The next yogi
molts his pelt from
the last, the way this
poem peals from
the bell tower of its past.
The well waters I carry
to your in this song
is borne in that skull
which descended from view,
when all was so lost
and surrendered
and written again.


THE NEXT PASSION

2004


Journalists of soul,
please note: This week
“The Living Dead,” a
re-make of George
Romero’s ghoul opera,
has knocked Mel Gibson’s
“The Passion” from
the top of the box
office chart. Apparently
we eat our dead with
steadfast glee, and
don’t require a cross
nailed so to glut on
eviscerations of
the apparitional Sidhe:
Perhaps the thrall
parallels from viewing
chair to chair, the muse
of worst ends endless
in her gory repartee
onscreen or page or
down the stony circles
where our imagination
yet fumes. How ripe
she dances up there
on the screen, peeling
off her fancies behind
the next victim’s throat-
split scream. Something
of that horror is too
revenant to simply
die away: it keeps
on knocking at the
doors and window
of our age, polite for
now but persistent,
as thirsty for our blood
as we are for recalling
theirs. Counter-Janus,
the faces stare each
other down at this
threshold., imploring,
aroused, even greedy,
the appetites of life
and death far more
dangerous than “vital”
or “needy.” Here’s a
table that we keep
returning too until
we’ve “supped full
well with horrors,”
like Shakespeare’s
bloody knight, holding
court onscreen in
a blue-to-black Hell
Castle reflected from
our darker soul’s
incessant gleam,
devouring for two
hours and twenty two
minutes a persistent
love-sick night.
Black hooves indeed
hammer all the nails
securely in. It’s what
that God requests
on His on way back to Eden--
the next passionate
eviscerating sigh.



NEW LAND,
NEXT GOD

2005

Call me a serial monotheist,
devoted to the next thrall
in Your pleroma. What eros
swims in these days of early
high summer, lifting wings
of a sunrise in an itch of
blue torment, painfully heavy
balls in surge of light &
blown upon by soft breezes
throug opened windows.
A new land lifts from
the waters like a lover’s
behind, offering the
next divinity, ire joining
fire in the ravish of
the plunge, earth the
marriage bed and me its
high waxing fire, nearing
the top bells of solstice.
And lo though I sit here
still as an monk’s oak
writing table & writing
it all down, the jackals
are loose and jonesing
for awe at its awfullest Cape
there between my love’s
sleepy thighs where the
next god will soon wake.
Praise to the waters
about to loosen there.
Ratify, dear augment,
the nipples of it here.




NOT HERE

2004

on deleting the blog Oran’s Well


You bid me find then dig
this well: Love bid me
shut its door, lest old hands
drown today in frightful swell.
Your blue throat
is silent now, gone underground
of every under sound
I shaped in this white shell.
Ah well: It’s not like
any but myself and
wrong and plurality
care much for these
blue dazzlements
of verbal quell.
Oran, you ravel down
the porches and spires
of a bright abysm, making
music inside hell:
Who says my hand
should fare differently
than your head? Or
that this hour boled
down under dawn is not
the same strange spell
You bequeathed to dirt
beneath an abbey long,
too long ago? On every
isle you found the
signature of He
who leaves few words
behind, a resonance
which is Not Here.
Our ages jell in one
far song I’ll never fully sound,
muchless sell, though I row on
sans stage, sans Well,
sans Your blue mellifluence
inside this darkling
diving bell. Gone,
but not lost.


THE WAY THROUGH

2005

The polarity of the Earth shifts
every ten thousand years or so,
north to south, causing all maps
to invert their orients, what’s
true turned upside down. Similarly
the sex of our God swings from
her to him and back, carrying our
sacreds in the tide. The dancing
man of Trois Freres was surely
father to the hunt, the Great
Mother the auguress of grain
planters. Then the sun chariots
rolled in and through with their
glorious heroic horses and
then the cult of Mary, Queen
of Heaven, whose womb could
grow a Christ & whose heart
was portalled in the great
rose windows of cathedrals.
Our rabid technical age spins
on the wheels which crushed
her, with furious haunches
speeding ever faster. Whatever
we would further must go
into the bog, to propitiate
and arouse the virility of sames.
We think it’s duration we
desire but only so we can
throw our seed deep enough
to engender our secret other,
the shadowy spouse whose embrace
slakes our god til he drowns,
til nothing is left but a
slow egressing sound of
hearts turning the other way
around, praising not the
resonance but an emptiness
which fills the other way.
Here’s the fire I stole
from your fertillist womb,
now the digital aura
of Northern Lights underground.
All I shout I remit here
at the southern end of the world,
at Your Cape Blue. And thus sail through.


ONWARDS

2005

I wonder if the dark so od
and useless enterprise
of getting juiced at 4 a.m.’s
reaches its saturation
when the batteries of
have fully charged on
the hour’s noctilucence
and I am freed from poems
at last. Perhaps then I
am freed to write
much other ways, up
from this dungeon of
a writing cell saying
things the world at most
dreams and forgets come
waking light. What a
charge there would be
to know I’m done
with ambling perambles
which plod on and on
the nacre of a thought
with occasional rhyming bots
embroidered in its weave,
across and down the
compulsive page which
always ends awkwardly,
pointed toward unsaid
or unsayables, depositing
me once more at day’s
door self-harrowed, another
smoking poem parked
there and nothing left to
do but roll it over to the
mere and let it bubble
and sink to the rear with
all the rest, like a mashed-
down totem of a song no one
but God and I cares much
to hear. A sensitive to dark
energies which may or may
not really be out there
in the cricket piccolos of
our garden late at night,
I’ve poured these labials
endlessly on a blueblack shore,
endlessly composing bricabracs
of verse with the same
cast of skulls and skiffs,
and womens’ breasts and
buckets brimming from
the well of a mordent which
may be hell, or just the
drowned page of my dark
life’s long descent into
stereotypical blue cant
no more intelligent than
those crickets’ endless
high crone. Me, I’m just plugged
into a dark lady’s rear
at the deep end of all
sighing spread nights,
convinced she likes it
best this way. I could
just be deceived
and blithe to all her
protestations which I
hear inside my wife
and through all the
difficulties of one
man’s life which do
not rhyme at all, much
less caress to fall
the same dark-sounding
ways I do here at 4:33
a.m. Am I done at last
with the curse of rhyming
verse? Have my meters
ticked off the deepest
levels of the pool? That’s
a query for my God, though
I let you listen in. In London
it’s a much more fraught
commute with the smell
of cordite tanging up the
morning air. Off the southeast
coast of this state
Hurricane Dennis charges
up the breech no verse
boat of mine has
ever found the ample
sail to reach. I’m brimming
with dark waters now
Lord, my roots are overgrown.
Grant me ways to rip this out
and begin anew the work.
Harvest what you can
of awe’s awfullest murk.
Spin me on to further coasts
beyond this furthermost.


NEXT SONG

March 2, 2006

If my life is so deeply
veined in spirit that
to talk of it is like
glossing the wet part
of the seas, then surely
each poem is a wave
torn from Your salt missal
so blue and wide and widely
chasmed even the
chiasmus which I bell
between Thee and Me
is holy, token of the
absent host which
descends tongue to heart
to sweet Thalassa
further down, saying once
again in some new way
what’s groined and grevious
in our distance.
Even my rude persistence
in resisting You is holy,
a will full pickled all these
years I have sat upon
this barstool of a writing chair
quaffing lesions, swarts
and augments, picking
from the well of hardest
hoof a dark or clearer proof
of how I whiskied falling
to the ground zero of it all
in a toppled and drowned
cathedral down the deep end
of my thrall. I have found
even in the bluest tundra
of desire the ache of God’s
hot heart, my lone-wolf drinker
out on the steppes of song
alone, cursing the rapture
of riptiding stars, ferrying
that music in my creases
and crevasses like a hearse
of love’s once-exalt swoon,
tolling every shore and bed
and page she fully fled
beyond, never to remit
my longing with return.
By falling to the basalt
floor love’s bones clatter
in a tide of gloomy silt,
my tattered lust eventually
gave up its ghost and
stilled in that great dark,
cold and full fractured
as all winters of the heart
--only to rouse exactly
where it lost the greenest
fuse of all, rising in
the welcome in the wave
which still carries me
away slow and sure
as the day’s fresh
startled surf. As I
then died, so for ages
here I’ve come to the
daily lysis of written
dream, the font at the
bottom of my song which emits
the clearest oldest
wildest note of all,
like a huge bass bubble
of sperm whale’s fart
wobbling up toward day,
the sigh which stirs
all bedded angels
to the rupture of communion,
conducting the birds
around our neighborhood
to commence their singing
and ringing and winging
the commingling hosannahs
of dear life. To fall, to walk
in darkness, to rise -- the
dying god’s three steps --
that’s easy: the flying
up through dark
still prefectures
is hard. Surely something
waltzes me into a
stranger paradigm, beyond
the rule of dying. As I
have harrowed those crypts
to death, perhaps the
next psalm will wake
and walk on down
a different shore
where You and I are givens
in one sweetly rising tune,
the sound of which may
physic and forgive
and tend the altar in
that salt cathedral
as both relic and pure
embrace, a wishbone
of the whale to hang
here twixt and true between
two breasts of one big bang.