Puddlefoot (On Sweetness)

A Brownie on the Celtic cringe, on the edge of the Gaelic-speaking country in Perthshire, haunted Altmor Burn, not far from Pitlochry. He used to be heard paddling and splashing in the burn, then he would go up with wet feet to the farm nearby, and if everything had been left untidy he would tidy it, but if it was left neat he would throw everything about. It was counted unlucky to meet him, and the road was avoided at night. He was laid ... by a nickname. A man returning merry from the market one dark night heard him splashing about the burn, and cried out jovially, "Well, Puddlefoot, how is it with you the night?" The Brownie was horrified. "Oh! Oh!" he cried, "I've gotten a name! 'Tis Puddlefoot they call me!" And he vanished, never to haunt the place again.

-- K.M. Briggs, The Personnel of Fairyland (Oxford U. Press, 1953)


PUDDLEFOOT

March 13, 2006

Hear me and you're
witched; sort and
I'll derange; scatter
and I found.
But name me
back and
I'm gone, into
wilds you'll never
recognize as such.
Nothing's
changed down
all these years,
though my folk
have dried to
vellum: still you
hear me, splashing
beyond the palest
margins, because
the rift which
drifts the tune
lies in dark lands
down your ears,
in folds of
unknown depths
you'll never nail
the darkest
sense of. I
will confound
you all the way,
your ordered
lanes wet-footed,
all gauzy beds
short-sheeted,
the moony clefts
revealed down mons
brute-wedgied
with my surf.
Persist and it
just gets stranger
but shore what's
strangest and it
fades past dust
like so much
disappearing ink.
A vanished tribe
descended here,
our story like an
old coin falling
down a well still
found inside one
ear and then
the other, each
fall both strange
and most familiar,
the flip side of all
you think you
know one way
and then its other.
An old dark culture
cannot die or dry
when words like
these are merry,
whistling home
on ancient lanes:
But before
you make my
late and last
acquaintance,
please quit the
poem here:
closed covers
keep me near
and wild and
wet-footed, my
troop of
whistlin' pixies
tootin' in the rear.


Waking, remembering only music

1997

There between the pillow and the dream
I heard a music rising from the seam
mellifluous as oboes a soft and wistful mood
breezing through the boughs of an ever darkened wood
It was late at night and in the sill
a blue moon heaved its lucent gill
gilding our bodies in a silver mane
cleansing our hearts of all the workday strain
caressing us down an long and winding stream
where all the reasons we married flicker and gleam
When I woke nothing but the tune remained
like the ebbing sound of the sea's blue dream
I marry it to you with that kiss that has no name
just the music of a distant heaven we make today again


OUR PLEASURES ARE THE WORLD'S

May 2001

Our pleasures are the world's;
there is no nature not our own.
Listen to the rain as it rustles
through slabs of sliding thunder:
You are sustained by a music there
the same way you are welcomed here.
Somewhere great fires smolder
in this rain, an end at last to drought.
Something wakens where you least thought,
an intimate invisible weave
between bough and page, a rough
green hunger inside the rage to love.


JUICE

2002


I turned 13 during my first summer
in Florida, hard-ripped from my
Chicago home when my parents split.
We moved into a new subdivision near
Winter Haven that had been torn from
an orange grove. Just beyond our house
the streets unpaved themselves into thickets
where bulldozers jawed whole trees, eager
to uproot slow makings for a fast buck.

My wounds and the grove's grafted into
each other through a season of fire,
my parents crossed like swords over
my puberty, old Florida parceled in
fruit bags of Eden. Loss and desire mingled,
sugared, swelled: then burst from every
pore in sweetly mutinous grog.

There were six orange trees in our
yard to plunder; I must have picked
and squeezed two quarts of fresh juice
every day, greedy for its slicksweet pour.
The first gulp always surprised me
with its sharp ardor, thick and loose,
springing a thirst inside mere parch.

That first summer was archangel-
ically hot, a humid blear which called
all earthborn things to high heaven.
I sent my dreams that way as I
hurled baseballs at a pitchback
screen, my wild pitches thonking
like heads on the wood fence.

To dive later into the pool was like
a belt of that juice: delirium plunged in
joy, the pool's bottom a glade of bright
glitters shushed in blue. I swam lengths
underwater then perched at the edge,
head and shoulders resting on hot concrete
with my legs drifting below. Lulled by
Carole King on the radio and high soaring
crickets, I drowsed in an undulate weave
of ripening girls peeled from their swimsuits,
their nipples pealing a red roar.

Every afternoon it rained hard,
big boomers in from Tampa sweeping
through in great wet sheets which left
me the rest of the day feeling somehow
unslaked. At twilight, the remaining grove
on the other side of the fence grew fierce
with frogs and whatever else pulsed out there,
mounds of a sugar silk-saturate and dark.

On a small radio I listened to hard rock bands
in the black-lit eeriness of my room; eyewhites
and lint burned like hot moons while the
thickening night heaved on my windows in
a rich, purring growl. Oh the sharp tooth I
felt in those songs by Mountain and Cream,
trillingly pure, loud as thirst, raw as plunder.

Thirty years later, that first summer in Florida
chirrs loud in my veins. I sit here in this house
with the windows wide to the humid heat of 5 a.m.
Outside in this small town never far from a fast
Florida buck, sprinkler heads and crickets saw over
that old beast who sleeps only in the linear sense.
Some untamed thirst prowls here as ever, ripened
deep within. My hands ache for the heft of those
oranges warm from ghost orchards; to cleave their
nude fire; to squeeze them down hard on a mount
of ridged whirl, filling this glass past the brim with
remembered gold, spilling juice over all.



PLEASURE, SWEETNESS

2002

Was it pleasure or sweetness
that I yearned for and sought,
my cup thirsty to spill over
with that honeyed pitch
which swells from a
woman's welcome of me,
arms, thighs wide,
ocean caught mid-summer,
mid-waverise, rich
in foam and scatter
in a long, bowering yes ...

All edges dissolve
in that latter swoon,
I and Thou liquified
of all difference and
or contrast, as sugar
melts its borders
in a wide sweetness.

Pleasure is different,
its bloom calyxed on thorn,
flame fed by an
ore of bad fevers-
anger, lust, shame-
reveling in its awfulness.

Pleasure dies without
enough abrasive surface,
and defeats itself in
every surrender. Like
mating cats, pleasure
thrills in a yowl belled
of weird brass-tawdry
tooth plunged in the neck,
the apple bitten too hard
& the tears which deliver
what sweetness can't quiver.



THINKING ABOUT ECSTASY

Jack Gilbert


Gradually he could hear her. Stop, she was saying,
stop! And found the bed full of glass,
his ankles bleeding, driven through the window
of her cupola. California summer. That was pleasure.
He knows about that: stained glass of the body
lit by our lovely chemistry and neural ghost.
Pleasure as fruit and pleasure as ambush. Excitement
a wind so powerful, we cannot find a shape for it,
so our apparatus cannot hold on to the brilliant
pleasure for long. Enjoyment is different.
It understands and keeps. The having of the having.
But ecstasy is a question. Doubling sensation
is merely arithmetic. If ecstasy means we are
taken over by something, we become an occupied
country, the audience to an intensity we are
only the proscenium for. The man does not want
to know rapture by standing outside himself.
He wants to know delight as the native land he is.