Strings of the Harp

OUT THERE IN HERE

March 8, 2006

Only certain families of historic
lineage, or persons gifted with
music and song, are attended
by this spirit ((the Banshee)), for
music and poetry are fairy gifts,
and the possessors of them
show kinship with the spirit
race.

— F.S. Wilde, Ancient Legends,
Mystic Charms and Superstitions
of Ireland

You’re out there yet
in here, beyond the rim
of what I’ll ever know,
though I row the
full breadth of my
life’s paused thought:
That’s the well You
sing from, master,
my totem bell
astride your plashing fish,
Dylan of my most
daring dreams:
You’re fanciful
and not, the numen
wraith saysinging
things which always
rounds me back to here,
strumming on an
air-harp in my ear,
whistling Dixies from
a surf’s collapsing
mass of heart-shaped
falling rears: Down
my father’s ruined
family cave You’re
painted on the walls,
astride a magic salmon
or some madder gilly
of the deep, the arch
typos of bewildered
song, coercing from
the rocks of days
three cups filled
past the brim
with laughter,
grieving, sleep:
My ancestors played
their harps for
Norman patrons
in the bested courts
of Munster, that
conquered magic
darker half of Eire:
They played on
in the draught of
later years — that
famous lament “I ask,
who will buy a poem”
is by one of ours:
The vein is silver
rimmed with riot’s blue
though mostly now
we ply trades far
from You, lawyering
and marketing, teaching
rocks bereft of rooks,
iotas of verbatim
which are dearth
if not death to you:
And there’s this lame
too-brained account
of mine to evanesce
a ghoul: I can’t charm
or harrow or rue Your
wave-backed blues
eerie-ing up my waking’s
shores: Can’t write around
or through you, so sure
your fairy hand’s in mine:
These poems are half-spurts
of some spermwhalin’ crest,
half-Ouijas of wee thrall:
An hour of pure Nordic blue,
racing fjords too deep to
fully nurse the sense of,
leys of importune cold fire
which nerve our shared
domain, this shore where
song each day begins and
ends: And I’m the worst
sort of sot to sidhe your
salt in, a mound of naughty
over-nibbled nipples and
dry dry dry conceits,
ten thousand lame laments
and silly rhymes mucked
in a metronome’s tic toc
wave rocking roll, too shored
to plumb Your wettage here,
too amped on the wattage
of my lubber fear, too
endeared to my dry
white riding for truly
riding naked pent and
drear as You so wildly do:
Damned to do or don’t,
I just drone on through
the seep of middle years,
matured beyond adventuring
yet still in thrall with
my fairy peer’s resolve,
still slamming every sea
to font between wide knees:
Call me a hagriographer
of his bouree, writing
blue gamboling full down,
although I know they can’t
exist, although I say it oh
so clumsily and distant
if not full damaged, useless,
just damn wrong: That’s
the curse of all gifts the
world no longer needs —
the pursestrings are drawn
tight, like a nose fast on
a convicted rouge — the
song keeps leaking
everywhere after its dead,
gilding dead leaves gold,
no longer that which
saves or hallows
but daunts the darkness
with its gleam, light,
glissading, mercurial
for all it cannot
much longer dream:
Swim on, mad Puck,
my tongue’s tutorial
in baleen-cathedral
sieves of blue: Swive
and merry just offshore
of each emboldened
falling wave: Beyond
the bling and its
dark deeper ring,
there’s a presence
which sings so loudly
no amount
of ink or throat
the bells of its
wild heaven will
full peal or ring here
though I try, pal,
I’m trying.


***

.... Do you think the heart
is unaccountable? Do you think the body
any more than a branch
of the honey locust tree,

hunting water,
hunching toward the sun,
shivering when it feels
that good, into
white blossoms?

or do you think there is a kind
of music, a certain strand
that lights up the otherwise
blunt wilderness of the body—
a furious
and unaccountable selectivity?

— from Mary Oliver’s “Muisic” in American Primitive

***

The recit ...is an account of events experienced, rather than of my experiencing. It was then unfolded; the angel then said; a mountain, a room, a colored light, a figure shone in splendor. Like a walk through the world, there is this and this and this; the colors and shapes of the things illumined, their faces, are the confession — it is their coming to light, their testament, and their individuation, as Corbin said, not mine. the angel before the feeling he brings. Feelings are accessory to them, received from the. They are “divine influxes,” as Blake said, moving through the heart in the company of images.

— James Hillman, “The Thought of the Heart”


****



TRISTAN

2004

A weathered, broken cross in St.
Oran’s Chapel bears your image,
Seated in a boat alone, this harp
In hand. Singing god, no one knows
If you were always there, or if
Time’s hand wrote you in, across a
Sea of vellum and worn stone. No
Matter: Whenever you played that
Harp, a boat plashed home inside fair
Isolde’s heart, a South awakened
Most urgent roots to hurl her kiss.
A song which harrowed every hell
Mortality conceives. Now distant,
Almost lost, I find you just ahead,
Your boat and muse crossed heart to head.






IRISH HARPS

2004

Irish harps don’t die,
though many slip
beneath the wave to hang
on the timbers of drowned
crannogs, singing in the
ears of Time’s cold flow.
Last night I dreamt of
a late Friday afternoon
at my old job at the
newspaper in Orlando,
trying to get out the word
about a friend who was
to perform later that
night in the cafeteria.
First it was supposed to
be a duo (the other
player me, I guess, before
fate and the toll of
bottles got me kicked
out of that enterprise)
and then just him;
and though in history
this guy was a drummer,
that night I dreamed
he was to play guitar
and sing (and although
I don’t ever recall him
singing). Maybe
he was me, the
successful half that I
lost in the wash of
bad Friday nights
repeated every night.
Let’s just say that his
presence in the dream
was representational, as
the color blue suggests
a liminal and lucent
threshold in the day,
where words and worlds
veil as thin as a fresh-
breaking Anyway I was
trying to get the word out
somehow in a mash
of old and new labors,
trying to dummy up
a sign with his picture
and some text on the
computer, scanning maps
and his photo and then
pasting it up on cardboard,
which looked like crap,
and the whole effort
seemed useless, since
one lousy sign was
hardly enough to
permeate a corporate
hive ... So I went back
to work, mindful of
the passing hour, knowing
that if I wanted to post
a newsboard as I once
did at that job, 26 of them
at locations around the
building and faxed to
bureaus and the offsite
production facility, if
I wanted to get the word
out that way I’d need
the HR director or the
president or one of the
other director’s approval,
and at 4:50 p.m. on
Friday they were surely
long gone to Happy Hours
at swanker bars than
I could afford, or off
to poolside barbecues
in Islesworth or royal
Winter Park. How then
to proceed? I called
a delivery express
company and talked with
a woman there a bit,
negotiating, estimating.
She said that my name
and voice sounded
achingly familiar, though
neither of us could fit
the sweet echo to
a time or bed or beach;
and so let it go, smiling
at a connection which
had remained pure blue
even when the line
went dead under water.
I then decided to create
and post a newsboard
without the approval of any
superiors, and got to
work here, way before
first light, heralding news
of a minstrel show that
returns every 300 years
or so, up from the crannog
where my totem Cobtach
Sweet-Tune entertained
both Norman court and
Danaan princes of the Sidhe.
I am the envoy of that
music, brandishing
what once was called an
Irish harp, stepping off
Saint Oran’s cross to
entertain you here
with songs and tales
that never quite die.
These fingers which knew
frets and strings recall
the bluer fourths and fifths
as pen swims over page,
holding dream and
its doors up close like
a harp to shoulder.
Let that old music ride
forth here, my harp-shaped
charger, toward first
and last and ever shore.


***


NOTES ON THEME

2002


O harp and altar,
of the fury fused ...
— Hart Crane

If I don’t arrive at some
spring of God
I think I’ll die
of parched unsaid:
and so I click my
pen & pause to
pray to those black
tongues wagging
near a rude trough.

Shall I mark these
acres I till as home,
somewhere beyound
urban and rural
a suburb and shore?
This stead is a
tempered composite
all ‘em all,
a bow running
across the everyday
of hardworking
humdrum joint-aching
midage; and because
the horsehairs were
plucked from so
complicate a horse,
the music straddles,
weaves, haunts, hurts,
complicates, and consoles,
silent to all but this
page, my day and God:

Or should I write inside
the wounds of sexual scythe,
sea-dipped and arced
between savage thighs?
Shall I ache my words
in her malt furies,
spermatic and balled
and racing the
e’erwashed beach
of a history unquenched,
its harbors never reached?

Shall I account the tonnage
of my father’s stones, each
a tooth in some titan’s jaws,
crowing buzzing, mooning
& lowing? Shall I give ‘em
room, tithe, voice, border
and title here, deep
in the shadow of
a million millenia
and their yeasty rows?

Or shall I chant the
missal poured from what
gathered here? I’ve
prayer upon prayer
woven of pagan
marginalia no one
50 years from now
will know. My chattering
skull sits on
the mantel of a well
always more lost.
Shall I give you
chapel and well
of that inchoate bone
which yammers &
tolls of scattering shoals?

Or—finally—shall
I write the finest tracers
which etch and limn
love as I know it today?
Of our cat poised in the
window before dawn,
her blue eyes lost in a
darkened face, perfect
at that threshold? Shall
I tell you of my wife asleep
amid too many cares?
Would you hear the
plainsong of a heart
where all words are tested
and found wanting, and
where all poems are just
a hobby for the first hour
of the day and lie strewn
around our bed where I
try to stroke alive the
connection which gives
me breath and blood,
and may too be lost?

Harp and altar,
I am manned in
your salt mordents:
scree and mortar
these black hooves.
Salmon my blood
toward the brooding
shore I cannot reach.
Bridge the next room
I can enter gladly
with this fading torch.
Sing of me beneath
the world, in your
resonant tomb,
this skull I call home.


***


BRUTAL HARP,
GENTLE SONG

April 2005


O brute harp, what tensile chords
you pluck from me when words are
charged full blue! How is it that when
I’m screwed tightest here, an aging
man at matins yet again, I am
bid and freed to roar this Cape
to Your heart’s content, long after
every song has drowned. What self-
sufficing mandate do You boon and
bane in these unfurling wings of blue?
How is it that I remain at this
bottomless derange of words for world,
my voice wetting every page
with Your dark salt rain, a
sing-song, solo susurration
watering blasted heaths long prophesied
to outlive the sea’s high reign.
Why do I remain for all these
dark, dole- rueful poems, cranking
high the amplitude of waves
I so desperately steer this heart
and house and love the other, safer,
gentler way? This resonant
next shore is a harp of both,
somehow, a ground where soft
white sands of bossa nova days
overlay a hard tremble further
down which refrains the
boom of awfulness, a faint basso
of far aftershocks, the chatter
of buried skull teeth. My love
asleep upstairs and this furnace-
tending in the boiler-room downstairs:
countervalences which whale together
this devilish bouree, this classy,
brine sashay. You bid me compose
this tub of soggy numens, to
brave and breech the massy gale;
to hold it high, like an old stone
crucifix, reminding gods of surge
and swale of every swilled delight.
Tear my mouth and throat and chest
full wide, and I will trim my sails
full blue, captain of the next song
to split and spiral further down
dark and deeper vaults of You.


***


STRINGS OF THE HARP

April 2002


On this cold clear
April night I stand
with my father
in his ancient yard,
the moon at full blast
lathering these stones
with the black milk of
the sea’s hurled soul.
The bell tower is a pale
gem gleaming in
that lamp, faceted
with uncut faces
—seal-man, ogre,
dolphin, snake —
each adrift in that old
moon-music, singing
from some place
we surely dreamed
before we knew.
And high above
in the newest portal
a harp’s clef stretches
wind-strings taut
and burning with
that other fire,
like tongues of heated
heart, or sails of
starry soul.
And O how they
tremble inside
that April moon
as if to tune our
own wild nerves:
Together we
are strummed
by a cold wind
weaving through the
garden of the mind,
and sing on through
that beaming door
which opens on the final
room of our strange career—
a richly booming,
darkly gleaming shore.