There's No Place Like Oz

God and all angels sing the world to sleep,
Now that the moon is rising in the heat

And crickets are loud again in the grass. The moon
Burns in the mind on lost remembrances.

He lies down and the night wind blows upon him here.
The bells grow longer. This is not sleep. This is desire.

Ah! Yes, desire ... this leaning on his bed,
This leaning on his elbows in his bed,

Staring, at midnight, at the pillow that is black
In the catastrophic room ... beyond despair,

Like an intenser instinct. What is it he desires?
But this he cannot know, the man that thinks,

Yet life itself, the fulfillment of desire
In the grinding ric-rac. ...

-- from Wallace Stevens’ “The Men That Are Falling”

***

The appeal of fairyland is the evanescence and effervescence of LaLaLand. Not much different from our current cult of fame, fortune ‘n’ celebrity. This tale is from WW Gill’s A Second Manx Scrapbook, who got it from a Miss Mona Douglas:

Johnny Callow, an old grave-digger in Lezarye, used to tell me when I was small about a man who was crossing Skyhill one night, and was “took” and lost his way. At last he saw a great house before him, bigger than Ballakillingam, all lighted up and the door open, and ones going in and out. He never thought where he was or what it would be, but went on towards it, and inside there were scores of grand ladies and gentlemen in silks and satins and velvet, and all the tables and chairs and dishes were of gold and silver, shining fit to blind you, and there was mortal grand food and drink all set out ready. He walked right in, but none of the ones that were there seemed to see him, so he thought he would take shelter and watch them for a bit, and he did, sitting all quiet in a corner. But he was tired coming in off the mountains after his day’s work, and before long he went to sleep, and when he woke up in the morning house and people and all was gone, and he was lying in the fern up on the top of Skyhill. I don’t remember whether Johnny had said he had eaten their food or not.

— retold in Katherine Briggs, The Fairies In Tradition and Literature

***


FANTASY

2001

She waits for me outside my
bleary boring day,
perfectly ripe, pure grape,
her hair, hot eyes, and wide thighs
spilled like milk for me—
Not a woman in any of
her mortally difficult ways,
just a heave of breasts for
fettered and obliterate needs:
Booze nipples, frothy head,
a happy hour on a faraway bed
where nothing is difficult
dull or real —
Have a sip from these,
she sings inside every
distant happy hour,
I’m your every thirst,
only yours, and bottomless.

***

In Mary Gaitskill’s superb novel Veronica, a middle-aged women recalls her days in the halcyon world of fashion and the lalaland of that fantasy of perfection which she called a “terrible heaven.” In this passage, the woman recalls how, after returning from a modeling jaunt to Paris, back to her family and sanity and classes in a community college, how the sound of that heaven was such an oppression on the real:


Sometimes the spell would break: I would look away from the terrible heaven and see my sister lying next to me, her neat, graceful form and her even breath beautiful and inviolate. If I put my hand on her warm shoulder, my thoughts might quiet; heaven would vanish and the ceiling would be there again, protecting us from the sky. I could lie against her and feel her breath forgive me. The day would come. My night thoughts would pale. My sister and I would go to school.

***

In “The Legend of Innis Sark” again shows the fairy underworld as ‘one made by glamour’ ... It is about a young man who fell asleep under a haystack on November Eve and woke in the same place the next morning. After some nightmare experiences in the fairy kitchens he found himself at a royal banquet. He had seen an old hag chopped up and boiled to serve the guests, but at the banquet tables he saw ‘fruit and chickens and turkeys and butter, and cakes fresh from the oven, and crystal cups of bright red wine.’

Now sit down and eat,” said the prince, who sat at the top on a throne, with a red sash around his waist, and a gold band on his head. “Sit down with this pleasant company and eat with us; you are welcome.”

And there were many beautiful ladies seated round, and grand noblemen, with red caps and sashes; and they all smiled at him and bade him eat.

“No,” said the young man, “I cannot eat with you, for I see no priest to bless the food. Let me go in peace.”

“Not at least till you taste our wine,” said the priest with a friendly smile.

And one of the beautiful ladies rose up and filled a crystal cup with bright red wine, and gave it to him. And when he saw it the sight of it tempted him: and he could not help himself, but drank it all off without stopping, for it seemed to him the most delicious draught he had ever had in his whole life.

But no sooner had he laid down the glass, than a noise like thunder shook the building, and all the lights went out; and he found himself above in the dark night lying under the very same hay-rick where he had cast himself down to sleep, tired after his work.

The effect of the fairy-draught was fatal to him, and he passed away and soon died.

— Briggs, ibid.

***


BOTTOMLESS

2002


Now would all the waves were women,
then I’d go drown, and chassee with them evermore!

— Maltese sailor in Moby Dick

The hard hurt comes from
believing what we dream—
selling our soul to that
confabulator who tweaks
waves into tittery, spilling
malt waveage on a
wanderlust page.
O Faust, with your
appalling spell! An
addict is a man in love
with his sweet cups,
the vision through them
bottomless, no holds barred.
Every unslakable thirst
drowns in possibility,
swirled in the siren bore
between tide and tempest,
my soul drawn between
misery and more of it.
I heard once of a lottery
winner was found 8 months
later floating in a Miami
canal, wearing only
a pair of shorts & an
empty pint jammed in
his pocket. School the mind,
drear friend, to turn
from salt infinitude.
It isn’t a woman you seek
but rather the world’s turn
and smile toward you,
something you never found
in a woman because the earth
is round and tides her curves
ever away, dissolving your fire
in a boneless choir of waves
you’ll never reach or name or sound.
Don’t follow signs
turned the other way.
The moon has closed for the night.



POLKA DOT SOIREE

2004

Alchemical work had to hurt
(boil, sever , skin, dessicate,
putrefy, suffocate, drown, etc.)
natural nature in order to
free animated nature. As soon
as psyche enter into consideration,
the only-natural is not enough.

— James Hillman,
Dream and Underworld


Fall 1986: A bad season of
collapsing walls. My last band
had folded wings that summer.
My guitar was frozen in
its case, a stone thing
falling through blue plush
into a well of banshee
booze, hauling me down
a tide with those fingers
of big night music gripped,
like stone, around round
my ankle. I had tried
swearing off the alchol
but going it alone I hadn’t
a clue what to mend or
forgive or give back. And so
I found myself out again
in that old the zombie zone,
suited up with a
a lunar-cold vengeance.
Real things fell from
angelic aeries, like
the massive oak
I discovered
on top of my garage
apartment after work
one day, the walls of
my tiny cheap room
buckled out. I retrieved
journals and guitar
and natty slax and got
the hell on outta there,
setting up in a tiny
room in my mother’s
house. That was when
I started writing down
the malaise, even
as I headed full force into
it. I made a weak
(inept, too wounded)
attempt to love a German
exchange student
named Magritte but
the clearer motions it
demanded — stability,
fidelity, sacrifice —
kept getting lost in
the murk of tequila.
One night I called
her to make plans
for dinner and a
Pat Matheny concert,
and found myself
after ringing off
walking right out
the door, engorged
with that cactus gestalt.
Long hours later screwed
to a barstool in
my favorite water
hole, the blackout man
crept from his
grave, that barking
hell-bent satyr equal
parts fang and cock.
Followed a woman
back to a house
where someone had
died recently —
there were piles of
bills on a table, ashtrays
of a ghost
overflowing like
sewers, the smell
of oatmeal cookies
and piss. In my journal
the next day, I wrote
“heights of sex around
2:30 and 6 a.m., yes,
but the falloff was
meteoric” — the blisses
of that season seemed
carved not from waves
but their riptide. The
next night — the one
before my date
with Magritte — I
ended up at Fern Park
Station drinking the
night away to the
sound of a bad big
hair metal band
& Kim the topless
dancer invited me
back to her apartment
for more of the same
though blacker in in
is blare. Bare overhead
bulb & Van Halen
squealing on a table
radio as we did shots
& drank beer. After
I fucked her on the couch
(from behind, hard,
like a wolf), she sighed
and said “I have always
hated you” softly
in my ear. The next
day I called in sick
and shook Kim awake
to drive me back to my car,
the late morning
overheated and
shriekingly bright,
all knife and no ocean.
I was 29 and falling
down the oubliette of
my old dream of
love’s billowy perfection,
refusing to let go
down those gripless walls.
Back in that room
in my mother’s house
I slept fitfully for the
afternoon, making coffee
at 4 p.m. and casting
an I Ching oracle. —
The Abysmal Doubled,
like snake-eyes formed
from six faces of two
coins, two hexagrams of
drowning stacked on
each other, auguring
the dangers I swam
without and within.
It offered the image
of a melancholy heart
going down in freezing
brine, a place shared
by the moon, thieves,
wisdom and darkness.
“Surrender is the
only escape,” it whispered
through the hungover
creaks and folds of
the afternoon. Ah
but what to surrender
and how to let it go?
What of the dream
I had in that season
of the purely curved
woman in a black and
white polka dot dress,
walking up to the
stage where I stood
trading licks with ZZ Top.
Her breasts hips and
ass waving like a tide
toward me, her eyes
so hot on mine
the way I thought
every woman I ever
desired looked at me,
a feminine veneer
for a greater ocean
behind, her kiss
which came later
absolving every
abyss I now swam
through. She took
me to her bed of beds
on some island
of sweet delight,
fucking me every
way I came,
sighing up from
that billowy descent
how she loved me
utterly — udderly,
lutely, resolutely,
undulantly, you
weave all the sounds
of love’s pious assent —
and yet the dream
was striated with
my late and fallen
ennui, and I doubted
her words though
I knew they were true.
And then I sensed
she would be gone
and forever hence
with me: “The eternal
moment” I wrote
in my journal. Such
was my appetite
for her, for you,
my bittersweet
ocean’s absentia,
my dark-blue drawing
wave, my hunger
which all the
bars and beds
could never sate.
The Florida of that
season now
18 years ago was
in every appearance
a nightmare of
overbright streets,
the necropolitic
spookiness of
all that suburbia
just a false front
for the land I
was dying in, eternal
night inside a
brilliance. Reagan
was in his second term,
the Chicago Bears
were mauling the NFL
and rock n roll
was a glitter in the
eye of the pax MTV.
I closed my journal,
cracked a beer and
toasted that bad age
which molted
into this one. Later
with Magritte at the
Pat Matheny concert
I heard the best score
yet for my love —
a long dark pulsing
rendition of the bossa
nova jazz soiree
“Are You Going With
Me,” watching Magritte
pull as far away from
me in her seat to
watch the band. I
loved that music most
when I watched her
face drift off toward
it, the woman lost in
the tide and me trying
to wade in after. After
the concert Margritte
wouldn’t talk to me
and I dumped her
at her car to head
back out into the night
which is like this
wild witch’s smile,
all tongue and razored
teeth, a pink wet
gullet which swallowed
me as I hit the bars
guzzling Buds and
shots of Rumpleminz.
In that darkling
scree the ache delivered
me to Laurie, an
exfuck who I hadn’t
seen in three years,
now fatter and older
and drunker from all
the ways her love of love
had abused her. I
followed her back
to her apartment (in
a complex attached
by the root to the
whole grim archipelago)
& she let me have
my way with her body
every way I wished
though we couldn’t
stand to look each
other in the eye. We
fucked the rest of
the night and half
the morning, our
pudendas jabbering
like unearthed skulls:
that curtained
room was torn from
some inmate’s
page where night
after night sharks
have had their way
with her, tearing
and plunging and feasting
in slow balletic clouds
of blood. She was
the girl I never got to fuck
inside all the ones
I had, a woman inside
my own self-
ravaged psyche.
I got the hell on outta
there late that afternoon,
coming home in a
fucked out hungover
bruise to find a message
to call Magritte. She
apologized for her anger
at me and asked if we
could meet that night
and make up, maybe
proceed. But how could
I even presume to try
playing love by its rules?
I said sure and headed
out to drink. Falling
thus I finally let go
of whatever hold love
had on me, the wounds
I nursed for all those
woman who had left
me for good, shredding
every guise and gout
of purer feeling to
get down to where
the woman in the
polka dotted dress
resides and queens.
In my cups that night
I drank to dregs
like a drowning man
holding on to the
anchor of his farewell,
all the way down
to that ruined city
where she dreams.
And then I lost
the queen herself,
the one so founded
and floundered in
the marketing of
a metaphor — accepting
at last that the
dream was only
that, pure seem
and puerile gleam.
And then I really
hit the bars, going
three months of
nightly blackout
drinking, lurking
at the bottom of
a sea with the
rest of the drowned
sailors, arms
wrapped tight
around the coral
bones we dreamed.
That was the brine
in which you were
pickled, never
to return to haunt
day worlds again.
The woman in the
polka dot dress
is that booze which
Bryan Ferry sang
about in that old
Roxy Music anthem,
“The Thrill of It All”—
that pure whiskey
poured into a tight
and nippled dress,
an anthem of desire
which I sang with
all my heart marching
out every door.
The death of every
dream is horrible,
a gripless slide down
all the names for hell.
My dreams from that
time are florid
with descriptions
of infernal gloom,
of vampires with my
face who ache
to die but can’t,
vultures preening
on the moon, carnival-
like rides down
sulphur chasms
beneath the blackest
coldest heart.
My love was torn
by desire’s devil
tongs in one long
whiskey draught:
Sundered till only
my lips remained, still
pursed and ejacualate
of her exalt sheen.
Poor fool. That
season crashed
and burned me
me now nearly
15 years ago. It’s
5 a.m. now on
this second day
of writing this
poem, heaping
so many lines
lines on the ache
I still feel recalling
that awful time. I sit
on my pure white
writing chair in
the house I married
and mortgaged
every dream to
remain in: it’s
a coolish morning
in November and
so much outside
is the same —
a second-term
Bush repeating the
arch Reagan chill, the
Steeler whupping
the NFL’s unbeatable
best, and E! Television
parading the
smiles of hotties in tight
dresses, eclipsing
the shine of blood
everywhere on
Iraqi streets. And
me hurling all this
ink in measure to
a feeling that harpoons
me still when I
recall that woman
in the polka dotted
dress whom I
always wanted and
never met. That image
is like an olive
at the bottom of
my worst infernal
drink. And yet,
today it seems I got to
you at last in her,
that curvy ikon
of those nights in
wild absentia: Or,
to scratch deeper,
perhaps I reach
you best recalling
those worst nights,
my lines sliding
down a time most
alien and strange
and wild. Dare I say
I’m more alive now
in the real work
of daily love for
having lost you
utterly on nights
so long ago? Or
is it that by naming them
the demons drop their
tines and go to work
for us, the woman
in the polka dotted dress
sashayed up close
to this banging stage
where I’m still trading
licks with fire,
translating for her
your own blueblack desire.




THE TERRIBLE HEAVEN


March 1, 2006

Inside the pap of sweetness I so desired
was a terrible heaven I was not meant
to survive, not in any sane or solid
or too-sweet way. An empyrean glade
of downy billows and hard surf, that
heaven is filled with women and goblets t
hat to kiss and to drink were one long
sweet draught so perilous to lip
and fatal to resist. — Paint the canvas
here with the red and gold augments
of De Danaan fire, upon a ground of wild
cerulean wash; a tableaux of
whiskey in heavy tumblers clinking
with ice and trio of strumpets
reclining nearby, blonde redhead
and raven all taut in their swellings
and depths, rounding desire with
undulant Ahs and sibilant Yesses,
parting and clenching the soul’s
uprailing spume with furious
hissess, lapping up the full
frenzy I so readily and greedily
and profanely exulted in gaining
entrance at long last to the
terrible heaven you can’t find
in any room labored for love
and its God. How could I not
dive headfirst through that
border of silk underwear like
a burning angel shot straight
through the narrows of the mere,
my hair on fire, singing the
praises of Cutty on the rocks
& the diamond glitter
of that infernal gem swinging
between the hooters of Persephone?
And who could last there longer
than just one night, the dream too
hot, too drowning, too blue for
mortal hips to nail, much less keep
within sight before desire
damns all that it embraces,
the swelling wave apexed
and crashing full down
in thunder and doom,
leaving me dazed on this
shore naked and scattered,
full harrowed of that sweetness
no man can taste without
drinking full magnums in hell.
Thus we wake and wearily
walk on, back as we can
to the world as it is and must be,
wondering just what that wild
music was all about, never
to dance that way again,
not in that strange and
effervescently damned hall.
Though we remember—oh yes—,
and full well. We recall the
syzygy of arching tongue
and falling drop of milkiest
issue, that eternal pause before
the dam buckles then shatters
and then pours and pours and pours.
We recall the depths where
angels sing only pale shores.
Like a distant music
it raids through the day
rendering sterile and moot
the loved labors of the day,
even though we know better
than to believe a note of it,
a siren sound of clinking glasses
and high laughter and that
vicious hissed Yes which
draws back to the next wave.




METAPHOR

2000

It wasn’t important to know
why he crazed so perilously
for her. Not any more.
Nor why he believed
so intransigently in waves and moon.
He already knew that metaphor
was just an adman’s conjure,
not steak but sizzle.
But like any addict
he plunged to hell anyway
and received his due.
Working back from ruin
he reflects how energy
fools the magician,
its jugglery a mask
for transformation. How passion
can glut on love with such repast
and then leave so little of it left.
Days now he wakes and walks
crying for those waters
like a man forsworn of drink
yet nursing a will to taste
that whisky again. His heart
reaching for that shot glass
with its draught of cold gold.
It burns like a pole star
amid all the duties of
renunciation. It will kill
him, he knows, and he prays
for a different love to
waken and call him back.
But he also knows there
are many worse ways to
live than this death.
At night’s end he turns
out the light and lays there
in the dark listening to street
sounds and thresh of
blades deeper down
whispering their brute
spells. He thinks of
waves and moon and
mounts the dolphin
which no metaphor can ride.



BONING THE GHOUL

2002

An appalling sweetness
slipped into view
when I lost the last
wet curvature of you:

Well, “lost” is landfill
for all tossed verbs,
numens of that last kiss
trucked from dead suburbs.

Atop that dread mound
an eerie twattage glows
as ghoul cockage choirs
in solemn, bony rows.

That chorus sings to me
the beat-to-hell old news
that I’ll not find her again
not even in rear views.

Who knows why forsaking
me was for her so easy,
why she drained the glass;
Or why her sleazy

voidings like a vacuum
in me yet clench,
a vertigo in all makings
with a familiar stench,

deigned to rule a wold
of cold and moony nights
with thorn plecturings of
strings no longer white,

their amperage sucked dry.
What’s horniness if it
douses not in fire
but bone-dry recit,

unbuttoning not blouses
but stone lips of banshee
rue—burning wicker men
because some dame decreed

my hands anon away?
Who wants to fornicate
unnippled sprites of ire?
Let’s banish hope, excoriate

the lust: debone the ghoul
who haunts the ossuary
of every stiffie lost:
let’s remit the actuary

before tits up it tanks.
She rose up from a wave
of breaking blue joy;
and then without a wave

she disappeared, willing me
this stale and sour undertow.
I’ll not find her on this
beach again: It’s time go:

Time to rearrange
into less salty, surer show:
time for bright diurnals
where fresher boners grow

beneath the fertile loam
of an untroubled sleep.
I’ll plunge on alone now
on waters twice as deep,

ghost-captain of a boat
destined for dryer shores,
calmer nights, no matter
how she always gores.



LETTER FROM PARADISE

2005

After a bitter cold holiday
where we groused drinking
hot tea beneath blankets
& the world outside was
foggy & chill in the two
weeks since it’s been
nothing but warm,
days lightly breezy in
the low 80’s, nights
in the 50’s. But heaven
on earth is always
relative; the saturate
of kind weather is
pressed down hard on
our heads by the heel
of a God’s hand —
a high pressure front
maintains this
infernal calm —
causing a legion of
headaches to sprout in
the day, my migraines
finding a pounding
counterpoint in the
bad sinus bangers
suffered by my wife.
In the past two weeks
we’ve had more than
a dozen between us.
So weave the pleasantry
of sky days with these
threads of thudding pain,
freighting each day with
a heavier step. No surf that
we can hear
this far inland but
that ever-approaching
curve and smash and
dulled recede is at work
in the ground we walk on,
the stations we work at,
the bed we sleep in.
At night as exhaustion
and the Sinus PM pills
reel us down from
the day’s worn shore,
the news on TV is
mostly bad or sad
or maddening, southeast
Asia’s coast a new
world of ravaged souls,
the President we did
not choose espousing
policy we despise, the
toll in Iraq daily and
grim and the resonance
of so much hard work
to support this house
grinding and feverish.
Outside the maple has
begun to bud, the
butterflies have colonized
the garden and our
cats are killing everything
they can. This morning
rain is falling off and on
in a massy blue brogue.
It’s so warm at 5 a.m
I have the fan on.
I read about a huge
cast-iron horse a man
found in the abandoned
ancient city of his dream,
nine feet high with huge
wings and a half dozen
cupdion holding on for
dear life, none quite able
to climb aboard for a
decent ride. The ambiguous
gods have cursed us with
this blessed life my love,
for us to find a way
to make that horse a
home. Today we try again,
for better amid worse,
amid the spiculations of
hard rain and a deeper
sound below, tiding
far below the bed
we never left once
we there at long last met
the other and married
the difficult world with a kiss.