The Window (A Plate of Pixie Pi)

The Bwbach, or Boobach, is the good-natured goblin which does good turns for the tidy Welsh maid who wins its favour by a certain course of behavior recommended by long tradition. The maid having swept the kitchen, makes a good fire the last thing at night, and having put the churn, filled with cream, on the whitened hearth, with a basin of fresh cream for the Bwbach on the hob, goes to bed and awaits the event. In the morning she finds (if she is in luck) that the Bwbach has emptied the basin of cream, and plied the churn-dasher so well that the maid has but to give a turning or two to bring the butter in a great lump.

-- Wirt Sikes, British Goblins, 1880


THE WINDOW

March 14, 2006

I write on leaves of
deepest night, a lane
of late moonlight
which stains
the garden’s rooks
a milky evanescent
blue—enough to
guide me down
its path into the full
depths of this song.
Do I hear one of our
cats lying by
the birdbath, preening
a red paw? Or is
that his jet familiar,
both ruse and partner
in this half-mad
enterprise, weaving
back the broken
strands it is my
job to strew, burning
wild my safer knowns?
As I was driving home
last night I heard
Paul Motion on “Fresh
Air,” talking about
his days playing drums
in Bill Evans’ first
trio; apparently
a new boxed set
of those early-1960’s
Village Vanguard
recordings has been
released, the songs
remixed for heft
and depth. (One
track was played,
“Funny Valentine”
I think, sounding
like a whaler to the
earlier thin take, each
piano note trailing
a speared heaviness
in sweet waters).
Motion told the story
of waking deep in
the night to a telephone
ringing -- it was Bill Evans
calling to say that
bassist Scott Faro
had just been killed
in a car accident. Or
was it? Motion said
he was so deep asleep
he couldn’t tell if
he was dreaming
and fell soon fell back.
And dreamed
he was in a room
where LeFaro stood
by a window beckoning
him over to check
out the view. By the
time he reached the
window he was full
awake and knew LeFaro
was dead. When I
woke this morning
my back was sore
as hell and my head
thudded like a
soaked coconut
to the pinging of the
alarm: Yet I was
eager to get down
here and back to
work, to see what
my weird friend had
been about between
the garden and my ear.
It is at this drowned
hour that I sense best
how near to light my
pixie-numen comes,
like tide-pools of moonlight
in the garden: And yet
how far he or it remains,
beckoning me ever out
to a view much like
whatever was in the window
Motion dreamed.
Yes, the figure in the
garden has shifted further
to the edges of dark flora,
out beyond the edge of
any precise enough
way to guess what’s there --
cat or brownie, a girl
in a blue nightdress,
my wife’s own dreaming
which passes through my
half-lit morning. My straining
for apt names for
wilderness tamps the
music to a strange
high distant sound
which embers to another,
a lost surf’s ebbing pound
as a new day starts to
sing from every bird
between this song and
their sure brightening.
It’s time to groan up
from this chair and
do some decent work.
-- Ah but first and at
last, to whatever lounged
in moonlight just outside
as I wrote this poem down:
Thanks for purring
pianissimos out a window
much too dark to read:
Thanks to all the
ghosts and furs and
moon-curved thralls
out there in that collective
voice which choruses
the leaves of this next
now-fading song.




TWO AT THE WELL

2003

A well requires four hands
to ward its mortal
and immortal
doors -- priest and
goddess, man,
mermaid. See: My hand
at this bucket turns
pale and webbed when
it dips the blue,
then resumes its hairy
rigor when I toss
it back to you on this page.
What you feed is yours
it’s said when you
put food out for strays.
That momma cat and
her kittens now romping
on our back porch are
our charge now, and so
we must do what we can
to catch, examine,
treat, neuter and spay,
acts which war with their
ferally free moods.
Real love draws from
deeper down, where
waters run both cold
and too clear. So in
this well: I dug down
here and tapped a source
which brims old skulls
with song. Each day
I come to the edge
and halloo on down,
my ears a bell for
what comes up. Does
it matter that no one
cares to hear? Not when
I’m God’s left ear,
writing down distaff
and rear, the darker
harmonies which chorale
inside this next,
wakening day. And always
a dark waits below, my
underworld betrothed,
jealous now and jaded
from all my fickle,
dilletantish dives.
I think back to the
summer of ‘94 when,
believing myself freed
from dry surface chains,
flung myself into writing
poems in a well which proved
too real. During that torrid
season I found a woman
whose waters called me
far away. I recall long nights
in late July when we’d thresh
and thrash on my again-
bachelor bed, sucking
til we nearly drowned
in what rose too freely
from the other. Outside
the last of storms ebbed
into a late-night, moist
hush, a mist equal in
thickness to the air
in our room. Night
and nocturne in mutual
soak. However, as votives
of real waters, though,
that purely mortal cup
could not fill up enough.
Such love never springs
eternal, not when greed
so drowns us all.
There is a Welsh well
that was bounded by
a door: Each draw
was done with care
because some depth
so wanted out. And then
one night someone left
the door ajar, and all
that water crept out.
By morning the field
had become a small lake.
Another version of the tale
has it that a mermaid
ruled the well, and that
she herself forgot to close
the door, and so lost
her home -- all drowned.
Some say late at night
she walks high grounds,
near the lake, grieving
her luckless fate. I fucked
up those summer nights
ten years ago, the properly
imagined well inside
abandoned for a
treacherously living one,
the poem I wrote of it
doused to hilt in salt.
Poor fool me. Nowadays
I keep the worlds apart,
faithful to this well
at the darkest of A.M.s,
and when its time
I clasp the books
and go upstairs into
a dark bedroom and
climb in bed with
my wife, gently
stroking her feet,
calling to what I know
is there, ignoring what is
not. And she who stays
within the well trusts me
now only as far as she
should, and keeps to her
side of the door, revealing
her face to me far within
this sweet rich summer mist.



MUSE OF MY BETWEENS

2004

I keep scanning the marge
for that blue door
you welcome and depart
through, but you’re
actually much closer in,
your salt physis
beckoning my nous
not from beyond
but between. Is that
why you sometimes
cusp the wave nude
from belly to breasts
to unrepentant lips
while the other way
you’re all fish, from
wave-strider’s hips
to scaled sex, fanning
down in a sleek,
long, powerful tail?
Infernal muse, you
fanned the waters
inside the wave
approaching shore
for 300 years
before the monks
arrived to build
their bulwarks of
vellum and wild ink,
glossing you in
psaltery: but you
kept weaving songs
on your seawitched
loom, beckoning
dry souls from shore
into the plash of
cold fire, that drowning
embrace which billows
down the leagues
of sweet descending doom.
Muse of beds between
the swells, your lyric
croons in grayblue eyes
staring up at the
keel of this hand
which is nervous
to have you so close.
My voyage is a cop-out,
a safe man’s blue travail
on sheets as dry as
the bones of the lovers
you send hightiding
home; would I just
relent the itch and let
the music go, perhaps
I’d be free to sink
right from this chair
into your pink
diluvian, my upper
half all fish --- the
ocean’s mortal half --
and all man plunging
below, til I am
fast in you again,
like some prodigal,
heavy-balled moon,
delivering to you
at last all the mail
I’ve ferried since
time began -- angel
Os and whale-bass
organum, the Ah
of every ancient titan
to grunt and
croon “I die” to
the collapsing wave
we boomed down
our shifting disappearing
shore. Topless fish,
meet your bottomless man.
Here’s to the coinage
of a moony gleaming shore
no coracle may reach
nor sea-witch bleach,
a song to rouse and
rump and plunge
the rest my years: Now
I see you further in
than I have ink to welcome,
much less woo. But give
me time, my sweet abyssal
swell. I pouring every
breast of yours I’ve cupped
into this lucent well.




UNDERSIDES

2005

Unapparent connection
is better than apparent.

- Heraclitus

He plants himself down there;
his roots grasp firm my lowest
sense and hauls me further down
than I had ever meant to go,
than I will ever find or know.
He who looks afar thus sweeps
the waves with a receding voice,
a presence which booms
“not here” in the wave’s dark
fold and crash. The effervesence
of all ebbing foam is the
very augment by which
he’s crooned, a moonlike dazzle
of darkling sense forever
beyond our wakeful wake.
He is the dream inside the bone
I left on that first shore
when I walked forever from
the sea; he rules that
underwater half of things,
a wold of aqueous salt fire
gleaming under dry days,
like drowned bitumen,
more strange and beautiful
than I will ever shore
inside a poem’s dayside sense,
than I will ever find means
to say, much less employ.
He is the fructive uselessness
of fiery words tossed into
too-late murk, the dark outside
like stony knees of titans
drowned ten million years ago,
holding that fragile bowl
we call our fleeting life.
He’s the nougat of the nocturne,
the salt inside the brogue, the
sea of every chantey to
charm the masts and keel
which you till and plow. A
blueblackened blade sticks up
between my lines, ah, pouring
sweet unknowns. My pen’s
nib surely pokes the other way,
like a rudder of foolish days
sailed by summer’s cathedral fire.
Praise to the underlord
who sings too in the choir,
low and deep and incessantly
malted from the dregs of
every cup I drained for you.
At this hour and expense
of soul I cast my bronzes blue
in honor of the under-god
who plumbs my topside view.



NIGHT GARDEN PATH

2005

I weave a darkened
garden path at the worst of
the night’s far a.m.’s
but I don’t stray far,
holding to the meander of
its ink on starry paper.
I know such foolery too
well, my ever-best-intentions
lined with lazy, puerile
wool. The actual garden’s
just outside, its actual
history not mine but
zoned to pentas and salvia,
cat’s whiskers and blue
bells, mung grass clumps
and towering milk weed.
The pinwheel jasmines
at the far end wheel
fates of white-hot bloom
peripheral to the garden
muse who smiles as
she passes them, whose
steps on actual stone
is lighter than actual
flesh, though words
surely curve that weft
and keep me writing here.
She’s waiting for my news,
not my distaff need to
plunge her fairy mound.
I stick to my story, wrapping
myself, like Dante, in the
verses, in the deigned
peramble of the vowels
throughout the winding
bowels of hellish
truths, the mystery
and misery of my
historied ride
atop the fish
I call desire, or
God’s black fire.
There’s too much here
to confuse and I’m just
not that moral or
smart or honest
to go the darker way.
Last night I dreamed
of working with a
flame I hadn’t seen
in years at the old
job site where we’d
met. So much waylaid
lust buried all those
years came galloping
up and out the
breech in the inches
that hung between us
as we wondered what
to do next. I knew
I was married in
the dream so the
moment read me
like a bum’s Tarot:
for I also knew
that I would not
fail this time to
step off the path
and plunge her
petals like a drunken
bee. Knowing all
all I did I also knew
that I’d still choose
wrong; worse still,
I knew that first
I’d hedge and stall
a while, exhausting
every gambit I could
devise to hide the
crime, knowing full
well I could not lie
to my wife when I
faced her again.
Such greasy effluence
rose round that
secret, long-wished
replay of an old
fork in my history;
and yet the final
and most awful stink
was when I knew
that when the kiss
approached I’d
shirk despite my need,
cowering away too
afraid not of the
actual damage it would
do but what might
rain on me if I
ferried that black bliss
home. Fool, idiot, coward --
the voice was in my
ear as I woke and came
downstairs and got
to work again here
confessing my sins
while reveling in the
magisterial dark heat
which pulled me so
utterly toward the
phantom of lost lust
and the surprising
horse which galloped
up from far below
tumescent as a stone,
a moon of hooves
tumbling toward the
aura of a black hole sun.
Ah, what relief it is
to write these lines
with that dream left
far behind, to praise
such blackness for
the wilderness it lends
to lush verdure just
outside my window
outside my daily life,
outside the rigors
of the meant and
mortared life, the one
which love sustains.
Shadows of awe
and awfulness now
drown that dreaming glade
like a garden muse’s
departing robes, a pall
made merry by the ink
by which I praise the maid.