Blue Mystery

Those who participate in the Round Dance of the Cross, circling in the dance and chanting “Amen!” in response to the person chanting Jesus’ part, were celebrating their new relationship with Jesus who here, as we have noted, invites them to

“See yourself in Me who am speaking,
And when you have seen what I do,
Keep silent about my mysteries.
You who dance, consider what I do:
For this human passion about which
I am about to suffer is your own.”

-- Acts of John 96 2-8,
in Eileen Pagels’ Beyond Belief:
The Secret Gospel of Thomas

***

COMMUNAL

April 20, 2006

I do this in remembrance
Of You, here at this altar of
Verbal salt and sweet dew, sieving
Words from a book through

The heart of my brain or vice
Versa, crying Amen! with
This pen or my penis or both,
A strange finger held to my lips

As these words shout of shores
And ruddy nipples in waves
Foaming in crashed blue
Harmony to the tide of my hips

Heaving from this chair to
The night, through the garden outside,
Up and deep into my wife
Sleeping upstairs. I do this

In celebration of blue bliss,
Milking the sea from Your chalice.



GNOSIS

April 20

What finger held to which
Lips when my heart shouts
Hosannas? She fell back
In the wave of white silence

Never to whisper my name again;
For years I walked those shores
With ears pent to a tide
Folding and crashing without me,

That absence over time grown
Cathedrally mute. When I write
Angels with wings to the knees
Fucking blue depths to the lees

Something calm and serene
Rounds the salty metaphor,
Hardened past stone. My
Angels half-smile on their crypts,

Bemused perhaps, or full seeped
In the mystery torn from their hips.






When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal -- each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in salt water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea. In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time. Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea. And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb, and the stages of his embryonic development repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a water world to creatures able to live on land.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us



THALASSA

2004

Travel down the monkey’s ass &
You’ll find a fish’s tail, finned for
Sailing the biggest womb of all.
Beyond foolery, these motions
Are more riven, nigh desperate
To swim and fuck and eat. That’s all.
That road is five hundred million
Years long; and deep, too, sounding some
thirty thousand leagues of salt blue.
The fish’s tail hangs from my own a
Very long ways back and down; that’s
Good comfort as I fan ahead
With my tribe, who think their brains have
Brighter synapses than the sea’s.
May all I fling swim deep in thee.


FISH TALE

2005

I have made of that old
adventure wooing
you a fish-tale,
the bedded bliss
become an isle that
walked or swam but
most certainly got
full away. The story has
grown fins then flukes
in its retellings,
found a wavelike
slap-and-sloshing resonance,
the sound of crashing
shores I only dreamed
back then, tidally
awakened in your arms
at last. All that remains
is that sound -- a semblance
of wild love which is both
spring river and trembling
bridge, both love and
lover pouring forth in
one gout of song the
three hearts which no
actual kiss may staunch,
much less damn, the
way sea-walls may jetty
sand chapels for a time
but the sea swells
tide the ends of every
ocean to full blue.
Of that short time
that broke all my clocks
I now endlessly return,
and walk, like a shore,
up and down its ghostly
reaches, performing
stations of devotion
on the way. Here fresh
on the beach I drove
off into the night
an emptied, riven man --
Here by this stump of
broken mast I stood
at the bar, pounding
down three shots of
blue lactissima -- Here
by the moonlit mash
of waves I met you,
your face averted to
the band, your breasts
rising from a lacy blouse
to imprison me between
the ocean and its heavings,
the high heart’s saltiest
retrievings. And here
on a stretch of
shattered whelks and
scattered, sprawled weeds
is where we thrashed
together in one wilding
spume, a shout which
rang the bells of heaven
and returned, forever
seared and scarred by
your lips, or mine, or
some wakened pair,
delivered by the sea
and ghosting every each
and croon inside every
tidal day long since.
My fish-tale has made of
me the tunny, elusive
and sea-wise, the slipperiest
half of soul no man
may mount and vaunt,
the prize more priceless
every time I reel the
telling out. The one
that got away became
the tail in every wave,
a sea-wife who sings
below, our children in
these darkling verses,
swans of riven undertow,
a dark gleam of moonlight
on massed waters, the
brilliant folded crash
we found and woke together
that one night, now
every night to wash
the shores I dream.
My myth grows deeper
every time I sing
that mythic night,
like the ocean filling
everything the moon
left in its wake.
Have I told you about
that night when
from the deepest sea
a woman roused
the depths of me?




GHOST CRAB

2006

You are descendant and
Metaphor of the first animals
To breech the sea, three hundred
Million years ago, eking an

Eternal day exactly where
Sea and shore are one,
Scuttling up the sands to seek,
Scuttling back to soak

Blue gills in brine. Such
ancient endurance speaks of
the fixity I too work
Across and down this shore,

My sorties of fresh words
Always rounding back to
Dive in wild collapse,
Cauling deep in ebbing flow.

Now you read me, then I’m gone:
That’s the ghostly margin of my song.


A STONE

Yves Bonnefoy
transl. Hoyt Rogers

A mysterious haste urged us on.
We went in, we opened
The shutters, we recognized the table, the hearth,
The bed; the star was growing larger in the window.
We heard the voice that wants us to love
At summer’s crest
Like dolphins playing in their sea without a shore.

Unknowing, let us sleep. Chest against chest,
Our breathing mingled, hand in hand without dreams.