Who's Yer Daddy (The Birth of Dionysos)

I.


DARK BREEZE

April 3, 2006

Dark breeze which stirs
and ruffles this unseen hour:
You ferry more than air
in your black pockets,

a jones for travel, perhaps,
for touching lightly
distant things. But most
of all you charge the

air with a pregnant letting
go, wave crashed now
sighing back, lost joys
released from the heart

to its maker. You’re here
in the window and there
in the trees and then gone,
releasing all forsakens.

***


A light touch: that’s the tidal wash of spring light and warmth and power, isn’t it, so gentle one could simply turn and loose pale blossoms in a fragrant hymn of air. Thus the drought rolls on day to day in Central Florida, each day sunny, breezy, and fair, what is not watered by human agency hardening down into a brown crust. So dreamy the days that you don’t notice the lakes receding by inches from their moats. That’s for later, first in the ochering of the scent of jasmine with distant smoke. Then come fiery days of May when it seems everything burns in cloudless skies raked by the same incessant wind, from the subterranean and dire lungs of Set. ...

***

Occluded powers, nascence virile but infant, an infinite restraint not yet ennobled by criminal audacities. I give birth to it here, or rebirth, strained through labors on the page. It always has a cost. “The invention of a birth from the thigh of Zeus had its function in Greece: to cover over the lavish gift at the expense of his own body. The myth cruelly emphasized the eternally necessary self-sacrifice of male vitality to the feminine sex, and hence to the human race as a whole.” (Carl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Imag of Indestructible Life)


ZEUS AND DIONYSOS

April 3, 2006

We too bear the child. See:
I’ve ripped a hole in my
thigh were my genitals once
hung, cock and balls torn

off and tossed to the wave
to make womb for a
diviner fish, giving
birth to a dolphin boy

who rides the virile waters
of my song. Of course
desire never ends despite
its rends: the ocean seethes

and surges voluptuous
in what I tore and tossed,
giving birth each day
to love’s too naked truths.

***

The pairing of Hades and Dionysos through the procession of the penis (Heraklitos) shows virility in death, in the sacrifice of libido to build a family, in the dark coursings of desire down roots into an aquifer of soul which sustains days with the insides of desire, rendering all surfaces into buttockal curvatures, the nippled milk-foam which crowns all waves to crash on daily shores. Shorn of desire’s concrete ends, the day is all desire, each breath a consummation, each surface and texture soft with post-fuck dreaminess, the float on blue waters far out to sea. Of course it’s dearth, the death of old cowboy ways, yeehawing nights like maddened filly broncos, tossing seed like squirts of spat tobacco juice; of course rigor is the wet dream of detumescence, of flaccid floppy-noodle shriven ball-retracted sterile hours where sleep or death is the preferred retreat from difficulty -- black horse-rider Hades stealing into death springlike Persephone, marrying night to days ... Dream on, Romeo, in your stone crypt across town from Juliet’s, the figure on your coffin carved holding sword in one hand, rose in the other ... Play on, aging guitar master, on stages I’ve long lost, with that blue guitar I tossed down the well all perfect loves dove into ... the virile dream survives its own repletions, the savage sunders Love itself tasks us with. ...





II.

It might be good to know what these are questions of ... substance, propriety, survival? I dream of a night-harrow, you know, a peramble through nonsensical rooms, chambers of a fun-house nautilus -- a tent under heavily weighed by rain under which I try to explain faith to a literate boss, going to a Sunday AA meeting in bright hot sunlight only wearing shorts. Distant proximities perhaps approximate the subsurface perambles of the dreaming mind.

It’s not quite like Dante’s Hell, which is an exact opposite in every dark reflection to the goodness and grace of God’s saved, but it’s close, as underworlds tend to look up where we look down, where one night there lasts 300 of our years. Perhaps the dreaming mind is like how sight in one eye is read by the opposite half of the brain, which transforms an upside down image into shapely breasts, the first white blossoms on the jasmine growing helter-skelter on the garage, one of our stray cats licking his paw on the back porch. Surficial day is read by the deep dark mind, consumed and parallaxed there, used for its own puppetry and purposes. Not opposite or opposed but certainly inverted, the undersides exposed, revealing the invisible connections. What was it I said of the Christian faithful to that skeptical boss of the English Section --- “let ‘em have the comfort of certainty?” She smirked, as if that were too great of an allowance ... Not with so much deluge about the split the seams bumping our heads. ...



INVOCATION

April 1, 2006

Your hand in hers warms mine
as it glides this pen across
the page, sure and sursurrant
as a faint surf near yet far,

dreamlike, silken at its edges
yet so dark and deep below,
colder than the grave. I wouldn’t
write here without her sleeping

in our bed upstairs, wife, soror
of love’s fragrant and hard-labored
day, where thorns pile up
far faster than they’re cleared away,

and become that bittersweetness
which is salt’s statue to the beloved:
a love for what is truly difficult
where we greet the shore You call.



ORPHIC

April 1, 2006

Call me Orphic if I write here
the plurals of an ancient sound
both terrifying and divine.
A child’s cry of birth and death

woke deep inside a golden cave
I harrow with this pen, where
Titan knives flashed and flew
and bid him enter days through

that wound which frees the
deep head from its hood. Bawling
its circumcised rage, the
infant bid me write down here

the tenors of that bloodied sheath.
O sweetest swoon swirled round
its darkest shriek, you arch
and vault the torn heart I page.


RECONSIDERING FORM

April 2, 2006

So they are gone over that shadowy water,
and always before they reach the other shore
a new noise stirs on this, as new throngs gather.

-- Dante Inferno III. 115-7 (transl. John Ciardi)

Our bindings make us strong.
Ligaments limit motion
to arcs which are strong
and nearly perfect in one range;

religion binds us back
to grace in communions
of bent knees. Twelve
lines in rollers of pert fours

is hardly room to sound
a poem, but something
rouses here not found in
letting go those tongues

in disembowelling fire.
As soon as I step off one
shore the other’s here, bidding
succincter sphincters form the rear.



THE OPPORTUNISTS

I saw a banner there upon the mist ...

-- Dante Inferno III.47
(transl. John Ciardi)

Too bent on living to live much well,
they clamor to fan for behind a winged
cloth in a colorful thin drone,
churning the day without a clue

of what comes after. Hellbent
we say, these infected butterflies
of soul, gas pedals to the floor
toward futurity’s imagined roses,

the scent of which occludes
the under-sides of the fray,
the inside job which requires
we live one thing and well.

Cellphone, iTunes, 100-channel
TV, the galactic Web: they banner
possibility’s strange ebb
which vaults in brightest waves.



DESIRE

April 1, 2006

I love the surface you can’t see,
that undulant curl-crashing
shore I’m ever trying hard
to walk through, like a door.

For you it’s different. My
nakedness is ugly and you bear
my weight as a freight
to bear amid the rest

all women haul beneath
that fragrant shell which
carries them to love’s shore.
It seems effortless, that grace,

but that’s just because I only
see the pretty half of it. What
cost desire exacts on those
abyssal gears her ocean swells!