Godz

Walk with me a while through Releig Odhrain, the graveyard of the Iona Abbey dedicated to St. Oran who harrowed the cold earth of Iona so Columba’s abbey walls could stand: Here the bones of many Irish and Scot kings are interred, sent there because of a prophesy that only Iona would survive the final flood. The graveyard was dedicated to Oran because, according to St. Columba, “no man may access the angels of Iona but through Oran”; as if one’s mortality was the very door to divinity, and it is, our mortality I mean, our every living breathing desiring dying sense a door to the infinite, reaching out across a distance the sense only intimate, only name the first careening shore of.

Wake with me here awhile, on this warm black morning of blossoming summer, one window opened to it, through which the rich weave of crickets and a dead suburb’s exhaling dream works through, pressed, almost, ghostlike against this interior, helping me to press fingers to the keypad. Summer’s nocturnal ouija, recalling the animus of days:

Yes, I remember, albeit dismembered from those moment which are still shrill and nubile:

It was in the mid-90s this weekend as I worked in the garden extending its border, rototilling the dirt,digging out roots, moving the black plastic border while the day soared brilliant and oppressive, into that indistinctness of the summer sky where the sun’s too bright for blue skies, blurring them into a melt of intensity, an almost browned hue without the benefit of clouds. Whew.

I loved it, half naked kneeling in the dirt, sweating hard, bugs crawling all over my hands, neighbors talking to each other as they worked, our tiny lots in Paradise about what thousands more are about, tiny beads on an infinite abacus whose sum is a summer day in Florida ...




I was so tired late afternoon I napped for two hours naked in the guest bedroom we’re sleeping in while the drywood termite situation is resolved, depleted and repleted, sailing down oblivion on an bark of sensual joy, overhead fan whirring breaths of Salome across my chest & balls, my wife sewing next door in this study, cats outside and inside spoored in their own snooze. Float in it, douse the fire, feel it still burning on the flesh ...

What joy later to eat grilled burgers & fries and cold juicy watermelon with the sprinklers calming the sun-bedazzled garden & nothing on TV but wasteland effluence, Schwarzenegger movies & Coyote competition among nipply CMT naiads & flashes of the world’s perturbance on CNN (Iraqi government formed, 23 killed by bombs, someone in Altamonte Springs murdered in a home invasion, worrisome glances at gator-infested lakes) & baseball games under the lights & NASCAR racing at Dayton & my wife falling asleep in her chair & Violet in the window behind me catching what’s on the tube of purring night ...

***

I arrive at this moment through Oran’s graveyard, weirdly, rightly so, as if His attention were as much on my iota as my iota yearns to his infinite blue. A mutual embrace of men and gods.
But what do we know of such things any more? With all the rituals gone rote, the leys forgotten, the keys to the kingdom fallen in the drink? We have mastered fire, made fire’s demon caster obsolete; now fire masters us, and the burning mind has forgotten the spells of containment. We burn with lost connection.

I think that’s what Larry Levis was getting to when he wrote,


... Walk a few steps more with me,

Show me the house I must still be living in,
Where eternity was no more than my hand
Scurrying across a sheet of paper,

Kindling blent to the music of its hush;
Walk with me a little way past it , now,
With the wrong, other angel trapped in stone

With the heavens behind you on fire.

-- “Elegy With An Angel At Its Gate,” from Elegy

***

And this poem by Rilke suggests that the avenues re-entering the divine cathedral are all dark, and take the direction not of glorious connection but loss:


HOLY GHOST

Behind an altar in the chapel
I found a demolished Holy Ghost;
he hadn’t perished from wrong-doing,
but, instead, from that eternal

Loss of things that surprises us
With its inimitable powers;
The rest, he admits, is as harrowing
As making absence into mother.

-- from The Complete French Poems, transl. A. Poulin, Jr


***

I venture that the process by which human consciouness has grown is one which necessarily comes to kill of the gods which once inspired it up from the waters. A distance, a difference is required for growth, defining how far one works from A to B: The gods evolved from Titans to Olympans, up from hoary earth to sky, as that difference evolved within us. We moved in sequence to that motion, a parallel leap, the greater metaphor inspiring the lesser mundane.

But the difference, the difference, that was the key. Roberto Calasso, from The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:

***

It was precisely because the Greeks had reduced the difference between gods and men to a minimum {gods have no blood and eat different food} that they measured the distance still separating them with such cruel precision: an infinite, unbridgeable distance. And never has that distance been so sharply defined as by the Greeks themselves. No mist hovered about the approaches to death. It was an abyss with razor edges, never crossed. Hence the Greeks were well aware of the powerlessness of their sacrifices. Every ceremony in which a living being was killed was a way of recalling the mortality of the participants. And the smoke they dedicated to the gods was certainly no use to the divinities as food. No, that smell of blood {poured in libation uselessly upon the ground} and smoke was a message from earth, a pointless gift, reminded the Olympians of the consciously precarious existence of all those distant inhabitants of earth, who in every other way were equal to the gods. And what the gods loved about men was precisely this difference, this precariousness, which they themselves could relish only through men. It was a flavor they could never get from their ambrosia or nectar. That was why they would sometimes abandon themselves to inhaling the smoke of sacrifice, breath of that other life which enjoyed the precious privilege of stirring the air of Olympus.

***

So where does that lead to, and what have we here?

***

OLYMPUS

May 19

Gods arose and flourished where
we faltered, failed and died--
Venus for unmanning age,
Poseidon where the boats go down,
Apollo for each loosed thought
shot far short of truth.
Hestia guards the hearth
we could not fully tend,
Artemis overts those purities
we ruined with desire.
What I lack They lustre,
what I wrack They wreathe
in all the starry gusto
a transfixed heart seethes
clinging to its upturned boat.
Their altars name the seam
which chasms I to Thou,
each a last surrender to
what we archly fail to do.
Their pride is our humility,
a herm where words run
short of sufficient things to say,
thunder where I once believed
no day had magnitude, a
brimming cup of wine-dark blood
for which there are no dregs
deep enough to slake these
horns so pent with ache.
A grave portals that door
through which no mortal lungs
inhale, the air beyond
pure water, inherent yet
dissimilar as any man and wife.
So why then did gods die,
leached back into an airless sky?
Is it because we’ve sealed enough
seams of our conflicted falls
with mortared fire, heaping so
much brilliance over every edge
the precipice whites out?
Our city lights have dimmed the stars
so long they hardly flicker in the mind;
only the bow of the Archer remains
of that fierce light which sped
arrow after arrow through the
pelt of Arcturus, bear-god who
lords the sleep of Arthur.
It’s not that we’ve bridged
the gaps as much as have exceeded
in our faulty amplitude, rescinding
savage constellates for that
far saner realm of character
with its twelve neurotic archetypes
and nine adducing muses
enrapturing the whistles of
our seven trooping sins.
We’ve dug down through divines
like prospectors in a mine,
hauling gold nuggets in our hands
sure we would get rich enough
to gambol in bright mansions
of our immortallest desires.
And thus the old world died,
whimpered down in the ebb
of an exiling doom, its sweet
and chilling music pushed back
beyond dunes now walled by condos.
It’s edged back beyond our care
where it has slowly stilled into
distance with a difference:
the age of melting steel.
The gods are headless torsos,
their wings & penises secreted
in the vaults of churches
bumping spires in the harbor
choiring a drowned vicarage
where Down’s the only way to go.
Even our words for Them are
vanishing; silence now attends
those altars to what we once knew
we’d never own, perfected now
in mortal gods whose days are bright
and hot down summer’s maw.
smile. Expect no arrows here,
no bad and funny masks,
no savior to salt the tide.
We face this beast alone
each morning in the mirror
with all we know faced off
with what cannot be clearer.
The difference we must bear
is the one which can’t be borne
and there is no horns to foist it on--
just this fool heart and its idiot
brother eighteen inches up the spine
which still thinks it freights
the heavens in its cup.
The vault from vale to mount
now spans a neck, from
shoulders to brainpan;
it shortens still; each time
we name an invisible
we close the gap an inch,
and something more leaps over
to claim an inch of spiral castle.
“Know Yourself” is the perfect
catapult, defining sharper a self
at the same time defying
the second part of the
saying etched in the lintel
of Delphi -- “And Know
That You Aren’t God.”
Perhaps the second part
comes first in Their world,
as if sea or sky were not
the true artist of all we wrought
mastering forbidden shores.
The gods bid us here and then
deserted the banquet table,
leaving us to sort out why
the ambroisa was so fabled.
And in the end it was not
what we found but didn’t,
as if the whole point of difference
was just to welcome its subsidence
down the more enduring
and endearing wave which
collapses us ever on the next shore
where gods once made things clear
whispering -- again! -- “Not Here.”


RELIEG ODHRAN

2003


Relieg Odhran was prophesied
by Columba to survive the
mortal flood: And so it became
a royal boneyard, housing
white dynasties in mud.
Therein lies a cache
of noble aspirations
arrogant enough to march
on to Judgement Day
with bones picked clean
but high and dry.
But don’t think Oran’s
skull plugged Hell’s void
for all time; I know
this well rises from his
loosed mouth, uncovered
three days after it had
been buried: Oran’s song
escaped that dread moment
when the eyes flew open
full of ocean & ice &
the mouth widened in
a black maw from which
the words were flung
-- “All you know of
God and man and heaven
and earth is WRONG!”
-- Columba (normally no
slouch for scholarship)
had the head covered back
in mud in all haste,
but it was too late, these
waters were unleashed &
continue to rise here, up
through a brine cathedral.
Surrender is the only
escape: the angelus tolls
from tonsils of a whale
and Ahab’s in the pulpit
robed in spermacetti pink.
Rilke at his zenith cried
that happiness falls, and
he’s right: In this humid
bird-waking sprinkler-
shooshing dark grows the
root and branch of every
summer day, every brilliant
hurl of wave across the
dazzled desired beach.
These ritual matins
at Oran’s Well repeat
his three steps: Descend,
walk in darkness, rise:
And it’s not that Oran’s
perigrins were new:
The bones of some 32
individuals more than
200,000 years old have
been found at the bottom
of a deep shaft in Spain:
And though that age seems
now impossibly deep
and far, I have only
to close my eyes and
drift on the current
inside and the million
year dreamtime opens
his own eyes, & sees it
all, the long species fall
into a 3 billion year thrall,
down to God’s bony
toes where the real
heaven goes and grows
and flows. And waits.