Poseidon's Venture

The tales of (Poseidon) depict a turbulent god who neither served the female, like the purely phallic beings, nor held supreme dominance over all, as Zeus did. In his quality of father -- for he could also be called simply Pater, “father” -- he came somewhere between the two sorts of the male god; those, on the one hand, who served the Great Mother; on the other hand, the Olympian Father who nevertheless, in times of stuggle and while the new rule was being established, still resembled Poseidon. Posiedon continued to be a darker father beside his heavenly brother; he continued, longer and more closely than Zeus, to be associated with animal shapes; and the sea was his most fitting dominionr. Yet he was not as dark as Hades, king of the Underworld, the third brother and also Zeus’s sinister counterpart, since the latter only ruled above.

Well-known portrayals of Poseidon show him majestically holding the emblem of his power, the trident. His suppressed savagery and menacing wrath were equally classical.

- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

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Suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity rising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.

—Melville, Moby Dick




... Far had he roam’d,
With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam’d
Above, around, and at his feet; save things
More dead than Morpheus’ imaginings:
Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large
Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;
Rudders that for a hundred years had lost
The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss’d
With long-forgotten story, and wherein
No reveller had ever dipp’d a chin
But those of Saturn’s vintage; mouldering scrolls,
Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls
Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude
In ponderous stone, developing the mood
Of ancient Nox;—then skeletons of man,
Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,
And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw
Of nameless monster. A cold leaden awe
These secrets struck into him; and unless
Dian had chased away that heaviness,
He might have died: but now, with cheered feel,
He onward kept; wooing these thoughts to steal
About the labyrinth in his soul of love.

-- Keats Endymion



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SHAKER MOVER

May 23

Earth-shaker, sea’s mover,
Your hooves of foam are too much
for me: to know You is to
assault with twenty-foot-high
waves of sperm in the spasmatic
bellow of billowed quake,
fundament in motion,
restless & unslaked.
No altar to You survives at
that mauled and boiled shore
You father in me every day;
instead I find myself pitched
on the horns of how I failed
to write of You, a splintered
breviary whose blue pages
crash endlessly through me.
Always the edge of days
You thrash insatiable, Your
sceptered manhood barbed
three ways to hook to three
dangerous middle worlds at
once: under water, earth, and
heaven’s dearth but shy
of darkest death. Your
trident’s poised above the blue
gleaming cruelly in the sun,
still dripping in Your tensed hand
to fling and pierce me once again
exactly where I sprint through days.
In words You are the crashing boom
which mauls petite epiphaines;
You are that cold undertow
which hauls from every pretty shore
the virgin bride of innocence,
marrying her sweet smile to the abyss
of one long deep descending kiss.
Every awe I womb with wonder
You salt with awful thunder,
ravishing perfected worlds
on horses hauling ass over the
end of every mortal enterprise,
each wave with a huge equine neck
maned with blowing foam,
the eyes inside that hurl full Yours,
smashing me clean through
with every trident doom.
You vault far down the blackened blue
vast treasuries of gold taboo,
violations and transgressions,
noctural outrage and rapines,
defiant thefts and profanations
in every temple built by men.
Whatever shadows the heat
of this salacious brain
ends down there on the shitpile
of Your drain, split frigates
spilling raw doubloons, piled
brassieres still warm with
their occupants’ spilt cream,
a million splintered poems
that tried to say just what
You whispered all night long
in that surf whose crash I dream
and wake as if drowned from,
disordered, strewn, unclean
in Your divinest way,
a son now of those rude firmaments
which trap and sire me in this day.