Springs of Artemis

High soaring heat after a latenight soak of a rain on Thursday night which drenched all of Central Florida: it turned cool for a couple of night and clear as a bronze bell. Breezy too, quickly drying out the land and putting us back in the wildfire red-flag territory.

After rising early Sat. morning to write the next poem I lay back on the couch in the living room around 5 a.m. and slept awhile, full moon blasting in from the window: dreamt hard and deep of a house not quite our own (my mother’s, too, perhaps formerly??) in which I labored to sweep the walkways clean of much blown sand and dirt, finding so much more property than I had imagined, finding at some northern corner (properly southern, as all dream territories are inverted, obversed) stairs leading down, a bath (overgrown with weeds), a kitchen filled with antique glassware and unmarked bottles under the sink (vodka or olive oil?). Wow, I had no idea ... wandering back through a garden of overgrown flowers, a domesticity gone wild, wanting to tell my wife all about this house we lived in that we didn’t know all about ... And then a far more sexual dream, some woman on a couch repaying me for my work at the pad on which I write poems and for dreaming by rolling off her jeans and panties, stretching her pussy wide for my view, inviting me to fuck her every which way, to thrust and tongue and buggar and bid suck every womanly orifice a man could desire -- and all of it a sexual welcome which is not, which cannot be, which is what some deeper agency than sex uses like blossoms to attract the bees of the mind, of song ...

Waking into a busy Saturday meeting with pest exterminators for another bid on ridding this house of drywood termites, and then working hard outside in the afternoon fury of the sun (into the 90s), attempting to move the border of the garden to the east, digging up 2-foot-square clumps of good St. Augustine sod -- a terrific effort for all of the roots of a nearby tree snarled in them -- and replainting the sod in a stretch of lawn on the western side of the driveway which has fallen into the ruin of crabgrass. Two hours of that in the late afternoon and I was wholly wiped, shoulders and back sore, hands cramped and caked with dirt, all of my singing downward in weariness ... Back to it again yesterday for another few hours mid morning past noon, the day again clearer than the conscience of a god, breezy and hot into the mid-90s, digging up the sod, digging out the old crabgrass, furrowing in the good stuff, wearying and glorying in the song of the day.



***


GRATITUDE

May 14

When the sharpness of life
would pierce through the dull
days, the Greeks would give
notice by attaching a red or
white woolen strip to whatever
was source to the pour.
The man who won a
the javelin toss would fasten
a bright strip to his arm
and mothers tied strips
to their daughters’ wedding
torches. Strips festooned
biers of the dead and
fluttered from the prows
of ships, they hung from
axe-hafts & the heads
of beautiful boys &
the horns of bulls led
to sacrifice. By such
gestures a culture lifted
itself on the breeze,
encircled and raptured
by the gods with their praise.
Wherever one saw those soft
fluttering strips the nature
of art was revealed,
like a sudden harbor where
every proud ship comes
in from the sea. Without
taking notice there is
no welcome, and without
welcome there is no sea,
only the hollow drone
of dead rituals. Imagine
what it was to walk on
a bright breezy day
amid thousands of those
tiny flags fluting merrily
from every protubance
and curve, from urns &
sword-hilts & cooking
pots & the waists of young
women laughing by the shore.
No wonder that people
live on deep in the heart,
glittering like sunlight
on the bluest of seas,
a garden of bright souls
of whom we are the leaves,
their gratitude our breeze.





BEYOND PLEASURE

Jack Gilbert

Gradually we realize what is felt is not so important
(however lovely or cruel) as what the feeling contains.
Not what happens to us in childhood, but what was
inside what happened. Ken Kesey sitting in the woods,
beyond his fence of whitewashed motorcycles, said when
he was writing on acid he was not writing about it.
He used what he wrote as blazes to find his way back
to what he knew then. Poetry registers
feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches
out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.
Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be
an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world
part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux
to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.
The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward
to know its merit with attention.

-- from Refusing Heaven

***


love is the stranger
who takes you away
love is the danger
you risk it all to play
love will always be like this
darkness just behind the kiss
love is the stranger
love is the stranger
love is the stranger

-- lyric to a song, 1986


***

In search of my Love
I will go over mountains and strands,
I will gather no flowers,
I will fear no wild beasts;
And pass by the mighty and the frontiers.

-- The Bride in “The Song of the Soul and the Bridegroom,” St. John of the Cross, transl. David Lewis

***

ALLIGATOR ATTACKS KILL 3 IN 1 WEEK

Orlandosentinel.com
May 15, 2006

By Amy C. Rippel and Stephen Hudak

A woman snorkeling in a Marion County spring and a homeless woman trespassing in a Tampa Bay-area backyard were found dead Sunday in alligator attacks, bringing to three the number of fatal strikes in less than a week.

The bloody week in Florida's waterways marks a stark departure for a state that had seen just 17 confirmed deadly encounters with alligators in 58 years.

The homeless woman found dead and dismembered Sunday morning had been killed as many as three days earlier, officials said. A homeowner found the body near Oldsmar in Pinellas County.

The woman apparently was alone, her purse and some drugs found nearby, and she had suffered alligator bites. Officials say the attack was a factor in her death but won't know an official cause for as long as four weeks.

A Tennessee woman killed Sunday afternoon was swimming with friends in Juniper Run in Ocala National Forest. Two of the friends tried to pry her body from the jaws of the alligator, gouging its eyes in a frantic effort to free her.

That incident came just five days after a South Florida woman out for a jog went missing near a Broward County canal. Her dismembered body was found the next day, and the alligator that attacked her was captured and killed Saturday, parts of the jogger's body still in its digestive tract.

Officials with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said there have been an increasing number of alligator attacks for several reasons, including warmer weather and humans encroaching on alligator territory.

"The bottom line is, yes, the trend is increasing," said commission spokeswoman Joy Hill.



The stomach of this 9 1/2-foot gator -- captured Saturday in the Sunrise canal where the body of Yovy Suarez Jimenez was found Wednesday -- contained 2 severed arms.

***


Roberto Calasso plumbs an artesian well of the paradox of virginity and rape as something about the willed inviolability of human boundaries and the frightening incursions of immortal desire:

The perennial virginity young Artemis demanded as a first gift from her father Zeus is the indomitable sign of the detachment ((of the divine from the mortal)). Copulations, mixis, means “mingling” with the world. Virgo, the virgin, is an isolated, sovereign sign. Its counterpart, when the divine reaches down to touch the world, is rape. The image of rape establishes the canonical relationship the divine now has with a world matured and softened by sacrifices: contact is still possible, but it is no longer the contact of a shared meal: rather it is the sudden, obsessive invasion which plucks away the flower of thought.

Man’s relationship with the gods passed through two regimes: first conviviality, then rape. The third regime, the modern one, is that of indifference, but with the implication that the gods have already withdrawn, and hence, if they are indifferent in our regard, we can be indifferent as to their existence or otherwise. Such is the peculiar situation of the modern world.

But returning to earlier times: there was an age when the gods would sit down alongside mortals, as they did at Cadmus and Harmony’s wedding feast in Thebes. At this point gods and men had no difficulty recognizing each other; sometimes there were even companions in adventure, as were Zeus and Cadmus, when the man proved of vital help to the god. Relative roles in the cosmos were not disputed, since they had already been assigned; hence gods and men met simply to share some feast before returning each to his own business.

Then came another phase, during which the god might not be recognized. As a result the god had to assume the role has has never abandoned since, right down to our own times, that of the Unknown Guest, the Stranger. One day the sons of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, invited to their table an unknown laborer who was in fact Zeus. “Eager to know whether they were speaking to a real god, they sacrificed a child and mixed his flesh with that of the sacred victimes, thinking that if the stranger was a god he would discover what they had done.” Furious, Zeus pushed over the table. That table was the ecliptic plane, which from that day on would be forever tilted. There followed the most tremendous flood.

After that banquet, Zeus made only rare appearances as the Unknown Guest. The role passed, for the most part, to other gods. Now, when Zeus chose to tread the earth, his usual manifestation was through rape. This is the sign of the overwhelming power of the divine, of the residual capacity of distant gods to invade mortal minds and bodies. Rape is at once possessing and possession. With the old convivial familiarity between god and man lost, with ceremonial contact through sacrifice impoverished, man’s soul was left exposed to a gusting violence, an amorous persecution, an obsessional goad. Such ar the stories of which mythology is woven: they tell how mortal mind and body are still subject to the divine, even when they are no longer seeking it out, when the ritual approaches to the divine have become confused.

-- The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 53-4

***

Yes, how much of my history is composed of misreadings of the divine, the messages confused, mixed, noodles between my hips and upon my shoulders arguing endlessly without much discernment of the wild world I was wending through ... If all things indeed are holy and worth mention, even the darkest nooks have their lucence and augment. And since I’ve gotten everything else so wrong, perhaps they shine the brightest in their worst darkness.

Was there a soul blindly seeking out a beloved in those nights of random quarry, quarrying not so much the body of some other as to mine the depths of a self? And as language is so imprecise of speaking the heart, so too the tropes of outward motion, that to spear the darkest numens of the soul one has to lunge into the blackest regions of the night - a necessary dangerous and luminous motion reserved for wilder agencies than exist in these days.

Maybe that’s why the night of the soul is so dark ...




***

O crystal well!
Oh that thy silvered surface
Thou woulds’t mirror forth at once
Those eyes desired
Which are outlined in my heart!


...

My Beloved is in the mountains,
The solitary wooded valleys,
The strange islands,
The roaring torrents,
The whispering of amorous gales;

The tranquil night
At the approaches of the dawn,
The silent music,
The murmuring solitude,
The supper which revives and enkindles love.

Our bed is of flowers
By dens of lions encompassed,
Hung with purple,
Made in peace,
And crowned with a thousand shields of gold.

In Thy footsteps
The young ones run Thy way;
At the touch of the fire
And by the spiced wine,
The divine balsam flows.

In the inner cellar
Of my Beloved I have drunk; and when I went forth
Over all the plain
I knew nothing,
And lost the flock I followed before.

There He gave me his breasts,
There He taught me the science of fulls sweetness.
And there I gave to HIm
Myself without reserve;
There I promised to be His bride.

-- St. John of the Cross, “The Song of the Soul and the Bridegroom”





ARTEMIS REVEALED


Those nights of unyielding
sex with strangers are long gone
except that thing which was never
quite about them: I mean
the way a woman whom I had only
seen the first fleeting and
surficial gleams of -- smiling
abstractly at me across the bar
in the smoke and din and ruin
of another night wasted in
the salt-mines of desire --
would only hours later in some
foreign room kiss me equally
abstractly and then, with the
most infinitesimal of sighs,
unbutton her blouse & then
unhook her bra and swing
her breasts free up to my face,
like some surfacing of dolphins
up from far below in a brilliant
splash of naked contact.
The memory of that
sudden offering of
nakedness from someone
so unknown to me is the
thing which remains like
a deep artesian spring;
How startled I was by
the shout of those breasts,
so pale and nippled and
curved my way, that
I felt baptised somehow,
blessed by the knowledge
of the thrill and thrall of
going all the way right then,
so fast and deep as to drink
the entire bottle of the other
in one unyielding swig. It
was surely like the hunter
Actaeon who stumbles on
a bathing glade to see not only
a virgin girl but a goddess virgin
in all her divine and dangerous
nakedeness as that stranger
of a woman would reach
from that great distance
we mortals live between,
across every hurtful strange
and angry reason lovers take
years to marry each other,
and with eyes fully in receipt
of the stranger I was to her
begin to stroke my cheek and
then my chest, pinching hard
a surprised nipple & then
snaking down to grip my crotch
and squeeze and knead and
yank my hardness out in
bewildered raw splendor,
cool in the night air despite
her hot hand which soon
was replaced by her hot
moist mouth, lips I had
only kissed but once now
sliding up and down my
dick, sucking one and then
the other testicle swollen
hard and rude with that
deepest nakedness which
is most aware of its receipt
in another’s desire. Not
the pornographic splendor
of those moments (though
you’ll never find me
complain about that)
but rather the curve and crash
of an immenser wave than
we are meant to find in
that surf where two souls
so fumblingly attempt to
fuse in one deep heart.
That a wild careen of
crashing foam -- both hot in
thrash yet cold from so
much else hauled willingly
up from far below: That
is the mineral lode of
luminescence I recall
from those one-night stands,
the part of sex which
was so pure and blue as
to be not about the sex at
all, the outermost confirmation
of something the inward virgin
goddess demanded most of me.
Sucked off hard and fast
yet dizzy for more and more,
I’d tug that strange waif’s jeans
and panties off & bury my
face in a pond which had a
mirror hanging at her deepest
pussy wall where my inward
woman stared back with greedy
drowned blue eyes, singing
my birthday song in a key
which I heard inside the
woman’s orgasmic sighs
on a surface miles above,
so far I could no longer see
her as she gripped my hair
and moaned some other
man’s name and clenched
and hissed and swore for
me to fuck her now and hard.
And when I did, pinning
her hands to the carpeted
floor, my cock careening
like a dolphin in and out
and up and down, balls
slapping hard against her
ass like the fool who
shouts Amen to every
king’s outrage: And when
I did, crazed past hope of
ever finding shore again,
completely in the arms of she
who I’d never see again
past dawn, I’d sense the
grimmest satisfaction in
the queen who rules below,
a curve which sirens in a surf
only infinitesimally a sea,
naked crash of blue black wave
which crests her bed at last
in amid the baying of desires
devouring me with fire.