Typhon

We have lost the capacity, the optical capacity even, to place myths in the sky. Yet, despite being reduced to just their fragrant rind of stories, we still feel the Greek myths are cohesive and interconnected, right down to the humblest variant, as if we know why they were so. And we don’t know. A trait of hermes, or Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Athena forms a part of the figure, as through the pattern of the original material were emerging in the random scatter of the surviving rags.

We shouldn’t be too concerned about having lost many of the secrets of the myths, although we must learn to sense their absence, the vastness of what remains undeciphered. To be nostalgic would be like wanting to see, on raising our eyes to the sky, seven Sirens, each intoning a different note around each of the seven heavens. Not only do we not see the sirens but we can’t even make out the heavens anymore. And yet we can still draw that tattered cloth around us, still immerse ourselves in the mutilated stories of the gods. And in the world, as in our minds, the same cloth is still being woven.

— Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

SUMMER AS TYPHON

May 10

Summer arrives in Florida like
a dragon up from sleep
from every local water, ever
surprising in sooth and saw
the feral magnitude it wings.
For weeks now fair and perfect
days have passed in the regatta
of their sails, serene and white,
a lover’s body naked at first light:
A first kiss which now arouses
the unleashing deluge of the next,
a desire which enrages and suffers
to swell in one bright blister.
We finally got some rain yesterday
morning, a half hour of messiah
soak: enough to trim the
hedge-tops of the brush fires
in the eastern beachside counties
but not nearly enough to stop
the burning further down.
When May is as dry as this
it’s said the June which follows
will be especially wild, a mace
of torrent summer burning all
the way through heaven &
swinging a mace of knocking thunders
which splits wide torrential storm-
clouds 40 thousand feet high.
All that precipitate to the menace
of the hurricanes, one after the
other for three months. Now it’s
just hot and still and fragrant
in the waking of wild wings,
the nascence of the titan
still at war with ancient gods.
No doubt such a summer is
male as only men in prison know,
cruel and sexual and predatory
and proud. His sex is something
mashed far up the ocean’s thighs
which grip all Florida’s length,
his huge balls clackering a distant
rouse of thunder in alarum for the day.
I turn on the sprinklers in the garden
not knowing what else there is to say,
and let the sound of water whirling
suffice as sown wheat cast on the tide
in offering to that beast now stirring
far below in the dark loins of my song.



APOLLO AND TYPHON

2004

High noon is thus my fatal hour,
The sun poised like a sword in all
Readiness to pierce and thrust and
Flay the scaled secret coiled under.
My might and madness both reign here:
You see it in the beachgoers who
Sail their naked alms so high that
Basal cells melt like wings of wax.
I am the god of pure willed fire
Flooding the world with knowns. Beware
Me most, pale supplicant, for I
Have no shadow at this hour, no
Edge or purchase or glint of blue.
At noon I nailed the bastard gleam:
He twines now round the mast within.




SUMMER’S ICUMEN

May 2005

In 1879 the body of an
adult woman was
found in a bog near Ramten,
Jutland in Denmark. The body,
known as Huldremose Woman,
was very well preserved. The woman
met her violent end sometime
between 160 B.C. and 340 A.D.
Her arms and legs showed
signs of repeated hacking,
and the diggers who found
her body noted that her right
arm was detached from the
rest of her body. That arm
was evidently cut off before she
was deposited in the peat.

— National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen

Yeah, summer arrives in
Florida, its heat thick as
peat in boggy high swelter,
blearying the keels of the clouds
to a yellow-brown blear which the
days stumble through, oppressed
as it is loosed in such deliriums of
fire. Around the state the sickos
keep hauling young girls off; the
other day we heard on the news of
a young man raping an 8 year old
& burying her in a landfill where
she was later, miraculously, found
under a herm of piled stones.
It’s harder to tell which story’s worse,
the one we must imagine from some
coroner’s report (one was strangled,
nude, holding a stuffed bunny), or
the tale that survives — this latest
assault victim telling about a tall
shadow over her then nothing,
coming to in a warren of stone.
No rains over our garden yesterday
but some real bastards mauled
towns just to the north, flipping
small planes at the Volusia
County airport; lightning killed
a surveyor working in soon-to-developed
wetlands (2,500 bolts were said
to have rained on the area in one hour).
Two weeks before the official start
of the hurricane season
& we’ve already seen Adrian rip across
El Salvador from the west & then
head for the Gulf; the weatherman
on WFTV showed a track over
Cuba & into the Atlantic, his
voice soothing enough but something
lurched in me to see how close
the storm would graze by South
Florida, that bottom of our state
like the exposed buttocks of the
Coppertone Girl, safe from the
sun but not from sea winds.
It’s not exactly menace — the days
are too blithe in the main for that
— but certainly something was raised
yesterday in hot air, like a hammer,
over the desperate housewives of
overdeveloped ‘burbs, inarticulate as
as the drunk in his cups,
the shadowy brilliance of mobbed,
too-sunny dreams. Outside the abortion
clinic across from my job the
old women and priest in his brown
ankle-length doggedly shout
their pleas and damnations from
the blistering curb as soon-to-be-
ex-mothers hurry into the building,
light and darkness fused in
that amplitude which gets mauled
in this heat, the faithful like martyrs,
the victims like nails. All that
cannot die with dusk; during the night
it burns in the asphalt and
on roofs, its red eye still glowering
on chrome bumpers and
aluminum siding. And as we sleep
its news turbines on, relentlessly,
the 2 a.m. cable news channel
reporting how the governor of Florida
is in hot water after it was revealed
that 218 registered sex offenders
had received Viagra through
state medicaid benefits over
a four-year period. I woke in
that simmer — who doesn’t,
not in a word wired to fear
and desire by cables so sure -
and now, at 4 a.m., sprinklers
churn out the aquifer on five
million swooning lawns, thickening
the pall of crickets to almost a firmament
not quite earth or sky but both,
like a new world awakened,
close to the one which climaxed
in the cab a Ford F-150 parked
on a lonely orchard road where
a dark lord spat spasm at his
opposite shore, the air
in that cramped space a dark
angelic realm of sweat and
blood and fish-scented, splayed oils.
Oh what a savage conundrum these days
are nailed to, so deeply I cannot
decide whether to damn or praise
with this hand or that, its awfulness
the most pustulent thorns
to braid the rose’s pale and pink
and extravagantly perfumed kiss.
(I write these horrid lines
in a house love gardens & grows,
my wife asleep in the next room &
our Siamese safe in the window
with her beauty huge against the
frailest of screens.) So I’ll
just leave that conundrum here,
like a blue-blackened tide at a shore
down from the surface of another
dingdong day of hard work in
the first full furies of summer. I’m
clinging for dear life to a water-horse
as it thunders over the dread
‘burbs that drain Your wonderful
blue never tasting a drop.
Ride on you fucker, you driver
of suns and moons to the west,
with your hooves of abyss
& black mane too sexual to resist
& infinitely dangerous to
hold with real hands. Your eyes are
far too wild to name all I
see rising back from the bog
you were thrown in when
we called this paradise
and then priced it dear.
Across the state, in shallow
graves between orange trees
and from the bottoms of
black lakes, maidenly bones
are whispering of love’s
thrusting steel so plumed with
high fire, a murmurous drone
beneath the morning’s black weave
where it all remits here,
lust at last dead and so soon
to wake on insatiable shores
to the east where later today
the girls in blue bikinis
spread their calyxes toward the sun.





KNIGHT OF SWORDS

2004

The wrath of the lion
is the wisdom of God.

— William Blake, “Proverbs
of Hell”

The warrior god of summer now
stirs in his greaves, his heat
rising at this dark early hour,
the night sweaty, chirring,
humming with air conditioners.
In summer the sun not so much
rises as unsheathes from the sea,
swording up and across the sky
pealing a brilliance which
cauls summer storms,
those fronts of risen air
lumbering and pouring
pent water over all.
Do not err in calling this
blade sweet — that’s for
the spring of orange blossoms
carried on soft breezes.
No. Something wilder hooves
in this hour, like the sound
of an army massing beyond
a ridge of warm soak.
A principle of bronze
spearing sea into sky,
marauding high angels
spilling gold from the wounds.