Black Gospel, Blue Ink

TO KNOW THE DARK

Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.

— Wendell Berry


***

The unrelieved darkness of the deep waters has produced weird and incredible modifications of the abyssal fauna. It is a blackness so divorced from the world of sunlight that probably only the few men who have seen it with their own eyes can visualize it. We know that light fades out rapidly in the descent below the surface. The red rays are gone at the end of the first 200 or 300 feet; and with them all the orange and yellow warmth of the sun. Then the greens fade out, and at 1000 feet only a deep, dark, brilliant blue is left. In very clear waters the violet rays of the spectrum may penetrate another thousand feet. Beyond this is only the blackness of the deep sea.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

BLUE IN BLACK

Perhaps the mythological zone
mixes with the deep end of the
personal, a region of wildest blue,
that depth in the sea where all
the higher spectra have
been sucked off, where
only deep-heartedness remains.
Here is the first and last light
of the day, a fade of ice to night
where the figures of my
history -- father, mother,
lovers, thugs -- jackal down
into brutally-finned gods
of the lost Devonian Age,
titans of cock and vulva
in their former hoary glory,
uneroded, stone starkly naked
and thundering their
colossal passions in
the hips of continents
smashing up mountain
ranges of desire.
When I sing of You
in extremest blue
I must have voyaged down
that far from native shores,
to that weird strand
I recall most when I dream,
a water-limbed and limbic
beach, I think, a deep
dark place where all
eternity comes to drink.
They clamor at a seaside
bar beneath a moon that takes
up half the sky, disquieting
the patrons in a way
not felt for millions of years,
back when the moon
was freshly hauled up
from the sea and so close
to Earth is amped the tides
to wash a hundred miles
inland and back in
one infernal gallop of
blue hooves. My history
sinks down the gullet
of my brian to mix and thrash
and drown in deeper leagues
where mystery is king,
a salt empire of deepening
gloom which ends in
evernight for a mile
and then another further down.
I sit here on this writing
chair as a hermit in his
writing cell on a rock
in the middle of that sea,
inking pages with salt
gospels of the kingdom
ever below. Its washes
in my mind ferry forth
my pen on immramas here
to there to find the
marvels of a catalogue
burned by doubters
ten centuries ago.
I sing, I slake, I write
blue waters down,
enraptured with the
bee-loud sound of
each day’s curve and
crash and ebbing hiss,
finding in each wake
a new, surprising,
older bliss -- nereid,
nautilus, skull of the
sea god himself
still babbling in that
first lost tongue
the metres of the swell
which margins 4 a.m.
to hell. It sounds
like the gaelic of Black
Angus, that seal-man
who cursed Columba on
the shore before he
leapt back in the tide
in search of Kirsteen
McUlrich in blackest
leagues below. Oh how
this tongue’s been
picked in his brine
brogue, rendering me
as useless
as a seal-skin folded
underneath a
writing chair.
This books’s a
reliquary for the
insides of those waves,
a charmed bone
that could never be
but is, a bluest lamp
for that blackest land
whose patronage I know
when I know I’ve got
it down all wrong again,
when my metres sink
and swim.





BLUE IN GREEN

2002


The song enters
gently, almost
painfully so:

Bill Evans on piano
washing in the
night’s minor chords
toward a shore
with no resolution,
blue rollers composed
of the lightest,
most fragile notes,
hesitant as all
who stand at midnight’s door
with so much flowing in
from the night:

And then Miles enters
on trumpet almost too late
in the progression,
not quite an afterthought
but still way after what
ever could have mattered,
that emphysemic
horn thin and spectral
over the wash of minor chords,
hovering like fog over the surf’s
embarcations, wedging us
between what’s
half in and
half out that door
we all hesitated at,
turning for a last long
look back on all we loved and lost
and then lost even more:

There’s no real name for it,
but the feeling is blue in green,
the bittersweet thrall
inside sweet sound;
not the sweetness, but
the crash of that sweetness
when it’s forever gone.

Evans never loses his infinite
restraint throughout,
strolling out those calm,
almost-suicidal progressions
of minor beachside ennui
over which Miles sighs and
sings with a breezy, diffident,
nearly frozen reserve.
Together they weave and sum
the night’s concessions
and conceits,
none of them good or even
passing for a temporary stay
against the facts of dissolution.
Back and forth they
toss that rigorous tao,
ever returning us to
this hard shore:

Then like a long ache
quenched in a needle’s whiteout,
Davis fades off, leaving Evans
to finish things:
The piano climbs that
trellis of sad chords
once more, reaching an even
higher, almost
impossible—
no—
irretrievable height: —then spills
back down
the clef to us
in a quick play
of gorgeous
major thirds,
just as waves will travel
across the world only
to collapse on the shore,
scattering jewels
at our feet before
hauling them all away
in a last low ebb
of minor chords:

“Blue In Green” names
that hard night’s surf
where we lose more than
we ever love, and in so
descending find
that harsh blue door
which scatters us
on a distant,
emerald shore.





... It’s only in darkness you can see the light, only
From emptiness that things start to fill, I read once in a dream ...

Old fire, old geographies.
In that case, make it old, I say, make it singular
In its next resurrection,
White violets like photographs on the tombstone in the yard.
Each year it happens this way, each year
Something dead comes back and lifts up its arms, puts down its luggage,
And says — in the same costume, down-at-heels, badly sewn —
I bring you good news from the other world.

— from “Looking Around,” Charles Wright
A Short History of the Shadow





SILT

May 29 2005

It dreams down with us,
these tiny efflorae of the mortal coil,
embers of our daily sunset
in the drink: the silt of
what settles in our nightly descent
is as close to death as we’ll
get in life. Fag-ends of pleasure
by the million swirl in balletic
slo-mo, an oblivion of what
remains which we forget but
cannot lose. They’re what moats
us in from the final death,
a Thou-less-shaped canal which
floats last thought to first light,
all that flings us wide
in exult enervation still ghosting
down below, the shadow of
abyssal snow where every
kiss above is held forever
in a drift, thick in the mud
of all we’ll never quite expire or know.


wELCOME TO THE ABYSS

2001

Since no animal can
make its own food,
the creatures of the
deeper waters live
a strange, almost
parasitic existence
of utter dependence
on the upper layers.
These hungry creatures
prey fiercely and
relentlessly upon each
other, yet the whole
community is ultimately
dependent upon the
slow rain of descending
food from above ...

— Rachel Carson,
The Sea Around Us

Whom filth plenished,
dearth devoured.

— Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Here in the abyssal ‘burbs
the roads are paved
by this incessant rain:
brokers and their broken
boats, pirates whose last
word was “whoops,”
victims of exploding
airlines descending
smaller to us from
much higher up.
We eat what we can.
The road through
our small world
is pure defecation and
inedible, indelible bone.

In our hood
it’s too dark to know
a face, but if you could
you’d be sorry.
We all have eyes
like extra-large
pie-plates and
huge jaws for catching
what we can.


Our diet’s
rounded with the
leavings of the leavings
of the leavings, and
less, a bite of
tiger shark, finger
of a gunman.
Oh how we dine
on all perdition.

Not much to see
round here but
the music never stops:
weird moans, trills,
clicks, and clatters
fill our nocturnal air,
a radar for appetite
and procreation.

We breathe the
inkiest of drink,
so dark and cold
and dense to be
the very heart
of the nihilist.
An edible grave.

We descended
seeking a little
elbow room in
a food chain too
tightly knit: grew
strong in our
abysms. We’ll live
forever since
everything you say
eventually falls
our way.

Welcome to the
Final Receipt, resting
place of all, Turd ‘Burb,
last house on the block
where we seize with
hungry jaws the
bitterest of God’s laws.


***


Black Velvet in that needy boy’s smile,
Black Velvet in his cool Southern style.
A new religion that will bring you to your knees—
Black Velvet, if you please.

“Black Velvet,” popular song from the ‘80s


***

DOWN AT SMOKEY JOE’S

2002


When we pony up at Smoky Joes, our favorite barman
says name your poison. Not that it really matters,
because any pair of burning wings will do. Top shelf or
well, we only choose how much or more it costs to lose.

Down at Smokey Joe’s we’re all victims, rappelling
down snowier abysms than the sea. We huddle
round the bar like monks at vespers, chanting
our complainsong to anyone caught in range.

The TV at Smokey Joe’s rolls the late sports highlights
we lowlifes coulda contended for, had not others
suckerpunched us to thirst: Bad Daddy, Bitch Wife from Hell,
the Bill Collector with his way-way- way-past dues.

We’re fenced in by a thousand blades, each aimed
with great angst toward our long-soured intents.
No wonder we’re such immortal flops, knocking back those
bullets of schnapps, blacking out the mirror’s leer.

At 1 a.m. in Smokey Joe’s it’s never dark enough and the tap
is always running dry — our wallets near empty, that resolve
to have just two drowned two hours ago, the only woman
in the place snoring with her head down on the bar—too

much trouble to rouse, too little lust in us to silk a souse—
Yet somehow we always find some way to order just one more.
Let’s light a fire, burn patience thin. Let lead the way with
our luckless chin. Let’s mouth the words to incite that

old, infernal brawl—Fuck it, naw, fuck it all. Bartender,
here’s my house; drinks all around—a final douse!
So it goes down at Smokey Joe’s, where the rotgut flows
like lava from the darkest reaches of thirst. And since

we’re down here again. my man, how about another to
thicken the murk just on notch closer before closing time
shoos us out that smokey door where the sun is soon to rise
and nail us to the next day’s rack. Oh what the hell—We’ll be back.


***

AHAB ORATION TO THE SPERM-WHALE’S HEAD

Melville read and re-read Shakespeare’s plays in the months before and during the writing of Moby Dick, and remarked on the plays that what he found most vitally in them was not purity of drama or a broad understanding of human psychology but “those deep far-way thing in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality .... “the things which we feel to be so terrifically true” that no merely good man would ever speak them. Melville found his Vedas at the bottom of Shakespeare, in his terrifying depths. One of my favorite passages from Moby Dick, which I’ve quoted here before, comes when the crew of the Pequod have caught their first whale; the head is cut off and tied to the ship — later it will be mined for the spermacetti trapped in the honeycombs of its skull while the crew work at stripping the blubber from the corpse and boiling it down for the whale oil. After the crew retires below decks, Ahab comes upon on the deck and contemplates the massive had hanging there, as if he were Hamlet observing the huge skull of the jester Yorick—or that of Shakespeare — certainly the soliloquy is Shakesperean at its darkest and deepest:

“It was a black and hooded head, and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the sphynx’s in the desert. ‘Speak, thou vast and venerable head,’ muttered Ahab, ‘which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet hear and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is within thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. The head upon which now the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the world’s foundations, where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot, where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned. There, in the awful water land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went, hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insensate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed — while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to make an infidel of Abraham, and no syllable is thine!”


***

TINCTURE
OF ABYSS

2004

... Four-and-twenty from Munster who
went with Ailbe upon the sea to find
the land which Christians never dwell ...

... The confessor who Brendan met in
the promised land, with all the saints
who have perished in the isles of the ocean ...

from “The Litany of Oengus,” 6th century


Ferry that tincture here, muse
of equinoctal silk. Ladle black
lactissima from those heavy
breasts barely obscured by
an unbuttoned and bottomless
blouse. Pour in my ear those
three degrees between deep
night and first light. May
my pen refrain that booming
choir which sings night and
day in the Cathedral of
the Sea, a lavish organum
of wave and boulder
on shores no man has walked
nor named, much less
scant dreamed. Throat
that sea-black color
in my voice that I
may sing the wildest
isling of them all,
the one with cliffs
no one has climbed
and a well within
of such sweet silver
that one drink sates
300 years of desire.
I peer in that blueblack
mirror and the fishtailed
man stares back, his
seal-eyes pent on cod
and raven, his smile
like a bell proclaiming
every hoof and fin
that steeples holy hell.
Salt Ys, strike that blue
noir note from the
hard prong aching
in the sea’s vast legs
-- that boom in every
wave’s orgasmic crash
resounding down the shore
of this life between
the massings of
consonantal stone
and the liquid plash
of what cannot in
words be known. The trick
is not to follow Lycidas
to the hollows of that
wild sound; to brew
sea trouble in a vat
or skull for ages long
enough to tincture
3 drops here: Enough to
shod each wave’s resound
with lines hooved loud enough
to reach at last your ears.





MELUSINE

1995

She is the dark startle
of a dream staining
my first thoughts today—
a drowning dare
in black velvet underwear.

A melusine dripping on
the shores of my crashing world,
she spoke my name with a kiss.
How could I resist the winds
which keened round her bed,
older than the surf itself
which crushes boulders to sand?

All night she wove her
seal-sleek body around
the aching acre of my
half-submerging song.
I wake this morning
bleeding honey from every
pore she kissed.
All that now remains
of her are these lines
dripping seaweed on the page.

Some spillage of that swoon
has me thinking of you
so like and unlike her,
now far too many
dreams away. Some
ink too dreadful writes your
shadow into her name.

Today my heart's bed
refuses to warm me
from the sweet smash
of that bitterly fading surf
in which the two of you
wrapped your arms
around me in a wave
and then sent me away
wilder than wind.

***


SPECTRE


And some in dream assured were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.

— Coleridge, “Rime of the
Ancient Mariner”

He’s swimming down there,
rarely visible as he follows
me except on nights
as this, when the full moon
filters down to trace the
huge pale wings lifting
and flapping through brine
in their slow, mighty rhythm.
Tonight he unveils
from the boat’s wake,
the black sea, from these
eyes which refuse to
believe he’s down there
just as the felon in jail
swears someone else
held the scythe he
once swung with such joy.
The spectre is agile
and supple as all dreams
are in their rout of the
heart, a nine-fathom
hallows inside the dark’s flow,
neither God’s nor the
Devil’s to damn or toil
or know, older perhaps,
a Prometheus unbound
or unsounded; or an
emissary perhaps of
some approaching rage,
like a surf pounding
in total silence
or the turning of pages
too pale for any words
I have learned, but will,
or be cursed to ride
with a ghost in my hide.

***

ST. BRENDAN AND THE HEATHEN HEAD

Brendan and his monks find the head of a dead man by the seashore. The head is very large, its forehead measuring five feet across. At Brendan’s request, the giant tells him that he was a heathen, who for his own profit waded through the sea. He was big and strong, and stood a hundred feet tall. He waylaid sailors and took their goods. For all his outsize proportions he was drowned in a flood. Brendan offers to resuscitate and baptize him, so as to give him the possibility of obtaining remission for his sins and afterwards going to paradise. The giant refuses because he is afraid he will not be able to resist the temptation of sin. This would be worse, for, as he says, baptized souls are tormented much worse in hell than heathens are. Besides, he has a terrible fear of dying once again. He wants to go back to his torments in the darkness. He takes his leave, with Brendan’s good wishes. Brendan departs in his ship.

— from Clara Strijbosch, The Heathen
Giant in The Voyage of St. Brendan





BLACK TORC

2005

How perilously close to nothing
is this black hour, where every
walking numen drifts drowned
in sleep’s thrall
and the garden dances stiffly
in the trance of black-wet leaves,
each petal burdened with the freight
of such a night at such an hour.
How strange and difficult
and wild the woman gathered
there in the center, keeping
time with her silent clapping,
her eyes cajoling, her ears
tuned to dead-dark music
spooring from this pen,
calling for black blood.
This rigor is almost,
perhaps already dead,
who can say? The step from
the ledge is not one you can see
with the tongue or say with the ear
but you must infer it anyway,
reaching out with your blackest
foot. You have to trust, in the
way of all dark divines,
that this night’s black tide
seen frmo her side below
and within is a starry
promenade, a shoe for
hooves which torcs
the dream which lamps
the full moon now
sailing spectrally behind
rag-twisting-drippy skies.
Ah, how easy it is right here
to mistake rigor for death
and downwarding hues
for depth, I mean, to read
the moment way too corporally,
the same way I always lost the
key to women inside their thighs,
trying to bridge white shores
with on waves of soggy
too-penultimate sighs.
Easy and so perilous the way
because one misstep here
on the harp-strung siege
and it’s hair, nose and eyeballs
all the way down to the black
hag’s hut at the fag end of my worst
nights, where wolves and tarry
vulvas tear each other wide
in the spin of disco balls
and the gruesome enterprise
is right next to the whalish
rectum which remits
all suitors’ bones in the
sound of disco organum.
No matter how many times
I circumnavigate this hell,
the risk is ever in the wings,
just off the deep thought’s
mazing, fangs notched and
wide with a bite so literal
that it’s many lines before
I know my head’s behind
morselling one black throat
or another. So why keep sailing
toward Capes of blackest blue?
Why peramble paths on
naked feet that burn
with the sea’s most strident
coals? Why indeed? It’s 4:42 a.m.
on the Wednesday of a rag-ass
week when I have too much
else to do for faux gambling at
this hour with such Sioux-
Lakotan coin. So why?
I always ask the question
here when it seems I’ve
harrowed full enough the
next day’s dark and still not
found the torc it wears.
That’s why I call my efforts
black and leave the poem
so, one step further down and
round a way I’ll never fully
name, though I have infernal
clues. My job’s to ferry on
the freight of what may
be almost or ever dead,
pointless though it seem.
Rain is falling now so slightly
as to wake the dream or
wrap me in its wake.
Which is keel and which
black weather? And is
that the torc which gleams
it all in one throat, there
beyond what I tried
my best to say?



THE BLACK SHAMAN

2005

“In the case of hereditary shamanism, the souls of the ancestral shaman choose a young man in the family; he becomes absent-minded and dreamy, loves solitude, and has prophetic visions and sometimes seizures that make him unconscious. During this period, the Buryat believe, the soul is carried off by spirits—eastward if the youth is destined to become a ‘white’ shaman, westward, if a ‘black.’ Received in the palace of the gods, the neophyte’s soul is instructed by the ancestral shamans in the secrets of the profession, the gods’ forms and names, the cult and names of the spirits, and so on. It is only after the first initiation that the soul returns to the body. We shall see that the initiatory process continues long after this.”

***

“The most marked specialization, at least among certain peoples, is that of “black” and “white” shamans, although it is not always easy to define the distinction. M.A. Czaplicka mentions, for the Yakut, the class if ajy ojuna (ai oyuna), who sacrifice to the gods, and the class of abassy ojuna (oyuna), who have relations with the “evil spirits.” But, as Harva observes, the abassy ojuna is not necessarily a shaman; he can also be a sacrificing priest. According to N.V. Pripuzov, the same Yakut shaman can invoke both the higher (celestial) spirits and those of the lower regions. Among the Tungus of Turukhansk the shamans are not differentiated into “black” and “white”: but they do not sacrifices to the celestial god, whose rites are always performed by day, whereas the shamanic rites take place at night.

“The distinction is clearly marked among the Buryat, who speak of “white” shamans (sangani bo) and “black” shamans (karain bo), the former having relations with the gods, the latter with the spirits. Their costumes differ, being white for the former and blue for the latter. ...

“We must not forget that many of the divinities and powers of the earth and the underworld are not necessarily “evil” or “demonic.” They generally represent authochthonous and even local hierophanies that have fallen in rank as the result of changes in the pantheon.”

— Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Arachaic Techniques of Ecstasy


I.

I meant to wing high heaven,
but You had other plans
and plunged me in the sea.
“We got the Jesus freak
high!” the stoners laughed
the first time I smoked pot,
an first victory for that
black lucency which full
roars beyond the sear
of day. At 14 I became
a Christian, out of mortal
dread of Hell; there was
a single dream in which
I flew above the highest
mount of all in the
ecstasy of God, a
stellar glow which made
me then believe I was
bound for Heaven’s
clean blue space.
But You had other plans,
dousing that jolt of
angel fire in cold blue
wave when I was
baptized in the Atlantic
Ocean later that summer.
I went down backward
into that water with a
prayer for salvation and
when down in that black
swirl, a deep wave washed
through me dark and rich
and too wonderful, hauling
my spirit by the ankles
down in the undertow which
drags the angels low into a sweetly
falling descent. I rose from that
water spluttering and falling too,
my salvation found in all the
lower chakras as I felt released
to sample the world’ delights
now proffered, it seemed to me
to a boy no longer with such child.
I meant to save the world
from sin, but You saved me
from that cross, turning me
upside down and dousing
me in bliss. How could I
resist that deeper sound?
The rest was amplitude.

II.

Flying west at the end of
the summer I turned 17,
I laid over in Chicago to
stay with Ruth three days.
She had been one of the
Christian sisters in our
our local fellowship, staying
there for one more year
of high school while I
flew west for college.
We somehow knew
as we grew older that we’d
some day try to find a haven
of low heaven in each other,
and there, returning from
my father’s land in the east
& flying west again, I stopped
three days in Chicago to
stay with Ruth. Ten minutes
inside that door of the apartment
she shared with her mother
I was thrusting in her
down a fast-collapsing
scree of pink wet-flowered
gasps. I swear I heard the
old imp chorus sing when I
collapsed in my first orgasm
inside a woman: Hey, we got
the Jesus freak laid!, high-
fiving the final end of my
stellar afterlife. When I woke
the next day -- creeping back
into her room after her
mother left for work -- my
feet were spongy with the
sea, my balls heavy again
with its dark wild wash, my
desire now in thrall of Your
deepest waves, awakened in
my then as never before.
It still felt like sin when with
wide-thighed complicity she
welcomed me back in (and
oh what an asshole my old
sinner’s guilt made me to her
in the months that followed,
never returning a single love-
stained letter with one word
of what then I then could say
of love -- I had so much to learn
back then about the
water wilderness, so many
faux-white feather to divest):
But each time I came in her
cunt and mouth, between
her nubbly freckled breasts,
even between the cheeks of
oil-slathered ass -- Each time
I came I woke somehow
an nth league deeper
to the madman mortared
into every abbey floor,
productive in every infernal
sense of Your clabbering
salt endlessness, the hot glow
of a heart three miles down
from heaven’s lowest step.

III.

Last night I dreamt I met
the Doctor in his office for
a cure to these bum migraines,
but instead it seemed I just
wanted to jest and fool around,
mimicking a woman’s voice
on the PA & conspiring to woo
some pretty in the waiting room.
Bright physic be damned!
I guess; pour me a stout shot of
the darker stuff, this useless satire
of an equiry in a sing-song salty brogue.
I’ll take the mash of faith and sex
any night over 500 mils of Depakote.
Besides, You’ve always mocked bright
science with its hokey alchemic spoor,
just as Black Angus of the Seal-Folk
mocked Saint Columba at the shore,
cursing him in fine Gaelic before
leaping in a bath of Hebridean maul
and gale. East of the sun at St. Peter’s
Gate these wings of song all break
and fail; but in the washes west of moons,
I plumb abysms on your whale.

IV.

Well, that’s that: time to shut the book
again and start the ding dong day.
Today we haul everything back outside
to sell what we can in our Huge Antiques
Yard Sale!, trying to make up
what we can’t earn. My wife’s as exhausted
as I am, and both of us hate the necessity
of the task; hate how much good stuff
refuses to be sold, no matter how hard we try.
It’s just dosage from the same bad Doc,
I guess, our best efforts failing just like his.
There’s an augur for this somehow, somewhere,
at least upon the page; may Your black
magic work out there in every way we fail.
I better trust our losses for discerning
which water is more wild and stout:
the one which undertows bright days
or throws the infant soulage out.