Delphi

DELPHI

June 14

I and You are one along
a brow or shore of difference
that means all the world
in heaven’s rule on earth
in us. The lintel over
the door to Dephi
was thus inscribed,
“Know thyself” -- Know!--
And know thou are not God.”
Where it was said
is so important here:
at the portal to bright
Apollo’s shrine,
that entry a bridge
between profane to sacred,
from outside to innermost,
across known planks
over the wildest blue of all.
For ages our work was
defined by the weight
of that lintel’s script.
There was a great sense
of peril of leaving
sense behind to coil
in the serpentine divine,
the inchoate frenzy
of the sibyl rising from
the darker bowels of time.
The distance from I to
Thou was made wide
by that door, and imperious
an imperial syzygy of fire
too hot for mortal bones.
But as we grew to know
ourselves as You ordained,
You grew fainter in the
sky -- hard to find on many
nights -- And yet
somehow you grew intimate
in some subtler way, as if
the moon down western seas
had doored into a sun
which rose the next morning
from inside waters, that
lintel now occiput to a shrine
deep between my ears,
beneath the tripod I was taught
to tend in ancient ways.
You’re that depths of me
I’ll never quite name, much
less know, a power not so much
higher as deeper, like the sea,
a baud of blue intensity I’ll
never sing quite loud enough,
though every day I humbly try.
I believe You bid me to,
enough so as to write
a message on a god’s brow
then float it over history
all the way to here.
In the ocean of Your will
these songs are merely
drops, but they’ve gathered
in a well which throats
a collectively deep voice
which may be Yours,
a whalish timbre of the
seems of You, which is the
best that I can do
without falling into the
depth of being You. That
fall is fraught with
Sathan’s freezing leagues;
I’ve erred that way before,
tried to drink the Python’s
whiskey blood and then
fuck the sibyl in Your conch,
my coracle of lust
cracking up on the shore
we shared for one alien
and verboten hour.
To have You in those worst
ways is to become Apollo’s
fool, a Marsyas ripped clean
of skin from nose to heel
and hung on some indifferent
tree, the flute I tried to rival
you on lying broken
just beneath the red drips
of my toes. No: I read
these oracles of blue writ large
upon the sea’s wild lips
and leave them on this shore
for You to succor and recede,
my work somehow thus Yours
upon a bed of wracked sand
always close to 4 a.m.
Those labors are kept clean
by the surf mill’s deep bellows,
by the ions of beach breeze
which beat from angel wings
as rapt in their labors as in this
inked phrenology of bliss.
There are just three things
I must do to keep this
precinct sacred and wild
as the utter depths of You:
To write it all down;
To never turn a dime;
To give it back in full.
Thus rigored, I am free
to swim every sea and sidhe
and she You welcome deep in me,
a vale akin to wombs and not,
a vault of coups forsaken,
the sum of every whale road
I’ve taken singing every
depths harrowing elation.
The Celts believed their Otherworld’s
infinite and timeless teem
was doored close by in the
humblest of rooks -- a mere,
a book, a tree, a well --
each a shining bubble in the throat
between the lines of head
and heart, serenely balming
this hour in which I try
to keep things level
with a starry ocean gaze.
I am just the janitor
who mops the floors of heaven,
whistling at this infernal hour
the ambergris of he
who will survive the death of me
and every other naked rider
who felt bid to dive
the ocean of Your song.
Know thyself -- caesura
or grace note here, huge dollop
of wild divine --
And know you are not God:
That’s the succor of the flavor
burnt sacrifices waft all
the way where He waits,
where he bids me climb
down every league, every
rung of sing song seem,
every breast and nipple of
what I can’t know and am,
the distance closing with
each line collapsing westward
on that shore whose
far embrace we are.



I KNOW

David St. John

The definition of beauty is easy;
it is what leads to desperation.
—Valery


I know the moon is troubling.

Its pale eloquence is always such a meddling,
Intrusive lie. I know the pearl sheen of the sheets
Remains the screen I’ll draw back against the night;

I know all of these silences invented for me approximate
Those real silences I cannot lose to daylight ...
I know the orchid smell of your skin

The way I know the blackened path to the marina,
When gathering clouds obscure the summer moon --
Just as I know the chambered heart where I begin.

I know the lacquered jewel box, its obsidian,
The sexual trumpeting of the diving, sweeping loons ...
I know the slow combinations of the night, & the glow

Of fireflies, deepening the shadows of all I do not know.


from Merlin: New Poems





BLUE GRAMMAR

2003

The most ancient witness to
grammatical teaching in Ireland
is to be found in the little manual
called Ars Asporii (or Apseri)
... ((this book)), in stark contrast
to the wholly secular tone of its
model ((the Ars Minor of Donatus)),
derives from the ascetic world
of sixth-century Irish monasticism.

- Daibhi O Croinin, Early Irish Monasticism
While I sat in classrooms
pickling in the drone
of American grammar
-- the official Latin of
verb-subject agreements
and modifiers rescued
from their dangling
precipices -- She was
writing it down in my
ear some other way,
a brogue inside my
writing’s new arches and
tenons, turning nouns
into nipples jazzing motions
I couldn’t master, only
ride. Before me all the
fixtures of learning
were composed and steady --
my book opened wide,
a #2 pencil in my hand
copying down the forms
on lined paper in a rough
miniscule, the late-
morning hush striated
with boredom and
hunger and a free-floating
toothed angst. On one
level it was all a
cultural Latin the way
it must be learned,
line after line, correct
and succinct, either
to be admired or strafed
with red ink: Yet further
down I wrote in Vulgate
about the places I
dreamed or sought
or would but dare not go:
My hands round the back
of the girl sitting in front
of me cupping new breasts,
fighting the evil one in
his lab far at sea,
swaggering nude
in the locker room
with a cock twice as
big as my own, three
times, no, four, shaming
all they boys with my
hammerlike stylus.
She was re-writing
the story the world
bid me learn
in a grammar which
shattered those schoolhouse
walls. There, in the midst
of such strict schooling
(if strict it ever was)
an infernal ars was
copied from the ass
of true love -- forms I’ll
never quite learn,
swimming away on
every sweet wave, a
language always just
out of reach, laughing,
cajoling, calling me home.
Of it I here write
in rooms far below
the cathedral which
pays for everything else.




WHO KNOWS

2004

... -- that I
then inexhausibly day and night should
have so much stored up, assimilated
nature to offer --- , without knowing whether
your radiance has anything to do with me ...

-- Rilke, “To The Awaited One,”
transl. Franz Wright

Who knows what composes
a mind, or why it rows the
way it does? I woke this
morning with this poem’s
peramble already streaming
in my mind, its first conceits
and gambits scrolling
behind my eyes as I
stumbled up out of bed
(still dank with dreams
of debating John Kerry
in the presidential
debate or me as John Kerry
debating you the reader)
& downstairs in the total
dark of my chosen
redeye a.m. That quote
from Plato through
the mouth of Sokrates
was on my mind’s tongue:
“Gods call things by
which they are naturally
right.” And only gods
know the proper names
winging in perfected
aeries to far above
our sense. Only Eros
knows why his truer
name is Pteros, “wing-
growing necessity;” only
He know whether
the song’s in his wings
or mine, my necessity or
yours, flight our lift
from all necessary
encumbrance or wings
that makes our plodding
feet seem moot?
Like in those first months
of dating my wife when
we made love most
of the night and stayed
in bed all Sunday:
why do I keep returning
to that rumpled bed,
my imagining inhaling
deep the musky sweet
still lingering there
9 years ago, as if
there’s gold in
them thar reveries
when current
days which seem dry
as ghosts? Or have
present wings grown
strong enough to
build a next from
the twigs and berries
of a history; the past
made gold when
touched by present
minds? Only Oran
knows why everything
Columba said of God
and man was wrong;
only Manannan knows
how much Oran’s
knowledge was stained
by three nights
of grave-dirt and
the cold Celtic sea
below his mouth and
eyes flew wide and
loosed; we don’t
know how dark
the bone of truth
he tossed up from
that hole when he
said, “In fact, the
way you think it is
is not the way it
is at all:” but it
makes me suspect
its marrow was
a silver shout:
His back mirroring
I have claimed my
own, underscoring
every flit of Ariel
I capture here
with the motley
of a Caliban further
further out and down
in Infrann or Valhalla
or Olympus, the
stuff of merriment
for the deathless ones
who drink our blood
from cups of hammered
gold. Surely they must
all agree that
I’m a windy fool
to presume to say
the names of that gust
inside a god’s gut
truth -- a bigger fool
to boot for always
getting it so wrong
with errant words
forged from that wind.
Who knows whether
all this inky
excess spoors from
a skull’s compulsion
to babble on, as if
to fill being’s voice
balloon was to live
again or more
truly, vitally too
perhaps; or is
that halloo up
the well simply
the dream of flesh
by ravaged, long-
dry bones? Who knows
whether I think
because I’m
still breathing air
or because the
morning awakens
light in all
its caverns? Who
can say that the sound
of birdsong picking
up at 5:30 a.m.
oboes and piccolos
a neuron in my ear
which telegraphs a
chemical derangement
of that hymn to
a vault limned in
my cortex where
a god or books or
nature or my beloved’s
naked body is aroused
and sings back, my
pen erectile with
that exuberant,
protruding shout?
Who knows why
beauty is a booty
I’ve always hoarded
and trilled me deep,
always cause to recall
on paper; what
at 5 years old
I’d crayoned
a page of vaulted
butts and pussies
I had couped
from playing games
with girls in the
woods, or why
I hid that picture
beneath my bed
or hauled out at
to count back out,
calmed and charmed
afresh, keen to scavenge
more that holy
land revealed.
Who knows whether
the same gods or devils
now draw my
thought on to the
next soft shore of
verse in lycanthromorphic
such verse, or whether
the motion makes the
language better
or something worse,
a descending spoor
of milk and ink.
Who but the gods
can say if this
passionate expense
of words will one
day hang between
your breasts like
a silver crucifix
to swing in prayer
& coilage, or
if you’ll simply
trash the cache,
sending it to
the landfill of
bad ends where
leeches crap
my kingly thought.
No one knows,
not here where
as I try at last
to end this poem:
nor is that
thought enough
to beach this boat;
I rest only because
I must, winded and
mind-wrung, talked
out, gas pumped from
my first day’s thought
now precipitously low.
Let’s close then
with more from Sokrates,
his mind forever
surer than my own:
“No doubt these
are larger matters
than you or I can
figure out.” Indeed.
I’m slowing my pen’s
motion down,
toward the line
that lets the black
reins go: And see
the blank page
further down like
a silent pool, the
blue cauldron
of all I do not know:
I rest my face on
water’s dream
and let the rhythm go
to sink and source
and sing the swells
of all I’ll never know.