Glaucus' Net: Third Haul

SNAKE SONG

June 8

”Theos,” the indeterminate divine,
was an invasion, of body and mind.
It was our becoming intimate
with what is most alien. And nothing
is more alien than the snake. A hand
lifted the snake toward the neck.
The hand slipped the snake under
the neck of the initiate.

****

The sea is the continuum, the perfection
of the undifferentiated. Its emissary
on earth is the snake. Where the snake
is, there gushes water. Beneath its
coils flows the water of the underworld.
Being sinuous, it has no need of
joints. The same pattern covers its
whole skin: its scales are uniform, its
motion undulating and constantly
self-renewing, like waves.

-- Roberto Calasso, The Marriage
of Cadmus and Harmony


I am the hour of the snake,
the black shore of the sea’s devouring.
My mouth hurls high as waves
and wide as their far thundering,
pent to strike the moon with
Your transfixing fatal fire.
I am the final, fatal arc of water
whose spasmic fall
You chapel and chalice
and charm from the bluest
graves in hell where
love sleeps on and on.
I am not her smile
but its penultimate,
the curve and flash in
every sated bed which drowns
far more than it reveals,
the merest invitation
to the dance and voyage
and receipt no words
can ever net a name for,
much revel the full
quintessence of,
though I try here til I die.
I am the sine wave
of coiled motions
dropped in the votive blouse
which ever hides Your
world-wide cleavage;
that asp inside a poem’s creaks
and squeals which
doors divine intrusion,
lifting mortal brassieres free
to find again the most
naked breasts of all
torn from my lips
at the shore of history
when I woke and walked
out from the sea.
I get back to You
astride the wave-back
of an ink-black adder,
though heavens rage
and drive all loves away,
though actual seas careen
far from even hope of sight,
though I just sit and
age and writhing write.
I am the third net
cast by Glaucus on
that rock You dreamed
in the middle of first seas,
the third net of one
enquiry, the deepest third
of all songs to name that thrall
whose is heart: The purest
draught of mystery
distilled from every
proof spilled from that
history of every panty torn
and hurled into the lake
of fire. Not lover, not mother,
but the beloved blue abyss
whose womb gives birth to me
each day, and baptizes me
back into her endless joy
beneath the next careening wave
to gout from the cock-mouth
of this pen. I ride to You
on sheets too pale to see
Your blue eyes staring back
in the black anointals of this hour,
the sound of saying this
enrapt in the gauzy billows of
a drowse that happened so
deeply and so long ago
I’ve made its sink the
sound of waterfalls
and booming waves
in songs I cannot wake from
much less share or shore
with anyone but You.
Your kiss was like a snake
loosed in my bed that found
and coiled round my heart,
making it a caduceus of
the gods of deep-sea love;
and then you bright fangs
deep in what is wildest in me,
loosing noctal seas
whose throat and shore I am,
son and sun and sum of she
who beards this slowly closing clam
around the pearl of song I am
shining dully in this dark
the prize of all devour.






The third cast is the deepest -- beyond depths, beyond all singing ... beyond love, beyond the flinging of the endless wave ...

***


THIRD CUP

2001

It doesn’t matter if you’re
looking for God or true wilderness
or the insides of your love:
you’ve got to search
at least three ways.
Query the same engine
and the same pages result.
First you rowed forth seeking
island to island the
descending rooms of a vault,
finding Orpheus astride
gray fishes and a sea god’s
house ribbed with whalebones.
Then you entered the forest
of your desire where it
was darkest, with only
your red hunger to
light the way. Now it’s
time to take the guided path
back from annihilation,
returning to the world
a simple boon. That chalice
that you found out there
heals itself returning
to the lips of those who
need it most. Actually,
the third way isn’t a
search at all: rather we translate
what we found in letting go,
filling the page with
loaves and fishes
from heaven’s deep.




THIRD ISLE

2005

There came a long dark season
when I tried to marry in both worlds,
loving my wife in the home we
daily made, and straying off to
woo your wild verbotens, daring
at the utmost peril to my first
and actual love just to press my
face into the saltiest curves
and mouth the dregs of you.
Errant fool, I strayed into the
woods from my path, chasing
glints and phosphor, first with
the mildest and most forgivable
of wrongs -- what man doesn’t
deserve a hearty peek into
the glade -- and then by silky-
so-savage degrees, my resolve
emboldened by the fire building
down below, I transgressed deep
and deeper til I was lost in
thrall, no husband anyone would
recognize by the wounded,
wicked lights he almed and
lamped and called. Daring to
leave home and dive full in
up to my neck in whiskey
and those loosened nights
where I found and flung
my heat’s desire, I ravened
far through lace and thorns,
the itch empurpled and
plunging me deep, down
to the sweetest abysms
a falling man could call.
Poor fool me, poor fucker,
poor asshole, poor souse:
my hard-fought house fell fast
in ruin like a collapse of poker
cards, leaving me a man most
without, self-abandoned on love’s
third isle, neither married
in my mind nor free in heart
to truly quest, much less sing
aptly enough those labials
I’d sacked all shores for.
Thus humbled and unhorsed,
I walked the million miles
home, a path I suspect will
thread the rest of my days.
God graced me to this third life
which harbors a third sea,
my song still riven to white
shores but loosed from
actual sands, literal tides,
much less too real metaphors
like dolphin riders or me
finding you on any distant
shore. Still the rhythms
of blue waves are hoof and
fin enough to write the music
down, the metrics of abandon
strict and strapping and
oh-so-bottomless. I suspect
I’ll hug this rock til Doomsday,
singing blue matins in both
penance and penury of
the delights which need no
riders to smash every ship
to shore, my Amens ever
freighted with the
next blue-belling More.


THIRD SHORE

2005

Daily I walk this shore
of what cannot be yet is
amazed at all the blue,
it takes to name the
silent depths of you. Some
days I recall the way I
walked that shore alone
and utterly washed by
your wet lips; other times
I think of how you stood
just so before the sea
in singular ecstasy
of my heart’s bigger,
albeit wetter half,
the half I graze and
altar yet dare not
fully breathe.
No two walks are
alike, though the
peramble is the same:
my butt here motionless
upon this writing chair
as the iambs trod down
and back, line by line
on down a page
not wide but oh
so deep, dowsing
til your salt rhetoric
has soused the daily
ache, a singing
man doused in brine
til every bone, every
writhe bereft of fin
is blue and wild
and fine, whatever
ends I started with
now bottomless, like
a descending magnum
of old wine. I walk on
down to where that
distant reach where
staid fixities greet
& mortar dripping walls,
ambiguities of wing
and wind, sea and land,
my hips on yours
exchanging fruit
we’ll never fully taste
nor squeeze to
dregs of rind. And
there -- at that locus
of my walk which
has now grown
fully here -- there
yet here we meet again,
me a motion
of wavelike words
and you uncorsetted
of all but verbs, our
wash more pure
than ink or ichoring
balls -- a spiral
springlike spume
of spermacetti fire.
Between the worlds
we greet and kiss,
two-thirds strange
and one salt bliss,
irreconciled and
inconsolable and
worth each spilling
acre of these pages
in wild and worse abyss.
There and here in
this third world
which is both shore
and poem abed,
we sing in salutation
of the diurnally
sweet dead, those
lovers who didn’t
know they’d found
each other til the
tide had fully ebbed,
leaving tide pools
and tropes of love
to fade and bleach
and lathe this third
world’s loam of
blue-in-white sands.





A PELT OF BEACHES

2006

I spent years pickling my
noodle in the wantons
of hi-proof woe, sitting on
barstools so singular in
my dement. For many
years after I’ve been
rolling my tongue in the brine
of those rude waters, as
if the later reveries
are the true brogue I was
angling for in rolled
and crashing booze.
What’s changed except
the angle of derange,
my collapsing narrowed
to the hips of a paper song,
fucking to its harrows
a night now ages long?
Poem after poem I’ve
assembled the pelts
of the animated tribe
that taught me the breakage
inherent in low swoon,
furry jezebels with mewly
voices who unzippered
me to the ravages
a pure and naked night
no waking brain can measure
nor aging man occlude.
What I’ve become is
an amalgram of their
their dank hot closures,
my pursuit as wide
as the state of Florida
and long as the state
of its disease, plunging
down and through
the gap in sense and
all stability, clasped
by the knees of crashing
seas. This is carnal knowledge,
gleaned from a book
whose pages are composed
by all those panties lost
in the covers of a drowned
bed, an unbrassiered sapience
where sun and moon swing
high in feral unison
across undying skies.
This long beach I wake
and walk is pounded by sighs
lucent and brilliant and torrential
all at once--and that is just
the visible part of its heart,
a marge of risible blue.
My coutre is pure accoutrement,
an outre fizz down champagne
necks uncorked so many
poems back the buzz and
thrash have ebbed far
down, as oolites of
an ululation long
jacked of all elation,
ossifying salt to stone,
my bride’s election to
a far stouter realm
which throngs the oldest
mead-hall where all
eternity comes to drink.
I’m just a motley maudlin
still mooning in the surf,
pruned to leather by
the sun, no longer the brown
child of summer I once
sought to become
but some merry older mentor,
my dominion autumn tropics.
I write here with one hand
on the surf-pole and the
other in my shorts,
both fishing for the gill god
who still roars and rears and snorts
the songs of summer’s spleen.
I am the fool of ten thousand
barstools who’s still knocking back
the tide, my thirst for her so deep
no bottle, song, or woman is
wide enough to slake
the salt germanes I ride.
Not even the sea is wild
enough to pelt the beaches
I here wear though
it must somehow suffice,
shoring once again
that brutaller tensed blue
which serenely sirens You.




LABOR DAY BY THE SEA

2000

Into the amniotic wash of Labor Day by the sea,
Ponce Inlet, SUVs and vans perched feet from high tide,
a sweet dreamy breeze caressing waves softly toward the shore,
sun straight up the dome and still fierce,
my body yielding to the kiss and suck of summer and sea
and curved eternities:
I sit in my folding chaise reading Walt Whitman to the salt breeze,
singing lines which pulsed rhythmic between my body and the sea,
trailing off the page to watch passerby, kids with boogie boards,
young couples proud in what still is unripened,
mothers given over to the suck of their babies,
leathery old men and women resolute to their end,
all emptying out like a tide, leaving just the sea before me,
softly folding and breaking in warm plashing waves,
sibilant in all the ejaculate praises of Walt, the song never ending,
finding in each new age new hearts to break into what now
passes for praise, nursing my aches and spawning my fevers:
I thought I heard the sea sigh oh come nestle in me
as it broke gently into foam and so I walked out into the surf
not believing a syllable but wishing it ever more,
praying for baptism to the rhythm and pulse of each wave,
finally diving beneath a tall one and going still trying to feel
God’s dazzle and drowse wash over and through me
cleansing and lifting me up from selfish gambols,
but it was just a wave going over and I rose up into brilliant clean air
no fresher with rebirth than a moment before but such truths
themselves are nourishing, forever alone yet one inside the womb
I wake and walk from merged at least between arrow and bow
riding metaphorically a dolphin which takes me beyond all I know:
The sun and sea are just ciphers, a mystery which refuses solution
though I stand here naked as law and love permit, my pilgrimage unending:
“You must derange your life” I once wrote by these waters five years ago,
but now I think there isn’t really a choice, life makes you crazy anyway;
Today I hear the sea sing to me
love well your wounds for in thy blooding thou art free;
salt smart hugs I have for you on this bed which rises and falls
And I close my eyes standing in the shallows of the rest of this life
hoping to praise what little I have, praying to love with all of my heart, turning back toward shore at last without any benediction to share
with you but blue green waters and a brilliant sun
and a breeze which sighs Eurydice O woman of waters
I am forever here on this shore between I and Thou
singing ocean songs to the sea, braiding your name in the day.






MINERVA

From Immrama, 2004


Romano-Celtic solid bronze votive in the form
of the helmeted head of Minerva
from 1st century CE was found at
former temple of Sulis in Great Britain.
Intensely stylized, she wears a high crested
helmet decorated on either side with
dolphins. Her hair falls in locks at the
perimeter of her helmet. Her facial detail,
including her wide eyes, broad nose and
tightly closed lips, is strongly preserved.


Something deep in me
stares hard into blue
waters; something deeper
stares back. Wider eyes
than mine focus me
in salt orizons. All I know
is what she sang to
me up the dolphin panniers
of Your well. She rules the
longing of my hand
the way the surf
caresses down the shore,
wave by darkling wave.
Every poem peers
down a depth of
brine, seeking that
bedded isle on
which she waits for
me. Every tree there
is bent with her
nippling fruit; the
very ground at
her feet leaks
a savage, milky sound.
Her eyes are everywhere
the view’s engaged:
like pyres they
freight the day with
glittering lakes and blazing
chrome. She swims
in the slitted eyes of our
cats as I slowly
pet them into a syrupy purr.
And she stares back
hardest in every woman
of my day, their eyes
averted but their
breasts below
so round and and loud,
fixing me in
their impaling gaze.
Her eyes flame
high in all dim
places, igniting words
I don’t or can’t fully
name, a low thrum fizzle
on dark waters
with hooves like
spears, piercing me
every time I look.
Yet for all the imploring
ire of her eyes, her
mouth is utterly silent,
the lips taut as stone,
gathering me here
only to tell no news.
In her silence she
is most terrible,
voracious for
my naked voice,
sliding up
and down the salt
blue registers,
unslakable, beyond
all words. Of course, it
is I who irrupts
her: I pulled her votive
dripping from
the well, & held it here
in this next poem’s
light, writing down
each gorgeous sound.
Minerva I don’t know
what to make of you
quite yet, the
song is perplex
today, too inchoate
and unravelled
and diffuse. All I
can do is lay
this poem across
your dolphin thighs
and bid your flame
adieu before the
real sun rise --
A mortal man
with goddess fins,
her wildest blue
the iris of my view.



WAVE-BORN SANCTUS

From Immrama, 2004
2004

Never is my mind more calmed
than when I’m rowing here,
O watering God, ferrying these
well-dippers of blue resonance
across and down the page.
Who knows if the sound
which so enchants my ear
was poured by that same loins
that filled the sea to brim.
Such facts are not required
to lift and cast my hand in
vigor of every wave-borne horse,
to gallop hoof-on-water
in words inked from abyss.
Their tones are bloom-mercurial,
belle-lettres of orange essence
both virginal and saucy in
the breeze, a mint of two-faced
doubloons spilled from vaults
below or within or on some
hidden shore between this day’s
poem and the poem not here yet.
Sulis, Rhiannon, mare Uffington
and Brigit all bed these lines
in the devout two inches
which margin both sides of flow,
across the fold which separates
the pages by a bind, and beyond
the turn of one page to the next.
Of their actual pubes and nips
and bites and moanings I’ll
not defile this pregnant surf:
Suffice to say such lucencies
coil in the wooings here
which only seem like waves
of words against an always empty
shore. Manannan smiles in Oran’s
gape, his tongue undead and
buoyed above all flood. His
missal slowly fills up here,
inked in his blood and the
spool of some whalish organum
I’ll never understand, much
lest name. My job’s to ferry
in my hands blue jots of
merry scrip and scree, the
jowled juju of Your frothernity,
and leave ‘em on this shore
that ends my every poem,
conch and spilt coin and
wilder wave-wrack than any
one has seen or sung
for you to carry home or on
to shores your gods will bid
you ferry, fold and crash.





AROUSAL

From Cape Blue, 2005

Cape Blue morning I write,
a spring front hard in the trees,
soaring and skewing and blowing
in seven directions at once from
the altered vantage of two open
windows. But that seems too trite,
my real imagined Cape indifferent
to confirming winds. Wild and lovely,
yes, but of no consequence to the
song. Still I imagine walking out naked
into that wet dark, to bathe in the
fullness of it alone in what was
a leisurely street in a small town
now a wilderness of big winds ripping
the sails, the garden become a harvest
of waves, each in worse foment than
the last, and my flukes happy to
have something strong to work with.
Perilous hours of gale too precious
to write and so I just sing as I walk
feeling rain and cold on my skin
and brilliantly happy to be naked
with You and going at it at last.
Grant me an old oak keel, Lord,
weathered by a hundred Cape Blues,
when I enter my love at long last.



THREE CUPS OF SONG

2004

The old singers down my father’s
Tree held three cups of brimming song—
Laugher, weeping, sleep: Dante strolled
Through three states of soul in travail
Between world and God: Three motions
I name here enact that blued waltz—
To recall bad nights, embrace today
And mint the dark ores lifted here:
Three writings row the “complicate
amassing harmony” Stevens
Poured which I here harbor: Three boats now
Line this brightening shore.
And God? A third to every shore:





NEREID OF THE WELL

From Oran’s Well, 2004

This well has a hymen
the day will break
and scatter with its
penetrate light and heat:
And all the secrets
of this well will thus
become known, the
properties of its waters
to physic art or
history. The vowel-like
sound of its cold plash
will find a saint to
garb our devotions in,
an oak or stone to
altar our prayers.
God’s will is divined
by what eventually
happened here
this hot summer day:
but at this moment
before first light
none of that can
yet be known, the
quiet hour like
a nereid’s dream of
still waters and sleeping
fire, the moonlight
icy on the liquid panes
of mind, faint, crystalline,
every fragrant mystery
within and below
all enclosed in the
fullness of God’s maternal
round which wombs
that high sound which now
starts to twinkle out, star
by fading star, replaced
by a low breath reaching
from a distant brightening
coast, pale blue and
swelling pink, tumescent:
And from that waking
heated sound
cry back from spreading
waters this ache, this
need, which makes a
belling cry to birth and
nurse and woo and fury
a wild summer’s day,
to be the white mare
this next day’s king
must ride from dawn
to dusk, partner and principal,
the milk of summer
swelter. She mirrors
the dazzling sky with
a silver bed of
chromatic fire, and drums
within for later storms,
eyes gleaming with the
bolt and thunder
and crash, mouth
receiving wide the dissolving
rains which slowly
fill and quell her well.
When last light
kisses the old gal good
night, she falls into the
futurity of dream, fashioning
the maid from that
lunar silk and leaving
her to hang on the branches
of the trees far down
there to vigil unto dawn,
singing that ancient
lay of springtime love
in the naked glade.
But wait -- to east
a flutter of that flute
which pipes the paling
blue -- in the well’s
black glass I see a
pale face peering back --
mother, sister, lover,
muse and fury
disclosed in one
sweet face rising
there, slowly,
oh so slowly,
by every silken degree
of this next waking day --
she arrives at the
calmed cool surface
opening her
noctilucent oh too
blue eyes: The coming
day pursed for
that moment I say Yes
and we for one instant
pause, and close, then kiss.



BLACK WEDDING BAND

From Black Vigil, 2005

For three days now storms have
swirled in from the Gulf, heavy
muthahs dumping high-wattage
rain in sheets larger than a city.
The sky’s at it again at 4:30 a.m.,
blowsy and suggestive, loosing
its hair into the trees and slowly
raising a register of sighs as it
lathers Ninth Avenue,
wet sounds sieving together in
in the dark into one gentle
genital slush, a lover sighing
O Yes as I write. Perhaps we
are thus wed, me and this
beloved hour with its darkness
now angel-braided with rain,
pen vowed to its black vowels
which offer suck of blue milk.
That sound in my pen is as faithful
as tides of the sea; as the moon’s
feathery amperage of silver,
spilling swoon as it sails -- O how
our garden trilled in that white
noise late last week when
the moon was so full! And O
how the salvia and cat’s whiskers
swell in this lavish love-fest
of rain; I can hear their roots
knocking about like big boners
in moist loam, their moon-
aroused capillaries now
engorged with dark water.
My pen can’t get enough of
that sense, and so I sit and sing
of June’s wet rousing dark,
gorgeous and lush in a
dead sleeping world. This
hour is a congress of bliss
hard at work, building a
house six feet under the
home my wife and I soon
wake to, strangely roused
and wetly refreshed.

PANTS ON FIRE

2006

A book in the hand
is a ball of fire.
— Emerson

My reading magicked
the booze abyss into
descending bliss, the old
jones for reckless dives
toward paps of no avail
become an inside job of
metaphorical descents.
I found my lost God’s
exalts in the brinous salts
of archetype and dream
and verse, wandering
from Jung to Campbell
and Hillman and from
Homer through Rilke
on a fertile promontory
of pure Shakespeare.
A book-to-book assay built
this downward tower into
dark divines, and strung
a eustachian tube of surf
from an angel’s ear to mine.
My feast of saints are shelved
in a burning aviary of books,
a vault of diving boards all
squealing Yippee down the
leagues I follow as I write across
and down the page. Image here
the hungry lover’s pants
collapsing at his feet
and you read the sense I sing,
the urgency of the burning
sun for seas, my words
enflamed, engorged by my
texts’ sea-smelling lacunae,
so consumed by thoughts of blue
that only romping to the
depths of them will do,
each line so hastily wrought
the ladder’s burning too,
chasing the poem down
to its smoking end.
If a heart can think,
so the mind full aches,
its high harrumphings
hooved by a libido
schooled in humping
every naiad numen
to crest the foam
proferring pink deliria.
My book’s too hot to hold,
much less full savor
unless you’re deep at sea
down under any sooth
or certainty that
fills those joyous canyons
a singing voice gestalt,
carving heaven in basaltic
floors of stone. All tides
are margined here, my
sources shared by the
moon and wombs alike,
the cry of first beginnings
in which I shouted full awake
and which no blue assay
can slake, though I’ll ever
try, astride these waves
of ink no angel dares to drink
the fullest measure of.
Oh my pants are on fire
and there’s never page enough
to drop them all the way
before I’m mounted full
upon the fishlike diving one,
plunging in salt exult.
Just like this poem, that
book will never end, the
seas it dreams so nude,
so bottomless, I must
content myself with shelves,
these daily islands like
library wings which harbor
me for just one poem
before the next conflagration
of arcane lyric swings
me further out and down
toward the ankles of delight
and I am fused again
in heaven’s deepest fire
where its words at last suspire
in choiring exalt Amen.





BLUE ENQUIRY

2005

I do not discover,
I remember.
She came into the
downstairs bedroom
where I had gone back
to sleep, some moist
blue silk lifted
from the my
secret sacred history.
She might have been
the Bond girl I
always wished
for, a swell both
Barbie Benton and
that girl who sat
next to me in my
10th grade typing
class, her beauty
like walled country
I would never cross.
The woman I dreamed
had that tidal
blue sweetness just
offshore my actual
life, yet she was
so familiar to me
she might have been
some inside of my
wife sleeping deeply
in our bed upstairs.
She twined around
me naked and tight
and asked me about
her man, that perplex
ruse of stone and North
Sea surf and iron hot
from the forge. I tried
to tell her how
apt he is at boxing
and then shelving
every matter of
the day except
in matters sexual,
a thrall which
whelms every room
of night and day
with seething, pent
and urgent waters.
In just that way
men seem like women,
I said, though, saying
it, it seemed to
me that in that
way we’re exactly
different, women
managing (or needing?)
to keep sex on a high shelf
discreetly out of reach,
difficult to open
and hastily reshelved.
How this could be
helping my marriage
is anyone’s guess, her
perfect naked body
seamed tight against
mine, drawing this
supernal information
from me like it was
the inside kernal
of hot kisses and
thrusting seed. And
yet it was clear
in the dream that
this was pure and
simple enquiry, informing
my past as I rediscovered
it, there in a room I
do not dream but fly
through, carrying
heaven back into
this day. It’s 5:30 a.m.
now, sprinklers outside
whirring the garden
& my wife now yawning
upstairs & something
most old and new in my hand
which I must spread
across the soles of
her feet lightly,
gently, with all the
urgency of those
distant days of spring
now everywhere at once.


HYMN FROM THE REAR

2006

Your charms would keep
me here on this dark blue
shore in the last ranks of
the cultural rear, the vanguard
of a fond, reflective old-
boned glance, of no matter
nor any consequence
to the times: Good for You,
I don’t belong to that ever-
faster harder brighter
dumber deluge with its
crashing falls and white-
crazed foam: I disappeared
long ago from the view
of the fonts of wild youth,
or at best became its
askant bemused uncle,
the lute I play the
road not slakened, plucking
mad and loud
infernal boughs:
As my form rounds and
bends and wrinkles,
I’m thus lurching toward
oblivion’s tribe, a
brightness ebbed to
embers of rue
and thence to pale cold
lucence, the memory
of a dream of fire
which no dearth or
darkness can requite
or suspire: Though my
days shoulder a cross
which befits my age
and love, there is a
yet a lightness in
the music You demand
of me which is less flight
than pure dive in the sea,
the freedom to fin the
depths drowned gods
and whalers fan in
the absolute heart of
God, that nadir where
all things rend remit
and thus surrender
that which at long
last begins: I linger
at that shore long
after all I wished for
all washed away,
the starry romancing
and incessant nights,
sea-dawns cerulean
pink, even, adieu
upon adieu, the sea:
Stripped of
such augments, the
training wheels fell
off and I’m now riding
in Your full blue,
astride a meaty heart
of verbal mouth and
fin, pure penis
sans the old addles
of hooch or plain
wrong beds: I’m more
naked now than
when I was born,
world and word
conjuncted in the
tongue which darts
across the page: You
bid me linger here
so long I’ve emptied
all of the songs,
all insides of the
wave’s collapsing mash
of blue blue blue blue
seem: I have devolved to
this far simpler man inside
walls of strange verse,
a sweetness so deranged
with salt that the sound
harps pure blue gall,
the quintessence, if you
will, of what those
emptied bottled distilled
in the long years after
I was emptied even
of them, at last even
of absence itself: How
wonderful and strange
and quietly enrapt
this hour in which I
try to write waves down
as close in sense
and thought as the man
who rides the fish
which strides them,
not by providence
but in pure
victorious thrall,
forever on these
staining waves which
ink my daily spiral
raves not even You
full understands:
That, I suspect,
is why I keep coming
back each day to
write the measures down:
As I reach back, You
reach forward into the
future gambols of the
tribe, perplex and falling
as they seem: They will
make a later sense,
to be sure: Your strange
gambols have been stamped
like a question mark
for all these ages: My job’s
to make ends blue
and salt my pages with
eternal breadths of You.

***

And to complete this third net-cast: In Keats’ “Endmion,” the hero -- a “new born go” for having freed Glaucus from the curse of Circe, awakening Syclla from her dark depths to rejoin Gluaucs and reviving all the paired lovers who drowned at sea, leads our procession home -- from shore to sea, down to the depths where the court of Neptune waits.

To the bottomost we dive, and thus arrive at the door where we may at last begin:

***

--- “Away!”
Shouted the new born god: “Follow, and pay
Our piety to Neptune supreme!” --
Then Scylla, blushing sweetly from her dream,
They led on first, bent to her meek surprise,
Through portal columns of a gret size,
Into the vaulted, boundless emerald,
Joyous all followed as the leader called,
Down marble steps, pouring as easily
As hour-glass sand -- and fast, as you might see
Swallows obeying the south summer’s call,
Or swans upon a gentle waterfall.

Thus went the beautiful multitude, not far,
Ere from among some rocks of glittering spar,
Just within ken, they saw descending quick
Another multitude. Whereat more quick
Moved either host. On a wide sand they met,
And of those numbers every eye was met,
Fro each their old love found. A murmuring rose,
Like what was never heard in all the throes
Of wind and waters -- ‘tis past human wit
To tell: ‘tis dizziness to think of it.

This might consummation made, the host
Moved on for many aleague; and gained, and lost
Huge sea-marks, vanward swelling in array,
And from the rear diminishing away --
Till a faint dawn surprised them. Glaucus cried,
“Behold! behold, the palace of his pride!
God Neptune’s palaces!” With noise increased,
They shouldered on towards that brightening east.
At every oneward step proud domes arose
In prosepect - diamond gleams, and golden glows
Of amber ‘gainst their faces levelling.
Joyous, and many as the leaves in spring,
Still onward, till the splendour gradual swelled.
Rich opal domes were seen, on high upheld
By jasper pillara, letting through thier shafts
A blush of coral. Copious wonder-draughts
Each gazer drank; and deeper drank more near.
For what poor mortals fragment up as mere
As marble, was there lavish, to the vast
Of one fair palace, that far far surpassed,
Even for common bulk, those olden three,
Memphis, and Babylon, and Ninevah.

As large, as bright, as colored as the bow
Of Iris, when unfading it doth show
Beyond a silvery shower, was the arch
Through which this Paphian army took its march,
Into the outer courts of Neptune’s state,
Whence could be seen, direct, a golden gate,
Through which the leaders sped; but not half-raught
ere it burst open swift as fairy thought,
And maded those dazzled fountains veil their eyes
Like callow eagles at the first sunrise.
Soon with an eagle nativeness their gaze
Ripe from hue-golden swoons took all the blaze,
And then, behold! Neptune on his throne
Of emeral deep -- yet not exalt alone;
At his right hand stood winged Love, and on
His left sat smiling Beauty’s paragon. (III.807-865)