Wyrm's Wyrd

WYRM’S WYRD

June 21

In the final movement of Beowulf,
(the dragon) lodges himself in the
imagination as a wyrd rather
than a wyrm, more a destiny
than a set of reptilian vertebrae.

-- Seamus Heaney, introduction
to his translation of Beowulf

***

A dry infection haunts the
tomb, the feral husbandman
of gold booty lost in battles
long ago when giants roared
the tundra of first time.
Beast and treasure are one
in that underground
where ancient kings are barrowed,
night and desire wound
in one fantastic weave
of glittery scales around a
gold scatter of
cups and coins and
gleaming armbands. The
metal’s so intricately wrought
that angels before their fall
led the hands of dactyl
craftsmen in working
foundries cold now for
a thousand years. Jealous
warden of our greatest measure,
berserker who flies
out at cold midnight
like a serpent from
black wombs, the beast
we battle is the one
we booned from ten
centuries of errant falls.
Augment and receipt of what
our lust kills most in us,
his thick coils round
a fire both unnatural
and just. Life ends upon his
trysting-ground, a blasted
heath outside a barrow
by the sea where gale
and brutal surf augment
the crush of dragon ire
upon the awful firmament
we all must harrow, his
black hide our thrall marrows,
both intent upon that ghostly
evanescent gleam which streams
through the final door. No man
can fully afford that gold
nor ferry it beyond inside
the keel of his airing ribs.
Hero and dragon meet at last
at the end of the ancient tale,
joined in a writhing seethe
of blade and fang and molten
fury. Keeper and seeker thus
coil as lovers in their lustful
spite of the other to spring
their door at last wide open,
spent vigors cooling
with their meat to end
the myth at last and
enter humbed history.
Smaller men walk
off wearing some fixture
of the trove -- a tarnished
shield or half-split helmet --
united by a story no one
will repeat except in songs
around a fire, that gold
heat inside a circle of the
the mouth bordered by
the ancient feral guardian
of all that gold devours.





PASSION IS WEIRD

September 1995

I wake these
mornings to an
intrusive agony,
my desire for you
thrashing me
with its bouquet
of thorns.

I know this sweetness
is too sharp
and must be eaten
right away,
a ripe fruit whose freight
of sugar is one
night from
bursting wide.

Eventually
I'll be free
and alone again,
healed of
this fragrant
craze.

On the phone
the other night
you talked about
the origins of
the word "weird"
in the old English tongue,
a blasted heath
where the strange
and the destined
twine fair and foul.

There are
some things
we must enter,
those stone doors
of doubt and loss.

There are
some things we
can avoid --
anything the
sun falls on.

But there are other
things we only think
we can avoid,
until our of certainty
gives out in a whoosh --
most things the
moon opens with
its silver blades,
vowels that woo
then wallop,
the shirt of fire
fanned with a kiss.

We say
it was weird...
which says all
we can't, or won't,
or dare not.

Holding you
last night
is torture today.
Knowing what
I must accept
in that moody embrace.

This weird passion
whets the day to a
frightening,
dizzy sharpness.

Unspeakably with
and without you,
I fall for you
as on a sword.




ST. MICHAEL AND MANANNAN

1995

Based on the drawing by William Blake
of St. Michael binding Satan

1. St. Michael to Manannan

He was part of the darkness
that was once my own.
But you bid me rise
so many leagues
that he became
my abandoned depth.
I think of him now
like the amputee
who wakes cupping
a breast in the dream
of a trembling hand.
Once he tried
to drag me home
and we fought halfway
to the bottom of the sea.
As we wrestled
my hair grew white
and his eyes
slit to dragon coals.
The waters
boiled round us
in a terrible swirl,
chasing sea
beasts to the broken
porches of Atlantis.
When I finally
broke his hold
and fettered him
in your chains,
his face sank
the thousand
leagues of grief.
Often these days
I think of him
disappearing into
those silt shadows.
My heart at least
has never been a blade.
You've built your walls
and towers now,
demanding a new
heaven of Gothic stone.
But understand
that each time
I intercede for you
and jam my white
sword in to
the bloody hilt,
an ancient narwhal
suddenly breaks
the sea to pierce
God in the back.

2. Manannan to St. Michael

When the last lock
snapped into
the links of doom
and he rose like
a white sword
to the sky,
I fell into deep
chill moodier
than any fairy spell.
The waters darkened
about me in a cloak
that forever hid
me from your view.
To me you portioned
hoof and horn,
the least parts of
the king's stag.
You paupered
my waves with
cunning boats.
Banished from
the cities to hide in
distant hills and islands,
I became a sleek
captain of absence,
forced to ply my
trade in dream
and sensual smoke.
My gold meadows
blazed to stubbled char.
I understand
that every time
I meet him the white
sword wins all.
Ah, but if you only
understood how those
losses make me strong!
I ripen on a vine that curls
about your sickness,
sorrow and death.
If you would only love
the gall now chilling
into winter, the gates
of my damnation
would forever close.
Perhaps then
the white prince
and I could resume
our song upon that
apple branch
where the fruit is
sweet and cold
and heavy as sleep,
where each bite
fills the mouth with moon,
and the juice runs darkly
down God's uncertain smile
the way eternal lovers
find the greatest grace
exactly where they fail.



BEYOND THE HERO

2004


If you meet the hero on
the road, drown him in
the mere. Subsume
his questing premise
in its blue ache, his mail
delivered tumbling
back to that Beloved
he will never find
nor ever lost.
Here is the night, more
ripened than you
can ever pray to juice,
offering suck to those
who praise the way
it hangs and swings
inside the shelves
of humid dark. Hold
it here at the
altar’s lip where you
hurry all your verbs
into her spread
too-lucent clench.
Praise the split whale-boats
and sunken skulls around
which the garden rises
so fragile and labile
and triumphant. Praise
our cats prowling for those
doves and hummingbirds
who kiss our day. And praise
the expense of sleep
which whorls like fog
an ocean phosphor
round the top of the
streetlight just outside,
just beyond the
world where all seems
riven with the dead.
The murmuring
light of dreaming
drowning men
is inside your mouth,
crying yes as it burnishes
the knight in his tired
armor where he lies
at the threshold of a
castle where an old
king keeps trying to
reassemble the broken
chalice which is
the history of my
long and fruitless
travail away from you,
an errant mission I
have found, useless
because the fathoms
of cold water of your No
does not so much drown
as disclose the amniotic
leak inside my desire
to hold you tight
at last and hear you
cry my name. Throw
the hero in the mere
that he may know
he windmill in his
gut which keeps the
king’s lands dry
and far apart; and so
beneath its ceaseless
awayward motions
find that stone which
lifts and loosens and
fills every quest with
brine. Praise the sounds
of his horse’s hooves
clopping far down
and inside the black
heaviness of this night,
the armor’s creak and
clatter, his tune almost
tonelessly whistling the
matins of his momentary
quench inside the
sweetly ravished
and deeply birthing bride.



SONG TO LIR

2005

I’m still in thrall with those bad
old nights. Black fiddles still
saw swoony and fey that
big night music in my reverie;
something lurches when I
recall the thrill of driving headlong
into the darkest rooks of town,
scenting something blonde and
bloodlike in the night breeze rushing
through the opened windows
of my car, the ions of summer
storm and surf igniting my
neural ramparts, like St. Elmo’s
Fire, with the eerie wattage
of danger and booze and sex.
That blue alchemy was the
quintessence of my Faustian
dive into LaLaLand, pouring
myself in votive jolting jets
down into the badassed
veld of all Black Mothers.
Certainly all that is
nothing to fall too much in
love with again, else I fall again
in all those hurtful ways.
Yet in that gnarly bad-booze
brew a crystal bed lay far
down out of view; at the heart
of those dark quests lay the
the hope of finding once again that
bright grail of clear blue love
which in all the years of
roaming and ravening I had
blundered on two or three
too-brief essential times,
each a milky pure enactment
which washed me more
cleaner of my arrears
than when I was baptized in the
sea at Melbourne Beach
when puberty shot me forth.
Perhaps that soft-glo bed
of Perfect Love was just the
golden carrot of a darker
more selfish appetite for More;
I certainly crept out of
far too many beds
at the far ends of those nights
believing Love -- the free-fall,
lucky type -- was nowhere
on that rumpled snoring shore.
All that is true, but these
days another thought begins
to form that the whole of that
gambol between savage lust
and starry love was just the
foolish half I too much believed,
meant by godlike hands whose
ends were mine, as if
my enbrined sense could drink
a goddess night to dregs.
A Puritan error I have so many
drowned fathers to thank, I think.
I come to sense now that while
I dissembled like an Actaon on
down those bad years, ever more
mauled and shredded by my own howls
for love in a wilderness of rock taverns
and boob bars and and bottle clubs,
some darker underside was nursing
from me, not so much from my acts
but the desires which teated them,
growing more visible as a shape defined up from an
enormous sea which is the greatest
part of me, a whale which grazed
upon on my yearning midnight stare.
While I banged on to ruinous ends
it lurched and followed, devouring
every whiskey bottle, bra and guitar
pick I flung over a shoulder toward
forgetfulness, each a wafer of communion
which slowly woke his soul in mine,
night after night, acre after fathom
of that watery abyss. And then one
night I found us somehow one,
my slipping & sliding & oh so
wounded feet astride his hoary back.
Back then the endless drinking felt
like I had fallen in the whale,
but now I sense that I had just
found a footing there where falling
is the precipice of everything
desire bid me lose. Weirdly too
I sense I’ve yet to hit the real
bottom of that sea, years now
after the last bad boozing night.
There were years in which I
boarded up against all beams
of wet wild night; then years of
reparation for the guilt and shame
by living well and deep. There came
hard education where I learned
that love could not become itself
till I forsook all hope of pouring
it its perfection from a bottle,
babe, and bed. Amid all that
I felt him there, dangerous and
wild, a dark layer of endless
ache which no prayer could
fleece or flay. Now I sense I’m
simply heading deeper as the
two of us swim on. I think
of those old nights and,
with no actual desire to lose
myself in them again, sigh and
swish the liquor of it here,
feasting with stained chops
upon its taste of endlessness,
hauling on huge nipples of
forever-sweeter more, invoking
that blackout in the beast
which parks me on the shore
of Paradise. Yes -- oh feel that
dark immensity lurch deep
within, free and feral in the
deepest nacre of the thrall,
cresting a huge wave in a shower
of moon silver to spume spermatic
fire defiant toward the sky,
crashing down with all the massy
freight of an old, emphatic joy.
And that is just the surface part,
for he dives deeper than what
sight I’ve learned to toss. The limbic
sea he swims on down and back
I will never fully sound, much
know how many million years
he thrusts and fins the verbs.
I’m writing here truly as I’m
riding him, a silly dram
of wakeful ocean on a course
of endless waves, boy cupid
with this tiny flute astride
the night’s Leviathan.
Carve me on the upmost
arch of his coat of arms. Hang
us on the headboard of every
bed I’ve held a woman in.
Carve us on the gravestone
where at last I’m fully wed.
And to every savage fantasy
I hold like whiskey on my tongue,
may his loll like the clabber
which all night bells are rung.


THE GOLDEN ASS

2004

High and lower god, you both have
Tails: No wonder ass is both my
Cup and curse, the gnomon of dark
Doors & arch foolery. The drunk
Has shit for brains, getting high on
Lows, his first thought hot for the worst
Rub-a-dub ding-dong diddly-dunk.
Ass chants its own high mass, just turned
Upside down: True in the fishy
Funkiest derange, chasing each
Salty dog from tail to sea to
tell all again. O give me the
Purest baptism of all, my sweet,
Nail me deep to all I cannot say:
Soar this song’s end -- O walk away!