Anitpodal Interdictions

THE ANTIPODES

also from July 22

Eventually I sail so far
to there I’m here, at
the bordermarges of
the known and unknown
worlds, a place where
deep water hangs like
a quilt above the air
and strange men
boom in pagan tongues
rude praises to a God
not worshipped by the
light of day for nigh
five thousand years
though he or she is
surely ours.
My skin crawls with
the prescience of danger,
something oily,
black, and cold,
even though at 7 a.m.
the day is certain now,
sustained, away.
Something in the garden
or far under it yet stirs,
disturbed by my
ravels down the
page, urging my pen
past its curved sense,
gliding beyond
the names of things.
I’ve sailed into the
antipodes of song,
where the sense of it
is upside-down,
low latitudes of page
discoursing in
high-watered rage
upwellings of deep
ocean rich with cold
doubloons, that lucre
of the lunar mint ripped
from keels to gleam
abyss and from
the sea to bleed silvery
across night skies,
lucent as desire, plunging
deep the bent-over nymph
which croons for me
helldoggie-style with all
the purple verbs in heaven.
The lines invert and reverse
in mute ligature, revealing
all that naiad meant when
she left the room with a finger
to her lips & thus slipped
beneath the wave. Those
fading eyes reopened here
to see what seas enclose,
spiralling keels and welcoming
dooms and the court three
miles down where abyss
piles high life’s fallen trash,
filling up the trenches of
the heart. My anchor’s fast
in the cold blue hands
of the warden of that keep,
an iron will which binds
me here to the same descending
song, delving deeper every
time I try to lift my lines
from paper. Now my
song’s a poem no more
but a horn-blast straight
from hell, the clamor of
a long-lost bell pounding
twixt the temples of the
drowned god himself,
his primordial deep rule
over what we escaped
500 million years ago.
What will at cut this
rope of of dopey drone
and let me sail on
to something else? I
wish I knew; for now
I just record the strange
tableaux of day at the
antipodes, calm light
now assured on our street
and a black spout in the
garden, furiously cold
and rich and deep, the
sum of all my poems
laddering down
a thin black column
like a throat or cock
or oubliette down-spire,
vesicle to the root of
songs which, unleashed,
just won’t shut up,
hurling hell’s waters
high through my
welling mouth till
all is floating in the blue
above the forest,
above the sky, above
the last shore between
lost You and failing I.



Season of torrid exhaustions, heat waves across the midwest, in California (San Francisco residents spelled yesterday by a fog off the sea which finally quelled the white quench; no hope yet for denizens further inland), rockets flying back and forth along the Israeli-Lebanon border, the honkings from those goons, wonks, cronies and boobs in the White House at a familiar acrimonious, protective yammer, the morgue in Baghdad cramming past full every day, Christie Brinkley savaged by the adulterous affairs of her husband in the war zone of the Hamptons, etc. Here it has rained savagely and then not, alternation of souse and drought which have spelled up this weird summer, incessant, wild, unpredictable. No hurricanes yet but the pressure is building.

***

I think today the dream of “Interdictions” (see the July 24 post) addresses the problem of “The Antipodes” in its own way, not from the art of that poem but the alternate poetics of heart, reading out the ways in which a home builds a walled fortress against the torrid river of creation, is joyful in its wide safe breadth yet has little depth against the water which comes from below or falls from above.

When Brendan has sailed to the anitpodes toward the end of his voyage, their boat is stuck fast by the anchor-rope in a strange region; the arrival of the dwarf and the good weird man (he’s dressed in animal hair) provide a human signal that they have reached a place less and greater than ours, a liminal, dreamtime, subconscious continent where waking drifts off and the wilderness of beginnings and ends opens its black wings.

In one version of the Voyage, the good man comes a forest where water has risen above the air yet does not threaten all it overhangs. Strijbosch:

“The geographical features of this description -- a place where the water ends and the air is lower than the waters, the abode also of a dwarf and perhaps an underwater people -- indicate that the good man probably lived somewhere near the edge of the known world. This border was seen as the dwelling-place of monsters, pagans and deviants. In the Voyage the good man is accompanied by a heathen dwarf of curious (or even repellent) aspect who sings the strangest songs.” (233)

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my: what is it to become stuck fast there, as if my sounding-line had snagged on a drowned wreck or the belfry of a lost cathedral there? Can lines stray too far from the known world, and become brutally compelled to stay there? What iron will refuses to let go?

The phrase “iron will” is unsettling, resonant with compulsion and addiction, all those years of ending up at the bottom of the same old whiskey glass night after night, bed after bed in search of the same ever-lost love, the way Oran searches fruitlessly for the sea-god Manannan. The surface narrative contributes: both poems were written early Saturday morning, and later when my wife came down for coffee she found the icepack (for a migraine) I had absent-mindedly left on her desk by the front door when I went out to pet Mamacita the night before, prior to heading up for bed. (Such a warm moment we’d had, black cat and I, she curling into my touch, talking with her tail, purring and trilling; an absolute tenderness out in the dangers of her night.) Water had seeped everywhere, soaking all of her mail & papers there, leaving a ghastly white stain across half the desktop. The desk had been a gift from her parents and it was quite an absent-minded outrage against everything she tries to maintain and protect and make lasting.

Boy did I feel awful. It was just another slop-ass mistake of mine, committed in the weariness of a too-hurried life. Too driven: up too early every day so I never get enough rest, too compulsively piling up these writings which do not have an audience, too driven to attend AA meetings and go to the gym five days a week. All of that makes me inattentive, or worse, slop-assed, knocking things over in my hurry, leaving the oven on or doors unlocked, letting my car take a beating without trying to keep it up, etc. etc. ad infinitum ad nauseum. Even the ailments -- the migraines (which account for the ice pack on Friday night), the weariness and bleariness, etc., can all be sourced back to some compulsive force in the drive to live to the full, to accomplish something whose name is unknown to me, to be fit & writ & sober & loved perhaps way out of measure, especially when you’re trying to do all these things in one life.

So the dream came in weirdly -- after the event which I was then unaware of (except, obviously, in my animal brain, which I was too tired to take notice of), before the conflict which erupted the following morning. I had no idea why the poem was to be titled “Interdictions” -- formal bans laid down by the authorities, the destruction of enemy lines of supply -- but my error prompted such a response from my wife. Boy did she let me have it, venting her fury at my foolishness, spilling all sorts of frustrations with me from there.

I left me feeling hopeless yet resolved to put some balance back into the whirl -- some self-imposed interdictions on the madness. So I’m getting up an hour later, trying to hit the gym only three days a week, trying to go slower and get more substantial things done over more time, sacrificing quantity for quality. We’ll see how that goes.

Did the dream’s interdictions augur the dominance of heart over art, and the dangers there? Did it wonder loudly enough whether great work is hampered by dailiness, or that great love is far more fructive than intimations of great work? By turning down the heat some and going about this even more peripherally, will that central iron hold loosen somewhat & allow me to proceed?

Questions only days can answer, in where the singing may yet go. Will the anchor-rope be released (or cut) by these changes, or will I just get dragged down into deeper anitpodes, starrier abysms, blacker contours of the heart?