A Boy's Song

DOLPHIN BOY

1991

All the world's a whisper,
Where ocean margins cry,
I ride my fevered fishes there
Between the breakers and the sky.

Cities lie beneath the flood,
The sun king sleeps below.
But I croon darkly in your blood,
With brine and brawl and brogue.

A woman waits for you on a shore
No course you chart can reach.
Only storms can take you there
To wreck you on her beach.

I am the Dylan of your fathers,
Galloping the nine-wave brute,
I call you from your harbors
Into the darkness of all truth.




The mythic perspective -- which roots in ancient human experience and spreads its weird canopy in a cathedral arch over our daily acts and sears and soaring souring aspirations -- is one we can never adequately harrow, much less describe or name. It’s too deep, too wild, too strange, too ineffable. We can, as Campbell accomplished in his long career, succeed in quantifying the masks of God in a catalogue of sorts, but that’s as close as we get to enquiring the ghoul behind the eyeholes. Something icy and eternal stares back at us from the well’s bottom, from the resounding surf, from the infinite sky.

Yet we must try; that quest nails us with a passion which we can neither requite nor sustain, no matter how far we flee from it or engage with our most potent articulations. I venture that each of us has a daunting metaphor which we’ve ridden and formulated again and again since we were young.

In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman asserts that each of us is born with a nut of myth implanted deeply in our psyches: “Each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.” The call to my adventure was announced in the lietmotifs of my childhood: in my mother singing to me over the sound of the surf at Jacksonville Beach, in the songs I made up singing to Big Toad whom I kept in a plastic pail, in the nightmare of the civil war outside my grade school where I had first enquired into the nature of what hides beneath girls’ bloomers, in the figure of my father up at the front of the church where he intoned his sermons, in the apocalyptic battles with big lugs who were always whupping my ass but good. Out of those events -- delicious wounds of nurture -- my nature slowly emerged, weirdly fused with those events, deep and strong because and despite the pain I suffered. I sought God in heaven and brassieres and bottles and guitars and crashing waves and poems and the bottoms of wells and abysms plunged by whales along a road whose ley was too meandering, too daunting to understand, much less name, ever more especially so every day.

The quest that has surfaced or been excavated down all these years is impossible -- like stealing treasure from a dragon -- but for that it becomes primary, essential, a bass note resonating under and through all the ways I have along the way mortared and planted myself into the surface world, in marriage and career. While I find myself ever more astride a bland tide of dailiness with its undertow of loss and susurrant ebbing waves, I have at the same time fought for and found a difficult and conditional shore where the quest continues. I’ve grown more serious about the quest as I’ve aged, my personas have morphed through the court cards, page to knight to king of salted sacred space, which for me has become a rock-solid liturgical matin a few hours in the dead of night before the day begins.

There has been a cost, but the very dearness of it has lent validity to the quest, a validity which only gods can proffer and one which is nigh-invisible in the light of day. I’ve lost years of sleep and wasted oceans of ink in this quest. Many times I’ve doubted the enterprise, the dogged drone of it; at those times the quest seems silly and moot. Whatever ends I once dreamed it might bring -- booty, fame, bigger digs inside the soul’s keep -- have come to naught, at least in the ways I imagined. The best I’ve come to understand of this is that the daily framing and farming and flinting and flinging of the mystery itself pays invisible dividends, ones which can’t be harvested until one knows absolutely that they have no cash value and are of no interest to the dayside world at all. That’s the Otherworld deal: fantastic sums which turn to dust at the cashier’s window.

I have my favorite stories, myths which I’ve found along the way which especially resonate with this quest and may indeed be the underworld face looking up at me from all the masks and tropes I’ve fashioned. I love the tale of St. Oran’s travel to the North when he is buried in the footers of the Iona Abbey, down and out in search of the sea god who once had inhabited that isle and fled with the coming of Christianity; Oran travels island to island in search of this god, each time encountering a sign which says “Not Here.” It is a sign of presence at the same time invoking absence, a way of eternally renewing the quest, bidding Oran to sail toward the next shore while at the same time telling us that the searched-for numen is always near but not in any visible way.

I also like the tale of St. Brendan’s voyage, which he undertakes in penance for his burning a book of God’s wonders which he had deemed untrue. His amends is to sail the islands of wonder with his monks and experience what was margined in that lost book, and then, at some far point, return to Ireland, write down what he had seen, and offer the refilled-book at an altar dedicated to Mary, Queen of Heaven.

Along the way he encounters birds of paradise fallen from heaven, the leviathan Jasconius with his tail inside its mouth (on whose back he will celebrate the Easter mass for seven years), a devouring devil cat and a crystal tower in the middle of the sea. All are sights of awe and awesomeness, and each seems like an end -- how could any wonder be greater? Yet each invokes another chapter of the Voyage. Is that not how we quest, too, the mystery growing wider and wilder as we query the phantasms of deep dream and read the mystery texts like the physiognomy of a Sphinx, the details filling in a visage which grows weirdly identical to the one we first found in childhood?

Hillman -- to me one of the great captains of the underworld voyage, articulating motions of psyche which are ever at quest -- turns the notion of growing up on its head, stating it is not up but down that we grow:

***

“To be an adult is to be a grown-up. Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and a heroic one at that. For even tomato plants and the tallest trees send down roots as they rise toward the light. Yet the metaphors for our lives see mainly the upward part of organic motion.

“Hasn’t something critical been omitted in the ascensionist model? Birthing. Normally we come into the world headfirst, like divers into the pool of humanity. Besides, the head has a soft spot through which the infant soul, according to the traditions of body symbolism, could still be influenced by its origins. The slow closing of the head’s fontanel and fissures, its hardening into a tightly sealed skull, signified separation from an invisible beyond and final arrival here. Descent takes a while. We grow down, and we need a long life to get our feet.”

***

Finding our feet: what a mythic tale washes round that theme, a tale tale deeper than the Flood! When Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, is he baptising us in the oldest mystery of all, that of walking up out of the sea and standing alone on bleached white shores? Does our story go back that far? Is our own story, which begins with the first gleams of consciousness up out of a watery mist -- the recollection of a pattern of sunlight on a carpet, the sound of parent’s voice, the softness of a crib with some enormity of space beyond reach -- are such memories metonymic of the oceanic story of life?

If so, then heavens, how could we ever hope to fully write such a tale? Easier to measure the wet part of the sea. “Unsagbareitstropos” is the rhetorical formula used by authors to explain they cannot record everything they should like to write down; the little man on the leaf on the sea who attempts to measure it out, bowl after bowl, is a metaphor for the task facing Brendan, who has been bidden by God to fill a book of wonders with the keel of a coracle which then becomes the nib of a pen. But try he must; and the plenitude of St. Brendan tales in the literature to me tells us that his work is essentially our own, a voyage back to sources, to the treasure hardest to attain.

There’s a child at the end of our deep questing, the one we grew up from and then slowly grew back down into, along all the years of our attempts to measure out the great sea inside us, bowl after futile bowl (or, in my voyage, Bible after bottle after brassiere after guitar after pen). Our end is his beginning, the one laughing and smiling up at the pure undifferentiated world as mother, the whole of it smiling its imprint in the words we will later come to say, no matter how futile and short and shrunken they seem.



BOY SONG

Today

What I write here sails
the words I heard my
mother sing over the
choiring sea nearing
50 years ago. These lines
are rigged in boats
which leapt out
from my chest
when I sang my first
songs back to Big Toad,
the Frog In The Pail
(capitals required here
for a remembered
child’s archons).
Those first songs
rudder these later
ones toward every shore
I heard back then
in my mother’s
the curved sea’s voice,
whose tide and timbre
my songs baptize,
wave after love after poem.
Sometimes it’s just a drone,
as bland and brutally
compulsive as the ostinato
surf which has played
one salt melody for nigh
three billion years; yet
even such dull similitude
delves gold doubloons,
its tidy rhythmus fleet
for daily pannings of the tide,
like pious rosaries of
wild blue. The man that
child became is
both sire and son
of siren song, a welcome
grown cathedral in an
aging man’s lowered voice;
one tutored in the mother
tongue enough to whale
back its gaelic brogue
with all the tang and blister
of the seal-man Angus
who satirized the white priest’s
mastery over exiled seas.
Against all learned brilliance
I go back to that boy’s
whispered pre-tonal tune,
so faint and moot that
you’d surely miss it mid
the clatter of a normal
family’s day, & with the
sea not far away
murmuring grey swooshes
over that boy’s ride
in the rolling heart of God.
His first song is my last
as of this next writing day,
an old bell hauled up from
ocean beds & the wombs
every love I lost & all
those bottles that I emptied
searching for what the
booze so blithely tossed.
His bell’s inside my voice,
a clarion ring of a spout
of a careening wave
of a keel of a flout of
proud jissoming stout
empurpled ding-dong song
which praises Gop in
an angel monkey’s brogue,
clabbering His bell
the way a tongue
hits on the hidden blue
surfaces below of the shore
that first boy’s first song
dreamed. It was just
a heartfelt ditty
on a day forever lost,
a pale small seed tossed
back in the surf
which down the years
grew into this loud
organum of five
times fifty seas,
a music that I’ll forever
shore, whose strange
old ligature I scrawl
in screaming jots of
spermaceti oil on
ink-black mornings here.
On a simple day
I sat beneath a fragrant
pine with a straw
heat on my head,
strumming with
no art upon a toy guitar
& peering in that yellow
pail at low toad, the
diplomat from every
slimy wild nook. I
sang exactly what
I heard the sea croon
not far away in
what seemed my
mother’s voice, and
I sang back, repeating
what I somehow knew
was most my own.
That boy of my first
history is the Hermes
of this soak which
only bears the title
of “poetry” but is something
far older, as that boy
upon the beach taught
the sea itself to sing.
This soak of voice of
words on paper boats
no real tide will float,
much less ferry, is
the theme I womb.
I sing of tide-crashing seas
and they sing back
the shores of mystery,
a bed where my Beloved sings
from God’s depths the
sea’s salt history.




BOY ON A DOLPHIN

2005

He is forever young astride
that sleek so wild blue dolphin,
yeehawing over the foaming
waves or dead asleep -- enwombed
still in first bliss -- or perhaps
even dead, ferried homeward
on Thalassa’s hearse. In all
the flower tucked behind
his ear bespeaks a listening
which trumpets back in
the antiphons of full bloom,
hurling such perfume
that the entire sea swoons
enrapt, sending curve
after curve his way
to plunge and riot
and plow under to
the source where all
life begins. No wonder
he appeared on so many
ancient coins -- the poster
boy for fortune’s pluck,
the gilded lucre through
which old men get
maids to fuck,
a way to duck death’s
swash by minting back
the eyes with youth.
Always a sea and shore
between his romp,
as he and fish are
merged in the marge
of tidal marches which
pulse a God’s blue
augments as they crash
and ebb the heart:
Always a fish-tail for
ship’s rudder, a song
for wet travail, a course
both known and
abyssal toward ends
both gold and bone.
And though the visage
of this tale is young
-- both boy and fish
careen in puppy glee --
it masks a far far
older man’s dark face,
that brooder
of the first horrific
sea, bull-ravager of
Europa, the wolfish
sharps and flats of
Apollo’s golden lyre
keyed from Hypoborean
depths. That old man is
Uranos, cleft of his
huge balls, dreaming
Aphrodite from the
froth of that first wound:
He’s the ghost of the
singer Arion, doomed to sing
to a court of whale-
and ship-ribs
two hundred leagues
below the wake he
was ditched by pirates in,
singing of rescue
to dry shores by the
dolphin not found
outside of songs:
He is Poseidon
inside his stallion
hooves which you
hear bestride the waves’
stampede to shore, a
thunder which grows
loud the more both sea
and land agree to share the
augments of a strand’s
so liquid rocky roar.
Behind or under that
puerile sweet of song’s first
crash and plunge
wakes first man of the sea,
a giant walking just beneath
the boy we care to see.
The boy astride the dolphin
crests so much that’s far
under me, ruddering his
courses in this hand which
writes his emblem down.