Homiletics

What could be more full of meaning! — for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes to the rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence, it that the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is that the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is the prow.

-- Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 18, “The Pulpit”

***

Saturday morning nigh 6 a.m., all yet dark, asea in the warm humid swash of high summer, birds beginning to toll the day’s alarums in their gentle world-deep voices, choir of a church whose billowing pews are palms, pentas, the hulks of sleeping houses. The saturate silence of the night yawns and slowly settles into wakefulness, pianissimos of sprinklers and the occasional car up Ninth Avenue rousing now in birdsong and spreading light. A sun approaches.

***

... every nature moves across the tide
of the great sea of its being to its own port,
each with its given instinct as its guide.

-- Beatrice explains our yearning for the origin of Heaven in Paradiso I.112-14, transl. John Ciardi

Have you heard about blue holes? These are oceanic sinkholes, formed after the last ice age when meltwater flooded vertical caves. Recently a research team from Texas A&M visited Abaco Island in the Bahamas with the mission of collecting specimens from these strangely formed depths. Oxygen content is low and salinity varies dramatically from surface to depths. It is believed that many ancient species previously thought to be extinct may yet thrive in blue holes. Already the team has discovered several new species of crustaceans -- or is it that we haven’t discovered their fossils yet at the bottom of the known seas?

I’m not seeking to re-work old material here -- Lord knows, how the poetaster in my ear loves the sound of “blue holes” -- Oran’s Northern well, the gullet of the diving whale, the dark cold descent into the first regions of things -- But I also am faithful to delve into what has been presented, and be nourished by that which upwells there, through in the sixth sense of the mind’s eye, call it the imagination or the art of the heart or the sailing of an inside sea which pours greater than the seven seas of the known world. A boat appears on the horizon hoisting an unknown flag; a figure stands in the prow; I am greeted in a strangely familiar tongue which is older yet newer than anything I have yet heard; I get the news from him or her as a dispatch from the Other World. Sometimes it’s a dream, sometimes a song, but always the news challenges me to say or see things somewhat askew of my former sense of them, to trope the ordinaries of the known into extraordinary sounds which somehow resonate more deeply, wildly, succinctly. In the I Ching there is are outer and inner world arrangements, the visible world and an unseen but equally real invisible one; they match each other but at an odd angle, the inner world always a notch askew from the outer one. Attenuating to that sixth sense is always an effort to move things around until there’s a click of infernal, internal correctness, a sound which confirms arrival at a crashing shore previously unknown.

I’ve identified that process with the writing of poems for years, though I have long lost the belief that what I end up with have any value as poems qua poems. Visibility in the outer world is not the point, though I’ll always selfishly long for a voice of recognition out there, a lover’s voice or the deep resonance behind that voice sighing yes as the last line gets across.

***

It’s been years since I’ve tried to publish any of my poems elsewhere than this blog, though I have sent some massy batches to my father to read. He is a partial owner of them, as many are rooted in conversations we’re had over the years, especially as they relate to the Oran-Columba mythologem.

Perhaps the nullility of my poems in the market of poems is because their telos is not poetic but homiletic; the verse is just the horse by which discursive and exegetical exhumations take place, a fitting engine for an illimitable wash.

Sound as vehicle, lines as waves, the physical enactment of a stylus across paper: all of these were written into me at an early age. When I wa between the ages of five and seven I would accompany my father to a random suburban church where he preached his pinch-hitting sermons. (For a time after he formally left employment in the church to work in socially-conscious business consulting in downtown Chicago, he was a sort of utility infielder, called in to handles services at this or that Presbyterian church around the northern suburbs when a pastor was sick.) I would sit in a pew toward the front, and when he began his sermon I would fish out one of those tiny pencils housed next to the tithing envelopes on the back of the pew in front of me. He’d preach and I would doodle on my copy of the program, the sound of his voice something I would bodysurf with the pencil, my motions on paper miming the susurrant wash of his homily. i(He’d trained in oratory at Princeton, so there was a rich texture to his baritone.) I didn’t much get the sense of his words, nor did my doodles much assemble into more than that -- I would for a few years later imagine myself an artist, and studied art until I was 12 or so (when I discovered girls and rock and roll), but now I come to think that it was never about making something artful out of that motion. As ever, at root is simply sufficed to keel a pencil over white water exactly as I heard my father’s voice pilot the soulage of an anonymous congregation from the prow of that pew.

So now I think nothing much changes in this life, that history is a false front, a fiction of narrative which hides an inner-world mystery of poetic timelessness. I’ve written variously over the years, but I have always been in that pew, writing down the Father’s voice as best as I can hear it. I started writing poems in high school, lyrics really to songs I was trying to write on guitar, goopy love-songs to girls I was hopefully infatuated with or steely earnest Christian salvation songs in a key consonant with the evangelical Christianity my father was then about. When my father left Church and family to come out of the closet and swirl in the world, I headed for the other end of the continent where I ditched the faith and tried writing something more serious than lyrics, morbid dark stuff churned out of my horrid isolation. I was sounding a deeper voice than my personal father’s or perhaps beginning then to hear something more deeply resonant.
I wrote crap, but all that juvenilia reads now to me like a voice sorting itself out amid the nine times nine waves of the sea.

In the years after I ditched college I tried playing in bands and wrote sporadically, influenced greatly by Theodore Roethke and Thomas Pynchon, sound and sense still vying for the right pitch in my ear, something imitative of authors I loved and those lowering homiletics. (I have to also add here my mother’s voice, for that sound is deeply embedded into the sea, conched in memories I have of her taking me and my brother to Jacksonville Beach when we were very young; so there a heart and an art to that voice in my ear, from my parents, from the god and goddesses of history and mystery behind them).

What to say, how to write it, what to do with it? I’ve written poems and prose seriously enough for a solid fifteen years -- all of the poems & prose & journals could fill up a wall of bookshelves -- Yet for all of that saying, it has for the most part fallen into a chuck-hole, been tossed into shaft or well. The conversation has little been with living others as in with a symposia of the mellifluous dead. A blue hole, if you will, which some stubborn voice has consistently harrowed and marrowed into the silent hidden depths of something.

Have I been trying to find the source of that voice, merged between my own history and the mysteries of the world? Will I ever awaken from that task, is there ever another one? Does one continue to row on and dive deeper and ferry further the stranger skulls exhumed there because that is the single task the sound of a voice has accorded me in this life, be that voice my father’s, dead authors’, or God’s? (Or my mother’s, lost lovers, and the Beloved?)

Or has all of that paper poundage massed as a sound not of explication but rather compulsion, a fearful daily retreat into the unknowable regions I feel safest in, Jonah singing his beer-hall-songs in the tumtum of the whale at the bottom of the mater sea? Is writing a prior peramble through every drowned suburb of a dead-wrong way which one must eventually repent of? If I shout enough blubbering!, will I be belched onto a shore, there to walk into town and commence hollering jeremiad at a world sorely in need of chastisement?

One wonders. I do, at least, here close to 7 a.m. after this harangue with God at the pulpit (with a poop break and cat-feeding intertwined in its frenzied keyboard weave). Everything outside now is raw and purply, yolk of dawn just broken in the east; I just heard my wife cough upstairs, signalling her waking: ‘nuff said here for the day, my sermon is winding down. Full day ahead, gotta mow the lawns and take pictures of two pillows my wife has made for my mother and aunt, head into town with my wife for a few errands and then on to my mother’s to celebrate our mutual birthdays (they’re a week apart) with my sister and her three teenaged girls. Chances of rain 50-50, swirler stuff now forming down south of Puerto Rico; killer heat blanketing the north from California to New Jersey; Day 18 of the latest mideast war with the Israeli military and Hezbollah militia volleying shells at each other’s populace while the world wrings its hands at the awful complication of things, while the simple world wakes and flexes its wings and sings blue wonders but softly, and the garden’s thick green and in blossom and needs no comment from me.



From Chapter 19 of Melville’s Moby Dick, “The Sermon”:


Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. "Star board gangway, there! side away to larboard- larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!"

There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher.

He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog- in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy-

The ribs and terrors in the whale
Arched over me a dismal gloom
While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by
And lift me deepening down to doom.

I saw the opening maw of hell
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell-
Oh, I was plunging to despair.

In black distress, I called my God,
When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints-
No more the whale did me confine.

With speed he flew to my relief,
As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
The face of my Deliverer God.

My song for ever shall record
That terrible, that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,
His all the mercy and the power.


Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah- 'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'"

"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters- four yarns- is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God- never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed- which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do- remember that- and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

***



***

Amen.


THE SERMON

July 31

Here I give voice to Your
hard blue tide which
tows me cross the surges
of the heart from my will
to Thine, not on any
merry surface but
deep and mordantly,
amid the hoary mossy
gleam of every hope
for easy passage
to split and spiral down
the whale gullet
of wrong things. My story
is a fish-tale of the
soul who almost
got away from the sea;
an immrama of island
plunder whose every
shore’s surf thunder
foamed the false birth
of the underling who
thought to find you,
as if any compass, keel
or throat could find,
much less name,
the white sands of
God’s land inside
this mortal main.
Such voyages turn
hellish, a freakish
panoply of dwarves
and whales and
mermid sea-trash
sucking clean
the marrow of
your bones &
belching back
the foetid Bible which
foretold the doom of
the errant fool’s whim.
Hopeless and wrong
are my words without
Your blue, redeemed
only when this loutish
tongue had learned
the harrows of a
a brogue too low
and brutal for
any human words
to frame, too broad
for oceans seen by
the light of day.
Surrender is the
only escape when
abysms breech that Cape
through which all
boats cannot escape
in rounding their way
home, a pole of awe
and awfulness too wild
for any pen to sail
inside this errant hand.
At that equidistant
too-fraught land I
gave up the ghost at last,
that hope that I
would find again
the curved and shining
one who left me for
a door which closed
upon rude seas.
Gone, and no words
fit or fleet enough
to round the howls
of absence. I can’t say
it loud or true enough
so I just let it go,
here on the unquiescent
wave of a lost heart’s
macerating smash.
May my ebbing back
to You begin the
long slow sigh of
a lover quelled of
his high ire, a
bluebelled ardor
felled exactly where
it mounted, hurled
and died. Not my
will but thine
these final lines
in ending choir.
A benediction for
the day which
now slowly rises
in the east
upon a wave of fire.



CARVE EVERY WORD

written during my
separation from my wife, 2000

Carve every word
before you let it fall
my father would intone
instructively, repeating
his debate coach
from Princeton: Pointers
for preachers. He thought
I would head to
seminary after college,
carry on his torch:
but my faith spluttered
in the wake of my
parents’ separation
and I sailed on
far West, bereft of
prinicpalities.
That leaky dorm
room outside Spokane,
a monk’s cell
where scholastics
and Led Zeppelin
subbed for theology
and Christian song.

I took my first
creative writing
class that fall
composing grim
soliloquies like
“where do all/
the ghoulies go/
when they fall/
into the endless/
elevator of the grave?”
Carving the words
as I fell into winter
and worse.

Not much has changed
really in 25 years:
Here I sit at 4:30 a.m.
on a Monday
before work and later
a grad school
class in form &
poetics, ringed now
as then by books
(collected poems
of Wm Stafford,
WC Williams’s “Paterson,”
verse journal, day/dream
journal, a journal for
bon mots and snippets,
some essays on Williams
too if there’s time).
Here now slashing
a shape that feels
like heart or mind
or cock or all,
pen nib bleeding ink
on blank pages:

Tactile, physical,
horse or dolphin enough
to suffice though
really it’s just a
scratch of sweet-
sounding absence.
Williams, “Paterson:”
“the poem/
if it reflects the sea/
reflects only/it’s dance/
upon that profound depth/
where/it seems to triumph.”
Old Bill, whose poems
I admire less for their
meanings than for a
courage to keep moving:
To carve poems on
the sea, marvelling
at love’s blueblack
proximity to the sea,
to this ink,
to the silly shit I think
at times like this.

Geez, you’d think
I would grow more
accomplished by such
motions repeated
for years. (Decades!)
But it’s a tussle with
some greater
angel of the same
sorry silence. Write it!
sd. Elizabeth Bishop
of the daily drain
to zero. (And well.)
Resume the lecture
on heaven’s predilection
for hellish sutures:
sermons, if you will,
on dark (or dank) matters.
My father left my mother
to carve his name
on men’s backs, then
stones. I left my wife
to oar the waves
of another woman
and write my
woes in poems:
Father to son
some work circles
a paradigm.

The work goes on,
too, alone now,
hoping for enough
ink to write to
the next margins.
They’re dark, I know,
sea-sounding but never
that real, that wet.
It’s safe here
only in one way
(less mortal)
though the blades
are sharp and
the stakes high
enough. It’s always
been about the fall
into song, lonely
livid and lost:
Words over water
buoyant only for
this moment
I suspend between
you and I. And then,
like all living things,
the connection dies.

Write it! Coracles
spinning on a blueblack
tide, hidebound vernals
for you and I or any
voyager to ride.
Carve the waves
correctly as they surge
and grieve each
one as it falls.


FATHERING

2004

Surely this exercise, my friend,
Schools an errant son inside this
Hand: Only eight beats to a line
And only fifteen lines to get
Say it right -- heavens, I’ve wasted
Half my chance! What a chore to haul
Down eagles here, to leash the tide,
To wrap a diaper round the rant!
How can so little said say all?
Can’t be done! the wild son fumes.
My brogue is meant for bigger seas.
But then a deeper voice assures
Me that this work is good, even
When the conceit of trying fails.
Son, he says, each cross needs its nails.



SONG TO LIR


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.



DEEP WAVE RIDER

Deep waves stroll the oceans
unseen to all surfaces
on the cold wings of abyss,
a visceral tow glowing
with the gules of minerals
torn from the paps of hell.
He rides those waves too,
my fish-familiar, in this
songlike totem I ride here,
his salty ancient brogue
still rich on my tongue
after a thousand mortal
spans. I on a fish which
masts deep waves is
what makes the music
so hugely dark, opaque
and fell, a buckaroo’s derange
in Moby’s wake
where shattered hulks
and eerie churchbells
fan by too fast and dim
to hearken, much less name,
and life is pure Silurian,
a swarm of sharks and jellyfish
and trilobites about the
same matins now for a half
billion years. That infernal choir
lifts the base note I here sound,
my vox humana the highest
ache of jism and jawing
egg, the hot rush of futurity
which forever lives the
next day with ravenous teeth
in a gale of sweet-torn flesh.
Just what song is it, I
wonder, rolling three miles
beneath my saddle? What
beast of lyric hooves so wild
and regal blue as to make all
depths divine, be they in
my words or in the sea or in
the angel’s fall between
us who limns the barrows
of all lost gods. From trough
to crest I clasp my knees
to waves as tall as Pyranees
yet never crash on shores
my love will ever see,
as if love’s shout of pure
liquidity was never meant
for beds or beaches or
the dry breeches of songs
about love, rather than
the ones all depths love.
Primal as to drown
the dreams of shamans
etched on walls not seen
in ten thousand years,
this music is old, it was
lifted pure up to God
when men and beasts
were one, brother and
familiar, both in the
maw of appetite and
the stellar foam of lust,
both in the other so
vastly that whole
caverns failed to harrow
the rituals of rebirth
into the womb which
birthed us all.
Perhaps that’s why
I’m here on the biggest
waves no human eyes
can see, yeehawing
to high heaven on
thalassas of brine joy,
lurching and lifting
up to crown Manannan’s
thrall, wilding all the
way down here where
Uranos parked his balls
in a mess of Venusian
cream. When I’m on my
beast we lord the waves
which rock and roll the seas --
the boy astride his guitar
of a cock of fish of a pen,
come at last to gig
the big night music,
power--chording deep
waves like shouts of
whales between beneath
and past all shores.

***

”Delight, -- top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake him from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath -- O Father! -- chiefly known to me by Thy rod -- mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s; or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”

He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.

-- Father Mapple finishes his sermon in Moby Dick, chapter ix