St. Brendan's Song

O lush humid and sweet
this dark hour, like milky
amniotics swirled round
my mind’s body in a warm
quiescent womb.
What I dream and what I
think and what I see is
most naked here, a
truth whose amen founds
the rapture and terrors
of torrid day to come.
Is late night the inside
message or what I say of it
upon the page? No matter.
Not when I swim out
in the blue yolk of
pleroma, a saline soak
of waves tide with
a mother’s breathing, her
her dark orgasmic sighs
and broken first-light cries.
Clench and quench are
surfeits writ small and
large, both in the spasm of
a line which plumbs the page
as in a old odd book
writ anew on whale
rapt in God’s black matins
two hours from the shore
of day. I write down the
weird marvels that I found
half dreamt, half succored
in the wet woods just
out of town where the wild
world never sleeps, like the
deep whirl of the sea
where appetites rape
and ravine in a uterus
whose psalm is the praises
of every gouting thing.
In the garden, in our house,
over our sleeping cats,
on the hard roads into town,
on the distant sea-lanes
and burning up the
war-vanes our tired
history, a preternatural
angel leys soft fingers
across the lobes of
our tribe, massaging
at the temples
a music which faintly
strobes its lunar angelus,
a pearly cold glass hue.
A thousand wombs
tide in that sound,
forever lost and ever new,
proffering to the sailor
on his watch a compass
of hard blue. Its orient
is fixed on the unseen
paradise inside the natal
north. My book of wonders
is crammed full of all
I’ve seen across the sea
that washes knee to knee
as I to Thou
the heart’s true ecstasy.