Thar She Blows

It’s out there at sea that you are really yourself.

-- Vito Dumas recalls a Swedish captain telling him this in his memoir, Alone Through The Roaring Forties





THE USES OF
ENCHANTMENT (2)

July 2-3

I missed the folktales when
I was young -- there were
Bible stories in Sunday school
and the rest was TV, movies
& books. My hero's pantheon
was populated by the likes
of Jesus, Roy Rogers,
Frankenstein, Tom Swift
and James Bond; they
were my familiars
instead of Jack and
Perseus and Crow
and Finn MacCool.
Maybe there’s no difference
there -- fables nonetheless
teemed in my forming
brain -- but the mode
was different (literal
and visual, not oral),
and the message somewhat
distilled, fainter of its
former million-year
phosphor, less awe, more
puerile thrall, the
hero’s armory accessible
to me like accessories
for GI Joe. So I fared
my childhood with
faux mysteries and
plastic guns, poorer
arms against feared
nights and even more
dreaded days than those
faerie Danannans
roused by charms
you cannot find but
must produce to woo
their saddles from
green swards. Nothing
to weave from cowslip
blossoms and hang
around the neck of
brutal breasts, nor
articulate and
appease what sprang
out of the bottle in
an effervescent,
poison pop. Without
a Christian god the
dark was steelier still,
indifferent as the stars
which burned holes
through all my bars.
Without a name to
call them, their rough
magic was a spleen
that careened me
helter-skelter through
the vaults of their empty
like Perceval through
the Grail Castle, its
bullion locked on
my wordless lips.
I got all that much
later when I finally
read the tales, when
that old secret language
poured seas back
over my deepest toes
and rose to fill
my throat. Why
did I receive such
grace but to bring
the boon somehow
back, that sons around
the world not have
to fall my way into
so pointlessly bankrupt
a delay. I write these
fairy singsongs down,
enrapt with a music
I can’t sing myself
though something cashiers
in every line I write --
reckless, unbounded,
free -- a marauding
merriment which may yet
dangle for the reader
their own lost gold key,
an invitation to the
dance, to voyage, dig,
bouree, singing every
old song in the book
that all bindings may
swim free in the heart
and ear we share. If
the shaman still wings
in the tree deep in
our tongues -- and I
know he does -- then
any repeat of his
tropes is to learn
to fall his way, eventually
to emerge from that
wild dark with what
he was fitted with
down there -- an
extra bone in tone,
a whale now under
every keel, an undersea
mountain ruddering
each steeple and
erection. Thus I am
lover and guitarist
and scholar and poet
no more, but song
direct from his old
heart, a thick black
brogue of richest blue,
priceless and immaterial,
so woundingly true
as to drone itself
susurrant as nine waves
collapsing on the shore.
I am the sea where
all heroes’ bones are
drowned, figure and ground
of the next most ancient
dream, free in every
way my soon-to-wake-up day
is bound and riveted
and tossed fast away,
a legacy of blue seen
only by You, salt master,
divine eyes staring
back from the deep
end of the well, from
a shore I walked on
long ago, in a book I
cast to the sea today,
from a screen somewhere
far in the world while
you were looking for
something far different --
(“nude mother nipple”
or “party girls ass” you
queried a search engine,
coming across Wick Lit).
Our meeting was meant
long ago when songs
rose in my throat
as I played a toy guitar
for a toad in a yellow
plastic pail. I was three
& engaging a frog prince
whose tale was too long
for me to see back then,
or ever. I’m content now
to pour and pour his
music back in that space
enchantment rocks me,
to let the sea of it baptize
or bathe or craze as it will,
trusting the blue in it
to anoint and ill
as its hoary father deems,
there on his stone chair
at the bottom of my
dreams I boat upon
this chair. Read it or don’t:
I’m doing my job
to make unknowns as
visible as blowing whales,
a spout of verbal joy
startling and effervescent
in moonlight, a forced
spray which hurls
meanings at the sky
too deep for these words
though they darkly, wetly fly.





SEA ROADS

2005

No one said the sea roads to you
would be safe or sane or even
mortally true. The trackless
path has indeed unmade the man
like a bed unmans its riders,
one by one, along the sword-length
of that night not found on
any map of shores in this too-
faintly-blue world. Still your
lovers voyaged on, harp in one hand
and puckerpeckering heart in
the other, reckless exactly
where you dreamed of trespass,
the guards deceived and your
door unlocked in those hours
before dawn when a song
is pure plunge in curve, the
refrains dipped in angel-dragon
fire. You wove deceit and delight
like snakes around their
rousing staffs, the whole
enchantment greater than
the doom of priests and
the quartering horses now
whinnying softly in
dark stables. Yogis of
the first chakra, the least
of heaven’s lights, your
men burned brightest in
your eyes when transgressing
all the way to frame your door
and plunge right in, your
welcome like the curl of wave
which commences to crash
on down the aching shore,
a tumult of blue bliss.
Ah how their songs were
all ferried back from that far
land, like buckets from a
well, brimming over with
daze and dazzle, pierced
and stricken with the color
of your eyes, the glint
of moonlight in the sapphire
hanging between your
breasts as you heaved
your penultimate of sighs,
its facets cut and polished
by every wax and ebb
you’ve altared since lovers
have dared to dance a dream.
Centuries have long passed
and only the songs do
scant remain, a ghostly
choir in miniscule
on ancient parchment,
bereft now of all actual
sounds. Those refrains
down the page are like
markers, perhaps of shores,
perhaps of all the beds
which turned into doors
into vaster regions
far below, beneath all
oceans and most dreams,
where you are every
long-suffered ache inverted
and requited with a Yes,
and heaven is all it
seems when lips to
lips we slake the
hell we now undress.





IT IS BORN

Pablo Neruda
Transl. Stephen Mitchell

Here, I come to the boundaries
where nothing needs to be said,
everything is learned with weather and ocean,
and the moon returned
with its lines silvered
and each time the shadow was broken
by the crash of a wave
and each day on the balcony of the sea
wings open, fire is born,
and everything continues blue as the morning.




LAND’S END, MY SONG


July 1, 2006

Any poet who does not know exactly how many rhymes each word has is incapable of espressing any idea whatever.

-- Charles Baudelaire, introduction to Flowers of Evil, tranls Jackson Matthews.

It always ends here, on the
last page as the day begins to wake,
on this shore of softly breaking
waves where there is no sea
in sight because there is no
need of one, not any more,
not since I heard my mother
sing sweetly over it,
not since I was baptized
in it, not since I was
loved awake and then left
behind by it, not since
I wrote so many poems
in praise and addlement
in it, so many poems that
the sea’s work has tided
so resonantly in mine
that my voice is just
a beachside morning after
a wild night of love between
my beloved and my Thou,
a merged collapsing crash
of thunders up from hell
and pealing down from heaven’s
older breech, that big night music
now distant as the whispering
surf in shells, still ringing in
the inner ear and ghost-
heavy on the hips, my song and
echo of love’s seem inside the
hard-hurled wave long ebbed
from distant shores,
that birth now father to
the water-horse whose
totem I here ride
astride my white riding chair
crossing seas no man would
dare in actual boats but do,
as no sea would ever hurl
these lines but does
in that metaphoric clear blue
that sees me diving deep
in You, and welcomes me
to shores which aren’t
shores nor beds or doors,
but are kisses still
which pull my oars.





THE SEA

Pablo Neruda
Transl. Stephen Mitchell

A single being, but there is no blood.
A single caress, death or a rose.
The sea comes and reunites our lives
and alone attacks and is split apart and sings
in night and day and man and animal.
Its essence: fire and cold; movement.


OCEAN

Pablo Neruda
Transl. Stephen Mitchell

Body purer than a wave,
salt that washes the line
and the luminous bird
flying without roots.