The Triune Heart

... Far had he roam’d,
With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam’d
Above, around, and at his feet; save things
More dead than Morpheus’ imaginings:
Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large
Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;
Rudders that for a hundred years had lost
The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss’d
With long-forgotten story, and wherein
No reveller had ever dipp’d a chin
But those of Saturn’s vintage; mouldering scrolls,
Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls
Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude
In ponderous stone, developing the mood
Of ancient Nox;—then skeletons of man,
Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,
And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw
Of nameless monster. A cold leaden awe
These secrets struck into him; and unless
Dian had chaced away that heaviness,
He might have died: but now, with cheered feel,
He onward kept; wooing these thoughts to steal
About the labyrinth in his soul of love.

Keats Endymion Book III, 119-141:


Three regions delve the dive
to the bottom of the sea --
shelf, slope, abyss.
In the first the world’s great
fisheries abound, like herds
of finned cattle, swarming
oblative as the feelings by
which the human heart
is found. Now comes
a long slow downward slope
that can fall for miles,
drowned ranges of Alps
we can’t see but haunt
the thickening gloom. This
seems like a border of
present names for
the heart, a wild where
no plants grow and
only carnivores dispatch
each other with something
like a pagan hunter-gatherer’s
intent, where sex is always
dangerous and saddles
the black mare of deep-water waves.
Maybe these peaks
and gulfs were cut by rivers
and winds some dry aeon
off the books, a savage
season of the heart
too old and brutal in its
yawp to do much else
than drown in a mercilessly
mothering sea. Finally
there is abyss as old as seas,
where water first fell and
never left, unevolved the
way shores are shaped
by waves and wind,
permafrosted in a permanight
under the weight of three
atmospheres. Its floor has no
known contour -- geologists
guess great lava plains
are laid up by muck and grist
of all fallen things from a
hundred zones above:
bones, shells, masts, men,
booty, shit, poems, loves,
gysms by the tetra
spoored almost forever.
Everything lost and tossed
is the bed abysms form,
a turbid massy marl where
dreams and ages snarl
inchoate in the
shadows of continents
far above, themselves
chthonic reefs.
Where islands form on
crests of volcanoes,
the sea compensates with
a trench that dives
as deep as six miles, so
what ravages highest in
the sea falls deepest
just behind. The deepest
trench lies east of the
Phillipines, another east of
Japan, a third’s south
of Cape Horn. When I imagine
these three terrains
I name the contours of
a heart which I shore
with you and all creation’s God,
a downward dome inversed
from the sky, completely
hidden from dry eyes trained
on surface waves. We shout
from mastheads at the spout
ahead which trumpets
from the depths we hunt
because we fear them,
and fearing secretly desire to
barb our heart’s own darkest
devil fish and stain our chops
with his gore and light our
lamps with the oil burned
drown from heaps of
blubber and suck the
honeycombs of his brain
that too partake of seas.
The heart’s charm is wound
in three steps down the
gloom, a nekyia which propounds
itself even as we pray our
keels sustain blithe crossings
of blue mains. See: I’ve
written shore to shore
to hell, and somehow
ballasted back on
the weird air that I
found -- prescient and
old, ripe as a sperm whale’s
spout, remitting here
what he inhaled so
far and long ago.
And through it I find
the heart’s low contours
enormous, dark, and wild,
productive of the dream,
the song of bliss, the child.




PAUSE HERE

July 15

Run the sprinklers in the front
yard (when I stepped out on
the porch to get to the controls
our big possum stared thinly
up at me & then skedaddled)
and pause here between big
waves on an early Saturday
morning with Violet sleeping
on the couch across from
me and the night outside
prescient and hot and humid.
No rains yesterday, none
for a few days, just heat’s
mortificatio, a shrill surl
of swarthy brilliance. At 7 a.m.
I drive over to Oviedo
to pick up my father-in-law
and drive to the posh Mall
at Millennia; he wants to
check out iMac at the Apple
Store and I volunteered to
help him decide. I worry
about my mother who had
a PET scan yesterday for
a growing nodule on her upper
lung. I worry about my wife
who’s alone too much &
grieving for a the business
she loves failing to sell. I
worry about my job which
is about working hard and
not selling much either,
not enough, not ever. I
worry about the Middle East
with Israel at arms against
Hezbollah radicals in Lebanon
with Syria and Iran just
beyond arming their
Ketushka rockets which
fall deeper into Israel
& all our troops sitting
over there in Iraq &
ready to drag the rest
of the world in. I worry
about a world drowning
fast in its modernity.
I worry about fundamentalists
who would legislate
medieval ways & I worry
about the mindless zealots
of libido appetite & Visa
who are consuming what
remains in one gobble.
But the sound of water
in the garden soothes,
like the susurration of
these lines, like the
remembered sound of
soft tides sighing
on Atlantic shores. I’m
grateful I have this home
despite once being
poised to throw it
in the drink. I’m grateful
my wife still loves me.
I’m grateful that there is
so much good work
still to do with or without
much presence of You
in the way this fool heart
dreams. Water slakes
and fans cool this morning’s
too-warm too-still air;
this poem makes a third
ballast of rightness for
a world more pointless
every day. Thank you, Lord,
for this sweet mess where
shells are pounded down by
waves to grains which weave
the sands of tomorrow’s pre-dawn
walk. I call this wetness good
and promise to pour it full out.





Brendan cannot accept that what he reads about God’s wonderful creation is true. This in itself would warrant a penitential journey. By making Brendan’s doubts culminate in the burning of a book, the Voyage author has given the journey an entirely new aspect. As Brendan’s sin is his doubt of the truth of the wonders described, his penitance will be a journey to see them himself. It is this journey which constitues the contents of the book which is written as it progresses. The penitent becomes a traveller, the traveller a writer.

***

The reason for the journey as a form of penitence is fairly clear in all versions at the beginning of the text. The way the story is finished is less accomplished. It is only in the Middle-Dutch version C/H that Brendan asks explicityly how the book is progressing. This is done after the adventure with “the invisible people” and the anchor which proves impossible to raise from the bottom of the sea. The chaplain answers that the book has long reached completion. Brendan does not hesitate for a moment; he has the anchor-rope cut and announces his decision to return to Ireland to deposit the book at Mary’s altar. Not long after they arrive in their home country.

-- Clara Strisjbosch, The Seafaring Saint: Sources and Analogues of the Twelfth Century Voyage of St. Brendan

***

((In episode 27 of the Middle-Dutch version of the Voyage of St. Brendan)),

It is hot and there is not a breath of wind. The ship has been becalmed for weeks, when a gust of wind blows it to a place of shallows. There the company hears all kinds of sounds: church bells ringing, the singing of priests, the sound of horns, horses, and cows, singing, dancing and the frolicking of men and women. The monks are surprised that the sounds are so close and yet they cannot see anything. Brendan does not know whether to make the ship go forward or backward. They decide to swing the lead; it hits bottom very quickly. Next they drop anchor. At once it is caught by someone or something under the surface. The sailors find it impossible to pull it back into the boat. The first mate is not sure what the best procedure is; if they cut the anchor rope, they will be without an anchor for the rest of the voyage. The monks pray to God and lower the sail.

... This description of an invisible people which is located under the surface of the water was linked by Maartje Draak with a number of lines in the introduction to the Voyage. There is is said that, in the book which he will consign to flames, Brendan reads, “How there was a world/Here under the earth/And when it becomes day/It is night there.”

— Strijbosch, ibid (earlier in the book)


ANCHOR A-WEIGHED


July 17

You will let me know,
salt Father, when
I have written down
the breadth of waves
You hurl and sounded
Your depths enough
to declare this blue
book finished,
thrown on the last enough
shore on which You’ll
never quite be found,

OK?

And if I reached that strand
of thundered-enough
wonders long ago,
You’ll eventually tide
that music loud enough
in my heart so that for
all that I’ve said I’ve
yet to know, I’ll yet
become willing
to let the rest go,

OK?

Because my anchor-
rope is stuck down
there on the belfry of
a town drowned long ago
by the salt leagues of
wild welcome, a beach
on which I thought no love
would ever reach,
which love did breech
and collapsed me,
sending one life spiralling
down, my former
faith and former doubt
tolling eerily past midnight
a thousand old lives down
this daily saturation
of foam-crashing waves
of pent desires.

That first life bid me
sail this second, and
I’ve troped a thousand
alternations of the thrust
in which I plumbed
the plunge to God
inside a woman’s Yes.

I could go on forever
in a wanker’s paradise
of remembered yanked-
down frillies, reveling here
in what was so briefly
revealed there, quims
of ardor grown celestial
for having been tossed:

Is this the porpoise
You still bid me ride
till thrills are harrrowed,
saddled to a metronome
of ding-dong rhymes
as if they were rank
enough to rid old stills
of their hootch-sour corpus
and drains the bottoms
of plunged nights?

Have I filled a page
for every time I
vented brine
against Your blue-
backed rage? I can’t
let go that rogue’s
ardor yet -- too stuck
here to the knickers
of my blue history --
Is there anything else
to haul up or is it time
to cut the rope &
head on home &
heap these songs
on a lap altared by
drier men as Queen
of Heaven but is
really my mother,
the one who sang to
me over the sea
ten thousand songs ago?

Have I said “Amen”
long and loud enough
to break that surf’s
hymen at last and
sire a wilder wave
than seas or sirens
croon in a mother’s
voice forever in my ear?

It’s up to you,
O Lord, to require and
requite, You toll the
matin bell which rolls
me blearily here
where I write the
canon’s hours in
blue majescule,
down to the
vespering page
on which the liturgy’s
rejoiced upon the
curves of the world’s
volupt marge
and in saying gloss
a salt satiety not
seen on shores for
two thousand years.

Surely You will pass
this on when You’ve heard
me say it all, won’t you,
Lord? You wouldn’t leave
me on a shore which seems
like all the rest
and has for many
years, this and the
next and the next,
the amperage inside
my pen stuck at ten
and no where else
to shoot Your wad
but on this and
the next and next
and next page.

Because sometimes
I feel betrayed
by a rage
I thought was Yours,
not mine or hers
or the one inside
her ocean-sounding
platitudes, a music
which isn’t salt at
all but simply the
mumblings of a drunk
who sips the world
and drowns us all.

Worlds without end!
I haw, and cap this
riding pen again, and
once more leave well
enough alone until
tomorrow, when perhaps
the death of song
is clearer -- or not:
And I’ll romp once
again in surf that ankles
me cerulean and pink
with foam as warm
as kisses and a voice
inside the crashing waves
which tolls the next
same old devil drowned
town, the one whose
ancient haunt and purpose
I remit with its strange sound.