"The unbroken duties of the foam"

Everywhere there seems some connection between the fairies and the dead; everywhere secrecy and reserve is needed in the mention of them. Their favours must not be boasted of, they must not be rewarded. It is generally not etiquette even to thank them. Everywhere they are greedy for mortal children, ready to decoy away young girls and nursing mothers -- almost everywhere they need the help of human midwives to enable them to bring forth children. In most places they have the power of invisibility, and an ointment or herb is needed to reveal them to mortals. All over the country some among them help mortals in their work. If their ways and wishes are regarded they give rewards of prosperity, or smaller, more tangible gifts; if they are offended or their taboos are broken, the punishment is at out of proportionto the offence.

-- Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature


WATER

Pablo Neruda
Transl. Stephen Mitchell

Everything on earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
bit, the petal fell
until the only flower was the falling.
Water is different,
has no direction but beauty,
runs through all dreams of color,
takes bright lessons
from the rock
and in those occupations works out
the unbroken duties of the foam.




ON MYTHOLOGICAL THINKING

To imagine in pairs and couples is to think mythologically. Mythical thinking connects pairs into tandems rather than separating them into opposites which is anyway of mode of philosophy. Opposites lend themselves to very few kinds of description: contradictories, contraries, complementaries, negations -- formal and logical. Tandems, however, like brothers or enemies or traders or lovers show endless varieties of styles. Tandems favor intercourse -- innumerable positions. Opposition is merely one of the many modes of being in a tandem.

James Hillman, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion

I.

Something loosens the mind
to wander the grimed marble
haunts of its lost pantheon --
humility perhaps, sufficiently
purged from the acid bath
of so many humiliations
trying to play God, the jealous
one at that. The hour helps,
first light yet to spill its blue
yolk to the east, one bird starting
to sing outside the window
opened on our dark garden,
so much stilled, paused,
dead asleep, eye of one night
shut at last, eye of coming day
yet to flutter. Between such
sight lies a lacuna, a door, an
opportunity to dive down
the well to where the pantheon
still dwells. And I do, letting
go of any sense of the mess,
slipping easily down a fish-
scented slide into woman and
surf and wet dream. I’m loosed
at last into the womb of the
mouses, a place which at
first looks like my father’s
house where I know he’s napping
and fear to disturb him in
death: And in the manic
mood of my inner conversation
(neurotic, bent), the paternal
fascia starts to loosen, grows
hoarier stubble, cackles in
my ear. There’s my horn-dog
of a great grandfather O’Riley
still offering a quarter to a
farmhand’s wife for a fuck,
there’s my greatgrandsire
O’Cobhthaigh in 1778
staring at the mouth of
Boston Harbor
like a sperm about to be
loosed from the Irish bark
Sea Sprite, long travelled
from Cork. And down
from there are three
ur-Cobtachs, the one
who accompanied Columba
to Iona in 563, the brother
of King Loegaire who feigned
a wasting sickness so
he could stiff his brother
with a knife, the one
who played a harp all night
defending the ears of
CuCulainn from the chants
of the enemy druids. Gentlemen,
a penny a psalm in the
coin of the realm. Show me
a means through the pause
of this hour.

II.

In the temple house of Zeus
there’s a room for each of
his tribe, every hall bearing
a throne of ominipotence
and wilderness and cruelty
at its center. You enter
each next one
from the last, the door
facing both ways at once,
like Janus, hinging
the possibilities of Artemis
to Apollo to Dionysos to Hermes
to Hades to Poseidon to Aphrodite
to Artemis to Ares to Hephaistos,
each with their own triple
aspect and zenith and nadir.
The palace thus is a spectrum,
each spectra a hurl of hue
in dancing with every other,
aligned in the mind of the divine which
foreshadows and backgrounds
us all. Each portal is a cross,
where a fullness has cusped
and spoored, a fruit plucked
and devoured. You enter it
naked as a baby facing what
strangeness and truth lies
ahead, harrowed of every
room you’ve been through
yet not enough for what
you still must go through.
Anticipation and desire
and dread fringe your
passage through, like
snakes hanging down
with bangles in their mouths.
The doors are like new and
death moons, prescient of new
auger and even precipitant
of it but blind as a pup
at the paps of sweetness
which sucking canines offend.
Enter a room - it belongs
to, say, Artemis -- and slowly
this next divine grows
on you; you like her mood
and style, the virgin huntress
who knows bloodlust but
not desire, who is jealous
of her glade & tribe of
Amazones who hunt outside
the village mons of family
and servitude to men.
This batch runs wild and
free: and you can feel
your own soles start to
pad and thence to run,
out past the last strand
into the breakers of
the unknown, into
the forest where it is
kindled and thickly
braided with the
animal in your desire,
where love is prey
and the sex the pleasures
of the hunt, a good
spear thrust through
the throat of a stag.
Ah, yield to this room,
there is no stopping,
no depth in the darkness
of the wilderness heart
which does not lure
and satisfy.
But who is beckoning
in the mist of the next door?
So regal, she, a queen
perhaps, or the spiritual
patron of the polis, her
shield a mind fit for
bright philosophies,
her feet square over the
mount which houses
all the snakes down
in us: Bright and
feared Athena, dragging
me back inside the wall
of the cidatel toward
duties and alms which
build and raise,
polishing that shield
every time I refuse to
yield my fuse back to
that huntress of the wild.
But then ahead
in the next strange door,
there is the man who looks
like a herald, with wings
on his feet and an old man’s
beard on his youthful
face, bearing a wand
wound with white and
dark snakes: Hermes
is Athena with
a vengeance, or one
of them, as she is
the urbane sister
of Artemis. He is mind
hauled to magical
extremes, borderlands
of psyche where paradox
is king, a topsy-turvy
sight which inwards
the outer world
on days more foul and
fair than men have
known, but will.
He walks inside
the underwear of
the underworld with
the softest steps heard
there, more fancied
than his brother Ares’
frontal assaults -- we’ll
get to him for sure -- but
first the fade into
the approach of Venusian
surf, surrounding
something down beyond
this poems’ overchawed
rind -- something most
corporeal, nippled, surgent,
the way cerulean waves
mash the morning’s shore.

III.

Ebb all this back in
this day’s next bouree,
firecrackers sounding
down the street, my
wife now watching
a cooking show on TV,
the shuttle Discovery
up in the atmosphere
having launched
two hours ago.
Nothing unusual here,
just a quiet day at
home, where love
is sufficient and loss
is sufficiently at bay
for us to just be still
and be glad. Down
under our mood the
currents persist,
history against history
like eddies in the
greater history of
our time, all of
that swashing the
foam of far older
deeper waves
we can’t see, cold
and urgent and
darker than death.
So what we feel
at one moment -- say
a sense of wideness
and welcome toward the
sprawling summer sky --
is only at best an nth unique
and the rest swims
up from that drowned
pantheon, if not all of it,
which is fine by me.
Heftier flags than any
I could raise blow wild
into that summer sky,
Venusian in its luxurant
soak, virile as Hermes’
staff, penetrant as
shining Athena’s brow,
wild as flung from
Artemis’ bow. If I
am not alone, it’s
because I’m in good
company, whether I
know it or not. So it
suffices here to drone
on in their throat
as the latest bronze
bell to cable loud
hosannahs from every
blue depth in hell.