Black Sextant

August 11

How is it that time is timeless
and space infinite? As if
calibration were just a keel’s
carnival mask for illimitable
depths, a fathom-cord
for what the gods are
still sinking down into
in their perpetual
immensity ... We want
to know it all: We pry:
We seek: We seek: We
peek through a profane
hole to behold our
first parents going
at like snake-headed goats,
father Zeus with his
haughty swollen plums
beating like hearts as
they spasm outrageous
sperm into our beloved
mother Rhea, her face
uplifted like an August
moon in pure reflection
of not his but our ever-
wounded bliss: We dare
to know, and test that
knowledge in the carnal world,
measuring the tyger
in this woman’s freckly thighs,
in the copper-coiled snatch
of another one, in the
strange hot-oiled clench of
a third which remits the
boil of our own errant spasm
deep in the Yes her spread
both measures and masks.
Sex then is like the other
vast principles, not a shore
but their sea: An infinite
mask of precise calibration:
Each bed is a notch this way
or that, the body’s sextant
on a course too dark to see
with our sense, ever dowsing
this way or that with degrees
of stiffie and thirst, some
wilder, some becalmed: In
the end direction doesn’t
seem to matter: We’re ever
waking the next raw morning
to find her gone, a simple
note pinned to her pillow --
Not Here, Not Her, Not Ever ...
Meaning is what we maul
from tides, a proper name
for their blue commotion
through us, our collaborations
with mystery charmed
by the desire to know it,
as if to say the words right
at last were to still the
spinning portcullis
of the spiral castle
long enough to enter her
at last on the bed of
purest beginning, that
time can start at last:
Again and again I wrench
this pen across white paper
in the faith that surflike
careens will mean enough
at last that I’ll stop requiring
it of days: That that
fulsome nameless
depth that washes just
inside will stop seeking
to drench my day too
blue and wild for measure,
the ejaculate of a
scree of angels which
redeems the too-bright day:
Time and space and sex
and their meanings keep me
in ever constant motion
trying to arrest them all
at last: I know it in my
bones but ever remain
gullible to the signets
of their wash -- late full
moons at 5 a.m., the sigh
of my wife upstairs as
she dreams in her
universe far away, our
cat in the window
scanning for lizards,
Dante mixed with Kerenyi
scattered like chum
on the wake in which
I read of angels in
imagined fucks: All of
that urging the pen
to set it all down again
on a slightly different
angle, which by dint
of being new enough
repeats the primal leys
which cracked the egg
at last and bid the
world begin. Another world,
at least, from all the
ones I hatched here
writing it again and
again and again. Poor
full fool me, spilling
sea water again all
over the page I meant
to use to ladder down
to the bottom of things,
that selkie rump which
rounds the rear entry
to the temple: I’ll find
and mount you yet!
Even though I sail more
lost than ever on an
ogham-inscribed coffin,
even though I weary
of paddling by the
black sextant that
grips me so surely from
below yet leaves me so adrift.





BLACK BATTERY

July 2005

I don’t so much write
poems these days
as power the hour’s poetics.
At 4:23 a.m. on July 4
2005 I find so much
wattage swank in
the night’s roots,
a noctilucence burning
out in the garden
just out of sight,
invisible in all that seems
only dead or aswoon
or bitterly revenant.
There I find black leys
of a power worth plugging
my poems into, supple
cords of moon-blossom bone
gripping down hard
in the loam. They surge
with yesterday’s sun
in black surging riptides
as regnant as anything
crowned by that day’s
lost fire. Here is dark
measure in equal
amplitude to that day,
coursing electrons
of an unseen
magneto between
everything line I write here.
I don’t know what
a poem like this powers
or whose cunning engines
fin and wing wild from
these gibbers; I
just write on and on
while some great lower
mouth drinks every
word I pour, getting
stronger and longer
and darker, regnant
in lake’s starless source
down the lees of abyss.
Just what deity resides
there I can never quite say
though I ferry his depths
deeper each line
quarried here, each
trope caught singing in
the dark at this hour.
Surely there are many other
powers at play in the world
but they are for other poetics,
other batteries of verb.
My job here is just
to build sufficient enough
cells of black juice for
this hour, coiling
yesterday’s last dying wave
round its infinite
black-tiding wash,
cabling the whole dreaming
word to the ghosts of
its margins and every
titan power bellowing below.
Black fins and deep hooves
ramp up a brilliant
dark bulb’s black-saturate
glow, a poem both night
and wild garden
both fang and rich flow.




BLACK TORC

June 2005

How perilously close to nothing
is this black hour, where every
walking numen drifts drowned
in sleep’s thrall
and the garden dances stiffly
in the trance of black-wet leaves,
each petal burdened with the freight
of such a night at such an hour.
How strange and difficult
and wild the woman gathered
there in the center, keeping
time with her silent clapping,
her eyes cajoling, her ears
tuned to dead-dark music
spooring from this pen,
calling for black blood.
This rigor is almost,
perhaps already dead,
who can say? The step from
the ledge is not one you can see
with the tongue or say with the ear
but you must infer it anyway,
reaching out with your blackest
foot. You have to trust, in the
way of all dark divines,
that this night’s black tide
seen frmo her side below
and within is a starry
promenade, a shoe for
hooves which torcs
the dream which lamps
the full moon now
sailing spectrally behind
rag-twisting-drippy skies.
Ah, how easy it is right here
to mistake rigor for death
and downwarding hues
for depth, I mean, to read
the moment way too corporally,
the same way I always lost the
key to women inside their thighs,
trying to bridge white shores
with on waves of soggy
too-penultimate sighs.
Easy and so perilous the way
because one misstep here
on the harp-strung siege
and it’s hair, nose and eyeballs
all the way down to the black
hag’s hut at the fag end of my worst
nights, where wolves and tarry
vulvas tear each other wide
in the spin of disco balls
and the gruesome enterprise
is right next to the whalish
rectum which remits
all suitors’ bones in the
sound of disco organum.
No matter how many times
I circumnavigate this hell,
the risk is ever in the wings,
just off the deep thought’s
mazing, fangs notched and
wide with a bite so literal
that it’s many lines before
I know my head’s behind
morselling one black throat
or another. So why keep sailing
toward Capes of blackest blue?
Why peramble paths on
naked feet that burn
with the sea’s most strident
coals? Why indeed? It’s 4:42 a.m.
on the Wednesday of a rag-ass
week when I have too much
else to do for faux gambling at
this hour with such Sioux-
Lakotan coin. So why?
I always ask the question
here when it seems I’ve
harrowed full enough the
next day’s dark and still not
found the torc it wears.
That’s why I call my efforts
black and leave the poem
so, one step further down and
round a way I’ll never fully
name, though I have infernal
clues. My job’s to ferry on
the freight of what may
be almost or ever dead,
pointless though it seem.
Rain is falling now so slightly
as to wake the dream or
wrap me in its wake.
Which is keel and which
black weather? And is
that the torc which gleams
it all in one throat, there
beyond what I tried
my best to say?