Boot Boat Book Bone

Ernesto lazily whorls off Cuba with 40 mph winds & into the Florida Straits, which are warm right now, naiad pink enough to growl up a hurricane’s high huff ... Right now it tracks to rake the east coast of the peninsula with tropical storm-force winds reaching as far inland as our sleepy burg. It will take another length of day to know with any better precision what to await. Days here have been hot and steamy with stormclouds clobbering iota stretches of the state & leaving the rest starved for moisture. So Ernesto is not, this far inland, unwelcome.

I struggle here battling a flu that is moving like wildfire through the populace, first one I’ve had in three years or more, a soggy snotty sneezy headachey sore throaty badass malaisey fucker that renders one listless and mostly thoughtless. Three days of inactivity (called in sick from work yesterday) and I’ve puttered here, read a chunk of Patrick O’Brien’s Post Captain and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. To bring Brutus into my bluesalt fray:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea we are now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures. (IV, iii)





THE COFFIN (2)

August 26

I paddle home on
a boat which freights
my dead friend facing up,
our hips joined in
that brine’s bouree
which crashes sad
and wildly in our hearts
every day, wave after wave.
I’m sick today, sick
sick sick with sore
throat headache chills
bad tummy & with
a reeling downward
sense of my crepitude.
Just let me crawl
up in my wife &
suck my thumb
& sleep vast on her
breasts till ill djinns
boo away! But noooo,
here I am instead
at 6 a.m. in the rigor
of an ancient habit;
for my friend’s tale’s
sake I ferry on
a dead man’s bourne,
a Christian box
carved in paganish,
empty of its charge
but not the weight
of my heart’s woe
for that man. He
was a South Seas king,
huntsman of the hottest
seas; his blood was
as supple and true as
his unerring iron barbs.
I hug this box for my
dear life while his
bones are down there
far below amid the
Pequod’s fallen trash,
all jawed whole by
the abyss that lifted
Moby up to Ahab’s
curse with a smile as
wide as God’s. I hug
this box for both our
sakes, that his tale
survive in my own
should I make it home.
A thick and thicker
dark outside, deep
in this strange stricken
season; it rained
hard yesterday across
the state as the Gulf
release the burden
of New Orleans’ soul
drowned in it a
year ago. My wife
coughs hard upstairs
-- she got this damned
flu first: night ends,
our day begins.
I hug here Queequg’s
box, ennobled by
the phosphors rising
from the seams --
memories of island
girls delighting under
him, a Micronesia
of blisses over my
shoulder, more
plentiful than stars --
a Milky Way of
nippled joys with
soaked-snatch fire
heaving naked in the
thrash of his immortal
bone, this empty
coffin now his throne,
immersing every
curve and crash
with the rain of
his lost foam.
Take home, my
friend, like a Penthouse
letter in a bottle
of a hearse marauding
every shore.: Between
me and the bottom
forever down is
this single empty box,
a ghastly relic of a
wild sea tale
which I have carved
into a writing desk,
the keel of every blue
deep song that lilted
in that pagan’s ear
by every girl he rode to home.



Grand ur-texts keep cropping up in my reading. Rachel Carson writes about an essential text lying deep in the sea in The Sea Around Us:

***

Every part of earth or air or sea has an atmosphere, peculiarly its own, a quality or characteristic that sets it apart from all others. When I think of the floor of the deep sea, one single overwhelming fact that possesses my imagination is the accumulation of sediments. I see always the steady, unremitting, downward drift of materials from above, flake upon flake, layer upon layer -- a drift that has continued for hundreds of millions of years, that will go on for as long as there are seas and continents.

... The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth. When we are wise enough, perhaps we can read in them all of past history. For it is written here. In the nature of the materials that compose them and in the arrangement of their successive layers, the sediments reflected all that has happened in the waters above them and on the surrounding lands. The dramatic and the catastrophic in earth’s history have left their trace in the sediments -- the outpourings of volcanoes, the advance and retreat of the ice, the searing aridity of desert lands, the sweeping destruction of floods.

***

Melville also locates a grand text down there, the secret blueprint of the world no less. He accounts in “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” chapter of Moby Dick

***

“When Bramha, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodic dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensible to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate as a whale, and sending down to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whalemen, then? ever as a man rides a horse is called a horseman?”


***

In the Sunday (8/27) New York Times, George Johnson writes about the accomplishment of Russian toplogist Grigory Perelman, who “seemed to be playing to type, or stereotype, when he refused to accept the highest honor in mathematics, the Fields Medal, for work pointing toward the solution of Poincare’s conjecture, a longstanding hypothesis involving the deep structure of three dimensional objects”:

“Who needs prizes when you are free to wander across a plane so lofty that a soda straw and a teacup blur into the same toplogical abstraction, and there is nothing a million dollars can buy? Until his death in 1996, the Hungarian number theorist Paul Erdos was content to live out of a suitcase, traveling from the home of one colleague to another, seeking theorems so sparse and true that they came, he said, ‘straight from The Book,’ a platonic text where he envisioned all mathematics was prewritten.”

***

And finally I read once again in Arthur Keith’s “The Old Man of Cro-Magnon” from The Antiquity of Man (1915):

***

In tracing the various kinds of men who lived in the Neolithic period, the open country, the river valleys, and the submerged land surfaces served us very well. When, however, we try to follow man beyond the bounds of the Neolithic period -- when the Thames was depositing the deepest layers of ballast gravel in her ancient bed -- we must seek sequestered nooks where the earth keeps a more orderly register of events than in the turmoil of flooded valleys. The ideal place we seek is a cave, particularly a limestone cave, for the drip from the roof, laden with lime salts,seals up with a covering of stalagmite any bones which chance to lie on the floor. The floor of such a cave is always having additions made to it. If men make their hearths on it, human debris accumulates. Chips and dust are always falling from the roof; the mud washed in by rain or flood is added to other accumulations. In course of time the floor may grow until it actually reaches the roof, thus obliterating the cave. If no living thing has visited the cave as it became filled up, then the strata of the floor are “sterile”; but if men have used the cave as a habitation or as a passing shelter, or if they chance to die there, then the earth-buried stratum of the floor becomes a page of history. It has taken us nearly a century to understand that caves may contain historical documents of the most precious kind. By a study of cave records, we have come by a knowledge of the races who preceded the men of the Neolithic period -- the races of the Paleolithic period.

In 1825, in one of the wooded dales lying behind the picturesque town of Torquay, on the south coast of Devonshire, Mr. MacEnery began to explore that great rambling subterranean series of chambers known as Kent’s Cavern. In the dense layer of stalagmite, covering the floor of the cave, he found implements in stone and in bone, shaped by the hand of man, mingled with the bones of the same extinct animals as Dean Buckland had found at Paviland. The priest had the courage to draw a just conclusion from these observations in Kent’s Cavern, and to face the opposition of the Dean and of the opinion of his time. Mr. MacEnery was convinced that man had lived in England as a contemporary of the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the cave-bear, and all those animals which we now know were native to Europe before our present climactic conditions dawned with the advent of Neolithic man. Mr. MacEnery did not dare to even publish his records; they were discovered and published by the Torquay Natural History Society many years after his death. It was thus a priest who first broke into the world of Paleolithic man -- at least in England.

***

So: A book containing our lost history is found, it written down, is then hidden again for fear of outraging the present, and then re-discovered and opened wide for all eyes to see. Exciting ways to find The Book, eh.

**

GRAND THEORY

August 27

My book of wonders
thunders & deep blue
unders hasn’t named
You yet but I’m
getting there,
page by page,
league by league.
Scientists patiently
labor their wild
theorems, believing
in a day maybe
centuries from now
when all will
trim to a simple
statement from which
all worlds proceed --
gravity, space, motion,
all of it -- the grand theory,
one line ending in a smile.
For now they bicker and
postulate in whorls of
algebraic rant, blackboard
against blackboard
on fields of furious thought
clouded by chalkdust
and what they know
too well. But there are
getting there, the
differences slowly
morphing into melt
and the questions
at growing less indicative
of wrong. One wave
will sweep in from
an unexpected shore
to drench the whole
enterprise, a fourth
dimension which will
obviously and succinctly
tie up all the conundrums
of the other three. Or
will they? Perhaps
the eggheads dream.
Science forges
better tools for seeing deep
and far, but it seems to
me that all the new knowns
crowd the view with more,
adding dimensions of
greater complexity.
Perhaps that’s
what nature’s book
is most about -
a wild cacaphony
spiralling out from a
few simple truths which
are themselves
koans and conundrums,
theorems without
a proof. I may be
wrong. I may die before
I find the shore which
laps just off the
page. But some later
self will come to ride
the pen in ways I never
dreamed. This culture
will one day vanish
leaving little of real use
to whatever takes our
place -- a foreign
tribe with morphed
equipage, or cockroaches
or inorganic streams
awhirl in tides of
space. In some part
of that dust my
book will sail, surely
hidden from all view,
an ecstasy, a dream
perhaps, a dark
theory of a blue
which today proves
too inky for the
flu I’m mucked in.
Ah well--I tried again
and hit the wall
of white unknowns.
Maybe I’m the
proof of that blue
theorem that for
every reach there grows
at the bottom
by the stones
a pile of gorgeous bones.

***

BOOT BOAT
BOOK BONE

August 2003

So here I am again,
Lord, astride a falling
surf, riding barebacked
out to you on an
ossuary of white foam:

One night you walked
away from me, “not here”
is inscribed on your
sweet curved ass.
That lass is my taboo and tide,

my voyaging for silk
to white-peaked islands
absent of your pent
and pert, so barbarous
and frothy milk.

Breviary, bestiary,
book in ocean thrown:
each wave I well here
vowels ocean bone,
no line completes the dash--

each blue curved plash
hisses through the motions
of a lover’s foreign tongue,
the first line her last kiss,
the last one all it rung.