The Preterite

This mid-to-late-summer season is fraught with preterition, a heavy sense of being passed over, repeatedly, by massive storm-fronts. Since last Sunday we’ve had daily predictions of rain around 60 percent; every day around noon those chipper airy puffs of cumulus have massed into midafternoon grey towers and walls; thunder cracks and winds blow; there’s a smatter a smidgen a smirk of rainfall, barely wetting the dust; and then the threat passes over, leaving behind a heavy dry marl overhead. Around the area there are pinpricks of foment, a 2-inch inundation which leaves the local recipients drenched and daze; but such assaults of rain are so precise and far-flung that just about everyone else that day comes home to glare at the sky and crank up the sprinklers. We the general preterite are spared those storms, passed over by angels of summer moisture; and though everything is still green there are stories on the news of wildfires in the seams, unheard of for this penultimateonth of the wet season, the one before the month when the hurricanes are most likely.

When I stepped out on the back porch around 5 a.m., the morning was impossibly still and heavy, like the near-bursting balls of a black bull snorting at the fence of a desire that will neither quit nor quell. Almost an evil thickness, ripe with some smell that seemed close to shit or bad garbage or old sex. The funk of stasis and corruption. Factor that here as the first big storms slowly ripen in the Atlantic.

***

“The collective instincts and fundamental forms of thinking and feeling brougth to light by analysis of the unconscious constitute, for the conscious personality, an aquisition which it cannot assimilate completely without injury to itself.”

-- CG Jung, Appendix to Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,, transl. RFC Hull, CW, par. 7

***

I PITY DA FOOL

from Oran’s Well, 2003

I pity da fool
who tries to wrest
the whale from this
black spoor. Dick
and dark go fluke
and spunk as far
as I can see,
bellied down here
on a dowser’s
blue nose.
Follow Leviathan
to lost galleons
and split cities,
all drowned
centuries ago.
The townspeople
here clack their
bones in the silt
as the ocean’s
deepest waves
comb the abyss,
clanging steeple
bells which toll
past midnight
at the bottom of
your deepest guesses
and beckons
and dreams. You’ll
not make sense of
this; all salvage
withers to sand
once hauled
to the bright
surface. I pity
da fool who
prizes the
whale’s blackened
stool, these
verses of inertias
which sank
long ago, Jonahs
and old boners
crying FOUL
to the flow.



***

THE OGRE ON THE SHORE

2005


Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia.

-- Laertes in Hamlet

As always, my history assumes Your
mystery, insolving seas inside
my mother’s voice that day
she sang over silk-bruited waves.
She and it You meant to pair
on a shore of such narrow degree
that one step right or left
was either witchery or knowledge,
both doomed to boil my bones.
The ogre on the road of souls
may loom close to my father’s height
inside the doors I cannot pass;
surely the monster got
his basso and berserker cock
from my six-year-old’s lack
and reverence of such things;
but he is not there at every
crossroads to mentor me
in song, even though
he’s Poetry and more. Redder
jousts than sweet psalmody
are in his throat, and I’m a fool
to margin all he ravages
and cancels out. Not by Providence
but Victory! the fish-man shouts
astride exultant waves, smashing
every naked shore with the his
uncleffed, sperm-gout gore.
How else can I say it? There is
my father’s dream or vision
of meeting Thor on the northern-
most wild of Iona years ago,
turning from his history
to face that huge churl of
Hebridean gale, the soul
of every rock-browed cliff
devoured by wind and wave.
Was it passion that burst
my father’s heart in love
for that sworded knight of
Northern winds? Was that
first song hot enough to
bid my father turn his gaze
back round to Pennsylvanian
velds where he pried and set
god’s hoar skeleton stone by
cold-ribbed stone? Or was it
enough of the second
song which does not huff and blow
the footers down in any
appeasable way but is wind itself,
unmixed of any abbey’s mortared mould,
defiant even of the words themselves?
Must I thus proceed?
How to build a chapel fit
to sing of him whom pronouns quit,
who is instead that dancing fit
which spirals sea and sky?
Build on water, yes; but tower
in no wise semblant to the backward
glance which mints its empire
on a selfish penury, a dime a dance,
vaulting the dervish in mere pedigree,
my resume which overwrites the mystery
into the majescule of history,
nippling seas and crowning winds.
Oh the shore is ever dangerous
which walks between dominions:
Not to drown or fully ebb
nor even say which sands I stride on
—not quite a page, nor sheeted
from that windy rage which grinds
the mortal shell of the earth
to infinitesimals of cosmic dust.
And we just oxidizers and rust,
corrosive as the salty seas,
& uncoagulent as loosened skies,
never one but many throats
professing gorgeous dooms
every time a wave curls high
and rides the poem to hell
down one long choiring boom.


SPECTROMETER

2005

This dark tallies
all that’s counted
by its days,
striations of dark
spectra which I in
turn sum here,
reading the shifts
in black hue
like a woman’s sleeping
face where waters gleam
with moonlight but
dream of shores and
houses far below.
That’s where this
poem tries to go
at 4:13 a.m. A few
weeks ago when it
couldn’t stop raining
this hour was like
sweaty lovers soaked
from their coil;
their swoon dripped
lush from every bough
and calyx. The dark
was like a greedy loam
whose tubers protube and
sprout and urge
their fingerlings both up
and down down down.
A dark like early summer’s
tide so warm and muscular
in its curve and smash,
its breezes raking
stiffly in like horses
riding hard. Now after days
of rainless skies, the lovers
drift a foot apart on their
old bed down dreamless,
aching veins, oppressed
by love’s daily consequence,
the work such loving thus
demands. This dark is high
and distant or deeper
underground and the
garden seems stunned,
its hundred tiny voices
petulant for the hose
I wend late afternoons
when I weary on home.
The dark here has a surf
so flat, so still, you’d think
the help had ironed it
with the day’s laundry, with
extra starch to give it the
stiff mortis of bad sleep.
This spectra is starved and
reedy and bears a whiff
of Set’s bad breath,
up from deserts further
south. And so I write
of a black prism as if
through the offices
of dark light, each
poem a spectra of
the spectral night
which pulses below
inside the garden at
this hour. Her face
so calm right now
but far away, seeking
comfort in dreams
of rain coming
hard in her,
more oblique
and fecund than
these fiercest days.