Where You End and I Begin

Well, as storms go, Ernesto was a psych-out, a fake, a fulminous fraud, swirling wide and wild with nothing much packed in his chinos. It was grey but dry for most of the day, the storm (moping down to a tropical depression) veering east and easter, heading off into the Atlantic near Melbourne. A single wild band of storms on my WeatherGenie radar around 3:30 p.m. (with news of a tornado touching down in Osecola county) got me into my car and driving home to Lake County, anxiously ahead of what turned out, in our western locus, to be a steady pissing into the night, enough to soak the garden (and how it needs it!) but prove the most vacuous ghost of Katrina one could imagine.

But maybe then that was the point, its purpose, his porpoising ...

***

Yes, the interface between I and Thou is imaginary, or rich in the imagination: Ernesto’s fact fonts a greater truth in Ernesto’s wilder intimations, in the awe and awfulness housed in the sea-side storm-chapel mortared between my ears. What is that line between real and imagined Ernesto? Did I draw it? Did He, the brooding salt master deep in my ear who loves a good storm-tale? (Recently I’ve relished reading stories of boats winding round Cape Horn, that lowest latitude of endurance in the face of the most malevolent seas in the world. Where does my pen end and his begin?

Collective and individual -- whose work is here? Jung goes into this question:

***

With regard for individual psychology, however, science must waive its claims, To speak of a science of individual psychology is already a contradiction in terms, It is only the collective element in the psychology of an individual that constitutes an object for science; for the individual is by definition something unique that cannot be compared with anything else. ...

... We must rigorously separate the concept of the individual from that of the persona; for the persona can be entirely dissolved in the collective. But the individual is precisely that which can never be merged with the collective and is never identical with it. That is why identification with the collective, and voluntary segregation from it are alike synonymous with disease.

It is simply impossible to effect a clear division of the individual from the collective, and even if it were possible it would be quite pointless and valueless for our purpose. It is sufficient to know that the human psyche is both individual and collective, and that its well-being depends on the natural co-operation of these two apparently contradictory sides. Their union is essentially an irrational life process that can, at most, be described in individual cases, but can neither be brought about, nor understood, nor explained rationally.

-- CG Jung, “Fundamental Principles in the Treatment of Collective Identity,” in the appendix to CW9, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,, pars. 484-6 passim.

(An Editors’ note was added to the final paragraph: “This paragraph, though included in the earliest draft of the German MS, was omitted from the earlier French and English translations”).

***

Well, to my question the archetypologist throws up his hands, crying, “doncha love it?”




OUR FATHERS’ SHORE

August 28

My story is not unique -- I’m just
another sea-brined skull bumping
‘bout the pickle tub -- So some
of it may also seem part of your own.
I’ve always had a hard time telling
where my father ends and I begin;
that beach has always been drenched
in a confusing surf of Your will and mine.
His voice, his words, his stature
towered over mine, as if I was born
to stand in his great shadow, terrified
to step out, enthralled with whatever
flooded up and through him roared
right on through me as a power
I could neither leverage nor
sanely protect myself from.
I wanted to measure up to him
as a kid but that was futile,
howlingly cruel: I was just
a fat smartypants who mouthed
off his brains in class & getting
clobbered during recess by a
world always meaner & stronger
than my words. Perhaps if I had
been an angry boy I might have
clobbered back, swinging some
big ass bat right at the knees of
the potency I lacked: But I was
born a singing boy in love with
pretty girls passing by, my birthmark
a heart with an arrow through it
high up my right breast. All that
swoon was too rich for righteous
waters, so I just stood my ground
inside my heart’s slow drown.
I might have hollered back
at my father for all he wished
of me but would not take
the time or care to teach
me in any substantial enough way
the world cares much about, but
how could I? He was too
damn successful for conflict,
at least he never showed it
anywhere in that smiling face.
Those awful woes he had
with my mother were kept
behind their closed doors,
ever out of hearing by us kids,
by my knowing too. Around
my outward impotence
I raised the inward fist,
wreaking my vengeance on
an ugly kid no girl would kiss.

II.

My father did show me my
liquor in my high school years;
the backyard Scotch towards
the end of another weary day
became our ritual, he smoking
his pipe, me my Kools, talking
about all the truths that make
us bleed so deep. His truths, I
should say, for he was Mouth
and I his Ear, his voice pouring
all a midaged wounded man
salves with Scotch & a son
too young yet for real company.
What troubles, what cares did
I have to talk about that measured
as rich & subtle as that hootch-talk
he brogued? The girl in class
I was so hopelessly bent on?
My flagging faith? The question
of adulthood which was falling on
me like a black angel out of
Chicago’s fallen sky, through which
too few stars could burn, much
less compass the right road
to depart on? So I just drank
that Scotch and listened
to all that dark talk as my
parent’s marriage busted for
the last time and my mother
and two younger siblings moved
away and the rest of us drank like
drowning fish for a summer before
I flew off to school. Oh I was full of
him by then, so full there wasn’t
much room for the Christian God
anymore, not much room for much
else than that fell imperative
to live as strong and tall and
sure as he whose fall closed over me.


III.

When I got to college, it became
a more wounded thing, me drinking
alone at night listening to the echoes
of my father’s voice and me trying
so ineptly to say something back
in my journal or on my guitar,
though mostly it stayed ringing
in my ear, a din I smothered with
sixpacks of beer. The space under
my bed became an aluminum
boneyard of my woes, all those
empties clattering as I shoved
new ones inside. My future
designs were cartoonish,
a pastiche of Bond
and Roethke and Jimmy Page,
leaping all the way from my
cig-thick beery dorm room
onto the big stages of the world,
a love poem so rocknroll
capable as to ejaculate
my true visage in the world
with the loudest power chord
ever struck by a man,
causing every girl in the chorus
of night to sing in high
harmony Yes Yes and More.
You see, his shadow was so damn
big over my shoulder that I
thought I had to stand that tall.
How I cursed my lame attempts
and standing up at all -- so shy
everywhere, my poems juvenile,
my guitar licks drunken and
clumsy: For one who must
stand tall, what remarked those
years was how far in dreams
there is to fall, abysm after
abysm, as if my height was
bottomless, no floor low
enough to stop my downward thrall.

IV.

I thought that was my father
over my shoulder: But all those
years I floundered in the cold
sea of a son’s own shadow, my
father was blundering with
his own, with leaving his
family to live openly gay,
with leaving cities and
the politics of man, with
entering the wilderness
of a stranger relation with
a being who called himself
the Guardian of the North Wind.
The second half of his life irrupted
on Iona in 1977 when he walked
the island on a dreamy spring day
and laydown on Dun Mannanan
on the north end (up the Road of
Souls past the abbey): And saw
him there, huge and ugly, misshapen
as a boulder carved in
Hebridean maul, as old as the
Earth perhaps: a fundament or
archetype, the bottom roar of
the windiest soul. My father
couldn’t tell where dream
ended and encounter began
-- in all his retellings, the
locus is vague, all awash,
perplex, preternaturally serene.
So he had his own work to do
too, trying in his fifties to
lift 20-ton stones on his
mountain-dale land and
make that being’s words stand.


V.

In my twenties I took up
a big field-scythe & swung it
cross the balls I thought were his
crowding out my every thought,
playing rock n roll & trying
desperately to nail every
womanish numen in the night.
But as I look back I see how
much I remained his wife, my
brain of womb teeming with
the fishes of a vast old totem,
father after father, much further
down than any son could sire,
much less further, without
a hell of a lot of floundering
and blundering and damage
left and right. I was my father’s
bitch, yes, my ear aswarm
with all the verbs he poured in me;
but he was gay for that big lug
who sounded a cathedrally low
tone from the grave-dirt of our
house. He fared no better
than I, though both of us
tried dearly to man that crashing
shore where He portends what
we begin in all our ends.
Me, my father, his father,
his father’s father -- we all
tried in far different ways
to chaff our sinew from
the far larger meat of a
tall man who stands under
and behind us all.
We fail we fail we fail we fail
and still we try, rending
and mending that dark blue man
who joins You to our shadowed dreams.



HARVEST

2002

I.

During that summer
in Pennsylvania—a
bridge between first
love and long winter—
I scythed a field
behind my father’s house.

The field was ringed
by oak and beech
and maple, puritans
all of wild nature.
Over us the sun
wrote hyperboles
of desire, lathering
us in its swoon.

I loved the motions
of faux harvest,
lifting high that
long blade, carving
off a shank of sun
before sweeping down
in a muscular arc
through shin-high
tapers of weed.

Each return of
the blade seemed
to reach for the
woman I’d lost,
sweeping into the
void she’d driven
off into: But the
blade returned naked
into the bright air
with a long, lonely swish.

Working down the field
I recalled how she smiled
as we stood over the Spokane
River, the spring runoff
pounding chords into mist.
How all that rose to
a hammering release
and then floated
for miles in a drowse.

All lost. I could have made
of that scythe a tillage,
clearing away love’s ruin
to plant something good,
at least useful; maybe
learn something, too.
I was for that hour good
and simple, poised to begin:

But I wasn’t ready to let go
what I’d had lost. I was
too young and stewed
in the sun’s bullish ire.
I mowed that field down
to summer’s end,
set scythe in the barn,
then boarded a train headed
West to find her again.


II.

On a cold autumn night
hedged by the striate
foliage of pot and speed
and booze, I picked up
a guitar and plugged
into a riverish roar.
I loved the weight
of that Fender Strat,
a heftier blade, equine
and amped, cranked to
the berserkeries of love.

What did I know? I was
far afield in foolish ends,
caught in a big night music
which screamed to the
nadir of her. Each swing
of that guitar at song’s
end hauled a sickle moon
down through loud falls
as hard as I could,
arcing back fever-bright
with the ghost of her smile.

Gone, but not lost.
It took me the worst years
to get back to those weeds.
To welcome emptiness
as a field you could scythe.
To celebrate the motions
which complete every kiss,
harvesting what falls
in that long, lonely,
brilliant swish.


032403


PATERNALS

20003


Each morning I begin
on my knees praying
Thy Will Not Mine:
I am about my Father’s
business then, but
He has many trades,
and I’m not sure
which to be about.
My own father
at my age was
clearing acreage
& building a chapel
& raising 20 ton
stones in deference
to some ferally
cold instinct inside
a memory of Iona:
This morning I read
in Fiona McLeod’s
Iona about a man
of that island
with a passion for
a seal in which
he seemed borne
or cursed or
fathered: That tone
is my tune,
those sea-songs
I mean, salty rollers
I ride jolly roger
butt naked on: The
silliest bouree of all
which I have sacrificed
years of sleep for:
That same beckoning
wave I was baptized
in 30 years ago,
replete with the high
and low blessings
of what I call God:
The work I carry on
here is my father’s
and his demi-fathers,
well-work,
buckets of seal-cold
waters hauled up
from a sea
“sweepin’ white an’
ghostly through
the moonlit nights”:
I’m laboring
in my salt mines
too early because
there is so much
to bring up: I mean
so much has been
thrown down there
over the years that
I’m soul-constipated,
jammed to the gut
with memories
dreams & reflections,
myth & mysteries,
lions & tigers & bears
Oh My: Bra-cups
& guitar picks,
wads of Kleenex,
Bibles & bottles,
spent pens &
poems & spleen
of the ages & ages
& ages: Chartres
and Corco Duibne,
Hell Castle and
Club Meds: My
crazy father slow-
dancing with Thor
of the North Wind,
a cloistered embrace
embowering the
caresses I soon
lavish on my wife:
What’s a son to do
but explicate the sea
bucket by curragh
by skull by testicle,
my thousand sons
floating off to you
in these rickety
paper boats,
their sails lifted
by a thousand
fathers’ breaths:

***

The stories of the Titans are about gods who belong to such a distant past that we know them only from tales of a particular kind and only a exercising a particular function. The name Titan has, since the most ancient times, been deeply associated with the divinity of the Sun, and seems originally to have been the supreme title of beings who were, indeed, celestial gods, but gods of very long ago, still savage and subject to no laws. We did not regard them as being in any way worthy of worship; with the single exception, perhaps, of Kronos; and with the exception also of Helios, if we identify the latter with the wilder, primordial Sun-God. The Titans were gods of a sort that have no function except in mythology. Their function is that of the defeated: even when they win seeming victories -- before the stories come to their inexorable conclusion. These defeated ones bear the characteristics of ancestors whose dangerous qualities appear in their posterity.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

***

THE VILLAS OF HELIOS

10/08/05

There are fathers so ancient
only their shoulders remain
on the coasts, grey and worn,
that and all of their sunlight.
Their sons are men of obscene
power and wealth who keep
building villas of Helios,
off Ibizia and Mustique and
Villefranche-sur-Mer,
immense brilliant porticos
grander than the glittering tableau
of blue seas and skies, jewels
big enough to drown a nereid
not destined to be queen.
Their yachts are huge, they
freight enormous testicles
which hang just below the
waterline, ever on the
verge of exploding into Europa.
The men smile like boys
with teeth brilliant
as the bleached sands, aging
men with greased dark hair
and loosening bellies. They
smile full of the contempt
and arrogance of every
old father they burnt in
lust for their mothers.
Their women are
so dazzling they seem to lounge
not on chairs but the half-shell,
miracles of flesh and composure,
their naked breasts staring
back at the paparazzis like
Medusae, staring coolly
straight into the face of the sun.
Roman pillars quarried from
Northern Italy still stand
by the pool overlooking it all,
forelocks of those miserable
first men who raged and
rampaged and fell, utterly,
to uteral dooms. These sons
are so godlike their aristocrat
world exists off all the known
maps, beyond every sea to salt
the likes of you or me.
And like their shameful
ancestors, they don’t even
know it. They prate on cellphones
and wave off children. Their
eyes are blank as they scratch
at crossword puzzles in silken
cabanas which partake of them
more than they ever will of them.
No, they’ll never quite get it
that the starry infinitude of
their gold is chump change down
below where the only wealth
that matters is what’s piled
in the ruins, stripped from
the corpses as they float round
down the gullet of drowned
Helios, delicates of clout
Dis shits in abyss.
No matter: the wine today
is indescribably
smooth--a vintage of
vineyards more than three
thousand years old--and
the married sister of
his wife is smiling
back from the pool, her
eyes all of Europe's stepping
not safely to shore, oh
so ravishingly blue,
her breasts at the waterline
burning above with
every shadow of wickedness
below out of view. She’s
every shore worth assaulting,
every other man’s sworn bride
like heavy fruit for the taking.
The whole outrage of this single
sea day was baked in visage
of Helios so very long ago:
Nothing can stop him now,
ever, though he’s falling
ever back down. Atreus,
Medici, Rothschild, DeLaurentis,
with all of the bankers between,
having bought their world
and now fully in its leisure,
in Tuscan palaces of burning white
pleasure, pure testes, hammered gold,
bright gouts of red wine
spilled over and over on the
grave of wild Helios,
spots which never quite dry,
being sons themselves
of the sun which never dies.


SONS OF STARRY URANOS

10/09/05

Sons will have their mothers
come hell’s every ball-high-water,
that flood unleashed by
one swipe of a hoar grey sickle
by which all mothers bid
their son replace old noctal
passions with the new.
Thus ages succeed each other
in motherly vengeance
and a child’s guilt-soggy greed,
bridged by cruel inventions
and newer rapt conceptions,
lesser powers, greater gains,
puerile gambols, ungartered rains.
And old dads never die,
their roar of outrage unfading
in the thunders which ejaculate
new dooms, the risen nippled
Venus wave-stepping on each
bedded shore with such graceful
fuckability you sense his
ancient ardor in every evil
lash she bats. Her smile is so
slight, so devious, barely
concealing in its demure
so hesitant upcurve
the massive cock
and balls within which
alchemized salt water
into pure empyriea,
fire water thieved from
the Maker of all fires.
Her eyes are filled
with his incessant drive
to bliss, starry as the sky
which each night for
an etern fell on earth to
raven plunge & furrow
all the Titan rhymes
spring-locked in our
concupiscent too-conscious brow,
concatenate in mind and soul
—yowling Iapetos, wave-tressed
Thetis, bookish Mnemosyne,
Time. All were freed to plague
our breast because that feral
sickle dared to rise and slice
offending members free, ending
five million years of noctal
same old same old fucks,
begetting daily rise and falls,
their proscribed pistionings
in rhythmus to our time.
Womb to grave we race, trying
to fit somehow in both
cunts of origin and future ore
we’ll never harrow nor mine well,
not like the archon Daddy
who penumbrates the depths
of hell with insatiate desire.
Always the sands beat us through
that narrow isthmus of glass
between the tits and ass,
the one substantial embrace that
we seek not found in time’s
one then other space, that
doppler curvature descending from
one fullness and plopping out
the other with no more than
a grain of heaven’s shore,
our O-mouths mewling
forever of her and more.
And all this while sons of
ours take steady aim at
cutting us forever off from
her clam, our claim to it I mean.
That’s the way it goes if you buy
the tale that endless night
was ended in one’s day’s
curve from thought to deed,
one sweep from cock to balls
and through. A sickle moon
hangs to the west this morning,
singing over that ancient
tumulus where every lust and ire
fonts so wicked and so bottomless
a starry hell-hot cream,
quintessence of the dad I’ll always dream
inside the mom I cannot mean.



OLD MAN LIR

2005

According to the (12th Cent.??)
Tenga Beth-Nua (“The Evernew Tongue”),
the sun rises when it passes “under the flanks
of the earth,” among “the hosts of the
children in the pleasant fields, who send
the cry towards heaven for dread of the
beast that kills many thousands of hosts
under waves of the South,” while it
illumines “the ribs of the Beast that
distributes the many seas around the flanks
of the earth on every side, that sucks
in the many seas again til it leaves
the shores dry on every side.”

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

At 4 a.m. the night is silky-still,
the faintest surf of crickets chirring
in the garden and that’s all. The dark
is huge and cool, too fragrant with
the jasmine blooming in profusion
up the chimney. Buckets of low
honey pour through the window
behind my head & over me, slickening
this poem. These facts are not new
but each morning seems to make
them so, my matins faithful to
the fish’s back I ride on
to every shore in the as-yet-unknown,
unsaid world. While I ride here
Old Man Lir prowls down under,
digesting the sun and the ten
thousand warrior who died yesterday
in the gates of his great teeth.
While I write the tide rises and falls
because he swims too hugely for
the world, his corpulence suffusing
even his tail which flits between
continents with a shrug. How can I
not ache to be with every woman
in the world with his mouth to fill?
How does that sweet madness of rioting
jasmine bloom slay every sober thought
if he weren’t inside that vine,
spuming up from darkest roots?
Even these words for him,
translating sense to savagery:
Why else pull all the stops
if he doesn’t boom them all
so low I don’t so much as hear him
as shore him everywhere I go?