Drool of the Fool Youll Always Rule

Since today I’m dragging my feet in the rut of the unconscious structured like a language, it should be realized that this formulation totally changes the function of the subject as existing. The subject is not the one (celui) who thinks. The subject is precisely the one we encourage, not to say it all (tout dire) as we tell him in order to charm him -- one cannot say it all--but rather to utter stupidities. That is the key.

-- Jacque Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge



SAVANT SONG

Sept. 17

There’s madness in poetry,
stupidity too. Foam and
drone in the service
of a bone in my ear.
(Or rear.) It’s just
so damn easy to
get lost singing
in dark woods
or down dirty depths;
utter one word
and the poem steps
left not right,
commencing
the sin of all
missed marks,
falling into the
thrill of a thrall
of an appalling
dark spell. Stupidity
enters when I think
this is about me,
that I own this thing,
that my singing
matters at all
to the world, to Her,
to You. Only whales
and broke keels
ever get to the
true bottoms of things.
Between mad fool
and idiot savant
a faint way winds
through a song’s
hidden heart, and
no one knows how to
find it, much less stay
on it for long
with anything like
what we
call certainty.
The one who
sails through a
cape’s horns of
awe and awfulness
has skill no doubt,
but his survival
depends on luck
or grace or fate:
He not so much
steers those end-
of-the-world waves
as rides the tiller with
eyes fast shut while
some greater will
will rolls his bones’
dice. Say it right
and you get passage
on through to
calmer days & fish
tales in harbors to come
when pen comes
to rest at the end of paper.
No matter how we
deign to usurp
or negate what surges
under the nib’s rudder,
our fortunes are
the grace of an
unknowable other:
We’re given the words
and then write them
down, and some of
them terrify and
some of them ring
every bell in the the land
and some of them
bore even the ones
enthralled with the
sound of writing them
down, again & again
& again & again. I
put pen to paper &
let the lines go
where they will,
& since as yet I
(or they) haven’t
hit bottom, perhaps
I’m not so much
singing as winging
blue skies not bowered
by you, not yet,
maybe never. Do you
love this fumbling
husbandry of every
first night, a jottin’
jerks joltage on paper
beds of pure white?
I don’t know whether
I should feel humiliated
or humbled wooing
you this way now for
ten thousandth time
here in the next draft
soon headed for time’s trash.
Are these motions
devotions of a lost
seas’s sad thrash?
I can’t answer that
any more than say
how I write of drowns
in defiance of song
as we know it today:
the road is narrow
& thins every line;
I haven’t the courage
or smarts to peer
much either way
into the dooms
I invoke: So I prow
on in faith of a
blue certitude,
my raptures and
schisms common
to the crazed and
the quelled. The
only distance or
difference which
keeps me from the
drink is the depth
of a page & blessed
covers to shut
when I’ve exhausted
the rage.





COMPOSING IS
THE THING

Sept. 20

Composing is the thing:
me here in this chair
at this God-saturated hour
with pen again to paper,
writing down the lines
just so and how, getting
them to sound right
somehow deep and
deeper in my deepest ear.
Composing is the next
way I hold You dear;
or, better,the next way I
remember how You
said Let’s go look for worms
in that back yard
now a life’s long tides ago.
(I trace that current
like the heart-line
of a palm to that
night much later
when You hissed stick
it up my ass, ah,
but that’s another
poem, another row
to hoe.) Composing is
my matin hour, here
between four and five a.m.,
writing in scribbled
latin a sound which
invokes a sunnier
majescule yet
to come, the letters
darkly blue with
church hallows and
lush resounds, like
plainchant in a stone
chapel which disappears
between the bells.
Composing is a joy
greater than rewriting
later at the taskboard
where I hang these cables
on the great bridge
of a so-called work,
that something which
breeches cross
the abyss to find
you safely lost again.
Without the sate of
composing I would
long ago have
sold that bridge to
a rube in San Antone,
a big steel bone
plopped from my mouth
or from regions
further South not
worth the pig iron
it was fired from.
Yes, composing is a
joy, its balm more
than spiritual,
flushing me with hope
once more that this
next time I’ll nail you
properly just offshore
my words, even
though I know I’ll
never quite do or
say it right; it’s
a satisfaction behind
the balls, more
animal I guess,
my rightness in
the world’s denouement
with my daily
vowels’ movement,
Yay to Gee and
back again. Composing
surely gets me
there, without lifting
ass from chair
I sight you there
in your black
sea underwear,
your selkie seem
deep desires. Composing
thus forges a blue
box for hiding that skin in,
empowering a
a seas-deep booty call.
Yes, composing
is the thing, predawn
bells I ring this way
then that each day I can
as long as am able;
as long as waves swell
and heave and fall
on shores, as long
as I put pen to paper
the way that young girl
smiled and walked
into the woods with
me enrapt behind
in search of her, or,
better, worms.
Composing is the
first part of the
writing that writhes
in freshly broken turf:
strange, somewhat ghastly,
blind, and coiling frantic
curves of dirt
and deeper seethe
displayed upon a paper
palm she holds forever
out to me.




QUEEQUEG’S COFFIN
SAILS ON AND ON

Sept. 18

When the Rachel adopted
me in lieu of her lost son,
they left my friend’s coffin
behind in the wash
to fare on, spectre of
the white whale’s ghastly
spout. As far as I know
it’s still out there on
the mash and crash,
a rogue trope ferrying
its emptiness
beneath moons so brilliant
only sea-wolves
see the darkness
there, inside that
feral box. Of all the
sad things in my tale,
I think it is that coffin
that I grieve the most,
sea-worthy house
of the pagan heart I lost,
the only wreckage
to lift from the
Pequod’s downward
sprawl to carry me -- me!
beyond its captain’s
bourne. The crew
of Rachel lifted
me off of that dream
offering all the
comfort of the tribe --
a warm berth, some
elbow room, grog --
relishing in my tale
as the ship sailed home,
the story rounding
from my mouth to
those sailors back
through my own ears,
falling into an inkwell
soon ripe with whale oil.
They always shifted
when I told them
how that coffin spouted
from doom’s wake,
a gift from drowning
gods, as if some will
-- Shakespeare’s, perhaps --
sent that casket forth
to bless the prophesy
I heard back in
Bedford that one
man alone would
sail past Ahab’s doom.
As they listened
to my ending
the would scan over
my shoulder to
the blue erasures
overboard, perhaps
trying to locate that faded
box with its rude
cartography of whorls
and glyphs and vastly
empty vault. Gone, except
as it rides here,
somewhere between
Melville and the
Pacific’s haunting ground.
In a lucent dream’s chapel
I hang this coffin-
shaped stone memorial
inscribed with the
names of the Pequod’s
black crew, and,
above, Ahab aboard
his whale, drowned
in deed but not in will,
pointing thus at you and
me, or maybe, far behind
us, that single floating
box which sails over
the wave-tops like a
frail candle that cannot
be dowsed, fuse of this
song that will not let me out.