Queequeg's Box

IN THE BOX

Sept. 6

Today I’m thinking
in the box.
In his box, I mean,
the coffin on which
I float these days
of an exhausted
rainless summer,
when 5 a.m. seems
almost rank with
the slaughterings
of light across a
parching land.
My boat’s a trope
for night as hearse
which bournes
a dead friend’s
absent bones,
a bastard’s throne
while the real king
swirls far down
the dark brine
of drowned things.
I crown this box
the way I own
my name -- mostly
a mere accident
of history: A
grand grandfather
down my father’s
line got the farmer’s
daughter pregnant
and was run off;
the son kept his
grandsire’s name,
which means
the coat of arms I
revel in is no more
magic or true
than the box I’ve
climbed on here,
knocking Melville’s
narrative pilot
back into the drink.
I begin here where
he ended, with
this wake for
Queequeg on his
burial mound,
too far at sea
for whaleboats
or the surer
keels of history.
We make an
odd scrimshaw,
man and casket
not meant for each
other, both carved
by a whale too
white to show
his etching
through the ruts
are deep indeed.
Their phosphors
limn the marrow
of the lines I lay
down here, and
reeks of deadly
lustful things --
rotting blubber
and pussy harbors
rich with a man’s
old geysered seed --
inditia of sea-leys
no boat has
ever sailed til now
in this coracle of
blue-balled baleen,
on this raft of
pagan bone.
When I think I’m
in this box I’m
empty, unnavigable,
and free, my neurons
chanting a pagan’s
chantey as I hurl
my barbs all the
way into a God’s
deepest reddest
heart. A vicious
minstrelsy no doubt,
safe only at this hour
when I can fling
it at the crashing
dark till all my
metaphoric bells ring
true: Then shut it back
in croaking covers
of this box of a book;
and thus bid my
friend adieu
just as first light
entrances east
a new book’s
swirling blue.




THIS IS MY BOX

2006

I loved Menotti’s “Amahl
and The Night Visitors”
when I was a kid, faux-
directing the Pittsburgh
Symphony on TV when I
was three, lounging by
the stereo in my father’s
study when I was ten or
so, reveling in the aching
pathos of a poor shepherd
boy’s night, lamed, fatherless,
tending his meager flock
in wide desert scrabble
as eternal as the desertions
that can kill a heart.
Amahl’s boy fusion of loss and
yearning was surely mine,
starry and cold and powerfully
linked to the infant mewling
in a nearby manger —a
feeling blent of grief and
beauty which was somehow
stronger than all
of the shadows in his house
and mine, millennia away
in fat Evanston where our
family got thoroughly mauled
by each other and God and sex
and The Sixties. I especially
loved that song by Balthazaar
the silly third wise man—almost
a Stooge—about the box he’d
carried all his years and which
he would offer the child,
a box filled with everything startling
and wonderful in the world.
“This is my box, this is my box,
I never travel without my box,”
Balthazaar sang, each verse
opening drawers laden with
strangeness and pleasure, lapis
lazuli eggs and dinosaur tears
encased in amber, fragrant dried
flowers and enormous shark
teeth, rude stone goddesses and
jewelled tweezers for plucking
the burning plumage of gold geese
What a collection! I always wanted
a box like that, some treasure
chest of oddities and ardors and
devices not vaulted anywhere
else in the world, at least
not in that peculiar way I
most desired, whatever that
was. That ache was probably
why I was so fascinated with
the devious cigarette lighter
used by the spy hero in “In
Like Flint,” which had,
according to James Coburn,
“87 different uses—
88, if you need a light.”
One day I tried to reverse-
engineer that contraption
on paper, drawing 87 rectangles
in a big rectangle and then
trying to name each one.
What an exercise
in desire’s floral consummations,
impossible and permanently
inked! I believed back then
that plural uses were
necessary if you planned
to win in the world; a hero
required all the mojos he
could muster if he was
to beat his evil adversary,
blowing up the monster’s
island laboratory with
all his goons; surely
the 47th or 59th use
of that Zippo was exactly
how the hero could
escape such devastation
with such harrowing
hair’s-breadth (cunt-hair?)
precision, leaping over
the falls with 5 half-naked
girls in bobbing drums.
Savagery, cunning,
balls, and ire: to light
the fire you need a Flint
and I sure wanted to
be one, paused, flicking
the wheel to say
“88, if you need a light.”
Now I read how shamans
collected damagoni in their
rucksack of ills ‘n’ cures,
each both guardian spirit
and sheer pain, a singular
employ in the choir with
with a two-faced purpose,
as to cure a cold and freeze an
enemy’s pent smile.
A shamaness named Old Dixie
said she had over 50 damagoni
in her truck, queening over
all the young buck magicos
who could only muster
two or three salvos with
their tongues. All that makes
me wonder just what
verbal sprites are cabinned
here inside this trusty
somewhat rusty steamer
of steely verse, yowling and
harrumphing in the engine
room’s hellish mash of
gleaming oiled gears, keeping
these songs chugging along
through a sea of dark mornings,
There’s Oran down his well
decanting old sea gods,
and Roethke sweeting his field
of brually-blowing wheat.
There's Cupid on his high
hard horse cuckolding waves
of their siphoning wives,
there’s Shakespeare booming
through to galaxies beyond
the words we thought
we knew. Some redheaded
siren is raking blue waters
with the nails of her song,
urging every salmon of
fire to leap to the lees
of her hips; and further
out you’ll find the leaky nips
of a dark blue madonna
who delves my every
ejaculation with ululations
of pale shores; and there
in the rip current rides
the hard-galloping gent
whose blue eyes are pure
ice glinting not of any
light borne of days but
belongs to God’s spectra anyway,
far right of violet perhaps
or under the cleft in
Persephone’s red fruit, lending
a cold metallish sound
to these worked-up hooves.
All of those numens -- call ‘em
sprites or jinns or dervish
whirls of verbal moods ---
all of them jackal and jest
the days wash these lines,
vaulted somewhere under
my tongue behind my ear
and under my balls in
the darker vaults of my heart,
the greater half of a heat
which names all it believes
but remains itself unseen,
unridden, urn-bidden to lean
daft against the wind.
This is my box, my
hurlyburly juke of songs,
ferried from a hundred
distant shores:
It is my gift to you,
my unsaved Beloved, my
unsounded depth, my
unslakable destination
for which my soles will
never quite shore. Now
you’ve heard of all
I keep in the first drawer:
you will surely dream
what’s kept in the second.
But what is in the
third drawer I sing?
Here I keep the depths
of my world, the heart
of that lonely shepherd
boy who raptured mine
playing in in a minor key
of major third harmony
on his desert flute,
lit by that perfect
abandoned night where I walk
walk without meters
or crutch, where I store
the most sacred blunts
of all— “Licorice!” the
third wise man sang
and here I refrain,
Black sweet licorish
Black sweet licorish

— Have some!





CAT IN THE BOX

November 2002


We don’t know why, but our cat
loves her loving in a box.
We set one on the floor
and she hops right in,
deigning to be lifted to
our bed as if on a ski-lift
and then demurring to long strokes,
her sapphire eyes misting,
milky, culled in kittenlike
memories of long ago.
Normally she can’t stand to
be held, but with only a
box between us she’ll take
all the love we can give.
I guess sometimes love
requires an inch of buffer,
a frontier absence making
not enough more than.
A beach between sea and
land brocades the
safest most pure caress.


***


EMPTY BOXES

1990


Walking back from work, I saw
Al the crazy guy coming from
the Shell station. He carted his
usual burden of empty boxes up
the hill toward his mother’s house.
I too was burdened, carrying an empty briefcase
and numbed by corporate routine.
Spectator to the gold saturate of late afternoon.

Al wore a heavy blanket of clothes;
an army jacket, jeans, green cap. He
dresses that way even in the fiercest
noon of summer. A black beard hides
but dark eyes. As our ways crossed, I said
hello; he waved sheepishly and continued
up the hill, his errand wrapped around him
like a heavy scarf.

I turned into my driveway, hoping
my wife waited inside today with a smile.
Al scared my wife for a long time.
Encountering him on our walks,
she’d tuck her hair into her shirt.
You can’t reason with the ones with nothing
in their eyes, she explained. But in three years,
Al’s proved harmless. Just an empty box-hauler.

Al lives with his mother a few blocks up,
a fat woman who bosses kids from her
crossing guard station at the elementary
school at the top of the hill. I’ve seen her
standing up there at night,
implacable fingers on her fat hips,
receiving her lame-minded son’s empty offerings:
a dizzy, unreachable summit all men climb each day,
too mighty to best, too high to resist.





THE SANDBOX

2005

In this play of gods and queens
I am forever between shores
of real and seem, of both composed,
yet never more than a figment
for air and water, a paper boat
on a sea of words more numerous
than the grains of sand I once
munched in lieu of sea or mother,
sands which now fill this daily
box I sit so happily inside
of, at work, at play, building
out of nothing bell towers and
drowned chapels, labyrinths
of half-lit swoon, City of God,
isle of Sycorax, tomb guardians
like a fleet of boners between
swells of florid bosamage
sure to milk all shores in
sweet sweet lactates, nippling
the world -- all in this in pious
driven play: my daily exercise
in abandonment to things.
When I’m in the box I wing
at will to every aerie in blue heaven
and fin the depths of meres
which haunt green wilds far
outside this sleepy town,
riding a mare of dreamlike sound,
hooves hammering the strand
in wild harmony to that music
I recall from beaches long ago,
each stride a wave’s loud crash.
Inside the box I’m by the sea,
I’m in the bushes playing
Let Me Thee See, I’m in the
basement at infernal chemistry,
I’m Mr. Ned conducting the
Dean girls naked bed-bouncing
glee: Outside the box it’s 2006
and our country sucks a sucky
world & my wife is far away,
as close as real love gets in
the big world of aches and smarts.
Outside the box is where
it all gets lost and hardens down
in rooms of stone, all sadness
permanent and ruin sure
and nothing much more to
say about it. Outside the box
this is poetry beneath the grade,
the dalliance of a working
man who suffers us the ennui
of things turning out the
other ways, tamed and cowed
by love’s mortgage-book,
a pulse mortared by bills
and pills and long-lost thrills.
Here I set to frolic in the surf
of sex-drenched summer days,
my naked length and depth
seduced into a merry crash
of warm hissing foam, all
thirsts roused and slakened
the way a shore is pounded
for ages by a wild collapsing
surf. Here is wonder and
enchantment, the thrall of
nascent hours, first light
glowing on the immortally
gratified pair in the bower
at the garden’s center,
green buds lifting from
dead loam in ripe hossannahs,
the air clear and startling,
all knowledge fragrant
finding out how close a kiss
is to that angel’s flowered breath
which blossoms in our hearts,
how much a song is like the
selkie queen who sings of God
offshore: -- Who’d ever care to
leave this box, which doesn’t
quite exist yet is the greatest
part of the life we life if only
on the pages in these latter-day
arrears. This sandbox is a
solitary enterprise for fools
and puerile sons, the very lap
of heaven poured by that
surf-mill which delves the
day its sun. Watch the words
pour from my mind, like
sand from cupped hands,
like gold dust on the world
you’ll never get to see
unless you climb in this box with me.







THE PORNOGRAPHY BOX

post to Joseph Campbell Mythology Group, May 2004


In response to this line from a person who posted about the pix from Abu Ghuraib:

“If you are doing something you shouldn't be doing, for goodness sake, don't take pictures!”

***

Heavens fellas, how do we approach this one ... is it only naughty boys and girls who ferret away that evidence so self- incriminating?

The box of porn mags in the closet, the bundle of Polaroids in an envelope at the bottom of a dresser drawer (underneath the neatly-folded cummerbund last worn at a distant cousin's wedding), the file folder marked “personal” in the desk at work filled with printouts of illicit e-mails ... stuff you should burn, but we hold on to those relics of old passion and thrall. All that wildness we’re terrified of falling into, desperate not to lose. Grainy out-of-focus shots of an old girlfriend who, on a dare allowed herself to be photographed with her legs spread wide .. shots from the bachelor party where the stripper went down on the groom ... pix of dead babies from My Lai, snuff films, things crusted with blood .. faint-smelling panties and love-letters still ringed with a shade of lipstick decades out of fashion ... all that eye nose and heart-candy which retains its headiest flavor hidden away from the disapproving view of wives, mothers, children, trophies and booty, unmentionables stolen from the sea witch next door ... all that creepy peeping tom naughty boy effluvia gathering in the most secret antechambers of the heart: there will be hell to pay if they get found out, but no way can we let them go ...

Without that pornography box I've nowhere to go to unburden all of my unspeakable desires, they portal the house of one thousand fantasies, slake just a small part of the unslakable thirst, just a daily furtive sip and I can be that perfect son husband brother coworker who should not, must not, does not have any secrets.

That's why those things keep turning up in dead men's attics, behind walls torn down years later, are fished up from some deep where they are most treasured, and we most damned. Why did he keep those pictures? And who is he really, when the truth be fully told? What wife or mother hasn't suddenly felt like they've been living with a someone who had a secret citizenship in an inacessible world?

Secret fetishes are like a yet-discovered language for love, may be the Eleusinian Mysteries of our age. Of all ages ... Vault of desire, burning, the invisible reflection of a face in your window. If it isn't in a box, it's beneath the tongue, or buried under these words.

Why did those idiots take pictures of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners? Are they only a drop of some wider flood? When shadows are shuttered the lens must see it all in living technicolor.


BOX

2004

I never travel without my box.
— Caspar the Third Wise Man
in Menotti’s Amahl and The Night Visitors

This box belongs to
Florida. It’s bound in
gator hide and filled with
roach-infested deeds to
swamp acreage. It washed
washed ashore tangled in
the wreckage of a space
shuttle’s, filled with
doubloons and transistors.
No bigger than the rudest
patron’s nose, it swings
between a stripper’s breasts
in Fort Lauderdale, bouncing
about like a bale of
pot in the Florida Straits,
and you’ll need more
than whiskey and a willie
to find out what’s in it.
It’s in the weeds of I-75
north of New Port Richey
ten feet from a drainage
ditch, forever parted
from its secret freight.
It’s on the formica dining
room table of a Paisley
tree trimmer who found
it in the high branches
of a downed oak in
College Park after the
hurricane; he’s sure it
will spring him from all
of this but he just can’t
bring himself to open it,
not with all those fallen
trees across the state.
The box is in the third
box down of the second
tier inside a storage
bin in Gainesville
amid the rest of a
marriage, still beating,
still warm. It’s made of
human skin and has
been ferried by gators
for centuries across
the swamp, all of whom
marvel at its sweet
pink luster, its sudden
jostle into fright. It’s
lodged way down --
a half-mile, I’d say --
in the murk and wreckage
of a sinkhole, wedged
between a cow’s pelvis
and a rusted ‘52 DeSoto
which fell so fast and
silently that the lovers
in their honeyed thrash
were too busy filling
up the box to understand
they were headed in it too.
The box is there under
Lake Ivanhoe, gleaming
now in 4 a.m. moonlight,
the occasional semi slurring
on the I-4 overpass,
the night fully braided
over what lies concealed
under it, which only
you can open and
read, if you will,
if you have ever dreamt
of such places,
or wondered just
what the day
covers with its bright lid.




BIG SKULL

2002

There’s a big skull
in our back yard
satirizing the half
we vaunt as day.

I hear it droning
low old chants
& alms, sad &
deep within its

chapel bone, cold
as time and all
that drained away
while we built and

taught and moved
and won. Our way
is powerful and
ripe, it’s true—a red

engine of high
rhythms, fleet
furious and blind.
It arcs a future

which has no need
of you and me;
it has cured itself
of the ache to love.

La la la, sings the skull
out back, not exactly
mocking, nor ironic,
but deeply disturbing

as all engraved
jesters are. He’s
exactly what we
cannot stand to hear:

correction from
down under,
God’s thunder
bringing up the rear.







WHY SKULL WELL

2003


Sufferers of the whooping
cough found healing at
St. Teilo’s Well in northern
Pembrokeshire when
water was lifted to
their lips from the
saint’s skull.

-- John Rhys, Celtic
Folklore: Welsh and Manx

I dip these skulls of
old welterings in the
name of cold deep,
splashings faintly
as I draw — why?
Because the arras
of this adult suburban
irreligious life is
so known, so dry?
Or is it simply that
the poem bids me
speak in its native
tongue? When St. Teilo
was on his deathbed
he asked his beautiful
maid to wait a year
after his death
and then dig up his skull
to use at the well.
Columba’s abbey rose
thus from Oran’s bone,
his mouth to doors
below; Columba
decreed that no man
may access the angels
of that isle but through
Oran, and it’s true:
All present enterprise
brackens with dead
ends, once-gloried
shouts now briared
promontories of stale
lust. I need wet sources
to ballast dry days:
if a harrowed skull
lifts more of that
deep blue, then dip
away. It’s 5:15 a.m. on a
Monday morning, Violet
given her treat and
open window, mama
cat and her kits outside
in a clump on the table,
my wife soon to be
wakened for another
wearying day of work:
Familiar tones to these
pre-dawn ranns, a mound
of knowns. That’s midlife,
both sordid and happy,
a res of young whims
grown reedy and old.
These poems are drawn
from all that, my
life’s manor showing
weed, but the well
at its center still delving
up cups of wonder.
I keep my thirst
here, where the hole is
bottomless and pure,
and each day’s measure
is the size of a skull,
a soul, or my heart--
all that I can ferry.
May I spill not a drop
nor sip more than I carry.
And at poem’s end
may I set the skull
properly back in place,
all depths below, their
darks eyeholed, inked
in the bourne we all
must cross. I set today’s
peom on the shore
where waves crease
and collapse, and in
that foam and hiss welcome
first and forever kiss.