Lamia

DEVIL IN THE BLUE

2004

Devil in the deep blue seas
Devil with a blue dress on
Devilish my blue ink scree
Salving every wave and psalm

Poet as beached monkey man
With nothing but his verbals on
Heating every blue degree
Which this song is cooking on

Devil in the foundry fire
Devil in the whale’s basso
Devilish the old church spire
Gleaming in the mire below

Dragon with a dolphin head
Mermaid with a siren’s throat
Verses drawn and arrowed
Nailing this devil in the moat

Who sings like an angel on high
With the wings of dragon ire
Whose exorbitance must die
To gut this cocheanal lyre

And be thrown back in the sea
To salt the blue mellifluence
I tide to You eternally
Like a moon under the influence

Devil in the deep blue seas
With you dripping blue dress on
My song is your disease
Busty lauds to milk the dawn

***

The mother ((of Skylla)) ... is called not only Hekate, but also Lamia. At this point these stories wander off into tales that do not even form part of seamen’s legend, but lie still further away in the outer fringes of mythology. They become such fables as nurses used to tell children, both to frighten them into good behavior and also to entertain them.

Lamia, or Lamo, is by name “The Devourer”: lamios means “gullet.” ... It was told that Lamia was a queen in Libya. Her cave was actually pointed out to visitors. Zeus loved her -- for she was beautiful -- and begat children by her. These fell victim to the jealousy of Hera. Since then Lamia has been ugly with grief and enviously steals the children of other mothers. She can take her eyes out of her head, so that they remain watchful even when she herself is saleep. And she can change into any shape. But if she is seized and held flat, the children can be taken alive from her belly.

A similar story of the Titans was also told to children. The tale in some ways resembles the story of Kronos. Lamia, like Kronos, possessed a tower. It is not clear whether she was a goddess or a god or both. The comic poet Aristophanes,who has preserved, but also distorted and burlesqued, so many ancient tales, mentions parts of Lamia’s body which are certainly not female. (Similarly the Gorgon sometimes has a phallus attached to her.)

On the other hand, she was noted for having the lustfulness of a harlot, and sometimes a harlot would be nicknamed Lamia. Her ability to change her shape reminds one of the threefold shapes of Hekate and of the mixed bodily structure of Skylla. Lamia has this gift in common with certain divinities of the sea, and also with another bogy, Empousa. Sometimes this last name is simply another name for Hekate, but sometimes Empousa appears as a separate being. People also used to speak of Lamia and Empousa in the plural, and when they did so the two names were synonymous.

When Empousa was encountered in the entrance to the Underworld, as in a play by Aristophanes, she appeared now as a cow, now as a mule, now as a beautiful woman, now as a bitch. Her whole face burned like flame. One of her feet was of bronze. (But obviously the poet is exaggerating. Other narrators speak only of her brazen sandal, which later Hekate wore in her quality of Tartarouchos, “Ruler of Tartaros.” In her quality of bright goddess, she wore golden sandal.) Empousa’s other foot was so befouled with the mule’s dung that it seemed to be not a mule’s foot, but a foot of mule dung. At this point, however, mythology has given place to mere ribaldry.

-- Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks





LAMIA

October 6

Mother of sea-demons, she
is the devourer of my children,
desperate to drink her fill
of the ghost-kin spilled
from this blue womb of words.
Her dark tide hauls
my dark impulse home:
bad daddy, demon lover,
abortion’s bladed knight,
booze rapturer with the
ribald, bald-mooned skull,
she reflects them all
in that seas-wide smile
and beds them deep beneath
the dregs of closing time.
Sometimes beautiful,
other times too torched
by the pyre of her smile,
she is the dice-roll in
every one-night’s stand,
alternating on two nights
twixt sweet and red-eye
vicious, preternatually
calm and wounded-wild.
Observe her girdled feet:
one wears the golden
sandal of good love
& the other the mule’s
shit-mired cloven shoe.
Her Venusian breasts
are crossed by
Hekatean arms -- a
welcome milked
with gall, like the
crab’s embrace
which drags is prey
beneath the wave,
a smile jammed
with spit and tongue
and endless o-so-
vicious teeth.
You just never know
what you score in
her, seductress wafted
from the scent of
hootch, spirit
from the bottle
broken in you long
ago when the
night nurse crept
to your crib and
fished inside your
diapers, stealing
what grew there.
She rules you from
a South which
no man has ever
reached, a Libya
of black brassieres
and panties hanging
from an ancient tree
with a thousand
suitor corpses
banging against
each other where
they hang, still
stirred by her
inciteful breeze.
Your ache for her
is eternal as
her need to eat you
whole -- the two of
you plunging and
feasting on fruit
you’ll never find
the sweetness of
again, not quite,
though you try
until you die.
I saw her across
the bar in a cloud
of sibyl smoke:
and when she
turned to look
at me full on,
naked, vulnerable,
torched, unwholesome,
greedy, bottomless --
Lamia’s rough
primacy laid hold
of my keel from
below and hauled
me from the last
known shore
to that island
bourne with its
tall hanging tree
down the salt
roads of pure
thrall. -- Old
potent stuff
which still lamps
the dark lees of
this hour
with a full
moon’s ghoulish
glow, cold
and urgent at
once, half sea
half sky &
fully lidded in
the Lamia’s huge
eyes which are
still looking at
me from across
that bar now
sealed in Davy
Jones’ blue locker,
welcoming
me again back home
with those sweet
blue eyes, those
sweltering dread
knockers.



THE BRA
IN THE TREE

2003

One altar of my
longing is that
southern oak
which spread in
the courtyard of
Dennison Junior
High. The locus
of my waking was
Winter Haven
in 1970:
thirty three years
ago and some fifty
miles from here
where southern
oaks line all the
streets, outliving
every high and low
I’ve found in
in this dazzled
drenched state
of Florida. We’d sit
on concrete benches
beneath its arms
on hot September
mornings, waiting
for that school
to mouth our bodies
for the day.
It was my first
semester of ninth
grade at a new school,
a fat Yankee kid
flung from Chicago
‘burbs into a
Southern welter
of impossible
desires. Over the
summer, sun,
citrus, storm and
swimming
pool hatched my
glands in a glittery,
gritty wave of lusts;
now desire ferried
me into that
collective maul
of public school.
I was both terrified
and enthralled to sit
on those hard
benches afar from
all, watching the
black boys race
past like windy blades
and revel in girls
all taller by half a
head, their hair
and brushed sleek in
manes of silken fire.
Oh and how their
bodies were all filling
up with fruit and
what infernal juice!
Those days of
early puberty’s shock
and thunder I thought
I had been pitched
into some mouth
of Hell, all knuckle,
tooth and boob.
How could I know
that those waters
sprung from below and
within: that the sap
of my own dark
regions sprouting
pale fur on my
lip and groin
& leaking semen
in the sheets
almost every night
was causing me to
only see sex and
more sex in every
day? Each
morning I much less
woke than surfaced
from a lake of fire,
dragging from bed
to shower
and breakfast
table in a glaze
of all I dreamed
of the night before.
As I walked to
the bus-stop some
mist of storm still
shrouded the orange
grove just beyond
our house, the light
labial and moist,
the shadows of
the other kids
forked by imps
they each had dreamed.
As the bus wended
into town past
orange groves and
cow pastures blue
green and stunned
in first light,
dirty jokes passed
around the dark green
seats like sacred pipes
glowing in our ears --
Do ya know why
Doctor Pepper comes
in a bottle? Because
his wife died! The
boys would roar
with glee, while the
girls just sighed
and stared further
out the windows,
surely looking for
those older, taller,
cooler, more mature
boys. While I sat
there, stony, not
joining in either way,
but loving all
the talk in my secret,
greedy way, the way
lust divides a boy in
two, worshipping those
divinely pretty faces
in the seats ahead,
sacrificing my mother
and sister and every
other righteous
love with a red
hardon for the
pale blue panties
which crooned
in wet darks below.
One day we pulled
up at the school and
piled out to see
a huge bra hanging
from a middle limb
of that oak tree,
bright white
amid the clumps
of ant moss, the
cups huge and
rude. My eyes
mouth and hands
all startled reflexively
at the size
of the breasts those
cups suggested,
nailing me suddenly
to an immortal
tree of my own --
just another boy
lost forever in a
boat of bone on
seas he’ll never cross,
much less beach.
I must have stared
slack-jawed at that
foolish thing ‘till the
first bell rang, as
entranced by the
startling white
fullness of it as by
the question of just
how it got up there --
my mind playing
reel after reel of
seduction at night
beneath that tree,
harvest moon
cupping above
the kiss, emboldened
reaching, the unclasp
and what all sprang
gree, a whoop of
joy sending that bra
up high to altar
the next day in my
eye. Of course the
wiser guess is that
some dweeb stole his
sister’s or mother’s
bra from where it
hung in the shower,
throwing it up the
tree on a dare; yet
in my diddler’s
cathedral someone
and someone else
is always paired,
eternally on fire,
releasing joy in
rhythm with my
every stroke, a relic
of a lost age
which never freed
for me (or her)
its rude so brilliant yoke.




SIREN

2005

The Liber Monstrorum warns that
the sirens distract ships with their song,
“and they are most like human beings
from the head to the navel, with the body
of a maiden, but have scaly fish’s tails,
with which they lurk in the sea.”

-- Clara Strijbsoch, The Seafaring Saint:
Sources and Analogues of the 12th
Century “Voyage of St. Brendan”


Halving goddess, you are
my dream’s reflection and
depth, the blue-boned nacre
of devil sweetness
inside all song. All my
errors I commend to you,
my pure white sails
furled by the God
stilled and limp
before your risings
oh so dripping with
unknowns. What course
is not foiled by the swell
of breasts inside the
wave which breaks
and pounds on that
shore over there,
the one not found
on any map, in
regions beyond
all Christian maps?
Gold cargo and
more golden ports
are both forgotten
in the pearled silver
of your voice,
your words not
spoken in any day
I’ve live, nor
read in any
text above the wave.
They gleam and
shimmer like gems
set in scales
which flash and
then are gone. Listen
to that singing at
your dry peril
O masthead scout:
doze there and
it’s hair nose &
eyeballs in one
long scream into
the soak & the silent
aria of drifting down
the miles to the bed
that gathers lovers
in a mile-wide embrace,
matressed by a
loam of bones.
Is that the measure
of your wild beyond,
a waist of song
between one kiss
and all abyss? Or
is such praise too
unsalted for your tongue
for which music
is blue labia, the
slick quench of
sucking cunt harrowing
my ears into wilder
dreadful rooms below?
What is that sound aft
of this daily jaunt
across the verbal blue,
a sound which can’t
be bedded here but
only flung in mist?
A swell of milky nipples,
the smile which melts
down to alloyed hell?
Who knows; the song
has sounded where I
swore it belled,
silent as an
otherworldly buoy.
Thank God (I think)
I sail on. But now
what surf do I hear
crashing ahead? And
that voice -- almost a girl’s --






VAMPYRE

2003

On cold mornings as this
I recall the vampyre
who folded me in his
black so red cape
during those hard winter
months of my worst
carousals. He picked
me off as his own
and sported me me
like some backassed Virgil
through the blasted
dead precincts of
infernal desire. Outside
it was bars at closing time,
dreary parties at some
wastrel’s duplex in
a forgotten suburb,
the bottle clubs at 4 a.m.
with their disco whirl
of wolves and waifs.
Under or inside all
that was a bitterly cold
nightscape in its
most feral remove, like
living on the moon,
or working at the bottom
of the sea, or roaming
frozen steppes miles from
the nearest farm. Wrapped
in his red caul of utter
wrong made god I fell
down my ravening’s ravine
on wings of black delight,
my vision narrowed to
a single blurred impulse,
the flash of ass in
the murk far below
like a tunny in the wake
or a neon sign in
a bar window at the
far end of the last street.
He was humming absently
in my ear a vacant,
droning air, repeating
draught for draught
all the thirst housed
down a bottomless well.
His face was smooth
and pale as ogham-stone,
a death-mask forged
in my own image
when I stared into the
mirror behind the bar
and saw a king of
nothing there. Only
the eyes showed life --
Owlish orca-eyes,
lidded and burning
inside polar ice as
they scanned the regions
below like whizzing
arrows of an opportunity
it is death or worse to
greet: old eyes too,
eternally tired, haunted
by a root insomnia
to shadow every
dark impulse from
damning dark to
doomed red dawn.
His breath stank of
sour mash and cunt
and the vomitus of
a sea-lion's heart: Desire
may be holy, but
greed is its marauding
Dane, cleaving the
abbot’s head, nailing
all the nuns, burning
the rectory and sailing
off with sacks of booty
(silver chalices stained
with blood, jeweled
reliquaries dumped of
grey bone fragments
at the last departing shore.
Mine all mine, that
foul breath saws, in and
out like the metronome
of a missing pulse, like
a blueblack blickering
tide. And the fangs!
Let’s just say that they
were spread behind
my worst blackout falls
in the dead of that
last winter of my drinking,
the angels of longing
and satiation standing
at the gates of every
3 a.m. to haul me
down again into that
cold maw where I’d lost
again, lost it all. Again
and again, night after
night, I died trying
to wing an imp
to the heart of a heat
I could not legitimately
fashion, much less bleed,
ruled as I was by that
outward motion that
makes of love cold ocean
and high winds the wings
by which I fanned
a berserker’s suburban
rage. I travelled way
way out there all alone
to pick a fight with
a vampire’s sippy bone.
Fool -- and yet that
passage wound me here
on this first cold morning
of what we call winter
in these sub-tropics,
a blanket on my lap
and surrounded by a
house fully home at last.
A cop car rolls
up the street with
a searchlight fanning
bushes and nooks
-- they’ll never find him
lurking there. He’s
somewhere overhead,
up in the branches
of a burning oak, spreading
wide his wings to a
late November moon,
drying all the blood,
warm for fading seconds,
eyes all the bad ends
my life could dissolve to.
His owl-eyes are big
as plates, as altars,
as moons. Cold as
he knows it bladed thirst
for pale warm necks
which pierce like wurst.
Such cold is in the pyre
of that that vamp
who angels my old nights,
a cold which one is wise
to fight with a real life
-- cross your heart
and pray it rise
with the next day’s sun.





THE DEEP END
OF THE POOL

2005

Shamanic initiation proper includes not
only an ecstatic experience but ... a course
in theoretical and practical instruction
too complicated to be within the grasp
of a neurotic. Whether they still are or
are not subject to real attacks of epilepsy
or hysteria, shamans, sorcerors, and
medicine men in general cannot be
regarded as merely sick; their psycho-
pathic experience has a theoretical
content. For if they have cured themselves
and are able to cure others, it is, among
other things, because they know the
mechanisms, or rather, the theory of illness.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy,

I.

Dear dark father far down under every
shape of the one I’ve known, I write to you
now in a letter that began when I was
delved up to the world on a wave of
bawling song: That water eddied and
swole slowly through my childhood,
cresting to a wave of malefic oh-o-swoony
height when its sexual semblance waxed
in my cresting teens, baptising me in its
blue augment long before I literally
became a man, if You know what I mean,
or I get properly now what You spleen
in my dream. Between events and our
knowledge of them is all that gets diseased
and mauled down into their awful wake,
years of twisting down abyms in a sprawl
of futile bubbles, dying in every bright
way to the dark underside which demand
descent before revealing what all mantas
shade, that gospel which You bid me
read at last beyond the lowest floating
lines which yesterday I wrote, leaving
me here to start again. But it’s all the same
event, the wound and its womb I mean,
with all the years between just peramabling
bubbles of a dream which is the real event,
its mundo, its shoving-off and every far
shore, the whole damn cathedral of
carouse at the bottom of God’s drowse.
Hell, what I see now might actually be
invoking its history, as if later reflection
could actually rouse percipient blue deeds.
Thus my ends beyond are just the oldest
rooms of a house I’ve yet to dig all full
down to, Trois-Freres that shore where
all I’ve sung matches Your voice enough
to join me amid the herd upon cave
walls, rescinding their plural deaths
in the resonance of my dust, sands
one day scattered on that one long beach
which crashes in my ear and in the shape
of every woman I loved too much to reach.

II.

Wing with me back to Chicago in the
Summer of 1974 to visit my last months
in that urban blight before taking leave
for good for college. Here is where my family
bone is broken the worst, the deep end
of that pool I call Intimacy which since
I’ve so loathed and bungled and yearned
the greatest depths of. You were spinning
fate’s wheels hard with all betters losing
worse: My father could no longer live inside
the closet of his life, and with an at-last
honest groan came out, telling my mother
me and my older brother that he was gay,
no husband of any ilk, nor much again
a father. Thus their marriage was finally
thrown in the drink and our family life
it once contained allowed to spout blood
and bloat and slowly turn over, giving up
the ghost which had darkened every
door we lived in with a closet’s gloom for
so many years. My mother, confirmed at
last of what she always knew, took my
younger brother and sister and moved south
for good to city- north- and husband-less
Orlando; my father, older brother and myself,
we lived as remnants for a while in that
now too-empty house on Fullerton
as summer cracked the Chicago in an
infernal runny roar. My father planned
to quit the church and move to New York
City’s; my brother was to move to California
where a new life might help him work
afar; and I was headed to Spokane for
school: So that last season in Chicago
was all for ending things but good, for
stumbling round the wounds like ghouls,
and pouring on the booze but good, our
thirst expanding exponentially
as Your dark mouth formed a deep end
to the hurt, a house at the bottom of
all things where bad spirits come to roar.
The echoes in that house those months
were hard and loud, each creak of a chair
around our emptied dining table sounding
in a percussive snap, beats of Your
shaman drum I guess. Scotch made
those noises mellow, even desirable,
as if the louder pain gave cause to amp
the imps of whiskey poured on ice,
one finger for divorce, two for silence
round the dinner table, three for the
sound of fast hooves away across a
frozen tundra of high emptiness. We drank
like fish that summer, my father no longer
caring much to be a father in the old way,
always there to talk and care but in no mood to warden
how much booze we drank, or sheriff
us for pouring every other octane on our
self-evicting flames. I frame that fire in Your
tinderbox dark Father, though the saying’s
hard, feral as all educations down under
I have learned must soddenly go.
Graduates of high school, family,
Christianity, and hope of saner
upper worlds, we became a drinker’s
mad fraternity, pouring booze on all that’s
spilled when faith’s been killed, when
what lives on in love’s hardest paternity.


III.

I spent some hot afternoons that summer
up on the roof of Ruth’s row house
across from our with she and her friend
Cathy, acting like soon-to-be-fully minted
adults, splayed half naked in folding chairs
beneath a turgid sun, listening to Pink Floyd
and the Doobie Brothers on rock radio &
talking about the glistening world through
a sheen of baby oil. Our desire was just
barely offshore of remittance, our good
Christianity losing the last of its embracure;
we bitched about our shitty lives and
dreamed of all we’d one day imbibe
once we figured out how to pop the cork
jammed hard in each of our young heads.
It was one of the season’s insanities, those
fleshy colloquies up high which could only
talk but never fly: a high-dive symposia
which taught that when you stand up
there long enough admiring the view,
the deep end of the pool just gets deeper and wilder and
more fierce, more quintessentially wild bllue.
We’d take turns reading from porno books
which Cathy had lifted from a brother’s stash, our voices quavering,
an infernal stillness in the air as we dared
to mouth words like cock and cunt in
so languid and labial a relish, tonguing
thrust and heaving breasts, some region
of our brains parted to spiralling orgasm
and ribbons of hot spurting come,
the three of us calm as toast upon those
folding chairs, the music tinny in its
upmost registers, while such deep bassos
roared between us, Cathy's big boobs in
in a blue bikini top bursting my every
seam, Ruth’s mouth a berry pucker saying
balls and cockhead and sucked clean. It would be
a year before I dove into all that with
Ruth in splash of cerulean nitro; six months
later when, passing through Chicago in
deep winter, I plunged Cathy to the hilt
after a party in about the three seconds
it took to dive all the way at last from
that roof. Maybe now you’ll write me,
she said as I kissed her rumpled, fresh-
fucked visage at the door; I smiled and
walked forever out into the silence of her
life. That summer we just burnt our soulage
on the roof, tindering wings for later flight
when eventually and on our own we each
leapt off and flew down to our separate
histories. It was all just talk then, the
first departure from God’s higher word,
the bridge to every later ecstasy when
words became their labials. We talked
our ways off of that roof for sex, then
love, then family: But first we sang the songs,
as if by singing them at least and last
the deep end found us willing votives
when You ordained to break your Your fast.

IV.

One day I got a spider bite up near my groin
--or was that really You? The venom fanged
something which cause a riot in my flesh,
hives and bumps swelling left and right
until my groin was swelling fire. I grew
hysterical and then passed out -- perhaps
that feint my first big seizure -- coming up
from dark to fog, fumbling to the phone
to call my dad for help. Things were
indistinct a while and then I was on a
gurney in the emergency room, receiving
a shot of antihistimines. Dazed in that
freezing room of steel, I seemed only
halfway there, the other part lost in
a tundra space where merciless black horses
thundered north, their eyes so wild
with wind as to gaze on me forever there,
even as I recovered slowly from that bite.
I was welcomed back to consciousness
by a gaggle of interns and residents
led by a doc who lifted my hospital gown
to offer them all a peek at my strange
malady: they mmmmm’d as one to see
the tortured tundra round my cock. Ever
since I’ve never been much afraid of
insect bites, nor ever had another
reaction to spiders ants or wasps. Maybe
that was my only encounter yet with a bug of
true awfulness, or maybe I was simply
ripe and plucked for passage down to You,
my upper wounds like a mouth spread
wide for the host you venomed into me,
opening the way to wounds much further
down the darkest blues Fat City horned
in the hot streets of its summer.

IV.

The last month of that season before
I flew away was where, truly, I was
brined in Your pool’s deepest leagues.
We moved out of the house on Fullerton
into the church manse next to Wrigley Field,
a dirtier and more risky neighborhood
with Latin Eagles pounding tympanis
in the playground across the street
and poor white Appalachians growing
poorer up and down that sad old street.
But it was free and temporary, a good
springboard for taking our leave of the
city for good. Weekdays that August
I worked downtown in the basement of
a bank, processing checks amid a hive
of faceless clerks. The sums were vast
and tough to reconcile against the checks
that fled through my hands; the sums
were everywhere when I walked out at
dusk, gold blood painted on every downtown
dive, as if the setting sun was Hades’ coin.
(Someone else’s wealth amid our
destitution: another of the season’s
fell dichotomies.) Riding the El home
after work I watched the windows blur
on by, catching the eyes for just a flash of
some poor fuck worse off than I,
dressed in BVDs and weaving unsteadily
in a room forever far too close to the tracks.
His eyes bored into mine with every fraught
futurity I feared, but what else could I do
but drink? And so once home I happy
houred with my father and my brother,
our Scotches poured to nudge the rim,
the roars from Wrigley where the
Cubs were losing somehow approving
each hard pull which fell and fell
and fell inside. My father then was
between two augments, the church behind
him like some contemporary pagan age,
some older vision forming up ahead
where stones were bidding him to raise
old archetectures in new vision: But
that season there was only the blood
of what’s between, too clouded by
pain and fresh desire, so he drank
and hard. And my brother? Well, he was
all high-proof angst and lust, a party boy
who drove his days as if inside a burning
demo derby car, pinning foolish women
with strong hands that later came to heal
with an uncanny strength. But to get there
he too had far too much to drink. I’d
talk with them awhile getting three
Scotches down and then heading down
into the basement with three or four
beers in hand, setting them on an
Ampeg tubeless amp that was rounded
a hard glittery blue plastic plush.
I’d strap on a homemade guitar
that had given to me a year before
by the leader of hard-rocking Christian
band, when I was still devout and
white in Christ-like fealty. He gave
me the axe -- not much of one
except for the humbucker pickup
which really made the fucker squeal --
on the condition that I only play God’s
song’s, making me promise to burn
the ax if I ever wanted to play it
the devil’s way. Well, that was what I
thought to wing when You first
blew through me at fourteen; but
You obviously had other plans for me,
because by the summer I turned
seventeen I was riding wild the other
way, heading down in the profaner
song of playing loud and wild.
I’d pull on those beers and smoke my butts
and wail away on that guitar but loud,
no child or Christian or folk-guitarist
any more, winging out on boozy riffs
beyond all sight of home, to lands
I’d make a later haunted wreckage of
in the name of my slow education
in the ways of your hardest, deepest
songs. I drank and wailed upon that
cheap guitar until the song was spent
at that summer’s end, climbing on a
DC-10 to fly far west where You
you took my soul and taught it how
to break what cannot bend.

V.

Of that too-loud later immrama
I save for other songs: suffice to say
the music drowned me good before
it washed me on to here. Look: I’m still
here at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day 2005,
31 years after that summer which You
perched above the amps of Hell,
sitting in the same white chair I’ve sat
in for years now every morning
before first light, doing what I always do
in the center of this life. I got to this
that older way --- so wrongly, hurtfully,
and wild -- but now I come to think that
every bruise’s bruiting was meant:
Every hangover, clap, sunburn,
split finger, hysteria, swoon, seizure, and
migraine writes the miniscule You
bid me cry aloud while the deeper
majescule went on instructing me
about darker bliss of what’s remiss
and fallen and oh-so-bottomless in
the deep end of the pool. Every woman
that I’ve pressed onto as if to drink
her sex to dregs has had the same
surficial sooth, like nipplage of darker
oceans which now learn to drink
without a single curve in sight. That I’m
writing you this letter only means
I get what was written there so long
ago, or perhaps only that I’ve glimpsed
the faintest title of the work I’ve left
to do. I feel I’ve nearly finished all that
I can say about that now: whatever journeys
forth seems zipped, like the woman falling
back into the wave with a finger of kelp
obscuring what her mouth would say.
The word “shaman” may be lost as
well, its port and purpose expendable,
a coin to toss the ferryman: We’ll see.
Suffice to say here, Father, that I now
thank You for dropping me in the deep
end that summer long ago. May I carry
down still further what you bid me find there
in the undertowing tones I come to sing.