The Poet as Menelaos between A Nereid and Her Sire

Proteus is the most easily explicable name of the “Old One of the Sea.” It is an archaic form of Protgonos, “the first-born.” No mention is made of Proteus’ parents, but only of the waters in which he can be encountered. He frequented a sandy island off Egypt, which was known as Pharos; whereas Phorkys ((his brother, another Old One of the Sea)) was more at home in the west, in a bay of Ithaca, or still further westwards, where his daughter Skylla also dwelt.

It is told, in the style of the seaman’s legends that Homer loves to tell in the Odyssey, that Proteus had a daughter called Eiodethea and that she betrayed him. “A greybeard of the sea frequents this region,” this goddess told the hero Menelaos, “the sea-greybeard of Egypt, the immortal Proteus. He knows the depths of all the sea, and is a subject of Poseidon. They say that he is my father, who begat me. If you could lay an ambush for him and capture him, he would be sure to tell you your course and the number of days of your voyage home, so that you may cross the fish-teeming sea. And, if you so desire, he will also tell you everything -- evil or good -- that has happened in your house while you were away upon your long, toilsome voyage.”

To which Menelaos: “Tell me then how I can lay an ambush for the aged god, that he may not espy me or be otherwise forewarned and escape me. For it is hard for a mortal to gain mastery over a god.” To which the goddess: “I shall tell you, stranger, exactly what to do. When the sun is at noon the greybeard of the sea comes out of the water, the greybeard who tells the truth. He comes in the gust of the west win, in the dark ripple of the waves. Once he is out of the water he lies down beneath the cavernous cliffs. Around him sleep the seals, the brood of the beautiful sea-goddess, in herds, just as they rose from the grey-white water and still exhaling the bitter smell of the deep sea. I shall lead you there at dawn and hide you in ambush. You must choose out only three of your companions, the best men for the task. Now I shall tell you the dangerous wiles of the Old One. First of all he counts the seals, five by five. Then he lies down in their midst, like a herdsman in the midst of his flock. As soon as you see that he has fallen asleep, use force and strength. Hold him fast however he may strive to escape. For this he will do. He will take on the shapes of all the beasts on earth. He will even change into water and fire. But hold him dauntlessly, tie the bonds upon him all the more closely. Only when he begins to beseech you, and has the same shape as that in which you saw him fall asleep, only then cease using force, set the Old One free and ask him ...” And so it came about. Proteus took on the shapes of a lion, a serpent, a leopard, a pig, then also of water and of a tree, and finally gave truthful answers to all that was asked of him.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, from Homer’s Odyssey 4.354




THE POET
AS MENELAOS
WITH EIDOTHEA
AND PROTEUS

October 10

She is the daughter
of the Old Man who
rules the deep end
of the sea. I met her
in a beachside bar
inside my ear one
deepest night too
long ago; waves
outside in
the aether’s beach
crashed and foamed in
threepart harmony
with lust and moonlight,
breezed by infinites
farthest offshore.
She drank Myers
rum and pineapple
juice with me,
swapping tales
of skids and rows;
at closing time
she bid me follow
to a house
not far way
that sat half on land
& half in riptide.
She bid me sit
on a couch of
cobalt blue, then
walked to the
kitchen to fetch
more rum (her
shape like the
dark moist curve
of my heart) while
bossa nova strummed
the thrall. Sat
back next to me
and set drinks
down, and then
commenced to
dance, lifting her
dress up and off with
a sigh & staring
at me all the while
with those
seagreen murderous
eyes. Stripped me
nude & mounted me,
riding my horse-
shaped desire
all the way to
first light’s dim
sated coast. Those
eyes reflecting back
some deep sea’s
depth, burning,
deep, & wild.
As wee lay there
drained she told
me of her dread
father who had
broke her long ago,
imprisoning her
to the same
short transit of
surfside bar to
this house in
fire and foam,
bidding her
shore all men
between her hips
for the aeons
of a myth,
glutting on every
fish to leap up
from a man’s
taut and riven ire
for Him -- to feed
his Titan need
for song.
She is the vault
in which I choir,
rapt and feral
for penultimate
blue psalms,
clutching them
between her
breasts and palms,
milking every
sea-verb dry.
Each chant here
plumbs a course
fro which her body
is sure compass,
blue bustier to
pink derriere
a salty promenade
between here to her
unharbored there.
And always deeper
down He turns
on the spit I
speared her with,
old Proteus I mean,
every way in
which I imagine
her again
the next room
of his dream --
naiad, barmaid,
matron weaver,
joyous naked
wench stamping
with stained knees
the blueblack grapes
desire vats in me.
Lamia in her woods,
Skylla in her
high-rise, Hecat
like a kelpie
up from the
darkest mere
which bids me dive
to all most
strange and wild.
My pen across
the page plunges
deeper into her
each time I
write her name,
each guise she
strumpets there
across the pages
of a bar -- And
always shadowed
darker behind
is He who strolls
the deeps seas of
desire. My words
are only his
footsteps in the
halls of a drowned
doom six miles
down from this
floating writing chair.
I scrawl her blessed
names here on the
sands which greet
first light, a majescule
of gorgeous sound
like rolling curves
of plashing blue.
She drank the
merry dregs of
that hue, feeding
Him too far below,
swelling black
waves no one sees
which only Proteus
can sow, furrowing
the only songs I know.




BLUE FINITUDE

2003

For now, this shore seems
endless, its tide so blue
and satisfying in all the
ways it pleases her,
or her surf-sounding ear.
I just keep on singing here
as long as she smiles
in that badass way of hers,
dark and sweet as
rum dum bossa nova
pulsing in the thickest
veld of night. I believe now
that she stayed on in that
surfside bar where I
last found her more
than 17 years ago. I was
that night a man
exhausted of all the
songs he once so believed
and played quite well,
a rock pauper reduced
to humming vampiric
ditties into his booze.
I found her there, drunk
herself, blonde and darkly
tanned, husky-voiced and
busy as all hell in a red
bikini top, her hips and
big rear wrapped in some
sort of florid tropic print.
A wasted bad girl you
wouldn’t care to woo
but so rich in that darker
milk as to make my jackals
jabber for what’s below.
We talked til closing time
drinking tall tumblers
of Myers and pineapple
juice, the fans above
slowly whirling and
whispering what the
surf outside lashed
with harder deeper beats.
She bid me follow her
back to a house in dark
Deland, and there on
a couch we proceeded
to strip and stroke and
striate the last of night
in a thick opiate dark
of dark dark blue. —- Come
dawn we found ourselves
in a pool in back, the
water in first light a
different blue, washing
our bare skin in an
oysterish liqueur, her
big fat nipples almost
black. I lost my last guitar
in the waters of that
long night: I tossed it
in that wet collapse
which formed the last
wave of a failed first
career. There one art
sounded and turned into
the next, turning blue
to black and into an ink
or oil from which
far greater turbines revved,
rising up this spluttering
well-shape high into
some verbal air, a tower’s
fume and fin I shaped
just the way she bid me.
I sit here 17 years
later apolunar to that
last raw seaside bar,
in a house and chair
where deeper oceans roam,
her yield to me spread
wide in measure to how
far this pen can swim,
or dare to. Sometimes
however I wonder if the
end of all poems
is a pale dark beach
harbored by the
same surfside bar, and
conched in that bar
she still sits waiting
patiently for me
to come straggling
in exhausted once again
in some wholly other way.
Perhaps she waits
for me to cast
this sea-ravaged pen into
the strange blue of
her savage demesne.
The was a music once
of hooves and heat.
The words came later
and were more composed,
of worlds inside the girl;
I swived and married
and forever mused:
Out there where the sea
and sky are one,
beyond the moon and
sun and starry wrack,
the next wave surely
rises and begins its
travel here. Surely
the sea-witch on her
bar-stool is smiling,
her eyes closed to the
song which jazzes on
the jukebox, the gloom
which holds here there
blue as mare’s milk,
thick and sweet and wild
and so utterly finite.



INCUNABULA

2004

This book you wrote
in me long ago
in a tongue between
my mother’s and the sea’s,
a half-uteral, half-literal
gorgeousness which poured
the littoral of Ys
— barbs of shining fire
plunging each wave’s
fold and crash till all
is a gliding, gilding blue.
Each day I write another song
amazed at how the ink
fins and oars the whiteness
of your breasts, your cleavage
binding every page,
invoking words I do not know,
much less name, though
each day’s shoring on the beast
who rides below gets closer
to that old, angelic sound.
Truly my ache for you
devoured me with this singer’s
mouth distilled from the
wintriest nights in the dankest,
most infernal south,
where beachside bossa novas
rimmed with rum a
noctilucent tide — full ebbings
of a lunar blare which dazzled
as it emptied me of all hope
of finding you. Who would have guessed
that my surrender inked the nib
which plunged harpoonlike
to that deepest heart and
willed the wildest blue,
the saltiest, wave-wracked,
spume-high exhalant of you
to drown a man’s drying lips!
And so the wonders I swore
were false, even deadly,
are writing (or riding)
themselves down, song by song,
in this book shelved between
the flukes of an old whale
— an inculabula of every thrill
and soak and plumage of
your infinitely wide
and ever deeper sea.
Each page was ferried from that abyss
which named the distance
of one kiss, one plunge,
one night so long ago:
I’m sure by now you’d
have it no other simple,
safe or ordinary way.
Breviary of blubber
and a five-ton fisting heart,
may my words be spermacetti-pure
as those sweet choiring tidals
who wax the ebbing art.

SEA LABYRINTH

Just beneath my trackless
ocean course between
this lonely shore and you
there lies a labyrinth,
an ancient code of your travail
which I enter as I launch
and wander as I sail,
finding the next isle
at its center not quite
sea or land but both
& you freshly departed,
the water in the well
there almost burning
with your blue, harrowed
to the dregs in the
lost carouse of you.
My job as I see it
from this chair today
is to make that
circuit canonical
and nude, an abbot
with his psalter
intoning lines over
waves that sing back
with nipples bigger
than a mouth: that
in those Nones of
stern devout your
gauzy peachy salt-
glazed beachy
pulses bossa rum sashay,
causing archangels
to go stout and
clamor for a fall,
just one, a good long
pussy plunging
dive down to the
saltiest names
of God. I see ‘em just
beyond the breakers
tumbling in a row,
those pairs of blessed
ankles and pale soles
vanishing in blue,
each like a book
tossed on the wave,
another vespering
poem. My job is
sound the depth
of that well
and count every bed
that’s lost down there,
each an inkling
burning with a desire,
an arrow’s shiver
up the mortal sense
that you’re staring
back up from that murk,
imploring all my seed
and ink and nouns.
My job’s to make
that view a shore
enfolded by incessant
tide, each wave an
antiphon and greeting
and taunt to mount
the coracle again
and chance once
more the main’s
desperately empty dazzle
with that spiral
dancing floor hidden
a mile of fathoms down
where gods and whales
and undressed lovers
sport and roam. Each
plunge and peramble
here comes to you
at last, or at least
that resonance
which hallows these
ears and haunts
my turn back home.
Each return is to
some higher deeper
ground where even
less is known and
the tide pounds harder,
like a kiss, a clench,
the next blue
widening door.



SONG TO LIR

2005

I’m still in thrall with those bad
old nights. Black fiddles still
saw swoony and fey that
big night music in my reverie;
something lurches when I
recall the thrill of driving headlong
into the darkest rooks of town,
scenting something blonde and
bloodlike in the night breeze rushing
through the opened windows
of my car, the ions of summer
storm and surf igniting my
neural ramparts, like St. Elmo’s
Fire, with the eerie wattage
of danger and booze and sex.
That blue alchemy was the
quintessence of my Faustian
dive into LaLaLand, pouring
myself in votive jolting jets
down into the badassed
veld of all Black Mothers.
Certainly all that is
nothing to fall too much in
love with again, else I fall again
in all those hurtful ways.
Yet in that gnarly bad-booze
brew a crystal bed lay far
down out of view; at the heart
of those dark quests lay the
the hope of finding once again that
bright grail of clear blue love
which in all the years of
roaming and ravening I had
blundered on two or three
too-brief essential times,
each a milky pure enactment
which washed me more
cleaner of my arrears
than when I was baptized in the
sea at Melbourne Beach
when puberty shot me forth.
Perhaps that soft-glo bed
of Perfect Love was just the
golden carrot of a darker
more selfish appetite for More;
I certainly crept out of
far too many beds
at the far ends of those nights
believing Love -- the free-fall,
lucky type -- was nowhere
on that rumpled snoring shore.
All that is true, but these
days another thought begins
to form that the whole of that
gambol between savage lust
and starry love was just the
foolish half I too much believed,
meant by godlike hands whose
ends were mine, as if
my enbrined sense could drink
a goddess night to dregs.
A Puritan error I have so many
drowned fathers to thank, I think.
I come to sense now that while
I dissembled like an Actaon on
down those bad years, ever more
mauled and shredded by my own howls
for love in a wilderness of rock taverns
and boob bars and and bottle clubs,
some darker underside was nursing
from me, not so much from my acts
but the desires which teated them,
growing more visible as a shape defined up from an
enormous sea which is the greatest
part of me, a whale which grazed
upon on my yearning midnight stare.
While I banged on to ruinous ends
it lurched and followed, devouring
every whiskey bottle, bra and guitar
pick I flung over a shoulder toward
forgetfulness, each a wafer of communion
which slowly woke his soul in mine,
night after night, acre after fathom
of that watery abyss. And then one
night I found us somehow one,
my slipping & sliding & oh so
wounded feet astride his hoary back.
Back then the endless drinking felt
like I had fallen in the whale,
but now I sense that I had just
found a footing there where falling
is the precipice of everything
desire bid me lose. Weirdly too
I sense I’ve yet to hit the real
bottom of that sea, years now
after the last bad boozing night.
There were years in which I
boarded up against all beams
of wet wild night; then years of
reparation for the guilt and shame
by living well and deep. There came
hard education where I learned
that love could not become itself
till I forsook all hope of pouring
it its perfection from a bottle,
babe, and bed. Amid all that
I felt him there, dangerous and
wild, a dark layer of endless
ache which no prayer could
fleece or flay. Now I sense I’m
simply heading deeper as the
two of us swim on. I think
of those old nights and,
with no actual desire to lose
myself in them again, sigh and
swish the liquor of it here,
feasting with stained chops
upon its taste of endlessness,
hauling on huge nipples of
forever-sweeter more, invoking
that blackout in the beast
which parks me on the shore
of Paradise. Yes -- oh feel that
dark immensity lurch deep
within, free and feral in the
deepest nacre of the thrall,
cresting a huge wave in a shower
of moon silver to spume spermatic
fire defiant toward the sky,
crashing down with all the massy
freight of an old, emphatic joy.
And that is just the surface part,
for he dives deeper than what
sight I’ve learned to toss. The limbic
sea he swims on down and back
I will never fully sound, much
know how many million years
he thrusts and fins the verbs.
I’m writing here truly as I’m
riding him, a silly dram
of wakeful ocean on a course
of endless waves, boy cupid
with this tiny flute astride
the night’s Leviathan.
Carve me on the upmost
arch of his coat of arms. Hang
us on the headboard of every
bed I’ve held a woman in.
Carve us on the gravestone
where at last I’m fully wed.
And to every savage fantasy
I hold like whiskey on my tongue,
may his loll like the clabber
which all night bells are rung.