Relics from the Acropolis

“The strangest ritual of all held in Athens hwas connected with the Arrephorai, the maiden bearers of the ‘unutterable objects’ -- for that is what the title seems to mean -- who assisted in the preparation of Athena’s new robe. Two duty girl, who, according to the women in Aristophanes’ comedy The Lysistrata, were often as young as seven years old, lived in a house on the Acropolis not far from the Old Temple.Who guarded or looked after them at such a tender age we are not told, though it seems safe to assume tht they were generally kept under the wing of the priestess of Athena.

“On the day of the festival -- which fell during Skirophorioa -- equivalent to our June -- they carried out by night the following curious rite. The priestess gave them certain secret objects whose identity was likewise unknown both to herself and to them. These they placed on their heads and bore to the precinct of Aprhodite in the Gardens by a subterranean walk. There they left their burdens and returned with others in their place. So mcuh we learn from Pausinas, who implies that the details were not generally known in his day.

“An important scholium or note in a passage in the late dialogue writer Lucian offers the suggestion that the ‘unutterable objects’ were pieces of dough modelled to resemble ‘serpents or male shapes.’ The latter were presumably phallic, though much uncertainty attaches to the scholium in question, as festivals and rites are confused almost past redemption. Snakes would certainly suggest a fertility cult.

“Again, the objects were taken to the sanctuary of Aphrodite, who was connected with fertility and desire. In Athens there seem to have been two sancutaries of Aphrodite in the Gardens, one on the southern flank of the Acropolis and the other, which has only recently been discovered, on the northern.

“The latter, which was sacred also to Eros, god of love, contained several altars, while stone representations of the male sexual organ were found scattered about. Bromeer, the discoverer of the sanctuary, suggested that as no burnt offerings or blood offerings were permitted to stain the altars of Aphrodite in Paphos, the phalloi themselves were the objects of at least the occasion of veneration, probably to increase the fertility of the seed-corn.”

 John Pollard, Seers Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution of the Sixth Century, BC




BIRTH OF VENUS

Ranier Maria Rilke
transl. Edward Snow


On this morning after the night that fearfully
had passed with outcry, tumult, uproar --
all the sea broke open once more and screamed.
And as the scream slowly closed again
and from the sky’s pale daybreak and beginning
fell down into the mute fishes’ chasm--:
the sea gave birth.

The first sun shimmered in the hair-foam
of the wide wave-cleft, on whose rim
the young girl rose, white, confused, and moist.
Just as a piece of new green leaf stirs,
stretches, and something curled up slowly opens,
her body unfolding into the coolness
and into the untouched early morning wind.

Like moons the knees rose clearly
and ducked into the cloud-rims of the thighs;
the calves’ slim shadows pulled back,
the feet flexed and grew luminous,
and the joints came alive like the throats
of people drinking.

And in the pelvis’s cup lay the belly
like a young fruit in a child’s hand.
In its navel’s narrow chalice was
the entire darkness of this bright life.

Beneath it the small wave rose lightly
and lapped continually toward the loins,
where no and then a silent ripple stirred.
But translucent and yet without a shadow,
like a strand of birch trees in April,
warm, empty, and unhidden, lay the sex.

Now the shoulders’ quick scales already
stood balanced on the straight body,
which rose from the pelvis like a fountain
and fell hesitantly in the long arms
and more swiftly in the hair’s cascades.

Then very slowly the face went past:
from the indrawn darkness of its bending
into clear, horizontal upliftedness.
And behind it, steeply closing shut, the chin.

Now, when the neck was stretched out like a jet
and like a stalk in which the sap rises,
the arms too stretched out like necks
of swans, when they are searching for the shore.

Then into this body’s dark dawning
came the first breath like morning wind.
In the vein-trees’ tenderest branches
a whispering arose, and the blood began
to rush louder over its deep places.
And this wind grew on: now it hurled itself

with all its breath into the new breasts
and filled them and pushed into them,--
so that like sails full of distance
they drove the light girl toward the shore.

And thus the goddess landed.

Behind her,
as she strode swiftly off through the young shores,
all morning the flowers and the grasses
sprang up, warm, confused,
as from embracing. And she walked and ran.

But at noon, in the heaviest hour,
the sea rose up once more and threw
a dolphin on that same spot.
Dead, red, and open.



RIDERS ON THE STORM

St. Oran’s Day, 2006

Late one summer afternoon
in 1970 -- I was almost 14 --
I lingered a while longer in the
deep end of our backyard pool,
holding on to the diving board
with my feet trailing down below.

The daily seabreeze front had
blown in right on schedule, changing
the blue shriek of June into
a thickening trouble of greys. But
I just continued to hang there,
unwilling to get out, deep in
a reverie half in the earlier day’s

bright water frolic, the other half
imagining forward to all it would
be. My toes were rubbed raw
& my arms would not last forever
holding on to the board that way,
but the rest was rigored in swoon,

deliciously recalling the hours
I had spent with my brother
diving toward & swimming round
Sue and Karen, 13- and 16-year-
old sisters from Ohio visiting
their grandfather next door.

Oh they were giggling vestals for
sure,fitted in chaste blue and red
one-piece suits that did nothing
to hide the watery swells
of their chests, making even
more wild the borders of
white thighs from groins round
to bottoms which beckoned all

the more as the girls kicked fast
away in a swale of swirling bubbles
as my older brother and I
tried to catch and throw them
screaming into the pool
& tickle and squeeze what we
could as we bulleted by in the water.

Hell, they were both on their
school swim teams, they could
have easily kept out of reach;
but our play was diving into the
precincts of an intenser motion
we were all falling into helpless

& undaunted, trying to grip the wave,
not the water, trying to wash just
enough way without falling in all
the way. The play had gone on
for hours, none of us going or
pulling back too far; at last the
girls were called over our fence

by their mother, and they left with
wide-smiling promises to come back
the next day. They walked away
with towels over their broad shoulders,
squeezing their hair, those one-piece
trunks signalling my newfound
next country with all I could dream.

My brother went inside to watch TV
for what remained of our day
before that dreaded dinner my mother’s
torn ghost served up chicken and woe.
But I stayed on, hanging on to
the diving board; I wanted to hang

forever half in blue; and the day’s added
note of approaching storm made the half
out of the water wild enough too,
a windy, surgent froth potent
with news of a fresh-arrived, sweet-
as-sin, dangerous world.

For at some point in our play
in the water I had grabbed Sue
round the waist -- my hands
pulling her back into my, gripping
the spandex of her suit and down
into her belly—

when everything stilled to a single
heartbeat and she and I were one
merging, my desire spreading deeply
into her in one lingering grip. And it
she allowed it for a second longer than
play, feeling that something else too:

then woke from its spell and writhed
fast away, giggling with a harshness
almost desperate in tone. And that
was that. I played the scene over and
over in my mind as I hung on the diving board
with a summer storm fast approaching:

And then “Riders on the Storm” by
the Doors started playing on the radio,
soaking my reverie in its eerie salt groove,
the thunders on its tracks were amenned
with crackles on the signal from the station
at nearby Cypress Gardens. Like a presence
approaching a third set of thunders was

pressed almost directly over me, turning
the song yet again. As Jim Morrsion sang
I followed the music through the
back of the radio; I saw myself
strolling lightly through rocknroll’s
boneyard of moonlit desires,
mystic and plush and revenant
on my own singing hips. I closed

my eyes and saw Sue waiting for me
at the other end of the pool
with the band playing behind her;
swam over to her and stood
there with her staring into her
eyes which deepened their cobalt;

I wrapped my arm again round
her waist but this time hauled
out to the pool’s depths
where we kissed in a long descending
swirly blue swoon; I reached
inside that darkred suit, touching
& squeezing & kneading those

budding pale breasts in all the
ways I never had; she slid
her hand under my trunks and
startled me there; the water
wilderness suddenly clotted in
stone; we fell naked to the bottom

breathing from gills of molt fire;
I plunged in her again and again
as the band played on: And then
I was History’s long deep sweet groove,
the song on the radio become the song of

my solus from mother to lover to love’s
later motions inside and down the
darkest pool of them all, Days and years
whipped by in a storm as I hung from that
diving board imagining it all; I hung there
for years enthralled with the substratums

of sex while “Riders on the Storm” churned
on overhead: There I received the news
from a drowned Sidhe, St. Oran’s
Land of the North, streaming a tickertape
of jisms up from Davy Jones Locker to
my head, thick with everything that gets

so wild in the name of love’s lust— brassieres
collapsing like the tents of empires
revealing bugeyed nipples as startled as
I, pants and panties too dropping their leaves,
sheaf after sheaf in the bright sickleman’s
cold sheaving song, his blade the length and girth

of my own ever-awakening desire sweeping
through every curve in the world from
the molten harrows of my forever pubescent
brain, a precinct of Venus no Athene could
master or even much train & so reverenced
with a lush garden deep in a boy’s brain.

The storm pressed in close and closer
to our house, up to that brink of
crashing white doom when I would
have to at last haul my ass out of the pool
and run inside to safety. But oh just for
another stanza of that driving water

storm song, my hooves made of
wind and steady as drums, my eros
rich as a Hammond organ
trading melodies with a moody
electric guitar, my balls swinging low
in the water on the notes of a bass

bass guitar—that song became my
my own as my world turned to water
and my jones falling deep and
deeper down into its blue, my
mind hanging from the diving board
while disaster blossomed in full
down below. The youth hanging
there became the young man

nailed to the world tree by the
sea, which in turn became the
aging man hammering lines to a pad
perched on the aerie of a bone-
white writing chair. Here I sit and
write today’s words of that first ambrosial
day when I got close enough to get

a whiff of the whole orchid’s blooming
to come, my mind’s boy reeling with a dank,
musky, sea-drenched, boozy wildly
sweet demesne that surely drowned me
as I sang myself free. You see, I caught

a whiff of that first ardor again yesterday
when I heard “Riders on the Storm” on my
headphone stereo at the gym; that music
stayed in my ear throughout the night
and when I woke today it was calling
me on the distant ends of a wildly blowing

night outside; I heard inside and beyond
the cold front the distant din as I began
to write, a noisome rattling Sidhe, surely
disturbed this Saint Oran’s Day when

every veil is thinned to a whisper
of a song heard on the radio thirty years
ago, carrying on its fish wings
sighs unzippering & belt buckles
hitting the floor like bones, shrieks and
lamentations too, the awful consequence

and reek of something holy forever
losing itself in the world, in the cogitations
of a fish-god spiralling down under
the years amid the flash and thunders
of an underworld I did not yet know
as I held onto to that diving board
for oh just a few seconds more, my
feet trailing down to the deepest of ends,

a storm brewing everywhere, my mind
reveling in the sense that swam through
me when I neared a girl’s ready body
in the thrash and splash of Primavera glee.
It was the certainty that falling would be
viciously delightful, sinfully complete.

I still write that way though I no longer
reel in noctally hard surf, adamantly
sitting here with pen in dowsing hand
and rousing up that groove again from
to the Doors to my dead past: And here

I go again, saddled to the horse that
Oran rides into the heart of wildhooved storms,
squeezing out every dram of fresh sweet
juice from the fruit of that first son
who found a way that day to hang
between the worlds in stilled and thrilling pause,

pressing deep and deeper into her blue ocean
swells while history blew her real shape
away again and again and again.
The song crackles and fades in my ear:
I put pen to paper and she smiles and dives here
to the well at the bottom of all songs
where riders on the storm hoove home.





“As we know that displacements in dream-work to ((avoid)) the influence of censorship of conscious thought, we will consequently be inclined to included that an inhibiting force also plays a part in the formation of wit ...

“... In the dream-work the solution of this task is brought about regularly through displacements and through the choice of ideas which are remote enough from those objectionalbe to secure passage through the censorship.

“... Wit usually has another technique at its dispoal through which it defends itself against inhibition. ... Wit does not have recourse to comprimises as does the dream, nor does it evade the inhibition; it insists upon retaining the play with words or nonsense unaltered, but thanks to the ambiguity of words and multiplicity of thought-relations, it restircts itself to the choice of cases in which this play or nonsense may appear at the same time admissible (jest) or senseful (wit). Nothing distinguishes wit from all other psychic formations better than this double-sidedness and this double-dealing; by emphasizing the ‘sense in nonsense’” ...

-- Freud, “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious”






FIRST NIGHT

October 29

Sunday: I lost an hour
of the vigil turning my watch
forward, but now I think
I got it wrong. No clock in this
house runs quite right these
days: watch stops in the dead
of night, the clock in the
downstairs bedroom
needs a battery, the time
on the VCR and microwave
belong to the wired century
but not to Daylight Savings
time. A jangly posse of
sicklement causes all to
lurch with the weight of
time, like the man forced
to carry a corpse all night
on darkened country roads.
All’s quiet outside, the front’s
rain & winds marched over,
leaving a heavy stillness
& chill: A rigor-mortared
hour, Oran in his ice boat
bumping against drowned
pews below, the body’s
spirit receiving death from
its rictus kiss -- gentle,
wildly dark — and this
song rowing on past troubled
dreams in a coracle
of untimely verse.
My dreams
are pale lucent floes
with all I can or will not
know sprawling vast below,
silent and close
and transcontinental.
Just a word here in
No Time while clocks
spin out of control & my
mind the worst piece of
all (it strikes me now
that the hour falls back
not forward dummy, now
I’m up an hour too early
not late). Something dark
pulses like a third heart
in the making -- singer
and Beloved, yes, with
some rounder God
around us both,
collapsing us together
with a weird rogue wave
up from no-Time’s no-Where,
ending one world on
the kissed shores of another
in an eternal thrash of air.

***


RIDE CAPTAIN RIDE

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

1971

Sitting in my
room on my bed
holding my
Fender Mustang
working out
the solo to
“Ride Captain
Ride” from a
ligature (pidgin
notation)
my guitar
teacher scrawled
out for me.
Notes on
paper
bloodless
and impure,
broken from
the branch
of song.
I read the
symbols only
long enough
to let them go
in my fingers
where the
song again
took root,
grooving
green marrow
into me.
Thirty three
years later
I can feel
that solo
in my hands:
if I broke
out my
dusty guitar
I could
probably
unscroll that
solo from
memory in
a half hour
or so, even
though I haven’t
played it
for years.
That’s how
deep the melody
grows in
memory.
There are
hundreds,
maybe thousands
of songs
scattered
through
my cortex
like a map
of road map
of desires.
Clustered
in orchards
of the different
times and
ways I made
music.
“Ride Captain
Ride” was
my first solo,
and when I
had fully learned
it I stopped
taking lessons.
The music
didn’t require
paper, only
an ear and
the will to
furrow the
contours of
a song into
my fingers.
The more I
practiced,
the more I
heard, making
double bar
and grand bar
chords up
and down the
neck, placing
them without
looking any
more, modulating
to minor and
minor seventh
and major
seventh chords.
Stumbling upon
startling sweet
doors in
the turns
that I had
never made
before. Making
new music.
And then I’d
return to “Ride
Captain Ride,”
my first
guitar manifesto,
proof I could
slice the world
with my axe,
join the players
on the stage,
get the girls,
sway the world.
Songmaker
centering the
universe on
a dolphin mount.
Ride Captain, Ride.






GIG ONE

from “A Breviary of Guitars”


Late Summer-
Early Fall 1979

How flip we were
about completion,
as if it was too
distant to ever
take seriously:
Slick Dick played
three gigs, and
they were like
stag wounds of
our eventual
demise: We
just weren’t good
enough, or we
just couldn’t like
each other well
enough, or we
just liked the
parties so much
more than the work,
or we unleashed
far more than
any of us knew
how to serve:
whatever the case,
three gigs form
the tale of a
local band who
could never rise
far enough from
their basement dreams:
Gig One was an
End of Summer Party
at Steve’s girlfriend’s
parents’ house while
they vacationed
in Europe: mansion
enought for Spokane
with a basement
ballroom: big enough
for a proper
kegger: We were
nervous and couldn’t
hear shit (no
monitors): We
banged out
Cheap Trick
“Hello There”
in cubes of
personal and
faint peripheral
fury: Hello
there ladies
and gentlemen
hello there
ladies and gents
are you ready to rock
are you ready or not
Some door opening
within us as
the partiers
cheered &
the beer flowed
like gold wheat
through the room:
We for once
played together
unleashing the
beast: “Dirty Weekend,”
“Whole Lotta Rosie.”
“Tie Your Mother
Down,“ “Respectable“:
Take a break,
highfive, get some
more beer, slither
through the
glistening
labial lips
of the room
O fulcrum
of desire:
Second set
and we’re
tight and
thundering
& chicks
are up dancing
in front of
us to Rod
Stewart’s
“Dirty Weekend”
You book
the hotel
I’ll pack the
bags honey
You call
the airlines
I’ll call the cab
Well when
you return
ramblin all
your plans
just tell your
mother that you’re
stayin with friends:
A guitar is
the key
to the sugar
suite just
watch those
chickies swirl
like tongues
around our song:
I’ll bring the
red wine you
bring the ludes
your mother’s
doctor must be
higher than you
we’ll hang a
don’t disturb
sign outside
our door
I’m gonna rock
you till
your pussy’s sore
After the set
we partied all
night on speed
and pot and beer
liking each other
for a change
high-fiving and
planning the
work ahead -
gotta get an
agent, gotta
get more PA,
gotta add more
songs gotta
gotta gotta:
I got the girl
who danced
all night for us:
We took a swim
in a chilly pool
in the blue
washes of dawn:
Up in someone’s
bedroom I
peeled back
her black bathing
suit to suck
on her cold
brown lumpy
nipples, my
tongue igniting
her darkmotherfire:
O plunge and plunge
I’m gonna rock
you till your
pussy’s sore:
Afterward I
talked on
about how this
was just the start
and man we were
gonna kick ass
but she had
fallen asleep:
Fucked up
now fucked
by the number
one rock god
of the night
she had completed
her transit
of the party:
So had I, though
I would have told
you to get fucked:
No stopping now,
I thought, the
dark crashing hard:




SHORT CUTS

2006

She juiced the jones so bad
in me with one seas-deep kiss
that I just had to have that bliss
again and now, in all
its crash and foam, inside
a bed’s wide welcoming
where savage nights roam
free and plentiful as waves.
Oh that need and greed
which amped my thrall
compelled me to ink
a deal with the very
devil of those swells,
speeding my every
lane back to her. Any
short cut through the
woods to her house
was good enough for me:
I mixed my blood with
booze and drank every
down every league,
each shot a foot pressed
hard down on the pedal,
hurtling me through
the night inside a
black Mustang of desire.
Forget the meet and
greet of romance, the courtly
grace of borders which
by slowly naming us
by rituals as to decide
who will make a life with who:
Those bounds were hymens
for the breaking in
one hellbent dive to bliss.
Old Bushmills was my
patron saint, a gnarly
hue of gold with wiry
whiskers and a cock
primed like a blunderbuss,
pointed up every sass
of night it sighted.
Each night was a short
cut to her which ended
up with him as my
demon bender,
whispering whiskey riffs
in my ear as he chuffed
me from behind. Whatever
spoils he gathered were
soiled adages of her, women
who were just as
charred as I, hot for
dark nights of sweet
oblivion, or just the next
night’s ride between
the maypole and its hole.
My short cuts savaged
my every dream I had of
one day coming home:
I became the aging
lover man with not one bright
tooth left in his smile,
no roostered hair or
skinny derriere, no words
not slurred and shapeless.
My short cuts emptied
me out like a bottle of
well-whiskey that gets
tossed behind in
a tall bucket of empties.
J’accomplait, s’il vous.
Of that mythically bad
man I’ve left him long
behind, a helpful bogie
of my past, instructive
as bad stories go &
relieved to be shut away,
corked and shelved for good.
Today bands from Alberto
work this far, sending mad
coursers of rainbands through
every few hours in a manic
tide of winds and rain,
quenching the earth’s
my old desire. We have
to wait and work for
this and then let it go.
I learned this in reverse
all those short-shrifted
nights when I plunged
the hilts of endlessness
inside a whiskey glass
where I swore I saw
her swimming off, the full
moon glowing on her
ass in an invitation
to the dance
where only ones gavotte.
The bottle clubs
after 4 a.m. were filled
with fools of my ilk,
their long nights of drinking
refusing to end
despite the whale’s ennui
of having lost her yet again,
perhaps forever. Well,
here’s to every short cut
there which led me
from there to here,
in this house which aging
love sustains and is wise
in winds and rain, of only
as to welcome sure roofs
and be grateful the garden’s
getting soaked, not me.



MY (HER) ACROPOLIS

So much history reveals about Athena, but to
assume that she was merely a strongly personalized embodiment of contemporary religious conceptions is to forget that her worshippers did not create her but inherited her from the distant past. Indeed, it might not
be entirely fanciful to claim that she herself was largely instrumental in making Athenians what they were.

-- John Pollard, Seers Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution of the Sixth Century BC

***

This floating hearse is my
Acropolis, an apocalypse
of salt-strung spume gestalted
into templed seed. Every gasp
of pleasure’s in this box;
I ferry all of then toward home
like a whaler full-casked
with oil and ambergris
so that later night stay torrid
and their breasts perfumed
with Venusian swells of mint.
The ghosts of history cry
from inside this box,
just below an old water’s
cold incessant tide,
pressed up to my hips
& singing there the sum
of all fallen underwear
by which the heart and
art of love’s wild lips
are at last rejoined with
the mothers of a fish-
god’s tribe with one soft
& ever-nascent sigh. The box is
empty as a coffin of the
sap which juiced my jones
but I honor priest and alm
it with my every singing bone,
pen and penis and St.
Oran’s saint’s skull uproaring
from the footer loam.
When I was 14 it was
600 BC: A girl swam to
the north end of the pool
carrying a basket on her
head which contained my
own dark mystery, god
yet boy, cock yet snake,
the paradox of Eros’ seared
heights plunged down
the swirly abyss of
his dam’s drear Yes
between my own salt hips.
A goddess bid me build
these temple grounds,
love by love, swoon
by groan, each creaking
bed a column of this
song’s incessant leak
of Sidhe-deep waters
everywhere. She built
this city on my rock and roll,
a sound she emptied
from guitars & bars
into precincts further
back and down
between my ringing ears.
The coffin I ride
is empty now of all
but echoes of love’s
first shout, a sound
which I still reverence
like a beached conch
close to first light,
echoing from head to heart
to balls to soles, from
this morning’s verse
to that blue surf’s first roar
at both ends of history.
I just write it down
and let the words sink
down to vault with
the other votives in
the box: -- bits of fin and
bone, candles burnt
beyond both ends, a tooth
broken half-heartedly in two:
And at it deepest
& most prized rear end
a black brassiere still
musky-warm, heady
with that wild perfume
that forever stirs this
mind like a breezy
Parthenon, a place
she built over my years
that I shall worship her.




WAVE SAVIOR

2004

If a man holds this to be foolishness,
he knows nothing of love and how it lives.

-- Rimbaut d’Orange (c 1175 AD),
transl. Jack Lindsay

... And in my spirit, which for so long by then
had not been left hopelessly undone
with awe and trembling in her presence

without more knowledge from the eyes, by
an unseen force that was coming from her,
felt the old love in its great power.

-- Dante Purgatorio XXX 34-9
transl. W.S. Merwin

Just one slap of that salt blue
wave which came from somewhere
behind her sweet kiss
and I was that foolish child
again on the beach, reborn
between my mother’s voice
and the sea’s. How much
tilled thought and willed belief
just vanished in that
baptismal sigh in which
I came in her then
ebbed to a clear blue
infintie space which
wrote over the whole text?
Years of hard study learning
all the greater names, that
slow attenuation of
nuancing numens held
by a greater net of words—gone,
my lips ababble with “duh” and
“dear,” my grin pure votive
of fool’s gold. One wave
drowned every dorm and
library I had in
solitude long marrowed,
& rose merrymost in the
old gothic church til
it bumped against the
window nexts to God
and snatched heaven
back to earth. Squishy
sounds of honeyed
light fill the hundred bedded
cells which limn my memory,
all those lovers and my love
pouring out the altared juice
which reels a secret cinema
inside each day’s picture show,
my ever-newing, salt and sacred
blasphemy. Love’s shore-
washing faith beheaded
every known with just one
fateful kiss too many years ago
and made me minstrel
with a foolscapped pen
atop the crashing wave
that drowns the world
and leaves behind
an ebbing, gentle hiss,
your wordles bliss.
May I sing merry and anon
to the primrose end of this.