Apollo and The Sirens

From John Pollard’s Seers Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century BC:

In a chariot scene from Olympia, a Siren stands looking at Apollo, who is represented with his lyre.

Possibly it is intended to personify the kind of unearthly music that is so movingly described by Plutarch. He is discussing the curious passage at the end of the Republic where Plato capriciously sets Sirens on the whorls of Necessity instead of the Muses.

“Now Homer’s Sirens, it is true, frighten us,” {he writes}, “but the poet too conveyed a truth symbolically, namely that the power of their music is not inhuman or destructive; as souls depart from this world to the next, so it seems, and drift uncertainly after death, it creates in them a passionate love for the heavenly and the divine, and forgetfulness of mortality; it possesses them and enchants them with the spell, so that in joyfulness they follow the Sirens and join them in their circuits.

“Here on our earth, a faint echo of that music reaches us ,and appealing to our souls through the medium of words, reminds them of what they experienced in the medium of existence.

“The ears of most souls, however, are plastered over and blocked up, not with wax, but with carnal obstructions and affections. But any soul that through innate gives is aware of this echo, and remembers that other world, suffers what falls in no way short of the very maddest passions of love, longing and yearning to break the tie with the body, but unable to go.’”




THE SONG
INSIDE THE SONG

Nov. 14

There’s a Siren inside
every song, brooding on
the branches of a
bass cleff’s reaches
like some lunar quartertone,
loosening in all melody
a selkie’s liquid bones.
We hear that deeper
music and feel called
back into its wake
to stroll the lanes
of deeper heaven,
into the grand cathedral
where desire and
sweetness marry
souls to the ends
we mortals reach
and ache and arch
toward with blunt
fingers and poor sense.
They’re always here,
far down the salt
leagues of my ear,
a blue tide’s lungs
winging treasures
through my hearing
with undulating
panty tones,
whispering grand
empyreans into
every kiss, every
draught, every exult
shout where bodies
clench and shout
and float together
down a starry,
drowned stream.
One night
at a church youth
group retreat when
I was 14 I led
Jane Anne Baker
by the hand
down to the
dock where we
kissed for the first
and last time. I
was so startled
and happy to be
actually holding her,
the girl I’d mooned
so for the year
before inside the
wattles of my baby
fat. Puberty to me
was a six-weeks diet
followed by three
inches of sudden
height, hatching
by springtime a lean
tall hungry boy-man,
rapacious to devour
all he’d been denied.
The deep-woods
night was pure Florida
in its sweet juice,
breathing deep
and sensual with
orange blossoms
and fanged mint,
noctally profuse
in the augments
of wild dark, a moon
above us reflecting
blue fire on the
black lake’s surface
where gar and gators
nosed like bergs
and bass leapt at
mosquitoes in a
silvery sexual thrash.
We broke off our kiss
and looked at each
other -- how
strange it was to
see her so up close,
yielding to me
no less, not toward
sex but all to
her it sires,
the full flower
of good love for
the rest of two lives.
It wasn’t how I
looked at her, desiring
so the trothed parts
of the wife in
those dewy undies
floating in love’s
undertow; soon
I would grapple
with her, trying
to get a hand up
her shirt or down
her pants, causing
her to say No Not Yet
-- words which
ignited the angry,
damaging fires
of a hot boy’s
hurtful hell. Well,
I told her to go there
and stormed off,
leaving her to cry
on that forsaken dock
while I spent the
rest of the night
hitting on the other
girls. Farewell,
mon amour. But
let us linger for
a moment there
where sigh to sigh
we warmed to young
love’s version of
shared heaven:
I recall watching
her watching me
right then, those big
blue eyes so open,
receptive, accepting,
plurally wide to
a music that I heard too
(or so it seems)
inside our nascent motions,
one’s we’d fuck up
the rest of our lives
trying to get it right.
Sirens sing where
hearts believe the
whole immortal heave
which hauls imagined
lovers down to
Love’s gauzy brass bed,
that bower where
time and distance
ends: Their music
is the jones for
heaven’s remittance
of our every break
and bend: They
salt that DNA which
makes us dream
so helplessly of
Beloveds on requited
shores: They hoove
libido’s tide in
relentless waves of
More and More,
susurrant with the
fold and crash
of that never-quite
located place
where She surely
sings More too.
That’s the dream,
the fantasy, the
truth inside the
Siren’s singing
inside my every
far-flung longing
psalm. Oh Jane Anne,
may you be well
wherever that music
winged and washed
you to. I was
just an idiot
as usual, bent
on frugaloos
I wanted but
was terrified to fall
into: Still I heard
that music too
& dove into it
as I also too much
believed. It led
me here to this
white writing chair
atop a matin’s cool
in Love’s most
achey breaky house
I can afford, the
real one I mean,
inside every song
I heard like star-
poured music
playing on that
bedside radio
of my 14th year.
May you still hear
the Sirens sing
in your every fling
of feeling where
cancered dreams
with broken wings
still reach for
that drowned heaven’s
gleaming ring.



ORANGE BLOSSOM

2005

How is it that the sweet scent
of orange blossoms shouting everywhere
is one of Your worst shores, those
ambrosial panties waved from
orchards I can’t see the source
of such abyssal ache to pluck and
plunger and plunder? Imagine a
gold fruit split and glistening
with cold juice -- and what is not
a thirst these days, the clear and
cool morning arousing through the
hours of sun a horny man with
fondled horns, his hardon housing
a high heaven’s song with such
ball-swelling ache you’d have to
drink every orchard in town to
slake? Pale white bells peal
a million pounds of sweetness
in the breeze of these days
of spring, a vernal carillion of
bloom hurled winglike across blue
skies, frigate cannonades firing
salvo after salvo into old sense
suddenly too young for any good,
arousing a sultry-sweltering sap
to rise in these gray wooded bones.
I’m roused and ready to head into
the pages of my Cape the way I
headed out from home at fourteen,
rounding the corner at the last
light of the day to light a cigarette
and inhale deep a blend of tarry
smoke and thicker fumes of
orange blossoms, like a grease of
sin in velvet dark, my every willing
sense amped for the outrageous, panty-
pulling night. Over the orchards to
the east a moon pulled up and out,
cold and blue and burning bright
with all I ache and swoon for, a
haunted house of assy figments
poured by orange blossoms into view
and crashing wild my Cape’s hard surf,
that cup from which I drink the
sweetest dregs of blue.




IT’S NATURE’S WAY

2004

It’s nature’s way of telling you
Something’s wrong --- that’s the way the old
Song crooned on the radio when
I was a teen and sex so new
And fantastical and scared.
Hell-mouths crooned me in ripened girls’
Cleavage, a tide hauled me far from
The world of God and high prayers, the
Work of saving souls. It must be the
Devil, they reasoned, wrapping wings
Of black honey around that low
Swoon. Yet the higher I sought God’s
Relief, the louder that sea roared,
A depth which a blue-balled God had poured
His tears. That wrong sights this next shore.