Night Rain

What to do when things ebb to a silence within? It such silence a theme to write about? It’s not writer’s block as much as writer’s yoke that oppresses today, my sense of duty to the page, always getting down on paper what inchoately whorls around the edges of the perceivable day -- as if, by naming those things in their ink sequences, the hidden pattern of the day could be divined, providing a rudder, a sense of balance and communion with the world. The Sibyl was seized by Apollo; blue verdicts are striated with verbal gold and sooth. If only I could what that infernal/divine mind is whispering down under the slow drip of dark rain ...

***

Today I write:

A SEA BEWITCHED

A pall hangs over
the sea I love.
Nothing sounds
or surfaces,
nothing moves.
The shores lie
empty like
forgotten beds.
No siren sings
the chasms
that I can hear,
much less voice.
I wait, I linger,
treading a stillness
with silent miles
looming for
miles under
my feet, nowhere
I would go
and nothing
I can say.

It’s a rain-dewy, mistral late night (4 a.m.), somewhat chill as it should be in this latter station of the year, the Presence I’m straining to name drifting, disincarnate. I imagine faint drifts of this rain falling over the Gulf of Mexico far to the west, tolling a imperceptible accumulation which slowly devours the peninsula. For now, it’s just sighingly wet, a faint spiculation over the dark wavelets which still them in their courses, or seem to, changing the perspective, so that tides are broken into individual frames of motion, revealing the sea through its miniatures, a drop of rain falling on a anonymous nth of a swell. It doesn’t say much, but it wasn’t meant to, not for our hearing anyway. The same rain falls outside my study window right now, here a faint patter and drip from the eaves. It striates darkly my
singing ear’s dull metronome, that meter I have learned by long habit to tide with my lines: today I can say nothing and be in complete fidelity with the slow susurration of that oracular-seeming sound, water to water in hymeneal surround.

***

Meanwhile clocks are zealously devouring all the hours I lose straining my ears here to eternes. I mean, c’mon: I’m almost 50 with no published corpus to speak of and this burdened beast’s equipage is slowing down -- migraines from hours of hunched shoulders and neck, phalanges going buttery and tingly from the relentless keyboarding (remember, this work here is just a prelude to a computer drone’s corporate day where I write endless email and create promotions and salescopy and knock out a bigfat whale of weekly production). So when silence wallows me in these shallows, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve simply run out of things to say in this way, and would far more profitably and much more to the will of thing writing a more productive reality.

Besides, how many phosphorous benippled wavelets can one truly give suck to before they’re milked all every ghost? Freud, in “Civilization and Its Discontents”: “The feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed.” I can harrow all the sweet billows of memory til I’m imaginally red in the face and blue in dreamt balls, pent with empurpled verbs, pounding away in the meters, my bells clanging wild against some pillowy poof of a melusine’s salt-stained blue bottom, yes yes: But are these aery rutts on the unbloodable sheets of the page tending essential fires from within, or is it all embering down anyway? I dunno, but the silence adds an magnitude of echo to the question.

Sure, libido is tidal, both sickle and full moon;
there is always a low moment when a wave has fully spent itself ashore in a glistening spoor of foam; there is always a long backdrawing process where a slow inward breath replenishes the ocean’s lungs as the water recedes, ebbing back into the surf-mill where it takes fundamental root in the footers of the next approaching wave. All remains still and silent as the next wave begins to rise into a full hump, into the destined curvature of consummation, waxing to an impossible fullness. Only then is there any sound, a sudden fold and crash into smithereen smash wild toward the shore, spreading a distant principle’s glistening lucre onto the sands, depositing there a new shell or a doubloon--the next chapel of song I inhabit -- or simply providing sea-milk for the denizens of the precarious tidal marge. The backdrawing, undertowing, riptiding part of the equation is that which happens under the surface, that which cannot be seen as much as felt. I can’t tell what’s going on here but I’ve come to trust that silence is pregnant and more potent in its way than high summer’s shriekingly bright noon.

Maybe I’m just paying dues for getting too fraught in the verse, too exegetical, homiletic, straining too hard to haul mystery up dripping fro the banalities of history. I’ve been overwraught and histronic; worst of all, I’ve gone on overlong telling my God what He already knows, rather than attending and listening and writing down what I hear. I’ve forgotten the old poet’s role as the king’s poesy bee-yotch. I’m just the verbal mead which pleasures His ear, and He loves to hear of His glories great and wide, not the doubts and vicissitudes such sickly contemporary motions which tear up in my insides to naught, always to naught.

The other day I wrote a long poem about how the year embers down and tied it to the fading embers of sex that seem to support the larger growing fire of love in my marriage; also tied into that the wrong-headed full-hearted roar of going the wrong way (Freud again, “The irresistibility of perverse instincts, and perhaps the attraction in general of forbidden things, finds an economic explanation {in the priority of untamed instincts over those that have been sublimated}”) -- somehow in writing that poem I heard a great whoomph, like a great fire suddenly witched out. The candle I write by, it seems, for all the obfuscurity of what I’m trying to say here.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been trying out Freud’s tough reality principle, throwing those hot ‘n’ naught blue jazzy verses into the cold shower of mortaility: All this is drone, pal. Or maybe it’s that old historic hubris of prioritizing love over art when I’ve gone as far as I dare go; where the real heart, out of its complex mix of truth and error, quenches the imagined hear. Do I sacrifice today the former to the latter, floating off into verbally silent though matrimonially more replete waters? Lord knows its tough up there, in the Real -- an aging morbid mess --: is it so much so that I simply can’t afford these dalliances? Afford to believe they mean more than ink?

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. For now, it just rains on, keeping time with my fingers tapping away this post of a “Seinfield” episode, trying to make much out of a doo doo of nada, yadda yadda yadda the end. I got up early this morning -- 2:45 a.m. -- feeling the need to create something here; but I came into this empty, lingered with it a while, and leave little more. A postmodern epiphany.

Ah, well. I woke hearing rain on our tin roof, dripping a watery semaphore into my surfacing mind; I finish writing here as that rain picks up again, soft and sure, bathing the yard with desperate moisture, slickening the pathways by which I meander through this post, leaving really only one image, many miles to the west, a good mile or two offshore, where two black immensities pour and heave and these words are lost there, trailing off unrevealed and uninspired, unbedded and untrue, useless wings and fins which end me in a grand dark period, ending one long sentence, awaiting the next.