The Siren Seams My Father's Screams

The earliest Sirens are, to judge from their beards, preponderantly male, though the earliest of them all, from Crete, is beardless and the question of sex is complicated by the fact that women on occasion wear beards, like the priestess of the Pedasians.

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

***

That sexual excitement can be independent to considerable extent of the production of sexual substance seems to be shown by observations of castrated males, in whom the libido sometimes escapes the injury caused by the operation ... It is, therefore, not at all surprising ... that the loss of the male germ glands in maturer age should exert no new influence on the psychic life of the individual. The germ glands to not really represent the sexuality of a person.

-- Sigmund Freud, “The Transformations of Puberty”

***

Though I be agèd now, though head and chin
Now show them hoary-hue'd with grizzling hair,
Still can I perforate those caught by me,
Tithonus, Priam, Nestor--every one.
You see how mightily my rage ye rouse
Who hem me ever with a bullfinch hedge
Forbidding robbers from approaching me.
This is to hurt while helping, this is but
To scare the birdies from the birder's snare.
The way is closèd nor prone-fallen thief
Can with his backside expiate his crime.
Thus I who erstwhile ever, ever and aye
Buttocks of plundering wights was wont to cleave,
For many a night and day in idlenesse stand.
I also, suffering pains enough and more,
Flow off in semen and a lecher whiles
Unlive my life-tide. Who could ever think
From lute the lutanist should cut him clear?
But you, ereeld's marasmus do me dead,
Desist, I pray you from vain diligence,
Nor hang a buckle on Priapus' yard.

-- Priapic Epigram #78, transl. Leonard C. Smithers and Sir Richard Burton, 1890. Statues of Priapus were set in gardens to ward off thieves with the threat of divine buggary. They were worshiped by women as gods of fertility.





SENEX DREAMS OF PUER

November 9, 2006


***

I turn to you, Grandfather,
as you turn restless in
the stone crypt which
rudders me round Cape Horn:
I see you ahead
in the rounded bottom
of my history, behind
yet ahead, your desire
reveling in that time
when my semen’s
font burst Old Faithfully
from greening surgent
hips. Priapus
is an old man’s god,
a gout of goatish glee,
the rout of hardons
remembered fondest
in the stone-aching
sprouts of puberty.
Their inside girth
and tension for release
is deemed enormous
in an old man’s mind,
monstrous even,
knocking about the
rafters of his memory
of a young man’s
hothouse mind
where the boy
dreamt and drooled
banging every belle
in heaven. Young men
don’t fret their woodies --
hardons are simply ends
of selves, no more complex
than making stinkies,
repleting the savage itch
with a grunt and spasm
and then racing back to
the heroic fray where
men hack each other
to pieces. Old men’s minds
are a garden of nights
long gone to seed,
where only ennui is
full-fruited and savage,
where the god who
lords that acre
can no longer
remit the bullish charge
no matter how much
he wishes to, where
desire hangs so heavy
in him that he leaves
a third trail in the sand.
His vantage is quite
different from the
the boy hanging
from the diving board
dreaming all he owns,
a cache of boners
plunging every tight
hole in hell. For the
boy, reverie sums
that portal which
no boy can pass through
and not be lost forever.
The old man looks
back on that hour;
it is his hands which
wont’ let go of the diving
board, not yet, not ever.
Though I could not know
it, he kept me dawdling
at that brink entranced
& afraid & bewildered.
For year I wanted
to go all the way
but couldn’t: surely
the ache of longing
are what’s most
Priapal in my reveries
today, Saturn’s horned sickle
caught midflight
across his daddy’s
balls, just before
he turns and runs
to his mommy Gaia’s
bed, entering her
at last forever to
the delight of all our gods.
Ah the readiness is all,
the ripeness of the heavy
fruit hanging there before
the Harvester’s reach,
a bursting silo of memory
inside this singing heart,
like a wave swole up
to heights impossible
to survive complete
without a shore, without
even collapsing in time’s
necessary fold and
roar. It felled the father
and made the man who
in turn was enthroned
at the bottom of
time’s chasm, sitting
beneath me on this
writing chair where I
brood on our election
to the wooly wilds
inside a girl’s pink
underwear -- a date
years in the making
while I stayed erect
and ready and dreading,
praying to a pagan
god for salvation through
remittance -- How long
O Lord, I prayed,
and You measured
that duration good,
albeit obscene, keeping
all the bells of heaven
clanging blue-blackly
at my knees, my
brain a mentule like
a zucchini as long
as my arm, bobbing
and weaving this hand’s
signature which writes
the names of gods
this long, or longer,
rude in length if not
girth, like those plinths
of erect deep songs
forever aching for
an aching to the
backdoors of a
heart’s art too
rude for polite
and taught society --
Ah poor fool me,
writing myself into
a corner where he
stands still at the
ready, even though
there’s nothing left
to say. I remember
one night in my
drinking years getting
up from some woman’s
bed to go to the
bathroom: stared at
me standing naked
there in the mirror,
surprised at how
long my dick was
stiff from pussy
and the need to piss --
a reverential
revenential moment
somewhere toward
the bottom of all
things -- surely
a Siren was standing
nearby, maybe behind
the shower curtain or
just behind my shadow,
I dunno, but that
cock’s pure length
was surely singing
her dark name.
haven’t had
a real erection like
that for years:
Nor you for ages
I suspect, grandfather
of all princely fish:
And yet we haul on
here like the boy
we once so lavished
on the monstrous
crashing wave, erect
and proud and louder
than hell as we shout
in steely baritones
our love’s most
boisterous names.



An Attic black-figured lekythos, now in Athens, which dates from the end of the sixth century BC, shows Odysseus bound to a pillar. Two Sirens perch on rocks on either side of him, one of which is stylized as in previous examples, while the other’s wings bear a close resemblance to a real bird. Both are playing musical instruments, while a pair of dolphins sport at the hero’s feet. But the absence of a ship is remarkable ...

... The monsters on the so-called Harpy Tomb from Xanthos bear the dead in their arms, shrouded like corpses. That they are intended to represent Sirens there seems to be no denying ... A similar monster from Cyprus, dating from the late sixth century BC, is in the Geau collection. On a Laconian cup in the Louvre collection a bearded figure reclines at the feast, accompanied by winged figures of various types and faced by a Siren. The scene is supposedly a feast of the dead, and the artist, we may infer, is employing the monster to give corporeal form to the notion of otherworldliness and the joys of bliss.

-- Pollard, ibid.



MY FATHERS’ SIREN EYES

Nov. 11

I age with the year. A cold
moon’s sickle hangs over the
garden, flint-sharpened,
obsidian, savagely sere,
severing the pentas and
salvia and angeloni from
their summer’s heaving
bloom. I brood heavily
in this pall, coagulate
of mood, my reverie
the mien of tribal elders
remembering the boys
were & how they
were made men
by their elders,
tutored by gods
into the red angst of the
hunt, its precious
and sacred lust
& all that eventually
costs. I devour my
memories like sons,
greedy for their
hot blood, fearful
that blooded memories
may supplant the
ghostly remains of
my drive, turning
leafless peckerwood
to stone. The
ocean is mine now,
its wrecked courses
bounded by my hips,
its deadly bliss too,
in vesicles hurling
against shores now
too far from real loins
to be fooled into
thinking I will ever
reap what they pour.
No wonder
Oddyeus strapped
himself to the mast
and plugged tight his
ears: There’s no way
through the pass of
our sex without the
cooing washes of its
sweet song, so pure
and blue that we
jump from our skins
in that rapture which
flings our bones down
salt leagues to devouring
vaginas we thought
doored our way home.
Oh those Sirens are
lyric and primal, so much like
our mommies’ voices singing
over the dunes of a crib:
But when we reach
for her and the breast
blackens, nipples fuse
to our tongues and a
Circean venom races
through our brains with
a fierce squirt, turning
us into grunting vassals
of what so believed
we could get from
a woman’s widened thighs.
That’s why the Sirens
are deadly, added by the
artist to mark
the point in the passage
from I to Thou where
something hangs in
the balance, a gate
we’re desperate to
pass through though
it’s death to so do,
a taboo deeper than the
tribe or its gods,
as deep as how
waking minds live
swoon and die.
Every time I chased
her I ended up on
that blank shore
with the surf sounding
hollow as it crashed
white recedes and me
more alone than ever,
never more lost in salt tides
no mortal was meant
to muster, much less
ride inside of her seem.
The cool outside this
morning’s window is
leaden and slow,
hanging just over
in a fog like my father’s
father’s father’s ghost,
that bastard O’Riley
who could never stop fucking
now sawing his fiddle --
fathered 13 children
and was paying the
neighbor lady a quarter
for a toss out there
on the infinite corn-
acres of Iowa, his lust
sheaved and bulging
like a silo of sweet corn.
His ire’s mine, inside
this blueballed pen
I have lashed myself to
as I prow down the lines
of an unbodied trip home
to her, my beloved who
sleeps at her loom.
If it let this pen go
they will take me in
their arms and sing
me down to the beds
where all of my fathers
were mastered and
mouthed, severed
and served, their
penises flutes the
Sirens played with such
skill that time settled
over them like the sea
and drowned them
with the blue which
hauls me again and
again gainst the
shores of a page
sweet with the fragrance
of orange blossomed
cunt -- wild and heady
and youthful as hell
to savor even savior
though lost, like
those church bells
ringing at the bottom
of the night’s mere
where boats glide
over hearing songs
from below: A redolent
resonance in my
fathers’ Siren eyes,
strapped to the bow
of this ship as I am
to its ghost mast,
the entire host
of our sex headed
toward that last shore’s
welcoming thundering
whitening thighs
which treasure the
measure which
fathers You in I.