The Mysteries of Bliss VII: The Bud

“Artemis, for example, is to be found in the untamedness of young animals and equally in the terrors of birth. In the classical figure of this goddess, the wildness and the terrors meet at a border-line: they are in equilibrium. The further we penetrate into her prehistory, the more the outlines connected with the name ‘Artemis’ evaporate. The border-line situation widens into a border region midway between motherhood and maidenhood, joie de vivre and lust for murder, fecundity and animality.

“It is a paradox, but nothing is impossible that we meet here: the revelation of something that is dark in comparison with an idea, but ideal in comparison with blind feeling -- the revelation of something still unopened, like a bud. All the most ancient mythological ideas are buds of this sort. Above all, the idea of genesis and origin -- an idea which every living thing experiences in its own genesis and, to that extent, realizes in fact. Mythologically, the idea is embodied in miraculous ‘primal beings,’ either in such a way that in them father and child, prime begetter and prime begotten, are one and the same, or that the fate of the woman becomes the symbol and expression of all givens and origination. Zeus, Apollo, Dionysos, Hermes, Asklepios, Heracles -- all may be regarded as having evolved out of a mythological primordial child, who originally comprised both begetter and begotten. The same idea, seen as the woman’s fate, presented itself to the Greeks in equally budlike form. The budlike quality of it is expressed in the name often given to its personification Kore, which is simply the goddess ‘Maiden.’

“The Kore-goddess throws light on the old mythological idea in its budlike capacity to unfold and yet to contain a whole compact world in itself. The idea can be likened to a nucleus. We have to understand, as it were, the structure hidden in the ‘abyss of the nucleus.’”

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore”



Daily I attend the mysteries, initiate and
priest of that sacred door which leads
to her at last, at least here.
The binding of this notebook hinges
pages which turn like doors, each affording
a fresh view of that grand expectant night
(which almost never came to good conclusion),
humid and fragrant and fresh-whisked
by dark storms. My every sense
as I walked out alarumed her awaking
up from the froth and foam, waiting
for me in some rocknroll bar
like a hunted desire haunting me
home. That creaking of limbs in
the southern oak which spread
over my garage apartment: they
groaned with my fathers’ bones
as I walked to my car, turning and
twisting them as they knocked
in metronome the cost of
every stout penetration
to shout immortal sighs.
But I paid scant attention,
whistling “Love is the Drug”
as I revved my Datsun up, backing out
of one bum dream and hitting the gas toward
its other, whose precise location was unknowable,
like the spinning island of the sea-witch.
Its door could only be approached and
entered in boozy flung abandon, my hooded sight
tuned to strange peripheries, compassed
to a border beach of moon-monstrous waves
that waited right or left of sense,
a place no man would dare to visit,
much less run and leap from
like a selkie back in his froth.
There the ninth wave waited for me,
the towering shape of the She
my nuts had hatched, giving birth to her
so she could give birth to my eternal
bliss, there in the lees of a post-
noctal kiss. And here I there live on,
keeping those fires bright even
to the ends of what once was proper poetry’s
petty epiphinals, further to the
ends of this difficult year where
bliss just can’t be found and is
made yet stonily. Yesterday --
taking a next-to-last vacation day --
my wife and I ate breakfast out
then ran errands at Wal- K-Mart and Lowe’s;
then came home midmorning
to enjoy our day together here, me
weeding in the garden and putting flowers in around
the birdbath while in back my wife
spray-painted white some metal chairs.
The day wan and breezy, soothing for its
dearth of heat or cold, rocking us
a tide of year-ending air.
Ten thousand passages through that door
in world and words put clear enough
what’s bordered here where love pays all
to build a home. Here
in the inmost vault where the mysteries
are boxed and tended by my vestal
dreams of true love, the sacred fire
burns clear and steady in work still fuelled
by that old hope, even now, even here.
We believe it with our bodies til
they fumble and fade, dusting the
furniture which remains. Last night my
wife and I set battery-powered candles
in the window of our house,
in gesture to that door which glows
with all our dreams
and is arched by the stars,
comfort for dark winter nights
which I drank to dregs in bars
and pour out now here in lines
which fling love wide and far,
siloed deep in the woman
that door led me to
when I decided to wake
up and come home.