What My Toes Nose

As heart hauls the depths of my thought
in the low stone chill of plainchant,
so the bottoms of my feelings are ferried
still lower down, bowels to balls of
groin then feet, nosing my voice
in the toes which never leave the ground.
Down here nothing separates soul
from sole, dolphin from the firstling
of my tribe; to speak is to
slither and fin teeming blue seas
where appetite and affection
are both love's digestion, where means
and ends are married and keel-hauled
in one dank ritual feast. There all is
humid and sweetly rank, scented with
blood milk and sex, fragrant in
each wave's smash and foamed careen.
To write this way is to wing upon
the broad back of the Ancient of Days,
seeking in every next sentence older
evidence of the unquiet muse
who bid us drop from trees and
walk savannahs a million years long,
spear in the ready, fire on the tongue.
Always that older deeper man is
walking ahead, waiting for me to catch
up to him, emerging in the slow
cookery of words, this stew of
forgotten gods laced with still-wild verbs.
I am joined at the hips to that savage
siren, my tongue swollen, even huge,
plundering her malt honey, rapturing
in the song I dowse which dives into
her wombs. Her meter is a cat lapping
milk, is the weave of crickets this
late in the year outside in the garden
this morning, here at this night-drowned
hour. are balls somewhere out there
slapping the ass of the some sirening
vixen, the both of them straining
to get through and past these isolate lusts
and on into that satiate peace which
floats off to dream, song choired at last.
That's when the sea-nymphs smiles,
riding herd on the bones of her latest
first lover down to that silt harbor to join
the rest on time's rotted bed down
the human abyss. Ah my feet now
walk there, squishing spongy bones
and detumesccent peckers, stepping over
plowshares cured of their swords,
their tempering fires quelled.
My song rings in a drowned abbey's steeple,
tolling the low name of gods fast asleep
in the ikons of heroes and saints,
discoverers and inventors, poets and
playboys and patriarchs and old
wheezy farmers dreaming of young
lust before merry winter hearths.
We all want you Mary, my mother
and Christ's too, mother of God
in Mer, in that salt sea of devotion's
fused cock and quim, mad whirling
unio of world-drench-quenching sot.
All sought a way home to you with their
stone axes and starry parallaxes, with
their singing bones and jukebox jones
for muddy waters and kinky daughters
who singscream Yes and No. I'm in rhythm now
mama, son and lover the same man heading
home yet again, safely inside the daring and
complicit profanities of the next bed-rocking
poem, secure enough now to know
that she and I are one, walking together
down the sea's dark bed with the blue bells
of heaven all aglow, pealing every empyrean
to jackal in the flow, those cursed divinities
which burn hot and icy in the heart's feral
undertrow, a backswash filled with failing poems
& spent jisms & bent harpoons amid
all the lacy undies, detritus of the wave-strung
muse who sings beneath my tongue
when I dare to sing big ones this way.