Whalin'

DOWN, UNDERr

Jan. 13

I grow down, I go under,
I flow back to row onward:
Behind Christ on His cross
grins Priapus in his groin
of hard gardened wood, beloved
of Mary’s mother, queen
of betoken lusts I am the
bother of, my druther’s drench
in big-night gouts I must
somehow pour the dregs of
getting beyond all dugs & bottles.
I barge on brute and bare
like a dervish devolving
Ariadne’s dancing floor,
refuting her alabaster charms
which so harms a hero’s soar,
her mazes grooves of wild
no one fazes any more, much
less expires in Mintaurish roar.
Under her labyrinth’s flat
minarets an older Moorish
capital spirals round and
down, age before age, down
to a cavern’s painted sounds
of flint and fire, to first thefts
new gods perplex in my hand into
as it crosses the desending page
with Priapal Christlike rage.
Those gods sing to me ahead in
the darkest haunts a diving
mind can assuage or gauge
or savage with a pen, yet on I
write, saddled to a diving
fish astride the courses
of a dream, three million years
of me and less and 500 milllion
more less hand and foot til
all is fin dazed on the first white
shore, where heaven broke
from hell’s blue liquidity
to weave the delphic coracle
I row, an oracle wattled of
both womb and tomb,
that full salt sensuousness
where I and Thou become
the world’s only tune, the first
one Hermes sang into
Apollo’s lyric room. Having
lowered thus I am now free
to fling my meters wide
as wings and flukes and hooves
can rings the bells of primal fire,
my motions cauled in the very
ire which dreams history like
an ore through mystery’s
core callosum, populating
this dark suburb with houses
and cats and rhubarb patches
with proud ears pent toward
the sugarded sun which soon
rises, roused to brilliant augment
and argument by the departure
of this song I hang on the coattails
of the moon falling into the hips
of the far hills I have at last begun
with a lust for ends’ pink rims.


WHALE’S WELL

2003

No mercy, no power but
its own controls it. Panting
and snorting like a mad
battle steed that has lost
its rider, the masterless
ocean overruns the globe.

- Melville

Surely this well’s dugs
are equal to that whale
which spouts desire
for breadth and depth
and salt dementia. Vestal
snow and temple whore
suffice the need and greed
of lust for the everyday’s
sea-roads, orifical hours
for spermacetti dives.
When I get careless
with the stone that covers
this narrow wild, all hell
breaks loose, drowning
life, wife and work. The
line is only so long, the
girth of a white whim
which diddles down and
down the only acceptable
furrow in my chosen way.
Besides, within such bounded
walls the sea will crash the
loudest, the beast descend
the farthest. This is my
pocket marge, my paper
tide, a cold barrow carved
with words down into the
hottest blood of all. A
wavelike sound holds
eternity in thrall
-- mine at least,
and only for a short
and lonely gambol long
before first light blinks:
Cat in the window,
wife asleep upstairs,
there’s a hoard of booty
splendor gleaming far
down here, which the sun
will soon nudge it’s
auric nose into.
I’m going bowels to the
vowels here in Her
ancient sacral deep,
a mere’s Moby in the
halls of pagan fire:
This motion between
waking and working
is all my heart requires,
hard hooves across white
paper, lowering my well
bucket to dip an inch
of frenzy, returning
to the waking day
dazed and praising
the tide which sobs away.


WHALES WEEP NOT!

DH Lawrence


They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm whales, the hammer heads, the
killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out
of the sea!
And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of
whale blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she whale’s
fathomless body.
And over the bridge of the whale’s strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid ocean, suspended in the waves of
the sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.

And bull~whales gather their women and whale calves in a ring when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea,
in the salt where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea she is the female tunny fish, round and happy among the males and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.

Sire

SHORE SIRE

Jan. 12, 2006

The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?
Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?

-- Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”

Ad citharam, cithara tensior ipse sua.

“Lyre of the stiff taut string, stiffer the string of himself.”

-- Hymn to Priapus #69

I write these lines each day
prowing a wake of dark
between my brow and an
outer dark in the full soak
of 4 a.m., careening toward
a crashing shore which may
yet prove door enough
to turn the first page of
the next dream. Who waits
for me there, half standing
in the surf’s collapse,
half ebbing in the foam?
No one I’d invite to my
house and wife for dinner,
not with those canines
curved like flint daggers,
with those blue eyes so
hardfrozen eternal blue,
with that loutish pecker
poking out and vivant
for all to see, an ugly
veined shark strung like
a lyre to my high purposes,
causing it to bob and
throb and arc in ache
of fecund cuntlipped skies.
He’s my papal augment,
my lust’s berserker brogue,
the tidal man arousing
full in the night like the
full moon now overhead,
lamping back into my
peering eyes the eerie pall
of big blue balls knocking
hard as stones into each other,
bluer than the sea and sky
reflected in my love’s
rolled-up, gawd-lovin’ eyes.
His hair is wild as seaweed
in the bitter courses of
the wind, his voice loud
yet distant, like the world’s
first news broadcasting from
the curved speaker of a
conch shell at dawn. This
poem is gutted deep to him
the way a lost guitar is
strung, still tensile though
the key has slipped and
the chords rusty and awkward,
familiar and not, crusted
over with the barnacles
of a million years adrift.
Do I sing him or he of me?
I wonder, staring out the
black front windows where
the world is dead asleep,
the garden lost in pall,
my sense enveloped by
a sea-bottomed, drifting
thrall which words can
only churn the highest
waters of. I’m thinking
down to him the way his
cock keeps twitching up
my way, enquiry to entreaty
paired like the arms of a
swirling world-wide tree.
No matter how much I trim
these sails it seems I’ll
never reach that huge old
figure on the strand where
I begin and end. If spirit
has libido, then mine is surely
his, rapacious and greedy
and yet patient -- o so patient --
to sing my way on through
into his feral finned visage
and crown his sceptered blue.


THE POPE
OF PLAYALINDA BEACH

2003

He stands at the
surf’s edge swaddled
in white and gold
brocade, his long
train dissembling in the
wash. His crozier
posts the sand like a
surf caster turned the
other way, bejeweled
with summer oceans
and the eyes of
rapturous women.
And those eyes --
so serene as they
scan our naked
congregation,
shepherding us
to the utmost wings
of this crashing
surfside day.
Above his head
the sun is a belfry
of summer fire,
pealing sanctus
over a shadeless choir.
Who is saved
and who gets damned
by such ordained
bliss? The surf thunders
and recedes down
the shore,
no crest not a prayer,
every crash
an eternal door,
the long ebb like
plainsong, censers,
egress to the back
-- a cathedral pour
the flesh adores.





SPECTRE

2003

And some in dream assured were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.

- Coleridge, “Rime of the
Ancient Mariner”

He’s swimming down there,
rarely visible as he follows
me except on nights
as this, when the full moon
filters down to trace the
huge pale wings lifting
and flapping through brine
in their slow, mighty rhythm.
Tonight he unveils
from the boat’s wake,
the black sea, from these
eyes which refuse to
believe he’s down there
just as the felon in jail
swears someone else
held the scythe he
once swung with such joy.
The spectre is agile
and supple as all dreams
are in their rout of the
heart, a nine-fathom
hallows inside the dark’s flow,
neither God’s nor the
Devil’s to damn or toil
or know, older perhaps,
a Prometheus unbound
or unsounded; or an
emissary perhaps of
some approaching rage,
like a surf pounding
in total silence
or the turning of pages
too pale for any words
I have learned, but will,
or be cursed to ride
with a ghost in my hide.


NODENS

2003

I swam on down
from my history,
down into mysteries
of the heart which
have torn me so
with old blades.
Down the well I found
the chapel of the
old Romano-British
god Nodens, a blue
tiled room with glass
windows which the
sea pressed hard
but would not break.
Shells and oars
were inscribed on
the walls, and the floor's
mosaic named all
the great whims of
the sea, shark and
narwhal, salmon,
seal. In the center
of the floor there
was a votive well just
nine inches across,
though I suspect
it descended more
than five thousand
years. I reached
down far and pulled
out a bronze coin
of the god riding
a chariot pulled
by four horses;
naked men
flank him as they
ride the waves.
That's enough for
me: each wave's
marbled meat
mints a pure motion
in the currency
of a wild sea.
Hand and fin obey
the current's maul;
his poem sounds
in blue thunder,
drawing on the
nipples of the
world's salt heave.
Having appraised
his wold, I wait,
and sure enough
he sends a wave to
wash the page clean.
On its bluegray
face I see the usual
sign: “Not Here.”
And so I let the
coin fall back down
in his receipt,
watching that eye
glint and burn
and smile and fade,
swallowed at last
by the darker god’s
abyssal stare.




THE HORNED GOD

2004

Always his heavier steps behind me
leading the way. Even at this hour,
when all the night has drowned
drifts broken in midair he’s hungry,
horny, his red eye nailed
to the jugular of this page.
When I was younger this hour
was the best and worst
when it was at all, for I was
either abed with some spear-tunny
greasing her with his molt slather,
or wandering the last of the
wolf-lined bars, cursed for losing
those cajones which ferried
me over to His salt dominion.
All that’s long gone now,
drowned with the rest of the
night -- receded in the wash
of years & wives and spent
seed I guess -- but still, something
calls me to this hour of his
rudest engage, rendering me
bored with mere poems.
His angst makes my fingers
ache to grasp a dark fruit
and tear its flesh wide, staining
the world with that juice.
Tonight’s the shortest night
of the year and the air
is trimmed with insects and
pulsing sprinklers and that
hairy heat which refuses
to sleep. God I’m thirsty,
booze is no longer enough
and my wife sleeps upstairs:
What cup have you hauled
to my lips, wild mentor?
What neck is this, so bare
and pale, with every forbidden
impulse beating patiently
under the morning’s skin,
filled with the jets of song?
Have I earned yet the balls
to remain on the page
while you have enough of
your way with the words?
See my hand? So poised
and articulate, studied,
calm -- hardly the hand which
must claw and dig deep
to wrench out that bleeding
fruit of what matters.
But do I have a choice?
The horned god closes in
here, the distance between
nothing psalm and hoary
song so small you can’t
squeeze more than a wave through,
maybe three drops from the moon.
Shore at last! This pen
has grown as heavy as an axe,
cruel and lethal and oh
so happy to swing free.
I head out to feed the cats,
5:30 a.m., the felines sleek
and muscular, rubbing
this way and that across
my legs while I fill their
food bowls with meat,
then sit with them
as they batten their tiny
fangs on the red fesat,
the first light of day
sawing a seam to the east,
a faint breeze lifting
the vincas and jasmine,
everything calling the
horned god home.


THE NEXT YOGI

2003

The word “shaman”
itself, which is from the
language of the Siberian
Tungus, has been thought
to some to be derived from
the Sanskrit “samana”
meaning “monk,” “yogi,”
and “ascetic.”

-- Joseph Campbell

For years booze was
my yogi, a blurry wild
man perched higher
than every good time
I couldn’t surmount.
While my days
down below burnt
to a self-immolated char,
he just on from his
ledge, singing, relax pal,
let go, get down,
pouring horn and hoof
and hickory club
into the bright
glass of my eyes.
For years I gamboled
in his arrears, some
loosening letterless
thing, wide in short
in my draft a man for
whom a bed and a babe
and a bottle of booze
was the purest
sum of desires.
But of what use
to the world was a life
inches thick, and
spongy with abysms
to boot? No wonder
things are so bad;
millions are bound
to the vespers of hooch,
spending their lives
in farewell down a
a life’s falling stair.
I was the drunk who
could only enjoy or
control his drinking --
not both -- and so
swung between miseries
like the clapper of a bell,
intoning wild yabbers
of descent, then crawling
back in the rigors of
a gentleman who also,
incidentally, drinks.
I never climbed out of
the canyon I cut with
my thirst, and nearly
drowned in abyss.
For me surrender was
the only escape, so I let
go all hope that I
could reach that truly
savage man -- And was
freed from the thrall
of that chill lunar gall.
The next yogi sits
inside and between
housed and hearthless men,
mediating with words
salt/sulphur extremes.
He teaches me how
to hold court with closed
eyes; to build and let go;
and to keep whatever I
give wholly away.
The next yogi, you know,
was inside the first --
I could not have found
him any other way.
The first yogi’s soma
dissolved me down
to scant bones; his
brittle low laughter
haunts the high stones
I lift today for the man
who surrendered and
went down below
so that song could rise
and nourish the world
in its flow. The next yogi
molts his pelt from
the last, the way this
poem peals from
the bell tower of its past.
The well waters I carry
to your in this song
is borne in that skull
which descended from view,
when all was so lost
and surrendered
and written again.


CONCH

2003

My chapel by the sea
is a conch fresh set
on wet sand by
the day’s first tide.
I see it there
from this dry chair,
surrounded here by
nothing of the sea
except the music of
beach days washed
through me lives ago.
I come upon the
conch at first light,
walking miles of
a summer shore;
at first it’s just
a dark hump protesting
an ebbing wave, a
prompt on sand
causing the water
to trail back from it
in a streaming,
pebbly “V” -- What’s
this? No one else
is there: the condos
at high dune are all
empty, sleeping, or
just dead. Just me
and beach and waking
sun and eternally
washing sea. I lift the
shell with both
hands -- it’s heavy,
like a skull or a
lost ship’s bell -- rough
grain without, all
knob and twist, a
shape which surely
captained long
seasons off the
continental shelving
to the east.
Yet its portal is
a sweet labial
labile pink to purple
and smooth as those
lips I’ve kissed
and pray to kiss again.
That mouth is
singing as I hold
cool seaglass to
my ear: and suddenly
all the lives resume
their constant hiss
within, a small wide
sigh of surf and sleep
and drawing back and
back and back
from the sandy
firmament on which
I stand, amid
the rinse and roar
deep within
whose tide I am.

Code Noir

We are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time and its creatures floweth and are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty ..

-- Emerson, “The Poet”

“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poorer eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee.

-- Ahab, “The Candles,” in Melville's Moby Dick


CODE NOIR

Jan. 11, 2006

When Louisiana was first
colonized by the French,
intermarriage between whites
and their black slaves was
encouraged to create a buffer
class of Creoles who might
prevent insurrection.

The image of my hexagram
shows Emerson astride fish
Melville, the deep-diving man
astride a unknown darker purpose.
Both dominate the thinking
song which tides deep in my ear,
lashed together like Ahab to
Saint Moby, a drowned sound
deep inside the words I pour
out here. If my poems were
doubloons, you’d see on one
face Emerson’s “infinitude
of the private man” reversed by
Melville’s “ungodly godlike” heart.
Code Noir keeps me from
drying or dying of too much
of either, my highs baleened,
the black ship steered clear
of its own self-killing ground.
Emerson affirms the throne-
like augments of this writing
chair while Melville kicks
me up and out of it
to join the working fray.
I once believed I could
burrow all the way to God
right here until the depths
grew chill and dense as
silence, ten atmospheres
of Me in fraught degrees
and starry adjectives
and yet no closer in
the quest. Older now
in my enquiries, it suffices
to marvel at all the blue
such depths propound
and leave it on the page
as some paper godhood’s rage
for orders no one can name,
much less corner and
barb clean through. I always
paddle back to shore
clinging to the covers
of this book, finding enough
ballast in the bombast
of “placard capitals” for
naught to ride on through
the rest of my indifferent
so incessant day. That
day belongs to Melville,
in the mystery of word
and world, where art
and heart are so confused
that seas are songs
for sots and dreamers
in the drone of fat machines,
allowing history to
fail and fall in golden
clatters right into
the pockets of the rich.
Code Noir makes
Emerson’s “The Poet’”
my theme astride
Melville’s Moby Dick,
that gnostic counter-meme,
rising and falling
these daily waves toward
first-light’s drastic shore:
Blue heaven anchored to
abyss, a measured margelessness
which sings in such
salty loquaciousness
that a wild sea rounds
all I’ll never lose nor reach
and bids me keep writing down
what those still rapturous
gods confound. Code Noir’s
my psalm, their greed, our bond.





ORAN’S SINK

Sept. 2004

Taurus dracomen genuit
et taurum draco

“The bull is father to the snake
and the snake to the bull”

-- Cretan symbolon

Coin the motions
I bell here a
Doubloon: On one
face blue Oran,
that dark raveller,
his mouth welling
antiphons of primal
cold: Turn the
coin over and you’ll
see me in this white
writing chair atop
a treelike esplumoir,
his dark book in one
hand,a gold pen in
the other, writing
down Oran’s slither
round and tween
the lines.
I found and fathered
him on this page,
though it is his
words which
engendered all of
mine -- “The way
you think it is is
not the way it is at
all!” -- a truth which
by its unknowableness
is by nature recessional,
bidding all who seek
to travel further down
and cross the page,
island to island,
poem to poem.
I have written down
what I found,
and what I found
has forged this song,
mortaring poem
by poem this
singing house
in buried blue.
The mystery is
as simple two
halves of symbolon,
a knucklebone
split in two and
shared by two parties.
One half is shaped by
lines on paper down
to here: The other
half is what lies
inside those lines,
or what comes after
them in a sheer
drop of white space
off the page -- what
I’ll never know fully
upside down,
though each next poem
I surely try. Each
day I flip the coin
and watch it rise
then splash and
tumble down in
gold and black
revolvings, articulate
and not, tumbling
line by line down
the shelves of
ancient dark
til it disappears
from sight, surely
to rest at last
in Oran’s skull,
atop a pile of
prior poems. That
bowl of bone is coffer
to these coigns which
have no vantage but
their salt surrender,
at home and free to
whirl the sea-god’s
sky which only
seems a wetter darker
blue. Suburban
angel of that
winged descent, I
ride this writing
chair astride the
white flanks of a
dolphin with a dragon’s
tail and hooves of
raging bull: A modern
man troping
an ancient rage,
illuminating a black
page which only seems
as pale as bone. I
count my words carefully
into that lost half
buried purse at the
bottom of a wishing
well no one may drink:
For every breath
I squander here
here fresh bubbles
rise from Oran’s
cathedral sink.




BLUE NOIR

Nov. 2004

Each day I mount this
pale white writing chair
and comment my verbal
self to waters wild and wide
with no oar nor paddle
or compass or sail.
This pen voyages where
you bid, or where I
fancy you remain as
I shut my eyes and
recall a trace of you.
Today I think of the night
I followed a busty
redhead home after
the bar closed down
in the year when I
had left my wife behind
and made my way
back home. Let’s color
that sinular night blue
noir, its saxophones
sexual and evil,
transgressing waht I
knew was wrong
and flinging myself anyway
in the name of revels
I could neither submit
to wihtou a wedding ring
tight around my heart,
nor resist as any
more sober man might
have. We drank burgundy
a while in that monied
professional apartment
and then she left to
go pee, leaving me alone
to stare out at the
streetlamped night
of 3 a.m., into that
maw of lost darkness
in the belly of the
whale. Everything
thick with drunkenness
and fatigue, Joe
Jackson on the stereo
& the door not far away.
So much in me still
demanding that I just
get up and go but then
she came out of
the loo wearing just a
half-buttoned shirt,
her huge breasts swaying
darkly in and down.
The embrace that soon
followed was like a boat
offshore at last on waters
profoundly deep and
wild. Oh how we went
out in the pure salt
of abandon, this way then
that, never fucking --
I didn’t have condom --
but going at it every
other way. Exhausted
spent & glistening with
all our expended oils,
we unclenched around
5:30 a.m. when she
told me I had to go
(she needed to write
a paper the next day).
And so I got zipped
and shod and kissed
her on the cheek as
she slept quenched
and sated, never to speak
to me again. I drove carefully
and raggedly back to
my mother’s house where
I was sleeping in a spare
room, aware at once
of such keen delight
amid the ruin of real love.
My wife in our house
20 miles away alone
in our queen-sized bed
with our cat curled
nearby, she believing
that I was gone for
good. A few months
later I told her I wanted
bgack, to somehow
find a way home.
A year later I moved
back home, sober,
sobered, all my errancies
named and laid at the
altar of a love
that promised nothing
but the love. It was
an evil voyage into
that blue noir night:
hurtful and expensive
& damn near ending
all thepoems that I’d
yet to write. But god
the satisfaction of just
reaching into that
gal’s unbuttoned blouse,
to clasp and hold those
huge warm breasts.
How good that evil,
how warm that demon
spray at the the shore
I pray never to return
to nor ever fully forget.
My song here is pure
in the second sense of
things, not orderly
or moral but complete
as the sea is full
of angels with big
teeth. Whatever
shore I ache and
dream here, the
sea gods intend
their own beach.
In the spectrum
of my love there’s
a blue-black isle
washed in booze.
The ink that
flows from my
pen today is
pours freely that
salt ooze--a bit
of ichor of your
cape which
spreads this
waking dawn
with words
I’d rather write
than lose.

The Eagle

Here is the story that the Buryat tell: In the beginning there were only the gods (tengri) in the west and the evil spirits in the east. The gods created man, and he lived happily until the time when the evil spirits spread sickness over the earth. The gods decided to give mankind a shaman to combat disease and death, and they sent the eagle. But men did not understand its language; besides they had no confidence in a mere bird. The eagle returned to the gods and asked them to give him the gift of speech, or else to send a Buryat shaman to men. The gods sent him back with an order to grant the gift of shamanizing to the first person he should meet on earth. Returned to earth, the eagle saw a woman asleep under a tree, and had intercourse with her. Some time later the woman gave birth to a son, who became the “first shaman.” According to another variant, the woman, after her connection with the eagle, saw spirits and herself became a shamaness.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 69

***

I had no idea an eagle
was flying there inside the
white soar of my desire
that night now long ago.
I barely understood what
that woman was saying
as she straddled me
rocking on my hips,
breasts swinging in
strict sexual metronome,
her eyes screwed tight
toward distant loves,
long red hair eclipsing
half her face and every
memory I have of drunken
one-night stands: Was it
my name or his or hers
or God’s that spilled fresh
from her lips to wash
down over me as I
thrust away in
a salmon’s heat for
high and deeper seas?
Something in those
distant words gripped my
heart like claws and tore
it free as I came in her
and then she on me,
collapsing in a wave
of breasts and hair,
quivering, still mouthing
all those names. I crept
out from that room in the
pink folds of first light,
the well-fucked hungover
boy retreating back from
another stolen heaven,
whistling throughout the
day that music she chirred
on my hips, a ditty
arch and sweet whose words
were wholly lost to me
all those years
I barged from bed to bed.
Only now I slowly come to hear
the rustling of brute feathers
in that feeding need,
the wingspan roar of blublack
augments no bottle bed
or balls could pour
the sixteenth heaven of.
All those years
spent ravening through
beds of no avail and it
turns out that he
was winging me to aeries
bright and far, my heart
tight in his grip of white fire.
When I was younger I
thought sex had me by
the balls, and though I
still think that’s true enough,
I’ve come to hear
what the eagle whispered
in my ear as he flew
me on through wicked
nights, a language composed
of two nameless lovers
and the vast expanse between
their drumming hips. There was
only the slick inches of
my cock (stumbling drunk
at that hour, struggling
to hoove home) but it was
somehow long enough to
sound an ocean with salt
verbs and their million shores,
a squirting bestiary of squid and
shark and sperm whales
in vast miniscule fleets.
Enough wet enquiry to
fill ten drowned Alexandrias,
all whispered in my ear
by that eagle who taught
to me first things
in all a floozied night still brings.
When I remember here
the way that that night’s
catch expired at last --
crawling wearily up my
chest to curl her breasts to me
and fall deep asleep
still murmuring words inside
a sea of soft red hair --
not much of a shore for
her, I’m sure, just
the next drunk stallion
coralled at the end
of whiskey’s charms --
I think with world-wide
beats of wing, lifting up to God
another pail of heart to drink.

Blue (A Minor Seventh Chord)

According to Buryat tradition, in olden times the shamans received their utcha (the shamanic divine right) directly from the celestial sprits; it is only in our day that they obtain it merely from their ancestors. This belief forms part of the general conception of the decadence of shamans, documented both in the Arctic and in Central Asia; according to this view, the “first shamans” really flew through the clouds on their horses and performed miracles that their present-day descendants are incapable of repeating.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 67

Has the world always waned? Do we remember first sources like our own puberty, flooding the world with citrus blossoms, everything enrapt, engorged, swelling with fruit next to bursting? No wonder we feel inept and decrepit. My powers are bound by white paper; no mojo found here pours spirits or spreads thighs beyond these invisible yet immutable margins. That was a long, hard, and slow learning, an initiation nursing at the bitterest tit of experience, that pap of no avail, found between the moon and the yew tree, where the darker voice swole like a wave and broke in my ear, saying


FORGET THE OCEAN

1996


The ocean is no door. I once thought
it was, travelling north to south
as through the welcome of a woman
I once dreamed of standing on a wave.

But her literal perfections all washed away.
Daytona Beach is hammered flat by cars
and the brunt of addict frenzies; upon
such drear sand, women in bikinis
flicker and lift like pale flame.

Further south, Melbourne Beach is
always troubled and thundrous,
bellowing at the cut in God’s balls
and Venus smiling into foam.

No beach ever kissed my flesh with flesh.
Between dune and sea there’s a promise,
but not to us. Ask the rotting crabs
and manowars. Witness the hang of
battered, bittern scrub. For me, I’ve
always fared far better shut in my tub.


This tub of tumescent verbs crashes loud and long enough for me at paper shores -- ‘tis a vitality I think -- survival of the whale -- though I’ve always doubted some fin of the beast, never quite sure I was an Ishmael of real experience or just a sum failure in it, my fear of the deep greater than my enthrallment with it, rendering me no great lover but a

TIN AHAB

2002

... I see now that the force
that made him great
Drove me to the dregs of life.
— Masters, “Spoon River Anthology”

Be sure of this, O young ambition,
all mortal greatness is but disease.
— Melville

It was the ungodly godly man
whose ship I so earnestly
yet badly sailed. I too yearned
to be a terror of the yeasty deep,
feral, uncompromising, brave,
unmatched but for the whale
which would drag me in the end to hell.
But who’s ever heard of a tragic
hero without a pair of pewter balls?
I merely drank in all the places
I should have been living
with impunity. The heart
of that grand amoral captain
of wild surges eluded me; I was
far too timid, too petty,
to vain; in the end I
was just too drunk.
My nights were just bad Melville,
a sot infatuated with grand
designs drifting in an inky
stinky whaleboat sans
oar or rudder, my will
two sheets to any breeze.
All the grand catches
got away, my barbs cartoonish,
slavish to false rigors.
No man’s more foolish
than he who hammers
a gold man from bad tin:
nor imparts less nobility
to the melancholy ship
he slowly sinks within.

***

Failure at that big night music: did it shore me here, like John Marr, a wounded sailor who must content himself with sea-like prairies, and imaginary letters from shipmates probably dead? One can bring the sea to one’s prose; certainly Melville did, for a time, before the sea he imagined proved greater than any actual book he could write. It took a youthful and vigorish prose to tack and gambol that sea, the old big night music crashing and dashing and brutal. “Blubber is blubber you know,” Melville wrote to Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, “ ‘tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; --+ to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves.” What does it take to write down that wild Cape Horn sound?



BOAT SONG

2001

He would say the most terrific things
to his crew, in a tone so strangely
compounded of fun and fury, and
the fury seemed so calculated merely
as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman
could hear such queer evocations
without pulling for dear life,
and yet pulling for the mere joke
of the thing

— Moby Dick

The pulling’s the thing — Pull hard!
Pull deep! Maul the sinews
of your work from the
bottom of your heart!
Only in such surrender to
the task will ye reach
that mountain of hellfish!
Row as if perdition’s jaws
were snapping right behind ye!

—It’s that vital,
though the real sea
is a thousand leagues
from this dry watch,
a cozy chair at 4 a.m.
with a heating pad
comforting my back
and a pile of the usual
books to my right:

Row hard or you’ll never
breast the mystery within!
To you only poems
of wakes and
soundings and spume
too far in the distance.

Row for everything and all,
man awash in
in a wilderness of verbs!
Make each stroke count!
There’s a bucket of
sperm gold brimming
hot beneath you, an
oil for every lamp
burning down winter’s
night. — Row, man!
Write these wild seconds
before they sound again!


As the actual sea wears one out, does the verbal one too? Can only the first shamans, the first singers, fly forever? Was their ambition heeled by the God who brought them into being? Are we all Lucifers of first light, bitching and moaning in the vast keeps of dark bone we have fallen into? Eliade:

***


Certain legends explain the decadence of shamans by th pride of the “first shaman,” who is believed to have entered into competition with God. According to the Buryat version, the “first shaman,” Khara Gyrgan, declared that his power was boundless, so God put him to the test, taking a girl’s soul and shutting it up in a bottle. To make sure that it would not escape, God put his finger into the neck of the bottle. The shaman flew through the sky, sitting on his drum, discovered the girl’s soul and, to set it free, changed into a spider and stung God in the face. God instantly pulled out his finger and the girl’s soul escaped. Furious, God curtailed Khara-Gyrgan’s power, and after that the magical abilities of shamans markedly diminished.

-- Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 68

__

Do our highest and best ladders get kicked down from above? Or are they grabbed and shaken by wiser hands below? Hubris is such a sticky valence, tarring and feathering us into the dodos we actually are. We might rival God in our powers, but we are not God. Cape Blue crashes and pounds here in salt similitude, but I cannot presume to harrow that etern crashing horror. Eventually we’re reminded of how much inside of all that we’re missing.. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1)

Melville’s my hero here, in all of his perplex ambition and damage, his achievements and failures both worth praising, his mortal mixture. During a visit by Melville to England in 1856, he and Hawthorne (who had by then a diplomatic post in London) took a walk by the sea, conversing as old friends much cooled of their former ardor. Melville by then had lost so much of his former ambition, Moby-Dick deemed by critics a failure, his next book Pierre reviled as half-mad, the gift ebbing from his work though it remained in his talk, his spirit. Hawthorne wrote of the day in his journal,

***

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists -- and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before -- in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than the rest of us.

(in Delbanco, Melville: His World and His Work, 253)


***

MOTLEYED MELVILLE:
A MEDLEY

Jan. 9, 2006

I.

Motleyed Melville is my gospel
or what’s left of it these
ebbing days: He was the
man of common rips
and sunders, failing Dad,
too dry a mother,
heading off to a sea’s
blue thunders leaving
behind bad days. He got
soaked in the salt of an
immensity which later
bid him write it down
and thus he launched
a fleet of novel frigates,
only one of which could
balance salt with vigorish
to clear his proper and
so fallen shores. That
once imagination and means
ruddered in him huge
and magisterial, mad and free
of portside damage and
Christian democracy.
That work hauled off
from every known shore
that had yet been said
and then wrecked him
in his deepest seas.
With no shore he
would paddle home to
he had little left to do
but curse indifferent
publics and fend on
with words once loud
grown drear into a
private man’s retiring
jail of drying verbs.
No wonder he burned
all his letters and
manuscripts, freeing
himself not of words
but of our lubber’s
sterile sense of them.
Thus Melville sailed on,
leaving us to bicker on
as we do about
all that loosened
from that descending
boat and beast -- modernist
prose, fascist manifesto,
gay sally, phrenology
of the sea’s broad fascias.
Only a smaller man could write
that one great book, a
doubter of all textures
yet delving all they yet
surround, like salt water,
abysms of the will to know
what madness renders
moot. Only a goodly ungodly
man could write of the
ungodly godlike one,
finding in faith’s faltering
fury enough to barb it to
the page and hold it there
in paragraphs of wilding wrench:
What else could Melville
do, having delved the full
bass octaves of the Whale?
And who, indeed, wrote
that Whale down, Melville
or Ahab; or did Moby
thus write them?
Melville sought to earn
a living writing down the
sea-tales of his youth
but for one book that
voyage mastered him;
he later said that two
books finned through
Moby-Dick, “the larger
book, and the intimately
better (one) ... for (his) own
private shelf,” or, vice versa,
the one which “demands his
ink” and the other “whose
unfathomable cravings drink
his blood.” He sought the white
whale but really Dick steered
that black book from behind,
a fin of sperm’s eternity which
was all a man of that day
could hook, perhaps ever.
Moby-Dick racked up some
500 bucks in sales and
was roundly panned by
the press, decrying its
wandering narrative,
snoozer asides,
fractured voices, doomed
ends. Then a warehouse
fire burned the inventory,
like a try-works burning
all the author had dreamed
of magnitude. And as
those books leapt into
fire, some darkness leapt
back into that author’s
ire, never to be found again.

II.

As the shamans of the
Buryat contend, the first
ones received their divine
fires directly from the
sky, and flew real horses
there; later generations
had to content with
ancestors, not divines,
and fly imagined skies.
So when I dare propound
the margins of the whale
I do in fished-out seas
where no one roars
with Ahab’s spleen, and
everyone calls themselves
Ishmael, paddling on
tidy self-graven caskets
over “all the stirs up
the lees of thing” in jobs
and wives and cats,
mowing not seas but lawns.
Last night I dreamed
of trading places with
the friend I left behind
who stayed to play in
bands -- He stepped out
of memory to assume this
chair, while I strapped
back on my blue guitar,
as far from that insouciant
two-bit rocker as the
hour of this night
to that one. And played
his songs again. I
poured over PA manuals
learning again to work
the sound & clopped
about town on crutches
saying farewell to my
wife & wondering just
how to rock the soak
of time’s abysmal pour.
Ahab’s not Melville,
nor Melville this man,
though some brogue
infernity dismasts and
mans us all and bids
us roar the wretched
night of wind and wave
that capsizes daily
enterprise & makes
of wreckage home.
At the cracks of doom
in the great below
scientists of late have
found vents that hiss
& swirl; and in that
total darkness they’ve
found colonies of
worms and crabs
thriving not on light
but heat’s bacterium.
Ahab’s down there,
harnessed forever to
Moby’s breast, and
Melville too, his book
on them strung around
his neck, book pages
opened to the gospel
Father Mapple intoned from
in his ship-shaped chapel
by the sea. That music’s
loud in my ear like the
roar of amplifiers I
once sailed upon, a
wilderness I hymn here
till the roaring’s done
with me, no matter
what the cost to
the paper man I dream.
I am thus obedient
in stepping off the ledge
to drown the seams
of sense and song
in this pure verbal sea:
For home is where
the heart sinks to,
and mine hunts dark
men ferally to
no longer placard
capitals of God or
gal or sea but the wild
lacunae of all three,
perfecting all they
wrought when they
self-ruined me. Thus
that motleyed Melville
is gnostic text enow
to keep the dark vents
burning and this
hand every churning
the oar-handle home
toward the next verboten
swirl of bubbles heading
down what’s left of prose
to the bottom where it grows.





Yeah, it’s always about Me and “mah Bee-You-Tee-Full Self,” as Johnny Rotten once crooned with the Sex Pistols. Love affair divine, ego and anima ever a-dance in a world of phosphor appearances. Maybe it’s amazing how much of my day I stay submersed in these liquid meditations, these conversations with that spot in the Pacific where the Pequod and Moby and Ahab and Melville went down, whispering like a breeze over the salt immensity, calling them as I say my own name ... cold this weekend, bitterly enough for Florida, temps into the mid-thirties both Friday and Saturday, enjoying quieter time at home after bruising corporate rugby the previous week, my wife battling a custom job to the bitter end, her anxiety over a coming operation ratcheting up, exploding Sat. night when she cracked her head on the door of the bathroom cabinet mirror over the sink and just collapsed on the floor, weeping, saying “I'm just so worried,” ... ‘s all right babe, I crooned, trying to hold her, but she just snapped at me and told me to leave her alone ... Sunday she’s in a cone of her own silence, knocking out the last two cushions of the job, finding toward the end that there’s not enough cording to circle the cushions, natch, another trip to JoAnn’s fabrics, another delay in getting this done .... I do the Sunday routines of gearing up back for work, wash clothes, clean the litter box, enter checks in the checkbook, vacuum downstairs, clean the downstairs bathroom, work in the window box setting in new petunias (limp and fragile purple blossoms which should love the shout of sun that box gets all day), lunch alone watching Carolina whup the Giants in the NFC playoffs, nap a while upstairs in all of that shouting sunlight -- cool yet halcyon, of a stillness somewhere between enlightened and dead -- read Melville’s biography a good while, iron clothes watching Thunderball on AMC (remembering how the big night music was so much my thrall with James Bond, first shaman, perfect hero, hetero Tyrannosaurus, only his martinis shaken, his heart rarely stirred), cook dinner, eat with my wife watching the Bob Dylan biopic No Direction Home on DVD, night cooling down cold again, Dylan’s story retrieved strangely into the present, like this whale we forgot, surfacing and blowing vintage 60s silliness into the wind -- silly to me, guy couldn’t sing worth a damn, lost his poetry in the big sound of his “Blonde on Blonde” rock-n-roll, celebrity stealing off with the poet for decades until this moment when the simple man of his words gets back in view of the camera (why now? mortgage payment? retirement money?) -- or is it that real artists are so hard to see and appreciate amid the cultural clutter of faux-ownership, as if those songs were ever his or ours, but rather blowings of a whale we’ll never really understand, much less simulate ... I went to bed around 9:30, big workweek ahead, leaving my wife to watch the rest on her own, my mostly silent partner of a quiet weekend, tangling with her own demons of greatness and silence, making small sense of her own day ...

***


A good half of writing consists of being sufficiently sensitive to the moment to reach for the next promise which is usually hidden in some word or phrase just a shift to the side of one’s conscious intent.

-- Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night

MIXED BLESSINGS

1994

Sunlight washes
this room, hides,
then returns,
revealing in one day
two shores,
two dolphins
chasing each other
over and through
the waves.

Simple to say
these antiphons
of light and shadow
teach the heart
to love its life
and fret love's end,
but these are not
simply alternation,
but doubly a reverse:
an unrivaled revel
pulsing over the grave.

All of this favors
the poem, I think,
and guides my words
with a thirst all waters
yet none may quell.

A poem dowses its
way to love on a path
of frangipani and yew,
with only their counter rages
to scent a middle way.

Thus I write
in praise of all
mixed blessings:
and pray for the wisdom
the half-scythed,
half-sighted.

Knowing my certainties
are no compass.
Coming to believe in shreds,
vagabond indices
of a truth
weaving
and leaping
about a room.


***

Not anyone who wants to do so can become a medicine man; vocation is indispensible. And this vocation is manifested above all by an unusual capacity of ecstatic experience.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 65

***

The sufferer of a bruised penis, fearing the cure of “legitimite and almighty gods” like Phoebus and Aesculapis,” who might suggest circumcision, prays to a lower god for a like cure in Priapal Epigram #37. Prayer, poem, votive for like healing like, a poet getting real, or really into his Theme:

I blushed to offer for cure my cock
And prayed -- “Priapus, an thou heal the part,
O Sire, whose very counterpart thou seems’t
And without hacking, make it whole again,
One limned on tabled to thee be given
Like-sized, like-colored, and alike of shape.
The God to promise deigning wagged his yard,
By way of nod divine, and did my bede.


WATER-FALL

Jan 7, 2006

Few take showers under waterfalls
singing louder than that blue cascade,
but most of us can hear it crashing
near yet far. And many of us try to
ramp up our voices to that augment
with what meager throats we have
or yearn for. Sometimes all one
ferries of that sound is one phrase
in a fleeting falloff from the droning
of a poem, like a patch of blue in
overwhelming clouds. Another hears it
for a while in the rapture of another’s
love before that person walks forever
off, relicking that memory on an
altar with one or two other nights
laid there never to return, always
revered. Such minor epiphanies
so rout the major vein that there’s
an angelic clout to such humblings,
an augment of some lower burn
which makes of sporadic gleams
cathedrals, as if that smaller music
heard in distant rooms sufficed
for lost divinity. Each age seems
to relish small and smaller ecstasies,
their pedastels reduced to stumps
by failing eyes and narrowed sighs,
settling for settling for because
no one, it seems, knows how to make
the water fall those old wild ways again.
No gods, no votives, no prayers, no alms
are in the once harrowed rooms we
now store once-vibrant precipices
in dimming words for them while
we go about our lives. Sufferers of low
complaint came to fear the cure
of regnant ever-more-distant gods
and thus lowered the sacral bar,
praying to lower one by writing
phallic prayers on tablets and
stetting them at the feet of priapal
gods rogering the routed garden.
Cure me in like and kind, they’d pray
to venereal angels. As they we too,
who have so far banished death from
our living rooms that we can’t
feel its waters crashing down.
We’ve become like gods where
youth and clout are beamed around
the globe with perfect starbright teeth,
ever changing channels because
there’s nothing and less to see
and its falling all around us,
an angelic pure blue scree.




THE WHALE WILL IMPROVE

2002


The whale will improve.
A few more harpoons,
Ahab's bones now lashed
to his ear—no problem,
his flukes seem to
semaphore as he
descends from our sight.
Not so poor Ahab,
unmanned at last
by his pride.
Even ungodly godly
men find their
grave at last
wrapped in the skeins
of their unmakers.
The Pequod’s bow
took a mighty whack
and sank mid-Pacific
in a spoor of lost
whale oil. And after
that one hour
of malevolence,
man the hunter
hunted down at last
by whale the wicked,
the white heart
of God is now beneath
the wave,
and all is calm,
almost paradisal.
Smooth as sated lovers
and dead kings.