Lyre of Hermes

FROM UNDERNEATH

Steven Dunn

A giant sea turtle saved the life
of a 52 year old woman lost at sea
for two days after a shipwreck
in the Southern Philippines. She rode
on the turtle’s back.

—Syracuse Post-Standard

When her arms were no longer
strong enough to tread water
it came up beneath her, hard
and immense, and she thought
this is how death comes,
something large between your legs
and then the plunge.
She dived off instinctively,
but it got beneath her again
and when she realized what it was
she soiled herself, held on.

God would have sent something winged,
she thought. This came from beneath,
a piece of hell that killed a turtle
on the way and took its shape.
How many hours passed?
She didn’t know, but it was night
and the waves were higher. The
thing swam easily in the dark.

She swooned into sleep.
When she woke it was morning,
the sea calm, her strange raft
still moving. She noticed the elaborate
pattern of its shell, map-like,
the leathery neck and head
as if she’d come up behind
an old longshoreman
in a hard-backed chair.
She wanted and was afraid to touch
the head—one finger
just above the eyes—
the way she could touch her cat
and make it hers.
The more it swam a steady course
the more she spoke to it
the jibberish of the lost.
And then the laughter
located at the bottom
of oneself, unstoppable.

The call went from sailor to sailor
on the fishing boat: A woman
riding an “oil drum”
off the starboard side.
But the turtle was already swimming
toward the prow
with its hysterical, foreign cargo
and when it came up alongside
it stopped until she could be hoisted off.
Then it circled three times
and went down.
The woman was beyond all language
the captain reported;
the crew was afraid of her
for a long, long time.

***

Hermes meets a tortoise, a primeval-looking creature, for even the youngest tortoise could, by the looks of it, be described as the most ancient creature in the world. It is one of the oldest animals known to mythology. The Chinese see in it the mother, the venerable mother of all animals. The Hindus hold Kasyapa in honour, the “tortoise-man,” father of their eldest gods, and say that the world rests on the back of a tortoise, a manifestation of Vishnu: dwelling in the nethermost regions, it supports the whole body of the world. The Italian name tartaruga keeps alive a designation dating from late antiquity, according to which the tortoise holds up the lowest layer of the universe, namely Tartarus.

Further, although in less striking a manner, the tortoise like the dolphin is one of the shapes of Apollo. In the Homeric hymn ((to Hermes)) it appears only as a most innocuous beast, the plaything and sacrificial victim of an ingenious child, albeit divine. The tortoise seems to be no more “cosmic” than the playthings of gods generally are, when the gods happen to be Greek gods and do not trespass beyond the natural order of things. The tortoise merely undergoes a Homeric miracle. Something divine glimmers through, the chance for a divine game: Hermes makes it into a lyre.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “The Primordial Child in Primordial Times”




POWER CHORDALS

Jan. 18 (version 2)

I choose now to arch back
cocksure and proud
into the assault of big night
music on the surflike pound
of power chords, the guitar
in my remembered hands
smashing blue waves chocked
with sea ice in snarled wallops
mean sound, exhilirant in
gales of Thor loosed in
that savage arc as I swung
that Phantom hammer down,
down all the way to
what was under that undertowing
sound. A shrieking god’s will
was wired to my own inside
that 100-watt amp atop a
squalling Peavey rack
cranked to blue max;
I’d smack a chord and
it whacked back, a
strolling thunder like
a rogue wave’s plunder,
tiding me to dark
and danker caverns
under the floor of
that dark basement
where one night
toward the end of
Summer 1979 my band
Slick Richard played
a party gig, the
boys so eager at the
bit to rock the room
that I still feel the
whale-deep urgency
of those power chords,
a surge which survives
to this distant day and
age so frenzied that my
lines leap like a salmon
against the stream of time,
trying to get back inside
that song we were playing
— “Repectable” by the
Stones, I think, though it
may have been “Dirty
White Boy” by Foreigner
or “Sweet Emotion” by
Aerosmith—riding
again steel stallion hammers
through the midsection
of a all desire, that
room where lovers
clench and come
surrendering pent
angels in a collapse
of heaving lees.
But it wasn’t something
I could choose back then,
not something I could
climb in and savor: it
was much to hot and wild
in its presence, a savagery
which I did not so much
ride as it ferried me toward
the evernight’s jade shores
on swollen black rollers;
huge hands were working
mine as I slammed those power
chords, demanding every
foaming crest of my
expendable youth, feasting on
it like a fishhead sticking
out the soul-hollow beneath
my arm as I lifted it up in
glory and supplication
and gory lust, cupping fire
not meant for mortals in
my hand as I drove the
next chord down.
It sure felt like arrival to
be rocking that party room
after so many months of
saggy droll practice,
all those hours mortaring
venom and bitchery into
wavelike shapes of sound,
a tumult made weird and
wretched by the ringing
silence at songs’ end
where triumph should have
meant applause. So many
nights lost in the gears
of an infernal machine
which had no employ,
no battlefield, no surfeit
that to stand there playing
to a crowd was surreal
and almost hurtful, all
our dreams stripped bare
and the bitch matrix
we loudly suited purring
show me what you got there boy ...
Those two barely legal teens
dancing in front of me
lamped almost too fully
all I mooned those months
of cold basement practice,
their eyes half-closed,
swaying tits and asses
in lewd undulation
as I fucked them
with those power chords,
cunts cocked wide for
all I horsed inside my
swingin’ guitar, fire and
desire finding in blue amplitude
the frenzy of a song’s shared
shore. And it sure felt more
real than anything my
dim working days could delve
when at the bridge of
“Respectable” by the
Stones and I launched
into my solo--no whiz
but respectable enough,
ballsy and bluesy and
spitting fire at the girl
dancing closest to me,
an assault which caught
her wide open as she
cried >Yes Yes with a dreamy
smile, a shout of
recognition or acceptance
which was the sound I
needed to hear so badly
back then that no amp
was loud enough to
shout the need full back.
I knew in that loose
certainty a good song
seems to delve that
she and I would complete
the tune on a bed or
floor or in some shower
stall—I was absolutely
certain of it as the
sparked arpeggios
my plectrum ripped
across my guitar’s
strings marauded back
down to the chorus
where we all yelled
“Respectable” at
our mikes, as if we
wrote the words
ourselves, which we
did, that night at least,
inside a smoky
beer-drenched room
three doors up from Hell.
But enjoyment was not
in the mix back then;
rather the big night
music was what the martyr
feels when the fatal
arrows thwock through
his chest and groin
one-two-three, ending
one story in operatic gouts
of world-ending pain.
The big night music
wore me like an iron shoe
which gave its hooves
full resonance as they
stampeded through
our songs, finding
true magnitude
as I hammered
on my blue guitar
all the mordents of
late-night suburban
angst and misspent youth,
a sound so loud and
hard and hellbent
that chords were trio
ecstasies of which I
was the minor third,
the hapless fish
squeezed between
sea dominant and
the god of fifths,
a drowning ecstasy,
a wind..
Hard chunky hammers
chording A to D to A
and then squalling down
to dive the rims of E
for that choral antiphon
to what those chicks
danced back as the
sacrificial tits of
the larger crowd wasted
on beer and pot and
rock n roll on
a late August night
almost 30 years ago.
The big night music
rode me but good
that rare, almost
cathedral night when
at last we actually gigged
—our band would end
soon enough, unable
to hold such malefic
majesties for long in
our too-eager hands—
and I was faithful to
the end, playing all
three sets sweaty
and loose, a Marlboro
hanging from my lips,
eyes squinty, Corcidin
bottle on my finger
for a slide, a plastic
cup of beer half-empty
on my rig, burning
everywhere I waved
my Music Man guitar.
All that proceeded
hence—the post-gig
drinking with boys
and chosen girls,
the room I languished
into, led by the hand
by that dancing girl,
the way she kept on
dancing as she lifted
up her t and bra, shaking
full breasts in my
face as if to milk
not my thirst but
the god inside those
cross-heavy songs.
There I exchanged
axe for cock and
played my power
chords fucking her
from behind as she
writhed and smiled,
taking every stroke
and wave and chord
til I or it was done at last,
every drop of big sound
cascaded in brute falls
down the slide of her
singing womb. And slept.
That music in its salt-
thalassic swale, brine-brutal
and deep waving, drowned
me full in its wild wake
as all those years of
fruitless bands squalled
down to a shutting
guitar case -- And yet
all that failed history
gives rise to what I
elect here, no longer
serf in big-night fields
but lord of its inmost
thrall, a sound I choose
for having dried of
all hope of actual
wet-chorded days.
I am the big night music
now, its brutal wings
my own inside the
aging simple visage of
a life descended into stone.
Power chords still
romp the ecstasy of
gods and I am free to
harness them and ride
hell-bent their augmental
dooms, on paper lengths
at least, approximate of
all the cunts I plunged
astride real sounds.
Horsecock winds outside
again today, another front
making maenads of the trees
and garden, a thrash of
passions which is fully the
world’s. When I patch here
into its words, each line
is a chord of that pagan fire
no amount of history can
douse or house or grow
fully up and out from, ever.
Here it is baby, all you
need to make the spirits scream.
I choose to play that song
because blue hell churns
the richest cream.

***

.... (the Hungarian scholar) D. Kovendi showed how for the Greeks, the birth of the divine child, in his capacity as Eros Proteurhythmos, signified the rhythmical-musical creation of the universe. The lyre in the hand of the Primordial Child expresses the musical quality of the world quite apart from the poet’s invention. It is first and foremost characteristic of Hermes himself. The Homeric poet sensed the musical nature of the universe as essentially Hermetic and located it in the Hermes colour-band of the world spectrum. In all probability the poet was not seeking this primeval music, but its higher, Apollonian form. If, however, the boy riding a dolphin (who sometimes bears the name of Phalanthos) has a lyre in his hand, we are driven to think not merely of his relations with Apollo Delphinios, but of a more general, primary connection that existed before all specific names: the connection of water, child, and music.

-- Kerenyi, ibid.

***

THE CHAPEL
GUARDIAN STIRS

2003

Up from disturbed ground an ancient
Turtle crawled, and in the center
Fixed his hoary bulk: and slept. By
Dawn the shell had hardened down to
A great red stone. The hands she dreamed
Built a chapel round and over
Her, as if to shell her breath in
Walls of stone and a high-pitched roof.
Years passed around that head within
To bud and hurl, drop leaves to snow,
Amid the murmur of human throats
Pouring out sweet and bitter aches.
Then something deeper stirred in her,
Flexed, sighed: A crystal boat touched shore.
She bids us find then build a deeper door.

Anti-Apocastastastasis; or, The Flag of Ahab

In Shakespeare’s tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote.

-- Melville, “Hawthonrne and His Mosses”

We who are born into the world’s artificial system can never adequately know how little in our present state and circumstances is natural, and how much is merely the interpolation of the perveted mind and heart of man. Art has become a second and stronger nature; she is a stepmother, whose crafty tenderness has taught us to despire the bountiful and wholesome ministrations of our true parent. It is only through the medium of the imagination that we can lessen those iron fetters which we call truth and reality, and make ourselves even partially sensible to what prisoners we are.

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The New Adam and Eve,” in Mosses at An Old Manse

ETHEREALIZING

Robert Frost

A theory if you hold it hard enough
And long enough gets rated as a creed:Such as that flesh is something we must slough
So that the mind can be entirely freed.
And when the arms and legs have atrophied,
And brain is all that’s left of mortal stuff,
We can lie on the beach with the seaweed
And take our daily tide baths smooth and rough.
There once we lay as blobs of jellyfish
At evolution’s opposite extreme.
But now as blobs of brain we lie and dream,
With only one vestigial creature wish:
Oh may th etide be soon enough at high
To keep our abstract verse from being dry.

***

(The church father Origen wrote,)

Since, as we have often pointed out, the soul is eternal and immortal, it is possible that, in vast and immeasurable spaces, throughout long and various ages, it ((the Devil)) can descend from the higest good to the lowest eveil, or it can be restored from utlimate evil to the greatest good.


Alice K. Turner comments, “Eventually, Origen proposed everyone would choose to repent, even the Devil. If Chirst died for us all, that would include the angels: the Devil was once an angel. If God is infinite, everything will naturally return at the end of time to be part of him -- the Devil’s negative aspects would be destroyed in the refining fire to leave only his essential angelic self. This theory of universal redemption is called apocatastastasis.

-- The History of Hell, 77



APOCATASTASTASIS

Jan 18, 2006

As Origen’s theory goes,
what goes around flows
underground in riptides
of immortal main, arteries
of red plush cycling back
to the pale white heart of things
through a harrowed vein,
my spleen for vengeance on
the wave embracing he who
folds and smashes me
on the final forgiving shore,
remitted in the pale at last.
In this view all who spiral
up and out through will
and pluck come home at
last on coils of His vast love,
what made us seem so
separate and wild reversing
poles at their extreme
and coursing back from self-
exile in the pure dream
of golden days where
citrus and mint
rise like perfume in
the cleavage of the long-lost,
now-welcoming Beloved.
Even the Devil obeys this
law, yearning from his
rude black chair to
redirect the black
waterfall which tumults
down from grace, dreaming
of stars halted in their
entropic tracks, confronted
by the Counterforce.
What dreadful sum or
nadir is in that pause
which gives birth to
reversing gears, slowly
wheeling the universe
the other way, yearning for
old unities which compress
infinity into a tight ball
smaller than a hair
on the ass of an iota?
Do we circulate from fire
to cold extremities, there to
warm black regions with
a kiss which belies the curse,
like red satin in a vampire’s
cape; and do we there, spent
and sated of angelic mission,
thus fold our wings and fall
backwards into the limb
and harrows of chthonic fire,
the poems of lost ecstasy
come home to roost in
that blissful crypt (a bed,
a beach, a writing chair)
which hurled ‘em? As business
models go it’s pure revenue,
every wasted dollar stacked
neatly in the shitpile which
loams the billion bullion apples
of the Hesperides. For quantum
physics, too, it’s neat ‘n’ reet,
and gloriously mad, the delusion
of cold fusion frigging God
from His depths on homewarding
sails of icy galactic fire.
But as songs, well, sorry Origen,
you’re pure disaster,
‘cause what’s the point
of singing if you know the
who’se listening? Why stand
at that shore if you’re so sure
that water is the oar for rowing
salty blues no cup or pap can pour?
If God is inexorable as
taxes, fat and death, then why
ride this warring pen knowing
that it will—it must—roll on
to its appointed end at the
last line of the poem where
the silence and whiteness
are destined to take over
and write the other way,
erasing every infernal spout
and spume with the smile of
dead serenity, slaking each
line’s lack and slum till I and Thou
are jammed back in the
womblike narrows of the one.
If these yawps of chaos must
exchange their extreme zoots
at song’s end & suit up
homewarding hymns,
then what’s the point of flinging?
Every god deserves a rant
and plunge no wave redeems
in any blue enough way.
As much as I love tides
I brook no centrifuge to them
but praise their pagan
gallops slipshod on every shore,
no end final enough to end
the reach for next wild doors
where wilder songs more
wildly soar. In such faith I’m poor
and verbal in all the useless ways,
keeping watch on the Pequod’s
mainmast roost ten thousand
leagues below, still hunting
for that feral whiteness with
barbs no silence knows
how to end, much less return.

***

This from the last chapter of Moby-Dick, which refuses to end even as it does. The White Whale has just smashed his brow into the Pequod, erupting a fatal wound in the ship’s breast:

***

Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.

"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,- death- glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;- ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.

For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;- at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Big Wind, Deep Wave

... Young man,
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
has forced wide open by your own voice--learn

to forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

-- Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I.3
transl. Stephen Mitchell

***

I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as a lamb. It is not a piece of feminine Spitalfields silk -- but it is of the horrbile texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.

-- Melville on Moby Dick in a letter to Hawthorne, ca. 1853

***

Groaning up a-weary & so sleepy this 3:15 a.m., weekend sleep (later beddings and wakings) making of the hour a dense sludge, rising zomboid from our bed into the cold blue moonlight which fills the room with lucent viscosities not meant for us to name, making my way wearily downstairs to this white writing chair with its stack of books to the right, Violet sitting patiently awaiting treats & the garden outside in the dark dead and huge in mid-winter’s gestative swoon.

A front came through on Friday night with massive rollers of winds that surely loosed from Arctic shores, making of somewhat cold night a nasty chill-factor, rocking the eaves of the house and whipping the oaks and camphor tree like the heads of drowning sailors, like those primal sexual passions which overwhelmed me into flattened surrender to agencies somehow inside and beyond the sexual thrall,

To wit,



RUDE PSALTER

Jan. 15, 2005

It is in such a mythical horizon that
we must place the relations of shamans
with their “celestial wives”; it is not
they who, properly speaking, consecrate
the shaman; they help him either in his
instruction or his ecstatic experience.
It is natural that the “celestial wife’s”
intervention in the shaman’s mystical
experience should be accompanied
by sexual emotion; every ecstatic experience
is subject to such deviations, and
the close relations between mystical
and carnal love are too well known for
the mechanisms of this shift in plane
to be misunderstood.

Then, too, it must not be overlooked
that the erotic elements present in
shamanic rites exceed the mere
relationship with the shaman and his
“celestial wife.” Among the Kumandin
of the Tomsk region the horse sacrifice
includes an exhibition of wooden
masks and phalli, carried by three
young men; they gallop with the
phallus between their legs “like a
stallion” and touch the spectators.
The song sung on this occasion is
distinctly erotic.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, p. 79

For every woman I fell through
crying rude and louder names
was a song born here
for flying low through
so blue and bolder heavens?
Were all those beds
like drums which beat
in carnal waves against doors
which opened for later,
like gestated wombs, to
paper shores where
the big night music found
wings and fins and hooves,
some inside yogi’s sense
slickened in the narrows
of those sum cunts
to font and yell these laster songs?
A hard cold front
wracks the night outside
with horse-wild winds,
smashing through our town
like some wicked storm surge,
a polar berserker’s cock
plunged all the way to here,
huge balls primed with
narwhal fire and sea ice.
I can see his face now
jammed against the window,
its one horrid eye or mouth
gaping rude down the
corridors of time, a visage
hard as granitic stone,
seeing and saying all
that rock first foamed
in magmatic spew, an ire
which foments on the page
in paper faux-angelic fire.
He is the marrow of my
plunging nights, the spine
of this incessant plunge
across and down the page,
the consort of the Queen
Of Beasts, eager as all
death with the surging song
I cry ejaculate and wild
right here, harbored home at last.
Those real nights are
now memories -- far perhaps
for the real cock and ball
show others must vault through,
but all these paper
nights require to dream
sufficient strength to leap
upstream in faith and
fury of far older things
than a poet’s history
or a man’s receipt,
leaping and muscling
a tide of songs in a
spermatazoic spoor,
the quick and loosened
jism of the lord marauding
through this darkly
sweet-loined night. The
songs of vicious summer
are gestated here, thrust
like seeds into the garden
by a horsecock that seems
ten thousand miles long
and twice yet as hard as
any song I’ve yet to swell
from those old cantankerous
desires. One hundred sixty
one years to the night Sire
Melville was born, I headed
out to celebrate my birth
and found a woman in
a bar who smiled and
leaned in close in the
roar of rock and roll
and invited me
to roam the plashing
steppes between her thighs;
a few hours later I
found myself more
enrapt and harder
than I’d ever been before,
a bone length of salmon
iron which no amount
of savage all-night fucking
could requite as we
yelped and squawked
the names of gods
I never heard again,
expiring of at last
our unquenched souls
on the pyre of a
pale midday white bed.
That night’s now gone
to dust amid the
gritty white crust
which glued us fast
as we slept deep into
the hungover afternoon,
gone with the color
of her eyes which
too soon said farewell
to me -- blue like the
summer ocean I
thought was home, lamped
by a golden ecstasy
which was never about
me or my cock
and survived that affair
to romp inside this
morning’s horse-cocked
winds. My words are
pregnant with the soar of
Thor-Mephisto winds I’ll
never ride the wildest
heavens of inside
the fleshy margins of,
though I try, here
and upstairs where
I soon enough will
go to wake my wife. Suffice
that these pages whip
and flutter and
turn fast to primal songs
breathed from the
spout of the lewd
orifice jammed hard
against the windows
of this yet-awakened
day. Enthrall my words,
o bluebelling master, with
what Your earth and sky
require. And I will ride
my keening orcas into
the blackest billows
of your savage choir.

***

When I talked to my father on Sunday morning he said they were in the midst of a bad windstorm, 14 degree temps on the thermometer whipped to subzero depths by gales which had arrived in the night and were still raging in mid-morning, knocking over trees with winds gusting up to 60 mph. Same Thor? A paternal or perhaps totem brutality, the angelic maul which stampedes overhead in measure to something which batters and battens within, under what’s under sex.


THE WINDBLOWN

April 2004

“I’m back again: the fast wind
spinning over wheat-top,
the faceless tumbleweed bouncing
over an earthen lyric,
the sky twirling tinctures
of black in a cloudy bowl...”

I wrote those lines two and
a half decades ago in one
of those half-poems I
suffered which seem to rise
with such urgency only to
end in half-finished ellipses.
Still I always remember
the power I felt with those
words announcing that
spring more than one year’s
vernals had broken free
from my history’s boreal funk,
an alarum of wind smelling of
fresh blooms and blood-metal
with the force of a stampede.
My own heart in the heat
of my hand was riding that pack,
or greeting it with the widest
welcome I could name.
At that moment I felt like one
finished grieving the dead,
one done to the gills with
the mordents of inwardness.
I’m back shouts the soul
and an arousing thunder
cracks open the sky.
Give me that urgency
which young lovers feel with
every sharpened sense,
slapping their moist bodies at the
other like clapping hands,
like rain at last at night
in a forest of cock and cunt.
My eyes, my eyes:
chasing down the long horizon
for a sleek shape. My ears, my
ears: where is she?
I wrote, and two weeks later
I did meet her. Invocation
preceded the frenzied pneuma,
as the high white ache and
break of winter cliffs
foments that spring runoff
which massively hurls toward
the sea, foaming the falls,
deranging the mind.
There’s still enough scent in
the jasmine this morning
to guide my hand back
there to here, even when
days are hardly young and worse.
My wife came home from
the hospital yesterday a wreck,
crying inconsolably after she
told me her father couldn’t
say who she was. In that hour
I ferried all the consolation
my God provides -- called my
uncle (a retired neurosurgeon)
and parlayed his equal take
on the situation -- difficult,
yes, but no cause for alarm--,
poured water from a red
bucket on all the new plants
in the garden, fed all the cats &
made us a simple dinner,
reduced all to a quiet drone which
cradled my wife at last into
the heaviest sleep. Let her
sleep long and well, Lord,
while I return to unsheathing,
honing this blade I found inside
and against an old grinding stone.
Each line here passes
this way then that,
narrowing the sword’s edge
to the sharpest second
where the wind suddenly
wakes from the dark mess
of time, cutting the wheatfield
like the fin of a great fish whose
saddle I here mount
till the Thrill is You,
a split till pouring blue coinage,
booty at last. Lord grant me fury
to campaign all the way south.
Shoe these wild verses
for their charge from my mouth.
I’m back again—
Please send the big winds.



My wife and I took a walk on Saturday morning while that huge sky was at work, wrapped in several layers of sweats, hugging coats tight as we leaned into our forward progress through neighborhoods bright but empty, everyone shut inside. Lake Dora was whitecapped and strolling briskly toward the boat ramp, the gates to the sky fully opened and all that northern impetus flooding at and through us. Shit, we muttered, hurrying around that windy moat, our talk of meals for the week and worries about one or other parent and equally heated commentaries about a wayward friend and the Bush administration tucked away until we could get out of the assault of the wind. My wife was certainly being brave that day -- she hates the wind -- while it was brutal good fun for me, loving for whatever reasons as I do the totem pleasures of such regent air. Maybe Montaigne fished out the essence when he wrote, “We are all wind. And even the wind, more wisely than we, loves to make a noise and move about, and is content with its own functions without wishing for stability and solidity, qualities that do not belong to it.”

Or are not content with those qualities, sensing what washes not from without but within?

***

The front wore itself out through Saturday until it was just cold, the following night still and blue with lunar otherlight -- oh not that cold, maybe 38 or so -- while we dined on slowcooked ribs & watched a video of 70’s-vintage flick, “The Parallax View” or some shit like that, not very good, faux-artsy, a Statement by some director who’s now long gone, lots of long-view long-shots of industrial corporate and big-school interiors,
the menace of The Organization, the thrall of conspiracy theories, Warren Beatty looking way too cute-lipped to be convincing as a hard-boiled investigative reporter fighting and fucking his way to The Truth ... Maybe the movie’s conceit was new back in the ‘70s but we’re jaded in our knowledge of corporate malfeasance, and have long spiralled the labyrinths of conspiracy, sped hilariously in shot-lenth, movies now edited in a be-bop tempos, the wired end of the indoctrination slideshow the Parallax Company used to bless the dark passions of those deviants it recruited for company sanctions. It’s not really worth much mention, bad movie, maybe by old standards as well as current ones. But it was diversion enough for us, my wife’s operation looming a week from now, cold night outside, the routine of dinner & TV & a warm bed creaturely enough comfort against middle-age wearies, worries, meditations on


THE WHITENESS OF
THE WHALE

Sunday, Jan. 16

This elusive quality it is, which causes
the thought of whiteness, when
divorced from more kindly associations,
and coupled with any object terrible
in itself, to brighten that terror to the
furthest bounds.

-- Melville, “The Whiteness of The Whale,”
Moby-Dick

(Robert) Frost believed that individual
venture and vision arose as a creative
defense against emptiness, and that it
was therefore always possible that
relapse into emptiness would be
the ultimate destiny of consciousness.

-- Seamus Heaney

Suddenly as he peered down
and down into its depths, he
profoundly saw a white living
spot no bigger than a white
weasel, with wonderful celerity
rising, and magnifying as it
rose, till it turned, and then
there were plainly revealed
two long crooked rows of white,
glistening teeth, floating up
From the undiscoverable bottom.

-- Moby Dick

..the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

— WH Auden, “The Sea and the Mirror”

Light though thou be, thou leapest
out of darkness; but I am darkness
leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!

-- Ahab, “The Candles,” Moby-Dick

Every morning I sit here
at the deep end of the night
with an ear pressed to a
great sea-wall, hearkening
to white voices in their
papered cum-liquid thrall.
I’ve spent years at this
listening post and
I’ve yet to yield more
than ghostly washing
sounds -- a few skulls
knocking from the other side,
a headboard’s metronome
in sum of remembered
nights of thumping bones,
the clang of a lost church-
bell tolling those
drowned sailors who
file like churchmen
in blue moonlight through
the garden just outside.
Not much of an education
but enough to tune my ears
to the washing sound
the angels tide, deep waves
against the wall of words
which holds me here
at 6 a.m. this Sunday
in the 48th Year of
the sea-lord who’s
poured my mortal coil.
I’ve listened at that wall
so long I can’t tell which
is the sea and what it
has behooved in this
bluer me, a water-riding one
who dives whale-like
into the darkest trenches
of the heart a man
of words can blubber.
The difference may be
moot by now (like shades
of bone-gleam starlight),
as if the ear I press here
is tuned exactly to
the one pressed back
in liquid harmony.
This song is what perhaps
we both hear inside
this porcelain chapel
of pink and blue, a conch
of winding rooms that
opens here and there
where all shores receipt
the pain of so much
pounded bone. Last night
I dreamed of wandering
with wife all night in
search of some beachside
house we once enjoyed
but we got lost in all that
night, my compass wrong,
my sextant fallen.
We ended up at 4 a.m.
in some charnel project
at the shore’s worst ghetto
where dopers and dickheads
breathed hot blades upon
our backs, eager for my
black wallet and my wife’s
white ass. Seeing
the way so unsafe I
cycled us back to first light
in some a beachside town
which was near but still
between the home I
sought to get us to
and the dream’s unfailing
snarl. We settled in a
rude cafe where
citizens on welfare
smacked down eggs
and grits with steaming
carafes of black whale oil.
I asked around for directions
to Daytona Beach,
the next named shore
on down the map,
borrowing a cellphone
from some fat patroness
and getting a cab company
of sorts on the line.
The dispatcher was
some black woman who
I could barely understand,
husking that help was on the way
though she couldn’t say
just when. You just believe
that hep is on the way
she slurred and then rung off,
leaving us to stare out
the large plate glass window
at no streets that I could
name, much less decide
the towns they might barb.
It’s cold again this morning,
Red in the back window
at 5 a.m. looking hungry
and miserable, a sad nth
to this winter’s night in
Paradise. The winds have
slowed to mournful stirrings
which deep waters wear
like a crown of white foam,
the out and inside brutality
of incessant paper seas.
I’m drifting off to sleep
here, too washed to
make much sense of
what’s washing back,
though I perceive a
wetter wall is hard
against the wet
words I’ve been writing
down. I can’t see or
name it though I feel
it hail below, melting
every wakeful line
into the white washes of
what’ I’ll never grow
as long as I keep writing
in this way --
a whiteness
enrapt and jawing
wide what’s ending
here