The Fetishist

I have made of one taboo
my cultural fold, a recess
of woods recessed in woods
satyrred with heavy glee.
My fetish is my starry heaven,
the poem I write ten thousand
times over trying to sound
it right. Can one drop of fire
on my tongue synod the oceans
seven, the same rote expletive
glossing every angel’s voice
in the choiring constellations?
I think so. I am so compulsed
by the certainty I’ll find her
yet in what subtracts
me by iota from sheer fire;
As if stiletto heels were
asbestos to my soul’s convulse
to walk creation’s coals.
My fetish keeps me on
the precipice of truly finding
out her name so I am
always guessing it, my love
in leather lubricent
to sail the marge forever
a mile offshore of her, that
strand where she and I
would certainly and
legally and permanently begin,
silencing this infernal bell for good.
It is like a dark beast I ride
in exult servitude,a secret society
of one astride an even deeper
code, where saddle and rein
are so confused as to save me
from my sere. It is the honeyed
pith of all the bland days
amassed in bushels I must
bear, ever sweeter as
the burden grows. I protect
it like a candle on a windy
night, though I suspect
the opposite is true: My
fetish is a whirling
beacon in an old
lighthouse which keeps
my ships in view, the
throbbing vein in
every stormy night
which provides sold
rudder through the water
wild of high desire.
It is the nth of hell which
which makes waves so
tall and so malefically
sweet when they fold
and crash in paroxysms
of fatal blue, refreshing
that old hole in the
wash of roguish salts.
Raw again, I’m real
and hurting like hell
and praising the dark god’s
name which bids me lust
again in exactly the wrong
way. Anal, pedal, pedo,
necro: they’re only names
the light of day dams
us with, damming off its
own derange. What dry
dearthed dim kind of man
would I be without my
secret strange? These
raids across its rude
and unkempt border are
never meant to hurt
another as to celebrate
my own wounds with
the nails of brute encounter,
submitting to its
humiliations with arms flung
wide, a cross to hang
between love’s actual breasts,
rounds I’ll never get to ride,
much less propound
sufficiently in actual days again.

Seance

FROM A SWISS LAKE

Eugenio Montale
transl. Jonathan Galassi

My vixen, I myself was the “poete
Assassine”: there where the hazel grove,
Razored by bonfire, makes a cave;
In that den
A sequined halo
Lit your face, then slowly fell
Until it touched a cloud, dissolved: and anxiously
I called for the end above that deep
Sign of your open, bitter life,
Abominably delicate, yet strong.

Shining in darkness, is it you?
Plumbing that throbbing furrow, on
An incandescent path, hot in pursuit of your
Zombie predator pawprint (nearly
Invisible star-shaped trace),
A stranger, I plunge anew; and a black duck
Now rising from the bottom of the lake
Invites me to the new fire that will singe her.

***


“The role of the animal spirit in initiation rites and in myths and legends of the hero’s travels in the beyond parallels that of the dead man’s soul in (shamanic) initiatory ‘possession.’ But it is clear that it is the shaman himself who becomes the dead man or the animal spirit, or the god, etc.) in order to demonstrate his real ability to ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld. In this light, a common explanation for all these groups of facts seems possible: in a sense, they represent the periodical repitition (that is, begun over again at each new seance) of the shaman’s death and resurrection. The ecstasy is only the concrete experience of the ritual death; in other words, of transcending the profane human condition. And, as we shall see, the shaman is able to attain this ‘death’ by all kinds of means, from narcotics and the drum to ‘possession’ by spirits.”

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,, 95



SEANCE

Jan. 27, 2006

All of this exalts from nowhere,
exactly where profanes
‘n’ ordinaries are the thickest,
the tangled brake of days
in love’s hard paradise.
I’m headachey this 4 a.m.,
weary from too much
onslaughtage at work,
a new Mac roughing
the grade with glitches
and tweaks, too many
immediates cawing on
the wires I must string
(new changes to trumpet,
new products to hawk),
not enough (never enough)
sleep, & the sense of
a falling world high in
the day, like waves
about to collapse everywhere,
the unlovely American
empire stamping its greedy
bling jackboots, a loudness
leeching the precipice
I here tend and abysm
with diving bells of song.
My seance today is
tempered by that
tractor tailor which
crashed a car behind
a school bus
yesterday near Gainesville,
killing seven kids; their
ghosts weave coldly now
through the garden outside,
demanding more than
mere singing, though its
all these seances provide.
Besides, what’s ecstasy if not
to bathe those spectral
profanes and their pungi
truths with the wildest
surf of blue, if only for the narrow
brief beach of a walking song?
Last night as I fought through
traffic trying to get home
I thought back on those first
wilding seasons of tidal-waving
love, finding in the barrows of
bad nights the woman of my dreams,
falling in love with her on the
wings of a fire which could only
quench in the sea my every
inland cornice and wall,
erasing every hard angle
and texture of jailed self
as I drowned in starry bliss.
I can’t do those halcyon
hours much justice here
but I thought last night
how I sure woke in some
fundamental way when
I died in spasming shudder
cock-deep in her Yes Oh Yes,
coming to in some blue augment
which became my history
since, my religion of one,
lover and translucent Beloved
merged yet apart, painfully
real in the ordinariest of ways,
each departure a welcome
to plant myself in the footers
of a sigh and swim the depths
inside what I once saw (or
believed I saw) of love in her eyes.
Such reveries roostered last
night in the eternal aggrieve
of commuting, too many red
lights, two dump trucks assholing
around as they phalanxed
both lanes, no more light
to the day, just a single star
in the darkness ahead where
I hoped soon to be home, my
weariness akin to the blind
salmon fighting to the far
end of wild seas, to a chapel
of mortar and bone and
wondrous hidden breasts,
the pelt of four cats, houseplants
everywhere & a garden full
of stilled bushes and fresh
ghosts, bordering the house
where love enacts its daily
profane rounds. These seances
here where I summon the
fish and ride fort on his
exhilarant, scintillant,
magisterial wave to shores
never seen, much less
dreamed -- these
seances are not so much to
take leave of this writing
chair at now 4:30 a.m.
as to dive deeper in it,
down through all the
leagues of inchoate
brine which lubes my
life’s plunge all the way
into my wife’s. That old
dream of love becomes real
in every droll and dear
sense here; and the mojo
I summon from that back
of that fish is not clout,
not permission to cock
love as I please, but rather
a species of praise--praise
for the grace of small
intimate things, for the
clutter and sameness and
comforts of home, my wife
asleep upstairs resting up
for another day sewing
pillows for hire, the cats
curled in the various nooks
of sleep, the world outside
fully at dark ebb yet soon
enough to rise with its
vanguard of brute sun
for better and ill, the whole
package like the skin
of a drum my hand keeps
pounding on in the rhythm
of lines spat and spumed
on pale pages. All of this ink
is the bounty of gods
you’ll never find in the
quarries of the next working
day, just like love.
I die daily here to
rudder what’s really there
in my days as they are --
rudder and rock, as to roll
and then split and spill
all the goods here, in
germanes no scholar can
coerce or explain. Suffice
now to say I’m singing
my way under the tow
of her undies left under
the foot of the bed
my mother once warned
as far short of God’s all.
We’re both right, I’ve found:
this is all and naught
of the ache at the font
of the sea-warding river,
first things first said
before I notch myself back
to the quiver and launch
into the the day, to
hit or miss that curved
pale ass leaving the
far ends of lost rooms.
I’m following that bliss,
and she vaults my seances
where the wave always booms.




FREEZE FRAME

from “A Breviary of Guitars,
2000

What was so arid
in a hammerlock
of high pressure
and a triumphant
angel sun now
just foams &
spouts in storm
after storm:
Every day now
I drive in to
work & see
bump marble
rumps mooning
the heavens:
By lunch they’re
massed ever
empurpled with
fevers hurling
ejaculate snaps
& flooding the
streets: Like new
lovers who cannot
exhaust their
bottomless cistern
of desire hurling
their bodies
at each other
frantic to find
what screams for
release: Storms
again midafternoon
as the day’s
wearies settle
amid problem
accounts & new
AS400 system
woes & programming
patches & the
itch & flick of
a desire which
has no body
it can vanquish
in: But man
it rains hard
a ballsoaking
cuntslobbering
titheave
ballstothewalls
of a storm
in which the
green world
shouts glittery
arias of joy:
The last time
such storm
rose in me
with Donna
was a wan
fair Sunday in
November ‘85
when we drove
to New Smyrna
Beach with her
son Nicky packing
lunch & a bottle
of sherry: Parked
along a deserted
stretch & set
a blanket on
the sand & lounged
there a couple
of hours enjoying
80 degree temps
& the sun
mellow and
sweet & the
surf softly
slapping and
slushing, love
not yet ebbed
& loss early
in its flow: Donna
just beautiful
in a black one
piece bathing
suit that carved
her curves with
authority &
grace & surrender
& her skin a
shock of white
as when she
first peeled
down her panties
for me then
turned her
ass toward my
bright hungry ache:
We sipped our
sherry watching
Nicky play
with a truck
in the sand &
Mr. Mister’s
“Run to Her”
on my boombox
half lost to
the sound of that
swoony merciless
surf: Blue pale
sky, blue green
waters stretching
for miles &
Donna’s eyes
sad and distant,
looking past me:
She got up and
walked down to
to the water’s
edge for a while
soaking up
all that feral
eternity that
makes babies
love & graves
her back to me
as one passing
through a door
into silence:
And then turned
to smile at
me radiant with
all I’ve ever
desired rising
in my heart
like Venus on
the half shell
amid the foam
of my balls &
then looking for
one second like
another woman
on another beach
in another love
which ended
in another surf
& I felt then
the horrid ironic
fatefulness
of the Ocean,
a wave which
parts the thighs
of a love which
births departure:
But Donna
just smiled
bittersweetly and
then as if she
had come to
a decision walked
back and gathered
up Nicky and
put him in
her car telling
him to sleep:
For a few minutes
the boy’s face
(resembling Donna
in the eyes
but the rest
a cipher of
some other man’s
love) crying in
the window but
Donna was
unmoved &
the head slowly
disappeared
like a setting
sun into silence:
Donna then looked
over at me
& smiled the way
she did that night
up at Fern Park
Station & then
lowered her
body on mine
to kiss me full
and dreamy
as the sea her
body breathing
full against mine
like a surf &
her bones against
my bones as
close as bones
go: Kissed slowly
down my chest
in a wave &
gripped my trunks
with both hands
& then pulled
them down far
enough to take
my startled cock
in her mouth
& slowly, sweetly,
gently, deeply
suck that slender
isthmus of flesh
that separates
I and Thou:
Loving there
what’s impossible
to find and
perilous to forget:
I watched her
for a while glide
up and down
my cock with
slow sure strokes
her mouth a
firm clench on
my slick hardening
length, veins there
pumping out like
clouds rising
over the sea
& her eyes closed
maybe prayerfully
or brokenly or
already somewhere
else — who knows:
Her long dark
blonde hair falling
around her pistoning
mouth like
a waterfall & each
downward stroke
washing me in
that gorgeous sure
river or wave
I always felt
in the sex that
joined Donna
to me: Then I
closed my eyes
& lay back
surrendering to
the pleasure
slowly building
in me, so sweet
& watery, not
urgent in the
way of new lovers
or knowledgeable
or secure like
old lovers: Rather
we were as
one receiving
a last kiss from
waters now receding:
Oh drifting boat
on sunny waters
on God’s now
gorgeous earth,
a breeze softly
raking the
glittery soft surf
& Donna’s hand
now cupping my
balls squeezing
& gently milking
the dangerous
seed rising up
there as she
settles her mouth
all the way
down to my
pubic bone &
I’m coming, coming,
rising up in
a wave of white
screaming joy
and she doesn’t
let go but takes
all of me in,
drinks my salty
sticky seed &
it feels so
strange so
utterly fucking
sweet as if
my balls were
dissolving & the
rest of me to
in this tingling
toe twitching
exhalation
emptying
erasing &
killing my
every conflicted
motion: O stay
there for just
a little while,
Breviary — linger
in the lavish
mouth which swallows
me whole: a
mother’s mouth
giving suck &
a receiving back
the milk she
gave me: The
ocean stretching
like a blue gray
angel’s blessing
& “Broken Wings”
on the blaster
true just for those
seconds and
so eternally true:
All the futile
stupid arrogant
wrongheaded
cruel self
destructive
things I wreaked
with that white
boy’s penis
absolved in
that melting
molten spasm:
These million
words flocking
in the wild sperm
cells flocking
to no home
down her throat
just like the
sea welcomes
no home I
have ever built:
One of my
hands inside
her bathing suit
clutching a
breast squeezing
up a nipple
desperate never
to let go:
This gloriously
beautiful ocean
of an angel
of a woman
nursing my
dolphin on the
wave it still
rides: O crest
& dissolve and
there’s no
way to remain
right there, no
way to prevent
the day’s return
into slow focus,
Donna letting
go with her
mouth kissing
the tip of my
glistening cock
& pulling my
shorts back
up with a sigh
patting my cock
and nuts one
one one one
one one one
one one one
final time: Wipes
her mouth with
her hand her
eyes slowly
refocusing taking
aim again beyond
me: I lift
up on an elbow
& try to push
her down to
kiss, return the
favor by lapping
away at her
sweet milky
thighs but she
shakes her head
sad and firm
& takes a drink
of wine instead
& looks farther
out to a sea
already gone:
O lift up from
that beach O
falcon o sad
sea eagle up
up over to
the edge of that
one infinite
spasm that
crashed up out
of me and through
me at the
same time like
the wave of
the woman of
the sea anointing
& cursing
me like that
baptismal wave
that crested
over me at 14:
Rise up over
the ocean’s
suck & haul
o angel of
my eternally
misbegotten love:
Up over the
rim of the green
ocean and up
up through the
blue heavens:
Up over the
hurl of this
ancient song:
Can you take
me higher o
peregrine
falcon up
where only
blind men see:
Up over the
edge of
my ruination
at your altar
o dolphin muse:
Join me with
my aborted
children, my
daughters of
Neptune: Can
you fly me up
over all to this
warm place
where my seed
lays waiting for
your welcoming
egg in the
belly of all
dead loves: Donna’s
son begins
crying in the
car & she
goes to retrieve
him & we start
packing up
to go: “Run
to Her” on the
blaster already
ironic and Donna
asks me
irritably hey
isn’t there anything
else you can
play? Something
that rocks?




COLLECTIBLES, 50 PERCENT OFF

August 2001

It’s a mercilessly hot Sunday
afternoon in downtown Sanford.
The sun lords over us like a
fat developer whose high broils
are pure whim—a careless ruin.
A few antique shops are open
today, welcoming us few shoppers
whose pace is less Shop Until You Drop
than Browse Til Ya Drowse.

Inside where it’s almost cold
—thank God!—I scan shelves
piled high with someone
else’s history, crap which,
at the right auction on the
right day, with the right wind
at our lucky sails and two
warring collectors upping the ante,
could sell for, well, more than
that 24-carat sun up there, yee-haw:

Antique lace and depression
glass, old toys, mason jars on quaint
kitchen hutches, boxes of sheet music,
portraits of someone else’s dead relatives
—like that sad severe woman hanging
near a window, her lower lip pinched
a parcel of parched Florida farmland
long sold off to developers.

I’m lost amid all this stuff.
You see, I’m just passing time
while my wife arranges linens
and lamps in her booth
in an antique mall down the street.
In times past when we drove
out on Saturdays searching
for fresh veins of cheap good stuff
along the back roads of Florida,
I trolled along til I was numbed at
the sheer volume of so much pricey
bad stuff. None of it I figured had
any place in what I then called home.

Now I try to read each cup and
cast-iron skillet as a clue to what might
lead me home, and I’m eager for any
message I can find. It’s still a language I
hardly fathom — a few things I know
to sift the haystack for like years
(Thirties or Forties) and types (tourist
memorabilia, ceramic burros from Mexico).
Stuff not distinctive for their market
value but simply just because my wife
loves that stuff. It’s hard to find.

Today I strike out and so walk slowly out.
The shopkeeper, a woman in her 50s
who’s commiserating with another woman
at the front counter, asks, Didn’t find
anything to take home with you?
Not today, I smile, gearing my voice
to sound like I would have if I did.

I know it’s a hard, unprofitable
business, something most people do
because they simply love the work
of finding and then dream of selling it well.
It’s sad to see so much of what’s out there
it just sit and sit on dusty shelves,
forgotten again on a more visible shelf.

Sure, it’s overpriced, and hardly fitting any
house: But here it is, resistant to so much
we also know, untranslatable in such
high heat, on a day when most people have
thronged to Target or Wal-Mart, where
faux stuff can be bought at sweatshop prices.

My wife plans to close her booth at the end
of next month, giving up on a 3-year
dream of making her own way on what
she really loves. I think of her standing
in her booth, arranging and rearranging
a pewter dish in front of a coffee table book,
hanging linens she’s bought as cheaply
as you can and so carefully cleaned
and ironed and labeled and brought now
to market. She does this as lovingly
as she created the house I don’t live
in any more. And so I take all of this

stuff—iota of eternity, ephermata of the
woman I love’s self-determination—
with a new and deadly seriousness.
We’ll find a way to move her goods,
even if it sells at 50 percent off. Although
she leaves the business I hope it’s just
for a little while. One half of paradise
is always better than an acre of what’s dead.



DANNY BOY

2004

It’s Monday morning and school
is back in already, compressing
this artery of traffic even
thicker the sleepy occludage,
everyone at the wheel
looking haggard and
hard-eyed, fraught somehow
deeper with the world’s
ten thousand revolving
cares. I wait four lights
to get through Clarcona-
Ocoee Road trying not to
give Monday morning’s
angel of despair any
more pissy script for
the big collection basket
being passed down the Trail,
though I sure as hell want
to as a migraine is
now leaking shrill dollops
of mercury through the
ill-cobbled landscape
of used tire dealerships and
Burger Kings and
half-empty strip malls.
I switch from NPR’s
news of terror (which
is not news but merely
ghost-sightings and
channel-pratter,
the preter-reportage
of a man defending
his house against
his own nightmare) to
a Bill Evans CD
(Empathy, 1962) cooling
down to his quiet solo
rendition of “Danny Boy,”
that traditional Irish
drinking song. Yes, it
has been a long careworn
road to here, hasn’t
it? The Trail stretches
a very long ways back,
and sadly there are
still so many miles
up ahead yet to travel
before getting home.
Accepting now my
day would also
have to freight
this sick migraine
now settled like a
black turkey buzzard
to raven my shoulders
neck and head, I
counted my day’s
labors and wondered
how I’d manage
to pay every piper.
Ah well. An SUV
zoomed past on my
right, affording me a
fast glance of a small
face in the back seat
looking at me in
that blank curiosity
of passage, a young boy
with pale blue eyes
and then the car
swerved and
wedged in front of
me ahead. My foot
hit the gas pedal and
I zoomed up to let
the fucker know there
wasn’t any room there
to start, but I was
too tired for that shit
and just let up &
resumed concourse as
a fellow weary traveller on
this road of travail
we drive daily for love
or money or
some fetish of both.
Up above through
my windshield I
see a broad span of
uncut blue sky, no sign
of traffic there, no
Burger Kings or
titty bars, no
boundary stones,
no jaded highways
to crease the brow.
Just God’s blue heaven
and the margeless sea,
that big house where
Bill Evans plays “Danny Boy”
for everyone who
found their way at
last off this sad long
Trail. Play a song for the
rest of us too, Bill,
still stuck in traffic
down here on
Monday morning
so far from home
and so far yet to go
we can’t hear the
music of either shore.

Deep Rider

The magus is “a contemplator of heavenly and divine science, a studious observer and expositor of divine things.”

-- Marsilo Ficino

***

“(Isaac Newton) shared with his contemporaries a world-view that was not a weird coexistence of magic and science but an ediface in which all the bricks came from the same mold. Today we regard some of these as the foundation of science and are tempted to discard the others as useless relics of another age. But if they were not there, the building would have collapsed. ‘The Renaissance magus,’ says the historian Francis Yates, ‘is the immediate ancestor of the seventeenth-century scientist.’”

-- Phillip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

***

I wonder, then, who today’s scientist anticipates, for science, for all of its magisterial wonders today, has half a brain, or lost touch with its occult source, both a sea and a madness. Perhaps the clues to who emerges lies in the following recap by Ball of the emergence of the scientist:

***

“Science did not emerge as a rational flight from medieval superstition; after all, the medieval scholastics were second to none in their pedantic rationality. What was needed for modern science to emerge was a renunciation of their bookish a priorism, with its Aristotelian notion that all things can be deduced by logical, abstract arguments from (ultimately arbitrary) first principles. Before the fertile logic of a genuinely scientific rationalism could assert itself, the sterile logic of Classical dogma had to give way to a form of empiricism that accepted the reality of certain unknowns and inexplicables such as the operation of occult forces. In this sense, men like Paracelsus and his fellow iconoclast Cornelius Agrippa were skeptics; they were prepared, indeed determined, to question what had gone before, to find things out for themselves rather than taking someone elses’s word for it.”






“... We must take into account the mystical solidarity between man and animal, which is a dominant characteristic of the religion of the paleo-hunters. By virtue of this, certain human beings are able to change into animals, or to understand their language, or to share in their prescience and occult powers. Each time a shaman succeeds in sharing the animal mode of being, he in a manner re-establishes the situation that existed in illo tempore, in mythical times, when the divorce between man and animal had not yet occurred.

“The tuletary animal of the Buryat shamans is called khubilgan, a term that can be interpreted as ‘metamorphosis,’ (from khubikhu, ‘to change oneself,’ ‘to take on another form’). In other words, the tuletary animal not only enables the shaman to transform himself; it is in a manner his ‘double,’ his alter ego. This alter ego is one of the shaman’s ‘souls,’ the ‘soul in animal form,’ or, more precisely, ‘life soul.’ Shamans challenge one another in animal form, and if his alter ego is killed in the fight, the shaman very soon dies himself.”

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy





“There is, then, no water that is wholly of the Pacific, or wholly of the Atlantic, or of the Indian or the Antarctic. The surf that we may find exhilarating at Virginia Beach or at La Jolla today may have lapped at the base of antarctic icebergs or sparkled in the Mediterranean sun, years ago, before it moved through dark and unseen waterways to the place we find it now. It is by the deep, hidden currents that the oceans are made one.”

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

***



DEEP WAVE RIDER

Jan. 24, 2006

Deep waves stroll the oceans
unseen to all surfaces
on the cold wings of abyss,
a visceral tow glowing
with the gules of minerals
torn from the paps of hell.
He rides those waves too,
my fish-familiar, in this
songlike totem I ride here,
his salty ancient brogue
still rich on my tongue
after a thousand mortal
spans. I on a fish which
masts deep waves is
what makes the music
so hugely dark, opaque
and fell, a buckaroo’s derange
in Moby’s wake
where shattered hulks
and eerie churchbells
fan by too fast and dim
to hearken, much less name,
and life is pure Silurian,
a swarm of sharks and jellyfish
and trilobites about the
same matins now for a half
billion years. That infernal choir
lifts the base note I here sound,
my vox humana the highest
ache of jism and jawing
egg, the hot rush of futurity
which forever lives the
next day with ravenous teeth
in a gale of sweet-torn flesh.
Just what song is it, I
wonder, rolling three miles
beneath my saddle? What
beast of lyric hooves so wild
and regal blue as to make all
depths divine, be they in
my words or in the sea or in
the angel’s fall between
us who limns the barrows
of all lost gods. From trough
to crest I clasp my knees
to waves as tall as Pyranees
yet never crash on shores
my love will ever see,
as if love’s shout of pure
liquidity was never meant
for beds or beaches or
the dry breeches of songs
about love, rather than
the ones all depths love.
Primal as to drown
the dreams of shamans
etched on walls not seen
in ten thousand years,
this music is old, it was
lifted pure up to God
when men and beasts
were one, brother and
familiar, both in the
maw of appetite and
the stellar foam of lust,
both in the other so
vastly that whole
caverns failed to harrow
the rituals of rebirth
into the womb which
birthed us all.
Perhaps that’s why
I’m here on the biggest
waves no human eyes
can see, yeehawing
to high heaven on
thalassas of brine joy,
lurching and lifting
up to crown Manannan’s
thrall, wilding all the
way down here where
Uranos parked his balls
in a mess of Venusian
cream. When I’m on my
beast we lord the waves
which rock and roll the seas --
the boy astride his guitar
of a cock of fish of a pen,
come at last to gig
the big night music,
power--chording deep
waves like shouts of
whales between beneath
and past all shores.



THE HONOR AND GLORY OF WHALING

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Chapter lxxxii

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.

The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda - indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it - is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea," saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin- like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St. George's decoration than they.

Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique Crockett and Kit Carson - that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan.

But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa; certainly they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the prophet?

Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of old times, we find the headwaters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord; - Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?

Dragon Attack

IF THEY’VE COMPARED YOU ...

Eugenio Montale

If they’ve compared you
to the vixen, it will be for your prodigious
lope, your darting step
that joins and dissevers, that scatters
and freshens the gravel (your terrace,
the streets by the Cottolengo, the meadow,
the tree named after me all quiver with it,
happy, wet, and won)--or maybe simply
for the gleaming wave you broadcast
from the tender almonds of your eyes,
for the shrewdness of your easy stupors,
for the havoc
of shredded feathers your baby’s
hand can wreak with a tug:
if they've compared you
to a blond carnivore, the faithless
genius of the thicket (and why not to the foul
fish that shocks, the stingray?) it may be
because the blind had failed to see
the wings behind your slender shoulder blades,
because the blind had failed to see
the omen of your incandescent forehead,
the line I’ve etched in blood there, cross and chrism
charm calamity vow farewell
perdition and salvation: if they failed
to see you as more than weasel or woman,
whom will I share my discovery with,
where will I bury the gold I carry,
the ember hissing deep in me,
if leaving me you turn away from the stairs?


transl. Jonathan Galassi




An unusual and rather entertaining apocalypse is the third century Gospel of Bartholomew. This features a conversation with Beliar (“worthless”) the beast, whose name used to be Satan. He has been brought up from the abyss by Jesus as a curiosity to show a band of monkish visitors and is “600 yards long and 40 yards broad with 8-yard wings, bound by fiery chains and held by 660 angels.” The apostle Bartholomew interviews him while treading on his neck, a familiar image in art. Beliar tells the whole story: how he was the first angel to be created, how he refused to worship Adam and fell with his followers (only 600 of them here), how he wandered to and fro in the world, how he seduced Eve (his method was unusual: she drank his sweat mixed with water), how he punishes the souls of men and is punished himself, how he sends his minon demons out into the world to tempt.

Bartholomew also contains an early account of the Harrowing of Hell, told, (unusually) from Jesus’ point of view, and, even more remarkably at this early date, a first glimpse of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Hell.

-- Alice K. Turner, A History of Hell




INTERVIEW WITH
THE DEVIL

Jan 2005

“Hell is just the half of it,”
the Devil told me as
we both swum and flew
the ramparts of His domain,
“though its the greater part
of heart and laps forever
at the mind. Only Jesus
and certain whales have
fully harrowed here,
so dense and
dark with convuluted
fires no living man
can dream it and not
wake thrashing down
in drowning bubbles.”
The Devil shifted beneath
my feet as if unaccustomed
to bear the freight of living
soles, though I knew it just
to be a ruse to get
me to step off into
the immortal fray.
So I stamped one foot
on the base of His
serpent skull, reminding
Him to resume his
sooth of my harrow.
“Much has changed
here over the bright
millennia. We’re like
a suburb that has
swarmed its banks
to devour the province
and then the state,
so plentiful the things
you have come to damn.
Just last year we added
a circle for virtual addicts,
cartoofing ‘em in
a ditch of busted
up computers where
they are compelled
for all eternity to
watch real demons
play and pine for
the life they never
got around to.
“Fine,” I said, “May
JD Powers give you
a Gold Medal for such
model modalities. But
where are the vaults
of those lost and tossed
and too-named depths
we buried from the
Christian light of days?
The Devil groaned.
“Gimme a break!
It’s been 500 years since
Hamlet declared that there
were more things under
heaven and earth than
are dreamt by philosophy,
and all of ‘em fell here
in the reign of such
cerebral foolery! You’ve
sent an empire of blue
empyreia down in the
broken hulls of ships --
flat earths like falling
apples, every proper plate
of armor a lord could
hammer sealing off his
queen’s amor,
the two skulls which
the Cerne Giant once
held in his chalklike hand,
the entire contents of
Cerridwen’s keg,
even all semblance of
my topside self, hooves &
tail and wanton goat
pecker, all of it cast
down in a spiralling
yowl your empty churches
all choir. As you can see,
the rain of broken augments
is incessant, a blizzard
of torn flesh and outdated
names. To rule in Hell
is to wear a crown of
starry losses, and be
their dark keeper, Dis Pater
of the disposed and dispossessed,
doorman to the gates of
an eerily vast landfill
exactly under all you
slough off the eroding
continent you call a self,
massing up your other
at the bottom of the rear.”
Sated of my salt’s derange,
glutted on this whim,
I thanked the Devil for
the tour, clipped on
my paper wings, and lifted
up fro the mire of doom
to emerge as if from
water into the quiet of
this predawn room,
in the thick of sleepy,
not yet dead-enough todays.
The only sign of my
harrowing is a strand
of seaweed wrapped
around my wrist, trailing
the faintest inklike spoor
across and down to this
end where the poem, at
last, is free and fully His.




WELCOME TO THE ABYSS

2001

Since no animal can
make its own food,
the creatures of the
deeper waters live
a strange, almost
parasitic existence
of utter dependence
on the upper layers.
These hungry creatures
prey fiercely and
relentlessly upon each
other, yet the whole
community is ultimately
dependent upon the
slow rain of descending
food from above ...

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

Whom filth plenished,
dearth devoured.

-- Finnegans Wake

Here in the abyssal ‘burbs
the roads are paved
by this incessant rain:
brokers and their broken
boats, pirates whose last
word was “whoops,”
victims of exploding
airlines descending
smaller to us from
much higher up.
We eat what we can.
The road through
our small world
is pure defecation and
inedible, indelible bone.
In our hood
it’s too dark to know
a face, but if you could
you’d be sorry.
We all have eyes
like extra-large
pie-plates and
huge jaws for catching
what we can.
Our diet’s
rounded with the
leavings of the leavings
of the leavings, and
less, a bite of
tiger shark, finger
of a gunman.
Oh how we dine
on all perdition.
Not much to see
round here but
the music never stops:
weird moans, trills,
clicks, and clatters
fill our nocturnal air,
a radar for appetite
and procreation.
We breathe the
inkiest of drink,
so dark and cold
and dense to be
the very heart
of the nihilist.
An edible grave.
We descended
seeking a little
elbow room in
a food chain too
tightly knit: grew
strong in our
abysms. We’ll live
forever since
everything you say
eventually falls
our way.
Welcome to the
Final Receipt, resting
place of all, Turd ‘Burb,
last house on the block
where we seize with
hungry jaws the
bitterest of God’s laws.

Back To Work

MAGUS

Jan. 22, 2006

Eins andern knecht soll
nemand seyn,
der fu sich bleyben
kann alleyn.

“Let no man belong to
another, who can belong
to himself.”

-- Motto of Paracelsus

Old and new I am,
so much of both
you paraphrase me mad,
a Faust and a Frankenstein,
defrauding both nature
and its data like
hell’s own con man,
bilking the devil of
his jade. These white
wings -- perplex and
difficult.yes, spreading
polyphonic wild shade --
are greater than your
brightest combustions,
they sail over your best
cognitions in salvos
of song-singing soar.
I am the lover who clones
his beloved and then marries
both, I summon imps of nano
to leap like salmon
back into God’s ejaculate
of stars., I mint gold from
forges whose candescence
only the dying see between
throw and sigh. Shall I go on?
I blaspheme both priest
and engineer with
such blue empiricals; I
am a strange god’s dream,
prophetic yet peripheral,
an exalt door opened
between the hips of salt
extremes. You can’t see me
in the tabloids or on TV
but you sense me augur
between turning pages
and changed channels, an
infernal, surflike hiss
between the one and zero
which makes divides divine,
all ones and zeroes rapt
and unitive and masks.
I am the augment in the code
no instrument yet names,
the hallow bower not yet
found in the steppes of
blizzarding white noise.
Here is my arctic vatic,
the singing drum of my pulse.
Sylphs and seraphim dance
on the rims of coke-spoons
and misty bridges so many
have jumped from trying
to leap the high falling water
I alone master and further.
It isn’t quite heaven
nor the drift of sated lovers
nor the bland dissolve
at the business end
of careening falls that
I augment with my addled
mix of cant and futurity,
but take all of those in
account when surmising
the leys my blue dark
sings into view, the outlines
of a dragon far older
than any this world has seen,
perhaps every other,
at least for now.
Account every sleeping cat
precious in the lucre of
this hour where all is dark
and dank and still in the
swoon of our sleep which
soon wakens to see all I
have dreamed. Between
the curve of those cats
and the vulupt rollers
of my wife beneath the
covers of a bed upstairs
there are here and only
three words I’ve been
cooking since God poured
into my brain from
his high starry loins.
Now the whole world
is brewing three drops
of a flavor Gwydion my
elder stole from the pot
of the witch Cerridwen,
revealing in that taste
an epiphany or gestalt
or poppy-nightmare of
a wave just who we are
in that raiment of the
rainbow no longer one
spectra but the next,
shining with all the
grace and serenity
of a sleeping cat.
I will disappear when
you rouse; you will
walk crying my name
for an age through
old orchards but I will
be gone, like the sigh
of jaded breeze, the
ringing absence to the age,
returning only the
when the next cusp
of times bids me
beacon and welcome
and perplex the
addled stew of
tomorrows. And I
won’t bear a trace of
this garb in the flying
fish of things which
evolve from the next
things you can’t see, like
the shade of a cloud
racing over a wave
which hasn’t surged
into the marge of a shore
you don’t know eases
out from the middle of
that madness which
makes less of more
in a riven and ecstatic
wave of the hand or
wand -- a benediction
to exalt all shores
in the surf-seeming
world-ending roar
of my song.



A WALK BY THE SEA

Jan 21, 2006

At last, a walk by the sea --
after all the fantasias and
digressions and brag-rolls
of the tongue, this simple
strand an hour before dawn
where the sea laps
diligently against the shore,
humble and serene
like a sleeping mother
or a song too old for its age.
It is enough just to walk
in the naissance of late
dark down a sandy lane
with no horizon greater
than the black sea to my
left and be still, the
true son I was meant to be,
rapt and washing my praises
back with slaps on a shore
ever right here, on a page
in the heart I’ll ever write
down and never get right,
filling a gospel
with every divine word
lost in the surf.
At the end of my walk
I will leave its book on the sand
like a conch for first light,
filled with the sound of
the sea’s vaster rooms
or my breath as I mouthed
its words in your ear
as I walked down a beach
by the sea, each step a song
of salty waves and blue ardors
washing and ebbing to here.