River Psalm

According to Carib tradition, the first piai (shaman) was a man who, hearing a song rise out of a stream, dived boldly in and did not come out again until he had encoutered the song of the spirit women and received the implements of his profession from them.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

***


THE RIVER BED


Feb. 2-3, 2006

This hour --- 4 a.m., still and dark
and deeply paused -- is like
this day in early February,
a hard heavy-metalled dark
raked by cool winds which
at their high sources could
freeze shamans in their ice-songs
with tusks no pole can bear.
But that is not this end, for
you can see a change stirring
like first buds here, in later sunsets,
those steadily more confident
& winged pinks beating back
a once-regent evernight.
Soon the scent of orange-bloom
will filter through our windows
and then, oh my, a torrent
of spring light and fair days
which tide to roaring summer,
pants down around the
year’s ankles, going full at it
with reddened face ....
But wait ...
This is the hour, and its song
arches back to that
scoured February day
when I walked downtown
Spokane alone -- as usual
alone, endemically,
preternaturally, lunar,
stellarly alone -- And
stood on the river’s bridge
watching a thin trickle
gruel down the center of a
thick gully of black
savaged stone, descending
over the falls’ lip in drips
and gobbets. Call this a
heart? I wondered in
my polar isolation, numbed
and bleak from wintering but
believing anyway all that by
all rights I shouldn’t -- how could I?,
having loved so little? That night
sitting in my chair alone in
the empty house I wardened,
I finished a gout of lines with
this button: “I will not die/Until
I touch another face.” All I
had known and found seemed
but a narrow drone of angels
in a space which seemed
designed for wide-choiring
hosannahs, as if the
falter and frustration of
my days lay framed by a
massive river gorge a wide
and wild as my dreams,
hammered and bruited and grooved
by some mysterious history
I had yet to know, loves
which in glut and dearth
would provoke and curse
and altar. I shut that book
and said goodnight to the
frosted panes which surrounded
me and bedded down with
that missing river. Lost and
swooning in winter’s pitch
I dreamed -- maybe that night,
or one nearby, my memory’s
not exact -- of a woman standing
naked in a river smiling
directly at me, rousing a desire
I had never known so deep
before, hollering an ache
to swim hellbent up through her legs
like a salmon arcing back
against a river which
spring days had loosed.
Thus I met my first love
a week or so later at a party,
our talk like the hum of
waters approaching but not
yet seen. On our first date
we walked rain-misted streets
downtown in an unleashed
thrall, dowsing through our
sentences toward a pounding
we heard everywhere. That
low turbinned thrum got
louder as we neared until,
there standing on the bridge, we
were enveloped in a white
cascading roar voweled
by ten million gallons of
snowmelt heaving down
the falls. I kissed that
woman on the bridge
but trothed my hips
forever to that river,
never more a solitary man
though ever-hence singular
in purpose. There’s a hexagram
for that man on the bridge
reaching for a woman who
would soon leave him forever,
a totem with two faces: The
shadow man seeing only
dearth in late winter
singing magic into trickles,
& the other one riding hellbent
over those falls in a fishlike joy
which ends in losing all,
a smashed whelk resonant
of all collapsing waves.
What I’ve learned is to trust
and seek the bridge which
spines the two together -
not the river in its
empty fulsome alterations
but to sing a span big enough
for all God’s water has to
offer, a smile for every season,
a song to bridge them all.
Between my hips there’s a
river gorge, scored and
scarred by huge waters
which poured now lives ago.
The hour and day and age
of this poem compose
the merest trickle of that swoon,
my wife asleep upstairs,
cat curled on the chair
across from me, window
opened to breezy changes
which foam a coming front.
But I have learned the
prescience of roar and
have through all such harrowings
come to love the quietus
of the worn valley at rest,
nourished, as if by sleep,
by the stillness of a pall
which lends the matin bell
such magic, and opening the
gates a welcome and a joy.
Yes, the stillness is all.
Besides, my tolerance for
gouts has changed -- far less
is needed or will do
to mad the springtime river
in the gallop of these words.
And the trickle that is seen
belies a leaping ecstasy,
dauntless all these years.
Not much has changed in
those essential waterworks
since I last stood on that wild
season’s steely bridge; I’m still
standing there though I am here,
still misted by that crashing blue,
still maddened by the sound of You
sighing backwards into foam,
still reaching where You left
to write the songs which turbine
all great falls, even when
all is still and dark and dead,
even when all sense is fled
and I’m just singing here, or singing along.
I remain to sing the river’s song.



antithesis

1978

you wake me with a smile
I wake up from a smile
a dream dissolving
into sheets and your hair
the sad-eyed woman
standing smiling in the river
in the rivers of your smile
white wet rapids spraying in my ear
calling back my blood
my words drowning in your eyes

washed ashore drunk and empty
I dream sunrise sunset at the ocean
I Ching changes no blame
the light born and dying
your Fiat backing over gravel
backing out into silence
I walk the garden run my fingers
through a grass tuft feel your hair
the sky an ocean rain and tears
the day turning dark and cold
no blame

call it passion call it love
when you smiled
it was all the same
springtime autumn
bedspring tantra
dream within a dream
Great Wheel spinning
a game for fools
demiurge
water bearing light

wordless
I speak of love
all day long your ocean held me
sparkling on a smile
dissolving the page
no blame

***


A GUITAR IS NOT A WOMAN

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 1999-2000

1.

The present

A guitar is not
a woman
but it’s awful
damned close:
It’s curves are
stolen from the
lucent pool of
Artemis & blown
huge with every
boyman’s ache
for vavavoom:
My heart reels
of a guitar solo
exactly the way
my fingers tremble
when I touch
a woman for the
first time: All
the songs I’ve
ever written
are inked from
the well she
departs down:
chords mortared
in the doors
and deeps of
desire: But it
is stupid and
perilous to
confuse a guitar
with a woman:
I’ve known a
million players
who went to bed
with a woman
and none of ‘em
took their axe
along for the
ride. A woman is
about something
becoming inside
you and a guitar
the difficult amazing
distance you must
travel to
prevent that from
happening: Oh how
long, how difficult,
how important
it is to finally
bloodily accept
this truth:


2.

Spring 1978:
I typed my poems
and papers on
an electric
typewriter using
erasable bond
paper, each draft
supremely more
precious than
the today’s flash
of printouts
so easily erased:
I made far
fewer scribbles
in my journals
too, still unfamiliar
with living long
on the page:
A few lines now
and then
before whoever
I was resumed
whatever I did.
Just think: six
lines of verse
in time
cashing out to
this Breviary:

first cigarette
the haunting music
adrenaline mauls the stomach
why won’t the eyes open
I will not die
until I’ve touched another face.

I read back
over those lines
as if probing
my heart’s DNA:
The pages of
that journal
that captured
the Spring of ‘78
is worn now from
my many returns
to it, in my
many attempts
to learn and write
my story in
so many forms:
A faithful
pilgrim to that nova
that flared soon
after the night
in March when
I went to a party
put on by
some girl at work
and met this
girl named Becky,
a pretty blonde
browneyed doe
who was leaving
for LA in a
week. She was up
from Florida
and didn’t
like winter a bit:
I told her I
was a guitar player
and poet sans
band or book:
that impressed
her nada:
I could have told
her I played
on the Whitworth
College basketball
team or dug
worms in the
park: Becky
preferred her
stuff simple,
not much to
say about it:
simple stuff.
I, who had
walked for years
deep inside and
apart from the
women I yearned for,
was bug-eyed
startled to find
myself so calmly there
beside her simply
chatting, the party
eddying about
us almost
unnoticed: A
A virgin dreams
of what sex
is like so
deeply that
the first time
passes almost
unnoticed: That
was meeting
Becky: She got
to me before I
knew she’d gotten
in: We talked
till one or so
in the morning
until my ride
yawned and said
we had to go:
I don’t remember
if I slept much
that night --
so much happened
so fast in one
week that
I wrote almost
nothing in the
thick of it,
a couple pages
of tortured verse,
hot jots of
amazement
at what erupted:
I think I
got her number
from her friend
and called
her the next day
to make a date:
She said yes,
oh yes:
We met downtown
for lunch on a
raw waking wet
spring day,
temps in the
mid-50s, the Spokane
river muscling
into a roar
with melted
snowpack carried
a dozen miles
down from the
western Spokane
mountains: I
remember Becky’s
brown eyes,
her easy smile,
her southern
voice, and
red-brown shoes
that fastened
with a buckle:
We ate a
restaurant
by the river &
drank a bottle
of wine & told
our life stories
as we could
tell them then,
our heads filling
with a sort
of boozy drowse
that nestled
in the boom
and hiss of
the nearby river:
Where that river
ended and
we began is
the utter mystery
to this day:
We ambled on
through that day
into the the night,
kissing in some
cold wet shelter
in the park where
spring’s raw fuse
burned weirdly
in the cold:
bought more
wine and munchies
and headed back
to my house
to smoke dope
& drink wine
& listen to my
Genesis (sounding
so distant: do
you have any
Journey? she
asked) & on
carrots and peanut
butter: She climbed
on my lap
facing me and
we began to kiss,
my heart pounding
with surprise
and surrender:
After a while
I asked weakly
(almost apologetically)
if she would like
to spend the night
and she just smiled
and led me to
my room by the
hand: We climbed
beneath the covers
n the cold cold
dark of that room,
finding heat
quickly between us
as we wrestled
from our clothes:
I tried to make
love to her
but fear kept
if from happening
at first: We fell
asleep for a
couple hours
and I woke on
her fucking slow
and languid,
the bedsprings
creaking and
squawking
with each dreamy
thrust which
she welcomed,
welcomed:
I came and
drifted off
still in her &
then dreamed
of an incredibly
clear blue space
like a morning
in early summer
by the ocean
in Florida:
Woke with crystalline
waters stretching
miles around that
bed and Becky
sleeping curled
into me like some
blessing I did not
deserve: You
never do: She
woke and we
began it all
again: I kissed
her all over
down to her
cunt which smelled
ripe like armpit
& she was
embarrassed
tried to push
me away but
I butted my
face past her
hand and bathed
my mouth and
face in deep
womanhood which
a day or so ago
was the faintest
constellation
at the furthers
corner of the night:
When she went
home that day
in her yellow
Fiat I wrote
of my surrender
to my birthmark:


O pulse of blood quickened by light
O heart reborn and squinting at the sun
O core bled clean and drying by the pool:
I have held her face beneath my eyes
O love o damnable love. (3/6/78)





HARVEST

2002

I.

During that summer
in Pennsylvania—a
bridge between first
love and long winter—
I scythed a field
behind my father’s house.

The field was ringed
by oak and beech
and maple, puritans
all of wild nature.
Over us the sun
wrote hyperboles
of desire, lathering
us in its swoon.

I loved the motions
of faux harvest,
lifting high that
long blade, carving
off a shank of sun
before sweeping down
in a muscular arc
through shin-high
tapers of weed.

Each return of
the blade seemed
to reach for the
woman I’d lost,
sweeping into the
void she’d driven
off into: But the
blade returned naked
into the bright air
with a long, lonely swish.

Working down the field
I recalled how she smiled
as we stood over the Spokane
River, the spring runoff
pounding chords into mist.
How all that rose to
a hammering release
and then floated
for miles in a drowse.

All lost. I could have made
of that scythe a tillage,
clearing away love’s ruin
to plant something good,
at least useful; maybe
learn something, too.
I was for that hour good
and simple, poised to begin:

But I wasn’t ready to let go
what I’d had lost. I was
too young and stewed
in the sun’s bullish ire.
I mowed that field down
to summer’s end,
set scythe in the barn,
then boarded a train headed
West to find her again.


II.

On a cold autumn night
hedged by the striate
foliage of pot and speed
and booze, I picked up
a guitar and plugged
into a riverish roar.
I loved the weight
of that Fender Strat,
a heftier blade, equine
and amped, cranked to
the berserkeries of love.

What did I know? I was
far afield in foolish ends,
caught in a big night music
which screamed to the
nadir of her. Each swing
of that guitar at song’s
end hauled a sickle moon
down through loud falls
as hard as I could,
arcing back fever-bright
with the ghost of her smile.

Gone, but not lost.
It took me the worst years
to get back to those weeds.
To welcome emptiness
as a field you could scythe.
To celebrate the motions
which complete every kiss,
harvesting what falls
in that long, lonely,
brilliant swish.

RIVER

Spring 1979

down to river full full river
strong river light-laughing river
pounding home home home and
through to other side o river
river we make we make we make
we wake and still wash on through
to other side where she left
o river river first birthday
and standing close only to you
wondering why why why she left
but you just keep on roaring
pounding gushing each moment
ever on and on and on
and the ocean still hides
it hides it hides and yet
I hear its music whispering
winter into roaring spring
o spring o spring o spring
buds burst into song
here today on water's wombday
I'm here in mist and foam
pounding me home o God
I'm breaking loose filling up
spilling over draining out
and lonely lonely so lonely
mad yet full of birdsong
kid cries sun burst
o God I'm coming coming
come to light

and on

to ocean beach and a smile
get up get out know forget know
smile for the kingdom
love the queendom
in ravage of foam
and birth in mist
o lady lady lady lady
lady you are gone but I remain
to sing this river's song




A TRICKLE

from “A Breviary of Guitars,”
1999-2000

Late Winter 1979-80

1.

Lee was the
stockroom boss,
a small muscular
bluecollar man
of 50 who
had spent his years
busting cartons
and getting the
goods for The Man:
He was simple
--almost a doofus--
but he sure worked
hard, leading us
by scything hardest
through all the
day’s tasks: One
day after the
annual inventory
he and Brian and
Linda and I
walked over
to the Trio
and got drunk:
Trading war
stories about work,
laughing, bitching:
Lee got quiet
as we bitched
hot and hotter;
He just kept
pounding those beers:
He had just
buried his younger
brother the
previous week,
so I thought
that was where his
jovial banter
had gone, when
he suddenly
exploded:
I don’t give
A FUCK about
what YOU
think you deserve:
Don’t talk to ME
about money!
Hell I worked for
those assholes
at Grant’s for
FIFTEEN years
for no more
than 250 bills
a week: If you
don’t want to
work at Penny’s
THEN LEAVE!
I don’t care!
The rest of us
sat there stunned,
embarrassed,
and later mad:
He left and the
three of us talked
of quitting, stung
by Lee’s bitter
slap at our
hard work:
Hell we were
just bitching:
But we weren’t
really mad
at Lee because
he was us
with many more
years of busting
ass: A guy who
loved his work
no matter how
much shit tumbled
down from the
fatcat managers:
I saw my future
in Lee and knew
I had better
learn to play
that guitar:
Knew I had
to get away:


2.

On the news
there were tales
of winter madness,
like the snowplow
driver in Chicago
who went amuck
and plowed in 8
cars, the last
one still occupied:
I sat by the
heating grate
with my beer
and cigarettes
with Bach harp
sonatas watching
snowflakes smother
the last of me,
my mind buried
deep: Plowed over:
One night I
dragged some
drunk Mexican
girl home from
the Aquarius who
was itching for
heroin but
took my body
instead there
on the living
room floor
her skin dark
& tough &
scarred her
hips wide
& stretchmarks
on her ass
and her cunt
taking my needle
with huge slurps
and her face
averted in shadow
as she mumbled
swear words and
endearments hugging
me tight and tighter
sucking every
bit of warmth
from my bones:
How do you wake
from night into
winter? How
can there be
light when the
socket keeps
spitting out
cusps of greater
dark? Winter
my woods and
me a weed
for Dion’s scythe:
Sit on that
heat vent, suck
a beer’s marrow
clean, plead
for enough light
to see the next
step, night
after night after
night: Then one day
in early February
it got above
freezing for the
first time in
six weeks: Hardly
a sign of change,
but I felt
a trickle: Some
evidence that
winter does not
follow winter:
My fingers
started to heal
and I could play
for an hour one
day: And still
play the next:
I dreamed of
of walking into
the lake by my
cousins’ house
in Orlando where
I’m greeted by
a great sea snake:
I nearly drown but
then find a footing
to return to shore
but it’s boring there
so I become a bear
and shag back
into the lake to
ask that snake
about a door
somewhere
further below:
The next day
I take my
place on the
heat grate to
write the dream
down & then
try to write
a letter to my
father about winter
and stalled dreams
and madness
but I can’t finish
no matter how
many times
I try: Each attempt
a trickle of
spring that kept
freezing back
over: Who am I,
I ask the slush
outside and
where have
I fallen?
Triple cups
filled with ice
ichor & dream:
Practices with
Dave are vague
and listless,
devoid of course
but we kept
practicing anyway
as winter invisibly
ebbed: But absence
of bitter cold
cannot warm
me where I
had frozen hardest:
not like the warmth
of those dreams
of Florida which
washed me back
ashore each day
gashed deeper
by what I
must return to:
Abuse and spells
unravelling each
day’s center
& returning me
to the heat grate
a shivering child:
Rains come
to melt further
the hard pile against
our apartment:
Finally I
went to a counselor,
unravelling my
untellable spiel
of 3D depression,
dreams, and
dissolution: He
was curious about
the spells but
offered other
wisdom than to
advise me to
stop partying
and to know my
mother: Therapeutic
chicken soup
I hardly sipped
though my heart
was infernally
seeded by angels
flying southward
home: Days in
the bright forties
and people in
the park downtown
jogging & hurling
frisbees & pushing
strollers: Dave
and I on a park
bench playing
the blues (me
on my J45,
Dave on his
harmonicas)
collecting
enough pennies
and nickels
to buy a sixpack:
finding enough
grace in that
small spring day
to find a footing
at the bottom:

3.

the present

Sitting here with
dawn yet far
away and the
window open
to a cool but
never cold breeze,
I look back on
that fell winter
and spring
wondering
how -- or why --
I survived.
Surely the light
was going out:
Drugs were
so easy to find
and I knew how
to do it:
Cocooned in
the terrible
selfishness
of depression
I heard nor
saw much beyond
my dark penumbra:
My sister sent
me a letter
that winter telling
me she dreamed
I had died,
and pled with me
to accept her
Lord Jesus Christ
as my Savior:
I never wrote
back or called:
I recall winters
as those when
I dwindled down
to less than zero:
Winter 78 wasn’t
the last time,
they kept on
marauding in
me even after
I moved to
Florida: two
or three therapists
and a gazillion
AA meetings
and a whole shelf
of psychology books
eventually provided
me with context,
but all their answers
proved moot:
I simply had to
endure those seasons
somehow and cycle
through to spring:
... among these
winters there is
one so endlessly
winter that only
by wintering
through it will
your heart survive
writes Rilke
in his Sonnets:
The energies
were big and I
was young and
stupid: A guitar
is a key to a
blue box filled
with water
heart-blood
sperm and teeth:
Be forever dead
in Eurydice--more
gladly arise into
the seamless life
proclaimed in
your song
Rilke continues:
Here in the
realm of decline,
among momentary
days, be the crystal
cup that shattered
even as it rang:
Tend your key
o so carefully.
Own what you
find inside
no matter how
it terrifies the world:



A ROARr

from “A Breviary of Guitars,”
1999-2000

1.

Spring 1979:
Perhaps what
happened in
early spring 79
was a trial
adjudicated by
Eros or Dionysos
to see if I
was worthy of
Rock’s bitter
blistering
cornucopia:
I believed
-- who in the cups
does not? --
but would I pay?
The Spokane
river by April
a swollen
dangerous
thing as it
hurled the blood
of meltpack
into town,
tumbling over
the falls in
a crash and a
rumble & the
night awash
in spray and mist:
I stood on
a bridge over
those falls feeling
the river inside
a love drowned
down further:
I was cold
and lonely and
more than
half-mad,
scarred with
hoarfrost and
rock dreams:
Flash In the Pan’s
“Walking in the Rain”
is the song
for that season,
swelling synths
and footsteps
on wet pavement
as a voice in
a tube intoned
the passion
of dislocation:
Walking, Walking,
In the Rain:
There I go,
2 a.m. after the
Aquarius had
closed, hugging
my jacket in
the raw spring
night & the
river nearby
surging with
nothing &
my feet the
only way home,
my heart filled
with everything
but the girl
who loves my song;
That music
a lute strung
from river to
my sodden
empty bed,
a sidewalk
glistening with
moon and rain
as all the world
sleeps without me:

2.

Her name was
Laura and she
was just a kid,
a very young 18
to my old 21,
slow witted
but gorgeous:
an innocent take
on the real
thing, big blue doe
eyes blonde hair
and breasts
like melons aching
for the harvest:
Just getting her out
from her house
here she babysat
her siblings
all day was a feat:
We walked in
the park one day
(careful to
show her my river
but she was
afraid to go onto
the bridge -)
Then on to a
fancy dinner: Two
glasses of wine and
she was easy
to steer to the
Sheraton Hotel
by the river
where I peeled
off her clothing
and took utter
delight in her body:
She wasn’t a
virgin, but sure
acted like one:
Had all the
trappings of a
woman except
for the girl
looking at me
through those
big blue eyes,
an innocent
in she-wolf’s
clothing far
too unready
for the likes
of any men,
especially ones
like me who
desperately
settled for
caricatures of
love: Laura
was my river
love-doll that
season and
I blew her up
in earnest:
How easily it
all deflated when
she went back
to her highschool
boyfriend
the next week:
Bereft &
aggrieved I stood
over the river
one night
shouting curses
lost in its larger
snarl: I walked
away believing
that if she lived,
my love had
surely washed
south: I called
my mother in
Florida and told
her I was taking
a bus home:
Quit my job
at Penney’s the
next day and
walked the late
afternoon
feeling stunned
and feral
and ready,
a changeling
in dirty jeans:
Bought a copy
of Burrough’s
Naked Lunch
for the long
long ride: Told
Dave that night
that it was time
we woke up from
our hopeless
dream of rock and
roll: I packed
one suitcase and
pitched the remaining
detritus of life:
guitar picks
and cannibis stems
and empty bottles
of beer: Some
Girls on the
stereo outside
a sun never warm
enough
now shattering
the sky: Blue blue
heaven calling
me south:

3.

Or so I thought:
I didn’t go:
Half an hour
before the bus
departed I knew
it was too soon
in the song
to go solo:
Torn loose
from my job,
quit of all
musical inspirations,
readying to head
home to mother
just like the
doctor prescribed,
skinny and
loveless and needy:
these were the
motions of my
wintered heart
and but at
that last moment
I saw that spring
had come to
Spokane, not
with the salvation
of love but the
true power of
the river:
Not to baptize
my mad loveless
soul but to
provide a
pagan rhythm,
a backbeat,
a lavish gradient
for song: A
river is a
guitar strung
with the blood
of Olympus:
And so I
remained to
sing the river’s
song: That night
Dave and I
went out to
the Black Dog
at State Line
Idaho to
celebrate
our reconvened
future: Hot
Stuff onstage
playing the
best rocknroll
around with
a killer PA
and the Pierogue
brothers with
just the right look
roostering Rod
Stewart and
the Stones
and that new band
Van Halen: Dave and
I pounded Scotch
& ate crosstops
& danced like
satyrs, like fiends,
like wolves: Some
cowgirl took me
home with her
way out in
Buttfuck Idaho
to a trailer she
shared with
her kid & folks,
riding me
savagely behind
a bedsheet
hung for a curtain,
a huge bang of
hair hiding
her eyes: She
the drunken
mediatrix of my
return, for good
and ill: The next
day she drove me
back to Spokane
through miles
of scrub and wild,
spring blasting in
through rolled down
windows, Pan’s
balls bouncing
in my startled
fresh heart:
Back home I
plugged my
MusicMan into
the stack and
began to rip
it up anew, the
music feeling
somehow different,
now a bladed,
whirling thing,
slashing madly
through bellowing
buds: Bereft
now of all
but song, only
the song mattered
and then in
an offhand,
rock-sassy way:
I was at last
dancing to my
music in
the wasteland:
walking, walking
in the drain:
and the song
was good
though I no
longer was:





RIVER PSALM

2004

o lady lady lady lady
lady you are gone
but I remain
to sing this river’s song

I wrote that in spring
1979, rivering words
on paper the awesome
gout I had felt earlier
in the day when I retraced
my steps back to
that bridge on which,
one year earlier,
I kissed my first
passionate love
while the Spokane
river pounded hard
below. Now wounded,
harrowed, and barely thawed
from a bad winter
in which her absence
froze me in ways
as deep and majestical
as the depths she
first opened in me
with a kiss -- One year’s
bad harrow from that
birthing bliss, I
had walked downtown
on sidewalks finally
bare of snow and ice
and walked out, alone,
over that frightening
foment -- of the river,
at least, ferrying
the melted icepack
from the mountains
west toward the sea.
Today I’m not sure
what gripped me more,
the river scene
I had returned to,
expecting to find
her on that bridge,
or the way in which
the words cascaded
from pen to paper
in full memory
of what passion’s
crashing billowing
cruelly descending
knife fully felt like.
I stood on that bridge
that day -- in flesh
and on paper --
enveloped in the
roar and the mist,
the steel track
shaking and trembling
from the naked pound
of that huge water’s
roll and pour and
smash to falls below.
That sound -- in
the river and in
my ear -- nailed
something angelic
to the hands spread
in my heart, hands
which once had
squeezed her breasts,
hand which on
that anniversary
and now I spread
wide in bittersweet
full welcome.
The scene was both
pregnant and bereft
of her when I got
home and wrote that
poem, my very
verbal sense trying
to cup her in that
bridge-span’s vigil.
As if words for a river
on a mighty day in
spring long after
she had left me
returned that shapely
ass to my hands,
the poem’s motion
her own rocking
on my hips,
my words distilled
from all the
ones she once
(and only once)
mouthed in the
psalms of high pleasure,
naming every fish
and glade in all
the seas below.
Ah, to recall that
sweet madness
in a river’s spasm
of a poem! To have
the fullness of her
absent that real
woman who gripped
down as I spasmed
and railed jots
of motlen sperm in
her: To hold high
that flood of light
in the collapse which
all falls and lovers
share as they
merge and so
dreamily drowse
on down to the sea:
Such was my feeling
then on paper
that even today
I know like my
own hands the
gauge and length
of every steel nail
the moment hammered
through my palms,
shrieking words
which pierced through
skin and tendon
and splintering bone
in an ecstasy of
pain and blood,
fastening me forever
to the soul-wood
of that day. How
could she be there in
every way that
dishevelled, half-lunatic,
badly hungover
March afternoon,
fully resonant in
the river’s rapture
and pouring bliss
—And yet be gone,
never to be held again?
That poem “River” was
the cry upon my lips
that day when one
faith dies and
another sprang to life,
freed from God and
godly women to build
a chapel by that scree,
a tide of lines which
keep old flames alive
in waters dark and fresh
and wild. The river’s
song is where her
single kiss, that raging
water, and your
strange dominion
in my history
all merge and sigh
in mint-fresh malt
and salt confusion.
See: words
are pouring from
my mouth as hot
as those molt
angels I unfurled
deep into my first
love one hungover
morning half a lifetime
ago, giving her
the wings to go.
Each word here’s
a stallion of that
stampede; this poem
is a mash of
those blue hooves
galloping wild over
the falls. And you
are there beyond
where all water
flows on, down and
in and deep, astride the
torrent of one
man’s river ache
to bed in your
deepest womb
& stare in your
eyes at last
your every body
clenched fast to mine.



BEGINNINGS

2003

Day, season, year -
each begins
from this bland
dark which neither
rises nor enfolds
not yet - but
pauses blinking
on the shore
among the skulls
of battened fish
& marvel at
white sands so
pale in late
moonlight and
the loins of surf
now drawing back
so slowly, like
an aftebirth -
Day, season, year
all begin as
an eye waking
sowly to the
next blue homeland
where all is harrowed
by those waters
which recede, a
caul of combed
abyss leaving
a pale gleam in your
eyes as you
gaze into the
waking day,
year, life. Be
grateful for
such parentage
& sire sure
motions of that
first bliss with
a gentle, oh
so loving kiss
as you vanish
down the deep
lanes of slowly
rising, softly
enfolding mist.

Cobalt Gestalt

The craft of the smith ranks immediately after the shaman’s vocation in importance. “Smiths and shamans are from the same nest,” says a Yakut proverb. “A shaman’s wife is respectable, a smith’s wife is venerable,” says another. Smiths have power to heal and even foretell the future. According to the Dolgan, shamans cannot “swallow” the souls of smiths because smiths keep their souls on fire; on the other hand, a smith can catch a shaman’s soul and burn it.

-- Eliade, Shamanism


STONES OF THE SKY -- XXIX

Pablo Neruda

We must speak clearly of the clear stones,
we must speak clearly of the dark stones,
of the ancestral rock, of the blue ray
held prisoner in the sapphire,
of the sculptured boulder in its rough
grandeur, of the wings under water,
of the emerald with its green flame.

Now, then: of the cobblestone
or of the the dazzling marketplace,
the virgin flash of the ruby
or the frozen wave of the coast
or of the secretive obsidian that chose
the negative glow of the shadow:
I, man in decay, ask
from what mother did they come,
from what volcanic sperm,
oceanic, overflowing,
from what flower before, from which scent
snuffed short by the glacial glare?

I am one of those vagabond men
who flying from love are in love
left burned out, broken up
into skin and kisses, into dark
words swallowed by shadow:
I am not ready for so many mysteries:
I open my eyes and see nothing:
I tough the earth and move on,
while flame and flower, scent and water
are changed into clans of crystal,
eternalized in works of light.





Zinc minerals and ores often appear in antiquity and the Middle Ages under the vague and confusing name of cadmia. The Greek writes Dioscorides (ca. AD 40-90) speaks of a cadmium that could be used as a balm; this was zinc oxide. It was formed in copper-smelting furnaces, since zinc is commonly present in copper ore. Later known as calamine, it is still used in medical ointments today.

But there was another kind of cadmia called cobaltum, or kobelt in colloquial German, named after the malevolent goblins that were believed to haunt the mines. The mineral became associated with these unpleasant earth spirits because it was “corrosive,” as Agricola wrote in the Bermannus, eating away at the hands and feet of miners who came into contact with it. Cobalt minerals themselves are harmless enough , but Agrociola’s cobaltum appears to have been a mineral rich in arsenic, probably the cobalt ore smaltite. Cobalt itself was the key component of a blue mineral known as zaffre, from which comes the word “sapphire” (which, however, is not a cobalt compound!). Zaffre was used a a blue glaze for pottery and a coloring agent for blue glass.

-- Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor




COBALT SUNSET

Feb. 1, 2006

Who let these dogs out
of their malefic vaults
to jinn the last of day
with this wicked cobalt sky?
It rained; a cool front
was working through; the
sun had died; what remained
was the ravage and wonder
of blue’s hardest fire,
a high ice shot shot
through with gold-silverish
bolts too harshly to
be called beautiful yet
can only be so named,
a Boschean disorder
limned by the coldest delights
afforded by Venus.
Collapsing love spread
like wings to the west,
amped on the soar
of infernal appetites,
a mouth wide open
for desires no sea
of any depth can slake.
A dying wonder, a
naked woman failing into
night, trailing a long
train of catastrophe’s
blue souse, slowly
smoothed over by God’s
hand like a parent tucking
child into bedcovers
of black water til nothing
remains but the faintest
pale blue wattage
too far to the west.
That thus this pour
forever revenant in
cobalt gestalts, eerie
mineralisms salting
the wash of my jones
for sapphire bling,
galloping the facets,
gouting the hue,
way down there,
hollering.



THE HEART OF STONE

Pablo Neruda
Trans. Dennis Maloney

Look,
this
was the heart
of a siren.
Helplessly
hard
she came to the shores
to comb her hair
and play a game of cards.
Swearing
and spitting
among the seaweed.
She was the image
herself
of those
hellish
barmaids
that
in stories
murdered
the weary traveler.
She killed her lovers
and danced
in the waves.
And so,
time passed in
the wicked
life of the siren
until
her fierce
lover, the sailor
pursued her
with harpoon and guitar
through all the seafoam,
farther
than the most
distant archipelagoes,
and when
she reclined
in his arms,
the sailor
gave her
his beveled point,
a final kiss
and a justified death.
Then, from the ship
the dead
commanders
descended,
beheaded
by
that
treacherous
siren,
and with cutlass,
sword,
fork
and knife,
pulled out
the heart of stone
from her chest,
and, near the sea,
it was allowed
to anchor,
in order that
it could teach
the little
sirens
to learn
to behave
properly
with
the
enamored
sailors.




BLUE IN BLUE

Oct 19 2005

Out the hall window
at 2 a.m. my car blares
silver blue and black
in full moonlight.
Wild light bulbs that
midnight blue; the two
are icy blondes writhing
cheek to cheek over the
abyssal mother of all moons,
blueblack and cooing
wave surges toward this shore.
My bluest fantasy
disappears into sex
the way sex fades
into something roaring forward,
a tide maybe, or an age
both newer and older than
any reckoning by saner,
drier, sated Dons. Blonde on
blonde I’m tangled up in
blue in a syzygy of sames,
moon and sea like
heart and sight like singer
and psalm and all halves of
bone in parting delight,
the one melting forever
out of sight, the lucent
gleam of all that remains.
My car in vast moonlight
takes me to a shore
where savage waves pound
wondrous grains now pouring
ineluctably from the window
glass, like a naked woman
walking out a door which closes
in a silver roar of collapsing
wild blue foam. And her eyes
which caught and held me
one in that so pregnant dark --
so blue and silvery with
desire for my blueballed streams,
amid a dark which nailed me
forever to a blueblack tree
of arching fire, evanescent now,
haunting, free, bone on bone
now dreaming of silver’s swoon
in blue, reflecting every sea
which delved the ache and
arch of me to You.

Mining for God

As newcomers, many of us have indulged in spiritual intoxication. Like a gaunt prospector, belt drawn over the last ounce of food, we saw our pick strike gold Joy at our release from a lifetime of frustration knew no bounds.

The newcomer feels he has struck something better than gold. He may not see at once that he has barely scratched a limitless lode which will pay dividends only if he mines it for the rest of his life and insists on giving away the entire product.

-- Alcoholics Anonymous

***



META-LITURGY

The ore is here. Getting to it is one
problem. Smelting it is another.
Then there’s minting and then
leveraging it wisely, exponents
only wizened labials can pour.
The veins run vast and wild and
dark beneath so much that is
gross and broken, hidden in
Alpine miasmas of gloss
and cant. You can’t see them
in the daily rounds of home and work
and weary commutes though
each is the surest vent to rich
caverns below. I say “room”
and something flukes in that sound,
a glint of phosphor bouncing off
deeper bones, names sounding
stranger and stronger in brogue.
You learn to dowse with the
undersides of the words, trusting
their roots to grip lodes. And
you do so with with radical glee,
hungering for depths at their
worst, pulling the whole lump up
with dirty hands, like a red
radish gritty wet and hot on
the tongue (from Latin radix,
“root.”) Thus you must trust the
sine waves of dark seem,
dearth dead in earth the surest
mine to the underworld dream,
every depth a door to the
treasure hard to attain.
Whence comes this the faith
that words in an order of wild sound
can burrow down under
into the barrows of wonder
packed high the the signets
and crowns of old kings?
It comes with each nugget
caught in the pan I hold here
as the early morning’s stream
plows powerfully through, waters
without face or history, no
more than a wild blue plash
in hard hammering motion
toward oceans singing their roots.
See: I’ve found another here
a full hour from dawn on a
cool Sunday morning in 2006,
a chunk of rude gold amid the
usual iota of dross, almost lewd
to be so revealed, like a 7-11
clerk suddenly exposing a boob
while you pay for chewing gum
or the long pecker of the mailman
flopping through the slot where
you expected a rain of bills -- This
is the surprise of good fortune,
lucre from dross, the wheel of
banalaties turned round to new
markets, vast sums flooding the
checking account. Last night I
dreamed of licking my wife’s cunt
through her panties, then of flash cards
with formulas on one side and
secret emails on the other
& finally of a game with poker chips
faintly etched with Tarot suits,
the most fortuitious minted
in pale blue. Some teacher
showed me how to “play” or
“read” the chips, no real suit
to look for as you would
in Poker nor any numerical
sequence as in an I Ching
or trellis of arcana but
rather simply the sum of
blue, the one in the game
who had amassed the most
blue chips regardless of what
else was spread to view.
The highest-blue person was
the one elected by blue
to invest full in the market,
the thinking I guess being
that the luckiest should be
the one elected to lower pan
to waters. The teacher said if
I followed his method I
could make for my family
a half million bucks the first year
alone -- Amazing, though now
as I read back over the dream
that was far less so than
that second scene, where
I risked dealing like a Tarot those
cards of deep converse with
my starry venomous animae;
and the high-river’s font
I loved most in the dream
was that first part, where
I was allowed to pan my
face in the labials of the real
woman I love, savoring real
the real wash these words
can only imply. What I write
here is just the salt of a
dreaming prospector, shining
my dazed and drifting thalamus,
but it flashes here like something
strange, delved -- or offered --
from below. And thus gleams
mineral and pagan in the facts
of first fire from that random
fleeting angel. There’s coin enough
here to invest something lavishly,
to compound the offices of gold
in the orifascia of my day,
the way the ancients lay coins
on the eyes of their dead,
offering pay for passage
over those dark waters which
lap on the other side of the grave
we dream. Blue voltage and
wet panties are enough to make
me feel wealthy today though
I’m still just sitting here
gripping down through the floor
for the gold roots of a door.



In his autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Jung relates his seminal encounter with the unconscious, a waking-dream experience or nekyia where he has the sensation of falling far down and then encounters several figures, personifications of that dark and deepest water:

Later, Philemon became relativized by the appearance of yet another figure, whom I called Ka. In ancient Egypt the “King’s Ka” was his earthly form, the embodied soul. In my fantasy the Ka-soul came from below, out of the earth as if out of a deep shaft. I did a painting of him, showing him in his earth-bound form, as a herm with a base of stone and an upper part of bronze. High up in the painting appears a kingfisher’s wing, and between it and the head of Ka floats a round glowing nebula of stars. Ka’s expression has something demonic about it -- one might also say, Mephistophelean. In one hand he holds something like a colored pagoda, or reliquary, and in the other a stylus with which he is working on the reliquary. He is saying, “I am he who buries the gods in gold in gems.” (184-5)

***


MINING FOR GOD

2003

God won’t be lived like some light morning.
Whoever climbs down the shaft must give up
earth’s repleteness for the craft of mining:
stand hunched and pry him loose in tunnels.

-- Rilke, Uncollected Poems (1919)
transl. Edward Snow

Little did I know I was mining for God,
spelunking down that grand Florida night,
clappering the narrow hips of belles
by the sea. Back then it was just a gallop
out of my ruined sense of self towards
some mythic Ys of sighs. The ore that
chipped loose there -- mineral horrors
of neon and glass -- gleamed otherworldly
in the lamps of absence, a cave- or
womb-infusion of light from within
the other, that light I could never
summon, anneal, or sustain.
The God within us worships God,
wrote Emerson; my deeps and darks
embowel holy hues and flues in
angelic tide-pools. Last night I dreamed
that my first wife and her daughter
were killed in some terrible, drunken
crash of cars at 3 a.m. at the crossroads
of a old neighborhood. I had been
in the car too but survived, and had
no memory of the impact. I was
trying to figure out whether anyone
had tried to call her folks in Idaho
with the news. Such as sad burden
that caller must bear, I thought,
waking to the most mournful cry of
a cat in the dark. I got up to check
and found her standing on the stairs
peering out the window at something
in the back yard. We’re all in this
together, our darker selves I mean,
untroubled by borders & familiar in
the deep where God keeps breaking
loose in our hands, untroubled too
that we see but cannot fully name
all the wonders found there, so many
oceans lapping just one beach, and me
in You, breathing hard, ripe to burst
a thousand more seas, sighs, waves
of a wild mineral psalm, loose at last
in Your hands, a gleaming gem of
what’s under the undertow’s soft sucking hiss.


GUNDESTRUP

May 18, 2005

The Gundestrup Cauldron is a religious vessel
found in Himmerland, Denmark, 1891. It was
deposited in a dry section of a peat bog,
dismantled with its five long rectangular
plates, seven short ones and one round
plate. Each plate is made of 97% pure silver
and filled with various motifs of animals,
plants and pagan deities.

***

In my dream’s swoon I fell to a shelf
I never meant to remember, a one
night stand tossed 20 years ago
behind me into the bog.
The bedroom was like an
orchid opened after all those years,
belling from a dark branch of
Florida’s night orchard, opening
like a grave suddenly awake.
The woman was unlovely but quite
fuckable in my old calculations
of lust, but in the dream she
was surrounded with
a sort of syrupy dark lucence,
bog-sap perhaps, enriched on
the liquor of so many lost or
tossed nights. Anyway she wonders
why I have come again to her room,
why I would leave my marriage
bed on the surface of dream
to call upon her, especially
after the way I had so blithely
strolled through on that night
long ago, randomly, faux-feelingly
enough to get her to
press her breasts together
while I came on them
& then tried to sneak out while
she feigned satisfied sleep.
I confess to her that I don’t know
but I there I was, sounding
much the way I usually
propositioned my need back
then, my voice ghosted
by echoes from the cruellest
vitals of my heart. It was
the sound of a mind chaffing
persons from bodies, hearts
from the outer equipage of
wombs which was feeling
enough for my intents.
To that she smiled,
perhaps pleased to receive any
notice from the land of the
living, being a dead memory
herself, a bent and discolored
plate from a cauldron whose
story I am. Yes, she smiled
and began the bouree, the
sweet low and dissolving
drawl of sure sex,
no more questions to
ask of myself.
She kneeled admiring
my chest, drawing her
cold hands over pecs
beginning to sag and
hairs turning grey, lowering
down the bed to gaze
at the white boxer shorts I
was sleeping in, fishing
a hand into the crotch
for the tunny
which grows into stone.
I closed my eyes and
saw the room in a warehouse
I worked in long ago, the
bed on a shelf, part of an
inventory I take in deep hours
when desire reassembles all
the plates and then overfills
the bowl with sea-water poured
from its ancient heavy heart,
wherever that may be found.
I opened my eyes and it was
bright morning in June, a
happy prod for the waking
world but the smoking fag
end of my nights spending
all for a Yes, just one, in
the absence of my own.
Closed my eyes once again
and she was exactly who
she was, 23 and unlovely
and mostly unloved by men
— at least back then, may
the gods have smiled on
her since — an undine of
undress under my pillow,
under the pillow
I once placed my face into
when I was 6 years old
watching me dive into
a pond to save a pretty girl.
I thought she should have been
sad or angry but the woman
in my dream was smiling
like a saint and humming
like a whore who loves her
night job, adoring the smell
of sex rising from my body,
mixing with hers at a
shore of brilliant blue waves.
She lay next to me to
continue the dance on to
the next plate they fished
from the bog in 1891 on
a cold Danish morning —
her shape next to me like
a fish I wanted to climb
and swim far back to my
wife but she was already
there next to me, the dream
woman’s voice ebbing with
a wave into my wife’s own,
which I dreamed was saying
the woman’s words — So you
want to fuck me and sighing
O Yes and Please Do. Blue
hands in the dark descending,
arousing, pleading, pleasuring
me in a blue orchid found
in the cauldron spinning
round the center of it,
happy to be lost, or tossed,
in a the peat pit of it all
where the divine metallurgist
casts plates of pure silver
in the bog heart of pure thrall.
And the face on that panel-
a woman’s, far and close-
the shaman or trickster,
my shadow’s deep gaze.
I don’t know his name
and hardly understand his
theme — though like a
woodland is still thick
in my genes. I can’t help
but enact his old pagan game,
scenes from a greenwood
marriage buried under
this house where love
came home to blossom at last.

***

According to a tradition from County Mayo in Ireland, [there is] as stone-built giant’s grave on a wild mountainside (location not given). If anyone were to dig into the grave, the mouhntainside would immediately be changed into a fertile plain, and a key buried in the tomb would open the gate of a beautiful city at the bottom of a nearby lake. Also the discoverer would have at his disposal “a great golden treasure.”

-- Janet and Colin Bord, The Secret Country

HEAVY METAL

2003

Hell’s thunder is
a team of four black
horses, their iron
hooves hauling us down
from virginally
bright metals into a
leaden, ore-like
flow. My desire’s
barbed into the
bottom sides of
things, low and
lewd, urging me
down toward
underground cities
where bar-lights
and bad girls glow,
under pants and
sheets and toward
upturned assses,
a carnal undertow
which defeats the
best of dayside
swims. Walking in
the mall with my
wife yesterday
looking for new
shoes, my eyes
kept leaping down
on comelies, their
breasts stretching
up and out to me,
calling me from the
places down below
for rescue, release,
rapine, milkings &
the lather of the
jism which hangs
in my balls like lead.
So I grabbed my
wife’s hand, and smiled
for the couple we are
and become -- and
let those wavelets
pass wholly unaware
of me. Heavy metal
has a wattage in
its song, loud and
nigh-pornographic,
maddening the horses
galloping the moon.
Have I not been
always mauled by
that surf toward
some settled shore,
out of my puerlike
sport at sea?
I first saw my
wife 8 years ago
in a club where we’d
separately gone to
hear folk music;
she was wearing
a white pantsuit
and had leaned across
the bar to shout
her drink order in --
Fine auburn hair,
a long lean white
stretch of white
curving over a
perfect ass -- Surely
I was hooked. Down
I plunged that night
into her smile as we
said hello, her voice
like water from a
well: And the next
night her kiss, which
was all merriment
and foam -- We tumbled
down from there to
the floating island
of her bed on Sunday
mornings in the dreamlit
float after sex, our
former lives far
above on a lonely
field where words
in dry stalks beat
like brittle bones.
-- Oh her bed
was fluffed with
pillows whiter than
any white I’d known,
and the billows
of her breasts were
soft and full yet firm.
the waters round us
were gauzy-azure,
soft-focus, demure,
and bridally pure:
So much so I
couldn’t see the
iron keel just below
that bed, falling fast
like some split
Bismarck, down
and down to a place
of heart which housed
me at last in place
and held me fast
til the roots locked
in place and my life
began at last. Those
bright merry cupids
on the sportive wave ---
such babes, the fruit
of surely joyful woumbs --
have eyes as cold
as basalt slag, and
take aim carefully;
there’s threat of steel
in each wave’s mane;
and just below the
waves big sex boom
an iron carriage waits
to ferry us down
to those dark and
darker rooms where
one-night orchids
crush in swoon
and perennial loves
in our house bloom.



[At a] church at Maughbold on the Isle of Man, it was decided to make two steps up to the communion rails instead of one steep one. During their excavations, the laborers found bones buried beneath the step. These were dug up and left exposed at lunch-time, and one labourer who stayed in the church heard distinct sounds of whispering or murmuring in the church. The bones were reinterred promptly, and the whispering stopped.

-- Bord and Bord, ibid.

***

GREAT WHITE

2003

Last week 100 rock fans
died in a fire at The Station
nightclub in Rhode Island.
Great White was the band,
a dinosaur from the 80’s
whose hits “Rock Me”
and “Once Bitten Twice
Shy” could still bang
metal-headed ecstasies.

A video survives from
the short, fatal start
of the show — there
is a flourish of drums,
a bright flash, the band
pounding into the song.
Standard metal pomp
—but behind the
band we see
two spires of flame
rising fast along
the wall, fangs
I guess of of rock
angst, real at last.

The camera pans
back into the crowd
a moment — you see
typical rockers, some
young, some only
trying to be young
— then back to the stage
where the bass player
at the rear of the
stage looks over
his shoulder at
the sudden mess
of fire and smoke.
The tape shown
on the networks
ends here.

They say people
had only 30 seconds
to get out, and in 3
minutes the entire building
was aflame. The fire
department got there
fast (a result of
9/11 awareness) but
there was nothing
they could do.

Many bodies were
found the next day
packed at the main door
(there were other exits
but no way to see them,
so quickly had the smoke spread)
and many more in the
bathrooms. Screams, smoke,
great white heat, gone.

One who escaped
was typical: a 23-year old
guitar player of sorts
who hoped to one day
find a stage door out
from his job at Wal-Mart.
He’d travelled with 2
friends across from
Massachusetts for
a night of dreams.

Caught in a knot
by the main door,
he pulled himself
through by grabbing
onto a white-hot
emergency exit rail
on the door. Then
despite 3-degree burns
on his hands, he
turned to grab for
a young mother
stuck in a pile.

Great White frontman
Jack Russell (described
by others as a pyro)
survived the blaze;
guitar player Ty Longley
did not. He later told
reporters that the club
had given the band
permission to light
the flashpots.

His lawyer is seeking
immunity for him
in return for testimony
against the club owners.
How old he looks
on camera, a rocker with
long hair and a puffy,
aged face, a wreck of
real stages long past
new hope.

I wonder what he now
begins—versus the kid
with the ruined hands
just released from
the hospital, who must
stare now across
his room at a guitar
he may never play
again: soot and
burnt flesh still
packed in the
rafters of his head,
that chapel of rock
dreams still ringing
with high and
higher octave screams.

***

And finally this from a great story by Christopher Rush titled “The Woman and the Waves” (Scottish Sea Stories, ed. Glen Murray, Polygon, 1996):

“He dipped into his deep blue pockets and brought out a handful of foreign gold. The coins burned in his palm like the suns of strange countries. He had been among mermaids and monks and winters and whales such as I had scarcely dreamed of. I had never seen further than the lights of the Lothians across the Forth, like fallen stars at midnight. Now this man was telling me of the secrets that lay beyond the horizon’s brow, and I was telling him that I would marry him.

We flowed into one another with long fulfillment, he into the quiet harbor of my arms, I into the running tide of his strange coming, a mingling of milk and honey, of sweetness and salt. Above us the stars blew their silver trumpets and no one heard them on the earth except ourselves.

(Yes, but he’s a whaler, and he never returns from his next voyage into the Arctic. Froze to death when the ship locked in ice. The woman does re-marry but this one drowns in the bay outside her town in a sudden storm, along with their son. At story’s end she looks out on the sea, which is her true lover:)

***

... At nights I dream of those other folk of mine that lie hidden in the sea. There are whelks on their hands and seaweeds in their hair. And the cold green fingers of the waves strum over their bones.

Or I hirple down to the pier and look over the harbor wall. I stand there for hours sometimes, thinking of their bonny heads still tossing with the turning tangles, out there somewhere. Sometimes I see them.

All I have loved is turned to coral and to kirkyard clay. Ah, the weariness of time and sea! They have taken from me everything I had, and left me an old empty shell. And yet, time and the sea are all I have ever known.

Death, as I approach it, is the wash of the waves inside my skull.

Secret Language

In the course of his initiation the future shaman has to learn the secret language that he will use during his seances to communicate with the spirits and animal spirits. He learns this secret language either from a teacher or by his own efforts, that is, directly from the “spirits”; both methods coexist among the Eskimo, for example.

The existence of a specific secret language has been veified among the Lapps, the Ostyak, the Chukchee, the Yakut, and the Tungus. During his trance the Tungus shaman is believed to understand the language of all nautre. The secret shamanic language is highly elaborated among the Eskomos and used as a means of coomunication between the angakut and their spirits. Each shaman has his particular song, which he intones to invoke the spirits ...

This phenomenon is not exclusively North Asian and Arctic; it occurs almost everywhere.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 96

SECRET LANGUAGE

Jan. 29, 2006

It’s taken years to learn the
secret words of blue,
decades, who knows: my
life in this salt scriptorium
upon my writing chair
may just be latest attempt
by oral veins to route
that sound full back on the tongue.
Perhaps the work is slow
because teachers are these
days so few, the old brute
waters so fished out, too
many darks now known,
the corpus callosum which
verbs the milk of sapience
from beloved distant breasts
tattered, rent by to much
light, perhaps, or too few pyres.
Who knows. Every age bears
a cross inside its new
articulations, its own
perplexities to addle
the augments of blue.
My familiars morphed
from the usual suspects
-- my mother’s voice next
to the sea; my father’s
words in rooms of stone--
girls too who said my name
like butterflies on a summer
day, so gossamer I could not
hold them in my arms, much
less say their names or write
them on the page. --Oh and
brutaller instructors too,
that bad sound of baleen-sieving
nights when I inhaled
too much musk and
whiskey in the smoke of
of lousy bars, nosing
my way to that brassy clang
which peals all shores
ululate and undulate
and undying for one night.
All those delights and
dolors ranged my timbre’s
hues: But just how to say
or sing full back the
bull-freight of blue? I
read, I wrote, I read wrote
more, over and over, day
after day for years, each
mornings’s embarcature
like the jaywalker who
loves wild crossings more
than getting safe across or
the barrel-diver who gets
a rise from fatal falls.
This morning’s poem is
my latest exempla
of servitude to words
which woof and wrangle
and perturb the petticoats
of a nakedness I’ll never
find words true enough for --
I mean true wilderness,
where names in their
ferallest pelts cavort and
plunge in sylvan thunder.
I always think I’m getting close
but each time I end up here
trying to wrap lacunas up
with something blue enough,
an azurish button of a couplet
or a pale sheet of metaphorcials
fluttering down on stated lovers
in the lysis of pure descent,
the picture fading full
to black just as the curvatures
die fully draped. But I can’t
end this thing, not yet, I
haven’t learned the ends of
that secret tongue. Or perhaps
that language knows no closure.
Perhaps the tongue of sea-
faring angels was meant for
endless tides of days and
hangs forever here, on
the same wave that I
started from when I
looked up at my mother
standing over me and sang
the sea right back. The
secret song is thus all the
ones a heart pours out
in gratitude for seas.
That works for me today
as I walk back from one shore
and begin to walk upon
next, hearing my wife sigh
and stir. I shut this book
to head upstairs and
lay next to her in pink
first light, and there run my
fingers across her soles just
so, again and again so soft
and slow, singing first
and last what only tongues
of angels know.



Over the long span of geoligic time, the ocean waters have come in over North America many times and have again retreated into their basins. For the boundary between sea and land is the most fleeting and transitory feature of the earth, and the sea is forever repeating its encroachments upon the continents. It rises and falls like a great tide, sometimes engulfing half a continent with its flood, reluctant in its ebb, moving in a rhythm mysterious and infinitely deliberate.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us


***

The great sea
Has set me adrift.
It moves me as the weed in a great river,
Earth and the great weather move me,
Have carried me away,
And move my inward parts with joy.

— Eskimo woman shaman, quoted by Rasmussen

***

How great it is to write the single line:
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!

- From "John Horace Burleson,"
by Edgar Lee Masters,
Spoon River Anthology

_____


THE SIREN’S TONGUE

2005

She sings on a black
rock just beyond the
tide, her voice inside
each treacherously-
breaking wave to
wash all shores salt blue.
What language ferries
deep that music here,
crossing ages, seas
and lifelong loves,
untranslatable and
unfathomable, undinal
in the crash and foam
which draws and
then denies me? It names
a girl, almost, her
breasts revealed
above the wave, her
throat pure white
and necklaced with
sea-foam, her cold
blue eyes reckless
and wild and set on
me in a way that
sees and psalms
progeniture beyond
all words I have
yet sired. Gaelic in its
lilt and plush yet
older as the stars
that sing the moon
up from the sea
to tide above yet
deeper in the waters
I really mean to say
but can’t, not yet.
Her song was wakened
in me in one shoreless
kiss a thousand years
ago: Since then
I’ve been rowing hard
to every known shore
and many more not
found on any map,
the long lost music
still ringing in my
ear like waves inside
a shell, or dreams
which drift ashore
all day in tatters of
the purest silk. Ah how
could words be loving
yet so cruel, the merry
foaming wave an oubliette
to so many rooms below,
each winnowed with abyss?
Malefic? Maddened?
Welled from the
worst booze? Yes--
But the song she pours
into this breaking scree
is the from sea half of
my heart’s decree, a child
both of water and its God.
A strange chanson that’s
altared best on these narrow
shores I walk and
write, on pages white
as her pale throat
out beyond the morning’s
dross of hotel coffee
& hours of selling
soap downstairs. Psalter
me, o love, just where
your tides siren the air.
Wash me with your next blue mare.



Like the priest, the artist is a master of metaphorical language. The priest, however, is vocationally committed to a vocabulary already coined, of which he is the representative. He is a performing artist executing scripts already perfectly wrought, and his art is in the execution. Creative artists, in contrast, are creative only insofar as they are innovative.

-- Joseph Campbell, "The Way of Art,"
in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

____

... (Mananan) will delight the company of every fairy-knoll,
He will be the darling of every goodly land,
He will make known secrets - a course of wisdom -
In the world, without being feared.
He will be in the shape of every beast,
Both on the azure sea and on land,
He will be a dragon before hosts at the onset,
He will be a wolf of every great forest.
He will be a stag with horns of silver,
In the land where chariots are driven,
He will be a speckled salmon in a full pool,
He will be a seal, he will be a fair-white swan.
-- "The Voyage of Bran," 52-54


***

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

2002


I first heard people speaking in tongues
at the Pentecostal church my mom
dragged us to when she was shopping
for a holiness great as her grief.
I was 13 years old and zipping down
everything those parishioners
tried to lace in high glottals.

After the sermon (smoky, taut)
someone behind us began talking
in words that were not:
a wave of clicks and ululates
strange but apt, in tune
with the fervency of belief,
an devout apassionata, though
cheesy with angels, almost stout.

Then an old lady next to my sister
started up in a different tongue,
faux-Arabic blent with trailer South.
One by one the congregation picked up
the tirade, and within minutes everyone
was going at it, a wild flapping goose
hitching a ride to high heaven.

I peeked over at my older
brother and like me he was torn
between fright and giggle. Something
in it was both silly and true, the
way TV rasslers took evil to the count
wearing powder blue tights.

My mother clenched her eyes
down hard and commenced her
own tongues, a pissing release
from her careful modulations
that somehow let her broken
heart go safe at last & saying
the right words to God. He seemed
to whisper the words back through
the faithful’s fountain of mouths.

I gave it a try. You had to pretend
you were dreaming. That it was OK
to fly. You stepped out on the tongues,
believing that wherever you babbled
turned holy. It always stood on a
buttery slope where you could equally
cry as break into a laugh. You could
only believe, as clouds carve ice
mansion in the sky.

To this day when I lower pen to paper
I pause, and remember that flow, sure to get
down what I don’t know. That’s how it works.
You really don’t.And like those people
talking in tongues, I may speak in
the language of angels—or simply join
in the congregation’s wholesome fraud.
The effort is silly. It flies.



FRENCH KISS

2003

Sometimes the ink
is pure glossolalia,
the skull-babble
of a dozen tongues
all crashing in the surf
I send to God.
Heart-prayers have
a voice which words
as they are used
all fail, and so it
skips the sounds,
like a stone, over
the waves, freed
of root in sense or
meanings my dry
usages ascribe.
The heart wells
up a torrent which,
unblocked by
dayside will, rises
a wild fountain
which drowns the
world in Yes.
Joyce released his
pen that way in
Finnigans Wake,
a "scherzarade
of one's thousand
one nightinesses"
-- a 17-year effort
to plumb the words
of dream. Its
prose is incoherent,
a fabulous babble
which washes
every page with
thunder. It
"truck his spickle
through his
spoke, disappeared
... from the sourface
of the earth, that
austral plain he
had transmarried
himself to, so
entirely spoorlessly
... as to tickle
the speculative to
all but opine ... that
the hobo ... had
transtuled his funster's
latitat into its
finsterest interrimost."
Yeah whatever he
he said, or spouted.
Surely such joys
have a riverish
gush, spring
boldened, lusty in
the crash of early
love's fool errands,
believing no thighs
unparted, no height
not swimmable --
I recall spring '82
when some woman
took me on the wings
of rock n roll
fantasy, asking for
a ride home from
the club and then
commanding me pull
over, tearing free
our clothes & then
fucking me in that
cramped Datsun
as savage as some
Scylla, hauling up
a torrent which lathered,
soaked, crashed,
spurned and then
nearly drowned us both
for a month or so.
One Saturday morning
I woke in that
bed I called (provisionally)
my own, with gum
in my pubic hair (she
parked it there) and
my words suddenly
unhinged, "rollicking,"
"verb-mated with lust,"
as if a thousand nunlike
nouns had all been
fucked silly and were
now sprinting with
merry devils on the lawn,
mewling and shrieking
Hell Yes. Certainly
sex as I desire
lubricates the jaw,
loosening a wavelike
torrent meant (I
think today) to circle
Her sweet ankles
and free all her bows
to the undertow
I'll never row.
Then (I also think
today) that sex goes
underground, freed
from mortal hips, so
to speak, to chase
Eurydices within and
the snakes she
augurs there. The
Pythoness was
maddened by Delphic
gasses rising from
the cracked floor,
her words vomiting
in a flow no man
could quite understand,
a chum of vowels
reddening the holy
blue, rousing appetites
which fin and maw
and chomp and chew
-- blah blah blah,
I usually think
about this time,
conscious how I've
gone on and on.
No poem's done, just
emptied of its
heart -- all
verbiage leashed, the
white shore bright
again, naked of Her
though I'm sure
she still calls me there,
standing in a shimmer
of my summer heat,
a curve of tongue
and home, her eyes
blue as my wife's,
our cat's, the dawning
day's -- a pale serene,
all the wings of
heaven once more
bathed & swathed
in aquamarine.




... think again of your own backward back ward, nursing and sitting with it, dwelling upon it, tracing the invisible mystery in it, letting compassion come for your own chronic disorder -- this all slows down your progress, moves you from future thinking to essential thinking about our nature and character, upon life’s meaning and death’s, upon love and its failure, upon what is truly important, and upon the small things in words, manners, act, necessitated by the limitations of your inescapable disorder. We begin to hear differently, watch differently, absorb more sensitively. Confronted with the unbearable in my own nature, I show more trepidation -- which is after all the first piece of compassion. In regard to others my manners alter, my language more attuned and precise. I become more sophisticated and artful -- as a cat steps, a bird perceives, a dog follows invisibles in the air. I look to arts for understanding, to ritual for enactments, and to the lives of men and women of the past and how they come through. I need something further than community and civilization, for they may be too human, too visible. I need imaginal help from tales and images, idols and altars, and the creatures of nature, to help me carry what is so hard to carry personally and alone. Education of sensitivity begins in the back ward, culture in chronic disorder.

-- James Hillman, "Cultural Disorder,"



***

LANGUAGE

2002


can almost mean
and frightening that it does not quite.
— Jack Gilbert

Yesterday the market fell
390 points. The economy
is recovering but the market
hasn’t accepted that yet
the official wisdom went,
though quietly we now accept
that the emotional ebullience
of investors can swing
both ways and hard.

Log that first.

And it was hot as the dickens
yesterday afternoon, huge hands
pressed down from the sky
to smash us flat and then
tore the air from our lungs.
After five days of this the pressure
dome had erased every feature
of the sky: so when it rained later,
hot drops issued from
a bleary wash above.

That’s two.

Finally when I got home
from work my wife was
assembling a puzzle
trying not to think about
needing a job and dreading
the thought of teaching
hormonally deranged middle
school kids. I kissed her
head but she didn’t say
anything back.

What keeps all
this reportage from
journalling or journalism
is that each facet of
the actual day is a verse
for this book of
lamentation, education,
and repair, the Real Magoo,
not just self-obsessed
and revenantly lyric poo ‘n’ goo.
I write these lines because,
as Williams says, men die
each day for lack of
the right words to say.
Surely I go that way
though screaming all the way.
Of course vanity and
habit are equal spurs.
But the cynic only has
one end and I won’t go there,
girlfriend: The world is
always difficult, but then
it always also disappears
into this hour, this dawn.
I’m like a cat in the window
soaking it up, mewling
at the birds, doing
what comes naturally
in the making of the lines
between the actual’s
too-sharp, almost vicious
tines. Hot again
today -- yardwork to do—
& I must review the
check ledger balance
to make sure
we can pay the bills.
Later we drive down to
my sister’s to celebrate
my mother’s
75th birthday with
relatives I hardly know
any more. Perhaps if the
job fair didn’t go too
corrosively on her mood,
my wife will joins us too,
the first anyone in
my family has seen her
in two years. I don’t praise
the living by signing it,
nor sing of loving
but by living it,
day by difficult
by absolutely perfect day.
What words can I
possibly lay down here
to adaquately express how
wonder gets mired in
the sweatshops of the every day?


***


The Irish received literacy in their own way, as something to play with. The only alphabet they'd ever known was prehistoric Ogham, a cumbersome set of lines based on the Roman alphabet, which they incised laboriously into the corners of standing stones to turn them into memorials. These runelike inscriptions, which continued to appear in the early years of the Christian period, hardly suggested what would happen next, for within a generation the Irish had mastered Latin and even Greek and, as best they could, were picking up some Hebrew. As we have seen already, they devised Irish grammars, and copied out the whole of their native oral literature. All this was fairly straightforward, too straightforward once they'd got the hang of it. They began to make up languages. The members of a far-flung secret society, formed as early as the late fifth century (barely a generation after the Irish had become literate), could write to one another in impenetrably erudite, neverbefore-spoken patterns of Latin, called Hisperica Famina, not unlike the dream-language of "Finnegans Wake" or even the languages J. R. R. Tolkien would one day make up for his hobbits and elves.
Nothing brought out Irish playfulness more than the copying of the books themselves, a task no reader of the ancient world could entirely neglect. At the outset there were in Ireland no scriptoria to speak of, just individual hermits and monks, each in his little beehive cell or sitting outside in fine weather, copying a needed text from a borrowed book, old book on one knee, fresh sheepskin pages on the other. Even at their grandest, these were simple, out-of-doors people. (As late as the ninth century an Irish annotator describes himself as writing under a greenwood tree while listening to a clearvoiced cuckoo hopping from bush to bush.) But they found the shapes of letters magical. Why, they asked themselves, did a B look the way it did? Could it look some other way? Was there an essential B-ness? The result of such why-is-the-skyblue questions was a new kind of book, the Irish codex; and one after another, Ireland began to produce the most spectacular, magical books the world had ever seen.

-- Thomas Cahill, How The Irish Saved Civilization



SCRIPTORIUM

2002


The scriptorium of the Sixth Century
was a cold, dark and brute room
where copyists inked their ecstasies
amid the bitterest rigors—reeking
sheepskin, claw-hand so carefully
moving across the page, each line
a curragh voyage from I to Thou.
Each copy of a book exacted a
raw chunk of someone’s life.
Nothing’s changed though
conditions have much improved:
I sit in an easy chair in the soft
augers of the early day, bright lamp
over one shoulder, cup of coffee
to my left; but it’s still pen in
hand and the next blank line
in this journal, embellishing
a text whispered in my ear
by one of those dirty angels
gone to dust long ago
when from so little came
ineffably more: voices like
a soundboard rising
from an invisible floor,
from a distant, gnashing shore.
The huts of the copyists
were built that way,
according to the lines of
the more ancient Poet’s House,
rooms of total darkness
where the master inscribed
all history in the
ears of his craftsmen,
line by patient line,
tale by tale,
life after life.
This hand is freighted
by a thousand older hands,
this ink an hourglass measure
of far immenser sands.

***


BLUE BOOK

2005

Each day I write a poem to
press in Your blue book,
my salt scrivener, so that
angel brogue of wildest seas
may once again be
heard inside pale days.
That’s all. In my dream I
found glass cabinet in a lost
corridor of a pressroom,
the metal frame long oxidized
by salt & the glass almost
blurred from all the years of
ink hurled from this pen.
Inside I saw upon a shelf
three shapes of glass, chalices
or hurricane lamps or glass
reliquaries like miniature
cathedrals. All of it is
worth saving here, each
a host, a wave, a belfry.
Yesterday started with every
engine of spring at full pour
with warm sun and breezes
suggesting something more
as I planted salvia and pentas
and kalanchoe in the garden,
my hands happiest to sing
in dirt without the pen.
The front came through
quickly and by one p.m.
I was hurrying in the last
plants in full rain with
thunder cracking overhead.
My wife cursing in the back
yard, all her painting
projects spoiled. Later
that afternoon I was
in my study typing in the
day’s poem when my wife
walked up behind to mock
what I’d just said; I turned
and grabbed her as she
giggled and fought to get
away & I buried my face
in her breasts biting on
a hardened nipple which
surpised us both. Some
Godawful Christian concert
somewhere in town, a singer’s
operatic steeple yowling
“How Great Thou Art”
so loud I could barely
feed the cats on the
back porch. My wife went
to bed early, zonked
on a PM sinus pill &
me joining her not long
after to our bedroom
blue with hard moonlight,
our Siamese curled into
my wife’s behind & purring
loudly as I petted her
and my wife, listening
to the sounds of Saturday
night near and far, voices
from a neighbor’s house
talking about something
indistinct and further
out some party music
weaving in faint roars
of cars and cycles
seeped in testosterone.
All of it liquifying &
draining down into
those glass vessels I
praise here in the last
lines of this poem
which is Yours to publish
in Your book or feed it
to the fish in abysses
far below or feather that
angel’s wing that will
fly when I am done.




The Latin word textus comes from the verb meaning, "to weave," and it is in the institutionalizing of a story through memoria that textualizing occurs. Literacy works become institutions as they weave a community together by providing it with shared experiences and a certain kind of language, the language of stories that can be experienced over and over through time as the occasion suggests. Their meaning is thought to be implicit, hidden, polysemous and complex, requiring continuous interpretation and adaptation.

-- Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory


***

SHOP TALK

2001

No students came through
the Writing Center last night,
so Lolly and I talked long
about the struggles between
creation and relation
and the bruised and bloody
border we inhabit between
those worthy realms of heart.
Difficult indeed to lay
claim to some work
that is our own (free enough
of ego and a puerile need
to master) and show much
measure of it in the daily
round. —Small results year
after year and always a call
in the woods to go naked and
alone into that blueblack fire.
There is much to love: kids,
cats, spouses, houses, the
flora a fabric of need and growth.
It is a rhythm we each said
we could give ourselves wholly to
were it not for this damned
water music within which
we cannot ignore: And so
the balancing act of
giving due to doing both,
accommodations and compromise
in every waking hour. Two horses
test the limits of our
patience and surrender.
Election of the life and the work:
resident of duple worlds,
our citizenship in each is
always muddy with ache
and frustration. We say
that the imperfect is our paradise,
a vale of soul-making
from which angels and
wolverines choir their
random antiphons.
So be it. Came the eventual
hour to say goodnight,
and so on our own
ways we sped, back to
varied homesteads of
the heart in the
territory between
settlement and wild,
back to the dear work
which counts so little
in the end and makes
all the difference in the world.


SHOP TALK (2)

2001

This pen and paper dance
is only that -- balletic
transcriptions of heart
and brain, an interface
both tangible and torn.
This pen obeys the hand
which makes words out
of a water which currents
toward one compass point
one day. Who knows what
that next poem will be about:
I rarely do, until the writing’s
done. Nor do most poems
master their themes:
Two hundred fifty
starts this year but
only a dozen or so
have been worked into
the middles which intimate
some more articulate end.
Perhaps I’ve only learned
to light a fire, and must
turn my efforts to tendering.
To learning how to winnow
out all the faults of
syntax and rhyme; carpenter
strong joints and masts;
revise the heart into
what it meant to say the most.
And beyond all that, there’s the
getting poems to the most
eyes and ears — Well, it’s
obvious now how much more
work there is to do. Foundations
count as far as they go, but
no more: These articulate
scribblings pawn across the board
in liege to a greater fortune
than I’ve yet to name.
Some day I’ll seize the heart
of the heat of the seize
of the soil of the soul.
Today it’s only writing
and weeding, watching the
day’s wavelets roll on,
surmising the wonder
just once before it’s gone.