A Pelt of Beaches

Among the Transbaikal Tungus a child is selected and brought up to be a shaman. After a certain amount of preparation he undergoes the first trials; he has to interpret dreams, demonstrate his ability in divination, and so on. The most dramatic moment comes when the candidate, in ecstasy, descrdibes just what animals the spirits will send him so that he can make a costume from their pelts. Long afterward, when the animals have been hunted and the costume made there is a new assembly; a neindeer is sacrificed to the dead shaman, the candidate puts on his costume, and he peforms a “great shaman song.”

— Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstsay

***

... Suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice in that untempted life presenting undisquieting problems, invested iwth an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

— Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer: An Episode from the Coast”

***

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghoslier demarcations, keener sounds.

— Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order At Key West”


***

A PELT OF BEACHES

Feb. 17, 2006

I spent years pickling my
noodle in the wantons
of hi-proof woe, sitting on
barstools so singular in
my dement. For many
years after I’ve been
rolling my tongue in the brine
of those rude waters, as
if the later reveries
are the true brogue I was
angling for in rolled
and crashing booze.
What’s changed except
the angle of derange,
my collapsing narrowed
to the hips of a paper song,
fucking to its harrows
a night now ages long?
Poem after poem I’ve
assembled the pelts
of the animated tribe
that taught me the breakage
inherent in low swoon,
furry jezebels with mewly
voices who unzippered
me to the ravages
a pure and naked night
no waking brain can measure
nor aging man occlude.
What I’ve become is
an amalgram of their
their dank hot closures,
my pursuit as wide
as the state of Florida
and long as the state
of its disease, plunging
down and through
the gap in sense and
all stability, clasped
by the knees of crashing
seas. This is carnal knowledge,
gleaned from a book
whose pages are composed
by all those panties lost
in the covers of a drowned
bed, an unbrassiered sapience
where sun and moon swing
high in feral unison
across undying skies.
This long beach I wake
and walk is pounded by sighs
lucent and brilliant and torrential
all at once—and that is just
the visible part of its heart,
a marge of risible blue.
My coutre is pure accoutrement,
an outre fizz down champagne
necks uncorked so many
poems back the buzz and
thrash have ebbed far
down, as oolites of
an ululation long
jacked of all elation,
ossifying salt to stone,
my bride’s election to
a far stouter realm
which throngs the oldest
mead-hall where all
eternity comes to drink.
I’m just a motley maudlin
still mooning in the surf,
pruned to leather by
the sun, no longer the brown
child of summer I once
sought to become
but some merry older mentor,
my dominion autumn tropics.
I write here with one hand
on the surf-pole and the
other in my shorts,
both fishing for the gill god
who still roars and rears and snorts
the songs of summer’s spleen.
I am the fool of ten thousand
barstools who’s still knocking back
the tide, my thirst for her so deep
no bottle, song, or woman is
wide enough to slake
the salt germanes I ride.
Not even the sea is wild
enough to pelt the beaches
I here wear though
it must somehow suffice,
shoring once again
that brutaller tensed blue
which serenely sirens You.


***

MOTHER OF PEARLS

2002


Brilliant sands reach back
toward a distant shimmer
where I recall white afternoons
and your voice above the sea’s.
Weaned in that bright music,
I have always loved words
which sing of that relation,
each line a surf between
you and I, cresting and curving
into us in foaming chords of joy.
Each poem I write is a pearl
sown from that cerulean wash,
a beach of adulation.
No wonder I ate all that sand.
I’m a voice now of that
restless, crashing land,
reaping your white songs
grain by patient grain,
the rest of my life long.

***


BAPTISM

2003

A low voice crooned in his ear:
a bittersweet song it was, passing-sweet,
passing-bitter.
— Fiona McLeod, “The Washer of the Ford”

At 13 I was baptized in the Atlantic
off Melbourne Beach by pentacostals,
an occasion which was strangely
perfect in its timing. Months earlier
I’d been given a tract which showed
the hells of sin: a blue novella of once-

good people deceived by pleasure into
grave of boozy sex and all the fanged
conceits which fork there, ending up
in the halls of pitch and apostate ire.
It scared the Bejezus into me just when
I was ready at last for the world: puberty

had just slammed its flaming wreck into
me, adding three inches of height, burning
off my childhood fat, curling out a brimstone
beard pubic hairs, lowering my voice a
gravelly half-octave.Poised at last for the
eternal pleasures of youth, their infernal

consequences bared their canines wide,
revealing an endless maw. Terrified of
punishment I fell on my knees and gave
myself to the God of the group who’d
passed the track. It was with these people
that I now drove out to Melbourne Beach

on a warm morning in early June, two months
from my 14th birthday. We sang Christian
songs in that packed station wagon, the windows
rolled to a predawn lurid Florida smelling of
citrus, death, and the sea. I was flanked by two
virginal girls, a chaste inch between our bathing

suited bottoms, literally just enough to spare
the devil’s bray. Still, when the car rolled over
a dead mole or ‘dillo, the jot caused the left girl’s
left breast to bounce against my arm, and
the chorus in the car turned to a drone while
I felt that deeper music thrum, the hard rock

of rages which was all thirst, all sweet, all
consummation. Parked on the beach at last
we exploded from the car like colts, sprinting
in joy toward a surf which curled and broke
in the glass of first light. Somehow I managed
to leap and come down on the very spot where

some manowars were buried, leeching my soles
in ocean fire. For an hour while the others romped
and bodysurfed I lay on a picnic table in pure
agony. I prayed God forgive me for the imp inside
me and gave thanks that I didn’t have the chance
fall further in that surf. When I was well enough

to walk, I was led to the surf where the service
began — standing waist high in cerulean, warm
surf with the sun just up from the east, still red
with first birth, the pastor next to me with eyes
shut tight, praying in tongues and then shifting
to English to say God bless this new son. He then
he tipped me back into the water and held me there —

only for a second or so — but while I was under
a cleansing wave passed over and through me, calm
and eternal and silently true. To this day, I swear
it was one of the closest moments I’ve had with God.
Or gods, since the wave passed under me as well,
washing me of every wrong and blessing of my darkest,

deepest joys — angel and imp, agape and eros, spirit
and soul married in that douse which washed through
and then passed and I was hauled back up spluttering
while the others clapped and praised God. The sun
continued to climb in the sky, hot and beckoning,
as the rollers sprawled in again and again and again,

curving and smashing and hauling back our blent blood,
waxing and ebbing, cleansing us in the sea’s feral mud.

***

IS THIS LOVE THAT I’M FEELIN’?

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000


Summer 1980:
Luckless with
musicians
and more
enamored of
what blossomed
after the sun
fell in the Gulf,
I traded my
Music Man
for a stereo:
That’s the
way most of
my art has
gone: flaccidly,
the heart root
never strong
or disciplined
enough to rise
up through current
realities into
the lush verdant
creations above:
Believing as all
children do
that art like
love and money
is supposed
to be effortless:
Once, after
closing down
some luckless
BO Bottomfeeders,
I drove to
Cocoa Beach &
drank coffee
at an I-Hop
til dawn, then
walked on the
beach at first light:
waves rustling
shoreward
in cerulean
pink swells
before the rising
sun: I walked
ankledeep
in warm water
with my shirt
off & jeans
cuffed high as
they would go,
my head filled
with Pat Travers’
version of that
Bob Marley tune
that goes
is this love
is this love
is this love
that I’m feelin ...
And my mood
was mysteriously
question and
answer, strange
because I was
alone and feeling
wonderful: kicking
at gentle waves
with the
eternally lost
and present muse,
the morning breeze
lifting my bleached
blonde hair: Surely
something would
come of this,
I thought,
and did:
Some guy spotted
me from a condo
balcony and
invited me up
for some butt:
A girl up ahead
chased by
cops as she
ran into the
surf screaming
uncontrollably:
surfers batting
around in 1 foot
waves & families
unscrolling from
station wagons
& gulls on
the prowl for
whatever: but
no Becky, ever:
I nearly passed
out driving
my car back
to Orlando
through 50 miles
of superheating
hopeless &
endless scrub
& saw palmetto:
nearly joined
Becky there:
There was
nothing to find
in all of
Florida but
I kept trying,
seeking, asking
the hot sun
is this love
is this love
is this love:

***

DANA BY THE SEA

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000


Summer 1983:
How can it be
that one so in
love with the
plural curves of
a woman which
lavish the day
would find it
so difficult to
be round one
for any length
of time: Dana
and I drove
to Daytona
Beach for the night
in mid-August,
finally time
away from
work and my
band—all
the cumbrances
which I bowered
us in — The
Sheraton Hotel
we stayed in
rife with beer
soaked assholery
all night (vomit
in the elevator
and hall), Dana
outraged at all
the violations
of her Roman cool:
But our room
was nice, 8
floors up &
looking over that
sea which
tongue-and-
grooved my
oceanic need
curl after
heartbreaking
curl: Pushed
Dana back on
the bed late
afternoon with
“Fantasy Island”
on TV: Pulled
off her shorts
& panties &
licked her
pussy along a
long gradient of
slowly mounting
fire, her pubic
hair trimmed
into a pert V
& lips like
glistening pink
gum: She hitting
her peak right
at the moment
that squeak
Herb Villechenze
grunted something
in pig French
on the TV
making her come
come come: I
was trying to
hurry up so
I didn’t have
to hear that guy
she panted, amazed
at how much
lather she built
on my face
averting the
dwarf’s (her
dad was a midget
of sorts, guy
with fake legs
who took ‘em
off to dance on
the bed with
Dana & her
sister: A rare
vulnerable
moment with
her when the
needy child came
up from the
gap to clutch
me desperately:
But laying there
as she returned
the flavor of
gasoline and
sun by swallowing
down my cock
with a sea of
spit and cupping
my balls in a
palm I found
myself too far
out to sea with
no guitar to
paddle: All
my own defenses
against yielding
to a woman’s
way now too
far inland she
slathered &
slithered my
red dong for
all she was worth:
She knew she
had me by the
balls: Knew
she would never
have to suck
so deeply again,
never have to
swallow: I
wanted to just
lay there &
drowse afterward
between the sound
of the surf
& her breath on
my belly but
she was done
with sex & wanted
to shower, dress
up, eat, go see
some bands with
me ever in tow:
Two hours in
the john &
another hour
finding a restaraunt
& two hours
just standing in
a club while bad
bands tried to
play A-list rock,
all of it seeming
so far away, so
casually strange:
The males of
my dad’s line
are all triple
dicked, farm
boys too ruddy
for their own
good: Great grandpa
David gave the
neighbor’s wife
a quarter for sex
& played a fiddle
so sweetly he
got inside a
lotta ladies
knickers: Burnt
his fiddle one
day in some
passing mood
of guilt: fathered
12 kids: One
of em my
grandpa William
Senior loved that
sex but refused
to father much:
Forced my grandma
to have 7 or
so abortions:
Just my dad
and his sister
survived & they
were separated
by 8 years:
My dad loved
that male monster
so much he carried
on with me in
a closet for
years only
having sex with my
mother at the
full moon when
he was drunk
& most weakened:
I’m a “soft male”
by Bly’s definition,
sucker for a
suckling breast:
Prone to losing
all my edges in
a woman’s curves:
Can surrender
or defend against
but never find
a way to live
in the middle
ground of
briared roses:
Without a
guitar for one
weekend in ‘83
I found myself
too close to the
ocean & in thrall
with a woman
who was cool &
cruel & beautiful
as we watched
some band play
wretched metal
while I drank
beers & she drank
Cokes & we talked
of forming our
own band &
touring the world
over: The next
day we woke
with the sound of
the sea washing
in our bodies with
a salty sigh but
Dana would have
none of the
oceanic equivalents
I offered her
along the length
of my aching cock:
Instead we went
down to lay
out on two deck
lounges by a
pool amid a
hundred others
nursing hangovers
& surrendering
to the pagan
sun, Van Halen
blasting from a
big PA & the
ocean far behind,
mute as all the
old passionate
loves that fell
in it: everything
drowned out
by heavy metal
and the pedestrian
airs of Relationship:
O I couldn’t
wait to get back
to Orlando &
to the cold solace
of my ice Jaguar
and the company
of men who
resist women,
flinging our axes
at the moon &
waiting for them
to fall:

***

WAVE PSALM

2003

I did not return from
that beach a sane man,
happy and free: the
wave that caught me
a dozen yards out
was greater than any
I imagined in my
cold rooms, darker too,
though at root pure
blue: It toppled and
then smashed me
in its marled collapse,
grinding my face in
her packed sand.
Raw and bleeding
with a mask of
salt smarts, I rose
to strand in that
vespering surf,
a man no longer in
love with his summer
verbs, rather a lover
now whose cross
crests and breaks
two million times
a day. My scarred
length is a vocable
hurled on a tongue
of salt insatiety;
each morning when
I spout these lines
they bleed an
abyssal ire, a chum
of Moby Dick, Maeldun,
and that Roxy tune
which goes “I will
drink my fill/Till the
Thrill is You.” It’s
a wet ill cocquina walls
can never quite hold
back, much less heal.
I have no idea where
this poem is going,
yet such voyaging
is my oar and compass,
tracking inward from
one sea’s way of
knowing (all grapple,
anchor, harpoon)
into a wavelike,
dark blue gnosis,
gathering up whatever
drift in from
the next salt door,
holding it high
to whisk its white foam,
smash it on today’s
paling shore, and
retrieve and hold
what so achingly
ebbs through my
hands, milking that
sad long kiss
as it slowly fades
to a thundering hiss.



***

BAPTISED AT EBB TIDE

2005

I was baptised at ebb-tide
on the last day of my childhood;
the receding wave which
caught me there has ferried
me at last to here, a man
both of the shore-walking world
and of waters brined by God
with salt’s hard misery,
stinging every bliss with
a bottomless undrinkable.
Your ebbings have defined
my ways, always leaving
me alone to name the flood
which drowned every bed
I’d shored on nights before,
filling my mornings with
that empty dripping soft
blue door still resonant
with the cantakerous roar
which wakened in our kiss.
Each beach-song I
carve here is a nautilus
of your curvelike curse,
woven in the rounded way
you turned to me then
turned away; curvelike
the song rounds down
through the misery of
dry and drier nights
grinding down, like old
sand poured through
a wave-smoothed glass,
into these roundelays
of surflike refrains
upon a paper strand
where verbals wash, leaving
me at last again at the far
white end of every beach
you woke me on. On those
fragile magic sands
I leave this shell-seeming shell
for you to find again,
long after I have washed
out to ring the bronze of hell.
How best to return
the wave that bittersweetened
all with its cathedral
rise and smash
careening wild in foam
than to harrow full
the quiet draw in
every pre-dawn dark,
recalling every man
baptised at ebb who
drowned in love’s
reclaiming wave?
Such dead are like
seaweed at low tide,
green glyphs of
what remains, drained
and flattened of
their former flout
of spermatic equine fire:
Read me in that wild
blue latinate the
same tenor which
the selkies sing from
their black rocks,
of sea and shore
dreams inked. I am
a man long ebbed
from North Sea smash
where just the song
of foam remains,
stingingly unrepentant
in the wilderness
of that recede which
wombs the next blue
to drown the likes of me
in you.


***

BLUE IN GREEN

2002


The song enters
gently, almost
painfully so:

Bill Evans on piano
washing in the
night’s minor chords
toward a shore
with no resolution,
blue rollers composed
of the lightest,
most fragile notes,
hesitant as all
who stand at midnight’s door
with so much flowing in
from the night:

And then Miles enters
on trumpet almost too late
in the progression,
not quite an afterthought
but still way after what
ever could have mattered,
that emphysemic
horn thin and spectral
over the wash of minor chords,
hovering like fog over the surf’s
embarcations, wedging us
between what’s
half in and
half out that door
we all hesitated at,
turning for a last long
look back on all we loved and lost
and then lost even more:

There’s no real name for it,
but the feeling is blue in green,
the bittersweet thrall
inside sweet sound;
not the sweetness, but
the crash of that sweetness
when it’s forever gone.

Evans never loses his infinite
restraint throughout,
strolling out those calm,
almost-suicidal progressions
of minor beachside ennui
over which Miles sighs and
sings with a breezy, diffident,
nearly frozen reserve.
Together they weave and sum
the night’s concessions
and conceits,
none of them good or even
passing for a temporary stay
against the facts of dissolution.
Back and forth they
toss that rigorous tao,
ever returning us to
this hard shore:

Then like a long ache
quenched in a needle’s whiteout,
Davis fades off, leaving Evans
to finish things:
The piano climbs that
trellis of sad chords
once more, reaching an even
higher, almost
impossible—
no—
irretrievable height: —then spills
back down
the clef to us
in a quick play
of gorgeous
major thirds,
just as waves will travel
across the world only
to collapse on the shore,
scattering jewels
at our feet before
hauling them all away
in a last low ebb
of minor chords:

“Blue In Green” names
that hard night’s surf
where we lose more than
we ever love, and in so
descending find
that harsh blue door
which scatters us
on a distant
emerald shore.


***


CRYSTAL SHORES

2004


Again and again I walk
these crystal shores
where you and I
once met and since
and ever dream.
The tide here is swift
and vast and
septiernally one to one
in its scrolling psalter
of wave after wave,
each one curved and curled
with your every latent
lucency, each one
crashing to crystal
smithereens on that
pale sand, erasing
the prints our feet
left behind. I voyage
every day day from this
white chair to that
pale shore where night
hauls back its sheets
revealing the palest of
pale blues around your
ankles, like moon-glazed
wavelets of ice or
the filaments of your eyes
which lit on me and lured
me out to drown the bottom
of all seas. All that remains
today is the music of that
motion at the wild
shore of an ocean
I’ll never see again,
much less walk hand
in hand ensouled with you.
I became the man you
dreamed you saw
that high cathedral night,
a rogue wanderer
no more, by days the
firm husbandman of love,
in early morning matins
a monk writing down
a crystal-seeming sound
on pages that go deeper
and beyonder than
I ever had real balls to go.
Your fantasy became
the phantasm who burned
through all my years
like a torch, leading me
beyond those ghostly
ghastly wastes where
you never to be found
into this shire of wet
surrender where you
are so meltingly afoot,
so fleetingly agleam.
Here the moon of our
imagined history ignites
each massive wave
I ride toward you
& the smashing tumult of
that foam keeps that
heart—or its memory— alive.
I’m happy to leave you
here with the offshore breeze
flinging your soft hair
& my song secreted
away inside your black
silk selkie’s thunder-
underwear: To shut
the covers of this
bone-white book
and head upstairs
to join my wife in bed,
telling her how much I
love her as I slowly
stroke her feet: And let
the day slowly wash
in through our big windows
to name our married
day where I’m growing older
and have so much work
left to do. That jazzy
blue periphery that you
and I walked once
is the sweet and simple
liturgy I daily ring, like a
crystal angelus. Lauding
each wave’s kiss of
noctilucent noir, adding
it to that one, incessant,
vastly booming choir.


THE POEM AS
A BEACH BEFORE DAWN

2004

The ancient image of Our Lady in
the Lady Chapel in the Church of
Notre Dame at Granville in Normandy
was found on the shore of Cap Lihoo.
It was set up in its own chapel, and is
still the focus of a pardon on the last
Sunday in July called “Grand Pardon
des Corporations et de la Mer.”

— Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes

My job as I see it is to vigil the matins
of this waking summer shore and receive
what the sea deigns to return to me:
To sing each day’s arrival with the tide,
building a white chapel in which a
freight grows sacred and is altared,
incensed, believed, hosanna’d. I never
know just what I’ll find here — a dream
perhaps, or some memory loosed
from the well, or a resonant bit of story.
I let the sea decide. I just walk here
on the moony sound while the surf
crashes silver milk at my feet, nursing
my inner ears and eyes. And even that’s
imagined as I sit in this chair in my
house squat in town, the dark outside
a cat’s attentive drowse. My job is to
make of that a beach I walk, and believe
I’ll find down its sandy lane the very
shape the next song needs. See: there
ahead a clump winnowing a receding
wave: the beached masthead of
a long-split ship, trailing in her hair,
a bit of barnacle kissing her faded lip.
She was carved two centuries ago
from the likeness of Our Lady in
which was washed ashore two centuries
before, a rebirth of the mother of the
Celtic gods, herself found in a tide-pool
three thousand years before, delved
from goddesses whose names drowned
many thousand years further back.
But their tidings all remain, as well
the shore which here washes down
the lengths of journal-paper. My job
is to hear that surf inside and give it
here a beach where devotees like me still
walk in the nuptials of the coming day,
my pen across the page the wet part
of the sea, what she bids shore in me.

wave rave

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

The present/
Autumn 1985:
The wave the sea
woman dashed
on me in the
welcome of
a few melusines
has baptized me
into a curve
and curl, an
arch foam
ache and break:
I accept today
that such loves
may have only
been moonbeams,
faulty ego
boundaries &
juvenile whim:
But the wave
itself is
one of the greater
angels, a titanic
motion swelling
up to kiss the
moon: One night
many years later
I walked Cocoa
Beach with a
woman Donna’s
age long after
Donna swam away:
A full moon
high above a
surf impossibly
stirred by a
hurricane
200 miles
out to sea; Waves
like we had
never seen at
that timid beach
scrolling in
huge dark swells
& the smash
& hiss of surf
a dull pounding
blissful roar:
Silver milk
in those waves
poured from
a crazy moon
& a stiff warm
breeze blowing
through the desire
we felt for each
other but could
not, would not
touch for the ties
she kept with
another: A
dazzling night
in which we
were gifted
with a sea so
few would ever
see: Some time
after midnight
on that silvered
beach where
angels sang
brokenly & eternally
of desire and its
terrible torn
beauty we stopped
talking & listened
& looked
& touched each
other’s hand, just
once, hugged,
just once, kissed
for a second then
turned to go:
I wrote a poem
on it and later
set the night
to music on
a keyboard
synthesizer (no
guitar could
suffice, I’ve learned)
tolling these
slow sure chords,
Emaj7 - Cmin7
F#min7 - Amaj7,
composing wave
after wave
of basso bellows
& swelling strings
& dazed dreamy
overtones caught
in the suck and
the roar of
a remembered night:
O I’m still
desperate to
describe the wave
of the sea woman
rising in me
in you impossibly
high fraught
with the ache
and plunge of
perfect union,
sure in its
rhythm & pulse
& chording &
broken utterly
when cusp trembles
foams & turns
down at the
moment of coming
falling weightless
for aeons in a
sheer glass curve
collapsing in a
smash and a
roar into oblivion:
I’m 43 now
and doubt
any such wave
does more than
shipwreck &
estrange us from
all we build and
strive for in
such difficulty:
No marriage
abides by such
a wave, no
poems or songs
ever summon
it truly back &
it’s an utterly
selfish amoral
unworthy
unwholesome
surrender no
one else in the
world gives
one tiny turd for:
Yet I desired
her & she kissed
me with that wave
& I can’t stop
this furious scrawl
down the page
mounting this
babel of joy:
Yesterday in
the spinning class
the instructor
was both lovely
& cruel, asking
us to pedal
harder faster up
an impossible
slope: It was
then that I truly
saw the wave I here
praise, this fearsome
nor’easter of a
swell curving
up high high
and higher,
mountainous to
moon: Oh
the teacher was
almost beyond
my heart & I
almost gave out
toward the end,
staying in gear
12 while she called
out 13, 14, 15:
She finally let
us go to
downshift &
pedal mad down
the hill & then
slow & slow
& slow till we
pedalled air
in sleepy arcs:
Of course she’s
this muse that
sirens me out
of too little
sleep & then swims
out just beyond
the tip of this
pen singing, “Come—”:
She was in the
3 or 4 women
who for whatever
reasons undressed
me in her waters
& then drowned me:
She stands beside
the real women
I have actually
loved judging their
passions which
always melt
into a deeper
surer love &
flashes her
booty whispering
“you could have
chosen this, you
know”: I cannot
surrender to
her but I will
not let her go:
Blue green monster
rising sinister
& ecstatic toward
a shore of loins
my balls throb
and pulse for
desperate for just
one smooch of
that hopeless
homeless hocus
hooch of
coochie coo
invoked in this
Breviary, this
blue green wave
reaching for
a fruit I can
never reach,
never burst, till
death do I
truly die: Such
is the passionate
singing I can
no more forget
than the sea
can reclaim it’s
orphaned moon:
Ah desperate
I am this morning
stung and dazed
by the foam of
one wave so
fucking long ago
rising anew here:
And I’m judged
as unworthy now
as I was then:
My hands weary
& aching & tingling
& the loam of
pages fattening
into a mound,
a mountain,
a sea, a cosmos
in the hollows
of a conch, a
pale flickering
dream at the
end of a farewell
& still I can’t
name it or
claim it
nor most of
all let it go:
The woman
of the sea has
exactly what
she wished: And
I her wandering
wounded dolphin
surfer watch the
horizon and wait
for the waters to
heave the next
slow swelling chord:

Spoonin'

Shamans do not differ from other members of the collectivity by their quest for the sacred -- which is normal and universal human behavior -- but by their capacity for ecstatic experience, which, for the most part, is equivalent to a vocation.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

***

... In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and to behold.

... Just to be there, to beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

ONe likes to practice the ting. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. ...

-- Wallace Stevens, from “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu”

***

Both in North Asia and elsewhere in the world, ecstatic election is usually followed by a period of instruction, during which the neophyte is duly initated by an old shaman. At this time the future shaman is supposed to master his mystical techniques and learn the religious and mythological traditions of his tribe, often, though not always, the preparatory stage culminated in a series of cermonies that are commonly referred to as the initiation of a new shaman.

But as Shirokogoroff rightly remarks in respect to the Tungus and the Manchu, we cannot properly speak of an initiation, since the candidates have actually been initiated. Long before their formal recognition by the master shamans and the commmunity. Moreover, the same thing is true almost everywhere in Siberia and Central Asia, even where there is a public ceremony (e.g., among the Buryat), it only confirms and validates the real ecstatic and secret initiation, which, as we saw, is the work of the spirits (sickensses, dreams, etc.), completed by apprenticeship to a master shaman.

-- Eliade, ibid.

***

SPOONING THE SEA

Feb. 16, 2006

The poem comes long after
the disease of shouting light,
serving its hard-learned
and -ridden tail fresh from
still-fuming kiln of
consummation. I shall never
say what her sweet booty
mdde of me in the curvatures
of a night which shipwrecked
me here for good in a beauty’s
pure unmarged quintessence.
Her Yes was a rogue wave
that came at me out
of uncompassed dark,
folding and crashing over
me in a wall of sheer blue
shattering exalt of tumbling
foam, malting my own
forever-pent and -belfried
Yes exult exactly where that
water ebbed to silence
and was gone. Brute waters
in their purest pale curve
left me to precis their
epiphany through those
closing doors, departures
which excised my soul
from one world forever
into a salt-seeming next
with these verbal jaunts
of such baleful imprecision.
First the bliss and then
its employ gear this
poem, as both
turbine and keel,
ground and figure
rounding all the bassos
to score the winning run
by which my ever-losing
team is finally redeemed,
pennant and confetti
hurling the the lissome
spray of a homebound whale
diving all the way to here.
These saltish emulsions
are the motion’s of a heart’s
own clarifying as it
washes back and forth
that first gestalting night,
verbal propulsions which
name by islanding,
one by next by other,
all the depths her Yes
could bound if it were
ever found again.
I have learned
to make wild absence
a presence worth full savor,
as if bliss were not
a nougat but the flavor
which abounds on every
shore my shape can spoon
nudging every curvature
in this book of cheeks and
clefts, my hips and lips
and nips arraigned to
whatever next arrears,
coming to an end curled
close to her who’s here
at last at least in words,
my thrall deflated yet
still deep in her surf’s
shore-wide resound,
my hand curved round
her breast which milks
the matter by slaking
every night I slept
dreaming of her
down the loveliest of seas.
A poem is the diving board
by which I run and jump
and spring high as hurt
over a spooned sea’s
strange and glittery hard blue,
falling once again in
wild delight line by league
by salt-mine mile into
a depth which is her
pure proximity to You.





THE HUNDRED ROOTS

My God is dark, and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

—Rilke, “Book Of Hours - 2” (transl. Bly)

2002

I underwent some transformation
when I turned 30 (in1987):
quit drinking, joined AA, got married,
settled into a family, promoted to
a professional-grade job, created
a study in a back room and began
to delve deeply into poetry and
archetypal psychoanalysis and myth.
Perhaps the tumult of change
was in proportion to the readiness
to begin which had built up like
a deep loam from so many years
of waste and longing and outer futility.
My eagerness had the cayenne
bark of zeal, slashing fast and deep,
learning slow and late.
The poetry I had set aside
for almost ten years leapt up
from roots which ad grown
without my knowing it.
Bly’s translations of Rilke’s
early poems ignited an
utterly transmuted way
of seeing within and out.
How I loved the oak trees
arching over me as I walked
to work each morning: for the
first time I felt them stretching
below in equal measure to
their apparent spread above:
Such duple plumage of seen
and known had a sexual
fusing at ground level,
thick trunk plunged in
soft earth, aching length
rising skyward ... My higher
power proved a deeper one,
a sea for which I was a pale
margin, one ecstatic beach
bum of a voice. It seemed
so strange and wild and limitless—
those first two or three years
I filled journals with huge
passages of Rilke, Bly, Hillman
and Jung, my thirst for
countervaling depths so
greedy and rapacious ...
And wrongheaded—wrong-
hearted too. My marriage
seemed impossible from
the start: our fault for
not heeding wiser voices
in AA who told us to wait
and change and grow first
before presuming to know
who we should settle with.
Old ills contended inside
and between us so fast
and hot it felt like sniper fire.
My wife fought bulimia,
the kid entered
a toothsome puberty
and I fled to my study
rather than get angry or try
to articulate better
sexual needs I didn’t know
I had any right to possess
much less express.
My job was high-anx
nitro, in the maw
of a brute corporation
eating all its young.
On my lunch hour
I’d retreat to the mezzanine
in the cafeteria or
to the patio by a
fountain when it wasn’t
too hot and then read
Antonio Machado
and Graves’ White Goddess
and Ulysses—clutching
roots which empowered me
to see far within but
could not help me
fight or cry or fuck.
I was as doomed as young
Rilke in Prague, who
walked about dressed
all in black and clutching
a pale lilac to his chest,
the young poet with
everything to say and
nothing do do about it.
I stayed on, grew, wrote:
entered therapy, joined
a men’s co-dependency group,
got divorced, then sick,
then better: wooed one
woman, then another,
then my current wife.
All the time I wrote,
most of it terrible,
but what else could I do?
The roots were in each shoe.


SECOND LIFE

... I know there is room in me
for a second huge and timeless life.

— Rilke, “Book Of Hours - 4”
(transl. Bly)


From such wakened
inwardness tunnelled halls
became tower walls,
one after another after another.
A great energy siloed
throughout my sad disapora
sufficient to raise a personal
Stonehenge no one may ever see.
I copied out Jung’s Symbols
of Transformation and Hillman’s
Re-Visioning Psychology. Read
Finnegans Wake (twice). Hurled
into Shakespeare’s depths
with a paper on the mythic
parallels woven into The Tempest.
Another paper brooding on
addictive adders in black Macbeth.
Wrote on male initiation patterns
and fancied myths around the
naked dolphin rider which crests
my father’s battered coat of arms.
I wondered aloud at the time
that I was trying to raise on paper
what my father was lifting in huge
stone; now I believe it was causes
and not the effects we shared
from some common heart. Each
of my efforts pitched me
into a frenzied coil of attention
and duress while I worked
my corporate job and played
at father and husband
and professed my surrender
to a Higher Power at my
AA meetings. I’d rise at
3:30 a.m. (just as now) to
wrestle with my angels and
pin some more of them down
on paper—And for who?
I never cared much if
anyone read what I created—
whether it seemed too much
of a burden or was hardly
intended for human eyes,
I cannot say. I’m not sure
now that any of it was as
much creation as a vaster
exhalation, bleeding fire
to make room for more.
Like these daily drafts
which move from heart
to pen to page and then
get typed in a hard drive,
print out for two or
three revisions and then
get booked in a notebook,
joining the common
unpublished loam.
What has changed at all
these 15 years? There’s
no art in this, it’s just
consumption, wave after wave
of a sea in the blurred meter
of gray-green immensity
and I the pounded shore
whose only option
is to get smashed up
once more. When I look
back over the dizzy
Pyranees of such
unconsolable work, I despair
of the general poverty,
the paucity of octane.
Maybe all this is the
booze still talking
through some backwards rent,
an inner shade equal to
the outer range which I
so heedlessly spent.
And thus this nonsense.
Could I drop this pen
for once and all,
cease dirtying silence
and prettifying the pale?
The last time I willed
such an act I was 21
years old, madly in
love, deserted, offering
alms before dropping
out of school. I wished
to learn a different language
from the bleary courts
of night. I vowed not to
write one more word
until I had been breasted
in the world’s tongue.
And it was a girl, almost ...
Lord, you make sense
of these paper boats
bereft of keels. I’m not
smarter for the freight
you stored up in me.
I’m chasing my tail now,
unable to find an end.
Dervish me on or off the page:
This hand is your cross,
this pen yet your rage.
Maybe I’m just passing
the buck, but I heard
once that humility is
simply giving credit
where it’s due. The song
tore from my lips
when I yet dallied
in the crib;
this poem another rib
you bid me use
to write that music down,
my loss the reed
which sings the world.


SWEET INDULGENCE

As I now re-read
Rilke’s Elegies and Sonnets
placing myself more
fully into the context
and weave of his singing
(just today I discover
that the whole first part
of the Sonnets was
written in 3 days,
hardly a line changed
and coming just when
his thought was most
focused elsewhere—
on finishing his Elegies).
I recall reading Rilke
the first time a dozen
years ago, from Bly’s
ham-handed translation
(like an overlush,
Romantic version
of Pachelbel’s Canon
in D)—in the first year
or so of my first
sobriety, out of the
wild brake of night
for the first time,
newly married, new
at looking inside,
astonished at the
undiscovered country
opening within: Walking
those ten blocks from
house to job in
downtown Orlando,
briefcase in one hand,
Bly’s volume in the other,
pouring into my morning
brian the music of
the Sonnets: It was a girl,
almost... that line
rearranging the entire
interface between word
and world into a simple
and articulate abandonment
to the insides of the
beautiful, the sayable:
It was a tidal shift from prose
to poetry, from words
about to music of.
How autumnal and still
I recall those ever-warming
mornings, my disastrous
nights receding in the
simple dawn, replaced by
bird and oak tree, a listening
which altared the clear
rising fountain of Rilke’s
poems. I was world
and Rilke my Orpheus,
my heart grown
superabundant in that
gauzy first light in
which my own poetry
would wake and take hold,
like the first grip of
a seedling. Five years I
walked to work with that
briefcase in one hand
and a book of poetry
in the other, reading the lines
out loud, instructing the
inner world—Heaney,
Gluck, Goethe, Lorca,
Aridjis, Shakespeare,
Transtormer, Oliver,
Wright, Hall, Ammons,
Auden, Blake, Nemerov,
Roethke, Dunn, Mallarme—
storing up the music
til it broke in my own voice
this way. Who knows
what’s to come of this
savagely sweet indulgence.
That is not my business.
Mine is today’s reading
of Rilke or Keats or Jack
Gilbert or someone new
to me, tolled to the fresh
turn of first light,
and the click of my pen
as I return what I heard here.
The motion has never changed
since I found my feet at last.





CHANGE YOUR LIFE

News of a tropical
storm wore down on
us yet it hardly rained —
no huge sky hammers as
forecasted. The day instead
was like all of summer’s,
bright and hot with a
slow accumulation of
late-afternoon cloud
which darkened, threatened,
grew skyward in
volcano-like hurls of bent air
and then rained elsewhere.
One distant rumble of thunder
close to evening and that was all.
We turned our attention back
to TV and slowly fell asleep,
spared the weather we
were so warned of when we woke.
Oh well: predictions of weather
are fickle as prognosticatoins
of self: we think we know
where we go but then we
find it isn’t the way we
thought to go at all.
Back in the fall of ‘94
I was sick, sick to death
though I knew not what from.
Weary to my bones with
some infernal eternal malaise,
everything slowed way down.
I could hardly make it
through the royal rages
of my corporate day;
had stopped working out;
bid my girlfriend go away;
wearied so of the depression
over my divorce that my
mood grew tidally black,
a chilling darkness which
soaked my waking bone.
Sick sick sick.
So in late October I took
a week off from my job
and from my life
and fled to my aunt
and uncle’s condo at
Port St. John just south
of New Smyrna Beach.
And commenced searching
for a root to grasp by which
I could start to pull myself up.
Some Northeaster was working
the sea further out, rendering
the surf into a hard crash
of big hooves and the sky
a mash of pewter grays.
Warm wet winds, the occasional
scarf of sunlight breaking through
no longer sharp with summer,
autumn in Florida settling in at
last. I slept late, drank quarts
of fresh squeezed carrot juice,
took long walks on a beach
narrowed by the storm’s erosion,
and journalled long about my
days and what might have illed ‘em.
Pulling up the same old dirty linen
I knew too well and going back
over every inch. I was 38 in
the full roar of my next, post-divorce
live, and utterly out of gas.
Worked so hard to end up there.
Afternoons I sat on a chaise
on the upper deck looking out
over that harsh sea, reading poems
aloud from Jack Gilbert’s The Great
Fires and wilding in them, my
attention like a gong and each
poem a new sally, a newly-shaped
mallet. But what I remember most
of that week is a single line from
Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.”
The poet staring at the holy madness
of that old marble (perhaps in
some museum, it leapt up at him
from a dark center: Du mußt dein
Leben ändern, “You must change
your life.” Confronted by what you
see, you must live in accordance.
Only the line came up in me this
way: “You must derange your life.”
For though I was sure to get
well if I could just remain
forever on that sea-balcony,
reading Jack Gilbert and firing
back my lines of praise,
I knew I had to drive back
to Orlando and resume my
actual life. The sea-music had
to travel along, but how? Not
simply by inhabiting a pretty
postcard-poem, but to somehow
anchor within in some regnant
phrase. I wrote the poem
“Late Autumn, Port Orange” when
I got back to town, positing
that sea-wilderness as some
motion within away from the
supreme orders and arrangements
which compose a life.
The derangement came
when I slowly stepped from bell
to hammer, warping the weave
which had steadily sickened me.
I got better by getting worse.
I went home and slowly got rid
of the girlfriend. Finished crying
my heart out over the marriage.
Started going to bars at night
drinking near-beer, listening
to music and wishing I were
drunk enough to pick up a
strange woman. Peeked at XX
websites in my cube at work.
The sickness went away,
at least that sort: I got
better deciding to take a
more dangerous fall,
as if a procreation flared
from the darkest center of it all.

Late Autumn, Port Orange

1994


There are virilities
you cannot ride
in your sleep.
Your urban moming
has no saddle for
this wild sea, nor
will such winds as these
rein to any corporate task.

No.
Something irresistible
stays here.

Watching storms batter
the tide, it's clear:
Like that raw rock
Rilke saw in Apollo's
marbled brow,
this sea's day churns
dark and urgent and cold:

You must derange
your life to save it.




ROSE IN A VASE

... And if she lifts her arms
to tie her hair, tender vase:
how much our loss gains
a sudden emphasis,
our sadness brilliance!

— Rilke, “The Windows” #1
transl. A. Poulin Jr.

Last night I dreamed
the ghost or angel of
my greatest longing
returned, or I to her.
Our tryst occurred
on some vast vacant
terrace of night—a
shoddily familiar house,
my verbs unbuckled
from too much booze,
a sense of damnation
as I pressed her back
on a blue conched bed.
O moment where wave
is tallest and ready
at last to break!
To fully believe
and wholly receive that
mad sumpage of a heart!
How foolish and wrong,
how infernally sweet!
When she vanished
I was left to succor
a wild emptiness,
my only trace of her
a pile of poems
I composed in that dark,
each line like blood
from a wound too florid
to congeal, too gorgeous to refuse.
I woke on a spit of misery,
my cock hard as history,
my wife upstairs asleep.
There was nothing to do
but get on my knees
and pray God help me
find words for what is
yet can never be.
Let some dram of that
blue wild balm
my chosen real life
of suburban difficulty.
Help me love a real woman
in all the complex
briars of old wounds.
O harpy heart, do not
abandon me to mere regret.
Help me to live in
that perpetual door
which opened when
I thought she lay back
to receive me at last.
Make of this longing
a rose in a vase
in a window. Shed
me like the blood
of that unworldly
and disastrous
perfume.

Cat Sooth

The grass is in seed. The young birds are flying.
Yet the house is not built, even begun.

The vetch has turned purple. But where is the brided?
It is easy to say to those bidden -- But where,

Where, butcher, seducer, bloodman, reveller,
Where is un and music and heaven’s highest lust,
For which more than any words cries deeplier?

This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out

of dirt .. It is not possible for the moon
to blot this with its dove-winged blendings.

-- Wallace Stevens, from “Ghosts As Cocoons”


****

THE FELINE SUBLIME

Feb. 14, 2006

It’s said that speech gives us wings
but surely they are not the moon’s,
not on so bitter cold and clear
a night as this one, where its
blue wash is too icy bronze, too
clarion for the floppy blunt
clappers my words belfry,
much less buoy on nights
when seas hardest darkest
to sound or shore.
You should hear our cat
converse her desires in this
house, articulate in all
the ways we’re not: she
tympanies her jones for treats
on our bedroom floor around
3 a.m., pounding paws as
small as padded thimbles
in a helterskelter assault
until I’m awake and roused
and about my blurry matins
here, pouring out five shakes
for her from a bag of Whiskas
Temptations. When it’s time
to claim the entire bed she’ll
pace and paw around my wife,
crossing over her sleeping
shape a couple times
& then digging at the covers,
making clear to my waking
wife that her job is now done,
warmth and scent imparted
to that pillow which Violet
claims as her own as
she sleeps throughout the day.
Very articulate and effective
and no more than a mew
from her own lips,
a mere grace note to
thundered needs. Compared
to her I’ve just one drone
for rousing God from bed,
too rude for angels’ tongues
and too tranced with blue
to properly rout the
dungeons of sand castles.
Words on paper are the
worst of ploy of all
for unbagging my cat’s heart,
black squiggles swarthy
in an abstract gout
too wide of the world’s
down dirty rhythms,
refracting the moon
in crazy-quilt whirlings,
contracting ills from
starry jisms. Ah well.
Did I tell you
how our cat will settle
in between my legs as
I fall asleep on nights
as cold as this one,
nudged close into the
heat vent of my loins,
our sleep? Or how our
sleep trances down
the same brainstem
where cat-tailed angels
purr and sing? Or how,
on bitter nights like these,
after I’ve left the bed
and she has had her
treats, she will head
back upstairs to burrow
under the covers & sleep
full against my wife’s
stomach, wombed again
at the threshold of
our difficult descending
from the animal wisdoms
we lose and squander
and forget most here, at
4:05 a.m. on the coldest
morning of the year,
snow deep in Central
Park and sprinklers
snap snap snapping
down the spines of
brittled groves, both
gleaming in the pale
moonlight, the sweetest
juice the world has yet
to freeze?

***


THE PANTHER

Rainer Maria Rilke

In 1905 Rilke moved to Meudon, France to take a job as the secretary of Rodin. When Rilke told Rodin that he had not been writing lately, Rodin's advice was to go to the zoo (the Jardin des Plantes) and look at an animal until he truly saw it.

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.
The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which a great will stands stunned and numb.
Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise
without a sound . . . then a shape enters,
slips though the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the heart, and dies.

-- transl. Stephen Mitchell

***


WOMAN AND LEOPARD

David St. John

Jardin des Plantes; the zoo.

Although she was beautiful,
Although her black hair, clipped
Just at the shoulders, glistened
Like obsidian as she moved
With that same slow combination
Of muscles as a dancer stepping
Casually beyond the spotlight
Into the staged, smoky
Blue of the shadows, it was
None of this that bothered me,
That made me follow her as she
Walked with her friends—a couple
Her age—along the wide dirt path
Leading to the island, the circle
Of cages where the cats glared
And paced. She was wearing a leather
Jacket, a simple jacket, cut narrowly
At the waist and dyed a green
I’d always coveted both in
Nature and out. It was the green of
Decay, of earth, of bronze covered by
The fine silt of the city, the green
Of mulch, of vines at the point
Of the most remote depth
In one of Rousseau’s familiar jungles;
It was that jacket I was following—
Its epaulets were torn at the shoulders;
The back was crossed by swatches
Of paler, worn horizons
Rubbed away by the backs of chairs;
Along the arms, the scars of cigarettes
And knives, barbed wire . . .
I think it was she who nailed that poster
To the wall of my small room in
The Hotel des Ecoles, an ancient photo
Of the Communards marching in a phalanx
Toward the photographer, tools
And sticks the poor
Weapons held ready in their hands.
It was a poster left up by every
Student or transient spending a night
Or week in that for-real garret,
Its one window opening out
Onto the roof, letting in both
The sunlight and winter rains, the drops
Or streams from the laundry hung to dry
At the window ledge, all of it
Running down along the poster, leaving
Streaks as ocher as the rivers crossing
The map of Europe pinned to the opposite
Wall. On the poster, faded by
Every year, those at the edge of the march
Had grown more and more ghostly, slowly
Evaporating into the sepia: half men,
Half women, half shadow. And I think
It was she in that leather jacket closing
The door to this room in May 1968 to march
With all the other students to the Renault
Factory, to plead again for some
Last unity. Those scars along the arms
Were neatly sutured in that heavy
Coarse thread that sailors use, a thread
Of the same fecund green. The woman,
Thirty-five perhaps, no more, glanced
At me; I watched
As she moved off away from her friends,
Over to the waist-high, horizontal
Steel rail at the front of the leopard’s
Cage. I moved to one side, to see both
Her face and the face
Of the leopard she’d chosen to watch;
She began to lock it into her precise,
Cool stare. The leopard sat on
A pillar of rock
Standing between the high metal walkway
At the rear of the cage, where its mate
Strolled lackadaisically, and—below
The leopard— a small pond that stretched
Almost to the cage’s front, a pool
Striped blue-and-black by the thin shadows
Of the bars. The woman stood
Very quietly, leaning forward against
The cold steel of the restraint, the rail
Pressing against the bones
Of her hips,
Her hands balled in the pockets
Of her jacket. She kept her eyes on the eyes
Of the leopard . . . ignoring the chatter of
Her friends, of the monkeys, of the macaws.
She cared just for the leopard,
The leopard tensing and arching his back
As each fork of bone pushed up
Along its spine—just
For the leopard
Working its claws along its high perch
Of stone, its liquid jade eyes
Dilating, flashing only for an instant
As the woman suddenly laughed,
And it leapt.

Pains

Music is a feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music,

-- Wallace Stevens, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”


There are also the “pains,” which are thought of both as sources of power and causes of illness. These “pains” appear to be animated and sometimes even have a certain personality. They do not have human forms, but they are thought of as concrete. Among the Hupa, for example, there are “pains” of every color; one is like a piece of raw flesh, others resemble crabs, small deer, arrowheads, and so on. Belief in “pains” is general among the tribes of Northern California, but is rare or unknown in other parts of North America.

The damagoni of the Achomawi are at once guardian spirits and “pains.” A shamaness, Old Dixie, relates how she received the call. She was already married, when, one day, “my first damagoni came to find me. I still have it. It is a little black thing, you can hardly see it. When it came the first time it made a great noise. It was at night. It told me that I must go see it in the mountains. So I went. I was very frightened. I hardly dared go. Later I had others. I caught them. They were damagoni that had belonged to other shamans and that had been sent to poison people on other shamanic errands.” Old Dixie sent out one of her own damagoni and caught them. In this way she had come to have over fifty damagoni, whereas a young shaman has only three or four. The shamans feed them on the blood that they suck during their cures. According to Jaime de Angulo these damagoni are at once real (bone and flesh) and fantasies. When the shaman wants to poison someone he sends a damagoni. “Go find So-and-so. Enter him. Make him sick. Don’t kill him at once. Make him die in a month.”

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy


DUOTONE

Feb. 11, 2006

If you’re going to write this properly
you’d better be prepared to sing it
both ways, as tone and archetypal
drone, as music cauled in conceit.
Call it a duotone of thought and heart,
black inkings of a blue’s deep skein.
A poem is thus pain and cure,
a wound’s own physic retelling
the up- and downsides of life’s
onswelling surf, where loves
and losses join in matrimony
to the strange interior lands
they took you to while you sat
imprisoned in the very self
which ligaments inside to out
as I to Thou. Here memory
finds flesh again the way first light
warmed her hair three decades ago,
so sure as delvings of creation’s
fire that my hand is stabled to
trace her properly all over again
both there in spring’s first exult
and roaming the dark cold
garden outside as I sit
here in a much later,
no less enraptured chair.
Something leapt across the gap
on those glowing strands of hair
scattered wantonly on my thin
pillow, the orchid bounty of
a belling thrall, sadly bellied by the
steely undertow of a fate,
pains I’ll never fully recover from
having altared them so high with
every blue abysm to surge the
siegings of my blood’s receipt of air.
The poem is the eventual name
for that bridge and the shores
it joined at last which bears a
blue infernal traffic in the ballsy
Gaelic brogue of an intercourse
no love can fully scree, much
less domain. Love is just the half
of it, the visible ventricles of
a heart which is much wilder
and dark-lucent and incessant
in its weave inside beneath my
swimming tongue. Sundered psalmist,
defiant weaver of white flags,
marauder whose tines I winnow
like an ancient pilot fish,
this song is betweening’s master,
ever both world and words for it,
never resting, never sated, always
cresting fresh-salted by old
wounds’ superations keeping noun
and verb at odds, ever praising
the difference in which I and Thou
become the fascia of a delight
which never quits or quells or
quakelike thunders and comes hard.



THIS IS MY BOX

Feb. 12, 2006

I loved Menotti’s “Amahl
and The Night Visitors”
when I was a kid, faux-
directing the Pittsburgh
Symphony on TV when I
was three, lounging by
the stereo in my father’s
study when I was ten or
so, reveling in the aching
pathos of a poor shepherd
boy’s night, lamed, fatherless,
tending his meager flock
in wide desert scrabble
as eternal as the desertions
that can kill a heart.
Amahl’s boy fusion of loss and
yearning was surely mine,
starry and cold and powerfully
linked to the infant mewling
in a nearby manger —a
feeling blent of grief and
beauty which was somehow
stronger than all
of the shadows in his house
and mine, millennia away
in fat Evanston where our
family got thoroughly mauled
by each other and God and sex
and The Sixties. I especially
loved that song by Caspar
the silly third wise man—almost
a Stooge—about the box he’d
carried all his years and which
he would offer the child,
a box filled with everything startling
and wonderful in the world.
“This is my box, this is my box,
I never travel without my box,”
Caspar sang, each verse
opening drawers laden with
strangeness and pleasure, lapis
lazuli eggs and dinosaur tears
encased in amber, fragrant dried
flowers and enormous shark
teeth, rude stone goddesses and
jewelled tweezers for plucking
the burning plumage of gold geese
What a collection! I always wanted
a box like that, some treasure
chest of oddities and ardors and
devices not vaulted anywhere
else in the world, at least
not in that peculiar way I
most desired, whatever that
was. That ache was probably
why I was so fascinated with
the devious cigarette lighter
used by the spy hero in “In
Like Flint,” which had,
according to James Coburn,
“87 different uses—
88, if you need a light.”
One day I tried to reverse-
engineer that contraption
on paper, drawing 87 rectangles
in a big rectangle and then
trying to name each one.
What an exercise
in desire’s floral consummations,
impossible and permanently
inked! I believed back then
that plural uses were
necessary if you planned
to win in the world; a hero
required all the mojos he
could muster if he was
to beat his evil adversary,
blowing up the monster’s
island laboratory with
all his goons; surely
the 47th or 59th use
of that Zippo was exactly
how the hero could
escape such devastation
with such harrowing
hair’s-breadth (cunt-hair?)
precision, leaping over
the falls with 5 half-naked
girls in bobbing drums.
Savagery, cunning,
balls, and ire: to light
the fire you need a Flint
and I sure wanted to
be one, paused, flicking
the wheel to say
“88, if you need a light.”
Now I read how shamans
collected damagoni in their
rucksack of ills ‘n’ cures,
each both guardian spirit
and sheer pain, a singular
employ in the choir with
with a two-faced purpose,
as to cure a cold and freeze an
enemy’s pent smile.
A shamaness named Old Dixie
said she had over 50 damagoni
in her truck, queening over
all the young buck magicos
who could only muster
two or three salvos with
their tongues. All that makes
me wonder just what
verbal sprites are cabinned
here inside this trusty
somewhat rusty steamer
of steely verse, yowling and
harrumphing in the engine
room’s hellish mash of
gleaming oiled gears, keeping
these songs chugging along
through a sea of dark mornings,
There’s Oran down his well
decanting old sea gods,
and Roethke sweeting his field
of brually-blowing wheat.
There's Cupid on his high
hard horse cuckolding waves
of their siphoning wives,
there’s Shakespeare booming
through to galaxies beyond
the words we thought
we knew. Some redheaded
siren is raking blue waters
with the nails of her song,
urging every salmon of
fire to leap to the lees
of her hips; and further
out you’ll find the leaky nips
of a dark blue madonna
who delves my every
ejaculation with ululations
of pale shores; and there
in the rip current rides
the hard-galloping gent
whose blue eyes are pure
ice glinting not of any
light borne of days but
belongs to God’s spectra anyway,
far right of violet perhaps
or under the cleft in
Persephone’s red fruit, lending
a cold metallish sound
to these worked-up hooves.
All of those numens -- call ‘em
sprites or jinns or dervish
whirls of verbal moods ---
all of them jackal and jest
the days wash these lines,
vaulted somewhere under
my tongue behind my ear
and under my balls in
the darker vaults of my heart,
the greater half of a heat
which names all it believes
but remains itself unseen,
unridden, urn-bidden to lean
daft against the wind.
This is my box, my
hurlyburly juke of songs,
ferried from a hundred
distant shores:
It is my gift to you,
my unsaved Beloved, my
unsounded depth, my
unslakable destination
for which my soles will
never quite shore. Now
you’ve heard of all
I keep in the first drawer:
you will surely dream
what’s kept in the second.
But what is in the
third drawer I sing?
Here I keep the depths
of my world, the heart
of that lonely shepherd
boy who raptured mine
playing in in a minor key
of major third harmony
on his desert flute,
lit by that perfect
abandoned night where I walk
walk without meters
or crutch, where I store
the most sacred blunts
of all— “Licorice!” the
third wise man sang
and here I refrain,
Black sweet licorish
Black sweet licorish

— Have some!

Fool's Physic

Asclepius was said to have learned medicine from the centaur Chiron, who taught him the art of pharmaka, the use of drugs that can heal or poison. By the time of the Greek golden age there existed a medico-religious cult dedicated to Asclepius, with temples throughout the Greek lands that the Roman writer Strabo calls aesculapii. In these places the healing arts were practiced by a brotherhood of doctor-clerics. Strabo says that Hippocrates acquired his cures and medical knowledge at the Aesculapium on the island of Cos.

Hippocrates can be jusfifiably regarded as the father of Western medicine, and he stands in relation to this science as Aristotle does to physics. Which is to say, he was almost entirely wrong, but he was at least systematic.

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

***

PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF

Feb. 10, 2006

Physician, heal thyself,
wardened in the asculapis
of your lazuli, that bright
white writing chair
in the center of azures
too softly blue to name.
Heal thyself even though
your physic is plain wrong,
gleaned from that book
we know so well it always
damns us to wrong boats
on bad seas, its heavy
German font too black
and sure to swim or sing
around fool gnomons.
And so I sit here droning
on again of pharma
for blue’s afflicted
ills, my sing-song rhetoric
like a bottle of the same
old pills, resulting in
the same healed shore
surrounded by the same
qua-quintessia of curve
and fold and crash,
a paper strand no
actual seas have
lashed, much less seamed
in any salt-sussuring
way. If cures
are mixed from ills,
then I am drenched
to death by one
song’s endless pour
in the boring archons
of a drone, ever taking
me back to that
a vapid dawn so many lives
ago in which a woman
walked forever from my rooms,
leaving me to create a life
resonant of her harrow’s
aches and praising
brutal doors. And for all
the words I’ve
washed this way -- a legion
silos of said seas -- I’m not
one whit closer to those
eyes which once
invited me, over a fleeting
scree of crazed delighting
nights, to swim a depth
that only she could
sphere, for which no other
alm or dam or mam on earth
could fully again revere,
not as first and thus all.
Perhaps not like but other
tandems can cure
love’s daunting spring,
not blue but a fang’s
pent almond burnt
by ten thousand
battenings; not milk but
blood nursed from some
far savager sort of shore,
washed not by seas at all
but their cracked remits,
arroyos not Azores,
vast in their marge of
dry so leeched occludes.
When love has lost its day
a lover learns to walk away
to become some other guise
of wild blue surrenders.
Doctors of old were just
dead-enders of all they thought
they knew, leaving us to live
or die of what then sufficed
for cure. Habitual rear-enders
are one day forced to surrender
their car keys and go on in
different ways, on lesser roads
on bicycles with eyes
burnt toward dark shoals
which reef far darker seas.
Perhaps these poems will
one day rise from their
rank similitudes, having
lost the ghost of love at last,
full-harrowed of the past
& whistling some other tune.



THE MAN WHOSE PHARYNX WAS BAD

Wallace Stevens

The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know.
I am too dumbly in my being pent.

The wind attendant on the solstices
Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,
Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls
The grand ideas of the villages.

The malady of the quotidian ...
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate
Through all its purples to the final slate,
Persisting bleakly in an icy haze,

One might in turn become less diffident,
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould
And spouting new orations of the cold.
One might. One might. But time will not relent.