The Changeling

BLOSSOM

Mary Oliver
from American Primitive

In April
the ponds
open
like black blossoms,

the moon
swims in every one;
there's fire
everywhere: frogs shouting

their desire,
their satisfaction. What
we know: that time
chops at us all like an iron

hoe, that death
is a state of paralysis. What
we long for: joy
before death, nights

in the swale - everything else
can wait but not
this thurst
from the root

of the body. What
we know: we are more
than blood - we are more
than our hunger and yet

we belong
to the moon and when the ponds
open, when the burning
begins the most

thoughtful among us dreams
of hurrying down
into the black petals,
into the fire,

into the night where time lies shattered,
into the body of another.


The Fairy Dwelling on Selena Moor

Once a Mr. Noy was taking a short cut across the moor, when he became lost. When at last he saw lights ahead he thought he had come to a farmhouse, but upon reaching it his horse and dogs would not approach. He went ahead through an orchard towards a house, and saw many people feasting and dancing. All were richly dressed but seemed quite small to Mr. Noy, then he noticed a girl dressed in white and taller than the others.

He approached the girl and she asked that he follow her to the orchard, away from the others. Once they were in the quiet he recognized her as Grace his sweetheart who was thought to have died several years before.

Grace was pleased to see him but told him that she was glad that she had stopped him before he could take a drink or eat any of the food, for if he were to do so he would be trapped forever. That was what had befallen her, she said. One evening when she was out on the moor she had heard Mr. Noy's voice and went towards him, but became lost and wandered for hours until she came to the orchard. She was so hungry that she picked a plum from one of the trees, and at once fell into a faint. When she awoke she was surrounded by the little people, who were well pleased that they had a girl to look after their children and bake and brew for them.

She was more content with what had befallen her now, she said, but Mr. Noy hoped to save the both of them. He turned his gloves inside out and threw them into the midst of the fairy gathering. At once everything, including Grace, vanished and Mr. Noy felt something hit his head and fell to the ground.

Mr. Noy was found later by friends and told them his story, but like many mortals who have been to fairyland he soon lost interest in the mortal world.


- William Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories of Cornwall

***


CHANGELING (1)

2003

She has changed in my soul's eye
as I rowed isle to isle in search
of her: Her eyes from blue to green,
her hair from blonde to red
to a mellow auburn; the swoon
of her once-revealing breasts
has lowered to the sight of
her walking away from me.
At first it was my historic row
with her, each night a chase,
each bed a beckons beyond
which I had no sense or smarts
to follow. Then it was my history's
scriptorium, as I wrote down
the story of each encounter,
weaving spoory myths around
her nightly thrall. Now it
seems I just boat the narrow
straits inside the story, and
I do not see her at all, just blue
beckons, red plunge, the ebbing
tide of farewell. Her song was first
snatched from the faintest breeze
piping from the flimsiest reed,
but it has grown as it dove down
through all the tenors of a
salt orchestra, piccolo to flute
to bassoon to doublebass, on
down to a grand tolling organ,
whose vox humana notes grind
the oceans from the lowest,
basalt bass. Deep and deeper
do I find her, down the long
shelves and arras of the abyss,
down to the very crack of doom
which splits the sea-beds wide.
And in that malefic fire I salt
her female swoon, all my ends
crowned there with her O Gods,
her heart-bursting O Yes. Will
it ever end, this blue descent
into the matins of the muse?
Do I even care? For if every day
there's fresh milk and strewn
underwear then I can row forever,
a changeling at the oar who
became wavelike in his roar,
racing over seas all night of
a life to psalm each day's greeting
on the next new nippled shore,
my inkwell ever changing
the hues of her dolor
- though the pulse is singular
and just one heart I know houses
the whole symphonic pour
of her parallelling vicissitudes,
of her every dawning door.



CHANGELING (2)

March 3, 2006

she speaks

Death only appears
ward me; instead I
fizzed into pure
lucence on a night-borne
wave. This beach only
seems bone-washed
in the hard bulb of the
moon; mist your eyes
and look askance
and far glamours
silver the strand.
The surf intones
her sursurrant sigh
and its crashings
wraith dark gears
working below,
panoplies of thrust
and suction oiled
with the sweat
of lovers thrashing
under sandy bedcovers.
And I'm not even there,
not now, nor ever,
though your dream's glass
ever passes those sands
back and forth in thrall.
Your heart senses me
just outside its
rim of feeling with a
certainty not faith
but close, beyond
the such words,
tantalizing and
frustrating as a brassiere
that teenaged boy
still in you can't
quite unclasp. As your
history is dead to me,
so you are my phosphor,
my fey lover man, sidhe
to my every woman-like
longing. I stand in the garden
of your 4 a.m. and watch
you writing me wretched
in the words you mound,
failing in any blossom enough
way to say what the surf
so surely propounds me.
Yet here I remain, ever
faithful in the bowers
of pale moonlight down
the garden shore. You
cried and reached for a woman
walking from the room
I filled when she was gone,
the augment of desire which
hallows every broken bone
which fills the sundered heart,
the arching roof of your
cathedral ache which no
wave or booze or woman's
Yes was ever meant to slake.
My tribe has gathered on
this shore with your every sad
farewell, one life emptied
slow filled this other side
with the resonance of
ebbing sighs, the toll of
all those farewells belling
pale and blue this garden's
buds which in spring moonlight
now break and ring a high
strange distant music,
sweet and dangerously lush,
the inside scent of love
which can neither last nor die.
My hair is wreathed in
of orange blossoms,
arousing faint and sure
the glamour of a dancing
ground where you and I
become pure welcome,
sweet and bottomless
as the echo of far surf
in every loving sound.

The Next

THE NEXT ANGEL

1994


Yes, surrender was good,
the grace that followed
was a sea wind
and the shore
sparkeled fresh
with all we became.

But you must know
that surrender also writes
a darker angel into the sky.
Today we walk a troubled
strand, naked of wish or will
our torrid meters swelling
harsh against the sea.

Just how do we
steady between curl
and plunge? How to
walk here, when desire's
riptide so dreamily
hauls at our ankles?

Thunder summons the
next angel. Later we may
believe that grace returned
in this spiralling air,
but for now, we are only
walking in rain on
the shore of a kiss,
wrestling the next
angel to a fall.



LET THE OCEAN GO

2002

O bed of silk,
lie back on your prairies of blackness
your fields of sunlight
that I may look at you.

I am happy to be home.
— Mary Oliver, “The Return”

If my home is a restless
shore, then my job’s to
turn the page: it’s time I
let the ocean go. I’ve written
its blue marges long
and deep enough,
harrowed in that surge
the way an analysand
emerges from past
badlands reframed
and widened
for the flow. Of late the poems
seem trite, cliche,
their motions too rhythmic
and rhymed, in need of
fresh curvature, voweled day.
Eventually the page is more,
its beach a whitely widened door:
Go on or you’ll get lost
in all the crashing,
a wrinkled old man
a metal detector
scanning the eternities for trash
and pennies, never again
more than beeps
on a once wealthy, fructive shore.




THE NEXT YOGI

2003


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

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


THE NEXT PASSION

2004


Journalists of soul,
please note: This week
“The Living Dead,” a
re-make of George
Romero’s ghoul opera,
has knocked Mel Gibson’s
“The Passion” from
the top of the box
office chart. Apparently
we eat our dead with
steadfast glee, and
don’t require a cross
nailed so to glut on
eviscerations of
the apparitional Sidhe:
Perhaps the thrall
parallels from viewing
chair to chair, the muse
of worst ends endless
in her gory repartee
onscreen or page or
down the stony circles
where our imagination
yet fumes. How ripe
she dances up there
on the screen, peeling
off her fancies behind
the next victim’s throat-
split scream. Something
of that horror is too
revenant to simply
die away: it keeps
on knocking at the
doors and window
of our age, polite for
now but persistent,
as thirsty for our blood
as we are for recalling
theirs. Counter-Janus,
the faces stare each
other down at this
threshold., imploring,
aroused, even greedy,
the appetites of life
and death far more
dangerous than “vital”
or “needy.” Here’s a
table that we keep
returning too until
we’ve “supped full
well with horrors,”
like Shakespeare’s
bloody knight, holding
court onscreen in
a blue-to-black Hell
Castle reflected from
our darker soul’s
incessant gleam,
devouring for two
hours and twenty two
minutes a persistent
love-sick night.
Black hooves indeed
hammer all the nails
securely in. It’s what
that God requests
on His on way back to Eden--
the next passionate
eviscerating sigh.



NEW LAND,
NEXT GOD

2005

Call me a serial monotheist,
devoted to the next thrall
in Your pleroma. What eros
swims in these days of early
high summer, lifting wings
of a sunrise in an itch of
blue torment, painfully heavy
balls in surge of light &
blown upon by soft breezes
throug opened windows.
A new land lifts from
the waters like a lover’s
behind, offering the
next divinity, ire joining
fire in the ravish of
the plunge, earth the
marriage bed and me its
high waxing fire, nearing
the top bells of solstice.
And lo though I sit here
still as an monk’s oak
writing table & writing
it all down, the jackals
are loose and jonesing
for awe at its awfullest Cape
there between my love’s
sleepy thighs where the
next god will soon wake.
Praise to the waters
about to loosen there.
Ratify, dear augment,
the nipples of it here.




NOT HERE

2004

on deleting the blog Oran’s Well


You bid me find then dig
this well: Love bid me
shut its door, lest old hands
drown today in frightful swell.
Your blue throat
is silent now, gone underground
of every under sound
I shaped in this white shell.
Ah well: It’s not like
any but myself and
wrong and plurality
care much for these
blue dazzlements
of verbal quell.
Oran, you ravel down
the porches and spires
of a bright abysm, making
music inside hell:
Who says my hand
should fare differently
than your head? Or
that this hour boled
down under dawn is not
the same strange spell
You bequeathed to dirt
beneath an abbey long,
too long ago? On every
isle you found the
signature of He
who leaves few words
behind, a resonance
which is Not Here.
Our ages jell in one
far song I’ll never fully sound,
muchless sell, though I row on
sans stage, sans Well,
sans Your blue mellifluence
inside this darkling
diving bell. Gone,
but not lost.


THE WAY THROUGH

2005

The polarity of the Earth shifts
every ten thousand years or so,
north to south, causing all maps
to invert their orients, what’s
true turned upside down. Similarly
the sex of our God swings from
her to him and back, carrying our
sacreds in the tide. The dancing
man of Trois Freres was surely
father to the hunt, the Great
Mother the auguress of grain
planters. Then the sun chariots
rolled in and through with their
glorious heroic horses and
then the cult of Mary, Queen
of Heaven, whose womb could
grow a Christ & whose heart
was portalled in the great
rose windows of cathedrals.
Our rabid technical age spins
on the wheels which crushed
her, with furious haunches
speeding ever faster. Whatever
we would further must go
into the bog, to propitiate
and arouse the virility of sames.
We think it’s duration we
desire but only so we can
throw our seed deep enough
to engender our secret other,
the shadowy spouse whose embrace
slakes our god til he drowns,
til nothing is left but a
slow egressing sound of
hearts turning the other way
around, praising not the
resonance but an emptiness
which fills the other way.
Here’s the fire I stole
from your fertillist womb,
now the digital aura
of Northern Lights underground.
All I shout I remit here
at the southern end of the world,
at Your Cape Blue. And thus sail through.


ONWARDS

2005

I wonder if the dark so od
and useless enterprise
of getting juiced at 4 a.m.’s
reaches its saturation
when the batteries of
have fully charged on
the hour’s noctilucence
and I am freed from poems
at last. Perhaps then I
am freed to write
much other ways, up
from this dungeon of
a writing cell saying
things the world at most
dreams and forgets come
waking light. What a
charge there would be
to know I’m done
with ambling perambles
which plod on and on
the nacre of a thought
with occasional rhyming bots
embroidered in its weave,
across and down the
compulsive page which
always ends awkwardly,
pointed toward unsaid
or unsayables, depositing
me once more at day’s
door self-harrowed, another
smoking poem parked
there and nothing left to
do but roll it over to the
mere and let it bubble
and sink to the rear with
all the rest, like a mashed-
down totem of a song no one
but God and I cares much
to hear. A sensitive to dark
energies which may or may
not really be out there
in the cricket piccolos of
our garden late at night,
I’ve poured these labials
endlessly on a blueblack shore,
endlessly composing bricabracs
of verse with the same
cast of skulls and skiffs,
and womens’ breasts and
buckets brimming from
the well of a mordent which
may be hell, or just the
drowned page of my dark
life’s long descent into
stereotypical blue cant
no more intelligent than
those crickets’ endless
high crone. Me, I’m just plugged
into a dark lady’s rear
at the deep end of all
sighing spread nights,
convinced she likes it
best this way. I could
just be deceived
and blithe to all her
protestations which I
hear inside my wife
and through all the
difficulties of one
man’s life which do
not rhyme at all, much
less caress to fall
the same dark-sounding
ways I do here at 4:33
a.m. Am I done at last
with the curse of rhyming
verse? Have my meters
ticked off the deepest
levels of the pool? That’s
a query for my God, though
I let you listen in. In London
it’s a much more fraught
commute with the smell
of cordite tanging up the
morning air. Off the southeast
coast of this state
Hurricane Dennis charges
up the breech no verse
boat of mine has
ever found the ample
sail to reach. I’m brimming
with dark waters now
Lord, my roots are overgrown.
Grant me ways to rip this out
and begin anew the work.
Harvest what you can
of awe’s awfullest murk.
Spin me on to further coasts
beyond this furthermost.


NEXT SONG

March 2, 2006

If my life is so deeply
veined in spirit that
to talk of it is like
glossing the wet part
of the seas, then surely
each poem is a wave
torn from Your salt missal
so blue and wide and widely
chasmed even the
chiasmus which I bell
between Thee and Me
is holy, token of the
absent host which
descends tongue to heart
to sweet Thalassa
further down, saying once
again in some new way
what’s groined and grevious
in our distance.
Even my rude persistence
in resisting You is holy,
a will full pickled all these
years I have sat upon
this barstool of a writing chair
quaffing lesions, swarts
and augments, picking
from the well of hardest
hoof a dark or clearer proof
of how I whiskied falling
to the ground zero of it all
in a toppled and drowned
cathedral down the deep end
of my thrall. I have found
even in the bluest tundra
of desire the ache of God’s
hot heart, my lone-wolf drinker
out on the steppes of song
alone, cursing the rapture
of riptiding stars, ferrying
that music in my creases
and crevasses like a hearse
of love’s once-exalt swoon,
tolling every shore and bed
and page she fully fled
beyond, never to remit
my longing with return.
By falling to the basalt
floor love’s bones clatter
in a tide of gloomy silt,
my tattered lust eventually
gave up its ghost and
stilled in that great dark,
cold and full fractured
as all winters of the heart
--only to rouse exactly
where it lost the greenest
fuse of all, rising in
the welcome in the wave
which still carries me
away slow and sure
as the day’s fresh
startled surf. As I
then died, so for ages
here I’ve come to the
daily lysis of written
dream, the font at the
bottom of my song which emits
the clearest oldest
wildest note of all,
like a huge bass bubble
of sperm whale’s fart
wobbling up toward day,
the sigh which stirs
all bedded angels
to the rupture of communion,
conducting the birds
around our neighborhood
to commence their singing
and ringing and winging
the commingling hosannahs
of dear life. To fall, to walk
in darkness, to rise -- the
dying god’s three steps --
that’s easy: the flying
up through dark
still prefectures
is hard. Surely something
waltzes me into a
stranger paradigm, beyond
the rule of dying. As I
have harrowed those crypts
to death, perhaps the
next psalm will wake
and walk on down
a different shore
where You and I are givens
in one sweetly rising tune,
the sound of which may
physic and forgive
and tend the altar in
that salt cathedral
as both relic and pure
embrace, a wishbone
of the whale to hang
here twixt and true between
two breasts of one big bang.

There's No Place Like Oz

God and all angels sing the world to sleep,
Now that the moon is rising in the heat

And crickets are loud again in the grass. The moon
Burns in the mind on lost remembrances.

He lies down and the night wind blows upon him here.
The bells grow longer. This is not sleep. This is desire.

Ah! Yes, desire ... this leaning on his bed,
This leaning on his elbows in his bed,

Staring, at midnight, at the pillow that is black
In the catastrophic room ... beyond despair,

Like an intenser instinct. What is it he desires?
But this he cannot know, the man that thinks,

Yet life itself, the fulfillment of desire
In the grinding ric-rac. ...

-- from Wallace Stevens’ “The Men That Are Falling”

***

The appeal of fairyland is the evanescence and effervescence of LaLaLand. Not much different from our current cult of fame, fortune ‘n’ celebrity. This tale is from WW Gill’s A Second Manx Scrapbook, who got it from a Miss Mona Douglas:

Johnny Callow, an old grave-digger in Lezarye, used to tell me when I was small about a man who was crossing Skyhill one night, and was “took” and lost his way. At last he saw a great house before him, bigger than Ballakillingam, all lighted up and the door open, and ones going in and out. He never thought where he was or what it would be, but went on towards it, and inside there were scores of grand ladies and gentlemen in silks and satins and velvet, and all the tables and chairs and dishes were of gold and silver, shining fit to blind you, and there was mortal grand food and drink all set out ready. He walked right in, but none of the ones that were there seemed to see him, so he thought he would take shelter and watch them for a bit, and he did, sitting all quiet in a corner. But he was tired coming in off the mountains after his day’s work, and before long he went to sleep, and when he woke up in the morning house and people and all was gone, and he was lying in the fern up on the top of Skyhill. I don’t remember whether Johnny had said he had eaten their food or not.

— retold in Katherine Briggs, The Fairies In Tradition and Literature

***


FANTASY

2001

She waits for me outside my
bleary boring day,
perfectly ripe, pure grape,
her hair, hot eyes, and wide thighs
spilled like milk for me—
Not a woman in any of
her mortally difficult ways,
just a heave of breasts for
fettered and obliterate needs:
Booze nipples, frothy head,
a happy hour on a faraway bed
where nothing is difficult
dull or real —
Have a sip from these,
she sings inside every
distant happy hour,
I’m your every thirst,
only yours, and bottomless.

***

In Mary Gaitskill’s superb novel Veronica, a middle-aged women recalls her days in the halcyon world of fashion and the lalaland of that fantasy of perfection which she called a “terrible heaven.” In this passage, the woman recalls how, after returning from a modeling jaunt to Paris, back to her family and sanity and classes in a community college, how the sound of that heaven was such an oppression on the real:


Sometimes the spell would break: I would look away from the terrible heaven and see my sister lying next to me, her neat, graceful form and her even breath beautiful and inviolate. If I put my hand on her warm shoulder, my thoughts might quiet; heaven would vanish and the ceiling would be there again, protecting us from the sky. I could lie against her and feel her breath forgive me. The day would come. My night thoughts would pale. My sister and I would go to school.

***

In “The Legend of Innis Sark” again shows the fairy underworld as ‘one made by glamour’ ... It is about a young man who fell asleep under a haystack on November Eve and woke in the same place the next morning. After some nightmare experiences in the fairy kitchens he found himself at a royal banquet. He had seen an old hag chopped up and boiled to serve the guests, but at the banquet tables he saw ‘fruit and chickens and turkeys and butter, and cakes fresh from the oven, and crystal cups of bright red wine.’

Now sit down and eat,” said the prince, who sat at the top on a throne, with a red sash around his waist, and a gold band on his head. “Sit down with this pleasant company and eat with us; you are welcome.”

And there were many beautiful ladies seated round, and grand noblemen, with red caps and sashes; and they all smiled at him and bade him eat.

“No,” said the young man, “I cannot eat with you, for I see no priest to bless the food. Let me go in peace.”

“Not at least till you taste our wine,” said the priest with a friendly smile.

And one of the beautiful ladies rose up and filled a crystal cup with bright red wine, and gave it to him. And when he saw it the sight of it tempted him: and he could not help himself, but drank it all off without stopping, for it seemed to him the most delicious draught he had ever had in his whole life.

But no sooner had he laid down the glass, than a noise like thunder shook the building, and all the lights went out; and he found himself above in the dark night lying under the very same hay-rick where he had cast himself down to sleep, tired after his work.

The effect of the fairy-draught was fatal to him, and he passed away and soon died.

— Briggs, ibid.

***


BOTTOMLESS

2002


Now would all the waves were women,
then I’d go drown, and chassee with them evermore!

— Maltese sailor in Moby Dick

The hard hurt comes from
believing what we dream—
selling our soul to that
confabulator who tweaks
waves into tittery, spilling
malt waveage on a
wanderlust page.
O Faust, with your
appalling spell! An
addict is a man in love
with his sweet cups,
the vision through them
bottomless, no holds barred.
Every unslakable thirst
drowns in possibility,
swirled in the siren bore
between tide and tempest,
my soul drawn between
misery and more of it.
I heard once of a lottery
winner was found 8 months
later floating in a Miami
canal, wearing only
a pair of shorts & an
empty pint jammed in
his pocket. School the mind,
drear friend, to turn
from salt infinitude.
It isn’t a woman you seek
but rather the world’s turn
and smile toward you,
something you never found
in a woman because the earth
is round and tides her curves
ever away, dissolving your fire
in a boneless choir of waves
you’ll never reach or name or sound.
Don’t follow signs
turned the other way.
The moon has closed for the night.



POLKA DOT SOIREE

2004

Alchemical work had to hurt
(boil, sever , skin, dessicate,
putrefy, suffocate, drown, etc.)
natural nature in order to
free animated nature. As soon
as psyche enter into consideration,
the only-natural is not enough.

— James Hillman,
Dream and Underworld


Fall 1986: A bad season of
collapsing walls. My last band
had folded wings that summer.
My guitar was frozen in
its case, a stone thing
falling through blue plush
into a well of banshee
booze, hauling me down
a tide with those fingers
of big night music gripped,
like stone, around round
my ankle. I had tried
swearing off the alchol
but going it alone I hadn’t
a clue what to mend or
forgive or give back. And so
I found myself out again
in that old the zombie zone,
suited up with a
a lunar-cold vengeance.
Real things fell from
angelic aeries, like
the massive oak
I discovered
on top of my garage
apartment after work
one day, the walls of
my tiny cheap room
buckled out. I retrieved
journals and guitar
and natty slax and got
the hell on outta there,
setting up in a tiny
room in my mother’s
house. That was when
I started writing down
the malaise, even
as I headed full force into
it. I made a weak
(inept, too wounded)
attempt to love a German
exchange student
named Magritte but
the clearer motions it
demanded — stability,
fidelity, sacrifice —
kept getting lost in
the murk of tequila.
One night I called
her to make plans
for dinner and a
Pat Matheny concert,
and found myself
after ringing off
walking right out
the door, engorged
with that cactus gestalt.
Long hours later screwed
to a barstool in
my favorite water
hole, the blackout man
crept from his
grave, that barking
hell-bent satyr equal
parts fang and cock.
Followed a woman
back to a house
where someone had
died recently —
there were piles of
bills on a table, ashtrays
of a ghost
overflowing like
sewers, the smell
of oatmeal cookies
and piss. In my journal
the next day, I wrote
“heights of sex around
2:30 and 6 a.m., yes,
but the falloff was
meteoric” — the blisses
of that season seemed
carved not from waves
but their riptide. The
next night — the one
before my date
with Magritte — I
ended up at Fern Park
Station drinking the
night away to the
sound of a bad big
hair metal band
& Kim the topless
dancer invited me
back to her apartment
for more of the same
though blacker in in
is blare. Bare overhead
bulb & Van Halen
squealing on a table
radio as we did shots
& drank beer. After
I fucked her on the couch
(from behind, hard,
like a wolf), she sighed
and said “I have always
hated you” softly
in my ear. The next
day I called in sick
and shook Kim awake
to drive me back to my car,
the late morning
overheated and
shriekingly bright,
all knife and no ocean.
I was 29 and falling
down the oubliette of
my old dream of
love’s billowy perfection,
refusing to let go
down those gripless walls.
Back in that room
in my mother’s house
I slept fitfully for the
afternoon, making coffee
at 4 p.m. and casting
an I Ching oracle. —
The Abysmal Doubled,
like snake-eyes formed
from six faces of two
coins, two hexagrams of
drowning stacked on
each other, auguring
the dangers I swam
without and within.
It offered the image
of a melancholy heart
going down in freezing
brine, a place shared
by the moon, thieves,
wisdom and darkness.
“Surrender is the
only escape,” it whispered
through the hungover
creaks and folds of
the afternoon. Ah
but what to surrender
and how to let it go?
What of the dream
I had in that season
of the purely curved
woman in a black and
white polka dot dress,
walking up to the
stage where I stood
trading licks with ZZ Top.
Her breasts hips and
ass waving like a tide
toward me, her eyes
so hot on mine
the way I thought
every woman I ever
desired looked at me,
a feminine veneer
for a greater ocean
behind, her kiss
which came later
absolving every
abyss I now swam
through. She took
me to her bed of beds
on some island
of sweet delight,
fucking me every
way I came,
sighing up from
that billowy descent
how she loved me
utterly — udderly,
lutely, resolutely,
undulantly, you
weave all the sounds
of love’s pious assent —
and yet the dream
was striated with
my late and fallen
ennui, and I doubted
her words though
I knew they were true.
And then I sensed
she would be gone
and forever hence
with me: “The eternal
moment” I wrote
in my journal. Such
was my appetite
for her, for you,
my bittersweet
ocean’s absentia,
my dark-blue drawing
wave, my hunger
which all the
bars and beds
could never sate.
The Florida of that
season now
18 years ago was
in every appearance
a nightmare of
overbright streets,
the necropolitic
spookiness of
all that suburbia
just a false front
for the land I
was dying in, eternal
night inside a
brilliance. Reagan
was in his second term,
the Chicago Bears
were mauling the NFL
and rock n roll
was a glitter in the
eye of the pax MTV.
I closed my journal,
cracked a beer and
toasted that bad age
which molted
into this one. Later
with Magritte at the
Pat Matheny concert
I heard the best score
yet for my love —
a long dark pulsing
rendition of the bossa
nova jazz soiree
“Are You Going With
Me,” watching Magritte
pull as far away from
me in her seat to
watch the band. I
loved that music most
when I watched her
face drift off toward
it, the woman lost in
the tide and me trying
to wade in after. After
the concert Margritte
wouldn’t talk to me
and I dumped her
at her car to head
back out into the night
which is like this
wild witch’s smile,
all tongue and razored
teeth, a pink wet
gullet which swallowed
me as I hit the bars
guzzling Buds and
shots of Rumpleminz.
In that darkling
scree the ache delivered
me to Laurie, an
exfuck who I hadn’t
seen in three years,
now fatter and older
and drunker from all
the ways her love of love
had abused her. I
followed her back
to her apartment (in
a complex attached
by the root to the
whole grim archipelago)
& she let me have
my way with her body
every way I wished
though we couldn’t
stand to look each
other in the eye. We
fucked the rest of
the night and half
the morning, our
pudendas jabbering
like unearthed skulls:
that curtained
room was torn from
some inmate’s
page where night
after night sharks
have had their way
with her, tearing
and plunging and feasting
in slow balletic clouds
of blood. She was
the girl I never got to fuck
inside all the ones
I had, a woman inside
my own self-
ravaged psyche.
I got the hell on outta
there late that afternoon,
coming home in a
fucked out hungover
bruise to find a message
to call Magritte. She
apologized for her anger
at me and asked if we
could meet that night
and make up, maybe
proceed. But how could
I even presume to try
playing love by its rules?
I said sure and headed
out to drink. Falling
thus I finally let go
of whatever hold love
had on me, the wounds
I nursed for all those
woman who had left
me for good, shredding
every guise and gout
of purer feeling to
get down to where
the woman in the
polka dotted dress
resides and queens.
In my cups that night
I drank to dregs
like a drowning man
holding on to the
anchor of his farewell,
all the way down
to that ruined city
where she dreams.
And then I lost
the queen herself,
the one so founded
and floundered in
the marketing of
a metaphor — accepting
at last that the
dream was only
that, pure seem
and puerile gleam.
And then I really
hit the bars, going
three months of
nightly blackout
drinking, lurking
at the bottom of
a sea with the
rest of the drowned
sailors, arms
wrapped tight
around the coral
bones we dreamed.
That was the brine
in which you were
pickled, never
to return to haunt
day worlds again.
The woman in the
polka dot dress
is that booze which
Bryan Ferry sang
about in that old
Roxy Music anthem,
“The Thrill of It All”—
that pure whiskey
poured into a tight
and nippled dress,
an anthem of desire
which I sang with
all my heart marching
out every door.
The death of every
dream is horrible,
a gripless slide down
all the names for hell.
My dreams from that
time are florid
with descriptions
of infernal gloom,
of vampires with my
face who ache
to die but can’t,
vultures preening
on the moon, carnival-
like rides down
sulphur chasms
beneath the blackest
coldest heart.
My love was torn
by desire’s devil
tongs in one long
whiskey draught:
Sundered till only
my lips remained, still
pursed and ejacualate
of her exalt sheen.
Poor fool. That
season crashed
and burned me
me now nearly
15 years ago. It’s
5 a.m. now on
this second day
of writing this
poem, heaping
so many lines
lines on the ache
I still feel recalling
that awful time. I sit
on my pure white
writing chair in
the house I married
and mortgaged
every dream to
remain in: it’s
a coolish morning
in November and
so much outside
is the same —
a second-term
Bush repeating the
arch Reagan chill, the
Steeler whupping
the NFL’s unbeatable
best, and E! Television
parading the
smiles of hotties in tight
dresses, eclipsing
the shine of blood
everywhere on
Iraqi streets. And
me hurling all this
ink in measure to
a feeling that harpoons
me still when I
recall that woman
in the polka dotted
dress whom I
always wanted and
never met. That image
is like an olive
at the bottom of
my worst infernal
drink. And yet,
today it seems I got to
you at last in her,
that curvy ikon
of those nights in
wild absentia: Or,
to scratch deeper,
perhaps I reach
you best recalling
those worst nights,
my lines sliding
down a time most
alien and strange
and wild. Dare I say
I’m more alive now
in the real work
of daily love for
having lost you
utterly on nights
so long ago? Or
is it that by naming them
the demons drop their
tines and go to work
for us, the woman
in the polka dotted dress
sashayed up close
to this banging stage
where I’m still trading
licks with fire,
translating for her
your own blueblack desire.




THE TERRIBLE HEAVEN


March 1, 2006

Inside the pap of sweetness I so desired
was a terrible heaven I was not meant
to survive, not in any sane or solid
or too-sweet way. An empyrean glade
of downy billows and hard surf, that
heaven is filled with women and goblets t
hat to kiss and to drink were one long
sweet draught so perilous to lip
and fatal to resist. — Paint the canvas
here with the red and gold augments
of De Danaan fire, upon a ground of wild
cerulean wash; a tableaux of
whiskey in heavy tumblers clinking
with ice and trio of strumpets
reclining nearby, blonde redhead
and raven all taut in their swellings
and depths, rounding desire with
undulant Ahs and sibilant Yesses,
parting and clenching the soul’s
uprailing spume with furious
hissess, lapping up the full
frenzy I so readily and greedily
and profanely exulted in gaining
entrance at long last to the
terrible heaven you can’t find
in any room labored for love
and its God. How could I not
dive headfirst through that
border of silk underwear like
a burning angel shot straight
through the narrows of the mere,
my hair on fire, singing the
praises of Cutty on the rocks
& the diamond glitter
of that infernal gem swinging
between the hooters of Persephone?
And who could last there longer
than just one night, the dream too
hot, too drowning, too blue for
mortal hips to nail, much less keep
within sight before desire
damns all that it embraces,
the swelling wave apexed
and crashing full down
in thunder and doom,
leaving me dazed on this
shore naked and scattered,
full harrowed of that sweetness
no man can taste without
drinking full magnums in hell.
Thus we wake and wearily
walk on, back as we can
to the world as it is and must be,
wondering just what that wild
music was all about, never
to dance that way again,
not in that strange and
effervescently damned hall.
Though we remember—oh yes—,
and full well. We recall the
syzygy of arching tongue
and falling drop of milkiest
issue, that eternal pause before
the dam buckles then shatters
and then pours and pours and pours.
We recall the depths where
angels sing only pale shores.
Like a distant music
it raids through the day
rendering sterile and moot
the loved labors of the day,
even though we know better
than to believe a note of it,
a siren sound of clinking glasses
and high laughter and that
vicious hissed Yes which
draws back to the next wave.




METAPHOR

2000

It wasn’t important to know
why he crazed so perilously
for her. Not any more.
Nor why he believed
so intransigently in waves and moon.
He already knew that metaphor
was just an adman’s conjure,
not steak but sizzle.
But like any addict
he plunged to hell anyway
and received his due.
Working back from ruin
he reflects how energy
fools the magician,
its jugglery a mask
for transformation. How passion
can glut on love with such repast
and then leave so little of it left.
Days now he wakes and walks
crying for those waters
like a man forsworn of drink
yet nursing a will to taste
that whisky again. His heart
reaching for that shot glass
with its draught of cold gold.
It burns like a pole star
amid all the duties of
renunciation. It will kill
him, he knows, and he prays
for a different love to
waken and call him back.
But he also knows there
are many worse ways to
live than this death.
At night’s end he turns
out the light and lays there
in the dark listening to street
sounds and thresh of
blades deeper down
whispering their brute
spells. He thinks of
waves and moon and
mounts the dolphin
which no metaphor can ride.



BONING THE GHOUL

2002

An appalling sweetness
slipped into view
when I lost the last
wet curvature of you:

Well, “lost” is landfill
for all tossed verbs,
numens of that last kiss
trucked from dead suburbs.

Atop that dread mound
an eerie twattage glows
as ghoul cockage choirs
in solemn, bony rows.

That chorus sings to me
the beat-to-hell old news
that I’ll not find her again
not even in rear views.

Who knows why forsaking
me was for her so easy,
why she drained the glass;
Or why her sleazy

voidings like a vacuum
in me yet clench,
a vertigo in all makings
with a familiar stench,

deigned to rule a wold
of cold and moony nights
with thorn plecturings of
strings no longer white,

their amperage sucked dry.
What’s horniness if it
douses not in fire
but bone-dry recit,

unbuttoning not blouses
but stone lips of banshee
rue—burning wicker men
because some dame decreed

my hands anon away?
Who wants to fornicate
unnippled sprites of ire?
Let’s banish hope, excoriate

the lust: debone the ghoul
who haunts the ossuary
of every stiffie lost:
let’s remit the actuary

before tits up it tanks.
She rose up from a wave
of breaking blue joy;
and then without a wave

she disappeared, willing me
this stale and sour undertow.
I’ll not find her on this
beach again: It’s time go:

Time to rearrange
into less salty, surer show:
time for bright diurnals
where fresher boners grow

beneath the fertile loam
of an untroubled sleep.
I’ll plunge on alone now
on waters twice as deep,

ghost-captain of a boat
destined for dryer shores,
calmer nights, no matter
how she always gores.



LETTER FROM PARADISE

2005

After a bitter cold holiday
where we groused drinking
hot tea beneath blankets
& the world outside was
foggy & chill in the two
weeks since it’s been
nothing but warm,
days lightly breezy in
the low 80’s, nights
in the 50’s. But heaven
on earth is always
relative; the saturate
of kind weather is
pressed down hard on
our heads by the heel
of a God’s hand —
a high pressure front
maintains this
infernal calm —
causing a legion of
headaches to sprout in
the day, my migraines
finding a pounding
counterpoint in the
bad sinus bangers
suffered by my wife.
In the past two weeks
we’ve had more than
a dozen between us.
So weave the pleasantry
of sky days with these
threads of thudding pain,
freighting each day with
a heavier step. No surf that
we can hear
this far inland but
that ever-approaching
curve and smash and
dulled recede is at work
in the ground we walk on,
the stations we work at,
the bed we sleep in.
At night as exhaustion
and the Sinus PM pills
reel us down from
the day’s worn shore,
the news on TV is
mostly bad or sad
or maddening, southeast
Asia’s coast a new
world of ravaged souls,
the President we did
not choose espousing
policy we despise, the
toll in Iraq daily and
grim and the resonance
of so much hard work
to support this house
grinding and feverish.
Outside the maple has
begun to bud, the
butterflies have colonized
the garden and our
cats are killing everything
they can. This morning
rain is falling off and on
in a massy blue brogue.
It’s so warm at 5 a.m
I have the fan on.
I read about a huge
cast-iron horse a man
found in the abandoned
ancient city of his dream,
nine feet high with huge
wings and a half dozen
cupdion holding on for
dear life, none quite able
to climb aboard for a
decent ride. The ambiguous
gods have cursed us with
this blessed life my love,
for us to find a way
to make that horse a
home. Today we try again,
for better amid worse,
amid the spiculations of
hard rain and a deeper
sound below, tiding
far below the bed
we never left once
we there at long last met
the other and married
the difficult world with a kiss.

Fly

Among all things that fly
the mind is fastest.

-- Rig Veda

Those who know have wings.

-- Pancavimsa Bahamana

There’s an osprey nested
in the thatches of my thought,
his eyes trained patiently
on blue waters where all
desire swims. Those eyes
are huge, elegantly most
extravagantly evolved,
with wings of equal ardor
and feral simplicity, spreading
six to eight feet across
the divining gloom. I sit here
droning lines in my beehive
cell of drab poem stone
at that deadest hour
of the night, scanning
strange wild waters for
a flash of fin--When
something sexual crests
below, urgent and creamy
hot exactly where I'm
hungriest. And then the
osprey is in red pursuit
lifting and breathing those
cruel wings in an urgent
thrum, hurling me across
a strand of ink and
thence to smack and
dive a wake of blue silk
sot not quite ocean,
nor even a woman,
a sidhe perhaps of
spuming verbs drowned
in their sense and wildly-
nippled porpii proferring
victual wombs. I’m flying
now inside the appetite
God lutes with sticky lollipops,
angelic and satanic for
the craw it archly sates.
My eyes thus gripping
all the plundered flesh a god
would greed, I caw adieu
to the rumpled bed of
blue and fly back to roost
above and beyond
all I meant and failed to
say, whetted though never
quite abetted or quit of
all I ever bedded in the
victuals of depth. And
thence at last to feed.
To cap my pen here is to preen
in sticky golden light
as the beachside day begins,
my song now lost in soft
susurrant surf, my
ravening constructions
mounded over by sand
castles and buried
manowars, real lovers
dozing on the burning sand
the osprey long ago resigned
when love learned it
couldn’t really fly
or swim or walk or die.

The Sea Mortgage

Magic, then, is natural when, after having considered well the powers of all natural and celestial things and having found their pattern by careful inquiry, the magician brings into the open the hidden and secret power of Nature. ... Remarkable wonders frequently arise this way, not so much by art as by Nature working these things, the art being no more than a servant. For magicians, as very careful inquirers into Nature, by applying and setting active things to passive, very often bring out the things that are prepared by Nature before the time that She appointed for these affects to be produced. These are commonly taken to be miracles but for all that they are no more than natural works.

-- Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), Three Books on Occult Philosophy

***

WHISTLE WHILE
YOU WORK

Feb. 25, 2006

I can no more complete
a poem than fix my life
but I love ‘em anyway
as seas so wild and strange
above and down their surfaces
that I cant help but
sing as I cross ‘em
and call that music God’s.
I’m like the guy in the
old Kliban cartoon who
whistles tunelessly
in full joy while
pushing an endless
cart of coals in hell;
an observing devil
says to the other, “Ya
know, I don’t think we’re
getting through to that one.”
Indeed. Larynx today
the late cool dark of
February half winter’s
and full spring’s, volatile
and gusty with cold
then too-warm winds.
This Saturday’s one for
chores or time with my
wife over a ruinous
exhaustion, sick to
death of computers
and traffic and George
Fucking Bush: that
distempered ringing
is still my ears as
the first birds now tune
up their gentle strings.
My faith in sweetness
amid such gall must
scent from orchards in
the brain far removed from
clarity or common sense, a
thrall of curves and blooms
and crashing waves where
none are found at all.
I keep tallying some
permanent wild calculus
across and down the page,
summoning green
hours back in sums
of blue rage. My life
is found deepest
in paper arbors and
and harborage. Between
weariness and dying
sings a pure unbrassiered
silk-sliding-down ardor,
one scent one suck one
remembered smile more than
half in dark and yet enough
to make God great again,
my tapped-out spirit tanked
full for the next day’s walk
in orchard oceans I cannot
see but are the fullest
cresting of, astride this
fish of song. My oh my
what a wonderful day,
a bossa nova blue sashay
straight down the seaside
empyreia of a grateful heart.
How great thou art,
thou green and blue day.


***

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark,

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.

-- Wallace Stevens, “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” xxxii


***

The sea--this truth must be confessed--has no generosity. No display of manly qualities--courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness--has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation ... If not always in a hot mood to smash, he is always stealthily ready for a drowning. The most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty ...

... Already I looked with other eyes upon the sea. I knew it capable of betraying the generous ardour of youth as implacably as, indifferent to evil and good, it would have betrayed the basest greed or the noblest heroism. My conception of its magnanimous greatness was gone. And I looked upon the true sea -- the sea that plays with men til their hearts are broken, and wears stout ships to death. Nothing can touch the brooding bitterness of its soul. Open to all and faithful to none, it exercises its fascination for the undoing of the best. To love it is not well. It knows no bond of plighted troth, no fidelity to misfortune, to long companionship, to long devotion. The promise it holds out perpetually is very great; but the only secret of its possession is strength, strength--the jealous, sleepless strength of a man guarding a coveted treasure within his gates.

-- Joseph Conrad, “The Initiation” (from The Oxford Book of Sea Stories, ed. Tony Tanner)

***

PORTUGUESE MAN 'O WAR

1995


Every ten yards along the shore
there's another one, a blue note
glowing like a coda on the sand.

It sharpens as I near into a pink
and cobalt sail billowed from within,
a pearl sown from the margins of abyss.

The feelers trailing back to sea
were never meant to rudder so harsh
or final a current as this shore.

Death combs the strings as the surf
desires, long as a noose or matting
their keel like pillaged skirts.

Many more amaze the beach ahead,
each a different spectra of the world's
worst blue, like fat flakes scattered

from an unseen, unsympathetic north.
Pay attention to these sterner
studies of a storm-roiled sea:

All night the bitter waves that
smashed their casual fury now recede,
leaving us these mongrel blooms,

beached and broken galleons
of a useless and eternal empire,
cool delight for the wandering eye

but stinging dickens for the feet,
beautiful to us only in death, and
forgotten three steps down the shore.





There was a delicious sensation of mingled security and awe with which I looked down from my giddy height on the monsters of the deep in their uncouth gambols. Shoals of porpoises tumbling about the bow of the ship; the grampus slowly heaving his huge form above the surface, or the ravening shark darting like a spectre through the blue waters. My imagination would conjure up all that I had heard or read of the watery world beneath me. Of the finny herds that roam its fathomless valleys; of the shapeless monsters that lurk among the very foundations of the earth and of those wild phantasms that swell the tales of fishermen and sailors.

-- Washington Irving, “The Voyage,” from The Oxford Book of Sea Stories

***

Pip loved life, and all life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to \ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green, and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up,not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell.

((then, after Pip is tossed from a whale-boat for the second time and left behind))

... Now, in calm weather, to swim the open ocean is as easy to the practiced swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is terrible. The intense concentration of the self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it?

... By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the ship like an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried him down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the warped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes, and the miserman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, is absurd and frantic, and weal or woe, feels them uncomprisied, indifferent as his God.

-- Melville, Moby Dick (“The Castaway”




ABYSSAL PLAINSONG

2002

There is a God (some say),
A deep, but dazzling darkness.
—Henry Vaughan


While we sleep
the night hauls us
through deep billows,
cold and ever-black,
tiding us in surges
we can’t hold onto
or name, just dream.

Lost in the marges
of that boneless toil,
we ferry the dead
in St. Elmo’s Fire,
our pulse lucent
in their basalt veins.

Seals fan the
cold waters of our
oblivions, their
long-lashed eyes
weeping like beloveds
in lost windows
or children carried
off in dark hands.

We wander through
floorless rooms all night
as the centuries
glow from split
whalers and the
spires of lost towns.

No wonder when
the alarm clock
hauls us back
we’re like someone
rescued from a riptide
who must sit awhile
dazed on the shore:

To him our day
is strange, almost painful,
as infinity ebbs
in scowling thunder,
leaving this scrawled
manowar—our
only plunder.


TIN AHAB

... I see now that the force
that made him great
Drove me to the dregs of life.

— Edgar Lee Masters, “Spoon River Anthology”

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

— Melville

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


A CUP OF OCEAN

Nov. 2004

Our truest embrace
is this most tenuous relation,
a blue reverb I attenuate,
poem after poem,
of some prior, uroboric bliss--
mother’s womb, crashing
surf, a lover’s hips against mine
hauling bursting nets up from
the sea -- all now in these
salt-mine hallows of ocean
seem. Call it an immrama of
the heart’s inmost ache
to return to its birthing God,
isle after isle, till inmost
secret thrill is You.
Nothing yet has sufficed:
like drafts of selves I’ve
outrowed so many tropes
trying to find you somewhere
enough at last: Faith in God,
guitars, bars, beds, books,
breasts, now these verbal boats
which I loose, more numerous
than stars, upon a predawn
darkling tide -- nothing yet
has named, much less quelled,
that cathedralling ache
one true enough kiss would
surely slake. It has left me
more naked than ever in
a blue which cannot be
and is the ripe enthrallment
of blue seem, that old
river’s thunder and wave’s
collapsing boom forever down
the shore of what I call
my life. That music never ends;
it’s like the ocean the old monks
rowed their tiny coracles across
trusting God to steer them on.
A constant blue buoyancy, God’s
joyous homeward stream,
enough of heaven in every bite
of the daily oar, some dearth of it
on the next envisioned shore.
I know I’ll never get there,
though each day I rise to try.
Some day the craft will change,
perhaps the loving too; or the
work, the locale, the ache’s
exfoliate in some next orchard
heavy with strange and sweet
new fruit. My labors then may
row apolunar to these, purely
refuting the world I once
had named, entranced with waves
which shout inside their foam
that all I know of heaven and hell
and God and woman is surely
and securely not the way it is at all.
And thus I’ll be about revising
that immortal thrall, burying
the poet & carving crosses on
the ancient ogham stones,
reinventing all the arts in the
name of some new God.
No different than what I always do
when one taste of ocean bliss
proves too much of you.


THE CHILDREN OF WATER

"O hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon"

—Archolochus of Paros

… Long ago, when Manannan, the god of wind and sea, offspring of Lir, the Ocearius of the Gael, lay once by weedy shores, he heard a man and a woman talking. The woman was a woman of the sea, and some say that she was a seal: but that is no matter, for it was in the time when the divine race and the human race and the soulless race and the dumb races that are near to man were all one race. And Manannan heard the man say: "I will give you love and home and peace." The sea-woman listened to that, and said: "And I will bring you the homelessness of the sea, and the peace of the restless wave, and love like the wandering wind." At that the man chided her and said she could be no woman, though she had his love. She laughed, and slid into green water. Then Manannan took the shape of a youth, and appeared to the man. "You are a strange love for a seawoman," he said: "and why do you go putting your earth-heart to her sea-heart?" The man said he did not know, but that he had no pleasure in looking at women who were all the same. At that Manannan laughed a low laugh. "Go back," he said, and take one you'll meet singing on the heather. She's white and fair. But because of your lost love in the water, I'll give you a gift." And with that Manannan took a wave of the sea and threw it into the man's heart. He went back, and wedded, and, when his hour came, he died. But he, and the children he had, and all the unnumbered clan that came of them, knew by day and by night a love that was tameless and changeable as the wandering wind, and a longing that was unquiet as the restless wave, and the homelessness of the sea. And that is why they are called the Sliochd-na-mara, the clan of the waters, or the Treud-na-thonn, the tribe of the sea-wave.

And of that clan are some who have turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind--the wind that would overtake the waves of thought and dream, and gather them and lift them into clouds of beauty drifting in the blue glens of the sky.

How are these ever to be satisfied, children of water?




BLUE DEBT

Feb. 27, 2006

Lord, You have lent my
song the sea, perhaps that
I may sing the darkest depths
of it and voyage on its
silvered wake to every shore
a heart can walk and bed
til waves full crash to ebb.
Have I gained a measure
of the sea in these brine-
soaked waves which pulse
ever out and cross and down
in tidy drams of mad
immensity, harnessed as
I am to a nigh-infernal
surge? Have I said its
blue unsayables enough
to pay Your sea full back,
these volumes as thick
and nigh-inchoate
as a wet dream’s
incessant plunge through
ass-ending rooms? You
mortgage my desire’s
tidal knees to a soak’s
insatiable insoluble
degrees, a wake of curving
halcyons each with foam
and sea-wrack half in their eyes,
half obscuring why You
sent them all to greet me
to the surges of one storm.
My song is thus a lover’s
driving hips full diving to
the depths of You,
my joy flinging wild
and free into the sea’s
so-ravenous black maw.
Dry man I am and
yet full drowned I end
at this too-early so-
specious hour, siting on
a white writing chair like
lifeguard’s pale tower
front and center of
the night’s strange crashing
beach, or like a conductor’s
stand before a wild
symphony, or like the gallows
where the sea remits the man.
Lord, what a vicious
usury, to indemn
my water’s dreaming
to vaults of blue eternity,
a debt no words can ever
scale the half of, piled
high with depths I can
never fully say, much less
repay, not in this life
or my others, in this
life or the ones I sail
and dive and nap through.
Rapacious creditor,
here’s my next repayment,
as usual a few days late
and short a sou or two,
another grain to pave
that beach full back
where no man sings
the sea like it full sings
him and You crash
full and huge and loud,
augmented anyway,
pleased with the small
sound of my singing
though never sated
or poured or proud.

***


Impenetrable and heartless, the sea has given nothing of itself to the suitors for its precarious favours. Unlike the earth, it cannot be subjugated at any cost of patience and toil. For all its fascination that has lured so many to a violent death, its immensity has never been loved as the mountains, the plains, the desert itself, have been loved. Indeed, I suspect that, leaving aside the protestations and tributes of writers who, one is safe in saying, care for littel else in the world than the rhytm of their lines and the cadence of their phrases, the love of the sea, to which some men and nations confess so readily, is a complex sentinment wherein pride enters for much, necessity for not a little, and the love of ships -- the untiring servants of our hopes and our self-esteem--for the best and most genuine part.


-- Conrad, “The Initiation”





SEA LABYRINTH

2004

Just beneath my trackless
ocean course between
this lonely shore and you
there lies a labyrinth,
an ancient code of your travail
which I enter as I launch
and wander as I sail,
finding the next isle
at its center not quite
sea or land but both
& you freshly departed,
the water in the well
there almost burning
with your blue, harrowed
to the dregs in the
lost carouse of you.
My job as I see it
from this chair today
is to make that
circuit canonical
and nude, an abbot
with his psalter
intoning lines over
waves that sing back
with nipples bigger
than a mouth: that
in those Nones of
stern devout your
gauzy peachy salt-
glazed beachy
pulses bossa rum sashay,
causing archangels
to go stout and
clamor for a fall,
just one, a good long
pussy plunging
dive down to the
saltiest names
of God. I see ‘em just
beyond the breakers
tumbling in a row,
those pairs of blessed
ankles and pale soles
vanishing in blue,
each like a book
tossed on the wave,
another vespering
poem. My job is
sound the depth
of that well
and count every bed
that’s lost down there,
each an inkling
burning with a desire,
an arrow’s shiver
up the mortal sense
that you’re staring
back up from that murk,
imploring all my seed
and ink and nouns.
My job’s to make
that view a shore
enfolded by incessant
tide, each wave an
antiphon and greeting
and taunt to mount
the coracle again
and chance once
more the main’s
desperately empty dazzle
with that spiral
dancing floor hidden
a mile of fathoms down
where gods and whales
and undressed lovers
sport and roam. Each
plunge and peramble
here comes to you
at last, or at least
that resonance
which hallows these
ears and haunts
my turn back home.
Each return is to
some higher deeper
ground where even
less is known and
the tide pounds harder,
like a kiss, a clench,
the next blue
widening door.

***

PRAYER FOR BALLAST

Feb. 26, 2006

5:30 a.m.on Sunday, winds
outside heaving the garden
into the trees, heavy rains
at pause with more surely soon
to come. My despairing wife
online in the study perusing
linens on Ebay, searching
for patterns and ideas
for a dying business,
getting up at 3 a.m.
to avoid the dreams
of failure that have
been raiding her heart
every dawn of late.
After a halcyon afternoon
yesterday where I napped
and read sea stories, I
here turn back to
my purposes, the next
long week ahead.
Thank God for sturdy
ships & surly poems
running full to that
wind & singing “bring
it on” at the terrible
heaving heaven of salt
magnitude which no
song survives.
Bring it on. Bills to
pay if we have enough
in the checking account
& copy to draft for
the NTW website, then
it’s clean house & iron
clothes & cook dinner,
loving to hilt-depth
my wife & cats &
family & sponsees.
I pray God ballast me
with a happy heart and
a dreaming mind and balls
of pluck and fortitude,
for endurance of all
for the next week of work
and poems and ecstasies
of love inside the calyx
of a wet hungry world
both rousing and dead.
Bless this ship, oh Lord,
with every shore your
angels have raptured
and ripped and
and thundered then poured.