Bok's Tower

Shamans and sorcerers are able, here on earth and as often as they wish, to accomplish “coming out of the body,” that is, the death that alone has power to transform the rest of mankind into “birds”; shamans and sorcerers can enjoy the condition of “souls,” or “disincarnate beings,” which is accessible to the profane only when they die. Magical flight is the expression of both the soul’s autonomy and ecstasy. This fact explains how this myth could be incorporated into such different cultural complexes -- sorcery, mythology of dream, solar cults and imperial apotheoses, techniques of ecstasy, funerary symbolisms, and many others. It is also related to the symbolism of ascension. This myth of the soul contains in embryo a whole metaphysiccs of man’s spiritual autonomy and freedom. ...

... An analysis of the “imagination in motion” will show how essential the nostalgia for flight is to the human psyche.

The point of primary importance here is that the mythology and the rites of magical flight peculiar to shamans and sorcerers confirm and proclaim their transcendence in respect to the human conditions; by flying into the air, in bird form or in their normal human shape, shamans as it were proclaim the degeneration of humanity.

For as we have seen, a number of myths refer to primordial time when all human beings could ascend to heaven, by climbing a mountain, a tree, or a ladder, or by flying by their own power, or being carried by birds. The degeneration of humanity henceforth forbids the mass of mankind to fly to heaven; only death restores men (and not all of them!) to their primordial condition; only then can they ascend to heaven, fly like birds, and so forth.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, (italics mine)



BOK’S TOWER

March 11, 2006

I prayed that we would
find a way there which
balmed what we are
so exhausted of these days.
For a few good scents
of what heals.
God is great, even
in Florida--I
bear witness here:
We drove down 19
to 33 through Howey-
In-The-Hills and Groveland,
miles of scrub and orchard
and hard-tack mobile
homes with our windows
cracked a partly cloudy
bright breezy day, temps
in the upper 70s rousing
the white bells spring
while truck after truck after
truck carried the future
up the other way.
Grace continued
as we slipped into as
we slipped down
Polk County on 17,
winding through
Haines City and
Davenport, stopping
a thrift and antique
shops the way
we always do, finding
little of interest
and all of it overpriced
and caring not a
whit because the
the drive and day
were so fine. Soon
we were at the Bok Tower
Sanctuary in Lake Wales,
driving slowly up through
groves which ringed
Iron Mountain, the highest
point in peninsular
Florida (some 320 feet).
Out of the car stretching
and breathing deep,
we walked dreamy acres of
azaleas just past their
prime on paths winding
through nook after nook of
Florida, beds of flowers
tucked in stumps, pools
fountains & a pond fronted
with solitary benches.
How easy it was to
thank the world for
its first origins there.
The tower Bok built
is a rich man’s cenotaph,
sheer walls of cocquina inlaid
with iron and tile & engraved
with starry platitudes,
the carillon in its crown
playing “Polotsvetsian
Dances” & a huge gilt
door engraved with
the creation story
forever locked. It was said
by the video we watched
in the visitors center
that Bok took his leisure
in a private study at
the base of that tower,
there on a promontory
overlooking what long
ago was drowned Florida,
a tower of stone and robber-
baron clout which he
lost soon after he built it,
dying only a year after
Calvin Coolidge dedicated
the place in 1929.
We walked the lanes
in quiet, taking notes for
our garden, relaxing in
some way like camellia
blossoms fanning out
to receive some sun
inside the one we’ve
inherited. Looking out
from the mount we
could see development
in every direction where
once there were groves,
ordered rows of houses
with no trees or dint
of history. All of that
rising like a sea again
up to the base of this
hill. There’s no one
without the other, I guess,
fools of paradise that
we are: And as we
drove home up 27
snarled in Friday night
traffic, the day faded
behind the hulks of
cement-block townhouses
beetling up from
razored tracts of raw
red sand. There was
a holiness too--grace,
even--in the weary road
on which we slowly
labored home,
the outer consequence
to the ecstasy of days
which hived in the
mind of Bok as he walked
alone up Iron Mountain
decades ago--a his
spirit was so complex,
the state of our state.
A stone phallus arose
from that mind of he
who would own paradise,
screw it for all
it was worth, even
squander the whole
peninsula’s coin
just to put a white picket
fence round a single dream.
I had an awful migraine
as we washed in traffic
through lane-construction
on 441 back in Lessburg,
the dark pierced by
overharsh headlights of
oncoming traffic, miles
still to go before we would
finally crest and then
enter our own sleepy
town so ringed with
new development,
there to edge up our
driveway and get out of our
car calling our cats
and inhaling our own
air. But still I reached
over and squeezed
my wife’s knee, saying
soft and complete
what a wonderful
day I had had
and I meant it, God,
with all of Your heart.

Hymn From The Rear

Your charms would keep
me here on this dark blue
shore in the last ranks of
the cultural rear, the vanguard
of a fond, reflective old-
boned glance, of no matter
nor any consequence
to the times: Good for You,
I don’t belong to that ever-
faster harder brighter
dumber deluge with its
crashing falls and white-
crazed foam: I disappeared
long ago from the view
of the fonts of wild youth,
or at best became its
askant bemused uncle,
the lute I play the
road not slakened, plucking
mad and loud
infernal boughs:
As my form rounds and
bends and wrinkles,
I’m thus lurching toward
oblivion’s tribe, a
brightness ebbed to
embers of rue
and thence to pale cold
lucence, the memory
of a dream of fire
which no dearth or
darkness can requite
or suspire: Though my
days shoulder a cross
which befits my age
and love, there is a
yet a lightness in
the music You demand
of me which is less flight
than pure dive in the sea,
the freedom to fin the
depths drowned gods
and whalers fan in
the absolute heart of
God, that nadir where
all things rend remit
and thus surrender
that which at long
last begins: I linger
at that shore long
after all I wished for
all washed away,
the starry romancing
and incessant nights,
sea-dawns cerulean
pink, even, adieu
upon adieu, the sea:
Stripped of
such augments, the
training wheels fell
off and I’m now riding
in Your full blue,
astride a meaty heart
of verbal mouth and
fin, pure penis
sans the old addles
of hooch or plain
wrong beds: I’m more
naked now than
when I was born,
world and word
conjuncted in the
tongue which darts
across the page: You
bid me linger here
so long I’ve emptied
all of the songs,
all insides of the
wave’s collapsing mash
of blue blue blue blue
seem: I have devolved to
this far simpler man inside
walls of strange verse,
a sweetness so deranged
with salt that the sound
harps pure blue gall,
the quintessence, if you
will, of what those
emptied bottled distilled
in the long years after
I was emptied even
of them, at last even
of absence itself: How
wonderful and strange
and quietly enrapt
this hour in which I
try to write waves down
as close in sense
and thought as the man
who rides the fish
which strides them,
not by providence
but in pure
victorious thrall,
forever on these
staining waves which
ink my daily spiral
raves not even You
full understands:
That, I suspect,
is why I keep coming
back each day to
write the measures down:
As I reach back, You
reach forward into the
future gambols of the
tribe, perplex and falling
as they seem: They will
make a later sense,
to be sure: Your strange
gambols have been stamped
like a question mark
for all these ages: My job’s
to make ends blue
and salt my pages with
eternal breadths of You.

Strings of the Harp

OUT THERE IN HERE

March 8, 2006

Only certain families of historic
lineage, or persons gifted with
music and song, are attended
by this spirit ((the Banshee)), for
music and poetry are fairy gifts,
and the possessors of them
show kinship with the spirit
race.

— F.S. Wilde, Ancient Legends,
Mystic Charms and Superstitions
of Ireland

You’re out there yet
in here, beyond the rim
of what I’ll ever know,
though I row the
full breadth of my
life’s paused thought:
That’s the well You
sing from, master,
my totem bell
astride your plashing fish,
Dylan of my most
daring dreams:
You’re fanciful
and not, the numen
wraith saysinging
things which always
rounds me back to here,
strumming on an
air-harp in my ear,
whistling Dixies from
a surf’s collapsing
mass of heart-shaped
falling rears: Down
my father’s ruined
family cave You’re
painted on the walls,
astride a magic salmon
or some madder gilly
of the deep, the arch
typos of bewildered
song, coercing from
the rocks of days
three cups filled
past the brim
with laughter,
grieving, sleep:
My ancestors played
their harps for
Norman patrons
in the bested courts
of Munster, that
conquered magic
darker half of Eire:
They played on
in the draught of
later years — that
famous lament “I ask,
who will buy a poem”
is by one of ours:
The vein is silver
rimmed with riot’s blue
though mostly now
we ply trades far
from You, lawyering
and marketing, teaching
rocks bereft of rooks,
iotas of verbatim
which are dearth
if not death to you:
And there’s this lame
too-brained account
of mine to evanesce
a ghoul: I can’t charm
or harrow or rue Your
wave-backed blues
eerie-ing up my waking’s
shores: Can’t write around
or through you, so sure
your fairy hand’s in mine:
These poems are half-spurts
of some spermwhalin’ crest,
half-Ouijas of wee thrall:
An hour of pure Nordic blue,
racing fjords too deep to
fully nurse the sense of,
leys of importune cold fire
which nerve our shared
domain, this shore where
song each day begins and
ends: And I’m the worst
sort of sot to sidhe your
salt in, a mound of naughty
over-nibbled nipples and
dry dry dry conceits,
ten thousand lame laments
and silly rhymes mucked
in a metronome’s tic toc
wave rocking roll, too shored
to plumb Your wettage here,
too amped on the wattage
of my lubber fear, too
endeared to my dry
white riding for truly
riding naked pent and
drear as You so wildly do:
Damned to do or don’t,
I just drone on through
the seep of middle years,
matured beyond adventuring
yet still in thrall with
my fairy peer’s resolve,
still slamming every sea
to font between wide knees:
Call me a hagriographer
of his bouree, writing
blue gamboling full down,
although I know they can’t
exist, although I say it oh
so clumsily and distant
if not full damaged, useless,
just damn wrong: That’s
the curse of all gifts the
world no longer needs —
the pursestrings are drawn
tight, like a nose fast on
a convicted rouge — the
song keeps leaking
everywhere after its dead,
gilding dead leaves gold,
no longer that which
saves or hallows
but daunts the darkness
with its gleam, light,
glissading, mercurial
for all it cannot
much longer dream:
Swim on, mad Puck,
my tongue’s tutorial
in baleen-cathedral
sieves of blue: Swive
and merry just offshore
of each emboldened
falling wave: Beyond
the bling and its
dark deeper ring,
there’s a presence
which sings so loudly
no amount
of ink or throat
the bells of its
wild heaven will
full peal or ring here
though I try, pal,
I’m trying.


***

.... Do you think the heart
is unaccountable? Do you think the body
any more than a branch
of the honey locust tree,

hunting water,
hunching toward the sun,
shivering when it feels
that good, into
white blossoms?

or do you think there is a kind
of music, a certain strand
that lights up the otherwise
blunt wilderness of the body—
a furious
and unaccountable selectivity?

— from Mary Oliver’s “Muisic” in American Primitive

***

The recit ...is an account of events experienced, rather than of my experiencing. It was then unfolded; the angel then said; a mountain, a room, a colored light, a figure shone in splendor. Like a walk through the world, there is this and this and this; the colors and shapes of the things illumined, their faces, are the confession — it is their coming to light, their testament, and their individuation, as Corbin said, not mine. the angel before the feeling he brings. Feelings are accessory to them, received from the. They are “divine influxes,” as Blake said, moving through the heart in the company of images.

— James Hillman, “The Thought of the Heart”


****



TRISTAN

2004

A weathered, broken cross in St.
Oran’s Chapel bears your image,
Seated in a boat alone, this harp
In hand. Singing god, no one knows
If you were always there, or if
Time’s hand wrote you in, across a
Sea of vellum and worn stone. No
Matter: Whenever you played that
Harp, a boat plashed home inside fair
Isolde’s heart, a South awakened
Most urgent roots to hurl her kiss.
A song which harrowed every hell
Mortality conceives. Now distant,
Almost lost, I find you just ahead,
Your boat and muse crossed heart to head.






IRISH HARPS

2004

Irish harps don’t die,
though many slip
beneath the wave to hang
on the timbers of drowned
crannogs, singing in the
ears of Time’s cold flow.
Last night I dreamt of
a late Friday afternoon
at my old job at the
newspaper in Orlando,
trying to get out the word
about a friend who was
to perform later that
night in the cafeteria.
First it was supposed to
be a duo (the other
player me, I guess, before
fate and the toll of
bottles got me kicked
out of that enterprise)
and then just him;
and though in history
this guy was a drummer,
that night I dreamed
he was to play guitar
and sing (and although
I don’t ever recall him
singing). Maybe
he was me, the
successful half that I
lost in the wash of
bad Friday nights
repeated every night.
Let’s just say that his
presence in the dream
was representational, as
the color blue suggests
a liminal and lucent
threshold in the day,
where words and worlds
veil as thin as a fresh-
breaking Anyway I was
trying to get the word out
somehow in a mash
of old and new labors,
trying to dummy up
a sign with his picture
and some text on the
computer, scanning maps
and his photo and then
pasting it up on cardboard,
which looked like crap,
and the whole effort
seemed useless, since
one lousy sign was
hardly enough to
permeate a corporate
hive ... So I went back
to work, mindful of
the passing hour, knowing
that if I wanted to post
a newsboard as I once
did at that job, 26 of them
at locations around the
building and faxed to
bureaus and the offsite
production facility, if
I wanted to get the word
out that way I’d need
the HR director or the
president or one of the
other director’s approval,
and at 4:50 p.m. on
Friday they were surely
long gone to Happy Hours
at swanker bars than
I could afford, or off
to poolside barbecues
in Islesworth or royal
Winter Park. How then
to proceed? I called
a delivery express
company and talked with
a woman there a bit,
negotiating, estimating.
She said that my name
and voice sounded
achingly familiar, though
neither of us could fit
the sweet echo to
a time or bed or beach;
and so let it go, smiling
at a connection which
had remained pure blue
even when the line
went dead under water.
I then decided to create
and post a newsboard
without the approval of any
superiors, and got to
work here, way before
first light, heralding news
of a minstrel show that
returns every 300 years
or so, up from the crannog
where my totem Cobtach
Sweet-Tune entertained
both Norman court and
Danaan princes of the Sidhe.
I am the envoy of that
music, brandishing
what once was called an
Irish harp, stepping off
Saint Oran’s cross to
entertain you here
with songs and tales
that never quite die.
These fingers which knew
frets and strings recall
the bluer fourths and fifths
as pen swims over page,
holding dream and
its doors up close like
a harp to shoulder.
Let that old music ride
forth here, my harp-shaped
charger, toward first
and last and ever shore.


***


NOTES ON THEME

2002


O harp and altar,
of the fury fused ...
— Hart Crane

If I don’t arrive at some
spring of God
I think I’ll die
of parched unsaid:
and so I click my
pen & pause to
pray to those black
tongues wagging
near a rude trough.

Shall I mark these
acres I till as home,
somewhere beyound
urban and rural
a suburb and shore?
This stead is a
tempered composite
all ‘em all,
a bow running
across the everyday
of hardworking
humdrum joint-aching
midage; and because
the horsehairs were
plucked from so
complicate a horse,
the music straddles,
weaves, haunts, hurts,
complicates, and consoles,
silent to all but this
page, my day and God:

Or should I write inside
the wounds of sexual scythe,
sea-dipped and arced
between savage thighs?
Shall I ache my words
in her malt furies,
spermatic and balled
and racing the
e’erwashed beach
of a history unquenched,
its harbors never reached?

Shall I account the tonnage
of my father’s stones, each
a tooth in some titan’s jaws,
crowing buzzing, mooning
& lowing? Shall I give ‘em
room, tithe, voice, border
and title here, deep
in the shadow of
a million millenia
and their yeasty rows?

Or shall I chant the
missal poured from what
gathered here? I’ve
prayer upon prayer
woven of pagan
marginalia no one
50 years from now
will know. My chattering
skull sits on
the mantel of a well
always more lost.
Shall I give you
chapel and well
of that inchoate bone
which yammers &
tolls of scattering shoals?

Or—finally—shall
I write the finest tracers
which etch and limn
love as I know it today?
Of our cat poised in the
window before dawn,
her blue eyes lost in a
darkened face, perfect
at that threshold? Shall
I tell you of my wife asleep
amid too many cares?
Would you hear the
plainsong of a heart
where all words are tested
and found wanting, and
where all poems are just
a hobby for the first hour
of the day and lie strewn
around our bed where I
try to stroke alive the
connection which gives
me breath and blood,
and may too be lost?

Harp and altar,
I am manned in
your salt mordents:
scree and mortar
these black hooves.
Salmon my blood
toward the brooding
shore I cannot reach.
Bridge the next room
I can enter gladly
with this fading torch.
Sing of me beneath
the world, in your
resonant tomb,
this skull I call home.


***


BRUTAL HARP,
GENTLE SONG

April 2005


O brute harp, what tensile chords
you pluck from me when words are
charged full blue! How is it that when
I’m screwed tightest here, an aging
man at matins yet again, I am
bid and freed to roar this Cape
to Your heart’s content, long after
every song has drowned. What self-
sufficing mandate do You boon and
bane in these unfurling wings of blue?
How is it that I remain at this
bottomless derange of words for world,
my voice wetting every page
with Your dark salt rain, a
sing-song, solo susurration
watering blasted heaths long prophesied
to outlive the sea’s high reign.
Why do I remain for all these
dark, dole- rueful poems, cranking
high the amplitude of waves
I so desperately steer this heart
and house and love the other, safer,
gentler way? This resonant
next shore is a harp of both,
somehow, a ground where soft
white sands of bossa nova days
overlay a hard tremble further
down which refrains the
boom of awfulness, a faint basso
of far aftershocks, the chatter
of buried skull teeth. My love
asleep upstairs and this furnace-
tending in the boiler-room downstairs:
countervalences which whale together
this devilish bouree, this classy,
brine sashay. You bid me compose
this tub of soggy numens, to
brave and breech the massy gale;
to hold it high, like an old stone
crucifix, reminding gods of surge
and swale of every swilled delight.
Tear my mouth and throat and chest
full wide, and I will trim my sails
full blue, captain of the next song
to split and spiral further down
dark and deeper vaults of You.


***


STRINGS OF THE HARP

April 2002


On this cold clear
April night I stand
with my father
in his ancient yard,
the moon at full blast
lathering these stones
with the black milk of
the sea’s hurled soul.
The bell tower is a pale
gem gleaming in
that lamp, faceted
with uncut faces
—seal-man, ogre,
dolphin, snake —
each adrift in that old
moon-music, singing
from some place
we surely dreamed
before we knew.
And high above
in the newest portal
a harp’s clef stretches
wind-strings taut
and burning with
that other fire,
like tongues of heated
heart, or sails of
starry soul.
And O how they
tremble inside
that April moon
as if to tune our
own wild nerves:
Together we
are strummed
by a cold wind
weaving through the
garden of the mind,
and sing on through
that beaming door
which opens on the final
room of our strange career—
a richly booming,
darkly gleaming shore.

The Surreal Life

Down deep under the waters
of Lough Neagh, can still be seen,
by those who have the gift of
fairy vision, the columns and
walls of the beautiful palaces
once inhabited by the fairy
races when they were the
gods on earth ... Giraldus
Cambrensis states that in
his time the tops of the towers
‘built after the fashion of
the country’ were distinctly
visible in calm, clear weather,
under the surface of the lake;
and still the fairies haunt the
ruins of their former splendor,
and hold festivals beneath
the waters when the full moon
is shining; for the boatmen
coming home late a night
have often heard sweet music
rising up from beneath the
waves and the sound
of laughter, and seen glimmering
lights far down under the water,
where the ancient fairy palaces
are supposed to be.

-- F.S. Wilde, Ancient Legends,
Mystic Charms and Superstitions
of Ireland

But LaLa Land is just
the half of it, fool’s gold
the literalist of soul
wears out his teeth
in chomping,
the manic seem of
fairy phosphor evil only
when we dive into
the madness of the fall.
Drowned angels are just
the half of it, a
Christian gloss on
how lower heavens
shine brightest in
error, making of
reverie’s wild thalamus
an oubliette of rank
devolving terror.
Let us suppose that
beneath the Christian
tale swims a wilder,
albeit darker one,
still regnant in
the drowned city
of our most ancient
dreams, a blue vale
where gods and
fathers and lost
lovers swim and
swive and merry up
a dead land’s darkest
hue, turning black
waters a silvered,
almost manic blue,
its music haunting
to hear on the shores
we wake and work
and walk down, and
far more daunting
for one prone to swilling
sweetness from all jugs.
They drink not booze
down there but
a sweeter quaff
of strange, so sweet
it never comes close
to mortal lips
though dreams are
drams of it, the flavor
by which we ink our
reveries. I sit here at
4:30 a.m. tired &
moody & nursing a
bad back & hear
an oh-so-faintest
lap of waters in the
dark outside, beyond
the sighing breeze,
blue plashings bowering
the scent of orange
blossoms now ravaging
our days from their
petite and hornlike bells.
I’m standing on that boat
beneath the moon
enthralled with the
tableau revealing in
lake waters just below,
the spires of a palace
a few leagues down
winnowed by wee folk
astride dark fishes,
circling down a lost
faith’s spire to dim
squares of pure merriment.
Beneath the keel of
sane men, beyond
the cathedral rim of
feeling any woman
I have known,
a deep tribe bequeaths
to me a surreal and
silvered gleam, a sing-
song melody I’ll never
fully quit or rid, enough
strange sweetness
to remind me--even here,
even now, despite all
mortal wearies pains
& doubts -- that the
darker part of me
is still dancing in
that watered Sidhe
in the bone light of
not ecstasy the
weirdest gleam of it,
a glint of such a
wild heaven that
I’ll never sing
the depths of it.
Something deep
in me is sufficed
by that surreal town
too strange to
actually drown
and never meant
to love or own.

Sons and Others, Present and Unaccountable

DOLPHIN BOY

1993


All the world’s a whisper,
Where ocean margins cry,
I ride my fevered fishes there
Between the breakers and the sky.

Cities lie beneath the flood,
The sun king sleeps below.
But I croon darkly in your blood,
With brine and brawl and brogue.

A woman waits for you on a shore
No course you chart can reach.
Only storms can take you there
To wreck you on her beach.

I am the Dylan of your fathers,
Galloping the nine-wave brute,
I call you from your harbors
Into the darkness of all truth.


THE SEA

Mary Oliver
from American Primitive

Stroke by
stroke my
body remembers that life and cries for
the lost parts of itself —

fins, gills
opening like flowers into
the flesh — my legs
want to lock and become

one muscle, I swear I know
just what the blue-gray scales
shingling
the rest of me would

feel like!
paradise! Sprawled
in that motherlap,
in that dreamhouse

of salt and exercise,
what a spillage
of nostalgia pleads
from the very bones! how

they long to give up the long trek
inland, the brittle
beauty of understanding,
and dive,

and simply
become again a flaming body
of blind feeling
sleeking along

in the roughage of the sea’s body,
vanished
like victory inside
that insucking genesis,

roaring flamboyance, that
perfect
beginning and
conclusion of our own.


***

In Campbell’s Popular Tales of the Western Highlands, there are many anecdotes of hill-dwelling fairies, rather more prosaically conceived than the Irish O’Sidhe. The tale of the smith’s son is one of them. In this tale the fairies coveted the smith’s only son, a handsome, merry boy, and left a wizened changeling in his place. The father took advice from a wise man, and discovered the imposture by the usual expedient of using eggshells instead of buckets; but though he got rid of the changeling, his own son was not returned to him, and he had to fetch him back from fairyland himself. A dirk, a Bible and a cock were necessary for the rescue, and he entered a fairy knowe at full moon, when it was raised upon pillars. He found his song among a group of mortal prisoners who were working at a forge in one corner, and succeeded in getting him safe away. It is curious that in this story the fairies bestowed skill in metalwork upon their pupil, and yet they were defeated by cold iron, the dirk stuck into the hillside.

— Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature


SON

March 4, 2006

My son lies in your thrall,
my cold, sea-hearted queen,
stolen from me years ago
when I thought I failed to find you
through all the doors I wished
you might be found in.
You smiled at my fruitless
searches as you swelled the
moon and delved my next
forever hidden from my view.
Your absence and his ghostly
presence mothered in me
a changeling’s art for broken latitudes,
fixing me here at a once-welcome,
now bone-lucent shore,
repleting every wave
in a pauper’s paper choir.
I’m stuck in dry day quavering
while in the soak he swims
emboldened in blue dazzlement,
riding every swell I cannot harbor.
He is Dylan to my Taleissin,
brine-brained Pip to my Ahab,
Ariel to my Prosper,
the Puck of drowned Titania
drifting down through me.
Instead of him this wizened
author writes in juvenalia,
an incessant mortal drone
which intones only those
surfaces of depths he’s grown
full into, boy of first dazzle
no more. I sit here scanning
eternal fists of blue and wonder
just where he went to all those
years ago, when he dove headfirst
into the surf in which you welcomed
me and left me in, forever.
He is our child, the son of the wildest
curve and smash of all,
riding and diving and singing
in the incessant absence
I here weave, inside a heart
far deeper than I’ll ever know,
much less live in, though I’m
always there, walking and
talking with my silvered son,
his smile in that moonlight
all that lingers in what disappears.


FREEZE FRAME

from “A Breviary of Guitars,
2000

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



PRESENCE

March 4, 2006

Ah but do not think
there is no presence here —
it overbrims, spring’s
tide approaching full
with sun and breeze
and quaffs of bloom
too sweet for human
lips, almost. How much
I love my wife these days,
almost desperately,
listening to her bitch about
her hair as she tried to
set it for a day out
after five days of sewing
fabrics here alone, fabrics
which may never sell.
I saw how beautiful she
was in that first cool light
upstairs, all of her
attention on the mirror
which will not yield for
her any more than her
business, her hands
busy behind her head
the way she labors in
this house. Such fierceness
is holy; it shows in way
she loves to stroke Red
on the back porch giving
that fool cat more love
than it can ever understand.
In such wild touch I see
receipt and struggle, an
odd precipice of the laboring
flesh which also succors
its freshenings in a marriage
and life we love.
It’s 4 p.m. and I sit up on
the upper deck during my
half day of downtime which
restores me for another hard
week of work — an hour’s
nap, reading sea stories,
giving Violet a brushing,
sitting here as the afternoon
sings quiet and lush the
halcyons of blossom and
pale green, rioting azaleas
flooding pink lusciousness
next to the garage, the
yard strewn with oak-leaves,
a dazed bush freshly replanted
wilting at our yard’s border,
a swarm of bees passing
overhead — These are
the vernals of what absence
became when I dug roots
into something difficult
and real and so slowly
counted out the sums
of contentment, day
after day after day,
married to an echo and its
flower, the surf never
seen and its present wild
power in an aging man’s
gratitude. A woman woke
me to this spring so
many lives ago; a woman
works next to me in this
one; something ferried from
one to the other,
not through their surfaces
and depths but through mine,
as I learned to love them truly
learning to truly love the world.

***

A vivid and detailed account of ((the idenity of fairies with fallen angels)) is given by Alexander Carmichael in Carmina Gadelica and repeated in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries {Evan Wentz, 1911}. According to this some of the angels seduced by Satan were not prominent in his councils, but might rather be counted his dupes. When Michael hurled the hosts of Satan out of Heaven they were followed by an almost endless stream of these compraratively innocent victims of his unholy eloquence. The Shining Host of Heaven was thinning rapidly, and the Son, seeing the danger, cried out: “Father, Father, the City is being emptied!” God raised his hand; the gates of Heaven closed, the seduced angels stopped bewildered and recollected thmeselves, and those who were already descending stopped in their tracks, som in the sky, some in the sea, some on mountains and in woods, some further on their way towards Hell, in bowels of the earth, and the foremost angels, wholly committed to evil, in the burning lake. This origin makes the final position of the Sidhe at the Day of Judgment a very perilous one.

— “Theories of Fairy Origins,”
http://waeshael.home.att.net/origins.html


ILLUSION

March 6, 2006

The persistence of this
illusion is astonishing.
— Alcoholics Anonymous

Let’s say there is heaven and
there is its bad other,
a terrible heaven always
in bloom and lucent and wrong.
Let’s say that many angels
poured from the first heaven
down toward the second on
tongues of false fire,
that old Devil brogue
which promises
clout and swoon and
sweet nightnight faery
dreams of drifting
oblivion. So many dove
from heaven on the
boozy waterfall of
the Evil One’s song,
folding their wings,
falling and falling
from gilt porches
all the way down
to the black
goop of doom. The Son
sensed the danger
and cried “Father! Father!
The City is soon emptied!”
causing God to rouse
from His slumber and
lift a white hand. Immediately
the gates of Heaven
clanged shut; the remaining
angels roused as if
from a dream and turned
their faces back Heaven’s
way. But those outside
Heaven’s gate found themselves
locked in the station of their
fall, some in the clouds,
some in the seas, some
in the mountains, others
in dark forests. Some were
stuck in day jobs and others
worked nights, some hunkered
in topless bars in the
hearts of anonymous cities
and still others lingered down
lonely country roads twisting
forever out of sight.
They’re everywhere amid us,
torn phosphors of fool’s gold,
gleaming like jewels just
out of reach, hanging between
breasts too ripe, too sweet,
too heavy for mortal lips
to suckle, though some of us,
also hearing that eerie
reel from bum heaven, try to
til we die trying. There are
as many different dolors
of these angels as there
are whiskies and gins,
dozens of vodkas and ryes
glowing in rooks like
bottles on shelves, the
lie of their presence turning
away, always away, just
when we jilt something
essential to join them
on the sward — a job, a wife,
bank accounts, our self
respect, conscience, sanity —
all hocked for a dance
with angels falling fast
through our hands like
sands through a glass, draining
our life as we descend
further down, finding
other angels at each
next sub-level, enthralled
with the next rung down
the dream — love, perfect love,
too-perfect love, the next
love, any damn love,
any refraction of love’s
long lost ardor, any seem
or semblage of ardor
at all — till finally moonlight
itself is sufficient, lamping
the final departure of sense
into abysms and bottle clubs,
making asses of us
all as we black out amid
sirens and succubi,
murderesses all — We who
have chased those falling
angels become their
slip-motion even though
they’re forever stopped in
their tracks, chasing that
terrible heaven til it has
us at last, our brains brined
in the sea of last fire,
burning, frozen, lost in the din
of the sorriest angels of all,
the ones who led the way in.