Wheels of the Chariot

The same confusion in outlines which exists in our own Bogie and Hobgoblin gives the Bwbacha double character, as a household fairy and a terrifying phantom.In both aspects it is ludicrous, but in the latter it has dangerous practices. To get into its clutches under certain circumstances is no trifling matter, for it has the power of whisking people off through the air. Its services are brought into requisition by this purpose by troubled ghosts who cannot sleep on account of hidden treasure they want removed, and if they cannot succeed in getting a mortal to help them in removing treasure, they employ the Bwbach to transport the mortal through the air.

— Wirt Sikes, British Goblins (1888)


WHEELS OF THE CHARIOT

At length the duple one
descended to the
badlands of my balls,
Can and Able, Helter
Skelter, Blissful Abyss,
blue skies swaying
twixt two thighs of
ancient ice:
They swing
from my day’s peramble
hooting and hymning
the hardons of God,
rewounding & redeeming
& rescinding heavne’s sense
with a sensual
devou t all cock and
and grinding clout,
crowing pink verbotens
furrowed through the
world’s foundations
too far and wide below.
Left and lefter knight
don hairy hefty
helmets to shout
and joust in their
shared scrotum for
the hero’s portion
of the maid, each
ready to plunge
his staff straight through
the heart of God
to pick the locks
of her fast girdle.
And me a married man,
trothed to higher
orders & faithful
to one woman at
the exclusion of all
they seek, those
surly burly balls,
clackering loud
in riotous thrall
the lewd rapacious
pudendas of
the best wrongs
in the hood. And
yet without their brassy
bright bravados
I’m just a flat ass
on a white chair
writing down tatters
of silkie underwear
strewn by your
old conquest of
a dry and aging shore.
Lack of pussy
make you brave
said Eddie Murphy
from his cross;
They bear the
sacred brunt
of all the cunts I
fucked, slapping on
so many heaving
rears as I plunged to
hilt in slishy undine
echoes — They juiced
my next joy’s salvo
of halcyon clouds
and rain. My thought
is half housed on
their half shells,
more Yours than
I can say in any
watery-enough
full-hearted way.
The poem bears witness
to my ancient
vassalage to balls:
See? I’m kneeling
in pure reverence
to smooth stones
of the sea swinging
blue and surly
like to hot colts
at the gate, like eyes
of the lion of God
staring out (or back?)
in the dark, like
St. Michaels
demented older
brother, that rude
hallower by which
all seams are cemented.
An infernal metronome
is tocking ear to ear
inside my skull
of delight’s thwocking
brute disorder,
night and blicker
with a jones for
jissoming a pair
of milky sweet
swole knockers,
ferrying the bass
notes lowest in
the surf’s bad crash.
In that undying blue
blue rhythmus
of left and lefter
thrall I glint
and thrash and grin
the rictus of the
moon and groan
hot heaven up
from waters
like the sun
fertilizing the
world with golden light
— purity inside
hard orbs of
vicious sight.



FIRE SPRITE FLA.

2004

Indeed some fire-sprite may
be at work, spawn of every sun
which aches to rise and
languish above the Western
gulf, refusing to go down.
He darts across the state
igniting the souls of pine
& subdivisions & sleeping lakes
like paper boats then
dances round their flame.
Out on the beaches the
young worship him, sprawled
on towels & hip-hop smashing
from car radios. Browning
in his orisons. In the bars
the dactyls serve his ire,
pouring out fistfulls
of gasoline while on the
TV brightly-colored street
cars go round and round
and round in a calyx of
white-hot speed.
The alligators feel him in their
gut edging from perch to shore
to raven on poodles and
the noggins of boys
too foolish not to dive in.
And the eyes of crazed
suburban mothers
kilned in debt and misery
are hottest in him,
their irises like fangs
as they cooly scan
sons and daughters crying
everywhere. What hour
of my summer day
is not some precipice of him,
an invitation in the brilliant
door to strip raw the hungry
hymn and glut on pipes of fire.
His cartel’s more potent than
every pulpit in the state
which crows brimstone taboos,
the one eternal in its fires,
the other right here right now
in purest puerile pyre,
merry and malicious
and so in infernally salacious.
Bask and dream in it if you will,
backyard Sunday snoozer:
He’s whispering to those
basking cells on tits and
nose to rise and riot
while you drowse.
Your heart on his
barbie, his fork in
your meat of carouse.






THE DOGS

2002


At first, the dogs were scalding,
furious, and free. I chased them nightly
out the walled defenses of my frigid self,
aswirl in humid fists of orchid and musk,
thrilled with the chase toward wantons
revealed only at the latest, nigh-drunk hour.
How the dogs all bayed canine joy!
But as the years progressed
the dogs grew hoary, lupine, hungry, mean.
I no longer followed them: they chased me
again and again out of my sad door,
yapping their saws at my sorry ass
out into the ever-more sterile
boneyard woods of bitter night. The sweet
odor of sex descended to some worse, a
whalish odure; no bandage was big enough
for the wound whose pus I was.
Beds now wronged a wrong I knew too well
yet found impossible to resist: a toothy
will now pawed my thirst, each night a hood
my executioner smiled so patiently from,
a cunning, baffling, so powerful wolf
drinking me down the last gnawed bone.



BALL BLUES

1995


1.
The red numerals
of the clock burn in
the night like coals.

It is 12:30, it is 1:12,
it is 2:03, it is 2:50,
it is 3:19, it is 4:10.

Each slice of hour
cuts into me most sharply
where I least have you.

My balls glow an angry
blue tonight, lunar
angels of your absence.

My cock strains to free
itself from my hips, a
stone viper hunting your silence.

I won’t jack the cream tonight.
I keep it for you even
though you will not save

your honey for me.
Tonight I refuse to admit
solitude’s wadded Kleenex.

My blue balls defy God,
they are lungs bursting
leagues beneath the sea.

They will not rise
unless you call them.
Speak or drown me in foam.

2.

You looked at me too
deeply today. Now my
balls are blue with your eyes.

They are overripe plums,
purple wineskins bursting
with torch brandy.

Run your tongue slowly
over that thick udder,
taste the taut fury

of my scrotum. Pull your
fist up the ladder
of my leaping cock and

feel the veins pumping
like the heart of horse
galloping moonlit ridges.

Suck the ruddy mile
of this heat rising
from the roots of my

loneliness to the slick
blue skullcap of my love
for you: all of that

waits for you this night,
waking me again and again.
And at the summit

of that impatient hammer
there’s a blind eye searching
the heavens for your pussy,

there’s a parched mouth
gaping for your peach honey,
there is an angry cock head

wild with thoughts of you.
I am one lurch from gushing
pure devil brimstone

all over your breasts, your
ass, your eyes, your hair.
My longing is a terrible angel

trapped tonight in a web
of hornets and honeysuckle,
bulging and throbbing

and lunging at the
spinning night, aching
to jam my swollen heart

up and up and up the wet
furrow of your absence,
cry your name, and die.

Tell me this is not
the cruelest love of all.





GOD’S BALLS

2000

Are like eyes of
blue fire
and lightning
everywhere: Eve
of destruction
on her bed
her white thighs
opening to receive
me. No one may
live in this red
seam between
the fin and foam.
Some frenzies
invoke, others
provoke. Naked
and screaming,
I enter


MAN POEM

2002

No man can conscience
or even connive
writing a poem
about a Man’s Experience—
it’s assumed we have
a prior right which
banishes all current
title to such talk:
We just do, and in
so doing are dismissed
for dingdongy wrongy ways:
I never think to
criticize women
for how they’ve failed
yearnings which,
being male, are suspect.
Certainly I’d never
vault and vaunt them
in a poem, because
I know such priapal bronzings
are unconscionable,
at least unpublishable.
I’m supposed to save
such rants for the
drum banging congress
of beer-drinking boors
playing paintball
out in confederate sticks.
So I go with the flow
and save my pecker-rants
for road and wood.
No one cares to hear
how disappointing this thing
desire is, so hot for a woman
in ways a woman hardly cares for,
but rather serves and fawns
to keep a man hearth-side.
How sad it is that
so much gets lost in translation,
the juicy central fact of sex
too central for a woman,
whose tastes seem to run
toward food and babies and talk,
effects not causes, circling
the boat rather than
going balls to the walls.
Sad how a man has to
swear off so much of
his homeland manners
to share a house with a woman.
What’s the point of this?
It’s convict-talk,
tappings on a cell wall
incoherent to the woman
who yearns for something
else from me. Why bother
proving I’m just a man? It’s assumed.





BALLS

2002

The greatest things I’ve cared to do
I couldn’t for lack of balls.

Standing at the arch
of something bold and real

sharp with the salt whiff
of an unsponsored fling,

I wimped out, returning a halved man
to safe and known, less scathing pursuits.

I left my own Christian God
behind but could not fission

the emptiness into a new divine
spark. And so sanctified mere hunger.

Couldn’t hold on to that guitar
savagely enough to hack away

the useless ties of love and fame.
Sober for a while, I couldn’t leave

it behind, and so spoiled every
next drink I tried. I left my wife

but couldn’t fuck like a yahoo
due to remorse and a useless conscience.

In every way I’ve failed as a passionate
man, seeing what I could be

and then, biting my nails, returned
to what I simply was. Told to shit

or get off the pot, I lumbered away,
sorry to have even tried. Cronos had

the balls to sickle his father’s off,
making him the Dude of Time.

Having failed myself, I became
time’s motleyed food, a plate of

steaming huevos rancheros fresh
clipped from the bull who stood

at his real life and couldn’t,
each I can’t a clangorous snip.

I became a map bordered by all
I wouldn’t, a safe land, perhaps,

certainly one fit for marriage and
sobriety and long slow accomplishment.

Where might I be had I more balls?
Surely a bright clangorous place of

bronze and steel blades, piled high
with trophies, notched belts, prizes

and booty, the long stain of burnt
bridges and homes with no way

to look back. Having become the
Knight of Time, ceaseless, unburdened,

up to the knees in blood and lime.


HELL’S BELLS

2004

Tunstall Church (in Norfolk),
(was) destroyed by a fire,
which yet left the bells uninjured;
the parson and churchwardens
quarreled for possession of them,
and meantime the Old Gentleman
watched his opportunity and
walked off with them. He was,
however, found out and pursued
by the parson, who began to
exorcise him in Latin. So in his
hurry he made his way through
the earth to his abode, taking his
booty with him. The spot where he
disappeared is now a boggy pool
of water, called Hell Hole, on the
surface of which, in summer-time,
bubbles are constantly appearing.
These, the folks say, are caused
by the continual sinking of the
bells through the water on their
endless journey to the
bottomless pit.

— Robert Charles Hope, The Legendary
Lore of the Holy Wells of England

... It was a pit — with fathoms under it —
It’s circuit just the same.
Seed—summer—tomb—
Whose Doom to whom?

— Emily Dickinson


The next poem’s begun:
so the bells hath rung
deeper in the mere
where nothing is cear,
nothing surely known
but that bubbles of bone
are rising from within.
Call it my old sin
to hurl high bells
down a dark missal
where ship-mast and whale
finish one tale’s
door into this other
further down my mother’s
horror, my father’s delight.
Endless the swirling flight
down a dark cold well
this singing bell;
endless its weird chime
inside the next rhyme,
the next rappelling poem.
Sound to the ankle-bone
of that first man
encrypted where he stands
down in the footers
of the blue headers
of a fish-god’s roof:
these bubbles are proof
those bells never cease
tolling the silver crease
between now and forever:
And thus I endeavor
as long as my pen troubles
to ink those wild bubbles
singing up from way down.
Who know what God found
under his own spire:
old bones, swords on fire,
and the Word, first and last,
where every bell was and is cast.


CAPE BLUE BALLS

2005

O nymph, loveliest of all the ocean,
though my existence gave you no joy,
what did it cost you to beguile me
with mountain, cloud, dream or void?

— Adamastor, titan-spirit of the Cape
of Good Hope in Camoes’ The Lusiads


Love drew You here — OK, desire,
that full ache of wave in gale,
a blueballed bull frenzy which cannot
think of higher things till the lower
ones get done, bull balls to walls
of salty hoochacha, thighs
flung like shores of a roaring
deep-contessa sea. A woman I was
dating tentatively after my first
marriage smiled when I at last
proposed that we make love;
you mean you want to fuck me,
she said with an evilly
complicit sigh, and the whole
space we’d built shifted and
went tumbling down the red maw
of the wave which hurled itself again
and again and again between us
the lovers become the cry of surf
relentless on wild shores. We both
wanted it bad that hot summer
of hurled storms, but what that
was could not be slaked with what
our sexes marshalled to the task
— cock in cunt, tongue to clit
or slathering sperm foam,
teeth nailing sharp desire
to screamed nipples, balls drumming
on asscheeks, no: None
of those red permutations would
equate, and that was where I
found You, my yowling Cape,
the awe in every awesome clinch
augmenting every futile Yes!
my love and I kept shouting
at each other as we teased the
fragrant sprite from each others’
loins. You never recovered from
the lust which betrayed You
to rock and shore and storms
to nth infernity; here at this
quietest hour, love and age
distill me to I yet war on
with dry eternity, choosing
still to roger on, the old sea-bull
between my knees, his horns
ramming toward the pure
puerile wilderness of swelter,
panties dangling from the lees.
Desire drew You here, but
love if that hard ache is what
is loudest on this page
and is the bawling rage
of every angel jism to
splash the harrows of Your Cape.
Here where nothing ever quite
gets done will nothing else quite do.
Red in royal amplitude
and every a smiling blue.

Sweet Purgatory

My God, it’s quiet out there
in the dark this morning, cool,
still, witched in a full moon’s
soak: A dream-calm, which
means I’m walking on
some path which winds the
garden’s visceral interior,
stepping over everyone
else who have fallen in
thrall of sweet splendor:
Here are three college
students from Michigan
on spring break, two guys
and a careening coed,
half-naked, their sex
like raw wounds milked
back by some hidden
mouth under desire
in a wave’s backdrawing sigh.
Here’s a developer
in Dockers and a white
golf shirt, clutching a fist
of zinnias torn from
every patch where it grew,
his forehead high as
a backhoe, a vault
sated on its remits
& knitted by bribes.
Here’s a stripper and
her john in the
weeds which overcame
them as she lowered down,
sour honey to pent money
drowning the catacombs of
Rome, the empty hiss
of their encounter
unzippering a moon
up from the ocean
so black and driven to find
light it shatters all
it sees. Here’s a teacher
with twelve children
stilled from class riot
to its causes -- or is that
consequence, the rigor
of each child’s dash
toward any door
freezing at threshold
where there’s forever
more in ever less?
There’s the rich
man from Isleworth
face down & spread-eagled
over a bed of pink
and red petunias,
swooning where they
smother; here’s the Puerto
Rican grownup boy
with the sound of
Easton gunfire in
his ears, licking at
his mamacita’s nipple
or a penta bloom. Here’s
a biker on the pavement
where he tumbled
spilling brains over
faux brawn; there’s the
lineman from Kentucky
whose fingers twitch
the semaphore of wind;
here’s the Christian
housewife whose ears
are trilling heaven’s
gold like Roundup
on a wilted orchid’s
profanely gorgeous bloom.
There’s my boss with
a DVD in one hand
and my future in the other,
here’s the guy from AA
who died last weekend
in his sleep -- an
esophageal hemhorrage --
sitting alert and calm
and opening his mouth
to say something to us;
there’s my wife with
one of her beautiful
sewn sheets
embroidered over
her naked shape &
she’s talking into
a telephone of milkweed
to her sister, consoling,
cursing God, crying
softly and inconsolate
in my ear. And there
I am in the garden’s
darkest corridor this
still, moon-wretched
night, holding a stick
in my hand as I
scratch lines in the dirt
only You understand,
words I cannot remember
here though I feel
the prescience of night
and dirt and the world’s
heart sleeping in them,
deep in its desire for
You in all your perplex
and fallen verdure,
reaching for the
sweetness in those
tiny pinwheel jasmine
blossoms spinning like
angelic demon sufis
at the garden’s gate to here,
so savagely still and silent
and sweetwater blue.

Spring Light

Some dam of winter
dark is breached by days
and then it’s bright
and breezy everywhere,
the trees in one abundant
sway, tidally awash
in brilliant light
and lifted in white song.
Your ecstasy abounds
high up those boughs,
nursed on dreamy paps
of fresh-washed blue
and bowered in a
pale green now leafing
everywhere. I’ve heard this
song for almost 50 years
and still it raptures me,
feathering these words
with gratitude and tears
in the aeries of Your bliss.
Feel the way the whole
moment here -- forever
early afternoon, streets
empty, between some
daily task and the next --
lifts and spreads huge
wings and spirals up
the air on some thermal
of pure song choired
by the trees softly
swaying round my home,
that precinct where love’s
frail so perfect flowers
into that watery and
windy light are thrown.

***


SABBATHS 1986 I

Wendell Berry

from A Timbered Choir


Slowly, slowly they return
To the small woodland let alone;
Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light.

Patient as stars, they build in air
Tier after tier a timbered choir,
Stout beams upholding weightless grace
Of song, a blessing on this place.

They stand in waiting all around,
Uprisings of their native ground,
Downcomings of the distant light;
They are the advent they await.

Receiving sun and giving shade,
Their life's a benediction made,
And is a benediction said
Over the living and the dead.

In fall their brightened leaves, released,
Fly down the wind, and we are pleased
Top walk on radiance, amazed.
O light come down to earth, be praised!



***

TRYING TO PRAY

James Wright

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.
It is dusk.
It is the good darkness
Of women's hands that touch loaves.
The spirit of a tree begins to move.
I touch leaves.
I close my eyes and think of water.




SPRING

Mary Oliver

This morning
two birds
fell down the side of the maple tree

like a tuft of fire
a wheel of fire
a love knot

out of control as they plunged through the air
pressed against each other
and I thought

how I meant to live a quiet life
how I meant to live a life of mildness and meditation
tapping the careful words against each other

and I thought—
as though I were suddenly spinning, like a bar of silver
as though I had shaken my arms and lo! they were wings—

of the Buddha
when he rose from his green garden
when he rose in his powerful ivory body

when he turned to the long dusty road without end
when he covered his hair with ribbons and the petals of flowers
when he opened his hands to the world.


from West Wing (1997)

***


SPRING TIDE

2004

Spring in Florida has washed
over us so clear and fragrant
these past few days as to
immerse us in a drowse
and a dream of heavenly
song, the breeze sweet with
orange and jasmine blossom,
the sky so heartbreakingly
blue, the pale green trees
whispering of lower
urgencies as the huge oak
boughs lift and cast us all,
like wave-spume, back
here. Wild. Yet is this sudden
thrall of God, the sea, or
of some paler propinquity,
the spirit of this not
so much lifting wings as
sprouting fins to fan an
emerelding blue? Spring
washes over us in a wave
and we emerge at dusk
spluttering and anointed,
our heart no longer ashore,
but far and deep and wild
in a vaster bliss which no
one walks or wake from.
It happened to me long
ago, when I was 14 and
stretching long exactly
when the groves awoke to
pour their white brandies
into the ladling breeze.
One day I woke smelling
that low sweetness in
the window and then
felt some inner beach
of flesh awake, washed
pure and clean
of any music beyond
that grove-wild sphere.
The angel-whitened
floss of my wings turned
right then a feral blue,
my hand reaching under
the sheets to translate
that boozy scent across
the sheets. Singing or
flinging back all I heard in
that waking, racing spring
day. That was 30 years
ago, and though my hand
now holds a more articulate
device (surely though a
more minor fin), the jots
are still as hot and hard,
the end just as imprecise,
my thrall no less for having
said it just so. Oh I can
smell that green whisky
rising from the dark just
now, curved and immortal
as the one so long ago
who washed her breasts
all over me and then
ebbed back into the grove
back and down of soul
to wait and sing and pray
and make a home of
the hole she tore in me.


***



A MEMORY OF SPRING IN 1977


1995

On a killer spring afternoon
Dave and Sunny and me piled
into Dave’s old Mustang
and drove fast out of town.
Warm air rushed through
the open windows, mixing
like booze with the Rolling Stones'
"Hot Stuff" blaring on the radio.

We passed a joint
and a bottle of Gallo red
as the far suburbs of Spokane
unwound into wheat fields
and foothills.
I sat in the back seat
watching Sunny and Dave talk
and wondered which of
us she would choose.
Sunny wasn’t really pretty
but she laughed easily
and had these big warm
breasts you just wanted
to bury your face in.

We drove up Mount Spokane
on a rough dirt road, spotting
deer, two eagles, a bear
looking ragged and mean.
Up top we uncoiled from
the Mustang like kids at recess,
buzzing on spring and booze
and sex and sunlight,
shouting words that faded fast
into such immensity.
Spokane to the east was
a quilt of buildings woven
into a greater one
of wheat and timber
and everlasting blue sky.

When we sat down to finish off
the wine there was a giddy pause
where I was as happy as
I ever would be.
Then it passed. I got drunk.
I only thought about
getting Sunny alone
and out of that blue
blue halter top.

And when I did,
later that night,
there was a full moon
in the window blasting pale
light over the sheets and
naked Sunny. And I
sure did enjoy filling
my hands with her breasts,
feeling her heart pound so
heavy and sure deep in
that luxuriant flesh.

The memory of Mount Spokane
and Sunny's breasts
washed by that moon
drives the spring of 1977
one day and one night
deeper into that
other immensity we are.


***


SPRING BLESSING

March 2004

Yes, I built this aerie
to toss white sails
on the sea, but You are
the salt breeze which
stirs its boughs into
a daily song. Your grace
touches my hand as I
grasp a skull crupper
and haul up new words
for old seas. Such
a breeze in the windows
this morning, spring-fisted
and warm for this dark
hour, stirring roots and
balls and breasts toward
fullness, the wet ejaculate
cry which tears you free
and we begin. Last night
such a full moon hauled
over our house as
I climbed in my car to
drive for takeout,
this small town’s night
anointed with Brigid’s
lucent smile, her pale
white caul praying over
tidy streets and kempt
houses, the slow traffic
heading out of town,
the lake to my left
a wide black glass
singing brilliant antiphons
of moonlight.

Then I smelled the season’s
first orange blossoms
—or rather that sweet
drowsy warmth poured
cup by cup into the
window as I drove
past the grove, brimming
my every sense: And
it was Brigid kissing the
fingertips of the king’s
inarticulate sons before
they pulled harps from
the walls and held
those strange shapes
for the first time and
began to play all the
old songs, all that night
and for the rest of
their lives. Your blessing
there and here, Master
and Mistress of Wells,
pouring such blue waters
from my mouth’s fingertips,
the pen in my frigate hand
a glen in blossom and
shrieking sweetness
throughout your lost land.



***

SABBATHS 1985 I

Wendell Berry


Not again in this flesh will I see
the old trees stand here as they did,
weighty creatures made of light, delight
of their making straight in them and well,
whatever blight our blindness was or made,
however thought or act might fail.

The burden of absence grows, and I pay
daily the grief I owe to love
for women and men, day and trees
I will not know again. Pray
for the world’s light thus borne away.
Pray for the little songs that wake and move.

For comfort as these lights depart,
recall again the angels of the thicket,
columbine aerial in the whelming tangle,
song drifting down, light rain, day
returning in song, the lordly Art
piecing out its humble way.

Though blindness may yet detonate in light,
ruining all, after all the years, great right
subsumed at last in paltry wrong,
what do we know? Still
the presence that we come into with song
is here, shaping the seasons of His wild will.

The Window (A Plate of Pixie Pi)

The Bwbach, or Boobach, is the good-natured goblin which does good turns for the tidy Welsh maid who wins its favour by a certain course of behavior recommended by long tradition. The maid having swept the kitchen, makes a good fire the last thing at night, and having put the churn, filled with cream, on the whitened hearth, with a basin of fresh cream for the Bwbach on the hob, goes to bed and awaits the event. In the morning she finds (if she is in luck) that the Bwbach has emptied the basin of cream, and plied the churn-dasher so well that the maid has but to give a turning or two to bring the butter in a great lump.

-- Wirt Sikes, British Goblins, 1880


THE WINDOW

March 14, 2006

I write on leaves of
deepest night, a lane
of late moonlight
which stains
the garden’s rooks
a milky evanescent
blue—enough to
guide me down
its path into the full
depths of this song.
Do I hear one of our
cats lying by
the birdbath, preening
a red paw? Or is
that his jet familiar,
both ruse and partner
in this half-mad
enterprise, weaving
back the broken
strands it is my
job to strew, burning
wild my safer knowns?
As I was driving home
last night I heard
Paul Motion on “Fresh
Air,” talking about
his days playing drums
in Bill Evans’ first
trio; apparently
a new boxed set
of those early-1960’s
Village Vanguard
recordings has been
released, the songs
remixed for heft
and depth. (One
track was played,
“Funny Valentine”
I think, sounding
like a whaler to the
earlier thin take, each
piano note trailing
a speared heaviness
in sweet waters).
Motion told the story
of waking deep in
the night to a telephone
ringing -- it was Bill Evans
calling to say that
bassist Scott Faro
had just been killed
in a car accident. Or
was it? Motion said
he was so deep asleep
he couldn’t tell if
he was dreaming
and fell soon fell back.
And dreamed
he was in a room
where LeFaro stood
by a window beckoning
him over to check
out the view. By the
time he reached the
window he was full
awake and knew LeFaro
was dead. When I
woke this morning
my back was sore
as hell and my head
thudded like a
soaked coconut
to the pinging of the
alarm: Yet I was
eager to get down
here and back to
work, to see what
my weird friend had
been about between
the garden and my ear.
It is at this drowned
hour that I sense best
how near to light my
pixie-numen comes,
like tide-pools of moonlight
in the garden: And yet
how far he or it remains,
beckoning me ever out
to a view much like
whatever was in the window
Motion dreamed.
Yes, the figure in the
garden has shifted further
to the edges of dark flora,
out beyond the edge of
any precise enough
way to guess what’s there --
cat or brownie, a girl
in a blue nightdress,
my wife’s own dreaming
which passes through my
half-lit morning. My straining
for apt names for
wilderness tamps the
music to a strange
high distant sound
which embers to another,
a lost surf’s ebbing pound
as a new day starts to
sing from every bird
between this song and
their sure brightening.
It’s time to groan up
from this chair and
do some decent work.
-- Ah but first and at
last, to whatever lounged
in moonlight just outside
as I wrote this poem down:
Thanks for purring
pianissimos out a window
much too dark to read:
Thanks to all the
ghosts and furs and
moon-curved thralls
out there in that collective
voice which choruses
the leaves of this next
now-fading song.




TWO AT THE WELL

2003

A well requires four hands
to ward its mortal
and immortal
doors -- priest and
goddess, man,
mermaid. See: My hand
at this bucket turns
pale and webbed when
it dips the blue,
then resumes its hairy
rigor when I toss
it back to you on this page.
What you feed is yours
it’s said when you
put food out for strays.
That momma cat and
her kittens now romping
on our back porch are
our charge now, and so
we must do what we can
to catch, examine,
treat, neuter and spay,
acts which war with their
ferally free moods.
Real love draws from
deeper down, where
waters run both cold
and too clear. So in
this well: I dug down
here and tapped a source
which brims old skulls
with song. Each day
I come to the edge
and halloo on down,
my ears a bell for
what comes up. Does
it matter that no one
cares to hear? Not when
I’m God’s left ear,
writing down distaff
and rear, the darker
harmonies which chorale
inside this next,
wakening day. And always
a dark waits below, my
underworld betrothed,
jealous now and jaded
from all my fickle,
dilletantish dives.
I think back to the
summer of ‘94 when,
believing myself freed
from dry surface chains,
flung myself into writing
poems in a well which proved
too real. During that torrid
season I found a woman
whose waters called me
far away. I recall long nights
in late July when we’d thresh
and thrash on my again-
bachelor bed, sucking
til we nearly drowned
in what rose too freely
from the other. Outside
the last of storms ebbed
into a late-night, moist
hush, a mist equal in
thickness to the air
in our room. Night
and nocturne in mutual
soak. However, as votives
of real waters, though,
that purely mortal cup
could not fill up enough.
Such love never springs
eternal, not when greed
so drowns us all.
There is a Welsh well
that was bounded by
a door: Each draw
was done with care
because some depth
so wanted out. And then
one night someone left
the door ajar, and all
that water crept out.
By morning the field
had become a small lake.
Another version of the tale
has it that a mermaid
ruled the well, and that
she herself forgot to close
the door, and so lost
her home -- all drowned.
Some say late at night
she walks high grounds,
near the lake, grieving
her luckless fate. I fucked
up those summer nights
ten years ago, the properly
imagined well inside
abandoned for a
treacherously living one,
the poem I wrote of it
doused to hilt in salt.
Poor fool me. Nowadays
I keep the worlds apart,
faithful to this well
at the darkest of A.M.s,
and when its time
I clasp the books
and go upstairs into
a dark bedroom and
climb in bed with
my wife, gently
stroking her feet,
calling to what I know
is there, ignoring what is
not. And she who stays
within the well trusts me
now only as far as she
should, and keeps to her
side of the door, revealing
her face to me far within
this sweet rich summer mist.



MUSE OF MY BETWEENS

2004

I keep scanning the marge
for that blue door
you welcome and depart
through, but you’re
actually much closer in,
your salt physis
beckoning my nous
not from beyond
but between. Is that
why you sometimes
cusp the wave nude
from belly to breasts
to unrepentant lips
while the other way
you’re all fish, from
wave-strider’s hips
to scaled sex, fanning
down in a sleek,
long, powerful tail?
Infernal muse, you
fanned the waters
inside the wave
approaching shore
for 300 years
before the monks
arrived to build
their bulwarks of
vellum and wild ink,
glossing you in
psaltery: but you
kept weaving songs
on your seawitched
loom, beckoning
dry souls from shore
into the plash of
cold fire, that drowning
embrace which billows
down the leagues
of sweet descending doom.
Muse of beds between
the swells, your lyric
croons in grayblue eyes
staring up at the
keel of this hand
which is nervous
to have you so close.
My voyage is a cop-out,
a safe man’s blue travail
on sheets as dry as
the bones of the lovers
you send hightiding
home; would I just
relent the itch and let
the music go, perhaps
I’d be free to sink
right from this chair
into your pink
diluvian, my upper
half all fish --- the
ocean’s mortal half --
and all man plunging
below, til I am
fast in you again,
like some prodigal,
heavy-balled moon,
delivering to you
at last all the mail
I’ve ferried since
time began -- angel
Os and whale-bass
organum, the Ah
of every ancient titan
to grunt and
croon “I die” to
the collapsing wave
we boomed down
our shifting disappearing
shore. Topless fish,
meet your bottomless man.
Here’s to the coinage
of a moony gleaming shore
no coracle may reach
nor sea-witch bleach,
a song to rouse and
rump and plunge
the rest my years: Now
I see you further in
than I have ink to welcome,
much less woo. But give
me time, my sweet abyssal
swell. I pouring every
breast of yours I’ve cupped
into this lucent well.




UNDERSIDES

2005

Unapparent connection
is better than apparent.

- Heraclitus

He plants himself down there;
his roots grasp firm my lowest
sense and hauls me further down
than I had ever meant to go,
than I will ever find or know.
He who looks afar thus sweeps
the waves with a receding voice,
a presence which booms
“not here” in the wave’s dark
fold and crash. The effervesence
of all ebbing foam is the
very augment by which
he’s crooned, a moonlike dazzle
of darkling sense forever
beyond our wakeful wake.
He is the dream inside the bone
I left on that first shore
when I walked forever from
the sea; he rules that
underwater half of things,
a wold of aqueous salt fire
gleaming under dry days,
like drowned bitumen,
more strange and beautiful
than I will ever shore
inside a poem’s dayside sense,
than I will ever find means
to say, much less employ.
He is the fructive uselessness
of fiery words tossed into
too-late murk, the dark outside
like stony knees of titans
drowned ten million years ago,
holding that fragile bowl
we call our fleeting life.
He’s the nougat of the nocturne,
the salt inside the brogue, the
sea of every chantey to
charm the masts and keel
which you till and plow. A
blueblackened blade sticks up
between my lines, ah, pouring
sweet unknowns. My pen’s
nib surely pokes the other way,
like a rudder of foolish days
sailed by summer’s cathedral fire.
Praise to the underlord
who sings too in the choir,
low and deep and incessantly
malted from the dregs of
every cup I drained for you.
At this hour and expense
of soul I cast my bronzes blue
in honor of the under-god
who plumbs my topside view.



NIGHT GARDEN PATH

2005

I weave a darkened
garden path at the worst of
the night’s far a.m.’s
but I don’t stray far,
holding to the meander of
its ink on starry paper.
I know such foolery too
well, my ever-best-intentions
lined with lazy, puerile
wool. The actual garden’s
just outside, its actual
history not mine but
zoned to pentas and salvia,
cat’s whiskers and blue
bells, mung grass clumps
and towering milk weed.
The pinwheel jasmines
at the far end wheel
fates of white-hot bloom
peripheral to the garden
muse who smiles as
she passes them, whose
steps on actual stone
is lighter than actual
flesh, though words
surely curve that weft
and keep me writing here.
She’s waiting for my news,
not my distaff need to
plunge her fairy mound.
I stick to my story, wrapping
myself, like Dante, in the
verses, in the deigned
peramble of the vowels
throughout the winding
bowels of hellish
truths, the mystery
and misery of my
historied ride
atop the fish
I call desire, or
God’s black fire.
There’s too much here
to confuse and I’m just
not that moral or
smart or honest
to go the darker way.
Last night I dreamed
of working with a
flame I hadn’t seen
in years at the old
job site where we’d
met. So much waylaid
lust buried all those
years came galloping
up and out the
breech in the inches
that hung between us
as we wondered what
to do next. I knew
I was married in
the dream so the
moment read me
like a bum’s Tarot:
for I also knew
that I would not
fail this time to
step off the path
and plunge her
petals like a drunken
bee. Knowing all
all I did I also knew
that I’d still choose
wrong; worse still,
I knew that first
I’d hedge and stall
a while, exhausting
every gambit I could
devise to hide the
crime, knowing full
well I could not lie
to my wife when I
faced her again.
Such greasy effluence
rose round that
secret, long-wished
replay of an old
fork in my history;
and yet the final
and most awful stink
was when I knew
that when the kiss
approached I’d
shirk despite my need,
cowering away too
afraid not of the
actual damage it would
do but what might
rain on me if I
ferried that black bliss
home. Fool, idiot, coward --
the voice was in my
ear as I woke and came
downstairs and got
to work again here
confessing my sins
while reveling in the
magisterial dark heat
which pulled me so
utterly toward the
phantom of lost lust
and the surprising
horse which galloped
up from far below
tumescent as a stone,
a moon of hooves
tumbling toward the
aura of a black hole sun.
Ah, what relief it is
to write these lines
with that dream left
far behind, to praise
such blackness for
the wilderness it lends
to lush verdure just
outside my window
outside my daily life,
outside the rigors
of the meant and
mortared life, the one
which love sustains.
Shadows of awe
and awfulness now
drown that dreaming glade
like a garden muse’s
departing robes, a pall
made merry by the ink
by which I praise the maid.

Puddlefoot (On Sweetness)

A Brownie on the Celtic cringe, on the edge of the Gaelic-speaking country in Perthshire, haunted Altmor Burn, not far from Pitlochry. He used to be heard paddling and splashing in the burn, then he would go up with wet feet to the farm nearby, and if everything had been left untidy he would tidy it, but if it was left neat he would throw everything about. It was counted unlucky to meet him, and the road was avoided at night. He was laid ... by a nickname. A man returning merry from the market one dark night heard him splashing about the burn, and cried out jovially, "Well, Puddlefoot, how is it with you the night?" The Brownie was horrified. "Oh! Oh!" he cried, "I've gotten a name! 'Tis Puddlefoot they call me!" And he vanished, never to haunt the place again.

-- K.M. Briggs, The Personnel of Fairyland (Oxford U. Press, 1953)


PUDDLEFOOT

March 13, 2006

Hear me and you're
witched; sort and
I'll derange; scatter
and I found.
But name me
back and
I'm gone, into
wilds you'll never
recognize as such.
Nothing's
changed down
all these years,
though my folk
have dried to
vellum: still you
hear me, splashing
beyond the palest
margins, because
the rift which
drifts the tune
lies in dark lands
down your ears,
in folds of
unknown depths
you'll never nail
the darkest
sense of. I
will confound
you all the way,
your ordered
lanes wet-footed,
all gauzy beds
short-sheeted,
the moony clefts
revealed down mons
brute-wedgied
with my surf.
Persist and it
just gets stranger
but shore what's
strangest and it
fades past dust
like so much
disappearing ink.
A vanished tribe
descended here,
our story like an
old coin falling
down a well still
found inside one
ear and then
the other, each
fall both strange
and most familiar,
the flip side of all
you think you
know one way
and then its other.
An old dark culture
cannot die or dry
when words like
these are merry,
whistling home
on ancient lanes:
But before
you make my
late and last
acquaintance,
please quit the
poem here:
closed covers
keep me near
and wild and
wet-footed, my
troop of
whistlin' pixies
tootin' in the rear.


Waking, remembering only music

1997

There between the pillow and the dream
I heard a music rising from the seam
mellifluous as oboes a soft and wistful mood
breezing through the boughs of an ever darkened wood
It was late at night and in the sill
a blue moon heaved its lucent gill
gilding our bodies in a silver mane
cleansing our hearts of all the workday strain
caressing us down an long and winding stream
where all the reasons we married flicker and gleam
When I woke nothing but the tune remained
like the ebbing sound of the sea's blue dream
I marry it to you with that kiss that has no name
just the music of a distant heaven we make today again


OUR PLEASURES ARE THE WORLD'S

May 2001

Our pleasures are the world's;
there is no nature not our own.
Listen to the rain as it rustles
through slabs of sliding thunder:
You are sustained by a music there
the same way you are welcomed here.
Somewhere great fires smolder
in this rain, an end at last to drought.
Something wakens where you least thought,
an intimate invisible weave
between bough and page, a rough
green hunger inside the rage to love.


JUICE

2002


I turned 13 during my first summer
in Florida, hard-ripped from my
Chicago home when my parents split.
We moved into a new subdivision near
Winter Haven that had been torn from
an orange grove. Just beyond our house
the streets unpaved themselves into thickets
where bulldozers jawed whole trees, eager
to uproot slow makings for a fast buck.

My wounds and the grove's grafted into
each other through a season of fire,
my parents crossed like swords over
my puberty, old Florida parceled in
fruit bags of Eden. Loss and desire mingled,
sugared, swelled: then burst from every
pore in sweetly mutinous grog.

There were six orange trees in our
yard to plunder; I must have picked
and squeezed two quarts of fresh juice
every day, greedy for its slicksweet pour.
The first gulp always surprised me
with its sharp ardor, thick and loose,
springing a thirst inside mere parch.

That first summer was archangel-
ically hot, a humid blear which called
all earthborn things to high heaven.
I sent my dreams that way as I
hurled baseballs at a pitchback
screen, my wild pitches thonking
like heads on the wood fence.

To dive later into the pool was like
a belt of that juice: delirium plunged in
joy, the pool's bottom a glade of bright
glitters shushed in blue. I swam lengths
underwater then perched at the edge,
head and shoulders resting on hot concrete
with my legs drifting below. Lulled by
Carole King on the radio and high soaring
crickets, I drowsed in an undulate weave
of ripening girls peeled from their swimsuits,
their nipples pealing a red roar.

Every afternoon it rained hard,
big boomers in from Tampa sweeping
through in great wet sheets which left
me the rest of the day feeling somehow
unslaked. At twilight, the remaining grove
on the other side of the fence grew fierce
with frogs and whatever else pulsed out there,
mounds of a sugar silk-saturate and dark.

On a small radio I listened to hard rock bands
in the black-lit eeriness of my room; eyewhites
and lint burned like hot moons while the
thickening night heaved on my windows in
a rich, purring growl. Oh the sharp tooth I
felt in those songs by Mountain and Cream,
trillingly pure, loud as thirst, raw as plunder.

Thirty years later, that first summer in Florida
chirrs loud in my veins. I sit here in this house
with the windows wide to the humid heat of 5 a.m.
Outside in this small town never far from a fast
Florida buck, sprinkler heads and crickets saw over
that old beast who sleeps only in the linear sense.
Some untamed thirst prowls here as ever, ripened
deep within. My hands ache for the heft of those
oranges warm from ghost orchards; to cleave their
nude fire; to squeeze them down hard on a mount
of ridged whirl, filling this glass past the brim with
remembered gold, spilling juice over all.



PLEASURE, SWEETNESS

2002

Was it pleasure or sweetness
that I yearned for and sought,
my cup thirsty to spill over
with that honeyed pitch
which swells from a
woman's welcome of me,
arms, thighs wide,
ocean caught mid-summer,
mid-waverise, rich
in foam and scatter
in a long, bowering yes ...

All edges dissolve
in that latter swoon,
I and Thou liquified
of all difference and
or contrast, as sugar
melts its borders
in a wide sweetness.

Pleasure is different,
its bloom calyxed on thorn,
flame fed by an
ore of bad fevers-
anger, lust, shame-
reveling in its awfulness.

Pleasure dies without
enough abrasive surface,
and defeats itself in
every surrender. Like
mating cats, pleasure
thrills in a yowl belled
of weird brass-tawdry
tooth plunged in the neck,
the apple bitten too hard
& the tears which deliver
what sweetness can't quiver.



THINKING ABOUT ECSTASY

Jack Gilbert


Gradually he could hear her. Stop, she was saying,
stop! And found the bed full of glass,
his ankles bleeding, driven through the window
of her cupola. California summer. That was pleasure.
He knows about that: stained glass of the body
lit by our lovely chemistry and neural ghost.
Pleasure as fruit and pleasure as ambush. Excitement
a wind so powerful, we cannot find a shape for it,
so our apparatus cannot hold on to the brilliant
pleasure for long. Enjoyment is different.
It understands and keeps. The having of the having.
But ecstasy is a question. Doubling sensation
is merely arithmetic. If ecstasy means we are
taken over by something, we become an occupied
country, the audience to an intensity we are
only the proscenium for. The man does not want
to know rapture by standing outside himself.
He wants to know delight as the native land he is.

Blue Enquiry

... This skin you wear
so neatly, in which
you settle so brightly
on the summer grass, how
shall I know it?
You gleam
as you lie back
breathing like something
taken from water,
a sea creature, except
for your two human legs
which tremble
and open
into the dark country
I keep dreaming of. How
shall I tough you
unless it is
everywhere?
I begin
here and there,
finding you,
the heart within you,
and the animal,
and the voice; I ask
over and over
for your whereabouts, trekking
wherever you take me,
the boughs of your body
leading deeper into the trees,
over the white fields,
the rivers of bone,
the shouting,
the answering, the rousing
great run toward the interior,
the unseen, the unknowable
center.

-- Mary Oliver, from “The Gardens,” 2d section
in American Primitive


BLUE ENQUIRY

March 12, 2006

I do not discover,
I remember.
She came into the
downstairs bedroom
where I had gone back
to sleep, some moist
blue silk lifted
from the my
secret sacred history.
She might have been
the Bond girl I
always wished
for, a swell both
Barbie Benton and
that girl who sat
next to me in my
10th grade typing
class, her beauty
like walled country
I would never cross.
The woman I dreamed
had that tidal
blue sweetness just
offshore my actual
life, yet she was
so familiar to me
she might have been
some inside of my
wife sleeping deeply
in our bed upstairs.
She twined around
me naked and tight
and asked me about
her man, that perplex
ruse of stone and North
Sea surf and iron hot
from the forge. I tried
to tell her how
apt he is at boxing
and then shelving
every matter of
the day except
in matters sexual,
a thrall which
whelms every room
of night and day
with seething, pent
and urgent waters.
In just that way
men seem like women,
I said, though, saying
it, it seemed to
me that in that
way we’re exactly
different, women
managing (or needing?)
to keep sex on a high shelf
discreetly out of reach,
difficult to open
and hastily reshelved.
How this could be
helping my marriage
is anyone’s guess, her
perfect naked body
seamed tight against
mine, drawing this
supernal information
from me like it was
the inside kernal
of hot kisses and
thrusting seed. And
yet it was clear
in the dream that
this was pure and
simple enquiry, informing
my past as I rediscovered
it, there in a room I
do not dream but fly
through, carrying
heaven back into
this day. It’s 5:30 a.m.
now, sprinklers outside
whirring the garden
& my wife now yawning
upstairs & something
most old and new in my hand
which I must spread
across the soles of
her feet lightly,
gently, with all the
urgency of those
distant days of spring
now everywhere at once.

Art Heart

... To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal,
to hold it

against your own bones knowing
your own life depends on it
and, when the time comes to let go,
to let it go.

... Mary Oliver, from “In Blackwater Woods”
American Primitive


***


The farmer of Knighton was very friendly with the pixies. He used to leave a floorful of corn when he was short-handed, and the pixies would thrash it for him. They did an immense amount of work for him, until one night his wife peeped through the peephole and saw them hard at it. She wasn’t afraid of their squinny eyes and hairy bodies, but she thought it a crying shame they should go naked and cold. She set to work and made some warm clothes for them and left them on the threshing floor, and after that there was no help from the pixies.

They did not forget the farmer, however, for one day, after Withypool Church bells were rung, the pixy father met him on an upland field.

“Wilt gie us the lend of thy plough and tackle?” (that is, packhorses and crooks) he said.

“What vor do ‘ee want ‘n’?” the farmer asked.

“I’d want to take my good wife and littlings out of the noise of they ding-dongs.”

The farmer trusted the pixies, and they moved lock, stock, and barrell, over the Winsford Hill; and when the old packhorses trotted home, they looked like beautiful two-year-olds.

-- R.L. Tongue, Somerset Folklore


ART HEART

March 12, 2006

The heart has no place
in the market -- ask
any of its players
from salt-seller to
grifter to brass tycoon.
I wonder too if the heart
should veer right of
poetry so to avoid
all confusion of verbal
swoon with the real
songs of love, the
ten thousand simple
ditties which compose
a couple’s fateful life.
The heart of art
is pure usury,
gold on one side of
the glittery wave
and Arctic blue on
its other, never meant
for beds or the
tender garden of
days. The art of
the heart ships to
shores far down
from the heart
of the art, where
it’s always full moon
and the waves
crash like milked
silver, harrowing and
blue and incessantly
brutal and deep
and divine. I swim
with the nixies
and wake with my wife,
secure in this
narrowed conceit
of two vaults meant
to fill far from the other
yet mutually misered
by one sambaltique
sea. Coinage and vantage
mean less in its slopes
than heels and mizzen,
spars cast far below.
However I say it is wrong
though the distinction
is true. Whalers in
crow’s nests would
agree: cask your oil
safe below; keep
an eye trained equally
on flukes and home
shores; and always
remember where you’re
standing, and on what,
somewhere between
God and the vast
plunging sea. Thus
I keep my heart
in its soul cage
beating sure down the page.