The Tiddy Mun

The Tiddy Mun ... seems to be a fen spirit, who can control waters and mists and call up pestilence out of the bogs. A certain affection was felt for him, but he could be dangerous if angered. He sounds eerie enough in the description:

“He dwelt deep down in the green water holes, and came out at evenings when the mists rose. Then he came creeping out in the darklings, limppelty lobelty, like a dearie wee old granter, all matted and tangled, a long grey gown so that they could hardly see him in the dusk, but they could hear him whistling like the wind and laughing like a peewit. He was not wicked like the rest, but he was eerie enough, though the times were when he helped them. For on wet seasons when the water rose to their doorsteps, the whole family would go out together and shivering in the darkness they would call:

‘Tiddy Mun wi’out a name,
Tha watter thruff!’

“They would call it till they heard a cry like a peewit across the marsh, and they’d go home. And next morning the waters would be down.”

The story is that the draining of the Fens so angered the Tiddy Mun that he brought pestilence on the children and the cattle, until he was pacified with lustrations and prayers.

-- Originally in M.C. Balfour, Legends of the Cars in Folk-Lore, Vol II, 1891; cited in Briggs,





Limpelty lobelty the Tiddy Mun haunts the lost wetlands of my words, grey but not ghastly, a ghostly blue phosphor who perambles lands I will never know though I’m ever drawn there here in the next foray into water’s dread wood. He keeps the tide hard at the the shore, an ungoverned pulse of undrinkable blue which thralls my unslakable sense away from the implacably riven and sure.

Puer in his daring, pure senex in his abyss, each wave he sends here is both first and last, merrily hooded with foam and troughed in a black cold falling footless down through regions long dead. It is he that keeps reeling me just offshore of safe poems?

Our Milky Way drifts toward a mass known as the Great Attractor, a mysterium of gas and dark matter that’s scary enough; yet scientists have measured it and found it short of girth thick and feral enough to haul our galaxy so surely. Behind the Great Attractor, they found a group of galaxies they call the Shapeley Supercluster (oh how there’s always a woman involved!!), ten thousand times larger than our Milky Way, sizeable enough to reel us toward it like a fish.

The music of our spheres is throated toward that heaven or hell shimmering darkly behind its front mun, the Great Attractor. There’s something behind that shore where the Tiddy Mun walks, his keening out there like a mist which shrouds something far eerier further out, pure swell and sheer hell and impossible to resist.

He’s the omelet which the egg became, and there’s no going back to the egg though its flavor hangs over my every bite here. Origin haunts the lining of things, lending my voice an eeriness when it sings. Inexorably I write down the leagues of a gravity which is heavier and darker and older every next page that I fill. It has made of me a Tiddy Mun in my own sights, spectral in every way to what the day calls a poet, a warden of waters long drained from the fens, devout in the rout of the angels I tout, laughing high and spectral, almost a wheeze lost in the surf and the night’s hard sighings down from ancient skies. And I am just one broken high half of it, conscious and purposed to the detriment of the thrall which whirls down and round into a void where all numens flicker and fall, that home at last where my every song is reeled by the Tiddy Mun to his Maker, flapping and juicy on the dream’s next wild shore.

Gratitude's Grace

...nothing's
to save us save loss itself.

-- A.R. Ammons, “Regards Regardless”

Here at spring tide's sinewed cusp, it's strange to feel so lost, so emptied of purpose and poems, so riven by work in a soured uncivil world, my wife depressed too, slowing at tasks, either insomniac or drugged through the night, hot flashes surging through her like volts of malaise.

These days my loins are itchy, fevered for impossible liaisons, angry at the dearth of mewling coitions. Here at stagnation, booze glows in its shot glass like a profanely bright invitation to darkness. The body, collapsing in its years, no longer tight, fit only in tandems (this calf, that bicep) nothing to marvel at any more or even much notice amid the masculine blooms apexing in the quarters of blind youth. Only a savage humility remains, breaky and achey, all dick and heartfelt soul-deep amends for what libido never redeems.

I was at such a low hour at the gym yesterday, threshing this flesh which no longer matters and not much responds to pent iron rituals I've been about for two decades. I was worried about my wife in her gloom as I watched a girl on the treadmill in front of me work her exquisite curves to a sheen, like sweat on a vodka bottle fresh from deep freeze beading in the morning sun.

It came to me then how essential the Prayer of Saint Francis is to it all with its message to comfort rather than be comforted, to give back exactly where there's so little hope of receiving, else I drown my world in the fathoms of its dissembling age in mine.

How important it is to make gratitude a verb and start wielding it like a hoe in the tough fields of work and home and even here. Of course it never mattered, that's surely the point: the throat praises when all is extinguished, recalling in gorgeous sounds how Eurydice looked on her wedding day, just before she stepped on her fate, so full of the spring which fled with a gasp, soft, imperially lush like a wheatfield or orange grove in bloom, the breeze quintessentially in surf with her name -- a breath which was freed forever from me when I first saw my wife standing across a crowded bar, perfect in a white paintsuit, her auburn hair like brown fire, eyeing me once and then turning to the bar to order a glass of wine, that shape of turning a door opening into my life, down into my heart and at last impossibly achingly sweet. I prayed for her as I finished my round on that workout machine, prayed for her next door to open wide with a welcome; prayed for our cats and for my sponsees and my aging parents; prayed for every love I had lost or squandered; prayed for our world to live through its waste and come to love the whole world in its thrall:

Then toweled off and headed over to the weights to lift it all back in place.



CLEARING A FIELD

1996

What has been spoiled through a man's fault
Can be made good again through a man's work.

-- I Ching

I walked out beyond the margins of this day,
out beyond the dying metaphors of the age,
beyond the lost rapture and broken communion,
beyond the cankered oaks and river sewage,
beyond the clearcut orchards' blossom of rot,
beyond the phosphate mines and beach condos,
beyond the landfills and ravaged wetlands,
I walked beyond the sere rim of this world
into another, green and strange and wild.

Further on I went, tracking into new territory,
Heading through the skirts of suburbs,
past the roadside sellers of peanuts and Elvis,
past 7-11's and junkyards and titty bars,
past burger joints and strip malls and mega cinemas,
down crumbling asphalt avenues of towering banks
casting long shadows of greed and fear:

Finding no hope there I continued on,
walking past the numbing grind of preterition,
stepping lightly round the cynic's sucking bog,
climbing over the fretful ridge of scarcer times
and out beyond this century's heart into what's truly wild,
finding beyond all streets a dark arousal,
beyond all wasted ends a wondrous door,
beyond the exiled flesh a shimmering bath deep in the body,
finding beyond exhaustion a field ripe with possibility.

There beyond what's known too terribly well
I found a paradise -- a dark, dreamy, fertile hell.

I exceed all boundary because the world is not geography.
I resist all seductions for one acre of your smile.

I harvest heart and heather for an exquisite hour on the page,
hacking and burning and turning a soil of words,
watering with the thunder and coo of lyric storms,
praising what is made well, whether by God or by hand,
whether saline or sulfrous, be it living or dead,
whether jissomed or breasted or sprouted or lathed,
celebrating this shaking bed of past and future,
tearing down the barbed wire between word and world,
bathing in the similitude of sea wash and tears,
singing of the wished for and the cursed,
ushering in the fallen and the prime,
sweating over the necessary and luxuriant,
praising flower and tower for their succulent tropes:

I worship this raw world born from dead words,
turning the loam with this humble poem,
watering the furrows with my broken joy,
heaping shit on shame for their ripening wrong,
walking back and forth between firmaments,
the son of two makings, clearing a field
for one summer breeze and one small song.


SONNETS TO ORPHEUS I.vii

Rainier Maria Rilke
transl. Stephen Mitchell

Praising is what matters! He was summoned for that,
and came to us like the ore from a stone's
silence. His mortal heart presses out
a deathless, inexhaustible wine.

Whenever he feels the god's paradigm grip
his throat, the voice does not die in his mouth.
All becomes vineyard, all becomes grape,
ripened on the hills of his sensuous South.

Neither decay in the sepulcher of kings
nor any shadow fallen from the gods
can ever detract from his glorious praising.

For he is a herald who is with us always,
holding far into the doors of the dead
a bowl with ripe fruit worthy of praise.



BEGIN HERE

March 1996


Begin here
where there
is no poetry,
only the clutter
of late winter,
the manic
mind's exile
in motion,
whirligagging
with the cold
moon for the
sake of something
to whirl.

Begin here
where there is
no beginning,
only these
shattered pixels
of sour winter light
swaddling the
frozen rubble of
last year's rot.

Here where
nothing and less
contend for
winter's
miserable crown
poetry sparks a fuse,
urging the day
down a simple
and singular path,

winding through
the ghetto

of bleak afternoons
to a quiet field
where berries
may yet sprout
like fire in the
heart of the city

o yes
this poor master
of silence and silk
asks only
that you
begin here:


***


BEACH GRACE

April 2003


A good day. A few sentences.
One that almost has the feel of the true.

-Flaubert

My reward for Being, was This.

- Emily Dickenson


When I get lost in the day's
infinite lack of gain,
I stop at a moment's pauses
and walk onto a beach
that's always there and
sit a while, a nothing about
nothing & asking less,
cupping what I can in these
hands and carrying it back
to a dry, desperate world
hurrying through so much
paradise. My hands only
hold so much: I spilled
some on my knees giving thanks,
some more on this page
(here and less there); the
rest I'll take upstairs to
my wife to rub salt traces
onto her feet, light and
gentle as the sea's blue sashay
under this waking, perfect day.


***


LABOR DAY BY THE SEA

2000

Into the amniotic wash of Labor Day by the sea,
Ponce Inlet, SUVs and vans perched feet from high tide,
a sweet dreamy breeze caressing waves softly toward the shore,
sun straight up the dome and still fierce,
my body yielding to the kiss and suck of summer and sea
and curved eternities:
I sit in my folding chaise reading Walt Whitman to the salt breeze,
singing lines which pulsed rhythmic between my body and the sea,
trailing off the page to watch passerby, kids with boogie boards,
young couples proud in what still is unripened,
mothers given over to the suck of their babies,
leathery old men and women resolute to their end,
all emptying out like a tide, leaving just the sea before me,
softly folding and breaking in warm plashing waves,
sibilant in all the ejaculate praises of Walt, the song never ending,
finding in each new age new hearts to break into what now
passes for praise, nursing my aches and spawning my fevers:
I thought I heard the sea sigh oh come nestle in me
as it broke gently into foam and so I walked out into the surf
not believing a syllable but wishing it ever more,
praying for baptism to the rhythm and pulse of each wave,
finally diving beneath a tall one and going still trying to feel
God's dazzle and drowse wash over and through me
cleansing and lifting me up from selfish gambols,
but it was just a wave going over and I rose up into brilliant clean air
no fresher with rebirth than a moment before but such truths
themselves are nourishing, forever alone yet one inside the womb
I wake and walk from merged at least between arrow and bow
riding metaphorically a dolphin which takes me beyond all I know:
The sun and sea are just ciphers, a mystery which refuses solution
though I stand here naked as law and love permit, my pilgrimage unending:
“You must derange your life” I wrote by these waters five years ago,
but now I think there isn't really a choice, life makes you crazy anyway;
Today I hear the sea sing to me
love well your wounds for in thy blooding thou art free;
salt smart hugs I have for you on this bed which rises and falls
And I close my eyes standing in the shallows of the rest of this life
hoping to praise what little I have, praying to love with all of my heart, turning back toward shore at last without any benediction to share
with you but blue green waters and a brilliant sun
and a breeze which sighs Eurydice O woman of waters
I am forever here on this shore between I and Thou
singing ocean songs to the sea, braiding your name in the day.


***


SONNETS TO ORPHEUS 2.29

Ranier Maria Rilke
transl. Stephen Mitchell

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your sense in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.




REGARDS REGARDLESS

A.R. Ammons

(Brink Road, 1996)

We had something to do for a moment
with the eternity of things, we made
contact, the sweeps deeper than we

knew, moving in and out without regard,
we, bits, too little too brief to take
the awful informings in: age edges

us aside: we vacate offices (such as
listening for the cloud, dull oriole
in May) to others whose earth earth's

becoming: but, aside, we note clearly,
having them separate again, bit from
power, second from time's springs:

look, there goes eternity, still astir:
here are roses seen before: nothing's
to save us at last save loss itself:

even our gatherings, bits and pieces,
will with our central dissolving float
free, disordered, unaligned, the chairs

empty, our voices in none of the rooms:
well, it was enough, even if nothing
came of it, no, it was something even

if it becomes nothing, the show turned
full round: freedom freely
enough allowed burns free, burns us free.


***


THE PRAYER OF ST. FRANCIS

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O, Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Remaining

There’s history and
Then its mystery
And then there comes
a time when
there’s none of it at all,
its wold erased and empty
as this morning’s breeze
which courses nameless
through the hour,
reverent only of air’s
voluptuous slides
from high to lower
scales, ferrying shelves
of wind across a world
not meant for human
ken, devoid of meanings
through robust and still
in its intents. You can
set a poem almost
anywhere in this world:
It fits atop a mainmast
and tucks beneath a
manta’s wing, you can
lodge it on the moon
or squeeze it tight
between a woman’s breasts.
It even sits quite pretty
on nothing’s nada ledge,
out beyond the pale of
bleary poets still droning
on at this hour when
there’s nothing left to say.
Dark so dark outside,
the garden deep in dream,
a few crickets chirring soft
the tide-pools of yesterday’s
heat, a random breeze
reaching this far like
this or that exhausted
wave. There’s nothing more
than these few facts
to name this deadened time.
Not much for a poem.
So why bother writing it
except because the
motion still assures
with faint semblance of
the known, the high
habitual which is
nesting of a sort,
imagined surf and
conceits of ecstasy
to keep me keeping on
right through the
blighted dawn. I made
a promise lives ago
to remain where love
was gone and sing
a river on. That
vow made of my throat
a gout of all I
wished of her --
a dream of plashing blue
which I have come
to call the wash
of depths and dregs of You,
salt master, swoon
inside those eyes
which welcomed me
to desire’s cross and
throne, a bone now
bleached in dark
scalding light and
wearied smooth to stone.
Now the song sounds
empty as the river courses
on, and I wonder what
keeps me here, why I
should try to make
fake waters lie -- as much
reason as the breeze persists
to sieve the atmosphere,
I guess -- one is what
one has become, for better
and for ill. My world
offers not God yet still
I pray to Him (Her/It), receiving
grace in measure to
the depth I welcome it
in willingness and humility
and reverence -- polysyllables
which wreck this poem
yet redeems its words,
comeuppance of the imp
who forks nonsense into
my ear in the form
of pouring bottles and
curved labials, ebbings
of the surf not meant
for human meanings
though this poem tries
in an ambling discourse
far down from the light
of day, like an aquifer
or God’s secret heart
or the waterings of art
where art has sorely failed.
Sometimes an ecstasy,
sometimes a dirge,
always reaching for what
dries upon the page:
That’s the measure
of what remains
& what I can still say
to that blue curved ghost
who sleeps upstairs
inside the rest of my life.

A Book to the Wave

Here just after the equinox and quiet, on par with the ambience of the hour and day of the year in this small Florida town; panther and developer both sleep in the depths of these waters, dreaming of prey and pleasure, while I sit here naming their marrow and harrow. It’s just what I do, habitual to the point of inhabited by shore-to-shore and down-the-shore-and-back rounds, faithful that words from deep waters wash something essential here, in this way, even today. But I may just be droning on.

Some ebbing of the verses has me in prose today, standing in starlight at low tide and walking unaccustomed without the narrow line breaks. Something else seems to be gathering in me as in the garden, tensing. It seems time for a change, maybe just for today, maybe for a cycle, or for ever. There came a time when the music of guitars faded in me, fell: I could still play the songs but the heat of the heart had disappeared. Songs became old songs and thence ditties, dribbles of an old flood fully poured.

Letting go is hard, the acceptance bitter a long time before it becomes sweet; my wife’s going through it now with her business, deciding at long last that she just isn’t going to sell enough doing what she love’s most, that there is retirement to save for and projects on the house that need to get done and it would sure be nice to take a vacation after all of these years. But the disappointment is sour and leaden, another loss to swallow, very sad: I came home yesterday and she was quite blue, having spent the day ironing vintage fabrics she’d collected, so many of them, so little real expectation that they might sell for any reasonable equivalent of what they’re worth. What could I say? I see how they’re gorgeous and exquisite and are fit for the bed of one’s dreams, and yet I’ve also been here in the precarious todder of our ledger, not quite broke but check to check to check breathing carefully. I sure hate to see her go work in some office, to the utter abasement of what she does so well here: but what else to do?

After so many years of writing poems, having long ago given up the ambition and then hope of publishing them, content to drone on with my muse in the deadest hours of the night, casting them here as some basalt floor of the act, I come to a sound-point, many fathoms down, that I can’t say much else that doesn’t repeat all I’ve said before. When the tropes become rusty, then the ropes aren’t trusty any more for hauling up strange dripping numens — gods, lovers, blue thrall — lost long ago.

Or so it seems, today. It may be equinoctal energies at play, the dead of winter sequestering behind the fresh certitude of light. What’s gone is gone and there’s energy to play a different way. I’ve been tempted to lose the versifier for some time now; began this blog last summer thinking that a prosaic voice might emerge, and then finding another cycle of poems in need of exhumation (“Shamanic Voices”). That had an afterlife which seems to have thinned from all hearing, so here I am.

The year progresses; a softer lighter equipage is required for the heat which arrives; a new pair of shoes, loose shirts for the breeze, a gob of SPF40 to blunt the knives of the sun; and fresh words to that effect, or no words at all, savoring and savioring through that absence apt motions of spring.

Hand me those clippers, it’s time to prune ...


TAKAMIME ACOUSTIC

(My last guitar)

From “A Breviary of
Gutars,” 2000

Fall 1986: That
blue Hamer guitar
died oh so slowly
but surely, like
a dream that
had run out of
further rooms
or a man who
can’t find any
new ways to
believe his song
could yet be
both pretty and
true. I towed the
Hamer with
me from mother’s
house to roommate’s
house, but hardly
ever played it.
The old riffs so
heavy with what
could not go
forward.

Nor could I
gambol any
more in those
henhouses of
eternal beginning
So I began to
take stock of
things in my
journal, accounting
less frequently
the previous night’s
desertions of sense
as looking back
over the past
as at a world
that never knew
its day. An
Orpheus looking
back on his
life’s fade. When
a puer enters his
own history
he is said
to finally find
substance in the
world, his blue
hops in the
aether grounded,
his heart slowing,
his dreams
digesting insoluble
agonies.

I put pen to paper
and the ink
flowed like blood.
Open wounds cast
on the page
became the
coagulates of
that old rage.

Ah but slowly.
There were more
bad nights foraging
badly for bad
women or simply
drinking badly
until a blackout
night in April
1987 when I came
to in jail for
DUI. The rock god
found his peerage
at the bottom of
his cups. Some guy
vomiting in a
toilet, another
mumbling prayers
within a sodden
hood. Such was the
beginning I grew
through. The judge
prescribed community
service and AA.
I taught English
at a vo-tech for
a season, my
AA nights lasted
8 years. In that
span I woke,
or sort of.
Thousands of
cramped rooms
confessing sins
big and small,
learning how
to walk and talk
from others
who’d earned their
wise words.
I married
unsuccessfully.
I entered therapy
and began unlocking
doors which opened
to psychology
and myth and
poetry. Through
all this I entered
time at last, finding
that substance
can only come
with time.
Surrendering
to the nails.

I traded my
amp for a
Takamime acoustic,
my blue Hamer
for a synthesizer
I’ve never played.
Tried to make
new music but
nothing assembled
or sang: ditties a
nd progressions
played on the porch,
none ending,
one dithering
into the next
like the bottom
of a halved
worm writhing
brainlessly.

I still dreamt
of stages and
fantastical
guitars, schmoozing
with David Bowie
or Peter Gabriel,
dallying with
groupies, but
I always woke
sober and eager
to get back to
work in the
study for an hour
or two before
heading to my
job. I listened to
jazz, classical,
new age, pumping
to rock anthems
only when
I lifted weights,
when testosterone
cocksurety blossoms
from the body’s
gallop and preen.


2.

I dreamed also
of pianos, rich
sonorous baby
grands of cherry
and mahagony
and teak which
turned up
everywhere ---
in forgotten rooms
of my childhood
house, in stockrooms,
by the sea,
squat in the
middle of a bayou.
Usually a woman
was nearby,
not young but
not old,
mysterious and
fair, not so much
sexy as deeply
loved. Was she
the mediatrix
bridging song
to poetry, her
body a cathedral
of the world’s
music I came
to know only
by dying to my
own music?
Eliot saw her
in the “A Game
of Chess” section
of “The Wasteland,”
a Dido like a lush
crown in an ornate
throne room,
jewelled with the
sea of ancient
myth, Thetis
ringed with gold
cupidon and ivory
viols of perfume.
He knew her well.
The same woman
and her pianos
drew me into
this history, ever
at the margins
of my verse
journal, always
flashing a smile
just beyond my
last line of the day.
And somehow
inaccessible from
the guitar I threw like
a hammer. “Forget that
passionate music,”
said Rilke’s Orpheus.
“ It will end.
True singing is
a different breath,
about nothing.
A gust inside
the god. A wind.”


3.

I’m still not sure
who the dolphin rider,
my totem guide
and logo, serves.
I can name many
candidates: Eros
attendant of Aphrodite,
Apollo Delphinus
guide of souls
to the heavenly
spheres, Dionysos who turned a rabble
of pirates into dolphins, saving the
navigator to become a priest of
doom to mind-blind Pentheus.
I was born with a tattoo of
a heart with an arrow through it
and the dolphin man rides there
somehow, lover and lyre like strands of
a helix wrapped around my heart,
both pierced by some need
for reaching a vanished Beloved.
So it’s somehow important
to ask the waters even though
I know I’ll never truly know.

Cupid’s darts were dipped
in gold or lead. Which metal
is buried in my birthmark?
Perhaps fool’s gold, since
the simplest lessons
have been so difficult.
You can seduce a woman in
a night and learn to play
a song in less than that time
and such beginnings make
you soar, delight in making love
and making song a gallop over
the yeastiest, fomenting waves.
But to truly make love? To truly
sing? Forget that passionate music.
Three years withmy wife and I’m
still working on the harmonies,
loving her for just who she cares to be
and trying to find the courage
to let her know my fully dappled desires.
And the poetry, well, as my friend
Peter Meinke once told me,
It takes decades. So I’m doomed
to shuffle these words many times
before they tell me much more.

I liken the rider to Manannan,
the Irish sea-god whose ripe valleys
looked like sea-crests to voyaging Bran.
The way you think it is is not
the way it is at all -- that’s a Celtic
promise, delivered from the Otherworld
through the mouth of just unearthed
Oran when Saint Columba decided
he needed to look upon the martyr’s
face once more, up out of the
abbey foundations he’d been sacrificed
to on hard-winded, heavy-oceaned Iona.
Oran had voyaged with Manannan,
and his truth is this: when you think
you’ve arrived at the the nut-busting
uttery of truth, this sign lowers down
from nowhere saying Not Here,
meaning the ripeness on the other
side of the wall is everything
and we can never know it:
So for us the troping’s all:
and just when my metaphors
of love and lyre seemed sweetly true
the song dove elsewhere,
drowning this rider.

A few years back, soon
after my first marriage died,
I had the dolphin rider
tattooed high on my left arm.
(Stole the image from Riverside
Editions). The location was
appropriate: Pelop’s shoulder,
shank of dolphin, a hero’s portion.
Many princes were imaged riding
what was oncecalled The Lion of the Sea --
Arion, Cadmus, Enalus,
Theseus, Coeranus, Taras,
Phalanthus -- and it makes for
a popular tale, as my tale of
the guitar hero kept me warm
on the many mornings of its telling.
Take Arion, a great musician
whose song saved him from
drowning when he was thrown
to the sea by pirates. A dolphin
in love with the music bore
him back to shore. That’s
just one of the stories. I’ve learned
that each life is rammed with
many lives, many tales.
Don’t think you ever come
to rest. Pelops means “dusky faced,”
shadowy and indistinct, as
Manannan was in his grey
cloak of invisibility. Pelops was
served up in a stew by Tantalus, his
father, up to the gods; the gods
realized the taboo and restored
Pelops to life. Only the shoulder
had been eaten and the gods
restored that part with the shoulder
of a dolphin. A sea beast god ruled Pelops
tribal Peloponnese, a lusty beast
of strength charging up the river
Styx.
Proteus tended the herds
of Poseidon the mare-tamer, and is
identified with Pallas, sea beast.
Proteus, misty faced changeling,
is both Callas and Salmoneus, the
human oak-king, as Llew Llaw Giffes
the Welsh antecedent of Irish Lug,
master of many crafts and somehow
son of Manannan ...

Are you weary
yet of the transformations? I get
lost too. That’s why I have the tattoo.
(Looks cool, too.) Lusty young man
on his ocean steed racing from the sea
up the river of the mother, singing
his gorgeous tune. Now there’s a metaphor
for the guitar man, the lover, the man
now poet and married man. Gorgeous
enough and true? We’ll see. The tales
continue to spin and transform.
What’s next? Ask the rider and
don’t be surprised if it doesn’t
make any sense until the present
dives into the next transformation.


4.

It’s raining now and
I must close this journal and head
to the john to ready for work.
Buster ansy at the door and
my wife coughing in her sleep.
This house so richly affords all we love, and
makes itself a home as we make
love and life within it. A story
of its own which has been patient
while I complete an older story
of guitars. I still have that Takamime
guitar: it’s tombed in my closet.
Will it ever wake? Will the ink dry
some day and that old music
rise and crest the surface
in a glitter of spray? Who knows.
Listen now to the rain’s soft
sursurrations, sighing
wait ... there is this ...


THE SINGING WELL

2003

I’ve dug a well
almost every day
for four years now,
my hand top left
of the next white
space, nib in motion
spading down, the
words like ink crowing
the depths mined
here. Call it just
a habit of mind
and hand and
prayer, solitary
throats in the one
or two foot of
page I daily plumb,
as if the pen
were a thorn
pressed on
my birdlike heart,
loosing songs
my dayside tongue
can’t quite sing,
not with so much
suburban prose
in the way. I’d
been writing poems
for a decade or
so, occasional riffs
on My Day or
Her sway: then in
‘99 I discovered
a well at which
I daily returned,
its troth and trust
my hands duly obeyed.
I started out
telling music’s story
in me, the bow of bios
cutting across
history’s bittersweet
remembered tide:
Retelling my
loves and losses
down the neck
of a guitar’s
big night music,
that savage
sound which
held me in thrall
for too many years
and then got lost,
its horselike thrall
sounded somewhere
in me never to return.
The words came in
daily waves, my hand
racing 12 pages to
name the next
fist clenching
in my heart,
balls, mind, all
of it along some
infernal ledge
where words said
just so become
more than their
straight suits,
growing poppy-
florid in a water-
lily dark. Eighteen
months and several
thousand pages
later, that
poem was done:
Yet I wasn’t finished
singing, or rather
the song was not
yet done in me.
Hardly. Having
loosed the waters
they flowed on,
above or within
some breakage that
occurred in me,
singing on as
I went dark for
a season, breaking a
home, chasing
nothings, drinking
on til mad, hammering
myself upon a
cross of remorse,
surrendering,
grieving, ranting,
eventually coming
home. Through
all that I wrote,
each day a fresh
page, some next
mouth opening round
5 a.m. in skull-
shaped, cold-water
O’s. Today’s no
different: I’ve worked
my way down the
depth of a thought
rising from below;
I’ve offered here
what I found there
as best I can.
And if the effort
failed -- who cares
but God, Oran
and myself? Oh sure,
I write for your
eyes, Beloved
Reader, and pray
you find my wells
compelling, wild
and well-made:
but I will never
live to see you,
and accept
Your descent
here is not love
but archaeology,
continuing the
work of finding
wells abandoned
long ago by
gods and fishes
and golden
throats). Having
found a level
deep enough
(or beyond which
I will or cannot
go), I wrap
things up or try
to, rubbing
Oran’s nose in
some thrice
widdershins way,
& button the final
lines with a rhyme
for the hour’s change
to ocean gray,
coloring in that
surf-like recede
from down there
to this beach
between, pausing
to wave farewell,
before I shut the
book and get on
with the day. The
motion’s ripe
in me, me hand
is sea foam: May
the next day’s recit
at the well prove
for God Oran and
me prove the
next lasting chapel,
oar, and home.


THIRD WELL

If you look too long
and too hard
into the forest,
eventually you’ll see
deer everywhere.
-- Hunter’s saying

A well is not a whale.
Nor is every poem
ripened from that gut.
Look: The last day
of verse to fit into
this 100 page composition
book, and what powers
are left to evoke from
a narrow throat of cold?
Eventually the whale
vomits the hero onto
the shore & swims off.
We walk back home
and get to work.
Have I rung well enough
the diving bell in this
bale of bluey matins?
Long and deep enough
in the Oran-marrowed
trough? In the Mabinogion
Manannan and Pryderi
travel through 3 towns
perfecting 3 crafts --
saddles in one, shields
in another, gold shoes
in a third -- once
they’ve mastered the
craft & raise the ire
of their fellow craftsmen.
Exhausting all the
possibilities of one
name of God, they
move on. Is a creative
life one well, or the
sum of many? The
singing fills a metaphor
til it’s soaked --
home, sea-roads, well --
and moves on. For
years I played guitar,
for more years I’ve
written poems. Perhaps
there is a third cup
yet to fill & spill --
an art for old age,
explorations distilled
from the first two.
It’s up to the God
of Oran’s talky sod,
to that tiller of the
loam of singsong
erectile bone. Me?
I just move the pen,
praying for the wisdom
and willingness to know
when one door closes
and its time to make
the next door open
and when the work
has simply dreamed
into the third room
further down.

The Selkie

SOUL OF MY SOUL

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

... Lord it’s been
almost 20
years since those
nights when
the knot of fire
raged between
us & still my
pen gallops ahead
heedless of
the strain urgently
trying to write
the words down
as they fly:
Nothing approximates
those few moments
of arrival and
erasure in the
hot alembic of
perfect
chemistry: Kay
surely was one
of the most
seamless unions
I have ever
known: At
least for one
two maybe
three nights:
But I know
now it wasn’t
Kay who
transfixed me
on my cross
of desire:
her green
eyes shouting
yes o yes
in the dark
of that parking
lot were just
the nails:
The ancient
Greek lyric
poet Meleager
said it right
when he wrote
“In my heart
Eros himself
created sweet
voiced Melissa,
the soul of
my soul”: For
a time Kay
was the soul
of my soul,
sent by Eros
as a doublebarbed
arrow of sweet
and bitter and
grace and curse
and ocean
and eternal pit:
That music
deafened my
rock rages
with roses
and nipples:
“I swear, I
swear it
by Eros,” I /
Would rather
hear her whisper
in / my ear
than listen
to Apollo
playing his lyre,”
quoth Meleager
again, a
startling statement
for a poet
of the ages
but infernally
true: Do you
think you
prefer to sit
here writing of
lost loves and
not-so-timeless
rock n roll
when I
could instead
be yet riding
that wave, the
shape of pure
dolphin abandon?
Ah but who
ever gets to
choose such
things: Cupid is
whimsical and
scattershot:
Adult Eros
marries Psyche
& trades his
wings for the
daily labors of
earthbound
love: Yet he
never stops
being a lover:
And that old
magic music
entrances me
still: It winds
throughout
and down this
descending
stair of
memory which
I call Breviary:
I chase old
loves in the
Otherworld of
crafted dream
& return with
a ring of
fire within
my gold wedding
ring: A sulphurous
lion mates the
vernal queen:
At week’s end
Kay and I
drove out
to New Smyrna
Beach where
we registered
at some surfside
hotel as a
married couple
and climbed at
last into
the cool sheets
of a bed:
Labial folds
of naked
softly plashing
surf in
a darkened
room and the
two of us
clenched in
our coil
of immortal
fire, panting
rising spasming
& littering sleeve
after sleeve
of Fourex on
the floor: The
next morning
we walked on
the beach --
me in shorts
and Kay in a
bikini which
fit her loosely
(relics of
a past season,
of an old
passion) --
The sun just
up from an
eastern marl
of cloud, soft
80º breezes, the
sea a quilt
of coral
and cerulean
folds with
crest of spermlike
foam, sandpipers
flittering by
our feet:
Kay had stopped
to pick up
a shell and
when she rose
up again to
look at me
with her back to
the sea &
the sun flooding
her every
hair and soft
full curve
with the
richest ripest
most pernicious
gold & in
that instant
she was Thetis
or Circe
or Aphrodite
herself just
off the
foam of the
old father’s
balls: Freeze
that moment
and fire it
from the
bow of bios
right through my
birthmark &
deep into my
soul to
pierce the soul
of my soul,
harrowing me
with an
utter presence-
in-absence
I will
forever sing:


NEIL McODRUM ANDTHE SELKIE

Long ago, on an island at the northern edge of the world, there lived a fisherman called Neil McCodrum. He lived all alone in a stone croft where the moorland meets the shore, with nothing but the guillemots for company and the stirring of the sand among the shingle for song.

But in the long winter evenings he would sit by the peat-fire and watch the blue smoke curling up to the roof, and his eyes looked far and far away as if he was looking into another country. And sometimes, when the wind rustled the bent-grass on the machair, he seemed to hear a soft voice sighing his name.
One spring evening, the men of the clachan were bringing their boats full of herring into shore. They swung homeward with glad hearts, and their wives lit the rushlights, so that the wide world dwindled to a warm quiet room. Neil McCodrum was the last to drag his boat up the shingle and hoist the creel of fish upon his back. He stood a while watching the seabirds fly low towards the headland, their wings dark against the evening sky, then turned to trudge up the shingle to the croft on the machair.

It was as he turned, he saw something move in the shadows of the rocks. A glimmer of white and then - he heard it between birds’ cries - high laughter like silver. He set down the creel, and with careful steps he neared the rocks, hardly daring to breathe, and hid behind the largest one. And then he saw them - seven girls with long dark flowing hair, naked and white as the swans on the lake, dancing in a ring where the shoreline met the sea.

And now his eye caught something else - a shapeless pile of speckled brown skins lying heaped like seaweed on a boulder nearby. Now Neil knew that they were selkie, who are seals in the sea, but when they come to land, take off their skins and appear as human women.
Humped low so he would not be seen, Neil McCodrum crept towards the pile of skins, and slowly slid the top one down. But scarcely had he rolled it up and put it under his coat, than one of the selkie gave a sharp cry. The dance stopped, the circle broke, and the girls ran to the boulder, slipped into their skins and slithered into the rising tide, shiny brown seals that glided away into the dark night sea.

All but one.

She stood before him as white as a pearl, as still as frost in starlight. She stared at him with great dark eyes, then slowly she held out her hand, and said in a voice that trembled with silver:

“Ochone, ochone! Please give me back my skin.”
He took a step towards her and she stared at him with large brown eyes that held the depths of the sea.

“Come with me,” he said, “I will give you new clothes to wear.”

The wedding of Neil McCodrum and the selkie woman was set for the time of the waxing moon and the flowing tide. All the folk of the clachan came, six whole sheep were roasted and the whiskey ran like water. Toasts overflowed from every cup for the new bride and groom, who sat at the head of the table: McCodrum, beaming and awkward, unused to pleasure, tapped his spoon to the music of fiddle and pipe, but the woman sat quietly beside him at the bride-seat, and seemed to be listening to another music that had in it the sound of the sea.

After a while she bore him two children, a boy and a girl, who had the sandy hair of their father, but the great dark eyes of their mother, and there were little webs between their fingers and toes. Each day, when Neil was out in his boat, she and her children would wander along the machair to gather wild parsnips and berries, or fill their creels with carrageen from the rocks at low tide. She seemed settled enough in the croft on the shore, and in May-time when the air was scented with thyme and roseroot and the children ran towards her, their arms full of wild yellow irises, she was almost happy. But when the west wind brought rain, and strong squalls of wind that whistled through the cracks in the croft walls, she grew restless and moved about the house as if swaying to unseen tides, and when she sat at the spinning-wheel, she would hum a strange song as the fine thread streamed through her fingers. McCodrum hated these times and would sit in the dark peat-corner glowering at her over his pipe, but unable to say a word.

Thirteen summers had passed since the selkie woman came to live with McCodrum, and her children were almost grown. As she knelt on the warm earth one afternoon, digging up silverweed roots to roast for supper, the voice of her daughter Morag rang clear and excited through the salt-pure air and soon the girl was beside her holding something in her hands.
“O mother! Is this not the strangest thing I have found in the old barley-kist, softer than the mist to my touch?”

Her mother rose slowly to her feet, and in silence ran her hand along the speckled brown skin. It was smooth like silk. She held it to her breast with one hand, and put her other arm around her daughter, and walked back with her to the croft in silence, heedless of the girl’s puzzled stares. Once inside, she called her son Donald to her, and spoke gently to her children:
“I will soon be leaving you, mo chridhe, and you will not see me again in the shape I am in now. I go not because I do not love you, but because I must become myself again.”

That night, as the moon sailed white as a pearl over the western sea, the selkie woman rose, leaving the warm bed and slumbering husband. She walked alone to the silent shore and took off her clothes, one by one, and let them fall to the sand. Then she stepped lightly over the rocks and unrolled the speckled brown parcel she carried with her, and held it up before her. For one moment maybe she hesitated, her head turning back to the dark, sleeping croft on the machair; the next, she wrapped the shining skin about her and dropped into the singing water of the sea.

For a while a sleek brown head could be seen in the dip and crest of the moon-dappled waves, pointing ever towards the far horizon, and then, swiftly leaping and diving towards her, came six other seals. They formed a circle around her and then all were lost to view in the soft indigo of the night.

In the croft on the machair, Neil McCodrum stirred, and felt for his wife, but his hand encountered a cold and empty hollow. He knew better than to look for her and he also knew she would never come to him again. But when the moon was young and the tide waxing, his children would not sleep at night, but ran down to the sands on silent webbed feet. There, by the rocks on the shoreline, they waited until she came - a speckled brown seal with great dark eyes. Laughing and calling her name, they splashed into the foaming water and swam with her until the break of day.

-- Fiona McLeod, Iona




SELKIE LOVE

March 19, 2006

Little did I know she was a selkie
on that shore, dazzling my
eye with morning surf and salt
after a long tumulting night.
She stepped into my eye
from a sealksin thousands
of miles and years from where
we stood, across that soft blue
ocean behind her, on a train
of glittery sunlight fresh
upon the waters which travelled
as far out as down my eye
and brain and heart and
balls and feet to soul
to a memory as old as the
love of all my fathers
for all the women they had
dreamed and once or
twice believed. I knew none
of that back then: The
moment of her standing
there in a loosely fitting
bikini (a remainder
of other summers,
other lovers)
was pure, perfect, and
sublimely actual, as if
to reach a shore at last
of love’s most inward
baptism. To see her
standing there it
seemed I was in
my heart at last, or
her’s, or our’s. My
dream was in the
way she tilted her
head and smiled
with a voltage equal
to the sun rising behind
her on the dazzling sea;
some molten fire
gilded her curves
and curly hair, grounded
in blue waters at
her feet which foamed
soft and warm toward me.
Nothing had prepared me
for that moment, nor
had I any alm or balm
for all that followed
as we drove inland
& futilely tried to live that
day, selkie wife and
mortal man condemned
to reach for the other
where no sea, no
inland air endured.
Blindly and stupidly
I tried to nail her to
that beach as she
surely ebbed back
into the crashing sea
which was not
meant for me, not
actually, nor ever.
She soon became
a lovely disappeared
thing the tide now
sings on sands
far down my ear.
Only much later
in the slow salve
of aging years did
I come to read how
that scene has been
enacted as long as
men have dreamed of
women from the sea,
telling those old tales
to each other at
seaside taverns and
on midnight decks of
boats where stars
burned so bright above
that eyes stared up
from the folds and
crests of waves, up
from the heart of hearts.
The wisdom of the
ages is that selkies
are no wives, her
heat not meant
for hearths, a song
to keep offshore.
Such beloveds stay
only as long as a
man connives to hide
their water-gowns;
but at night while
mortals sleep,
the selkies swim deep
down our ears,
rummaging through
every vault and locker
there til at last salt
gossamer is found and
the spell of landlocked
love unbound.
Once she learned
how desperate I was
she flipped her tail
and was gone, a blue echo
in a door which still
washes with the sea,
cold and empty and
heartbreakingly beautiful
as the moonlight which
hangs heavy over
our garden this early
morning. The wife I found
after that selkie swam
away sleeps deep upstairs,
my lovely, despairing,
aging and menopausal
wife, difficult in all the
ways that selkie seemed
to easy, free, and young
before she disappeared.
Did I have to learn the
story of the seal-wife
to loose her from
within, as if to
name an archetype
was like hauling free
the anchor
of a wreck far undersea
which stayed hooked
through my heart
for years, allowing
me to come ashore
and work the
inland life that’s mine?
And though I’m not fully
freed from the surflike sound
of how she disappeared
I’m free to whistle
and croon it here
where once I drowned.
The selkie wife is
a tale now in my creel,
still wonderful and
sleek and darkly blue,
a shape of words
which I offer you,
son of my long lost
reader, to make of it
as you will and sooth
and do as you soak
in your own history’s
blue brine. Oh she
was so lovely standing
there, Venus off the
wave, the dream of that
immortal love which no
ring can troth
nor by keeping save.
Be well, o one who
was all and could
never be: Bewitch
the swells and
rouse the tale.



MAC ODRUM

2005

It is given to them (the seal-
tribe of MacOdrum) that their
sea-longing shall be land-longing
and their land-longing shall
be sea-longing.

— South Uist farmer

Shall I forever row
this rock which flaunts
below so brute a tail
and brogues the wind
like flukes? Standing
here do I forever
ride the wave
which answers every
shore with blue recede?
Surely I was just the next
nude nallie to lose his skin
in your embrace, doomed
thus to build his lives
ashore with the greater
half of the three hearts
pursed in your abyssal blue.
Half-man half fish
between the worlds
I weave my three
dark songs of fin
and breast and
thrall, that music
riven as the tide
which pounds these
rocky cliffs where
you are least of all.
Will you ever give
me back my skin,
that oiled black frock
which I must wear
to dive full back to
the single world,
free of doubletalk at last?
Shall I woo you or connive,
do I ravage the verses
or mount the mare I ride?
Such strategems
I dream atop this lonely
rock which is my writing
chair, reaching out as
far as I know how
to kiss the cross still
burning there, inscribed
aeons ago when love
was young and I woke
in your arms, a naked,
fresh-borne man 18 miles
out to sea with no
way ever to go home.
Your breath has
stayed in my ear
for all these lives,
like the sea inside
a shell, a shining
blue tide my song
has slowly pickled in.
Three cups, three
heavens, three purgatories
here beyond the ninth
wave you folded and
crashed over me —
a charnel house of
every thrill and thrall
to fade from blue to black.
I hear the selkies singing
on moony nights as
this an hour from
first light: I write
their sealskins down.
Inside this oratory
on high rock I
nail that strange music
to my own, a revenant
still revenant of
the blue which
drowned my bones.


CRYSTAL SHORES

2004


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



BORDERLING

2005

Borderling I am,
of sea and shore
composed, a sand
which slips through
dark blue veins
from every bed
I’ve loved. Soul-
doors are packed
but hard where
waves have smashed
and roared, a road
worn smooth by
the feet of selkies
who have wandered in
and we who have walked
those crashing miles
searching for your
smile again. Here
is where worlds
mist and wash
to greet in songs
as old those strange
fish who first crawled
beyond the sea.
That land still
feels the ache of gills
no longer fanning blue,
sea angels and their
swift dragon left
behind to myths
forever drowned.
Here is where love
plunged me deep
into a sweet tide’s
psaltery, baptising
me in crash and swoon,
forever haunting every
wave with strange
ebbed quietus which
erased your smile at last.
Betrothed and sworn
I am to that infernal
wash that stained
my life half-blue,
bleached and burnt
by its shore-vowelings,
my feet shod in that
homeless wave
which voyages on
to every isle you
once slept in,
bedding your
resonance, entranced
with the fading
perfume that is
mixed in every tide.
This song grows
smooth as sea-glass
with day’s wave,
shoring the pale
throat which ferries
blue between
divinities, dominions
of soul at least --
heart wild as the
pagan sea, the mind
building its chapel
on those blue bones,
writing down the
waves. Here is my
country of birth,
my native tongue
of foam and breeze:
an oh-so-narrow isthmus
of sand-packed page
between eternal marges
of brine and fire,
of spume and torpor.
It’s a death of sorts
to remain here
where you will not
return, long after all
wrack of actual beaches
have long washed away:
Yet each walk before
first light refrains
the voice way down
which rose so many
lives ago. Borderling
of blue I am,
psalmist of that tide
on which all lovers
dreamers &
changelings on
blue angels ride.



ANNIVERSARY

2002

Today it’s been twenty years
since I lost the second woman
I hardly knew yet I loved
in full, stupid, jealous & greedy.
In losing her I became
so desperately and infernally
alive as to beg silence: her shade.

All I remember of her today
is that morning we walked
on Cocoa Beach after fucking
most of the night. We were
making small talk in our
dreamy exhaustion—laughing
at the way sandpipers scurry
like tiny execs— when she
paused and smiling at me
in front of dawning sea.
The whole package I recall—
that smile, the blue eyes streaming,
the curly blond hair in a halo
of sun, her breasts full
and straining against
a year-old bikini top, the
sea crashing light foam
at her ankles like cream,
that evanescent breeze—
all of that was greater than
any morning, a finally found key.
Yet that was only true
in reverse, when she told
me at last to go to hell.
but in reverse. I recall
how I hurt bad enough
in the proceeding months
to see beyond the heat
into caring at last about
how I lived love.
How the days slowed
in the viscosity of grief,
a sludge both anguished
and gorgeous, slowing
the day to a wave-crawl,
the sunlight lengthening
across the lakes.
That image spoiled my drinking
for the next 4 years
though I tried, reaching
for her on every tree.
to care last about how
Eventually I came to
marry that shape,
sacrificing the wild
night of making love
for long hard days
of patient making.
Love doesn’t teach us
how much there is to
gain in love, only
how much there is to lose
by not loving, or failing
to love well enough.
Today I recall those long
burnished days in September
when grief was a tide
tolling a sea
I’d been born to in losing.
Stupid, jealous, greedy,
it’s true, but also the wound
which eventually bled me real.
I sit in the house I prayed
that day to inhabit,
the sum of every surrender
I made to love’s brine,
it’s awfullest, most
incompetent son,
each smile a wine
so much more difficult now
so much more
what she only kissed.





ONE LOVE,
ONE SONG

2004

Singing cannot much avail
unless the song wells from the heart,
unless it’s noble love you feel.
My singing’s then supreme. For, bold
in the deep joy of my love, I hold
and still direct my mouth, my heart,
my eyes, my understanding art.

-- Bernart de Ventadour (12th cent.)
transl. Jack Lindsay

My love for you and this song
are one in this singular travail
across the empty, gorgeous sea.
Though my ways seem
pathless, I follow my heart
which knows the way
through the wilderness
of waves, seeing with
eyes we share the deeper
darker path of love, an
ache as low as the moon
hangs high over that
silver, abyssal tide.
Our love cannot be
requited though nothing
else will do than that
day or night when
we’ll merge at last
and dream and drift
off together into an
endless, clear blue space.
No matter all the
mortal loves that failed
to find you. No matter
all the instruments I’ve
blunted in my dowse
and reach for you -- penis,
guitar, pen, boat-prow.
No matter this ocean
of ink that grows
between us, filling
the hallows of your
every departure (or
were they all mine?)
with angel-burning tears.
All that matters is
the pure note welling
in my throat with
clarion and halcyon
desire, lofted over that
crystal thalassa like
a breast of pale blue milk
or the lucence of that
afterglow which brimmed
a few beds on a few
nights along this lifelong
row to you. I’m just
another luckless troubadour
marked from birth to
ache and sing to you,
my lady of royal blue seem.
Perchance today I
sing well enough of you
to stir you from your dream.
Smile for me just once
on whatever shore you
now walk. Bless these
penny verses with with
glint of your pure silver.
Kiss me once just over
the crest of the wave
I send to you from
the bottom of this art.



APPARITION

2004

In this next great season
I can feel her rising from the sea,
the shape of summer rages
composed of mist and and sun and surf
and orange groves dreaming of
winter juice, and coral drouths
we love to work and love and
sleep together in. A sine-wave
essence of her makes of days
a gentling, smiling drench
and of every opened heart
the still-toss of the drowned.
Call her Isis or Venus or Our Lady,
hail her Mother or My Love
or the breasts of history: She
is the tide which ebbs and flows
with one sure voice,
in eyes deeper than the sea’s.
Days now not so much pass as
dance on, in love with summer’s lead.
Buds unfurled now in sail-like blooms,
a scent-bath rises from her breasts.
My song in hers rose here long ago,
perhaps long before my count
of years. I am that child of summer
that she dreamt inside the
emulsions of the sea, up
the aching balustrades of a sea-
breeze storm. My words
once freed of this pale hand
are grains fro her cathedral beach,
siliclastic island no dayside
use can ever row to reach.
Pour ‘em all into this crystal bowl
bounded by our spring and fall:
The glass is summers, the water
Your’s, its depth all mine
to hallow with a song which
makes of summers and all kisses long.