The Uses of Salt Savagery (On Wilderness)

Extremity battens its wild tooth on this page, insatiable, greedy, pent. Seeking Beatrice, the mouth drinks from the lake of fire, rolling hell on the tongue as one would taste an infernal wine. For it is there, on the stoniest ledge on the lip of abyss, that we find balls and bluster and endless cunt for the saying, hooves and wings, ten-thousand-fathoming flukes: And then, harrowing the hallows of that first instinct, we drag our prey home, like a trophy or booty, each line gleaming with that spoor.

In the Orphic mysteries, the throne of initiation is located in the cave where the infant Dionsysos is murdered. Out of the greatest awfulness, the the rebirth. Kerenyi continues the story:

“The murderers wrapped the severed head in a purple garment, put a wreath on it, and bore it on a bronze shield to the foot of Mt. Olympos — perhaps because this was the birthplace of Orpheus who, with the exception of his head which went on singing, was torn to pieces by women like a second Dionysos. According to our Christian source ((Clement of Alexandria)), the same two brothers carried the pagan secrets unveiled, the phallus and with it the Dionsysian religion, in a basket to the Etruscans. These two stories — the one speaking openly of a phallus, the other employing the word “head” — are variations of the same theme. The murder of the Divine Child was his reduction to an organ from which — or as which — he could be reawakened. The murder was prerequisite to the reawakening. (Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible LIfe, 267)

I sieve the dream from the other night through this story — with its scene of gruesome murder in the woods, which is explained in writings on a cave wall — redolent with personal history (some girl molested me in the woods) and collective (the tale of Dionysos the child murdered in a cave) and wonder if the next unfolding is happening there, even as I write ...


***

But back to the wildness. Perhaps there is a fascination and power in it due to its imaginal proximity to the waters of the unconscious, a presence which defies time and place, which wraps history and mystery in its urobouric tentacles and infuses the victim with sublime saline electricity. The images are like magnetos brimming with blue fire. So in my dream last night of the entering and then hastily withdrawing from a conspiracy to rape a child -- I was contacted by a woman to set the thing up for this vampiric pederast, both husband to that woman and some figure of self from my past -- the horror has a gothic steel to it, empurpled in evil, utterly sublime. I went to the authorities to inform them of the planned crime, and then waited for the Bad Dude’s revenge: he was a sort of Bruce Willis with terrible jaundice, this yellow-skinned skinhead whose pelt had withdrawn terribly, leaving only the hard marble sinew of appetite. How do I fend this fucker off, I wondered? I planned the conversation: look, I have my foibles too, no one is perfect, no one doesn’t carry around their shadow, your thing is yours, just not mine, your historic consequence, only resonance for me ... The argument sounded convincing enough in my mind as it I rehearsed it, but when he showed up (some fast food restaurant), his face was unyielding, skin sallow and taut, everything tensed with bull-strength, those eyes black pools of eternity.

I can’t say just what that poem is about though surely its like a tea-bag of divines seeping in my watery noodle, spooring something essential for the track of my thought...






Two sailors try their comeuppance in J.N Reynolds “Mocha Dick,” the ur-tale which inspried Mevlille.

The first mate of the whaler Reynolds travels on is of first rank in the vicious pursuit of whales:

“... No man in the American spermacetti fleet had made so many captures, or met with such wild adventures, in the exercise of his perilous profession. Indeed, so completely were all his propensities, thoughts, and feelings, identified with his occupation; so intimately did he seem acquainted with the habits and instincts of the objects of his pursuit, and so little conversant with the ordinary affairs of life; that one felt less inclined to class him with the genus homo, than as a sort of intermediate something between man and the cetaceous tribe.”

In that man’s eyes I see the fish-rider of my totem, hunter astride the Lion of the Sea, instinct to instinct perfectly matched in cunning and viciousness.

Yet there is another figure on board that whaler, a man who hunts seals who professes an even wilder instinct:

“Where the sea is roughest, the whirlpool wildest, and the surf roars and dashes madly among the jagged cliffs, there — I was going to say there only are the peak-nosed, black-eyed rouges we hunt for, to be found, gambolling in the white foam, and there must the sealer follow them.”

***

Calls to adventure, out from home into the woods of the wild hunt, beyond all safe and known harbors, comfy white writing chairs in the suburban living room, out of the 21st century back to the 21st BC, from spring’s arousing genital blossoming onto tundras rocked by winter’s hardest-cocked winds of all time.

Such is the fuse of the writing life, a cable laid down cross the abyssal plain, plumbing my oldest heart, thrumming with coax threnodies of salt blue savagery, infernally holy, pulsing with God’s own hot gyszym. (Thanks to Ginsberg’s “Howl” for that spelling). “The poet know that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly,” sd Emerson, which, if you take into account the wooliness of that studious man, shows that he knows where his galloping sentences are shod. “The intellect inebriated by nectar,” indeedy. Fiery drink of the black mother means ink, I think, not from any actual dugs — heaven knows that road means true destruction — but through the cleavage of their seem. (The ritual drama of Dionsysos’ murder is part of the initiatory act of enthronement: we park our ass on that horror, and it blossoms a inward sight in us.)

Thus I gather wild tales, that I may use them like a diving board for plunging deeper into foam.

This from R. Hunt’s Popular Romances of the West of England,, 1930:


***

“The Dandy Dogs, or Dando and his dogs, is a name given to the Wild Hunt in the neighborhood of St. Germans. As Hunt tells the story, Dando was the name of a parson of St. Germans who was given to all forms of riot and was passionately fond of hunting; and as they drove over the estate called Earth, they were joined by a strange huntsman on a splendid and fiery horse. It was a hot finish, and Dando called for drink, but he had already exhausted all the flasks of his servants.

“Well, if you can’t find any on Earth, go to Hell for it!” he said.

“Here is some drink from the place you mention,” (the strange huntsman) said. Dando drained the whole flask, and declared he had never tasted anything so good. In the meantime the stranger was collecting a large share of the game, quite as a matter of course.

Dando was drunk and bellicose, and denied his right to it. The stranger quietly continued to strike it to his saddle. Dando flung himself off his horse and staggered to the stranger. He grabbed at the game, and fell as the horse swerved. This put him in a passion. “You shant have it!” he shouted. “I’ll go to Hell for it rather than you get it!”

“So you shall,” said the stranger. He lifted Dando by the scruff of his neck, and carried him off, followed by the hounds at full cry. When they got to the Lynher he leapt into the deepest pool with the hounds into a blaze of fire and a great column of steam. That was the last that mortal men saw of Dando and his dogs, but they can still be heard early on Sunday mornings, pelting past in full cry.

***

Springboard enough: What follows is a response to that wilderness, of history and mystery composes, glittery titties cresting keeled foam, harpoon barbs wounding my own heart, hauling me back to God ...

***

SPLEEN

2001

God help the, old man,
thy thoughts have created
a creature in thee; and he
whose intense thinking
thus makes him a Prometheus;
a vulture feeds upon that heart
forever; that vulture
the very creature he creates.

— Melville Moby Dick

Guitar, woman,
bottle, boat-shaped mind:
That of which there
never can be enough
rises and crashes
like a surf in me,
restless, impure,
furious in a spleen
of hot oil. Who but an
Ahab rides the white
whale, plunging each feral
barbs into his
own bottomless heart?
And yet, o rebel will,
bloody in unsounded
agitation, how is it
that the very life
you mock rounds
here to these sure reins,
this dry surrender?
Harrow the depths
first, last, and well.
Nothing that surges
can without dark swell.
My story’s my name
and this day my father,
hard oaring between dry salvage
and the old, historic slaughter.


DON’T FRAME ME

From “A Breviary of
Guitars,” 2000

So I entered
Summer ‘83
tempered in loss
by new health and
the wealth of
some other
woman’s body:
But the true
whetsone proved
a guitar and
anger was its
blade: Sitting
at my desk with
that Washburn
acoustic not
writing baroque
malaise but
weaving chords
round a rapid
scree of rant:
It’s all right
to do drugs &
try to reminisce/
But it’s getting
late / & I’m much
too straight / There
is something
clearly amiss /
I’m tired of
paying for the
crimes of the past /
When the past
aint even my own /
It makes me makes
me makes me
want to say /
Don’t frame me /
Don’t frame me:
The chords are
B minor E minor
A with the B
string open, an
airy wiry feral
sounding stop
high up the
aerie of my
anger: “Don’t
Frame Me” was
one of the
first songs I
wrote that summer
and I took it
with me to
Norman’s house
where we jammed
on acoustic guitars
in a fraternity
of boot-on-
asphalt fury
hanging with
the Stones, Elvis
Costello, Pretenders,
Police, more
Stones, and
then into my song:
Norman lit to
it as if he
were tippling
new booze: Something
lean and angry
and ours: Played
it through 2 or
3 times &
then stopped for
the night high
fiving & jiving
high up a tree
we both had
planted: Outside
on the porch
smoking cigarettes
& the night
humming &
sweet &
fit to gallop
across: Up
to Fern Park
Station on a
Monday night for
10 cent drinks
feeling like
eagle hatchlings
and the world
on fire round
us down below
& all the chickies
for the taking:
We jazz and
razz these 2
babes at the
bar & one of them
Lenny this
lovely redhead follows
me home for tea
and 3 a.m.
sympathy: We don’t
fuck, it’s not
necessary
somehow: But
her hand is sure
and willing
gripping my cock
through my jeans
as we kiss
wet & languid
half drunk on
the fires I’d
found when my
guitar unsheathed
in song: Rage
on to the next day,
beat to hell
but amazed at
the hooves I’d been
trampled by: But as
the day wears on
the hi-anx metal
hooves return
in more dour
and dire thunder,
all the fears
of losing Cindy
rilled noxious
& fell from
the sad old
basement, my
treasury of
broken hearts
(they only
look like genitals):
But now there’s
no way to
ride the banshee
down to back
so after work
I swim long
laps in the pool
as the sun burns
long and low
in the West:
An edge now
there between
abyss and fire
on which Cupid
rides his merry
hairy hoary
immortal steed:
Later, feeling
fit and rinsed
by sun-saturate
waters, I
practiced songs
on my guitar,
getting the
changes down,
limbering my hands
in the river —
Deep rhythms
which you must
ride the way
a dolphin submits
to the old
man of the sea;
Letting go
by holding on:
Writing another
hard song about
the power inside
Love’s grave:
“A Savage Heart
won’t lie to you/
Its words don’t have
a chance / There is
no way to woo
it / When it’s
Razors and Ice:
Hang on to
that E minor
chord in a
slow pummel
of punches
resolving for
one measure
on C major 7
pond that froze
over long ago
before tearing
back out into
the brutal wind:
Sometimes the
heart is
a fist that only
speaks in power
chords, each slam
a defiant hammer
sending a marker
up the sky to
God where the
Beloved sleeps:
I don’t know
if 4 years
away from bands
has built up
like snow on
some distant range
& just melted
when Cindy
walked away
& I picked up
a guitar: Melted
and built by
rivulets and
tributaries into
one joyful
angry roar:
Instead of the
old seesaw between
lost loves &
drunk dives
I now found
a ledge along
the neck of
a guitar that
afforded enough
room between
her heaven & her
hell within a
sheath of song,
fucking but
not impregnating
myself with
the erasures of
welcome &
farewell: But it
was a season
for writing songs,
each starting
with a ditty
and a line and
developing along
a gradient
I found not
by criticizing
the mess too
soon: & then
I found myself
horsed with
another rock
n roll song
to heave off
the stage: Feeling
blades sharpen
within me to
a point as I
practiced the
new songs:
Furious storms
breaking overhead:
My guitar soaked
in sweat: Eager
for the next
practice with
Norman, unveiling
the next song
like a hotrod
in a garage:
My fingers
loose, summer
in full arrival,
no longer merely
about love:






THE USES OF SALT SAVAGERY

April 2005

I would make a turbine of You
if I could, my Cape, a wattage
maxed to blitz my days in
Your high-joltin’ jolly rogers,
keel smashing through the
towering tumult inside this
gentle spring in Central Florida.
Surely there should be
uses for Your crag and storm
and blue careens on the
nether lips of two oceans;
uses for these predawn
sermons which pulpit on
those seas; coinage for this
singing skull held in place
by breasts and breasts of salt,
my bad boy music minted
not melanged in the colloid
roughage of abysms. Yep,
such high wild amplitude
could surely be of use out there
in my dingdong long work day,
turning my commute into
a run through feral waves,
my hours in salt mines
made rife with Your blue plunder
and rude booty, the spleen
of seal-harvest and their
moony dead chorales, limning
up the task list with
a revenant still fragrant joy
harmonic in the mode
sea monsters moo between
all shores. It would be
of great boon to vaunt You
there as both ship and
deranging seas, heightening
those droll hours with Your
imperilled weave: But alas,
within mere minutes of
driving out I’ve leaked the
mega bergs and squid,
subsumed by all the arid tropes
of suburban modernity,
prosaic and pastless and
so addicted to surficialities
as to drown all depths
beneath its taut glassine
— Glad Wrap mashed round
Your rims to keep day skies
from spoilage in Your
thrash of deep blue
brine-fouled awfulness.
In my day there’s endless
neck and nipple and
asscheek to chomp
to hell’s own slake, but
every incisor in my jaw
gets hauled off by the
rising sun, my shoulds
and musts and might-as-wells
like gums no longer bleeding
for the gnash and clench
and tear of older joys,
youthfuller employs of
pure puerile greed,
fucking every tunny that
moves where foam delves
clefted curvatures —
Gone those stallion wastes
though I ride gamely on
in this dark hour before
the day bangs its gong
of bright necessity.
Bad echoes of old surf?
Ennui of hard-blued balls?
The commotion of lost gears
churning in the deep tide
of lost & forgotten years?
Yes: for better or ill, this hour
charges on in aging newer
older motions three deeper
than my former old thrall,
pure whiskey poured on
the wettest place in the
whole damn thrill of it all
— a Cape of savage
swivery writ on pages of a
book that fits in my
breast pocket — That’s all I
take of You to work —
not to alm or amulet
or cash in Cape Horn’s round
as keep a long-lost sound of blue
alive just where it drowned.


MAPPING HELL

June 2005


Maybe everyone gets around to
mapping their hell (or hells),
holding lamps in the dark to name
chasms and rivers and black
mansions of bone — littorals of
the real life’s viscuous stone.
My little white boat — the chair I write
in every day, I mean — bumped
this hour of 4:02 a.m. in
the swoon beneath high summer
and is ferried on a stilled chirring
weave into a dark garden
bared of bright days, a garden
richer and stranger than dreams,
wilder than I have the pluck
or ink to aptly describe, though
— you know me — ever I try.
That’s the harrowing, a circuit
of nouns through blue bones
lost to days, my hand and
pen revenant, fixed on what
I remember, how the world
seemed, all I tried and failed
to quite sing. A bleak cartography
perhaps, were it not for
a strange melody that winds
through black trees still
dripping from last night’s
soaking rains. What is it?
The crying of seals, my
love sighing Yes in some
faraway dream, the sound
of fresh water dripping in
chambers of stone which
may be my heart or
perhaps its older home
in the ribs of narwhal
plunged deep in pack ice.
A bittersweet music I’ll
never fully transcribe,
like guessing the names
of every sinner in hell.
I look out, I hearken back,
I surmise and inscribe
ley lines and fey tombs,
stone crosses with gills
and wells by the umpteen
like the pores of a
dead god, a singing black
country at the far end
of my own. I hear my
life’s blue threnody
fluting from a far window
between what’s forever Yours
and this shore where You’re not.



WORD, WORLD, WOMB

March 26, 2006

Why should I desert you,
blue tasker? I’d ghost
my deepest roots
and tumble off into
the windblown drone
of days too chrome
and clatter-stanked,
my soul so much
future chum. So what
if nothing more
comes of this
than just what this is?
A voice survives its
own swank needs
to swim into far
deeper desires,
pure balls to
clapper Davy’s bells
in his brine chapel
on abyssal plains,
whole hearted
in the deepest blue.
Today as I read
Wendell Berry’s
“A Timbered Choir”
again I recall
a morning twelve
years ago when
I read those lines
a second time,
between the marriages,
alone in that
apartment by Lake
Cherokee, swamped
by overwork and guilt.
I read the lines
and wrote my own
like a tree back to its
tribe, savoring the
sound of words
like breezes through
a copse indifferent
to sounds of men, and
yet also communed
in their voices
on the wind,
something personal
yet collective,
lover and Beloved,
I and Thou, greeting
at a shore
my rows of words
tided against.
The motion lead
me down the page
to a resting-enough
place, harrowed there
sufficient to cross
my day with keel and
rudder where hot
bright charging
hours had none.
I looked up from
the pad to the
brightening day
as I do now, a
liquid smoothness
in the magnolia
tree beyond my
balcony, awakened
as if from
my words, with roots
and branches fuller
from the saying
or so it seemed.
6:20 here on
Saturday, and
the day is present
where it somehow
was not when I
rose to my same
old same old
same old matins,
calm and green
despite the cold
which seeped in
overnight, a
halcyon communion
of leaf and bird
and light I
came to here
down all these
unwordly lines.
So what if no
one ever comes to
shore what so
souled me then
as now? The wings
and fins and hooves
are for the going,
growing down
becoming’s way
to the salt blue
womb of the world’s
own being. I write
my part of heaven
content it choirs here.

The Cobalt Metronome

The writing life, that silvery skein through the inside darkness between I and Thou, re-creates a myth or mythology, makes old numens live and breathe and walk thunderously, re-energizing the too-safe and too-known perambles of the waking day which threaten to drown a soul in its occluding, indifferent white noise.

It is faithful to origins even as it writes them over, troping or turning them just enough to leave original surface to walk on, like a shore, fresh juice to rim the orificial plunges of entry. My history provides ample material for the written mysterium, foreground or foreskin behind and beneath is a pagan dark tumescence, hungry and vital and perilous and sacred. Papered genitalia cannot fructify real wombs nor bear true children, but they serve a sort of synecdochal initiation, where seem and sound are foundation enough to raise the inward cathedral. Prior acts become apostles, deacons of God-sounding wind, tolling bells from the inside bottom of that sea where the past dreams, bowered with every love lost and still throbbing with every pent orgasm in which I touched and lost and reveranced whatever holiness was in the comminglings of the flesh.

First Dionysos, then Orpheus: the raw before the cooked, the deed before its capitalled Verb, bloodied Titan giving birth to Hesiod’s throat. This is the archetypal swing from penis to pen, the education of a life from reflection over its living. We can go back quite a way, all back to the emergence of writing, to see what function it served. I quote here from Carl Kerenyi’s Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life:

***

Orphism has been termed “a religious-philosophical-literary tradition movement that cannot be defined with precision,” but within its own setting, the Dionysian religion, it can be summed up and characterized. It was a masculine, speculative tendency within a religion having women’s cults as its core. Omomakritos embodied this tendency. In the light of its initiations, through which individuals made atonement and strove for apotheosis, Orphism may be characterized as a kind of private religious exercise. The mythical prototype expressive of this tendency was the figure of Orpheus, who was not only a solitary strolling singer but also an initiator of men and youths. Another feature of Orphism was its predilection for archaic elements of myth and cult, which it sought to preserve in writing. The Orphics wrote sacred books, linked myths together, and created a mythology of Dionysos.

They did not divulge the women’s cult secrets. Rather, they covered them with a cloak that was transparent enough to those in the know, and they constructed a mythical history of the world in such a way that everything on which the Dionysian religion was based had already happened before either the women’s cults or the Orphics’ cults made their appearance. In so doing they observed the spirit of the living myth, whose function was precisely this ...
(262-3, italics mine)

***

An old communion, written anew, made living or kept living, bound in safe margins, incessantly wild within ... at least for and in the writing.

Is that enough?

***

Last night I dreamt of visiting a museum/crime scene/tourist attraction, the scene of a horrific crime, set deep in the woods, out where you would expect such pagan nastiness to occur. A sort of clearing -- at least the trees weren’t so thick -- on a gently sloping knoll heavily strewn with leaves. The crime scene is cordoned off from the initial approach, you walk around it wondering just what the hell happened there, though there look to be clumps which could be bodies or clothed skeletons. We walked around that perimeter into a cave where the story is engraved on the walls, some low-bottomed guys were out in the woods, vagrants or criminals, sharing a stolen watermelon, when all hell broke loose ... a knife flashed, swung, dove, splattered gore over tree stump and watermelon slices ... the central facts seem occluded, not seeable or readable on the walls, as what is out there on the knoll is difficult to ascertain, even when we walk out there ... Is the light bad? too old? to aquaeous? It’s a horror felt if not fully seen, is not colored in, as if the eye was trying to compose what the dream dictated and decided to leave much to imagination. So there’s the sundered watermelon, stained with a sepia ink (maybe I’m dreaming in mono or duo chrome) ... there’s a clump half-covered in leaves, and what looks like a clenched hand sticking up, attached to a fibula wrapped in tatters ... There are other Horrors but I can’t really see them, or won’t, swimming back to the surface of my waking morning with a few baubles of dream in my creel, lucent but worthless, or of a price which is far from becoming known ... Somehow, if I write on, perhaps that will become more clear ...

A Maenad sunder of male desire? An Orphic text? These pages like leaves covering old crimes, first soundings of God? Site of myth, ensouled in dream sight? Cordoned off here, as I hold the image in my mind’s hands, settling it back into its deep pond, watching the last of it drift back out of sight?


***

THE POEM AS
A CRUSTACEAN
SCUTTLING ACROSS
THE BOTTOM OF
GOD’S HEART

March 26, 2006

This cobalt metronome
has gone everywhere
my life has seeped
though its mostly been
from here, a fixed
daily writing chair
hours before the
warmings of dawn.
I remember flying
to Salt Lake City
thirteen years ago
with my first wife
& her daughter
to visit her family,
driving a rented
Chevy Lumina
into southern Idaho
& the majestics
of that sprawled
wild land, watching
my wife’s forsaken
history unspiel
from a thatch
of thorns and stones.
Along the way
I read Campbell’s
Primitive Mythology
and wrote in my
verse journal
something between
travelogue and geology.
One morning I
sat on a picnic
bench behind
her father’s house
watching sunlight
play across huge
hills across the valley,
changing their
primal folds and
lifts from cold grey
to steely
aquamarine, then
something warmer
in the summer day,
washed bright then
dark by passing
clouds. The day,
the place, that family
for that time
inside my own
were in the words
I wrote down,
spiralling on verbal
coils like DNA
toward something
newly resonant
of something I
was finding vastly
old. I had never
been that way but
that savage breadth
of Western day
was like an airy
sea which welcomed
some great depth
in me, stirring
in my hand a
crustacean at
the bottom of
the earth’s own
memory, praising
what I saw
as vastly old
and new. When
I checked back
on that journal
today the words
I read are not
what I recall
about the sense
of writing them down
though a visual
orchestra strikes
up inside them,
enthralled, slo-mo,
those mountains
receiving tinctures
from the sky
was it washed
once and forever
over them &
the valley &
my hand as it
crossed from edge
to binding then
returned to write
again one line lower
toward a heart
reaching up to me
with news of God,
each back and
forth wash of lines
the palpitus or
heartbeat of a
cobalt metronome
inside what
can’t be known.



SINGING HEART

April 2004

Today I sight this singing heart
below behind and between
as a crannog built by You
for a dark and wild bell’s ringing.
In previous years
I’ve seen otherwise
in a well’s cold drench,
in whale and girl astride
toward every beach
worth dreaming,
guitar and Bible buried
there when their time
had run Your curse,
amid the manowars
and other boats
I built just for such beaching.
Ten thousand poems
I’ve launched from here,
their verbal engines
tooled for salt abandon’s
blue overreaching, a
name for every isle
in the dark archipelago
of ten thousand teachings.
Here to the tide contains
the kiss and curve of
every woman who smiled
and shared with me
the secret of her blue
beseechings, both
bottomless and more,
that samba sambaltique
I found there and lost, one
foot now citizen of
every wave’s collapsing,
each bed’s undinally
pale pure enlacing.
Winds now work the
trees outside, a late
spring front to wash clean
the humid heat of the
past few days, and with
it bring a clearer blue
for our refreshing,
tiding in perhaps
another take on You --
Heron? Psalter?
Mother, Father River?
Some other vantage
on this dark which
does not bear explaining
but requires of me these
three wetmost things:
apt saddle for deranging;
the will to ride heart
all the way to naming;
and the sense of ages --
God’s and Your’s
conjoined in mine --
to let this crannog
fade to waves
so I can go where
blue ends send me,
bereft of any real
sail or bone rudder,
adrift in the next
draught of a room in
a dream, without a way
of ever arriving
or truly knowing.
Ah! but what songs
ahead are glowing!



ODYSSEY

2004

That which love works upon
is not love but soul.

-- James Hillman, Anima: Anatomy
of Personified Notion.

Ah, the torch enkindled by your eyes
was the lamp by which I voyaged through
my nights. When I was younger I thought
it helped me see you out beyond my walls.
That light was faint and strange, as if
beaconed by some low-candled moon n.
It spluttered often and went out. And
so I sailed through an infinity of nights..
In lieu of any archipelago that I
could name, the beds were mythic,
islands in a stream of boozed-up chaos,
dunes of shores where the tides were
terrible in alternation of booming
wave and utter, ebbed silence. It was always
strange when you were lying close to me
in our next naked tryst, whomever
fortune poured my way that night
passed out under me or turned,
in a post-coil frieze, to be the wall
of all those foreign regions
I swore you were beyond.
Those curves and crevasses were
so faintly lit by your lucence,
either as moonlight through
the window or a hall light in
the door, like an iceberg’s blue-
veined tracery, a magic image
between starry black
bolts of universe above and
that mountain of massed darkness
hidden underneath the bed,
hauling through waters so black
and cold as to drown the gods.
There you were again, making
my heart catch for an instant
in the hope that we might at last
begin a love that had been so
long quested and frustrated, stalled --
Yet always at that last micron’s
separation between my lips and
the cleavage of your breasts I
was reaching for, you leapt
into a sudden wave
flashing a fish tail so alien as to
mock the moon and tide and
every shore I’d ever dreamed
you on. No trace of you ever
remained by first light, leaving
just a groggy woman drained of
every lucent rill and ridge,
hungover and bitchy and leaden
with remorse at having let
her hair down to a sailor
so short of his promised tides.
The sun shrieking round
the edges of those
window-shades was fierce
and terrible, etching in pure
ire all the hard and fast
edges of my isolation, searing
brutal truths into that bed
and utterly dismissive of the
nougats I searched for there.
And so I’d get the hell
on outta there, promising
to call as I hurried out
the door, whispering “man,
that was close” to the gaunt
pig-man in the rear-view
mirror as I sailed away.
In the blazing foolishness
of my youth I believed
one night my luck would change,
that given the right night
in the right bar drinking
the right cruel booze I’d
find you sitting in a pool
of lamplight like the
right island at last, revealing
your true blue face to me at last.
How many times does a heart
need breaking before love’s
real purpose can clear the reefs
at last? I’m not sure how it
happened, but there came a time
when, harrowed perhaps by all those
luckless gambols on the night’s
dark stream, I came to see
you in a different light, not
as the shape of all I’ll never reach
-- not some bossa nova numen
walking forever off from me,
down some naked crashing beach --
but the inward shores between
heart and its ache, my beloved
a soul awake and winding me
like a skein through all those
darkened rooms and halls which
sprawl the eterne internal, the
chambered vault down under the
iceberg’s secret bulk.
The light in your smile
took me out to the world’s last
edge where I found at last
the walls of a sacred room
both womb and tomb of
every lover’s song. Love lit
your smile like a fuse in me,
burning through all loves
to ignite its other, this soul
which sees itself at last,
though ever faintly. At least,
that’s the writing on the
walls today, as the mythic
wanderer and adventurer
clears the harbor reefs at last
and the real woman stirs
at her loom, suddenly mindful
to set fresh linens on the bed
and pull the curtains wide.



HAGIOGRAPHY

December 2003

Old lives float along
in the high masts of
that frigate moon,
spiritous and cold,
a blue-washed psalter
whispering lost
hagiography through
the eerie moony night.
Long, long ago the
poet covered his face
with her palms and
sailed three nights
below, his song tumbling
like a severed head down
her dark blue well, his
thumb dipped in
her sidhe-mound and
tasted rich with
the honey of prophecy.
The moon sails
on in that ancient
enterprise, seeing all
in death and sleep
what we only dream,
eyes wide where we
can or dare not see.
Oran’s high up in
that mast with
Amergin and Merlin,
Billy Shakespeare
Blake & Whitman too,
vatic votives all
singing high in their
deepest burials,
their deadliest falls
into her silver arms.
Old songs are still
streaming from that
ever-westward moon,
thin and distant
as the mewling stars,
in registers the dead
intently listen to
under all the waves of
this world -- Chunts
and chanteys, lays
and lives, a high sky
stream gleaming on
the cheeks of that
magic moon, the one
I found beneath
my pillow as I slept,
and which now at
5 a.m. dully fills
the yard with blue
milk, the moon which
somehow is the song
inside my own.
A silver marrow
of wild sea bone
whispers soft and
high and thin
inside this pen:

O let me tell you
of my dance with her
in the merrow-milk
of a high December moon ...


***

FIRST, LAST, EVER

Feb. 2004

Each poem sails toward You as first and
Last and ever, singing in the
Surgency of Now’s blue curl, wild
Smash, pale sigh. The cavern of my
Isolde reveals its secret door
In drowned Ys only this once,
When hot words plunge deep in stone.
A kiss to waken sleep, blue light
To see deep: The wings which my song
Lifts and fans are feathered in moon
Milk and whale jets, cold Thor and orange
Bloom. And when the spasm ebbs all trace
Of You away, it joins the other
First and only songs on the beach,
The sum of Yous I’ll never reach.

Dorothy's Emerald Hammer

Oklahoma City

It’s 5 a.m. and I sit
here in a nicely
appointed suite at
the Marriott Residence
Inn next to susurrant
freeway interstate which
cuts through Oklahoma
City, the soft whir of
the air conditioner
playing pale ostinato
to trucks sliding past
in heavy flourishes
of whirling tires -- a
purposeful freeway,
not frenetic like the
chortled arteries
which slog through
Orlando, but steady
and clean and fast,
intent on purposes
not found in the
landscape which
is hammered flat
& eternally brown, the
quintessence of “plain.”
It’s as if despite the
hardtack desperation
of its years
the folk-soul keeps
on keepin’ drilling
for invisible dreams
like those lone derricks
I espied from our jet
chugging pints of
Oklahoma crude,
whatever that’s worth.
The signs for restaurants
and gas stations are
all pitched very high,
vying for the eyes I
guess, but maybe that’s
how high the snow
packs when blizzards
roll down from
the Rockies. Well,
it’s spring now and
those signposts look
equally impeccable
and nude; everything
is brown but you
sense something
virginal afoot,
Dorothy perhaps,
the redolent one
struggling to open
the locked cellar
door with the wind
whipping her plain
dress this way then that.
In the distance
a rude pagan god
lolls a long thin
penis this way then
that across ever-
foregrounding fields,
explodings farms
& silos into so much dust.
Spring ravages
Oklahoma
with the howl that
cries Yes as it lifts
our hearts in a spin
over the rainbow
to Oz. My boss and
I are here to talk
weather, trying to
name the deal we’re
inking, a partnership
to vend weather
services through
a devious desktop
device which intends
to keep users streaming
back to a newspaper’s
website -- we flew up
from Orlando on
Monday (my
departure backgrounded
by tender misery
as I kissed my wife goodbye
at the back door -- she
refused to move from
it as I waved goodbye --)
to visit one partner
and ready to meet the
other (later this
morning), dining at
“the best restaurant
in Oklahoma” with
the weather guys,
telling our business
histories over ossa bucca
and swordfish, booze
or water. Things are
going well, we think,
though one partner
is throwing a curve,
changing his desired
distribution strategy
where we give the
thing away rather
than license it, picking
up the revenue from
hits on the search
engine which comes
bundled with it. It’s
certainly intruiging
in the way opportunities
form, rousing the mind
to possibilities which
may deliver or not.
Maybe that comes with
this eternally flat
territory, where dreams
are groined in the fury
of trying, this
town both its nightmare
and its possibility,
a bowl alternately filled
with dust or gold,
fruit sometimes bursting,
other times dried
like prunes, Dame
Fortune spinning
the University of
Oklahoma football
team this way then that,
Texas-stomper one
year, Longhorn bee-yoch
the next. Dorothy in Oz
is surely the archetype
here, dust dreams in
full color the way only
the soror of youth
can dream, the dizzy
capital of emerald
phalli straining up
at the coined sun,
there just beyond
an undulant poppy
veld of luxury’s scent,
like perfume twixt
the boobs of
cinema queen.
What is there
to go home to
but what is deepest
in the heart, beyond
such green noise?
It’s been a good
trip for us, so far, as
far as I can see,
but there’s always
a witch in the woods
on the way, the
devilled twist swirling
its nails into the
details. My boss
has launched and
lost a dozen ventures,
he’s a true entrepreneur,
hopeful now as ever
with this next cleave
between Fortune’s thighs;
but he’s weary, too:
he’s building a house, has
a employees to pay,
turned 60 this year.
And I’m the more
the savage bought
for front lines,
a shut-down poet
suiting up for the fray
with great needs
at home both financial
and emotional. Bliss
bears a price in
romance and finance;
it’s what must be
paid after LaLaLand’s
long harrowing when
you find the fool
curtained in back,
moving the levers
which fume and roar
the visage of greatness.
There’s no yellow
road behind him
to point a way to
the bliss secreted
behind him--no, under--
no ruby slippers tapping
their toes three times
for that descending
back-swastika of
air down the twister’s
old oubliette
as I write these lines.
Still I close my
eyes invoking that
sacred formula
for the whole of
American life.
There’s no place
like home though
its everywhere, even
here, as I sit on
Marriott-appointed
furniture staring
through faux-lace curtains
onto a night not yet
warmed by any hint of
day, out into a courtyard
of strangers’ cars parked
under icy white lights
& trucks whizzing
the freeway like surf
on a shore I forever
walk down here, between
the pen and its home.
I’m eager to get on
with this day, labor
the next vendor visit,
ask all of the
questions and
write down all
of the answers, then
head for the
airport & board
those jets which
ferry my bright
and darker purposes
back to Florida.
The second plane
get in at 11 p.m.,
which means I’ll
hit my little town
around midnight
and my driveway
thereabouts. I’ll climb
in bed with my wife,
God willing this
day, fit myself snug
up to her and the cat
and the rest of my life,
sleeping a short while
before racing back
to the world where
dreams lift and fall
and the work’s utter blue
umbrage is nothing and all.