Blue Atlantis

FINDING ATLANTIS

April 21

Edgar Cayce would lay down
And fall into a deep trance,
Singing without sight the depths
Of all we know and don’t.

He could read a book just by
Laying on it, he could read
The springs of oil and disease,
He could read without knowledge

The rise and fall of nations
To come & re-read our histories
As they were, not seem. His voice
Told of Atlantis & its farthest reach

Which sank entire in the sea.
I wonder if his talent was in
Dipping a dark wilds cable
Down that sea into the mind

Of a lost tribe’s future history,
Singing of its blue eternity.





From Yves Bonnefoy’s poem “Let This World Endure,” transl. transl. Hoyt Rogers:

III.

Let this world endure,
Let absence and word
Fuse forever
In single things.

Let word be to absence
As color is to shadow,
Gold or ripe fruit
To gold or dry leaves:

Not parting until death
Like a snowflake on a hand --
The water vanishes,
So does the gleam.

IV.

Let so pure a presence
Never cease
Like sky that fades
From water as it dries.

Let this word remain
As it is tonight:
Let others, beyond ourselves,
Partake of the endless fruit.

Let this world endure,
Let the shining dust of summer eve
For ever enter
The empty room,

And the water of an hour’s rain
Stream forever
In the light
Along the path.

VI.

Drink, she said,
Bending over him,
As he wept full of trust
After his fall.

Drink, and let your hand
Open my red dress,
Your mouth consent
To its good fever.

The heart that burned you
Has almost drained away.
Drink of this water, which is
The mind that dreams ...




To the human senses, the most obvious patterning of the surface waters is indicated by color. The deep blue water of the open sea far from land is the color of emptiness and barrenness, the greern water of the coastal areas, with all its varying hues, is the color of life. The sea is blue because the sunlight is reflecteed back to our eyes from the water molecules or from very minute particles suspended in the sea. In the journey of the light rays downward into the water and back to our eyes, all the red rays and most of the yellow have been absorbed, so it is chiefly the cool, blue light that we see.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us




BLUE IN BLUE

April 21


I fell asleep in my first love’s
Arms & dreamed I was
Drifting far at sea, through velds
Of brilliant blue. The sun

Brocaded the surface of my float
With dancing eyes so gold
I swooned, entranced, serene,
Scattered, drifting home at last.

Such blue was a new sky’s depth,
A new sea’s vault in heaven, my
Body wrapped in hers asleep
Beyond all surf and flesh for

All eternity and forever
Here and now. In that hour
After coming hard in her
I fell down in a sacred deep,

Baptized in the heart’s third blue:
A soak I’ll never sing or love but do.

Blue Mystery

Those who participate in the Round Dance of the Cross, circling in the dance and chanting “Amen!” in response to the person chanting Jesus’ part, were celebrating their new relationship with Jesus who here, as we have noted, invites them to

“See yourself in Me who am speaking,
And when you have seen what I do,
Keep silent about my mysteries.
You who dance, consider what I do:
For this human passion about which
I am about to suffer is your own.”

-- Acts of John 96 2-8,
in Eileen Pagels’ Beyond Belief:
The Secret Gospel of Thomas

***

COMMUNAL

April 20, 2006

I do this in remembrance
Of You, here at this altar of
Verbal salt and sweet dew, sieving
Words from a book through

The heart of my brain or vice
Versa, crying Amen! with
This pen or my penis or both,
A strange finger held to my lips

As these words shout of shores
And ruddy nipples in waves
Foaming in crashed blue
Harmony to the tide of my hips

Heaving from this chair to
The night, through the garden outside,
Up and deep into my wife
Sleeping upstairs. I do this

In celebration of blue bliss,
Milking the sea from Your chalice.



GNOSIS

April 20

What finger held to which
Lips when my heart shouts
Hosannas? She fell back
In the wave of white silence

Never to whisper my name again;
For years I walked those shores
With ears pent to a tide
Folding and crashing without me,

That absence over time grown
Cathedrally mute. When I write
Angels with wings to the knees
Fucking blue depths to the lees

Something calm and serene
Rounds the salty metaphor,
Hardened past stone. My
Angels half-smile on their crypts,

Bemused perhaps, or full seeped
In the mystery torn from their hips.






When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal -- each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in salt water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea. In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time. Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea. And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb, and the stages of his embryonic development repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a water world to creatures able to live on land.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us



THALASSA

2004

Travel down the monkey’s ass &
You’ll find a fish’s tail, finned for
Sailing the biggest womb of all.
Beyond foolery, these motions
Are more riven, nigh desperate
To swim and fuck and eat. That’s all.
That road is five hundred million
Years long; and deep, too, sounding some
thirty thousand leagues of salt blue.
The fish’s tail hangs from my own a
Very long ways back and down; that’s
Good comfort as I fan ahead
With my tribe, who think their brains have
Brighter synapses than the sea’s.
May all I fling swim deep in thee.


FISH TALE

2005

I have made of that old
adventure wooing
you a fish-tale,
the bedded bliss
become an isle that
walked or swam but
most certainly got
full away. The story has
grown fins then flukes
in its retellings,
found a wavelike
slap-and-sloshing resonance,
the sound of crashing
shores I only dreamed
back then, tidally
awakened in your arms
at last. All that remains
is that sound -- a semblance
of wild love which is both
spring river and trembling
bridge, both love and
lover pouring forth in
one gout of song the
three hearts which no
actual kiss may staunch,
much less damn, the
way sea-walls may jetty
sand chapels for a time
but the sea swells
tide the ends of every
ocean to full blue.
Of that short time
that broke all my clocks
I now endlessly return,
and walk, like a shore,
up and down its ghostly
reaches, performing
stations of devotion
on the way. Here fresh
on the beach I drove
off into the night
an emptied, riven man --
Here by this stump of
broken mast I stood
at the bar, pounding
down three shots of
blue lactissima -- Here
by the moonlit mash
of waves I met you,
your face averted to
the band, your breasts
rising from a lacy blouse
to imprison me between
the ocean and its heavings,
the high heart’s saltiest
retrievings. And here
on a stretch of
shattered whelks and
scattered, sprawled weeds
is where we thrashed
together in one wilding
spume, a shout which
rang the bells of heaven
and returned, forever
seared and scarred by
your lips, or mine, or
some wakened pair,
delivered by the sea
and ghosting every each
and croon inside every
tidal day long since.
My fish-tale has made of
me the tunny, elusive
and sea-wise, the slipperiest
half of soul no man
may mount and vaunt,
the prize more priceless
every time I reel the
telling out. The one
that got away became
the tail in every wave,
a sea-wife who sings
below, our children in
these darkling verses,
swans of riven undertow,
a dark gleam of moonlight
on massed waters, the
brilliant folded crash
we found and woke together
that one night, now
every night to wash
the shores I dream.
My myth grows deeper
every time I sing
that mythic night,
like the ocean filling
everything the moon
left in its wake.
Have I told you about
that night when
from the deepest sea
a woman roused
the depths of me?




GHOST CRAB

2006

You are descendant and
Metaphor of the first animals
To breech the sea, three hundred
Million years ago, eking an

Eternal day exactly where
Sea and shore are one,
Scuttling up the sands to seek,
Scuttling back to soak

Blue gills in brine. Such
ancient endurance speaks of
the fixity I too work
Across and down this shore,

My sorties of fresh words
Always rounding back to
Dive in wild collapse,
Cauling deep in ebbing flow.

Now you read me, then I’m gone:
That’s the ghostly margin of my song.


A STONE

Yves Bonnefoy
transl. Hoyt Rogers

A mysterious haste urged us on.
We went in, we opened
The shutters, we recognized the table, the hearth,
The bed; the star was growing larger in the window.
We heard the voice that wants us to love
At summer’s crest
Like dolphins playing in their sea without a shore.

Unknowing, let us sleep. Chest against chest,
Our breathing mingled, hand in hand without dreams.

Sargasso Sunrise

How the flukes splash!
How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!
Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mpoers,
I take my place among you as much as any;
The past is the push of you and me and all precisely the same,
And the night is for you and me and all,
And what is yet untried and afterward is for you and me and all.

I do not know what is untried and afterward,
But I know it is sure and alive, and sufficient.

-- Walt Whitman


HEAVEN IS (NOT HERE)

St. Brendan and his companions come to a very high inaccessible island and cannot find an entrance. Having circled the island for a number of days, they see a church, and hear the voices of people singing and praising God. A waxen tablet is lowered to them, bidding them to cease trying to enter the island, that they will find the island which they seek, but that they must return home as their own people wish to see them; this is not the promised land (“non ista tibi terra promissa”). They leave the island, taking with them the tablet, which they used to read every day as if it had been sent to them by God.”

***

SARGASSO

Rains finally after weeks and
Weeks, that hard blue-maned
Coursing sky now a thick black
Loam humming and sweet

At 4 a.m. Jasmine blooming
On the chimney like a thousand
White mouths of honey. Profusion
Clogs the tide though not far

Beneath there’s nothing but sand
And cold water for miles.
The visible part of this poem
Winnows its hair in the garden,

Dreaming sated of the rain
Which fell far into the night.
But so much of it drifts far under
Like the ghost keel of fallen titan,

His penis swirling in dark swale
Like a slowly dying, diving whale.




Sargasso:

The central oceanic regions, bounded by the currents that sweep around the ocean basins, are in general the deserts of the sea. There are few birds and few surface-feeding fishes, and indeed there is little surface plankton to attract them. The life of these regions is largely confined to deep water. The Sargasso Sea is an exception, not matched in the anticyclonic centers of other basins. It is so different from any other place on earth that it may well be considered a definite geographic region. A line drawn from the mouth of Chesapeake Bay to Gibraltar would skirt its northern border; another from Haiti to Dakar would mark its southern boundary. It lies all about Bermuda and extends more than halfway across the Atlantic, its entire are being roughly as large as the United States. The Sargasso, with all its legendary terrors for sailing ships, is a creation of the great currents of the North Atlantic that encircle it and bring into it the millions of tons of floating sargassum weed from which the place derives its name, and all the weird assemblage of animals that live in the weed.

The Sargasso is a place forgotten by the winds, deserted by the strong flow of waters that girdle it as with a river. Under the seldom-clouded skies, its waters grow warm and heavy with salt. Separated widely from coastal rivers and from polar ice, there is no inflow of fresh water to dilute its saltiness; the only influx is of saline water from adjacent currents, especially from the Gulf Stream or North Atlantic Current as it crosses from America to Europe. And with the little, inflowing streams of surface water come the plants and animals that for months or years have drifted in the Gulf Stream.

The sargassum week is a brown alga that lives attached to rocks along the coasts of the West Indies and Florida. Many of the plants are torn away by storms, especially during the hurricane season. They are picked up by the Gulf Stream and are drifted northward. With the weeds go, as involuntary passengers, many small fishes, crabs, shrimps, and innumerable larvae of assorted species of marine creatures, whose home had been the coastal banks of sargassum weed,.

Curious things happen to the animals that have ridden on the sargassum weed into a new home. Once they lived on a rocky shore, a few feet or a few fathoms below the surface, but never far above a rocky bottom. They knew the rhythmic movements of waves and tides. They could leave the shelter of the weeds at will and creep or swim about over the bottom in search of food. Now, in the middle of the ocean, they are in a new world. The bottom lies two or three miles below them.Those who are poor swimmers must cling to the weed, which now represents a life raft, supporting them above the abyss. Over the ages since their ancestors came here, some species have developed special organs of attachment, either for themselves or for their eggs, so that they may not sink into the cold, dark water far below. ...

It may have taken eons of time to accumulate the present enormous quantities of weed, which Parr estimates as about 10 million tons. But this, of course, is distributed over so large an area that most of the Sargasso is open water. The dense fields of weeds waiting to entrap a vessel never existed except in the imaginations of sailors, and the gloomy hulks of vessels doomed to endless drifting in the clinging weed are only the ghosts of things that never were.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

Apolutrosis

Faith is our earth, in which we take root;
Hope is the water through which we are nourished;
Love is the air through which we grow;
Gnosis is the light through which we become fully grown.

-- Gospel of Philip 79:25-31, in NHL 147



APOLUTROSIS

April 18

Beyond the baptism in water
Another in fire: Yet even then
One more, leaning back into
The wildest mystery of all,

Where You and I are one. Only
Then will you see the Master smile
And find welcome in the dance
Which sings the round of God,

No more a bruited slave
To death’s too-harbored life
Where free men chain themselves
To shores bereft of surf or salt

Or moon. No more shards of
Shattering light, no more hearts
Like withered promenades.
No more baptized but pure

Blue plunge between God’s knees
Become the wet part of Her seas.

***

Apolutrosis:

“What Irenaeus found most distressing was that those who flocked to the groups gathered around teachers like Ptolemy often heard in these meetings that the baptism all Christians receive in common is, in fact, only the first step in the life of faith. Such teachers explained to newcomers that just as John the Baptist baptized with water those who repented, when they themselves first confessed faith in God and in Jesus, they too received, in effect, the ‘baptism of John’ to cleanse them from sin. But such teachers also pointed out how, according to the gospel accounts of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, John the Baptist prophesized that Jesus himself would baptize his followers ‘with the holy spirit and with fire.’ They pointed out, too, Jesus’ saying that he had ‘another baptism with which to be baptized,’ and they explained that this means that those who advance on the spiritual path are to receive that second baptism.

“Furthermore, they said, this higher baptism marks a major transition in the initate's relationship with God. In their first baptism, believers have pledged to serve as Lord the God whom they revere as creator, and fear as divine lawgiver and judge. But now, Ptolemy and his disciples explained, having progressed beyond that level of understanding, they are to come to God as Father, as Mother, Source of all being -- in other words, as One who transcends such images. Thus Ptolemy invites those who previously saw themselves as God’s servants -- or, more bluntly, his slaves -- to come to understand themselves as God’s children. To signal their release from slavery to become, in Paul’s words, God’s own children and heirs, Ptolemy calls the second baptism apolutrosis, which means ‘redemption’ or ‘release,’ alluding to the judicial process through which a slave becomes legally free.”

-- Eileen Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas





AMBITION

Jack Gilbert

from Refusing Heaven

Having reahed the beginning, starting toward
a new ignorance. Places to become,
secrets to live in, sins to achieve.
Maybe South American, perhaps a new woman,
another language to not understand.
Like setting out on a raft over an ocean
of life already well lived.
A two-story failed hotel in the tropics,
hot silence of noon with the sun
straying through the shutters.
Sitting with his poems at a small table,
everybody asleep. Thinking with pleasure,
trailing his hand in the river he will
turn into.



***

TEAJACK

2005

Salt and foam careen the surge
which carries me toward You
upon this lurch of fin and tooth
and pale white spermacetti fire.
Teajack is my name, tar of
every Southern coast, a brawn
of blue maraud. In my cup
of passage I was brined
in whiskey’s womb, then
hung a year upon a sea-dam’s
stake where noctals washed my
mind for good; wakened
like a conch upon a shattered beach,
I began these spiral sing-songs home.
I ride from shore to shore upon
the backs of uddered waves,
a stone skipped across the sea
from bed to bed to bed of blue.
Each night torn from Your abyss
sings the starry depth of God
before He ripped his name
pure from Your vocal chords.
Each morning wakes with
dew on these hands, the sweat
of sweet breasts which milked
now brighten this next shore
with a pearly, sated light.
Here is the undiscovered
country I never thought I’d find, that
home inside the wildest heart
I always meant to ride but feared.
I begin here, a bluer salt, to harrow
all found in that water, even to the
ninth most fatal wave.
The crash of surf booms
down the shore like the welcome
of an old friend at the door,
of shark and queen composed:
the womb inside my pen’s blue sense
now shouting in wild resonance.





ISIS RISING


From The Golden Ass: The Transformations Lucius by Apuleius, transl. Kennedy (1998)

‘It was not yet midnight when I awoke with a sudden start to see the full moon just rising from the sea-waves and shining with unusual brilliance. Now, in the silent secrecy of night, was my opportunity. Knowing that this greatest of goddesses was supremely powerful; that all human life was ruled by her Providence; that not only all animals, both tame and wild, but even lifeless things were animated by the divine power of her light and might; that as she waxed and waned, so in sympathy and obedience every creature on earth or in the heavens or in the sea was increased or diminished; and seeing that Fate was now seemingly satiated with my long tale of suffering and was offering me a hope, however late in the day, of rescue: I decided to beg for mercy from the awesome manifestation of the goddess that I now beheld. At once, shaking off my sluggish repose, I jumped up happily and briskly, and eager to purify myself I plunged into the sea. Seven times I immersed my head, since that is the number which the godlike Pythagoras has told us is most appropriate in religious rituals, and then weeping I uttered my silent prayer to the all-powerful goddess.

“Queen of heaven, whether you are Ceres, nurturing mother and creatrix of crops, who in your joy at finding your daughter again set aside the ancient acorn, fodder for wild beasts, and taught man the use of civilized food, and now fructify the ploughlands of Eleusis; or whether you are Venus Urania, who in the first beginnings of the world by giving birth to Love brought together the opposite sexes and so with never-ending regeneration perpetuated the human race, and now are worshipped in the sanctuary of sea-girt Paphos; or whether you are Phoebus’ sister, who by relieving women in labour with your soothing remedies have raised up many peoples, and now are venerated in your shrine at Ephesus; or whether you are Proserpine of the fearful night-howling and triple countenance, you who hold back the attacks of ghosts and control the gates of hell, who pass at will among the sacred groves and are propitiated with many different rites; you who brighten cities everywhere with your female light and nourish the fertile seeds with your moist warmth and dispense according to the motions of the Sun an ever-changing radiance; by whatever name, in whatever manner, in whatever guise it is permitted to call on you: do you now at last help me in this extremity of tribulation, do you rebuild the wreck of my fortunes, do you grant peace and respite from the cruel misfortunes that I have endured: let there be an end of toils, an end of perils. Banish this loathsome animal shape, return me to the sight of my friends and family, restore Lucius to himself; or if I have offended some power that still pursues me with its savagery and will not be appeased, then at last let me die if I may not live.”

Such were the prayers that I poured forth, accompanied with pitiful lamentations; then sleep once more enveloped my fainting senses and overcame me in the same resting place as before. I had scarcely closed my eyes when out of the sea there emerged the head of the goddess, turning on me that face revered even by the gods; then her radiant likeness seemed by degree to take shape in its entirety and stand, shaking off the brine, before my eyes. Let me try to convey to you too the wonderful sight that she presented, that is if the poverty of human language will afford me the means of doing so or the goddess herself will furnish me with superabundance of expressive eloquence.

First, her hair: long, abundant, and gently curling, it fell caressingly in spreading waves over her divine neck and builders. Her head was crowned with a diadem variegated with many different flowers; in its centre, above her forehead, a disc like a mirror or rather an image of the moon shone with a white radiance. This was flanked on either side by a viper rising sinuously erect; and over all was a wreath of ears of corn. Her dress was of all colours, woven of the finest linen, now brilliant white, now saffron yellow, now a flaming rose-red. But what above all made me stare and stare again was her mantle. This was jet-black and shone with a dark resplendence; it passed right round her, under her right arm and up to her left shoulder, where it was bunched and hung down in a series of many folds to the tasselled fringes of its surface shone a scattered pattern of stars, and in the middle of them the full moon radiated flames of fire. Around the circumference of this splendid garment there ran one continuous garland all made up of flowers and fruits. Quite different were the symbols that she held. In her right hand was a bronze sistrum, a narrow strip of metal curved back on itself like a sword-belt and pierced by a number of thin rods, which when shaken in triple time gave off a rattling sound. From her left hand hung a gold pitcher, the upper part of its handle in the form of a rampant asp with head held aloft and neck puffed out. Her ambrosial feet were shod with sandals woven from palm-leaves, the sign of victory. In this awesome shape the goddess, wafting over me all the blessed perfumes of Arabia, deigned to answer me in her own voice.

“I come, Lucius, moved by your entreaties: I, mother of the universe, mistress of all the elements, first-born of the ages, highest of the gods, queen of the shades, first of those who dwell in heaven, representing in one shape all gods and goddesses. My will controls the shining heights of heaven, the health-giving sea-winds, and the mournful silences of hell; the entire world worships my single godhead in a thousand gods; the native Athenians the Cecropian Minerva; the island-dwelling Cypriots Paphian Venus; the archer Cretans Dictynnan Diana; the triple-tongued Sicilians Stygian Proserpine; the ancient Eleusinians Actaean Ceres; some call me Juno, some Bellona, those on whom the rising and those on whom the setting sun shines, and the Egyptians who excel in ancient learning, honour me with the worship which is truly mine and call me by my true name: Queen Isis.”’

Resurrectus

Saturday

A brilliant, hard blue afternoon in bone-dry Florida, spiritually virulent, omnipotent, the air suffused with the final breath of the Christ on the cross, sighing “it is finished,” consummatum est ...

An emotionally torn day, my father-in-law taking a turn for the worse a couple nights ago in the stroke recovery ward of the hospital, my wife in agony, aggrieved, angry, full of black angst, unarguably spent, sensing only her life’s ruins, back turned to me too late at night, refusing everything my heart has led me to offer ...

Perhaps it’s temporary. She’s at the hospital now, may spend the night there keeping watch as much on him as the half-assed nurses who may have botched his care.

(May is important here, because that family suffers the worst form of consumer outrage at times, suspecting everything -- from hospital staffers up to God Himself -- in some form of fraud, a complicity against life & love & good people.)

So the windows are shut and the a/c’s suffising the house with a calm stasis, and Bill Evans’ last platter “I Will Say Goodbye” spins bittersweetly on the stereo, a passion of deep beauty ...

Whose passion? In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, “Let the one who seeks not stop seeking til he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished.” Is that the inward harrow, a road which leads through skulls to paradise, an ever-newly created one, at that?

***

Always such suffering and grief in the most gorgeous music, a cathedral bittersweetness: Temple of Eros, perhaps, whose embrace crushes the heart’s bursting grapes and swoons down into the the distillate dark for a season. According to Carl Kerenyi in Dionysos, Archetypal Image of Indestructible Nature,, “The oldest idol of Dionysos known to Athenian tradition was a phallus set up in the templ of the Horai, but the identity disclosed in the epithet ‘orthos,’ ‘he who stands erect,’ was intentionally veiled by the explanation that the right mixture of wine and water enabled men to stand upright.” The god depends on stout draughts of bittersweetly-seasoned ale, His fructive honeyed words distilled in gall.

Rilke writes in a letter in 1923,


***

More and more in my life and in my work I am guided by the effort to correct our old repressions, which have removed and gradually estranged us from the mysteries out of whose abundance our lives might become truly infinite. It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them.

But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Life -- and we know nothing else --, isn't life itself dreadful? But as soon as we acknowledge its dreadfulness (not as opponents; what kind of match could we be for it?), but somehow with a confidence that this very dreadfulness may be something completely ours, though something that is just now too great, too vast, to incomprehensible for our learning hearts --: as soon as we accept life's most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it (i.e. from our own Too-much!) --: then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us and, at this cost, will be ours.

Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and JOYOUS consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the IDENTITY of dreadfulness and bliss these two face on the same divine head, indeed this one SINGLE face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it--: this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.

(transl Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton)

***

It’s the Saturday before Easter and I’m far at sea, far down under it, wet like never before, feeling kin to those animals for whom salt in the blood was not enough. Rachel Carson here in The Sea Around Us:

Some of the land animals returned to the ocean. After perhaps 50 million years of land life, a number of reptiles entered the sea in Mesozoic time. They were huge and formidable creatures. Some had oarlike limbs by which they roved through the water; some were web-footed, with long, serpentine necks. These grotesque monsters disappeared millions of years ago, but we remember them when we come upon a large sea turtle swimming many miles at sea, its barnacle-encrusted shell eloquent of its marine life. Much later, perhaps no more than 50 million years ago, some of the mammals, too, abandoned a land life for the ocean. Their descendants are the sea lions, seals, sea elephants and whales of today. (p. 14)

***

I yearn back to sea, for its salt breadth and iniquity, its ever-changing changelessness, its deep pelvic tide: My words are all wet, drowned of dry purpose, lost: Consider this the gospel writ at the book at the bottom of the sea, the one the first whale-rider found at the bottom of Melville’s mythic sea ... both father and source:

“When Bramha, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodic dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensible to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate as a whale, and sending down to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whalemen, then? ever as a man rides a horse is called a horseman?” (“The Honor and Glory of Whaling”)




DARK DANCER

Easily written loose-fingered words!
I feel the thrum of their climax and close.

-- Walt Whitman

Why is it, dark god, that when
The hour is so grim and sad
That You are most tumescent,
Ruddy and slick and laughing?

Does the sickleman walk
Closest to you on the parade
To darkest doors, the one
Who closes them innate within

Your clasping cry? And why
Is the song so male? My wife
Receives your smile only
When the hour’s perfect

Once or twice in the life.
While I find at the worst of
Times you’re dancing with
The Master around a greedy pole,

Ecstatic to mount and die
Exactly where no wings can fly.

***


FROM UNDERNEATH

Steven Dunn


A giant sea turtle saved the life
of a 52 year old woman lost at sea
for two days after a shipwreck
in the Southern Philippines. She rode
on the turtle’s back.

—Syracuse Post-Standard

When her arms were no longer
strong enough to tread water
it came up beneath her, hard
and immense, and she thought
this is how death comes,
something large between your legs
and then the plunge.
She dived off instinctively,
but it got beneath her again
and when she realized what it was
she soiled herself, held on.

God would have sent something winged,
she thought. This came from beneath,
a piece of hell that killed a turtle
on the way and took its shape.
How many hours passed?
She didn’t know, but it was night
and the waves were higher. The
thing swam easily in the dark.

She swooned into sleep.
When she woke it was morning,
the sea calm, her strange raft
still moving. She noticed the elaborate
pattern of its shell, map-like,
the leathery neck and head
as if she’d come up behind
an old longshoreman
in a hard-backed chair.
She wanted and was afraid to touch
the head—one finger
just above the eyes—
the way she could touch her cat
and make it hers.
The more it swam a steady course
the more she spoke to it
the jibberish of the lost.
And then the laughter
located at the bottom
of oneself, unstoppable.

The call went from sailor to sailor
on the fishing boat: A woman
riding an “oil drum”
off the starboard side.
But the turtle was already swimming
toward the prow
with its hysterical, foreign cargo
and when it came up alongside
it stopped until she could be hoisted off.
Then it circled three times
and went down.
The woman was beyond all language
the captain reported;
the crew was afraid of her
for a long, long time.

***

TALES OF SEAL-MEN


From Iona, The Works of Fiona Macleod Volume IV

Elsewhere I have told how a good man of Iona sailed along the coast one Sabbath afternoon with the Holy Book, and put the Word upon the seals of Soa: and, in another tale, how a lonely man fought with a sea-woman that was a seal: as, again, how two fishermen strove with the sea-witch of Earraid: and, in "The Dan-nan-Ron," of a man who went mad with the sea-madness, because of the seal-blood that was in his veins, he being a MacOdrum of Uist, and one of the Sliochd nan Ron, the Tribe of the Seal. And those who have read the tale, twice printed, once as "The Annir Choille," and again as "Cathal of the Woods," will remember how, at the end, the good hermit Molios, when near death in his sea-cave of Arran, called the seals to come out of the wave and listen to him, so that he might tell them the white story of Christ; and how in the moonshine, with the flowing tide stealing from his feet to his knees, the old saint preached the gospel of love, while the seals crouched upon the rocks, with their brown eyes filled with glad tears: and how, before his death at dawn, he was comforted by hearing them splashing to and fro in the moon-dazzle, and calling one to the other, "We, too, are of the sons of God."

What has so often been written about is a reflection of what is in the mind: and though stories of the seals may be heard from the Rhinns of Islay to the Seven Hunters (and I first heard that of the MacOdrums, the seal-folk, from a Uist man), I think, that it was because of what I heard of the sea-people on Iona, when I was a child, that they have been so much with me in remembrance.

In the short tale of the Moon-child, I told how two seals that had been wronged by a curse which had been put upon them by Columba, forgave the saint. and gave him a sore-won peace. I recall another (unpublished) tale, where a seal called Domnhuil Dhu--a name of evil omen--was heard laughing one Hallowe'en on the rocks below the ruined abbey, and calling to the creatures of the sea that God was dead: and how the man who heard him laughed, and was therewith stricken with paralysis, and so fell sidelong from the rocks into the deep wave, and was afterwards found beaten as with hammers and shredded as with sharp fangs.

But, as most characteristic, I would rather tell here the story of Black Angus, though the longer tale of which it forms a part has been printed before.

One night, a dark rainy night it was, with an uplift wind battering as with the palms of savage hands the heavy clouds that hid the moon, I went to the cottage near Spanish Port, where my friend Ivor Maclean lived with his old deaf mother. He had reluctantly promised to tell me the legend of Black Angus, a request he had ignored in a sullen silence when he and Padruic Macrae and I were on the Sound that day. No tales of the kind should be told upon the water.

When I entered, he was sitting before the flaming coal-fire; for on Iona now, by decree of MacCailein Mòr, there is no more peat burned.

"You will tell me now, Ivor?" was all I said.

"Yes; I will be telling you now. And the reason why I never told you before was because it is not a wise or a good thing to tell ancient stories about the sea while still on the running wave. Macrae should not have done that thing. It may be we shall suffer for it when next we go out with the nets. We were to go to-night; but, no, not I, no, no, for sure, not for all the herring in the Sound."

"Is it an ancient sgeul, Ivor?"

"Ay. I am not for knowing the age of these things. It may be as old as the days of the Féinn, for all I know. It has come down to us. Alasdair MacAlasdair of Tiree, him that used to boast of having all the stories of Colum and Brigdhe, it was he told it to the mother of my mother, and she, to me."

"What is it called?"

"Well, this and that; but there is no harm in saying it is called the Dark Nameless One."

"The Dark Nameless One!

"It is this way. But will you ever have heard of the MacOdrums of Uist?

"Ay; the Sliochd-nan-ròn.

"That is so. God knows. The Sliochd nan-ròn . . . the progeny of the Seal. . . . Well, well , no man knows what moves in the shadow of life. And now I will be telling you that old ancient tale, as it was given to me by the mother of my mother."

On a day of the days, Colum was walking alone by the sea-shore. The monks were at the hoe or the spade, and some milking the kye, and some at the fishing. They say it was on the first day of the Faoilleach Geamhraidh, the day that is called Am Fhéill Brighde, and that they call Candlemas over yonder.

The holy man had wandered on to where the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He was praying and praying; and it is said that whenever he prayed aloud, the barren egg in the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud unfold, and the butterfly break its shroud.

Of a sudden he came upon a great black seal, lying silent on the rocks, with wicked eyes.

"My blessing upon you, O Ròn," he said, with the good kind courteousness that was his. "Droch spadadh ort," answered the seal, "A bad end to you, Colum of the Gown."

"Sure now," said Colum angrily, "I am knowing by that curse that you are no friend of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of the north. For here I am known ever as Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint; and it is only the Picts and the wanton Normen who deride me because of the holy white robe I wear."

"Well, well," replied the seal, speaking the good Gaelic as though it were the tongue of the deep sea, as God knows it may be for all you, I, or the blind wind can say; "well, well, let that thing be: it's a wave-way here or a wave-way there. But now, if it is a druid you are, whether of fire or of Christ, be telling me where my woman is, and where my little daughter."

At this, Colum looked at him for a long while. Then he knew.

"It is a man you were once, O ROn?"

"Maybe ay and maybe no."

"And with that thick Gaelic that you have, it will be out of the north isles you come?"

"That is a true thing."

"Now I am for knowing at last who and what you are. You are one of the race of Odrum the Pagan?"

"Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And what is more, I am Angus MacOdrum, Aonghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name I am known by is Black Angus."

"A fitting name too," said Colum the Holy, "because of the black sin in your heart, and the black end God has in store for you."

At that Black Angus laughed.

"Why is the laughter upon you, Man-Seal?"

"Well, it is because of the good company I'll be having. But, now, give me the word: Are you for having seen or heard of a woman called Kirsteen M'Vurich?"

"Kirsteen--Kirsteen--that is the good name of a nun it is, and no sea-wanton!"

"O, a name here or a name there s soft sand. And so you cannot be for telling me where my woman is?"

"No."

"Then a stake for your belly, and nails through your hands, thirst on your tongue, and the corbies at your eyne!"

And, with that, Black Angus louped into the green water, and the hoarse wild laugh of him sprang into the air and fell dead upon the shore like a wind-spent mew.

Colum went slowly back to the brethren, brooding deep. "God is good," he said in a low voice, again and again; and each time that he spoke there came a daisy into the grass, or a bird rose, with song to it for the first time, wonderful and sweet to hear.

As he drew near to the House of God he met Murtagh, an old monk of the ancient race of the isles.

"Who is Kirsteen M'Vurich, Murtagh?" he asked.

"She was a good servant of Christ, she was, in the south isles, O Colum, till Black Angus won her to the sea."

And when was that?"

"Nigh upon a thousand years ago."

"But can mortal sin live as long as that?"

"Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before Oisin sang, before Fionn, before Cuchullin, was a glorious great prince, and in the days when the Tuatha-de-Danann were sole lords in all green Banba, Black Angus made the woman Kirsteen M'Vurich leave the place of prayer and go down to the sea-sbore, and there he leaped upon her and made her his prey, and she followed him into the sea."

"And is death above her now?"

"No. She is the woman that weaves the sea-spells at the wild place out yonder that is known as Earraid: she that is called the seawitch."

"Then why was Black Angus for the seeking her here and the seeking her there?"

"It is the Doom. It is Adam's first wife she is, that sea-witch over there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks."

"And who will he be?"

His body is the body of Angus, the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum, for all that a seal be is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas."

"Black Judas, Murtagh?"

"Ay, Black Judas, Colum."

But with that, Ivor Macrae rose abruptly from before the fire, saying that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a seamew that was like a human thing.

So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes and said, "God be with us"; and then I opened the door, and the salt smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness of the night.






Easter Sunday


Deep still night, as ever, again: cool breezes rake the dry verdure, a late full moon casting the fascia of darkness in pale bronze. The Tomb door opens -- as it does, every day, every departure here -- and though I can’t hear the Feet approach, there is a sense of readiness in the hour. All is cast for the god’s brute clapper, announcing if not resurrection or a good erection, the next selection, the next chambered Bride, the next shore ...

***

Wherever the currents meet, especially if they differ sharply in temperature or salinity, therer are zones of great turbulence and unrest, with water sinking or rising up from the depths and with shifting eddies and foam lines on the surface. At such places the richness and abundance of marine life reveals itself most strikingly.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

***

(In the gnostic Gospel of Philip) Philip says that many people, whome he calls “the apostles and the apostolic ones” are “in error,” since they remain oblivious of -- even offended by -- this mystery (of spiritual rebirth). Such people, he continues, are also wrong about resurrection, since they take this, too, as if it could be only a unique event in which Christ died and rose bodiliy from the grave. Philip suggests instead that Jesus’ resurrection, like his virgin birth, is no only something that occurred in the past but is a paradigm of what happens to each person who undergoes a spiritual transformation.

...


Whoever undergoes such a transformation, he says, “is no longer a Christian, but a Christ.”

-- Gospel of Philip p57:26-27, in Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas

***

BLUE ARK

The Great Flood became a
History of fresh-sinned worlds,
The emptied ark a skull for
Cathedrally lost innocence.

Judgment now is pounded on
A water cross, & harrowed by
Upwellings of blue radiance.
I live where mystery rims the

Tide with deeper surges than
Mere words reveal, a a marginal
Tumescent wood alive
With night and sea and lunar

Eyes: A Christian world
No more, nor one strummed by
The lover’s harp, nor modern
In the screwy sense of gears,

But a Christ of wet descending lanes
Aboard an ark of wildest names.






Monday


PROMENADE

It’s not easy, sitting here at 4 a.m.
When I could as well be sleeping
Sheeted next to my wife: But You
Have nailed me here with jolts of

Faith or jones or desire, bidding
Me bathe my verbs again in
Blue salt and diving fire. My
Eyes close reading Whitman

And I drowse, finding myself
Upon a hard-baked promenade
That is covered with skeins of web,
A white sprawled beach of it

With no sea in sight though
I know the ocean lies ahead. I
dream the driest augment of
This hour, truth in naked brilliance,

Desperate for something to soak and swim
This blue mind’s finned aortas in.

***

Desperate for the sea’s: strangeness, its intractably heaving loins of surf; for its evers and alls, its preternatural calm of blue thrall. In “The Story of the Siren” by E.M. Forster an Greek local relates to an English tourist (the baedekkering perambling Author) how only good people can survive the Siren’s song; only they can hear it without drowning in some quintessential way. “The priests have blessed the air,” he says, “so she cannot breathe it, and blessed the rocks, so that she cannot sit on them. But the sea no man can bless, because it is too big, and always changing. So she lives in the sea.” He tells of how his brother dove into the sea after wronging him and sees the Siren, engaging the sea’s disastrous fate. The man is down under too long, and when he at last is hauled into the boat, “he was so large he seemed to fill it, and so wet that we could not dress him. I have never seen a man so wet.” Although a priest tries to rescue the man’s soul by sprinkling him with holy water, “it was no good. He was too big -- like a piece of the sea. He kissed the thumb-bones of San Biagio and they never dried til evening.”

That sort of going-back-to-sea, that sort of seal-singing, that sort of abyssal wetness of the mind which hearts a greater home than any dry hour, though each is sufficient portal.

***

A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE

Jack Gilbert

from Refusing Heaven

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives becuase that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengla tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laugter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in teh ruthless
furnace of the world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

***

SONNET 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.