Cup Two: Aphrodite Ourania

OURANIA

Queen of depths and nights
No sea or sky has mastered,
You are the immortal kiss
Which blessed my blind

Disaster, bidding me stumble
Room to bed to shore in search
Of augment equal to the moon
You lifted clear of me.

Unvowelled ache to arch
A name, my longing was
Drowned in one long
Night, pickling me in the

Way of drunks, my heart
No longer free or solid or
Sane for good, the shape
Of ecstasy flung too far.

You hinge that wild blue door
Forever creaking just offshore.


***

When I was eleven or so I attempted to go on my first date with Lauren Knipmeyer, a wonderful tall eight-grade classmate who had this breezy broken aura, pretty in the floodwaters of pubescence yet dangerously faulted by some violence in her past (a bad daddy, I seem to recall her once saying). Building up my courage for weeks, I finally asked her walking her home from school if she would like to go bowling the following Saturday. She was quiet for a time, looking elsewhere at the big Victorian houses we passed (we lived in Evanston, one of the first suburbs of Chicago on the near north side): finally she whispered something which sounded like a yes. (Thinking back, it could easily have been a sigh, but I wanted a yes from her more than anything else in life). We agreed to meet at noon Saturday on the schoolyard of Dewey Elementary nearby. (She was adamant about me not picking her up at her house.)

My elation and wonder the next few days was unsurpassed in all of my previous experience. Finally --finally!-- I was getting out of that bad childhood where I was some dork fatty, smart to a fault and faulted every way in physique. I’d gotten more than a few beatings on that schoolyard at Dewey Elementary, and here I was to return there to pluck my date like a blossom and begin all that would follow in my life. How my imagination teemed in the waters of Aphrodite Pandemos!

The day arrived and I showered and groomed excessively, imagining that boy’s face in the mirror to be a Bond, elegant and smooth and exuding unspeakable capabilities. My feet walking the sidewalks to the school sounded like the ostinato steps of Bond as he entered a casino, surrounded by the lush violins of the James Bond Theme. My heart was in readiness as I waited on that deserted playground, full of every expectation of love that I was sure that would come to me in the form of that willowy broken girl, prettier surely than I deserved, a gift from the gods, oh heck, perhaps a goddess...

The school had a clock tower which chimed off my vigil every quarter hour, deepening the sound of my first tragic encounter with the Aphrodite: 12:15, 12:30, 12:45, 1. The day was empty, perhaps early spring, I dunno, filled with the sound of those schoolbells echoing everywhere She could not be found or revealed. 1:15, 1:30, 1:45. I finally, finally accepted what I always suspected -- that I was a fool for hoping, for believing, for dreaming that my lot would finally change, that I wouldn’t have to go home to that terribly isolate space where I lived as a prisoner of self.

But it was true, all too true. “Fool” was the sound of those bells when they ebbed into silence, like a dream ebbed to nothing. Fool -- for believing, for knowing what I could not know, for letting myself get poured insanely by the first cup of Aphrodite.


***

Here I (we, for any who cares) proceed to the second cup of Aphrodite, as empty as the first one was full: Aphrodite Ourania, queen of Heaven, goddess of Beasts, meme of the bitterly crashing, empty sea, archetype of absence, dark twin of presence, the resonance of ebbed presence. We are filled with the first cup and drained by the second, harrowed by depths which came to us through a merry glittery surface.

A story of this Aphrodite appears in Theocritis, retold by Carl Kerenyi in “The Gods of the Greeks.” In revenge for causing Zeus to fall in love with mortal women and neglect his own wife-sister Hera, Aphrodite is compelled to fall in love with the herdsman Anchises, who tended his cattle on top of Mount Ida. Aphrodite looked once at him and is stung, believing him as beautiful as the immortals. She falls in love with him, and, preparing to woo him, hastens to her temple in Paphos where the Graces bathe her and anoint her in the oils of the immortals.

In beautiful raiments and adorned with gold she returns to Troy where she makes her way up Mount Ida. In her train wolves and tigers, bears and leopards follow, as enrapt with her as she is delighted in them. She smiles and the beasts drift off in pairs to couple in the forests. Queen of Beasts, indeed, climbing the mount.

Aphrodite enters the hut of Anchises and finds him playing a lute. Aphrodite presents herself as a mortal woman, by Anchises is so astonished by her raiment and adornment and shape that he declares her a goddess, promising her altar and sacrifices and seeking her blessing for his posterity. Aphrodite then lies to him, saying she was abducted by Hermes from the choir of Artemis to be his bride.

She begins to speak of all the arrangements which must be made -- she must be untouched until his parents and brother have seen her to their approval, arrangements for a dowry made, etc. etc.: but Anchises is only provoked to greater desire by these mortal procedures of sacrament, and declares, “If you are a mortal maiden, and destined to be my wife, then neither god nor man shall hold me back form you. Even though Apollo should thereafter slay me, I wish to love you now, at once, and then die!” He seizes Aphrodite’s hand, leads her back to his bed, and falls on the maiden like a beast of prey, laying with the goddess in accordance with the will of Zeus wholly unaware of who she is.

They drowse a while, and then Aphrodite wakens him, revealing herself to him in her true form and beauty. Anchises is horrified, covering his face and begging for mercy, for he knows it is death for a mortal man to sleep with a goddess.

Aphrodite prophesies that the son of their union will go on to greatness -- indeed he will become Anaeas, founder of the Rome -- but for Anchises, well, Aphrodite is ashamed of their union, and makes him promise never to reveal who the mother of his son is, when the nymphs in her retinue return the boy to him. She warns that the bolts of Zeus would punish him for saying so. One later report has him lamed by a lightning-stroke, while another has punished with blindness for seeing a goddess naked. Bees stung out his eyes.

***

So here is an encounter with the immortal part of the feminine, extrahuman, the One who is always over the Beloved’s shoulder as she smiles at us, a welcome which is inexpressibly absent in the real woman, no matter how far and long we search. Queen of heaven, queen of beasts, mortal consequence of immortal desire, Aphrodite Ourania is the confusion in our hearts of archetype and its projection, whereby we look for something not found on earth, are stung so badly by momentary infusions of the divine that we can’t see things properly again.

Aphrodite is not Psyche, the mortal soul; but there is always a perilous coniunctio or shore where the commingle. In the story of Eros and Psyche told by Apuleius, when men fall so much in love with the beautiful mortal Psyche they neglect the altar Aphrodite. Angered, the goddess is harsh in her punishments of the mortal woman. In the end, though, it is Psyche who successfully woos away Aphrodite's son Eros, making him a man through love, so to speak. Suffering the labors of that cruel mistress of desire, Psyche slowly finds a shore which is not tranced and trapped and devoured by Aphrodite.

***

Aphrodite Ouranous suggests the dark side of love, its shadowy other. As Eros had a twin Himeros (“Desire”), so Aphrodite Pandemos has her doppler Ourania, the wild cathedral arch of eternal silence and remove: the night sky over the sea, the bare mountaintop above the fertile glades. (We find Pothos and Penia -- “Plenty” and “Want” -- both in Aphrodite’s train). We would have our lovers Aphroditean, nublile and ripe-nippled, deep as the sea in their desire for us, goddess of curve and smash in the slakings of the surf: Yet such identification is always perilous, a confusion of the elements, worship at the wrong altar. And then one night the heavens crack and She does appear, or someone so close in appearance that we don’t see it, refuse to for the rest of our lives spent trying to find her again.

However, I come to think that Her seduction is a natural part of our psychic growth. As James Hillman says, anima uses the guise of Aphrodite to lead us into our depths. Why else cross that ocean bridge, so wild and terrible and into regions too mysterious to name?

Here’s Hillman, in “Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion”:

***

... Though anima is not eros, her first inclination is toward love. So she seduces in order to be turned on, set afire, illumined. So she makes advances in order to move pure reflection into connection. So she commands an incredible range of voluptuous imagery in order to draw eros down upon her for what Plato called “generation,” or soul-making. Nevertheless, though love be essential to soul, as theology insists and psychotherapy confirms, and that soul be that by which we receive love, soul is not love. (33)

***

“Soul is not love” -- slippery notion indeed, with all of that crashing of foamed ceruleans at our knees! Desire and then love certainly lead us to a point of leaping, but when we jump, it’s never, IMO, into a beloved but rather into a deeper notion of ourselves. We do not fall in love so much as fall off its boat into soul.

I don’t think we realize this until after She disappears, fading from whoever we see her reflection in, or that person fades from us. Here is the black Aphrodite, Melainis “the black one” and Skotia “the dark one”, queen Pasiphassa “the far shining” moon, Tymborychos “the gravedigger” who exults in our reckless fruitless gambits, Morpho “of various shapes” who has many waves but is one sea. We are left standing on a crashing shore in full moonlight more alone that ever, deafened by the sound of the big night music, blinded by the dazzle of light across black water. It is a baptism by absence, and through it, drained by the second cup of Aphrodite, we are somehow reborn, reverencing the silence booming through our empty selves.

In an essential way, my obeisance to Aphrodite Ourania is altared in the memory of that empty Saturday when I was eleven, waiting and waiting and waiting for a love which never arrived and has been a strange companion ever since.




FULL MOON ON COCOA BEACH


I.

The surf was pounding
the air when we climbed
out of my car, hurling
sea mist toward
a full moon now
breaking from clouds.

The pier was closing early
that night, swarmed
by the high surf
of a hurricane's
turbulent pass
many miles to sea.
The guard said
an advisory was out
for a high tide come morning
with fifteen foot waves.

We leaned on a rail
halfway down the pier
and watched the night.
The horizon a wash of
foam and darkness.
Shards of moon
scattering like silver fish
in the glassy curl
of a wave before tumbling
into foam and thunder
and rocking the pier.


You leaned to watch
a wave pass under,
your dress fanning
wild in the breeze.
The wave I felt
curved that satin and
the mystery beneath
into moon and sea.


II.

Later we walked on
the beach, found
a place to sit
and talked a long while,
telling our stories
as warming strangers do
who find the distance
between them narrowing
to less than tissue.

It was after midnight.
The beach, the sea,
the moon took us
somewhere
on a silver stream.

It was a gift
that rose unhurried
from the depths of
some heart which must have
always known these things,
recalled from old loves
or the salt soundings of the womb
or perhaps the full store
of ineffable moments
a man and a woman
have ever stumbled on together,
a silver strand of DNA
pulsing and receiving
this tide.

Having forgotten joy
for so long on a road
of deaths small and large,
having gotten so lost amid
hurry and complication
and complacence,
that night slapped
me back to life.

Warmed by something
I can never name,
we opened our arms
to one embrace
and then walked
back to my car,
each of us more
alone than ever.


***


THE LOST HOTELS OF PARIS

Jack Gilbert


The Lord gives everything and charges
by taking it back. What a bargain.
Like being young for a while. We are
allowed to visit hearts of women,
to go into their bodies so we fell
no longer alone. We are permitted
romantic love with its bounty and half-life
of two years. It is right to mourn
for the small hotels of Paris that used to be
when we need to be. My mansard looking
down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,
and me listening to the bell at night.
Venice is no more. The best Greek islands
have drowned in acceleration. But it’s the having
not the keeping that is the treasure.
Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon
and said he was giving up poetry
because it told lies, that language distorts.
I agreed, but asked what we have
that gets it right even that much.
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.

-- from Refusing Heaven (2005)


***

LONGING

2002

I sometimes wonder whether longing
can’t radiate out from someone so
powerfully, like a storm, that nothing
can come to him from the opposite
direction. Perhaps William Blake
has somewhere drawn that?

— Rilke, letter, 1912

There is a longing in us which
grows from sigh to starry shriek.
Perhaps comets are charred furies
of that pain, a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears to God’s porch
and back, insatiable and unanswered.
Perhaps. All I know is that
it’s infinitely perilous to think
that longing has a human end.
In my cups I once believed
a woman mooned for me,
her longing a white welcome
over my million nights alone.
I met and passed her many times
those hard years, blinded by the aura
of her unvowled name.
Surely when two longings touch
it’s like when great waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
Our deeper thirst can never sate:
as each draught of booze
was never enough, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.
I recall a young man
walking home drunk on a
frozen night long ago,
his beloved nowhere
to be found in the chalice
he had named. Winds hurled
steel axes through the
Western sky, failing to clear
the cruel foliage of fate.
In his defeat he was greater
than any angel beckoned
by that night: his heart so
hollowed by longing
as to chance in pure cathedral,
her absence the clabber of a bell
shattering the frozen air,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.

A Venusian Soak

I love the Venusian soak; Aphrodite comes from the sea (one of her epithets is Pelagia, "she of the sea"); her influence on thought and deed is like trying to describe the wet part of the sea -- what sufficient name is there for that abundant, changeful, wild, incessant, dangerous, deranging, sempiternally singing One at the shore where I end and the eternal infernal Other begins?

In recent years I've enjoyed much reading and writing about the sea. My reading has taken me from Homer's Odyssey to Melville's Moby Dick (an ur-text for the American gnostic), thence into Joseph Conrad and Francisco Coloane's Cape Horn And Other Stories From the End of The World (dangerous, wild), stories of St. Brendan collected in Sarah Strijbosch's The Seafaring Saint. (My screen name and nom de plume "Brendan" is he who stares out as the mystery behind this mask of a self, a history.) The Oxford Book of Sea Stories is magnificent. Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us stirs the imaginal soup with the rich observations of a naturalist, and David Thomas's The People of the Sea pours in a rich mineral lode of folklore about the selkie or sea-people in Scotland. And then there are the sea-poets, folks with brine in their throats, Hart Crane and Robinson Jeffers and, yes, Homer; and poets with venusian ecstasy in their mouths from Mary Oliver's gorgeousness to David St. John's exquisiteness to Susan Olds' explicitness to Jack Gilbert's complicit swash in the most saline realms of the heart.

Such writings confirm the wet part of my experience, one theory has it that the moon tore from the Pacific basin, and in similar fashion it seems that Aphrodite Pandemos hangs out over every writer's work, beckoning from the wave-seeming surfaces of pages and bedsheet. To wit:

WEEKEND AT MELBOURNE BEACH

June 1994

Our first night here was wild.
A full moon tore from the sea
faint and bloody as storms
approached from inland,
lacing the dark with hot bolts.
A sea turtle dragged her burden
of eggs across the sand.
You and I watched from our hotel window,
our bodies trilling with thunder
and salt. I leaned you back on
the table and pulled down your shorts.
Buried my face in your lap.
Sweat and cunt and coconut oil
ripening the sharp ions of beach storm.
You tore wet gasps from
the night, startling the darkness
as much as each lightning bolt
slicing from outside.
Coming again to that third
body that waits for us
beneath the basso billows of surf.
This morning you sleep,
still far off in that sea
of primal soak. The day so
brilliant white, dazed with itself.
I eat a nectarine at the table
and watch maddened dragonflies
hover and hurl in tall dune grass.
Flattened waves break
at the shore in weak curlicues.
The smell of our riot rises
from the table. All we do
these days is surrender.
Swelling for you again,
I return. A blue sheet
ripples over your breasts in a wave.


***

Well, yes. Certainly Aphrodite sexualizes the language, fits flukes on the words like a train of dolphins: Her Pelagian waters are rich, fertile sources of fantasy provide abundant ink for the pen: certainly my wade in Venusian surf is in part a writer's gambit, trope-a-dope to lure the next lucid shimmer from the soup, a gleaming blue pompadour or heavy pubic Aphro tickling the undersides of your attention. Sexualized language is not necessarily genital, only surficially sexually charged: in fact, it's wilder and more fun when the nubbins of sense are just out of sight, hidden by a gossamer of words; when the pressure is applied all around but not diretly, when the funk of desire is amped by the naiad flight of something just out of reach of these words.

Plenitude surrounds Aphrodite like a loosed garment, and danger -- of inflation, of digression, of logorrhea -- is inherent. One of Aphrodite's epithets is Pandemos, "common love," a pandemonium of coitions and cognitions, every permutation right if it somehow slakes or even approximates the slaking of desire, no holds not freighted with frangipani, no holes barred. (An Aphroditean epithet here, "Anadyomene," "she who 'emerges' from the salt sea," suggests that every meme available to thought has a sea-underside incessantly wet and bottomless) One gets easily lost in the polymorphose perverse, the din of its sirens and satyrs furiously coupling in the surf gets in the way of any clear thought. Wow, what was I saying? No discrimination of the spirits here, and monogamy is as welcome as clarity and conviction. It makes for a helter-skelter profusion of posts, first taking one position, switching to another, hammering away in a third and yodeling the high octanes of sweet hell in a fourth. Another day, another song, another dip in waters which are never quite the same.

Venus Pandemos will getcha where you least expect it, and hers is a slippery slope. Reach for those nipples and you're likely to end up milking your own soul's testes of every drop your worth and then you wake up on a bitterly crashing, empty shore, more alone than every, the sound of her laughter folded in the crash and ebb of every wave. It's not a clear road, and we've struggled hard to provide maps and compasses and night-vision goggles, but I don't think the way is any more clear today, not in the present day's media blare of over-bronzed concupiscence.

Having worked the literal consequences of such pandemonium -- years of bad drinking and naiad-chasing, the horrid cost of abuse, spearing venereal diseases along with those curves, endangering two marriages with a rebellious deep-water current of desire which fought with tooth and nail the presence of a ring on my finger of troth -- I've tried to move the altar of Aphrodite offshore.

Hard, almost fatal lessons came first. Necessarily there were jaunts with Ms. Wrong, the one too perilous to yield to and impossible to resist. Perhaps on pain of death I've been forced to move the altar elsewhere, onto a shore more fictive than fact. The imaginal pandemonium has been given a sea, sort of, in my noodle, allowed to vent and froth and dip tootsies in the surf of Aphrodite Pandemos. But pages are dry and wet words are hard to keep in the margins. Like a goddess who will have her way every which way, my fancy is distracted from the pen when She winks from the rounded swells of a remembered passing woman; Her perfume wanders in from the window in the guise of blooming jasmine, disordering and scattering the prim pristine august measures of whatever I was thinking at the time. The shore between verbal ennervation and ham-handed masturbation is thin indeed; always there is the danger of overstepping the bounds, going too ripe, and dropping one's drawers to go fromp up the froth. Floozies bamboozle my prayers with a muse's susurrant excuse.

Acknowledging that is, I believe, casting offerings to the first Venus: goddess of everything forever just offshore, beckoning, sighing, pointing and then curling a finger at me, inviting me to dance and sing and rout and drown. It is by overstepping here that I obey her, and am rewarded (OK, condemned) by Aphrodite Pandemos with a tide of a tongue with deep roots in the slappping bells of drowned heaven.

(And all of this doesn't come close to the everyday eros of Aphrodite Pandemos, the utter profusion of small delights, the smell of jasmine blooming in the window outside, the soft wet sound of cats eating in their bowls, the exquisite curve of my wife's hip as she stirs up from her sleep ... Consciousness seems in some way to narrow the flood of Aphrodite Pandemos through socially acceptable gates, perhaps for the survival of the species: If I truly could savor every thing my senses receive, would I then realize that the Kingdom of Heaven is here? And die?)

Surf's up ... But shut the front door! Else the whole house burble and sink. Besides, this is just one third of Her tale, one aspect of the moon. Coming: the Second Aphrodite Ourania, and then third, She Who Turns Away (With A Callipygean Smile ...)

Peek-A-Booty (Hints and Glimpses)

SEA-WRACK

April 26

We don’t survive desire. That’s
The point. Long ago it hauled
Me under with its sweet salt
Wave, subsuming me in the blue

Of my pent loins. It had me
And kept me where the sun
Don’t shine, tucked smartly in
The cheeks and crevasses of

A roundness too great to name,
Drowning every sense it sated
With insatiables of More.
For years I have lived beneath

The sea of her disclosing wave,
A spilt and split so faulted man,
Ever at the cusp of her farewell
In plunged and scattered swells,

The tidal man who left the shore
Forever pounding at an opened door.



SICKLEMAN AND NAIAD

April 26

My song grows wilder as I drown
Down the mere of darker days,
Death crawling up the chimney
Hurling a pale, precise perfume

From the peripheries and fronts
Where I’m doggedly engaged—
Acquaintances, co-workers,
Friends and in-laws struck

By fated fatal arrows,
Killing them and crippling
Us. And then the world
Is sour, gas-crunched, war-

Shriven, too bright in
The hellbent bragadoccios
Of bling and clout, building
Big and bigger houses on

The rims of coming fire.
Yet how sweet the dying choir!

***

The author of the Secret Book (of John) stresses that the insights (the) spiritual intuition (of epinoia) conveys are neither complet nor certain: instead, epinoia conveys hints and glimpses, images and stories, that imprefectly point beyond themselves toward what we cannot now fully understand.

Thus the author knows that these very stories are to be taken neither literally nor too seriously; for these, too, are merely glimpses that, as Paul says, we now know only “in a mirror, darkly.” (1 Cor. 13:12).

Yet, however incomplete, these glimpses suffice to reveal the presence of the divine, for the Secret Book says that, apart from spiritual intuition, “people grow old without joy, and die ... without knowing God.” (Apocryphon of John 30:2-4, in NHL 115)

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



HINTS AND GLIMPSES

I see a fish flash in the wave
And the goddess lifts her skirt,
Offering a peek at salt divine:
That’s all we get of You,

Blue heaven, exasperation
At the lip of wild infinitude.
Salt roads are paved with
Fleeting hints, each shard of

Moon on water a cobblestone
Of naked wonder plunged
In darker mystery. Not much
To build a learned abbey on

But that’s the point, to
Train the voice to sing
The sides of eels, hurl arias
Whose tippytoes tweak

Roused nipples of abyss,
Disclosing all in one lost kiss.



IN A MIRROR, DARKLY

April 26

Not much but infinitely more
Than days would be without
You, my blue surprise, ever
Slipping from the wave

Which foams to nothingness.
What would I be without
Those thwocks from nowhere
Which pierced me to the quick?

Big bra in the oak, first flash
Of pantied ass, blue eyes
Inviting me to chase a fleeting
Curve, my wife in bed last night

Smiling at a joke, our cat
Now looking at me so
Dreamily there in the window
Of a spring-hatched 5 a.m.:

A thousand scales of silver swoon
Comprise a fish-god’s deepest moon.

Epinoia (On Nakedness)

The Secret Book (of John) suggests that the story of Eve’s birth from Adam’s side speaks of the awakening of ... spiritual capacity. Instead of simply telling about the origin of woman, this story, symbolically read, shows how the “blessed one above, the Father” (or, in some versions of the text, the “Mother-Father”), feeling compassion for Adam, sent him

... a “helper” -- luminous epinoia (“creative” or “inventive” consciousness) which comes out of him, who is called life {Eve}: and she “helps the whole creation by working with him, and by restoring him to his full being, and by teaching him about the descent of his kind, and by showing the way to ascend, the way he came down. (Apocrypha of John 20:15-25, NHL 110)

Thus Eve symbolizes the gift of spiritual understanding which enables us to reflect -- however imperfectly -- upon divine reality. Another book discovered at Nag Hammadi, On The Origin of The World, says that when the first man and woman recognized their nakedness, “they saw that they were naked of spiritual understanding {gnosis}.” But then the luminous epinoia “appeared to them shining with light, and awakened their consciousness.” (On The Origin of the World 108-118, NHL 167-174)

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



EVE

April 25

On the eve of my first waking
She appeared, off the half-shell
Of the kegger’s profane din,
Smiling absently, not quite awake,

Not really there next to me
Though we talked a long time there.
She stared straight out as she
Drove us to my place, more of the night

Than all the words we said:
And when it was time, she
Slithered from her clothes
Like a snake or the moon up

From the sea, offering her nakedness
Like the first book I truly read,
The knowledge of her breasts
And thighs something inside of me,

Which, awakened now, burned,
The bulb by which my pages turn.





NAKEDNESS

April 25

Road of beaches where seals
And sirens sing, you alway
Surpise me in your frank assault
Upon my eyes and then my heart.

Still after so many years
Something wakens to see you nude--
Birth, first days of love, perhaps,
Creation of blue worlds:

So fresh and new the air
Sings sharp with wild perfume,
Sweet and acrid with the ions
Of a shore’s hard-crashing sea.

O the things I need to shout
When I see you once again--
The colors and shapes of heart
In the pale gauze of first light --

Ten thousand shells to say
And you just take my breath away.






THE CONTAINER FOR THE
THING CONTAINED

Jack Gilbert

What is the man searching for inside her blouse?
He has been with her body for seven years
and still is surprised by the arches of her
slender feet. He still traces her spine
with careful attention, feeling for the bones
of her pelvic girdle when he arrives there.
Her flesh is bright in sunlight and then not
as he leans forward and back. Picasso in his later
prints shows himself as a grotesque painter
watching closely a young Spanish woman on the bed
with her legs open and the old duenna in black
to the side. He had known nakedness every day
for sixty years. What could there be in it still
to find? But he was happy even then to get
close to the distant, distant intermittency.
Like a piano playing faintly on a second floor
in a back room. The music seems familiar, but is not.




BODY OF A WOMAN

Pablo Neruda
Trans. Robert Bly


Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
when you surrender, you stretch out like the world.
My body, savage and peasant, undermines you
and makes a son leap in the bottom of the earth.

I was lonely as a tunnel. Birds flew from me.
And night invaded me with her powerful army.
To survive I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow for my bow, or a stone for my sling.

But now the hour of revenge falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of firm and thirsty milk!
And the cups of your breasts! And your eyes full of absence!
And the roses of your mound! And your voice slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will live on through your marvelousness.
My thirst, my desire without end, m wavering road!
Dark river beds down which the eternal thirst is flowing,
and the fatigue is flowing, and the grief without shore.



O Best of All Nights,
Return and Return Again

James Laughlin

How she let her long hair down over her shoulders, making a love
cave around her face. Return and return again.
How when the lamplight was lowered she pressed against him, twin-
ing her fingers in his. Return and return again.
How their legs swam together like dolphins and their toes played like
little tunnies. Return and return again.
How she sat beside him cross-legged, telling him stories of her child-
hood. Return and return again.
How she closed her eyes when his were open, how they breathed to-
gether, breathing each other. Return and return again.
How they fell into slumber, their bodies curled together like two
spoons. Return and return again.
How they went together to Otherwhere, the fairest land they had
ever seen. Return and return again.
O best of all nights, return and return again.

-- After the Pervigilium Veneris and Propertius’s “Nox mihi candida.”




RAPTURE

Galway Kinnell

I can feel she has got out of bed.
That means it is seven A.M.
I have been lying with eyes shut,
thinking, or possibly dreaming,
of how she might look if, at breakfast,
I spoke about the hidden place in her
which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo,
and right then, over toast and bramble jelly,
if such things are possible, she came.
I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it.
I imagine her hair would fall about her face
and she would become apparently downcast,
as she does at a concert when she is moved.
The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes
and there she is, next to the bed,
bending to a low drawer, picking over
various small smooth black, white,
and pink items of underwear. She bends
so low her back runs parallel to the earth,
but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly
begun.
The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking,
lift toward the east—what can I say?
Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth.
Her breasts fall full; the nipples
are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars
of the gate under the earth where those who could not love
press, wanting to be born again.
I reach out and take her wrist
and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas.
Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again,
rummaging in the same low drawer.
The clock shows eight. Hmmm.
With huge, silent effort of great,
mounded muscles the earth has been turning.
She takes a piece of silken cloth
from the drawer and stands up. Under the falls
of hair her face has become quiet and downcast,
as if she will be, all day among strangers,
looking down inside herself at our rapture.





WATER SERPENTS

David St. John

Beneath the lit silk of your naked body

When you move your bones move like nervous water snakes
A complicated Medusan nest of rippling eels

Currents in the dawn river

My own body littered by broken limbs of almond sunlight
As your breath uncoils its music & anxious histories of sexual pride

Echo from the hotel room next door

As our own pasts rise through the water like sacred filaments
& in our dead lovers’ eyes we can recall

Woman upon woman upon man swirling in a pool of memorylessness

& upon the shore the day arrives entwined in its sisterly mass of red hair
Those brash & roiling fields of ruby kelp where

The dark sailor's body is found





THE BATH

Gary Snyder


Washing Kai in the sauna,
The kerosene lantern set on a box
outside the ground-level window,
Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the
washtub down on the slab
Steaming air and crackle of waterdrops
brushed by on the pile of rocks on top
He stands in warm water
Soap all over the smooth of his thigh and stomach
“Gary don’t soap my hair!”
— his eye-sting fear —
the soapy hand feeling
through and around the gloves and curves of his body
up in the crotch,
And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus,
his penis curving up and getting hard
as I pull back skin and try to wash it
Laughing and jumping, flinging arms around,
I squat all naked too,

is this our body?

Sweating and panting in the stove-steam hot-stone
cedar-planking wooden bucket water-splashing
kerosene lantern-flicker wind-in-the-pines-out
sierra forest ridges night —
Masa comes in, letting fresh cool air
sweep down from the door
a deep sweet breath
And she tips him over gripping neatly, one knee down
her hair falling hiding one whole side of
shoulder, breast, and belly
Washes deftly Kai’s head-hear
as he gets mad and yells —
The body of my lady, the winding valley spine,
the space between the thighs I reach through,
cup her curving vulva arch and hold it from behind,
a soapy tickle a hand of grail
The gates of Awe
That open back a turning double-mirror world of
wombs in wombs, in rings,
that start in music,
is this our body?

The hidden place of seed
The veins net flow across the ribs, that gathers
milk and peaks up in a nipple — fits
our mouth —
The sucking milk from this our body sends through
jolts of light; the son, the father,
sharing mother’s joy
That brings a softness to the flower of the awesome
open curling lotus gate I cup and kiss
As Kai laughs at his mother’s breast he now is weaned
from, we
wash each other,
this is our body

Kai’s little scrotum up close to his groin,
the seed still tucked away, that moved from us to him
In flows that lifted with the same joys forces
as his nursing Masa later,
playing with her breast,
Or me within her,
Or him emerging,
this is our body:

Clean, and rinsed, and sweating more, we stretch
out on the redwood benches hearts all beating
Quiet to the simmer of the stove,
the scent of cedar
And then turn over,
murmuring gossip of the grasses,
talking firewood,
Wondering how Gen’s napping, how to bring him in
soon wash him too —
These boys who love their mother
who loves men, who passes on
her sons to other women;

The cloud across the sky. The windy pines.
The trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow

this is our body.

Fire inside and boiling water on the stove
We sigh and slide ourselves down from the benches
wrap the babies, step outside,

black night & all the stars.

Pour cold water on the back and thighs
Go in the house — stand steaming by the center fire
Kai scampers on the sheepskin
Gen standing hanging on and shouting,

“Bao! bao! bao! bao! bao!”

This is our body. Drawn up crosslegged by the flames
drinking icy water
hugging babies, kissing bellies,

Laughing on the Great Earth

Come out from the bath.



THE NAKED TRUTH

Sept. 2004

Marcus, a student of the gnostic
Velentinus (c. 150), relates that
a vision “descended upon him ..
in the form of a woman ... and
expounded to him alone its own
nature, and the origin of things, which
it had never revealed to anyone,
divine or human.”

-- Eileen Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

She appeared at the upper bar
out of nowhere, fanning through
the smoke and blaring rock
as if stepping from that wave
ordained to drown me with
every blue fury in the lap
and chest of Love. We talked
a while nursing beers in
the wild din, her voice and
mine forming a bower
in which some goddess awoke,
aroused, and laid hands
on us, ushering us into woods
to sacred for a name.
And left us there, in
reverence for a secret
only we could reveal
and revel when all
our clothes fell like
angels to the floor.
Much later that night --
in fact well into the
next morning’s too-
bright hot summer light --
She smiled unbuttoning
her tropic blue blouse,
and unhooked her bra with
that hidden gesture,
freeing her full, pink-
nippled breasts, startling
me more awake than
I had ever been: And with
eyes locked on mine
came close, to softly
weave her chest against
mine, whispering O
make love to me. O
indeed: And so I did,
a half dozen times or
more that too-late-night
which had crashed
so dreamily on the next
day’s shore, licking her
to sweet moans once
then twice, getting sucked
off, fucking slow and
long in rhythmus
to a secret beat
which was new even
to God. We could not
stop entering and
collapsing in each
other, leaving selves
and hours far behind;
thus we drifted
so far offshore as to
never quite return.
Ever. But as a
mortal pair we fared
quite poorly, and in
weeks she jilted
the needy, greedy,
angst-ridden boy
I had become, walking
back into the night
for good. After all
these years, I mark
this day -- Sept. 15 --
as the tolling of
her wavelike recede
from the ecstasy of
my life, my feet forever
thence half in a surf
which once proclaimed
our naked name. Fare
thee well, lost lover.
The child you said you
begged of my seed
our second night
would now be 23,
and perhaps he
or she is here,
cuculattus of that
high blue wave
which crests in every
“Yes!” God gives
me truth to shout.
Whenever I hear those
old Journey songs
from 1982, I go back
to that first unveiling
hour, in thrall
and surrender to
the whole fantasy
of love and lust,
believing it more
than Truth itself. That
fictive beach where she
and I came hard
calling each other’s name
remains here, built
up with the ground
bones of every other
love I’ve sung,
sustained now by
the long, perhaps
my life’s remaining
duration with the woman
I call my wife by
day and blue welling
deep down the
pike of night.
Our hearts are
more naked now
than our bodies
may be allowed to
go: Mere angels
can’t fly this naked reach
which is part dream,
part ocean beach,
part clear blue sky
inside you and I.

On Noctilucence

NOCTILUCA

My tribe comes from cold depths
To burn surficial seas with ice,
summer’s wild doubloons
Spilled like silver bullion

From the moon’s first treasury.
Such lavishness would be
Usury in more conscious,
Abler hands, but look,

We are just a cell or two
Of partial fire, mere protoplastic
Ire, each of us a shard
Among a trillion singing folk,

A galaxy whose depths
Perfect the spinning stars,
More ghostly than lumniescent
the gleam we vastly are.

Leaping squid and dolphins flash
The silver sea we burn to ash.







THE ARCHANGEL MANANNAN

I am the stone that was rejected,
Oran’s mouth reburied in the ground
Upon which brighter abbeys of
The soul were firmly mortared,

Bereft of fish and moon and gale.
In my heart of cooled star-
Milk I margin every next-
Crashing strand God can’t be

Found on, or won’t, every shore
A page from Eve’s salt breviary,
A petticoat of Yes as present as
The surf exhales its absent No.

Inside and down the ancient
Faith I ward the door to dreams,
That heaven of much later dread
I alone have fins to tread.

Put me in your poem exactly where
Your aching arches cry Not Here.





Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where do you come from?’ Say, ‘We come from the light;’ the place where the light itself {first} came into being’ ... If they say to you, ‘Who are you?’ Say, ‘We are the children {of the light}, and we are the chosen of the living Father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the sign of the Father in you?’ Say to them, ‘Movement and rest.’”

-- The Gospel of Thomas 50, in NHL 123


GENUS LOCII

April 22

Again and again I come
Back to you, blue ocarina,
Finger the ocher stops
And blowing up a tide

To wash bright and clean
All shores. I was taught
In part by our tribe of tooters
Though none plays quite like

This, as far as I can tell,
Or care to know. It may be
Blind habit or a blander
Angel, perched immobile on

The singer’s tomb, astride
A cocked and feral fish &
Aiming his rude trident where
Only salt monsters flaunt

And dare. Each day I write the lines
My totem hauls on dreadful tines.