Harm and Boon

A WALK BLOSSOMING

Jack Gilbert


The spirit opens as life closes down.
Tries to frame the size of whatever God is.
Finds that dying makes us visible.
Realizes we must get to the loin of that
before time is over. The part of which
we are the wall around. Not the good or evil,
neither death nor afterlife but the importance
of what we contain meanwhile. (He walks along
remembering, biting into beauty,
the heart eating into the naked spirit.)
The body is a major nation, the mind is a gift.
Together they define substantiality.
The spirit can know the Lord as a flavor
rather than power. The soul is ambitious
for what is invisible. Hungers for sacrament
that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.

-- from Refusing Heaven (2005)

***


The lifelessness, the hopelessness, the despair of the winter sea are an illusion. Everywhere there are assurances that the cycle has come to the full, containing the means of its own renewal. There is the promise of a new spring in which the very iciness of the winter sea, in the chilling of the water, which must, before many weeks, become so heavy that it will plunge downward, precipitating the overturn that is the first act in the drama of spring. There is the promise of new life in the small plantlike things that cling to the rocks of the underlying bottom, the almost formless polyps from which, in spring, a new generation of jellyfish will bud off and rise into the surface waters. There is unconscious purpose in the sluggish forms of the copepods hibernating on the bottom, safe from the surface storms, life sustained in their tiny bodies by the extra store of fat with which they went into this winter sleep.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us




APOSTROPHE (2)

May 5


Winter or summer She has her
Ways with me, gestating songs
Equally in the turning year,
Freezing me in winter seas

Then soaring me in the
Blare of near-nude beaches.
Either way she bids me sing
And it’s the same baritone,

Joy and woe perfecting
The heart in the next way
Of desires unknown even
To itself. I pet our cat Red

On the back porch at dusk
And he purrs richly in my lap,
As hungry for love as he is
Later fro whatever prey he

Tears in our nearly dark
Back yard, a lover at next work.

(Apostrophe: 2. The arrangement of chloroplasts
along the lateral walls of leaf cells -- called positive
when caused by intense light and negative
when caused by prolonged darkness.)



HARM AND BOON IN THE MEETINGS

Jack Gilbert

We think the fire eats the wood.
We are wrong. The wood reaches out
to the flame. The fire licks at
what the wood harbors, and the wood
gives itself away to that intimacy,
the manner in which we and the world
meet each new day. Harm and boon
in the meetings. As heart meets what
is not heart, the way the spirit
encounters the flesh and the mouth meets
the foreignness in another mouth. We stand
looking at the ruin of our garden
in the early dark of November, hearing crows
go over while the first snow shines coldly
everywhere. Grief makes the heart
apparent as much as sudden happiness can.

-- from The Great Fires (1995)




NEIL MC CODRUM AND THE SELKIE

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

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

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

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

All but one.

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

“Ochone, ochone! Please give me back my skin.”

He took a step towards her and she stared at him with large brown eyes that held the depths of the sea. “Come with me,” he said, “I will give you new clothes to wear.”

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

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

Thirteen summers had passed since the selkie woman came to live with McCodrum, and her children were almost grown. As she knelt on the warm earth one afternoon, digging up silverweed roots to roast for supper, the voice of her daughter Morag rang clear and excited through the salt-pure air and soon the girl was beside her holding something in her hands.

“O mother! Is this not the strangest thing I have found in the old barley-kist, softer than the mist to my touch?”

Her mother rose slowly to her feet, and in silence ran her hand along the speckled brown skin. It was smooth like silk. She held it to her breast with one hand, and put her other arm around her daughter, and walked back with her to the croft in silence, heedless of the girl’s puzzled stares. Once inside, she called her son Donald to her, and spoke gently to her children:

“I will soon be leaving you, mo chridhe, and you will not see me again in the shape I am in now. I go not because I do not love you, but because I must become myself again.”

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

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

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

Aphrodite, Persephone, Adonis

MOREOVER

Jack Gilbert

We are given the trees so we can know
what God looks like. And rivers
so we might understand Him. We are allowed
women so we can get into bed with the Lord,
however partial and momentary that is.
The passion, and then we are single again
while the dark goes on. He lived
in the Massachusetts woods for two years.
Went out naked when the moon would allow it.
He watched the aspens when the afternoon breeze
was at them. And listened to rain
on the butternut tree near his window.
But when he finally left, they did not care.
The difficult garden he was midwife to
was indifferent. The eight wild birds
he fed through both winters, when the snow
was starving them, forgot him immediately
And the three women he ate of and entered
utterly then and before, who were his New World
as immensity and landfall, are now only friends
or dead. What we are given is taken away,
but we manage to keep it secretly.
We lose everything, but make harvest
of the consequence it was to us. Memory
builds this kingdom from the fragments
and approximation. We are gleaners who fill
the barn for the winter that comes on.

from Refusing Heaven (2005)

***


‘O where am I?’ quoth she, ‘in earth or heaven,
Or, in the ocean drench’d or in the fire?
What hour is this? or morn or weary even?
Do I delight to die, or life desire?
But now I lived, and life was death’s annoy;
But now I died, and death was lively joy.’

— Venus in Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” 493-8

First the tale Aphrodite/Venus and Adonis, figure and ground of this meditation on what it means to grow up into the insides of love. Adonis is the love child of Myhrra and her father the king of Lebanon (or Cyprus or a number of other kings — so this is a foundational story). Myhrra was so vain of her hair - she thought it more beautiful than even Aphrodite’s - the love goddess stung her with an immortal immoral desire for her father’s embrace. Myhrra connives to get her father drunk and lay with him for 12 nights. At last the father sees the face of his dark lover with the aid of a hidden lamp and, to his horror, sees his daughter asleep in his arms. Enraged at the sacrilege, the king draws a sword and chases her from his court. Pregnant and ashamed, Myhrra pleads with the heavens to send her to an oblivion that is neither among the living or the dead. Aphrodite thus turns her into a myrrh-tree, the tree that weeps its fruit in spicy gum.

Adonis, the future lover of Aphrodite, is born of this tree. He is so beautiful that Aphrodite hides him in a chest and sends him to Persephone for safe keeping. The Queen of the Underworld is curious and, taking a peek in the box, is so struck by the boy’s beauty that she claims him for her own. Aphrodite, yearning to have the boy back, takes her suit to Zeus, and his judgment is that the boy should be shared as follows: for a third part of the year he dwells by himself, a third part with Persephone, and the last third with Aphrodite. Kerenyi comments, “Aphrodite was thus compelled to mourn for Adonis before she could truly possess him.”

***

A strange story, about the nature of passion I think, for desire is only a third part enactment and rapture, spending the greater part of its year either among what’s lost or simply alone. Aphrodite’s greatest love, the one which breaks her immortal heart and makes a religion not of consummation but of separation — for Adonis’ fate is to sundered by the tusk of a boar and speed away through air and sea away from Aphrodite, living on a realm of her heart which is eternally with and without. Weird epiphany, huh. In the rites of Adonis, women brought him little “gardens” — symbols of their femininity — and in eastern shrines they were compelled to offer themselves to strangers or sacrifice their hair: thus some symbol of what attracts men to women — the Aphroditean lure - is offered or sacrficed, as if to render holy that which is forsaken.



Myth and folklore offer blue-tinted lenses for looking without and within, IMO, a skein of mystery for tracing back the labyrinth of history. As I meditated on the tale of Aphrodite and Adonis this morning, weirdly I thought of a really horrible season in my life now twenty years past, when one life was dying and the next was far too underground yet to discern. Please bear with me this story, a good yarn as skeins go, which traces a fragrance — spicy gum, perhaps? — into a grave which is rimmed with faint light. That that lucence which shines in darkness, half of darkness composed, which is, IMO, how the greater half of the heart is lit, I write ...

**

I was playing in my last band — Innocent Thieves — ha ha, very 80’s, big hair, skinny ties, metalish New Wave if there could be such a thing, power-pop-ish a la Robert Palmer’s Power Station (“Some Like It Hot”) - yet we were All Original, choosing the muse who fated us to play shit dives off of the A-list. And my bandmates were a bunch of guys I hardly knew and little cared for, banded together simply because it seemed the next thing to do for us, each for different reasons, a between-time sort of exercise, two of the guys playing out at Disney in a 50s-review (their day gig), me pining for A-list kliegs but wanting to write my own songs (right feeling, wrong medium), a drummer on hiatus from a Top-40 band that played the hotel bars. We had been playing together for about 3 months whipping together fairly tightly-crafted stuff though drinking always seemed to be the greater order, someone running out after the first hour practice on a beer run which juiced up everything so much that the second set loosened into disarray and angst — we really didn’t like each other much — and then everyone took off on their own. A ship of fools fuelled on fading rock dreams.

Sometime in July we finally got a gig, playing in a 7-band showcase called Rock Against Racism in a rented American Legion hall. We were on the bill with a bunch of punk bands with names like Declared Ungovernable and Damage. Punk of that era was careening into death metal Nothing like the stuff we played, but hey, it was a gig.

The night of the gig I started out at my usual happy-hour watering hole, knocking back a couple of Myers rum-and-pineapples, watching the afternoon outside begin to brew into the usual bruised gnarl of ass-whupping storms. My hair was teased up in Rod Stewartean chunks of blonde and I wore black jeans, hightop sneakers & a black bowling shirt festooned front and back with leopard spots. Flashes of lighting outside would fade into a penumbra showing my ghost in the window staring back at me in some rictus parody of all I depserately wanted to project, like a tincture of abyss, someone tensed and ready for every magnitude he had ever yearned for, now in the fullness of an almost fully-waned legitimate youth (I was 28). It was an imagined self, a caricature; in reality I was a loser guitar player stuck down an endless bottle, but in my imagination I was the ripened shape of exactly what was needed to snare the Beloved of my dreams, a woman somewhere between Barbie Benson and Eve, an oceanic Yes fitted in a tight polka dotted dress. Oh it was an imagination so vivid, something that I took so literally, that I was literally anointed for the fall which began in that night as the cold booze glowed through my veins.

The gig was insane, wild, horrible. It was hot and humid in a hall which slowly filled with a mosh-pit of punks and gawkers lured by public-service ads picked up mysteriously by the local Top-40 station, the place where none of us would ever be heard. The two tribes eyed each other with amusement and malice. We were third on the bill, and I spent the first two acts standing at the bar in the back, trying to pace myself with beer. though the proceedings were depressing. Punk bands flared up these two-minute smashing freight trains of blitzkrieg thunder, flailing, hoarsely shouting into the mikes, bobbing mohawks, razor blade earrings flashing. Out on the floor the moshing grew earnest, dudes in fatigues and jackboots hurling into the center of the fray and richocheting off each other with glancing punches. No one in the pit was much in the mood for a late 80s power-pop band though there was applause from the gawker/geek fringe. We didn’t really have anything to offer, our set unwinding badly, monitors on the fritz, guitars going out of tune or breaking strings. We had maybe two good songs out of the eight, the first and penultimate, hard-rocking on one and then a ballad on the other which had this riff I played at the chorus that was pure myrrh, sweet and longing and hanging over the din of colliding and falling history.

(I can remember the heft of my blue Hamer Phantom electric, fleet and stony, a winged axe with fast action, screaming pickups, and a whammy bar I never had much use for. Did I play it or it play me? I’ll never know.)

We then crashed through our last song, the final of my stage career, meager as that was, smart and muscular but hoarse and wounded, torn deep in the thigh by the angst we could not control in our out-of-control lives. The rock beast killed us in the end, and we bled that last song profusely, crashing down the last chord with the relief that it was finally over, shooting murderous glances at each other.

I headed to back of the room where the bar was and proceeded to get drunk, knocking back doubles of Dewars, watching the disorder of the next set spill over into the room. One of the punks careened off a gawker and the fighting began, first here and then there, suddenly everywhere at once. Chairs collapsed, fists windmilled, boots stomped, gleeful thugs dove into the meelee, girls screeched hugging the walls. One of the synth players from Damage squirmed through the melee back to the bar and ordered up a beer next to me. “I wuz wonderin’ when things would start rocking,” he said, proud of the panorama. Cops came, so did firemen and paramedics, clearing the hall. I don’t think anyone was hurt, really, it was just a night of punk glory and mayhem, maybe the real stuff of what rock n roll needed to become, a darker angel, losing the mousse and eyeliner. I dunno ... But whatever I thought that stage was to deliver to me that night was horribly wrong, and I knew there was only one place for me to go: out and away, far into the night. I wormed back in through a side door, discreetly grabbed my axe and amp, packed ‘em into my ca, and drove off under a wet night flashing with long ripples of heat-lightning, lucent scars tracing the malefecence of black clouds.

Thus began a black perigrinatio of bars, Bailey’s and Decades and Two Flights and The Station, pouring booze into a gullet which thirsted greater than life itself, for which all the Bud and shots of tequila I hurled down could not sate. I drank past closing time and ended up at the Hot Line bottle club, this awful lupine inferno of rapacious drunks like I was, the locus of true unrepentent fury, whirled by disco lights and bad funk. There I stumbled into a woman I had screwed a few months ago and tossed off the next morning — modus operandi back then — and for whatever reason, she was as desperate as I to forget history. She invited me to the house where she was staying, and I lurched after, somewhere past the blackout hour of 4 a.m.

I don’t remember driving there, just suddenly being in this awful house close to the freeway, a claustrophobic cigarette-reeking mess of piled newspapers, stacks of bills pouring over a desk, overflowing ashtrays, stained furniture. Apparently it was the house of a woman who died several weeks before, the distant relative of this girl who had been given the task of closing out the place. It was the house of a person who had lived alone for years and died more alone than I could imagine (though in later months as the booze wore me down to a tiny carbon ball it was exactly the death I imagined). If there’s a way-station of Persephone in this life -- certainly in the story of my life -- it was in that house that night.

We cracked open beers from the fridge, smoked a joint in stifling sweaty smoky heat, croaking like two birds of one black feather: and soon enough tumbled on to bed, not in the urine-reeking room of the dead woman but another bedroom, tiny and cramped, room only for a single bed, a dresser, and a fan. Of the milky enactment there I don’t need to tell you anything but its nature, numb and greedy and hostile and broken. Between blackout spaces I ravened what I could, the room impossibly dark and hot, raked by the occasional pass of a twisting fan, traffic whooshing back and forth on the nearby expressway like life in motion high up on the surface of things, far from that bottom. And there was this soft clicking sound nearby, like the claws or beaks of big birds of prey holding vigil over us from the dresser, praising and damning us with the same black attention. Perhaps they were Aprhodite Praxis and Melanis (Sexual Action and Sex After Dark) crowing us on ... And then everything went thoroughly black until a car screeched outside and it was mid-morning, swords of sunlight jabbing through the window shade. Get up asshole, the girl was saying, trying to get me to leave.

***

Thus ended my night with Persephone, a waystation in Hell that began the slow and tortured travail leading to this 4 a.m. twenty years later, to a house that love created and maintains. The story of Aphrodite and Adonis, read again of late in Kerenyi’s “The Gods of the Greeks,” casts blue light on that black night, silvering its mordents, reflecting back lucent undersides. Soul must harrow before it comes to love, IMO, sample all of love’s plastic fruit set on the wrong tables, peramble through desire’s fragrant ghastly wood, chasing the ghost of the Beloved into every chamber of Hell.

And the weird part is how projection inverts the story in ways that make it difficult to see in the present: Adonis whom both Persephone and Aphrodite loves is, IMO, that image of self whom pysche must tutor in all the ways of love, my ego but a third part of soul, a shore between infinite night and blazing day, between loss and enactment, between the shades of passion and their singular moments, between Persephone and Aphrodite.

Thus we slowly learn, we slowly come to be, up out of the gorgeous wounding of our finally-sundered adolescence, into an adulthood which is both passionate Persephone and grieving Aphrodite, a muddled middle ground which is both and neither, a union of split states which is Hermaphroditic, of both sexes, weak and lamed (gored in the thigh, as the Fisher King was so wounded), ever bleeding like the anemone, ever fragrant like the cut bark of the myrrh, ever lost in the swirling hair which is half-underwater and half turned by the apostrophic breezes which turn us around to walk the other way.

“Do I delight to die, or life desire?” asks Venus in Shakepeare’s poem. Harrowed Adonis knows.


VENUS AND ADONIS

The having is only a third of
Love, the feasting to the bone
Once cup only that is poured.
And it’s not the first, not the

Second. He is strong and
Separate, hunting boars
Til sunset: Death then takes him
On its tusk: Even the goddess

Of every ripe encounter
Must be broken thus before
Her heart is wakened to
Itself. Venereal surf ever

Slapping at my thighs, you’re
Singing da blues too, crashing
On an empty shore, incessant
In your jones for him

Who climbs highest in departing
On the trellis of her sweet garden.

Tincture of A Tide

In my youth I was her rockin’
Satyr, drunk on honey-mead,
A boat ever caught between
Her curve-careening waves.

Desire smashed me hard
And left me on that shore
Where I became her student
Reading water like a text,

Her girdles become pages
Thought thirsted so to penetrate
Like a war god hurling spears
Between the lines of mysteries.

But she ebbed on, her book
Become a third glass of sate
And I the sot full-poured and pent
To spill her next strange shore

With a tincture of the sea’s wild thrash,
Baptising her and I in it’s blue sass.

Aphroditean Foam

APOSTROPHICS

The chorus faces left to sing
The mind’s first waking day,
Clear and true and unbroken
As the birth of the green world:

Next the antistrophe
Where the chorus turns
Fully the other way, like a
Two-step in reverse,

Retracing This to come to
That on the shore of that
Other truth, the balance pans
Of mind now equalled, paused:

Ready for the second and third
Act. Only She know why
The singers turn, the third
And secret sister of the dance,

Twisting in a chamber far below,
The yearning heart who tides the show.



BIRTH OF VENUS

Ranier Maria Rilke

transl. Edward Snow


On this morning after the night that fearfully
had passed with outcry, tumult, uproar --
all the sea broke open once more and screamed.
And as the scream slowly closed again
and from the sky’s pale daybreak and beginning
fell down into the mute fishes’ chasm--:
the sea gave birth.

The first sun shimmered in the hair-foam
of the wide wave-cleft, on whose rim
the young girl rose, white, confused, and moist.
Just as a piece of new green leaf stirs,
stretches, and something curled up slowly opens,
her body unfolding into the coolness
and into the untouched early morning wind.

Like moons the knees rose clearly
and ducked into the cloud-rims of the thighs;
the calves’ slim shadows pulled back,
the feet flexed and grew luminous,
and the joints came alive like the throats
of people drinking.

And in the pelvis’s cup lay the belly
like a young fruit in a child’s hand.
In its navel’s narrow chalice was
the entire darkness of this bright life.

Beneath it the small wave rose lightly
and lapped continually toward the loins,
where no and then a silent ripple stirred.
But translucent and yet without a shadow,
like a strand of birch trees in April,
warm, empty, and unhidden, lay the sex.

Now the shoulders’ quick scales already
stood balanced on the straight body,
which rose from the pelvis like a fountain
and fell hesitantly in the long arms
and more swiftly in the hair’s cascades.

Then very slowly the face went past:
from the indrawn darkness of its bending
into clear, horizontal upliftedness.
And behind it, steeply closing shut, the chin.

Now, when the neck was stretched out like a jet
and like a stalk in which the sap rises,
the arms too stretched out like necks
of swans, when they are searching for the shore.

Then into this body’s dark dawning
came the first breath like morning wind.
In the vein-trees’ tenderest branches
a whispering arose, and the blood began
to rush louder over its deep places.
And this wind grew on: now it hurled itself

with all its breath into the new breasts
and filled them and pushed into them,--
so that like sails full of distance
they drove the light girl toward the shore.

And thus the goddess landed.

Behind her,
as she strode swiftly off through the young shores,
all morning the flowers and the grasses
sprang up, warm, confused,
as from embracing. And she walked and ran.

But at noon, in the heaviest hour,
the sea rose up once more and threw
a dolphin on that same spot.
Dead, red, and open.

***

KIMBERLEY BLUE

1995

She is a blue stream
winding through
the smoke and booze
long brown hair
and blue blue eyes
the high tide of her body
straining against
the shore of her dress
blue spandex sparkling
like morning water
in this jaded light

She stops before me
with all night behind
all winter outside
all broken hearted
somehow eclipsed
a black aura in
this sapphire's halo
she smiles on me
sweetly & asks
would you like a dance
and I say sure

She lifts her dress
lays it on my lap
reaches behind
to unleash blue lace
and begins to
wave and weave her body
round rich jazz

I inhale her deeply
a musk of jasmine and orchid
and I am only here
in this brilliant shadow
captive to blue billows
dreaming in my balls

Something too strong
for words not a wave
but more than a sigh
washes out of me and
climbs the salmon run
of her dance
Up knees up thighs
to hips whispering
whiskey saxophones and lace
Up smooth belly
to breasts so proud
they startle me
even here
even at such a naked price

When my eyes
rise all the way
I find her
watching me
watching her
for one two three beats
and we're in some other room
too foolish to question
too swollen to ignore
too soon swept away

She smiles and looks
off into the mirror
to admire my lust
glowing on her skin
and devotes her motions
to a deeper blue

and that is that

Around the bar
other women repeat
this dance for other men
each pair a room where
a man tries to drink
deeper than a woman goes
and the night
is an empty glass
on any beach
where just one sip
would surely drown us all



Adonis dwells a third part of the year by himself; for a third part with Persephone; and for a third part with Aphrodite.

... Of the death of Adonis which every year carried him off to Persephone in the Underworld, it was most commonly said that he was wounded by a boar while hunting. His blood rand down, red anemones sprang up from it, and the brook Adonis in Lebanon ran red. It was through that Artemis or Ares sent the boar against the lad.

Aphrodite was thus compelled to mourn for Adonis before she could truly possess him. The festivals for which her woeful love was celebrated were held in commemoration of the day of the love-goddess’s parting from her young lord. He lay there wounded unto death, loved and wept over by Aphrodite. In vain she tried to hold him back. On the next day he soared away through sea and air.

It used to be said, however, that he was still alive. Women brough him little “gardens” -- a symbol and picturesque expression, which was common in our tongue, as in others, for their own femininity. In eastern shrines they gave themselves to strangers. Whoever did not do this must at least sacrifice their hair to Adonis.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks


VENUS AND ADONIS

The having is only a third of
Love, the feasting to the bone
Once cup only that is poured.
And it’s not the first, not the

Second. He is strong and
Separate, hunting boars
Til sunset: Death then takes him
On its tusk: Even the goddess

Of every ripe encounter
Must be broken thus before
Her heart is wakened to
Itself. Veneral surf ever

Slapping at my thighs, you’re
Singing da blues too, crashing
On an empty shore, incessant
In your jones for him

Who climbs highest in departing
On the trellis of her sweet garden.






BLUE IN GREEN

2002

The song enters
gently, almost
painfully so:

Bill Evans on piano
washing in the
night’s minor chords
toward a shore
with no resolution,
blue rollers composed
of the lightest,
most fragile notes,
hesitant as all
who stand at midnight’s door
with so much flowing in
from the night:

And then Miles enters
on trumpet almost too late
in the progression,
not quite an afterthought
but still way after what
ever could have mattered,
that emphysemic
horn thin and spectral
over the wash of minor chords,
hovering like fog over the surf’s
embarcations, wedging us
between what’s
half in and
half out that door
we all hesitated at,
turning for a last long
look back on all we loved and lost
and then lost even more:

There’s no real name for it,
but the feeling is blue in green,
the bittersweet thrall
inside sweet sound;
not the sweetness, but
the crash of that sweetness
when it’s forever gone.

Evans never loses his infinite
restraint throughout,
strolling out those calm,
almost-suicidal progressions
of minor beachside ennui
over which Miles sighs and
sings with a breezy, diffident,
nearly frozen reserve.
Together they weave and sum
the night’s concessions
and conceits,
none of them good or even
passing for a temporary stay
against the facts of dissolution.
Back and forth they
toss that rigorous tao,
ever returning us to
this hard shore:

Then like a long ache
quenched in a needle’s whiteout,
Davis fades off, leaving Evans
to finish things:
The piano climbs that
trellis of sad chords
once more, reaching an even
higher, almost
impossible—
no—
irretrievable height: —then spills
back down
the clef to us
in a quick play
of gorgeous
major thirds,
just as waves will travel
across the world only
to collapse on the shore,
scattering jewels
at our feet before
hauling them all away
in a last low ebb
of minor chords:

“Blue In Green” names
that hard night’s surf
where we lose more than
we ever love, and in so
descending find
that harsh blue door
which scatters us
on a distant,
emerald shore.


THE GARDEN

Jack Gilbert


We come from a deep forest of years
into a valley of an unknown country
called loneliness. Without horse or dog
the heavens bottomless overhead.
We are like Marco Polo who came back
with jewels hidden in the seams of his ragged clothes.
A sweet sadness, a tough happiness.
This beginner cobbles together a kind of house
and makes lentil soup there night
after night. Sits on the great stone
that is a threshold, smelling pine trees
in the hot darkness. When the moon rises
between the tall trunks, he sings without
talent but with pleasure. Then goes inside
to make courtesy with his dear ghosts.
In the morning, he watches the two nuthatches,
the pair of finches with their new son.
And the chickadees. There are chipmunks
in the afternoon finding seeds between
his fingers with their exquisite hands.
He visits his misbegotten garden where
the mint and chives flourish alongside
the few stunted tomatoes and eggplants.
They are scarce because of ignorance.
He wonders all the time where
he has arrived, why so much has been
allowed him (even rain on the leaves
of sugar maples), and why there is
even now so much to come.

-- from Refusing Heaven (2005)

passionate music

2001

That passionate music —
How it erases the one
who meant to ride it,
godlike, on a dolphin’s back.
Love is not personal
though it wakens in a face.
The sweetness of an idea
blooms redolent in
a shared history,
but this music passes,
like spring. And then what?
Trapped in vernals
of I and Thou, I cannot
write poems. It is only
by taking wing
over the embedded
pair that I have any
measures to sing. Not
that the lovers care
for anything more than
their sighs, their sweet
fricative margins.
Oh well —
on this goes.
Eros now husband
to Psyche. Groom of
orchards far beyond
any bed, I waken
and hunger and surrender
to these words. Forget
that passionate singing,
for it can never end.


***


SONG OF THE SEA

Ranier Maria Rilke

Capri, Piccola Marina


Timeless sea breezes,
sea-wind of the night:
you come for no one;
if someone should wake,
he must be prepared
how to survive you.

Timeless sea breezes,
that for aeons have
blown ancient rocks,
you are purest space
coming from afar...

Oh, how a fruit-bearing
fig tree feels your coming
high up in the moonlight.

-- transl Albert Ernest Flemming

She Who Turns Away (Third Cup)

The Aphroditean surnames Pandemos and Ourania — of whom I’ve posted about here recently, are linked, according to Kerenyi, to a third, “and thus form a trinity; as in the very ancient cult of Thebes, where the goddess had a third form in Apostrophia, ‘she who turns herself away.’”

His reference comes from Pausinas, who writes of “The three wooden images of Thebes, so very ancient that they are actually said to be votive offerings of Harmonia, and the story is that they were made out of the wooden figureheads on the ships of Cadmus. They call the first Ourania (Heavenly), the second Padmemos (Common) and the thrird Apostrophia. Harmonia gave to Aphrodite the surname of Ourania to signify a pure love free from bodily lust, that of Pandemos to denote sexual intercourse, that of Harmonia Apostrophia, that mankind may reject unlawful passion and sinful acts. For Harmonia knew of many crimes already perpetrated not only among foreigners but even by Greeks, similar to those attributed later by legend to the mother of Adonis, to Phaidra, the daughter of Minos, and to the Thrakian Tereus.” (9.16.3)

Now here’s a strange curvature of Venus! Not that three of her are represented — the Triple Goddesss has been much touched on here — but that the third would seem such a rejection of Aphroditean pleasure. Is this the third Aphrodite. pr does the epithet Apostrophia — “she who turns away” by Pausinas — as the Venus who steers us away from her dark passions — have a more satisfactory completion of the other two Aprhodites?

Elsewhere in Pausinas (8.32.2) a sanctuary of Aphrodite is mentioned on the south of Megalopolis in Arcadia, then in ruins, where there still remained 3 images of Aphrodite: Ourania, Pandemos and “the third without a surname.” Instead of a name, we have “she who turns away.”

There is a mystery, a gap, a lacunae in this third Aphrodite, which makes her perhaps the most powerful of the three. Certainly she engages the imagination most as it hurries to fill in her gaps, dredge her depths and excavate her ruins. Nature abhors a vacuum, and Venus delights, IMO, in a good penetrating poke into her most mysterious places. As the Greek gods and goddess were projections of psyche, so Aphrodite lifts like a moon from us, triple in aspect as somehow our psyches, our souls, are triune in its longing, how our imagination comes to be fertilzed and new work is fructified.

***

The word Apostrophia has roots in the Greek root “stophe” meaning “the act of turning” plus the prefix “apo” meaning “away”: hence, “to turn away.” There obverse epithet of Aphrodite “Apistophia” means “she who turns toward,” as in the heart’s flush and rush to love. So we have this turning away from from something, perhaps from the shamefulness of sex in Aphroidite Pandemos to the heavenly nature of love in Aphrodite Ourania, perhaps away from love itself into some other or next evolving.

The epithet survives into our language as “apostrophe,” the mark which gives posession to a noun — certainly Aphrodite’s claim to the world around her in Pandemic profusion. It also gets to the how’s and why’s of inside knowledge, Ourania’s coin which vaults in us from bittersweet experience.

In a third definition, apostrophe is a manner of speaking in which a person not present is addressed: When I write, “My delight in the sound of words is a bow to Aphrodite,” I apostrophize. Her presence is inferred and evoked when I speak of Her that way.

In the writing life at least — this alchemy of symbolic play in the waterworks of the Lord — The ghosts in my skull all crow for my astrohphopic attention, beckoned by the black blood of ink pouring from my pen. The mythic tongue is apostrophic in troping or turning the senses of words over into their otherworldly or underworld associations. Aphrodite Apostrophia might be the goddess of that delight, worthy indeed of much praise.

A fourth defining: The ancient Greek chorus — the ur-stage of all literary works — would sway back and forth over the ground of its theme through the motions of strophe and antistrophe. In the strophe it would turn from one side to the other of the orchestra, speaking one side of the argument or representing the protagonist’s voice. This was then matched by the antistophe, an exact answer to the previous strophe, turning to the other side of the orchestra, addressing the counterargument, the antagonist. A strict logic is inherent in this motion, perhaps in mimicry of the bilateralism of the brain, the poles of thought which range from one side of an opinon to its other, from dark to light, up to down, epiphany to tragedy.

Ah, but what was the ground of that turn but Apostrophia, she who turns our thought away from one ground, one certainty, toward its other shore, its opposite end of the earth? It is Aprhodite Apostrophia who changes our minds midstream, turning the postures of youth into the humilty of old age, the moral authority of the sun king to twist tragically into the weeping of women, pride become tears.

Something has to turbine that movement, and it isn’t in the brain which mediates and motions its binaries or contrairies but comes from below, stemming in the heart, a much fickeller engine, whooshing its sea-enriched blood like a tide into the cortical heights, washing first this way then that.

Indeed, Apostrophia is identified with Roman Verticordia, “the turning of the whirling heart.” A dancing sufi prays into being our waxes and ebbs of thought. This Apostrophia is She who provides the to-and-fro motion of our fray, is perhaps the very ground or dancing floor of the ancient drama.

Whatever position we’re in, she delights in switching, first on top, then missionary, then from behind, then in the behind. If Pandemos creates a pandemonium of floodings desires, Apostrophia makes us pine for Ourania’s high clarities; if we get to be too damn heavenly to be any earthly good, Apostrophia gives us a thirst for that honkey-tonk sea-booze, for actual nipples. What she turns us to is of no import to Apostrophia; her altar and exalt lies in the very act of turning itself ...

This reminds me much of Emerson. The critic Richard Poirer once remarked that the places Emerson goes to in his thought are far less important than the manner of his leaping. Poirer writes:

***

... “Nothing,” (Emerson) remarks in “Circles,” is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.” Rely, that is to say, not on anything fixed or stabilized in your vocabulary but only on the power that allows you to move away from these, movements precipitated by desire whose object is uncertain and which, if too certainly defined, could turn thinking into more thought, activity into inertia. As a writer, much less as a person, this is for Emerson a saving principle, and it determines the disruptive energies at work in his essays, and in the compelling enigmatic turns of his poetry. (in “Poetry and Pragmatism,” Harvard University Press, 1992)

***

So isn’t what you know that counts, its that you use it to leap after what you don’t know. Such thinking is Apostrophean in nature, IMO.

***

As Aphrodite Apostrophia turns away, so we revolve from light into darkness, as a moon becomes full with passionate lucence and then wanes to a frail sickle. Why would anyone or thing or god choose to turn toward darkness, away from light and love? Why leave behind the joys of tidal passion? Do we choose, or does life has its immutable rhythms? The goddess in her third, dark aspect is one of maturity-in-decrepitude, filling with that knowledge which is death-in-life, the wisdom of dark things. She is Eurydice turning back from the lip of doom to walk slowly home, fading from the eyes of Orpheus as all fallen loved ones fade from view into oblivion. The sight of Eurydice retreating is enthralling, is holy, as beautiful in its way as that maid appeared on the wedding day of spring. Revence for buttocks may be a meme for the ache inherent in all parting, the last we see of our beloved as she walks out that door of parting. (Perhaps, or maybe that’s just salt water intrusion of Pandemos iinto Ourania’s turf.)

Certainly whatever Apostrophia turns toward is dark and darker, darker than mere light, stranger than life. The moon empties til it is gone and there is a space of nothing, as if the moon had never existed: But then it reappears, is reborn in some new-moon equivalent to the last visage of the old-moon. Out of the emptying of light comes the birth of life; out of the turn away from life and love new life and love is reborn. There is an emotional law here at work which defies the brain, which cannot conceive of letting go its bright hold on certainty. We are dragged kicking and screaming into our darkest truths, turned toward them, perhaps, by Aphrodite Apostrophia.

***

In my dream I am in a great hotel for a convention, selling wares to a group I have no apparent connection to. I’m just a vendor, a panderer of wares. (Waking note: I do this sort of thing in my day job.) I travel a great distance to be there and am in the surficial experience of travel, which is defined by fresh impressions which have no roots in day-to-day experience: I don’t know these people, I don’t know the area, I don’t know whether to order the veal or the salmon on the menu, I flip channels on the TV in the room to station call letters which are foreign. I think about drinking — who would know here? — and wander about the hotel, searching for a bar perhaps (one turn seems to open onto a saloon but its a flower ship) or just perambling through the rooms, the stations of a night. There is a digression into family rooms, my wife and I at my aunt & uncle’s house, staying there past our welcome, one of our cats vomiting on their nice living room floor — And then I approach a sultry woman in a great hall, she’s a “former intellectual” (so says the dream), before than an 80’s porn queen: She’s got big hair and a frowsy blowsy dress, curves popping out all over, walking towards me with this gaze which is at and through me, not looking at me at all, or looking at something deeper in me than I am aware of. We pass; my left pinkie grazes her hand, a warm fleshy part that would feel wonderful to be in the tight silky clasp; but she’s gone, and the dream ends in a loading dock of sorts where giggling young men and women are fished from a lake of sorts, drenched in delight and passion.

I share this dream mainly because it rose in me on the night before I began writing this third assay on Aphrodite, and I was advised long ago to put the dreams in last. I don’t have any great understanding of the dream but love its twists and turns, the rooms of its enactment like twisting chambers of a nautilus fished from some surf. Who is the woman who approaches me? Ourania as the “former intellectual”? Pandemos as the “80’s porn queen?” Or Aphrodite Astrophia, the spiralling twisting one whose movement is far more important than her name, is the queen of that conch, lifted from the shore of my waking and unscrolled here. Perhaps she is the cup which pours out the three.

Whatever the case, this three-part post began with an epithet without a name -- “she who turns away” -- and has rounded via Apostropha in that work which poceeds by finding a means to an end. Pour the third cup, baby, and turn me all the way round. I’m done with this prose, lemme turn away from what I learned here toward the blue boundlessness of an unshorable verse.

Happy Beltainne to all --




THREE GRACES

after Botticelli’s “La Primavera”

It could be any clearing
in every woods, a May
quilt of sunlight and
early summer shade,
as vernal as a painting
could ever go,
composed raw from
a god less believed
than breathed
(even though the
Neoplatonism’s ripe).

Three women dance
a simple round,
praising an invisible
Maypole which centers
them like the horn of
a unicorn,
in all we know
but cannot see,
their hands joined
in a loose knot of joy:

The first on the left
faces most to us,
her soft red hair
violet eyes and pale
face simple as the
tufts of flowers which
The sheer fabric of her dress
strains lightly at her
breasts but reveals
nothing, as concealment
and revelation bordered
the wild bounty of rapture:

At the right turning
back to the circle is
the one composed
harvesting shades,
not as one facing death
but rather someone returning
the bounty to God: a taller
maid by an inch or two,
and perhaps older, oh, only
by two or three years —
we know that she returns
what the first grace newly learns,
her position in the round
much like the musky
breath of an orchid beneath
a midsummer moon.
Her shift is a hue between
cobalt and silver, the
splendor of days:

And the third — well, we’re
not exactly sure how
to describe her, her back
is to us and she turns
toward the first yet her
head looks back to the second.
We cannot tell her age
due to the play of light
and shadow on her face —
a motley which might
betray joy or grief or
the tenderest desire:
Her hands are joined
to the others’,
keeping the circle complete,
her betweens filling a
cornocopiea to the brim:

The painting is old for
our age, a reliquary
of adolescent fuses
long faded by hard use.
Hard to believe now much
in grace—much less three.
Expression is untutored
and shrill these days,
an flash of broken swords in
blind alleys. Hardly anyone’s
left to admire a painting
which now hangs on a
a wall too far away.
But I don’t care: I’d sing
of those three ladies anyway
because they circle my every day,
their softly turning feet
a murmer in my ear
urging me forever to have heart
and sweat the details
and never let their motion go.