The God, The Naiad, and The Gator

Looking is such a marvellous thing, of which we know little; as we look, we are directed wholly outside ourselves --— but, even when we are at our most outward, things seem to happen within us which have been waiting longingly for the moment when they should be unobserved, and while they take their course, intact and strangely anonymous, their significance grows in the object outside, a more convincing, more powerful name, their only possible name, in which we happily and reverently recognize the happenings within us.

-- Rilke, letter to his wife Clara, BR3:215


***

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

Ranier Maria Rilke

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Transl. Stephen Mitchell








ARCHAIC CREST OF THE GODDESS

today

The invisible of man is the
visible of the gods.

-- Roberto Calasso

Every angel is terrible.

-- Rilke


You have to die for some time
before finding resonance.
The ever-empty surf grows loud
with her lost sursurrance,
most marvelous in the crash
of warm foam edging to my feet
for that faintest trace of her kiss
before receding back to blue
the way she whispered I Love You
and walked forever out the door.
Nothing’s quite divine til the
surface dazzle swills a darker brine,
my aesthetic quilled in the
black quinine of numens too
strange for a name. The broken
sculpture of Apollo which Rilke
observed in a museum in 1906
was a mess; the god had lost his
head along the way, surely crippling
the full intent of shapers who
had gone the way of that head.
And yet that absence unlocked
in the poet’s gaze a sight inside
his seeing, reflecting down the
god’s stone bulk to find dark
brilliance in the chest, depths
drawing his gaze still lower
to still darker loins “where
procreation flared.” Flared!
Not from fullness but its
ruins, beheaded by the fall
of ages and trundled across
the world, installed in some
trumped-up roadshow for later
rubes to gawk at what remains ---
the marble chest, a missing
Grecian penis proud in
vanquished antiquity. And all
I get of him is what pal Rilke
strained from the coursings of
his thoughts a few hours now
a century ago, buttoned with
this chilling shout: “You must
change your life.” Odd
how I heeded those words
here to this burgher’s nice-enough
domicile mid a ruined world.
Home and cat and wife
is all I’ll get of him, the
wolf-god with his arts
firing arrows tipped in language
again and again through
a page as silent as that
surf now decades lost to me.
I am the father now, husband
in the bliss of an ever-
resounding shore where gods
from nipply naiads suck the
hoary ink I pour, quiescent
and so dangerous,
collapsing every line
in her salt blue dazzling roar.


LATE AUTUMN,
PORT ORANGE

1994


There are virilities
you cannot ride
in your sleep.
Your urban morning
has no saddle for
this wild sea, nor
will such winds as these
rein to any corporate task.

No.
Something irresistible
stays here.

Watching storms batter
the tide, itís clear:
Like that raw rock
Rilke saw in Apollo’s
marbled loins,
this sea’s day churns
dark and urgent and cold:

You must derange
your life to save it.

***

"Working after Nature" has in such a high degree made that which is into a task for me, that only very rarely now, as by mistake, does a thing speak to me, granting and giving without demanding that I reproduce it equivalently and significantly in myself. The Spanish landscape ... Toledo - drove this attitude of mine to its extreme: Since there the eternal thing itself -- tower, hill, bridge -- already possessed the incredible, unsurpassable intensity of the inner equivalents through which one might have been able to represent it. External world and vision everywhere coincided as it were in the object; in each a whole inner world was displayed, as though an angel who embraces spaces were blind and gazing into himself. This world, seen no longer with the eyes of men, but in the angel, is perhaps my real task -- at least all my earlier experiments would come together in it; but to begin that task, Ellen, how protected and resolved one would have to be!

-- Ranier Maria Rilke, letter to Ellen Delp, 10/27/1915



1903

2003

A century ago there was
a stillness, a quiet which
belied the truth that the
blade was merely pausing
before plunging again
in its inkhorn of blood.
Cruelties yet imagined
waited for trench and oven
and the lickety-split atom.
In 1903 however it
was fair and wan
with flowers growing in
great abundance over
the stilled killing fields
of China and civil-war
United States. In Paris Rilke
wrote letters for Rodin
and then tried to write
poems with the same
chiselled fury of his master.
New Poems, he called them,
pocket empires of seeing:
"The Panther" and "The
Rose Window" and
"Archaic Torso of Apollo"
Surely there was hope
for this century, if poems
as those could be written.
The future seemed great,
pregnant with an art
which could sanctify
life at last. Rilke at his
high writing-desk laying
pen to paper with Paris
alive in its almost pagan
whirl. But wait -- in
the black psaltery of that ink--
What is that cry far above
(or below) beginning to tear
the page apart? An angel?
Love? Victories? The mouth
of Orpheus ripped from its
stem? This morning it is
early spring in Florida --
a warm wet day to come --
Soon orange blossoms and
yard work and skin bared
at last to the sun -- Battle
to do with terrorists and
bankers and Christian
fundamentalists -- A poem
to write which does not know
its name but hears something
caw from great black wings,
and from that dim future
pluck strange wild strings.





GATOR BAIT’R

2004

As I was sitting in traffic
in the downtown Apopka
bottleneck I noticed
a boat on a trailer next
to me. “Gator Bait’r”
was written in cute gold
glitter script across the aft.
It’s Friday night and I’m
going home, my body
trilling from the last hard
workout of the week (45
minutes of cyclings &
then upper body lifting);
sunglasses, air conditioning,
low jazz, weariness &
endorphins cauling the
ferocity of the rainless
late-afternoon sun, where
its so humid and bright
I cannot even see the sky.
A sign outside a pest
control company a mile
further down says, “10
Days to Bring in the
Biggest Roach in Apopka
and Win Big $?” Why
are these messages
hooking my attention
these blearing dog
days? I drive on listening
to a “Fresh Air” interview
with some guy who’s written
a biography on Fatty
Arbuckle. Traffic darts
helterskelter around me,
everyone desperate to
go home, get to that
first beer, I don’t know.
Seems that Arbuckle went
to a doctor to have a
carbuncle lanced and
the job was botched.
The doctor prescribed
heroin for the pain
and Arbuckle got hooked.
The studio forced him
to quit by building a
cold turkey room in
his house and locking
him into it. He lost so
much weight that when
he went on tour soon
after to promote a movie,
he had to wear a fat suit.
A lime-green Volkwagen
turns onto old 441 ahead
of me bearing a vanity
plate that reads
“NOG8R” -- get it,
No Gator? -- it was
printed on a Florida
Seminoles logo plate.
The rivalry between our
nature and nature’s, the war
of predators and privateers,
is a virile summer rassle
tented in this big heat,
cheered on by whatever
angels are gathered on
the head of this pen --
hawks and turkey buzzards,
wasps and buzzing roaches,
I dunno, some raptoring
will which keeps drawing
me back to the true heart
of the heat of this season,
the rude indeterminate
roadkill and lanes off the
main intercourse which
are drowned in swamp
ivy and grime. I see it
even as I turn onto
the last street home, my
neighborhood blasted with
the same heat, a motorboat
almost hidden in weeds
next to the duplex up
the street, sprinklers
at the rental foolishly
pumping precious water
at this hour, my ancient
neighbor Dan drinking
Jim Beam with that woman
who visits him thrice weekly
in revenge on her husband
who left her and came back.
It’s there right at home, our
garden hanging limp from
its ruddy heights, the cats
sprawled on the back porch
hungry for dinner, my wife
taking me upstairs to show
me her latest embroidery
laid out on our bed
looking more than
magnificent & the a/c
at full broil & the western
windows melting down.
Honey, it’s beautiful, and
I mean it with all of my
heart, it’s absolutely true,
just as true as we’ll never
get that thrashing gator
out from under the bed,
not ever.


SWAMP GLASS

2004

The day was like every other
in Florida’s long connubial
of light and heat -- the
worker standing in the
shallows of the lake pulling
up weeds in that steady
slow rhythm that has
kept him at this long
seasonal job for so
many years, working
the shores of so
many hundreds of
lakes around Central
Florida -- the mid-
morning sun conducting
a rising choir of crickets
in the reeds, the
occasional rag-tag cloud
overhead slowly fleecing
in others of that flock
in the way of summer
days that by late
afternoon amass to
principalities of air,
cracking heaven wide
and spilling both seas.
But for now, it’s just
the hazing humid
prescience of all that
in a near-dreamy
saturate of heat, the
lake water about him
reflecting back what
life he’s always known
here -- docks leading
back to rich folks’
houses, some shadowy
man in a bass boat
drifting by a ways
out, all of the lake’s
mysteries sealed tight
against the underside
of that brilliant glass
like the hid half of
the moon. He barely
notices the gator
lolling ten feet from
him, its black bark
barely breaking
the surface of the
water -- no big deal,
gators are everywhere
in these lakes, they
approach and watch
and linger and then
drift off. The weeds
pull up soft and mushy
belling with them that
stink that makes you
first think of fish and
pussy and shit at once,
but it’s just for him
the same old redolence
of work as daydreams
down the shore, his
hands in water gripping
roots uplifting memories
of nights now long ago,
before he was this
lonely divorcee,
before he was married
and married before
that; back when it
seemed so many
women smiled at
his tanned Cracker
charm, inviting him to
swim the sweet warms waters
of their welcoming within.
He was reeling slowly in
one of those tales
spooled out along
the the shallows of
his mind of busty
Darlyn, 18, a prissy
and pious waitress at the
Chat n Chew in Eustis
whom he’d talked into
going on a date with him
to go bowling. Instead
he’d takne them
to the RiMar drive-in
to see “Brewster’s Millions.”
She’d protested on
the way there for
what seemed a sufficient
enough while, sawing on
about how she was a
good Christian & saving
herself for her husband
and he’d just agreed,
saying in his soft
twang that his intentions
were pure as silk,
he’d just like to hear
her talk. But later
after she had helped
him work through a
pint of Southern Comfort
in the darkness of his
Ford pickup (the movie
track on the gizmo
hanging from the window
mixed with the softer
stream of laughter,
belches and the high
brogue of moans and
ejaculate sighs coming
from the darkened
vehicles around
them. And suddenly
there broke from
her this other woman whom
perhaps even she didn’t know,
turning to kiss and kiss
him again, then giggle,
and reach down to massage
his crotch, kissing him
with her tongue swimming
deep in his mouth.
Then she unbottoned
her her red polka dot blouse
and tore it and that big
brassiere away, weaving
those magnificent hooters
in his face, slapping his
cheeks with each breast.
He closed his eyes then
falling into the mily soak
and drift of sex which in
this present he tries to
reattach their surficial
part -- as if the spirit
required a house, a horse,
a hearse, that whorish
sweaty stink of perfume
and passion. And then
something woke him from
that dark -- something plinking
him in the nose -- he opened
his eyes to see this glittery
silver cross hanging between
her breasts reaching out
to flick him as she swayed,
sharp and hard and
maddening as hell. He
pulled back to focus
better only to see the strange and
terrible double image of Darlyn’s
breasts superimposed on the
face of Richard Pryor on
the screen much further
behind them, the sweet
fruity fullness of breastmeat
crossed with his ten foot bulging
bug-eyes. The gator struck
right then, its jaws fast as
traps, collapsing in a
instant on his upper thigh.
Sweet Darlyn fled screaming
from those searing red holes
below and the worker was
right here, reassessing
the cruciality of his moment,
in a world of trouble
& the rest of the world
still calm and sleepy
and too hot. He did not
panic but bore back
and wailed with all
his strength, whacking
the gator once but
good with his fist
between the weak
hazy eyes, which seemed
to flutter for an instant
and then wake from
its own dream, loosing
its jaws and slowly
swimming off. The same
day buzzed and droned
everywhere, the lake
still pure as glass
except where he
was stumbling out --
exactly there all
was muddy and richly
red and smelly of
the funk which stiffens
our nose-hairs, alert
to some world in ours
we care or dare or
cannot quite see
and it holding us
exactly there for
that one singular
moment in its gaze,
whispering, pay attention.

***

O ancient curse of poets!
Being sorry for themselves instead of saying,
forever passing judgment on their feelings
instead of shaping them ...
... Instead of sternly transmuting into words those selves of theirs,
as imperturbably cathedral carvers
transpose themselves into the constant stone.
That would have been salvation ...
The big words from those ages, when as yet
happening was visible, are not for us.
Who talks of victory? To endure is all.

-- Rilke, Collected Works SW i, 654, transl. Leishman

Inside Out

Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, “These nursing babies are like those who enter the kingdom.”

They said to him, “Then shall we enter the kingdom as babies?”

Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter (the kingdom).

-- Gospel of Thomas, 22

***

The Challenger set out from Portsmouth in the year 1873 and traced a course around the globe. From bottoms lying under miles of water, from silent deeps carpeted with red lcay ooze, and from all the lightless intermediate depths, net-haul after net-haul of strange and fantastic creatures came up and were spilled out on the the decks. Pouring over the weird beings brought up for the first time into the light of day, beings no man had ever seen before, the Challenger scientists realized that life existed even on the deepest flor of the abyss.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

***


The external fascade of the temple imposes the “law of men.” The nuptial interior subverts it. But if the interior becomes the exterior, the world is threatened by the adolescent diable au corps that then invades it. So the world strikes back an strikes to kill. Sacrifice and heirogamy are two forces taht presuppose each other, are superimposed over each other and interlocked. They oppose each other, but they also support each other. Eahc is the aura of the other. The girl who is going to be sacrifice seems to be waiting for her spouse. While the background to every erotic pleasure is dark and bloody. Everything that happens is a pendular motion between these two forces. Facing each other, each in its gaze reflects the other. Heirogamy tends toward destruction of the law, whereas sacrifice reonstructs its bloody base. All it takes to upset this equilibrium is a ‘successful love.’ But history makes sure the equilibrium survives.

-- Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony




THE DREADFUL
MIRACLE

May 17

That I found love at all
was a miracle, and a terrible
one at that. Those first
few nights far out to
sea with her absolved
my entire life before,
inverting my every
split and rupture
the world into pure
collapsing union.
Each plunge, each
rapture in a woman’s
arms not meant
to be found in this life
undammed the life
drowning dry canonicals
down an incessant tide
of Yes. Her shape
dreaming next to me
at dawn defied
even my birth,
flooding the source
in pure audacity;
it was a wash surprising
most to me but also
made in one gasp
the world a different
place, pre-Flood, pre-Fall,
absolving every sin
my fathers predisposed
me to. The last of
my Christian faith was
lost in that embrace;
so too all faith in books
and words for love --
my nouns poor aqueduct
for nights my verbs
could never rollick
through with such force
and gusto. And when
the world broke back
in two as she drove away
for good, even though
I felt more solitary
than ever for having
failed at love, the
ruined life to come
defied the wound
for having believed
in love at all. Thus
even absence was
a specie of blue presence,
holding to her
lavish shape in
every wave of ghostly
seem: a holiness
inside such words
as “never.” Contact
and loss are both
egregious to a world
bred for collusion
and miasma,
watering the heart
and then heaving it high
like a moony cenotaph
to carillon love’s disaster
on the very tide it
dreams. I write here
in the house love built,
steeling for another day
now with words on paper
and then palm on sole
when I stroke the bottoms
of my wife’s feet.
Protest is futile, I whisper,
when a cop car rushes
down our quiet street.
Love only if you dare, I
say to the space on the
couch where our cat curls,
a space one day
I’ll only see as empty.
Each gouge and tear
just makes me fuller
with that old quiescent sea
that rocked for an entire night
my harborage in Thee.


***

A TASTE FOR GRIT AND WHATEVER

Jack Gilbert


More and more it is the incidental that makes
him yearn, and he worries about that.
Why should the single railroad tracks
curving away into the bare December trees
and no houses matter? And why is it
the defeated he trusts? Is it because
Pittsburgh is still tangled in him that he
has the picture on his wall of God’s head
torn apart by jungle roots? Maybe
growing up in that brutal city left him
with a taste for grit and whatever it was
he saw in the titanic rusting steel mills.
It might be the reason he finally moved out
of Paris. Perhaps it is the scale
of those long ago winters that makes him
restless when people laugh a lot.
Why the erotic matters so much. Not as
pleasure but a way to get to something darker.
Hunting down the soul, searching out the iron
of Heaven when the work is getting done.

-- from Refusing Heaven (2005)




DAY OFF FROM WORK

May 18


Without love the work could not
be so difficult, its ardor so
savagely tenacious. It matters
greatly that his wife cried “I’m so
isolated!” in the dark of his sleep,
that the next day he downloaded
procedures for Chinese adoption.
It will take 18 months to
complete and cost 20 thousand
dollars. It matters also
that he took the next day off
from work so he could be home
to be there for the bug guys
when they showed up to treat
their bedroom for drywood termites.
It matters that he blackened
the soles of his feet moving
all the storage of their marriage
out and back into the closet
they had to mist with poison.
It matters that the album of hers
he found was filled with photos
of men she had mentioned only
in passing -- good-looking guys
from the 1980’s smiling on couches,
their eyes bright desire, each
assembled so as to suggest a
book of failures. He looks at the one
framed picture she stored in that
box of the two of them together
from that week in Pennsylvania
when they vowed to marry. Perhaps
she put that picture there when
he left her that bad season now
six years past. It matters that
after the exterminators
left he stashed all that stuff back
into the attic, momentoes and
books meant for a coming yard sale,
big plastic witches and smiling pumpkins,
and all those boxes of shoes,
an inexplicable dozen bed pillows
still in their wrappers. The
cat alert at the threshold
inspecting his work as he
bent low again and again
and crawled on wet boards.
The day breezy and cool-ish
and bright, perfect for his
gratitude for being in the same
house as his heart. He could have
showered and then lounged after
setting everything that matters
back in the places she had assigned;
he could have read a novel
for a while up on the recently
painted upper deck:
But instead he then labored
for three late hours in the front
yard, tearing up sod to extend
the garden, spading the tough
St. Augustine grass & shaking off
the dirt by whacking clods against
a nearby palm tree. He was soon
filthy in the hard work of what
matters, indescribably happy.
When she got home from
her day of taking her father to
physical therapy (he’s recovering
from a stroke) & taking gifts to
her mother for her 75th birthday
he could hardly move from the
couch. She thanked him for his
work saying she should have been
there and then told him that her
sister’s mother-in-law died the
last night from lung cancer, drowned
in her own fluids. They eat takeout
fried chicken and potato salad
and a delightful fruit salad (sweetness
upon sweetness in soft cusps
of fleshy juice) watching a bit
on the Knights Templar on the
History Channel, trying to stay
up for the “American Idol” results show.
But she passes out from the effect
of the Tylenol PM pills she took
for the day’s bad headache. He
sits for a while in the living room
with cool breezes fanning every which
way, trying not to think of the
hard day waiting for him ahead,
not knowing how much further into
the outside love will take him,
how much work it will take,
whether they’ll get any breaks at all
nor if that matters in any way
to the salt roads they fell to
when at last each said I do
and for ten hard years have
found a way to make that matter.

On Heirogamy and Sacrifice

“... Despite the fact that both (Melanippus) and Komaitho wanted to marry, all they got from both sets of parents was a determined refusal. The unhappy adventures of Melanippus, like those of many others, show how love tends to undermine the law of men and subvert their devotion to the gods. For, unable to marry, Komaithos and Melanippus slaked the thirst of their passion in the temple of Artemis, then took to using the temple regularly as a nuptial chamber.

“As a result, Artemis begin to weak her anger on the local inhabitants. The earth ceased to bear fruit, and people contracted strange and fatal diseases. So they fled to consult hte oracle at Delphi, where the Pythia laid the blame on Melanippus and Komaitho. The oracle ordered that the lovers be sacrificed to Artemis and that every year the most beautiful young girl and the most handsome young boy be sacrificed to the goddess.

“Because of the sacrifice, the people dubbed the river near the temple The Merciless. Previously it had had no name. The young boys and girls who would perish without having committed any crime, and likewise for their familiies, this was a terrible desitny, but I do believe that for Melanippus and Komaitho it was not a misfortune; only one thing is worht as much as life itself for me: that a love should be successful.”

-- Pausinas Description of Greece VII, 19, 1-5

Roberto Calasso comments, “Eros brings into the open what the law must hide yet nevertheless contains within itself: the fact that the temple is a nuptial chamber ... If heirogamy is the secret of sacrifice, sacrifice will nevertheless serve to hide the fact. It will pile a wall of blood and corpses before the place whree Komaitho and Melanippus abandoned themselves to their improbable, ‘successful’ love. (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 290)





DEFIANCE

May 16


Love is the greatest defiance,
defiling the temple of what we
must not touch with its
buck blue naked embrace.
Against the will of gods
and fathers I fathom down
to you, blue contemptessa,
finning leagues of salt desire
no mortal lungs or angel
wings can reach. Every cut
and bruise of this sundered
world condemns this fragile
house where my wife sleeps
and I extol profane profounds
& our cat curls on the cusp
between with the surest
purchase on Your theme.
Sum the freight of bills &
chores & worrisome news
both near and far and
a black sea’s mashed hard
against this house up to
its eaves: And yet we wake
and smile and hold hands
defiant of the day as
we have for ten years running.
I don’t know if marriage
thrives despite the ills
or because of them, as if
those nascent seeded
lovers years ago could not
rise to bloom without so
much black earth to fight
through. I knock against the
cold stone knees of fathers
who all failed in love’s
holy sacrilege: their fear is
the bony carapace of
self-reliant gall, erecting
a stone sea-wall against
the wash which heals
only by destroying all
one thinks is true and good.
They all failed love
as I do every day, in
all the bruised and sequent ways;
yet the mystery of history
is that love is wilder still,
an eternal boy astride
a dolphin joy, cresting
the pourings of first light.
I’m more enthralled with You
than ever, as both Eve-song
and eve-tide doom, that
curve of wave which
slakes the lyre I strum
and burn each day.
My life is one great
songbook for which this
poem is the latest page
I rip like panties from
the sweet slick hips
You are. Here at the altar
of the bluest depth
I jack my daily seed,
in praise of every shore
and bed I walk
and swim defiant
margins of. We’re slowly
dying in this crush of days,
every losing to the sea
the frail harborage we
found in each other
so many years ago: Yet
here is where love is
most strange and strongest,
after the wave has curved
and smashed and runnelled
up the sand in a cusp of hissing
foam: Whatever we made
here is holiest in ebbing back,
that motion resonant
of what is best in You and I,
cathedralled in the backdrawn
sigh which bids new lovers
desecrate the temple
we have built, and mortar
with their own ground bones
what we did in defiant
of all gods and parentage.
Let what they see in each others eye
replete what paired gods found
in their immortal immoral bouree
when they clenched and hissed I Dye
defiant of their every birthright
for one wild plunge in Your dark sea.





AN ANNIVERSARY

Wendell Berry

What we have been becomes
The country where we are,
Spring goes, summer comes,
And in the heat, as one year
Or a thousand years before,
The fields and woods prepare
The burden of their seed
Out of time’s wound, the old
Richness of the fall. Their deed
Is renewal. In the household
Of the woods the past
Is always healing in the light,
The high shiftings of the air.
It stands upon its yield
And thrives. Nothing is lost.
What yields, though in despair,
Opens and rises in the night.
Love binds us to this term
With its yes that is crying
In our marrow to confirm
Life that only lives by dying.
Lovers live by the moon
Whose dark and light are one,
Changing without rest.
The root struts from the seed
In the earth’s dark — harvest
And feast at the edge of sleep.
Darkened, we are carried
Out of need, deep
In the country we have married.





HOMEWARDING RIDE

20005

Looking out over the cove I felt a strong
sense of the interchangeability
of land and sea in this marginal world
of the shore and of the links between
the life of the two. There was an
awareness of the past and of the
continuity of time, obliterating much
that had gone before.

-- Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea

This shore we share was once
a birth, then a baptism,
and later still a naked kiss:
Now it’s just a paper strand
where I walk, pen in hand,
down a mile or so of
remembered bliss, arousing
on dry acres the salt
semblance of a blue fold
and crash and hiss.
Here I remit every ache
and sorrow on the inside
that remains, a love of
wetter regions of the
heart where here, even
at this our, that greater
salt sustains. Yesterday
my mother’s poodle
died, clutched away
by a massive heart attack
on the examining table.
My mother in her grief
said she was joined at
the heart with the frail
so docile doggie who
loved to be held in
her lap. Sometimes
my mother would set
Ginger in the front basket
of her bicycle and ride
the neighborhood, an old
woman with her matron
charge triumphant in
the basket, ears flapping
in the breeze like kites.
How awful now the empty
spaces in my mother’s house --
holy too, as heart-spaces
grow cathedral in the
tidal smashings of love,
waxing for scant moments
and then draining forever
out; and then the magic
of how that absence tides
into a fullness of
the inward shore, the
grieving sands poured
slowly full with laughing
children and romping dogs
and beloveds smiling
deep and sure. That’s
the strand I walk and
weave each day, declaring
brimming hearts from
paper boats loosed
on waters deep inside.
With God and kisses
on blue rockings my
homeward songs thus ride.

Springs of Artemis

High soaring heat after a latenight soak of a rain on Thursday night which drenched all of Central Florida: it turned cool for a couple of night and clear as a bronze bell. Breezy too, quickly drying out the land and putting us back in the wildfire red-flag territory.

After rising early Sat. morning to write the next poem I lay back on the couch in the living room around 5 a.m. and slept awhile, full moon blasting in from the window: dreamt hard and deep of a house not quite our own (my mother’s, too, perhaps formerly??) in which I labored to sweep the walkways clean of much blown sand and dirt, finding so much more property than I had imagined, finding at some northern corner (properly southern, as all dream territories are inverted, obversed) stairs leading down, a bath (overgrown with weeds), a kitchen filled with antique glassware and unmarked bottles under the sink (vodka or olive oil?). Wow, I had no idea ... wandering back through a garden of overgrown flowers, a domesticity gone wild, wanting to tell my wife all about this house we lived in that we didn’t know all about ... And then a far more sexual dream, some woman on a couch repaying me for my work at the pad on which I write poems and for dreaming by rolling off her jeans and panties, stretching her pussy wide for my view, inviting me to fuck her every which way, to thrust and tongue and buggar and bid suck every womanly orifice a man could desire -- and all of it a sexual welcome which is not, which cannot be, which is what some deeper agency than sex uses like blossoms to attract the bees of the mind, of song ...

Waking into a busy Saturday meeting with pest exterminators for another bid on ridding this house of drywood termites, and then working hard outside in the afternoon fury of the sun (into the 90s), attempting to move the border of the garden to the east, digging up 2-foot-square clumps of good St. Augustine sod -- a terrific effort for all of the roots of a nearby tree snarled in them -- and replainting the sod in a stretch of lawn on the western side of the driveway which has fallen into the ruin of crabgrass. Two hours of that in the late afternoon and I was wholly wiped, shoulders and back sore, hands cramped and caked with dirt, all of my singing downward in weariness ... Back to it again yesterday for another few hours mid morning past noon, the day again clearer than the conscience of a god, breezy and hot into the mid-90s, digging up the sod, digging out the old crabgrass, furrowing in the good stuff, wearying and glorying in the song of the day.



***


GRATITUDE

May 14

When the sharpness of life
would pierce through the dull
days, the Greeks would give
notice by attaching a red or
white woolen strip to whatever
was source to the pour.
The man who won a
the javelin toss would fasten
a bright strip to his arm
and mothers tied strips
to their daughters’ wedding
torches. Strips festooned
biers of the dead and
fluttered from the prows
of ships, they hung from
axe-hafts & the heads
of beautiful boys &
the horns of bulls led
to sacrifice. By such
gestures a culture lifted
itself on the breeze,
encircled and raptured
by the gods with their praise.
Wherever one saw those soft
fluttering strips the nature
of art was revealed,
like a sudden harbor where
every proud ship comes
in from the sea. Without
taking notice there is
no welcome, and without
welcome there is no sea,
only the hollow drone
of dead rituals. Imagine
what it was to walk on
a bright breezy day
amid thousands of those
tiny flags fluting merrily
from every protubance
and curve, from urns &
sword-hilts & cooking
pots & the waists of young
women laughing by the shore.
No wonder that people
live on deep in the heart,
glittering like sunlight
on the bluest of seas,
a garden of bright souls
of whom we are the leaves,
their gratitude our breeze.





BEYOND PLEASURE

Jack Gilbert

Gradually we realize what is felt is not so important
(however lovely or cruel) as what the feeling contains.
Not what happens to us in childhood, but what was
inside what happened. Ken Kesey sitting in the woods,
beyond his fence of whitewashed motorcycles, said when
he was writing on acid he was not writing about it.
He used what he wrote as blazes to find his way back
to what he knew then. Poetry registers
feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches
out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.
Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be
an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world
part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux
to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.
The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward
to know its merit with attention.

-- from Refusing Heaven

***


love is the stranger
who takes you away
love is the danger
you risk it all to play
love will always be like this
darkness just behind the kiss
love is the stranger
love is the stranger
love is the stranger

-- lyric to a song, 1986


***

In search of my Love
I will go over mountains and strands,
I will gather no flowers,
I will fear no wild beasts;
And pass by the mighty and the frontiers.

-- The Bride in “The Song of the Soul and the Bridegroom,” St. John of the Cross, transl. David Lewis

***

ALLIGATOR ATTACKS KILL 3 IN 1 WEEK

Orlandosentinel.com
May 15, 2006

By Amy C. Rippel and Stephen Hudak

A woman snorkeling in a Marion County spring and a homeless woman trespassing in a Tampa Bay-area backyard were found dead Sunday in alligator attacks, bringing to three the number of fatal strikes in less than a week.

The bloody week in Florida's waterways marks a stark departure for a state that had seen just 17 confirmed deadly encounters with alligators in 58 years.

The homeless woman found dead and dismembered Sunday morning had been killed as many as three days earlier, officials said. A homeowner found the body near Oldsmar in Pinellas County.

The woman apparently was alone, her purse and some drugs found nearby, and she had suffered alligator bites. Officials say the attack was a factor in her death but won't know an official cause for as long as four weeks.

A Tennessee woman killed Sunday afternoon was swimming with friends in Juniper Run in Ocala National Forest. Two of the friends tried to pry her body from the jaws of the alligator, gouging its eyes in a frantic effort to free her.

That incident came just five days after a South Florida woman out for a jog went missing near a Broward County canal. Her dismembered body was found the next day, and the alligator that attacked her was captured and killed Saturday, parts of the jogger's body still in its digestive tract.

Officials with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said there have been an increasing number of alligator attacks for several reasons, including warmer weather and humans encroaching on alligator territory.

"The bottom line is, yes, the trend is increasing," said commission spokeswoman Joy Hill.



The stomach of this 9 1/2-foot gator -- captured Saturday in the Sunrise canal where the body of Yovy Suarez Jimenez was found Wednesday -- contained 2 severed arms.

***


Roberto Calasso plumbs an artesian well of the paradox of virginity and rape as something about the willed inviolability of human boundaries and the frightening incursions of immortal desire:

The perennial virginity young Artemis demanded as a first gift from her father Zeus is the indomitable sign of the detachment ((of the divine from the mortal)). Copulations, mixis, means “mingling” with the world. Virgo, the virgin, is an isolated, sovereign sign. Its counterpart, when the divine reaches down to touch the world, is rape. The image of rape establishes the canonical relationship the divine now has with a world matured and softened by sacrifices: contact is still possible, but it is no longer the contact of a shared meal: rather it is the sudden, obsessive invasion which plucks away the flower of thought.

Man’s relationship with the gods passed through two regimes: first conviviality, then rape. The third regime, the modern one, is that of indifference, but with the implication that the gods have already withdrawn, and hence, if they are indifferent in our regard, we can be indifferent as to their existence or otherwise. Such is the peculiar situation of the modern world.

But returning to earlier times: there was an age when the gods would sit down alongside mortals, as they did at Cadmus and Harmony’s wedding feast in Thebes. At this point gods and men had no difficulty recognizing each other; sometimes there were even companions in adventure, as were Zeus and Cadmus, when the man proved of vital help to the god. Relative roles in the cosmos were not disputed, since they had already been assigned; hence gods and men met simply to share some feast before returning each to his own business.

Then came another phase, during which the god might not be recognized. As a result the god had to assume the role has has never abandoned since, right down to our own times, that of the Unknown Guest, the Stranger. One day the sons of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, invited to their table an unknown laborer who was in fact Zeus. “Eager to know whether they were speaking to a real god, they sacrificed a child and mixed his flesh with that of the sacred victimes, thinking that if the stranger was a god he would discover what they had done.” Furious, Zeus pushed over the table. That table was the ecliptic plane, which from that day on would be forever tilted. There followed the most tremendous flood.

After that banquet, Zeus made only rare appearances as the Unknown Guest. The role passed, for the most part, to other gods. Now, when Zeus chose to tread the earth, his usual manifestation was through rape. This is the sign of the overwhelming power of the divine, of the residual capacity of distant gods to invade mortal minds and bodies. Rape is at once possessing and possession. With the old convivial familiarity between god and man lost, with ceremonial contact through sacrifice impoverished, man’s soul was left exposed to a gusting violence, an amorous persecution, an obsessional goad. Such ar the stories of which mythology is woven: they tell how mortal mind and body are still subject to the divine, even when they are no longer seeking it out, when the ritual approaches to the divine have become confused.

-- The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 53-4

***

Yes, how much of my history is composed of misreadings of the divine, the messages confused, mixed, noodles between my hips and upon my shoulders arguing endlessly without much discernment of the wild world I was wending through ... If all things indeed are holy and worth mention, even the darkest nooks have their lucence and augment. And since I’ve gotten everything else so wrong, perhaps they shine the brightest in their worst darkness.

Was there a soul blindly seeking out a beloved in those nights of random quarry, quarrying not so much the body of some other as to mine the depths of a self? And as language is so imprecise of speaking the heart, so too the tropes of outward motion, that to spear the darkest numens of the soul one has to lunge into the blackest regions of the night - a necessary dangerous and luminous motion reserved for wilder agencies than exist in these days.

Maybe that’s why the night of the soul is so dark ...




***

O crystal well!
Oh that thy silvered surface
Thou woulds’t mirror forth at once
Those eyes desired
Which are outlined in my heart!


...

My Beloved is in the mountains,
The solitary wooded valleys,
The strange islands,
The roaring torrents,
The whispering of amorous gales;

The tranquil night
At the approaches of the dawn,
The silent music,
The murmuring solitude,
The supper which revives and enkindles love.

Our bed is of flowers
By dens of lions encompassed,
Hung with purple,
Made in peace,
And crowned with a thousand shields of gold.

In Thy footsteps
The young ones run Thy way;
At the touch of the fire
And by the spiced wine,
The divine balsam flows.

In the inner cellar
Of my Beloved I have drunk; and when I went forth
Over all the plain
I knew nothing,
And lost the flock I followed before.

There He gave me his breasts,
There He taught me the science of fulls sweetness.
And there I gave to HIm
Myself without reserve;
There I promised to be His bride.

-- St. John of the Cross, “The Song of the Soul and the Bridegroom”





ARTEMIS REVEALED


Those nights of unyielding
sex with strangers are long gone
except that thing which was never
quite about them: I mean
the way a woman whom I had only
seen the first fleeting and
surficial gleams of -- smiling
abstractly at me across the bar
in the smoke and din and ruin
of another night wasted in
the salt-mines of desire --
would only hours later in some
foreign room kiss me equally
abstractly and then, with the
most infinitesimal of sighs,
unbutton her blouse & then
unhook her bra and swing
her breasts free up to my face,
like some surfacing of dolphins
up from far below in a brilliant
splash of naked contact.
The memory of that
sudden offering of
nakedness from someone
so unknown to me is the
thing which remains like
a deep artesian spring;
How startled I was by
the shout of those breasts,
so pale and nippled and
curved my way, that
I felt baptised somehow,
blessed by the knowledge
of the thrill and thrall of
going all the way right then,
so fast and deep as to drink
the entire bottle of the other
in one unyielding swig. It
was surely like the hunter
Actaeon who stumbles on
a bathing glade to see not only
a virgin girl but a goddess virgin
in all her divine and dangerous
nakedeness as that stranger
of a woman would reach
from that great distance
we mortals live between,
across every hurtful strange
and angry reason lovers take
years to marry each other,
and with eyes fully in receipt
of the stranger I was to her
begin to stroke my cheek and
then my chest, pinching hard
a surprised nipple & then
snaking down to grip my crotch
and squeeze and knead and
yank my hardness out in
bewildered raw splendor,
cool in the night air despite
her hot hand which soon
was replaced by her hot
moist mouth, lips I had
only kissed but once now
sliding up and down my
dick, sucking one and then
the other testicle swollen
hard and rude with that
deepest nakedness which
is most aware of its receipt
in another’s desire. Not
the pornographic splendor
of those moments (though
you’ll never find me
complain about that)
but rather the curve and crash
of an immenser wave than
we are meant to find in
that surf where two souls
so fumblingly attempt to
fuse in one deep heart.
That a wild careen of
crashing foam -- both hot in
thrash yet cold from so
much else hauled willingly
up from far below: That
is the mineral lode of
luminescence I recall
from those one-night stands,
the part of sex which
was so pure and blue as
to be not about the sex at
all, the outermost confirmation
of something the inward virgin
goddess demanded most of me.
Sucked off hard and fast
yet dizzy for more and more,
I’d tug that strange waif’s jeans
and panties off & bury my
face in a pond which had a
mirror hanging at her deepest
pussy wall where my inward
woman stared back with greedy
drowned blue eyes, singing
my birthday song in a key
which I heard inside the
woman’s orgasmic sighs
on a surface miles above,
so far I could no longer see
her as she gripped my hair
and moaned some other
man’s name and clenched
and hissed and swore for
me to fuck her now and hard.
And when I did, pinning
her hands to the carpeted
floor, my cock careening
like a dolphin in and out
and up and down, balls
slapping hard against her
ass like the fool who
shouts Amen to every
king’s outrage: And when
I did, crazed past hope of
ever finding shore again,
completely in the arms of she
who I’d never see again
past dawn, I’d sense the
grimmest satisfaction in
the queen who rules below,
a curve which sirens in a surf
only infinitesimally a sea,
naked crash of blue black wave
which crests her bed at last
in amid the baying of desires
devouring me with fire.