The Trident

SEA-TREASURE

Buried under the garden
just outside now darkly dreaming
down your waters is
Your trident, sea-father,
farer of my bluest thundering.
Only a tip of barb breaks the
earth in three places I’d
rather not name, for fear
their terrible thirst awaken
here to nail my ghostly
readers, or the absence of
them where I heave these daily lines.
The tale of its brute fashioning
on the island of Rhodes
in the fog of human time
is one so drowned and rounded
by salt swash that it survives
only by savagery, each curve
of cruel iron like a keel
that sailed impossibly far
to ruin here. When your infant heart
was entrusted to a daughter
of Okeanos to nurse, the
island’s darkest citizens
went to work below
to forge Your claw and sceptre.
In caves where sulphurous
pits spat and stank
with magmatic melt the
Telchines hammered and
killed spits of red hot iron,
shaping a form emblemic
of triple death by water,
the very nature of our tempering.
I imagine the sound
of that infernal craft
like a bass continuo to
Your youth, a low thrum
which as you grew rose
up to pound darkly in
Your loins. You left Your
nurse and walked down
to shore where You saw
the sea-nymph Helias curved
naked by the sea. Thus
You were hooked by
shapes suggesting thrash
and sate, and fell deeply
in love right there, hurling
wave after wave of salt-
hot sperm into her teeming
womb. A wonder for You,
perhaps, but the sons You
sired were rude and mean,
beating down the locals
and refusing harbor to the maid
of love in every stony cove.
No wonder she punished them,
using in an inside way
the same sharp barbs
the land had forged for Your
outer deepest rule;.
Your sons penises all
grew stout and cawed
loudly not for maidenheads
but Your wife, their own
exalted mama. And
exactly when they
fell on her the Giants
roused along the eastern
shore, their hair all matted
with seaweed and shattered
masts, their cliff-high
torsos exactly in the mold
of the Colossus who would
much later rise above the
the seaport built by Greeks
at Rhodes, the shadow of
the old man who is both
watcher and warden
of Your sea. But You first
had work to do, dispatching
sons and giants back into
the brutal earth. I imagine
their howls as the ground
split wide to be that cry
of birth which gluts on
unholy rage and fire. As if
to baptize the myth a second
time, Your wife jumped into
the sea to become the white goddess
whose watery name is pure
death, the eternally just-ravished
moon. She smiled as You
watched in horror at
the mass of bubbles which
swirled then disappeared.
And then the third barb of
this myth sank in as You
felt something tap Your shoulder:
You turned seeing no one there
(not even love)
but a trident laying huge
and cruel upon pale sands,
still wet with Your wife’s
forever ebbing wave.
Of that trident’s long patronage
to here, I’ll only say what
awe and awfulness it bore
in the salt careen of my black-wet years.
No song I’ve crafted yet has well enough
described how hard and rough
You plunged it through my soak,
over and over again so many
nights that only seas are
metaphor enough to reckon
the breadth and depth of blue
that trident murthered me through.
I write at 4 a.m. in the blackest
sounds of night, my wife far
in her waters & the cat curled
on the couch dreaming surely
of treats and prey and long
slow pets wherever she would
lay. Outside the garden is aswoon
in the wilder latitudes of May
which invoke the rainy season,
a coming tide of bolt and rain
which alone can save this land.
Your trident is buried in the
garden’s fragrant loam, above
the sons and devils of every night
I erred heaving Your eternal waves
on beds whose shores no man
was ever meant to fall on.
Oh how gently the butterfly
bushes swirl in the noctilucent
breeze, their tiny pink and
red buds aswoon in that sweetness
which nails their prey clean through,
hauling every delighted soak
all the way back and down to You.
And though this is just
more lines on paper, each one
tines a torn gobbet of that old
dark flavor forged on Rhodes
so long ago, so juicy with
fat and blood I swear I taste my mother
in its barbed and hard-fucked indigoes,
clear and cold and pale as moon
now dreaming in a sea whose
shore I bane and boon.



From Carl Kerenyi’s The Gods of the Greeks:

According to a tale {from Diodorus Siculus}, Rhea carried the newly born Poseidon into safety with {the Telchines, a} people of skilled craftsmen, the Underworldly inhabitants of the island of Rhodes. Kapheira, a daughter of Okeanos, was Poseidon’s nurse. It was the Telchines who forged his trident for him. But it was never suggested that this jealous people could have taught him their crafts.

... When Poseidon had ripened into manhood, so the tale continues, he fell in love with Halia {“the sea-goddess”} and begat by her six sons, also a daughter named Rhodos, from whom the island got its name. This was a time when the Giants had sprung up in the eastern part of the island, and when Zeus had already defeated the Titans. Aphrodite had just been born of the sea, near Cytherea, and was already on her way to Cyprus. The insolent and high-handed sons of Poseidon prevented her from landing on Rhodes. For this the goddess punished them with madness, so that they sought to lie with their own mother. This they did, and they also oppressed the islanders with their own deeds of violence. When Poseidon observed this, he avenged the disgrace that his sons had brought upon their mother by causing them to sink beneath the earth; since then they have been called Gods, or Spirits, of the east. Halia threw herself into the sea, and since then has borne the name Leukothea, “the white goddess,” and is worshipped by the islanders as immortal.

D-Cup Epiphanies

UPON JULIA'S BREASTS

by Robert Herrick

DISPLAY thy breasts, my Julia—there let me
Behold that circummortal purity,
Between whose glories there my lips I'll lay,
Ravish'd in that fair via lactea.


***

There is a tale from Hyperides retold by Carl Kerenyi in The Gods of the Greeks about the marriage of Poseidon and Thophanes, whose name is central and epiphantic, translated either as “she who appears as a goddess” or “she who causes a god to appear.” Both statements I think are mythically true, showing how mystery arises and arouses directly out of history, on the wave-crashings of desire.

Anyway, the story goes that her father King Bisaltes of Macedonia was a son of Helios and Gaia, a titanic legacy which delved the daugter Theophanes, so beautiful that suitors swarmed round her aura like intoxicated bees. Poseidon abducts her to an island in the middle of the sea whose name means “The Island of the Ram.” To hide from the suitors, Poseidon turns his bride into a sheep and himself into a ram; oh what the hell, one guesses his thought, as he then turns all the inhabitants of the island into sheep. (One ram, all that sheep, get it.) The suitors show up and find no trace of the god or goddess-seeming woman on the island and depart, allowing Poseidon to consummate his ram-marriage. From this union the ram with the golden fleece was born, a pelt which was later carried by Phrixos to Colchis, thus causing the great voyage of the Argonauts.

Beauty and booty, the sacred profane: who is that god of desire who rises from the waters, both the Venusian wonder of every curve to take a man’s breath away, and the shout of the exultant god arousing thus, wakened from nothing, flat waters and abyss.

That moment is both far and close; past and present phrenologies reveal a rich dappled surface prescient of and precipient to the divine, the rough surface of an orange unpeeling to naked fruit bursting with sweet juice, naughty nipples where there were qwerty keys on a computer keyboard, each letter & symbol a door to the imprurient and lacivious dark.


EPIPHANY

May 24

She appeared to me as a goddess,
she caused a god to appear
in the great profane night of my soul,
redeeming with desire. One look
across the room and my world
fell into water, jostling my fate
on huge waves as inevitable
of white shores as the way she
loved me a short while and
then drained out of every door.
Not much remains of that night
except recalling how, much later
yet still hours from first light,
she stared full into my eyes
with a cryptic soft smile
unbuttoning her blouse
and freeing her breasts from
a brassiere as if to slap me
awake with her pure
circummortal fire. Thus
the pretty stranger suddenly
changed into the utterly
ravishable bride, so fast
that wheeled eternities
spun something something
deep and wild free from
my history, jumping from those
tracks to another one
forever in and out a door
not grasped by mortal hands.
With an unwavering gaze
and half-shadowed smile
she revealed her secret
treasury to me, the epiphany
of a goddess waking a god
I didn’t know I ferried.
fleecing the night, the hour,
that random short bouree
a fleeting woman had with me
with a gold not found but is--
the myth, the mystery of
naked breasts which
tided me to a god’s isle
far at sea. There we found
ourselves naked amid
a choir of crashing waves,
anointed by Their highest
desire. The whole ruined
pantheon seemed alive
that singular night,
hallooing and crowing
and crowning our hot
loins where it seemed
the entire lost relation
was so juicily rejoined.

***

So yesterday, some 25 years later I’m at the imaging clinic with my wife on a Tuesday morning, taking a half day off from work so I can be there for the results of her mammogram -- there’s a cyst, questions about how it should be treated, whether the darker sorrows are colonizing there. A cloudy warm morning, several weeks before the start of the hurricane season, oppressive and humid with age and worry and history.

Oddly, next door to the facility is the Harem Room, formerly called the Booby Trap, a topless bar with very obvious architecture, two round domes for a roof fonted by large cement nipples. Back all those years into my lost voyagings on the black sea of desire I’d stopped into the Trap, drinking six-dollar beers and sitting dazed and bleary next to the stage where Daphnes and Chloes and Porches shook breasts whose nipples had been covered, according to the law, with Band-Aids. Trap of desire, indeed -- sitting there with all the other connectionless losers, rednecks with baseball caps slung low over their eyes, greasy accountants with loosened ties, husbands and lovers for whom simply looking at nakedness from the belly of the whale sufficed. We all believed something great and luminous was there, enough to risk the humiliation of being there, the risk of getting a DUI or a loved one finding out about all the secrets stashed in the closet of one’s hidden desires -- Call it a chapel of sorts, albeit cheap and beer-washed and attended by a bunch of bored buck-hungry young women for whom everything else had been stripped away already: Holy and dread, just like the old tales ...

Anyway, the waiting room is packed with nervous women of various ages, a high TV babbling the cycle of cable news for the two hours I sit there, Barry Bonds blah blah bear breaks into Colorodo house blah blah Enron jury deliberations continue blah blah bombs kills 40 in Bagdhad blah blah blah. I’m reading an Umberto Eco novel somewhat blearily, half asleep, lulled by the drone of dread and news into a fraught sort of half-sleeping. I doze off the end of a sentence and dream that behind the closed doors of this ward women fit their breasts into a plastic safe like we use for our butcher knife, a booby trap of medical certainty. How could so much fructiveness and wonder also font such horrors? When my wife emerges she’s smiling though somewhat pale -- nothing to worry about that cyst, the radiologist confirms, though she will have to come back to have it drained, though the blood test may still show something, though she will have to come back next year, though she will always have good reason for worry due to those breasts I have always found such delight in cupping while she slept, as if to curl my hands around the infinite itself.

Maybe Venus is more naked than ever -- to terribly revealed and revered for our own good -- but a culture besotted on D-cup-sized creamery thus calibrates its thirst to divine magnitudes. The goddess of the wave may have vanished, but not ever her epiphany. Girls, I don’t know if you’ve ever had your breath taken away with the sight of your lover naked -- maybe all that’s mere interface for more substantial nutrients within -- but if eyes could portion eternity, they do it one glance. Never mind the consequence, the ruin, the failing of both sight and what it beholds: that’s the power of the mythic image, a bulb with wattage that cannot go dark.




OLD IRISH LOVE POEM

O God, that I and my love
of the smooth white breast were together.
And none awake in the land of Ireland,
Men and women deep in sleep
While my love and I make play!
O fair-hued and loveliest of women,
O guiding star of my destiny,
I shall never believe from priest or brother
That there is sin in making love ...
... Never will death come near us,
In the middle of the fragrant wood.

— O Tuama, an Irish love poet,
from “An Gra in Amhrain,”
transl. Prosinias Mac Cana


***

She comes not (now)
She comes not when Noon is on the roses —
... Too bright is the day.
She comes not to the Soul til it reposes
... From work and play.
But when Night is on the hills, and the great Voices
... Roll in from Sea,
By starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight
... She comes to me.

— Herbert Trench, “She Comes Not When Noon is On The Roses”



… Do not dare to name them! Half-gods
hardly are allowed in our dark mouths ...
And, even full of insistence, the soul
knows only this amorphous Angel
who, bit by bit, erects himself on the edge
of our sufferings: bright, fatal and forceful,
never flinching, never afraid of heights,
but for all that, himself the vassal-being
of an unknown and sovereign contract.
Him, Captial, vertical letter
of the word that, slowly, we demolish;
brass boundary of our native life,
anonymous measure of those mountains
forming a chain in our heart,
in its abrupt and savage part ...
Harbor statue, landing beacon,
and yet, contemptuous shipwrecks!
... But inside you, a the very depths of you,
what a cemetery! So many Gods acquitted,
dismissed, forgotten, out of use,
so many prophets, so many wise men,
abandoned by your mad desire!

— from Rilke’s “But It Is Purer To Die,” transl. A. Poulin Jr.




KIMBERLEY BLUE

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





CROSS BETWEEN
A WOMAN’S BREASTS”

Bright martyr,
you’re perfect
hanging there,
fusing me
to this song.

Grace note at
the center of
a dark pond.

Gold cup
brimming my gaze.

Compass
of insurrection
and grief.

Hammer for
a distant gong.

Nails at nether
and nadir
of this surf.

Ferryboat
and sherpa.

Crossroads
altar to making
and slaking.

You’re the bright aria
of the woman
I’ll never know
sitting across from
me in every room,

blessing my day
with one glint
of paradise.

Thank you, Lord,
for hanging
me here.


STUDIOLI

Dec. 2004

My study’s housed upon
the back of Brendan’s
whale, mid-sea of
all you turned salt blue
when you smiled and
disappeared from view.
Here are vaulted all
the beds and boats a
and books I found
the ghost of a warm
bleam of you in
these cold and rainy nights
when the world seemed
doomed to drown.
Your proffered breasts
upturns the bottom
of the sea and milks
its old lactissima,
a white smile so
sweet and warm
and frothy as to
smash every coast
and cape in ecstasy.
Guitar and pen
are my harpoons,
polished to a gleam
and displayed in thick
blue plush, fabled nibs
for hauling in those
finny angels whose
names I sing in
these matins of all seas.
Here are the three
rude cups you bid me
drink, poured to dregs
the swelter tonnage
of abyss; and here’s
the ravaged saddle of
the wave-maned horse
which is your
palanquin and my
writing chair.
Here is the spout-hole
of the whale which is
my darkling reach
to all the books cast
to the wave, a well
which spumes the exalt
psalms of every poet
since Taleissin to look
at you and sing. Here
is the heart of my fancy,
my outre madman’s
gaming room; ,my half
acre of black blubber
bathed by darkupswellings
of deep gloom; my chapel
of Iseult of the White
Hands who weaves my tears
each night upon her
dream-pale loom. Here
is the chambered
study study where
each artefact your
womb produced is
vaulted and revered,
the sum of every ache
and swoon I ever
felt for you, every
wave that ever found
a shore, every kiss
that turned the world
the wildest windy blue.

that his thirst may thus stay sealed.

Poseidon's Venture

The tales of (Poseidon) depict a turbulent god who neither served the female, like the purely phallic beings, nor held supreme dominance over all, as Zeus did. In his quality of father -- for he could also be called simply Pater, “father” -- he came somewhere between the two sorts of the male god; those, on the one hand, who served the Great Mother; on the other hand, the Olympian Father who nevertheless, in times of stuggle and while the new rule was being established, still resembled Poseidon. Posiedon continued to be a darker father beside his heavenly brother; he continued, longer and more closely than Zeus, to be associated with animal shapes; and the sea was his most fitting dominionr. Yet he was not as dark as Hades, king of the Underworld, the third brother and also Zeus’s sinister counterpart, since the latter only ruled above.

Well-known portrayals of Poseidon show him majestically holding the emblem of his power, the trident. His suppressed savagery and menacing wrath were equally classical.

- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

***

Suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity rising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.

—Melville, Moby Dick




... Far had he roam’d,
With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam’d
Above, around, and at his feet; save things
More dead than Morpheus’ imaginings:
Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large
Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;
Rudders that for a hundred years had lost
The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss’d
With long-forgotten story, and wherein
No reveller had ever dipp’d a chin
But those of Saturn’s vintage; mouldering scrolls,
Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls
Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude
In ponderous stone, developing the mood
Of ancient Nox;—then skeletons of man,
Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,
And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw
Of nameless monster. A cold leaden awe
These secrets struck into him; and unless
Dian had chased away that heaviness,
He might have died: but now, with cheered feel,
He onward kept; wooing these thoughts to steal
About the labyrinth in his soul of love.

-- Keats Endymion



***


SHAKER MOVER

May 23

Earth-shaker, sea’s mover,
Your hooves of foam are too much
for me: to know You is to
assault with twenty-foot-high
waves of sperm in the spasmatic
bellow of billowed quake,
fundament in motion,
restless & unslaked.
No altar to You survives at
that mauled and boiled shore
You father in me every day;
instead I find myself pitched
on the horns of how I failed
to write of You, a splintered
breviary whose blue pages
crash endlessly through me.
Always the edge of days
You thrash insatiable, Your
sceptered manhood barbed
three ways to hook to three
dangerous middle worlds at
once: under water, earth, and
heaven’s dearth but shy
of darkest death. Your
trident’s poised above the blue
gleaming cruelly in the sun,
still dripping in Your tensed hand
to fling and pierce me once again
exactly where I sprint through days.
In words You are the crashing boom
which mauls petite epiphaines;
You are that cold undertow
which hauls from every pretty shore
the virgin bride of innocence,
marrying her sweet smile to the abyss
of one long deep descending kiss.
Every awe I womb with wonder
You salt with awful thunder,
ravishing perfected worlds
on horses hauling ass over the
end of every mortal enterprise,
each wave with a huge equine neck
maned with blowing foam,
the eyes inside that hurl full Yours,
smashing me clean through
with every trident doom.
You vault far down the blackened blue
vast treasuries of gold taboo,
violations and transgressions,
noctural outrage and rapines,
defiant thefts and profanations
in every temple built by men.
Whatever shadows the heat
of this salacious brain
ends down there on the shitpile
of Your drain, split frigates
spilling raw doubloons, piled
brassieres still warm with
their occupants’ spilt cream,
a million splintered poems
that tried to say just what
You whispered all night long
in that surf whose crash I dream
and wake as if drowned from,
disordered, strewn, unclean
in Your divinest way,
a son now of those rude firmaments
which trap and sire me in this day.

Godz

Walk with me a while through Releig Odhrain, the graveyard of the Iona Abbey dedicated to St. Oran who harrowed the cold earth of Iona so Columba’s abbey walls could stand: Here the bones of many Irish and Scot kings are interred, sent there because of a prophesy that only Iona would survive the final flood. The graveyard was dedicated to Oran because, according to St. Columba, “no man may access the angels of Iona but through Oran”; as if one’s mortality was the very door to divinity, and it is, our mortality I mean, our every living breathing desiring dying sense a door to the infinite, reaching out across a distance the sense only intimate, only name the first careening shore of.

Wake with me here awhile, on this warm black morning of blossoming summer, one window opened to it, through which the rich weave of crickets and a dead suburb’s exhaling dream works through, pressed, almost, ghostlike against this interior, helping me to press fingers to the keypad. Summer’s nocturnal ouija, recalling the animus of days:

Yes, I remember, albeit dismembered from those moment which are still shrill and nubile:

It was in the mid-90s this weekend as I worked in the garden extending its border, rototilling the dirt,digging out roots, moving the black plastic border while the day soared brilliant and oppressive, into that indistinctness of the summer sky where the sun’s too bright for blue skies, blurring them into a melt of intensity, an almost browned hue without the benefit of clouds. Whew.

I loved it, half naked kneeling in the dirt, sweating hard, bugs crawling all over my hands, neighbors talking to each other as they worked, our tiny lots in Paradise about what thousands more are about, tiny beads on an infinite abacus whose sum is a summer day in Florida ...




I was so tired late afternoon I napped for two hours naked in the guest bedroom we’re sleeping in while the drywood termite situation is resolved, depleted and repleted, sailing down oblivion on an bark of sensual joy, overhead fan whirring breaths of Salome across my chest & balls, my wife sewing next door in this study, cats outside and inside spoored in their own snooze. Float in it, douse the fire, feel it still burning on the flesh ...

What joy later to eat grilled burgers & fries and cold juicy watermelon with the sprinklers calming the sun-bedazzled garden & nothing on TV but wasteland effluence, Schwarzenegger movies & Coyote competition among nipply CMT naiads & flashes of the world’s perturbance on CNN (Iraqi government formed, 23 killed by bombs, someone in Altamonte Springs murdered in a home invasion, worrisome glances at gator-infested lakes) & baseball games under the lights & NASCAR racing at Dayton & my wife falling asleep in her chair & Violet in the window behind me catching what’s on the tube of purring night ...

***

I arrive at this moment through Oran’s graveyard, weirdly, rightly so, as if His attention were as much on my iota as my iota yearns to his infinite blue. A mutual embrace of men and gods.
But what do we know of such things any more? With all the rituals gone rote, the leys forgotten, the keys to the kingdom fallen in the drink? We have mastered fire, made fire’s demon caster obsolete; now fire masters us, and the burning mind has forgotten the spells of containment. We burn with lost connection.

I think that’s what Larry Levis was getting to when he wrote,


... Walk a few steps more with me,

Show me the house I must still be living in,
Where eternity was no more than my hand
Scurrying across a sheet of paper,

Kindling blent to the music of its hush;
Walk with me a little way past it , now,
With the wrong, other angel trapped in stone

With the heavens behind you on fire.

-- “Elegy With An Angel At Its Gate,” from Elegy

***

And this poem by Rilke suggests that the avenues re-entering the divine cathedral are all dark, and take the direction not of glorious connection but loss:


HOLY GHOST

Behind an altar in the chapel
I found a demolished Holy Ghost;
he hadn’t perished from wrong-doing,
but, instead, from that eternal

Loss of things that surprises us
With its inimitable powers;
The rest, he admits, is as harrowing
As making absence into mother.

-- from The Complete French Poems, transl. A. Poulin, Jr


***

I venture that the process by which human consciouness has grown is one which necessarily comes to kill of the gods which once inspired it up from the waters. A distance, a difference is required for growth, defining how far one works from A to B: The gods evolved from Titans to Olympans, up from hoary earth to sky, as that difference evolved within us. We moved in sequence to that motion, a parallel leap, the greater metaphor inspiring the lesser mundane.

But the difference, the difference, that was the key. Roberto Calasso, from The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:

***

It was precisely because the Greeks had reduced the difference between gods and men to a minimum {gods have no blood and eat different food} that they measured the distance still separating them with such cruel precision: an infinite, unbridgeable distance. And never has that distance been so sharply defined as by the Greeks themselves. No mist hovered about the approaches to death. It was an abyss with razor edges, never crossed. Hence the Greeks were well aware of the powerlessness of their sacrifices. Every ceremony in which a living being was killed was a way of recalling the mortality of the participants. And the smoke they dedicated to the gods was certainly no use to the divinities as food. No, that smell of blood {poured in libation uselessly upon the ground} and smoke was a message from earth, a pointless gift, reminded the Olympians of the consciously precarious existence of all those distant inhabitants of earth, who in every other way were equal to the gods. And what the gods loved about men was precisely this difference, this precariousness, which they themselves could relish only through men. It was a flavor they could never get from their ambrosia or nectar. That was why they would sometimes abandon themselves to inhaling the smoke of sacrifice, breath of that other life which enjoyed the precious privilege of stirring the air of Olympus.

***

So where does that lead to, and what have we here?

***

OLYMPUS

May 19

Gods arose and flourished where
we faltered, failed and died--
Venus for unmanning age,
Poseidon where the boats go down,
Apollo for each loosed thought
shot far short of truth.
Hestia guards the hearth
we could not fully tend,
Artemis overts those purities
we ruined with desire.
What I lack They lustre,
what I wrack They wreathe
in all the starry gusto
a transfixed heart seethes
clinging to its upturned boat.
Their altars name the seam
which chasms I to Thou,
each a last surrender to
what we archly fail to do.
Their pride is our humility,
a herm where words run
short of sufficient things to say,
thunder where I once believed
no day had magnitude, a
brimming cup of wine-dark blood
for which there are no dregs
deep enough to slake these
horns so pent with ache.
A grave portals that door
through which no mortal lungs
inhale, the air beyond
pure water, inherent yet
dissimilar as any man and wife.
So why then did gods die,
leached back into an airless sky?
Is it because we’ve sealed enough
seams of our conflicted falls
with mortared fire, heaping so
much brilliance over every edge
the precipice whites out?
Our city lights have dimmed the stars
so long they hardly flicker in the mind;
only the bow of the Archer remains
of that fierce light which sped
arrow after arrow through the
pelt of Arcturus, bear-god who
lords the sleep of Arthur.
It’s not that we’ve bridged
the gaps as much as have exceeded
in our faulty amplitude, rescinding
savage constellates for that
far saner realm of character
with its twelve neurotic archetypes
and nine adducing muses
enrapturing the whistles of
our seven trooping sins.
We’ve dug down through divines
like prospectors in a mine,
hauling gold nuggets in our hands
sure we would get rich enough
to gambol in bright mansions
of our immortallest desires.
And thus the old world died,
whimpered down in the ebb
of an exiling doom, its sweet
and chilling music pushed back
beyond dunes now walled by condos.
It’s edged back beyond our care
where it has slowly stilled into
distance with a difference:
the age of melting steel.
The gods are headless torsos,
their wings & penises secreted
in the vaults of churches
bumping spires in the harbor
choiring a drowned vicarage
where Down’s the only way to go.
Even our words for Them are
vanishing; silence now attends
those altars to what we once knew
we’d never own, perfected now
in mortal gods whose days are bright
and hot down summer’s maw.
smile. Expect no arrows here,
no bad and funny masks,
no savior to salt the tide.
We face this beast alone
each morning in the mirror
with all we know faced off
with what cannot be clearer.
The difference we must bear
is the one which can’t be borne
and there is no horns to foist it on--
just this fool heart and its idiot
brother eighteen inches up the spine
which still thinks it freights
the heavens in its cup.
The vault from vale to mount
now spans a neck, from
shoulders to brainpan;
it shortens still; each time
we name an invisible
we close the gap an inch,
and something more leaps over
to claim an inch of spiral castle.
“Know Yourself” is the perfect
catapult, defining sharper a self
at the same time defying
the second part of the
saying etched in the lintel
of Delphi -- “And Know
That You Aren’t God.”
Perhaps the second part
comes first in Their world,
as if sea or sky were not
the true artist of all we wrought
mastering forbidden shores.
The gods bid us here and then
deserted the banquet table,
leaving us to sort out why
the ambroisa was so fabled.
And in the end it was not
what we found but didn’t,
as if the whole point of difference
was just to welcome its subsidence
down the more enduring
and endearing wave which
collapses us ever on the next shore
where gods once made things clear
whispering -- again! -- “Not Here.”


RELIEG ODHRAN

2003


Relieg Odhran was prophesied
by Columba to survive the
mortal flood: And so it became
a royal boneyard, housing
white dynasties in mud.
Therein lies a cache
of noble aspirations
arrogant enough to march
on to Judgement Day
with bones picked clean
but high and dry.
But don’t think Oran’s
skull plugged Hell’s void
for all time; I know
this well rises from his
loosed mouth, uncovered
three days after it had
been buried: Oran’s song
escaped that dread moment
when the eyes flew open
full of ocean & ice &
the mouth widened in
a black maw from which
the words were flung
-- “All you know of
God and man and heaven
and earth is WRONG!”
-- Columba (normally no
slouch for scholarship)
had the head covered back
in mud in all haste,
but it was too late, these
waters were unleashed &
continue to rise here, up
through a brine cathedral.
Surrender is the only
escape: the angelus tolls
from tonsils of a whale
and Ahab’s in the pulpit
robed in spermacetti pink.
Rilke at his zenith cried
that happiness falls, and
he’s right: In this humid
bird-waking sprinkler-
shooshing dark grows the
root and branch of every
summer day, every brilliant
hurl of wave across the
dazzled desired beach.
These ritual matins
at Oran’s Well repeat
his three steps: Descend,
walk in darkness, rise:
And it’s not that Oran’s
perigrins were new:
The bones of some 32
individuals more than
200,000 years old have
been found at the bottom
of a deep shaft in Spain:
And though that age seems
now impossibly deep
and far, I have only
to close my eyes and
drift on the current
inside and the million
year dreamtime opens
his own eyes, & sees it
all, the long species fall
into a 3 billion year thrall,
down to God’s bony
toes where the real
heaven goes and grows
and flows. And waits.