Water Song

ON VISITING STAFFA

John Keats

Not Aladdin magian
Ever such a work began;
Not the wizard of the Dee
Ever such a dream could see;
Not St. John, in Patmos' Isle,
In the passion of his toil,
When he saw the churches seven,
Golden aisled, built up in heaven
Gazed at such a rugged wonder.
As I stood its roofing under,
Lo! I saw one sleeping there,
On the marble cold and bare,
While the surges wash'd his feet,
And his garments white did beat
Drenched about the sombre rocks.
On his neck his well-grown locks,
Lifted dry above the main,
Where upon the curl again.
"What is this? and what art thou?"
Whispered I, and touched his brow.
"What art thou? and what is this?"
Whispered I, and strove to kiss
The spirit's hand, to wake his eyes.
Up he started in a trice:
"I am Lycidas," said he,
"Famed in funereal minstrelsy!
This was architected thus
By the great Oceanus --
Here his mighty waters play
Hollow organs all the day;
Here by turns his dolphins all,
Finny palmers great and small,
Come to pay devotion due --
Each a mouth of pearls must strew.
Many a mortal of these days,
Dares to pass our sacred ways,
Dares to touch audaciously
This Cathedral of the Sea!
I have been the pontiff-priest
Where the waters never rest,
Where a fledgy sea-bird choir
Soars for ever; holy fire
I have hid from mortal man;
Proteus is my sacristan.
But the dulled eye of mortal
Hath passed beyond the rocky portal;
So for ever will I leave
Such a taint, and soon unweave
All the magic of the place.
'Tis now free to stupid face,
To cutters and to fashion boats,
To cravats and to petticoats.
The great sea shall war it down,
For its fame shall not be blown
At every farthing quadrille dance."
So saying, with a Spirit's glance
He dived!




So the myth disappears into the sea, and the heart which follows it becomes the sea's

...



THE STORY OF ALPHEUS AND ARETHUSA

Ovid Metamorphoses, Book V
Translated by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al


Still were the purling waters, and the maid (Arethusa)
From the smooth surface rais'd her beauteous head,
Wipes off the drops that from her tresses ran,
And thus to tell Alpheus' loves began.

In Elis first I breath'd the living air,
The chase was all my pleasure, all my care.
None lov'd like me the forest to explore,
To pitch the toils, and drive the bristled boar.
Of fair, tho' masculine, I had the name,
But gladly wou'd to that have quitted claim:
It less my pride than indignation rais'd,
To hear the beauty I neglected, prais'd;
Such compliments I loath'd, such charms as these
I scorn'd, and thought it infamy to please.

Once, I remember, in the summer's heat,
Tir'd with the chase, I sought a cool retreat;
And, walking on, a silent current found,
Which gently glided o'er the grav'ly ground.
The chrystal water was so smooth, so clear,
My eye distinguish'd ev'ry pebble there.
So soft its motion, that I scarce perceiv'd
The running stream, or what I saw believ'd.
The hoary willow, and the poplar, made
Along the shelving bank a grateful shade.
In the cool rivulet my feet I dipt,
Then waded to the knee, and then I stript;
My robe I careless on an osier threw,
That near the place commodiously grew;
Nor long upon the border naked stood,
But plung'd with speed into the silver flood.
My arms a thousand ways I mov'd, and try'd
To quicken, if I cou'd, the lazy tide;
Where, while I play'd my swimming gambols o'er,
I heard a murm'ring voice, and frighted sprung to shore.
Oh! whither, Arethusa, dost thou fly?
From the brook's bottom did Alpheus cry;
Again, I heard him, in a hollow tone,
Oh! whither, Arethusa, dost thou run?
Naked I flew, nor cou'd I stay to hide
My limbs, my robe was on the other side;
Alpheus follow'd fast, th' inflaming sight
Quicken'd his speed, and made his labour light;
He sees me ready for his eager arms,
And with a greedy glance devours my charms.
As trembling doves from pressing danger fly,
When the fierce hawk comes sousing from the sky;
And, as fierce hawks the trembling doves pursue,
From him I fled, and after me he flew.
First by Orchomenus I took my flight,
And soon had Psophis and Cyllene in sight;
Behind me then high Maenalus I lost,
And craggy Erimanthus scal'd with frost;
Elis was next; thus far the ground I trod
With nimble feet, before the distanc'd God.
But here I lagg'd, unable to sustain
The labour longer, and my flight maintain;
While he more strong, more patient of the toil,
And fir'd with hopes of beauty's speedy spoil,
Gain'd my lost ground, and by redoubled pace,
Now left between us but a narrow space.
Unweary'd I 'till now o'er hills, and plains,
O'er rocks, and rivers ran, and felt no pains:
The sun behind me, and the God I kept,
But, when I fastest shou'd have run, I stept.
Before my feet his shadow now appear'd;
As what I saw, or rather what I fear'd.
Yet there I could not be deceiv'd by fear,
Who felt his breath pant on my braided hair,
And heard his sounding tread, and knew him to be near.
Tir'd, and despairing, O celestial maid,
I'm caught, I cry'd, without thy heav'nly aid.
Help me, Diana, help a nymph forlorn,
Devoted to the woods, who long has worn
Thy livery, and long thy quiver born.
The Goddess heard; my pious pray'r prevail'd;
In muffling clouds my virgin head was veil'd,
The am'rous God, deluded of his hopes,
Searches the gloom, and thro' the darkness gropes;
Twice, where Diana did her servant hide
He came, and twice, O Arethusa! cry'd.
How shaken was my soul, how sunk my heart!
The terror seiz'd on ev'ry trembling part.
Thus when the wolf about the mountain prowls
For prey, the lambkin hears his horrid howls:
The tim'rous hare, the pack approaching nigh,
Thus hearkens to the hounds, and trembles at the cry;
Nor dares she stir, for fear her scented breath
Direct the dogs, and guide the threaten'd death.
Alpheus in the cloud no traces found
To mark my way, yet stays to guard the ground,
The God so near, a chilly sweat possest
My fainting limbs, at ev'ry pore exprest;
My strength distill'd in drops, my hair in dew,
My form was chang'd, and all my substance new.
Each motion was a stream, and my whole frame
Turn'd to a fount, which still preserves my name.
Resolv'd I shou'd not his embrace escape,
Again the God resumes his fluid shape;
To mix his streams with mine he fondly tries,
But still Diana his attempt denies.
She cleaves the ground; thro' caverns dark I run
A diff'rent current, while he keeps his own.
To dear Ortygia she conducts my way,
And here I first review the welcome day.




So the hunter Alpheus merges with the nymph Arethusa when she transforms herself into a spring and becomes the river Alpheus, flowing through that spring out into the sea as an underwater current. Roberto Calasso comments:

He was a hunter who one day decided to become nature. He was the only lover who, when his beloved turned to water, agreed to become water itself, without wanting to be held back by the boundaries of identity. He thus achieved a union no other man or woman had ever achieved, the union of two freshwater streams soon to plunge together into the sea.

... Alpheus and Arethusa: water with water, the spring that gushes from the earth, the current that rises fro the depths of the sea, the meeting of two lymphs which have travelled far, the ultimate convergence, perennial happiness, no bastions against the world, gurgling speech.

-- The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,





WATER SONG

June 2

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

- Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 2.24

The sight of you is pure water,
turning my throat into a river
hurrying with eagerness
and joy in the plunge of deepest seas.
We greet each other in the
kiss which makes a language blue,
my words a teeming haul
of fish netted in a womb
of soak, brilliant infinitesimals
we share beyond all shores,
all hope of waking up.
Song is just well-silver
delved from your deepest slopes,
a curve inside my heart
so voluptuous in rapture of you
as to cause the world to quake.
That pent thunder causes
this pen to unleash the
brassy bells of scalt heaven,
pealing every bright name
for love to gout from
the drown of coiled hips.
All this tides so far below
the day which
wearies everything
in its hard inland breeze,
withering the orange groves,
making delight a dust
fretted away too long ago.
But I have learned the
tide is greatest where
it ebbs fullest away; the
absences of later life
boom in sea-caves far below
where you and I forever greet
and choir our salt amens,
soul to soul in one blue wash,
bedded in our emptiness.
Did I say how when you
turned in sleep, my sigh
was fraught with the ten
thousand strands of crashing
waves I've ridden on that
cresting waist to hip
here on the page
and off in the wounded
current of our life,
inside a marriage that can't die
no matter how it does.






FRENCH KISS

2003

Sometimes the ink
is pure glossolalia,
the skull-babble
of a dozen tongues
all crashing in the surf
I send to God.
Heart-prayers have
a voice which words
as they are used
all fail, and so it
skips the sounds,
like a stone, over
the waves, freed
of root in sense or
meanings my dry
usages ascribe.
The heart wells
up a torrent which,
unblocked by
dayside will, rises
a wild fountain
which drowns the
world in Yes.
Joyce released his
pen that way in
Finnigans Wake,
a "scherzarade
of one's thousand
one nightinesses"
-- a 17-year effort
to plumb the words
of dream. Its
prose is incoherent,
a fabulous babble
which washes
every page with
thunder. It
"truck his spickle
through his
spoke, disappeared
... from the sourface
of the earth, that
austral plain he
had transmarried
himself to, so
entirely spoorlessly
... as to tickle
the speculative to
all but opine ... that
the hobo ... had
transtuled his funster's
latitat into its
finsterest interrimost."
Yeah whatever he
he said, or spouted.
Surely such joys
have a riverish
gush, spring
boldened, lusty in
the crash of early
love's fool errands,
believing no thighs
unparted, no height
not swimmable --
I recall spring '82
when some woman
took me on the wings
of rock n roll
fantasy, asking for
a ride home from
the club and then
commanding me pull
over, tearing free
our clothes & then
fucking me in that
cramped Datsun
as savage as some
Scylla, hauling up
a torrent which lathered,
soaked, crashed,
spurned and then
nearly drowned us both
for a month or so.
One Saturday morning
I woke in that
bed I called (provisionally)
my own, with gum
in my pubic hair (she
parked it there) and
my words suddenly
unhinged, "rollicking,"
"verb-mated with lust,"
as if a thousand nunlike
nouns had all been
fucked silly and were
now sprinting with
merry devils on the lawn,
mewling and shrieking
Hell Yes. Certainly
sex as I desire
lubricates the jaw,
loosening a wavelike
torrent meant (I
think today) to circle
Her sweet ankles
and free all her bows
to the undertow
I'll never row.
Then (I also think
today) that sex goes
underground, freed
from mortal hips, so
to speak, to chase
Eurydices within and
the snakes she
augurs there. The
Pythoness was
maddened by Delphic
gasses rising from
the cracked floor,
her words vomiting
in a flow no man
could quite understand,
a chum of vowels
reddening the holy
blue, rousing appetites
which fin and maw
and chomp and chew
-- blah blah blah,
I usually think
about this time,
conscious how I've
gone on and on.
No poem's done, just
emptied of its
heart -- all
verbiage leashed, the
white shore bright
again, naked of Her
though I'm sure
she still calls me there,
standing in a shimmer
of my summer heat,
a curve of tongue
and home, her eyes
blue as my wife's,
our cat's, the dawning
day's -- a pale serene,
all the wings of
heaven once more
bathed & swathed
in aquamarine.




SECRET LANGUAGE

2006

It's taken years to learn the
secret words of blue,
decades, who knows: my
life in this salt scriptorium
upon my writing chair
may just be latest attempt
by oral veins to route
that sound full back on the tongue.
Perhaps the work is slow
because teachers are these
days so few, the old brute
waters so fished out, too
many darks now known,
the corpus callosum which
verbs the milk of sapience
from beloved distant breasts
tattered, rent by to much
light, perhaps, or too few pyres.
Who knows. Every age bears
a cross inside its new
articulations, its own
perplexities to addle
the augments of blue.
My familiars morphed
from the usual suspects
-- my mother's voice next
to the sea; my father's
words in rooms of stone--
girls too who said my name
like butterflies on a summer
day, so gossamer I could not
hold them in my arms, much
less say their names or write
them on the page. -Oh and
brutaller instructors too,
that bad sound of baleen-sieving
nights when I inhaled
too much musk and
whiskey in the smoke of
of lousy bars, nosing
my way to that brassy clang
which peals all shores
ululate and undulate
and undying for one night.
All those delights and
dolors ranged my timbre's
hues: But just how to say
or sing full back the
bull-freight of blue? I
read, I wrote, I read wrote
more, over and over, day
after day for years, each
mornings's embarcature
like the jaywalker who
loves wild crossings more
than getting safe across or
the barrel-diver who gets
a rise from fatal falls.
This morning's poem is
my latest exempla
of servitude to words
which woof and wrangle
and perturb the petticoats
of a nakedness I'll never
find words true enough for --
I mean true wilderness,
where names in their
ferallest pelts cavort and
plunge in sylvan thunder.
I always think I'm getting close
but each time I end up here
trying to wrap lacunas up
with something blue enough,
an azurish button of a couplet
or a pale sheet of metaphorcials
fluttering down on stated lovers
in the lysis of pure descent,
the picture fading full
to black just as the curvatures
die fully draped. But I can't
end this thing, not yet, I
haven't learned the ends of
that secret tongue. Or perhaps
that language knows no closure.
Perhaps the tongue of sea-
faring angels was meant for
endless tides of days and
hangs forever here, on
the same wave that I
started from when I
looked up at my mother
standing over me and sang
the sea right back. The
secret song is thus all the
ones a heart pours out
in gratitude for seas.
That works for me today
as I walk back from one shore
and begin to walk upon
next, hearing my wife sigh
and stir. I shut this book
to head upstairs and
lay next to her in pink
first light, and there run my
fingers across her soles just
so, again and again so soft
and slow, singing first
and last what only tongues
of angels know.





MYTHOS

April 2005

I cannot harrow through your pass of awfulness
without the myth, nor boat but mythically,
my outrage in your titan gorge affrontal
in its nudity, a fish-boy jamming his song on
through astride a whalish steed. All of that
is pure mythos, upside-down the actual
moment in which I write, at this small hour in
my writing chair in the house love tends
in tenderest frail bloom. My ache for You
is bluest in the green bells of sweet spring
now pealing everywhere the sun doth shine,
a moon inside the rising heat of days,
its bone knuckle fleshed by my wife's touch.
I came to You through our cat in the
window, her Siamese perfection of
the fairest spleen to grace this world or
the next. She stares back from that night
with Your eyes, bluer than the blackest
gale to split a ship in two. There's little
wild invitation in my wife after all these years,
though she loves me more vitally than ever --
our margins these days civil and humane and
neighborly and partnered, working on our
house together, sharing the day's wounds and
worries and outrages over dinner by TV,
co-conspirators in a leisure which pools
the fading day outside. Nothing there of that
desperate isle of fairy women it is death
to harbor and delight, their need for me
so much deeper than my own deep need
for sex as to suck me dry with every look
my way, their mouths like burning books,
their nipples angry red and leaking milk
each anguished writhe they make for me,
hips desperate to join with mine, loins
bawling for my seed. Yet my wife is selkie in
that way, her dry land days of mortal love
chaste and aging as wives go, though in sleep
and the unsayable sounds a seal in cold waters
which surrounds and abounds out there,
offshore of our weary, worried, paradisally
ever-working lives. I'll never know the true
depths of her, though our years grow broad
and wide. That's the way I've learned to sing,
instructed by blue waters I've sought for years
and will never see the end of nor truly walk
or name, though I can't stop writing the
next salt surgency upon a white whale's mane,
this book I mean, the one I'll never publish,
the one my wife will ever read. It sings
to her all night while the mortal doofas that
I am sleeps next to her, snoring and farting
and growing hard as I dream of her, harder
than I'll ever get inside her love again.
My hand around this pen is writing Cape
Blue gibberish on the pale sweet curve
of her warm bottom in our bed upstairs,
every name of God I've loved in this
bottomless mythos of words an hour
before we start our next working day.

The Look of Love

ON THE SEA

John Keats

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often 'tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it sometime fell.
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
Oh, ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody---
Sit ye near some old Cavern's Mouth and brood,
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired!


PANTHEON

June 1

In the Age of Wonders
every awe is god,
the panoply of thrills
a choir, a panting
pantheon, enrapturing
the mind to fresh
far older heights.
A bolt cracks through the dark
and Zeus sears down,
a wave booms to shore
and Poseidon looms
thunder in the surge,
a woman bares her
breasts to her new lover
and the air grows bright
and tangy with Venus,
sharper than any bolt
of desire to transfix
a wakened heart.
Souls must be young
for so many gods to crow,
a freshness in the equipage
which sees all things anew,
a springtide veracity
which sprout the evergreen
memory. As we age we
slowly seal the borders
to the polyglot divine,
raising in our defenses
something solitary, an
eye which sees bliss
as a dangerous loss of
control, shutting down
the agencies of praise
and awe and thrall.
We dull ourselves into
that monotheism
which vaults the many
in the one, hardening
that ocean essence into
a papal heart of stone
which leans ever heavier
against all doors, locking
me in me. It’s raining now
at 4 a.m., such a blessing
to us here who have seen
no rain for weeks, trapped
beneath the imperial lock
of hot and brighter days.
I can almost hear the
garden’s hundred mouths
suck at the nipples of
that rain, a feral sort
of feeding which goes
far beyond one day’s
wetted whistle; we are
all Gaia’s young,
and infinitely thirsty.
Here’s some of that
pale juice, spilled from
my greedy lips, a
taste of that teeming
fresh horde who remits
whatever I uncover.





PHANTOM BOTTOM

June 1

... between the reigns of Osylus and Iphitus, the Olympic games were abandoned, forgotten. {According to Pausinas, in Description of Greece,} “When Iphitus restored the games, people still couldn’t remember how they had been in ancient times; gradually they did remember, and each time they remembered something, they added to it. It is the very image of the Platonic process of learning: nothing is new, remembering is all. What is new is the most ancient thing we have. With admirable candor, Pausinas adds: “This can be demonstrated.” And he tells us when each memory surfaced: “At the eighteenth Olympiad, they remembered the pentathon and wrestling.”

-- Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

I was walking back to the showers
after working out hard when a
woman approached then passed
me whom I remembered in some
unspecific way, not actually
yet essentially. She was of an age
somewhat close to mine -- not
young, not yet old -- and her blonde
hair was curled old-school,
in the fashion of the 80s. Her
workout duds were somewhat out
of fashion, though much
attractive to my eyes, a bit
of Jane Fonda and Samantha
Fox squeezed in a smaller
woman’s spandexed frame.
She had a glint of my own
bad history, yes: but it was
the way she looked at me
that what made me remember
what I loved most about those
old nights of catch-release sex,
a dark stare earnestly boring
into me as up through leagues
of dark-boiling water,
inviting me to dive and plunge
and drown. And as I remembered
her rare sort -- so few encounters in
all those drunken nights would
ever haul her to a bed where
she got on hands and knees
to receive those loosened fishes
from pounding hips -- that memory
took flight in something
far newer yet much older,
the cocksman I once was
astride the back of a sea-dragon
or black manta with wings
a hundred miles wide,
two old and ancient selves
astride a far more primal
appetite which rises
every night to feed
and sleeps it off by day.
She passed and was gone
and I showered and drove
home on a humid breezy
afternoon heavy with
the scent of rains to come,
home to my far happier
and older life. Those old
nights are drowned for good
yet live freshly forever here
on pages wet with ink
and seaweed and strange pussy,
those eyes staring back
at me with all the might
and wonder of deep wings,
fresh from every hell
a sweet black heaven flings.
I did not turn to see
her bottom walking off
the other way -- who needs to?
When its spread forever ahead
of me across and down this page,
her knees planted on both
margins, and my song,
my song, plunging rapt and deep
inside the folds of her salty sweet.




SEA-MAGIC

Fiona MacLeod

In one of the remotest islands of the Hebrides I landed on a late afternoon in October a year ago. There was no one on the island except an old man, who was shepherd for the fourscore sheep which ate the sweet sea-grass from Beltane till Samhain (1st May till 31st October): one sheep for each year of his life, he told me, “forby one, and that will he right between them an’ me come Candlemas next.” He gave me water and oatcake, and offered to make me tea, which I would not have. I gave him the messages I had brought from the distant main-land of the Lews, and other things; and some small gifts of my own to supplement the few needs and fewer luxuries of the old islander. Murdo MacIan was grateful, with the brief and simple gladness of a child. By mistake a little mouth-organ, one of those small untuneful instruments which children delight in and can buy for a few pence, was in my package, along with a “poke” of carvies, those little white sweets for buttered bread dear to both young and old—though even they, like all genuine products of the west, great and small, are falling away in disuse! The two had been intended by me for a small lass, the grandchild of a crofter of Loch Roag in the westerside of the Lews ; but when the yacht put in at the weedy haven, where scart and gillie-breed and tern screamed at the break of silence, I heard that little Morag had “taken a longing to be gone,” and after a brief ailing had in truth returned whence she had come.

And for the moment neither snuff nor tobacco, neither woollen comforter nor knitted hose, could hold Murdo as did that packet of carvies (for the paper had loosened, and the sugary contents had swarmed like white ants) and still more that sixpenny mouth-organ. I saw what the old man eagerly desired, but was too courteous and well-bred even to hint: and when I gave him the two things of his longing my pleasure was not less than his. I asked him why he wanted the cruit-bheul, which was the nearest I could put the Gaelic for the foreign toy, and he said simply that it was because he was so much alone, and often at nights heard a music he would rather not be hearing. “What would that be?” I asked. After some hesitation he answered that a woman often came out of the sea and said strange foreign words at the back of his door, and these, he added, in a whinnying voice like that of a foal ; came, white as foam ; and went away grey as rain. And then, he added, “she would go to that stroked rock yonder, and put songs against me, till my heart shook like a tallow-flaucht in the wind.”

Was there any other music? I asked. Yes, he said. When the wind was in the west, and rose quickly, coming across the sea, he had heard a hundred feet running through the wet grass and making the clover breathe a breath. “When it’s a long way off I hear the snatch of an air, that I think I know and yet can never put name to. Then it’s near, an’ there’s names called on the wind, an’ whishts an’ all. Then they sing an’ laugh. I’ve seen the sheep standing—their forelegs on the slit rocks that crop up here like stony weeds—staring, and listening. Then after a bit they’d go on at the grass again. But Luath, my dog, he’d sit close to me, with his eyes big, an’ growling low. Then I wouldn’t he hearing anything: no more at all. But, whiles, somebody would follow me home, piping, and till the very door, and then go off laughing. Once, a three-week back or so, I came home in a thin noiseless rain, and heard a woman-voice singing by the fire-flaucht, and stole up soft to the house-side; but she heard the beat of my pulse and went out at the door, not looking once behind her. She was tall and white, with red hair, and though I didn’t see her face I know it was like a rock in rain, with tears streaming on it. She was a woman till she was at the shore there, then she threw her arms into the wind an’ was a gull, an’ flew away in the lowness of a cloud.

While I was on the island the wind had veered with that suddenness known to all who sail these seas. A wet eddy swirled up from the south-east, and the west greyed, and rain fell. In a few minutes clouds shaped themselves out of mists I had not seen and out of travelling vapours and the salt rising breaths of the sea. A long wind moved from east to west, high, but with its sough falling to me look a wood-echo where I was. Then a cloudy rain let loose a chill air, and sighed with a moan in it: in a moment or two after, great sluices were opened, and the water came down with a noise like the tide coursing the lynns of narrow sea-lochs.

To go back in that falling flood would be to be half-drowned, and was needless too: so
I was the more glad, with the howling wind and sudden gloom of darkness and thick rain, to go in to Murdo’s cabin, for it was no more than that, and sit by the comfortable glow of the peats, while the old man, happy in that doing, made tea for me.

He was smiling and busy, when I saw his face cloud.

“Will you be hearing that?” he said looking round.

“What was it?” I answered, for I thought I had heard the long scream of the gannet against the waves of the wind high above us.

Having no answer, I asked Murdo if it was the bird it meant. “Ay, he might be a bird. Sometimes it’s a bird, sometimes it’s a seal, sometimes it’s a creature of the sea pulling itself up the shore an’ makin’ a hoarse raughlin like a boat being dragged over pebbles. But when it comes in at the door there it is always the same, a tall man, with the great beauty on him, his hands hidden in the white cloak he wears, a bright, cold, curling flame under the soles of his feet, and a crest like a bird’s on his head.”
I looked instinctively at the door, but no one stood there.

“Was the crest of feathers, Murdo?” I asked, remembering an old tale of a messenger of the Hidden People who is known by the crest of cuckoo-feathers that he wears.

“ No,” he said, “ it wasn’t. It was more like white canna blowing in the wind, but with a blueness in it.”

“And what does he say to you?”

“His say is the say of good Gaelic, but with old words in it that I have forgotten. The mother of my mother had great wisdom, and I’ve heard her using the same when she was out speaking in the moonlight to them that were talking to her.”

“What does he tell you, Murdo?”

“Sure, seldom he has anything to say. He just looks in the fire a long time, an’ then goes away smiling.”

“And who did you think it was?”

“Well, I thought it might be Mr. Macalister, him as was drowned on St. Bride’s day, the minister over at Uiseader of Harris; I’ve heard he was a tall, fine man, an’ a scholar, an’ of great goodness an’ fineness. And so I asked him, the second time he came, if may be he would be Mr. Macalister. - He said no, an’ laughed the bit of a laugh, and then said that good man’s bones were now lying in a great pool with three arches to it, deep in the sea about seven swims of a seal from Eilean Mhealastaidh, the island that lies under the shadow of Griomaval on the mainland of the Lews. (“‘ Seven swims of a seal.” A seal is supposed to swim a mile on one side without effort, without twist ; and then to change to the other side and swim in the same way the next mile ; and so on.)

“An’ at that,” added Murdo, “I asked him how he would be knowing that.”

“‘How do you know you are a man, and that the name on you is the name you have?’ he said. An’ at that I laughed, and said it was more than he could say, for he did not seem to have the way of a man an’ he kept his name in his pocket.”

“With that he touched me an’ I fell into an aisling (a swoon with remembrance). And though I saw the red peats before me, I knew I was out on the sea, and was a wave herded by the wind an’ lifted an’ shaken by the tide—an’ a great skua flyin’ over saw my name floating like a dead fish an’ sank to it an’ swallowed it an’ flew away. An’ when I sat up, I was here on this stool before the peats, an’ no one beside me. But the door was open, an’ though there was no rain the flagstone was wet, an’ there was a heavy wetness in the room, an’ it was salt. It was like a spilt wave, it was.”

I was silent for a time, listening to the howling of the wind and the stumbling rush of the rain. Then I spoke.

“But tell me, Murdo, how you know this was not all a dream?”

“Because of what I saw when he touched me.”

“And what was that?”

“I have the fear of it still,” he said simply. “His arms were like water, and I saw the sea-weed floating among the bones in his hand. And so I knew him to be a morar-mhara, a lord of the sea.”

“And did you see him after that?”

“Yes.”

“And did he say anything to you then?”

“Yes. He said to me after he had sat a long time staring in the fire: ‘Murdo, what age have you?’ An’ I told him. I said I would have eighty years come Candlemas. He said, ‘You’ve got a clean heart: an’ you’ll have three times eighty years of youth an’ joy before you have your long sleep. An’ that is a true word. It will be when the wild geese fly north again.’ An’ then he rose and went away. There was a mist on the sea, an’ creep-in’ up the rocks. I watched him go into it, an’ I heard him hurling great stones an’ dashing them. ‘These are the kingdoms of the world,’ I heard him crying in the mist. No, I have not been seeing him any more at all: not once since that day. An’ that’s all, BanMorar.”

That was many months ago. There is no one on the island now: no sheep even, for the pastures are changed. When the wild geese flew north this year, the soul of Murdo MacIan went with them. Or if he did not go with them, he went where Manan promised him he should go. For who can doubt that it was Manan, in the body or vision, he the living prince of the waters, the son of the most ancient god, who, crested as with snow-white canna with a blueness in it, and foot-circt with cold curling flame—the uplifted wave and the wandering sea-fire—appeared to the old islander? And if it were he, be sure the promise is now joy and peace to him to whom it was made.

Murdo must have soothed his last hours of weakness with the cruit-bheul, the little mouth-organ, for it was by the side of his pillow. In these childish things have we our delight, even those few of us who, simple of heart and poor in all things save faith and wonder, can, like Murdo MacIan, make a brief happiness out of a little formless music with our passing breath, and contentedly put it away at last for the deep music of immortal things.

The Phantom Tide

An ancient will ordains
these sweeping motions
across and down the page,
bidding me complete the
breviary tossed in the drink
when You cried Your name
at last, so many ages ago,
a name I’ll sound today,
perhaps tomorrow. Ocean
scholars give me precedent.
Deep-water waves tide
dark and cold huge masses
of Your blue, a feral undulation
which tropes my every thrall,
sweeping my beloved into view
and then erasing her in
ebbing foam and hiss from
every shore we shared
in the deadest hours of the night.
Related to that black tide
and still relative to this
wave-seeming script,
a living cloud of depth
has been found to thrive
down all basins of the sea,
a “phantom bottom” which
rises by night -- perhaps to
feed -- and falls far down
by day. Some vast appetite
rides that deepest tide,
the tide, each revered in
the other, both revealing
in this poem a world-deep
manta’s wings whose
every heave I sigh.
Such motions in the
sea are new only to
me, but knowing them
has somehow altered
the sea’s influence
upon the mind which
wades offshore to
soak and praise and dream
its depths. Aware now
that my bluer inclinations
are ripped by deep tides
and abyssal wings,
my ocean sense of things
grow freer, released more
leagues from the land-locked
man I was. Love’s waters
baptised me into a realm
never quite solid or
solitary again; and now
in love’s maturity
I sense something deeper
and wilder in its Yes,
valved through the
brinous heart of God
cathedralled undersea.
Each time I write lines
down I’m less the one
who writes the words
as that wave rider
whose known saddle
is dissolving down,
ink on paper glossing
cock in cunt, that
hot mash hurling
in its smash a deep
diviner & far colder
water, thrown
from distances and
depths no words
have yet to name
but might. I just keep
writing down as You
bid me to, salt master,
hurling these radar
bounces of bright
noise from one singing
mouth to all that
sings enormously below.
Here’s evidence that
desire and its pains
ghost wet topograhpies
of a far greater beast
who swims below
those massy whales
we’ve damn near killed
the last of. True singing
is the barb I can’t
throw deep enough,
far under the lowest
plunging throb and ache,
the sweetest blackest pour
of all inside love’s forever
drowning breasts.
A gust of tidal curve,
that long collapsing boom
which welcomes the next
room I’ll wake to write
about. It’s 4:30 a.m. -- at
that cusp of night and day --
sprinklers whirring in
the garden & an ambulance
with whirling white
and red bright lights
headed up to the
adult care facility
on the next block where
someone’s giving up
Your ghost. Our cat
on the couch staring
at me with eyes of lidded
pure blue, wondering
if I’ll get it yet, if I ever will.
I call her name softly over
and again: she bats her
eyes, then sinks to sleep.




“There is, then, no water that is wholly of the Pacific, or wholly of the Atlantic, or of the Indian or the Antarctic. The surf that we may find exhilarating at Virginia Beach or at La Jolla today may have lapped at the base of Antarctic icebergs or sparkled in the Mediterranean sun, years ago, before it moved through dark and unseen waterways to the place we find it now. It is by the deep, hidden currents that the oceans are made one.”

— Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

***


The recent discovery that a living cloud of some unknown creatures is spread over much of the ocean at a depth of several hundred fathoms below the surface is the most exciting thing that has been learned about the ocean in many years.

When echo sounding was developed to allow ships while under way to record the depth of the bottom, probably no one suspected that it would also provide a means of learning something about deep-sea life. But operators of the new instruments discovered that sound waves, directed downward from the ship like a beam of light, were reflected back from any solid object they met. Answering echoes were returned from intermediate depths, presumably from schools of fish, whales, or submarines, then a second echo was received from the bottom.

... In 1946 ... the United States Navy issued a significant bulletin. It was reported that several scientists, working with sonic equipment in deep water of the California coast, had discovered a widespread ‘layer’ of some sort, which gave back an answering echo to the sound waves. This reflecting layer, seemingly suspended between the surface and the floor of the Pacific, was found over an area 300 miles wide. It lay from 1000 to 1500 feet below the surface. The discovery was made by three scientists, Eyring, Christensen, and Raitt, aboard the USS Jasper in 1942, and for a time this mysterious phenomenon, of wholly unknown nature, was called the ECR layer.

Then in 1945 Martin W. Johnson, marine biology of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, made a further discovery which gave the first clue to the nature of the layer. Working aboard the vessel E.W. Scripps, Johnson found that whatever sent back the echoes moved upward and downward in rhythmic fashion, being found near the surface at night, in deep water during the day. This discovery disposed of speculations that the reflections came from something inanimate, perhaps a mere physical discontinuity in the water, and showed that the layer is composed of living creatures capable of controlled movement.

From this time on, discoveries about the sea’s ‘phantom bottom’ came rapidly. With widespread use of echo-sounding instruments, it has become clear that the phenomenon is not something peculiar to the coast of California alone. It occurs almost universally in the deep ocean basins -- drifting by day at a depth of several hundred fathoms, at night rising to the surface, and again, before sunrise, sinking into the depths.

— Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us


MANTA WINGS

2002


Sleep is a dark manta
sweeping blue floors,
a wild clench
I re-compose
in paper forays
through chapel doors
flapping white wings
toward you God or
the world.
Spread pages inscribe
fling furrow imbibe
lines I can’t master
though each surely wrings
some ichor of that angel
who flew all night
to harrow this day.



ENTER THE DRAGON

Jan 2005

The Dark — felt beautiful.
— Emily Dickinson (Fr. 627)

Beware the scented bed of
Love: it rides upon the
dragon’s back who swims
abyssal realms. Drowse
there and you’ll wake
a molted man of fire,
enrapt inside the rupture
of the devil of deep
welcome. Your wings
will lift you into nights
the size of titan ire,
your eyes whet and keen
for any trace of blue
embroilment to fall,
silklike, from yet
knowable breasts
ripe and leaking
dragon’s milk, booze
poured from paps
of doom. Ride such
nights at your peril,
son of ancient smiles:
Do not presume you
have tooth or troth
sufficient for that dark
demanding angel ride
into the chasm which
splits the fundaments.
Just hold on for your
immortal soul
and let heavens collide
and smash down
every shore. Let every
numen reveal the bestial
depths below, like buoys
singing on blackened tides,
rippled by deep waves
fanning deeper lands
than undreamt Love can go.





DEEP WAVE RIDER

Jan. 24, 2006

Deep waves stroll the oceans
unseen to all surfaces
on the cold wings of abyss,
a visceral tow glowing
with the gules of minerals
torn from the paps of hell.
He rides those waves too,
my fish-familiar, in this
songlike totem I ride here,
his salty ancient brogue
still rich on my tongue
after a thousand mortal
spans. I on a fish which
masts deep waves is
what makes the music
so hugely dark, opaque
and fell, a buckaroo’s derange
in Moby’s wake
where shattered hulks
and eerie churchbells
fan by too fast and dim
to hearken, much less name,
and life is pure Silurian,
a swarm of sharks and jellyfish
and trilobites about the
same matins now for a half
billion years. That infernal choir
lifts the base note I here sound,
my vox humana the highest
ache of jism and jawing
egg, the hot rush of futurity
which forever lives the
next day with ravenous teeth
in a gale of sweet-torn flesh.
Just what song is it, I
wonder, rolling three miles
beneath my saddle? What
beast of lyric hooves so wild
and regal blue as to make all
depths divine, be they in
my words or in the sea or in
the angel’s fall between
us who limns the barrows
of all lost gods. From trough
to crest I clasp my knees
to waves as tall as Pyranees
yet never crash on shores
my love will ever see,
as if love’s shout of pure
liquidity was never meant
for beds or beaches or
the dry breeches of songs
about love, rather than
the ones all depths love.
Primal as to drown
the dreams of shamans
etched on walls not seen
in ten thousand years,
this music is old, it was
lifted pure up to God
when men and beasts
were one, brother and
familiar, both in the
maw of appetite and
the stellar foam of lust,
both in the other so
vastly that whole
caverns failed to harrow
the rituals of rebirth
into the womb which
birthed us all.
Perhaps that’s why
I’m here on the biggest
waves no human eyes
can see, yeehawing
to high heaven on
thalassas of brine joy,
lurching and lifting
up to crown Manannan’s
thrall, wilding all the
way down here where
Uranos parked his balls
in a mess of Venusian
cream. When I’m on my
beast we lord the waves
which rock and roll the seas —
the boy astride his guitar
of a cock of fish of a pen,
come at last to gig
the big night music,
power—chording deep
waves like shouts of
whales between beneath
and past all shores.




THE HONOR AND GLORY OF WHALING

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Chapter lxxxii

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.

The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city’s legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda - indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it - is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin- like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse’s head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St. George’s decoration than they.

Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique Crockett and Kit Carson - that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan.
But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa; certainly they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the prophet?

Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of old times, we find the headwaters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord; - Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?

Further Poseidonals

May 26

It was told that when Poseidon began to pursue Demeter {Da, an ancient name for Gaia, and Mater, “Great Mother”} with amorous importunance, the goddess was already engaged in seeking her abducted daughter Persephone. Demeter turned herself into a mare and mingled with the grazing steeds of King Onkios. Poseidon perceived the trick, and coupled with Demeter in the shape of a stallion. The wrathful goddess turned into Erinys, the goddess of anger, and was actually called Demeter Erinys until she washed away her anger in the name Lousia. She bore to Poseidon a daughter, whose name might not be spoke outside the Mysteries, and at the same time she bore the famous steed Arion, the horse with a black mane. Arion inherited its black mane from Poseidon -- so the story was conceived even in times of great antiquity.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks


FILLY

Oh she was a filly all right,
gold-maned and wild as hell
and twice as cruel.
I found her grazing with her
sisters in an oyster bar
on SR 44, a mile down from
the St. John’s colossal river float.
Saw those flanks asheen with
blue neon as she tossed back
whiskies at the bar & I was shot
clear through by the hottest
barb in Cupid’s blueballed
quiver. Yee haw! I shouted
as I chased her all that night,
her every feint and ruse
keeping her just out of reach
as we thundered across the
cracker steppes which
precede and invoke every
one-night stand. I cornered
her at last in her trailer at 5 a.m.,
mounting her pale perfect flanks
and plowing hard and fast and
deep, remitting at last the burn
in which she broiled me.
I watched her face twist
in the most delicious rage,
her O-mouth spitting curses
as she came, her huge eyes
slitted and rolled back into
infernal regions of dark pleasure
not found on any night but
is their secret hoard and treasure,
the bottomless region of
every whiskey glass. Afterward
we smoked in the frail
lucence of a full moon far
to the west, our sweat drying
in the breeze of an opened
window ripe with citrus blossoms
and the stench of roadkill
coming off the nearby road.
Oh you should have seen my sperm
spooring down her thighs
in lazy runnels of sea foam,
more than any womb can
harbor, more than an man
has thrown! I told her
of my patronage and rule
amid the horses of th sea,
those wild-maned blickers
of brine iniquity, whose
hooves pour like booze
down every wanton throat
the devil’s own red shoes.
She only smiled, her face
half-hidden in a post-fuck,
inward pent, her eyes
turning dark and darker
as her newly roused anger
turned first light to stone.
Her fury knew no bounds
as my children in her swelled;
she took to terrorizing every
bar and truck-stop in
North Florida, bidding
bad men take her in the woods
for a trick where she pulled
their own pants down,
nailing them for good.
In time she bore
the daughter who never
speaks her name -- the
autistic Persephone who
ever turns away -- And
also the horse Arion
with the wild blueblack mane
who indeed may be
the coded sequitur of her.
Each of our children
was a fraught vesicle
of what that sight of
that filly testicled in furious fate,
for better and far worse.
Those two are out there
in the garden as this
far later incarnation writes,
the one a ciphered soror
who cries for every name
desire mounts and hollers,
the other my totem gallop
across seas and pages here,
my court this crashing shore
of blue in most dangerous roar.
Yes, she was a filly, that
sass Da Meter, mother of
the mother who nurses
all these lines, bestower
of the black hair in them
which manes in wet tiding.
She’s the Fury with the
sweetest ass to be
savaged in my mooning,
and our tropes endure to here:
A whisper in the pentas,
a whinny in the gorse --
the orgasmic silence of
the maenad stare
galloping forever as pure horse.



***


In the tale of the marriage of Medousa and Poseidon this mane became “the dark locks” of the god. When Persues had cut off the Gorgon’s head of Medousa -- a head which had the countenance of an Erinys -- forth from the neck of that bride of Poseidon sprang the magic horse Perseus. Anoter tale declared that the bride of Poseidon, she who bore Arion, was a Harpy. As I have already said, appellations such as Erinys, Gorgon and Harpy all mean the same thing.

-- Kerenyi, ibid





MEDEA


2002

Surveyor, sausage
deliveryman, retired cop,
state agent, parts store
owner, unemployed laborer:

all must have thought twice
before turning back to
pick her up: but lust is such a
common stay against the

dreary bloodings of age,
trumping all the suits
we thought to wear. Lust
is that lens which made her

so lurid for the press:
We see the bastards waiting
for her to catch up and climb
in, fingers drumming on

the wheel: feel the indecision
between forking up twenty bucks
for ten minutes of hateful sex
or peeling rubber back to

that job or wife where life belongs:
Feel the false privilege in the cab
of the truck as she climbs
up and in with heavy sigh,

country songs on K92
and a pint of Jack Daniels
now empty on the seat:
She palms the sawbucks

and then pointing back in
the woods where all the
action takes place: Feel
the goatish glee sour-mashed

with dread as they wind past
pine and palmetto to the spot
where a whore gets fucked
but good in the broad,

scadling light of a day
which unzips and rips:
The sense of enactment
is so precise that it takes a

moment to see .22’s snout
in her hands: To see beyond lust
to what’s really there, those pig
eyes meant to plead now

burning with a different
desire: To hear the gun’s
sudden yawps, two, four
times, maybe the entire clip:

Or what follows after all lust
collapses, the rapine
complete in the dripping
cab with the sharp smell

of cordite like sperm in
the air: To feel at last the
sense of justice, in turning the
whole perverse script of lust

on its hairy, indignant ass.
We loved the story which emerged
from the trial, reliving the passion
of her spree. Taking both sides.

Rooting for her one way,
in some other shadowing her
every bad step toward her end.
Everyone got what they deserved:

The rubes get rubbed out, the whore
our prick in the end. Someone
has to do the job. Mornings driving
in on 441 I pass a highway hooker

who’s worked that stretch for years.
She stands out from the dark
as if waiting for me in particular.
Our eyes lock for just one

second - I’m moving fast-
but it’s enough to feel that
ancient heat inside the
unkempt, thumbs-out gaze.

Inside every mark’s a Medea,
a cistern for paired lusts and
there for the taking, raking
hell on any hot, dreary

afternoon between here
and the next town, the next
enactment flipping its coin,
her tale, our fate.






May 28

Wet your whistle with wine now, for the dog star, wheeling up the sky.
Brings back summer, the time all things are parched under the searing heat.
Now the cicada’s cry, sweet in the leaves, shrills from beneath his wings.
Now the artichoke flowers, women are lush, ask too much of thier men,
Who grow lank, for the star burning above withers their brains and knees.

-- Alcaeus of Mytilene, 6th century BC
tranl. Richard Lattimore.



HEAT

2 p.m. and 96 degrees, so hot
the soaring sun cleaves its sear,
splitting wide the light a cracked
melon. Skies so blue and feral
you inhale the sea in it,
scenting pussy corals of desire
inside as savage salt which
soaks exactly what must never sate.
And from the season’s own
awakening the clouds begin
to mass, rousing sky-high clippers
of pure white, their keels
growing heavy, stained a
steely, fraught blue-black,
freighters of the sea
soon to hammer us with drench.
But not yet: Still the rouse
of rising heat, a tenor
brassed with nascent shriek,
a lust so nigh imperial
as to ram May’s thigh-wide hours
to hilt of every highest degree,
funking every sense with sweat,
the call of every passion hurled and met.




In Carl Kerenyi’s The Gods of the Greeks I read how Poseidon’s claim to the sea is what bred the sea-horses, caused something to appear in those waters which had never been seen before:

***

None of the gods who ruled our sea before Poseidon had anything to do with the horse ... Before there was anything like a sea-horse, a god shaped like a bull used to tow a goddess through the sea. Poseidon himself assumed this bull’s shape and in his quality of sea-god he had bulls sacrificed to him. For the bull, too, appeared on the shores of the Mediterranean much earlier than the horse.

Hippokampoi -- “horse-monsters” -- half horse and half serpent-like fish; sea-centaurs whose animal lower bodies were a combination of horse and fish; Okeaninoi and Nereids, with such names as Hippo, Hipponoe, Hippothoe and Menippe -- all these first appeared in the Greek sea when Poseidon had taken possession of it.





THE SEA-HORSE

May 27

Only when you claimed the sea
as Your birthright and deep rule
did the Hippocampusai appear,
horses with fins for hooves
and descending serpent-tails.
Also the sea-maids you wived,
Nereids and Okeananoi with
names like Hipponoe and Menippe.
Something happened in us
when you married equine to
aquaean, making the sea in
us your queen, a mare whose
green blue depths You ride
to every crashing shore.
In Your embrace of her
something became of us,
as if it were we who forfeited
forward land and sun to
dive back in first waters,
reversing every birth.
In You we thrilled to find
ourselves far stranger than before,
baptised by depths which
dappled soft low horrors.
Sailors busy at their watch
were enthralled with the
sweetness of the terror,
scanning the surge for nipply
naids whose siren song
saddles ships with a
dark descending pleasure.
Such stories came to birth
when You exacted Your
full measure offshore our
every coast, a naming which
changed the sea within
the heart, making us
more beautiful and terrible.
Your wet epiphany is
especially mine--a genus
locii or totem as You please--
because a strange emblem
crests my father’s coat
of arms, a naked fish-rider
who masts the family
enterprise of poetry and song.
(We have a harpist of
the sixth century in the
annals; he may appear
on St. Oran’s cross,
one of Columba’s twelve
to found the abbey on Iona.)
Non providenita sed victoria
is the motto written at the
foot -- “Not by Providence
But Victory!” -- and the
two I think delve You
deeply in song at least:
a naked fish-rider as
the one who fonts all
naked songs, battler
and romancer who
dares to say I Do
to the deepest sounds of You.
You leapt from our later
shores like a man out
from his clothes, embracing
surf with majesty. Surely
that stallion herd which
thunders down the shore
in restless infinitude
completes what can be sung:
A collapse of pure hellbent foam
which foals Your brilliant rung.

***

So there’s a myth for the conscious return to water,, or the self’s remittance of the only-conscious perspective, a delve and dive which is Poseidon’s, which is the essence of the Christian baptism -- the second birth, awakening a deeper child in later life. Horse of the sea, hippo- and hypo-, mare and mere, stout inference of the wave-rider’s paradigm.



Hot and hotter, as you might infer from the poem. Memorial Day weekend is always this way, the last blast of infernal rainless heat before the commencement of the rainy season. It’s been a lot hotter in years previous -- and smokier, like back in ‘98 when the rains came on the day the state was surely going to conflagrate, 500,000 acres smoking and the winds picking up again.

Yesterday my wife and I packed into her Toyota and drove over to Daytona for a rather superheated, listless foray thorugh a depressingly diminished rondo of thrift shops and anitique malls. That trade now seems passe, the customers dwindling due to the cost of gas or E-bay, rents going up, developers eyeing the mom-and-pop shops with a hunger and greed. We didn’t do too badly, though -- my wife found a beautiful ceramic bowl on the cheap in a place that was going out of business, and I got two AA books I needed at a place outside Deland (the fans in the place serving only to waft the dusty hot oppression of the room) and Bill Evans’ “You’ve Got to Believe In Spring’ on vinyl at a record shop in the Volusia County Flea Market.

Strange place, that flea market, or perhaps quintessential: 3 miles of booths spread out in six or eight long tin-roofed stalls, all indoor with these huge fans blowing overhead. It was filled with everything cheap and glitzy and random, t-shirts and boogie boards and sunglasses and leather thongs, incense and sabre-long knives, body piercings, vegetables, and office supplies. My wife was hoping for someting more antique and collectible but all that was ferreted into one air-conditioned corner building, maybe 20 booths in all, a third of them shut down. No: this place was for the brutally sunned acreage of coastal Florida and was packed with everyone trying to get out of the sun, plodding seniors, barely pubescent girls showing way too much, black teens in pajamas and slippers, fat mothers yammering on cell phones, vets talking shop in booths packed with military paraphanelia. As church on Saturday goes, it rivals the mega-Baptist congregations of Sunday; they are surely identical: desire and confession share the same guilty gonads housed in the shorts and the wallet.

For our foray, streets were packed with holiday traffic, lots of booming bass out of jazzed-up pickups, vans packed with families headed for beach, convertibles driven by blowsy aging Parrotheads. The streets blasted white, too bright for the eyes, and dilapidation everywhere, the riot and rot of the fun in da sun. We turned a few times off US-1 to look for a garage sale or get back to a shop and found brutalized neighborhoods of beat-to-shit trailers and ranch styles, a profusion of vehicles parked everywhere, boats covered with tattered tarps, lawn chairs in the yards and trash cans overflowing with empties.

There’s a ghetto in the sun, you know, the altar of surfeit, tended by mortals trapped in the desire for light ...




Kerenyi tells us more about who Poseidon married, what he entered in that sacred hymeneal:


Amphitrite and Tethys each was, beyond comparison with all other goddesses, and in however particular a sense, the mistress and proprietess of the sea, to whom belonged all foaming waves and sea-monsters ...

It was told that Poseidon espied the goddess Amphitrite as she danced with the Nereids on the island of Naxos, and ravished her. The story went on to say that Amphitrite feld from Poseidon to the western extremity of the sea, to Atlas or the palace of Okeanos, which lay in the same quarter. Indeed, it was a dolphin who persuaded the goddess and led her to her bridegroom. It was rewarded by being set among the stars.

After his marriage with Amphitrite, Poseidon was the ruler of our sea. The ruling ocuple resembled in many aspects Zeus and Hera; just as Zeus could simply be invoked as “Husband of Hera,” so Poseidon could be addressed as “Husband of Amphtrite of the the golden spindle.” Their nuptial procession was modelled on that of Dionysos and Ariadnew; not only horses, bulls and rams, but also stags, pantghers, lions and tigers appeared as marine monsters ridden by Nereids.





So the return of Poseidon to the sea is not only a selfish claim -- there is that -- but it is also a marriage. And that marriage is not only a symbolic appropriation of the feminine - criminal, to many contemporary eyes -- or at least, that symbol dives deeper, for “marriage to the feminine” is a re-uniting of developed consciousness with its maternal and feminine depths. We emerged from the sea and walked forth, we woke and spoke words, we built cities and empires, then found ourselves looking over our shoulder, back toward lost days, back to the waters we came from, back to the infinities disclosed in the blue.

We weren’t the first animal to return to water, as Rachel Carson tells us in The Sea Around Us:

***

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

**

So the procession of sea-animals which accompanies Poseidon and Amphitrite represent a legion of animals that had gone back to water, bulls and rams and horse and lions, all masters of ground now something stranger and stronger in the aquaous element. That they are ridden by Nereids posits the relationship of maternal or feminine riding on something even deeper or older, animals, and water-animals at that: so the marriage of Poseidon is a linking back through all the orders of the world, laying claim to the sea.

There is some measure of humility in this too, since it was adequate to speak of Poseidon as “Husband of Amphtrite of the the golden spindle.” No name necessary, just function: that’s a good way to praise the ego which remits itself. To give more praise to the Husband would be to overreach his role in the process.

***


NAXOS

September 2004

Eros is a mighty daimon
but an army of lovers
can be beaten here
with just a word: No.
Desire ends where it
begins, at that
honeyed source just
beyond my lips,
in a name I know
but cannot say,
not yet, its
brilliant beach
and blue surf dropped
from rounded hips
so casually, with
such killing grace.
As soon as I say Yes
or Come she then
departs, as if along
a loosening and
diffuse spray of surf,
receding like a
tide as I approach,
forever just out
of reach, silencing
me down to this.
And when I say
No or Go I hear
the rise and fold
and tumescent crash
welcoming me with
open arms of crazy
foam, pleading all
the words I meant
to say but lost.
so it goes between
the word and its beloved,
forever here and gone,
an icy sweet peramble
which melts the names
back down the well,
though raise them here
somehow I’ll try.
She will not come
unless I refuse her,
she will not stay
unless I let her go.
And so I’ve learned
to assault love from
the rear, marrying
the verses to its
wavelike curve and
crash by loosening
the cincture of my
sense, merging
noun and sound
and then horsing
them upon both
sine and wave
where you and I
are one bedraggled
castaway upon
this rock, this tiny
island in God’s stream
where what we know
we copulate
and what we don’t
we dream.






May 29


THE COLOSSUS

When Alexander’s son Demetrius approached the island city-state of Rhodes in 305 BC, he found the city’s walls well defended against his force of 40,000. So he had enormous siege towers built, the cruelest of that day. The first great engine had been erected on six ships and was blown over in a storm. The second, even larger one was called Helopolis and was fashioned on land; the city’s defenders stilled it by flooding the land in front of the walls. When a relief force for the city arrived Demetrius was forced to flee, leaving behind most of the siege equipment.

To commemorate the victory the Rhodians built the Colossus, a statue of the naked shape of Zeus, holding high a torch. The creation of the famed sculptor Lysippus, the Colossus was said to stand some 100 feet high and took 12 years to build, much of it from pieces of the siege equipment Demetrius left behind. Some say it stood straddling the harbor at Rhodes (though that’s doubtful, given its breadth).

Only 56 years later an earthquake destroyed much of Rhodes and toppled the Colossus, breaking it off at the knees, its weakest point. Ptolemy offered to have the statue rebuilt, but an oracle made the Rhodians believe that they had offended Helios and refused.

The remains of the Colossus lay on the ground for some 800 years and were even thus one of the seven marvels of the ancient world. Many travelled far to marvel over the ruins. Pliny the Elder said that it was impossible to wrap one’s arms around the thumb. In 654 AD an Arab force under Muawiyah I captured Rhodes, and the remains of the Colossus was sold to a travelling salesman from Edessa. He broke down the remains and hauled the bronze scrap on the backs of 900 camels.

Pieces continued to turn up for sale for years along that caravan route, but eventually all traces disappeared. It wasn’t until 1989 that the first remnant was thought to be found, when a huge block of stone was dredged up from the harbor of Rhodes and believed to be a fist. But it was only stone and mud debris thrown into the sea by a bulldozer.


***

COLOSSUS


Even lying on the ground, ‘tis a marvel.

-- Pliny the Elder

Why man, he doth betride a narrow world
like a Colossus, and we petty men
walk under his huge legs and peep about
to find ourselves dishonorable graves.

-- Cassius referring to Caesar in
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I.ii.136-9

Yesterday we planted blue salvia
and white and purple angelina
in the garden. It was a towering
hot day, breathless, cloudless,
into the upper 90s by mid-morning;
the whole neighborhood was
stilled, feeble in the sounds
of its Sunday labors, as if the sun
god’s weight had smashed
our block into ruins.
My wife and I weren’t
working together well, the
both of us bitchy, squabbling
over design -- what comes out,
what goes where -- But thanks
to past experience with
working through our funk
we got on to our task,
finishing well after noon,
burnt and sweating hard.
We stood together at the
garden’s entrance surveying
what we had done and
felt proud, of our work
and each other. After
cleaning up we ate pasta
salad & cold watermelon
on the back porch, watching
clouds to the north amass
and rumble, delivering
ten minutes of dazed sprinkle
then turning bright again.
“There are two things
every person needs,” my wife
said as we watched the
thin rain fall: “A pet
and a garden.” I agreed.
I napped hard & then woke
to my wife enraged and
weeping over an Ebay
sale that had gone from
sour to all bad, the buyer
of her carefully-tended
linens raising hell over
condition, sending email
after email calling my
wife a liar, and now PayPal
had decided in that
awful person’s favor.
Another left hook from
bad luck for my wife,
another bad chapter
in her bad year,
another reason to despair
of her beloved business
of ever turning a dime.
She raged at me but good
for being lackadasial
in sympathy, begrudging
all the time I’ve had to
spend talking it over and over,
the time I spent helping
write reasoned rebuttals
to those indifferent powers
of Ebay and Paypal,
efforts which all, it
seemed that overheated
day, had come to naught.
“Some day you’ll come
home and I’ll be gone,”
she said crying on our
couch, our cat cowering
underneath, terrified
of her anger. “Then
you won’t have to worry
about indulging me any
more.” For rest of the day
I felt the keen blades of
failure, this rebuilt marriage
come to naught, our fortunes
slowly withering in the
omnipotence of bright powers
who simply yearn it seems,
to burn us in our tracks.
I drove to the video store
and searched an hour for
nothing & came home with
naught. My embittered wife
was embroidering something
beautiful on a sheet for
her mother to give to her
sister on her birthday, $200
worth of work she’ll get
paid almost nothing for.
I put on Bill Evans' LP
“You’ve Got To Believe
In Spring” -- bought the
day before in a flea market
near Daytona Beach --
and listened bittersweetly
to it as I made Cobb salad for
dinner, the day outside
darkening with another storm
which failed to delve us
rain. My eyes were weepy
from allergies in them
assaulted by the day’s sweaty
work outside, making me feel
like I had been crying hard
and long. My mood and the
music made me think back
on that hard season in 1995
when I first heard Bill
Evans through this album.
I was divorced, dead-ended
in my job and growing sour
of any hope of finding
a place in poetry, wanting
to go back to booze but
holding back, knowing that
last resignation would drown
everything else: And had fallen
hard for a girl-woman at work,
my desire for her growing
oceanic in the the knowledge
that it couldn’t be. I remember
the sound of the title song
inside a moment when she
and I came back from a downtown
bar (she drinking beer, me
O’Doul’s) sometime after
midnight on a work night,
that sweet sad music
and the hour defining
something colossal in
my heart -- not proud
and tall for anything I
could achieve,
but rather in how much
was revealed when all that
desire crashed -- perfect
ruins, a marvel of imagined
heights no human arms
could wrap around, not even
a severed thumb of it.
The sons of Poseidon had
set the precedent at Rhodes
in mythic times, refusing
Venus her harbor, receiving
her punishment as she
turned their desire back
toward their mother, causing
Poseidon to drive them
underground. Lesson
One: Resist love at your
peril. Ages later the city’s
men raised a Colossus
in triumph over a mortal
enemy they barred harbor to,
offending not, I think,
the sun god Helios,
but its watery derange
we call Poseidon.
You struck the Colossus down
in an earthquake, breaking
pride and joy at its knees.
Lesson Two: I survive
love at my peril. In
love’s ruins I met my
my wife and married her,
building this house,
shattering it with desire
and then finding solace
in what comes after,
the humility and power
of ruins. But some days
were like yesterday and
I feel that love is only
ruins, a godly defecation,
the spoils of so much
augment trapped in
human hearts. Ah well.
We watched “The Big
Lebowski” on DVD as
we wearied on toward
sleep, sprinklers calming
the blistered garden,
our new additions there
like tiny siege towers
meant to break us. Oh,
how hard we laughed
at John Goodman in
that movie, laughed hard
and sadly at ourselves.
We bedded early praying
termites not come out
from the works to dance
on our fallen dreams. I
wake to a sea-god’s laughter
beneath Bill Evans’ spring.




May 30

Poseidon, the turbulent husband not only of Amphitrite, but also of many Nereids, naiads, nymphs and heroines, was the father of many sons who played their parts in heroic saga. Amongst these were not only heroes, but also savage, violent beings who were defeated by the heroes -- such beings as Polyphemos the Kyklops, whose punishment by Odyssesus called forth the vengeance of Poseidon.

Hesiod called Triton “him of wide force,” and described him as a great god who dwelt at the bottom of the sea, in the golden palace of his beloved mother Amphitrite and his lord and father Poseidon. The poet declared that he was a terrible deity. I have mentioned his love affair with Hekate, and also that Herakles overcame him by force in the presence of the threefold “Old One of the Sea” -- whose art of metamorphosis the younger god apparently did not possess.

Triton was half fish, half human in shape, and can best be compared to the Silenoi and Satyroi. His only difference from them lay in the fact that they developed from disguised human beings into land-creatures, whereas Triton’s prototypes were men who decked themselves with the tails of fishes or dolphins.

The tales concerning Triton can be summarized as follows: He was the Silenos or Satyros of the sea, a raper of women -- indeed, a raper of boys, too, and from of old these rapes were performed by several Tritons at once -- a being who could awaken terror and lead men astray with his conch-horn. The Tritons were sometimes accompanied by Tritonesses. But usually it was Nereids who accompanied them as they swam in nuptial processions through the sea, celebrating the marriage of Poseidon and Aphrodite {sic -- Amphitrite?}, or the birth of Aphrodite, or those mysteries that were said to have been revealed by the Nereids to mankind.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

***

TRITON


She whispered the Triton’s
dark oracle in my ear
as I swirled down from our
tensely spasmed wrap
into the blackest folds
of dream, her voice now
his, a sound of surf and
debacle, ten thousand waves
snaking from a mouth
of cruellest blue:

***

Forget booze. I distill a
far deeper darker flavor
in the abysyms of the heart,
the most dangerous brine of all.
One sip and you’re falling water,
not fresh either but mine
to rape in divinest thrall.
Look out the window
and it’s 4 a.m. on a summer's
night with everything
humming and aswoon,
quiescent in every human
way, drifting at the bottom
of hot bright days. Yet in
this dark the sun yet boils,
loined in my conch-horn
whose bass is three
stops down from vox
humana, too low for
human ears or sexual gears
but sounding in both
nonetheless, as whale-
flukes churn, slapping
sacred precincts to
full attention, a fuck heat
cauled inside the frozen
press of deep-water waves.
I rouse you with your
worst desire here
at the bottom of that sea,
a mare’s ass plump for
cocking deep in godlike
impunity, rioting the
nocturnes of ball-salt bliss.
Satyrs are just the half
of my descending dance,
their wino greed
just the first fist
of that far older juice
I squirt from my mother’s
tits, queen of every deep
and wife of Poseidon,
vanquisher of her seas.
Every shore you walk
shouting names of God
is just the lip of a precipice
I am the eternal plunge
off from. I am that sound
inside a wave’s collapse which
thunders high pleasure down,
he black rip current
in your every bluegreen hurl.
I do not sate, I cannot praise
what does not plunge in darkest swirl.