... Less than a billow of the sea
That at the last do no more roam,
Less than a wave, less than a wave,
This thing that hath no home,
This thing that hath no grave ...
-- Fiona MacLeod, “In the Night”
TRINITY2004
Three fins weave this
wave from heart to hand
to page where your eyes shore;
consubstantial, male in
their martial quest for
affect, like the three kings
of Orient who ride their
camels slowly across
the starry desert, each
a third aspect, all pulsing
the obligatos of Empire.
First there is my greed
for sexual plunder, slick
and raw and urgent,
that bell which bears
a tight-balled ache to
hurl the next name of God.
Then there is the voyager
who never gazed at
a margin that he didn’t
wish to escape; his compass
is much different from the
first, pointing just beyond
the beloved toward the
angels she occludes.
Finally, there is the one
with molting wings who
refuses to call this
anything but calling;
he tends a font of quintessential
blue that isn’t blue at all
but sings the blues of it,
the way the ocean is not
blue but heaves great
dreams of blue on every
summer shore. Three
glands ooze their salt
mercurials into the
perplex ardor of this next
poem, rising from one great
body buried deep in me:
Cerne Giant, Oran in
his bone coracle, and
some Shakespearean wog
sawing a Dantean rag
on his bluey violin. Three
tenors warble center
stage of this hall of song,
belting out a three-part
harmony this next poem long.
***
Finally, rains of their own accord, a midmorning mist segueing into harder spiculations, the urgency of the torrent, slathering all with desperately needed moisture ... so there’s a suck to the Sunday, a receipt around and about and down the usual rituals of mowing, cleaning, ironing, cooking, recalibrating the being for the work week. A watered being, refreshened from an aquifer I call my giant past ...
A meditation here on the background of the hero. What he quests, he is, in some former sense, and the progression of his tale is regression, heading into wider and wilder steppes of the dream. Each test heightens the quandary of ego and Self: the weapons which the hero march off with work in the first battles yet are increasingly of no use in the subsequent ones.
Take, for instance, the figure of the giant which the hero encounters. It is one thing to meet and best the ogre on the road; it is another thing to tackle with his mother, a far older and menacing matrix (her jaws open wide beneath us); its is a third thing to enter the lair of the dragon, the oldest figure in this trio of encounters, the third apocalyptic embrace of the hero with his Self. Well, apocalyptic to the ego, because it knows it cannot resist or best the transformation about to take place.
To progress in the tale is to regress to its sources; the next figure on the road is the background of the former. In
Iona, Fiona MacLeod traces this course back down in the lineage of St. Michael:
***
The “Iollach Mhicheil” — the triumphal song of Michael — is quite as much pagan as Christian. We have here, indeed, one of the most interesting and convincing instances of the transmutation of a personal symbol. St. Michael is on the surface a saint of extraordinary powers and the patron of the shores and the shore-folk; deeper, he is an angel, who is upon the sea what the angelical saint, St. George, is upon the land: deeper, he is a blending of the Roman Neptune and the Greek Poseidon: deeper, he is himself and ancient Celtic god: deeper, he is no other than Manannan, the god of ocean and all waters, in the Gaelic pantheon: as, once more, Manannan himself is dimly revealed to us as still more ancient, more primitive, and even as supreme in remote godhead, the Father of an Immortal Clan.
***
1. THE OGRE ON THE ROADKatherine Briggs writes in
The Fairies in Tradition and Folklore Often monstrous traits are attached to heroes, who sometimes seem to have changed from gods to heroes and from heroes to giants. In a learned and penetrating article in Volume 69 of
Folklore, Dr. Ellis Davidson has examined the connection between Wade and Weland, and the beliefs we can deduce from various fragments of the story. It well illustrates the connections between the fairies, the giants, and the dead. In the course of the paper she says:
“Behind the figure of Weland the Smith it seems possible to discern a race of supernatural beings thought of in general as giants (but related also to dwarves and elves), who are both male and female, who live in families, who are skilled at the making of weapons and at stone-building, and whose dwellings may be reached by a descent into the earth of under-water. Wad and Weland are possibly Grendel also. The local traditions of giants who dwell in mounds, caves or stone tombs are of great interest, and Sir Gawain’s Green Knight should perhaps be added to the list.” (H.R. Ellis Davidson, “Weland the Smith,”
Folklore Vol 69, 145-59)
(She continues:)
Occasional hill figures, like that at Cerne Abbas, or the Long Man of Wilmington, have generally gathered some kind of vague giant story to them, whatever their origin may have been. So the Cerne Abbas figure is supposed to be the outline of a giant killed by the local people as he slept a gorged sleep after eating their cattle. (see J.S. Udal, Doreshire Folk-Lore, Hertford, 1922, 154-8)
***
GIANTJune 15
Abbas Cerne was cut from chalk
where all the men had killed him,
sleeping on mountain sward
deep in the glut of slaughter.
His six-foot penis still glistens
with moon and sea and wombs
our wives will never speak of
though they smile faintly
when they dream. When he
walked his shoulders cleared
the highest ridges, his feet
connected villages in one stride.
He could stand far out at sea
with his head above the crests
like a darker-browed island,
his smile widening in mist
as he devoured errant ships.
And oh the hauls spilled
from his net, filled with
mackerel as large as bulls,
narwhals and sea-lions,
parcels of sea-treasure
too, fat chests of gold,
barrels of wild whiskey
still corked tight as
a nun’s hoo-ha, steeples
with bells not heard
on land for a thousand
years. It’s said he lived
down there, at the ass-
end of all seas where
dead sailors and lost gods
drift their fabled bones.
His abbey was in
a long-drowned town
and it was piled high
with verboten books
where every lost secret
has been bound, salt
liturgies now ebbed away,
tales of heroes too tall
for skeptic ears, spells for
spinning castle doors
and love-potions for
the maidenheads of kings
who battle and fell beneath
far huger moons of old,
wide as the sea and
gibbous in a heart
blue-blacker than the
one we’ve come to
call our own. His haunt
is drowned by the
thousand leagues of time
down which all tales fall
from ferocity to gleam
to broad shouldered shades
fading yet further down
to a certain ache of absence
which arches back in
welcome when a fragment
of his tale washes up
on this first shore.
A certain wave reveals
in its curved crash
a phosphor of a dream,
reminding us that he’s
still there in ghost relief,
chalk father of the psyche
we married. Oh and
that cock of his
was immense and
unmerciful as the sea,
thick as a drunk tongue
and as long as we are
buried when we’re
planted back into his loam.
My love of tall tales
strides with him out there
on that moony sea; the
wave rider of my song
is just his merry brow;
the singing of the topside
man arises from lungs
of heaving brine and silt
and tides like deep waves
across a basso clef
pure cliff to billowed abyss.
Sing down with me
in his beclouded jisms
of divine ferocity and tooth,
a wut or singing hut
of infernal holiness, eternal
sot and sate and murder
on green fields. He’s no more
me than the pen I her rage
though I sing of him as
hard and deep as I can,
my hand thus a colossal
striding profane man
who totems the singer’s clan,
whose salt-abbey I man
re-scribing all its manuscripts,
verse by spell by rann.
THE OGRE ON THE SHORE2004
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia.
-- Laertes,
HamletAs always, my history assumes Your
mystery, insolving seas inside
my mother’s voice that day
she sang over silk-bruited waves.
She and it You meant to pair
on a shore of such narrow degree
that one step right or left
was either witchery or knowledge,
both doomed to boil my bones.
The ogre on the road of souls
may loom close to my father’s height
inside the doors I cannot pass;
surely the monster got
his basso and berserker cock
from my six-year-old’s lack
and reverence of such things;
but he is not there at every
crossroads to mentor me
in song, even though
he’s Poetry and more. Redder
jousts than sweet psalmody
are in his throat, and I’m a fool
to margin all he ravages
and cancels out.
Not by Providence
but Victory! the fish-man shouts
astride exultant waves, smashing
every naked shore with the his
uncleffed, sperm-gout gore.
How else can I say it? There is
my father’s dream or vision
of meeting Thor on the northern-
most wild of Iona years ago,
turning from his history
to face that huge churl of
Hebridean gale, the soul
of every rock-browed cliff
devoured by wind and wave.
Was it passion that burst
my father’s heart in love
for that sworded knight of
Northern winds? Was that
first song hot enough to
bid my father turn his gaze
back round to Pennsylvanian
velds where he pried and set
god’s hoar skeleton stone by
cold-ribbed stone? Or was it
enough of the second
song which does not huff and blow
the footers down in any
appeasable way but is wind itself,
unmixed of any abbey’s mortared mould,
defiant even of the words themselves?
Must I thus proceed?
How to build a chapel fit
to sing of him whom pronouns quit,
who is instead that dancing fit
which spirals sea and sky?
Build on water, yes; but tower
in no wise semblant to the backward
glance which mints its empire
on a selfish penury, a dime a dance,
vaulting the dervish in mere pedigree,
my resume which overwrites the mystery
into the majescule of history,
nippling seas and crowning winds.
Oh the shore is ever dangerous
which walks between dominions:
Not to drown or fully ebb
nor even say which sands I stride on
—not quite a page, nor sheeted
from that windy rage which grinds
the mortal shell of the earth
to infinitesimals of cosmic dust.
And we just oxidizers and rust,
corrosive as the salty seas,
& uncoagulent as loosened skies,
never one but many throats
professing gorgeous dooms
every time a wave curls high
and rides the poem to hell
down one long choiring boom.
In the Christian era, the saints kept bumping up against their forefathers’ bones, which were usually collossal. s. Heavy upon them was the burden or quest of saving their ancestors from the mortal sin of pagan sooth.
The
Life of Colum Cille (Columba), written in Irish by Manus O'Donnell and written in 1532, contains the following episode:
"Once when Colum Cille was walking beside the river Boyne a human skull was brought to him. The size of the skull was much bigger than the skulls of the people of that time. Then his followers said to Colum Cille, "It is a pity we don't know whose skull this is, or the whereabouts of the soul that was in the body on which it was." Colum Cille answered, "I'm not leaving this place until I find this out from God for you."
"Then Colum Cille prayed earnestly to God for that to be revealed to him, and God heard that prayer so that the skull itself spoke to him. It said that it was the skull of Cormac mac Airt, son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, king of Ireland, and an ancestor to himself, for Colum Cille was tenth generation after Cormac. And the skull said that although his faith wasn't perfect, he had a certain amount of faith and, because of his keeping the truth and that as God knew that from his descendants would come Colum Cille who would pray for his soul, He had not damned him permanently, although it was in severe pain that he awaited these prayers.
"Then Colum Cillle picked up the skull and washed it honorably, and baptized and blessed it; then he buried it. And Colum Cille did not leave that place until he had said 30 masses for the soul of Cormac. And at the last of the masses, the angels of God appeared to Colum Cille, taking Cormac's soul with them to enjoy eternal glory through the prayers of Colum Cille."
- O'Donnell, The Life of Colum Cillle, transl. B. Lacey, Dublin 1998
***
THE HEATHEN GIANTFeb. 2005
(In episode 4 of
The Voyage of St. Brendan) Brendan, having had a ship built for him, finds the exceptionally large head of a dead man on the beach. Its forehead measures five feet across. When Brendan asks what kind of life he has led, the man’s head answers that he was a hundred feet tall and very strong. He was a heathen who waded through the sea to rob ships. This he did for a living. In a heavy storm which whipped up the waves to extreme heights he was drowned. Brendan offers to pray for the giant, and to beg God to revive him so that he may be baptized. Once that is done, the giant may even, if he lives to praise God, find forgiveness for his sins, and eventually ascend to paradise. The giant refuses; his is afraid that in his new life he might not be able to withstand the temptation of sin. What if he started robbing again? He would be a lot worse off then as, according to the giant, Christians are punished much more severely in hell than pagans. Moreover, the prospect of having to suffer the pain of death as second time frightens him. He wants to go back to his torments / poor companions in the place of darkness. He departs with Brendan’s best wishes. Brendan then proceeds on his way.
-- Clara Strijbosch,
The Seafaring SaintThe old nights lay like massive bones
scattered on the beach, the skull
like a split moon buried in the sand.
Sea-sounds through its occiput
are the voices of memory, faint
and ghastly as the depths I once
fell to find you in the darkest
beds of sweet abyss. He remembers
the feral heart of old, icy and
on fire for plunder, parting thighs
with blue gusto & launching his
dragon ship there with the pith
and pitch of awfulness,
rowing voices crowing one pent
dragon seethe. Eye-sockets big
as church-doors retain the marrow
of those nights, their dark abcessa
still lucent, even lewd, harrows which
invite the next arriving saint to
find a heaven wide enough to
revive and save a soul so massive,
old and hungry. But he will not
rise again, not for all the pearly
virginettes bent in heaven’s
puffy marge. Wholly dark now, he
strides between this beach and
those dark nights, sporting
in a sea of finned and ghostly
salt delights, unrepentant
as my backwards glance which
call his life and ways both holy.
I appoint that house of bleached
ribs apt chapel of the wilder
half of my heart and God’s and
yours, you who would embrace
the seven seas to slake
your womb’s blue belling need.
SKULL MUSIC2004
My head is also Yours, rude stone,
Bone petra: A vault of verbal
Coins and blue booty, the old slush
Pile of all my days and what You
Make of them. I now believe that
Each event enfolds three cups here:
The tale, its bedding, and the dream
It opens like a door. It’s no
wonder that skulls were set in the
Lintels of barrows, and pitched down
Wells. Nor that I’ve found so many
Here. Each poem is but a tongue both
Back and forward of Your own, my
Totem father, my old stone cross.
May Your bone summit bless this toss.
2. GRENDEL’S DAMThey went to sleep. And one paid dearly
for his night’s ease, as had happened to them often,
ever since Grendel occupied the gold-hall,
committing evil until the end came,
death after his crimes. Then it became clear,
obvious to everyone once the fight was over,
that an avenger lurked and was still alive,
grimly biding time. Grendel’s mother,
monstrous hell-bride, brooded on her wrongs.
She had been forced down into fearful waters,
the cold depths, after Cain had killed
his father’s son, felled his own
brother with a sword. Branded an outlaw,
shunned company and joy. and from Cain there sprang
misbegotten spirits, among them Grendel,
the banished and accursed, due to come to grips
with that watcher in Heorot waiting to do battle.
The monster wrenched and wrestled with him
but Beowulf was mindful of his mighty strength,
the wondrous gifts God had showered on him:
He relied for help on the Lord of All,
on His care and favour. So he overcame the foe,
brought down the hell-brute. Broken and bowed,
outcast from all sweetness, the enemy of mankind
made for his death-den. But now his mother
had sallied forth on a savage journey,
grief-wracked and ravenous, desperate for revenge.
--
Beowulf, 1251-78, transl. Seamus Heaney
***
DAMJune 17
If you think sons Grendel
Cerne & Caliban were bad,
try stepping back into their
moms, those giant dams of
heart so hot with Hekatean
spleen you’d think their wombs
were lava casks, fountains
of deranging ire. Beowulf dove
in the mere to have it out
with she who nursed Grendel
on blue gall, who after the
son was dispatched became
the greater hurt of Heorot,
a fen of gore-dripping jaws.
At the bottom of the lake
the hero met the mama
and battled in a swallowed
court where body parts still
drifted about the abysmally
dark pall, the witched waters
almost too deep and drear
for Beowulf’s greatest test
which he would yet survive.
(The third test with the worm
went back, sadly, too far.)
The Cally berry of Ulster
would fly over the heights
in the thick of night
with Cerne’s big balls
bound in her skirt, tonnish
boulders which she ferried
far to build a mobile
court, the castle which
moves every night from
one man’s dream to
the next. And then there’s
Sycorax, the prioress
of Shakespeare’s final isle,
gone when the tale begins, her
rude magic rough in Properero’s
hands, leeched in his book
of charms, her ancient
darkness washing against
the play like tides
against the island’s shores,
haunting every line.
These dames don’t fuck
around, if you know
what I mean; or they
do and wildly so,
off every psalter page,
deep down beneath
the bleaching altars of
the male god’s history
when his loins and
hands were colossal
havocs of libido
cockstrutting across
the earth. Behind
every of those big lugs
there’s a dam, a walled-
off lake of fire whose
womb is bottomless,
whose will cements
her sons into Green Chapels
of headless rapine
and sea-wide ravages.
In her name those giants
wreak havoc on the
later realm, like adulterated
children of the booze,
drowning all they touch
dementing every kiss with
fire. The father in those
old tall tales can never
quite be found, much less
named, though he’s a bastard
to be sure, god in his
nth iniquity, saddled to
his black hips and armed
with dragon’s teeth. He
broke in one night
and had his way with
her (who once was young
and beautiful, betrothed
to kings of men) -- Had
his way with her all night,
fucking her so hard
and deep as to pockmark
the very moon with
gouges and crevasses
amid tranquil seas
of hurled sperm. The
son she bore was her
revenge on the
eviction of her rule
by men more conscious
than they dared
or knew was death to try.
Up from the fens
and moors she sent
her monster son,
and when he fell to
knights and priests
she washed out from
the tide, a fell
malignant tree-sized
thing no sword has
ever touched, nor
gospel ever quelled.
I leave her rasping
at the door outside
at the hag ends of
this poem’s hour,
a pent growl of a purr
with every claw distended
one inch from coming through.
Say what you will of
her but only mud and fire
will do to see her standing
there outside my writing
room, an invitation
to the dance and die
amid the echoes of salt doom.
***
GIANTESSI am Cupid’s WMD, a
Catapult of blue breasts. The skulls
Of my scooped-out lovers line the
Mazes of my cave, far beneath
The rolling sea. By day I dream
Of your cock and balls in this mouth
Of stone; by night I feed, tapping
O so gently my suckered limbs
Against your window panes, calling
You out to drown my way. My rule
Has lasted here some four hundred
Million years, yet every dusk which
Darkens abyss I wake afresh,
Starved wet in uncoiling desire,
Beak snapping for your milk of fire.
-- In an article in Geology 28, L. Piccard finds tectonic roots for Grendel’s mam:
A multidisciplinary study reveals close correspondences between mythological descriptions, arrangement of the cult-sites and local active faults in ancient Greece (Piccardi, 2000a and 2000b). Chthonic dragons, mostly feminine polymorph creatures, were also indicated at many of these special sacred places, and their lairs are located directly above major active faults (Piccardi, 2000c). The veneration of these places might have been a consequence of the observation of peculiar natural phenomena, such as gas and flames emissions, underground roaring, ground shaking and ground ruptures. Maybe this coincidence is simply circumstantial in the East Mediterranean due to the abundance of myths in such a highly seismic region. However, it can likewise be observed in areas less active seismically, and with different mythologies. Scotland, for example, is famous for its modern myth of the Loch Ness monster, affectionately called Nessie. Known to derive from a primitive cult of the water-horse, sacred to the Picts, its first written mention appears in Adomnan's 'Life of St. Columba' (7th century AD). In the original Latin description the dragon appears "cum ingenti fremitu" (with strong shaking), and disappears "tremefacta" (shaking herself), which seems to point to a telluric nature of the monster living in the lake. In fact, Loch Ness is positioned directly over the fault zone of the most seismic sector (for example the M=5 earthquake of 18.09.1901) of the Great Glen Fault, the major active fault in Scotland. In this light, many modern eyewitness reports attributed to Nessie may find a simple natural explanation.
-- “Active faulting at Delphi: seismotectonic remarks and a hypothesis for the geological environment of a myth.” Geology, 28, 651-654.
****
Jung frames the giantess as the mother and consort of the giant whom the hero first encounters, a greater door to the inner dark. He writes in a 1932 article on Picasso:
...When I say 'he,' I mean that personality in Picasso which suffers the underworld fate - the man in him who does not turn towards the day-world, but is fatefully drawn into the dark; who follows not the accepted ideals of goodness and beauty, but the demoniacal attraction of ugliness and evil. It is these antichristian and Luciferian forces that well up in modern man and engender an all-pervading sense of doom, veiling the bright world of day with the mists of Hades, infecting it with deadly decay, and finally, like an earthquake, dissolving it into fragments, fractures, discarded remnants, debris, shreds, and disorganized units. Picasso and his exhibition are a sign of the times, just as much as the twenty-eight thousand people who came to look at his pictures.
When such a fate befalls a man who belongs to the neurotic, he usually encounters the unconscious in the form of the 'Dark One,' a Kundry of horribly grotesque, primeval ugliness or else of infernal beauty. In Faust's metamorphosis, Gretchen, Helen, Mary, and the abstract 'Eternal Feminine' correspond to the four female figures of the Gnostic underworld, Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia. And just as Faust is embroiled in murderous happenings and reappears in changed form, so Picasso changes shape and reappears in the underworld form of the tragic Harlequin - a motif that runs through numerous paintings. It may be remarked in passing that Harlequin is an ancient chthonic god.
The descent into ancient times has been associated ever since Homer's day with the Nekyia. Faust turns back to the crazy primitive world of the witches' sabbath and to a chimerical vision of classical antiquity. Picasso conjures up crude, earthy shapes, grotesque and primitive, and resurrects the soullessness of ancient Pompeii in a cold, glittering light - even Giulio Romano could not have done worse!
Seldom or never have I had a patient who did not go back to neolithic art forms or revel in evocations of Dionysian orgies. Harlequin wanders like Faust through all these forms, though sometimes nothing betrays his presence but his wine, his lute, or the bright lozenges of his jester's costume. And what does he learn on his wild journey through man's millennial history? What quintessence will he distill from this accumulation of rubbish and decay, from these half-born or aborted possibilities of form and colour? What symbol will appear as the final cause and meaning of all this. In view of the dazzling versatility of Picasso, one hardly dares to hazard a guess, so for the present I l would rather speak of what I have found in my patients' material.
The Nekyia is no aimless and purely destructive fall into the abyss, but a meaningful katabasis eis antron, a descent into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge. The journey through the psychic history of mankind has as its object the restoration of the whole man, by awakening the memories in the blood. The descent to the Mothers enabled Faust to raise up the sinfully whole human being - Paris united with Helen - that homo totus who was forgotten when contemporary man lost himself to one-sidedness.
ORAN AND THE GIANTESSYou found her sleeping in that cave
Which fonts the western sea, below
All depths I dream. Kissed her gently
As a shade and watched her stir and
Sigh and slowly open her deep
Eyes. She whispered your name as you
Climbed in next to her, singing
All the while. What happened next you
Would not say, except to smile that
Dolphins and sea horses pranced round
The bed while sea-blooms widened to
Hurl wavelike a wild blue perfume.
You drank in draughts the distillate
Of her salt souterrain, till dawn
Awoke me startled here, blank page
Beneath, and pen like her in hand.
My joy’s your shore, this crashing land.
THREE: ENTER THE DRAGONWhen the dragon awoke, trouble flared again.
He rippled down the rock, writhing with anger
when he saw the footprints of the prowler who had stolen
too close to his dreaming head.
So may a man not marked by fate
easily escape exile and woe
by the grace of God.
The hoard-guardian
scorched the ground as he scoured and hunted
for the trespasser who had troubled his sleep.
Hot and savage, he kept circling and circling
the outside of the mound. No man appeared
in that desert waste, but he worked himself up
by imagining battle; then back in he’d go
in search of th cup, only to discover
signs that someone had stumbled upon
the golden treasures. So the guardian of the mound,
the hoard-watcher, waited for the gloaming
with fierce impatience; his pent-up fury
at the loss of the vessel made him long to hit back
and lash out in flames. Then, to his delight,
the day waned and he could wait no longer
behind the wall, but hurtled forth
in a fiery blaze. The first to suffer
were the people on the land, but before long
it was their treasure-giver who would come to grief.
The dragon began to belch out flames
and burn bright homesteads; there was a hot glow
that scared everyone, for the vile sky-winger
would leave nothing alive in his wake.
Everywhere the havoc he wrought was in evidence.
Far and near, the Geat nation
bore the brunt of his brutal assaults
and virulent hate. Then back to the hoard
he would dart before daybreak, to hide in his den.
He had winged the land, swathed it in flames,
in fire and burning, and now he felt secure
in the vaults of his barrow; but his trust was unavailing.
--
Beowulf 2287-2323, transl. Heaney
***
Heaney writes in an introduction to his translation,
... the dragon has a wonderful inevitability about him and a unique glamour. It is not that the other monsters are lacking in presence and aura; it is more that they remain, for all their power to terrorize, creatures of the physical world. Grendel comes alive in the reader’s imagination as a kind of dog-breath in the dark, a fear of collision with some hard-boned and immensely strong android frame, a mixture of Caliban and hoplite. And wile his mother too has a definite brute-bearing about her, a creature of slouch and lunge on land if seal-swift in the water, she nevertheless retains a certain non-strangeness. As antagonists of a hero being tested, Grendel and his mother possess an appropriate head-on strength. The poet may need them as figures who do the devil’s work, but the poem needs them more as figures who call up and show off Beowulf’s physical might and his superb gifts as a warrior. They are the right enemies for the young glory-hunter, instigators of the formal boast, worthy trophies to be carried back from the grim testing-ground -- Grendel’s arm is ripped off and mailed up, his head severed and paraded in Heorot. It is all consonant with the surge of youth and the dire compulsion to win fame “as wide as the wind’s home/as the sea around cliffs,” utterly as manifestations of the Germanic heroic code.
Enter then, fifty years later, the dragon. From his dry -stone vault from a nest where he is heaped in coils around the body-heated gold. Once he is wakened, there is something glorious in the way he manifests himself, a Fourth of July effulgence fire-working its path across the night sky; and yet, because of the centuries he has spent dormant in the tumulus, there is a foundedness as well as a lambency about him. He is at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure of real oneiric power, one that can easily survive the prejudice which arises at the very mention of the word “dragon.” (xvii-xix)
WYRMJune 18
He’s the old bastard at the
bottom of my brain, coiled
in a vault deeper and older
than the sea, rounding his
thousand drear vertebrae
around a million years of
gold lost down the booty well.
The son was awful, a wreaker
of wrecked halls; the mother
was worse at the bottom
of her mere, defeated only
with a giant’s blade found
hanging on her treasure-wall.
But this guy was the worst
in England’s oldest written
tale, a berserker of wing
and soil awakened from
long stupor to raven
sky and land with pre-mother
pagan fire, the genius
of the tomb that wombs
all later mater father-hater
ire. Here’s the rouge
spermatazoon who cracked
the cosmic egg, bellowing
in sky thunder while
the earth squirmed in
receipt, the oceans
parted like thighs as the
lightning pealed and rang
the bells of hell
all the way from heaven
in addered spits of foam.
Here’s drunk daddy
Saturn eating all his
chillen as they birthed,
the boggler who stained
his chops with every
demiurge to quim the
roiled brain. Here’s the worm
of Uffington who meanders
every night the sky,
feeding his wings on
moon star milk,
ferrying wyrd lucence
back down into his lair
beneath the mountain
under the sea which
lies undermost my
dimmest memories
where all the fathers go
when their persons
have been laid to rest
& battened through
the guts of worms
and shat in dirt as
dusts. It all rains
down that far in a
a ghastly spiculate,
drip by drip of
blood, like shots of
booze upon the tongue
of sleeping beast.
Our final receipt
thus feeds the wyrm
who’s always got one eye
open, no matter how
deep we sleep. Oh
he’s something,
that dragon father
in his lair, brute
and horrid as first
things go. Who am
I to creep down there
and pry this cup
from his coils, so
gold and weirdly
carved with the
world’s seven days?
He only seems to be
sleeping, you know: it’s
more like senescence,
an old man’s swoon where
his thoughts loose in
a river where nothing
quite takes hold
nor ever can let go.
I sing him here
this far down,
singing low as I can
for fear of waking
what will never stop
enraging this sweet land
with that old violence
that dark time’s
secret wand.
THE LAMBTON WORMLike the monster whom Andromeda was to be sacrificed, the Lambton Worm was the punishment of impiety. The young Heir of Lambton was a wild lad, and one Sunday morning, when everyone else was going to church, he insisted on sitting fishing in the river, in full sight of the worshippers. When the bell had stopped and the church door was closed, the Heir had a catch. A stranger was passing that way, and the Heir called to him to come and look at it. “He’s shaped like an eft,” he said, “and it has seven holes in its head like a lamprey. What is it?”
“I never saw its like,” said the stranger. “It seems to me to bode no good.” The Heir took the thing off the hook, and threw it in disgust into the Castle Well. He thought no more of it for a long time.
But years passed, and the thing grew. The Heir steadied down, and went off to the Holy Land. But while he was away the thing grew too big for the well, and came out and began to ravage the countryside.
At length it got so big that it coiled three times around Lambton Hill, and every night it had to be given the milk of seven cows to keep it quiet. Many people tried to destroy it, but its breath was venemous, its hide was thick and when it was cut to pieces they joined up again.
At last the Heir came back, and by the advice of a wise man he destroyed the creature, wearing spiked aromour so that it wounded itself when it bit him, standing in the rushing waters of the Weare, so that the dragon’s limbs were carried down one by one as he cut them off, and could not re-unite.
But he had to pay for his success by killing the first creature that met him on his return. He failed in this condition, and since then no heir of Lambton has died in his bed.
-- W. Henderson,
Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England, 1879, in Katherine Briggs,
The Fairies in Tradition in LiteratureBriggs comments: “The dragon which joins itself when it is cut and which coils round hill belongs to an old tradition. We are within hearing of primitive things.”
ENTER THE DRAGON2004
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.
RED DRAGON2005
Lucifer (“Fire-bearer”) in Hebrew is
Helel ben Sahar, “Bright Son of the
Morning.” Later tradition has linked him
to the planet Venus and, somewhat
ambiguously, to other fiery falling
figures: Hephaestus, Prometheus, Phaeton,
Icarus. The pride that made him sit
“in the seat of God” led to his fall; this
is the Greek
hubris so often punished
by cosmic justice. The final battle of
Revelation was also interpreted as a
primal battle, the war in Heaven between
Lucifer's forces and those of St. Michael
at the beginning of time. After the fall,
Lucifer, identified with the red dragon,
becomes as hideous a he had become
beautiful -- and changed his name to
Satan.
-- Alice K. Turner,
A History of HellOh you should have seen me back then
as I ravened starry heavens in
my silver Rolls convertible, my black
hair like a mane wild in courses of the
night, my hands more perfect than
poured marble at the wheel. There wasn’t
an angelette in all eternity who could
resist my warm smile and icy eyes;
I could plunge a phallus of pure blue fire
right through ‘em with a glance. All those
downy wings spread wide in hot delight
of me! The O-mouths of ecstasy like
black holes birthing a legion suns with
each new name of God they called me
as I plunged and pumped the rebel fire.
I nailed ‘em all in the aeons of my youth,
each a campaign to mount the Master’s throne.
So many followed after me like whorls
of musky afterburn, cupping starlight
from the pools of sweat I left behind
between their ravished breasts, that cold
fire small comfort for eternity yet
infinitely far too much for life The rosewood
inlay above the backseat of that beastly Rolls
toward my end was notched ten billion
times, each scar and angel star, the
only true map of the horny heavens.
That fabled car is now smashed into the rocks
at the bottom of an abyss of black fire.
That’s where me and my element and
vampiric brood were hurled to when the Master
decreed I’d hurled rebellious oats around
the gables of his mansions long enough.
Every way I once shone bright is now
a hellish underglow; the smile I once
reaped angels with in a flash is now
this dragon’s snarl. I once was Lucifer
but that was long ago, before every thrill
heisted from the Master’s lap returned
to me, crying,
Satan. Every delight I halved
from His light is now a scale heaped on my flesh,
a coil which circles now the undersides of the
earth’s own mortal plunge to smoking ruin.
But don’t be scared, my friend: I don’t
reveal the visage of desire’s fate till long
after you have fallen through the last bed
of your ding dong dorking life. By day you
only see this middle-aging man who shows
not an inkling of his former years. Who would
guess that the bland man driving in traffic
next to you was once the rapture of an angel’s
crease, the feral pillage of gossamer skirts
in the back seat of a hot car at the darkest
edge of town? No one: that’s the Master’s
curse, to burn the wings off every ache to
romp and roger His high heaven. That outer
fire burned wholly down and in, hurling
in its fumes that tell-all-book of big-night
drives to a place where none will ever
read it. My hell’s found in what burned from
my smile when the tide turned the other
way: when
she at last refused to get in
and walked demurely off, leaving me with
this endless ache which no thrust skyward
could ever again slake. Forever now I am
the road not taken by every good impulse,
the shadow of infernal lust which no longer
must compulse maturing virgins of the heart
toward bad and worser ends. The hood
ornament of my Rolls was once the ikon
of my war with God is now all that remains
of my desire, washed on some faraway beach:
I am he who all put behind to start their
histories, the forever middle-aging man
between God and His procreative mysteries.
