Avalon

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

-- Keats, “Lamia”


The apple was the tree of enchantment in medieval England. It was under a grafted apple tree that Lancelot was asleep when the four fairy queens carried away, and in the “Romance of King Orfeo,” Eurydice was asleep under an apple tree when the Fairy King carried her off. Apples and apple peel are used in several forms of divination, and Avalon, the Isle of the Apples, was the name of the Paradise of Fairyland into which Arthur disappeared. If it was Glastonbury it was none the less Fairyland.

-- Katherine Briggs,
The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (italics mine)

Now ending June and we’re finally
into the rainy season, a wet dream
of seabreezes strolling back and
forth across the peninsula, like
the pendulous breasts in the
shining face of a drunk adoloter
in the Doll House down the Trail.
Lush heat and fusillading streams
of grace while heavens flash and flounder:
That is the year’s moment,
roused from calmer months
and wary of what soon comes
whirling in from the sea to
shores we don’t yet know the name of.
Cat Violet curled on the couch asleep
and Cat Mamacita outside the
opened window to my right,
mewling for love, for food,
for alms of security. I step outside
to pet her some, her black fur
rousing somehow from the dark
garden; she reaches nose to mine
as I look into those frank gold eyes,
whispering softly the richness
of the wild. How long will this miracle
last, how vulnerable it is,
the heart I mean, blown into
durable shapes with the most
fragile of steels -- glass whale,
glass penis, glass cat, glass life --
Upstairs my moody wife
drifts deep in cancer worries,
the simple aspiration of a cyst
in her right breast on Wednesday
pulling out some blood -- a
dangerous sign perhaps though
also usual, said the nurse,
in many procedures on otherwise
benign cysts -- My wife now waits
for the test results to come back,
praying good news will shake
our telephone today, before noon
when the doc’s office closes,
and not have to wait through
the weekend and past Monday
and Tuesday (the office closed
for the long July 4th holiday
weekend). Fear works its
black snake through her
despite three doctors’
assurances - with luck like
hers, she reasons, how could a
simple thing not slide down
screaming to that hell
where all of the other
bad turns in her life have led?
You have to frame her current
fragile state against the ills
of this year -- in her family
alone there’s been a heart attack/stroke,
a death from lung cancer, two
of the family got arrested for
something they didn’t cause,
huge sums were lost in the
court case, her business failed,
our house had to be treated
for the return of drywood
termites. Plus the world has
soured -- good Heavens, spare
us from those Bozos in the
White House! -- and I have
darkened too, my job demanding
ever more, so much work
to be done at home on house
and garden, this morning
work seeming useless,
its poems droning on to
an ever more indifferent
room. Drip drip drip goes
the gall from a teat we don’t
understand; all we can do
is manage as best we can.
So much to love, so much
to lose, this home like an
orange grove hedged in by
all that swings and saws
and plows over just because.
I write these lines down
to bower that fading fragrance
of sweetly knowing thrall,
a liquid pour of breasts and
fur and summer days so
pure they rouse and flash
and expire unravished and
entire, the fruit of a salt
bliss I cannot defend enough
nor lose despite all that goes.
This hour of my singing
is the Avalon not found
on any shore we name,
where an orchard grows
the dreams I pluck and
savor here. Just one taste
of that juice -- incessant,
liquorous, wild -- is enough
to quell the rages and turn
these ink-spilled pages. The
heart at home is a dangerous
affair, an island thick in orchard
bloom with water, black water,
encroaching everywhere. Soon
I must wake and row back
from this dream to enter the
blister bluster of the next day.
Each morning when I drive
off the house at dawn with
its roused blooming garden
in front and a cat in the window
seems to wave farewell to me
from a sacred well deep inside,
a place I’ll lose and never
find again, like Lancelot
back from the apple realm
seamed by four fairy queens,
or Orpheus in the grove at
last light, surrounding by
all of that merry fruit and
none of it responding to
the call of his wife’s name.
I look a last time at our house
having backed out of the
driveway and about to
drive forth -- perhaps my
wife will be in the kitchen,
waving farewell, come back soon --
perhaps not -- And then
steel myself to get into gear,
and to make that orchard real.




JUICE

2002


I turned 13 during my first summer
in Florida, hard-ripped from my
Chicago home when my parents split.
We moved into a new subdivision near
Winter Haven that had been torn from
an orange grove. Just beyond our house
the streets unpaved themselves into thickets
where bulldozers jawed whole trees, eager
to uproot slow makings for a fast buck.

My wounds and the grove’s grafted into
each other through a season of fire,
my parents crossed like swords over
my puberty, old Florida parceled in
fruit bags of Eden. Loss and desire mingled,
sugared, swelled: then burst from every
pore in sweetly mutinous grog.

There were six orange trees in our
yard to plunder; I must have picked
and squeezed two quarts of fresh juice
every day, greedy for its slicksweet pour.
The first gulp always surprised me
with its sharp ardor, thick and loose,
springing a thirst inside mere parch.

That first summer was archangel-
ically hot, a humid blear which called
all earthborn things to high heaven.
I sent my dreams that way as I
hurled baseballs at a pitchback
screen, my wild pitches thonking
like heads on the wood fence.
To dive later into the pool was like
a belt of that juice: delirium plunged in
joy, the pool’s bottom a glade of bright
glitters shushed in blue. I swam lengths
underwater then perched at the edge,
head and shoulders resting on hot concrete
with my legs drifting below. Lulled by
Carole King on the radio and high soaring
crickets, I drowsed in an undulate weave
of ripening girls peeled from their swimsuits,
their nipples pealing a red roar.

Every afternoon it rained hard,
big boomers in from Tampa sweeping
through in great wet sheets which left
me the rest of the day feeling somehow
unslaked. At twilight, the remaining grove
on the other side of the fence grew fierce
with frogs and whatever else pulsed out there,
mounds of a sugar silk-saturate and dark.

On a small radio I listened to hard rock bands
in the black-lit eeriness of my room; eyewhites
and lint burned like hot moons while the
thickening night heaved on my windows in
a rich, purring growl. Oh the sharp tooth I
felt in those songs by Mountain and Cream,
trillingly pure, loud as thirst, raw as plunder.

Thirty years later, that first summer in Florida
chirrs loud in my veins. I sit here in this house
with the windows wide to the humid heat of 5 a.m.
Outside in this small town never far from a fast
Florida buck, sprinkler heads and crickets saw over
that old beast who sleeps only in the linear sense.
Some untamed thirst prowls here as ever, ripened
deep within. My hands ache for the heft of those
oranges warm from ghost orchards; to cleave their
nude fire; to squeeze them down hard on a mount
of ridged whirl, filling this glass past the brim with
remembered gold, spilling juice over all.




SEXUAL WATER

Pablo Neruda
(translated by Robert Bly & James Wright)

Rolling down in big and distinct drops,
in drops like teeth,
in heavy drops like marmalade and blood,
rolling down in big drops, the water
is falling,
like a sword made of drops,
like a river of glass that tears things,
it is falling, biting,
beating on the axle of symmetry, knocking on the seams
of the soul,
breaking abandoned things, soaking the darkness.

It is nothing but a breath, more full of moisture than
crying,
a liquid, a sweat, an oil that has no name,
a sharp motion,
taking shape, making itself thick,
the water is falling
in slow drops
toward the sea, toward its dry ocean,
toward its wave without water.

I look at the , wide summer, and a loud noise coming from
a barn,
wineshops, cicadas,
towns, excitements,
houses, girls
sleeping with hands over their hearts,
dreaming of pirates, of conflagrations,
I look at ships,
I look at trees of bone marrow
bristling like mad cats,
I look at blood, daggers and women’s stockings,
and men’s hair,
I look at beds, I look at corridors where a virgin is
sobbing,
I look at blankets and organs and hotels.

I look at secretive dreams,
I let the straggling days come in,
and the beginnings also, and memories also,
like an eyelid held open hideously
I am watching.

And then this sound comes:
a red noise of bones,
a sticking together of flesh
and legs yellow as wheatheads meeting.
I am listening among the explosion of the kisses,
I am listening, shaken among breathings and sobs.

I am here, watching, listening,
with half of my soul at sea and half of my soul on land,
and with both halves of my soul I watch the world.

And even if I close my eyes and cover my heart over entirely,
I see the monotonous water falling
in big monotonous drops.
It is like a hurricane of gelatin, l
ike a waterfall of sperm and sea anemones.
I see a clouded rainbow hurrying.
I see its water moving over my bones.






THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT

2006


Let’s see, the hour raw and too
early, my facts the usual sortie
of bulldozers crashing into Paradise.
It’s hot and still this morning,
everything shrill beneath a
marauding high pressure front,
the air high with crickets
& faintly acrid with the
smoke of distant brush fires.
I’m writing on like a monkey
in the the wind machine
of an indifferent age, amid
the thickening plethora of
health and money worries
with a faltering and failing world
crowing at the trough
for more toothsome blood.
All of that precisely why
I take such pleasure sitting here
in the brutal nascence of late night,
singing on a strand of
moon and noctal butterflies
and cats sleeping always nearby
and my wife curled in our bed
upstairs in the great feminine
sleep she is the dearest surface of.
Oh and how the garden shifts
from drinking that saturate
to press up close to me,
sighing More even as I would
shut the covers for good on
that wet indifferent wild, declaring
such things well enough spoken of
when I have barely begun to drown
in blue waters just outside
stronger and more strange than any
booze I have known, a chalice
of silver and hard-boned quartz
forever off my lips. There is a tide
which floods my facts with curves
& purrs & the poured nipples of
careens, not despite the difficulty
of long days (for that would ratchet
down the holy calibration), but
because the magic sea’s far
more inland than it seems,
crashing on a shore which
is yet cannot be, right here
between the saying and the said,
insatiably inside the hips of
my beloved’s softly booming No.
Ever between bereaving and bereft,
ever soon to rise and trudge on,
I am yet infused with a sweetness
I can never say or come to know --
a starry lilt of cold sweet jasmine
ferried on tarry boats of smoke,
the bite of exactly what’s dying
and the bit of heaven it releases
to swing voluptuously here, at
least, at last, so naked, soaked, and free.





BODY OF A WOMAN

Pablo Neruda
Trans. Robert Bly


Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
when you surrender, you stretch out like the world.
My body, savage and peasant, undermines you
and makes a son leap in the bottom of the earth.

I was lonely as a tunnel. Birds flew from me.
And night invaded me with her powerful army.
To survive I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow for my bow, or a stone for my sling.

But now the hour of revenge falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of firm and thirsty milk!
And the cups of your breasts! And your eyes full of absence!
And the roses of your mound! And your voice slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will live on through your marvelousness.
My thirst, my desire without end, m wavering road!
Dark river beds down which the eternal thirst is flowing,
and the fatigue is flowing, and the grief without shore.





ICEE


When I was 13 we
lived at the far end
of a new subdivision,
the woods beyond
our fence the worst
wild. Back then I
walked the furthest
for an Icee, yet it
was a routine I loved
that first summer in
Florida. It got me
out of the house,
that sorry ward of
family wounds, my
mother upstairs in bed
and three siblings
warring not so openly
any more, careful not
to rip the sutures
which so rudely
bound us together.
My errand aimed
me away from all
that in a dutiful,
excusable way, what
with that imperial
season dazing us all
in a rising soar of sun
and crickets. It was
both merry and
malevolent, like the
shards of light on
our swimming pool
which seemed to laugh
and burn along the
same lucid skin.
Yes, an Icee was just what
a boy desired in
that pith of suburban
summer, its oblations
as pure as fresh-squeezed
juice. And so I left each
day around 4 p.m. after
the scheduled round of
storms had passed, the
sky by then a stole of
aftermath--steaming
pavement and heat
lightning. I walked
those two dozen blocks
from home with my
t-shirt slung over my
shoulder (necessary
at either end of
the mission). A few
kids rolled by on
Hot Wheels or knocked
clackers on house
porches, but for
the most part I was
always alone. At the
7-11 it was always so
terribly cold, like a
bad brother to the day.
The Icee machine
had two flavors - Coke
and Cherry -- and a
combination of the two.
I poured out the flavored
slush of ice each way,
on different days, believing
each carried a certain joss
to me, that on the right
day, with the right pour
cooling in my hands, those
skies would deliver
love my way. That was all
I cared for then -- not sports,
nor cars nor grades --
just that gift of cool
which would lend my steps
a Bond-like sway and
turn the eyes of pretty
girls my way. — That was
my only thought as I
idled home, Icee in hand,
back to family routines of
chores and dinner which
waited for me unsheathed
and sharp. Just one kiss,
I’d pray up toward summer’s
twilight, seeing no other
way out. And then I’d
sip my Icee, its slush
so sweet and cold that
too-eager draws would
rush a headache my brow.
In a few months I’d learn
to obtain other wares
from that store -- Swisher
Sweet cigars (they wouldn’t
sell me Kools) and
magazines laded with
hussies in red drawers
Soon I would learn darker
reasons to egress from
my home, searching for
cool and cooler comforts
in Florida’s vast suburb,
each house a plot of
paradise, half-acre jots
of personal desire summed
into a bland, common hell
-- But in that raw hot first
season, there was only the
Icee and its way in summer,
deep and sweet and cold
where nothing else held.
My wife and I drove
through that subdivision
a few years back, out on
a long day trip from home.
I hardly recognized
the approach -- so
many miles more
developments and strip
malls: my earlier years
all paved over. My own
old digs seemed cramped,
small and old, the houses
all in that sort of ruin which
Florida ages so fast, once
the first blush has bleached
in the sun. The orange
trees in every yard were
like old olives, bend and
scrabbly, their fruit like a
spent woman’s womb. Our
house was hardly what I
remembered -- new color,
a wing added on, a fence
knocked out to give more
driveway, in which a green
dune buggy sat on blocks.
Whatever we were back
then had fully drained
away, and all that changed
now looked tired. The
store had been boarded up
long ago, it seemed, abandoned
as places go in Florida,
too expensive to raze,
busier corners on which to
build better stores filled
with all the goods. Well,
my thirst grew up too.
In later years I drank iced
vodka, revenantly wired to
its cold blue fang. Doors
opened when I drank it,
rooms revealed, desire’s
zenith spiked by the
lowest means, pitching
the sun into the
Gulf like a speared olive.
Back then each house
I walked past burned with
the purest booze of
possibilities, each
who could very well let me in,
sigh my name, unclasp
the hooks that brassiered
such swollen nipples.
Those twilight walks were
each a voyage down and
out a well of history,
possibility and lust,
burning for a beloved who
hadn’t yet a face.
That was 30 years
ago. Only here do those
summer fades remain,
in some region within,
the storms receding
into that darker interior,
flashing high in their swart
bellies, bathing all in
that last of light, both pink
and sere, the pavement
steaming, a smell of rain
and rotting oranges in the air,
like a funk rising from
mysterious mere, like
the sweat of my own body
in this early, dank day,
where those daily transits
remain in still torrid
corners of this ripening brain.





THE ORCHARD

2000


Not much rises
as evaporates.

So many movies
restaraunts
& poems are
threshed empty
in the first
encounter.

In this riven
world where
so much is
about so little,
bad fruit brims
every bushel,
wormed with
self and greed.
We eat the
fruit anyway
because that’s
all there is.

Too much
nakedness
dulls the edge
of sensual dapple,
just as too much
sun withers
the orchard.

Anchorites of
old climbed towers
in the desert
to see God,
searching for
that path to
heaven that was
least obstructed.
May I see her
again on this
dry mount
with only
a glint of
moon on this
chrome pen
to name her.






ORCHARD OCEAN GROOVE


Out of the spirit of the holy temples,
Empty and grandiose, let us make hymns
And sing them in secrecy as lovers do.

— Wallace Stevens

According to P.I. Tretyakov, the Samoyed and
Ostyak of the Turukhansk region go about
initiating the new shaman as follows: The
candidate turns to face the west, and the
master prays the Spirit of Darkness to help
the novice and give him a guide. He then
intones a hymn to the Spirit of Darkness,
and the candidate repeats it. Finally come
the ordeals that the Spirit inflicts on the
novice, demanding his wife, his son, his
goods, etc.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy, 114

I welcomed my dark master
for all the wrong reasons
though the invocation has
proved a powerfully dark wood.
At 14 I stood next to an orange
grove smoking a cigarette
in the last of late winter light
& breathed deep the pussy
whiskey pale perfume
of sweet orange blossoms
& wanted all of it, scenting
in such endless depth
a way to cast off
the the broken finitudes
of my life til then.
A breeze rippled out
of the motley of that grove,
carrying me into the
years of pure addition,
a thrall amped wild and blue,
stereos roaring and bras upclasping
to a milky flood of
the dark’s familiars,
a tide of booze and
rumped-waved boogaloos.
A dark joy welcomed
me those years to
its noctal Eden
of heavy fruit, made
even more pendulous
by the danger of the reach.
When I had waded hip deep
into that surf & lost all
words for anything else,
I felt the faint
prescience of evil
haul harder from
below, signalling in
the subtractions,
those years of
empty gestures and
savage repetitions
on an endlessly
emptier and harder bed.
Whatever I gained from
the dark I lost far more to it,
far more than any
life can ever presume
to redeem. My failings
ever at that door
she disappeared from
have proved me
worthy and meet
to speak blue addlement
drowned on the lips
of love’s paraclete,
the soror solus which
completes by emptying
the barrel of wild verbs.
I lean these rickety
tall ladders against
a descending wild bliss,
festooning each
step with a bauble
of bright timbrel sound
no one but the
dark can quite hear
much less read, each
a proof of my pickling
in the vats of a black
brine’s brogue. To sing
of the dark these days
is to with great
humility and thrall
resume that sound’s ever
more precarious sums
inside a groove cut
in me long ago
when I turned to
that grove and welcomed
the scent of a sound
of wild waters, letting
my thrill be thus shod
in blueblack master’s
half-hooved,
full-finned throttle
through a sweet wood’s
candescent thick burning
like a black candle deep
in my life where love
is the feral equation
song must sum somehow
with an abacus beaded
orange blossoms and
smiles in the dark
and beds sinking in
a singing blue tide.





THE ART OF POETRY

Pablo Neruda

Transl. Robert Bly

Between shadows and clearing, between defenses and young girls,
having inherited an original heart, and funereal imagination,
suddenly pale, something withered in my face,
in mourning like a desperate widower every day of my life,
for every drop of invisible water I drink
in my sleepy way, and for every sound I take in shivering,
I have the same chilly fever, and the same absent thirst,

an ear coming into the world, an oblique anxiety,
as though robbers were about to arrive, or ghosts,
inside a seashell with great and unchangeable depths,
like a humiliated waiter, or a bell slightly hoarse,
like an aged mirror or the smell of an empty house
where the guests come in hopelessly drunk at night,
having an odor of clothes thrown on the floor, and no flowers,
—in another sense, possibly not as sad—
still, the truth is, the wind suddenly hitting my chest,
the nights with infinite substance fallen into my bedroom,
the crackling of a day hardly able to burn,
ask from me sadly whatever I have that is prophetic,
and there are objects that knock, and are never answered,
and something always moving, and a name that does not come clear.


HARM AND BOON IN THE MEETINGS

Jack Gilbert

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

-- from The Great Fires (1995)

Black Gospel, Blue Ink

TO KNOW THE DARK

Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.

— Wendell Berry


***

The unrelieved darkness of the deep waters has produced weird and incredible modifications of the abyssal fauna. It is a blackness so divorced from the world of sunlight that probably only the few men who have seen it with their own eyes can visualize it. We know that light fades out rapidly in the descent below the surface. The red rays are gone at the end of the first 200 or 300 feet; and with them all the orange and yellow warmth of the sun. Then the greens fade out, and at 1000 feet only a deep, dark, brilliant blue is left. In very clear waters the violet rays of the spectrum may penetrate another thousand feet. Beyond this is only the blackness of the deep sea.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

BLUE IN BLACK

Perhaps the mythological zone
mixes with the deep end of the
personal, a region of wildest blue,
that depth in the sea where all
the higher spectra have
been sucked off, where
only deep-heartedness remains.
Here is the first and last light
of the day, a fade of ice to night
where the figures of my
history -- father, mother,
lovers, thugs -- jackal down
into brutally-finned gods
of the lost Devonian Age,
titans of cock and vulva
in their former hoary glory,
uneroded, stone starkly naked
and thundering their
colossal passions in
the hips of continents
smashing up mountain
ranges of desire.
When I sing of You
in extremest blue
I must have voyaged down
that far from native shores,
to that weird strand
I recall most when I dream,
a water-limbed and limbic
beach, I think, a deep
dark place where all
eternity comes to drink.
They clamor at a seaside
bar beneath a moon that takes
up half the sky, disquieting
the patrons in a way
not felt for millions of years,
back when the moon
was freshly hauled up
from the sea and so close
to Earth is amped the tides
to wash a hundred miles
inland and back in
one infernal gallop of
blue hooves. My history
sinks down the gullet
of my brian to mix and thrash
and drown in deeper leagues
where mystery is king,
a salt empire of deepening
gloom which ends in
evernight for a mile
and then another further down.
I sit here on this writing
chair as a hermit in his
writing cell on a rock
in the middle of that sea,
inking pages with salt
gospels of the kingdom
ever below. Its washes
in my mind ferry forth
my pen on immramas here
to there to find the
marvels of a catalogue
burned by doubters
ten centuries ago.
I sing, I slake, I write
blue waters down,
enraptured with the
bee-loud sound of
each day’s curve and
crash and ebbing hiss,
finding in each wake
a new, surprising,
older bliss -- nereid,
nautilus, skull of the
sea god himself
still babbling in that
first lost tongue
the metres of the swell
which margins 4 a.m.
to hell. It sounds
like the gaelic of Black
Angus, that seal-man
who cursed Columba on
the shore before he
leapt back in the tide
in search of Kirsteen
McUlrich in blackest
leagues below. Oh how
this tongue’s been
picked in his brine
brogue, rendering me
as useless
as a seal-skin folded
underneath a
writing chair.
This books’s a
reliquary for the
insides of those waves,
a charmed bone
that could never be
but is, a bluest lamp
for that blackest land
whose patronage I know
when I know I’ve got
it down all wrong again,
when my metres sink
and swim.





BLUE IN GREEN

2002


The song enters
gently, almost
painfully so:

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

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

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

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

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

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





... It’s only in darkness you can see the light, only
From emptiness that things start to fill, I read once in a dream ...

Old fire, old geographies.
In that case, make it old, I say, make it singular
In its next resurrection,
White violets like photographs on the tombstone in the yard.
Each year it happens this way, each year
Something dead comes back and lifts up its arms, puts down its luggage,
And says — in the same costume, down-at-heels, badly sewn —
I bring you good news from the other world.

— from “Looking Around,” Charles Wright
A Short History of the Shadow





SILT

May 29 2005

It dreams down with us,
these tiny efflorae of the mortal coil,
embers of our daily sunset
in the drink: the silt of
what settles in our nightly descent
is as close to death as we’ll
get in life. Fag-ends of pleasure
by the million swirl in balletic
slo-mo, an oblivion of what
remains which we forget but
cannot lose. They’re what moats
us in from the final death,
a Thou-less-shaped canal which
floats last thought to first light,
all that flings us wide
in exult enervation still ghosting
down below, the shadow of
abyssal snow where every
kiss above is held forever
in a drift, thick in the mud
of all we’ll never quite expire or know.


wELCOME TO THE ABYSS

2001

Since no animal can
make its own food,
the creatures of the
deeper waters live
a strange, almost
parasitic existence
of utter dependence
on the upper layers.
These hungry creatures
prey fiercely and
relentlessly upon each
other, yet the whole
community is ultimately
dependent upon the
slow rain of descending
food from above ...

— Rachel Carson,
The Sea Around Us

Whom filth plenished,
dearth devoured.

— Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Here in the abyssal ‘burbs
the roads are paved
by this incessant rain:
brokers and their broken
boats, pirates whose last
word was “whoops,”
victims of exploding
airlines descending
smaller to us from
much higher up.
We eat what we can.
The road through
our small world
is pure defecation and
inedible, indelible bone.

In our hood
it’s too dark to know
a face, but if you could
you’d be sorry.
We all have eyes
like extra-large
pie-plates and
huge jaws for catching
what we can.


Our diet’s
rounded with the
leavings of the leavings
of the leavings, and
less, a bite of
tiger shark, finger
of a gunman.
Oh how we dine
on all perdition.

Not much to see
round here but
the music never stops:
weird moans, trills,
clicks, and clatters
fill our nocturnal air,
a radar for appetite
and procreation.

We breathe the
inkiest of drink,
so dark and cold
and dense to be
the very heart
of the nihilist.
An edible grave.

We descended
seeking a little
elbow room in
a food chain too
tightly knit: grew
strong in our
abysms. We’ll live
forever since
everything you say
eventually falls
our way.

Welcome to the
Final Receipt, resting
place of all, Turd ‘Burb,
last house on the block
where we seize with
hungry jaws the
bitterest of God’s laws.


***


Black Velvet in that needy boy’s smile,
Black Velvet in his cool Southern style.
A new religion that will bring you to your knees—
Black Velvet, if you please.

“Black Velvet,” popular song from the ‘80s


***

DOWN AT SMOKEY JOE’S

2002


When we pony up at Smoky Joes, our favorite barman
says name your poison. Not that it really matters,
because any pair of burning wings will do. Top shelf or
well, we only choose how much or more it costs to lose.

Down at Smokey Joe’s we’re all victims, rappelling
down snowier abysms than the sea. We huddle
round the bar like monks at vespers, chanting
our complainsong to anyone caught in range.

The TV at Smokey Joe’s rolls the late sports highlights
we lowlifes coulda contended for, had not others
suckerpunched us to thirst: Bad Daddy, Bitch Wife from Hell,
the Bill Collector with his way-way- way-past dues.

We’re fenced in by a thousand blades, each aimed
with great angst toward our long-soured intents.
No wonder we’re such immortal flops, knocking back those
bullets of schnapps, blacking out the mirror’s leer.

At 1 a.m. in Smokey Joe’s it’s never dark enough and the tap
is always running dry — our wallets near empty, that resolve
to have just two drowned two hours ago, the only woman
in the place snoring with her head down on the bar—too

much trouble to rouse, too little lust in us to silk a souse—
Yet somehow we always find some way to order just one more.
Let’s light a fire, burn patience thin. Let lead the way with
our luckless chin. Let’s mouth the words to incite that

old, infernal brawl—Fuck it, naw, fuck it all. Bartender,
here’s my house; drinks all around—a final douse!
So it goes down at Smokey Joe’s, where the rotgut flows
like lava from the darkest reaches of thirst. And since

we’re down here again. my man, how about another to
thicken the murk just on notch closer before closing time
shoos us out that smokey door where the sun is soon to rise
and nail us to the next day’s rack. Oh what the hell—We’ll be back.


***

AHAB ORATION TO THE SPERM-WHALE’S HEAD

Melville read and re-read Shakespeare’s plays in the months before and during the writing of Moby Dick, and remarked on the plays that what he found most vitally in them was not purity of drama or a broad understanding of human psychology but “those deep far-way thing in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality .... “the things which we feel to be so terrifically true” that no merely good man would ever speak them. Melville found his Vedas at the bottom of Shakespeare, in his terrifying depths. One of my favorite passages from Moby Dick, which I’ve quoted here before, comes when the crew of the Pequod have caught their first whale; the head is cut off and tied to the ship — later it will be mined for the spermacetti trapped in the honeycombs of its skull while the crew work at stripping the blubber from the corpse and boiling it down for the whale oil. After the crew retires below decks, Ahab comes upon on the deck and contemplates the massive had hanging there, as if he were Hamlet observing the huge skull of the jester Yorick—or that of Shakespeare — certainly the soliloquy is Shakesperean at its darkest and deepest:

“It was a black and hooded head, and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the sphynx’s in the desert. ‘Speak, thou vast and venerable head,’ muttered Ahab, ‘which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet hear and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is within thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. The head upon which now the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the world’s foundations, where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot, where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned. There, in the awful water land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went, hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insensate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed — while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to make an infidel of Abraham, and no syllable is thine!”


***

TINCTURE
OF ABYSS

2004

... Four-and-twenty from Munster who
went with Ailbe upon the sea to find
the land which Christians never dwell ...

... The confessor who Brendan met in
the promised land, with all the saints
who have perished in the isles of the ocean ...

from “The Litany of Oengus,” 6th century


Ferry that tincture here, muse
of equinoctal silk. Ladle black
lactissima from those heavy
breasts barely obscured by
an unbuttoned and bottomless
blouse. Pour in my ear those
three degrees between deep
night and first light. May
my pen refrain that booming
choir which sings night and
day in the Cathedral of
the Sea, a lavish organum
of wave and boulder
on shores no man has walked
nor named, much less
scant dreamed. Throat
that sea-black color
in my voice that I
may sing the wildest
isling of them all,
the one with cliffs
no one has climbed
and a well within
of such sweet silver
that one drink sates
300 years of desire.
I peer in that blueblack
mirror and the fishtailed
man stares back, his
seal-eyes pent on cod
and raven, his smile
like a bell proclaiming
every hoof and fin
that steeples holy hell.
Salt Ys, strike that blue
noir note from the
hard prong aching
in the sea’s vast legs
-- that boom in every
wave’s orgasmic crash
resounding down the shore
of this life between
the massings of
consonantal stone
and the liquid plash
of what cannot in
words be known. The trick
is not to follow Lycidas
to the hollows of that
wild sound; to brew
sea trouble in a vat
or skull for ages long
enough to tincture
3 drops here: Enough to
shod each wave’s resound
with lines hooved loud enough
to reach at last your ears.





MELUSINE

1995

She is the dark startle
of a dream staining
my first thoughts today—
a drowning dare
in black velvet underwear.

A melusine dripping on
the shores of my crashing world,
she spoke my name with a kiss.
How could I resist the winds
which keened round her bed,
older than the surf itself
which crushes boulders to sand?

All night she wove her
seal-sleek body around
the aching acre of my
half-submerging song.
I wake this morning
bleeding honey from every
pore she kissed.
All that now remains
of her are these lines
dripping seaweed on the page.

Some spillage of that swoon
has me thinking of you
so like and unlike her,
now far too many
dreams away. Some
ink too dreadful writes your
shadow into her name.

Today my heart's bed
refuses to warm me
from the sweet smash
of that bitterly fading surf
in which the two of you
wrapped your arms
around me in a wave
and then sent me away
wilder than wind.

***


SPECTRE


And some in dream assured were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.

— Coleridge, “Rime of the
Ancient Mariner”

He’s swimming down there,
rarely visible as he follows
me except on nights
as this, when the full moon
filters down to trace the
huge pale wings lifting
and flapping through brine
in their slow, mighty rhythm.
Tonight he unveils
from the boat’s wake,
the black sea, from these
eyes which refuse to
believe he’s down there
just as the felon in jail
swears someone else
held the scythe he
once swung with such joy.
The spectre is agile
and supple as all dreams
are in their rout of the
heart, a nine-fathom
hallows inside the dark’s flow,
neither God’s nor the
Devil’s to damn or toil
or know, older perhaps,
a Prometheus unbound
or unsounded; or an
emissary perhaps of
some approaching rage,
like a surf pounding
in total silence
or the turning of pages
too pale for any words
I have learned, but will,
or be cursed to ride
with a ghost in my hide.

***

ST. BRENDAN AND THE HEATHEN HEAD

Brendan and his monks find the head of a dead man by the seashore. The head is very large, its forehead measuring five feet across. At Brendan’s request, the giant tells him that he was a heathen, who for his own profit waded through the sea. He was big and strong, and stood a hundred feet tall. He waylaid sailors and took their goods. For all his outsize proportions he was drowned in a flood. Brendan offers to resuscitate and baptize him, so as to give him the possibility of obtaining remission for his sins and afterwards going to paradise. The giant refuses because he is afraid he will not be able to resist the temptation of sin. This would be worse, for, as he says, baptized souls are tormented much worse in hell than heathens are. Besides, he has a terrible fear of dying once again. He wants to go back to his torments in the darkness. He takes his leave, with Brendan’s good wishes. Brendan departs in his ship.

— from Clara Strijbosch, The Heathen
Giant in The Voyage of St. Brendan





BLACK TORC

2005

How perilously close to nothing
is this black hour, where every
walking numen drifts drowned
in sleep’s thrall
and the garden dances stiffly
in the trance of black-wet leaves,
each petal burdened with the freight
of such a night at such an hour.
How strange and difficult
and wild the woman gathered
there in the center, keeping
time with her silent clapping,
her eyes cajoling, her ears
tuned to dead-dark music
spooring from this pen,
calling for black blood.
This rigor is almost,
perhaps already dead,
who can say? The step from
the ledge is not one you can see
with the tongue or say with the ear
but you must infer it anyway,
reaching out with your blackest
foot. You have to trust, in the
way of all dark divines,
that this night’s black tide
seen frmo her side below
and within is a starry
promenade, a shoe for
hooves which torcs
the dream which lamps
the full moon now
sailing spectrally behind
rag-twisting-drippy skies.
Ah, how easy it is right here
to mistake rigor for death
and downwarding hues
for depth, I mean, to read
the moment way too corporally,
the same way I always lost the
key to women inside their thighs,
trying to bridge white shores
with on waves of soggy
too-penultimate sighs.
Easy and so perilous the way
because one misstep here
on the harp-strung siege
and it’s hair, nose and eyeballs
all the way down to the black
hag’s hut at the fag end of my worst
nights, where wolves and tarry
vulvas tear each other wide
in the spin of disco balls
and the gruesome enterprise
is right next to the whalish
rectum which remits
all suitors’ bones in the
sound of disco organum.
No matter how many times
I circumnavigate this hell,
the risk is ever in the wings,
just off the deep thought’s
mazing, fangs notched and
wide with a bite so literal
that it’s many lines before
I know my head’s behind
morselling one black throat
or another. So why keep sailing
toward Capes of blackest blue?
Why peramble paths on
naked feet that burn
with the sea’s most strident
coals? Why indeed? It’s 4:42 a.m.
on the Wednesday of a rag-ass
week when I have too much
else to do for faux gambling at
this hour with such Sioux-
Lakotan coin. So why?
I always ask the question
here when it seems I’ve
harrowed full enough the
next day’s dark and still not
found the torc it wears.
That’s why I call my efforts
black and leave the poem
so, one step further down and
round a way I’ll never fully
name, though I have infernal
clues. My job’s to ferry on
the freight of what may
be almost or ever dead,
pointless though it seem.
Rain is falling now so slightly
as to wake the dream or
wrap me in its wake.
Which is keel and which
black weather? And is
that the torc which gleams
it all in one throat, there
beyond what I tried
my best to say?



THE BLACK SHAMAN

2005

“In the case of hereditary shamanism, the souls of the ancestral shaman choose a young man in the family; he becomes absent-minded and dreamy, loves solitude, and has prophetic visions and sometimes seizures that make him unconscious. During this period, the Buryat believe, the soul is carried off by spirits—eastward if the youth is destined to become a ‘white’ shaman, westward, if a ‘black.’ Received in the palace of the gods, the neophyte’s soul is instructed by the ancestral shamans in the secrets of the profession, the gods’ forms and names, the cult and names of the spirits, and so on. It is only after the first initiation that the soul returns to the body. We shall see that the initiatory process continues long after this.”

***

“The most marked specialization, at least among certain peoples, is that of “black” and “white” shamans, although it is not always easy to define the distinction. M.A. Czaplicka mentions, for the Yakut, the class if ajy ojuna (ai oyuna), who sacrifice to the gods, and the class of abassy ojuna (oyuna), who have relations with the “evil spirits.” But, as Harva observes, the abassy ojuna is not necessarily a shaman; he can also be a sacrificing priest. According to N.V. Pripuzov, the same Yakut shaman can invoke both the higher (celestial) spirits and those of the lower regions. Among the Tungus of Turukhansk the shamans are not differentiated into “black” and “white”: but they do not sacrifices to the celestial god, whose rites are always performed by day, whereas the shamanic rites take place at night.

“The distinction is clearly marked among the Buryat, who speak of “white” shamans (sangani bo) and “black” shamans (karain bo), the former having relations with the gods, the latter with the spirits. Their costumes differ, being white for the former and blue for the latter. ...

“We must not forget that many of the divinities and powers of the earth and the underworld are not necessarily “evil” or “demonic.” They generally represent authochthonous and even local hierophanies that have fallen in rank as the result of changes in the pantheon.”

— Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Arachaic Techniques of Ecstasy


I.

I meant to wing high heaven,
but You had other plans
and plunged me in the sea.
“We got the Jesus freak
high!” the stoners laughed
the first time I smoked pot,
an first victory for that
black lucency which full
roars beyond the sear
of day. At 14 I became
a Christian, out of mortal
dread of Hell; there was
a single dream in which
I flew above the highest
mount of all in the
ecstasy of God, a
stellar glow which made
me then believe I was
bound for Heaven’s
clean blue space.
But You had other plans,
dousing that jolt of
angel fire in cold blue
wave when I was
baptized in the Atlantic
Ocean later that summer.
I went down backward
into that water with a
prayer for salvation and
when down in that black
swirl, a deep wave washed
through me dark and rich
and too wonderful, hauling
my spirit by the ankles
down in the undertow which
drags the angels low into a sweetly
falling descent. I rose from that
water spluttering and falling too,
my salvation found in all the
lower chakras as I felt released
to sample the world’ delights
now proffered, it seemed to me
to a boy no longer with such child.
I meant to save the world
from sin, but You saved me
from that cross, turning me
upside down and dousing
me in bliss. How could I
resist that deeper sound?
The rest was amplitude.

II.

Flying west at the end of
the summer I turned 17,
I laid over in Chicago to
stay with Ruth three days.
She had been one of the
Christian sisters in our
our local fellowship, staying
there for one more year
of high school while I
flew west for college.
We somehow knew
as we grew older that we’d
some day try to find a haven
of low heaven in each other,
and there, returning from
my father’s land in the east
& flying west again, I stopped
three days in Chicago to
stay with Ruth. Ten minutes
inside that door of the apartment
she shared with her mother
I was thrusting in her
down a fast-collapsing
scree of pink wet-flowered
gasps. I swear I heard the
old imp chorus sing when I
collapsed in my first orgasm
inside a woman: Hey, we got
the Jesus freak laid!, high-
fiving the final end of my
stellar afterlife. When I woke
the next day -- creeping back
into her room after her
mother left for work -- my
feet were spongy with the
sea, my balls heavy again
with its dark wild wash, my
desire now in thrall of Your
deepest waves, awakened in
my then as never before.
It still felt like sin when with
wide-thighed complicity she
welcomed me back in (and
oh what an asshole my old
sinner’s guilt made me to her
in the months that followed,
never returning a single love-
stained letter with one word
of what then I then could say
of love -- I had so much to learn
back then about the
water wilderness, so many
faux-white feather to divest):
But each time I came in her
cunt and mouth, between
her nubbly freckled breasts,
even between the cheeks of
oil-slathered ass -- Each time
I came I woke somehow
an nth league deeper
to the madman mortared
into every abbey floor,
productive in every infernal
sense of Your clabbering
salt endlessness, the hot glow
of a heart three miles down
from heaven’s lowest step.

III.

Last night I dreamt I met
the Doctor in his office for
a cure to these bum migraines,
but instead it seemed I just
wanted to jest and fool around,
mimicking a woman’s voice
on the PA & conspiring to woo
some pretty in the waiting room.
Bright physic be damned!
I guess; pour me a stout shot of
the darker stuff, this useless satire
of an equiry in a sing-song salty brogue.
I’ll take the mash of faith and sex
any night over 500 mils of Depakote.
Besides, You’ve always mocked bright
science with its hokey alchemic spoor,
just as Black Angus of the Seal-Folk
mocked Saint Columba at the shore,
cursing him in fine Gaelic before
leaping in a bath of Hebridean maul
and gale. East of the sun at St. Peter’s
Gate these wings of song all break
and fail; but in the washes west of moons,
I plumb abysms on your whale.

IV.

Well, that’s that: time to shut the book
again and start the ding dong day.
Today we haul everything back outside
to sell what we can in our Huge Antiques
Yard Sale!, trying to make up
what we can’t earn. My wife’s as exhausted
as I am, and both of us hate the necessity
of the task; hate how much good stuff
refuses to be sold, no matter how hard we try.
It’s just dosage from the same bad Doc,
I guess, our best efforts failing just like his.
There’s an augur for this somehow, somewhere,
at least upon the page; may Your black
magic work out there in every way we fail.
I better trust our losses for discerning
which water is more wild and stout:
the one which undertows bright days
or throws the infant soulage out.

Out and Down, Around and Ground

THE POEM AS CORACLE
AND DIVING BELL

June 27

There, there is nothing else
but grace and measure
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

-- Baudelaire, “L’Invitation Du Voyage”

This crossing and descending
line both travels and rappels,
extending toward shores
& descending to bottoms
neither yet dreamed of in the
catalogue. I sail; I dive;
I keep the pulse alive
by finding surf-hallowed
ground at the same
time harrowing the
deeper leagues of what I find.
There are ports
which drift and dream
all night of shores
too far to reach, bobbing
all the boats tied there
with swells of sweetest
far-shore booty--
gold chapels, moon
castles, white
birds choralling God
on trees which take
up islands, steaming
plates of meat and
ardor laid out on tables
which no human
hands have cooked.
Also there are salt
Vaginas in the sound of
those far crash-
and booming waves,
the welcome of farewells,
an invitation to travel
down the deepest brines
of the heart, mines of
pure abyss darker and
wilder than any kiss
than I have known.
But will, this dark,
rain-sotted morning insists,
wafting lucent cleavage
in the next blue door
I find as the song gets
down under occluding
riven basics like I to
Thou and other glints
Of surficial seem.
Thus I peruse the ages
and carouse the beds,
dislodge gold psalters
from beneath the sleeping
head of a great blue
dragon circled round
the next island in the main,
a wild not found on
any chart on any ship
except the one inside
my dream. I voyage forth
to froth and foam
past all marges
to the sea god’s throne:
I dive deep along the
descending mile of
the iceberg, tracing
that god’s frozen bones
to where the poem’s
heel at last strikes
his own in the basalt
lingua of first things.
Such motions keep me
square on an unrelenting
thrash of ocean, level
between island and doom,
exceeding both coracle
and bell which tolls the
lees of hell.



From Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis (“The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbott”), transl. Denis O’Donoghue, 1893:


St Brendan then embarked, and they set sail towards the summer solstice. They had a fair wind, and therefore no labour, only to keep the sails properly set; but after twelve days the wind fell to a dead calm, and they had to labour at the oars until their strength was nearly exhausted. Then St Brendan would encourage and exhort them: ‘Fear not, brothers, for our God will be unto us a helper, a mariner, and a pilot; take in the oars and helm, keep the sails set, and may God do unto us, His servants and His little vessel, as He willeth.’. They took refreshment always in the evening, and sometimes a wind sprung up; but they knew not from what point it blew, nor in what direction they were sailing.

At the end of forty days, when all their provisions were spent, there appeared towards the north, an island very rocky and steep. When they drew near it, they saw its cliffs upright like a wall, and many streams of water rushing down into the sea from the summit of the island; but they could not discover a landing-place for the boat. Being sorely distressed with hunger and thirst, the brethren got some vessels in which to catch the water as it fell; but St Brendan cautioned them: ‘Brothers! do not a foolish thing; while God wills not to show us a landing-place, you would take this without His permission; but after three days the Lord Jesus Christ will show His servants a secure harbour and resting-place, where you ‘may refresh your wearied bodies.’

When they had sailed round the island for three days, they descried, on the third day, about the hour of none, a small cove, where the boat could enter; and St Brendan forthwith arose and blessed this landing-place, where the rocks stood on every side, of wonderful steepness like a wall. When all had disembarked and stood upon the beach, St Brendan directed them to remove nothing from the boat, and then there appeared a dog, approaching from a bye-path, who came to fawn upon the saint, as dogs are wont to fawn upon their masters. ‘Has not the Lord,’ said St Brendan, ‘sent us a goodly messenger; let us follow him;’ and the brethren followed the dog, until they came to a large mansion, in which they found a spacious hall, laid out with couches and seats, and water for washing their feet, ‘When they had taken some rest, St, Brendan warned them thus: ‘Beware lest Satan lead you into temptation, for I can see him urging one of the three monks, who followed after us from the monastery, to a wicked theft. Pray you for his soul, for his flesh is in Satan’s power.’

The mansion where they abode had its walls hung around with vessels made of various metals, with bridle--bits and horns inlaid with silver,

St Brendan ordered the serving brother to produce the meal which God had sent them; and without delay the table was laid with napkins, and with white loaves and fish for each brother, When all had been laid out, St Brendan blessed the repast and the brethren: ‘Let us give praise to the God of heaven, who provideth food for all His creatures.’ Then the brethren partook of the repast, giving thanks to the Lord, and took likewise drink, as much as they pleased. The meal. being finished, and the divine office discharged, St Brendan said: ‘Go to your rest now; here you see couches well dressed for each of you; and you need to rest those limbs over-wearied by your labours during our voyage. ‘

When the brethren had gone to sleep, St Brendan saw the demon, in the guise of alittle black boy, at his work, having in his hands a bridle-bit, and beckoning to the monk before mentioned: then he rose from his couch, and remained all night in prayer.

When morning came the brethren hastened to perform the divine offices, and wishing to take to their boat again, they found the table laid for their meal. as on the previous day; and so for three days and nights did God provide their repasts for His servants.




In the “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” chapter of Moby Dick, Melville transforms his lateral, linear sea-tale into something deeper, sinking his American gnostic gospel to its true end in the depths, as the Pequod will dive after Moby Dick at the story’s end.

“The more I dive into this matter of whaling,” he writes in the chapter, “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.”

Melville then ranges through a variety of mythic whale-sized endeavors, from Perseus freeing Andromeda from Leviathan to Jonah spending three nights in a whale, Hercules battling his way out of one and St. George fighting the Dragon (offering that whales and dragons were often confused, and quotes Ezekiel: “Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea”).

Yet that is not enough: his greatest effort calls for an even more fundamental source. So he writes,

“Nor do heroes, saints, demigods and prophets alone compose the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is till 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 wonderful oriental story is now rehearsed from 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 Bramha, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodic dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensible to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which 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 as a whale, and sending down to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whalemen, then? ever as a man rides a horse is called a horseman?”





TWO DOOMS

June 28

I don’t know which deep-
sea image thralls me more:
The once-held notion
that ships & whales &
drowned men float
forever at the league
whose pressure finally
resists their falling weight;
or the later fact that
all things fall down the sea
until they lay at rest
at the bottom of it all.
As tropes go, each
unfurls bright sails
of welcome to the breeze,
lifting and crashing
the poem’s bow over a
wild blue wake startling
for what it travels toward
as reveals so far below.
In the first I see an
afterlife of angels in their zones,
hierarchons of salt abyss
stationed according to
their mass -- first the wide-eyed
men with arms still open
to the flinging of their souls;
then the halves of ships
with broken masts afloat
upon tides too dark for hearts
to see; and then, still further
down, the spiralling gavotte
of dead whales round the seas,
eternally at rest where
they once jawed squid
and spat their offspring
between a hell-dam’s knees.
In the second I read it takes
about three days to fall
all the way down deepest seas,
a nekyia like Christ’s three
days’ walk through Hell,
or St. Oran’s voyage to
Manannan’s north down
the well in which he was
buried in beneath the Iona
abbey’s footers. Three days
and nights to harrow down
the leagues of doom, to reach
at last the country of the
lost and tossed and damned,
a Sidhe-mound of spilled
doubloons and whale hips
and the teeth of dinosaur
divas not seen in seas for
three hundred million years.
It’s all there amid the
trash of a billion year
dreamtime falling, falling,
falling that way. How deep
is that infernal loam, I wonder,
across an acreage which
takes up three quarters of
this globe, a bricolage too
thick to read with all
sorts of endings sticking
out, a mast, a pocket
watch, the eyehole
of Manannan’s huge skull
like a door to mansions
further down?

To float -- or fall?

I’d hire ‘em both
to keel these lines
with the two darkest
lumbers in the sea,
ends which tantalize
the greenhorn pen
to leave behind dry chores
and seek those crashing shores
where all ships convoy out
beyond the metres of the known,
all eyes on deck riveted on
the dream of far adventure
with fear in its undertow,
repasting on the soul for dinner.
The great ships roll
proud and blowsy between
the awe and awfulness,
careering every wilderness
to find the greater shore,
even when it’s one or
three miles further down
from the softest beds
of island girls who
stain their lips with juice.
Two ends of falling
delight as they appall,
harrowing with depths
far wilder than the shores
of the farthest maidenhead
of all: and which, I wonder,
is the truest skipper of the dream:
the ever-drifting Yes of No
or the final failing scream?

Kelpie

It seems there were two kinds of fairy beasts, those that are magical in themselves with special powers and an independent way of life, fairies in animal form that is, and the fairy domestic animals, different from human cattle and often of a superior breed, but appurtenances of the fairies.

The seal people are a prime example of the first kind, a separate race, owned by nobody, friendly it may be with other sea-people, but not their property. Such creatures as the kelpie, though its proper form may be that of a horse, has powers of its own and appears to be no one else’s servant, though a magic bridle will enslave a kelpie for a time. Grahame of Morphie succeeded throwing such a bridle over the kelpie and forcing it to work at the building of his castle. When the castle was built and the kelpie was freed it cried, as it galloped off,


Sair back and sair banes,
Drivin’ the laird o’ Morphie’s stanes!
The lair’ds Morphie’ll never thrive
As lang as the kelpie is alive!

-- Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature


SELKIE HARNESS

June 22

He sports the sea, ruthless
and rulerless, salt’s entropy
darting and devouring
through every drowned village
lost down the black chasms
of time. I reined him with
with harness of rolling foam,
line after line of wavelike rhythmus
which enchants him into
my work of sounding seas.
He makes of my song
something brutaller than craft,
a circulation of blue to black
and back like a feral
metronome swinging ball
to testicle in bedded thrall,
pouring music in thick
gysms, the mortar of
the sea’s wild organum.
My bricks thus soaked
they raise a cathedral
all the way up from down
there, a weaving glittering
edifice of waves intricate
as the scales of that fish
that harrowed the abyss,
whose tail still fans
deep-water tides infernally
here and there. Oh what
a building this is
just offshore sand-castles,
a work I could not attempt
without the selkie’s salt
plumline, which levels
with long rollers strung
between Thy heart and mine.
Oh how he will laugh
when this building is done,
rip a good one when
I lift the surf saddle
from his black haunches
and bid him farewell.
With a kick and a splash
he’ll be gone, down
the lengths of blue doom,
leaving me to wander
this dream of a castle
through paper rooms
in inked gloom, haunted
by the sound chambered
there like a nautilus
found on shores of first light --
A merry, distant song
fading in the last crashing wave,
selkie fins falling
under the last line
he helped me write,
erased of all the thunder,
ebbed down to pure white.




POSSE

5:30 a.m. here at the Vinoy
Renaissance Hotel next to the
St. Petersburg harbor, all of it
thick and luxurious as the
terrycloth robe in the closet
(which has a little card tucked
in a pocket saying, enjoy
me for your visit, but if you
take me your credit card
will be charged $55). It’s all
here if you want it and
can afford it, which I
do (who wouldn’t?) and
I can’t, the rooms at $160
a night for the Fla. Press
Association a fraction
of what they normally
cost and then paid for
by my company. This
has me here though I
really don’t belong and know
better than to soak in
it too much, because I
smell booze in its plush
folds, a short cut to
high times which would
destroy my marriage
& life in just one night.
Still the women look
so ravishing here, buxom
and lithe and looking
eagerly around in ways
they don’t in real days --
maybe they’ve gotten
the hots from all of
this material seduction,
dreary editors and reporters
no more -- who knows
what other stories
fill this hotel but someone’s
paying for it and the women
know to look their best,
perhaps the best money
can buy. The convention
so far has been a bust --
only two prospects came
by the first day -- the
trade show area only
half-filled with vendors,
we’re spread across too
large an area -- so this
is an expensive foray
for us, the company will
pay dearly for little results.
Well, maybe today will
be different. Odd shifts
today -- 7:30-10:30 a.m.,
11:30 a.m - 12:15 p.m.,
nothing then until 4:45
to 6:30 p.m.. and then
tear-down, if I stay
that long, making for
a very late drive home.
But I’ve got to make
good on this somehow
down there, and part
of that depends on what I
dredge up here in this
sea-bottomed soak of
blue songs. I’m still
trying to shake off
the two hours I spend
by the pool yesterday
afternoon, baking under
a brilliant hot sun &
slaking on pool-water &
trying not to look too long
at all the young women
everywhere wearing almost
nothing, feeling starved
for all of it yet refusing to
bite & feasting on the insides
of all that with a gusto that
cannot let go. I’m also
feeling the torpor of the
huge dinner we had last
night at a harborside bistro,
an aged NY strip, king crab
legs, asparagus & red potatoes
in a heavy sauce, a messy
heap of meaty goodness which
the shark in me glutted
delightfully on, staining my chops
with ravenous gore. I walked
back to the hotel in the last of daylight,
faint breeze off the gulf, , me
overdressed in overtight pants and
longsleeved shirt, sweating as I
watched couples approach & pass
from the other way in the
full flower of first love, joggers
jiggling, inline skaters in tandem,
all devout in the pour of late heat.
Inside the hotel sequinned
matronas flashed by with gay partners
in arm, headed for a hall where
a ballroom dancing competition
is underway, pure bodice-ripping
romance novel fancies blooded
in flashy faux bourees. Back up in
this room at 8:30 p.m., not
wanting to watch my bosses
drink half the night, I head to
bed & watch a porn flick where
tiny Asian women get fucked
every which way & try to sound
like they’re enjoying any of it.
Slept hard, roused refreshed
at 4 a.m. All of that makes this
hour here seem so small and
useless, whatever collective
energy I wring from blue depths
of no use at all in this world
of indulgence and pleasure,
invisible and empty. Boy, does
this place ever make the life I work
so hard to give harbor to and
ground seem insignificant -- my
wife and I suffer so just to
get by, take our grievances knock
after knock, take no vacations,
enjoy no libations, luxuries,
hardly any sex -- And for what?
The privilege of laying down
inchoate lines of verse no
one will ever read? This stuff
inks on the page like a posse
of horses up from the mere,
beautiful and unchaste, wild,
trampling every opportunity
to make a decent buck. I know
all this but love too much
the sound of wet fairy horse-hooves
on the shore, stamping off
the depths and translating it to a
nocturnal land purpose, greedy
and nameless as the shadow
under my hand. Gotta S&S soon,
get this show on the road, make
something out of the nothing
summed by all of this luxury
& git my ass on home to where
real life and love trudges on.
Suffice here to say that the lust
of that posse isn’t expendable
and not worth a penny. If there’s any
bridle for them here, its
the wild indifferent page
which always greets their
black wet hooves with a
lover’s patience, happy
to wait & write their
wild and boundless ends.





CLOSING THE DEAL

1990

You stand at the window of your
hotel room, naked and wet from the pool.
Heavy curtains pull back to reveal
palm trees winnowing lazy fronds.
A fountain spouts glass into the
brilliant Florida sky. You feel its deeper
possibilities lift and cast you,
like spray, into the sun. A yearning
infinitude. Your skin burns with it.

All this first class treatment proves
how weak their deal really is:
the black jet that muscled you south,
this hotel of marble and brass,
bright servants, iced salmon
on pale porcelain, golf fairways
neater than carpet, poolside women
in neon bikinis serene in
the torpor of water and sun.
All of this shouts disaster at you.

Later you head for the bar.
You sit on a wicker barstool
sipping a tall glass of rum and fruit.
A combo pulses moody tropic jazz.
Slowly spinning fans whisper
in their tireless cradles:
first class, first class, first class.
How could they know you’d tremble?

As sheets of satin booze settle
over your eyes, you find yourself
wanting to drowse forever in this descent,
to fall gently on all dotted lines,
a chunk of pineapple sinking in rum,
one with whom any deal can be made:
just pour on that dark bossa nova, bartender,
and let the music fade blue to black.




The legends of the doings of the water kelpie all point to some river god reduced to a fuath or bogle. The bay or grey horse grazes at the lakeside, and when he is mounted, rushes into the loch and devours his rider. His back lengthens to suit any number; men’s hands stick to his skin; he is harnessed to a plough, and drags the team and plough into the loch, and tears horses to bits; he falls in love with a lady, and when he appears as a man, and lays his head on her knee to be dressed, the frightened lady finds him out by the sand amongst his hair. “Tha gainmheach ann,” “There is sand in it,” she says, and when he sleeps he makes her escape. He appears as an old woman and is put to bed by a bevy of damsels in a mountain sheiling and he sucks the blood of all, save one, who escapes over a burn, which, water horse he is, he dare not cross. In short, these tales and beliefs have led me to think that the old Celts must have had a destroying water god, to whom the horse was sacred, or who took the form of a horse.

-- J.F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the Western Highlands, Orally Collected, 1890


THE AWFUL HOOVES
OF GOD

June 24

There are gods of awe like
Zeus or Apollo, magnitudes
of light which so zap the mind
and spirit with brightness
that the world’s jaw hangs agape
in stunned hosannah.
But there are also gods
of awfulness limned in
those high gods’ shadows
who rip that jaw away
in a torrent of wild blue,
a stampede of river-nixies
no religion myth or poem
can prettify or precede.
His source is behind
the springtide roar of waters
down the plain, his feral
sex engorging way past
the banks to haul off
all who linger there --
washermaid, dreamy
shepherd, crone and
fisherman -- he doesn’t
care, he sweeps away,
he consumes. What ire
in the world conspires
to devour its votives,
leaving behind a
harrowed shore -- a shoe,
a shift, a prayer of
praise pinned to a branch?
And though no one’s
seen him in days for
a thousand years, he’s still
throned in those waters
on a horse of black
desire, arising after
midnight in the gloaming
of the dream. Nicht Naught
Nothing, Bogie Fuath, brute
wreaker with the black
hooves & balls bluer than
the sea's, he rides up
from the smoothness
on a current we can’t see
but welcome out of some
need only dreams understand
and they’re inchoate, gibberish
like the sibyl’s song beneath
a gibbous moon, the babble of
the madman who faced
the madness square on
at the bend in the river
just outside of town
where something’s always
rising, ah, dripping
with unknowns,
his eyes so black and vast
they door the stars’ cold
infinites. He shakes his
mane -- ropes of black silk --
and then his haunches,
which dry fast into familiars
we can name - my brother,
the mean black kid in
the locker room, James
Bond’s Blofeld, the boss from
hell, the witchy woman rising
from a bar’s whiskey well,
the mother dam with
her strange low-high tides --
nightmares all who are
only water I once drowned
in and ferry my days now
over, for better and for worse.
He’s not the sort you
ring church bells for, nor
saint in sacristies,
but there he is, the
darker half of the pantheon,
cruel and ruthless
and so virile blue
as to vibrate what remains
with that flooded river’s stain,
a breadth which takes
my psyche’s breath away.




NUCKELAVEE

Nuckelavee was a monster of unmixed malignity, never willingly resting from doing evil to mankind. He was a spirit in flesh. His home was the sea; and whatever his means of transit were in that element, when he moved on land he rode a horse as terrible in aspect as himself. Some thought that rider and horse were really one, and that this was the shape of the monster. Nuckelavee’s head was like a man’s, only ten times larger, and his mouth projected like that of a pig, and was enormously wide. There was not a hair on the monster’s body, for the very good reason that he had no skin.

If crops were blighted by sea-gust or mildew, if live stock fell over high rocks that skirt the shores, or if an epidemic raged among men, or among the lower animals, Nuckelayee was the cause of all. His breath was venom, falling like blight on vegetable, and with deadly disease on animal life. He was also blamed for long-continued droughts; for some unknown reason he had serious objections to fresh water, and was never known to visit the land during rain.
I knew an old man who was credited with having once encountered Nuckelavee, and with having made a narrow escape from the monster’s clutches. This man was very reticent on the subject. However, after much higgling and persuasion, the following narrative was extracted:—
Tammas, like his namesake Tam o’ Shanter, was out late one night. It was, though moonless, a fine starlit night. Tammas’s road lay close by the seashore, and as he entered a part of the road that was hemmed in on one side by the sea, and on the other by a deep fresh-water loch, he saw some huge object in front of, and moving towards him. What was he to do? He was sure it was no earthly thing that was steadily coming towards him. He could not go to either side, and to turn his back to an evil thing he had heard was the most dangerous position of all; so Tammie said to himself, “The Lord be aboot me, any tak’ care o’ me, as I am oot on no evil intent this night!” Tammie was always regarded as rough and foolhardy.

Anyway, he determined, as the best of two evils, to face the foe, and so walked resolutely yet slowly forward. He soon discovered to his horror that the gruesome creature approaching him was no other than the dreaded Nuckelavee. The lower part of this terrible monster, as seen by Tammie, was like a great horse with flappers like fins about his legs, with a mouth as wide as a whale’s, from whence came breath like steam from a brewing-kettle. He had but one eye, and that as red as fire. On him sat, or rather seemed to grow from his back, a huge man with no legs, and arms that reached nearly to the ground. His head was as big as a clue of simmons (a clue of straw ropes, generally about three feet in diameter), and this huge head kept rolling from one shoulder to the other as if it meant to tumble off. But what to Tammie appeared most horrible of all, was that the monster was skinless; this utter want of skin adding much to the terrific appearance of the creature’s naked body,—the whole surface of it showing only red raw flesh, in which Tammie saw blood, black as tar, running through yellow veins, and great white sinews, thick as horse tethers, twisting, stretching, and contracting as the monster moved.

Tammie went slowly on in mortal terror, his hair on end, a cold sensation like a film of ice between his scalp and his skull, and a cold sweat bursting from every pore. But he knew it was useless to flee, and he said, if he had to die, he would rather see who killed him than die with his back to the foe. In all his terror Tammie remembered what he had heard of Nuckelavee’s dislike to fresh water, and, therefore, took that side of the road nearest to the loch. The awful moment came when the lower part of the head of the monster got abreast of Tammie. The mouth of the monster yawned like a bottomless pit.

Tammie found its hot breath like fire on his face: the long arms were stretched out to seize the unhappy man. To avoid, if possible, the monster’s clutch, Tammie swerved as near as he could to the loch; in doing so one of his feet went into the loch, splashing up some water on the foreleg of the monster, whereat the horse gave a snort like thunder and shied over to the other side of the road, and Tammie felt the wind of Nuckelavee’s clutches as he narrowly escaped the monster’s grip.

Tammie saw his opportunity, and ran with all his might; and sore need had he to run, for Nuckelavee had turned and was galloping after him, and bellowing with a sound like the roaring of the sea. In front of Tammie lay a rivulet, through which the surplus water of the loch found its way to the sea, and Tammie knew, if he could only cross the running water, he was safe; so he strained every nerve. As he reached the near bank another clutch was made at him by the long arms. Tammie made a desperate spring and reached the other side, leaving his bonnet in the monster’s clutches. Nuckelavee gave a wild unearthly yell of disappointed rage as Tammie fell senseless on the safe side of the water.

—- Mr. W. Traill Dennison in the Scottish Antiquary







CISTERN OF ENDS

June 25

Dazed black heat at 5 a.m.,
storms still not delivering the
knockout punch which sates
the rainy season - way late this
year -- held back like a good
bowel movement or long-delayed
fuck, gritting the teeth of the
male in the night, turning the
woman of the night away in her
sleep -- no children in the womb,
eternal care of old parents, wrinkles
and grey hair. You know. Violet
sleeps on her side on the couch --
vulnerable for a cat, trusting I guess --
and Mamacita’s laying on the front
porch doorstep, a new rhythm
there, she’s staying round most
of the day, needy for love and food --
bonding in a different, more enhanced
way, we figure she’s lost her old
roosting spot down the street
with new occupants or a dog
nearby. I write on for no reason
but that I write, cashiering the
nipples of blue nougat I find,
a flexion of ink and Platonic sooth.
Without much purpose anymore,
not hoping to publish or find
readers in a blog or pique
interest anywhere else; I’ve put
this stuff out there long enough
to feel fully the contempt of
indifference, confirming the feeling
I’ve had for long that this
is only between me and You,
dear Lord, a colloquy built
for two, nigh and amen.
I wonder if a growing certainty
of this is throwing the whole
enterprise down the same
well I lost my guitar down years
ago. This season of songs like
those two or three years
when I continued to play
on a guitar whose pitch
and thunder had long
drowned. That guitar
seemed to sink for years
through my hands into
a pit which eventually
completely silenced it,
though the songs had
a long half-life, not
so much in their note
as in what I once believed
summed magnitude and
squall. I write line after
line of a long-ebbed tide,
harrowing a shore I haven’t
walked down for years,
singing to a sea I learned
long ago wasn’t calling
me at all. How many
miles of verse down the
page did it take to
fully eviscerate that
lonely blue rage at
departure and emptiness
and salt-sounding
blue seem, the equivalence
of words and the womb
which refuses all of them?
Does a massive second
turn slowly now announce
itself in the past year
of drone over the same
futile empty hunting
grounds a mile out to sea?
When will I have said it
again enough to never
need sound it again?
What will fall from my hands,
the same old themes
or the pen itself? Or
maybe all words ...
I certainly feel I’ve done
my job, pulled on
these oars long and hard
enough, perambled every
isle singing Manannan’s
lost name, catelogued every
sweet curve offered
to me beneath the moon,
drained the entire pantheon
of its feral hungry high croon:
And still found myself
on a white writing chair
in the first clusters of light
wearier than ever of writing,
desperate for more shut-eye,
some rain, a bowel movement,
good sex. Can any trope
nipple the milk I’ll never suck
past my lips? I’ll leave
that to You, heavy thick night
like a blueballed lover
forever waiting to plunge
his love to the lees.
Here’s another draught
to cistern in Your great
receipt of without.
Not that I expect an
answer anywhere else
than in what I say here.
It makes planning
difficult, and ending far worse.
No wonder the lines
go on down the page
a mile past their true ends,
unsatisfied, droning on
the same epiphantic
carols of bliss -- O
consummate kiss under
and through all of this! --
reverting to rhyme when
there’s nothing to name,
and finally just tired,
spent, seeking the first
door to get the hell on
out of here -- cats to
feed, a wife to wake
who will hopefully
be in the mood, a million
Sunday chores to fork
into the next hot day’s
wide maw. Maybe what
is left is the boy in the
woods still dropping
his shorts to show You
his, dear Lord, wondering
if she’ll every show
her Yours too, remitting
my words with pale clefted
rounds which inserts
a proper enough heft
of awe back into this
awful sing song, and hang
something sufficient
there on the last line.
A period is door enough
for an amen. But instead,
I look out the garden
window and see the
faintest white cumulus
rising above the house
across the street, glowing
with the silvery magnetos
of first life, the titan of
my ire, auguring rain at last
perhaps, movements
of bowel and testicle,
augments I’ll take any
day over the sound of
surf repeatedly plowed over here.



TAKAMIME ACOUSTIC

My last guitar

(The final poem
from “A Breviary of
Gutars,” 2000)

Fall 1986: That
blue Hamer guitar
died oh so slowly
but surely, like
a dream that
had run out of
further rooms
or a man who
can’t find any
new ways to
believe his song
could yet be
both pretty and
true. I towed the
Hamer with
me from mother’s
house to roommate’s
house, but hardly
ever played it.
The old riffs so
heavy with what
could not go
forward.

Nor could I
gambol any
more in those
henhouses of
eternal beginning
So I began to
take stock of
things in my
journal, accounting
less frequently
the previous night’s
desertions of sense
as looking back
over the past
as at a world
that never knew
its day. An
Orpheus looking
back on his
life’s fade. When
a puer enters his
own history
he is said
to finally find
substance in the
world, his blue
hops in the
aether grounded,
his heart slowing,
his dreams
digesting insoluble
agonies.

I put pen to paper
and the ink
flowed like blood.
Open wounds cast
on the page
became the
coagulates of
that old rage.

Ah but slowly.
There were more
bad nights foraging
badly for bad
women or simply
drinking badly
until a blackout
night in April
1987 when I came
to in jail for
DUI. The rock god
found his peerage
at the bottom of
his cups. Some guy
vomiting in a
toilet, another
mumbling prayers
within a sodden
hood. Such was the
beginning I grew
through. The judge
prescribed community
service and AA.
I taught English
at a vo-tech for
a season, my
AA nights lasted
8 years. In that
span I woke,
or sort of.
Thousands of
cramped rooms
confessing sins
big and small,
learning how
to walk and talk
from others
who’d earned their
wise words.
I married
unsuccessfully.
I entered therapy
and began unlocking
doors which opened
to psychology
and myth and
poetry. Through
all this I entered
time at last, finding
that substance
can only come
with time.
Surrendering
to the nails.

I traded my
amp for a
Takamime acoustic,
my blue Hamer
for a synthesizer
I’ve never played.
Tried to make
new music but
nothing assembled
or sang: ditties a
nd progressions
played on the porch,
none ending,
one dithering
into the next
like the bottom
of a halved
worm writhing
brainlessly.

I still dreamt
of stages and
fantastical
guitars, schmoozing
with David Bowie
or Peter Gabriel,
dallying with
groupies, but
I always woke
sober and eager
to get back to
work in the
study for an hour
or two before
heading to my
job. I listened to
jazz, classical,
new age, pumping
to rock anthems
only when
I lifted weights,
when testosterone
cocksurety blossoms
from the body’s
gallop and preen.


2.

I dreamed also
of pianos, rich
sonorous baby
grands of cherry
and mahagony
and teak which
turned up
everywhere ---
in forgotten rooms
of my childhood
house, in stockrooms,
by the sea,
squat in the
middle of a bayou.
Usually a woman
was nearby,
not young but
not old,
mysterious and
fair, not so much
sexy as deeply
loved. Was she
the mediatrix
bridging song
to poetry, her
body a cathedral
of the world’s
music I came
to know only
by dying to my
own music?
Eliot saw her
in the “A Game
of Chess” section
of “The Wasteland,”
a Dido like a lush
crown in an ornate
throne room,
jewelled with the
sea of ancient
myth, Thetis
ringed with gold
cupidon and ivory
viols of perfume.
He knew her well.
The same woman
and her pianos
drew me into
this history, ever
at the margins
of my verse
journal, always
flashing a smile
just beyond my
last line of the day.
And somehow
inaccessible from
the guitar I threw like
a hammer. “Forget that
passionate music,”
said Rilke’s Orpheus.
“ It will end.
True singing is
a different breath,
about nothing.
A gust inside
the god. A wind.”


3.

I’m still not sure who the dolphin rider,
my totem guide and logo, serves.
I can name many candidates:
Eros attendant of Aphrodite,
Apollo Delphinus guide of souls
to the heavenly spheres,
Dionysos who turned a rabble
of pirates into dolphins, saving the
navigator to become a priest of
doom to mind-blind Pentheus.
I was born with a tattoo of
a heart with an arrow through it
and the dolphin man rides there
somehow, lover and lyre like strands of
a helix wrapped around my heart,
both pierced by some need
for reaching a vanished Beloved.
So it’s somehow important
to ask the waters even though
I know I’ll never truly know.

Cupid’s darts were dipped
in gold or lead. Which metal
is buried in my birthmark?
Perhaps fool’s gold, since
the simplest lessons
have been so difficult.
You can seduce a woman in
a night and learn to play
a song in less than that time
and such beginnings make
you soar, delight in making love
and making song a gallop over
the yeastiest, fomenting waves.
But to truly make love? To truly
sing? Forget that passionate music.
Three years with my wife and I’m
still working on the harmonies,
loving her for just who she cares to be
and trying to find the courage
to let her know my fully dappled desires.
And the poetry, well, as my friend
Peter Meinke once told me,
It takes decades. So I’m doomed
to shuffle these words many times
before they tell me much more.

I liken the rider to Manannan,
the Irish sea-god whose ripe valleys
looked like sea-crests to voyaging Bran.
The way you think it is is not
the way it is at all -- that’s a Celtic
promise, delivered from the Otherworld
through the mouth of just unearthed
Oran when Saint Columba decided
he needed to look upon the martyr’s
face once more, up out of the
abbey foundations he’d been sacrificed
to on hard-winded, heavy-oceaned Iona.
Oran had voyaged with Manannan,
and his truth is this: when you think
you’ve arrived at the the nut-busting
uttery of truth, this sign lowers down
from nowhere saying Not Here,
meaning the ripeness on the other
side of the wall is everything
and we can never know it:
So for us the troping’s all:
and just when my metaphors
of love and lyre seemed sweetly true
the song dove elsewhere,
drowning this rider.

A few years back, soon
after my first marriage died,
I had the dolphin rider
tattooed high on my left arm.
(Stole the image from Riverside
Editions). The location was
appropriate: Pelop’s shoulder,
shank of dolphin, a hero’s portion.
Many princes were imaged riding
what was oncecalled The Lion of the Sea --
Arion, Cadmus, Enalus,
Theseus, Coeranus, Taras,
Phalanthus -- and it makes for
a popular tale, as my tale of
the guitar hero kept me warm
on the many mornings of its telling.
Take Arion, a great musician
whose song saved him from
drowning when he was thrown
to the sea by pirates. A dolphin
in love with the music bore
him back to shore. That’s
just one of the stories. I’ve learned
that each life is rammed with
many lives, many tales.
Don’t think you ever come
to rest. Pelops means “dusky faced,”
shadowy and indistinct, as
Manannan was in his grey
cloak of invisibility. Pelops was
served up in a stew by Tantalus, his
father, up to the gods; the gods
realized the taboo and restored
Pelops to life. Only the shoulder
had been eaten and the gods
restored that part with the shoulder
of a dolphin. A sea beast god ruled Pelops
tribal Peloponnese, a lusty beast
of strength charging up the river
Styx.
Proteus tended the herds
of Poseidon the mare-tamer, and is
identified with Pallas, sea beast.
Proteus, misty faced changeling,
is both Callas and Salmoneus, the
human oak-king, as Llew Llaw Giffes
the Welsh antecedent of Irish Lug,
master of many crafts and somehow
son of Manannan ...

Are you weary
yet of the transformations? I get
lost too. That’s why I have the tattoo.
(Looks cool, too.) Lusty young man
on his ocean steed racing from the sea
up the river of the mother, singing
his gorgeous tune. Now there’s a metaphor
for the guitar man, the lover, the man
now poet and married man. Gorgeous
enough and true? We’ll see. The tales
continue to spin and transform.
What’s next? Ask the rider and
don’t be surprised if it doesn’t
make any sense until the present
dives into the next transformation.


4.

It’s raining now and
I must close this journal and head
to the john to ready for work.
Buster ansy at the door and my wife
coughing in her sleep. This house
so richly affords all we love, and
makes itself a home as we make
love and life within it. A story
of its own which has been patient
while I complete an older story
of guitars. I still have that Takamime
guitar: it’s tombed in my closet.
Will it ever wake? Will the ink dry
some day and that old music
rise and crest the surface
in a glitter of spray? Who knows.
Listen now to the rain’s soft
sursurrations, sighing
wait ... there is this ...