Manannan's Wheel

And, if the soul is about to know itself, it must gaze into the soul.

-- Plato, Alcibiades

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about the sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick


It is out at sea that you are really yourself.

-- Swedish Captain

The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look what egg-shells are drifting over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetary? In our graveyards we scoop a pit, but this aggressive water opens mile-wide pits and chasms, and makes a mouthful of a fleet. To the geologist, the sea is the only firmament; the land is in perpetual flux and change, now blown up like a tumor, now sunk in chasm, the the resitered observations of a few hundred eyes find it in perpetual tilt, rising and falling. The sea keeps its old level; and 'tis no wonder that the history of our race is so recent, if the orar of the ocean is silencing our traditions. A rising of the sea, such as has been observed, say, an inch a century from east to west on the land, will bury all towns, monuments, bones, and knowledge of maknind, steadily and insensibly. If it is capable of these great and secular mischeifs, it is quite as ready at private and local damage; and of this no landsman seems so fearful as the seaman.

-- A queasy Emerson at sea in his essay "Voyage to England"; for him, as, I, the imagined sea is the one to sail. In 1842 he writes in his journal, "Wisdom consists in keeping the soul liquid. There must be the Abyss, Nyx, and Chaos, out of which all things come, and they must never be far off. Cut off the connection between any of your works and this dread origin, and the work is shallow and unsatisfying."

***

That night the north wind had already risen to gale force. I only put my nose outside from time to time to see if there was anything ahead.

How full of meaning and menace is the sound of those two words: Cape Horn! What a vast and terrible cemetary of seamen lies under this eternally boiling sea! Fear adds its chill to that of the atmosphere, the terror that lurks in the name and the sight of those seas.

Here, everything seems to be attracted and drawn towards the depths, as by some monstrous, supernatural magnet. Had I a larger surface of wood under my feet, I could have calmed my nerves by pacing the deck, but no: I could not walk my thoughts under control.

Fear of the storm? No. Apprehension that sprang, I felt, from legend, for all that I had been told about these regions. Of all storms, that which lurks invisible in an atmosphere of terror is the worst.

... As Lehg II neared the grim promontory, through hours made long by impatience and anxiety, I threw my last card on the table of life.

If luck was against me, it would be easy to say:

"It was lunacy to attempt Cape Horn alone, in a 9-tonner -- barely that."

But what if I suceeded?

Imperceptibly, perhapps, the longing of all those who would have liked to make the attempt and were unable to do so, or the hopes of those who had tried without success, crept towards me. Perhaps I had the help of those who perished in this trial; perhaps I was not quite so alone as I thought. Perhaps the seamen of all latitudes were spectators of this struggle against the squalls and the darkness.

-- Vito Dumas rounds Cape Horn in his memoir of circumnaviagating the globe alone in The Roaring Forties





MANANNAN'S WHEEL

July 7

Manannan, or Manachan Mar Lir, is the most distinctive of (the Manx) spirits. It is he who takes the form of the three-legged wheel which is the emblem of Man. He is long-dead, however; no appearance of Manannan has been recorded in living memory.

-- Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature

***

St. Columba breaks a chalice and sends a servant to have it repaired. The servant encounter Manannan on his way and the god magically restores the chalice. The god sends the servant back to Columba with question: would he achieve Christian immortality? When the servant shows Columba the healed chalice and submits the god's question, the ungrateful saint replies, "There is no forgiveness for a man who does such works as this!" The servant returns to Manannan with the answer, who broke out into indignant lament. "Woe is me, Manannan mac Lir! For years I've helped the Catholics of Ireland, but I'll do it no more, till they're weak as water. I'll go to the gray waves in the Highlands of Scotland."

***

You haven't been seen
above the tide since
the Christians named
it rude, but that doesn't
mean You're dead: Foam
of wave which lingers
after the ebb is proof
enough You ride
those breakers still.
Their manes are gripped
in Your hands the
way a darkness rides
its depths, fleet
and laughing where
the light of abbeys
built on dry earth
can't enter,
or won't, for fear
of finding the very
devil happy in his
toil. You're there
enthroned amid
a seaweedy wash
of pubic hair,
smiling and
one-eye proud,
booming in Your
baritone a wheeling
brogue composed
of the sea's three legs
of breadth and depth
in endless blue tide.
They raised their
chalice to every bright
and high part
of the day, claiming
there the next life's
judgment and rule.
You lost that battle
in their eyes but
won the greater war,
founding a salt
empire in the
deeper regions of the
heart, that lower,
Sidhe-rich half of
Ireland which sings
and swives and drinks
to dregs the salt
orizons of the soul
while their altars
dry and fall in
certitudes too
heavenly for this
world's good. At the
edges of the known
You are close -- almost --
the pale gleam of
moonlight which ghosts
the icebergs with
ever-noctal fire,
bowering abysms
where narwhals
clatter their horns
like marimbas
and moan long tones
in the tongue of
those darkest
gods who were exiled
there and came to
rule what we banished
from our lands for good.
Oh undaunted demiurge
smiling a deep welcome
which confounds this
well of a whale of a
whorl of a quim of
darkly-diving words!
It's raining now at
4:30 a.m., a steady
soft glissade of
tropic moisture wrung
from low-pressure-
marling skies, making
this morning a drowned
and dowsing, post-coital
wash on shores still
lucent with Your foam.
This effervescent absent
swash will soon enough be gone,
wheeling out and down
that merry sea whose
whirling thrall we are.




ORAN'S VOYAGE TO THE NORTH

It is commonly said that the People of the Sìdhe dwell within the hills, or in the underworld. In some of the isles their home, now, is spoken of as Tir-na-thonn, the Land of the Wave, or Tir-fo-Tuinn, the Land under the Sea.

But from a friend, an Islander of Iona, I have learned many things, and among them, that the Shee no longer dwell within the inland hills, and that though many of them inhabit the lonelier isles of the west, and in particular The Seven Hunters, their Kingdom is in the North.

Some say it is among the pathless mountains of Iceland. But my friend spoke to an Iceland man, and he said he had never seen them. There were Secret People there, but not the Gaelic Sìdhe.

Their Kingdom is in the North, under the Fir-Chlisneach, the Dancing Men, as the Hebrideans call the polar aurora. They are always young there. Their bodies are white as the wild swan, their hair yellow as honey, their eyes blue as ice. Their feet leave no mark on the snow. The women are white as milk, with eyes like sloes, and lips like red rowans. They fight with shadows, and are glad; but the shadows are not shadows to them. The Shee slay great numbers at the full moon, but never hunt on moonless nights, or at the rising of the moon, or when the dew is falling. Their lances are made of reeds that glitter like shafts of ice, and it is ill for a mortal to find one of these lances, for it is tipped with the salt of a wave that no living thing has touched, neither the wailing mew nor the finned sgAdan nor his tribe, nor the narwhal. There are no men of the human clans there, and no shores, and the tides are forbidden.

Long ago one of the monks of Columba sailed there. He sailed for thrice seven days till he lost the rocks of the north; and for thrice thirty days, till Iceland in the south was like a small bluebell in a great grey plain; and for thrice three years among bergs. For the first three years the finned things of the sea brought him food; for the second three years he knew the kindness of the creatures of the air; in the last three years angels fed him. He lived among the Sidhe for three hundred years. When he came back to Iona, he was asked where he had been all that long night since evensong to matins. The monks had sought him everywhere, and at dawn had found him lying in the hollow of the long wave that washes Iona on the north. He laughed at that, and said he had been on the tops of the billows for nine years and three months and twenty-one days, and for three hundred years had lived among a deathless people. He had drunk sweet ale every day, and every day had known love among flowers and green bushes, and at dusk had sung old beautiful forgotten songs, and with star-flame had lit strange fires, and at the full of the moon had gone forth laughing to slay. It was heaven, there, under the Lights of the North. When he was asked how that people might be known, he said that away from there they had a cold, cold hand, a cold, still voice, and cold ice-blue eyes. They had four cities at the four ends of the green diamond that is the world. That in the north was made of earth; that in the east, of air; that in the south, of fire; that in the west, of water. In the middle of the green diamond that is the world is the Glen of Precious Stones. It is in the shape of a heart, and glows like a ruby, though all stones and gems are there. It is there the Sìdhe go to refresh their deathless life.

The holy monks said that this kingdom was certainly Ifurin, the Gaelic Hell. So they put their comrade alive in a grave in the sand, and stamped the sand down upon his head, and sang hymns so that mayhap even yet his soul might be saved, or, at least, that when he went back to that place he might remember other songs than those sung by the milk-white women with eyes like sloes and lips red as rowans. "Tell that honey-mouthed cruel people they are in Hell," said the abbot, and give them my ban and my curse unless they will cease laughing and loving sinfully and slaying with bright lances, and will come out of their secret places and be baptized."


They have not yet come.

This adventurer of the dreaming mind is another Oran, that fabulous Oran of whom the later Columban legends tell. I think that other Orans go out, even yet, to the Country of the Sidhe. But few come again. It must be hard to find that glen at the heart of the green diamond that is the world; but, when found, harder to return by the way one came.

-- From Iona, Fiona McCleod (William Sharp), London: William Heinemann, 1912

The Web

July 6

It’s said that the perfect
web was spun by one spider
and since then that’s all
arachnids weave, like
Scyllas of the whorl,
round killing-pits of
absolute pitch, again
and again from birth
to death, brood after
brood for millions of years.
One spider wove the
perfect zero in a
simple weave of straight
lines, engineering
thus a foolproof lair
for drawing prey
into its jaws, a vortex
of gossamer and steel
and unending thirst
for sucking others dry.
There was one end
to each millionth
prior attempt -- to
craft that round --
and once achieved
innovation retired,
its daring attempts
sewed and sealed a
groove in the
species brain, became
innate. When will we get
anything so right,
I wonder,
we creators and
confabulators
and engineers of
world upon world?
There’s never any
end in sight, only
the next blue door
to harrow through
with whatever tools
we’ve been handed
to us for our labors
by the gods who
yet linger in the
depths of the heart.
So I’m here at
4:30 a.m. in early
July with the garden
outside black and
rich as god-loam,
growing wilder as
I write after another
late-day storm,
rich and musty like
a new lover’s smell
just between a
parted thigh and
lifted panty -- a
vertiginous zone
of heat and unhalved
origin, so delicate
and dark in scent --
beneath the lemon
soap there’s sweat
and fish and something
else, too wild and
urgent to wait for
me to try to name it.
Shores heaving in
the garden with an edge
of panties pulling down,
seas throbbing and
crashing there, wave
after wave from
weather far away,
or continents down
under. I inhale that
fragrance deep as
I press pen to paper,
unfurling the taste
of moistened pussy lips
to skies which brood
and foment, unleashing
tongues of fire and rain,
washing it all clean
& drinking deep what
only it can pour
and nourish and sustain.
A perfect round may
yet be cabled here
with these doggedly
black lines in which
I swallow all of You,
beloved Thou, each
salvo left to right
another plunge, my
song fucking You
past the rims,
to that final shore
where we at last
begin. Maybe
that happened
long ago to me
and each day’s
song spins another
web whose perfection
isn’t found in the
craft of its making
(obviously not)
but rather in
its sussurant
and successive
waves of the
same blue sea
tiding deep between
a You and a Me.
Perhaps the song
perfected when I was
three & sang for
the first time to
Big Toad in his
yellow plastic pail,
ferrying there what
I heard when I napped
in that cottage close
to Cape Cod’s sea,
a sound so like
the womb I heard
in my mother’s
voice that
I had to repeat it,
that low ocean
surf-rounding sound,
finding in my own
voice milk and
pussy sweetness, the
sound of breakers
smashing hard
down miles and
miles of shore,
a path which
continues here.
So praise this hour
of dank and humid
dark which so sighs
for this penis
which looks half
like a pen
and half like a
bottlenose dolphin
playing just past
the the bow of the
this frigate
writing chair.
I’ll keep plunging
here if You’ll pull
down your underwear,
my sweet, my
savage heart. My
threads of ink are
black yet gossamer,
its bower soft and
billowy with a
nascent reek of death,
its rudder ruddy thick
and veined, plunging
slick and urgently
the surging oily waters
You proffer beneath
my history, the perfect
circle I can’t see
though it rims my
every ecstasy, in
gardens ripening
on Avalon or Ys
tomorrow perhaps or
the next. I’ll see her
standing midst
the pentas, angelica
and sage, just the
way she looked
when she waved
her last farewell
-- all curves in blue
with dreamy foam
and the saddest
smile just ebbing
from her face, one
finger falling slowly
from her lips
as if to name
at last, forever,
the true sound
of my name
beyond the
breakers of this day,
where all and nothing
still have much to say.

*


... I’m writing this poem
desperate and drowning
in a desire which
never reaches shore
never exhausts in foam
between your thighs

I knew full well the price
I wrote this poem
in that kiss
knew where
this slick slide
of letting go would lead:
to everywhere and
nowhere; to this
page with its leaky
singing bloody words;
to yet another
morning’s long walk
back to silence.
I knew, I knew
you couldn’t stay,
couldn’t let go.
So fucking what.
How could I resist.

I asked for this
chalice of flame
when my hand
reached down
your jeans to
cup your ass
I knew I’d burn
into cinders and soot
this is my sulfur road race
pumping hellbent again
from surrender to sorrow
what a way to burn
what a way to learn

she sits on the shores of the world
her red hair the wild sunset
I sail toward without hope
the sea a foam of writhing fury
the sky so blue
like her eyes
I’m trying so hard to see
in the dark of this morning

when I touch you
I am a poem
of burning poppy
exhaling your sweet fuck musk
down every dark corridor
singing through the lonely night
that stole into this room

when you pulled back
when you walked out
I’m burning baby
a pyre of pure beginning

-- Desperate poem, 1996



THIS IS THE DANCE

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

Spring 1984:
One of the
last songs I
wrote for Rip
the Silk was
“The Dance,”
a slow brooding
reflection on
how there’s love
at last in death:
“What is now
is what we’ve all
been waiting for /
That certain cusp
between the string
and bow / This is
the dance that we’ve
all been asking
for / So dim the
lights / And open
faces / Read the lines
between the
spaces / This is what
we’ve all been
waiting for:”
This arrival, this
bowered bed,
right? The angry
songs got us
girlfriends who
wooed then soothed
then tucked away
they old anger
nighty night in
their sheets:
Stepping into
love killed the
songs I wrote when
love walked away:
Helix of loss,
helix of gain:
Dana and I
found an
apartment in
North Orlando
in one of those
dreary complexes
where everything
is prefab and
cloistered with
easy comforts:
Florida at its
commercial
suburban
narcotized worst:
Dana threw herself
into making her
first nest away
from home, blowing
bucks we’d vowed
to our PA on
a big color
TV, dish & bath
towels in blueberry
& peach, big woven
fans tacked on
the wall & a
huge comforter
for our bed: Home
sweet dying
loam: I can’t
remember a square
inch that was
my own: Kept
my guitar under
the bed &
my journal tucked
under the couch:
Our goal was
for me to pay
the rent & she
to save her
money for PA
& Dana to
practice on
her voice & me
on my guitar
licks & together
find a touring
band to fly
fly fly away
from the rigid
ordinaries of
our life: I took
my old stockroom
job back, less
money but
better for the
look (I could
rooster the hair
& wear an
earring): Dana
got work as
a cocktail
waitress down
Orange Blossom
Trail at Thee
Doll House, the
“quality” tit
bar: So though
we now lived
together our
work shifts
kept us further
apart: Helix
of presence,
helix of absence:
Poised to make
our break,
instead we
dawdled: Days
when Dana should
have been practicing
her voice she
mostly watched soaps,
complaining of
hoarseness from
the smoke: Nights
when I was
supposed to
practice my
guitar god riffs
I mostly noodled
watching movies
on MTV: Poised
to fly, we
folded our wings
& let the moment
pass us by:
“We gathered on
the esplanade
our shadows
and the moon /
The orchestra
played melodies
so say to
hear so soon:”
See the happy
hearth of love,
the lovers rising
from the same
bed to forage
nothing from
the day, as
if love would
do it for them:
Schedules being
what they were
we had sex
less & less,
Dana always
tired or sore
not wanting
me in her
and fussy with
my cock in
her hand --
all that jizz
such a mess --
And I, with
no ground I
could stand
on apart from
her, simply
paled to gossamer:
“The lights went
out / our fingers
touched / the air
turned sad
and blue /
So turn around
and disappear /
No one can
tell what
happened here /
This is the
dance we’ve
been waiting
for:” I threw
my band away
for this fuckless
fin de siecle
sleep in someone
else’s bed: I
wrote these
lines today
as every day
in my chair
in my study,
the one room
wholly my own
in this house
I love furnished
by my wife --
this room I
made, all my
books & journals
on big white
bookcases &
more goods
stuffed in 2
file cabinets
in the closet:
I made a
desk which
stretches across
the room, enough
to work on
the iMac & have
room to pay
bills: I have
a fat loam
of notes songs
jots jisms books
younameit in
a pile to the
right of this
chair—all for
ready reference
as I dally &
drowse down
the interminable
length of this
poem, this
Breviary, this
ding dong song
all night long:
I love my wife
because she
doesn’t question
or change this
room with me
in it at this
terribly early hour:
Don’t think we’d
be together if
she didn’t: My
first wife hated
my study, once
hissed in tears
that she wanted
to go in &
rip apart all
of those pages
I had mortared
up between us:
Living with
Dana I had
as few defenses
as when I used
to visit my
father: Left
me feeling
wholly unworthy
& substanceless,
as if I
had nothing
of my on to
hold on to
when I had to
face my life
again: Dana’s
cat heart felt
that emptiness
in me just
willing to give
in & simply
strutted away:
Is all this
fucking substance,
this unreadable
poem, just a
cockring I can
use to keep
another’s heart
filled with me?
Don’t fool yourself
kiddo: At least
know it never
works: There
at the last land
after all your
bridges have
been burned
(as the song
goes), The final
dance is with
a ghost, the
woman who
was never there:

"The unbroken duties of the foam"

Everywhere there seems some connection between the fairies and the dead; everywhere secrecy and reserve is needed in the mention of them. Their favours must not be boasted of, they must not be rewarded. It is generally not etiquette even to thank them. Everywhere they are greedy for mortal children, ready to decoy away young girls and nursing mothers -- almost everywhere they need the help of human midwives to enable them to bring forth children. In most places they have the power of invisibility, and an ointment or herb is needed to reveal them to mortals. All over the country some among them help mortals in their work. If their ways and wishes are regarded they give rewards of prosperity, or smaller, more tangible gifts; if they are offended or their taboos are broken, the punishment is at out of proportionto the offence.

-- Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature


WATER

Pablo Neruda
Transl. Stephen Mitchell

Everything on earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
bit, the petal fell
until the only flower was the falling.
Water is different,
has no direction but beauty,
runs through all dreams of color,
takes bright lessons
from the rock
and in those occupations works out
the unbroken duties of the foam.




ON MYTHOLOGICAL THINKING

To imagine in pairs and couples is to think mythologically. Mythical thinking connects pairs into tandems rather than separating them into opposites which is anyway of mode of philosophy. Opposites lend themselves to very few kinds of description: contradictories, contraries, complementaries, negations -- formal and logical. Tandems, however, like brothers or enemies or traders or lovers show endless varieties of styles. Tandems favor intercourse -- innumerable positions. Opposition is merely one of the many modes of being in a tandem.

James Hillman, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion

I.

Something loosens the mind
to wander the grimed marble
haunts of its lost pantheon --
humility perhaps, sufficiently
purged from the acid bath
of so many humiliations
trying to play God, the jealous
one at that. The hour helps,
first light yet to spill its blue
yolk to the east, one bird starting
to sing outside the window
opened on our dark garden,
so much stilled, paused,
dead asleep, eye of one night
shut at last, eye of coming day
yet to flutter. Between such
sight lies a lacuna, a door, an
opportunity to dive down
the well to where the pantheon
still dwells. And I do, letting
go of any sense of the mess,
slipping easily down a fish-
scented slide into woman and
surf and wet dream. I’m loosed
at last into the womb of the
mouses, a place which at
first looks like my father’s
house where I know he’s napping
and fear to disturb him in
death: And in the manic
mood of my inner conversation
(neurotic, bent), the paternal
fascia starts to loosen, grows
hoarier stubble, cackles in
my ear. There’s my horn-dog
of a great grandfather O’Riley
still offering a quarter to a
farmhand’s wife for a fuck,
there’s my greatgrandsire
O’Cobhthaigh in 1778
staring at the mouth of
Boston Harbor
like a sperm about to be
loosed from the Irish bark
Sea Sprite, long travelled
from Cork. And down
from there are three
ur-Cobtachs, the one
who accompanied Columba
to Iona in 563, the brother
of King Loegaire who feigned
a wasting sickness so
he could stiff his brother
with a knife, the one
who played a harp all night
defending the ears of
CuCulainn from the chants
of the enemy druids. Gentlemen,
a penny a psalm in the
coin of the realm. Show me
a means through the pause
of this hour.

II.

In the temple house of Zeus
there’s a room for each of
his tribe, every hall bearing
a throne of ominipotence
and wilderness and cruelty
at its center. You enter
each next one
from the last, the door
facing both ways at once,
like Janus, hinging
the possibilities of Artemis
to Apollo to Dionysos to Hermes
to Hades to Poseidon to Aphrodite
to Artemis to Ares to Hephaistos,
each with their own triple
aspect and zenith and nadir.
The palace thus is a spectrum,
each spectra a hurl of hue
in dancing with every other,
aligned in the mind of the divine which
foreshadows and backgrounds
us all. Each portal is a cross,
where a fullness has cusped
and spoored, a fruit plucked
and devoured. You enter it
naked as a baby facing what
strangeness and truth lies
ahead, harrowed of every
room you’ve been through
yet not enough for what
you still must go through.
Anticipation and desire
and dread fringe your
passage through, like
snakes hanging down
with bangles in their mouths.
The doors are like new and
death moons, prescient of new
auger and even precipitant
of it but blind as a pup
at the paps of sweetness
which sucking canines offend.
Enter a room - it belongs
to, say, Artemis -- and slowly
this next divine grows
on you; you like her mood
and style, the virgin huntress
who knows bloodlust but
not desire, who is jealous
of her glade & tribe of
Amazones who hunt outside
the village mons of family
and servitude to men.
This batch runs wild and
free: and you can feel
your own soles start to
pad and thence to run,
out past the last strand
into the breakers of
the unknown, into
the forest where it is
kindled and thickly
braided with the
animal in your desire,
where love is prey
and the sex the pleasures
of the hunt, a good
spear thrust through
the throat of a stag.
Ah, yield to this room,
there is no stopping,
no depth in the darkness
of the wilderness heart
which does not lure
and satisfy.
But who is beckoning
in the mist of the next door?
So regal, she, a queen
perhaps, or the spiritual
patron of the polis, her
shield a mind fit for
bright philosophies,
her feet square over the
mount which houses
all the snakes down
in us: Bright and
feared Athena, dragging
me back inside the wall
of the cidatel toward
duties and alms which
build and raise,
polishing that shield
every time I refuse to
yield my fuse back to
that huntress of the wild.
But then ahead
in the next strange door,
there is the man who looks
like a herald, with wings
on his feet and an old man’s
beard on his youthful
face, bearing a wand
wound with white and
dark snakes: Hermes
is Athena with
a vengeance, or one
of them, as she is
the urbane sister
of Artemis. He is mind
hauled to magical
extremes, borderlands
of psyche where paradox
is king, a topsy-turvy
sight which inwards
the outer world
on days more foul and
fair than men have
known, but will.
He walks inside
the underwear of
the underworld with
the softest steps heard
there, more fancied
than his brother Ares’
frontal assaults -- we’ll
get to him for sure -- but
first the fade into
the approach of Venusian
surf, surrounding
something down beyond
this poems’ overchawed
rind -- something most
corporeal, nippled, surgent,
the way cerulean waves
mash the morning’s shore.

III.

Ebb all this back in
this day’s next bouree,
firecrackers sounding
down the street, my
wife now watching
a cooking show on TV,
the shuttle Discovery
up in the atmosphere
having launched
two hours ago.
Nothing unusual here,
just a quiet day at
home, where love
is sufficient and loss
is sufficiently at bay
for us to just be still
and be glad. Down
under our mood the
currents persist,
history against history
like eddies in the
greater history of
our time, all of
that swashing the
foam of far older
deeper waves
we can’t see, cold
and urgent and
darker than death.
So what we feel
at one moment -- say
a sense of wideness
and welcome toward the
sprawling summer sky --
is only at best an nth unique
and the rest swims
up from that drowned
pantheon, if not all of it,
which is fine by me.
Heftier flags than any
I could raise blow wild
into that summer sky,
Venusian in its luxurant
soak, virile as Hermes’
staff, penetrant as
shining Athena’s brow,
wild as flung from
Artemis’ bow. If I
am not alone, it’s
because I’m in good
company, whether I
know it or not. So it
suffices here to drone
on in their throat
as the latest bronze
bell to cable loud
hosannahs from every
blue depth in hell.

Thar She Blows

It’s out there at sea that you are really yourself.

-- Vito Dumas recalls a Swedish captain telling him this in his memoir, Alone Through The Roaring Forties





THE USES OF
ENCHANTMENT (2)

July 2-3

I missed the folktales when
I was young -- there were
Bible stories in Sunday school
and the rest was TV, movies
& books. My hero's pantheon
was populated by the likes
of Jesus, Roy Rogers,
Frankenstein, Tom Swift
and James Bond; they
were my familiars
instead of Jack and
Perseus and Crow
and Finn MacCool.
Maybe there’s no difference
there -- fables nonetheless
teemed in my forming
brain -- but the mode
was different (literal
and visual, not oral),
and the message somewhat
distilled, fainter of its
former million-year
phosphor, less awe, more
puerile thrall, the
hero’s armory accessible
to me like accessories
for GI Joe. So I fared
my childhood with
faux mysteries and
plastic guns, poorer
arms against feared
nights and even more
dreaded days than those
faerie Danannans
roused by charms
you cannot find but
must produce to woo
their saddles from
green swards. Nothing
to weave from cowslip
blossoms and hang
around the neck of
brutal breasts, nor
articulate and
appease what sprang
out of the bottle in
an effervescent,
poison pop. Without
a Christian god the
dark was steelier still,
indifferent as the stars
which burned holes
through all my bars.
Without a name to
call them, their rough
magic was a spleen
that careened me
helter-skelter through
the vaults of their empty
like Perceval through
the Grail Castle, its
bullion locked on
my wordless lips.
I got all that much
later when I finally
read the tales, when
that old secret language
poured seas back
over my deepest toes
and rose to fill
my throat. Why
did I receive such
grace but to bring
the boon somehow
back, that sons around
the world not have
to fall my way into
so pointlessly bankrupt
a delay. I write these
fairy singsongs down,
enrapt with a music
I can’t sing myself
though something cashiers
in every line I write --
reckless, unbounded,
free -- a marauding
merriment which may yet
dangle for the reader
their own lost gold key,
an invitation to the
dance, to voyage, dig,
bouree, singing every
old song in the book
that all bindings may
swim free in the heart
and ear we share. If
the shaman still wings
in the tree deep in
our tongues -- and I
know he does -- then
any repeat of his
tropes is to learn
to fall his way, eventually
to emerge from that
wild dark with what
he was fitted with
down there -- an
extra bone in tone,
a whale now under
every keel, an undersea
mountain ruddering
each steeple and
erection. Thus I am
lover and guitarist
and scholar and poet
no more, but song
direct from his old
heart, a thick black
brogue of richest blue,
priceless and immaterial,
so woundingly true
as to drone itself
susurrant as nine waves
collapsing on the shore.
I am the sea where
all heroes’ bones are
drowned, figure and ground
of the next most ancient
dream, free in every
way my soon-to-wake-up day
is bound and riveted
and tossed fast away,
a legacy of blue seen
only by You, salt master,
divine eyes staring
back from the deep
end of the well, from
a shore I walked on
long ago, in a book I
cast to the sea today,
from a screen somewhere
far in the world while
you were looking for
something far different --
(“nude mother nipple”
or “party girls ass” you
queried a search engine,
coming across Wick Lit).
Our meeting was meant
long ago when songs
rose in my throat
as I played a toy guitar
for a toad in a yellow
plastic pail. I was three
& engaging a frog prince
whose tale was too long
for me to see back then,
or ever. I’m content now
to pour and pour his
music back in that space
enchantment rocks me,
to let the sea of it baptize
or bathe or craze as it will,
trusting the blue in it
to anoint and ill
as its hoary father deems,
there on his stone chair
at the bottom of my
dreams I boat upon
this chair. Read it or don’t:
I’m doing my job
to make unknowns as
visible as blowing whales,
a spout of verbal joy
startling and effervescent
in moonlight, a forced
spray which hurls
meanings at the sky
too deep for these words
though they darkly, wetly fly.





SEA ROADS

2005

No one said the sea roads to you
would be safe or sane or even
mortally true. The trackless
path has indeed unmade the man
like a bed unmans its riders,
one by one, along the sword-length
of that night not found on
any map of shores in this too-
faintly-blue world. Still your
lovers voyaged on, harp in one hand
and puckerpeckering heart in
the other, reckless exactly
where you dreamed of trespass,
the guards deceived and your
door unlocked in those hours
before dawn when a song
is pure plunge in curve, the
refrains dipped in angel-dragon
fire. You wove deceit and delight
like snakes around their
rousing staffs, the whole
enchantment greater than
the doom of priests and
the quartering horses now
whinnying softly in
dark stables. Yogis of
the first chakra, the least
of heaven’s lights, your
men burned brightest in
your eyes when transgressing
all the way to frame your door
and plunge right in, your
welcome like the curl of wave
which commences to crash
on down the aching shore,
a tumult of blue bliss.
Ah how their songs were
all ferried back from that far
land, like buckets from a
well, brimming over with
daze and dazzle, pierced
and stricken with the color
of your eyes, the glint
of moonlight in the sapphire
hanging between your
breasts as you heaved
your penultimate of sighs,
its facets cut and polished
by every wax and ebb
you’ve altared since lovers
have dared to dance a dream.
Centuries have long passed
and only the songs do
scant remain, a ghostly
choir in miniscule
on ancient parchment,
bereft now of all actual
sounds. Those refrains
down the page are like
markers, perhaps of shores,
perhaps of all the beds
which turned into doors
into vaster regions
far below, beneath all
oceans and most dreams,
where you are every
long-suffered ache inverted
and requited with a Yes,
and heaven is all it
seems when lips to
lips we slake the
hell we now undress.





IT IS BORN

Pablo Neruda
Transl. Stephen Mitchell

Here, I come to the boundaries
where nothing needs to be said,
everything is learned with weather and ocean,
and the moon returned
with its lines silvered
and each time the shadow was broken
by the crash of a wave
and each day on the balcony of the sea
wings open, fire is born,
and everything continues blue as the morning.




LAND’S END, MY SONG


July 1, 2006

Any poet who does not know exactly how many rhymes each word has is incapable of espressing any idea whatever.

-- Charles Baudelaire, introduction to Flowers of Evil, tranls Jackson Matthews.

It always ends here, on the
last page as the day begins to wake,
on this shore of softly breaking
waves where there is no sea
in sight because there is no
need of one, not any more,
not since I heard my mother
sing sweetly over it,
not since I was baptized
in it, not since I was
loved awake and then left
behind by it, not since
I wrote so many poems
in praise and addlement
in it, so many poems that
the sea’s work has tided
so resonantly in mine
that my voice is just
a beachside morning after
a wild night of love between
my beloved and my Thou,
a merged collapsing crash
of thunders up from hell
and pealing down from heaven’s
older breech, that big night music
now distant as the whispering
surf in shells, still ringing in
the inner ear and ghost-
heavy on the hips, my song and
echo of love’s seem inside the
hard-hurled wave long ebbed
from distant shores,
that birth now father to
the water-horse whose
totem I here ride
astride my white riding chair
crossing seas no man would
dare in actual boats but do,
as no sea would ever hurl
these lines but does
in that metaphoric clear blue
that sees me diving deep
in You, and welcomes me
to shores which aren’t
shores nor beds or doors,
but are kisses still
which pull my oars.





THE SEA

Pablo Neruda
Transl. Stephen Mitchell

A single being, but there is no blood.
A single caress, death or a rose.
The sea comes and reunites our lives
and alone attacks and is split apart and sings
in night and day and man and animal.
Its essence: fire and cold; movement.


OCEAN

Pablo Neruda
Transl. Stephen Mitchell

Body purer than a wave,
salt that washes the line
and the luminous bird
flying without roots.