The Invisible World

Fairy houses are sometimes underneath human hearths, and the hearthstone is often their door. Walter Gill has a story quoted from The Celtic Quest about a house at Airlie in Angus which was supposed to be haunted by the fairies because cakes baking at the fire sometimes disappeared. At length the house was pulled down, and it was found that the hearthstone was actually the roof of an underground house. A number of mouldering cakes were found which had slipped through the crack.

- Catherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature


***


Toward the end of the 12th century Voyage of St. Brendan, Brendan and his monks find their anchor stuck in the sea. The sailors clamor loudly for help, and a dwarf, hearing their cries, runs to a hermit dressed in animal hair. The monks watch the two approach in a small boat and hear the old man sing in a loud voice beautiful pagan songs. Brendan isn’t sure this man comes from the devil, so he has him stand close to the relics on board. But the old man, whose name is Johannes, actually is one of God’s chosen people and he celebrates mass on board, offering the sacred host to all. The dwarf tells the men that the rope is tethered to the invisible world and that the singing they heard actually came from down there. At that moment Brendan understands that the book he burned contained the truth and that he must now head home to write down all those wonders in a book of his own writing.



THE INVISIBLE WORLD

July 21

Faith is the certainty
that the invisible world
protects and borders
and greets us as love
was always meant to,
no matter what breaks
our hearts along the way.
Our works then proceed
to build a life upon
soft water, the way
the Lady of the Lake
circleted her court
beneath the waves.
I came by that faith
ever slowly down my
years and with great
and foolish ardor,
wounded in every way
which love is neither
actual or virtual
but is instead supernal,
a whale beneath the
wave which rudders
every homeward song
with salvos of loud
basso. The other day
I downloaded tracks
from Lyle Mays’ second
solo album (1985),
stuff I hadn’t heard
in years. That music
first entered my ears
late in my first
drinking career,
washes of such aching
purity as to render
my ruined heart
complete: A wash
for those broke
hungover afternoons
of late-autumn light
that weirdly and
for no good reason
confirmed that my
heart still beat resoundingly
deep in the invisible world
that ghosted the world
I had shattered.
Bittersweet songs, viscous synth
in counterpoint with plinked
sweet arpeggios, liquoring
my sense without the hootch,
love songs full like the moon
in satch and lucence
if only in reflection,
in the brutal undertow
which had washed all loves away.
An art’s Platonic gold
flickered in the ghastly
cave I had mined full down
in futile search for gold,
as if to whisper from
a keyboard, you and I
both are children of the wave.
How can I say it: I was lost
to broken nights yet found
myself complete in the lush
blue agon of those songs,
home at last in the
way that said I had always
been there, just not to
the eyes and surfaces of things
(empty doors, sour mashed
autumn light, the horrid
waste of exhaustion,
abysms doubled in a
nekyia’s bottle club).
Heartened by that sound
I rowed slowly on;
in a few years I left
the bottle of those nights
and shored at the
margins of a love which
slowly grew me down to here.
This still dark hour of
4:30 a.m. is complete
in the aching swoon of
songs I haven’t heard in
years, fulfilled in what
life absents, as if presence
full hallows what the heart
must harrow through alone.
One cat is turned deep
asleep on the couch
across from me, another
mewls in the window
just outside, in hunger
for food or love or both,
for what security I can offer
from that outside,
indifferent, dying world.
Nothing in the garden
but the washed and
welcoming bride
I never married,
beckoning to me though
not to enter but rather
simply to welcome as
best I can here and everywhere
the surfside rumbles of
the rollers ebb their
quintessentially smashed foam.
That’s what I task these
lines to: To kiss the faith
in an invisible world
of what can’t be known
or found or touched at last
and in so losing
raise enduring chapel walls
over an ever fading
music hall that
tides the deepest
chambers of my heart
where the whale is singing,
singing loud.





PIANO TRANSCRIPTIONS

From “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

Summer 1986:
On the eve of
my 29th
birthday I
headed out
expectant and
cynical of what
lay wrapped for
me in the moon-
folds of dewy
humid summer
night: Tipping a
few with Norman
at 2FU though
he’s distant &
chattering of
futures exclusive
of me: Then walked
over to
Decades to
hear The Walk
and Bad Roads
who had this
guitar player
Dena I’d met
several times &
wanted but would
not chase—brotherly
for some reason
with her —they
sound good, punchy
& sassy, Dena
handling her leads
well & carving
an edge onstage
in a polka
dot dress &
black cowboy boots:
On to Bailey’s
for shots and
beers & then
back into the
blitzkrieg
partyrama of
the Crocodile
Club but it’s
cold blooded,
insensate, my
presence nothing
new or noticeable:
The hours molt to
closing & so I
head up to the
bottle club, still
expectant of The
Event Which Saves:
Wade into that
bog of sweaty
drunkenness
& bad disco,
the place mostly
empty though I
strike up a
conversation with
this girl Laney,
20, fattish, rich,
expensive threads
too, 400 dollar
purse, Newport
Beach inflections,
talking drunkenly
Daddy’s Lear jet
& all this local
backwardness:
Yah yah are ya
coming home with
me or not? She
not so much
coaxed as simply
steered out the
door down washed
out blackout
lanes to my
bed, 4 am., my
tiny tinny
blaster playing a
worn-out copy
of Mr. Mister’s
first album, the
woman passing
out as soon as
she hit my
dirty sheets: But
still I managed
to get those
expensive white
boots & pants off
& have my way
anyway at least
this way which
is the worst way,
coming at a locus
I’d rather grieve:
Happy Birthday
asshole I sighed
passing out: I have
the next day off,
waking round noon
to drive stuprous
Lenny back to her
car (her Newport
Beach accent gone
& she staring out
at the fierce
August heat with
something between
resignation &
terror): Go to
the Y, work off
the alcohol on
the Stairmaster,
lift weights, lay
out in the sun
awhile by the
pooi just grateful
for the sun which
is no guitar
& happily
opposite my
nocturnal jugular:
Then it’s off
to my mother’s
for a birthday
dinner with my
mother & my
aunt & uncle,
easy time, Greek
salad, pita bread,
laughing &
talking &
remembering,
classical music
on the tape deck,
easy friendly
love, homemade
ice cream, my
mother doing all
she can to show
me how much
she loves me:
That’s what God
told her to do
when I first flew
south: She didn’t
have the slightest
idea what to do
with a lanky wild
rock n roller:
Just love him said
the inner voice
& that’s what’s
she’s done so
faithfully ever
since: That year
she gave me
Lyle Mays’ 2d
solo album,
absolutely
wonderful
piano-based
mediations,
wholly without the
freight of guitars:
That music
lorded over
the impending
destruction of
my guitar,
leading me through
a wasteland with
such gentleness
& force of heart
I still believe
the notes though
they never meant
a woman on a
beach welcoming
me: sure felt like
a beachside
accompaniment:
though: Lyle with
Pat Matheny’s
group which first
grabbed me with
“As Witchita Falls
So Falls Witchita,”
which I heard
in the autumn
of 1981 after Kay tore
loose from me:
Such inexpressibly
bittersweet grief
in that tune
“September
15” (prophetic
too): & then
the 1982
album “Offramp”
which Holly gave
me amid our
long rainy miles
of summer night:
“Are You Going
With Me” that
heaving bossa
nova pulse of love
you swear you’d
someday rediscover:
And years later
in the summer
of 1995 after
my divorce and
a long season
of solitary nights
I bought
“Fictionary,”
a collaboration
between Mays and
Johnson and
De Johnette:
Lush and soft
and sweet and
moody, lyric in
the tradition of
Bill Evans but
with a gorgeous
late century
attention to the
heart’s polyphonic
wash: A music
beyond or
inside my
guitars, notes
not so much plucked
as silvered like
sighs from a
kissed nipple: As
this poem reaches
for all I could
not reach axing
down my life
with a guitar:
I played that
first Lyle Mays
solo album in
the summer
when the guitar
finally died
or dived down
to Tyr Na Og
& anchored
whatever followed:
Bandless my
bandwidth shrinks
to a zero where
each hour strums
the same empty
chord resonant of
nothing: The next
day out to a pool
party put on by
fellow aethletes
from the Y:
The sky blatantly
clear & hot, shrill
blue high nineties
& the day’s round
of fitness events
and physical
exuberance
getting lost in heat
& beer & though
I wish I could
just be an easy
body friendly
with the world:
Or perhaps my
desire for it
was so intense
that it poisoned
every attempt
to blossom in
it: So I just
participate in
the events this
half jock half
nocturnal worm
& ieave with
burning shoulders,
a buzz & raving
impatience for
a woman, any
woman: Drive home
in a funk as
the skies freight
with storm &
sleep awhile
knitted by thunder
& wake on fire,
strap on my
guitar, crank the
mother up, climb
aboard that sweet
chariot of song
that sounds like
iust or even love
but isn’t, as words
here approximate
or conjure a
life which is
really so
bloodless, not living
at all: Drink some
beers, read some
of Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
(my Book of the
Dead, my underworld
companion), stare
out the window
at the ruined,
remnant marl of d
ay, a wash of
black trees, gray clouds,
some empurpling
of the Between
composed of
dying day and
rising night: A death-
time which wakes:
Revenant, my black
heart tolling
vampire matins,
I shower &
throw on my
musty stale rock
n roll threads,
haul up another
twenty from the
dresser, walk on
out into the
fretful night littered
with puddles &
bugs & sheet
lightning: Walk to
Bailey’s for a
beer & a shot
& talk with
a lawyer just
relocated from
Miami who tells
me how bad this
town is until he
spots a couple
of blondes at a
nearby table &
wanders over
there telling the
girls the same
story he launched
with me: I leave
& walk in light
rain (Walkin’, Walkin’,
In the Rain —
from Flash in
the Pan, my old
solitary Spokane
nocturne): Up to
Decades where The
Walk is setting up
for their set &
talk with this
songwriter Jon
David a while
about Phil Ochs
& Dwight Yoakum
& Jason Ringenbug
(of Jason & the
Scorchers) & the
possibilities of
Bruce Cockburn:
Possible indeed but
not for one who
has ridden on
the spine more
savage fish:
Bored I walk
over to 2 Flights
Up where Crooner
plays light jazz,
an after dinner
cordial before the
main carouse:
Time to party:
Walk back to
Bailey’s & the
Croc Club to
do shots & shots
& shots dance
with whatever
& when the place
closes go home
to grab another
20 from the dresser,
get in my car &
drive up to the
bottle club: Fearful
of cop cars that
prowl like
barracuda in
the dark shallows:
Unfurling into
the bottle club
like a banner of
hyena howl:
Raging now for any
woman, any outlet
for my raging
empty useless
predatory heat:
Bump into Steph
& we go eat
breakfast & she
invites me home
which is this awful
wreck of an old
woman s house
who died a
few weeks before
— some relative of
Stephs— Ashtrays
still fraught with
the dead woman’s
cigarette butts &
a stench of sweat
or piss & old
papers & all of
that hanging like
smoke in the
yellowish dank
washes of the
house: We drank
a last beer at
6 a.m. & headed
to a bedroom
with a single bed
& a fan & a
small black & white
tv showing the
agricultural
report & fell
there on her
body pulling back
covers & panties
to nestle nurse
lavish her
pussy with my
tongue fingers
cock fingers tongue
cock cock tongue
tongue tongue till
she’s gripping my
head with her
thighs coming in
peals clenched between
fire and foam:
But I can’t
muster my
own release, trying
to come in her
pussy, mouth,
asscheeks, over
her belly or
between her tits,
but there’s nothing
& I’m up looking
for water: When I
get back in bed,
she’s asleep &
I lay next to
her descending
below zero: We wake
in an hour or
two. the Sunday
morning already
hot in that house
of death: Get up
to start drinking
beer smoke a joint
& listen to Soft
Cell on the
stereo & Steph
says wanna go
to the beach
today? & I say
Oh what the Hell:
No practice
today, no edge,
no reason to
hold back anything:
Pick up another
6 pack & a
girlfriend who sits
in front with
Steph passing a
bong & gabbing
about asshole men
while I pound beers
in back: The sun
beats the morning
flat & Van Halen
roars on the radio
& we weave through
beachbound traffic
like a frantic
manta in brilliant
blue meaningless
waters: There is a
beach for every fool
errand our silly
heart sends us on:
A beach for
every dream,
every love,
every guitar, and
when all that
fails, a beach
for the roar of
of Aw Fuck It
which means either
Turn The Page or
Kick The Bucket:
Drunk when I
woke, plastered
when we get to
Daytona Beach,
I wander off from
the girls (who were
getting disgusted
with my blackout
antics) down to
the beach among
passing Firebirds
& Corvette
convertibles
blasting Ratt &
Lynyrd Skynyrd
& girls wear
fluorescent
bikinis bright
as flame &
flicker in and
out of blazing
chrome: And for all
that heat and
brilliant light I was
still in the
bottle club, flashing
& gnashing my
canines, my hunger
engorged all the
way from dusk
the night before
now blueballed
with the sky &
sea & eyes of
passing girls &
there’s nothing,
absolutely nothing
I can do about it:
Walk out into
the surf &
settle there up
to my neck praying
take me away
motherlode I’m
ready to just be:





LYLE MAYS (2)

2004

I heard your music first in the
Ruin of my days -- that sad time when
I’d drunk to dregs what wasn’t there,
No draught deep enough, no bed my
Own. Lost in an ever-souring
Night, your second solo album
Came into my hearing like a green
Sprig on a changing wave -- hope at
Last of land. No, that’s not quite it:
More like uncorking a note from
An old, perhaps infinite bliss
Which resembles the wild blue sea
But isn’t. Men die every day
For lack of your sweet so dire salt.
Your soft keys sprang my ear’s deep vault.


LYLE MAYS

2002

Listening to Lyle Mays
as I have these past
20 years has frequently
been like swimming in
sweet waters: immersion
in a uteral plenitude
with all the time in
the world: Yet his
gorgeous keyboard
arias turn bittersweet
in the sad knowledge
of how little
they truly move or
matter or rescind
the human day:
His ripened ecstasies
are almost deadly so:
Music for the lover you
dreamed of all these years,
with soft sea eyes
and impeccably spread hair:
Drops of lost mother’s
milk dribbling
from the notes:
Pure, inconsolable
nourishment. Of late
I’ve popped the “Solo”
(1998) CD into the
player of my rental
Grand Am and driven
to work and back
inside a lush, becalmed
sheath. Sometimes
I feel stilled as a baby
returned to her
eternal beach: Other times
I want the other tit,
with its dark juice
anticipating perfectly
met desires. I don’t know
whether his music
blesses or braces
the life I choose:
Completes or collapses:
Breaks me open
like a rash of sweet
jasmine or caulks
me shut in a calyx
of ice: Both I
suppose: It’s my best
and worst music,
the way I listen
to Lyle Mays,
so sadly earnest,
so resigned to
an ineffably
impotent sigh:
My wife can’t stand
to listen to it,
says it depresses
her to no end:
Can there be a goodness
in the music of falling
angels? In the heart’s
impeccable and
unbreachable desires?
Is there any truth
to narcotized traffic,
to the Florida day
infused with an
aural hoar? Does such
Longing ever finish
braiding her Lament?
I don’t know, but
this music is surely
one of my names,
the sum perhaps
of what is in every day
that can’t be touched
though we wish to,
oh, infinitely so.
Pandora’s box
locked in the roots
of my ear-heart
with its one
consoling content
singing back to
Lyle’s sweet piano
washes: my glittering,
terrible tide
with it’s too wide,
too dark mirror.





BILL EVANS
DIED DRUNK

2000

Bill Evans died drunk
or fucked up on drugs,
I’m not sure which,
but suffice to say here
that he was a
great jazz pianist
who ended things
out on that glittery
cold shore between
our ecstasy and God’s.

What a player.
He could lift those notes
so serenely and true
they dripped with a lyric
glitter that surpassed
what any heart could bear.

Yeah, Bill Evans died
fucked up. But consider
the courage it took
to forge a career
on ecstasy. Amid that
all that is not joy.
To mount that cross
of sweetness night after night
only to come back down
into days and days of this.

That was his genius, you know:
to haul up those chords brimming
with saturate joy and know
there’s more, oh, infinitely more.

The first kiss over and over
and over again, inexhaustible.

How else could you die but drunk?






CONCERT IN PARIS

2003

Bill Evans sounded
the ocean in
a piano’s keys. Played
them like a man
holding on to his
totem fish for dear life.
Each song was
chaliced from a tide
so full of sweetness
there that just
one thimble could
smash down a
cathedral of pale
singers in its wake.
Those keyboard washes
killed Evans for sure --
a career OD on
infinitely pure and
purer chords composed
of bitter minors
and collapsing major
sevenths, pouring
in the ear the sounds
of angels in bed
praising God with
sexual wings.
Addiction was
his only defense --
who does not numb
what only God
can fully hear? The
powdered horse
post-gig, plugging
the ears with that
whiteness else
sirens swallow the sea ...
Was he any kind of
man away from those
wild keys? Could he
ever walk on dry land
with feet grown
so skilled at the waves?
Perhaps art is just
a migraine of soul,
a smoky torch wrapped
in a falling angel's wings,
surrender to the wave's
collapsing half, limned
in that cloak of mist
and foam which thunders
down a life's short shore,
forever in tumult, always
demanding more of
exactly what can never
be sustained. Every time
he found those gorgeous
places (composed of
two or three of the
same piano keys a
million players also
played but never
could sound), you
sense how beauty
shoots inward as it
reaches achingly out,
each fingered ecstasy
an arrow through
its own ripened heart.
At the Paris Concert
in '79 Evans played
with his last trie,
aged 50 and looking
much worse: he bent
over those keys the
way the moon works
the tide -- a power
above soothing
forces below. He
would be dead soon
enough from all the years
harrowed by that song,
damping down the voice
of God in every wave,
his hands obeying what
hauled him too far out,
into places more
savagely sweet than
the very sea -- “Minha”
thonged with so many
curved vowels of ocean
bliss, capping a
career careering just
offshore, just out of
reach, just where all
the angels lean against
the bar long after closing
time and try, oh try,
to shut the door
with just one more,
my friend, just one more
& all the while
cawing in the booming
hiss, flinging wide the
wild startle of the next
kiss from that piano
on a stage beside the sea,
an ecstasy whose
bottom is bottomless.

ELEGY
(For Bill Evans, 1929-1980)

Bill Zavatsky

Music your hands are no longer here to make
Still breaks against my ear, still shakes my heart.
Then I feel that I am still before you.
You bend above your shadow on the keys
That tremble at your touch or crystallize,
Water forced to concentrate. In meditation
You close your eyes to see yourself more clearly.

Now you know the source of sound,
The element bone and muscle penetrate
Hoping to bring back beauty.
Hoping to catch what lies beyond our reach,
You hunted with your fingertips.

My life you found, and many other lives
Which traveled through your hands upon their journey.
Note by note we followed in your tracks, like
Hearing the rain, eyes closed to feel more deeply.
We stood before the mountains of your touch.
The sunlight and the shade you carried us
We drank, tasting our bitter lives more sweetly
From the spring of song that never stops its kiss.

(from the liner notes for Evans’ album
You Must Believe In Spring)

A Boy's Song

DOLPHIN BOY

1991

All the world's a whisper,
Where ocean margins cry,
I ride my fevered fishes there
Between the breakers and the sky.

Cities lie beneath the flood,
The sun king sleeps below.
But I croon darkly in your blood,
With brine and brawl and brogue.

A woman waits for you on a shore
No course you chart can reach.
Only storms can take you there
To wreck you on her beach.

I am the Dylan of your fathers,
Galloping the nine-wave brute,
I call you from your harbors
Into the darkness of all truth.




The mythic perspective -- which roots in ancient human experience and spreads its weird canopy in a cathedral arch over our daily acts and sears and soaring souring aspirations -- is one we can never adequately harrow, much less describe or name. It’s too deep, too wild, too strange, too ineffable. We can, as Campbell accomplished in his long career, succeed in quantifying the masks of God in a catalogue of sorts, but that’s as close as we get to enquiring the ghoul behind the eyeholes. Something icy and eternal stares back at us from the well’s bottom, from the resounding surf, from the infinite sky.

Yet we must try; that quest nails us with a passion which we can neither requite nor sustain, no matter how far we flee from it or engage with our most potent articulations. I venture that each of us has a daunting metaphor which we’ve ridden and formulated again and again since we were young.

In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman asserts that each of us is born with a nut of myth implanted deeply in our psyches: “Each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.” The call to my adventure was announced in the lietmotifs of my childhood: in my mother singing to me over the sound of the surf at Jacksonville Beach, in the songs I made up singing to Big Toad whom I kept in a plastic pail, in the nightmare of the civil war outside my grade school where I had first enquired into the nature of what hides beneath girls’ bloomers, in the figure of my father up at the front of the church where he intoned his sermons, in the apocalyptic battles with big lugs who were always whupping my ass but good. Out of those events -- delicious wounds of nurture -- my nature slowly emerged, weirdly fused with those events, deep and strong because and despite the pain I suffered. I sought God in heaven and brassieres and bottles and guitars and crashing waves and poems and the bottoms of wells and abysms plunged by whales along a road whose ley was too meandering, too daunting to understand, much less name, ever more especially so every day.

The quest that has surfaced or been excavated down all these years is impossible -- like stealing treasure from a dragon -- but for that it becomes primary, essential, a bass note resonating under and through all the ways I have along the way mortared and planted myself into the surface world, in marriage and career. While I find myself ever more astride a bland tide of dailiness with its undertow of loss and susurrant ebbing waves, I have at the same time fought for and found a difficult and conditional shore where the quest continues. I’ve grown more serious about the quest as I’ve aged, my personas have morphed through the court cards, page to knight to king of salted sacred space, which for me has become a rock-solid liturgical matin a few hours in the dead of night before the day begins.

There has been a cost, but the very dearness of it has lent validity to the quest, a validity which only gods can proffer and one which is nigh-invisible in the light of day. I’ve lost years of sleep and wasted oceans of ink in this quest. Many times I’ve doubted the enterprise, the dogged drone of it; at those times the quest seems silly and moot. Whatever ends I once dreamed it might bring -- booty, fame, bigger digs inside the soul’s keep -- have come to naught, at least in the ways I imagined. The best I’ve come to understand of this is that the daily framing and farming and flinting and flinging of the mystery itself pays invisible dividends, ones which can’t be harvested until one knows absolutely that they have no cash value and are of no interest to the dayside world at all. That’s the Otherworld deal: fantastic sums which turn to dust at the cashier’s window.

I have my favorite stories, myths which I’ve found along the way which especially resonate with this quest and may indeed be the underworld face looking up at me from all the masks and tropes I’ve fashioned. I love the tale of St. Oran’s travel to the North when he is buried in the footers of the Iona Abbey, down and out in search of the sea god who once had inhabited that isle and fled with the coming of Christianity; Oran travels island to island in search of this god, each time encountering a sign which says “Not Here.” It is a sign of presence at the same time invoking absence, a way of eternally renewing the quest, bidding Oran to sail toward the next shore while at the same time telling us that the searched-for numen is always near but not in any visible way.

I also like the tale of St. Brendan’s voyage, which he undertakes in penance for his burning a book of God’s wonders which he had deemed untrue. His amends is to sail the islands of wonder with his monks and experience what was margined in that lost book, and then, at some far point, return to Ireland, write down what he had seen, and offer the refilled-book at an altar dedicated to Mary, Queen of Heaven.

Along the way he encounters birds of paradise fallen from heaven, the leviathan Jasconius with his tail inside its mouth (on whose back he will celebrate the Easter mass for seven years), a devouring devil cat and a crystal tower in the middle of the sea. All are sights of awe and awesomeness, and each seems like an end -- how could any wonder be greater? Yet each invokes another chapter of the Voyage. Is that not how we quest, too, the mystery growing wider and wilder as we query the phantasms of deep dream and read the mystery texts like the physiognomy of a Sphinx, the details filling in a visage which grows weirdly identical to the one we first found in childhood?

Hillman -- to me one of the great captains of the underworld voyage, articulating motions of psyche which are ever at quest -- turns the notion of growing up on its head, stating it is not up but down that we grow:

***

“To be an adult is to be a grown-up. Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and a heroic one at that. For even tomato plants and the tallest trees send down roots as they rise toward the light. Yet the metaphors for our lives see mainly the upward part of organic motion.

“Hasn’t something critical been omitted in the ascensionist model? Birthing. Normally we come into the world headfirst, like divers into the pool of humanity. Besides, the head has a soft spot through which the infant soul, according to the traditions of body symbolism, could still be influenced by its origins. The slow closing of the head’s fontanel and fissures, its hardening into a tightly sealed skull, signified separation from an invisible beyond and final arrival here. Descent takes a while. We grow down, and we need a long life to get our feet.”

***

Finding our feet: what a mythic tale washes round that theme, a tale tale deeper than the Flood! When Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, is he baptising us in the oldest mystery of all, that of walking up out of the sea and standing alone on bleached white shores? Does our story go back that far? Is our own story, which begins with the first gleams of consciousness up out of a watery mist -- the recollection of a pattern of sunlight on a carpet, the sound of parent’s voice, the softness of a crib with some enormity of space beyond reach -- are such memories metonymic of the oceanic story of life?

If so, then heavens, how could we ever hope to fully write such a tale? Easier to measure the wet part of the sea. “Unsagbareitstropos” is the rhetorical formula used by authors to explain they cannot record everything they should like to write down; the little man on the leaf on the sea who attempts to measure it out, bowl after bowl, is a metaphor for the task facing Brendan, who has been bidden by God to fill a book of wonders with the keel of a coracle which then becomes the nib of a pen. But try he must; and the plenitude of St. Brendan tales in the literature to me tells us that his work is essentially our own, a voyage back to sources, to the treasure hardest to attain.

There’s a child at the end of our deep questing, the one we grew up from and then slowly grew back down into, along all the years of our attempts to measure out the great sea inside us, bowl after futile bowl (or, in my voyage, Bible after bottle after brassiere after guitar after pen). Our end is his beginning, the one laughing and smiling up at the pure undifferentiated world as mother, the whole of it smiling its imprint in the words we will later come to say, no matter how futile and short and shrunken they seem.



BOY SONG

Today

What I write here sails
the words I heard my
mother sing over the
choiring sea nearing
50 years ago. These lines
are rigged in boats
which leapt out
from my chest
when I sang my first
songs back to Big Toad,
the Frog In The Pail
(capitals required here
for a remembered
child’s archons).
Those first songs
rudder these later
ones toward every shore
I heard back then
in my mother’s
the curved sea’s voice,
whose tide and timbre
my songs baptize,
wave after love after poem.
Sometimes it’s just a drone,
as bland and brutally
compulsive as the ostinato
surf which has played
one salt melody for nigh
three billion years; yet
even such dull similitude
delves gold doubloons,
its tidy rhythmus fleet
for daily pannings of the tide,
like pious rosaries of
wild blue. The man that
child became is
both sire and son
of siren song, a welcome
grown cathedral in an
aging man’s lowered voice;
one tutored in the mother
tongue enough to whale
back its gaelic brogue
with all the tang and blister
of the seal-man Angus
who satirized the white priest’s
mastery over exiled seas.
Against all learned brilliance
I go back to that boy’s
whispered pre-tonal tune,
so faint and moot that
you’d surely miss it mid
the clatter of a normal
family’s day, & with the
sea not far away
murmuring grey swooshes
over that boy’s ride
in the rolling heart of God.
His first song is my last
as of this next writing day,
an old bell hauled up from
ocean beds & the wombs
every love I lost & all
those bottles that I emptied
searching for what the
booze so blithely tossed.
His bell’s inside my voice,
a clarion ring of a spout
of a careening wave
of a keel of a flout of
proud jissoming stout
empurpled ding-dong song
which praises Gop in
an angel monkey’s brogue,
clabbering His bell
the way a tongue
hits on the hidden blue
surfaces below of the shore
that first boy’s first song
dreamed. It was just
a heartfelt ditty
on a day forever lost,
a pale small seed tossed
back in the surf
which down the years
grew into this loud
organum of five
times fifty seas,
a music that I’ll forever
shore, whose strange
old ligature I scrawl
in screaming jots of
spermaceti oil on
ink-black mornings here.
On a simple day
I sat beneath a fragrant
pine with a straw
heat on my head,
strumming with
no art upon a toy guitar
& peering in that yellow
pail at low toad, the
diplomat from every
slimy wild nook. I
sang exactly what
I heard the sea croon
not far away in
what seemed my
mother’s voice, and
I sang back, repeating
what I somehow knew
was most my own.
That boy of my first
history is the Hermes
of this soak which
only bears the title
of “poetry” but is something
far older, as that boy
upon the beach taught
the sea itself to sing.
This soak of voice of
words on paper boats
no real tide will float,
much less ferry, is
the theme I womb.
I sing of tide-crashing seas
and they sing back
the shores of mystery,
a bed where my Beloved sings
from God’s depths the
sea’s salt history.




BOY ON A DOLPHIN

2005

He is forever young astride
that sleek so wild blue dolphin,
yeehawing over the foaming
waves or dead asleep -- enwombed
still in first bliss -- or perhaps
even dead, ferried homeward
on Thalassa’s hearse. In all
the flower tucked behind
his ear bespeaks a listening
which trumpets back in
the antiphons of full bloom,
hurling such perfume
that the entire sea swoons
enrapt, sending curve
after curve his way
to plunge and riot
and plow under to
the source where all
life begins. No wonder
he appeared on so many
ancient coins -- the poster
boy for fortune’s pluck,
the gilded lucre through
which old men get
maids to fuck,
a way to duck death’s
swash by minting back
the eyes with youth.
Always a sea and shore
between his romp,
as he and fish are
merged in the marge
of tidal marches which
pulse a God’s blue
augments as they crash
and ebb the heart:
Always a fish-tail for
ship’s rudder, a song
for wet travail, a course
both known and
abyssal toward ends
both gold and bone.
And though the visage
of this tale is young
-- both boy and fish
careen in puppy glee --
it masks a far far
older man’s dark face,
that brooder
of the first horrific
sea, bull-ravager of
Europa, the wolfish
sharps and flats of
Apollo’s golden lyre
keyed from Hypoborean
depths. That old man is
Uranos, cleft of his
huge balls, dreaming
Aphrodite from the
froth of that first wound:
He’s the ghost of the
singer Arion, doomed to sing
to a court of whale-
and ship-ribs
two hundred leagues
below the wake he
was ditched by pirates in,
singing of rescue
to dry shores by the
dolphin not found
outside of songs:
He is Poseidon
inside his stallion
hooves which you
hear bestride the waves’
stampede to shore, a
thunder which grows
loud the more both sea
and land agree to share the
augments of a strand’s
so liquid rocky roar.
Behind or under that
puerile sweet of song’s first
crash and plunge
wakes first man of the sea,
a giant walking just beneath
the boy we care to see.
The boy astride the dolphin
crests so much that’s far
under me, ruddering his
courses in this hand which
writes his emblem down.

Sea Copyist

Many human occupations were imitated by the fairies. There was a small boat-building yard at Lerwick, and often at dusk the boss would say, “Now boys, it’s time to be putting about your tools. They’ll be wanting to get to work!”

-- Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Traditions and Literature

***

Voyage episode 29 has the story of a little man whom Brendan sees bobbing about on the waves on top of a leaf. According to (the) M (version) the leaf is the size of a hand, according to C and H the little chap is hardly an inch tall.

He dips the stylus (the bowl M) into the sea, after which he holds it over the bowl to catch the water dripping off the stylus. When the bowl is full, he at once empties it into the sea, an action which amazes Brendan and his companions.

Brendan asks him why he is doing this and the little man replies that he is measuring the volume of the sea, and will continue to do so until Doomsday. He hopes God will be merciful once he has finished measuring. Brendan says, “You will never succeed in measuring the sea completely. The whole world would not be able to measure the sea before Doomsday.” The little man on the leaf answers: “No more can I measure the sea before Doomsday, is it possible for you to see (with your eyes M) all God’s wonders on this earth. Your spiritual children need your support. Pray God to keep you safe; we must part.”

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint: Sources and Analogues of the Twelfth Century Voyage of St. Brendan

***

According to an exemplum in the Bienboec, St. Augustine, when out walking, saw an exceptionally beautiful child ladling water with a silver spoon from the sea into a hole in the sand. This was at the time that St. Augustine was writing his book on the Holy Trinity.

When he asked what the child was doing, it answered: “What I am trying to do, is less impossible than what you are intending. You intend to explain in a booklet the secret of the sacrament of the Trinity. I will have spooned all the water from the sea into this hole in the sand before you will have explained the mystery in a treatise.”

Having said this, the child disappeared at once. St. Augustine praised the Lord and realized the truth of the child’s words.

-- in Strijbosch, ibid



SEA-COPYIST

Quite the fool’s errand, eh Lord,
measuring the breadth and depth
of wildest seas with just these
thimbles of frail white paper,
a copyist in the sea’s scriptorium
writing down its book wave
by gale by gloom. Might as well
try to dowse and dive the
harrows of the heart
with only this prick of a pen
to guide me and slake Thee,
with only words to eye the
winging mantas down there
& track the shadows which
they gyre. Yet measure both
is my daily task, with tools
not meant for either, dry paper
leeched down by water
as soon as it’s afloat,
ink so awkward a gloss
for blood, more apt for spooring
down the keels of sinking boats.
I sit here on this dank shore
beneath a summer night’s sky
heavy as the sea itself,
humid and thick as what
I recall once wafted on my
face as I knelt to pray between
a woman’s crooning thighs,
the mysterium her incense
redolent of fish and seaweed
and my own birth’s mewling sighs.
All that’s inside and down
the scent of early morning
I copy here, sated after
storms doused the garden
yesterday and good,
the way new lovers
drench each other in
their first surrenders
to the sea’s final desire.
That air moats my head
as I mouth another draught
of salted blue and begin to sing
what the sea-god dreams
from his lost court far beneath
the mortal marge I seam.
How much of this is his?
What is the wet part of the sea?
That’s the task I enterprise
in writing all this down,
siloing drop by drop a
paper heart of wet dreams
and bluer porpoisings
astride the world’s first waves,
naked and ejaculate
and forever lost at toil
which I’ll never pour down
to the lees. So many secret
gospels rounded in each drop,
so little time to name them!
And every day I find another
conch demanding that I
listen deep and sing back
what I hear, as copyists
once copyists once scanned
seas of ink and ferried
it word by word across
a distance to another text,
line by line, year after year.
Am I less for having started
what only whales and Gabriels
can name with their deep
tubas and day-rousing horns?
Certainly. But a faith
whispers in my ear like the
sea inside a shell that
this work is Yours, over
and under all I thought
to say: An exercise in
futile shouts as synecdoche
of crashing waves.
I’m just the larynx of the
Sphinx curled just offshore
whose eyes blue up the marge.
Can you feel those eyes
boring into you beyond
the ends of these lines?
I bucket out the sea
with the pages of a
filling book: Perhaps
I fill a saint’s lost well,
perhaps I’m bailing
the heart it hails.

The Triune Heart

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

Keats Endymion Book III, 119-141:


Three regions delve the dive
to the bottom of the sea --
shelf, slope, abyss.
In the first the world’s great
fisheries abound, like herds
of finned cattle, swarming
oblative as the feelings by
which the human heart
is found. Now comes
a long slow downward slope
that can fall for miles,
drowned ranges of Alps
we can’t see but haunt
the thickening gloom. This
seems like a border of
present names for
the heart, a wild where
no plants grow and
only carnivores dispatch
each other with something
like a pagan hunter-gatherer’s
intent, where sex is always
dangerous and saddles
the black mare of deep-water waves.
Maybe these peaks
and gulfs were cut by rivers
and winds some dry aeon
off the books, a savage
season of the heart
too old and brutal in its
yawp to do much else
than drown in a mercilessly
mothering sea. Finally
there is abyss as old as seas,
where water first fell and
never left, unevolved the
way shores are shaped
by waves and wind,
permafrosted in a permanight
under the weight of three
atmospheres. Its floor has no
known contour -- geologists
guess great lava plains
are laid up by muck and grist
of all fallen things from a
hundred zones above:
bones, shells, masts, men,
booty, shit, poems, loves,
gysms by the tetra
spoored almost forever.
Everything lost and tossed
is the bed abysms form,
a turbid massy marl where
dreams and ages snarl
inchoate in the
shadows of continents
far above, themselves
chthonic reefs.
Where islands form on
crests of volcanoes,
the sea compensates with
a trench that dives
as deep as six miles, so
what ravages highest in
the sea falls deepest
just behind. The deepest
trench lies east of the
Phillipines, another east of
Japan, a third’s south
of Cape Horn. When I imagine
these three terrains
I name the contours of
a heart which I shore
with you and all creation’s God,
a downward dome inversed
from the sky, completely
hidden from dry eyes trained
on surface waves. We shout
from mastheads at the spout
ahead which trumpets
from the depths we hunt
because we fear them,
and fearing secretly desire to
barb our heart’s own darkest
devil fish and stain our chops
with his gore and light our
lamps with the oil burned
drown from heaps of
blubber and suck the
honeycombs of his brain
that too partake of seas.
The heart’s charm is wound
in three steps down the
gloom, a nekyia which propounds
itself even as we pray our
keels sustain blithe crossings
of blue mains. See: I’ve
written shore to shore
to hell, and somehow
ballasted back on
the weird air that I
found -- prescient and
old, ripe as a sperm whale’s
spout, remitting here
what he inhaled so
far and long ago.
And through it I find
the heart’s low contours
enormous, dark, and wild,
productive of the dream,
the song of bliss, the child.




PAUSE HERE

July 15

Run the sprinklers in the front
yard (when I stepped out on
the porch to get to the controls
our big possum stared thinly
up at me & then skedaddled)
and pause here between big
waves on an early Saturday
morning with Violet sleeping
on the couch across from
me and the night outside
prescient and hot and humid.
No rains yesterday, none
for a few days, just heat’s
mortificatio, a shrill surl
of swarthy brilliance. At 7 a.m.
I drive over to Oviedo
to pick up my father-in-law
and drive to the posh Mall
at Millennia; he wants to
check out iMac at the Apple
Store and I volunteered to
help him decide. I worry
about my mother who had
a PET scan yesterday for
a growing nodule on her upper
lung. I worry about my wife
who’s alone too much &
grieving for a the business
she loves failing to sell. I
worry about my job which
is about working hard and
not selling much either,
not enough, not ever. I
worry about the Middle East
with Israel at arms against
Hezbollah radicals in Lebanon
with Syria and Iran just
beyond arming their
Ketushka rockets which
fall deeper into Israel
& all our troops sitting
over there in Iraq &
ready to drag the rest
of the world in. I worry
about a world drowning
fast in its modernity.
I worry about fundamentalists
who would legislate
medieval ways & I worry
about the mindless zealots
of libido appetite & Visa
who are consuming what
remains in one gobble.
But the sound of water
in the garden soothes,
like the susurration of
these lines, like the
remembered sound of
soft tides sighing
on Atlantic shores. I’m
grateful I have this home
despite once being
poised to throw it
in the drink. I’m grateful
my wife still loves me.
I’m grateful that there is
so much good work
still to do with or without
much presence of You
in the way this fool heart
dreams. Water slakes
and fans cool this morning’s
too-warm too-still air;
this poem makes a third
ballast of rightness for
a world more pointless
every day. Thank you, Lord,
for this sweet mess where
shells are pounded down by
waves to grains which weave
the sands of tomorrow’s pre-dawn
walk. I call this wetness good
and promise to pour it full out.





Brendan cannot accept that what he reads about God’s wonderful creation is true. This in itself would warrant a penitential journey. By making Brendan’s doubts culminate in the burning of a book, the Voyage author has given the journey an entirely new aspect. As Brendan’s sin is his doubt of the truth of the wonders described, his penitance will be a journey to see them himself. It is this journey which constitues the contents of the book which is written as it progresses. The penitent becomes a traveller, the traveller a writer.

***

The reason for the journey as a form of penitence is fairly clear in all versions at the beginning of the text. The way the story is finished is less accomplished. It is only in the Middle-Dutch version C/H that Brendan asks explicityly how the book is progressing. This is done after the adventure with “the invisible people” and the anchor which proves impossible to raise from the bottom of the sea. The chaplain answers that the book has long reached completion. Brendan does not hesitate for a moment; he has the anchor-rope cut and announces his decision to return to Ireland to deposit the book at Mary’s altar. Not long after they arrive in their home country.

-- Clara Strisjbosch, The Seafaring Saint: Sources and Analogues of the Twelfth Century Voyage of St. Brendan

***

((In episode 27 of the Middle-Dutch version of the Voyage of St. Brendan)),

It is hot and there is not a breath of wind. The ship has been becalmed for weeks, when a gust of wind blows it to a place of shallows. There the company hears all kinds of sounds: church bells ringing, the singing of priests, the sound of horns, horses, and cows, singing, dancing and the frolicking of men and women. The monks are surprised that the sounds are so close and yet they cannot see anything. Brendan does not know whether to make the ship go forward or backward. They decide to swing the lead; it hits bottom very quickly. Next they drop anchor. At once it is caught by someone or something under the surface. The sailors find it impossible to pull it back into the boat. The first mate is not sure what the best procedure is; if they cut the anchor rope, they will be without an anchor for the rest of the voyage. The monks pray to God and lower the sail.

... This description of an invisible people which is located under the surface of the water was linked by Maartje Draak with a number of lines in the introduction to the Voyage. There is is said that, in the book which he will consign to flames, Brendan reads, “How there was a world/Here under the earth/And when it becomes day/It is night there.”

— Strijbosch, ibid (earlier in the book)


ANCHOR A-WEIGHED


July 17

You will let me know,
salt Father, when
I have written down
the breadth of waves
You hurl and sounded
Your depths enough
to declare this blue
book finished,
thrown on the last enough
shore on which You’ll
never quite be found,

OK?

And if I reached that strand
of thundered-enough
wonders long ago,
You’ll eventually tide
that music loud enough
in my heart so that for
all that I’ve said I’ve
yet to know, I’ll yet
become willing
to let the rest go,

OK?

Because my anchor-
rope is stuck down
there on the belfry of
a town drowned long ago
by the salt leagues of
wild welcome, a beach
on which I thought no love
would ever reach,
which love did breech
and collapsed me,
sending one life spiralling
down, my former
faith and former doubt
tolling eerily past midnight
a thousand old lives down
this daily saturation
of foam-crashing waves
of pent desires.

That first life bid me
sail this second, and
I’ve troped a thousand
alternations of the thrust
in which I plumbed
the plunge to God
inside a woman’s Yes.

I could go on forever
in a wanker’s paradise
of remembered yanked-
down frillies, reveling here
in what was so briefly
revealed there, quims
of ardor grown celestial
for having been tossed:

Is this the porpoise
You still bid me ride
till thrills are harrrowed,
saddled to a metronome
of ding-dong rhymes
as if they were rank
enough to rid old stills
of their hootch-sour corpus
and drains the bottoms
of plunged nights?

Have I filled a page
for every time I
vented brine
against Your blue-
backed rage? I can’t
let go that rogue’s
ardor yet -- too stuck
here to the knickers
of my blue history --
Is there anything else
to haul up or is it time
to cut the rope &
head on home &
heap these songs
on a lap altared by
drier men as Queen
of Heaven but is
really my mother,
the one who sang to
me over the sea
ten thousand songs ago?

Have I said “Amen”
long and loud enough
to break that surf’s
hymen at last and
sire a wilder wave
than seas or sirens
croon in a mother’s
voice forever in my ear?

It’s up to you,
O Lord, to require and
requite, You toll the
matin bell which rolls
me blearily here
where I write the
canon’s hours in
blue majescule,
down to the
vespering page
on which the liturgy’s
rejoiced upon the
curves of the world’s
volupt marge
and in saying gloss
a salt satiety not
seen on shores for
two thousand years.

Surely You will pass
this on when You’ve heard
me say it all, won’t you,
Lord? You wouldn’t leave
me on a shore which seems
like all the rest
and has for many
years, this and the
next and the next,
the amperage inside
my pen stuck at ten
and no where else
to shoot Your wad
but on this and
the next and next
and next page.

Because sometimes
I feel betrayed
by a rage
I thought was Yours,
not mine or hers
or the one inside
her ocean-sounding
platitudes, a music
which isn’t salt at
all but simply the
mumblings of a drunk
who sips the world
and drowns us all.

Worlds without end!
I haw, and cap this
riding pen again, and
once more leave well
enough alone until
tomorrow, when perhaps
the death of song
is clearer -- or not:
And I’ll romp once
again in surf that ankles
me cerulean and pink
with foam as warm
as kisses and a voice
inside the crashing waves
which tolls the next
same old devil drowned
town, the one whose
ancient haunt and purpose
I remit with its strange sound.