St. Brendan's Song

O lush humid and sweet
this dark hour, like milky
amniotics swirled round
my mind’s body in a warm
quiescent womb.
What I dream and what I
think and what I see is
most naked here, a
truth whose amen founds
the rapture and terrors
of torrid day to come.
Is late night the inside
message or what I say of it
upon the page? No matter.
Not when I swim out
in the blue yolk of
pleroma, a saline soak
of waves tide with
a mother’s breathing, her
her dark orgasmic sighs
and broken first-light cries.
Clench and quench are
surfeits writ small and
large, both in the spasm of
a line which plumbs the page
as in a old odd book
writ anew on whale
rapt in God’s black matins
two hours from the shore
of day. I write down the
weird marvels that I found
half dreamt, half succored
in the wet woods just
out of town where the wild
world never sleeps, like the
deep whirl of the sea
where appetites rape
and ravine in a uterus
whose psalm is the praises
of every gouting thing.
In the garden, in our house,
over our sleeping cats,
on the hard roads into town,
on the distant sea-lanes
and burning up the
war-vanes our tired
history, a preternatural
angel leys soft fingers
across the lobes of
our tribe, massaging
at the temples
a music which faintly
strobes its lunar angelus,
a pearly cold glass hue.
A thousand wombs
tide in that sound,
forever lost and ever new,
proffering to the sailor
on his watch a compass
of hard blue. Its orient
is fixed on the unseen
paradise inside the natal
north. My book of wonders
is crammed full of all
I’ve seen across the sea
that washes knee to knee
as I to Thou
the heart’s true ecstasy.

The Horse-Man

We do not find the Island
of the Everliving in our voyage.
We travel so far across the page
and then turn home, released
at last by a sign sufficient
enough in guise and gesture
that whispers Not Here enough.
In the Voyage of St. Brendan
it was a magnificently dressed and
dignified horseman who rode
up to their boat on the next
blandly crashing shore: a prince
who had left his country long
ago to guard the margins.
Or perhaps he was a totem
further down -- Manannan
self-exiled from Christian Eire
who wards those far lands
where wilds remain hoar-wooly.
Or perhaps he goes farthest
down, past the salt king to
those fathers who brow
the keep of abysms. To
see him was enough;
He didn’t say a word
but Brendan knew
and turned his mission
round, bidding his men
to oar them home
where white pages waited
to receive his water tale.
The rider offered no news
of what haloed behind him
ultriolet and sere:
we aren’t told that inland that
shore was the Terra
Repromissionis Sancotorum
of the saints, nor the
Otherworld that laps
its footers. All we get
is the tale of searching for
that place everywhere water
sings its shire, vowels keeled
in boats which are themselves
the tropes of an undying
emerald gleam, isle for isle
finding Him in wild and wilder
panoplies of arch feathers
and furred seem. A tale
is not for dying but
the hallow harrowing
which makes dying
worth it in the end:
augments of life which
are the true chest of
treasure at the bottom
of the sea, a heart
completed in all it repleted
in gorgeous proximities
on salt extremities,
the warp and woof of
that rider’s look from
helm to saddle to hoof.
Take the full measure of
him here, fellow raveller,
on this dank humid dark
Thursday in the belly of July
with a frayed day breathing
heavy on the windows of
the east and this pen
scuffed and battered
and barnacled from all
the shores it gleaned
egressing cross the page.
I found him in a tale
buried in a book
three times three
centuries old, itself
a remnant of a song
that had almost fully
died and dived from the minds
of of that time. There he is
right here, eyes bluer than
polar seas, hair heavy as
a mane, proud and ancient
on a grey mare that sweeps
the wildest wave: The herald
who is the shore no man
can reach oaring beach to beach,
the summa and quintessence
who bounds the known world
to its dark other, like the spine
of Brendan’s finished book.
The end of the tale which will
never quite complete but
simply trails off here, like
moonlight across night waters,
like the sound of a crashing surf
forever lost and always near.

The Reef-Wreck

An aged and broken ship
eased into a small secret bay
and died there, sinking
50 feet to settle in soft
white sand. There was
a waft of perplex bubbles
as the entire crew
swum free and then
one ghost was gone,
the boat forgotten. Many
years later word reached
oceanographers that a
ship had formed a reef
in an obscure island cove.
They sighted the wreck
from the tops of two rusted
masts listing 20 degrees
above still waters, akilter
like a cockeyed cenotaph
whose riddle is not ours
to explain. When they
dived down they
found the rusted bulk
had grown a reef of
corals wide and wild.
Twenty years after
the ship had sunk it
had become a water-town,
thronged by ten thousand
fish and eels and housed
beings thriving on
the foundation of one doom.

Does it really matter that
this music stayed upon
my lips but only sailed
that far, even though I
thought to make great work
of it? Even though the
poundage of that labor
failed to find a shore
beyond the moon, the surf,
inside the soul’s black
underwear? So what?
Low organum’s for whales,
so here’s a morsel for Your
throat, my jawed
and vatic Dick,
for you to gnash and
throat and shit; inside
Your rude motions
make what You can of it.
I must figure out
what I think I do not know
and what I truly don’t,
that all my corpuscles
take hold exactly
where I can’t, or won’t.



In my dream I was
back in school --
a man of almost 50
trying to finish the
last course or two
at the font of this
life’s bookish career,
as if all of this were
naught, not yet.
I steeled for humility
wondering what to
tell my wife, three
thousand miles away
(“Honey, I forgot
to finish school,
I’ll be late for dinner,
see ya in three months”)
-- And then she was
in the Stockroom of
my dreams where all
my songs are shelved
and labeled for
dispensation according
to to the gods.
How did she get
inside that room
so many salt leagues
down my brain?
She fit in there like
a briar in the underwear:
There was was porn on
the computer (too many
windows to close out),
so much custom orders
to place; she was hungry
& wandered off while
I read PDF files which
tried to emulate
in Version 1.1 style
the arts of making love ...

The art and the heart
persist even in their
slow mutual wreckage,
nourishing stuff we’ll never
see or ever understand,
though falling is to shore abyss
as longing is shrined
in one lost kiss.
This sunk wreckage is
Your’s, salt master, to
swim and swive and
sport the deepest hue,
the dolors of a voice
tinctured of ink and rue.
The oceanographers
said that for the sea
denizens motion was
unquenchable as thirst
so the sunk ship gave
them something to
hold onto and thus begin:
Is that why you bid me
here, blue master?
A deep shore in dark
welcome for all
Your ghosts to fin?

Anitpodal Interdictions

THE ANTIPODES

also from July 22

Eventually I sail so far
to there I’m here, at
the bordermarges of
the known and unknown
worlds, a place where
deep water hangs like
a quilt above the air
and strange men
boom in pagan tongues
rude praises to a God
not worshipped by the
light of day for nigh
five thousand years
though he or she is
surely ours.
My skin crawls with
the prescience of danger,
something oily,
black, and cold,
even though at 7 a.m.
the day is certain now,
sustained, away.
Something in the garden
or far under it yet stirs,
disturbed by my
ravels down the
page, urging my pen
past its curved sense,
gliding beyond
the names of things.
I’ve sailed into the
antipodes of song,
where the sense of it
is upside-down,
low latitudes of page
discoursing in
high-watered rage
upwellings of deep
ocean rich with cold
doubloons, that lucre
of the lunar mint ripped
from keels to gleam
abyss and from
the sea to bleed silvery
across night skies,
lucent as desire, plunging
deep the bent-over nymph
which croons for me
helldoggie-style with all
the purple verbs in heaven.
The lines invert and reverse
in mute ligature, revealing
all that naiad meant when
she left the room with a finger
to her lips & thus slipped
beneath the wave. Those
fading eyes reopened here
to see what seas enclose,
spiralling keels and welcoming
dooms and the court three
miles down where abyss
piles high life’s fallen trash,
filling up the trenches of
the heart. My anchor’s fast
in the cold blue hands
of the warden of that keep,
an iron will which binds
me here to the same descending
song, delving deeper every
time I try to lift my lines
from paper. Now my
song’s a poem no more
but a horn-blast straight
from hell, the clamor of
a long-lost bell pounding
twixt the temples of the
drowned god himself,
his primordial deep rule
over what we escaped
500 million years ago.
What will at cut this
rope of of dopey drone
and let me sail on
to something else? I
wish I knew; for now
I just record the strange
tableaux of day at the
antipodes, calm light
now assured on our street
and a black spout in the
garden, furiously cold
and rich and deep, the
sum of all my poems
laddering down
a thin black column
like a throat or cock
or oubliette down-spire,
vesicle to the root of
songs which, unleashed,
just won’t shut up,
hurling hell’s waters
high through my
welling mouth till
all is floating in the blue
above the forest,
above the sky, above
the last shore between
lost You and failing I.



Season of torrid exhaustions, heat waves across the midwest, in California (San Francisco residents spelled yesterday by a fog off the sea which finally quelled the white quench; no hope yet for denizens further inland), rockets flying back and forth along the Israeli-Lebanon border, the honkings from those goons, wonks, cronies and boobs in the White House at a familiar acrimonious, protective yammer, the morgue in Baghdad cramming past full every day, Christie Brinkley savaged by the adulterous affairs of her husband in the war zone of the Hamptons, etc. Here it has rained savagely and then not, alternation of souse and drought which have spelled up this weird summer, incessant, wild, unpredictable. No hurricanes yet but the pressure is building.

***

I think today the dream of “Interdictions” (see the July 24 post) addresses the problem of “The Antipodes” in its own way, not from the art of that poem but the alternate poetics of heart, reading out the ways in which a home builds a walled fortress against the torrid river of creation, is joyful in its wide safe breadth yet has little depth against the water which comes from below or falls from above.

When Brendan has sailed to the anitpodes toward the end of his voyage, their boat is stuck fast by the anchor-rope in a strange region; the arrival of the dwarf and the good weird man (he’s dressed in animal hair) provide a human signal that they have reached a place less and greater than ours, a liminal, dreamtime, subconscious continent where waking drifts off and the wilderness of beginnings and ends opens its black wings.

In one version of the Voyage, the good man comes a forest where water has risen above the air yet does not threaten all it overhangs. Strijbosch:

“The geographical features of this description -- a place where the water ends and the air is lower than the waters, the abode also of a dwarf and perhaps an underwater people -- indicate that the good man probably lived somewhere near the edge of the known world. This border was seen as the dwelling-place of monsters, pagans and deviants. In the Voyage the good man is accompanied by a heathen dwarf of curious (or even repellent) aspect who sings the strangest songs.” (233)

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my: what is it to become stuck fast there, as if my sounding-line had snagged on a drowned wreck or the belfry of a lost cathedral there? Can lines stray too far from the known world, and become brutally compelled to stay there? What iron will refuses to let go?

The phrase “iron will” is unsettling, resonant with compulsion and addiction, all those years of ending up at the bottom of the same old whiskey glass night after night, bed after bed in search of the same ever-lost love, the way Oran searches fruitlessly for the sea-god Manannan. The surface narrative contributes: both poems were written early Saturday morning, and later when my wife came down for coffee she found the icepack (for a migraine) I had absent-mindedly left on her desk by the front door when I went out to pet Mamacita the night before, prior to heading up for bed. (Such a warm moment we’d had, black cat and I, she curling into my touch, talking with her tail, purring and trilling; an absolute tenderness out in the dangers of her night.) Water had seeped everywhere, soaking all of her mail & papers there, leaving a ghastly white stain across half the desktop. The desk had been a gift from her parents and it was quite an absent-minded outrage against everything she tries to maintain and protect and make lasting.

Boy did I feel awful. It was just another slop-ass mistake of mine, committed in the weariness of a too-hurried life. Too driven: up too early every day so I never get enough rest, too compulsively piling up these writings which do not have an audience, too driven to attend AA meetings and go to the gym five days a week. All of that makes me inattentive, or worse, slop-assed, knocking things over in my hurry, leaving the oven on or doors unlocked, letting my car take a beating without trying to keep it up, etc. etc. ad infinitum ad nauseum. Even the ailments -- the migraines (which account for the ice pack on Friday night), the weariness and bleariness, etc., can all be sourced back to some compulsive force in the drive to live to the full, to accomplish something whose name is unknown to me, to be fit & writ & sober & loved perhaps way out of measure, especially when you’re trying to do all these things in one life.

So the dream came in weirdly -- after the event which I was then unaware of (except, obviously, in my animal brain, which I was too tired to take notice of), before the conflict which erupted the following morning. I had no idea why the poem was to be titled “Interdictions” -- formal bans laid down by the authorities, the destruction of enemy lines of supply -- but my error prompted such a response from my wife. Boy did she let me have it, venting her fury at my foolishness, spilling all sorts of frustrations with me from there.

I left me feeling hopeless yet resolved to put some balance back into the whirl -- some self-imposed interdictions on the madness. So I’m getting up an hour later, trying to hit the gym only three days a week, trying to go slower and get more substantial things done over more time, sacrificing quantity for quality. We’ll see how that goes.

Did the dream’s interdictions augur the dominance of heart over art, and the dangers there? Did it wonder loudly enough whether great work is hampered by dailiness, or that great love is far more fructive than intimations of great work? By turning down the heat some and going about this even more peripherally, will that central iron hold loosen somewhat & allow me to proceed?

Questions only days can answer, in where the singing may yet go. Will the anchor-rope be released (or cut) by these changes, or will I just get dragged down into deeper anitpodes, starrier abysms, blacker contours of the heart?

Interdictions

A dream exudes its sweet spoor
here, redolent of two worlds
in one house far away where
my past and future live:
I travelled with an other --
You, blue master, yet
also at other moments
an old friend or a bandmate,
a counselor, my wife --
Travelling from too far
West toward my old West,
to the house where
my old bass player now
lives (so said the dream)
lives with a wife who
is dominant and he
her HoneyDo -- A Christian
pair evolved toward Christina
shores, while I have rowed
the other way -- or so
I think, or like to think.
One bookcase was
packed with Bibles and
only one AA Big Book;
they talked of Church
activities like a quilt
that covered all of life;
two beds side by side
with white duvets where
their living room once was;
there was a bird inside
a central cage; outside
I found a stone wall only
two stones high with a
great stream nearby,
inside or close to a
freeway -- plenty of
stones but no time
or will to haul ‘em.
The house was poor,
the tin roof all rust,
the neighborhood
blue collared, long victured
on dust and tumbleweeds,
hard-scrabbled gains
to meager to much measure.
But they were happy.
A big shaggy dog pled
for me to walk it, smiling
and bounding about; I wanted
to walk far with him, I wanted
to stone up that wall
and fix the roof and
find AA meetings
and make those two
beds one: I wanted all
that consequence to marry
the insides of my heart,
though I could only visit
what was in my past
a law that has grown
too explicit. The dream
took me far -- I woke
later today than ever,
6 a.m., more than 8
hours of sleep, barely
time to write these lines
before the day begins
with everything outside
that dream’s inside
the daily boat I row,
like a dark wake
or disturbing undertow
where chilled truths
blend with desire
composing what I
can’t or won’t quite see
but row on happily
with all my sails on fire.