Speaking in Blue Tongues

“Donna del miue paratge”

2005

Messenger, leave in the morning.
The voyage won’t be long.
To my friend in his own far land
carry now this song.
Tell him I’ve very happy
with the words he said to me
after he’d given me a kiss
beneath the canopy.

-- Anonymous song of a lonely lady,
c. 1200, sung by a woman who called
herself a great lady, donna del miue
paratge. (Jack Lindsay, The Troubadours
and their world)

The greater half of my
verse faith crosses,
like the sea,
to your white shores
where you sing
forever waiting for me
to return and find
you ready and willing
to begin at last,
after all lives.
Queen of beaches
like a pale white valve
to all blue heights
and depths, I hear
your song best at
the lonely hour
I spend boarding
ache and fret
on paper dragon ships,
dispatching my love
on that courier tide
that circles globes
and hearts, my longing
shipped to you and
yours returned to me.
I doubt we’ll ever meet
but this correspondence
is an old & deep affair,
our missives long
stained black by
dolphin foam,
old passions brewing
brine and brimstone
in the ink amid the
gentler ichors of abyss,
the orchid fragrance of
one remembered kiss
in that bower we both
stumbled on and
then stumbled through
each other, yearning
for whatever younger people
mistake for fire. The
bed we’ll share again
may shore in death, or
lives like every isle yet
to be found: suffice
here now that I heard
a high and distant sound
inside the winds now
blasting hard down from
the north, a pink
tongue for all their
teeth revealed. Heard you,
great lady, in that chambered
room inside the conch
I lifted on my morning
rounds here, down from
my great white writing chair:
Heard the voice which rules
the greater half of
the wild world
beneath the leagues of blue,
song of my soul’s unvanquished
ache to sing the depths of you.




SALTY GRAMMAR

2003

I am her berry O-mouth,
her silvering tongue,
blue grammarian
of the salt-tiding blue:
I turned and touched
her on some foreign
night, and she began
to sing, up from
the throat of my
every heaven-flung
nerve. Sing she did,
ever louder as
some woman smiled
and bid me mount
and ride wave
dazzle to the moon,
each foaming plunge
a construct of
arch and ache,
each stout article
of my faith
received in her
voweled sighs, her
Os and Ahs,
her sibilant, soft
Yes ... And so she
wrote her blue flamelets
down in the burning
book whose leaves
were torn from my
mind and heart and
balls; wrote them
down loin for line
in a wavelike sine
from one white startle
to the next, bed
to bed a voyage
like ravening, her
thirst the moon
hung high in the
window, gleaming
one white road
through all that
blackening blue.
She wrote the story
down and called
it my life, a
saltier hagiography
than I would choose
to write, but hey!
I am just the
hand in her
scriptorium,
transcribing the
next song, dipping
this pen into
her dark and then
scratching for a while.
She works out the
genitives, the syntax
and style of the
tale told so. My job
is just to chord
the mordents and
mellifluents of
her faux-angelic ire,
a vocalissimus
of beachside wonder
one poem short
of the surf’s one choir.




BLUE RHETORICS

2003

We have seen that the fili
Amargin is also represented
in the Leabhar na Gabhala
as reciting a set of rhetorics
immediately on landing
in Ireland.Presumably,
therefore, he had acquired
them elsewhere.

-- Nora Chadwick,
“Imbas Forosnai”

I am the wind that blows upon the sea;
I am the ocean wave;
I am the murmur of the surges …

-- from “The Song of
Amergin,” attr. to
Taleissin


She held my face
in her white hands
that night and
as I slept the
sea slipped into
me, wave after
wave after wave,
filling me with her
wild curvature.
Ah how I drank
Her as I slept,
free at last from
a long drought
of driest words,
her level rising
topmost in my brain.
When I woke
my eyes flew open
and my mouth
began to move,
spilling blue rhetorics
which to this day
I don’t understand,
just sing. It was as
if my tongue had
been pickled in
sea brogue, a
language both
so bitter and too
sweet, its numens
full of beach
bosomage spilling
wavelike from
their brilliant cups.
Cups I would drink
more than my fill
of if I could, but
I was already drowned
and washed back
to that shore where
She was every
wave’s farewelling
kiss, dissolved
and trailing back
to mute eternity.
The words could
only phrase what
never quite got
said between the
plunge and drying
spume, a low echo
of the sea’s wide
weeping when each
night the moon hauls
free a million miles
from Her womb.
I too must sing
in those blue
rhetorics, my tongue
now not of fire
but of the sea.
One day I woke
two thousand miles
north of that sea
I was once baptized
in, reborn to the
God who quells and
purifies Her primal
rough and raucous
ire: My eyes opened
and I saw then
not Him but Her,
curled close to me,
her shape the receipt
of all that foaming
wave which crashed
over me pregnant
with rooms He
might name but
never roam. My
mouth began to
move in ways
never again quite
my own, cerulean
and hooved, professing
a history dredged
up from the abyss,
old lost still gleaming
portents which are
worthless inland
or upstairs, a mother-
of-pearl inlay which
fades to blue
if you stare too hard.
Yet each saying here
rows me further back
to home -- so many
years after that
drowning embrace,
more years down
the road from that
first embracing wave,
so long as to lose
both her and history
to this blue argument
which still washes
wavelike from this
hand and now fades
in a drawling,
shorelike, rhetorical hiss
-- her voice inside
my own, a sea
inside the poem.






BOOTY

2003

What did I keep of her
all those lost or stolen nights
when she took me home
and bid me swim
her naked blue? Sights --
pale revealings and the
shock of sheer nature:
Beachside motions as
I pinned her and she
my mine, all curve and
wave and fatal crash:
Three words she
whispered just before
dawn which sank so low
in my ear I can’t repeat
them here, though all
I say is a toil and toll
and vintage of them.
I see those hours a
fraudulent, pale vicars
of a drowning faith
that nearly damn killed
me til I found a home
at last. Now I sometimes
wonder if the booty
I brought back was
just the darker
blue insides of my
own too-hot heart,
the part where she
always resided. There’s
a mirror she once
looked into lying on
an altar far below,
the portrait of a gaze
over my shoulder at
the love she could not
find that damned and
boozy night where
we both made off
with booty -- silver cups
we spilled so utterly
which still gleam
bluish white inside us,
visible only on moony
nights when the
sea we call the heart
is calmed to glass.




WOMAN ON MY LIPS

2004

Affection! thy intention stabs the centre
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat’st with dreams; -- how can this be?--
With what’s unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow’st nothing.

-- Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

I was the greater fool
who thought you breathed
and pined for me on
that bed I reeled to reach.
Walked too many miles
down that broken shore
alone, my voice more naked
than the white sands
of that beach, my song
more blue than the surf
that spring day I swore
to find you. As if real
breakers could dissolve
the vanish in your curves!
Or that some wavelike
passion raised your
stabbing nails of sweetness
back from that dead terrain
where I had heaped, like
corpses, all the nights
I couldn’t find you
where my heart
swore you reclined. What
I’ve salvaged from
my ruination in a trope
is that your initmacy
is pure intimation,
the lucency beyond
each fragrant
kiss, a surflike hiss
expiring into that
which no clench may
ever fully crash and
recede, alike as loaves
and fishes in the
miracle of that love
no love may fully kiss.
You aren’t an untouched
body but my embodied
reach from this shore
toward a mythic strand
where every Yseult
rouses her half-drowned
sea-weedy man,
my ache’s Tristanning
which shipwrecks
all purpose in one
unmanning wave and
leaves me where
no compass sail or
rudder of my mind
can ever find. You
aren’t the wings but
their necessity, the
sweet hot flash
inside the insdes
of fused loins. Yours
is the gaze which
in passing pierces me
then is gone,
leaving me to figure
out who’d read my
name then tossed it
back, hot for bigger
game. Your absence
is the pure invitation of
every inward-swinging
door; your smile the
length of that always
self-evicting digression.
What remains to say
of you is unsayable
in this poem and
so fragrant and
flagrantly blue
in the the next,
where surely I’ll
beach at last
on your apple island
where all is
pale and pearly pink
to death and you
are all I cannot name
much less conclude,
and all I ever wished
for with my face flat
in the aching well,
the woman on my
lips whose name
I can’t recall, beckoning
inside the next wave’s
bright booming farewell.

Dark Partner

In addition to the repressed material, the unconscious contains all those psychic components that have fallen below the threshold, as well as subliminal sense-perceptions. Moreover, we know, from abundant experience as well as for theoretical reasons, that besides this the unconscious contains all the material that has not yet reached the threshold of consciousness. These are the seeds of future contents. Equally we have every reason to suppose that the unconscious is never quiescent in the sense of being inactive, but presumably is ceaselessly engaged in the grouping and regrouping of so-called unconscious fantasies. This activity should be thought of as relatively autonomous only in pathological cases; normally it is coordinated with consciousness in a compensatory relationship.

-- CG Jung, “The Structure of the Unconscious,” appendix in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW7, par. 445




THE STORY OF SAINT ORAN

Oran may may have already been on the Isle of the Druids when Columba and his 12 companions arrived in 563 A.D. to found the Abbey of Iona.

At first, the abbey construction fares badly. Each day’s work is leveled overnight by some disturbed spirit. Columba sets up a watch to observe what happens at night, but each person set to the task is found dead the next day amid the fallen timbers.

Columba decides to do the vigil himself and sits alone at the site in the howling cold dark. In the middle of the night, a great and terrible being in the shape of a half-woman, half-fish comes to Columba from the surrounding waters. Columba asks the apparition what is repelling his efforts to build at Iona and the fish-woman says she does not know, but that it would continue to happen until one of his men offered themselves to be buried alive in a grave seven times as deep as a man’s length.

Lots are cast and Oran is chosen (other accounts say he volunteered) and he lay down in the footers and was buried. No wind rises up that night to spoil the work and the construction proceeds without incident.

After three days and nights Columba became curious to know how his follower had fared and ordered him dug up. The monks excavate the spot where Oran had been sacrificed, finally uncovering his face. Oran’s eyes pop open, and staring right at Columba he declares, "There is no wonder in death, and hell is not as it is reported. In fact, the way you think it is is not the way it is at all." Horrified, the saint had Oran buried again at all haste, crying "Uir! Uir! air beul Odhrain" or "Earth, earth on Oran’s mouth!" (The saying "chaidh uir air suil Odhrain" or "Earth went over Oran’s eye" is still widely heard in the Highlands and Hebrides.


Despite the frightful encounter, Columba dedicated the monestary’s graveyard to Oran (Reilig Odhrain) and honored Oran’s sacrifice by saying that no man may access the angels of Iona but through Oran. The bones of many Scottish, Irish and Norwegian kings were sent to Oran’s graveyard; Duncan and Macbeth are interred in the St. Oran chapel at the center of the graveyard.





ENERGY FROM THE RESTLESS SEA: A RENEWABLE SOURCE, AND CLEAN, BUT NOT WITHOUT ITS CRITICSE
Heather Timmons
New York Times, August 3, 2006

NEWCASTLE, England - There is more riding the waves here than surfers, thanks to a growing number of scientists, engineers and investors.

A group of entrepreneurs is harnessing the perpetual motion of the ocean and turning it into a commodity in high demand: energy. Right now, machines of various shapes and sizes are being tested off shores from the North Sea to the Pacific -- one may even be coming to the East River in New York State this fall -- to see how they capture waves and tides and create marine energy.

The industry is still in its infancy, but it is gaining attention, much because of the persistence of marine energy inventors, like Dean R. Corren, who have doggedly lugged their wave and tidal prototypes around the world, even during the years when money and interest dried up. Mr. Corren, trim and cerebral, is a scientist who has long advocated green energy and pushed through numerous conservation measures when he was chairman of the public energy utility for the city of Burlington, Vt.

Another believer in the technology is Max Carcas, head of business development for Ocean Power Delivery of Edinburgh. ''In the long run, this could become one of the most competitive sources of energy,'' said Mr. Carcas.

His company manufactures the Pelamis, a snakelike wave energy machine the size of a passenger train, which generates energy by absorbing waves as they undulate on the ocean surface.

With high oil prices, dwindling fuel supplies and a growing pressure to reduce global warming, governments and utilities have high hopes for tidal energy. The challenge now is turning an accumulation of research into a viable commercial enterprise, which for many years has proved elusive.

No one contends that generating energy from the oceans is a preposterous idea. After all, the ''fuel'' is free and sustainable, and the process does not generate pollution or emissions.

Moreover, it is not just oceans that could be tapped; the regular flow of tides in bodies of water linked to oceans, like the East River, hold promise too. In fact, it seemed like such a sensible idea that inventors started making the first wave of such generators centuries ago. Many operated like dams, trapping water and then releasing it after the tides fell. But they were outmoded with the rise of steam engines and other more efficient fuel sources.

Ocean energy had a brief revival when oil prices rose in the 1970's, and prototypes were tested in Europe and China. But financing dried up when oil prices were low in the 1990's, and advances in wind turbines and other renewable energy elbowed out tidal projects.

These days, wave power designs vary from machines that look like corks bobbing in the ocean to devices that resemble snakes pointing into waves. There are shoreline machines that cling, like limpets, to rocks.

Tidal power machines, in contrast, often come in the form of turbines, which look like underwater windmills, and generate energy by spinning as tides move in and out; some inventors also are testing concrete-and-steel machines that lie on the seabed and pipe pressurized water back to the shore.

Even big commercial power companies are joining the action. General Electric; Norsk Hydro, a Norwegian company; and the Germany power giant Eon have recently pledged money for new projects or investments in tiny marine energy companies.

''It is an untapped renewable energy source,'' said Mark Huang, senior vice president for technology finance in General Electric's media and communications business, which is financing marine projects. ''There is no where to go but up,'' Mr. Huang said.

... A handful of commercial projects are also in the works, including the world's first ''wave farm,'' as the fields of machines are known, being installed off the north coast of Portugal. A field of tidal turbines is also being built off the shore of Tromso, Norway.

Britain could generate up to 20 percent of the electricity it needs from waves and tides, according to an estimate by a government-financed group here called the Carbon Trust. That is about 12,000 megawatts a day at current usage, or three times what Britain's largest power plant produces now.

... One research center here in Newcastle is putting marine devices to the test in a wave pool, and another is deploying them in the roiling ocean off the Orkneys, the low islands off northernmost Scotland. The Scottish government has pledged to generate 18 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2010 ...




SILENT PARTNER

August 17

My silent partner in this
blue enterprise is a
relentless patron and
idea-man, offering up
wave after wave for
me to mount and ride
upon this fevered fish of song
toward shores too dark
yet for a name:
His lunar tide grows
in my bright eye, the way
that dreams profuse
when you write them down:
I stand here on the same
damn shore, straining
to hear my mother’s voice
in the shells of history.
& slowly become aware
how this wave today is
so lushly curved, swelling
like a nutsack’s womb,
aching up toward full
& then collapsing down
the shore in a choiring,
angelic boom, the basso
of old man Dick who
flukes behind the anima
who called my ears to sea
when my dam sang
over me when I was
so young, so boundless,
a cathedralled ecstasy:
My silent partner works
a deep-sea farm where
he harnesses the motion
of deep things to my songs,
dowsing leys of of first fire
from squid squink into
my pen’s black ink,
hurling up a voltage
which amps the heart’s
whole grid, a triune uteral
where balls and head floor
and roof my soul’s casbah,
my vowels thrice enwombed
in salt’s unsaid brogue: He
whispers so deep in my
history that words are worlds
formed in black history
in the out and inner reaches
of God’s space: I paddle
on a coffin back to home
and my silent partner’s
in the box, Oran’s skull
perhaps or the cinders
of the first book Brendan
burnt protesting fantasy
as false: Oh this is my
box, I never travel without
my box: Home of the family
jewels and devil crest:
House of the pussy-slish
of sweet muse swash
connubling every
bedded and morning here
where I fuck the metaphors
with all the abandon I
once fucked their
hairy pinkest
metaphors for so
many soggy black years:
This scrawl belongs to
the day man, but what
plots its motion is
a trade secret of his
partner, a spice route
hidden in a magic map
scrolled helter-skelter
underneath my brain,
like an inverse language
lurking beneath the
stairs of the singer’s tongue
almost articulate
but never quite:
My silent partner whispers
me to trade in a strange
familiar coin, an lucre
so old and new as to shout
of alien worlds beyond
the reach of dime-store
rhymes: My black book’s
an old boat & a pagan
coffin to boot and
yet the tide is far
far colder, older, a
smoulder of first days:
My voice is hoarse
of mortal days damaged by
the immortal fray; yet I
oar on with bare hands
cupping blue immensity,
each song a happy dram
of the infinite my silent
partner distills in the
quim of the hottest thrall:
I’m just a lost speck
paddling home
with the sea’s harvest in
an empty box, a
shipwrecked man my
dark partner sails,
happy, wild, free,
wealthy in all that
mythic mother
poured so vast and
deep in me
when I was inside Thee
yesterday, today,
tomorrow I pray too:

Talkin The Dark's Talk

The siss of the shisp of the sigh of the sitzing at the stir of the ver grose O arundo of a long one in midias reeds: and shades began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing, duusk unto duusk, and it was as glooming as gloaming could be in the waste of all peacable worlds.

-- Joyce, Finnegans Wake (140)


***


Fascinting reading in a review of Annie Rogers new book The Unsayable in Sunday’s New York Times. Rogers enervates Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytics as a means of uncovering -- and recovering -- the language of the unconscious, which is both true and beautiful, strange and horrifying.

In “What’s Left Unsaid,” reviewer Kathryn Harrison tells the story:

***

At the age of 16, Annie Rogers stopped speaking. “I realized,” ... “that whatever I might say could be misconstrued and used to create a version of ‘reality’ that would be unrecognizable, a kind of voice-over of my truths I could not bear.” Given her apprehension, silence was a sane response — the only response possible for a girl who understood herself as having been called by the archangel Michael to end human suffering by translating “the voices of angels for the world.”

Rogers recovered; she spoke; she grew up and became a Harvard University professor and a clinical psychologist who treated abused and abandoned children, fulfilling the vocation that, when she was a teenager, landed her in a mental institution. She no longer felt the responsibility to convey messages from heaven and had replaced the archangel with another divinity of sorts, someone with a different ecstatic following — Jacques Lacan — but ending human suffering remained her purpose. “The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma” is an account of Rogers’s successes, as well as her frustrations, in helping girls, herself included, hear the stories of their pasts and discover the truths of their essential selves, truths that surface no matter how forcefully they are repressed. A basic principle of psychoanalysis, Rogers, who now teaches at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, reminds us, is that a powerful, even controlling part of each person, the unconscious, “insists on knowing the truth, even if the truth is a shocking and costly retrospective.”

She calls her own troubled adolescence “a place of shattering and beginnings,” and she presents her personal history as a prelude to a series of case studies that reveal how the ideas of Lacan (whom she introduces as “enigmatic, maddeningly obscure”) provided her an essential tool for analysis. Those ideas offered Rogers “a structure for listening” to her patients so as to help them understand themselves and transcend symptoms more commonly treated with cognitive-behavioral therapies developed for post-traumatic stress disorder. Lacan’s contention that “the unconscious is structured like a language” was the epiphany — the light-bulb moment — she needed to begin to untangle the puzzles of symptoms, actions and statements that characterized the abused children she worked with, many of whom were considered too sick or damaged to be helped.

When we contemplate acts we consider unspeakable, we call on a civilized society’s imperative to remain silent about physical abuse, rape, incest — the third monkey in the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil triumvirate of denial that protects abusers who hold victims in their thrall. As a matter of conscience we fight to create a climate in which victims are not shamed into silence’s effective complicity. But unspeakable is not the same as unsayable. The first audience of the self is, of course, the self, and what stops us from revealing hurtful and damaging events isn’t (or isn’t only) imposed from without. Before they protect their predators, victims of trauma (defined as any experience “which by its nature is an excess of what we can manage or bear”) protect themselves by not consciously expressing what happened to them. To articulate, or to say, is to put together, to draw fragments of an experience into a coherent narrative, a potentially devastating process if the experience was so overwhelming as to have been, like the author’s own past, “shattering.” Before a thing is consciously (if not audibly) voiced, it has yet to be acknowledged or owned; it has yet to be believed.

Rogers’s user-friendly (and admittedly self-serving) summary of Lacanian psychoanalytic thought explains that human beings are “born into language,” and that as we acquire language we discover loss. Our preverbal selves are one with an all-providing mother who anticipates needs we cannot give voice to; our verbal selves have separated, enough that we are conscious of that separation. Necessarily, we are traumatized by what separation means: that we must rely on language to express our demands and thus risk being misunderstood. It is equally risky to be understood too well, and in order to get the affirmation we crave from mother, we repress or censor what we imagine she won’t like.

While Rogers apologizes for having to guide her readers through enough psychoanalytic theory to understand the work she does with damaged children, her abbreviated tutorial helps make “The Unsayable” an absorbing, even exciting book for readers who are neither victims of abuse nor therapists. To grow up and become fully human is traumatic. Whether we recognize it or not, each of us is poised between two existential terrors, that of remaining unknown and unseen, our anguish and our joys without witness, and that of being known so completely that we are left undefended. Every reader of this review has experienced overwhelming and unbearable separation from his or her mother, trauma that fractured each of us into a conscious and an unconscious self.

Lacan’s insights represent a “radical return to Freud,” to the concept of a separate and dynamic unconscious where “time stands still, words function as puns, forbidden ideas find uncanny disguises and dreams are riddles or puzzles.” The Freudian, or Lacanian, analyst is as much sleuth as listener, piecing together a code that emerges from language, symptoms and actions. “Although unconscious life is anything but random, its logic isn’t always clear” but it can be deciphered “through associations and in retrospect.” In recounting her treatment of an 11-year-old girl who suffered debilitating headaches and anxiety in the wake of being abused by a neighbor, Rogers outlines a process of listening for words or even parts of words the girl repeated during therapy, remarking how motifs from her dreams connected to her waking life, and remaining alert to any physical symptoms, in this case the headaches. After sessions, Rogers took notes, and she ruminated on what she’d heard. Like a good detective, she acted on a hunch as well as evidence when she asked the child if headaches might not be code for Ed aches, a way of “telling by not telling” that the neighbor, whose name was Ed, had hurt her.

Psychoanalysis has been eclipsed to a great extent by less expensive and less time-consuming ego-based therapies, and by the even shorter cut of psychopharmacology. But as “The Unsayable” demonstrates, analysis is as uniquely rewarding as it is demanding. Given discipline, patience — and a measure of courage — it may be the only means of reaching certain patients. To learn that “the unconscious is structured like a language” is to see this aspect of the self as radically different from the way it is popularly misrepresented, as a murky soup of dream fragments and primitive urges from which it’s possible to fish out the occasional insight, a kind of primordial chaos from which higher consciousness distinguishes itself.

For Freud, Lacan and Rogers, the unconscious is as complex and sophisticated in its organization as is the conscious, and as individual: each psyche requires its own lexicon. Within this mysterious realm that the Jungian analyst Alan McGlashan called a “savage and beautiful country,” Lacan’s voice does hold the power of an archangel’s, and Rogers’s ability to listen and perceive has an equally rare authority. It isn’t everyone who can hear what we don’t allow ourselves to say.





ANGEL FLUKES

August 16

My angels demand Truth and
Beauty; there’s a brace of ‘em
with a fiery blue halo for each
sooth, hot for troth’s sweet booty.
They bid me mount the whale
and dive full down where
a blue chapel houses horror
and repast, bound in a whale’s
belly or split in the father’s keel,
cold rooms piled with verboten
trash -- feces where they don’t
belong, the Man in the Car’s
Lacanian slacks, the bloody
stump of a squirrel I once
dissected with a brick trying
to get what lies under and
below, the unremitting
stone vagina of that older
girl who undressed me
in the woods. That sort of
stuff wells the sea itself,
a shitpipe of wash and thrash,
uteral and magisterial,
smashing in its surf
sursurrant breasts of
foam. How can I speak
of that salt-cut
umbilicus without a
stylus in my hand,
without oars of white
desire, without a
guitar pick to flail
airs on g-strings,
without a yellow pail
for hauling up
the wonders of black
water woods, be
it a big toad or
a tossed toy or a
forever breeching whale?
Such metaphors greet
the shores of walking
destiny, a salt-brined
gnash of watery bones
still regnant despite
the atrophy of my lips,
crowned by a silver
phallus which sailed
from me long ago
in search of a fading,
perhaps forever
sundered Yes. Heave
night and sea close to
me here, as if my head
were squeezing out
the halves of a dream’s
riot-rousing scream,
thighs of myth and mystery
urging me to jot
this urgent ink-cream
of doodle-jots into
noctilucent quim
too deep and old to name,
much lest spout
wild discourse with
on saline, siren reams.
All this hot jackulate
and not a cunthair closer
to the devastating realm
of raw truth and naked
beauty, the undersea half
of things beneath the heart
I wring, tolling every
black bell of heaven’s thing
pantied in blue abyssal seem.
I just spiral round and
down the same damn
drain like a plastic
yellow ducky, stuck
in the same incessant
sucking drone which
sounds like every lala
dream of home --
the fantasy of perfect
returns which I
forever habitually
roam with penis
guitar scythe boat
book pen, mortared
fast between that
narrow land between
a woman’s thighs,
pressed hard by
howling margins.
The pattern is the
same, a signature
write in my inner ear
by events so long ago
they are like wrecks
turned reefs, paradisal
tumors down the leagues
both true and beautiful
in forever’s tide,
silent or most eloquent
to be all that I feared
yet exactly what
I fought here to become.
A black brogue lacquers
my ear with whiskied
pussylicks inside a
curved hellacious wave,
nailing me to old crimes
with the desire they
spoored then spawned,
a dark childhood’s
beautiful monster
erupting through doors
I chained and locked
in growing up, irrupting
the boyman I fear I am.
Beneath the basement
stairs the bogeyman stirs,
his green horseteeth
a rictus smile,
his appetite unspeakable,
his crimes too long unsaid.
He’s coming back
for me in the guise of
a happy dog I fear
will kill one of our cats
out back; he is the
sales call I can’t make,
the poem which I
can never end right;
he’s in the way my
wife turns far away
on her side of the
bed; he’s in the
world too high or
low for me to reach
or name, breeching
in the strangest
ways -- a breeze,
sour light at 3 p.m.,
a tossed sneaker
next to a dead
possum on the tired
road home. To sing
of him I Finnegan
the wake like a
barber bleeding dreams,
like a parishioner
singing in tongues
the heart’s hot Arabic
almost, not quite,
askew by one or
two degrees from
the propoundings
too damn dark to
say, their leagues
too deep for mortal
tongues to fin. The lovers
shout all night to
orgiastic gods from
hard nipples and
swole balls; they
are the unseen
benefactors of
the schnickschnacking
pair, the white shore
always just behind
the other. The mortal
man plows hard and fast
the sweet sluice of
the wanton swive,
both of them with eyes
screwed tight,
sighting dark familiars,
& shades & ghostly ruins,
their ecstasies geared
to fling them far
into the clear blue space
of Love; stare hard,
sweet lovers, hurl
wild the name buried
deep within the ruins
of a self. Meat in
motion swirls the bole
which devours every
lust and once oh
so rarely once
wakes the next day
in love, giving wing
to the hatchling
ichor of my pen.
Caul the spoorings
of this dark
hour on that spent
bed I never was welcome
in for long, not in all
those old first damaged
ways when thrall
was a war’s seahorse
built for two to battle
on. It’s dank and humid,
juicy and still, the
late night breathing low
and steady like a world
asleep and dreaming
this cold blue song.
No, it’s not poetry
but still vatic in its
way, the singer’s
shadow’s ligature,
the part of song
at Acheron beseeching
Hades to remit
the beloved ghost of
history, she who
left me long ago
when the Girl on
The Playground took
my dandelion bouquet
and flung it laughing
in the air, leaving me
to curse in showering
gold; the one I dove
into the pond to
save who left me
standing naked in
the woods; the tide
which ebbed from my
mother’s voice, taking
the breast of seas away.
This is the old song
of that first shore
when fish and sea
parted ways, creating
the language of two
worlds, a lyric both
high and deep, strange
and bittersweet,
forever lost and ever
new, both beautiful
and true and all of
it swirling round
bore of chiasmic blue.
Thus I am welcomed
yet again at this next
futile end where I give
up the ghost with an
empty toast and
trudge home alone
to first light
where seedlings are soaring
green and proud and true,
ethereal and wounded,
perfect in my angels’ sight.

The Iron Tide

The submarine mountains are the earth’s nearest approach to the “eternal hills” of the poets. No sooner is a continental mountain thrust up that all the forces of nature conspire to level it. A mountain of the deep sea, in the years of its maturity, is beyond the reach of the ordinary erosive forces. It grows up on the ocean floor and may thrust volcanic peaks above the surface of the sea. These islands are attacked by the rains, and in time the young mountain is brought down within reach of the waves; in the tumult of the sea’s attack it sinks again beneath the surface. Eventually the peaks are worn down below the push and pull and drag of even the heaviest of storm waves. Here, in the twilight of the sea, in the calm of deep water, the mountain is secure from further attack. Here it is likely to remain almost unchanged, perhaps throughout the life of the earth.

Because of this virtual immortality, the oldest oceanic mountains must be infinitely older than any of the ranges left on land. Professor Hess, who discovered the sea-mounts of the central Pacific, suggested that these “drowned ancient islands” may have been formed before the Cambrian period, or somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion years ago.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us




THE IRON TIDE

August 13

There was a network series
which recently gloried in
catching Internet predators.
The producers had someone
pose as a 13 year-old girl
in a chat room and then lured
these Draculassholes to
a house in a suburb where
the anchor and cameraman
stripped ‘em raw of
their intent, driving a stake
of pure primetime pleasure
into their greedy fool hearts:
An easy, salable concept,
the perfect crusade, the
victims readily upping
for slaughter on the iron
wings of desire, appearing
on camera in our
living-room network-TV
arena with enough
veneer of the criminal
for us to insanely cheer:
The predators though
were all of bland sort,
nasty and brutish, yes,
red in their intended
tooth and claw, but
yahoos nonetheless,
surprisingly so—are
we toned to expect
Hollywood grandeur
even at it dimmest depths?:
The perps were bald
or fat or so cable-guy
looking you’d wouldn’t
notice them twice in
traffic or at the supermarket:
What is strange to me
today is how veiled
the evil iron tide of
the passion looks from
their surfaces, invisible
in the light of day as they
are in the crowd of
humanity: So pale you
just had to stare hard
at the TV to connect the
dork visage with the horrorshow
vigor of their intent:
I remember getting lap dances
at strip clubs when I first
hit Florida back in 1980,
back when they were allowed:
A half-dozen times over six
months of lost zeal
a somewhat curvy,
somewhat flabby bleached
blond with long dark roots
rocked listless against my
jeans looking far left
or far right as J Geils Band’s
“Centerfold” blared away
in the toxic cold of the
bar: Her breasts swung
sure as metronomes up
and down or side to side
in the skewed crosshairs
of my drunken attention,
a desire which settled for such
moments when every
avenue of a night’s wooing
had failed, was too
difficult to try in my
grand boozed-up isolation:
Anyway I remember looking
around me at other guys
getting lap dances and
was appalled at the
general grade, fat
bearded truckers
& scowling bikers
& rockers with torn
t-shirts and lots of hair
& nerdy norks who
could have been parts
store clerks or shoe
shop managers: All of
‘em were drowning in
tit-flesh dancing before
their eyes, just like me: Lust
is such a least common
denominator in the aerials
of desire, rude, mean,
lazy, gluttonous, ever
angling for any way in,
its torch smokiest and
tumescent in the dark
dankest caverns of night:
Desire creates a bum
fraternity: Pride and
vanity make men
desperate to find
enough difference from
that pack, only to have
the fantasy of difference
drive us deeper into
the fold, self-deception
being the core of that identity,
enabled by booze and
porn and acquiescence to
that falling angel who
burns all he wells down through:
Ariel and Caliban were
both chained to Prosper’s magik
balls through a witch’s vowels,
pure sprite and puerile spite
like halves of a heart whose
name, alas, is Sycorax,
that witchiness which
spells as it appalls: What is
that dark sweetness so
front and center of sex
that men wear such
blinders trampling the
real world for ten minutes
of stolen, immoral, even
criminal bliss?: Oh the
excuses shouted by
those Internet predators
when they found themselves
in front of the naked lens,
exposed at last: No one
confessed any fault, none
admitted the truth of
their lust: They were always
about other business, like
conducting their own stings,
or trying to save a young
innocent from going the
wrong way: They had been
lured themselves by vixens
and tramps like sheep to
a kills: Never any truth in
their stories, as if the
truth of lust was just too
damnable, its admission
sure death: One by one
they came to the house,
right on time, sometimes
shedding clothes as
they walked in the front
door, calling a phantom
phoenix’s name: A sad
same parade of such
lusty packaging, none
with a name: That savage
late moonlight still glows
like a pale bone on a blue
beach at this hour seems
a like crime, too hot
and still for this time in
the season, deathly becalmed,
bewtiched: Yet another
day to come in the wine-press
stamping down the given
grapes, weeding and mowing
and laundry and bills: All
the ways which the real isn’t
sexy, isn’t about getting
some and how: Yet like
sea mountains, an aging man’s
desire slips beneath the wave
of old nights and refuses to age,
enormous ranges far from sight
but never slighter as the world
ages on: A blue-balled immensity
that just hangs hard and sore
in abysms, swollen with an
angst that has nowhere to go:
I’m not going to take it out
on my aging wife, nor will
I betray her just to relieve
what can’t or won’t find
relief, no matter how many
wells I cram down hollering
the names of black Jesus:
I won’t even write more of
this, not in any obvious way:
Heaviness is leaden and
achy like my shoulder and
foot today, sore with the
burden and freight of
a loved full life: Rather
than scatter all that
may I furrow relief’s
utterly pent grandeur:
May I farm truth and
beauty far from the
ravaged acres of the seem,
their appetite, their claws:
Invisible is lust in
its plenipotent foment,
crashing all of the shores
of this world, the underwater
terrain of my heart, immobile,
unchanging, free:

Black Sextant

August 11

How is it that time is timeless
and space infinite? As if
calibration were just a keel’s
carnival mask for illimitable
depths, a fathom-cord
for what the gods are
still sinking down into
in their perpetual
immensity ... We want
to know it all: We pry:
We seek: We seek: We
peek through a profane
hole to behold our
first parents going
at like snake-headed goats,
father Zeus with his
haughty swollen plums
beating like hearts as
they spasm outrageous
sperm into our beloved
mother Rhea, her face
uplifted like an August
moon in pure reflection
of not his but our ever-
wounded bliss: We dare
to know, and test that
knowledge in the carnal world,
measuring the tyger
in this woman’s freckly thighs,
in the copper-coiled snatch
of another one, in the
strange hot-oiled clench of
a third which remits the
boil of our own errant spasm
deep in the Yes her spread
both measures and masks.
Sex then is like the other
vast principles, not a shore
but their sea: An infinite
mask of precise calibration:
Each bed is a notch this way
or that, the body’s sextant
on a course too dark to see
with our sense, ever dowsing
this way or that with degrees
of stiffie and thirst, some
wilder, some becalmed: In
the end direction doesn’t
seem to matter: We’re ever
waking the next raw morning
to find her gone, a simple
note pinned to her pillow --
Not Here, Not Her, Not Ever ...
Meaning is what we maul
from tides, a proper name
for their blue commotion
through us, our collaborations
with mystery charmed
by the desire to know it,
as if to say the words right
at last were to still the
spinning portcullis
of the spiral castle
long enough to enter her
at last on the bed of
purest beginning, that
time can start at last:
Again and again I wrench
this pen across white paper
in the faith that surflike
careens will mean enough
at last that I’ll stop requiring
it of days: That that
fulsome nameless
depth that washes just
inside will stop seeking
to drench my day too
blue and wild for measure,
the ejaculate of a
scree of angels which
redeems the too-bright day:
Time and space and sex
and their meanings keep me
in ever constant motion
trying to arrest them all
at last: I know it in my
bones but ever remain
gullible to the signets
of their wash -- late full
moons at 5 a.m., the sigh
of my wife upstairs as
she dreams in her
universe far away, our
cat in the window
scanning for lizards,
Dante mixed with Kerenyi
scattered like chum
on the wake in which
I read of angels in
imagined fucks: All of
that urging the pen
to set it all down again
on a slightly different
angle, which by dint
of being new enough
repeats the primal leys
which cracked the egg
at last and bid the
world begin. Another world,
at least, from all the
ones I hatched here
writing it again and
again and again. Poor
full fool me, spilling
sea water again all
over the page I meant
to use to ladder down
to the bottom of things,
that selkie rump which
rounds the rear entry
to the temple: I’ll find
and mount you yet!
Even though I sail more
lost than ever on an
ogham-inscribed coffin,
even though I weary
of paddling by the
black sextant that
grips me so surely from
below yet leaves me so adrift.





BLACK BATTERY

July 2005

I don’t so much write
poems these days
as power the hour’s poetics.
At 4:23 a.m. on July 4
2005 I find so much
wattage swank in
the night’s roots,
a noctilucence burning
out in the garden
just out of sight,
invisible in all that seems
only dead or aswoon
or bitterly revenant.
There I find black leys
of a power worth plugging
my poems into, supple
cords of moon-blossom bone
gripping down hard
in the loam. They surge
with yesterday’s sun
in black surging riptides
as regnant as anything
crowned by that day’s
lost fire. Here is dark
measure in equal
amplitude to that day,
coursing electrons
of an unseen
magneto between
everything line I write here.
I don’t know what
a poem like this powers
or whose cunning engines
fin and wing wild from
these gibbers; I
just write on and on
while some great lower
mouth drinks every
word I pour, getting
stronger and longer
and darker, regnant
in lake’s starless source
down the lees of abyss.
Just what deity resides
there I can never quite say
though I ferry his depths
deeper each line
quarried here, each
trope caught singing in
the dark at this hour.
Surely there are many other
powers at play in the world
but they are for other poetics,
other batteries of verb.
My job here is just
to build sufficient enough
cells of black juice for
this hour, coiling
yesterday’s last dying wave
round its infinite
black-tiding wash,
cabling the whole dreaming
word to the ghosts of
its margins and every
titan power bellowing below.
Black fins and deep hooves
ramp up a brilliant
dark bulb’s black-saturate
glow, a poem both night
and wild garden
both fang and rich flow.




BLACK TORC

June 2005

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