The Preterite

This mid-to-late-summer season is fraught with preterition, a heavy sense of being passed over, repeatedly, by massive storm-fronts. Since last Sunday we’ve had daily predictions of rain around 60 percent; every day around noon those chipper airy puffs of cumulus have massed into midafternoon grey towers and walls; thunder cracks and winds blow; there’s a smatter a smidgen a smirk of rainfall, barely wetting the dust; and then the threat passes over, leaving behind a heavy dry marl overhead. Around the area there are pinpricks of foment, a 2-inch inundation which leaves the local recipients drenched and daze; but such assaults of rain are so precise and far-flung that just about everyone else that day comes home to glare at the sky and crank up the sprinklers. We the general preterite are spared those storms, passed over by angels of summer moisture; and though everything is still green there are stories on the news of wildfires in the seams, unheard of for this penultimateonth of the wet season, the one before the month when the hurricanes are most likely.

When I stepped out on the back porch around 5 a.m., the morning was impossibly still and heavy, like the near-bursting balls of a black bull snorting at the fence of a desire that will neither quit nor quell. Almost an evil thickness, ripe with some smell that seemed close to shit or bad garbage or old sex. The funk of stasis and corruption. Factor that here as the first big storms slowly ripen in the Atlantic.

***

“The collective instincts and fundamental forms of thinking and feeling brougth to light by analysis of the unconscious constitute, for the conscious personality, an aquisition which it cannot assimilate completely without injury to itself.”

-- CG Jung, Appendix to Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,, transl. RFC Hull, CW, par. 7

***

I PITY DA FOOL

from Oran’s Well, 2003

I pity da fool
who tries to wrest
the whale from this
black spoor. Dick
and dark go fluke
and spunk as far
as I can see,
bellied down here
on a dowser’s
blue nose.
Follow Leviathan
to lost galleons
and split cities,
all drowned
centuries ago.
The townspeople
here clack their
bones in the silt
as the ocean’s
deepest waves
comb the abyss,
clanging steeple
bells which toll
past midnight
at the bottom of
your deepest guesses
and beckons
and dreams. You’ll
not make sense of
this; all salvage
withers to sand
once hauled
to the bright
surface. I pity
da fool who
prizes the
whale’s blackened
stool, these
verses of inertias
which sank
long ago, Jonahs
and old boners
crying FOUL
to the flow.



***

THE OGRE ON THE SHORE

2005


Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia.

-- Laertes in Hamlet

As always, my history assumes Your
mystery, insolving seas inside
my mother’s voice that day
she sang over silk-bruited waves.
She and it You meant to pair
on a shore of such narrow degree
that one step right or left
was either witchery or knowledge,
both doomed to boil my bones.
The ogre on the road of souls
may loom close to my father’s height
inside the doors I cannot pass;
surely the monster got
his basso and berserker cock
from my six-year-old’s lack
and reverence of such things;
but he is not there at every
crossroads to mentor me
in song, even though
he’s Poetry and more. Redder
jousts than sweet psalmody
are in his throat, and I’m a fool
to margin all he ravages
and cancels out. Not by Providence
but Victory! the fish-man shouts
astride exultant waves, smashing
every naked shore with the his
uncleffed, sperm-gout gore.
How else can I say it? There is
my father’s dream or vision
of meeting Thor on the northern-
most wild of Iona years ago,
turning from his history
to face that huge churl of
Hebridean gale, the soul
of every rock-browed cliff
devoured by wind and wave.
Was it passion that burst
my father’s heart in love
for that sworded knight of
Northern winds? Was that
first song hot enough to
bid my father turn his gaze
back round to Pennsylvanian
velds where he pried and set
god’s hoar skeleton stone by
cold-ribbed stone? Or was it
enough of the second
song which does not huff and blow
the footers down in any
appeasable way but is wind itself,
unmixed of any abbey’s mortared mould,
defiant even of the words themselves?
Must I thus proceed?
How to build a chapel fit
to sing of him whom pronouns quit,
who is instead that dancing fit
which spirals sea and sky?
Build on water, yes; but tower
in no wise semblant to the backward
glance which mints its empire
on a selfish penury, a dime a dance,
vaulting the dervish in mere pedigree,
my resume which overwrites the mystery
into the majescule of history,
nippling seas and crowning winds.
Oh the shore is ever dangerous
which walks between dominions:
Not to drown or fully ebb
nor even say which sands I stride on
—not quite a page, nor sheeted
from that windy rage which grinds
the mortal shell of the earth
to infinitesimals of cosmic dust.
And we just oxidizers and rust,
corrosive as the salty seas,
& uncoagulent as loosened skies,
never one but many throats
professing gorgeous dooms
every time a wave curls high
and rides the poem to hell
down one long choiring boom.


SPECTROMETER

2005

This dark tallies
all that’s counted
by its days,
striations of dark
spectra which I in
turn sum here,
reading the shifts
in black hue
like a woman’s sleeping
face where waters gleam
with moonlight but
dream of shores and
houses far below.
That’s where this
poem tries to go
at 4:13 a.m. A few
weeks ago when it
couldn’t stop raining
this hour was like
sweaty lovers soaked
from their coil;
their swoon dripped
lush from every bough
and calyx. The dark
was like a greedy loam
whose tubers protube and
sprout and urge
their fingerlings both up
and down down down.
A dark like early summer’s
tide so warm and muscular
in its curve and smash,
its breezes raking
stiffly in like horses
riding hard. Now after days
of rainless skies, the lovers
drift a foot apart on their
old bed down dreamless,
aching veins, oppressed
by love’s daily consequence,
the work such loving thus
demands. This dark is high
and distant or deeper
underground and the
garden seems stunned,
its hundred tiny voices
petulant for the hose
I wend late afternoons
when I weary on home.
The dark here has a surf
so flat, so still, you’d think
the help had ironed it
with the day’s laundry, with
extra starch to give it the
stiff mortis of bad sleep.
This spectra is starved and
reedy and bears a whiff
of Set’s bad breath,
up from deserts further
south. And so I write
of a black prism as if
through the offices
of dark light, each
poem a spectra of
the spectral night
which pulses below
inside the garden at
this hour. Her face
so calm right now
but far away, seeking
comfort in dreams
of rain coming
hard in her,
more oblique
and fecund than
these fiercest days.

Iron Jonah

WHO STANDS BEHIND ME

August 24

He who irrupts here cannot be seen
disturbing the calm of this dark morning
of the summer which can’t rain.
He’s here but not, about, around,
charging the sense I try to write
with this upsurgent feeling close to
joy or lust, murderous yet just,
prescient as a whale-boat’s calm
with all barbs pointed at the wake
which hides the breeching whale.
Our cat, serenely sleeping on her side
(not curled but opened like a calyx
in the trust of wilderness) rides on
his shoulder as he crosses a deep blue
to surmount this daily shore of paper.
Then he’s here, standing vast behind me,
hairy, naked, resting on an iron sword
stuck in my sward’s soliloquy, the eyed
tip of his three-yard penis barely grazing
the reaches of my thought as I present him
to this page. He’s oghaming my verbs
with an old, infernal rage for order’s
maddened strange, a fishlike amplitude
too rude to say outside the covers
of a predawn book of wanders. Something
broken red & greedy crests the waters
of my mind to grasp the tendons of my
hand in an ancient iron claw; it wills
me down to here, to the silt-thick
bottom of the mere no mortal diver
would dare, down where what matters
most to me is how he gilds his mystery
with the gleam of lost doubloons
and hints of long-tossed treasure
amid the wreckage and the shadows
of my earnest life’s piled trash.
It’s a dark still morning after days that
mean to rain but won’t, the thick black
outside sabling things hurtful to the eye.
The state is now a starved and paling green,
its fustian moisture sumped away
by a maul of atmospheric high - the world’s,
of course, but its regent stands back there,
a cerne giant with rusted joints and basalt toes
and Niagra miles of falling hair. He assumes
the place I once believed was the proper height
and breadth to vault me in the world, as if
godlike augurs could sooth men.
The Bible once seemed such shoulders,
a thundering Aramic which made my voice
in saying them seem desert-wide and loud.
So too the scholar’s boat that God coffined
in, as if a library could keel a tongue,
much less say all one cannot know.
And there’s nothing like a tall amplifier
right behind a mute blue guitar to howl
and screech the rafters with those roarings
of the rear. How many times in this short life
have I felt him standing there, & wished his
will were mine? Oh but I am just a skull
through which old winds cold & vastly blow,
a conch of seas crashing nearby,
a couch of hoary dreams. His tongue
freely swims Atlantic depths I’ll never name
when I just let it go, hairy wild & rude;
when I give up his feathers sprout, his feet
dance on the wave. Every augment has
three things to give away: A dark mere
in a forest no one has entered for three
thousand years: A gold well in its middle
which we are but can never touch: and
an Iron Hans at the bottom of that well
crying to be freed from the endearments
of the grave, a Lurch who strolls a village
every step whose song irrupts so rudely
here in a too low thick sexual brogue,
all hair & balls & empty gut, voracious,
pent, enthralled. Three gifts I leave here at this
shore for you to vault or squander as you may,
as you can’t will: I’m just the little guy sitting
on the shoulders (with my cat) of the walking
wounded whale now striding cross the bay
of verbs and into open waters I can’t say, that
sea which gleams in moonlight yet dries to
dust by day. Queequeg’s coffin, yes: my
boat toward all he hurled his harpoon in
that fateful long-dead fray.





IRON JOHN

From Grimm’s Fairy Tales

There was once upon a time a king who had a great forest near his palace, full of all kinds of wild animals. One day he sent out a huntsman to shoot him a roe, but he did not come back. Perhaps some accident has befallen him, said the king, and the next day he sent out two more huntsmen who were to search for him, but they too stayed away. Then on the third day, he sent for all his huntsmen, and said, scour the whole forest through, and do not give up until you have found all three. But of these also, none came home again, and of the pack of hounds which they had taken with them, none were seen again.

From that time forth, no one would any longer venture into the forest, and it lay there in deep stillness and solitude, and nothing was seen of it, but sometimes an eagle or a hawk flying over it. This lasted for many years, when an unknown huntsman announced himself to the king as seeking a situation, and offered to go into the dangerous forest. The king, however, would not give his consent, and said, it is not safe in there, I fear it would fare with you no better than with the others, and you would never come out again. The huntsman replied, lord, I will venture it at my own risk, of fear I know nothing.

The huntsman therefore betook himself with his dog to the forest. It was not long before the dog fell in with some game on the way, and wanted to pursue it, but hardly had the dog run two steps when it stood before a deep pool, could go no farther, and a naked arm stretched itself out of the water, seized it, and drew it under.

When the huntsman saw that, he went back and fetched three men to come with buckets and bale out the water. When they could see to the bottom there lay a wild man whose body was brown like rusty iron, and whose hair hung over his face down to his knees. They bound him with cords, and led him away to the castle. There was great astonishment over the wild man, the king, however, had him put in an iron cage in his court-yard, and forbade the door to be opened on pain of death, and the queen herself was to take the key into her keeping. And from this time forth every one could again go into the forest with safety.

The king had a son of eight years, who was once playing in the court-yard, and while he was playing, his golden ball fell into the cage. The boy ran thither and said, give me my ball out. Not till you have opened the door for me, answered the man. No, said the boy, I will not do that, the king has forbidden it, and ran away.

The next day he again went and asked for his ball. The wild man said, open my door, but the boy would not. On the third day the king had ridden out hunting, and the boy went once more and said, I cannot open the door even if I wished, for I have not the key. Then the wild man said, it lies under your mother's pillow, you can get it there. The boy, who wanted to have his ball back, cast all thought to the winds, and brought the key. The door opened with difficulty, and the boy pinched his fingers. When it was open the wild man stepped out, gave him the golden ball, and hurried away. The boy had become afraid, he called and cried after him, oh, wild man, do not go away, or I shall be beaten. The wild man turned back, took him up, set him on his shoulder, and went with hasty steps into the forest.

When the king came home, he observed the empty cage, and asked the queen how that had happened. She knew nothing about it, and sought the key, but it was gone. She called the boy, but no one answered. The king sent out people to seek for him in the fields, but they did not find him. Then he could easily guess what had happened, and much grief reigned in the royal court.

When the wild man had once more reached the dark forest, he took the boy down from his shoulder, and said to him, you will never see your father and mother again, but I will keep you with me, for you have set me free, and I have compassion on you. If you do all I bid you, you shall fare well. Of treasure and gold have I enough, and more than anyone in the world. He made a bed of moss for the boy on which he slept, and the next morning the man took him to a well, and said, behold, the gold well is as bright and clear as crystal, you shall sit beside it, and take care that nothing falls into it, or it will be polluted. I will come every evening to see if you have obeyed my order.

The boy placed himself by the brink of the well, and often saw a golden fish or a golden snake show itself therein, and took care that nothing fell in. As he was thus sitting, his finger hurt him so violently that he involuntarily put it in the water. He drew it quickly out again, but saw that it was quite gilded, and whatsoever pains he took to wash the gold off again, all was to no purpose.

In the evening iron Hans came back, looked at the boy, and said, what has happened to the well. Nothing, nothing, he answered, and held his finger behind his back, that the man might not see it. But he said, you have dipped your finger into the water, this time it may pass, but take care you do not again let anything go in.

By daybreak the boy was already sitting by the well and watching it. His finger hurt him again and he passed it over his head, and then unhappily a hair fell down into the well. He took it quickly out, but it was already quite gilded.

Iron Hans came, and already knew what had happened. You have let a hair fall into the well, said he. I will allow you to watch by it once more, but if this happens for the third time then the well is polluted, and you can no longer remain with me.

On the third day, the boy sat by the well, and did not stir his finger, however much it hurt him. But the time was long to him, and he looked at the reflection of his face on the surface of the water. And as he still bent down more and more while he was doing so, and trying to look straight into the eyes, his long hair fell down from his shoulders into the water. He raised himself up quickly, but the whole of the hair of his head was already golden and shone like the sun.

You can imagine how terrified the poor boy was. He took his pocket-handkerchief and tied it round his head, in order that the man might not see it. When he came he already knew everything, and said, take the handkerchief off. Then the golden hair streamed forth, and let the boy excuse himself as he might, it was of no use.

“You have not stood the trial, and can stay here no longer. Go forth into the world, there you will learn what poverty is. But as you have not a bad heart, and as I mean well by you, there is one thing I will grant you. If you fall into any difficulty, come to the forest and cry, iron Hans, and then I will come and help you. My power is great, greater than you think, and I have gold and silver in abundance.”

Then the king's son left the forest, and walked by beaten and unbeaten paths ever onwards until at length he reached a great city. There he looked for work, but could find none, and he had learnt nothing by which he could help himself. At length he went to the palace, and asked if they would take him in. The people about court did not at all know what use they could make of him, but they liked him, and told him to stay.

At length the cook took him into his service, and said he might carry wood and water, and rake the cinders together. Once when it so happened that no one else was at hand, the cook ordered him to carry the food to the royal table, but as he did not like to let his golden hair be seen, he kept his little cap on. Such a thing as that had never yet come under the king's notice, and he said, when you come to the royal table you must take your hat off. He answered, ah, lord, I cannot. I have a bad sore place on my head. Then the king had the cook called before him and scolded him, and asked how he could take such a boy as that into his service, and that he was to send him away at once. The cook, however, had pity on him, and exchanged him for the gardener's boy.

And now the boy had to plant and water the garden, hoe and dig, and bear the wind and bad weather. Once in summer when he was working alone in the garden, the day was so warm he took his little cap off that the air might cool him. As the sun shone on his hair it glittered and flashed so that the rays fell into the bed-room of the king's daughter, and up she sprang to see what that could be. Then she saw the boy, and cried to him, boy, bring me a wreath of flowers. He put his cap on with all haste, and gathered wild field-flowers and bound them together. When he was ascending the stairs with them, the gardener met him, and said, how can you take the king's daughter a garland of such common flowers. Go quickly, and get another, and seek out the prettiest and rarest. Oh, no, replied the boy, the wild ones have more scent, and will please her better.

When he got into the room, the king's daughter said, take your cap off, it is not seemly to keep it on in my presence. He again said, I may not, I have a sore head. She, however, caught at his cap and pulled it off, and then his golden hair rolled down on his shoulders, and it was splendid to behold. He wanted to run out, but she held him by the arm, and gave him a handful of ducats. With these he departed, but he cared nothing for the gold pieces. He took them to the gardener, and said, I present them to your children, they can play with them.

The following day the king's daughter again called to him that he was to bring her a wreath of field-flowers, and when he went in with it, she instantly snatched at his cap, and wanted to take it away from him, but he held it fast with both hands. She again gave him a handful of ducats, but he would not keep them, and gave them to the gardener for playthings for his children. On the third day things went just the same. She could not get his cap away from him, and he would not have her money.

Not long afterwards, the country was overrun by war. The king gathered together his people, and did not know whether or not he could offer any opposition to the enemy, who was superior in strength and had a mighty army. Then said the gardener's boy, I am grown up, and will go to the wars also, only give me a I am grown up, and will go the the wars also, only give me a horse. The others laughed, and said, seek one for yourself when we are gone, we will leave one behind us in the stable for you.

When they had gone forth, he went into the stable, and led the horse out. It was lame of one foot, and limped hobblety jig, hobblety jig, nevertheless he mounted it, and rode away to the dark forest.

When he came to the outskirts, he called "Iron Hans," three times so loudly that it echoed through the trees. Thereupon the wild man appeared immediately, and said, what do you desire. I want a strong steed, for I am going to the wars. That you shall have, and still more than you ask for. Then the wild man went back into the forest, and it was not long before a stable-boy came out of it, who led a horse that snorted with its nostrils, and could hardly be restrained, and behind them followed a great troop of warriors entirely equipped in iron, and their swords flashed in the sun. The youth made over his three-legged horse to the stable-boy, mounted the other, and rode at the head of the soldiers. When he got near the battle-field a great part of the king's men had already fallen, and little was wanting to make the rest give way. Then the youth galloped thither with his iron soldiers, broke like a hurricane over the enemy, and beat down all who opposed him. They began to flee, but the youth pursued, and never stopped, until there was not a single man left. Instead of returning to the king, however, he conducted his troop by byways back to the forest, and called forth iron Hans.

What do you desire, asked the wild man. Take back your horse and your troops, and give me my three-legged horse again. All that he asked was done, and soon he was riding on his three-legged horse. When the king returned to his palace, his daughter went to meet him, and wished him joy of his victory. I am not the one who carried away the victory, said he, but a strange knight who came to my assistance with his soldiers. The daughter wanted to hear who the strange knight was, but the king did not know, and said, he followed the enemy, and I did not see him again. She inquired of the gardener where his boy was, but he smiled, and said, he has just come home on his three-legged horse, and the others have been mocking him, and crying, here comes our hobblety jig back again. They asked, too, under what hedge have you been lying sleeping all the time. So he said, I did the best of all, and it would have gone badly without me. And then he was still more ridiculed. The king said to his daughter, I will proclaim a great feast that shall last for three days, and you shall throw a golden apple. Perhaps the unknown man will show himself.

When the feast was announced, the youth went out to the forest, and called iron Hans. What do you desire, asked he. That I may catch the king's daughter's golden apple. It is as safe as if you had it already, said iron Hans. You shall likewise have a suit of red armor for the occasion, and ride on a spirited chestnut-horse. When the day came, the youth galloped to the spot, took his place amongst the knights, and was recognized by no one. The king's daughter came forward, and threw a golden apple to the knights, but none of them caught it but he, only as soon as he had it he galloped away.

On the second day iron Hans equipped him as a white knight, and gave him a white horse. Again he was the only one who caught the apple, and he did not linger an instant, but galloped off with it. The king grew angry, and said, that is not allowed. He must appear before me and tell his name. He gave the order that if the knight who caught the apple, should go away again they should pursue him, and if he would not come back willingly, they were to cut him down and stab him.

On the third day, he received from iron Hans a suit of black armor and a black horse, and again he caught the apple. But when he was riding off with it, the king's attendants pursued him, and one of them got so near him that he wounded the youth's leg with the point of his sword. The youth nevertheless escaped from them, but his horse leapt so violently that the helmet fell from the youth's head, and they could see that he had golden hair. They rode back and announced this to the king.

The following day the king's daughter asked the gardener about his boy. He is at work in the garden. The queer creature has been at the festival too, and only came home yesterday evening. He has likewise shown my children three golden apples which he has won.

The king had him summoned into his presence, and he came and again had his little cap on his head. But the king's daughter went up to him and took it off, and then his golden hair fell down over his shoulders, and he was so handsome that all were amazed. Are you the knight who came every day to the festival, always in different colors, and who caught the three golden apples, asked the king. Yes, answered he, and here the apples are, and he took them out of his pocket, and returned them to the king. If you desire further proof, you may see the wound which your people gave me when they followed me. But I am likewise the knight who helped you to your victory over your enemies.

If you can perform such deeds as that, you are no gardener's boy, tell me, who is your father. My father is a mighty king, and gold have I in plenty as great as I require. I well see, said the king, that I owe thanks to you, can I do anything to please you. Yes, answered he, that indeed you can. Give me your daughter to wife. The maiden laughed, and said, he does not stand much on ceremony, but I have already seen by his golden hair that he was no gardener's boy, and then she went and kissed him.

His father and mother came to the wedding, and were in great delight, for they had given up all hope of ever seeing their dear son again. And as they were sitting at the marriage-feast, the music suddenly stopped, the doors opened, and a stately king came in with a great retinue. He went up to the youth, embraced him and said, I am iron Hans, and was by enchantment a wild man, but you have set me free. All the treasures which I possess, shall be your property.

Lowlandgauge

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 (Annie Rogers’) "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.

-- Review of Annie Rogers’ The Unsayable by Kathryn Harrison, NY Times Book Review, August 13, 2006

***

LOWLANDGAUGE

August 22

Only someone with wounded
light or wounded by it would
dare delve in your unquiet ink:
My birth star crossed me with
a talent not fruitable in the world,
a brainy dumbass whose
moment to shine was always
stumblefooted not by others
but from below, by some shadowy
second person within -- silent
partner, Oran’s skull, motley
fool who hauls my balls &
decks my halls with fouls
and follies: Like that spelling
bee in the third or fourth grade
where my teammates highfived
each other gleeful over getting
the smartypants & I went
down in the second or third
round over a word I was
too confident I knew: I thought
it was a breeze and was stunned
when the teacher shook her
head & walked back in shaming
flames to the black derision
of my peers: My days were surely
perhaps virally but most surly
wounded by blights of woeful
circumstance, not only by fists
pounding on my door but
mauled from behind it by my
own funk & far more essentially
getting tripped up from below:
I was not permitted by my
familiar to succeed on luck
and talent: The geis of sex
churned black fins in the
wake of glittery dreams of love:
I was terrified of junior high
because it meant showering
after gym with the black boys:
Once or twice of their wet
horsecock glee at my tiny wee
wee wee & I developed every
manner of osteopathic wounds,
stretching the doctor’s excuse
to last the entire school year:
I had no success with women
in my long adolescence unless
flooded balls to gills with
marauding booze, but I was
a worse lover when I scored,
my pokey dorky half-rect
soldier shooting helterskelter
in the fray if at all, too
drunk too often to muster
up a helmet hard enough
to penetrate and pray:
O I was plenty wounded
when I surrendered to
Your mental opiates,
aesthetic pleromas like
blue beauties and pale
beauties beyond the
empty bitter tide of days:
Roethke’s verse, Eno’s
Pachelbel Variations,
Bach harp partitas,
Pynchon’s downed
parabola scouring
every swoon in hell
with wings I felt
but could not flex:
How sweet those ambient
amniotics which gave
birth to us in Your
womb, a pure sweet
lactal nougat of a divinely
dark swole boob: How was
I to know that a far older
wilder stranger man would
break from the waters of
those shadows, a vast
maturity which had little
to do with me or my years
like a man rising from
a ten thousand year old
sleep from an ancient mere,
hairy, haunted, magnificent,
angelic and terrifying,
St. Michael riding on
the shoulders of his dark
and darker precedents,
a sea god who rules the
vastest waters of my heart:
O I felt him flex his wings
when I strapped on my
Fender Strat and let the
horses go, hammering
those power chords
nailing every angel on
most high with a soaring
screech of song in precise
reverse amplitude to
the size of my ding dong:
Loved that huge angelic
howl, gutteral and gluteal,
roaring with the lust
of Danes on dragon ships
with axes the heft of
Ireland’s split skull: Too
bad I never could make
anything of it, not a buck
and far too fucks as
wild as the songs I screeched
of ‘em: Too bad I never
could last for long upon
that stage, partying too
hard, commiserating too
late at night with my
wounds’ bandinage: Yes
well that was part of
his salt sooth, the way
he came to speak to me,
under my vaulting hopes:
How many defeats before
I came to love his blue
sense, his vatic reckonings
in the danger and the
breakage and the second
world it wombs: He is
my genus, strange, peculiar,
his brogue almost cipherable
but not, incessantly dark
& strange, speaking in the tongue
of tics and puns and slips
of the tongue, a jarring bit
of leftness which makes
what’s right most wrong,
revealing a seal’s belly
which is only surficially
a tum tum, but also a
scarred fundament,
basaltic, old as stars,
the womb which spat
the moon up in its
haunted sky to rule
these moody tides
I call song but are
really rides on
singing’s blue dingdong:
He and I are strange
pals and quite different
from the liege which
ligaments you to
your own dark strange:
If I were to reel out
my prized fantasizes you’d
take offense, halted by the
puerile reek of it: You’d thank
me for sharing then beat
it for the door: No one likes
the smell of someone
else’s farts but to their
flatulators farts are
close and sweet-sour
old, intimate, stinky
with history’s prized
turds: The song of my
dark man apparently only
rings most true for me:
Its threnody I guess
is so woven of one
pair’s counterpoint
that whatever makes
its sound in a collective
blue the organum’s
too peculiar, its key
and mode not heard
on shores for a millenium
and soon enough lost
here, tossed back into
my immortal bath: I share
it not so you’ll sing along
but so you might have
some metaphoric
equipage for listening in:
Believe me, one he (or she)
sees you on your own
out there standing at
the silvered well, he
(or she) just won’t stop
belling up ever Bozo
buzz and buss to throng
the manic bus: Take all
my seems -- sea, well,
voyage, cape, selkie,
dark garden, dank pantheon
of first wild crimes to break
and riot in my heart -- And a
language begins to form
offshore my tongue which
the deeper man sings
inside the booming surf:
An informing rhetoric,
if you will, which argues
for a fructive wild midground
between opposing worlds:
What do such words permit:
What worlds do they not:
I wish it were simple but
he’s one riddle of a joke,
offended by the light:
He bids me sing in his
own black tongue though
shores of sense drift
far from sight: He laughs
still in my daily rounds,
delights in awkward sounds
& Faustian faux-pas: I’m
in the groove here on his
back aboard the joyous wave,
but when I go upstairs
to coddle my sick wife (the
flu, after so many headaches
& stomachaches, disorders
whirlpooling down from a
hard look at closing shop)
there are shit stains on
her clean white sheets on
my side of the marriage bed:
Heavens, how the hell
could I so besmirch her
view with that odd male
carelessness? She’ll never
read a word of this and
pines for me to learn
her tongue: Will I ever change,
will she? Will we change toward
the center of the bed where she
and I can talk as satisfyingly
as I talk with him in the dark
beds further down? My tastes
have changed over the years:
Perhaps they’ve been rearranged
by him, two leagues deeper into
the forest, to the left of daily
sense: In my youth it was
busty blondes on flaming
poolside chairs, but now
it’s dusky auburns with shoots
of red peering out half
in shadow from a darkened
room, or staring up from
the wave: I’m an ass man
who gets no booty with
a tooth for truth and beauty
& no longer afraid to
make a verbal ass of myself
bending over every numen
in the wake: Oh its a lowland
gauge this dark language,
dowsing with the dream,
the heavy sore blue balls
of the seal-man dragging
over heaven’s rune’s below:
His words from in my mouth
and ink begins to flow,
a flood of first and last augurs
I’ll never truly know
though its sugars salve
his dark blue undertow.





BLACK ANGUS, ST. COLUMBA
AND THE SEA-WITCH

From Fiona MacLeod,’s Iona

On a day of the days, Colum was walking alone by the sea-shore. The monks were at the hoe or the spade, and some milking the kye, and some at the fishing. They say it was on the first day of the Faoilleach Geamhraidh, the day that is called Am Fhéill Brighde, and that they call Candlemas over yonder.

The holy man had wandered on to where the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He was praying and praying; and it is said that whenever he prayed aloud, the barren egg in the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud unfold, and the butterfly break its shroud.

Of a sudden he came upon a great black seal, lying silent on the rocks, with wicked eyes.

“My blessing upon you, O Ron,” he said, with the good kind courteousness that was his. “Droch spadadh ort,” answered the seal, “A bad end to you, Colum of the Gown.”
“Sure now,” said Colum angrily, “I am knowing by that curse that you are no friend of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of the north. For here I am known ever as Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint; and it is only the Picts and the wanton Normen who deride me because of the holy white robe I wear.”

“Well, well,” replied the seal, speaking the good Gaelic as though it were the tongue of the deep sea, as God knows it may be for all you, I, or the blind wind can say; “well, well, let that thing be: it’s a wave-way here or a wave-way there. But now, if it is a druid you are, whether of fire or of Christ, be telling me where my woman is, and where my little daughter.”

At this, Colum looked at him for a long while. Then he knew.

“It is a man you were once, O Ron?”

“Maybe ay and maybe no.”

“And with that thick Gaelic that you have, it will be out of the north isles you come?”

“That is a true thing.”

“Now I am for knowing at last who and what you are. You are one of the race of Odrum the Pagan?”

“Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And what is more, I am Angus MacOdrum, Aonghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name I am known by is Black Angus.”

“A fitting name too,” said Colum the Holy, “because of the black sin in your heart, and the black end God has in store for you.”

At that Black Angus laughed.

“Why is the laughter upon you, Man-Seal?”

“Well, it is because of the good company I’ll be having. But, now, give me the word: Are you for having seen or heard of a woman called Kirsteen M’Vurich?”

“Kirsteen—Kirsteen—that is the good name of a nun it is, and no sea-wanton!”

“O, a name here or a name there s soft sand. And so you cannot be for telling me where my woman is?”

“No.”

“Then a stake for your belly, and nails through your hands, thirst on your tongue, and the corbies at your eyne!”

And, with that, Black Angus leaped into the green water, and the hoarse wild laugh of him sprang into the air and fell dead upon the shore like a wind-spent mew.
Colum went slowly back to the brethren, brooding deep. “God is good,” he said in a low voice, again and again; and each time that he spoke there came a daisy into the grass, or a bird rose, with song to it for the first time, wonderful and sweet to hear.

As he drew near to the House of God he met Murtagh, an old monk of the ancient race of the isles.

“Who is Kirsteen M’Vurich, Murtagh?” he asked.

“She was a good servant of Christ, she was, in the south isles, O Colum, till Black Angus won her to the sea.”

And when was that?”

“Nigh upon a thousand years ago.”

“But can mortal sin live as long as that?”

“Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before Oisin sang, before Fionn, before Cuchullin, was a glorious great prince, and in the days when the Tuatha-de-Danann were sole lords in all green Banba, Black Angus made the woman Kirsteen M’Vurich leave the place of prayer and go down to the sea-shore, and there he leaped upon her and made her his prey, and she followed him into the sea.”

“And is death above her now?”

“No. She is the woman that weaves the sea-spells at the wild place out yonder that is known as Earraid: she that is called the seawitch.”

“Then why was Black Angus for the seeking her here and the seeking her there?”

“It is the Doom. It is Adam’s first wife she is, that sea-witch over there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks.”

“And who will he be?”

His body is the body of Angus, the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum, for all that a seal be is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas.”

“Black Judas, Murtagh?”

“Ay, Black Judas, Colum.”

But with that, Ivor Macrae rose abruptly from before the fire, saying that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a seamew that was like a human thing.

So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes and said, “God be with us”; and then I opened the door, and the salt smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness of the night.





THE LOW-LAND

Like other legends deeply rooted in folklore, the Atlantis story may have in it an element of truth. In the shadowy beginnings of human life on earth, primitive men here and there must have had knowledge of the skining of an island or a peninusla, perhaps not twith the dramatic suddenness attributed to Atlantis, but well within the time one man could observe. The witnesses of such a happening would have described it to their neighbors and children, and so the legend of a sinking continent might have been born.

Such a lost land lies today beneath the waters of the North Sea. Only a few scores of thousands of years ago, the Dogger Bank was dry land, but now the fishermen drag their nets over this famed fishing ground, catching cod and hake and flounders among its drowned tree trunks.

During the Pleistocene, when immense quantities of water were withdrawn from the ocean and locked up in the glaicers, the floor of the North SEa emerged and for a time became land. It was a low, wet land, covered with peat bogs; then little by little the forests from the neighboring high lands must have moved in, for there were willows and birches growing among the mosses and ferns. Animals moved down from the mainland. There were bears and wolves and hyenas, the wild ox, the bison, the wooly rhinoeros, and the mammoth. Primitive men moved through the forests, carrying crude stone instruments; they stalked deer and other game and with their flints gurbbed up the roots of the damp forest.

Then as the glaciers began to retreat and floods from the melting ice poured into the sea and raised its level, this land became an island. Proably the men escaped to the mainland before the intervening channel had become too wide, leaving their stone implements behind. But most of the animals remained, perforce, and little by little their island shrank, and food became more and more scarce, but there was no escape. Finally the sea covered the island, claiming the land and all its life.

As for the men who escaped, perhaps in their primitive way they communicated this story to other men, who passed it down to others throughout the ages, until it became fixed in the memory of the race.

None of these facts were part of recorded history unitl, a generation ago, European fishermen moved out into the middle of the North Sea and began to trawl on the Dogger. They soon made out the contours of an irregular plateau nearly as large as Denmark, lying about 60 feet under water. Their trawls immediately began to bring up a great many things not found on any ordinary fishing bank. There were loose masses of peat, which the fisherman christened ‘moorlog.’ There were many bones, and, although the fishermen could not identify them, they seemed to belong ot large land animals. All of these objects damaged the nets and hindered fishing, so whenever possible the fishermen dragged them off the bank and sent them tumbling into deep water. But they brought back some of the bones, some of the moorlog and fragments of trees, and the crude stone implements; these specimens were turned over to scientists to identify. In this strange debris of the fishing nets the scientists recognized a whole Pleistocene fauna and flora, and artifacts of Stone Age man. And they remembering how once the North Sea had been dry land, they reconstructed the story of Dogger Bank, the lost island.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

The Song as Atlantis

From Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us:

As the hidden lands beneath the sea become better known, there recurs again and again the query: can the submerged masses of the undersea mountains be linked with the famed “lost continents”? Shadowy and insubstantial as are the accounts of all such legendary lands -- the fabled Lemuria of the Indian Ocean, St. Brendan’s Island, the lost Atlantis -- they persistently recur like some deeply rooted racial memory in the folklore of many parts of the world.

Best known is Atlantis, which according to Plato’s account was a large island or continent beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Atlantis was the home of a warlike people ruled by powerful kings who made frequent attacks upon the mainlands of Africa and Europe, and finally attacked Athens. However, “with great earthquakes and inundations, in a single day and one fatal night, all who had been warriors {against Greece} were swallowed up. The Island of Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea. Since that time the sea in those quarters has become unnavigable; vessels cannot pass there because of the sands which extend over the site of the buried isle.”

The Atlantis legend has lived on through the centuries. As men become bold enough to sail out on the Atlantis, to cross it, and later to investigate its depths, they speculated about the location of the lost land. Various Atlantic islands have been said to be the remains of a land mass once more extensive. The lonely, wave-washed rocks of St. Paul, perhaps more than any other, have been identified as the remains of Atlantis. During the past century, as the extent of the Atlantic Ridge became better known, speculations were often centered upon this great mass, far below the surface of the ocean.

Unfortunately for these picturesque imaginings, if the Ridge was ever exposed, it must have been a long time before there were men to populate such an Atlantis. Some of the cores taken from the Ridge show a continuous series of sediments typical of ocean oceans, far from land, running back to a period some 60 million years ago. And man, even the most primitive type, has appeared only within the past million years.



SEA HEART

August 19

Perhaps I so sing the sea
because its fundament
tides too deep in me, a
wash of sheer true
blue salinity. My
heart’s music is
a pickle of that sea,
hurling blood to polar
‘'burbs of toes and nose
and back in an essential
exultant pulse,
spasming out the
sea’s receipt,
wombing what returns
in major minor thirds.
The heart of this
matter’s dark, hidden
behind the ribs of
the whale who swims
top to bottom in a
single breath, scaling
hell to heaven’s breadth
in one breech and ebb.
Oh the flukes which
pound in my chest
for the naked testament,
God’s sheer immensity
in those undulant curves
beneath the lace and
satin naughtiness, eyes
of Persephone inside
welcoming thighs
for the Poseidon of
my plunder, as needy
for my hot blue psalms
as I am to fling ‘em
in jots of God-gout fire.
When I read of the sea
I sense my soul’s topography,
drowned down beneath
aged eyes which sail
days in solar, too-bright ways;
the sea is shaped like my
inside brain, the root half
of the tree as equal in
immensity in obverse dark,
peopled with precedent
and totem ancestors --
schools of Jung and
Rilke, mantas wide
as Shakespeare, the Heraclitean
eel fanning over substratum
daddies to far down and
deep and dark to recall
much of a name. The
sea’s abysm is their
darkness on my tongue,
succinct in all I fail to say --
lacunae of the green
lagoon, yawning chasms
of first thought which
lifted in the brains
of us that first
instant off the sea’s nipple
which shaped isolation’s
drool steeple tolling all
the names of what
we lose. Isolde bells
inside the balls I
clabber with bronze peen,
hurtfully clamoring
for the forever fading
view of her upon that beach
no real waves ever reach,
much less cream in
spermatazoic foam.
A singsong nursery fonts
sea water in my brain,
delighting in the trains
of waves which rhymes that
brilliant white shore
of summery orizons,
minting gold from fakey
ores hauled in from
imagined horizons
far sweeter than I
will ever see with these
mortal, moderned eyes.
The sea is the end
of every ecstasy,
my river’s homeward
organum, pouring
lavish down the
pages to hear that
surf’s hurled boom
and ebbing swash
fro which all bliss
is inextricable from
the nature of its loam.
Sea-water, heart’s blood,
blue motions both
eternal, my ever tiding
hand in the chambers
of the heart which
first beat in the sea.
My sea-borne heart
ferries this keeled
casket of a song
directly home to Thee,
sweet master, breasty
ululant of summer
days at the shore
I woke upon when
love poured volumes
into me with just
a fading kiss
and then bid me write
it all back down
till every league
was sounded, till
every wave is rounded
rolled careened & smashed
full here, and all the wild
waters of the heart have
foamed and hissed
and held for this moment
in a perfect caesura of
stilled silence which
is ever the umbilicus
between blue you and I
which no verbs can
measure nor name
final enough may cut
though every sea
will one day dry
and the music from
this mouth will die.




SONG OF THE STRAND

My song is a merman
bereaved of his scales
sitting on a rock
between his sea and
this world we call our own.
He’s crying low
in a sweet-salted voice
for Swinburne’s tides
on a Joycean beach.
For him this pale page
so raw at first light
is hardly a vantage,
for he can dive
three miles down
on the back of a whale
and when Leviathan
falls no further, bid adieu,
and leap all the the way
down beneath abyss
to a merry world
where coral bungalows
are the teeth of
Tiamat’s split jaw.
-- Lost to him now,
my ancient brine captive,
who now lives in this hand
walking a pale white sand,
singing of low mansions
to the ear’s desperate strand.


COLD SONG

Dec. 2003

This song is hauled up from a cold well
Nearby -- Oran’s, I sense, though
His skull is just the topmost phosphor
In the darkened flow. From this chair
In sleepy Florida I taste
The salt of Hebrides -- brutal,
Male, like iron on the tongue, wild
As the huge rollers which smash
The Orkney coast. I tried this sea-
Chantey strapped to a guitar, but
The roar would not be amped or staged
or spermed in nereid blue. All
that puerile wattage drowned the song.
I threw my guitar down a well.
Oran sings from that falling shell.




SONG TO LIR

2005

I’m still in thrall with those bad
old nights. Black fiddles still
saw swoony and fey that
big night music in my reverie;
something lurches when I
recall the thrill of driving headlong
into the darkest rooks of town,
scenting something blonde and
bloodlike in the night breeze rushing
through the opened windows
of my car, the ions of summer
storm and surf igniting my
neural ramparts, like St. Elmo’s
Fire, with the eerie wattage
of danger and booze and sex.
That blue alchemy was the
quintessence of my Faustian
dive into LaLaLand, pouring
myself in votive jolting jets
down into the badassed
veld of all Black Mothers.
Certainly all that is
nothing to fall too much in
love with again, else I fall again
in all those hurtful ways.
Yet in that gnarly bad-booze
brew a crystal bed lay far
down out of view; at the heart
of those dark quests lay the
the hope of finding once again that
bright grail of clear blue love
which in all the years of
roaming and ravening I had
blundered on two or three
too-brief essential times,
each a milky pure enactment
which washed me more
cleaner of my arrears
than when I was baptized in the
sea at Melbourne Beach
when puberty shot me forth.
Perhaps that soft-glo bed
of Perfect Love was just the
golden carrot of a darker
more selfish appetite for More;
I certainly crept out of
far too many beds
at the far ends of those nights
believing Love -- the free-fall,
lucky type -- was nowhere
on that rumpled snoring shore.
All that is true, but these
days another thought begins
to form that the whole of that
gambol between savage lust
and starry love was just the
foolish half I too much believed,
meant by godlike hands whose
ends were mine, as if
my enbrined sense could drink
a goddess night to dregs.
A Puritan error I have so many
drowned fathers to thank, I think.
I come to sense now that while
I dissembled like an Actaon on
down those bad years, ever more
mauled and shredded by my own howls
for love in a wilderness of rock taverns
and boob bars and and bottle clubs,
some darker underside was nursing
from me, not so much from my acts
but the desires which teated them,
growing more visible as a
shape defined up from an
enormous sea which is the greatest
part of me, a whale which grazed
upon on my yearning midnight stare.
While I banged on to ruinous ends
it lurched and followed, devouring
every whiskey bottle, bra and guitar
pick I flung over a shoulder toward
forgetfulness, each a wafer of communion
which slowly woke his soul in mine,
night after night, acre after fathom
of that watery abyss. And then one
night I found us somehow one,
my slipping & sliding & oh so
wounded feet astride his hoary back.
Back then the endless drinking felt
like I had fallen in the whale,
but now I sense that I had just
found a footing there where falling
is the precipice of everything
desire bid me lose. Weirdly too
I sense I’ve yet to hit the real
bottom of that sea, years now
after the last bad boozing night.
There were years in which I
boarded up against all beams
of wet wild night; then years of
reparation for the guilt and shame
by living well and deep. There came
hard education where I learned
that love could not become itself
till I forsook all hope of pouring
it its perfection from a bottle,
babe, and bed. Amid all that
I felt him there, dangerous and
wild, a dark layer of endless
ache which no prayer could
fleece or flay. Now I sense I’m
simply heading deeper as the
two of us swim on. I think
of those old nights and,
with no actual desire to lose
myself in them again, sigh and
swish the liquor of it here,
feasting with stained chops
upon its taste of endlessness,
hauling on huge nipples of
forever-sweeter more, invoking
that blackout in the beast
which parks me on the shore
of Paradise. Yes -- oh feel that
dark immensity lurch deep
within, free and feral in the
deepest nacre of the thrall,
cresting a huge wave in a shower
of moon silver to spume spermatic
fire defiant toward the sky,
crashing down with all the massy
freight of an old, emphatic joy.
And that is just the surface part,
for he dives deeper than what
sight I’ve learned to toss. The limbic
sea he swims on down and back
I will never fully sound, much
know how many million years
he thrusts and fins the verbs.
I’m writing here truly as I’m
riding him, a silly dram
of wakeful ocean on a course
of endless waves, boy cupid
with this tiny flute astride
the night’s Leviathan.
Carve me on the upmost
arch of his coat of arms. Hang
us on the headboard of every
bed I’ve held a woman in.
Carve us on the gravestone
where at last I’m fully wed.
And to every savage fantasy
I hold like whiskey on my tongue,
may his loll like the clabber
which all night bells are rung.





WHALE SONG

2004

Sometimes the song
that guides my hand
arrives from way below,
down where the blue
whale swims, his voice
the deepest register
sea’s brine organum.
His voice under mine
is terrible, the angel
of Jonah and Ahab
who demands more than
short mornings here afford.
It is brutal and cold like
plainsong in my father’s
stone chapel at the
winter solstice, and yet
agelessly sweet like a
blue piano’s kiss.
Such sounds hold in words
only vaguely and at
great cost. I would have
that music pass over me
sitting here in my life
with my wife upstairs asleep
and our cat drinking in
the night air of an opened
window: And yet
such trebles shine
because of his bass clef,
each note of merry
surface bliss
resounding in those
deepest tones which
swim only with the whales,
hurling Thor’s chords
down a thousand-
fathom trench. Poems
inked there drown
their makers, so beware.
Labor carefully
at the organ-pipes
of that lumbering whale.
Go shore to shore
on the highest wings
of his dark hell-booming bell.





LOVE SONG

2004

Before Hurricane Jeanne

Between I and Thou
in the woods and glades
I cannot know
much less sustain
there’s an echo of
Pan-pipes, reedy wet
and high, strange
as every first peramble
into rude terrain:
A song which sighs
I Love You in the air
where you are gone
yet everywhere,
into the hushed lawns
and stormtossed oaks,
the garden just outside
drowned in dark
at this hour long
before first light.
The soft breeze
through the window
is like your breath
in sleep, the intimate
fusions of a far
and unseen surf’s
curve and crash,
tiding perhaps this
small town’s dreams.
My companion to these
lines is neither God
nor you (though surely
both house me here
today and in this life)
but that inside sound
the late night makes
as I sit here
writing down the notes
and stops of a song
which leads me out
down sleepy streets
into a blackened wood
and blacker pools
drummed with starry pelts
and all the women
my life has seen
are dancing round a
stone engraved with
all the fish and coils and
cups I’ve named or
at least loosened here.
Such a strange high
music just outside
the window, prompting
me to egress frar from
where I thought this
poem would go,
the god I thought to
name. Here is where
ends gather and fall
together in a crush
of sweet black grapes:
ah, but whose lips
are glistening with
the juice of our first
kiss? Whose throat
has swallowed whole
this poem which I
brewed from that
bliss? And where
does that sigh I’ll
never fully name
come from, just
when I here end --
Failed words? Her
sleep? That echo
of a dream the
night dances on
with so soft, so
evananescent a breeze
coming from a distant
slowly approaching storm?


THE SONG
HEALS THE SINGER

2005

December 1973: I’m 16 and walking
home from school and work through
New Town on a late afternoon that’s
frozen in the old Chicago way, by
a ferocity more certain in its
hard blue curtaining than death.
The cold seems freighted directly
from the North Pole as I hug
my peacoat tight, hands jammed into
its pockets, a cigarette in my lips
with its tiny bead of fire like a single
orange life-vest lost in a towering
Arctic sea. When I turn right at Fullerton
the wind slaps at me hard like a wolf-
pack sprung with red joy; it mauls and
tears to free the last of heat from me
which I try to shield like a throat.
The light to the west is minted from those
canines, an angry red leaping high at blue
then blacker truths. I could die out here
and no one would care nor even notice
amid the city’s grey decrepitude which
devours whole whatever morsels its
battered citizens provide by failing and
falling hard. Not that much awaits me
at home a few blocks further on, my parents
imploding into an unspoken doom, the
eyes of my siblings too bright with
rage and fear, even the dogs yapping
hysterically at every next wrong sound
coming off the street ten feet from our
front door, sounds we hear and pray
only the safest registers of. I’m walking
there anyway, because where else would
a boy-man like me go? It’s all ending
in the brutal precis of a winter afternoon
very close to the dead end of my sixteenth
year: So why am I just then hearing
Billy Paul’s “Me And Mrs. Jones” in my head?
That sappy Philly soul tune played on
so sweet and tender despite ghetto
arrears which freezes every bud to
stillness on the stem, dooming me
in the end. Stolen love and fragile dreams
which cannot survive another day --
that’s the hottest and most eternal
shaman-puerile flame, and it kept me
walking happily bittersweet on that day
& in fixed in my memory every since,
above the miseries of being 16
in the maul of a Chicago winter, with
neither Jesus nor any bottle of sufficient
proof to poof those dogs away. Like
a choirboy I sang along with that
divine song in my head, thus getting
all of that sweet stuff too. My ears were
burning ice but I still heard the song;
my hands were numb yet ached
to hold my guitar once again; my heart
was empty of any lover’s smile but
was alight on Mrs. Jones smile in that
sad cafe, holding her hand, making up plans.
I burned to write and sing what warmed
that frozen city playing from every
radio and juke in town, creating a music
of my own that boated me spoon-fashion
to that song away from that hard afternoon
down some moony river to this pre-dawn
sub-tropic middle-aging swoon.
I’m still singing bluesy love back
in the face of hard-fought days: Florida
and marriage and a switch from pick
to pen have changed perhaps the singer
but not at all the song; it’s still the
soundtrack of all walks through arctic
fields, delighted to see her once again
albeit in the northern lights of my
conceit splashed upon the page;
thrilled the way she loves me too,
dancing there inside the frozen world
slow and sweetly over all the bones
fallen to the bottom of a life. “Me
And Mrs. Jones” is still in my ear
and I’m still walking that cold road home,
singing along with Your song’s mojo
and singing back my own songs,
getting to every healing inside of
what it means to Get the Girl,
even when love is nowhere to
be found or flung, even when it
freezes to hard ice. Dante harrowed
hell wrappeda in the meters of his song,
the whole passage down the way he
found that heart where Beatrice
waited for him. Whatever I hummed
as a baby I’m still trying to sing here,
her kiss the welcome of each page
I stain in sea-wrack and foam,
still trying to walk those last blocks home.

Michael's Mass

It is said that conditions in the Atlantic change today which croak open the gates of storm for the Southeast. A numbing of the shear which has been lopping off the crowns of fronts. Of late it’s just been hot and still around here, clouds building regnant in the afternoon but not loosening their blue skirts of rain. Driving in to work this morning the wreckage of those storms remain across the sky, rusted gray frigates of cumulus with shattered decks still above the horizon, howitzers aimed at heaven, the occasional numbus catching flares of sunlight like a pentecost whose name has faded from our lips. One season remains, another might approach.

***

This from CG Jung in “The Structure of the Unconscious,” appendix to Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW7, par. 446:

We urge our patients to hold fast to repressed contents that have been re-associated with consciousness, and to assimilate them into their plan of life. But this procedure, as we daily convince ourselves, makes no impression on the unconscious, since it calmly goes on producing apparently the same infantile-sexual fantasies which, according to the earlier theory, should be the effects of personal repressions. If in such cases, the analysis be continued systematically, one uncovers little by little a medley of incompatible wish-fantasies of a most surprising composition. Besides all the sexual perversions one finds every conceivable kind of criminality, as well as the noblest deeds and loftiest ideas imaginable, the existence of which one would never have suspected in the subject under analysis.




MICHAEL’S MASS

August 18

Oh dear Michael, row this coffin
home: The sea is dark and moody,
rough, tit-swole: I can’t find Your
ballast in my less: My hand is
errant, my words hang flaccid
& salt-drippy past my knees:
My compass lies shattered
at the bottom of my dreams:
My best thinking pilots
me here too many thousand miles
from any shore with not a drop
to drink and no horizon at all,
with too much to bail out
out before my ink has writ
the full measure of a
drowning thrall: This morning
it’s too warm and humid, distaffy,
cloyed clotty-dense: A low
off Jacksonville swirls heavy
skies this way which threaten
but cannot pour rain: They’re
like the hands of the old man
hired to primp the nipples of
dancers in the Rue D’Orsay:
Nigh-dead hands cupping
the most gorgeous breasts
in Paris but his bed’s the
empty milkpail kicked over
long ago by fate: Just like
this coffin I sail on,
freighting nothing home:
In love’s name I fill silo
after silo of sweet song
down and down these pages
though no beloved I ever
found can listen in: Oh Michael
desire’s bottomless: No matter
how much rough blood I pour
in my lack’s trough, the
shades keep shimmying back,
perpetually lifting rotted
skirts and braying me back in:
Is it tooth for booty or
truth’s nacre of beauty
which has me savage here
with this empurpled pen
and not a single real
pink proferring on beauty’s
margeless labial sea:
The maid prophesied when
she told my mother
when I was three, Honey,
he ain’t gonna be nuthin’
but a luvah as I fascinated
at the front window the
sight of pretty girls passing
by: I didn’t turn out to
be much of a luvah on
the real end of the score,
though I’ve wilded water
wildernessies here: When I
married I proved a
zeroing force, leaving me
in love and listless, delighting
in the sweetness despite
incessant sexual rind: O I’m
old in this shit, all of it,
the gambols and the gambits
foregone for better days
of sobriety and work and
love, where light is a drydock
and blue the sacral haze
by which I dance round
the moon with pants at
my ankles, huzzahing
spouts of pagan fire
though a tiny prick’s
blasphemous spire:
A mouth up from the grave:
yes, that’s the autonomy
of the rude loud bone,
riven to say over and
over and over here
exactly what I perambled
all those years on nights
I would not could not end
until I breeched some
lady’s bedded bend
and blend and flood:
A maenad horde
of past delights
hurled the poet’s head
into the river’s rend
of tossed delights;
That vatic mouth sung
hard and loud down
time’s maudlin scree,
all the way to Delphi
where the head
lodged rudely next
to the real boss article,
the sacred precinct
of aureolied oracle:
The head brayed
horn-hard fortissimos
of dark truth that
Apollo roused his Python
to shut that piehole up:
Columba buried Oran
to appease a sea god
and get on with things:
But he just had to look
once more his pagan
face and bid his monks
reveal the face of
all that’s lost: That’s
when Oran let him
have it and good
with words from
beneath behind within
the trackless grave,
his truth as unrepentant
and insatiable as this
ever saying pen: Everything
you say about God and
man and heaven and earth
is WRONG, the blue-soaked
skull boomed like waves:
In fact, Oran sd, the way you
say it is is not the way it
is at all: Michael you started
this, you finish things off:
You choired me here inside
surf’s organum: My rapture,
my bliss was all the bait required
to spring the trap when
you leapt and hauled me
laughing into the plash,
deep into this Sidhe-song’s
blue infinity: You began
this rutting triskele, this
three-footed round which
gallops me around the
poles of nowhere and
exhausts the hour
with so much ripe noise
and not a thing quite said:
Not my will by Thine
I pray first on my knees
and through the day,
a pickled man surrender
to his brain’s brine, a salt
so thick I’ll never think
cukelike again: Not
by Providence But Victory
my totem fish-man shouts
from top and bottom
of my dad’s crest: My song
has grown so befuddled
with its tone I can’t tell
which is water and when
it’s merely a tomb’s whine:
Michael you have made my mouth
a sea forever haunting
shores: My hands aren’t oars
though they cry for
more and more verbally
blue dolors, egressing
every sensual door for
the sensate quim which
welcomes then breaks
water over all: If this is
womb then tome me,
Michael, ferry me on home
beyond a poem’s drone;
Call me Ishmael: Call my boat
a pagan’s bourne: Call
these poems halleluhs
or just ripe halloos
but I’m collapsing
on your wings now
father as I hear a
surfside roar: Oh
feral angel who
keeps fucking my
whole history, I’ve
got to start my day:
I can’t ever end this
thing so I’ll just sing
& step down off the
song onto your blue
wings spread below,
here,
now:




The male member and its function appears as the organic symbol of the restoration -- albeit only partial -- of the foetal-infantile sense of union with the mother and at the same time with the geological prototype thereof, existence in the sea.

-- Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality,


ST. MICHAEL AND MANANNAN
based on the drawing by William Blake
of St. Michael binding Satan


October 1995

1. St. Michael to Manannan

He was part of the darkness
that was once my own.
But you bid me rise
so many leagues
that he became
my abandoned depth.
I think of him now
like the amputee
who wakes cupping
a breast in the dream
of a trembling hand.

Once he tried
to drag me home
and we fought halfway
to the bottom of the sea.
As we wrestled
my hair grew white
and his eyes
slit to dragon coals.
The waters
boiled round us
in a terrible swirl,
chasing sea
beasts to the broken
porches of Atlantis.

When I finally
broke his hold
and fettered him
in your chains,
his face sank
the thousand
leagues of grief.
Often these days
I think of him
disappearing into
those silt shadows.
My heart at least
has never been a blade.

You've built your walls
and towers now,
demanding a new
heaven of Gothic stone.
But understand
that each time
I intercede for you
and jam my white
sword in to
the bloody hilt,
an ancient narwhal
suddenly breaks
the sea to pierce
God in the back.


2. Manannan to St. Michael

When the last lock
snapped into
the links of doom
and he rose like
a white sword
to the sky,
I fell into deep
chill moodier
than any fairy spell.
The waters darkened
about me in a cloak
that forever hid
me from your view.

To me you portioned
hoof and horn,
the least parts of
the king's stag.
You paupered
my waves with
cunning boats.
Banished from
the cities to hide in
distant hills and islands,
I became a sleek
captain of absence,
forced to ply my
trade in dream
and sensual smoke.
My gold meadows
blazed to stubbled char.

I understand
that every time
I meet him the white
sword wins all.
Ah, but if you only
understood how those
losses make me strong!
I ripen on a vine that curls
about your sickness,
sorrow and death.

If you would only love
the gall now chilling
into winter, the gates
of my damnation
would forever close.

Perhaps then
the white prince
and I could resume
our song upon that
apple branch
where the fruit is
sweet and cold
and heavy as sleep,
where each bite
fills the mouth with moon,
and the juice runs darkly
down God's uncertain smile
the way eternal lovers
find the greatest grace
exactly where they fail.




THE NINTH WAVE

Fiona McLeod

From Volume II, The Works of Fiona McLeod


... On the last Sabbath, old McAlpin had held a prayer-meeting in his little house in the " street," in Balliemore of Iona. At the end of his discourse he told his hearers that the voice of God was terrible only to the evil-doer but beautiful to the righteous man, and that this voice was even now among them, speaking in a thousand ways and yet in one way. And at this moment, that elfin granddaughter of his, who was in the byre close by, let go upon the pipes with so long and weary a whine that the collies by the fire whimpered, and would have howled outright but for the Word of God that still lay open on the big stool in front of old Peter. For it was in this way that the dogs knew when the Sabbath readings were over; and there was not one that would dare to bark or howl, much less rise and go out, till the Book was closed with a loud, solemn bang. Well, again and again that weary quavering moan went up and down the room, till even old McAlpin smiled, though he was fair angry with Elsie. But he made the sign of silence, and began: " My brethren, even in this trial it may be theAlmighty has a message for us " --when at that moment Elsie was kicked by a cow, and fell against the board with the pipes, and squeezed out so wild a wail that McAlpin, started up and cried, in the Lowland way that he had won out of his wife, "Hoots, havers, an' a! come oot o' that, ye Deil's spunkie!"

So it was this memory that made Padruig and Ivor smile. Suddenly Ivor, began with a long rising and falling cadence, an old Gaelic rune ofthe Faring of the Tide.

Athair, A mhic, A Spioraid Naoimh,
Biodh an Tri-aon leinn, a la's a dh'oidhche;
S'air, chul nan tonn, no air thaobh nam beann!

O Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Be the Three-in-One with us day and night,
On the crested wave, when waves run high!

And out of the place in the West
Where Tir-nan-Og, the Land of Youth
Is, the Land of Youth everlasting,
Send the great Tide that carries the sea-weed
And brings the birds, out of the North:
And bid it wind as a snake through the bracken,
As a great snake through the heather of the sea,
The fair blooming heather of the sunlit sea.

And may it bring the fish to our nets,
And the great fish to our lines:
And may it sweep away the sea-hounds
That devour the herring:
And may it drown the heavy pollack
That respect not our nets
But fall into and tear them and ruin them wholly.


And may I, or any that is of my blood,
Behold not the Wave-Haunter who comes in with the Tide,
Or the Maighdeann-màra who broods in the shallows,
Where the sea-caves are, in the ebb:
And fair may my fishing be, and the of those near to me,
And good may this Tide be, and good may it bring:
And may there be no calling in the Flow, this Srùthmàra,
And may there be no burden in the Ebb! Ochone!

An ainm an Athar, s'an Mhic, s' an Spioraid Naoimh, Biodh an Tri-aon leinn, a la's a dh' oidhche,
S'air chul nan tonn, no air thaobh nam beann!
Ochone! arone!

Both men sang the closing lines with loudly swelling voices and with a wailing fervour which no words of mine could convey.

Runes of this kind prevail all over the isles, from the Butt of Lewis to the Rhinns of Islay: identical in spirit, though varying in lines and phrases, according to the mood and temperament of the rannaiche or singer, the local or peculiar physiognomy of nature, the instinctive yielding to hereditary wonder-words, and other compelling circumstances of the outer and inner life. Almost needless to say, the sea-maid or sea-witch and the Wave-Haunter occur in many of those wild runes, particularly in those that are impromptu. In the Outer Hebrides, the runes are wild natural hymns rather than Pagan chants; though marked distinctions prevail there also-for in Harris and the Lews the folk are Protestant almost to a man, while in Benbecula and the Southern Hebrides the Catholics are in a like ascendancy. But all are at one in the common Brotherhood of Sorrow.

The only lines in Ivor McLean's wailing song which puzzled me were the two last which came before "the good words," in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit," etc.

"Tell me, in English, Ivor," I said, after a silence, wherein I pondered the Gaelic words, " what is the meaning of--

'And may there be no calling in the Flow, this Srùthmàra,
And may there be no burden in the Ebb?'"

" Yes, I will be telling you what is the meaning of that. When the great tide that wells out of the hollow of the sea, and sweeps toward all the coasts of the world, first stirs, when she will be knowing that the Ebb is not any more moving at all, she sends out nine long waves. And I will be forgetting what these waves are: but one will be to shepherd the sea-weed that is for the blessing of man, and another is for to wake the fish that sleep in the deeps, and another is for this, and another will be for that, and the seventh is to rouse the Wave-Haunter and all the creatures of the water that fear and bate man, and the eighth no man knows, though the priests say it is to carry the Whisper of Mary, and the ninth--"

" And the ninth, Ivor?"

" May it be far from us, from you and from me and from those of us! An' I will be sayin' nothing against it, not I; nor against anything that is in the sea! An' you will be noting that!

" Well, this ninth wave goes through the water on the forehead of the tide. An' wherever it will be going it calls. An' the call of it is, ' Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow! . . . Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!' 1


An' whoever hears that must arise and go, whether he be fish or pollack, or seal or otter, or great skua or small tern, or bird or beast ofthe shore, or bird or beast of the sea, or whether it be man or woman or child, or any of the others."

" Any of the others, Ivor? "

" I will not be saying anything about that," replied McLean, gravely; " you will be knowing well what I mean, and if you do not it is not for me to talk of that which is not to be talked about.

[1 Ivor, of course, gave these words in the Gaelic, the sound of which has the strange wail of the sea in it.]


" Well, as I was for saying: that calling of the ninth wave of the Tide is what Ian-Mòr of the hill speaks of as 'the whisper of the snow that falls on the hair, the whisper of the frost that lies on the cold face of him that will never be waking again."'

" Death? "

" It is you that will be saying it.

" Well," he resumed after a moment's hush, " a man may live by the sea for five score years and never hear that ninth wave call in any Srùth-màra, but soon or late he will bear it. An' many is the Flood that will be silent for all of us: but there will be one Flood for each of us that will be a dreadful Voice, a voice of terror and of dreadfulness. And whoever hears that Voice, he for sure will be the burden in the Ebb."

" Has any heard that Voice, and lived?

McLean looked at me, but said nothing. Padruig Macrae rose, tautened a rope, and made a sign to me to put the helm alee. Then, looking into the green water slipping by--for the tide was feeling our keel, and a stronger breath from the sea lay against the hollow that was growing in the sail--he said to Ivor:

"You should be telling her of Ivor MacIvor mhic Niall."

"Who was Ivor MacNeil?" I said.

"He was the father of my mother," answered McLean, " and was known throughout the north isles as Ivor Carminish, for he had a farm on the eastern lands of Carminish which lie between the hills called Strondeval and Rondeval, that are in the far south of the northern Hebrides, and near what will be known to you as the Obb of Harris.

" And I will now be telling you about him in the Gaelic, for it is more easy to me, and more pleasant for us all.

" When Ivor MacEachainn Carminish, that was Ivor's father, died, he left the farm to his elder son and to his second son, Seumas. By this time, Ivor was married, and had the daughter who is my mother. But he was a lonely man, and an islesman to the heart's core. So . . . but you will be knowing the isles that lie off the Obb of Harris-the Saghay, and Ensay, and Killegray, and farther west, Berneray and, north-west, Pabaidh, and beyond that again, Shillaidh? "

For the moment I was confused, for these names are so common: and I was thinking of the big isle of Berneray that lies in huge Loch Roag that has swallowed so great a mouthful of Western Lewis, to the seaward of which also are the two Pabbays, Pabaidh Mòr and Pabaidh Beag. But when McLean added," and other isles of the Caolas Harrish " (the Sound of Harris), I remembered aright; and indeed I knew both, though the nor' isles better, for I had lived near Callernish on the inner waters of Roag.

" Well, Carminish had sheep-runs upon some of these. One summer the gloom came upon him, and he left Seumas to take care of the farm and of Morag his wife, and of Sheen their daughter; and he went to live upon Pabbay, near the old castle that is by the Rua Dune on the southeast of the isle. There he stayed for three months. But on the last night of each month he heard the sea calling in his sleep; and what he heard was like 'Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow . . . Come away, co e away, the sea waits! Follow!' And he knew the voice of the ninth wave; and that it would not be there in the darkness of sleep if it were not already moving toward him through the dark ways of An Dàn (Destiny). So, thinking to pass away from a place doomed for him, and that he might be safe elsewhere, he sailed north to a kinsman's croft on Aird-Vanish in the island of Taransay. But at the end of that month he heard in his sleep the noise of tidal waters, and at the gathering of the ebb he heard

' Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!' Then once more, when the November heat-spell had come, he sailed farther northward still. He stopped a while at Eilean Mhealastaidh, which is under the morning shadow of high Griomabhal on the mainland, and at other places, till he settled, in the third week, at his cousin Eachainn MacEachainn's bothy, near Callernish, where the Great Stones of old stand by the sea, and hear nothing forever but the noise of the waves of the North Sea and the cry of the sea-wind.

" And when the last night of November had come and gone, and he had heard in his sleep no calling of the ninth wave of the Flowing Tide, he took heart of grace. All through that next day he went in peace. Eachainn wondered often with slant eyes when he saw the morose man smile, and heard his silence give way now and again to a short, mirthless laugh.

" The two were at the porridge, and Eachainn was muttering his Buich-eas dha'it Ti, the Thanks to the Being, when Carminish suddenly leaped to his feet, and, with white face, stood shaking like a rope in the wind.

" ' In the name of the Son, what is it, Ivor mhic Ivor? What is it, Carminish?' cried Eachainn..

" But the stricken man could scarce speak. At last, with a long sigh, he turned and looked at his kinsman, and that look went down into the shivering heart like the polar wind into a crofter's hut.

" ' What will be that? ' said Carminish, in a hoarse whisper.

" Eachainn listened, but he could hear no wailing beann-sith, no unwonted sound.

" ' Sure, I hear nothing but the wind moaning through the Great Stones, an' beyond them the noise of the Flowin' Tide. '

" ' The Flowing Tide! The Flowing Tide! ' cried Carminish, and no longer with the hush in the voice. 'An' what is it you hear in the Flowing Tide?'

" Eachainn looked in silence. What was the thing he could say? For now he knew.

" Ah, och, och, ochone, you may well sigh, Eachainn mhic Eachainn! For the ninth wave o' the Flowing Tide is coming out o' the North Sea upon this shore, an' already I can hear it calling, ' Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow! . . . Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!'

And with that Carminish dashed out the light that was upon the table, and leaped upon Eachainn, and dinged him to the floor and would have killed him but for the growing noise of the sea beyond the Stannin' Stones o' Callanish, and the woe-weary sough o' the wind, an' the calling, calling, 'Come, come away! Come, come away!'

" And so he rose and staggered to the door, and flung himself out into the night, while Eachainn lay upon the floor and gasped for breath, and then crawled to his knees, an' took the Book from the shelf by his fern-straw mattress, an' put his cheek against it, an' moaned to God, an' cried like a child for the doom that was upon Ivor Maclvor mhic Niall, who was of his own blood, and his own fosterbrother at that.

" And while he moaned, Carminish was stalking through the great, gaunt, looming Stones of the Druids, that were here before St. Colum and his Shona came, and laughing wild. And all the time the tide was coming in, and the tide and the deep sea and the waves of the shore and the wind in the salt grass and the weary reeds and the black-pool gale made a noise of a dreadful hymn, that was the death-hymn, the going-rune, of Ivor the son of Ivor of the kindred of Niall.

" And it was there that they found his body in the grey dawn, wet and stiff with the salt ooze. For the soul that was in him had heard the call of the ninth wave that was for him. So, and may the Being keep back that hour for us, there was a burden upon that Ebb on the morning of that day.

" Also, there is this thing for the hearing. In the dim dark before the curlew cried at dawn, Eachainn heard a voice about the house, a voice going like a thing blind and baffled,

'Cha till, cha till, cha till mi tuille!
I return, I return, I return never more!