My history mystery book

Follow your bliss: That’s the dictum, the mantra, the scripture pinned to the back of a diving whale. I’m ever searching for that clear blue space I emerged from as a child and have fleetingly and hauntingly re-entered at wyrd moments of a life which seems to bear the linear lineaments of a tale but is far too circular, too polytonal and deviously rhythmic for anything so literal.

Follow your bliss: I first reentered it in a girl-woman’s smile, waking after a night of first love: I had been dreaming that I was floating far at sea on a shatteringly clear summer day, free free free free free, feeling a baptismal cleanliness, my dark lonely self-imprisoned chill disptached in one still-strange woman’s simple, late-night, somewhat drunken Yes, whispered to me for reasons which to this day I do not fully understand, not in the light of which soon would cause her to forever disappear, leaving me to wander a deserted beach calling her name in every surfside bar. ...

Follow your bliss. Is bliss ecstasy, or is it the dream of it? Do we fail to find it because we grow addicted to the semblance it once wore? Is the path we call our vocation a deified version of the conch from which we first hear the sea whisper, like a chapel by the sea? Is every post, every poem another attempt to name that presence which is so achingly absent wherever we seek, like St. Oran boating in search of Manannan, only to find on each next island a note scrawled in the sand: Not Here ...

Some bliss wrote that note, and each note is a page from a book that was written long ago and tossed into the depths of our hearts.

In Bryan Sikes’ Saxons, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland, where he makes the case that local folklore has actually proved a reliable way to dowse the leys of history using DNA testing, finds that book (again, as I have noted it turning up on other shores in previous posts)

“The origin of the myth ((of Arthur)) was a quite brilliant work of creative imagination by a Welsh cleric, Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in 1138. The History of The Kings of Britain has everything an origin myth should have. It is full of heroic deeds, terrible battles, black treachery, and is woven with just enough threads of authenticity to be taken seriously. It even had its own mysterious source -- a book (never discovered), written in the British language, which told of the lives of the ancient British kings from Brutus, the first, to Cadwallader the last, given to Geoffrey by a mysterious archdeacon, named Walter, in Oxford where he wrote the History.”

Was the book of my bliss written long ago, or do I write it anew, rediscovering it here, in this very next sentence? An interesting toil, this excavation of rapture’s tombs, this next adventure to that crashing shore where I found and she waits ...


MY HISTORY’S MYSTERY BOOK

August 31

This Book by which I came to
know my secret’s history
was handed to me by
a mistral of the sea, a sleek
selkie inside my mother’s voice
when she minstrelled over me
on that beach where I begin.
By that poured tome’s authority
do I now rant and rhyme,
writing on the shoulders
of a giant whose voice
strides shore to booming shore.
His knowledge arms and appetite
are so vast that the wildest
waters in the sayable world
merely ape the margins of
the song he teaches me,
line after line after line.
My job’s to write full down
that text in blueballed majescule
before the tide of history --
mine, his, ours, Yours --
surrounds this salty psalter
and hauls it back to doom,
returned to that brine
library where all Your
lectors leer and frown
in the peerage of drowned bones.
No one has ever read aloud
the full measure of my Book;
its last page is the final shore
I pray and fear to reach,
that bedded billow of first light
where my Beloved waits
to hear love’s first unbroken song.
The whole sea’s at her feet
from first to final wave,
and in singing to her here
at least at last one day
I’ll get to the last line of
that book; and in ending
band the marriage ring
which cycles this immrama song
through every round and
swale conceived in the
beloved womb of God.
Who first wrote a book
bound it to the flukes of
a whale and bid it shelve
down every league in hell.
Who now opens it? I do,
or He in me; I’m just
the latest author
to exhume a sacred history,
that long-lost mystery
whose ruined pages
silt our day. A sea-borne
voice -- my mother’s, His bride’s --
told me long ago about
that blue bound book,
and bid me seek
it under all the nooks
I could chase or
drink or name -- beds
in whiskey bottles,
all that swims under
those sweet curved bottoms,
beyond farewelling bournes,
upwelling from shut doors --
And that’s what
I’ve done here, page
after luckless oh so
fruitful page,
a full frontal explication
of the backyard beachside
ecstasy. And see!
The book now stretches
far back and beyond,
a tale whose flukes
are surely flailing
down the dark main
of His bride’s blue telling.


WHO WROTE THE
BOOK OF LOVE?

2004

“Here, here,” she whispered low, “here on my mouth
The swallow, Love, hath found his haunted South.”

-- Fiona Macleod, from “The Love-Kiss of Dermid and Grainne”

What a library, what a boneyard,
what a daunting reliquary of
love’s fallen saints have
assembled here upon
the back of the whale
who is also my unfreighting
for this next, still-latent,
wilding blue day! Just who
wrote the Book of Love
while I careered careening
at its hinged door, desperate
to both gain the sanctum
of as well remit its lascivious
warmth which tides
a thousand leagues below
all mouths? Ah the incessant
scribe of that dread south
with his scaly, fishlike pen,
composing polyphones of
scripture upon the
backs of brutal waves!
I recall that bad winter
a generation gone
when I poured booze
like freezing rain
upon my broken heart,
breaking it worse into
a cruel shatter of
mannish shards, glints
of ice, of hot abyss
which lured a tribe of
women to my bed
to sup the dregs
from a devilish
chalice. What words,
what wild exchanges
transpired there between
the underwateriest waves
of bad love? I don’t recall,
I was drunk and bleeding
from the thousand holes
I’d harpooned in my soul,
desperate to cauterize
the mess between whatever
woman’s breasts I could
release in the furthest
wasteland of that night,
my prone shape the
howling hollow acre
between those waves
a woman prays to wed.
That awful majescule
was writ those nights
in a madman’s bellicose
tongue, unharnessed,
unequivocal, a jabber
translating passion into
spermy schools of
of blinded fish. Love, what
an infernal pen you wielded
in my groping hand, the words
like horned cudgels
pounding shores so cliffed
no man could hope
to breach, much less sound.
The songs of angels
are distilled from such abyss,
their blue arias woven
from frantic black wings.
The Book of Love is
a weighty one, and sure
to drown that ship
which tries to freight
more than a page, two fins,
three words further south
than her softest mouth
that smiled but never
said a thing, much less
my name, while leaving
me for good. Not every
chapter since has been
so dark or riven -- most
actually have been good,
even merry -- but the
weight and depth of
the manuscript was
born in the hairy wood
of my most errant nights,
the sweetness of
whatever cream I cull
poured directly from
that older scream
that lingered in the
still, Siberian night
at the bottom of all seas
where I roamed and
cried your name
inside so many women’s
bodies, my voice
a Borealis -- the
greeny choler of the
hurtful scholar writing
far below the page I
dare to write,
rider of the rogue wave
which comes from nowhere
and knows only the
sound of smashing shores,
the recede at last to you.


MY BOOK OF WILD BLUE WONDERS

2005

My little book of wild blue wonders
is writing itself down long after
the voyage in which I found You
and endless foundered through,
My Cape of noctilucent seas.
Back then I was too in thrall
with Your fever and fret
to do much else than tie myself
to the mast and let the waves
mass through, each an
apocalypse of futile desire,
its force and drench and angel
of such brute amplitude as to
send me reeling down the
hundred leagues of doom.
Again and again I sailed out
to prow those curving walls,
surmounting crests of vicious
foam to crash on down
glassy backs and hurtle
into troughs of pure abyss,
the face staring back at me in
those deeps my own and Death’s
a caricature of bone write blue
by puerile awfulness. After
years of such sturm und drang
I travailled on to calmer seas,
but the smash and howl
of those rough nights formed
a strata in my years, a bass
clef if you will, which tide
on darkly in words I came to write
on mornings such as this,
the outer life becalmed and fine,
the inner one a drowned Cape
where all that big night music
went down down down to
silt the nougat of my heart
I tried to find so wantonly
inside a woman’s Yes.
Here at this quieter hour
of a deadened, sleepy world,
the waterworks are still
hammering the weird wattage
of that thrall, confined to
a chicken scratch across
and down the page. Each
song’s a thundrous fall of
nights long dead to me,
rehearsing in brute cerebration
the awe those wild winging seas.


BLUE BOOK

2005

Each day I write a poem to
press in Your blue book,
my salt scrivener, so that
angel brogue of wildest seas
may once again be
heard inside pale days.
That’s all. In my dream I
found glass cabinet in a lost
corridor of a pressroom,
the metal frame long oxidized
by salt & the glass almost
blurred from all the years of
ink hurled from this pen.
Inside I saw upon a shelf
three shapes of glass, chalices
or hurricane lamps or glass
reliquaries like miniature
cathedrals. All of it is
worth saving here, each
a host, a wave, a belfry.
Yesterday started with every
engine of spring at full pour
with warm sun and breezes
suggesting something more
as I planted salvia and pentas
and kalanchoe in the garden,
my hands happiest to sing
in dirt without the pen.
The front came through
quickly and by one p.m.
I was hurrying in the last
plants in full rain with
thunder cracking overhead.
My wife cursing in the back
yard, all her painting
projects spoiled. Later
that afternoon I was
in my study typing in the
day’s poem when my wife
walked up behind to mock
what I’d just said; I turned
and grabbed her as she
giggled and fought to get
away & I buried my face
in her breasts biting on
a hardened nipple which
surpised us both. Some
Godawful Christian concert
somewhere in town, a singer’s
operatic steeple yowling
“How Great Thou Art”
so loud I could barely
feed the cats on the
back porch. My wife went
to bed early, zonked
on a PM sinus pill &
me joining her not long
after to our bedroom
blue with hard moonlight,
our Siamese curled into
my wife’s behind & purring
loudly as I petted her
and my wife, listening
to the sounds of Saturday
night near and far, voices
from a neighbor’s house
talking about something
indistinct and further
out some party music
weaving in faint roars
of cars and cycles
seeped in testosterone.
All of it liquifying &
draining down into
those glass vessels I
praise here in the last
lines of this poem
which is Yours to publish
in Your book or feed it
to the fish in abysses
far below or feather that
angel’s wing that will
fly when I am done.

Where You End and I Begin

Well, as storms go, Ernesto was a psych-out, a fake, a fulminous fraud, swirling wide and wild with nothing much packed in his chinos. It was grey but dry for most of the day, the storm (moping down to a tropical depression) veering east and easter, heading off into the Atlantic near Melbourne. A single wild band of storms on my WeatherGenie radar around 3:30 p.m. (with news of a tornado touching down in Osecola county) got me into my car and driving home to Lake County, anxiously ahead of what turned out, in our western locus, to be a steady pissing into the night, enough to soak the garden (and how it needs it!) but prove the most vacuous ghost of Katrina one could imagine.

But maybe then that was the point, its purpose, his porpoising ...

***

Yes, the interface between I and Thou is imaginary, or rich in the imagination: Ernesto’s fact fonts a greater truth in Ernesto’s wilder intimations, in the awe and awfulness housed in the sea-side storm-chapel mortared between my ears. What is that line between real and imagined Ernesto? Did I draw it? Did He, the brooding salt master deep in my ear who loves a good storm-tale? (Recently I’ve relished reading stories of boats winding round Cape Horn, that lowest latitude of endurance in the face of the most malevolent seas in the world. Where does my pen end and his begin?

Collective and individual -- whose work is here? Jung goes into this question:

***

With regard for individual psychology, however, science must waive its claims, To speak of a science of individual psychology is already a contradiction in terms, It is only the collective element in the psychology of an individual that constitutes an object for science; for the individual is by definition something unique that cannot be compared with anything else. ...

... We must rigorously separate the concept of the individual from that of the persona; for the persona can be entirely dissolved in the collective. But the individual is precisely that which can never be merged with the collective and is never identical with it. That is why identification with the collective, and voluntary segregation from it are alike synonymous with disease.

It is simply impossible to effect a clear division of the individual from the collective, and even if it were possible it would be quite pointless and valueless for our purpose. It is sufficient to know that the human psyche is both individual and collective, and that its well-being depends on the natural co-operation of these two apparently contradictory sides. Their union is essentially an irrational life process that can, at most, be described in individual cases, but can neither be brought about, nor understood, nor explained rationally.

-- CG Jung, “Fundamental Principles in the Treatment of Collective Identity,” in the appendix to CW9, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,, pars. 484-6 passim.

(An Editors’ note was added to the final paragraph: “This paragraph, though included in the earliest draft of the German MS, was omitted from the earlier French and English translations”).

***

Well, to my question the archetypologist throws up his hands, crying, “doncha love it?”




OUR FATHERS’ SHORE

August 28

My story is not unique -- I’m just
another sea-brined skull bumping
‘bout the pickle tub -- So some
of it may also seem part of your own.
I’ve always had a hard time telling
where my father ends and I begin;
that beach has always been drenched
in a confusing surf of Your will and mine.
His voice, his words, his stature
towered over mine, as if I was born
to stand in his great shadow, terrified
to step out, enthralled with whatever
flooded up and through him roared
right on through me as a power
I could neither leverage nor
sanely protect myself from.
I wanted to measure up to him
as a kid but that was futile,
howlingly cruel: I was just
a fat smartypants who mouthed
off his brains in class & getting
clobbered during recess by a
world always meaner & stronger
than my words. Perhaps if I had
been an angry boy I might have
clobbered back, swinging some
big ass bat right at the knees of
the potency I lacked: But I was
born a singing boy in love with
pretty girls passing by, my birthmark
a heart with an arrow through it
high up my right breast. All that
swoon was too rich for righteous
waters, so I just stood my ground
inside my heart’s slow drown.
I might have hollered back
at my father for all he wished
of me but would not take
the time or care to teach
me in any substantial enough way
the world cares much about, but
how could I? He was too
damn successful for conflict,
at least he never showed it
anywhere in that smiling face.
Those awful woes he had
with my mother were kept
behind their closed doors,
ever out of hearing by us kids,
by my knowing too. Around
my outward impotence
I raised the inward fist,
wreaking my vengeance on
an ugly kid no girl would kiss.

II.

My father did show me my
liquor in my high school years;
the backyard Scotch towards
the end of another weary day
became our ritual, he smoking
his pipe, me my Kools, talking
about all the truths that make
us bleed so deep. His truths, I
should say, for he was Mouth
and I his Ear, his voice pouring
all a midaged wounded man
salves with Scotch & a son
too young yet for real company.
What troubles, what cares did
I have to talk about that measured
as rich & subtle as that hootch-talk
he brogued? The girl in class
I was so hopelessly bent on?
My flagging faith? The question
of adulthood which was falling on
me like a black angel out of
Chicago’s fallen sky, through which
too few stars could burn, much
less compass the right road
to depart on? So I just drank
that Scotch and listened
to all that dark talk as my
parent’s marriage busted for
the last time and my mother
and two younger siblings moved
away and the rest of us drank like
drowning fish for a summer before
I flew off to school. Oh I was full of
him by then, so full there wasn’t
much room for the Christian God
anymore, not much room for much
else than that fell imperative
to live as strong and tall and
sure as he whose fall closed over me.


III.

When I got to college, it became
a more wounded thing, me drinking
alone at night listening to the echoes
of my father’s voice and me trying
so ineptly to say something back
in my journal or on my guitar,
though mostly it stayed ringing
in my ear, a din I smothered with
sixpacks of beer. The space under
my bed became an aluminum
boneyard of my woes, all those
empties clattering as I shoved
new ones inside. My future
designs were cartoonish,
a pastiche of Bond
and Roethke and Jimmy Page,
leaping all the way from my
cig-thick beery dorm room
onto the big stages of the world,
a love poem so rocknroll
capable as to ejaculate
my true visage in the world
with the loudest power chord
ever struck by a man,
causing every girl in the chorus
of night to sing in high
harmony Yes Yes and More.
You see, his shadow was so damn
big over my shoulder that I
thought I had to stand that tall.
How I cursed my lame attempts
and standing up at all -- so shy
everywhere, my poems juvenile,
my guitar licks drunken and
clumsy: For one who must
stand tall, what remarked those
years was how far in dreams
there is to fall, abysm after
abysm, as if my height was
bottomless, no floor low
enough to stop my downward thrall.

IV.

I thought that was my father
over my shoulder: But all those
years I floundered in the cold
sea of a son’s own shadow, my
father was blundering with
his own, with leaving his
family to live openly gay,
with leaving cities and
the politics of man, with
entering the wilderness
of a stranger relation with
a being who called himself
the Guardian of the North Wind.
The second half of his life irrupted
on Iona in 1977 when he walked
the island on a dreamy spring day
and laydown on Dun Mannanan
on the north end (up the Road of
Souls past the abbey): And saw
him there, huge and ugly, misshapen
as a boulder carved in
Hebridean maul, as old as the
Earth perhaps: a fundament or
archetype, the bottom roar of
the windiest soul. My father
couldn’t tell where dream
ended and encounter began
-- in all his retellings, the
locus is vague, all awash,
perplex, preternaturally serene.
So he had his own work to do
too, trying in his fifties to
lift 20-ton stones on his
mountain-dale land and
make that being’s words stand.


V.

In my twenties I took up
a big field-scythe & swung it
cross the balls I thought were his
crowding out my every thought,
playing rock n roll & trying
desperately to nail every
womanish numen in the night.
But as I look back I see how
much I remained his wife, my
brain of womb teeming with
the fishes of a vast old totem,
father after father, much further
down than any son could sire,
much less further, without
a hell of a lot of floundering
and blundering and damage
left and right. I was my father’s
bitch, yes, my ear aswarm
with all the verbs he poured in me;
but he was gay for that big lug
who sounded a cathedrally low
tone from the grave-dirt of our
house. He fared no better
than I, though both of us
tried dearly to man that crashing
shore where He portends what
we begin in all our ends.
Me, my father, his father,
his father’s father -- we all
tried in far different ways
to chaff our sinew from
the far larger meat of a
tall man who stands under
and behind us all.
We fail we fail we fail we fail
and still we try, rending
and mending that dark blue man
who joins You to our shadowed dreams.



HARVEST

2002

I.

During that summer
in Pennsylvania—a
bridge between first
love and long winter—
I scythed a field
behind my father’s house.

The field was ringed
by oak and beech
and maple, puritans
all of wild nature.
Over us the sun
wrote hyperboles
of desire, lathering
us in its swoon.

I loved the motions
of faux harvest,
lifting high that
long blade, carving
off a shank of sun
before sweeping down
in a muscular arc
through shin-high
tapers of weed.

Each return of
the blade seemed
to reach for the
woman I’d lost,
sweeping into the
void she’d driven
off into: But the
blade returned naked
into the bright air
with a long, lonely swish.

Working down the field
I recalled how she smiled
as we stood over the Spokane
River, the spring runoff
pounding chords into mist.
How all that rose to
a hammering release
and then floated
for miles in a drowse.

All lost. I could have made
of that scythe a tillage,
clearing away love’s ruin
to plant something good,
at least useful; maybe
learn something, too.
I was for that hour good
and simple, poised to begin:

But I wasn’t ready to let go
what I’d had lost. I was
too young and stewed
in the sun’s bullish ire.
I mowed that field down
to summer’s end,
set scythe in the barn,
then boarded a train headed
West to find her again.


II.

On a cold autumn night
hedged by the striate
foliage of pot and speed
and booze, I picked up
a guitar and plugged
into a riverish roar.
I loved the weight
of that Fender Strat,
a heftier blade, equine
and amped, cranked to
the berserkeries of love.

What did I know? I was
far afield in foolish ends,
caught in a big night music
which screamed to the
nadir of her. Each swing
of that guitar at song’s
end hauled a sickle moon
down through loud falls
as hard as I could,
arcing back fever-bright
with the ghost of her smile.

Gone, but not lost.
It took me the worst years
to get back to those weeds.
To welcome emptiness
as a field you could scythe.
To celebrate the motions
which complete every kiss,
harvesting what falls
in that long, lonely,
brilliant swish.


032403


PATERNALS

20003


Each morning I begin
on my knees praying
Thy Will Not Mine:
I am about my Father’s
business then, but
He has many trades,
and I’m not sure
which to be about.
My own father
at my age was
clearing acreage
& building a chapel
& raising 20 ton
stones in deference
to some ferally
cold instinct inside
a memory of Iona:
This morning I read
in Fiona McLeod’s
Iona about a man
of that island
with a passion for
a seal in which
he seemed borne
or cursed or
fathered: That tone
is my tune,
those sea-songs
I mean, salty rollers
I ride jolly roger
butt naked on: The
silliest bouree of all
which I have sacrificed
years of sleep for:
That same beckoning
wave I was baptized
in 30 years ago,
replete with the high
and low blessings
of what I call God:
The work I carry on
here is my father’s
and his demi-fathers,
well-work,
buckets of seal-cold
waters hauled up
from a sea
“sweepin’ white an’
ghostly through
the moonlit nights”:
I’m laboring
in my salt mines
too early because
there is so much
to bring up: I mean
so much has been
thrown down there
over the years that
I’m soul-constipated,
jammed to the gut
with memories
dreams & reflections,
myth & mysteries,
lions & tigers & bears
Oh My: Bra-cups
& guitar picks,
wads of Kleenex,
Bibles & bottles,
spent pens &
poems & spleen
of the ages & ages
& ages: Chartres
and Corco Duibne,
Hell Castle and
Club Meds: My
crazy father slow-
dancing with Thor
of the North Wind,
a cloistered embrace
embowering the
caresses I soon
lavish on my wife:
What’s a son to do
but explicate the sea
bucket by curragh
by skull by testicle,
my thousand sons
floating off to you
in these rickety
paper boats,
their sails lifted
by a thousand
fathers’ breaths:

***

The stories of the Titans are about gods who belong to such a distant past that we know them only from tales of a particular kind and only a exercising a particular function. The name Titan has, since the most ancient times, been deeply associated with the divinity of the Sun, and seems originally to have been the supreme title of beings who were, indeed, celestial gods, but gods of very long ago, still savage and subject to no laws. We did not regard them as being in any way worthy of worship; with the single exception, perhaps, of Kronos; and with the exception also of Helios, if we identify the latter with the wilder, primordial Sun-God. The Titans were gods of a sort that have no function except in mythology. Their function is that of the defeated: even when they win seeming victories -- before the stories come to their inexorable conclusion. These defeated ones bear the characteristics of ancestors whose dangerous qualities appear in their posterity.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

***

THE VILLAS OF HELIOS

10/08/05

There are fathers so ancient
only their shoulders remain
on the coasts, grey and worn,
that and all of their sunlight.
Their sons are men of obscene
power and wealth who keep
building villas of Helios,
off Ibizia and Mustique and
Villefranche-sur-Mer,
immense brilliant porticos
grander than the glittering tableau
of blue seas and skies, jewels
big enough to drown a nereid
not destined to be queen.
Their yachts are huge, they
freight enormous testicles
which hang just below the
waterline, ever on the
verge of exploding into Europa.
The men smile like boys
with teeth brilliant
as the bleached sands, aging
men with greased dark hair
and loosening bellies. They
smile full of the contempt
and arrogance of every
old father they burnt in
lust for their mothers.
Their women are
so dazzling they seem to lounge
not on chairs but the half-shell,
miracles of flesh and composure,
their naked breasts staring
back at the paparazzis like
Medusae, staring coolly
straight into the face of the sun.
Roman pillars quarried from
Northern Italy still stand
by the pool overlooking it all,
forelocks of those miserable
first men who raged and
rampaged and fell, utterly,
to uteral dooms. These sons
are so godlike their aristocrat
world exists off all the known
maps, beyond every sea to salt
the likes of you or me.
And like their shameful
ancestors, they don’t even
know it. They prate on cellphones
and wave off children. Their
eyes are blank as they scratch
at crossword puzzles in silken
cabanas which partake of them
more than they ever will of them.
No, they’ll never quite get it
that the starry infinitude of
their gold is chump change down
below where the only wealth
that matters is what’s piled
in the ruins, stripped from
the corpses as they float round
down the gullet of drowned
Helios, delicates of clout
Dis shits in abyss.
No matter: the wine today
is indescribably
smooth--a vintage of
vineyards more than three
thousand years old--and
the married sister of
his wife is smiling
back from the pool, her
eyes all of Europe's stepping
not safely to shore, oh
so ravishingly blue,
her breasts at the waterline
burning above with
every shadow of wickedness
below out of view. She’s
every shore worth assaulting,
every other man’s sworn bride
like heavy fruit for the taking.
The whole outrage of this single
sea day was baked in visage
of Helios so very long ago:
Nothing can stop him now,
ever, though he’s falling
ever back down. Atreus,
Medici, Rothschild, DeLaurentis,
with all of the bankers between,
having bought their world
and now fully in its leisure,
in Tuscan palaces of burning white
pleasure, pure testes, hammered gold,
bright gouts of red wine
spilled over and over on the
grave of wild Helios,
spots which never quite dry,
being sons themselves
of the sun which never dies.


SONS OF STARRY URANOS

10/09/05

Sons will have their mothers
come hell’s every ball-high-water,
that flood unleashed by
one swipe of a hoar grey sickle
by which all mothers bid
their son replace old noctal
passions with the new.
Thus ages succeed each other
in motherly vengeance
and a child’s guilt-soggy greed,
bridged by cruel inventions
and newer rapt conceptions,
lesser powers, greater gains,
puerile gambols, ungartered rains.
And old dads never die,
their roar of outrage unfading
in the thunders which ejaculate
new dooms, the risen nippled
Venus wave-stepping on each
bedded shore with such graceful
fuckability you sense his
ancient ardor in every evil
lash she bats. Her smile is so
slight, so devious, barely
concealing in its demure
so hesitant upcurve
the massive cock
and balls within which
alchemized salt water
into pure empyriea,
fire water thieved from
the Maker of all fires.
Her eyes are filled
with his incessant drive
to bliss, starry as the sky
which each night for
an etern fell on earth to
raven plunge & furrow
all the Titan rhymes
spring-locked in our
concupiscent too-conscious brow,
concatenate in mind and soul
—yowling Iapetos, wave-tressed
Thetis, bookish Mnemosyne,
Time. All were freed to plague
our breast because that feral
sickle dared to rise and slice
offending members free, ending
five million years of noctal
same old same old fucks,
begetting daily rise and falls,
their proscribed pistionings
in rhythmus to our time.
Womb to grave we race, trying
to fit somehow in both
cunts of origin and future ore
we’ll never harrow nor mine well,
not like the archon Daddy
who penumbrates the depths
of hell with insatiate desire.
Always the sands beat us through
that narrow isthmus of glass
between the tits and ass,
the one substantial embrace that
we seek not found in time’s
one then other space, that
doppler curvature descending from
one fullness and plopping out
the other with no more than
a grain of heaven’s shore,
our O-mouths mewling
forever of her and more.
And all this while sons of
ours take steady aim at
cutting us forever off from
her clam, our claim to it I mean.
That’s the way it goes if you buy
the tale that endless night
was ended in one’s day’s
curve from thought to deed,
one sweep from cock to balls
and through. A sickle moon
hangs to the west this morning,
singing over that ancient
tumulus where every lust and ire
fonts so wicked and so bottomless
a starry hell-hot cream,
quintessence of the dad I’ll always dream
inside the mom I cannot mean.



OLD MAN LIR

2005

According to the (12th Cent.??)
Tenga Beth-Nua (“The Evernew Tongue”),
the sun rises when it passes “under the flanks
of the earth,” among “the hosts of the
children in the pleasant fields, who send
the cry towards heaven for dread of the
beast that kills many thousands of hosts
under waves of the South,” while it
illumines “the ribs of the Beast that
distributes the many seas around the flanks
of the earth on every side, that sucks
in the many seas again til it leaves
the shores dry on every side.”

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

At 4 a.m. the night is silky-still,
the faintest surf of crickets chirring
in the garden and that’s all. The dark
is huge and cool, too fragrant with
the jasmine blooming in profusion
up the chimney. Buckets of low
honey pour through the window
behind my head & over me, slickening
this poem. These facts are not new
but each morning seems to make
them so, my matins faithful to
the fish’s back I ride on
to every shore in the as-yet-unknown,
unsaid world. While I ride here
Old Man Lir prowls down under,
digesting the sun and the ten
thousand warrior who died yesterday
in the gates of his great teeth.
While I write the tide rises and falls
because he swims too hugely for
the world, his corpulence suffusing
even his tail which flits between
continents with a shrug. How can I
not ache to be with every woman
in the world with his mouth to fill?
How does that sweet madness of rioting
jasmine bloom slay every sober thought
if he weren’t inside that vine,
spuming up from darkest roots?
Even these words for him,
translating sense to savagery:
Why else pull all the stops
if he doesn’t boom them all
so low I don’t so much as hear him
as shore him everywhere I go?

An Otherworld Whirl

I was surprised to find it raining already as I walked out in the dark to my car to drive in to work. I didn’t think we’d see much of Ernesto until later this morning. A thin, soft rain, sparse yet insistent, the farthest tresses of that tropical storm slowly churning up the peninsula. There are hints of daybreak to the east, blotches of blue showing around the ragged edges of cloud, but they are fleeting, phantasmagorical, suddenly here and then gone, reappearing somewhere else along the wispy black contrails of cloud.

Wipers in steady rhythm, highway 441 slick, dangerous though lighter with traffic (schools closed), I drive into town, towards the storm, as I listen to stories about Hurricane Katrina on the public radio station -- the long shadow of that great storm like basso rumble offshore this piddly soft surrsurration of rain. Ernesto whispers what Katrina roars: a piddly-ass tropical storm which will breeze hard and dump rain over a state desperate for moisture and terrified of more. (Christ, our homeowners’ insurance has leapt 60 percent in the two years since Jeanne and Charlie and Francis and Ivan mauled Florida.)

Fifteen miles from home the rain lightens then stops. To the east there’s clear weather still, enough to pour the angry corals and powder blues of dawn this way (revealing some ugly-looking uppermizzens of storm cloud level with the eastern horizon, sloops and frigates leading the way of the storm), while the entire southern sky is grey and blank, a great dark void. Call it a wimp on the Saffr-Simpson scale, but there’s enough up and out and down there in Ernesto to dwarf human scale, a sky-wide bleak angel with dripping black wings and a voice, though soft and high and distant, surely from the same chorus as Katrina.

The light for the final miles into Orlando is wyrd, luminescent against that darkness, a sort of reverse satch of evening light, a brief jot of Wednesday normal candescence soon enough wholly covered over (outside my window at work, all now has been covered over with gray). A veil of sorts, neither day nor night, neither dry nor yet stormed, the streets like gray synapses of downward-trailing mind, leaving This for an Other, neither here nor there ...



In the tale “Manawydan son of Llyr,” four heroes depart from dinner to venture onto a fairy mound, where suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the world of what is morphs into that what isn’t. It’s a typical start of an Otherworld foray:

***

When Pryderi returned ((to Dyfed)) he and Manawydan feasted and took their ease. They began the feast at Arberth, since that was the chief court where every celebration began, and after the evening’s first sitting, while the servants were eating, the four companions arose and went to Gorsedd Arberth ((a fairy mound)), taking company with them. As they were sitting on the mound they heard thunder, and with the loudness of the thunder a mist fell, so that no one could see his companions. When the mist lifted it was bright everywhere, and when they looked out at where they had once seen their flocks and herds and dwellings they now saw nothing, no animal, no smoke, no fire, no man, no dwelling -- only the houses of the court empty, deserted, uninhabited, without man or beast in them; their own company was lost too, and they understood that only the four of them alone remained.

(from The Mabinogion, transl. Jeffrey Gantz)

***

Suddenly we aren’t in Kansas anymore: the color scheme has inverted from drab dustbowl to Beverley Hills lalaland, strange high violins tremble in the background, and from the tittering in the bushes and the scrawled up feet of the witch who got smashed by our falling house (or was it a well-bucket tumbling to the bottom of the psyche?), the locals just aren’t the same yokels who were minding the barnyard just an hour ago -- yet are, in their inversed or reversed selves, as if we saw the true inward demeanor of our humdrum dailiness.

Just where does one go, when one traverses the veil to enter the land down under, the fairy mound, the enchanted well or the drowned village at the bottom of the lake? Is the Otherworld a blue face staring back in the pond’s reflection, the visage of the unconscious as it stares directly back into our conscious state? Is it Either, or Other, or Neither, or somehow Both?

What trade or traffic is there in the Otherworld, what labors must be performed? Do we deal in the coin of Pluto there, or pay passage with puns and riddles, taught by wily Hermes? Do we go down to Tartarus to harrow the depths, a la Christ, or fill an inkhorn’s inferno, like Dante? Are there labors to perform there, wielding the club of Hercules against every three-headed dog in Hell? Is there tongues of sooth and truth which can only be loosened by pouring bull-black blood in a trough? Do we barter with Persephone, hoping for the return of Love by singing our most aggrieved love songs? How to gain entrance to that treasure-vault guarded a bling-greedy dragon, or make off the three golden apples hanging luscious over the Bulrog’s thundering bed?

Who woos us from under and beyond? -- fairy princesses with purple eyes and honey lips, or horrific kelpies so virile and lean from the shore with seaweed in their hair? Sirens and melusines and well-nymphs, oh my; mermen and bogies and fin-folk between midnight and three, dancing on the moonlit strand, beckoning our dreams swim with them out past our own crashing land ... They call us as much as we desire them, their voices outside the nights’ window both suitor and abductor, our leap through that window both betrayer and bride. We are matched in our eagerness for each other, This and Other world pursuing and fleeing, revealing and vanishing.

What would this world be without its Other? It would be like a black swan bereaved of its lifelong mate; we could never recover from the loss.

Perhaps as long as we dream, we’ll always have entry to the Otherworld, but I’m wondering what other portals and accesses and raids and immramas this posting community have experienced. When for you has the veil been so truly thin that weird time commenced, beyond history, beyond clocks and maps?

To steal three drops of a Jungian magic from the cauldron, active imagination -- a conscious dive into the blue mysterium -- has proved for me a sure and enduring access to an Otherworld which is as real as it is impossible to ever truly know or understand. Reading myths and fairy tales (like the story above) has for a long time been a conscious form of dreaming for me: a structured narrative into the tapestry hanging behind us which provides a well for the imagination to dive down.

If dreams are compensation for consciousness, as Jung believed, whose truths must be read backwards and upside down (every symbol has halves facing the opposite way), are myths to be uttered in our most meditative whispers, like matins, drawing our minds out through the window and into its wilderness?

Curious and fascinating, a maddening cream left here by elven-hands working in my thoughts during the night. We have lost much of our actual folklore, it has ceased to exist, blinded out by the hot glare of technology, which has largely evicted the little folk, sent them far under the Sidhe and to the furthermost islands of the main. Yet the Otherworld remains in my fancy, in the tales, in the saying of it: How? Can a myth survive its own cultural evaporation, as if the memory of a well were enough to keep it full?

Perhaps it is important for the tribe to hold fast to both its futurity and past, dreaming the tale forward, further into the lands of enchantment. For me, my fascination with Otherworld doors, even ones that only exist on paper in any literal sense, is so deep and abiding that I don’t think I could proceed any other way. The dream demands our dreaming.

Later in the tale of “Manawydan son of Llyr,” the heroes go deeper into the Otherworld forest until they come to an omphalos of sorts, the font and stocks which draw us and hold us fast in the tale until it has worked its magic on us. I leave where it leaves my question -- stuck fast at a truth which is yet cannot be. And hope someome will offer tales & experience & fascination that will not so much free the question and root it still deeper to its abiding thrall.


***

They pursued the boar until they saw a great tall fortress, a new building where they had never before seen any kind of stone or work, and when the boar and the dogs had gone inside they marvelled to see this fortress where they had never seen any before.

“Lord, said Pryderi,” “I will enter the fortress and seek news of the dogs.” “God knows, that is not a good idea,” said Manawydan. “I have never seen this fortress before, and, if you take my advice you will not enter it, for whoever placed the enchantment on the land must have caused this building to appear. “God knows, I will not give up my dogs,” said Pryderi.

Manawydan’s advice notwithstanding, he entered the fortress but once inside he could see neither man nor beast nor boar nor dogs nor house nor dwelling. What he did see, as if in the middle of the fortress, was a fountain with a marble stone round it, and a golden bowl fastened to four chains, the bowl set over a marble slab and the chains extending upward so that he could see no end to them.

Ecstatic over the beauty of the gold and the fine craftsmanship of the bowl he walked over to the vessel and grasped it, but as soon as he did so his hands stuck to the bowl and his feet to the slab he was standing on, and his speech was taken so he could not say a single word. There he stood.





MACODRUM

2005


It is given to them (the seal-
tribe of MacOdrum) that their
sea-longing shall be land-longing
and their land-longing shall
be sea-longing.

-- South Uist farmer

Shall I forever row
this rock which flaunts
below so brute a tail
and brogues the wind
like wings? Standing
here do I ride the wave
which answers every
shore with a hallowed
blue recede? I was just
the next nude nallie
to lose his skin to
your embrace, doomed
to build the lives ashore
with the greater half
of the three hearts
forever pursed in blue.
Half-man, half fish,
between the worlds I
weave my three songs
of fin and breast and
thrall, that music
riven as the tide
which pounds these
rocky cliffs where
you are least of all.
Will you ever give
me back my skin,
that oiled black coat
which I must wear
to dive full back to
the single world,
free of doubletalk at last?
Shall I woo you or connive,
do I ravage the verses
or mount the mare I ride?
Such strategems
I dream atop this lonely
rock which is my writing
chair, reaching out as
far as I know how
to kiss the cross still
burning there, inscribed
aeons ago when love
was young and I woke
in your arms, a naked,
fresh-borne man 18 miles
out to sea with no
way ever to go home.
Your breath has
stayed in my ear
for all these lives,
like the sea inside
a shell, a shining
blue tide my song
has slowly pickled in.
Three cups, three
heavens, three purgatories
here beyond the ninth
wave you folded and
crashed over me --
a charnel house of
every thrill and thrall
to fade from blue to black.
I hear the selkies singing
on moony nights as
this an hour from
first light: I write
their sealskins down.
Inside this oratory
on high rock I
nail that strange music
to my own, a revenant
still revenant of
the blue which
drowned my bones.

Boot Boat Book Bone

Ernesto lazily whorls off Cuba with 40 mph winds & into the Florida Straits, which are warm right now, naiad pink enough to growl up a hurricane’s high huff ... Right now it tracks to rake the east coast of the peninsula with tropical storm-force winds reaching as far inland as our sleepy burg. It will take another length of day to know with any better precision what to await. Days here have been hot and steamy with stormclouds clobbering iota stretches of the state & leaving the rest starved for moisture. So Ernesto is not, this far inland, unwelcome.

I struggle here battling a flu that is moving like wildfire through the populace, first one I’ve had in three years or more, a soggy snotty sneezy headachey sore throaty badass malaisey fucker that renders one listless and mostly thoughtless. Three days of inactivity (called in sick from work yesterday) and I’ve puttered here, read a chunk of Patrick O’Brien’s Post Captain and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. To bring Brutus into my bluesalt fray:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea we are now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures. (IV, iii)





THE COFFIN (2)

August 26

I paddle home on
a boat which freights
my dead friend facing up,
our hips joined in
that brine’s bouree
which crashes sad
and wildly in our hearts
every day, wave after wave.
I’m sick today, sick
sick sick with sore
throat headache chills
bad tummy & with
a reeling downward
sense of my crepitude.
Just let me crawl
up in my wife &
suck my thumb
& sleep vast on her
breasts till ill djinns
boo away! But noooo,
here I am instead
at 6 a.m. in the rigor
of an ancient habit;
for my friend’s tale’s
sake I ferry on
a dead man’s bourne,
a Christian box
carved in paganish,
empty of its charge
but not the weight
of my heart’s woe
for that man. He
was a South Seas king,
huntsman of the hottest
seas; his blood was
as supple and true as
his unerring iron barbs.
I hug this box for my
dear life while his
bones are down there
far below amid the
Pequod’s fallen trash,
all jawed whole by
the abyss that lifted
Moby up to Ahab’s
curse with a smile as
wide as God’s. I hug
this box for both our
sakes, that his tale
survive in my own
should I make it home.
A thick and thicker
dark outside, deep
in this strange stricken
season; it rained
hard yesterday across
the state as the Gulf
release the burden
of New Orleans’ soul
drowned in it a
year ago. My wife
coughs hard upstairs
-- she got this damned
flu first: night ends,
our day begins.
I hug here Queequg’s
box, ennobled by
the phosphors rising
from the seams --
memories of island
girls delighting under
him, a Micronesia
of blisses over my
shoulder, more
plentiful than stars --
a Milky Way of
nippled joys with
soaked-snatch fire
heaving naked in the
thrash of his immortal
bone, this empty
coffin now his throne,
immersing every
curve and crash
with the rain of
his lost foam.
Take home, my
friend, like a Penthouse
letter in a bottle
of a hearse marauding
every shore.: Between
me and the bottom
forever down is
this single empty box,
a ghastly relic of a
wild sea tale
which I have carved
into a writing desk,
the keel of every blue
deep song that lilted
in that pagan’s ear
by every girl he rode to home.



Grand ur-texts keep cropping up in my reading. Rachel Carson writes about an essential text lying deep in the sea in The Sea Around Us:

***

Every part of earth or air or sea has an atmosphere, peculiarly its own, a quality or characteristic that sets it apart from all others. When I think of the floor of the deep sea, one single overwhelming fact that possesses my imagination is the accumulation of sediments. I see always the steady, unremitting, downward drift of materials from above, flake upon flake, layer upon layer -- a drift that has continued for hundreds of millions of years, that will go on for as long as there are seas and continents.

... The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth. When we are wise enough, perhaps we can read in them all of past history. For it is written here. In the nature of the materials that compose them and in the arrangement of their successive layers, the sediments reflected all that has happened in the waters above them and on the surrounding lands. The dramatic and the catastrophic in earth’s history have left their trace in the sediments -- the outpourings of volcanoes, the advance and retreat of the ice, the searing aridity of desert lands, the sweeping destruction of floods.

***

Melville also locates a grand text down there, the secret blueprint of the world no less. He accounts in “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” chapter of Moby Dick

***

“When Bramha, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodic dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensible to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate as a whale, and sending down to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whalemen, then? ever as a man rides a horse is called a horseman?”


***

In the Sunday (8/27) New York Times, George Johnson writes about the accomplishment of Russian toplogist Grigory Perelman, who “seemed to be playing to type, or stereotype, when he refused to accept the highest honor in mathematics, the Fields Medal, for work pointing toward the solution of Poincare’s conjecture, a longstanding hypothesis involving the deep structure of three dimensional objects”:

“Who needs prizes when you are free to wander across a plane so lofty that a soda straw and a teacup blur into the same toplogical abstraction, and there is nothing a million dollars can buy? Until his death in 1996, the Hungarian number theorist Paul Erdos was content to live out of a suitcase, traveling from the home of one colleague to another, seeking theorems so sparse and true that they came, he said, ‘straight from The Book,’ a platonic text where he envisioned all mathematics was prewritten.”

***

And finally I read once again in Arthur Keith’s “The Old Man of Cro-Magnon” from The Antiquity of Man (1915):

***

In tracing the various kinds of men who lived in the Neolithic period, the open country, the river valleys, and the submerged land surfaces served us very well. When, however, we try to follow man beyond the bounds of the Neolithic period -- when the Thames was depositing the deepest layers of ballast gravel in her ancient bed -- we must seek sequestered nooks where the earth keeps a more orderly register of events than in the turmoil of flooded valleys. The ideal place we seek is a cave, particularly a limestone cave, for the drip from the roof, laden with lime salts,seals up with a covering of stalagmite any bones which chance to lie on the floor. The floor of such a cave is always having additions made to it. If men make their hearths on it, human debris accumulates. Chips and dust are always falling from the roof; the mud washed in by rain or flood is added to other accumulations. In course of time the floor may grow until it actually reaches the roof, thus obliterating the cave. If no living thing has visited the cave as it became filled up, then the strata of the floor are “sterile”; but if men have used the cave as a habitation or as a passing shelter, or if they chance to die there, then the earth-buried stratum of the floor becomes a page of history. It has taken us nearly a century to understand that caves may contain historical documents of the most precious kind. By a study of cave records, we have come by a knowledge of the races who preceded the men of the Neolithic period -- the races of the Paleolithic period.

In 1825, in one of the wooded dales lying behind the picturesque town of Torquay, on the south coast of Devonshire, Mr. MacEnery began to explore that great rambling subterranean series of chambers known as Kent’s Cavern. In the dense layer of stalagmite, covering the floor of the cave, he found implements in stone and in bone, shaped by the hand of man, mingled with the bones of the same extinct animals as Dean Buckland had found at Paviland. The priest had the courage to draw a just conclusion from these observations in Kent’s Cavern, and to face the opposition of the Dean and of the opinion of his time. Mr. MacEnery was convinced that man had lived in England as a contemporary of the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the cave-bear, and all those animals which we now know were native to Europe before our present climactic conditions dawned with the advent of Neolithic man. Mr. MacEnery did not dare to even publish his records; they were discovered and published by the Torquay Natural History Society many years after his death. It was thus a priest who first broke into the world of Paleolithic man -- at least in England.

***

So: A book containing our lost history is found, it written down, is then hidden again for fear of outraging the present, and then re-discovered and opened wide for all eyes to see. Exciting ways to find The Book, eh.

**

GRAND THEORY

August 27

My book of wonders
thunders & deep blue
unders hasn’t named
You yet but I’m
getting there,
page by page,
league by league.
Scientists patiently
labor their wild
theorems, believing
in a day maybe
centuries from now
when all will
trim to a simple
statement from which
all worlds proceed --
gravity, space, motion,
all of it -- the grand theory,
one line ending in a smile.
For now they bicker and
postulate in whorls of
algebraic rant, blackboard
against blackboard
on fields of furious thought
clouded by chalkdust
and what they know
too well. But there are
getting there, the
differences slowly
morphing into melt
and the questions
at growing less indicative
of wrong. One wave
will sweep in from
an unexpected shore
to drench the whole
enterprise, a fourth
dimension which will
obviously and succinctly
tie up all the conundrums
of the other three. Or
will they? Perhaps
the eggheads dream.
Science forges
better tools for seeing deep
and far, but it seems to
me that all the new knowns
crowd the view with more,
adding dimensions of
greater complexity.
Perhaps that’s
what nature’s book
is most about -
a wild cacaphony
spiralling out from a
few simple truths which
are themselves
koans and conundrums,
theorems without
a proof. I may be
wrong. I may die before
I find the shore which
laps just off the
page. But some later
self will come to ride
the pen in ways I never
dreamed. This culture
will one day vanish
leaving little of real use
to whatever takes our
place -- a foreign
tribe with morphed
equipage, or cockroaches
or inorganic streams
awhirl in tides of
space. In some part
of that dust my
book will sail, surely
hidden from all view,
an ecstasy, a dream
perhaps, a dark
theory of a blue
which today proves
too inky for the
flu I’m mucked in.
Ah well--I tried again
and hit the wall
of white unknowns.
Maybe I’m the
proof of that blue
theorem that for
every reach there grows
at the bottom
by the stones
a pile of gorgeous bones.

***

BOOT BOAT
BOOK BONE

August 2003

So here I am again,
Lord, astride a falling
surf, riding barebacked
out to you on an
ossuary of white foam:

One night you walked
away from me, “not here”
is inscribed on your
sweet curved ass.
That lass is my taboo and tide,

my voyaging for silk
to white-peaked islands
absent of your pent
and pert, so barbarous
and frothy milk.

Breviary, bestiary,
book in ocean thrown:
each wave I well here
vowels ocean bone,
no line completes the dash--

each blue curved plash
hisses through the motions
of a lover’s foreign tongue,
the first line her last kiss,
the last one all it rung.