Portals to (Bliss)

... the Freudian unconscious is situated at this point, where, between cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong. the important thing is not that the unconscious causes neurosis -- of that one Freud can quite happily, like Pontius Pilot, wash his hands. Sooner or later, something would have been found, humoral determinates for example -- for Freud, it would be quite immaterial. For what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real -- a real that may not be determined.

In the gap, something happens. Once this gap has been filled, is the neurosis cured? After all, the question remains open. But the neurosis becomes something else, sometimes a mere illness, a scar, as Freud said -- the scar, not of the neurosis, but of the unconscious. ... What does he find in the hole, in the split, so characteristic of the cause? Something of the order of the non-realized.

- Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours,” ifrom The Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. Alan Sheridan




FALL INTO THE (GAP)

Sept. 5

Beyond the last sentence
lie dragons. Do they not?
Pure wilderness of
adulterous blue,
raw ocean smashing
against my hips,
thrashing tidal
spasms out my pen.
The whole world
nubile and wide,
pliant in liquid
greed for my sin,
for this sine
to thrust through
its sinuous wave,
begging this red
poem to begin and
never end, not
on any bed, my
every trope hurled
at that need in
burbles of white bliss
too seminal to
sate or rend
or by stars forfend.
He is hardest where
she hides her
orchid lair -- smells
it lush and swoony-
sweet, suffusing
the night’s atmosphere
with the blossom’s
peal of venusian
cream. His cock
aches to its stone-
veined length
desperate to reach
penetrate that dewy
deep in her where
his own heart’s night
beckons, fold by
spreading fold.
Without the
itch that mads us with
a dream’s curved
bitch in heat,
I would not dare
exceed my town’s
last light, transgressing
tangled brush and
brake in love’s
most dangerous name,
my day around
my ankles, my
mouth a sing-song
ocean pouring
vaster seas in
every broken seam
and lack where
she is everything
crying Yes
forevermore.
And yet and
still I’m just
sitting on this
big white chair
two hours south
of dawn, writing
down again and
yet and still
again this next
haul of stranger
stronger fish.
Arisen from salt
leagues I’ll never
name or scour
I yet and still
enjoy in greater
measure this
paper miniscule
of sex like a dragon
of no ending whirls
beyond the gap
where he forever
and insatiably devours
something essential
red and fragrantly
hot -- the object
of God’s appetite,
the true blue mortar
of this abysmal hour.





At first, the unconscious is manifested to us as something that holds itself in suspense in the area, I would say, of the unborn. That repression should discharge something into this area is not surprising. It is the abortionist’s relationship to limbo.

Certainly, this dimension should be evoked in a register that has nothing unreal, or dereistic, about it, but is rather unrealized. It is always dangerous to disturb anything in that zone of shades, and perhaps it is the analyst’s role, if the analyst is performing it properly, to be beseiged -- I mean really -- by those in whom he has invoked this world of shades, without always being able to bring them up to the light of day. One can never be sure that what one says on this matter will have no harmful effect.

... It is not without effectd that, even as public speech, one directs one attention at subjects, touching them at what Freud calls the navel -- the navel of the dreams -- he writes, to designate their ultimately unknown centre -- which is simiply, like some anatomical navel that represents it, that gap of which I have already spoken.

-- Lacan, ibid.



BLUE AND GOLD

Sept. 8

Longing and desire
are the two doors of
my heart, the north
and southern portals
of a vast cathedral
through which stars
and oceans stream.
Sex is the beach
my love can never reach,
its dunes and surf
and mistral breeze
collaborating with
the ruse between
knees I’ll never
plunge the depths of
nor fully whet
this feathered nib
to say what she
concluded when
she tensed and
cried Yes and
sighed my name.
Longing is a more
complex lysis
in this dream,
the sound of broken
waves ebbing
their distaffs from
the shore,
first light’s sad welcome
of her bed empty
of her; it is that via
negativa in my
bee-loud head
which betrays love
with its name,
never satisfied in
the sots and sates
of those nights I
marginned her,
never more empty
as when she
is finally at peace
with me, never more
fulfilled as when
she’s gone. Desire
and longing are
portal ventricles
which flap as wild
as beached fish,
desperate for
waters which poured
out long ago
when I was beached
like Jonah to this
world and bid
to merge blue
curvatures
with the gold
light of their god,
to woo a seeming
beautiful into the bed
a broken truth.
How many times
have I got naked
that sea-streaming
ghostly muse, writing
with my body
the next name
of her lost
beach, retelling my
first story amid
the wild crashings
of an indifferent sea,
beneath a canopy
of coldly distant stars,
the whole massed
universe of skin
pressed up against
me in every Other
way, for reasons
not my own, with
eyes so focused
behind and above
me that my voice
sounded like white
noise in the clinch,
no diving devilfish
at all, just a
a creaking hinge
to some truer
door badly in
need of grease
or sense or mojo.
The poems I came
to write are paper
phalloi of that
indecent pride
which keeps both
doors below oped
wide in worship
of the poles by
which I compass
God: Songs both
notes and reconnoiterings
of those aches
which mad
and make a man,
the blue and
gold ends of
Her dream’s
divining rod.




THE DEVIL’S DOOR

Saxon churches had
a Devil’s Door facing
north: Some say it was
where the door
pagans would enter
that still reached
the old built-over gods:;
Your bias was thus
known by which door
you entered: Some
Sussex people believed
that the Devil lay in
wait outside that north
door to damn the soul
of any poor Christian
foolish enough to
egress that way: Today
you’ll find most of
those north doors
permanently blocked:
Recall that Oran
travelled north from
where he was buried
in the Columba
abbey footers, descend-
ing north into the
icy regions of Hell:
This Well egresses
or drills north, dooring
pole-wraiths & welling
a witch’s tit brine:
At the end of my
workouts at the gym
I ease down into a
cold splash bath and
remain there some 5
minutes applying
physic to sore knees
& back with 48-degree
water: Seal-cold waters,
North Sea waters:
Survivors of the wreck
of the Titanic died of
hypothermia in waters
like this, blueing into
hard clumps of
supplication & knocking
into each other like
billiard balls: When I
can stand the cold
no more I submerge,
& hang for a moment
in that wild cold
to pray my Devils
Door prayer -- “By
the Rock of Saint
Columba sworn” I
intone deep inside
then burst up like
a narwhal glad to
death for the sky:
Upon Oran’s cold-
splashed bones I build
this low chapel: Through
his Door I egress
and transgress this
daily vowel movement:
I am baptized by
his brute underworld
swim: Harrowed by
the ice-lords and snow-
queens found there
isle to polar isle: Up
beyond Skye and
Bute and Callanish,
way north of the
Orkneys where Thor
hammers & hearkens
his infinite gale: Hell’s
balls bell a thrall of pure
icy fire: Pealing that
freezing foam ghosting
wave-beards where
demiurges roam:
North Door with your
high brow of skulls:
Where the black
apparition lies in wait
to confound & ferry us
home: I’m writing runes
today on the Devil’s Door
for all who would transgress
here in the pedigree of
most ancient stone: Down
and north, sound the
buckets down to that
dark island where the
bones of the fathers pack
the loam: Marrow this
song with those cold ribs
& ghost peckers: They
are the rock upon which
all churches we know
grow:For those who would
worship here you must
use the queer door so fair
and foul which opens to
an upside down demesne
of backassed whirl:
Heaven’s down here, folks
-- below -- it’s where the
angels all go when pieties
fail and Moby’s gut is
is pink beehive cell: Not so,
sighs the wind outside
the Devil’s Door: Not
Here: The ice is clear:
Blue imps flicker like
wattage in the polar
night, singing low
in the glacial undertow:
Not here, tragic son,
Not here. Welcome home.

Southbound

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000


The Present

1.

Those days in
Summer 1979
are exactly 20
years from these
days where
each is a petal
from a centrally
formed bud
of marriage,
mortgage, career:
Sitting here on
the usual 5 a.m.
stage with a
cup of coffee and
Buster purring
on the floor
by my feet
-- the phrase
is now Homeric,
a worn narrative
button: I look
back on those days
almost mythically,
relics of someone
else’s crazy life,
the stupidity of it
accepted only when
I let it go:
A madness that
required treatment,
meetings, alembics
long closure: But
there’s also jealousy
for the carefree
swagger of those
days, the easy
random humps
with soft lumps
long before fidelity
and AIDS: I who
now have grown
accustomed to
the depths envy
my shallow
gluttony for
God’s plenty
of bra sizes
and panty colors:
I’m wakened
and roused by
a gauze bestiary
of sighs and
ululations:
I’ve traded all that
for this, knowing
sadly and at length
that nothing really
happens without a
stable base and
practice, lots
of practice:
I learned to
write and study
in rooms as this
for the past
10 years.: I’ve
filled tall bookcases
with books I have
loved and more
than 50 journals
of prose and poetry
iterating
reiterating
bitching
swooning
dreaming
making
masking;
I’ve spent years
just sitting in a
chair at first
light holding
a pen: That’s
what love
is in this house
with my wife has
become: substantial,
secure, roots deep
enough for
the losses we
must now sustain
-- James in his
grave & our parents
aging, Buster
nearly giving
up ghost,
relenting for
this little while:
We start each day
in bed our bodies
gentle and easy along
each other from
long familiarity,
passion now a treat
a couple times
a month but
love our daily
free feast:
Back then I could
not have fathomed
such grounded
motions: My itches
and furies always
bled for the
quickest, most
fragrant cure:
Unfettered lusts
were like a swarm
of bees and
I was the hive,
my balls my
brain my hands
my guitar all
tending the
Queen Bee in
her vault: endlessly
stung by Cupid
and galloping
on the dolphin
through
ancient sea-roads
with the next
night knocking
from the next door,
calling me south:


2.

I suspect now
that my rock
and roll fantasies
were not
simply spun
from some
pop-cultural
jukebox
of popstar
fame &
pussy that
every teenaged
boy would
gladly plop
his inheritance
into: I think
I had by the
distilled
into a specie
of divine madness
that would
eventually rouse
me here:
I fell down
from bare
Golgotha into
a library
and down
through an
ocean into
a thrashing bed:
My mind
was southbound
and earthward,
wings molted
into hooves
then fins:
Music of the
spheres pointed
down at
at a woman’s
body through
the stallion
neck of
a guitar:
But I was
young and
my downward
tumescence
was stupid:
Foolish as
all boys who
believe their
cock’s sooth:
I thought
love was a boat
rocking on
a drowsy
summer tide,
Everpresent
and eternally
far: Addicted
to the fresh
scent of musk
rising from
a woman’s
cleavage: I
glutted and
rutted among
masks and
tin idols,
settling for
booze and babes
and that mass
market rock
poster boy:
As if any
of that had
to do with
the real singing,
that which
I yearned for
beyond every
note and
which I
continue to
distill into:
The silence
borne of
pandemonium:
The still point
on the frenzied
stage and
the clear
light within
coming’s thrash
and spew:
Unconsciously
I craved sweet
for the sour
cathedrals within:
Loved joys
for the salt
of absence:
I grew as
Robert Frost
in “To Earthward”
to crave the
stain of tears,
the aftermark
of almost too
much love,
the sweet and
bitter bark
and burning
clove: Passion
nailed me to
the earth my
frighted spirit
soared high
over: My
mind became
inflamed with
Amor’s downward-
burning torch:
Initiate to
Dion’s cup
and thyrsus,
I wore the
rock god’s mask
and roared
for joy of
a bedlam
which achieved
sweet nothing:
I’m amazed
now how the
chapters of
my life are
so far from each
other, each flake
wholly new
to the pattern:
I sometimes
feel I’ve lived
not A Life but
Lives, 5 Ages
passing slowly
into human time:
The hour of
Christian plainsong
passing into
folk Renaissance
into sappy
love classicism
into baroque
metal thunder
and on and
on: Each of
my guitars
a spectra of
my song’s rainbow
as I fell to
earth to
find the ways of
heaven ever
slowly &
painfully emerging
into this world
of real love
& real work
& real grief
& further
exploration
& critique of
he who sings
I, I: Jeff and
I played a sweet
duet on Thin
Lizzy’s “Southbound”
and the two
guitar lines
are like how
mind and heart
find each other
at last in
aging, finding
what Frost
called in that
poem weight
and strength
to feel the
earth as rough
to all my length:
What will these
days spent
recomposing
the past resemble
20 more years
on? How sickly
-sane, mad-ironic?
Surely they will
seem so but
that’s another
book of poems,
another retrospective
of a greater
gallery of lives:






FULL MOON AT COCOA BEACH


1995

I.
The surf was pounding
the air when we climbed
out of my car, hurling
sea mist toward
a full moon now
breaking from clouds.

The pier was closing early
that night, swarmed
by the high surf
of a hurricane's
turbulent pass
many miles to sea.
The guard said
an advisory was out
for a high tide come morning
with fifteen foot waves.

We leaned on a rail
halfway down the pier
and watched the night.
The horizon a wash of
foam and darkness.
Shards of moon
scattering like silver fish
in the glassy curl
of a wave before tumbling
into foam and thunder
and rocking the pier.

You leaned to watch
a wave pass under,
your dress fanning
wild in the breeze.
The wave I felt
curved that satin and
the mystery beneath
into moon and sea.

Later we walked on
the beach, found
a place to sit
and talked a long while,
telling our stories
as warming strangers do
who find the distance
between them narrowing
to less than tissue.

It was after midnight.
The beach, the sea,
the moon took us
somewhere
on a silver stream.

It was a gift
that rose unhurried
from the depths of
some heart which must have
always known these things,
recalled from old loves
or the salt soundings of the womb
or perhaps the full store
of ineffable moments
a man and a woman
have ever stumbled on together,
a silver strand of DNA
pulsing and receiving
this tide.

Having forgotten joy
for so long on a road
of deaths small and large,
having gotten so lost amid
hurry and complication
and complacence,
that night slapped
me back to life.

Warmed by something
I can never name,
we opened our arms
to one embrace
and then walked away.





STRINGS OF THE HARP

April 2002


On this cold clear
April night I stand
with my father
in his ancient yard,
the moon at full blast
lathering these stones
with the black milk of
the sea’s hurled soul.
The bell tower is a pale
gem gleaming in
that lamp, faceted
with uncut faces
—seal-man, ogre,
dolphin, snake —
each adrift in that old
moon-music, singing
from some place
we surely dreamed
before we knew.
And high above
in the newest portal
a harp’s clef stretches
wind-strings taut
and burning with
that other fire,
like tongues of heated
heart, or sails of
starry soul.
And O how they
tremble inside
that April moon
as if to tune our
own wild nerves:
Together we
are strummed
by a cold wind
weaving through the
garden of the mind,
and sing on through
that beaming door
which opens on the final
room of our strange career—
a richly booming,
darkly gleaming shore.




ICY MUSE
2003


I sing of my pale
contralto, bourne
of everlasting ice:
Inside every poem
there’s a Nordic
shore where she
waits for me:

I return, though you
bid me speak: I am
the mortal tripod,
you are the musk
of sweet death, witching
my words with a
wild trepidation.

When I lay pen to paper
you tear the ream
with cold nails,
as long as your stare.
Mad queen, you split
the coffins of a hundred
generations to haunt
me here, but why?
The world cares
not for you as I.

Together we ride
sea waves which
shatter far coasts of ice,
yet the highest comber
passes mute beneath
the world’s sotted,
clamorous gaze.

Of course, that’s you’re
old lament: It was
Homer’s brother you
favored, the one
who never made it
into the hall,
his lyre badly out of
tune, exposed to
the truths of
the salt cold shore.

Only you cared for
his song because he
sang it only for you.
The laurel crown is
only booty; its power
curses the upstart head,
the gold which it bestows
curled like snakes.
All else from him is filler.

So today I’ll not grouse
of that irrelevance
which your blue eyes
are an altar to,
knowing that I cannot
see more than a
personal scrawl
of black amid faint
blue lines, lines which
erase the transit
of dragon boats long ago
—your song refrains
below abbey pillage
and blood eagles.
O icy muse, let
me not forget
whose prow you whet.





THE DOOR

2005


Life receives us from that door,
splattered with blood & bawling
to high heaven our solitary complaint;
slapped by cold and delved in
barks of flesh, we sail on and on
from those long-lost ports, weaving
our way through naked blue.
Eventually we come to her, the crone
perched on chapel doors, her bug-
eyed, Southern stare steering us down
to where she grips her vulva with both
hands, widening the door over which
she roosts. You’re howling dark and wild
inside that door, my Cape, a dreaded
pass no one may scape and none survive
in any way we sing or dream or pray;
and yet we all must go naked there
as we once began, frightened and
most alone, to ferry on to gentler seas
than wash and tide through mortal bones.
What does she look like from the other,
darkened side? And how do You seem
when wave and gale pound at brutal
regions now behind? That’s the rub,
the sea salt in the opened wound
which nothing here can salve
this windy humid, rainy yet-dark morning
in hard-tossed southbound Florida.
These songs tear from my lips and spiral off
like storm-tossed birds, disappearing
almost before their quaint and frail Amens --
She’s fascinated with them, I think,
alert -- no, greedy for their pulse and
flicker; her mouth does not speak but
that grinning womb says all, a
maw of Yes devouring my words,
shepherding their singed wings
on home, inside where all their questions
slake at the pond beneath my grave.
You too await me, your gaze too like
the Male Medusa who hangs over the
baths at Sulis, with eyes of awe and
awfulness amped to a Cape’s blue
infernity by every ship to descend
the coast but not quite round,
not in any way we have found words
dark and deep enough to describe.
Ah well. For us the day portends
more storminess, raindrops glistening
on orange-blossom petals like -- well,
like kisses from my weary wife
when we groan up into the first of our
day, like our cat’s blue eyes staring
up at us from the foot of the bed we
sail together on toward the same
old sad far shore. Winds wake and wash
the trees in a tide of sighing ebbs
and rain now gently falls, feeding
our garden and spreading its door
which from an old wet voice now calls.

The Siege Corryvreckan

Thrilling and trilling those tensed webs we create around the labyrinthine mystery, like a musical note, sounding us deeper into unnamed corridors. That it is endless is the gift, isn't it? That this entranced romancing through an empty labyrinth keeps waltzing into the next stranger room of the dream; that one poem always beings where the last left off; that each embrace is never final; that the shoreline slowly slopes down beneath us, one fathom, three fathoms, five, fifty, five hunderd, five thousand, fifty, always deeper, diviner, darker, more dubious, duplicitous, double-tongued ... incessantly down and round we go, each time more earnestly, informed, assured, although each round leaves us at the same departure point more stupefied & fooled & frustrated.

How could such travail be our greatest and least satisfying jaunt? Do we not tire of the eternally circularity of it, where nothing seems to get done, where each shore or bed or signifier only implies something further behind which may have more significance, more truth?

It's not the stuff that worldly things are built on: my marriage doesn't depend on such verbal whirligigs: nor does it contribute one sou toward my mortgage; I get no cardio benefit from galloping my verses in the froth of hooves I cannot name; it doesn't help a fellow drunk or make me any more courteous on the daily commute; our cats could give a shit about the tremendum of my Otherwordly gambols and conceits, they just want food and loveums. No: all this serves an Otherworldly purpose (porpoise), and like Las Vegas jaunts, whatever I accomplish there stays there.

The Lacanian unconscious (if I'm reading him aright), is structured like a language, but a dark one: sensible to itself, witty, florid as a dream, prone to fortuitous slips, and incomprehensibly a drone to the dayside working ear. Yadda yadda yadda et cetera ad infinitum ad nauesum it goes on and on and on, the blubbering idiot atop the upside downward throne falling down a deep blue well. Falling in the gap where You and I will never meet. It's sick, compulsive, god and wormlike at once, black magic and blue ouija, my soul's sore repitoire, bleeding gorgeously forever out my mouth.

Is there benefit at all in articulating such dark depths? The jury's still out. As long as interesting things show up squiggling and gleaming in the next hauled-up well-bucket, the work is worthwhile enough in the hour which precedes first light -- that time for crossing over, for giving thanks to God inside the belly of His whale.



What house is not rocked by desire and eventually or not steadied and mortared by love, that larger incessant demand which proceeds from desire into its enduring (though less flashy) certinties?

In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, we are told how Vortigern, king of the Saxons and father to Arthur, attempts to build a fortress on in the hills of Wales, but each day’s beginnings of the work is torn down overnight by some mysterious agency. He consults his court bards and is told that he must find a child with no father, and mix that child’s blood in the mortar. Men are dispatched across the land to find such a boy; in Carmarthen they find one and bring him there with his mother. But this is no ordinary boy, this is Merlin, son of a human woman and a devil (thus explaining his extreme hairiness). He challenges Vortigern’s bards as to why it is necessary that he be sacrificed in order to make the walls of Voritgern’s castle stable. They cannot anwer. Merlin “sees” into the ground and tells Vortigern that if he excavates the soil beneath the castle stie he will find a pool underground. Vortigern’s men dig and indeed they find a lake. Drain the lake, Merlin says, and you will find two hollow stones, each containing a slumbering dragon. The pool is drained and the dragons, one red, one white, awake and begin to fight. At first the White Dragon prevails but is eventually overcome by the Red Dragon. The White Dragon symbolizes the Saxons, the Red Dragon the Britons, we are told, and the message was “clear”: Fight back against the treachery of the treacherous Saxons and you will prevail.

That’s a reading which could support the dynastic claims of the Edwards, yet always the truth is simpler, deeper, darker. Is desire the white dragon, first principle to rouse from the waters below, and the red dragon heart-centered with love?

Is the reading equally true in reverse? Do we always read passion as love -- the white dragon -- dressing up every raw need and hot jot in its sable? But is the red dragon of passion superior, regnant in the truth of the deeper waters, beyond love’s incessant greed for reunion, a trope on the metaphor of birth, returning it to its far more ancient principle of life waking and rising from the very sea in the primal pulse of survival?

Interesting indeed ...

THE KELPIE
OF CORRYVRECKAN

Sept. 4

Cleo. I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved.
Ant. Then must thou needs find a new7 heaven,
new earth.

-- Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra I.i.18-28

I have no dwelling beyond the sea,
I have no good ship waiting for thee.
Thou shalt sleep with me on a couch of foam
And the depths of the sea shall be thy home.

-- Traditional rann,
from “The Kelpie of Corryreckan”

***

At midnight he appeared
out of Corryvreckan’s thrash
of maddened foam,
that whorl which picks its teeth
with masts and sailors’ ribs.
He was eerily young for
the hard hour, handsome
and malevolent, as hungry
for bridal sheath as
to bequeath a ghostly
maidenhead to that
spiralling-down
convulsing south.
He rode ashore on a wave
which changed as it curved
and crashed, wild waters
congealing into mane
and forming a white torso
where moon-fraught foam
had teemed insane.
Right where the wave
ceased up the beach
black hooves palavered,
thundering mad surf
over pale heath and turf.
Man and horse marauded
across that deep night,
withering and warping
whatever the hooves
in his heart touched.
He was hot to pry
that gap in a shore-
maid’s eve-tide sighs
where girdles and saddles
liquefy and turn
until a Corryvreckan
roars down and
through upsoaring thighs.
Such unknickered
plunder dreams hottest
in their hearts
sleep at the hallows,
after midnight
on Beltane’s flood tide,
when grand deceivers
woo their wildest
believers.
He wilded through
the sleeping villages
calling soft her name,
horse and rider
like a shadow
shadowing the darkest
rooks of night:
Til at last in the smallest
hamlet down the coast
he felt a tremble in
the town’s thick sleep.
A light quickened in
a window: then opened:
And she was there,
her red hair down
wild and long, like
strands of the same
kelp which the rider
had tucked up and
tried to comb clean
of his stallion’s mane.
She stared eyelessly
out in the dark -- seeing,
no, needing his too-
black approach,
so much that
it only took the
smallest finger
of moonlight
through tree limbs
to reveal her
smile’s beacon
to his own.
He pulled her
through the window
in one haul
then held her fast
in front of him
as they paired
on the wet
leather saddle.
He cried: Away! and
the beast raced hellbent
back to sea, encircling
her with the iron will
which hoops all
trothings fast.
Surely she was terrified,
but he laughed for
them both like a
sudden gale and stormed
back on the strand where
Corryvreckan mashed
the sea so swole and
malevolent as to seem
the world’s own heart-wound,
the very mound where
every desire sucks and
draws us round to doom.
Laughed again, then spurred
his beast to haul full
into the cruel mash of a wave --
too cold, too deep, too forceful
for the maid. She screamed
so loud it carried all the way
inland, rousing all
from sleep; the sound
tolled once and then
was gone, silenced by
what all the locals knew
too well, each crossing
their heart and clutching
closer their rosaries.
And then the
air was simply night,
a trilling of insects
and a lone dog’s
barks, idle hoverings
above the distant
mashings of the sea.
It’s said at flood-tides
you can see the pair
down by the shore, the
man-horse with the
seaweed in his hair
holding his ghostly lover
from behind, racing up
and down the beach
while she cries for
home and pleads him
ride harder faster
now now now
and Corryvreckan
rounds and rends
its God-deep roars.



In an online forum a friend talked about the divine circulation of energy, how that flows into us first as a sexual impulse - an ennervating, enlivening desire to plunge and bower the world’s hot brightness — which we either sate with physical sex or sublimate it into some other activity.

Regardless of how we pass on that energy, our ability to do whatever we do with is precisely balanced by our capacity to receive it. The engines don’t go without fuel, and the tanks are in constant need of replenishment.

Thus there is a tidal motion in the circuitry, a loop which requires receipt and surfeit, and psychic (or soul) development is that education we receive in how to manage those energies, or rather how they manage us.

Transformation occurs both in the god and the god in us as we attune to the process. The trickster has his way with us as the infantile, boob-addled Cupid, firing his arrows indiscriminately, raising hell for the hell of it, a real terror to tribe; and then he falls in love with Psyche and becomes Eros, an adult function, the one who suffers to reveal himself to psyche, for whom psyche suffers in turn with a love that eclipses Aprhodite’s golden sauciness.

And anima — the lucent aura behind the beloved — evolves from witch (think of Merlin enthralled into a stone prison in his passion for Niniane) to soul mate (and all of the confusions that go when divine and mortal blend in one face) to the interior function, her eyes to help us see the inward visage of the outer world, the part of the world that’s holy, the wet part of the sea.

Growth never stops; the circulation becomes more gradated, attenuated, polyphonic as we articulate and attune to the process. So what I hear as the peep of a birdsong unfolds and unravels its long scroll of coded meanings each time I return to it, each time I try to listen not only with the ears but all of the ears in me, so that bird has the voice of an angel and a narhwal and chapel choir and tree in the middle of paradise where the souls of all my loves and histories are gathered.


CIRCUITRY

2005

In younger days when I was a drowning
nocturne of purely puerile thrall, sex was
an amplitude of only two levels,
dread silence and high shriek. The
fabileau of my days and nights sawed
me back and forth without mercy or
grace, my lack a frozen tundra of lunar
dearth, my hunger for pillage of women’s
beds a wolfish and feral despot, limiting
my every night to that pursuit. My
daily libido was like the tides of a billion
years ago in the age of awfulness, when
the moon was huge in the sky and
still bloody with its birth from the sea,
daily hauling waves hundreds of miles
inland and then back, too hard and loud
for any life to take hold. I kept
mines awash with booze, lubricating my
every transitional surface with that
disillate of gods that trapped all
beds in bottles, all nights to one-night
stands. Awful, and yet looking back
I now see a compulsively high devotion
to a primal drama that was not mine,
zoned beyond my futilely thrusting hips
to a preliterate titanic age that was coded
and striated in the blueblack howl of
worldwide balls, my semen’s gorge rising
like the cudgel of the Cerne giant, its
hooves leaping mountains like the
Uffington Horse. Me, I just droned
in to dionysian ends, drunk and suicidal,
smacking my lips down to the bottom
of the cistern where I was torn apart at
last in a glee of red brutish claws.
There at last I slept, the final chord
crashed down, the silence ringing with
that old surf’s savagery & the night
absolutely dark, no moon, no woman,
no hope of going back to the nothing
I had become. There I dreamt
of harrowing down into the grave
where I lay still a long while
and then sorcerers detached
from cavernous walls to reassemble
my scatter, my organs sewn back,
my liver emended, gallsack drained
and re-fitted, my testes retrieved
from the bottom of the sea
rich with the salts of abysm,
my brain given wings and a fish-tail,
my heart hammered anew with
full view of all of its rooms and floors,
its walls and valves made porous
and tough, both sea-worthy and
ground enough to build something
sturdy upon, a library perhaps,
or a cathedral, or a good enough
song, or a house fit for love.
I turned 30, I quit drinking, I
got married, became a stepfather,
I settled down into a hard house
of love & got to work in a daily
grind of labors. All of that was
amped by the old loud thrall for sex
but that loudness was now poured
into two dozen striations,
canonical hours of the flow —
dream-work, studies in myth
and psychology, writing poems,
reading poems aloud as I walked
to work, working harder than
I ever had before, serving the
corporate father, singing in
every space of him the song of
the mother, working out at
the gym & loving the old wild
thresh of my limbs, the high
and dazed buzzing of beach-ions
in the dazzle of my post-exercise
high, walking back home in
the gold saturate of day’s end to
a house where all of the difficult
work of love waited for me —
walking through the living day with
eyes wide to nipples glazed with
milk, to birds singing on telephone
wires high above all the appropriate
names of God that I hadn’t heard
before in the loudness, the night
traffic outside howling those old
inappropriate names with the
vengeance of gypped ghosts. At home
I worked daily in the salt mines
of love, learning all the ways love
burns hot where sex will not, my
first wife fighting a tribe of
personal imps for a free hour with
me, the desperation in that effort
rounding the caesura of our
small island serenities, walking
together and talk talk talking,
the taste of an apple afterward
cathedral in its sweetness, in
all that old juice roaring just
as loudly but in deeper, less
apparent registers. And all of
that doomed to fail as it must
as the great wings learned to
fly between I and thou, to
fin the waters of sex in
sublimation, no less for disappearing
in so many new ways from all
of the old singular vista.
In the years since — through
divorce and wandering and
high sex and low, to remarriage
and rassles with old truths I
did not want to know, nearly
divorcing again and hiding for
a time back in the belly of the
whale with a bed a babe and
a bottle of booze & then a long
travail coming back to this home,
and more years of healing slowly
without much sex here to this hour
of 4:30 p.m. in a house of good and
durable love— : Along that travail the
tides have slowly changed, mere ripples
now at the old ravaged shoreline
but booming hard & harder below.
As an aging drunk’s tolerance
for hooch ebbs to where one sip
is too much, so one kiss now suffices
to ban my heart’s ice, even though
I ever wish for more and diddle
the dream in sanctuaries I have found
safe from melusines and bottle-
sprites — like travailling through You
each day, my Cape, the swash and
buckle of Your savage throat
jolly and feral enough to keep the
balls happily enraged in pen-strokes
and rapine of the page, in songs
thrown to indifferent winds. Outside
it’s cooler after two days of rain
and impeccably still. An hour ago
I heard a small mewl outside the
window; when I went close to check
things out I saw a small cat walking
away and then a fast flap of huge
wings as an owl crossed the street
and into a tree’s boughs above the
cat. It’s all there in that moment,
coded like that, the whole coiled
circuit of receive and release, wane
and wax, my desperate desire
for You fed by Your watery worlds,
hauled by your moon, lucent and
latinate, incarnate in all the ways
my heat exploded in those old lost
rooms of enactment, and returns to me now
inside the first bird of the day to
now sing, amid such a moist and
halcyon chill. Just one note will do,
exactly where old seas were darkest blue.


The distribution of the motif of “Clashing Rocks” is an indication its prehistoric antiquity, and refers the complex pattern of the Urmythos of the Quest to a period prior at least to the population of America. The signs and symbols of the Quest of Life which have so often survived in oral tradition, long after they have been rationalized or romanticized by literary artists, are our best clue to what must have been the primordial form of the one spiritual language of which, as Jeremias says (Altorientalischen Geisteskultur, Vorwort) “the dialects are recognizable in the divers existing cultures.”

Here, for the sake of brevity, we are considering only a single component of the complex pattern, that of the “Active Door.” It has been quite generally recognized that these Wandering Rocks, “to pass between which thou must thyself find a means” (Juelg), are the “Mythical forms of that wonder-door beyond which lie Oceanus, the Islands of the Blessed, the Kingdom of the Dead” and that they divide “this known world from the unknown Beyond” (Jessen in Roscher, Lexikon) that, as Cook, endorsing Jessen, says, they “presuppose the ancient popular belief in a doorway to the Otherworld formed by clashing mountain-walls.” The Planktai Petrai, in other words, are the leaves of the Golden Gates of the Janua Coeli, of which in the Christian tradition, St. Peter, appointed by the Son of Man, is now the Keeper.

***


Thus the way “to break out of the universe” (Hermes Trismegistos Lib XI.2.9) into that other order of the Divine Darkness that Dionysos describes as “blinding by excess of light” and where the Darkness and the Light “stand not distant from one another, but together in one another” (Jacob Boehme, Three Principles, XIV, 78), is the single track and “straight way” that penetrates the cardinal “point” on which contraries turn; their unity is only to be reached by entering in there where they actually coincide. And that is, in the last analysis, not anywhere or when, but within you; “World’s End is not to be found by walking, but it is within this fathom-long body that the pilgrimage must be made.” (Samyutta Nikaya 1.62)

Our soul is, as it were, the day, and our body the night;
We, in the middle, are the dawn between our day and night.
(Shams-i-tabuiz, ed. 252.12)

Of every land, that Dark Land is the best,
In which there is a Water, the Giver-Of-Life.
(Niza_mu’d din, Sikandra Na_una LXVII, 18)


— all in Ananda K Coomaraswamy, “Symplegades”

___

CLASHING ROCKS

Nov. 2004

I knew there was a door
to eternity in that surf.
I thought it was ecstatic
and pure and free.
Two or three times in
my bad gamboling
I encountered a woman
on a night when all else
faded to a drone and
the world became a
singular motion from
lips to lips and hand
to breast, her hair
falling over my face in a
a red-gold wave of
silky fire. All the world’s
possible waters narrowed
to this single strait,
a well or font which
redeemed to powers
of ten or a hundred
the ten thousand ways
I’d lost her on all
the other nights.
Two or three nights
I found the door
unlocked and She
inside smiling on her
bed of swimming blue,
singing blue psalteries
which washed me
clean to birth
and sent me far far
out to sea in the
coracle of a woman’s
drowsy curves. Eventually
each time we woke
on a beach some yards
apart, and the sound
of a cruelly crashing
surf sent us further
apart and away from
the bed of wonder
we once shared in
some place we’d never
find again: And departed
from each other
bewildered by the
whole bouree, embittered,
smarting from heart-
wounds the sea just
slapped and mocked
with salt. Alone again
I’d face that surf
and see the waves
as walls which kept
me jailed inside all
the ways I wanted out.
Each foray back into
the bars was a launch
against that tide, praying
to lost gods to change
my luck to guide that
arrow loosed by my
desire this time into
that blue wall and hit
some heavenly latchworks
and allow me passage
through the straits
of love yet one more time.
Years of that bone
minstrelsy, piping sweet
airs on a strand composed
of smithereened skulls
and aons and the
wilted pricks of loverboys, all
careened and drowned
in that hostile surf.
Eventually I
hung that wild carouse
on some coathook
by the door through
which I passed to
enter my real life,
the one I passed through
to begin to work and age
and even truly love.
Who would guess
those Symplegades
would part once I
surrendered all assault?
It makes sense to me
now in that blue
infernality I pickeled
in sitting in this
big easy chair: For
as she is upside down
and backwards to my
every meaty motion,
a widdershins egress
to my life’s hot
progress, so the
passage through that
door which hides in
every wave’s collapse
is one (today) of
stilling the horse
before he leaps:
To pause at every
hellbent Yes that
reaches wildly
in the wave to find
ghost handles
and let Her reach
back Her own way,
to turn the knob
in me — here — inside
the bower of a salt
surrender which isn’t
a surf at all, nor
any door, nor any woman
that I’ve met in this
life; not the jazz of
of ball-saxophones
though they surely
bray their hard bop
swoon: The horses
I sing here are all
of whimsy, with
manes of silver foam,
my ocean dry as paper
and inked in black
carousals where
godlike verbals roam
for some short while,
just a poem’s length,
which always ends
in rooms She’s been
in before, maybe only
an hour, a kiss apart:
Tomorrow I’ll be back
for matins at this tide
to sing of singularities
as narrow as the
sea’s pale blue hips,
deeper than this
page is wide, almost
a brush of lips.




***

It seems unlikely that any coast is visited more wrathfully by the sea’s waves than the Shetlands and the Orkneys, in the path of the cyclonic storms that pass eastward between Iceland and the British Isles. All the feeling and fury of such a storm, couched almost in Conradian prose, are contained in the usually prosaic British Islands Pilot:

“In the terrific gales which usually occur four or five times in every year all distinction between air and water is lost, the nearest objects are obscured by spray, and everything seems enveloped in a thick smoke; upon the open coast the sea rises at once, and striking upon the rocky shores rises in foam for several hundred feet and spreads over the whole country.

“The sea, however, is not so heavy in the violent gales of short continuance as when an ordinary gale has been blowing for many days; the whole force of the Atlantic is then beating against the shores of the Orkneys, rocks of many tons in weight are lifted from their beds, and the roar of the surge may be heard for twenty miles; the breakers rise to the height of 60 feet, and the broken sea on the North Shoal, which lies 12 miles northwestward of Costa Head, is visible at Skail and Birsay.”

- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

Queequeg's Box

IN THE BOX

Sept. 6

Today I’m thinking
in the box.
In his box, I mean,
the coffin on which
I float these days
of an exhausted
rainless summer,
when 5 a.m. seems
almost rank with
the slaughterings
of light across a
parching land.
My boat’s a trope
for night as hearse
which bournes
a dead friend’s
absent bones,
a bastard’s throne
while the real king
swirls far down
the dark brine
of drowned things.
I crown this box
the way I own
my name -- mostly
a mere accident
of history: A
grand grandfather
down my father’s
line got the farmer’s
daughter pregnant
and was run off;
the son kept his
grandsire’s name,
which means
the coat of arms I
revel in is no more
magic or true
than the box I’ve
climbed on here,
knocking Melville’s
narrative pilot
back into the drink.
I begin here where
he ended, with
this wake for
Queequeg on his
burial mound,
too far at sea
for whaleboats
or the surer
keels of history.
We make an
odd scrimshaw,
man and casket
not meant for each
other, both carved
by a whale too
white to show
his etching
through the ruts
are deep indeed.
Their phosphors
limn the marrow
of the lines I lay
down here, and
reeks of deadly
lustful things --
rotting blubber
and pussy harbors
rich with a man’s
old geysered seed --
inditia of sea-leys
no boat has
ever sailed til now
in this coracle of
blue-balled baleen,
on this raft of
pagan bone.
When I think I’m
in this box I’m
empty, unnavigable,
and free, my neurons
chanting a pagan’s
chantey as I hurl
my barbs all the
way into a God’s
deepest reddest
heart. A vicious
minstrelsy no doubt,
safe only at this hour
when I can fling
it at the crashing
dark till all my
metaphoric bells ring
true: Then shut it back
in croaking covers
of this box of a book;
and thus bid my
friend adieu
just as first light
entrances east
a new book’s
swirling blue.




THIS IS MY BOX

2006

I loved Menotti’s “Amahl
and The Night Visitors”
when I was a kid, faux-
directing the Pittsburgh
Symphony on TV when I
was three, lounging by
the stereo in my father’s
study when I was ten or
so, reveling in the aching
pathos of a poor shepherd
boy’s night, lamed, fatherless,
tending his meager flock
in wide desert scrabble
as eternal as the desertions
that can kill a heart.
Amahl’s boy fusion of loss and
yearning was surely mine,
starry and cold and powerfully
linked to the infant mewling
in a nearby manger —a
feeling blent of grief and
beauty which was somehow
stronger than all
of the shadows in his house
and mine, millennia away
in fat Evanston where our
family got thoroughly mauled
by each other and God and sex
and The Sixties. I especially
loved that song by Balthazaar
the silly third wise man—almost
a Stooge—about the box he’d
carried all his years and which
he would offer the child,
a box filled with everything startling
and wonderful in the world.
“This is my box, this is my box,
I never travel without my box,”
Balthazaar sang, each verse
opening drawers laden with
strangeness and pleasure, lapis
lazuli eggs and dinosaur tears
encased in amber, fragrant dried
flowers and enormous shark
teeth, rude stone goddesses and
jewelled tweezers for plucking
the burning plumage of gold geese
What a collection! I always wanted
a box like that, some treasure
chest of oddities and ardors and
devices not vaulted anywhere
else in the world, at least
not in that peculiar way I
most desired, whatever that
was. That ache was probably
why I was so fascinated with
the devious cigarette lighter
used by the spy hero in “In
Like Flint,” which had,
according to James Coburn,
“87 different uses—
88, if you need a light.”
One day I tried to reverse-
engineer that contraption
on paper, drawing 87 rectangles
in a big rectangle and then
trying to name each one.
What an exercise
in desire’s floral consummations,
impossible and permanently
inked! I believed back then
that plural uses were
necessary if you planned
to win in the world; a hero
required all the mojos he
could muster if he was
to beat his evil adversary,
blowing up the monster’s
island laboratory with
all his goons; surely
the 47th or 59th use
of that Zippo was exactly
how the hero could
escape such devastation
with such harrowing
hair’s-breadth (cunt-hair?)
precision, leaping over
the falls with 5 half-naked
girls in bobbing drums.
Savagery, cunning,
balls, and ire: to light
the fire you need a Flint
and I sure wanted to
be one, paused, flicking
the wheel to say
“88, if you need a light.”
Now I read how shamans
collected damagoni in their
rucksack of ills ‘n’ cures,
each both guardian spirit
and sheer pain, a singular
employ in the choir with
with a two-faced purpose,
as to cure a cold and freeze an
enemy’s pent smile.
A shamaness named Old Dixie
said she had over 50 damagoni
in her truck, queening over
all the young buck magicos
who could only muster
two or three salvos with
their tongues. All that makes
me wonder just what
verbal sprites are cabinned
here inside this trusty
somewhat rusty steamer
of steely verse, yowling and
harrumphing in the engine
room’s hellish mash of
gleaming oiled gears, keeping
these songs chugging along
through a sea of dark mornings,
There’s Oran down his well
decanting old sea gods,
and Roethke sweeting his field
of brually-blowing wheat.
There's Cupid on his high
hard horse cuckolding waves
of their siphoning wives,
there’s Shakespeare booming
through to galaxies beyond
the words we thought
we knew. Some redheaded
siren is raking blue waters
with the nails of her song,
urging every salmon of
fire to leap to the lees
of her hips; and further
out you’ll find the leaky nips
of a dark blue madonna
who delves my every
ejaculation with ululations
of pale shores; and there
in the rip current rides
the hard-galloping gent
whose blue eyes are pure
ice glinting not of any
light borne of days but
belongs to God’s spectra anyway,
far right of violet perhaps
or under the cleft in
Persephone’s red fruit, lending
a cold metallish sound
to these worked-up hooves.
All of those numens -- call ‘em
sprites or jinns or dervish
whirls of verbal moods ---
all of them jackal and jest
the days wash these lines,
vaulted somewhere under
my tongue behind my ear
and under my balls in
the darker vaults of my heart,
the greater half of a heat
which names all it believes
but remains itself unseen,
unridden, urn-bidden to lean
daft against the wind.
This is my box, my
hurlyburly juke of songs,
ferried from a hundred
distant shores:
It is my gift to you,
my unsaved Beloved, my
unsounded depth, my
unslakable destination
for which my soles will
never quite shore. Now
you’ve heard of all
I keep in the first drawer:
you will surely dream
what’s kept in the second.
But what is in the
third drawer I sing?
Here I keep the depths
of my world, the heart
of that lonely shepherd
boy who raptured mine
playing in in a minor key
of major third harmony
on his desert flute,
lit by that perfect
abandoned night where I walk
walk without meters
or crutch, where I store
the most sacred blunts
of all— “Licorice!” the
third wise man sang
and here I refrain,
Black sweet licorish
Black sweet licorish

— Have some!





CAT IN THE BOX

November 2002


We don’t know why, but our cat
loves her loving in a box.
We set one on the floor
and she hops right in,
deigning to be lifted to
our bed as if on a ski-lift
and then demurring to long strokes,
her sapphire eyes misting,
milky, culled in kittenlike
memories of long ago.
Normally she can’t stand to
be held, but with only a
box between us she’ll take
all the love we can give.
I guess sometimes love
requires an inch of buffer,
a frontier absence making
not enough more than.
A beach between sea and
land brocades the
safest most pure caress.


***


EMPTY BOXES

1990


Walking back from work, I saw
Al the crazy guy coming from
the Shell station. He carted his
usual burden of empty boxes up
the hill toward his mother’s house.
I too was burdened, carrying an empty briefcase
and numbed by corporate routine.
Spectator to the gold saturate of late afternoon.

Al wore a heavy blanket of clothes;
an army jacket, jeans, green cap. He
dresses that way even in the fiercest
noon of summer. A black beard hides
but dark eyes. As our ways crossed, I said
hello; he waved sheepishly and continued
up the hill, his errand wrapped around him
like a heavy scarf.

I turned into my driveway, hoping
my wife waited inside today with a smile.
Al scared my wife for a long time.
Encountering him on our walks,
she’d tuck her hair into her shirt.
You can’t reason with the ones with nothing
in their eyes, she explained. But in three years,
Al’s proved harmless. Just an empty box-hauler.

Al lives with his mother a few blocks up,
a fat woman who bosses kids from her
crossing guard station at the elementary
school at the top of the hill. I’ve seen her
standing up there at night,
implacable fingers on her fat hips,
receiving her lame-minded son’s empty offerings:
a dizzy, unreachable summit all men climb each day,
too mighty to best, too high to resist.





THE SANDBOX

2005

In this play of gods and queens
I am forever between shores
of real and seem, of both composed,
yet never more than a figment
for air and water, a paper boat
on a sea of words more numerous
than the grains of sand I once
munched in lieu of sea or mother,
sands which now fill this daily
box I sit so happily inside
of, at work, at play, building
out of nothing bell towers and
drowned chapels, labyrinths
of half-lit swoon, City of God,
isle of Sycorax, tomb guardians
like a fleet of boners between
swells of florid bosamage
sure to milk all shores in
sweet sweet lactates, nippling
the world -- all in this in pious
driven play: my daily exercise
in abandonment to things.
When I’m in the box I wing
at will to every aerie in blue heaven
and fin the depths of meres
which haunt green wilds far
outside this sleepy town,
riding a mare of dreamlike sound,
hooves hammering the strand
in wild harmony to that music
I recall from beaches long ago,
each stride a wave’s loud crash.
Inside the box I’m by the sea,
I’m in the bushes playing
Let Me Thee See, I’m in the
basement at infernal chemistry,
I’m Mr. Ned conducting the
Dean girls naked bed-bouncing
glee: Outside the box it’s 2006
and our country sucks a sucky
world & my wife is far away,
as close as real love gets in
the big world of aches and smarts.
Outside the box is where
it all gets lost and hardens down
in rooms of stone, all sadness
permanent and ruin sure
and nothing much more to
say about it. Outside the box
this is poetry beneath the grade,
the dalliance of a working
man who suffers us the ennui
of things turning out the
other ways, tamed and cowed
by love’s mortgage-book,
a pulse mortared by bills
and pills and long-lost thrills.
Here I set to frolic in the surf
of sex-drenched summer days,
my naked length and depth
seduced into a merry crash
of warm hissing foam, all
thirsts roused and slakened
the way a shore is pounded
for ages by a wild collapsing
surf. Here is wonder and
enchantment, the thrall of
nascent hours, first light
glowing on the immortally
gratified pair in the bower
at the garden’s center,
green buds lifting from
dead loam in ripe hossannahs,
the air clear and startling,
all knowledge fragrant
finding out how close a kiss
is to that angel’s flowered breath
which blossoms in our hearts,
how much a song is like the
selkie queen who sings of God
offshore: -- Who’d ever care to
leave this box, which doesn’t
quite exist yet is the greatest
part of the life we life if only
on the pages in these latter-day
arrears. This sandbox is a
solitary enterprise for fools
and puerile sons, the very lap
of heaven poured by that
surf-mill which delves the
day its sun. Watch the words
pour from my mind, like
sand from cupped hands,
like gold dust on the world
you’ll never get to see
unless you climb in this box with me.







THE PORNOGRAPHY BOX

post to Joseph Campbell Mythology Group, May 2004


In response to this line from a person who posted about the pix from Abu Ghuraib:

“If you are doing something you shouldn't be doing, for goodness sake, don't take pictures!”

***

Heavens fellas, how do we approach this one ... is it only naughty boys and girls who ferret away that evidence so self- incriminating?

The box of porn mags in the closet, the bundle of Polaroids in an envelope at the bottom of a dresser drawer (underneath the neatly-folded cummerbund last worn at a distant cousin's wedding), the file folder marked “personal” in the desk at work filled with printouts of illicit e-mails ... stuff you should burn, but we hold on to those relics of old passion and thrall. All that wildness we’re terrified of falling into, desperate not to lose. Grainy out-of-focus shots of an old girlfriend who, on a dare allowed herself to be photographed with her legs spread wide .. shots from the bachelor party where the stripper went down on the groom ... pix of dead babies from My Lai, snuff films, things crusted with blood .. faint-smelling panties and love-letters still ringed with a shade of lipstick decades out of fashion ... all that eye nose and heart-candy which retains its headiest flavor hidden away from the disapproving view of wives, mothers, children, trophies and booty, unmentionables stolen from the sea witch next door ... all that creepy peeping tom naughty boy effluvia gathering in the most secret antechambers of the heart: there will be hell to pay if they get found out, but no way can we let them go ...

Without that pornography box I've nowhere to go to unburden all of my unspeakable desires, they portal the house of one thousand fantasies, slake just a small part of the unslakable thirst, just a daily furtive sip and I can be that perfect son husband brother coworker who should not, must not, does not have any secrets.

That's why those things keep turning up in dead men's attics, behind walls torn down years later, are fished up from some deep where they are most treasured, and we most damned. Why did he keep those pictures? And who is he really, when the truth be fully told? What wife or mother hasn't suddenly felt like they've been living with a someone who had a secret citizenship in an inacessible world?

Secret fetishes are like a yet-discovered language for love, may be the Eleusinian Mysteries of our age. Of all ages ... Vault of desire, burning, the invisible reflection of a face in your window. If it isn't in a box, it's beneath the tongue, or buried under these words.

Why did those idiots take pictures of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners? Are they only a drop of some wider flood? When shadows are shuttered the lens must see it all in living technicolor.


BOX

2004

I never travel without my box.
— Caspar the Third Wise Man
in Menotti’s Amahl and The Night Visitors

This box belongs to
Florida. It’s bound in
gator hide and filled with
roach-infested deeds to
swamp acreage. It washed
washed ashore tangled in
the wreckage of a space
shuttle’s, filled with
doubloons and transistors.
No bigger than the rudest
patron’s nose, it swings
between a stripper’s breasts
in Fort Lauderdale, bouncing
about like a bale of
pot in the Florida Straits,
and you’ll need more
than whiskey and a willie
to find out what’s in it.
It’s in the weeds of I-75
north of New Port Richey
ten feet from a drainage
ditch, forever parted
from its secret freight.
It’s on the formica dining
room table of a Paisley
tree trimmer who found
it in the high branches
of a downed oak in
College Park after the
hurricane; he’s sure it
will spring him from all
of this but he just can’t
bring himself to open it,
not with all those fallen
trees across the state.
The box is in the third
box down of the second
tier inside a storage
bin in Gainesville
amid the rest of a
marriage, still beating,
still warm. It’s made of
human skin and has
been ferried by gators
for centuries across
the swamp, all of whom
marvel at its sweet
pink luster, its sudden
jostle into fright. It’s
lodged way down --
a half-mile, I’d say --
in the murk and wreckage
of a sinkhole, wedged
between a cow’s pelvis
and a rusted ‘52 DeSoto
which fell so fast and
silently that the lovers
in their honeyed thrash
were too busy filling
up the box to understand
they were headed in it too.
The box is there under
Lake Ivanhoe, gleaming
now in 4 a.m. moonlight,
the occasional semi slurring
on the I-4 overpass,
the night fully braided
over what lies concealed
under it, which only
you can open and
read, if you will,
if you have ever dreamt
of such places,
or wondered just
what the day
covers with its bright lid.




BIG SKULL

2002

There’s a big skull
in our back yard
satirizing the half
we vaunt as day.

I hear it droning
low old chants
& alms, sad &
deep within its

chapel bone, cold
as time and all
that drained away
while we built and

taught and moved
and won. Our way
is powerful and
ripe, it’s true—a red

engine of high
rhythms, fleet
furious and blind.
It arcs a future

which has no need
of you and me;
it has cured itself
of the ache to love.

La la la, sings the skull
out back, not exactly
mocking, nor ironic,
but deeply disturbing

as all engraved
jesters are. He’s
exactly what we
cannot stand to hear:

correction from
down under,
God’s thunder
bringing up the rear.







WHY SKULL WELL

2003


Sufferers of the whooping
cough found healing at
St. Teilo’s Well in northern
Pembrokeshire when
water was lifted to
their lips from the
saint’s skull.

-- John Rhys, Celtic
Folklore: Welsh and Manx

I dip these skulls of
old welterings in the
name of cold deep,
splashings faintly
as I draw — why?
Because the arras
of this adult suburban
irreligious life is
so known, so dry?
Or is it simply that
the poem bids me
speak in its native
tongue? When St. Teilo
was on his deathbed
he asked his beautiful
maid to wait a year
after his death
and then dig up his skull
to use at the well.
Columba’s abbey rose
thus from Oran’s bone,
his mouth to doors
below; Columba
decreed that no man
may access the angels
of that isle but through
Oran, and it’s true:
All present enterprise
brackens with dead
ends, once-gloried
shouts now briared
promontories of stale
lust. I need wet sources
to ballast dry days:
if a harrowed skull
lifts more of that
deep blue, then dip
away. It’s 5:15 a.m. on a
Monday morning, Violet
given her treat and
open window, mama
cat and her kits outside
in a clump on the table,
my wife soon to be
wakened for another
wearying day of work:
Familiar tones to these
pre-dawn ranns, a mound
of knowns. That’s midlife,
both sordid and happy,
a res of young whims
grown reedy and old.
These poems are drawn
from all that, my
life’s manor showing
weed, but the well
at its center still delving
up cups of wonder.
I keep my thirst
here, where the hole is
bottomless and pure,
and each day’s measure
is the size of a skull,
a soul, or my heart--
all that I can ferry.
May I spill not a drop
nor sip more than I carry.
And at poem’s end
may I set the skull
properly back in place,
all depths below, their
darks eyeholed, inked
in the bourne we all
must cross. I set today’s
peom on the shore
where waves crease
and collapse, and in
that foam and hiss welcome
first and forever kiss.

She is (Here)

A hot hot Labor Day weekend, our malaise the lack of any substantial rain, the temps soaring and searing the undersides of this cool house, a nagging insanity ... Sunday afternoon, my wife putting more wares into her booth as the store she’s located in readies to close in October -- so sad to see her so defeated, having worked so hard and well. -- Cats dozing all around the shadows, lizards sprinting on the pavement, my neighbor across the street hammering down a new porch, the sky like this bronze bell that just won’t stop clanging.

***

Beginning to read into Jacques Lacan’s “On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge,” and what he says early on helps articulate a poetics I’ve been reaching for for some time:

***

I am going out, and once again I will write on the door, so that, as you exit, you may perhaps recall the dreams you have pursued in this bed. I will write the following sentence: “Jouissance of the Other,” of the Other with a capital O, “of the body of the Other who symbolizes the Other, is not the sign of love.”

That is why the unconscious was invented -- so that we could realize that man’s desire is the Other’s desire (eds’ note, or “that man’s desire is for the Other’s desire”), and that love, while it is a passion that involves ignorance of desire, nevertheless leaves desire its whole import. When we look a bit more closely, we see the ravages wreaked by this.

Jouissance -- jouissance of the Other’s body -- remains a question, because the answer it may constitute is not necessary. We can take this further still: it is not a sufficient answer either, because love demands love. It never stops demanding it. It demands it ... encore. “Encore” is the proper name of the gap in the Other from which the demand for love stems.

-- “On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge,” Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, transl. with notes by Bruce Fink, p. 3-4 passim

***

So the Beloved is a fiction of consciousness, and the unconscious is Her bed, Her bower, Her shadowy aquaean souterrain, the place where all of my womb water-spilled, from where my devastating thirst for return is maddened and drenched and never quite quenched.

My desire is the Other’s desire, or for the Other’s desire: Always there is a hard, childlike need for acceptance, which has behind an unprovable certainty that my desire can only be hers, surely must be hers. That goading need and certainty ghosts all of the unconscious projections and fantasies that have dogged my waking hours, and acts like a lucent jetstream in the endless reels of masturbatory immersion into insuperably hot unions.




SHE IS (HERE)

September 3

Who knew my Beloved wasn’t
out beyond my dark unlovely
nights but the dark herself,
that otherworldly princess
the sun will never find
in his bright and knowing
ways, not ever, though
he plunder every shining shore
to door love’s wildest main.
Who knew how much wreckage
all my raptures would leave
behind, a rubble of Iseult
nonsense fallen precisely
in that rupture
that only widened each
time I almost found her.
Beware the riptides
of your bliss; they
will haul you from her bed
with such viciousness
you’d think all wombs
were siege engines tearing
down our very souls,
tossing whatever we
hold dear down cold
thralls of infinite farewelling.
She’s gone so far away
now that were I
to knock on every
seeming door in hell’s
drowned cidatel, I’ll not
name that fleeing angel
who welcomes all sons
home. Beneath the awkward
turrets of my life there’s
an ocean of blue nougat,
the yolk of dragons
and mermen and
dorky poets, oh my.
You cannot build a castle
on the sea unless you
first plunge your child
in its lees, mixing
his hot bloodings into
the rigor blue of mortar.
The house of love
rides on a fish
from here to Avalon
and back, singing his
beloved’s name on
every empty shore
full crashing with sweet foam.
She’s never far, though
ever here, too dark even
at this hour, this dank
black 5 a.m. Ah, but listen
to her sigh and whisper
in her dream
inside the pulsing insects,
beneath the dark garden
just outside this window,
inside these groping
words which trace
her absent welcome
with a sense too
viscerally airy to
touch with any more
certainty than a
curved glissade of
a smile of a softly
ebbing wave. She’s
pressing up against me
from that buried mere,
her sex dowsing with my
own dark pen
for words of her dark world.
Each morning we hold
converse before the
real world wakes up,
a colloquy which recconnoits
our every gap and lack.
We’re repeating Love’s name
through all our echoing lacuna
so that Love may understand
our faithfulness and surrender to
a kiss we lost forever when
she and I began, on that
white shore long ago
when my mother cried
and released us to
this tale we can’t outgrow.