Drool of the Fool Youll Always Rule

Since today I’m dragging my feet in the rut of the unconscious structured like a language, it should be realized that this formulation totally changes the function of the subject as existing. The subject is not the one (celui) who thinks. The subject is precisely the one we encourage, not to say it all (tout dire) as we tell him in order to charm him -- one cannot say it all--but rather to utter stupidities. That is the key.

-- Jacque Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge



SAVANT SONG

Sept. 17

There’s madness in poetry,
stupidity too. Foam and
drone in the service
of a bone in my ear.
(Or rear.) It’s just
so damn easy to
get lost singing
in dark woods
or down dirty depths;
utter one word
and the poem steps
left not right,
commencing
the sin of all
missed marks,
falling into the
thrill of a thrall
of an appalling
dark spell. Stupidity
enters when I think
this is about me,
that I own this thing,
that my singing
matters at all
to the world, to Her,
to You. Only whales
and broke keels
ever get to the
true bottoms of things.
Between mad fool
and idiot savant
a faint way winds
through a song’s
hidden heart, and
no one knows how to
find it, much less stay
on it for long
with anything like
what we
call certainty.
The one who
sails through a
cape’s horns of
awe and awfulness
has skill no doubt,
but his survival
depends on luck
or grace or fate:
He not so much
steers those end-
of-the-world waves
as rides the tiller with
eyes fast shut while
some greater will
will rolls his bones’
dice. Say it right
and you get passage
on through to
calmer days & fish
tales in harbors to come
when pen comes
to rest at the end of paper.
No matter how we
deign to usurp
or negate what surges
under the nib’s rudder,
our fortunes are
the grace of an
unknowable other:
We’re given the words
and then write them
down, and some of
them terrify and
some of them ring
every bell in the the land
and some of them
bore even the ones
enthralled with the
sound of writing them
down, again & again
& again & again. I
put pen to paper &
let the lines go
where they will,
& since as yet I
(or they) haven’t
hit bottom, perhaps
I’m not so much
singing as winging
blue skies not bowered
by you, not yet,
maybe never. Do you
love this fumbling
husbandry of every
first night, a jottin’
jerks joltage on paper
beds of pure white?
I don’t know whether
I should feel humiliated
or humbled wooing
you this way now for
ten thousandth time
here in the next draft
soon headed for time’s trash.
Are these motions
devotions of a lost
seas’s sad thrash?
I can’t answer that
any more than say
how I write of drowns
in defiance of song
as we know it today:
the road is narrow
& thins every line;
I haven’t the courage
or smarts to peer
much either way
into the dooms
I invoke: So I prow
on in faith of a
blue certitude,
my raptures and
schisms common
to the crazed and
the quelled. The
only distance or
difference which
keeps me from the
drink is the depth
of a page & blessed
covers to shut
when I’ve exhausted
the rage.





COMPOSING IS
THE THING

Sept. 20

Composing is the thing:
me here in this chair
at this God-saturated hour
with pen again to paper,
writing down the lines
just so and how, getting
them to sound right
somehow deep and
deeper in my deepest ear.
Composing is the next
way I hold You dear;
or, better,the next way I
remember how You
said Let’s go look for worms
in that back yard
now a life’s long tides ago.
(I trace that current
like the heart-line
of a palm to that
night much later
when You hissed stick
it up my ass, ah,
but that’s another
poem, another row
to hoe.) Composing is
my matin hour, here
between four and five a.m.,
writing in scribbled
latin a sound which
invokes a sunnier
majescule yet
to come, the letters
darkly blue with
church hallows and
lush resounds, like
plainchant in a stone
chapel which disappears
between the bells.
Composing is a joy
greater than rewriting
later at the taskboard
where I hang these cables
on the great bridge
of a so-called work,
that something which
breeches cross
the abyss to find
you safely lost again.
Without the sate of
composing I would
long ago have
sold that bridge to
a rube in San Antone,
a big steel bone
plopped from my mouth
or from regions
further South not
worth the pig iron
it was fired from.
Yes, composing is a
joy, its balm more
than spiritual,
flushing me with hope
once more that this
next time I’ll nail you
properly just offshore
my words, even
though I know I’ll
never quite do or
say it right; it’s
a satisfaction behind
the balls, more
animal I guess,
my rightness in
the world’s denouement
with my daily
vowels’ movement,
Yay to Gee and
back again. Composing
surely gets me
there, without lifting
ass from chair
I sight you there
in your black
sea underwear,
your selkie seem
deep desires. Composing
thus forges a blue
box for hiding that skin in,
empowering a
a seas-deep booty call.
Yes, composing
is the thing, predawn
bells I ring this way
then that each day I can
as long as am able;
as long as waves swell
and heave and fall
on shores, as long
as I put pen to paper
the way that young girl
smiled and walked
into the woods with
me enrapt behind
in search of her, or,
better, worms.
Composing is the
first part of the
writing that writhes
in freshly broken turf:
strange, somewhat ghastly,
blind, and coiling frantic
curves of dirt
and deeper seethe
displayed upon a paper
palm she holds forever
out to me.




QUEEQUEG’S COFFIN
SAILS ON AND ON

Sept. 18

When the Rachel adopted
me in lieu of her lost son,
they left my friend’s coffin
behind in the wash
to fare on, spectre of
the white whale’s ghastly
spout. As far as I know
it’s still out there on
the mash and crash,
a rogue trope ferrying
its emptiness
beneath moons so brilliant
only sea-wolves
see the darkness
there, inside that
feral box. Of all the
sad things in my tale,
I think it is that coffin
that I grieve the most,
sea-worthy house
of the pagan heart I lost,
the only wreckage
to lift from the
Pequod’s downward
sprawl to carry me -- me!
beyond its captain’s
bourne. The crew
of Rachel lifted
me off of that dream
offering all the
comfort of the tribe --
a warm berth, some
elbow room, grog --
relishing in my tale
as the ship sailed home,
the story rounding
from my mouth to
those sailors back
through my own ears,
falling into an inkwell
soon ripe with whale oil.
They always shifted
when I told them
how that coffin spouted
from doom’s wake,
a gift from drowning
gods, as if some will
-- Shakespeare’s, perhaps --
sent that casket forth
to bless the prophesy
I heard back in
Bedford that one
man alone would
sail past Ahab’s doom.
As they listened
to my ending
the would scan over
my shoulder to
the blue erasures
overboard, perhaps
trying to locate that faded
box with its rude
cartography of whorls
and glyphs and vastly
empty vault. Gone, except
as it rides here,
somewhere between
Melville and the
Pacific’s haunting ground.
In a lucent dream’s chapel
I hang this coffin-
shaped stone memorial
inscribed with the
names of the Pequod’s
black crew, and,
above, Ahab aboard
his whale, drowned
in deed but not in will,
pointing thus at you and
me, or maybe, far behind
us, that single floating
box which sails over
the wave-tops like a
frail candle that cannot
be dowsed, fuse of this
song that will not let me out.

Prayers to Hekate (On Old Foolishness)

Goddess-Nurse of the young, give ear to my prayer, and grant that this woman may reject the love-embrace of youth and dote on grey-haired old men whose powers are dulled, but whose hearts still desire.

-- Prayer to Hekate from Homeric Epigrams
(translation by H.G. Evelyn-White]

***

Maybe that old fool's prayer is the augment behind our Dumb and Dumber culture ... as if reason has apexed and ebbed into the dotage of desire, for the puer's spring, the puella's virginal smile ...

Hekate is closely related to other feminine night-deities; daughter of Leto (a moon-goddess who gave birth to Apollo) or Lux, Goddess of Night; guide of Persephone in the realms of the dead; virginaL in her relation to Aretemis, wise in woman's arts (many of the black, though other simply feminine, like childbirth), all exclusive of men.

It's obvious why a horny old coot would invoke any means possible to get up under a young hottie's tunic -- including a fistful of Hekatean invective. Is there another level, too? Do rational people age past the height of their powers, and, ebbing, find themselves prone to superstition, or, at best, charmmed by ennuis's bittersweet gold?

And is there a third level? Do rational eras themselves age past their prime? After the Hellenic, do superstitious & sacchyrine Hellenistic ones follow? When cultural innovation becomes endless repitition? Is Catullus Ovid without the storytelling? Is he the faintest remains of Homer, reduced to cackling & drooling at the scent of pretty girls walking by? Don't get me wrong, I love Catullus; and the sexual certainly is the pschompomp of the spiritual, our animal rudder, our ground and figure ... Is the dirty old man a gatekeeper of sorts whose message we don't yet understand?

Certainly we're awash today in time's fools; lordy what an obsecene amount of cash & energy gets squandered on the addlements of youth's aura. How many angels d'ya think dance on the tip of Hilton's nipple? Enquiring minds gotta to know!

To me there's nothing uglier than old & older people trying to look young and younger; perhaps Hekate's charm works us in reverse, a physic which returns to scotch its maker. We don't so much charm the maid as become enthralled with her spell, like Merlin in Nimue's bower of thorns. All of this Botoxing and boob-heaving and fatsuction and face and/or penis transplanting is like that maimed ugly artisan Hephaistos trying to create Pandora, first woman on earth. And like the old tale, the Pandora we create with our immortalized flesh ushers in a godlikeness which further asks us just what the hell humans -- and human faith -- is for.

The intensity of the density of such a mind to me shows its extreme age; and whether it augurs impending annihilation or simply a gentler mediation from one age to the next, the geezer who by day defends the city walls and by nights babbles his appeal to a remote dark feminine maruader is a strange hexagram for modernity. Maybe Hekate gets her husband at last in the old man's desire, unrepentant, world-burning, defiant of every turret in consciousness for one dig in the dale of filly's dilly's demsene, jowls to the howls, burying Descartes in a casket with sea sand. I sink, therefore I clam.

Dumb and dumber, someone call the plumber ...

A Miscellany of Heart-Roads

So what am I getting at? Don’t we all ask ourselves that in the work we’re about? The deep work I mean, in our poems and prayers, in our studies and excavations. Getting to the heart of the matter, to that infernal heartland of the magic South, the half of Ireland beneath the Sidhe, eighteen inches down from the noggin along a descending road of souls into the plush and gush of vitallest gules, a swampy hot island in the center of the chest where my truths are all rooted: knowledge of self, knowledge of God, knowledge of the world. There the starry heavens are writ, margined by all things lost at sea.

Heart-knowledge is knowledge of first things, of the way we were when love flooded through us like a uteral sea. It is knowledge of mythic time, the lineage of gods before kings, of the vast intercoursings of Aphrodite astride tunny Poseidon, of the precise count of Zeus’s sperm, of the names of all his children, the number of of Hera’s enraged tears. There too my personal father and mother, as the latest bum battlefield of the heart, re-enacting Wellington and Shiloh with grand intentions and generations-deep wounds.

If only learning the heart followed a clear procedure: always the roads there are muddy, strange, noctilucent, dangerous (at best turbulent), as if one were tasked to walk a sword bridge over to it. The light provided for this passage is moody and moony, ethereal, cold: clearly Other. No wonder we’ve always loved faery imagery, as Thomas Tickell sings “Kensington Gardens” (18th cent.):

When Albion ruled the land, whose lineage came
From Neptune mingling with a mortal dame,
Their midnight pranks the sprightly fairies play’d
On every hill, and danc’d in every shade.
But, foes to sun-shine, most they took delight
In dells and dales concealed from human sight:
There hew’d their houses in the arching rock;
Or scoop’d the bosom of the blasted oak;
Or heard, o’ershadowed by some shelving hill,
The distant murmurs of the fading rills.
They, rich in pilfer’d spoils, indulg’d their mirth,
And pity’d the huge wretched sons of earth.
Ev’n now, ‘tis said, the hinds o’erhear their strain,
And strive to view their airy forms in vain;
They to their cells at man’s approach repair,
Like the shy leveret, or the mother-hare,
The whilst poor mortals startle at the sound
Of unseen footsteps on the haunted ground.

What are these beasts in our chests, surly yet serene, burning with a certainty for invisible things, durable most in breaking, always just beyond our wills, our courage, our knowledge? How do we receive the wisdom of the heart? Is it a matter of Solomonic instruction, as we read in the Proverbs:

My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings.
Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart.
For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh.
Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. (4.20-2 King James Version)

Or is it always something we must find on our own, to know our true feelings, to sound its mysterious depths? For such a task do I turn to personal history, the jawbone and Rosetta stone of the heart’s mystery? In AA they say, “your story is your sobriety;” the tale is whale I here ride. All I have are memories, signs, passions, griefs, and oceans of coagulative ink, thinking down into the heart of that heart, through its heat and its confusions, its mad certainties.


AURA OF THE HEART

Sept. 16

I was born Merovingian,
fixed by a birthmark
over my heart of a red
heart with an arrow through it.
Some tattoo, eh. It faded
when I was three, perhaps
when my own heart
first began to break,
waking to the great
and greater distance
between me and
the objects of desire
I call love, that lucent
moon which hauls
ever higher and further
across its singing mothersea.
Moonlight casts an aura
over night lands; so too
that mark’s memory
lamps the blue realms
of my heart,
a ghostly phosphor
which somehow knows
what I can’t see
like an inward bulb
screwed into ecstasy.
That birthmark’s aura
gives voice to a skull
up from the dirt
or phallus in a boat
floating down a
black tide’s nekyia
bringing the news
to me of that furthest
limit down and away
where You swell
the rooks of hallowed
sound. Did that mark
fade into my chest
or travel down?
There’s a blotch of
brown on my right
anklebone; if that’s
where my royal
numen came to
rest, its surely
just a poor wreck,
the relic shoreline
of a first pure
ecstasy. I live there
now, in the slow
wreakage of my
body’s South, the
happy ruin of
a rune which so
transfixed and
nailed my history
to a woman’s—real,
imagined— smile.
To dowse the depths
in love’s high name
became the aura
of my own -- “son
of love? is my
real name’s Jewish
root, that name
which hides behind
and south of
the name I writ here
by, like the rudder
of the coracle
St. Brendan
sails in search
of one true shore.
That birthmark
lost long ago is
the bluest aura
of my song, staining
every chord in noctal
wash, giving birth to a
faery brood of
singsong ditties
fathered by a
brutal fish & nursed
on mortal titties.
Infernal parable,
mythos of a heart,
ghostly lucence
of a thrall I’ll never
name, housed down
at the bottom of
it all, though each
harrowing goes deep,
wilder, freer too. So
upon my secret altar
I place that
sign of a birth-unions
struck by love: savage
calyx of perfumed
lush thorns, rosebud
closure which has me
forever sworn to
an ending without
real orifice, waters
at first light, the
aura by which I’m
born again here,
a moon over the
first wild sea,
giving heart
to what cannot be.


BIRTHMARK

2004


All metre and mystery
touch on the Lord at last.
The tide thunders ashore
in praise of the High King.

-- from “A Defense of Poetry,”
Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe (13th cent.)
transl. from the Gaelic by
Thomas Kinsella

For some—it is horsemen; for others—it is infantry;
For some others—it is ships which are, on this black earth,
Visibly constant in their beauty. But for me,
It is that which you desire.

—Sappho, Fr. 16, transl. D. W. Myatt

I was born to such
hapless outre & riven
song out in love’s
blue tide: The
gods scarred
or scored me at
birth with the
unlikely mark
of a red heart
with an arrow through
it & affixed high
over my right nipple:
I was a humming
baby who took later
delight in the sight
of pretty girls walking
by our front window:
Sang long & loud
to Big Toe my
toad in her yellow pail
out at Cape Cod where
we once vacationed:
Fell desperately in
love with the girl down
the street who swam
topless for me in a
bright blue wading pool
(we were 3): So when
at 4 years old
I sat on Jacksonville
Beach with my mother
& heard her voice inside
the surf I was already
old in that song, a
veteran sailor of
the rise and crash
of blue seem: The
birthmark faded around
then, it sunk into my
heart to conch a chapel
of that beach of
song and love and
you: Ever since
it bid me sing
for good and ill
these useless raptures
of sigh and swill:
No more of that
history this morning,
there’s work to do:
My wife and I up
now at 4 a.m., I to
work where the pile
is high, my wife on
to Wal-Mart to get
shopping done
so she can get home
& to work on her
fabrics, that
embroidery inside
her which must
come forth: Incessant
this desire to repeat
and name all the
waves which carved
a sound inside my
ear, or woke more
ancient tidals of
womb and gene
and heraldic
minstrelsy, like
an old song’s next harp:
This life is one
wave’s rise and crash
and ebb so wild to
reach you at last as
ever, pregnant
in every wave
you’ve bid Cupid
ride since time first
poured the seas: I’ve
long given up caring
how the world accounts
and dismounts this
blue tongue from your
salt throat: And if I
err, I err now wildly
enough to appease
the errant itch: I’m
not much different
from woman who saw
the likeness of the
Virgin Mary in a
grilled cheese sandwich
she had just taken
a bite out of, preserving
the morsel for ten
years (waiting for
the death of her
parents, she said)
& then selling it
the other day on E-bay
for $28,000 to an
online casino:
Same gal, different
grill: There’s lucre
aplenty to blow
in fustive coin, spume
and spew enough
of burning narhwal seed
to horn every ocean
womb: Enough sweet-
sounding syllables
to wash on every shore
that lies ahead where you
once walked and gazed
imploring emptiness
to send your lover
at last: That’s my gig,
my under-employ, while
the real life goes on
and down and through:
A happy life, I’d add,
composed of joys
which carry a high
and dear price:
This salt blue intone
is like bone-ribbing
for that big-finned life,
a cathedral keel
of wavelike bones with
all the world between us
and every song on loan
from the missal buried
far down there in
the cold dark sea
where you and I
sing in each other,
spinning the great
wheel over and over,
praying we’ll get lucky at last:


THE BIRTHMARK

2000

Both ends burning:
head and cock
sizzling down
to the unexplainably
dark heart from
whence all hungers
are denied.
Ghost birthmark
heart with
an arrow through
it. Son of Eros,
lordly fire filtering
hither and yon
with his untutored
clutch of arrows,
looking for love
in all the wrong places.
How many beds
does it take to find
the name?
Rooms I have entered
heedless of the
hour or of my
sour condition
in search of the
the edge of fire.
Flying off again
before drowsy
rains: appetites
sated but not whet.
Puer in the guise
of Eros flying over
each encounter
never touching
earth or bed
long enough to
recognize a face.
Because love is
a torture, the heart
forged in fires
greater than passion.
A geologic, transforming
boy to man in each
bloody kept transition.
Returning to the same
house again and
again finding room
after room
and when they
seem to end
remaining to praise
the same room.
Releasing the goddess
from the woman
not to love
imperfection but
rather to praise
what is perfectly
here, her blue gray
eyes rising from
one voluptuously
offered hug. Understand-
ing boundaries as
walls of a heart
which permit old
blood to grow new.
Adult eros a fable
we love to tell
amid the order
of our lives - Praying
o not shoot thy
sweet and terrible
arrows this way
again.
I’ve plenty.


HEART PIERCED BY ARROW

2000


Heart pierced by arrow:
a signet of assault
by Eros. Love’s rebirth
on a shaft of white fire
when she says
O Yes
and I write O Boy.
All I ever wanted
to know in that
swift pierce
from half to half
of a heart.
My birth tattoo,
my epitaph.
God singing while
he warms his hands
on my pyre.

NOT LOVE BUT ART

1995

Not love but art:
rare dazzle of
the highland hour;
seducer combing
his black hair
on the sagging
porches of the heart.

He who obeys
by violating love;
Arrow barbed
in glowing iron
falling gorgeous
to the sea.

Gilding the
echoes
of love's
futile shout.

Solitary boat
rocking on a
black lacquer tide.


NOT ART BUT LOVE

1995

Not art
but love:
she who walks
so naked
outside
cathedrals
Whose smile
defeats
their shadow

Hot blossom
so indolent
and svelte
curving the dreams
of island boys

Her eyes
so deep in blue
to make
God weak
in the knees

Most herself
when this
glass womb
shatters


THE HEART IS
NOT A DIGITAL FACT

December 1994

The heart is not
a digital fact.
It is not locked in
a choice between
solitude and romance.
No.
I would awaken
to what wilds there
are between those
cities of sorrow
and swoon.

If only
I could quit
this godforsaken chase.


ART HEART

2006

The heart has no place
in the market -- ask
any of its players
from salt-seller to
grifter to brass tycoon.
I wonder too if the heart
should veer right of
poetry so to avoid
all confusion of verbal
swoon with the real
songs of love, the
ten thousand simple
ditties which compose
a couple’s fateful life.
The heart of art
is pure usury,
gold on one side of
the glittery wave
and Arctic blue on
its other, never meant
for beds or the
tender garden of
days. The art of
the heart ships to
shores far down
from the heart
of the art, where
it’s always full moon
and the waves
crash like milked
silver, harrowing and
blue and incessantly
brutal and deep
and divine. I swim
with the nixies
and wake with my wife,
secure in this
narrowed conceit
of two vaults meant
to fill far from the other
yet mutually misered
by one sambaltique
sea. Coinage and vantage
mean less in its slopes
than heels and mizzen,
spars cast far below.
However I say it is wrong
though the distinction
is true. Whalers in
crow’s nests would
agree: cask your oil
safe below; keep
an eye trained equally
on flukes and home
shores; and always
remember where you’re
standing, and on what,
somewhere between
God and the vast
plunging sea. Thus
I keep my heart
in its soul cage
beating sure down the page.


HEART INSIDE SONG

2000

from “A Breviary of Guitars”


Summer 1986:
Music brought me
from a sparkling
beach just outside
the womb to
another distant
strange beach which
felt more like a
tomb: Throughout
the transit in
the many stances
I presumed
holding a
guitar I
never doubted
the notes which rose
in me & called me
from beyond:
Never doubted
the heart inside
the song though my
performance was
always flawed
& errant &
suspect: There was
a riff I created
or which came
unbidden to
me which I wove
into one of the
only true
Innocent Theives
songs: four chords
descending through
each other—
Cmaj7 (pause)
Amaj7 (pause)
Gsus7 (pause)
Em7-9 (pause &
pause) & then
back to some
perky pop
confection Shawn
desired, D-F-C,
C-G-D etc:
Over and through
the chords I wove
a melodic line
bending &
reaching notes that
cried from inside
the chords, nothing
complicated, all
of it pure
alloyed beach:
If you could
distill the
fevers &
longings from the
heart of one late
20th century
end of the
rock n roll show
get a job boy,
it was all in
those chords, that
solo: To Rilke
such music was
language where
all language
ends and standing vertically
on the motion
of human hearts
(“To Music,” transl.
Mitchell): Surely
what I was most
about beyond the
thrash and smash
of my wounded
life was like
stamping the grapes
for the wine
which uncasks:
Transformation
of feelings into
audible
landscape: Notes
of longing
wonder laughter
grief ascending
like gauzy
mermaids of
the air from the
graves of love:
Of them but not
ever she who
waits forever out
of reach clasp &
quench: The deepest
space in us,
which, rising
above us, forces
its way out,
—holy departure:
When the innermost
point in us stands
outside as the
most practiced
distance as the
other side of the
air: Pure, boundless,
no longer
habitable: That
storm cloud rising
above James’
memorial bench
on Sunday,
lifting up toward
the inexpressible
welcome in the
chorus of Cheap
Trick’s “I Will Be
The Flame”: A
totality of wings
& hooves which
has always driven
me beyond what
I know & what
I can do & how
I love: I was at
my very best
as a guitar
player in Innocent
Thieves, reaching
and turning more
notes than ever
& crafting them
back into the
world: I don’t
know if my
darker deeper
ever more wretched
nights destroyed that
promise or coaled
it in whiskey
fevers that only
bade the notes burn
brighter: Both
perhaps: For pure
song cannot live
long in this world
& one right riff
burns oceans
to sand:


GHOST HEART

1999

from “A Breviary of Guitars”

Winter 1984:
A song for this
season though
it wasn’t
recorded til
years later
is Bad English’s
“Ghost in
Your Heart” —
John Waite watching
a lost love from
some high
shamanic perch
as she goes
on without him,
& with some
other: And though
Waite is far far
away that
absence is
a resonance in
the heart which
remembers still
old fires: “Are
you crying in
your sleep tonight”
he sings: When
you’re lying with
him / Do you turn
out the light /
Are you hiding
in your dreams
tonight / In your
world / I will be /
The ghost in
your heart / In
your heart:
She ain’t missing
him oh year:
For years I
wanted to believe
that Dana could
not forget me
now matter how
hard she tried,
that every
future love, ever
other bed would
seem transparent
& false laid
next to the
deeper fuller
love she had
walked away from:
A virile power’s
in that song,
cocksure despite
defeat & oh
how I felt the
edge of that
song years after
Dana was long
dead & buried
in my heart:
Ah but in that
song I heard
again my thrall,
my eros a
black gold which
grew within as
I festered &
fell refusing
to let go: Salting
the wound with booze
booze & more
booze: It did’t
help either that
we kept in touch
on Dana’s terms,
dear friends
without a prayer
of sex: She’d
call me at work
& I would sit
and listen &
listen &
listen, offer
an encouraging
word here & a
joke there:
Listen to how
hard it was for
her to go it
alone and
all the bills
she now had
without me to
help: Listen
to her tirades
against assholes
at work & how
she was gonna
get outta there
for sure: She
didn’t care a
whit to listen
back about how
badly I was living
turning on the
spit of our split:
No: I was the
Ear into which
she poured her
talk: That was
what love of
mine she wanted &
I just sat there
reeling her words
in, stuffing it
down, hoping I
guess that she
would fall in love
again with my love,
this passive open
receive: But
she just talked
on and on
until she flowed
away: After
she hung up
I’d pace the
stockroom in
a terrible rage,
punching cartons,
all of that
fury pointed
at myself,
the asshole,
fool, wimp,
no wonder she
stopped wanting
to fuck you:
Ghost in whose
heart indeed:
that song a
saddle quern
of ferocious
irony because
eros is just
a personal
delirium, fooling
us into thinking
our desire
matters at all
to the Other:
How frightening
it would be
to see what the
Beloved truly
thought about
me: Like looking
into the heart
of an alien: What
makes the song
still so utterly
true is that we’re
all fooled by
our loves: We all
think we matter
to the one who
walked away, that
the love which
wounded us so
is guilt without
reprieve as long
as we deem:
Ha ha ha
ha ha: Dana was
on to her new
loves a month
after crying
her farewells to
me: She
hardly looked
back chasing her
own desires:
Instead of a
ghost, just a
regret when there
was one moment
to think about
it: Eros
feathers our
love with a
godlike soar
when to the
Beloved it’s just
the next wake
to oar: These
lessons were
truly new in the
winter of ‘84
because I had
never before
known any
duration in
loving: Never
given away so much
for an other:
Never encountered
the dire
consequences
of dispossession:
And so for a
long season
I skittered
about like a
crab on a dark
ocean floor
howling my
grief and
grabbing at
whatever release I
bumped into
as I spun:
My kind of love
nearly kills me
— Here’s an
epitaph: “Peg
In My Heart”
or maybe “Both
Legs In Your
Dark” or maybe
“Cashed In
That Vault
of Love:”
Go figure:


POEMS WITHOUT HEART

2000

Poems without heart:
These are the ratty
rooms I now shack in.
And you thought it
was Art over Heart.
Well, Art without Heart
is a waste of ink and page,
a tuneless fart
which no amount
of bitching here
can avert or assuage.


COR DUPLEX
(“Double" or "Duplicitous Heart”)

There is a cor duplex
in this warp of a weave,
a double-hearted shout
whose bright shadings
reveal and conceal
with an obstinate fist.

The Church saw
this long ago,
declaring the heart
both seat of salvation
and perilolus siege,
a foundation stone
cracked three
times before first light.

A diabolic sanctus
houses bride and demon
lover, Michael
the hammer
of God
and Lucifer
the doubting scourge.
Each beckons
to the world
through one
sulphuric portal.

So when I say
“I love you
with all my heart”
you must understand
the danger there.
It means my
rises come with
my falls. I speak
openly to you
and lie through
my teeth.
You get it all.
This morning
is all fumes and mist.
A full moon aches
high above, its
brilliance
blackening the sky.
While you sleep,
there is
a lion with his
feet planted wide
opening wide to roar.
This duplex
heart paces
by its sea,
shouting names
at silver black waves
eternally here
and gone. Someone
show me how to
live wholeheartedly
without ripping
some world in two.


HIGHWAY HEART

2001

The heart is a two lane
highway at rush hour,
burning two directions
at once, arriving as
it departs, descending
as it blooms ...

Even heaven has its height.
Love is defined by
a barbwire fence
we can never cross.
It exiles every embrace.
I would stay with you
forever, but there’s always
another broken chalice
in the next day, another
door smelling of
swilled jasmine and moon.
The heart’s circulation
keeps me on the road
praying to meet you at last
as I wave farewell.

Hopeless O dolor
of sweet encounter,
bone brow melting only
to jut again by morning,
wings moulting into stone.
The gods who washed away
left this salt on our faces
and it can’t be cried clean.
Purge the arrows
and the song flies away.
Radios at night all
fall silent, the moon
is trapped in the sea
which lies flat as glass.

No: It must go on,
prodigal rhythmus
of a torched homeland,
its arterial traffic
hurling ever westward
while the royal vein
carries back the
exhausted desire.
Celebrate it! Or die.


HEARTLAND

2001

...when we choose
the way by which our only life
is lived, we choose and do not know
what we have chosen, for this
is the heart’s choice, not the mind’s;
to be true to the heart’s one choice
is the long labor of the mind.

-- Wendell Berry

We’re talking the infernal
South here, kingdom
by the burning sea.
Heart-roads meander
and invert, blossoming
in the bed of a Nereid
one night, only to
snarl the knickers
of a sea-witch the next.
And always in the air
that sweet fiddling, so
maddeningly near yet gone ...

It’s hell when the mind
tries to make sense
of the heart, no,
moralize its mess, no,
marries a debutante
from some safe
northern ‘burb.
You can try to rid the rouse,
spend a month in detox,
sweep the seaweed under
twelve steps, put some
order in your house:

But still she comes for you
in your brightest hour,
her wet hair clicking
with crabs, singing a
o thing of darkness,
you are my lover,
my child, my bath of red gold ...

Bone minstrel, harp truly
of what’s forever yours:
a spinning boat
on moon-washed brine,
a compass upended
toward the heart’s sour star,
another poem shipwrecked
where it loved, swirling
down this green-black page.



OCEAN HEART

2001


Ah brig, good night,
to crew and you:
the ocean's heart too smooth, too blue
to break for you.

-- Emily Dickinson (LI)

After 20 years adrift in modern paradise
the heart grows burnished, like sea glass,
of its malt obliquities. I remember
my first summer down here walking Cocoa Beach
after drinking all night, my jeans rolled,
the morning a sweet diaspon of swelling joy,
my head singing that old Bob Marley tune
is this love is this love is this love that I’m feelin
to tiny Atlantic rollers which broke and scattered
all the sunlight just before my feet. How I hoped
for some Venus to sashay butt-naked off
those waves and fuck my emptiness
with porno-cum-motherly abandon.
Ah me. I drove as always home empty-handed,
my need for love conched inside that brilliant beach.
The years were not without their tide of vestals,
boozy and half-spread devotees of things
I way too partially represented. Our bodies
clanged like clabbers of a weary fog bell,
our hearts nacreous with bitters which would appall
any god, much more twenty-somethings
reaching for the golden ring inside the other’s thighs.
I tried, they tried, we all tried to make a go
of something which had small Michelangelo.
Then came the wives, who joined hands with me
in houses built on time, earnest sorors who sought
to reconcile their history with mine. Both wives
attacked the task with a feral openness I fell far
short of matching. We never made it together
much to any beach, what with daily tasks so far inland,
removed from those yeasty beams of ocean light,
our earnest labors wearying us from every sou
of drippy fun. No wonder I dreamed
of nipply naiads scampering red-rumped
in the surf just out of reach, their beach towels
dropping like moot fig leaves in the scree
— Nor any surprise that I plunged from
those briared ridges into sweet, descending,
horrific billows. I’ve just begun to right
those rumpy arrears. What’s next?
I’ll not go forward without reaching for
the hand I know, surf or no, toward
the best or worst years of love. Sadly
she may not reach back. We’ve new waters to face,
beached, if you will, where there are the
most difficult of surf conditions, full of riptides
and dark harbors: Yet face it together we must,
paradise or no, or never know which hands
the white heat rinsed in those white sands.


KNOW YOUR HEART

2001

You asked me to know my heart
at last, for once and all,
and either marry or divorce you.
Fair enough. Yet I thought I
decided that for good
six months now, and have
been living to the hilt of that love,
leaching out all unvowed dross
— changed well, corking up the
bottle, paying my debts,
making a daily amends to you.
But a confession of a mistake
in blithely cracking the door
to an old love widened into
a brutal, cold wind
in which you doubted all I’d done
as cover for a truth I won’t
or can’t accept. Know yourself!
You pleaded, desperate not to
set yourself up once again
for some later, even harder plunge
into the brine. And so, I’ve had to wonder
if I love as I live, whether all
I do is imposed from above
upon a rude dissent below.
How can I decide what
seems so equally true?
For two days now I’ve felt
physically mauled, whipped by an
old, older brother, my every
good impulse questioned to
the very stone ground. Awful.
Last night I dreamed
of an elaborate library
of childhood books and
huge leather volumes which
was ruled over by a huge moon
and two fighting bulls and
warmed with a creamy, puppy brood.
And dreamed then of an awful
sea-threatened gorge
between halves of a world
—my father’s, or my own?
I struggled almost vainly to
cross over, cresting the
last ridge to find all becalmed
but divided by an impossibly
wide river. Must I always love
by halves, yoking one to some
other will? Is that the best
I can offer you, and can that
ever be enough? Must I lose
all we have made together
in its hard fought dream of
some paradise, simply because
by rights I’m only and always
halved? The truth will set
you free, but it first
will make you miserable,
I’ve heard it said. How true.
This morning I wonder what
truth must kill to rid
at last the ill too much happiness
has depended upon.
Lord, walk with me down
this frightening aisle
of blood and brine
which divides the good man
from the honest one.
Grant me eyes and ears
which are fearless, open, and free.


HEART-SHAPED MIND

2002

A heart-shaped mind
is not the same as
a ship-shape gut
or (sorry boys)
a divinely curving
butt: There’s no jello
mold on earth
that can succor to
the rim this kissy
cortical waddle
lathed in heaven’s
fruit (halved strawbs,
benignly crescent
orange, sliced Kiwi
squealing limegreen horns):
I would trade Ahab’s
Dick for just one hour
with you in that gelid glade,
peeled and complicit
and congealing
on a prelapsarian
lettuce leaf:

A heart-shaped mind
takes two to tango:
chamber to chamber,
cheek to cheek,
we waltz up the Congo
sans paddle, sans creek.
Only a heart-shaped brow
knows even what to prow.


HEART

2003

The heart’s a charnel house
where the dead in their salts
turn and groan, their voices
like a weird-light over
moonlit bogs, seal-songs
on their rocks, the chorus
in the greeny light of
the drunk tank at 5 a.m.:
Hard stuff if you would
have all this and not let go.

Or, the heart’s a Chartres
raised by poor hands
toward greater use,
a hall of rose windows
which tell our story
and in the telling catch
the sun & hurl the
glory of myth throughout
hugeness, upon cool walls.

Which heart would you
reveal, traveller:
bourne of restless bones
or a lasting home
for all who follow?



HAPPY HEART

2003


The wheat leans back toward
its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.
— James Wright

Clear today, bone-bright
and rinsing snowmelt
into the gutters. Slowly
we revert to standard
procedure, the gleaning and
palming of the hours
for whatever they’re worth.
Yesterday 2 dozen naked
women ran through Central
Park and lay down
to spell out Bush
in protest, I guess.
National security at
Code Orange and some
unnamed threat on
the East Coast.
Soon to ready this dog
and pony show for another
day of sales and then
home, aboard some cramped
Delta 737 for the
belligerent joy of Florida
and my home, which has
seen little of is these days,
but does have a wife and
a cat and a warm chair
for first waking
and whatever may be left
to say here.
This winter light bright
yellow and deep blue,
a sort of toothiness with
an appetite for clarity
at all costs and a clench
which bleeds darkness
come end of day.
A posture of letting go what
served well but is now dead.
God help us survive
with a happy heart.


THE HEART DOESN’T KNOW

2002

The heart / never fits
the journey. /Always
one ends / first.
— Jack Gilbert

Poets believe their art
loquates blue shadows
of the errant heart,
but I doubt it. I’ve
hacked my own in two
attempting to speak
fully, and it only brought
me closing-time blues.
The words never
do more than name,
and that’s not enough.
They’re fall chasms
short of the mark.
Orpheus could have
harrowed hell with
just 3 more words
for love but instead
he found ruin. The heart
doesn’t know, it decides.
Each turn has a name,
but that isn’t what makes
them true. Don’t ever
mistake art and heart
again. You don’t get
any more reprieves.
Not at your age,
and not in this world.


HEART LINE

2002


Every work of a writer should be
a first step, but this will be a false step
unless, whether or not he realizes it
at the time, it is also a further step.
... It takes little talent to see clearly
what lies under one’s nose, a good deal
of it to know in which direction
to point it in.

— Auden

Autobiography has
a personal stink to it
which guides this pen
with surety: but what
is that to you? My wife
says dreams not her
own are boring.
In my dream last
night I felt
a savage love for a
hoary cat kept in an
old stockroom all night:
The cat’s need for me or I for it
was a bittersweet sap
thick with all the things
I’ve truly loved and lost.
I uncork it here for your
potage, not that you
may swill my dreams—
a boorish aim—
but rather to share
that dram of authentic
love which outlasts
all other fires.
My own history is
lit with smoky
hells, the smell of
burning fat my personal
reek and musky from
the glut of needs which
served only to cast
me forlorn further on...
Such news is old,
nothing you’d care to
read about in the papers,
small events long tendered
which do not shape
this world as much to shade
and bass its verbs.
In AA they say your story
is your sobriety.
This backwards gaze
is a poor man’s map,
the lie of today
reckoned from yesterday’s.
This verse is printed
in my opened palm,
a heart-line etched deep
and crossed out
where I try and try again
to get it all down
the way it always has been,
the way it was may
yet surprise us all.


SPEAK FROM THE HEART

2002

Only in the heart of
quickest perils; only when
within the eddying
of his angry flukes; only
on the profound unbounded
seas can the fully invested
whale be truly and
livingly found out.

— Melville, Moby Dick

Speak from the heart
if you dare: Heaven’s
abyss has a sure
appetite for these paper boats.
And not about the heart
but in it, seized by
larger hands in
the calm of this
overwarm, suburban day.
In this house which
wakes light to horrid
questions about who
we are and what we
could ever be about.
In a world already
lost in its whirl
toward banal
satisfactions.
Here, where there
is no difference
between these
house timbers and
the ribs of Gaza
dwellings mauled
by Israeli ‘dozers;
nor any beween
the white ashes
of our cat urned
on the mantle
and ten million
cinders swirling
round Ground Zero.
It’s a common,
heart-felt theme, this
commodious yawl
from dawn to dusk:
We voyage through
this life from
heart to rougher heart,
washed on with
only these frail candles
to light the way.
There is a security (if
you are brave enough
to call it that) in
oaring these boats
over a heart we’ll
surely never know,
tide to tide, fling to flow:
the only wisdom
you’ll find here
lies in letting go.



SINGING HEART

2004

today I sight this singing heart
below behind and between
as a crannog built by You
for a dark and wild bell’s ringing.
In previous years
I’ve seen otherwise
in a well’s cold drench,
in whale and girl astride
toward every beach
worth dreaming,
guitar and Bible buried
there when their time
had run Your curse,
amid the manowars
and other boats
I built just for such beaching.
Ten thousand poems
I’ve launched from here,
their verbal engines
tooled for salt abandon’s
blue overreaching, a
name for every isle
in the dark archipelago
of ten thousand teachings.
Here to the tide contains
the kiss and curve of
every woman who smiled
and shared with me
the secret of her blue
beseechings, both
bottomless and more,
that samba sambaltique
I found there and lost, one
foot now citizen of
every wave’s collapsing,
each bed’s undinally
pale pure enlacing.
Winds now work the
trees outside, a late
spring front to wash clean
the humid heat of the
past few days, and with
it bring a clearer blue
for our refreshing,
tiding in perhaps
another take on You --
Heron? Psalter?
Mother, Father River?
Some other vantage
on this dark which
does not bear explaining
but requires of me these
three wetmost things:
apt saddle for deranging;
the will to ride heart
all the way to naming;
and the sense of ages --
God’s and Your’s
conjoined in mine --
to let this crannog
fade to waves
so I can go where
blue ends send me,
bereft of any real
sail or bone rudder,
adrift in the next
draught of a room in
a dream, without a way
of ever arriving
or truly knowing.
Ah! but what songs
ahead are glowing!


THE TRIUNE HEART

2006

Three regions delve the dive
to the bottom of the sea --
shelf, slope, abyss.
In the first the world’s great
fisheries abound, like herds
of finned cattle, swarming
oblative as the feelings by
which the human heart
is found. Now comes
a long slow downward slope
that can fall for miles,
drowned ranges of Alps
we can’t see but haunt
the thickening gloom. This
seems like a border of
present names for
the heart, a wild where
no plants grow and
only carnivores dispatch
each other with something
like a pagan hunter-gatherer’s
intent, where sex is always
dangerous and saddles
the black mare of deep-water waves.
Maybe these peaks
and gulfs were cut by rivers
and winds some dry aeon
off the books, a savage
season of the heart
too old and brutal in its
yawp to do much else
than drown in a mercilessly
mothering sea. Finally
there is abyss as old as seas,
where water first fell and
never left, unevolved the
way shores are shaped
by waves and wind,
permafrosted in a permanight
under the weight of three
atmospheres. Its floor has no
known contour -- geologists
guess great lava plains
are laid up by muck and grist
of all fallen things from a
hundred zones above:
bones, shells, masts, men,
booty, shit, poems, loves,
gysms by the tetra
spoored almost forever.
Everything lost and tossed
is the bed abysms form,
a turbid massy marl where
dreams and ages snarl
inchoate in the
shadows of continents
far above, themselves
chthonic reefs.
Where islands form on
crests of volcanoes,
the sea compensates with
a trench that dives
as deep as six miles, so
what ravages highest in
the sea falls deepest
just behind. The deepest
trench lies east of the
Phillipines, another east of
Japan, a third’s south
of Cape Horn. When I imagine
these three terrains
I name the contours of
a heart which I shore
with you and all creation’s God,
a downward dome inversed
from the sky, completely
hidden from dry eyes trained
on surface waves. We shout
from mastheads at the spout
ahead which trumpets
from the depths we hunt
because we fear them,
and fearing secretly desire to
barb our heart’s own darkest
devil fish and stain our chops
with his gore and light our
lamps with the oil burned
drown from heaps of
blubber and suck the
honeycombs of his brain
that too partake of seas.
The heart’s charm is wound
in three steps down the
gloom, a nekyia which propounds
itself even as we pray our
keels sustain blithe crossings
of blue mains. See: I’ve
written shore to shore
to hell, and somehow
ballasted back on
the weird air that I
found -- prescient and
old, ripe as a sperm whale’s
spout, remitting here
what he inhaled so
far and long ago.
And through it I find
the heart’s low contours
enormous, dark, and wild,
productive of the dream,
the song of bliss, the child.

The Solace of Wet Things

Two events that flowed beneath the tide of this weekend, this year at least: Michaelmas and a more personally bittersweet anniversary. One paeans Manannan’s sound in the swash of St. Michael’s bones, the other the salt cathedral which arose when a deeply-wakened love walked away, on a September 15 now 25 years ago. (That date is also the anniversary of Bill Evans’ death, a jazz pianist whose heart-sounds- and washes- were sweeter and deeper than any thing I’ve heard lifted from the throat of song; he died on the same date my love gave up her ghost.)

Wha happened? A hot weekend in a slowly changing September -- early and late in the day there’s a sweet semblance of autumn, breezes from afar, a slowly shrinking center of the day, still large, summer-hot ... Yard-chores on Saturday (pruning back bushes, transplanting cat’s whiskers into the bare island, mowing, edging, blowing), watching college football & reading Jackson Bate’s biography of Keats while my wife, too weak from the Day Two of a muthah of a headache, ironed a mountain of linens to go into her end-of-business sale.

The sum: Louisville beats Miami (yay), Florida State loses to Clemson (boo hoo), money’s tighter ‘n’ a parson’s bung and there’s weariness aplenty in this house, our tenth wedding anniversary on the horizon asking us just what we have done all these years, is this enough, what happened to our youth, just what do we make of this shrill and shrinking world: I question all of this writing in some essential way similar to the way my wife gives up the ghost of her dream, all these sea-wide words washing bonelessly on shores no one will ever care about, no one except a curved phantom who lives inside the conch Manannan washed up in my ear, she who whispers Come and More and Say It Say It Now. That rigorous call to a vastly vapid task. Who am I kidding?

Thank God for consolations -- the ease of our house, the beauty of the garden just outside (big butterflies awhirl in the blossoms, the frail bending stalks of green, the whole of it like a softly lifting heart), cats everywhere demanding love and food and providing buckets of comic relief, pizza Margherita (my wife loves the way I make it) and the BBC version of “The Office” on DVD while the day outside spoors down from blue to gold to black and the sprinklers work the garden in a pianissimo glissading surf, black heads sursurrating the solace of wet things.

***

A wet sound, yes. (Joseph) Severn, speaking of Keat’s absorption in whatever he saw, was especially struck by his delight in the billowing grain as the wind moved across it; as they walked, Keats

“would suddenly become taciturn, not because he was tired, not even because his mind was suddenly wrought to some bewitching vision, but from a profound disquiet which he could not or would not explain.

“The only thing that would bring Keats out of one of his fits of seeming gloomful reverie ... was the motion of the ‘inland sea’ he loved so well, particularly the violent passage of wind across a field of barley. ... He would stand, leaning forward, listening intently, watching with a bright serene look in his eyes and sometimes with a slight smile, the tumultuous passages of the wind above the grain. the sea, or though-compelling images of the sea, always seemed to restore him to a happy calm.”

-- In Bates, John Keats, 194-5




Indeed. The bells of Michealmas and Sept. 15 -- ground zero of my awakened heart -- ring deeply undersea, so much inside my words that I write to their ruddering, beneath the broad blue sails ....

***

“Jouissance of the Other is not the sign of love. And here I am saying that love is a sign. Does love consist in the fact that what appears is but the sign?

“What is not a sign of love is jouissance of the Other, jouissance of the other sex and, as I have said, of the body that symbolizes it.

“A change of discourses -- things budge, things traverse you, things traverse us, things are traversed ... and no one notices the change ... The notion of discourse should be taken as a social link, founded on language, and thus seems not unrelated to what is specified in linguistics as grammar.

“If one considers everything that, given the definition of language, follows regarding the foundation of the subject -- so thoroughly reviewed and subverted by Freud that it is on that basis that everything he claimed to be unconscious can be grounded, then one must ... forge another word. I call it linquistricks.

-- Jacques Lacan, “To Jakobsen,” in On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-3, Book XX of the Seminars of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, transl. w/ notes by Bruce Fink




I ALWAYS GET IT WRONG

Sept. 15

I always get it wrong,
trying to make you love
me by making myself look
the way you wow me.
Instead of wooing opposites
I’ve always had a jones
for sames, blonde to blonde,
lots of flesh both ways,
tight clothes revealing
my surficial bulge the
way your bra and
panties flaunt all
they must conceal,
as if in my swells
and ripples I somehow
proferred to you
your own swart nipples.
I thought looks were
the compass of true love,
a woman’s thrall of
me in bedded thrash
the purest dram
of that blue sea which
which salts God’s
ecstasy. And in my
spring-to-early-
summer years that
seemed true; the
women I danced and
mated with sure seemed
to find delight exactly
as I dreamed, our nubile
surfaces a sheen and
wild, our eyes reflecting
back an orchid’s fire,
drinking deep the
fragrant booze of red desire.
But always eventually
as day broke us
back in two the other
words emerged, words
which seemed to tower
up from seas, like cliffs
renouncing all the
talk which brought
us to a crescendo there.
I mean love, that whole
deep question which
sex precedes and
sometimes breeds,
where a body’s welcome
begs to ask if hearts
do too, and if they do
just what two souls
can marry to one life.
Those next words
had nothing to do
with blue appearance
and derangement:
forget the cockledoodle’s
hoo when there’s work
today to do, bills to
pay and weary remits
to the weal of living
at eye-level. Such hard
realities embolden love,
casting two hearts in
a tough old bronze
which ring so true and
loudly in the night
as to make one wonder
just what all the
earlier fuss was all about,
as if the torrid hours
were a dream, a wet
one surely, but no more
than lubrication of
a door that got
two people to the shore
where all things at last begin.
OK -- All true -- yet
the persistence of that
first thrall in this dark-houred
inkhorn is so thick
and rich (not to mention
evalucent) as to keep
me perpetual in the writing
of its writhe -- Oh blue
rapture of seas raked by
a naked moon’s passing
rear! -- If only here,
these daily captures keep
that first song fresh
and awash in my ear.
Hard learning in the
topside world has tutored
me to seek my nubiles
only here, between safe
margins, sans dementia
of that third dimension
which triangulated
rumpy rears with
sears & dears. Thus
I clear the reefs of
the actual Thou
to sail Your pantyless
pink main, ball-deep
inside a twisting wave
exultant in your sighs
which plead my ever
drop of burning ink
whaled from the bottom
of all seas. Back here
across the language
before love conquered
all, we’re back at
work at first great
things, my years
down like pants around
my ankles and you
standing proud with
skirt uplifted & knickers
down & smiling, smiling,
smiling, with your eyes
shut fast on me: O nude
transcription of the song
whose words are lost
on me, whose cost is
measured out in all
we toss away trying
to get back to the
firstness of it all
before we called it love.
Maybe I always had
it right, only in reverse,
our nakedness the
outward sign of
discretion at its worse,
propriety spanked into
us & abandoned in
the purer light of
angels, the airier
lust of sawhorses
riding dry and
drier waves. a
puerile rowdiness
for sure, oily at my
age, a rage for
disorder’s plunge
and plunder kept to
pages whose ruination
is my sole business
and perpetual delight
so many years after
love sent you packing
into the billows of first light.
But then—mon dieu!
even my verses seem
doomed for wooing you
the way I think youdream,
singsong nonsense where
clear and specific things
might have caught your
eye, nailed you in my heart.
Poor fool me, then,
at it wrong again,
joyous in those metres
which swamp
the bed we’re in.

***

“‘The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law & precept, but by sensation and watchfulness -- that which is creative must create itself.’ By this leap ‘headlong into the Sea,’ he had learned at first hand ‘the soundings, the quicksands, & the rocks,’ and knew them in a way he could never have done if he had ‘stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice.”

-- Jackson Bates, John Keats, 232, quote from Keats is from Letters 1.374





THE CHILDREN OF WATER

Fiona Macleod
(Collected Works, Volume V)


O hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon

—Archolochus of Paros

… Long ago, when Manannan, the god of wind and sea, offspring of Lir, the Oceanos of the Gael, lay once by weedy shores, he heard a man and a woman talking. The woman was a woman of the sea, and some say that she was a seal: but that is no matter, for it was in the time when the divine race and the human race and the soulless race and the dumb races that are near to man were all one race. And Manannan heard the man say: "I will give you love and home and peace." The sea-woman listened to that, and said: "And I will bring you the homelessness of the sea, and the peace of the restless wave, and love like the wandering wind." At that the man chided her and said she could be no woman, though she had his love. She laughed, and slid into green water. Then Manannan took the shape of a youth, and appeared to the man. "You are a strange love for a seawoman," he said: "and why do you go putting your earth-heart to her sea-heart?" The man said he did not know, but that he had no pleasure in looking at women who were all the same. At that Manannan laughed a low laugh. "Go back," he said, and take one you'll meet singing on the heather. She's white and fair. But because of your lost love in the water, I'll give you a gift." And with that Manannan took a wave of the sea and threw it into the man's heart. He went back, and wedded, and, when his hour came, he died. But he, and the children he had, and all the unnumbered clan that came of them, knew by day and by night a love that was tameless and changeable as the wandering wind, and a longing that was unquiet as the restless wave, and the homelessness of the sea. And that is why they are called the Sliochd-na-mara, the clan of the waters, or the Treud-na-thonn, the tribe of the sea-wave.

And of that clan are some who have turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind--the wind that would overtake the waves of thought and dream, and gather them and lift them into clouds of beauty drifting in the blue glens of the sky.

How are these ever to be satisfied, children of water?


THE NAKED TRUTH

Sept. 15, 2004

Marcus, a student of the gnostic
Velentinus (c. 150), relates that
a vision “descended upon him ..
in the form of a woman ... and
expounded to him alone its own
nature, and the origin of things, which
it had never revealed to anyone,
divine or human.”

-- Eileen Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

She appeared at the upper bar
out of nowhere, fanning through
the smoke and blaring rock
as if stepping from that wave
ordained to drown me with
every blue fury in the lap
and chest of Love. We talked
a while nursing beers in
the wild din, her voice and
mine forming a bower
in which some goddess awoke,
aroused, and laid hands
on us, ushering us into woods
to sacred for a name.
And left us there, in
reverence for a secret
only we could reveal
and revel when all
our clothes fell like
angels to the floor.
Much later that night --
in fact well into the
next morning’s too-
bright hot summer light --
She smiled unbuttoning
her tropic blue blouse,
and unhooked her bra with
that hidden gesture,
freeing her full, pink-
nippled breasts, startling
me more awake than
I had ever been: And with
eyes locked on mine
came close, to softly
weave her chest against
mine, whispering O
make love to me. O
indeed: And so I did,
a half dozen times or
more that too-late-night
which had crashed
so dreamily on the next
day’s shore, licking her
to sweet moans once
then twice, getting sucked
off, fucking slow and
long in rhythmus
to a secret beat
which was new even
to God. We could not
stop entering and
collapsing in each
other, leaving selves
and hours far behind;
thus we drifted
so far offshore as to
never quite return.
Ever. But as a
mortal pair we fared
quite poorly, and in
weeks she jilted
the needy, greedy,
angst-ridden boy
I had become, walking
back into the night
for good. After all
these years, I mark
this day -- Sept. 15 --
as the tolling of
her wavelike recede
from the ecstasy of
my life, my feet forever
thence half in a surf
which once proclaimed
our naked name. Fare
thee well, lost lover.
The child you said you
begged of my seed
our second night
would now be 23,
and perhaps he
or she is here,
cuculattus of that
high blue wave
which crests in every
“Yes!” God gives
me truth to shout.
Whenever I hear those
old Journey songs
from 1982, I go back
to that first unveiling
hour, in thrall
and surrender to
the whole fantasy
of love and lust,
believing it more
than Truth itself. That
fictive beach where she
and I came hard
calling each other’s name
remains here, built
up with the ground
bones of every other
love I’ve sung,
sustained now by
the long, perhaps
my life’s remaining
duration with the woman
I call my wife by
day and blue welling
deep down the
pike of night.
Our hearts are
more naked now
than our bodies
may be allowed to
go: Mere angels
can’t fly this naked reach
which is part dream,
part ocean beach,
part clear blue sky
inside you and I.


***

waves

1981

waves
carry me carry you
to this beach
so frightened
to be so close
to be so completely here with you
the mist is thick around us
I cannot say how I got here
or remember where I came from
it no longer exists
to touch you
our skin skittish as colts
in a storm
and pass through with you
to a place that has no name
that terrible place of rest
between firmaments
where we become one
and sink there
then wake walking on this grey beach,
home at last,
hearing only the crash
of things forgotten long ago:
waves...
waves ...
waves...




in losing

1981

In losing there is the coming of night.
Waves recede, revealing
The heart’s flapping fish.
In losing slow jazz plays on and on,
Spinning around a spike on a record.
The cut is clean and deep.
In losing the peg is yanked out,
And the wound gets raw,
Washed with a spillage of sewage and brine.

Eventually, riderless horses appear
With wild manes coursing in the wind,
Their cold eyes asking,
Shall we take you home?

You must decide how much there is
In losing.






DEEP WAVE RIDER

2006

Deep waves stroll the oceans
unseen to all surfaces
on the cold wings of abyss,
a visceral tow glowing
with the gules of minerals
torn from the paps of hell.
He rides those waves too,
my fish-familiar, in this
songlike totem I ride here,
his salty ancient brogue
still rich on my tongue
after a thousand mortal
spans. I on a fish which
masts deep waves is
what makes the music
so hugely dark, opaque
and fell, a buckaroo’s derange
in Moby’s wake
where shattered hulks
and eerie churchbells
fan by too fast and dim
to hearken, much less name,
and life is pure Silurian,
a swarm of sharks and jellyfish
and trilobites about the
same matins now for a half
billion years. That infernal choir
lifts the base note I here sound,
my vox humana the highest
ache of jism and jawing
egg, the hot rush of futurity
which forever lives the
next day with ravenous teeth
in a gale of sweet-torn flesh.
Just what song is it, I
wonder, rolling three miles
beneath my saddle? What
beast of lyric hooves so wild
and regal blue as to make all
depths divine, be they in
my words or in the sea or in
the angel’s fall between
us who limns the barrows
of all lost gods. From trough
to crest I clasp my knees
to waves as tall as Pyranees
yet never crash on shores
my love will ever see,
as if love’s shout of pure
liquidity was never meant
for beds or beaches or
the dry breeches of songs
about love, rather than
the ones all depths love.
Primal as to drown
the dreams of shamans
etched on walls not seen
in ten thousand years,
this music is old, it was
lifted pure up to God
when men and beasts
were one, brother and
familiar, both in the
maw of appetite and
the stellar foam of lust,
both in the other so
vastly that whole
caverns failed to harrow
the rituals of rebirth
into the womb which
birthed us all.
Perhaps that’s why
I’m here on the biggest
waves no human eyes
can see, yeehawing
to high heaven on
thalassas of brine joy,
lurching and lifting
up to crown Manannan’s
thrall, wilding all the
way down here where
Uranos parked his balls
in a mess of Venusian
cream. When I’m on my
beast we lord the waves
which rock and roll the seas --
the boy astride his guitar
of a cock of fish of a pen,
come at last to gig
the big night music,
power--chording deep
waves like shouts of
whales between beneath
and past all shores.



WAVE SAVIOR

2004

If a man holds this to be foolishness,
he knows nothing of love and how it lives.

-- Rimbaut d’Orange (c 1175 AD),
transl. Jack Lindsay

... And in my spirit, which for so long by then
had not been left hopelessly undone
with awe and trembling in her presence

without more knowledge from the eyes, by
an unseen force that was coming from her,
felt the old love in its great power.
-- Dante Purgatorio XXX 34-9
transl. W.S. Merwin

Just one slap of that salt blue
wave which came from somewhere
behind her sweet kiss
and I was that foolish child
again on the beach, reborn
between my mother’s voice
and the sea’s. How much
tilled thought and willed belief
just vanished in that
baptismal sigh in which
I came in her then
ebbed to a clear blue
infintie space which
wrote over the whole text?
Years of hard study learning
all the greater names, that
slow attenuation of
nuancing numens held
by a greater net of words—gone,
my lips ababble with “duh” and
“dear,” my grin pure votive
of fool’s gold. One wave
drowned every dorm and
library I had in
solitude long marrowed,
& rose merrymost in the
old gothic church til
it bumped against the
window nexts to God
and snatched heaven
back to earth. Squishy
sounds of honeyed
light fill the hundred bedded
cells which limn my memory,
all those lovers and my love
pouring out the altared juice
which reels a secret cinema
inside each day’s picture show,
my ever-newing, salt and sacred
blasphemy. Love’s shore-
washing faith beheaded
every known with just one
fateful kiss too many years ago
and made me minstrel
with a foolscapped pen
atop the crashing wave
that drowns the world
and leaves behind
an ebbing, gentle hiss,
your wordles bliss.
May I sing merry and anon
to the primrose end of this.