Widdershins for Hekate

Zeus revered (Hekate) above all the other ((goddesses who came to his aid in his battle with the Titans)), and let her have her share of the earth, the sea and the starry sky, or rather, he did not deprive her of this threefold honour, which she had previously enjoyed under the earlier gods, the Titans, but let her retain what had been awarded to her at the first distribution of honours and dignities.

She was therefore a true Titanness of the Titans, even though this is never expressly stated. On the contrary she is said to be that kataiis, that “Strong One” who bore to Phorkys the female sea-monster Skylla. Tales are told of her love-affairs with gods of the sea: with Triton, in particular, whom Hesiod calls euybias, “of wide force.” On the other hand, it was also said, that Hekate was mistress of the Underworld and every night led around a swarm of ghosts, accompanied by the barking of dogs. She was even called Bitch and She-Wolf.

She was literally “close” to us, in the sense that she stood before the doors of most of our houses under the name of Prothyraia, the goddess who helped women in childhood (or sometimes cruelly opposed them), and was also to be seen at meeting places of three ways, where images of her were set up: three wooden masks upon a pole, a threefold statue with three faces looking in three direction.


-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks





WIDDERSNINS FOR HEKATE

Sept. 28
She has been with me from
my mother’s birth-cries,
that swell inside first seas
which left me torn and
gasping on red sheets
dying to get back.
Did she smile, did she
dive, did she howl inside
that searing pain
with her pack of dark
she-wolves? I don’t know,
I can’t, it’s not for me
to say, to speak of
the dark feminine,
not without great peril
of the blackest one’s
physic, diseasing my
deep courts with
a wild, rude distress.
She demands her
due from one of
three masks hanging
at the triple
crossroads outside
this dreaming town;
they skew off toward
each road yet are
one upon each other,
a threefold glance
which cauls a darker
view, trebled with
sea-depths, moon-
drenched nights
& what soars down
beneath the keels
of graves. Oh dark
immeasurable as
inconsolable, rich
as spermacetti oil
spooring backwards
through my life, like
a she-shaped windmill
turning widdershins
in an evil breeze
still holy between
the black trees of
my knees, a sexual
contempting breath
both hers and
her husband Set’s,
the feral beast
of summer scorch.
My dreams are votives
in her down-spiralling
cathedral, endlessly
repeating its charm
over the bubbling froth
inside my skull,
invoking the power
of all entropies,
half-bat, half-newt,
full nude & reeking
riot. I dream amid
those drowned
upsidedownward
pews, working at a
desk in corporate
bowels where I
sleep old hangovers
off, reeking of pussy’s
whisky pelt, a scent
I could not savior,
much less use in
any forward way
to orient a path
back out of the labyrinth
I’d fashioned in
the name of what
is lost in losing love,.
She rules a barrow-altar
with her mojo jig and jones
shades and vapors
of the will which hews
these paper stones.
She rules the breath
and depth between
each word I’ve cabled
cross the sea to You,
giving shape to
steely semaphores
the way I learned
of love not in
but round the
words we said, as
if the only way
to name love was
pyre its infinity
on a beach far down
my spine, alone
among the
hymnal froth
and sursurrations
of what purely
walked away.
Each wave is tidal
of she who howled
inside that woman’s
yes and ravened forth
when the real girl
disappeared,
bidding me to wake
and walk in her
eternal crashings
of desire. She hymens
my hosannahs with
amens of blue-to-
blacker dearth, ever
keeping me bound
to the troth
which by threes only
is found -- three deep,
thrice lost, triple-faced
with maid and matron
and black crone implied
upon each other. She
will not be known;
that due was deigned
by Zeus to ferry on
its course after she
helped him beat
her Titan lovers down
on land in sky down seas;
honored her by letting
her stay dark in the
triune regnum of
the witch--the hex,
the bloody gates
of birth, the
vexation of swept
abysms which hauls
so wildly in all I
cannot, must not say.
Lord, how many
women have I fucked
like a priest of
her wolfpack? How
many power chords
did I belt out on
a stage that
rounded past the yowl
of amplifiers to batten
on my throat, hungry,
no, starved for ever
more? How many
red cracks have I
shot these jisms
of venusian noise
only to find a darker
mouth begging for
the hot-blackest words
I know? I pay
homage here to
a sonnet’s drab
with cold black waves
of ink, sitting
on a soft white chair
at the hour when
dead folks dream
on spits she turns,
my rondos stolen
from their burning
lips: & pile them here
like spinning herms
where three roads
fuse and spread
brine and musk
and corruption
like oils into
the air, an
infernal holy scent.
Perhaps it spoors
from the ditch-drab’s
widened who waits
for me at those roads,
one eye boring
back at me
with the spectral
vision of three masks,
warning yet inviting
me to plunge a
balls-deep a rectumed
truth, God and
love be damned
behind what
the Ram of Heaven
breaks. I will never
fully speak the
aegis of that
darkened swale
whose low laugh
riptides me far
from home,
though I will try
till sun-yolk hangs in ribbons
from the gibbous moon,
till all coupled angels
cross each other thrice and swoon,
till she and I wind up the
charm and lie at last enwombed.





Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting variety
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! Rather on Nilus’ mud
Lay me stark-naked and let the waterflies
Blow me into abhorring! Rather make
My country’s high pyramides my gibbet
And hang me in chains!

-- Cleopatra, Antony and Cleopatra V.iii.65-72



Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell:
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

-- Shakespeare Sonnet 144

***

THEY WYRD SISTERS

Macbeth, I.i

A desert place.
Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches

First Witch

When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch

When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch

That will be ere the set of sun.

First Witch

Where the place?

Second Witch

Upon the heath.

Third Witch

There to meet with Macbeth.

First Witch

I come, Graymalkin!

Second Witch

Paddock calls.

Third Witch

Anon.

ALL

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Sweet Machine (2)

GOOGLE, PLEX

2003

I.

I’ve found much in this
Well out on the Web’s
sprawled spoor, and the
search engine Google
has led me there -- its
algorhythms have an
arch nose for dowsing
out skulls & hulls &
divers low ruins,
old hollows which bell
my hallooing voice.
As engines go, this one
has some mighty hooves.
The name Google itself
resounds, sending me
back into the Sixties
when I was first heard
it’s homophones. My
seventh grade math
teacher told us of
the discovery of the
biggest numbers next
to infinity: Googol, one
with 100 zeroes (ten
to the hundredth factor);
and Googolplex, one with
a googol zeroes (10 to
the ten to the hundredth)
They were apt numerals
of that age, moog in name,
op-operatic in their reach,
way out there in space
and somehow wildly more:
both Apollo on the moon
and some supercock-
shaped ship approaching
Jupiter in “2001:
A Space Odyssey.”
Hyper- and preter-real,
they purpled and
splooshed my own
possibilities, a kid
nearing puberty in
a rebellious, daring,
dangerous age. Googol,
googolplex: Wendy
Carlos in the spheres,
lysergic zeroes plumping
up a far-fetching rear
that zings.


II.

Those numbers also
mined a rhythm which
already sawed down me,
suggesting doors which
opened into rooms
infinitely deeper than
what chattered on the
surface of my
12-year-old day:
Solitude and savage
loneliness, sweet desire
and the maw of sex,
mod and modernity’s
overripened, poppy
crush. Googol, googolplex.
I could grasp the size
of that vault of vaulting
zeroes whenever I tried
to guess how close I
got to girls, moments
which only made them
seem infinitely far from
what my heart desired.
Ingress, egress, mons,
moon: My fantasies of
kisses and clenches
inflamed those middle
school years into an
impossible yearning,
a hundred times a hundred
swoons each time a girl
looked away. Hopelessness,
I found, was just the
a dark mirror-face of
love, equal in absolute
measure to that first
kiss I dreamed of growing
on an orange tree far South.


III.

Googol, googolplex
-- a mad echo there:
I began to have strange
spells in that Math class,
the day’s integers
fizzing like an Alka-Seltzer
into the image of a salesman
on TV talking over and
over about a washing machine.
The banality of the spell
had a vicious doppler to it,
banging wall to surreal
wall of real; I felt a vertigo
which hyped to panic
when it felt that I was
stuck forever in that
lousy commercial. But
each time I just washed
ashore dazed and strange,
cowled with a bad
headache. It was a whiff
of my underworld’s sick
breath, enough hell for
me back then. In
later years the spells
would bloom through
booze and speed into real
blackout toffs, swirling
me down through that
sucking door far below
strapped to a bier
of rigid, black bone.

IV.

Googol, googolplex.
The numbers crunched
their infinities the other
way, too, for the time
was awful and yet
awfully sweet. My
parents separated,
moving us into a smaller
house: and though the
tears leaked from every
room, its was also that
magic time when some
dark flower opened its
O-mouth to me, pelting
me with such sweetness
that each night my hand
dowsed down under the sheets
to rouse a white heat
until it flooded out the dark.
I’d fall asleep on some
oceanic curve, my heart’s
hammers slowing to drowse,
the surf collapsing round
me in an insatiable ebb.
Googol, googol-plex: the
sumless summation always
left me wanting more, my
thirst eternal, the cup
an ocean’s shore.

V.

Somewhere back
then I was given a paper
calculating machine
called a hexa-flex: a
hexagon with two visible
and four invisible faces.
You inserted the thumb
and two fingers
of each hand, asked of
the device a sum,
then folded and flexed
the paper mouth
some number of times,
peeling back a flap
to reveal always
the right answer. I
never thought much
about how it worked;
instead I just let the
magic do its thing,
sawing this way, then
that, to the truth. Hex,
flex, googol, plex.
The mouths formed
zeroes which stretched
toward the infinity of
space, almost as far as
I yearned. Out, back,
in, down: When I was
six and first discovering
girls I drew a house with
rooms filled with crossed
O’s in two sizes -- cunts
and butts -- I must have
been storing up the ones
I’d seen when playing
that child’s revealing game
of “show me yours & I’ll
show you mine,” out in
the woods outside first
grade during recess. I never
finished the drawing -- shame
or some other thrill
drew me on -- (monsters,
I think). Anyway, the
rooms were left half-full,
the page buried in some
secret place I forgot for
many years. Hex, flex,
the room was there and
gone, part of the sum
which tallied me on
those strange, dark years,
its treasures uncounted,
its vault a bell both
womb and cell.

VI.

Googol. Googolplex.
Such big numbers arch
toward a distant shore
they’ll quite reach,
like a well that lathes abyss.
Newer ones will come
tomorrow -- and the next --
but the hex-flex motion will
never change. These days
I gambol out on Google’s
interface, finding rooms
I filled up long ago. I use
what I find out there in here,
filling one well by digging
up another. This motion
was minted in me long ago
-- to see, to show -- sawing
between the sweet and its
dark-sweeter hole, hoarding
my visions in that oak room
which has no floor, though
deeper down I suspect
there’s a door where God lets
all the zeroes go. Googol,
googol-plex, this is today’s
sum; tomorrow there will be
some other. Looking out on
this morning’s paling
wash of dew-fresh green,
I want this calculus
of rooms to last forever.
Is there an end which does
not fold and flex like a
lover’s pagelike limbs?
As metaphor is simile,
a mouth which opens
both ways ladles up the
richest flow. Regale, perplex:
A googol wells out there
sum this complex hole,
crossing all my O’s,
enriching the
infernal toll.




HE GETS THE GIRL

2002


As a kid I changed the world
by going into my room
and acting out James Bond:
Killing evil Blofeld
at the crack of worldwide doom
then lounging in lazy billows
with his yeasty girl.
The James Bond theme
would ease my steps
back into the real world,
a little while: Before all
the cold winds conspired
to blow me back to smithereens.
I could turn tin to gold
by placing my face
to a pillow, changing
the channel to David
Gets The Girl. I watched
a pretty girl edge round
a deep pond then fall:
I dove in and hauled
her back, her gratitude
flooding me with this
sweet, presexual warmth,
like milk straight from
gold-knockered Pussy Galore.
When the real leaves you
homeless, there’s always the peel,
the pith and rind of surface cool.
I yearned and learned to
glide there lubed by
cool quaffs of Bond and
my own bouncing balls,
chasing the Laylas of La-La.
—a mystic of moments,
a bra unclasping its double
wealth, the shoosh of
jeans sliding down
their white daughters.
O splendid crucifix,
crying for immortal nails.
—That was the dance, those
Penthouse Letter-moments
where, Dear Reader, I found
what I never thought
I would personally ever
encounter. I dropped out
of the monastic mill
of college to play rock n roll,
hurling the delights
of a few nights with Becky
into the coiffed frenzies
of boogie brawn, each song
another dive in her rocking,
ululate bed— holding my guitar
like a surf-pole, casting
out these chord progressions,
humming a while, then
hauling up a solo that was
at once glittering, fierce, and
wild. At least, that’s what
I sure hoped for, and tried
to live for, amid a howling
ruin of wasted hours,
initiate and annihilate
twinned in a 25-year
old boy. Rightburn, I called it,
that perfect balance
of opiates (booze, pot,
speed or coke) carrying
me out on the coracle of song,
a triangulation of
wish fulfillment, drunkenness
and balls, unsheathing a
bright blade after the
second chorus, tempered
cruel and swift and
eternally sharp. Such moments
came as frequently as
the perfect babes. Dear Reader,
it never happened, some guy
on staff wrote all that crap,
the whole fantasy of sex
and drugs and rocknroll,
knowing exactly what we all
wanted, what we prayed
for each night we walked
into a crowded bar. It
was the entire exception
to the rule that I prized
above all else, thus dooming
me to the quest for a chalice
which in truth proved
the millstone of my years.
It seems I’m always
investing in fictions
and pay dearly for them all.
Has much really changed?
Here I labor away
on this overlong, overly
autobiographical lyric
meditation, earnest as ever
to ink a gleaming fish
on white pages, the mirror
of a life deemed greater
than what it can only refract.
I’m entertaining at best
a troop of ghosts in my
own head, bandmates,
lovers, all the guys
who played James Bond,
the solemn poets. Having
written this far it’s a struggle
to shift back to the day slowly
waking outside, now washes
of blue warbling along
with scattered birds.
My face always felt strange
lifting from the heavy warmth
of that pillow-TV, protesting
the effort of returns to the real.
What can you say of a life
spent voyaging the top feet of the sea?
What have I learned
but to ink obliquity?
No matter: I’m hard wired
to the James Bond theme,
walking round that deep pool
whose waters shake only what’s stirred.





SHAMANIC LETTER

2005

Among the Alarsk Buryat studied by
Sandschejew shamanism is transmitted
in the paternal or maternal line. But it
is also spontaneous. In either case
vocation is manifested by dreams and
convulsions, both provided by ancestral
spirits (utcha). A shamanic vocation is
obligatory; one cannot refuse it. If there
are no suitable candidates, the ancestral
spirits torture children, who cry in their
sleep, become nervous and dreamy, and
at 13 are designated for the profession.
The preparatory period involves a long
series of ecstatic experiences which are
at the same time initiatory; the ancestral
spirits appear in dreams and sometimes
carry the candidate down to the underworld.
Meanwhile the youth continues to study
under the shamans and the elders; he
learns the clan genealogy and traditions,
the shamanic mythology and vocabulary.
The teacher is called the Father Shaman.
During his ecstasy the candidate sings
shamanic hymns. This is the sign that
contact with the Beyond has finally
been established.

-- Mercea Eliade,
Shamanism: Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy


I.

Father, I’ve been writing you a while
on shores stronger and stranger even
than the man who cried me forth,
though that paternity mustered sufficient
libido and its mystery in my brain
to ache me on toward you, out there
on the next great shore of vibrant
swimming dark. Last night I dreamt
of planning Halloween in our yard though
it belonged to richer folks than us,
large house & big yard like my wealthy
uncle’s, lots of stations to spook up.
Though also with that magnitude the
difficulty increased, with big rutty holes
in the asphalt sure to gobble kids, with
blatant steel girders from some older
ruined enterprise jutting out like rude
iron phalli, malefic, more than kiddie
stuff. As I let go my plans I mused upon
a red-capped devil’s tale, the song
I must have heard a bit of when I wrote
“Red Dragon” yesterday; something burrowed
down and deep into the inner sea of
my singing ear, down into that wild-water
resonance which bounce whale-songs
from shore to shore. I don’t now recall
his words which in my dream were so
harrowing and pure, but in the dream
I thought to publish his song instead
of my own, dark psalms instead of
childishly spooked-up palms with paper
ghouls and too-dim ghastly lights.
And so I here continue down that
red-capped shaman song which pulses
ugly in an angry vein astride some
engorged cock inside my addered tongue,
ferrying back the harrowed blood in
some infernal circuitry: I rouse to flap
his blackened wings and write this
dragon singing down. And as my left
hand writes these words my right forearm’s
wrapped in medical tape, concealing the
IV font I’ve been plugged thrice to
in receipt of a stiffer migraine cure
than all the physic hurled before
trying to quell that beast at last. There’s
been great relief -- three more doses
left to go -- though today I woke from
my dream with my eyes sealed fast
with that irritating goop that doesn’t
have a name (I squeeze Alrex drops
to knock it back) & that old infernal
hammer at it again in the base of my
skull, knocking at Hell’s Gate. I write
because I dream and because the hour’s
mean: I write because You complete
a work louder in my ear than a
mere falling angel’s world-wide scream.

II.

Those early migraines that hit me with a
waking dream and then split my skull in
two: I was in seventh grade, 1969 I believe,
my parent’s marriage burning up and
world outside of it also on fire, no where
wet enough to stand without one foot
becoming a pyre. It was always in Math--
that subject which always made a fool
of my lazy, dreaming mind with its ticking,
dreadful sums -- that the pillow in my head
would suddenly lamp up and I watched the
same deja-vu-swamped scene where some oily
salesman compared one appliance to another,
expressing the logic of a sale I also could
not fathom, pitching me from its summa
down a dizzy oubliette of sense, whirling
toward a blackness I always cracked just
short of as my skull, it, seemed, split wide.
The headache was sudden and blinding
and short-lived, dulling in the drone of
pencils scratching formulas, erased with
a rubberlike ferocity till I was me again.
Were those the hours when You first arose
in me, Your bald red skull dripping with
the O-shape of infinity, the roaring in my
ears your own, a surf collapsing my sanity
in white foam? My first seizures were thus
headaches too, that malaise which so
tormented my latter youth becoming
this other which so shadows these
early latter days, both perhaps circulating
from that massy growth on my brain
above one temple which was revealed
in a CAT scan three years ago. Is that
Your temple, and this banging in my head
today (a migraine, in the midst of such
massive treatment of late, no less) like
a gong, defiant of every shrink and doc
to come along with dayside remedies?
Who was that dweeby guy in the waking
dream, selling dross yet fundamental
merchandise -- a dishwasher no less,
with its riot of cleansing blue? He was
no one I ever spied in the pantheon,
just a character actor iconic in his
oiliness, his eyes ringed with weariness
or worry, his staccato delivery which
acted like a strobe in my diseased brain,
signalling the waking dream to torment
and haul me down again: was he hermaneut
or some dissociative warlord of my
bruised and shitty life, winging me off
and away from my day but good? Who
knows? I just let him now crow on the
wires of my historic pulse to You, those
veins which freight the harrowed juice,
the marrow of these daily chats with God.

III.

Or did you initiate me in a swarm of
lust when I saw that big bra hanging
in a tree outside the public school I so
feared? I was 13 by then, living in Florida
with my maritally sundered so wounded
mom and three siblings who were just
as bruised as I; and all I wanted in the
world after seeing that booby trap swinging
cup-heavy in the breeze was whatever
swelled girls wild and saucy just that
way. No matter I had no ideas what
teeth were hidden there between
the smiles and the underwear, on
that road from a t-shirt’s hem up under
all the way to what that goofy bra
disclosed slung high into a tree
You planted just for me. My entire
miserable childhood tore in torrent loose
in the single moment of that sight: right
then I was no longer in but in and
desperately wanting out, or suddenly
so out and wanting in. Sugared by the
works which spun cotton brassieres
round the slather of my brain, I jerked off
every night with that high bra held in
sight, rubbing my newly-wakened cock
against the sheets til they were soaked
in sperm and blood. (Heavens, what did
my mother think? Were You thus satyrizing
her as You were plecturing me?) Sometimes
I wonder if the booze was just the surest
conduit to pussy, to that catastrophically
sweet swirl in the soft curves and musk oils
of a willing enough, bra-freed girl. Which
was booze and whence the bottle but from
Your cabinet of thrills, red master? And
whose worm swirled at the bottom of
my endlessness cry for more -- me or Your
latent now wakening desire for those
bloody lines of sperm ink I wrote on
those first white sheets? Though the medium
has changed, I’m still gouting all I think
about that primary bliss; that white bra’s
still turning on a summery and warm
too-noctal breeze, flashing like a smile
in the dark where all lovers climax in
a spark which burns the matter down
once more -- No, there’s no escaping this
tonsured shirt of fire. Father, your head
is reddest with the depths of it, and I am
just another aching pent baritone in
one huge randy, forever famished choir.

IV

As usual, there’s not enough time to sing
things full enough -- the day I choose
intrudes with the bright wings of Your
morning star staircasing into dawn. I
always shut Your book and head upstairs
to wake a second time with my wife,
stroking her feet slow and light with
fingertips still glowing with Your gules.
Does she sense at all the heat of our
dialogue, this ecstasy transcribed for her
in the angel’s touch she understands?
Does any of this ever remain topside?
I do not tell her much of where You
and I have flown, nor of what depths of
bliss we found descending pages in such
heedless flux of verbal sooth: The words
just seem acrid, self-musked, the strange
smell of a husband’s life one tolerates
for reasons known only for love of house
and garden love bestowes. For her its
all about what follows, not precedes, the
kiss; her strand’s far up from mine, inland
from where waves crash and fold the
lovers’ psalmody. Night and day this beach-
wild song and my fingers on her soles,
yet its still just the one long day I love
and live and work to death. It’s 4 a.m. here,
night leaking a thick fog from its vents,
too warm for November (though tonight
its supposed to cool down a great deal).
Another hellbent day ahead, with my last
infusion of DHE and Toradol and some
anti-nauseating drug at 9 a.m. (I’m dosing
twice a day for three days in this latest
big-gun assault on knocking migraines out);
then its in to work for a day of fast and
hard production finishing off the weekly
package in time to mail everything off
today since tomorrow is Vets Day.
My eyes are feeling glutinous and tacked
with whatever’s ailing them -- too much
of what’s to do in sight? -- and I’m weary,
not having slept well despite the increased
dose of Depakote. As usual You fight
the medicines, the way you battled therapy
when it was so hard to yield to EMDR.
You’re as stubborn as a rude hardon which
no amount of feathered talk can hide,
much less deny. Well, this song’s Your
chance to vent but good. To every devil
His due, and Your’s it seems, is wildest blue.

V.

In my dream last night You might have
surfaced once again as that bald fat
aging criminal whose heart was pure
lust for larceny, stealing what he could and
then challenging a pretty girl to a rassling
match in the center of my brain. He looked
a bit like I imagine Judge Holden in Blood
Meridian, ax godless godlike man of such
hard intelligence he was primed to fuck
the world in every way, especially all its
softest maids. But the dream didn’t give
that naked brute a chance, instead switching
channels to the house I lived in when
my first marriage ended. I stood in my
study at the back of the house looking
out on the back yard where I saw a
young man naked as the day with
a long thin hardon crowing proud,
curved like a sexual scimitar. He was
thrusting away at the hindquarters of
a fattish crone, someone the brute
equivalent of the earlier fat man, perhaps
the sort of woman inside that sort of
man. Anyway the young guy was just
pumping away while the woman grunted
and yowled her ecstasy, demanding of him
his all, from crown to hilt of bouncing
balls. Is that how all this passes on
down to here, each page a blasted heath
so foul and fair as to smirch the
Mother’s underwear with the blood-
spermed spume of Your white whale?
In 5,000 poems lost to this thrall
which no one hardly cares to read,
have I yet waded half across the sea
of her undinal sighs? Far indeed from
actual hips the plunging of this membered
sense, now 2000 words or worse long.
Yet when did You ever have any need
for that sweet pink cusp of Venusian mons,
a labial littoral shored by swirly pubic hair?
It now seems to me that that just kept
on the singer’s tongue enough taste of the sea
as to rudder metaphoricals toward the beach
where You made this man out of me.
What am I now but the son of an infernal
scree, about a totem Father’s tide?
See: I’m nothing now but waves, all surge
and salt-coiled clench, collapsing verbs
in foam. My singing is forever half offshore,
of one wet world winged with the other’s
drydocked feather. New bucks are horning
up Your wood. May ever song of salt derange
show them how to plunge the depths but good.
And if a cracked head keeps Your door flung wide,
then may this migraine fog the wildest wood.

The Sweet Machine

What is repeated ... is always something that occurs -- the expression tells us quite a lot about its relation to the touche ((the real encounter)) -- as if by chance.

The function of the touche, of the real encounter -- the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter -- first presented itself in the history of psychoanalysis in a form that has in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma.

Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real should have presented itself in the form of what was unassimilable in it -- in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin? We are now at the heart of what may enable us to understand the radical character of the conflictual notion introduced by the opposition of the pleasure principle and the reality principle ...

In effect, the trauma is conceived as having neccessarily been marked by the subjectifying homeostasis that orients the whole functioning defined by the pleasure principle. Our experience then presents us with a problem, which derives from the fact that, at the very heart of the primary process, we see preserved the insistence of the trauma in making us aware of its existence. The trauma reappears, in effect, frequently unveiled. How can the dream, the bearer of the subject’s desire, produce that which makes the trauma emerge repeatedly -- if not its very face, at least the screen that shows that it is still there behind?

Let us conclude that the reality system, however far it is developed, leaves an essential part of what belongs to the real a prisoner in the toils of the pleasure principle.

-- Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, transl. Alan Sheridan





SWEET MACHINE

What is it about the real
that has to be so rude,
so rough, so unassimably
ragged blunt & stewed
that I can’t speak of it
without immediately
attempting to rev up
the sweet machine,
whirling fast off-topic
in a pervertimento
of blue glee, singing
pussy pussy pussy
where I should be
saying just what it
is that makes hard
going real on the
next oh-so labored
day? My wife and
I watch TV on
Sunday night, our
weekend together
soon to close, watching
“The Bourne Identity”
for a second time
because anything half
good is worth watching
again than all that’s
worthless mute and
poor -- just about
everything else, these
days. The story
of brilliant fights
against sure extinction
was classic Hero.
half Hercules half
James Bond, & provided
a distracting counterpoint
to the real terrors of
our small life, the
one we live to make
love’s dreams real,
at least. As I lay
there on the couch
the thought came to
me that we could lose
all this so easily,
just a random rude
spark from Fate and
we could be out of
this comfort room
-- if I lost my job,
if one of us died
driving home,
if this country
took a hard hit
from bombs or some
financial blight:
the more I wondered,
the more traumas
crowed into the room.
It made me feel the
awful preciousness
of our simple, long-
worked in too-sharp
relief, spooring the chill
emptiness of loss into
our dark living room,
lit only by the phosphor
of the TV, with the
world outside dark
too, all dark soon cold.
And that’s exactly when
the the sweet machine
began: I found myself
no longer there
but strutting on a stage
singing truths directly
from a burning ocean’s
page & fucking every
finhole rumping up
the swale. Is song
the nightingale which
feels the inflict of
the real like a
barb clean through
its breast, causing
a gorgeous music
to erupt from its
barbed heart with
the ocean sense of things,
rhythmic and margeless,
bawdy, free, safely
back inside the
womb's backside
that first rejected
to me to cold hours
so alone. Ever there’s
a cross between two
paths: the one which
leads from what
really happened toward
what will happen
yet again, and the one
which reels drunkenly
from honey pots
toward poppy fields
of incessantly sweet
dreams. At that
crossroads I’m
worst (or best)
at opting for Plan B,
howling happy doggy
style in creamy
cheeks, yowling
sonnets at the moon.
The irony is that
the wrong turn here
bears the right one
in a strangely prescient
delay: I make this music
as if it were plainsong
in a matin chapel
of a grounded, purposeful
day, harrowing the
sweet machine so
I can enter the next
day sated, refreshened
on blue waters, my
wolf-boy’s trouser
tooth fed full
so the adult can
zip up & begin real
labors which always
must ensue.
Thus I close
the book and head
upstairs to love my
aging sad and lovely
wife who needs the
most visible proof that
a real man is getting
business done, beneath
and beyond this tender
roof real love worked
hard to sustain,
lala excrescence
and hooha boobs
restrained between
wet pages of a book.
Monday morning at work
I heard of a former coworker
at the newspaper being
struck by a massive heart
attack as she sat with
her husband watching TV
on Sunday, wholly out of
the blue -- 47 years old,
a runner and health-food
freak -- Now I wonder
if my fright which
revved the sweet machine
was gyred through
fear’s aether from that
awful, cruel event,
a whiff I caught through
night-opened windows.
Dunno. Whatever
the cause, I think
my addlement and
thrall keeps the saddle
ready for rides on
oceans always toward land.
The real man here
emerges in what
the surreal one surges
and submerges,
forever happy here
so it’s never only
crappy there.
Maybe some day
I’ll sing my way
out of the sweet machine,
step from its wave
of crashing, hymnal blue
and walk a real man’s
way inland back home to You:
or perhaps this is the
only way I’ll ever have
to mine and mint a dream
which feeds on horrors
to bloom gorgeously
at night when ills lamp
the margeless moon.

The Blue Rail

Let’s begin with this poem by Jack Gilbert, IMO one of the best poets of the generation now in active retirement (which includes Mary Oliver, Mark Strand, W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich). Gilbert is a poet of clear statements about what poetry tries to enter through language, and this poem is succinct:

BEYOND PLEASURE

Gradually we realize what is felt is not so important
(however lovely or cruel) as what the feeling contains.
Not what happens to us in childhood, but what was
inside what happened. Ken Kesey sitting in the woods,
beyond his fence of whitewashed motorcycles, said when
he was writing on acid he was not writing about it.
He used what he wrote as blazes to find his way back
to what he knew then. Poetry registers
feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches
out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.
Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be
an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world
part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux
to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.
The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward
to know its merit with attention.

-- from Refusing Heaven (2005)

***

Question: does poetry fish us to a realm beyond poetry, attempting to see into what washes behind it, a fourth realm which does not so much merit attention -- that perhaps is too willed and capable for minds so grooved as ours -- as demand it? Is there a poetry which must leave poetry behind in order to cohabit or inhabit that wilderness? I wonder ...


BLUE RAIL

No one taught me to
sing this way, no mortal
I mean I could pluck
from my writer’s history.
My profs all chanted
Compress! and Revise!,
ranting against getting
drunk on the nectar
of words gouted lush
and profuse, against
going outre on god-oomph
with postmodernistic
rooms now bereft of
beds which well whales.
Is this all a grand rebellion
against the folly of
the wise? Or have I
simply kept my ear
to the blue rail
I found between a
woman’s sighs
long ago (a girl’s
really), the most
subtle sighs I mean,
creamy yes and wide
as waves on a shore,
collapsing a wet
center ripe for
oohlalah it’s true,
but distant,
oh so distant, hidden
always behind the
peel’s rude rind
the way my God
is ripe and deep
exactly where worlds
sleep. I’ve sung
with mad fidelity
stripped of poetic
felicity exactly
what I heard
humming there,
a heavy low and
surgent sound
like an coming
train or nascent tide,
announcing an
epiphany I’ll never
find the true shore
of, much less in
exult frenzy ride,
though I try,
though I try.
I’m jammed between
two written breasts
-- call ‘em poetry
and prose, if you
please -- enrapt
with both, I suppose,
or needful of both
milks, praising two
encirling whorls
of well silver as I
work my membered
sense between.
My hand holds a
pen and writes
that strange
cartography across
and down a page
between margins
of doubt and certitude,
between a mad
and foolish rhetoric,
between the ocean
span which tides
twist You and me.
Jubilant I roust
my verbs, using two
ways of saying to
fuck well one sense,
inking there an inkling of
what the both are
trying to give birth in me.
Such words do not
so much arrive at
a knowledge fit to
print as describe
the fitness of what
heaves and crashes
in a collective spasm
of Yes -- mine, her’s,
God’s, maybe our’s
-- in foaming brute
emptiness. A boor of
the metaphor, savant
of foolish rhyme, the
helterskelter welder
of wild lines whose
toothiness is the
rail inside blue swoon,
lying hidden in
all these sweet
digressions like
a wolf inside
a grand mer’s empyreia
& tart delirium. Nipples,
naughty nooks and
damp sea smelling musk,
all of that are flora
of the red tusk which
drives all songs.
I’m just an old guy
droning on and on
of first and earlier
times, reliving those
red hours when
all was pure desire
inside a calyx of
soft suspire: my
mother’s voice above
the sea, the soft surf
sighing endlessly
& the way I was sealed
right then into one sort
of song -- a cast of mint
and mien -: A faery
dream perhaps in
a magic summer’s drone,
hardly the stuff of
serious verse, nor
of the proseman’s
straight discourse;
something which
returns ever and
again to the sense
of all amen’s --
not “the end” but
“it is so” -- truth
as that place where
the choir repairs
when a song exhausts
what it can’t know
but affirms anyway,
robes all at their
ankles getting wet
in brinous lees,
exposed & gentled
by a soft uteral breeze,
angels all around
holding wide the
covers of a book
that binds me to
glass pages blown
the day that I
was born, the
text inscribed there
precisely stating
the way that first
world looked to
me from this
vantage far away,
as far away as
an old man will get
having nothing else
to say & with direr
business just a
soft blue breath
a famished
tooth away.

The Real

MASTERY

2002

Glenn Gould launched a brilliant career
as a pianist at age 24 when he recorded
Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Shortly before
he died at age 50 he recorded them again.
He told an interviewer that he recognized
his style in the earlier recording—wild
runs and trills, bright surfacings—yet
its heart seemed unfamiliar. The material
was the same—he’d always loved the Master’s
genius for exploding many ideas at once—
but his own way of riding that music had
deepened so much that the earlier talent
sounded strange, like the sound of
someone walking outside a dark, wet window.

On the later recording you can hear
Gould humming along as he played.
He hated the habit he’d formed over the years,
and it made hard work for the engineers:
Yet he knew he always played better
dancing along with his voice. Imagine painting
while you dreamed, or making love in a storm.
There is a mastery which finds the heart
of the heart and learns how to stay there.
None of that was apparent to the younger man.
It took decades for Gould to find the
deeper handles of mastery. I think of him
walking outside that house trying to go home.
Of one day finding a door, not in what he knew,
nor in the brilliance of his hands, but by
abandoning himself to what opened when
the keys of the piano ceasing running; and flew.

***

What, then, is this function of traumatic repetition if nothing -- quite the reverse -- seems to justify it from the point of view of the pleasure principle? To master the painful event, someone may say -- but who masters, where is the master here, to be mastered? Why speak so hastily when we do not know precisely where to situate the agency that would undertake the operation of mastery?

... We see here a point that the subject can approach only by dividing himself into a certain number of agencies. One might say what is said of the divided kingdom, that any conception of the unity of the psyche, of the supposed totalizing, synthesizing psyche, ascending toward consciousness, perishes there.

-- Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis


AUTUMN SCYTHE

Sept. 23

The great summer
is folding its wings
by faint degrees,
calm and fair early
and late in the day,
a mote of less in
the heat, like a
belating stillness
gently whisked
into the air
here at 5 a.m.
The garden has
grown to its apex
and now hang
there; even the
weeds seem
sluggish in their
verdurous assaults.
Such quieting
seems like grace or
mercy; surely it’s
friendly, turning
us slowly round
from those imperial
days of blare and
blaze & mauling
summer storms:
But today I also
see a cruelly limned
in this hour of
the year as we
say it here in
Florida. Feral
casks of summer
are not so much
ripening as now
bursting with ire,
its juice fiery
and dangerous
having mashed
from our brains
by the sun’s
heavy feet. The
children of summer
fret the vineyards
of their South,
the harvest task
upon them heavy,
wearied, old in
knowledge of
what fountains
from their hearts
up through their
mouths in hot
scarlet words.
I dream my first
wife wants to
fuck me - ha!
while my second
one’s away.
I’ve no desire
for her at first
and I want to
stay true to the
wife that’s away
dealing with
the futilities of
life. But we’re
naked, see,
and when she
backs up to me,
well, the old
rage starts welling
sweet-wild up
in me. But my
real wife is
away & I will
not hurt her this
way: So I remove
myself from the
impending scene
to walk broad
night avenues
alone where early
autumn heaves in
so lush and dark
I can’t hear my own
shouts on white paper
which are only
tropes of evasion
and flight from that
seam which pulls
the worlds apart
and whets a
darker man’s screams.





IMAGO DOMINUS

1978

She stands at the bedroom door,
half in, half out,
shadow cupping breast and belly,
a half moon smile on her face,
fine mist hanging in the air
between us, darkest night behind,
and water coursing everywhere,
crystal blue and deep and silent.

***

Eurybia, as her name signifies, was a goddess “of wide force.” Bia means “force” and is synonymous with Kratos, “strength.” Eurybia was supposed to be a daughter of Gaia, but her father was the sea, Pontos. Her brothers were Nereus and Phorkys, the two “Old Ones of the Sea,” and Thaumas, whose name means “Sea Wonder.” Her sister was Keto, the goddess of the beautiful cheeks, whose name means “Sea Monster.” Eurybia has a heart of steel. She bore children to Krios, whose name means “The Ram of Heaven,” and who was one of the two Titans who did not marry many Titanesses. She of the steely heart, however, was herself almost a Titaness. Her sons resemble the Titans in their nature: Astraios, “Starry One,” Pallas, the husband of Styx, and Perses, the father of Hekate.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

***


The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle. ((The steely heart -- my note)). The real is that which always lies behind the pleasure principle. The real is that which always lies behind the automaton.

If you wish to understand what is Freud’s true occupation as the function of phantasy is revealed to him, remember the development, which is central to us, of the Wolf-Man. He applies himself, in a way which can almost be described as anguish, to the question -- what is the first encounter, the real, that lies behind the fantasy.

-- Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis




CHANCE ENCOUNTER
WITH THE REAL

Sept. 25

It’s like a job from hell,
showing up here day after
day to engage the same
old same old primal
nonsense of absent seas,
ever enthralled
with sweet sounds
and salt breasts
miles away from the
the real grinds of the
actual day. Who am I
kidding? I just
love this long-grooved
round in the
blue surf’s mill,
habitually yoking
this pen to the seem
of a long-faded dream,
singing of phosphor
wherever it clings.
Big deal. No wonder
no one cares much to
listen for long; it’s always
the same fray, the
same dingdong
singsong verse
of a day. Like the
man I dreamt
last night, still at
work in a dead-
end corporate job
(the one I had
years ago)
endlessly rewriting
the same dumb policy.
Over and over
he wrote
the same stupid
sentenc, yet
the dream shouted
Deity! Miracle!
As if to the dream’s
ear that idiot
was Shakespeare,
someone I didn’t
hear in that dork,
nothing you see
in this
over-labored yet
half-assed work.
I am too just
a drone in the honey
chambers of my
inner’s ear’s
combed bliss,
plunging in
sweetpots the
only way I can
at will anymore,
the real stuff being
too wounded and
difficult and
responsible for
the dream, if you
know what I
mean. Too real.
My dark lady --
the You forever
standing in that
dark door across
the room with
night & blue waters
up to pale thighs --
loves me at my
most foolish, stupid
and driven too,
charmed most
by my blubbering,
comforted, loved,
a soul-lover’s truth
not meant for dayside
eyes to see, much
less believe. Perhaps
too she loves how
marginal, hurried
& cramped this work
must be, amped from
a small hour before
the real work wakes
up and mounts its
droll horse. Loves
that this is just
a gizmo, a sex toy,
so much like the
hurlyburly hobbyhorse
I rode on as a child
as to dream of me
forever sitting there
while days raged
& wounded my
real love, the one
who sleeps upstairs
in this house. Thus
my swoons are her
disease, my thrall
of blue moons
and ass runes
petit mal spirals
of an an old black
barn dance that
sits square over
a destructive raw
fire that eats
cities in rage,
flame after flame
to the same old
metronome, like
waves on a beach
repeating over and
over the same
heave and collapse
of salt flush of womb
in sea-milky sighs
no son can quite
reach though he try,
though he try. She loves
that I’m stuck here
on the lee shore of song,
and my devotion to her
is as much starry
as drowned, divine
and artful to her
perhaps in the
stupidest ways
I can see sitting
here writing it
all down ever
faithfully yet again.
How far can
such fidelities
go? Endlessly I
suppose with all
the conviction
of a birthmark’s
heart-rose, like
an eccentric’s
labial ease with
the weird: Like
Swinburne sliding
naked down banisters
or skinny-dipping
in the sea, his lines
always strict slick
sursurrations of
meter & rhyme
in the service of brine.
Maybe my saving
damnation is that
I’ve a leakier blue heart:
Always comes a point
writing here when the
sea-magic fades
too thin & wonder
for a moment if
I must leave first
beaches to begin
the real work at last.
As if song’s deeper
concourse is the
distance I make waking
from her & saying,
no, not quite this
way at all; & thus
by negating her
I leave mons and
moon-seas behind
to love the living
wonder as I tried
to call it years ago
& finally wake up,
here at 5:40 a.m.
on a rich dark
Sunday morning
in late September
with so much to
be about today --
wake & walk &
talk with my wife,
landscape the lawns,
enter checks (saying
a prayer with each
one), call my father,
read the paper with
its difficult news of
the real, iron clothes,
cook dinner, prepare
for another hard week.
So that, in the
furthering distance
I place twixt myself
and the dream, the
old big night music
perhaps can sing
and dance and merry
in ever-smaller old
ways, like fey-folk, like
the stories of Titans
in titanic convulse
of desires & battles
in a lost world’s
fading pulse. I played
my guitar until it forgot
how to sing; I wonder
here now if the whole
book must get flung
at last into the same
dam’s well to get on
with things; both
refusals may be
about marrying her
by burying her
in starting the real
work at last. Which
is the true sign
of the next time:
this box I forever
ride on, trapped
like the ghost
of a lost sound;
or the rare
appearance
of the good ship
Rachel which
offers just once
a way home at last,
a passage to dryer
hours unwashed
by dread sound?
A heart crossed
by barbs of sea
dreams and sea
walls, that’s the coat
of arms for this
hour, for this
last season of
this year. Thus
I burn the harvest
throwing black sheaves
to the sea, perhaps
—perhaps!—waking
up for God’s sake
older & colder
& ripe past her knees.

****


Sonnet 130
Shakespeare

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.


***


LIVING DEAD

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

A howl of joy
broke me once
or twice in
a woman’s wraps:
I mean the
tidal wave of joy
that smashes
everything you
know & believe
about love &
sex & leaves
you dazed on
some glittery
beach in some
foreign land
without a
name or history:
In 1985 I lived
as some revenant
of a dead
music, desperate
to forge it
again and
trapped inside
a bottle of its
most wicked
& debilitating
distillation:
I’m sure that
big stage rock
and roll was
thrilling to
me because it
embodied the
gallop and hurl
of that howl:
Perhaps my whole
long dalliance
with guitars
was about a
young man between
love and art
trying to carry
that compliant
amazing hiccop
to a stage
where surely she
would notice:
And I wonder
now if I
had any measure
of success,
any band which
made it onstage
for anything longer
than an hour,
one night, a
season, if
she actually would
have come to
me from some
adoring crowd:
Or if I could
have ever seen
here there:: I
went through
dozens, hundreds
of women in
my voyage of
guitars searching
for the big
passionate music
no guitar could
ever quite make:
Girlfriends, two
week stands, one-
night flings and
flowers: The
percentage of
roaring connection
is infetesimal
and then for
one big bell
of a moment
followed by
some series
of ever smaller
aftershock
into the great
white sandy
latesummer silence:
As futilely
as I sought
women with a
guitar, so something
else was
futile in my
wade through
women: Perhaps
I had just raised
the bar too high:
If the first set
of sighs didn’t
rush toward some
milehigh lip
of foam then
I painted “Not
Here” on her
sleeping forehead
(or ass) & rowed
on outta there:
Such expectations
don’t make for
much happiness
in today: One
of the big AA
lessons was
the notion that
happiness isn’t
getting what you
want — it’s
wanting what
you got: You can
travel as far
as you want
in La La Land
but all you
ever need is
languishing
in your back
yard: Try
to convince
a teen or
twentysomething
of this: No:
They have to
row their boats
as far as
their oats need
sowing: And
I at 27 was
surely approaching
an icy north
where it became
harder & harder
to believe some
sunny beach
was on the
next island somewhere
in the next
night out:
Compulsion is
doing the same
thing over &
over expecting
different results:
That’s another
AA truth: How
many gazillion
nights did I
finish a song,
unplug my
guitar, lean it
against my amp
& head out the
door thinking
that night I’d
find the grail?
Not merely
to find a
berth between
some strange
woman’s thighs
at a soggy drunk
a.m. locus, but
to nail the
next coil
which would scream
Big One,
Big Time: Such
is the bane of
drunks &
gamblers &
lovers, addicted
as they are
to the big howl
music that rang
out long ago
and shattered
us into a
life doomed
to expect we’d
hear that music
again rise in
an other: Here
in the Year 2000
on this Saturday
I look forward
to climbing back
in bed with my
wife &
waking our
weekend together
just doing the
small things which
build & savor
our love: No
big music
but a melody
we’ve learned
together which
makes each day
sweet &
absolutely worth
living & free
of the beloved
undead:



THE ACTUAL LIFE

2005

These filaments of wild whaling
dark glow hot against my actual life,
the one there’s never much to say
about. It just a faceless mere from
which I fish peculiars out. But then
there could be no poem of this hour
without that bed I rose from an hour
ago with its indistinct, merging sleep
of an aging man and woman in their
replenishing drift together far and wide.
How could I ever come to dream
without that shore of things too simple
and common that they rarely find
mention in the tale, my wife breathing
in slow rhythm, cat shifting at my
feet into a more complex repose, the
air conditioner blasting on awhile
later, drowning out faint sounds of
night beyond the windows. To dream
means to slip beneath all that, to loosen
surficial sense and be hauled down
gently by darker ones which subsume
then rouse the sleeping mind. Thus
I dreamed I was in auditorium filled with
literary types, some figure at the podium
the measure of all accomplishment
whose words I can’t remember here.
But I do recall the moments after when
familiar-seeming types came up to
shake the speaker’s hand (or mine?).
An older, well-dressed man with a neatly
clipped beard and a cultured voice
stepped up and asked him (or me)
what was the measure of success
in poetry -- publication in the Sewanee
Review, a Pushcart Prize? The speaker
had that much authority to say for sure
and though I do not recall what he replied,
I woke at my misbegotten 3 a.m. with
the question loud in the Western
windows where a late moon burnt softly
in a gauze of cloud. Or was it the answer?
Just what especializes words? What
quarries out the finest gems? What
ferries saints of lasting hue? Not, I muse
today, any polish that a pen could gloss,
but rather the gold is in how much won’t
go on paper, all that plebian normal
married dayside habit which is the bigger
nail, the truer cross, the secret sacred
third rail thrall which freights gods
from tomb to womb. For nine years
now I’ve gotten up many hours before
my wife to roar and ramble here,
rummaging old skirts and churches
undersea, the one life shore to
its balder extremities, the other
a shore for all its maladies
and melodies, its infernal infidelities,
bounded by a safer sea. I ink my thrall
on paper but lay down with the wife
on sheets she irons purer than snow.
My garden muse at 4 a.m. is thus my
dreaming wife, the myth and mystery of
the sleeping life. So whatever dark
music is sweetest here, I must
remember to plow it back into her,
the mare of days I’m mated to.