Skylla

Seamen told — and the tale has been preserved in the Odyssey ... — that there are two cliffs, one of them of smooth stone and so high that it rises to heaven, and its summit is invisible. In the middle of this cliff is the cave of Skylla. The cave faces toward the west, towards the impenetrable darkness of Erebos. ...

... We must recognize in Skylla a great goddess resembling her mother Hekate. Probably the accounts of Skylla that are the truest to her real nature are those that depict her in the shape of a beautiful woman down to the hips, but changing at the hips to a dog and from the hips downward into a fish. Those accounts that speak of her also having wings are equally true to her nature, in that, unlike ((her sister)) Charbydis ((who dwelt under the other cliff)), she rules not only over the depths, but also over the far distances both below and above.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

I found her when I was 17
— late, compared to my
randy peers — in a 19th-
story apartment of a Lake
Shore highrise. Her parents
had by then just let
her be in glum resignation,
their attempts to bring
her to their adulthood
stillborn in the
rages of a premature
motherhood.
Her father didn’t smile
when he opened the
door, just waved
me down the hall
toward her room.
My guitar case felt
heavy in my hand
as I swung it down
the hall, the maguffin
which barely concealed
a rude penis sprouting
up. My excuse for calling
on her that Friday night
was that we were to
make some music
together, but it
was obviously the
father wasn’t buying
that. His coldness was
strange to me, for
I had always been able
to sweet-talk parents,
good gold boy I
was by all appearances;
but I guess Skylla
had so pissed them off
that every caller
was damaged goods
to them. Just knocking
on the door was
a complicit, guilty
sound. Nor was I
fooling myself that night.
I said thank
You to the father
and headed back,
passing the mother
who sat stonily in
their expensive
living room, her
eyes staring out
the window on
the black film
of Lake Michigan.
At the other
end of that I knocked;
Come in a rich
soft voice intoned;
and did. Skylla sat on
her bed with a classical
guitar, picking with
some skill a Joni Mitchell
tune from “Blue” -- her
song a dark wound’s
sweet cave
between love
and hell. She was a
year older than I,
redbrown hair thick
and wavy falling past
her shoulders, a long
sharp nose punctuating
something feral
between those deep,
doe-soft eyes -- a
dangerous fragility
which stirred from
awful depths to smile
sweetly and sigh
come sit down ...
I did. She held
that guitar close
against heavy breasts
which swung
freely beneath a
peasant blouse.
Oh my heart was
pounding with the
knowledge that I
was finally going
to get to lose my
long-mocked and
useless virginity—
a strange heaving
in my chest, tiding
in and out thick
washes of hot blood.
Some days earlier
on a cig break from
our church youth
group we had stood
outside in the
city’s sharp-edged
cold; she had
just finished saying
that she will never
get the ways of
men -- she’d been
dumped again--
when I blurted
I was still virgin.
Skylla ground out her
cigarette with
her shoe; when
she looked
up she saw
something
clear through
me from the
deep waters of
her eyes: And
whispered, well,
we’ll have to do
something about
that, won’t we
— matter-of-factly,
offering me the
next spot in
the bad male queue
outside and through
her high-rise room.
Yes, I was ready
to join them,
desperate to shed
my boy’s innocence
& stand nude before
her naked world,
a man of darker
purposes revealed
to revel lavishly
at last ...
Her room was
warm and dark,
curtains pulled
tight against the
city night -- perhaps
to deny the height
of privilege, or
in fear of fates
and faces in
the jeweled city
lights, or worse,
from the flat black
visage of Lake
Michigan spreading
ever to the east.
Candles around
the room tongued
a soft low glow.
“Take off your shoes,”
she whispered; her
fish tail seemed
to flinch as I
heaved off my
boots, her
eyes watching
my first undress
with what seemed
to me a savage
red sadness, most
sexual yet not,
like a woman
long fallen from
all discreeter
interpretations. My
Christian talk
meant nothing to her,
having been raised
a smart Jewish
humanist, now
grown agnostic of
the men she embraced,
her God wide and deep
in the ways heaven
could not say by
any light of day.
By then it didn’t
mean much to me
either, having lost
the God of words,
my sights set on
lower epiphanies,
surer anointings.
I pulled my Epiphone
12-string from its
plush blue bed and
began to play those
Christian songs we
knew from youth
group -- “Sing My
People,” “Blind Man,”
“Resurrection”; then
played a few of
my own songs
about hopeless
love and salvation;
then she played
a few of her own,
songs which made
mine sound naive
& stupid & inarticulate,
which I was. She
had been taught
to play & compose
by the father of the
child she was forced
to give away when
she was just 16 --
she kept that
master’s touch inside
her own, her thin
pale fingers picking
deep notes out,
her voice sorrowful
and true, rich
as any whiskey
I would later come
to know. Finishing
a third song she
laid that guitar
aside and poured
us wine; as
we drank she
talked of him,
her lost son,
perfect pink
and nursing at
her perfect breast
for one day only,
before they took
that son away.
Her parents just
would not stand
to have their only
child end her
future as a
unwed teenaged
mother. They
moved soon after
from Minneapolis
to Chicago where
they told her
to start her life
over. That’s when
the war began,
two years of
schools at which
she failed despite
her brilliance,
using her vagina
to break her
parents’ will
taking on boy
after boy after
boy, consuming
their fast semen
with a horrid
sort of joy. By now
they had settled into
a warlike stalemate
where she went to
school and paid her
dues but when at
home she had full
rights to her room,
inviting whoever
she cared to
to do with them
as she pleased.
No wonder they
hated me, but
did I care that night?
She drained her
glass and then
smiled low at
me in that
low-burning room;
then whispered
come here love
and I did,
like a lamb to
virgin slaughter.
We kissed: we
worked each
others clothes
off: and I reeled
at the sight at last,
she laying there along
my length, her breasts
thick and wobbly
in my hand, a wide
scar across her
belly from the
C-section like
a pumpkin’s mouth,
the thatch of
thick brown
pubic hair
which ground
against my pubic
bone like seaweed
long onshore.
My fingers roamed
from breasts to
belly to cunt to thighs
and back, tracing
a territory that
seemed familiar
yet so strange,
a wilderness of
womanhood I
could not name
though my hand
seemed fluent
in the touch.
She tried to fondle
me erect but
I was too scared,
I guess, too
unaccustomed to
the feel of soft
on rough, the
sense of waters
loosened from
a dam that would
not ever heal
back; my cock
flopped loose
like a beached
and dying fish inside
her hand as she tried
a long time -- two hours,
probably -- to rouse
the devil. Alas, I
was in a stalemate
too, with my own
body, screaming with
all my will from
the outside at
some motlen
steel within
which refused
to temper a
rude girder.
Some time after
midnight we just
gave and lay there,
kissed-out, half
sleeping, complete
in every way the sin
except in the raw deed,
Skylla my wet mentor
looking distantly through
me with those eyes
which trailed seaweed
deep down into the
soft long pubic hairs
my fingers rested on,
down to the sand
between my teeth
and balls and toes,
down into that
black sea sighing
underneath the
phallic tower I
had climbed, with
some church bell
tolling far way,
a distant buoy
I hardly recognized
any more. Oh sweet
initiator to the
wide and deepest
realms to tide me
far from heaven’s
bourne: What a
bittersweet conclusion
to the way I formally
began to name
my Beloved with my body,
far from the pond
I dreamt she fell
into. Plunge and
capture, fuck and
run: Sweet breasts
in the caves’s entrance
and rude fish smells
far inside, back
in the deep ends of
the night: Thank
You for that first
encounter where
by failing I learned
to fuck by falling
into every failed
reach and breech
sex delves but
can’t deliver.
Oh so late that
night I wearied my
way home, carrying
my guitar in one
hand and the ghost
of a breast in the
other, my knees
rubbed raw & my
soft dick smarting
in ways which would
holler rude and rampant
soon enough, soon
enough: That sensation
of abrasion from an
Other hung high above
me as I waited for
the subway in some
deep dank empty
somewhat dangerous
El station, loud
and lost as all 2 a.m.’s
came to be ... Was
I still a virgin? Could
I still find my way
back to a boy-child’s God?
No: and as I rode
the subway home
in a clatter of half-sleep,
I thought back on
Skylla’s breasts and
cunt and ass as
the car heaved and
sparked; of
that rude scar
of birth like
a scowl; of her eyes
so deep through me
like a book that
closed as it opened,
lurching me from
one life to a next
that seemed wild
and beautiful at
once. Skylla wrapped
around that car
ensuring I’d never
find my way to
that old home again,
not on any street,
nor in any guitar,
not in loving or
digressing here
all the waters at her
rear: Never home
but always near, a
sighing ominipresence
which fades fast
from any view -- I
never went back
to Skylla’s room
& she never returned
to our youth group—
yet always returning
too, in the next woman
who took me to bed
and roused me at last
to give up the ancient
ghost. She’s in
the garden outside
at 5 a.m. in
today late late
summer sere wan heat,
fading like a lover’s
breath from sex
on down darkest sleep.
Skylla rules this hand
from a deep and
crashing land, calling
and refusing me,
demanding that I
measure out the
broadest, deepest,
darkest sea, line
by line, song by song,
that her nursed-
on nipples at full
length be told,
a milky taut
derangement that
I learned from a
girl-woman in
a highrise room
now 30 years ago,
so large and stiff
and brown, slightly
chewed by all
the ghosts, still
proudly proffered
unto me to feed
that long-starved
child offered to
her when I became
a man’s pent seed
giving birth to
the waylaid life.

The Round

THE POND IN THE FOREST

Oct 2 2006

I.

So when I was 5
I began the solo game
of masturbation
sans dick to diddle:
Pressed my face
into the pillow of
my bed with my
sensitive yet
unbreeched regions
against the mattress
& watched the only
episode rise to view.
I walked around
a deep pond
with a pretty girl
who walked the
other way around,
the both of us
atop a bounding
wall of stone.
The water in the
pond was calm
and deep and black,
alluring and terrible
like the place
between my hips,
whose depths belied
the place where I
had lived before,
in that still saline
womb at the center
of my life's woods.
Always the girl
would teeter and
then totter and
and then fall into
the pond with a
a horrid glassy splash;
always she thrashed
in water a while
and then slowly
started going down;
always she then
cried out my name,
only my name, forever:
And always I would
jump right in
even though I didn't
really know how
to swim (I had fallen
into a swimming pool,
though, so knew about
going down), my lungs
nearly collapsing into
that heavy press of
dreamy blue, my
feet dangling dizzy
over a mouth of dark.
And always somehow
I got the both of
us back out, manfully
as Roy Rogers or
Superman. We sat
dripping & wheezy
on that old stone
wall (exactly opposite
the point at which
we diverged to
walk around the pond)
and then the lysis
of the fantasy
gave the money shot:
The girl would (always)
wrap her pretty arms
around me, and hugged
me close, sighing
"My Hero," a sound
which washed over
my floating mind
and hungry, yet-
articulated body.
And like some
Eurydice of the balls,
after she said those
words she faded
out, leaving me
alone with my
faced mashed to
a dark pillow.

II.

For a long while I
played that game
over and over,
never varying the
details of the show --
the entire scene
mythic, complete,
omnipotent in
its power to deliver
just the glee I
needed most
when I was five
years old. My
interest in that
simple game
eventually faded,
replaced by other,
more perplex ones,
darkened perhaps
by my slow history
round and down
the vortex of sex.
My games changed
from solo to au pair,
growing so close to
real that they needed
to become real.
But always the round
remained, circling
an indefinable
wet center that
ruled me with an iron
will. My sexual
fantasies all share
that same blue core,
spinning round
and round a
set of scenes
where I get what I
ask for, or am
blessed with more
than I dreamed:
A dog-eared book of
revealings and
bright squealings
real and not, encounters
that happened
and the ones I'll
always wish that had
where she always
sighs My Hero
as I well my molten
seed. I play those
scenes over and
over with my mind's
loins fast against
curved welcome,
grinding away
at water oh sweet
water, getting home
ever again.

The fixed round
fantasy subscribes
has many daily
anchors: The walk
I take with my
wife is always the
same, Ninth Avenue
to Tremain then
down to the lake,
skirting that wide
water & then turning
back to home, up
through Granthon Park
and onto Grandview
all the way back
to Ninth and home.
It's habit and pleasantly
so, like suppers
watching TV, like
me waking her
at first light
with my fingertips
soft across her soles,
wave after wave
after wave. Maybe it's
all the pleasant residue
of the courtship
of a marriage today
ten years old --
our pleasure together
as we round that
pond again, finding in each
other what the water
water welcomes back in.
Our rounds revere
love's center fixed
between us, like
well inside our years.

III.

As I've aged, I've
slowly come to see
the other side
of that first sex
dream, how that
round worked
equally in reverse.
That girl who
walked around the
pond the other way
had and has her
own game to play,
with a payoff reversed
from mine. I'm told
this by my dreams
which repeating the same
primal scenes but
from below, reversing
the flow to a dappled
panoply where everything
about pours back into
the one -- stockrooms
and oceans, stock
cars and church tombs,
ever faces of that girl
beneath that pond's water.
She is the mistress
of my dreams,
refusing to wake up
til the last room in
that lake has been
laid open and plunged.
A game, I fear, I'll never
quite wake from,
or maybe wish I won't.


IV.

And what is a poem
but the same old round
just told some other
way? A to Z I ferry
ichored water
from a forest's center
and back, my lines connecting
the wombs like an
isthmus of ink in
whatever fresh my
dreaming words conceive.
Ten thousand poems
in one round drone on,
partnered in thousand
ways to that strange
sweet curved figure
walking on the other
side of water who
needs me just as I
need her in ways
neither of us will
quite understand.


V.

She fell in where
I would not dare,
exactly where
my sex divines:
I dove hellbent
in blent desire
to rescue her
from that well's fire
we'll never quite
requite or find,
much less
full marry,
no matter
how long or deep
I sing, no matter
how many bells
I ring around the hours
which round two
sleeps at once.
The round is old --
my five-year's
reach perhaps
goes deep into
the species' reach,
the cathedral arch
of Lascaux perhaps,
that cold dark
round of souls --
and it is ever new,
presented here
today in this
next poem I write
perambling round
that forest pond
on stones which
found the world,
today's, at least,
if only for a song.


***

THE LADY OF THE LAKE

(From Bullfinch's Mythology, The Age of Chivalry, Chapter 6: Launcelot of the Lake,"
BULFINCH'S MYTHOLOGY)

KING BAN, of Brittany, the faithful ally of Arthur, was attacked by his enemy Claudas, and, after a long war, saw himself reduced to the possession of a single fortress, where he was besieged by his enemy. In this extremity he determined to solicit the assistance of Arthur, and escaped in a dark night, with his wife Helen and his infant son Launcelot, leaving his castle in the hands of his seneschal, who immediately surrendered the place to Claudas. The flames of his burning citadel reached the eyes of the unfortunate monarch during his flight, and he expired with grief. The wretched Helen, leaving her child on the brink of a lake, flew to receive the last sighs of her husband, and on returning perceived the little Launcelot in the arms of a nymph, who, on the approach of the queen, threw herself into the lake with the child. This nymph was Viviane, mistress of the enchanter Merlin, better known by the name of the Lady of the Lake.

Launcelot received his appellation from having been educated at the court of this enchantress, whose palace was situated in the midst, not of a real, but, like the appearance which deceives the African traveller, of an imaginary lake, whose deluding resemblance served as a barrier to her residence. Here she dwelt not alone, but in the midst of a numerous retinue, and a splendid court of knights and damsels.

The queen, after her double loss, retired to a convent, where she was joined by the widow of Bohort, for this good king had died of grief on hearing of the death of his brother Ban. His two sons, Lionel and Bohort, were rescued by a faithful knight, and arrived in the shape of greyhounds at the palace of the lake, where, having resumed their natural form, they were educated along with their cousin Launcelot.

The fairy, when her pupil had attained the age of eighteen, conveyed him to the court of Arthur, for the purpose of demanding his admission to the honor of knighthood; and at the first appearance of the youthful candidate the graces of his person, which were not inferior to his courage and skill in arms, made an instantaneous and indelible impression on the heart of Guenever, while her charms inspired him with an equally ardent and constant passion. The mutual attachment of these lovers exerted, from that time forth, an influence over the whole history of Arthur. For the sake of Guenever Launcelot achieved the conquest of Northumberland, defeated Gallehaut, King of the Marches, who afterwards become his most faithful friend and ally, exposed himself in numberless encounters, and brought hosts of prisoners to the feet of his sovereign.


CHAMPION

Nov. 2005

Behind every queen you'll find a mere of
welled and walled desire, not mine but Yours
for which no quest will ever slake
the lowest leagues of thirsty fire.
Behind the actual shape of love in
her daily cottons is the more difficult
gossamer she is, an individual as alien
to everything inside a suitor as any
next too-mortal bride. One marries
the surfaces one's heart needs to see
and prays the rest in her abide.
Her king is you, in ordinary troth
and husbandry, a love requited in
shared work and weariness beyond the bed,
in the ramparts of a home it takes years
of surrender to that work to build.
At least, that's what I've learned
about sustaining love, a young man no
more who yet still shares with that first
prince a wild thrall for the sea's blue
pour inside each wave's collapsing roar.
My moment here was ferried forth
by him, or him inside Your thrall.
For years I sought nocturnal lists of
revelry, seeking in every quest to gain
a queenly savor to next days, that bit
of sea hard-drenched in blue where
loved reeked the sea's full flavor:
Yet in my errand I was always denied,
my thrust parried by a troth which
the women looking somewhere else.
I was looking for them to fill my heart,
and so in turn were they; how could
anyone be satisfied drinking
from a lake of fire which the other
cupped in someone else? Always
my wild hope affixed its wings to this
or that shape of faux heaven, flying
to the height of love's vault to pull
that ring which unleashed abysms.
Always then the crash and burn
inside the wake she left behind,
a burning brand chucked back into
the mere, my dream of queens and
courts remitted in the mire of
my bottomed-out desire. In that
waste of mud her darker shade
arose from depths to cobble
me back together all again,
teaching me the art of unhorsed
arisings, glueing back my broken balls.
Rearmored thus in her salt rectitude,
I rose again to woo and win afresh
the same old wounds. Odd rhythmus,
to be so driven to the same leaping
falls, and foolish, so damn foolish too:
But what's a knight of cups to do?
Every suitor's defined by the suit
which starred his water's birth,
and mine was blazoned in the
birthmark of a heart pierced by
an arrow: lance and cup are both
mine to pour full and empty out.
Behind all courts you'll find the woods,
a castle in the mere: Behind my
starry venturing a deeper quest
worked the other way, handing me a pen
exactly where that woman's shape
could never fully welcome me.
By days I am her husband, the king
of my life's queen: By night (well, early
morning) I am the depths' salt
champion, a knight of bluest meres,
the thrall of every queen to ride the
lists requiting all that never was
beyond the shimmer and the sheen.





ROUND (1)

Jan. 2004

The poem is not a dream
but shares some common
milk, circling round and
down the day's next pap
to lip its proferred nub.
This morning steady rains
& still warm though a front
approaches, sure in gentlest
sighings. In that tide
a bad migraine beating
black wings at the base of
my skull. Oh well. Up
at 3:30 a.m. to watch
a rebroadcast North/South
college bowl (Greg Jones
bouncing off tacklers
to score a 12-yard TD) and
"Wild On: Roman Empire"
on E!, those savvy
producers minting a sexual
coin from far stranger
wilder ruins. Then it's on
to work, reading in Inferno
about the dragon Geryon
-- the very beast of Fraud --
& how the Poets mounted
him to wheel and descend
down to the Malebolge or
Eight Circle of compulsed
Hell. A heavy breast
is pressed to these lines,
and though I haven't found
it yet I feel it close by,
swollen past ripe and
screaming to to loose its
freight of milky blue. Listen
to all that rain outside,
letting go, rising now in
volume, in full stride, basting
and lathering and soaking
all to a glistening, black
lacquer. Suck it deep, my
friend, fill every parch and
ache that brought you here:
and once sated, sleep,
you'll dream the shape
I dowsed for here
but couldn't quite reveal.

***

SHE IS WHAT
SIDHE SEES

Oct 2004

My longing is an abbey
scribe who's scratching
down the old tales,
recording for great
God above the
those one thousand
nights she sashayed
off opening all
the doors inside.

My longing is that
drifting monk
on wintry seas
who trusts his God
to compass
his frail boat
to the next shore
of trials and wonders
where she is near
yet further to the
rear of the sea's
colossal wash.

My longing is the well
which offers tribute
to her so far below
and oracles her
mythic plunge,
drinking deep
her blue derange,
carrying from
far the news I
need most to hear
on any given day.

Every poem sights
her somewhere in
the day's tableaux
-- in my wife's
first-waking smile or
in some fleeting
face in traffic, on
TV or the
radio where
sirens and
divas tide --
or further in,
finning the depths
of daydream
or a text. A poem
is that sudden gush
of ache and wonder
praising all she is
in bells of
towering lack.

Sometimes she
is Eve and sometimes
Helen, a pure maternal
or that poured nocturnal
too wild for any
cup I've drained. I've
come to guess that
her face and shape accords
with what my longing
bids me see, as if
she disclosed some
next or further reach
of my heart's long
walk on a beach
of white desire.

All my loves have
one thing in common --
me -- or, more precisely,
my longing's high
cathedral shape
within the borders
of my life, its ringing
bells smashing clabbers
hot steel against
massive walls of
singing bronze,
pealing my need to
praise her names
and within them mine.

What is every
quest and grail
but another romance
for the stacks,
one more exempla
of the ten thousand
ways her eyes shined
back the face I
was searching for, the
heat in her eyes
my own, risen sunlike
from blue seas?

I''ll never have
enough nib and
squid-squirt and
bleached parchment
to finish all the
tales that winged
angel of the heart
has bid me write;
it defies all the
aching shorelines
of this art, whispering
MORE inside each
crashing way
that she and
I have met.
Again and again
and again that
litany of champagne
foam froths the wake
of smash and boom,
a spill of failing
bubbles ebbing to a hiss.

Listen, I hear
that salty angel croon.

Your soul's in for a kiss.

***

Manannan, or Manachan Mar Lir, is the most distinctive of (the Manx) spirits. It is he who takes the form of the three-legged wheel which is the emblem of man. He is long-dead, however; no appearance of Manannan has been recorded in living memory.

-- Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature

MANANNAN'S WHEEL

2006

You haven't been seen
above the tide since
the Christians named
it rude, but that doesn't
mean You're dead: Foam
of wave which lingers
after the ebb is proof
enough You ride
those breakers still.
Their manes are gripped
in Your hands the
way a darkness rides
its depths, fleet
and laughing where
the light of abbeys
built on dry earth
can't enter,
or won't, for fear
of finding the very
devil happy in his
toil. You're there
enthroned amid
a seaweedy wash
of pubic hair,
smiling and
one-eye proud,
booming in Your
baritone a wheeling
brogue composed
of the sea's three legs
of breadth and depth
in endless blue tide.
They raised their
chalice to every bright
and high part
of the day, claiming
there the next life's
judgment and rule.
You lost that battle
in their eyes but
won the greater war,
founding a salt
empire in the
deeper regions of the
heart, that lower,
Sidhe-rich half of
Ireland which sings
and swives and drinks
to dregs the salt
orizons of the soul
while their altars
dry and fall in
certitudes too
heavenly for this
world's good. At the
edges of the known
You are close -- almost --
the pale gleam of
moonlight which ghosts
the icebergs with
ever-noctal fire,
bowering abysms
where narwhals
clatter their horns
like marimbas
and moan long tones
in the tongue of
those darkest
gods who were exiled
there and came to
rule what we banished
from our lands for good.
Oh undaunted demiurge
smiling a deep welcome
which confounds this
well of a whale of a
whorl of a quim of
darkly-diving words!
It's raining now at
4:30 a.m., a steady
soft glissade of
tropic moisture wrung
from low-pressure-
marling skies, making
this morning a drowned
and dowsing, post-coital
wash on shores still
lucent with Your foam.
This effervescent absent
swash will soon enough be gone,
wheeling out and down
that merry sea whose
whirling thrall we are.



ROUND (2)

2004

A poem is a round,
a pattern or circuit
written by an angel
at a blue angle to the
day's iota. It meanders
wishy-washy in
a maze of noctilucent
ribs, taking note
of the glyphs and
organum resounding
there, coming at
last to the rude
stone face back
of the center with
his rough brogue
of salt boom.
There I kiss the
cross and turn,
seeking the outward
gloss of endings,
swimming back
over the gleaming
town below,
seeking that
churchyard gate
that closes back
over this liminal
circle-dance
in realms down
under and between,
of equal drams
commedia and nekyia,
immrama and
forest esplumoir.
The subjects wash
on and through the
dream's next door,
but this nibbed
and inked oar's
peramble remains
as sure as stone,
inscribing left to
right and top to
bottom of some
wilderness in
a columnar arrange,
as if the faithful
round accomplished
daily here were
landscape and
temple enough, sufficient
wing and dowse
to find that well
which springs in
every poem's dark
centre, brimming
cold and pure
as God's gold
ninth-wave smile.
All the relics
are found here
in the vowel's cascade
of swash and plash
and shore-long boom,
their sighing, soft
recede: Skulls with
silver brains and
crosses poured
from quicksilver,
fish-god runes
and ogham tongues
of treelike flame,
a patch of the
that saint's robe
who settled over
a vicious pagan ire
and became its
later song. -- At
5:17 a.m., I sit
here feeling off a
bit from a bout of
Charley Flu &
the sprinklers in
the garden whirl
round and round,
watering fairy-realms
sprawled inches
under the soil. Far
off Hurricane Frances
twirls her dervish
skirts around the
edges of Bermuda,
rapt in her dance,
receiving high or
low instructions from
the deva-riders
of horse-latitudes.
Between us there's
so much that's lost
and misused, stolen,
built over with
that stuff mined
from the gap between
all gods. That hollow
sound strides along
here like a corpse
on the poem's back.
It's never easy any
more, raising chapels
with verbals which
must suffice for stone.
But when were the
times ever propitious?
So here's to this next
round in paradise,
this next voweled
peramble from angel
rage to pen's black
ley down and through
the next few pages.
Time now to shut
the covers like a gate
and go forth to
repeat the day
which grounded in
this round through
those waters which give
birth to every day's
first light. May some
of that lower heaven
ferry forward into
those dry stations
of the world that
stretch what seems
too endlessly
between the end
of this poem
and the next
spiral down.


UTERAL

2001


It's all uterus.
God, how many summers

ago was it that I came
here, hoping, believing

in the salt wash of
some woman's soft beach?

- And always ending up
at the same door with

the sign which reads,
"Not Here." Some fool.

The serial killer in
"Silence of the Lambs"

assembled the flesh of
his victims into a pink

blouse, a chrysalis to
help him cross that

inexorable divide of flesh
which keeps us apart.

So many have has been
burnt in my flame for union.

What a rampage our
baffled compulsions,

soiling the air with
untreated desires.

I turned the world into
a beach, sought her

in boozy descents and
carefully laid verses,

between the disciplined
chores of the good life

and the oaks just beyond
in the storied dark.

Always the sound of a surf
just out of reach,

irascibly immanent
and maddeningly pale.

No hope to sustain me
but that next fresh smile

in some corner of the day,
new and wide as birth

and just as far. What
happens when finally

the page is turned? How
will the world populate

the next play? Will the
beach shimmer into

strip of fire, some weave
of cotton and crumpled

foil? Perhaps. What will come
the heart will accord.



NEREID OF THE WELL

July 2004

This well has a hymen
the day will break
and scatter with its
penetrate light and heat:
And all the secrets
of this well will thus
become known, the
properties of its waters
to physic art or
history. The vowel-like
sound of its cold plash
will find a saint to
garb our devotions in,
an oak or stone to
altar our prayers.
God's will is divined
by what eventually
happened here
this hot summer day:
but at this moment
before first light
none of that can
yet be known, the
quiet hour like
a nereid's dream of
still waters and sleeping
fire, the moonlight
icy on the liquid panes
of mind, faint, crystalline,
every fragrant mystery
within and below
all enclosed in the
fullness of God's maternal
round which wombs
that high sound which now
starts to twinkle out, star
by fading star, replaced
by a low breath reaching
from a distant brightening
coast, pale blue and
swelling pink, tumescent:
And from that waking
heated sound
cry back from spreading
waters this ache, this
need, which makes a
belling cry to birth and
nurse and woo and fury
a wild summer's day,
to be the white mare
this next day's king
must ride from dawn
to dusk, partner and principal,
the milk of summer
swelter. She mirrors
the dazzling sky with
a silver bed of
chromatic fire, and drums
within for later storms,
eyes gleaming with the
bolt and thunder
and crash, mouth
receiving wide the dissolving
rains which slowly
fill and quell her well.
When last light
kisses the old gal good
night, she falls into the
futurity of dream, fashioning
the maid from that
lunar silk and leaving
her to hang on the branches
of the trees far down
there to vigil unto dawn,
singing that ancient
lay of springtime love
in the naked glade.
But wait -- to east
a flutter of that flute
which pipes the paling
blue -- in the well's
black glass I see a
pale face peering back --
mother, sister, lover,
muse and fury
disclosed in one
sweet face rising
there, slowly,
oh so slowly,
by every silken degree
of this next waking day --
she arrives at the
calmed cool surface
opening her
noctilucent oh too
blue eyes: The coming
day pursed for
that moment I say Yes
and we for one instant
pause, and close, then kiss.




UPON JULIA'S BREASTS

March 2004


Behold that circummortall purity ...

-- Robert Herrick

Beloved white rose across an
incalculable wash of thorns,
holy isle peaked with
aureole and nipple
of St. Brigid Kiss-Me-
Spring: my yearn for
you is as infinite
as it is moot,
a cathedralling drive-
through: Silly-coned,
as Julia the stripper
remarked to me
about a fellow
tradeswoman in
the grand gloom of
the Foxhunter Club
twenty years ago,
a year or so before
the place shut down.
That night I couldn't
quell the booze-fired
urge to peek and gawk
at heaven's landed
jugglery, even if it
meant sitting in
the utter degradation
of rooms like that
& have to fork fivers
meant for rent over
to this dissipate
vestal of waxing
womanhood for the
revelation of all I
couldn't woo with any
art I knew. It's cold
this morning, 45 degrees
maybe, creeping in
now at 5 a.m. where
two hours ago it was
easy as I held an ice
pack to the back of
my head, flipping
channels, hoping for
the odd shot of boob
or butt to nurse this
migraine's briar of
pain away. "Circummortall"
indeed, always rounding
me to there and back.
Well, I'm not alone
in my disease, if desire's
milky booze deserves
so fallen a handle. You've
kept me here in this life,
my sweets, always coming
back for more. On TV
too this a.m. there's
footage from the train
bombings in Madrid which
have killed 200 or so
and wounded twelve
hundred more. Some folks
churn gall from Your milk,
or maybe that's what
you've always proferred
those dusky sons of Allah,
contempt, and fire. All
perhaps their own
choler-ful testes could
seethe into their hands
as they wired and fused
their dread paps of
history. Paramedics
wove the wreckage
laying brilliant yellow
and blue and red
tarps over the bodies--
carnival colors to
ferry off the dead.
Mortal breasts can rend
like any flesh, the milk
infused with blood or
Pac-Man cancers. The
montage shifted to
a hall-turned-morgue
where family members
tried to ID beloveds
or what remained of
them; we watch a woman
being led by another
into a room, her back
to us, long curly brown
hair, a breezy dress,
her hand gripping
another's like mortis ...
I flip back to the promo
for Girls Gone Wild
where beachside coeds
gleefully lift t-shirts
and brassieres and bikini-
tops or begin to, the
hucksters editing out
the white flash just before
You're revealed. Buy the
tape asshole is what
remains, the sour gritty
taste in the rube's
mouth who thought he'd
see all behind the brightly
colored canvas tent
that night at the fair
and received only the
fleetingest glimpse of
impossibly desired
air. Better luck next
time. For me, it's time
to get to work here, writing
all the names of God
in hurled black seed
across pages whiter
than the palest breasts
I have ever seen, whiter
than the blueish drizzle
which my infant greed
recalls. Such nipplage
may be poor substitute,
but then all of it
is too, eh my roundage?
My Brigid's nipples are
under deep seas, and
only feed the cupidons
and narhwal herds which
ride my raw desires.
I'm afraid my wit is not
fully up for circumnavigations
of so grand a theme:
The hands of my verse
shape and heft and tweak
the air and leave the rest
for you to nurse or proffer
as your sex decides.
Oh, and about Julia's
breasts: I talked with her
awhile that night in that
doomed club, laying down
six bucks for her Cherry
Coke while I told her
all I would one day
accomplish onstage.
Her lips pursed the straw,
giving suck, while her
blue eyes roamed the
shadowed men around
the room. She asked
me if I wanted a dance:
Hell yes, I mumbled
up to You. Up she stood,
tall and blonde and
nineteen, fidgeting
behind her back.
Whiteness drowned
an inky black.

ANNIVERSARY

Sept. 2003

Today it's been twenty years
since I lost the second woman
I hardly knew yet I loved
in full, stupid, jealous & greedy.
In losing her I became
so desperately and infernally
alive as to beg silence: her shade.

All I remember of her today
is that morning we walked
on Cocoa Beach after fucking
most of the night. We were
making small talk in our
dreamy exhaustion-laughing
at the way sandpipers scurry
like tiny execs- when she
paused and smiling at me
in front of dawning sea.
The whole package I recall-
that smile, the blue eyes streaming,
the curly blond hair in a halo
of sun, her breasts full
and straining against
a year-old bikini top, the
sea crashing light foam
at her ankles like cream,
that evanescent breeze-
all of that was greater than
any morning, a finally found key.
Yet that was only true
in reverse, when she told
me at last to go to hell.
but in reverse. I recall
how I hurt bad enough
in the proceeding months
to see beyond the heat
into caring at last about
how I lived love.
How the days slowed
in the viscosity of grief,
a sludge both anguished
and gorgeous, slowing
the day to a wave-crawl,
the sunlight lengthening
across the lakes.
That image spoiled my drinking
for the next 4 years
though I tried, reaching
for her on every tree.
to care last about how
Eventually I came to
marry that shape,
sacrificing the wild
night of making love
for long hard days
of patient making.
Love doesn't teach us
how much there is to
gain in love, only
how much there is to lose
by not loving, or failing
to love well enough.
Today I recall those long
burnished days in September
when grief was a tide
tolling a sea
I'd been born to in losing.
Stupid, jealous, greedy,
it's true, but also the wound
which eventually bled me real.
I sit in the house I prayed
that day to inhabit,
the sum of every surrender
I made to love's brine,
it's awfullest, most
incompetent son,
each smile a wine
so much more difficult now
so much more
what she only kissed.

Dark Hypotenuse

She who is close to this writing hand, for better or verse, subtextual and contratpuntal, the dark hypotenuse to my every angling dangling here ... Any paean Hekate must iterate in her triune realms of the earthly life -- down from Olympus, south of Heaven, necessary and forceful like Ananke and Bia (those other Titanesses in the employ of Zeus) yet also outerboundaried, overabundant, hypovenusian, of the widest and wildest extrapolation words can find, can never. I'm talking here of the Queen of Sin, the divine fall without which there can be no elect, no postlapsarian 'burb, nothing said, no eternal soul to lose.

Kerenyi, in The Gods of the Greeks:

Hekate had a share of sky, earth and sea, but never became an Olympian goddess. She was closely connected with the life of our women, therefore with mankind generally, that she seemed smaller than the wives and daughters of Zeus. On the other hand, her realm -- especially the sea, where in primordial times she carried on her love affairs -- was so great that the Olympian could not possibly control it. When she was not walking on the highways, she dwelt in her cave. So did her daughter Skylla, a sea-bogy -- according, at least, to the tales of our seamen, whose main object in telling them was to frighten landsmen. For they themselves knew the real nature of even the most dangerous parts of the sea, and did not associate the great goddess who could appear in many shapes, with a single spot only.

If I am A and Thou art B, She is the transit opposite our infinitely-waylaid bedding, following the alternate course of that starry union, the shadow self of it, its abysmal shelf, its unconscious reading, the black sutra which praises the agony of our union, its difficulty, its long travail and travels, she completes herself in the vast black empyrean of every way I failed to reach You...






SIN

Sept. 30

For years the Philly soul
tune “Me and Mrs. Jones”
has washed sweet and
heavy in my ear,
held there there by
teenaged memory’s
pure gilt nails.
One late afternoon
in 1973 I walked home
in the cold hell of
Chicago’s near-north side,
my heart despairing
of a girl who
who always fell hard
for my friends
& cried to me
when they always
left her. I knew I
was not her type,
a gawky blonde,
too Appalachian
where she
preferred the
darkhaired Puerto
Rican with his
switchblade smile
and snappy steps
on the dancefloor.
Whenever I hear
“Me and Mrs. Jones”
I think of me imagining
her dancing with all
of them as I walked
the last streets home
in the dying gold light
of winter. I was deep
into the city yet
it seemed I was
alone, the row
houses all mute
and shut, busses
lumbering past
with iced-up windows,
no one else fool enough
to walk out in
the bitter
cold (though I loved
it that I walked
alone, my self-pity
at the time of
that song arch,
even archetypal) --:
“Me and Mrs. Jones
played in my head in
an almost hymnal way,
bittersweet and lyrical,
the impossible love
song impossibly and
defiantly true.
Yet it occurred to me
yesterday as I
spun the song on
CD driving home
in late September
light (wanheat,
gold roads clotted
with pickup trucks
and SUV’s roaring back
to the consequence of love)
that the words were
important too, scriptural
in reverse, blessing
an adulterous affair
with a ghetto-wattage
of defiance. The singer
knows it’s wrong that
he and Mrs. Jones meet
each day at six thirty
at their favorite cafe,
holding hands, making
up plans, playing
their favorite song
over and over and
over again: Knows
it must come to
an end some day too
soon; that each of them
will trudge back to
their own separate
lives of unmentioned
husbands an wives,
living out the rest
of their lives
in the blues-festered
wounds they have created:
But right then, in the hallows
of the song, the only
thing that matters is
that they are together
for three minutes
of a song, more together
maybe than they’ll ever be
again. That’s the magic
of their sin, in choosing
to go left when all
the world & heaven too
commands them not
to give in, to do
the right thing instead.
Choosing to sin
is to love the
profane with hearts
made sacred by a will
as powerful as the devil’s
if only for a song
played over and over
and over for one season.
As my own fallen
heart’s anthem,
“Me and Mrs. Jones”
dives deep into the
magnitude of sin,
sketching a vault
of impregnate holiness
rimmed by cold
emptiness, a savagely
sweet error
it is death to veer
back to God from
once we’ve chosen
to dance and fall.
I was sixteen and losing
my faith in God,
that iron omnipresence
which ruled from
the other side of
grey skies, His love and
promise too far away
to help me much
while the object
of my starving love
kept turning away,
a repeating whirl
which sliced
me clean into two
stumps of heart
each time,
one bloody, the
other black. Nor could
He help me with the icy
evidence of my
parents’ failure to
stay married, my
mother walking round her
day like a revenant,
my father keeping
long & longer hours
at the church, confiding
with me late at night
as we hit the Scotch
that he was gay
& moving East
after my mother
took my siblings South.
God couldn’t, or
wouldn’t, help me with
my salt appeals:
So what did I owe
Him? That question
I think hovered in
my mind as the song
played in my ear,
walking home that steely day.
The refusal of my
faith I think began
inside the hallows of
that song, warming
into a bittersweet
interior which changed
the frozen doors of row
houses that I passed
into options, their
portals boozing wide
to beds inside,
warmed by knee-
spread iniquity, the
billows of the damned.
“Me and Mrs. Jones”
became the moonlit
monologue of my
backslide to hell,
a sweet descending
poem which droned
the infernal truth
in love for earthly things,
greaving my ways
and words for she
who ruled the byways
of the found, by
sea, by rooks of night,
in uxurious nooks
between a woman’s
sighs. The opening
sin welcomed in me
I knew was wrong,
far short of heaven’s
work (hamartia,
the Greek root of
our word for sin,
means “missing the mark”),
but holy enough: All
I felt a boy-man could
be about, given the
damage in my cold
winter’s heart. There
is a note of confession
in “Me and Mrs. Jones,”
like a story being
rehearsed for some later
return: A wine
mixed with with
blessing, too, the
boozy glow which
warms the gut
when we settle for
settling for, and take
our comfort there,
God as some white man’s
supreme demands
be damned. A Friday
night song; or, better
so, one for Friday
afternoons when we’re
walking home
toward bitter ends
and game for one good
fall. When we’re
whispering the prayer
of every falling angel
just off the icy precipice:
Fuck It. Say it once
and the song redeems.
Say it thrice and you’ll
hear on every jukebox
at closing time.
Thus ensued the years
of whiskey’s faux gold,
false-godly roads, my
faulted self become
a vault of fevers
wrongs & terrors, my
brain & liver pickling
in a well of flame-
tickling sin.
Horrible yes, though
ruled by the angelic
demon of that song. I was
just looking for love,
you know, in all the
wounded ways a feral
heart completes itself
through all the graves
it grieves. I found my
God that way, in all
the realms below,
His awe and awfulness
the truer part of me
which aches for
all roads home
& swills not girls
but gods of them
til You and I are one.
Stroll with me,
blue violin, toll the
bells of Philly soul
my way, broken and
bedamned and holy
if only for this song
this once, this single
gold kiss, just before
the sun sets for good.
Be my last and
only portal to
love’s dark,
unquiescent
and slow-dancing rue.