Talking Cure

My Private Delphi: Thus the old sure rituals, dead for seeming millennia, live on within. Does the mythographical poet grow in proportion that he or she harrows the roots of song, extending to the degree that the underground cathedral is charted, lamped, hymned? And are such ventures these days necessarily personal, discrete, individual, singular corridors of a vast labyrinth the tribe may one day recognize as equally valid and important adventures into the new world of our oldest dreams? Perhaps.

This may not be adventuring at all, just the same old rope-a-trope of savoring the same old buckets of hauled strange sweet deep blue, one older guy’s fascination with a process repetitive as wanking or dreams? Of the former, need I describe the iron channels of fantasy, the fascination spinning the same old events & feminine topographies? ‘Twould seem like Lacanian porn.

But of the latter, isn’t it interesting (sez the archon of repetitive motions) how poetry’s deep work in language is a mimesis, is an identical twin to dream work, which Freud describes thus in “Wit and Its Relation To The Unconscious”:

***

“A structure of thoughts, mostly very complicated, which has been built up during the day and not brought to settlement - a day-remnant -- clings firmly even during night to the energy which it had assumed -- the underlaying center of interest -- and thus threatens to disturb sleep. This day remnant is transformed into a dream by the dream-work and in this way rendered harmless to sleep. But in order to make possible its employment by the dream-work, this day remnant must be capable of being cast in the form of a wish, a condition that is not difficult to fulfill. The wish emanating from the dream-thoughts form the first step and later on the nucleus of the dream.”

***

Resonates with me, though I don’t know any more if I qualify by an contemporary standard for the title of poet: I sit in a white recliner in our living room at 4 a.m. in a pool of plush lamplight with the dark world everywhere around me, sleeping, twisting, wandering in Dis; I read a while the sources du jour, Lacan or Freud or Kerenyi or Keats or Blake or the Brothers Rees or Hillman or Graves or whowhatever; the words I read stir words in my mind, a vague feeling like an undertow of a thought; I put pen to paper and ride out where that verbal feeling wills, finding great pleasure in the saying. No wonder sexual pleasure is often celebrated there. No wonder I call it a vowel movement. A verbal libido has been satisfied, the gods have spoken, I can go on with my day, which is the conscious inverse of sleep. Poetry is the bright brother of the dream, identical in procedure if fraught from difference in the purpose (for the poem is when I am most aware, where the dream ensures I fold deepest into sleep).



A talking cure. Here’s a psychological read on that procedure from the website www.emotionalprocessing.org:

“One of the shared procedures of nearly all psychological therapies is that the patient talks, shares, explores or explains. Verbalisation is central. Patients talk and therapists listen. This takes us back to the beginning of psychological therapy. In 1880, Breuer told Freud about the treatment of a woman with hysterical symptoms, involving paralysis, fits and states of mental confusion. His treatment had 'allowed him to penetrate deeply into the causation and significance of hysterical symptoms' (Freud 1910). Breuer discovered that the patient could be relieved of her symptoms by expressing what was troubling her whilst under hypnosis. Freud and Breuer worked together producing a preliminary communication 'On the psychological mechanism of hysterical phenomena' in 1893 and a book 'Studies in Hysteria' in 1885. Their method was referred to as the "Cathartic Method".

“The patient herself referred to this process as her 'talking cure'. Freud later dropped the hypnotic element of the therapy, concentrating on talking. However, Freud regarded this theory as 'unpretentious' and saw the cathartic method as a transition to 'psychoanalysis proper', where the emphasis shifted from expressing thoughts and feelings to uncovering the hidden unconscious conflicts underlying symptoms. Conscious insight became the primary goal of psychoanalysis rather than catharsis.

“The idea of catharsis can be traced back to Aristotle's definition of a tragedy as being a dramatic work 'with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions'. Experiencing powerful emotions in vicarious form could purge, purify, release or morally re-educate those watching the tragedy. Milton, Montaigne, Boswell and other literary figures refer to this concept of 'purging the mind of those (pity and fear) and such life passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure' (Milton). The Greek word katharsis comes from kathairein (to purge) and from katharos (pure). The meaning of purging the stomach or the bowels of impurities with purgatives and laxatives has been a major medical sense in which the word has been used over the centuries. It has been Freud's writings that have further developed the psychological concept of purging emotions, originally proposed by Aristotle.

“The idea that expressing our feelings is healing and restorative, whilst bottling up, suppressing or hiding them is a danger to our health, is a widely held belief in the west. It is common for psychological therapists to hear patients talk of the relief of sharing their feelings and to see many examples of how unearthing and talking about traumas and hurts, previously suppressed, can bring much relief to patients. Although different psychological therapies may have varying understandings of how expressing emotions may operate, most endorse or encourage expression. Some therapies (Gestalt, Reichian, Primal Scream) emphasise the element of discharging affect; others emphasise the explanation or understanding of events involved in emotional expression (emotional focusing, person centred therapy); others the act of putting emotions into words (structured guided therapy); others exposure to noxious memories, affects or emotional stimuli (exposure therapy); and yet others as a vehicle for reconstructing cognitions (rational emotive therapy) or reconstructing relationships (object relations therapy).”

“In 'Expressing Emotions' 1999 Kennedy-Moore & Watson proposed a venting hypothesis which refers to the idea that expressing emotion reduces negative emotional experience and psychological arousal, assuming that the bigger the expression of distress the greater the relief. The beneficial effects are immediate and are the direct result of expression rather than operating in a cognitive or interpersonal level. This is presented as a sort of operationalisation of the catharsis concept, allowing it to be experimentally tested. The emotional venting hypothesis attempts to capture the essence of the 'hydraulic model of emotion' which is that it is important to 'let emotions out' rather than 'bottle them up'.

“The venting hypothesis appears to have been particularly applied to the expression of anger. The Kennedy-Moore & Watson review in the book (1999), review by Bushman (2002) and the influential writings of Tavris (1984, 1989) suggests that at the experiential, behavioural or physiological level, short term expression of anger does not bring relief but often the contrary - it heightens tension. The title of the chapter in which Kennedy-Moore & Watson propose the venting hypothesis is 'The myth of emotional venting' so the overall purposes of operationising catharsis seems to enable it to be disproved.

“Another stream of debate about catharsis comes from a different perspective; an anthropological approach in which ritual was argued (by some such as Malinowski) to help individuals process cultural losses and uncertainties: whereas others (such as Evans-Prichard and Levi-Strauss) disagreed. Similar to the venting controversy, it was argued that vicarious or symbolic events leading to emotional feeling could be just as destructive as they could be purging.

One of the problems with the venting hypothesis is whether it is an adequate operationalisation of catharsis. It is certainly equated with catharsis (Kennedy-Moore & Watson 1999) and conclusions about the ineffectiveness of venting are taken to apply to the ineffectiveness of catharsis. In the psychotherapy literature, catharsis applies to the reliving of significant traumatic events, often from childhood, which have not been adequately emotionally processed and which are addressed during the process of therapy. These are significant personal events re-lived or re-experienced, often with strong emotional reactions. Patients may feel immediate relief in one session but often require a number of sessions in order to fully work through the event. Therapists may instruct patients that they may feel worse at first, before the material is properly explored and while further memories are being retrieved, but that over a period of time, there will be resolution and relief.

“Venting, whilst not excluding this, seems to refer to more short term daily hassles rather than long term significant personal events. It is not set within a psychotherapeutic context, but applies more to everyday living and experimental psychology paradigms. Venting differs from catharsis in being closer in time to the trigger event (hours rather than years), less severe (an argument rather than say sexual or physical abuse) and with no reference to it having previously been suppressed, not dealt with, or inadequately processed, probably over a period of years. It is not surprising that the experimental psychology literature on venting can be at variance with the psychotherapist's understanding of catharsis. Catharsis may still be relevant as a concept if attention was paid to what factors make an emotional discharge therapeutic and what factors make it unhelpful or non-therapeutic.

***

Ventings, once sacred, increasingly profane, the god’s mouth up through the sibyl’s throat, wild, incoherent, a text which must be interpreted by the priest/analyst, transcribed for general consumption: am I only making myself more conscious, or getting kicks from my past (the catharsis), or healing somehow that part of the world I’ve burrowed down into?




OK. So let’s return to the Delphic procedure, picking up in Pollard now what happens following the ritual descent and lustration in the hallows of the oracle:

“Before the Pythia was admitted to the shrine a goat was led in by the priests and sprinkled with holy water to see how it would react. If it shivered properly it was sacrificed and the seance was allowed to go forward.

“Arrived in the sanctuary the Pythia mounted the tripod, itself an extraordinary and unique procedure whose significance has been much discussed. Probably little credence can be given to the comic poet Aristophanes’ vulgar suggestion in the Plutus that the Pythia conceived the spirit of Apollo while so seated, though Doro Levi has produced evidence from ancient Crete to show that the tripod set over a fire for the purposes of sorcery came to be regarded as a symbol of mantic power.

“Next she prophesied, according to the Homeric Hymn, ‘from the bay’, whatever the precise significance of the phrase. Whether she actually chewed the plant, in order to induce some form of stupefaction, always assuming that the bay can stupefy, as Sophocles implies in a fragment from a lost play which contained the advice, ‘After eating bay be careful to bite your lip’, i.e. to say, keep your secrets to yourself, or whether she merely functioned in close association with the god’s sacred tree, are questions which we cannot answer. Possibly the custom varied over the centuries. Later the plant was apparently burnt in order to give off incense, if that is what Aristophanes meant in the Plutus by ‘shaking the bay.’

“Squatting on the tripod the Pythia awaited the moment of divine inspiration in a mood which doubtless varied with the temperament of each. Plutarch records how one unfortunate woman, when forced to prophesy against her will, suddenly went mad. Her frenzied behavior put the priest to flight, and so overwhelming was her distraction that she died. That few Pythias were so powerfully moved seems probable but that the majority regarded themselves as divinely inspired there seems no reason to doubt. Even now it is hard to be at Delphi and remain a sceptic, and in the days of Croesus few men were.

-- -- John Pollard, “The Delphic Oracle” in his Seers Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century BC



Now there’s something drear about this Sibyl, wrested from her former role as vestal of the goddess (albeit, perhaps, a sexually eloquent one) & hauled by the dread bright god into a temple now His & forced to squat over the old flame & speak to Him, or from Him ... there is the old patriarchal crime to this -- one for which there is a great amount of justifiable and liberated anger from women -- yet my reading is different, as that of the emergence of consciousness and what it wrests from darkness as its true voice, the true source of its power. Shade my reading from my side of the sexual difference between genital men and women, perhaps; I’m willing to take a punch in the gut for speaking from my own heart.

Anyway, to emulate the procedure, which I see everywhere in my various rope-a-dope poetics (those metaphors of: sacred well, immrama, feminine upwelling, Cape Blue, the crannog, liturgicals of the dark, shamanic letters to a migrained poet, wheels of Mannanan, now Queequeg’s coffin ...) I squat myself and vent:


TALKING CURE

October 12

My tripod is this white
writing chair’s three
domains of wish
and fancy and dread,
perched at 4 a.m.
over a world
dark and breathing
deep. It is a pagan’s
empty coffin whose
barnacle-encrusted
ribs I ride from the
end of Ahab’s tale
to its next. It is
a feral woman’s heat
I press my hips into,
words spouting
on my lips as she
sighs Yes from the
beds of history
at the silky bottoms
of all seas. Thus
I name my wounds
and praise them
for their roasting
ghosts, sometimes lust-
addled, other times
frothing at the
lips of whiskey’s toast,
always naming in
another way that
old far shore where
I was beached for
good, spat out from
some Delphic womb
to make
my way along
the strand-loom
of a life. This
is my talking
cure, dowsing out
and down the
meres and mares
and mamas of a blue
sear’s solder,
wombing back
and forward this
imperfect ever-healing
day. My Delphi is
a dolphin’s dick
still singing in
Queequeg’s coffin,
upwelling what’s
inside the wave’s
cerulean derange
inside my words,
as that box of ancient
ribs is housed inside
my own. The very
ocean’s singing bone’s
inside my dolphin’s
sire, Manannan’s rude
red sacral pen I mean.
I write on and on
insaned by gods
no longer almed
by day, my song
a looped symposium
of nereid grapes
crushed and quaffed
between basaltic knees.
A moony Gaelic
diatribe moves
my mouth inside and
back to a Sidhe-drenched,
wild South my old
pal Queequeg would
be proud of, exactly
where he’s fit to
stand and hurl
harpoons dead on
into the center
of desire, those
red repasts
and pinker gluts
of the animal
we are most far from
yet still ride.
Thus I heal the worlds
with blue-curved
words -- in the writing
at least, and lasting
enough to rise
from this chair
with keel and ballast
sure in darkness
enough to sail
a scalding
godless day.

My Private Delphi

Is poetry oracular, words gouted in their darkest limned divinity, dowsing sources not speakable in any dayside sense?

Perhaps. Certainly the motions of my early-day writing seem to source in ancient rituals, ones that have survived without my needing even to know of them. Now that I read more about practices at Delphi, I only feel confirmed that history IS mystery’s dream, forward and back, where ancient whispers up into the modern ear from cracks in the firmament below. I write these songs on the walls of a Lascaux I imagine and yet exists sprawling beneath the everyday suburb’s swooning sleep.


MY PRIVATE DELPHI

October 8

Always this dark hour
before daybreak sings
the news of lost
yet living worlds.
The white chair
is housed on
secret vents which
snake and charm
my mind with the myrrh
of ancients seas inside
a sibyl’s wash,
a salt-sweet,
venereal drench.
The woman starts and
writhes exactly here,
whispering in my
ear blue verses torn
from depths, words I
write but cannot know,
rich in moon-milk’s
dark lactal hue,
blue ejaculates of
our darkest truths.
Last night a cool front
finally arrived
behind a front of
wild storms, belting
our avenue with
shrieking bolts
and strolling booms,
more rain than
we’ve seen now
for a month, a
swirl of dime-sized
hail bulleting off
the tin roof of
our house.
That pent frenzy
marched slowly
south, leaving
in its wake
a witchy calm
and cooler air.
Here at 5:30 a.m.
it’s clear and halcyon
with a full moon
high above, singing
loud a cold blue aria
which the sleeping dark
amens. That’s her up there,
high above this bone-
white writing chair, our
vantages reversed
down the deep end
of this song, her darkness
regnant, her wild voice
in all its screechy
rectitude voweled
now in a cusping moon
on the first real
night of autumn
in Central Florida,
heralding a change
whose inside purposes
will be made known
in the unintelligible
froth of tomorrow’s
song, or the next, or
the next, or not at all.
What matter? It hangs
over me pure and perfect
like a full moon soon
to tumble down the west
to Delphi’s entrance
south of my sibyl’s
thrice-lipped waist,
each of which
I unbutton and
unleash here.



“Diodorus of Sicily, the Greek historian of Roman times, says that the Pythias were originally maidens, but that one forgot her vows, so that later married women were preferred. Nevertheless, they were expected to wear maiden costume, live apart from their husbands in a special house, and practice ritual chastity. IN fact the emphasis on chastity appears to have been purely titular, and the result of a practical compromise. It probably reflected the change of function which the Pythia underwent when she ceased to be the priestess of Earth. The fruitful earth mother, or her Mycenean equivalent, might have been expected to be hostile to celibacy even in a priestess. Apollo, on the other hand, had always demanded celibacy in those he favored, as the legends of Cassandra and the Sibyl show. Neither might marry, though Cassandra was said to have been raped by the lesser Ajax, and subsequently enslaved, and once the god had endowed them with the gift of true prophecy he was powerless to take it away.”

-- John Pollard, “The Delphic Oracle” in his Seers Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century BC (A.S. Barnes and Co., 1965)

***

So the assault, the male appropriation, consciousness penetrating the dark, making a wild feminine votive and subservient, demanding chastity, the sibyl a sealed vessel who can only be filled by the god, and only when he deigns ...

Yet does Apollo truly rule at Delphi? For his thrall with Her is the true mover, the foundation of the temple; it is Her words which he bids me write down ...



BLUE GRAMMAR

2003

The most ancient witness to
grammatical teaching in Ireland
is to be found in the little manual
called Ars Asporii (or Apseri)
... ((this book)), in stark contrast
to the wholly secular tone of its
model ((the Ars Minor of Donatus)),
derives from the ascetic world
of sixth-century Irish monasticism.

- Daibhi O Croinin, Early Irish Monasticism

While I sat in classrooms
pickling in the drone
of American grammar
-- the official Latin of
verb-subject agreements
and modifiers rescued
from their dangling
precipices -- She was
writing it down in my
ear some other way,
a brogue inside my
writing’s new arches and
tenons, turning nouns
into nipples jazzing motions
I couldn’t master, only
ride. Before me all the
fixtures of learning
were composed and steady --
my book opened wide,
a #2 pencil in my hand
copying down the forms
on lined paper in a rough
miniscule, the late-
morning hush striated
with boredom and
hunger and a free-floating
toothed angst. On one
level it was all a
cultural Latin the way
it must be learned,
line after line, correct
and succinct, either
to be admired or strafed
with red ink: Yet further
down I wrote in Vulgate
about the places I
dreamed or sought
or would but dare not go:
My hands round the back
of the girl sitting in front
of me cupping new breasts,
fighting the evil one in
his lab far at sea,
swaggering nude
in the locker room
with a cock twice as
big as my own, three
times, no, four, shaming
all they boys with my
hammerlike stylus.
She was re-writing
the story the world
bid me learn
in a grammar which
shattered those schoolhouse
walls. There, in the midst
of such strict schooling
(if strict it ever was)
an infernal ars was
copied from the ass
of true love -- forms I’ll
never quite learn,
swimming away on
every sweet wave, a
language always just
out of reach, laughing,
cajoling, calling me home.
Of it I here write
in rooms far below
the cathedral which
pays for everything else.






“Not only the Pythia herself, but the priests, known as Hosioi also suffered lustration ((ceremonial purification)), as indeed those who wished to consult her. From Pindar downwards the texts refer to clients ‘descending’ into the place of consultation, yet there is no archaeological support for anything in the nature of an underground chamber within the shrine. Possibly something of this nature formerly existed at Delphi, and long after the consultants ceased to descend into the Pythia’s presence the inherited ritual verb remained. Probably again, as Fontenrose has suggested, there was in prehistoric times some religious association with the Corycian cave, which is mentioned in Aeschylus, and lies some miles to the north of Delphi. However this may be the most that the archaeological evidence will allow us is that there was probably an inner room beyond the outer vestibule, screened off in some way and set in a slightly lower level.

-- Pollard, ibid

***

Tropes of access to the divine voice: the ritual purification which illuminates one from within ... A practice which always meant going down, going within, going south, reiterating a vastly old procedure, old as consciousness itself perhaps, of regressing from the light into the vast cold gloomy watery depths of the fructive urobouric unconscious. We sacrifice the outer light for an inner lustre, the moony light of the soul ... And as we proceeded the act became more symbolic, no need for an actual cave, no actual lower room in the shrine itself, just a dip of altitude, maybe only the bending of the knees, triggering the vast stored inner complex of lustration, unleashing the torrent of seawater in the sibyl’s mouth, the sperm-froth ejaculate of the god himself, the logos spermatokoi, bursting with the inside knowledge of the words ... What we know yet can’t ...




DELPHI

June 2006

I and You are one along
a brow or shore of difference
that means all the world
in heaven’s rule on earth
in us. The lintel over
the door to Dephi
was thus inscribed,
“Know thyself” -- Know!--
And know thou are not God.”
Where it was said
is so important here:
at the portal to bright
Apollo’s shrine,
that entry a bridge
between profane to sacred,
from outside to innermost,
across known planks
over the wildest blue of all.
For ages our work was
defined by the weight
of that lintel’s script.
There was a great sense
of peril of leaving
sense behind to coil
in the serpentine divine,
the inchoate frenzy
of the sibyl rising from
the darker bowels of time.
The distance from I to
Thou was made wide
by that door, and imperious
an imperial syzygy of fire
too hot for mortal bones.
But as we grew to know
ourselves as You ordained,
You grew fainter in the
sky -- hard to find on many
nights -- And yet
somehow you grew intimate
in some subtler way, as if
the moon down western seas
had doored into a sun
which rose the next morning
from inside waters, that
lintel now occiput to a shrine
deep between my ears,
beneath the tripod I was taught
to tend in ancient ways.
You’re that depths of me
I’ll never quite name, much
less know, a power not so much
higher as deeper, like the sea,
a baud of blue intensity I’ll
never sing quite loud enough,
though every day I humbly try.
I believe You bid me to,
enough so as to write
a message on a god’s brow
then float it over history
all the way to here.
In the ocean of Your will
these songs are merely
drops, but they’ve gathered
in a well which throats
a collectively deep voice
which may be Yours,
a whalish timbre of the
seems of You, which is the
best that I can do
without falling into the
depth of being You. That
fall is fraught with
Sathan’s freezing leagues;
I’ve erred that way before,
tried to drink the Python’s
whiskey blood and then
fuck the sibyl in Your conch,
my coracle of lust
cracking up on the shore
we shared for one alien
and verboten hour.
To have You in those worst
ways is to become Apollo’s
fool, a Marsyas ripped clean
of skin from nose to heel
and hung on some indifferent
tree, the flute I tried to rival
you on lying broken
just beneath the red drips
of my toes. No: I read
these oracles of blue writ large
upon the sea’s wild lips
and leave them on this shore
for You to succor and recede,
my work somehow thus Yours
upon a bed of wracked sand
always close to 4 a.m.
Those labors are kept clean
by the surf mill’s deep bellows,
by the ions of beach breeze
which beat from angel wings
as rapt in their labors as in this
inked phrenology of bliss.
There are just three things
I must do to keep this
precinct sacred and wild
as the utter depths of You:
To write it all down;
To never turn a dime;
To give it back in full.
Thus rigored, I am free
to swim every sea and sidhe
and she You welcome deep in me,
a vale akin to wombs and not,
a vault of coups forsaken,
the sum of every whale road
I’ve taken singing every
depths harrowing elation.
The Celts believed their Otherworld’s
infinite and timeless teem
was doored close by in the
humblest of rooks -- a mere,
a book, a tree, a well --
each a shining bubble in the throat
between the lines of head
and heart, serenely balming
this hour in which I try
to keep things level
with a starry ocean gaze.
I am just the janitor
who mops the floors of heaven,
whistling at this infernal hour
the ambergris of he
who will survive the death of me
and every other naked rider
who felt bid to dive
the ocean of Your song.
Know thyself -- caesura
or grace note here, huge dollop
of wild divine --
And know you are not God:
That’s the succor of the flavor
burnt sacrifices waft all
the way where He waits,
where he bids me climb
down every league, every
rung of sing song seem,
every breast and nipple of
what I can’t know and am,
the distance closing with
each line collapsing westward
on that shore whose
far embrace we are.




“In this inner room stood the omphalos, the sacred navel, which was said to mark the centre of the earth, or, by some, the site of the tomb of the monstrous Python, which Apollo slew when he first came to Delphi.”

-- Pollard, ibid

***

Yes: the navel of the world, the locus of our beginnings, the seat of the soul deep in the belly of the world. That Apollo slew the Python exactly there, at noon, when the sun was lifted high in the sky like a sword of fire, poised to cut loose the dread old connection which kept consciousness in paralyzing thrall with its dark mother, allowing civilization a free gradient to proceed ...

APOLLO AND THE PYTHON

2004

High noon is thus my fatal hour,
The sun poised like a sword in all
Readiness to pierce and thrust and
Flay the scaled secret coiled under.
My might and madness both reign here:
You see it in the beachgoers who
Sail their naked alms so high that
Basal cells melt like wings of wax.
I am the god of pure willed fire
Flooding the world with knowns. Beware
Me most, pale supplicant, for I
Have no shadow at this hour, no
Edge or purchase or glint of blue.
At noon I nailed the serpent queen:
She twines now round the mast within.





WHO KNOWS

2004

... -- that I
then inexhausibly day and night should
have so much stored up, assimilated
nature to offer --- , without knowing whether
your radiance has anything to do with me ...

-- Rilke, “To The Awaited One,”
transl. Franz Wright

Who knows what composes
a mind, or why it rows the
way it does? I woke this
morning with this poem’s
peramble already streaming
in my mind, its first conceits
and gambits scrolling
behind my eyes as I
stumbled up out of bed
(still dank with dreams
of debating John Kerry
in the presidential
debate or me as John Kerry
debating you the reader)
& downstairs in the total
dark of my chosen
redeye a.m. That quote
from Plato through
the mouth of Sokrates
was on my mind’s tongue:
“Gods call things by
which they are naturally
right.” And only gods
know the proper names
winging in perfected
aeries to far above
our sense. Only Eros
knows why his truer
name is Pteros, “wing-
growing necessity;” only
He know whether
the song’s in his wings
or mine, my necessity or
yours, flight our lift
from all necessary
encumbrance or wings
that makes our plodding
feet seem moot?
Like in those first months
of dating my wife when
we made love most
of the night and stayed
in bed all Sunday:
why do I keep returning
to that rumpled bed,
my imagining inhaling
deep the musky sweet
still lingering there
9 years ago, as if
there’s gold in
them thar reveries
when current
days which seem dry
as ghosts? Or have
present wings grown
strong enough to
build a next from
the twigs and berries
of a history; the past
made gold when
touched by present
minds? Only Oran
knows why everything
Columba said of God
and man was wrong;
only Manannan knows
how much Oran’s
knowledge was stained
by three nights
of grave-dirt and
the cold Celtic sea
below his mouth and
eyes flew wide and
loosed; we don’t
know how dark
the bone of truth
he tossed up from
that hole when he
said, “In fact, the
way you think it is
is not the way it
is at all:” but it
makes me suspect
its marrow was
a silver shout:
His back mirroring
I have claimed my
own, underscoring
every flit of Ariel
I capture here
with the motley
of a Caliban further
further out and down
in Infrann or Valhalla
or Olympus, the
stuff of merriment
for the deathless ones
who drink our blood
from cups of hammered
gold. Surely they must
all agree that
I’m a windy fool
to presume to say
the names of that gust
inside a god’s gut
truth -- a bigger fool
to boot for always
getting it so wrong
with errant words
forged from that wind.
Who knows whether
all this inky
excess spoors from
a skull’s compulsion
to babble on, as if
to fill being’s voice
balloon was to live
again or more
truly, vitally too
perhaps; or is
that halloo up
the well simply
the dream of flesh
by ravaged, long-
dry bones? Who knows
whether I think
because I’m
still breathing air
or because the
morning awakens
light in all
its caverns? Who
can say that the sound
of birdsong picking
up at 5:30 a.m.
oboes and piccolos
a neuron in my ear
which telegraphs a
chemical derangement
of that hymn to
a vault limned in
my cortex where
a god or books or
nature or my beloved’s
naked body is aroused
and sings back, my
pen erectile with
that exuberant,
protruding shout?
Who knows why
beauty is a booty
I’ve always hoarded
and trilled me deep,
always cause to recall
on paper; what
at 5 years old
I’d crayoned
a page of vaulted
butts and pussies
I had couped
from playing games
with girls in the
woods, or why
I hid that picture
beneath my bed
or hauled out at
to count back out,
calmed and charmed
afresh, keen to scavenge
more that holy
land revealed.
Who knows whether
the same gods or devils
now draw my
thought on to the
next soft shore of
verse in lycanthromorphic
such verse, or whether
the motion makes the
language better
or something worse,
a descending spoor
of milk and ink.
Who but the gods
can say if this
passionate expense
of words will one
day hang between
your breasts like
a silver crucifix
to swing in prayer
& coilage, or
if you’ll simply
trash the cache,
sending it to
the landfill of
bad ends where
leeches crap
my kingly thought.
No one knows,
not here where
as I try at last
to end this poem:
nor is that
thought enough
to beach this boat;
I rest only because
I must, winded and
mind-wrung, talked
out, gas pumped from
my first day’s thought
now precipitously low.
Let’s close then
with more from Sokrates,
his mind forever
surer than my own:
“No doubt these
are larger matters
than you or I can
figure out.” Indeed.
I’m slowing my pen’s
motion down,
toward the line
that lets the black
reins go: And see
the blank page
further down like
a silent pool, the
blue cauldron
of all I do not know:
I rest my face on
water’s dream
and let the rhythm go
to sink and source
and sing the swells
of all I’ll never know.

(to be continued ....)

The Poet as Menelaos between A Nereid and Her Sire

Proteus is the most easily explicable name of the “Old One of the Sea.” It is an archaic form of Protgonos, “the first-born.” No mention is made of Proteus’ parents, but only of the waters in which he can be encountered. He frequented a sandy island off Egypt, which was known as Pharos; whereas Phorkys ((his brother, another Old One of the Sea)) was more at home in the west, in a bay of Ithaca, or still further westwards, where his daughter Skylla also dwelt.

It is told, in the style of the seaman’s legends that Homer loves to tell in the Odyssey, that Proteus had a daughter called Eiodethea and that she betrayed him. “A greybeard of the sea frequents this region,” this goddess told the hero Menelaos, “the sea-greybeard of Egypt, the immortal Proteus. He knows the depths of all the sea, and is a subject of Poseidon. They say that he is my father, who begat me. If you could lay an ambush for him and capture him, he would be sure to tell you your course and the number of days of your voyage home, so that you may cross the fish-teeming sea. And, if you so desire, he will also tell you everything -- evil or good -- that has happened in your house while you were away upon your long, toilsome voyage.”

To which Menelaos: “Tell me then how I can lay an ambush for the aged god, that he may not espy me or be otherwise forewarned and escape me. For it is hard for a mortal to gain mastery over a god.” To which the goddess: “I shall tell you, stranger, exactly what to do. When the sun is at noon the greybeard of the sea comes out of the water, the greybeard who tells the truth. He comes in the gust of the west win, in the dark ripple of the waves. Once he is out of the water he lies down beneath the cavernous cliffs. Around him sleep the seals, the brood of the beautiful sea-goddess, in herds, just as they rose from the grey-white water and still exhaling the bitter smell of the deep sea. I shall lead you there at dawn and hide you in ambush. You must choose out only three of your companions, the best men for the task. Now I shall tell you the dangerous wiles of the Old One. First of all he counts the seals, five by five. Then he lies down in their midst, like a herdsman in the midst of his flock. As soon as you see that he has fallen asleep, use force and strength. Hold him fast however he may strive to escape. For this he will do. He will take on the shapes of all the beasts on earth. He will even change into water and fire. But hold him dauntlessly, tie the bonds upon him all the more closely. Only when he begins to beseech you, and has the same shape as that in which you saw him fall asleep, only then cease using force, set the Old One free and ask him ...” And so it came about. Proteus took on the shapes of a lion, a serpent, a leopard, a pig, then also of water and of a tree, and finally gave truthful answers to all that was asked of him.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, from Homer’s Odyssey 4.354




THE POET
AS MENELAOS
WITH EIDOTHEA
AND PROTEUS

October 10

She is the daughter
of the Old Man who
rules the deep end
of the sea. I met her
in a beachside bar
inside my ear one
deepest night too
long ago; waves
outside in
the aether’s beach
crashed and foamed in
threepart harmony
with lust and moonlight,
breezed by infinites
farthest offshore.
She drank Myers
rum and pineapple
juice with me,
swapping tales
of skids and rows;
at closing time
she bid me follow
to a house
not far way
that sat half on land
& half in riptide.
She bid me sit
on a couch of
cobalt blue, then
walked to the
kitchen to fetch
more rum (her
shape like the
dark moist curve
of my heart) while
bossa nova strummed
the thrall. Sat
back next to me
and set drinks
down, and then
commenced to
dance, lifting her
dress up and off with
a sigh & staring
at me all the while
with those
seagreen murderous
eyes. Stripped me
nude & mounted me,
riding my horse-
shaped desire
all the way to
first light’s dim
sated coast. Those
eyes reflecting back
some deep sea’s
depth, burning,
deep, & wild.
As wee lay there
drained she told
me of her dread
father who had
broke her long ago,
imprisoning her
to the same
short transit of
surfside bar to
this house in
fire and foam,
bidding her
shore all men
between her hips
for the aeons
of a myth,
glutting on every
fish to leap up
from a man’s
taut and riven ire
for Him -- to feed
his Titan need
for song.
She is the vault
in which I choir,
rapt and feral
for penultimate
blue psalms,
clutching them
between her
breasts and palms,
milking every
sea-verb dry.
Each chant here
plumbs a course
fro which her body
is sure compass,
blue bustier to
pink derriere
a salty promenade
between here to her
unharbored there.
And always deeper
down He turns
on the spit I
speared her with,
old Proteus I mean,
every way in
which I imagine
her again
the next room
of his dream --
naiad, barmaid,
matron weaver,
joyous naked
wench stamping
with stained knees
the blueblack grapes
desire vats in me.
Lamia in her woods,
Skylla in her
high-rise, Hecat
like a kelpie
up from the
darkest mere
which bids me dive
to all most
strange and wild.
My pen across
the page plunges
deeper into her
each time I
write her name,
each guise she
strumpets there
across the pages
of a bar -- And
always shadowed
darker behind
is He who strolls
the deeps seas of
desire. My words
are only his
footsteps in the
halls of a drowned
doom six miles
down from this
floating writing chair.
I scrawl her blessed
names here on the
sands which greet
first light, a majescule
of gorgeous sound
like rolling curves
of plashing blue.
She drank the
merry dregs of
that hue, feeding
Him too far below,
swelling black
waves no one sees
which only Proteus
can sow, furrowing
the only songs I know.




BLUE FINITUDE

2003

For now, this shore seems
endless, its tide so blue
and satisfying in all the
ways it pleases her,
or her surf-sounding ear.
I just keep on singing here
as long as she smiles
in that badass way of hers,
dark and sweet as
rum dum bossa nova
pulsing in the thickest
veld of night. I believe now
that she stayed on in that
surfside bar where I
last found her more
than 17 years ago. I was
that night a man
exhausted of all the
songs he once so believed
and played quite well,
a rock pauper reduced
to humming vampiric
ditties into his booze.
I found her there, drunk
herself, blonde and darkly
tanned, husky-voiced and
busy as all hell in a red
bikini top, her hips and
big rear wrapped in some
sort of florid tropic print.
A wasted bad girl you
wouldn’t care to woo
but so rich in that darker
milk as to make my jackals
jabber for what’s below.
We talked til closing time
drinking tall tumblers
of Myers and pineapple
juice, the fans above
slowly whirling and
whispering what the
surf outside lashed
with harder deeper beats.
She bid me follow her
back to a house in dark
Deland, and there on
a couch we proceeded
to strip and stroke and
striate the last of night
in a thick opiate dark
of dark dark blue. —- Come
dawn we found ourselves
in a pool in back, the
water in first light a
different blue, washing
our bare skin in an
oysterish liqueur, her
big fat nipples almost
black. I lost my last guitar
in the waters of that
long night: I tossed it
in that wet collapse
which formed the last
wave of a failed first
career. There one art
sounded and turned into
the next, turning blue
to black and into an ink
or oil from which
far greater turbines revved,
rising up this spluttering
well-shape high into
some verbal air, a tower’s
fume and fin I shaped
just the way she bid me.
I sit here 17 years
later apolunar to that
last raw seaside bar,
in a house and chair
where deeper oceans roam,
her yield to me spread
wide in measure to how
far this pen can swim,
or dare to. Sometimes
however I wonder if the
end of all poems
is a pale dark beach
harbored by the
same surfside bar, and
conched in that bar
she still sits waiting
patiently for me
to come straggling
in exhausted once again
in some wholly other way.
Perhaps she waits
for me to cast
this sea-ravaged pen into
the strange blue of
her savage demesne.
The was a music once
of hooves and heat.
The words came later
and were more composed,
of worlds inside the girl;
I swived and married
and forever mused:
Out there where the sea
and sky are one,
beyond the moon and
sun and starry wrack,
the next wave surely
rises and begins its
travel here. Surely
the sea-witch on her
bar-stool is smiling,
her eyes closed to the
song which jazzes on
the jukebox, the gloom
which holds here there
blue as mare’s milk,
thick and sweet and wild
and so utterly finite.



INCUNABULA

2004

This book you wrote
in me long ago
in a tongue between
my mother’s and the sea’s,
a half-uteral, half-literal
gorgeousness which poured
the littoral of Ys
— barbs of shining fire
plunging each wave’s
fold and crash till all
is a gliding, gilding blue.
Each day I write another song
amazed at how the ink
fins and oars the whiteness
of your breasts, your cleavage
binding every page,
invoking words I do not know,
much less name, though
each day’s shoring on the beast
who rides below gets closer
to that old, angelic sound.
Truly my ache for you
devoured me with this singer’s
mouth distilled from the
wintriest nights in the dankest,
most infernal south,
where beachside bossa novas
rimmed with rum a
noctilucent tide — full ebbings
of a lunar blare which dazzled
as it emptied me of all hope
of finding you. Who would have guessed
that my surrender inked the nib
which plunged harpoonlike
to that deepest heart and
willed the wildest blue,
the saltiest, wave-wracked,
spume-high exhalant of you
to drown a man’s drying lips!
And so the wonders I swore
were false, even deadly,
are writing (or riding)
themselves down, song by song,
in this book shelved between
the flukes of an old whale
— an inculabula of every thrill
and soak and plumage of
your infinitely wide
and ever deeper sea.
Each page was ferried from that abyss
which named the distance
of one kiss, one plunge,
one night so long ago:
I’m sure by now you’d
have it no other simple,
safe or ordinary way.
Breviary of blubber
and a five-ton fisting heart,
may my words be spermacetti-pure
as those sweet choiring tidals
who wax the ebbing art.

SEA LABYRINTH

Just beneath my trackless
ocean course between
this lonely shore and you
there lies a labyrinth,
an ancient code of your travail
which I enter as I launch
and wander as I sail,
finding the next isle
at its center not quite
sea or land but both
& you freshly departed,
the water in the well
there almost burning
with your blue, harrowed
to the dregs in the
lost carouse of you.
My job as I see it
from this chair today
is to make that
circuit canonical
and nude, an abbot
with his psalter
intoning lines over
waves that sing back
with nipples bigger
than a mouth: that
in those Nones of
stern devout your
gauzy peachy salt-
glazed beachy
pulses bossa rum sashay,
causing archangels
to go stout and
clamor for a fall,
just one, a good long
pussy plunging
dive down to the
saltiest names
of God. I see ‘em just
beyond the breakers
tumbling in a row,
those pairs of blessed
ankles and pale soles
vanishing in blue,
each like a book
tossed on the wave,
another vespering
poem. My job is
sound the depth
of that well
and count every bed
that’s lost down there,
each an inkling
burning with a desire,
an arrow’s shiver
up the mortal sense
that you’re staring
back up from that murk,
imploring all my seed
and ink and nouns.
My job’s to make
that view a shore
enfolded by incessant
tide, each wave an
antiphon and greeting
and taunt to mount
the coracle again
and chance once
more the main’s
desperately empty dazzle
with that spiral
dancing floor hidden
a mile of fathoms down
where gods and whales
and undressed lovers
sport and roam. Each
plunge and peramble
here comes to you
at last, or at least
that resonance
which hallows these
ears and haunts
my turn back home.
Each return is to
some higher deeper
ground where even
less is known and
the tide pounds harder,
like a kiss, a clench,
the next blue
widening door.



SONG TO LIR

2005

I’m still in thrall with those bad
old nights. Black fiddles still
saw swoony and fey that
big night music in my reverie;
something lurches when I
recall the thrill of driving headlong
into the darkest rooks of town,
scenting something blonde and
bloodlike in the night breeze rushing
through the opened windows
of my car, the ions of summer
storm and surf igniting my
neural ramparts, like St. Elmo’s
Fire, with the eerie wattage
of danger and booze and sex.
That blue alchemy was the
quintessence of my Faustian
dive into LaLaLand, pouring
myself in votive jolting jets
down into the badassed
veld of all Black Mothers.
Certainly all that is
nothing to fall too much in
love with again, else I fall again
in all those hurtful ways.
Yet in that gnarly bad-booze
brew a crystal bed lay far
down out of view; at the heart
of those dark quests lay the
the hope of finding once again that
bright grail of clear blue love
which in all the years of
roaming and ravening I had
blundered on two or three
too-brief essential times,
each a milky pure enactment
which washed me more
cleaner of my arrears
than when I was baptized in the
sea at Melbourne Beach
when puberty shot me forth.
Perhaps that soft-glo bed
of Perfect Love was just the
golden carrot of a darker
more selfish appetite for More;
I certainly crept out of
far too many beds
at the far ends of those nights
believing Love -- the free-fall,
lucky type -- was nowhere
on that rumpled snoring shore.
All that is true, but these
days another thought begins
to form that the whole of that
gambol between savage lust
and starry love was just the
foolish half I too much believed,
meant by godlike hands whose
ends were mine, as if
my enbrined sense could drink
a goddess night to dregs.
A Puritan error I have so many
drowned fathers to thank, I think.
I come to sense now that while
I dissembled like an Actaon on
down those bad years, ever more
mauled and shredded by my own howls
for love in a wilderness of rock taverns
and boob bars and and bottle clubs,
some darker underside was nursing
from me, not so much from my acts
but the desires which teated them,
growing more visible as a shape defined up from an
enormous sea which is the greatest
part of me, a whale which grazed
upon on my yearning midnight stare.
While I banged on to ruinous ends
it lurched and followed, devouring
every whiskey bottle, bra and guitar
pick I flung over a shoulder toward
forgetfulness, each a wafer of communion
which slowly woke his soul in mine,
night after night, acre after fathom
of that watery abyss. And then one
night I found us somehow one,
my slipping & sliding & oh so
wounded feet astride his hoary back.
Back then the endless drinking felt
like I had fallen in the whale,
but now I sense that I had just
found a footing there where falling
is the precipice of everything
desire bid me lose. Weirdly too
I sense I’ve yet to hit the real
bottom of that sea, years now
after the last bad boozing night.
There were years in which I
boarded up against all beams
of wet wild night; then years of
reparation for the guilt and shame
by living well and deep. There came
hard education where I learned
that love could not become itself
till I forsook all hope of pouring
it its perfection from a bottle,
babe, and bed. Amid all that
I felt him there, dangerous and
wild, a dark layer of endless
ache which no prayer could
fleece or flay. Now I sense I’m
simply heading deeper as the
two of us swim on. I think
of those old nights and,
with no actual desire to lose
myself in them again, sigh and
swish the liquor of it here,
feasting with stained chops
upon its taste of endlessness,
hauling on huge nipples of
forever-sweeter more, invoking
that blackout in the beast
which parks me on the shore
of Paradise. Yes -- oh feel that
dark immensity lurch deep
within, free and feral in the
deepest nacre of the thrall,
cresting a huge wave in a shower
of moon silver to spume spermatic
fire defiant toward the sky,
crashing down with all the massy
freight of an old, emphatic joy.
And that is just the surface part,
for he dives deeper than what
sight I’ve learned to toss. The limbic
sea he swims on down and back
I will never fully sound, much
know how many million years
he thrusts and fins the verbs.
I’m writing here truly as I’m
riding him, a silly dram
of wakeful ocean on a course
of endless waves, boy cupid
with this tiny flute astride
the night’s Leviathan.
Carve me on the upmost
arch of his coat of arms. Hang
us on the headboard of every
bed I’ve held a woman in.
Carve us on the gravestone
where at last I’m fully wed.
And to every savage fantasy
I hold like whiskey on my tongue,
may his loll like the clabber
which all night bells are rung.

October Kink

OCTOBERAL

October 6

Dark creeps slowly back like a tide
edging up shores of dawn and dusk.
And like a spirit charmed out from
his tree, it waves a plush spell
through the air, half fey, half of
some darker lucency, like the pale
moon of this full Octoberal.
Today we’re off to celebrate
our marriage-day with a
trip to look through old stuff shops
in Melbourne and then
Titusville, and then head
back this way finishing
off with dinner at our favorite
Coq au Vin: Past-due
remittance for the hard work
of this rough year with all
its losses great and small
throughout, for all the sweat
and weariness, for the headaches
and backaches and disenchanting
worried bowels. Yesterday we got
the next hard news -- my in-laws
put their old loved cat down. BJ
had so many survivals
that we all thought he’d just keep
going on; who were we kidding?
My wife bought a sympathy card
that we both wrote in -- what a good
kitty, what a good full life he had,
-- We’ll stick it in the mail before
we hit the road. Last night
I waited up for our own
black cat to show up for dinner,
even walking down dark
moonlit Ninth Avenue to softly
call her home. At last she showed up
on the porch just as I was giving
up on her for the night, those big
eyes peering right at me from the
window panes in the door.
She greeted me as I walked out
with a score of low soft mews --
scolding me or giving thanks,
who knows? I sat down next to
her with food, stroking her sleek
black back awhile, leaning close
to hear her purr -- oh what a soft
far sea inside that sweet drone --
Then just let her eat while
the moony night pushed close
and closer in, the long summer now over,
mixed days of heat and less ahead,
along with more hard work, more
worries, more losses for sure. I
gave thanks for that moment,
just to sit there with that stray
mama cat who sired the two
fat males we also feed; and it
seemed a whole life was held
together in that single moment.
She finished her food and
looked at me with those full
gold eyes, searching for
some unsayable link in our ritual
before leaving me sitting there
alone with all the night still there,
the moon near full, lamping
pale blue across the yard’s hard black,
a light both old and dancing
over all we cusp through loss and lack.



According to the I Ching, reality is composed from two great wheels -- the Outer or Primal World arrangement of seasons and things as they have been from the beginning, and an Inner World of kin and history. The wheels spin in alternate rotations, so that there is always a secret meaning to the face of things. “To understand fully,” Richard Wilhelm writes in his commentary, “one must always visualize the Inner World arrangement as transparent, with the Primal Arrangement shining through it.” Each wheel has the same trigrams assigned to cardinal points, but they are not in the same order. “Thus when we come to the trigram Li ((The Clinging Fire, in the position looking south)), we come at the same time to the ruler Ch’ien, who governs with his face turned toward the south.”

Always the orders are one, yet kinked a notch the other way; identical with a difference. Must one have a skewed vision to see things dead on?

***

So my mystery’s confluence with history is kinky; it sport a well of a wound of a womb of a tomb: Two readings, for better or ill: Fair’s foul, foul’s fair, and never will I quite again requite myself inside Her blue underwear, though I try, though I try.

Lacan identifies the formation of the libido around a fear of castration, which I suppose for girls would be a fear of being devoured by the mother. (Read back to yesterday’s foray into Lamia.) The position of heaven at our history’s source is maintained in the Inner World by a jackal with bloody jaws:

***

“The description of the stages ((up to the age of 3 or 4)) which go to form the libido, must not be referred to some natural process of pseudo-maturation, which always remains opaque. The stages are organized around the fear of castration. The copulatory fact of the introduction of sexuality is traumatizing -- this is a snag of some size -- and it has an organizing function for development.

“The fear of castration is like a threat that perforates all the stages of development. It orients the relations that are anterior to its actual appearance -- weaning, toilet training, etc. It crystallizes each of these moments in a dialectic that has at its center a bad encounter ...

“The central bad encounter is at the level of the sexual. This does not mean that the stages assume a sexual taint that is diffused on the basis of the fear of castration. On the contrary, it is because this empathy is not produced that one speaks of trauma and primal scene.”

-- Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis




What a garden grows around the trauma of that primal scene, welling blood turned ambrosial, swoony and uncoagulate, a booze no glass can empty. Star that omphalos my daemon kink, his kick powered by all the dark delivers ...


KINK

October 4

If the sexual is
our secret text,
then the kick we get
from kink is the
hidden hex which
magicks our sweet losses
into sourer surer lines,
There’s a secret meat
we ache to eat
that we can only
steal from steel
verbotens and then
only oh so glancingly,
not truly, never quite
for real, and then
not even more
than once in fancy.
Just a whip, a dip
in darkling rectums,
not a dive; just
the faintest whiff
of the menacing animal
whose black-furred
cock we glove and shoe
and closet in closed
bedrooms. Kink is always
more than heaven's
love affords, a slap-
ass raunchy raid
across the tracks
no one must know
about, its forays
always under heated
pressure, up the
tight-pressed tits
of rude taboo
into a profane veld
of pearl necklaces
and golden showers,
the infant glee of
pantymost perverse
oh only for a night,
an hour, a well-jaunt
concluded long
before first light.
Maybe kink does
come from history --
wounds we come
to romance into wombs,
the pederast
become a sire,
the absent mother
the ghostly hue
of blue stockings
and black garters,
all that infernal
50’s equipage stolen
from yer mama’s drawers
and warn before the
mirror, obsessional
and replete and ornate,
housing deep within
such gilt a chewed
and broken knuckle.
Surely kink has
a bruised catalogue
of hymeneal
assaults -- titfuck,
reverse cowgirl,
suckoff, anal,
footjob, DP:
Sordid jacks of
nastiness no good
boy or girl would
dream of playing
once their potty
training was complete.
But nightmares have
great hooves -- there’s
gold in them thar ills --
and kink delivers
so wild a kick
against safe worlds
that none are truly
safe, thank God,
except the holy
and the dead.
And I wouldn’t
count those
rollers out, because
kink is the
literal visceral
genital gospel
which has no pages
we can see, much
less read or believe
or not, being
written from the
inside view which
finds truth always
a step off into
the margins of
all we think we know--
brute and unrefutable
stuff, even for the Lord.
In the sidhe of
kink foul’s fair and
and fairest are
fouled panties, and
what sustains are
whipcrack kisses
of a welting sort
of pleasure, pinched
nipples weaning
a black sea’s measure
where a slapped-ass
moon rises fully
into view. Kink
maps infernal
regions of bad
leisure which only
falling angels can
enjoy, wings burning
down through
the babylonian ‘burbs
of hearts broke
into sweetmeat
long ago. No place
I would ever care to
live in -- thank God
His Outer Heaven
keeps me round --
but the occasional
jaunt has merit
to the mystery I
sing, a dip in that
inkwell which keeps
this pen flowing
like a tongue up
through some
noir nympholet’s
widespread cheeks.
Naughty nasty
& fraught with
sin, a-reek with
just enough
sweet-sour sulphuring
to drop kink’s
anchor down
adrift bland days
between the life
and its long dying.
Kink tethers me
to a dark seafloor
inside my mother,
turning all the bells
outside into wordy
balls that smoulder,
slapping happy
against a nightmare’s
cheeks as the siren
squeaks and squeals
in bottomless pleasure,
delighted to hear
me singing loud and blue
our naughty nasty
birthday song,
shameless and forever true.





BLUE BONE BRIDGE

2002

he strong, inwardly quivering bridge
of the mediator has meaning
only where the abyss between God
and us is admitted—:but this very
abyss is full of the darkness of God,
and where someone experiences it,
let him climb down and howl away
inside it (that is more necessary
than crossing it.)

— Rilke, letter to Ilse Jahr, 2/22/23
transl. Stephen Mitchell

When I was 5 my mother took me
to a matinee of “Puss And Boots.”
Two images forever twined in my mind:
in the first, a terrible night thunderstorm
caused a tree to fall on the hero in
an overloud, horrific crash.
In the second a boy jumped
bare-assed into a smiling summer pond.
Terror from the first scene leapt up
in a strange howl, made huge and
loud by the weight of that savage trunk;
a warm delight of the second scene
to lathe my fear in a rich white goo.
On many nights thereafter I’d wake
from nightmares of crashing thunder,
only to press my face to the pillow
and watch myself jump into
warm waters to save a girl.
For all the simple carefree days
which composed my early years—
nurtured and loved by my parents,
safe in suburban neighborhoods—
that dark sweet imagining
kept seizing me like a claw up
from the floor which flicked
me in a pool.
My friend and I built monster
models—Creature From The
Black Lagoon, Dracula, The
Forgotten Prisoner—the two of
us in thrall with the dripping
caverns and rotted cells of
revenants and skeletons.
I found in actual woods
near home and school
a dark sexual joy of
peeking and revealing,
play-acting Mommy and
Daddy not as I knew
but thrilled to guess.
As a child I only guessed at
that blue bone-latticed
land, walking as I did in
relative safety, knowing I
was but a hand away from
some parent’s hand.
Far different was the night
which called me from home into
the tropic lush of my 14th year:
bolder and colder that moon,
wild and intoxicate,
sexual with swollen glands
and aching fingers.
Growing up meant straying
far into that insatiable wood;
a self’s composed from paths
far from home and God.
The musk of crushed oranges
seared up from the rot of ruin
which came on a stormy night
much longer ago, when my God
decreed I craft these craven
images from what I bleed
and perilously need.
How I bandage myself up
from that horrid land
and link back—to the living again
and to a loving hand—is
a complicate return
to a forest night
where a thunder merges
with all the joys down under.


TALK DIRTY TO ME

2004

Talk dirty to me barks the sea
As I amble down the naked
Shoreline of a prayer. Shake it,
Shake it like a horny Pope down
Under. Angelic apes stand in
The wash stroking huge erections
& mouthing every name of God.
When old men enter puberty
It’s a rude uproar: Our lust is
Brown-eye ugly to those oiled girls
Sunning for young kings & hard hooved
Rings of fire. I’ve stopped caring for
Good press -- It’s time now to get down.
Watch me lower my shorts down to
This ankling tide -- I’ve seas to screw!






SEA-WITCHERY

Halloween 2004

And what of the sea-witch,
my thousand-year bride?
She was once the nun
who prayed matins
like a shore but I
lured her to the dark
waters with the music
of the tide between
these protean hips,
ensnaring her white
calves with a bony laugh
& dragging her all the
way out and down. I
had my way with her
but good, the envy
of every narwhal bull
and deep-diving
spermacetti ram.
And then I lost her in
that keep, & become
an exile of love’s spleen
on a hard-smashing shore
of basalt ruins, searching
every wave for a trace
of her seem amid the
drifting dozing
manes of low sea-grass.
I know she’s there
but I’ve lost the way
I used to see her,
or she has simply
wearied of my eyes
and now fins the
arteries of a darker,
deeper man than
I have balls to go.
The news each day
washes in the
battered corpses
of her undinal ways,
naked cyanotic sailors
with still-red lips
pursed to kiss what
you keep drawing
5 more fathoms down.
Look at all the pumpkins
we carve recalling your
raw pudenda’s ire.
And oh the darkened
forest spreading round
the heart of he
who finds you nightly,
black stumps creaking
in a cold autumn
night’s breeze, a
bonier sound knocking
from your last soiree
into the noirish
tableaux of bars
and cars you dreamed.
I should have rid my
loins of this thirst
for you so many lives
ago -- divorced the
demiurge, renounced
the sea, bled white
my salt iniquities:
Yet this muse of
darkness I call my
own, albeit for
bitter and perverse,
the moony incandescence
inside my every wave’s
dying sigh. I am here
for her declision
on shores of nascent
white pages gleaming
white as bone. Her
name is Kirsteen M’Vurich
and she is that much
further out, sprawled
on a bed of chorda filum,
staring in the silver mirror
in which she sees me
in its gleam. I can hear
a high and ghastly laughter
beyond the booming stones,
a twittering of teeth
that picks the pelvis clean
and blots its lips with foam.

Lamia

DEVIL IN THE BLUE

2004

Devil in the deep blue seas
Devil with a blue dress on
Devilish my blue ink scree
Salving every wave and psalm

Poet as beached monkey man
With nothing but his verbals on
Heating every blue degree
Which this song is cooking on

Devil in the foundry fire
Devil in the whale’s basso
Devilish the old church spire
Gleaming in the mire below

Dragon with a dolphin head
Mermaid with a siren’s throat
Verses drawn and arrowed
Nailing this devil in the moat

Who sings like an angel on high
With the wings of dragon ire
Whose exorbitance must die
To gut this cocheanal lyre

And be thrown back in the sea
To salt the blue mellifluence
I tide to You eternally
Like a moon under the influence

Devil in the deep blue seas
With you dripping blue dress on
My song is your disease
Busty lauds to milk the dawn

***

The mother ((of Skylla)) ... is called not only Hekate, but also Lamia. At this point these stories wander off into tales that do not even form part of seamen’s legend, but lie still further away in the outer fringes of mythology. They become such fables as nurses used to tell children, both to frighten them into good behavior and also to entertain them.

Lamia, or Lamo, is by name “The Devourer”: lamios means “gullet.” ... It was told that Lamia was a queen in Libya. Her cave was actually pointed out to visitors. Zeus loved her -- for she was beautiful -- and begat children by her. These fell victim to the jealousy of Hera. Since then Lamia has been ugly with grief and enviously steals the children of other mothers. She can take her eyes out of her head, so that they remain watchful even when she herself is saleep. And she can change into any shape. But if she is seized and held flat, the children can be taken alive from her belly.

A similar story of the Titans was also told to children. The tale in some ways resembles the story of Kronos. Lamia, like Kronos, possessed a tower. It is not clear whether she was a goddess or a god or both. The comic poet Aristophanes,who has preserved, but also distorted and burlesqued, so many ancient tales, mentions parts of Lamia’s body which are certainly not female. (Similarly the Gorgon sometimes has a phallus attached to her.)

On the other hand, she was noted for having the lustfulness of a harlot, and sometimes a harlot would be nicknamed Lamia. Her ability to change her shape reminds one of the threefold shapes of Hekate and of the mixed bodily structure of Skylla. Lamia has this gift in common with certain divinities of the sea, and also with another bogy, Empousa. Sometimes this last name is simply another name for Hekate, but sometimes Empousa appears as a separate being. People also used to speak of Lamia and Empousa in the plural, and when they did so the two names were synonymous.

When Empousa was encountered in the entrance to the Underworld, as in a play by Aristophanes, she appeared now as a cow, now as a mule, now as a beautiful woman, now as a bitch. Her whole face burned like flame. One of her feet was of bronze. (But obviously the poet is exaggerating. Other narrators speak only of her brazen sandal, which later Hekate wore in her quality of Tartarouchos, “Ruler of Tartaros.” In her quality of bright goddess, she wore golden sandal.) Empousa’s other foot was so befouled with the mule’s dung that it seemed to be not a mule’s foot, but a foot of mule dung. At this point, however, mythology has given place to mere ribaldry.

-- Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks





LAMIA

October 6

Mother of sea-demons, she
is the devourer of my children,
desperate to drink her fill
of the ghost-kin spilled
from this blue womb of words.
Her dark tide hauls
my dark impulse home:
bad daddy, demon lover,
abortion’s bladed knight,
booze rapturer with the
ribald, bald-mooned skull,
she reflects them all
in that seas-wide smile
and beds them deep beneath
the dregs of closing time.
Sometimes beautiful,
other times too torched
by the pyre of her smile,
she is the dice-roll in
every one-night’s stand,
alternating on two nights
twixt sweet and red-eye
vicious, preternatually
calm and wounded-wild.
Observe her girdled feet:
one wears the golden
sandal of good love
& the other the mule’s
shit-mired cloven shoe.
Her Venusian breasts
are crossed by
Hekatean arms -- a
welcome milked
with gall, like the
crab’s embrace
which drags is prey
beneath the wave,
a smile jammed
with spit and tongue
and endless o-so-
vicious teeth.
You just never know
what you score in
her, seductress wafted
from the scent of
hootch, spirit
from the bottle
broken in you long
ago when the
night nurse crept
to your crib and
fished inside your
diapers, stealing
what grew there.
She rules you from
a South which
no man has ever
reached, a Libya
of black brassieres
and panties hanging
from an ancient tree
with a thousand
suitor corpses
banging against
each other where
they hang, still
stirred by her
inciteful breeze.
Your ache for her
is eternal as
her need to eat you
whole -- the two of
you plunging and
feasting on fruit
you’ll never find
the sweetness of
again, not quite,
though you try
until you die.
I saw her across
the bar in a cloud
of sibyl smoke:
and when she
turned to look
at me full on,
naked, vulnerable,
torched, unwholesome,
greedy, bottomless --
Lamia’s rough
primacy laid hold
of my keel from
below and hauled
me from the last
known shore
to that island
bourne with its
tall hanging tree
down the salt
roads of pure
thrall. -- Old
potent stuff
which still lamps
the dark lees of
this hour
with a full
moon’s ghoulish
glow, cold
and urgent at
once, half sea
half sky &
fully lidded in
the Lamia’s huge
eyes which are
still looking at
me from across
that bar now
sealed in Davy
Jones’ blue locker,
welcoming
me again back home
with those sweet
blue eyes, those
sweltering dread
knockers.



THE BRA
IN THE TREE

2003

One altar of my
longing is that
southern oak
which spread in
the courtyard of
Dennison Junior
High. The locus
of my waking was
Winter Haven
in 1970:
thirty three years
ago and some fifty
miles from here
where southern
oaks line all the
streets, outliving
every high and low
I’ve found in
in this dazzled
drenched state
of Florida. We’d sit
on concrete benches
beneath its arms
on hot September
mornings, waiting
for that school
to mouth our bodies
for the day.
It was my first
semester of ninth
grade at a new school,
a fat Yankee kid
flung from Chicago
‘burbs into a
Southern welter
of impossible
desires. Over the
summer, sun,
citrus, storm and
swimming
pool hatched my
glands in a glittery,
gritty wave of lusts;
now desire ferried
me into that
collective maul
of public school.
I was both terrified
and enthralled to sit
on those hard
benches afar from
all, watching the
black boys race
past like windy blades
and revel in girls
all taller by half a
head, their hair
and brushed sleek in
manes of silken fire.
Oh and how their
bodies were all filling
up with fruit and
what infernal juice!
Those days of
early puberty’s shock
and thunder I thought
I had been pitched
into some mouth
of Hell, all knuckle,
tooth and boob.
How could I know
that those waters
sprung from below and
within: that the sap
of my own dark
regions sprouting
pale fur on my
lip and groin
& leaking semen
in the sheets
almost every night
was causing me to
only see sex and
more sex in every
day? Each
morning I much less
woke than surfaced
from a lake of fire,
dragging from bed
to shower
and breakfast
table in a glaze
of all I dreamed
of the night before.
As I walked to
the bus-stop some
mist of storm still
shrouded the orange
grove just beyond
our house, the light
labial and moist,
the shadows of
the other kids
forked by imps
they each had dreamed.
As the bus wended
into town past
orange groves and
cow pastures blue
green and stunned
in first light,
dirty jokes passed
around the dark green
seats like sacred pipes
glowing in our ears --
Do ya know why
Doctor Pepper comes
in a bottle? Because
his wife died! The
boys would roar
with glee, while the
girls just sighed
and stared further
out the windows,
surely looking for
those older, taller,
cooler, more mature
boys. While I sat
there, stony, not
joining in either way,
but loving all
the talk in my secret,
greedy way, the way
lust divides a boy in
two, worshipping those
divinely pretty faces
in the seats ahead,
sacrificing my mother
and sister and every
other righteous
love with a red
hardon for the
pale blue panties
which crooned
in wet darks below.
One day we pulled
up at the school and
piled out to see
a huge bra hanging
from a middle limb
of that oak tree,
bright white
amid the clumps
of ant moss, the
cups huge and
rude. My eyes
mouth and hands
all startled reflexively
at the size
of the breasts those
cups suggested,
nailing me suddenly
to an immortal
tree of my own --
just another boy
lost forever in a
boat of bone on
seas he’ll never cross,
much less beach.
I must have stared
slack-jawed at that
foolish thing ‘till the
first bell rang, as
entranced by the
startling white
fullness of it as by
the question of just
how it got up there --
my mind playing
reel after reel of
seduction at night
beneath that tree,
harvest moon
cupping above
the kiss, emboldened
reaching, the unclasp
and what all sprang
gree, a whoop of
joy sending that bra
up high to altar
the next day in my
eye. Of course the
wiser guess is that
some dweeb stole his
sister’s or mother’s
bra from where it
hung in the shower,
throwing it up the
tree on a dare; yet
in my diddler’s
cathedral someone
and someone else
is always paired,
eternally on fire,
releasing joy in
rhythm with my
every stroke, a relic
of a lost age
which never freed
for me (or her)
its rude so brilliant yoke.




SIREN

2005

The Liber Monstrorum warns that
the sirens distract ships with their song,
“and they are most like human beings
from the head to the navel, with the body
of a maiden, but have scaly fish’s tails,
with which they lurk in the sea.”

-- Clara Strijbsoch, The Seafaring Saint:
Sources and Analogues of the 12th
Century “Voyage of St. Brendan”


Halving goddess, you are
my dream’s reflection and
depth, the blue-boned nacre
of devil sweetness
inside all song. All my
errors I commend to you,
my pure white sails
furled by the God
stilled and limp
before your risings
oh so dripping with
unknowns. What course
is not foiled by the swell
of breasts inside the
wave which breaks
and pounds on that
shore over there,
the one not found
on any map, in
regions beyond
all Christian maps?
Gold cargo and
more golden ports
are both forgotten
in the pearled silver
of your voice,
your words not
spoken in any day
I’ve live, nor
read in any
text above the wave.
They gleam and
shimmer like gems
set in scales
which flash and
then are gone. Listen
to that singing at
your dry peril
O masthead scout:
doze there and
it’s hair nose &
eyeballs in one
long scream into
the soak & the silent
aria of drifting down
the miles to the bed
that gathers lovers
in a mile-wide embrace,
matressed by a
loam of bones.
Is that the measure
of your wild beyond,
a waist of song
between one kiss
and all abyss? Or
is such praise too
unsalted for your tongue
for which music
is blue labia, the
slick quench of
sucking cunt harrowing
my ears into wilder
dreadful rooms below?
What is that sound aft
of this daily jaunt
across the verbal blue,
a sound which can’t
be bedded here but
only flung in mist?
A swell of milky nipples,
the smile which melts
down to alloyed hell?
Who knows; the song
has sounded where I
swore it belled,
silent as an
otherworldly buoy.
Thank God (I think)
I sail on. But now
what surf do I hear
crashing ahead? And
that voice -- almost a girl’s --






VAMPYRE

2003

On cold mornings as this
I recall the vampyre
who folded me in his
black so red cape
during those hard winter
months of my worst
carousals. He picked
me off as his own
and sported me me
like some backassed Virgil
through the blasted
dead precincts of
infernal desire. Outside
it was bars at closing time,
dreary parties at some
wastrel’s duplex in
a forgotten suburb,
the bottle clubs at 4 a.m.
with their disco whirl
of wolves and waifs.
Under or inside all
that was a bitterly cold
nightscape in its
most feral remove, like
living on the moon,
or working at the bottom
of the sea, or roaming
frozen steppes miles from
the nearest farm. Wrapped
in his red caul of utter
wrong made god I fell
down my ravening’s ravine
on wings of black delight,
my vision narrowed to
a single blurred impulse,
the flash of ass in
the murk far below
like a tunny in the wake
or a neon sign in
a bar window at the
far end of the last street.
He was humming absently
in my ear a vacant,
droning air, repeating
draught for draught
all the thirst housed
down a bottomless well.
His face was smooth
and pale as ogham-stone,
a death-mask forged
in my own image
when I stared into the
mirror behind the bar
and saw a king of
nothing there. Only
the eyes showed life --
Owlish orca-eyes,
lidded and burning
inside polar ice as
they scanned the regions
below like whizzing
arrows of an opportunity
it is death or worse to
greet: old eyes too,
eternally tired, haunted
by a root insomnia
to shadow every
dark impulse from
damning dark to
doomed red dawn.
His breath stank of
sour mash and cunt
and the vomitus of
a sea-lion's heart: Desire
may be holy, but
greed is its marauding
Dane, cleaving the
abbot’s head, nailing
all the nuns, burning
the rectory and sailing
off with sacks of booty
(silver chalices stained
with blood, jeweled
reliquaries dumped of
grey bone fragments
at the last departing shore.
Mine all mine, that
foul breath saws, in and
out like the metronome
of a missing pulse, like
a blueblack blickering
tide. And the fangs!
Let’s just say that they
were spread behind
my worst blackout falls
in the dead of that
last winter of my drinking,
the angels of longing
and satiation standing
at the gates of every
3 a.m. to haul me
down again into that
cold maw where I’d lost
again, lost it all. Again
and again, night after
night, I died trying
to wing an imp
to the heart of a heat
I could not legitimately
fashion, much less bleed,
ruled as I was by that
outward motion that
makes of love cold ocean
and high winds the wings
by which I fanned
a berserker’s suburban
rage. I travelled way
way out there all alone
to pick a fight with
a vampire’s sippy bone.
Fool -- and yet that
passage wound me here
on this first cold morning
of what we call winter
in these sub-tropics,
a blanket on my lap
and surrounded by a
house fully home at last.
A cop car rolls
up the street with
a searchlight fanning
bushes and nooks
-- they’ll never find him
lurking there. He’s
somewhere overhead,
up in the branches
of a burning oak, spreading
wide his wings to a
late November moon,
drying all the blood,
warm for fading seconds,
eyes all the bad ends
my life could dissolve to.
His owl-eyes are big
as plates, as altars,
as moons. Cold as
he knows it bladed thirst
for pale warm necks
which pierce like wurst.
Such cold is in the pyre
of that that vamp
who angels my old nights,
a cold which one is wise
to fight with a real life
-- cross your heart
and pray it rise
with the next day’s sun.





THE DEEP END
OF THE POOL

2005

Shamanic initiation proper includes not
only an ecstatic experience but ... a course
in theoretical and practical instruction
too complicated to be within the grasp
of a neurotic. Whether they still are or
are not subject to real attacks of epilepsy
or hysteria, shamans, sorcerors, and
medicine men in general cannot be
regarded as merely sick; their psycho-
pathic experience has a theoretical
content. For if they have cured themselves
and are able to cure others, it is, among
other things, because they know the
mechanisms, or rather, the theory of illness.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy,

I.

Dear dark father far down under every
shape of the one I’ve known, I write to you
now in a letter that began when I was
delved up to the world on a wave of
bawling song: That water eddied and
swole slowly through my childhood,
cresting to a wave of malefic oh-o-swoony
height when its sexual semblance waxed
in my cresting teens, baptising me in its
blue augment long before I literally
became a man, if You know what I mean,
or I get properly now what You spleen
in my dream. Between events and our
knowledge of them is all that gets diseased
and mauled down into their awful wake,
years of twisting down abyms in a sprawl
of futile bubbles, dying in every bright
way to the dark underside which demand
descent before revealing what all mantas
shade, that gospel which You bid me
read at last beyond the lowest floating
lines which yesterday I wrote, leaving
me here to start again. But it’s all the same
event, the wound and its womb I mean,
with all the years between just peramabling
bubbles of a dream which is the real event,
its mundo, its shoving-off and every far
shore, the whole damn cathedral of
carouse at the bottom of God’s drowse.
Hell, what I see now might actually be
invoking its history, as if later reflection
could actually rouse percipient blue deeds.
Thus my ends beyond are just the oldest
rooms of a house I’ve yet to dig all full
down to, Trois-Freres that shore where
all I’ve sung matches Your voice enough
to join me amid the herd upon cave
walls, rescinding their plural deaths
in the resonance of my dust, sands
one day scattered on that one long beach
which crashes in my ear and in the shape
of every woman I loved too much to reach.

II.

Wing with me back to Chicago in the
Summer of 1974 to visit my last months
in that urban blight before taking leave
for good for college. Here is where my family
bone is broken the worst, the deep end
of that pool I call Intimacy which since
I’ve so loathed and bungled and yearned
the greatest depths of. You were spinning
fate’s wheels hard with all betters losing
worse: My father could no longer live inside
the closet of his life, and with an at-last
honest groan came out, telling my mother
me and my older brother that he was gay,
no husband of any ilk, nor much again
a father. Thus their marriage was finally
thrown in the drink and our family life
it once contained allowed to spout blood
and bloat and slowly turn over, giving up
the ghost which had darkened every
door we lived in with a closet’s gloom for
so many years. My mother, confirmed at
last of what she always knew, took my
younger brother and sister and moved south
for good to city- north- and husband-less
Orlando; my father, older brother and myself,
we lived as remnants for a while in that
now too-empty house on Fullerton
as summer cracked the Chicago in an
infernal runny roar. My father planned
to quit the church and move to New York
City’s; my brother was to move to California
where a new life might help him work
afar; and I was headed to Spokane for
school: So that last season in Chicago
was all for ending things but good, for
stumbling round the wounds like ghouls,
and pouring on the booze but good, our
thirst expanding exponentially
as Your dark mouth formed a deep end
to the hurt, a house at the bottom of
all things where bad spirits come to roar.
The echoes in that house those months
were hard and loud, each creak of a chair
around our emptied dining table sounding
in a percussive snap, beats of Your
shaman drum I guess. Scotch made
those noises mellow, even desirable,
as if the louder pain gave cause to amp
the imps of whiskey poured on ice,
one finger for divorce, two for silence
round the dinner table, three for the
sound of fast hooves away across a
frozen tundra of high emptiness. We drank
like fish that summer, my father no longer
caring much to be a father in the old way,
always there to talk and care but in no mood to warden
how much booze we drank, or sheriff
us for pouring every other octane on our
self-evicting flames. I frame that fire in Your
tinderbox dark Father, though the saying’s
hard, feral as all educations down under
I have learned must soddenly go.
Graduates of high school, family,
Christianity, and hope of saner
upper worlds, we became a drinker’s
mad fraternity, pouring booze on all that’s
spilled when faith’s been killed, when
what lives on in love’s hardest paternity.


III.

I spent some hot afternoons that summer
up on the roof of Ruth’s row house
across from our with she and her friend
Cathy, acting like soon-to-be-fully minted
adults, splayed half naked in folding chairs
beneath a turgid sun, listening to Pink Floyd
and the Doobie Brothers on rock radio &
talking about the glistening world through
a sheen of baby oil. Our desire was just
barely offshore of remittance, our good
Christianity losing the last of its embracure;
we bitched about our shitty lives and
dreamed of all we’d one day imbibe
once we figured out how to pop the cork
jammed hard in each of our young heads.
It was one of the season’s insanities, those
fleshy colloquies up high which could only
talk but never fly: a high-dive symposia
which taught that when you stand up
there long enough admiring the view,
the deep end of the pool just gets deeper and wilder and
more fierce, more quintessentially wild bllue.
We’d take turns reading from porno books
which Cathy had lifted from a brother’s stash, our voices quavering,
an infernal stillness in the air as we dared
to mouth words like cock and cunt in
so languid and labial a relish, tonguing
thrust and heaving breasts, some region
of our brains parted to spiralling orgasm
and ribbons of hot spurting come,
the three of us calm as toast upon those
folding chairs, the music tinny in its
upmost registers, while such deep bassos
roared between us, Cathy's big boobs in
in a blue bikini top bursting my every
seam, Ruth’s mouth a berry pucker saying
balls and cockhead and sucked clean. It would be
a year before I dove into all that with
Ruth in splash of cerulean nitro; six months
later when, passing through Chicago in
deep winter, I plunged Cathy to the hilt
after a party in about the three seconds
it took to dive all the way at last from
that roof. Maybe now you’ll write me,
she said as I kissed her rumpled, fresh-
fucked visage at the door; I smiled and
walked forever out into the silence of her
life. That summer we just burnt our soulage
on the roof, tindering wings for later flight
when eventually and on our own we each
leapt off and flew down to our separate
histories. It was all just talk then, the
first departure from God’s higher word,
the bridge to every later ecstasy when
words became their labials. We talked
our ways off of that roof for sex, then
love, then family: But first we sang the songs,
as if by singing them at least and last
the deep end found us willing votives
when You ordained to break your Your fast.

IV.

One day I got a spider bite up near my groin
--or was that really You? The venom fanged
something which cause a riot in my flesh,
hives and bumps swelling left and right
until my groin was swelling fire. I grew
hysterical and then passed out -- perhaps
that feint my first big seizure -- coming up
from dark to fog, fumbling to the phone
to call my dad for help. Things were
indistinct a while and then I was on a
gurney in the emergency room, receiving
a shot of antihistimines. Dazed in that
freezing room of steel, I seemed only
halfway there, the other part lost in
a tundra space where merciless black horses
thundered north, their eyes so wild
with wind as to gaze on me forever there,
even as I recovered slowly from that bite.
I was welcomed back to consciousness
by a gaggle of interns and residents
led by a doc who lifted my hospital gown
to offer them all a peek at my strange
malady: they mmmmm’d as one to see
the tortured tundra round my cock. Ever
since I’ve never been much afraid of
insect bites, nor ever had another
reaction to spiders ants or wasps. Maybe
that was my only encounter yet with a bug of
true awfulness, or maybe I was simply
ripe and plucked for passage down to You,
my upper wounds like a mouth spread
wide for the host you venomed into me,
opening the way to wounds much further
down the darkest blues Fat City horned
in the hot streets of its summer.

IV.

The last month of that season before
I flew away was where, truly, I was
brined in Your pool’s deepest leagues.
We moved out of the house on Fullerton
into the church manse next to Wrigley Field,
a dirtier and more risky neighborhood
with Latin Eagles pounding tympanis
in the playground across the street
and poor white Appalachians growing
poorer up and down that sad old street.
But it was free and temporary, a good
springboard for taking our leave of the
city for good. Weekdays that August
I worked downtown in the basement of
a bank, processing checks amid a hive
of faceless clerks. The sums were vast
and tough to reconcile against the checks
that fled through my hands; the sums
were everywhere when I walked out at
dusk, gold blood painted on every downtown
dive, as if the setting sun was Hades’ coin.
(Someone else’s wealth amid our
destitution: another of the season’s
fell dichotomies.) Riding the El home
after work I watched the windows blur
on by, catching the eyes for just a flash of
some poor fuck worse off than I,
dressed in BVDs and weaving unsteadily
in a room forever far too close to the tracks.
His eyes bored into mine with every fraught
futurity I feared, but what else could I do
but drink? And so once home I happy
houred with my father and my brother,
our Scotches poured to nudge the rim,
the roars from Wrigley where the
Cubs were losing somehow approving
each hard pull which fell and fell
and fell inside. My father then was
between two augments, the church behind
him like some contemporary pagan age,
some older vision forming up ahead
where stones were bidding him to raise
old archetectures in new vision: But
that season there was only the blood
of what’s between, too clouded by
pain and fresh desire, so he drank
and hard. And my brother? Well, he was
all high-proof angst and lust, a party boy
who drove his days as if inside a burning
demo derby car, pinning foolish women
with strong hands that later came to heal
with an uncanny strength. But to get there
he too had far too much to drink. I’d
talk with them awhile getting three
Scotches down and then heading down
into the basement with three or four
beers in hand, setting them on an
Ampeg tubeless amp that was rounded
a hard glittery blue plastic plush.
I’d strap on a homemade guitar
that had given to me a year before
by the leader of hard-rocking Christian
band, when I was still devout and
white in Christ-like fealty. He gave
me the axe -- not much of one
except for the humbucker pickup
which really made the fucker squeal --
on the condition that I only play God’s
song’s, making me promise to burn
the ax if I ever wanted to play it
the devil’s way. Well, that was what I
thought to wing when You first
blew through me at fourteen; but
You obviously had other plans for me,
because by the summer I turned
seventeen I was riding wild the other
way, heading down in the profaner
song of playing loud and wild.
I’d pull on those beers and smoke my butts
and wail away on that guitar but loud,
no child or Christian or folk-guitarist
any more, winging out on boozy riffs
beyond all sight of home, to lands
I’d make a later haunted wreckage of
in the name of my slow education
in the ways of your hardest, deepest
songs. I drank and wailed upon that
cheap guitar until the song was spent
at that summer’s end, climbing on a
DC-10 to fly far west where You
you took my soul and taught it how
to break what cannot bend.

V.

Of that too-loud later immrama
I save for other songs: suffice to say
the music drowned me good before
it washed me on to here. Look: I’m still
here at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day 2005,
31 years after that summer which You
perched above the amps of Hell,
sitting in the same white chair I’ve sat
in for years now every morning
before first light, doing what I always do
in the center of this life. I got to this
that older way --- so wrongly, hurtfully,
and wild -- but now I come to think that
every bruise’s bruiting was meant:
Every hangover, clap, sunburn,
split finger, hysteria, swoon, seizure, and
migraine writes the miniscule You
bid me cry aloud while the deeper
majescule went on instructing me
about darker bliss of what’s remiss
and fallen and oh-so-bottomless in
the deep end of the pool. Every woman
that I’ve pressed onto as if to drink
her sex to dregs has had the same
surficial sooth, like nipplage of darker
oceans which now learn to drink
without a single curve in sight. That I’m
writing you this letter only means
I get what was written there so long
ago, or perhaps only that I’ve glimpsed
the faintest title of the work I’ve left
to do. I feel I’ve nearly finished all that
I can say about that now: whatever journeys
forth seems zipped, like the woman falling
back into the wave with a finger of kelp
obscuring what her mouth would say.
The word “shaman” may be lost as
well, its port and purpose expendable,
a coin to toss the ferryman: We’ll see.
Suffice to say here, Father, that I now
thank You for dropping me in the deep
end that summer long ago. May I carry
down still further what you bid me find there
in the undertowing tones I come to sing.