Lights Out

Freud, on the ground shared between wit-formation -- let’s say the poem -- and dream-work: “A foreconscious thought is left for a moment to unconscious elaboration and the results are forthwith grasped by the conscious
perception.” (“Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious”)

***

Or, to put it more succinctly, a la Melville:


Suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity rising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.

-- Moby Dick




LIGHTS OUT

I turn the lights out
and I don’t know what
then will appear to
happen, only that it
will, up from some sill
or porch or yawning
vault I encounter
in my dangle down
an ink-dark drown.
No wonder I got
drunk the way I
did; plenty horrors
in a whiskey glass,
freakshow ‘bysms,
atheistic moons
benighting Plath’s
yew coffin, -yes:
but lots of ass down
there in the dregs,
in the bottomless part
of black thirst.
The trick I learned
from that fool
drunkalogue is
that you cannot
have one: cannot
pry an angle of descent,
cannot know too well
the brine procedure
as you drift on down
or else device
confuses way with
means, missing
thus what sparks
or spears. Then
you end up settling
for the same old
thrash, your baleen
gears fluking
up the trash of
all your past failed
efforts. The way gets
narrower down the years
it’s said; it sure seems
so in this writing,
so much already said,
so many old rooms
so harrowed that
entering them yet
again takes words
of the wildest order,
descending thus
on older skeins,
holding onto
some manta’s dream
of seafloor empire
with a heat
so strange and bold
as to startle this
plump burgher cortex
into flinging verses
further off the ledge.
More difficult, yes,
but simpler too,
the vatic keel
beneath the tongue
become a salty sailor
of black seas,
clicking and clabbering
the darker sounds
in the back reaches
of the brine like a
blue belle sibylling
up in the hayloft
getting it but good
up through her vent
from dread Apollo’s
Hyperborean wolf wurst.
Outside in our garden
at 4:30 a.m. three votives
glow on through
the fag ends of the night,
preternatural lanterns
my similes liken to
three teeth in a the
tripod of a rictus smile
welcoming you to my
house of sloshing dreams:
A big plastic pumpkin
roaring orange light
from our front stoop;
a black witch whitely
amping the arch
beneath a golden dewdrop;
a smiling cat up
from a fat pumpkin
streaming phosphor
between the withered
branches of the butterfly
bush and a sadly
spent penta.
They’re luminaries
from that ravaged suburb
in the boneyard
which merries up
my diving song,
divining the inside
glow which no
one refutes or knows.
Denounce no writhing
creature in the
thick loam God has
loined on the
undersides of words:
I hurl my verbs
from sole to tongue
onto the furrowed page,
laying in a thick hot sperm
rich in lesser gems
and stranger coins,
remitting with a
spasm an entire
river’s length
back to the sea
I woke from. The
song thus is shore
to what begins
and begins again;
I sing because
there is no
succincter way
to resphincter what
that Sphinx herself
swore when
I plunged my
words into the
bunghole of it all
down there.
I sing because
there’s laughter tears
& dreams between
the enchantment
of the lines,
swooning me to
the sidhe of endmost
ways where words
fail and fly
at once, three times
the wrong way round
the barrows of blue freeze.
I sing that I may
wake full frontal
to a day made wider
and wilder by my
singing. I sing for that
moment before first
light when something
unseen unseemly
& wholly unaccounted
for rouses up and
out my mouth like
Moby’s breeched white
length, the biggest
hardon of the deepest
seas, a straight assent
to every verb in heaven
which perforce here
smashes down all
boats and ‘burbs
with a colossal
white Amen.
I’m giving it to her again
with this wild white pen
tucked in his feral grin.




SEA FOREST

2003

Dark life. Confused. Tormented,
incomprehensible and fabulously
rich and beautiful.

-- Tennessee Williams

Huge wood I can neither
resist nor enter. Danger
and wrong the petals
of a heavy blue orchid.
My breakage an artery
hurling toward your breasts.
Elusive verb radiating nouns
like scent. Milky hour of
beachside enactment leading
to death & that float
in blue waters of we.
Ink which disappears
the closer I get to writing
the actual bed. Itch and fever
of the violate child. My war
with the gods of no and without.
Summer afternoons
which build and slake are
still distant; for now, this
high heat which has too
much pressure, like bright
balls clanging against
off every pendulate roll,
heave, sashay. All of it zipped
yet pent, waiting,
plotting, grinding teeth
as the day groins on.
Most difficult angel, You
belong most to the God
inside these raw words. The
poem about sex is a water
horse at noon: the fleet
shade of shadows narrowed
to that hour’s high drone.
A roar like a wave like
a wound like a man
at his meat, grilling over
an unrepentent fire
burning everywhere at once.
A door opens, the blue
mystery resumes
as I tumble down and down
what’s under the heart,
the sky, the summer,
the page, one fin to write
with and endless teeth below.




BLACK TORC

2005

How perilously close to nothing
is this black hour, where every
walking numen drifts drowned
in sleep’s thrall
and the garden dances stiffly
in the trance of black-wet leaves,
each petal burdened with the freight
of such a night at such an hour.
How strange and difficult
and wild the woman gathered
there in the center, keeping
time with her silent clapping,
her eyes cajoling, her ears
tuned to dead-dark music
spooring from this pen,
calling for black blood.
This rigor is almost,
perhaps already dead,
who can say? The step from
the ledge is not one you can see
with the tongue or say with the ear
but you must infer it anyway,
reaching out with your blackest
foot. You have to trust, in the
way of all dark divines,
that this night’s black tide
seen frmo her side below
and within is a starry
promenade, a shoe for
hooves which torcs
the dream which lamps
the full moon now
sailing spectrally behind
rag-twisting-drippy skies.
Ah, how easy it is right here
to mistake rigor for death
and downwarding hues
for depth, I mean, to read
the moment way too corporally,
the same way I always lost the
key to women inside their thighs,
trying to bridge white shores
with on waves of soggy
too-penultimate sighs.
Easy and so perilous the way
because one misstep here
on the harp-strung siege
and it’s hair, nose and eyeballs
all the way down to the black
hag’s hut at the fag end of my worst
nights, where wolves and tarry
vulvas tear each other wide
in the spin of disco balls
and the gruesome enterprise
is right next to the whalish
rectum which remits
all suitors’ bones in the
sound of disco organum.
No matter how many times
I circumnavigate this hell,
the risk is ever in the wings,
just off the deep thought’s
mazing, fangs notched and
wide with a bite so literal
that it’s many lines before
I know my head’s behind
morselling one black throat
or another. So why keep sailing
toward Capes of blackest blue?
Why peramble paths on
naked feet that burn
with the sea’s most strident
coals? Why indeed? It’s 4:42 a.m.
on the Wednesday of a rag-ass
week when I have too much
else to do for faux gambling at
this hour with such Sioux-
Lakotan coin. So why?
I always ask the question
here when it seems I’ve
harrowed full enough the
next day’s dark and still not
found the torc it wears.
That’s why I call my efforts
black and leave the poem
so, one step further down and
round a way I’ll never fully
name, though I have infernal
clues. My job’s to ferry on
the freight of what may
be almost or ever dead,
pointless though it seem.
Rain is falling now so slightly
as to wake the dream or
wrap me in its wake.
Which is keel and which
black weather? And is
that the torc which gleams
it all in one throat, there
beyond what I tried
my best to say?





PETROGLYPH,
PLOW SCENE

2005

They wrote on rock what
they carved down into you,
dark mother, a pair of oxen hauling
the sacred nib of wood
across the loam, furrowing
the fecund lanes. A
tumescent figure strolls
behind, flinging wide
his sheaves of burning seed.
My motion then is oceans
old; the same labor hauls
this hand across the page
and down into the bladed
dark of 4 a.m., first prayers
issued from the heart
of my pen into Your halved
wake, revealed and reveled
mons, o res, o sidhe, o mound
of ever darker riper doors.
They wrote their
hard-earned mythos
down, harrowing their
tumuli with its first scribblings,
crying their music into a
lost, lightsoaked, spring-to-
early-summer morning whose
remains have settled here.
That sacral loam is so
thick and fresh at this hour
its ripeness caws from
every seam, balls-heavy,
blood-tanged, slightly
fishy and massively dark,
preternaturally so, packed
like bowels or funerary
urns with the riotous stink
of gods passing on from one
age to the next, nothing left
but ripeness yawning wide
and crying Yes in the lowest
registers of the night.
Who knows what gods begin
when the last line tides to this end?






MOTLEYED MELVILLE:
A MEDLEYy

2006

I.

Motleyed Melville is my gospel
or what’s left of it these
ebbing days: He was the
man of common rips
and sunders, failing Dad,
too dry a mother,
heading off to a sea’s
blue thunders leaving
behind bad days. He got
soaked in the salt of an
immensity which later
bid him write it down
and thus he launched
a fleet of novel frigates,
only one of which could
balance salt with vigorish
to clear his proper and
so fallen shores. That
once imagination and means
ruddered in him huge
and magisterial, mad and free
of portside damage and
Christian democracy.
That work hauled off
from every known shore
that had yet been said
and then wrecked him
in his deepest seas.
With no shore he
would paddle home to
he had little left to do
but curse indifferent
publics and fend on
with words once loud
grown drear into a
private man’s retiring
jail of drying verbs.
No wonder he burned
all his letters and
manuscripts, freeing
himself not of words
but of our lubber’s
sterile sense of them.
Thus Melville sailed on,
leaving us to bicker on
as we do about
all that loosened
from that descending
boat and beast -- modernist
prose, fascist manifesto,
gay sally, phrenology
of the sea’s broad fascias.
Only a smaller man could write
that one great book, a
doubter of all textures
yet delving all they yet
surround, like salt water,
abysms of the will to know
what madness renders
moot. Only a goodly ungodly
man could write of the
ungodly godlike one,
finding in faith’s faltering
fury enough to barb it to
the page and hold it there
in paragraphs of wilding wrench:
What else could Melville
do, having delved the full
bass octaves of the Whale?
And who, indeed, wrote
that Whale down, Melville
or Ahab; or did Moby
thus write them?
Melville sought to earn
a living writing down the
sea-tales of his youth
but for one book that
voyage mastered him;
he later said that two
books finned through
Moby-Dick, “the larger
book, and the intimately
better (one) ... for (his) own
private shelf,” or, vice versa,
the one which “demands his
ink” and the other “whose
unfathomable cravings drink
his blood.” He sought the white
whale but really Dick steered
that black book from behind,
a fin of sperm’s eternity which
was all a man of that day
could hook, perhaps ever.
Moby-Dick racked up some
500 bucks in sales and
was roundly panned by
the press, decrying its
wandering narrative,
snoozer asides,
fractured voices, doomed
ends. Then a warehouse
fire burned the inventory,
like a try-works burning
all the author had dreamed
of magnitude. And as
those books leapt into
fire, some darkness leapt
back into that author’s
ire, never to be found again.

II.

As the shamans of the
Buryat contend, the first
ones received their divine
fires directly from the
sky, and flew real horses
there; later generations
had to content with
ancestors, not divines,
and fly imagined skies.
So when I dare propound
the margins of the whale
I do in fished-out seas
where no one roars
with Ahab’s spleen, and
everyone calls themselves
Ishmael, paddling on
tidy self-graven caskets
over “all the stirs up
the lees of thing” in jobs
and wives and cats,
mowing not seas but lawns.
Last night I dreamed
of trading places with
the friend I left behind
who stayed to play in
bands -- He stepped out
of memory to assume this
chair, while I strapped
back on my blue guitar,
as far from that insouciant
two-bit rocker as the
hour of this night
to that one. And played
his songs again. I
poured over PA manuals
learning again to work
the sound & clopped
about town on crutches
saying farewell to my
wife & wondering just
how to rock the soak
of time’s abysmal pour.
Ahab’s not Melville,
nor Melville this man,
though some brogue
infernity dismasts and
mans us all and bids
us roar the wretched
night of wind and wave
that capsizes daily
enterprise & makes
of wreckage home.
At the cracks of doom
in the great below
scientists of late have
found vents that hiss
& swirl; and in that
total darkness they’ve
found colonies of
worms and crabs
thriving not on light
but heat’s bacterium.
Ahab’s down there,
harnessed forever to
Moby’s breast, and
Melville too, his book
on them strung around
his neck, book pages
opened to the gospel
Father Mapple intoned from
in his ship-shaped chapel
by the sea. That music’s
loud in my ear like the
roar of amplifiers I
once sailed upon, a
wilderness I hymn here
till the roaring’s done
with me, no matter
what the cost to
the paper man I dream.
I am thus obedient
in stepping off the ledge
to drown the seams
of sense and song
in this pure verbal sea:
For home is where
the heart sinks to,
and mine hunts dark
men ferally to
no longer placard
capitals of God or
gal or sea but the wild
lacunae of all three,
perfecting all they
wrought when they
self-ruined me. Thus
that motleyed Melville
is gnostic text enow
to keep the dark vents
burning and this
hand every churning
the oar-handle home
toward the next verboten
swirl of bubbles heading
down what’s left of prose
to the bottom where it grows.

The Old One of the Sea

"It was told that Nereus used similar tricks of metamorphoses ((to Proteus)). These tails were told also by our ancient painters, sculptors, vase-painters and goldsmiths. They created for us men with the bodies of fish, and this at a far earlier time than they created women with such bodies: which is evidence that the power of the great goddessess of the sea was not confined to the watery element, whereas the "Old Ones of the Sea" was always associated with the depths.

"The pictures also show him with a lion, a buck, and a serpent thrusting their heads out from his fishlike body. These were the creatures into which Nereus changed himself when advised by the goddesses of fate, and thus questioned him. This happened much earlier than Menelaos's adventure with Proteus, and earlier on than Herakles's wrestling match with the Triton who in our mythology is one of the younger sea-gods. We will come across him as the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite. The "Old One of the Sea" was, however, also a spectator at that wedding match, in threefold shape, as he is shown on one of the earliest pinnacles of the Acropolis in Athens, where he is most often referred to mistakenly as Typhon.

"Under one name or another the "Old Ones" ruled our seas before Poseidon. Unlike that still earlier figure, the hundred-armed Briareos, he was famed for his wisdom and truthfulness. In the words of Hesiod: "The eldest son of Pontos was Nereus, who never lies, but always tells the truth. For this reason he is called the Old One, because he is truthful and kind. He never departs from what is seemly, but is always full of justice and kindness." Doris the Okeanine bore him 50 daughters, all of them sea-goddesses ..."

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks



OLD ONE OF THE SEA

Oct. 16


Do I age down to him
as I read and write
his name over and again,
the gospel of him
my years assemble
sounding down
to full magnitude and
resonance, so easily
the first whale my
oldest father named
and rode? Beyond the
frothy nereids,
further out beyond
the sound of my
mother's voice,
there the pure echo
of his blue womb.
There my totem tribe
resides, blue mood
my big night music,
a Cape of awful
swells where all
the churches spires
point downward
like the masts
of doomed ships,
dowsing my
sounding sense
from head to heart
to balls to feet
into a domicile
of green to blue
to blacker truths.
Manannan ebbs
back to Lir who
dives into the
hallows of Poseidon's
shadow where
the Old Ones
still carouse
and sing.
My tongue's clabber
rings stronger
notes as it
beats against
an old and older
bell, grown
unafraid of
culture's device,
free to vault all
depths which
salt my singing ear.
He knows
the spectre of
my sex is blind
and wild and loves
him anyway;
Prospero kept
Caliban after freeing
Ariel, which tells
me there's more
fairy gleam
insdie the ugly
fish snout of
a naked pen.
Something here
has moved past
its prime,
rendering ambition's
booty moot,
making this
writing chair
a seat for
worthless salvage,
for diving
deep and sailing
far, for logging
a blue course through
the undersides of a
life. The naked man
astride the fish who
crests my father's
coat of arms
is St. Brendan free
on God's finned
coracle, a tongue
loosed up
from deep waters
which speaks
the truest names
of things. Each
poem measures
a spoonful of it,
a league, a sea
beneath the
sea's vicious
careens. I row
on home on
Queequeg's chair
as his spirit
hands me down
and down and down
to all the fathers
of our song, each
darker than the last,
freer too. The Old
One rules the winter
home of Delphi's
shining lord, a
palace of cold
dark dreams, the
male's own womb,
if you will,
where all the sperm
of summer is
tended in an
ancient building
uncorrupt at the
bottom of time's floor.
Thus I close my
eyes and lift the next
spoor through my loins
and heart and mind,
geysering a spirit's
spout off the bow
of 5 a.m., a pure
ripe exhalation
of the truth
as he would say it,
as I his son
translate truth
here on the Delphic
fish I ride. May
I honor him with
a song worth
rousing him
with a bass note
of a smile.

Deeper Words

To continue on about this “talking cure.” Rollo May shows the importance of correctly naming the disease -- identifying with that bad spirit yammering in the whiskey bottle, owning up to one’s own shadow. But he also tells us that naming is not enough, that it only solves the first half of the problem. A deeper sort of naming is required.

***

“The daimonic needs to be directed, channeled: and here human consciousness is important. ... Consciousness can integrate the daimonic. This is the purpose of psychotherapy.

“Native psychotherapy often shows us exceedingly interesting and revealing ways of dealing with the daimonic. Dr. Raymond Prince, a psychiatrist who lived and studied with the natives of Yoruba for a number of years, filmed a fascinating ceremony which I offer here as illustration.

“When the tribal mental healer is to treat some members of the community for what we would call psychological ailments, the whole village participates. After the usual rituals of the casting of bones and a ceremony that is believed to transfer the problem -- be it sexual impotence or depression or whatnot -- to a goat who then (as the “scapegoat”) is ceremonially slaughtered, everybody in the village joins together for serval hours of frenzied dancing. In the dancing, which constitutes the main part of the healing, the significant point is that the native who wants to be cured identifies with the figure he believes has daimonic possession of him.

“... What is necessary for the ‘cure,’ then, is that he confront and come to terms with this ‘demon’ in himself.

“... In the frenzied dance he then ‘invites the daimonic,’ welcomes it. He not only confronts the devil toe to toe, but accepts her ((in the case of an impotent man with an evil mother complex)), identifies with her, assimilates and integrates her as a constructive part of himself -- and hopefully becomes both more gentle and sensitive as a man and sexually potent.

“... The principle is, identify with that which haunts you, not in order to fight it off, but to take it into yourself; for it must represent some rejected element in you.”

-- -Psychotherapy and the Daimonic.” in Myth, Dreams and Religion, ed. Joseph Campbell




BRINE SANCTUS

April 2005


Reflexive insights may arise like the lotus
from the still center of the lake of meditation,
(but) creative insights come at the raw and
tender edge of confrontation, at the borderlines
where we are most sensitive and exposed --
and, curiously, most alone. To meet you, I
must risk myself as I am. The naked human
is challenged.

-- James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis

The grand plan on which the unconscious
life of the psyche is constructed is so
inaccessible to our understanding that
we can never know what evil may not be
necessary to produce good by enantiodromia,
and which good may possibly lead to evil.

-- Jung, “The Phenomenology of the Spirit
in Fairy Tales,” CW 9.1, 397

I keep my Cape at full-bore howl
to seep the blue folds of my song,
deeps of saturate salt bliss
I call a shore for love and God.
Here at the wildest lull of night
when old passions lay split
in silt-deep seas, I lure their
ghost-bells back with lines of
inky blood, verses of black
heart-spoor and blue-balled
verbiage, spews & spouts from
the hundred rooms I woke in
no closer to You than when
I headed out into the fraught
and riven night in hope
of pale white beaches,
surf drowning every door.
Every night of that old
awfulness is caught between
these lines, brute and scaly,
blue-glittery, a steely ire
which is both fang and booty,
obfuscant drouth and wave-
cathedralled fire. My compass
was drowned those nights and
perfected in their soak,
erect now to every northern
latitude to spasm this far
south, a high-low fricative
which prows the worst wet
pass & plunge that devil
sphincter in songs of honeyed sass.
Such is the brine sanctus
You tolled in my ears
while I was drinking to the
dregs the worst booze of
winter nights, an awe distilled
from awfulness which
you pour in equal measure
from this pen at this
lonely, God-stilled, jasmine-
fragrant hour.
Perhaps this poem will
find that night again
in which I clenched
and died at last, the
one in which I flooded
at last through a secret Cape’s
infernally blue throat.
My every heaven’s
pubes are thickest round
the maw of that eternal rout.




OK. But we find at the center of this labyrinthine truth a decided shift or turn which decides whether one drowns in talk -- forever staying the victim of it -- or it allows one to walk on to cure. To resume with May:

****

“Experiencing is absolutely essential; but if it occurs without the changing of the patient’s concepts, symbols, and myths, the “experiencing” is truncated, and has a masturbatory rather than full procreative power.

“The way man has gained power over the daimonic historically is by the Word. This is demonstrated in the crucial importance of knowing the name of the demon in order to overcome him.

“... Referring specifically to the drunkard’s proclivity for evading his problem through calling it everything else, ((William James)) writes:

But if he once gets able to pick out that way of conceiving, from all possible ways of conceiving the various opportunities which occur, if through thick and thin he holds to it that this is being a drunkard and is nothing else, he is not likely to remain one long. The effort by which he succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly present to his mind proves to be his saving moral act.

“Many therapists, like Allen Wheelis, speak of their task as “naming the unconscious.” Every therapist must be impressed almost every hour with the strange power the names the psychological complexes or patterns have for the patient.

“...It has been argued that the relief the patient gets is that the “naming” gets him off the hook; it relieves him of responsibility for making a technical process to blame; he is not doing it but his “unconscious” is. There is truth in this.

“... The Word does give man a power over the daimonic. The Word discloses the daimonic, it forces it into the open where we can confront it directly.


“But the greatest danger in the therapeutic process lies right here: that the naming will take the place of the changing; we stand off and get a temporary security by diagnoses, labels, talking about symptoms, and are relieved of the necessity of using will in action or loving. This plays into the hands of modern man’s central defense, namely intellectualization -- using words as substitutes for feeling and experience.

“The Word skates always on the edge of the danger of covering up the daimonic as well as disclosing it. When Apollo, the intellectual, argues in the Oresteia that the Furies be banished, he is using the cultural arts to fragmentize man, to suppress the daimonic and truncate human experience. Athena, who “reconciles the opposites in her own being,” rightly refuses. By accepting the daimonic Furies, welcoming them into Athens, the community itself is enriched. And the furies have their names changed: They are now the Eumenides, the makes of grace.

“This ambivalent character of language requires our asking what the ancients meant by the Word which has power over the daimonic. They were referring to the logos, the structure of reality. “In the beginning was the Word” is true experimentally as well as theologically. For the beginning of man as man is the capacity for language. This Word can be communicated only by symbols and myths. It is important not to forget that any healing process -- even what each of us with a common cold is to do about his viruses -- is a myth, a way of looking at oneself including one’s body in relation to the Word. Unless my illness changes my myth of myself, I shall not have distilled from the trauma of illness the opportunity for new insights into myself and self-realization in life, and I shall not attain anything that can rightly be called a “cure.”

- May ibid.

***

SHUT UP & DO IT

Oct. 15

There is talk and chat,
the swelled verbose,
the naming too. And
there are words under
all that worth drilling to,
worth egging on to birth.
Does that equate to
more words always,
or does more simply
serve as that stay against
conclusion which
so poorly suffices for
a life? Round and round
I’ve gone on and down
a page, a pro at rant
and cant, at rhyme
& meter too, as if
the bone metronome
were sufficient water
for this parched hour.
But is that as
important as making
love near?
Could I have it so
wrong? A cool October
morning this, my wife
in bad arrears over
the failure of a
9-year business
& me feeling so inept
at saying anything
which might be of help,
just shut up with the
peptalk drone but
don’t clam up with
the salt commiserations
she needs to harrow:
Be the stupid fall guy
who follows her on down
to whatever must be
suffered through,
getting to what counts
the most. No dark
angel here, the dark
itself just and hour
still faint with a
Saturday night’s
crisp cackles -- distant
hiphop songs, a rooster
revving up a few blocks
away & our house
creaking in its struts,
burdened, failing even,
with so much real
work to do. So shut up
and do it.



FOAM JONES

Oct. 16

I could spend the rest
of my life’s mornings
on this floating coffin
of one song, chanting
salty lines between
the tines of a devil-
seeming sea, singing
til the thrill full spills
her blue dress on
every spoken shore.
It’s just me here with
my hips pressed
to a musing melusine’s
sailing hips, getting
the whole sea down
sip by sip
from her wave-
milking ripe plump
nerps. Writing thus
I’m forever just
offshore, short
of saying it, never
coming because
going’s hard, drained
before first light.
Delay becomes
the charm
which seals me
forever down the
sidhe of Niniane,
my Yes her ablest
spell, the thrill
of her the blue gills
which breathe me
toward every
bottom, my mouth
a scoop spilling
silt & sea-booty
& coarser
verbotens, hauled
up from the tills
I’ve let myself pickle
in whilst swooning
up the swale.
No, naming is not
enough. I could
spoon these ranns
forever trying to
measure out a
sea’s girth and depth
& still be just
another sorry
victim of the
old sea tides,
the shadow sound
of long-crashed waves—
gorgeous, yes, harmonic
with the sea’s harrumphing
choir, it’s true,
but oh so ebbed
and empty
nonetheless. A worm
of metaphor, lord of
his own ocean-
sounding nautilus
washed up at the
bottom of the night,
dreaming fast
in black paradise
while the world
forgets its proper
name & turns
fastly toward the
wall. Can
a sick mind find
cure through the
vast extensions
of its word? Do
poems die when
they settle for
the sound of nearby
shores they pray
to never reach?
Those blue labials
up and down my
pen are spit-lush
comfort to be sure,
a pleasure I
do not care to
limit quell
or measure:
But do I thus
outrage life
by trying to
seal myself
back in its blue
womb? By
refusing
to walk out past
the beach where
love almost
always began,
am I just a
trope of a
rope tied round
both waists of
nothing?
Oh boat coffin
are you empty
because the
mind of my drowned
dear friend is
empty too? Are
you echo of the ghost
of an old voyage
mouldering into
nothing on a shelf
two thousand fathoms
down from this
soon-to-wake real
day? And if so,
what words are
then proper to
say a prayer
for him here?
Is this box
empty because
we’ve lost his
father’s father’s
father’s name?
Or is it that
the name is so
moot as to
empty high
and lower heaven,
simply not
the point at all?
To name is not
to say the depths
all names too
archly father:.
I’ve told all
about my love
but failed importantly
to say how much
I fail her sitting here
telling you about
her face n tits n ass
walking forever
down the same
departing shore.
We’re still here,
me at the pad
& she upstairs
in an embittered
& embattled aging
woman’s sleep
no words I know
can comfort,
merely provoke.
Last night I woke
to see her standing
over me before
getting in bed --
watching my face
I guess -- then
stroked my face
and said something
I can’t recall,
important words
I should be
saying here
I could just
get over their sound.
Among the missing
relics from that box
I come to call
my heart
is that which
swelled to hurl
dread spears into
the naked girth
of God, a mile off
the course of this
dread ship
of shopworn verbs
& faux whale oil
going down again
inside this sinking
nib. He was always
unerringly about
what I still always
fail to say,
though I try, though
I try. Not much else
to write today
but that I wonder if
that loony Pilgrim’s
hat my pagan friend
wore at the mast
of his last toss
has washed up
on some distant shore
like the sated head
of Orpheus, floated
on enough beyond
this dreadful,
bloated drone.
Whoever finds that
hat please toff it
once for me
in remembrance of
the man still
lost in the jones
of wave crashed foam,
the man forever
singing to his
own far drifting,
still burning bones.

The Booze Talking

“Goethe, who knew modern man’s daimonic urges intimately, as shown in so eloquently in Faust, remarks, ‘The daimon is the power of nature.’ But the important characteristic of the daimon is that the one element within the personality which has its rightful function as a part of the personality, can itself usurp power over the whole self, and this drives the person into disintigrative behavior...

“‘Eros is a mighty daimon,’ said Diotima, the authority on love among Plato’s banqueting friends. The daminoic is correlated with eros rather than libido or sex as such. ... When Freud introduces Eros as the opposite to and adversary of libido, i.e., as the force that stood against the death-instinct and fought for life, he was using Eros as this way which includes the daimonic. The daimonic fights against death, fights always to assert its own vitality, accepts no “threescore and ten” or other timetable of life. It is this daimonic which is referred to when we adjure someone seriously ill not to give up the fight.

- Rollo May, “Psychotherapy and the Daimonic.” in Myth, Dreams and Religion, ed. Joseph Campbell




THE BOOZE TALKING

Oct. 2004

Blame it on the booze for
merging your face in hers.
Given the general slurry
of those pouring nights,
such confusions weren’t
surprising, though you
nor she nor I have since
forgiven me. She
stepped off one nights’s
wave of alcholic sleaze
and then we found ourselves
in a room where dawn’s
pale mordents were
streaming through every
blue window. Yowza the heat
I felt in her when she
unzipped and wrapped
her soft legs around
my hips, her loins
as hot and moist as
as my name which
tore from her lips as
she came again and
again, my full weight
and fullness plowing
and plunging & plundering
her with an empty
heart’s naked greed.
Afterward we were two
strangers deep in love
with nary a clue how to
proceed beyond that
apple-isle’s wave-tossed
bed. Not me, at least,
and of her own fall
what can I say? I loved
her too much to grant
her mortal falter, and so
was like a stag in the
headlights of approaching
doom. The same mouth
that sucked me dry
& whispered how she
wanted all my children
spoke all the later words
of bile and choler and
oh-so-blue-rue. How could
such magnificent breasts
be rounded with that
boredom she eventually
felt with me, pointing
them on toward the next
more manly man? And
so when all those hurts
invaded me, descending
wraith-like from the moon
to fever my brain, I knew
the daily barbs and ice
which was breaking us
back in two were the
fault of my own fool’s
equipage in the wiser
ways of love. What could
I really say to her when
my tongue was inked
in your pure honey?
Always in that awful clinch
where love in real
lovers is daily made
I’ve quailed, my
equipage both
insufficient and too
gossamer, tooled to you
who beamed that sickly
aura behind every
woman that I’ve loved.
How many loves have
ebbed from the women
I’ve loved because I
didn’t fight with them?
As if a marriage rode
on a husband’s willingness
to defy and even curse you
in some real love’s darker
name. Sorry Charley,
my history’s assembled
feline choir hymns,
we don’t want tuna
with good taste, we
need a fish to whup
some ass. That feral
dolphin which the
naked man rides upon
my father’s family
crest ain’t no lap-puppy.
But when will I
ever learn to lose
you in my heart?
Back to my story --
and when those
soaring soggy spumes of
love had ebbed in
a collapse of closing doors,
how I mooned for her
and you in the you-in-her
of iced vodka’s slurry
drowse. I was like
a man tossed from the
sea and exiled on
a bitter shore where
all my fellow drowned
Jolly Rogers assembled
at the bar to drink
all night and stare
at their reflections
across the bar, repeating
the words we could or
should have said
to keep you-in-her
from sailing forever away.
But it was just the
booze talking, speaking
loud to no one the
awful secret you hold
like a finger to our lips.
Who do we love anyway,
and what is it that we
greet when all the sheets
have been torn from
that infernal book
on which we bed all dreams?
Beyond the heart’s thalassa
is this discriminating rage,
a will to fight to the
end of all poems,
making certain things
at last clear and clean.
Not by your providence
but my victory, dread queen,
will I ink that page at last.
Beyond your dread similitudes
are seas without a same
and salt in sheer infinitude
and feelings you’ll never fully name
no matter how much booze
it took to drink
before my you-in-her was weaned.




THE BLACK RIDER

Oct. 14

He is my backassed rider,
my hellbent delighter,
the slicksweet gall
hived in th every
dread center of
my wrong
desire to die diving
all the way.
He will not take No
for an answer, he takes
no prisoners & he’s
always gone before
first light. He’s
the scourge of
all panties scattered
on the way to
bed or left hanging
from an ankle,
a scornr of
foreplay and
rubbers. Oh he’s a
bad boy all right,
the poster child
of delight, just
smilin’ away
with hell’s mouth.
Boozed up and
boogied down he
carouses in bottle
clubs til 6 a.m.,
freighting from
those pickled lees
the next giggling
Giselle aboard
his blackout saddle.
He’ll die drunk maybe
driving her home
or kill her or
someone else on
the road if the Fates
don’t opt to string
him further down
the dread lines
of appetite. Sequestered
back at her room
or his just as day-yolk
surely spreads,
he devours that
palegirl’s bones
with a jones for
jolly rogers in
the salty lockers
of the night.
Many times he
passes out taking
her all the way.
I take a drink
and it’s he who thinks
it a splendid idea to
head out for a little
fun; it is him
sawing that smooth
bad fiddle when I imagine
myself walk some tightly
packed room where
every pussy swoons.
He’s singing in my
ear as I imagine myself
a Bond, the hero in
with a thousand tight
blue jeans pulled
down the ankles of
one night. And when
I’ve had enough to
drink he really spreads
his wings, cawing loud
and lewdly from
the belfry which
bells from balls to cock
to tongue, spiralling
Satanic poetry
across the hallows
of the night, arch,
arcane, pure indigo,
with the black wit
of an Iago making
moves while the
king sleeps. He is
the shadow of
my thrall of
love and life,
the spectre swimming
in libido’s wake
singing in dread
bubbles the
drear drowned view
inside my evil ear,
the rebellious one
on the left side of
my sense. His news
have such force and
flavor that heeding
is too dangerous
to embrace and
too delightful to resist.
Good thing for
all of us that a
bigger beast than he
swims even deeper down
with flukes he is
but the bad imagining of.
My black rider’s
but a mere shiver
of freeze which that
darker beast swims
with an ease as
natural as me
sitting here &
writing all this down.
Maybe that bad
boy is the deep god’s
angel, winging me
through bad years
to the ledge of
depths mere
darkness could not
dive to on dark
savoring alone.
I was rounded here
by a great black turn
which sailed me
far from home
aboard a melancholy
ship captainned by
a bolt-seared mentor.
He hurled his ship
straight through
the Cape of awful
dreams & on to
doom just to feel
his harpoon pierce
the whiteness of
the whale, thrusting
red and merry
as the beast dove
down for good.
I alone survived
to sail back here
the chastened
chastised man, with
only an empty box
of ravaged nights
to found the house
that followed. And
did, and give thanks
today for surviving
that dark man’s
yahoos on the
dread surge of
black loins. Yet I
know he’s never all
that far from here,
he’s always just
below inside behind,
brimming shot
glass of brimstone
in one hand, the other
on black reins, ever
waiting to make
room for me on
his saddle and
ride out again
to the deep end
of the surge
with its pink
nipples of wild
foam & the champagne
toast which ends
it all, loosing the
cork beneath
my heart’s eventual
home inside that
wilder beast below.




“The daimonic needs to be directed, channeled: and here human consciousness is important. ... Consciousness can integrate the daimonic. This is the purpose of psychotherapy.

“Native psychotherapy often shows us exceedingly interesting and revealing ways of dealing with the daimonic. Dr. Raymond Prince, a psychiatrist who lived and studied with the natives of Yoruba for a number of years, filmed a fascinating ceremony which I offer here as illustration.

“When the tribal mental healer is to treat some members of the community for what we would call psychological ailments, the whole village participates. After the usual rituals of the casting of bones and a ceremony that is believed to transfer the problem -- be it sexual impotence or depression or whatnot -- to a goat who then (as the “scapegoat”) is ceremonially slaughtered, everybody in the village joins together for serval hours of frenzied dancing. In the dancing, which constitutes the main part of the healing, the significant point is that the native who wants to be cured identifies with the figure he believes has daimonic possession of him.

“... What is necessary for the ‘cure,’ then, is that he confront and come to terms with this ‘demon’ in himself.

‘... In the frenzied dance he then ‘invites the daimonic,’ welcomes it. He not only confronts the devil toe to toe, but accepts her ((in the case of an impotent man with an evil mother complex)), identifies with her, assimilates and integrates her as a constructive part of himself -- and hopefully becomes both more gentle and sensitive as a man and sexually potent.

“... The principle is, identify with that which haunts you, not in order to fight it off, but to take it into yourself; for it must represent some rejected element in you.

-- May, ibid., (italics are the author’s)

***


ICED VODKA

From “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

Winter 1985-86:
It was a poise,
a pose imagined
by loveless thrall:
Pure surface
glistening with
night dew and
the addict’s sense
of dusk, all
possibilities
enfolded in
lips of cherry
red & midnight
blue: A
rococo sirocco
blowing tumbleweeds
through a dusty
deserted
necropolis:
Big night music
for a fin de
siecle swine:
There is a
taste for iced
vodka during
such sunsets,
Stolichnya and
tonic on
the rocks,
an ice pick
of bitter clarities
to plunge in
the eye of love:
Out one night
I bump into
Parke and Jeff
again who have
this sax player
Paul in tow and
they say man
are you ready
to rock? We
couldn’t make
anything happen
before but
everyone wants
that to
be different
now, dying as
we were in
the hiatus
of drinking
gone sour without
a band’s edge:
We high-five
and plan a
practice the
next Sunday,
and the thought
of a band puts
a fuse into
the dark iciness
that had settled
over me colder
than the winter
without: A
small burning
place where I
hope I’ll survive
my own embalmings:
But come Sunday
something’s up
& practice
is called off &
instead I
go to a Bears
playoff party
where Norman
and I celebrate
an old home
team’s victory in
a town where
victory is
rare & truly
sweet: Up in
Soldier Field on
a bright frozen
afternoon our
Bears annihilated
the Rams with
an offense as
potent as its
lockjaw defense
& victory is
like a belt of
Stoli slammed
down with beers
& coke & pot:
Fired on that
victory I
race on out
into the cold
night to a
deserted Fern
Park Station where
some tiny topless
dancer joins
me & we drink
drink drink
from there to
ABC lounge &
my cold cold
apartment &
we cant fuck
because she’s
on her period
but I masturbate
against her belly
& shoot ribbons
of coke Stoli
across her
small taut nipples
& watch me
freeze there:
She tells me
of her biker old
man who’s threatened
to kill her
2 daughters &
I hold her in
the bitter dawn
of a ruined
Monday as she
cries & cries
& we tumble
into a mutually
vapid dark: The
following Tuesday
night I’m out
jamming with
Parke & Jeff at
the sax player
Paul’s house, trying
to enthuse for
their brand of
power funk,
feeling tense
& unacclimed to
a power poise that
feels somehow
long passed over:
But what else
is there to
do? The next
night out with
Norman getting drunk
& in a late
blackout drunk
I call Donna
who speaks with
me little & rings
off: The next day
I can’t recall
anything she said:
It’s all iced vodka
folks, puer Stoli:
A collection
agency gets tough
with me trying
to collect on
my old college
loans & I
hear doom again
in my finances:
I look about
that ruined den
of an apartment,
that icy
shattered
shipwrecked
herpes blister
of a space I
call home:
And think, geez,
I could lose all
this: Practice
with the boys
starts to heat
up as we find
some groove
we can tolerate
if not inhabit:
Ah but is
that just too late:
My car is
ever worse for
my hard wear, won’t
start in the
cold: There is
no sense of
personal ignition
either, only
the dry bone
clattering friction
of ice cubes knocking
against each other
in the dark:
One clear cold
hungover morning
that January we
went up on
the roof of
the newspaper’s
production center
to watch the
space shuttle
Columbia launch —
it must have been
25 degrees or
so that morning —
Seconds after
the bright plume
lifted from
the east all
went haywire, a
helterskelter of
smoke and
nothing more:
Everyone raced
down to the
newsroom to
watch the replays
on TV of
the explosion
again and again
and again, all
of us mute
witnesses to
the failure of
so many dreams,
the loss of
some small
remaining
innocence in
us all: Recognizing
right then
how things fail,
pieces tumbling
in a slow q
smoky glissade
down to the
cold sea: Iced
vodka, crystal
clear, a heart
immobile as
a frozen angel
tumbling from
the sky into
the shot glass sea:
If I learned
anything that
awful final
season of guitars,
it was how
truly far you
can fall holding
a guitar the
wrong way: How
dread the
destination
of motions borne
out of the
shadows of
true love,
true work,
true singing:
Commence here
a winter
rabid with
drunk fucks, my
cock given over
to the folds
of soggy night
dowsing with a
dread clarity
for the worst
receptive loins:
Having given
up the ghost
of love, there
is only bottom
feeding in the
bone fires of
the moon: After
the Bears won
the Super Bowl
O tore up
to Fern Park
Station bladed
with triumph
dipped in sour
mash & rounded
up some girl
in a Bears t-shirt
who had big tits
hauling her &
her fat friend
& some vagrant
back to my
icy dark
apartment —
set the other
couple in the
kitchenette
with a blanket
and then maul
Bears girl
into my bed
hauling off
that t-shirt
and pressing her
head down on
my cock: brown
hair & long loose
teats flapping
heave ho as
I came richly
into her throat
& then passed
out: Come dawn
I kicked em
all out & buried
myself in
the rough wool
of shame no
sleep can erase:
Out a few nights
later getting
drunk at Bailey’s
& back into
the Crocodile
Club to dance
with this Puerto
Rican girl who
loves my first
name Jonathan
-- “Chonaton
won’t you come
home with me,”
she sang as
we left the
club at closing
time: How easy
those harbors
when you have
fully released
any semblance
of belief in
real connection:
Her room is
sweet with stuffed
animals & photos
of her family
back in PR, very
girlish stuff
but when she
takes me in
her bed she
is a woman who
knows what she
wants and its
hot buttered
rumba ooh lah
lah an oiled
clench of tropic
spurts I can
sing but not
linger long in: So
it’s off I go
the next morning
with her phone
number on a
strip of paper
that falls amid
the wreckage
of litter on
the floor of
my car: It’s
off I go for
a day of work
sleeping at
my desk &
dreaming of my
band & puzzling
how to squeeze
another $20
out of
bankruptcy for
the next night,
the next bar,
the next drunk
gallop which so
unerringly flies
toward the
cliff where her
ghost walks:
A lonely woman
in her 30s
who takes me
on skeptically
inviting me
to dinner at
her house where
her 16 year
old daughter
eyes me
venomously:
We get drunk
on wine & after
David Letterman
after all resistance
& sense has ebbed
into the wine
I press her back
into her room
where we kiss
naked on her
bed her skin
webbed with an
age I sense
approaching for
me: She won’t
fuck but sucks
me off and as
I come filling
her mouth and
greasing her
cheeks & neck
we fall fast
asleep & &
sneak out at
dawn never to
return: Hauled
some rich drunk
girl back from
the bottle club
& when she
wouldn’t let
me undress her
I waited til
she passed out
then pulled
down her pants
& panties &
fucked her
from behind: Those
first 3 months
of ‘86 I bedded
close to 20
women: At the
gym a buddy
would ask me
every time about
the latest &
usually I had
something to
say, this blonde
that bar an
apartment &
a welcome which
I took and ran
never to thank
and always forgot:
All that drunken
philandering
like deep deep
waters I not
so much swam
(for that implied
a will, which I
didn’t have) as
was hurled by
the basalt balls
of a primordial
fish, all appetite,
only in motion,
never to find
the surface
again: That I
did emerge
eventually
prayerfully
brokenly with
hard work &
acres of bruise
is as mysterious
to me now
as the guitar
I rode down then:
Though you have
to wonder what
sort of cuke-day
proceeds so
pickled in that
old brine: Once you
have heard Oran’s
satire from
the grave, what
proper church
can ever house
upon it?



“Experiencing is absolutely essential; but if it occurs without the changing of the patient’s concepts, symbols, and myths, the ‘experiencing’ is truncated, and has a masturbatory rather than full procreative power.

“The way man has gained power over the daimonic historically is by the Word. This is demonstrated in the crucial importance of knowing the name of the demon in order to overcome him.

“... Referring specifically to the drunkard’s proclivity for evading his problem through calling it everything else, ((William James)) writes:

But if he once gets able to pick out that way of conceiving, from all possible ways of conceiving the various opportunities which occur, if through thick and thin he holds to it that this is being a drunkard and is nothing else, he is not likely to remain one long. The effort by which he succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly present to his mind proves to be his saving moral act.

-- May, ibid. (his italics again)




THE HUNDRED ROOTS

2002

My God is dark, and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

—Rilke, “Book Of Hours - 2” (transl. Bly)

I underwent some transformation
when I turned 30: quit drinking,
joined AA, got married,
settled into a family, promoted to
a professional-grade job, created
a study in a back room and began
to delve deeply into poetry and
archetypal psychoanalysis and myth.
Perhaps the tumult of change
was in proportion to the readiness
to begin which had built up like
a deep loam from so many years
of waste and longing and outer futility.
My eagerness had the cayenne
bark of zeal, slashing fast and deep,
learning slow and late.
The poetry I had set aside
for almost ten years leapt up
from roots which ad grown
without my knowing it.
Bly’s translations of Rilke’s
early poems ignited an
utterly transmuted way
of seeing within and out.
How I loved the oak trees
arching over me as I walked
to work each morning: for the
first time I felt them stretching
below in equal measure to
their apparent spread above:
Such duple plumage of seen
and known had a sexual
fusing at ground level,
thick trunk plunged in
soft earth, aching length
rising skyward ... My higher
power proved a deeper one,
a sea for which I was a pale
margin, one ecstatic beach
bum of a voice. It seemed
so strange and wild and limitless—
those first two or three years
I filled journals with huge
passages of Rilke, Bly, Hillman
and Jung, my thirst for
countervaling depths so
greedy and rapacious ...
And wrongheaded—wrong-
hearted too. My marriage
seemed impossible from
the start: our fault for
not heeding wiser voices
in AA who told us to wait
and change and grow first
before presuming to know
who we should settle with.
Old ills contended inside
and between us so fast
and hot it felt like sniper fire.
My wife fought bulimia,
the kid entered
a toothsome puberty
and I fled to my study
rather than get angry or try
to articulate better
sexual needs I didn’t know
I had any right to possess
much less express.
My job was high-anx
nitro, in the maw
of a brute corporation
eating all its young.
On my lunch hour
I’d retreat to the mezzanine
in the cafeteria or
to the patio by a
fountain when it wasn’t
too hot and then read
Antonio Machado
and Graves’ White Goddess
and Ulysses—clutching
roots which empowered me
to see far within but
could not help me
fight or cry or fuck.
I was as doomed as young
Rilke in Prague, who
walked about dressed
all in black and clutching
a pale lilac to his chest,
the young poet with
everything to say and
nothing do do about it.
I stayed on, grew, wrote:
entered therapy, joined
a men’s co-dependency group,
got divorced, then sick,
then better: wooed one
woman, then another,
then my current wife.
All the time I wrote,
most of it terrible,
but what else could I do?
The roots were in each shoe.


FETISH

... with this lack of esteem
for the subject he falls into
the fetishism of things.

— Antonio Machado


Whose nipples are those
anyway, pert and mouthable
at the butt of the moon?
Not completely yours
and never enough mine.
I could suckle til you’re
sore and sorry you ever
met me, and would I be
one sip more sated than
when I first saw you
jiggling across the street?
So it goes in the night
of self-satisfactions,
me with my tin gods
clamoring for every
raw roaring need.
It is by surrender
that we survive:
not to the too many
never sufficient
fruit on the tree,
but rather by refusing
the need altogether
and so opening into
a room I forgot as a child
with its simple
wood table and
soft sweet pears.





BACK WITH THE TIGER

1997

It was a choice of danger
over mediocrity.
Eight years of AA
taught me how to
breathe free of vapors
but not how
to stop loving
their swoon.
Now one year
back in the
cage with the tiger.
Not knowing
what happens
next. Trouble
and delight
in carnal alteration.
The tiger's purr
so infinitely close
to a red growl.




METERS FOR HELL

2001

When you’re going
through hell, don’t stop,
they told me in AA.
Virgil’s meters kept
Dante afoot through
all those fuming circles,
but what have I?
Surely not these lines,
though I crank ‘em
anyway. Sotted with
Bea’s tits bluelit
by an obstinate moon.
Ooh ooh ooh.
Now the salt sting
of love lost, the tidal
ache of a woman
I once loved well
and a life I worked
once so hard for.
All gone now because
I couldn’t set still—
Asking stones to
unbind untruths and
so forth. Oh well:
A narrow
path now traces
a third transit, perhaps
a way out. Alone
and working
hard on just one
or two poems.
A little meter inches
me forward. It there
an honest life
devoid of love?
Is that good
enough? Good God,
enough at least
of this bonehacking saw.


WHITE CHIP

2001

Air I could not breathe,
vowel I would not speak.

Bright penny of
the bitterest moon.
Ante of surrender.

Door through which
it is death to enter
and hell to refuse.

Coda to an
infinite agony.
Color of an
endless patience.

One hand held
high in room no
longer empty,
begging the
coin which begins.


DARK SUGARS

2001

Dark sugars in
bottles, blouses
and the pale chill
of vanilla ice cream:
Sirens all
of a leave-taking
for that honey isle
roamed by bears
too close to my ilk,
too shaggy in their
red hunger. I’d turn
it all over but their
reverse seems
is a surer curse,
a riven fixity bereft
of salvage.
A dry drunk corks
himself in with his thorns.
Good God, make me
willing to let go
this dangerous
preter-swilling
where even the
shadow of sugar
is insatiable.


PORTCULLIS

2001

The soul’s portcullis
on which these poems grow
is an invisible root
shaped like a prow.
Sometimes it boats toward love,
sometimes higher still.
Other times it sinks far deeper
than any diver’s bell.
In each and every direction
this trellis leads me home,
weaving stars upoon a loom,
marrowing the weaver’s bone.





EXTREME UNCTION

2005

My Cape in its darkest folds
of blue paints a mordent of hard
unction, the rock-bottomed man
sunk to his last awfulness, like a pour
of bad booze on cold nights when
there is nothing left to do but drink
to dregs and die; my voided heart
had become a screaming, wave-mashed
strait which by my passing through
to calmer times harrrowed in me
a sense of vicious unction, a man
who had outlived his own last rites.
Now that hour calls from every turning
page, wild pourings which task a
daily rage not found in daily life but
measures that time out, song
by song, grain by Cape-milled grain.
A stain of awfulness, a creed
of blackest blue, a thirst for
spilled honkeytonks beyond the
last lights of every town. The gleam
of shark teeth grow sharper
in azure, the oil squanders rich
and deep where all my extremities
grind and smash down into
a sated, wicked foam. This morning
it is cold again but the air
is droolingly sweet with the
swoon of swollen blossoms
poured from groves not far away,
a blue spring welling in the
black waters of a winter still too close.
I’m exhausted from a week
of too little sleep & too much
work & all these wild-sounding words
clicking like teeth inside my ears,
the chatter of marauding winds
inside my Cape’s dark skull,
a poem’s bad-assed piracy
on the widest seas of a hell,
some region of my mind in that
extremity while life itself
is busier and more productive
and bursting sweet with love
than any life I’ve known before.
A wild blue world’s inside
the soft green one that
landscapes this good life.
No one cares much for such songs
as this, though I comb ‘em anyway,
like a man who lives alone
on a beach at farthest extremity
from any strand warm waters reach.
Yet I sooth both, mortgaged to love
yet sailing daily to its furthest South,
writing daily verses in the darkest
hour of the night, tending this pale
garden with that Cape-man’s harrowed sight.





SPECTRE

And some in dream assured were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.

— Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

He’s swimming down there,
rarely visible as he follows
me except on nights
as this, when the full moon
filters down to trace the
huge pale wings lifting
and flapping through brine
in their slow, mighty rhythm.
Tonight he unveils
from the boat’s wake,
the black sea, from these
eyes which refuse to
believe he’s down there
just as the felon in jail
swears someone else
held the scythe he
once swung with such joy.
The spectre is agile
and supple as all dreams
are in their rout of the
heart, a nine-fathom
hallows inside the dark’s flow,
neither God’s nor the
Devil’s to damn or toil
or know, older perhaps,
a Prometheus unbound
or unsounded; or an
emissary perhaps of
some approaching rage,
like a surf pounding
in total silence
or the turning of pages
too pale for any words
I have learned, but will,
or be cursed to ride
with a ghost in my hide.