As we changed, the votives did, too

"One of the most exciting archaeological discoveries ever made was the finding of the marble korai or maidens. Most of these charming statuettes, with their demure archaic smiles, old-fashioned robe-styling, and delicate Ionian-type workmanship were found lying in a pit on the Acropolis near the N.W. corner of the Erectheum where they had been buried as part of the debris after the Persian sack. Others lay scattered about in the rubble with traces of the original paint-work still fresh upon them.

"Their purpose and provenance is disputed. The custom of dedicating statues of simular offerings to deities was widespread, and characteristic of the archaic era in Greece, as is known from the large number discovered in temple ruins. Some considered that the statues were intended to represent her (Athena’s) worshippers or even the goddess herself. But the discovery of an inscription recording the offering of a maiden by a fisherman to Poseidon, suggests that they were merely standard offerings and intended to represent no one in particular. The proximity of the pit, where the majority of the statuettes were found, to the sit of the Old Temple, together with their late sixth-century style, is strong evidence that they were dedicated there. Certainly there could have been no more charming way of honoring the goddess in her new home than by arranging with a sculptor to provide statuettes in keeping with the worshipper’s state and means."

-- John Pollard, Seers Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century BC


CACHE OF THE KORAI

Oct. 26

Upwelled vault
of forever smiling
maidens, we’ll never know
for sure whose bent knees
sent you forth to heaven,
but the evidence I haul
to here is ratified
from the gut, just
as wise Metis holds
her balance-pans
on a throne in the
belly of dread Zeus.
I see these small plain
statuettes of virgin alms
arriving from
the dark borders
of an earlier soul
where commerce
sufficed for devotion,
the tit-for-tat
of buying safe
passage. One korai
bore an inscription
to Poseidon with
a plea for fishtail
booty: religion
as the archaic hedge
fund of survival’s
temple. Then came
the age when She
arrived to claim the
grounds, armed
with forceful rhetoric
& the cunning plow;
shining wise Athena,
bearer of the Gorgon’s
skin which she
wore as the
aegis of Athens'
brightest future,
clawing a smarter
way to heaven.
The korai’s name
and nature
thus changed,
their maiden
faces turned up
to the winged
heart in a devotion
grown classical.
Received thus
by her, their faces
shined with the
a simple art of
soul so clean
and sensible
that the very
prayers which
almed were the
sure foundations
of the new
temple complex.
They became
the votives of
a selfless gift,
missives to her
mythic style,
stepping virginal
and sun-bright
above the awful
tides of history
for just a moment,
the way every
artist has a
youthful flush
when all is said
dead-on, in
perfect harmony
with her sky father
and wet mother
in the belly of
immortal scale
before it all
gets dumped
into the furrow
of the grave.
I here hold
a korai up
from that cache,
the wide-eyed
virgins with
a demurely
dancing smile:
she is the
bridal bridge
between the old
and new parts of
the this song,
hinges of a temple
door which swings
between salt
chaismus and
blue refrain.
I lift her lost heart
up to my God’s
great desire,
votive of my
own dark song.
May we both
be consumed
in her vestal fire.

***


PROCESSION OF THE VIRGIN

Ranier Maria Rilke

transl. Edward Snow

Ghent

Out of all the towers wave on wave of
surging metal flings itself in such masses
as if down below in the streets’ mold
a shining day would arise from bronze ore,

along whose rim, hammered and embossed,
there’d be seen the brightly-knotted train
of nimble girls and brand-new boys,
and how its waves drove and pulsed and sustained,
held down by the uncertain weight
of the banners and stemmed by hindrances
invisible like the hand of God;

and over there suddenly almost swept away
by the upsurge of the startled censers,
which, all seven taking flight, as if in terror
pull at their silver chains.

The scarp of onlookers hems the track
in which the whole thing falters and lurches and rolls:
the Oncoming, the Chryselephantine,
out of which baldachins rear up to balconies,
swaying in the fringework of gold.

And they recognize over all the white,
carried high and dressed in Spanish garb,

the old statue with the small hot face
and the child perched on the hand
and kneel down, the more he nears and nears,
in his crown naively growing obsolete,
and still woodenly holding out his blessing
from the grandly gesturing brocade.

But then as he comes moving past
the kneelers, who gaze shyly from below,
he seems to command his bearers
with a quick uplifting of his eyebrows,
haughty, indignant, and decisive:
so that they start, stand, and ponder
and at last hesitantly proceed. She, though, takes

into herself the steps of that whole flood
and goes, alone, as on familiar paths
toward the thunderous pealings of the wide-open cathedral
on a hundred shoulders with womanly aplomb.


Chryselephantine. Rilke “explained” the word in a letter of 25 July 1907: “Made out of gold (chysos, Greek) and ivory (elephas), and used of the statues of Phidias, which according to the texts were made of these things: here the expression should help to evoke suddenly, at a stroke, the white-gold aspect of the procession.”

The Snake Child

I midwifed her from
all-father’s head,
freeing them
with a blow
that split the seas
and sundered
new from old.
She emerged--no--
shouted forth
complete, armored
in cunningly wrought
gold, her face already
brazen and fierce,
her first words
so pure and wise
as to name
the unvoweled world.
How could I not
desire her with
my smithy’s eye,
a creator’s zeal
for rapturous
forgeries? She
was perfect
in every nobler
way my hammer
beat hot iron.
How could I
not claim her
as the bride-price
for my services?
Zeus assented
and we were wed;
yet her aegis
proved impregnable
even to a god,
aloof and breechless
as high Athens.
I led her to
our wedding bed
and lay her whiteness
down, spreading
those unwidened
thighs--and yet
as I thrust my
hammer down
she disappeared,
my god-loud dew
falling on the
ground. Thus
my union with
her fell to Mother
Earth to grow
to term. Yet Gaia
was not happy
to womb a son
not here, not by
nature bred, and
she refused to birth
such strangeness.
So Athena snatched
the disincarnate
mess & locked it
in a cunning box
where it grew at
last to term, a boy
with snaketails
for hands and feet,
half-real, half-imagined,
first and last at once,
half hammer of
male desire, half
vanishing virgin.
She bid the snakeboy
kept in that box
& had it stored in
in a ghostly, gloomy
cavern deep beneath
the city, and there
he ruled it from
heart of hearts,
in the secret depths
of culture. I failed
to mate her
in the flesh, and
yet our coupling
sired the brightest
inch of history,
Hellenism’s wild
short flare.
Does that not tell you
what fangs in
foiled desire,
what dark
dynasties egg in
love’s fading Yes?
I think of him
sometimes as I
labor aons
at the bellows, amid
the reek of sulphur
and sour sweat;
his name resounds
in each hammer-stroke
by which I forge
the swords and
shields of history.
He’s at work too you
know in the smithy
behind the tongue,
coiling strangeness
between the lines
of Plato & hauling
combers of blue
majesty in a Sibyl’s
scalding mouth.
He’s the soul of every
human truth, you know,
battering you til we shine.


Source material

from Apollodorus, Library and Epitome,
ed. Sir James George Frazier

Some say that this Erichthonius was a son of Hephaestus and Atthis, daughter of Cranaus, and some that he was a son of Hephaestus and Athena, as follows: Athena came to Hephaestus, desirous of fashioning arms. But he, being forsaken by Aphrodite, fell in love with Athena, and began to pursue her; but she fled. When he got near her with much ado ( for he was lame), he attempted to embrace her; but she, being a chaste virgin, would not submit to him, and he dropped his seed on the leg of the goddess. In disgust, she wiped off the seed with wool and threw it on the ground; and as she fled and the seed fell on the ground, Erichthonius was produced. Him Athena brought up unknown to the other gods, wishing to make him immortal; and having put him in a chest, she committed it to Pandrosus, daughter of Cecrops, forbidding her to open the chest. But the sisters of Pandrosus opened it out of curiosity, and beheld a serpent coiled about the babe; and, as some say, they were destroyed by the serpent, but according to others they were driven mad by reason of the anger of Athena and threw themselves down from the acropolis. Having been brought up by Athena herself in the precinct, Erichthonius expelled Amphictyon and became king of Athens; and he set up the wooden image of Athena in the acropolis,6 and instituted the festival of the Panathenaea, and married Praxithea, a Naiad nymph, by whom he had a son Pandion.

***

Hephaestus and his brother Ares are sons of Hera, with or without the cooperation of Zeus. In classic and late interpretations, Hera bore him alone, in jealousy for Zeus's solo birth of Athena, but as Hera is older than Zeus in terms of human history, the myth may be an inversion. Indeed, in some versions of Athena's birth, the goddess only enters the world after Zeus' head is split open by a hammer-wielding Hephaestus. Either way, in Greek thought, the fates of the goddess of wisdom and war (Athena) and the god of the forge that makes the weapons of war were linked. In Attica, Hephaestus and Athena Ergane (Athena as patroness of craftsman and artisans), were honored at a festival called Chalceia on the thirtieth day of Pyanepsion. Hephaestus crafted much of Athena's weaponry, along with those of the rest of the gods and even of a few mortals who received their special favor.

An Athenian founding myth tells that Athena refused a union with Hephaestus, and that when he tried to force her she disappeared from the bed. Hephaestus ejaculated on the earth, impregnating Gaia, who subsequently gave birth to Erichthonius of Athens; then the surrogate mother gave the child to Athena to foster, guarded by a serpent. Hyginus made an etymology of strife ("Eri-") between Athena and Hephaestus and the Earth-child ("chthonios"). Some readers may have the sense that an earlier, non-virginal Athene is disguised in a convoluted re-making of the myth-element. At any rate, there is a Temple of Hephaestus (Hephaesteum or the so-called "Theseum") located near the Athens agora, or marketplace.

-- source: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hephaestus

***

Erechtheus
by Micha F. Lindemans
in Encyclopedia Mythica
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/e/erechtheus.html

Erechtheus the First, known as Erechtheus or Erechthonios (not to be confused with Erechthonius the Second, believed to be the son of Pandion and the nymph Zeuxippe), he was, according to legend, an early king of Athens. Thought to be the son of the goddess Gaia, Erechtheus - the "earth-born king of Athens" (ref: Iliad) - was raised by Athena, the patron of Athens, as her own child. Erechtheus was worshipped, together with Athena on the Acropolis after he gained divine honors during his life. He was also associated in his lifetime with Poseidon, god of the sea, and Cecrops, a mythical king of Athens who was half man and half snake. The snake was also the sacred animal of Erechtheus, and opinion is divided as to whether Cecrops and Erechtheus were actually one and the same person. Others say that Cecrops was the son of Erechtheus. Erechtheus had two daughters, Creusa and Procris, who married Cephalus.

According to legend, Erectheus resided atop the Acropolis in his palace. Some myths state that Poseidon killed Erechtheus with his trident, whereas in other versions, it was Zeus who killed Erechtheus with his thunderbolt. After his death the palace was refashioned and used as a temple. Homer records that this was the first temple on the Athenian Acropolis.

Poseidon at that time was trying to gain control of Athens, and challenged Athena to see who had the most to give to the people. Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a salt water spring flowed from that very spot. Athena also struck the ground with her spear, and miraculously an olive tree sprang up, fully grown and bearing fruit. The olive tree proved to be far more useful than a salt-water spring, and Athena won the contest, but neither she or Poseidon were given the honor of having the temple, which had been built on the site of the contest, named after them. Instead, the temple was named "The Erechtheion"; it also kept its name when, in the 5th century, it was replaced by the temple we see today.

Erechtheus was said to have founded the "Panathenaia", a festival in honor of Athena, when the cult statue of Athena Polias, housed within the Erechtheion, receives a new "peplos" (woolen gown). The sacred snake of Erechtheus was depicted on the inside of the shield which the chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue of Athena Parthenos held in her hand. The statue was the work of Pheidias the famous Greek sculptor, who also sculpted the great statue of Zeus at the sanctuary of Olympia.

First Words

102406


There are words of such
nascent thrilling power
that I still giggle when
I say ‘em: penis,
vagina. Nipple, butthole.
Words which pair
the beginning’s
ends: Piss and shit,
cunt and fuck. Each still
startles my tongue like a
crashing comber of
pure blue
Primavera, fresh
and wildly naked up
from the sea in the
maddened puberty
of first light. I’ve
learned to be mindful
in saying them: I
button up my lips
when I’m around
mother & teacher &
employer & wife:
My rhetoric is learned,
restrained, persuasively
chaste: But a poem
is license to open
that locker which
hides the cupdion
beneath the city
& lets him out
with a puerile shout,
his little pecker
swinging exuberant
as he runs toward
the waves of
loosened exaltation,
freed to exult
in verbal excitation.
Lets go behind the
trees, that daunting
boy sings, lets see
what you’ve
got and I’ll show
you mine:
degrees -- naughty
knickers pulled
south of the knees,
dresses held high
showing all of it
if you please!
Only by now
it’s not Cupid but
Priapus who
strides my pen,
lewd gardener
in the virginal grove,
my mind likke
a phallus erect
to my nose,
red rude and veiny,
extending all
the way from
pussy to heiny,
exhilarate
length of a song.
And my what
balls swell with
this ink, heavy
bells so hairy &
blue they
clang at my feet,
jostling and jangling,
bursting to crow
every name in the
book. Oh bawdy
confrere! Oh pale
derriere like a moon
under sea breaking
out for the first time
for all the world
to see! Dare I say it?
Ass me, shout
my name vaginally,
unshore my shorts,
show me the valley
of swoon with
a heaping helping
of poon in a
riptide too raw
to repeat anywhere
else, straight
from the schoolyard
where the words
passed through
ear to that
naughtybox
in which I
stored them &
hid it beneath
the bed in my
head. That box
is where every
badness is
treasured and
worshipped with
a bedlamite’s zeal,
praising what
is said only at night
beneath the
covers, whispered
into the sea’s
soon-to-birth
source: Bra strap
and panty, cunt
hair and clitty,
Venus astoudning
the world with
fresh sounds
if only in the saying,
as if words were
enough of pure origin
in the melt of the sea,
asscheeks like pages
spread wide for
the reading
salt sphincters
in blue sphinxery.

Aphrodite and Athena (2)

The Word that I came to revere as a writer was the same product of my vulgar, pagan years: it grew up, or grew into, the rhetoric and poetic which lamps my way through this post. As much as I babble, I struggle to shape and refine the flow of these words into a tangible mind, a corporeal presence which the reader can identify as Brendan Thinking, expressing his Nous to a far-flung audience in the thin vastness of cyberspace. It's work, yes; but it has sources in a deep joy. Without the fundamental pleasures of the text, why work so hard to say something well?

It is here that the two temperamentally opposed goddesses Athena and Aphrodite come richly into the dialogue.

Robert Graves identifies Athena as a culture goddess, attributing to her these innovations: "The flute, the trumpet, the earthenware pot, the plough, the rake, the ox-yoke, the horse-bridle, the chariot, and the ship. She first taught the science of numbers, and all women's art, such as cooking, weaving, and spinning."

Aphrodite's inventions are hardly cultural, though where would we be without desire, desire, desire, each in exponential amplitude to the previous. What other inventions are attributed to her in the mythological record? Missionary, doggie, sixty-nine. Inout, updown, roundnround. Ululation, mooning, sighs. Anywhere and everywhere the possibility of triple helpings of ungirdled delight.

Athena unleashes the mind's creative plenitude; Aphrodite enraptures our creative inclinations further down the brainstem, rendering us heedless, maddened and reckless, abandoning the wisdom of the tribe for a personal dive into the moony depths.

Athena is the high-minded, productive choice, a no-brainer for any thoughtful person; yet Aphrodite's seductions are ancient and sea-powerful, excreting a wildly intoxicating perfume over the mind's olfactories in a way which few even classical men could successfully resist.

Athena's clout comes from the persuasiveness of her rhetoric, again, according to Graves: she takes no pleasure in war, but rather from settling disputes and upholding the law by pacific means; if it does come to blows, her gift for strategy always trumps the battle-rage of Ares. According to her archetype, intellect trumps passion every time. Aphrodite is the low choice, the inevitable one for the purely biological man. She arms herself in nakedness, with a callipygean girdle and a wicked smile of disastrous assent. Jealous of her powers, Aphrodite rarely leant her girdle out to the other goddesses; I read this to mean that her primacy in the tidals of sex has no equal.

All in a man's mind, you ask? Perhaps. Much in this man's windings through the harrows of his history. I came to the higher (or deeper) mindings of the word through the latter's curves. First the noose of sexual Necessity, then the textual cessations of persuasive Nous.

***

As I suggested earlier (a thought actually lifted from the likes of Jung), human development in the individual roughly parallels the grander sweep of human history. I am a microcosmic egg of the human race: my infancy primate, my childhood Neolithic, my puberty Paleolithic, adolescence blossoming out of the Fertile Crescent, my slow adulthood the gestation of a modern, tempered, to some degree articulated calibration of what human consciousness has evolved to.

I also agree with Erich Neumann that mythology tells the entire story of human consciousness. The primacy of matriarchies for the overwhelming length of our cultural story shows how mother-bound consciousness is, how great the unconscious world rules us. Aphrodite belongs to this early order of millennials, a sea-goddess who arose from the imaginal froth of the ur-daddy's crushingly wanton libido. Her magic girdle gets its power from the moon-cults which occupy the lower hundred floors of the human ziggaraut.

(There is an astronomic parallel which somehow fits into this: the moon was once much closer to the earth, causing tides to roll hundreds of miles inland and back every day. Over eons, the moon has drifted further from earth's orbit, causing its influence to slowly wane in the physical. Did the moon-cults lose their power accordingly? Does the biological thrall of Aphrodite also wane, ever so slowly, from human consciousness?)

Then comes Zeus, shining, heavenly, phallocentric, sun-drenched. His visage is so brilliant that no woman can look him directly and not get burnt to a cinders. Such was the fate of the moon-goddess Selene, who pled to see his lover in his full glory. Zeus rescued Dionysos from Selene's immolated womb and brought the boy to term in his own thigh. This is just my reading, but to me this says something about how consciousness slowly weaned itself from dependency upon its mother.

Zeus is faced with the challenge of asserting his authority over all the goddesses who ruled every valley and river and mount in Greece. How can he accomplish this? Through sexual conquest and marriage, which are both a form of subversion, of "eating" their powers for his own employment.

Here's Campbell on an early instance of this takeover:

"Zeus ... had taken as first wife, the goddess Metis, daughter of the primal water-couple Oceanus and Tethys ... Metis (was) infinitely wise. She, in fact, knew more than all the gods. She knew, moreover, the art of changing shape, which she put to use whenever Zeus approached, until, finally by device, he made her his own and conceived.

"But then Zeus learned that her second child, if born, would be the end of him; and so, inducing her to his couch (she pregnant still), he swallowed (Metis) at a gulp. And it was only some time later, while walking by a lake, that he began to feel an increasing headache. This grew until he howled; and as some declare, Hephaestus, others say Prometheus, arrived with a double axe and gave his head a splitting blow; whereupon Athena, fully armed sprang forth with a battle shout -- and Zeus thereafter, continued to claim that Metis, still sitting in his stomach, was giving him the benefit of her wisdom." (Occidental Mythology, 150-1)

So here now, at a later stage of the myth of the divine feminine, comes Athena, daughter of a the devoured wise Metis, born from Zeus's head the way that Dionysos was born from his thigh. Athena is the wise virgin of an internalized (subjugated, in a sense, but also sublimated) feminine; her sooth serves Zeus in his councils and wars; she is an animated functionary of the great sea goddess who lives in the belly of Zeus. His anima; mine, too, ours perhaps, though I'm sure its a more complicated reading from a woman's point of view.

Question is, how does Athena stack up next to stacked Aphrodite? In a man's eyes, in a woman's? Can she help anyone resists the ungirdled persuasions of Miss Primo Primavera? Athena's strategies easily defeat Ares on the battlefield, she decides all manner o legal disputes: Can she also help the inflamed libido get real? Can Athena's ship successfully navigate the Aprhroditean sea? Is Athena's virginity stronger than Aprhodite's profligacy?

Athena's epithet "Pallas" suggests this. According to Carl Kerenyi, "'Pallas' can be variously accented and inflected so as to have either a masculine or a feminine meaning. In the masculine it means a strong young man, in the feminine a strong virgin, a 'virago,' as she would be called in Latin. The male Pallas was always the same figure, although given various geneologies, a wilder and even more warlike male version of Pallas the goddess. It is said of Pallas, the father of Pallas Athene, that he sought to do violence ot his own daughter. The goddess overcame him, took his skin as booty, and herself wore the skin." (The Gods of the Greeks). Tough broad, eh?

Tough-minded, certainly. In the Oresteia, Orestes is put on trial for matricide, a crime he committed at the bidding of Apollo, who in turn represents Zeus. The Eumenides (or Furies) are hot on his heels, demanding revenge (it's never good to fuck with mother nature!). They demand the Orestes be put on trial. The balloting over his fate is equal. Athena then intervenes to argue in his favor. There is a climactic argument between the Eumenides and Athena, and it is Athena who wins the case, thanks to the force of her argument.

James Hillman comments, "The key word is persuasion, 'peitho,' the word translated in our language as 'rhetoric.' Rhetoric persuades necessity. The greatest trilogy of all mythological drama ends with the reconciliation of Zeus and Destiny." (From his excellent essay, "On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology: Ananke and Athene," anthologized in Facing The Gods)

***

The Aphrodite-Athena split is an archetype that tries us all, regardless of our gender (though it is plain our reading of this is infinitely varied). There is a struggle between Necessity (the urges of Aphrodite) and Nous or Mind (the wisdom of Athena); between Compulsion and Reason, between Bia, violent force, and Peitho, persuasive argument. It is that chasm between indulged and sublimated passions which so define our character, for better and worse.

Just in the writing both these goddesses are at play (in earnest) in the mind. Aphrodite is in saucy-sounding words productive of urgent conclusions; she delights in randy profusion, in wit, in bucolic escapades in the immediate greenwood vicinity; she loves dirty talk, loves saying it every way up and down in the pure relish of fricatives and labials. Aprhodite's words result in innumerable couplings, yes, and all those difficult offspring. Athena would have us "eat" all that gooey rumpy naughty slick hard effusiveness for straight talk, penetrating insights, and useful, productive creations. Forget the fluff, get to the point, we're not here to entertain, simply propound.

For most of us, I think, the struggle between Aphrodite and Athena for our souls is never over. Always there's the temptation to indulge a present sweetness, yet its always paired to strong reasons for resisting. Sometimes attraction becomes obsessive, even a jones for salt and honey; sometimes purity becomes airtight and sterile. Drafts slip and slosh either way.


Temperance, I think, is the balancing function we learn from living long enough with both goddesses. It teaches us that moderation is best, it cuts a smaller piece of pie yet allows us to feel free to indulge when we wish. It is a third product, it comes after Aphrodite steps off the wave and Athena shouts forth from Zeus' head. It can only be practiced with great humility, 'cause there is no mastery of such a profoundly complex common ground.

For one as devoted the Aphroditean swell of the surf, my year have transferred most of it to the page. Ever eager to find Aphrodite's first shore, I yet proceed mostly on a ship fashioned by Athena, careful in the combing of the sentences, attentive to the wisdom in my gut. Does temperance allow us to go overboard with the one in a style completely devoted to the other?

If so, I've learned about it the hard way, the wrong way. The greater half of my bildungsroman is seaweedy, surgent, tossed: not a passage to master as to be mastered by. I learned the saving words way late, perhaps when I was past saving in all the ways I thought important. Or maybe I had to go down joyfully in the first words, so the later ones could arise at all.

I think it's interesting that the myth of Athena is so wrapped up with the cultural history of Athens, itself the flower of Hellenic civilization. She is queen of the Acropolis and empress of the mind which wrote dramas, explored the realms of science and mathematics, and celebrated a ritual calendar. It is said that she and Poseidon struggled with each other for dominance of the town; near the Acropolis there's a stone inscribed with the sea-god's trident, a well of salt water, and from the heights you can still hear the sea.

Her eminence in Athens, oddly, comes from the only story of her violation. Hephaestus, having midwifed the birth of Athena by splitting open the skull of Zeus with a huge hammer, demands Athena as his wife for repayment. Zeus agrees and Hephaestus leads her to the marriage bed. However, she disappears just as the lame smith-god starts to penetrate her, keeping her virginity intact. His seed falls on the earth where it is received by Mother Earth and grows to fullness. She however does not wish to bear a child that is the actual fruit of Hephaestus and Athena and says that she will have nothing to do with the child; so Athena takes responsibility and has the boy Erechthonius, born with snakelike appendages, be hidden in a chest that is stored beneath Athens where he rules. Athens grows to glory and Athena becomes its tuletary goddess with dark Erechthonius ruling from below.

Lots of ways to read this story, but to me it's so rich in psychological truth. In Hephaestus is crossed by sublimated desire: his very creations all arise out of the emulated furnace heat of lust: he is the cuckolded husband of Aphrodite (she secretly mates with Ares until they are caught in a cunning net wrought by Hephaestus) and is the failed yet fertile groom of Athena, producing in his fantasy fuck (she disappears when he comes) the underground ruler of Athens, Athena's own dark rudder. Hephaestus first unites with Aphrodite and meets his emotional ruination there, being the god of sublimation, his physical attributes not beautiful, his productions more rounded and whole than callipygean Aphrodite herself. The fruit of his later, imaginal coupling with Athena is Athens itself. Desire lifts his hammer, but his productions are pure culture itself, the inside truth of Aphrodite which belongs to and is ruled by Athena. They are indispensible to each other, sharing the same spine, the same hinges, the same former and latter-day history in the odyssey of soul.

To finish, when I think now of that primal scene in fifth period typing, awash with superheated Florida sunlight and metronomed by the mechanical clatter of the Word, I am eternally grateful that both of those figures, Katie Poole and Ranae Looney, Aphrodite of the heaving pink sweater and ultramarine blue eyes, Athena with the wide, moony face and serious aloof gaze, attended my initiation into that magic process which gets world in words. Poet and scholar both tributary back into those figures. So too the addictive slaker and consciential vestal holding my fate in her scales. And ultimately, this isn't about my desire for knowledge of a woman's body and the ways of God at all, but rather the desire of words to be said in fullness, wildly yet wisely, tempered by a shared shore no wider than a thong, no sweeter than what is strongly, aptly, deeply said.



SURF SADDLE

2004

Of course I blew it. Mistook you
for the woman who was
only meant to reveal you.
Tried to fuck my way through
her to you. It's what young fools
do. It's how I found a purchase
on the narrow path to you.
When all the grief bit down
and through. Those bitter
departures, the mooning heart,
the endless ululations
in the petulance of booze:
As if something so poetic
must also be so literally
true as to return with
risen nipples from the grave.
All that passionate flinging
tried to sing the hallows
you absent -- nice beat,
steady wavelike rhythm, all
the horses loosed & me
growing hoarse shouting
across dark waters beyond,
transgressing every bed
for you. But desire never
changes without a moulting
god; I'm too hard wired
as a fool for that, and you,
you are no god.
Only after having nailed
myself for so many
years to that stone bone
cross did the the wounds
seek abbots, those
dactyls who surrender
by translating the
desire, hammering
a shape of seem upon
a beach of paler fire.
Forging a relation from
all those farewells. To make
a bliss of resonance after
the wave's certain collapse.
It's hard to put this into
words, but when has loving
you ever been easy?
In this weave I hone
an ear attuned to that
surf wilderness that swells
and washes just beyond
or under a life's laboring
to make love real and last.
I hold that music up
an inch above the tide,
praising those foam fillies
and curved lamias I
was never meant to ride.
Each poem is a saddle
for that gallop all the way
almost to you which I'll
never mount enough.
The music of each
one's making is the song
that beds you here,
for just a second,
in the wash. That's what
I figure on the island
that I walk today,
surrounded by that
ocean whispering
which shells and bells
your name.

Aphrodite and Athena

The only time I was close to being sent to the principal's office at school was when, at 14, in the middle of fifth-period typing class, during a droll and somnolent hour following lunch when Florida afternoons roared brilliant high tides of light against the dirty windows of Winter Haven High School, that Katie Poole, surely one of the sexiest girls in school and who, for fateful reasons I only discern now, was assigned to sit to my left at those long tables by which we learned to QWERTY the Word, and who, one afternoon, bored beyond tears of such sterile and noisome approximations of Nous, decided, for earthy and malicious reasons of her own, followed me to to the pencil sharpener at the back of the room and there, for a pregnant lasting moment, leaned up close to me, blue eyes laughing, blonde hair in perfect silvery light-maddened abandon, more- than-ample 17-year-old’s breasts (in fresh, just-off-the-wave yummy heavyhigh perfection, like grapefruit aching to be harvested in a grove outside of town) jamming perilously close to my scrawny 14-year old chest (I a sophomore and a year ahead of my class, she a junior), demanded impishly that she be allowed to see my belly button--something of which I had, at our typing station, been joking about, my snickering sex-talk empurpled by the uncorked effervescence of my flooding puberty I guess--and tried to lift my t-shirt up there next to the pencil sharpener, amid my giggling, near-shrieking protestations, the least of which had anything to do with her advances as my own fear of getting caught in flagrante delectio in the middle of a some droll memo drill, goggle-eyed at the Penthouse letter-perfect predicament I was sliding, no swooning down into the moist chasm of, hell-bent and loving it. I was an easy tease, a virgin soph of declared pentacostal Christian bent, so corruptible in my rickety talk of high heaven, talk which was fundamentally undermined by a wide-eyed and slack-jawed jones for every and any display of femininity -- a votive, you might way. I loved to hear the news from the other side of sex, news of infatuations and couplings, dirty talk, snide innuendo, heated banter: this was the Word for me in its Venusian beginnings: pure sexual verb, fecund, I believe of more nuanced and hefty words to come ...

There was a moment there next to the pencil sharpener where something passed through me which rivets even now my recollection of the moment, even though I knew then that she was just having some fun at my expense, even though it was crazy and dangerous what was transpiring, that I felt overcome, subsumed, drenched by a silkysweet desire which made everything else disappear. An epiphany of desire, a summation, a beach where something stepped off a wave and washed right through me. There in the middle of fifth period typing. I had been baptized in the Atlantic Ocean a few months before in my pentacostal abandonment, and had felt when put down into the water a wave pass not over but decidedly though me -- cleansing me of all past sin, yes, certainly washing away the childhood I was so ready to be rid of. But was it Nous, or Eros, that had anointed me there in the salt wilderness of an early morning in June?

Katie Poole was amply arguing for the former in that heated silly strange molten moment; our eyes locked for just a second and the play evaporated and I felt myself leaping into her, or being smashed and washed by some wave hurling out from her, her breasts within a micron’s gasp of smashing me forever on shores I would never return from...

But it was just a moment. The whole spell was shattered with the irritated sound of Mrs. Harris’ voice at the other end of the room, resonant with the sound of my first-grade teacher Mrs. Gilbert who had found out about me and Alan Fausel hiding in the bushes during recess and inviting girls to play Show Me Yours and I’ll Show Me Mine. At least, I felt a terror at that moment akin to what I felt that day when Mrs. Gilbert threatened to tell my mother if I ever tried such a thing again. Mrs. Harris adulted-up the drama by sending me to the principal’s office for “discipline,” which back then meant licks from one of the coaches with a Cypress Gardens Dick Pope Sr. waterski that had holes drilled into it to give it some turbo whammy against an errant boy’s ass. I was not noble in the courts of Eros; fearing the judgement of that ass-whacker, I hung around outside the class for ten minutes and then bargained my way back in without having to face the music. I apologized, made every promise to be diligent, applied my every good boy’s wile and ruse to persuade Mrs. Harris to relent me back into class where I sat down, cheeks burning with shame, and proceeded to type my memo while Katie Poole just smiled and clattered dreamily away on her manual typewriter.

Sitting on the other side of me in that typing class was Ranae Looney, another 17-year old beauty who was a cheerleader and member of the school newspaper and yearbook staff. Quiet, much more thoughtful, infinitely purer in my eyes, bemused at the erotic antics that went on from the other side of my typewriter but having none of it herself, I loved Ranae even more than I lusted after Katie (note the archetypal prioritizing of unrequited love over indulged lust). I was caught in a hopeless helpless infatuation that I knew I had no hope of bridging either way, and these two girl-women knew that well. They were happy to taunt and tease and instruct a wide-eyed votive boy in all the ways of sexual and emotional maturity, offering me alternate readings on the whole matter of sex and love, telling me about boyfriends and making out in cars, going all the way and saving oneself for marriage.

Now I’m sure my years have mythologized the event, but I can see now how my education in the Word was worked out between Katie Poole and Ranae Looney in a sort of divine drama where desire and knowledge twined their serpentine bodies around my hands that were tap tap tapping on the keyboard back then and are still tapping it out here.


***

It was on a path that didn’t seem to have much to do with literature at all during much of it. I read all sorts of stuff as a rather isolated and poorly-adjusted child -- Tom Swift, James Bond novels -- I loved My Side of the Mountain --- even wrote a few stories, mostly rehashes of lame TV spy shows like “The Man from Uncle” -- But all of it was verbal masturbation, saving the world, getting the girl, not much unlike my early first fantasies of saving some girl from drowning in a lake. The Word for me was seductive and powerful, a sort of mojo for liberating lovelies from their gossamer restraint: seducer’s booze. I was a virgin til I was seventeen, and not much of a profligate until my 20’s; but my head was always deep in conversation with desire, and starry in its soliloquies above Love. I didn’t read Shakespeare until I sobered up after age 30, but those words in my head certainly foregrounded everything I later found he had said so long long before.




BLUE GRAMMAR

"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.