Friday, November 03, 2006

Grand-Paternals



“Outside the Dipylon Gate ((of the Acropolis)), beside the stream Eridanus, was the sanctuary of the mysterious Tritopatores or Tritopatreis, if the two were originally identical, whose name seems to mean ‘great-grandfathers,’ and who were perhaps the ancestral spirits worshippped by the Athenian lcans. According to one authority prayers were offered to them on behalf of the children of the family. According to another they were wind-spirits, and so presumably connected with Orphic myth. Elderkin again intpreted their name as meaning ‘those who have Triton for a father,’ i.e. to say mermen, and connected them with Athena who was known to Homer as ‘Tritogenia,’ ‘Triton-born,’ whatever the title implies. Clearly the Tritopatores were associated with water, as the proximity of their shrine to the Eridanus seems to prove, but Elderkin’s subsequent identification of them with Erichthonius, Erechtheus and Cecrops on the ground that they were represented as anguiform ((snake-tailed)) in art is, to say the least, highly speculative. Whatever their origin, and they appear to have been benevolent ancestor spirits of some kind, the Triopatores were typical of the many lesser cults with strong local roots which flourished in Athens in the sixth century.”

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


PRAYER TO TRITOPATORES

Nov. 2

Greetings my wild salt father,
come and stay with me awhile
in this wave-washed scriptorium
at the cape which all seas lash
just off the edges of my white
writing chair, dank in the dregs
of a foggy dead suburb’s a.m.
I’ve filled these hallows with
rigging and tackle of forgotten ships
long-tossed to You, bent barbs
& whalebone pelvises too,
the freight of passages so rapt
in the blue of summer seas
that every storm’s fraught harrow
were the thorns of a wild sweetness,
black reaches vomiting paired
genitives upon a morning’s pale beach.
But it isn’t my story at all,
is it, fish father? A wave crashed
over me in a mute agony of
flukes and swirling foam: when
I rose spluttering I was no
longer a man of my own choice.
From in and out I was thus baptised,
soaked mind down to drowned
bones there at the deep end of
my greening sea-horned loins.
One kiss and I was no longer
a land man again, never safe
from Your sea’s too-noctal wash,
my every word and gesture
slurred by seabreeze ions,
my every reach echoed
by the surf’s fold and crash
devouring white bedded shores,
grinding cities down to sand.
My history’s not mine, not
really; it’s just how the dream
gets written down by a mind
fresh up from sleep, still
flapping in the nets, gorgeous
and strange on the deck, gleaming
in sunlight that would kill
50 fathoms down the dream’s
green ink. My history shrouds
Your child in me; it is for his sake
I offer this prayer today,
brine pater, blue Pope, dancing
sorcerer painted on the walls
of that drowned trench which
spat the moon out aeons ago.
I tend to him (or her) as I can,
line after line, song after song;
but I’m too smart for his own
good, my way of thinking things
never quite the way it is at all,
too rapt in the sound of
wetter things, too resonant
of my mother by the sea
calling loud my name.
I’m too pent to hurl
hot seed into every billow and
sprawl of seeming pale thighs,
believing to a fault that
the sea welcomes my every
swoon-thick undulating sigh.
I keep forgetting to offer alms
to Your coat of arms carved
on every mauled shore
I’ve ever walked down. Father,
please mentor him where
I can’t for all of the broken
and stupid reasons that has
me clinging to a dead
headsman’s empty coffin,
trying to get home with You
spreading Your salt blue arms
three miles down and further.
It’s just not for me to say in
this life -- I’m too far along
the road of our tribe’s diaspora
from Cork Harbor perhaps,
too lost in darkening woods of
ever faster-CPUs, I dunno,
maybe I’m just trying
too hard to love & live sober to
ripely assess how much is down
there in the part of me You drowned
with all the clits and asses
I drew in a house of desire
when I was five years old.
My fins have atrophied to these
hands which can only dive paper
depths & fan imagined rooms
of Your old salt cathedral
shadowed now by the the
moon over this fogged morning,
ghostly and luminous, yes,
but achingly lost, forever soused.
This chapel of words full-seeped
in deep blue dowse is hardly
worth mention in the catalogue --
a footnote really to a grand
crashing chapter fished from
the angst of icy black North Seas,
just one fish of it -- maybe the
last, since I’ve sired no actual
children in this life --
flapping toward the end of
one man’s immrama toward
the dawn in a bone-white coracle.
This is Your child, Your tale, Your
fierce enquiry: Thy will not
mine be the whale of its
wild Sidhe, ruling from rapt precincts
all the way down under
all the words I sound.
Yours be the thunder, the
flukes in this hand; may
my errancies of sense and
decency be the keel by
which You still sail.
May these faltering
and falling endings
make Your chalice shine
down the salt leagues of
brine Hell.




THE CHILDREN OF WATER

Fiona Macleod

"O hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon"

—Archolochus of Paros

… Long ago, when Manannan, the god of wind and sea, offspring of Lir, the Ocearius of the Gael, lay once by weedy shores, he heard a man and a woman talking. The woman was a woman of the sea, and some say that she was a seal: but that is no matter, for it was in the time when the divine race and the human race and the soulless race and the dumb races that are near to man were all one race. And Manannan heard the man say: "I will give you love and home and peace." The sea-woman listened to that, and said: "And I will bring you the homelessness of the sea, and the peace of the restless wave, and love like the wandering wind." At that the man chided her and said she could be no woman, though she had his love. She laughed, and slid into green water. Then Manannan took the shape of a youth, and appeared to the man. "You are a strange love for a seawoman," he said: "and why do you go putting your earth-heart to her sea-heart?" The man said he did not know, but that he had no pleasure in looking at women who were all the same. At that Manannan laughed a low laugh. "Go back," he said, and take one you'll meet singing on the heather. She's white and fair. But because of your lost love in the water, I'll give you a gift." And with that Manannan took a wave of the sea and threw it into the man's heart. He went back, and wedded, and, when his hour came, he died. But he, and the children he had, and all the unnumbered clan that came of them, knew by day and by night a love that was tameless and changeable as the wandering wind, and a longing that was unquiet as the restless wave, and the homelessness of the sea. And that is why they are called the Sliochd-na-mara, the clan of the waters, or the Treud-na-thonn, the tribe of the sea-wave.
And of that clan are some who have turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind--the wind that would overtake the waves of thought and dream, and gather them and lift them into clouds of beauty drifting in the blue glens of the sky.

How are these ever to be satisfied, children of water?


BAPTISM

2003

A low voice crooned in his ear:
a bittersweet song it was, passing-sweet,
passing-bitter.


-- Fiona McLeod, “The Washer of the Ford”

At 13 I was baptized in the Atlantic
off Melbourne Beach by pentacostals,
an occasion which was strangely
perfect in its timing. Months earlier
I’d been given a tract which showed
the hells of sin: a blue novella of once-

good people deceived by pleasure into
grave of boozy sex and all the fanged
conceits which fork there, ending up
in the halls of pitch and apostate ire.
It scared the Bejezus into me just when
I was ready at last for the world: puberty

had just slammed its flaming wreck into
me, adding three inches of height, burning
off my childhood fat, curling out a brimstone
beard pubic hairs, lowering my voice a
gravelly half-octave.Poised at last for the
eternal pleasures of youth, their infernal

consequences bared their canines wide,
revealing an endless maw. Terrified of
punishment I fell on my knees and gave
myself to the God of the group who’d
passed the track. It was with these people
that I now drove out to Melbourne Beach

on a warm morning in early June, two months
from my 14th birthday. We sang Christian
songs in that packed station wagon, the windows
rolled to a predawn lurid Florida smelling of
citrus, death, and the sea. I was flanked by two
virginal girls, a chaste inch between our bathing

suited bottoms, literally just enough to spare
the devil’s bray. Still, when the car rolled over
a dead mole or ‘dillo, the jot caused the left girl’s
left breast to bounce against my arm, and
the chorus in the car turned to a drone while
I felt that deeper music thrum, the hard rock

of rages which was all thirst, all sweet, all
consummation. Parked on the beach at last
we exploded from the car like colts, sprinting
in joy toward a surf which curled and broke
in the glass of first light. Somehow I managed
to leap and come down on the very spot where

some manowars were buried, leeching my soles
in ocean fire. For an hour while the others romped
and bodysurfed I lay on a picnic table in pure
agony. I prayed God forgive me for the imp inside
me and gave thanks that I didn’t have the chance
fall further in that surf. When I was well enough

to walk, I was led to the surf where the service
began — standing waist high in cerulean, warm
surf with the sun just up from the east, still red
with first birth, the pastor next to me with eyes
shut tight, praying in tongues and then shifting
to English to say God bless this new son. He then
he tipped me back into the water and held me there —

only for a second or so — but while I was under
a cleansing wave passed over and through me, calm
and eternal and silently true. To this day, I swear
it was one of the closest moments I’ve had with God.
Or gods, since the wave passed under me as well,
washing me of every wrong and blessing of my darkest,

deepest joys — angel and imp, agape and eros, spirit
and soul married in that douse which washed through
and then passed and I was hauled back up spluttering
while the others clapped and praised God. The sun
continued to climb in the sky, hot and beckoning,
as the rollers sprawled in again and again and again,

curving and smashing and hauling back our blent blood,
waxing and ebbing, cleansing us in the sea’s feral mud.


***


“There is a whole series of Greek coins showing a dolphin carrying a boy or youth on its back. Eros is another such boyish figure, (a) winged child ... Then we have Phalanthos and Taras, the last-named being the legendary founder and name-giver of the city of Tarentum. The boy riding on a dolphin often wears a flower in his hair, and this seems to indicate a creature midway between fish and bud. Another numismatic figure approximates very closely in type--though without being dependent on it -- to the Indian picture of a child asleep on a sea-mount, and this is Palaimon, alias Melikertes, lying dead or asleep on a dolphin, a child god who deserves special study from our point of view. There are Greek legends, translations of the mythological theme into purely human language, which tell how dolphins rescued their mortal favourites or carried the dead safely to shore. But the names of those favoured of the dolphins are unmistakably mythological, such as Koiranos (‘Master’), or Enhalos (‘he of the sea’). The story of Arion the Singer, who was rescued from the clutches of pirates by a dolphin, is the best-known example of these legends, proving at the same time that we are in the sphere of influence of Apollo, the lord-protector of poets. The second part of the Homeric hymn to Apollo, held by many to be a second hymn on its own, relates the epiphany of Apollo Delphinios. In the form of a dolphin the god conducts his first priests to Krisa, the bay on which his shrine has just been founded. His epiphany is an epiphany on a ship: this delphiform Apollo makes a place for himself on the ship of his future priests--a proof here ... (that) ‘fish’ and ‘ship’ are equivalent mythical images. As variants of the same theme they mean the same when combined in one.”

-- Carl Kerenyi, "The Primordial Child in Primordial Times"




DOLPHIN BOY

1993

All the world's a whisper,
Where ocean margins cry,
I ride my fevered fishes there
Between the breakers and the sky.

Cities lie beneath the flood,
The sun king sleeps below.
But I croon darkly in your blood,
With brine and brawl and brogue.

A woman waits for you on a shore
No course you chart can reach.
Only storms can take you there
To wreck you on her beach.

I am the Dylan of your fathers,
Galloping the nine-wave brute,
I call you from your harbor, boy,
Into the darkness of all truth.

***

So give me those two powers of love and longing
That numb gods’ thoughts and every human notion,
For I must reach the ends of springing, thronging
Earth, and cross the god-begetting Ocean.

-- Homer, Iliad 14

***


BOY ON A DOLPHIN

2005

He is forever young astride
that sleek so wild blue dolphin,
yeehawing over the foaming
waves or dead asleep -- enwombed
still in first bliss -- or perhaps
even dead, ferried homeward
on Thalassa's hearse. In all
the flower tucked behind
his ear bespeaks a listening
which trumpets back in
the antiphons of full bloom,
hurling such perfume
that the entire sea swoons
enrapt, sending curve
after curve his way
to plunge and riot
and plow under to
the source where all
life begins. No wonder
he appeared on so many
ancient coins -- the poster
boy for fortune's pluck,
the gilded lucre through
which old men get
maids to fuck,
a way to duck death's
swash by minting back
the eyes with youth.
Always a sea and shore
between his romp,
as he and fish are
merged in the marge
of tidal marches which
pulse a God's blue
augments as they crash
and ebb the heart:
Always a fish-tail for
ship's rudder, a song
for wet travail, a course
both known and
abyssal toward ends
both gold and bone.
And though the visage
of this tale is young
-- both boy and fish
careen in puppy glee --
it masks a far far
older man's dark face,
that brooder
of the first horrific
sea, bull-ravager of
Europa, the wolfish
sharps and flats of
Apollo's golden lyre
keyed from Hypoborean
depths. That old man is
Uranos, cleft of his
huge balls, dreaming
Aphrodite from the
froth of that first wound:
He's the ghost of the
singer Arion, doomed to sing
to a court of whale-
and ship-ribs
two hundred leagues
below the wake he
was ditched by pirates in,
singing of rescue
to dry shores by the
dolphin not found
outside of songs:
He is Poseidon
inside his stallion
hooves which you
hear bestride the waves'
stampede to shore, a
thunder which grows
loud the more both sea
and land agree to share the
augments of a strand's
so liquid rocky roar.
Behind or under that
puerile sweet of song's first
crash and plunge
wakes first man of the sea,
a giant walking just beneath
the boy we care to see.
The boy astride the dolphin
crests so much that's far
under me, ruddering his
courses in this hand which
writes his emblem down.

***

The Manx word for giant is foawr, in which a vowel-flanked "m" has been spirited away, as shown by the mordern Irish spelling, fomhar ... I have been in the habit of explaining the word as submarini but no more are they invariably connected with the sea. So another etymoloygy recommmends itself, one which comes from Dr. Whitley Stokes, and makes the morin fomori to be of the same origin as the mare in the English nightmare ...

- John Rhys, "Celtic Folklore"






DOLPHIN RIDER

2000

He is both meat
and motion of
my darkest
pure joys,
a figure carving
one wave
with his weight
then leaping
over the next
in a shower
of full-mooned
spray. It doesn't
matter what I
say here, how
I praise or damn
him: He just
rides that
bigass fish
on and on,
every night
and nightside
of my life singing
those big
brassy songs.
He's my
totem curse,
an archetype of
ruin which has
hammered every
swingin' dick
in my clan.
Like my
great great
grandfather
O'Riley who
burned his fiddle
to atone
for all the
drunk fiddling
haystack-fucking
the fish god
demanded of
him. The last
time my father
saw him he
was 72
and in hot
shit for offering
the neighbor
lady a quarter
for a toss.
The music
never ends:
tail and tooth
and cock
and voice are
all flames of
an eloquent fire
born on God's
abyssal plains,
awful or
awesome
depending on how
you survive
that music.
Today I say
he rides to
protect and
border and greet
us just beyond
whatever solace
we call harbor.
Singing is just
surrender you know
to what rises
and burns
as much as
to the dark waters
you carry.
A white flag
for dolphins
at midnight.
Your voice alone
singing her name.


BLACK FIDDLE

2005

The fairies usually took up their abode
during the day underground in the bosom
of isolated round green hills. I have met
with people who knew this to be a fact,
because sometimes on a fine still
summer evening, when they had lain
down on these hills with their ear
close to the ground, they were
astonished to hear piping, fiddling,
singing and dancing going on far down
in the interior.


-- William Brockie, Legends and
Superstitions of the County of Durham


In this hour the great humility,
the dark world naked in its repose
and the poem of it as it is,
nothing to embargo from night
or defraud, no jewel hanging
from the garden’s dark cleavage
that I would mount here, nothing
I can do but press my ear to
the night and write of its deep
revelry, bearing witness to its dream.
It didn’t rain yesterday so
that heat is like some priapal elf
wandering bareassed in the garden,
leering at every beckoning bloom
sprawled in the stillborn air,
lending to the music of the hour
a bit of lunar hooch, manic perhaps,
the ghost of every man to die
before his time, to drowse before
surfeit of all that sun in his balls.
They dance, you know, my
garden muse and that wretched
ratcheted man, the pith and
scour of summer light, raw
thirst and thrust the sacred
low feet which drum the coming
day. I say give ‘em this blue
dancing ground, a sanctum at
the bottom of my every verbal
mound. Hand to hand let man
and maid complete the noctal
augment and kiss the hour
my black fiddle played.



HERALDRY

Nov. 2004

In the story of my father's
name (a bastard relic
now at best) there are
harpists in our history
who entertained the
Norman kings in the
south of Ireland: And
when those kings and
their courts washed
back into the Irish
sea, their minstrelsy
wandered forth, seeking
patronage in whatever
semblance of a court
that sad country
could provide. A
family singer of the
17th century lamented,
"who will buy a poem?"
and concluded, "I'm
a ship with a ruined
cargo/now the famous
Fitzgeralds are gone./
No answer. A terrible case./
It is all in vain that I ask."
Perhaps that's why
one of ours boarded
the Sea Sprite in
1779, carrying that
music to Boston Harbor.
But when were your
songs ever safe, praising
the rise of kings who
always fell, revelling
in love's wild delights
beyond the pale of
papal decree and
the prying eyes of
royal husbands? Such
blasphemy and scandal
have always pleased you
well, even if your
mortal lovers all found
sorrow at the far ends
of their verses. No matter.
All those years I wandered
and blundered learning
how not to drink from
those three cups of song
which festoon my father's
crest: a delight only to
you. Certainly not for
my mortal loves; nor
even much in my
long education in
singing mortal songs about love.
The rise and fall of
every wave to you
is holy and florid,
no matter how wet
and scraggly my
leaps become in them.
That naked man
astride the mean-
looking dolphin atop
the crest - he's not
giving up the song.
That's plain from
the motto - Not by
Providence but Victory! -
which is written under
wall like a labia
buzzing a Bronx cheer
to every noble aim
and their chaste remains.
You love this sweet
cacophony of lost
and lonely songs
forever hitting shores
you've just left behind.
Whatever I set to paper
here was lifted from
that sweet air
drifting in from
the absence you hurl,
like perfume, everywhere
you've been: A high
strange music which
my lyrics dare complete
or at least ferry to
the next wild shore
flapping in the breeze
like your dress
just out of sight.
Libraries and chapels
and writing chairs
are just our way
of trying to master you,
as men build dams
and bulwarks against
the sea. But the music
like a tide is crashing
down the shore
where you are close,
oh, closer than the
margin of a kiss.
You have made of me
a brine-soaked harp
which sings of you
everywhere there's
moonlight on the strings
and blue dazzle in the springs.

BERMANUS

2004

Bermanus, or Borvo, was a deity
who presided over seething,
turbulent waters, especially hot
springs. A ceramic image from
Vichy shows him attended by a
horned serpent and a dolphin.
His indwelling well-goddess was
Damona (or Burmana). As in the
case of Diano Abnoba, Bumanus
was identified with a larger
sacred forest area, the Lucus
Burmani, around Cervo in Liguria.


- Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes

Addiction took me deep into
a forest of night naughtiness.
Days were fired by the energy
of those spent secrets, and had
the zeal and mania of a boy-man
with too much to hide, night music
welling and bleeding from every
purposeful seam. Lousy way to live
but I had to, for reasons known
to God: In every arc of drink to mouth
was the complicit desire which
turned every itch to a rabid south,
attempting egress of a magic shire
known in the parley of the season
as Good Times. Years I tossed
down that black well now resurface
here, gleaming silvery and blue,
distilled into an older man's abandonment
to the verbal way the dark sings.
That wild wood I once ravened
was too alien to be called my heart
- I the eternally early riser plying
the dead a.m.s between midnight
and three - yet that wild is
tethered here, reconnoitered,
compassed in every bad way
the errant knight of booze
in his quest descends. That
harrowed hell lies close to this
hour like a lost or buried shrine
to the god of hot bubbly springs
who lorded over the forest
with every well-surge released.
He's in this one pale hand
which rides across the page
beneath the only lamp stirred
to this hour-too early for most,
too late in all the bottle clubs
when most wallets bottles
and last-gasp enterprise are spent.
At this loneliest and most savage
hour of my past I write, each
page torn from the heart of a
sacred dark wilderness, fresh,
still beating, still bare as a
jackal's greedy tooth. I recall
a night in the winter of '86
when I steered a too-drunk
wealthy Winter Park girl
from the Crocodile Club
into the jaws of my torn
and stained bed, working down
her bright white pants
while she snored face-down.
Some of that white calcination
of pant and panty and flabby
asscheeks which I spread
and furrowed is here in this
white crannog just above
a black and cold and ancient
tide - in the towel I drape
over one arm to ward off
coffee-spills, in the writing desk
in my lap, in this spread
of pages with its dark blue
seam which calls me still
to all between desire and
its dark-hooved mordents,
the marauding futile jaunt.
This crannog was mortgaged
by all those horrid years
of one bad long carouse,
each night a black tree
felled and sawed and hammered
into this shrine atop so
much below. All that passed
so I can sit here and
observe the night without
the empty glasses. I paid
for this residence with
a greedy coin, vaulted in
a hundred pale white loins:
And the motion which kept
all concealed now hauls
me from shore to shore,
down wells and on to
crannogs - at least upon
this page. In the alchemy
of nights this one still lolls
the tongue of the fire-lizard
who crawled through all
that darkness to make
an apt home here. O Lord,
keep my glottals smoking,
and fill my pen with
blackwash of gin
and blue-finned aqua,
wild shorage for that satyr
You still see to ferry in.




THE DANCING
SORCERER
OF THE ATLANTIC
TRENCH


2003

Forever out of view
down the shelves
and canyons of
primal stone,
deeper than
the sperm whale
fears to dive --
there on a wall
as black as
death's emptying
gaze you'll find
my truest image,
crouched in
surprise to be
seen at all,
my antlers
spread high
and wide,
this lion's tail taut
for the hunt,
my horse-hooves
ready for full gallop
and inside all
that the man
dancing on the
wave of the
blood for the
spear-soar
of the next line.
My eyes stare
back at you
in black swirls of
honed abyss,
sucking so greedily
at the marrow of
each wave with
such consummate bliss.


the POPE of
playalinda beach


2003

The Pope of Playalinda
Beach stands at the
surf’s edge swaddled
in white and gold
brocade, his long
train dissembling in the
wash. His crozier
posts the sand like a
surf caster turned the
other way, bejeweled
with summer oceans
and the eyes of
rapturous women.
And those eyes --
so serene as they
scan our naked
congregation,
shepherding us
to the utmost wings
of this crashing
surfside day.
Above his head
the sun is a belfry
of summer fire,
pealing sanctus
over a shadeless choir.
Who is saved
and who gets damned
by such ordained
bliss? The surf thunders
and recedes down
the shore,
no crest not a prayer,
every crash
an eternal door,
the long ebb like
plainsong, censers,
egress to the back
-- a cathedral pour
the flesh adores.


JARCHA (REFRAIN)

2005

In an old song a woman’s voice
began the tune, a phrase from
which the singer built his ark
of verse, fashioning a whale
of sorts part spleen part balls
part pure romantic blubber.
He’d end the song with
her refrain, rephrased in
what was called the jarcha,
words for her words
which were meant to
be sung by a woman,
a cantiga de amiga
to voice your love for me
upon the whale you bid
me ride -- Very wise
singer indeed! The ends
of my poems are hollow
of those words, an ebbing
surf which sounds deeply
the door you walked
forever out; a sad,
tidemongering affair
of bleeding heart and
profuse art trying to
staunch waves with
lines of maidenhair.
How shall I refrain
the words you left me
with, you who said
nothing but simply
pulled me close
into river’s ocean-
pounding pour?
“Here you go,” the
dream offered, the night
before I found you again,
years and bottles and
guitar-strings later, that
flotsom of every night
“Not Here” signaled
from every shore?
Home again at long last!
—the voyager’s dauntless
prayer. I’ve swum with that
whale, and sounded far
with him: seen every
wonder of the deep
between the ribs of hell.
Gasping and spluttering
I’ve wakened this
dazzling shore in the pure
light of high summer,
a glitter of aching blue
where you are nowhere
and everywhere to be found,
like an ancient sip of wine
that drowns every age
and kills the smoking brand,
tempering and sharpening
that ache for you
which transits all shores,
all songs, all ends
in endlessness, that tidal
crash and ebbed refrain
you whispered in the
roaring darkness we once
embraced. How did you
lift it, like a well-bucket
from my abyss? You
smiled and moved your
lips as I quaked and
erupted a spume of
whale-deep bliss: you
smiled and held me close
and whispered Yes, oh Yes ---

***


The following initiatory dream of a Avam Samoyed shaman is recounted by A. A. Popov in Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, pp. 38-42:

***

Sick with smallpox, the future shaman remained unconscious for three days and so nearly dead that on the third day he was almost buried. His initiation took place during this time. He remembered having been carried into the middle of a sea. There he heard his Sickness (that is, smallpox), speak, saying to him: “From the Lords of the Water you will receive the gift of shamanizing. Your name as a shaman will be Huottarie (Diver).”

Then the Sickness troubled the water of the sea. The candidate came out and climbed a mountain. There he met a naked woman and began to suckle her breast. The woman, who was probably the Lady of the Water, said to him: “You are my child; that is why I let you suckle at my breast. You will meet many hardships and be greatly wearied.”

The husband of the Lady of the Water, the Lord of the Underworld, then gave him two guides, an ermine and a mouse, to lead him to the underworld. When they came to a high place, the guides showed him seven tents with torn roofs. he entered the first and there found the inhabitants of the underworld and the men of the Great Sickness (syphilis). These men tore out his heart and threw it into a pot. In other tents he met the Lord of Madness and the Lords of all the nervous disorders, as well as the evil shamans. Thus he learned the various diseases that torment mankind.

Still preceded by his guides, the candidate then came to the Land of the Shamanesses, who strengthened his throat and his voice. He was then carried to the shores of the Nine Seas. In the middle of one of them was an island, and in the middle of the island a young birch tree rose to the sky. It was the Tree of the Lord of the Earth. Beside it grew nine herbs, the ancestors of all plants on earth. The tree was surrounded by seas, and in each of these swam a species of bird with its young. There were several kinds of ducks, a swan, and a sparrow-haw. The candidate visited all these seas; some of them were salt, others so hot he could not go near the shore.

After visiting the seas, the candidate raised his head an, in the top of the tree, saw men of various nations; Tavgi Samoyed, Russians, Dolgan, Yakut, and Tungus. He heard voices: “It has been decided that you shall have a drum (that is, the body of a drum) from the branches of this tree.” He began to fly with the birds of the seas. As he left the shore, the Lord of the Tree called to him: “My branch has just fallen; take it and make a drum of it that will serve you all your life.” The branch had three forks, and the Lord of the Tree bade him make three drums from it, to be kept by three women, each drum being for a special ceremony — the first for shamanizing women in childbirth, the second for curing the sick, the third for finding men lost in the snow.

The Lord of the Tree also gave branches to all the men who were in the top of the tree. But, appearing from the tree up to the chest in human form, he added: “One branch only I give not to the shamans, for I keep it for the rest of mankind. They can make dwellings from it and so use it for their needs. I am the Tree that gives life to all men.” Clasping the branch, the candidate was ready to resume his flight when again he heard a human voice, this time revealing to him the medicinal virtues of the seven plants and giving him certain instructions concerning the art of shamanizing. But, the voice added, he must marry three women (which, in fact, he later did by marrying three orphan girls whom he had cured of smallpox).

After that he came to an endless sea and there he found trees and seven stones. The stones spoke to him one after the other. The first had teeth like bears’ teeth and a basket-shaped cavity, and it revealed to him that it was the earth’s holding sone; it pressed on the fields with its weight, so that they should not be carried away by the wind. The second served to melt iron. He remained with these stones for seven days and so learned how they could be of use to men.

Then his two guides, the ermine and the mouse, led him to a high, rounded mountain. He saw an opening before him and entered a bright cave, covered with mirrors, in the middle of which there was something like a fire. Then he saw that there was no fire burning but that the light came from above, through an opening. One of the women told him that she was pregnant and would give birth to two reindeer; one would be the sacrificial animal of the Dolgan and Evenki, the other that of the Tavgi. She also have him a hair, which was to be useful to him when he shamanized for reindeer. the other woman also gave birth to two reindeer, symbols of the animals that would aid man in all his works and also supply his food. The cave had two openings, toward the north and toward the south; through each of them the young women sent a reindeer to serve the forest people (Dolgan and Evenki). The second woman, too, gave him a hair. When he shamanizes, he mentally turns toward the cave.

Then the candidate came to a desert and saw a distant mountain. After three days’ travel he reached it, entered an opening, and came to a naked man working a bellows. On the fire was a cauldron “as big as half the earth.” The naked man saw him and caught him with a huge pair of tongs. The novice had time to think, “I am dead!” The man cut off his head, chopped his body into bits, and put everything into the cauldron. There he boiled his body for three years. There were also three anvils, and the naked man forged the candidate’s head on the third, which was the one on which the best shamans were forged. Then he threw the head into one of the three pots and stood there, the one in which the water was the coldest. He now revealed to the candidate that, when he was called to cure someone, if the water in the ritual pot was very hot, it would be useless to shamanize, for the man was already lost; if the water was warm, he was sick but would recover; cold water denoted a healthy man.

The blacksmith then fished the candidate’s bones out of a river, in which they were floating, put them together, and covered them with flesh again. He counted them and told him that he had three too many; he was therefore to procure three shaman’s costumes. He forged his head and taught him how to read the letters that are inside it. He changed his eye; and that is why, when he shamanizes, he does not see with his bodily eyes but with these mystical eyes. Then the candidate found himself on the summit of a mountain, and finally he woke in the yurt, among his family. Now he can sing and shamanize indefinitely, without ever growing tired.





SHAMANIC LETTERS I.iv

2005

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



FOUNDING A CAPE-CHURCH

2005

A merchant at sea in a gale promised he
would perform a pious deed if he survived.
He landed safely on the the Fylde coast, and
a voice told him to build a church “where
a statue of Our Lady stood above a well
which grew a crabtree bearing apples without
cores, at a place called Fernihalgh.” Being
in unknown territory, the merchant did
not know where this place might be,
until he overheard a milkmaid telling
someone how her cow had strayed to
Fernihalgh. Having asked for directions,
he went there and saw everything the voice
had told him.


-- Janet and Colin Bord, The Secret Country

I did not choose this Cape as ground to raise
my singing walls so much as its voice
elected me, coming from a dark I’ve learned
to never fully name or shore though each song
is their proper door, a clear blue space
I blundered through lives ago
and woke to write those harrows down.
For years I’ve rowed these pages bed
to shore to well and back, searching for
substantial enough waters to build
a stone cathedral on. And thus I
came to realize that failing and falling
are their own sweet masonry,
a song of bones descending to that
abyss where the remains of whales
and whalers wreathe a rumpled bed
of wild blue ends. That’s when I found
this Cape (or it found throat in me),
here in the final clash of sea and sky
in brute extremity on God’s last
acre of unparcelled ache. Here
sea horses big as houses thunder
up from deep-sea plains
to slake their God-parched, devil-
brindled tongues. My saddle on this
writing chair is the size of that far Cape,
a bishop’s seat upon a stone
which was once a dragon’s testicle
and later Adam’s apple sweet
and red and rising to praise the crime.
Intemperate and loath to ward
the middling prime and mean,
my Cape’s extremity is of all
dayside clarities so renounced
as to only the wing the dark
where the great squids squirt
and daunt and grapple. The bell
I ring is in a tower 3 miles down
just off my Cape’s infernal shore,
its roof sunk into the sunless sea’s
fat bottom far below. That hat has
made me merry, a Cape-man
with his nose to grinding continents
where angels fear to flow.

DAVY JONES’ LOCKER

2003


Great God! How the sea whitens
When first it comes!
Great are its gusts
When it comes from the south;
Great are its evaporation
When it strikes on coasts.
It is in the field, it is in the wood,
Without hand and without foot,
Without signs of old age,
Though it be co-aeval
With the five ages or periods ....


-- Song of Taleisin (The Mabinogion)

My mind is too wild for your
tethering skull. I walk past
the school library at dusk
this late summer’s day,
huge storms ripping horizons,
the dark not so much falling
as rising from all I don’t know,
up from the corners of buildings
and streets of far ice, up
from the eyes of robed
deacons guarding all the doors,
like waters rising,
drowning commons and classrooms,
drowing this library at the
center of all, floor by floor,
knocking all books from their shelving
til they bump and bleat against ceilings
then go limp, dark to their spines,
freed at last to swim in the
black watery mine of a mind
molted here, my scholar’s career
tossed from view, sunk and split
and spilling pearls of swine truth,
chumming a red spoor to bright sharks
fanged in what I already always knew.


MANANNAN’S WHEEL

2006

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

-- Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature

St. Columba breaks a chalice and sends a servant to have it repaired. The servant encounter Manannan on his way and the god magically restores the chalice. The god sends the servant back to Columba with question: would he achieve Christian immortality? When the servant shows Columba the healed chalice and submits the god’s question, the ungrateful saint replies, “There is no forgiveness for a man who does such works as this!” The servant returns to Manannan with the answer, who broke out into indignant lament. “Woe is me, Manannan mac Lir! For years I’ve helped the Catholics of Ireland, but I’ll do it no more, till they’re weak as water. I’ll go to the gray waves in the Highlands of Scotland.”

***

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

DEEP WAVE RIDER

2006

Deep waves stroll the oceans
unseen to all surfaces
on the cold wings of abyss,
a visceral tow glowing
with the gules of minerals
torn from the paps of hell.
He rides those waves too,
my fish-familiar, in this
songlike totem I ride here,
his salty ancient brogue
still rich on my tongue
after a thousand mortal
spans. I on a fish which
masts deep waves is
what makes the music
so hugely dark, opaque
and fell, a buckaroo’s derange
in Moby’s wake
where shattered hulks
and eerie churchbells
fan by too fast and dim
to hearken, much less name,
and life is pure Silurian,
a swarm of sharks and jellyfish
and trilobites about the
same matins now for a half
billion years. That infernal choir
lifts the base note I here sound,
my vox humana the highest
ache of jism and jawing
egg, the hot rush of futurity
which forever lives the
next day with ravenous teeth
in a gale of sweet-torn flesh.
Just what song is it, I
wonder, rolling three miles
beneath my saddle? What
beast of lyric hooves so wild
and regal blue as to make all
depths divine, be they in
my words or in the sea or in
the angel’s fall between
us who limns the barrows
of all lost gods. From trough
to crest I clasp my knees
to waves as tall as Pyranees
yet never crash on shores
my love will ever see,
as if love’s shout of pure
liquidity was never meant
for beds or beaches or
the dry breeches of songs
about love, rather than
the ones all depths love.
Primal as to drown
the dreams of shamans
etched on walls not seen
in ten thousand years,
this music is old, it was
lifted pure up to God
when men and beasts
were one, brother and
familiar, both in the
maw of appetite and
the stellar foam of lust,
both in the other so
vastly that whole
caverns failed to harrow
the rituals of rebirth
into the womb which
birthed us all.
Perhaps that’s why
I’m here on the biggest
waves no human eyes
can see, yeehawing
to high heaven on
thalassas of brine joy,
lurching and lifting
up to crown Manannan’s
thrall, wilding all the
way down here where
Uranos parked his balls
in a mess of Venusian
cream. When I’m on my
beast we lord the waves
which rock and roll the seas --
the boy astride his guitar
of a cock of fish of a pen,
come at last to gig
the big night music,
power--chording deep
waves like shouts of
whales between beneath
and past all shores.




OLD MAN LIR

2005

According to the (12th Cent.??)
Tenga Beth-Nua (“The Evernew Tongue”),
the sun rises when it passes “under the flanks
of the earth,” among “the hosts of the
children in the pleasant fields, who send
the cry towards heaven for dread of the
beast that kills many thousands of hosts
under waves of the South,” while it
illumines “the ribs of the Beast that
distributes the many seas around the flanks
of the earth on every side, that sucks
in the many seas again til it leaves
the shores dry on every side.”


-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

At 4 a.m. the night is silky-still,
the faintest surf of crickets chirring
in the garden and that’s all. The dark
is huge and cool, too fragrant with
the jasmine blooming in profusion
up the chimney. Buckets of low
honey pour through the window
behind my head & over me, slickening
this poem. These facts are not new
but each morning seems to make
them so, my matins faithful to
the fish’s back I ride on
to every shore in the as-yet-unknown,
unsaid world. While I ride here
Old Man Lir prowls down under,
digesting the sun and the ten
thousand warrior who died yesterday
in the gates of his great teeth.
While I write the tide rises and falls
because he swims too hugely for
the world, his corpulence suffusing
even his tail which flits between
continents with a shrug. How can I
not ache to be with every woman
in the world with his mouth to fill?
How does that sweet madness of rioting
jasmine bloom slay every sober thought
if he weren’t inside that vine,
spuming up from darkest roots?
Even these words for him,
translating sense to savagery:
Why else pull all the stops
if he doesn’t boom them all
so low I don’t so much as hear him
as shore him everywhere I go?



“DO YOU NOT HEAR THE SEA?”

-- King Lear

2006

Yes, your waters lap this far,
salt regnum, at this margin
which resembles no bright shore
I thought I’d find her on
foolishly believing that
waves of reallest water were
the surest prayer of all:
You are here, at this 4 a.m.
on Sunday morning in the
depths of this next summer,
lapping through the garden
half the blackest whiskey brine
to limn my worst memories
and half of that collapsing foam
which spanks the sun afresh
and sets a stallion wild across
the steppes of the next raging
summer’s day. You fold and
crash Your distant scree
in almost-audibles meshed
just past my window screen,
inside the plush weave of
swoooning crickets, their
sighing siesta of sexual sleep
immensely Yours, tiding in my ear
a lover’s softest cries, wetly
collapsing under the hardest
freight I’ve hurled between
loves’s knees. These words
gout in Your warm sea
like sperm of great antiquity,
a spasm cloud of sea-horse spawn
delved from Arion’s mount
as he sang his shipwrecked heart
to shore. Oh I hear You all right,
old man dreaming deep
beneath the concave sea;
Your shores are biblical enough
to swoon the fey libidos
of ten thousand naiad quim,
their nascence hot in my
verbatim scrawl, their absence
all you brood in the cold
conch-chambers of my dream.
My book is in Your hands;
I’m only writing what I saw
when I slipped her panties down,
her nakedness on pale moonlit
sheets bound in Your breviary.
The watery expanses I dived
there split and spilt my binding
on its spine of certain round
in a slow,glissading sound.
In a way, I have choired so long
Your quintessential text
that I have claimed Your throne
right here, sitting on this white
writing chair at the bottom of
the night so many miles from
actual shores of actually wild seas.
Like Glaucus I am cursed
to eternally rehearse the
propoundings of a sea
where there is none and less
to see of it that it sounds
more real and true, soaking an
ever deeper voice beneath
the silent, dark-hearsed sea.
My book is drowned in he
who shipwrecked long ago
a love too wild, too wide for water
and was condemned for
a thousand years to a
goaty dry senility
when only pages were permitted
to receive the vaster
crashings of the sea,
rescuing the paired numens
love throws like chum to night
by writing their raptures down.
Some day a youth will come
who knows the last line of the tune
and I, like You, will wake,
and like Yours, my love will too
revive on her drifting departing
bed. And the two of us
will come home to this shore
and make of it a home
enthoned on sheets as pure as sand,
as secure as that far sound
that washes me from page to
page in one long farewelling poem
about the soundings of a sea
I cannot hear but do.




WHALE ORGANUM

2005

When Brendan asks whether they
((the Welscherands)) know God, he
receives a shocking answer: the
monstrous creatures claim to have
seen God with their own eyes. They
explain that when Lucifer rebelled,
they did not take God’s side. As
a punishment for their indifference
they were banished from Heaven.
However as they refrained from joining
Lucifer and his companions, they
are not in hell, but a kind of paradise.


-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

The sanctus of my Cape is
a shrieking blue black harrow
between seas of a sort, or
of their wildest shores: an angelic
augment for which no one dare
enter and not emerge a big fish
pruned of belfry peals, humbled,
mauled but good, swimming on in
witness to that sound of blue
which divines not up but down
into a wet wilderness
inside dry mortal hours.
Like the angels Brendan
found on an island paradise
whose loyalty fell short of God
when Lucifer spread black wings
and were thus cast from one heaven
to sing inside a lower one,
a pearl hidden in the ocean
we carol for a life. My Cape
booms with a surf which
resounds in all cathedrals, a
basso, vox-humana organum
you hear whales throat in
liquid groans as they stroll
deep water waves. It was not
refusal of the Lord to love the
big night music more than
white prayers on my knees,
the thump and wallop of that
3-piece band playing Grand
Funk Railroad’s “Are You
Ready?” as I walked into
my first cotillion
dance. That wild sound
pitched me with a lurch
from one high register (let’s
call it a child’s faith in God)
down to another where the
sound was boobed a purer blue,
the nth part of heaven which
shares a shore with hell. How
those girls I knew from
school danced to that band
that night, each a flame of
lime or peach or brandied
orange, their bodies ferrying
into Your pass of dread
blue curves. How could I not
grow fond of that night’s
dragon wings, too afraid
to mount them fully, content
to watch them fan fires
greater than my former
angels dared totread, much less sing?
My Cape is one part heaven’s hell
a brutal salt mine of deep bliss
which, once harrowed, becomes
hell’s heaven, an everlasting pass
of awful, loud and bigassed lucency
whose flukes and spume I am,
a Welscherand of the whale’s organum,
plenty of roof for one wild soak
and sufficient floor to raise the next
abbey’s water walls -- a song
which may yet swim and swive them all
if I can just survive the thrall.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Samhain 2006




As All Hallows go, last night’s
was a dud: maybe 60 kids
in all came up to our door
for treats, leaving our black
plastic cauldron half-full by
night’s end. Good treats too,
plastic bags each filled with
Mounds and Snickers and
Milky Ways, Clark Bars and
Almond Joys, Reeces Pieces,
salt water taffy, Mary Janes,
Twix Stix and Blood Drop gum,
Starbursts and Whoppers
and Paydays. The works; my
friends in AA will make out
like bandits today when
I dump ‘em all on a table
at the Central Orlando club.
We’d decked our front yard
out with everything to lure
trickers too -- the witch
moon lit up in the second floor
closet window, big plastic witch
and cat-pumkin in the garden,
bright yellow Beware! tape
strung around the perimeter
on stakes (to keep kids from
trampling through to the house),
paper luminaries up the
driveway, plastic pumpkins
with votives inside on the steps
and round the doorstep, a
greeny lantern hanging above
the door, a carved pumpkin
with a merry long stem curving
up and left sitting on the
birdbath. Lots of extra
touches too this year: a tape
of groans and moans and
wicked night storms playing
from a boombox hidden
in the garden; a demon
hanging outside a window which
I tripped with a string, causing
red eyes to flicker and moans
to wail from it while the
ghoulplast knocked and flailed
against the house siding; my wife
was in a witch’s getup sitting
on the porch step with
the candy cauldron at her feet;
and I wore a rubber ghoul
mask and perched inside
a window holding a flashlight
up to my face as kids
approached, growling &
snarling & whispering “mmmmm
mmmmmm good” or, when
they left, “don’t forget to
brush tonight!” For those
who turned up
it was a blast -- Draculas
and clowns and hockey
players and ballerinas
slowed in their approach
slack-jawed and calling
to their friends to check out
the monster in the widow,
slowing down again to
ask the witch for candy. And
my wife up there with black
fabric over her face with
eyes & mouth cut out --
she feared getting remarks
about Hey witch you don’t
need an outfit -- her kid’s
bluegreen eyes smiling
and cooing to the children to be
careful coming up the steps
and praising everyone’s costume --
perfect. But this year’s crew
was for whatever reason the
thinnest ever, and by 8 p.m.
the night was mostly done.
It was too warm perhaps
or the church events were
harvesting more kids --
or maybe it was Halloween
Horror Nights at Universal
down south of Orlando,
the big-time boogaloos --
but our small town’s streets
stayed mostly empty last night.
Witch and ghoul ended up
sitting together on the
front stoop, bored and dejected
over having worked so
hard to create the best
spook house in town &
end up just sitting there
with all that fucking candy.
Last year we gave out
80 bags, the previous year
more than 100; our
expectations were not
unfounded: but for reasons
we could only guess
All Hallows had lost its
creaking chain and thunder.
Goes with a year so
ripe with woes, my wife’s
family in arrears, her
business going bust, money
woes for us, health only
OK, so many young
American soldiers dying
for no reason in Iraq
& a growing spectre of
more bad news to come.
Maybe it’s all just too
real for everyone to indulge
a night’s dark sport in
Sidhes lost long ago.
Do ghosts disappear
when living minds are
too tired and afraid
to indulge a boo? Perhaps.
By 9 p.m. we’d stripped
the dread but empty
delusion down,
blowing out the candles
& shuffling everything
to the back porch except
for one more night of
burning figures in
the garden & up in the
closet window. I also
I left that carved
pumpkin smiling on the
birdbath with his crooked
elven cap. A last night’s
farewell to No Time
& the sacred pleasures
of the past. Back to
work today & its the
last few days before
the midterm elections --
2 billion dollars spent
on attack ads on TV
& who knows what Karl
Rove has yet to hatch
to hatch a zillion
drone Republicans
all marching to
the polls. Back to
all the ugly pressures
and hard facts which
rob us of the treasures
which were once the
ore of night. But you know?
We did all that stuff
for Halloweens still
treasured by our kids,
the ones inside my
wife and I who we
can indulge, having no
children ourselves.
And so now, speaking
for the child who got
exactly what was best
about his childhood,
I’d say we made out
quite well in our
little local jaunt in hell,
where all the bones
surfaced in the garden
and danced creaking
and merry round us,
exactly where the
most dire need for play
is utterly profoundest.





FRENCH KISS

Oct. 31

As the new sexual aim ((of puberty)) assigns very different functions to the sexes, their sexual development now parts company. The male sexual development is more consistent and easier to understand, while in the woman a sort of regression seems to appear. The normality of sexual life is guaranteed only by the exact concurrence of the two streams directed to the sexual object and sexual aim. It is like the piercing of a tunnel from opposite sides.

-- Sigmund Freud, “Three Contributions to the
Theory of Sex”

***

Is there a temple
precinct of the soul
forever in first flush
of puberty? Is that
why Athena’s priestess
would dispatch two
girl-vestals to carry
alms of snake-shaped
phalloi on their heads
-- mysteries to them,
“unnamed” -- into the
Gardens of love at
the north and south
ends of the Acropolis,
leaving them at those
altars no blood was
meant to stain? Does
that same priestess
bid me build by digging
down & singing up
the leys and dowses
of a hidden temple
deep in my, in history’s
bones? And does my
thrall of those awakening
years keep vestal fires
burning, the waters blue,
this heart forever yearning
to merge the white and blue?
Perhaps. My body’s shout of
salt exult those frothy
windswept days of my
13 and 14th years
are seared into the
inward temple of my
being -- like Poseidon’s
triton carved by
lightning on a rock
near the Parthenon ---
singeing the air I sing
with the orange blossom
scent of first-smelled
ecstasies, the sweet
draught of fresh-squeezed
orange juice become Sue’s
deep kiss one night
on a dock of a lake
near our houses
in a development that
had cleared away most
of an orange grove near
Cypress Gardens Florida.
The fullness of split
oranges envowled in
her wild tongue as
it coiled and sucked
and slurred mine.
Ding! A light went on
like a moon more brilliant
than the sun, lamping
a landscape I had never
seen before, not that way,
nor every quite so
royally again. Where
before I thought of girls
as movie truths who
saved Bonds from
abysmal worlds,
suddenly one was right
beside me, laying on the
dock that reached out
onto warm black water,
Sue’s blonde hair spreading
on the sun-aged wood
as I pressed down
into our kiss, my weight
no master for the sizzle
of her mouth’s pink
perfections sucking
at my tongue.
The satisfactions of puppy
love -- my silver ID bracelet
jangling on her wrist,
the conceit of saying “girlfriend”
loud and proud to the boys
at school -- were suddenly
perplexed by high
and lower ignitions of
an older eros, eclipsing
all I once believed of love
with a sudden frantic
girl getting down harder
to french kissing than I
thought was possible.
My hand was trembling
at the border where her
t-shirt and jeans ended,
aching to reach up
under and grip her soft
fresh breasts; my entire
insides were shaky
with terror and desire,
my trembling fingertips
like a populace in swoon
of mysteries behind
bronze doors now slowly
opening, the one door
inscribed Thou Shalt Not!
and the other Do It
Dude! — a majescule,
it seems to me now,
scribed by the same
black artisan.
High and lower heaven
greeted on the beach
of a Sue’s pale belly,
revealed when
she stretched out
further beneath my
weight and began
to slowly thrust
against me in a
soft nocturnal tide:
motions I could not
yet understand, much
less dream of pressing
further -- not that night,
at lest. And so we kissed and
clenched and frenched
on that dock between
dark lake and starry night,
the roaring in my ears the
blood-pulse of the sea
which had us both so
urgent there, seeing
in each other what seemed
just over our mashed
shoulders, somewhere
between the treetops
across the lake and
the moon so naked
high above, beneath
the lake’s black mirror
of jewel-bright heavens,
a Brigadoon beneath
the waves inside one girl’s
wild and wilder kiss.
And then we broke
it off; lay there panting
for a moment as the
red god embered down;
then talked a good
while beneath that
night sky teeming with
poured diamonds,
talking of what we’d do when
we at last turned 18 for good.
That night we satisfied
the goddess, I now believe,
the one borne of water
in a petra’s teeming brain,
our ritual accomplished
in accordance with the
gospel of our species
written down a million
years ago, tasks which
tend the temple and
make its gardens grow
as we linger in our
trespass, as we vow
to go again.
What it did for Sue
I can only guess,
knowing how differently
desire plays us, man and
woman I mean, the
way I think upside
and down of hers
like Oran who sailed
from his grave beneath
the Iona abbey to
the free North land down
under, his bones soaking
in a blue infernity,
his tongue gestalting
words which broke
the abbey’s calm
when Columba had
his dead friend’s mouth
unburied. Let her speak
then, 35 years down
love’s primrose road;
maybe she has kids
of her own, grandkids too,
living and already dead;
she could be happy
to be almost 50 and
done with diving men,
a divorcee or widow maybe;
maybe drugs & booze
got her just as bad
and maybe she survived
or maybe she’s dead herself
of all she wanted to become
or simply dead. Or maybe,
just maybe, she’s just
happy, happy to be alive
for whatever pleasures
are in the day.
Whatever she is now
is some how a salt
refrain of one night’s
first kisses with me on
that long dark dock.
I don’t fool myself that we had
a destiny together, but
this morning I believe
we did set something in motion
when we invited Eros to
our kiss. For she is as
equidistant as I am
from where we entered
that deep tunnel with
a kiss, our wakened
hearts become a
cathedral -- ruined or not
-- on the heights
of own vast depths?
From the evidence I get
from my wife, the news
is still foreign for both
parties, more strange
perhaps from all the
years you can spend
with someone.
And in the end,
does any of this matter
to the whose aegis covers
us anyway, regardless
of what we think or how
we lived our lives?
Last night our last gesture
was one simple o-so-light
kiss followed by a glimpse
of water with each others’
eyes: I love you, we said
both ways, and I reached
over to turn off the bedside
lamp. The night still dreams
down from that kiss;
it also dreams that other
first one on night dock
years ago. In gardens north
and south I smell the
flowers sing a distant
gently music, a sound
which our own garden
outside the real window
is faintly echoing.
Tonight we’ll scare the
kids but good and
give them goody bags
filled with all the candy
in this souring world.
Her rites as ever
will be performed
even as these temple stones
love and desire raise
bleach and tumble to her sea.





MASTER OF REALITY

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 1999

Fall 1971:

I.

That my 10th grade
sped so smoothly
like a well practiced
12 bar blues
meant I had
coined an identity
that sufficed,
glinting with
the plural
golds of Jesus
and Fender.
In the mornings
before class
I gathered with
my fellow
Christians to
hold hands and
pray for
our school’s
salvation from
sins we feared
so reverently.
With the bell
I fled to
the safety of
classrooms far
away where
my faith
was of a different
order. Amid
the drone of
instruction in
chemistry
and French and
world history I
drew cartoons
of wrestlers
and guitar players
and made
ligatures of songs.
My head a teeming
sea of teenaged
fancies, of muscles
and guitars and
girls, girls, girls.
I reveled in
the opportunities
unfolding
in each class:
Dawn who sat
behind me in History
copying my test
who smacked
her gum loudly
and made
extravant noises
when stretching.
Cathy Sims
in French with
her blonde hair
and freckles
and shy eager smile.
Renae and Katie
in Typing like
bookends of
my encyclopedia
of longing,
Renae moonfaced
and beautiful
the (virgin goddess)
whom I wanted
to save and
succor and
Katie the
blonde breasty
Venus who
reveled in
teasing me
to distraction.
Why either
cared for me
much was
a mystery - both
were juniors (two
years older than
me) -- perhaps
I was just a fresh
innocent safe boy
whose delight
in them was
brilliantly clear.
My eagerness
to drink in
everything they
offered required
no actual touch.
I sat there
like Ferdinand
on Miranda’s
beach drunk
on the sweet
sounds swirling
from their
eyes & smiles
& hair & perfume
& voices & laughter
& tanned arms &
legs & undulating
walk & the
Venusian peaks
rising from
my startled Earth.


II.
.
At home I
finished homework,
practiced my guitar,
lifted weights,
listened to songs
on WORJ and sketched
psalms of baseball
and hippie love.
I was by
then skilled
at self-amusement,
yet my room
was no longer
a locked cell.
On my wall a
livid cerulean
poster of Peace
with the peace
symbol cut out
(Satan’s claw,
my mother proclaimed).
Without a black
light it didn’t
much matter,
but the hole
in that poster
was a door
leading out
of my room.

After dinner
I’d head out
for an hour
or two of
fellowship
with Christian
brothers.
Dusk a rich
saturate of
late gold light
& the air in
October still
citrus sweet with
humid urges.
I’d light a
first cigarette
as I rounded
the corner
and inhale deep:
and out the
hole my poster
I would seep,
no longer
in Christian day
heading now
into rock and roll
night. Each step
away making
me feel lean
and hungry,
wide-eyed at
all that was
too perilous
to embrace
hence impossible
to resist.
Kids on minibikes
and knocking
those clacker
balls on a string.
Ululations of
swamp music
rising far ahead.

III.

In Sue’s room
she and I listened
to 3 Dog Night
while Sue told
me all about
the terrible tack
her life had
takened after
moving to
Winter Haven
from Sparta
in New Jersey.
Cruel teachers
& her parents
telling her
she could
do whatever
she wanted now
because they
didn’t care.
As proof
she would change
in front of me.
Silk green panties
with a flaming
heart on the front.
Once I play
wrestled her
on the bed while
she was half
dressed and
ran my finger
up the hairy
thatch on
the front
of her panties.
Sus stilled
and looked at me
with frank
invitation. But
I just giggled
and pulled
back, my
heart hammering
so loud I
swore she could
hear it too.
We usually
ended up
out by the lake
smoking Marlboros
watching the
moon and
stars glitter
cold blue on
black water.
She’d tell me
about all the
boys who’d
had their way
with her and
how she
couldn’t wait
to turn 18 and
get the hell
out of here.
I sat and
just listened, enthralled
with how the
world had entered
her so many times.
There’s a music
in a bad girl’s
tale that I’m
an absolute
sucker for.
All I wanted
was just to
hear it
rock and roll
the precarious
motions
of the night.

IV.

Where I thought
it was safe I
wreaked my
totem-guitar
havoc. The
Parties with
my old pals
from Ridge
Independent
where Everybody
Dances With Everybody
became a
specie of my bedlam.
I’d weep aside
that dreck by
Cat and James
and Carol and
put my new
Black Sabbath album
“Master of
Reality” on the
turntable and
crank the hard
stuff. The dancing
now darker and
pulpy with desire
as I pushed
and pushed at
the next boundary.
Each party
I picked out
one of the girls
and worked her
for the night,
smiling and then
scrabbling my
name all over
her dance card.
Following her
to the snack table.
Stealing kisses
during the slow
dance. Watching
her eyes progress
from first glint
to widened surprise
on to languid
release. It was
always just a kiss with
darker implications:
a tip of tongue,
hugs strong enough
to forget the
boundary of clothes,
a fluttery heart
pounding harder.
By night’s end
I got what I
wanted. The Yes.
Having heard that
sweet chord in her
body, I slammed
down my guitar
and scythed myself
free. I’ll call!
And sashay
out the door
with her yes
clutched in my
hand to take home
and cast it
with the others
I had collected.
In the dark
I diddled
with what I
could not do,
dotting each
of her circles
with a jot from
my pen, standing
over her
with one
killer of a howl.




HIEROPHANY

2005

It is important to bring out this notion
of singularity conferred by an unusual
or abnormal experience. For, properly
considered, singularization as such
depends upon the very dialectic of
the sacred. Most elementary hierophanies,
that is, are nothing but a radical
ontological separation of some object
from the surrounding cosmic zone; some
tree, some stone, some place, by the mere
fact that
it reveals that it is sacred, that
it has been, as it were, “chosen” as the
receptacle for a manifestation of the
sacred, is thereby ontologically separated
from all other stones, trees, places, and
occupies a different, a supernatural plane.


-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

Every few seasons it seems I’m back at
this, combing my history for blue-boned
sooth they way one walks a morning’s
beach searching for what shells the
sea bequeathes. What am I looking for,
what do you bid me see inside those
rounds of time You ground on down
in tides of blue eternity? The poems of
late have all focused on the upwellings
of my teenaged years -- puberty being,
it is said, the trysting ground where
white and blacker shamans grow their
wings -- the fonts are singular: A white
big white bra swinging on a high
branch of an oak tree, my father’s
loving boozy smile, the heft of a red
Fender Mustang guitar as I played that
Grand Funky music back -- Luminaries
on the darkened wake behind which
catch my eye and then begin to sing
like well-buckets of blue silver spilled
and ebbing back across my iambs’ naked feet.
It’s like a tide, this backward glance
on personal, profaner time, where deities
are merely fealties to surficial gobs
of gleam: Like that afternoon in my
fourteenth year when my friend Sue
changed in front of me in her bedroom,
sliding down her jeans revealing panties
stitched with”Burning Love” across
the crotch. The sight -- just for a second
or two -- speared me clean and true
all the way to here, 34 years down this
salty strand to here, though she quickly
turned away to yank another pair of
jeans from a dresser drawer ( was
that turn from me in which her pantied
butt stared back at me the undertow
which had the surer hold on my thrall?)
and zipped them blithely up. The end.
What had I seen, what had been revealed
which elected me right then to sing
forever of that wild tide till I had seen
and later sung it all, until the entire
panoply of the naked world was
spread fully to view? Nothing supernatural
in such eagerness for eye-candy; what
randy boy doesn’t jam an eye to the
keyhole, praying for just one glimpse?
And Lord, all I did to count that coup
for all those nights, notching my
headboard with each pubic scalp
my eyes offered up to You -- so adolescent
and in adulthood wrong, so tediously
irreprehensible; so many bottles emptied
to fill those beds just to get full-frontal
for ten minutes with Artemis -- And oh
the dogs unleashed by looking, the hells
I’ve paid to spread those pages just to
read that singular line! Astounding,
sad, predictable ... And are these poems
just gouts of long-counted cunts an
attempt to squeeze the last blue voltage
from that juice which used to amp
my balls past all limits of all sanity?
Certainly and perhaps: My intent here
is not imprurient: I offer a peek at
pubescent pantied snatch because You
knifed me so that way right then.
It took me years to write that moment
down, but once I had -- five years or
so ago -- the constellation I call
“Burning Love” whirled into my
starry pantheon, a name for fate which
is that wave’s shout which rises at
the shore and careens into a
collapsed roar delving to my feet
a precious whelk -- smoothed and
broke and almost fully faded, to
be sure. Those two or three seconds
when, getting up from her bed where
we were talking about the misery
of classes and parent(s) and the
dream of running free, Sue unbuttoned
unzipped and shimmied down her
jeans, kicked one leg free then
the other, and paused for just
one second in front of me, looking
some other way, like a Venus
off the half-shell to my shore:
an me agape and staring hard,
my heart hammering, my desire
drowning every other nautilus
inside my soul for good, drowning
every high heaven’s white-washed
wings which only fly as they
should, drowning every word I
sing here in a sea of Burning Love,
a silky blue oh-so thinnest pause between
the wildest world and You. Upon the mantel
of my verbally hot heart I put these shells
on view, each an eye a sight a song,
a nether wending way in which
the beach I dream I’ll never reach
will welcome me at last
when the last shell swoons me down.


IF NOT HERE, WHERE?

2002

If not here, where?
I gasped, my hand
half down Robbie’s jeans,
almost there, almost free—
But we were sitting
round folding tables
in my ninth grade
English class (I’m not
dreaming here folks
this is history)
discussing Homer’s
Odyssey.
What time or room
had we to proceeed?
She hissed Not Here,
to which I could only
gulp the lava and
fire back Where?
Well, she never said,
or I stopped listening,
& so in a day or two
my lust ravened
on toward other
nippled fonts.
That’s Poetry. Today
this entreaty, this wave,
tomorrow some other
vexing scree. But today,
this mount: why pair
verse with that 14
year old nurse of
my budding lust?
Sweating at some table
while voice above droned
round Circe’s isle and
below my hand inched
closer to a mons of fire.
The sense of desire
mounting possibility
against the certainty
of refusal, heights
grown slippery,
perilous, penultimate,
as if only the gasp
of yes could ever do,
and it worth the
entire predictable
tumble hair nose and
eyeballs to the
gorges of this page,
end of the poem,
another failed ingress.
But who cares! For
three seconds I was so
close, the air tense
and bright, my fingers
under the softest
fabric and brushing
fine hairs steaming
with white fire.

O evanescence,
my trellis rising
and falling from
a sound, the scent
of the sea.

Tomorrow I’ll be back.






LONGING

2002

There is a longing in us
that grows from sigh
to starry shriek. Perhaps
comets are charred
furies of that pain,
a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears
to God’s knees and back,
insatiable and unanswered.

Perhaps. All I know is
that it’s infinitely perilous
to think that longing has
a human end. In my cups
I once believed a woman
waited on the moon for me,
her longing the white
welcome of my million
nights alone. I met and
passed her many times
those bad years, so blinded
by the aura of her name
that I never saw her face.

When great longings touch
it’s as when waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
That deepest thirst can never
sate: as each draught of booze
cries for the next, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.

I recall a young man
walking home drunk
on a frozen night
long ago, his beloved
nowhere to be found
in the chalice
he had named.
Winds hurled steel axes
through the Western sky,
failing to clear the
cruel foliage of fate.

In his defeat
he was greater than
any angel summoned
by that night,
his heart so hollowed
by longing as to
chance in pure
cathedral, her
absence the ringing
bell which forever
shattered there,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.




WHEN ANGELS SIN

For God spared not the angels that
sinned, but cast them down to Hell,
and delivered them into chains of
darkness to be reserved unto Judgment.


-- 2 Peter 2:4

Lord knows it’s hard enough for
mortals not to sin, but what tempts
those big wings to fly dark nights?
You’d think their fortitude against
blue tempts to be celestial,
girdered with the dizzy sense
of how much further they must fall.
Or did they know, who had
only known the right hand of
the Father, whose every utterance
was psalmodic, the pure white
spunk of silvered starry praise?
Last night I dreamt of going
with my partner in poetry readings
to a play he was stage-managing
at a bar somewhere in this town,
a place which summed all the
ones I entered with great hope
and desire and blue thirst (every
bar I’ve drunk in, then). We talked
about his play and what problems
to expect, but I was mostly plotting
drinks, what and how much here,
where to go to next as I walked
home, how much cash I had
to drink, how many more drinks
I might cadge somehow along the way
and who I might meet and romance
along the way. The inside of this
bar proved to be the outside of
this winter’s night, the bar set
in a field facing Lake Dora, that
broad water somehow also the stage.
I ordered a beer and then a shot
of tequila and drank both down
fast, dreaming what that booze must
feel like on the tongue, and what
reciprocates in kind spreading
wilder wings as the hooch spread
out and down. I found a tree beneath
some trees facing the lake and sat
there a while, waiting for the show
to start, promising myself to watch
a bit before tearing off to drink
my way home, my mind revelling
in all the drinks ahead and what
black doors they’d open my
reverie gossamered with that second
to third drink glow we call in AA
the Golden Moment -- eternal
and sweet for ten minutes or so
which we leave as we drink down
to the bottom of the night.
I woke up on the couch at 4 a.m.
(having settled there an hour before)
utterly relieved to be both sober
and at home, far from the black
iniquities I dreamed. Recalling
now that dream I wonder what
could have knocked those legion
angels from their first estate,
what arrows from whose quiver,
what sort of gold-tipped barb of
eros -- feathered in thanatos --
could have shot so high
to pierce them through and
make ‘em such rebel divers from
the height of stars, singing down
the depths of hell. I can only
guess my dreams are theirs,
my leaks their ocean roar.
Shots of Rebel Yell delved
up by abyssal Jezebels
with circummortal cleavage
can woo the nth of heaven
into the greasy bung of Hell.
Let’s have some sympathy
for those augments the devil
deputized into honky tonks;
they are truly just the augment
of desire, that tidal ache
for shores not found on
any continent. Their wings were
molted in our hearts when
I and Thou were cleaved
in one kiss of welcome and
surrender to forever parting ways.
Who does not hallow every
heaven to the harrows of their hells?
If They truly wait in chains
and darkness for our judgment
then I light a candle here for Them,
enemy combatants in God’s war
against essential sin, Their glut
and frenzy all the bottles in my
dream I dreamt, my relish Theirs as
I lifted that mug of cold draft beer
up to my lips, surrendering all these
years of saying No to one more sip,
that one substantial draught which
drowns heaven in a wilder bliss.
Fare thee well, blue augments,
and fare me forward through that
dreadful pass You faltered in so
I can live another day of this.
May I never lose respect for
the clout of endlessness which
You are every link to. By Your
chains, this paper kiss, this
dry and paupered boozeless bliss
which wings me hell to heaven.




SHAY

2002

Shay was never good with men.
She always ran with the ones
who ran over her in the end.
Maybe it’s all Bad Dad, she groused
to a girlfriend one night over
tequila shots and chasers at the bar;
a grim succession of dirtier shades
pulled over the old man’s grave.
Lord knows they all drank like him,
proud and cocksure at their end
of the bar, little boys so pumped
on bullshit you’d think their tattoos
glowed like the neon Bud sign at the door.
She’s danced for ‘em, rode astride
their Harleys, fucked ‘em every
way and how, even placed a
white rose or two on their graves.
She lights a Marlboro and inhales deep,
staring at herself in the bar mirror.
She’s not young enough anymore
for an merely honest charade. Now there’s only
the same slow dance at closing time,
late leers poured down onto the next
morning’s chilly cringe, rants and beatings
like a metronome clocking their
last footfalls out the door.
She remembers Saturday mornings
watching cartoons while Daddy slept
off his rages on the couch. How he’d moan
and curse behind her as if stranded
far at sea. Once in a while he’d sigh and
whisper baby I’m so sorry before
your Daddy wants you. Well he
never rose much higher than that couch
before falling into his grave. All she asks
of these men who shamble into her
is that one I love you before
they commence on falling through.