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.
posted by Brendan MacOdrum at 8:31 AM
