Who's Yer Totem?
“‘A totem,’ wrote {JG} Frazier in his first essay, ‘is a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special relation. The connection between a person and his totem is mutually beneficent; the totem protects the man and the man shows his respect for the totem in various ways, by not killing it if it is an animal, cutting or gathering it if it is a plant. As distinguished from a fetish, a totem is never an isolated individual but a class of objects, generally a species of animals or plants, more rarely a class of inanimate natural objects, very rarely a class of artificial objects.
“At least three kinds of totem can be distinguished:
“1. The tribal totem which a whole tribe shares and which is hereditary from generation to generation;
"2. The sex totem which belongs to all the masculine or feminine members of a tribe to the exclusion of the opposite sex;
“3. The individual totem which belongs to the individual and does not descend to his successors.”
-- Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
SINGER OF THE TIDES
2004
Naked fin-rider atop my
family crest, you alone
or best sing the changeling
tide which folds and crashes
near yet far. Your song carried
you from Normandy to Cork
a salt jongleur bearing in
your lap the 3 wood cups
of song—dippers you abandoned
long ago to Oran’s Well
and which now slowly
re-appear here, poem by
poem, line after line, in
high heat of heart and
some soulish, lowing ebb.
A fractured dazzle on dark
blue points the way toward
where you’ve gone, brute
rider, Arion merry on every
wave-back bronc served
up by that stony deep:
You travelled down the
throat of your own conductus,
an infernal melody wed
to holy massives roaming
the salt’s roaring hoar keep.
O dread ur-father beneath
my every daddy’s dickdom:
their one long plunge through
Her furrows down earth and
time through bones and ruins
and split ship-holds of lost coin
to that beach where you still rule,
your eyes so blue and feral,
your mouth a harp of tides,
the heaving sea above
the music you still ride, if only
ever and nonce on this weaving
wave-believing tun between
my throat and balls and hand,
jolly rogering that surf forever
in far stampede this hour
before first light,
before it disappears for good
like a cup tossed in the wave
or a song mouthed in the curl.
BLACK MAGIC WOMAN
from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000
Autumn 1970:
I poured into Dennison
Junior High just another
fish aflame with summer’s
superannuated fevers.
Ninth Grade at Hell
Gate gleefully
pitchforking me
into the maw of puberty.
I was terrified:
a soft new getting
fat Yankee squeaking
in a jackal horde
of redneck fists
and black cupidity.
The classrooms
were old and poorly
ventilated by
huge too slowly
rotating fans.
Smelling of moldy
books and stale
hormonal sweat.
I felt the teeth
in all this
because I
desired just
as badly: I wanted
to saw my way
through the bones
of stronger boys
to get at girls
refused to
my timid station.
Acutely inept
for the challenge
-- I think of it
now as merely
overconscious
of what I did
not know then --
I quailed. I ran
home to Mommy.
I pled and cajoled
and cried until
she talked my father
into paying my
way into a private
school for the year.
But before I left
after one week
for Ridge Independent
I recall coming to
school and being
transfixed at the
sight of a bra
in the limbs of tree
in the yard.
One of Cupid’s
wildest barbs
seared through
my imagination:
How could such
undermystery
find its way
up a tree?
What squiggly
bobulous ecstasies
were freed
when it was tossed
up there to hang
like a prayerful
oblation, stiffening
and aching the
root of trees?
Nearly 30 years
later I see it
perfectly clear
in the early morning
light of late summer,
slung on a branch
next to some ant
moss and blowing
softly on a
concupicent breeze:
A big bra, or so
it seemed, each
cup could hold
a grapefruit surely.
A horn of plenty
I have hungered
for the rest of my life.
And out of those
two cups, this third
of song, or poetry
about song: the
dolphin one
attendant of foam
born Aphrodite.
Red nipples rising
in the pool
and a revolution
rising between
my legs. Just like
me, they long to be
close to you.
There was a girl
in the schoolyard
that last day
of a wilderness
I could not yet
enter, a darkhaired
wanton looking girl
with big breasts
wearing tight jeans
and a short blouse
revealing squeals
of tanned belly
and back -- I thought
surely she must have
owned that bra
before she
transfigured night
and boyfire by
unhooking,
freeing and flinging
that brassiere
still dripping with
moonwaters in
the first light of
my puberty.
O pure transfiguration.
The song here,
of course, is
Santana’s “Black
Magic Woman,”
Carlos ripping
out solos that
swim along the
long arched curve
of her sweaty back,
equal parts
howl and heave.
She became the
pure opposite
of my pure riffs
of puppydawg love,
nursemaid of
the hard rock of lust,
evil and delight
unequalled.
The girl looked
in my eyes at some
moment as I sat
there waiting for
the morning bell --
or do I as always
imagine? -- and her eyes
seemed quenched
in that forbidden dark.
And became midwife
to my own.
How that flippant
brassiere (which
some hick probably
stole from a sister
and heaved up there
for a gross joke)
swung for months
in the sprouting tree
of my diddler’s paradise,
the one who will
always believe a
woman’s beauty
and delight is
a personal beach.
How that 14 year old
girl sprouted deep
in my longing
at the deep end
of perfect love,
downward burning
into the murk
of fatal excess.
The perfect fantasy
of fucking which
all men must suffer
in their love
or die of thirst.
“Black Magic Woman”
weaving black snakes
through the sacchyrine
turns of “Close to You”
like a shadow
of Karen Carpenter’s
secret hunger.
All body, unchaste,
ravenous.
“Few archaic representations of Odysseus’ adventure are known. The Boston Museum of Arts contains a black-figured Corinthian aryballos dating from the second quarter of the sixth century BC, which shows two sirens sitting on a rock with their lips apart singing. The rock is curiously ship-shaped, and to its right appears a rectangular object which Bulle and others have taken to represent Circe’s palace. To the right again, though as the vase is round any precise orientation is difficult, is Odysseus’ ship and crew with the hero bound to the mast.
“So far the painting, which, incidentally, is the earliest known, is an accurate enough representation of the Homeric story, but certain other features are difficult to explain. Two enormous birds either hover above or perch on the hurricane-deck, while behind the Sirens a female figure with a human form croaches before the rock’s phallic-shaped stern. A large fabric (?) conceals the ship’s poop, the end of which is curiously fashioned and includes an object shaped like a phallus. If the object is a phallus (and phallic objects are common in Corinthian art), then its presence may be intended to emphasize the Sirens’ allure.”
-- John Pollard, Seers, Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century BC (Italics are mine.)
VASE PAINTING, BOTTOM
Nov. 6, 2006
Wild sirens lure me back to
the pinkest folds of history.
They point me to a girl
swimming fast between
my legs in the summer pool
of my 13th year, her red
suit pure cerulean in
the dazed wake of bubbles
I felt below as I reached
and clutched after her,
grazing a ghostly ankle.
They sing to me of
another girl a year
later who invited me into
her bedroom where
she took off her jeans
and sat crosslegged
with me on the bed
bitching about parents &
school & what to do when
she at last turned 18.
They sing how later,
on a dark dock
down from her house,
she frenched me with
all the madness in
my brain that couldn’t
hear anything she’d said
while I was staring
at her pantied cunt,
a fire which soaked
everything like the
moon above us on
that lakeside night.
Today they sing
loudest of a girl
in my junior high
school whose heavy
breasts & sullen eyes
suggested an enactment
so pure I could not
say the word but dreamt
it savagely beneath
my darkened sheets.
They point me to
that day I came to
school to see a big
white bra flapping
and twisting up
in the branches
of a sprawling Southern
oak in the schoolyard;
back then they told
me it was hers
& hung there for me.
Sirens paint themselves
in those three girls
on the my tale’s vase-
bottom in a round
so I can’t tell if
they’re fully behind
or yet to come;
whether I’ve sailed on
beyond them or
remained behind on
some Circean rock,
dreaming the a
life’s pulp novel,
the sweet prisoner
of her or my or Your desire.
Erectile phalli throng
the scenes I still fantasize,
rising up behind those
girls like the oak
masts of a ghost ship
I may still be aboard,
each Siren curvature
held fast by my own
longing, spears impaling
me with what I saw
in them, in whatever
by those totems
I dreamt they offered me.
The holy clench
was sexual but more,
a pure sea-drenched thrall
past all harbors, houses,
moral intents for which
bodies were pale
substitutions for grander
ceruleans. Going all
the way with them
was too far for me
back then, or so
I thought: I lingered
just before the folds
of night in terrified
desire, refusing to
back down, fearful
of what I’d find
at the bottom of the dive.
And yet, the folds
of night which
parted only so far
parted just enough
for an oblique
mystery to well
gold spermacetti
into my first-pried
mind, engendering
a faculty for riding
fishes without
the actual importunance
of sperm, without the
factual engenderings
which made mommies
of girls & packs away
every sail meant to
catch wild winds.
I bought the ruse’s
sexual conceit -- how
could I not, so green,
so puerile, so unfathered
in my horning -- You
deigned a distant,
down-seas mentoring,
brute father, my own
dad a thousand miles
away, the gambols of
TV men no baritone
to steel my own.
I took to sex the way
I found in booze the
solution for the problem
child I was, believing
hook line and sinker
all the lala labials
singing forth from bras
and panties, a sound
so musical I forgot
(or wasn’t told)
how bottomless
a Siren’s mouth can go.
Poor fool errant me,
forever on those Bodysseys,
always offhsore a
native land to call my own.
Still, the thought occurs
to me today that
the vase’s bottom is
round because those
first mysteries that
paint Sirens on
the keel of
this ship of bones
are enduring, vast
and bluest for
being most true and
loudest where they
aren’t, and most
silent: What I so believed
which so crucified
me round and
down the years
proves the closest thing
to a religion that
my salt blue heart
can embrace as
genuine, fateful,
meant. That bra
swinging high
in an oak tree
of my middle
schooling days
was heaved
for me by Sirens
in the receipt of
dreams where
I paid them due
having my way
with that bra’s
nude tenant,
or she with me,
deep in the back
seat hard rock
juicy night
of mind’s fashioning
as I lay home
alone in bed.
My hands
played beneath
the sheets while
in my mind I
went up and in
that bad girl’s
tshirt, lifting up and
off bra-fabric to
palm such big warm
boobs, my thumbs
surprised at nipples
big as mushrooms
& all the while she’s
singing, taking off
t-shirt and flinging
that big bra up into
the tree, her voice
much like the sea’s
as it washes cross the
bow of a ship too
happily distracted
in its courses to
mark the rocks
ahead. There
in the fixity of
a boy’s hot gaze
deep into a dream
of a girl he never
fucked but did
a thousand nights,
where an image
offshore of the
object of an affliction
he could not name
sufficed to loose
a flood of semen:
There I paint a vase
for every first
encounter, placing
the Siren up
in the mast
where a bra is
swinging piratical
in the breeze,
signalling her
name, the
aim and end of all
imagined booty which
surfeits not me but
You, big daddy,
her daddy too,
dreaming on your
ancient throne
at the bottom of
the sea behind
beneath this big
white writing chair.
My hand writes
what yours is
twitching in its dream,
cupping and squeezing
those marvelous
breasts, milking
a music so akin to joy
that the dry world
floods forever
& the known sea
is suddenly both
strange and wild
as a Siren’s silent eyes,
a pandemonium of
silence above
the fold-and-crashing
cries of a thousand
fantasized spread thighs.
KIMBERLEY BLUE
1994
She is a blue stream
winding through
the smoke and booze
long brown hair
and blue blue eyes
the high tide of her body
straining against
the shore of her dress
blue spandex sparkling
like morning water
in this jaded light
She stops before me
with all night behind
all winter outside
all broken hearted
somehow eclipsed
a black aura in
this sapphire's halo
she smiles on me
sweetly & asks
would you like a dance
and I say sure
She lifts her dress
lays it on my lap
reaches behind
to unleash blue lace
and begins to
wave and weave her body
round rich jazz
I inhale her deeply
a musk of jasmine and orchid
and I am only here
in this brilliant shadow
captive to blue billows
dreaming in my balls
Something too strong
for words not a wave
but more than a sigh
washes out of me and
climbs the salmon run
of her dance
Up knees up thighs
to hips whispering
whiskey saxophones and lace
Up smooth belly
to breasts so proud
they startle me
even here
even at such a naked price
When my eyes
rise all the way
I find her
watching me
watching her
for one two three beats
and we're in some other room
too foolish to question
too swollen to ignore
too soon swept away
She smiles and looks
off into the mirror
to admire my lust
glowing on her skin
and devotes her motions
to a deeper blue
and that is that
Around the bar
other women repeat
this dance for other men
each pair a room where
a man tries to drink
deeper than a woman goes
and the night
is an empty glass
on any beach
where just one sip
would surely drown us all
FULL MOON AT COCOA BEACH
October 1995
The surf was pounding
the air when we climbed
out of my car, hurling
sea mist toward
a full moon now
breaking from clouds.
The pier was closing early
that night, swarmed
by the high surf
of a hurricane's
turbulent pass
many miles to sea.
The guard said
an advisory was out
for a high tide come morning
with fifteen foot waves.
We leaned on a rail
halfway down the pier
and watched the night.
The horizon a wash of
foam and darkness.
Shards of moon
scattering like silver fish
in the glassy curl
of a wave before tumbling
into foam and thunder
and rocking the pier.
You leaned to watch
a wave pass under,
your dress fanning
wild in the breeze.
The wave I felt
curved that satin and
the mystery beneath
into moon and sea.
Later we walked on
the beach, found
a place to sit
and talked a long while,
telling our stories
as warming strangers do
who find the distance
between them narrowing
to less than tissue.
It was after midnight.
The beach, the sea,
the moon took us
somewhere
on a silver stream.
It was a gift
that rose unhurried
from the depths of
some heart which must have
always known these things,
recalled from old loves
or the salt soundings of the womb
or perhaps the full store
of ineffable moments
a man and a woman
have ever stumbled on together,
a silver strand of DNA
pulsing and receiving
this tide.
Having forgotten joy
for so long on a road
of deaths small and large,
having gotten so lost amid
hurry and complication
and complacence,
that night slapped
me back to life.
Warmed by something
I can never name,
we opened our arms
to one embrace
and then walked away.
WAVE RAVE
from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000
The present/
Autumn 1985
The wave the sea
woman dashed
on me in the
welcome of
a few melusines
has baptized me
into a curve
and curl, an
arch foam
ache and break:
I accept today
that such loves
may have only
been moonbeams,
faulty ego
boundaries &
juvenile whim:
But the wave
itself is
one of the greater
angels, a titanic
motion swelling
up to kiss the
moon: One night
years after Donna
left me on the
shore I walked
Cocoa Beach
with a woman
Donna’s age:
A full moon
high above a
surf impossibly
stirred by a
hurricane
200 miles
out to sea; Waves
like we had
never seen at
that timid beach
scrolling in
huge dark swells
& the smash
& hiss of surf
a dull pounding
blissful roar:
Silver milk
in those waves
poured from
a crazy moon
& a stiff warm
breeze blowing
through the desire
we felt for each
other but could
not, would not
touch for the ties
she kept with
another: A
dazzling night
in which we
were gifted
with a sea so
few would ever
see: Some time
after midnight
on that silvered
beach where
angels sang
brokenly & eternally
of desire and its
terrible torn
beauty we stopped
talking & listened
& looked
& touched each
other’s hand, just
once, hugged,
just once, kissed
for a second then
turned to go:
I wrote a poem
on it and later
set the night
to music on
a keyboard
synthesizer (no
guitar could
suffice, I’ve learned)
tolling these
slow sure chords,
Emaj7 - Cmin7
F#min7 - Amaj7,
composing wave
after wave
of basso bellows
& swelling strings
& dazed dreamy
overtones caught
in the suck and
the roar of
a remembered night:
O I’m still
desperate to
describe the wave
of the sea woman
rising in me
in you impossibly
high fraught
with the ache
and plunge of
perfect union,
sure in its
rhythm & pulse
& chording &
broken utterly
when cusp trembles
foams & turns
down at the
moment of coming
falling weightless
for aeons in a
sheer glass curve
collapsing in a
smash and a
roar into oblivion:
I’m 43 now
and doubt
any such wave
does more than
shipwreck &
estrange us from
all we build and
strive for in
such difficulty:
No marriage
abides by such
a wave, no
poems or songs
ever summon
it truly back &
it’s an utterly
selfish amoral
unworthy
unwholesome
surrender no
one else in the
world gives
one tiny turd for:
Yet I desired
her & she kissed
me with that wave
& I can’t stop
this furious scrawl
down the page
mounting this
babel of joy:
Yesterday in
the spinning class
the instructor
was both lovely
& cruel, asking
us to pedal
harder faster up
an impossible
slope: It was
then that I truly
saw the wave I here
praise, this fearsome
nor’easter of a
swell curving
up high high
and higher,
mountainous to
moon: Oh
the teacher was
almost beyond
my heart & I
almost gave out
toward the end,
staying in gear
12 while she called
out 13, 14, 15:
She finally let
us go to
downshift &
pedal mad down
the hill & then
slow & slow
& slow till we
pedalled air
in sleepy arcs:
Of course she’s
this muse that
sirens me out
of too little
sleep & then swims
out just beyond
the tip of this
pen singing, “Come—”:
She was in the
3 or 4 women
who for whatever
reasons undressed
me in her waters
& then drowned me:
She stands beside
the real women
I have actually
loved judging their
passions which
always melt
into a deeper
surer love &
flashes her
booty whispering
“you could have
chosen this, you
know”: I cannot
surrender to
her but I will
not let her go:
Blue green monster
rising sinister
& ecstatic toward
a shore of loins
my balls throb
and pulse for
desperate for just
one smooch of
that hopeless
homeless hocus
hooch of
coochie coo
invoked in this
Breviary, this
blue green wave
reaching for
a fruit I can
never reach,
never burst, till
death do I
truly die: Such
is the passionate
singing I can
no more forget
than the sea
can reclaim it’s
orphaned moon:
Ah desperate
I am this morning
stung and dazed
by the foam of
one wave so
fucking long ago
rising anew here:
And I’m judged
as unworthy now
as I was then:
My hands weary
& aching & tingling
& the loam of
pages fattening
into a mound,
a mountain,
a sea, a cosmos
in the hollows
of a conch, a
pale flickering
dream at the
end of a farewell
& still I can’t
name it or
claim it
nor most of
all let it go:
The woman
of the sea has
exactly what
she wished: And
I her wandering
wounded dolphin
surfer watch the
horizon and wait
for the waters to
heave the next
slow swelling chord:
RED SILK DRESS
2000
Black formal slacks, black shiny shoes,
black jacket, plum silk shirt,
black bow tie, black belt, black
sox, bright cologne, blackened heart:
I’d spent half a grand on these
threads meant together for
just one night, one moment:
I’d separated from my wife
and stayed that way, perhaps,
just so I could walk into the
company Christmas party and
see you in that red silk dress
and so you could see me
see you with such pride and joy.
Pretty silly shit, eh? And the
moment of course fared poorly
as such things go in the real,
when expectations flutter like
frightened birds amid the
harsh and vulgar noise of
the truths we build our houses in.
There you were in that oriental
dress with your hair held up
with chopsticks (and beneath
wearing the red bra and thong panties
you pulled from a Victoria’s
Secret bag on Friday before I
blasted you for all we weren’t)
looking oh, so beautiful: But you
were with your boyfriend,
walled there as you have chosen
in high hopes of love as something
real and lived. And I without my
wife, my guest your boyfriend
so your sister could be there too,
which meant I really was alone.
And showed it, too. Ah but
dapperly, smoothing through the
awkward folds and wrinkles of
solitude with a smile, greeting
coworkers and their beloveds,
pouring down the booze.
You sat across me at our
table animated and eager,
dark red lipstick an architecture
of smiles, kissing each morsel
of food you lifted to your lips.
Isn’t it strange how clear these
images remain, even though you
and I were so unconnected,
mute to all we once so eagerly
would say to each other, our
words like wild horses racing
towards each other on a wildest
beach by an unnamable sea?
Tired of chatter with your boyfriend
(easy enough, but weird) and pained
to sit so far across the table from
you, I excused myself to stand
at the bar with a Scotch.
Jennifer left her husband’s
side and slid drunkenly down
to lean in close, asking where
my wife was and why I was
alone and saying she was sorry
our friendship lapsed after I
started hanging out with you.
She was drunk so I didn’t try
to interpret the code, just enjoy
the warmth of some woman
leaning in close, my own
drunkenness making me believe
as it always does that the
warmth alone is enough.
Eventually she announced I
was gay and it too bad that
I couldn’t admit that to myself.
I smiled my gay smile and thanked
her, sailing back into the room,
a lover these days mostly of the
shambles my love of women
has led me to. Later you tried
to get me to go along to a club
for dancing, but by then
the booze and anger had
distilled a bodiless removal,
as if the very images I had
lived for these weeks had
lost all gravity. You wanted
that one slow dance, but
I think we’ve already had that.
Naw, I’m outta here, I said,
and you did not look up
when I said goodnight.
I drove downtown
for a Scotch at the Kit Kat Klub
and a beer at the Sapphire
and a last beer down the
trail at the Doll House. How
I wanted to find you there
for the first time, you in your
red silk dress and me in my
black bow tie, and have a
night of slow dances, the
way we have never been able
to anywhere but on this computer
screen. But you weren’t there,
and nothing else I saw warmed
me in the least, and so I went
home and threw my clothes
on the floor, eager to start
putting it all behind me.
The next day was beautiful
only as Florida in winter
can be, a sigh of a smile
on a dream of a day,
fair and lightly breezed with
everything feeling like love
can be, or should be, or was.
I sat in a chair on my mother’s
porch, dozing some, washing
my hangover in the pure song
of the day, battling hard guilts
of money wasted and grief for
my wife and anger at what
you and I can’t wake to.
And trying to build what comes
with these bloody idiot blocks.
I cried hard at dinner, surprising
both myself and my mother —
old wounds furrow deep
their hard harvest, I guess. Walked
alone afterward the blocks
around my mother’s home,
one world decked with blinking
Christmas lights, the other all
blue shadows mounted by a full moon.
Between those worlds I walk,
offering these words to you as
witness for good or ill of whatever
the true binds in life are.
Was that one moment at the
Christmas party worth all it
has cost me? You bet. And
now that I have written it down
I guess it can be gone.
WAVE STORY
2001
The waves rise
and fall, each in
their own measure
yet tethered
to the last.
The past is
circulation—
we breathe it out,
it hauls us back in.
Love breaks in us
like the waters we
arrived on: tide
after tide ignorant
of the toll.
No poem can
measure this.
Writing the lines
is just a call
beyond the last
harbor I fled,
out by the final
rocks and that lone
tower whirling its
hard white beam.
And each wave has
its own wings
which rise and fall,
gossamer and brute
and never ours at all.
CIRCE
2004
It’s been so many years
since I left you on that first
bed, drowsing while I
crept out. -- Or had
you already abandoned
me before I thought
to leave you there?
Did you flit out
the window like the
dream I could
not keep, leaving
behind the part of love
I thought was booty
but later found
that sack slack
and empty in
the shadows of
the bow as it kissed
the next shore.
Circean wares don’t
ever leave the bedding
of their wiles: My longing
is just the snout she
gave me for scenting her
ahead, wild for her
dusky immortelles,
my blue eyes cursed
in the ocean’s fixed gaze
ever beyond the bounds
toward that whatever
next gambol where
she forever next resides.
Where curves are rounded
most the moist-eyed lover
knows no night can ever be
long enough, no tale
an ocean too wild
to voyage across.
The next shore simply
dresses now in
the same oldschool
debauch. Will I ever
write another poem?
Someone deliver me
from this whale of swoon
who thrones and altars
and rudders this bliss.
Connive for me to
clear the reefs which
shores my heart’s soul kiss.
HEAVEN’S GATE
from Shamanic Letters, 2005
Shamans, like the dead, must cross a
bridge in the course of their journey to
the underworld. Like death, ecstasy implies
a “mutation,” to which myth gives
plastic expression by a “perilous passage.”
... The symbolism of the funerary bridge
is universally disseminated and extends
far beyond the bounds of shamanic
ideology and mythology. This symbolism
is linked, on the one hand, to the myth
of a bridge (or tree, vine, etc.) that once
connected earth and heaven and by
means of which human beings effortlessly
communicated with the gods; on the other
hand, it is related to the initiatory
symbolism of the “strait gate” or “paradoxical
passage” ... Once the easy communication
between earth and heaven were broken
off, people could not cross the bridge
except “in spirit,” that is, either dead
or in ecstasy.
-- Eliade, ibid. 483
Heaven always hides itself,
like a spinning spiral castle
with a gate that lowers only
once in a lifetime, just thrice
in all our lives. It’s somewhere
behind my beloved; I know
it’s there but she fills the
doorway with that sad
familiar strangeness I’m so
enthralled with that I
forget just the raiment
and daily transport of the
goddess I’ll never get to
love and who’s always
calling my name. Another
cold front is changing
Florida back into its
brutal cousin, ravaged
and windswept, the
night sky a cloud-mottled
cooling augur of the
solstice days ahead.
Cats sleeping in their
curl outside and in,
noses down, eyes
sealed in the pleasure
of cat dreams. Wounds
got me here, in my
battening and betterment
of them I mean. They
were inside augments
of that heaven’s
disappearance into
bad days and nights.
Your physic was horrific
as I learned to fall but
good, taking comfort
in false heavens as the
only havens this world
affords. That spreading
glow of whiskey which
tranced the flighty
brain, the wholesale
revival of the sacred
in my whoring, settling
for love’s obverse,
moon instead of Earth,
down some drunken
woman’s drenched
ravines. Old wounds
thus became cathedrals
of awe and awfulness
in which the toll of
nightly masses damn
near killed me as I
drove in sotted funk,
bellowing my orisons
as the sea belched
all its moons. I did
not die but for years
was worse, the blackout
revenant in a blacklit
tableaux of rude indigo,
God’s curse on every
woman I got close to,
my need too freighted
with high greed to
be much of a lover,
much someone a
woman cared to call
beloved. Well, that
song is by now a
tattered old standard
which muzak stations
leak like syrup from
the speakers of every
elevator going down.
I got therapy, joined
AA and worked the
steps, I poured oceans
of salt verbiage into
those old-school wounds,
eating all the scum
I scattered wide
while beating this
blue drum which I’ll
never understand,
much less mint or
mortgage. Years are
now passing with me
down another way,
reverent of the depths
in which I once
was revenant and fell,
hallowing that harrowing
by ringing the same
old ding-dong bell
cast in the blackout
abysms of Your hell.
Is each migraine’s
hooves the white wings
of old hangovers, blue
echoes of black drums?
Is each song a gripping
back down the gradient
You once reached up
to grab me by the
balls, my going down here
like Beowulf in the mere
to where M’am Grendel’s
tending bar at that
tavern ghosting the
bottom of my nights, her
teats squirting the milk
of all I leaked in her,
her ghostly smiles
dragging every line I write
down to the same dark
rumpled beds? Heaven
hides itself even here,
where a life survived
to build a bright chapel
of love exactly where
old wounds fell, the
same old music of
rapine and rapture
evanescent and horrific
in the wings, distilling
quaffs I cannot drink
but think the depths of here.
To shamanize is to keep
wounds open when all
the bars are closed
and my wife sleeps deeply
in her life somewhere,
always, upstairs. You
bid me bang the bejeezus
out of a drum that’s both
ventricle and testicle
of dreams of heaven’s wash
and hiss, a shore which
hears my feet as I gallop
down a life crying blue
heaven, blue moon’s name.
It’s a scarring motion,
a door of flame, a warring
lover no salt or swoon
can tame, much less blame.
posted by Brendan MacOdrum at 8:10 AM
