Blue Oracles

DEAD ME SCROLLS

Nov. 23

Bacis, like Musaeus, is little more than a name to which the authorship of oracles was conveniently referred. Men naturally turn to oracles in times of crisis, so it was only to be expected that the pronouncements of the best-known legendary prophet should have been widely quoted and credited during the Persian War. ... There existed ... if Herodotus’ sources are accurate, a corpus of oracles which were referred to Bacis at the end of the sixth century BC.

-- John Pollard, Seers, Shrines and Sirens

Here in this blue scriptorium
at the bottom of the night
I write the old truths down.
Each squirt of ink across
the page is another oracle
from behind of what’s ahead.
In the turning and reversing
of the dream my compass
has inverted toward Your
sooth, and the news
I seek is that which leads
me better ie further back;
prophecy thus foretells
what lies uncovered on
the next page, revealing
the contours of the
digs like occiputs of
a long-buried skull
intoning tomorrow’s song.
I’ve filled scroll after scroll
of this blue-boned sooth,
shelving it in a library
that’s between just
me and You, salt father,
half of the corpus
piled up in an aging
man’s singing mind,
the other half
one tiny nook of
drowned Alexandria
glowing eerie and feral
at the bottom of the
writable sea.
I read and the well
clears its throat; I write
and something low
and old pours an urgent
sweet cold draught
of pure silver through
my pen’s mouth,
hauled up from the
deepest sea of all
down Lascaux’s
singing vaults. I have
no idea who this serves,
if anyone at all -- for
me a myriad compulsions
& vanities dross the
gold it mines; it’s vatic
and fool-savant too,
unerringly binding me
to a cobalt metronome
droning metrically
in whiskey-malted
preter-tequila-salted
singsong dirty rhymes.
Its oblique wings are
nigh impossible
for the tribe, lost
amid a zillion
more accessible
acceptable & fun
ways to roar & fly.
The oracles pile on
shelves to
grey and crumble
in the fall of this
man’s life: A library
for the sack
and burning, the
flame which pyres
dreams. Perhaps that’s
what these tongues
were crying for but
got trapped instead in
bony margins, between
these ears too-sexualized
seams. Maybe with
my final sigh
these dead me scrolls
will release You at last
to swim naked and
free upon the
wave which washes
through us all.
What’s curious today
is that these curios
hold magic thrall
for just an hour
apiece: each waking
rings a new bell
in the prophet’s starry
mind, causing him
to haruspicate a new
reading of the ancient
text, the next inside
account which is
good only for that day’s
song, then shelves
in shadow with the rest,
amassing somewhere behind,
down digestion’s tract
where history is shat
& lies amid its ochred
precedents. The topmost layer
is what I add before
I too am gone.
Yesterday’s sooth
is forgettable, tomorrow’s
too vague to tell:
only now do the
vast flukes
smash and hammer
the oracles of Bacis
which, it is said,
were stored in a
sacred cache like
the inmost vault
of Grecian destiny,
regardless whether
they were true or not.
Those oracles had the
gleam of a proof
that reads two ways
at once, offering
not one truth from
the deep but two:
Words from a mouth
perplex and blue
and shifty as the sea,
rollers of salt wilderness
retaining their
emboldened shape
in ten thousand
scrolls lined up
in rows down down
down this page.
It’s interesting to
me at least, today,
enough to stopper
the whole dingdong
wash between what
begins and ends today
in this spout of
spuming verse. And
now that I’m done
the meat cools fast,
leaving just a skull
of paper stone,
that dead and
bleached seas’s
scroll I am, if such a
thing exists, if there’s
any truth that all this
sooth could live
here way back there
and thus to glory
row hereafter.





SIBYLLYA

Nov. 24

The female counterpart of Bacis was Sibylla, whose name and origin alike have resisted analysis. She is first described by the philosopher Heraclitus “with raging lips uttering prophecies grave, stark and unadorned.” At some stage she was pluralized, but all her early associations are with the east, whether Phrygia, Babylon, Libya or the Troad. Being legendary figures, the dates of the various Sibyls are obscure and vary in the authorities from the pre-Trojan era to the time of Solon. Best known in later times was the Erythrean Sibyl, whose cave in Asia Minor has been discovered, but it is perhaps not without significance that the oracles quoted all refer simply to a single prophetess... It seems likely that the Sibylline tradition moved west with the colonizers, and reached Cumae and Delphi too. ... Whether the Sibyl was a female shaman, or whether she had always claimed to be inspired by Apollo, we do not know.

-- John Pollard, Seers, Shrines and Sirens

She haunts a far-Eastern cave
in my ear, singing eerie and
low in the wave-lashed voice
of rear things in their cove
distant and strange and
ferociously blue, like the
conch’s drowned insides
softly roaring all things true.
She pronounces to soul birds
the inside names of the world,
flinging wide my thought’s wings
like an unquiet wave hungry
for shores in full gusto of
pent roar of a man
whose blue balls cry
for harbor at last
where he can unload
the full freight of wet
dreams stored in bursting
barrels just below.
What she says never makes
sense when I hear it at first;
it’s like news from a far land
in a foreign-bourned and
brawling twang, a brogue
two-fisted in meter
with a dark meaning in
its wake, smashing like
flukes her full import
much later in the tale,
the oracle breeching
and leaping like a
black exultant whale.
The maid who helped
my mother keep house
in Pittsburgh when I was
three would call to me
“Pretty girls walking by!”
and laugh as I raced
to the front window for
what the day delved for
my view. She’d say to
my mother, “He ain’t
gonna be nothin’ but a
lover!” The fins of my
frenzy were as obvious
to her as they became
to me, and the imperious
shading of her oracle
haunts my words for
world to this day.
A lover and that’s all,
a daunting egreeser
of Cupid’s salt tide,
beseeching curved wavelet
for a peek up inside
their pretty blue skirts
as life passed forever by,
taking with them in
those velveteen mysteriums
all I must ride to
the ends of all seas.
Each crash and roar
of blue pent desire
bears the truth of her words,
not so much legitimizing
my errors as giving
the saddle a sense of
homewarding truth
as I ride rude
and homeless all waves,
my voyage a
salt confidential,
all secrets hush-hush,
in revel and plain
view for all. So when
my mother warned me
at 13, “Son, there’s
more to life than a
bed and a babe
and a bottle of booze,”
Sibylla was only
confirmed further
down the roots of
her jade junk truth,
suggesting hidden worlds of
blue in a girl’s pretty
eyes, each wave becoming
the crown of something
passing by much further
down: The second
oracle salted the first
so that I could
never look a woman
between the thighs
without in some way
espy an old cave’s
mossy door from which
I heard Sibylla croon
in my own thumping blood
a ditty I whistled
as the thickening
steeple arose in my hips,
tolling the fish
who totems this ball-
peened hammer I hurl
down the page.
She’s singing even now,
at the dew-laps of sense,
not so much bidding
as goading my hand
to commence writing
the names yet again
of her first signature
in the womb of my ear.
I’ll never be more
than a lover of
all sights of that sound:
her oracle’s both
blessing and curse
in my darker mind’s
equivocal sense,
like a curved harvest
blade that reaps
exactly what it mows.
It keeps the view limited
marginal to all
for sure: but it also
drills far far down,
unpacking every
meaning of that
sweet wet spot,
finding as
it dives aquifers and
cathedrals, lunar wombs
and first blues, everything
to make a spirit soar
and sigh watching the
prettygirls parade softly by.

Winter Ghosts

When an old cultural canon is demolished, there follows a period of chaos and destruction which may last for centuries, and in which hecatombs of victims are sacrificed until a new, stable canon is established, with a compensatory structure strong enough to guarantee a modicum of security to the collective and the individual.

- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

***

The sixth century BC was an era characterized both by psychological and intellectual unrest when the utterances of prophets were believed to be inspired, and the miraculous feats of shamans were generally accepted. Best known of the former were the oracles of Bacis and the Sibyl who, whether historical persons in origin or mere generalities attached to a class of individuals who claimed to possess a direct approach to god, are yet of importance as being typical of the kind of authority to which men appealed during the ferment of uncertainty of a period yet uninfluenced by the beginnings of rational thought.

-- John Pollard, Seers, Sirens and Shamans

***

... you have learned to falter
in this good way: stand still, walk on, remember—
let one by one things come alive like fish
and swim off into their future waves.

— William Stafford, “In the Museum”

***

.. originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive -- indeed, an all-embracing -- feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we may assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a great or less degree, it would exist in them side by side with a narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpoint to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe -- ... the “oceanic” feeling.

... In the realm of the mind ... what is primitive is .. commonly preserved alongside the transformed version which has arisen from it... When this happens it is usually in consequence of a divergence in development: one portion (in the quantitative sense) of an attitude of instinctual impulse has remained unaltered, while another portion has undergone further development.

-- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, transl. James Strachey

***

The derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontravertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged by childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection. Thus the part played by the oceanic feeling, which is something like the restoration of a limitless narcissism, is ousted from a place in the foreground. The origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness.

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents





PRAYER FOR OUT KITTIES,
OR, THE SONG OF THE NEXT SONG

Nov. 26

Where there is danger
there too is hope.

-- Holderlin

Rough and rude outside
at this darkest hour,
cold and heavy-winded,
pure misery for those
stray cats who refuse
to come inside or
even climb into
towel-lined boxes
that would proffer
the sign of a
warm bower.
Misery too for
an age that can’t
yet find the swaddles
of what it awakens;
our darker gut
tells us it’s there,
just over the margins
of our thought,
outside our religion,
despite all the
tools we’ve
forged to break
the last remnant of
its semaphores
down and in.
I can’t name it
but a prescience
tells me its Him,
the fish in full
fervor astride his
blue-foaming wave, a
even-green impulse
hollering the news
toward every shore
of what it means
to let go the reins
& let the totem
go where it sings.
A faculty for horsing
the insides of things
wherever You deign
in Your next savioring,
after all the wrong
towers tumble into
illegible dreams.
Cold winds engender
babes in our manger,
but such bitter bluster
must first make more
than a few stray
cats miserable outside
where we flee and
wander and seek.
It all sucks a big one
going down one drain,
vacating the temples
and cities, making
hallow the stiletto-
heeled wallow of
forever-rich folk,
emptying
the sea itself of
all traces of roguery,
alkalines, salt,
melting the icecaps,
drowning the page
of its once-singular
vocal, that lighthouse
subsumed in a
vast digital glare.
Going, gone perhaps
when none of the relics
still glow in the night.
And there’s not a
damn thing I can say
or should but I do
anyway, praying,
bless those sweet
kitties, Grandfather,
envelop them in
an accidentally
comforting nook
in Your brutal black
cloak as You
ravage on over
astride the next
wintry roller
I squawk and margin
and slowly discover
inside the next
book’s dying-to-
be-found ogham
stone covers.



MASTERY

2002

Glenn Gould launched a brilliant career
as a pianist at age 24 when he recorded
Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Shortly before
he died at age 50 he recorded them again.
He told an interviewer that he recognized
his style in the earlier recording—wild
runs and trills, bright surfacings—yet
its heart seemed unfamiliar. The material
was the same—he’d always loved the Master’s
genius for exploding many ideas at once—
but his own way of riding that music had
deepened so much that the earlier talent
sounded strange, like the sound of
someone walking outside a dark, wet window.

On the later recording you can hear
Gould humming along as he played.
He hated the habit he’d formed over the years,
and it made hard work for the engineers:
Yet he knew he always played better
dancing along with his voice. Imagine painting
while you dreamed, or making love in a storm.
There is a mastery which finds the heart
of the heart and learns how to stay there.
None of that was apparent to the younger man.
It took decades for Gould to find the
deeper handles of mastery. I think of him
walking outside that house trying to go home.
Of one day finding a door, not in what he knew,
nor in the brilliance of his hands, but by
abandoning himself to what opened when
the keys of the piano ceasing running; and flew.

The Ages of Man

Prelude

The riddle of the Sphinx (from the old mother goddess culture) which Theseus solves, ceasing the practice of sacrificing young women to her (he also gets the city & can marry the widow of the king, his mother), goes like this: What is it that first goes on four, then on two and eventually on three? Crafty Theseus thinks, and answers: MAN. As a child he walks on all fours, then as an adult on two, then as an old man on three (two legs with the aid of cane, or his ever-wounded dick.)

The Sphinx throws herself into the sea, and Greek civilization leaps forward.

***


I.

Friday 11/17

While the primacy of the genital zones is being established through the process of puberty, and the erected penis in the man imperiously points toward the new sexual aim, i.e. towards the penetration of a cavity which excites the genital zones, object-finding, for which also preparations have been made since early childhood, becomes consummated on the psychic side. When the very incipient sexual gratifications were still connected with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct had a sexual object outside one’s own body, in the mother’s breast. This object is later lost, perhaps at the very time when it becomes possible for the child to form a general picture of the person to whom the organ granting him the gratification belongs. The sexual instinct later becomes autoerotic, and only after overcoming the latency period is the original relation re-established. It is not without good reason that the suckling of the child at the mother’s breast has become a model for every love-relation. Object-finding is really a re-finding.

-- Sigmund Freud, “The Transformations of Puberty”

***

The transformation of the child into the adult, which is achieved in higher societies through years of education, is accomplished on the primitive level more briefly and abruptly by means of the puberty rites that for many tribes are the most important ceremonies of the religious calendar.

... (The) secret dimension of the world is the revelation of the men’s rites, through which the mind grows to knowledge, and after beholding which one is far above the plane of the mental system of the child. It is a marvel, a source of wonder, well worth the pain and fright of a second birth.

... The imprint irreversibly established in infancy as energy-releasing signs are (here reorganized), and through an extremely vivid, increasingly frightening and unforgettable series of controlled experience are in the end to be so recomposed that the boy’s course will be directed forward into manhood; not to merely open, uncommitted manhood, but specifically to a certain style of thought and feeling, impulse and action, comporting with the requirements of the local group.

- Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology



In the puberty rituals
of Lascaux (as best as
we can figure and
imagine), male elders
dressed up as bugaboos
and stormed their
camp at night,
hauling off the
screaming
girly men
while the
mothers dutifully
wailed and tore
their breasts. The
boys were then
manhandled through
Lascaux’s brute
mouth and forced
down a half-mile
of black descents,
at several junctures
having to squeeze
between walls clenched
tight as death.
Separated from
the mothers they
lived in such union
with til then,
they moaned and
chattered through
the cold harrows of
those halls,
bloody, wobbly,
eyes wide to nothing’s
blackest stare.
Something in their
psyches was torn
away like a foreskin,
leaving them raw
and wide open to what
the fathers would
do next.
There, in the deepest
caverns of the cave
complex, a torch
was lit: And the
whole panoply of
the animal hunt
foregrounded by
their unmasked
fathers’ faces
screamed into
their eyes.
The essential
ritual lay in
a man’s panoply of
elks and mammoths
painted again and
over for 30 thousand
years; it seared
forever in their
brains the image
of the men they
must become
and muster in
their own sons’ eyes.
Here was the second
birth into the
man’s adult life.
And thus the
tribe’s elders
reined in those
budding bucks
whose genitals
had outgrown
their mama’s tits
and were now
thirsty to for
a darker milk
sapped in their
mother’s laps.
Right at the
precipice where
they were about
to leap back
into their mothers,
the fathers impressed
those pricks
back into the
primal stone
which girders all
men’s loins;
then steered
their appetites
toward the
tribe’s survival
in the grand
libido of
the Hunt. Thus
the myths transferred
from walls to mind
through a womb
carved in a man’s thigh,
offering both figure
and ground a
nurture for our nature,
a culture both
archetypal and
tribal so unitive
that the practice
went unchanged
for 300 centuries,
there in that last
room of the million-
year dreamtime.




II.

The river-god Acheloos (“him of the silver eddies”) is set by Homer above Okeanos, “the origin of everything.” Acheloos could beget seas and streams, springs and fountains, just as Okeanos could. When Okeanos was portrayed as an old man with the horns of a bull, the prototype of this portrayal was Acheloos. In other pictures and descriptions, the shaggy head of Father Okeanos -- which as finally only a mask, a countenance of deep, almost sorrowful gravity -- sprouted a lobster’s claw and feeler. The bull’s horn played a special part in the tales concerning Acheloos. Herakles fought with this water-god, as well as with the Old One of the Sea and with Triton. Like these latter, Acheloos had a lower body consisting of a serpent-like fish. But his head was horned, and one of the horns was broken off by Herakles. From the blood that dropped from the wound the Sirens were born, a birth similar to that of the Erynnes. {In one tale, Gaia is made fruitful from the blood shed by her husband Uranos in his maiming/emasculation, and gives birth to the Erynnes.}

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

The situation in America today is not that the sons still need a symbolical patricide and a ritual reminder of it in the form of a totem meal to keep alive the memory of their crime to keep any of them from stepping into the slain father’s shoes. That spirit may have survived as long as there was still a western frontier. The cultural behavior pattern of North America has meanwhile developed into mere contempt for the father. Present-day American culture is no longer motivated by rivalry with the father arising from ambivalence between respect and hatred of him. What is taking place is centered elsewhere, and incidentally includes a non-respect for the father with very little affect indeed.

-- Alexander Misterlich, Society Without The Father (1963)

We walked from the sea
like Jonah, spat from
one immensity to
walk inside a
dream that
had held us in its
own blue thrall
for aeons. Slowly
and without mercy
Gods faded into
kings and heroes,
those mortal appropriations
of formerly divine aloofs
which ebbed mystery
to forward thus
a history. Herakles was a
man to beat the gods,
strutting with a
teen’s fool cajones,
invulnerable,
rassling every father
of fire and water,
causing the Golden
Age to fall.
He bested the Old Man
of the Sea and
Triton; even Archeloos,
that half man half fish
who was by some
accounts the oldest
blue divine of all.
Herakles broke
off one of his horns
in the rout; blood
poured from
a god’s wound
into a strange
deep womb which
in turn gave
birth to Sirens.
Those figures were
thus half of the
most ancient
father -- perhaps they
gout his eyes -- and
half of that wild
boy-man who refused to
be tutored in the ways
of men. Herakles
was Hera’s glory
and her curse,
a mother-deranged
boy going after
dad in a red cape
and trunks, filled
with a parricidal sort
of self-loathing
that makes one
spend his life beating
every man and fucking
every woman. Call
this man the
outrage of Lascaux,
modernity’s prouder
steel father,
a man without
a ritual, the undamned
cock of free will
swinging loud and
proud in the advance
of thing while
bringing culture
to its knees.
He’s stronger than the gods
in the bent imagining
of the stillborn
adolescent, that room-bound
boy who won’t come out,
addled with purply
visions of TV wrestlers
& comicbook heroes
& Bonds of every stripe,
swollen on the tit
he never quite let
go of as the years
of a life drain full away.
The Sirens haunt the
hero as mysteriums,
the strangely familiar
song of foregone
labors in the service
of a lost maimed king.
They judge the hero
unworthy & choir
him to doom,
singing of rapine
& booty & endless
jousts at the bottom
of the sea he stole
from his father. It’s
a song he’s sucker
for, & jumps naked
as a Pict Beowulf
into the wild blue.
He dives and dives
but never gets
down there,
drowning exactly
where he tossed
his father’s horn
so bloody into
the sea. It always ends
right there, in
full heroic collapse
of one to other;
aged and no longer
strong, he faces off
with the next young buck
who skewers him
clean through with
a profaned steel cock
which is the pride
of and mast of his
intemperate sailing.
Such is the new succession,
the next trope on the old
ritual where boys
succeed their fathers
by lopping off their
heads or horns or
balls. Cronos
sickled his daddy’s
dick and his son
Zeus dispatched
him in turn to hell.
And all the later figures
were bewitched by
Siren spells, swinging
bright blades into their doom.
The hero masks the
father’s face we lost
when the son refused
to do as he was told;
the Sirens thus
have a vengeant cast,
like Furies, demanding
horn for horn
that place in our
psyche where
Lascaux graves the sea.




III.


We have been describing a secret identity of the two halves {senex and puer}, two halves not of life, but of a single archetype. This secret identiy of both faces that are actually one face with only some differences of feature should not astonish us, since a corresponding feminine union of sames (the Mother-Daughter mysteries) have been placed at the center of the feminine personality.

... Without this polarity, which is at the essence of the archetype and holds its meaning together, there is perfection but no process, no movement from here to there, from past to future. A tension of ambivalent opposites its the structural precondition for change.

... The main characteristics of each half shows parallels in symbolic forms with the other:

The Holy Old Man as Attik is concealed and as Saturn has his head covered or cloaked; Harpocrates, the boy, is hooded, faceless or covered; so too Attis and telesphoros. saturn has a sparse beard; Mercury wears his first downy beard or a small beard. Saturn is taciturn and guards secrets; Harpocrates has his fingers to his lips. As Mercury is winged, so can Saturn-Kronos, as Aion, or on tombstones, be winged. Both are related to the dead, to time and eternity, and to the Golden Age ... Both show abnormality of the feet ... Saturn is lamed and crippled, the foot of Attis is bound, and Mercury has winged foot-gear and the unbeatable heel of Achilles of heroic illusion. One cannot walk, the other can only fly. The deformity points to their being only a first or second half of the whole reality.

-- James Hillman, “Senex and Puer”

Friday morning, 10 a.m.,
sitting on the upper deck
above a cool clear sunny
sky -- it’s in the 50’s --
squirrels in the oak
at the back of the yard
scritching down at
Red who’s always game for
game. His prey eluded,
that stray cat we feed
now sullenly tests a patch
of sunlit grass to
resume his long day’s nap.
My wife’s out at estate
and yard sales, her stomach
knotted tight with
worry over finding work,
paying bills in December,
hosting Thanksgiving
for her family next
week & all the other
merry lunacies
of the holidays season
which we do not
so much celebrate
as commiserate:
love is aging her and hard.
Meanwhile I have
this day as a timeout
from my own manic
schedule, to luxuriate
here in our home,
write more, delve deeper,
listen to my jazz and
classical CDs, read and
nap and write some more.
I’m home alone with You,
Grandfather, with so
much work to do;
though more and more
I wonder why I bother.
No one cares to read this stuff
& the pile of words just
keeps getting higher
& my will to write it
shrinks in measure
like the shadow
of a libido to make
ends meet, beleaguered
by the lack of
means to reach those ends.
I’m getting old for this
shit & my brain just
ain’t that smart. I’ve
tried to get back to
the deep blue nature
of that swimming pool
where puberty woke
me to gods and demons,
high heaven’s
lemony tarts
squeezing something
in me til Your juice
ran down my leg,
but it seems to
me a blind way
in a much less
sighted world.
Can a wounded man
sire his misbegotten son
in memory, and worse,
only on a paper page?
To what end? Lord knows
if my youth was damaged
today’s youth is an nth
dimension worse, unfathered
even more by their
unfathered dads, unfettered
and unshod, galloping
loose along the shore
& spouting fluorescent jisms
of a noctal silk so black
that surely it is the
dark energy which cracks
our future wide.
Is this tumulus of
words any good for
them? I sponsor
newcomers to AA with
tutelage as fierce as
the priors of Lascaux;
it’s By the Book or Else,
no less, 12 steps out
of the black forest
& then round and
round and round
those steps to
drill their margins
into hopelessly
pickled brains
& all of it mere
preparation to
give it all away, that
sponsorhip which
keeps the elders sane.
For arrested drunks like
me there’s no other
way to keep the plug
in my doom’s jug
than by staying faithful
to the worst truths
in the tale, by keeping
the memory green.
A dark part of my history
is stuck in a whiskey
bottle with an
ancient devilish spirit,
the boy who refused
to jump into
the whale-mouth of
Lascaux & killed
his daddy instead.
He’s the eternal
adolescent with balls
the size of Herakles,
draining every shot
glass in the swamp
of ginned-up jezebels,
basting in the dregs
of Hell. I save myself,
perhaps them too,
by keeping my attitude
true to the AA way,
the straighter and
by the Book the better.
This instruction of
blue verse serves
no one but me in You,
as far as I can tell,
but it is part of
that same program,
schooling the wet
brain in the ways
of deeper water
that thoughts may
be fruitful for the tribe.
Amid much aging
weariness and ennui
and nulled sex I sing
the rockhard man
who found a woman’s
shape inside the
last room of those caves,
a world he married
with his tongue
and cock and spear.
I can’t go on with
this sing-song toll
of heaven’s drowned
bells without his
strong young hands
pulling pulling on the
rope I weave and coil
with these words.
There’s just too much
dross and clutter
outside and in --
our technoculture
burning everything
to cinders of old
meaning and my
verbal arteries so
clogged with books
and songs and dreams,
so much of everything
turning into pure
white ungluing noise.
We need Your help
and mentoring so
desperately Grandfather,
and it’s all that I can do to
set these masques on
paper which may yet
drag that yet-unmanned
boy in me down through
a hole at the bottom
of that pool, and pitch
him into awe and
awfulness where
You still may be revealed.
And if this is just
bullshit, another
day’s pointless salt drone
-- I think much on that
these days -- well, at
least I’ve kept myself
amused & singing
the praises of a cool
sunny day while
a self-drunk world
drinks itself away.
At least I’ll go
whistling & erect &
proud out into
the lost surf
of an old infernal
amplitude set
so low that
whatever I’m here
shouting will
never be heard
out loud. Place
a Siren exactly
here to mark
my grave. Perhaps
some boy will
find it on some
much later day
& read the music
caught between
my lips and hips
and she-shaped rips
I am.



IV.

Saturday 11/18

Mythology ... is progressive, not regressive. And the rites themselves, through which the new sign symbols are impressed on the minds of the growing young in such a way as to recondition the entire system of their innate releasing mechanisms, constitute one of the most interesting and crucial foci of our subject. For it is precisely here that we confront directly the problem of the meeting of the general and the particular, of the elementary and the ethnic, in the field of youth. The initiation rite is the cauldron of their fusion.

And should the fusion not take place?

If it should happen in the case of any particular individual that the impress of the socially enforced reorganization of the infantile imagery should fail of its proper effect, that particular individual’s personal system of references, and consequently of sentiments, would remain essentially infantile and therefore aberrant, isolating, shameful, and frightening, so that the sort of disorientation known so well to the psychoanalytic couches of our contemporary, literarily instead of mythologically and ritually educated civilization would inevitably result. In the traumatic experience of his second birth the individual would have suffered an accident precisely comparable to a misbirth or physical accident in the first. In which case, of course a regressive interpretation of his peculiar mode of experiencing the imagery of local myth would be in order. However, for the psychoanalyst then to make use of the fantasies of that regressive case as a key to the scientific understanding of the progressively functioning and mythology and ceremonialism of the social group in question would be about as appropriate as to mistake a pancake to a souffle.

-- Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology



Ah, but that young man
is pure buckshot,
blown out of childhood
through the twin barrels
of such troubled
parents. My dad suffered
my early years inside
a closet of gay heat,
cloistering his bum-
honeyed pecker inside the
puritanical arrears
of church and home.
He clung to us
in flighty desperation,
warm when he
was there and simply
gone when he was not,
fleeing like a shost
on the subway
far down under us
into Chicago’s
icy concrete mansions
where he worked
and ployed and played.
My mother
only wished to mother
but also bore the cross
of a father she hated,
a man who died
quite young to her
delight (he was in
his fifties). Alas, she
married that man’s
ghost in my father,
a man’s man who
couldn’t understand
(or feared) the nth
part of a woman.
Thus her breasts
for us grew sickly
and galled, depressive,
cold with fear,
desperately in love
with her children
as we fled into our rooms.
When they split
I was 13; she moved
us far South from
that city of gay angels
and far-too-wintry winds,
nursing our wounds
in a house in
Florida that had
a pool right next to
an orange grove.
Having hauled us
back to her womb,
she then went under
the knife, having
her sex cut out &
falling down through
that wound into a
fundamentalist fever
of end-time demonics
salted by a booming
All-Father and at-end-
marriageable Christ.
My father gone,
my mother in retreat,
I entered puberty
hanging on to the diving
board for dear life
while my feet trailed
below in an abysm
of sweet wild blue.
Puberty was all about
finding an edge sharp
enough to cut my
daddy’s dangerballs off
and sever my mom’s
black umbilicus,
freeing me of the boy
I so loathed and was;
I dieted to lose the
baby fat, bleached
my hair blonde
and blonder in the sun,
picked up a cherry-red
guitar and swung
it all: All to swoon
those neighborhood
girls who came
to my room & sat on my
bed while I played
Grand Funk songs
for them. Their new
daddy, our hero.
Thus I committed
the ancient crime,
swinging with glee
a scythe across
my God’s earthly balls,
chucking them
back over my shoulder
into the sea I’d
left behind when
I was baptised
a second time.
I was walking -- no,
running -- into
a wild grove of
my own choosing,
amped on a magnitude
that was mine, all
mine, like a breast
of blue sweetmilk
I had swallowed
whole, with impunity,
in the pure greed
of a boy getting
his world at long last.
No wonder She
rose exactly where
I abandoned my
father roaring wounded
in the tide of his years:
she emerged perfect
and whole, the
complete complicit
complicate enchilada,
blue eyes, angel lips,
blond hair hanging
free to her nerps,
her waist pure
cerulean, waving
hello to mine,
slowdancing with
me to Cream’s
“Badge” at
Cotillion in
my rapture of a
a loud rock n roll
band: Venus my
penis’s massed bugaloo,
crashing forever
down love’s vernal shore.
I saw her in class
and dreamed her
into the life I so
wished, there beneath
gooey sheets of
my nightly frigs,
paying close attention
to infinite details --
the way she gripped
me at the song’s
end sighing Yes,
how she lay back
one the seat of
the car I would own,
eyes advancing into
me as I pushed her
down, the way
her belly fluttered
as my hand breached
its border, no longer
refusing, never again
quite alone; how her
bra lifted up and off
like a house falling down;
the squeeze of those
budding squirters filling
me like a sea of perfect
blue motions of softly-
lapping ecstasies. Night
after night I sang her
back up from the tide
with my hand, gripping
this pen in the first
caterwaul with a dying
father, doing him in.
This was 1972, when
all the sons of this
country were about the
same work, defying
the father as they
died in his war, smoking
dope and blasting hard
rock into the jungle
night, shooting the major,
shouting at Woodstock,
shrieking with glee
with a junior’s
pink panties balled
in my hand, thrown
over my shoulder
getting all of her at last,
someday soon, I prayed
those spermed up lone
nights to the god
I was becoming
in the fountains that
surged. Prometheus
bound to a Marshall
stack, to the rack
of his glorious thievery
in the name of
the new father,
the next stumblebum
to pillage the henhouse.
Did You bless or curse
that curve flint sickle
handed up to me from
my depths, the one
which I used to slice off
one pecker and spark
up the next? Grandfather,
it was You in her
shape, gleaming naked
on the surf, walking directly
at me with eyes like
the sea? Its cold this
morning, 45 degrees,
the hour -- 4:30 a.m. --
still as the stones which
wall up my father’s chapel
far far in the north. That
boulder in its center
is beneath this writing
chair like the coronation
stone stolen from Iona
to Scone to Westminster
Abbey and back. That
boulder is silent here,
which makes me believe
I’ve got it all terribly
wrong -- or right, in
every way that all
fathers must be beheaded
in the name of the son..
This is the season
of the Old King’s despair,
the oldest time of the
year between harvest
and winter solstice --
A withering, dying
time, when all fructive
juice retreats underground.
The hand writing here
is the fag end of that father’s
son, smoked down from
confusion and belligerence,
a cock’s ghost stone
dreaming Venus and
all surfside sport
on a fatherless white
shore, where everyone
but me is female and
naked, glistening with
coconut and pussy
oils, forever at leisure
and undying pleasure.
My reality is just an
errant wank in the shower
maybe once a week
& the prayer of my
wife getting in the
mood maybe once a
month or so &
infinite treasures
of that soak within,
sighing ready and willing
on the page I here jester
for an audience of one -
You, Grandfather, oldest
king of my kind’s tribe.
Don’t get me wrong -- I
have a daddy for sure,
a big well-aged man
of soul, made of winds
and Scotch and
and towers of brute stone --
His blue homiletics
are mine, loud over pews
that rib the ancient whale.
But You tore the mystery
of that man loose from
the misery of my history
with him, separating
dominions, as You will,
calibrating the scale of
awe and awfulness
as inversely proportional
to the boy who mans
the whale. It is by this
difference I remain a
married man, revering the
real woman of my years
while rapturing my
dream’s downy billows
here. It took a long time
to fully digest the
vision of that wave;
to distinguish appetite
from savor, the virgin
kiss from the hell it
savored in the afterglow,
in all that eerie undertow
awakened and ravened
and distilled. Can I
write any more? Each
day I seem to sing
longer and longer still,
refusing to end the tale,
sure or hopeful that there’s
something more essential
freighted further down
the cavernous harrows
of my tongue. But maybe
it’s just fear of silence,
of going it alone
into modernity
without even the song.
Do we never grow
up, clinging to that
strange distant music
I heard once when
my mother sang
over the sea, again
when my father
stood up at the pulpit
and preached immensity?
Is my work simply theirs
but worse, as they damaged
their own bloodlines?
Or is it Your’s my iron Moby,
Lascaux’s curse that
is never quite safe
from the swirly curlicues
of highly nippled verse?
Perhaps? But I’ll talk
it out here, for this
is the only converse
I seem to have left
with fathers in the fields
by my culture
yet to work. Cap this pen
with this old bone song
like a hearse afloat
on my first father’s
sea, a poem skulled
in wild cursories..
If I speak for You,
then let’s sire a son
fit to hammer the
next set of nails
full through our box,
yielding these overripe
nuts to his oh-so-soon
to swing down blade.




V.

Sunday 11/19

... Simultaneously with the overcoming and rejection of these distinctly incestuous phantasies, there occurs one of the most important as well as one of the most painful psychic accomplishments of puberty; that is, the breaking away from parental authority, through which alone is formed that opposition between new and old generations, which is so important for cultural progress. Many persons are detained at each of the stations of development through which the individual must pass; and accordingly, there are persons who never overcome their parental authority and never, or very imperfectly, withdraw their affection from the parents.

-- Freud, “The Transformations of Puberty”

Kronos has left to us associated with his own memory, the memory of the Golden Age. His kingdom coincides with this happy period of the world history ... The closeness of the connection between the two is indicated by the further story of Kronos, which other poets have told more fully than Hesiod. In that ancient Golden Age, honey poured from oaks. The disciples of Orpheus were convinced that, when Zeus enchained Kronos, the old god was befuddled with honey. (In those days there was no wine.) Zeus enchained the old god in order to carry him off to the place where he, Kronos -- and with him the Golden Age -- still exists: at the outermost edge of the earth, on the Isles of the Blest. Thither Zeus betook himself with his father. There the breezes sent by Okeanos bathe the tower of Kronos. There he is king, is husband of Rhea, the goddess, enthroned over all.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks


Homer and Hesiod
singing Mysteries
into psalms, writing
down the gods.
Columba at Iona
inking gospels
on an abbey’s
parchment ground
so wet and wooly
that Oran sang
from underground.
Chretien de Troyes
and his jongleur
tribe pouring love
into the Gothic
ear, awakening
a stout devout
which pushed God
to our rear.
Minds emboldened
on the uncasked
wine of pagan
lilt -- I whirl
the Renaissance
burly here -- free
the bear called
Shakespeare,
that polar tongue
so new and old,
sporting every
sea in wild
mortality with
a new heat
and heart and
language, both
bottomless and
pure soar. The
Romantic titan
ego-artists Shelley
Keats & Byron
reaching up to
cleave the starry
balls themselves,
gathering in
their wings
the lungs of a Wagnerian,
world-collapsing yowl.
Joyce at the gates
of cyber in his
polyedrions of
scripture, a sentence
running into forever
rounding all the way
back to Ariadne’s
dancing floor. Pynchon’s
Rainbow, giving
a Hollywoody arcing
ache and oomph
to every hammer
flung toward Ys.
All these sons
crow in Your
cock the next
lost Golden Age,
renewing and deranging
the tribe with a
perplex, swoony
honey which on
the far ends of
our minds distilled
into ambrosia, half
sea half milk, pure
wine. When I set
pen to paper I
do it in remembrance
of You, Grandfather,
the one whose
crimes are legend
in their legion,
whose rule hinges
time to its eternity
down the miles
of a wild dark sea
beneath this writing
chair. When I was
14 and wanted sex
and rock and roll
in a measure meant
only for gods and
kings and fathers,
I was terrified to
wander far beyond
actual havens set
by church and home
& yet determined to
figure out a way
to hack those bonds
free -- booze helped
me sort that out.
I hefted guitar and
penis in all the ways
I dreamed and prayed
nightly between my
knees beneath the
sheets as I spouted
the first foamings
of Your spleen. My
history held all
these sea-enraging
singers in its thrall,
a booty I could
scarce imagine then
though they were
waking, slowly coming
into view in the
blacklit poster of
Flaming Love on the
far wall of my
bedroom, as Led
Zeppelin in the
radio filled my
pre-cultural room
with a cold
creepy aether,
the sense that
I had entered
the antechamber
of a vast descending
room marked as
much by divines
as by divine defiance.
It was a place I wouldn’t
name for 35 years
and wasn’t game for
until I had harrowed
down and round
the spiral doom
of Lascaux horrors
inside my bones
as they tumbled
down a whiskey’s
throttle. While I played
“Are You Ready?”
on my Fender
Mustang guitar
with Sue or
Derinda sitting
on my bed, I was
Grand Funk Railroad
on stage, invoking
gods of sturm und
drang my terrified
penis would take
years to find a
way to twist and
shout. Your old
salt catechism
which wakes
to dream
was somehow
counted off
between
those six sweaty
strings. And when
I set that guitar
down and tried
to preach my
power chords,
the pews were
filled with breasts,
libidios twin
vitales gunning
me right
up through the
middle sea
toward Saturn’s
Golden Age,
arousing oaks
which rained
pure honey from their
boughs onto
the forever-waylaid
someday-to-bower
pair engroved
ensealed in
puerish rapture
of the everwomb,
cuddling and rocking
and nursing on
she who’s always
worth some particide.
Not sex, not love,
but the unbridled
song hooving on the
biggest wave to
collapse on Your
sweet shores
here on heaven’s
main, this pure
white buck naked
page. Song after
song I hurl
your jisms, as
imperfectly now
as I then played
that guitar: Craft
is not the meat
but simply keel
for cruelest oceans,
motions which rouse a
perfection with nipples
as big as a boy’s
stout penis as he
dreams her up
beneath the sheets.
I cream and caw
and limn the lines
with a golden sigh’s
hung fever, that
cusp just before
the crash of
You wild waves
which haul
me out to she
who will give birth
to raptures even greater
in the next poem
I may write. Such are
the rhythms which
cannot end and I
am just one wave
amid the googol
to have rushed from
shore to shore in
the name of a salt
gospel stirred from
high and low. I pray
to let these starry
sons of ancient
foment go; to retire
from this task
when my lot of singing
has been through
the full measure of all
You meant to screw
upon the margeless
unpantied main.
Meanwhile I’ll pile
these hoary gems
of loquacious blue
in a chest sunk
down a zillion
leagues where all
my fathers’ bones
are still singing,
playing their guitars,
getting all the girls,
still married &
working hard in
those fields fard down
under which enrich
and loam the page
with an enduring holy
goatish rage. Am I
done? Hardly, when
my tongue is hard
and hot as molten
ocean-bottom
stone. Not when
the tower of Kronos
deserves a higher throne
erected by a song
of a gold night long
ago when I got up
under Sue’s t-shirt
at last, sitting together
on a parked motorbike
beneath a wild full
moon. Suddenly my
palms beheld the breasts
I had forgotten --
they were strange
in my rougher hands --
gelatinous and warm
where I somehow expected
something stout and
creamy, yes, a pour
which spilled down
my fingers and wrists
and arms to drown
me full below
in the lap of a dew
honey which drowned
one world & gave
voice and plectrum
to something
racing toward a shore
down at the far
end of the pool,
deep down dread Lascaux
where every stone is
swallowed and remits
a frenzy here.




VI.

Monday, Nov. 20

The destiny of Kronos develops in three stages, during which his potentiality unfolds and manifests itself. In the first stage the birth of Kronos is a violent and revolutionary crisis. Kronos succeeds in coming into the world only at the price of a violent rebellion against his father. A second stage follows in which the figure of Kronos takes on its central characteristic: placed between heaven and earth (the parents), he becomes an independent being, contradictory, dangerous, and problematic. He generates sons who are destined to deprive him of the power he has conquered. He had experienced in the first stage the severe test of a father who prevented his liberation from the fertile and enveloping womb, and against that obstacle he had turned the unmeasurable violence of his thirst for liberty. Now he himself is threatened by that same force and violene, born as inevitable consequence of his life and destiny. This stage we can call the conservative stage.

In the first and second stages the story of Kronos is essentially constituted by a father-son relationship of mutual competition, challenge, and violence. As in the first stage Kronos endures the hardness of the selfish father, so in the second stage he himself is the father who is frightened by the possibilities of his sons, and he too turns to deceit and violence in order to survive and keep his power.

In the third stage we see the breakdown of this dramatic figure: he is deprived of his reign, and while the generation of the Olympic Gods begins, Kronos turns to the other side of his destiny. We see him now as a king over a land very different from the Titanic battlefield. The nature of the God is transformed; he is the wise and beneficent sovereign of happy men; the earth produces her goods in abundance; men and animals live in harmony.

-- Augusto Vitale, “The Transformation of the Father,” in the anthology Fathers and Mothers, ed. Patricia Berry (Spring Publications, 1991)

Now these births
seem annual: from
Samhuin to Winter
Solstice as the dark
year settles down
into its cold latent
dream, I go back over
this primal ground
like a tribe returning
to its far-stepped
homeland where
amid the graves of
kings the omphalos
is found, a rude stone
dick with wings and
a throat of iron basso
welled and whaled
from Your zero, Your
first world-waking cry.
You carried me in
that totem’s thigh
while I pickled and
puckered all those
years trying to
wake from or
die of my own
father, unable
or unwilling to
put up my dukes.
You watched sadly
from the bower of
my grand melancholy
as I launched so
many frigates of
the name of that
salt freight I could
neither saddle
or name in bottle
or babe. Did You
agonize as all
fathers do or
rejoice in Your
wisdom to watch
me come
slowly to in the
icy testicular green
phophored gloom
of a drunk tank at
3 a.m., having
exhausted the ends
of desire, seeking
in Love’s wrong places
the milk of Your pale fire?
Blame it on my
culture perhaps that
boys remain boys
for so fucking long,
so many times --
perhaps most or even all --
forever; do You
always loom ahead
for us like that door
it is death to enter
and eternal dearth
to flee muttering
“whatever ...” ?
Well, thanks for
ripping me free as You
did, just at that
nadir when I
accepted that I
had supped full
well with horrors
and there was no
lie, no fancy I
believed enough
that I could find
my way out alone.
Like they say in AA,
there’s no going back
to being a cucumber
after you’ve been pickled.
It was only then
that I was ready
to approach Your
door at Lascaux,
entering that strange
brute mouth as
I read Carl Jung
and Joyce and Rilke,
their words salting
my mind for what
followed when I read
in Campbell’s Primitive
Mythology about
the old puberty
rituals, a tale
which me like
a brute ancient wave.
I travelled down father
Joe’s account of the
puberty rites at Lascaux --
my mind like those
boys, oppressed by
miles of deathlike
descent, finding myself
with those trembly
boys in the belly of
the whale where You
lit the torch and
the mystery screamed
full into view. The
grand mal seizures
of my crazy youth
were perhaps spasms
of that cold womb
which gave birth
to the grand whale’s
granddaddy lessons
inside Your ancient
thigh. Whatever the case,
it seems to me today
that I hung forever
on that diving board,
years and years,
quailing at the getting
on to the real baptism
down under. Perhaps
all the centuries of
civilizing progress
makes it take much
longer for a young
soul to get all the
way back to Your
shore. Or maybe in the
ages of a man its just birth
after birth after birth,
a continual spasm out
from the sea to
walk forth a free man,
feral, lonely, the curved
blade still dripping with
a father’s blood &
intent on reaping
every field of his ecstasy,
mortaring with those
jisms some Lascaux-by-the-Sea,
part conch, part
inner voice
drenched in low Sidhes.
Every year it seems
I give birth again
to the New Year King
from the hairy thigh
of an old myth
which I deem Your’s
Grandfather, that
wave’s cusping sigh
which folds to a roar
at the bottom of
summer’s pool in ‘71,
awakening me to
a flint exterior
keen for soft soak,
resolving me to plunge
through my father’s
yoke of throat
right into a female
not my mother
but close. Were
those Your elders
in the dangerous weave
of summer storm clouds
which formed above
and from the
poolside radio which
was playing the Doors’
“Riders of the Storm,”
invoking that dreamlike
swoon in which I
saw a mask of sorts
there at the bottom
of the pool, Your
Lascaux -- just
a fleeting glimpse
of that mad face
which cut the
umbilical cord
and married me
to its ghost.
I caught a fleeting
glimpse of Your
eyes and something
in me was struck
and lit, revealing
the inside usage
of all I wanted
so to name, my
feet trailing down
into the surgent
water as I hung
onto the diving
board becoming
vast and vaster
roots of a tree
whose canopy
was leafed and
hung with heavy,
dangerous fruit,
their nipples dripping
honey booze and
milk. At that moment
was no longer
a song but the
father of the tale,
entrusted by
Your dreamtime
to be its votive
and salt priest;
I’m still at my
offices, the dude
with the middleaged
frightmask waiting
for a reader to
find his way down
here, where I”ll
spring from Your
granite loins
and tear loose
the artiface
with a flash of
shock and awe fire.
It’s all I can do
to tend and tincture
that swimming pool
with salinity and
ocean motions,
throwing in the
occasional shrieking
curve to keep
flint sickles sweeping
in rollers of pure
verbal blue. I’ve become
a mad Manx on the
beach, full of fish
tales and pranks and lewd
jestering for an
Old Year King whose
rule slowly ends in
mine. The endless
iteration of the
lines comes from the sea,
it is the vast temple
complex winding down
from blue dapple
to holy black infernity
like stations of
a pourgatory that
belongs half to
me and the rest
to You, Grandfather,
the oldest pickle
in the sea. The Sirens
assemble and croon
from under that
undetectible seam
which holds and
yet distances fathers
and sons, like the
ocean between shores
or one song between
two mouths or
that grave which
bourns mortality
from its Other.
It is a raw cold
border which
those sweet-voice
Vixens love to
dry their black
wings on & stare
out on the world
with eyes like
reversals of the moon,
the quintessence
of that ambience
which filled black-lit
rooms, eerie and
ghostly and sexual
and more, heavy
with the father’s
breath as he intones
Obey, Oy Vey and Adieu
as I reach for her,
making all his
crimes my own
as I sought to do
the deed, thus
beginning again
the intricate descent
into the belly of the tale.
On the phone yesterday
my father told of more
chest-pains and weariness,
his heart unable to
keep up with and
ever-green blood
sapped from Your
ritual tree. Sirens
coo like folding
water which sounds
like a womb which
resembles that room
which You held
me in until I
was of an age
to crash and boom
on the Siren shores
of these pages
for better and
complicit ill.
I walk on three legs
now -- lamed by
actual years
but rock-hard and
long in my metres,
my long deep voice
like a third pedal
which lifts and
pounds huge flukes,
writing all of this
down down down.
The riddle whose
answer made the
Sphynx leap from
a cliff into the
doom-tombed sea
is that one I
ever pose here,
ferrying through
the ages of man
inside the same
coracle of aging
skin and viral bone.
I carry the
Sirens’ music in
these folds of ink,
an amplitude
which births a making
in horror and dearth
of You. It’s time
now to cap this pen
& get to work -- Monday
morning, a long full
week ahead -- short
production schedule,
a fifth step with
a sponsee, Thanksgiving
dinner here -- and
somehow I must
try to get this Cro
Magnon paean nailed and
caulked and launched.
Suffice to say -- Suffice!
-- that the fields of the
Lord are ever-loud and
roisterous, my enterprise
in Him a soul’s beaching
over and over on
shores of a song
which gonged in my
ready ears that
afternoon when I
was 14 hanging on
to the diving board,
Lascuax’s old purposes
manning me on
this porpoise which
may yet teach
sons to ride.

Intermission, with Big Stones

Something is still brewing in the thigh of the All-Father, so, in lieu, as intermission music, these early man-poems, and a much much earlier man-tale, the fish all these foundational poems ride ...


MAN

1988

Fuck these poetics, lets
go where it’s so hard
it hurts:

there’s this lead log
swinging between my legs,
calling me to rise up in the night.

Such a small thing! you say,
half a hand and less a shoe.
Perhaps to you; but it’s the
stone bear I live in, my blood’s
dark, purple prowling.

Now, remember,
I’m always thrusting,
being a dick at both romance
and career, vengeful on
the backcourt, ramming the road
with my car.

It’s always
the same, this fucking!
Sorry. I can’t help it.
Every second is wet or
pendulous, there’s a proud
nipple rising up at the end of
every sheer sentence.
The sun-clit rides a boat of fire
and the moon
I love to pound in the dark.

My heads smile at each other.
Their three eyes wink like frat
brothers.
My eyes all see the same
and my heads both think they’re swell.
One head thinks for the other
(though which, I’m not sure).

My hands celebrate the memory of
pressure, the hammering of birth:

I’ll be damned
if I’m not burrowing and sweating
the brine inches home!

How I love the body’s
vaginas, its tight loca -
a virgin’s sealed cunt
or the practiced mouth of a whore,
big boobs or wobbly
ass-cheeks heaved together, a clenched
fist, the lonely space
between two toes!

Deeper and deeper I push, hard
into the home spaces, greased
with the
oils of spit and pussy-juice,
hot as lava on the homeward thrust,
as far as I can go . . .

I close my eyes to see
the roaring redlights, I feel
my balls shudder
and then I’m spouting the sea,
touches she-in-all in
that second or two of coming -
and falls -

too far -

Well, it’s fucking mainly,
and I’ll do it for love
and I’ll do
it for fun and I’ll do it with
you or I’ll do it alone and
I don’t care much what shatters along the way.
I don’t give a fuck.

All I know
is that I must, I’ve got a shark in me
that eats and swims and can never
stop. If you say no, I’ll
just take my frenzy somewhere else.

So c’mon, baby, spread it wide.
Receive me.

God’s calling.



CLOSING THE CASTAWAY BAR

1989


Oh fuck it all, he sighs, and so cuts his sleek black
car through the night. It's cool inside. Nothing intrudes.
Instruments on the dash glow green their phosphor
ghosting his hands. The radio plays old songs.
Miles of road thread back into the corrupt interior.

Home is behind, a throttle of malls and
the ceaseless traffic of broken things.
A battered rondo of bars and bottle clubs.
He flees for the ocean like some latter-day Jonah,
scheming rebirth in the pink cerulean surf of morning.

He enters the beachside town. Streetlights approach
and fan over the windshield. Lowering the window:
the ocean night crowds in warm and briny gusts.
The street deadends at a bar called The Castaway.
Yards away surf wrestles the shore. The bar is decorated

with fishing nets and sweet curving conch shells.
He finds an empty stool next to a battered bar.
The barmaid takes a shine to him and buys him shots
of tequila. The gold fangs pierce, glow. He talks
openly with her as he does when drink and sex coil
his heart late at night. Nice ocean haul, he thinks.
Of course, any mermaid will do. Must do.

The hours dissolve darkly to closing time. He finds himself
laying on a table close to the surf. Muscular breezes work
the naked beach. A zipper of silver paves black water
to a zenith moon. He remembers the barmaid and the bruise
on his cheek. Gulls slide overhead like beggar angels.

Is this night the belly of the whale? Even in his stupor,
he’s sure it is. The poor beast lurches and rolls,
swims shitfaced, nauseated utterly by him. What did
he expect? He's the worm at the bottom of every
bottle. He sighs wearily. Same guts, different bar.

The ocean sings to him in wind and surf like
a mother's soft birthday song. Rising out of nothing's breakers.
He feels he should join in, too, sing back brokenly and
tearful, but his tongue is like whale fat. Doesn't matter, though,
because the sea isn't singing for him, any way, nor nor for the

locked door of the bar, not for the gull that’s crapped on his chin,
nor the hard breezy night. Not for the all world's dark shore.
But will our hero ever learn? What? is his last thought there on the
table, lulled by the boneless choir of the sea. Fade to black
as our hero descends the welcoming gullet.



THE CLINGING

1988

Why are we always clinging, clinging to what we can?
Such a useless gesture . . . Remember birth? how we
were squeezed down those gripless walls?
Wasn’t that the essential lesson? And do we ever stop
sliding? It’s just goes on, one long hilarious
tumble into the grave’s sudden mitt.

Our hero has clung heroically for all his life. Raised
in a Depression home, he learned the trade of salvation
through ownership. Now 50, he’s appropriated well:
a successful career in sales, a beautiful house in a ritzy
subdivision, some sizable chunks of real estate, a Jaguar.
A new wife, young, pretty, manageable.

He had expected his hunger to eventually
sate on this life of big-ticket meals, but every morning
his hunger renews at first light. Predator by day.
He clings not merely to substance but context as well:
club ownership policies, presidential politics, county
zoning pecadillos, lifetime subscriptions, sworn affidavits,
affiliations and memberships, yellowed boxes of memorabilia.

Capitalist of the heart -- grabbing and grubbing all away!
To keep it all intact, he makes deals, he cements things
with shit and blood and semen. His lawyer and accountant
have license to slice off hunks of his ass, so long that

his affairs are presentable. His pretty wife can shop
his Gold Card purple as she neither leaves nor loves him.
If his kids smile at least when his mother comes to visit
they can smoke dope and fuck whoever in their rooms
while he watches the 11 o’clock news.

All in place!
Every autumn, he rides with busloads of drunk boosters
to football games at his alma mater. They all dress
in cartoon blues and oranges, they fill the stadium.
He bets and loses huge sums of money. He gets drunk
on the way home and sings with the boys.
They all know about his secretary, how she can’t type well
nor even take a decent telephone message,
but boy does she take dick-tation! On quiet afternoons
he fucks her on the conference table. Daddy, she whispers,
daddy. Her face clenched and closed as he pumps her.
He lets her cling until her clinging no longer incites him.

On late Saturday afternoons in the summer
our hero barbecues in his back yard. His new wife lounges
by the pool with fashion magazines and manhattans.
He drinks iced vodka as he turns the red spits of meat.
Fat hisses and smokes, rising to no god. Tonight they
are alone: his kids are partying at a beachfront hotel.
He imagines them climbing on balcony
railings, throwing up in elevators, getting the clap.
Fuck 'em. They cling to his wallet like rats.

The Florida sun falls fat and red into the far
bending palms. Sizzle of meat, easy listening, biting
sips of cold booze. Air conditioners and pool pumps
drone around the neighborhood. He tries to add it
all up, this continual assault on Easy Living --
a brutal, a contourless climb. He thinks
he should be on the verge of recovering
something -- that soon he will arrive at some suburban
womb of things, like a lone salmon finally in home waters.
Will he then be able to rest? The music sweetly
segues from song to song. All in place, so still, so immanent . . .

But our hero is already far away, plotting, casting
his desperate silver threads at the sun. The sun sails on
in cruel silence, eternal inches from his grasp,
bloodying the dark horizon.


CLOSING THE DEAL

1990

You stand at the window of your
hotel room, naked and wet from the pool.
Heavy curtains pull back to reveal
palm trees winnowing lazy fronds.
A fountain spouts glass into the
brilliant Florida sky. You feel its deeper
possibilities lift and cast you,
like spray, into the sun. A yearning
infinitude. Your skin burns with it.

All this first class treatment proves
how weak their deal really is:
the black jet that muscled you south,
this hotel of marble and brass,
bright servants, iced salmon
on pale porcelain, golf fairways
neater than carpet, poolside women
in neon bikinis serene in
the torpor of water and sun.
All of this shouts disaster at you.

Later you head for the bar.
You sit on a wicker barstool
sipping a tall glass of rum and fruit.
A combo pulses moody tropic jazz.
Slowly spinning fans whisper
in their tireless cradles:
first class, first class, first class.
How could they know you’d tremble?

As sheets of satin booze settle
over your eyes, you find yourself
wanting to drowse forever in this descent,
to fall gently on all dotted lines,
a chunk of pineapple sinking in rum,
one with whom any deal can be made:
just pour on that dark bossa nova, bartender,
and let the music fade blue to black.



THE STANDOFF


1990

Taken from a photo in the paper:
a man in a doorway holds a gun
to his head with one hand, in the other a beer.
Two police face him from behind a shield.

I stand at the door, half-in, half-out,
the winter morning jagged and cold
like the snout of this .38 jammed in my ear.
This beerís cold too, each swig
falls slow and mean like Harlem sleet.
But my trigger fingerís colder. Frozen.

Funny, no matter which way you point
a gun, this street always stops to watch:
the two cops cowering behind their shield,
squad cars phalanxed on the sidewalk,
radios squawking, lights strobing bluered bluered,
sunglasses and shotguns glittering
like broken glass in the hard morning sun,
beyond them camera crews edging closer
with the crowd, jostling for a gape at splatter.
Only the paramedics seem bored,
smoking together by the ambulance.

The shield before me talks like a TV daddy,
trying to babble me down from here
with such shit about its not too late
and give yourself another chance. I mean really.
But that dull plate looks like my old man,
a shadow in steel that canít be shattered,
sending me off again with that cold winter stare.
Drunk father, dark father, take no prisoners, rage.

How long? An hour, two? It isnít up to me.
I just stand here like the piano man
at the Pussy Prowl on stage between the babes,
that old sorry ass blues mooning
from my fingers like a shot of bad whiskey.
Hold me up to the light and you see
the same malt nigger nothing.
You'd pull the trigger too.

It's too cold for the grace my momma
said would always come if we prayed.
This angel just wants my ass.
A wind off the lake sweeps in,
swirling up litter up in tight funnels,
and a truck backfires, startling the crowd:

Then suddenly itís happening,
everyone screaming Do It, Fucker,
the cameras click and whirl like startled pigeons,
and the cops behind the shield cower holy Jesus,
and the winter sky barrels down on the city
like a molester on a shivering pale girl,
and blood erupts in the stone of my finger,
screaming nothingís getting in, man
I take no prisoners
I squeeze my eyes shut and
shut and shut
and shut
and



THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO

David Cohea

1988


I've been fucking the Madonna
in a frenzy of beds and sweat,
mounted to a crucifix of immortal desire,
unharbored, unholy, messiah and nail --


1.
I met her when I was thirteen.
Back then her name was Sue.
We swam in the pool
in my back yard.
Her body flashed wet
and dazzling in a neon
bikini as she giggled out
of my reach. How my cock
leapt after her, month after
masturbating month, hurling
a joyous fury of sperm into the water.


2.
It is years later and very late at night.
A woman holds my cock in her hand,
pistoning its floral head in her mouth.
I fuck her later on my mother's bed,
her heavy breasts heaving as I thrust.
Salmon leap over us, trailing gin-tasting
waters. There is a half-empty bottle
on a nightstand; inside, a full moon rises.

I hunt on the moon.
Behind me vultures peck at bloody,
glistening eggs. They croak and caw,
sounding like high school buddies trying to
scrabble out of their lockers.
I reach for a magnificent staff in the dust.
Neon signs blink in craters.
I am crying, for I have been
re-united with my foreskin.

Winds pick up and maul the father desert.
Tumbleweeds bound past trailing
shreds of red satin and panty hose.
I approach a bleached shack.
The door is open but women guard the entrance.
I can't remember the words to say and the women
curse me, pitching dead rats at me.
I flee.


3.
The moon is the screen
of a nine inch b&w TV
several feet from this bed.
It is 3 a.m.; a 70's comedy
babbles canned laughter.
I lay on hair, long, long hair
that flows like water
from my head, my face, my
chest, my crotch, my legs.

It has tangled some struggling thing
that makes muffled feminine protests:
what if the kids hear, I'm on my period,
I don't have any protection,
don't you think we should wait
to get to know each other better?

The woman's ass protrudes from all
this hair, framed in scant black panties.
Darling fig leaf, what a beacon her shame!
I run my fingers under the cool material,
over pliant, soft skin, dipping my finger
into swimming lava. The bed hardens,
plunging me into the red cavern.
Here the air is hot and smells of the distant sea.

Tears fill me: home!
I watch the woman's face as I shudder then spasm.
Her smile melts and becomes a snake that
tightens round my throat, becomes an
umbilical cord knotting me in the ground.

A stone man crashes out of the forest
swinging an axe and severing the snake's head.
The head rolls along down a hill and into a boat.
I chase after it but the boat slips free
and floats out into Chinese waters.
Tall cliffs hump above dense mist.
I swim after the boat, calling out my own name.


4.
More years pass. Spring arrives.
I walk with a woman I call my love.
She holds my hand and smiles
although it's a cold day, dark and damp.
We walk out on a bridge
that spans a pounding river.
Its roar encloses us as we kiss.
I lean her back:.
Her eyes widen into moons when she falls.
We will meet again, I call . . .
The mist is alcoholic, turning
to hard squall which batters down the bridge.
I wash away in tears.


5.
Summer.
I swim in an Olympic pool.
The water is blue.
I stroke slowly, counting off laps.
Sunlight wrinkles on the pool floor
in a mosaic of delight.

Sweet with exhausting,
I climb out and lay on a deck chair.
My towel is blue. The sky is blue.
Blue water coils through my blood.

A smiling blonde in a black string bikini
straddles my chest. Her eyes are ocean.
She smells of cocoa butter and is very, very tanned.
She rocks on my hips, moaning her name.
Bossa nova fills the air.
I sip dark rum mixed with her vaginal fluids.


There is diving board a hundred feet
above a glass of water.
Everyone from the bar is on the ladder,
joking and pitching cherries at each other.
Couples giggle and hold hands mock-solemn,
then bounce off me and fall
smashing like melons on the concrete below..



6.
I am in a drunk blackout at Daytona Beach.
It is late at night. Motley Crue
blasts from the windows
of passing Firebirds and 'Vettes.
Around my neck I wear a necklace
of withered, bloody nipples.
The crotch of my shorts has been cut out.

Bartenders work in the surf, dipping up shots.
I have no more money so I offer my car,
rolling it into the water. Everyone cheers.
Topless dancers fandango for me,
their fangs brilliant in the moonlight.
I thrash and moan and hump the air.
Bouncers snort like bulls and race toward me.

At some dead a.m. I wake, rolling onto
the concrete in some parking lot.
My face is bloody my hands are bruised.
I am in a graveyard of lost sons
howling from patrol cars sleek as barracuda.


7.
Dawn.
I'm in bed with a woman I take
from time to time, usually after all the bars
have closed and every other woman I can think of
has refused me. My last-ditch fuck.

She lives in an old house.
A corrupt smell rises from the basement.
Candles burn in every window.
The woman is plain, ass and belly flaccid,
her face too homely for the lava I seek.
She falls far to welcome me.

I drink a beer, smoke a joint. She waits.
I push her down onto her couch.
Fantasy women sashay on MTV.
I fuck her snatch; too bored to come,
I try fucking her tits.
There is no warmth, no wet,
but the motion is cruel enough
to keep me hard. Finally I jam
my cock in her mouth and force her
o swallow my come.
There is nothing in the moment,
no delight, no crooning melt.

She runs to the john to retch
and smoke fills the room, thick and black.
I fall asleep, finished at last,
mounted by flames.



DARK SAUCER

1990


Sweetface the stray cat we feed is in heat.
Three tomcats surround her, like mangy lions,
waiting for her to tire. Then they take turns on her.
They've been feasting on sore Sweetface for three days now.
Caterwauling yowls tear into our dinner.

My wife runs outside with stones she's collected, and
the tensed cincture of fur scatters. Pale eyes stare
patiently from under car and house, behind the garage.
When my wife sits back down she glares at me.
I say look, hon, Sweetface isn't neutered, they can't help it.
Our daughter tries to watch the action in the window.

Later I walk to the corner store for milk.
As I open the door a woman exits: black dress,
blonde hair lifting in the draft, pallor, perfume.
Our eyes lock for one departing second. Reaching
for the cooler my hand is pale and calm as bone.

I swing the cold jug of milk as I walk back.
It's a warm night, humming and sweet. On our porch
my daughter dances to music on a small radio.
She's 12, barely innocent in the porchlight.
A Chevy roars past, and the cats are at it again, pelting
the night with howls, lapping their dark saucer of milk.



IRON JOHN

from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 1812

by Jacob Ludwig Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm

ONCE UPON a time there lived a King who had a great forest near his palace, full of all kinds of wild animals. One day he sent out a huntsman to shoot him a roe, but he did not come back. "Perhaps some accident has befallen him," said the King, and the next day he sent out two more huntsmen who were to search for him, but they too stayed away. Then on the third day, he sent for all his huntsmen, and said, "Scour the whole forest through, and do not give up until ye have found all three." But of these also, none came home again, and of the pack of hounds which they had taken with them, none were seen more. From that time forth, no one would any longer venture into the forest, and it lay there in deep stillness and solitude, and nothing was seen of it, but sometimes an eagle or a hawk flying over it.

This lasted for many years, when a strange huntsman announced himself to the King as seeking a situation, and offered to go into the dangerous forest. The King, however, would not give his consent, and said, "It is not safe in there; I fear it would fare with thee no better than with the others, and thou wouldst never come out again." The huntsman replied, "Lord, I will venture it at my own risk; I have no fear."

The huntsman therefore betook himself with his dog to the forest. It was not long before the dog fell in with some game on the way, and wanted to pursue it; but hardly had the dog run two steps when it stood before a deep pool, could go no farther, and a naked arm stretched itself out of the water, seized it, and drew it under. When the huntsman saw that, he went back and fetched three men to come with buckets and bail out the water. When they could see to the bottom there lay a wild man whose body was brown like rusty iron, and whose hair hung over his face down to his knees. They bound him with cords, and led him away to the castle. There was great astonishment over the wild man; the King, however, had him put in an iron cage in his court-yard, and forbade the door to be opened on pain of death, and the Queen herself was to take the key into her keeping. And from this time forth every one could again go into the forest with safety.

The King had a son eight years old, who was once playing in the court-yard, and while he was playing, his golden ball fell into the cage. The boy ran thither and said, "Give me my ball." "Not till thou hast opened the door for me," answered the man. "No," said the boy, "I will not do that; the King has forbidden it," and ran away. The next day he again went and asked for his ball; the wild man said, "Open my door," but the boy would not. On the third day the King had ridden out hunting, and the boy went once more and said, "I cannot open the door even if I wished, for I have not the key." Then the wild man said, "It lies under thy mother's pillow, thou canst get it there." The boy, who wanted to have his ball back, cast all thought to the winds, and brought the key. The door opened with difficulty, and the boy pinched his fingers. When it was open the wild man stepped out, gave him the golden ball, and hurried away. The boy had become afraid; he called and cried after him, "Oh, wild man, do not go away, or I shall be beaten!" The wild man turned back, took him up, set him on his shoulder, and went with hasty steps into the forest.

When the King came home, he observed the empty cage, and asked the Queen how that had happened. She knew nothing about it, and sought the key, but it was gone. She called the boy, but no one answered. The King sent out people to seek for him in the fields, but they did not find him. Then he could easily guess what had happened, and much grief reigned in the royal court.

When the wild man had once more reached the dark forest, he took the boy down from his shoulder, and said to him, "Thou wilt never see thy father and mother again, but I will keep thee with me, for thou hast set me free, and I have compassion on thee. If thou dost all I bid thee, thou shalt fare well. Of treasure and gold I have enough, and more than any one in the world." He made a bed of moss for the boy on which he slept, and the next morning the man took him to a well, and said, "Behold, the gold well is as bright and clear as crystal; thou shalt sit beside it, and take care that nothing falls into it, or it will be polluted. I will come every evening to see if thou hast obeyed my order." The boy placed himself by the margin of the well, and often saw a golden fish or a golden snake show itself therein, and took care that nothing fell in. As he was thus sitting, his finger hurt him so violently that he involuntarily put it in the water. He drew it quickly out again, but saw that it was quite gilded, and whatsoever pains he took to wash the gold off again, all was to no purpose.

In the evening Iron John came back, looked at the boy, and said, "What has happened to the well?" "Nothing, nothing," he answered, and held his finger behind his back, that the man might not see it. But he said, "Thou hast dipped thy finger into the water; this time it may pass, but take care thou dost not let anything go in." By daybreak the boy was already sitting by the well and watching it. His finger hurt him again and he passed it over his head, and then unhappily a hair fell down into the well. He took it quickly out, but it was already quite gilded. Iron John came, and already knew what had happened. "Thou hast let a hair fall into the well," said he. "I will allow thee to watch by it once more, but if this happens for the third time then the well is polluted, and thou canst no longer remain with me."

On the third day, the boy sat by the well, and did not stir his finger, however much it hurt him. But the time was long to him, and he looked at the reflection of his face on the surface of the water. And as he still bent down more and more while he was doing so, and trying to look straight into the eyes, his long hair fell down from his shoulders into the water. He raised himself up quickly, but the whole of the hair of his head was already golden and shone like the sun. You may imagine how terrified the poor boy was! He took his pocket-handkerchief and tied it round his head, in order that the man might not see it. When he came he already knew everything, and said, "Take the handkerchief off." Then the golden hair streamed forth, and let the boy excuse himself as he might, it was of no use. "Thou hast not stood the trial, and canst stay here no longer. Go forth into the world, there thou wilt learn what poverty is. But as thou hast not a bad heart, and as I mean well by thee, there is one thing I will grant thee; if thou fallest into any difficulty, come to the forest and cry, 'Iron John,' and then I will come and help thee. My power is great, greater than thou thinkest, and I have gold and silver in abundance."

Then the King's son left the forest, and walked by beaten and unbeaten paths ever onwards until at length he reached a great city. There he looked for work, but could find none, and he had learnt nothing by which he could help himself. At length he went to the palace, and asked if they would take him in. The people about court did not at all know what use they could make of him, but they liked him, and told him to stay. At length the cook took him into his service, and said he might carry food and water, and rake the cinders together. Once when it so happened that no one else was at hand, the cook ordered him to carry the food to the royal table, but as he did not like to let his golden hair be seen, he kept his little cap on.

Such a thing as that had never yet come under the King's notice, and he said, "When thou comest to the royal table thou must take thy hat off." He answered, "Ah, Lord, I cannot; I have a bad sore place on my head." Then the King had the cook called before him and scolded him, and asked how he could take such a boy as that into his service, and that he was to turn him off at once. The cook, however, had pity on him, and exchanged him for the gardener's boy.

Now the boy had to plant and water the garden, hoe and dig, and bear the wind and bad weather. Once in summer when he was working alone in the garden, the day was so warm he took his little cap off that the air might cool him. As the sun shone on his hair it glittered and flashed so that the rays fell into the bed-room of the King's daughter, and up she sprang to see what that could be. Then she saw the boy, and cried to him, "Boy, bring me a wreath of flowers." He put his cap on with all haste, and gathered wild field-flowers and bound them together. When he was ascending the stairs with them, the gardener met him, and said, "How canst thou take the King's daughter a garland of such common flowers? Go quickly, and get another, and seek out the prettiest and rarest." "Oh, no," replied the boy, "the wild ones have more scent, and will please her better."

When he got into the room, the King's daughter said, "Take thy cap off, it is not seemly to keep it on in my presence." He again said, "I may not, I have a sore head." She, however, caught at his cap and pulled it off, and then his golden hair rolled down on his shoulders, and it was splendid to behold. He wanted to run out, but she held him by the arm, and gave him a handful of ducats. With these he departed, but he cared nothing for the gold pieces. He took them to the gardener, and said, "I present them to thy children, they can play with them."

The following day the King's daughter again called to him that he was to bring her a wreath of field-flowers, and when he went in with it, she instantly snatched at his cap, and wanted to take it away from him, but he held it fast with both hands. She again gave him a handful of ducats, but he would not keep them, and gave them to the gardener for playthings for his children. On the third day things went just the same; she could not get his cap away from him, and he would not have her money.

Not long afterwards, the country was overrun by war. The King gathered together his people, and did not know whether or not he could offer any opposition to the enemy, who was superior in strength and had a mighty army. Then said the gardener's boy, "I am grown up, and will go to the wars also, only give me a horse." The others laughed, and said, "Seek one for thyself when we are gone, we will leave one behind us in the stable for thee." When they had gone forth, he went into the stable, and got the horse out; it was lame of one foot, and limped hobblety jig, hobblety jig; nevertheless he mounted it, and rode away to the dark forest. When he came to the outskirts, he called "Iron John" three times so loudly that it echoed through the trees. Thereupon the wild man appeared immediately, and said, "What dost thou desire?" "I want a strong steed, for I am going to the wars." "That thou shalt have, and still more than thou askest for."

Then the wild man went back into the forest, and it was not long before a stable-boy came out of it, who led a horse that snorted with its nostrils, and could hardly be restrained, and behind them followed a great troop of soldiers entirely equipped in iron, and their swords flashed in the sun. The youth made over his three-legged horse to the stable-boy, mounted the other, and rode at the head of the soldiers. When he got near the battle-field a great part of the King's men had already fallen, and little was wanting to make the rest give way. Then the youth galloped thither with his iron soldiers, broke like a hurricane over the enemy, and beat down all who opposed him. They began to fly, but the youth pursued, and never stopped, until there was not a single man left. Instead, however, of returning to the King, he conducted his troop by bye-ways back to the forest, and called forth Iron John. "What dost thou desire?" asked the wild man. "Take back thy horse and thy troops, and give me my three-legged horse again." All that he asked was done, and soon he was riding on his three-legged horse.

When the King returned to his palace, his daughter went to meet him, and wished him joy of his victory. "I am not the one who carried away the victory," said he, "but a stranger knight who came to my assistance with his soldiers." The daughter wanted to hear who the strange knight was, but the King did not know, and said, "He followed the enemy, and I did not see him again." She inquired of the gardener where his boy was, but he smiled, and said, "He has just come home on his three-legged horse, and the others have been mocking him, and crying, 'Here comes our hobblety jig back again!' They asked, too, 'Under what hedge hast thou been lying sleeping all the time?' He, however, said, 'I did the best of all, and it would have gone badly without me.' And then he was still more ridiculed."

The King said to his daughter, "I will proclaim a great feast that shall last for three days, and thou shalt throw a golden apple. Perhaps the unknown will come to it." When the feast was announced, the youth went out to the forest, and called Iron John. "What dost thou desire?" asked he. "That I may catch the King's daughter's golden apple." "It is as safe as if thou hadst it already," said Iron John. "Thou shalt likewise have a suit of red armor for the occasion, and ride on a spirited chestnut horse." When the day came, the youth galloped to the spot, took his place amongst the knights, and was recognized by no one. The King's daughter came forward, and threw a golden apple to the knights, but none of them caught it but he, only as soon as he had it he galloped away.

On the second day Iron John equipped him as a white knight, and gave him a white horse. Again he was the only one who caught the apple, and he did not linger an instant, but galloped off with it. The King grew angry, and said, "That is not allowed; he must appear before me and tell his name." He gave the order that if the knight who caught the apple should go away again they should pursue him, and if he did not come back willingly, they were to cut him down and stab him.

On the third day, he received from Iron John a suit of black armor and a black horse, and again he caught the apple. But when he was riding off with it, the King's attendants pursued him, and one of them got so near him that he wounded the youth's leg with the point of his sword. The youth nevertheless escaped from them, but his horse leapt so violently that the helmet fell from the youth's head, and they could see that he had golden hair. They rode back and announced this to the King.

The following day the King's daughter asked the gardener about his boy. "He is at work in the garden; the queer creature has been at the festival too, and only came home yesterday evening; he has likewise shown my children three golden apples which he has won."

The King had him summoned into his presence, and he came and again had his little cap on his head. But the King's daughter went up to him and took it off, and then his golden hair fell down over his shoulders, and he was so handsome that all were amazed. "Art thou the knight who came every day to the festival, always in different colors, and who caught the three golden apples?" asked the King. "Yes," answered he, "and here the apples are," and he took them out of his pocket, and returned them to the King. "If thou desirest further proof, thou mayest see the wound which thy people gave me when they followed me. But I am likewise the knight who helped thee to thy victory over thine enemies." "If thou canst perform such deeds as that, thou art no gardener's boy; tell me, who is thy father?" "My father is a mighty King, and gold have I in plenty as great as I require." "I well see," said the King, "that I owe thanks to thee; can I do anything to please thee?" "Yes," answered he, "that indeed thou canst. Give me thy daughter to wife."

The maiden laughed, and said, "He does not stand much on ceremony, but I have already seen by his golden hair that he was no gardener's boy," and then she went and kissed him. His father and mother came to the wedding, and were in great delight, for they had given up all hope of ever seeing their dear son again. And as they were sitting at the marriage-feast, the music suddenly stopped, the doors opened, and a stately King came in with a great retinue. He went up to the youth, embraced him and said, "I am Iron John, and was by enchantment a wild man, but thou hast set me free; all the treasures which I possess, shall be thy property." - -