A BUMP OF KEELSNov. 26
A chill fog hovers
like an Old One’s
sea-bourn breath,
all sounds loud in
its ghost depths - -
acorns dropping on
the tin roofs of garages,
a fluttering breeze,
a leaf turning in the
garden. This dank
and leaden apparition
scours the last days
of the year, foraging
for something final
enough to say.
Somehow the sea
seems far overhead,
its surge and toil
above this miasma
in a more angelic
aether, its heap
of silted bones
making the fog
squat over us
like a coolie between
railroad blows.
A streetlight
a few doors up the
street catches
billows and whorls
in its chemical
glare, revealing
a spiritous unquiet
that does not speak
here of the dead
nor of mistral
bournes which stay
me from that course
I keel; it cares not
whether I write of
them today, well
or not, or not at all.
The windows are
open, breathing in
this late night’s
shifting waters,
proffering to the
page the hint
of something still too
dark to name, like
the bone-bumping
of another keel
I had no idea
was so close by,
offering passage
out where my boat
just seems stuck
and boring, sighing
in its sedges
a different marinal,
the next low ocean
rhyme, crooning
in the fog’s whorled
anima something
criminal and worthless,
just what this
bluebound bible
dry of purpose needs.
FADING FIRENov. 25
I.
Breezy this morning but not
so cold -- just dark and chill.
The fading ember of the year
still glows enough
to hold to it for a moment
here & relish the
blade of burning words
swung through another
great year’s arc,
harrowing out
and in the usual
lot of present-
day ecstasies and miseries
providing vantage to sing
forward and yet down,
hallowing deeper some
deeper sacral ground
or just hallooing further
the cavernous presence
of a wave’s crashing salt
resound tiding through
the trees outside. So
many words motioned
through my dream’s
soft bed, mouthed
by a swelt libido
savaging and soaking
the page with petrol
reference to numens
and gnomons wide
and far. And yet
I’m still just sitting
here at 4:30 a.m.
in the same chair in
the same living room
I’ve written in at
the same hour for years,
our town still turning
in its sleep
oppressed by the usual
chants and sighs,
crying for all
we just can’t keep
as the the restless
sicklemen approach
from every dancing
border. Iraq’s on fire after
Sunnis bombed Sadr
City on Thanksgiving
Day, killing hundreds
and wounding many
hundreds more; yesterday
the Shiite militias
retaliated, driving through
Sunni neighborhoods
in Baghdad & spraying
mosques with bullets
and RPGs. And all
the while American
GIs just hunkered down,
praying to God and
Don Rumsfeld for the
end of tours &
trying not to catch on fire.
Such horror made
me think on a burning
dream from long ago
when I was six
years old. In the
dream -- my first
recurring nightmare --
my school was at
war with itself,
my classmates on
both sides of something
uncivil and fraught,
taking aim at each
other with Shiloh
rifles. Somehow
the conflict had
been ignited by
that boy who I
recall wore to school
a Confederate
uniform; he’d spied
me and my
buddy Alan playing
I’ll Show You Mine
If You Show Me Yours
with girls in the woods
behind our school
on recess, and had
ratted to our teacher,
that looming
crone Miss Gilbert.
Shaking in rage,
she had called me
to the front of class
and whispered
with a shaking tone
of rage that
that if I EVER tried
such a thing again
she would tell ... my ...
MOTHER. Back
in the dream
I hugged
the school’s brick
wall, trying to stay
safe; but a boy on fire
crept round the
corner hugging
to the wall. He
barely touched
me as he passed
in front of me:
And then I was
burning too,
burning out of
control burning
down to the
nightmare’s finale
where I saw
my bones
in a pile, prying
the last of me
away, waking
me in terror.
Surely it was
in fright of that
dream that I
soon buried
all desire for
the actual sight
of those smiling
skirt-lifted girls,
for the view of
Wonder fresh
and pure
as naked as my
own birth. I’d
kept a drawing
tucked under
my bed
of a house whose
rooms were stacked
with small and larger
O’s -- cunts and
butts I drew in
each day I counted
coup in those woods--;
sometime after
the nightmare I
got rid of the drawing,
burned and buried
it in the inner
woods those outer
woods had sung
into view. I
returned to home
and school
never looking
behind. And yet
that unquiet house
of fire kept mewing
wetly in my ear,
even today,
inside a Sibyl’s
mouth half down
a woman’s curve
& the rest down
a vastly more naked
sea. That fiery voice
fountains a pure jet
pitchy verse, its
black gold cooked
up in the bum
alchemy of all
those later nights
I spent racing
through an
inversed forest
in a drunken blaze,
my hands and mouth
and feet and cock
like burning swords
battling helterskelter
through verboten woods
seeking others whose
eyes burned the way
mine did or promised
a proper quench in
some suspiring sigh.
That nightmare scene
repeats itself here
each day I put pen
to paper, hugging
walls of salty blue
around which creep
my destiny, a
raving puer with
his pants on fire
which no words
can quell or quench,
though I try, though
I try, til I am embered
full down. It’s so
quiet at this hour -- the
day seems worlds away,
its brute mechanics and
droll evils part of
the killing light
which sears as it
soars us with our
wings of wax
reeking of sexual smoke.
Not yet: let me linger
here in the matin
quietus of a heart
and mind at rest,
the night blowing
through the trees
gentle and ancient,
a distant sigh
of welcome which
must suffice here for
a God, that shadow
in the old dream’s sooth
that left me so alone
while danger piled on danger.
Hugging the school’s walls
proved the doom of
every structure; that
I was safest in the
woods where the
privates of consenting
girls was wettest,
both sea and octane,
breech and beach.
An older god might
have shouldered me
and led me back into
that forest, but first
I had to screech
and moan as my
skin blistered
and turned black,
as my guts erupted
in a bloated stink
behind which
my burning
skeleton emerged,
God’s cathedral
in full conflagration.
Maybe I speak him
here in the primogeniture
of the one who
writes his own waves.
The year is dying fast
and this time it’s taken
much of us along
inside its ebbing roar
-- our bodies aching,
money too tight,
worries for our
loved ones like a pall,
a certain wooden
dullness in the
heart, tired of so
much incessant work.
But the ending year
also wombs that
first boy in its
words, freeing
him to retrace
the roads to Eden
and exhume that
map of pleasure,
with me in every
breezy bough and
rafter sighing
and advancing
my father’s
father’s laughter.
II.
(Sunday)
It’s blowing again
in this next day’s
vigil deep down
inside a world’s
old burning skull.
A breeze like this
could light up Rome
and Paris and London
in one fugitive
sweep: In fact
it did, in the fish-tale
of my salt history.
In May of ‘97
wildfires nearly
devoured Central
Florida -- 500,000
acres of dry scrub were
already at full roar
& had the winds not
shifted one morning
Orlando might
have roared and
embered into toast.
It was early
in our marriage
and things were not
very well, money was
awful owing to
premarriage debts we
both carried, our
newly-bought house
was swarming with
termites -- we’d fled
to the downstairs
bedroom -- and I
was drinking again,
trying to go back
to being a cucumber
as they say, the middle-
aged gentleman in his
cups with every disaster
soon to ignite on those
tindered wings. I fed
my resentments well
in the tinder-closet of
my heart, hating how
little sex my wife
seemed to want
& bold enough to
betray our marriage
to get what I thought
I so needed on the sly,
stacking up porn mags in
the closet & romancing
others via email:
You know, all of that
ruinous, back-to-younger
days-middle-aging-brittle-
man’s vicissitudes,
quailing at the threshold
of adulthood ever
yet again, burning all
to keep from burning
through. My wife knew
little of this and
deserved even less;
she was laboring
hard for pennies and crumbs,
working a shit job &
longing desperately for
a business of her own,
no boss or desk or
corporate routine to
trap her in days. In
another month she
would stage the garage
sale which started
her dream venture, selling
beds and furniture
she had painted white
in our back yard in
hundred-degree heat
amid bad menstrual
migraines & all of
our hard life inside. She
loved almost desperately
that work, happiest
when engaged in work
of her own making.
Imagine the dour
mood of our house
when Monday rolled
back around and
she was forced to
suit up again for
naught and less.
Me, I’d drive into
town to the newspaper
where I caricatured
my old former
heroics, hating my
job and its infernal
incessant stresses,
it’s 18-year-old
routines. Hell,
I could walk those
halls blindfolded
and hamstrung.
Bored and feeling trapped,
I sought comfort
where I could, sneaking
peeks at porn
on the new Internet,
my Mac Quadra 950
taking forever to
load those images
of naiads sucking
baring boobs
& sucking cocks
and spreading their
asscheeks to stare
at me from the behind
I so desperately thought
to thrive in someday
when I was free again.
I also tap tap tapped
vernal orchestrals
of stolen love to
that secret other woman,
creating a tale of
burning delights
on the lam, reveling
in the pussy-smell
of the smoke, lingering
without committing
to doing anything,
nailed between fancy
and fright. Oftentimes
a hangover clanged
in my skull tolling
corporate hours like iron,
making me desperate
to flee down the clock
to happy hour’s free
falling glow, back to
remembered lost nights
of unfastened jezebels
ginned on my jizz,
buoyed on the big
night rock n roll
of the lost 80’s where
I would once again
be so oceanically
welcomed to starry
wet love. Not. I
drove home that May
after work and the gym
too exhausted for the
rituals of love which
were supposed to be
the greatest part of
my day, where I
knew my angst-ridden,
money-worried, career-
challenged wife was
waiting for her husband
to come home in
some real way at last,
swatting away those
drywood termites in
flight over stacks
of due bills. My windows
were rolled tight &
the A/C was on high
as the light of early
summer poured
down from the sky
like smelted raw
gold through a sour-
smelling smoke,
prescient of the
pyre I was invoking
with each day
further down the drink.
I kept a little plastic bottle
under the driver’s seat
filled with Schnapps,
there exactly for those
moments when I felt
ready to fly up to
that sun, torch wings
to hell’s own source.
I’d take three hard
hits along the way
home where love
waited, juicing my brain
enough to make
my night’s one
official Scotch (poured
four fingers strong)
do more than its
safely sanctioned
work as I cooked
our dinner in a haze.
A burning man for
the world, caught
inbetween his ages
with his pants past
his knees & his
peckerwood on fire
& nothing he can do
about it except
take another hit
from that bottle
which whispers
nothings in his future’s
ear, nothings which
fume in his ears
like the sea in a shell
as he drives those
last streets home
where love is waiting,
waiting, waiting to begin.
III.
Later Saturday morning
we took a walk,
the waking day
about 60 degrees,
sunny and breezy,
a perfect Saturday.
We’d had a difficult
coffee talking about
how tight our money
was, how little we could
do for Christmas this
year, analyzing what
was wrong with each
family relation as if
to justify how little
we could spend on each.
Behind it my wife was
brokenhearted about
the slow death of
her business, eight years
of hope and hard
work come to naught,
holding on to it far
longer than she should
have -- these are her
words --- putting us
into the financial mess
were were now in.
All the while I
just listened and tried
to be supportive down
the middle, agreeing
we needed to change
but sadding how she
can never let the
dream of her business go.
The sober husband,
six years after I left
her for the depths of
the bottle and five
years since I came
home, giving up that
bottle each day for good.
Turning our talk
elsewhere we both
ladled on invective
for the Bush administration,
for such a lousy war
burning out of control,
for how this country
would be years in the
hole they dug for us
trying to restore
a dying, embered church.
As the day woke
sweetly round us
we turned our burning mouths
onto the whole
wrongheadedness of
the holiday season,
a guilt-ridden,
over-extended
expansively expensive
affair of duty and
dreariness, compulsively
squeezing the old Santa
doll for stuff that
never showed up under
the Christmas tree,
not then, nor ever.
The conversation left
us hallow and winded
so we had breakfast
and headed out to
walk in our way,
the same ritual
route down to the lake
and back. As I said
it was breezy and fair,
promising a glorious
some-what cool day,
spilling some of that
happiness into our
weary worn steps,
repairing something
in and between us,
I dunno, a game face
for the age, pleasure
in the simplest of
things. We talked about
our cats & what to
eat that night for dinner,
about what we would
have to change if we
adopted a child, that
sort of stuff. We looked
at houses along the
way taking note of
paint jobs and landscaping,
reminding ourselves of
so many things we’d like
to do with our house
one day when we had
the money. Close to
the end of our route,
just a few blocks from
home, I pointed out
the garage apartment
that had burned the
week before. An unemployed
couple had lived there
with their kids, and
last Tuesday night
when it was so bitterly
windy and cold they
had tried to heat the
apartment with their
gas oven. Somewhere in
the night the whole place
had caught fire. The account
in the newspaper
said that there was only
a moment to collect the
kids & flee, taking along
just a few clothes. What
little was left was
lost in the roaring
pour of doom.
Now it was just a ghost
of that roast, a shell, the
windows broken out
and blackened round
their frames, offering
a view inside of nothing,
a few cindered posts
holding up a roof
which sagged like
molten iron.
We passed by looking
at the ruin in silence,
there but for the grace
of a God whose mercies
are strange and difficult,
maybe even wild.
I stepped over a page
from a coloring book
that was singed around
its edges -- there were
a dozen pages strewn
about us in the grass
and on the sidewalk.
Evidence of that
fiery hand which
spins bum Fortune’s wheel --
a hand which belongs
half to us and the other
to the mystery which
turns tidally under all,
asking, with ghost whispers,
whether we care for
another try, and why.
My wife and I could
have ended up there
or perhaps will some day:
perhaps more truly,
that burnt tale was
the end of the one
I hadn’t taken,
had I not given up
on the swoon
of vernals, wine
and seem, had I
gone ahead and
tossed one life
blithely to the fire in
order to burn with some
other in the seams of
the undersides of the
riptiding dream. Maybe.
Whatever the case
my wife and I walked
aside of such fate &
headed home to the
one we’d chosen and
made instead, where
I eventually came
home to my wife
and she allowed me back
in & this is our
difficult and mixed
result. We’ve got
to work hard through
this stretch; ahead
we must work further
in from the ledge
where it’s too easy
to fall. Love must
become even more
real, even as we
age past its prime,
or exactly because
something essential
now cinders down.
This morning the
year doesn’t feel so
much ebbed as empty,
a hollow container,
like entering a room
not yet furnished, a
chamber untouched by
the first ochered ink.
This present dry
stage could bed a
bluer sea or turn into
the ash-white face
of fate. Jung said
it takes spirit
to beat the bottle;
Paracelsus believed
that only fire counters
fire, that disease
must be poxed, its
cure arrived from sames.
Grandfather,
I need sap and vigor
for these wooden verbs,
a fresh green pulse
to sickle a dying year.
Burn what You must
to clear out the trash.
Make of this man
a fire for the life
which burns hot and
holy through the middles
and sames, that I may
be free enough
to walk in those woods
a green-married man,
deeper and darker
and more loving than ever.
Take these final sparks
and hurl ‘em in a womb
which can ferry to the
next shore something
sustaining, ripe, and
croons like the sea it burns.
CAPE BLUE FIREMarch 2005
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.-- Jack Gilbert, “The Great Fires”
At this beach of wind and wave
hard boiled to high awfulness
no one would dare to light a fire;
But you, my Cape, are still and
ever burning, burning evanescent
with blue fire, a roar of flaming angels
inside the wet world’s awesome pour.
In my prime years -- a savage
span of high-angst lust lit
nightly by Your dream -- I sought
You everywhere I needed more than
any man is due, more than any boy
afraid to live could spark and tend
within. Cut free of childhood &
parents & the great white Christian god,
the booze which came first in
the narrative seemed magical,
freeing my tongue and goosing me
from my room and hurl me
into women’s rooms late at night,
my breath whiskey-warmed
sweet-soured. Drunk at some
party on a layover in Chicago
before my sophomore year
in college, I walked
home a young woman I had known
in high school, our talk slurred
and giggly, our path narrowing
to her door at which we kissed
and didn’t stop, backing through
one room into the bedroom and
thence down on her bed, my
hands a blur inside her
clothes and hers yanking
hard at mine until I was
on and in her and through,
coming in one dazed collapsing
wave of boozy heat. Amazing
how that fire water could
pry a woman’s legs from her
smile in just one night, cracking
the alien shell of strangers to
spill the yolk of messiness & greed,
my ache beyond her walls before
first light. And then when I plugged
my guitar into an amp a big night spread
in me wings of pagan fire, the minor
man become a magus of amplitude
inside minor-seventh chords, his ax-swings
fit for the Cerne giant’s club and cock.
I’ll never forget that first song of the
first set onstage of one band or another
during my failed career,
some months of half-assed
preparations delved up in that
first initial pour of sound, three short
taps of the drumsticks unleashing
the whole of us in a fusillade of
sound that fanned out on the crowd
in a wave of blueballed lust, enraging
and enrapturing the beer-tamped
libidos assembled in that basement
or grange hall. And later still
when love woke at last in a vernal blast
of green, I found myself forever miles from shore
in just three days and one night.
There the deepest forge in your blue
wash roaring equally within me as without,
Yes to Yes in hymenal tenderness,
fish rider swum up the stream inside
his beloved’s long-forestalled embrace.
The wild startled joyful font of sperm
unleashed that night bore a dragon
freight of your fire, fructifying some
deeper soul than I have yet to know,
much less name. But I never had
much patience with any of those crafts,
greedy for the height and depth
of burn but lazy in my means,
hoping that your crazy fire would
well up where and whenever I
should deign to taunt the wicker
seams. And so I got to be a drunken
garage-band player with big hair
no money and spent dreams,
thirsting toward that end for
pure and puerile yearning,
burning just to burn, my
big night music down to
the ashes of an occasional
jam session in rooms too littered
with broken strings & empties
& the howl of ever-broken things.
For all the loudness of your fire,
I got it down best in those final
days when I knocked off for
the night and laid my blue
Hamer Phantom back into its
case to rest in blue velour
and clicked black covers shut.
I didn’t know shit about great
fires, not then nor now,
no matter how much I sing
on about You, my Cape.
I never got much for your blue
lucre, not in any way I drank
or chorded or swooned.
But then maybe our human
hands were never meant
for Your greater fires. I suspect
You know this as you
watch each ship careen
down the worst of coasts
into Your boiling wilderness.
Try as we might, You are
about a work we can
only mimic and thieve.
Oh well. Those years were
like a nursemaid to this nursery.
Every day now I milk
the paps of hell for just three
drops of Cape Blue swoon,
lucent and malefic and
sidereally rich in blue spleen,
killing these lines inside
an early morning forge
beneath this chair inside
the horse which ferries
shore heart to distant shore’s
desire. May all my augments choir
the crash and burn of Cape Blue noir.
SIREN SONGBOOK(from Nov. 11)St. Brendan’s voyage
is the mirror of this
blue-verbed enterprise.
He read a book of
wonders and burnt
it in the bad faith
of his mind; he
was then was bid by
God to sail to
every island of
the stream &
witness all he’d
sent to flame;
and once God’s
plenty had been
revealed he was
returned to
dry shores to write
that book again.
I read that book
of wonders between
a girl’s blue eyes
and panties and
burnt myself in
so doing, nearly
to a crisp, losing
then true north
of sense; I was
then bid by my
God -- by You,
Grandfather -- to
set those sights
to the polestar
which burns
over the wild
and widest
inside sea, writing
fire down.
Your Sirens drew
me here with
a song so earthly
pretty it was pure
ethereal, lashing
me to a comp-book’s
spine, my ears
hearing something
inside the muted
world, inside those
sweet curved bodies
which chaliced a
waking pour down
from bliss to
abyss and further,
down into fertile
dominions beneath
even the words they
back on the shore.
When I lost the
deep-sea apparition
of love’s wildest embrace
-- when she walked off
on a faded, embered beach --
a sea of books rushed in,
the womb in myth’s
long history inside
each salty kiss.
The fancied forays
ebbed when I sobered
up and hitched my
hips to a real woman
& entered real working
days: That’s when the
psychic marriage too
began, my hot heart
wooing Psyche’s flavor
as I read Rilke and
Jung and dove down
into Joe Campbell’s
skull cauldron of
the world’s teeming
blue mythologies.
James Hillman’s
monograph “Senex and
Puer” lamped for
me the basalt concavities
ground in me when
she left, like the
moon that got away;
and my father slowly
wa freed from his
deeper gravities, or
rather, the world he
fathered was let be
when I forgave him
in my amendcs for
having so failed to
be the other half
of a healthy father-
son relation.
Place Sirens on
those years where
I crossed from the
outside thrall to
it inside crashing
harmony, passing
round a pass of awe
and awfulness ruled
by you, Grandfather,
Adamastor, aggrieved
too of his love, his
moon, in the confusion
of the tides at the
Cape of all lost hopes.
Those Sirens sing the
big night music
inside the one I
thought I’d find out
in the big night
swelter of guitars
and bars and tarts,
a whiskied tilt-a-whirl,
each stage a bed,
a pass, a pool to haul
sweetness to its deepest
end where I thought
some door would surely
open -- and did, though
I never saw it quite that
way. Those Sirens mark
the pass where history
dreams through to
its other, that inner
mystery which shrouds
salt words with a
clef held to their lips.
The Sirens sing and
yet the eyes are silent:
the wakened man stirs
on a shore inside of
of love’s bowering,
the embrace of Psyche
come to pass in the
writing of these
lines, savoring the
past the way I couldn’t
the first time through,
so eager and hot to
devour the next big
thing that I missed
the whole ghostly flavor
of all things down
and round. Those Sirens
are the watermark of
She who holds my
youth and age together,
the spine of this songbook
where pages ensoul
wild worlds yet to flow
from one to other,
one side always adventuring,
the other going home,
both fellas crucial to
the task of piloting
that distant inland
sea where
every burning book is
found drowned at the
deepest ends of their wash.
Yesterday my wife and I
drove to Deland on
errands, buying me
new shoes for work
& hitting stores as
we always do, finding
very little. When I tried
to sympathize with
my wife’s frustration
-- never any stuff, no
clothes she likes --
she got mad, saying
how I patronize her
for showing angst
I just bury over.
“Dammit, I love my
life, I’m just not
afraid to show its
rougher edges,”
she said as we drove
once-rural 44 toward
home in the last
light sedges of
the day. A moment
for the real man
I’ve become while all
this saws and heaves
below, for which
I had little tact or
cool or skill but
blundered anyway
because the keel I
know is true.
Maybe this book
of wonders will burn
back into my days
a more real man,
the one my wife so
needs; perhaps not.
A poem is itself,
not a cure or a
lesson on how to be:
It heaves seaward
relentlessly even as
I walk away into
dryer hours of
saltless employ,
into all the aging
rigors of a life. I only
have a book of blunders
to show my wife
up there where it counts --
half-truths, awkwardness,
overbusy sooth, snoozing
on the couch at night
soon after dinner.
Some lover, eh? Somehow
those two guys
must meet enough --
young man and old one
I mean -- enough on the
page, enough to support
my side of that sear
of two hearts engaged
in that intimate third
sea neither wholly
without or within me
but between my wife
and me, that truly
dread passage which
the Sirens mark like
all scary women did
when they cornered me
and demanded something
from the inside reaches
of a kiss -- a fullness
which comes from
alternating a wave’s
crash and its receding
hiss. To be be willing
to turn any which way
and whenever needed
to get to the truth
which makes two
hearts find home.
I thought Sirens lured
sailors to their dooms
because their song
was pure opus
contra naturuum,
inviting sons into
a womb’s soak:
But no! Oran bids
me turn that upside
and listen to
the inside measure
of their song. We fear
‘em for their truths
and lash ourselves
to masts which
plunge the errant course,
hitting anyway brute
rocks, going down
down down where we
listen at last
or drown
I write and write
the pages of a book
Homeric in it
wine-dark washes --
perhaps You strung
that poet’s harp
into my singing
heart -- I close my
eyes and see Sirens
clearly at the
bottom of my life’s round:
Now may whatever salt
I’ve mined there
make what comes a
pleasure to both tongue
and hour, for its time
for me to go wake up
my wife in bed and start
this Sunday in our
labored paradise,
a field made fertile
by the riches far down
under a Siren’s
songbook thunder.
