Eleusis Redux 2: The Door

What of that hoary arch which
spectralled every door I hurried
through into the lustral night?
Surely Heading Out meant
escape from the rude cage
of my weary bones, leaving
behind the fuming ruins of
the day, that awful sum
of all I'd failed to become,
siloed in my bum history.
Yet to flee such sordids
for their oblivions gave
that door the power of
inversing magnitude,
firing wild the blue neon
bulb of noir descents
in my imagination
with that first drink front
and center, the sacred
key by which I tossed
one self away and sprung
its wicked, the one
who opens every door
in the descending night,
jumping bed to bed in
jackal glee, knee-deep in
vodka brine. Reverse a
Tarot card and you get its
truth the harder way,
a sacred text read right
to left bottom to top,
across a sea which
does not wash here to
home but rather toward
that beach whose
features are defined
in the drab particulars
of coming to the next day
after another night of ruin.
That wild dark and
emptying door read
my heart for its vacuities,
a caliber of willed
unknowing which
changed night to
night; as I rushed
through it noired
me with a measure
of its cold phosphor,
lamping to all
the true amount of
wad I had to blow.
I thought my looks
--Rod Stewartean,
rail-thin, spiked-hair,
somewhat familiar
yet not--were what
rolled the dice
for me each night;
a single blade of hair
not spiked made
all the difference
between which lips
I'd taste that night.
Now I come to
believe that my
luck was fated
by that door,
by how much it
spoored over me
according to my
need. That's what
the others saw in
my blurred red eyes
standing at the bar --
the eerie shadows
of that door,
signalling how far
they'd fall in
reaching out for me.
And thus those nightly
motions of hand to
glass and cock
toward ass around
the midnight clock
were ciphers that door,
ruins of a ritual we
lost so long ago,
naked of the sort of
grace which clothes
us from below.
And like a movie
read to its ends
in negative, off the
outer screen, the song
of that door's
mystery is still voiced
in caricature,
out in libido's merry
throng, upside down
and errant, sexy,
clueless and wrong.
Out there in the press
we stole cherries from
each others' drinks
& used brassieres
for baseball mitts
playing catch with
a lost god's balls,
marauding on toward
dawn's brute shore
where desire found 'em
long ago. What a grand wild
feeling there always
was in whooshing
out into the grand
arch night, so full
of springlike expectation
no matter how
bad the season,
not knowing what I'd find
or where I'd find it
or if I'd find anything
at all except bad luck's
snake eyes again,
that usual course of
drunken nights which
set the main, above
which all good luck
rose in benippled isles.
The door welcome
me out into that
vast warm disarray
in Your blackest embrace,
the one in which
You slowly wombed
the door which opens in.

Eleusis Redux

"The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which appears to date from about 600 B.C., has been thought to preserve in epic form much of the ritual of the Mysteries. It describes how Aidoneus, better known as Hades, the 'Unseen,' a euphemistic title of Death, could find no one willing to share his grisly kingdom. Spying Persephone, Demeter's daughter, gathering flowers in company with the Oceanids in the plain of Nysa, he ensnared her with a lovely bloom and bore her away beneath the earth. Demeter's grief was so inconsolable that the world grew barren and Zeus was moved to restore the girl to her mother. Aidoneus dare not refuse his great brother's request, but even Zeus was powerless in face of the law which laid down that return from the underworld was only possible for those who had eaten nothing there. Persephone unfortunately had eaten some pomegranate seeds, so a comprimise was agreed whereby she was permitted to return to earth for eight months only before rejoining her consort among the shades.

"Demeter meantime had wandered to Eleusis, and been kindly treated by king Celeus. In return, she attempted to render his infant son invulnerable by burning him in the fire, but was surprised by the child's mother, who spoiled her plan. Thereupon the angry goddess revealed herself in all her dread majesty and commanded the Eleusinians to raise a temple and altar in her honour by the spring of Kallichoron.

***

"The myth as recorded, and apparently also by the nebulous Pamphos, if Pausinas really used him to check his own account, is composed of three elements. One, and possibly the earliest, was concerned with the chthonian deity, connected with agriculture and fertility, variously known as Plutus or Pluto, whose name means 'Wealthy,' presumably in the specialized sense of riches in the earth. That he should have in course of time become identified with Hades, and his wife with Persephone, who were also associated with the depths below, is scarcely surprising, if such a fact was the true course of events.

"Why the equation should have been made at Eleusis we do not know, unless the Hymn was composed as a piece of propaganda either in the Eleusinian or Athenian cause. Eleusis at any rate possessed the Rharian plain, where the science of agriculture was supposed to have been first practiced, as well as a hero of the stature of Triptolmeus who was destined to attain wide fame.

"Superimposed upon or coeval with the legend of Plutus/Hades and Persephone was the worship of the corn-goddess Demeter and her daughter Kore -- the word means 'maiden' or 'daughter' -- who was apparently a personification of the seed-corn which, as Nilsson suggested, was kept in subterranean silos after the harvest until the period of the autumn sowing. This barren season was described in myth as the time of Kore's absence in the underworld. Finally the story of how the local Eleusinan king adopted the worship of Demeter may have an historical basis in Mycenaean times."

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





THE MYSTERIES OF BLISS

Dec. 6

1.

In the raw particulars of my
drunkalogue, I always went out
to get lucky. On the high end
I dreamed of finding my long-lost,
ever--desired, forever-unrequited
Mrs. Right at last that night,
falling deeply into her starry
wild kiss, ending my whole
long bad history as a solitary
man. At the low end of the
hope -- the place where I
lived on night after night --
I knew that with enough
beer and whiskey in my
brain that I would be
able to see the nubilette
in the smoky murk,
my ever-shy hands becoming
tridents, hauling her off
at closing to enter the
profaner sanctions of Love,
deep in the dankest folds
of the verboten night.
The compulsion for going out
and finding her was so enmeshed
in my alcoholic gears that
booze and pussy
were one noctal thresh
whose soft suggestions sang
so deeply into my brain
that just couldn't say
no to the heading out
and repeated it endlessly,
four to seven nights a week,
my desire a turkey
vulture spiralling
on the downward
thermal of my years.
When all that ended
-- again -- I see what what
life I have been given
back as means to
right my ways,
to make amends for all
those late-night thefts
in Pluto's britches. How?
By trying to help others
out of the same bottle,
by trying to be a good
husband to my wife.
Here I matin back that
vespered booty on the pure
white sheets of this page.
I work the deep fields of
the Lord at 4:30 a.m.,
that former zombie zone
where I was either
nodding off with my nose
up in some girl's cooze
or driving blacklit highways
home, the man at the wheel
a hollow iron drone.
I know from hard experience
that it's perilous to romance
the booze, that I'm not good
at resisting temptation's
gold-rimmed shotglass
set there on bright neat space
front and center of my mind;
it's also infinitely dangerous to
make a myth out of those
dreadfully wrong nights,
for fear the siren song again
be heard, calling me out
to bars and babes in the
voice I can't refuse. So here
I write to amulet enough
that pair of dark divines
who still softly beg me
swill the depths of salt
desire, even though
I know they're shortcuts
to the storied God of Love,
routes which only
empty the world of
You, Beloved, God,
Umpteenth Thrall
to hymn a song. Wisdom
cautions me to write O so
carefully of the magic
which still hums below.


II.

Still -- (O Lord, limn these
words as I proceed, in faith
You speak most deeply here)
-- There was something ritual
to those pagan hours, a Mystery
rudely enacted in that gloom
that still haunts me here, arising
not from memory as from what
they distilled, an intuition of
a wilder story deep within,
thrown out as young men do
across the night in cocksman's
myth, the same way Greeks
psychologized the stars.
Why else are dreams
so porous, confused and starry,
harrowing back to long-lost days
(as when, last night, I tried to
find a coworker in a vast
corporate tumulus) only to
marrow what's ahead?
So travel with back with me
25 years in a tumble of white
sands down the upturned glass ...

There's the fool initiate practicing
his guitar, running through the
riffs of gut-strung ecstasy, his
hands like horses up and down
the fretboard, itself a shore
for big night music always
bluer and wilder and more
swollen than mortal hands
achieve ... Such minstrelsy
is not enough to rouse
real singing beasts, to invoke
the genie who envowels all
wishes: No Mephistopheles
ever came knocking
after those power chords,
his arm around some
poodle-skirted knockered
vixen offering her to
me for play: Rather, what
arose in my bottled-up
frustrations was just the
sort of spirit I jonesed
on worst, the one who
whispered More and More
and More, pointing out my
door into the unmargined
grand maternities of the
night. Yes, something of that
next order was required (that
spirit in my ear's bottle
whispered), leaping off a
bum guitar's airy back
onto a more fully-blooded filly,
seaweed mane be damned.
And so headed out into
a lush humid dark
still singed from early
evening storms,
where flashes of heat
lighting jiggered
high and spectral
across the heavens
from god to god to god.
I always walked out
as if through a grand
proscenium whose stone
arches were pocketed
with skulls and pottery
filled with burnt down
bits, garlanded with orange
tree boughs in high blossom,
exuding the kind of naked
sweet that turned my brain
to whiskey, as when
I'd cram into a woman's
cleavage for the first time
of a night. When I walked
out that door I was 14
and leaving my mother's
Christian house, heading
out to meet a naughty
girl & play beneath
the moon, I was 6
and playing Show Me
Yours in the woods of
first grade recess, I
was the four-year-old
holding Paula's hand
heading into the park
away from home
to look for worms: Always
desire lead me out
on the scent of something
new and wild in the
air, sweet with first
love's pealing bells
beyond the borders
of the known -- a place
I knew I must not go
and could not help
from going so.

What My Toes Nose

As heart hauls the depths of my thought
in the low stone chill of plainchant,
so the bottoms of my feelings are ferried
still lower down, bowels to balls of
groin then feet, nosing my voice
in the toes which never leave the ground.
Down here nothing separates soul
from sole, dolphin from the firstling
of my tribe; to speak is to
slither and fin teeming blue seas
where appetite and affection
are both love's digestion, where means
and ends are married and keel-hauled
in one dank ritual feast. There all is
humid and sweetly rank, scented with
blood milk and sex, fragrant in
each wave's smash and foamed careen.
To write this way is to wing upon
the broad back of the Ancient of Days,
seeking in every next sentence older
evidence of the unquiet muse
who bid us drop from trees and
walk savannahs a million years long,
spear in the ready, fire on the tongue.
Always that older deeper man is
walking ahead, waiting for me to catch
up to him, emerging in the slow
cookery of words, this stew of
forgotten gods laced with still-wild verbs.
I am joined at the hips to that savage
siren, my tongue swollen, even huge,
plundering her malt honey, rapturing
in the song I dowse which dives into
her wombs. Her meter is a cat lapping
milk, is the weave of crickets this
late in the year outside in the garden
this morning, here at this night-drowned
hour. are balls somewhere out there
slapping the ass of the some sirening
vixen, the both of them straining
to get through and past these isolate lusts
and on into that satiate peace which
floats off to dream, song choired at last.
That's when the sea-nymphs smiles,
riding herd on the bones of her latest
first lover down to that silt harbor to join
the rest on time's rotted bed down
the human abyss. Ah my feet now
walk there, squishing spongy bones
and detumesccent peckers, stepping over
plowshares cured of their swords,
their tempering fires quelled.
My song rings in a drowned abbey's steeple,
tolling the low name of gods fast asleep
in the ikons of heroes and saints,
discoverers and inventors, poets and
playboys and patriarchs and old
wheezy farmers dreaming of young
lust before merry winter hearths.
We all want you Mary, my mother
and Christ's too, mother of God
in Mer, in that salt sea of devotion's
fused cock and quim, mad whirling
unio of world-drench-quenching sot.
All sought a way home to you with their
stone axes and starry parallaxes, with
their singing bones and jukebox jones
for muddy waters and kinky daughters
who singscream Yes and No. I'm in rhythm now
mama, son and lover the same man heading
home yet again, safely inside the daring and
complicit profanities of the next bed-rocking
poem, secure enough now to know
that she and I are one, walking together
down the sea's dark bed with the blue bells
of heaven all aglow, pealing every empyrean
to jackal in the flow, those cursed divinities
which burn hot and icy in the heart's feral
undertrow, a backswash filled with failing poems
& spent jisms & bent harpoons amid
all the lacy undies, detritus of the wave-strung
muse who sings beneath my tongue
when I dare to sing big ones this way.

Fate

FATE

Dec. 3

You should have seen my wife
when she came out of the bathroom
on the first night we made love.
We had booked a room at a hotel
in Melbourne Beach on a bitterly
cold and windy night in early December.
A full moon hung archly over all,
turning the pool outside our
window into an eye, lavishing the beach
and long black ocean with a high-
sighing, heavy gleam. We had been dating
for several months, our late-night
sessions of passion slowly yielding,
waxing to this moment, the door
where we would pass together
into our future life. I lay in bed
trying to be patient, trying not to think
of what she would soon reveal to me
at last. A candle on the nightstand
cast a soft glow in the gloom, bright
in such great darkness, and the roof
swayed now and then to a hard
northeastern breeze. And then she
emerged, wearing that long white Calvin
Klein nightdress for the first time,
the one I loved so in the first years
of our marriage, flowing over her
nakedness demure and pure, like white
water, suggesting, like moonlight, all
my hands and heart so ached
to touch and stroke and clutch, over
and over again. Her brown hair hung
down over shoulders are ever pale,
her eyes stared at me dark and bright
as if she would soon approach: And yet
for a moment she just stood there
with her arms crossed over her breasts,
fingertips resting against her clavicle.
“I’m so scared,” she whispered: That
simple statement so filled the room
with a strange aura to her beauty,
lifting something out into the
freezing moony night’s eternal
arches where my memory today
is still asking why she said it.
It was our true wedding night,
preceding by a year the actual one
when we returned to that hotel
wearing wedding rings.
By then sex was no longer a surprise
nor much of a fright: Not that
first catastrophic wave of welcome
we collapsed upon each other’s
shores, but rather a vowed
belief in such magnitude,
that such a breadth existed,
sure enough for us to stand
and work together for our lives.
But what scared her so? Of course
by giving herself to me she
was spreading herself wide
not only my body but all my the
other freight, stuff known and unknown
even to me. But was there more?
Could she see ahead to the way
things would go for her
in the dowries of love? So
much indeed spiralled down
when we said Yes: Our finances
were a ruin to start with,
I fell quickly back into the
bottle and hurt her badly
in those years it took to
surrender it up again, her body
soon began to flush its sex
with all the ways a woman’s
plumbing can go wrong (but no,
not all of them have gone,
not gone the worst, not yet--).
And did that Yes invoke the rest
of her fate’s life-long sourings? --
her nephew dying drunk
at the wheel, her beloved
cat dying after 16 years,
her father going twice toward
death and coming back less
vitally each time, her business
failing hard leaving us
broke this Christmas,
her mother always over
her shoulder, singing
shades of bleeding wounds:
Did she feel as she stood there
unwilling yet to walk down
those final feet to me the
full of weight of that sad full
moon’s prescient history?
Yesterday morning we drank
coffee with the windows shut
& the a/c cranked, another
gray warm day making us both feel
miserable; she cried long and hard
dark holiday blues, so angry at
always doing the right thing
to no good, for never getting any break
in the incessant maul of losses.
Could things have gone different
had she not come out of that
bathroom door 11 years ago?
Should she have sensed the
danger earlier and fled me
long before, leaving me to
wreak my surgent urgencies
inside someone else’s fragrant
so-fragile heart? Has there ever
been any other door for her
than plain old lousy luck?
After all that hard talk today, I
wonder. Fate was the only choice
offered her that night, and she went
willingly through it, believing
in the heart of life I guess,
even when it leads to slaughter.
And me? I sure was desperate
to house and ground my howling,
feeling the precipice my swelling
thirst was nearing me to; I was
also greedy to make her body
mine, to have my way with her
and finish looking deep in those
lovely bluegreen eyes as I
jissomed into her my entire
inheritance, a ghastly spray
of proteins rich with half my
history and half my tribe’s,
mixing that infernal juice
with warm wash of her womb.
Little could I know back then
(or even now) how that tidal
wave of lust would carry me
dry shores far away where heart
was more than house or the
art of making a home, but
a ravaging destruction which
fills deepest where it suffers.
She might have seen that fate,
but I was just a guy, determined
to possess what was revealed
standing there, as if to own
the full candescence of
a wild yet sterile moon.
She lingered at that door
we entered eleven years ago,
the pure summation of a woman’s
curvature by which my heart
is shaped and wrecked, her
pale arms crossed over such
perfect breasts which fate
mauled so, nursing a feral
history half mine, half hers, a sum
whose softer readings are obscure,
hidden in the belly of the wave
which washed over us that night
in one devouring kiss, with me
on fire for her full delights
and my future next wife for life
shaking in immortal fright.





LONGING

Summer 2002

I sometimes wonder whether longing
can’t radiate out from someone so
powerfully, like a storm, that nothing
can come to him from the opposite
direction. Perhaps William Blake
has somewhere drawn that?
— Rilke, letter, 1912

There is a longing in us which
grows from sigh to starry shriek.
Perhaps comets are charred furies
of that pain, a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears to God’s porch
and back, insatiable and unanswered.
Perhaps. All I know is that
it’s infinitely perilous to think
that longing has a human end.
In my cups I once believed
a woman mooned for me,
her longing a white welcome
over my million nights alone.
I met and passed her many times
those hard years, blinded by the aura
of her unvowled name.
Surely when two longings touch
it’s like when great waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
Our deeper thirst can never sate:
as each draught of booze
was never enough, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.
I recall a young man
walking home drunk on a
frozen night long ago,
his beloved nowhere
to be found in the chalice
he had named. Winds hurled
steel axes through the
Western sky, failing to clear
the cruel foliage of fate.
In his defeat he was greater
than any angel beckoned
by that night: his heart so
hollowed by longing
as to chance in pure cathedral,
her absence the clabber of a bell
shattering the frozen air,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.




ISIS RISING


From The Golden Ass: The Transformations Lucius by Apuleius, transl. Kennedy (1998)

‘It was not yet midnight when I awoke with a sudden start to see the full moon just rising from the sea-waves and shining with unusual brilliance. Now, in the silent secrecy of night, was my opportunity. Knowing that his greatest of goddesses was supremely powerful; that all human life was ruled by her Providence; that not only all animals, both tame and wild, but even lifeless things were animated by the divine power of her light and might; that as she waxed and waned, so in sympathy and obedience every creature on earth or in the heavens or in the sea was increased or diminished; and seeing that Fate was now seemingly satiated with my long tale of suffering and was offering me a hope, however late in the day, of rescue: I decided to beg for mercy from the awesome manifestation of the goddess that I now beheld. At once, shaking off my sluggish repose, I jumped up happily and briskly, and eager to purify myself I plunged into the sea. Seven times I immersed my head, since that is the number which the godlike Pythagoras has told us is most appropriate in religious rituals, and then weeping I uttered my silent prayer to the all-powerful goddess.

“Queen of heaven, whether you are Ceres, nurturing mother and creatrix of crops, who in your joy at finding your daughter again set aside the ancient acorn, fodder for wild beasts, and taught man the use of civilized food, and now fructify the ploughlands of Eleusis; or whether you are Venus Urania, who in the first beginnings of the world by giving birth to Love brought together the opposite sexes and so with never-ending regeneration perpetuated the human race, and now are worshipped in the sanctuary of sea-girt Paphos; or whether you are Phoebus’ sister, who by relieving women in labour with your soothing remedies have raised up many peoples, and now are venerated in your shrine at Ephesus; or whether you are Proserpine of the fearful night-howling and triple countenance, you who hold back the attacks of ghosts and control the gates of hell, who pass at will among the sacred groves and are propitiated with many different rites; you who brighten cities everywhere with your female light and nourish the fertile seeds with your moist warmth and dispense according to the motions of the Sun an ever-changing radiance; by whatever name, in whatever manner, in whatever guise it is permitted to call on you: do you now at last help me in this extremity of tribulation, do you rebuild the wreck of my fortunes, do you grant peace and respite from the cruel misfortunes that I have endured: let there be an end of toils, an end of perils. Banish this loathsome animal shape, return me to the sight of my friends and family, restore Lucius to himself; or if I have offended some power that still pursues me with its savagery and will not be appeased, then at last let me die if I may not live.”

Such were the prayers that I poured forth, accompanied with pitiful lamentations; then sleep once more enveloped my fainting senses and overcame me in the same resting place as before. I had scarcely closed my eyes when out of the sea there emerged the head of the goddess, turning on me that face revered even by the gods; then her radiant likeness seemed by degree to take shape in its entirety and stand, shaking off the brine, before my eyes. Let me try to convey to you too the wonderful sight that she presented, that is if the poverty of human language will afford me the means of doing so or the goddess herself will furnish me with superabundance of expressive eloquence.

First, her hair: long, abundant, and gently curling, it fell caressingly in spreading waves over her divine neck and builders. Her head was crowned with a diadem variegated with many different flowers; in its centre, above her forehead, a disc like a mirror or rather an image of the moon shone with a white radiance. This was flanked on either side by a viper rising sinuously erect; and over all was a wreath of ears of corn. Her dress was of all colours, woven of the finest linen, now brilliant white, now saffron yellow, now a flaming rose-red. But what above all made me stare and stare again was her mantle. This was jet-black and shone with a dark resplendence; it passed right round her, under her right arm and up to her left shoulder, where it was bunched and hung down in a series of many folds to the tasselled fringes of its surface shone a scattered pattern of stars, and in the middle of them the full moon radiated flames of fire. Around the circumference of this splendid garment there ran one continuous garland all made up of flowers and fruits. Quite different were the symbols that she held. In her right hand was a bronze sistrum, a narrow strip of metal curved back on itself like a sword-belt and pierced by a number of thin rods, which when shaken in triple time gave off a rattling sound. From her left hand hung a gold pitcher, the upper part of its handle in the form of a rampant asp with head held aloft and neck puffed out. Her ambrosial feet were shod with sandals woven from palm-leaves, the sign of victory. In this awesome shape the goddess, wafting over me all the blessed perfumes of Arabia, deigned to answer me in her own voice.

“I come, Lucius, moved by your entreaties: I, mother of the universe, mistress of all the elements, first-born of the ages, highest of the gods, queen of the shades, first of those who dwell in heaven, representing in one shape all gods and goddesses. My will controls the shining heights of heaven, the health-giving sea-winds, and the mournful silences of hell; the entire world worships my single godhead in a thousand gods; the native Athenians the Cecropian Minerva; the island-dwelling Cypriots Paphian Venus; the archer Cretans Dictynnan Diana; the triple-tongued Sicilians Stygian Proserpine; the ancient Eleusinians Actaean Ceres; some call me Juno, some Bellona, those on whom the rising and those on whom the setting sun shines, and the Egyptians who excel in ancient learning, honour me with the worship which is truly mine and call me by my true name: Queen Isis.”’


BLUE IN BLUE

2006


I fell asleep in my first love’s
Arms & dreamed I was
Drifting far at sea, through velds
Of brilliant blue. The sun

Brocaded the surface of my float
With dancing eyes so gold
I swooned, entranced, serene,
Scattered, drifting home at last.

Such blue was a new sky’s depth,
A new sea’s vault in heaven, my
Body wrapped in hers asleep
Beyond all surf and flesh for

All eternity and forever
Here and now. In that hour
After coming hard in her
I fell down in a sacred deep,

Baptized in the heart’s third blue:
A soak I’ll never sing or love but do.