Wick Lit

Orpheus and the Sirens

2006-12-31T08:10:00.000-05:00

According to Herodotus, Orpheus was taken by Jason on the advise of the wise Centaur Chiron, in order to help the heroes pass the Sirens, who duly plunged into the sea when his music surpassed their own.

At some breadth of the sea
the song pierces its depth,
plunging from the ear and
leaving the singer to row
on more alone than ever
into the erasure of time.
Maybe all doors require
an openness to closure,
no one without its other.
There is nakedness
and then there is faith
in the charge which sustains
without proof, even though
no meter exists to register
its quaver of volt.
It is enough that he sings on
while we amble dully
into the killing fields of a life.
Yesterday an ice shelf
the size of Manhattan
tore off Greenland. Or was it
the South Pole? That was
last week. In a few years
the summer solstice will
celebrate blue seas at the
north pole, not a fleck of
ice in the eye. It’s happening
so fast and there’s nothing
to ground us in the pour.
The tombs of the kings
of Egypt are all split, their gold dust
and pottery shards all sifted,
decoded, emptied into
the vaults of an Alexandria
which no Osiris can row through.
All that counts is that the song
of Orpheus so enthralled
the Sirens so that they dove
themselves to doom. Take
measure from that. Only
the sea remains, emptier,
more ravenous for land than
ever, payment in lieu of
the white bones of the man
in the moon, her lost son
who lamps on overhead
this last morning, baring
the next page for someone
else to fill in with his
own theft of lucence,
his own ghastly seed
taking root with Eurydice
in the vast barrow of
of forever-loud need.

Hush Hush

2006-12-29T07:51:00.000-05:00

Under the rug go the verbotens;
foetids and foecals and fossicled
fish rots pile up beneath the tongue
like a fertile vault of what’s not
proper to speak of by the light
of dry days. Language is rigored
by love’s winnows away
from the mortally hot,
securing dayside domains for
home and office, its curves
bound flat and hidden from view,
its rhetoric remaindered
in terse nones of filtered blue.
God’s foot sits so heavy on the
tongue that its margins swell out
in bootyful bounty, raising just
behond the last light of town
rich mounds of forbidden rooms --
barnyard, bordello, honky-tonk,
playground, shitter -- each
mansions the delight’s reverse,
writing the Ten Shall Nots
with a scalloped and filigreed
hand, painting them on rococo walls
where cupidon and priapals
sport with the nymphs, giving
them a good jolly roger on
rogueish rolls of the tongue,
afloat on a vast vineyard’s
scat-singing tide. Such vandals
crow and pound at the gates
of my day, threatening Rome
with all a tongue slakes
singing the wild side of things.
Once -- I was eight or so --
I hid in a garbage can behind
our house while playing
neighborhood hide-and-seek;
it seemed like a good place to
try out my curse-words singly
and in streams. There was a light
above me, and I looked up
to see my mother aghast
holding high the garbage can lid,
finding her sweet blonde boy
cursing up a storm, drunk
on the paps of a gross suckling
pig. It was one of the minor
epiphanies on the road which
leads here where I sit at the
dead bottom of the night
fully awake and aware of the risk
of singing God’s privetest parts
to the world, with a joy reserved
for lovers frying in their oils,
crying as they coil. Praise to the one
who first hid out of view
to rollick the tongue in nasty
waves of sweet blue, delighting
in salty labials and pussy-breathed
moos, perambling the rooks
and souterrains of a naughty god’s
nookie juice, boldly going where
no good son would dare
to sniff lick and stare,
much less cathedral
the undertow’s blue underwear.

TALK DIRTY TO ME

2004

Talk dirty to me barks the sea
As I amble down the naked
Shoreline of a prayer. Shake it,
Shake it like a horny Pope down
Under. Angelic apes stand in
The wash stroking huge erections
& mouthing every name of God.
When old men enter puberty
It’s a rude uproar: Our lust is
Brown-eye ugly to those oiled girls
Sunning for young kings & hard hooved
Rings of fire. I’ve stopped caring for
Good press -- It’s time now to get down.
Watch me lower my shorts down to
This ankling tide -- I’ve seas to screw!

TANGLED UP IN BLUE
2005

Out the hall window
at 2 a.m. my car blares
silver blue and black
in full moonlight.
Wild light bulbs that
midnight blue; the two
are icy blondes writhing
cheek to cheek over the
abyssal mother of all moons,
blueblack and cooing
wave surges toward this shore.
My bluest fantasy
disappears into sex
the way sex fades
into something roaring forward,
a tide maybe, or an age
both newer and older than
any reckoning by saner,
drier, sated Dons. Blonde on
blonde I’m tangled up in
blue in a syzygy of sames,
moon and sea like
heart and sight like singer
and psalm and all halves of
bone in parting delight,
the one melting forever
out of sight, the lucent
gleam of all that remains.
My car in vast moonlight
takes me to a shore
where savage waves pound
wondrous grains now pouring
ineluctably from the window
glass, like a naked woman
walking out a door which closes
in a silver roar of collapsing
wild blue foam. And her eyes
which caught and held me
one in that so pregnant dark --
so blue and silvery with
desire for my blueballed streams,
amid a dark which nailed me
forever to a blueblack tree
of arching fire, evanescent now,
haunting, free, bone on bone
now dreaming of silver’s swoon
in blue, reflecting every sea
which delved the ache and
arch of me to you.

MINNE'S CAVE

2004

Hands as big as my lust for You
Surely built this love grotto, deep
Under this hill where sheep graze and
Slumber. The stones which vault Your bed
Could raise cathedrals, but instead
The Old Ones hid them far from view
Beneath the turf, to barrow old
Ferocities of star and sea.
They are gone but we remain, fresh
Heart inside stone ribs. Only here
Can we let ourselves go in the
Star and sea frenzy that first kiss
Unleashed. Here, my love, here we will
Coil on crystal linen and sail
Verbatim into wild blue hell.

BLUE NOIR

2004

Each day I mount this
pale white writing chair
and comment my verbal
self to waters wild and wide
with no oar nor paddle
or compass or sail.
This pen voyages where
you bid, or where I
fancy you remain as
I shut my eyes and
recall a trace of you.
Today I think of the night
I followed a busty
redhead home after
the bar closed down
in the year when I
had left my wife behind
and made my way
back home. Let’s color
that sinular night blue
noir, its saxophones
sexual and evil,
transgressing what I
knew was wrong
and flinging myself anyway
in the name of revels
I could neither submit
to without a wedding ring
tight around my heart,
nor resist as any
more sober man might
have. We drank burgundy
a while in that monied
professional apartment
and then she left to
go pee, leaving me alone
to stare out at the
streetlamped night
of 3 a.m., into that
maw of lost darkness
in the belly of the
whale. Everything
thick with drunkenness
and fatigue, Joe
Jackson on the stereo
& the door not far away.
So much in me still
demanding that I just
get up and go but then
she came out of
the loo wearing just a
half-buttoned shirt,
her breasts swaying
heavily into dark.
The embrace that soon
followed was like a boat
offshore at last on waters
profoundly deep and
wild. Oh how we went
out in the pure salt
of abandon, this way then
that, never fucking --
I didn’t have condom --
but going at it every
other way. Exhausted
spent & glistening with
all our expended oils,
we unclenched around
5:30 a.m. when she
told me I had to go
(she needed to write
a paper the next day).
And so I got zipped
and shod and kissed
her on the cheek as
she slept quenched
and sated, never to speak
to me again. I drove carefully
and raggedly back to
my mother’s house where
I was sleeping in a spare
room, aware at once
of such keen delight
amid the ruin of real love.
My wife in our house
20 miles away alone
in our queen-sized bed
with our cat curled
nearby, she believing
that I was gone for
good. A few months
later I told her I wanted
back, to somehow
find a way home.
A year later I moved
back home, sober,
sobered, all my errancies
named and laid at the
altar of a love
that promised nothing
but the love. It was
an evil voyage into
that blue noir night:
hurtful and expensive
& damn near ending
all the poems that I’d
yet to write. But god
the satisfaction of just
reaching into that
gal’s unbuttoned blouse,
to clasp and hold those
huge warm breasts.
How good that evil,
how warm that demon
spray at the the shore
I pray never to return
to nor ever fully forget.
My song here is pure
in the second sense of
things, not orderly
or moral but complete
as the sea is full
of angels with big
teeth. Whatever
shore I ache and
dream here, the
sea gods intend
their own beach.
In the spectrum
of my love there’s
a blue-black isle
washed in booze.
The ink that
flows from my
pen today is
pours freely that
salt ooze--a bit
of ichor of your
cape which
spreads this
waking dawn
with words
I’d rather write
than lose.

BLUE ARK

2004

The Great Flood became a
History of fresh-sinned worlds,
The emptied ark a skull for
Cathedrally lost innocence.

Judgment now is pounded on
A water cross, & harrowed by
Upwellings of blue radiance.
I live where mystery rims the

Tide with deeper surges than
Mere words reveal, a a marginal
Tumescent wood alive
With night and sea and lunar

Eyes: A Christian world
No more, nor one strummed by
The lover’s harp, nor modern
In the screwy sense of gears,

But a Christ of wet descending lanes
Aboard an ark of wildest names.

On Sacrifice

2006-12-27T07:53:00.000-05:00

“Robertson Smith {in The Religion of the Semites, 1907} shows that sacrifice at the altar was the essential part of the rite of the old religions. It plays the same role in all religions, so that its origin must be traced back to very general causes whose effects were everywhere the same.

“But the sacrifice -- the holy action ... originally meant something different from what later times understood by it, the offering to the deity in order to reconcile him or to incline him to be favorable. The profane use of the word was afterwards derived from the secondary sense of self-denial. As is demonstrated, the first sacrifice was nothing but ‘an act of social fellowship between the deity and his worshippers.’”

-- Sigmund Freud, “The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism” (Totem and Taboo)

***

“The woman penetrated is a labyrinth. You emerge into another world inside the woman. The penis is the bridge; the passage to another world is coitus; the other world is a womb-cave. Cave man still drags cave woman into his cave; al coitus is fornication (fornix, an underground arched vault). And the cave in which coitus takes place is the grave; a chthonic fertility rite; Antigone buried alive, together with her ancestors, her bridal chamber the tomb. Death is coitus and coitus is death. Death is genitalized as a return to the womb, incestuous coitus.

“..The head, the husband, and the soul of the body. The classic psychoanalytical equation, head=genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The was up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital...

“... In the unconscious, cerebral is genital. The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head. The soul-substance is the seminal substance: the genius is the genital in the head.”

-- Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

Sacrifice has an older meaning than guilty
surrender. The sacred flesh torn wide open
poured out His wine for all to share that we
may enter one heart and feast forever there
inside the ritual moment. Later we added
the shame and remorse, turning the sacrifice
into something more nuanced, distanced from
its former sweet surf. Maybe we erred less
back then, thinking from lower centers
which were eclipsed then lost. Is not
guilt altared in memory? Before such sins
there was Eden. We offer our bodies to each
other in remembrance of our first joy,
entering it riven, sustained by its rapture.
The itch reminds us that we’ve been far
too long from our lord’s round table in
that chapel by the sea. We hurry back,
tearing off each other’s clothes in pent
abandon, knowing with our dark deeper brains
that we’re close. Greed mauls us off into the
errant realms, incessantly pounding on the door
which has grown ever heavier with unsayable
need. No wonder we grow nuts and strike out,
forgetting the crops in the field, scything down
our neighbors to furrow their wives. Sacrifice
grew guiltier, robbing all pleasure from the meal,
a communion for lost souls with a flesh
and blood idealized into an arid, comfortless
toast to eternally lost beds. Thank God
for the dark genius who rides on the brain
with his long balls hanging over each cortex,
his long straining neck and dark-capped
head hollering for the blue drain of the matter,
thos dewy folds where sacrifice awakens
back to its former upturned glory. The thought
of the heart forgets the art of the ritual,
opting instead to the sweet cheeks of the matter
and have at her again, painting a womb’s deepest
walls with bison and mastodons, sabre-tooth
tigers and prone dreaming shamans whose
song echoes faintly here. She’s behind that altar,
you know; I flip its guilty weight over to find
a smiling god holding wide the door by which
I enter through him back to her, into
the paradise of waking on ecstasty’s bright
shore which begins here. I’m writing words
today in long phallic lines, each a stair
descending as far down as they go
into what’s oldest and first. Here’s to Eros in
the saddle of my dolphin brain, riding
the waves of sursurrant desire, diving
the main into a mouth which rules from
down under where true north is most South,
a devouring congregational devout.

The Fourth Cup

2006-12-26T08:08:00.000-05:00

FOUR OF CUPS

(the Final Outcome card of my year-end Tarot)

A young man is seated under a tree and contemplates three cups set on the grass before him; an arm issuing from a cloud offers him another cup. His expression notwithstanding is one of discontent with his environment.

Divinatory Meanings: Weariness, disgust, aversion, imaginary vexations, as if the wine of this world had caused satiety only; another wine, as if a fairy gift, is now offered the wastrel, but he sees no consolation therein.

This is also a card of blended pleasure.

THE FOURTH CUP

Dec. 24

One cup inspires with a flash
of recollection; the next one
gallops the breadth of noctal
steppes in its greed for union.
The third cup unites again
boy Cupid with his mother
in the nuptials of first bliss.
Three cups and you’re done,
the crooners insist: three nights
in paradise, three stations
in the heart’s purgatory,
three stanzas buttoned with
a song-ending couplet,
bedding with a rhyme
two heats in one final line.
The eternal round persists
in threes, refusing to fare
further, endlessly in love
the with the same old tale,
repeating it in every precinct
and station of a life, striving
and swinging for the same
sweet wife who shores Elysian
dreams with an ever-crashing
kiss. Such rapture never
bores of that grinding metronome
which enflames but cannot burn,
yearns but never welcome,
refrains but not conclude.
The fourth cup offers itself
again and again but we
refuse to hearken to its voice
sitting as we do dejected
at the base of the tree
with arms heavily folded,
jonesing for one more shot
of that first triadic blue.
New ideas get added to
the round but do not change it;
they’re just new positions to try
out in the same old
wooing of starry unions,
a bit of spice for a trice
of nights, a salt flavor to
refresh the tongue with
with some of that old ocean
quaver. Difficult indeed to take
up that fourth cup and drain
what it really offers, leaving
mother for the real wife,
waking life from its sloshy
sappy origins with slaps of
something truly else -- a leap
so radical it doesn’t have a name
nor fits an enquiry and yet
is there, like a bold new
road behind the mewling
manger just ahead. How to
offer this fourth cup a
surface for its leap,
free of culture’s sad gravity
and futurity’s mad gravitas?
Those ends are dying
of each other’s thirst,
enrapt and warped by that
fool who crowns the brain.
What speaks of its own accord
without certainty’s seductive
swash? It may not be
possible with a pen, or
the impossibility may be just
the door it needs to walk
out from the wilderness
and join the tribe at last
who are lost there too.
Let make of desolation
a scripture not so much
modern as post-cultural,
a divinely broken mess which
choirs salt agons with torn throats.
Those wounds are eyes and see
what I cannot, the one who’s
too shy of the blade that hacks
the feeding tube away, freeing
the boy at last to go and birth
a man. Lord, if this is the
ripening doorway of Your will,
then teach my tongue its ways.
Lord knows I’ve said enough
about the first three cups; to
drink of them past surfeit
is to nail myself to the throne
at the bottom of the brine
and age forever there, melancholy,
mute and misty for the bed
I never found. I pray You
free these wings at last to
turn the other way in
the song which offers more
than love itself, that love
be freed to pour the fifth
and sixth and seventh cups
that we were meant to savor.

Whale-Gut Lascaux

2006-12-26T08:05:00.000-05:00

“For Deleuze and Guattari ((whose Anti Oediups (1972) states there is an inner fascism that structures sexuality and politics as well)), there is no structure, no boundary, no forms of idenity which is not a blockage of the flow of desire, a flow which they posit as the only and necessary alternative to inner fascism.

"Desire alone is revolutionary. It is not governed (contra Freud) by the Oedipal conflict and its subsequent repressions, nor (contra Lacan) by some even more primal lack.

"Desire is nomadic and universal, and 'does not take as its object things and persons, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therin breaks and captures"; it is only ‘through a restriction, a blockage, and a reduction that the libido is made to repress its flows in order to contain them in narrow cells of the type 'couple', 'family,' 'person,' 'objects.’”

-- James Berger, "Cultural trauma and the 'Timeless Burst': Pynchon's Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland" (Postmodern Culture 5.3)

A growing poetics then would create then destroy the categories of its making: ever on the pursuit of a fresh perspective, a new woman, the next glimmer of possibility. Friction raises tension: the contained bursts forth in song and seed.

***

“The woman penetrated is a labyrinth. You emerge into another world inside the woman. The penis is the bridge; the passage to another world is coitus; the other world is a womb-cave. Cave man still drags cave woman into his cave; al coitus is fornication (fornix, an underground arched vault). And the cave in which coitus takes place is the grave; a cthonic fertility rite; Antigone buried alive, together with her ancestors, her bridal chamber the tomb. Death is coitus and coitus is death. Death is genitalized as a return to the womb, incesturous coitus.”

"... The head, the husband, and the soul of the body. The classic psychoanalytical equation, head=genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The was up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital...

"... In the unconscious, cerebral is genital. The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. Onians, archaeologist of languate, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head. The soul-substance is the seminal substance: the genius is the genital in the head.

--Norman O. Brown, Love's Body

MY WHALE-GUT LASCAUX

Dec. 23

Heavy spats of rain keep rolling
over the morning, unfreighting
Hel’s bilges on the trees and
roofs of our town. A drowning night.
Yet this is all the home I know
in my deepest bones.
The music of such wet sighing
repletes my dry ears with
the its low tones, harrowing
them with the sound of
Leviathan swimming overhead,
fanning up fresh rollers of wild
rain with his sea-clabbering
flukes. I’m here alone in the
belly of my song, O Lord, writing
these verses just to you, and
I don’t know if its with the steeliest
tongue of devotion or the flintiest
sickle of defiance that I write
on about the same old old things
in the same old chanson,
singsonging with the ardor of
drippy droll blue freeze.
What’s a singer without a tribe
or whose clan is long dead and
deep buried, too long unseen
by the light of real days?
Is this the poetry of poetry’s
own death, a wheezy geezer rattle
of old-frothed frenzies
geysered brittle on the page,
a dry soul’s sotto cunt canto
dressed up like mashing tides?
I’m just a fool in the saddle
of self-addled contretemps,
stubbornly clinging to a clanging
black bell’s overblued balls,
clabbering the same set
of wrong-headed devices
for so long that they
smack of a faith, a sotted poetics,
the leys of a dark myth?
Is that bliss enough
for the age and mine,
that smack of the lips
sufficient for the kiss
that never comes, for
the taste of delights
lost in lost nights?
First light will come soon enough,
erasing this sweet dripping dark
with a pale sigh, draining all
traces of ink from the page.
I’ve tossed a hundred
comp books like this one
into two boxes in the closet;
they’re all I have to show
for these duly daily
forays out on the blue of a
song’s womb-aching soak,
shouting salt matins to
a congregation of one.
A hundred cheap headstones
whose one meter is mired deep
in the silt of latenight aeries
which fell between the moon
and the sea. Give me enough
trope and I’ll hang myself
high in those drowned trees,
propounding the sound of lost gods
with my bones turning and
knocking in the blue that
song my real hand
couldn’t carve out except
the wrong way, across and
down the tree-ghosted page.
Daily I scythe myself at the hips,
spouting white nonsense
back to the wave I was
born in and reborn through,
celebrating the joy of
union even when there is
none to be found. It’s not
very noble, just all I can do,
a dirty white boy stuck
in the brine gut of Lascaux,
writing down and singing aloud
every song of the God who lives on
in the blue-swooned fabliaux
of an old maker’s halloo.

The Mysteries of Bliss XII: Pisces Rising

2006-12-22T07:32:00.000-05:00

"The supreme moment of the initiation ceremony was not concerned with the ritual, as Mylonas rightly insists, but with the Deiknumena--the Things shown. Suddenly the doors of the Anaktoron swung open to a blaze of light, streaming presumably from the torch of the Dadouchos, as the Hierophant revealed the Heira. Alongside him stood the goddess’ holy priestess and the two heirophantides, female ‘expounders of the mysteries,’ representing Demeter and her daughter. The effect must have been awe-inspiring as the moment when the Orthodox bishop proclaims the Resurrection of the Christ.

"The nature of the Orgia is much disputed, and will almost certainly be never revealed. Possibly they were Myceneaan cult objects, as Mylonas suggests, whose provenance and purpose had been long forgotten. Possibly again the parable of the cycle of vegetation played its part, though we can hardly accept Hippolytus’ contemptuous statement that the Epoptae or Adepts, who were admitted to the higher mysteries, were merely shown a ripe ear of wheat. According to the same authority, the ritual also included a holy birth. ‘In the course of the night,’ he says, ‘the hierophant at Eleusis in the midst of a brilliant fire celebrating the Great and Unspoken Mysteries cries and shouts aloud saying ‘Holy Brimo has borne a sacred child Brimos, that is the Mighty has given birth to the Mighty One.’'

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

"To enter the figure of Demeter means to be pursued, to be robbed, raped, to fail to understand, to rage and grieve, but then to get everything back and be born again. And what does all of this mean, save to realize the universal principle of life, the fate of everything mortal? What, then, is left over for the figure of Persephone? Beyond question, that which constitutes the structure of the living creature apart from this endlessly-repeated drama of coming-to-be and passing-away, namely the uniqueness of the individual and its enthrallment to non-being. Uniqueness and non-being understood not philosophically but envisaged corporeally in figures, or rather as these are envisaged in the formless, unsubstantial realm of Hades. There Persephone reigns, the eternally unique one who is no more. ... Had that uniqueness not been, had nothing ever stirred and started up in non-being, then the realm of Hades would not exist, in relation to pure nothing it would not be at all, not even an aspect of the past.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore”

That door which once entered Eleusis
is the frame through which I
beheld her for one flickering moment.
She stood there smiling in
my heart’s outflooding stream,
smiling with eyes that said Yes.
I reached for her; she faded
with a kiss; I woke to the
third birth which fraught
the first two, ferrying me beyond
my mother’s womb and on
beyond the Christ’s shipwrecked
tomb into ardor and futility of
the deepest sea whose shores
I now attend in wavelike lines
across and down the page.
Ten thousand nights I hurried
out that door with heart on fire
for that arrow which flew
from hidden surfeit billows,
pouring all that booze onto
what proved a pyre of lonely
choiring bones. There was no
woman to find in the way
I needed her most: She was gone,
hitched to the Lord of Underworlds,
sped or fled away on cruel wheels.
Her absence became the crown
which my nights wore as I
raged and galloped and cursed
indifferent shores. That door’s
interior reaches like a universe
of frozen, too-distant stars
which burn on in eternal remembrance
of that night in which I came to
be a man, awakened and then
shattered in a hurled epiphany,
baptized by that she-shaped wave
so blue and wild and ecstatic
that I was jolted free, if only
for one night, into some quasi-
immortal scree of one,
planted and reborn in Thee.
Too bad I was then left to figure out
what to make of that awesome
awful door which framed the
nothing which she faded with
a smile through, a door which
then swung shut and locked
me in empty self’s tomblike
chill, bereft of all wild seas.
Without Eleusis I had
to myth that door in darkness,
with all the madness and error
of the fool who knows but can’t
quite say it and acts out the
drama in reverse, with ass-ears
on, upside down, backwassward,
wrong-headed, puerile,
vicious, out of control, abused,
with all the malice and criminal
intent of the son mothered
by heartbreak. A sad way to
go -- you can waste your life stuck
down there, bewildering through
the old labyrinth, making wrong turn
over and over into more wrongful
depths, holding high the fool candle
which blunders on convinced
you’ll get lucky some night
and find the strip-club-
caliber muse who’ll turn
all things aright
with one sassy sashay
of her upturned ass.
I’m still on that fool’s
errand, just on a different stage,
penis exchanged for pen,
salty nights for bottomless page.
Here it is at solstice and
I say this song’s at end, ready
to be put to bed in the
manger which concludes the tale,
the king’s youngest son reborn
in a rude hut out beneath the
stars, long after I gave up
on finding his immortal mother
in the bars, lost all flicker of
her here down the wearyings
age & so much ink spilled
in bootless rage. It simply ends,
and then he cries
tender, small and frail,
the candled renewed, leaping
across the word from where
she disappeared to where
he now begins: Thus one year
ends in the welcome of the next.
Dark and still outside, absent
and dreamy in the night’s far
wash -- at high tide here of
all that’s lost, is dead, moved on,
can never be found again --
Christmas lights burning white
across the street, a soft far slur
of traffic on 441 -- nothing here
suggests new life, but that’s
why we have mysteries, doors
turning near and wide, bliss
heightened to infinity
exactly where it dies.
My wife’s awake now & in
the shower upstairs, water
which echoes the sound
of my soul’s imago padding
softly in the garden outside,
blue slippers on her feet
still dewed with our embrace,
her blue gown like water
over her lush curves, her
blue eyes of a moon which
is nowhere this morning
to be found. But wait: You know
it will return, like the upside
wash of love, redeeming all this
drought and dearth with an infant’s
mewling cry, nursed by
his mother’s evanescently
fulfilling sigh,
tracked by an infinitesimal I
rowing on alone in
this verse coracle
praising far Demeter’s skies.

Mysteries of Bliss VIII: Imago

2006-12-20T07:33:00.000-05:00

Whose image so filled the night
which opened through that door
with the quintessence of blue phosphor,
a wild lucency that lit my way
between mother Leto rising
from the sea and that shore-bitch
Hekat, yowling for blood seed?
My fragrant hope of finding love
placed her in a blue klieg light
only I could see, washing over
her hair and face and turning
her curves to water as she
drank demurely in some
preterit bar, waiting, I
was sure, for something she
would not know until she
saw me smile. But that was just
the motive fiction which
sprung me from my damaged lair,
hurrying out onto the bruised
avenues of night to blow it all
again with the rest of my
pickled ilk, down the vast
brine barrel of desire’s
lonely, self-evicting swash.
Truth is, the scene I so desperately
sought each night like a grail
was not called by any door
outside my own but
rather hollered out from within,
by mysteries I couldn’t
name and thus were prey to,
ens and djinns and kelpies,
diabolic banshees of the moon
lavish in silkily curved descents,
bursting, I was sure, with fresh-
milked news of the man I could
not be since I was holding on
to his boy so stubbornly.
Lustral, mistral, widwife, muse:
all were frescoes in the
grand chapel where I sought
my wife for life, at least for
one night. All these distaffs
washed across a face slowly
bulbed on inside my mind
as I dully practiced my guitar,
growing more lucent and surgent
with each can of beer I drained,
amping me with lunar ardor.
I was convinced that somewhere
out there, on some random night,
I’d find the one who could open
with a kiss that locked-
down, bruited arbor, and make all
days green and wild again. It was
my hope of finding my way back to
Eden on a bed delved from its
lost depths that shaped and
fraught that night-turning door
with such hymeneal craft and sass
that in just Heading Out
I was already entering her,
naked of all broken means. Surely
she would see it in my eyes
when I walked up and said hello,
offering to buy her a drink: surrender
to the ocean which composed
her curves in waves I was ready
to be baptized in, her son and
lover both, votive, feral, truest
where i could only stand there
staring wide and open in her eyes,
like a book fished from the depths
which told her tale complete ---
Foolish stuff, what does any of
this have to do with who that
woman was, what did I care of
the big question which had hauled
her out to that bar that very night?
Foolish too to ply even imagined
hope in the worst strata of all,
that zeroed night of drunks on
fire. Yes and Yes, it was such
stupid stuff: I’m just trying to
write here of the nature of
that light which flickered in
my mind to lamp a woman
far out in blicker’s night:
Frail and wrong-headed though
it was, that image was the
first flicker of a candle
which burns so brightly here,
solstitial against all dark.
Heavy fog and drippy rain
outside this morning, Gulf-
saturate, not chill, just boggy,
shrouded, so dense that sounds
are cloistered, muted, close.
My wife stayed over at her
sister’s last night, weary from
fruitless Christmas shopping
and heavy traffic, not wanting
to make the long drive home
in such dreary dark rain.
Yet her presence is in every
room outside and in, a meld of
the real and imagined woman,
the hopeful and the hopeless
one, the passionate yet cold
one who wishes I were more
of her kind of man as much
as I wish she were more of
the woman who ghosts the
door I passed on through
til I got here at last, with
the woman whose stars got
strayed in mine. Got up at
3:15 to read and write and
will head back to bed soon,
perchance to float off to
that Avalon I never could
remain on more than a night
yet call my home, like the
moon which marrows in
my bones. I still believe
in that fruitful shore which
crashes love’s blue bliss
and draws forever back, leaving me
anointed and in love with its evanescence,
the lucence of a life-long-faded kiss.

The Mysteries of Bliss XI: Pig Rot

2006-12-19T08:24:00.000-05:00

"The link between sowing the grain and vanishing in the underworld is confirmed by a further correspondence of myth and cult. The Orphic variants of the mythologem relegated the events in the Homeric hymn to a very primitive setting. A swineherd comes in, with the name of Eubuleus (a name also of Hades); he is the witness of the rape, because his pigs were swallowed up by the earth along with Persephone. This story is borne out -- as the sources themselves show -- by the fact that young pigs were cast into pits in honour of the two goddesses. We learn this in connection with the Tesmophoria; but it would be clear enough in any case that an analogy existed between the cavalier treatment of pigs and the sowing of the grain.

The pig is Demeter’s sacrificial animal. In one connection, where it is dedicated to the Eleusinian mysteries, it is called ... the “uterine animal” of the earth, just as the dolphin was the “uterine animal” of the sea. It was customary for Demeter to receive a gravid sow as a sacrifcial offering. The mother animal is a fit offering to the Mother Goddess, the pig in the pit a fit offering to her vanished daughter. As symbols of the goddesses, pig and grain were perfect parallels. Even the decomposed bodies of the pigs were drawn into the cult: the noisome remains were fetched up again, put on the altar, and used to make the sowing more fruitful. If , then, the pig-and-grain parallel lays stress on corruption, it will no doubt remind us that the grain decays under the earth and thus, in the state of fruitful death, hints at the Kore dwelling in the realm of the dead.

So the Demeter idea is not lacking in the element of corruption coupled with the Kore’s subterranean abode. Seen in terms of the Persephone myth, the fruitful death of the grain, religiously emphasized by the particluars of the pig-sacrifice, acquires a symbolic value, just as it is used as a parable for another idea: ‘Verily I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground an die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ {John 12:24} The corn and the pig buried in earth and left to decay point to a mythological happening and, interpreted accordingly, become transparently clear and hallowed.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore”

I drank like a pig, snout in the bum
of the night’s malt excretes,
jolly, devout, routing in the
roots of my rot in a merry
blotto sot, blithe to the damage
I wreaked with every shot poured
from lips out through my hips.
I lived a third of my life,
straining to hurl every
drop of blue swirl from gullet to
hips into the marl of that votive
darkeyed girl who daughtered
my great ancient mother’s
dark uteral thrall. In AA they say
your story is your sobriety,
and I’m happy to report that
I’ve come back from the abyss
twice (by the grace of my God),
the prodigal pig full harrowed in
his filth, foresworn of swinish thirst,
at work now the other way, trying
to pour back into the world the
divinest blue I can name from
well-depths I now tend by not
falling into them one day at a time.
Now I read in the old ritual how
pigs were thrown into the hole
Kore was raped through
and left there to rot, only to
be interred at a further station
of the ritual and set on an
altar, in full flower of reek,
as evidence of how the lost
soul returns through the gates
of its death into spring’s flower,
hallowing those harrows with
a new crop of grain. So I dig
in my dirt and find that bum self
like a lord of swine night,
knocking back shots of schnapps
in moonlight as cold as his
heart, then gripping the asscheeks
of Ms. Wrong and snouting
her asshole in a delirium of
delight so wrong every split hoof
in hell starts high-fiving and
spitting into that rout
of the world, the king of hell
himself in my hips
swiving the dew billows of
Kore in his carriage
thundering under the world.
Licking that rear portal
through which all corruption
passes, fucking there too,
jamming every wrong-headedness
into the darkness of
hell’s coffined womb,
no matter how hard it hurts
the orizons of love. Awful.
And how hard he comes
there at the cape of worst
nights, in a bellowing shriek
of black-lit hurled seed,
blanketing dark regions
with the depths of his
need, ebbing to a grunt
wheeze and sigh & passing
out there, cock still in
the cornhole where death
siloes its vast winter’s store.
As long as I stayed there
the tale had to stay dark,
invisible, perforce blotted out
with the next night’s oblivion,
drifting down the dark tide.
But I surrendered at last,
sacrificing that pig, letting
deeper powers lift me
out of that corrupt mess,
wakening the man from the boy,
budding the sower, the
husbandman, the reaper
and greenman
whose wife is the life
of the womb no booze
can reach. That man in his
cups down in the dirt of my
past is sacred to her, the
essential lost third of the
mystery meant to stay dark,
the corrupt, broken visage
of guilt which dies to give
life to the tribe. It keeps me
humble, knowing how far one
can fall, wanting the worst
of it all, very dip dram and
clench in the foresakens of hell.
It makes one desire to make
of that tomb a womb of great
usefulness to the next
wearing traveller who
beaches the mess in surrender.
In AA we laugh at the horrors
of our tale because they
belong now to our past,
part of that rude bucolic,
that comedy of errors down the
bottom of a glass which led to
the door which opened
strangely to the beginning
of a real, serene, purposeful
yet humble adult life.
And to think - all we had to do was
die enough down there.
So too this writing, interring
the walls of that tale lost long
ago when Eleusis fell into ruin.
Gone but not forgotten, not
in the soul’s code which still
semaphores like a buoy in
the inarticulate swamps
of our civilized night. I read
of the mysteries and write
my own down alongside them,
seeking to spark a leap
which jumps both ways at once,
igniting in history and mystery
a walk through the dark
giving birth to the mark I
was born with -- a heart
fixed by the arrow it aches
for, the sear of the Yes which soars
where it scores, rooting me
here on this grave-marking
chair. I’m riding the end
of this poem like a dolphin
in the dirt of its sea,
carousing the panties
left in Hades' aged coach --
how lacy and supple
they lay on my face,
their criminal center
still fragrant against my nose,
perfumed with springtime
and oceanic desire
and riot of all that
it ruined -- its something
this snout offers back
today as a penultimate
if not quintessential
of bliss: The riotous
cry of the rebottled booze,
that sourmash trout
I ride in hell’s rout
singing the praises
of rot’s sweet devout,
that in such low offalish
orizons, such whale-shit
chansonings, I salt new
horizons in all that
I tossed there
awakening here.

THIS COMPOST

Walt Whitman

1.

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceived,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and
turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2.

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow,
the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata
of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea
which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves
in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard,
that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises
out of what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions
of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.

***

from “GARBAGE”

A.R. Ammons

garbage has to be the poem of our time because
—- garbage is spiritual, believable enough

to get our attention, getting in the way, piling up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and

creamy white: what else deflects us from the
errors of our illusionary ways, not a temptation

to trashlessness, that is too Or off, and,
anyway, unimaginable, unrealistic: I’m a

hole puncher or hole plugger: stick a finger
in the dame (&m, damn, dike), hold back the issue

of creativity’s flood, the forthcoming, futuristic,
the origins feeding trash: down by I-95 in

Florida where flatland’s ocean- and gulf-flat,
mounds of disposal rise (for if you dug

something up to make room for something to put
in, what about the something dug up, as with graves:)

the garbage trucks crawl as if in obeisance,
as if up ziggurats toward the high places gulls

and garbage keep alive, offerings to the gods
of garbage, of retribution, of realistic

expectation, the deities of unpleasant necessities:
refined, young earthworms,

drowned up in macadam pools by spring rains,
moisten out white in a day or so and, round spots,

look like sputum or creamv-rich, broken-up cold
clams: if this is not the best poem of the

century, can it be about the worst poem of the
centurv: it comes, at least, toward the end,

so a long tracing of bad stuff can swell
under its measure: but there on the heights

a small smoke wafts the sacrificial bounty
day and night to layer the sky brown, shut us

in as into a lidded kettle, the everlasting
flame these acres-deep of tendance keep: a

tree offering of a crippled plastic chair:
a played-out sports outfit: a hill-myna

print stained with jelly: how to write this
poem, should it be short, a small popping of

duplexes, or long, hunting wide, coming home
late, losing the trail and recovering it:

should it act itself out, illustrations,
examples, colors, clothes or intensify

reductively into statement, bones any corpus
would do to surround, or should it be nothing

at all unless it finds itself: the poem,
which is about the pre-socratic idea of the

dispositional axis from stone to wind, wind
to stone (with my elaborations, if any)

is complete before it begins, so I needn’t
myself hurry into brevity, though a weary reader

might briefly be done: the axis will be clear
enough daubed here and there with a little ink

or fined out into every shade and form of its
L,./ revelation: this is a scientific poem,

Asserting that nature models values, that we
have invented little (copied), reflections of

possibilities already here, this where we came
to and how we came: a priestly director behind the

black-chufffing dozer leans the gleanings and
reads the birds, millions of loners circling

a common height, alighting to the meaty streaks
and puffy muffins (pufffins?): there is a mound,

too, in the poet’s mind dead language is hauled
off to and burned down on, the energy held and

shaped into new turns and clusters, the mind
strengthened by what it strengthens: for

where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption:
as where but brought low, where

but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we
discern the savage afflictions that turn us around:

where but in the arrangements love crawls us through,
not a thing left in our self-display

unhumiliated, do we find the sweet seed of
new routes: but we are natural: nature, not

we, gave rise to us: we are not, though, though natural,
divorced from higher, finer configurations:

tissues and holograms of energy circulate in
us and seek and find representations of themselves

outside us, so that we can participate in
celebrations high and know reaches of feeling

and sight and thought that penetrate (really
penetrate) far, far beyond these our wet cells,

right on up past our stories, the planets, moons,
and other bodies locally to the other end of

the pole where matter’s forms diffuse and energy
loses all means to express itself except

as spirit, there, oh, yes, in the abiding where
mind but nothing else abides, the eternal,

until it turns into another pear or sunfish, that
momentary glint in the fisheye having

been there so long, coming and going, it’s
eternity’s glint: it all wraps back round,

into and out of form, palpable and impalpable,
and in one phase, the one of grief and love,

we know the other, where everlastingness comes
to sway, okay and smooth: the heaven we mostly

want, though, is this jet-hoveled hell back,
heaven’s daunting asshole: one must write and

rewrite till one writes it right: if I’m in
touch, she said, then I’ve got an edge: what

the hell kind of talk is that: I can’t believe
I’m merely an old person: whose mother is dead,

whose father is gone and many of whose
friends and associates have wended away to the

ground, which is only heavy wind, or to ashes,
a lighter breeze: but it was all quite frankly

to be expected and not looked forward to: even
old trees, I remember some of them, where they

used to stand: pictures taken by some of them:
and old dogs, specially one imperial black one,

quad dogs with their hierarchies (another archie)
one succeeding another, the barking and romping

sliding away like slides from a projector: what
were they then that are what they are not:

The Mysteries of Bliss VII: The Bud

2006-12-18T07:28:00.000-05:00

“Artemis, for example, is to be found in the untamedness of young animals and equally in the terrors of birth. In the classical figure of this goddess, the wildness and the terrors meet at a border-line: they are in equilibrium. The further we penetrate into her prehistory, the more the outlines connected with the name ‘Artemis’ evaporate. The border-line situation widens into a border region midway between motherhood and maidenhood, joie de vivre and lust for murder, fecundity and animality.

“It is a paradox, but nothing is impossible that we meet here: the revelation of something that is dark in comparison with an idea, but ideal in comparison with blind feeling -- the revelation of something still unopened, like a bud. All the most ancient mythological ideas are buds of this sort. Above all, the idea of genesis and origin -- an idea which every living thing experiences in its own genesis and, to that extent, realizes in fact. Mythologically, the idea is embodied in miraculous ‘primal beings,’ either in such a way that in them father and child, prime begetter and prime begotten, are one and the same, or that the fate of the woman becomes the symbol and expression of all givens and origination. Zeus, Apollo, Dionysos, Hermes, Asklepios, Heracles -- all may be regarded as having evolved out of a mythological primordial child, who originally comprised both begetter and begotten. The same idea, seen as the woman’s fate, presented itself to the Greeks in equally budlike form. The budlike quality of it is expressed in the name often given to its personification Kore, which is simply the goddess ‘Maiden.’

“The Kore-goddess throws light on the old mythological idea in its budlike capacity to unfold and yet to contain a whole compact world in itself. The idea can be likened to a nucleus. We have to understand, as it were, the structure hidden in the ‘abyss of the nucleus.’”

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore”

Daily I attend the mysteries, initiate and
priest of that sacred door which leads
to her at last, at least here.
The binding of this notebook hinges
pages which turn like doors, each affording
a fresh view of that grand expectant night
(which almost never came to good conclusion),
humid and fragrant and fresh-whisked
by dark storms. My every sense
as I walked out alarumed her awaking
up from the froth and foam, waiting
for me in some rocknroll bar
like a hunted desire haunting me
home. That creaking of limbs in
the southern oak which spread
over my garage apartment: they
groaned with my fathers’ bones
as I walked to my car, turning and
twisting them as they knocked
in metronome the cost of
every stout penetration
to shout immortal sighs.
But I paid scant attention,
whistling “Love is the Drug”
as I revved my Datsun up, backing out
of one bum dream and hitting the gas toward
its other, whose precise location was unknowable,
like the spinning island of the sea-witch.
Its door could only be approached and
entered in boozy flung abandon, my hooded sight
tuned to strange peripheries, compassed
to a border beach of moon-monstrous waves
that waited right or left of sense,
a place no man would dare to visit,
much less run and leap from
like a selkie back in his froth.
There the ninth wave waited for me,
the towering shape of the She
my nuts had hatched, giving birth to her
so she could give birth to my eternal
bliss, there in the lees of a post-
noctal kiss. And here I there live on,
keeping those fires bright even
to the ends of what once was proper poetry’s
petty epiphinals, further to the
ends of this difficult year where
bliss just can’t be found and is
made yet stonily. Yesterday --
taking a next-to-last vacation day --
my wife and I ate breakfast out
then ran errands at Wal- K-Mart and Lowe’s;
then came home midmorning
to enjoy our day together here, me
weeding in the garden and putting flowers in around
the birdbath while in back my wife
spray-painted white some metal chairs.
The day wan and breezy, soothing for its
dearth of heat or cold, rocking us
a tide of year-ending air.
Ten thousand passages through that door
in world and words put clear enough
what’s bordered here where love pays all
to build a home. Here
in the inmost vault where the mysteries
are boxed and tended by my vestal
dreams of true love, the sacred fire
burns clear and steady in work still fuelled
by that old hope, even now, even here.
We believe it with our bodies til
they fumble and fade, dusting the
furniture which remains. Last night my
wife and I set battery-powered candles
in the window of our house,
in gesture to that door which glows
with all our dreams
and is arched by the stars,
comfort for dark winter nights
which I drank to dregs in bars
and pour out now here in lines
which fling love wide and far,
siloed deep in the woman
that door led me to
when I decided to wake
up and come home.

Mysteries of Bliss VI: Theorems and Proofs

2006-12-14T07:49:00.000-05:00

“The sixth century BC was a period of remarkable religious ferment when the ordinary individual, who enjoyed no gentile privilege was become more and more concerned about the after-life. The Isles of the Blessed were reserved for heroes and those favored by the gods, or what usually amounted to the same thing, by birth, for Homer had no care for the common man’s soul. The initiation ceremony at Eleusis, impressive and satisfying by its own nature, seemed to proffer some real hope, and for those who returned death had apparently lost much of its terror. It seems strange, of course, that a belief in future immortality could grow out of a humble ritual connected with a fertile patch of land, or one long-forgotten palace ceremony involving, as in the case of Athena and Erecthoneus, a goddess and a king. Yet so it was, and although the details of the mysteries have remained a secret, some general notions may be gleaned about them from the reports of witnesses in various ages.”

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

***

Fear of death, of its shadowy girth
which made entering its door so chill-
Tartarean, shorn of one’s beloved bones,
with no tongue to savor sweetness
or belt the all-night blues, no sex
to stir ambrosial reveries of coming home again -- horrible. Or so we think. Neuropsychiatrists
are learning how behavior acts like a
swizzle stick in the brain, mixing up
elixirs of desired mood: Young women
gush and talk for the oxytocin which
such intimate details released. Such
love is their drug and they can’t get
enough of it -- think soaps, Harlequin
romances, the Lifetime channel,
HSN’s 24-hour girlfriend babble
on shoes and creams and faux jewels.
Their talk weaves the nest: It makes
good biological sense, to paint the ears
of maids with the echo of distant wedding
bells, attuning every other sense toward
that fragrant ideal. (Know what
the most popular scent is among
women? Baby powder.) For
guys, well, it seems we can’t stop
babbling on about sex: What
is it that such clabbering of the tongue
tolls in the brain? Perhaps the feeling
of sanction against death? An intimacy
with the ever-burning light which shines
behind a woman’s smile ... Do men jones
conversing with dreamt pussy,
as if thus stirring their penises
round and down back to a woman
which makes a spirit right,
invulnerable against decrepitude
and age? Does the sexual lubricant
loosed by some psychoenzime
serve as immortal baste, where no
man ages but cavorts the beach
where love’s endless first encounters
singing tra la la? Apollo and Zeus
and Hermes and Heracles were
all such ever-first children, and
their libidos bear them out, weaning
our imaginations on the starry
couplings of their fate; perhaps the
starkest child of them all on that
beach is Hades, lord of the darkest
third of world, who looked on Kore
playing in that springtime field and
was stricken to his core, his dreadful
realm poised so perfectly against
her naive naiad sport that the two
were halves heart, black-hooved lust
and blue-eyed innocence, looping
one circuit in the human brain with
something close to fate or zeitgeist
or gnosis. We each must go crazy in
that loop to sustain our species story,
but women and men go through the
other way from each other.
A maiden ages into the maid when she
gives birth, she ages further as she rears
her young, suffering all her mother did
when a dark man appeared at the
door & stole her away, carrying her off
to fates beyond the nest, above and beneath
the grave. Such toil further ages her into
the crone, that keeper of the Mysteries
whose hooded visage and exposed vulva
crowned medieval doors and portals,
a sheilanagig fertile now for death’s chill
seed, nesting in the grave’s own womb.
Through all the stations of her
purgatory, a woman tends to life,
her arc parallel to it, its boon companion
til death takes her for his queen.
For men there is no this to that:
it’s always sex and death; each
stroke’s the same no matter which
orifice he plunges or even whose,
the more the merrier. Each union
thimbles out a sea that he keeps
trying to measure, outnumbering his
death. It makes good biological sense,
sowing lifelong seed as far as wide as myths
can scatter, giving life its surest
chance to root and flourish in every
any nook. All those rapturous nights
I raptored, whiskey glass in one hand,
lassie’s ass just beyond the other --
I was conjuring that old sufficient man
of tundra hunt and quest, heading out
the door to night as if into the portal
of my grandpa’s story, for a mood
of godlike ache and glory, defeating
death with a self-same brood imbued
with all my genes. And though those
nights are long gone the reveries
persist, as I have found that ghosts
are lucent where the sun’s just hot,
the inside funk and slosh of memory
the full metal jacket of what I’ll
always thrust and ejaculate
acting out the man without
terrorizing the world. If anything
I get closer to him renouncing
glut for gleam. Writing at this hour
is best because it’s been a while
since my last meal -- evolutionary
scientists now say that hunger
mothers craft, our innovations
hammered out on the anvil
of an empty gut, devising stone axes
& spears & tactics for the hunt
and protecting its rude borders,
prolonging kills with salt and fire.
Thus I’m here at 4 a.m., the early
early bird out to catch the worm
before the committee of the waking
world tries to snatch it from my reach.
My hand across the page in rhythms
not unlike my penis in love’s furnace,
rapt that rape of that wild door which
made me man and woman: I write
to initiate again those mysteries
whose doors swing two ways at once
-- out and in, forward and back, up
and down, to Thee and She
both back from the Sidhe to
surface or sound in me again.
Researchers now say that our
future survival in this tool-mad
age depends upon psyches which
refuse to age, staying fresh & young
& devious to the needs of the next
day’s hunt. In psychic neotony
age is declared a trick of time and
the magic water that it wells
bids us stay forever young, granting
gross permission to head out
again and again ready to find
the next wife for life, if only
(or perhaps especially) for a one
night’s noctal thrash of jazz and
gin and jism (shouting Yes
cocktails the same), baptising
in eternal plenty here and now,
forever and amen.
It keeps me filling pages, though
I wonder what of the missing father
who ghosts the whole affair;
there is a troubling resonance between
all starry lines which undertows
the young fool’s ways which learn
so fast but cannot know, who sows
but fails to reap. That father is the boy
who ended with a sigh inside a nuptial
clench, foregoing his wide forays
for the deeper one, siloed down
a wedding ring’s gold mound. That
father’s ghost makes much of our
culture’s iron rounds sound hollow
when struck against true making’s anvil:
we’re addicted to woozy dreams of
floozy youth’s immortal-seeming dew;
we’ve hammered out in our hunger
for that flesh vast replicas of youth
-- botox, boobjobs, Viagra, anti-aging
hormones and creams, tribal tats,
60’s rocknroll bands strutting
on the stage in their 60’s. (Some kid
drove one of those Ninja motorcycles
150 miles per hour into that back
of an SUV the other day, bulleting
his corpse into the rear storage unit.)
The danger of all this is clear, for
what once made sense to a threatened
species of amillion years ago is
a far different thing when that species
now rules the world with an almost
misogynistic contempt of earth-wide
mother. We’ll live forever till we kill
the world, exulting Free At Last
to our salt’s disaster. We must grow up
somehow, retool that ancient father so he’s
working here again, hand in hand with
that cunning boy, in marriage to what
the inner woman really needs,
sufficing the tribe with stable fructive
motions. Let’s pair Kore and Hades
at the banquet table we share with worms,
let’s scythe her harvest moon with
the full cycle of our sickleticklepickle.
The old Mysteries didn’t make Greek
culture immortal in any real way
but they calmed it down somehow, humanized
the whole deific mess, right-sized them
for true passage into the aegis which still
shines in their sixth century BC.
They built a cathedral of that peek
into the Mother’s womb, to slake
eternal hunger, pairing a maid’s
fancy to the tall dark handsome one’s
plural fiery phalloi. Today I view that
door I hurried through long ago in lust
of finding love again as a woman’s
revealed rear view where holies
gape and wink, like a temple entrance,
like a cave’s dark door, the view
which suffices to make suns rise again?
Just to think of roses petalled
in such obscenely sublime poses
is enough to baste my brain with these
virile hecatombs, the horses of
that black chariot I fear to ride
but must. I write, I ride, straight
through that gate of mythic ecstasies,
that I may end one song at last and seed
the next to come, perhaps tomorrow,
maybe on this page, or some other
womblike wave’s long crash and hiss
which tides that door I rushed on through
seeking out the mysteries of bliss.

The Mysteries of Bliss V: Bliss and Emptiness

2006-12-13T07:51:00.000-05:00

“To the religious-minded man of the Greek world, his divinities had always appeared in classical perfection since the time of Homer. And undoubtedly they appeared not as the fictions or creations of art but as living deities who could be believed in. They can best be understood as eternal forms,, the great world-realities. ‘The reason for the mightiness of all these figures lies in their truth.’ {Walter Otto}.

“As psychologists we may stress the fact that this truth is always a psychic reality; as historians we may add that the psychic reality of such a truth, as indeed of all truth, changes with time; as biologists we may call the alteration of the power that so moves us natural decay, but the essentially convincing inner structure of the classical Greek divinities remains unshakable for all time.

“We have a handy comparison in the kind of formula that gives us a clear picture of the balance of tremendous cosmic forces, that catches the world in each of its aspects as though in a border-line situation and presents to it to the mind as though the least disturbance of that balance would bring about a universal collapse. Every natural law is just such a balanced aspect of the world and is immediately intelligible as the mathematical formulation of a border-line situation.

“So it is with the figures of gods. In Apollo sublimest clarity and the darkness of death face one another, perfectly poised and equal, on a border line; in Dionysus, life and death; in Zeus, might and right -- to name only the three greatest. In relation to the cosmos as a whole, these divinities are merely certain aspects of it; in themselves, they are wholes., ‘worlds’ which have aspects in their turn, and contradictory aspects for the very reason that their structure combines contradictions in perfect equilibrium.”

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore,” in Essays on a Science of Mythology, 103-4

Here on this cool Sunday morning
on the last late porches of the year,
where the dark never quite leaves
the day, making light hang wan and heavy,
ever turning back to sleepy winter dreams:
Today I feel so far from those noctal
noons of the cocksure spirit
that even my imagination finds it
difficult to keep up this poem’s round
through every station in the
purgatory of bliss. Of late I’ve been
infected with a mood so hollow
that I feel close to the jumping-off
place of my old bottoms, that dreary
depth down the bottle where I
could not go on another minute feeling
so bad yet couldn’t bring myself
to end it all for good. Haven’t felt
that way in years. Yesterday I stayed
home while my wife shopped -- she
didn’t want me going sour on holiday
crowds and goal-unspecific shopping.
Thus I had the whole place to myself,
to read and write and doze and amble,
free inside myself without the
least encumbrance of an other. So much
for rowing toward the ineffible svelte She.
It was a savagely selfish opportunity
which around here is A: A rarity;
B: Evidence of what’s worst right
now between my wife and I;
and/or C: Exactly what an
alkie in or out of his cups needs
the very least. And where I’ve taken
these love-free days with great
pleasure in the past (very
wrong ones in the first half of our
marriage -- like drinking all afternoon
in some lousy local bar -- or
purposeful & sustaining ones
since, like reading Moby Dick
or assembling these verse excessives
into some more assembled form) --
where I’ve had my pleasures high
and low alone in the past, yesterday
I wanted none of it. I was home
alone and wanted out, I wanted
to be free of that Yale-turned-jail
again, for someone to knock on
my poor door of self and beg
me come out to play, to not feel
dutiful and dronish, old and inept
and unattractive, half and less
of all I once believed: I dunno,
all of that summed on a bad shore
yesterday that somehow I
got to exactly by my meanings,
as if this noisome cortical
howl was destined to crash
on silent shores beneath the
frozen stars. I moped, I puttered
and ate and napped, the day outside
soft and breezy-cool in the
ambience of death. Tried calling
my sponsor three times, read “The
Christmas Banquet” in a first edition
of Hawthorne’s Mosses
(thinking old purities soothe)
listening to Ravel’s “Gaspard de
Nuit.” Bored, I put on the video of my
last gig in 1986, watching myself
at 29 play in that final mess,
too tall, silly-haired, waving my
blue Hamer guitar around like the pro
I couldn’t be, hammering out heavy metal
riffs with those sugarpop yahoos
who just wanted relief from playing
in a 50’s band out at Disney all
day long. Everything I played looked
and sounded so fucked up until “Lonely
Town,” which was pure enough perfection
as my minor ways go, the only decent song
in the entire set we played that night
(lost amid a the death roaring of six
punk-rock bands) -- good, because we
had recorded it few weeks earlier. Three
worthy minutes of Aphroditean foam-
and-yearn, all I had in my pockets after
10 years of inept foolery. Oh well. I
turned off the tape and just sat there
quiet on the couch as afternoon halcyons
drifted breezy through the trees,
my life come to naught and perfect for so doing.
Well, as the Arkansas Traveller would say in
AA meetings,“Everybody gets da blues
sometimes.” His voice saying that in
memory -- low and cracker, juicing that
word “blues” as he said it -- proved comfort
enough as the hours wore on, that
and knowing that my wife was coming
home and that I would have it ready for her.
I vacuumed the house & cleaned the bathroom
& spent two hours cooking dinner, grilled
flat-iron steaks with potatoes gratinned in
heavy cream and goat’s cheese, green beans
blanched then sauteed with glazed shallots,
brown apple betty for dessert. There was a
I-A division football championship on the tube
(snow drifts just off the field, the warring
teams exhaling plumes of steam) as I worked,
the house across the street from our kitchen window
now decked in lights & glowing in the dark,
I imagined my wife driving out from the
mall-frenetics of the season & coming
home to this: My mood improved. Fed the cats
on the back porch, all of them greedy
for love’s food, butting up against my hands
and purring up a storm, tearing into
their bowls as I poured dry food out
& spooned wet food over, the three of them
getting at the simplest truths which
bind us to these difficult and strange islands
we call out hearts. Beyond the porch our
yard in winter looked parched and beaten,
the bushes ragged, the oaks at the back
border slowly, oh so slowly bending in the wind,
motions which their roots sustain, gripped down
into the black loam of that old and almost
lost religion, the one which made the wild
bourne which separates You and I a
door, and welcoming at that. This Christmas
we’re doing the very least, just what’s required,
mostly because we’re so broke, but also taking
satisfaction from our remove from things
we must do but cannot feel. Thus yesterday
was more solstitial than yuletidal, harrowed
in a pregnant emptiness which surrounds both
out and down with that vestigal future which
reaches further back, sighing oh so soft
and lost like a lonely shore in winter,
like the creaking of garden gate
that will not close or open.

The Mysteries of Bliss (IV)

2006-12-12T07:04:00.000-05:00

The Florentine Renaissance came to love the Homeric hymns even more than the two great epics. Marsilius Ficinus, the translator of Plato, began by translating the Homeric and Orphic hymns. We know that he also sang them in the antique manner to the accompaniment of a lute. Angelo Poliziano, another leading spirit of Florentine humanism, paraphrased a hymn to Aphrodite -- neither the greatest nor the least of those ascribed to Homer -- in his own verses.

We could say that he painted it in the style of the Quattrocento were it not for the painter who actually did so, with Poliziano’s poetic assistance: Botticelli. The Birth of Venus is not a good name for this picture. It is rather Aphrodite’s arrival in Cyprus according to the Homeric hymn, or, in accordance with the significance of this masterpiece and the role it has played in our civilization, Aphrodite’s arrival among us. Botticelli’s picture contains at least as much living mythology as the Homeric hymn.

Aphrodite's birth is different: brutal and violent, and departing from the style of Homer poetry in just as archaic a manner as from the style of Botticelli. In both cases the mutilation of Uranos, the casting of his manhood into the sea, the whole terrible foregoing history, the titanic mythology of the world’s beginnings -- all this was swept aside. The unity of that mythological moment when begetter and begotten were one in the womb of the water had been broken up even in Hesiod and became a historical process. In Hesiod, too, we hear of Aphrodite drifting, drifting on the waves, as Maui did in the myth of the Polynesians.

At last the white foam gave birth to the girl who took her name from it ... This ancient etymology, accepted by Hesiod, derived its creditability from a grand mythological vision that must be still older: from the picture of Anadyomene, the goddess risen from the waves. Representations of Aphrodite’s arrival are later. The mild breeze carries the great goddess, already born, to one of her sacred islands, or, in Botticelli’s picture, to firm ground.

The soft foam that cushions Aphrodite is a symbol of her birth, and fits in with the Homeric style just as the mussel-shell does with Botticelli’s. In the Roman poets we read that Venus was born of a mussel-shell, or that she journeyed in a mussel-shell over the sea. Ancient representations show her as if growing out of a mussel. We need not surmise with H. Usener, the eminent philologist, that the growth of the pearl was at the bottom of the symbol. Later, this image was blended with the archaic foam-image.

Originally yet another kind of mussel, by no means so noble, was the creature sacred to Aphrodite in Cnidos. The mussel in general constitutes a most graphic example and expression, appealing at one end of the senses, of the aprhodisian properties of the ‘humid element.’ The Homeric poem was too spiritual to employ this symbol Poliziano was too sensual to be able to forget it. Venus steps out of her mussel-shell in Botticelli in such a way that you can see immediately: it belongs to the goddess, yet she is leaving it behind her as she leaves behind the whole of primitive mythology...

From the high sea, stepping out of a mussel-shell, borne along by the wind and received by the gaily clad goddess of earth, Aphrodite Anadyomene arrives. She is an aspect of the primordial maiden, Protogonos Kore. Botticelli’s picture helps us, as modern men, to conjure up the vision of Anadyomene. And she must be conjured up if we want to understand the Greeks. She is the closest to the origins.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore,” in Essays on a Science of Mythology

A swoony humid storm-charged
night high-runneled in door-foam:
that portal was the mussel which gave
birth to my pagan, love-tossed heart,
drowning the last pews of my Christian
soul inside a new-found woman’s
world-waking, heaven-remaking Yes.
Three times in Heading Out I had met
the woman that I dreamed, enacting in
a starry fusillade the wave-like crash
and smash of my broken self into ecstatic
smithereens. Three times I drifted past
the dawn on a womblike ocean stream inside
my other’s peace, her breasts heaving against
my chest in sleep, her soft breath lush
inside my ear & all the world blue water,
sparkling to a fresh-born sun. Such eternal
rapture wrapped its tail round me
when I woke up, convulsing me with
the hopeless desire of living forever there,
scarring a deep alcoholic trench in me
and, further down, suggesting the roof
of a lost temple I’m still trying to exhume.
Venus was only the first goddess to there appear,
anointing me in a votive mystery which
must proceed through two more, revolving
and evolving successively harder births,
doors you can’t go through until you finish
with the first. (Or it with you.) For a buck
like me back then, fresh-loosed from all
control and free to roam my will, I looked for
that sweet first goddess night after night
in greed of her rogue roller -- rare as a
royal flush, evanescently plush on the coast
where two bodies find and propound her
milk-foamed hard resound. God I ached
to find her again in the next bar’s smoky thrash,
apart from all the others I deemed embalmed
in party sins (venials I spotted because I had
so got ‘em ). Somewhere out there she waited,
I was sure, for the groom who make her bloom;
I saw her sweetly pure and fragile, not naive
but innocent in the way of Kore, playing with
her Oceanids, those girls who back the band.
Somehow that night I’d find her and offer to
buy her a drink, the way Hades handed Kore
a flower from his black depths, the dreaded
groom who hauls every daughter from her
mother’s hearth down onto the couch of pleasure
which wakes the maiden’s other, the queen-maid
Persephone. Of course, I didn’t see it that way,
or couldn’t say so, being young and drunk
and addled by too much beer & rock n roll.
I saw myself the gallant who’d rescue her
from falling into a bar whore’s floozy night,
myself the only one that night graced by God’s
white light, one half of destiny, desperate to
find its wife for life inside the spread thighs
of the perfect catch. My dreams were thus
hard-Kore, a stone-laced ritual of finding that
first field in the forest of fucking’s night,
so much that I repeated it again and again,
an ever-saggier knight of cups with a vaunted
droopy lance, staring crosseyed out across
the void, driving drunk on all those roads.

Eleusis Redux 2: The Door

2006-12-08T08:23:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-07T07:51:00.000-05:00

"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

2006-12-05T11:28:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-04T07:53:00.000-05:00

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.

Locker Room Sutra

2006-12-01T08:08:00.000-05:00

Headphones off, my s-shirt soaked,
having galloped my body down
the full length of that shore I
try to exercise at least four days
a week -- today 50 minutes on
the elliptical cardio, then upper
body freeweights -- I head
for the locker room in a roseate
funk of maxed-out endorphins.
As usual, I say nothing to anyone
as I walk, passing by an abs
class on my left and a pack
of treadmill-churning votives
to my left, past the attendant
desk where bored trainers
wait for appointments, past
the court where young men
attack the net through each
other, their Air Jordans
squeaking high and spectral
in the looming spaces of
this suburban sportsplex,
gulls above the bouncing
basketball’s whale basso.
And then I’m in the men’s
locker room, the part
of things forever hidden
from our other where we
go about the usual business
but as mess, undressing
and suiting up, peeling
down again to shower
and dressing back up
again. On one TV
ESPN pundits argue
whether Southern
Cal or Michigan should
play Ohio for the BCS;
on the other TV some guy
hollers the ups and down
of stocks on MS-NBC.
The attendant folding
towels is an older
Haitian who always says Hi.
(Hi.) One guy walks in front of
me on the way to the showers,
naked, short and muscular,
perfectly proportioned for
football or rugby, his ass stout
but chiselled his shoulders
fit for one accomplished
at lifting worlds from a squat,
his hands huge, at the ready,
like a wrester heading
back to the mat.
Ahead an old guy, naked too,
has one foot up on the bench
next to his locker and is
drying between his toes
with an air dryer. His balls
hang in a loose sac which
swings slightly as the
guy rocks the dyer back
and forth. Some guy
is sitting on the next
bench down, talking on
a cellphone, apparently
about a patient; he
fires off some instructions
and rings off, heading
back out to the gym.
I open a nearby locker and
pull off my sweaty duds,
throwing them into a
plastic bag which in
turn goes into my gym
bag. I stash everything
back in the locker and,
now naked too, I head
for the showers. Take a
look at myself in the
big mirror where six
sinks are arranged --
not too bad for my years,
pecs high and tight,
belly not too flaccid,
good bulge in the biceps,
the tats on my arms
keeping their strong
outlines -- fish-riding
Arion, the Uffington Horse --
my legs lithe and strong,
my cock bouncing smallish
in a brown thatch of
pubic hair -- could be better,
could be worse.
A guy is shaving with
a towel wrapped
round his hips, he’s fat
& hairy, balding, tired eyes
looking in the mirror
at me -- is he gay? What’s
he doing here? Probably
he’s had a scare and some
doc has read him the riot
act, or maybe he just
needs to be in here more
than whatever must get
done out there on the
floor (come to think of it,
I rarely see him out there).
Walk on by, walk on by.
I get into the shower
room as a guy steps out
of a stall, plain looking
guy, little heavy, average
face, but what a cock he
has! Thick and veiny,
swinging and bouncing
like an eight-inch
sausage as he walks
(I think, his poor wife!
and oh how I would
love to swing such
savage meat!).
I climb in a stall
and turn on the water,
adjusting it toward
hot and then lavishing
under the steamy pour,
washing away the
sweat and stink, my
pores opening further,
exhilarated, making me
feel refreshed, ready for
anything the world decides
to throw at me. I soap
my chest abs pits neck
balls sphincter legs,
wash it all away and step out,
walking over to the towel
cabinet to pull a thick
beige one off the stack,
dry myself off, wrap a
fresh one round my
waist and then head back
toward my locker,
stopping at the digital
scale on the way.
235. Geez. When I
first hit Florida in ‘80
I was around 150 lbs, a
waif rock n roller
with long bleached
hair and a liver
seeped in picklejuice.
I could stand at
the bar in a rock n
roll club and the girls
would come and talk
to me. Yah well.
The row where
my stuff is locker
is packed with
guys going home.
Two guys my age
who I’ve seen at
this gym for years
are talking with
each other as they
dress, rating the
chances for the
Orlando Magic.
They're jocular good
guys, hard-working
at professions
and sport and love,
the one in love
with his wife (as
far as I can tell from
their conversations),
the other in love
with his wife and
child and mistress.
A young guy dresses
up a few lockers
past, furtively pulling
down his gym shorts
and hurrying up his
jockeys, zealous
to keep his privates so.
Next to him a father
towels of his son,
the man lean in
his 50’s sharply
cut grey hair, they
boy’s eyes ablaze
with all our Mysteries
full in view.
All the way down
at the end of the
row an old guy finishes
toweling off, his back
to me, his former
jock’s body now
fully sloping down,
hairless, pearly,
his spine’s archipelago
working down his back
amid liver-spots and
old scars, his ass
skinny and long,
the shadow of his penis
hanging between
his skinny legs -- he
must be 80, God
bless him. I towel
off a last time
and dress back up
into the clothes
my days know me
by, khakis, short-
sleeved shirt, matching
sox & comfortable
brown shoes, finally
fitting on the gods’
equipage -- watch of
Cronos, gold ring
encircling my heart
with my wife,
the eyeglasses of
of Hermes by which
I peer near and far.
I run my fingers
through my damp hair,
trying to comb out
the wildness; then
shoulder up my gym
back and stroll
lightly out of the
dressing room,
ready to go home.
As I pass the
bathrooms a long
low bladdery fart
lumbers from
in there; on the
one TV the
the ESPN pundits
are now sawing
NASCAR’s ruling
body in half.
Two young black guys
saunter in the door as
I head out, fresh
from their battle of hoops,
insouciant, loose,
baggy shorts and t’s
hanging over their
monstrously lean
lengths, their eyes
laughing or suspicious
or arrogant, taking
small notice of
me as I pass, or so
I think. What the hell,
I’m just another aging
white dude still trying
to look and play young,
walking out a little
hurried since I want
to get home to
my wife by 7 and
start our tired evening
together. And the man
who emerges from
the mouth of the
men’s locker room
says nothing of what in
those depths were revealed,
not even here. I walk
past basketball court
and up the long stairs,
smiling goodbye to the
pretty bosomy attendant
working the front desk
(oh for the old life if just for one night)
and walk on by, down the
last hall and out the last door,
into the night where traffic
is thickly streaming,
pouring steel vehicles
into a dark sea's roar
where testosterone
is in full gallop down
desires long shore,
songs of the male body
whose mysteries I door.

The Drowning Phads of Pushtar

2006-11-30T07:03:00.000-05:00

Rajasthani singers can still recite
epics longer than Homer and
the Bible combined. One old bhopa
started learning them at age four,
his father pressing twenty lines
into his memory each day,
nursing the tale with buffalo milk.
The epics are sung in eight-hour
nightly performances which can
go on for weeks. A courtyard
is cleared, lamps hung from the
arches amid swirling boughs
of bougainvillaea, thin white
mattresses set on the ground
and the phad unscrolled between
two poles, a 17-foot tapestry
which backgrounds the reading
of each epic, depicting the tale’s
particulars — robust men pairing
off with demurring maids,
horses and cattle and battlements,
kings and queens and blue-
skinned gods, peacocks and
tigers, forests which melt
into oceanic fish-mounts.
At the center of it all was
the hero of the narrative, a
man so brave that to
hear his tale was to
burn the ground around it.
His soul the singers poured
out like well-water, devoted
to praising his account
like lovers subjects and priests.
The phads are carried round
India by the bhopas as they
circulate the songs, bringing
the spirit of each god to the
people through the tale,
painting in the minds of
the audience a bridge to
heaven’s wildest ways.
Each phad is passed on to a
singer’s child when he grows
too old or ill to perform.
If the fabric of it fades
or gets torn, the scroll is “cooled”
of its fire in the holy lake
of Pushkar and never used again.
The bhopas are fast disappearing
with their songs, ebbing back
to the most conservative
provinces in India. The written
record has just begun; most
of the songs will probably not
be saved, swimming back
with their phads down the waters of
Pushkar. Of those lost epics
there is only a bare surficial
gleam with silence far below
-- what passes in an old man’s eyes
whose mouth no longer flows
words of what soul knows.

Night Rain

2006-11-29T07:44:00.000-05:00

What to do when things ebb to a silence within? It such silence a theme to write about? It’s not writer’s block as much as writer’s yoke that oppresses today, my sense of duty to the page, always getting down on paper what inchoately whorls around the edges of the perceivable day -- as if, by naming those things in their ink sequences, the hidden pattern of the day could be divined, providing a rudder, a sense of balance and communion with the world. The Sibyl was seized by Apollo; blue verdicts are striated with verbal gold and sooth. If only I could what that infernal/divine mind is whispering down under the slow drip of dark rain ...

***

Today I write:

A SEA BEWITCHED

A pall hangs over
the sea I love.
Nothing sounds
or surfaces,
nothing moves.
The shores lie
empty like
forgotten beds.
No siren sings
the chasms
that I can hear,
much less voice.
I wait, I linger,
treading a stillness
with silent miles
looming for
miles under
my feet, nowhere
I would go
and nothing
I can say.

It’s a rain-dewy, mistral late night (4 a.m.), somewhat chill as it should be in this latter station of the year, the Presence I’m straining to name drifting, disincarnate. I imagine faint drifts of this rain falling over the Gulf of Mexico far to the west, tolling a imperceptible accumulation which slowly devours the peninsula. For now, it’s just sighingly wet, a faint spiculation over the dark wavelets which still them in their courses, or seem to, changing the perspective, so that tides are broken into individual frames of motion, revealing the sea through its miniatures, a drop of rain falling on a anonymous nth of a swell. It doesn’t say much, but it wasn’t meant to, not for our hearing anyway. The same rain falls outside my study window right now, here a faint patter and drip from the eaves. It striates darkly my
singing ear’s dull metronome, that meter I have learned by long habit to tide with my lines: today I can say nothing and be in complete fidelity with the slow susurration of that oracular-seeming sound, water to water in hymeneal surround.

***

Meanwhile clocks are zealously devouring all the hours I lose straining my ears here to eternes. I mean, c’mon: I’m almost 50 with no published corpus to speak of and this burdened beast’s equipage is slowing down -- migraines from hours of hunched shoulders and neck, phalanges going buttery and tingly from the relentless keyboarding (remember, this work here is just a prelude to a computer drone’s corporate day where I write endless email and create promotions and salescopy and knock out a bigfat whale of weekly production). So when silence wallows me in these shallows, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve simply run out of things to say in this way, and would far more profitably and much more to the will of thing writing a more productive reality.

Besides, how many phosphorous benippled wavelets can one truly give suck to before they’re milked all every ghost? Freud, in “Civilization and Its Discontents”: “The feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed.” I can harrow all the sweet billows of memory til I’m imaginally red in the face and blue in dreamt balls, pent with empurpled verbs, pounding away in the meters, my bells clanging wild against some pillowy poof of a melusine’s salt-stained blue bottom, yes yes: But are these aery rutts on the unbloodable sheets of the page tending essential fires from within, or is it all embering down anyway? I dunno, but the silence adds an magnitude of echo to the question.

Sure, libido is tidal, both sickle and full moon;
there is always a low moment when a wave has fully spent itself ashore in a glistening spoor of foam; there is always a long backdrawing process where a slow inward breath replenishes the ocean’s lungs as the water recedes, ebbing back into the surf-mill where it takes fundamental root in the footers of the next approaching wave. All remains still and silent as the next wave begins to rise into a full hump, into the destined curvature of consummation, waxing to an impossible fullness. Only then is there any sound, a sudden fold and crash into smithereen smash wild toward the shore, spreading a distant principle’s glistening lucre onto the sands, depositing there a new shell or a doubloon--the next chapel of song I inhabit -- or simply providing sea-milk for the denizens of the precarious tidal marge. The backdrawing, undertowing, riptiding part of the equation is that which happens under the surface, that which cannot be seen as much as felt. I can’t tell what’s going on here but I’ve come to trust that silence is pregnant and more potent in its way than high summer’s shriekingly bright noon.

Maybe I’m just paying dues for getting too fraught in the verse, too exegetical, homiletic, straining too hard to haul mystery up dripping fro the banalities of history. I’ve been overwraught and histronic; worst of all, I’ve gone on overlong telling my God what He already knows, rather than attending and listening and writing down what I hear. I’ve forgotten the old poet’s role as the king’s poesy bee-yotch. I’m just the verbal mead which pleasures His ear, and He loves to hear of His glories great and wide, not the doubts and vicissitudes such sickly contemporary motions which tear up in my insides to naught, always to naught.

The other day I wrote a long poem about how the year embers down and tied it to the fading embers of sex that seem to support the larger growing fire of love in my marriage; also tied into that the wrong-headed full-hearted roar of going the wrong way (Freud again, “The irresistibility of perverse instincts, and perhaps the attraction in general of forbidden things, finds an economic explanation {in the priority of untamed instincts over those that have been sublimated}”) -- somehow in writing that poem I heard a great whoomph, like a great fire suddenly witched out. The candle I write by, it seems, for all the obfuscurity of what I’m trying to say here.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been trying out Freud’s tough reality principle, throwing those hot ‘n’ naught blue jazzy verses into the cold shower of mortaility: All this is drone, pal. Or maybe it’s that old historic hubris of prioritizing love over art when I’ve gone as far as I dare go; where the real heart, out of its complex mix of truth and error, quenches the imagined hear. Do I sacrifice today the former to the latter, floating off into verbally silent though matrimonially more replete waters? Lord knows its tough up there, in the Real -- an aging morbid mess --: is it so much so that I simply can’t afford these dalliances? Afford to believe they mean more than ink?

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. For now, it just rains on, keeping time with my fingers tapping away this post of a “Seinfield” episode, trying to make much out of a doo doo of nada, yadda yadda yadda the end. I got up early this morning -- 2:45 a.m. -- feeling the need to create something here; but I came into this empty, lingered with it a while, and leave little more. A postmodern epiphany.

Ah, well. I woke hearing rain on our tin roof, dripping a watery semaphore into my surfacing mind; I finish writing here as that rain picks up again, soft and sure, bathing the yard with desperate moisture, slickening the pathways by which I meander through this post, leaving really only one image, many miles to the west, a good mile or two offshore, where two black immensities pour and heave and these words are lost there, trailing off unrevealed and uninspired, unbedded and untrue, useless wings and fins which end me in a grand dark period, ending one long sentence, awaiting the next.

A Dread Miscelleny

2006-11-28T08:27:00.000-05:00

A BUMP OF KEELS

Nov. 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 FIRE

Nov. 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 FIRE

March 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.

Blue Oracles

2006-11-24T07:38:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-22T08:02:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-21T07:55:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-20T07:56:00.000-05:00

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." - -

Odin's Whirl

2006-11-16T08:13:00.000-05:00

TWIN CAM TOTEM MAN

November 16

Last night while we slept
the tail of a wild front
whorled across the
state -- earlier yesterday
tornadoes ripped through
Baton Rouge into
Mississippi --:
Sleep held us down
in its dreamy thrall
while the sky heaved
the tress & rattled
windows & baptized all
with a haul of blessed blue.
I dreamt of a man who
was like a spinning
swastika, his nature
of dual fealty and
ferocity, savage and
surgent, whirling and wild,
his yearning burning
and bellowing like the
storm’s vortex over
us which whooped as
it spun. The pairing of
qualities made him more
and most a tribal
or totem man, a
master of two realms
like a shaman’s
basso inside
the dayside poet,
sexual and spiritual,
cortical horizontal,
a spurt of molt steel
siring all kings and
fathers and marge-
thirsty keels. I’ll take
him as You, Grandfather,
demiurge who’s
hauling me around
and down this whorlpool
of whirlywords choked
with the world’s gnomons
and verbs: You choke
this poem’s waterwake
with brassieres up in
trees pyring desire
on its cross, staring
at history with a Siren’s
oh-so-black eyes. You
give me something
to say here to the rain
that’s falling now,
drenching the garden,
the humps of our cars,
floating ten thousand
sleepers in this town
to destined salt dreams.
You bid me iterate
again and again
the rounds of my tale,
revisiting its rooms
and chapters like
isles of an immrama
which deepen their
hues each time
I sing a shore of them:
Puppy love’s powder
blue splits into
red sex and hard love,
pewter ceruleans
surge dark with
the wave which
baptizes and breaks
a soul into swoons,
empyreans and falls.
I became a Christian
just before I turned
14 and was doused
in the Atlantic Ocean
off Melbourne Beach
one morning in June
to cleanse me of all
past freight keeping
me from heavenly ascents;
but the sea I was
dunked in suddenly
doubled in a wave
that came out of
nowhere (or everywhere
You are), passing
over and through me
with white heaven’s
steely salt flow.
When I was lifted
spluttering and pale
I was both a new
Christian and something
far older, hoary
and brined in
a faith which
rang low in my ears
for the rest of my years
like the sea in a conch,
a strange melody
which was loudest where
tiny silver crosses
swung between a
girl’s budding breasts.
Where the taste of
fresh orange juice
was strangely akin to
the spiritous flush
of that first drag
on a cigarette,
wherever a
ghostly undertow
opened doors
both fascinating and
terrible, enthralling
and wild. Paint a
Siren at that shore
on Melbourne Beach
where I woke from
first water into
two future men,
one soaring,
one diving, one
divining white
courses in the
aether’s cirrus gauze,
the other dining
on every treat
to tumble down
the throat of the whale.
My trunks were
plastered over my
skinny cock and
marble-sized balls
like a frieze
of Eden seen
from inside the apple,
Eve as the
fresh-bitten moon
laughing over the
ocean, blessing
my sex with its dual
drives for rapine
and rapture.
Summer storms
were massing inland
while beach breezes
raked me ripe with
salty sea-ions
tinged with low danger,
making me feel
a bit chilly as
the last vestiges
of water dried from
my face chest and
legs. I was now an
animal up from first
seas, walking erect
and proud, naked
of spirit and loud
now of soul, heading
back to where the
crew was playing
volleyball under
a brilliant sun.
My heart beating
furious from two
wakened chambers,
the one half white
God’s, the other
Manannan’s, never
again far from
that shore where
two immensities
greet and clash
and strum this
salt lyre. Back and
forth over the net
flies the ball,
the boys hollering
& the girls shrieking,
leaping and bouncing,
trying and failing
to get clear to God
while hard and soft
entropies hauled
them back in
gravity’s undertow,
swooning us all
in the surf of the
soul’s crashing thrall.
Tiny crucifixes
afire in that sun,
jumping and leaping
like Mexican beans
about those girls’
bikini tops, as if
to touch such ground
was death or worse,
dissolving God’s
precious metal
into something
feral and gross,
exactly where boys
in their manning
clobber and yowl
trying to nurse.
Whirl and whorl
that primary scene,
old Father, brood
it down to its dregs:
Sirens are perched
on the poles of
that net, silent
but greedily
drinking it all in
with their eyes,
marking a music
not so much heard
as intoned in
the wash of those
youthful bodies
joyous thrash
in a water not
so much seen
as interred in
the locus I dream.
I work for them
as You, salt father;
I am the medium
here, thousands
of years down
the tale. Fresh green
mint and bit glowing iron:
Smooth white linen
over rough wooly pubes:
Wave crash and
angel thrash in
the spume and the flue
of a disquieting waking
today I call yours
where twin cams are
slaking something
that sings as it roars.

DOUBLE OUTBOARD

2003

For two-headed
double-edged turbo-rollers
of wild blue, we’ll need
some elbow room. Dear
Pal Rilke, if we
are the bees of the invisible
we are not indivisible
but a complex
and dappling
emulsion, congregate
and appellate in our
eruditions. See: I’ve loosed
my polysyllables from
their stables today, all
the ones who could
or would not
roam set-sized hawkers
of sooth: So ease back
and buckle up, roll down
the windows, enjoy
the ride ...
Today I
think of Cary Grant
who would be 100 years
and a day today. What
a polished archon of
noblesse! — Handsomest
of all & almost the
funniest too. His genius
may have been to keep
those whirls in
paired motion: Strolling
in in black-tied
perfection, then from
that vantage stealing every
scene with a rear-guard
wit and thus revealing
some whole
other man who didn’t
give a shit about the
minted glamour boy.
Always at his sartorial
best with a motley grin
to boot: together they
formed the summa of
a style, a blent
quintessence which
no woman and few men
could resist. — Rest
thee well, good man.
- Tough act to follow!
Yet his example serves
this next poem well,
where shaft and shore
sing the harmony of
a strange yet nearby
key, of stone
and sea composed.
We’ll see. Cary Grant’s
trick was to wow ‘em
with one face and then
loose a zinger with that other,
providing the rudest and
unassailable permission —
So well practiced that
he never won an Oscar
(his roles must have seemed
too easy). Lord knows
I’ll never wow my wife’s
undies to the thundertow
that way: Nor will I
gain a nod from fathers
everywhere with
this conceit: Still I’ve
roamed wide and deep
in ink here, so it’s time
to yoke both to task.
Alpha my bucket,
Omega my oar: Ripe
contrarians, it’s time to roar
where idols heap outside
my city’s walls. Let wounds
in tongues of ocean
plumage soar. Perplex blue,
hang your strange pale
light above the next
dashing, devilish shore.

ST. MICHAEL AND MANANNAN

based on the drawing by William Blake
of St. Michael binding Satan

1995

1. St. Michael to Manannan

He was part of the darkness
that was once my own.
But you bid me rise
so many leagues
that he became
my abandoned depth.
I think of him now
like the amputee
who wakes cupping
a breast in the dream
of a trembling hand.

Once he tried
to drag me home
and we fought halfway
to the bottom of the sea.
As we wrestled
my hair grew white
and his eyes
slit to dragon coals.
The waters
boiled round us
in a terrible swirl,
chasing sea
beasts to the broken
porches of Atlantis.

When I finally
broke his hold
and fettered him
in your chains,
his face sank
the thousand
leagues of grief.
Often these days
I think of him
disappearing into
those silt shadows.
My heart at least
has never been a blade.

You've built your walls
and towers now,
demanding a new
heaven of Gothic stone.
But understand
that each time
I intercede for you
and jam my white
sword in to
the bloody hilt,
an ancient narwhal
suddenly breaks
the sea to pierce
God in the back.

2. Manannan to St. Michael

When the last lock
snapped into
the links of doom
and he rose like
a white sword
to the sky,
I fell into deep
chill moodier
than any fairy spell.
The waters darkened
about me in a cloak
that forever hid
me from your view.

To me you portioned
hoof and horn,
the least parts of
the king's stag.
You paupered
my waves with
cunning boats.
Banished from
the cities to hide in
distant hills and islands,
I became a sleek
captain of absence,
forced to ply my
trade in dream
and sensual smoke.
My gold meadows
blazed to stubbled char.

I understand
that every time
I meet him the white
sword wins all.
Ah, but if you only
understood how those
losses make me strong!
I ripen on a vine that curls
about your sickness,
sorrow and death.

If you would only love
the gall now chilling
into winter, the gates
of my damnation
would forever close.

Perhaps then
the white prince
and I could resume
our song upon that
apple branch
where the fruit is
sweet and cold
and heavy as sleep,
where each bite
fills the mouth with moon,
and the juice runs darkly
down God's uncertain smile
the way eternal lovers
find the greatest grace
exactly where they fail.

IT’S MY CROSS
(AND I’LL BURN ON
IT IF I WANT TO)

2004

There are easier ways to go
than this unrequited,
ever-off-the-shore travail
between the islands of
your washing bliss.
I could just go numb
inside the free-fall
of days; zip up the
itch and say no more
of that tantalizing
blue so full and not
of what you are
always nougating through.
A sturdier keel of
less sensate wood would
surely cut the swath
of wave with drier
purpose and surer
compass, I mean
should it ever rue
to leave the harbor
which it would not.
Moored fast to the
world’s known dock,
that boat would
rock all night on soft
dazed sleep, impregnable
to the breasts of dream.
But you are much too
sweet upon that crashing
shore no boat or song
can reach for me to
even wish to fling
the burn of those high
frozen stars which augured
my voyage long ago we
first met and kissed.
Such ancient lamps
are much too oiled
from our first bliss
to dare physic a
damping down by sleeping
through to first light.
Instead I war on
with my gods
here on my
devout knees,
beseeching the wide
dark tide to show
your face at last,
a least one smootch
of curve and smash.
for these curve
smashing eyes.
And so I vigil here
again and again and
again, lighting candles
in these votive boats
of paper and incessant
ink, writing down
every squid and
sperm-whale tussle
in the depths of all
I dream to know of
you. Futile and fruitless
perhaps to the waking
day, but the nails
are inextricable
and have fused me
to a burning tree that
lamps each matin
with a wild candesdcent
longing for the next
words I can say
of how you stood
and smiled in the
milky new day’s light
with sleep blue in
your eyes and pulled
me once again into that
voluptuous song
that deepens
because it dies.

TWO MEN

2001

Two men foster me:
the one who looks beyond (or within)
towards a half-lit blue margin
and the other, whose work is always at hand
and reaches itself reaching for your hand.
It takes both to build an enduring
chapel by the sea:
One to dive and treble,
the other to make God eye-level.
And so I am, a northern man in southern climes
where had and heart incline
towards world in daily demarcations
and ghostly embarkations.
Two pistons, two feet, two oars
glide me down the center of the hours
and make a life fit for love and and murk.
May I keep the two apart and ever at work.

TWO SEAS

2002

In the world I would live in
the sea is both fair and cruel:
the drowse of lovers and
Poseidon’s stallions balls.
I love a day on the beach
in early June as much
as a jaunt in hard December;
they slake two needs.
Womb waters, frozen keep,
cerulean jacuzzi or
infrann’s deep: both
announce me here, tiding
in these lines with
gentleness and hooves.
As the eye is formed
so are its powers,
wrote Blake. From my
mother’s hazel to
my father’s blue,
there’s an ocean to see
and saw the world.
In my duple seas
I forge turbines,
eternal and infernal:
sufficient to the task
of writing past your
margins toward the next
inchoate isle.
A pen so tempered
cuts the wildest swath:
but when I head off course
I suffer a duple wrath.

TWO WINGS

2002

That much I cannot yet
declare has been my angel
from childhood until now ...

—Emerson Journal 11/22/33

One wing greatness,
the other sibilant speech.
The bird they haul
is monstrous, a bruised
and brutal angel
circling itself. In it
I have known heaven’s
ache and it’s deep pavilions.

The trick is to stay right-
size while dominions blow.
The archon sings tidally
and far -- I can do no more
than follow with a steady hand:
Penning wings-strokes
down a page I know won’t
very sensibly sing
though at times it does
so preternaturally ring.

DUAL CITIZENSHIP

2003

While the wave-borne
beast bid me ride
and hard, there was
a life upon another
nearby beach
where I fared as
you, working, building,
loving, building walls
of sand against
the sea (each with
a guilty, impossible
door). Who isn’t
citizen of two lands,
one which builds
a chapel by the sea,
the other which
come as night to
drown the psaltery?
And who doesn’t
salute the flags which
hoist above and
below, and try to
mouth that difficult
and surrendering
pledge which sings
true both ways? By
now you know my
only drill: It’s 5 a.m.
a cup of coffee (big
stallioned, strong
regular & two shots
of Cuban), the night
outside quiet & dying
slow to a difficult
pale of dolphin blue,
cat Violet at the
window on her
private beach, cat
Mama in the guest
room crying gently
for all she would leave
for but cannot because
her kittens are
not allowed, my wife
asleep upstairs in a
bed of worry over her
sister: Inside all that
I release this vowel
movement, as
necessary as that
other shove which
more slowly builds
as I write -- Each day
I compose or recompose
the well waters Oran
ventured in, dragging
up these wood buckets
of oar and skull
and fin, this page
both beach and
cenotaph, my beloved’s
thighs crying wide
for ink, more ink.
Some hand instructed
mine to hold the pen
just so, to rise and
fall on paper as waves
in sheaves toward
shore all go; and when
all apparently’s been
said, draw carefully
the recede which salts
the next day’s storm.
Summer’s motions
here are regular too,
the clouds accreting
high in hot balconies,
sea and sky in sweet
conspiracy, sure as
two lovers who bare
their hot cupidity
to each other in
surrender to the wave
which will wash them
clean & float them
miles away. These poems
are coracles which
travel two ways, obedient
to both day and drowse,
compassed by a heart
both salt and sand,
the perch between what’s
dry and banal and
that blue bacchanal
such motions invoke.
And once I’ve had my
spout and spurt, I zip
the last line back into
white trousers, & pull
the sheets over my
beloved’s sweaty, sated
back, & let her sleep --
Then shut these books
and go upstairs
to join my wife
in bed who stirs,
groans, and slowly
stroke her feet,
milking that real day
which tides up
from that other
day He reins and
rules and rides.

CROSS BETWEEN
A WOMAN'S BREATS

2001

Bright martyr,
you’re perfect
hanging there,
fusing me
to this song.

Grace note at
the center of
a dark pond.

Gold cup
brimming my gaze.

Compass
of insurrection
and grief.

Hammer for
a distant gong.

Nails at nether
and nadir
of this surf.

Ferryboat
and sherpa.

Crossroads
altar to making
and slaking.

You’re a bright aria
to the woman
I’ll never know
sitting across from
me in every room,

blessing my day
with one glint
of paradise.

Thank you, Lord,
for hanging
me here.

The Siren's Dionysian Romp

2006-11-15T07:57:00.000-05:00

Last night I dream a panoply of ensuing scenes, frames perhaps of one film -- Priapus in a garden with his monstrous erect red penis; a pair of harlots or harpies grinning at me in a smoky bar, inviting me to their killing pool; a man on some outskirts of a settlement, offering me his child, saying he can’t or won’t take care of him; an old Greek vase-painting of some black winged women; a garden hose or snake, more I can’t remember now. At the end of the dream a voice says, say all of these things to say the Siren ...

***

“Other {Sirens} again pipe for Dionysos and his attendant Satyrs in an early red-figured vase, personifying again possibly the kind of music that could only be heard by adepts in a state of ecstasy. The association with Sirens with other-worldly joys probably explains their presence on tombs. But the practice does not become widespread until the 5th century BC, though figures presumably of the deceased appear in scenes with Sirens playing lyres and squatting on pillars.”

-- John Pollard, Seers, Shrines, and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution of the Sixth Century BC

DIONYSOS AND THE SIRENS

Nov. 15

How oddly fertile these
late-year scritches
down owl-eyed page, as if
the dying world sieves
its receding sap
through my achey
breaky brain, down
into fragrant groves
so heavy with sweet
fruit the whole underworld
wants to awaken me,
unburdening itself
of my dreams.
No wonder Sirens were
carved on gravestones
in signature of the joys
down under and across
the last-flung tide; they
play their lyres and
squat on phallic pillars
like the ligature of
a song welled from
the drunken mad
ecstatic god himself,
the one whose jones
for life in overdrive
kills so many
when they try
singing it in
all stupid profane
too literal
ways the topside
life errs down
to salty doom.
I remember how
heavy metal surged
out of my radio
at night when
I was 13, a
marauding nightmare
perfectly stout and
hooved and wild,
amplifying (even
at the tinny drone
demanded by my mother)
my dream of a girl’s
desire and acceptance
of me up to immortal
decibels, a crash
and thrash and whinny
wail thundering
right up the glistening
trail between my
imagined love’s
eventually-parted
thighs. Santana,
Led Zeppelin, Mountain,
Cream -- the early 70s
were awash with these
metal-finned and -winged
gods of howl; and
the welcome by which
I wildly received this
music was the
greater part of my
body’s awakening,
that loud sound
mirrored by my
own body’s hormonal
roar, those power
chords fisting up my
pubic hairs, cracking
the alto of my voice
revealing a strange
baritone, my penis
stretching out beneath
the sheets like a blue
trombone or a guitar’s
stallion neck while
the rock hero nails
the high notes right
at its chin. “Mississippi
Queen,” “Black
Magic Woman,” “Crossroads,”
“The Lemon Song” --
those songs caught me
by my mind’s balls
and hurled me toward
that raucus troop
marauding just ahead,
those peers who were
smoking dope & fucking
girls in the backs of
souped up cars, who
were playing in bands
for dorks like me -- Oh
I wanted like death
to follow those wings
of heavy metal
out of my
lonely boy’s suburban
curfewed window
and up over the
entire dreary world
and join my
rock gods on
their stages, delivering
those hammer-spasms
of burning noctal
juice, no longer just
a listener but music’s
own bone-wild thyrsus,
whacking a cherry-red
guitar down on
the stage’s floor like
the god’s hammer which
enchants the enraged ground.
It was a deathlike ecstasy,
not much removed
fro that white rictus
of my diddler’s joy
beneath the sheets
alone at the least
vestage of a boy’s day:
That moment when
this world collapses with
a gong and we pass
over, if only for an
engorged cuspate
second, into a blue bliss
which both womb and
tomb are fragments of,
the relics of a cathedral
far under and behind
the last room of the
dream. There, at
excitation’s exalted
reach, the Sirens perch
and sing, atop the totem
amps and guitars I
heard in a tiny
tinny radio on
another boring night
of my so-called
teenaged life; they
perch there in
my memory which
so fruits and frets
today’s solo on
an air-guitar that’s
forever fixed at the
song’s highest amplitude,
held high for the last
chord which cracked
me wide, awoke and
bewitched me at the
same time, a sound
I revel here at this
silent cold still hour,
the patch chord
still in my boy’s navel,
still rapt in heaven’s
heavy metalled grind.

FENDER MUSTANG

From “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

Spring 1971:

I.

I was 14 when
my friend Steve and
I decided to get
into a band like
Led Zeppelin,
do cool stuff,
get all the girls
We begged our moms
to get us guitars.
For two weeks
we cruelly jammed
that button of love
and guilt in them,
saying how having
a guitar was all
we ever really wanted,
how we would
work extra chores,
vacuum rooms,
clean dishes, etcetera.

Being little men
in houses forsaken
by fathers,
our moms
broke down as we
knew they must
and took us
to the music
store in Winter Haven
to pick out
rental guitars.
After a long wistful
scan at the Caddys
on the top rack—
Strats, Rickenbackers,
Flying V’s, Les Pauls
—I lowered my sights
to the rental rack
below and fell in love
with this red Fender
Mustang. It was
a kid’s learning
guitar, a cheapo
Strat clone
probably cranked
out in Japan:
ah but it was
also cherry red
like Corvette coupe,
like the dark
wet insides
of a girl’s mouth.

That Mustang was
my first real purchase
on puberty, no longer
the fat kid imprisoned
in his room but
newly-tall and skinny
and ready for the world,
ready to rock.

The guy who taught
me to play was
some longhair
who loathed my
kiddie taste for
Grand Funk Railroad
and Black Sabbath,
but since it
was the best
inducement to
practice he
grudged me
three minutes
to puzzle the riffs
to “Are You Ready.”
I sat there
as he transmuted
radio dross
to living gold.
Playing the
riffs put me
onstage somehow,
as if the chords
were the first
words of a
new language.

At the end of
the lesson I unplugged
my Fender from
the teacher’s amp
(so big and ballsy
compared to that
whippet of an amp
I had at home)
and laid it back
in its case.
The inside of
the case was
a plush blue velvet;
midnight blue
and cherry red
felt like all
the magic erupting
around me those
days, shimmering
pool water and
full fire moons by
the lake and
the blue eyes
of all the really
popular girls,
impossible to reach,
impossible to resist,
my heart impeccably red.

III.

Back in my room
at home I’d go
over the riffs again
and again, plugged
into that tiny amp
& sworn to play low.
Practicing guitar was
one of the first necessary
evils I learned,
that patient start from
the easiest beginning
and then working
through to the end
of the lesson in
that dreary Mel Bay
Guitar System book.
And then I’d head
into the songs
I wanted to play,
going through them,
taking time to smooth
the rough parts.
I remember practicing
the ligature for “Ride
Captain Ride,” learning
my first solo note for note.
Playing it & feeling
in my hands something
forming harder than
the lines of my
biceps when lifting
wieghts. Ripe with
the scent of orange
blossom and Boone’s Farm.
Thrilling to make
music sure
to thrill girls.

I tried it out:
Derinda one
of the neighborhood
girls who’d visit
when my mom
was out
sitting on my bed
while I cranked that
amp and muscled
“Are You Ready.”
Afterwards I
lifted weights
and then wrestle with
Derinda on my bed,
our tongues soon
engaged in a
splashy battle royale,
my hand trying to work
its way down
the top of her
t-shirt to get
to her big breasts
which were always
too far away.
I sorely needed
practice in
everything
in the world.

IV.

Two weeks after
Steve got his
guitar he lost
all interest in
it, surer at
playing football
and riding his Stingray
bike through
the subdivision.
But I remained,
less sure
in anything else,
lifting that
Fender Mustang
from its blue lap
feeling all the latent
power in it, my fingers
at its strings so potent
with longing.
Playing all the cool music.
Getting all the pretty girls.
Ravaging the world.

KILLER TUNE

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

Autumn 1970:

Humble Pie’s
“I Don’t Need (No
Doctor” was the
killer song of
Autumn 1971
that launched
me into Winter
Haven High.
A punchy mean
piece of rock
jackhammery
launching from
E minor -- a
yaw of savage
emptiness --
up to G to A
hold that A
A- G/G,
bending the G-note
up a grinding
tad (the difference
between a kiss
and frenching)
before slamming
back to E-minor,
home plate
where the next
progression
takes is infernal
swing a the moon.
Man did that
song rock!
Down deep
in my inner ear
long after I
heard it on
the radio,
ringing in my
senses as I
got off the bus
outside the school
and went over
to the 7-11
to smoke a cigarette.
Fat no longer,
I was ready for
the world, even
public school.
Ladies and Ladies,
meet Bond. James
fucking Bond.
“I Don’t Need
(No Doctor)” and
the boy-king on
the prowl, Cupid
in all his feral
puberty. That’s
the genius
of killer songs:
their fuse is
a fusion of
lover and bedlamite,
hungry for deaths
big and small.
Few bands
have more
than one of them.
A killer song
is a miracle,
a precise moment
when all the
energies of the
old ones wake
in the minds
and hands of
the musicians
in a band merging
in a chord progression
(always in a minor key)
that suddenly lifts
and hurls like
a dragon up out
of this sleepy
world of work and hurt,
burning all suburbia
to char. At 14 I heard
that music run deep
and dark through
the red core of my
bland bland school
days, slipping past
the walls of fearful
Christian mores.
The earth belongs
to eternal delight
and God the
door shut terribly
tight against
our deadly Dionysian
swoon. I don’t need
no doctor, I don’t
need no white Christ,
no parents, no school,
just let me run
shaggy and hard
over the pretty girls
in the hall wearing
polkadot minis
and big plastic boots.
Knocking aside that
Mel Bay silliness
with my Mustang
to get to the real
stuff-- songs like
“Sweet Hitchiker”
and “Heartbreaker”
& cranking up
that amp all the
way (my sister
howling in the living
room) and
squeezing that
bad muscle with
every iota of
revenge against
the world. Taking
what was mine. America
was in retreat those
days, numbed by ‘Nam
and the bullets
of National Guardsmen
and sappy sweet
soft rock the big
mama tits we hid
within: But others
kept exploring
the hard dark zone,
kamikazes like Hendrix
and Morrison still
burning high like
nova, a burning
compass for the
likes of us who
would follow that
road at the interface
of desire and denial.
Like the utter
meltdown that happens
during Led Zepplin’s
“Since I’ve Been Loving
You” when Jimmy Page
takes a Delta blues
and turns it into
a pure magma
of 64th notes
raging and rearing
and roaring up and
down the neck
of his Gibson ES330.
We who would
not, could not accept
our ends inscribed
on the margins of
our lives, like the
driver of that
Dodge Challenger
in “Vanishing Point”
who would not,
could not stop
for sleep
or love or
cop, not
even for
that bulldozer
at the end.
The impact only
sent him hurling
into pure desire.
My wife’s nephew
James died in
the full flower
of his youth
going at that speed,
spinning and
whirling so fast
the Honda
broke in two
when it hit
that tree
& sent the
hood spinning
back across
4 lanes of I-95.
His death
had the pacing
of a killer song
real teeth.
Hell I thought
had fangs
for doors
when I was 14
but when I sat
behind Sue
on a motorbike outside
Derinda’s house
on a night when
the moon
was “I Don’t Need
(No Doctor), my
hands could not stop
as they trembled up
under her t-shirt
and then in a gasp
of surrender
hurled up to
cup and squeeze
her 14 year old
breasts (oft-
touched by
others by then).
Forget that tender
sweet music of love.
The killer
song is true
expression, primal,
unalloyed by
our civilized
rococo. Down the
years I came to
know other killer
songs -- Alice Cooper’s
snarl in “Halo of Flies”
and Edgar Winter’s
monster “Frankenstein.”
Genesis’ “The Knife”
off their live album,
when Phil Collins
rampages on the kit
exceeding every
limit I thought there
was to song.
The manic tropes
of Eno’s “Driving
Me Backward” with
its fusillades of
jissomy sounds.
Roxy Music’s “The
Thrill of It All”
an anthem of
every nocturnal
prowl. Thin
Lizzy’s “Got To
Give It Up”
which I played
with Slick Richard,
all snap and
vinegar unleashing
guitar wails
that fuck
the very crevice
of the moon.
Or A/C D/C’s “Sin City”
which we also
played, viciously climbing
up the minor gradient,
picking its riffs
and modulations
o so carefully, lurching
into pools of dark desire
only to pull back,
intensifying through
restraint, the
balls getting madder
and they turn
darker blue.
A killer song perches
on a racing stallion
on a bitter
cold night out
somewhere on
the farthest
steppes of the heart,
gathering up
all a generation’s
angst in five
minutes only
to burn out
of control for
another 30 seconds
It is turning one
cheek to
spread the
other. And like
a hurricane
hurling foam
and fringe
many miles offshore,
I knew none
of this when
I walked into
a dance in September
1971 and the
band was playing
“I Don’t Need
(No Doctor)”
and I grabbed
the first girl
I saw and asked
her to dance.
It was Jane Anne
Baker and she
smiled when
she saw my
killer light
and angularity
and said yes
o yes

LAMENT FOR THE PLAYERS

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

They came and went so fast,
I think, now that it’s been 30 years
since I began to idolize those
guitar studs jamming onstage
shaking and sweeping and strutting.
I’d be lying if I said
they were all great at guitar --
oh they were, but not purely,
as if poise were more piquant
than playing the notes.
I mean Mark Farner of Grand Funk
and Tommy Iommi from Black
Sabbath, they were as much
music in a teen’s longing
as the gods Hendrix
Clapton or Page.

For all of us there is
a brief set of years at puberty
that defines the boundaries
of our musical estate:
For me, the years are 1970-74,
“Layla” and “Paranoid”
and “Are You Ready”
and “Halo of Flies”
and “Mississippi Queen”
and “Stairway to Heaven”
all part of that mesh.
Forged in those years,
my guitar heart has
always erred on this
side of the B’s --
Bombast, Bravado, Balls,
Bitchen. Big 70s,
BigHair 80s. I never
could figure out
those small guitar
New Wave bands or
what followed to eventually
make all mine such a bad cliche.
That laughable Mark Farner
still struts inside me, saxon
savage, hairy, loud, a rooster
in the henhouse of PreUnsafeSex.
I cannot make him understand
computers. He bangs on
this keyboard like tympani.
He doesn’t grok mortage
or marriage. So I keep
him at some far arms’ reach,
opening the cage doors
now and then to give
him a drink of that ole
dirty moon in some
pretty thing at the gym.
Let him growl when
I’m on the treadmill,
shake his wet hair
when I’m lifting weights.
Feel his balls swing
as she passes by.
Caught in limbo
between my growing up
and this ennui for
what has been lost,
he’s like a ‘62 Les Paul
that can never die,
silver as the moon
and forever leaping
at the final chord.

DIONYSOUSE ROCKS

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

On those who enter the same rivers,
ever different waters flow
-- and souls are exhaled
from moist ((dark)) things.

-- Heraclitus (B12)

Spokane, WA,
Autumn 1978:

My rock n
roll heart
birthed that
autumn under
the star of
fell Dionysos,
Loosener,
least and
last respected
of all gods:
Cruelty and
delight upon
the cusp of
a power chord
& loose living
drunk and
dunking my
head up to
the hilt
her mad brine:
The rapture
and terror
of life are
so profound
because they
are intoxicated
with death.
Life which has
become sterile
totters to
meet its end,
but love and
death have
welcomed and
cling to each
other passionately
from the
beginning,
writes Walter
Otto in Dionysos
Myth & Cult:
The music
of Dionysos
was pure rock
n roll a clash
of bright brass
timbrels &
drums, hot
thyrsus
spearpoints
glinting with
bloodied sun:
The scythe of
love cut me
clean in half:
Gone all
of my austere
new agey
clarities in
the clarion
maw of a wave:
No metaphor
of her could
suffice out
in the weed
fields I now
found myself
mowing: returned
to Spokane
after summer:
She was gone:
The river some
small paltry
trickle, barely
a sip of her
there but I
drank it for
all she was worth:
Dave and I
jammed on
Stones and Roxy
tunes after
no luck running
ads for bandmates,
heating up
that cold tiny
house with our
rockballs while
the clutter of
bills and empties
piled up round
us & Dionysos
opened the night
to us in all
her terrible
swoon: loveless
& broke I
swam out
toward those
who were
drowning, out
where delight
and death are
sides of the
same song:
Sweet Karla
whose boyfriend
was in the pen
for murder
who said little
though her
body was a
cathedral of
pert breasts
and trim belly,
white panties
with a small
purple ribbon
that pulled down
to reveal a
wildjuiced pussy
hauling me
in to pink
sacraments
her ass bucking
so hot and
fast I always
came in just
two dunks
which sourced
her real fast
on my rock
lobster: Old
loves Landi
and Terri
a night each
friendly amid
the grim needs
of the grind,
Landi rubbing
my sperm into
her grand breasts
(nipples glistening
bluebrown) &
Terri sucking
up my nacht
nougat & then
grinding on
me till her
mouth opened
in operatic
Ah Ohs:
Dionysos
washing me
back ashore come
morning, alone
and festering:
A guitar is
the jaw of an
ass sweeping
down Ninevah
and New York:
Saturdays I
practiced and
practiced, nailing
Tom Petty’s
“Breakdown” and
Foreigner
“Hot Blooded” and
the Cars “Just
What I Needed”:
cracked open
a beer and sucked
hard on her
ciderish moon
boob, thirsting
wilder in the
deepening cold:
Karen a half
crazed mother
who shrieked
of disorder locked
in a house with
a son & the
heat cranked
too high: But
her cunt clutched
and clenched
my cock like
the fist of
Venus herself,
milking my hard
harder penis
with a shrill
shattered joy:
And as I
collapsed on her
splattering and
spluttering
she erupted
in tears crying
so hard I thought
she’d die of grief:
I got the fuck
outta all those
places leaving
behind a
banshee bouree:
Hungover and
pissy went
back to the
JC Penney
stockroom busting
ass & bitching
how the day
steals every
dram of delight,
cardboard cartons
drying the river
from my fingers
(cracking and
then bleeding):
The stockroom
was a theater
of all I was not:
O how I
wanted a band
& the road &
stages high above
this basement
drudgery: Heard
crowds roaring
for me in those
cluttered aisles
of stock: there
was even a girl
Chris who checked
in & priced
stock to remind
me how far
the sea had
receeded: She
looked like
Becky & looked
at me with
the same eyes
but she had
a man and
a kid and
languished in
despair pricing
baby jumpers
and ugly sweaters:
No hope for me
with her though
I ranted and
raged for her
every day,
safe from the
suffrage of love:
Oh how I
took it all back
to the music,
mad now in
the dessication
of summer with
cold dark
biting down from
everywhere:
I was warm
only wearing
a guitar or
plunging in some
her & chilled
to freeze bone
so fast fresh
out of whatever
clench & worn
out from booze &
pot & speed
& no sleep &
addicted to
the scythe
which sharpens
as it loosens
heads from
all sense:
Bull-roarer
Bromios,
tearing me
down to the
real rock music:

OH KAY

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

August 1982, Orlando, FL:

Warmer foggy
morning here as
my wife sleeps
upstairs
(only the second
time she’s been
able to since
her hysterectomy)
with cat Violet
ensconced under
the covers next
to her belly
(V. loves
wombing most
when my wife wears
her warmsilk
pajamas): Buster
now content
asleep in
the living room
after waking me
at 4 a.m.
for A Treat
and A Pet:
Streetlights
outside like
vague pearls
in viscous murk,
soggy & drippy
& warm like
ye olde waters
of birth
& memory
& this song:
Leah and Mike
next door partied
long and late,
the voices of
revellers piercing
our sleep and
peeling it back
with its
unwelcome
unwholesomeness,
hoots & hollers
& country music
& pickup truck
peelouts round
3 a.m. like
a demon jest
of nights I
lost so long
ago: Leah
and Mike are
far better
neighbors than
we: Caring
& open where
we selfishly
enclose, enwomb:
They can harry
one night of
old folks’ peace
(we were in
bed as usual
before the
9 a.m. bell
which wakes
the revenant):
Between the
last drunken
farewell and
cat Buster’s first
yowly cockle
doodledoo
I dreamed something
vague and yeasty
like a fertile
furtive embrace:
standing beneath
stadium stands
with some girl
& following her
to a house in
Winter Park
late at night
where porn
girls sing poke
arias & then
trying to get
a ride to my
car so I could
get back to my
mother’s house
in time to
get ready for work:
Deep beneath
my married bed
I’m wrapped
in pubic
tendrils which
sink from
middleage down
through youth
and childhood
into the massy
maternal cleft
from which all
syllables of
dream are but
bubbles of:
I don’t recall
now her name
or face: Whether
she had big
tits or poochy
ass, brown eyes
or blue,
blonde or
red pubes, nada,
none of that
remains, just
a warm sigh
in my ear
wet with
sea susurration
urging my
pen to
sing sing sing:
And so after
two cups of
coffee & 2
Busterpetums
& a diddle
daze of
unscribbable
delights &
a dig in
Whitman (“Toward
the fluid and
attaching character
exudes the sweat
of the love of
young and old,/
From it falls
distill’d the
charm that mocks
beauty and
attainments,/ Toward
it heaves the
shuddering
longing ache of
contact.”: I swim
out into those
sea-rapt washes
of fog leaving
behind my
marriages &
mortgages &
graves & carpal
tunnel malaise
& all semblance
of the day’s
senex ochering
to join myself
19 years ago
in a lawn chair
in back of
my mother’s
house on that
clear hot
August morning
which began
my 24th
birthday: I
was baking
away a rough
hangover,
poisonous sludge
sweating out
from my pores
slowly as I
lay there dazed
trying to recall
the night before:
It had been
a week of
frustrated excess,
drinking every
night at the
Station finding new
hells to raise
& darker deeps
to wake to:
One night a
guitar player
from a cool
Texas band
drank long with
me, swapping
tales of bands:
A fellow traveller,
I thought, but he
later said he
just wanted to
lick me all over:
The next night
I got drunk &
bumped into
Judy my old
surfer girlfriend
& she challenged
me to follow
her home so
I did, racing after
her at 95 mph
through orange
groves & far fields
to some guy’s
house -- her current
boyfriend, out
of town -- I
nailed her on
the floor next
to her bed
hard and gleeful,
taking what
was never mine,
beating her
this once:
Wednesday and
Thursday I roamed
other bars in
search of new
sounds of new
pussy but I
was by then
quite damaged,
undeserving
anything new,
just a goat at
the bar with
his tongue lewdly
lolling to the
left: back to
the Station
on Friday night
to drink so
much I didn’t
recall the last
half of it --
who I spoke
with or where
I went afterward
or how I got
home: the week’s
excess and expense
racking my body
with guilt as I
vented my
bad humours to
the sun, furious
and defeated that
I could not find
a quench in
Florida’s dark
citrus bowl: Give
it up, exhale
defeat into
the feral winds
of that day,
hot with Set’s
equatorial tejas:
Bake and sweat
and bake
and sweat
as the radio
plays Journey’s
“Who’s Cryin’ Now,”
that fretless bass
reminding me
of a dream where
I was in the
Spokane river
floating like a
cork down the
foaming thrash
down from the
mountains into
Spokane over
the falls and
down down down
to my Evanston
house-of-childhood
where I met
a “matured” Jeff
and Rudy: They
invited me and
Dave to rejoin
them in their
killer band, our
Slick Richard: I
felt naked,
afraid to speak,
guilty that I
didn’t even own
an electric
guitar anymore:
I touched the
strings of a
semiacoustic
bass & felt
the poppy ripeness
there, dark
whiskey power
inside the
moon’s sea-vowel:
Who’s crying
now as the song
washed the
dream away
and the sun
of my birth
royal above,
Lugnasdah’s
gold harvest-scythe
mowing my
miseries,
restoring me
by midafteroon
to find yet
again that
hunger fro what
waits beyond
the crepuscular
skirts of
early evening:
And so up
to the Station
yet again
with my last
20 bucks and
drinking slow
& guilty, feeling
far from poised
to plunge:
Unworthy,
unwelcome
beggar at
the courts of
delight: Traded
shots with
my Station
buddy Klaus
(a friend
of Holly’s this
rock Teuton
who loved
schnapps and
The Scorpions
and nailing
girls just
the way I did):
Just a couple
of tridents at
the bar glistening
with schnapps
and talk of
old pussy: I
was starting to
leave after
the third set
when Klaus
heard of an after
hours party &
invited me along:
Why not? Take
this sad-assed
birthday out
to the bitter
low tide wilt:
Some dorky
guy’s expensive
house in a
jazzy subdivision,
big pool, billiard
room with a bar,
muscular stereo
hammering the
3 a.m. night
with Van Halen:
Shrewdly none
of the band or
bartenders had
been invited
so the B-list
guys could
have a shot
at A-list
crack lured
with promises
of coke &
bubbly: I set
up behind the
bar to sling
spiked drinks
at the ladies,
shaking my hair
and laughing,
onstage this
once: Caught
the eye of this
one curly blonde
girl with a
mischievous
big smile &
breasts heaving
like Valkyries
at the fabric
of her tropic
blouse: oh hymen
o hymenee
some sacred
dance here
sickleman and
maid at the
rose hedges
of encounter
mid-1981
wearing the
mask of
bartender and
rock babe: I
have no idea
how I got there
or how it began
but those first
moments of
play with her
-- shaking my
hair to the
Police doodoo
doodoo dadada
da and Kay’s
smiling wide &
shaking along,
my hand passing
a vodka OJ
over to her
and her fingers
touching mine
more than she
needed to:
There, there
we stepped
out of ourselves
into the
immortal coil,
shedding history
to enter pure
mystery: Round
5 a.m. we
took a skinny
dip in the pool
with Klaus
and his girl
du nacht:
Somehow we
weren’t naked
but pure in
those blue
burning depths:
While the
party roared
from the house
& the night
above drinking
up our pale
milk as she
waded in close
her full breasts
against my
chest her pubes
mingling with
mine in
the water &
her eyes cat
green and
it all spinning
into motion
so fast o
hymen o hymenee
our voices low
and insignificant
o hymen:
Klaus on the
other side
of the shallows
trying to
prick a pussy
with his long
dick and
the girl looking
mostly drunk
and afunk:
The asshole
host inviting
us in to shoot
a porno movie:
O hymen
O hymenee
brush it aside
sweet holiness
somehow we
bathed it
away in
what had begun
this bower of
silk and gauze with
a lattice of
orchids in startled
widemouthed bloom:
Wide as Buster’s
eyes as he
strains and
strains to see
anything in them,
the faintest
glimmer of
what he hopes
or fears is
there: Blooms
dying of thirst
for what had
begun to
pour within us
— Blue and
more lucent
and deeper
and wilder
than any pool,
all nights,
every sea:
Klaus stole
a couple of
magnums
of the best
champagne
and at dawn
we loaded
into cars to
drive engorged
with night
through sun-
waking suburbs
of lawn sprinklers
and settled folks
in bathrobes
retrieving the
morning paper
& letting the
dog pisscrap:
to some
apartment suburb
(always some
always other)
where Mary lived:
We settled in
a living room
with FM rock
(Blondie “The
Tide is High”
Billy Squire “The
Stroke,” Cars,
Journey, GoGos,
Rod Stewart’s
“Passion” like
gasoline flambe:
Drink champagne
in the labial
folds of Party
which loose
and glisten like
a welcome: Klaus
and Mary head
up to her room
leaving us
in this dazed
space asking
o should we?
When one kis
is fraught with
more than we
can bear and
the mind screams
stop here
stop before its
too late:
Kiss again
slow and
lingering as the
tide foams in
and I’m leading
her upstairs
by the hand into
a spare
bedroom asking
should we wait
feeling all the
potent pregnancy
of the moment
which stills
and silences
and holds us
there impossible
to resist and
terrified to
begin: Anne
Carson writes
in “Eros,”
“As Socrates
tells it, your
story begins
the moment
Eros enters
you. That
incursion is
the biggest
risk of your
life. How you
handle that
is an index
of the quality,
wisdom and
decorum of the
things inside
you. As you
handle it you
come into
contact with
what is within
in you in
sudden and
startling ways.”
Perhaps if
we had waited,
made a date,
spent more hours
talking, fortifying
our respective
beacheads before
passing through
that fragrant
arch: Who knows:
We could have
married &
had six kids:
But that was
not our way,
not the bed
Eros unmade
between us:
At least not
my way -- I
don’t have Kay
to corroborate --
I who could
never be content
to peer through
temple gates
& wait: Character
is fate & so
I just reached
across the
dizzy gap between
I and Thou
and pulled her
close for
a kiss & placed
a hand on
each expectant
breast and
she sighed her
soft surrender
as a ripened
fruit welcomes
breaking open
in a rapture
of rupture:
Sweet citrus
juice spreading
now through
the room as
hunger splits
the curtain wide
and the light
changes from
blue drowse to
fire: She
unbuttoned her
tropic blouse &
the orchard
opened onto
such proud sweet
aching breasts
my gasp pleasing
her infinitely
as she pulled
my face into
the vale of joy
and held me
there as I
breathed, drank,
enflamed: Votive
sanctity falling
away like jeans
and underwear
revealing the
nymph and satyr
at the proscenium
of the god’s
bellowing ire:
She grabbed my
cock &
fisted it with
her hand & mouth
and I licked her
greedily from
breasts to pussy
and plunged the
wild wet there
hot as the
high sun outside
& she gasped
in me in me
in me and
so I did
sliding slow
into a slickened
slough that
grabbed me
& turned me
to feral stone:
Fucking her
in a rage
so white
I couldn’t see
anything but
her eyes
spearing back
& her mouth
going oh
oh oh come
come come
o hymen
o hymenee
she coming
as I came
shout to
shriek & then
licking her
pussy clean
of my come &
licking her
back up her
silk mountain
and throwing
her off the cliff
there & catching
her in the
waters below
with my stiff
pole fucking
her again &
she sucking me
off and me
sucking her
suck & each
of us licking
the other clean
afoam afire
again &
fucking again
and again
& licking
it all clean
back to gauze:
Hours of
this totally
in the throes
of sacred fire
wholly
undeserved,
utterly unexpected,
changing me
correcting me
enslaving me
embalming me
rebirthing me
to the core
in a gasp
and shudder
of forever:
What hurricane
of the body
refused to
exhaust in
our hands cock
mouth breasts
pussy mouth
ass come
sweet swoon
astonishing the
spirit and its
heretofore
arrogant angels,
burned to our
last drop
of napalm
coil, we
disengaged &
came back
into focus weary
shy & utterly
changed: It
was late Sunday
and we both had
to go hours ago:
Dressed sore
& crumpled
& held hands
as we weaved
drunk back
downstairs
where Klaus
was utterly
bored waiting
for me to
drive him home:
She and I
lingered at
the door refusing
to let go
the bower door
& the afternoon
hot as ever
stained with
exhaustion and
guilt and
insufferably
apart, judged
now nigh
criminal by
the rose garden
we had wandered
into alone and
departed from
more song
than any I
have ever found
on any guitar
or page
or rage
or metaphor
or whiskey
or sage
or sooth:

BAND’S END

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

Summer 1986, Orlando:

My vocal coach
Ron threw a
birthday bash
for for himself
every year
inviting all
his students
past & present
& all the
local bands:
A true insiders’
event to which
I was asked to
not for any
success I’d had
singing or
playing but
because I
regularly plopped
a $20 on
Ron’s piano:
Some apartment
clubhouse somewhere
in the everburb,
beers in buckets,
eddies &
pockets of
local fame all
part of Ron’s
craven stream:
These three
kids probably
16 who Ron
swore would be
the next Van
Halen: Ziggy &
John from Four
In Legion: guys
from Stranger &
other bands: &
yes all of
Innocent Thieves,
Shawn & Rick
who were friends
of Ron &
Paul invited along
because Shawn
& Rick said
we had to talk
that day as a
band: Ron gettting
drunk fawning
on his boys
& holding court:
I walked over to
him to say hi
& he looked at
me bleary & said
hell man I just
can’t take your
money any more
you aint getting
any better: Well
happy birthday
quoth I &
headed for the
beer: the band
gathered on a
deck on a day
already full of
clouds &
distant thunder
& Shawn said
Rick & I are
leaving the band
we got this
Shifters thing
& another
project we d
like to move
on toward:
Paul was silent,
I think he knew
already, looking
dark & darkly
accepting: I
didn’t say
anything either,
just looked Shawn
full in the eyes
letting him know
how much he was
cutting loose in
me & then walked
away chucking
a half full beer
in a garbage
can by the door:
Got in my car
& drove home
deafened by
the sound of a
guitar case
slamming shut
never to truly
open again: 4:10
a.m. here with
Buster whining
at the door —
I’ve shut him in
with me so he
won’t disturb the
rest of the house
with his plaint
—Weary in the
incessant motions
of the week,
lots to do,
finish this work,
finish the
Columba-
Oran piece
(more edits
arrived in the
mail yesterday),
a brochure for
my wife’s
business,
& heavy
production at
work while
Rebecca’s on
vacation,
training Leslie
& the usual
zoom of workouts
& family matters
& turbulence:
The usual
frenetic haul
known as The
Work which is
this life’s
passionate thresh:
Rocked now by
goat fevers like
a bad wake I
can’t resist or
submit to: But
you knew all
that — I’m just
trying to survey
the landscape
which marks the
official end of
the tale: Landscape
created by the
epic it composed,
or vice versa:
All I wanted to
do was learn how
to forget that
passionate music
yet all I’ve
done is recall
it, epically:
Johnson tells
us in his
analysis of
“Paradise Lost,”
“Epic poetry
undertakes to
teach the most
important truths
by the most
pleasing precepts,
and therefore
relates some
great event in
the most affecting
manner: History
must supply
the writer with
the rudiments
of narration,
which he must
improve &
exalt by a
nobler art,
must animate
by dramatic
energy, and
diversify by
retrospection
&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; anticipation;
morality must
teach him the
exact bounds, and
different shades
of vice &
virtue; from
policy, and
the practice
of life, he has
to learn
discriminations
of character
and the tendency
of the passions,
either simple
or combined:
The physiology
must supply him
with illustrations
& images: To put
these materials
to use, he is
required an
imagination
capable of
painting nature
and realizing
fiction: Nor is
he yet a poet
til he has
attained the
whole extension
of his language,
distinguished
all the
delicacies of
phrase, and all
the colors of
words; and learned
to adjust their
different sounds
to all the
varieties of
metrical
modulation:”
And so judge
this arrogant
history of a
loser with his
guitar and the
older man who
tried to open
a door by
reopening a
guitar case: Not
a noble or
important theme
perhaps but then
who’s to read
this anyway:
Not the poets,
not the babes,
not my mother
or father or
wife: Profane
& unpublishable
I sing of
paradise lost:
I have some
mopping up to
do yet: Record
the resonance
of a guitar case
shutting & the
roads which appeared
just beyond
which lead here:
I promise I
won’t dally for
long & you’ll
finally be
free: Back to
the bliss of your
own back yard:
Maybe for me
too such a
return, unburdened
at last of this:
Now there’s a
gust inside
the god: A wind:
More than a
whine but less
than a welter:

BIG SEA MUSIC

2002

He dipped into his deep blue
pockets and brought out a handful
of foreign gold. The coins burned
in his palm like the suns of strange
countries. He had been among
mermaids and monks and winters
and whales such as I had scarcely
dreamed of...

-- Christopher Rush,
“The Woman and the Waves”

I played that big sea music
for a decade or so tethered
to an angry god: Walls
of water behind me leapt
and spat as I rode my
midnight blue guitar.

The world in that season
was wild with wastrel noise:
Snare-snaps and bass
thunder meshed in the squeal
and squall of humbucker
pickups as we aimed those
metal stallions of song
through a dank peripheries
where women trailed
infinity in their perfect,
young bodies.

I was pickled in that brine,
the same way booze distilled
in me drunk plunder: The homeless
waves of that music splashed
through me and pooled
into some inner, wild sea,
waters which seem
ever sillier the older I get.

I sit here my house quilted
into a quaint Florida town
with the beloved cat in the window
sniffing an approaching front.
Soon I head upstairs to
wake my sweet wife. Soon
the day’s payment begins.

Yet still I can feel that
full Atlantic moon
burning high above,
it’s blue aeries capsizing
this room, this poem.
All I can do now is write
that old music down,
shut the book, and push
off into the day where
no wild waters remain
though their savageries
leave a brutal stain.

SINGER OF THE TIDES

2004

Naked fin-rider atop my
totem crest, you alone
or best sing the changeling
tide which folds and crashes
near yet far. Your song carried
you from Normandy to Cork
a salt jongleur bearing in
your lap the 3 wood cups
of song—dippers you abandoned
long ago to Oran’s Well
and which now slowly
re-appear here, poem by
poem, line after line, in
high heat of heart and
some soulish, lowing ebb.
A fractured dazzle on dark
blue points the way toward
where you’ve gone, brute
rider, Arion merry on every
wave-back bronc served
up by that stony deep:
You travelled down the
throat of your own conductus,
an infernal melody wed
to holy massives roaming
the salt’s roaring hoar keep.
O dread ur-father beneath
my every daddy’s dickdom:
their one long plunge through
Her furrows down earth and
time through bones and ruins
and split ship-holds of lost coin
to that beach where you still rule,
your eyes so blue and feral,
your mouth a harp of tides,
the heaving sea above
the music you still ride, if only
ever and nonce on this weaving
wave-believing tun between
my throat and balls and hand,
jolly rogering that surf forever
in far stampede this hour
before first light,
before it disappears for good
like a cup tossed in the wave
or a song mouthed in the curl.

Apollo and The Sirens

2006-11-14T08:16:00.000-05:00

From John Pollard’s Seers Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century BC:

In a chariot scene from Olympia, a Siren stands looking at Apollo, who is represented with his lyre.

Possibly it is intended to personify the kind of unearthly music that is so movingly described by Plutarch. He is discussing the curious passage at the end of the Republic where Plato capriciously sets Sirens on the whorls of Necessity instead of the Muses.

“Now Homer’s Sirens, it is true, frighten us,” {he writes}, “but the poet too conveyed a truth symbolically, namely that the power of their music is not inhuman or destructive; as souls depart from this world to the next, so it seems, and drift uncertainly after death, it creates in them a passionate love for the heavenly and the divine, and forgetfulness of mortality; it possesses them and enchants them with the spell, so that in joyfulness they follow the Sirens and join them in their circuits.

“Here on our earth, a faint echo of that music reaches us ,and appealing to our souls through the medium of words, reminds them of what they experienced in the medium of existence.

“The ears of most souls, however, are plastered over and blocked up, not with wax, but with carnal obstructions and affections. But any soul that through innate gives is aware of this echo, and remembers that other world, suffers what falls in no way short of the very maddest passions of love, longing and yearning to break the tie with the body, but unable to go.’”

THE SONG
INSIDE THE SONG

Nov. 14

There’s a Siren inside
every song, brooding on
the branches of a
bass cleff’s reaches
like some lunar quartertone,
loosening in all melody
a selkie’s liquid bones.
We hear that deeper
music and feel called
back into its wake
to stroll the lanes
of deeper heaven,
into the grand cathedral
where desire and
sweetness marry
souls to the ends
we mortals reach
and ache and arch
toward with blunt
fingers and poor sense.
They’re always here,
far down the salt
leagues of my ear,
a blue tide’s lungs
winging treasures
through my hearing
with undulating
panty tones,
whispering grand
empyreans into
every kiss, every
draught, every exult
shout where bodies
clench and shout
and float together
down a starry,
drowned stream.
One night
at a church youth
group retreat when
I was 14 I led
Jane Anne Baker
by the hand
down to the
dock where we
kissed for the first
and last time. I
was so startled
and happy to be
actually holding her,
the girl I’d mooned
so for the year
before inside the
wattles of my baby
fat. Puberty to me
was a six-weeks diet
followed by three
inches of sudden
height, hatching
by springtime a lean
tall hungry boy-man,
rapacious to devour
all he’d been denied.
The deep-woods
night was pure Florida
in its sweet juice,
breathing deep
and sensual with
orange blossoms
and fanged mint,
noctally profuse
in the augments
of wild dark, a moon
above us reflecting
blue fire on the
black lake’s surface
where gar and gators
nosed like bergs
and bass leapt at
mosquitoes in a
silvery sexual thrash.
We broke off our kiss
and looked at each
other -- how
strange it was to
see her so up close,
yielding to me
no less, not toward
sex but all to
her it sires,
the full flower
of good love for
the rest of two lives.
It wasn’t how I
looked at her, desiring
so the trothed parts
of the wife in
those dewy undies
floating in love’s
undertow; soon
I would grapple
with her, trying
to get a hand up
her shirt or down
her pants, causing
her to say No Not Yet
-- words which
ignited the angry,
damaging fires
of a hot boy’s
hurtful hell. Well,
I told her to go there
and stormed off,
leaving her to cry
on that forsaken dock
while I spent the
rest of the night
hitting on the other
girls. Farewell,
mon amour. But
let us linger for
a moment there
where sigh to sigh
we warmed to young
love’s version of
shared heaven:
I recall watching
her watching me
right then, those big
blue eyes so open,
receptive, accepting,
plurally wide to
a music that I heard too
(or so it seems)
inside our nascent motions,
one’s we’d fuck up
the rest of our lives
trying to get it right.
Sirens sing where
hearts believe the
whole immortal heave
which hauls imagined
lovers down to
Love’s gauzy brass bed,
that bower where
time and distance
ends: Their music
is the jones for
heaven’s remittance
of our every break
and bend: They
salt that DNA which
makes us dream
so helplessly of
Beloveds on requited
shores: They hoove
libido’s tide in
relentless waves of
More and More,
susurrant with the
fold and crash
of that never-quite
located place
where She surely
sings More too.
That’s the dream,
the fantasy, the
truth inside the
Siren’s singing
inside my every
far-flung longing
psalm. Oh Jane Anne,
may you be well
wherever that music
winged and washed
you to. I was
just an idiot
as usual, bent
on frugaloos
I wanted but
was terrified to fall
into: Still I heard
that music too
& dove into it
as I also too much
believed. It led
me here to this
white writing chair
atop a matin’s cool
in Love’s most
achey breaky house
I can afford, the
real one I mean,
inside every song
I heard like star-
poured music
playing on that
bedside radio
of my 14th year.
May you still hear
the Sirens sing
in your every fling
of feeling where
cancered dreams
with broken wings
still reach for
that drowned heaven’s
gleaming ring.

ORANGE BLOSSOM

2005

How is it that the sweet scent
of orange blossoms shouting everywhere
is one of Your worst shores, those
ambrosial panties waved from
orchards I can’t see the source
of such abyssal ache to pluck and
plunger and plunder? Imagine a
gold fruit split and glistening
with cold juice -- and what is not
a thirst these days, the clear and
cool morning arousing through the
hours of sun a horny man with
fondled horns, his hardon housing
a high heaven’s song with such
ball-swelling ache you’d have to
drink every orchard in town to
slake? Pale white bells peal
a million pounds of sweetness
in the breeze of these days
of spring, a vernal carillion of
bloom hurled winglike across blue
skies, frigate cannonades firing
salvo after salvo into old sense
suddenly too young for any good,
arousing a sultry-sweltering sap
to rise in these gray wooded bones.
I’m roused and ready to head into
the pages of my Cape the way I
headed out from home at fourteen,
rounding the corner at the last
light of the day to light a cigarette
and inhale deep a blend of tarry
smoke and thicker fumes of
orange blossoms, like a grease of
sin in velvet dark, my every willing
sense amped for the outrageous, panty-
pulling night. Over the orchards to
the east a moon pulled up and out,
cold and blue and burning bright
with all I ache and swoon for, a
haunted house of assy figments
poured by orange blossoms into view
and crashing wild my Cape’s hard surf,
that cup from which I drink the
sweetest dregs of blue.

IT’S NATURE’S WAY

2004

It’s nature’s way of telling you
Something’s wrong --- that’s the way the old
Song crooned on the radio when
I was a teen and sex so new
And fantastical and scared.
Hell-mouths crooned me in ripened girls’
Cleavage, a tide hauled me far from
The world of God and high prayers, the
Work of saving souls. It must be the
Devil, they reasoned, wrapping wings
Of black honey around that low
Swoon. Yet the higher I sought God’s
Relief, the louder that sea roared,
A depth which a blue-balled God had poured
His tears. That wrong sights this next shore.

The Siren Seams My Father's Screams

2006-11-13T08:01:00.000-05:00

The earliest Sirens are, to judge from their beards, preponderantly male, though the earliest of them all, from Crete, is beardless and the question of sex is complicated by the fact that women on occasion wear beards, like the priestess of the Pedasians.

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

***

That sexual excitement can be independent to considerable extent of the production of sexual substance seems to be shown by observations of castrated males, in whom the libido sometimes escapes the injury caused by the operation ... It is, therefore, not at all surprising ... that the loss of the male germ glands in maturer age should exert no new influence on the psychic life of the individual. The germ glands to not really represent the sexuality of a person.

-- Sigmund Freud, “The Transformations of Puberty”

***

Though I be agèd now, though head and chin
Now show them hoary-hue'd with grizzling hair,
Still can I perforate those caught by me,
Tithonus, Priam, Nestor--every one.
You see how mightily my rage ye rouse
Who hem me ever with a bullfinch hedge
Forbidding robbers from approaching me.
This is to hurt while helping, this is but
To scare the birdies from the birder's snare.
The way is closèd nor prone-fallen thief
Can with his backside expiate his crime.
Thus I who erstwhile ever, ever and aye
Buttocks of plundering wights was wont to cleave,
For many a night and day in idlenesse stand.
I also, suffering pains enough and more,
Flow off in semen and a lecher whiles
Unlive my life-tide. Who could ever think
From lute the lutanist should cut him clear?
But you, ereeld's marasmus do me dead,
Desist, I pray you from vain diligence,
Nor hang a buckle on Priapus' yard.

-- Priapic Epigram #78, transl. Leonard C. Smithers and Sir Richard Burton, 1890. Statues of Priapus were set in gardens to ward off thieves with the threat of divine buggary. They were worshiped by women as gods of fertility.

SENEX DREAMS OF PUER

November 9, 2006

***

I turn to you, Grandfather,
as you turn restless in
the stone crypt which
rudders me round Cape Horn:
I see you ahead
in the rounded bottom
of my history, behind
yet ahead, your desire
reveling in that time
when my semen’s
font burst Old Faithfully
from greening surgent
hips. Priapus
is an old man’s god,
a gout of goatish glee,
the rout of hardons
remembered fondest
in the stone-aching
sprouts of puberty.
Their inside girth
and tension for release
is deemed enormous
in an old man’s mind,
monstrous even,
knocking about the
rafters of his memory
of a young man’s
hothouse mind
where the boy
dreamt and drooled
banging every belle
in heaven. Young men
don’t fret their woodies --
hardons are simply ends
of selves, no more complex
than making stinkies,
repleting the savage itch
with a grunt and spasm
and then racing back to
the heroic fray where
men hack each other
to pieces. Old men’s minds
are a garden of nights
long gone to seed,
where only ennui is
full-fruited and savage,
where the god who
lords that acre
can no longer
remit the bullish charge
no matter how much
he wishes to, where
desire hangs so heavy
in him that he leaves
a third trail in the sand.
His vantage is quite
different from the
the boy hanging
from the diving board
dreaming all he owns,
a cache of boners
plunging every tight
hole in hell. For the
boy, reverie sums
that portal which
no boy can pass through
and not be lost forever.
The old man looks
back on that hour;
it is his hands which
wont’ let go of the diving
board, not yet, not ever.
Though I could not know
it, he kept me dawdling
at that brink entranced
& afraid & bewildered.
For year I wanted
to go all the way
but couldn’t: surely
the ache of longing
are what’s most
Priapal in my reveries
today, Saturn’s horned sickle
caught midflight
across his daddy’s
balls, just before
he turns and runs
to his mommy Gaia’s
bed, entering her
at last forever to
the delight of all our gods.
Ah the readiness is all,
the ripeness of the heavy
fruit hanging there before
the Harvester’s reach,
a bursting silo of memory
inside this singing heart,
like a wave swole up
to heights impossible
to survive complete
without a shore, without
even collapsing in time’s
necessary fold and
roar. It felled the father
and made the man who
in turn was enthroned
at the bottom of
time’s chasm, sitting
beneath me on this
writing chair where I
brood on our election
to the wooly wilds
inside a girl’s pink
underwear -- a date
years in the making
while I stayed erect
and ready and dreading,
praying to a pagan
god for salvation through
remittance -- How long
O Lord, I prayed,
and You measured
that duration good,
albeit obscene, keeping
all the bells of heaven
clanging blue-blackly
at my knees, my
brain a mentule like
a zucchini as long
as my arm, bobbing
and weaving this hand’s
signature which writes
the names of gods
this long, or longer,
rude in length if not
girth, like those plinths
of erect deep songs
forever aching for
an aching to the
backdoors of a
heart’s art too
rude for polite
and taught society --
Ah poor fool me,
writing myself into
a corner where he
stands still at the
ready, even though
there’s nothing left
to say. I remember
one night in my
drinking years getting
up from some woman’s
bed to go to the
bathroom: stared at
me standing naked
there in the mirror,
surprised at how
long my dick was
stiff from pussy
and the need to piss --
a reverential
revenential moment
somewhere toward
the bottom of all
things -- surely
a Siren was standing
nearby, maybe behind
the shower curtain or
just behind my shadow,
I dunno, but that
cock’s pure length
was surely singing
her dark name.
haven’t had
a real erection like
that for years:
Nor you for ages
I suspect, grandfather
of all princely fish:
And yet we haul on
here like the boy
we once so lavished
on the monstrous
crashing wave, erect
and proud and louder
than hell as we shout
in steely baritones
our love’s most
boisterous names.

An Attic black-figured lekythos, now in Athens, which dates from the end of the sixth century BC, shows Odysseus bound to a pillar. Two Sirens perch on rocks on either side of him, one of which is stylized as in previous examples, while the other’s wings bear a close resemblance to a real bird. Both are playing musical instruments, while a pair of dolphins sport at the hero’s feet. But the absence of a ship is remarkable ...

... The monsters on the so-called Harpy Tomb from Xanthos bear the dead in their arms, shrouded like corpses. That they are intended to represent Sirens there seems to be no denying ... A similar monster from Cyprus, dating from the late sixth century BC, is in the Geau collection. On a Laconian cup in the Louvre collection a bearded figure reclines at the feast, accompanied by winged figures of various types and faced by a Siren. The scene is supposedly a feast of the dead, and the artist, we may infer, is employing the monster to give corporeal form to the notion of otherworldliness and the joys of bliss.

-- Pollard, ibid.

MY FATHERS’ SIREN EYES

Nov. 11

I age with the year. A cold
moon’s sickle hangs over the
garden, flint-sharpened,
obsidian, savagely sere,
severing the pentas and
salvia and angeloni from
their summer’s heaving
bloom. I brood heavily
in this pall, coagulate
of mood, my reverie
the mien of tribal elders
remembering the boys
were & how they
were made men
by their elders,
tutored by gods
into the red angst of the
hunt, its precious
and sacred lust
& all that eventually
costs. I devour my
memories like sons,
greedy for their
hot blood, fearful
that blooded memories
may supplant the
ghostly remains of
my drive, turning
leafless peckerwood
to stone. The
ocean is mine now,
its wrecked courses
bounded by my hips,
its deadly bliss too,
in vesicles hurling
against shores now
too far from real loins
to be fooled into
thinking I will ever
reap what they pour.
No wonder
Oddyeus strapped
himself to the mast
and plugged tight his
ears: There’s no way
through the pass of
our sex without the
cooing washes of its
sweet song, so pure
and blue that we
jump from our skins
in that rapture which
flings our bones down
salt leagues to devouring
vaginas we thought
doored our way home.
Oh those Sirens are
lyric and primal, so much like
our mommies’ voices singing
over the dunes of a crib:
But when we reach
for her and the breast
blackens, nipples fuse
to our tongues and a
Circean venom races
through our brains with
a fierce squirt, turning
us into grunting vassals
of what so believed
we could get from
a woman’s widened thighs.
That’s why the Sirens
are deadly, added by the
artist to mark
the point in the passage
from I to Thou where
something hangs in
the balance, a gate
we’re desperate to
pass through though
it’s death to so do,
a taboo deeper than the
tribe or its gods,
as deep as how
waking minds live
swoon and die.
Every time I chased
her I ended up on
that blank shore
with the surf sounding
hollow as it crashed
white recedes and me
more alone than ever,
never more lost in salt tides
no mortal was meant
to muster, much less
ride inside of her seem.
The cool outside this
morning’s window is
leaden and slow,
hanging just over
in a fog like my father’s
father’s father’s ghost,
that bastard O’Riley
who could never stop fucking
now sawing his fiddle --
fathered 13 children
and was paying the
neighbor lady a quarter
for a toss out there
on the infinite corn-
acres of Iowa, his lust
sheaved and bulging
like a silo of sweet corn.
His ire’s mine, inside
this blueballed pen
I have lashed myself to
as I prow down the lines
of an unbodied trip home
to her, my beloved who
sleeps at her loom.
If it let this pen go
they will take me in
their arms and sing
me down to the beds
where all of my fathers
were mastered and
mouthed, severed
and served, their
penises flutes the
Sirens played with such
skill that time settled
over them like the sea
and drowned them
with the blue which
hauls me again and
again gainst the
shores of a page
sweet with the fragrance
of orange blossomed
cunt -- wild and heady
and youthful as hell
to savor even savior
though lost, like
those church bells
ringing at the bottom
of the night’s mere
where boats glide
over hearing songs
from below: A redolent
resonance in my
fathers’ Siren eyes,
strapped to the bow
of this ship as I am
to its ghost mast,
the entire host
of our sex headed
toward that last shore’s
welcoming thundering
whitening thighs
which treasure the
measure which
fathers You in I.