What do we know of truths down under? Messages from You, Paternost, are dried by wet thunder on vellum furthermost.
You sing as You like; it’s we who shrink the breeched whale to drink-sized pinky hell, the rant of things gone stale knelling vacant the sailed.
Who made death the silencer, blacking truth with fatal spits? We’re listening the wrong way, strung on our dam stakes praying for darkness to grey.
As you found reciting psalms, water hists and listens best: plunging Your head in the weir woke us to Oran’s aviary, every thought feathered sidhe, a-seethe with ghosts caroling.
Mornings I keep raising these plinths of paper stone on which runes are written in some bidden dancing hand.
The sound of hard surf on soon subsumed sand prophesizes the loss of Your precipital land— that rib and spine stave which whales the assay.
As Oran is my Christ so Christ was your Druid: we’ll write Him both ways. Bubbles buoy in that fluid which lofts prayers aweigh.
I will keep your grave fresh dancing ruins of this day, wearing the tuion you feathered, singing Kells with the waves.
As legend goes, St. Columba copied a psalter in secret and when he was a young priest in the parish of St. Finian. Finian found out about the copy and demanded it from Columba, but he refused to relinquish it. The case ended up before King Diarmait, who sided with Finian and issued a decree that was probably the first copyright law in a newly literate culture: “To every cow her calf, to every book its copy.” The king’s ruling over the psalter enraged Columba. Crying “As Christ is my Druid!” he took up arms with his kinsmen and fought the forces of King Diarmait in the Battle of Cul Drebne in 561. At day’s end, three thousand were killed or wounded. The day belonged to Columba, but not as a cleric, for he was summarily excommunicated. Due to Ui Neill influence, the church later rescinded that action, but there were two conditions: that Columba leave Ireland forever, and that he bring as many souls to Christ as had been killed at Cul Drebne. He sailed off for Iona, off the coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides.
“As Christ is my druid” resonates with Columba’s day, where paganism and Christianity co-existed for centuries. I wonder if the present age is similar, where Christian foundations are being slowly replaced by a flowering sentience, so that Oran — the one who was buried so the Iona abbey walls may stand firm — becomes the edifice arising from the ruins of Christianity. An anathemata in the Welsh poet David Jones’ conception, where things turn over into their opposite meaning in the long flow of time.
A blood lid lowers on a full moon far west, glowering the arc with a heavier mass, a glutted, drunk and drowning blood feast. Last night I dreamed my Yesterdays wished me godspeed – childhood pals and first girlfriends, college peckerwoods and old bandmates, et cetera ad nauseum the motleyed of my past. As their bon voyage faded I crossed over to the next building on a skyway bridge and gangplank, utterly open yet clearly a river with two sides bank to bank. Once across, I came upon my mother and father who said I’d be dead soon. Desperate, I told them that my laptop was sitting on a desk I hadn’t worked in 40 years, and they could read my life’s work from a folder they could find on the upper left of its desktop — all yours, I told them. Inexpressible futility shadowed their faces when I remembered they were dead. Theirs wasn’t a farewell from my past but a stilled and chill welcome to the barrow where nothing more is done. I realized how little time was left to finish all my business but the measure was moony — was it days or milliseconds before that final midnight chime from which no traveler ever echoes a return? And where was my wife and neighbors, folks from my AA meetings, our cats, all that living loving legerdemain? Panic poured icewater and I woke, 1:30 am, the bedroom shade black in the middle and pale all around, full moonlight’s hymnal singing its lines. Bood time acumen, already filled, the passageway Oran’s and yet mine still to distill this short time. Blood moon setting: My work becomes yours, sooner than I care in the forever of shores. A volume reddening with severed rhyme.
Even when things are sweetly vernal ours is a lonely land, what’s present and blooming looming too with the absent’s emptying low tide. The young oak in the front yard has dropped its leaves and budded out, its shade grown wider for petunias we planted round its trunk. A vital figure on the fruiting plain, but surging from a spring whose source is cankered with the cancelled out. Polluted with beholden things taken long ago by the devout. That’s the trouble with sacred landscapes raised within: Pilgrimage is a coffin road when the journey and its destination are lonely cairns. They tend to blur the rapture of warm and breezy days in their stilled nigh frozen poise, nigh immortal as my yesterdays. Maybe there’s a candle for that, a frail flicker’s contra in the poetry. You know it’s spring there too on the sacred isle in my heart, an everliving augment for the heather and bog asphodel bestride the fallen stones and chapel ruins which undulate vast graveyards of the dead. Purely present too – awake and scything harvests when I sleep. My mother and father greet me at the door beneath the hill. Back together and in love, with my two brothers at their side. Waving me in. Handing my ghost a glass of water freshest from the well which rises graves to glory. The draught of it so springlike, so vanishingly quelled. Candle that if you can: A happiness growing two worlds embracing all it vales. Two sheets for the starlit journey which begins and ends unveiled. And if you believe all that, I have a bridge in Lonelyland for sale; I’ll throw in some lowtide candles, flickerworks for lonely trails.
A late contribution to Dora’s “Embodying a Landscape” challenge from this past Tuesday and with an accidental nod to Sanaa’s “low tide” mini-challenge, which somehow found its way into the poem before I read it.
In the old lit, a king spent All Hallows Eve on the mound with the lord of the sidhe, learning where lost treasures were bound & hearing old stories of that sacred ground. Come Christian time, saints raised heroes from the dead to speak of ancient things offering baptism from wells and a Heaven. Lifting old tales from the cairns and court tombs for the scribes to write in lines of gold leaven. Who knew the encounter of these traditions would light two fires from one feathered quill, flinting mouth-music on vellum while willing the mind’s eye into things familiar yet strange. Lamping a sidhe under and behind every page, a liminal vale swarming with faery archange. Lit proved more potent than the high gates it once loudly proclaimed — more durable too. Tucking the Newgrange riddle in the tender of that choo-choo skytrain. Took fifteen centuries to shovel it entire in the firebox but how that kah-blooey now downward rains! Now we get the shatter of Oran’s grave shout, lit that can’t matter churching the sky’s rout. Uncowling Patrick to peer in Crom’s snout to spy odysseys deepwrit on ocean veneer. Lit is the goddess whose shade sings that pier.
If the God ceases to be the way of the zenith, he must fall secretly.
— Liber Novus
Not writing many poems these days because its precinct is so spare: the unread medium of turning’s gaze, a breath of fatal noctal urning air.
Shadows are all that’s left to mine when verses write illegible, when dreams are unintelligible and digs in dirt too sepulchral for the sufficient’s fallow court.
Skeletal of culture, faith & brain I grow elemental on the stem of rootbound shadow, a canopy of lost truths pilloring the dust of holy pallors. It sure makes
for narrow reading, the blander simile in unheated tombs, rooms molting the drag hotel of turning’s dim queen. Her As If not labial nor labile or much labeled anymore but shines verses barrowing the sublime sound love once made harrowing art with its truth.
The old ghost bedsprings creak ghost Yahweh’s rheumy freight, commanding too much, demanding & damning all it nadirs to more’s punchdrunk, basalt, dimming score.
When a literal godhood fails, the littoral clitoral becomes its insufficient jail, a clatter-masque of nails board-scraping what once seemed bullion — mythos-real.
No wonder I now dream of aliens in libraries bowling metal balls of lurid doom. Absence is the rhetoric of the cathedrally-emptied room where I fail writing poems:
I still blight that feckless tomb, the echo of epitaphs where the dust of darkness had once bloomed. Who needs hocus in writ focus when the given note is spume, wavechant spectrally strewn?
Hello Kay, I hope I haven’t disturbed you in the low caul of the ages, dead now perhaps or simply gone from all reference in the tides of living time. Long time no speak — not since that September night in 1981 when you tore from my car and walked back into the house where you lived with your sister. Not looking back, leaving me to this ever without, at once and hence the severed man. I don’t even have a picture of you, just blood inked in journals which later poems traced the barest contours of, trying to recall the insides of falling in and out of drunkfuck love. The wild grief and sour oblivion which followed your walk out of my life I always blamed on you so I never thought to make amends which now seem necessary to the dead.
Sorry. It isn’t the same shame of keeping buried bad night friends who disturbed the marital peace. And for that it’s worse, pointing the finger of fateful blame so steadily at your ghost like a willfulness ossified to stone because everything that felt reborn merging with you suddenly groaned an abyss where you turned away.
And O the dreadful gears of resentment that soon plowed my days and nights, against you and Real Love Herself, me hound-howling and bitch-pounding while glubbing unmerciful fifths drowning our ghost tryst. A supple steely motion I’ve embraced and traced now for years, down to this very morning trying to make such late amends to remembered summer moonlit airs while my wife of 30 years sleeps upstairs.
Your echoing in that translucence sobered eventually into me trying to stop mistaking literal conductions for Salome’s verse jive, seamstress of dreams and abductor of your file from my heart-vault to finally process and recess in this dark and murkier self-truth-berserk latter-amends style .
But I digress — sorry. For decades now I’ve done this sort of talking to the wall of colossal fuckups of my fate erected and put you on the far side of, a condition I can’t stop thinking you might hearken if I just said a few things rightfully if self-frightfully fucking true.
For whatever confoundings of your own tale which leapt so momentarily into mine — four abortions with your previous boyfriend, your hopes cracked and greatly blooded mistaking my drunken aura for the true beguine — Falling in love, I gave you clout of a goddess crossed by wiles of the snake, all the shit I yearned and feared ramped toward an infinity which could never be invested in any real woman’s 1981. For all that mythic monstrance I millstoned our brief encounter with, I am truly sorry, for everyone else I hurt lugging the unforgiven freight of your ghost name.
Those fleet six weeks might surely have taken root and even blossomed into time had they not been so scoured and soured by the collapsing sense of my failure at understanding just who you were and could never be. God how infinite the rays of that August sun at Cocoa Beach, rising just behind your regnant silhouette and you smiling so deeply, long and sweetly fucked all the night before: Your imago right then branded my heart’s zenith as if atop summer’s true Everest, the purest rebirth with no further height mortal lovers can go. How foolish I was to worship our three-night grail of fucking at such dazzling cliff-heights! How grateful I should have been for what I learned about heights with the subsequent barrel-fall back into one’s finite lonely self, nursing all that grief with endless boozing!
And why should I blame you for all I subsequently broke those sodden years so determined to chain your ghost to a falling, failed despair? While you delved so briefly in me and (I assume) became free. Well, like they say, resentment is drinking poison wishing someone else would die. A long life’s interim has passed — what, 44 years? I like to think you settled down to find what made you happy, that you finally brought a child or three to birth and raised them long enough to become the grandmother of hope by now.
For whatever blame I bid you heap on your mirror and might kept you thirsty, heartsore or drearier —sorry. I know face-to-ghost amends can only go a certain distance healing hearts either living or dead with latter truth, but it’s all I can offer in this poem, standing apart from all the others brained, pulped and/or eviscerate in your name. I set all those down, take off this mask and hold my naked heart up to this wailing wall’s to say:
Sorry I didn’t add up to the man you so dreamed I was at first, whoever he might have been. How far I drifted from him in your gaze and ears, bent over you sweaty and defensive, raving much I needed you — pleading nigh insane. Your eyes behind dark sunglasses, already seeing tomorrows with me happily unendured.
In lieu of more direct amends here are the one I made to the living with all my sins with you in mind. I believe I’m closer now to the man you rejected me for hoping some better love might have spanned my broken bridge’s imago.
I don’t wear Speedos to the beach and stopped requesting Journey from DJ Death’s bone choir.
I don’t yearn from all ends wishing to torch love and then pour that yearning like a booze on fuming pyres.
I got a vasectomy — no more inseminate errors to terror the bedded soire terroir!
And grief of losing you has taught me magnitude and beauty and a chance to work for better things.
I sobered up and got married — twice — this time for 30 years of a real woman humbling me and keeping me on sure ground.
Buried my mother and father, two brothers, two nephews, a cousin, three AA sponsees and so many cats learning what salt serves in tears.
And of that serpent sexuality who feasted so wildly upon us all I can say is that she and I abide and remember you with neither pride nor shame — cliffs of touch I never need bleed again.
All that from your not turning around, bidding me envowel this ghostly garden sound!
What Thou I so mistook in you has slowly made me understand that we were fierce but temporary puppets romancing grails furthest inside, our touch electrifying ghostly ingots buried before we were born, lifting with a kiss shadowy gildings of the tide, dolphin laments I here ride no woman’s love presides.
I’m still rowing I to Thou but the promised island’s my own and the only place where any God’s temple may be found and Oran peeps underground.
And from all that, this: I’ve learned that happiness isn’t getting what I wanted so in you but wanting what I found after you turned.
So, shade: Is there anything else you’d add to the ways I hurt you blundering badly in that distant age? And how is it, my brightest of night friends, still simmering penumbral rage, you might yet be fully repaid?
I shuddup with ear to stone and listen: Come with your ban sidhe creel of wounded tales. Croon to me your widow’s song. Moon this shadow garden tomb.
Walking gets me near wild mind. It suggests that pace and rhythm can flush the full embrace, returning the poem, if only for fleet moments, to the greener vales of pagan grace.
But I walk home to resume my day, forfeiting every awe I’ve gained beholding edges of that ecstasy. Resuming the myriad betrayals of all I had been walking to.
Unless the mind stays wild its stain claims kin to wonder, a soot that buys up all the shine and hangs it like wallpaper, patterns of gold on green fit for the breakfast nook: A bowl of cornflake canopy.
Maybe walking without going home is the only path to feral circuitry, crooked lines in pathless woods inking jolts of verdant poetry, seeming greens be damned. So that meters may yet match Pan’s earthy tread, vital matters sung sans comfort, stay or stead.
The music of that survival sounds far different when I’m rounding last blocks home. My eyes intent on ending’s one address, with its porchlike stair and ultimate door. Wild words soon grave deep in too-familiar once-more sleep.
Let’s get lost then, you and I, in raspy tempos of the awfuller voice, a forest moist, hungry and darkling for those who walk in feral poise without indulgence or choice in that poetry a home destroys.
Jung thought Christian law might complete itself accepting the lament of the dead. But that would mean refuting History for a lighter scan, more bladder, less nail. A sacrificial lamb of a different color to bear the summed misery of latter time, returning the dead from Hell by refusing to pay the boatman coign of Christian fate.
Sending that bleating throat-cut Zevah back down among the shades to hearken where Jesus only preached. Such humility was not invested in the King of Fisheries and is doubtful even now, extinction being the far smoother, shorter course for saving Mother Earth from upswept human bane, a straight shot’s snap of senex History.
Jung was hearing the dead’s ripe organum but its Latin translation could only go so far. That’s not to say I found no benefit growing up and through and outward from the Church; it made me literate, drunk & somewhat kinder. Smoothed my bluey Pict war-feathers for preenings in the alcove of a sweeter love. I had to learn how my sips of eternity were fraudulent without the wonder, grace, and fateless luck. A fucking education for sure, albeit greatly mistaken and barely understood: Redressing the pagan takes plumage, myth and lamentation evicting damnation from its wood.
Worshipping the echo of old wells deeper and diviner than dystopia’s blicker rood. Fitting blacker batteries under time’s battered hood. I mean, what else am I gonna do, dragging shallows of corrupt Christian grail condemned with all modernity to sop its emptied, bitter, ghostly ale?
I wear burnt Rome for candled harrow, churching death where all domes fail. Picking up the stones that were rejected and placing them where they most appall, in blood and starlight’s next birth brawl. I’ll be dead soon, so here’s to girthing shores, hailing the arks which pagan Jesu oars.
“I believe I have learned that no one is allowed to avoid the mysteries of the Christian religion unpunished. I repeat, he whose heart has not been broken over the Lord Jesus Christ drags a pagan around with in himself, who holds him back from the best.” (Carl Jung. The Black Books, Kindle Edition, p. 239).
Cold as loveless fuck in Florida tonight, 24 degrees at a full moon’s five AM, lustral Brigit now white waste, the sundered Arctic casting long its vortex wraiths. The wind picked up midafternoon with titan gale, Edmonton berserkers of ripped-wide sail, tensing and frenzying my every bulwark of domestic scale. Pinning billows of freeze fabric over the petunias gardened round the oak tree, padding PVC pipes in foam and duct-taped tighter than any simile’s sealed smite, setting outdoor spigots to the slightest drip, ticktocks dripping down the twelve predicted hours of unlikened cold. How whipped the foxhole prayers tonight to Holocene-era themes, as worthy as iceboxes to the icehole fisher who uses Krampus shit for bait. Life in sunny Florida, meet the frostbit moocher of your sweet-as-candypanty dreams. ‘Tis the era of the rarer fortune now, extremity of heat and cold become the local taint, a jammed foot-pedal speeding fast and nasty while signposts of the once-beloved scatters unsemblanced to what’s fled and bled and vast, the “feels like” abyssal scribed by this coldbrite blast.
I know, bitching about cold weather Florida-style is like carving ice sculptures with a blunt simile, but there you go. The heating Arctic is making for wobblier polar vortexes and equatorial frost. Last weekend’s blast broke low temperature records in my area that have held for 50 years.
Oran's Well 
