Oran's Well

Substance and equivalence
I sought back then in power-
chording brawls, constancy and
valence lost to cascading
magnitudes — falls which
approximated for me the
nearby Spokane river’s springtide
maul of runoff from the Rockies.

Precipitous and smashing-wild
careening walls of awesome water,
I invoked that river in my guitar
like a heart a-hurtle into love
awakened, initiate & borne.
I was wild with and for exactly
what I just had lost when that
woman drove away, unleashing
melts of grief and rage from
high ridges of a heart I had
just discovered. It fell and pounded
and drowned a sacred reach
just wakened from its bed,
a vale I had just named below
massive and obliterate and
too huge for puerile rock ‘n’ roll.

But what did I know? I was just
a sick boy maddened losing love
without a Christ or Dad or Rilke
to shaman the aborted trove
buried my broken being’s sidhe.
A-rage, I played my music loud
and strutted with heroic scowl,
black-scarfed all winter in the
wastes of the ever-dying Now.

It was all pose and swagger,
hiding my awful heights of grief
in cleffs of roaring amplitude
so cliffed for chording falls
that swinging them felt
higher-powered, godlike
without the holy scriptuals.
Visceral and figural, mineral
and clitoral too, littorals all
of liberal profane falls into
what used to feel like love
fresh smashed and smiling,
free and one and willing.

That’s the thing about myths
of equivalence: They hound
us off our cliffs believing such
motions of the gallop are heart
enough to make us horses
when wings were what we
needed most —sortilege
and craft for flying’s art
I to Thou til death we part.

The bringer’s myth we must
impart for its next restart
else those cliffs are toast
forever.

Father, I fled from you
long ago, too staggered by
what I thought you pinnacled
and believed I could never in
like amount, become my own
Ziggy Zarathustra, my guitar
topping places that your stones
would never think to surmount.

I sing now of those old miasmas
I smashed on your account
with decibeling verse in choral
shout. Hurling wide and far in
the present manner of my post-
Christian rage the sacred fisheries
your absence still unleashes
on this hollow page, a teeming
cage of enquiries mid the sharks
and mermen who haunt modernity,
that lacuna where gods age out
while we grow too old and stout.

Today’s your birthday nearly a
century ago, nearly six years
after your death and ninety seven
beyond the forceps of the
abortionist who robbed you of
your brothering and made you
thirsty-mad for men, feraling
your Y chromosome by hammering
its puerile drone into tall stone.

I visited you in 1979, fall I think,
my band in its brief and only
season of stages and applause,
my hair wild for it I’m sure,
a distaff so beyond yours
no augment of stone could
drown the noise I claused
or so I thought then. We walked
the field down from your house

all grey and surly in the few
black and white pictures that
I took that day, your New Age
mystery slowly purling dragon wings
you were just beginning then
to sense after building your chapel
and receiving studied welcome
from the guardians of Iona. You
had wanted to drop all your
work at Columcille to go live
full-time on Iona but they told
you Our work is your work and
your work is ours, intonations of
wind and stone and old which
complement one’s sense of
destiny with the usual fossil
drone I now call my own.

We walked into the wood where
the new chapel boldly stood,
six walls of fieldstone ten feet high
with a big oak door, roof of
cedar shim, a window for starlight
at its brim and a massive boulder
for its heart and center, censor
and hymn. We stood silent in there,
jacketed against the cold outside
which somehow was vast
and older leaning against those
inner walls, a raw guttural climbing
up from the abyss of time,
croon-whispering a plainsong
old as the Big Bang. I can’t now
say which tide was vaster in
that space between us then,
which parent of which generation
had bade us be such wild men.

But I have my suspicions now,
digging up the history of ships
and ports and battles, bottles,
beds, and steads —names repeated
and rewrought, wombs plentiful yet
stricken, sons In querulous drought,
downing draughts obliviate
to truths both common and dire.

That profane history now becomes
the spire of my latter, perhaps final
religion, attending this verse wake
over the ripened leys of the dead.
If only bringers like us understood
the myths our dire hymnals tread —
I question all of them now
in all guises they once pledged
for the mysteries they reneged.

Take father and son — what a song.
And to think you and I got the key
of it so fucking wrong singing
our fated harmonies with ghosts.
Who knew  back then that
you and I were so about the same
tragic thing from history long
vantage that we were actually
one note lives apart, ,bearing
separate witness to the magnitude
which made our living oceans,
our yearning cliffs and separate
devotions the same damn riffs
repeated by our fathers on both
sides of the greater failure
to name the bringer’s myth.

I flew back to Spokane like a
man dying of thirst who jumps in
the ocean and drowns, plugging in
my Music Man guitar with dead
bone and balefire in both hands
and me a prince of misbelieving,
carving crosses in my daddy sands.
Just like the rest of the guys, waifs
and oafs and orphans of the pale
which never grows into manhood
eviscerating every stone which
pays the cock’s blackmail. We
should afford ourselves a weary
respite on this day, Father,
standing in that stone chapel
which will survive our family’s
years by thousandfold, perhaps
forever. That’s the thing about
the bringer’s myths — starlight
pestled into power chords is
still the same damned lunacy,
lucence chased with fifths
poured from hymnal cliffs.

The music I here recleff
is for the bringer’s smith.

April 2024

Spent most of yesterday writing
the resurrect history of my until-just-
recently and still only-guessed-at
great-great-grandfather, drawing
that vanished branch of my family tale
from the man’s own account, a
history of his lineage he wrote
in 1911 and was transcribed and
posted online a century later by
another of his kin. Thanks to
that shadow of the deeper one
for handing this to me).

I was grateful for the sere detail,
following a man and wife sailing
from Germany to the Colonies &
setting up in Maryland & founding
a clan which fought in all the wars
traveling to Kentucky and then
Indiana and then a county just
south of where my great grandfather
was born illicit, like a sour grape
in vast braiding of corn rows.

Documenting that in history’s
droll prose enough to hang
proscenium for the darker
verse it bows, that fiddle
music I can’t prove or see
but hear lamenting sadly
off the right margin those
descending paragraphs,
concludingwhat is never said
or seen in the evidence
which so far remains.
The mystery, alas, is born
and borne and bourned so,
rising soft and melodic where
awful things fell hard and
were buried deep & long forgot.

And so I found myself inserted in
the narrative of my newly named
GG grandpere, bearing witness of
dead truth to what the living man
would not say about 1867 into ’68
when DRC was conceived, grown
in a womb and bawled into the world
without a father until now.

I doubt any of the descendants
of the man I have now found
would care to hear this chapter
from his life, fresh from the Civil
War and settling down next
to his kin only to uproot suddenly
and leave for southern Missouri
with wife and children the very
month the profane babe was born.

Besides, I may be wrong, wholly
deceived by the ease of family trees
and those DNA pots’ silken sleaze.
For now, I widen the conversation
of my present quest to include
unfatherings closer to the shore
of my long-sailing heart.

My DNA test’s closest match was
to a man who is probably my
ailing brother’s love-child, conceived
when he was about the foolish
age of his great great grandaddy’s
wan’dring plow: I’ve talked with
the guy and he holds no grudge,
was adopted well and now
has a robust family himself —
just wishes he knew more
about his mystery kin. I’d
tell my brother but his cancer
is so bad now, this truth comes
close to questions presented
to those living close to dead,
which side of the news they
hear best and find passage
into the darkness close ahead.

I wait — for now — but knowledge
is a heavy thing, adding weight and
prescience in the underworld
I nightly dream. Then there’s my
only living cousin on my father’s
side who has agreed to test her DNA
and add those results to mine.
It might help me to narrow down
my absent kin’s foreground Adam,
but it also adds another ghost-
daddy to the mix, the man
who had an affair with her mom
when her marriage fell apart
just after World War II.

The man vanished when her
mother got back with the
man she married; and so
the daughter born was raised
fully under that man’s name.
Now in her seventies, my
cousin wonders how her life
and ways were both marrowed
and harrowed by the absence
of the biological fact, what might
be added now to help make her ending
more beloved, true, intact.

She might finally know or sense
such things with the result:
And yet truth’s a harborage
whose bane and boon arises slowly
from the dirt around the fact.
Knowing more about such
shadows in my own history
might explain why my grandfather
was so strange about family,
fathering eight children on
his wife but only allowing two
their birth. Or why my father
loved so vastly her mother but
was devoted to bodies of men,
the crucifix of his desire milking
heaven of its semen — gasps
stolen from his wife, sobs of
children lifting colossal stone.

Go figure. And who am I to
cast my own verse rocks?
I had plenty of illicit liaisons
when I was young, three of
them taking root in wombs
as far as I know and all
aborted, far as I’ve learned.

The first was when I was just
19 and playing in that band
the hard winter of 1979: She
was the friend of a girl-woman
I slept casually with, the two
of us hooking when the other
looked for other men. After
practice she’d come over
to spend the night, her toddler
son in someone’s care, her
stare darkly intimate in that
manner I allowed with such
defining and demeaning rock-
star insouciance that I still bear
the wounds it carved in love.

My roommate and bass player
off to his girlfriend for that night,
I played my Journey albums
while we smoked joints &
shared from the same beer,
she listening to my complaint
about lousy bandmates and
our asshole agent setting us up
with unpaid gigs (“It’s great
exposure, guys”). When I
told her how sore my fingers
had become, she took my hand
and kissed the splits like some
Madonna of the blueblack vale,
a gesture so pure it bid me
turn further away from her
lest love envelop me entire.

We held on til spring and the
band’s breakup, but I left her
in Spokane that April to fly
south to my new life in Florida,
her figure standing next to
my roommate at the airport
looking hooded and vast, an
empty space resonating into
to the ground I now dig in.
An echo’s haunted presence,
the psaltery it darkly veins.

Eight or so months later,
dead drunk in a twin bed
in my mother’s house after
another wasted night a-spree
through bars across Orlando’s
neon pale, the phone rang
and it was her, informing
me with icy chill that she’d
just aborted my daughter.
And hung up, never to be
heard from by days again.

It was heading into winter
1980 in the tropic swale
I’d fled to, calm, less hot
but still humid and breezy
long into the night, the air
livid with lurid implications
of desires misbegot — neon
foreshadowings of old ghosts.
I sometimes wonder if the
woman in my dreams is that
baby girl grown up to death’s
adulthood, wise contrarian,
playwright of guilty time,
alluring in every sibyl rhyme.

She kissed all my cracks exactly
where I fled to fill them wrong
and now seek to excavate
and exonorate with redress
too late with her birth song,
this enquiry leading back
to absent fathers everywhere
the toil and toll they breed
which ghosts of their equivalence
seem to need so and lament.

We’ll see who’s waiting further
down this enquiry with what
document in hand that I have
taken and now purpose as
inheritance — but of what
forsaken farm’s misbegotten land
I have yet to barely understand.

Here I am, O ripe kissyface,
awaiting the mother of
the boon whose bane
so mists the trysts of
this waking bottomland.

April 2024

Note

… Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions…For the god
wants to know himself in you.

— Rilke, from “As Once The Winged Energy of Delight”

When I first took guitar lessons
at age 14 (gaming to be just like
Grand Funk Railroad and the wallop
my puberty unleashed in them),
I recall how tender and sore
the fingerpads of my left hand
grew after an hour’s practice.
A yowling complaint against
the howling I so yearned. They
were like my younger sister,
pounding on my bedroom door
to TURN IT DOWN while I
hammered those choice post-
practice power chords at top volume
on my rented red Fender Mustang,
a cheap imitation of the big balls thing
and all I back then so hoped to fling.

The pain seemed somehow worth it,
the way those months of shallowed
eating had helped me lose 30 pounds
the year before just as a growth spurt
made me tall and angular, child no more.
Callusing ain’t easy, but what velds
come into sight beyond pain’s sloughs
practicing those long cleffed rows!
Nothing sacred comes from pouffy
crosses, no gain is measured without
the bloody cups poured into where
all the flooded ghosting goes.

Within a few months I grew cocksure,
chording “Are You Ready?” and
wailing (OK, almost sufficiently nailing)
the solo to “Ride Captain Ride” through
that tiny practice amp for girls in
the subdivision, my calluses roughing
as I worked up and down that Mustang’s
neck, the way my biceps were contouring
doing barbell curls. I would do one
then the other in my bedroom
trying to make some 13 year old girl
thirsty enough to practice kissing —
another thing to practice those hot
afternoons after high school in 1971,
my heart picking up a callus or two
as the girlfriends came and went.

Yet for all the doors my roughing
seemed to open, there were as many
hidden darker ones that portaled
something more when they closed.
The summer I began to grasp
the wild mane of that Fender Mustang
I also found Jesus, or He nailed me,
infecting me with such fear of hell
I converted to the pentacostal knell
something tougher darkly clappered.

Baptized in the Atlantic Ocean one
birthy hot and humid June sunrise,
I felt a wave wash over yet through
two worlds rapt in one voodoo.
Just when I was sprouting wings
the awful crack-of-doom sounded,
heralding what cannot suffice by flying
or be bedded in full by falling.

I didn’t get any of this til years later
while playing in my first real band
when winter hit and how, icing
all the windows of my Spokane
apartment and heeby-jeebying
nights we practiced in the stiff
cold stone basement below.

That’s when the northwestern
winter’s cold dry tundra slowly
pried my callused fingertips apart,
a seam become a split cracked
down to deep red rooms which
lit bright with whiting pain
when a note was fingered so.

For weeks I didn’t practice much,
saving what I had for songs
played with the full band.
Got drunk instead sitting by the
heat vent clanking beer bottles
with the dead — the love I’d found
and lost so fast, the mad shadows
which chased me so the previous
bad winter, their voices sharp and
plaintive in my throbbing wounds.

How could strength become one’s
nemesis, as if the very wings I’d
sprouted could only fly toward hell?
There was little to do but salve
with ointment and wait for enough
days before picking up that dread
guitar and playing Johnny Rotten
to the pain with masochistic vane.

Such crosses I guess I’ve always
fated myself too, unbound by
wilder spirits than the merely
gratifying ones I had crowned.
Winters always suck; there’s
no avoiding their dreadful gain
singing dead in winter rain.
Live long enough and the bane
of living resurrects all its kin
in every aging wound to come.

Now the splits are in my feet,
my toes so worn from long
walks and workouts in cramped
shoes that their tips are raw
with whatever — fungus, age,
infections from this tropic spa,
rot treadmilling for the dead.

The pain won’t stop me from
the day’s demands — hour on
the elliptical machine in the gym,
yard work to do, maybe a walk
with the wife late in the day —
but it does make something
conserve Being in some truer faith
than in high heaven, this growing
trust in the everliving dead.

The other night I dreamed a Lawyer
or some scribe of official records
from a century or two ago showed me
in a document the hidden intent
of the very maze of old wood cabins
I had just unearthed researching
ancestors, their lost and dark obliquity
hiding leys and cables thread
between them with a surplus
of energy that to this day sustains.

Who was that guy? I wondered
as I woke and opened laptop
to the day, finding on my
Ancestry feed the guess I’d made
to the identity of my long-unnamed
great great grandfather confirmed
with DNA pots glowing back of
him through his parents and theirs.

An ancient family history revealed
first in dream and then in waking,
a wound’s long festering pealed
and demanding due in both shriek
and salve, this poem’s muttered,
overlong yet crucial due.

I wrote some of this yesterday
then paused to walk the waking
darkness of a surprising cool spring
morning praying Not My Will but
Thine, thou sighing archipelago
of homesteads buried deep yet
back and on and through.

Then came home for coffee with
my wife waking to the harder
opportunities of our late years,
everything so fucking expensive
now and the world splitting wide
and wider along our growing fears.
Got to work appealing that by
finishing a revised book of poems
and sending it to the printer for
its proof, paying bills, making calls
and digging one day deeper in
the sighing graveyard of my dead.

The dream last night seemed so
contrary it’s hard to see the lysis
it provides the first dream this
poem accounts — too fretful
and self-aware, me in some city
council meeting in an auditorium
where I carried all my books of
poetry as some sort of proof
An older woman who sat behind
me as I explained all this
huffed You say Um too much
deflating my balloon entire.

I then walked rounds at the
old newspaper, freshly back from
my living on (a common trope
in this season of deep dreams),
my lean appearance after dieting
totally lost to these working dead.

The infernal purpose dressed up
as newspapering by the dream
was so back or beyond of my own
as to make me feel insignificant,
useless, and unable in all the
ways I felt as a child discarded and
cast into the random faults of time.

Splits still true and raw as I walked
my old rounds after a quarter
century gone, humiliated to a fault,
alone & separate and still raw
down to the fundamental cores.
As the dream ended I was passing
through Editorial — that heart of
the old operation I was never
qualified to be in yet yearned with
all my depth to belong — just
as all the newsroom staffers
stood in honor of some guy
who was retiring just then.
Everyone had their shirt and
coat and blouse collars upturned,
a la Elvis, emulating the storied
manner of this guy reporting
on the rocking dead.

They hummed an old hymn
deep and slow and low,
a monklike murmuration
that hung a heavy benediction
in my head as I awoke.
A old and deep reverberation
affirming what I’ve done so far
demanding here a deeper tread,
splitting all the calluses
for ancestries yet read beyond
the cleffs I now plow in rows
of lament of and for the dead.

May those splits be eyes
for sighting the beachheads
I play the old songs for now:
Small price for passage
into the leys they darkly floor.

April 2024

Somewhere on those better
nights of practice in my first
garage band I took up slide guitar.
Our bass player told me how
Duane Allman fitted a glass
medicine bottle on his ring finger
to glide and soar the neck of
his Gibon LG guitar, climbing
cliffs with liquid cleff to
hover gull-like over roar.

I never got that good at slide in my
youth of hasty half-assed practice.
Still, I loved to perch that bottle on
my amp stack, to crazy dance next
to the growing count Bud bottles
as we hammered Cheap Trick and
Foreigner and the Sex Pistols.

The smallest gnome in the array,
that glass slide gleamed in distaff
promise of all a boy could rise to
if one day he got around to working
hard enough. I used it on just one
or two songs I don’t think we ever
played onstage, my risings there
no equal to our lead guitarist Jeff,
feathers maybe but not wings.

I think of that slide glass bottle
now hearing Dickie Betts has died
pining for those moustachioed
jams through the latter 1970s,
rightburned caesuras by the sea
soaring smooth and sure pure over
frets of a profaned history.

Who wouldn’t long for such things
and yearn to feel that glass bottle
become the liquid rightburn of
my verse digit, sliding over black
well-water for the depths which
come unbidden and so strange.
a translation of the angel rage
which bournes the burning page?

I felt I was dreaming that way last
night, my dayside occupation
with ancestors known and hidden
deep pattering broken ends and
rabbit holes into a hot pond,
an electrifiable sense of frazzled
and sparking ends that
no one dare dive into much
less dream of walking over.

But there I dreamed last night,
my sleep light and buoyant
over matters I couldn’t figure out,
me a James Bond walking around
the corporate Day in his underwear,
poking around for leys and bones
while their dragon hit the stones.

The poet was there too, droning
on in bouncy pentameter the
prosaic fit my dream had wrought,
smooth and gliding exactly over
what ties both sides in knots
and even gives Thanatos the hots.

Cooing and soothing that glass
voice, crooning without choice,
playing it in that register which
separates the men from the boys
and the dead from daily noise.

Practicing slide guitar is like
learning to forget that passionate
music which makes poetry
a yearning frost —  It ends
just off the cliff for which only
a slide’s cleffing can surely ghost,
flickering on that lost amp-top
with all I meant but lost.

As the world springs now
toward the summer of its end
I so need that glassy host,
its gliding starry liquid cost.

April 2024

For Open Link Night #360 at D’Verse

Rightburn, I called it, the
feral means of maintaining
altitude when winging hell,
keeping eye and ear wide
just enough to saddle
my abandonment to
the nature of wild things.

I hadn’t read Emerson’s
“The Poet” yet in those
soused forsaken nights
where I practiced loud
guitars with boys like me
crashing heavens in the sea

but I was finding out
you can’t get lost in the
howls unloosed by
whiskey’s blacking cowl
where closing time is
mere proscenium to
the crooning forest of
bedded babes inthrust.

The golden moment
between the second and
third drink only lasts a flicker
of a looming pause; love
evokes it scented brake
for just that long, too,
a fleeting glance across
the bar which vanishes,
swept off by some other
lucky guy for the dance:

So how then perpetuate
the buzz? How to make
love’s falling last? I found
a rope of sorts in what
I called rightburn, virile
means to roll while rocking
the big night music hard.

Rightburn offered purchase
on the rollicking
without burning in inferno,
casting my guitar like
a surf-pole into the churn
and hauling back the
glittering undine in full
heave — a solo dancing
off the middle 8 to
rollick in like seethe,
coiled in that sexual
frenzy which births
love from its sleeve.

The myth was clear
to me back then but
youth fooled me utterly
as to means: I thought
it was a matter of the
proper mix of boons,
just enough booze
buoyed by crosstops
and topped with pot
to ride level over chaos,
fretboarding noctal cliffs.

Rightburn was a mask
created by wish-fulfillment,
drunkenness, and balls,
the summa of my spirit’s
youth seeking gnosis in
the excess, doors in
vastly empty halls
I always got lost down
fucking up a solo’s grain.

It kept me riding headless
horses through nights of
cold and colder rain,
still, yes, an abandonment,
but to the nature of the drain.
Hoping every next worst night
the old fires would alight again.

Poor fool me then and now
repeating righburn’s motions
over the ocean’s crashing scowl
of dead and gone lament.

In my dream I was back then,
a college boy readying to leave
for good, preparing to drive
far west to Los Angeles to
resolve myths of quest: it’s
where that woman left for long
ago while I fell far below
my first cliff falling in love;

now in that guise of then
I was trying to wake the dead
power chording where they
had tread so many years before.
The dorm I was evicting from
was also my aunt and uncle’s
house — another of those
dead-of-night tombs where
my drunkalogue petered out.
(I stayed there for six months
five years before I sobered up).

My uncle was sick and faded,
my aunt off searching for
answers to one item of my
current quest — how had all
her family’s money been lost
to jest? Her Yankee grandfather
was bankrupted during the
Depression when rebel
ghosts in Thomasville called
in their loan exactly when
they knew he couldn’t pay.

Yee-haw thou trebled dell
my fantasy of rightburn swells,
slaver font of Rebel Yell
and ghostly frozen decibels!
I mount your corpse again
with verse to gallop your blue
bourne. When I got around
to reading him a decade later,
Emerson taught me I was rightly
wrong — my alembic improper
and so its fantasy half-borne,
become the chatter of teeth
in a coldly smart oblivion,
that drunk we bury all the time.

But the trope is not so insurrect
as to grow up here intact,
a means for naming all the dead
as souls half buried in their fact.
My dead aunt and uncle, say,
become hosteliers of the dream
where bottommost is gravature
revealing leys beneath the cliff,
the inside music I here cleff.

I bend myself to God’s will
and ride time’s galloping,
this immortal hieroglyph.
Righburning bournes so wild
they swing the cenotaph.

April 2024

Note

From Emerson’s essay “The Poet”:

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, “with the flower of the mind;” not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.

As a kid I changed the world
by hiding in my room
and acting out James Bond,
killing evil Ernst Stavro Blofeld
at the crack of worldwide doom
then lounging in the lazy billows
of his yeasty breastful girl.

The James Bond theme’s
electric guitar pace
would ease my steps
back into the real world
a little while before all
the cold winds of the
Sixties conspired to blow
me back to smithereens.

I turned wracked tin to gold
placing my face into a
imaginarium of what I
called TV Pillow to watch
a pretty girl edge round
a deep-forest pond,
falter, shriek then fall:
then watched myself
dive pillows deep to
to haul her back as
she crooned My Hero,
her gratitude flooding
me with this sweet
presexual warmth, like milk
nippled to me by Pussy Galore.

Years later on my own
and faring badly in the dream
and worse in the daily man
I found that when the real
leaves you homeless, there’s
always shelter in the peel,
the pith and rind of surface cool.

I yearned and learned to
glide there lubed by
cool quaffs of Bond and
my own bouncing balls
chasing Layla across
a noctal La-La-Land,

become a mystic of
my puerile thirst moments,
for bras unclasping double
wealth, the shoosh of jeans
sliding down the ramparts
of pale curvaceous daughters.

O splendid crucifix
crying for immortal nail!
That was the dance, those
Penthouse Letter-moments
where, Dear Reader, I found
what I never thought a dimwit
due like me could ever
truly sin-to-skin encounter.

I dropped out of the monastic
mill of college to play rock ‘n’ roll,
hurling the delights of two or
three nights of first love
into the coiffed frenzies
of boogie brawn, each song
another dive in her rocking,
ululate bed— holding my guitar

like a surf-pole casting
wild chord progressions,
humming a while, then
hauling up a solo that was
at once glittering and fierce.

At least, that’s what I sure
hoped and tried to live for
amid my howling ruin of
wasted hours, initiate and
annihilate twinned in a
no longer young or even
initiate growing boy.

Rightburn, I called it,
that perfect balance
of opiates (booze, pot,
speed or coke) carrying
me out on the coracle of song,
a triangulation of wish
fulfillment, drunkenness
and balls, unsheathing a
bright blade after the
second chorus, tempered cruel
and swift and deadly sharp.

But those moment came as
rarely as the perfect babes.
Dear Reader, such things
never happen, some guy
on staff wrote all that crap,
the whole fantasy of sex
and drugs and rocknroll,
knowing exactly what we all
wanted, what we prayed
for each night we walked
into a crowded bar.

It the doomed desire to
be the one exception to
the rule of growing up
that I prized above all else,
tombing me in a quest
for chalices which
millstoned my years
in a sate of greed which
nearly drank me dead.

It seems I’m always
investing in fictions
and pay dearly for them all.
Has much really changed?
Here I labor away
on this overlong, overly
historical lyric meditation,
earnest as ever to ink
a gleaming fish on
trembling white pages,
the mirror of a life deemed
greater than what it
can only vatically refract.

I’m entertaining at best
a troop of ghosts in my
own head, bandmates,
lovers, all the guys
who played James Bond,
the solemn poets. Having
written this far it’s a struggle
to shift back to the day slowly
waking outside, now washes
of blue warbling along
with scattered birds.

My face always felt strange
lifting from the heavy warmth
of that tv pillow, protesting the
effort of returning to the real.

What can you say of a life
spent voyaging across
the bare surface of the sea?
What have I learned
but to ink that obliquity?

No matter: I’m hard-wired
to the James Bond theme,
walking round that deep pool
whose waters shake and part
for prayers fully stirred
righburning the blue word.

— from A Breivary of Guitars (1999),
revised 2002, 2024

As then, now this: the maxim
recipes a signature for
pacing births of summer,
as when my fingers were
learning how to play the
loud peacock guitar, one
hand chording and soloing,
the other picking and
hammering, darting down
to measure dials of volumed
and trill, measuring out
just how much of Valhalla
a certain song should squeal
off its given cliff of spill.

Heat without the humid
in these latter April days
is the attenuation I seek here
applying maxim to the art:
It ies just shy and short of
the berserker’s leaping thrall,
hot enough to break big sweat
while planting jasmine vines
on the new fence yesterday
while my wife planted pentas
beneath the front yard oak.

A ditty for the greenwood
marriage without the falling
soak like the random fleeting
passacaglia of two strangers
dancing late & later on the floor.

Like my dream last night
of playing Ovid for a pair in
some hearted cottage where
a winter gale whipped the
getaway with prying fingers of
the dead, who must have
been pining for it too,
love at fever’s torrid pitch
in warm blue baths of love.

I was in that drama from
that height where early summer
is not yet in ramping broil,
a tentative deliciousness
of virginal pale greens
before the smashed obscene.

Play it carefully, bro, the
way you never bothered to
practice well or long enough
back then: For there’s a pausing
in this refrain which keeps
the almost-crashing wave held
up as nave and starry precipice,
the face of my wakened love
beholding me from the dead.

There’s a point at every leap
to love when the precipice arrives
saying there’s still time to stop,
inches toward the ledge to pause
beholding what’s pounding
vast and wild and passionate
below, asking, Dare I risk it all
again? Shall I yet believe?
Is this halcyon of warming days
the held wafer of communion
or the apple’s feral unction,
one bite of endless dread?

I suppose the word here is
caesura, that brake in the
middle of a song’s wild wood
where to enter is a promise
of rapture and grand error
aflush with both hot fates
and well worth the holding
up for that long and melting
pause where ingress is the
only true option, the leap
and winding fall, splashing
into eternities which both
sublimely teach and so deeply,
utterly appall. If only I had

learnt to play that indecent
breve full well — what bands
of value and even paydays
might have risen in the flood
instead of all those garages
& Bud bottles emptying rage.

Well, as then, now this
caesura before full summer
on warm not scorching days
where breezes are distaff
enough to suggest love’s
hair without the striptease,
the falling god disease.

While there’s still time
to feel that it’s a choice,
this matin hour remembrance
scanning oceans from a height
my birth and fate excite.
To take full in the sight
of mashing, crashing blue:

That wild heave in the pause
which bears witness to
a magnitude, already leapt
a thousand times into
high summer’s starlight,
truly vast, fiercely wept.

April 2024

1.

And just like the rising flood
I called falling in love back then
which bid me cast history away
for rebirth in mysteries of bliss
— chucking the fallen Christian
trope of literary rope-a-dope —

so now those fled histories
arise slow but surely in their
wailing wall of time, the boy
I was become man enough now
to assess centuries of cliffside falls
by my clans into the long
blue drown of the dead.

A genetic predisposition, I suppose,
for heralding the chanting head
from both sides of lament,
mythic mask and its bearers
attenuating the music from
alpha wowza to sorrow’s zed.

2.

The dire porpoise of kin enquiry
is mapping darker cleffs where
poetry is still best but more dreadful,
demanding lower stead than
even dreams may purpose —
schema darker figures may
portend if I could find
the means apt to expend.

Back then I took up loud guitars:
now I must amplify the obscure
to name the catacomb of cisterns
whose lids barely tremble in the
dark and frustrate every end
of what I now practice as art.

A vastly mooing crooning darkness
in the forsaken boneyard of my blood
whose answers are not summas
and welcome is so chilling,
a creeping deadlight’s flood. Name
this,  history now intones to mystery,
if you want to me to stay.

3.

The woman in my dream was from
the deep end of my first long pass
at writing just that poem, a relic
shatter from the relapse which
rebirthed me from bottledrown.
She was broke as usual, her truck
in disrepair, a heart-valve broken
in the engine which drives love’s
hope and brokenmost despair.

We got the truck into a shop
where a mechanic I knew
looked deep and found what
needed the repair, telling us
a thousand bucks should do
the job — something she could
pay, almost, not now — her
checking account was at zero —
but by her next payday.

I wanted to step in and pay for
the work with a credit card,
have the woman reimburse me
when her time came: But I knew
my wife would see the charge
and I’d have to confess to
graves and bones still rattling
what long love overtones.

No, let this be her charge,
I decided, the work is hers
to mar and veld and prise.
The latter works murkwise
rebirthing the fated canopies
You willed into my bones.

And woke with that attitude
the altitude for this poem
where I’m the friendly janitor
who sweeps the cliffside
porches of the vast unknown,
his aging ears and mind a
conduit for conversations
the dead requite with stone
starlit and coldly chattering
from their diving bournes
with ripened news of falling so.

April 2024

My mother’s maternal lines fade fast
in the generations, her father’s
mother divorced and gone
before she was born, her mother’s
mother recalling her grandmother
but no more. Where the men of
my family tree savor clear lines,
not so for the women, whose
wombs were all that mattered
propagating fatherly seed for
the next generation of male deeds.

Ironic then it just might be
(besides mythic and a majesty)
that the fated arc of my life
was subverted and realloyed
with one kiss and the flooding
sense both sides of it that
my chosen course was so amiss
and faint and unreal unless
I learned to write that impossible
poem which made love stay.

That crashing recorrecting sense
was enough to bid me drop out
of college and embark down
the stanky road of rank guitars
suiting up for love’s falling
into wombs becoming shires,
the useful employ of tending
true but awful fires. Now I find

the lacuna in my family tree
where absent women are the sidhe
singing lower somehow than the
dead, handing up vague and
fleeting dream buckets filled
with knowledge of the lost.

Last night I found my dream self
wallowing deeper in some mire,
freighted by wrongs long ago
which hide their mystery entire
by lowing deep from sight,
a name envoweling into mud,
its truth coagulate old blood.

I’d shot up a busload of children
for tormenting my kid brother;
threw two heavy dreadful pistols
in a lake where my aunt’s family
had once lived; then pretended life
as usual while the police investigated
close and closer to my arrest.

Desperate I maintained my mask
and fiction in the name of family,
clocks ticking loudly everywhere,
my cliff-side gambit close and closer
to its fated, fading and obliviate fall.

Who wouldn’t wake mid-pall of
night and wonder whose lament
I was laden with for that dream,
which lacuna in the family tree
I’m drawing seems to cry so
about carrying heavy things
like a woman in ancient labor
or truths which judge the dead.

You tell me, sweet blue pool of
drifting dreams. My purpose now
feels almost lost, tossed to those
evincings and predations of the
family skein whose host reside
at the deep end of that fateful kiss
ten thousand poems ago,
ghosts of that love which stays
awaiting redress, spades, & praise.

April 2024

My worst years were not wasted
in Your account, mistress of wells;
falling buckets still fill the dead’s
receipt, their voices limn and ley
of my bottommost elite. How
long it takes to discern the psalms
they sing there, what angels hide
inside the cleffs of smashed receipt …

My relapse in the bottle kept me
trapped there for six long awful
years ghosting memories of
my father’s worst, the urbane
successful man driving home
listening to the latter century’s news
while sneaking snorts of schnapps
from a bottle hid underseat.

Like some grizzled actor prepping for
his entrance as The Happily Married
Man Comes Home, each slug and
resultant slur furring me into
the armed mask of smiling content
as I walked back in the house of love
I’d traveled too far from every day
indulging alcoholic excess of the brain.

Honey, I’m home! I’d sing a few last
times while driving last streets there,
the afternoon sweltering and dazed
just like the heart I nailed with booze
& suppurated in my nice shoes.
Popping a breath mint or two to
bury grave and fumes as I drove
into the driveway, parked, and
made my terrified entrance.

That was Dad as I recall him in that
big old house my happy childhood
vanished in, arriving with pipe and
grey fedora and tanned grin, sweeping
his arms wide as fathers will do
taking in all they were losing fast
and faking all that was now past.

But it was me, not him, now shattering
a marriage, my wife innocuously
about her after-work routines, feeding
the cat or ironing some linens to a
cooking show on TV.  How little
she suspected back then, just like
my mom, who took married life
exactly for what it was, love and
home and nurture — like a cocoon
abandoned by its ventral moth.

Changing into shorts and a T
I poured my official Scotch on
rocks and starting cooking dinner —
the gussied employ of a hiding man,
making something to occlude
the roaring of one’s vacuum —

gulping hooch whenever
she was elsewhere in the house,
refilling that glass once or twice
and thrice as I diced and sauteed
and simmered the night’s entrée/
I hummed low a cocktail music
glowing in my dimming head
like some cat burglar pulling off
the latest score, the hidden man
sealed fast and tight behind his daddy
mask for one more night at home.

All of that enclosed me in the closet
I had fallen in just like my father,
a secret hiding place of indulgence
fueled by drunken ego, resurrect
after 8 years sober when I dared
scant months before remarrying.

My father was still alive back then,
decades divorced from my mother
and cheating on his live-in partner
while playing archon of the New Age.
His entire bad history the genie in
the half gallon bottle of the cheapest
Scotch I hid in that closet used to
refill my official bottle in the kitchen
cupboard, the one from which I
was supposed to drink the one
official Scotch of the night
which masked the wet part of
wolf howls and blackout.

Who knows how my father
fell there, what Titans or Formoiri
had occasioned that lowland
for him, collapsed or dragged or
pushed by which father how
far back: Relapse for me was

collapse back in the worst of
history which makes us flee
the dead, the dread truths
their graves intone which like
moonlight can infect and then
possess us with the falling trope
— backass plummets into the
abyss where blackouts embrace
every circuit of those winding down,
the obliviate waves time drowns.

Forgive me, father, for I’ve sinned
in every way your fathers taught,
even blamed all them for you.
When none of that was either
rosy metaphor or deathly true
but a mask talking trash while
walking down Park Avenue
dead drunk on ego brewed.

Thank God I didn’t die of
uncorked bad daddies,
that worst of history which
makes ancestry seem lewd,
better zipped and limed
and locked behind the iron
door of misbegotten time.

Maybe it’s why my dreams of late
are all so mumbly and inchoate,
like skulls with jaws nailed tight
bobbing in some coffin’s lake.

I wake with phosphors reeking
where some person might have
taken shape, a tale or myth
leaving just the echo of a name
scrawled in a family bible on
a table I can’t retrieve from
the vale of history. Instead
of inspiration, a putrid scent:

The dark part of the dead’s
lament, fetors where this poem
went dragging Daddy back
from crimes he never meant
repeating ancient shadows,
ancestral deceit and monstrance
which makes its song a harrow,
the ill that chills doors back.

Thank God I sobered back up
and made of my life amends
to the wife I hurt so badly
betraying love with forgeries
of heart and art and history.

Like the dead king said of his
vulture: This thing of darkness
I call my own. What I did
I masked with permissive
ghosts — an addled tale of
sires and sons pretending zest,
bubbles in ale to rime the
rim of rigor mortis frost.

What I used to harrow has
become the thing which hollows.
I still use that mask to pray
the insides of these poems,
a ghost become the spirit
who bears the father key.

Fabricated starlight faked
by remembered standing stone
is a ripe and apt soliloquy for
unlocking truth from bone.
Let dreams then be unquiet
and may God write their poem.
Forgive all else said here, father,
I’ve pretended was your wrong.

April 2024