Blue Rhetorics (2003)

We have seen that the fili
Amargin is also represented
in the Leabhar na Gabhala
as reciting a set of rhetorics
immediately on landing
in Ireland.Presumably,
therefore, he had acquired
them elsewhere.

-- Nora Chadwick,
“Imbas Forosnai”

I am the wind that blows upon the sea;
I am the ocean wave;
I am the murmur of the surges ...

-- from “The Song of Amergin,” attr. to Taleissin


She held my face
in her white hands
that night and
as I slept the
sea slipped into
me, wave after
wave after wave,
filling me with her
wild curvature.
Ah how I drank
Her as I slept,
free at last from
a long drought
of driest words,
her level rising
topmost in my brain.
When I woke
my eyes flew open
and my mouth
began to move,
spilling blue rhetorics
which to this day
I don’t understand,
just sing. It was as
if my tongue had
been pickled in
sea brogue, a
language both
so bitter and too
sweet, its numens
full of beach
bosomage spilling
wavelike from
their brilliant cups.
Cups I would drink
more than my fill
of if I could, but
I was already drowned
and washed back
to that shore where
She was every
wave’s farewelling
kiss, dissolved
and trailing back
to mute eternity.
The words could
only phrase what
never quite got
said between the
plunge and drying
spume, a low echo
of the sea’s wide
weeping when each
night the moon hauls
free a million miles
from Her womb.
I too must sing
in those blue
rhetorics, my tongue
now not of fire
but of the sea.
One day I woke
two thousand miles
north of that sea
I was once baptized
in, reborn to the
God who quells and
purifies Her primal
rough and raucous
ire: My eyes opened
and I saw then
not Him but Her,
curled close to me,
her shape the receipt
of all that foaming
wave which crashed
over me pregnant
with rooms He
might name but
never roam. My
mouth began to
move in ways
never again quite
my own, cerulean
and hooved, professing
a history dredged
up from the abyss,
old lost still gleaming
portents which are
worthless inland
or upstairs, a mother-
of-pearl inlay which
fades to blue
if you stare too hard.
Yet each saying here
rows me further back
to home -- so many
years after that
drowning embrace,
more years down
the road from that
first embracing wave,
so long as to lose
both her and history
to this blue argument
which still washes
wavelike from this
hand and now fades
in a drawling,
shorelike, rhetorical hiss
-- her voice inside
my own, a sea
inside the poem.