Bermanus (2004)

Bermanus, or Borvo, was a deity
who presided over seething,
turbulent waters, especially hot
springs. A ceramic image from
Vichy shows him attended by a
horned serpent and a dolphin.
His indwelling well-goddess was
Damona (or Burmana). As in the
case of Diano Abnoba, Bumanus
was identified with a larger
sacred forest area, the Lucus
Burmani, around Cervo in Liguria.

— Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes

Addiction took me deep into
a forest of night naughtiness.
Days were fired by the energy
of those spent secrets, and had
the zeal and mania of a boy-man
with too much to hide, night music
welling and bleeding from every
purposeful seam. Lousy way to live
but I had to, for reasons known
to God: In every arc of drink to mouth
was the complicit desire which
turned every itch to a rabid south,
attempting egress of a magic shire
known in the parley of the season
as Good Times. Years I tossed
down that black well now resurface
here, gleaming silvery and blue,
distilled into an older man’s abandonment
to the verbal way the dark sings.
That wild wood I once ravened
was too alien to be called my heart
-- I the eternally early riser plying
the dead a.m.s between midnight
and three -- yet that wild is
tethered here, reconnoitered,
compassed in every bad way
the errant knight of booze
in his quest descends. That
harrowed hell lies close to this
hour like a lost or buried shrine
to the god of hot bubbly springs
who lorded over the forest
with every well-surge released.
He’s in this one pale hand
which rides across the page
beneath the only lamp stirred
to this hour--too early for most,
too late in all the bottle clubs
when most wallets bottles
and last-gasp enterprise are spent.
At this loneliest and most savage
hour of my past I write, each
page torn from the heart of a
sacred dark wilderness, fresh,
still beating, still bare as a
jackal’s greedy tooth. I recall
a night in the winter of ‘86
when I steered a too-drunk
wealthy Winter Park girl
from the Crocodile Club
into the jaws of my torn
and stained bed, working down
her bright white pants
while she snored face-down.
Some of that white calcination
of pant and panty and flabby
asscheeks which I spread
and furrowed is here in this
white crannog just above
a black and cold and ancient
tide -- in the towel I drape
over one arm to ward off
coffee-spills, in the writing desk
in my lap, in this spread
of pages with its dark blue
seam which calls me still
to all between desire and
its dark-hooved mordents,
the marauding futile jaunt.
This crannog was mortgaged
by all those horrid years
of one bad long carouse,
each night a black tree
felled and sawed and hammered
into this shrine atop so
much below. All that passed
so I can sit here and
observe the night without
the empty glasses. I paid
for this residence with
a greedy coin, vaulted in
a hundred pale white loins:
And the motion which kept
all concealed now hauls
me from shore to shore,
down wells and on to
crannogs -- at least upon
this page. In the alchemy
of nights this one still lolls
the tongue of the fire-lizard
who crawled through all
that darkness to make
an apt home here. O Lord,
keep my glottals smoking,
and fill my pen with
blackwash of gin
and blue-finned aqua,
wild shorage for that satyr
You still see to ferry in.