Here You Go (Jan 2, 2005)

I have dreamed of those
annihilate green blue waters
river-running toward deep
oceans, a brute overflow
from nursling mountain
passes flooding bridges
and towns, urgent as
salmon leaps to reach
home & hauling me
off my feet away from
my thousand and one
fruitless emulations,
baptizing me one again
in the cataclysm of Yes:
Such dreams have
preceded by a fortnight
encounters I’ve had
in the flesh which hauled
me off from shore
and left me bleeding
miles out to sea,
dazed, united and freed
to squander every ounce
of blue in two bodies’
literal translations of you
to the utter wounding
of an endless salt delight.
Oh well, I asked for it,
didn’t I? That’s why I
suspect the voice in one
dream whispered
Here you go,
come and get it
as I was caught
full force in the frenzy
of the river,
that devil’s voice
inside every answered prayer
and requited-at-long-last
desire, squeezing tongs of
fire round my heart inside
the delirium of release.
These days I simply pray
for a decent vowel movement,
sufficient enough spume
from the whale to
wash me to the next
poem’s shore, far enough
at sea to bare its truths
with every homeward sail
full trimmed. St. Brendan
and his crew once
found an isle of devilish
smiths at work in
foundaries of hellfire;
aware of the eternal
danger God had tided
them to, he bid his
men to row the other
way as fast as they
could, as deeply as
they loved their souls.
From a doorway on
the isle a shaggy man
appeared, “full at once
of fire and darkness,”
carrying an immense lump
of red-hot slag in
giant tongs, then hurled
the beast of fire like
a meteor towards their
fleeing boat. The men
escape through boiling
seas as Brendan watched
the confines of Hell
fade back to noctilucent
black. Great words for
ocean and its latent
abyssal fire is the book
You bid me write: May
God nail me fast to
this mast of days
like a sail full hearted
as polar winds blow,
my hand full tiding
the blue wilderness below.
And when I’ve shored
my last wet poem,
may my last words
be succinct as the
goddess from that dream
whose whale I
ride from isle to isle --
a line for every reader
who dare here also dream --
Here you go --