Immrama

Welcome Aboard

2005-05-17T04:32:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Immrama, a voyage which has voyaged on. Consider it a ritual shaft of sorts filled with love songs and like votives; you've blundered into a faceless patch of the cyberfields, found a cover of sorts -- this final post, like a message scrawled on a door.

Open that door ... dig down ... read forward from the first archive, or back from the last post.

It's been 1500 years since anyone's even wandered around down here. There's buried gold further down ... and sleeping dragons ... many blue-eyed maids ... strange angels ... crashing shores.

Great is the distance between I and Thou. Read what one voyager found on all the islands between.

-- Brendan

P.S. if you are reading this far in the future of this post, know that two blogs followed this one:

www.capeblue.blogspot.com

www.wick-lit.blogspot.com

The End

2005-02-22T04:41:00.000-08:00

Postscript to “The Sea and The Mirror” (W.H. Auden)

(Ariel to Caliban. Echo by the Prompter:)

... Never hope to say farewell,
For our lethargy is such
Heaven's kindness cannot touch
Nor earth's frankly brutal drum;
This was long ago decided,
Both of us know why,
Can, alas, foretell,
When our falsehoods are divided,
What we shall become,
One evaporating sigh

...I

(follow that sigh to www.capeblue.blogspot.com)

Last of the Troubadours

2005-02-22T04:40:00.000-08:00

Those who recall the century that’s past
so rich in deeds, so full of charms, and then
compare it with our age so poor in men,
so sad, a bad age which promises at last,
to comfort us, with an age still worse by far.

-- Piere Cardenal, “Ensanhamen d’Onor” (c. 1270)

The song dies on my lips. I
see nothing now of shores
in this dry world, no
glint of smile or gossamer
descent: The gauze has
fully here unspooled,
curved beneath the wave
to drift, wraith-like, among
the tombs and weed.
Where is that bird now
which rose so proud
each day to sing your matins,
carving with his voice
both glade and chapel,
bed and blade, plunge
and buttery blue swoon?
Gone now, flown, I guess,
to younger worlds, more
devoted cares than I have
heart or hurt to alm. What
remains is an endless tide
of paper waves, this effigy
of self cut out and taped
to a curling, paper shore.
A single of draft of
sterile verse which I here
ball and toss into the wastecan
of an age, patient now with
the rest of the trash to
be hauled from empty rooms.
No more an ocean-seaming
man, the sea’s my moon-bare heart,
a boneless parody of wash
and pour devoid of love or art.
How long have you waited
for me at last to end? And what,
dead numen of the only shape
I could draw with this tongue,
what will you at last begin?

Merlin Enthralled (Richard Wilbur)

2005-02-22T04:39:00.000-08:00

In a while they rose and went out aimlessly riding.
Leaving their drained cups on the table round.
Merlin, Merlin, their hearts cried, where are you hiding?
In all the world was no unnatural sound.

Mystery watched them riding glade by glade;
They saw it darkle from under leafy brows;
But leaves were all its voice, and squirrels made
An alien fracas in the ancient boughs.

Once by a lake-edge something made them stop.
Yet what they found was the thumping of a frog,
Bugs skating on the shut water-top,
Some hairlike algae bleaching on a log.

Gawen thought for a moment that he heard
A whitehorn breathe "Niniane." That Siren's daughter
Rose in a fort of dreams and spoke the word
"Sleep", her voice like dark diving water;

And Merlin slept, who had imagined her
Of water-sounds and the deep unsoundable swell
A creature to bewitch a sorcerer,
And lay there now within her towering spell.

Slowly the shapes of searching men and horses
Escaped him as he dreamt on that high bed:
History died; he gathered in its forces;
The mists of time condensed in the still head

Until his mind, as clear as mountain water,
Went raveling toward the deep transparent dream
Who bade him sleep. And then the Siren's daughter
Received him as the sea receives a stream.

Fate would be fated; dreams desire to sleep.
This the forsaken will not understand.
Arthur upon the road began to weep
And said to Gawen, "Remember when this hand

Once haled a sword from stone; now no less strong
It cannot dream of such a thing to do."
Their mail grew quainter as they clopped along.
The sky became a still and woven blue.

End of Brendan's Voyage

2005-02-22T04:05:00.000-08:00

3843. After that, then, they reached the land which they had been seeking for the space of sevenyears, even the Land of Promise: as it is in the proverb, Qui quærit inuenit. Now, after they had come nigh that land, and they desired to take harbour there, they beard the voice’ of a certain old man, and this he said to them: O ye toilsome men, O hallowed pilgrims, O folk that entreat the heavenly rewards, O ever-weary life expecting this land. stay a little now from your labour’ So after they had been for some time silent, yon old man said to them: ‘Dear brothers in Christ,’ saith he, ‘why do ye not take this noble, beautiful land, wherein a human being’s blood bath never been spilt, and wherein it is meet to bury sinners or evil men? So leave ye all in your vessel everything that ye have, except a little raiment round you, and come from below.’ Now after they had landed, each of them kissed the other, and the old man wept exceedingly with the greatness of the joy. ‘Search ye and see,’ saith he, ‘the plains of Paradise, and the delightful fields of the land radiant, famous, loveable, profitable, lofty, noble, beautiful, delightful. A land odorous, flower-smooth, blessed. A land many-melodied, musical, shouting for joy, unharmful. A place wherein Ye shall find,’ saith the old man, ‘health without sickness, delight without quarrelling, union without wrangling, princedom without dissolution, rest without idleness, freedom without labour, luminous unity of angels, delights of Paradise, service of angels, feasting without extinction, avoidance of pain, faces of the righteous, partaking of the Great Easter. A life blessed, just, protected, great, loveable, noble, restful, radiant, without gloom, without darkness without sin, without weakness, in shining incorruptible bodies. in stations of angels, on plains of the Land of Promise. vast is the light and the fruitfulness of that island, its rest, its lovableness, its dearness its stability, its security (?), its preciousness. its smoothness, its radiance, is purity. is lovesomeness, its whiteness, its melodiousness. its holiness. its bright purity, its nobleness, its restfulness. its beauty, its gentleness. its height. its brightness. its venerableness, its full peace, its full unity! Happy he who shall be with well-deservingness and with good deeds, and whom son of Finnlug shall call into union with him, on that side,’ saith the old man, ‘to inhabit for-ever and ever the island whereon we stand!’.

3873. Now after they had seen that paradise among the waves of the sea, they marvel, and wonder greatly at the miracles of God and His power and they honour and glorify the Lord after seeing those mighty miracles.

3876. Now thus was the holy old man: without any human raiment, but all his body was full of bright white feathers like a dove or a sea-mew. and it was almost the speech of an angel that he had. After the striking of his bell the Tierce is celebrated by them. They sin. thanks to God with their mind fixed on Him. They durst not ask anything, and they receive their spiritual instruction of him at the uplifting of the gospel.

3882. This then was the preaching that Peter and Paul and the other holy apostles most often used to make, as preaching of the punishments and of the rewards, for they were displayed to them in the same manner. This, then, is the preaching that Sylvester, Abbot of Rome, made to Constantine, son of Helena, to the over-king of the world, in the great assembly when Constantine catered Rome to Peter and to Paul. This is the preaching that Fabian, Peter’s successor, made to Philip, son of Gordian, King of the Romans, when he believed in the Lord, and when many thousand others believed there, and he was the first king, of the Romans who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. This, then, is the preaching which Elijah is wont to make to the souls of the righteous under the Tree of Life in Paradise. Now, when Elijah opens the book for the preaching, then come the souls of the righteous in shapes of bright white birds to him from every point. Then he first declares to them the rewards of the righteous, the happiness and delights of the kingdom of heaven, and at that time they are exceedingly rejoiced. Then he declares to them the pains and punishments of hell and the banes of Doomsday. Manifest exceedingly is a countenance of sorrow upon themselves then, to wit, on Elijah and on Enoch: wherefore those are called the Two Sorrows of Heaven’s Kingdom. Then Elijah shuts his preaching-book. The birds then make an exceeding great wailing, and beat their wings against their bodies till streams of blood come out of them for dread of the pains of hell and of Doomsday.

3899. Now since it is the souls of the saints, whose lot it is to inhabit for ever the kingdom of heaven, that make that lamentation, it were meet for the men of the world, though they should shed tears of blood expecting Doomsday, in quo die mala erunt. Now there will be many evils and tribulations on that day, that is, on the Day of judgement, in quo die Judex justus sua suis reddet: impiis pænas, præmia justis. Then will the Lord pay to every human being in the world his own wage. Punishment He hath for the sinful, reward for the righteous. Then the sinful will be cast into the depth of the eternal pain. and the lock of God’s word will shut them up under hatred of tile Judge of Doom. Then the saints and the righteous the folk of charity and of be carried to the right hand of God the Father, to inhabit the kingdom of heaven for ever. Then they will abide in that great glory. in the unity of the Godhead and the Manhood of the Son of God: in the unity that is nobler than any unity, the unity of the holy, noble, almighty Trinity, Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost.

3912. I beseech the high, almighty God, through saint Brenainn’s intercession, may we all deserve that unity, may we reach it, may we dwell therein for ever and ever!

Betha Brénnain (Life of Brenainn)
Source: Book of Lismore
Translator: Whitley Stokes
Date of Translation: 1890

Homewarding Ride (Sat. Feb. 19, 2005)

2005-02-21T10:52:00.001-08:00

Looking out over the cove I felt a strong
sense of the interchangeability
of land and sea in this marginal world
of the shore and of the links between
the life of the two. There was an
awareness of the past and of the
continuity of time, obliterating much
that had gone before.

-- Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea

This shore we share was once
a birth, then a baptism,
and later still a naked kiss:
Now it’s just a paper strand
where I walk, pen in hand,
down a mile or so of
remembered bliss, arousing
on dry acres the salt
semblance of a blue fold
and crash and hiss.
Here I remit every ache
and sorrow on the inside
that remains, a love of
wetter regions of the
heart where here, even
at this our, that greater
salt sustains. Yesterday
my mother’s poodle
died, clutched away
by a massive heart attack
on the examining table.
My mother in her grief
said she was joined at
the heart with the frail
so docile doggie who
loved to be held in
her lap. Sometimes
my mother would set
Ginger in the front basket
of her bicycle and ride
the neighborhood, an old
woman with her matron
charge triumphant in
the basket, ears flapping
in the breeze like kites.
How awful now the empty
spaces in my mother’s house --
holy too, as heart-spaces
grow cathedral in the
tidal smashings of love,
waxing for scant moments
and then draining forever
out; and then the magic
of how that absence tides
into a fullness of
the inward shore, the
grieving sands poured
slowly full with laughing
children and romping dogs
and beloveds smiling
deep and sure. That’s
the strand I walk and
weave each day, declaring
brimming hearts from
paper boats loosed
on waters deep inside.
With God and kisses
on blue rockings my
homeward songs thus ride.

Salt Abbey (Sunday, Feb, 20)

2005-02-21T10:52:00.000-08:00

(In the “many fishes” episode of The Voyage
of St. Brendan), gale force winds blow the
ship off course and .. the sea is whipped up
into towering waves. When the sea had died
down the sea-faring monks see so many fish
in the sea that it frightens them. ... Brendan
says, “This is the Liver Sea. I have read many
wonderful things about it. .. Brendan asks
himself how it is possible that the sea should
feed all these animals and concludes that
God is so great that he can provide for all
these creatures every day. He has parchment
brought to him to record all he sees and
gives orders to heave to; the ship is not to
move until he has finished.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

I am of the tribe of ocean-faring monks
who roam blue deserts in search
of You, writing Your blue wonders down.
Such psaltery is of gospel truths but
yet unknown, revealed wave by wave
from isle to isle in an underwater
majescule, anchored in God’s darker
vaults. Some abbey fathers raised Your
walls by digging down through earth
to water; ours found singing halls
the other way around, reaching sacred
ground upon a dolphin’s back and
then plunging down to basalt floors
a thousand chapel leagues or more.
The old ones disturbed there are first
and last in Your husbandry, ogres
and their gigantessas in consort
of stone truths only moons and
stars exult the full language of. That
ore is what we ferry here, copyists
of brine in brutal brogue, each
line crammed with the hieroglyphs and
griffin-curves which cram the bottom
of all seas, down there in the
greater half of my heart where the wild
ones roam, singing, we, too, are
sirings of God. Each voyage here is
a fat volume of water and its wonders,
on shores too far below.
Read on if you dare to lose your
land legs and dry soul. Come to
know what only water angels dare
to sing in that salt scriptorium
between the narwhal’s ribs at
the bottom of what’s below.

Glosses on a Line (Hooked & Sinking)

2005-02-21T10:51:00.001-08:00

Glosses on a line from the Life of Columba (Amram Columba) vary as follows:

He protected a hundred churches, a hundred crowds at completeness of offering.

Guardian of waves is he, over seas of a hundred churches; and this is a definite (number put) for an indefinite, i.e. Hi and Derry.

He protected a hundred churches under the fullness of the draught (of the chalice) of offering.

He was a guardian of a hundred churches, a draught upon completion of the offering.

A hundred churches to which the wave goes.

Abbot of a hundred churches to which a billow comes.

A hundred chruches which a wave frequents.

This is the number of churches which he has on the shore of the sea.

A hundred chruches with the fullness of the wave of the mass-chalice in every church.

Abbot of churches which a great wave reaches.

Gloss and Trope (2004)

2005-02-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

Abbot of churches which
a great wave reaches ...

-- 11th Century gloss on a
line from the Amram Columba

One root of Oran’s name
is Gaelic auran, or song

That’s the poet, sitting here
at 4:30 am between the 21st
century and the fourth,
settling down into the great
sleepy dark where breezes
fan a chorus of drowned trees.
He how dips his head
in water and returns singing,
his tropes cleansed and
freshened by immaculate
blue. Each dive presents
a daily varied view, some
turn of the topic a few
degrees toward the moon
as it molts across the sky:
and so the crannog is my
aquae aerie, the shape of
accumulate song, the
action itself of riding
the great sea horse of God
inside and under the waves’
sparkling plain which
covers Your mouth.
Today it occurs to me
that the crannog is a
grave-marker for a
martyr sown into the blue,
a soul tree which fruits
all I let go. Recently I
cut the throat of Your well:
Hit the delete key three times
and all that blue bother
was gone, from cyberspace
I mean, that visible (though
seldom visited) face of an
invisible swell and thrall
released back to the dark
waters from where You came.
Nothing of it remains
but the cathedralling
shape of this crannog,
its roots gripped deep in
a silence which once
sang louder than the wildest
booming wave I still ride
on; bell-shape I once rang
like a monk tolling matins
is that door to the lowest
porch below, down
with the denizens of dream
who guard the vaults
of Her preterite gleam.
Song is the Oran
Oran bid me bury here
which walks in dark ways
for three nights here
whose face buoys up
in blue waters found here
like the bog-man buried
throat-slashed smiling here
between moon and mere:
Abbot of the hundred
churches this crannog
supports, apple-isles like
Your fingertips poking
just above a calmed sea.
Angel of the mouth
that just won’t stop
singing, chalice and
baptize me in the next
gloss, the next wave’s
wilder ringing.

Shore Abbot

2005-02-21T10:50:00.002-08:00

Winwaloe (b. circa 455) is often presented in art as an abbot, standing on the shore, his staff in one hand and a bell in the other. The fish raise their heads above the surface of the sea, as if they obey the summons of the bell.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint,

The Pope of Playalinda Beach (2003)

2005-02-21T10:50:00.001-08:00

The Pope of Playalinda
Beach stands at the
surf’s edge swaddled
in white and gold
brocade, his long
train dissembling in the
wash. His crozier
posts the sand like a
surf caster turned the
other way, bejeweled
with summer oceans
and the eyes of
rapturous women,
hooking us all.
And those eyes --
so serenely they
scan our naked
congregation,
shepherding us
to the insides
of this crashing
surfside day.
Above his head
the sun is a belfry
of summer fire,
pealing the sanctus
of a shadeless choir.
Who is saved
and who gets damned
by such ordained
and consummate
bliss? The surf thunders
and recedes down
the shore,
no crest not a prayer,
every crash
a blue door,
the long ebb like
plainsong, censers,
egress to the back
-- a cathedral pour
the flesh restores.

Fin Parson

2005-02-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

Anthony of Padua, too is said to hav preached to fish, as a way of convincing heretics who have refused to be converted of the strenght of the true faith. Immediately from the depths of the sea a huge number of fishes rose to the surface, their heads turned toward the preacher. The fish slapped their tails, opened their mouths and showed in all manner of ways that they wished to glorify the Lord.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint,

Lovers, Drinkers, Singers, Demons

2005-02-21T10:49:00.000-08:00

The supernatural suitor seems to correspond to the Indian Gandharva, whose presence ... is considered necessary for conception. At weddings, the Gandharva is a kind of rival who, to the last, disputes the bridegroom’s possession of the bride.

The few references to the Gandharvas (in the plural in the Rig Veda show them to be spirits of the air or of the waters, but other texts associate them with mountains, caves, and forests, with the world of the dead, and with animals. They are half-man and half-bird. Their wives or mistresses, the Apsaras, appear as water-nymphs. The Gandharas have charge of soma, or they steal soma; they are skilled in medicine and they are fond of women. They also appear as singers and musicians who atttend the feasts of the gods, while from the time of the Mababhrata their name also denotes human musicians.

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage

The Fluid Freedom

2005-02-21T10:48:00.001-08:00

Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse to give this joy to anyone?
Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim in the huge fluid freedom.

-- Rumi (transl. Coleman Barks)

Dylan Eil Ton

2005-02-21T10:48:00.000-08:00

The moment he is baptised Dylan (twin of Lleu or Lug) makes for the sea and receives the sea’s nature, swimming well as any fish, and because of this he is called Dylan Eil Ton, "Sea Son of Wave." No wave ever broke beneath him.

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage

The Soul of Two Centuries (2003)

2005-02-21T10:47:00.000-08:00

He was the soul of his century.
- Emerson, "Goethe, Or, The Writer"

It is one thing
to write the book
of an age. Another
to tome the
seam of two.
Here is not
solus but
saddlae, born
on one beach,
ebbed from
the next. The
words of hybrid
wings must grip
and howl as
if caught between
tectons, each
sentence a stormy
range two miles
up from the sea.
I am not he,
but yammer on
in the heat of
such artistry,
my spume of
Sputnik's beep
and the World
Trade Center's
ghost legs dancing
on Manhattan's
glitzy ends. The
death of literature
on parent in my ear,
some fuse incarnate
yet inchoate my
other sire, a widow
who clasps a
blue rosary in
a drowned chancelry,
a finger to her
wrinkled lips.
Spawn of Jello
and Mao, this next
day is my green
martyrdom, the
world so casually
aflame in the
ordinaries of dawn.
My waking here
at the pad the
repeated matins
of a liturgy only
spread ages
understand, each
poem a prayer
furrowing the foam
between googol
plex and tetrabyte,
no wiser for
the motions which
the well I found
here satisfies
and oceans. Thigh
to thigh I travel,
the rhapsodic
anchorite of
ripe unravels,
a boor angel
of the gravel
ground from
those two ages
which wrap
around me crying
c'mon baby
give me more
make waves for
Dylan's twice-
born roar on
the next more
savage shore.

Dylan (Monday, Feb. 21, 2005)

2005-02-21T10:46:00.000-08:00

My demon twin still rides the wave
unrepentant, torn, and free,
a music-making mouth astride
the white mare of all shores,
singing salt hecatombs
inside the wombs of shells.
Darkling prince with the grey
blue cloak, he contests my day-
bride wooings by riding far below
where only women in their deepest
thrall have dared to go, their
drowning hair curved round the
prow that I, proud man of a
wretched faith, point ever toward
the next isle she once called
me from. In my drinking days
I swore I had a twin named
Steve who was my blackout self,
emerging when I clocked out
to fang the throat of 2 a.m.,
dancing in the bottle clubs
with drownlettes or alone, a
man of plunder and a fool’s
blue greed. When I woke
sometime later that next day
he was gone, leaving behind
cuts and bruises on my arms,
the press of a woman’s ankles
on my back and shoulders,
my hips ground to raw points
of cooling fire. The sea-man
is like my Steve but swims
a deeper malt than booze.
He’s out there just beyond
all shores with his blue guitar,
singing the sweet matins of
desire inside each wave’s
approaching curl. He and I
were born of one womb, and
though for years we’ve wandered
far and farther apart, there
is a land we share, of seas
and shores composed --
a mutual embroilment
of song in water metres,
a soul which shires both
priest and prick, somehow
both reliquary of God’s
star glow and the tinkling
of heavy hairy balls below.
Dylan Eil Ton is my
blue brother in the undertow
while I sit here, the sum
of all the nights I drank
more than three beers,
those three cups which
he spilled gold and frothing
on the bosom of the fraulein
who lives inside my wife.
That darkling pair frolic
and writhe wildly beneath
this pillar of salt which is
my writing chair, pagan
slips descending down
a primordially dark stair
which is infernal measure
to my day-song’s sweet
ascending up into -- oh my!
heaven’s lacy blue underwear

Jammin' With the Heathen Giant

2005-02-18T04:30:00.000-08:00

Walk a dun blink roundward this albutisle and you skull see how old ye plaine of my elters, hunfree and aurs, where wone to wail whimbrel to peewee o’er the saltings, where wilby citie by law of isthmon, where by a droit of signory, iceflow was from his inn by Byggnning to Whose Finishtere Punct. Lete erehim ruhmuhrmuhr. Mearmerge two races, swete and brack. Morthering rue. Hither, crashing eastuards, they are in surgence hence, cool at ebb, they requiesce. Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this flage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a awaast wizzard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde from erde.

-- Joyce, Finnegans Wake, from the dialogue of Jute and Mutt

***

(In episode 4 of The Voyage of St. Brendan) Brendan, having had a ship built for him, finds the exceptionally large head of a dead man on the beach. Its forehead measures five feet across. When Brendan asks what kind of life he has led, the man’s head answers that he was a hundred feet tall and very strong. He was a heathen who waded through the sea to rob ships. This he did for a living. In a heavy storm which whipped up the waves to extreme heights he was drowned. Brendan offers to pray for the giant, and to beg God to revive him so that he may be baptized. Once that is done, the giant may even, if he lives to praise God, find forgiveness for his sins, and eventually ascend to paradise. The giant refuses; his is afraid that in his new life he might not be able to withstand the temptation of sin. What if he started robbing again? He would be a lot worse off then as, according to the giant, Christians are punished much more severely in hell than pagans. Moreover, the prospect of having to suffer the pain of death as second time frightens him. He wants to go back to his torments / poor companions in the place of darkness. He departs with Brendan’s best wishes. Brendan then proceeds on his way.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

***

The Life of Colum Cille (Columba), written in Irish by Manus O'Donnell and written in 1532, contains the following episode:

"Once when Colum Cille was walking beside the river Boyne a human skull was brought to him. The size of the skull was much bigger than the skulls of the people of that time. Then his followers said to Colum Cille, "It is a pity we don't know whose skull this is, or the whereabouts of the soul that was in the body on which it was." Colum Cille answered, "I'm not leaving this place until I find this out from God for you."
"Then Colum Cille prayed earnestly to God for that to be revealed to him, and God heard that prayer so that the skull itself spoke to him. It said that it was the skull of Cormac mac Airt, son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, king of Ireland, and an ancester to himself, for Colum Cille was tenth generation after Cormac. And the skull said that although his faith wasn't perfect, he had a certain amount of faith and, because of his keeping the truth and that as God knew that from his descendents would come Colum Cille who would pray for his soul, He had not damned him permanently, although it was in severe pain that he awaited these prayers.

"Then Colum Cillle picked up the skull and washed it honorably, and baptized and blessed it; then he buried it. And Colum Cille did not leave that place until he had said 30 masses for the soul of Cormac. And at the last of the masses, the angels of God appeared to Colum Cille, taking Cormac's soul with them to enjoy eternal glory through the prayers of Colum Cille."

- O'Donnell, The Life of Colum Cillle, transl. B. Lacey, Dublin 1998

***

After three days and nights Columba became curious to know how his follower had fared and ordered him dug up. The monks excavate the spot where Oran had been sacrificed, finally uncovering his face. Oran’s eyes pop open, and staring right at Columba he declares, "There is no wonder in death, and hell is not as it is reported. In fact, the way you think it is is not the way it is at all." Horrified, the saint had Oran buried again at all haste, crying "Uir! Uir! air beul Odhrain" or "Earth, earth on Oran’s mouth!" (The saying "chaidh uir air suil Odhrain" or "Earth went over Oran’s eye" is still widely heard in the Highlands and Hebrides.

Despite the frightful encounter, Columba dedicated the monestary’s graveyard to Oran (Reilig Odhrain) and honored Oran’s sacrifice by saying that no man may access the angels of Iona but through Oran.

***

THE HEATHEN GIANT (Feb. 18, 2005)

The old nights lay like massive bones
scattered on the beach, the skull
like a split moon buried in the sand.
Sea-sounds through its occiput
are the voices of memory, faint
and ghastly as the depths I once
fell to find you in the darkest
beds of sweet abyss. He remembers
the feral heart of old, icy and
on fire for plunder, parting thighs
with blue gusto & launching his
dragon ship there with the pith
and pitch of awfulness,
rowing voices crowing one pent
dragon seethe. Eye-sockets big
as church-doors retain the marrow
of those nights, their dark abcessa
still lucent, even lewd, harrows which
invite the next arriving saint to
find a heaven wide enough to
revive and save a soul so massive,
old and hungry. But he will not
rise again, not for all the pearly
virginettes bent in heaven’s
puffy marge. Wholly dark now, he
strides between this beach and
those dark nights, sporting
in a sea of finned and ghostly
salt delights, unrepentant
as my backwards glance which
call his life and ways both holy.
I appoint that house of bleached
ribs apt chapel of the wilder
half of my heart and God’s and
yours, you who would embrace
the seven seas to slake
your womb’s blue belling need.

***

THE TOLLUND MAN (Seamus Heaney)

I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,
Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

***

SURVIVING ENERGIES (2000)

From “A Breviary of Guitars”

The energies call
and caul and cowl
and cull us
beyond our every
pale imagining:
Just when we
think we know
how to master
‘em, a different
flame rises up
to scorch us
in the ass,
hissing that
heaven is not
as commonly
supposed nor
hell as imagined:
Poison physic
returns to scotch
its maker: Hooch
unmade me for
sure, it drank
my rock ambitions
down to the
dregs: Sure it
kept me loose,
the eyes must
be lidded to
perceive the
thrall of dark
desires, equiporpoise
in winnowing
waves & parting
willing thighs:
You had to
be half-looped
to fly rather
than fall:
But a drink
never made me
a better guitar
player: And
neither did a
guitar make me
any better lover:
The energies
are savage
cunning and
patient: When
my every ambition
wrecked out
on the alcoholic
reef there was
nothing to do
but put the
plug in the jug
& chuck my
guitar down into
the pit where
all my loves
were buried too:
Eight years of
AA rebuilding the
ruin of a life
or maybe starting
the first one
for the first time:
Jung’s formula
for beating the
bottle is simple:
spiritus contra
spiritus meaning
“it takes spirit
to counter spirits:”
The living you
see cannot endure
the full gale of
energies which
call us beyond:
Our survival
requires us to
harness ‘em with
oblique forces,
temperings,
balance,
ambiguity:
Rein in the
hot horses of
spiritus with the
cool slake
of spiritus:
Addition is
false veneration,
worship of
whatever we
wish our gods
promise: Cure
consists then
in surrendering
to the terrible
truth that our
gods are not
the way we think
they are at all:
Not that eternal
glow between
the second and third
Scotch: Not
a prolonged orgasm
water & wild
between her
perfect parted
thighs caressed
by venereal
ululations of
my name: Not
more passionate
singing over
some irredeemable
suburban abyss:
Try to drink
your fill of
these things believing
this time
it will all come
true: The energies
will batten
on these dreams
like maggots:
No: The only
hope in
surviving immortal
desire is to
sacrifice that
passionate singing
to another song,
another spirit:
change the
lucre, invert
the worlds: It
was almost a girl /
who, stepping away
from / the single
harmony of song
and lyre, / appeared
to me through
her / diaphanous
form / and made
herself a bed
inside my ear
sings Rilke in
Sonnets to
Orpheus 1.2:
Almost a girl:
Almost rock
and roll: Almost
a bottle:
Similitude
bears imp and
angel faces which
both lead us down
the primrose path
to hell: The song
wants me to
believe with all
my might that it’s
a girl, almost:
And it’s all
too human
to build
cathedrals round
the first part
of the phrase
& bury
the second:
Wallace Stevens
transcends the
old-time religion
when he writes,
the poem must
resist the
intelligence /
almost successfully:
“Almost” is the
vault where in
lie the dead’s
final, forever
saved up, forever
hidden, unknown
to us, eternal
valid coins of
happiness (Rilke
again, this time
his Fifth Elegy):
Almost is the
dragon of
metaphor loosed
from the foundations
of certainty:
A threshold
which restrains
us from our
godlike addictive
falls: Allen
Greenspan criticized
the market’s
“irrational
exuberance” 2
years ago
which just
seemed to goad
the new market
mavens on: Stock
money is the
coke of the Oh
Ohs, promising
fantastic boundless
unstoppable returns:
Even last week
when there was
a whopping selloff
the investors
returned with
a vengeance
gaining it all back:
Boundless
intemperance
in nature is
a tyranny
(“Macbeth”) Ask
any addict:
Irrational
exuberance
is bull territory:
Alas! How hard
we’ll fall before
we accept that
money is almost
but never never
never ever enough:
Some day we’ll
hurl into the
pit our stock
options & margin
calls & Rolexes
& brokers: Clean
& sober & broke,
perhaps for the
rest of our lives
our generation:
Though at the
window we’ll
always see her
dancing so
beautiful & pure,
weaving gold round
her every curve
and curl:

***

VOYAGER (Feb. 2004)

Then
we voyage.
The second singer
lifts wings to sail
to blue horizons
rid of this hooved
anchor that holds
me here. Rain and more
rain this morning,
cold and riveting the
hard talk between my
wife and I last night
in drear punctuation.
O how far yet we must
go before any real billows
spread for me in
her real arms. So I
get back to work here
reminded infernally
that all work is suspect.
But this Oran the
second archon obeys
the master builder
and goes down anyway
beneath the stone
floor of all abbeys,
singing his way down
through the cracks
in the ocean’s basalt
text. He falls so this flies.
Ornate capitals writhe
in Kells to the samba
of that finalizing sigh.
And seeks the words
behind the words
which dot the marges.
He sails toward the sea
god who can never
be shared or shored.
This home I live in
is the best I will ever have
and I intend to stay
on long with her
finding the actual
difficult and always
imperfect garden the
mortals call love. And
perhaps only because
my heart remains
does he find harbor
loose enough to
launch these boats
of longing with their
wordy sails. Send the news,
O traveller, on and down.
Harrow this life on
dry land with the salty
wave-smash of the voyage.
I may never set foot
on the Iona you dream;
love bid me duration
here instead. Be my
long back inward
down-imploring glance
where I’ll never quite
find her, nor should.

___

EACH POEM A SKULL (2003)

Each poem is a skull
hauled up from a well
of words and their
ripe fury, eye-holes
dazzling dark, teeth
like castanets.

The voices I hear
in them is
an orchestral
in disarray,
oboes of woe,
fluting fair days,
gravid soul-cellos
.
What to do with
all these skulls?
Set ‘em in the arches
of some viaduct
gone dry? Or arrange
them like a
ghoul’s xylophone?

Far kinder to
to loose each one
back into the well’s
back maw having
spoken it’s peice.

Here’s another skull
up from cold hell,
fished from the waters
of an ancient tongue:

Oracle and bless
that moment we shore
where night and this
waking cusp and
break, and roar.

***

BISMARCK (2002)

Lave a whale a while
in a whillbarrow ... to
have fins and flippers
that shimmy and shake.
— Joyce, Finnegans Wake

You say you egressed
here through the best
poems, but rather
you’ve sunk here
reaching for the
starlingest gleam
of stellarmost truth.

Your best descends
like a fat Bismarck
three miles down
to a cold grave.
It fails even to
fin that chill absence
at the bottom of the blue.

But what did you expect,
singing there on the
beach? Did you think
she could actually
return to you there,
stepping from some wave?

All that’s just a door
into this salt cellar
of dark savagery.
From her narrow waist
these whale roads where
the music of what falls
is what her smile calls.

***

RAGNAROK
The Weird of the Gods (2003)

Poets are in the beginning
hypotheses, in the middle
facts, and in the end values.
-- Randall Jarrell

Each of us
completes our history
and History’s.

Or tries to.

There was a time
when the river
in springtime
was such a wild flow,
bursting over
the falls the way
I wanted to collapse
inside a woman’s
embrace. I played
guitar that way too,
trying to loose
all the horses inside
a loud song. Instead
it was I who was
trampled, a suburban
door ripped from
the floor.

Then I learned
to forget such passionate
music -- learned.
I turned into that
votive who buries his
old self in the
foundations of its tale,
reading about songs
& entering the hard
world of pedigrees
& senex greed
& slow publication.

Or tried to. But by
the time I got there
the learned music
had blown through
and was gone,
leaving stone viaducts
in the words
to arch emptiness
and gall and
endless sand.

Truly there was
nothing left for me
to do but retrace
my steps through a
back door and down
cold rotting steps
until I found the stone
which covered this well
and pried it loose.

First my old head
floated up (I stacked it
here), then his totem,
a naked man riding
a feral fish (I loosed
them here). Soon
the others rose
in a raw torrent,
giants and dwarves,
the dog Garma
the wolf Fenris, even
the Midgard Serpent
(he stretched the
length of a 5000
page poem).

O how the sea
rose up through that
hole, a sea of seas,
up to devour every
trace of the scholar
I once was: Every
trace of that bone
was soon lost inside
a raging and
ripening foam.

And now this
third song, risen
from that river
and the cathedrals
that it mortared
and then fled.
My mouth now is
flung wide like some
Leviathan’s maw,
spilling the oldest
treasures inside
a raw but sacred brine.

Now I must forget
all that I learned,
or make of it some
onward, inward thing
-- A dashed heaven
far beneath the sea
where my blue
familiars sing.

Watch my hand
now cross the page
-- A Ouiji boat which
shores on runes
in Neolithic caves
and writes of a rage:
Counting the fangs,
ferrying the staves
of the darkest tunes.

Blue Rhymes, Salt Riddles

2005-02-17T04:33:00.000-08:00

How different are the marriages of mythology! Just as the hero’s birth has an outward resemblance to the most disgraceful births in human society, so does his marriage have more in common with abductions and elopements than with the socially approved forms of marriage.

... In parts of Wales, the bridegroom’s representatives were at first refused admission at the bride’s home and a contest in verse between the two parties ensued. Such contests “in the doorway” also featured in certain seasonal rituals and riddles were sometimes embodied in the verses. Riddle contests took place in the marriage rituals of parts of Russia and central Asia until modern times, and in some cases the riddles consist of requests for impossible things. Thus, in one of the villages of the Government of Yaroslav, the “bride-seller,” sitting by the bride, invited the best man to “bid for the bride,” offering him the choice of trading either in riddles or in gold. The choice always fell upon the riddles, and half a dozen or more tasks were then set by the “bride-seller.” For example: “Give me the sea, full to the brim, and with a bottom of silver.” The best man gave him a bowl full of beer with a coin at the bottom. “Tell me the thing, naked in itself, which has a shift over its bosom.” He gave him a candle. “Give me something which the master of this house lacks.” The bet man then brought in the bridegroom -- presumably to remedy the lack of a son-in-law.

-- Rees & Rees, Celtic Heritage, 267, 268-9

WOOING RIDDLE (Feb. 17, 2005)

These songs limn a narrow
shore, like a skin which
borders two worlds,
a place where wave and
land are hostile yet arouse,
where out and inner words
face each other and
the impossible love they must,
somehow, in lust of souls,
requite. In every kiss two
worlds collide,
uprooting solitudes
& washing griefs away
so suppler, abler
hurts may salt a
greater tenderness with
tears. Oh the gentle way
you walked to the
bathroom from our sated
bed of wooing, many
years now gone -- what
frightening registers rippled
out from there, beneath
the gauzy undulations
which had entranced
then drowned my
heart ... raging horsemen
with bright blades of
moon and more
awakened also in
that womb, ogres with
clubs the sizes of narwhal
horns, blackened dicks
swinging further down
like tiger sharks. How
could such downy
billows rouse the
rippingest regions of
black tides? How could that
spume-exultant YES
invoke the mess of years
in which I proved
so much less than
all you dreamed?
The songs harrow
that blue interface
where nothing quite will
do but your thighs
up round my hips and
all there is of you is
boneless ocean, salty
motions devoid of
face or loin, as if
one single desire had
at its core an
emptiness as deep
as the soulless sea?
And how but in verse
can I name these dry
days as the closest I
will get to you, my lonely
strolls in predawn wastes
cathedrally intoned,
adding cleffs and modals
and quartertidaltones
to the drone inside the
conch shells you lift
on some faraway beach
to hear high news of me.
What wild music rises
from this chair
where I write your
kisses down, those
puckers of sweet abyss
a heart may till
and perhaps distill,
but never fully ride, not in
a life so shored by
two worlds that
there’s no purity not
assed in all the
rudest ways, no devil
not gossamered come
dawn upon that beach.
In the end only the
song remains, you gone
back into your self,
ditto beach, the years
since conspiring
to smooth and bleach
our dance on down
to faintest glimmers
on dark waves, a babble
of silver tongues long
freed from human throats.
Those two worlds once
bordered by our lips
have poured fully through
the other, leaving only
the sound of the tide
far down the shore,
a washing, reaching,
ebbing verse for
all we once conspired
to greet and riddle
and forever since
are source.

ONE DAY I WROTE HER NAME UPON THE STRAND
(Edmund Spenser)

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.

Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalise;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.

Not so (quod I); let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.

THE BURIED HARBOR (Giuseppe Ungaretti)

The poet arrives there
and then resurfaces with his songs
and scatters them
All that left me
of this -- this poetry:
the merest nothing
of an inexhaustible secret

- Mariano, June 29, 1916

(transl. Andrew Frisardi)

SONG OF THE STRAND (2003)

My song is a merman
bereaved of his scales
sitting on a rock
between his sea and
this world we call our own.
He’s crying low
in a sweet-salted voice
for Swinburne’s tides
on a Joycean beach.
For him this pale page
so raw at first light
is hardly a vantage,
for he can dive
three miles down
on the back of a whale
and when Leviathan
falls no further, bid adieu,
and leap all the the way
down beneath abyss
to a merry world
where coral bungalows
are the teeth of
Tiamat’s split jaw.
-- Lost to him now,
my ancient brine captive,
who now lives in this hand
walking a pale white sand,
singing of low mansions
to the ear’s desperate strand.

NAMES

Nomina sunt consequentia rerum
(Names are the consequences of things)
— Dante, La Vita Nuova

Ipso facto the poem,
an arrival which
forces wide the mouth
& go ooh la wee
or yee-haw. Panged
by the world’s is-ness
we ply the business
of saying
roller or height,
crescent oranges
sweet sour bright.
I see with angel eyes
the white of her
thighs, & wow
mountain heights
with the crest
of my sighs;
coo to the cat with
a cow-ululant moo,
& low sable swoon
between soror and moon;
the ink I’ve hurled
in one florid line
burl dead space
—an articulate spine
through white billows
where she once came
crying my name.
I’ll curve all my meters
til they curl that lost flame!

THE PSALMIST (2004)

Poetry’s for words that never
Quite see heaven, or her naked,
Or the shore of an exiled home.
Kind David stroked his harp singing
to the God of distant rooms, as
If a psalm was a boat for seas
He never meant to cross. The verse I
Hammer down here forms a cup shaped
For pouring past as brims, for blue
Draught I’ll never quite slake, much less
Ever sip: Yet there’s physic in bright
Wings which cannot fly toward any
Heaven this heart knows, a God’s grace --
Synecdoche of a stolen kiss
Which tides and hurls sufficient bliss.

HYMN TO THOTH (2004)

Praise the monkey in the middle
Of my days, mute yet aroused, his
Penis straining up every curve,
His pen writing everything down.
He’s at it all the ding dong day,
Down in a wet scriptorium
Of pelt and poop and prayer, his salt
Gibberish an angel’s brogue, white
As saints in song, blue as the imp’s
Cold refrain. What I write here is
Just poor calligraphy of him
Who says it all with tightened lips.
Inside this hour a beast scrawls poems
On the shores of this darkling heart:
What you read here is his brute art.

CONGRESS (Feb. 2004)

My head’s a congress of high selves
At this hour; their voices loosed in
Water mount the sea stallion of
The next poem -- light cavalry with
Swords for carving waves. Jung has
Less value as a shrink than psycho-
Pomp, a witch doc only for words;
Dante’s travail in Love’s bright name
Sings a bride of whitest metres;
Joyce.s noises in the chamber
Toot low angels across the shore,
A cochineal arrest which wakes.
Each sings in my head at this hour
Long after their towers fell to sea.
Dawn finds me clacking their bones
Not for rough magic but gruff tones.

FROM "SOME FURTHER WORDS"

(Wendell Berry)

... No one has made
the art by which one makes the works
of art. Each one who speaks speaks
as a convocation. We live as councils
of ghosts. It is not "human genius"
that makes us human, but an old love,
an old intelligence of the heart
we gather to us from the world
of the creatures, from the angels
of inspiration, from the dead --
as intelligence merely nonexistent
to those who do not have it, but
to those who have it more dear than life.

WELL OF NAMES (2003)

Many mornings now I
wake at 3:15 or 3:45
gripped by an urgency
to get up & get on with
this work which I hardly
fathom, much less name.
Today Violet woke us
both from her chair
talking in her dream.
In mine she was trying
to name her kittens
or the ones we now
feed along with a badly
chewed momma: Around
Violet’s neck were
place cards on which
names were written,
names I couldn’t read.
Her dead-of-night fit
of naming stuck with
me, oiling the gears of
my own cause. Am I
trying to find God’s
name for things -- the one
inside the names we
use --, or is it that I’m
seeking God’s own name
in this ritual naming
game? In my dream
I drove an old car through
an old familiar course
which was like so
many things: the long
roads I travel each day
to work and back; the
course my first wife and
I used to walk in
downtown Orlando
(through quiet neighborhoods
& by a middle school
to a lake & back);
the way I drove
my bike to my own
middle school in
Evanston Illinois
35 years ago; and it
was the way my father
went when he travelled
between his secret
gay urban life in downtown
Chicago and our crazed
suburban home. I could
wind all those routes
with my eyes closed;
they may all be carved
in granite. In the dream
the way had grown
cluttered, packed close
with garbage and other
leavings of time, like
archaeological walls,
grown out into the streets
like fatty tubes of blood.
It made for tight
passage. In the car
with me was some
black woman from AA
& we talked about the
God we try to serve,
whose heart we try
to daily bathe our
rebel wills. -- I woke
from the dream at
4:15 a.m., my verbal
engines roaring on
octanes drawn from
(or to) this inky well.
I know I must be
careful, because deep
things love to drown
makers foolish enough
to believe they can
possess any of this.
Me? I’m just a bucket
of safe enough passage.
I only hold so much
which I must spill here
before there’s any more
blue gold. Besides, it’s
only writing poems too
early in the day. It’s
5:45 a.m. now, time to
shift to the study, fire
up the iMac, pour another
cuppa joe, & sit down
to type these lines in,
maybe revise a poem or
two, pack the next boat
to send down Oran’s
Well. Then -- the day:
A shower, some chow,
then up I go to lay next
to my wife’s indigo
cool-cotton sleep. Hopefully
we’ll wake together there,
and assemble at that
shore from which we
must both embark,
me out into the labors
of the day in corporate
trenches, paying the bills,
scansions further out
where my parents age
and God turns the page.
A name for this visit,
this travel and rappel
to a holy dark and back?
Another poem, another
splash on morning stones
which soon will gleam
in hot summer’s first light,
and catch the distant
croon of some wave’s
recessional foam.

BLUE GRAMMAR (2003)

The most ancient witness to
grammatical teaching in Ireland
is to be found in the little manual
called Ars Asporii (or Apseri)
... ((this book)), in stark contrast
to the wholly secular tone of its
model ((the Ars Minor of Donatus)),
derives from the ascetic world
of sixth-century Irish monasticism.

- Daibhi O Croinin,
Early Irish Monasticism

While I sat in classrooms
pickling in the drone
of American grammar
-- the official Latin of
verb-subject agreements
and modifiers rescued
from their dangling
precipices -- She was
writing it down in my
ear some other way,
a brogue inside my
writing’s new arches and
tenons, turning nouns
into nipples jazzing motions
I couldn’t master, only
ride. Before me all the
fixtures of learning
were composed and steady --
my book opened wide,
a #2 pencil in my hand
copying down the forms
on lined paper in a rough
miniscule, the late-
morning hush striated
with boredom and
hunger and a free-floating
toothed angst. On one
level it was all a
cultural Latin the way
it must be learned,
line after line, correct
and succinct, either
to be admired or strafed
with red ink: Yet further
down I wrote in Vulgate
about the places I
dreamed or sought
or would but dare not go:
My hands round the back
of the girl sitting in front
of me cupping new breasts,
fighting the evil one in
his lab far at sea,
swaggering nude
in the locker room
with a cock twice as
big as my own, three
times, no, four, shaming
all they boys with my
hammerlike stylus.
She was re-writing
the story the world
bid me learn
in a grammar which
shattered those schoolhouse
walls. There, in the midst
of such strict schooling
(if strict it ever was)
an infernal ars was
copied from the ass
of true love -- forms I’ll
never quite learn,
swimming away on
every sweet wave, a
language always just
out of reach, laughing,
cajoling, calling me home.
Of it I here write
in rooms far below
the cathedral which
pays for everything else.

Shore (Feb. 16, 2005)

2005-02-16T04:32:00.001-08:00

A shore is as narrow
as the reach from
heart to God or my
lips to yours. It’s
strict as margins
go: a ligament of
incessant pulse
I keep returning to,
bound by an ache
I can resist no
abler than requite,
no matter how many
times here I’ve tried.
So my Theme is
like a corset of
rhyme foaming at
my feet, constraining
wild-bosomed and
salt-bottomed life
to the rigors of
one walk between
the crash and ebb
of unforgettable
nights and dry days
whose ears are harrowed,
like conch-shells,
with that distant,
unrelenting sound.
Perhaps you, fair
reader -- could such
a thing exist in this
world of long-drowned
books -- perhaps you
would rather I
just let these puppies
breathe and loose
my verbals wild and
free to roam the nooks
of the free world --
to write not one but
ten thousand Themes.
Sorry -- I have
ravened on the world
that way, my taste
for bluelettes only
whetted with each
bouree, scarcely tasting
the sea-depths welling there.
No, I have settled
down and married here
to walk my daily course,
penning in wet verse
a narrow peramble
down a page’s whiter shore
singing between dead
silence and the next
wave’s wild-maned course.
Its rise and fold and
long rolling boom tasks
the next poem with
providing enough room
for grapes and hooves,
erotics and rhetorics,
a splash of lactate wash
and fins of first fire
spilling in your womb,
siring sirens and
madmen maddened
by the sound of gloamings
stretched on a surf’s
hot loom and you
astraddle my singular
device crooning
Dylan, Dylan -- my
older, saltier, wave
wandering name.
Well, that’s
the endless labor
of my shore’s benighting,
my predawn perambling
Theme. And if I am
bound too tightly to
these sands, swaddled for
much darker beds
than those tiny creakers
you woke then left
me on, then may my
doom prove resonant
for the eternals gathered
here. The sound of
tides is so riven
in my tribe’s ears
that no one ever
walked here that
didn’t wash away,
trying for the rest
of their blue years
(where one love
pours the sands of time)
to find a way to
sing inside a
savage toil and
bind back all
loosened hearts
into one kiss.

Every walk here is a rebirth

2005-02-16T04:32:00.000-08:00

The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and the relentless drive of life. each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meaning, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings.

-- Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea

Beauty (2003)

2005-02-16T04:31:00.001-08:00

Let’s say that beauty is an analogue
for the organs of rebirth. That desire
and its consummations are a homewarding
boat which can—sometimes—cross water.
It is piano jazz on a summer afternoon.
It is my wife’s shape turned away from me
in sleep, curved into the softest wave.
It is our cat staring out at late rain and then
back at me with such blue so naked eyes.
Each encounter with beauty blends the next
source with some other, earlier swoon—my
mother’s voice become the sea’s, the
wash of night storms draining through this poem.
You walk the beach at first light, alone in stilled
immensity, and see ahead a washed-up, gleaming shell.
Pick it up and hold it in your hand, reading its
strange sweetness like a map to a distant aching
land where your first love smiles ankle-deep in
a warm tide. To know beauty is to valve
a heart that beats below its name. Ten
thousand beauties harbor in the day, each
a chapel of salt and flame, urging you to begin.

The Shore

2005-02-16T04:31:00.000-08:00

... tonight we make a soft
Parenthesis upon the sand’s black bed.
In that dream we share, there is
One shore, what we look out upon nothing
And the earth our whole lives.
Where what is left between shore and sky
Is traced in the vague wake of
(The stars, the sandpipers whistling)
What we forgive. If you wake soon, wake me.

-- David St. John, “The Shore”

Sea-weeding, -wedding

2005-02-16T04:30:00.000-08:00

It is a true saying that memory is like the seaweed when the tide is in — but the tide ebbs. Each frond, each thick spray, each fillicaun or pulpy globe, lives lightly in the wave; the green water is full of strange rumours of sea-magic and sea-music: the hither flow and the thither surge give continuity and connection to what is fluid and dissolute. But when the ebb is far gone, and the wrack and the week lie sickly in the light, there is only one confused, intertangled mass. For most of us, memory is this tide-pool strand: though for each there are pools, or shallows where even the ebb does not lick up in it thirsty way depthward — narrow overshadowed channels to which we have the intangible clues.

— Fiona MacLeod, “Morag of the Glen”
from “Dominion of Dreams”

The small waves (Pamela Milweed)

2005-02-16T04:29:00.001-08:00

… Just as the small waves came where no waves came,
unending as the peaceful turn of fish,
breaking the still level of morning
until by noon we half forgot the sea
had ever been a taut and hazy skin,
so resting on the shore we kept the motion.
At calm we found we rocked on air
the long day's waves, were not surprised
come evening we played whale, spewed softened brine,
rolled effortless and mammoth through the night
.
- Pamela Millweed, "Just As The Small Waves Came Where No Waves Came"

Closing the Castaway Bar (1988)

2005-02-16T04:29:00.000-08:00

Oh fuck it all, he sighs, and so cuts his sleek black
car through the night. It's cool inside. Nothing intrudes.
Instruments on the dash glow green their phosphor
ghosting his hands. The radio plays old songs.
Miles of road thread back into the corrupt interior.

Home is behind, a throttle of malls and
the ceaseless traffic of broken things.
A battered rondo of bars and bottle clubs.
He flees for the ocean like some latter-day Jonah,
scheming rebirth in the pink cerulean surf of morning.

He enters the beachside town. Streetlights approach
and fan over the windshield. Lowering the window:
the ocean night crowds in warm and briny gusts.
The street deadends at a bar called The Castaway.
Yards away surf wrestles the shore. The bar is decorated

with fishing nets and sweet curving conch shells.
He finds an empty stool next to a battered bar.
The barmaid takes a shine to him and buys him shots
of tequila. The gold fangs pierce, glow. He talks
openly with her as he does when drink and sex coil
his heart late at night. Nice ocean haul, he thinks.
Of course, any mermaid will do. Must do.

The hours dissolve darkly to closing time. He finds himself
laying on a table close to the surf. Muscular breezes work
the naked beach. A zipper of silver paves black water
to a zenith moon. He remembers the barmaid and the bruise
on his cheek. Gulls slide overhead like beggar angels.

Is this night the belly of the whale? Even in his stupor,
he’s sure it is. The poor beast lurches and rolls,
swims shitfaced, nauseated utterly by him. What did
he expect? He's the worm at the bottom of every
bottle. He sighs wearily. Same guts, different bar.

The ocean sings to him in wind and surf like
a mother's soft birthday song. Rising out of nothing's breakers.
He feels he should join in, too, sing back brokenly and
tearful, but his tongue is like whale fat. Doesn't matter, though,
because the sea isn't singing for him, any way, nor nor for the

locked door of the bar, not for the gull that’s crapped on his chin,
nor the hard breezy night. Not for the all world's dark shore.
But will our hero ever learn? What? is his last thought there on the
table, lulled by the boneless choir of the sea. Fade to black
as our hero descends the welcoming gullet.

Water Serpents (David St. John)

2005-02-16T04:28:00.000-08:00

Beneath the lit silk of your naked body
When you move your bones move like nervous water snakes
A complicated Medusan nest of rippling eels
Currents in the dawn river
My own body littered by broken limbs of almond sunlight
As your breath uncoils its music & anxious histories of sexual pride
Echo from the hotel room next door
As our own pasts rise through the water like sacred filaments
& 'in our dead lovers' eyes we can recall
Woman upon woman upon man swirling in a pool of memorylessness
& upon the shore the day arrives entwined in its sisterly mass of red hair
Those brash & roiling fields of ruby kelp where
The dark sailor's body is found

Bindings (2000)

2005-02-16T04:27:00.001-08:00

The etymology
of the word “religion”
suggests a ligament
(ligare) which binds
us back (re) to God: The
Christian binding sucks,
tut-tutting with a
threat of hell any
gambols in cherrycoke
tits & rye: But the
Church has continued
to provide community
for many, its faith
wrapping the bone
and sinew of strong
& committed good:
For me, the Church
has long died,
sacrificed perhaps at
the altar which
broke my parents’
marriage: But the
notion of religare
is still potent:
Marriage has provided
such a ligament for
me for ten of the
past 12 years: Held
in place there, I’ve been
free to roam here:
I’ve launched so
many poems
from the stability of
my study in a house
with a wife asleep
upstairs & a cat
purring at my feet:
Poems which tested
and questioned the
bindings of a marriage
though I always shut the book
and headed upstairs
to stroke my wife awake
when it was time, taking
solace & comfort in
that mutual breathing warmth:
Now I’m separated from my
wife and these lines
sound like a torn ligament:
The spaces are now
too wide and wild
to get on the page:
Free to roam, I don’t
know how or where
to start or even if
I want to: There is only
the rages of emotion
in my torn heart:
Well, these poems may
be bad and worse
until I can find the
ligament below or
inside this ruptured one:
I’ve got to find rituals
and nuptials and
ablutions devout enough
for the stronger
rivers I now flounder in:
Maker, renew
me in the binds
where truth and craft
are sworn and further:

Marriage (2002)

2005-02-16T04:27:00.000-08:00

Time bruised us with its
white knuckles. Death loss
death loss loss loss loss,
those bone ridges
tapped on the pane like
a cruelly insistent breeze.
Days were a sewage of
grief, its tide sucking at
our ankles, hauling us out.
But we didn’t go.
Instead we chose to keep
working at this together.
Sorting it out. Opening
all the doors, building
on what we had, not what
we’d lost. That’s how
marriage survives to this
day: our accomplishment
lies in the thousand minor
moments when we chose to
open the shade and let
it all in. Because we began,
today we begin. Not much
smarter but so much more
alive. Even though it hurts
and hopes are yet small.

The Triple Marriage (2003)

2005-02-16T04:22:00.000-08:00

Love and its lust
have always rounded
me to You, whether
rising the glass staircase
of sweet devotion
or swirling down
the whirlpool of
the worst desires.
Both are Your tides,
like high and low Mass,
the one intoned
in the Latin of sweet
verse, the other
a vulgate hissed
through a bitch’s
teeth, mid-swoon,
full cursed. I have
lived and loved at
both ends, the
brown child of
high summer
and winter’s alley
cat. Today I believe
You wound me both
ways in your
perplex bed, like
alternating paps
of honey and gall
where the sweetness
always jissomed
bitter days, and the
dark could prove
infernal and so
endlessly wild. --
You hummed in
my heart three
melodies (or maladies):
With, without, and
some murky shore
between or beyond,
rife in the bittersweet
blues of lifelong
exile in the heart’s Paree,
always one surer step
shy of Your permanent
thighs. The worse time
was when I wanted
both high and low
real fruit at once,
and sought to limn
a life with two
real loves. I mean
that season when
I tried to maintain
a marriage gone chaste
and dry while
whetting my whistle
downtown with an
other woman who
hungered dark as I.
I wove those days
in a terrified funk,
incensed and guilty,
secretive, desperate
to keep the order
and sense of high
love’s happy home
while growing ever
more addicted to
a sugar malt that
was bubbling up
from a distaff well
I would not, then
could not close.
The awfulness of
infidelity full whored
me as I lathered
the air around my
wife with lies; when
I came home at
night she sometimes
sensed the rages
behind my husbandly
soft smile, and would
ask, Is everything OK?
And the words would
gush like violins--
-- fine my love,
this life with you
everything, all I
ever dreamed of one
day living in. The
words were true
in one half of
heart and thus
perilous, and the
bulk of what I did
not say right then
grew muskier
and more fatal
every day I zipped
my lips tight. O God
I’d pray in the darkness
of our bed those
nights, teach me
how to love right.
And then the next day,
back at work downtown,
I’d type cock amd
balls on the keyboard
and send them to
that other who
took every word
and swallowed them
with a dreamy smile.
More, she’d always
reply. All ways more.
How could I resist
such assy ear?
My wife could hardly
bear to read a
word I’d put to paper.
(So sad, she’d say.)
And so, after months
I could dam the sea
no more and let
the wave-shapes roar
across a foreign,
damned bed, and so
began the fall in which
I lost wife and home
and every shred of
sense -- nearly lost
it all. You received
me in that cold dark
season of reckless,
costly thrills, in
an even colder bed --
further down than my
mortal wrong headedness
could go. I recall a
January day awaking
in that wrong woman’s
bed after drinking
most of the night
and fucking for just
about the rest -- How
cold and gray and
windswept the day
as it blew clear through
my ravaged heart,
the life I had chosen
so destitute of
choice, so emptied
of every good emotion
as to drown me there --
Yet still the dark
in me cried More!,
some worser part of
my heart in
love with the awfulness
of it all, the booze
without all measure,
the hard menacity
of the sex (fanglike
in its plunge, all
greed, insatiate,
plundering the full
receipt of need).
I remember coming
to the rest of my
life in the paupery
of that day, thinking
of my ex-wife in our
ex-house with our
ex-cat staring out
the window toward
where I’d disappeared,
all of that so many
miles away on
some island I’d fully
lost, my every high
wish for love and
every hard labor
I’d engaged for it
lost in my leap
into this infernal
bed with the woman
you crowned there
just like any other,
only wounded
more in every sexual
way which gifted
ear and pen to
plead with otherness
the same way somehow
I yet bled. -- I was
her demon lover
and she mine, and every
day and night we
stole together was
some theft of every
good grace a soul
might one day work
under -- Well, that
affair lasted long
enough to help
me tasted enough the
booze that losing
always brews. It sank
of its own accord
and, some months
later, up at my old
house to help my wife
with chores while
we figured out how to
go about divorce, my
wife and I realized
that we didn’t want
to lose what we had
worked for, no matter
how much it was
that we had already
forever lost. And so
my travels back
to home began. Two
and a half years later,
we’ve come a long
ways. This morning
as cold winds blow
outside, the house
inside is warm in
so many anchoring
ways -- The Christmas
tree we slowly decorate
adding new ornaments
with the year: The cat
upstairs and the kits
in the guest room
and the mama cat
outside all circling
round our feeding
loving hands: The
bed upstairs where
my wife sleeps
and soon where
I will go, to stroke
her feet slowly
as she wakes for
the next work day.
We’re not yet
fully home; sometimes
I wonder if we can
ever get there. Last
night again my wife
asked me what
was wrong; and though
I knew with all
my heart that nothing
was, not now, I also
knew her worry
came from older
wrongs from nights
when was supposed
to be fine but surely
most awfully was not.
The shadows cast
from then to here
are mine, but You
are surely the bright
source, a lucid depth
which burns no
matter how I live.
My mortal loves have
all contended that
strange disorienting
voice inside my own
which surely is Yours;
it makes me sound
half-hearted, out of
sync with the day,
my loyalty a leaky,
riven thing where
wilder music on
some other shore
will always sing.
Well, this home is
one I pray to grow
oldest in, and so
these highs and lows
must live further
inside than the
mere and rawer angels
of embodied lust --
Your loins are a
beach where windswept
waves contend but
have no teeth, no
real woman to rend.
Perhaps that’s the
triune marriage you
have always been
sighing and singing
and signing for --
My one hand stroking
my wife’s real feet,
the other with
this pen stroking
up the choir
line after line
til you are also fine,
the shore between
high and low loves
like a ring I wear
around this heart.

Love and Poetry

2005-02-15T04:14:00.001-08:00

To pile like Thunder to its close
Then crumble grand away,
While everything created hid--
This would be Poetry:

Or Love--the two coeval came--
We both and neither prove,
Experience either, and consume-
For none see God and live.

-- Emily Dickinson

Third Shore (Feb. 15, 2005)

2005-02-15T04:14:00.000-08:00

Daily I walk this shore
of what cannot be yet is
amazed at all the blue
it takes to name the
silent depths of you. Some
days I recall the way I
walked that shore alone
and utterly washed by
your wet lips; other times
I think of how you stood
just so before the sea
in singular ecstasy
of my heart’s bigger,
albeit wetter half,
the half I graze and
altar yet dare not
fully breathe.
No two walks are
alike, though the
peramble is the same:
my butt here motionless
upon this writing chair
as the iambs trod down
and back, line by line
on down a page
not wide but oh
so deep, dowsing
til your salt rhetoric
has soused the daily
ache, a singing
man doused in brine
til every bone, every
writhe bereft of fin
is blue and wild
and fine, whatever
ends I started with
now bottomless, like
a descending magnum
of old wine. I walk on
down to where that
distant reach where
staid fixities greet
& mortar dripping walls,
ambiguities of wing
and wind, sea and land,
my hips to yours
exchanging fruit
we’ll never fully ripen
nor squeeze to
dregs of rind. And
there -- at that locus
of my walk which
has now grown
fully here -- there
yet here we meet again,
me a motion
of wavelike words
and you uncorsetted
of all but verbs, our
wash more pure
than ink or ichoring
balls -- a spiral
springlike spume
of spermacetti fire.
Between the worlds
we greet and kiss,
two-thirds strange
and one salt bliss,
irreconciled and
inconsolable and
worth each spilling
acre of these pages
in wild and worse abyss.
There and here in
this third world
which is both shore
and poem abed,
we sing in salutation
of the diurnally
sweet dead, those
lovers who didn’t
know they’d found
each other til the
tide had fully ebbed,
leaving tide pools
and tropes of love
to fade and bleach
and lathe this third
world’s loam of
blue-in-white sands.

Permeable Aesthetic

2005-02-15T04:13:00.001-08:00

Because of the dual existence of the lady as both perfection and an imperfect human being who shares the quest, the stress in Troubadour experience is on the phase leading up to union, in which uncertainty, jealousy, distance, cannot but rule. Love seems to have its own inner unpredictable law. “Love can descend,” says Robert de Ventadour, “wherever it may please her.” The lover declares his love without any claim on the beloved. “In love man has no dominion; who seeks it there serves woman basely. Love does not want what is unfitting.”

-- Jack Lindsay, The Troubadours and their world

Elusive Boundary

2005-02-15T04:13:00.000-08:00

For no two successive days is the shoreline precisely the same. Not only do the tides advance and retreat in their eternal rhythms, but the level of the sea itself is never at rest. It rises or falls as the glaciers melt or grow, as the floor of the deep ocean basin shifts under its increasing load of sediments, or as the earth’s crust along the continental margins warps up or down in adjustment to strain and tension. Today a little more land may belong to the sea, tomorrow a little less. Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary.

-- Rachel Carson, The Edge of The Sea

Bridging the Worlds

2005-02-15T04:12:00.000-08:00

Kulhwch first meets Olwen in the house where his mother’s sister and the giant Custennin live in matrimony, a house where two worlds join, and CuChulainn makes contact with Emer through a dialogue composed of riddles whereby two worlds are spoken of at once. In the Welsh story of Llyn y Fan, the lady from the lake refuses the hero’s offer of bread when she first appears before him, and again his offer of dough on her second appearance. When she appears the third time, he offers her half-baked bread -- bread which is at once baked and unbaked -- and with that the gulf between their two worlds are bridged.

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage

The Kelpie of Corryvreckan

2005-02-15T04:11:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, Beltane Eve rejoicings were going on at Moy, not far from Loch Buie in Mull. When the bonfires were blazing and the dancing and revelry were at a height, there appeared a young and handsome stranger, mounted on a white steed, who seized the loveliest of the village maidens, swung her ont the saddle before him, and galloped with her over mountain and moor to the dark sea-shore.

He then dismounted and asked the maiden if she would be his, "a so a chaoidh" (for evermore). Bewildered by this tempestuous wooing and weary after travelling the rocky road on horseback, the girl asked if he was taking her to some dwelling across the sea or if he had a ship waiting for her, as she would fain rest. To this he replied:

I have no dwelling beyond the sea,
I have no good ship waiting for thee.

Thou shalt sleep with me on a couch of foam
And the depths of the sea shall be thy home.

Only then did she realize she had been carried off by none other than the dreaded Kelpie of Corryvreckan, who could assume man's form at will. She turned his eyes on the horse and saw that its saddle was of seaweed, its bridle of pearl, and its bit of coral. Its man was like the froth of the waves, and as she gazed, it plunged into the billows and became one with the foam of the sea. Its erstwhile rider then seized her in his arms and bore her with him into the green depths. The maiden's shrieks were heard above the loud roaring of the blast as they sank.

Down to the rocks where the serpents creep,
Twice five hundred fathoms deep.

Next morning, a fisherman saw her corpse floating near the shore and recognized her by her lily-white skin and golden hair. She was buried under a rock on the shore with the dirge of the waves as her requiem. Every year, on Beltane eve, it is said that the Kelpie gallops across the green on his sea-horse swift as the wind, with the mournful ghost of a maiden held fast on the saddle before him.

-- from Murray, Scottish Sea Stories

Feather (Feb. 14, 2005)

2005-02-14T04:04:00.001-08:00

Spare me the violins,
the labia of surf
at first summer’s light:
That was all about
beginning a work
which must drive
inland where the
feathered house
is built. Even what
beauty which adorns
these words is just
an isle of beautiful
facets and compelling
cleavage, signalling
that difficulty is
the more worthy
embrace, the thorns
no more savage
than that first kiss.
I’m weary of beaches,
Lord, the incessant
lucent trombones
that fold and crash
at the door & the
long tweezing recedes
signifying nothing.
The Beloved is long
gone from all this,
leaving only her
blue feathered gown
strewn at my feet
like tide at a shore
or plumage of
a seal-queen whose
fins are just
the wetter feathers
of a soul from an
island at the center
of the greater half
of a heart. Can one
ever grow old in
this incessant
sawing in two
the margins of
unsayable bliss?
Certainly I have no
better proof or
knowledge of salt
dreams than these
white shores which
turn, like pages,
into islands of
foam and ebb,
depleted, full-said,
spumed and harrowed
once again, for better
or just for verse.
Do tidals resent
their employ, or
whales their
lonely song?
My audience is
between my ears,
some amening
choir of dead
lovers and drowned
singers, filling up
the rear of Love’s
cathedral at the
bottom of the sea.
Mine is just to
lend one tenor
like a feather
to their winging song --
one sharp ululate
of a deep-diving
& perplex joy,
gathered from
the absence of you,
like a bite of the
most forbidding
ripened fruit by
an unrepentant
insubstantial
soon-to-find-shore
dazed & dazzled boy.

Boundless Love

2005-02-14T04:04:00.000-08:00

If we view the audacity and the excess of the hero from this standpoint, he seems to personify not only the initiate but also the inner meaning of initiation. He is the victory, the embodiment of a spirit which no boundaries can contain.

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage,

Wooing the Worlds

2005-02-14T04:03:00.001-08:00

(((When CuChulainn woos Emer he must work his way through her hostile father Forgall Monach, nephew of Tethra, the king of the primordial Formaire))

Though Fergall’s fortress was in Ireland, the journey there was a metaphorical adventure into a mysterious world. Conversing in riddles with Emer, CuChulainn says that he passed the night in “the house of a man who calls the cattle of the plain of Tethra” ((from the sea)), and he has come “between the Two Props of the Woodland, from the Darkness of the Sea, over the Great secret of the Men of the Gods, over the Foam of the Two Steeds of Emain, over the valley of the Great Ox, between the God and his Prophet, over the marrow of the Woman Fedelm, between the Bear and his Dam, over the washing-place of the Horses of the Gods, between the King of Ana and his serpent, to the food storehouse of the Four Corners of the World, over the Great Ruin and the Remnants of the Great Feast, between the Vat and the Little Vat, to the Daughters of the Champion of Tethra, king of the Fomoire, to the Gardens of Lug.”

When the hero goes a-wooing, the drive from Ulster to Brega becomes a ceremonial progress into the world beyond.

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage

Fish-Tale (Feb. 11, 2005)

2005-02-14T04:03:00.000-08:00

I have made of that old
adventure wooing
you a fish-tale,
the bedded bliss
become an isle that
walked or swam but
most certainly got
full away. The story has
grown fins then flukes
in its retellings,
found a wavelike
slap-and-sloshing resonance,
the sound of crashing
shores I only dreamed
back then, tidally
awakened in your arms
at last. All that remains
is that sound -- a semblance
of wild love which is both
spring river and trembling
bridge, both love and
lover pouring forth in
one gout of song the
three hearts which no
actual kiss may staunch,
much less damn, the
way sea-walls may jetty
sand chapels for a time
but the sea swells
tide the ends of every
ocean to full blue.
Of that short time
that broke all my clocks
I now endlessly return,
and walk, like a shore,
up and down its ghostly
reaches, performing
stations of devotion
on the way. Here fresh
on the beach I drove
off into the night
an emptied, riven man --
Here by this stump of
broken mast I stood
at the bar, pounding
down three shots of
blue lactissima -- Here
by the moonlit mash
of waves I met you,
your face averted to
the band, your breasts
rising from a lacy blouse
to imprison me between
the ocean and its heavings,
the high heart’s saltiest
retrievings. And here
on a stretch of
shattered whelks and
scattered, sprawled weeds
is where we thrashed
together in one wilding
spume, a shout which
rang the bells of heaven
and returned, forever
seared and scarred by
your lips, or mine, or
some wakened pair,
delivered by the sea
and ghosting every each
and croon inside every
tidal day long since.
My fish-tale has made of
me the tunny, elusive
and sea-wise, the slipperiest
half of soul no man
may mount and vaunt,
the prize more priceless
every time I reel the
telling out. The one
that got away became
the tail in every wave,
a sea-wife who sings
below, our children in
these darkling verses,
swans of riven undertow,
a dark gleam of moonlight
on massed waters, the
brilliant folded crash
we found and woke together
that one night, now
every night to wash
the shores I dream.
My myth grows deeper
every time I sing
that mythic night,
like the ocean filling
everything the moon
left in its wake.
Have I told you about
that night when
from the deepest sea
a woman roused
the depths of me?

Beauty and Her Plunging Breast

2005-02-14T04:02:00.000-08:00

The Troubadour ... saw himself as moving to an ever greater freedom. The less he asserted his own will, the more he accepted that of his lady, which was seen as a rule emanating from pure Beauty. Thus his union with a higher level of life (a higher level than his own self) was assured; he leaped into a new dimension where the dichotomy of law and freedom, rule and will, was overcome.

But in fact this position, which hypostasised the lady and destroyed her individuality, was all the while contraverted by the conviction of equality in love, by the acceptance of her as a real person who was also struggling forward.

-- Jack Lindsay, The Troubadours and their world

Marriage (Feb. 12, 2005)

2005-02-14T04:01:00.001-08:00

The man you formed
of wave and wind
awoke one day
in a woman’s arms
far from land
and a lubber’s verbs,
fanned in sparkling
blue. Baptized a
third time in
the waters of
God, I was healed
of one divine
wound and
thus maddened in
the next, questing
years to never quite
find you again,
not in any way
I dreamed. Yet here
in this married home
I have learned
to love you best
as may a mortal
man of modest means,
my love a sum
almost adequate
for my actual wife
whose life and work
rests folded in her
sleep upstairs before
the next hard
day. My questing
has subtracted
her from the blue
main though heart
for her alone is my
vow, the two
worlds kept separate
as the out- and inner
bands of a gold
ring on my betrothing
finger. Two connubials
I shore and shire
and gender forth
with every fire a
man of my years
and truth can steal
and forge and
husband. Perhaps
the wrong quest
ends each time
I shout this book
and join my wife in
our bed of daily nails,
to work and work
some more then drowse
at the long day’s end,
scant inches from
where we started,
our principal
scant paid down,
the ache requited
just enough
to keep the distance
blue. Who’s to say
the rowing here
and the loving there
are not greater halves
of heart no man
may master, much
less ascertain,
though his life
is shaped that way,
a shore of infinite
hosannas and just a
sigh to hold it all,
kiss enough to
valve the darkness
and bless the mess
on day further down
the the starry fate
you minted in me
that morning long ago,
when love was startling
and pure and wild as
sea horses and their
undertowing hearses go

House of Wings

2005-02-14T04:01:00.000-08:00

In Echtra Mecik Cuind -- “The Adventure of Art son of Conn” -- (the surviving text is dated post-1200 AD) -- Conn, having sailed on the ocean without knowledge or guidance, reaches an island full of fragrant apple-trees, delicious nuts and wells full of wine. He sees a hall which is thatched with white, yellow and blue birds’ wings. He is given food and wine without knowing who has fetched them for him.

In the second part of the text Conn’s son Art also reaches an island after roaming the ocean. This island is again full of apples, birds, and flowers, and has a noble and hospitable house in the middle of the island. The house is thatched with white and purple birds’ wings; inside dwell a company of beautiful women.

It would seem that the presence of a house thatched with birds’ feathers in a paradise was a conventional motif in Irish travel stories which the Voyage
((of St. Brendan)) author probably picked up and incorporated in his work.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

Tuion ("Singing Robe") (2001)

2005-02-14T04:00:00.000-08:00

There is the poet
in his feathered robe,
reciting the lays
of a flight which descend
into the deep ends
of our dim daily rounds.
Harrowing and precarious
the inside of every
common vault -- love,
quests, otherwordly
encounters written
in a secular font.
Such inwardings
would strip a verseless
person raw as beef:
His metres are like
feathers on an earnest
wing which sees all
in passing, greeting
the ogre on the road
without haste or without
stopping. Such songs
are a matter
of imbalance and
importunity -- qualities
no one else tethers
to such royal gain.
Not that he has any
better luck in the
goings of a life:
the worm gnaws every
human bone. Notice how
the brusies beneath his eyes
map a wearied encounter
with that paupering muse.
No, the poet is only
a zooted-up courier from
the high aeries of the heart,
a king’s moist mistress sighing
his praises from the gauzy
bowers of his lays.
His boat is poetry and
he ferries us across the
divide in each of us
between our language
and ecstasies. It’s a common
enough trade, no more
distinguished than
motleyed fool or
dancing sickleman.
They’re all attendants
in the house of thrall:
his specialty is simply
to beat those wild wings
over the sea in us
which too saltily and deeply sings,
and sing that music back.

Esplumoir By The Sea (2003)

2005-02-14T03:59:00.000-08:00

I wade out each morning
into a foam of rhyme
and down a metered stair
to soak up the darkness
that tides holy there --
A presence so great
as to negate its own
shape, a redress which
fills the hollow ache
of my voice through a life.
Sea and well are both
sound and swell of its
mordents, the splash
and boom of some great
drowned room, deep
within the Jack-O-Lantern’s
raw grin. Last night
the rising moon was
postcard of old boo,
orangey and sieved
by a scum of fleet clouds,
a cantankerous night
for the soul, aggrieved
by wearies and worries
that ferried low in our sleep,
making our bed a
dreamscape of that toil,
and shaping these matins
white as a bone sail.
Dear God, I prayed on
achy knees, lower this
cup and fill to the lees.
Teach me something
of that rooty oak tree
which warrants and
wards the wild primal sea.
Molt in its leafage a
durable, clean page,
& write leaf out of root
a legible, wet rage
for wind in the rafters
and surf in bright swoon
heaved up by huge depths
& dazzled by moon.

Seeking Beauty

2005-02-14T03:58:00.000-08:00

While Art son of Conn is playing fidchell at Tar with his stepmother Becuma (a woman from the Land of Promise), the sid-men steal his pieces and he loses the game. Becuma lays a geis on him to search for Delbchaem (“Fair-Shape”), daughter of Morgan, who dwells on an isle amid the sea. He sets out and finding a coracle on the shore he travels in it from island to island until at last he comes to a strange island full of apple-trees and lovely birds and bees, where a company of ever-beautiful women dwell, in a house thatched in bird-feathers and equipped with a crystal bower and inexhaustible vats. Among the women is Creide Firalaind (“Truly Beautiful”). She gives him a splendid mantle ((of feathers, like a tuion??)), and, seeing that it fits him, she welcomes him as Art son of Conn -- “and it is long since thy coming has been decreed.” As he takes his leave after six weeks, she warns him of the perils ahead and how to deal with them. “There is sea and land between you (and her, Delbchaem) ... there is a great dark ocean between you, and deadly and hostile is the way there; for that wood is traversed as though there were spear-points of battle under one’s feet, like leaves of the forest under the feet of men” ...

-- Alwyn & Brinsley Rees, Celtic Heritage

Jacob's Ladder (Feb. 10, 2005)

2005-02-10T04:11:00.000-08:00

No one knows where
this ladder goes, nor
even much sees its
isle to isle travail;
yet each shore is
certainly a rung
which greets the foot
with iambs of wild
blue, changing both
voyage and its pilot
into a deeper, stranger
meld, old firmaments
confused and waking
less solitary or
solid than ever.
See: my hand here
on the page has become
a ferryman of sorts,
hauling the next day’s
sentience from one mind
to some other, its
end wrapped further
in fish-tails and riot,
the mysteries entangled
there at once history
and poetry and you.
Each travel here
is another rung on
some rising or falling
stair, depending on
which way I clasp
the wave which crashes
everywhere you
curve and curl and
leaven. I hardly
recognize the singer
any more after
all the songs, his
patronage a soak,
his origins revoweling
for new ends no one
knows the breadth
or depth or heft of.
No one knows which
ladder that they climb,
nor whether even next
steps were meant to
be taken in the span
of just one life:
No one sees the last
rung or is allowed
to report on back
the view -- surely the
widest span of blue --
one unlike any espied
from a masthead or
tossed bed, deeper
and wilder than any
shore this pen will
reach and name, though
each day I try again.
Perhaps ten thousand
ladders in one work
will get me high enough
to graze that wild night
when all heaven broke
out in a tumult of angel
wings - or was it a spring
river? -- ten thousand
lives ago: And there
upon that daring ledge
find grip enough to
find the rung which
rises and voyages on
beyond what that
one kiss began.

The Antipodes of Jerusalem

2005-02-10T04:10:00.000-08:00

Dante's Purgatory is a lofty island-mountain, the only land in the southern Hemisphere, at the antipodes of Jerusalem. On the lower irregular slopes are the souls whose penitence has, for some reason, been delayed in life and whose purgation is now delayed. Above that is the base of Purgatory proper, the place of active purgation, which consists of seven level terraces surrounding the mountain and rising one above another, connected by stairways in the rock.

On these terraces the seven deadly sins are purged by penance from the souls that have been beset by them. On the summit of the mountain is the Garden of Eden, or Earthly Paradise, from which the purged souls ascend to Heaven.

The Divine Ladder (Trad.)

2005-02-10T04:09:00.001-08:00

Unto each mortal who comes to earth
A ladder is given by God at birth
And up this ladder every soul must go,
Step by step from the Valley below;
Step by step to the Center of space,
On this ladder of lives, to the Starting place.

In time departed (which yet endures)
I shape my ladder, and you shape yours,
Whatever they are—they are what we made
A ladder of light, or a ladder of shade,
A ladder of love, or a hateful thing,
A ladder of strength, or a wavering string.

A ladder of gold, or a ladder of straw,
Each is a ladder of righteous Law.
We flung them away at the Call of Death,
We took them again with the next life breath.
For a Keeper stands at the great birth gates;
As each soul passes, its ladder waits.

Tho mine be narrow, and yours be broad,
On my ladder alone can I climb to God.
For none may borrow and none may lend.
If toil and trouble and pain are found,
Twisted and corded to form each round,
If rusting iron our mouldering wood

Is the fragile frame, you must make it good;
You must build it over and fashion it strong,
Tho the task be as hard as your life is long;
For up this ladder the pathway leads
To earthly pleasures and spirit needs;
And all that may come in another way
Shall be but illusion and will not stay

In useless effort, then waste not time;
Rebuild your ladder, and Climb and Climb.

The Mountain of the Everlasting

2005-02-10T04:09:00.000-08:00

St Brendan, son of Finnlug Ua Alta, of the race of Eoghan, was born in the marshy district of Munster He was famed for his great abstinence and his many virtues, and was the patriarch of nearly three thousand monks. While he was in his spiritual war-fare, at a place called Ardfert-Brendan there came to him one evening, a certain father, named Barinthus, of the race of King Niall, who, when questioned by St Brendan, in frequent converse, could only weep, and cast himself prostrate, and continue the longer in prayer; but Brendan raising him up, em-braced him, saying: ‘Father, why should we be thus grieved on the occasion of your visit? Have you not come to give us comfort? You ought, indeed, make better cheer for the brethren. In God’s name, make known to us the divine secrets, and refresh our souls by recounting to us the various wonders you have seen upon the great ocean.’ Then Barinthus, in reply, proceeds to tell of a certain island: ‘My dear child, Mernoc, the guardian of the poor of Christ, had fled away from me to become a solitary, and found, nigh unto the Stone mountain, an island full of delights. After some time I learned that he had many monks there in his charge, and that God had worked through him many marvels. I, therefore, went to visit him, and when I had approached within three days’ journey, he, with some of the brethren, came out to meet me, for God had revealed to him my advent. As we sailed unto the island the brethren came forth from their cells towards us, like a swarm of bees, for they dwelt apart from each other, though their intercourse was of one accord, well grounded in faith, hope, and charity; one refectory; one church for all, wherein to-discharge the divine offices. No food was served but fruits and nuts, roots and vegetables of other kinds. The brethren, after compline, passed the night in their respective cells until the cock-crow, or the bell tolled for prayer. When my dear son and I had traversed the island, he led me to the western shore, where there was a small boat, and he then said: ‘Father, enter this boat, and’ we will sail on to the west, towards the island called the Land of Promise of the Saints, which God will grant to those who succeed us in the latter days.’

- Nauigatio sancti Brendani abbatis [the Voyage of St Brendan the Abbot],Transl. Denis O’Donoghue, 1893

Jacob's Ladder in the Middle Ages

2005-02-10T04:07:00.000-08:00

Early in the monastic system there had been set out the idea of a progressive movement upwards, imagined in terms of the ascent of Jacob’s Ladder. To go up represented humility, to go do, pride. But at first the steps were defined as signs or tokens of humility, not as stages of growth. With the second half of the eleventh century came the various social malaises that stirred a desire for the life of a hermit: an acute inner conflict with a new need of solitariness. Even the old Benedictine orders were affected, for instance in Anselm. In his account of the Ladder he recasts the twelve rungs mentioned in the Rule and turns the Ladder into the Mountain: the rungs become seven steps, which are set out in a more logical order, with greater stress on the inner life. The corporate element in monastic life is played down and the steps are seen as concerned with the individual who struggles alone with himself, through self-knowledge, grief, confession, persuasion of guilt, acquiescence in judgment, suffering or punishment, love of punishment.

-- Jack Lindsay, The Troubadours and their world

The Hermit on the Rock

2005-02-09T04:23:00.000-08:00

from Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis [the Voyage of St Brendan the Abbot], transl. Denis O’Donoghue

St Brendan afterwards made sail for some time towards the south, in all things giving the glory to God. On the third day a small island appeared at a distance, towards which as the brethren plied their oars briskly, the saint said to them: “Do not, brothers, thus exhaust your strength. Seven years will have passed at next Easter, since we left our country, and now on this island you will see a holy hermit, called Paul the Spiritual, who bas dwelt there for sixty years without corporal food, and who for twenty years previously received his food from a certain animal.”

When they drew near the shore, they could find no place to land, so steep was the coast; the island was small and circular, about a furlong in circumference, and on its summit there was no soil, the rock being quite bare. When they sailed around it, they found a small creek, which scarcely admitted the prow of their boat, and from which the ascent was very difficult.

St Brendan tol. the brethren to wait there until he returned to them, for they should not enter the island without the leave of the man of God who dwells there. When the saint had ascended to the highest part of the island, he saw, on its eastern side, two caves opening opposite each other, and a small cup-like spring of water gurgling up from the rock, at the mouth of the cave in which the soldier of Christ dwelt.

As St Brendan approached the opening of one of the caves, the venerable hermit came forth from the other to meet him, greeting him with the words: “Behold how good and how pleasant for brethren to dwell together in unity.’’ And then he directed St Brendan to summon all the brethren from the boat. When they came he gave each of them the kiss of peace, calling him by his proper name, at which they all marvelled much, because of the prophetic spirit thus shown.
They also wondered at his dress, for he was covered all over from head to foot with the hair of his body, which was white as snow from old age, and no other garment had he save this.

St Brendan, observing this, was moved to grief, and heaving many sighs, said within himself: “Woe is me, a poor sinner, who wear a monk’s habit, and who rule over many monks, when I here see a man of angelic condition, dwelling still in the flesh, yet unmolested by the vices of the flesh.”

On this, the man of God said: “Venerable father, what great and wonderful things has God shown to thee, which He has not revealed to our saintly predecessors! and yet, you say in your heart that you are not worthy to wear the habit of a monk; I say to you, that you are greater than any monk, for the monk is fed and clothed by the labour of his own hands, while God has fed and clothed you and all your brethren for seven years in His own mysterious ways; and I, wretch that I am, sit here upon this rock, without any covering, save the hair of my body.”

Then St Brendan asked him about his coming to this island, whence he came, and how long be had led this manner of life. The man of God replied: “For forty years I lived in the monastery of St Patrick, and had the care of the cemetery. One day when the prior had pointed out to me the place for the burial of a deceased brother, there appeared before me an old man, whom I knew not, who said: “Do not, brother, make the grave there, for that is the burial-place of another.” I said’ ‘Who are you, father?’ ‘Do you not know me?’ said he. ‘Am I not your abbot?’ ‘St Patrick is my abbot,’ I said. I am he,’ he said; and yesterday I departed this life and this is my burial-place.’

He then pointed out to me another place, saying: ‘Here you will inter our deceased brother; but tell no one what I have said to you. Go down on to-morrow to the shore, and there you will find a boat that will bear you to that place where you shall await the day of your death.’ Next morning, in obedience to the directions of the abbot, I went to the place appointed, and found what he had promised. I entered the boat, and rowed along for three days and nights, andthen I allowed the boat to drift whither the wind drove it. On the seventh day, this rock appeared, upon which I at once landed, and I pushed off the boat with my foot, that it may return whence it had come, when it cut through the waves in a rapid course to the land it bad left.

‘On the day of my arrival here, about the hour of none, a certain animal, walking on its hind legs, brought to me in its fore paws a fish for my dinner, and a bundle of dry brushwood to make a fire, and having set these before me, went away as it came. I struck fire with a flint and steel, and cooked the fish for my meal; and thus, for thirty years, the same provider brought every third day the same quantity of food, one fish at a time, so that I felt no want of food or of drink either; for, thanks to God, every Sunday there flowed from the rock water enough to slake my thirst and to wash myself.

‘After those thirty years I discovered these two caves and this spring-well, on the waters of which I have lived for sixty years, without any other nourishment whatsoever. For ninety years, therefore, I have dwelt on. this island, subsisting for thirty years of these on fish, and for sixty years on the water of this spring. I had already lived fifty years in my own country, so that all the years of my life are now one hundred and forty; and for what may remain, I have to await here in the flesh the day of my judgment. Proceed now on your voyage, and carry with you water-skins full from this fountain, for you will want it during the forty days’ journey remaining before Easter Saturday. That festival of Easter, and all the Paschal. holidays. you will celebrate where you have celebrated them for the past six years, and after-wards, with a blessing from your procurator, you shall proceed to that land you seek, the most. holy of all lands; and there you will abide for forty days, after which the Lord your God will guide you safely back to the land of your birth.’

Third Isle (Feb. 8, 2005)

2005-02-09T04:22:00.000-08:00

There came a long dark season
when I tried to marry in both worlds,
loving my wife in the home we
daily made, and straying off to
woo your wild verbotens, daring
at the utmost peril to my first
and actual love just to press my
face into the saltiest curves
and mouth the dregs of you.
Errant fool, I strayed into the
woods from my path, chasing
glints and phosphor, first with
the mildest and most forgivable
of wrongs -- what man doesn’t
deserve a hearty peek into
the glade -- and then by silky-
so-savage degrees, my resolve
emboldened by the fire building
down below, I transgressed deep
and deeper til I was lost in
thrall, no husband anyone would
recognize by the wounded,
wicked lights he almed and
lamped and called. Daring to
leave home and dive full in
up to my neck in whiskey
and those loosened nights
where I found and flung
my heat’s desire, I ravened
far through lace and thorns,
the itch empurpled and
plunging me deep, down
to the sweetest abysms
a falling man could call.
Poor fool me, poor fucker,
poor asshole, poor souse:
my hard-fought house fell fast
in ruin like a collapse of poker
cards, leaving me a man most
without, self-abandoned on love’s
third isle, neither married
in my mind nor free in heart
to truly quest, much less sing
aptly enough those labials
I’d sacked all shores for.
Thus humbled and unhorsed,
I walked the million miles
home, a path I suspect will
thread the rest of my days.
God graced me to this third life
which harbors a third sea,
my song still riven to white
shores but loosed from
actual sands, literal tides,
much less too real metaphors
like dolphin riders or me
finding you on any distant
shore. Still the rhythms
of blue waves are hoof and
fin enough to write the music
down, the metrics of abandon
strict and strapping and
oh-so-bottomless. I suspect
I’ll hug this rock til Doomsday,
singing blue matins in both
penance and penury of
the delights which need no
riders to smash every ship
to shore, my Amens ever
freighted with the
next blue-belling More.

Dark's Dominion (In the Wedding Band)

2005-02-09T04:21:00.000-08:00

... whereas marriage is from the overt social point of view a happy and amicable affair uniting two people who wish to be united and establishing a new bond between two kindreds, myth and ritual are at one in proclaiming the converse of this view. Peaceful and friendly on the surface, marriage symbolizes the victory of a principle from an upper realm over the sinister powers of a lower one, a victory won on the conditions set by those powers themselves. The price is the emancipation from that lower relam of the opposite prinicple and the consummate union of the two.

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage

Outside the ritual the deeds of mythical heroes cannot be repeated by mortal men ... As events in ordinary life they are, as often as not, fantastic, anti-social, immoral and catastrophic. Yet ... it is one of the great paradoxes of human life that it derives its deepest meaning from a mytholigical realm the inhabitants of which conduct themselves in a way that is antithetical to what is normal in every-day behaviour and experience.

-- Rees & Rees, ibid

Sea-Roads (Feb. 9, 2005)

2005-02-09T04:20:00.000-08:00

No one said the sea roads to you
would be safe or sane or even
mortally true. The trackless
path has indeed unmade the man
like a bed unmans its riders,
one by one, along the sword-length
of that night not found on
any map of shores in this too-
faintly-blue world. Still your
lovers voyaged on, harp in one hand
and puckerpeckering heart in
the other, reckless exactly
where you dreamed of trespass,
the guards deceived and your
door unlocked in those hours
before dawn when a song
is pure plunge in curve, the
refrains dipped in angel-dragon
fire. You wove deceit and delight
like snakes around their
rousing staffs, the whole
enchantment greater than
the doom of priests and
the quartering horses now
whinnying softly in
dark stables. Yogis of
the first chakra, the least
of heaven’s lights, your
men burned brightest in
your eyes when transgressing
all the way to frame your door
and plunge right in, your
welcome like the curl of wave
which commences to crash
on down the aching shore,
a tumult of blue bliss.
Ah how their songs were
all ferried back from that far
land, like buckets from a
well, brimming over with
daze and dazzle, pierced
and stricken with the color
of your eyes, the glint
of moonlight in the sapphire
hanging between your
breasts as you heaved
your penultimate of sighs,
its facets cut and polished
by every wax and ebb
you’ve altared since lovers
have dared to dance a dream.
Centuries have long passed
and only the songs do
scant remain, a ghostly
choir in miniscule
on ancient parchment,
bereft now of all actual
sounds. Those refrains
down the page are like
markers, perhaps of shores,
perhaps of all the beds
which turned into doors
into vaster regions
far below, beneath all
oceans and most dreams,
where you are every
long-suffered ache inverted
and requited with a Yes,
and heaven is all it
seems when lips to
lips we slake the
hell we now undress.

Darkness Visible 1 (2000)

2005-02-08T04:09:00.000-08:00

Darkness visible when the woman
he didn’t know looked away.
Like the cool breeze which follows
sudden sunlight on the creek
or the underside of a sparrow’s wing
frightened off by your approach.
The heart turns both ways at once,
its walls permeable and true
only in alternation. The way grief
inlays the day with its mother-of-pearl,
translucent and gorgeous in
handing us too much to bear.
A woman I didn’t know glanced
and then looked away, and that was all:
A possibility perfect only in that chance,
brief, passing and now lost moment,
breaking me open with all the fervor
of bread fresh from the oven.
Darkness in how quickly she passed
into the fading dusk of memory,
a bell in an distant orchard
ringing thin but clear just after
the moon breaks like a heart to the west.

Darkness Visible 2 (2000)

2005-02-08T04:08:00.001-08:00

Darkness not that visible.
It wasn’t the fantasies
of getting drunk or bedding
strange women. Not the
actual tumble into ruin.
Not the reach or the fall,
but close. There is a darkness
next to dark shatter. The
murmur of shades on the rim,
their lacquered tongues
mournful and pure
like the last vespering bell
of the sea. I want to launch
boats all night on the waves
between as and is.
Glorying in the curves
whose rise cannot be seen
until they fall.

"God and Love do well agree" -- Troubadourish sentiments

2005-02-08T04:08:00.000-08:00

It is of interest that as the vital Troubadour tradition broke down ((in the 13th century)), the poets turned more and more to the Virgin, at times paraphrasing the Ave Maria or imitating Latin liturgies. We find the old concentrations of love on the Lady turned towards the Virgin. The poet expresses the devotion of a knightly servant to her. The Virgin is all beautiful and amiable; she lifts the worshipper up to perfection and never lets down his hopes. With a minimum of retouches the old conventions are used. G. Riquier and Bernart de Panassac are examples of the turn to Mary. The Dominicans, who had been the Inquisitors destroying southern culture, were great propagandists of the Marian cult; and the poems on her multiply after 1250. Near the beginning of the fourteenth century the system of her seven sorrows, seven joys, her plaint at the foot of the Cross, has been worked out. The same process changed the dawnsong of lovers into one of religious symbolism. The night is the darkness of sin, the dawn is the day of Christ. Peire Espanhol exemplifies this sort of thing.

One effect of the social forces begetting the Marian cult was a certain humanisation of God. In both cases we can see an upsurge of deep pagan elements kept alive at the popular level, linked with fertilitycults and their offshoots. In the Virgin the Earth-mother reasserts her self, and God too is swayed over to acceptance of sensuous love. In La Lai de l’Oiselet the wise Bird declares: “This truth then is recalled by me: God and Love do well agree. God loves honour and courtesy; and Love they please most thoroughly. God hates disdain and Falsity. Love holds them base in every way. God hearkens to those who truly pray. And Love won’t turn from such away.” Such statements, made by the early thirteenth century, would have been unthinkable a century before, except perhaps in a defiant refrain.

-- Jack Lindsay, The Troubadours and their world

God and Love (Feb. 7, 2005)

2005-02-08T04:07:00.000-08:00

God and Love found their white shore
where you and I once met and danced,
a strand where wind and wave embraced
around our kiss and then smashed us
to blue smithereens. And though
I woke more alone than ever, I was
yet never quite alone again, the better half
of me freed to roam unruddered in your womb.
The impress of her hips on mine has
lingered, like a a shadowy faith;
the fish tail I’ve grown is scaled
in that wilder half of ocean
I'll never fan the full fiefdoms of,
much less with these lips ever come
to kiss and know again. God and Love
now ride the waves like Arion on
his dolphin, their song for every shore
which translates in transit to hosannas
of abyss, the moon’s gleam distilled
from the ache of pure basalt, your
smile in distant regions altared and
lamped right here. Rude pagan rogering
the tunnies, yahwist hurling reams
of fire: both met and mingled in our kiss,
becoming some malt of awfulness
no confabulist would dare to pour
and live; nor could I much mouth these
words till I’d pounded my last shot
at the bar, and let go black wings that
were never meant to fly, much less soar.
All my wounds were washed in that
salt blue, burning every orifice I tried
to fill my depths with you. As I slept
I turned and twisted down the darkest tide,
all my expletives brine-whelmed and
pustulent, a blackening acre of old bones
sailing south to that port where Davy
is the harbormaster, vaulting Moby’s
Dick and every awfulness I’ve ever yowled
inside my semen’s tide. I woke at ebb
with every joint intact, full harrowed
by the voyage, alone on a great white shore
where wind and wave wire in full motion
the ocean now inside my mouth, my words
all salted a godly blue. God and Love
are in the choir which rises from a throat
which reaches from drowned Ys to
fair high heaven, with every note and all
poems between sufficient space, I’d say,
to weave whale roads and wing the
greater halves of God. Cerulean is
the color of my wash, the mash and
foam of my Boolean search for you
between the waves of as and is.

Tall Tale (Feb. 5, 2005)

2005-02-07T07:42:00.001-08:00

The hermit described in Episode
19 of the Immram Mael Duin ...
is clothed in his own hair (and)
lives on a small island. Many trees
grow there, and each tree is full of
birds. He tells Mael Duin and his
company that, having set on a
pilgrimage from Ireland, his
small boat split in two under him.
He returned to the coast, positioned
himself on a sod and on this
piece of turf set out into the
waves again. God allowed the sod
to remain motionless in the
place where he now is, and adds
some turf to the sod each year,
as well as a tree. The birds in
the trees are the souls of his
relatives, who await Doomsday there.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

I set out in my little boat so many years ago,
my heart full of its quest for you
like a wave dreaming distant shores,
full and high and curved close to crash.
Yet God willed my ways otherwise,
splitting my purpose on black rocks below
and delving me back to home shores,
a spluttering, half-ruined man, one for whom
the sea became both longing and its cross.
The bit of strand I settled on became both chapel
and isle, its walls of pale cocquina faith brilliant
by day. But the hull below is not seen by any,
its mast my spine, its sails woven from
gossamering dreams of finding you
and not. My course is a wild immrama
of blue words, mouthed from this pew where
the sound of the uniting surf is never far.
Years now I've remained here to voyage far
beyond the beds I never found you in, clothed
only in my hair & this patch of pale sand
the very fabric of my white writing chair.
Blue is everywhere my mind's eye now navigates,
as if you were looking back over your shoulder
when you left the room for good. How can a song
be both choir and quest I'll never know, but
mine is just to altar that surf here, writing
down all that love still distantly yet urgently
demands. My poems are like the lover's hands
dressing a with the greatest of haste, grooming
something in the mirror and hurrying on out
to find and woo a destiny before the night
is forever hence too late. Far I have travelled
on the same soul-remitting sea, always
lost and ever charmed by the strange music
just ahead of the next swell, just before the
the spill of light which foams and forms the day --
sounds which ink this pen and rudder
its travail down and down to the last line
which buttons to a kiss -- an island of a singular
desire torn from the bridal doom of Ys.

Echtrae (Feb. 6, 2005)

2005-02-07T07:42:00.000-08:00

The main theme of the echtrae concerns
the entry of a human being into the
supernatural "Otherworld." The voyage
there is relatively unimportant. In the
immrama, on the other hand, the
emphasis lies in sailing from island
to island.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

Are all shores required to surfeit one song
or is the one isle all, revolving like a whorl
of bliss between the cheeks of blue abyss?
The debate has long disquieted these waters
with two sort of questing men, the one in love
with every wave, the other settled down
in what one foam mounts and mazes
and expires in sweet ebbings from the ankles
of long enduring love. Last night I could have
used some connubial bliss, but my wife
came home tearful and torn, anguished
over her father's fear of dying in some
nearing day. I would have held her tight
to console her dark-diving mood, but she
was somewhere else, estranged by depths
of hurt I could neither share nor shore.
And so our dinner and evening of TV
was surficial and distant, the woman of bliss
I had dreamed the night before a
completely other door a wounded girl
had entered decades ago, never quite
to return. At times like that I wonder
if our lips have ever met, our words
tangential to the other's at best,
grazing regions we only think we share,
enough perhaps to forge a seam
sufficient for the days we call our
life's marriage. All those lost nights long ago
I harbored in so many different women,
slipping in and sneaking out the least
semblance of your uuddered Otherworld:
Easy to shade now as a boy's refusal
to grow deeper than a fearful heart allows:
But married now a second time and
delving surely in the years, I wonder
if I now come to know what so errantly
quested then. that atop the waves and
down the troughs are all the shores
one finds. As if communion was just a
penury of dream, the clear blue space
we share forever just that part of
a wave's fold and crash I'll never reach.
At least the sound offshore of every day
is sweet enough, and the next poem
isle and salt enough to ferry through the
day a flavor of your love. Indeed, my love
is one shore and my wife another; the
third is that strand she and I both
walk and is most inarticulate here,
defiant of any noun I name and
rendering all verbs of crossing drear.

Homage to Wang Wei (Jack Gilbert)

2005-02-07T07:41:00.000-08:00

An unfamiliar woman sleeps on the other side
of the bed. Her faint breathing is like a secret
alive inside her. They had known each other
three days in California four years ago. She was
engaged and got married afterwards. Now the winter
is taking down the last of the Massachusetts leaves.
The two o'clock Boston & Maine goes by,
calling out of the night like trombones rejoicing,
leaving him in the silence after. She cried yesterday
when they walked in the woods, but she didn't want
to talk about it. Her suffering will be explained,
but she will be unknown nevertheless. Whatever happens,
he will not find her. Despite the tumult and trespass
they might achieve in the wilderness of their bodies
and the voices of the heart clamoring, they will still
be a mystery to the other, and to themselves.

Wave Story (from the Aran Islands)

2005-02-07T07:39:00.000-08:00

"There was one night a man going fishing out from the Claddagh in Galway. This man was going out with his three sons, and they had no one else for a crew. They were waiting a long time on the others. The old man didn't know what he should do; he hadn't enough help to go to sea. 'Twasn't long till he saw a man making toward him on the strand, and he riding a white horse. He shouted to the sons that there was a stranger coming riding and that he didn't know who he was. The horseman came as far as them and spoke and asked were they going fishing or where were they going. The boatman said they were going fishing.

" 'You are a stranger here,' says he. 'I don't know you. Who are you?'

" 'Yes, indeed, I'm a stranger,' says the man of the white horse, land if ye are going to sea tonight, take with ye three things: an axe, a hook and a knife.'

" 'When he had said that and they turned around, the man of the white horse had disappeared.

"'Why do ye think he said that to us?' asked the old man, of his sons.

" 'I don't know,' says one of them. 'But what harm can it do to us to take them with us till we see?'

"One of the sons went to the house and brought with him an axe, a hook and a knife. They had their nets boarded and they shoved out the boat and went to sea. There were a lot of other boats out before them. The night was very calm. But before long there came a great squall of wind. The old man said that it was time to be pulling for the land, that he was afraid the night was going to harden, for the sky was bad-looking and the sooner they made shore the better.

" 'We may as well pull for home,' says the sons, 'as we haven't the help.'

"They started to row and they weren't long rowing when the sea rose, and they saw the mighty wave coming toward them.

" 'This will put us to the bottom, 'tis so big,' shouted one of the sons. 'The boat will not carry it.'

"'Throw out the hook, see will it be any help,' says the old man. 'We may as well take the stranger's advice.'

"When the wave was almost on top of them the son threw out the hook. The wave split in two and passed on either side of them without doing any damage. They battled on and battled on as well as the were able-and strong men they were - and soon they saw the second wave coming, as high as a hill.

"'Heave out the axe!' shouted the father.

"One of the sons threw it out and the minute he did the wave split in two at either side of the boat and did no harm. They pulled on another while-getting bad the night was with gale and heavy rain. They didn't know what to do -twas so dark that they couldn't see where they were going. On came another wave, as high as a hill, and they were sure that this would finish them.

"'Throw out the knife!' says the old man.

"One of the sons threw it out, and the wave split in two and passed on either side with a sweep that threw the boat up on the strand. They were safe. Whatever way one of the men looked around, he saw an oar being washed in, and a piece of a boat.

"'There has been a drowning for sure,' says the father.

"The wind was so high and the night so bad that they weren't able to shove the boat up for a while, but they got it up a little and tied it with a big pelt of a rope and filled the boat with stones. They made for home, and the gale was taking the cornstooks and stacks. It was a good while later before it got calmer. They ate their supper when they got home-'twas very late then-and then they heard someone at the door.

"'Who's there?" the old man shouted.

" 'Open!' shouts the person outside. I want to go in.'

"One of the sons opened the door, and who should be there but the man of the white horse.

" 'Are your sons asleep?' says he.

"'No,' says the old man.

"'Tell them come out - I want them,' says the horseman.

"The three sons went outside the door.

"'jump up here on the horse, men,' says be

"'There's not room,' says one of them.

"'There will be,' says the horseman. 'I'll walk, and the horse can take ye all.'

"They mounted the horse and set off, the stranger walking and they riding, and didn't feel until they were in a big to". They were terrified when they didn't know where they were; they saw big crowds of people, men and women coming from a dance, and they up and down the street together, holding one another, and having great sport and pastime.

" 'Now,' says the horseman, "don't take any notice of them. Come along with me to the top of the street. There's a big house there - that's where we're going. When ye go in, don't speak a word or answer any question till ye come out to me again.'

"He reached the door, and it was opened by a man that was standing inside.

" 'In ye go now, boys,' says the horseman. 'Ye are needed inside: They went in,

"'Go you up to the top room,, says the doorman to the eldest son. 'There's somebody waiting there for you.'

"He went up to the room, and when he opened the door he saw a parlor the like of which he had never seen before, 'twas so fine and well done up. When he looked around what should he see but a young woman stretched on a bed, a woman so beautiful that he had never seen her like with the light of his two eyes before. Stuck in her forehead was the axe!"

"'Come over here,' says the young woman, 'and pull the axe out of my forehead. That's your handiwork tonight.'

"He pulled out the axe, and came down to the kitchen without saying a word.

"The doorman then spoke to the second son. 'Now 'tis your turn to go up to the room,' says he. 'You're needed there.'

"He went up and what should he see but a woman stretched on a bed there and the hook stuck in her shoulder.

" 'Come over here, , says she, 'and pull out this hook. This is the result of your handiwork tonight.'

"He pulled it out, and pretended not to hear what she was saying, and when he had it pulled she sat up in the bed and looked at him for a while, and when he thought she was looking at him too much he walked off down into the kitchen. The two brothers were there waiting for him. The doorman then spoke to the youngest brother.

" 'Your turn to go up now,' says he.

"Up he went and he saw the most beautiful queen he ever saw in his life, before or after, and a knife stuck in her head behind her ear.

"'Come over here,' says she, 'and pull out this knife. My blessing on you and my curse on those who have given you orders. There isn't a young woman in the town tonight, except the three of us, who hasn't got a husband. We're three sisters. My curse on the man of the white horse. Only for him we would have got the three of ye tonight. He's outside waiting for ye now, but we'll have our revenge on him.'

"He left the room and the three of them went out to the man of the white horse where he was waiting for them.

"'Up on the horse with ye now,' says he, I and don't ye speak for ever again about what ye have seen or heard tonight. Don't ever again go to sea-if ye do, I don't want to say what may happen to ye.'

"The three mounted the white horse and weren't long on their journey till they reached home again. Yet the journey back took them seven times longer than the journey there.

"'Go in home now,' says the man of the white horse, 'and I forbid ye ever again to go on the sea. If ye do ye will be taken by the women of the host. There were thirty-one men drowned tonight and ye saw them up and down the street with their women. 'Tisn't how they were drowned but taken away. I'm leaving ye now,' he said, ' ye won't see me any more. Only for me ye would be where ye'er comrades are.'"

from The People of the Sea: A Journey In Search of the Seal Legend, David Thompson

Harm and Boon

2005-02-04T10:22:00.000-08:00

Mugain, the Munster queen, seems to be the same person as Mor of Munster. The story goes that the Kings of Ireland were seeking Mor. Her "house" is pointed out at the western extremity of Corco Duibne (off the southwest coast of Ireland), and when the sun is shining on it is said that "Mor is on her throne." Fintan changes his form, and the Old Woman of Beare renews her youth, time and time again.

A similar metamorphosis appears in a Fenian story in which Finn's destiny is revealed by a visitant from the Other World. This stranger is Cronanach -- his name is suggestive -- from Sid ar Femuin, the sid of Munster, and he appeared, an enormous, black, misshapen churl, upon Finn's hunting-mound. He brought out two pipes and played "so that wounded men and women in travail would have fallen asleep at the exquisite music which he made." Later, "As the light of day came there came upon the churl a beautiful form and shapeliness and radiance so that there was a delightful beauty upon him ... and he had the demeanor of a high-king, and there was the charm of a youth in his figure.

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage

Ogre On The Road (2001)

2005-02-04T10:21:00.001-08:00

Perhaps the minotaur
is a poet. Is Poetry.
A hoary hammer, like sex.
Didn't the Irish bard
Senachen once meet
a churl on the road
whose hellmouth
was the gate of all song?
Why are sweet words
suddenly so loathsome
on this road we
must all travel some night?

In the Irish tales
the lord of the South
was a harper-changeling,
a green giant who'd
as soon sing as lose
his head (or yours)
at the solstice. (And oh
what a pretty wife had
he, wearing only that
green pubic sash...)
Horrid lug was just
one his guises. A signal
that you've hit the
mid-point of the barrow.

Question is, what then?
Senachen could have
turned back and trudged
home as Senachen,
but instead he got past
and went on to become
a Taleissin. Will I eventually
write poems too, after all
this posing and posing
in poisoned trash heaps?

The problem is, a lyric
is not a tale. No stripper
here with nipples to offer
in ripened sequence: this
is flashing: not fiction,
but close. Poets play fast
with truths but from the
other side: We dip the day's
pewter turds into moonwater
and -voila!-pull out a
silvery bone of spirit.
Preter-truths, a peel more
real than the real itself.

But who cares for such
jugglery today? Poems for
a penny, a dozen for two!
Least of all cares this oaf,
burdened with this
bushel of rancid poems.
I would rather sneakeypete
around this beast of sweet
utterance just to get home again.
To what at least is livably real.

But I wrote my way here and
must write my way through.
For now these satires,
black-pelted raillery at
the ogre on the road.
I'm a king's fool, worthy only
in reverse, offering for your
pleasure ugly words on a page
of foul brine, a bitterroot
inked with all that somehow
must be said before there's
any going on or going home.

The Siren's Tail

2005-02-04T10:21:00.000-08:00

The ceiling began its upward curve from this band, making the arc of the vault conform to that of the doorway. The border was richly inventive and delightful, with excellent carving, being harmoniously filled with little semi-human sea-monster in an imitation of water and waves. There were women with curling fish-like tails seated on the their backs, some of them nude, embracing the monsters with mutual intertwinings. Some played the flute or fantastic instruments, while others were seated in strange chariots drawn by tireless dolphins. some were crowned with the cold flowers of water-lilies and clothed in the foliage of the same; others had many vases filled with fruits, and overflowing horns. Some were striking each other with bundles of sedges and flowers of wood-beard; others were girt with trivuli. The rest fought mounted on hippopotami and various other unfamiliar beasts protected with tortoise-shell. Here and there they were acting lasciviously, or playing various festive games. Their vivacious gestures and movements were carved and expressed to perfection, and the decoration ran all the way form one side to the other.
...

In this way I came to the end of the hallway, where the charming scenes ended, but beyond that there was such dense darkness that I did not dare to proceed. I was turning to go back when suddenly I heard a sound in the ruins like the breaking of bones and the cracking of branches. I stood stock still, my delightful recreation shattered, and then heard, closer to hand, a sound like the dragging of a great bull's carcase over the rough and ruin-strewn ground. As it grew ever louder and nearer to the doorway, I heard the deafening hiss of a giant serpent. I was stunned. Voiceless, and with my hair standing on end, I felt no reassurance in rushing for escape into that thick darkness.

--- Hypnerotomachia Poliphila,, transl. Joscelyn Godwin

Ghost Music (2004)

2005-02-04T10:20:00.001-08:00

Fascinating but fatal is the Leanhaun
Shee, the "fairy mistress" who is so
hauntingly beautiful that men cannot
fail to fall in love with her. If a man
should meet her, then through his love
for her he is inspired with the power
of the bardic arts. However, she is
a malevolent muse, for through loving
her the Gaelic poets die young. She
is restless and will not let them
practice their art long on earth.

-- Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes

Driving home last night after the gym
it was raining slow and steadily, summer's
pulse of that cerulean certainty which
cauls every day in sun then storm.
I popped in an old CD, Everything But
The Girl's Walking Wounded (1996), and
settled into techno-dance mixes of love
songs which somehow caught the far
rumble of thunder and held it there
in moisture and abandon of storm.
But most strongly it made me
recall the taste of bad Scotch in
secret places, illicitly honeyed,
infernally wronged-Clan MacGregor, I
think, $16.99 a half gallon, cheap
enough to drink the way I desired.
The glow of that booze settled on
an awful season, just after I got
married the second time, when I
gave myself permission to get lost
in the bottle again. So much
of that drive home yesterday had
the same familiars: job and gym
done, mind and body relaxing from
that toil, the long miles home opening
like petals, though then it was a
darker, opiate bloom I desired, not
the flush of fresh love, deciding
back then to give in to a falling man's
gradient of deceit and loss, down
and out whatever drain I'd find.
That when my new wife waited for
me happy in our new home -- the
same as this one, only younger --
glad for me to be a part of it,
kissing me when I got home and
then working upstairs arranging
furniture or making the bed
this linen-fresh, bright white
arrangement. Downstairs I made
dinner working on my "cooking
Scotch," refilling my glass again
and again from the bottle under
the counter, or sniping swigs
from the other bottle stashed in
the closet. And that music played
on the stereo, the late summer
afternoon mixing into it a sere
gloom, at least the way I perceived
things descending down the buzz
of too much bad Scotch. The
sureness of the descent was
somehow made delightful by
the flightiness of my deceit,
perhaps as every deal with the
devil is forged. I cooked our
dinner in a filling cloud
and praised our love when my new
wife came downstairs to eat,
too affirming, overloud, yes, but
nothing -- not yet -- that my wife
would take notice of. Little did
she know I was stealing her
happiness, draught by draught
from that cheap green bottle.
There was not poetry those days,
only dark love and ever guiltier
arrears in the motions of a man
of the suburbs. (The poetry began
further down, whether to praise
or redeem my blackening wings,
I'll never know, though that writing
has led me here. I listened to that sad
music yesterday and wondered why I
would want to bugger love so and good,
choosing instead to pursue the secret
thrills balmed by that booze. Perhaps
it was just the toll of an ex-drinker
turned gentlemanly spelunker, my
ravel back down to the thickest
Scotch-amber below. Perhaps too I'd
chosen the false god of fast fucks, that
zero half of my moral circuitry (always
suspect), taking what was mine when
I couldn't get her to agree to fall my way.
Somehow -- thank God -- I found the
plug for that jug. I ravelled back home
and remained, choosing to love the
difficult and the real. The permanent
and legitimate. The spirit not found
in bottles, or between any bad woman's
great thighs. Why did I want to hear
that music which rises the gorge of
my awfullest times? Certainly not
to indulge a dark thought of returns.
(I pray.) Perhaps because it's becoming
safe enough to look back on those days
with no desire for them. Humbling move,
the awfulness this ink can only
rib and echo, the malevolent muse
of every ebb and recede, her charms
sufficient only when the hole in me's
indulged, making comfort instead
of truth the drink of the day -- Perhaps.
But I also heard in those songs a
mere terrible sway which I could no
better resist than say here just what
made such dreariness also dear.
And so I listened to a song or two
as I drove my way home, a man
minted of motions counterclockwise
to those screws, looking forward
to this rain in our garden as I cook
up a meal -- kisses surficial and
a clear deep dark blue, that half
of the tide now married to you.

Columba and HIs Two-Faced Past

2005-02-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

In St. Columba's encounters with his pagan past, darkness and light are like a magical seam. He meets Black Angus on the shore of Iona -- an ugly seal-man who is Judas and married to Lilith, a sea-witch ("Columba and Angus MacOdrum, Feb. 1, 2005 posting) ; and he also meets on that shore Manannan in the form of a shapely youth. Oran -- of the clan MacOdrum and he who travels on in search of Manannan -- is Columba's unconscious persona who remains connected to the Otherworld.

In an anecdote of Colum Cille in "Sancti Columbae Hiensis cum Mongano Heroe Colloquium" (ed. Grossjean), a mysterious youth appears to Columcille at Carraic Eolairc on the shores of Loch Foyle. When asked by Columcille about the original form of the lake, the youth gave a description from his own experience. The youth describes the prosperous country which the lake has covered, and says that he has at various times been a deer, a salmon, a seal, a wolf, and a man. Carney: "The mysterious youth came to be identified with Mongan mac Fiachna, but I would suggest tentatively that in the original composer's mind, although preserved without identification, he probably came out of the water and may have been a manifestation of Manannan Mac Lir.

***

Columba's curiosity about his past is weirdly echoed in a tale in which a chalice used by the Iona abbey is broken. It is taken by one of the monks to the sea-god Manannan, who magically restores the chalice by blowing on it. He sends it back to Columba with a question: would he achieve Christian immortality? "Alas," says the ungrateful saint, "there is no forgiveness for a man who does such works as this!" The message is returned to Manannan, who breaks out into an indignant lament. "Woe is me, Mannan-mac Lir! For years I've helped the Catholics of Ireland, but I'll do it no more, till they're weak as water. I'll go to the gray waves in the Highlands of Scotland."

Sounds of the Magic South

2005-02-04T10:19:00.001-08:00

We have connected the Music of the South with low-class entertainers, but this gives only one side of the picture. Time and again, both in the early literature and in folktales, sweet music is revealed to be one of the essential attributes of the Other World. Its sound often heralds the approach of the supernatural, and by means of it the sid-folk place men and women under enchantment.

... In China "right behavior" Li and music ... are contrasted: "Li is of the order of earth ... music was made manifest in the genesis of all things, and Li has an abode in their completion." It is a supernatural belief that words have a creative power; they symbolize the manifest world. Music, on the other hand, brings us into harmony with the non-manifest, and "to understand music is to understand the secret source of Li"

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage

Proximity (Feb. 2, 2005)

2005-02-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

I know I'm close to you
when the surf is high
yet far, its drone piped
from a distant drowse
which floats into pure blue.
Driving home last night
wrecked by the difficulty
of my day -- ferrying,
if you will, a hundred
wounded cares --
I popped in Lyle Mays'
Solo CD, jumping to
"Let Me Count the Ways,"
which for 3 minutes
pilots your infinity,
pouring sweetness and
grief from a piano's
jazz into my broken
brow and hull, letting
go the flood that's
always just below.
I thought of my wife
at home hard at work
at her sewing machine,
embroidering bed linens
of a dream we make
together, waking (at
least on weekend)
wrapped in the cool
blue wash of first light
amid the antique and
clean whites and
pale fern greens of
the bedroom she and
love both made.
That gentle so
gorgeous jazz filled
my ear as I drove
back to home shores,
traffic knotted with
fretful tail lights
and the sky at that
hour of the season
another seam for you,
the last blues ebbing
into black with the
first stars burning through.
For the duration of that
song my work day was
simply the cross you
came and lifted me
from. its difficulty
like a rock hard pounded
by the sea, the stinging
mist arising from
the mash angelic
and deep blue, singing
hosannas of soul sweetness
surely sent from every
depth of you, though
only the music is what
endures till all my
hearts have drowned.
How good it was to
get home at last, pulling
in the driveway with
you in the kitchen
making dinner & the
lights bright in nearly
every room, the dark
outside a rich wild
velvet in which love
so gemlike harps
its gleaming distant tune.

Verge, Marge, Shore (Feb. 2, 2005)

2005-02-04T10:18:00.000-08:00

In the 32 Triad of the "Mysteries of
the Bards" it is said that when the soul
inherits Gwnnfyd, that is, Happiness, three
supreme gifts -- once, long ago, its crown,
but long, long ago, lost (...) -- primitive
genius, primitive love, and primitive memory.

Fiona Macleod, "A Triad"

Wash your plashing curves over me here,
oh my blue empyreia, salt of my swoon's
incessant plunge: tail every siren's sweet
wave-breaking tune with the harder
caesuras of abyss, black as the churl
who came from the West bearing a
heavy horned cudgel of pure South.
Verge in my margins shores of white bliss.
Pour in my ears the roars and ebbed
hiss which rises to fall into your dark Yes.
Walk with me here where the triad completes
its charm of three heavens -- old dreams,
first kisses, the infinite book at the rear
of all seas where one tidal music
drowns all the reams. I'll be your pilot,
your lover man, your poet despite
that those worlds are now far under
and near lost, subsumed by the
greater brute thunder of waves
pounding for miles and aeons the loneliest
of shores where I daily wake and walk,
the no-longer-quite-solid-or-solitary
penman, author and augurer, blue
salt's inland metaphor and integer,
its dreamiest denizen. Leave the lapis
at the last line I weave, a hue of
lazuli bluer than this world has seen,
yet. Let the horses ride wild on
the steppes of far waves, their
courses and thunder hooved hard
from your heart, or mine, our ours, I dunno,
the sources of song are so vast and
so lost and ripe for the plucking,
for fucking and flipping like
flat stones cross still waters,
plucking the surface then diving full down
through every egress to kiss your breast
and sleep, perhaps forever.

Rudder, Root, Roar (Feb. 4, 2005)

2005-02-04T10:17:00.000-08:00

Without these soaks in
your old blue, I'd surely
die of dry futurity,
a three-world man
planed flat of all his
lumps and sags. Ahead
like a shimmering runway
lies the long workday
in the life I found
when I made my
grief of you a song,
an inland road
shy of shores or
even the faint thunder
of the surf, having
fading and long dried
to relic dunes
my wheels sigh over
on the way to work.
Nowhere in that
furious hive of forwarding
labors is there time
or room to stray
or curve, so this scant
hour here must fall
anchorlike down the
shelves of silted rue,
salvaging the flukes
and spume of those
drowned mordents
which are the sighing
depths of you, or me,
or what you and I
hurled long ago. The
greater half of the
bright day ahead
roots down in cold
abysms to grip
and suck rootlike
that mouldered bed
in which we once
cooked the very
devil in a spasm of Yes
which broke my
every shore in one
loud booming crash
then ebbed in such
angelic bliss to
haunt the rowing here
in predawn depths,
haunting every line
with a hallowed
harrowed sound,
weaving like a
siren's hair around
this pale white
writing chair.
Forward now I
must row, to complete
the tasks assigned
by love of the life
which rose treelike
from that bed, a faith
and purpose married
to your own. Daily
I mouth these prayers
inside a chapel
on the shore, built
over what is known
about the mysteries
of that ancient
unquiet blue, its floor
and footers ruddered
by old urgent and
betsotted bones which
mouth the ever tide.
Ahead the road to the rest
of my life, bright for
the trudging and arrowed
like a western sun
directly toward the strife.
Praise to the shells
which you delve and roar
hard pounded in the
asphalt, ferrying that
deluge into all dry
hours far ahead.

Book, Boat, Bone (2003)

2005-02-04T10:16:00.000-08:00

Here I am again
striding in the surf
& riding out to you
writing it all down
on an ossuary of foam.

You walked away:
"not here" is inscribed
on a pouty angel's ass,
taboo and tide

my voyaging silk
to absent tart islands
and their galling,
gorgeous milk.

Breviary, bestiary,
book in ocean thrown:
each wave I well here
is a vowel of the
sea's blue bone,

curving plash to hiss:
the motions of a
lover's tongue,
the first line last kiss.

From Underneath (Stephen Dunn)

2005-02-04T10:15:00.001-08:00

A giant sea turtle saved the life
of a 52 year old woman lost at sea
for two days after a shipwreck
in the Southern Philippines. She rode
on the turtle's back.

-Syracuse Post-Standard

When her arms were no longer
strong enough to tread water
it came up beneath her, hard
and immense, and she thought
this is how death comes,
something large between your legs
and then the plunge.
She dived off instinctively,
but it got beneath her again
and when she realized what it was
she soiled herself, held on.

God would have sent something winged,
she thought. This came from beneath,
a piece of hell that killed a turtle
on the way and took its shape.
How many hours passed?
She didn't know, but it was night
and the waves were higher. The
thing swam easily in the dark.

She swooned into sleep.
When she woke it was morning,
the sea calm, her strange raft
still moving. She noticed the elaborate
pattern of its shell, map-like,
the leathery neck and head
as if she'd come up behind
an old longshoreman
in a hard-backed chair.
She wanted and was afraid to touch
the head-one finger
just above the eyes-
the way she could touch her cat
and make it hers.
The more it swam a steady course
the more she spoke to it
the jibberish of the lost.
And then the laughter
located at the bottom
of oneself, unstoppable.

The call went from sailor to sailor
on the fishing boat: A woman
riding an "oil drum"
off the starboard side.
But the turtle was already swimming
toward the prow
with its hysterical, foreign cargo
and when it came up alongside
it stopped until she could be hoisted off.
Then it circled three times
and went down.
The woman was beyond all language
the captain reported;
the crew was afraid of her
for a long, long time.

WATER LILY (Rilke)

2005-02-04T10:15:00.000-08:00

My whole life is mine, but whoever says so
will deprive me, for it is infinite.
The ripple of water, the shade of the sky
are mine; it is still the same, my life.

No desire opens me: I am full,
I never close myself with refusal-
in the rhythm of my daily soul
I do not desire-I am moved;

by being moved I exert my empire,
making the dreams of night real:
into my body at the bottom of the water
I attract the beyonds of mirrors...

-- Translated by A. Poulin

WATER BRIDE (Dec. 24, 2002)

2005-02-04T10:14:00.000-08:00

The water bride returned
in the silted waters
of night: She was weary

of wearing this or that
woman's face, so she
came blind as the sea.

I was once desperate
to claim her for life
& so kept losing her

in comic motions,
shaping my body for her,
shouting into waves.

None of it worked: She
lapsed on back into surf,
leaving this bald shore,

even her smile erased
in the boneless wash.
But not lost. She curves

every line down this page,
across and down down
down, nothing I'll kiss

again but deeper, a wave
washed through, forever
afoot in wastes of this heart.

I have been pickled in
her brine: I am that dawn
where she'll always shine,

that scree of white
slippers dancing where
I pull my every breath.

It's 5:30 a.m. on Christmas
Eve, the windows open
to a restlessness which

later will pour rain
then turn cold. I am that year
at birth once again:

son and lover of a
uteral gulf which streams
through the day

like the sheets of her
gauze bower, cell and
boudoir, well and tower,

ring to middle finger,
trothed to the wave's
forever breaking smile.

THE LOVE-KISS OF DERMID AND GRAINNE (Fiona Macleod)

2005-02-04T10:12:00.000-08:00

When by the twilit sea these twain were come
Dermid spake no one word,Grainne was dumb,
And in the hearts of both deep silence was.
"Sorrow upon me, love," whispered the grass;
"Sorrow upon me, love," the sea-bird cried;
"Sorrow upon me, love," the lapsed wave sighed.

"For what the King has willed, that thing must be,
O Dermid! As two waves upon this sea
Wind-swept we are,--the wind of his dark mind,
With fierce inevitable tides behind."
"What would you have, O Grainne: he is King."
"I would we were the birds that come with Spring,
The purple-feathered birds that have no home,
The birds that love, then fly across the foam."

"Give me thy mouth, O Dermid," Grainne said.
Thereafter, and whispering thus she leaned her head --
Ah, supple, subtle snake she glided there
Till, on his breast, a kiss-deep was her hair
That twisted serpent-wise in gold-red pain
From where his lips held high their proud disdain.
"Here, here," she whispered low, "here on my mouth
The swallow, Love, hath found his haunted South."

Then Dermid stooped and passionlessly kissed.
But therewith Grainne won what she had missed,
And that night was to her, and all sweet nights
Thereafter, as Love's flaming swallow-flights
Of passionate passion beyond speech to tell.
But Dermid knew how vain was any spell

Against the wrath of Finn: and Grainne's breath
To him was ever chill with Grainne's death;
Full well he knew that in a soundless place
His own wraith stood and with a moon-white face
Watched its own shadow laugh and shake its spear
Far in a phantom dell against a phantom deer.

"Elegy: The God in the Sea Greets Bran In the Land of the Waves" (Seamus Heaney)

2005-02-04T10:11:00.000-08:00

(from the Eighth-Century Irish "Voyage of Bran")

When Bran and his companions had been at sea for two days and two nights, they saw a man in a chariot coming toward them over the sea. The man sang to them and made himself known, saying he was Manannan. These are some of the verses he sang:

Bran is astonished at the beauty of the waters;
his coracle lifts on the clear wave.
I ride where he rows; my chariot plunges, I
surge through a blossoming plain.

Bran rolls with his boat, the sea lifts and
lays him, he leans to the prow.
My chariot axle threshes a surf of wildflowers,
my wheels are spattered with flower juice.

Bran sees the backs of the waves like the quick
backs of dolphins; the sea surface glitters.
I see greensward, wild roses and clover,
the pelt of the grazing.

You look and next thing salmon leap out
of the foam; mother-wet silver.
They are my calves, my calves' licks, my
lambs, my bleating cavorters.

One chariot, one charioteer-me at full tilt-
that's all you can see.
You are blind to what's here. The land is a drumming
of hoofbeats, a mane-flow, a host at full gallop.

The land is immense, we swarm in its
bounty, it flourishes for us.
You are welcome; from the prow, gather up
the fruit of the branches.

Men and women, lovely, at ease among
windfalls. No sin and no forcing.
They rise off the forest floor, they pour
out the wine.

We are from the beginning, won't grow
old or go under the earth.
We cannot imagine debility; we
are unmarked by guilt.

Progeny of the Seal

2005-02-01T10:05:00.001-08:00

MacLeod mentions a MacOdrum of Uist of the Slioch-nan-ron or Progeny of the Seal. "The seals splash to and fro from the moon-dazzle, calling to one another, We, to, are the sons of God."

-- Fiona McLeod, Iona

MacOdrum (Feb. 1, 2005)

2005-02-01T10:05:00.000-08:00

It is given to them (the seal-
tribe of MacOdrum) that their
sea-longing shall be land-longing
and their land-longing shall
be sea-longing.

-- South Uist farmer

Shall I forever row
this rock which flaunts
below so brute a tail
and brogues the wind
like flukes? Standing
here do I forever
ride the wave
which answers every
shore with blue recede?
Surely I was just the next
nude nallie to lose his skin
in your embrace, doomed
thus to build his lives
ashore with the greater
half of the three hearts
pursed in your abyssal blue.
Half-man half fish
between the worlds
I weave my three
dark songs of fin
and breast and
thrall, that music
riven as the tide
which pounds these
rocky cliffs where
you are least of all.
Will you ever give
me back my skin,
that oiled black frock
which I must wear
to dive full back to
the single world,
free of doubletalk at last?
Shall I woo you or connive,
do I ravage the verses
or mount the mare I ride?
Such strategems
I dream atop this lonely
rock which is my writing
chair, reaching out as
far as I know how
to kiss the cross still
burning there, inscribed
aeons ago when love
was young and I woke
in your arms, a naked,
fresh-borne man 18 miles
out to sea with no
way ever to go home.
Your breath has
stayed in my ear
for all these lives,
like the sea inside
a shell, a shining
blue tide my song
has slowly pickled in.
Three cups, three
heavens, three purgatories
here beyond the ninth
wave you folded and
crashed over me --
a charnel house of
every thrill and thrall
to fade from blue to black.
I hear the selkies singing
on moony nights as
this an hour from
first light: I write
their sealskins down.
Inside this oratory
on high rock I
nail that strange music
to my own, a revenant
still revenant of
the blue which
drowned my bones.

Neil McCodrum and the selkie

2005-02-01T10:04:00.000-08:00

Long ago, on an island at the northern edge of the world, there lived a fisherman called Neil McCodrum. He lived all alone in a stone croft where the moorland meets the shore, with nothing but the guillemots for company and the stirring of the sand among the shingle for song.

But in the long winter evenings he would sit by the peat-fire and watch the blue smoke curling up to the roof, and his eyes looked far and far away as if he was looking into another country. And sometimes, when the wind rustled the bent-grass on the machair, he seemed to hear a soft voice sighing his name.

One spring evening, the men of the clachan were bringing their boats full of herring into shore. They swung homeward with glad hearts, and their wives lit the rushlights, so that the wide world dwindled to a warm quiet room. Neil McCodrum was the last to drag his boat up the shingle and hoist the creel of fish upon his back. He stood a while watching the seabirds fly low towards the headland, their wings dark against the evening sky, then turned to trudge up the shingle to the croft on the machair.

It was as he turned, he saw something move in the shadows of the rocks. A glimmer of white and then - he heard it between birds' cries - high laughter like silver. He set down the creel, and with careful steps he neared the rocks, hardly daring to breathe, and hid behind the largest one. And then he saw them - seven girls with long dark flowing hair, naked and white as the swans on the lake, dancing in a ring where the shoreline met the sea.

And now his eye caught something else - a shapeless pile of speckled brown skins lying heaped like seaweed on a boulder nearby. Now Neil knew that they were selkie, who are seals in the sea, but when they come to land, take off their skins and appear as human women.

Humped low so he would not be seen, Neil McCodrum crept towards the pile of skins, and slowly slid the top one down. But scarcely had he rolled it up and put it under his coat, than one of the selkie gave a sharp cry. The dance stopped, the circle broke, and the girls ran to the boulder, slipped into their skins and slithered into the rising tide, shiny brown seals that glided away into the dark night sea.

All but one.

She stood before him as white as a pearl, as still as frost in starlight. She stared at him with great dark eyes, then slowly she held out her hand, and said in a voice that trembled with silver:

"Ochone, ochone! Please give me back my skin."

He took a step towards her and she stared at him with large brown eyes that held the depths of the sea. "Come with me," he said, "I will give you new clothes to wear."

The wedding of Neil McCodrum and the selkie woman was set for the time of the waxing moon and the flowing tide. All the folk of the clachan came, six whole sheep were roasted and the whiskey ran like water. Toasts overflowed from every cup for the new bride and groom, who sat at the head of the table: McCodrum, beaming and awkward, unused to pleasure, tapped his spoon to the music of fiddle and pipe, but the woman sat quietly beside him at the bride-seat, and seemed to be listening to another music that had in it the sound of the sea.

After a while she bore him two children, a boy and a girl, who had the sandy hair of their father, but the great dark eyes of their mother, and there were little webs between their fingers and toes. Each day, when Neil was out in his boat, she and her children would wander along the machair to gather wild parsnips and berries, or fill their creels with carrageen from the rocks at low tide. She seemed settled enough in the croft on the shore, and in May-time when the air was scented with thyme and roseroot and the children ran towards her, their arms full of wild yellow irises, she was almost happy. But when the west wind brought rain, and strong squalls of wind that whistled through the cracks in the croft walls, she grew restless and moved about the house as if swaying to unseen tides, and when she sat at the spinning-wheel, she would hum a strange song as the fine thread streamed through her fingers. McCodrum hated these times and would sit in the dark peat-corner glowering at her over his pipe, but unable to say a word.

Thirteen summers had passed since the selkie woman came to live with McCodrum, and her children were almost grown. As she knelt on the warm earth one afternoon, digging up silverweed roots to roast for supper, the voice of her daughter Morag rang clear and excited through the salt-pure air and soon the girl was beside her holding something in her hands.

"O mother! Is this not the strangest thing I have found in the old barley-kist, softer than the mist to my touch?"

Her mother rose slowly to her feet, and in silence ran her hand along the speckled brown skin. It was smooth like silk. She held it to her breast with one hand, and put her other arm around her daughter, and walked back with her to the croft in silence, heedless of the girl's puzzled stares. Once inside, she called her son Donald to her, and spoke gently to her children:

"I will soon be leaving you, mo chridhe, and you will not see me again in the shape I am in now. I go not because I do not love you, but because I must become myself again."

That night, as the moon sailed white as a pearl over the western sea, the selkie woman rose, leaving the warm bed and slumbering husband. She walked alone to the silent shore and took off her clothes, one by one, and let them fall to the sand. Then she stepped lightly over the rocks and unrolled the speckled brown parcel she carried with her, and held it up before her. For one moment maybe she hesitated, her head turning back to the dark, sleeping croft on the machair; the next, she wrapped the shining skin about her and dropped into the singing water of the sea.

For a while a sleek brown head could be seen in the dip and crest of the moon-dappled waves, pointing ever towards the far horizon, and then, swiftly leaping and diving towards her, came six other seals. They formed a circle around her and then all were lost to view in the soft indigo of the night.

In the croft on the machair, Neil McCodrum stirred, and felt for his wife, but his hand encountered a cold and empty hollow. He knew better than to look for her and he also knew she would never come to him again. But when the moon was young and the tide waxing, his children would not sleep at night, but ran down to the sands on silent webbed feet. There, by the rocks on the shoreline, they waited until she came - a speckled brown seal with great dark eyes. Laughing and calling her name, they splashed into the foaming water and swam with her until the break of day.

Knight Errant (March 2004)

2005-02-01T10:03:00.000-08:00

Lord, I do not know
how I err so wide
riding the back
of so narrow a pen:
How, when I attempt
to describe the vaults
you have filled
in my day -- feverish
spring, the drift of
a nap on the courses
of a breeze, dreams
of breasty valences
breaking yeasty waves --
You resound in my
yesses with such
echoing no-ey egresses,
your refusal of home
in a wave’s recessional
pale foam. Striving for
a precision of alms
I keep confusing the ends
-- are you over or
under the great water,
inside or beyond the
the next room I dream?
Are those fragrant bells
of orange blossom now
tolling through revery
window your envoys,
or are they augurs
of fullness whose kiss
shrieks of dregs down
the bottommost plunge
of abysm? How would
I know, O Lord, without
Your blue graces
sprinkled over me in
the trough between
the lines, east of good
porpoise and west of
divine shoals -- salt
ablutions You sieved
from texts housed under
the North Sea’s
northernmost wash,
revealing the other’s
undermost ravines,
maulings of basalt
which somehow
balance the wings of
every cloud-harping
stooge of empyriea.
Your corrective croaks
from the dirt of every
cathedral I have presumed
to build. Song strung
with human wires still
taut with heart balls
& mouth, it all seems
so half-understood
flapping here on the page,
still wet with salt
infinity, the eyes I see
with draining of
undervaults into the
blindness of day: A
cockeyed organum
for wind, wooer and wave,
harrowing a threshold
that moves every day,
like a barrier island
or itinerant god whose
name tides the sea.
Make fragrant and
wild, O Lord, this
aging man’s music
in Your surf’s choired skulls.

Holy isle, holy merge

2005-02-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

Islands in holy lakes have a special quality, for it is through lakes that the otherwordly land of Tir nan Og may be visited. This is the “Country of Youth,” where people and non-human beings live immune to the passage of time. It is said to exist in the depths of lakes, and the legend is localized in several places such as Lough Carrib, Lough Gur and Lough Neagh.

On occasion, these lands have been visited by human beings. Both the bard Oisin and the warrior O’Donoghue entered the otherworldly realm through the Lake of Killarney.

To reach Tir nan Og, one must pass through the reflective crystal waters of the lake, undertaking a journey from the outer world into the inner, just as the sun enters the waters of the underworld at sunset. It is a perilous shamanic descent into the unconscious depths where timeless archetypes reside.

The lake is a dangerous crystal castle where all is reflected inwards. There, the visitor may be trapped in an inner world that bears no relation to the outer one. Once entered, it is a region from which it is difficult to escape. But those who do manage to return to the everyday world are transformed by the experience.

-- Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes

Tir nan Og (2003)

2005-02-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

This journal-page is just
the surface of a lake too
bright with what we intend
to see what’s really there.
When the bothos of
this pen begins to flow
I again descend
to the chapel
of Tir nan Og, a bone
house lodged among
meteorites and
broken swords. Here
is the crystal skull
of Oran, a water-song
weaves and winnows
my words amid
dancing weeds and
drowned maidenhair.
Down here depth is
true compass and
blue the only coin
the mistress of the
house accepts,
pressing my mint
into her dread corset
deeper than any
loch in Scotland.
The music enchants
and dreams and fins
and pours like blood
bereft of pause or staunch.
ItÕs said that no one
returns from the castle
in the lake -- not quite,
though I see the shore
again now brightening
above with a spring-
sugary day. Who knows
how the selkies and
melusina will succor
the singer who remains
down there while
I emerge dripping
here, but of him I’m
harrowed in a
a way that will forever
return me back down there,
next day, next poem,
next page parting where
it’s bluest and deepest,
where all harper plays
all night in the shadow
house of song.

Columba and Angus Macodrum (Black Angus)

2005-02-01T10:00:00.001-08:00

On a day of the days, Colum was walking alone by the sea-shore. The monks were at the hoe or the spade, and some milking the kye, and some at the fishing. They say it was on the first day of the Faoilleach Geamhraidh, the day that is called Am Fhill Brighde, and that they call Candlemas over yonder.

The holy man had wandered on to where the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He was praying and praying; and it is said that whenever he prayed aloud, the barren egg in the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud unfold, and the butterfly break its shroud.

Of a sudden he came upon a great black seal, lying silent on the rocks, with wicked eyes.

“My blessing upon you, O Ron,” he said, with the good kind courteousness that was his.
“Droch spadadh ort,” answered the seal, “A bad end to you, Colum of the Gown.”

“Sure now,” said Colum angrily, “I am knowing by that curse that you are no friend of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of the north. For here I am known ever as Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint; and it is only the Picts and the wanton Normen who deride me because of the holy white robe I wear.”

“Well, well,” replied the seal, speaking the good Gaelic as though it were the tongue of the deep sea, as God knows it may be for all you, I, or the blind wind can say; “well, well, let that thing be: it’s a wave-way here or a wave-way there. But now, if it is a druid you are, whether of fire or of Christ, be telling me where my woman is, and where my little daughter.”

At this, Colum looked at him for a long while. Then he knew.

“It is a man you were once, O Ron?”

“Maybe ay and maybe no.”

“|And with that thick Gaelic that you have, it will be out of the north isles you come?”

“That is a true thing.”

“Now I am for knowing at last who and what you are. You are one of the race of Odrum the Pagan?”

“Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And what is more, I am Angus MacOdrum, Aonghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name I am known by is Black Angus.”

“A fitting name too,” said Colum the Holy, “because of the black sin in your heart, and the black end God has in store for you.”

At that Black Angus laughed.

“Why is the laughter upon you, Man-Seal?”

“Well, it is because of the good company I’ll be having. But, now, give me the word: Are you for having seen or heard of a woman called Kirsteen MÕVurich?”

“Kirsteen -- that is the good name of a nun it is, and no sea-wanton!”

“O, a name here or a name there s soft sand. And so you cannot be for telling me where my woman is?”

“No.”

“Then a stake for your belly, and nails through your hands, thirst on your tongue, and the corbies at your eyne!”

And, with that, Black Angus louped into the green water, and the hoarse wild laugh of him sprang into the air and fell dead upon the shore like a wind-spent mew.

Colum went slowly back to the brethren, brooding deep. “God is good,” he said in a low voice, again and again; and each time that he spoke there came a daisy into the grass, or a bird rose, with song to it for the first time, wonderful and sweet to hear.

As he drew near to the House of God he met Murtagh, an old monk of the ancient race of the isles.

“Who is Kirsteen M’Vurich, Murtagh?” he asked.

“She was a good servant of Christ, she was, in the south isles, O Colum, till Black Angus won her to the sea.”

“And when was that?”

“Nigh upon a thousand years ago.”

“But can mortal sin live as long as that?”

“Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before Oisin sang, before Fionn, before Cuchullin, was a glorious great prince, and in the days when the Tuatha-de-Danann were sole lords in all green Banba, Black Angus made the woman Kirsteen M’Vurich leave the place of prayer and go down to the sea-sbore, and there he leaped upon her and made her his prey, and she followed him into the sea.”

“And is death above her now?”

“No. She is the woman that weaves the sea-spells at the wild place out yonder that is known as Earraid: she that is called the seawitch.”

“Then why was Black Angus for the seeking her here and the seeking her there?”

“It is the Doom. It is Adam’s first wife she is, that sea-witch over there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks.”

“And who will he be?”

“His body is the body of Angus, the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum, for all that a seal be is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas.”

“Black Judas, Murtagh?”

“Ay, Black Judas, Colum.”

But with that, Ivor Macrae rose abruptly from before the fire, saying that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a seamew that was like a human thing.
So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes and said, “God be with us”; and then I opened the door, and the salt smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness of the night.

Your feathers wing my song

2005-02-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

The "tuion" or "singing robe" (of the Irish bard) may have been stolen from an otherworld woman who spends alternating years as a bird. In "The Dream of Oengus," a man betroths a selkie (seal-woman), an while he is in possession of the (human) robe she is in his power.

-- Anne Rosse, Pagan Celtic Britain

The Goodman of Wastness

2005-02-01T09:58:00.000-08:00

A tale of the selkie from the Orkney islands:

The Goodman of Wastness was a handsome, well-to-do young fellow.

Strong, well-liked and with a profitable farm, it will come as no surprise to learn that many of the unmarried local girls had their sights on him.

However, despite their ample attentions the Goodman was a man who was simply not interested in marriage.

Their advances spurned, the local girls soon began to treat the Goodman with contempt.

Describing him as "an old, young man" and "old before his time" in their eyes he was committing the unpardonable sin of celibacy.

The Goodman, however, paid these malicious creatures little heed and as is more often the case, the gossips soon turned their attentions elsewhere. When questioned by his friends as to the reason he would not take himself a wife, the Goodman would smile and simply explain:

"Weemin ir lik minny ither tings in dis weary wurld, only sent fur a trial tae man an' I hae trials aplenty withoot bein' tried be a wife. If yin owld fool Adam hiddno been bewitched be his wife, he might still be in the Gerdeen o' Eden the day."

Women are like many other things in this weary world, only sent as a trial to men and I have enough trials without being tried by a wife. If that old fool Adam had not been bewitched by his wife, he might still be in the Garden of Eden to this day

One old woman who heard this oft-repeated speech, remarked:

"Tak thoo heed theesel, fur thou'll mibbe be yursel' bewitched wan day."

Heed well what you say, you will maybe be bewitched yourself one day

"Aye," replied the Goodman, laughing. "That'll be when thou waaks dry-shod fae the Alters o' Seenie tae da Boar o' Papey"

That will be when you walk from the Alters o' Seenie to the Boar o' Papa [Orkney placenames] without wetting your feet

So it came to pass that one fine day the Goodman was down on the ebb when he saw, a short distance away, a number of Selkie Folk lying out on a flat rock.

Some of these Selkie Folk were sunning themselves in the afternoon warmth while others jumped and played in the clear water. All were naked with unblemished skins as white as snow. Their enchanted seal-skins lay strewn carelessly on the sand and rocks around them.

The Goodman crept closer to their basking rock.

As he neared the place the Selkie Folk played, the Goodman leapt to his feet and ran towards them for all he was worth. With a shriek the Selkie Folk snatched up their seal skins and quickly retreated to the safety of the sea. However, swift as they were, the Goodman was quicker and he managed to seize a skin belonging to one beautiful seal-maiden.

In the hasty rush to safety this poor creature had forgotten to retrieve her skin.

The Selkie Folk swam out a little distance and turned to gaze mournfully at the Goodman. He stared back and realised that all, save one, had taken the shape of seals. Grinning, he put the captured seal-skin under his arm. Whistling a merry tune he set out for home.

No sooner had he left the ebb than he heard the most sorrowful wailing and weeping coming from behind him. Turning, he saw a fair woman following him. She was a most pitiful sight. Sobbing and howling in grief, she held her arms out and pled to have her skin returned. Huge tears ran from her large dark eyes and trickled down her ivory cheeks.

Falling to her knees, she cried:

"O bonnie man! If thur's inny mercy in thee human breest, gae me back me ain selkie skin! I cinno live in da sea withoot it. I cinno bide amung me ain folk waythoot me selkie-skin."

Oh handsome man, if there is any mercy in your human breast give me back my seal-skin. I can not live in the sea without it. I cannot live among my own people without my seal-skin.

The Goodman was not a soft-hearted man but he could not help but pity the poor creature. Pity, however, was not the only emotion he felt. With the pity came the softer and sweeter passion of love.

The icy heart that had yet to love a mortal woman was soon melted by this seal-maiden's beauty.

Eventually the Goodman managed to wring from the Selkie Wife a reluctant consent to remain with him as his wife. She had little choice in the matter for as you all Orcadian know, she could not return to her kin in the sea without her skin.

So the sea-maiden went with the Goodman and stayed with him for many a day. She turned out to be a thrifty, frugal and kindly wife and although she was a creature of the sea the Goodman had a happy life with her.

The Selkie Wife bore the Goodman seven children.

Four boys and three girls came from their union and it was said that there were no children as beautiful as them in all the isles. And all the while the sea-wife, and her human husband, seemed content and merry.

But all was not as it seemed - there was a weight in the Selkie Wife's heart. Many was the time that she was seen to gaze longingly out to the sea. The sea that was her true home.

So to all the islanders and to the Goodman himself all seemed well with his family. But as is always the case in these tales, the bliss was not to last.

One fine day, the Goodman and his four sons were out fishing in their boat. With the menfolk out of the house, the Selkie Wife sent three of the girls down to the ebb to gather limpets and whelks for their tea. The youngest girl had to remain at home because she had hurt her foot climbing on the sharp rocks by the shore. As usual, as soon as the house emptied, the selkie wife set to looking for her long-lost seal-skin.

She searched high and she searched low. She searched "but" and she searched "ben". She searched out and she searched in but to no avail.

She could not find the skin.

The time passed and the sun swung to the west, lengthening the shadows. The peedie lass, seated in a straw-backed chair with her sore feet on the creepie, watched her mother carry out the frantic hunt.

"Mam, whit ir thoo luckin' fur?" she asked.

Mother, what are you looking for?

"O' bairn, dinna tell, bit ah'm luckin' fur a bonnie skin tae mak a rivlin dat wid sort thee sore fit." replied the Selkie Wife.

Oh child, don't tell but I'm looking for a pretty skin to make a shoe that would cure your sore feet

"Bit Mam, " said the bairn. "I ken fine whar hid is. Wan day when ye war oot and me Fither thowt I wis sleepin' i' the bed, he teen a bonnie skin doon, gloured at hid for cheust a peedie meenit, then foldit hid an' laid hid up under dae aisins abeun da bed."

But Mother, I know where it is. One day when you were out and my Father thought I was asleep in bed, he took a pretty skin down, glowered at it for a short time, then folded it and put it away in the aisins over the bed

When the Selkie Wife heard this she clapped for joy and rushed to the place where her long-concealed skin lay.

"Fare thee weel, peedie buddo," she said to her child as she ran from the house.

Rushing to the shore she threw on her skin and with a wild cry of joy plunged into the sea. Shifting again into her selkie form she swam out through the waves where a selkie man was waiting for her and greeted her with delight.

All the while, the Goodman was rowing home and happened to see these two selkies from his little boat. His wife uncovered her beautiful face and cried out to him.

"Fare thee weel. Goodman o' Wastness. Farewell tae thee. I liked thee weel enough fur thoo war geud tae me bit I love better me man o' the sea."

Farewell Goodman of Wastness. Farewell to you. I liked you because you were good to me but I love my husband from the sea more.

That was the last the Goodman ever saw of his sea-wife.

Often though, in the twilight of his years, he could be seen wandering on the empty sea-shore, hoping once again to meet his lost love.

But never again did he look upon her fair face.

-- Sigurd Towrie, www.orkneyjar.com

Anchoring (On the Precedents for this Work)

2005-01-31T04:49:00.000-08:00

As with other traditional cultures, Celtic society could not function without precedents. A dispute over boundaries could not be settled on grounds of expediency; the oldest and most learned historians had to be called upon to recount how ireland was divided in the beginning. When the original model had been recalled, there could be no more further argument: “It is thus it has been, and will be forever.”

That the need for archetypal precedents of this kind persisted even when the old tradition had been supplanted by Christianity is clearly seen in the incantations and charms of Scottish crofters. Cures derive their efficacy, and daily activities their meaning, by being regarded as repititions of what members of the Holy Family and the Saints did once upon a time:

“I bathe my face
In the nine rays of the sun
As Mary bathed her Son
In the rich fermented milk ...”

“I am smooring the fire
As the Son of Mary would smoor ...”

“I will pluck the gracious yarrow
That Christ plucked with his one hand ...”

This is the way of all ancient cultures. Life is meaningful in as much as it is an imitation or reenactment of what the gods did in the beginning: “reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model is “meaningless,” i.e., it lacks reality.”

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage
(the concluding quote is from Mercea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return

St. Columba's Precedent

2005-01-31T04:48:00.001-08:00

Iona had a history before Columba stepped ashore with his 12 companions at Porta Curraich in 563 AD. To become its new king—the one to dream its dream onward—Columba first had to mate his story with the island’s story, much as kings of his clan were ritually mated with the clan totem, a white mare.

"Desert in the Ocean"

2005-01-31T04:48:00.000-08:00

.. the acetic practices of the early Irish church could serve to purge the soul in this life in order to mitigate suffering in the next, and they also served to assist the souls of departed kindred and friends. Asceticism is etched in monastic sites such as Skellig, a bare rock in the sea dedicated to Michael the archangel, leader of souls into Paradise. The hardship of existence on a windswept height over the raging sea must surely have counted as penitential preparation for the perilous passage of the soul after death, and the pilgrimage to the top of the bare height can be seen as a Christian adaptation of Irish pagan practice of assemblies on heights in honour of their deities
.
As well as living in "a desert in the ocean" like Skellig, undertaking the perilous sea-journey in search of such a retreat is also a feature of early Irish monastic asceticism. The eighth-century Navigatio of St Brendan thereby reflects contemporary monastic practice as well as pre-Christian tales of the journey of a mortal to an overseas Otherworld.

-- Maire Herbert, "The Celtic Otherworld and The Commedia"

The Rock of Purgatory

2005-01-31T04:46:00.000-08:00

After this dreadful sight, they sailed for seven days towards the south, and then St. Brendan observed a very dense cloud, on approaching which there came into view what had the shape of a man, sitting on a rock, with a veil before him as large as a sack, hanging between two iron prongs; and he was tossed about like a small boat in a storm. When the brethren saw this, some thought it was a bird, others, that it was a boat; but the man of God told them to cease the discussion, and to steer directly for the place, where, on his arrival, he finds the waves all around motionless, as if frozen over. They found a man sitting on a rugged and shapeless rock, with the waves on every side, which in their flowing beat upon him, even to the top of his head, and in their ebbing exposed the bare rock on which the wretched man was sitting; and the cloth which hung before him, as the winds tossed it about, struck ,him on the eyes and on the forehead.

When the saint asked him who he was, for what crime he was sent there, and how he had deserved to suffer so great a punishment, he answered: ‘I am that most unhappy Judas, the most wicked of all traffickers; not for any deserving of mine, but through the unspeakable mercy of Jesus Christ; am I placed here. I expect no place for repentance; but through the forbearance and mercy of the redeemer of the world, and in honour of His Resurrection, I have this cooling relief, as it is now the Lord's Day; while I sit here, I seem to myself to be in a paradise of delights, considering the agony of the torments that are in store for me afterwards; for when I am in my torments, I burn like a mass of molten lead, day and night, in the heart of that mountain you have seen. There Leviathan and his satellites dwell, and there was I when it swallowed down your lost brother, for which all hell exulted, and belched forth great flames, as it always does, when it devours the souls of the reprobate, But that you may know the boundless mercy of God, I will tell you of the refreshing coolness I have here every Sunday from the first vespers to the second; from Christmas Day to the Epiphany; from Easter to Pentecost; on the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and on the festival of her Assumption, On all other days I am in torments with Herod and Pilate, with Annas and Caiphas; and, therefore, I adjure you, through the Redeemer of the world, to intercede for me With the Lord Jesus, that I may remain here until sunrise tomorrow, and that the demons, because of your coming here, may not torment me, nor sooner drag me off to my heritage of pain, which I purchased at an evil price.’

-- The Voyage of St. Brendan, XIV

Skellig Michael (Jan. 28, 2005)

2005-01-31T04:45:00.000-08:00

Looking back from the great civilizations
of 12th-century France or 17th-century
Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite
a long time -- almost a hundred years --
Wester Christianity survived by clinging
to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle
of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast,
rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.

-- Kenneth Clark

Here is your most desolate
shore of rock, southwest
of all we build and till
and love: What a brutal
bed it is, O Lord,
500 feet of stone perched
above a sea-blast
which choirs below
all dreams with the
blessed thunder
of salt’s destiny.
You bid me build
this oratory beyond
all ears, joining my
voice to mashing waves
and a legion of gales,
each note not so
much offered as ripped
from my lips. Here
the oldest gods are
ravenous and raw,
their bones knocking
like boulders against
first rock, fucking
and dismembering
and roaring pure blue
riot, foaling water-dragons
of the tongue I dare not
speak but must because
this hour derives its
gospel from such abyss.
O God it’s lonely here
between angel wing
and heartless tide,
my song a rock
gnawed by appetites
which have not human
end, or, at least
for which few people
I have known would
care to bend their
inner ear. So be it,
ten waves I daily row:
I will make of this
mote in the sea’s
eternal eye a chapel
for every selkie and
child of Lir to lose
their wits on their
way here, long ago
today and perhaps
tomorrow, perhaps
as long as this rock
remains at the last
shore of the heart.

The pilgrimmage on Skellig Michael

2005-01-31T04:44:00.000-08:00

... because they are places of vision, mountain-tops are attractive to mystics and magicians. Anyone who reaches a place of vision on a mountain will have done so through undertaking a life-threatening pilgrimmage whose effect will have been transformative. The initiatory nature of climbing can be given no better than the ritual climb performed on the holy isle of Scelig Mhichil. There, after offering and praying at holy wells at the foot of the mount, the votary climbs a steep pathway which leads to narrow chasm called The Needle’s Eye. After squeezing through this gateway, he or she then continues high above the sea on a periolous ledge called the Stone of Pain. Beyond this, the next stopping-place is called the Eagle’s Nest, where there is a stone cross. Lastly, the climber must sit upon a ledge overhanging the sea 460 feet (140m) up, to kiss a cross carved on the rock. Those who succeed in completing this pilgrimmage are respected as brave and pious individuals who will be rewarded in the next life.

Station Island

2005-01-31T04:43:00.000-08:00

Station Island in Lough Derg is the site of the most curious pilgrimages in Ireland. It began in the 12th century when a knight named Owen spent a fortnight in prayer and fasting there. He spent the final night of his vigil in a cave, where he received visions of the afterlife, both heavenly and hellish.

Owen recounted his experiences to a Lincolnshire monk, Gilbert of Louth, who spread the story among the Cistercians. They recognized that Owen’s visions were similar to those of St. Patrick, who, unable to convince his congregation of the existence of heaven and hell, prayed to be shown a place where people could experience them. Patrick then discovered a cave where the visions were accessible.

Owen was declared to have rediscovered it, and it was henceforth called St. Patrick’s Purgatory. It became an important place of pilgrimage, though only pilgrims who were considered worthy, and who had purchased the appropriate permits, could enter the cave. Once there, they were shut in to experience visions of torment. They were warned not to sleep, for, as in all otherworldly myths, once one sleeps in the otherworld, one can never re-enter the world of the living.

The Augustinian Order was put in charge of the cave, but in the late medieval period there were allegations that the cave was no longer effective in giving visions. So in 1497 the Pope ordered the cave-shrine to be closed on the grounds that it was inauthentic. But this was not done, for in 1503 the Bishop of Armagh petitioned the Pope to grant indulgences for those who entered the cave.

Nearly 500 years later, the pilgrimage still exists, though the cave is sealed. It lasts three days and begins with a fast. Barefooted pilgrims visit a number of sacred stopping-places, including St. Brigid’s Cross, St. Patrick’s Cross and six beehive cells, named “beds” of various saints. Until quite recently, it also involved plunging into the cold waters of the Lough, but this has been discontinued.

-- Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes
(Thames & Hudson, 2000), pp. 97-8

St. Patrick's Purgatory (Feb. 2004)

2005-01-31T04:42:00.000-08:00

I swam down Oran’s Well to find
The islands that he shored there, the
Gods he named as they ebbed, like surf
Through his hands. I was warned not to
Fall asleep in that hollow, but I did;
It crept over me like a curved
Sweetness, the muse who writes that low
Psalm on every longing heart. When I
Woke I could never quite dry my
Meters of that wash, and now walk
My days harrowed by Oran’s haul,
Drowned in a long-lost coracle.
Hot torch now upside down, skull that
Won’t shut up: The wages of my sin
Are seas I daily fill within.

Every Devotion Dreams It's Cross (Jan. 29, 2005)

2005-01-31T04:41:00.000-08:00

For all my voyaging
home is here, on this
sterile black rock
exposed too fatally
to sea and sky, with
every bruised angel
of third heaven
winging round its heart.
Here I am as naked
as the stone washed
by salt immensity,
awed and silenced
by your wild presence
most absent in all
I see and say. How did
I come to make this
chair southwest of
every bed we shared,
to make of my without
an oratory of drowned
prayer? Yet where
else can I see you
better than perched
high on this grave-marker,
the last proud stone
to recall that sea
where kisses mined
infinity and abysms
wombed the oldest
song I’ve yet to find?
Every devotion dreams
its cross, a spread atop
a hill of skulls
exposed to devouring
winds; the heart flung wide
with its ecstatic Yes
to every sea-wolf
and polar hammer of wind
to batter a bed’s high
promontory. On Skellig
Michael the pilgrimage
begins at wells before
the mount, the ache sent
down before the awful
climb along a narrow
stair which threads a
tight chasm called The
Needle’s Eye. From thence
the perilous walk across
that ledge known as the
Stone of Pain where one
step false to you is
a scream straight down
to doom. Still more is
required of the pilgrim
who then stops at
The Eagle’s Nest to touch
the stone cross which reaches
like a throat to heaven
but cannot say the
words, not yet, perhaps
never. Here the
one who reach his
beloved must crawl
along the last ledge
some 500 feet above
the cold sea-mash,
there to kiss the cross
etched in the rock.
Press warm lips there
to Manan’s last trace,
like a cross between
blue breasts I’ll never
see or kiss again.
All who dare to
name you must harrow
here all words in
brute travail, crucifying
every billow and drowse
atop Michael’s mount
of oldest stone. How
else can desire
mate its bliss
than to summit
the absolute without
and there there
still find the ghost
of a face to kiss?

Continent's End (Robinson Jeffers)

2005-01-31T04:40:00.000-08:00

At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and doubled stretch of water.

I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava and coral sowings that flower the south,
Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours that has followed the evening star.

The long migrations meet across you and is is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled Out of the womb and lay in the sun’s eye on the sideline.

It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the insolent quietness of stone.

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror she stars, life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.

That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation of thin vapor and watched you change them,
That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat rock, shift places with the continents.

Mother, though my song’s measure is like your surf-beat’s ancient rhythm I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire both our tones flow from the older fountain.

A Choir Beyond the Ninth

2005-01-31T04:39:00.000-08:00

Brendan glimpses a church with ten choirs (in the C/H version) or, as (the) M/N (version) has it, a town/citadel with twelve choirs or doors. The latter image is probably based on representations of the heavenly Jerusalem, which was, according to the Bible, the holy city with 12 gates which the apostle saw coming down out of heaven from God, “having the glory of God, and the light thereof was like to a precious stone” (Apoc. 21:11). The ten choirs in C/H probably refer to the traditional order of the heavenly hosts, which was supposed to have 9 choirs consisting of angels and a tenth of human beings. According to this doctrine, God created men to replace the group of angels associated with Lucifer, who were banished from heaven. The saints and the just were to take the places of the fallen angels. In the 12th century this was a commonly held idea. It can be found in the Elucidarium (early 12th century), a guide to salvationi in the form of a dialogue between a master and a pupil.

- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint 111-12

Skellig Michael's Older History

2005-01-31T04:38:00.000-08:00

(The) biblicized “history” ((of Ireland)), as set out in Lebor Gabala, culminates in the story of “The Sons of Mil.” After journeying through Egypt, Crete, and Sicily, these ancestors of the Irish eventually reached Spain, and one of their company, Bregon, built a tower there. From the top of this tower Ith son of Bregon saw Ireland across the sea and set sail to investigate the land he had seen. At that time Tuatha De Danaan were in occupation of the country, and they, suspicious of his motives, killed him. Then his kinsmen, the eight Sons of Mil, invaded Ireland to avenge his death. The most prominent among them were Donn the king, Amairgen the poet and judge, Eremon the leader of the expedition, and Eber. They were accompanied by Lugaid the son of Ith, their own sons, the sons of Bregon, and a number of champions.

On reaching Ireland, they defeated the Tuatha, here associated with Demons and Fomoire, and then proceeded to Tara. On their way they meet in turn the three goddesses, Banba, Fotla, and Eiru, each of whom extracted from Amairgen the promise that her name should be a name for the island.

At Tara they encountered the three kings of the Tuatha, Mac Cuill, mac Cechct, and Mac Grene, who “pronounced a judgment against the sons of Mil” to the effect that they should leave the island in peace for three days. The justice of the case was referred to Amairgen, on pain of death if he judged falsely. “I pronounce it,” said Amairgen, “Let this island be left to them.” “How far shall we go?” said Eber. “Past just nine waves,” said Amairgen. this was the first judgement he gave in Ireland.

And so they withdrew and went through the motions of landing again as though they were performing a ritual. Their first landing had been resisted, for every time they came up with Ireland the demons made for the port as it were a hog’s back, and they skirted round the island three times before coming ashore. Now the poets of the Tuatha sang spells against them, and a magic wind carried them far out to sea, but Amairgen countered with a poem which calmed the wind. The invaders landed for the second time and, after a further victory over the Tuatha, took possession of the country.

The repeated landing, which may have a significance comparable to that of the “second birth” in the life-story of individual personages, is not the only feature which reveals the pre-Christian origin of the tale. As the invaders raced for land the first time, Donn showed envy of his brother Ir who had gained the lead. The oar broke in Ir’s hand and he fell backwards and died. He was buried in “Skellig of the Spectres” off the west coast of Munster, and his brothers judged that it would not be right for the envious Donn to share in the land.

After they had landed, Donn offended Eiru, the queen of the Tuatha De Danann, and she prophesied that neither he nor his progeny should enjoy the island. When he again spoke threateningly of the Tuatha before landing the second time, a wind arose and his ship was wrecked.

Lebor Gabala also says that the youngest brother, Erannan, climbed the mast to reconnoiter and fell to his death. But according to the dinsenchas it fell to the lot of Donn to climb the mast, to chant incantations against the Tuatha, and as a result of the Tuatha’s curse an ague came into the ship.

Donnn asked that his body be carried to one of the islands lest the disease remain in Ireland, “and my people will lay a blessing on me for ever.” After his ship had foundered, his brother Amairgen declared that his folk should come to the high rock, Tech Duinn, “the House of Donn,” whither his body was carried, and so, according to the heathen, the souls of sinners visit it and give their blessing to Donn before going to Hell, while the souls of the penitent behold the place from afar and are not borne astray.

There are references to the House of Donn as the assembly-place of the dead in earlier sources: “To me, to my house ye shall all come after your death.” And the belief has survived in Ireland that on moonlit nights the souls of the dead can be seen over the Skellig rocks, on their way to “The Land of the Young.” (Tir na nOg)

-- Rees and Rees, Celtic Heritage

Precedent

2005-01-31T04:37:00.000-08:00

The story of Oran’s sacrifice in the footers of the Iona abbey are built on this older story, for it is Oran’s lot to be sacrificed so that the abbey walls may stand (in effect, so that the ship of the Iona abbey can finally land at Iona & be received by the resident energies there. It is Oran who travels for 3 days and 3 nights into the Celtic otherworld, and it is his bones which harrow the graveyard where all the dead where sent, and it is through Oran that the angels of Iona are accessed.