To every ascension there is a corresponding descent, involving passage over a threshold or through a gate.
All things move toward
the light
except those
that freely work down
to oceans’ black depths
In us an impulse tests
the unknown
~
I passed through the lens of darkness
as through a furrow, and the dead
gathered to meet me.
A herm is a pile of commemorative stones left for Hermes, the Bringer, guide of soul from world to world (soul as message, Hermes the messenger), from vessel to vessel, moment to moment to endowment. Under Hermes’s sponsorship, dice, bones, sticks, and quills begin to speak, forming a living body of graffiti, a graphic crypt of signs. The herm evoked in every roll of the dice enumerates the name of the throw. As if throw were thaw.
The descent to a level plain with scattered small hills before the river—there is a mound we climb in the moonlight to look for the mountains of the plains, never visible by day—and the chill that comes then is the shake of an oracle, the cast of an augury, small haruspices cut in the air—there, the small stone picked up without thinking is everything, the unattended stray memories, everything, in the throw of the vision, the catch of us in the vision.
Earth ventriloquism. Penetrating, suffusing, hypnotic. A narcosis of tropical conductivity, blending the living with the dead. Lure of a gregarious polysemia. It is a hermetic propensity of psyche to compact all space and distance into exertions of the local:
strong like a puddle’s ice
the bios
of nature in this
park of eternal
events is a sidewalk
to slide on, this
terminal moraine.
The scale of that puddle—“150,000 years ago to the t”—is the timeform of continental drift, sea voyage of a world under composition, tectonic plates malleable as “a puddle’s ice.” Continental immensities gesturing through tectonic mass, volcanic and glacial heave.
Continents of water and of earth,
Gaia! Time’s mother too
must wear guises,
hop on one leg
and hide her head in a hut,
dance with the rest among the maskt guys.
~
The war of Africa against Eurasia
has just begun again. Gondwana
~
There is only
the one continent, the one sea—
moving in rifts, churning, enjambing,
drifting feature from feature.
The work obeys a process. The worker is dissolved at the crown of creation. A tropic summit; a crypt. “In the mind, the bone pile grows.” And on this “sarcophagus of we know not whom, / each figure, impending, become a sign,” each sign a seed (sema), each seed a soma (some body), is forced through hermetic (sealed) passages by the heat of the process. The fire smokes until the whole mass is illegible chiaroscuro. Black sun. Nigredo.
tomorrow rustles in yesterday’s corpse.
Light the death lamps, see the shadows condense!
~
Not lost battles or even defeated people
But blackness alive with itself
At the sides of our fires.
At home with us
And a monstrous anti-grail none of those knights could have met or invented
As real as tomorrow.
Not the threat of death. They could have conquered that. Not even bad magic.
It is a simple hole running from one thing to another.
~
downward,
to darkness,
to chill
and darkness
—its sybilline letters in the form of bones, blackened against the cooled ash-white of the page. A composite portrait, a monstrous calligraphy disassembling and reassembling itself hypnotically before its maker as it goes along. Aroused to plangency, semenslippery quick, the exoteric is propelled out of reach. The dreams pursue us over the snow. I wanted the country beyond the garden, over the garden wall. The wall was orgasm, to give it a common name, soft red brick always in sunlight, some of the bricks black with age & with an intrinsic moisture that slipped down the rough channels of the brick
Past the skin & over the wall
to the shape I have seen stretched out
solider than darkness
before I lost my purchase on the wet brick.
In Ammons’s corresponding vision of
… the whole mystery, the lush squeeze, the centering
and prolongation
if one can get far enough this way imagination
and flesh strive together in shocking splendors, one can
forget that sensibility is sometimes dissociated and come.
Carnal rotation in the erotic compressor blanks out the dissociated “split man” of modernity who is momentarily baptized again as an animal, in the flicker of sexual grace, where
supraliminal language-field is body-field
is feeling
and feeding:
so I am always finding in feeling
locating in shifting
the terms that compose me
the rhetorical cinnabar lode
whose clavicle’s wavicle’s key.
No wonder a ritual drama marks the occasion. Irby’s “Offertory” condenses layers of mineral wealth into a theme-schist of hypnogogic masturbation and geophagy:
to call up the dead from dreams
and break the heart’s stone
whose cock is it? not just my own.
“Expression” takes on a difference in the sensorium; “but along the edge of the wall, later a new stain.” The leakage is heraldry with semiotic implication—a pli or pleat in meaning,
yolk openings in the hand
back into which the bird had fled
—in the easy slippage of the dreamwork alchemy these messengers are alternately owl, duck, and finally
crows on Tufts Hill
silver by night
turned black again by day.
These are the crows of the completed opus (the egg on the steps between Irby and his brother*), nigredo of the upspringing vigor in compost. “Offertory” ends on an image of the oracular surplus of the earth:
and now there will be a footstep uncovering a rock in the mud, and in the line of sight will appear a quartzite boulder brought down by the glacier, carved with the rotations of the star, leading inward, Northeast—and from the foot lifted to the one remaining ancient spruce, the air is folded in on itself, capturing the moisture, shimmering, opening a pool through which the hands reach, yolk-stained.
Hands and even whole heads may emerge from the rubble’s froth
… where,
From huddle of trash, dried droppings, and eggshell, lifts
The unfeathered pitiless weakness of necks that scarcely uphold
The pink corolla of beak-gape, the blind yearning lifeward.
Warren’s hatchlings resonate with Olson’s kingfishers, out of whose “dripping, fetid mass” comes a brighter excrement, disclosing (as in “The Lordly and Isolate Satyrs”) the other half of the beach, unsuspected.
The Visitors—Resters—who, by being there,
made manifest what we had not known—that the beach fronted wholly
to the sea—have only done that, completed the beach.
The difference is
we are more on it. The beauty of the white of the sun’s light, the
blue the water is, and the sky, the movement on the painted landscape,
the boy-town the scene was, is now pierced
with angels and with fire. And winter’s ice shall be as
brilliant in its time as life truly is, as Nature is only the offerer, and it is we
who look to see what the beauty is.
The contrary side—the verso of the whole globe—comes into play. “In any case the whole sea was now a hemisphere, / and our eyes like half a fly’s, we saw twice as much.” These Visitors (“Resters” in contrast to the agitated revenants in “As the Dead Prey Upon Us”) are the sleeping dead, the hungry dead, and as the Greeks most feared, the stupid dead, unknowing in death’s narcosis; unable to retain the sophrosyne of their own identities (headstones were to remind the dead, not the living, of their names)—but, for all that,
gnostic reminder of
world-rut, remnant, revenant,
whirled, unraveling, whir …
World, word, whirred : these necropolitan visitors are vessels, part of the alembic.
Hail them solely that they have the seeds in their mouth, they
are drunk, you cannot do without a drunkenness, seeds can’t,
they must be soaked in the contents of the pot, they must be all one mass.
But you who live cannot know what else the seeds must be. Hail
and beware the earth, where the dead come from. Life
is not of the earth. The dead are of the earth. Hail and beware
the earth, where the pot is buried.
Greet the dead in the dead man’s time. He is drunk of the pot.
He speaks like spring does. He will deceive you. You are meant
to be deceived. You must observe the drunkenness. You are not to
drink. But you must hear, and see. You must beware.