Drowning Atlantis

I need to swim.

Right now, the water-of-life goes down like water.

When I am swimming regularly, putting in the laps, day after day, I'm not so thirsty.

Right now, I'm trying to drown Atlantis.
And I am.
Drop by drop,
dram by dram,
deluge by deluge.

The King of Atlantis
Fall 2009: Sculpture mix
(glazed with Transparent Brown, Stormy Blue, & Celadon),
copper wire, and hemp.

Face In The Water

Face: 
sculpture mix; transparent black and shino glazes.

Jack Spicer: Of Fools, Goddesses, Heroes, Oceans, Love, and Memory

ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN

Any fool can get into an ocean   
But it takes a Goddess   
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
    water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

--Jack Spicer

(Thanks, JP, for the suggestion.)

Thunder, Free, Curse: Three Poems from Brendan Kennelly

SPECIAL THUNDER

He had to reach the island in the winter gale.
From Saleen Quay he pushed the little boat
Over the rough stones till she came afloat;
You'd swear he could see nothing when he hoisted sail
And cut the dark.  Once a grey shape blurred
Above his head while pitchblack water slapped
And tried to climb over the side but dropped
Into the sea, thwarted.  In time, he heard

The special thunder of the island shore,
He hauled the boat in, sheltered near a rock
And smiled to hear the sea's defeated roar;
Breathing as though the air were infinitely sweet,
He watched the mainland where the hard wind struck.
The island clay felt good beneath his feet.


FREE

Once ever a boat capsized on Red
So simply he couldn't tell why.
One moment the sun caressed his head,
The next, his world was water.  His eyes
Opened, closed, hurt by the urgent green
That pressed him down, down into the mud
Until his face touched the obscene
Slime.  Strange, though, how foul touch calmed his blood.

His grey head about to split in pieces,
He kicked free, free till he broke into the air.
Breathing hugely, he righted his craft in time,
Clambered aboard.  Ghoulish faces
Of water haunted him, seemed to stare
At his repose.  The sun tasted of green slime.


CURSE

They said a curse was on the boat.
It would never put to sea again
Because two men were lost from it.
Red bought it from a fisherman
For thirty pounds and four tides later
Headed it out into the Shannon.
'There's no such thing as luck,' we heard him mutter
'There's but the skill and strength of a man

With sure hands and sense in his head.
And one thing more.  Luck was never known
To drown the living or raise the dead
But many a cocksure man went down
Because his trust was not where it should be.
Out there, forget your brothers.  Trust the sea.'


--BRENDAN KENNELLY,
from his Love Cry sequence,
collected in Breathing Spaces: Early Poems,
Bloodaxe Books, 1992.

Deluge In Clay: Atlantean

Reprise: Exile of Atlantis; the Spearman.

"Hooked, Slimed, and Gutted"

SONG: "CABIN'D, CRIBB'D, CONFIN'D"

There's a hammer in the head
And a pounding at the door.
You'll never sleep soft
Till you even out the score.
There's a question on the table
And a cupboard full of woes,
But your sole occupation's
Shooting blanks of Old Crow.

The innkeeper said,
It never fails, never fails.
Just make yourself at home:
Bed of nails, bed of nails.

Our ghosts just doze at dawn
In a soul-bin "Lost and Found."
Though hooked, slimed, and gutted,
Sorrows rarely ever drown.
(At every bottle's bottom,
Every sinner floats.
On this fishing trip to hell
You're still bailing out the boat.)

Opportunity's not knocking,
But Misery's banging pails;
You've made yourself at home:
Bed of nails, bed of nails.

--MD

Fatality Knocks

"Dead people and dead thoughts and supposedly dead moments are never, ever truly dead, and they shape every moment of our lives.  We discount them, and that makes them mighty."

--from Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Drowning Girl: A Memoir

Langston Hughes' "Island"

ISLAND

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.

--Langston Hughes



(Thanks, Mi Robin)

The Tide Is Low: Mask and Kelp

Triton Beached (detail).


Perhaps an ancient Greek poet can help us here:

Desire the limb-loosener,
O my companion,
Has beat me down.


--Archilochos

(Translated by Guy Davenport in 7 Greeks.)

Or, perhaps, we should recall a poem by W.B. Yeats I've posted once before here.
His poem begins . . .

I am worn out with dreams;
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams . . . .

Blue Drop

"Why can't you ever let anything just go?" Cora cried.  "Just let it go."

"You think I like remembering everything?" said Tom.  "There's this deep well--dark, dark blue with no edges that I can see--and I just keep dropping deeper and deeper."

"What are you talking about now?  Can't you just finish an argument, for once?"

"Finish it?  There's never an end, don't you get that?  That's what hollow, what empty, means.  It still hurts.  You blink, and I can roll out this anger at what happened before, at what you did or didn't do, at what I did and didn't do, like it happened yesterday.  And it's been years.  You know all that.  Of course, I still get mad.  Getting mad hurts less than being sad.  Sad's like this grip that squeezes and squeezes and never lets up.  The only way to breathe is to roar."

"Roar, roar, roar!  The past--let it go!  You need some help."

"Why do you think I'm still talking?  What do you think I'm doing here?  Throw me a goddamn rope."

"No!  No, you . . . coward!  Swim for it.  Swim out of your goddamn imaginary blue hole yourself!  Or drown.  Drown, drown, drown, drown."

Draft in motion, from "The Devil's Acre."

Haunted By Lice: The Power of Suggestion

Here's a poem by Seamus Heaney that my mind can't quite let go of, and I take such grip to be a fine sign of quality and power in any writing. "Vision" is the seventh and final strand of "A Lough Neagh Sequence" from his 1969 volume Door Into The Dark.

I am struck by the "vision" of "hatched fears" resulting from, what, the childhood admonition to comb his hair, an admonition accompanied by an invocation of monstrous, fatal lice. How could the child not imagine the worst, no matter how well or how often he combed his hair. Words and images, particularly, woven into story have tremendous powers, if only to awaken our imaginations, our own dark envisionings.

The "jellied road" haunts my imagination, certainly.

7. VISION

Unless his hair was fine-combed,

The lice, they said, would gang up

Into a mealy rope

And drag him, small, dirty, doomed,

Down to the water. He was

Cautious then in riverbank

Fields. Thick as a birch trunk,

That cable flexed in the grass

Every time the wind passed. Years

Later in the same fields

He stood at night when eels

Moved through the grass like hatched fears

Towards the water. To stand

In one place as the field flowed

Past, a jellied road,

To watch the eels crossing land

Re-wound his world's live girdle.

Phosphorescent, sinewed slime

Continued at his feet. Time

Confirmed the horrid cable.

--Seamus Heaney

I want to echo what surfers say about prime conditions: Not a drop of water out of place, not a word out of place, not a single syllable gone awry. I take it that he drowned, finally, and probably such an end came from too much caution, too many cautionary tales, than from any simple clumsiness by the bankside.