Grendel's Heirs

GRENDEL'S HEIRS

However, it befell me that I with my sword slew

Nine nicors--sea-monsters.

             --Beowulf, in Beowulf (lines 574-575a)

"Smell the bitter, briny tang,"

The elders angled, hoarse with rage,

Wrapped in hair and hide. "Fear

Caves of sorrow, waves of hate.

Know below fell creatures wait."

Naked Ottar smiling swam

Into the sea, long-knife in hand.

Across the wind, the nicors neighed,

Saltbound night-mares stabled

Beneath these waves. Through the roof

Of Ottar's mouth, the blunt, blind,

Ugly truths his not ignoble

Life tore out. Freshened now,

Rife they sang. "Smell the bitter,

Briny tang and hallow here

This mere-hero, with gilded bronze,

With horn and drum. Scorn not

Ottar's gift, this fierce price,

That we may pass our foes unafraid."

Twice, in their grotto, the nicors neighed.

--Matt Duckworth

P.S. I'd originally written a version of this poem in 1995 or so back when I was deep in graduate studies of heroism and wondering if I shouldn't have been trading Lord Byron back for Beowulf. I've revised the piece slightly just now.

Woad: The Road to Autumn

This mask derives from an old memory.

When I put the mask onto this heap of mulch, I remembered once again the buckeyes I carved into goblin-heads one autumn twenty or twenty-five years ago while camping up near Napa. Sugarloaf, the place is called. Lots of dry country, hiking trails through hilly terrain, the larger hill of Sugarloaf providing sightlines and guidance in the days before GPS addictions. Every autumn I yearn for the countryside, preferably beside river or lake or ocean, but that year I needed to get away and yet stay close, so much work to do in those early days of graduate school, so Napa country fit the ticket. Maybe stop at a winery on the way. Now--writing this--I remember the big old Ford truck I had then with the tent and other gear in the back, so this must have been before graduate school. Memory, especially an otherwise good, full one, is a tricky thing that often needs warming up, grease and supplications, to work best.

Buckeyes, fist-sized and -shaped, soft enough to work, hard enough to hold the carving. I started with one, cutting slanted eyes and a crooked mouth, and then picked up another and another, working to catch the shifting trickster images flittering though my mind. (I don't recall ever carving such heads before, or carving much of anything as an adult other than sticks for grilling trout or marshmallows.***) After a dozen or so, I stopped, wondering what to do with the set of heads. There are lines in Hamlet: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." Something like that. These heads were certainly rough-hewn. Primitive, lacking the marks of skill, but still expressive. Or, in the best other words, I liked them.

What to do with them?

What to do with these buckeye-heads, goblin-featured? Take them home? Wouldn't they rot pretty quickly? Leave them? Piled like a Celtic fane, the pyramid of victory--I'd been reading Caesar's Gallic Wars-- or lined up monkey-see-no-evil- monkey-do-no-evil by the firepit? As I said, I liked these little leaf-daemons, as I started calling them, and didn't just want to throw them away, to abandon them. I considered burning them, consecrating them to the spirits of the land, but in my mind they'd only just begun to live.

Finally, I set the leaf-daemon heads in the trees looking down on the camp. All around the camp. Witnesses. Protectors.

Hope the next campers didn't get freaked. Hope they noticed, though.

P.S. "Woad" is my name for this mask--and the creature behind the mask. Woad is also the plant-source for the pigment the ancient Celts used to color their bodies blue, either by painting or tattooing. Such blue markings would have been ceremonial; tribal and idiosyncratic; as preparation for journeying, in life or death, or for battle; and for love and luck.

***Note: 11/3/12.  Of course, I carved Jack O'Lanterns year after year after year, and those goblin-heads were somewhat like junior jack o'l's.  Also, frankly, was that truck a Ford or a Chevy?  Really?  Memory is a very tricky beast; I once thought my Memory was very dependable and loyal, but who really knows?  Pondering to be done.

Clay Bowl, Stone Bench

Point Reyes Morning

Or, Kayak Jack and the Oyster Racks.

As The Who said . . . getting in tune . . . right in tune.

Rock Star: Sequence

There's a bit of illusion here, but an illusion to catch real effects.

The first, second, and fourth photos feature the same seastar, but the third photo's star is actually the one below that featured star. Is that clear?

Despite the shift in stars, I like how that third photo helps to catch what happens when the wave washes through.

Oyster Racks and the Tide

Oyster racks as the tide rises. Soon you won't be able to see them at all.

Oyster farmer checking the crop. A bit after low tide.

Bright Lights, Big Cathedral

The visibility was much better down below, but I like how my eyes get pulled to the yellow weights and then set free. (Did you see the funny face first? Glowing eyes and blue smile?)

Kelp-hopping off Lover's Point in Pacific Grove.

I also like this shot--and the shot below--because this is how diving often can be, not so good for photography, but still wonderful for swimming and looking around. (I sometimes see more when I put away the camera.) The water and sky weren't cooperating for those cathedral shots, but we were still swimming through those cathedrals, those green halls of kelp and salt and sacred motion.

Swell and Surge

What Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest.

About that father and "full fathoms five."

Here, a passage amongst rocks.

Mussel-bound rock.

Kelp anchors for the soul.

Fathoming and unfathoming.

X marks the spot. Gazebo Rocks.

Sea-change.

Rest easy, rest lightly,

though rocked and rolled

by swell and surge.

Quartet: Feathers and Salt

I've never seen geese crop the grass right here, next to the parked cars and the divers getting ready. Those are divers, not birds, in the water in the background. Note here the watchers; I love that about geese. That's how the Roman Republic was saved from the invading Celts back in . . . oh, that's another story for another time.

Now, here, just respect this foursome and how they make the space.

Rock Star

Shelf Life

Running Aground Off Withaven Cove

Or, Time-Travel: 1988. Can you call it juvenilia, if you wrote it at age 21 or 22? Here's a poem I rediscovered while rummaging through old boxes in storage; I was supposed to be culling the past, and here I am, not or not yet. Listen: I'm not sure what I was trying to get at then, and there are phrases that make me cringe now, but I like how it all sounds, like the rhythms and the singing (yes, singing) still.

Besides having read my Melville, Stevenson, Coleridge, London, and such, I must have been reading John Gardner's The King's Indian at the time. (Also, "grim" sure shows up a lot; why? Was that my stab at "serious"?)

A slightly different version was published in Byzantium: Vol. III, by the Associated Students of UC Berkeley back in 1988. I'd written it a bit before that. I'm not claiming any merits beyond modeling exuberance by posting "Sea Doggerel" here.

SEA DOGGEREL

The hard deck heaves; the sea flames white.

The troubled crests shudder against the night

As the sky tumbles into the surge.

Melville stalks tavern planks, turning

A page--as the sea-swells do--and stark Ahab

Turns to in his mind. He drinks the mild Mermaid wine

And sets his words in stalwart verse, carefully

Weighed as an Emperor's gaze, falling far

Fathoms deep. (Through crusted hulls, clear songs breach,

The black and white leviathans of the deep.)

The untiring winds hurl us on. The old ropes snap

And flap and straight-a-way crack. The storm is strong.

"Land ho, ahoy!" a salt-washed sailor cries,

The clerk in tar-cloth, narrowing his eyes

At these winded shores of Withaven Cove.

The ship lists, to port, as his mind does rove

Where he hangs aloft ere Nowhere's icy rim,

Dangling fast from the mind's mainmast limb.

Aye, this shallow ship is shot, it leaks,

The broad beams split, and bald rats starving

Pace the hold, planking painted

With grim phosphorous--that stinking ship glow.

The salted clerk--no whaler, no mariner he--

Fears the great white birds that fail to flee.

Fall waters gnaw the windy shores. Siren

Songs call and the Christian seaman

Moans and rings the old church bell.

Ding-dong, dong-dirge, the cold

Swell's surge and the drowned man's bones

Shake and swell to fill the tones.

Words, grim words, are a seaman's lot,

The rotten grog that the Devil's wrought.

When the storm's aloft, it's grim advice

That whaler's bones be but hump-backed dice.

From the Toolshed

Gazebo Rocks

Passages: Why Read? Why Write?

Here's a poem by Chase Twichell from her Dog Language volume that offers an answer to those questions, at least for me.

NECK EXERCISES

Because I have arthritis in three

vertebrae, I do yoga and lift

small weights. Strange,

what the exercises dislodge:

a Popeye cartoon,

pirates and skeletons--

what's so indelible about that?

Or the way a dog's eye looked

in a painting, how it followed me.

I like the spinal rotations,

the flex in the tree of history,

part green, part stiffened by bark.

It sprouts a shoot of memory,

a line I once abandoned:

all their hope in their shoulder blades--

it came from seeing some fifteen-

or sixteen-year-old girls on a summer dock--

why should that survive? I guess

it's why I'm standing here before you,

pumping the tiny barbells.

--Chase Twichell

Daedalus at Work

"Aptness to purpose: one definition of beauty." --Ezra Pound.

Or, as a different caption:

THE MYTHS

Italy and Greece lay in ruins,

inhabited by beasts: the Minotaur

in his labyrinth,the scrush of his hide

against its walls; the blinded Cyclops

groping for Ulysses among the sheep.

Dad taught us all the myths.

Up on Mount Olympus

people disguised themselves

as animals. It was like that then.

It's not like that now.

Back then you were half animal

if your father was a god.

--Chase Twichell

from Dog Language