Images and writing by Doug
CHARON BEGINS TO DREAM
A rare moment to use the corroded cleat,
And the musty mangled line
To moor my punt so sought
In the sustained traffic of death.
Scarcely I will pause at either shore,
Ever,
Since out of shattered chaos
The inky Styx began to flow,
A river of laws to show in earth
What mortal man is taught from birth,
That all his breaths count up to none.
But this ichorous body,
Not yet subordinate to death,
Does not clamor for my service
Like the rest of the naked, shore-bound swarm.
He flowers his petition for passage
Into a drifting song,
And on his lyre, between plaints,
Reticulating scales open,
Music of its own world and space,
Very ancient music,
Music that slips over time’s hard folds,
Harpstrings studded with grains of creation,
Torches flickering on a third shore.
He looked me in the eye.
Souls keep distance from me,
Begging and fearing
They arrive with coins in mouth,
Foul and pale,
Unserene,
Driven by anxiety.
It’s tiring to keep the breast so tight,
To clench my ear in
The name of tenebrous order,
I can taste the dry fiber
Of my disregarded heart.
While he chants
On the slip below,
I’ll stand tall in my prow,
Billowing my black cloak,
But rest against my upright oar,
And temporarily silence my eyes
Into to the palm of his voice.
My divine indignation,
Barnacled.
He will not pass,
He will not pass.
OLD CAPE COD
I.
Mother Glacier shat as she retired For the Laurentian Shield,
Leaving this bending arm of sand In the indifferent sea,
I think it was a Tuesday,
Then we came
First by foot,
Waiting for white-tailed deer
In prismatic bogs,
Then tripped by ship,
Sucked cranberries,
Buried our dead in brittle pitch pine roots,
Cached corn in the slipping dirt,
Siphoned landscapes through brush and pen,
Romped in caustic marram grass,
Scraped the edges for the last few cod,
And had one hell of a dinner party.
II.
She says,
I will fold you softly into this story for just a moment
This song carried over an ice age,
which is really more of a groan than a song — the ache of shifting land.
The story of the heaving, never silent ocean,
buttressing and thieving.
The sadness of passing time insisted by the failing dunes.
Watch it go.
It is also the story of a million silver blades of grass,
reaching over their shoulder in the wind today
and drawing circumferences in the sand,
as if there was nothing better to do.
We watch the September light pull down on the dune faces.
There is something like an old memory
that says we can be here, too,
in the thoughtless,
limitless
rising and falling of time.
THE DEEP-DOWN PLACE
I am searching for the deep-down place,
The oldest spot.
Is it a warm cellar enmeshed in wet roots and black soil?
Is it the far off shore, where land and water confuse in a thousand milky reeds?
Could it be found in the indigo filaments of the retreating sun?
I am looking for the deep-down place because I was once there before,
Immense lifetimes between me and it,
I faintly remember the way down.
It might be a spiral,
In part a flowing outward,
But definitely a thread inward to follow,
Quickly launching past the brief comedy of mind made stuff,
the aspirations, the machinery, the clever day to day systems,
The rushing wind blew that all away.
First, wavelets across the surface of the water,
The sensual undulating trees,
Then it came – the gust,
Air moving through the land and pouring over me
– little naked animal thing, clinging to the moss.
So stripped of my skin that my spirit nearly fell backward into the yawning void,
The beauty almost frightening in its honesty,
A scope of time too wide even for my long arms,
So much richness and goodness assembled in that very large hall
– the faces of friendship, the green caress of birch leaves.
I know I was here before,
Even if it didn’t look like this.
The deep-down place where a well-tended fire is still burning,
Smoke helps carry us back.
Insects alight and then depart.
The world constantly unfolding its perfection. How could it be otherwise?
Beginnings and endings are conjoined in me.
Through the arcing verdant canopy above I sense the old reunion.
The great mysterious parallel.
The murky water’s edge; I know it.
The glimmering light; I know it.
The dying day; I know it.
I have died into this moment myself a thousand times before.
VOLCANO SONG
People keep coming to the edge of the volcano
To dance on the rim
And peer down in
Magmatic crimson glow pushing curves into their faces
As they gape
And sweat
As their bodies convulse to the roar
Of earth being blown open again and again
Stomp around the edge of the living wound
Only here are destruction and creation
Sown in the same soil
So dance in the sulfur stench!
Gasses waited a millennia in deep fissures
To wrap around your ecstatic flesh and beneath you
Poisoned earth trembling full of God
Tonight’s the night
Dance!
That fire’s been burned in you before—
Dance!
Your callused soles on pumice floor—
Dance!
This is the spot for wayward feet—
Mountain!
Bleed up that demon heat