TIME AND AGAIN
Out of the curse of his exile, there sprang
ogres and elves and evil phantoms
and the giants too who strove with god
time and again until he gives them their reward.
Beowulf
Did they spring up marked by a curse,
scarring the forehead red,
that of the exile, the outlaw, some old god
trampling the heath, voicing his challenge
like the prolonged scream in the marshes
of something killing something? A bang
(prowler outside my ajar window?)
wakes me startled from an outlandish place
full of the fallen, their angelic harangue.
Out of the curse of his exile, there sprang
the hint of some thing wading closer
through the dark, hungry for flesh;
tight throat, eyes closed, shapes
flood in from a frost-stricken scene,
the fen where it nests, rough and alone.
Weeds choking the mire’s bottom,
an enormous head emerges, grimacing,
laughing its gruff, inhuman laughter.
(Am I dreaming up these gruesome
ogres and elves and evil phantoms?)
Monsters banished before Cain
cut down his brother Abel,
they persist. Unable to sleep I wander
past the poster of a psycho TV star
tacked to my daughter’s door. He assaults me.
Dots of light in his pupils, odd,
gleaming like hard, barbaric gems;
spots of blood on his face, a criminal’s
he killed while working for the crime squad.
And the giants too who stove with god
stared too long into that abyss that stared
back into them and now into him,
our hero driven by his voices to kill.
He’s on a mission to purge the city
like a wind cleansing the marshes
of their pestilence, their ill-starred
thistles swollen with seeds.
Vigilante, he is stalking the guilty,
the ice pick killers in the freight yards,
time and again until he gives them their reward.
****
FISHER KING
And so they lead him to the chamber
where the Fisher King lies
which seems to be strewn
with grass and flowers.
Perlesvaus
The Fisher King lies in a room
smelling of the river. Its reed grass and sedges
covering the floor are strewn over
with wildflowers: cowslips and lavender spikes,
and, of course, clover to avoid madness,
where windows of green glass shower
down light as if from underwater;
everything wavers. Is the Fisher hale,
or gray as a dying river elder?
And so they lead him to the chamber,
another promising hero to see this king
who leans against pillows groaning
from an wound in the thigh, or groin.
A river slides through it, brown
with the sunken foliage of a Viet Nam
jungle; he watches it explode into a floodway
sucking his recruits suddenly from shore
into a kill of snakes and seepage, all
the bamboo groves napalmed in the melee.
Where the Fisher King lays
in his carved oak and curtained bed,
his thoughts drift to last summer,
burying his buddy in a family plot.
A convoy of aging motorcycle knights
comes to attention, as a cannon volleys
its salute over a humid field, its platoons
of daisies, cowslips, buttercups, and clover.
Sulphur and singed petals smudge
the air, incense for the dead. This afternoon,
which seems to be strewn
around him like pollen grains on a tomb,
he honors the hero’s departure with a whiskey,
begins again to write a few
lines of seduction, or plans for escape
to a woman confused for letting him
pour his deluge into her, overpowering
her dream of a fountain where tulips
nod their tended heads; she knows
he lies alone in his river-washed tower,
with grass and flowers.
****
IMMRAM
Plenteous are the wonders
upon the blue wave’s kingdom;
swift is the sailing
when Maelduin makes his voyage.
The Voyage of Maelduin
“What drove your people to sail West?,”
a Cree student asks in our Arctic trailer,
the temperature hovering at -50 outside.
“Not hard,” a bard of old would say.
“It’s the open-ended curve of our art
lifting our boat like a wave, its rowers
and bailers, from off a windy headland
with its cliff-castle into the Great Sea.
It is the restless art of the wanderer.”
Plenteous are the wonders
to lure him offshore: celestial music
shaken from a silver branch by a strange
woman, or the poetry of a trickster god,
rolling his chariot over the flood.
His promise: beyond the sallow fog,
lies an isle without grief, or gruesome
death, a place of tilled land
and white cliffs warmed by the sun.
Soon monks begin falling like flotsam,
upon the blue wave’s kingdom,
throwing themselves to the fierce, green
tide like criminals cast off
in hide-covered boats without rudder,
or oars. Seeking penitence or the truth,
they remember what their new god
told Abraham: “Go forth, leaving
your native land and your father’s house,
to the land I shall show you.”
Winds brawling, a whale spouting,
swift is the sailing
in the old yarns of the seafarers, older
than the standing stones they navigated by,
trading their ingots of copper and tin,
brokering in time and space to the oars’
creak and splash, catch and drive.
Watching the sea swallow the ridges,
the green slopes, the gentle hills,
the crew bursts into a shantey—bravado
overriding lament—sculling from their moorage,
when Maelduin makes his voyage.
NOTES
Poetic license (fairy glamour) occurred with a few of the epigrams: their verbs were changed to the present tense and their verbiage compressed, to achieve a more seamless flow between ancient and modern.
Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf (London: W.W. Norton, 2000) 9. Does the hero become the monster he fights?
Nigel Bryant, trans., The High Book of the Grail, 77. Symbol of life, many Fisher Kings have appeared: Vishnu, Buddha, Tammuz, and Christ, etc.
Caitlín Matthews, trans., “The Voyage of Maelduin,” in The Celtic Book of the Dead (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) 20. God speaks out in Genesis 12.1, as again and again boats set sail for Avalon, Ys, Lyonesse, Atlantis, and the Isles of the Blessed.
