Letter to an Dead Shaman: Guinnevere

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“… Usually sickness, dreams, and ecstasies
in themselves constitute an initiation,
that is, they transform the profane,
pre-’choice’ individual into a technician
of the sacred. Naturally, this ecstatic
type of experience is always and everywhere
followed by theoretical and practical
instruction at the hands of the old
masters; but that does not make it any
less determinative, for it is the ecstatic
experience that radically changes the
religious status of the ‘chosen’ person.”

— Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

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The man befits his woman, their fates
ordained by You, blue Pastor, married
through an augment which is rarely true,
much less for any time on earth both
to hips and hearts engrooved. So I’m at work
yesterday afternoon, costing out revisions
to our editorial package & listening
on i-Tunes to co-worker’s shared vault of
songs—-mostly stuff from the 70s which
I don’t much care for—but scrolling down
the playlist I find “Crosby Stills & Nash”
(1969), and play the songs from that
band’s first album, oaring out again
in the inside boat You bid me build
and launch and ride to the bottom
of all shores, this song where all song falls.

I hadn’t heard those tunes, not in a row,
for  thirty years: But when “Guinnevere”
strummed gently from the speaker of my
Mac I was transported on Your wings
from my desk of latter-day arrears
full back into the spring of ‘75
when I was seventeen-—the age of
Your consent to the death of my
heart’s Heavenly intent, at least
the one of angelic, unbodied skies.

It was toward the end of my freshman
year of college, deep in those two weeks or
so in which I fell hard for and then
lost a young woman named Leslie,
a gold redhead with blue eyes and freckles
who offered me a passing glance
one day in World History Part Two.

Amid the news of my failing world
I watched a new one—-Yours-—awaken
round the sweet form sitting
in the desk in front of mine,
no great beauty but slim and curved,
her hair Arthurian, a tapestry of
mythically spun gold, the roundness
of the back of her head so complete
it suggested how all worlds begin and end
in that curtsy which commands.

It’s a curve I’ve married
each day since that short and failed
bouree in bliss; these days I get back
in bed in reverence to that curve,
stroking our Siamese curled at our feet
from nose round to tail close by,
running my fingertips along the
the rounding plains of my wife’s soles
slowly, over and over again,
rising and falling on that sacred
land I border and try to marry,
shored next to Your watered world
the surf forever choirs.

Play “Guinnevere” along that
wild beach of sweet resounding falls
which wake and take away.

Oh how desperate I was to love that
girl far down my history, for her to love
me back! How ready I was to
drown whatever of my bookish world
that kept me from keeping her
for more than that one torn night
where we kissed Your mystery,
where seas disclosed Your secret name
inside a crashing, world-drowsing bliss.

She loved Crobsy Stills and Nash
so I did too, or came to laying next to her
smoking Marlboros and staring at
ceiling tiles which were blank
of the love-tale I so prayed for in her.
I listened to that album with new-found
interest even though I was utterly estranged
from CSN’s hippie-Californian-digs,
those earth-mothering sweet teats
equidistant from the hard-rocking tundra
of my inner ear. I was Led Zep and Jethro
Tull and The Stones, loud and hard, my taste
a Tartar riding stone Uffington from
Saxon hill to Uther’s hell around some
fatal dick of a standing stone and back:

But it was her record that we spun
and spun in my dorm room as we kissed,
hungering for more. And “Guinnevere”
was the nougat of that float where I found
the clear blue space at last—-only for
a fleeting fragmented moment back then–
but enough to waken every boat I
later launched seeking to shore
that womb-blue of shared nakedness again.

This is the moment: It’s the afternoon of
the day after our only date, my homework
stacked high on my monkish desk
(a term paper on the modern world’s rouse
from Gothic slumber soon due),
spring raw in my basement window
where a single beer stood proud in a final
drift of snow, remnant of our late-night
drunkalogue that ended with a kiss,
first one and then another, singular
and oceanic at the same time, both queen
of hearts and naiad stave which stove
me cleanly through.

I’m laying on my single bed, refusing to climb
back into the iron maiden of my studies,
hungover, smoking Marlboros end
to end, staring at the grim dorm ceiling
and floating far on the waters of “Guinnevere,”
the song she most revered, playing it over
and over like one of Your secret chants,
boating on its bittersweetness as if
the mere sound of it could resume
that late-night kiss, psalming her
back into my arms & drifting us together
on that once and never bed, the healed
history I so yearned for but had no
manner of praying for (having dumped
my Christian beliefs out a back door,
having no wetter myth yet to embrace)
sadly knowing that love was just a dream
and would never really come to pass.

My hand felt still warm with the shape
of her head as kissed south down to my hips,
trying to suck me off and how before
blowing me off for good. She’d said it
just before she left, tucking my
drunk cock back into my briefs with
a last, late-night nurse’s kiss:

Said in that conch-whispered voice
I’ll never forget or find again
(I’ll always remember how she said soft
the way a ripe avocado feels on the tongue,
earth-rich, lush-plump, so welcome)
there in the darkness of my dorm room
with its single candle low (almost out)
that she loved another guy, an asshole
two floors up in my dorm who was
everything I loathed. A theater major
fer Crissakes, married to the mask.

He loved those stages she too loved,
something I, the shy retiring
minimally handsome monkish somewhat
rocking knight of a suitor, could not
offer any like or seem. My spring-wakened
desire—-virile and first for me-—was
only sweet to her, nothing next to
the courtly cum-romantic fire one
feels for who the heart decides,
masks and stage make-up be damned.

And that was that. She said goodnight
in a goodbye sort of way, creeping
out when she thought I slept, leaving
me to stare at candlegloom more lost
and broken than ever, aswoon in
in the sweetest swarm of sound
I’d ever heard—-“Guinnevere,” my grief.

What was that crashing magic
land that still resonated in my ears as
I lay on abed far into the next afternoon,
spinning and spinning that album side?
How could it be so present and permanent
inside when I knew real love had left for good?
I lingered in that lapse of sense, refusing
to wake up, slow dancing with my love
in some Camelot of starry wine inside
a lost, late-60’s song, refusing to let
go; amazed, too that I didn’t have to,
not then, nor ever.

Yesterday outside my window at work
it was a cheery autumn afternoon, traffic
light the day after Thanksgiving,
an easy day for working ahead,
no phones ringing, hard commerce at a pause.
A good day to crunch the daily numbers
while listening again to that tune and
it’s mythic sums, rocking gently in the boat
of that anthem which took me to a place
beyond the kiss and clench of desire,
deep into the tundra of fast farewells.

That’s the place I’ve lived in for the
bittersweetmost half of my life, a land I come to
think of as Yours. I was there when I drove
home later in the day, pulling up
to our house where my wife inside
was pricing stuff to sell in her shop,
sweating the small actuals of her dream.

I live there here, inside a fool’s
paradise, weaving a lost song’s still-
quavering candle-lit soft singular bliss,
sounding every note of love I married
back then which led to here.
You brought me to that kiss
which mortal lips can’t quite slake:
Proferred nipples to my lips which no
man can reach: Poured on too rich
that creamy shoreless afterglow
which washes clean the soul.

So for You, blue master, I hold that
song high inside my heart like a sword
drawn from a lake—-cock-straight and
proud as any guitar-neck, incessant

as the pen which gallops line for line
across and down the page. It was the
back of a woman’s head in class some
30 years ago that sang me to this
curvature which coats my arms in blue.

I’m stuck here at an ending I won’t-—
no, can’t-—let go of, long after the real
“Guinnevere” slipped out the door.
The music is too sweet and singular,
full adrift in the hierophanies
of heart-song. My ear’s hard-wired
to it now, a shell which pours the sea.
I’ve chucked everything into the drink
—-including drink itself—-to remain
exactly there this while longer here,
still staring at the ceiling from
that bed, amazed at what I’d shored
at the bottom of all seas.

“Guinnevere” is the anthem of my salt
expense and these pages measure out
a costly coast, its fortune mythic
the real sum harder and more dear,
a balance of her blue and You
and the curved loves I have
tried to be true to, as if song
could ever have an Arthur,
a Lancelot enough to matter.

Each lover since has been another bead
to sling across the feral abacus,
summing the full round of this ever-breaking
heart the sous of bum lead You tossed
to me from that golden head
that flickered just once and then went down.

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November 2005

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Submitted for d’Verse Poets Undercurrents Poetics challenge.

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