Hymns to the Great Goddess

 

 Writing about Isis, the Great Goddess of Egypt, punted memories back to the 1960s, when my libido was strong enough to generate religious feelings in the fashion of D. H. Lawrence, especially in the presence of a woman who still delights me fifty years later. The goddess named in my first poem is Isis' mother Nut, who represents the arc of the sky, perhaps the Milky Way. The poem was published later in the Winter 1986 issue of Yellow Silk: Journal of the Erotic Arts, a copy of which is open before me and is really yellow now because it was printed on newsprint.

LETTER IN EARLY MARCH

The sleet fell yesterday. The thin-

leaved bushes sang like skin

as I moved in you. Brown buds

darkened with the sudden bloods

that drum our spiral dance, efface

our being in the ancient race.

Like Geb and Nut, Earth and Sky,

we merge, enfold a world, and die.

Let me be Sky--apologies

to old Egyptian--let my knees

be wind, and let a pubic cloud

halo my solar pillars proud

migrations, underneath whose days

your unwintered valleys praise

my risings as I fall to rain

fecund beneath the rising plain.

The mythos lingers. Damp of sweat

and juice returns. Outside, the wet,

gas-burner-blue descant of sleet.

Inside, the icy rush of heat.

I almost meet you, half asleep

(but miles apart now), oceans deep,

sinking deep to deep, enwound

in silent flesh and wordless sound.

The next poem, with its motif of cosmic rape, violent destruction and creation, would be objectionable if it described real people, but it is an allegory of the creation and destruction of the universe in the mythos of the pre-patriarchal goddess, where creation is cyclical and sexual. The Mother is both the void and the source of being, chaos and the fount of cosmic order. The poem gestures toward a world before the Babylonian Enuma Elish, before the all-consuming female became a dragon to be slain.

        Unabashedly imitating Dylan Thomas, cross-pollinated with Old Norse verse with a dash of Poe, it has never been published. It's very unfashionable. Fifty-five years ago, I showed it to Cleanth Brooks, and he predictably didn't care for it and said nothing. Dylan Thomas seems to have been a stylistic dead-end, a backwater of moribund Romanticism. People love him but not his mode--not in other incarnations. I marvel at the rococo verse form here, a mosaic of internal and external slant rhyme and alliteration. I wouldn't (and probably couldn't) patch such a word-quilt today.

                           TEMPLE

    When the flashing facade falls, smash,

    in a clatter of mica, plaster, and glass

    to a clutter of glitter, debris, and dust,

    we'll see what the source was of storm and fuss,

of trumpets and all.

    We'll see a haphazard hall in ruins,

    a jumble of patches, props, and runes,

    a tumble of rocks, tackle, and racks

    revealing the reason for rifles and such

by  the pillared wall.

    Among timbers, splinters, and twine stands

    on a midden of pottery, plastic, and stone,

    a maiden by dust and rubble untouched,

    her eyes the incentive for armor and such,

for parade and ball.

    In her sight, cities smoke and plantations,

    vibrating, crumble to ashes as thousands

    of migrating rabbits and bulls and bears

    obey the attraction of eye like stars,

gigantic and small.

    A shroud of smoke over cities, ablaze

    in her laser light, covers the razed

    dark lazar land her dazzle has shown

    to  be, by her diamonds, a daub of loam

where vermin crawl.

    The refugee rout rumbles and blares,

    a rabble of Tartar, gyrfalcon, boar,

    minotaur, spaniel, Saracen, horse,

    elephant, gibbon, and goat in a chorus,

    a host, a muster, a mass, a herd,

    a choir, a swarm, a shoal, a horde,

    loose a babel of bellow, shriek, and whine

    around the she-god in here shambled shrine,

her ancient stall.

    Small in a shimmer of silk, her flesh

    is ripe for the multitude's stony press,

    for rape by the millions caught in her gaze,

    expressing an urgency older than trees

with a hollow call.

    Brought to her back by the blatant want,

    the fairest receives a phallic grant

    of forest and sea in her festive port,

    unfolds in the ruins of her royal fort.

O fortunate fall!

    A flame in the farthest folds of her womb

    coughs and speaks and sings out a dome

    that kefs of fire and singing expand

    till they carve out a castellate Vatican,

candescent and tall.

    Our trees, gates, gardens, rooftops rise

    revealed among rivers, reborn of light,

    congealing around the jubilant lode

    that crumbling columns and doors enclosed

in her cosmic hall.

    And when the flashing facade falls, smash,

    in a clatter of mica, plaster, and glass

    to a clutter of glitter, debris, and dust,

    we'll see what the source was of storm and fuss,

of trumpets and all.