Index of Titles and First Lines

A Lay of Fafnir

  I

Where the great dragons lay
centuries sleeping, into millenia milleniae,
we have cloven and turned the sod
wherein their great bones dreamt
out an ancient and eternal destiny:
- for back into their earth
the dragons sank, down,
home into the darkcleft flame and dust
that first gave them breath
and long-living's wisdom.

Their end came, their time outlived;
- and we small apes leapt down from trees,
swam up onto the steep-valed ocean shore,
found foot, then hewed the verdant, rifted earth
asunder...

Did, as old legends sing, our warriors
bold slay cruel the worm-kind King? -
The last long-lived prince of the sky and abyss,
the lordly monsters of the ocean deeps and dark-caverned halls,
butchered to pay the tribute their secret majesty
made toil upon our virgin, too-young souls...
- did our kin end their race
        by sharp-silver swords,
or did but our learning's plowshares
        dig up their hidden eyes?
Their last beloved eggs unbroken,
turned stone, and found to raise unto the cold
of altar-crypts and reliquaries
or shattered by hammer and light
to trace our infant line...

The dragon-land arises,
world-serpent shifts his coils -
our payments time, our living's test
is come:

The sacrifice shall be the flower of the earth:
The stone shall be seared clean, the garden of the world re-made.

  II   Gimli

  III   Hydra

  IV

(Untitled)

My own voice, brazened, but an anticked mimicry,
has no use, a sterile generation gone
deaf and blin to purpose, and to event:
I have no tribe, or nation born, would hear
the story of my years, or the passions
                    of this epoch's end.

So where amidst the cannon and the blood
there sounds a hollow claim to peace?
Let fire burn out our heritage, and singe
the centuries of man's deceits, raise up
the voices of all aeons long-gloried down.

Ever since man's grey mind reached out
and touched its matters upon the unthought world,
there were ghosts of sages unheard-of yet
lurking in the labyrinths, awaiting birth
and growth to hero's steels, and magic-mettled braveries
                    to fuel unholy fires.

(Who heeds the dragon's stir?
What forge will melt this metal's sword?)

The Drunkard at the Feast

Shapeless, endless, can thus be unleashed
without the driving-in and -out of other urge
to fuel the fires of tongue and nonsense-deeped?
Does this wording's voice sound true -
do I speak of, in, naught, or vain?
Do I not hold more fast herein
than any have sought to walk ere now?

Am I hard, or but are you dumb, less mute?
For the stillness of your own artifice-moderned mock,
simulacrum of a jaded, heavying empire of glory long-lost,
of pretensions stretched to guile in final gullibility,
purpose and talent broken into shard,
the jugs and casks shaken, broken for frenzy's sake
driven by the drunkenness of sour, rotten wine?

What a feast this timely hour's orgy is! -
       (Hush, let the drunkard fix his speech and finish!)
Painted concubines, dour courtiers of Art,
what flavour is the gilding on your abasement's throne?
Is it rich in meat enough for your consumption's hungry palate?
Is the gold tainted fine with power and hardlied pride?

       (-Behold, he has fallen drunk before the dais,
         swept away by wine
         overcome by the stench of rot!
         Quick - let's cook him fast
         and scorch his bones
         that he may not utter thus again!
         Certainly, and sooth, his fibre will be tasty
         and sinew-soft in our toothless gums...)

(1982)

Sestiad
(The Drunkard at the Feast - Part II)

If I did, then, did unleash them onto you
     how much would be heard as was felt and done?
          Enough to sate your whim, and more?
Enough to leave you no escape from what I lived as true
     and would have no debate was writ for fame or fun?
          And would you dare to find my years a bore?

I knew too much - or so I'm told -
     of things that others would never want
          to know by right of scar. My fate
is to wield a tongue of burnished gold
     in an age when such can never daunt
          its ancient foes: idiotic sloth and hate.

If you could learn to dance an untarnished tune
     and wander mad in wilden mountain nights,
          then I would heed your pride perhaps
a bit more than I can now - for by the moon
     that burns the star-cold sky, your sight
          could not then suffer this present, mortal, lapse.

But even now you wince to see me rhyme
     and hold free a form where none need be ever put
          to say what woe I have said (or tried to) here.
My song is deep, but your discernment's crime
     avoids the fact my eye exists. A meter-foot
          is all that deafs your heart from what is clear:

I lived my life, I lived it well, I
     knew much that never can be known again.
          No, no, such a one as I cannot exist
for they tell me that my times did die
     long afore cruel fortune had me born, or pen
          was brought unto my idle, earnest, fist.

In such a case (a world so dead), pack up a box
     wherein to retire all the times I've told myself
          and hope that folly never opens it.
For I have seen that something mocks
     this world and age of yours, in stealth;
          but this better ever silent than debased as wit.

I've gone on and on, with never much to say -
     only a few lines in which to say it
          and find an end to my complaint
around the bitter craft of thoughtful speech, a day
     between my hand and thine, and hate
          between the eye, the brush, the paint.

For mere sake of shape, I'll pour this ninefold and crude
     (so I can say a bit more yet). I hope
          that naught of what I've thrown offends your vanity.
What clay I've lived and loved no other has, no mood
     the like has found my tether with a knotted rope -
          Any further I could hearsay is already more inanity.

A Symbol for Our Age

an orb, dense, decaying, heavy

          (the earth, the cosmos,
           the order of existence:
           the perfection of the whole,
           seething, fuming matter)

Struck, sundered by a metal wedge

          (itself - the wedge - on fire:
           the axe of human error -
           deceit, folly, overcunning,
           the will of violence
              driven hard
                into
              our green world
           the hot fruit of our time,
           the fungus on an ancient rot . . .
            . . . and the Tree begins to fall . . . )

the whole encased in coffin
          (falling, falling,
           from the sky,
           waned, streamlined,
           accurate,
              oh
           so deadly accurate,
           a seed of heavenly fire
           dropped to scorch this earth;

           But this is not Apollo's sun
           - it is Gravity's cruel bastard,
           a flower of subnuclear incest,
              the bloom of cosmic lust,
           a momentary scream, its umbilical cord
           the world of its birth
              only silence
                and storm
                  and final dark)

and destroyed unto oblivion:
In seacula saeculorum,
the technology of the ultimate.

           Dies irae, dies illa
           solvet seaclum in favilla
           Teste David cum sybilla
           tuba mirum.......

Abstract, mindless,
   thought-formed
      form-hewn and circuit-driven, guided
pregnant with a load
   of annihilation
a word of power:
a light.

   - And oh, oh!
      such, such a fire!!

And then there shall be no time
and the eyes of space will have
                  melted
and no skin will feel matter's
                  touch
no bone the weight of years;
the earth will have been
    cleansed, and changed.

The Curse

  I

Sinew, marrow, nerve, all jumbled
by the shape of words, the loom of dreams
Decidings that the will has bent
in spite of all-opposing flux
a catalogue of nevermores unwrit
that tract of life and lives long-gone
- relics of the heedless past, days
turned night by a passing veil:
the goassmer present sweeping broad
time's consuming wind digesting
the myriad futures of what-may-be.
No human will dare defy that wall,
that barrier that is the will of Fate:
of God may we only dream,
beyond the fleshy wrappings of our life.

  II

  III

  I   Rocky Mountain Elegy

Strange winds, strange lights, this day -
the red of sunset mingled in pale moonglow
a bathe of light filling the mountain vale,
the sky a still grey, that held the light
there was no shadow
                    beneath that one cloud
                    (fringed in iridiscent green,
                    rolled and curled with nameless hues)
Aside those facing rays the horizons
                    burned with blue -
blue, with a flush of green,
                    a haunt of purple,
forest, jade, turquoise (deep), malachite, emerald,
        - what shaded word can name that only green, the green of life
          when immmersed in sun and moon's full-twinned radiance?

                    (it seemed as a verdant fire,
                     the sky all water, the air rainbowed
                     by one unnameable, unnamed hue)

It was as though the world was flame
a conflagration of dazzling beauty
at the juncture of two worlds,
              two times,

     (as though all the cares of earth
           were fallen - as from a spell of anguish -
           and the world's boundaries opened, our air
           knew the light of a yet-brighter star,
           raptured in the intermingled grasp
                of our sun and moon, the air rich with savour
                    the light pungent
                         with a mighty spice
                    the stillness heady
                         and calm in raging quiet
                         a moment's peace
                         from earth's and heaven's
                         hardrode rides)

- as though somewhere in those hills,
above an endless plain, there lay a pass,
a warm wind of light coming out of fairer realm,
awakened from our earth's, our humanity's
fading and saddened dream of destiny and pain,
flushed and flashed, splashed, enrushed in tone,
all elements drunk and drenched with colour,
the eyes ablaze, strange eyes, strange blaze,
strange freshness amid an urgent strain.

                (the reins relaxed,
                    but the gallop increased,
                        the rider one with the horse,
                            thigh and haunch locked in one strength,
                                                  one grace)

And strange rides, strange hours
strange throats, strange songs sung
in a different mode, with nimble tongue
upon a sugared bit, and a tangible surge........

  II   Gaea (Rocky Mountain Sonnet)

The empire of the earth is nature:
        destiny's realm the doing of every single hand;
        history's end the going of time-dilemma'd man.
The bounty of the earth is fertile life:
        fortune's wind the blowings of breezes and of storms;
        growing's force the driftings of possibilities and forms.
The majesty of the earth is land and sea,
        red skies and blue fires and white-wondrous veil,
        the rough-hewn land, bright shores wave-enrailed.
The glory of the earth is the starjewelled void -
        our precious orb spinning madly
                   in eternal velvet's night
        blue and white and green and brown,
        strung, shone, sparkling,
                   in the millionlight.
The mountains dominions are the sky's great spheres,
The ocean throbs, lakes glisten, forests chorus,
                            the land hears.

The Spheres (Apollon)

       - are not the planets, then,
        the muses, nine dancers
        round a sun?
        Nine the strings,
        rung in rings,
        Millionfold, the lights,
        onefold, bright night
        chords bathed, haloed, crowned
        by the savage and mass-turbulent core

Massive, consumed,
consuming, fuming loud,
a great voice screaming into the void.
        Iacchus!
Unto the stars - the outermost spheres . . .

Can you not hear the great voice?
Can you not hear the great music?
Can you not feel the great dance?
 . . . gravity's throat
 . . . fire's tongue

(mid '80s)

Fragments of a Dream

tumbling we fall
within the mountains of the night
our hearts unstrung, and life re-made

Cataracts fall red into a sun-blue sea,
stones ochred by the salt, feathers
green and bright and umbre purpure
stars swirling in the sunset's lea.

******************

   II

(The Wanderer)

Worlds had shifted, time unwarped, doors opened, entered, and re-closed, feint on
feint to trace no trail, no cosmic map to reveal his shape to Hunters, or his
Kin.

His Kin were dead if he sought for them, or they for he. Any movement in such
reference coordinates would alert pursuit, and all might risk capture and its
consequence. But this, now, was daily life. How long now? . . . .What was a
year, or ten, anyway? Centuries slipped through his mind like fish, hours were
only atoms blown like sand, howling through his mind.

Empty, he told himself, stay empty. The bracelet's contact was resilient, needed
hours of break from flesh to loose the bond that gave him Gift, and let him See.
And others See him.

Thinking animal, unthinking existence, he sat up and looked at the world about
him. Fields, the fragrance of wildflowers. Stars. The noise of stream. Wind
in woods.

No fires.

He sniffed, thinking of food and fearing raptors, scented neither. He slunk out
onto his front, crawled into a crouch, sighted about.

The stars were fading, dark and darker night. No moon or moons. Strange stars.
Where was he? Do not think of that . . . .

He felt light, not light enough. A smaller world than before, faster to traverse
if need be; less power, less fortitue, greater speed and energy. Still he could
not fly. Could he leap? Maybe here, but better in the dawn when he could see a
danger, choose a course of action or retreat.

He tried not to think of where he'd been, but risked remembering Vasha's grasp,
her thumb tracing his nipple, her mouth hot on his lips, his tongue . . . he
loosed the thought, unknotting it and flinging it away, let his body feel it out
and let it go. No memory could be kept for long within the Hunt. She would be
found if he thought the place, named her world, or her.

He decided to crawl, to move away from the Rift. Grass, low in the grass,
seeking downhill for water, shelter, thirst.

A grove of beeches - beeches? - towered above the tinkling water, a dark pool.
Where was he, for an earth planet to grow wild. Many worlds had been settled,
many more traversed, bits of Earth itself made Hidden.

The bracelet glowed, reminding him to take it. But he could not wear it. Putting
it in his pouch, he slunk toward the water, daring not to make a sound. Dawn. How
long 'til dawn?

A smaller world - maybe only a few minutes, depending on the latitude. Try not
to describe, to sense. Only be. Eat, sleep, love. Dare not think, or locate
yourself in any way.

How many worlds had he dreamt since it began? How many shapes and names has he
worn, many strange loins and hearts explored? He dared not know, now that he
understood.

Boldness only begets Fate, he was warned to learn. To step abroad amid the
dark-corridored universe do not presume yourself Unseen. For you are new, you
Way clumsy.

He had flourished at first, shifting at random, having fun. Thinking it all a
game. Then he had begun to learn the Rules, the implacable evidence of a higher
scheme - and not so necessarily a beneficial one at that.

Strange events had befallen him. Sudden attacks, instant retribution for
thoughts dared, souls touched. He had begun to learn that your mind could shape
your life, and without mercy. Like a beacon in the night, a free-roving heart
attracted the thirst for blood, for meat and lust and feeling. He had learnt
that he would be the object of a Hunt.

Fleeing through a thousand worlds, hiding as even Great Wanderers did, legends of
the cosmic shadows whose names mortals would never know; even They ran if run They
must. How long must he live to face the darkness, to grow Great, to fend off the
Huntsmen - whose names and shapes he did not know, whose methods were only
rumour, whose damage a carnal, bitter truth?

He drank of the water, and crawled back to lay amid the cress and gaze unthinking
at the new-laced stars. A swirling plume lay above the nightward sky like a holy
glyph; a blue-yellow dim broke across the sunward sky. Could he Hide here, and
play mortal for a few careful years, maybe sire some Young if breeding was to be
had?

He dozed amid the growing dawnlight, trying not to dream.

(Untitled)

Who hears the dog barking in the street?
Who is that moment, what that beholden room?
Do you hear the darkness roar?
Do you feel the silence blaze?
Do you howl, o hound,
for lost savagery, for animal divine?
Two flows converge, and boil with in their mixing,
and outflow in surge,
          the mountains strain to march,
                             to meet;
          The forest grows with wind
               and bend's around the city's gate.
A dog barks, in idle anger,
a room filled with empty echos
listening for a light,
reaching for a drum.
Howl, o hound, howl
and hear me roar.

These laboured trumpetings
these clarions of toil, of end
- this silence that binds
a mortal tongue.

Oracle

We watch in dread
the forming of our future,
tye tying of our cord -
who can unknot the thread of history?
What new rule (or ruler) dare demand
our epoch's grand-doomed riding out?
Time's unfolding bloom reveals the void,
the lightelss mystery of what shall be:
this is our destiny, to face our time,
to take upon together the task
that our ancient king's contrived -
the mastering of our world
by not one hand, but all.

But who will die      ere all is wrought?
Who shall count the dead     or name the fallen?
Let the thunder wreak,
but seek ye shelter from the storm . . . .

The View from Hlidhskjalf

I knew
    the long-distant end was near
I heard
    the din of horses' hooves
    the roar of ancient beasts
    the silence of the empty wild.

I saw the shadow
    of Muspelfire,
the light of ages done
        and plucked,
a hot, gory fruit
    dropping into endless night:

The void again gaping (ginnunga!)
The ice massed, the deserts seiging
    tender green,
    softwrought flesh,
  scraping stone

; the archcold of Stellar Night
    engrips our piteous, precious orb:
The Muspel Light (faster than bright day's)
  a wave on netherworld sea
  a mountain heaving across,
          through throughout
    the plasmic of the universe
    the shape of cosmic fold,

    breaking sunder

      all the stuff of space
          the coil of time

      . . . . a wall of black ice from the hitherworld
              a chill waft and bright fire of storm,
              a mergement of stone-fire, frozen air, and sea:

                  Behold, the giants march:

***********

(Odin awakes out of a dream presaging fulfillment of the sybil's prophecies:)

harps raised arrow-strung
hammers drummed on shields
    (echoing on the stolen wall)
voices toned in quaverless roar

I felt the world-serpent
    death-throed
        tremble beneath my feet,
I knew when dragon waked, gnawed . . .

    . . . beyond the one-eyed view
            the lofty light of Hlidhskjalf . . .

I dreamt:
I woke
    and saw the dream come true

        (O Baldr, Baldr,
         my sweet, bright Baldr!
         Yet I weep for thee, my son)

The vola's words, alive,
                enformed.

Sigurd

For a noble beast I am named,   as one have I wandered,
      furthermore a motherloss son,
A father had I not      as men's sons;
      always I go alone, together with myself.

Thus responds Sigurd the Volsung to the dying Fafnir's request for the name of his vanquisher ere the dragon's death. Ostensibly, Sigurd is being cagey with the giant dragon because of the great power the words of a dying creature - animal, man, or spirit - were known to have. And Fafnir was a titan, one of the giant-kin, and so his final words would be even more powerfully fey.

What is striking here is the resemblance of this response to Odysses' answer to the cyclops Polyphemus - "I am no man, fatherless, not born of woman...", etc. - and the near-identical reason for the hero's use of cagey wit as a way to evade the power of the dying monster's cursing wrath. Without a name, no curse or spell could take hold; and in Fafnir's case, it had been prophesied that no man born of woman would be able to slay him (Sigurd was torn from his dead mother's womb, and knew no father). When he heard Sigurd's words, he knew his end had truly come.

The speech of Sigurd is that of the newly heroic man, laconic and sly in his youth and in the youth of his spirit, having just conquered by brawn and wit the primal forces of the wasteland, the titanic fireworm that, for all the magic armour and weapons in the world, it still takes a man to kill. Newly self-aware and in the clarity of his pride, he beholds - and portrays - the essence of his own newly-won manhood. Man, the noble beast, going forth as an individual against the dire forces of eternity and fate, the scion of unknown parenthood and irrelevant, deceased, or alienated heritage, without inheritance (the literal meaning of akka), eternally alone and going of his own will, "one together" (einn saman), he himself his best and only company. The mood is not one of alienation so much as adventurous - and defiant - independence and self-reliance, the very epitome of the Norse warrior ethos.

Yet here he has told very much more the truth than his name, for Fafnir had asked him, essentially, who he was, and by tradition it is impossible to lie to a dragon, such is the power of the dragon's eye and tongue, and it is further dishonourable to lie to those you have killed. The dragon, as in other myths, is also the living embodiment of the chthonic forces of the earth (Fafnir, being one of the titanic jotnar or giants - indeed, it was he who was of the pair of giant-kin who built the walls of Asgard at the dawn of the Age of the Gods. Fafnir is more than symbol or mere horrific demon - he is of the sentience and power of primal Nature, the raw elemental made manifest.Fafnir represents and is that which heroic man must face and overcome in the process of becoming man: before such a power, one is so swept away one is not aware that once cannot lie; before such a power, one is more exposed to the truth about oneself than at any other time: thus the double fruits of triumph over the elemental and the instinctive - at such a moment the self is more full-known to the self itself than at any other time - but also correspondingly more innocent and vulnerable. In the flush of enthusiasm and pride and new-found awareness, Sigurd is even more open to the spell of the dragon's question, and moreso to the lure of newborn hybris that is the other face of the fate called glory. The temptation to commit the very crime of the giants itself - vainglory against heaven - is bound to come upon one so young who has accomplished so much and vanquished so great an evil.

Fafnir gives him advice (with the slyness of a dragon's tongue), telling him of his hoard, but warning of its curse, and of the probable duplicity of Fafnir's brother - and Sigurd's own fosterfather, teacher, and mentor - Reginn, the dwarf. Why Fafnir is so generous with his advice is not entirely clear. Certainly to revenge himself upon Reginn, whom he rightly perceives contrived his death by Sigurd's hand - and certainly, as he admits, out of admiration for the audacity and cunning of Sigurd. Dragons are known to be flatterers in their wiliness, but there can be no doubt the dragon does not genuinely acknowledge the greatness of the human before his dying eyes. He reminds Sigurd of the gold, diverting the hero's attention from the glory of his victory. Still fey and in post-battle calm (one would think), Sigurd comes to taste the blood of his triumph, and as a poet or bard comprehends the language of the wild and the birds, gaining wisdom, but also becoming tainted with the gold-lust and the fancy for the flesh of woman, becoming obsessed with these passions as he eats the hearts of both titans, Fafnir and freshly-slain Regin. From the darkly-gotten knowledge gained from the dying dragon and the birds attending the dragon's heart-roast he has been touched by two curses that constitute fall from the heroic and manly grace he has just - so briefly - attained. Knowing that there is a curse on the dragon's actual gold, as well, he cannot turn back from danger or the promise of adventure, especially if a noble death awaited him along that path. It would not have occurred to him not to seek out the danger warned of, nor would he wish not to; this is the essence of the warrior's creed in the North - not merely to face death, but to challenge its sure inevitability, to walk open-eyed into its very jaws.

Leaving the scene of his victory, his enlightment and his initiation, and his loss of innocence, he gathers up the accoutrements of the hero - the Helm of Terror, the sword Hrotti, a gold coat-of-mail, and sets out from the blasted wasteland on his charger. The road leads, surely, to glory, and ultimately to hell.

Sigurd is the first of the great human heroes, their mortality as fair as that of the gods, and as farfamed. He emerges in a halfdivine world, is tutored and surrounded by mythological characters, and becomes heir to the gold and the curse of Odin and the other gods, who dominate the opening of the cycle. By the time of Sigurd's death, the gods have vanished from the story and the poem (except in kennings and allusions), the sense less mystical and more pointedly human and mortal. . .

Sigurd is the transitional life, the human that bridges the divine and the wholly human, whose mortality carries the flavour of both worlds, whose heroism strikes both the foes of the gods (the giants) and of men (other men), whose loves can be divine (Sigrdrifa/Brynhildr, who fell from immortality for love of him) and human (the Brynhildr of the later poems, and the tragic figure of Gudrun).

Ultimately, by the secret of the gold and the passions of women, Sigurd meets his bloody end in his marriage bed, and the curse is full-told. More famous than infamous, yet still heroic, even though he dies in bed by the hand of a hired killer - at a woman's instigation (the very woman foretold to him when the dragon revealed the secret of the gold and its curse to him). Sigurd dies in a scene redolent with the flavour of horrendous betrayal, as expressed by the lay's imagery of crimson blood on the innocent "blue and white sheets" a grotesque emblem of lost virginity and fetid with sexuality. It is the monstrousness of this great betrayal and of the malice of the curse, that give the purifying flames of his funeral pyre their heroic, and tragic, tinge. Though not dead in battle and in the most humiliating of circumstances, Sigurd's honour as a hero survives in the fearlessness with which he undertook an knowingly accursed and ultimately hopeless quest.

Prologue to Gilgamesh....

  I

But this is no testament, nor excuse,
if aught, tribute to the ancient tongue
and the first dreamers in the wasted wild . . .

Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh -
across far mountains and distant seas,
millenia rolled out, fallen wheels,
through the daze of modern sadness;
eyes still see, ears still hear
of the splendour of the glory
of the wonder of your heart . . .
I cannot speak with thy mouth,
I saw these things not with thine eyes -
I am but peasant-tongued
in a mongrel, bastard speech.
I seek to render you with will and honour,
living, and not idolled or abased, but my age
was of the evening, and thine was of the morn.
Yet I will do this well, and from my heart,
as best I can, to honour you,
ancient, long-lost friend, and man, and beast -
let such maundering be reft, let the tale begin....

  II

Akkad

When the One Mind was smashed
by evil war and cruel time
much was lost forever
from the byways of eternity.
Much was ruined, broken
by the march of many-scripted tongues,
by the wrecking of an old ocean's grace.

New York, London, Paris, Rome
will crumble in one day's desert dust:
Sages will speak of fragments, bones
of what was once a flesh-walled world.
And in such times, young men will dream
to remedy their world aright
from what they know of now, and then.

These relics they will seek to read
as though they held the only truth:
Dim shadows of a lived-in life
that never stoops to page.
For truth is bold when written loud
but bitter, more, when spoken soft
and better when forgotten, or made.

Give me great and fearful deeds
before you give me mighty words
Give me all your youthful light
to light the world with our age's fire!
Give me all the best of mortal strength
to hold our hearts up to the truth
to hold our world alive within our clumsy grasp!

The Diaspora

  I

Our forefathers bore this age
our mothers hewn its soul
Our days are yet but a lonely shore
upon the eternity of Time.

What bequeath did state
that man would rule the stars,
or dare to fly beyond the clouds,
using Fire to smash the rule of Space?

Fecund, swollen, our race
o'er-grown its only world:
the distance from the next other
endeeps our special'd solitude.

Bringing void, Fire met Ice;
the star-tribe roamed a middle world.

  II

when fair seasons yet undarkened bloomed
untarnished by the skin of our human, mortal, doom.

Woe unto the tide of truth, O Lord,
that washes at the rock of time!
Woe betide the dragon's horde
that multiply the ancient crime!
How many heights have yet to fall
ere Mankind heeds the stormcloud's call?

From the Far Wilderness "Now!" I cry
to raise alarum on my frontier's cruel home:
the last age of Man is done, a great Fate is nigh -
the greenwood mountains ageless old
about to bear unending shame

but man's greedy coursing of his ancestor earth
gouged to gage the measure of its use, the tolling of its worth.

Ruined, ruined, for all ages evermore! -
Down shall fall these forest heights
to sate the frenzy of a fang-tooled gore
and humbled shall be the ancient glory
of the cosmos-hewer's might.

Behold! - brought down shall be the walls of paradise
unmade beyond the circles of the mortal world;
reft shall be the blue oceans of the last-fair skies.

Dare flaunt the dragon to its face?
Dare raise magic war upon his race's curse?
Dare spin our world into the cold-starred space
or seek to cast such truth into a verse?
I raise my tongue, I flaunt a need;
I seek a sceptre with which to rule,
and with which to heed.

(Untitled)

O, my sweet rhyming's churning's changed:
Chains chaining fettered found an fast,
roamings sweat-burned grands embrazened, brained,-
O! Fair Foundry! O, strove-stricken star-cold cast!
Stretched out at last, a deep music's strains......

Memento

(for Georgia Brown/White Cloud)

....To have wandered in those other worlds,
    the million homes, the universes within,
        to have danced upon the galaxies.....

Ah, and then to have been sundered!-
    to have had your eyes undone,
        your heart ruptured from its kind....

This is a quiet pain, this pain, if pain it is:
    a melancholy yearning for the rainbow gates,
        the crystal hills, the moon-fire's glade;

Starlight at the high west's rim,
    (at the hard dark where all worlds meet;
        the mountain that is beacon to all worlds)

Ah, ah - these memories were once reality,
    this daily world but a fevered dream,
        an exile, and the long years

of time......................
    ........................
        ........................

On certain days, in certain nights,
    I smell the wind, or give tongue,
        or feel the earth twist, the shifting hills

beneath my feet; I meet a stranger
    who walks the wilden road
        as once I did, in quest of hidden nevers - -

and then, then, I yearn for Fairyland,
    for the fair realm of the twilit birch,
        soft shadows cast by the lamps of evermore.

The cool breeze, the chill meres,
    Ah - I ache, my core grows numb,
        my senses recede.....thought grips my mouth.....

Sweet land, sweet land,
    somewhere you yet survive,
        somewhere, sometime, the road will open

again. Somehow, someone
    will come unto the rainbowed gates
        and pass therein

to the court of the silver wand and its starlight king,
    the palace of clear elfing light
        the bright fountains of musics fine.

Ah! Ah! - the long years gone -
    the exile groans, the rift feels yet wider:
        this tale goes untold to Fairyland......

Summoning

Let us hear of the bony birth of mountains
            the bleeding of the sea
            the weeping rain and plunging rivers
            the heweing of the world-tree

Sound, fiery gorge, give throat
to the songs of new, hot earth.
Dance, o winds and storms,
March, old walls of ice,
...come, tell us your tune,
come unshape the aeons
            with your olden drums.

Thundering, the firmament calls
the gathering of the host of years;
let us see how well these words
shall bear their weight upon my tongue
            the music of the earth,
            the world struck awake.

Odin and Angrboda

Angrboda:

Who are you, who walks living
     on this road of death?
Who are you, alive and warm,
     to seek the realm of Death
          cold and starless, life-silent Hell?

Odin:

A wanderer am I; my son is dead
     I come to ask his life
I grieve my life; it is as Death
     for my boy's youth is broken
          his pulse as ice.

Angrboda:

Go ye, from this place! The dead are dead -
     The plain of Hel is full
Fuller shall it grow, the grim domain a-spread
     until the ending of the world
          fills out its borders with mortal-kind.

Odin:

What know ye, who scold me so?
     Are ye dead, and bitter still
to have left the light of sun, the taste of sea,
     who guards this lonely place
          from the damned, but not yet dead?

Angrboda:

Are ye damned, then? For ye can die
     before your time, if justice if fate-true.
What damns you, then, to seek more death
     where your blood-young son has gone...
          or are you only mad?

Odin:

I am Bur's son; I am doomed to die
     by writ of destiny, but to battle I am trothed.
I will not surrender life to you, old hag!
     The riddle-feat I must have is Hel's,
          corpse-maiden, queen of Death,
          who cleaves my son beside.

Angrboda:

Wanderer, you are cursed, for Baldr is rightly dead!
     How many giants from Ymir down
has his brethren - and yourself - sent smashed down
          into immortal Earth, to this dark-cold plain?
I forebode your coming. I am living still
          for I guard the families of my dead.

(Unfinished)

(This piece is a paraphrase of "Odin's Ride to Hell" from the Elder Edda and is meant for the stage. Angrboda is a giantess, wife of the renegade god Loki and mother of Hel, Queen of the Dead)

Creation, as a created thing, through repetition (deliberate sentiment: the cherishment of a moment or object of wonder) becomes ennui, a banality unoriginal and failing of uniqueness, or at least of its powers as a new thing. The dismemberment of the primal elemental unity is necessarily of the same nature as the final retriburtion by and of the "resultant" elemental chaos. I both cases the ultimate agent and victim are the gods (the Aesir), expressions of the essences of human intellect and inspiration and motivation: party to this are the forces of the earth and beast and the flesh of man (Vanir), vanquished by the fortress-kingdom of Odin by a treaty of hostage (Vanaheim, who knows the road to Vanaheim? For Vanaheim is lost, some say laid waste...) and set to serve the purposes of the Aesir, the sado-masochistic and destructive lords of the world of men, of Midgard. Less the pawns than the battlefield itself, the bodies and souls of men are made commodity between imposed order (Asgard) and the natural unity-chaos of the giants. But the majesty of the giants has been smitten and bloodied, twisted into foulness and evil by a history of treachery and repression and opposition, their kings and loremasters - Thjazi, Vafthrudnir, Mimir, Ymir their common grand-sire - slaughtered as a necessary consequence of the existence of the gods, who are shown to be creatures of vanity, pride, futility, and imbecilic greed (this the story of the Ring, wrapped in wolf-hair, sent as omen to betray the clan as much as to warn - and thus entice). The elemental forces, robbed of their rulership and frustrated to inert, meaningless matter and energy, take on the aspects of terroand evil - Hel, Garm, Jormungardr, the bastard children of Loki (a mischevious wit) and Angrboda (foreboding, grim prescience, ancestress and queen of the Volar), the very terror of the physical aspect of the cosmos, the greatness of even the remnant pieces of hewn Ymir. Even the vola, and not some monkish editor, knew this: the dragon's flight would end, an age of light and fields of grass with golden chessmen would come to pass when a genius of the tenth world would descend to reunite the nine, the necessary clarification of what had been seen as darkness, but really only was the extinguishment of the gods.

But Ginnungagap and Ragnarokr must be understood to be ultimately physical - the origin and finish of man and spirit in, of, and by the might of the physical universe: the age of man is framed at beginning of and, for al lof history and within each individual life, by the implacable eternity and strength of the elemental. The ugliness of the giants is a creation of the gods, and their momentary setback the result of the cunning and ingenious buildings (the wall) and weapons (the hammer) of the gods. Asgardr is mortal: the rainbow bridge of heroes buarded by only the musician and father of men Heimdal, and too vacuous to support the weight of the cosmic powers and to bear the passage of ultimate physical truth, the armies of infinity. The giants final attack across the gulf is not of vengeance but by necessity. The norns guard another bridge, but where it leads, none know save them...

The death of Baldr was a tragedy, true, but the beauty of life was a creation of the youth and love of men, easily consigned to marraige and the half-queen, half-hag lady of the dead. His death by fratricide was a necessary element of the foolish vices and vain games of paradise, and his consignment to the realm of death his only possible fate, his marriage to the illbegotten queen of Niflheim probably fitting: such a child of the union of fickle god and disconsolate giant blood could only be sated by the best of the gods, untainted by the violence and the doom of his kin. But even this is a story only anecdotal in the grander passage of things: the cosmic panoply of the unspeakable elemtnal "nature", still yet undimmed in all, in any, world's passing.

For destruction and creation are omnipresent across all ages, the fire and ice perpeutally meet and give forth new giants, new fertilities, new dooms. Genesis and apocalypse are scattered like stars across the void, which is the beginning and the end, the truth behind the singularity, and singular lie, of the moment of the "now", the present. And each is unique, even in their consummate constellations as the alpha and omega of what experience we can measure, and no more, and of what reason we can divine.

The mist in the abyss between north and south, fire and ice (the realms of Surtr and Thjazi - and Surtr survived the rule of the gods, conquering at the end not for sake of his own dominion, but to cleanse the world of the pestilence of the divine), is the tongues and thoughts of men and spirit, but also the confusing muddle that cloaks the limitless character of the gap, the abyss, and the boundless sprawl of the final battlefield. In the gap float the nine worlds, and thus in the gap is also the battlefield of Ragnarokr: yet the fire and ice remain existent beyond that emptiness and are unreachable by the efforts of men. Their ultimate triump, the closing of the gap and the union of opposites, is beyond the ken of man - and at this the sibyl could only hint, and taunt.

And so destruction makes futile all clutchings at the created, all interpretations of the ineffable words of mystery which butt at the ancient cage of language and mind....

Metaphysical Cataclysm
(The Body of Ymir, Part II)

In point of fact, the death (or transfiguration) of mind is viewed as a consequence of the condition of its birth, which was in offence to the elemental forces and primal awareness, embodied in the clan of Ymir. In the end, the elemental triumphs over the inherent weakness (the consequences of compromise) of the rule of the gods and overturns the earth: man survives, but under the aegis of a new spirit, a One. According to most commentators of the Edda, this One is presumably the Christ, but this may only be a monastic gloss inserted to protect the Edda's poetic lore from destruction as heresy, but this is unlikely considering references elsewhere, as well as the awesome antiquity and auspiciousness of the sybilline cult of the volar, which even in Christian times would be prohibitive of any interference in the delivery of the oracular lore of the Voluspa. The likelihood instead is that the One is a pre-Christian messianic figure, akin to the final prophecies of their own extinction by the Cumaean Sibyl and the Delphic Oracle or the role of similar messianic figures in the lore of New World cultures, which existed before the advent of Christian emendators of pagan beliefs.

By the end of the Elder Edda, indeed, the Gods have disappeared from the annals and activities of men, the emotional waste of their twilight given over to despair and bloodthirstiness, even mean-spiritedness. It is small wonder that Scandinavia readily accepted the relatively benign succour of Christianity...

The opening books, pillar and counter-pillar, of the Edda are the mystical-religious Voluspa and the ethical-magical Havamal, the twin (and divergent) currents of Norse culture - the titanic and the Odinic. Their confluence brings abouu the Viking cultural flowering and skaldic artificiality of the turn of the last millenium. The rigor of the mentality and fierce individualism of these two books, in fusion with Christianity and its evangelizing rhetorics, helped produced the crisis between faith and clerical authority known as the Reformation, from which was ultimately spawned the Englightenment and Existentialist revolutions. The fusion between Judaeo-Christian and Hellenic mind expressed by Thomas Aquinas and others is thus not a complete model of the European intellect. The Western tradition cannot go without reckoning the Pictic, Celtic, Slavic, and Nordic contributions, which remain the main delineations of modern culture and alliance in Europe. The Edda's mysteries are endemic to an understanding of European civilization, although they are often dismissed as pagan obscurities and primitivities.

(Unfinished)