Jack & Adelle Foley

SWEENEY ADRIFT

                for Ivan Argüelles

welcome to the house of failure

see these are the structural bases of the house its beams and arteries

its artificial light its hands its vast appendices

who is

not here?

the range of things

delights us welcome welcome

see there is the door it opens for us

welcome

what sweeney what

have you done and

where have you done it?

sweeney clubbed the man

not once but twice; bashed his head in, hurt

him badly. Oh,

Sweeney they’ll

not stand for that surely—                                                         cf. Buille Suibhne

surely that’s                                                                              trans. J.G. O’Keefe, 1913

no way to behave—                                                                 trans. Seamus Heaney, 1984

Sweeney

ended his tirade

his wild life then—

They all said, Enough, enough, Sweeney,

surely that’s

no way

for a man to behave

Sweeney

kicked his eyes out hurt him broke his ribs twisted the tongue not once but twice

bones broke, brittle for Sweeney, his trophy, taken, the life taken, the balls

bashed

the life

ended

oh Sweeney

she bespoke him sorely oh

and Sweeney repented then

turned churchman spoke vows made retreats novenas bled holy water ended his wild life

told tales made miracles believed end-

ed his wild life turned goodman churchman died of age and

soul

now surely turned—

to

heav’n.

sweeney.

SUN-

the slow turn of resolving

            moved (as ever) us (as ever) if

            (stay)

I go out again with

            money in my pockets

click!

how many times have I

asked you—spoken your

name—in this darkness—

I have nothing to offer—

in the air—endless

variations—speech!—

Bear

     turns—

open to the

   light—

She stopped for a moment and looked back. It is not easy to tell. They saw each other only momentarily. It was not easy to tell.

Your book is…

a big crazy delicious effort, fundamentally great, highly interesting, jocular, kinky, lovely, magnificently nice, opulent, pretty, quick, redolent, snazzy, tricky, undoubtedly very whimsical Xmas yummy. Zounds!

The night came, and a storm, and Sweeney’s misery and mania were so great that he cried out:

I who have neither another nor now

in the dim light (love)

            possibly

  frame (make) this (how) (love) quick

“I wrow rowe wrote chu

yesterday”—

Sweeney returns, and the lies about his son’s death have caused him to

All day, all night,

Sweeney clings

   to the branch, and opens

                        (spreads his)

                                                wings

He is now

                “adrift”—

(spoken to—

            uneasy in the night—

                                                pressure—)

                                    Remember this, “friend”—

                                    hand extended—

is the problem presence?

            what does it matter if we love each other?

is the problem presence?

            what does it matter if we love each other?

is the problem presence?

            what does it matter if we love each other?

is the problem presence?

            what does it matter if we love each other?

bear

            the bear-son

opes

            his eyes

the “master of the mountain” is of special interest to us as he is the “master” of the bears. On the one hand he is a man, on the other, a real bear, only of unusually large size. All other bears are his fellow tribesmen…The slaughter of a bear represents the departure of the soul of the animal to its master and a subsequent return to earth is expected…It is not to the beasts themselves that offerings and prayers are made but to their “masters” or “owners”

“grandfather”… “old man”… “he”…Taking the skin off a slain bear they say, “Grandfather, owner of the earth, don’t think ill of us. we did not do this to you. The Yakut did it. Your silver bones we shall put in a special house.”

fish-dragon

blind and eyeless

naked as a

human finger

Sweeney

pueblo—bridge—creek—

cameras

clicking—old woman—looking—

eyes: thinking—

“We’re going to have lunch with the guy who published Nailed to the Coffin of Life. His name is Loss Glazier.”

“His name is Loss?”

“Yes.”                                                                     “Lunch With Loss”

“We’re going to have lunch with Loss?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been having Lunch with Loss for most of my life.”

the bear has always been the weather prophet because he presages by his emergence the

return of spring

to the

wintry

world

Juan, Juan el Oso, Juan del Oso, Ivanko the Bear’s son—

Since matter itself is in a state of flux and is deprived of that form through which it takes shape and is made manifest, they took the dampness and humidity of caves, their darkness, and, as the poet says, their “murkiness,” as an appropriate symbol for the properties of the cosmos

the Persian mystagogues initiate their candidate by explaining to him the downward journey of souls and their subsequent return, and they call the place where this occurs a “cave”—

descending paralysis

bull

lord of genesis

sun—

            shadow—

there is

blood on my face—

fuck it you know that fuckin cocksucker you know what that fucker said to me

Sweeney picked himself up off the hardbitterdesolatefrozen ground.

Again.

“Mother, would you please answer the door. I’ve been standing here for fifteen minutes.”
“Couldn’t be helped. I was on the shitter.”              —neighborhood music

what does it mean to use the word fuck?

“Sleep a little, love,

                                    for thou needst nor fear the least”—

“I am Sweeney alas!

my wretched body is utterly dead—

A year have I been on the mountain

            without music, without sleep—

Madman

                   am I—”

John Anson wrote a hundred rounds

As I have written only one.

O listen as his name resounds:

            John Anson.

My little round might be the sun.

The planets in their daily rounds                                     around the roundel

Must circle it in unison.

His trope might be the separate gowns

Of long-dead ladies now at one.

These separated, joining sounds:

            John—

                        Ann’s son.

how many times have I

asked you—spoken your

name—in this darkness—

I have nothing to offer—

in the air—endless

variations—speech—

It was night. The heat was still glutinous and no wind stirred. The whirling “deedees” died away to the east as the glowing orange orb of the sun drifted to the west in a purple miasma. (A narrative of ideas not of events.)

And, Orpheus, will you bring your mother with you?—

field   piece   violence   cob   decoration   porcupine   brogan   finch   zeppelin   permeate   convent   artifact   behemoth   climax   ranger   pin   mens rea   brand   convent   jitter   own   as   bell   man   scatter   which   saddle   strange   blend   peace   orphan   spatch   poll   boing   infant   such   enter   hone   savor   claim   once   ping  

                                                                                    Rhea—

—Why have you followed me here?                                          (Here the Hag speaketh with Sweeney

—Yes.                                                                                      and telleth him

—What have you come to tell me?                                            nothing.)

—Yes.

THE DEEP AND ABIDING MISERY OF THE MAD!

it was all sorrows          love’s seeking

in a bloodless ending                 still steeping

Sorrow, be neither stow(n)e nor still

it was blunt weeping

—The fly

, the little imp

teases your nose and your forehead.

When one is a fly one is not an eagle

but one knows how to walk on the ceiling.

Pierre Febvre…Yes, Pierre Febvre. Why should I think of him, and wonder what my spirit will                  make of him, feeling as I now do. His face—

O obstinate mysteries

innocent animality!

You, simple house-fly

and you—foxes, crows, panthers,

creatures in whom the impulse to bite exuberates—

But I understand now how it is possible to muse upon the outline of a nostril

or the curve of a lip for hour upon hour and never be satisfied.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Difference of sex makes for clear-sightedness, eh?

The street was dark; the Square was deserted;

the morning sun was still

and did not rise. “Sweeney—?”

Nevertheless I spent less time on the opening caresses in order to get to the concluding ones with which we had just become acquainted.

I lie upon the grass and see the sky. Her dress

billowed in the wind.

He sits for hours staring at the sea.

The way your breasts move as you move—the strangeness of it

It is the woman’s part

to touch the

hand

to let you know   she wishes   to be touched—

August-

a thrives in the summer’s carrion—

The relationship

                        between the self-discovering mind and the world, between the self-discovering mind and others, is one of analogy. I can “find” myself not by looking inward but by looking outward (invidia, envy, mania)

He stared upon the table on which a knife a fork and a spoon had been carefully arranged

There are, uh, times I forget

I meant to

to forget

times     I do not want to

to

remember

“It’s possible he has another reason for acting as he does. It’s possible he genuinely has something to hide.”

Dawn light

mechanical and

human figures

catch the light

Think not, revolted Spirit, thy shape the same,

Or undiminisht brightness, to be known

As when thou stood’st in Heav’n upright and pure (thrives in the summer’s carrion)

sunlight? here?     through a single

shaft

What are the names of the Seven Dwarfs?                                 —loneliness at the

Slothful, Envious, Lustful, Wrathful, Shameless…                                  shopping mall

contradictions       explanations

you who turn the wheel—

…an immense Being who alone remains eternal amidst the continual change and ceaseless transformation of all that constitutes him…

are you as good at sex as you are at literature?

For he whose mind is fixed upon true being has surely no time to look down upon the affairs of earth or to be filled with malice and envy, contending against men; his eye is ever directed towards things fixed and immutable, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and to these he will, as far as he can, conform himself.

—you complain about “obscurity”

and assert that my poetry

is overly “intellectual.”

You assume in saying this

that however complicated

“intellectual”

matters may be, in matters of

“emotion”

you stand with the poet

on common ground.

But is it not possible

that the poet has

felt something which you have not yet

felt

or have not yet recognized as

feeling

that it is an emotional

not an intellectual

“obscurity”

to which you object?

And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened. Imagine mankind living in a cave with a long entrance open to the light; in this they have been since childhood.

A “friend” is a relative. To “have right” expresses an obligation. About half the families have horse-drawn mowing machines. Those who have them mow their own meadows, working from earliest morning as long as light holds. They work with the aid of their sons and of boys from the families which have no machines. At each stage of the process a boy not a member of the family gives his labour and takes his place at meals during the day.

“I am patriotic and it may be a bad thing to say but I think that the school system they have now is bad and that the teaching of Irish is bad. In my day and before, a man might go to school when he could—maybe for only three months in the year. But he would know more then than they get now when they go to school all the time. The old people learned more then too. When a child finished school he would be expected to read a newspaper to the old people or to write a letter for them or to do sums. And he would do it well.” …a system which to his mind makes no provision for the mutuality between young and old…

and when one of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of what in his former state he had seen only as shadows

Things are “cast adrift,” more or less like one another without any of them being able to claim the privileged status of “model” for all the rest—

Sweeney moved amongst the branches making a tremendous sound in the / head which listens—

                                                How is talk measured, love—        Beyond the obvious—

                                                “stained” words—

                                                restrained—

                                                heart’s clue

                                                spoken

“Continual changes…are…every instant…occurring…to every…man”

epi-logos

…I  would never have by myself undertaken the task of establishing such a collection and, grateful as I am to Bill Germano for his initiative, I confess that I still look back upon it with some misgivings. Such massive evidence of the failure to make the various individual readings coalesce is a somewhat melancholy spectacle. The fragmentary aspect of the whole is made more obvious still by the hypotactic manner that prevails in each of the essays taken in isolation, by the continued attempt, however ironized, to present a closed and linear argument. This apparent coherence within each essay is not matched by a corresponding coherence between them. Laid out diachronically in a roughly chronological sequence, they do not evolve in a manner that easily allows for dialectical progression or, ultimately, for historical totalization. Rather, it seems that they always start again from scratch and that their conclusions fail to add up to anything. If some secret principle of summation is at work here, I do not feel qualified to articulate it and, as far as the general question of romanticism is concerned, I must leave the task of its historical definition to others. I have myself taken refuge in more theoretical inquiries into the problems of figural language. Not that I believe that such a historical enterprise, in the case of romanticism, is doomed from the start: one is all too easily tempted to rationalize personal shortcoming as theoretical impossibility and, especially among younger scholars, there is ample evidence that the historical study of romanticism is being successfully pursued. But it certainly has become a far from easy task. One feels at times envious of those who can continue to do literary history as if nothing had happened in the sphere of theory, but one cannot help but feel somewhat suspicious of their optimism. The Rhetoric of Romanticism should at least help to document some of the difficulties it fails to resolve…. (Paul de Man, 1983)

, by its absence

dominates everything—

Sharp-eyed lynxes

watch us:                                              Goyim?

How can one

begin

To think of you I

move

                        “Hello, Tiny”

In the evening, in the rain—

            of birds

           a harvest-

                              wealth-

NOTES

This poem is a fantasia based on a medieval Irish poem called Buile Suibhne. Buile Suibhne was translated first by J.G. O’Keefe in 1913 as Sweeney the Mad and then by Seamus Heaney in 1984 as Sweeney Astray. My poem is not a translation, but I do use the Irish poem as the basis for themes and variations of my own. Some sources: A. Irving Hallowell, Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere; Herbert Wendt, Out of Noah’s Ark; Tony Moffeit’s poem, “Those Who Speak Do Not Know Those Who Know Do Not Speak,” Oro Madre, vol. 2, nos. 3-4; Rhys Carpenter, Folktale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics; Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (the article on the “Bear’s Son”); Robert Lamberton’s translation of Porphyry’s essay, On the Cave of the Nymphs; Ivan Argüelles’ poem, “Descending Paralysis”; Kathleen Hoagland, 1000 Years of Irish Poetry; Ivan T. Sanderson, The Continent We Live On; Georges Norge, “Les Innocents” from La Belle Saison (I have translated only part of this poem); Jules Romains, The Body’s Rapture, translated by John Rodker; some of my own very early poetry; John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VI; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (the Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bower); Plato, The Republic, Books VI and VII (I used both the Jowett and the Rouse translations); Conrad Arensberg, The Irish Countryman; James Harkness’ introduction to his translation of Michel Foucault’s This is Not a Pipe; Paul de Man’s introduction to his The Rhetoric of Romanticism. The second passage in the epilogue was written while listening to Charlie Parker (“of birds / a harvest- / wealth”). John Anson is a friend of mine who published a sequence of a hundred roundels, Sessions and Surroundings: A Century of Roundels. I responded to his sequence with my one. My proper name is “John,” and my mother’s name was a variant of “Ann,” so I am in a sense “John, Ann’s son.”

FRAGMENT

for Fran

To which my Lord responded:

            That though for his part he cared not whether there were witches or no; yet his opinion was: That the confession of Witches, and their sufferings for it proceeded from an erroneous belief, viz, That they had made a contract with the Devil to serve him for such Rewards as were in his power to give them; and that it was their Religion to worship and adore him; in which Religion they had such firm and constant belief, that if anything came to pass according to their desire, they believed the Devil had heard their prayers, and granted their requests, for which they gave him thanks; but if things fell out contrary to their prayers and desires, then they were troubled at it, fearing that they had offended him, and not served him as they ought, and asked him for forgiveness of their offences. Also (said my Lord) they imagine their dreams are real exterior actions...

I leave it to you, O Nut of Knowledge

The Girls at home and the Boys in college

“Promise me that you won’t do it.”

So

I promised her.

But

I did it.

Rip cord of the sky’s acetylene.

It was a raft of purposes, who could have told what came of it

After the night, expenditure

at the high

what clouds this morning

who could have said--

you

are neither Substance nor Shadow

The roar of Thor Gadwa’s chainsaw shattered the spooky silence of the ashen-gray wilderness around him yesterday. Rip cord of the sky’s acetylene.

Good morning, Carolyn! Rip cord of the sky’s acetylene What are you doing up so early? Great blue I’ve got to be out of here by seven! All We’re taking a group of our special ed kids out to the island on a field trip! Out of proportion You like your work don’t you? It was a raft of purposes who could have said what came of it  It can be the most frustrating--but also the most rewarding when you see the results you can get with slow learners Rip cord, rip cord of the sky’s acetylene

There is a certain kind of light which can be seen only at certain times of day. I had tried to find it then but was not able. There is a certain hint of dusk as well which can be seen at times though rarely written of or praised. I had hoped to see you. Afterwards it was necessary to begin, again and again.

Dearest, neither you nor I in this late sun can be seen more clearly.

In Crete

there was the procession of the Sacred Heart

He was a boy of high spirits and impatient of rest; but at the age of seven he fell head first from the top of a ladder to the floor below, and remained a good five hours without motion or consciousness. The right side of the cranium was fractured, but the skin was not broken. The fracture gave rise to a large tumor, and the child suffered much loss of blood from the many deep lancings. The surgeon, indeed, observing the broken cranium and considering the long period of unconsciousness, predicted that he would either die of it or grow up an idiot. However by God’s grace neither part of his prediction came true, but as a result of this mischance he grew up with a melancholy and irritable temperament such as belongs to men of ingenuity and depth, who, thanks to the one, are quick as lightning in perception, and thanks to the other, take no pleasure in verbal cleverness or falsehood.

From flock and from down to rise--

Take it to heart!--were folly for thee

This is the oppressor. This is the oppressor’s language. The wind, the wind cut short the speech of George W. Bush to a GOP delegation at the Hilton Inn near the

, yesterday, at four o’clock, here, in the capital of Hatred and Bitterness!

Dignity and Good Luck be yours

After biting the mouth merges with her skin

Flock upon flock--up

in the sky

one feels that he would have agreed with the Duke of Newcastle who, in his discourse with Hobbes, affirms in the clearest fashion his belief in the religion of witchcraft as a fact

‘contrarie’ rites and ceremonies

look, at the first rift of the sky he

turned his head and

severed his attention   clouds

rammed into clouds         the dark

and com and daunce with me

in Irlonde

“Faggot, I burn thee”

Love speaks, barely, in this century. He kissed her hard upon the mouth, thrusting his tongue inside. Her hands were caressing his ass then pressing his cock against her cunt. Uh.

They are images of longing, she said. Often sexual. They were walking, quickly, away from the building. She spoke without design, spontaneously.

Her hard eyes followed him along the corridor. Darkness

having in the name of the Holy Trinity, sprinkled a little water, quelled the

I am become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all

This

is the ship I am

building

It is

a ship of death yes

Harvest. Darkness. They

split the air with their cries          Love

There is nothing self-contradictory in the thought of many actual entities with the same abstract essence, apart from the reiteration gained from never societies. In proportion to the choas there is triviality. There are different types of order; and it is not ttrue that in proportion to the orderliness there is depth. There are vari us types of order, and some of them provide more trivial satisfact than do others. Thus, if there is to be progress beyond limited ideals, the course of history by way of escape must venture along the borders of chaos in its substitution of highter for lower types of order.

Speak, animal,

ere I be brought to ground

The depression

in your voice stays with me

What to do when there is something

always hanging over your

head “And the weather is cold.”

Dockside, the boat is moving

How to express anything

Look, there is a possibility over there on that far

island, and a tree, which,

once gazed upon, can barely be

forgotten. Leaves fall, even in

.

How do we look when once those eyes

which others praise more finely still than

I

cease looking, and the word “change”

and the word “kill” and the word “cold”

come close, and your voice,

which was only a projection of the

telephone,

                  comes close:

NOTES

Sources: Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft; SF Chronicle (the now defunct comic strip, “

”); D. H. Lawrence, “The Ship of Death”; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”; David H. Greene, An Anthology of Irish Literature; The Golden Bough; an encyclopedia article on exotic fish; H.T.F. Rhodes, The Satanic Mass; Vico’s Autobiography; Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. The typos in the passage from Whitehead—beginning, “There is nothing self-contradictory”—are not errors but intended. Stephen W. Hawking suggests that what we call “time” is the same as what we call “entropy.”

While on the surface the poems are juxtapositions, collages--as we dig deeper and listen more closely we hear a multitude of individuals, ideas, images and complexes of these unifying all around us. To compel us toward a moment of liberation.

      - Jake Berry