Oran's Well

… I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat …

— Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish”

Winter 1978, a bad, mad time, 21 years
old & living in a Spokane apartment shared
with my bass player Dave as our desire
to play in bands was freezing down and far,
obsolescent in the ferally cold weather as
happy hour in any bar. Mid-December, a
dissociation creeping some looseness in
the over-partied brain pried wide by darkness,
the shaman’s introductory moraine. Evenings
after work in the JC Penney stockroom
when Dave was over in his girlfriend’s
warmer bed, I’d sit on the heat grate
drinking beer and spinning albums watching
snowghosts swirl in blackened windows.
My sanity leeching fast away as swarms
of petit mal seizures preyed on my
conscious victual, a bit of Thou in every
bloodied beak. Help me I cried, but only
the blackest mothers’ scarred legs I could
pry seeking fleeting refuge from I, I, I.
Like the Mexican heroin addict I scarfed
from some downtown bar with the
promise of a warm room and beer.
Got back to the apartment in a taxi
at 2 AM only to find my roommate
already bedded down with someone
in the bedroom we had split in two.
So I fucked her on the carpeted floor
of the living room, her ravaged addict
body like a cross long nailed for familiar
sins which surely, sourly reeled back
generations, perhaps the entire history
of my lustful chromosome. Who knows.
I slept maybe an hour there on the floor
next to her, waking to hear her talking
on the phone to her connection, face
half in a shadow whose materia and source
was devouring me. Fucked her again
then forked up twenty bucks to pay
for a taxi to elsewhere in death’s main
and she was gone, devoured by the
frozen blue of dawn’s bloatware.
We’d hardly said a word to the other
except what was necessary for the
destined dance masking the cruel
romance, Necessity’s schooling fish
consuming all in greed of flooding
legion sperm toward one lost egg.
Lay back on the carpet watching
dawn scrawl a frosty scrimshaw on
the window — hoping for one hour’s
sleep before dragging up and back
to work — I dreamed the seminal
complete, a woman standing at my
bedroom door half in and out, her
face lost in shadow and blue water
flowing past her feet to flood my room
with all that’s crystal blue and silent.
Made a poem of that, one of just
a few that’s lasted all these decades.
Praising an elegy for the dead’s lament,
carrying on the work of Dionysus
who resides now with his uncle Hades
My dire sexual porpoise and purpose his,
careening wildly toward the small death
which echoes from grander darker rooms
the lament which ferries now my tune.
“Imago Dominus” I titled that poem,
hotcha nun with the whips to prove it,
intiatrix of the bleakest season which
ovummed the song in all its half-lives
swarming in buckets up the Well.
From the scant look I had at her nakedness
she had mothered — stretch marks on
her thighs, breasts hanging with chawed
nipples — perhaps many times exchanging
fuck for dope. Her eyes so blackly brown,
abysms which grabbed my drunken gaze
and held it fast while I pumped my seed
even though I’d screwed them shut, imagining
my first love Becky crooning fairly and
come-hithering behind this ravaged crone.
Another son come home through heartless
pleasures — that unmeasured drone which
dully scours the evening hours while pouring
drunk and getting some. Maybe she indeed
hatched the maddest season in my psyche’s
nest, a primal unnamed Cailleach who gulfed
my cock and balls and made of sex sea-water,
the imago’s birth-caul of madness divine
as the spells rocked me again and again and
again, sometimes three score in one day.
Help me, I cried sitting every January night
on that heat vent, remitting the crone’s flight
from bed to bed on opioids which train
the sot’s delight. None came, and so
I harrowed through the belly of the icewhale
alone as every death-made man must learn.
Last night I dreamed a weird profusion of
little fish swarming some tapestry or layout
gouting where other mordents crowed and
crowded too — a tryptich of hells in
full hosannahs of hullabaloo.  I knew it
was about that woman, unmasked by
reading an old poem upside and rearing
the snake now its divinity, blue waters
dripping off its reflective grievous drone.
I survived the worst winter of my life
to become a changeling in dirty jeans,
fit at last for playing big night guitar and
the Beloved’s addict man, tethered to
the chariot which stampedes its means.
Imago Dominus, I amend my themes
for the prefecture your gift marines.
Flooding lament with dead fluorenes,
penumbral rainbows the caught fish screams.

Submitted to “Borrowing Bishop” at D’Verse Poets

Your work is my work, my work is Ours
in the transliterations of blood and time
loosely-stoned in rhyme — is that it?
Fundaments all of a life’s latter work
ham-handedly naming more closely
just what was so fucking daunting
about circle upon circle of stones
manly dancing toward an isle’s north end.
And that in an odd bend not of my life
but further back in ancestral strife,
my father’s or his, or their druid
composite, fish-tailed, star-bright:

Not quite a vision but far more
than a dream in that milky cold mist
midnighting one’s life inner theme,
upending everything a proper
church education and vocation
prayed for and worked and sailored.

All wrong! —: Up from the depths
cried that Voice — Upside down
and backwards of heavenly course
still bidden by its 21^st century corpse,
ridden with the rigor and salver of
relics too long drained of source.

I get it Dad, the whole fundamental
break in the only pattern left for
homo sapiens in the old sapience
of absence and presence in cold
sexual – magical – magisterial signs.
Upended, you went to the stones
where they bid you miscreate Rome,

your Pope a backhoe with a front-end
loader and the next upright crone
lifted from geology’s star-chart
and placed exactly where the old
moonlight burst whatever it shone.
Breaking well-water, giving birth,
mangering and mantling with stone.

Funny your first visit to Iona was
the same year I was born: Two
years from now that will be 70
years ago, the age you were
went you went back there to die
just not in the way you thought to
at all. That’s when the real mindfuck
fratricide began and the work
I now call Ours  laid its first apparency
in the Oran-shaped well-bucket
I drew for you in full adulthood
from my sot-noodle brainpan.

I wrote that monograph whose
cosmic duo of Oran and Columba
still whoops and troops through
the living room this Christmas morning
in the Year of Our Lordship 2025,
5:19 AM, my wife up with a headache
making coffee while I wrap this
life-sucker up, praying to old gods
that it sill whatever is still stirring,
next lamentation of the dead.

Maybe by its tinsel tintinnabulation
the argument can be discerned
enough for Your moonlight to be read.
Something is sure clawing in the weir,
jawing enough of the leapt salmon
to demand court and truth, canon, air.

Such work demands apt wetware,
fodder majescule and Oran’s mare.
So zip up and giddyup, pards, the babe
year’s a-bawl and nascent as prayer.

December 2025

Your work continues while I ordain
what’s left behind, decrypting gambols
writ slant in megalithic terrain. So much
more continues within and shrined,
down the passage from your cist
in the chapel floor, freed of bone’s
breadth and supplement to converse
with fish about powers you couldn’t explain,
much less Vatican with pig-Latin names.

Plopped into the greater waters,
the spiral wave dances round
a druid drain: Such is the augment
and argument of the dead,
the symbol’s further explication
on walls only those who breathe
the starlight are allowed to read.

Those passage graves are yours now,
resumed now in their old riposte.
Building Navans of the mystery,        
pipe smoking mason of cold ghosts.
Me, I just work the near side’s sill.
Glossing panes with frosted quill
unroofed starries on Sidhe Hill.

December 2025

Submitted to D’Verse Open Link Night

Note

George Nash writes in “Megalithic Art: A Visual Repertoire for the Dead” (Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2000): “There are a small number of passage graves where megalithic art is carved externally, either onto kerb stones or within the fascade, for example, the three Boyne Valley passage grave complexes of Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth. Here, the art appears to act as a point of reference between space that is known and the fore boding of the long dark passage and the unknown spaces beyond. These public expressions of ritualized rock art production are, however, few in number. The carved art is generally strategically placed within the inner passage and chamber areas where visual access would have been restricted to possibly elites or religious actors within the community. With some monuments, the art faces into the mound or is carved onto the back wall of the ante chamber where its intentional positioning appears to be reserved for the incoming dead and for the ancestors (e.g., the passage graves of D’Er Grahand Gavrinis, Brittany). The carvings within the inner passage and chamber may have represented physical markers where by the art played a vital role in how the dead changed physically and metaphysically as they moved from one area of the monument to another. The position of such art would have also had an impact on those people allowed to accompany the dead to their resting place. “

Difficult it is sourcing poetry
in dreams — such wells and
weirs of the infinite are like to
matinee patrons of a theater
where movies are the myths
and the plot walks blithe
from screen to audience and
memory while chasing old
themes. I can’t say now
which tale my ticket vended
but I sure was earnest in
that shadow-show’s theater
occupation, picking and choosing
among the spirit patrons
in whose midst I was seated
One was a harried blithe
older woman prowling for sex
with a vagina called Poetry.
We departed left the theater
through a back door, walking
into the forest brake where
my first sins had been Edened.
The two of us colliding
erotic hearses in a smash of
arch steroidal verse. She told me
of her fourth husband
& how much old anger
she had wed and now nursed:
I was relieved to hear
no unfaithful sauciness
was demanded of me
in this latter vatic burst.
Her eyes were Sappho’s,
I think, Plath long survived
from her Januarial oven sink;
her manner mature though
still too fired for the crone’s
bitter frost-tit beseech.
Opportune: That word and
its work I can resume in
this darker speech, meant
only for that dead theater,
they who sing beseeched.

December 2025

A road then, like any other — call it Jackson Street
if you like — hidden or hard to find in the usual
means of reference: memory fails, the route is hard
to explain, maps fragment the truth. I tried
mouthing directions to this street to co-workers
of a job that died 30 years ago in last night’s
verseyhearse resurrection, placed in the position
of knowing and not, trying to be more than who
I was and caught in fragrante delecto, my vanity‘s
errant understanding having a hard go telling these
folks what I thought I knew was so much lame
dream lard. I searched mental maps, went on Google
Earth looking  down on 1989 Orlando and those
neighborhoods I walked every day for years
forth and back from a doomed industry’s career.
Peered harder and tslowly began to see that
Jackson Street was really in Chicago 25 years
before that and was the last block of a long street
leading to Lake Michigan. My dreaming it so
the latest expression down the long road of souls,
that cursus of primal mystery ever voweling
up past its brink to the next living ones. Yep,
there was Jackson Street, found it, writ plain
as the eternal Day on the streetmap of a life
which was young and near to roar, back
when I was in high school walking and walking
from New Town down to the condo of
some girl’s parents on near north of downtown
— a long fucking trek getting just the faintest
remembrance of a kiss, maybe one touch of tit.
But there I was on Jackston Street, me climbing
out of one car with my care (ghosts, ambients,
coworker-shaped purses of mystery), while
from a second car emerged the HR Director.
She walked up while I fumbled introductions,
trying to remember a generation of dead names.
She pointed to a tall standing stone by the
shore whose name was Biast — the half-woman,
half fish who rose from prehistory’s
midnight tide to demand blood for the
reconsecration of Iona’s grave stones.
It was she who was ensouled by buried
St. Otteran at the far end of the cursus
whose lysis woke me astounded from dreams.
Columbanus of Bobbio denied the idea
that mortal life was just a road leading
to the eternal, a street walking
memory’s side street to lakeside pussy:
Quod enim sum non fui, et non ero,
et unaquaque hora aliud sum, et
numquam sto: ‘I am what I have not been,
and will not be; and every hour I am
something else, and never stand still”
Or, as Oran saith, the way I think it is
is what dreams posthaste backfill.
Blooding my history in the name of
cursus so the mystery wets its gills.
Columba didn’t ban woman and cow
for the temptation they illed: Threw
‘em both in a pit with Otteran’s spill
so that covering over inks a blue quill.

November 2025

What the dead mean to tell us
by the stones which buried them
we may never know: But death
is the grand intelligible by which
us lighter folks are darkly sown.

The stones’ dead are my dead too.
Both occupy a speechless, moonlit
frostbit bourne, eloquent only
in the lonely, wind-whipped eaves,
murmurring lost languages in
the spiral-fall of bony leaves.

Our dead are the empty vale and
wintry brace of nothings evermore,
my father paused between last breaths
praying Jesus Oran Starlight free us all,
my mother walking absent down
her beloved shore, near where
where we spread her ashes between
sea oats and a shrugged mortal shell.

Their essence makes true and prime
the ancient sacred landscape of
the dead, a vast array of grey stone
barrow cists and cenotaphs spread
far and vast as the old gods whose
teeth the stones still standing in
the circles display, jagged grins and
grimaces of the eternal night and day.

They are all there when I am here
remembering all my dead, my
brothers and co-workers, sponsees
and lovers who could not stay
as long as I so one would remember
them walking the familiar way.

That cursus down to the lake
which remembers death like dreams —
familiar yet not and darkly conversant,
like the waking birds who braid
my soul measure into thirds
of laughter, weeping, sleep.

I walk with all of time remembering
adding this sum with treading feet.

December 2025

Lord what a storm, pouring hell and high water,
flooding the river which ran near an old shack
at the bottom of my family’s mystery gulch.
So my brothers and I (none of us looking as
we do or did outside of dreams) went to check
on the threat and finding things much worse
than anyone could have believed, a cold stream
running black and heavy and clear over the banks
of that shack’s enclosure, soon drowning
my rickety old historic default & then gone.

Not that we were much concerned for the loss,
the shack my rock-bottom habitation at
the end of the last street of dreams
like a cankered gut of bad booze, fast women
& endlessly long nights like I was having  
on the waking side of last night — my wife
upstairs streaming Youtubes in insomniac
despair, that fucking now-somewhat-house-
cat Billy restless as hell at 1 AM wanting food
or out or a good shit, who knows but all that
kept me clinging to a branch over deep sleep
for long while til I dreamed. Settling down

into the long low incessant thunder of
that deluge that nearly drowned this town
a few weeks ago … Books! I shouted
in despair to my brothers, all my books
are down there too! Knowing how important
those bound words were to my work with
the dead, my dead brothers drove with me
back out to that house on a perilously
wet road & terrain that kept pitching and
rolling like bad-blotto dreams. Clambered

out and down drowning steps into
a cheap dire hole in the wall of a hovel
and began loading books into boxes
to carry back up and out.  I looked around
wondering what else was down there
that I could ill afford to lose: Nice shirts
and pants in the dirty clothes pile which
I stuffed into a trash bag, then gazed
at my desk wondering if anything in
those drawers shouldn’t die. Then we

were hauling ass outta there, up and out
with water crashing down, the car now
too full for the three of us so I told them
I’d walk back to our childhood home.
Grieved for two cats clinging to each
other in the middle of a flooding road,
finding my way suddenly perilous too,
washed out, done for, almost through.

All for the sake of some words’ how-dee-
fucking-do. You tell me, father, the difference
between getting words out or drowned,
letting life go and dreaming it through.

November 2025

A long time since I’ve been down to shore
where sea and sky weave the blacknight’s choir.
Ages: And as each one ended the question boomed:
Shall my exile in the book now end? Does
principality like some copyright expire?

Oran went to the world beneath the wave
under the sward so salt could pillar my abbey:
Yet on the third day I missed his song so much
I had his face ungraved. What he then said
was inked in crashing truth on devil sands:

The way you think it is is not the way it is at all.
And so transept was leveled with a spiral floor
so that no one can pass straight through to God
without first trespassing out the devil’s door.
My end tonight shouts from that dire beginning.

Who knew a rotting oracle preached more
than buried bones? Cerements we holed plenty in
the abbey graveyard, to cenotaph the ocean’s swell:
But those few words satired the angel’s white,
miring books in the black of death’s inkhorn.

I wonder where he is now—singing matins with
the seals? sipping narwhal milk in the salt lair
of the sea-witch, weaving kelp and maidenhair?
Only an echo here in each wave’s long boom,
An expiring Come each time I cry I am done.

The ocean will outlive us, even if we kill
every seal and fish that filled it. Observe
its incessant heave and loll and swash of foam,
eternal as the dark—heaving up an old bone
or ring or missal here tossed down the well.

Even now this seeping ark of bloodied Kells,
its mighty angels faded to faint salt runes
no one bothers any more to run a finger cross.
In Chartres a voice was heard—Almighty
Kells is dead—And so I strode down here.

Now to reverse the old ritual: Oran, step aside.
It’s my turn now to appease the undergod
whose face is no longer Lir’s but Christ,
the old new god become the new old god,
the sod now water of the chapel buried there.

And so I’m here at last, lying in the sand
waiting for the first blush of light to intone
the call to sacrificial matin. I’ve got my
psalter in my arms—Cathach, the Battler,
copied in secret all those myths ago—

and though I can recite the Three Fifties
from memory, I will read the lines from my
book out and down the sea’s black throat,
become a written sanctum for the whale
who booms the psalm in silvered spout.

Thus Oran’s black harp is now unstrung
and refitted to the gospel’s whiting age
and I become the waves’ dismast scribe,
crooning in the foamcrown of the crashing mill
the way you think dreams skulls on Oran’s hill.

May 2015, revised and reposted November 2025

1,2,3, Go! at D’Verse

Note

St. Columba is believed to have founded the abbey of Iona in 563 AD. There is a legend that one of his monks named Oran was buried in the foundation to appease an angry spirit who was preventing the abbey’s construction. St. Columba honored Oran’s sacrifice by appointing him the tuletary guardian of the abbey’s graveyard, declaring that no one may access the angels of Iona but through Oran.

In his monastic rounds, it is said that each night St. Columba spent one third ministering to his fellows, the second third in prayer and the final third laying down by the shore, singing the Three Fifty psalms to the waves.

In Celtic myth the ninth wave is said to be greater than all waves that precede it and is known as “the wave of transformation.” Manannan’s home is said to be beyond the ninth wave.

In the ditch of my dream they
removed a lower portion of my spine —
a desperate, deathly procedure —
afterwards someone described what
scribes had discovered down there
narrating grisly details of scalpel, forceps,
bone-saw and grippers for freeing
then holding aloft those dripping low bones:
A burst of insight in an auroral flare,
igniting Heaven with demonic blare.

Who dies down there who can turn
poems into piers of the immense,
the murmuring night become the
shouting dead, a hostel of imbas
in return for an IV and something
the doc shoved up my anus saying
this won’t hurt you poor fuck.
You tell me the work isn’t stuck
where excarnate is procedure, the
druid collegium’s muckety-muck.
Offsy bonsey and dip the pen thus.

November 2025

I’m walking that same road north from
the abbey somewhere between here
and forever and my father’s just up ahead,
dreaming and visioning and invoking and
building a dead tonnage of guardian stone.

Me, I’m weaving the ghost of that aura
into a like plottage of psalms, evergreen
down to the ditches where Oran lay
his bones down. That memory stay
freshened, hallowed and half drowned,
here and forever subsuming and rising
from the Sound. The Callieach of eels

weaves her net-fates after Samhain
when all that is lost summons ice-host,
folk in my dreams by Hyperboreans writ,
a sidhe of calligraphies seething seasonal
frost. I read that book here writing my
founder’s tale — halved and discarded
and much longer discredited by time,
become the sacred cursus of ghosts.

That’s where he and I walk l truly,
in starlit mysteries which he stoned
and I excavate adding tonight’s aura,
the speckled fish-grailing crone
of augments wet-trailing red and
green spectra back to that coast
no matter the skull, well or swash.

November 2025