Broadside #4
from the
Urban Shaman by Gene Fowler
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* * *
THE ALL-PURPOSE SHAMAN
Orange
blood red and deep blue
sunset
out over the Pacific. Color burst
cracking the eye
opening gold veins in the milk-stone
and wet black leaves in the blue pools'
reflecting waters.
Writing ads. Where to put 'em.
Personals. Services offered. Help given.
The flesh of the Pacific is burnished green.
Rippled. White fingers.
The tribe is scattered. Wandering
freeways. Floating in jet streams.
Where i come upon small bands
gathered at the marble disc
in a coffee house
or a wine bottle in a living room
the eyes snake
into question marks.
"Who are you with your wild crockery
eyes? Your air-tasting beard hairs?"
Itinerant preacher?
Unlicensed medic or theological infant Hercules?
Thief? Fingerer of clitori?
Hunter of some star-bound buffalo
that never ate grass?
Rimbaud with a driver's license?
The making new
is a hard swim through the cluttered body-jam
in the river,
the water-heavy images wakened
by my songs over the 30,000 years
of my singing.
Is my star robe opaque
because it's cut into a pair of Levis?
If i prophesy about next week's
Dow-Jones Industrial Averages
does it have to stop there?
Fierce winds breathe out of the Pacific
behind a shaman's
looking for work.
* * *
SHAMAN DRUNK
A swallow cuts the sky in two
and cacti are stopped in warriors' salute.
Up out of dream
layers and hollows and
more layers
above the land.
City bred.
A long sighting down time
to first shamans
and out into time against planet hopping shamans
and star hunting shamans.
Wine on the terrace at Enrico's.
Neons hinting at possibilities of Naked Truth.
Vision rises out of the flames
where my crotch is flush
against the woman's crotch
--jammed trees--
Earth is quaking and ripping and panting
and howling.
A meditation method
for Coyote.
Hunkered down flatfooted and holding
onto my knees in an unfurnished room
no different
from a stone-age man
and still seeing things
i can't make sense of
can't handle in any way
but to bring back in song
against a time
they'll be useful.
* * *
DOUBLING
A shaman's astral body
ecto-
plasm flowing
that most think a special device
bought with long ritual
and drugs
and fatigue
to make a rare journey
for the tribe's use,
is
really
always humming with the same corpuscular
life as the body it links to,
and always it shifts,
eases out,
a kid escaping kinder-
garten order,
hand half raised, bathroom
half imaged, but
exotic hallways
calling,
and old shamans, with calloused
peckers and wild spirits
can do two things
at once, f'rinstance
walking lumberingly down a street, getting
from point A to point B with the
flesh, avoiding fire hydrants,
baby buggies, and the less
agile
and in ecto-stasis, a shimmering
silver-blue spirit,
sidling over, grabbing a fair
haunch in cupping
horned palm,
bending her across that porch rail,
and planting starry wagon-tongue
in that wagging, furred
first swallow
of spring.
* * *
THE JUG OF WINE
The art is the
art of starting fires.
In a less stripped out landscape
pile up leaves and twigs
into little harvest stacks
twisted into fibrous toughness,
find a flint rock
and an iron rock,
and find the spark and place it where
fire waits; or
make a twine bow, a gut bow,
and spin a stick til there's smoke and where
the smoke is, fire.
But here, where
it's asphalt and cement, door-
ways from the
wind, and
never through the door, only
up against it,
the lore of fire's different.
Do it with
your own flesh.
Do it with a jug of cheap red.
Catch it on the bough
of wrist - big jug,
that's the dream,
gallon,
hundred gallon,
cauldron,
catch it on the wrist
and bend it like a swan's throat
and find the fire
riding down the throat, burning
out the deep cold, to land
clear to the bottom
of the belly
and bounce back up through all
the cold flesh,
that's fire, the leap and dance,
the fires -
and the slow fire following
that tree-top rush of fire
as you hunch in toward
your own fire pit
and burn the sugar through the night
while winds pass over
and dreams explode like ember-sparks
and flare into visions
of worlds to
be built -
and fallen back, eyelids covering con-
flagrations, quietly
chant, in husk voice,
the fire chant:
"Oh, shit,
"Jes-us, shit,
"oh, shit . . .
"shit . . ."
And let the yellowed sunset
go ruby
in the sinking puddle
in that bent
toward you
jug.
* * *
CITY HUNT
Long, bleak
heartscapes where i run in my
vision, lost
as i wake into fog drenched
wallscapes, run
knotted into trudging
hours long walk, to walk
away the gathered
fires and howls -
through windows i see the holders
of civilization
arched back, thrusting
at Diona, bent over a board table, arms
swimming among fluttering
prospecti,
the holders of culture
zeroing in on each
other's reared buttocks
while Diona escapes -
and beside her i run, a few
thrusting holders even fanning wind
trying for my fleeing butt,
a few spearing at this
in me turning to leave
figure...
snarling, whining
that i'd move up to the high desert
get wind burnt, rip
off and wear the Indian's skin
or
drift back farther in coriolis
swirls
of time,
wear mammoth
hide, rip off
the raw boned Siberian's sighting,
but i turn
more deeply
the thing in me'd
go deeper,
farther back,
to be again
a molecular sentience in primal
soup, the first hot sea, and rebound
to fling itself outward
and know wholly
our galaxies
our constellar
cities.
* * *
VISION FLIGHT
All the crap falls
away -
sea weed tangle
sliding off a wet suit -
and the sea battered shaman
pulls himself ashore -
The wonderful wizard of All
ready to go for it
again -
Sniffs the air,
peels off the regulation
wet suit,
lets the invisible
tickle body hairs,
Spreads scapulae
to catch
A fiercing up wind.
© Copyright Gene Fowler