Last week, I wrote about Celtic Studies scholar John Cary’s hard core study of the varied tales of sky ships in medieval Ireland and its consequences for taking stories of this kind as ancient versions of modern-day UFO sighting reports. Cary points out the motif that equates sea and sky, seabottom and land is prevalent, not only in world, but Irish, literature as well, from the ancient poems about the hero Bran to one by Seamus Heaney. I added that the comparison of clouds to sea foam is equally ancient, and that that familiar childhood revery helps make the point clear to anyone who remembers sharing it.
I noted, but didn’t publicize, at the time, I had spontaneously hit on the same pattern of imagery in my first trade edition Grand Gnostic Central in the collection’s titular poem. Nor had I read Heaney’s poem until many years after composing the one that follows or even taken up my present mytho-ufological concerns at the time. The prose poem records a very real perception of Montreal, imaginably possibly familiar to anyone who has wandered its streets on any one of its clear, semi-tropical, humid summer nights.
from “Grand Gnostic Central”
The metropolis is unexceptional except for its foundation sunk profoundly deep into the bedrock of the ocean floor. A hemisphere of breathable air is maintained by a permeable membrane admitting needed gases and releasing excess into the seawater. Lights, that on the surface are aircraft, here trace supertankers. A traffic of smaller craft swirls into constellations nightly. The potentially catastrophic difference between air and sea pressure is corrected by three beams of light rotating atop the city’s highest edifice.
[Photo by Ed Hawco (Blork)]
over twenty years ago, and the response, livelier than any to any of my work in recent memory, encourages me to return to the work that chapbook began.
So, for interested parties, I append one of the first poems from this project, the last poem of my first trade edition, 