Four Chthonic Praise-Chants & One Lament
by Christien Gholson

Sun Over The City of Rocks New Mexico Chthonic Praise-Chant
16,000 Year Old Carved Spear-Thrower Tip Chthonic Praise-Chant
Sirius Rising Over Picacho Peak Chthonic Praise-Chant
Empty Road in Taos Chthonic Praise-Chant
Lament for Snow Blowing off the Roof under Grey Skies

Author’s Note: These poems are from a new manuscript called Twenty Chthonic Praise-Chants & One Lament (after Neruda’s first book, Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair). I wrote the bulk of these praise-chants in the fall of 2019, when overwhelming fear and sorrow were constantly moving through me from news about the current mass extinction taking place across the planet.

At the same time, I realized that deep grief is a form of praise for those things we have deeply loved (See Martn Prechtel’s The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief & Praise). With this in mind, the “chants” developed out of my desire to record my own personal ecstasy in the presence of so many things outside the human realm. That ecstasy includes the realm of death—the underworld, the depth of the earth itself, the chthonic, grief and praise—how they burst onto the senses together.

Sun Over The City of Rocks New Mexico Chthonic Praise-Chant

Hideous sun flesh-devourer eating its own children 
Hideous sun holding all shadows hostage in an eternal red season 
Red-creator vaporizing scattered rain across this plain before it 
	reaches my mouth
 
Ant-tyrant slow-chewing a half-dead dragonfly in my mouth

Savage holy fire that turned me into a raven blinking newborn 
Singes black feathers off my shoulders 
Separates water from the mind makes my legs walk incoherent circles
 
Hideous mystery I saw you out walking this morning scraping harsh 
	light across yucca elata flowers

My burnt raven-mind has given you everything and is still invisible 
	to you 
You ask for sacrifice of the eye the finger these feathers 
You ask for a wound so you can enter my raven-body and burn 
	shadows onto the walls of my organs

Fury messenger gouging light from all raven-secrets 
Skin-flayer the grimace of the Triassic fern pattern crucified on stone 
	half-buried in sand 
While the wind is as still as possible trying so hard not to be seen 
And darkling beetles tunnel into shadows their own size

Raven-Killer sun 
The promised son-assassin with black gloves pulls the last breath out 
	of my laughing black beak 
Terror sun my father who sends orange fried-dust skittering over 
	the edge 
Hideous No-Shadow-Judge who reveals everything and so reveals 
	nothing   

Hideous Unknowable sun reveals my feather gown to me 
My claws score a scorch-fissure that marks the boundary between 
	worlds 
Who will cross who will break this hunt without water this stalemate 
	without water 

Your face in mine 

Lifted to you

16,000 Year Old Carved Spear-Thrower Tip Chthonic Praise-Chant

So many names without animal now back then too many to name 
White ibex carved at the tip of the antler spear-thrower 
Doe’s ass lifted reveals a birth sac on which two birds perch 

To sing a birth song a death song 
A hypnotic tragic-mask soft-shoe 

So many names without animal now back then so many to name 
I place a long-distance night-call back 16,000 years 
Ask the prophet-birds if they sang of a new world birthed with a 
	chorus of bison chanting grass into being with bees 
	that name themselves 

So many names without animal now back then so many to name 
Did the birth save us from that strange hour when elder-dreams 
	drowned children in their sleep 
Who pierced the black lacquered eye-shine of the palearctic 
	water beetle into existence

To sing a birth song a death song 
A hypnotic tragic-mask soft-shoe 

So many names without animal now back then so many to name 
A profusion of furred alleys inside the embryo 
Harmonics of dust inside the wriggling pupa 
Faces at the edge of fire-light 
Refugees from the future so hungry begging for their souls back

So many names without animal now back then so many to name 
Names like ichor-squeezed-from-the tide-pull-of-Sirius 
Names like ant-antennae-woven-around-the-nails-of-a-juniper-claw 
Names spoken by fire by stone by mist by the clear eyes of 
	water rats

To sing a birth song a death song 
A hypnotic tragic-mask soft-shoe 
 
So many names without animal now I wait for the one who 
	struggles from the sac who bellows at the dead fern to 
	keep the sun revolving in its socket 
Who will speak the original name of the grey dhole so that it will 
	appear

Sirius Rising Over Picacho Peak Chthonic Praise-Chant

Sirius is engaged ancestor-light engaged ancestor-distance 
	changing now blue now red now green

My head flies into the earth with the light cupped between 
	my paws 

Sirius is engaged ancestor-light how it travels down the 
	carnival chute to the eye before I was born 

Eight point six light years that almost eternal thread 
	transforms the body tortures the body  

Sirius is engaged ancestor-light and I become ancient 
	as I wait for the sacrament 

White-fire gaze of Sopdet floods the Nile holds up the night sky 

Black water drains into black water

Sirius is engaged to Sah but refuses Sah shines so bright it 
	breaks desire in two 

Sirius is engaged ancestor-light it hovers inside a twist 
	of bare branches an idea-knife prying me open

I grow rabid teeth to bite the ley lines 

I whirl and wait like a vortex of feathers inside the light

Sirius is engaged ancestor-light carves the pattern of longing 
	across my forehead 

I am a beast-manuscript that tells the tale of the horror-space 
	that light has crossed
 
Sirius is engaged ancestor-light invades my grimace my 
	lonely cry invades the way I lope off into 
	the darkness

Empty Road in Taos Chthonic Praise-Chant

Everything is dying the way it does 
Airplane bottles of vodka gin whiskey scattered in sun-thistle
Dead straw-corolla heads bowed 
Kindling for a drunken wildfire 

Everything is dying the way it does 
Everything an ash-announcement for something or someone 
Here parachute seeds fell to earth 
Stars that wanted to know what it would be like on this plot 
	of earth this flesh 
End up paper trash wind-tortured incoherent 
Too many slurred words

Everything is dying the way it does 
And everything is dying the way it hasn’t done before 
Smoke along the ridge 
Extinction and love 
Extinction and confusion 
Paper rattles against sage tries to tell its story 
I was here and then I was there and no one will remember

Everything is dying the way it does 
I can’t make out the words of tossed bottles or lost cat 
	posters gone to coyotes one and all 
Stones that line the road are counterpoint blades of clarity
	precise as Manjushri’s sword

Everything is dying the way it does 
And everything is dying the way it hasn’t done before 
Last grey grasshoppers are footsteps following me 
Awkward wings shoot the sun and miss 
Friends long dead seen for a few seconds at the corner of 
	the eye escape into abandoned prairie dog holes

Everything is dying the way it does 
Two blue birds follow me once a part of my body 
Milkweed seeds inside dried-skin pods pull me down 
I lift them let them fly 
Parachutes over sage flats float to where they were always 
	going to land

Lament for Snow Blowing off the Roof under Grey Skies

There is loss it skins the world raw 
Sloughs off tomorrow and tomorrow blots out the stars scrapes 
	snow-dust across snow-hives 
Tears snow through snow a junco blown into last night’s window 
Unfathomable loss no raven or angel eye can plumb it

I must forget how snow can peel back the skin

This is the loss snow-dust an illusion while it happens 
Snow-dust that flies already gone 
I long for raven wing on a fence-post mice who dream 
	snow-crust into existence packrat-cell beneath 
	floorboards double oval of deer prints in mud 
	while they are still here

I must forget the snow as it falls
  
There is loss indistinguishable from my death who stands 
	beside me wearing a late Paleozoic snow-cloak 
When I go snow-blind there’s nothing left but voices on 
	the wind calling to themselves hunting their 
	former bodies 
Look at how they ache and cry and skin the air

I must forget how all the cats in the world lift their open mouths 
		to catch the flying snow

This is the loss standing on the shoreline with my first child 
	watching snow fall into the sea 
Whitecap-embrace of water with water thinking how many 
	times it will happen in the years to come and it has 
	not come again 
Death’s hands are cold so cold but hold me so close

I have already forgotten the murder-cry in the magpie’s 
                                  blue feather

I spin with snow-dust become snow-dust for maybe the last time 
To feel snow-dust blow through the heart into a cavern of masks 
	and stub-candles held by disembodied claws 
Our hands and tongues and thighs become shadow-mutations 
	because of such loss

How can I forget the way snow collects on your hat your 
               cheeks eyelashes brightens your eyes

This is the loss words torn off roofs names without bodies 
No I would become snow I would   
I would sacrifice my body for the body of snow the slide of 
	a blue whale’s back against ocean ice the arctic hare’s 
	leap the snow leopard’s eye from behind snow-driven 
	stone No

I will not forget

Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press), and On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press, re-issued by Parthian Books in the UK); along with a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). Other work at Mudlark includes the long poems Kill-Floor, The Sixth Sense, The Black Edge, and the eco-catastrophe-ceremony poem, Tidal Flats. The sequel to Tidal Flats, Solutions for the End of the World, can be found at The American Journal of Poetry. Gholson himself can infrequently be found on his blog: noise & silence. He lives in New Mexico.

Four Chthonic Praise-Chants & One Lament by Christien Gholson