Amulet

... this great herb with holy force
will keep your mind and senses clear.

-- Hermes to Odysseus
on the road to Circe’s keep

***

No mortal man has ever
scaped your swoony bed.
It’s much too beautiful
and ambrosial, too sexually
true. Inexhaustible like
a spring leaping from your
every curve and sweet
crevasse. Nothing but
the greenest world may
suffice once I entered
the glade where you are throned.
My every thrill since
was minted in that view,
my nerves woven by
that silvery blue derange.
And your kiss -- was pure
puckered nipple
and endlessly wild. No wonder
I lost it all again and again
those awful nights of
my youth, grunting
and whinnying your name
in bacchanals where nothing
but your actual breasts would do
and none I found sufficed.
Then the Lord of Roads
came and handed me this
amulet of verbal seem
and hid me in a
lyric with verses for hooves.
I’ve writ on down that
savage perplex stream
from I to all your Thous,
aboat abook aboot around
what babes in boozy
beds aroused
then drowned. Holding that
blade of tempered tween
has yielded all your beds
without your seawitch curse.
To write of your delight
inside the white hot blight
is like finding a way
off your sable island at last
albeit on keels your ribbed
with naked arms flung wide.
Who am I fooling? Yet I
sit here at 5 a.m. on this
cooled Sunday morning
in late October, in a house
real love built and lives in,
stilled while ten thousand
verdured naiads whirl
and sport my tongue.
I sing the world
exactly where I lost you
or learned to row away.
I’d hardly call that completion
but it gives me much to say
and pleases you, I’ll bet,
more than all that dicking
in a doodleplast you
wove like skirts or shores
beyond. Thank God
for the next poem
and pass the ammunition.
Soft and green the garden
inside your salt commission.

-- Oct. 24 2004