Riptide

We may know a good deal about the manifestations of Aphrodite in myth and in our personal lives. But we know far too little about how she governs the premises and conclusions of our thinking. These we naively think are based on
empirical facts. But the very idea of concrete, sensate facts suits her style of consciousness. The erotic “facts” on which we build our ideas are her creations.

-- James Hillman, “Anima”

RIPTIDE

Myths of your submission
and service to my cause
are as laughable as the bells
which cap every fool’s
blue skull. I’m no less caught
in your riptides now
as when I sailed to you
through all the folds of night.
See: each day I sit to write
some life onto the page
and end up hurling
all my ink your way,
exactly as I railed
the legion of my sperm.
Both are manners
of copying down your
tidal ingress through
a singular, vicious maw.
This poem is like a
field of poppies
outside of town
behind some stoved-in,
long-abandoned trailer,
the flowers’ shimmer
somewhere between
high moon and distant sea,
naked in their silver,
their sirens’ scent of
endless drowse. What better mast
to masturbation’s greed
for quench on distant
shores than the pure
reverie of reach?
What an effort to look
up from here and out
the window at 4 a.m.
2004, the outside moment
lulled in the million-
year dreamtime with
little actually there --
a yellow cast of streetlight
staining as with
sulphur physic a bough
of oak, a stretch of
dead Ninth Avenue; the
garden just outside
underexposed in
this fag-end of night
though from outside
eyes it’s washed
by the moon
I saw in the hall
window as I trudged
to the kitchen a
half hour ago, its
shape rounding
towards St. Oran’s
eve two nights down
the week, its cast
so white and blue,
lathering all
with exalt, exiling light.
Our cat followed
me a few steps
behind on silent
feet, greedy
for her morning
treats (three pairs
of Double Delights offered
to her as I say my first
prayers on my knees);
my wife coughed hard
once upstairs in bed;
a few fish runneled
fast away in the
ebbing waters of
my dream, where I
had wandered an
old job’s halls with
some predatory
hunger for sex,
fancying a new woman
at a desk in
a building I haven’t
entered for six
years & taking
up the reins of my
old corporate
communicator's
job, talking with
my old boss Mary
who loved me in her
way or mine,
having shared only
the burden and fire
of so much work
for so many years.
That dream faded
fast, taking all
reverie of old jobs
with it, leaving this
task at hand with
all those shadows.
Are these so so
early motions
devotions that I send
to you, or are they
yours already, strummed
from a lyre you’ve
hidden between my ears,
throned in my hippocampus
or walking a green
verbal sward of Sidhe
somewhere, forever elsewhere
on the ranging hills
of brain? My mind these days
seems to have just
one song, of deeper
daily undulations,
the way the world itself
bells a single drone
from all the world’s
waves pounding
all its shores. Narrowing
my means to find you
between safe margins
has not made you
any less or safer a sea.
Hardly. If any, I’m
more in thrall with
you than all those nights
I chased you through
a forest of shot glasses
and tall Budweisers.
It’s as if I’ve not so
much evolved as
revolved back to
my earliest sense of you,
between my mother’s
voice and the crashing
tide at Jacksonville
beach in Florida
when I was 2 or 3.
Ah what bright preponderance
of celestially ringing blue!
Surely it is the aptest
measure for all the ink
I’ve poured these
past few years
trying to get down at
last to you, to your
salt psalm’s threnody
at the bottom of my throat
and heart and gut
and sex and ancient,
fishlike dream.
And yet -- please
evidence that hermetic
voice -- And yet I struggle
hard to find a blade
to circumcise my thrall,
to cut me free at
last of salt mother’s
mighty web, the
web which rips all
tides into one furrow.
Help me write -- I pray
to that road-sailing
sooth who carries
the old ape-scribe
Thoth in the pack
on his back -- Help
me write of yesterday
afternoon when love
was so much at rest amid
the worry of finances
& bitter days a
week before a bad
election: Help me
tenor that halcyon
light of Florida’s
autumn bronze
with temps in the
low-80s and a
breeze washing through
all the opened windows:
Shoe me in that
Sunday drowse
I settled down
into on the couch
as my wife read the
employment classifieds
& our cat curled
at my feet and
slept, her fur all
sable and mink: Help
me bowl here all
of that milk, a cream
despite the hour, the age,
the rude saga of
flooding years.
There at midocean
of an afternoon
he helped me see
the land beyond you
which is always ever here,
the one you make
invisible with all the ways
you cloud and toss
my mind. What I found
there I would write
here, though my
words have seeped in
you; no wave, no shore,
no bower or cabin
of lashed palm and
frond with its bed
of halved mangos
& brimming cups of
rum and the naked
fruit of you -- No
dream of tropic hithers
hindmost of every day
but the very now
astride all that
standing proud in
the foreground, dripping
and smiling and mine,
all mine, no matter
what you say. Now
it’s almost 5 a.m., time
to type this drivel in
& start the dingdong day
in the screaming
perfect world -- time
to shit and shower,
shave and groom, eat
some breakfast &
feed the strays on
the back porch --
& then time
go join my wife in
bed & tell her how
much I love her
by stroking slow
and soundlessly
her feet: And when
it’s finally time to
tuck that nipple back
in your blouse &
drive into the now
roused and wakened
day, may the world
be washed with
that old marbled
beachlight, that first
fold and crash
inside this lifelong lash,
this wild riptide.

-- Oct. 25 2004