Blue Finitude (2003)

For now, this shore seems
endless, its tide so blue
and satisfying in all the
ways it pleases her,
or her surf-sounding ear.
I just keep on singing here
as long as she smiles
in that badass way of hers,
dark and sweet as
rum dum bossa nova
pulsing in the thickest
veld of night. I believe now
that she stayed on in that
surfside bar where I
last found her more
than 17 years ago. I was
that night a man
exhausted of all the
songs he once so believed
and played quite well,
a rock pauper reduced
to humming vampiric
ditties into his booze.
I found her there, drunk
herself, blonde and darkly
tanned, husky-voiced and
busy as all hell in a red
bikini top, her hips and
big rear wrapped in some
sort of florid tropic print.
A wasted bad girl you
wouldn’t care to woo
but so rich in that darker
milk as to make my jackals
jabber for what’s below.
We talked til closing time
drinking tall tumblers
of Myers and pineapple
juice, the fans above
slowly whirling and
whispering what the
surf outside lashed
with harder deeper beats.
She bid me follow her
back to a house in dark
Deland, and there on
a couch we proceeded
to strip and stroke and
striate the last of night
in a thick opiate dark
of dark dark blue. --- Come
dawn we found ourselves
in a pool in back, the
water in first light a
different blue, washing
our bare skin in an
oysterish liqueur, her
big fat nipples almost
black. I lost my last guitar
in the waters of that
long night: I tossed it
in that wet collapse
which formed the last
wave of a failed first
career. There one art
sounded and turned into
the next, turning blue
to black and into an ink
or oil from which
far greater turbines revved,
rising up this spluttering
well-shape high into
some verbal air, a tower’s
fume and fin I shaped
just the way she bid me.
I sit here 17 years
later apolunar to that
last raw seaside bar,
in a house and chair
where deeper oceans roam,
her yield to me spread
wide in measure to how
far this pen can swim,
or dare to. Sometimes
however I wonder if the
end of all poems
is a pale dark beach
harbored by the
same surfside bar, and
conched in that bar
she still sits waiting
patiently for me
to come straggling
in exhausted once again
in some wholly other way.
Perhaps she waits
for me to cast
this sea-ravaged pen into
the strange blue of
her savage demesne.
The was a music once
of hooves and heat.
The words came later
and were more composed,
of worlds inside the girl;
I swived and married
and forever mused:
Out there where the sea
and sky are one,
beyond the moon and
sun and starry wrack,
the next wave surely
rises and begins its
travel here. Surely
the sea-witch on her
bar-stool is smiling,
her eyes closed to the
song which jazzes on
the jukebox, the gloom
which holds here there
blue as mare’s milk,
thick and sweet and wild
and so utterly finite.