A Failure of The Imagination (Nov 2004)

Imagine further, line by line ...

-- Keats Endymion III, 733

But just as perilous
to this joyous heat
is that failure of the
imagination which strands
you too far above the tide.
Nothing drains faster
than completed passion,
its nails dissolved
in gossamering rails
of ghost-white sperm,
the spasming wave
become the thinning
foam which cusps all
emptiness, soul’s stout
sulphur quenched, the
day reassembling into
sore elbows bad breath
& endless travail
just beyond the bed
& she not you at all
but a grumbling mate as
equally at odds with
me as I with her.
Without your blue
ebb, that sucking
reverse from womb
to sea, the heart dries
to sand beneath
the sun, and all the
music thins to the
sound of gulls
cawing over trash.
Lack of balls
will surely make your
life minimal
but there is also
that lack of dream
which stays in
the last room
and does not venture
to risk and fail
the next for which
you are door and
marge and potent
potential crashing
shore. All lust starts
from the ebb that
drains the furthest
from her embrace,
the torch rekindled
in that coldest abyss
apolunar from her kiss.
That spark which leaps
and lights desire comes
from the mind, not
the groin, where
moony ululations
are cleft and nippled
with an archly aching
juice. Imagination
salts my purpose with
the sea, my hull
grown stout and stodgy
for that shore where
nothing but her
slicksweet clasp
will do, no matter
how I fail again
to find her. Without
the dream I doubt
I’d be much more than
an unkeeled perplexity,
one bump and grind
followed by endless
drift and drowse
-- that sort of death-in-life
which makes war in lieu
of love. I’d be like a
pentacostal without
his tongues or a
Republican robbed
of Dubya’s dubloons.
Perhaps you have made
my love seem to my love
too weedy and strange,
but without your ebbing
reclamations, I doubt
I would even be with her
at all. Your blue bathings
keep me ever sighing
for returns to her,
my thirst by salt
made desperate to
remiss abyss with
one slaked kiss,
to hurl and smash
your ocean in my
tide to her.
Failure of the nerve
always hauls me back
to you, but failure of the
dream keeps me far
and farther from
this shore of her.
So today I sing
orizons of the jazzy
curvature and meanderings
of the most difficult poem
of all: Each wave
daring to go farther
than the last, each
poem failing deeper
back in you. With
wings so spread I fly
on toward the wildest
aeries of a song
I heard in surfage long
ago combing those
o so whiter sands
where you and her
conjoin and part.
I doubt I have either
the heart or art to
nail enough what I heard
there, but here’s to
all I ache to slake
in this tidal blue
confabulate.