My Night With Persephone

Dear Satan, you who
delight so in a writer’s
inability to describe
or inform -- watch me
tear a few terrible leaves
from my book of the damned.
-- Rimbaud

Marge and marginalia
complete all I cannot
say here -- that blue-in-
white infirmity which
beckons the loves I
cannot voice yet must.
Their deep saturation
in that song is my salt
dementia, a horse I
must somehow ride,
perilous though his
wild haunches and
hooves. Each day the
portal shifts in changing
surf, no one entry
spread quite the same.
Of course, it may
be I whose sight
has altered, my leap
from some shore
changed by slight
degrees from all
I’ve written here before.
Today composes from
normalities, the 5 a.m.
perch in this whitechair,
Cat Violet in
the window casting her
eyes out to the dark
like nets, and all that’s
dark appearing still
and sleepy, though
something inside suggests
that’s just a ruse,
drowsing out an ocean
more wild than any
poem can saddle or
harbor or -- fait accomlit!
-- complete. Still that’s
the yoga of this hand’s
motion, repeating line
for line surf-like emulsion,
dragging up to view
some naked altar
with dark nipples
and eyes so sapphire blue.
Today though she's more
Persephone than some
Triple-X wavelette,
sex in its deepest
sublimation, gone down
under long ago
to queen the coldest
flow of my imaginings,
ever restless to come
home again to where
mortal mothers thresh
the mortal grain--the
house I call love.
I pray today for all those
sad girls who rowed with
me for just one night
inside their bed, giving
up their bodies for
some metaphor for
marriage that fed the
ache like the worst
sort of well-brand booze.
I vaguely recall a
woman from one
night whom I met
in a local fern-bar
round midnight
in the early 1980s, the
both of us quite drunk,
spilling our sad repertoire
of loss into the other’s
ear as we drank on.
I told her about the
woman whom I thought
would lead my starryband,
our love and loud
metal guitars housed
in a surfside hut
where all was hot and
cool and going places
to be sure. But (I told
this woman in a
slurry monotone)
we could not because
she could or would
not stay--my heat
not hot enough--and
my life since then
(four months behind)
had been some
a bad specie of
descending doom,
an every emptying
glass of a farewell
she cared little to hear.
The woman I spoke
to was dark-haired,
framing a tanned
face with deep blue
eyes, an even darker tan:
a scorched beauty
with wild eyes, the woman
I could only reach
through drunk stumblings
onto accidental beaches
far from anything
real or true. She
then told me of a live-
in boyfriend who booked
bands and owned a
titty bar, a guy with
killer looks and flush
with all the cash the
night could soak. Love
for him was always too
difficult, she said,
obscured by his greater
love of himself and
his appetites for coke,
strange nookie
and fast cars. He’d
dumped her a
month ago in some
maniacally drugged
episode and was far
too proud to chance
a look back. -- Since
then she’d been
on a binge, ravening
on the loss, taking men
home every night
because she couldn’t
stand her bed alone.
Booze and boys were
adding up a toll;
just the previous
night she’d been busted
for indecent exposure
at Daytona Beach,
her bare footprints
against the window
of a Camaro, the cop
hitting on her as he
drove her off to jail.
Yet even after such
sobering arrears,
there she sat again,
settling tonight on me,
the rock pauper
with the endless thirst
for rock fantasy.
I was so drunk that
night that by closing
time I could hardly
speak; and yet she took
me by the hand and
led me out the door,
driving me to her
apartment somewhere
beneath the wicked
sea, and sat me on
her bed saying there
will be no sex tonight
though we’ll share
this double bed. I
watched her undress
-- a truly holy moment,
this truly beautiful
woman slowly and
dutifully peeling off
blue silk blouse and
white brassiere, her
small breasts swimming
out fully tanned,
her nipples like darker
eyes on a darker
lower face. She unzipped
her jeans and wriggled
free, pulling down
red silk panties,
revealing only the
thinnest pure white
tan-lines, a thong-
road leading to a
dark brown bush, all
secrets hidden there
in a proud thick lush.
There was none of
that for me in that
night, but in truth
I was almost too drunk
to care, and almost
grateful just to be
held there in that
bed, beneath covers
so heavy we seemed
to tumble down a
sea into the void
of voided souls. The
next morning we groaned
up to the sound of
ZZ Top on a tinny
small radio. She kissed
me on the forehead
and got up to hit
the john, leaving me
there to come to
in another far-too-distant
room, like an island
without a name
and by day proved
for too harsh and real.
Time to go. She drove
me back to my car
and that was that.
I never saw her again.
That night was almost
20 years down the
well I call my history,
and surely she lives on
in my Persephone,
throned in my worst
sort of falling and
forever roaming there,
unquenched of the
life she couldn’t live
on her own, her
addict-greed for warmth
married to my own
that single night
for all time. Who knows,
she’s probably dead
by now, if all that
awfulness failed to
find a healing shore.
Or she could be
truly married to some
other Lord of Hell,
whatever emptiness inside
that beautiful carriage
in thrall with a bad
man’s hearse and hard
hooves. I could have
meant something far
different to her back then:
I could have said
a word or two of real
solace had I not been
too drunk to speak,
told her to get help: I
could have stuck around
a little longer with
no intent for sex
just to help ferry another
human being back
to shore: Hell, I could
have rowed on with her
toward some truly
engaged and vital life
-- Dream on, oh Kore
wheatfield of a heart.
The only reason I ended
up with her that night
was because I was so
lost in hell, my self-
inflicted wound bleeding
just the way she
needed so to drink.
She would not that
night have wanted
the man that I became,
sitting here in this
married house two
hours before dawn,
my real life chiseled
from hard work where
love is so much about
not getting what
you want, but wanting
what you got -- however
short of shored blue tidals
it forever must be.
No: she is lost down
there, as all the dead
are in their oblivions,
combing their hair
in vacant mirrors,
crying in the empty
rooms of one vast
apartment complex
at the bottom of
the sea. My reverie
of her here is now
near an end -- Violet
has jumped down to
join my wife in
bed, and the dark
outside the window
is slowly paling
toward first blue.
It’s time I joined
my day. Still, I can
light a votive for
her at the tidal end of
all this verse -- and
say a prayer for one
of the darkest saddest
and most beautiful
woman I ever met
in the long night of
my personal curse.
She was dark in
every way -- black
hair, almost black tan,
a black narrative
heading for the
darkest of all ends:
Yet her blue eyes
almost sang in the
dark of that darkest
room -- minted from
ice for sure, but
also somehow some
daughter’s pure
sea-glass, the lost
child who never
stops staring up
in all the ways I
stare back down
for news of where
she’s gone. She and
I are shore today
to this poem of
hubris and amends.
I don’t know where
you are today, sweet
lady of worst sorrow,
but I pray you’ve
found a way to
escape the hell you
chose. I wish you
better, I pray thee well.
Now send this
poem on to endless blue
upon your bitter swell.
My marriage hauls
you like bilge and
ballast; may I never
err again in finding you.