Niniane

Give me insight into to-day,
and you may have the
antique and future worlds.
-- Emerson

I met her on that beach
from birth I had dreamed
her on -- years, lives,
ages later, it seemed.
My eyes were almost
too salted from the
mist to see her standing
there at last, half ashore,
half yet in wave,
her hair bright red,
her eyes sapphiric blue,
her lips parted in
an invitation to that
very place I yearned
so for yet never found
on any beach I walked
on, or sang about,
or wrote down. There at
last the warring aons
merged, past and future,
sea and sky, outside heat
and inner heart -- all
clasped to that point
where her immortal hips
pressed against mine
and stilled for the
duration of one kiss.
Was it only that?
It seemed I fell then
into a drowse and
faded for a while,
bowered in a curving
wave which so slowly
folded over me in
a soft cerulean wash
and hiss ... I came to
here at first light
dazed upon the sand,
something withdrawing
in a strange ebb
of red-gold foam,
the waking day
arousing from a
red-gold sun separating
from the eastern marge.
-- Where had I been?
And where to return?
I was like so much
afterbirth of a sacred
thrall, no longer solitary
or solid again. As I
drove back inland toward
the suburb I call home,
nothing was the same,
the K-Marts and Applebees
crumbling mortar like
so much dust, their
shattered marquees
half-marooned with vines,
shouting garbled offers
to a mute riot of
wild green. Then the
road gave out and I
had to walk on through
mile after mile of
corrupt and split
and grown-over Paradise,
a million houses humped
like headstones, a
million swimming pools
filled with bones and
vulture doody, like
cauldrons of pagan
rot. Finally I could
go no further -- the
tangle of it all too
dense and dark and
breathing with
sharp tooth and claw.
-- Naw, I didn’t really
see any of that
as I wound the
asphalt miles home.
All was as it always
had been: tidy rows
of houses spread between
thick lanes of commerce,
the traffic heavier
than usual as commuters
try to cram their
Christmas shopping
in. (You should have
heard my wife go on
last night about the
madness she endured
travelling to the Florida
Mall and back.) Nothing
had really changed
at all except within
where I saw with eyes
a few degrees to right
or left of center,
a vantage which brought
past and future faces
into sharper focus.
Of course you know
I never kissed that
nereid on the shore,
not as I so lyrically
enscribe in these
psalteries of desire:
I never found her
anywhere I though she
had bid me walk,
though sometimes
on an empty beach
day she seemed
everywhere behind
where she was not,
her blue eyes inside
the ocean’s spread,
the breeze her
breath as she parted
lips to kiss. None of it
every happened: In
fact I write all this
from an easy chair
in a land-locked suburb
I haven’t left for years,
miles and miles
from any beach, years
from all the gambols
when I even believed
she waited for me
at the next shore. It’s
all just lines across
and down the page,
a dry bouree I repeat
every day where she
and I are truly home
at last, standing at
a dazzling dawn shore
that isn’t anywhere
and she is most
beautiful exactly how
I will never see her
again - nor ever did,
right here across the
threshold of my skin,
the ocean fully within,
her length mine -- almost --
a salt sway against my
bones, fast heart hooving
inside my own, blue
eyes my hazel view,
her lips pressed up
against this line,
whispering, Home at
last, my son, my love,
my blue-welling spell;
I am your future
and your past, your
dazed and disappearing
footsteps over surf-
crashing sands. You
are my thundering hiss,
your life the kiss
I have waited for
since all time, your
life, began ... Somewhere
in some farthest ear
I hear her whisper
those words and here
write them all down,
for time to wash them
all away -- not today,
maybe though tomorrow --
erasing every trace
of song but not the sighs
forever in the surf
resounding in my ear,
forever blue as
her wild blue eyes.