Beautiful Tempters (Nov. 27, 2004)

Since you left ... I have dared
to do strange things—bold things,
and have asked no advice from any—
I have heeded beautiful tempters,
yet do not think I am wrong.

-- Emily Dickinson, letter to Jane
Humphries in 1850

The legitimate Venus is mundana
musica {the music of the world} ...
But the shameful Venus ... we call ...
the mother of all fornication.

— Alan of Lille (12th century)
De planctu naturae

I should have reined these
waves in long ago—shut
the door your walked out
and labored on. Instead
and to great detriment
I remain here at that
shore imploring seas
in every foment of ink
and tongue to delve you
up at last in ocean equal
to that kiss. Think of all
the other poems I might
have clabbered from
the day’s milk: the mortal
fracas I might have entered,
my fortunes visible and
tenable in the fray,
my themes varied
and important, my
couplets hooved and potent.
But here the gold glints
like worn doubloons
in sands you poured through
my ears from so many
authors they’ve lost
their names. Song here
is every kiss I never got
plus all the ones I lost
and a few the tide tossed
in from far away
and the one I most hope to
receive, come first light,
when I wake my wife
back in our bed. Such
singing is just foolery
perhaps, but exactly
the way the shore
demands on this
pale-as-down assay
between the marges
of a life. There’s much
to damn this as drollery
and drool, a moat of moot—
the pathology perhaps
of a boy’s blue tongue,
a puerile dive from reality
into the polymorphous
pervese of swoon
and swagger, postpost
modernistic, a syntactic
horror rising like
a ziggaruat ababble
on the teat. Certainly
nothing your mother or
father or wife would
care to read, nor anyone
else for any matter
in the silence you
left behind. But what
gorgeous errancy!
Wrong in every
way where the ground
is too firm or known
and sweet dilirium on
the noirblue back
of the salt-tracked whale.
My tongue’s the
very cock of God,
plunged in your
every sweet vale
and swale, my every
trope and verb and
metaphor squishing
from that sound.
That music now
is like a wilder marge
that crashes all night
just outside a window
I once saw you through—
an infernal, outre and
riven tune, rumpussing
the rollicking sea
of our royal blue redundancy.
Now forsworn of the
rest, let’s get down
to its abyssal best.