Incunabula (Dec. 27, 2004)

This book you wrote
in me long ago
in a tongue between
my mother’s and the sea’s,
a half-uteral, half-literal
gorgeousness which poured
the littoral of Ys
-- barbs of shining fire
plunging each wave’s
fold and crash till all
is a gliding, gilding blue.
Each day I write another song
amazed at how the ink
fins and oars the whiteness
of your breasts, your cleavage
binding every page,
invoking words I do not know,
much less name, though
each day’s shoring on the beast
who rides below gets closer
to that old, angelic sound.
Truly my ache for you
devoured me with this singer’s
mouth distilled from the
wintriest nights in the dankest,
most infernal south,
where beachside bossa novas
rimmed with rum a
noctilucent tide -- full ebbings
of a lunar blare which dazzled
as it emptied me of all hope
of finding you. Who would have guessed
that my surrender inked the nib
which plunged harpoonlike
to that deepest heart and
willed the wildest blue,
the saltiest, wave-wracked,
spume-high exhalant of you
to drown a man’s drying lips!
And so the wonders I swore
were false, even deadly,
are writing (or riding)
themselves down, song by song,
in this book shelved between
the flukes of an old whale
-- an inculabula of every thrill
and soak and plumage of
your infinitely wide
and ever deeper sea.
Each page was ferried from that abyss
which named the distance
of one kiss, one plunge,
one night so long ago:
I’m sure by now you’d
have it no other simple,
safe or ordinary way.
Breviary of blubber
and a five-ton fisting heart,
may my words be spermacetti-pure
as those sweet choiring tidals
who wax the ebbing art.