Muse of My Betweens (Dec. 9, 2004)

I keep scanning the marge
for that blue door
you welcome and depart
through, but you’re
actually much closer in,
your salt physis
beckoning my nous
not from beyond
but between. Is that
why you sometimes
cusp the wave nude
from belly to breasts
to unrepentant lips
while the other way
you’re all fish, from
wave-strider’s hips
to scaled sex, fanning
down in a sleek,
long, powerful tail?
Infernal muse, you
fanned the waters
inside the wave
approaching shore
for 300 years
before the monks
arrived to build
their bulwarks of
vellum and wild ink,
glossing you in
psaltery: but you
kept weaving songs
on your seawitched
loom, beckoning
dry souls from shore
into the plash of
cold fire, that drowning
embrace which billows
down the leagues
of sweet descending doom.
Muse of beds between
the swells, your lyric
croons in grayblue eyes
staring up at the
keel of this hand
which is nervous
to have you so close.
My voyage is a cop-out,
a safe man’s blue travail
on sheets as dry as
the bones of the lovers
you send hightiding
home; would I just
relent the itch and let
the music go, perhaps
I’d be free to sink
right from this chair
into your pink
diluvian, my upper
half all fish --- the
ocean’s mortal half --
and all man plunging
below, til I am
fast in you again,
like some prodigal,
heavy-balled moon,
delivering to you
at last all the mail
I’ve ferried since
time began -- angel
Os and whale-bass
organum, the Ah
of every titan of the sea
to grunt and
croon “I die” in
that collapsing wave
we boomed together
down our shifting shore.
Topless fish, meet your
bottomless man.
Here’s to the coinage
of a moony gleaming shore
no coracle may reach
nor sea-witch bleach,
a song to rouse and
rump and plunge
the rest my years: Now
I see you further in
than I have ink to welcome,
much less woo. But give
me time, my sweet abyssal
swell. I pouring every
breast of yours I’ve cupped
into this lucent well.