Wave Savior (Dec. 18, 2004)

If a man holds this to be foolishness,
he knows nothing of love and how it lives.
-- Rimbaut d’Orange (c 1175 AD),
transl. Jack Lindsay

... And in my spirit, which for so long by then
had not been left hopelessly undone
with awe and trembling in her presence

without more knowledge from the eyes, by
an unseen force that was coming from her,
felt the old love in its great power.
-- Dante Purgatorio XXX 34-9
transl. W.S. Merwin

Just one slap of that salt blue
wave which came from somewhere
behind her sweet kiss
and I was that foolish child
again on the beach, reborn
between my mother’s voice
and the sea’s. How much
tilled thought and willed belief
just vanished in that
baptismal sigh in which
I came in her then
ebbed to a clear blue
infintie space which
wrote over the whole text?
Years of hard study learning
all the greater names, that
slow attenuation of
nuancing numens held
by a greater net of words—gone,
my lips ababble with “duh” and
“dear,” my grin pure votive
of fool’s gold. One wave
drowned every dorm and
library I had in
solitude long marrowed,
& rose merrymost in the
old gothic church til
it bumped against the
window nexts to God
and snatched heaven
back to earth. Squishy
sounds of honeyed
light fill the hundred bedded
cells which limn my memory,
all those lovers and my love
pouring out the altared juice
which reels a secret cinema
inside each day’s picture show,
my ever-newing, salt and sacred
blasphemy. Love’s shore-
washing faith beheaded
every known with just one
fateful kiss too many years ago
and made me minstrel
with a foolscapped pen
atop the crashing wave
that drowns the world
and leaves behind
an ebbing, gentle hiss,
your wordles bliss.
May I sing merry and anon
to the primrose end of this.