Antipode (Jan. 26 2005)

How there was a world
Here under the earth
And when it becomes day
It is night there.
-- in the book of wonders Brendan reads and then burns, thinking all of them untrue. (God then sets Brendan to sail, where he discoveres all of things he had read and refuted)

Another world conjoins
with this sphere of flesh
an fire, antipodal if you will,
to the dry demesne we
call a life. I suspect I live
there more than half
my hours though I’d
never know it, sitting here
so tired and migrained,
the day’s long work ahead
sprung wide and waiting,
tensed, the bait of lucre
set far inside. Or at
least some greater
half of soul’s in love
beneath that blue
which margins this
pale hour, lucent and
curved and bottomless,
sexual only as the
pole which loves its
other, plunger deeper
than any sane and
married man would go.
Beneath the keel of
this white riding chair
I hear a hundred voices
partying, the corks
from champagne bottles
popping free like
depth charges from
lost days, their effervescence
nearly toppling my wake
with an insupressible
and downwarding ache.
And yet the hour
is becalmed, almost
bewitched, my boat
still on the water
as a slice of white
toast on a blue plate,
nothing much to
rouse the gods,
much less than a poem
should. So I row on,
weary already from
the day ahead, every
distaff frenzy fading
below and behind, water
lapping at the buoys
and the past spread
fresh with lime.