Primavera (Three Waterspouts Off Port Orange)

They dance in a
a simple round
transfixed by
an invisible
maypole, a
sea-unicorn’s
pale horn,
vestals of
all I know
but cannot see,
their hands so
lightly touching
mine in the
round I write.

The first one
to the left
faces most to us,
her soft red hair
and violet eyes
simple as the kelp
laced in her dress.
She smiles the
most openly,
most recently,
stirring up sea
with the
fragrance of
cocoa butter
and orange blossoms.
The sheer blue
fabric strains lightly
at her breasts
revealing nothing
except approaching
waves and sea-mist.

At the right turning
back into the circle
is the second,
the one invoked
by storms, summer’s
high wild fullness
approaching harvest
in the pelts
of lightinged rain.
She’s taller by an inch
or two, older by a few years.
She returns what the
first one newly learns,
her position in the round
much like a vast wave
breaking just offshore.
Her shift is
deep green candor,
the  splendor of
awakened days,
reveling in the
revealing, a knowing
nakedness.

And the third
— well, we’re
not exactly sure how
to describe her,
her back is to us
and she turns toward
the first, yet her
head looks back
toward the second.
We cannot tell her age
due to the play of
shadow on her face —
nor can we quite
read her mood
since it hinges joy
to grief, looking
back almost
bittersweetly on
the first desire:
Her salt hands
are joined to the others’,
keeping the circle
wound in charm,
her place in
front adding
a sternness to the
dance, a scythe-
blade’s sharpness,
the first one to
ravage the shore,
the last to dance on.
She’s wearing
nothing I can tell,
a secret gown of
ocean swells.

They circle each
other for a few
more moments
and then dissipate.
Gone as fast
as they arrived
they leave nothing
but a troubled afternoon,
rich blue waters
with all that darkness
overhead rumbling,
soon to flash.

And yet their softly
turning vicious
motion still rounds
vastly here,

ghosting this pen’s
rolls and circuits
with a triune admonition
sealed with one sad kiss:

to have heart

and sweat its rapture

and never stop dancing
on these pages

no matter how
much that unicorn
between them fades.

The Selkie Bride

Little did I know she
was a selkie on that shore,
dazzling my eye with curved
surf and salt after
a long night of sex.
She stood at that
water’s ledge staring
at me with the rising
sun behind, wearing
a loose bikini (almost
absently pulled on,
stretched from other
summers, other
selkie loves):

And she was prefect,
so sublimely and
supremely actual
in my startled eyes,
leaping the deepest
sort of feeling
into me that I had
reached at last the
fully baptized
shore of love.

She tilted her head
and smiled
with a voltage equal
to the sun rising behind
her on the dazzling sea;
her curves and curly
hair gilded from without
and within, grounded
by blue waters at
her feet which foamed
soft and warm
all the way to me.

Thus she waded into me
from her ancient sealskin,
up from thousands of leagues
and years and distances
across that soft blue
ocean of her. Pearl
that sun and delve
it up sparkling on
her oyster lips, the
selkie mouth that I
couldn’t see when she
came up and kissed me
tasting of sperm and
beer and the ocean of
her sex.

Nothing had prepared me
for that moment –
it surprised me out
of every disbelief
I had for finding love.

Alas, I also had no
defense against
what followed
as we drove inland
& futilely tried
to make our life
an all-night next-
morning by the sea,
selkie wife and
alkie fool condemned
to reach for the other
where no sea’s
depths or man’s
breaths endured.

Blindly and stupidly
I tried to nail her
back to that first
beach but she
would just smile
here ebbing way,
holding a finger
to her lips as she
got up to wash
my presence off,
disappearing
back into the tide.

She soon became
the lovely sound
of water in my ear,
a vanishing,
she-shaped pour
fainter than rain
falling forgotten shores.

Selkies are not
wives, their blue
heat not meant for
hearths; men’s love
of them is the stuff
of song, one best
loved far offshore.

They stay only
as long as we
connive to hide
their water gowns;
but at night
while men dream,
the selkies pour their
blue whispers down
their ears, rummaging
through every vault
a man desires

til at last their salty
gossamer is found
and rescinded from
our souls, the spell
of landlocked love
unbound and doomed.

Once she learned
how desperate I was
for her she flipped her tail
and dove, a blue echo
in a door which still
washes with the sea,
cold and empty and
heartbreakingly beautiful
as the moonlight which
hangs heavy over our
garden this early morning.

The wife I found
in that selkie’s wake
sleeps on upstairs,
my lovely, despairing,
aging menopausal
wife, difficult in all the
ways that selkie seemed
so easy, watery, free.

To rapture, riptides,
to to heart, this home,
this joy which
has learned to keep
the blue and dry worlds
far apart.

Oh she was so lovely
standing there,
so pink and
cerulean, the dream
of that immortal love
which no ring can troth
nor by keeping save.

Be well, O one who
was all yet could never be.
Be free and swell
your wildest waves
in salt remembrance
of your smile in me.

A Scent of The Sea

You were too real for a dream
sitting there across from me,
sheepish to be thought dead
by everyone all this while.

Our family was packing for a
day at the beach — Dad carrying
out fishing poles, Molly
and Will bickering over who
would ride shotgun,
Mom packing Mountain Dews
into a cooler of ice.

You and I sat here and talked
a long while, almost the
entire night. I wondered
where my good
sneakers were and how to
beach this slippery moment,
our talk too much like a fish
to write much about.

But a poem did come to mind,
“A Scent of the Sea,” making
me sad that my best work
seems now out of reach,
as inaccessible as you.

I said you’d have to check
out the memorial website
I’ve been tending all these months,
& let me know how much
was true. You only smiled.

Then I realized that we would
have to return to you all of your
stuff that we kept, your camera
& laptop & journals and slides.

I’d gotten used to writing
with you laptop’s heft in my lap.
Hard indeed it will be
to balance my ancient iMac here
but it’s the right thing to do,
giving it all back.

Time to go, a voice said,
and I got up to look for my sneakers
but woke up instead,
Violet scratching away at fleas
in the dark of our bedroom at 3 a.m.
with rain falling slow and steady
onto the eaves.

Downstairs Mamacita was
crying on the front stoop wet
and hungry and wanting in.
Our new kittens Silk and Hugo
in the guest bedroom and quiet,
hopefully just sleeping.

No sign of that poem
anywhere on your laptop,
hardly here either
though I write it anyway,
the chair across from me
empty now & rain still
falling so dreamily
in the window,
carrying in a
distant scent of the sea.

Noir

The night which kills us
has a sexycool swing to it,
a music called noir.

Noir is rain late at night
in L.A. where
everything but rain falls.

It’s car wipers brushing
back and forth
over a black blear
as a raspy voice
intones how it all
began a few days ago

when the heiress
walked into the office
looking like a tall glass
of trouble in her wealthy
woman’s dress,

her crocodile tears
and lousy alibis
the stooges of
icy green eyes
giving us the go
beneath a shaded
widow’s hat.

Noir beckons us
from the crossroads
of perdition and parole
like the amber splash
of neat bourbon
in thick glassware.

Noir is a slow dance
for cops and crooks who
have seen it all
but go for it anyway,
suckers for the
razzle and growl
of life too close
to the edge.

It praises what really
doesn’t matter with
its moody saxophone,
a preterit awfulness
most die of,
or should.

The fatale with the
shot-glass heart
left the real one
with her last lover,
the one she
dances with in
cement pumps
across the harbor floor.

Noir is the fated
end of those pale
eyes, staring so
patiently amid
scarves of seaweed,
coral jewels.

Only our hero endures
to the story’s end:
Rumpled, rolled,
hog-tied, shot-up
but not quite drunk
enough, he drives
his blue roadster
down an old highway
in the deadest
of night, pulling at last
into the only
all-night diner
for 20 miles.

He sees his future
chalked on the
pavement by that
door, though he’s
fatally unsure
whether it’s the
coming or the
going that holds
the smoking gun.

Ah, but for tonight
he has our every
grievance and
permission
to yield to each
tempting fall—
drive fast, hit hard,
booze plenty,
love some, drive on.

And there she is,
sitting at the counter
like a madonna or
siren in a pool
of sad late light
blowing smoke rings
round a cup of joe.
The next caper,
our future wife.

Tomorrow will
come soon enough
with its patient
and hideous four
riders. But for now
there’s only this
one, late, perfect
riff on possibility,
the one we read
insatiably for,
just as spinsters
read their bodice
rippers and corralled
pards those fenceless
western odes.

She’s so sleek
and pale, a thousand
swizzle sticks
fencing in a heart
of gold she’ll pour
for him, despite all the
odds that their love
won’t survive
the credits soon to roll.

She reaches for another
cigarette but the pack’s
empty, of course. He
offers a Camel of his own,
reaching over to light
her cigarette with a flick
of a chrome Zippo.

She pulls his hand close,
her sharp features
warmed and softened
by that smallest
thermal of hope
while the rest
of the weary world
sleeps in the shadow
of grace.

Don’t you love the
noir of it, such B-
grade fare, the strongest
stuff we can swig
without tasting real brine,

as close to the edge
as any one dare go
without getting up
from our easy chair’s
so-un-noirish glow.

Imago Dominus

She stands at the bedroom door,
half in, half out,
shadows cupping breast and belly,
the faintest smile on her face,
a fine mist in the air
and darkest night behind
with water coursing everywhere,
silent, deep, and blue.

1978

Longing

I sometimes wonder whether longing
can’t radiate out from someone so
powerfully, like a storm, that nothing
can come to him from the opposite
direction. Perhaps William Blake
has somewhere drawn that?

— Rilke, letter, 1912

There is a longing in us which
grows from sigh to starry shriek.
Perhaps comets are charred furies
of that pain, a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears to God’s porch
and back, insatiable and unanswered.

Perhaps. All I know is that
it’s infinitely perilous to think
that longing has a human end.
In my cups I once believed
a woman mooned for me,
her longing a white welcome
over my million nights alone.
I met and passed her many times
those hard years, blinded by the aura
of her unvowled name.

Surely when two longings touch
it’s like when great waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
Our deeper thirst can never sate:
as each draught of booze
was never enough, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.

I recall a young man
walking home drunk on a
frozen night long ago,
his beloved nowhere
to be found in the chalice
he had named. Winds hurled
steel axes through the
Western sky, failing to clear
the cruel foliage of fate.

In his defeat he was greater
than any angel beckoned
by that night: his heart so
hollowed by longing
as to chance in pure cathedral,
her absence the clabber of a bell
shattering the frozen air,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.

Cat in the box

We don’t know why but
our Siamese loves
her loving in a box.

We set it on the floor
and she hops right in,
purring as she’s ski-lifted
slowly up to our bed.

So seduced and
set there she
then demurs
to our long soft strokes,
sapphire eyes misting
in the milky pour
of kitten memories.

Normally she doesn’t
like to be held,
jumping  away as
soon as we let
our embrace go;
but with only a
paper wall between
us she takes
all the love we give.

Sometimes love needs
just an inch of buffer,
I think, a defining enough
border to make not enough
the lover of more than,

sighing in the distance of
the most intimate walled kiss.

Art and Heart

ART AND HEART

1.

Not heart
but art.

Rare dazzle of
the highest hour.

Seducer combing
his black hair
under the boardwalk.

He who obeys
by violating love.

Arrow barbed
in glowing iron
falling gorgeous
to the sea.

Gilded echoes
of love’s
futile shout.

Solitary boat
rocking on a
black lacquer tide.

2.

Not art
but heart.

She who walks
so naked beyond
cathedral walls.

Whose smile defeats
their shadow.

Her heat
blooming indolent
and svelte.

Glittering sea
of island dreams.

Her eyes so blue
God goes weak
in the knees.

Most herself
when this
curved glass
shatters.

The Lonely Vigil

On our last night together we drank Lancers
& smoked pot in my dorm room, listening to
that odd jarring mix of music we brought to
each other - Joni Mitchell and Genesis, Heart
and Jethro Tull — & not saying much, just
laying there on my cramped single bed
while the albums dropped one by one down
the spindle singing of passion that changes,
of sweetness calyxed round time’s wounding thorn.
I would fly East the next morning, gone from

the Northwest for good (or so I thought),
dropping out of college to work on my father’s
land and write big things; she would
remain to finish another two years before
heading back to Korea (or so she thought)
where her mother worked as a missionary
nurse. My bed was narrow for one; the two
of us crammed in its pew like an overmanned
dingy where every inch of one smacked
of the other. No matter that night though,

because sleep wasn’t what either of us
wanted, and it wasn’t what one of us got.
We drank off the whole bottle of smuggled
wine & smoked another few pipefuls of dope,
growing thick and lush in our spreading glow
while the single candle stuck in on old bottle
of Lancers - relic of our first night of sex –
burned slowly down. Today I think of that
bum-fated couple’s growing glow set against
the only light in their room ebbing away

as consequents of desire’s rise and fall, shore
and sea where one shared heart is greedily
seeded but usually fails much to grow. We
kissed for a time, mouth to mouth valving
up what the next day we’d let go;
I tugged her clothes off — t-shirt and jeans,
big bra and then those baggy white panties –
while she just lay there breathing, looking at me
in the dark from a lonely distance, trying to read
in my lust the something more that was all

that was giving up to me on any night. She
did not try to undress me — she was far too shy
for that, even that night — just lay there glowing
naked in the near dark & watching me fumble
out of my clothes; and watched me as I climbed
up over her and proceeded to rub my hardening
penis against her furred cunt. Letting it happen,
willing it be, though the whole procedure seemed
like praying in the wrong chapel, to the wrong god,
some far distaff or mistral chamber of her heart

cut off from her real blood. Without any foreplay
(which, I knew, she didn’t much care for anyway,
just more patient waiting while I sucked at her
nipples or fingered her cunt — I knowing nothing
about the sutras of slow and long touching)
I then fucked her in my awkward, late-teenaged way
and she let me, her hands gripping my hips
as I huffed and pumped away, the both of us
now charged with the destiny of bodies we
understood far too little, in wonder and ashamed
with its surfaces, terrified and in thrall with

what came rising from underneath. But the
nakedness that night was real enough, her big
pillowy breasts with their rarely-stirred nipples
mashed up against my skinny chest, my hands
kneading and spreading the soft cheeks of her ass;
my lust was real enough, fanning out from
from that fish-dipping penis out to my hips &
up into sulfrous regions of my chest as if
fucking was a form of obedience to a dark
forest god whose roots were growing over
the church I’d left behind. Her eyes were closed

closed tight, willing a receipt more vestal than
venal, her goddess too young yet to be outraged,
too bound to the savage hymns of her mother
and yet, essentially so, free enough to choose
that most infinite of tendernesses, holding fast
to the one who would the next day disappear.
Her cathedral silence was real enough, allowing
the room to be filled with my humphs and
grunts, augmenting the creaking of that tortured
little bed with all it was and yet could never be.
The sweat was real enough as I humped her

to my crest, mine dripping from my face onto
hers; her tears were real too, mixing salt’s sweetness
with its thorns. And the rictus wallop of white
bliss that tore through my body was real, my
hurry to get that spouting whale of a frail
incensed penis out of her was real, the sperm
that spurted all over her stomach was real too.
All too real, surprising, even harsh: It felt like pissing
back then, pulling out just behind the wave’s crash
& sending it smithereening & foaming over the

shore of her belly, a potty affront, defying the
teaching of mothers & diapers, every No’s
chain in my being set against letting go. The clench
which slowly ebbed our bodies apart was real
but the falloff back into our huge and growing-
by-the-moment apartness was more real,
not really icy but windy and distant, an
old, glacial feeling this earth has felt since
it was born. We held each other in that long
postcoital float away from each other, her long hair
and breath in my ear a tide I hated myself

for needing so to leave — was there time yet
to stay? But in truth I was terrified of that sound,
I had just gotten free of one mother’s voice in
my deepest ear, love back then seemed too much
like a womb of a nest, a strangling of sticks and
strips of lace and promises. No, in the morning
I would go: And lay there waiting. She lay there
silently too, still as sleep but immensely awake.
For a while I felt her tears dropping one by
one against my cheek, warm, pissy like my sperm,

a caustic acid on a night only meant to go one way,
hissing against the iron of my resolve to get the
hell on outta there. So we just lay there for
an hour and then two, listening to the stack of LPs
as they fell from spindle to needle to be covered
over by its odd other — “Court and Spark” “Trick
of the Tale,” “Dreamboat Annie,” “Thick As A Brick”:
mid-70’s albums, wizened down from the first
flush of big night music, older, more jaded, jazzier.
The sound of an adulthood I guess. Walking away,

Playing on. For all the great things I thought I
would soon write, words that night 30 years
ago were scarcer than AA meetings; they all
seemed so flattened and negated by the huge
hug we lingered in. Just harrow down this last
night together and in the morning say goodbye,
leaving her behind in my heart’s deepest blue.
She didn’t say much either, having used up
all of love’s rhetorics trying to convince me
out of my intent but for one: She refused to

tell me she was pregnant, coming to believe
(I here believe) only in her love & knowing that
if I would not welcome it on my terms that
night then I never could on hers. She kept
that secret sealed in a womb where all the
future she cared for lay, something only cellular,
the merest foundations of the home we
wouldn’t build together. And so we lay there
together down the night’s slow-drifting hours,
not sleeping, not talking, the candle slowly

dripping down to a nub which flickered then
was lost, leaving only full darkness and the sound
of two breaths, rowing the final two hours of
that night. Only she made it to first light; I
nodded off, and when I woke she was gone
for good. I think of that oh-too-young couple
laying together on their final night as a pair
as I sit here writing in the eleventh year
of my second marriage: And choose to believe
that all that I have today is rounds back to
that lonely, fragrant, deepening night where

love’s candle stayed lit even when all trace of it
flickered out from the ever-breaking surface
of things, its glow burning deeper than my every
foolish thrust and parry at what I thought
coupling was about, running like a bright gleam
in the catacombs of what it would take years to
learn was my heart, thick and blue and lucent
torch steady beneath that dribble of always-too-
hasty and late-withdrawn sperm. Joni Mitchell’s
“The Hissing of Summer Lawns” playing deep
in my ear this early-summer late night a life

down the stream, the broken heart of the Sixties
turning to smart jazz, saturating in this predawn
next-century vigil of man confessing all the
errors of his heart. Three ghost children from
three lost women — the aborted family that
I know of — sit together on a distant beach
poured from my mortal glands, their hair so fine
in the sun, softly lifting in the breeze, their smiles
up at me so absent and pure and welcoming
that I can’t get my arms enough around this
difficult and deeply loved life, can’t wait to get

home on working days, can’t pet our cats enough,
can’t pull enough weeds from our garden,
can’t wait to get on with the long slow decline
which is the dance of a happy heart. I can’t
tell you how important the moment is when,
just before we turn out our day’s final light,
I always turn to my wife, look her deep in her eyes
(she looks up from reading the New Yorker)
& and thank her for this life we share: And kiss
her just once, almost chastely, so soft not even

her pillow indents. And yes, I know none of that’s enough
to change whatever fates are hatching through
the night, readying to break acid yolk in the next day,
for better and ill: Know that the weariness &
disappointments could easily break her will
or mine or both & pour cold water into this house
like a boat that’s been split: But I say the words
anyway, in the name of that long silent night,
and pray they’re enough to carry us together
to morning where we must get back to work again
in a paired gesture of heart which welcomes first light,

working and aging and loving in this home,
tending a candle which burns deep in stone.

Migraine Colloquies #3: Pocket Delphi

Recent research suggests that migraines start at the root of the brainstem and flourish out in a wavelike spasms of dopamine and serotonin that cause blood vessels to act abnormally, swelling and souring into a tyranny of pain.  I’ve been reading a lot about the Temple of Delphi in Greece, the predominant oracle in the ancient world for almost a millennium. Something about the pythia’s brilliant madness over the vents reminds me of what happens to the brain under the influence of migraine, the bane of many creatives. What if Delphi is the archetype of migraine?  So I write …

POCKET DELPHI

The trope endures here, or rather
down in that fissured place deep
in my skull where eerie
pharmakons flash and pulse
emitting a god’s fumes,

arousing her, that creature,
half-fish, half woman,
to rise up from cold brine
and walk naked as truth
on old sands where
I and Thou are one.

She sings to me in that
first salt tongue I know
and don’t, wombing me
in the water-psalm of the dream,
auguring an oracle
brimming, like a beached conch,

wild portents of soul,
my grand old history
& love’s magisterial assaults,
all in the finned vowels of
an art which always conclude
at that door of waking
with its ebbed blue farewell.

When I woke my migraine
was terrible, whacking its
huge iron clapper against the
bronze walls of my skull

& the fish-woman I dreamt
was now licking the
undersides of my balls,
straightening out the pen
which leaps into my hand
trailing blueblack waters–
ocean, she-spoor, ink.

That’s when the prophetes*
shows up for the next
phase of the work, the hierophant
trained to turning
she-water into wine
of a long and careful vintage,
straightening out the
wild babble of dream
into the singsong of poems.

Thus the old oracles of
Delphi live on in the
wounded swamps
of my song, sibylling
dark and hurt waters
the way dowsers
find the motherlode
with a plunging,
cockhead of stalk.

Thus I sooth the pain
in its drain, writing
on pages that float
like seaweed, across
and down an ocean
to where she sits
on her tripod.

She’s mouthing
arch-honeyed sounds
which I ark into homonyms;
I write here and
she quickly fountains
words like mere and
and rear in my ear.

Rilke refused analysis
not because his devils weren’t
dark — they were –
but because he could ill
afford to throw his angels
into the same deafening fire.

It’s what keeps me keeping
on here on this ancient writing chair,
discoursing and intercoursing
with a voluptuous babel fish.

My pocket Delphi, if you will,
which no pills can assuage,
a happy exult singing shout
while the inexorable bell
is routed again and again
by the black hammer of god
high in the belfry of my
lowermost brain,
bloodying and blooming
my tongue sweet blue again.

***

NOTE: Prophetes

“The priest who recorded and passed on the Pythia’s words was known as the prophetes. This individual did not foretell the future but was simply the god’s mouthpiece or medium of communication. The relationship between the phophetes and the Pythia is obscure. If his sole function was to formulate the Pythia’s answers in intelligible terms, her wide knowledge of human, political and even geographical questions bordered on the miraculous. Nillson’s view is that the prophetes either elaborated on the Pythica’s utterances and put them into plain speech or actually gave her guidance on her answers. There is no full solution to the problem, but we know that the oracular priest were anything but charlatans and frauds.”

– Ivar Lissner, “The Pythia Replies,” in The Silent Past (GP Putnam’s and Sons, 1962)