Moon-Doze

I met her as a blossom on a stem
Before she ever breathed, and in that dream
The mind remembers from a deeper sleep;
Eye learned from eye, cold lip from sensual lip.
My dream divided on a point of fire;
Light hardened on the water where we were;
A bird sang low; the moonlight sifted in;
The water rippled, and she rippled on.

-- Theodore Roethke, from "The Dream"

***

Sometimes when I can't sleep I try to woo the waters back by imagining various sexual encounters, varied women in lost rooms who yielded their softness and sweetness and curves to my fire. Pleasure comes in waves, like a tide, each riding on a crest of breaking foam, carrying in the fold and crash breasts freed from brassieres, hips astraddle mine, the rocking and plunging and ululation of sex as it breaks open from bad nights and bad bars and all of the bad ways I sought oblivion from who knows what, an urge which maddened me -- not with horniness, that was, with booze, the emollient -- but with the sense of a task which I was not ready to take on. And so like Jonah the bellyflops into night waters, all those beds stations in the intestine of the whale.

Or something ... anyway the other night, 5 a.m. after being up for 3 hours, trying to get a couple more in the dissolving peace of sleep, downstairs on the couch with a window still open to the carillon of moonlight and deep summer's insatiate heat, I wound back down the labyrinthine recall of not lovers but loves, the women who I tried to stay with, make love to, give what I desperately needed to be given: what a sad bossa nova in that reverie, wives with all of their complicate woes for which I was just one affliction (though bad enough), girlfriends of half-year or some months' duration, even women I tried to see a few nights beyond the first: Tried to stay with the sex of each, their own practiced hands, known rhythms and preferred positions, a sable sheen in the cleavage of one, fine buttocks against my plunging hips, mouths which sucked so far, hands which finished the duty, dutifully, furtively, rarely with gusto but a certain permanence, a sustaining rhythm.

Oh but how hard it was to imagine the sex, the frames kept sloshing with bitterer colder waters, the difficulty of calibrating my desire with my beloved's the awkwardness of truly trying. Maybe that reverie was simply stained by the real history of my love in and out of those women, the real wounds I suffered and caused, making those water slides of sexual joy fraught with the broken glass of hurt feelings, the horrible sense of wrongness, of the distance which grows the more I try to love:

Yet, while hanging with the memories of mammaries and too-infrequent comings -- trying to keep the old moon music roaring through lost time, broken attempts to truly love -- from that flotsom of fumbles and fiascos I got the sense of what was wrong in all of that, that each of those women were a shore I which I got close to the Beloved in whom none of those women may ever reside, the mortal and immortal parallax ever distorted, most off-kilter the closer we view 'em; so that it while the parade of true loves and actual threshings was bittersweet and rueful, not so much soothing the sexual imagination which wanted to be rocked to sleep as to do homage at the altar sex is merely the sorceror's apprentice of, the unconscious thrall which isn't about sex at all, or about sex with equipage that can only be gained through its decimations in the arms of real beloveds.

I didn't get back to sleep that night -- hovered on the rims of the deep as I praised all those women I said farewell to -- and around 6 a.m. with first light's palest blue amping the filaments of dark, I got up and went out to feed our outdoor cats, Mama and Blue and Red, letting them mew and rub against me as I poured out dry food and cracked tins of wet food and spooned the heaps of faux prey, chicken for the boys and beef for Mama: And sat there in the music of their tiny tongues working the bowls, their eyes gazing forward at the rims, the first of day like a love departing on a boat as reality slowly, surely, inevitably resumes its regnancy over the actual way a life goes.

And then it was time to brush the teeth and go join my wife in bed, and lay there while the first stirrings of waking turned her to me, one hand on my belly and working slowly, surely, and gorgeously south.

***

"Moon-consciousness, as matriarchal consciousness might be called, is never divorced from the unconscious, for it is a phase, a spiritual phase, of the unconscious itself. The ego of matriarchal consciousness possesses no free, independent activity of its own; it waits passively, attuned to the spirit impulse carried toward it by the unconscious.

"... Matriarchal consciousness is dependent upon mood, upon harmony with the unconscious. This moon-dependency can be viewed as instability or caprice. Yet it provides a backdrop which acts like a sounding board, endowing matriarchal consciousness with a special and positive character. Its response to rhythm, the times and tides of waxing and waning, of crescendo and decrescendo, gives it something of the quality of music. Therefore, music and dance, because of their accented rhythm, play an important role in creating and activating matriarchal consciousness and in establishing a consonance between the ego and femininity and its ruler, the moon-spirit."

-- Erich Neumann, "On The Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness"

***

WEEKEND AT MELBOURNE BEACH

Our first night here was wild.
A full moon tore from the sea
faint and bloody as storms
approached from inland,
lacing the dark with hot bolts.
A sea turtle dragged her burden
of eggs across the sand.
You and I watched from our hotel window,
our bodies trilling with thunder
and salt. I leaned you back on
the table and pulled down your shorts.
Buried my face in your lap.
Sweat and cunt and coconut oil
ripening the sharp ions of beach storm.
You tore wet gasps from
the night, startling the darkness
as much as each lightning bolt
slicing from outside.
Coming again to that third
body that waits for us
beneath the basso billows of surf.
This morning you sleep,
still far off in that sea
of primal soak. The day so
brilliant white, dazed with itself.
I eat a nectarine at the table
and watch maddened dragonflies
hover and hurl in tall dune grass.
Flattened waves break
at the shore in weak curlicues.
The smell of our riot rises
from the table. All we do
these days is surrender.
Swelling for you again,
I return. A blue sheet
ripples over your breasts in a wave.

***


MOONER

Description is an element,
like air or water.
-- Charles Wright

After the four poets read I was
jazzed on words, their brilliant
beams helterskelter in my ear's
uteral dark, like moons firing
water from every upwelling seam.
The sky driving home was
the pushed-back remains
of our summer's stacked plate,
hosannahs which rushed
through the windows
in a post-fuck fetor of
evaporate rain and exhaust
and the tang of far-off cut grass
ripe with ardor and ruin, ions
tasting like wet pennies,
augurs I brush here like
a chimney sweep
at the other end of the night.
Stayed up late with my wife
bemoaning George Bush
and laughing about the grand
dames who still write for
my business, tough crones
drilled so deep in their
work that their obsolescence
is moot, the fire part of
time's mortis. Four hours
later and it wasn't the cat
awakening me with her
scampers-for-treats but slaps
of blue moonlight sloshing
the gunwales of our bed. What
boneyard brilliance crooned
to me as I stumbled downstairs,
the garage out the back
window split between
hard black and endless milk.
I just wanted to stick my face
out there and go buh buh buh buh buh!
like a drunk slapping his
face between the saggy boobs
of a bored lapdancer, my greed
for description so aroused
by those four quarrying voices
still echoing in my ears from
last night. Sometimes I drink
from the fountain at the center
of a black garden, and sometimes
it drinks me, guzzling the
hottest blue notes to squonk
at this hour from this pen
which not so much writes as
write me. Oh I feel an upwelling
so cold and mineral as
to set all my angels into
a frenzy of mouths, the poem
all teeth and jubilant stained lips
and spout-desperate hips.
I'm the ass-man of all nights
today, my poem a black
thong which stretches its
silk between moon and
silvered garden, between
this state of summer-wild
excitation and saturate reams.
I'm jammed to the hilt of
blackened blue, ripening
here the cock's first doodledoo
when dark blossoms lose
their lunar hue. Drink deep, my
gardenish muse, from this
split cask of a boat, its whiskey
distilled from four burning throats
which mooned me but good.