Breasting the Waves (1)

CROSS BETWEEN
A WOMAN'S BREASTS

Bright martyr,
you're perfect
hanging there,
fusing me
to this song.

Grace note at
the center of
a dark pond.

Gold cup
brimming my gaze.

Compass
of insurrection
and grief.

Hammer for
a distant gong.

Nails at nether
and nadir
of this surf.

Ferryboat
and sherpa.

Crossroads
altar to making
and slaking.

You're the bright aria
of the woman
I'll never know
sitting across from
me in every room,

blessing my day
with one glint
of paradise.

Thank you, Lord,
for hanging
me here.

***

Yesterday -- weary of week-day labors, wanting to spend a day together just leisuring -- my wife and I drove east (away from Hurricane Katrina, churning its circular saw toward New Orleans).

We first stopped in Sanford to drop a few things off in her shop. While she placed and arranged stuff I walked down First Avenue to a bookstore that had stuff outside for sale, even a box of free stuff where I retrieved a nifty palm-sized King James bible. Back in the antique mall, waiting for her to finish up, I rummage old Playboys a few booths down, 1966-era Astartes with wide bathing-suit-whitened asses and large breasts with big aureoles. An older guy walks into the booth next to me and farts trumpetingly, like a horse, oblivious to me maybe, though everything bears significance in the leys of my recallings here, perhaps for this writing, or for what I'm trying to write through, past, into.

Standing next to her booth as she finished up, I read from Isaiah:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou has said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most high. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. (14:9-15)

She finishes up and we take off, the late morning getting hot and hotter, into the 90s', the sky still, betwitched in tandem with the foment of boiling clouds to the west; we drive up into Deland amid the raucous traffic of suburban Florida (everyone on the road, unable to stay at what passes for home), driving past a few subdivisions still half in water from the drubbings of last year's hurricanes (built by greedy developers on land with no drainage). Into a K-Mart in Deltona to use the bathroom & check out the clearance aisle (my wife disgusted at the measly markdowns). My eye strays to young poor mothers with sons in tow, still silky, breasts beginning to sag, tans motleyed tattoos, I dunno, a certain war-weariness perhaps from the party-courts of hot Eros, something I eye with relief (to be well out of that fray) and ennui (oh to fuck such a woman in the squalid and gelid billows of hot falling!).

We stop near Deland to eat what passes for OK enough food -- my wife is so wary of food out these days, after the case of food poisoning she got last summer on a road trip with her sister -- and we talk a good while about her business, about ways to be more efficient in the custom jobs, learn the embroidery software, maybe upgrade machines. It's all premised on the business we pray will evolve, her first custom job finally approved, changing her mood from depressed (earlier in the week) to stressed (an energy in her that day that was hot, ramped-up, moving fast where I loitered, dawdled, tromping in loose sandals, my eyes half-soaked in peripheries). In the can before we left I stood at the urinal and saw a crude drawing of two huge breasts with what looked like a cock jammed between them, spurting upwards into blank space (nothing of the female but those breasts). A dark scribble between the breasts, pubic hair maybe or just a fumbling focus, the dark center between breasts and hard cock, between objects of desire and the offending member -- a lacunae which may be filled with guilt, or an incessantly drowning lust, or a sublimity which will truck in no metaphors not rooted in sweet lactates, blinding seed ...

In through Deland an onto Highway 44, stopping at a thrift store my wife promises to make short work of, the place dirty and mostly overpriced. It certainly is hot in the place, no air conditioning, excessively still and close and humid with dust. Near the counter checking out jewelry a tattooed redhead with lots of facial artillery, pierced ears & nose & lips & eyebrows, almost scary but richly sexual too; she never looks up and I pass quickly by but I wonder why all of the sexual undersides keep flashing at me. Is it my middleaged goaty hunger? dissatisfaction with my marriage, my lot? or is it the deep delving into the hero's pathological heat here, the odd connection from earlier in the day (long before first light), a sense of what the hero must eventually battle through, out of the mother into the realm of the Fathers, the father's work, to carry the Father's seed into this world, to make lucent the dark, to speak with words hot with logos spermatikoi, jisms of brilliance in which to name next worlds -- Is all of this sexual blue phosphor a part of that Name, rebellious of the Heavenly Father, thus doomed to musky pendulous ball-swelling hells out in the heat-dazed steppes of this southernmost hell?

The place really is dreary, but I find the book section really fun, all sorts of oddball titles, many many books on Christian life alternating with paperbacks from The Executioner series and many Frank Yerby paperbacks with titles like Vixens. Everything in between, unpicked, unsavored, pristine. I find a small book on seashells and then -- miraculously -- an Everyman's Library edition of Melville's The White Whale, another palm-sized book for my eventual exile to some ocean-flung isle. (I'll take with me that King James Bible, Dick, Fiona Macleod's Winged Destiny, that tiny seashell book, a sum of tidy tuckables to warden my daily meditations, after I have given thanks to God for the day ...

In Dick there's a quote from a randy Maltese sailor that I once used as epigraph -- a masthead, so to speak -- for a poem which helped define which side of the sea I try to walk on these days:

BOTTOMLESS

Now would all the waves were women,
then I'd go drown, and chassee with them evermore!

The hard hurt comes from
believing what we dream-
selling our soul to that
confabulator who tweaks
waves into tittery, spilling
malt waveage on a
wanderlust page.
O Faust, with your
appalling spell! An
addict is a man in love
with his sweet cups,
the vision through them
bottomless, no holds barred.
Every unslakable thirst
drowns in possibility,
swirled in the siren bore
between tide and tempest,
my soul drawn between
misery and more of it.
I heard once of a lottery
winner was found 8 months
later floating in a Miami
canal, wearing only
a pair of shorts & an
empty pint jammed in
his pocket. School the mind,
drear friend, to turn
from salt infinitude.
It isn't a woman you seek
but rather the world's turn
and smile toward you,
something you never found
in a woman because the earth
is round and tides her curves
ever away, dissolving your fire
in a boneless choir of waves
you'll never reach or name or sound.
Don't follow signs
turned the other way:
The moon has closed for the night.