Breasting the Waves (2)

Soon enough -- fleeing the cloying heat & dust & so much useless stuff -- we're outta there & off towards Daytona, driving a long miasma of rebuilding Highway 44, sun mashed against the windshield, an Ella Fitzgerald CD of her stuff from the 30's and 40's playing over and over on the stereo, road construction -- seems like they're building the other direction in lanes divided by a meridian, where it's just two-lane creep now -- stalled from last summer, the last time we travelled up to Daytona, masses of fallen trees now grey, spectral, long stretches of flattened sand pocketed with rainwater gullies which have grown into ponds, the everpresent yellow Caterpillar tractors fossilized into place ...

Eventually we make it to US-1 and work slowly up into New Smyrna, the inland course (A-1-A, a mile further to the east, runs along the beachside developments) well-worn, a ghetto of sorts, everything looking hammered by the sun and its annihilations. An older guy on motorcycles with younger blondes hanging on from behind, neither wearing helmets, the guy wizened but with all his hair, tanned deeply, lots of jewelry, Harley Davidson t-shirt, you know, unrepentently (or desperately) liplocked on youth; while the gal is probably in her mid-thirties, pretty enough to seem improbable sitting behind him, everything in the right place, breasts heaving against the guys's back, her arms around his waist, ass like a bottomless heart beating in my eyes as the dude speeds on ahead of us.

Maybe its the torpid license of beachside living, but everyone seems either way young or way old, permanently at leisure, in defiance of the middle way of middle life and hard work and home -- or, of course, it's the way my daimon prefers me to see things today looking at that day, at a rare moment of leisure here as I slave away for no one at this computer at 5 o'clock on a Sunday morning, burning to delay here -- and when it is always dangerous to wish for more leisure than I am due, more welcome in the summer than I may survive -- that's booze, or my alcholic devastation in it. Whatever: in those sea-warding, dessicated, overbright neighborhoods and strip malls and trailer parks there seemed to be a willingness to just rot in this dissembling heat, to drink it to the dregs, savoring the brilliance even as it burns every inch of the skin, the soul.

A year ago -- after our last trip to Daytona -- I wrote about it this way:

SUN GHETTO

In the ghetto of the sun
we age into rough skins,
for a lifetime of arousals
weds to a ring of fire.
In the Daytona TJ Maxx
princes and paupers searched
for threads of that ire,
seeking to ferry it far
into the dream waters
of infinite night. Phat boyz
with tattooes in faux
hip hop hats weave
trails of hot jive
everywhere but home,
exactly where the Venus
of summer yearning
bids them come.
On the other side of
the store the gals
try to fit into brilliance
despite child after child
the sun hid inside them
while they dazzled
the sands. Inside the store
it's cool and soft-lit,
a bower of new
clothes over which the
sun at full throttle
levels all with its scythe.
There is no aging here
in the sun's archipelago,
only heat which fans
to a lesser or greater roar
something we'll never
hold in our hands.
We're no different here,
my wife looking for
pants to fit a frame
thinned by worry, me
for shorts and shirts
more generous to my girth
We too are regents of
a summer that we are
old enough sailors in,
sealing our house tight
with a/c, slathering thick
the SPF40 before
heading out to pull
weeds in the garden.
Over us the sun makes
its high thrall while
we try to make it matter
less if at all -- to love
the endearing enduring
which cares to make a bed
big enough to catch the
wheeled ball and hold
it in our arms as we sleep
less it drag us under
where all sunburners
blight the ur-burbs of death:
A glittering trailer parked
on the shores of a thong,
a blazing isthmus
cramming mouths with
a music that can never end,
cannot quench, cannot arise
since the ghetto of summer
never favors or falls.

We walk a short avenue in New Smyrna Beach, stopping in three or four antique malls still open after 2 p.m. on a Saturday, everything way overpriced, maybe for wealthy beachside residents; the heat on the street is maniacally still and piercing, the solar father pressing his brilliant body down on us with lust, Zeus burning Semele to a crisp. We go into a furniture store where my wife uses the bathroom and I peruse truly awful contemporary furniture, leather couches priced over $4,000, beds strewn with tiger-print duvets, watercolors of fatasses in big ocean cruisers, the sun's wealth translating here into fantastic excess. Couple of middle aged women with a boy in tow looking about, huge breasts, hmmm, very hard eyes (again, what's that tandem, the feral anima, animal in its fury, like a she-cat loathes all the hissy males grunting from behind), grazing the far reaches of the store like aging gazelles, while I keep my roaring appetite zipped, my surface demeanor calm, almost lazy, just perambling a day of leisure, though some darker thing is beginning to arouse in the heat fatigue. An anger, maybe.

I'm more tense with my wife back on the street but so is she, the heat is truly awful, and after another store or two we pack up in the car, heading to a Dunkin Donuts for iced coffee & a lard-filled donut (another old biker with a younger woman behind us, waiting to order, she in a print dress, sort of heavy, breasts sagging some; when she bends down to pick up a napkin she's dropped I steal a glance into her cleavage and there's that darkness, forbidding and welcoming at the same time). We get the hell on outta there and into the car and start our way back home, before really getting to Daytona, most of the shops closed at 5 a.m.; and we welter past the Daytona Speedway (an empty hugeness just off the road to the right & onto I-4 where traffic zips by us going 90 mph or better and the sun still high in the west is like an archon, or a demiurge, or simply an insane projection of something once spirit, or maybe soon to become that again.

Home we cooked burgers on the grill & watched reruns of "Glick" on video, ever so grateful to be home, off the road, safe inside our womb of rooms, ventured far enough Out There to find great gratitude for Coming Home: And before sleepp, after my wife had gone upstairs, I got on my knees to pray thanks for another day of sobriety & the lebriety it succors just under the obvious welcome of things.


THE HORNED GOD

Always his heavier steps behind me
leading the way. Even at this hour,
when all the night has drowned
drifts broken in midair he's hungry,
horny, his red eye nailed
to the jugular of this page.
When I was younger this hour
was the best and worst
when it was at all, for I was
either abed with some spear-tunny
greasing her with his molt slather,
or wandering the last of the
wolf-lined bars, cursed for losing
those cajones which ferried
me over to His salt dominion.
All that's long gone now,
drowned with the rest of the
night -- receded in the wash
of years & wives and spent
seed I guess -- but still, something
calls me to this hour of his
rudest engage, rendering me
bored with mere poems.
His angst makes my fingers
ache to grasp a dark fruit
and tear its flesh wide, staining
the world with that juice.
Tonight's the shortest night
of the year and the air
is trimmed with insects and
pulsing sprinklers and that
hairy heat which refuses
to sleep. God I'm thirsty,
booze is no longer enough
and my wife sleeps upstairs:
What cup have you hauled
to my lips, wild mentor?
What neck is this, so bare
and pale, with every forbidden
impulse beating patiently
under the morning's skin,
filled with the jets of song?
Have I earned yet the balls
to remain on the page
while you have enough of
your way with the words?
See my hand? So poised
and articulate, studied,
calm -- hardly the hand which
must claw and dig deep
to wrench out that bleeding
fruit of what matters.
But do I have a choice?
The horned god closes in
here, the distance between
nothing psalm and hoary
song so small you can't
squeeze more than a wave through,
maybe three drops from the moon.
Shore at last! This pen
has grown as heavy as an axe,
cruel and lethal and oh
so happy to swing free.
I head out to feed the cats,
5:30 a.m., the felines sleek
and muscular, rubbing
this way and that across
my legs while I fill their
food bowls with meat,
then sit with them
as they batten their tiny
fangs on the red feast,
the first light of day
sawing a seam to the east,
a faint breeze lifting
the vincas and jasmine,
everything calling the
horned god home.