Light in August

SHORE

David Cohea

I imagine these late August
days like a shore where
the ocean keeps ebbing
further back, leaving the
tinfoil of wet sand to pale
into something more
worldly -- a road, perhaps --
poured by the sky
alone. It's the spaciousness
of it, pulled back like
covers of a bed, revealing
too much of us here
without a clue what happens
next. How grateful we
are when dusk shawls
us back over in a darkling
wave, providing if not
comfort at least the
riche cider of sense
to bob for the sun in a drowse.

***

Finally, it seems, the lock of heat seems to be cracking. A guy at work yesterday told me that the high pressure front hanging over the state which prevented seabreeze fronts from their afternoon cross-shore inland stroll had moved west in to the gulf, meaning we should be getting back to Florida norms.

And sure enough, by midafternoon the sky was churning past brilliance into armadas of cloud, and by 4 p.m. thunder could be heard outside as I put the finishing touches on my work week. Droplets of rain big as quarters tumbling on me as I walked to my car. Heavy squishy rains on I-4, slowing traffic to a frustrated inching, though who would not be grateful for the saturations of rain and the coolings of cloud? Storms still rumbling about when I emerged from the gym an hour and half later, lingering, rousing and dousing here then there, indeterminate, fomenting in a simultaneous polyphony. Rain and thunders all the way home too, in storm, then out, then back in again, the traffic just slogging along. (Why is it always heaviest and slowest on Fridays?) Pulling in our driveway, house inside richly dark & lamplit with a cooking show glowing on the TV in the living room, the garden moist, hanging heavy from a recent dowse, rain falling lightly, cracks and splinters of lightning around the compass of the sky, the strolling booms rich and satiate.

Thank God for this change.

***

Certainly the incessant heat of this lattering summer has produced its own maliase, similar perhaps to the late-winter madness of northern latitudes: a siege of brilliance and heat wearing down the populace, making every day a toil. Spiralling gas prices and a darkening war in Iraq also hammer away at one's game-readiness, the optimism required to live and love well. Lunching with my mother yesterday she told me of my cousin who "was manic again," got two DUI's in two days, fucking up all chances for solo visitation of his child, product of a very messy divorce. She said that her sister (my aunt, mother of the cousin) had told her that the cousin "always did badly in August," the manic-depression seeming to crest in late summer.

Hmmm. I could see parallels in my story. My drinking had two seasons of awfulness, late winter and later summer, times when I seemed to step off a cliff of bad drinking into really bad, mad, suicidal shit. Badlands of the soul where there is no hope, where rain does not so much sate a thrist as to drown in it.

Seasons of madness, malaise, murderous swings of the guitar, the malice of whiskey: pour all that on a soul on ice and the result freezes everything into a rotting stasis -- winter OR summer. There was the sense of having exhausted every means of escape from some prison of centrality -- today I call it the tyranny of a hero archetype I could in no way measure up to -- and there, on the extreme shore or steppes of my days, there was nothing left to do but go insane or die.

Yet that rot actually is how we grow past the hero, n'est pas? He has to die of his own wounds, dissembled, like Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow, rambled through the fullest reaches of the underworld Zone; like Acteaon ripped apart by his dogs chasing Dionysos through the infernal wood, the deeper the hero travels into the mess of his ambitions, the weaker his centrality becomes. He can't hold up to his own spiritual imperatives, succumbing to the wetness of sexuality, of anima's soppy vale, the desire for uteral oblivions in the blue. If ferocity is his club, then the exhaustion of the great seasons -- their swords raised past full -- are signal of the weakening and rot which brings about his transformation.

And though my seasons aren't marked by such surficial excess anymore, still they cycle through. I still go through a fallow period in late August, poems listing in too-stilled waters, the sense of having troped to the end of my rope. No poems at all from my pen for more than a month now, instead reviewing my sources here, aligning what I know about what I will never know, enjoying the alternate rhythm of prose (I have a friend who is a relentless reviser who says when he finishes his current book of poems he may permanently switch verbal sides.) For now, I enjoy the glide of going void of course, shoulder sore, money tight, my wife desperately holding on to hope she can make her business work, everyone aging, the world at high tide of awfulness, thunder again in the distance, hopefully soon wealing the garden with rain.



SUMMERTIME BLUE

This time of summer -- half-mad
with its sunwise shrill revolvings --
makes me think of the Summer of
1974, when I was readying to
leave Chicago for my first year
of college in Spokane Washington.
My father brother friend Albert
and I had moved into the the
church manse on the other
side of the El tracks from Wrigley

Field after packing up my mother
& younger brother & sister
for good from our row house
on Fullerton and waving farewell
to our family as they drove
the hell on South outta Chicago
for Florida, which was surely
hotter but also more nestled in
the bosoms of the angels.

For us in that ever-empty manse
it was a royally rough time,
all of us bleeding bad & the
summer noxiously fierce, no
respite from its 95 degree days
where all was glare and wither,
the ire of an angry god, or our
anger at Him who answered
no prayers in this world. My
Christian faith by then was in

full "backslide," as we called the
worst sinners back then, the
towery ascents of belief suddenly
losing all gradient & becoming
a hole into which I pitched my
fevers of need for abandon: To
make a loud sound, to get laid,
to get good and drunk, to get the
hell on outta town. With every
Christian restrain torn loose

by the flapping wound I would
not then dare call my own heart,
that latter summer I dover full
into those needs, daily, neck-deep,
in fuller throttle than the sun I
imagined, as far as I dare go (which
proved far shorter than what the
world allowed). In the basement
of the manse, Albert dragged in
a drum kit and I played rock n roll

the loud way for the first time,
using a homemade electric with
great humbucker pickups -- given
to me by Glenn, the lead guitarist
of the Resurrection Band from the
Jesus People up the street from
my father's church, & on the condition
that I burn that guitar before
playing a note of the devil's music --
Sorry Charlie, something in me

whispered as I patched into a
borrowed Ampeg amp (it had that
silly plush glitter padding and
a nasty reverb, making a loud
clatter every time I jolted the frame),
this soul needs a hotter wattage
than is delivered by your angel
choir. God we were awful down in
that boomy cool basement, Albert
whacking the drums & I wailing

on that loud guitar as we tried to
knock out renditions of "China
Road" and "Smoke on the Water"
and Alice Cooper's "Under My
Wheels," hanging for dear life onto
the tail of a sloppy sleepy fire
salamander who would one day
grow large in me. It would be years
before my first real rock n roll
band, but credit that summer for

sinking those addictive loud fangs
in me for the first time. I was 16
going on 17, as the old tune
from "The Sound of Music" goes,
virginal too but by that
summer (or because of it) desperate
to end that pact with God. No longer
cowled by daily prayers of purity,
those summer days were horridly
blueballed, clanky with the day's
cranky heat, the secretaries crowded

round me on the El as we all hauled
deeper into the city to the truly
urban jobs were like angels of bad
summer, their sweaty cleavages the
downward gradient I needed small
push to fall down. And who was that
girl I finally ended up with? I
can't remember her name but she
was from a dangerous perimeter
of my decaying church circle, the

bad friend of one of our most errant
girls. We'd go up to her bedroom
on Saturday afternoons -- her parents
silently acquiescing, some steely
and smoky arrangement there
that had to do with a child
no longer in the house. On her
bed we'd make out like wolves,
her legs hooked round my waist,
hips grinding and pumping

against my terrified pubes, our
mouths greedy, tirelessly tonguing
the other as we moaned and
gasped and walloped that small
bed. It was all so illicit and torrid,
yet her permission was greater
than I found I yet had balls to
proceed: I desperately wanted
relief from the last vestige of
my youth, yet my manhood

hung back, slack in its cave,
terrified of the infernal heat
it must go raw to. God that room
sweltered as we failed to finish
the job. Frustration with me after
a few weeks of such thrash made
here finally kick me out of her
room for good, out into a rainy
late Saturday night: I remember
walking home in that rain with

"Ricky Don't Loss That Number"
sawing through me, my factual
virginity intact but my heart,
oh my heart, far far at sea
& Chicago at that drowned hour
steaming & insensate, unrepentant,
everything dead & shutter yet
bottomless, o infinitely open for more.
So of course I drank -- we all did
that summer, wildly, like camels

crawling out of the desert of
their own skins, my dad brother
Albert and me drinking to fill the
bleeding hours with something
like sea water but more obliterate,
of a bluer oblivion -- Scotch by
the tumbler, beer, by the case. My
father wasn't trying to monitor
any of it, he was just finishing
up pastoral affairs before moving

on to gay New York (Albert would
tag along) and my brother saving
a buck or two between beers to
drive out to California to start over.
I was drinking the hours down
to my flight west to Spokane where
I would be rid of all this or more
fully it. That manse was a mostly
empty house filled with four mostly
men but mostly filled with empties

-- dead space between the next
drink. Grief and drunkenness the
patter between shrill loud naked
moments is most of what I recall
about that summer of 1974 --
all that and how hot it was, if not
hellish then in some trailer park
near that latitude, all of its motions
faux to all of the real things: perhaps
as close as you can get to hell in

the summers of this life, or the
mad ends of them. How many times
have I found myself shipwrecked
at that high temperature shore,
none of my tools working in that
heat -- not faith, not love, not art
--- and the heat of the world's
most selfish embroilments devolving
me down to the nit, the bare bones
of cracked and dry living where

it's easier to burn than cry for
a saving sip of water. A suicidal,
infinitely holy vigil I've fared well
and not over the years, harrowing
me through fire, burning part of
me away to see what was truly
under the wrong skin. Let's see --
Summer 1979 was the rocknroll
summer after first love, maddest
winter and the survival of both,

my party animal grown an axman's
tooth for pussy, where each night
seemed an ocean with all bets
off and the next day's sun in
my two bedroom windows like
snake eyes. That was the hot season
of the first blackouts, gobbling
crosstops & drinking beer by the
case & swinging that Music Man
guitar every which way but the

right way & jumping as fast as
I could from bed to flaming bed.
Summer 1982 -- again after love
& gambolling about with the
anarchist artist Holly in that
drowning pool of Florida's rainy
season (that year worse than
any I recall -- my trials precipitate),
nights of danger and lightning
translated into suicidal exhaustion,

that high summer libido fucking
me raw and broke and spiritually
wild -- hilarious ends, shrill, mad,
sterile. Summer 1986, post love
(see a pattern?), post band, even
the alcohol by then defining a
post which I struggled to get past,
mornings coming to clutching my
pillow with those swords of summer
sun thrusting and lunging at me

in the window, hacking away
all semblance of even a
precipice to jump from. Summer
1992, towards the end of my
first marriage, taking walks in
the dead of summer just to get
out of the house, walking in the
high cathedral of shrieking light,
my libido wardened by sobriety,
cold marriage, a thousand books

I knew I must read -- cackling and
howling with the chorus as I walked,
walked, walked, like Flash in the
Pan's "Walking In The Rain" in
treble soprano, showers of light
replaced the old dark splatter,
listening to New Age dissociation
on the Walkman, all of it a piece
of my identity in that wild summer
catastrophe, that disconnect between

bull-roaring sky-lust and the drowned
silence of lakes. Summer 1995 - late
August, the divorcee exhausted
with his divorced, undrinkable carouse,
having just kicked out of the apartment
his 18-year old stepdaugher for
being way too much work, swamped
with guilt's gilded self-geldings, not
enough near-beer in the world to
swash the sound of that high keening

from the chorus of furies which
barred all ways back home, a
high-anx deep-root trouble in
the vein telling me that none of
my art mattered at all as much as
the heart that had been lost,
scattered by the high regnancies
of summer that I had chased,
pen-in-hand, penis flopping between
sea and infancy like a metronome

rehearsing in an empty hall. -- a
high summer wildness,wild with
absence, wild with guilt, wild
with horniness, wild to say it
and no words sufficient for the sun
which hauls up over the state
chewing lakes and girlies and the
skin cells of millionaires dozing
in the back yards of their golf estates,
silence raining back over me in

a Biblical torrent as bad as any
fixed subzero January shriek:
Summer '97 in my second marriage
& happy home in Mount Dora &
drinking it all down the storm
gutters in secret, watering my
uncapped thirst with vodka &
scotch & beer & schnapps, writing
few small token bad poems, straying
via e-mail with other women &

keeping it all together up on the
cheerful loving crust of the
marriage -- Out cutting the yard
on Saturday mornings in the
patterns of suburbia, mashing the
mower against grass grown four
inches in the rainy heat of July,
the sun and my sweat complicit,
plotting my next drink, dreaming
of D-cups lifting and butt-fucks

squealing while inside in the air
conditioning and sound of merry
calm safe '30 jazz my wife arranges
and rearranges furniture in our
bedroom of dreams, airy, white,
free: Summer 2000 staying at
my mother's house after my wife
and I separated because I wanted
to carouse and drink with impunity --
left her in November and by

February all that was gone too,
didn't want the other woman, my
bar tab was clanging at the $20
thousand dollar limit of my
MasterCard gold card, & I just
wanted by that summer to go
home but how could I -- the poems
I thought I would write over
love had dead-ended, the lines
sprawled & shunk & rotted in

the sun, cast off like so many
shattered wagons. I'd wake on
hungover mornings with the sun
pressed against the window shade
trying to fuck his way into the gloom
& me hugging that pillow again, again,
again, like a suicide holding an
empty .45 to his head pulling
the trigger repeatedly: It is the same
gesture, the same end, this deadly

summer river's end, this turn back
to dread origin which always finds
me no god of its ilk. Whatever I think
is sufficient protection against this
dead straits of summer -- whatever
love, ire, art - none which I call my
own last in this heat. In this Summer
of 2004 I basked in it and felt myself
empty today, felt that old dread
drumming of hot knuckles on

the walls of this empty self, and
what could I do? But get on my
knees and try to give thanks enough
for this life and the wife I still have.
To be grateful for what shade and
comfort that can be found in
this season; to let bad days simply
pass. Yesterday we woke to clouds,
a cooler breeze, and daylong rains.

We stayed in and played house,
cleaning, washing, cooking, taking
breaks together to laugh at the
cats or dream of future days. We
bedded together full of what remains.
Surely that heat here will return
this Monday, with all its wild freight.
Am I naked enough inside to weather
these withers? Is the well blue enough?
That really is for these knees to decide.