The Fisher King (3)

ANTITHESIS

Spring 1978

you wake me with a smile
I wake up from a smile
a dream dissolving
into sheets and your hair
the sad-eyed woman
standing smiling in the river
in the rivers of your smile
white wet rapids spraying in my ear
calling back my blood
my words drowning in your eyes

washed ashore drunk and empty
I dream sunrise sunset at the ocean
I Ching changes no blame
the light born and dying
your Fiat backing over gravel
backing out into silence
I walk the garden run my fingers
through a grass tuft feel your hair
the sky an ocean rain and tears
the day turning dark and cold
no blame

call it passion call it love
when you smiled
it was all the same
springtime autumn
bedspring tantra
dream within a dream
Great Wheel spinning
a game for fools
demiurge
water bearing light

wordless
I speak of love
all day long your ocean held me
sparkling on a smile
dissolving the page
no blame


IMAGO DOMINUS

Fall 1978

she stands at the bedroom door,
half in, half out,
shadow cupping breast and belly,
smiling at me across the room,
a fine mist in her eyes, night behind,
and water coursing over her feet,
crystal blue and deep and silent



THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO


1988


I've been fucking the Madonna
in a frenzy of beds and sweat,
mounted to a crucifix of immortal desire,
unharbored, unholy, messiah and nail --


1.
I met her when I was thirteen.
Back then her name was Sue.
We swam in the pool
in my back yard.
Her body flashed wet
and dazzling in a neon
bikini as she giggled out
of my reach. How my cock
leapt after her, month after
masturbating month, hurling
a joyous fury of sperm into the water.


2.
It is years later and very late at night.
A woman holds my cock in her hand,
pistoning its floral head in her mouth.
I fuck her later on my mother's bed,
her heavy breasts heaving as I thrust.
Salmon leap over us, trailing gin-tasting
waters. There is a half-empty bottle
on a nightstand; inside, a full moon rises.

I hunt on the moon.
Behind me vultures peck at bloody,
glistening eggs. They croak and caw,
sounding like high school buddies trying to
scrabble out of their lockers.
I reach for a magnificent staff in the dust.
Neon signs blink in craters.
I am crying, for I have been
re-united with my foreskin.

Winds pick up and maul the father desert.
Tumbleweeds bound past trailing
shreds of red satin and panty hose.
I approach a bleached shack.
The door is open but women guard the entrance.
I can't remember the words to say and the women
curse me, pitching dead rats at me.
I flee.


3.
The moon is the screen
of a nine inch b&w TV
several feet from this bed.
It is 3 a.m.; a 70's comedy
babbles canned laughter.
I lay on hair, long, long hair
that flows like water
from my head, my face, my
chest, my crotch, my legs.

It has tangled some struggling thing
that makes muffled feminine protests:
what if the kids hear, I'm on my period,
I don't have any protection,
don't you think we should wait
to get to know each other better?

The woman's ass protrudes from all
this hair, framed in scant black panties.
Darling fig leaf, what a beacon her shame!
I run my fingers under the cool material,
over pliant, soft skin, dipping my finger
into swimming lava. The bed hardens,
plunging me into the red cavern.
Here the air is hot and smells of the distant sea.

Tears fill me: home!
I watch the woman's face as I shudder then spasm.
Her smile melts and becomes a snake that
tightens round my throat, becomes an
umbilical cord knotting me in the ground.

A stone man crashes out of the forest
swinging an axe and severing the snake's head.
The head rolls along down a hill and into a boat.
I chase after it but the boat slips free
and floats out into Chinese waters.
Tall cliffs hump above dense mist.
I swim after the boat, calling out my own name.


4.
More years pass. Spring arrives.
I walk with a woman I call my love.
She holds my hand and smiles
although it's a cold day, dark and damp.
We walk out on a bridge
that spans a pounding river.
Its roar encloses us as we kiss.
I lean her back:.
Her eyes widen into moons when she falls.
We will meet again, I call . . .
The mist is alcoholic, turning
to hard squall which batters down the bridge.
I wash away in tears.


5.
Summer.
I swim in an Olympic pool.
The water is blue.
I stroke slowly, counting off laps.
Sunlight wrinkles on the pool floor
in a mosaic of delight.

Sweet with exhausting,
I climb out and lay on a deck chair.
My towel is blue. The sky is blue.
Blue water coils through my blood.

A smiling blonde in a black string bikini
straddles my chest. Her eyes are ocean.
She smells of cocoa butter and is very, very tanned.
She rocks on my hips, moaning her name.
Bossa nova fills the air.
I sip dark rum mixed with her vaginal fluids.


There is diving board a hundred feet
above a glass of water.
Everyone from the bar is on the ladder,
joking and pitching cherries at each other.
Couples giggle and hold hands mock-solemn,
then bounce off me and fall
smashing like melons on the concrete below..



6.
I am in a drunk blackout at Daytona Beach.
It is late at night. Motley Crue
blasts from the windows
of passing Firebirds and 'Vettes.
Around my neck I wear a necklace
of withered, bloody nipples.
The crotch of my shorts has been cut out.

Bartenders work in the surf, dipping up shots.
I have no more money so I offer my car,
rolling it into the water. Everyone cheers.
Topless dancers fandango for me,
their fangs brilliant in the moonlight.
I thrash and moan and hump the air.
Bouncers snort like bulls and race toward me.

At some dead a.m. I wake, rolling onto
the concrete in some parking lot.
My face is bloody my hands are bruised.
I am in a graveyard of lost sons
howling from patrol cars sleek as barracuda.


7.
Dawn.
I'm in bed with a woman I take
from time to time, usually after all the bars
have closed and every other woman I can think of
has refused me. My last-ditch fuck.

She lives in an old house.
A corrupt smell rises from the basement.
Candles burn in every window.
The woman is plain, ass and belly flaccid,
her face too homely for the lava I seek.
She falls far to welcome me.

I drink a beer, smoke a joint. She waits.
I push her down onto her couch.
Fantasy women sashay on MTV.
I fuck her snatch; too bored to come,
I try fucking her tits.
There is no warmth, no wet,
but the motion is cruel enough
to keep me hard. Finally I jam
my cock in her mouth and force her
o swallow my come.
There is nothing in the moment,
no delight, no crooning melt.

She runs to the john to retch
and smoke fills the room, thick and black.
I fall asleep, finished at last,
mounted by flames.


DARK SAUCER

1990


Sweetface the stray cat we feed is in heat.
Three tomcats surround her, like mangy lions,
waiting for her to tire. Then they take turns on her.
They've been feasting on sore Sweetface for three days now.
Caterwauling yowls tear into our dinner.

My wife runs outside with stones she's collected, and
the tensed cincture of fur scatters. Pale eyes stare
patiently from under car and house, behind the garage.
When my wife sits back down she glares at me.
I say look, hon, Sweetface isn't neutered, they can't help it.
Our daughter tries to watch the action in the window.

Later I walk to the corner store for milk.
As I open the door a woman exits: black dress,
blonde hair lifting in the draft, pallor, perfume.
Our eyes lock for one departing second. Reaching
for the cooler my hand is pale and calm as bone.

I swing the cold jug of milk as I walk back.
It's a warm night, humming and sweet. On our porch
my daughter dances to music on a small radio.
She's 12, barely innocent in the porchlight.
A Chevy roars past, and the cats are at it again, pelting
the night with howls, lapping their dark saucer of milk.


SOROR


soror drains away the fire
and fills me with a thirst
for another absence
two tides beyond the wind
that blows beneath the sea

soror means heart of sorrow
twin who died at birth
sister in the woman I love
commending my name to silence
the rest of my days

I will love you
and leave you
and love you
and leave you

a perpetual comet
shedding brilliant
ice across the night


DIFFERENT FICTIONS

1995

Divorce raises
a sail once more to
an errant wind
and days that
rush by unmoored,
the sun hard as copper
on the bay,
the shore a blur.

Indian summer
brings fantasies of
new love, binges
on fresh credit,
smiles in the
mirror worldly and keen.

It was like exchanging
bronze for paper,
sapling for seeds,
only actual for
only possible.

Exchanging the adult
cage of age and wear
for the ruse of
adolescent thrills,
the silly lea
and surfer music
of women
ten years younger.

Yet it's really all
the same stuff, you
know, only woven
from different fictions.


Father and feather
are only a matter
of intonation,
curve versus knuckleball
from the same hand
crossing the same old plate.

In the gambol
of divorce, there are
only so many swords:
guilt, abandon,
repatrimony, thrill.

The fiercest blade
of all is the once
that finally appears
long past court
in the eventual release
of self-sundering.

So many long
afternoons are required
to slow then stop
the guillotine's fall,
weary of the same
old crime's long
guilty shadow.

Today I'm mumbling
rosaries to that
pig god who eats
her dead to scent
something wild
in the dirt,
who turns
the dead's shuffle
into sudden truffles.


THE NEXT ANGEL

1994


Yes, surrender was good,
the grace that followed
was a sea wind
and the shore
sparkeled fresh
with all we became.

But you must know
that surrender also writes
a darker angel into the sky.
Today we walk a troubled
strand, naked of wish or will
our torrid meters swelling
harsh against the sea.

Just how do we
steady between curl
and plunge? How to
walk here, when desire's
riptide so dreamily
hauls at our ankles?

When shattered whelks
take us deeper into sand?

Thunder summons the
next angel. Later we may
believe that grace returned
in this spiralling air,
but for now, we are only
walking in rain on
the shore of a kiss,
wrestling the next
angel to a fall.


LONER

1994

Excoriating nail:
my heart a dick in the rain,
salty prong for her unsate.
She will suffer no
poem unswilled in night
& inks me jagged on
that sordid page.
So where are the words
to reach that woman
across the bar
so hotly abloom
in busty blue satin
and red curls aswarm?
It seems right -- water to
water, spike of fire between --
yet there seems no way
to speak her plural
name without the old
boneyard honey.
To sane to rage
into her fragrant swells,
there is no way
to cross from iron scrap
to blue slumber.
Nights like this
bereave in silence home
to a muffin and TV and
my hand around the god,
riding in an empty harbor
on the least of dolphin waves,
writing the words at last.