The Fisher King (4)

JACK GILBERT AGAIN
BY THE SEA

1999

Reading Jack Gilbert
again by the sea,
this time at Longboat Key
on holiday with my second wife.
We lay in the shade of
a blue umbrella, so dazed
with heat we can barely breathe.

The Gulf beach so white,
an sheet ironed by the sun.
Far from that stormy beach
on the Atlantic three years ago
where I tried to get well
in a raging surge.

Yet today as then I read
Jack Gilbert's poems and find
the balm I need, his lines
washing me in waves
of indolent truth.

How I've searched for words
like his to say to water.

He looked down over
the sleepy Aegean
and saw an ocean inside
the making of his life.
So much must have seemed
the same: glitters spread
across the aching blue,
breezes clean and
supple as gauze.

In so few words he found
the exact sense of his
day at the ocean,
concealing how much
time and craft and courage
it takes to write on water.
Erasing all that is not heart
from seascape and day.

Today his poems
remind me that
the sea is only a page
impatient to turn and the
sun a shield
against all the things
we learn or else.

Unscroll the heart
in the gull slowly
crossing the scree.
Breathe the gently
passing day like a prayer
or the memory of grace.
Now grasp the pen lightly
and curve words into surf.



CUPID

2000

Well, you asked for this
or thought you did.
Staring out at the combers
of a moon-fraught night
with the hard salt breeze
so fresh & the wide sea
singing of beds and drowse.
You just stood there
like a door with the
waves runneling sweetly
over your naked feet.
So I shot you clear through,
barbed you balls to brain.
I knew I’d hit my mark
when the ocean leapt
into your eyes.
All of the nouns which
anchored you in one harbor
now scuttling loose on the
seabed and your boat
far far away
with no oar you trust,
no sail you understand
how to unfurl. No way to
stop the night now
streaming through
your protests and denials.
Well, you asked for it,
you belong to me now.
Not that I have the least
interest in what happens
next. I’m off: Tell the wind
if you must how your
poems blow like loosened sails.
Explain your sorrow
and guilt to the
million shattered
whelks you call sand.
Me, I’ve sighted some
other sucker twenty
yards down the shore
standing like you did,
staring at the swells
agape like a boy
who doesn’t know
he’s all trussed up
for a turkey shoot.
See the arrow
I’ve pulled from my quiver?
So long and elegant
and barbed so sharp
he won’t know
what began in him
til he’s finished.
Just like you,
lover boy.


SO FUCK IT

2000

So fuck it he said,
striding down the beach
ignoring the sprawled
bodies of love lost,
the wives dying of betrayal
and the others who
just loved elsewhere.
Fuck it. I followed him
because there wasn’t much to do,
the hours now lame
and decrepit with easy guilt
and irks. Fuck it! It seemed
like such a casual way
to rebel through the walls
of this self-condemning, ululate fate,
and so I followed him back
to the ocean which boomed
its annihilate welcome.
He waded on out
like a stone man in a liquid kiss,
his shoulders all sinew and bone,
the back of his head like a
bulging eye or nutsack:
Paused there a moment
to summon a great blue
dolphin which surfaced
with a whinny of pure joy.
He mounted the bone saddle
of the beast and turned
to stare at me with all the
fury and folly of the sea:
Green blue eyes open
not in invitation but
command, for better or ill:
to walk on through
the broken bodies of love
and the hell on outta here:
And just two words
to keep me from
kicking any bucket,
a pearl set inside a
brute iron socket,
a brine saddle
to ride to hell
and pluck it:
A prayer for
all the graveless
whalers who
didn’t make it
back to Nantucket:
Say it and let’s be gone:



PENELOPE

2000

"Hello?" She said when I dialed
our number, surprising me
because I thought she was
at work and had only meant
to leave a message. Her voice
in the word a blue bell
which rang with all the
resonance of the life I
had left behind, musical
and lively inside a home
we had made and earned:
I had to hang up on her,
not knowing what to say,
sitting in my other woman's
lviing room, hungover,
sexed to a rich weak glow,
a cool rain falling &
boding more cold.
Her voice repeating that
one word throughout my day
like a hammer that finds
its nail or a swan
diving repeatedly on a lake
never to be seen again.



STILL A BEACH

2001

A few knowns remain
to call this yet a beach:
a single jet of moonlight
coursing through your hair,
the reaches of your back
pale as sand at Longboat Key,
my fingers wave enough
to wander steadily there
... intimacies I’ve shattered
with a shuttering,
bole-stricken heart.
Yet after all we’ve said
and less some dark demands
one gentle good-night kiss:
a bivalved, gleaming door
just a few steps down
eternity’s sweet
astonishing and
ungovernable shore.



MARSYAS

2001

Why do you tear me from myself?
Oh, I repent! Oh, a flute
is not worth such a price!
— Marsyas, Ovid Metamorphoses


My god’s a blue Mohican,
a virtuoso of swoon.
He slides round moonlit trees
like strings of a black lyre.

I tried my pipes against him,
playing a song tapped
from dark suburbs.
Played it well too, soulful
and true—so sure I’d win!

But then the god reversed
his lyre and played it
from below. Oh how the
Muses raved! He tore the ivy
crown from their hands
like a blade from its sheath.

Next I was stumbling down
city streets at 2 a.m. with
techno blasting out every door.
Girls in faux lame clattered
through me like beads from
a broken strand.

A god left me hanging from
this wild tree like a trophy,
a red acre at last pure song.



THE SHORES OF ITHACA

May 2002

Thursday afternoon,
l93 degrees in 5 p.m.
traffic as I head up
shimmery 441,
the car windows rolled
down because the
a/c causes the engine
to stall in heat like this.
Some asshole swerves
suddenly into my lane
going 45 and my
homecoming slows
to an angry simmer.
This is part of what
resumes: the day’s
grade made higher
and longer in love’s
surer labors and
consequence. On
the radio they’re
not sure where
to send the Thirteen
Palestinian Gunmen
in the Church of
the Nativity. I
wonder what you’ll
want to eat tonight.

Home at last, you’re
not back from your
trip to St. Augustine.
The house has baked
all day in this, but
Violet doesn’t seem
to mind, sprawled sideways
beside the phone table.
I crank up the A/C,
strip to my shorts,
and sit a while leafing
through Food and Wine
magazine hunting for
one good recipe.

Is this my spot?
I pray to find it
and relax well here,
no matter how much
work there is to do,
no matter how much
we have yet to decide.
For me, who has been
half of a home for too long,
this is home enough—
this sweaty, tired hour.

When you get home
a while later, you
look just as fagged
by the heat and the road—
pissy and tired.
Wearily we resume
the strange ways of
the familiar: talk,
an exchange over
a busted sink drain,
spaghetti with meat
sauce, TV—too tired
to acknowledge the
miracle in doing it
all again, ever.

But as we lay in bed
side by side whispering
our faint good-nights,
we’re back home in
the home we always
should have had
had so much life not happened.
We grew this way, into
the hardest work of all,
the reality of homecoming.
I’m grateful to be
at it again at last.