Guinnevere

Guinnevere had green eyes
Like yours, mi'lady like yours
When she'd walk down
Through the garden
In the morning after it rained
Peacocks wandered aimlessly
Underneath an orange tree
Why can't she see me?

-- David Crosby, “Guinnevere”
from Crosby Stills and Nash, 1969


“GUINNEVERE”

Nov. 26, 2005

... usually sickness, dreams, and ecstasies
in themselves constitute an initiation,
that is, they transform the profane,
pre-“choice” individual into a technician
of the sacred. Naturally, this ecstatic
type of experience is always and everywhere
followed by theoretical and practical
instruction at the hands of the old
masters; but that does not make it any
less determinative, for it is the ecstatic
experience that radially changes the
religious status of the “chosen” person.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy, 33

... Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:

I miss my husband’s company—
he is so often
in paradise. ...

-- Mary Oliver, “The Swan”

The man befits the woman, their fates
ordained by You, blue Pastor, married
through an augment which is rarely true,
much less for any time on earth both
hips and lips engrooved. So I’m at work
yesterday afternoon, costing out revisions
to our editorial package & listening
via i-Tunes to co-worker’s vault of
songs--mostly stuff from the 70s which
I don’t much care for--but scrolling down
the list I find “Crosby Stills & Nash”
(1969), and let that album oar again the
inside boat You bid me build and launch
and ride to the bottom of all shores.
I hadn’t heard those songs, hell, for
half of my waking life, but when “Guinnevere”
strums gently from the speaker of my
Mac I’m gone from my desk of latter-day
arrears, full back in the spring of
1975 when I was seventeen. It was
toward the end of my freshman year of
college, deep in those two weeks or
so in which I fell hard for and then
lost a gal named Leslie, a golden redhead
with blue eyes and freckles who proffered
me a passing glance once day in World
History, Part Two. Amid the fall of
Your old world I watched a new one
awaken in form sitting in front of
my desk, no real beauty but slim
and curved, her hair Arthurian,
a tapestry of spun red gold, the
roundness of the back of her head
so complete it suggested how all worlds
begin and end in a curtsy which
commands. It’s a curve I’ve married
each day since that short and failed
bouree in bliss; these days I get back
in bed in reverence to that curve,
stroking our cat curled at our feet
from nose round to tail close by;
then run my fingertips from my wife’s
hip and butt and thighs and soles
rising and falling in that sacred
land I border but cannot fully marry,
shored next to Your watered world
the surf forever choirs. Play
“Guinnevere” along a beach
of sweetly resounding falls.
Oh how desperate I was to love that
girl far down my history, for her to love
me back! How ready I was to
drown whatever of my monkish
scholar’s world that kept me from
getting back to that hour of pure float
beyond the booze where we kissed
and kissed and undressed Your mystery,
where seas disclosed the secret name
inside a crashing, world-dissolving bliss.
She loved Crobsy Stills and Nash
so I did too, even though I was
utterly estranged from that band’s
Californian roots, their earth-mothering
appeal so equidistant from my tundra-
frozen ears. I was Led Zep and Tull
and ELP, loud and hard, my taste
a Tartar riding Uffington from hell
to hell and back: But it was her record
that we spun and spun in my dorm room
as we made out and more. And “Guinnevere”
was the nougat of that float where I found
the clear blue space at last, or when it
awakened me to every boat I’ve launched
toward her always foreign shores. This
is the moment: It’s afternoon the next
day, my homework stacked high on my
desk (a term paper on the modern
world’s rouse from Gothic slumber soon
due), spring raw in my basement window
where a single beer stood proud in a final
drift of snow, remnant of the late-night
drunkalogue that ended with her kiss,
first one and then an other, both queen
of hearts and naiad stave which stove
me cleanly through. I’m laying on my bed
the next day, hungover, smoking cigarettes
lit from the last, staring at the grim dorm
ceiling (with its large wound where
the showers on the next floor drained):
And I’m floating far on the waters
of “Guinnevere,” the song which she
so patently revered, as respinning that
bittersweet tune could resume me
to her late-night kiss, drifting us
together in that once and present bed
into a sealed history I knew, sadly,
would never come to pass. My hand
felt still warm with the the shape
of Leslie’s head as she kissed south,
trying to suck me off but good
before blowing me off for good.
She’d said it just before she left, tucking
my limp cock back into my briefs with
a last, late-night nurse’s kiss: said in
that conch-whispering voice (I’ll always
remember how she said soft with an
avacado-textured middle) in the dark
that she really loved another guy, this
asshole in my dorm who Arthur in
function only, a doofus of the Theatre
who loved those stages she loved
more than I, the shy retiring minimally
handsome monkish mostly bookish
knight of a suitor, whose early ‘70’s
desire was sweet but nothing next to
the courtly cum-romantic fire she felt
for someone else. She’d said goodnight
in that goodbye sort of way and crept on
out, believing me at last asleep, leaving
me to stare in the dark so lost and broken
in the sweetest swarm of sound I’d ever
heard. What was that crashing magic
land that still resonated in my ears as
I lay on abed far into the next afternoon,
spinning and spinning that album side?
How could it be so present and permanent
inside when I knew she’d left for good?
I lingered in that lapse of sense, refusing
to wake up, slow dancing with my love
in some Camelot of starry wine inside
a lost, late-60’s song, refusing to let
go; amazed, too that I didn’t have to,
not then, nor ever. Yesterday outside my
window at work it was a cheery autumn
afternoon, traffic light the day after
Thanksgiving, an easy day for working
ahead, no phones ringing, hard commerce
at a pause; a good day to crunch the numbers
and hear again that tune, the anthem of
a place beyond the kiss and clench,
inside their hard farewelling. That’s the place
I’ve lived in for the deeper half of
my good life; was there when I drove
home later in the day, pulling up
to our house where my wife inside
was pricing stuff to sell in the actuals
of her own dream. I live there here
inside my own fool’s written paradise,
this weave of a song’s crashing bliss,
the love I married between all that
and this. You brought me to that kiss
which mortal lips can’t slake: Proferred
to me their nipples which no thirst
on earth can slake: And poured on
rich that creamy shoreline afterglow
which washes clean again my bones.
So for You, blue master, I hold that
song high inside my heart like a sword
drawn from a lake -- cock-straight and
proud as any guitar-neck, incessant
as the pen which gallops line for line
across and down the page. It was the
back of a woman’s head in class some
30 years ago that sang me to this
curvature which coats my arms in blue.
I’m stuck here at an ending that won’t --
or I can’t -- let go, long after “Guinnevere”
slipped out the door. The music is too sweet
and empyrean, full adrift in the metres
of wild song: my ear’s hard-wired with it now,
like a shell which pours the sea. I’ve chucked
everything into the drink -- even now
the drink -- to remain here just a while
longer, still staring at the ceiling from
that bed, amazed at what I’d shored
at the bottom of all seas. “Guinnevere”
is the anthem of my every salt expense,
these sheets a balance of her blue and You.
Each lover since has been another bead
to sling across the abacus, summing
in this broken heart every sou of gold
You tossed to me from her round head’s hold.




Guinnevere
Drew pentagrams
Like yours, mi'lady like yours
Late at night
When she thought
that no one was watching at all
She shall be free
As she turns her gaze
Down the slope
to the harbor where I lay
Anchored for a day

-- “Guennivere,” David Crosby

***

WHERE LOVERS MEET

1978

There was an evening, once,
Long before the summer’s end,
When we sat by the river
Eating grapes and cheese,
Smoking hash at sunset.
You were talking,
But all I heard were whispers
From the swirling falls,
Climbing up the devoured cliffs,
Spraying mist on our faces
Like a blessing--

we will meet again
in that water
water
wine
water
we will meet again
in the age of summer


FULL MOON AT COCOA BEACH

1995


The surf was pounding
the air when we climbed
out of my car, hurling
sea mist toward
a full moon now
breaking from clouds.

The pier was closing early
that night, swarmed
by the high surf
of a hurricane's
turbulent pass
many miles to sea.
The guard said
an advisory was out
for a high tide come morning
with fifteen foot waves.

We leaned on a rail
halfway down the pier
and watched the night.
The horizon a wash of
foam and darkness.
Shards of moon
scattering like silver fish
in the glassy curl
of a wave before tumbling
into foam and thunder
and rocking the pier.

You leaned to watch
a wave pass under,
your dress fanning
wild in the breeze.
The wave I felt
curved that satin and
the mystery beneath
into moon and sea.

Later we walked on
the beach, found
a place to sit
and talked a long while,
telling our stories
as warming strangers do
who find the distance
between them narrowing
to less than tissue.

It was after midnight.
The beach, the sea,
the moon took us
somewhere
on a silver stream.

It was a gift
that rose unhurried
from the depths of
some heart which must have
always known these things,
recalled from old loves
or the salt soundings of the womb
or perhaps the full store
of ineffable moments
a man and a woman
have ever stumbled on together,
a silver strand of DNA
pulsing and receiving
this tide.

Having forgotten joy
for so long on a road
of deaths small and large,
having gotten so lost amid
hurry and complication
and complacence,
that night slapped
me back to life.

Warmed by something
I can never name,
we opened our arms
to one embrace
and then walked away.


Guinnevere
Had golden hair
Like yours, mi'lady like yours
Streaming out when we'd ride
Through the warm wind down by the bay
Yesterday
Seagulls circle endlessly
I sing in silent harmony
We shall be free

-- “Guinnevere,” David Crosby





DESIRE

1998


Aching stars:
this hopeless longing
for the forever-withheld,
miasmically-waylaid clench
of all you offered in one glance.
Arrival and departure
the same portal.
Desire a wild
gallop through fields
of strawberry wheat
in early autumn,
riding harder toward
your absence.
There it pulses,
beacon to strange
and reckless waters,
open wide and forever
deaf to consequence,
shining faintly on
the next door, the next room,
the next blue bed where you
in all your faces wait,
out beyond the breakers
of any moon-struck beach,
dangerous and darker
and wilder than
this heart has ever
dreamt. But will.