Fly

Among all things that fly
the mind is fastest.

-- Rig Veda

Those who know have wings.

-- Pancavimsa Bahamana

There’s an osprey nested
in the thatches of my thought,
his eyes trained patiently
on blue waters where all
desire swims. Those eyes
are huge, elegantly most
extravagantly evolved,
with wings of equal ardor
and feral simplicity, spreading
six to eight feet across
the divining gloom. I sit here
droning lines in my beehive
cell of drab poem stone
at that deadest hour
of the night, scanning
strange wild waters for
a flash of fin--When
something sexual crests
below, urgent and creamy
hot exactly where I'm
hungriest. And then the
osprey is in red pursuit
lifting and breathing those
cruel wings in an urgent
thrum, hurling me across
a strand of ink and
thence to smack and
dive a wake of blue silk
sot not quite ocean,
nor even a woman,
a sidhe perhaps of
spuming verbs drowned
in their sense and wildly-
nippled porpii proferring
victual wombs. I’m flying
now inside the appetite
God lutes with sticky lollipops,
angelic and satanic for
the craw it archly sates.
My eyes thus gripping
all the plundered flesh a god
would greed, I caw adieu
to the rumpled bed of
blue and fly back to roost
above and beyond
all I meant and failed to
say, whetted though never
quite abetted or quit of
all I ever bedded in the
victuals of depth. And
thence at last to feed.
To cap my pen here is to preen
in sticky golden light
as the beachside day begins,
my song now lost in soft
susurrant surf, my
ravening constructions
mounded over by sand
castles and buried
manowars, real lovers
dozing on the burning sand
the osprey long ago resigned
when love learned it
couldn’t really fly
or swim or walk or die.