Glaucus' Net: First Haul

In Keats’ Endymion, Glaucus observes a shipwreck and vainly tries to rescue the sailors from their doom; watching the last fatal swirl of bubbles from his rock, an old man’s hand appears up out of the water and hands Glaucus a scroll, which reads:

***

In the wide sea there lives a forlorn wretch,
Doomed with an enfeebled carcasse to outstretch
His loathed existence through ten centuries
And then to die alone. Who can devise
A total opposition? No one. So
One million times ocean must ebb and flow,
And he oppressed. Yet he shall not die,
Those things accomplished. If he utterly
Scans all the depths of magic, and expounds
The meanings of all motions, shapes and sounds;
If he explores all forms and substances
Straight homeward to their essences;
He shall not die. Moreover, and in chief,
He must pursue this task of joy and grief
Most piously -- all lovers tempest-tossed,
And in the savage overwhelming lost,
He shall deposit side by side until
time’s creeping shall that dreary space fulfill;
Which done, and all the labors ripened,
A youth, by heavenly power loved and led,
Shall stand before him, whom he shall direct
How to consummate all. The youth elect
Must do the thing, or both will be destroyed.

-- III.689-711




GLAUCUS ON HIS ROCK

June 6

Time swoons at this hour
of sated mossy dark, dreaming
in salt mansions of
Circean fire, rousing
cold naiads with red bouffants
to dance with legioned
stiff contraires.
It’s only me here on this
rock in the middle of the sea,
chanting endless runes,
singing of old loves
as if to haul them dripping
from their abysmal drift
still clutching what they lost.
How many tides? A thousand?
A million more? The wash
seems endlessly moot
yet I persist, droning in
wild meters psalms of purest blue,
so foolishly believing
that one day my song
will thrill You back to me.
Oh well -- someone has
to ward this hour and
pray its passage through,
a belling buoy for
every future love as
well as sandy cenotaph
for all who fell exactly
here, collapsing in the
waves they rode this far.
Oh my song is choked
with splintered masts
and ensnarled rigging,
a drowned mess from
which a thousand
bluest limbs protrude,
breasts which startled
the moon and hands
an inch awry them,
loins still pressed
so tightly that nailed
souls stare blankly out
from behind, like rapt
mastheads sailing down
the frigate leagues of doom.
No matter how often
I write these lines
their joy and grief
compounds in contra-
bassos the boom
of waves collapsing
in this surf’s loom,
a whalish organum
whose proper bellows
is this margeless heart
where all love perforce
thrills and dies at sea.
One day perhaps I’ll say it so
and bid my youth farewell,
the hippocampus of
that passion freed
to dive off into the
swells like a book
tossed to the wave.
I’ll let her walk away
the way she did all those
times before, ebbed
from every door
I’ve harrowed in the
hallows of high absence:
I’ll write these songs no
more, thank God.
Well -- til then my
work remains, such as it
is, despite my age,
my faulty moron sooth,
the general sinking
irrelevance of words
writ on crashing water
while the world sleeps
on and on: I throw
this next net in the
wash and haul my
past in Yours on up,
flashing wet and slippery
in the waters they reveal,
peels of that greater fruit
whose juice stains my
chin and cock and toes
and all the stuff far under,
so fresh, sweet, and wild,
gone forever from the world
before the first cock crows
blue pale to crack black under.





SURFSIDE SOLUTIONS

November 2002

Long ago my mother set me
like a shell upon the strand.
Her voice tides in my ear—
warm milk for worried brow,
pink rooms which soft resound
the drench of drain and draw.
I love to mound my words
inside that nautilus of surf
—a useless carpentry,
you say, to castle heart
in walls of hammered grain—
No matter. Sonorous physic,
wave-songs I curl my mornings
to, you are a cat’s solution,
the sweeter nous. Like the
town that solved its water
shortage by showering in twos.
That’s what you’ll find here,
a vault of curved additions
which fall too fast to count,
shapes which fail in every way
except to greet those great rooms
she carved with her salt voice,
bright mansions left on wet sand
for your own hands to hoist.


BIG TOAD

from A Breviary
of Guitars, 2000


When I was three
my family
vacationed
at Cape Cod:
I recall only
vague shadows
& that buttery
halflight of first
memories:
But there is
a photo of
me sitting
by a tree
playing a
ukulele to
a frog in a
yellow bucket:
I named him
Big Toad
and sang to
him with my
toy uke: Music
for that swart
appendage
apart and
with me,
a tadpole
longing that
swam so
wonderfully
below: I knew
the pud was
loved and sang
of the big world
it swam through:
Everything was
connection back
then, soft light,
the sound of my
mother’s voice
wrapped in
the surf and
breeze: those tiny
songs I found
so easy to sing:
A dolphin’s weave
on a bright
cresting wave
carrying me
us here:



sand castle


2000

Sigh down the long runnels of foam
which line the heart-road of this shore,
now soft in the gauzy drift
of a late summer afternoon,
the sun far to the west, it’s fierce
maul now fleece, pale on the backs
of two boys building the same sand castle
you built against the tide so long ago.
Each measured handful
of packed sand is angled
so close to the water’s edge
it’s understood a that sand castles
are an invitation to what
washes it all away.
The arrival of each wave
in its final exhausted spread
is exhilarating, filling the moat past brim
and tearing down with singing foam
what you too would release
if you knew what, or how:
You watched those walls tremble and fall
to the sea’s mute caress
and when you walked away
you forgot what was so earnest
about it all almost before the sea
erased it anyway. Now it’s too late
on one beach to save your life
though there’s still time on this other.




BAPTISM

2003

A low voice crooned in his ear:
a bittersweet song it was, passing-sweet,
passing-bitter.
-- Fiona McLeod, “The Washer of the Ford”

At 13 I was baptized in the Atlantic
off Melbourne Beach by pentacostals,
an occasion which was strangely
perfect in its timing. Months earlier
I’d been given a tract which showed
the hells of sin: a blue novella of once-

good people deceived by pleasure into
grave of boozy sex and all the fanged
conceits which fork there, ending up
in the halls of pitch and apostate ire.
It scared the Bejezus into me just when
I was ready at last for the world: puberty

had just slammed its flaming wreck into
me, adding three inches of height, burning
off my childhood fat, curling out a brimstone
beard pubic hairs, lowering my voice a
gravelly half-octave.Poised at last for the
eternal pleasures of youth, their infernal

consequences bared their canines wide,
revealing an endless maw. Terrified of
punishment I fell on my knees and gave
myself to the God of the group who’d
passed the track. It was with these people
that I now drove out to Melbourne Beach

on a warm morning in early June, two months
from my 14th birthday. We sang Christian
songs in that packed station wagon, the windows
rolled to a predawn lurid Florida smelling of
citrus, death, and the sea. I was flanked by two
virginal girls, a chaste inch between our bathing

suited bottoms, literally just enough to spare
the devil’s bray. Still, when the car rolled over
a dead mole or ‘dillo, the jot caused the left girl’s
left breast to bounce against my arm, and
the chorus in the car turned to a drone while
I felt that deeper music thrum, the hard rock

of rages which was all thirst, all sweet, all
consummation. Parked on the beach at last
we exploded from the car like colts, sprinting
in joy toward a surf which curled and broke
in the glass of first light. Somehow I managed
to leap and come down on the very spot where

some manowars were buried, leeching my soles
in ocean fire. For an hour while the others romped
and bodysurfed I lay on a picnic table in pure
agony. I prayed God forgive me for the imp inside
me and gave thanks that I didn’t have the chance
fall further in that surf. When I was well enough

to walk, I was led to the surf where the service
began — standing waist high in cerulean, warm
surf with the sun just up from the east, still red
with first birth, the pastor next to me with eyes
shut tight, praying in tongues and then shifting
to English to say God bless this new son. He then
he tipped me back into the water and held me there —

only for a second or so — but while I was under
a cleansing wave passed over and through me, calm
and eternal and silently true. To this day, I swear
it was one of the closest moments I’ve had with God.
Or gods, since the wave passed under me as well,
washing me of every wrong and blessing of my darkest,

deepest joys — angel and imp, agape and eros, spirit
and soul married in that douse which washed through
and then passed and I was hauled back up spluttering
while the others clapped and praised God. The sun
continued to climb in the sky, hot and beckoning,
as the rollers sprawled in again and again and again,

curving and smashing and hauling back our blent blood,
waxing and ebbing, cleansing us in the sea’s feral mud.





from A GUITAR
IS NOT A WOMN

“A Breviary of Guitars,” 0200

Spring 1978:
I typed my poems
and papers on
an electric
typewriter using
erasable bond
paper, each draft
supremely more
precious than
the today’s flash
of printouts
so easily erased:
I made far
fewer scribbles
in my journals
too, still unfamiliar
with living long
on the page:
A few lines now
and then
before whoever
I was resumed
whatever I did.
Just think: six
lines of verse
in time
cashing out to
this Breviary:


first cigarette
the haunting music
adrenaline mauls the stomach
why won’t the eyes open
I will not die
until I’ve touched another face.

I read back
over those lines
as if probing
my heart’s DNA:
The pages of
that journal
that captured
the Spring of ‘78
is worn now from
my many returns
to it, in my
many attempts
to learn and write
my story in
so many forms:
A faithful
pilgrim to that nova
that flared soon
after the night
in March when
I went to a party
put on by
some girl at work
and met this
girl named Becky,
a pretty blonde
browneyed doe
who was leaving
for LA in a
week. She was up
from Florida
and didn’t
like winter a bit:
I told her I
was a guitar player
and poet sans
band or book:
that impressed
her nada:
I could have told
her I played
on the Whitworth
College basketball
team or dug
worms in the
park: Becky
preferred her
stuff simple,
not much to
say about it:
simple stuff.
I, who had
walked for years
deep inside and
apart from the
women I yearned for,
was bug-eyed
startled to find
myself so calmly there
beside her simply
chatting, the party
eddying about
us almost
unnoticed: A
A virgin dreams
of what sex
is like so
deeply that
the first time
passes almost
unnoticed: That
was meeting
Becky: She got
to me before I
knew she’d gotten
in: We talked
till one or so
in the morning
until my ride
yawned and said
we had to go:
I don’t remember
if I slept much
that night --
so much happened
so fast in one
week that
I wrote almost
nothing in the
thick of it,
a couple pages
of tortured verse,
hot jots of
amazement
at what erupted:
I think I
got her number
from her friend
and called
her the next day
to make a date:
She said yes,
She said yes:
We met downtown
for lunch on a
raw waking wet
spring day,
temps in the
mid-50s, the Spokane
river muscling
into a roar
with melted
snowpack carried
a dozen miles
down from the
western Spokane
mountains: I
remember Becky’s
brown eyes,
her easy smile,
her southern
voice, and
red-brown shoes
that fastened
with a buckle:
We ate a
restaurant
by the river &
drank a bottle
of wine & told
our life stories
as we could
tell them then,
our heads filling
with a sort
of boozy drowse
that nestled
in the boom
and hiss of
the nearby river:
Where that river
ended and
we began is
the utter mystery
to this day:
We ambled on
through that day
into the the night,
kissing in some
cold wet shelter
in the park where
spring’s raw fuse
burned weirdly
in the cold:
bought more
wine and munchies
and headed back
to my house
to smoke dope
& drink wine
& listen to my
Genesis (sounding
so distant: do
you have any
Journey? she
asked) & on
carrots and peanut
butter: She climbed
on my lap
facing me and
we began to kiss,
my heart pounding
with surprise
and surrender:
After a while
I asked weakly
(almost apologetically)
if she would like
to spend the night
and she just smiled
and led me to
my room by the
hand: We climbed
beneath the covers
n the cold cold
dark of that room,
finding heat
quickly between us
as we wrestled
from our clothes:
I tried to make
love to her
but fear kept
if from happening
at first: We fell
asleep for a
couple hours
and I woke on
her fucking slow
and languid,
the bedsprings
creaking and
squawking
with each dreamy
thrust which
she welcomed,
welcomed:
I came and
drifted off
still in her &
then dreamed
of an incredibly
clear blue space
like a morning
in early summer
by the ocean
in Florida:
Woke with crystalline
waters stretching
miles around that
bed and Becky
sleeping curled
into me like some
blessing I did not
deserve: You
never do: She
woke and we
began it all
again: I kissed
her all over
down to her
cunt which smelled
ripe like armpit
& she was
embarrassed
tried to push
me away but
I butted my
face past her
hand and bathed
my mouth and
face in deep
womanhood which
a day or so ago
was the faintest
constellation
at the furthers
corner of the night:
When she went
home that day
in her yellow
Fiat I wrote
of my surrender
to my birthmark:


O pulse of blood quickened by light
O heart reborn and squinting at the sun
O core bled clean and drying by the pool:
I have held her face beneath my eyes
O love o damnable love.:




ANNIVERSARY

2002

Today it’s been twenty years
since I lost the second woman
I hardly knew yet I loved
in full, stupid, jealous & greedy.
In losing her I became
so desperately and infernally
alive as to beg silence: her shade.

All I remember of her today
is that morning we walked
on Cocoa Beach after fucking
most of the night. We were
making small talk in our
dreamy exhaustion—laughing
at the way sandpipers scurry
like tiny execs— when she
paused and smiling at me
in front of dawning sea.
The whole package I recall—
that smile, the blue eyes streaming,
the curly blond hair in a halo
of sun, her breasts full
and straining against
a year-old bikini top, the
sea crashing light foam
at her ankles like cream,
that evanescent breeze—
all of that was greater than
any morning, a finally found key.
Yet that was only true
in reverse, when she told
me at last to go to hell.
but in reverse. I recall
how I hurt bad enough
in the proceeding months
to see beyond the heat
into caring at last about
how I lived love.
How the days slowed
in the viscosity of grief,
a sludge both anguished
and gorgeous, slowing
the day to a wave-crawl,
the sunlight lengthening
across the lakes.
That image spoiled my drinking
for the next 4 years
though I tried, reaching
for her on every tree.
to care last about how
Eventually I came to
marry that shape,
sacrificing the wild
night of making love
for long hard days
of patient making.
Love doesn’t teach us
how much there is to
gain in love, only
how much there is to lose
by not loving, or failing
to love well enough.
Today I recall those long
burnished days in September
when grief was a tide
tolling a sea
I’d been born to in losing.
Stupid, jealous, greedy,
it’s true, but also the wound
which eventually bled me real.
I sit in the house I prayed
that day to inhabit,
the sum of every surrender
I made to love’s brine,
it’s awfullest, most
incompetent son,
each smile a wine
so much more difficult now
so much more
what she only kissed.




FREEZE FRAME

From “A Breviary of Guitars”
2000

Fall 1985
What was so arid
in a hammerlock
of high pressure
and a triumphant
angel sun now
just foams &
spouts in storm
after storm:
Every day now
I drive in to
work & see
bump marble
rumps mooning
the heavens:
By lunch they’re
massed ever
empurpled with
fevers hurling
ejaculate snaps
& flooding the
streets: Like new
lovers who cannot
exhaust their
bottomless cistern
of desire hurling
their bodies
at each other
frantic to find
what screams for
release: Storms
again midafternoon
as the day’s
wearies settle
amid problem
accounts & new
AS400 system
woes & programming
patches & the
itch & flick of
a desire which
has no body
it can vanquish
in: But man
it rains hard
a ballsoaking
cuntslobbering
titheave
ballstothewalls
of a storm
in which the
green world
shouts glittery
arias of joy:
The last time
such storm
rose in me
with Donna
was a wan
fair Sunday in
November ‘85
when we drove
to New Smyrna
Beach with her
son Nicky packing
lunch & a bottle
of sherry: Parked
along a deserted
stretch & set
a blanket on
the sand & lounged
there a couple
of hours enjoying
80 degree temps
& the sun
mellow and
sweet & the
surf softly
slapping and
slushing, love
not yet ebbed
& loss early
in its flow: Donna
just beautiful
in a black one
piece bathing
suit that carved
her curves with
authority &
grace & surrender
& her skin a
shock of white
as when she
first peeled
down her panties
for me then
turned her
ass toward my
bright hungry ache:
We sipped our
sherry watching
Nicky play
with a truck
in the sand &
Mr. Mister’s
“Run to Her”
on my boombox
half lost to
the sound of that
swoony merciless
surf: Blue pale
sky, blue green
waters stretching
for miles &
Donna’s eyes
sad and distant,
looking past me:
She got up and
walked down to
to the water’s
edge for a while
soaking up
all that feral
eternity that
makes babies
love & graves
her back to me
as one passing
through a door
into silence:
And then turned
to smile at
me radiant with
all I’ve ever
desired rising
in my heart
like Venus on
the half shell
amid the foam
of my balls &
then looking for
one second like
another woman
on another beach
in another love
which ended
in another surf
& I felt then
the horrid ironic
fatefulness
of the Ocean,
a wave which
parts the thighs
of a love which
births departure:
But Donna
just smiled
bittersweetly and
then as if she
had come to
a decision walked
back and gathered
up Nicky and
put him in
her car telling
him to sleep:
For a few minutes
the boy’s face
(resembling Donna
in the eyes
but the rest
a cipher of
some other man’s
love) crying in
the window but
Donna was
unmoved &
the head slowly
disappeared
like a setting
sun into silence:
Donna then looked
over at me
& smiled the way
she did that night
up at Fern Park
Station & then
lowered her
body on mine
to kiss me full
and dreamy
as the sea her
body breathing
full against mine
like a surf &
her bones against
my bones as
close as bones
go: Kissed slowly
down my chest
in a wave &
gripped my trunks
with both hands
& then pulled
them down far
enough to take
my startled cock
in her mouth
& slowly, sweetly,
gently, deeply
suck that slender
isthmus of flesh
that separates
I and Thou:
Loving there
what’s impossible
to find and
perilous to forget:
I watched her
for a while glide
up and down
my cock with
slow sure strokes
her mouth a
firm clench on
my slick hardening
length, veins there
pumping out like
clouds rising
over the sea
& her eyes closed
maybe prayerfully
or brokenly or
already somewhere
else — who knows:
Her long dark
blonde hair falling
around her pistoning
mouth like
a waterfall & each
downward stroke
washing me in
that gorgeous sure
river or wave
I always felt
in the sex that
joined Donna
to me: Then I
closed my eyes
& lay back
surrendering to
the pleasure
slowly building
in me, so sweet
& watery, not
urgent in the
way of new lovers
or knowledgeable
or secure like
old lovers: Rather
we were as
one receiving
a last kiss from
waters now receding:
Oh drifting boat
on sunny waters
on God’s now
gorgeous earth,
a breeze softly
raking the
glittery soft surf
& Donna’s hand
now cupping my
balls squeezing
& gently milking
the dangerous
seed rising up
there as she
settles her mouth
all the way
down to my
pubic bone &
I’m coming, coming,
rising up in
a wave of white
screaming joy
and she doesn’t
let go but takes
all of me in,
drinks my salty
sticky seed &
it feels so
strange so
utterly fucking
sweet as if
my balls were
dissolving & the
rest of me to
in this tingling
toe twitching
exhalation
emptying
erasing &
killing my
every conflicted
motion: O stay
there for just
a little while,
Breviary — linger
in the lavish
mouth which swallows
me whole: a
mother’s mouth
giving suck &
a receiving back
the milk she
gave me: The
ocean stretching
like a blue gray
angel’s blessing
& “Broken Wings”
on the blaster
true just for those
seconds and
so eternally true:
All the futile
stupid arrogant
wrongheaded
cruel self
destructive
things I wreaked
with that white
boy’s penis
absolved in
that melting
molten spasm:
These million
words flocking
in the wild sperm
cells flocking
to no home
down her throat
just like the
sea welcomes
no home I
have ever built:
One of my
hands inside
her bathing suit
clutching a
breast squeezing
up a nipple
desperate never
to let go:
This gloriously
beautiful ocean
of an angel
of a woman
nursing my
dolphin on the
wave it still
rides: O crest
& dissolve and
there’s no
way to remain
right there, no
way to prevent
the day’s return
into slow focus,
Donna letting
go with her
mouth kissing
the tip of my
glistening cock
& pulling my
shorts back
up with a sigh
patting my cock
and nuts one
one one one
one one one
one one one
final time: Wipes
her mouth with
her hand her
eyes slowly
refocusing taking
aim again beyond
me: I lift
up on an elbow
& try to push
her down to
kiss, return the
favor by lapping
away at her
sweet milky
thighs but she
shakes her head
sad and firm
& takes a drink
of wine instead
& looks farther
out to a sea
already gone:
O lift up from
that beach O
falcon o sad
sea eagle up
up over to
the edge of that
one infinite
spasm that
crashed up out
of me and through
me at the
same time like
the wave of
the woman of
the sea anointing
& cursing
me like that
baptismal wave
that crested
over me at 14:
Rise up over
the ocean’s
suck & haul
o angel of
my eternally
misbegotten love:
Up over the
rim of the green
ocean and up
up through the
blue heavens:
Up over the
hurl of this
ancient song:
Can you take
me higher o
peregrine
falcon up
where only
blind men see:
Up over the
edge of
my ruination
at your altar
o dolphin muse:
Join me with
my aborted
children, my
daughters of
Neptune: Can
you fly me up
over all to this
warm place
where my seed
lays waiting for
your welcoming
egg in the
belly of all
dead loves: Donna’s
son begins
crying in the
car & she
goes to retrieve
him & we start
packing up
to go: “Run
to Her” on the
blaster already
ironic and Donna
asks me
irritably hey
isn’t there anything
else you can
play? Something
that rocks?






WEEKEND AT MELBOURNE BEACH

1994

Our first night here was wild.
A full moon tore from the sea
faint and bloody as storms
approached from inland,
lacing the dark with hot bolts.
A sea turtle dragged her burden
of eggs across the sand.
You and I watched from our hotel window,
our bodies trilling with thunder
and salt. I leaned you back on
the table and pulled down your shorts.
Buried my face in your lap.
Sweat and cunt and coconut oil
ripening the sharp ions of beach storm.
You tore wet gasps from
the night, startling the darkness
as much as each lightning bolt
slicing from outside.
Coming again to that third
body that waits for us
beneath the basso billows of surf.
This morning you sleep,
still far off in that sea
of primal soak. The day so
brilliant white, dazed with itself.
I eat a nectarine at the table
and watch maddened dragonflies
hover and hurl in tall dune grass.
Flattened waves break
at the shore in weak curlicues.
The smell of our riot rises
from the table. All we do
these days is surrender.
Swelling for you again,
I return. A blue sheet
ripples over your breasts in a wave.





FULL MOON
AT COCOA BEACH

October 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.


WIND AND SURF

1996

Cold rags of sky
whip sand and froth
down the beach,
blasting away
all signs of spring:

but inside
our hotel room
you and I
bower that dream
between our bodies,
my chest rapt
in the billows
of your breasts.

Beat silly
in the maul
of wind and surf
at the windows
we sleep,
curled into
the vernals
of love,

never quite solitary

or solid again.