Sea Fool

NOTHIN BUT
A LOVER

from “A Breviary
of Guitars,” 2000

1.

I’ve always been
drawn to women,
fascinated
by their bodies,
their curves
my heart’s
round welcome,
their soft voices
like cat’s fur
or the surf’s
susurration:
I’ve hummed
their tune since
birth: When I was
three or so
the maid in
our Pittsburgh
home would
yell to me
Pretty girls
passing by!
and I would
scamper to the
window to catch
the faintest curve
of departing
wonder: The
maid would say
to my mother,
He ain’t gonna
be nothin’ but
a lover, and
it’s true,
no matter how
many words I
throw into
the smoke,
no matter how
many times
I lose my
way to her:
I have always
been finding then
losing then finding
them again:
Like Paula
who I played
with when
I was three.
Paula was 4
and lived across
the street,
a jolly Jill
who refused to
wear a top
when it got
hot: One day
she led me
far away from
home to search
for worms in
the park: We
ambled on
and on until
I had to
go to the
bathroom: We
crossed a
highway overpass
& knocked
on some row
house door: A
woman whose
knee I faced
let us in &
led me to
the bathroom
& then fed
us cookies &
called the cops:
My parents were
frantic when
we drove up
in the police
care — sure
we had been
lost — But
all their squabble
just faded when
When Paula’s
mom hauled her
home away
from me: O
watch her
walk down the
street taking
with her all
song: When we
moved away
to Illinois
all I had of her
was a wallet
photo that I
carried everywhere
until my brother
ripped it up
in a rage at
me: Somewhere
I’m still
inconsolable,
searching and
searching through
the oldest plumes
of memory
for her in
her wading
pool, smiling
at me:
I am fascinated
with how a
female draws
me to her
on some
current toward
the sweet
prong between
her legs like
a widdershin
dowse: In first
grade Alan Fausel
and I hiked
into the woods
at recess
in search of girls
who walked alone
or in pairs:
We’d spring
up at them
and propose
I’ll Show You
Mine if You Show
Me Yours:
O it was
perilous business:
There were these
two who always
ripped us off,
gettin us to
hike down
our pants
and underwear
and stand there
aflop in the
breeze: They’d
flash their skirts
up then down
& shriek happily
away: But I also
remember this one
Susie cute as a
button with dark
brown eyes and
short brown hair
who would lower
her undies gently
down to her
Buster Browns
& lift her skirt,
& close her eyes
and smile, smile,
smile: At home
I drew a house
to store my
visual coups:
One room stacked
high with large
crossed O’s
for bottoms &
another room
filled with smaller
crossed O’s for
vaginas: I
understand
this now as
the basic song
of male worship
for a female’s
body: It’s not
something that
women reciporcate:
They don’t stare
at men the way
we do at them,
gape-jawed, stunned
into mute
reverence for
nature’s fertile
fuckable founts:
My wife
never ceases
to wow me when
she emerges from
the bathroom
at night dressed
for bed in her
white Calvin Klein
gown: How it
clings to her,
so sinuously
sweet, so richly
awarble: I know
I make her
nervous staring
so at her, but I
can’t help it:
She’s voluptuous
in every way I
have ever dreamed
women could be:
I never tire of
running my hand
gently oh so
gently down her arms,
her legs, her back
and bottom,
her breasts -- softly,
so softly, the
way she loves
being touched:
Then cupping
and squeezing her
breast as if to
fill some
undrenchable
cup: It never ends:
The vault is
never full:
And it’s more
than mere
horniness,
that urge which
stiffens sates
and drains: Rather
my love of
women is a bath
from uterus
to grave:
An eternal river
the dolphin sports
in where the
music of Ariel
drifts like smoke,
my dream of
her heaven between
the waking and
the wake:




Katherine Briggs in The Fairies in Tradition and Literature describes the Shellycoat as a sort of impish, not-quite evil fairy “who gets his name from the clattering shells in which he is clad .. and is a spirit who resides in the waters, and has given his name to many a rock and stone upon the Scottish coast.” She relates this tale from Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of The Scottish Border (1801):

“Two men, on a very dark night, approaching the banks of the Etrick, heard a doleful voice from the waves repeatedly exclaim -- ‘Lost! Lost!’ They followed the sound, which seemed to be the voice of a drowning person, and, to their infinite astonishment, they found that it ascended the river. Still they continued, during a long and tempestuous night, to follow the cry of the malicious sprite; and arriving, before morning’s dawn, at the very sources of the river, the voice was now heard ascending the opposite side of the mountain in which they arise. The weary and deluded travellers now relinquished the pursuit; and had no sooner done so, than they heard Shellycoat applauding, in loud bursts of laughter, his successful roguery.”




GOOSE CHASE

June 10

Well here I am again, roused
too soon from sleep on a
Saturday morning by some
naiad sound, hurrying with
my deepest heart wide open
to this shore, pants down
around the ankling tide,
greedy to find her
on the same choiring tide
which isn’t singing my
birthday song today
after all, as ever.
There was a game
I loved to play with
girls when I was six --
you know -- Show me
yours and I’ll show mine--
I was so eager and happy
to lose my shorts, in
full expectation of the
dream I was sure I’d find
there tucked up between
some scrawny gender-other’s
legs: And though I did,
my rapture flashed into
view and then clothed
back so fast as to leave
me wondering what was
greater -- what I’d glimpsed
for one hard heartbeat
or the naked devotion
it fast devoured, leaving
me standing there forever
more empty than before,
just for having dared that
one next peek at verboten
pucker-pink first seas.
Nor do I know now
which of those
polar encounters
was the more blessed,
the girl who lifted
her little skirt
and smiled and smiled
with eyes closed tight,
or the one who tricked
me good, urging me to
go first, lavishing her
sight on me standing
barest to the breeze
and then flashing so
fast in return that
all I saw was her turn
and run full tilt
away in an ebb
of shrieking giggles.
But I suspect the
latter queens the former;
so when I write this
way yet again of
that crashing shore
whose voice is most
my own (if desire’s
waves are any score),
I am happy in the ruse
which fools me
one more time
back to the marge
where blue matronas
crash and fall. I
know they’re never
more than waves to
shore, but it seems
that singing in salt
faith is sea enough,
a vault stored high
with all those peekaboos
from long ago
on naked shores
whose smile arches
wide across my life.
This flood of words
drowns every hope
in its sing-song mash
way past even an
intelligent derange:
it’s just a compulsive
itch, greedy and vain,
lending to bad habit
every exalt, starry name.
See? I’m fooled here
to the ends of pages
with nothing new to say,
standing on the first
shore of all, amid
thundered down boulders
and ten thousand
splintered masts, each
still swirled with the
sheets I lifted with
the same hope of sailing
all the way to you.
Again and again the
dream vanished exactly
where I thought I’d
find her; where I
thought she beckoned
me to come; so many
times I come to wonder
if my failing is what
that bedspring sound
in crashing waters
loves about me most.
Surely her fading posture
(always fleeing out a door)
reveals a crueller intent
than love, distilled from
deep within its darkest
heart, taking delight
in my self-exposures,
this hackish repartee
between a man and
his foiled fool desire.
Perhaps the peeking game
was her idea all along: a jaunt
in the sort of nakedness
which maps a wilder shore,
not the one I meant
to find, but the one whose
wet dream I am. Perhaps the
whole point of the exercise
is to feel that cold
indifferent breeze
here where I stand,
my pen-cock reeling at
that touch and speechless
at its one-eyed view
of all the breadth and depth
that was thus intimated
in those first so
profane peekaboos --
shrinking, too, aghast
to find myself fooled
to flaunt it all again,
hearing a high coarse
laughter whip rock
to rock to rock
an ancient jester’s
guile. I was never
meant to regain or
even halfway name
the insides of that shape
running so fast way.
No: instead I hurl
high tides in measure
to my loss, like winds
racing toward a
pressure low, regaining
if not sight of her
the satiety of the
fools show, the next
trick lulled to his doom
expecting sweetest heaven
in the salt crash of her loom.



Lamia bid him come near, more near --
Close to her passing, in indifference drear,
His silent sandals swept the mossy green;
So neighbored to him, and yet so unseen
She stood; he passed, shut up in mysteries,
His mind wrapped like his mantle, while her eyes
Followed his steps, and her neck regal white
Turned -- syllabling thus. “Ah, Lycius bright,
And will you leave me on the hills alone?
Lycius look back! and be some pity shown!”
He did -- not with cold wonder fearingly,
But Orpheus-like at Eurydice --
For so delicious were the words she sung,
It seemed he had loved them a whole summer long.
And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up,
Leaning no drop in the bewildering cup,
And still the cup was full -- while he, afraid
Lest she should vanish ere his lip had paid
Due adoration, thus began to adore
(Her soft look growing coy, she saw his chain so sure):
“Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, Goddess, see
Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee!
For pity do not this sad heart belie --
Even as thou vanished so I shall die.”

-- Keats Lamia I.237-260



THE MOON
OVER HER SHOULDER

June 11


Up at 4:30 a.m. this Sunday
for reasons I can’t understand,
ever. Now the moon
is full and feral in the
westward windows, blasting
a pale, whalish organum,
its soaring sails wafted by the
darkest breezes in the world,
those deep-sea waves the
moon recalls and beckons
in a tide-wild thrall. That
moon is over my shoulder
as I write of it over hers,
behind shores and beds I
thought I found her forever
on, where every sound
and seem of her cathedralled
in a luxuriantly dying ebb.
Who’s seeking who, I wonder
at this humming too-warm
hour: Me for she as I for
Thou; or that sea for me
which is its sidhe, a
teeming womb of dead
laments, choiring emptily
the sum of these tidal lines’
hard hammerings?
She’s that moon, you know,
Euryidce of the backward
glance that lingers
over my shoulder in
the aura of lost presence,
milking the waters
I behold her through
with a dazzling trail of seem.
Forward and back
my story gazes,
up and down a well
where history and mystery
spill through each other
and over, as if what
I first saw in those
pretty girls passing by
my childhood’s eastern
windows has followed
me all the way to here,
sleek up-from-surfish
constellations of a fate
whose ache and thrust
I am. I have come
to think that moonlight
hides the truth
so greater myths
can fly; every
time she ebbed away
my mouth was bid
to fling the deepest
water songs, spouting
up across the starry
sky fresh meters of
their metier, receiving
syllables of tone
like seed into a womb
where all my sights
and songs are vaulted.
As necessity is the
mother of invention --
my wounds have all
been slowly and surely
balmed in this verbal
susurration of a swoon
-- So the reverse
is just as true, albeit
more ferally so.
Each jot of crashing
blue here makes her
welcome seem all the
more dearly drear,
as if to find her
shadowed gazes between
these lines (or just off
their margins or beneath
the last one), like the
prioress of the age I
reach for. So the past
welcomes its future
in every man’s slack-jawed
view of his lover nude
the first time and forever.
Her curves were shaped
so long ago to as to merge
at fonts across the sea,
coming at me from ports
drowned some fifty thousand
years ago, when it dawned
on me that she was shaped
like a heaven winged all the
way hell. That wild waking
knowledge bid me ring this
bell again and again and
again, all the way to here.
And to think I found that
moon far after it found me,
a lover rapt and foolish enough
to ankle her first warm tide
forever on an empty shore
of long-crashed waves.
To think she watched
me standing there
so long that song itself
became a sea, rapt and
ravished not by her
but by the sound she
made in me. Lost sons
become losers, the prize of
every floozy to bid
drunks chase them home
through the darkest folds
of night: The game
is older than the ones
who first played it out, too
old for me to reckon. But
who cares? Suffice I’m not
alone in rapturing the bone
which halves and joins
to a breast she shares
and equally adores. All
this flinging just makes
the diving down our
separate billows more wild.
That full moon’s falling
behind a mons of dark-
thatched trees, failing
in first light: another
hot one’s in store for
us -- upper 90’s in
clear skies -- and there’s
a heavy scent of wildfires
drifting through the
screen amid a paler
scent of something in bloom
out there or here.
A tropical storm is said
to be heading our way,
promising a riot of rain.
I pray it also brings
fresh water for
this pen where I’ll say it
for sure next time, name
her for once and truly
yet again, just the way
she desires, we being
mutual and mothered
by the same black tide
of Neptune’s choiring fire.





(The) immense, square-headed, formidably toothed whale known as the cachalot or sperm whale discovered long ago what men have known only for a short time -- that hundreds of fathoms below is an abundant animal life. the sperm whale has taken these deep waters for his hunting gounds; his quarry is the deep-water population of squids, including the giant squid Architeuthis, which lives pelagically at depths of 1500 feet or more. The head of the sperm whale is often marked with long stripes, which consist of a number of circular scars made by the suckers of the squid. From this evidence we can imagine the battles that o on, in the darkness of the deep water, between these two huge creatures -- the sperm whale with its 70-ton bulk, the squid with a body as long as 30 feet, and writhing, grasping arms extending the total length of the animal to perhaps 50 feet.

The greatest depth at which the giant squid lives is not definitely known, but there is one instructive piece of evidence about the depth to which sperm whales descend, presumably in search of the squids. In April 1932, the cable repair ship All America was investigating an apparent break in the submarine cable between Balboa in the Canal Zone and Esmerldas, Ecuador. The cable was brought to the surface off the coast of Colombia. Entangled in it was a dead 45-foot male sperm whale. The submarine cable was twisted around the lower jaw and was wrapped around one flipper, the body, and the caudal flukes. The cable was raised from a depth of 540 fathoms, or 3240 feet.

--- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us



Let the mad poets say what’er they please
Of the sweets of Faeries, Peris, Goddesses,
There is not a treat among them all,
Haunters of cavern, lake and waterfall,
As a real woman, lineal indeed
From Pyrra’s pebbles or old Adam’s seed.
This gentle Lamia judged, and judged aright,
That Lycius could not love in half a fright,
So threw the goddess off, and won his heart
More pleasantly by playing woman’s part,
With no more awe than what her beauty gave,
That, while it smote, still guaranteed to save.

- Keats Lamia I.328-339

***

MY APPETITE

June 12

My appetite for her
is sublime, a moonlit
beach of indigo desires
where the ocean
hauls all night our raptures,
her surf a goddess that
perforce bids me rise
and fall in ten thousand
waves of perfect bliss
and scowling remorse
in the crash and boom
of Yes and No and Come
then Go; an appetite
ache which arches
its high mass inside
a blue chapel
whose ancient ribs are mine.

My appetite is most hers
when I loose it here,
these lines freed to
sprint like dogs toward
every numen of desire,
chasing and naming,
howling and tearing
the nymphet insides
of wave cream, each page
a ladle overflowing
with deep blue, lost
gold, and sea-wrack,
the full freight of
her looking back
through that empty door
with all the fire
of my desire.

My appetite for her
is heart and gut
and balls at one
in wild intent to feed,
needy and so greedy
to glut upon her every
sigh and breast and
mons as to devour
her salt similes whole,
swallowing til she
is full inside
every leaping organ of
my amorous, carnivorous,
and lascivious sense,
full scented, mouthed
and fucked, curved
prey now glutted past
the rims of every
hungry sea.

My appetite isn’t mine
at all, its teeth
belong to an instinct
older than any beach
I thought I found her
one, deeper than any
surface shaft of light
can penetrate, a sperm
whale’s glee in
an abysmal trench
where only deep sea
denizens choir the
quench which completes
the way in which
she devours me
with my own spread
jaws, taking possession
of me from below
as pound hips hard
on hers then loose
my stallion legion
through that huge
gorged staff which
fills her well with water.

I am her son, her
lover, her knight,
her green stalk rising proudly
all the way to the naked
sun, that song which is most
alive in the whoosh of
surfeit’s down-swooping scythe
-- her surfeit, or mine,
or ours, or purely yours?
Who cares? Juice stains
my lips here as I start
to drowse, my song full
once again with all I lost
and tossed and rogered
in the surf back then
and now and ever.

I’m tanked here, spent,
languid now in every
way my appetite had
curved high and roared
hard down with
so much to say
about that blue sashay
she bid me follow
down a wild, ever-
thrashing sea.