When the Pupil is Ready, The Gator Arrives

Feral days here in sunny Fla: whitehot and ghastly still, the rainy season holding back, afternoons soaring syzygies of brilliance and menace. There's a faint scent Set in the air - part brush-fire, part something deeper fish-like, a serpentine venom which gives the torn clouds a brownish hue. Traffic winds the interstate in a slow sear, a river whose scales blaze with chrome bumpers and windshields and sunglasses, its edges all too sharp, like shrieks of shattered glass. Everyone on the road seems one cutoff short of conflagration, as if the afternoon commute will suddenly burst into fireball of road rage.

Yeah, we could use the rain. Even writing at this hour of 4:30 a.m. everything is dazed with the heat, smashed flat, wilted. Do seas boil? They certainly dry. But does this heat come from above, or does it rise from below, like a sun waking from the otherworld just below the eastern horizon?

And who is venting here, the oppressed or an oppressor? The tricky thing about projection is that we see ourselves best in others. What pisses me off most by that jerk in the black BMW who suddenly frags into my lane without signalling is that his assholic surge is exacty mine a half-mile up the road when jump lanes to get around a lumbering semi. I spot it, I got it.

So if summer has become a hot adder, then its fangs are my own, piercing all the way past the bone of what matters to me, what ails and prevails and nails me but good.

To follow the intent of that bite ...

Fructifyer and destroyer, the sun makes everything visible, for better and worse. Photosynthesis greens the garden, but without enough water the bloom withers, its possibilities decapitated in its cradle. The body delights in the lavish smile of sunlight, especially up from winter -- there's nothing like walking next to naked on a shore of salt thunder -- but dalliance and abundance wrinkles and hardens the skin, and nurtures carcinomas in our folds. There are ghettoes of the sun where every bad vice comes to harbor; overdeveloped Florida is sprouting these all over, blighted subdivisions without a single tree in sight, trailer parks like a thousand naked hindquarters too vulnerable to hurricanes, deserted strip malls cracking in the sun and four-lane highways everywhere cutting through towns so indistinguishable that the only way you know you've approached the next one is that a fresh cluster of franchises like Target and Ross and Publix and Taco Bell has fanned into view.

Ubiquitous traffic, the incessant savaging of wetlands by lumbering house-sized Caterpillars, roads always widening, huge concrete shitpipes in sections laying idly nearby, Hummers and 'Vettes whipping by in eternal pleasure with bumper stickers proclaiming faith in George Bush and fishing and Dale Earnhardt and Brandy who's on the Lake Brantley soccer team: no wonder that the substratum is sleeping uneasily if at all, turning on a spit of that sunlight that pierces all the way down, forcing us to see what we can't accept. It's coming, isn't it, the retribution, a wave of blue doom is right behind us, which will turn us into pillars of panicked salt if we turn around, if we look inside, if we call on Eurydice too soon.

The heralds are everywhere, those augurs and prophets and tomb-guardians which slither through the garden with hunger trained on our soles. Here in Florida, three women this year have been hauled from lake- and river-shores by gators and killed, at points or stations of the state which triangulate roughly to here. Such deaths have been rare and now they are happening everywhere, all at once. Shark attacks are up too. Fear of hurricanes is something that runs deep through the state's psyche, with six major hurricanes ripping a portion of the state's flanks over the past few years. And the brush fires are bad this time of year, always about to tide a great flame over the state about the time the rainy season begins (this year it's bad enough - they have to close I-95 near the east coast for a few hours every day due to the smoke - but in 1998 500,000 acres of the state burned, and if the winds hadn't shifted and the rains started the next day, many towns would now be char).

Maybe its from all of the encroaching development, from the global warming which has made seas just that bit more inviting to cyclonic winds hundreds of miles wide. Who knows, but there's shadow in the sun's eye, something dark and invisible. We came here looking for the fountain of youth, but something else is staring back in the black pupil of that aged water.

Our situation here is mythic, for the tale of innocence getting an eyeful of divine horror goes back to Kore, in her days before she became Persephone. She was the virgin in the garden of profusion, "a place," according to Roberto Calasso in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, "where dogs would lose their quarry's trail, so violent was the scent of flowers."

Kore was admiring her favorite flower, the narcissus, when Hades appeared. That yellow flower, used as both garland of Eros and of the dead, was so beautiful, so engrossing, that the eye leaps into it, loses all reference, become drunk on its exulting lush scent.
Indeed, Kore -- who's name means "girl" but also "pupil" -- is the quintessence of seeing ourselves in the world; the beauty which ravishes her eye is her own. She is innocent, unaware; there is no fixed border between what is seen and felt. She is also self-absorbed, seeing the perfect reflection of her own beauty in that flower. What is it that Eros sees but himself, reflected in Psyche's eye? What is it about the dream of the world which makes us so wish to dive naked into it, to drink and drink and drink its nectar until we are full drowned?

Yet at that moment Kore is looking at the narcissus -- just when her gaze is about to fall fully into its yellow womb -- just when virginity cusps toward quintessence, love sealed completely within itself, a Narcissus enmeshed with the naiad of the pool - Precisely at this moment Hades irrupts from the ground in a chariot led by four horses running abreast of each other (great image of magnitude and amplitude and ferocity there, 16 hooves of black horsepower churning all at once in her direction, like an approaching storm).

Kore's gaze is torn from the flower into the visage of death, the invisible silent and cold bourne of Hades. The pupil Kore, she who gazes at the fullness of life, is what Hades sees himself in, with all the passion of the dead for the living. That is the moment of Kore's transformation into Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, wife of the invisible, maid of visible gardens only in one third of her former sense, her former viewpoint. She goes down, she grows up. Or we do.

Kore is the woman in the Ocala Forest who one night about a month ago wandered off slightly drunk from the guy she was partying with to skinny dip in a lake after midnight, when the moonlight over all was like a saturate lucence, making her nakedness a flower to the eye, sacred and sexual, perfect. And indescribably desirable as meat to the flat gaze of the 14-foot gator who, sensing the disturbance in its own waters, floated slowly but with great purpose, the mouth already salivating as the massively powered jaws began to tense for the spring. Did she see those jaws as they spread to welcome her, did she see those empty reptilian eyes ghosted in moonlight as they saw that this prey would not get away?

Horrible, ain't it? Yet that tale is woven into the over-bronzed infernity of the season, in our history in the state of ten thousand flowers, in the psyche of this twenty-years' resident who came looking for a woman on the shore and found the sea instead, or the woman inside the salt thunder of the surf -- the fairy queen Cliodna perhaps, whose three birds sing so sweetly as to induce laughter, tears, and sleep, an otherworldly, dangerous sound which lingers at this hour in the faint buzzing of crickets and sprinklers pulsing in yards, sighing just beyond the sound of semis slowly lumbering up 441 just outside of town. We think we'll find her if we build enough subdivisions, but that's just kindergarten to her, kid stuff. The real learning is just begun for the pupil finally ready to see her.

How shall I see, if I do not pay close attention?






GATOR BAIT'R

As I was sitting in traffic
in the downtown Apopka
bottleneck I noticed
a boat on a trailer next
to me. "Gator Bait'r"
was written in cute gold
glitter script across the aft.
It's Friday night and I'm
going home, my body
trilling from the last hard
workout of the week (45
minutes of cyclings &
then upper body lifting);
sunglasses, air conditioning,
low jazz, weariness &
endorphins cauling the
ferocity of the rainless
late-afternoon sun, where
its so humid and bright
I cannot even see the sky.
A sign outside a pest
control company a mile
further down says, "10
Days to Bring in the
Biggest Roach in Apopka
and Win Big $?" Why
are these messages
hooking my attention
these blearing dog
days? I drive on listening
to a "Fresh Air" interview
with some guy who's written
a biography on Fatty
Arbuckle. Traffic darts
helterskelter around me,
everyone desperate to
go home, get to that
first beer, I don't know.
Seems that Arbuckle went
to a doctor to have a
carbuncle lanced and
the job was botched.
The doctor prescribed
heroin for the pain
and Arbuckle got hooked.
The studio forced him
to quit by building a
cold turkey room in
his house and locking
him into it. He lost so
much weight that when
he went on tour soon
after to promote a movie,
he had to wear a fat suit.
A lime-green Volkwagen
turns onto old 441 ahead
of me bearing a vanity
plate that reads
"NOG8R" -- get it,
No Gator? -- it was
printed on a Florida
Seminoles logo plate.
The rivalry between our
nature and nature's, the war
of predators and privateers,
is a virile summer rassle
tented in this big heat,
cheered on by whatever
angels are gathered on
the head of this pen --
hawks and turkey buzzards,
wasps and buzzing roaches,
I dunno, some raptoring
will which keeps drawing
me back to the true heart
of the heat of this season,
the rude indeterminate
roadkill and lanes off the
main intercourse which
are drowned in swamp
ivy and grime. I see it
even as I turn onto
the last street home, my
neighborhood blasted with
the same heat, a motorboat
almost hidden in weeds
next to the duplex up
the street, sprinklers
at the rental foolishly
pumping precious water
at this hour, my ancient
neighbor Dan drinking
Jim Beam with that woman
who visits him thrice weekly
in revenge on her husband
who left her and came back.
It's there right at home, our
garden hanging limp from
its ruddy heights, the cats
sprawled on the back porch
hungry for dinner, my wife
taking me upstairs to show
me her latest embroidery
laid out on our bed
looking more than
magnificent & the a/c
at full broil & the western
windows melting down.
Honey, it's beautiful, and
I mean it with all of my
heart, it's absolutely true,
just as true as we'll never
get that thrashing gator
out from under the bed,
not ever.





SWAMP GLASS

The day was like every other
in Florida's long connubial
of light and heat -- the
worker standing in the
shallows of the lake pulling
up weeds in that steady
slow rhythm that has
kept him at this long
seasonal job for so
many years, working
the shores of so
many hundreds of
lakes around Central
Florida -- the mid-
morning sun conducting
a rising choir of crickets
in the reeds, the
occasional rag-tag cloud
overhead slowly fleecing
in others of that flock
in the way of summer
days that by late
afternoon amass to
principalities of air,
cracking heaven wide
and spilling both seas.
But for now, it's just
the hazing humid
prescience of all that
in a near-dreamy
saturate of heat, the
lake water about him
reflecting back what
life he's always known
here -- docks leading
back to rich folks'
houses, some shadowy
man in a bass boat
drifting by a ways
out, all of the lake's
mysteries sealed tight
against the underside
of that brilliant glass
like the hid half of
the moon. He barely
notices the gator
lolling ten feet from
him, its black bark
barely breaking
the surface of the
water -- no big deal,
gators are everywhere
in these lakes, they
approach and watch
and linger and then
drift off. The weeds
pull up soft and mushy
belling with them that
stink that makes you
first think of fish and
pussy and shit at once,
but it's just for him
the same old redolence
of work as daydreams
down the shore, his
hands in water gripping
roots uplifting memories
of nights now long ago,
before he was this
lonely divorcee,
before he was married
and married before
that; back when it
seemed so many
women smiled at
his tanned Cracker
charm, inviting him to
swim the sweet warms waters
of their welcoming within.
He was reeling slowly in
one of those tales
spooled out along
the the shallows of
his mind of busty
Darlyn, 18, a prissy
and pious waitress at the
Chat n Chew in Eustis
whom he'd talked into
going on a date with him
to go bowling. Instead
he'd takne them
to the RiMar drive-in
to see "Brewster's Millions."
She'd protested on
the way there for
what seemed a sufficient
enough while, sawing on
about how she was a
good Christian & saving
herself for her husband
and he'd just agreed,
saying in his soft
twang that his intentions
were pure as silk,
he'd just like to hear
her talk. But later
after she had helped
him work through a
pint of Southern Comfort
in the darkness of his
Ford pickup (the movie
track on the gizmo
hanging from the window
mixed with the softer
stream of laughter,
belches and the high
brogue of moans and
ejaculate sighs coming
from the darkened
vehicles around
them. And suddenly
there broke from
her this other woman whom
perhaps even she didn't know,
turning to kiss and kiss
him again, then giggle,
and reach down to massage
his crotch, kissing him
with her tongue swimming
deep in his mouth.
Then she unbottoned
her her red polka dot blouse
and tore it and that big
brassiere away, weaving
those magnificent hooters
in his face, slapping his
cheeks with each breast.
He closed his eyes then
falling into the mily soak
and drift of sex which in
this present he tries to
reattach their surficial
part -- as if the spirit
required a house, a horse,
a hearse, that whorish
sweaty stink of perfume
and passion. And then
something woke him from
that dark -- something plinking
him in the nose -- he opened
his eyes to see this glittery
silver cross hanging between
her breasts reaching out
to flick him as she swayed,
sharp and hard and
maddening as hell. He
pulled back to focus
better only to see the strange and
terrible double image of Darlyn's
breasts superimposed on the
face of Richard Pryor on
the screen much further
behind them, the sweet
fruity fullness of breastmeat
crossed with his ten foot bulging
bug-eyes. The gator struck
right then, its jaws fast as
traps, collapsing in a
instant on his upper thigh.
Sweet Darlyn fled screaming
from those searing red holes
below and the worker was
right here, reassessing
the cruciality of his moment,
in a world of trouble
& the rest of the world
still calm and sleepy
and too hot. He did not
panic but bore back
and wailed with all
his strength, whacking
the gator once but
good with his fist
between the weak
hazy eyes, which seemed
to flutter for an instant
and then wake from
its own dream, loosing
its jaws and slowly
swimming off. The same
day buzzed and droned
everywhere, the lake
still pure as glass
except where he
was stumbling out --
exactly there all
was muddy and richly
red and smelly of
the funk which stiffens
our nose-hairs, alert
to some world in ours
we care or dare or
cannot quite see
and it holding us
exactly there for
that one singular
moment in its gaze,
whispering
pay attention...