The Iron Tide

The submarine mountains are the earth’s nearest approach to the “eternal hills” of the poets. No sooner is a continental mountain thrust up that all the forces of nature conspire to level it. A mountain of the deep sea, in the years of its maturity, is beyond the reach of the ordinary erosive forces. It grows up on the ocean floor and may thrust volcanic peaks above the surface of the sea. These islands are attacked by the rains, and in time the young mountain is brought down within reach of the waves; in the tumult of the sea’s attack it sinks again beneath the surface. Eventually the peaks are worn down below the push and pull and drag of even the heaviest of storm waves. Here, in the twilight of the sea, in the calm of deep water, the mountain is secure from further attack. Here it is likely to remain almost unchanged, perhaps throughout the life of the earth.

Because of this virtual immortality, the oldest oceanic mountains must be infinitely older than any of the ranges left on land. Professor Hess, who discovered the sea-mounts of the central Pacific, suggested that these “drowned ancient islands” may have been formed before the Cambrian period, or somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion years ago.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us




THE IRON TIDE

August 13

There was a network series
which recently gloried in
catching Internet predators.
The producers had someone
pose as a 13 year-old girl
in a chat room and then lured
these Draculassholes to
a house in a suburb where
the anchor and cameraman
stripped ‘em raw of
their intent, driving a stake
of pure primetime pleasure
into their greedy fool hearts:
An easy, salable concept,
the perfect crusade, the
victims readily upping
for slaughter on the iron
wings of desire, appearing
on camera in our
living-room network-TV
arena with enough
veneer of the criminal
for us to insanely cheer:
The predators though
were all of bland sort,
nasty and brutish, yes,
red in their intended
tooth and claw, but
yahoos nonetheless,
surprisingly so—are
we toned to expect
Hollywood grandeur
even at it dimmest depths?:
The perps were bald
or fat or so cable-guy
looking you’d wouldn’t
notice them twice in
traffic or at the supermarket:
What is strange to me
today is how veiled
the evil iron tide of
the passion looks from
their surfaces, invisible
in the light of day as they
are in the crowd of
humanity: So pale you
just had to stare hard
at the TV to connect the
dork visage with the horrorshow
vigor of their intent:
I remember getting lap dances
at strip clubs when I first
hit Florida back in 1980,
back when they were allowed:
A half-dozen times over six
months of lost zeal
a somewhat curvy,
somewhat flabby bleached
blond with long dark roots
rocked listless against my
jeans looking far left
or far right as J Geils Band’s
“Centerfold” blared away
in the toxic cold of the
bar: Her breasts swung
sure as metronomes up
and down or side to side
in the skewed crosshairs
of my drunken attention,
a desire which settled for such
moments when every
avenue of a night’s wooing
had failed, was too
difficult to try in my
grand boozed-up isolation:
Anyway I remember looking
around me at other guys
getting lap dances and
was appalled at the
general grade, fat
bearded truckers
& scowling bikers
& rockers with torn
t-shirts and lots of hair
& nerdy norks who
could have been parts
store clerks or shoe
shop managers: All of
‘em were drowning in
tit-flesh dancing before
their eyes, just like me: Lust
is such a least common
denominator in the aerials
of desire, rude, mean,
lazy, gluttonous, ever
angling for any way in,
its torch smokiest and
tumescent in the dark
dankest caverns of night:
Desire creates a bum
fraternity: Pride and
vanity make men
desperate to find
enough difference from
that pack, only to have
the fantasy of difference
drive us deeper into
the fold, self-deception
being the core of that identity,
enabled by booze and
porn and acquiescence to
that falling angel who
burns all he wells down through:
Ariel and Caliban were
both chained to Prosper’s magik
balls through a witch’s vowels,
pure sprite and puerile spite
like halves of a heart whose
name, alas, is Sycorax,
that witchiness which
spells as it appalls: What is
that dark sweetness so
front and center of sex
that men wear such
blinders trampling the
real world for ten minutes
of stolen, immoral, even
criminal bliss?: Oh the
excuses shouted by
those Internet predators
when they found themselves
in front of the naked lens,
exposed at last: No one
confessed any fault, none
admitted the truth of
their lust: They were always
about other business, like
conducting their own stings,
or trying to save a young
innocent from going the
wrong way: They had been
lured themselves by vixens
and tramps like sheep to
a kills: Never any truth in
their stories, as if the
truth of lust was just too
damnable, its admission
sure death: One by one
they came to the house,
right on time, sometimes
shedding clothes as
they walked in the front
door, calling a phantom
phoenix’s name: A sad
same parade of such
lusty packaging, none
with a name: That savage
late moonlight still glows
like a pale bone on a blue
beach at this hour seems
a like crime, too hot
and still for this time in
the season, deathly becalmed,
bewtiched: Yet another
day to come in the wine-press
stamping down the given
grapes, weeding and mowing
and laundry and bills: All
the ways which the real isn’t
sexy, isn’t about getting
some and how: Yet like
sea mountains, an aging man’s
desire slips beneath the wave
of old nights and refuses to age,
enormous ranges far from sight
but never slighter as the world
ages on: A blue-balled immensity
that just hangs hard and sore
in abysms, swollen with an
angst that has nowhere to go:
I’m not going to take it out
on my aging wife, nor will
I betray her just to relieve
what can’t or won’t find
relief, no matter how many
wells I cram down hollering
the names of black Jesus:
I won’t even write more of
this, not in any obvious way:
Heaviness is leaden and
achy like my shoulder and
foot today, sore with the
burden and freight of
a loved full life: Rather
than scatter all that
may I furrow relief’s
utterly pent grandeur:
May I farm truth and
beauty far from the
ravaged acres of the seem,
their appetite, their claws:
Invisible is lust in
its plenipotent foment,
crashing all of the shores
of this world, the underwater
terrain of my heart, immobile,
unchanging, free: