Aphrodite and Athena

The only time I was close to being sent to the principal's office at school was when, at 14, in the middle of fifth-period typing class, during a droll and somnolent hour following lunch when Florida afternoons roared brilliant high tides of light against the dirty windows of Winter Haven High School, that Katie Poole, surely one of the sexiest girls in school and who, for fateful reasons I only discern now, was assigned to sit to my left at those long tables by which we learned to QWERTY the Word, and who, one afternoon, bored beyond tears of such sterile and noisome approximations of Nous, decided, for earthy and malicious reasons of her own, followed me to to the pencil sharpener at the back of the room and there, for a pregnant lasting moment, leaned up close to me, blue eyes laughing, blonde hair in perfect silvery light-maddened abandon, more- than-ample 17-year-old’s breasts (in fresh, just-off-the-wave yummy heavyhigh perfection, like grapefruit aching to be harvested in a grove outside of town) jamming perilously close to my scrawny 14-year old chest (I a sophomore and a year ahead of my class, she a junior), demanded impishly that she be allowed to see my belly button--something of which I had, at our typing station, been joking about, my snickering sex-talk empurpled by the uncorked effervescence of my flooding puberty I guess--and tried to lift my t-shirt up there next to the pencil sharpener, amid my giggling, near-shrieking protestations, the least of which had anything to do with her advances as my own fear of getting caught in flagrante delectio in the middle of a some droll memo drill, goggle-eyed at the Penthouse letter-perfect predicament I was sliding, no swooning down into the moist chasm of, hell-bent and loving it. I was an easy tease, a virgin soph of declared pentacostal Christian bent, so corruptible in my rickety talk of high heaven, talk which was fundamentally undermined by a wide-eyed and slack-jawed jones for every and any display of femininity -- a votive, you might way. I loved to hear the news from the other side of sex, news of infatuations and couplings, dirty talk, snide innuendo, heated banter: this was the Word for me in its Venusian beginnings: pure sexual verb, fecund, I believe of more nuanced and hefty words to come ...

There was a moment there next to the pencil sharpener where something passed through me which rivets even now my recollection of the moment, even though I knew then that she was just having some fun at my expense, even though it was crazy and dangerous what was transpiring, that I felt overcome, subsumed, drenched by a silkysweet desire which made everything else disappear. An epiphany of desire, a summation, a beach where something stepped off a wave and washed right through me. There in the middle of fifth period typing. I had been baptized in the Atlantic Ocean a few months before in my pentacostal abandonment, and had felt when put down into the water a wave pass not over but decidedly though me -- cleansing me of all past sin, yes, certainly washing away the childhood I was so ready to be rid of. But was it Nous, or Eros, that had anointed me there in the salt wilderness of an early morning in June?

Katie Poole was amply arguing for the former in that heated silly strange molten moment; our eyes locked for just a second and the play evaporated and I felt myself leaping into her, or being smashed and washed by some wave hurling out from her, her breasts within a micron’s gasp of smashing me forever on shores I would never return from...

But it was just a moment. The whole spell was shattered with the irritated sound of Mrs. Harris’ voice at the other end of the room, resonant with the sound of my first-grade teacher Mrs. Gilbert who had found out about me and Alan Fausel hiding in the bushes during recess and inviting girls to play Show Me Yours and I’ll Show Me Mine. At least, I felt a terror at that moment akin to what I felt that day when Mrs. Gilbert threatened to tell my mother if I ever tried such a thing again. Mrs. Harris adulted-up the drama by sending me to the principal’s office for “discipline,” which back then meant licks from one of the coaches with a Cypress Gardens Dick Pope Sr. waterski that had holes drilled into it to give it some turbo whammy against an errant boy’s ass. I was not noble in the courts of Eros; fearing the judgement of that ass-whacker, I hung around outside the class for ten minutes and then bargained my way back in without having to face the music. I apologized, made every promise to be diligent, applied my every good boy’s wile and ruse to persuade Mrs. Harris to relent me back into class where I sat down, cheeks burning with shame, and proceeded to type my memo while Katie Poole just smiled and clattered dreamily away on her manual typewriter.

Sitting on the other side of me in that typing class was Ranae Looney, another 17-year old beauty who was a cheerleader and member of the school newspaper and yearbook staff. Quiet, much more thoughtful, infinitely purer in my eyes, bemused at the erotic antics that went on from the other side of my typewriter but having none of it herself, I loved Ranae even more than I lusted after Katie (note the archetypal prioritizing of unrequited love over indulged lust). I was caught in a hopeless helpless infatuation that I knew I had no hope of bridging either way, and these two girl-women knew that well. They were happy to taunt and tease and instruct a wide-eyed votive boy in all the ways of sexual and emotional maturity, offering me alternate readings on the whole matter of sex and love, telling me about boyfriends and making out in cars, going all the way and saving oneself for marriage.

Now I’m sure my years have mythologized the event, but I can see now how my education in the Word was worked out between Katie Poole and Ranae Looney in a sort of divine drama where desire and knowledge twined their serpentine bodies around my hands that were tap tap tapping on the keyboard back then and are still tapping it out here.


***

It was on a path that didn’t seem to have much to do with literature at all during much of it. I read all sorts of stuff as a rather isolated and poorly-adjusted child -- Tom Swift, James Bond novels -- I loved My Side of the Mountain --- even wrote a few stories, mostly rehashes of lame TV spy shows like “The Man from Uncle” -- But all of it was verbal masturbation, saving the world, getting the girl, not much unlike my early first fantasies of saving some girl from drowning in a lake. The Word for me was seductive and powerful, a sort of mojo for liberating lovelies from their gossamer restraint: seducer’s booze. I was a virgin til I was seventeen, and not much of a profligate until my 20’s; but my head was always deep in conversation with desire, and starry in its soliloquies above Love. I didn’t read Shakespeare until I sobered up after age 30, but those words in my head certainly foregrounded everything I later found he had said so long long before.




BLUE GRAMMAR

"The most ancient witness to
grammatical teaching in Ireland
is to be found in the little manual
called Ars Asporii (or Apseri)
... ((this book)), in stark contrast
to the wholly secular tone of its
model ((the Ars Minor of Donatus)),
derives from the ascetic world
of sixth-century Irish monasticism."

- Daibhi O Croinin,
Early Irish Monasticism,

While I sat in classrooms
pickling in the drone
of American grammar
-- the official Latin of
verb-subject agreements
and modifiers rescued
from their dangling
precipices -- She was
writing it down in my
ear some other way,
a brogue inside my
writing’s new arches and
tenons, turning nouns
into nipples jazzing motions
I couldn’t master, only
ride. Before me all the
fixtures of learning
were composed and steady --
my book opened wide,
a #2 pencil in my hand
copying down the forms
on lined paper in a rough
miniscule, the late-
morning hush striated
with boredom and
hunger and a free-floating
toothed angst. On one
level it was all a
cultural Latin the way
it must be learned,
line after line, correct
and succinct, either
to be admired or strafed
with red ink: Yet further
down I wrote in Vulgate
about the places I
dreamed or sought
or would but dare not go:
My hands round the back
of the girl sitting in front
of me cupping new breasts,
fighting the evil one in
his lab far at sea,
swaggering nude
in the locker room
with a cock twice as
big as my own, three
times, no, four, shaming
all they boys with my
hammerlike stylus.
She was re-writing
the story the world
bid me learn
in a grammar which
shattered those schoolhouse
walls. There, in the midst
of such strict schooling
(if strict it ever was)
an infernal ars was
copied from the ass
of true love -- forms I’ll
never quite learn,
swimming away on
every sweet wave, a
language always just
out of reach, laughing,
cajoling, calling me home.
Of it I here write
in rooms far below
the cathedral which
pays for everything else.