Fate

FATE

Dec. 3

You should have seen my wife
when she came out of the bathroom
on the first night we made love.
We had booked a room at a hotel
in Melbourne Beach on a bitterly
cold and windy night in early December.
A full moon hung archly over all,
turning the pool outside our
window into an eye, lavishing the beach
and long black ocean with a high-
sighing, heavy gleam. We had been dating
for several months, our late-night
sessions of passion slowly yielding,
waxing to this moment, the door
where we would pass together
into our future life. I lay in bed
trying to be patient, trying not to think
of what she would soon reveal to me
at last. A candle on the nightstand
cast a soft glow in the gloom, bright
in such great darkness, and the roof
swayed now and then to a hard
northeastern breeze. And then she
emerged, wearing that long white Calvin
Klein nightdress for the first time,
the one I loved so in the first years
of our marriage, flowing over her
nakedness demure and pure, like white
water, suggesting, like moonlight, all
my hands and heart so ached
to touch and stroke and clutch, over
and over again. Her brown hair hung
down over shoulders are ever pale,
her eyes stared at me dark and bright
as if she would soon approach: And yet
for a moment she just stood there
with her arms crossed over her breasts,
fingertips resting against her clavicle.
“I’m so scared,” she whispered: That
simple statement so filled the room
with a strange aura to her beauty,
lifting something out into the
freezing moony night’s eternal
arches where my memory today
is still asking why she said it.
It was our true wedding night,
preceding by a year the actual one
when we returned to that hotel
wearing wedding rings.
By then sex was no longer a surprise
nor much of a fright: Not that
first catastrophic wave of welcome
we collapsed upon each other’s
shores, but rather a vowed
belief in such magnitude,
that such a breadth existed,
sure enough for us to stand
and work together for our lives.
But what scared her so? Of course
by giving herself to me she
was spreading herself wide
not only my body but all my the
other freight, stuff known and unknown
even to me. But was there more?
Could she see ahead to the way
things would go for her
in the dowries of love? So
much indeed spiralled down
when we said Yes: Our finances
were a ruin to start with,
I fell quickly back into the
bottle and hurt her badly
in those years it took to
surrender it up again, her body
soon began to flush its sex
with all the ways a woman’s
plumbing can go wrong (but no,
not all of them have gone,
not gone the worst, not yet--).
And did that Yes invoke the rest
of her fate’s life-long sourings? --
her nephew dying drunk
at the wheel, her beloved
cat dying after 16 years,
her father going twice toward
death and coming back less
vitally each time, her business
failing hard leaving us
broke this Christmas,
her mother always over
her shoulder, singing
shades of bleeding wounds:
Did she feel as she stood there
unwilling yet to walk down
those final feet to me the
full of weight of that sad full
moon’s prescient history?
Yesterday morning we drank
coffee with the windows shut
& the a/c cranked, another
gray warm day making us both feel
miserable; she cried long and hard
dark holiday blues, so angry at
always doing the right thing
to no good, for never getting any break
in the incessant maul of losses.
Could things have gone different
had she not come out of that
bathroom door 11 years ago?
Should she have sensed the
danger earlier and fled me
long before, leaving me to
wreak my surgent urgencies
inside someone else’s fragrant
so-fragile heart? Has there ever
been any other door for her
than plain old lousy luck?
After all that hard talk today, I
wonder. Fate was the only choice
offered her that night, and she went
willingly through it, believing
in the heart of life I guess,
even when it leads to slaughter.
And me? I sure was desperate
to house and ground my howling,
feeling the precipice my swelling
thirst was nearing me to; I was
also greedy to make her body
mine, to have my way with her
and finish looking deep in those
lovely bluegreen eyes as I
jissomed into her my entire
inheritance, a ghastly spray
of proteins rich with half my
history and half my tribe’s,
mixing that infernal juice
with warm wash of her womb.
Little could I know back then
(or even now) how that tidal
wave of lust would carry me
dry shores far away where heart
was more than house or the
art of making a home, but
a ravaging destruction which
fills deepest where it suffers.
She might have seen that fate,
but I was just a guy, determined
to possess what was revealed
standing there, as if to own
the full candescence of
a wild yet sterile moon.
She lingered at that door
we entered eleven years ago,
the pure summation of a woman’s
curvature by which my heart
is shaped and wrecked, her
pale arms crossed over such
perfect breasts which fate
mauled so, nursing a feral
history half mine, half hers, a sum
whose softer readings are obscure,
hidden in the belly of the wave
which washed over us that night
in one devouring kiss, with me
on fire for her full delights
and my future next wife for life
shaking in immortal fright.





LONGING

Summer 2002

I sometimes wonder whether longing
can’t radiate out from someone so
powerfully, like a storm, that nothing
can come to him from the opposite
direction. Perhaps William Blake
has somewhere drawn that?
— Rilke, letter, 1912

There is a longing in us which
grows from sigh to starry shriek.
Perhaps comets are charred furies
of that pain, a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears to God’s porch
and back, insatiable and unanswered.
Perhaps. All I know is that
it’s infinitely perilous to think
that longing has a human end.
In my cups I once believed
a woman mooned for me,
her longing a white welcome
over my million nights alone.
I met and passed her many times
those hard years, blinded by the aura
of her unvowled name.
Surely when two longings touch
it’s like when great waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
Our deeper thirst can never sate:
as each draught of booze
was never enough, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.
I recall a young man
walking home drunk on a
frozen night long ago,
his beloved nowhere
to be found in the chalice
he had named. Winds hurled
steel axes through the
Western sky, failing to clear
the cruel foliage of fate.
In his defeat he was greater
than any angel beckoned
by that night: his heart so
hollowed by longing
as to chance in pure cathedral,
her absence the clabber of a bell
shattering the frozen air,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.




ISIS RISING


From The Golden Ass: The Transformations Lucius by Apuleius, transl. Kennedy (1998)

‘It was not yet midnight when I awoke with a sudden start to see the full moon just rising from the sea-waves and shining with unusual brilliance. Now, in the silent secrecy of night, was my opportunity. Knowing that his greatest of goddesses was supremely powerful; that all human life was ruled by her Providence; that not only all animals, both tame and wild, but even lifeless things were animated by the divine power of her light and might; that as she waxed and waned, so in sympathy and obedience every creature on earth or in the heavens or in the sea was increased or diminished; and seeing that Fate was now seemingly satiated with my long tale of suffering and was offering me a hope, however late in the day, of rescue: I decided to beg for mercy from the awesome manifestation of the goddess that I now beheld. At once, shaking off my sluggish repose, I jumped up happily and briskly, and eager to purify myself I plunged into the sea. Seven times I immersed my head, since that is the number which the godlike Pythagoras has told us is most appropriate in religious rituals, and then weeping I uttered my silent prayer to the all-powerful goddess.

“Queen of heaven, whether you are Ceres, nurturing mother and creatrix of crops, who in your joy at finding your daughter again set aside the ancient acorn, fodder for wild beasts, and taught man the use of civilized food, and now fructify the ploughlands of Eleusis; or whether you are Venus Urania, who in the first beginnings of the world by giving birth to Love brought together the opposite sexes and so with never-ending regeneration perpetuated the human race, and now are worshipped in the sanctuary of sea-girt Paphos; or whether you are Phoebus’ sister, who by relieving women in labour with your soothing remedies have raised up many peoples, and now are venerated in your shrine at Ephesus; or whether you are Proserpine of the fearful night-howling and triple countenance, you who hold back the attacks of ghosts and control the gates of hell, who pass at will among the sacred groves and are propitiated with many different rites; you who brighten cities everywhere with your female light and nourish the fertile seeds with your moist warmth and dispense according to the motions of the Sun an ever-changing radiance; by whatever name, in whatever manner, in whatever guise it is permitted to call on you: do you now at last help me in this extremity of tribulation, do you rebuild the wreck of my fortunes, do you grant peace and respite from the cruel misfortunes that I have endured: let there be an end of toils, an end of perils. Banish this loathsome animal shape, return me to the sight of my friends and family, restore Lucius to himself; or if I have offended some power that still pursues me with its savagery and will not be appeased, then at last let me die if I may not live.”

Such were the prayers that I poured forth, accompanied with pitiful lamentations; then sleep once more enveloped my fainting senses and overcame me in the same resting place as before. I had scarcely closed my eyes when out of the sea there emerged the head of the goddess, turning on me that face revered even by the gods; then her radiant likeness seemed by degree to take shape in its entirety and stand, shaking off the brine, before my eyes. Let me try to convey to you too the wonderful sight that she presented, that is if the poverty of human language will afford me the means of doing so or the goddess herself will furnish me with superabundance of expressive eloquence.

First, her hair: long, abundant, and gently curling, it fell caressingly in spreading waves over her divine neck and builders. Her head was crowned with a diadem variegated with many different flowers; in its centre, above her forehead, a disc like a mirror or rather an image of the moon shone with a white radiance. This was flanked on either side by a viper rising sinuously erect; and over all was a wreath of ears of corn. Her dress was of all colours, woven of the finest linen, now brilliant white, now saffron yellow, now a flaming rose-red. But what above all made me stare and stare again was her mantle. This was jet-black and shone with a dark resplendence; it passed right round her, under her right arm and up to her left shoulder, where it was bunched and hung down in a series of many folds to the tasselled fringes of its surface shone a scattered pattern of stars, and in the middle of them the full moon radiated flames of fire. Around the circumference of this splendid garment there ran one continuous garland all made up of flowers and fruits. Quite different were the symbols that she held. In her right hand was a bronze sistrum, a narrow strip of metal curved back on itself like a sword-belt and pierced by a number of thin rods, which when shaken in triple time gave off a rattling sound. From her left hand hung a gold pitcher, the upper part of its handle in the form of a rampant asp with head held aloft and neck puffed out. Her ambrosial feet were shod with sandals woven from palm-leaves, the sign of victory. In this awesome shape the goddess, wafting over me all the blessed perfumes of Arabia, deigned to answer me in her own voice.

“I come, Lucius, moved by your entreaties: I, mother of the universe, mistress of all the elements, first-born of the ages, highest of the gods, queen of the shades, first of those who dwell in heaven, representing in one shape all gods and goddesses. My will controls the shining heights of heaven, the health-giving sea-winds, and the mournful silences of hell; the entire world worships my single godhead in a thousand gods; the native Athenians the Cecropian Minerva; the island-dwelling Cypriots Paphian Venus; the archer Cretans Dictynnan Diana; the triple-tongued Sicilians Stygian Proserpine; the ancient Eleusinians Actaean Ceres; some call me Juno, some Bellona, those on whom the rising and those on whom the setting sun shines, and the Egyptians who excel in ancient learning, honour me with the worship which is truly mine and call me by my true name: Queen Isis.”’


BLUE IN BLUE

2006


I fell asleep in my first love’s
Arms & dreamed I was
Drifting far at sea, through velds
Of brilliant blue. The sun

Brocaded the surface of my float
With dancing eyes so gold
I swooned, entranced, serene,
Scattered, drifting home at last.

Such blue was a new sky’s depth,
A new sea’s vault in heaven, my
Body wrapped in hers asleep
Beyond all surf and flesh for

All eternity and forever
Here and now. In that hour
After coming hard in her
I fell down in a sacred deep,

Baptized in the heart’s third blue:
A soak I’ll never sing or love but do.