ISSUE: Autumn 1993
If this life’s the only text we have
and each day’s a page
of longhand, a rough draft of transubstantiating clouds
and each day’s a page
of longhand, a rough draft of transubstantiating clouds
that change from odalisque
to sine curve to pineapple to popcorn kernel
to kinks of uncarded wool
and then to nothing but the blank blue
of mindless heaven
without ever finding the one exact
monosyllable to describe
what our anonymous millionth millennium B. C.
author originally intended,
then I’d like to bequeath this poem as one more
endnote to infinity.
Let it be a variorum of all the voluminous
pages of new leaves
printed with light. Let me annotate the scrolls
of surf unrolling
on the beach where my wife and I walk, eating raspberry
Italian ices
in paper cones, our tongues lolling along the sheer
delicious deliquescence
of this the longest day before it all dissolves
to the spittle’s
tingle in the pink dark of our throats. Dull tongue stained
a telltale indelible
flamingo, let me whistle off-key and watch for hours
the ocean
dash its signature of foam and flotsam
along the high-tide line.
Tangled twine, driftwood, tarred dolls, and condoms
swollen with saltwater seed
all spell desire and the burgeon of oblivion.
Nine months pregnant,
my wife must stop for breath. She puts my hand
on her belly taut
as a spinnaker ballooning with the first gust of wind
so I may feel
again the kicks and shadow punches of our child snorkeling
in the warm saltwater
of the womb’s horseshoe harbor. We tell time differently
in the ninth month.
Our clock is the child knocking on the door of her cervix.
Her blood moves
to the tide’s timetable—rip, neap, flood, and ebb. She has passed
through the phases
of the moon from first quarter to full, and still to come
birth’s partial
eclipse. We are at zero’s zenith. Everyone
is celebrating
the long hours of sunlight by flying kites,
letting the string
slip through their fingers as the wind takes their lures
and lofts them,
parti-colored constructions of paper thinner than skin
with pine sticks
for bones, some in the shape of snakes or dragons
or pterodactyls,
competing with the screaming gulls. They strut the air and pantomime
in peacock feathers,
gliding and bowing to the pavane of wind that thrums
through the umbilical
of light-weight twine down to the hands of children who feel
each trill
and tremolo travel along their arms. Cut the lines loose. Let the kites
hover forever
on the updraft of this poem, I want to say. No words can salvage
the day in all its dazzle,
the rhinestones that the surf throws at our feet, the ocean
like crumpled tinfoil
spread out flat on a table. The children will reel their kites in
with nothing on the line
but their bright bait. Are words no more than kites whose long tails
troll the sky
for invisible bluefish with scales like tarnished silver,
which we will never
land, though we feel their pull? Twenty thousand feet
above sea level,
the jets leave their vapor trails, chalk marks the wind erases
with one slow hand.
Here, on the beach, sunbathers cast in bronze
doze or listen to the latest
crooner’s love song, the extended weather forecast, a news update
on more terrrorist bombings
in Beirut, while a one-prop plane flying low along the surf
pulls a streamer of huge cut-out letters
that proclaim SAM’S CLAMS, ALL U CAN EAT RESTAURANT & HAPPY HOUR!
Fifteen minutes later,
it returns flying the opposite way with its sign now backwards,
IRUOH YPPAH,
and TNARUATSER, words in a lost language that I repeat
to savor their re wed-up R’s
and roll of gutturals, which make me think of the Aramaic
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.
This is the day that the Lord our God hath made
and numbered
in all its contradictory glory, where a man and a woman
stand on the fulcrum
of the year and are not yet weighed in the balance that finds the world
wanting. In her womb
our child waits to come kicking feet first forth
into the blinding
searchlight of sunlight, to add its own wails to the sum
of all the other
cries, which are the only praise there is.
