Conception

A POEM is the bright convergence of many streams; e.g., when Sappho fiddled with her girls, the odour on her finger made her lyre sweet but never found its way into her words. There was a private bed and public laughter and there was the world all golden, a zodiac of special pleasures where perversion and health were both quite irrelevant. Perhaps there was--indeed there was--a time when readers found relief in such escapes and enjoyed the arbitrary play of words. No more. I feel myself, dear friend, that lyrics on their own are weak conundrums. Pierce the darkness webbed between the poems. There is a larger life sustaining them of which they are merely tokens. A proper surgeon can flicker blades like fingers, clipping, cauterizing, shaping the flow of that dazzling, too-much-to-be-believed reality. Let light bleed.

When I have faith
that I shall cease
to be, an unanticipated
calm comes over me,
and I can hope to heal.

I have no plot and certainly there's nothing novel here. Only Yat Ming looked about him and saw that life was difficult but good but lacked ornament and praise. If we never see ourselves becoming--pigs, so human in their physiology, if not properly fed will grow long hair, revert, that is, to the pre-pork stage of hound-goring boars. If we never see ourselves becoming our souls grow hair and when we copulate or work our physiology scatters into immelodious grunts. I saw I was a grunt, grunting in work and sex, yielding little and trying to keep body and soul together with no light or melody but what the televison gave.

Time rushes down upon us
in a cataract of days,
a noisy clamour of needs,
a clash of duties
that drown our intimate whispers.
Our children press their tiny cosmic urgencies,
distorting our bodies,
diverting our laughter,
blocking our lusts,
and claiming total territory.
All we have that we can call our own
is getting and arranging money,
and money both works and eats.
So as our bodies tire and our minds
grown tight with confusion,
we lunge and break like
swimmers gasping for the air
our two souls need.

So Esther, my Mei Ling, told me her plans and problems. Not so that you'd notice any control, but lists, and lists of lists, terror of poets, tools of our embourgeoisment, a sweet girl revealed as a Circe, the hag behind the virgin. Alas, a man's wild sex stiffens to be chastised, and a woman submits all sentimental juice and squeezings to a dry mirage. And so we started with a list of priorities (which means we must abandon first the things we love the most), and then went on to pads of procreative numbers: mortgages and charge cards breed a startlingly robust arithmetic. The cash nexus was the fiber of our nest and I was great with child. Esther saw my psychic waddle and took pity on me, releasing my desire and cradling it in her womb. And so our problems squared and squared again and plans proliferated into interference patterns and we learned to haruspicate like Einstein to see where the tangible particles are and she sees clearly she thinks but I do not.

All my joy's invested now in futures,
in these children, whose struggles
for the moment are only play.
I work from day to day
not just for money but to clear,
build, and beautify their way.
But what ghosts
attended them at birth?

O how it all began in a veritable whirlwind of delight there beside the pool with the light like shards of bright mica breaking on the chlorinated water and Joanna emerging from those waves like a fanged mermaid abeam with an anthropophagous grin of hello! The day was a song and we were borne on the deep charms of its harmonious burden from dark to dark. In that blue-burning interval of divided time, George arose, a fish-god clothed in a gorilla's skin, splitting the waves like a new vagina. Joanna was sitting on a towel next to ours, her black swimsuit clinging wetly to her small breasts, her hair a matted rage of natural red. Her long nose twitched above a lecherous laugh as she told how she'd met the Neptune stepping toward us. Seeking exits from her doctorate and hooks for a steady job she found an anthropological sun blazing white in the undoctored blue of the Aegean whence arose this George as he was doing now, all earth-brown, wet-down hair clinging around a hard fat swollen body, arms, chest, and back and legs and ass all fat and hair and muscle and the swollen hairy belly a laughter-bucket, a secret swill surmounted by a wide, white, wicked grin. But on that beach, sun-dazzled and emptied of even history, he had been naked and now we were missing his most active part. We laughed together, all of us, but his laughter rolled up like a damp wall of earth and Esther and Joanna laughed like bells with a firm hand on their clappers and I felt dry but laughing talking laughing until I was sure that the sun would split my skin. I slipped into the warming water, an afterbirth, a seed of memory, and let the small waves block and confuse the sounds. The chlorine burnt my eyes as it always did-­-empiric quacks that would bring so many privates and secretions into one soup only to try to murder them!

Anyhow, I never wanted much to see, and not now, not his bloody active parts in the humid mouldy corners of the changing room. I didn't have to. His eyes, as black as mine but bottomless, his strong white teeth, and his loud rowdy­ rousing charm bore me easily laughing through that time and out over the brown­ patched grass of the park. On the patio of the restaurant, in the sun-spotted shade of over-hanging vines, we drank our wine. Health and ease radiated from four bodies like a promissory note of pleasure. Joanna, chalk-white among those three brown skins, had all the suggestive melodies. I never saw Mei Ling more beautiful, her voice darting, feathery, pitched to silver, her brown eyes burnished with the day's delight. I heard myself, loud and witty, free, eating those girls' laughter like sexual dainties, and George. George. His baritone, fat and muscular, thick, pricked out the shape of everything we sang and gave us joys which could be circumscribed in no small measure.

I went home at nine because of work and left the three of them still drinking there. I saw the sun, refulgent now with memories of its climb, skim the blue still water of the pool with endless light. I thought of Mei Ling, so fat and round (my Esther), and Joanna, so slender, red, and white, and me so drunk, wanting now to work.

Li Po sat on the mid-thwart of his boat
heaving
weaving
in the water's gentling cradling sway,
drunk with the memories
the wine had brought to him.
He knew it wasn't physical wine
that washed his eyes
and floated through his brain.
It wasn't wine which made
the girls rise up from the starlit darkness
with delicate nipples bare
and impossible laughs.
Wine didn't bring those moans
that pale skin
those pale cheeks
bloated like fishes' bellies
wet with death.
All of his poetry
more than a thousand years of odes
were fisherman's fingers
strong for grasping and killing prey
agile for knotting nets
but the small truths wriggled through
and were free.
The wine in his body illuminated him
suddenly. Suddenly,
he was glad of the moon on the water's face.
Truth lay hid at the bottom of a well of light
and he went singing drunken verse
to a dark damp death below.

I heard George's laughter bellowing dominant over all, a bull drenched in salt­ foam with gold horns lowered, ready, wreathed in our trust and fear.

Two years we had been trying, two years without success, two years of thick white semen liquefying and dribbling through Esther's acrid fluids down her perineum to stain the bed. I didn't know that women had hair around their anuses. It was like discovering a map of pleasure. I was a Chinese Columbus discovering on pacific shores a milder climate and a more elaborate art. Even when she farted I was hard. Oh in the smooth, round moon-mound of her soft, fat bum I could come and come and come and the wet strong squeezings of her vagina milked my mind. With her long fingers and delicate nails on my back and buttocks Esther would trace out invisible tattoos of past pleasures and soon the past would swell and rise into an all-insistent, o-to-be-joined, wet-welded now. God can give no greater pleasure to a woman or a man than this procreative trust biology has laid in us. Not just the skin or those instruments that dance their miracles between our legs but the muscles that tie the bones, the blood that takes its pressure from the heart, the breath that flows high in shallow ecstasies, and the mind that knows the body well and truly now at last's its master, are called into this promise.

On that hot dark morning of that fecund, hot July, I opened the bedroom window hoping for a breath of air and then went to bed alone. Esther came home at four, die stille stunde, die starke stunde, die zarte stunde, die Wolfestunde, and she was fanged. Work had worn me through like limestone sponged with caves.

Still pools of sleep reflected fitful dreams and I lay motionless on my belly beneath a single sheet, trying to escape the molten heat, my skin a map of helplessness. When I awoke I felt a hot, fragile hand stroking the fine hairs above my buttocks. Esther, pool of pleasure. I was still. Her hand rose in a smooth stroke up my skin.

Ripples stirred in every nerve. I could feel the heat of her arm and smell the odour lurking in her passion, a scent to draw my wandering soul home. And I was throbbing, pressing on the bed the luminous ghost of a brilliant day. Her small tongue licked my neck beneath my ears again again like wavelets. Esther, foam-light delight. Esther. I turned to embrace her. Esther. Her dark eyes were stars, her face flushed with sex. My finger down between her legs found her loose and longing. Esther, daughter of delight, Esther, mother of numinous night, Esther, the soft fragility of your flesh breeds life in me and when I enter you, so open and so new I am in freefall, hard O Esther, singing, plummeting through shells of time to the centre of your power, dark, dense, unknowable, a tangle of singularities waiting to flare forth illimitable jets of future life.

We two slept and woke and loved and slept and loved, wet and hard and soft and seeking, nightwalkers of that fertile, humid night until in the first, soft, just perceptible light, our blood was quenched.

(And as they slept
the night swept over them
a silent wind.

His mind rose
like a bubble into dreams.
He heard a whisper
soft and wet with sleep:

I have been travelling
travelling to the past
long travelling she said

I saw you when I met you first
lying in our bed.
You were a virgin. I had thought
that you were cruel.

Was I?

No.

And now still
I am not entirely good.

He felt her thigh rise
up his leg. He turned
to take her as they slept the night
wind swept over them.

A wind of whispers
wound about their bed
and bound them to the darkness
with a sharp thin thread.)

Clouds had gathered and I heard thunder break against the sky.

"I love you, Esther."

"I love you too."

"Where were you?"

"We went to a late show at the Ritz. Die Zartlichkiet die Wolfe."

Before the rain, a cool breeze came blowing through the window lifting the sheers into small, humped, fluttering forms.

I've heard of storms that howl
over rivers or through valleys
like monsters that ravage
a young child's dream.
Such storms can make a steel bridge sing
and shudder it to ruin.
I have seen terror
split the earth
rising wrapped in a clinging wind
crisp and loud and clean.
And who can tell
before hopes ripen
where flaws lurk
or where our souls have been?

“Did it last till four?"

"O yeh. I guess so. Isn't George incredible? He's so full of life.”

"Hmph. What does he do?"

"He enjoys life, Eddy. He enjoys everything. He's a wind of joy breathing life into everything. He leaves the print of a passionate life on everything he touches."

"He's a walking pelt. He cares nothing for people and certainly he cares nothing for women." And I turn over and feign a numbing sleep.

And I can see my mother
sit still, tight-lipped,
her soft Jewish heart bound
by moral steel,
while my father
stamps in a childish fit.
She is silent but in my blood I feel
her howling, torn, alone
and as I fall asleep against my will
I moan.

"I don't know what's wrong with you, Eddy. Why can't you relax? You just had the greatest screw of your life and you can't let go. I just want to lie back and float. Thank God it's raining now."

I hear storms howling
through the valleys of my sleep,
stiff and turbulent winds
that twist the rivers with desire,
penetrating empty souls
and clothing them in fire.

What ghostly hands ushered
my daughters through their wet birth?
What flaws of heat and cold
could swell and corrode
their hearts?
Who can tell
where joy ends
and thwarting starts?
Confusion accumulates like a clot
in the heart of things,
and the source of all voices
like a caught bird
sings.