Albert's Landing

I've taken to swimming Little Albert's Landing,

From jetty to jetty in the late afternoon sun.

I can do it one way,

In one hundred modified backstrokes,

More or less,

Always keeping the sunlight in my face

And the empty hill that cradled the Bell estate on my left,

Gardiner's Island out across the bay on my right.

Literally no one on the beach or in the water for that matter

Except me, thousands of sand eels and wild-eyed baby blues,

A family of piping plovers pecking at the tide line and an osprey circling

And waiting, waiting, waiting.

I listen to my breathing, then, as I swim,

I listen to my heart beat, the sound of the water as it swirls about me,

The bright light dancing on the water,

Free-floating in this eclectic sea of hope, even as I struggle to accept these forces

That bind me to this earth,

To this pulsing sea, to this surging life around me,

To my own cell of pain.

Later, lying on a flat rock, giving my back it's heat and hardness, yes,

A man can be blind in so many ways,

Leaving his life to a future that will never come,

Circling and waiting, waiting, waiting

While all of the world pounds and swells beneath him,

Calling his name softly in its profound eternity.

Mud

The intertidal smell of mussels opening and closing as the skin pulls back. 
The black mud speckled with piss clam tunnels. 
Boys with flat sticks wiggling bare toes, a jab and thrust, clams in the air.
 Jabbing and thrusting is what boys do, piss clams flying through the air. 
Fiddler crabs peering out sideways from their hideouts. 
The boys scurry sideways to mimic the crabs, throwing long ribbons of seaweed at one another, in their hair, slapping their faces, flying though the air.

There were girls here the night before, girls and music. 

The boys swirled through their faint, sweet fog. 
The scent opened something hidden. 
The deep inside them mixed with the fog and doors opened everywhere. 
There are not always enough locks or keys to go around. 
Some of the doors are closed forever. Some doors are hanging off their hinges. 
Someone said once that everything has been thought of.

The boys think of these girls over and over again, they think of almost nothing else, they dart here and there after fiddler crabs as the bright light beats down on their bare skin and they think of girls. 

To stand on the water, to stand in a boat in the water, the salt drying in white streaks on their skin, their skin that longs for the girls hidden in the sweet, dank mud of desire before they even know it. 

Before they even know it they are thinking of girls again and again, even as they are covered in mud and seaweed and laughing sideways at each other they are still jabbing and thrusting though the sweet, sweet fog again and again and even, again.

Today is your advocate

I encouraged everyone to invest in you

Long ago we were a migratory phenomenon

So in love in dark little simultaneous conferences
And hot steaming bubbles of automobiles

Thrilling to far-flung places armed
With metaphors for social responsibility

We were a phenomenon known as ‘immovable minutes’

You circulated five million stolen moments
Capable of communing instantaneously

With what we were soon to be

I miss you; you left so suddenly
I still have all of your once-fringe issues

Rammed like a disease down the throat of your barometer

It’s a universe unto its own, all right
As I dreamed again you were dawning next to me

“It’s all about flow,” you said
Announcing the delicate technology of your luminous hips

A C T I O N P O T E N T I A L

take this moment for example
open the gate the flood of doves frightening
us like frozen little children
as if there were no mothers in the world
and I would ask, if I were there

    how to stop this death by holding
it's bleeding head under the tap?


watching you again for any signs of life
or distracting aromas
binding your hands behind you with
trans-atlantic cables

[another sun comes up]
[another goose is cooked]
[another letter lingers]
[reaching back]
[further]

remember at that moment

don't get distracted


remember losing this moment
as if you lose your keys or your last breath
unlike any other
we could spread it out like jam across a thousand loaves of bread

but there is no way

you could make
this army of  little children that we are
stop this apoptotic death
from penetrating
the glassine skin of our own history
 

I am here

I am here

Not quite a man then 

Stubble on the head neck
Awkwardly shirt off sun towel beach world

I am here years; then rain water on MacDougal Street
Front of Café Wha
Disintegrating newspapers sound from in/out
Looking for your hand

I am here uncorking a bottle of King’s wine
Small hill, golf course birthday dream
You are full with the roundness of spring flush

And I am here again with Robert Frost’s walls
The cowbirds are the only visitors
Save a lone chipmunk lightening speed
Having seen the shadow

You away, always away, always always
The yearning, the soul
There is a kernel of everything
Inside everything, inside every kernel there is everything

Drifting alone on Gardiner’s bay

Drifting alone on Gardiner’s bay,
No ship or neoprene raft between me and the crisp blue sea,
Just quantum gravity and millions of gallons of sea water
From as far away as Pretoria and Tierra Del Fuego, to make my fluid bed,
Hands behind my head, floating like a champagne cork,
My thoughts bubbling into the endless blue
Above and below me.
Salt on my lips, the sun making neon worms in the ripples.
My Cubistic world, my instinctual nihilism, my habitual obsessions,
Behind me and above me the swoosh/pause/swish/pause/swoosh
Of a fish hawk’s wings, the whimper of a dark wet mouse
Locked in powerful, unforgiving talons,
This life goes on around me, as I learn to float alone,
As I listen to my heart beat,
As I listen to my thoughts drop across the ocean like milkweed puffs,
Like water in water, sand upon sand,
With only love making me different than this ocean,
Than this warm sunlight, than this immeasurable, spinning world.

We had a predilection for flying

At least this moment, for at least this moment
We had a predilection for flying,
Sitting far back in seats 146b or 175c
Next to the window, the back of the plane
And if sometimes, passing over the marble steps of the palace
or the hidden interior of our own secrecy or sometimes after barely clipping our abyss
Of reluctant assimilation to reveal the mournful solitude of our dreaming
We would wake again drunk with the wind and everything that was flying with us
Over this dense black mirror of ocean everything that was supposed to be guarding us and
Our practiced stumbling our flight out of the tunnel our reeling into
The blinding light that we surged past now as if we were unaware again
As if we had just thrown ourselves up into the air and reached our hands out to fly