The Swan

Here again, M stopped, and looked out at the horizon. Gulls were cawing at each other, seawater was turning into vapor, the final bits of light began to contract and transform themselves into the intensifying darkness.

M parked in the lot off Maidstone beach just as dusk was beginning to fall. The beach and jetty were empty; he'd seen the last stragglers driving off on his way in. The tide was moving, and M was sure the stripers and blues would be trying to feed up in the last rays of light. The salt spray hung in the air and coated his clothes and skin as he scanned the fading horizon for birds working the surf. M grabbed his light casting rod and knapsack, and headed to the bulwarked jetty. At the end of the rocks was an iron framework with a pulsing green light marking the channel entrance into Three Mile Harbor. At this point, the water is black and thick and moving too fast for many fish to linger. Off to the left twenty or thirty feet, the sea begins to slack a little into a back eddy. There, halfway across the channel, it is sometimes possible to entice a roving striper with a lure bounced along the turbulent bottom, or to encounter a school of marauding manic blues on their way inland. At least, that was M's thinking that night.

Gingerly making his way across the jetty, he came to a massive flattened boulder solidly wedged onto several others. Ten or twelve feet long and wider than he could stride, this is where M set his sack and released his lure. M was using a 3 oz. Hopkins with a bucktail hiding a single hook, but even that would get tossed around in this turbulent vortex.

It was off this jetty a number of years ago that two local Bonakers capsized in an unexpected, rogue squall. Their full rubber waders dragged them under and held them there. The Baymen's bodies weren't found for several weeks. This part of the sound can be treacherous and unpredictable at a moment's notice.

Directly across the channel M could still make out the rocks and sand of Sammy's Beach. At this point, Three Mile Harbor opens out into Long Island Sound, which in turn opens out into Block Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean.

Suddenly, from behind and slightly above him, M heard a sudden, shatteringly loud rushing, a sound not unlike a train speeding through a tunnel, a sound so foreign and unfamiliar that it made him reach for something to hold on to. At first, in the dimming twilight, he couldn't see anything except a mass of glowing white hurtling through the shadows. As he turned to face it, he saw the entire length of a massive swan's body feverishly pumping its enormous, cumbersome wings; the whitely sinuous neck outstretched and its glowing, orange beak pointed straight at M's head. It was traveling fast and furiously, and leveled right at his eyes. The sound was deafening, and paralyzed him for a moment. M had never in his life heard such a sound, and there, precariously perched on a boulder at the edge of the sound, in the trailing light of the approaching darkness, the specter of this ascending swan flew straight at M's head.

Throwing the pole to the sand at the edge of the beach, he teetered on the jetty rocks about to catapult into the churning breakwater surf. The huge ball of hurtling white struck his shoulder and outstretched arm. As his balance failed, he began to list over towards the raging current, M thrust his weight to the left, slipping down the rock and tumbling into the sand and tide-washed seaweed. The apparition had now righted its huge body and gained the speed and altitude necessary to make its way over the pulsing channel light.

Lying in the wet sand, the rising pools of surf making puddles around his fingers, his heart beating frantically in his chest, M gazed into the darkness after the receding thunderous sound. Several moments of near silence went by, the memory of the sound began to fade and blend with the sound of the saltwater tossing the sand, the sound of cicadas, the sound of his lungs contracting and expanding . . . the jetty became the jetty again, the darkness fought with the light, the world became the world again that was the world just moments before.

how it is

There is just one moment
that then projects the next moment

The caul of word

"The Myth is the art of living" - Laura Riding


The way we are, how we are born
In what recent guard we quake
By deeper root our newborn eye is cast
As newly born, rising, head covered by shroud of language
Growing these names in circles, circles, asking

"What name is this?"

Being the being for, the being to
Drowning in the talking, the gestation,
Our thick, steamy, ancient veil of mutuality

"Let us not talk of this, or that or such and such"

Of those sleeping membranes between life and death
Of exceedingly neglected things, ideas, pertinence?

"Let us call it this or that, or such and such"

In all our propitiousness
As Language builds and clings to myth
As roots nurture a growing irrevocable function of time
As words fix things to become what they are
The newborn caul sets, the fresco dries
The ruse is passed, the moment is lost
The language is learned, word is carved in stone
Unbroken the veil becomes the face of moment
All moments, all faces, all things

Little waves

Why not make poetry out of Tsunamis?
Your oceans are so small, too small to carry home the local coast
That amounts to too little water and too little wind in your canal
Too few ripples in this rogue ocean you carry inside you
After all your energy, all those little valves and capillaries
Those miniscule rivers hidden inside your liquidity,
that flowing invisible pasture
This is not God talking
God is just something you invented to share the blame
His flow, anyway, is the only cinematic blip in your apocalyptic surface
Ride on for a little, these Warholian minutes
That you continue to be so fond of
Here today gone tomorrow
Generally, elsewhere, even

What does not stand upon words?

What does not stand upon words?
The blue snow melting in the palm of your hand
Your miniature face in the hesitant drop
The murmur of your electricity
Sounding to the chatter of tiny birds

What will not stand upon words?
To give them form and purpose
How the brightest light becomes
So burdensomely heavy
How love passes through
The sieve of hearts
So effortlessly
And so permanently

How could we stand upon our words?
The pure stillness of your hair in my face
The counting and bearing of moments we are apart
The defiance of our stand on eternity

What cannot construct upon words?
Our precious, plausible, monumental selves
Our noumenal sense of longing
The kindness of the evening glow

What cannot come to pass
In these remorseless seconds
Of blue and precious memory?
I will stand for you
and you will stand for me
As these hearts and fragments sense
Which words will stand and stand alone.

She gone

She gone her skirts burned at the beginning of the wheel
one wheel the dull stairs, the ones where the fields
are stretching past the rectangle of the window
Before she knows her time is out now--you must silence
the stiffening step and she gone, her skirts at the wheel
This is the sound you know, have come to know,
The look over the shoulder the just beginning

She gone 2

(Before she is the small curve of time from the beginning)

I am already gone sanctified
one wheel has cracked the remedy is broken
the rutted road is no longer passable
In the distance I can see the fields breathing into the ocean
See how the Phragmites dance in the wind
From here there is only a small curve of time
between the beginning and the end
She’s gone my lively laughter lifting
onto your table herself the one wheel only
--you must be silenced with the terrified of her
This is her shoulder her skirts stepped over, useless
She’s at the end again lively and very wanting to know
She ends horrified before you can come to her
This is the time: Before she becomes all that remains
Before she is the small curve of time from the beginning

Someone else lives in this house

Someone else lives in this house
Up the stairs in the eaves on the north side
behind the far bedroom I think
I know because I have begun finding things
Odd things, out of place during the whole of a dull, dark,
and soundless day, in the autumn of the year,
When the clouds hang so oppressively low in the heavens.
There was the night the eviscerated fawn screamed like a murdered child
The night the wind formed echoes of other people’s voices down in the hollow
I often passed alone, through a singularly dreary splash of country,
Looking out upon this dream, knowing that someone else
lives in this house up the stairs behind the bedroom wall
I have looked closely at these other lives
And have begun to sense the urgency of this place
I think in the eaves on the north side
I know because I have begun finding things, certain things
In and around the soundless evenings
with the constant drawing of the voice
this view from the other side, this finding of things
And others, out of place and even others,
Someone else, through the entire length of day
found when the clouds are in the heavens,
multiplying this melancholy with the
sternest of supernatural images
within the desolation of a dull, dark,
and distant shade, I singularly perceived
that dreary and terrible reverie,
Up in the north far bedroom
Low out beyond the passing tract of country;
upon the scene itself, as the stairs rise
behind the eaves one year, the knowing then
that I am not in this house alone