Novella about a WWII vet who returns to civilian life as a deep-sea diver and confronts his war-past through a series of hallucingenic undersea visions.
Gregg G. BrownORDER OF CHAPTERS
U2s moved on the condensed sweat
The four sacred roses of the jellyfish
Without wires the wrasse tilts
The cartoon hermitcrab's claws
Damselfish retire among clumsy spines
A starfish protested on a clamshell
Someone has drawn the Venetian blinds
The sea sunfish takes its colossus
The chainsaw falls through a redwood
The blank pebbles the glaciers
The whole gale starts at 56 knots
The house exploded in broad daylight
A ceramic statue of Clark Gable
The Triassic period painted Dolphins
Neat as soldiers in their Union blue
"Sea Dragons and Flying Freaks"
The squat sea bug emanates its death
Prodding the Cariaco Trench with a humongous
The straight knitting needle of the piston-corer
A waterfall sugars the cliffside
A plate of squiggles, extravagant as pasta
In meditative aspect, the inverted rockweed
El Peno does not threaten its hot arrival
One-island volcanoes, bone ribbed
This is the submerged cunt of Asia
The 14 toothed triggerfish dismantles
Evolution knows no death is sin
The tabernacle prism skin undulates
An arrow painted on highlighted plywood
Mid-Atlantic ridge and rift, echoing Africa
The Gulf Stream, falls on snow-blue paper
Chocolate-striped like a dapper cookie
Inverted antlers of the mangrove roots
The Angola Abyssal plain is burnt
The crimped sail bakes in sunlight
A lighthouse steams in the spermy Switzerland
It is a matter of energy. It is a matter
The iris accumulation of the coral
Nightshade and venus forced to bloat
The deep sea eel folded like a carpet
It comes from the demanded drama
II* Therefore *
Straight from the inked and crisscrossed terrors
The goat-eyed squids in the pebbled foreground
Dominated by dinosaurs, the quick lizard
A subtle Pteraspis sucks my will
A dime shines brightly in the dark bar
My life's a wreck. The vital squeal of will
Tremendous music billows from the plush
Lost in space, my stale head clunking in a tin globe, viewing a grey paste through temporal cracks and volcano holes, I can make nothing of my present situation except that I am trapped in static; bounced by automatic satellite between two steel grids, I turn my hamburger-raw back under the rough canvas in search of a flame, some ignited center of attention in this dimensionless mist. I can't breathe, a broken lightbulb fizzing on flesh in the dark.
I am embedded in the sulfur solar plexus of the sea. The poison spits, grey plume obliterating nothing in darkness. A sunk vent, spewing swift heat in a pure blood loss. Comfortable as occupied couches, flesh familiar, warm as afternoon vinyl, these submerged currents-- settled at the bottom of the sea, the impossibly cold deep-- spear about their thin exit crack in radiant rivers, a thermal Japanese flag.
Weightless in abeyance, I take this limbo-time out to count up my spiritual gaps, close over unmarried miscarriages with an institutional brand of scar tissue. The cut-out construction paper face of my first slim girl, sweet Christy, rises from the red pulp background of her dad's borrowed car. Her crystal face hovers in photographed abstraction over our awkward manipulations on the squeaky backseat. The next time I saw her wealthy daddy's face, it bore the worried maze look of a bisected head of lettuce. A tense Roosevelt, still smiling in his fourth, fatal term, floats in his tin-lizzy glass rims above my remembered draft card. These images disassemble in a brown boil. Nothing builds toward significance in the heated sea. My head sweats. I feel as if my liquid body were terminating in steam. No war welts my agile hands to fists. Nothing is delicate to me but Christy's nipples, her left breast the size of a grenade I have brought here to bury.
An ice cream cone of sulfur kills the fish. Rock erupts upwards. An infant island takes cubist form; in Hiroshima mist a cloudy crown envelopes a cut stone semblance. It carries the elemental authority of dreams. This is a birth. It is the flayed up and cock craved skirts of mother earth, balling through space, turning on her blue fauvist side like a lazy hippo.
Clumsy in canvas gloves, I give my tinsel instruments a quick feel. Poverty hands under sackcloth. The glowing dial, perched above my thumb and index finger like a windshield, says in accurate millimeters that this volcanic pimple won't wake a new Hawaii; it will simply pile invisible cinders in a submerged underworld made devoid by liquid fire of all vegetation. Perhaps the warted frame of a chemical company exhausts its livid fumes through the cracked rock nipple. Nothing in nature has developed a mouth for this.
Through my faceplate, like an invisible diner dish, I am confronted with a corrupted image of myself, my society. According to recent evidence, a hive of life will be pulled here, a collapsed puppet. This albino hive will not extend twenty feet beyond the rim of heat their sulfur source emits. Like the floursack faces of 19th century city workers, receding in paleness beyond a discernment of features, a bleached summer sky of converging August, uneating worms, drained of their red earth color and inflated to tractor innertube dimensions, mouthless crabs with welded jaws sulking in seamless exoskeletons, and every stone garden monstrosity brought to able life, electric Frankenstein mobility, minus the vital punctuation of weeds, will gather their oblique underlit countenances around the flaming ash can in front of me. They will bring a sculptured darkness to the poison atmosphere, moving oddly sideways in habitual blindness, blocking or isolating themselves randomly in the usherless movie house.
U2s moved on the condensed sweat of the Mediterranean past charbydis with motors out. The civilized tears escape from Lebanon, flake dry from the shouting Greeks, shoot from the opera of Italy, slap off the clean beaches of an annoyed France, tumble the dark oil film of Spain, scream from the internecine nightmare of Africa. The heavy current slides on the pedestal of Gibraltar. The light Atlantic Ocean dazzles in. The level of this sea is constant.
On my first trip to Europe, I killed a Gothic town. I was burning in the 121st regiment. It was just the other summer. Black in my wax-sheen wetsuit, I blew up a munitions factory with waterproofed dynamite. I hid behind the tread of a German tank some plastered church had swallowed. Holy glass lit up with the explosions. Job smiled beneath his multi-colored boils; the sinister sulk of the tank's sway-back body inherited his outlines: bright, abstract as flowers. I returned to the buoyant teardrop of the Mediterranean quietly as a cyclist.
With my light head half under water, the dark sea seemed to encircle the incinerated star of the town.
+ x *
A fish suspends itself in whiteness. It untangles its blue form in air. It is dying for air in the distorted ocean of its origins. Its body is the worn hammer weight of an overused sinker smelted from horseshoes. Its days pace out the ocular round of its sky-affixed eye. This is the religious fish that will clamber through evolution into Jesus' tunic. The stiff back of the Thelodus is ready to work. The inflexible lobster skin will spring into hands that preach or divide bread like a factory blade, incomparable in its equalness. One can see in the dull lumps of the fins, blurred as a breast restoration, the infant hands that unearth a Lazarus among us.
I think that's what I see among the razorback rhythms of the fan coral, the empty blue tankards of anemones. A red timberline in ghostly horizon flames marks the faded boundary of my imagination, the worn slur of distance and underwater weather that let golden instances flare in the generalized haze. These are the metal insecurities of the light that I can own, that can float in a distant flatness I can project upon, like Christopher Columbus' blanked-out sea map. I see the extinct and hide-bound fish glide.
It opens the asshole oval of its sucker mouth like a VP. It could have survived the atomic war, the whittle of evolution, time's shuttle and all that, in its executive shelter. The monotone suit alone proclaims its station, one runty fin above its fellows. It flashes into exotic underbrush. Complicated as a paisley, the ragged edges of this reef defy the engineered stencil of a visible boundary. My Thelodus, exiled emperor out of his concrete hut, is striped by far-away fingers of light into the assumption of extinction, rare as any saint, breathing pure Perrier in his hidden castle.
Militant in pinnacled rows, a single live spike detaches itself. A small whip of licorice wraps the vertical snout, which could be the stump arm of a Nagasaki victim. The whip (a whiplet, actually) attaches like a supple twig to the long cut of the pipefish mother's mouth. It is one of the broken attachments that used to manipulate the sewer lid keys of a tossed out clarinet. The thin thread of the baby feeds, suckling its mother's slit jaw at its termination; it could be the wire of an accident victim, a dietary aid, the wasp end of a cartoon bubble left blank for speech. They are perfectly alike, this madonna and child, perfect as seahorses in their filigreed presences, the bass and high notes together, the swift attunement of their flagellating dance, as if attached, the grotesque body of the communal amoeba fluctuating in the invisible heaven of their mutual desire like a golden steam organ.
Simmering four feet in front of my hothouse eyes, is this a lacramae memory from childhood or a shimmed up sham and puppety vision of the afterlife ?
+ + +
The four sacred roses of the jellyfish trap a baby pipefish under its transparent proscenium. The roses close over a head as fine as a horse's, made in miniature as if inscribed in the face of a wristwatch or carved in the triangle side of a class ring.
The pipefish's tail extends beyond the plastic wrapped death of its head; the tip of the tail contains the baroque serrations of Renaissance metalwork and is the exact shape of a scallop whose mouth has been glued shut. As the pinhead eye of the pipefish begins to dissolve in the overhead gardens of the perfectly round, serene as Krishna jellyfish, the shivering tail continues to exhibit its supreme artwork, the unenclosed fan of its tip beating and beating.
I feel like that, clamped in my Greek bronze helmet, shaking a furious whip of attached tin cans, a cheap echo of fate in the full-of-sounds water, the cramped rattle of mockery, the stolen and paperclipped on style of some Augustan age that was incapable of tragedy. Flirting visions hold my head in a vice, creaking like Uncle Fester, popping towards health, the last release of an untimed death. The clear panes of the jellyfish flinch. Reverse sweet pangs of birth.
Graduating out of a salt sea meditation capsule, locked against light or the undue radiation of others' actions, the plashing appearances of their variable mood ring existences, hueing towards a dwarf blue, I feel the shrinking pressure of wetcap death crowning my clenched cranium in its soulful honorarium of persistent consciousness, the held flame of a name flickering behind the nervous protection of a claw. Closed in the translucent condom of this perception, I watch the tied-shut iridescences of the nascent pipefish's gills stop their fluctuating struggle upwards. Dull beneath the milky substance of the jellyfish there is a miniature, expressionless face.
The mating pipefish pair are suspended in a tinsel cross, opposed clockhands or the gold hilt of a knight's sword held in aquarium illumination.
The unconscious weeds drift in dullard imitation of them, aching for the delight of life, watching their medieval Adam and Eve pronounce like Chaucer on the flat cart serving as a stage that contains hell, heaven, and earth with its brakes locked. The pipefish themselves are barely able to be distinguished from the drift mass of the weeds, except in this position, paying their taxes, or when at last they die, abandoning the spear forest of their slow friends, silently floating on a full air bladder towards the sky.
Later, I see their embarrassed bodies curling over themselves in contemplation, dull among dull tall weeds, every live egg of the female deposited in the male's pouch, whose musical skin, rubbing through the water like a sandpaper accompaniment to the marimba, reminded of past lust by his fat abdominal sack, which now bulges with the uninstructed young. Ten thousand Cains and Abels.
My heterosexual middle will never thicken like Tiresias with fatherhood, ready to burst with abandonment.
+ + +
A tinted fish backs into a puff mushroom. Actually, it is an anemone, with Buckminster Fuller's forehead and all the self-centered attentiveness of a yogi. Mom used to say the dust from a mushroom big enough could kill a careless dog, if it wasn't raining. A fish was dying in the drowned arms that would digest its center into nothingness.
Noticing nothing, the lion-yellow interior of the anemone begins to act like a furnace with the plutonium control rod just shoved in. All the movements of the tentacles are placid. It is as if regulated by the intricate manipulations of a new computer or shuttered like a camera that operates on the pull of a single string. It settles to its digestion. Slavered slivers of fish fray in its inflated lemon belly. That the now-casually fisted anemone did not bend back for a nearby beer surprised me, it was so numb in all its diminished motions, its glossy squalor and pear plush nether half, lust saffron, static as an inverted top.
My flounced-by-tides form floats before its sun colors. Angled towards its pure helium burn of beginning, of destruction, I see its squat shape as a hepatitis icon of the combined in oil and set alight desires of my life; my military insistence of goal and instant zen rejection of same. It had the minor glow of a soon to be devastated hill, blown bald by dynamite, hunching behind me in sunset robes, the only accomplishment I could accept and deny. This was my twisted paradox of worthless achievement realized. My bounced and dissolved baseball.
Squeezing towards the retinal echo of its fierce yellow, my glasshouse eyes return to the citron hut back at basic, the raucous grenade target we were supposed to explode. Pinching off the exposed, unpainted fishhead for a safety pin, I toss off the open pineapple of the anemone, uselessly stinging my Catfish Hunter hand, lobbing it into a lush face of swaying coral, blotched as my broken mirror reflection.
Without wires the wrasse tilts in blare red connected by alternate electric blue and carnally virgin white square stripes that target its squad of buck tusks emanating from the rectangle of its mouth like candy corn. The ejected side fins are perfectly oriental fans blasted to a clean sun yellow active as Van Gogh by a rocket ejection of energy necessary to paddlewheel it towards its prey.
Flying at my facemask with underwater velocity, the wrasse's eyes begin to clear into shielding a bullet of black that must be absorbing the flattened and torqued image of itself from the silver blip of my mask. If its clumped cornea, increasing at an angry speed, were the uninhibited diameter of the Astrodome, its small bulb of perceiving midnight would be the destructive size of an MX missile.
The wroth wrasse veered, an expanse of striped circus tent canvas disappearing quick as a staff car's flag, past my peering mirror oval, shy as an obese lady. As I turned, an abrupt minute hand clicking my stone feet over, I could see the disturbed flutter that followed its shivering tail. It bit water.
The far waters began to unfocus into a glow, the depleted spray of a hydroelectric plant's deenergized water, a misted limpidity almost, a distorted effect of dust of August lifts of heat on an open road. This shimmering hinged on the wroth wrasse's tail, leaching its colours, paling out from a Muslim paradise to a puritan heaven, making me ache to be instantly against it, a sealed condensation unable to penetrate its slick unchosen glass. I flowered open my folding chair soul, rivering ribbons of veins perhaps, from the agitated center fan of my ice heart. I longed for a boundaryless existence, pure liquid in that liquid, mercury among the motes and flashes of the sea, delineating nothing, characterless, permanently crippled into the blank inability to caress a trigger, ring a blush nipple with the same finger, unable to decide and divide at all.
The cartoon hermitcrab's claws hook like a surgical clamp. Already it has removed its tumorous questionmark body into a larger shell stiff as a plaster cast. Picking its way through sand for rocks and food, it has found an injured companion that now crests his shell, an incandescent anemone that outgrew its perch, or whose crispy coral, slick with a surface of new cells, was broken in awkward halves by the local tarde in human feet. The two-inch hermitcrab grinds through the fabulous canyons on his paws like a camper, in search of a campsite with his burning backpack.
I follow the path of his armoured tongs on my paws. I have surmised that he has the practical man's knack for finding an operational Shangri La, open to paying visitors in a tourist season. The hermitcrab hunches past the intestinal flower of a sea cucumber with a steady awkwardness. A paramour of pastiche, he heads for a mismatched clump of coral, suggesting the richness of the Great Barrier Reef in its grocery display. As I tug a paused limb from the hungry obstruction of a lobster, I can see the torchbearing body and shell of the crab disappear into a black oval beneath a bone dead outcropping of inaccessible coral.
I do not give up. It is a sexual experiment, daring me to rush through and manipulate its symbols like a frontline deck of marked cards, played under the covered glow of cigarettes, dogeared by subtle evolution, a cheapskate. My world-first feet hit the soaked sand with a soft crunch. I bend down slowly, inflating an intestinal tension in my belly. Through the jagged Rorschach hole, penile breast implant absence of darkness, no anemone illumination exits. Too small for the exaggerated metal outline of my ego to enter, I shove a condomless fist into the mixed feeling of that black ink territory, bottomless as my memory of home.
I wait for something nameless to attack, detecting nothing.
The stinging cell of a jellyfish contains a long thread coiled like a spring. Its transparent skirt shifts. It stays the floating helmet that dissolves its edges into environment in the unprincipled undulations of living; so far from the detested abstraction of a war death, that my soul unloads like an orgasm at its darting flutters. Flummoxed.
Phosphorescent in a field of dark blue, this animated medal of some dead Union soldier collapses its helmet, along with the sheet-thin helmet's few cells of contents, into a ridged point, like a tripled arrow whose edges intersect each other to form a starburst pattern as it enters the eye. The minuscule jellyfish, enlarged by my dollop of attention, shoots and pauses forward like a politician. Now it hangs, a glowworm's eaten inch away, caught on the nail of a decision that could rip the heart-like flutter of its transparent brain cells into an unlabelled pulp.
No bigger than a displaced eyeball, it is strangely watched and identified with, a voyeur's introspection. One's mind releases to a thin purple in water, a peignoir outline, the light aurora of a watch magnet barely magnified. Its aquatic undulations are infectious. One begins to move in phosphorescences. Pulse. Pause. Pulse. Pulse. An inner film of black rubber echoes ones translucent actions. One tumbles in elongated taps on the gigantic head of a drum membrane. Being in this way an ear, eyeing ones way through unclear liquids, one starts to pick up the buried syllables of the sea, the shovelled whaps of the waves, sharp augments of urchins in stiff sine curves that almost translate into surface sounds, sharp tack of a competitive bat, the blunt nose of an unloved and hungry shark almost entering ones cellophane flesh in words.
Damselfish retire among clumsy spines. Their black bodies are striped in lime and lemon; the lime-green spines dangle their pink tips placidly above them, circulate in cool coos around their fins. Like all women, they are indifferent. They are pleased by their trio dance, or delighted. The south sea anemone which encloses the dozing bodies of these fish is as fat as a forsythia bush. The green limbs excrete a protective juice filled with the intricate codes of peace; this is how each stinging spine, blind, knows not to attack its neighbor, how to avoid the human convulsions of guilt and self-flagellation; Einstein hair on a weighted corpse gone wild. The ladylike fish in their ringed skirts inherit the flower's secretions. Hooping in and out of the rose-tipped and saturated pine needles, sewing in the contractual tears, the slow bleed of each live leaf that sweats an aura against death, the damselfish become aware of some minor victory, a distorted rumour from defeated Greece perhaps, become proud and exhibit a matronly swivel, know that they possess some important inoculation against desire.
My rape hand commands them. Counselling a caught fish to my cloth breast, I whisper Caesar desires into her unblinking Cleopatra eye. I unzip the reluctant crest of her sweet spine. Wild against my hidden palm, her gnostic body declares. Light enters my stung and swelling heart, a complacent poison that raises a Byzantine cathedral in my rib cage. Suddenly compelled, I unfist her.
Almost post-coital in my underwater jumpsuit, I find myself sinking among anemones. Knees twist like a sleepy hinge. Distorted adumbrations against narcoleptic fits arrow by. Their green ignited spines console my spine, swamped like a snake among its frittery children.
I cry and cry. My dark helmet is dashed with mercury.
A starfish protested on a clamshell against a seawind. Orange arms wavered backward silently in a grey blue. An argot rock underpinned the dramatic tightrope dance. One clown end fingertip cupped a C. The clamshell rocked with a cockle sound. It held the unconscious hand of the starfish like a candle on an antique stage's edge; the set was bathed by an indifferent light from an outside source, making the isolated scene look dimly backlit as Plato's cave, standing still on the horizon of colour, awaiting an increase in the light, the embarrassing high-beam of Fate, perhaps, some ushered in notice from a void, shotgun applause, something to make the central knuckle of the orange dockworker starfish, sunk in its anonymous union and manipulations, begin to develop a face.
But for now, the fluttering tentacles of the starfish, riding its serrated clamshell like a spur, remains the held diminishment of a candle, opening on emptiness, illuminating nothing.
This is how I wobble, indecisive against the indifferent curtain of the ocean. Its thick, blocked blues diffract the hot spot of the sun, which creates the illusion of other-attention in the minimalized, fried-oyster flesh of humans. Desert Indians especially fancy the universe in constellation around themselves. But here, pale in a pale light, one picks up on the subtle differences, the switched alphabets, the garbled typefaces of life-forms finally allowed to blink a thin halo of identity out of themselves in the dark lack of interstellar competition.
One sees the starfish instead of oneself. Its leggy flames open an orange inside, a silvery cocoon of exposed mirrors, detailing shoplifters, noticing the neon outposts of the beings next door. One sees its litter of suckers, aching for attachments. One touches its sandpaper back.
Someone has drawn the Venetian blinds, separating the dusty parlor from the street. Someone has thrown a tremendous circus tent on its side, or put convict stripes on a whale. The regular lines of the wall in front of me shimmer, like the triple advertisements hanging in sexy judgement in JFK; it disappears. The flooding flesh of ten thousand fish has disappeared.
This is how the porkfish, elegant in their magician suits, school their fragile young. All of the fish are striped as a warning to sharks, the scarred alteration of a half-loaded or stiff paintbrush marks the flaking shingles of their old house bodies front to back. Quick with the reduced drag of their foreshortened foreheads, these fish remember how to grow old, the antelope speed of a pack dispersed confusing the thousand hungry teeth of the barracuda that follow.
Finding my bald bearings in the swirled silence of this sudden emptiness, I feel the shifted gravity of an astronaut, released from the hot thermos of the spaceship, fanning his domestic mind with its mute closetful of notions into the distant ache of the periwinkle stars. Even an inveterate slob would be sucked into the abstract. This is our original garden, winking under the distortions of distance and atmosphere, allowing, in holy stillness, contracting diurnal pulsations of breath, a far swerve in the murkiness to be perceived. In our image of God, once out of the bright shadows of ourselves that we create and chase, is founded on something like this, a dimple in the black felt, a small warp of uninstigated motion in an uncontrasted blank the instant, unpredictable shattering of appearances has dropped us in.
A sharp reef or quartered moon interrupts my vision.
The sea sunfish takes its colossus namesake's ball of mass to make a solid 49 square feet of flesh. It's half a fish, ending abruptly behind the kayak paddle fins that slice its treetrunk body symmetrically, looking at its injured condition, one suspects in a few billion years its remaining hydrogen will eddy into the blue halo of a supernova.
It is a dwarf, this tight ton of fish, maneuvering its fixed and oppressed expression through the sea like a cerebral palsy poster. Its fist of mouth pouts in a permanent oval; it has nothing to say. Despair is silence personified, it seems to imply. All art is trash. The warped bones buck out under the castor oil skin taut as arching bows, strong as the diseased determination of a kamakazi pilot.
By the sheer effrontery of will it swims, chugging forward, a thrown Acheulean stone axe, leaving an awkward whistle behind it as it splits the air. Now it plunges into a confused underworld of jungle growth. I follow its bumblebee speed on finned feet, hanging a hundred feet over a neon orchid orchard of coral. In the puffed-out blimp-bulge of my hand-sewn suit, I dive on an aircraft carrier acre of reef. Dodging a control tower of patched pink and irregular amber, tilting at a steep heil-Hitler angle, like a retarded Mercury, I see the cerebral palsy path of the sacred, almost Mayan, sunfish move into a clotted grotto of colours. I kick my feet with a spastic rapidity, the crayon strokes of a cold child, in order to catch up with the compact fat of the distant sunfish. Moving through a green cloud of seaweed, struggling towards the physical lightness of a greater depth, I reach the black, bunched roots of the plants and grab at the covered rock support to propel myself downwards to the dark cove where the fish has hidden itself. I feel the blunt outline of the diffuse rock slip along my hand and a sharp vagina of pain opening in my palm. My punctured skin explodes in a linked stream of globes, chugging towards Auschwitz, mushrooming upwards in an underlight like umbrellas flooded on all sides, phosphorescent over a Nagasaki of industry, an intense weave of activity on all scales, busy as a bombed anthill.
Forcing my way by a blood hand, leaking air in pneumatic gasps, I gained the gold cove of the sunfish. It had set itself up in a solar system of brain coral, a central hub amongst warts or cartwheel rivets on an overturned wagon spinning against the sky; I took up the cold Pluto position, swamped in black, invisible among stars, with the stinging spin of a closed fist for asteroid-orbiting moon. The sunfish fluctuated its cut gills in a steady state. Losing a galaxy of red interstellar dust from my trailing unconscious right hand, I circled in the deteriorating spiral of an electron, ready for quantum action, the only diminishment towards a central authority that emanates light.
Swirling past the Jupiter clump, crimped as a living cortex with knowledge, I arrow in towards the solar bullseye, a clean burn of hurt animating a ghost arm starting at the balled socket of my ragged right shoulder. Mars moves under me like a silent movie, a red tear in my unconsciousness. A film of lukewarm water encases me up to my chest, a fresh blanket of apostolic charity. My light mind is slowed and drugged by salt erosion. Mercury boils just ahead of me, flooded yellow, slicing a planet of shadow from the yellow ache of fan coral supporting in pentagon altar fashion the unlimited caliber artillery shell of the sunfish, humming an atomic solipsism to itself, aiming at everything.
My drained-out-of-blood limbs detach in a flash.
The pulseless pod of the sea cucumber eats with its belly out. An anal blossom appears when it is calm. At any alarm, it resumes the use of its rigid skin. I have never seen one move. A contented chess piece, it lets the aqua wind spoon-feed it plankton and digestible parts of the dead. I think that no sea cucumber corpse exists. It is one of God's Eternals. Its recurrent ubiquitousness has a quality of permanence, of subservience to fate.
Could this fat blob of pickle think ? Sunk in the lumpy outlines of a tour bus, I extend my gauntleted Godzilla arm and lift it like a fake train, incubated high-impact Japanese plastic; a fake man in a rubber suit, appearing avant-garde before a cameraless sea. The hungry delicacy of its flesh flower withers, an innercity reaction, a lopped desire, the Puritan reaction of oppressed and pressed-in blacks, Buddhistic refugees stabbing themselves like Christ with a nail bed, bursting like jellied napalm with gospel tunes and blues.
It is a religious instrument, this mindless gherkin, waving in my unmirrored hand like a distorted wand. Invoking no music in the restless gurgle of the gastrointestinal sea, I shove the holy mass away from the duplicate blunder, God's blunt stroke of efflugenceless pink, of my soldered-in body. I breathe my registered air like an under-glass candle, burning littler and littler, like Alice, the longer I look at what silently exists under us when we walk on the earth.
Unbuckling my lead tarot cards of weights belted like Orion at bellybutton level, I start up like a bubble, demagnetized from the Maya grief of reality, fantastic as lust rising in a dream towards dryness, a final dehydration of altitude and perspective, with a weatherballoon's sensitivity of registration, caught in a cirrus crustacean of vision perhaps, and break into the ordinary air to hear a tin echo of electronic trumpets loudspeaking Farsi from the permanent carnival beached nearby.
The formal sky blue tiles of its adept legs hinge and point. What do they indicate ? Polite as a tuxedo, psychedelic as nightmares, the blue crab's pincers close on empty water, sift sand. It is a mobile arena of drama, this crab, caught on its tense line of hunger so intense only a pinched child from the submerged Third World could understand. The claws, red and black at their business tips, have evolved from want. Unbruisable, the interminable craving of a blunt digit split, dividing its sky of mass to diminish the scissoring ache of necessity. But, intuitive as Henry Moore, the projectile desire arched from expression into usefulness. The castanet claws in endless repetition of practice conduct the compass pinions of the skipping-rock flat, radar-round center of the crab in the timing of the precise, impinging, untranslatable marks that start across the opinionless sand.
For all his crunch of claw, bruised paramour, his jerky way among auburn rocks, his flash of Scottish steps upon a plain, plaid skirt of rocks, it is his dwindled eyes that receive the diminished sacrament. This sacrament of sight is everlasting, in its whir of hues, despite empty manipulation of empty hands, perfect for uninvented levers. The blue crab huffs against the shouting coral, the crimson skull, universal skeleton, chalky relic, omnipotent bone. Distorting snowy sinews in a distracted winter of effort, it is, medallion of unbitten blue, perfect semaphore of fate against a red alphabetic coral, absent autumn, the latest phosphorescence of the green, tumescent metaphor. Liquid identification in a rippled world is all its angled banner, its concrete cape of sky, will allow. It is, stiff against the grown stone, the total mariner of tidal inconsistencies.
I broke the unbabbling water.
The chainsaw falls through a redwood. The swallowed purr of its motorcycle chain repeats its highs like an addict, its adjacent handles out for cash, unable to applaud its stiff, buzzing performance as it falls through the divided trunk. A red sugarcube of heat is all that can be seen outside the thick tooth envelope of the tree, the dry river bark. This is the man raised by wolves in France and unable to speak of his happiness.
I watch its slipping progression downwards; averse to heaven in its joy, it seems. The stuttered mirage, bending under its own asphalt heat waves, makes, with its momentary crimson bulb--breeze blown-- against the stalwart tree, the illusion of a blossom. A uniquely Californian flowering occurs in me, plastic in its persistence, violent in its detailed volition, its surrealistic accuracy and Hindu caste.
OMNI S
The high tide moon blocks the sun. It is the overwhelming arch of spring rising and rising. It will pull the planet into the shape of an eye. The pupil burns in its nickel light. It is a divided eye, the dot cannot extend into its recesses. The spring of this diurnal water will tear the worlds apart.
The famous chinese brother with the infinite neck would be stressed to walk its renewed depths, rubbernecking at the sky, his silk slippered feet on the foundation rock and subconscious of the earth. Registering on the chalk cliffs of Dover, clean as a nightgown, the sleeping sea licks up the delicate, jellyfish hem in spring. Determined as clocks in their multiple ticks, confident of exactitude or inevitability, the salt swells in new suits leave a snail trail of wetness against England. Thermometer in an oven, the tall cliffs soften, until, finally, they are submerged with the puffed sheep in the meadow, who, surprisingly, do not float, and whose white backs going under are the last marks on the fever chart.
Maybe it would be alright to enter the deluge. To drown and drown. A sparked canopy of green and blue overhead the formula of human blood. Maybe, tenseless in the Freudian dream, it would be like flying, padding through the treetops, examining a drowned bird in its inaccessible nest.
Here is a slim branch brought to bud; encased in jade, now, confined to a permanent chrysalis until winter relaxes the ocean, congeals the polar eyelids into unsalted ice, unstinging tears. This is when the sweet tree, possibly a pussywillow, will absorb from the fresh subzero air its freedom to die.
Rolling back awake from a detached hand, I find that someone has placed my disconcerted head on a beach.
The comber telescopes down the beach. A blue tube culling itself towards destruction. It is an extended Lemming headed in the wrong direction. It tries and tries to dry its tears. Every day the handkerchief whiff of beach absorbs the long rings of the ocean's Narcissism. It eats the green sin. It eats the circulated sins of the earth.
A pointillist display of heads tumbles in the surf. Vacationing heads, in various stages of decay and tan. What are they trying to spell at the roaring moment of their absolution ? Maybe they are afraid that they will cease to exist, that they are all sin, a wicked witch of the west confection with chrome plated show business six-shooters and wet caps. It is difficult to think with the long green line of light rolling and rolling; the unceasing sun strikes a straightness through its angles. The stagnant swamp of the self is ordered into an emerald mind. You take a chance in the unsteady shuffling. You think you will be totally erased. I have floated in on the red resistance of a body board on many occasions. Every slick head enters the final wave or tube horizontal and wide-eyed.
I watch the heads, black and gold as royal walking sticks for sea titans, dissolve in fiery whites. These are the furious exchanges edges induce. The uneven edge of a halo's emanation. Compact as sea turtles, the waders are conveyed in bullet enthusiasm into a spilled treasure chest of sand. Pearly curls crown them. Rolling laughing from their accelerated fall, they rise and walk in the intense beach bright, which razors over or out of their skins as well, illuminated as Lucifer's angels in the pilot light of hell.
My cold instinct for humanity is baffled into blankness.
The blank pebbles the glaciers left could turn an elephant's foot. Long Island's squat eye stares into the gullet of the atlantic. This is where the ice flowed back, like a retreating fortress, the sudden appalling disappearance of a white sky, startled prehistoric birds and bewildered mammoths stomping a new dune grass under an instant sun that appalled. The birds circled in their freedom. Cro-Magnon hands sharpened the stones into faces the axe-size of their wives.
Even today a beachcomber will arrive from the edge of some dead time to blink at the sea. A pale belly, unbalanced as a stork, makes its way like a metronome towards the end of land. The dry ostrich eggs of rock, in their ages old attempt at birth that have scarred even their moony surfaces, are trying to tip the uncertain belly, which is heavy and white with doubt about itself and its slipping income or ego in an uncertain society of bellies, bleached as banjos, inflated as used condoms, into the cerulean saline solution of the ocean like a crusty contact lens.
The swung sack consciousness of the belly is narrow minded. The belly perceives by hungry insinuations of events, the button-down needs of its blind enzymes aching outwards with the magnetized, undeniable claims of a turned-on TV tube. The outrageous albumen belly asserts a name against the shitty sea; a modern appellation, a single syllable of dry ice clipped from a frozen-stiff tongue, barely audible: "man," or, even more dimly, "me."
The pendulum belly, becoming pensive as a wilted teardrop in the chill air, hovers under a sad expanse of sky, mostly mauve, waiting to be dumped by the glacier-emancipated lumps of occupied land into the unceremonious, baptism blue sea. Instead, wordless at his soliloquy cue, a kindly stage manager, the scenery-shaded invisible duffer, signals the intoxicated sky to rain.
The whole gale starts at 56 knots (Beaufort #11). Diamond shoal oil platform drew lightning to its needle. The central sky absorbed its hypodermic cure. My dad's new fiberglass boat rode on an open throttle. Moving like Caruso's blood lettered goat skin in a coconut corked bottle, we angled at the absent, invisible tit of North Carolina's shark sharp shore.
The house exploded in broad daylight. The stitched, interlocked siding of girdle white aluminum distorted to a mobius strips in the fist of a dirt brown wave. Its plumbing, unplumbed interiors distended. It collapsed landward in a fury of liquid, dousing abandoned cars to their alert headlights, crystal in a crystal spray.
A neighbor dog straddles the roof of its house. Owning abandonment with its thumping tail, excited by the high water as if finally allowed on the family sailboat, the clenched sail of the green billowed shingles transports him to his dog heaven. Ignoring the Arabian miracle of the magic carpet canine, a jerky bird, sparrow diminutive in its dun aspect, picks its new nest in a spilled jewel box. Iridescences darken in its eye. Looping under a splintered joist, my salt hands pull me over shifted junk, an uneasy toilet balanced on a black spattered carpet remnant, past an unsmashed rack of wineglasses, white as penlights in their acrylic cabinet, towards the gigantic spill of the songbird's throat.
The splay German shepherd bays above a promontory of cracked angles, under a planetarium sky soaked with dawn and polite exit signs blinking in cheap red. Crossed paws return to the house's crest. Moony markings double the apparent size of his tragic and decided, coal-nosed face. St. Peter has abandoned him to happiness. Lost gestures struggle in his mink shoulders. The house shivers. It detaches from its underwater moorings in a gasp of flotation pressure, like a thrown card revolving towards the Mississippi paddlewheel of the Pacific.
The songbird dabbles in its gauds. Depressed under the screwed-down clouds, I tap along a swiveled fragment of Mediterranean tiling (a perfect imitation) in my used Italian loafers, crimping vein-blue dolphins' skulls, slipping on their rainy tails, regaining ground on the pale traction of their square-filled bellies. Reaching the scuffed songbird, distracted in its haloes, I touch its crimson cap, purpling in my shadow, and trash its egg frame like eroded foil.
A ceramic statue of Clark Gable sizzles in the aftermath. The dynamo of a waterspout knocked it over under the bruise eye of a hurricane. Breakfasters in Malibu exit a room littered with peppered eggs. Neon backlighting indicates palms on a sky painted wall. Doric half columns offer an illusion of distance. An overturned wicker chair crowns a green carpet; it appears to be freshly cut. The giant square sunrise windows fill it up with water from a wave. A perrier bottle tips over and crests a designer purse with effervescence. Shocked outlines of fish press against the glass of an air aquarium in a tourist mood. The tall glass in black reacts. Nobody has paid their checks in the abandoned opulence; the fish enter with an established crack; their slit gills commune with soda water.
God, in his aesthetic perfection, tossed off a waterspout from his great throw wheel.
The Triassic period painted Dolphins for the Greeks. Tired eyes behind the thin comb of hunger, their three feet of tooth-pronged noses proclaimed. Gallows humor of the working class air-breather in a pre-tuna sea predominated, it seems, by them wrestling with the cynicism of their existence: a brain the size of a man's and no hands to kill with. Above the two thick toes, outlined in rubber like a scuba suit, where the butcher's blade side-fin jams its fat handle into a convolution of washed blues and fluorescent highlights, there stands unfurled in a shark triangle the noble prong of the Dolphin's dorsal fin. This is the humanistic impingement on a universe of air that has dragged the sobbing lungs and soaked heads of thousands of refugee sailors to the thumping shore in storm time. Perhaps this is what happens when the clubbing instinct to kill is defeated by chance circumstance and allowed to fester in a meditative state. Maybe this is why that unarmed vet in the paper spends his dolloped and subsidized time writing immaculate sonnets with a fountain pen stuck in his mouth.
My hands can kill. Detached as the empty rubber stumps sold in the magic shop, they hacked up a nazi my bayonet had pierced. Thrilled at the nicking end of a latent homosexuality, his left lung sighed like a fart through a screen of medals; he flopped into the sliced out of earth pitkin of the ditch. Out of his loose hand an instant luger loomed; it staggered after my swaying face, bloomed with blood. It was as nice as a Dolphin's nose. My angry molars crunched the knuckles. I heard his index digit crack. My unarmed hands smashed his Adam's apple open, a crisp snap.
Rifling through the gloomy tones of a thoracic history magazine, a death erection, pulsing out of my aching life, raises the coned noses of depicted dolphins like a benediction, a proffered saltine wafer.
Neat as soldiers in their Union blue and offset by a flat TV tray of lion yellow life preservers uninflated, yoked around the sunburnt necks stiff as oxen's, two men stand in a floating safety orange bucket like telephone repairmen, awaiting pickup in the metal cornice of their bottom scraping bathyscaphe, proud as wrestlers under the flash page of this unrolled newsmagazine, they know that they have triggered something strange. They are aware, having arrived at the ocean's hammer in fit condition, spliced out of the secret (even to themselves) training camps of America, ready as today's bread to be consumed, they are aware that a moonwalker's fame does not await them, that they will maunder through a grove of deep-haired women towards their children, towards the imitation of a future they can no longer apprehend; their experience has voided apprehension of the flat world they came from, the solid, horizontal mud flats of midAmerica they sprang from like lungfish, thirsty as hindu mystics for the last return to water.
What have they seen ?
Looking down from a pumped up and astutely muscled height, a self-contained Everest, these underwater astronauts speak of space in closed quotes: "It was like not being watched. No 'mom' to make you do anything, either. Nothing to do until you hit the bottom. Just the radio link." They mention voids in ellipses: "You feel like the only thing living... like being alive is rude."
Square faces above honest jaws, they describe the outer darkness in scientific jargon, metres of visible penetration before ray fray encroaches on the megawatt stage lights they packed in their untarred, waterproof Miracle Play oxcart that represents Heaven, Earth, and Hell and won't unfold. Electric with pre-show jitters in the dim backstage regions of their mental landscape, they whisper: I feel unplugged... planetary, really alone.
"Sea Dragons and Flying Freaks"
The eternal convergence of the sea tucked the peabrained Tylosaurus under. Belly pale as shaving cream, swift teeth yellow with victims, the ripped nubbins of a black green picket fence shirring over its suave spine. The exaggerated, fat tail ready to execute a 90 degree turn and become a fat fin.
This 25 feet of Marvel comics, thick in the middle like a toddler, could have been dropped from the orbiting aquarium of a UFO. I turn to the weary Sunday funnies in my stifled hotel room after a sick work week of grotesqueries, imaginative baubles running blood, nitrogen hallucinations impinging on my sacred underwater soirees. Runny eggs engulf a frilly plate. The sun sinks below the tan blind, churning its fiery bucket of snakes beneath the windy flap of injured skin. My awful eye makes this.
What is the face in the trio, coconut swirl of eyes with the pie crimped edge beatific as Buddha ? It is an ancient design rediscovered by the Sumerians, and yet in this Apollo photograph scored off the sunken surface of the moon we inhabit, it turns its filigreed edges like a slow prop fan in sand. Did they remember it in the holy fabric of their bodies and overawed eyes ? It is a fossil without phyla or classification and hangs like candy in an Islam of mystery we obey.
First seen by an Aborigine, one wonders if it is round footfall straight from space; this is the depth of the impression one receives. Why wouldn't some out-of-atmosphere angel in geosynchronous orbit decide to visit the abundant ocean instead of us ? Vanity won't answer it. It is not a grey mirror made to absorb us. An Aborigine tribe preserved it as a sacrament, an insistence of mystery, something to prop up a Catholic resolve in people; honest in our ignorance, lacking pride, this one time we have decided to let this rock imprint remain unclassified.
Making love in my ardent sunburn, I think I have felt such desert attractions, a willingness or need to sink and sink. Christy whistles beneath me, her face crooning abandonment with the triple Os of eyes and puckered mouth. Is this hard fossil the deflated ambition of
sex ? The confessionless communion ? A hairy fly lights against my lips. An uncontrollable grimace, streaked as rust, makes it leap away from my unshaven face, carrying its instruments.
The squeezing image of Christy leaves me, leaving sticky tracers down my athwart hips like tears. I am convinced she was here in the pre-Xtian carbon-dated year of 3000 to 100000 B.C., fixing her red hair, slouching towards my unborn ghost her incarnate mystery.
In the shallows of Kansas, the precursor sea of gold loafing by evaporation into wheat, twelve feet of creaking bone saw the face, the face of the dance that would translate them eventually into red men and herrings. This face was a mirror. It was the totentanz of gluttony. Through the jail grill of its ribs another herring ancestor swims towards the simplified rectum; it is six feet long under the wave of grain. Six feet in the scaled and degraded grave of its totem-faced cousin, the face of the dance.
The black bones lie at the bottom of a pit a gigantic square spade might have gouged. It is the first flight on an inverted Inca pyramid, funneling towards the crystal jewels of the first dynasty of life. The single cells, exact as regimented cubes or individual as the spinnaker needle of the Eiffel tower, suspended in saline, floating in uncried liquid before the first eye, knew from enlightened self-interest perhaps that cannibalism, even interracial, attaching cubes surmounting the smooth elevations of the tower, is universally caustic, and suck off the altruistic sun instead.
White sweat bleaches my back.
The squat sea bug emanates its death, proclaims shamelessly its sham of life in the rock that has replaced its slowly growing and emanating, pulsing even, shell as hard as dry leather. The trilobite's two protrusions serve as stone eyes from the 100 million year depths of its defiant extinction.
In the skeleton negative white powders permanently cascade like the flashlit interior of an indian cave. The heavy organs are veils traced in refrigerator dust; the shell is a sad face of pick-up sticks, a fire-bombed umbrella from Dresden.
I dust off its mortician's grin with an efficient hand, clarifying the instructional chalk sketch. It detaches from its geologic base, the thumbed history of sediment rock, like Christ waving goodbye to Peter, floating apart, and shudders in my mind like a kite. This white violence, prizefighter's knuckle, takes up a shrill position above my competing cortex lobes, settling its heaviest bone fragments in the interior absent space, acid umpire comfortable as a spider resting after its web's expulsion. I was trapped.
Alien intuitions came to me. My Maine hands knew Latin rhythms, Appalachian repetitions. Even the gnarled Nazis began to make a slanted sense to my manipulated perceptions. Their sinister guns were an expandable picket fence inflating against garden moles. Jews, weeds. The anthropologist in me trashed the victor's history. Something black and stabbing as a bureaucrat's pen rewrote those grim men, grey as bayonets in their tailored fighting outfits, into mewling victims, wronged by international weather, engaged in constructive behaviour under psychoanalysis.
I poured my hot face into grey dusted hands and wept.
From the dismembered hood of a Chevrolet these flying fish arrive; caffeine stiffens their mercury wings. Trimmed by accident and flashing at everything, they bear the uncorked confidence of California surfers inside the puritan management of their identical IBM business suits.
They skitter at the side of the ship. A paid-off group of playboys fondle a pingpong ball with green paddles that web their stiff-fingered hands. They have the unremarkable, humped scuffle of suddenly unwatered seals on the dry deck, one tier up-- the unwinged angels-- and over my shoulder. Their immature voices take off in giddy spirals, resound in low laughter as if shellacked. The silver fish scissor in the sea. The fat ship rips.
Entombed in this steel tumor of my civilized race, I turn from the aerodynamic expressions of the ocean, manipulating existence by pure blood pulls, the genetic tug, to Dildo and Ovum above, my bicycle-maker pals, trying to fly in dull hops, giggling as if garroted when the ship slips under them during their momentarily airborne, parasitically high and gulping jumps towards the sky. I climb up the steps, a kind of lazy metal ladder, really, tugging on the flexless side-cables that have been industrially spray painted, like the universal whites I am wearing. My broad foot, slim in a bright boat shoe, grinds on the cheese-grater surface of the top step, shams forward like a basketball star, then finally slides down the saw-toothed assemblage from peak to peak, a reverse Everest ascent, and deposits me, a small charge of loose change shaking in my pocket with each bump, harmless as a Himalayan monk, on the nubby rubber decking in a sprawl. Maintaining a Buddhistic position against the ship's yawl, I bite off my friend's eviscerated fish heads, in my damned and drummed imagination, with Shiva teeth, as their blank static jet laughter roars above me.
The suave sex of an otter through water. Its feather paddles offer a furry belly to the Sun. This soft center muscles in the crack and cold tongue of an oyster's black and blue body opening under a tempo of rock. The otter's eyes are under water.
The spilled ink of the ocean dazzles in perfect blues. The otter handles others with efficient blind bureaucratic hands. The cocaine holding claws rattle blackly against the soiled and closed oyster's perception of itself, visible to others in the cragged and chalky, quietly accreted, shell that shelters its spitting soul. Raised to the uniform, opinionless zero-G of outer space, it would be an exact sphere of thinking water: every point along the zeppelin grey surface equidistant from an imaginary, infinitely small dot in the exact center of its being.
Snapping down the purple God-globe of the medieval oyster's body in a slurped growl, the otter celebrates under Sun its licked desires. It burps. Its fuzzy belly flutters in a seawind. Its black eyes blink out salt nostalgias, semaphore silently with the dark light of pupils to unidentified plane wrecks whose radar tips, painted black as otter noses, were only searching for a few oysters, anyway.
The sun embitters me, bright, watching the otters' flap, observing the dignified isolation of the oysters as they disappear into tension, throats fisted in darkness, bathed and anointed in their own ceremonial liquids. A metal yellow creeps into the sea waves. Maybe the tossed back reflections of the ship-side, drowning in sunlight. The narrow heads of the otters are crowned in light, pure gold, jagged at the ornamental tufts, jellied to fatness by the water's insecurities, slap and slide.
The sun makes me ruffle as a shadow in the water.
It is a deaf cleft, a crevice in an Aztec god chunked and regularized out of lava stone and into terror. The fixed expression the staggered opposite of Monet's water lilies, a split toboggan's track in black, the Blake escarpment, deep and perilous as the derriere indent between brain halves.
This is the deep sea. Near the record outrages of Cape Hatteras the Nansen bottles go down; they check in thirsty burps the unheated salt and oxygen the eyeless denizens filter and sanctify. The small gills, the large slashes, the Spanish comb dentures, fine as a blue whale's sifting equipment, pronounce a silent benediction with their breath. They use and renew.
We are releasing sealed instruments, molten mirrors of ourselves. Drowning the effigies with a scientific attitude, Ray and I find a certain illumination, a lightness, in the wet detachment, scanning our array of glowing scopes washed by laser bars of light in the sunken sea-cabin's interior. Occasionally a photograph is filmed over in green or blue, highlighting faces under their microscope slides. My center screen blips, oxygen content registers, a graph of our ignorance appears, tracing the jilted jag line of our single certainty up and down the chart with a drunk's attention to a thrown in the ocean scotch bottle.
Ray rakes his hands along the empty table.
Information spills from the seismographic chart-maker, brightens in the screen's confines. My breathing tightens. I am underwater, breathing in my rubber tension suit, swishing with a dynamite pack to TNT my Italian desires, my Aeonian home. The impartial screen, rigormortis emotionless as any president repeating his crimes, relates a mass of disasters. The very atmosphere is elliptical! Nothing crumbles or slickens to an armoured resolution, a military
intervention, a sabotage attempt. The sorry ocean, slurring its eternal apology, scraped me towards the viny outline of the shore, clumped in tux blacks and sedate midnight to avoid the flying punch of an air strike. My froggy body bumped ashore. I sniffed around, locating myself in the uncoloured bushes under an absence of bruised over moon. A yuletide dane yeowled its warning blip, and was fuzzily ignored by the drunk and slumbering axis sleeping party that had giggled its instruments over the dull hills past its high-voiced welcome.
Slouching into the fabulous sweep of the square screen, bleating its sorrows, I wait for an angry face to resolve from the stinging dots, coalesce out of the maze haze of facts, to jump into me and eat out my napalm heart, chastising into tameness my licking tiger impulses.
The light, with intimate access to the deep darks of this sunken escarpment, wipers back and forth, hesitating at the edges of escape.
Cradling a camera, the tepee frame in aluminum puts a campfire light on slugs and albino crawlers. A bleached crab attunes blind eyestalks to the unknowable intrusion. It is a memory of sight, of lightness, of a world that does not crush under 10 atmospheres of junk and salt, but floats, cannot help but float, inescapably buoys up until one learns the trick of weighted belts and lead moon shoes. This is the life at the bottom of everything.
A prehistoric fish, cauterized at birth to existence in these deeps, was thought to be extinct, a frail eyelid outline in mountain lime, until, one heated day, an incarcerated skipper, tapping the limits of his arrowhead deck, his distempered brain baked to boredom, attached his nerve-damaged hands to a double length steel line and let it plummet, tied to an aerodynamic, unpainted plumb the approximate shape of the space shuttle, until it scraped the ultraviolet sand fathoms under and tricked the fish like a balloon to the surface with its carnival lure, where after a credible pause it exploded.
My voyeur video tells me about this pressurized existence, this dime-thin swimming aching to expand in condom desire to the sky. Grey fish swish in static. They turn about like tanks, occasionally cancelled in their intricate maneuvers by an aluminum glare that bleeds onto the screen, the square cell. I check the ocular wire, lying lazy as a fuse, that wriggles out the window into choppy water to bury its head. I have the end that rattles.
Blind images stalk around the tilting table, stable as anything at sea, nosing after pheromones for food, nagging towards white worms in lip acute nipple reflex. I tongue a striped straw into my worn mouth, sipping proteins, waiting to be snagged by some aberrant attraction and lifted to my annihilation.
Prodding the Cariaco Trench with a humongous thermometer, a team of men resembling Norman Rockwell before death thread a six inch thick chain through the narrow gully of a pulley. The enclosed probe is an extension of themselves, an implacable attempt to confute the rapture of the deeps by sheer insistence. And yet, these men never win at cards, cut their sandwiches on the diagonal, and marry the first women to give them sex.
What black sweetness made them set out ? The licorice taste of coal veins can't spark here. Their real selves would be crushed. Desire and impossibility occur together. They make the inhuman attempt as if dreaming, subtle and faceless in a siphon of will, made communal and strong by anonymity. They chant around a black and white monitored image of the hole they create. An undrilled hole in themselves responds. "Destruction is creation," they say to themselves in white smocks tidy as atomic scientists'. As a simple cluster of male members, they wonder if this is the unspeakable secret of sex. Transported from the postulated cubby holes of universities by sonic jets, the mandolin absence in their chests, resonating, tells them in unattached adolescent phrases, in a man-made world, in swift whispers, of an untimed, soulless and heuristic, distant, Neanderthal initiation.
The pulley jumps on a snag, an instant opponent, whipping the dangerous weight of the chain against the gunwale with the sound of metal thunder.
* * * * *
The straight knitting needle of the piston-corer bears no relation to the Rock Drill skeleton of Epstein. It is the pure explorer of the sediment fat of history. It steals in 65 foot ribbons the Grand Canyons of the sea floor. It creates an audience in its instant separation of context, the living fall of fin or ash to its last rest, the implied document of the object's finish. This is an electrifying situation. For the man at the top of the piston, perhaps at the unspilled crest of a mill wheel, there is the vividness of voyeurism, the compressed rush of seeing the lightless stream, a muscled unconscious force, that snagged him to the height of the spinning wheel, abruptly upright in evolutionary dawn, supported by the flat paddle's hesitation and stiff cross grain, walking over a desert of hidden colours, a current ocean of simplified mud.
Desires warp away from me, my white image stiffening under the increasing pressure on the canvas sack as I lower into the loured over ocean, dropping to check on the stifled rotation of our communal piston-corer. Its whining diamond rotor, whirling away like a girl in her fresh crinoline dress, spins on a nick in the unglossed dance floor, sputtering up musk dust from the dirty gym periods that dried down in layers from the pore-popping exercise sweat of June. An unidentifiable heat increases at the back of my waterproof suit, some crucible eye spun down on stage angel wires. I sink to the presumably unstoppable pinhead of our suspended boat's attentions, the gaping barracuda bit.
Cirrus scuds of dust attack me. My hanging lights angle in towards the impenetrable middle of the brown hell. Everything appears to be okay, banging away. I peer and maneuver. Nothing. Everything is fertilely active. Like a good lover, I give up trying to understand it and give it a metal kick, a swoozy boot in slow-motion. Kite-coloured silts volcano up. I spur away. A green approving light goes on in my head.
A waterfall sugars the cliffside. It is a fuzzed spill, seen through a dark occulation, the perverse diminishment of time or politics. It is a fuzzed spill, seen through a dark oculation, the perverse diminishment of time or politics. The winds are infinitely slow and heavy. A sea-through syrup disrupts the falling flow. The sunken landslide sucks the tourist sand down.
"Thou one blind sailor, rich in joy Though blind, thy tunes in sadness hum And mourn, thou poor half-witted Boy ! Born deaf, and living deaf and dumb. Thou drooping sick Man, bless the Guide Who checked or turned thy headstrong youth, As he before had sanctified Thy infancy with heavenly truth."
by William. Wordsworth runs through my head, with a torch, the gasoline lit up arm of a guilty terrorist innoculating himself against life. The flame blends with the sand-fall, the orange threat of a molotov revelation itching the back of my fishscale skull. Aimless as a prototype buzzbomb in my creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon suit, I waver in the wake of hallucinogenic sand, falling down my faceplate, an unfocused beach of LSD that doesn't dissolve in the eye. My immersed perception bifurcates towards chaos. Uncertain rivulets form in the Nile delta dial of my diving mask, split blurrs of clear light in the gritty vista I can no longer transform to cloud canyons, or sky, or clouds. One staggered stream, the quavering shape of a tear-track, opens in my Cleopatra delusion to the sea-blue suavity of an asp. My diluted mind staggers at the water aspect of death. Unleashed by an Egyptian identification, I stare up at the Rameses aspect of the cliff, my sediment father full of trash and sifted, unerodable junk, and whisper in undecipherable syllables against glass: "Peace, peace !"
The neon DNA spirals enfold a silver fluke. Someone has ruined a hundred screen door springs and painted them. The springs ignore the tension of the death they inflict, dimensionless in a flat black universe. The fish darts outward in agony, arrow imitation of a scream in its attempt. The powder blue springs, attached by tiny stingers at their simplified ends, follow in sweet and agonized silence the bullet body until stretched to maximum tension. They are taut as a barber's razor strap.
Eternal victim at the end of a string. In a deepness of detachment, abstract in blackness, the fluke grows stiff by the light of its executioner, a deep sea lure handmade in Mexico with a metal lip that twists the imitation corpse as if dropping from the instant end of a hangman's noose.
My voyeuristic impulse is charged with dissatisfaction. Silver death is not enough. Iron holds of a delicate garrote achieve nothing. My strings twinge with anticipation. I will put on my nine-year-old's halloween skeleton and dance, bright bone, bright bone.
Unscrewing the survival tension of my patched up and cauterized with rubber right glove, I expose the Frankenstein mesh of my sutured and anxious right hand. Cold water bites it like a dog. The filling sleeve explodes its airs.
Under ice in my sagging suit, a rigor mortis extends my naked blade palm into the jumping center of the acetylene springs. with a psychopath's Olympic detachment, I note the chemical death of Kurdish civilians as the initial stinger lights my scar. Burning babies, small as Mexican beans, twirl along the open arena of my attacked palm. Fast air, turbulent around my wrist, makes a few heated curls refrain. I fold into baggy pants with the steel guilt of a bedwetter.
Even the fluke has ceased its piccolo actions.
The flounder flattens out from its codfish shape. It is trying to enter a renaissance painting, before perspective. In this pressurized and sinking attempt to comprehend surfaces, one eye slides toward the crest of the forehead, gravitating innocuously, reverting to an indian drawing in colored sand.
Circular as coins, the deflated size of a midget Roman soldier's leather skirt, in the overcrowded public housing of the nuzzled and overgrazed shelf of the teacart delicate Dutch coast, the European flounder was transported, a religious effort, by a man of British citizenry, the last empire dying in its enthusiasm for accurate botany, Walter Garstang, who put them, as if on a domestic pedestal, onto the barren underwater mesa plaice in the middle ocean of the North Sea, surrounded on three sides by concrete land frosted like Phil Donahue with dead ice on top. In emptiness, flat down with frigid bones of burned funereal Vikings, the Dutch flounder, in abrupt punch hole outline, abandoned to the wild west of a cold sea, increased the muscular, solar cell black, blankets of their bodies to four times their innercity dimensions.
Their is a sandy field of them in front of me, landmines, alert as hunger, pumping the flat circuitry of their two-dimensional hearts. Distant equations of dust go off in silent bangs. Markers over the slate pool top clack the grain. Perfect in their pasted down adaptation, they remind me of the exaggerated jungles I used to cut in kindergarten, thick taste of illegal glue ("You will die"), faded now to the D-day graininess of these fish, tacked among the paper perfumes of a mother's closet.
Angling my gauntleted head, I raise the new rubber of the speargun against my shoulder, elastically taut. The nearest flounder, having just eaten its neighbor, is glazed over with happiness. Its left eye shoots out with the underwater sound of a diver, entering from heaven.
A plate of squiggles, extravagant as pasta, spill in ochre octaves of light against light. Sea lilies. A domination of death in its clean preservation. You can almost hear them say in red, white and blue "Dear Dolly, they're singing to your legs, they're worth more than eggs or even but-ter too." A flamingo's skirts beat around their pink ears. In underwater wind. In shelf light.
The fast hammer of my heart, nailed corsage of veins affixing my breast, follows their flutter. I reach down with underlit shadowless hands and detach a soft bell. Arteries of spent light, reflected rainbow patterns, race up sand down my bulging arm, dry in bathwater. There is a clipped insistence to the picked lily's skirt now, a series of short jerks, adjusting her carnation slip in a high, angry wind. Perhaps this headless lady is trying to kick out of the five brutal arms my fat fingers make, complacent in the collective power of their friction, her leggy desperation a dull lump under my machine-stitched gloves.
Stretching a marbled arm, I let the pink powders of the sea lily go into a fold of light.
My troubled heart floated after. Coronary pain cracked my arm in another country, low distance of pewter clouds. Bellied after the interstices of the sea lily's dress by a powerful flood of 98.6 salt water, I ache towards an infinitely recessed, infinitely desirable, damp light. My forgotten body shrinks to a dwindled anchor, a copper hairpin in the sand, vaguely attached under a mile of ice by a memory monofilament. The cold light ceases to retreat with my steps. It hovers in mid-air above a coliseum of coral I can no longer see.
Something rises and I rise with it.
In meditative aspect, the inverted rockweed hangs above the blood crisscross eyes of a suede rock crab. A mass of dead hair veining green giant green above the brow of a stone. Blank succession of days, the muffled shift of an existence over a worn spot. Veins suspended in sea water, valved inflation of salt water, stiffening them to a shiftless pattern of shadows on the muted sand.
Grabbing a sweet branch the consistency of latex vomit, I place it like a mustard patch on the top of my head where the burn comes through, hoping to grow from the weed's power in rank imitation. Voodoo sympathy magic of a foster child taking the temporary father's driver license and eating his picture in ritual. I've sat here for hours, tied to the surface by a blue snorkel hose, trying to attach to the rocks. I give up. My finned feet, astute as a pelican's, flutter against the aching emptiness of the sand, disturbing nothing.
A world of angles open to me as I reach the feathered disturbance of the surface, hacking its whites, trembled green on green insecure as a thunderized dog to infinity; quirky boats ride the jade indecisions. As immense wings the waves oscillate around me, requiring nothing, letting me skim the mercury envelope of the ocean, shadowing my tenants with a broken shadow, an approximate cross the size of a man. That is attached to the rock, with all its dwindled disturbance of shape, its buzz bomb dimensions perhaps, marking the x spot, exploding in silent dark, filling the available crevices with black tar, my angel projection that cancels the sun.
The intense whine of a gasoline crane makes me ascend, flapping my cardboard seraphim parts, bidding goodbye, goodbye to all that awful wetness, the fat wart of my second womb, the only place safe where nobody want me. That lower coldness lacks drafts.
El Peno does not threaten its hot arrival this year. The timed prick strokes of its killing heat are momentarily abated. Perhaps it is afraid of AIDS. Plankton clouds the guano sea, anchovies thick as beetles, y wings of seagulls dipping into the soupbowl with the spiritual mist edge shorter than the horizon, which cannot be seen over the cold uncirculating stream.
Lacking any lovely, unencumbered wife, other than the tied-down South American coast, El Peno simmers around on its Pacific oils, trembling here, coiling coyly there, posing in seductive ceremony somewhere else, silently venting his Polynesian preoccupations in a predawn preemptive steam, wilting nothing, only fostering a flurry of algae. Tightly applied duct tape cramps my hands as I haul in fish. Seagulls caw their punctured notes. sea heat ferments against my face, bent double over the rising gunwale, full of blood, and flapping like a dog's jowly jaw.
My revolving arms piston the appropriate ropes of the net upwards. A metal kaleidoscope of fish appears. They circulate in the net, using subtle bodies of their flashing companions for ocean. Triangle head and awning tail reverse and interlock and grimace in meeting. There is a logical end to the mutating combinations, but the switching rhythm is endless. even their drying scales compose a leitmotif, a harmonious repeat, almost. I spill their grainy carcasses onto the splintered deck.
Standing to stretch out my snapped rubberband back, the frail lights of the stilling fish, racing against evaporation, form a flicker image of Christy for a second among their multiple positions. The wandered lights that compose her face make me faint.
Astutely recovered in the dark, I can feel the subterranean thumping of accumulating El Peno burning beneath the yawing boat.
Red algae in a tidal pool. Soft coral lifts its green velvet antlers overhead. Low tide dries the cycle. The sun burns Rome to dust. Coral colonnades stiff in the sand mock the dry plastered algae, its weak-backed inability to defy, to die like the classic Irish kings, tied to a column, upright in misery, loose deer boots stuck like a hairdryer in a tidal pool of blood. The moonstruck inconsistencies of the sea can't touch the thin, scarlet foreskin of the coral. Dying in cycles from its bitter pride, the candelabra burns its death into the exploding face of the sun it cannot see. Darkening in dehydration, the spent tips will snap off in midair, transforming to lungfish before they hit the resurrection edge of the world.
I hobble down to their burning dust, fauvist in the frying pan flames of the copper sun. My opened hand is still sore, and my bruised, mauve knee retaliates at the mechanical tension of a weight-bearing bend. Close enough to see the sandy pimples of the coral's bone surface, I kneel on my best knee and use the uninjured fingertips of my hurt hand to pinch an onionring off one of its Parthenon columns. It balances like a bread puff on my taped palm, not quite deciding to be blown off by the paramour breezes. One side is rough with clumsy jags, a handmade medieval crown, washed in hot water and machine dried to fit Tom Thumb. I wear it Teasingly around my knuckle so that it sprouts a blank forehead swirled with the intense logic of my identity. Under a strangely bearish and nonvocal impulse, I crush it to pink powder in an improvised fist. I sniff its girlish composition and decide nothing.
Thinking of my previous life with pretty Christy, I snuff it against a dead rock, making it blush, and ripping my stitches in the process.
One-island volcanoes, bone ribbed and eruptionless, emerge from a mass of moss. Twenty-fingered sponges tower over the white limpets like orange, demented clouds torn on a jet stream. From the small, single cells of anger the limpets have distilled into, an iguana's black eye might bulb.
Marcel Duchamp would argue with my trying to strangle meaning from it. This impersonal monument won't even obey the final significance of death, the eternal Achtung! It simply refuses, with its sloped sides hipped like a thatch cottage, falling away from itself, from the signal of its pinnacle, as if it were a girl's dress made of etched lime. What fertile and subjoined joints would appear! Duchamp clamps his gamey mouth shut, unable to forget himself in overrational expressions of his sublimation exact as Freud in his thanatos hat which bears the suspicious slant and slash pleats of a sexy limpet. He is the bearded and slouched Job kicking the naked Mediterranean docks in Moby Dick.
Turning the pimple shell over and over in my sandy hand, I wait for it to express itself from under my projections, a stranger's face asserting its muscular ridges in front of a movie screen, a wavered surface of corrugated colors as tattoo. I toss off its coned bone of adolescence, regularized statued memorial of embarrassments, letting it fall face down in the sugar sand, a bleached acne scar. Some wave will wash it away.
I remember the stiff fluff of Christy's prom dress, her breasts rising like dough, my pulsed spur of desire; our forehead zits touched with a hammer's thwack, producing electric Athenas, fully armed, who let us see, soft under their iron ritualized curls and noseguards, that we, sacred Christy and I, were only the moment's embodiment, quivering slugs inside a Platonic ideal of lust, mere bodies, praying and touching to incarnate the gods, the eternal passions, pimpleless and pure.
Verbena break the stiff riff of lines in the sand the air arranged. King and queen with secret roots among the miniature stones, accumulating to spears of foxtails, mounting to the lazy yawl of a palm tree, the slant existence of coconuts, a protean sweetie swinging her swank hips in a verge of green against the hot land. This is what will happen. Given the instigation of a dropped seed, a sexual gesture, invisible against the blank heat of the open sand, time will unwrinkle a leather leaf, start a sprout, and erect a permanent column of water over nothingness in the cellulose rivers of a tree. The irreducible quartz grains of beach sand click against each other in rough whispers, in regular intervals, exact spaces that deride with shifting footing and accuracy the clocked increments of increase and life.
Lonely out of the wide water, jumped forth from an improbable froth, clapping against sanddust at my maudlin departure, a pale bipedal stalk, I straighten up, arrange dusty leaves, and take two fisted cuneiform shapes of sand, condensed by sweat, and hold them dutifully opposite, at the shoulder-high extremities of my arms, like charged electrodes, waiting in a fixed posture for the feathery green sprouts to start, an ample statue.
I am praying for life to begin its sins. Kick-starting the irregular realities of existence with my stillness, I watch the spines of the sand begin to shift, spelling nothing, but opening, like live pores, a skein of sifting opportunities for any errant seed, asleep in the swaled dust, to initiate its Buddhistic cycle, escape the dull transcendence of eternity, and propagate its idiocy, its unstoppable, leaf-blade blunt idiocy, into limitless generations of death.
I am unbearably happy.
This is the submerged cunt of Asia, the Marianas trench. Exotic slot. The islands are outlined in a sealevel halo of light, the continents in a stretched ribbon exact as a crag. The flat map, whose scar of mountains is etched with skirts to resemble 3-D, jerks to one side like a smirk. The double triangles of a bikini girl, dangling in Babylonian garden blush beneath her imperial Rameses face, have smeared the sullen bumps of the drawn landscape into instant erection.
As I fold the flat depiction of empty oceans towards my cross-legged lap, the third great pyramid of her set opens into view. She is stark scarlet.
"Is it OK if I sit down?"
"Um, sure."
Her taut legs buckle under with the graceful instantaneousness of a sand crab.
Her body is full of scars. Tattoo erasures perhaps. At her age, not so old, not so young, she has expended an effort at newness. Her red ass shifts into the sand. Above the surreptitious mobility of her breasts, full yamakas, one voice starts out.
"Maps, I see." She charts me out with her eyes.
"Yeah."
A fixed constellation, I wish I could disappear with the sun. She swings her agile lumps onto my lap. The empty beach impresses me, the uninterpretable phases of the light. Burning double impression of a cartographer's nightmare, plane slicing through plane, expanse and cohesion of unexpectedly overlaid bodies of water. I roll with the cradle sensation of her motions. Her hooked palms, clamped into my back, begin in scratches to strike a match.
Sea palms cling to the rock. An ocean throws its bitterness at their existence. Presumption of the mangled heads of the storm-flat scalps of trees. The blue consumption and bile of the demonic stomach condenses into the salt insistence of insults. The dank waves slash. The waves slash back.
Is this the insulted rhythm of an artist? Or is it the fake anger of a histrionic hack? That the unspeaking sea itself is divided on the aesthetic issue is obvious: each attack (or is it the attempted blue spur of an alien communication?) resolves itself into tidepools and undertow, a radical racing back to its origins that delivers oxygen to the trapped crabs and weeds that any enemy child could stoop to eat. Perhaps it is an untranslatable offering, a gift from the foreign eyelid of the sea, blinking a fecundity of tragedy onto us; an educational attempt; begging the interpretation of some inspired Atlas, a communicable fellow, some brother, anything other than the ghost displays of the ignorant and uncomprehending creatures it created and expelled, in automatic Jehovah justice, from its paradisiacal depths, the luminescent registers of it elongated, angelic choir.
A black wave, running suddenly unexpectedly forward, plasters my bare foot with foam. Somebody's kid is kicking a related part of the dark wave back to its sliding coils. The male child, sporting intense satyr's curls, on his wet head, is screaming insensibly at the sea. A tiger's smile distorts his handful of face, his lighted eyes as concentrated as the down point of an ice cream cone.
Without thinking, I toss a carnival beachball (which was lolling alongside my ear in a paper static), light as my thoughts, into the endless awning of the sea.
And I watch the stupid boy, propped up by proud smiles, bear it back to me, smiling.
The dye tank at Woods Hole in Cape Cod looks like an inverted cyclopes diver's mask. The water is a pure chlorine blue. Two students belly down on a diving board watch a red infection that has been scientifically introduced. Lamps crimson as road flares double for sunspots. Long tubes of air-pumped breath imitate jet winds on an incrementally rotating platform the shape of the cyclopes' hand with twenty-four fingers for hours. Behind black glasses with grey frosted rims a man in a plaid shirt and drawing compass squints at the deflected pupil of the world written in water.
It is accurate, in its miniaturization, as a welded Swiss watch serving stand-in by religious metaphor for the universe. It is complete as Schrodinger's box. It is the wet model of a child who couldn't hear the news a dead seashell whispered him at four. The far waters were an industrial East Coast grey, harassed and vomiting choked horseshoe crabs from its dismal past onto the breakered rocks and graffiti indignant shores suburban timidity had paid for.
Banks of instruments clicker with information. Ray, grown up now, stoops over the frying pan of water, intently listening. Terrible hisses rise and enlighten him. He is learning the fundamental syllables of life, death. His hearing ear (the left one), never hit with anything intense enough to puncture it, bending to the babble, is shaped like a seashell, an eroded horn.
I respect his dead-white wish to read the world. Strolling closer, descending from the awful speed of my electron orbit and decisionless energy level, reaching around Ray with a subdued glance, not wanting the shallow water knowledge of this world, not really, I see the glossy colors of a drama spill and melt over the painted Mediterranean spot in the pool, a Jupiter eye.
The 14 toothed triggerfish dismantles a pickup-sticks sea urchin with its eyelid bright florescent lips. Head down in no atmosphere, it could be orbiting Jupiter, or sent out last minute to disassemble a Sputnik satellite. Its outlined rear end signals to frocked, thick-lensed men hunched over a deep dish of radar emanations. The radiant scopes inscribe pies on their faces. A smooth light wipes their faces clean at regular intervals.
This triggerfish is a queen. She has reined in her attitudes towards death in order to eat, her world is regally equitable, even the infinite pain of the half dismantled sea urchin's spines seems unattractive. She is in complete control of her compulsions. Decked out in the royal blue of an acetylene burn, her traced body seems a halloween skeleton, suddenly alive on a child, or the fishingline thin bones of her devoured husband, the king.
I slap Ray's back, Christ-skinny under his tenting shirt. He stands from the oscillating scope and breaks his bone face with a smile.
"Lemme study this stupid fish, willya?" His eyebrows rise.
"Learn away."
I turn towards a bank of unlabelled knobs as he hooks himself towards the glowing water. A spiritual indecision settles over me like dust. My bold shoulders hunch under the powders. Knobs rise like melted towers, ruined religions warting the simple metal of history. Each arrowed fist demands a conversion, an action. Each will swivel like a new girl when picked. My numb fingers slip from the slick trousers, fluctuating with the motion in stylish grey. Perhaps the fate of a nimble triggerfish rests along my itchy finger. I confront the manipulating knobs whose identifying chants and mantras and rites have been worn away by science to one hum. An abstract hand decides and rises, reversing arrows, trailing evaporate sweat over the pinched plastic grips. A world turns.
And Ray, underlit by faith, stiffens as the triggerfish wavers under a new Gulf Stream.
Evolution knows no death is sin. Christ knew this. Pteranodons snap their Elizabethan green bat gowns above a rapid, big-skulled bait. Their leather lips require lipstick. They demand the drama of a madam, shitting and eating between four fast hands of claws. It is an elemental poker, this abstract head, twisted as a red diamond on an Alice-in-Wonderland card sprouting potato limbs. It shifts with a pouched twist of the sagging neck, angling like a torn awning, above the long rows of ocean moss burning white at the high edges of their aspirations.
An unlovely Pteranadon strangles the interrupted arc of a fish. The split fish begins to flip its aerodynamic tail beneath a blood streak, flying with its oxygenated rust scar towards an unblinking blue heaven where it can breathe a pure, clean solution, so much like home.
Circuitous route. In its circus suit, amplified for business, white for the splayed wedding day, the clown sea slug appears on a clipped twig of a cypress tree, inches underwater in a phony lab still. Two snowy lips, discrete as labia, float the orange flecked, shapeless except for its no-shape, stippled slug. These silent creatures, flapping in erratic colors as if a somber judge's robes had been turned inside out and stung alive, tumble out hieroglyphs in water with a matador's flair to travel a straight line. They are students of subtle connections. The Zeno-infinite barrier of distance is overcome with sheer style and the unknowable tao display of a blind at birth mime.
I check the crenellating subject. It is partially wilted with an anxious school boy's over-effort, like the fresh photograph in my drippy hand. Its oranges are slowly alive compared to the artificial contrast induced by the stringent chemicals of the padlocked darkroom, the creator's void of imitation, my buzzing brain borrowed light of reflected objects, the womb water fixative, the steel pan for extra organs, faux alcohol soaked clothesline necessary to evaporate the newness from the cribbed text, a Japanese copy of Chinese characters foamed by the choppy effort to transport the infantile watercolors over a wet trench without a humped sea change. Its Rio Grande curves diminish to a drenched mop's motions. This sun-melted buttery slug is disappointed with its glassed-in life, its bureaucratic habitat, the artful spine of snapped-off coral that provides no restful net of shadows under the carefully articulated modeling lamps an artist named Lenny leant me.
Readjusting from the bright blank dark of my elaborately gloomy Civil War Reconstruction chamber, birth-bathed with chemical fluids as Frankenstein, I disconnect Job-string from the sensitive boil of the subject's squirming body and let it fall from its artificially natural arches to its relaxed, laughless ruffles, absent rough exaggerating of pain my jabbing birth-pangs created, to the limp insistence of limits in its measured salt and aquarium existence. It cannot even choose when to wither.
The tabernacle prism skin undulates in purple. Hairy legs soft as pine trees fluctuate in time with a dark internal mechanism visible through the stained glass skin. The claw of its face is black and hard as a tiger bite. Red TV antenna substitute for eyes. The slouched beast emerges from the paranoiac landscape of a microscope. It is the size of a grain of rice.
This is a sea flea, lost in water, and stuck like a Kansas suicide with nothing to jump off of. Forced by gravity it despairs of fighting, a retired trapeze artist hopping out of bed to face the shaving razor, to the muddy bottom, the obscure fecundity of sea sludge from which everything else sprang, this stained glass amphipod, obscured by the dirt it eats, an artist-journalist, is thoroughly defeated. Trapped in the coiled expectation of a long siege, unsprung in the springing bed, this Jesse Owen's Hitler diaries will be buried in its burrow beneath its pure body, a bud of amethyst, indecipherable under the shrunken will of its miniaturized state.
I shake the microscopic slide clean. Its contents curl from the glass with the extended glitter of oceanic spittle under an artificial wind. They head from the initial anus of the chrome drain to the settled ignominy of the infertile freshwater sewer. I settle the purified pane on the laboratory sink's edge and wash my bandit hands like a raccoon. "Somebody has to burn the libraries," I say to myself and cast an empty eye around the room for a new start.
Historic, almost historic, bolted bronze plaques announce my ogled accomplishments from the field of a daffodil-shaded wall. I lean in a wet wind from the tilted open aluminum window, leaning towards the inherited clutter of my cynical experiments like an implicit critic. It has dropped the repetition of habitual gestures, doffed off hats and tin smiles. Absolutely original in its invisible motion of forgetting, its unsponsored touch, arising simultaneously out of everything, can readjust the ant-footing of a monarch in its momentary redwood, or smash the Mardi Gras coast of Louisiana back to its mud blacks.
Penicillin grows in the sea. It is a mold forming a perfect radius of health on nothing. Pythagoras knew this truth, the smallest plants in the sea pock it like bread mold, swamp the unbrushed teeth of humpbacked whales with the cold food of their diminutive souls.
They manufacture themselves in a Judasless slaughterhouse. None of them considers the sacrifice, or considers themselves as sacrificing; they all want to be president. Pure in their McGovern ambitions, the machine of an amphipod, with the registered extent and soul of a flour bug, can dismember 100,00 of them per day in bursting good health. Their circular minds, absorbed in mathematical rotations and schemes, are fiercely happy as Joan-of-Arc in the sea acids of their upward digestion.
Perhaps there is nothing to them, an altruistic enzyme machineguns them towards birth, the selfless myth of multiplied corn, oiling their gold envelopes to be crushed or punctured with rupturing heat. The combined plankton sizzle the soulless sea-sounds of their miniature pleas into a cloudless air. They are manipulated by design, a flaw in the manifold of time-abiding Darwinic success, inducing drag on the entire system. Whales loll in their green abundance, thin-lipped fish initiate rituals to celebrate the inexhaustible tarp of food some benign fish-faced god has sprinkled over the surface of the waters. Caught in a rubber daze of cyclical dancing, as if vulcanized by the abrupt discovery of sex, the spinning fish are unable to avoid the taut closure of a dolphin's mouth. Blue dolphins signal in watery ultrasonics the tasty news of a miracle. Annual frenzies arise around the stupefied twirls of the fish. Sharks or barracuda, attentive to blood, magnetized themselves towards the white action. Bottom plants, fixing the nitrogen of leftover flesh into their stiffening stems, raise a myriad of obsequies towards the sun.
In the warm, ignored wallows of the water, unmarried masses of plankton, pregnant beyond the borders of their bodies, are attempting to avoid dishonor in suicide.
The one celled diatom of the mind resigns. Its intricate crystal resistance voids in a spike the aims of a weltred lifetime. A few, rectangular cells, assemble a xylophone to play a show tune on. The dissolved will reabsorbs itself a final time into the lie of a remembered face, the stage set of inspired eyes, articulated gestures of a mouth, the sag disappointment work-weary cheeks assume over their disappearing bones.
We dissolve to our origins. This soup of clothes, pool of pretenses, adjustable cells of selves. My flashing dreams manipulate these amoeba constituents to sea birds, dragons. The steel microscope kicks pout of focus. My wristwatched wrist and pale hand, contemptuous of culled possibilities, have shoved the prepared slide to the chipped edge of the worktable.
My tired eyes rise to a blind room. Over a dimensionless floor, condensing to a scuffed mist, my abrupt, often disjunctive, consciousness suspends itself, waiting to be resolved into clarity, to have a clarity imposed. The sturdy table tilts its bitten outline into lost clouds. The microscope mirror flashes its indecipherable signals, telegraphing to invisible confederates. I stand up in the directionless steam and snap my slowly dissolving head towards the remembered frame of a window. A bright square leans towards me. Remarkable landscapes appear and disappear past its flexible edges, soft as new aluminum. Miltdown melts in my sleepy intestines, nuzzling the third highball towards stepped pastures. Sweat scalds across my thin forehead, sudden as a shadow, a fired iron blade.
My disparate parts disintegrate to their amoeba units. A dragged hand registering numbers. A sickle-shaped back crouching against wildflowers. A nimble knee sinking in my brother's ten year old stomach. A detached cock shrunk in its caul of underwear, now alert in a haze of Christy's hair. An elbow knocking against nothing immediately identifiable.
An asleep mouth suck and disperses. Drawls towards silence, an awake blank of wax. The first cheek registers a cheeky substance. A muscle fluctuates in warmth. And now, there is an incredible spinning as if in orbit around a huge and black and furiously burning furnace. The insane spinning stops, a sudden calm out of an unexpected east. Only one drop of the pure wax remains, infinitely impressionable.
The far floor stiffens into stasis.
An arrow painted on highlighted plywood points to hO. The wroth broth plain refuses the complaisant sky. Its simmering blues are unabated. Two days of storm still mark the sea. It is restless, white, an abrupt shrill surface of active champagne.
An awkward stork in hinged steps bobs before the divided scene. Maybe it is the white intercession of an archangel. The ambiguous figure in tall starts adjusts its wings edged with charcoal. Wrecked vegetation frames its weighted motions in lumps as it draws a scene of utter astonishment in the sand.
Indecipherable stones grind under the stark sea, negligee pale. Birth water. Out of the combative source of blue, red-blue, the slap of terror, knives of finding, deposited on a heaving plain barren of obstacles, flat blank of personality, hands of sands dissolving, the biting face of my enemy myself, detached from the retinal umbilical, thrown into lightning sight, the divided self that emerges from the alert eye of hypnoses as slow definitions of consciousness detach like smoke from a wreck of being like a smashed-up spaceship on ovoid rocks the shapes of breasts. This was my first war.
The delighted sign, florescent arrow pinning my pumping heart against my snapped spine, indicates a renewal of battle, the breaking panes of the sea. Perhaps a salt whiff of annihilation rises, one unity among many others. The tall stork balks. It is unable to bring off the idea of birth in this quickening desolation. Small stones sizzle at my feet, a rash jazz.
The sky, ignored in its flamingo tones, demands, like one gigantic pale bruised eye, an answer. Who will I be?
Droning in a daze beside white slippage of the combers, I regret the 100,000 names I found in a book of names for baby boys.
Mid-Atlantic ridge and rift, echoing Africa in its Westward bend, aching an underwater breast in outline towards starved American shores. Atlantis and Plato Seamounts intersect the inverted question mark at the start of the neck. with its comforting layer of fat and water removed, it is an old bone ball, a dry eye.
This image seeps into my dream, snapping me back to wartime italy and my first deceased stormtrooper. I see him repeating his dazzling entrance, shocked hair blond as fire, chipped eyes lost in a face too brutal to be useless. Wheeze of butchery, and his unblanketed body beside me all night long....
The Gulf Stream, falls on snow-blue paper like a tree trunk. In the elaborate over-definition of his age, Benjamin Franklin has magnetized the stream with the grain of a board. A security of something known in the face of such sudden ignorance. It is an assertion of style, the flash of Marlowe, with feathered indian arrows indicating the general sweep of the just discovered mystery.
Clipper ships in three-quarter view slice a confused white wake in the fallen branch. Maybe they are exposing the tender sap that runs beneath the all-weather bark. Save two weeks West on the right vein, the feathered shaft indicating the rapid cupidity of our founding fathers. Mandrake men with split beards to fork off the devil.
New in the primeval woods of New England, they confronted themselves without limit, without the collective stare of their peering superiors, the reflective glare of history, that under the trout neck tanning device that slits against me now, plowing through a pile of books on the windless beach. Nightmares began their elemental glare, the simplified outlines, the rough circumference of gigantic trees rising out of their capped and buckled minds. Heathens breathed their air. Savagery escaped the projected woods, the wolf-dark biting out from under their brown brows.
This earth nurtured their paranoias; it nurtures mine. The injected vein arrow of their flight begins to ribbon into leaf and purple vine. The sandy soil allows expansion of the ripping roots, the iconoclastic impulse that rivets dreams to the barked-over real.
Primly on their birth-painted canoes, tourists glide like seconal past the intersected circular trunk of the bright bay. One, a student, rigid in the remembrance of his dreams, the strict rictus of imagined knives, tips his heavy load of books back into the winking sea.
Chocolate-striped like a dapper cookie, crisp in a white linen under-canvas, the snail's shell appears to be arranged in geologic layers, the scrap snippet of a seismograph emerging from the minute jars in the chocolate lines. But this is all history, dead as day old video tape, precise as Egyptian scribe transcriptions, perfect as the eviscerated papyrus curling in broken Red Sea jugs.
Mussels crust the rocks. Scavenger seagulls pimple the heights, the mid-region of rock covered by the spitting shells. Below them, in a fallen arc of the viewer's attention, a slime so green it is black, swells. Kelp and surf grass dynamite to life in blasted tidal pools. Bladdered seaweed swivels in the backwash. This civil society cusps itself on the unpredictable edge of air. A political wind will agitate their shallow order. They are essentially Americans living in the degraded eighties, slouching at dead water midnight towards their limited and manipulated image of the nineties. The sky is a blank TV screen their aquatic eyes can't unblurr from static.
In a few words, they will be enough like me that I can ignore them, almost. Safe distance of identity. A cynical condescension. A projection. On the solipsistic beach, flooded with sun, even the eternal line of the unceasing sea fuzzes like an uncertain section of hair in front of my eyes. Imagining cat-slits on my ocular bulbs, I could manipulate its lazy blues away. The easy blink of nonexistence reddens my inner eyelid. Its minor frictions hesitate. I do not want to be the womb that ejaculates a world. What has forced me to this destruction, this creation?
rich algae explodes its black flak on a rock. It is a mural by the artist of jet. His fast ebonies. I shape it, in erotic octaves of imagination, beating with the tousled sea, into the midnight depiction of a copulating couple. Invisible birds cry out.
At one time, my hundred-fingered hands, caressing dresses of invention, were dumb globes, fumbling at knobs, decisively incompetent. Now, in the low drama of the tide, murmur of insurrection, I feel them begin warmly to bloat, asleep in their injuries, their laughable murders of men I invented and stuck like cardboard in their designed worlds, to swell and to bloat back to globes.
Inverted antlers of the mangrove roots held a stag's bark brown prick in the air. Sea urchins gather in the tangle. Salt water marks the chalky arches black. The urchin mouths suck towards the swamped roots. They are entering an ancient city, a druid wood, the arched mathematical construct of a gigantic space station. Formal as archbishops in their starched doctrinaire robes, the urchins move through a dimpled distortion of shallow water, keeping a pointed distance from each other as if they were active tips of identical spin, agonize over an obstacle of corralled rock, tip their bride of Frankenstein armament on an incline of sand, and disappear with a spiny motion under dry mangrove groins.
I measure myself against the stiff triumphal arches. It is a cold comparison, excluding appearances, excluding dramas.
Lowering my crew-cut and lopsided head through a decently large Gothic V, I shoulder my bundled back through the four foot space portal, dodge the shrill hair of sea urchins, and hunch comfortably in the shattered reflections of pissy tidal waters. It is the inside of a nuclear missile's nose cone; radiant nodules of urchin flash darkly the countdown sequence. Or else it is a full body electric hair dryer, hovering pastel above the wincing faces of women, rusted to the dim patchwork of tank camouflage and making my fresh fur sweat. Leaning against the massy tangle of mangrove roots, I see the frozen halo of a sea urchin approach my charmingly naked, sea-slug white, right foot. I examine the medical authority of its motions, stiff timidities, as if it were diagnosing the throat of the sand. It bulks on the hump of my foot, a ball of foils in the side light, and adjusts its one doctor eye to my travels. No injections. It tumbles to the glow spines of its fellows, clumping for take-off like a bag of icecubes. A tense rivulet of sweat unzips my back, spilling nothing vital. alive at last in the green tree water reflections, I will never rise or dry.
The Angola Abyssal plain is burnt. There, miles under the smashed mirror of the slave trade routes, the volcanic ochres ripen. The evaporated Congo river on this map inflicts a "fan" of scored, lasagna wavy edged lines on the otherwise smooth, completely tense anger of this ocean plate shaped like a chicken leg, or a footprint, resonant as drums made from human soles.
I slap my foot in the dead trench. Dust puffs up. It is a robin's egg afternoon, ready to smash apart. Fragment jags of blue stab out of my back in enemy territory. I carry a conspicuous brightness in my spine, scalding open spina bifida style, a pretty radiation winking from the eyelike wound of bone, the removed hatchet absence in my back. This eviscerated field in Italy is scissored apart by shells, by the sky, by every unpredictable whirr.
Abandoned objects thrust up under a paddling foot, trying to jack my sweat-back head above the dirt crest of the four-man foxhole, baked lake unable to shake its dry ocean connections, its long blades of clay exposed by spade and a gauged taste for the desperate. This is my shoveled hovel, staring at the waxy page of my sea-floor map, dropping me without its salt water and toilet flotation device straight into the crummy memory crevice of WWII.
Pacing past the dead nazi's body, slumped and slashed with swirls of clothes-folds like last night's laundry, I tap a slim cylinder cigarette into my numb hand. The blaring battle action has sagged. Occasional emphysema coughs erupt from either side at random, scattered noises of a sickness stricken zoo.
Orange plains. Blue pressure of sky or ocean. My life has crawled between these two extremes. I fold the depopulated map and accept the waiter's iced drink and red ink check.
Manta Ray. Devilfish. Picking delicate shrimp the shade of a girl's fingernail from an abstract plant complex as a beehive hairdo, it scrolls its flexible scythes that loop the wide mouth in a semi-funnel, tapping the pink crustacean like a wedding cake rose through the flush water. Its caped bachelor suit is perpetually neat.
Netted like Christ off the paradise shores of Acapulco, a huge ray reveals, in its flying diamond complexity, nothing vital about itself. Like me, slashed with accusative shadows, stump of a pork loin, sold and wrapped in self-attractive plastic that bonds with anything stretched to the requisite drum note, sufficient insistence of alien hands, always obeying like the subtle bow of attic stairs, willing to be walked on, or raised into faceless symboldom. That attracts me, that lazy covalent bond among men, the unity of marxism and christianity, Lenin and Christ, the swiped pagan attitudes towards nature, native numbness of faces ritualized into significance, i.e. doing what their grandparents did, seeing the void under the same warp of magnetism, bland values out of the past milk-consoling, stabbing off the inevitable loneliness, the one on one of intimate killing, my gold man, razoring over the ditch edge, surprised as sunshine at my unrusted bayonet. I want to be what he was, young, able to rise and fall in the war ritual, premature fetus swinging his mother's womb on an umbilical lasso, deranged by hand into the social concept of a pretzel, considered edible, able to be sacrificed because so thoroughly a part of the communal body, a spare pared nail.
The Manta Ray sways in a rigorous confusion of dark diamonds, the butter cuts of the monofilament net lowered for something new.
The crimped sail bakes in sunlight like the edges of Mrs Delmonico's under pressure needlework on a wood circular loom the size of her shrinking and wrinkled husband's face as he waves to me from their oval window, his hand enlarged as a claw under a red reading lamp, undefined as a tentacle in its slurry of motion behind the green-tinted glass.
The waves themselves are the icebreaker wakes of her angelfood cake. Pure air honeycombed in sugar dough. Two inch candles, twisted under the spiral undulations of the flames, melt into the white icing. It is the birthday of a stranger, a remembered ceremony, the cancelled reverberations of a faintly German song marching into our empty yard. Watching through the uninvented view of a window, I can see the small yellow tinsel sequentially extinguished. A new light appears, that shares the outline of my hungry body.
Set adrift in a hull-splitting scurry of accidents, I see in the submerged matchstick eyes of an agitated knot of sharks under my safety orange rubber lifering, the happy last image of a sea-marooned and starving man.
A lighthouse steams in the spermy Switzerland of its outlet. A dark block of hewn night, assembled as arrows bound in cat gut or the eye strings of enemies, the twist single single single switches of field grass tied tightly to create an obelisk; the black bulk indicates a determination, the direction, a god.
The enormous peppermint stick in enameled spirals torques towards an emotion. It is a reverence for technique in the bald face of overwhelming odds; given a solid, upright engineered form becomes, through its unique engagement of resources, technology. The icepick enters an elephant. Light enters the darkness; the lighthouse darts a flank of sky. A spout of blood illuminates its way. This is the sweet method of technology.
Halfway underwater, my tin head keeps its glass lamps dry. On the inside. The sea breaks its Greek shards at the phallic foot of the lighthouse smaller and smaller. Chromey water oils my view. Bright slant stripes pinwheel into distorted sleeves with a Renaissance puff. The tower crouches among uneven blacks, an ebony sickle spurring paper-thin to the one ray of the first dusk star.
Out of my ecstatic spotlight, the hooked edifice blurrs in thick margined lines, shapeless chimpanzee fingerpaints, distorts toward the doughnut oval of its own desire. The simple assertion of the lighthouse, high as my pre-war suburban dream, flashed with crimson insight and latex waterproofing, curls in the priestly intercession of a wave, sizzles skyward, away from the tilting warning zone of the water, trying by luck of our combined angles to puncture a new revelation through the Hollywood heaven.
Solipsistic in the shallows of the given year, the interfering wave folds over the Marconi-sensitive, mantis prayer shell of my body.
It is a matter of energy. It is a matter of energy, and not time. Trigger shoals blade into the soft sides of ships off Nantucket. The bone shoulders of this fanned out and convoluted sand catch bait. They are hoping to cull together a critical mass of dead parts and sea junk. A rust stain swirls away from the coral bed. This is the aching Gertrude of thoughtless men; the switching sea channels did change Hamlet, the birth of resolution through its mixed metaphor and chaos. New England men killed themselves; in a detached spree of American independence they did not even recognize their farming, rock turning and wall building, fathers as fathers. Only the sea. But the sea was mother too. So abstract father became God, became a constellation, became a guide to navigation. They step-fathered themselves to maturity against the suavity of the rocks. In a radical arc of action they killed their fathers and now must kill themselves. So they load up the iron hooks and needles, a rapier-minded sewing klatch, into the long shells whose edges are turned up like dry leaves, a carved mask, a breakable wooden persona, and give chase to the most basic image of themselves: the roiling, blue and diving, burning and plumed sperm whale.
The stark shoals are humming under their primal and nuclear weight. Compacting to a photographic plate, an unclear x-ray, this rippled under pinning of the Atlantic has culled its debris into clumped and whitening clouds of disease. They are a general indication of the ailment, a pensive weatherhead of cancer, the puritanic accumulation of an underachieving child's pervasive and general sense of guilt. Looking at the sand-bagged and rusted out outlines of shadow hulks, shifting in the hallucinatory sand, I add my throw-away and sag gravity to its drowned black hole that eats the light of identities.
The iris accumulation of the coral is a spaceship. Its aerodynamic UFO edge gives it the bloated elegance of a zeppelin. honeycombed with the hard blossoms of its species, you can see a few of the living cathedral windows have been punched out; perhaps by the agitated scrabbling of an octagonal crab, perhaps an organized squad of escapees exiting Iran in their traditional hem regularized as a jet contrail.
Indeed, it has the fractal appearance of a mosque, the religious denial to depict real life made by Mohammed in his Arabic visions in the secret faith that the solipsistic powers of people can't project with any real idiosyncrasy, any ability to emanate from a center Islamic preconceptions have not altered and epoxied into stereotype. An Orwellian will to affix reality. A Soviet determination. An IBM appearance to instill. And yet this is real, an effort of individuals disappearing in a circular edge of stone flowers incisive enough to pry apart the entrenched, presidential pearl of a sullen oyster. Unclenching my gloved and hovering fist, I realize that only a manipulative hand is required to bring about this feat, to topple a religious, political and social environment, complaisant in antagonistic harmony, at once.
My bound hand having ceased to bleed, I idle above the pleased symmetry of its oval edges in irreversible recovery. I could bring this edifice down like a deer, melting in its sudden confusions and wound open hexagons, crumbling after a crutch like Bambi's broken mom. I pause, a velvety evil piles up like tar and ebbs. The aerosol hairspray of my intentions sprays and frays, stiffening nothing into desire. The unencumbered blood bank of cellular aliens simmers its engines; it rocks from its anchors like a parade float, a dim orange emanating in laser diffraction beneath its sinister weight. Its slick energies engage in a silent rage of red, axing into the shifting sky.
This sissy reticence is as close as I will ever come to birth.
Nightshade and venus forced to bloat pregnancy under ultraviolet light. A Portuguese man-o-war sacked with bbs and given a face to chew hubcaps. An airport string of runninglights imparts a permanent curve to the niger's scoliosis sides, shoved 4,000 feet away from air straight down as if allergic.
Deep in its unpollinated Utah of water, the Chiasmodon niger prowls for miniature shrimp and bleating flotsam with an invisible scowl. Upsidedown on its predescribed belly, plush violet and heavy, a false fin, like a mittened and spastically stiff hand, emerges reversed like a backwards jet engine. It could be a tossed dart, this purple fin, aimed at the rollercoaster lights along the ruffed spine and missing with a drunken lover's lag of carrythrough. Hanging mid-way beneath the two inch terror's anus is a blind eye, the false eyelash of an eye, perfect as a target and intended to distract the tiny attentions of its immature victims.
It was in a similar spirit of illusion that I was given a magician for my fourth birthday party, crowded indoors by the rain. The room rose with balloons, silver luminosity melted into shapes of hearts gave back the triggered activities of the closed square. A quilt of healthy children, bouncing about like apples in a tub, their heads rising under dark straws of hair to split in the mercury shifting crevice of the strapped-to-the-ceiling hearts, shifting with our collective breath, misting with the gigantic puff, insistent as the bearded North wind, that put out myriad candelabras arching to the bloated hearts' edges. I grew older.
And then, suddenly punctured by the magic man's glove hand, the nearest balloon, dark in the dimmed bay of the room that had made the burning cake dramatic, dropped and instant glitter of confetti against my upturned face. I shake a new knife into the niger's black gut, my SS present, and find my distant faceplate nubbed with unexploded eggs. And I am unable to smell the fragrant rain.
The angry whips exist in gems. They flick behind a curtain pure as pearl, immune to the sloppy cycles of sun or moon; the tide is a tent top ten thousand feet high, undulating in wind strongly and slowly as if desert dunes, moving by hours, covering the high, tiny unicyclist dolphins and tightrope flying fish in alternate bands of bluegreen light that are almost stripes when the enormous, stringed surface is startled by a summer breeze.
Like all angry objects, the miniature whips are attached. They connect to the clawless form of a lobster, the deep sea prawn. The four inch prawn is actually a shrimp, expelling against all odds its gilded screen; it emits a glitter from the small links of its body, this tiny prestidigitator with enough arms to be a stage manager, or a 1914 movie heroine, mouthing curses in bitter silence, beating her endangered arms in practiced distress cutely against the chest of her captor. This is how the prim prawn flagellate their innocence against the snap jaws of viperfish, their retreating and troubled antenna writhing like rubberbands behind their staged gold smoke screen.
This pink prawn retreats from my fingertip. A fat prawn in mortician's black, my index digit guesses its pale disposition under the expulsed golden gloom; a militant quorum of mortician's jabs past the hokey gold and grabs the skittering bracelet shape of the prawn. Something black behind all that metal swirl crushes the reddening resistance of its crimped body in an invisible explosion, small guts tracing twirls around my knuckles.
The whipped glitter of the flagellants curtains the corrosive drama without redemption entirely.
The deep sea eel folded like a carpet on a staircase. Its eye is not blind, its bulldog jaw crushes the political rhetoric of its banner body with instant death. A red Roman tassel flashes over its orange eye the size of a mortar barrel. Paired arrows, florescent red, enter its circulating gills as a frill, an eccentricity of design expressing the personality of their owner. Perhaps they are the expression of a death-wish, the lust of a hunter to feel the strength of its own bite, its fatal superiority.
Its tensionless crest buzzes by me. My canned hair edges up. This far under I must boost to the silver surface in creeping stages, dangling by a looped over air line in mid-murk, waiting without a nicotine fix for Grendel to grump his way home (perhaps after unpacking a crumpled tin of me, hanging in helpless piñata profundity, buoyant as a girl clawing along an empty bar with her balanced drink), watching the tremendous butch abundance of the bleak eel peel past. I hold my glistening innards still. Nothing bleeds in fish whiffs from my skin, except perhaps a clenched stench of oil, spoiling from my joint. Tin man in the magic woods, I want this punk Dorothy with her razor wig and slicing edges to purl along, leaving me to the rusted-in shackles of my interrupted industry, the riveted stove-pipes of my bolted Andy Jackson bearing, stolid and without a horse in the coalblack battlefield of my chosen eternity.
If its steel teeth were to bite colonies of errant air from my made in Malaysia suit, I would have to rise towards light and bend.
It comes from the demanded drama, the poet's tweak and thunder, that the old stone fish in her alcove recess blends an ordinary carapace with dismal murk. Double mossed fins like a lady's slip make a mundane skirt for the hidden venom of lips. This race of fish is all female in their long wait and poisonous anger abrupt as a matchstick in the dark.
And yet, there is an undeniable maleness in the stony surface of the eye. Scratched like a temple wall, the registered sled tracks fall off into an abyss of pupil, dark as a dream of hunger, of hunger satisfied by Abraham's sacrifice. If miniature aircraft, adroit as flies in their landing maneuvers, had skidded unwitnessed on the dust of a discarded monocle, the marks would not be different. This fish, sunk to the bottom of a pile of unkept rocks, has lifted a line from Yeats and has "cast a cold eye/ on life, on death."
This is my manikin image, my bloat stone of perception, something I can fall down to be. Crusted with mossy petticoats, it blocks definition with an androgynous sulk, an armored brow, the pasted up attitude of a library lion, all terror in sleep. Does it see a mirage of existence perhaps? Or is it locked in the iron meditations of a motherlode? Its grainy gills blip. It is living towards some catastrophe, riveted to silt and lost like a discarded breadloaf among rock imitations of breadloaves, too real for anybody to eat. Maybe Prometheus, sizzling to this depth, would bite of their compacted bitterness.
Suspending a wicked hook of chum, detached from my own thigh, in from of its split trumpet lips, I wait for the earth to move, concentrated down to this quarried rock, this detached scion that will stand for all the meanings of mundi my imagination can muster. I will catch it and kill it and be free.
The striped spikes radiate from a striped body. It is an indecipherable geometry. Its jut of action as it swallows is complete as a turkey gobble. The zebrafish studies a line of desire to its last implication; Louis XVI puffs of assertion motivate its jagged going. It is always arriving. Identical in black and white or cinemascope, it has an androgynous aspect, a political evasion of identity even as it declares itself in loud stripes. Thinking of this as it murders a flamingo newt with an unconscious spine, passing on with an iron stomach and stiff brocade of spines as the ballet tissue in pure pink convulses, I see that the zebrafish, bullying forward on its hollow chest, replete with insistence as a stock broker, has made a sacrifice for its successes, its big entrances slick and gliding under a silk hoop skirt; it is the assassination of character under image.
I want that faceless existence. Something under the totally reflective silver circle of my diver's mask bubbles after anonymity. I swallow a lump of regulated air. The sedate zebrafish ruffles its facade. Living curtain of spears, slashing their accuracy, sauntering against a comparatively blank backdrop of actor, hysterical and minute, it rolls it Buddha placidity forward, making the remote tips of the spears fluctuate like a girl's frill. Swimming in uniform, the tight black code outfit of my assigned unit, I swiveled into sand with a bright, almost electric, erection under the rubber, trying to find the sunken shallow water eggs of my misplaced mate. Christy's serious face, detached as if reading, rose halo-style over the soon to be exploded factory town.
Trapped in the active definition of myself, moving in secret, I lacked access to the Mardi Gras ingénue anonymity of the zebrafish. There was no allowed entrance to make my decisions foe me, nothing but the agreed-upon goal to erase my responsibility. What social protocol could I evaporate into? What assimilated sky would accept my frantic atoms? The casual boxes of the town bulked up, obscuring with a quenched clocktower Christy's luminous left nostril, fractured like a highrise her hovering smile.
Tracing the filigree reflections of the rained-on streets, I passed crossed out, or closed, carbon copy shops, butcher shops, greengrocers, innocuous duplicates of any Italian town, a singularly diminished essence that would not suffer any loss when compressed onto a postcard, flashing in a tall stand that twirls. I am almost ready to insert the confetti brilliant causality of the explosives with a unique guilt and make my zebrafish exit, entirely absorbed under the gigantic combers of Christy's rainbow hair, vaulting down.
Straight from the inked and crisscrossed terrors of the 19th century, two behemoths wrestles under water. The boiled cleats of a lobster claw clamp the smoke-hole of an octopus. Its segmented feelers and tiled waist, starting just behind the giant head, hides beneath the mottled skirt of the octopus, avoiding the tentacle ovals NASA learned to design air locks from, waltzing in a southern correctness under the ballooning brain bag into the perfectly centered beak of death.
This Godzilla contest bucks across the abandoned ground. Struggling for supremacy in a meaningless sea of counterpunches, the octopus puts an Atlas foot on the nonporous rock face and slides for a better grip on its tank opponent. Exposing its splotched vital in an attempt to use its brown parrotlike beak, the octopus ties itself down like a tent. Strapped and rippled by different tensions of its suction anchors, the octopus' unmoving eyes stare straight out from the opposite ends of a no-nose; carrying a dream of Arabia perhaps in the still unsettled bob and forehead of its jello sack of brains, the octopus in its expectation of a feast curls the feather tip of its farthest anchor into the cinnamon swirl of a princess' slipper.
I close the old fable book edged in gold. The outrageous swallow body of the octopus is frozen in the plaster bulk of my night lamp, its feminine hips and leg-like stripes of art deco molding. Out of water in the stacked bones of this dry New York aquarium hotel, high as a hundred year pile of baseball cards, face down, I bounce from the velvet bed towards the half-buried silver ball of a covered tray, resting like John the Baptist on the thrown angle of a serving cart. Steam bleats under the fogging edges as I raise the bright cover up an inch. It flares under the oblique light of the veiled eye of the octopus light as I throw it over the happy jumble of salad.
Shivering like a high wire under snapping winds, the pale epileptic shakes of my abusive right hand cannot resist crackling the innocent curves of the red back, the solemn lobster's laboring arch, wide open to expose the pure white plumes of death.
The goat-eyed squids in the pebbled foreground are wearing party hats. It has a hundred legs made of compressed oil, this nautiloid that farts into its skullcap to keep afloat; its empty head, elegant in length as an Elizabethan announcing trumpet, carries the Aztec herring-bone pattern of a 3 a.m. motel room left between cable channels.
Po Pot's potato head expands in the coriolis effect of the earth's motor rotation. The split tides of his mind divide into opposed currents, dirty water rotoring counterclockwise in Argentina sinks. This within the Richard the Second circlet of his skull. It is a political wash. A deflection. "Watch very carefully as with stunned efficiency this shuffled pack of Tarot cards disappears into your life," a carbine voice announces in paced words.
Somebody is selling a copyrighted (and incorrect) method of ascension. The television, bolted by thick bars to the textured ceiling, screams in blasé hypnotic grey over the tortured and ripped up edge of my aquarium-size Map of All Tides, O Man. The pretty lady with smeared face and painted nails fans her demonstration pack in a way that implied colors. My dramatic memory drips in black and white, awful absences of blank for the washedout faces, scolding scabs of tattoo ink, pure black, blotching out the subliminal bone structure, the cow's skull. Her wide mouth flabbergasts at coincidences. She cites the celestial influences of stars, million-eyed. My map folds along its wavelength warp, squeezed light allowing a quantum distinction in the delicate overlay of other atoms, their cloudy orbits and evasions. Crunching it down to a large card's size, I begin to see the aquatic relations of the swirled world unblurr. It is a solar connection, an oven of insistence roiling the arrowed whips of the tides to an arterial beat, a constant game of cessations.
Playing with the skirted pleats of the blue map, I notice a secret drain in the TV accessible only to the completely insane, a buzzing bore hole leaking away the trapped and renewing tides to a dark, electrical place: the cathode ray gun tube.
Dominated by dinosaurs, the quick lizard splashing a housing project swamp packed with matched dragonflies and killer-leaved ferns, made his way down the delta in the first of billions of returns to the freedom of the amoeba. Its unmown curbedge of teeth is half of its length, seaside tough and overgrown. Balanced in its whip rapport with speed, its cartilage core and slight, tiger tattooed sides could curl with comfort into my grandmother's basket.
No commanding parent, clustered over the toilet with his cramped child, sane and domineering, would flush this ball of terrors into the rank fecundity of a sewer.
A subtle Pteraspis sucks my will. Armored under the dome of ocean, its unfinished tail end, awkward as a 50s car, embodies an innovation. A segmented series of calcium deposits allows its armor shielding to melt into skin. It is an ancient burn victim scored and mottled with sudden flexibility. The slick tail slashes. The water washes back. They disappeared with the appearance of more salesmanlike fish sporting hinged jaws.
As an extinct type, they gather an academic sympathy. their brown bullet heads batter history into existence. They make the Hegel ghost of evolution batter and repeat. Immense transparent constructions arise full blown in the afternoon mind, tinted by the fake shift light of imagined details. White water feathers from the tap, floriate. Ghost faces melt in its water flames. My German enemies, bouncing blond over the blond autumn landscape, blond wheat, blond fire at evening eating the cold grapes. Also native Italians invited to a massacre. We looked, a glum group of big-boot Americans, at the Nero ruins of Caligula's famous floating battle boat in the empty Nemi. even this theatre of war was at last trashed to cinders. Something beyond the copper shields of history, distorting our summer ambitions with an unearned tan, flashed and burned here, the decimated dell staring into space ,after god like a bruised eye.
Spinning towards darkness, I watch the open archeology books, stolen snickeringly from the public library only to be punctually returned, flip by the window with nobody reading. Fantastic facts and slick shapes, streamlined by a constant razor of grief and necessity, practice their trained curves in front of me, starving girls or dolphins. But I am a boy, a thoughtless boy, let in late to the neighbor's berry patch, after the crows.
A dime shines brightly in the dark bar. Square, ruined faces, like the torn off ends of a shoe box, turn into holy ovals in the reflected light. A hollow shotglass with a racingstripe lip saunters by the bundled body of a man a foot away. His padded figure hovers.
"What's the shortest distance between that dime and this shotglass?" A slim grin divides his face with a shadow.
"I don't know." My rye voice is fallow.
"Wanna bet?" A yellow leer.
"I said I don't know."
He coddled the shotglass in ravaged hands, torn by sea salt perhaps, and soiled with tobacco fidgets. He pulled a comic strip bubble of blank air through his teeth with a squeak, crimping a tired lip. Rescinding speech, I sank into the thin foam of the mauve barstool. Out of a violet crossfire of reflections, his stout voice clips out:
"Straight line."
Crumpling money in a rose spotlight, diverted by a suspended glitter of beer mugs, I tuck my puny bartab towards the rich edge of the unmirrored bar, stuffed with leather. I turn like an electricity meter on the screwtop of my seat, ticking a perpetual increase in eaten amperage. The stranger's "straight line" has fished a decision out of me, my plum-colored depths. Something purple in my heart proposes action, any action, any flat out and rippling delta overwash of movement. My mind grinds in its socket. A grotesque propeller of hooks tries to beat out what my glands know, what I am going deliberately, in idiotic deliberance and absurd consciousness, a walking talk show host fired by an immense desire to occupy time, to do.
Under pink floods of scribbled neon, my feet cross over the steel threshold past the uncertain waver of a glass door. I am going to the ignited Empire State Building.
My life's a wreck. The vital squeal of will, a surreptitious scar formed over malfeasants who by subtle dissolution become yourself, playing ego, acting id, crashing in black heaven over yourself as guilty superego. Above I, above I is flight. Slight of hand somersault never able to fall, to learn how to fall, to tumble in unmentionable silence to the quick pits, the tarry essences that stick and restrict. This is what the terrible two year old rejects. Naysaying freedom. The blessed ability to abrogate, invent by distortion, the counting up of bleak blocks, grey tiles of effort, stories of will rising over fields of circled and invisible indians chanting central park into luminous, criminal existence. These are the imagined you, the ripple of existence that expands and demands, cresting into the art deco topping of the blessed and fluorescing Empire State Building, my high soapbox declaring nothing, denying nothing.
Its glow ribs ignite to a peaking diminishment, a stiff definition, a delineation of character-- as created by its stopping-- as increased and eternalized by its stony implications, its sweet repeats of format and style. This is how everything begins to be. My chest aches with the underlit rock waterfalls of its needle. I near its chopped out valley of sky, its girlish window on infinity.
Iceskating down the avenue, stumbling on stilts, wilting towards the dissolved disaster of decision, provision, projection including everybody, lying millions into existence, steeped in the erect sleep that will cause this monumental train wreck of consciousness, I pay my way into the carpeted elevator that will steam me upwards to the injection tip of my awake dream.
The steel grey doors cuff shut. My day-glo ribs ripen open.
Tremendous music billows from the plush planking; soft as a cassette ejection the audible tremors buffet my rising body. Dirty light exits a centered and welded in place lamp. There is no sliding sensation of motion, no fresh ruffle as we fall through the resonant aorta valve, sinking three inches in wet cement to a rocking stop.
The sore doors hiss apart.
I am underwater. The submarine portals, sallow in green copper frames, play out a darkness, washing away the sinister stark stars, humming a phosphorescence of waffled by low currents coral at its lower, binocular rim edge. I step up to the high, round focus, the punctured moon's secret vet exit. UnAmerican McCarthy, I stall at the view, glancing back at a glitter trash of gumwrappers and the labial glare bleating off the ruddy remains of smashed coke cans. Still, I can't turn to that awful black, the hole-punch hole pulling the spinning jet's passengers to a communal void. I want to find out something about myself, anything valid, as if speaking alone in a hollow room, that skeletal clarity.
"Here I arrive, boisterous off the hot winds of chemical New Jersey."
Tin reflections refuse the words, returning their welter complexities with inanimate overtones. It is a tough tin buzz. A sealed circuit fostering a wicked fray of feedback. My spun skull, candy cotton delicate in its inalienable prejudices, falls towards the Golgotha window, perching against the greased glass at perfect witness height.
Night, night,
and the city in consequence
high above itself, illuminated skeleton as on dirigible
as on the deep fish
the hatcheted faces.
No mouth showing
where the moon-circle blots stars,
a hole of darkness, the
telescope eye painted over.
One falls through the skeleton
to stars, meaningless stars,
meaningless, meaningless.
Threaded lightning not apparent
in the flash and beat
Nor the streets, also,
invested with sleet