SUNDAY
MORNING, BERTH 1-11, Sausalito
—for Kathy Evans, it was her houseboat
Sunday
morning—not the Wallace Stevens kind rising on extended wing—I awaken in a
white room, the houseboat moaning and rocking on the mud flats. A lone curlew
daubs the tidal palate, jacksonpollacking the air with his spatulated beakness. The last time I slept on a
houseboat, I was child—the names pleased my ears, a sing-song: tiki junction
tiki junction tiki junction. Last
night I dreamed the water was sweet, and I stirred it with my feet. Black bees
came to drink from it, burrowed beneath my skin, the darkness a refuge. I
couldn’t walk, my feet bloated with hairy bees—like burrowing birds or
children— seeking entrance through the small blisters where I’d walked too far,
too fast. I squeezed them out: what of the stingers and the legs and wings left
inside?
Last
night’s love came in small o’s, too late for the rubber, and I worry about
conceptual art of squeezing bees from the soles of my feet. We trundled the
double bed where a divorce has severed the sex from the psyche, and cleaved
emotion from the arteries and venous matters. The honeyed odor of sex is
stronger in a cloistered room. Kathleen’s mother calls, wants to know why a
strange man with a Russian accent answers her on a Sunday morning.
Many
women poets I know live alone in white rooms. I want to write a poem in each of
their rooms; the undocumented lives behind the walls of writing. With her
divorce nearly final, Kathleen says she can barely look at her houseboat poems,
She says, “We can't afford to but each other out, life is selling us short.”
She manages to stuff the essence of a life, her four children of a one-room
studio; birds have begun to build nests in the eaves. Life goes on, blindly
unaware of ideas like fairness, or sea planes asleep on the mud. My lover’s
cigarette seeks the kindred air of gray sky and oceanic debris, of freeways and
houses on ancient sea cliffs anchored against an eon of low tides, the seas are
rising. No neap about it. The sea plane, a bee with yellow stripes of mixed
imagery. I'm still afraid of the bees trapped in the pockets of my undertoes and rising tide.
On
the dock, a small potted pine snags the ancestral whirl of H.D.’s pines.
Incandescent remnants of holidays spent alone, or with the children, in the
separate enclaves of poetry, because the basic structure of family is altered.
(Sacrificial, like all the rest. Did I tell you about my father?) Oleg rises to
the occasion, only to deny it, but this morning I take it, thinking of modems,
and “handshakes;” the peculiar electronic orgasm of computers exchanging data
via the phone lines, and malapropisms. Strange songs. What would our ancestors,
the primordial blue-green algae, make of this development? I shake his cock, a
friendly offering across the celibate bed of concealed weapons and thighs. It
seems Oleg and I are more enemies than lovers—but the rare moments we disarm
ourselves before sleep, are flowered, like the egret walking elegantly across
the unstable mud flats.
Thinking
of all those dead bees trapped in my feet, I cried and remembered how, in the
dream, we sat on the edge of our seats as the car managed to drive up the angle
of declination each time. Right before the crest, the fear of falling backwards
into space volleyed the darkness behind our heads. A final refuge to be savored
when it seems we can't go on. Each time the car crested the hill, we turned
back the way we’d come, only to start at the bottom again, in a perpetual
Möibius strip-teaser of time, the snow endlessly melting towards the renewal of
spring. Does it matter if I don't know the driver? Horses followed the car,
their fleeting beauty arched across the sky, my sorrel mare pulsed against all
that green. Will I spend the rest of my dream life purgatorially searching for
that damned mare who was allergic to hobbles, ropes and barbed wire fences in
the hills of Forest Knolls? She's been dead longer than my half-life, still I
dream of finding her. She's not lost, she knows exactly where she is grazing
those hills, achingly familiar, out of childhood.
The
questions seem mundane in daylight—why write at all? Small epiphanies made even
smaller under sunlight. Those rare moments etched in our memories, yearning for
a time that will never come, and so, like the burdened oxen laboring through
our waking moments, we glance into the déjà vu of what if, if, if. . . I gave up everything and moved here to live on the
cradle of the sea, incunabula at the intersection of land and water, delta
triangle of cunt from which the word “queen” stems.
Someone
advises me to learn to grieve for what I’ll never have. We've opened the burden
of living together among ourselves, other wives and children. Resentment draws
the familiar longitudinal line in the bed at night, this is why it's easier to
draw a truce in a bed not our own. The relative freedom from constraint. Tender
enemies: barnacles and mussels prepare for exposure to air by drawing inward.
Suspended from the anchor ropes, and from the sides of barges, they've learned
to adapt to the harsh aerobic reality of air, while all we’re capable of is
learning the fine art of dressing wounds.
Oleg
says the word mussel is midia in
Russian, muscled mice in the tree of tongues, no Babylon to be expelled from
here. The word “paradise” is the walled garden of the desert. When the Slavs
came to the Black Sea it was already occupied. Midia, milish, the mealy-mouthed sweetness of bees, melissa. What
media is your art? The medium is the message—crystal balls, and computer chips.
The technology we use to write with: silica divines the information, Jason's
golden fleece and the dead lion with honey in his bones; parthenogenesis of
words from one life form to another. Stromatolites, and the first “I am” life
uttered. We read about a crack smoker makin' Jason, the ultimate orgiastic quest. We evolved out of the
mud for this? Flowers stranded on the mud flat (the bay pulls its silken sheet
from the bed slowly, as if unveiling a masterpiece, slowly), a vermilion gash;
who would throw flowers into the sea? Surely not the just married, or the newly
dead. Who, in the night, had such hope, or despair, to give the sea this gift?
What lions alive in the fleeced carcasses of bees springs from the loins of our
days?
While we stretch metaphor to
its limit, each new crenulation of word, where ideas rub shoulders, becomes
clichéd the moment it's conceived. Forever divining the spirit of word in
purgatorial surroundings, we are headhunters in search of our own heads,
cannibalistic dreams are a natural phenomenon in the New World. Cannibal,
cannabis. Prospero's daughter in love with the island of Caliban. Canvas, the
hemp sails and rope-that took Columbus to the New World—E. Cannabis Unum. The quincentennial is upon us. Airearthfirewater, and the fifth, quintessence. Take the Fifth. Five
hundred years of blue-eyed love among the tribes. Mi lengua, mi Llorana, La Malinche, my sister, my voice, who spoke in
tongues until the blue-eyed mestizos fell from her like stars to populate the
cities of the sky. We are gathering from the four corners of the earth; she is
calling us home. The trough in the mind made by this houseboat in berth 1-11, a
canyon, a small river seeks the blood mother, and our beginnings. Who came
first? Alpha or omega? Omicrons, small o’s as we face the second coming.
Umlauts and epsilons. The invention of letters on the mud flats is left to the
crabs calligraphing their way to safety.
Kathleen
says she writes in order to keep her sanity. The mellifluous saxophone upstairs
seeks union with the human voice within the channels of the ear. Coltrane? A
friend with the angel’s name gave up singing after 15 years because her voice
migrated to Wagnerian dimensions, and she hated the idea; her voice, a
betrayal. Now she answers corporate phones at Apple, and lets poets buy
computers with her company discount so we can continue to bite off words from
the spoken air of conspiracy underfoot, and divine words onto the page via the
handshakes and addresses of electronic media. I just bought a scanner. We can
theoretically scan anything, even our own body parts and enter them into the
electronic arena where the only thing real is on off-off off-on-off on on
ommmm.
This
battle of the sexes continues to operate between the sheets, making no
distinction between the lines of gender, telephone lines, coke lines, the shore
line, midline, the line of declination, the screen phosphor line, another line
fed to us from the psyche, the gods, or another man or woman wanting something
other than commitment between church and state, war and peace, enemy and
friend. The helical line of the electromagnetic spectrum—where anything from
radio to color bands is explainable to the staircase of DNA unwinding the
haploid life, is explainable—is drawing the line, is toeing in; the shortest
distance, points of recognition—the bee line, the perspective line, the song
lines at Walkabout.
The
earth's name is Gaia. Last night I dreamed Kathleen told a man her other name
was Gaia, and she was smiling, alone and ruddy-cheeked, loveliness in a white
room suspended above the squalor of mud, the tide going out, something larger
than love coming in. Why should she give her bounty to the dead? In this way I
understood we are all imperfect transmitters and receivers—pain is not
interference from deep space, it is a conduit that allows us a glimpse, the curtain
drawn aside for a moment, we see in the mirrored air, a little beyond the image
of what we call “self,” the first “I am” we cannot help but utter in the
plasmic void of what we are, and what is to be, becoming literal in this
littoral zone.
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