Something Solid: Miscellaneous Sonnets: Into the Dawn
If I had made it— vodka-rocked, summer-burnt—
from Moody’s Pub in Andersonville to her pad,
set in an obscure part of the Loop— the mystery
remains. Stacy had her own obscurity levels to
deal with— the filthy rich minister’s daughter
from Indiana, with a taste for avant-garde lit,
& blonde goddess to boot— who had fallen
in love with my first full-length. There they were,
covering the plush, green-toned flat symbolically,
as I imagine them— the good book & the good
book, the actual bible with the bible I had
penned for her. That, I believe, is the holy
dilemma I would’ve uncovered, maybe roughly,
in that flat. Not in her bed, I would guess—
despite the resemblance to women from my past,
I would’ve received the floor to sleep on. Leading
us off the cliff of the cross & the cross— the one
hung solemnly on her wall, about her childhood,
family, heritage, money— & the one borne in her
heart, which wanted to live as I had with Mary & Abby,
full sensory immersion in a series of present moments.
That’s the key to Stacy’s dilemma, universalizing
the night’s detritus, which would’ve been the same
had I accompanied her home or not. To unify body
& soul is the work of several long lifetimes.
The divided, L-shaped human race cannot conceive
of a reality in which the books are all good.
As a person part text, I held her all night, into the dawn.
I.
“We’re at our most bestial when threatened not
with hatred but indifference; what our blood wants
is reaction of some kind.” New Hampshire night,
our own reaction, you pliant, penetrable, laid out beneath me as
flies fidgeted our room, pirouetted moist air, but
we sank beneath bestiality to do just what indifferently
we wanted, beneath our glut of blood, so the summoned
beasts might react with this: ripped limb from limb,
buried in low-lying Virginia swamp marsh, given what
aphorism is only got in extinction, darling, as I quote
what you said at the bar before. In other words, they
hated us. The one-night stand wouldn’t matter if your
brain didn’t have the right words in it: stories, sequences,
slammed-down metaphors of a singed self. Frequencies.
II.
As the world between her legs tightened around
her, what she saw in bed with me was stark: okra,
stamens, roots, all that in nature coalesces in erect
growth; and a shadow father bent, then erect, then
bent again, perverse from amassing wealth in a world
whose submissiveness poisons him. Beneath the sultry,
wooded surface, what I saw was a semi-frightened
animal, along for an all-night ride (gruesomeness of
4 a.m. New Hampshire sun), knife thusly thrusting
into the backs of everyone around her, managing
to have stamina enough against constraint to take
what she was taking. The mattress thumped: above,
an angel was unable to conceal laughter, understanding
it was all in the script, including the garish sun’s leer.
I see her occupy the back of a motorbike: complicit
in the destruction of established orders, expressive
of the willful imposition of the defiant on any
alternative life-path. The front’s only half a curmudgeon.
The road is slick with moisture. If they hydroplane,
you can say goodbye to my own future life. Yet
she’s quiet at PennCrest, stubbornly resistant to
attempts to draw her out. She’s his girl Friday more
than wife. Real marriage hovers in the future as
a homing beacon, against the ravages of too many
deal-related parties, intermediaries imploring her
to step back, climb on his loaded lap, the one & only.
Body/soul unity haunts her waking hours, a vision
inherited from the Renaissance shakes her semi-addled brain.
The most crucial future comrade migrates from flat to flat,
the length of Manhattan; saved from school’s repetitive
rigors, yet awkward against others more normal. As is
often the New York spin, there is no getting close. Kids
come & go. She’s got the pluck, as is ascertained, to paint
what she wants. The most difficult forms flow easily
out of her, as though she were a weird, worrisome windup
doll to defy the lightness of touch used to lighting up
the New York art firmament, a gem for someplace else,
not dust-binned yet, but close. Half-noticing, she also
imposes a posture of defiance on her life, wired into willfulness.
Day-to-day, the grind is to take the advanced forms, find
somewhere to migrate with them. The vision behind is crystal.
I was destined to defy the motorbike with paper piles, marriages. Right?
So, there we sat in Kim’s car, for the hour’s
ride back from New Hope to Center City, drowsy,
all three of us, on a bunch of laced weed, thinking
whatever we were thinking, as Kim kept putting
the pedal to the metal at times slightly off. We all
could’ve been as good as dead, if we didn’t have it,
but we did. What we had was a shared pact, into
the air, the spheres, the universe, that whatever befell
us at that time, that place, we would have to survive,
because we just would. And we did. Which didn’t
change the state of affairs, stagnant for both of us
with Kim, not brimful of anything, so that whatever
soporific fantasies I might’ve had, our taking her out
to canoe on the Delaware did not result in any
consummation, & with her forgetting her purse on
one of the islands, where we got even more trashed,
forgot about this, the ride home, Kim’s reflexes, how
the rest of our lives depended on something not proven,
trustworthy. The two buddies had brains circling
similarly, nothing to worry about, go with it, understand
your invincibility, it’s there if you believe, it just is.
Where shields like that come from, I don’t know, but I
will say— exclusivity is the rule. You only depend on it
if you know it’s there. Off the two of them went, into
the late afternoon sun, after dropping me off in Logan
Square. Somewhere, a frequency in the sky consolidated
itself. Gaetan didn’t look like a star-child then, but he was.
His magnanimity, more than a lion’s, granted him more than nine lives.
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