In August Light

August 2016- “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”                                                                                                                    William Faulkner, Light in August

Long Island Sound

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fN9ImKKkXfw

Now in this past of a punched ticket

at low tide I drink down this July sun.

Cathedral afternoon of canopy blue

in an endless awning sky;

 

Myself looking at the sealed plastic bag

of fiddler crabs as bait

thinking how hot and doomed it was inside

there.

 

Now after the rituals were observed

and completed nude solitary on the beach

Walking as elderly on the thousand stones

toward the water

wanting into the cold salty stinging sound

Your balls drawn up into a hard sphere

The waves at you ass the erect nipples

the water licking everything in degrees at once.

 

The excitement form the prospect of entering her

as she enter you.

These ten years past her flesh now sea better yet sound

Under this sky, bright bare to the shoreline shoulder

 

I’m dunking. Going under. Full immersion. Opening my

eyes underneath. The pressure of the silence has its

tongue in my ear. I’m coming up for air. I push off

and explode in high white foam.

 

I look back on the beach

to see who is lying under the makeshift driftwood

lean-to as the Sound breeze chops the darker blue

waters white while fluttering the contour sheet

in animated penciled in ripples.

 

And I recall falling into your eyes that moment

and never looking down

still finding I never, ever hit the bottom.

Even now.

Another Rubber Eden   7/91-2/93

*

 

Ordinary Roar

 

July will linger just near the door

as it is time now to go

and in a sigh or perhaps that an ordinary roar

informs the waning afternoon in the calendars

numerical voice that your number is up.

What startles you with all its whispering are

concussions that wakes the waves to break

and erode the short eroded rocky bug infested

disappearing shoreline.

 

I hear strange voices in this ardent insistent wind.

I feel a tongue just inches from my ear that speaks

‘in that sigh or ordinary roar that these years I

was assured I wouldn’t be able to hear anymore.

All about this hazy animation of dirty white foam

driven madly on and upon.

So parade a secession of walkers across the face in

the beach. They nod or speak appearing as apparitions

that drift windblown on the most silent of feet.

Only some will find the courage to speak.

 

Scraps of paper and fragments of prose difficult to define

whip by in a helpless driven fury.

Now expression has little opportunity for introspection

or reflection. The art of language has been lost in

the stiff insistence of a brisk lake gust of wind.

And the sky above is so blue and blank

and it’s almost like time herself has slipped out

of her harness and has run on the shoreline

riding on the wind, being blown all over the beach

naked, wild and free of the sigh or that ordinary roar

of us as July lingers near the calendars door.

Another Rubber Eden   7/95

*

Her Roll Of Lost Pictures.

 

So then his thunder was exposed as an endangered species.

Your brief downpour of words soaked the situation to everyone’s

dissatisfaction. They have this sure fleeting flash of

momentary light. Illumination to a la carte

Sure shows everything up. You can count on it.

But only so far for tonight. (and of course there are

expressly no substitutions.)

 

Move this night like a set of negatives never exposed

within aperture. Seems the film just never became tightly enough

twisted in a circle about the housing.

 

Much was missed. Still no one had the guts or the smarts to

question the intent. . . . but near the end I seemed to over

hear some smug talk from somebody so very intent on making

a point to everyone’s satisfaction.

 

Or was that barter: trade you your cross to bear for my axe

to grind: or Sure… you can remain the foremost expert in the

 

following category: most likely to be lost in translation.

 

I can’t change the way you waste one of the last few good

days at the start of September (like you had lots).

 

Let’s just try a small voice then saying, “if you have to

go, make the most of the season. Fall into October’s arms

already ablaze intent upon.

 

And if you find you don’t have anyone’s name to call

when autumn’s dream coat flashes some spectrum vivid;

remember how I once waited up for you call

while dropping plenty like the number of thunderstorms

left you could count on your

right hand after August.

Another Rubber Eden    9/97