Two Waters

Body-surfing the break at Bean Hollow,

the blue Pacific exactly the color of cold,

I hold to the wave and am swept through a

forest of kelp. The slippery bulbs parting,

the rocks and shells parting, the various lights

of the harbor. How the sea seems to set

and not set, and the sleepy ground fog of late-

summer wintering into me, neither vaporous

nor inexact. Dusk drives on. Highway 1

sparkles like white and red jewels on the nape

of a woman I once knew. Once and knew,

successions of cities, frame and body.

Making love in an Upper Westside apart-

ment. A row of Chandon White Star bottles

shimmering in candlelight. Expense and then

some distance. A woman I once knew.

Incarnations, families, vessels of record, what

makes up the song, what fills up the time?

My father loved sailing but not the beach,

it was waves and it was not dunes.

Fillial flaw, I have

his ankles, bony like egrets, step

into the mud, feel the cool suck down,

down, in the sedge, salt crusting black mud,

north wind gusting in pampas grass, the click-

ing pod-weed husks.

love is locations names

of the stains

mother father

lover

wind

song which is

a gathering man's

where? and scattering

bone by bone

what?

in his bag

in his suit of skin

Clam shells, seagulls, tar and yellow seafoam. Six-pack rings, pitted styrofoam, cobbles and driftwood snares. In grade school we would come to the coast on field trips. Drake's Bay. Traveling songs. Biology. The bright bus rolling through fog, the damp gray destination never the beach on TV.

In third grade I found a dying seal at the little delta of San Gregorio Creek. Its sad salt-spangled eyes, waiting. The distant cry of classmate's screams lost in a wind-water sound. Everything humming as I watched. As we watched, and waited.

To draw a bird in the sand,

to find a way to the word

which resembles the shore

mumbling forward, thumbing

back, the grip of beginning

an old love that's silver and torn.

Something replaces the past

(lover, nostalgia, resistance).

Like the next wave you notice

the next wave, how knowing's

a wake, a hand in the ocean,

counting the semblances,

sounding the water's return.

The Ohlone called it sa'ka nepu: waters to be eaten, home. So much fish and game. A feasting tied to tides. To the falling acorn, the silver run of salmon. When the Spanish fathers came the Ohlone were amazed and confused. They called the padres Children of the Mules. With their glass beads, clocks and shining crosses the Ohlone believed them a new sort of God.

story is

school songs history books

abalone ashtrays

Mission Days

wind in the bleechers that snuffs the tongue

where? string to a kite

her

ceaseless trail of

when?

My mother was always truthful. Not that she didn't lie but that she taught me where to tell the truth. In other words conviction, knowing what you believe in and when to say it. Vaguely Lutheran, she converted to Judaism when she was eighteen. The belief in Justice, family. The knack for drama and song at each year's Seder.

Song. When is it the cause of conviction? Can the voice be represented if the speaker is not? God is a song for presences. The missing we do ourselves.

When my parents divorced it was "how we are, and how we are not." Locations in a series which marked out drift. Succession. Affair. Father flaw. Or something in a body which is a cause. "Till death do us part" a song between lungs.

Between names: The Coop. My nickname in college. My father's. His father, suturing on the Main Line, learning the dark rules of American Jewry. An Ellis Island story. Alien, alias. The brand of a name that is not yours. Or to tell the truth and know it is only yours."I am the land between saying and feeling." Marriage vow. That I will not. Feel. Betray. Extol. Corrupt. Voice is a name for beginning. Begin–

because inside the moon is all symbol

because outside it is an actual egg

because history

is fragments

I

in the sky

what comes back

and bleeds

teller's jagged tracery

shells seeds lies

what fills up the time?

The noon bell rings over Ms. Jasper's instructions. She protests the explosive exit of her class, but what can she do? I sprint out of the room, slip at the top of the stairs and fall onto the small of my back. Out of air, I watch kids race out for Friday tacos. Chris Lafleur, her slow burn of cigarettes and wine. Steve Heffries, who will die in a car crash unceremoniously at eighteen. Billy Battie, married to Sharon Good and his father's Big Bill car dealership. Annette Warren, who I will finger in the balcony of the Laurel Theater during the climactic dance competition in Saturday Night Fever. In the airless pause of a fourth-grade noon I swim in Ms. Jasper's arms. The pale green walls. Everything slows and clouds and breathes.

A frame to a movie, successions of cities, a particular explanation of gender. What's to be known in the wake of beginings? The missing we do ourselves. The problem of singing the present is deciding when it began.

For instance this skin, this literal frame. I remember my first "R" movie. Vanishing Point , an homage to '70s hippie excess. Blue language and the blue veil of tire smoke burning in the Mojave desert. Jujubees. Crushed velvet. A rumbling Barracuda. A naked woman rides a motorcycle in twilight. In and out of the dust and barrel cactus. Her rosy nipples bouncing, bouncing...

and then:

"...Aye, aye, aye, oh Lydia," my father singing to my embarrassment,

to my relatives at Thanksgiving, to the full moon shining through

the skylight when the first plot of my sex began to bloom.

She is lying on the waterbed, a dark reef of sin, of Styx,

"Come Sail Away," my first seductive song.

She is bleeding and wanting and I am bleeding and wanting.

and then:

What will we do in the morning? The same as we do at night, my sweet. Turn off the something, turn on another. She was tender and jagged in her New York apartment. Corn-fed portraits all teeth underneath. An artist's roar. The champagne and lingerie and linger. We ordered Chinese, addiction, stayed in for the lyrical moment.

The Ohlone called it hunger, sa'ka nepu, waters of return, words to be

ground, to stand on. When a boy reached maturity he was set

out in a tule boat. Seven days in his reed cup. The waves

rushing under him, the rocking sounds...

gambrel oak bunch grass indian paintbrush

timothy madrone cormorant egg

Drake's Bay

China White

Upper West Side

Corruption's a part of the architecture.

I pick up the weave, the seething rhythm,

feel it in my soggy feet (memory's sieve

that drags the wake), walking in spring

with Mother off the Limantour dunes.

Nineteen years since we traced this stretch,

a film of sand candles, elastic pants

rolled to my knees, the swarming smoke

of sand flies curling in the updraft of waves.

What's in your song that's silver and torn?

semblances orders of once and knew

of love is a father who pimps his daughter bags

of blow

in her bra

the shadow of everything too fast and slow

cabs and cocks the city

inside her

home

in a word breaking down form

veins seeds scores drones

wormwood mescaria Chinese poppy

On a recent trip to California I helped my mother buy a stereo for her new house. She had given the old one, which my father had bought, to the Jewish Community Center. We went to a number of stores and finally found exactly the size and sound and cost of what she wanted. We set it up on her new bookshelves. The house, all blond wood and windows, shimmered above the bay. The sound of Nina Simone rising and falling. We drank a Dry Creek Cabernet on the deck and watched the moon rise out of the redwood trees. It reminded me of a time sitting by the pool at the old house. The eerie scrim of water. The moon lolling in the tops of the white oaks. We had drunk numerous bottles of wine, and she told me that she had been married once before. How it didn't last more than a month. That her parents were mortified, scared, their independent daughter losing her way in the big city that was Milwaukee. That I was mortified, scared, an arbitrary son. What did I know of this woman? A stranger passing through. That I wanted to. The moon slowly climbed out of the oak trees. We threw acorns into the pool to break the stillness.

Story of the dark

Love problems, subjecthood, this is all our poems. In my movie I am whoring

and painful. The credits reveal no rest. A sequel, as is a son, a pattern

is only a pattern is only a pattern.

Sung (in theory)

distance is not a safety net but a zone of tension

my daily form a willing flame

novel

that we survive

that we cannot help but tell

traveling in waves restless traveling in see

and seem story is

an I

a mast

at most and least

what

might have been

Sad bag of skin, how can we call this Justice? Love is a kite that keeps on raveling. Families of salt, anger, and drift. The missing we do ourselves.

Mother. Father. Lover. Other. The noon bell rings. I remember the times. Seen clearly. Felt. Despised and coveted. A truth at a distance. A particular explanation of gender.

No–

Love is this bottle of steak sauce, a barbecue day, my eyes on your crotch, a cold sweat breaking us down. Love is my body that crashes. The city gone to seed. One more day to say and feel, my arm a map, this vein oasis...

Stated, simply

that telling the truth gets you there. That words might but I cannot. Intentions

gutter endlessly, and all this restless casting casting the sad metaphysic of sons.

Drake's Way, to break the nest.

My father sailed here, silent,

would wave offshore as he caught

the northerly out through the breakers.

Beat up past these Dover'd cliffs

to moor in Half Moon Bay.

Mirrored in surf, he holds

the lithe hand of his new wife

and dreams of his children

running this cusp of home.

I dream of a woman who resembles a city,

asleep, at rest, relieved, returned...

Autumn turns. A winter wind

begins the wide inscription.

Ohlone singing

"He has prepared himself since his father died. He has prepared himself.

All of you women get the pine needles, get the pines. He is going to do

the same as his father did. He has prepared himself since his father died..."

bodysong

thirty years

by the sea one

body to climb

back into yours

mine yours mine

one body

Paddling out through the stems of the

bay, the big surf a translucent screen.

The ocean turns to coinage in my hands.

Silver this and silver that, image a

love flourescent in each dip, once

and knew in each stroke. God is a thrum

of presentness. The missing we do ourselves.

Story of fear–

So what is this blue light before me? A

road to the shore that disappears, a boat, this

moon, that body, shining through the skin of

a poem? There are two waters in every

life, one we have left, the other the gulf

between waters. What I need are durations

that compass the heart (season, forgiveness,

alteriety, sex), how to find a way to say loss

that isn't, to find that I've always been

home. Know is a word that embodies all

at once. Word is an axis and becomes

its own song (story, inscription, lover, frame),

that every family's a wave, and the blue

Pacific exactly the color of cold.

Mother keeps digging for cherrystones in

spongy pickleweed. Late sun, shoulders

square to the sedge, she thrusts the shovel

into the open mouth of the marsh. It is

a bottomless place. Mingling of fresh

and salt water, our ankles steeped

in tidal brine as we comb the sands

for treasure.

Now ebb tide, the black mud salted

with egrets, last light glinting off her

gray-blond hair as she digs for clams.

She takes my hand, polishes its ooze, points

to the great blue heron wading from

the edge of the marsh. A gust of wind,

late summer. He lifts over the waves,

spreads his wide wings east.