Too many street corners to watch, too many feet, too many breaths mixing in the acid air that smarts your eyes and swirls in your hair with soiled fingers to caress your thoughts into carelessness.
All this I see as I look at the sky, up into the mercuric moon that plummets out of the night. Say a prayer for the moon, say a prayer for me, say one for yourself, shout to God until your bones rattle.
Watch the couples as they stroll past the museum, the way that they trade glances with strangers and saunter towards their hallowed beds for long nights of love.
Jasper eyes, Rosemary locks, crystal lips that are cool to kiss and that beam their desire to the good and the bad alike. The soft fingers tacting my love. We seek transcendence like two missiles shining towards the sun. Our vapor trails like a double helix. We seek to envision a heavenly twin whose halves we are, whose selves are we. This twin is always conjoined with itself in bliss, as are we, and spirits come from high and low to bask in the ecstasy we radiate from our passion. Your lips question me, and I answer in bold thrusts, exclamation points really, insisting upon love.
The triremes, having rolled up Third Avenue, roll back down Lexington, and then out into the soapy ocean in New York Harbor, to sail to parts unknown with news of you, of me, of us together. The Gulf Stream is a haven for drifters like yourself, gulls circling about your tire or log. Bits of paper bob in silence over the still waters, so deep, so dark, all the way down, fathom under fathom, down to the quiet blackness where old wrecks and bones halt their descent. Above, the paper bobs; below, the bones exhume themselves constantly, an auto-autopsy for passing glow fish or the stray crab. Their fascination is unbounded.
But we know the true import, I know the look in your eyes that answers my thrusts, my urgency. We have scribed whole libraries, encyclopedias, Baedekers: Antediluvian to Berserker, Blowfish to Caryatid, Crustacean to Dinosaur.
A screaming beak in its green-bronze haze, trapped in Plexiglas and surrounded by archaic figurines beckoning to long buried sentience.
I weep over you, and my hot tears burn your breasts as we love. Your face of pain, your dear eyes, so hurt and confused, so full of surprise and hatred.
How many loves?
How many?
Her portrait looks more like you than her. Do I love her, then, because she is you?
My helmet chafes my ears as I go into battle, my spear point crumbles at the first thrust, I go down on one knee. My greaves shatter, my blood ignites, I am burnt away. The wind scours the earth with my ashes, later I am scattered and birds get me between their toes. They fly away and I drop into oceans, onto forest tree tops, I melt into glaciers and mountain icecaps.
Absolutely unprecedented.
Totally unpredictable.
Continually astonishing.
I gawk, I stare, my jaw hangs slack, I drool. I dare not blink, I turn off all the lights, I see the darkness, I pluck out my eyes, my blood sees, the eye jelly sees, I run and hide. Tell me, tell me until I believe you, tell me again, insist, reiterate, be redundant, still I do not believe, so long has it been since I had any beliefs. I used to trust esoteric tomes and oriental tracts. They promised everything, sacrificed everything.
Drops of lymph soaking into the ground.
One.
Two.
Three.
The nail gun coughs its plagues, my fingers curl from the tendons
snapping. A scribe writes the announcement, dips his quill often, accidentally
transposing syllables, leaving out clauses, whole sections. He yawns.
But what of now, with the triremes bearing their boatloads of Greeks up and down the island without ceasing? The strange smells that cleanse our clothes and coats rising to swirl in the narrow chimneys between our houses, windows so close that we are each reluctant voyeurs pulling the shades. So many in pairs, hand in hand, one taller, the other smaller, one on top, the other on the bottom, then switching. And then one alone, or only a half, really, floating along on his or her isolation, looking, appraising, longing.
The bit of green on my windowsill gets watered only intermittently, it pines for home. It wonders why I keep it captive in the choking winds and among the onyx, rose quartz and fossils. The wind rips sheet music from my stand and swirls the leaves in the air like the jazz notes issuing from the speaker. Are these the papers that end up floating in the cold Atlantic, awaiting a passing frigate? Should I fold them into paper airplanes, to fly them out the window and thus commence their journey? From air to gutter, to sewer, through pipes so huge that whole armies could march through, out into the harbor, floating soaking in the strong brine, fading, losing the music into the rolling lapping of the ocean. Is this the way that pain swirls, too, on its way from the heart to the sky? In the city there are strange smells of pain ascending from millions of burners, mixing in the sky-scraped heavenly dome. Baby pigeons in the airshaft, crying for their milk, which here, now, can only mean nuclear dregs and sweet Ginko nuts gathered by patient Japanese women after a rain.
A mother and daughter, hand in hand, crossing the street, looking both ways, teaching the daughter to look both ways, to look out in all ways, the transmission of experience.
How many loves?
How many?
The sweat drenched sheets, the creation of worlds, the originating couple coupling in eternity.
Mahadevi, as you sit across from me in the cold orange subway car, what can I say? I see your beauty, your dark skin like molasses, sweet like molasses and soft, soft like eyes that make you drunk. I see your hands, the red color flaking off the nails, hands that touch and feel warmth and are that warmth, hands adorned with rings like a yogini full of siddhis, deep with Tantric power secrets of sex. In your gaze I see the creatrix gleaming, that calm distance looking through the world, seeing into life. Hips for straddling and for being straddled, hips for birthing, draped in blue denim, contrapasto. Hips of the goddess. Dark breasts like night. Softness and heat, desire like a plant troping towards the sunshine. My heat and your heat, mutual beckoning, straining like two magnetic poles, like mountain ice-melt to the sea. Up on the street you go pushing a laundry cart sprouting a house tree and sack of dirt. Firemen stare from the passing engine, all of them become Shiva, you love them all, couple with them all, your blonde tresses trailing cosmos. You walk the earth. Now you are three, each beautiful, each bashful, loving. Now one, always one, raven-haired, hair draping across my face, in my mouth as we love. The curve of the waist curling down to the buttocks, this curve of unknown equation, this lost formula: graph it, integrate it, approximate it by sections, auto cad it and project the results onto cloud banks with lasers. Geometry of the goddess with lover, with child, with endeavors of every kind.
The goddess is one and many.
The actual, individual, concrete woman is always only one.
Now you, too have crept into my heart, to plant your seed there. Is the seed yours or hers? Is my heart one or many? As different as night is to my day.
Two warriors fight on a rooftop with swords and daggers. Mutual striking down. They fall into each other's arms, lie on the tar kissing and awaiting death. Warriors and lovers.