Short essays from the life of the poet, Gregg G. Brown [Gregg Glory].
. I .
Is there, in all this trash
Of destinations, of places seen and places repeated
Like last year's film, last year's roses, last year's weather
Anything for the spirit to extract,
Extract and raise high and chant about?
Any glitter to be picked from the waste of days,
Any gold cloud built, any monument of twigs?
Is there anything to whistle up from the repeated place,
An eon's verdure or stone bouquet?
. I I .
In the repeated place, in a repeated time
Must cold bouquets like fountains still renew
And renew again their spilling blooms---
As in a height of speech in a vented space,
As if death itself were only heightened speech
In a vented space, or an old horn abandoned in a field,
The hunt decayed, and the trumpet rusted
That had brightened speech, and not quite out of sight?
Is there any bower to be had? Or only
Repeated scenes stuffed with repeated speech
Crisp adjective must keep forever fresh---
Perpetual ecstasy, and still unfinished rooms,
Rotted flowers racing back to bloom?
. I I I .
The pile of days like a pile of cards
Tips one more card blankly onto a pile of blanks.
Where is the change of hue or lilted modulation,
The mutibility in the rose that turns
Ripely from rose-red to rose, to a few
Green, wrecked leaves laying spattered in the path,
Sparse litterings, wretched shrinkage
Of a grander theme that pushed, and with the push
Of birth had pushed, teasing lustrous harmonies
Out of rocks that tinkled for a time, spritzed fresh,
Lisping a damaged planet's name to space?
Now at an age when the past seems hardly formed, I start on a project to cast it all again in enduring shapes.
The more nearly one touches the subject of memory, the closer we come to a sense of some authentic basis for human personality
The more nearly one touches the subject of memory, the closer we come to a sense of some authentic basis for human personality. And yet, memory is undoubtably one of the most impersonal forces any individual confronts, flashing at us pictures from a remote life, forcing us even to a solemn acknowledgement of those long dead memories committed to us through the years by the odd combination of pen and chance quietness or unlikely skill at history, a strong outline of events or detached image flooding into the mind with unbidden certitude and intensity.
Leaning against a warm curb at the height of summer some years ago, a loose knot of theater people speaking with animated or distracted faces on my righthand side, and staring down at my gripped hands lolling between the fold of my knees and up at the dim stars in the humid air, the conversation turned towards the subject of first memory. Whether, once out of the womb, any memory depends on the ability to say that one recalls some image personally, that some "I" must be present at the recollected moment, I do not know. If it must be so, then the first memory must be of alienation, a gasp at the recognition of some diminished "I" against an overwhelming "Other." As the talk drifted past me and went on to some more current subject that has now lost its signification, there came before my eyes the image of a brilliant chameleon waving on the bitten tip of an infant's pink finger. It had attached itself by the teeth to the wormy finger which shook its mutable body in time to an unending wail against a sky half filled with palm fronds amidst the blue. Somewhere between the floating blue and lime green, the chameleon was wriggling in the middle of its liquid changes, the infant wailing at the lost beginning of his.
I remember that flexible skin. The Jamaican atmosphere. The universal hue things seen in childhood retain. The chalky concrete of the porch's balustrade that had been poured in decorative shapes to admit a mixed light. To the left a swimming pool warmed its blue belly in the sun. The chameleon's bite had surprised me; I cried. I forget much of the intervening years; much of the last few weeks; much of yesterday; much of this morning. And I remain firm at this present instant only about the distant past--- faces and wreckages. A few human shoals scattered in the waters.
WHENEVER I THINK of that woman, the great wreck of her life before me, I am moved, as it were, by a tangible nothingness. What the mind's eye cannot create it cannot devour; and there was nothing in those languorous limbs and dim hair darker than ravening midnight that had ever been in my brain before. All her gestures were the work of a noble indolence; all her thought a race in terror from the unjust atrocities of the world. Nothing was more beautiful, nor more foreign to my imagination than such a creature.
It was before a bough of May, and not a winter's branch, that I first saw her
It was before a bough of May, and not a winter's branch, that I first saw her. She had in her eye some coin of sharp umber that flashed intermittently over whatever she passed by. On her body she wore a loose cloth of yellow-gold, under which she had safety-pinned together a bodice of lace, dark garters and a pair of cherry-red boxing shorts. On her head stood a black pillbox cap with a fine peacock blue stone set in tarnished silver where a lieutenant's bars belong. I moved in a trembling liquid, and found myself indissolubly enmeshed in bliss. I walked in a world expanded. Everything that touched my eye was elevated from its drab daily character and imbued with a tremendous energy and permanence. Perhaps my perceptions, wiped free of the useless mud of everything that does not command our affections, and stung into a new alertness by her beauty, had at last allowed an engendering passion in things to express itself, even as I had been impassioned to new expression by the unexpected reality of her presence. Stone and shoot moving alive under the stare of a freshened mind. And this strange elation affected my writing as well, for all my purpose was mixed in her glance. That tangle of instincts unable to be abated, I made a great deal of noise and poetry for her sake and let no song of mine rest in achieved calmness or mastery of effect but that I would change its note to longing. I strove too hard, as it now seems to me, after a plurality of voices. If one man and one voice could not win her, perhaps a crowd of men or a diligent choir could. But nothing would bend her from that steadfastness she showed in every endeavor that could arouse her sympathy, and, later, she would let me very close to her heart indeed.
But still the horror of the mass was upon her, the great revolts and brutalities of this world sinking in on a conscience too delicate, too high-strung not to take the raving injustice of humanity damagingly. So much so, in fact, that she eventually was driven to refuge in mystic thought, the tenets of her adopted philosophy passed from initiate to initiate by secret rites and long study of occult and irrational objectivist matters. She harbored within her, I think, some deeply obscured
the horror of the mass was upon her
A CERTAIN MAN has of late accused me of copying his verses. The phone rang angrily as I stepped from bed. I listened with concentration to the imagined instances of 'more than echo' but was hard pressed to hear any correlation between effect and evidence. In my own mind I dismissed the matter as some midnight expression of human fraughtfulness. After all, everyone has at one time or another expressed in full measure some meretricious conviction it later appeared wiser to retract in silence. And so, having said nothing, I returned the receiver to its slim cradle, stumbled down the awkwardly dark hallway, and turned back to my dreams.
On our next meeting we exchanged starched cordialities and a few lame, lamentable jokes--- as had been our habit from the first. The air seemed to me clear, and even an odd sort of intimacy established by the incident.
But silence is no salving abyss for those whose hearts are full of confusion and flinging dust and bitterness. Certain men, it is true, must press their case in agitation until some public outcry settles the matter in the world's eyes. And so was I pressed with renewed vigor. Now I began to calculate, charting the time of reading and the date of composition of the suspected poems, arranging my life into trial.
I hesitate to wear the plagiarist's disfiguring stamp
I hesitate to wear the plagiarist's disfiguring stamp, as vulgar and heavy as a fat aunt's kiss. So I made my list. All of the poems that had been quoted back in shock to me pre-dated my reading of his first verse. The blue and red lines on the chart refused to touch. What more was there to say? Our positions had become coldly polar, he obviously convinced of the justice of his position, I of its vanity. I considered the abject matter solved and returned to my preoccupations.
But after a few days, when the fury of his argument had still not abated, I was driven to further thought.
I became convinced that there was some blurring of ambitions in his perception, some partisan view in promulgation that made him see, not the separate facts of the various productions, but instead some imposed pattern, some recursive syntax, collapsing the intricately different poems into an abstract singularity, which is but a moment's thought. It occurred to me that perhaps this was evidence of a need for some reassuring falsity, an example of a strident spirit in application of some surety not to be gotten out of modern life's increasingly rapid heterogeneity. Who, in their heart, has not on occasion reached out excitedly for such assurances? As when one sees a familiar face in the winter's fire and smiles comforted by that brief glance where in reality there is only fierce heat and bright combustion.
It seemed, as I thought, that nothing nowadays could be conducted in disinterestedness; that veracity has been lost; that all is agitation, excitation, distraction.
It is no longer fashionable for the artist to have many things held in a steady view, but everything must be montage and vertiginous close-up, a whirl of unsettled emotions promoted as convictions. All become howling symptom laid upon symptom with no calm diagnosis emerging. Partisanship and viciousness reign. Nothing any longer lambent and full of pity rising from the deep matrix of experience that has not been twisted and rent to serve some phony purpose, some point of propaganda or hysterical conviction that lasts a day. No longer could we create in the ignorant honesty of our perceptions; no detail savored and kept accurate for its own sake, as if indecipherably important and true, as in contemporary accounts of Benedict Arnold's reported propensity to blush, or when some painter of the renaissance records--- in his vision of the Madonna ---the sweet blemish on his model's cheek.
The world enlarged from a shell
Is stripped and standing bare,
A grinding dancer on a stage
Violent with despair
And sweet to look upon.
A poet of my acquaintance passes to mind as an exemplar of such despair. The one doomed man of my youth, I remember him speaking with an unearthly quaver in his voice, slouched in some easy chair, as if violence and vision had been compounded into one pale apparition. There were times when the veil was drawn so lightly over his eyes that all creation seemed but an interruption of some more perfect dream. When serious,--- and cajoled out of his bad habit of entertaining those who would be merely satisfied with hollow jests or minuets of jibe,--- he would reconstruct life as a series of holy moments, with a casual acquaintance or sacred girl assigned some certain sainthood, and villainy consigned to those thin absences that accrue minute by minute and stain and weaken us as surely as drops of blood drained from the heart and that comprise most human traffic.
In his house there were few things
In his house there were few things; a tastefully black divan holding limp clothes, a few treasured books, his own works handbound, some utterances of a friend, philosophy and small books of verse against the wall. Nearby, a solemn stereo performed its central office as a conduit of sound, bringing moving voices from a past carefully purged of all not made meaningful, all that had not been lifted into sainthood, its outlines made more clear and more deeply itself by a diligent and trained perception. For he always found in these voices of young men and women, discontent and dreaming, a something essential--- the voices harshly laughing or plaintive, or hissing with an assumed vanity from the enclosure of a garage studio--- an opposite to the anesthetic music of our own day, with its rhythms dry and repetitive, and no stepladder of melody on which to ascend to meaning or escape out of this false abyss into the real.
It is always a miracle if we can taste in our passing relations some hint of their eternal character. And it was always this miracle which his glass heart recognized and out of which his life was made. A musing girl's face remembered without haze, the movement of scarlet snow over a wound, or the same girl kneeling in a June garden, the face lost in her hands, or bathing perhaps it will be in an autumn pool, and we come to meet her in black water. It was, I think, the deliberate strain of an art imposed too strictly on life, the hideous distances straddled by a single personality during the daily commerce of existence that induced his despair. He had, as Eliot has it in one of his poems, "his soul stretched tight across the skies."
But what must be called despair was actually, in him, a heightened form of concentration
But what must be called despair was actually, in him, a heightened form of concentration--- a concentration so intense that it must consume whatever it apprehends in its conflagration. There was a skeletal intensity in his visage, as if he had poked through life and found it vile. Only objects of a purified memory, past touch, past life itself and renewed in the mind by their continual loss, can withstand such attentions. No living girl, nothing real, nothing that must ache and change could long remain.
The result of this concentration was the production of poems of permanent value; intricate, sullen, objects of a devastatingly sincere spiritual nature. As he had said to me in accounting the cost of their materialization, he had gone through "the blackest days of hell" to pull out these few clear things. There was no clutter, no useless abstraction among his images but only the intensest remembrance codified into a tongue that "angels would weep to hear." And it seemed that in his life too there was no time for the clutter of desultory loving but only anguish and passion bound into a whole. He had so few objects in his household and before his attention because he perpetually felt himself passing through life like Adonais' dying star and had only time to touch what would burn and must let cool things lie in forgotten waters.
I have often, at the close of day, having climbed to a view of waters, and sweating with effort, come to play in my mind some such image as his verse brings, the fire cold in contemplation. We have always before us, whatever our mood or preoccupation, some such unguarded image holding before us, undiminished as in an inescapable dream, the mask of life.
A hand that beats against the senseless head of Christ, the beads of blood and sweat drawn into the skin like wormeaten wood, the face defeated, his eyes cast down on the wandering crowd. Around him lie the works of a dedicated youth spent in pursuit of a final countenance or perfected gesture, be it in oak or marble or shaped perhaps in clay and cast from a mold into undimmed bronze. A raised hand or half-worked figure of some stiff-backed titan or unrepentant Lucifer stands half hidden in the shadows. Always I see him amid the monstrous evidence of such toil, a calm thorough look in his eyes, lips set straight as if inscribed by some mathematical prescription. For him the image and mystery of man must always be revealed in some religious allegory or appointed symbol. All our discussion is of great men, and of those touched by the frenzy of some inescapable dream.
He spoke of his Rex Christus, the bright crown of thorns protruding from the impassioned face...
He spoke of his Rex Christus, the bright crown of thorns protruding from the impassioned face like a ring of impenetrable thoughts, as God in one skin, I of the human multitude. Some draped study of Joshua, the "American spirit incarnate," stood nearby, the powerful chest almost breathing in that room, an impatient fist knotted in his unlifted mantle. I nodded at some fine thing he had sketched that morning upon a wall. "More work," he said, tracing its outlines in the air with a worn chisel he had forgotten to put away when I walked in.
There is between us always the debate, he with more conviction than I, that a truly uncreated art must show its lineaments in the life as well as in the work, and that in both a consonance of character must be maintained: a steady bravery, or flagless sincerity, or unstrained nobility, whatever is the keynote of the life we had undertaken to study during the slow afternoon. He has always as a favorite example the unity of Michelangelo, the monk's cell and the painted altar; but when I think of that man's life, his great Judgement, the flayed skin of Bartholomew in which he hid his portrait and which demands the extermination of our pity to hold that sacrifice justice, I must always think of the wild boy in that old man's crooked frame whose heart beat after the sexual godhead, and the heavy voluptuous limbs of his marbleveined Pieta. And I think in countertheme also of those mundane men whose voices must break in treasure, of Shakespeare's unremarkable wit once out of the inkpot, or Nabokov's answering television interviews by letter. He spoke of those men of the East whose lives are consumed with nothingness, and of how their minds, stripped clean as an ailing tree of its sweet bark, because they have denied everything in this life and seen all creation as but a sack of false images must enter into heaven, as it were through a backdoor, all else besides heaven having ceased to exist. I thought of how those there called such asceticism a little ferryboat that could bring but a few souls to the last shore. And I thought of how those uncommunicative men, having renounced every expansive pleasure of life for their cave, grew small and artless. Dante's famous lechery only made him more ardent for virgin embraces; his clouded lips giving Beatrice her taste of sanctity.
His paradise was real because his abject circumstances made it necessary that it be real; no painted repose, no imaginary bliss, no talk that was not parable to that diviner purpose would serve. Not until the discarded body and all it told of truant love had been compounded by holy duty, by transforming effort, and by desire into a single golden arrow of rotless art would the great yellow rose of his mind be made approachable in timid ecstacy.
A sliced strawberry or kiwi fruit halved could provide an hour's worth of conversation for that kind man without pause or fatigue. Unexhausted talk flowed from him as naturally as sleep follows prayer, as the saying has it.
He approached each canvas or projected scheme with a methodical incertitude
He told me once of a textile project of his to impose on a pattern of flowers the recurrent outline of a girl's face, as in Dali's illusionist works. To him it was the simple doubling of positive impulse and positive impulse,--- as he had once half-humorously described the troika of beer, yeast, and women, and told of how that supreme triad had stolen his fate from his own hands and consigned it to their fertile substances. But we can see in that faint flickering between slant petal and female smile on the pillow, as between ant and saint in Dali, a shift in our perceptual paradigm. First the lovely girl, then all is exuberant blossom swirled with shadow. Looking again, petal and face have again exchanged their places. The sovereignty of the imagination to designate its objects is coaxed by a trick of the light, a suavity of line. Caravaggio, in his canvas of the conversion, has the stunned man crawling away amazed from the glossy side of a rioting horse, having seen, in some moment that mixed ecstasy and grace, some portion of God's countenance in that great glistening square of skin rearing in triumph over his lasped and piteous body. But what besides that fallen saint's imagination had put it there? A shift in his ideas of the universe's central theme allowed him to see some discrete omnipresence in that reality which was before fit for nothing save the carrot or the spur. It is for this reason that my friend, when too full of the world and the world's affairs, clambers at dawn onto a limber trampoline to shake some new mystery down; and it is why, however troubled the life, the consummate artist must, like the straight wake of the turbulent swan, leave no unperfected image after him.
But I must see him, even now, half in the air, and smiling still, squabbling with me over some point of medieval church decoration or peasant folktale, and tossing a squeaking ball back to the madly circling dog.
Technology is an unhappy expression of our discontent with life, its search for answers misguided. Pure science, art, the untutored religious impulse, are always and always have been a search for proper questions. The form of the question is aesthetics, its content religion (in the blunt pagan sense), its context science. It is the old story of the switched paradigm, the ruling metaphor which must--- because it has stolen into the imaginations of or occurred simultaneously to the genius' of an age--- shape the time which formulates it. It is like the old story where the fox fools the rabbit and ferries him over the water only to be eaten on the shore. The rabbit's paradigm had been changed by the fox's tale; in our modern story, if true inspiration had founded his fiction, and not some crass motive of temporary advantage, the fox would have walked off with the rabbit paw in paw towards a new existence. The greater the age the more noble and daring the contrast between the two halves of the equation. In the East, in India, man and cricket are equated and an unperishing soul consigned to every passing mote of dust. Ancient Greece saw the shape of man in every deity, where the Semitic imagination imposes an utter alienation between Jehovah and Job, Jehovah playing the castigating fox in the sky. Perhaps this emphasis on the difference only makes more dramatic, and thereby more imperative, the collapse of the equation into a unity. If so, it is the bravest (and perhaps the longest) effort of the imagination ever undertaken. And when some inspired man comes declaring his Christhood and Godhood again, mad with Bacchic bliss, who will hesitate to praise the heroic statuary born of that re-birth?
My father had come rumbling into the room, out of breath with indecision and nervous about some plot, his eyes trembling. Maniacal eyebrows cresting a dome long gone bald, he invited all of us kids out for a midnight spin under another, more lyrical, moon than his own. My bored brothers, one on either side of my age, yipped strenuously and scrambled for their yellow and maroon (bruise yellow and bruise-maroon, as it turned out) windbreakers with giddy and muscular delight. I was engaged in my own pre-adolescent task, darkly trying to discern the non-quantum motives of electromagnetism as revealed in consumer electronics, and declined the invitation with an abstract shake of my distracted head, poking a crooked straight-pin at my broken toy. He had been hatching, it seemed, a dramatic getaway in the blue Blazer, imagining some victorious coupling with his hesitant mistress in Motel 6's luxurious bathroom while his three sons, witless and whistling, or, more likely, kneeling their three cropped heads against the shivering lavatory door as they jostled each other to get closer to the golden keyhole, as he ran around the room picking up stray matchsticks, and furtively dialing his anchor banker to make sure that he had melted all of the assets in his frozen account. When he finally lumbered out the door and into the whistling autumn evening, my two bright brothers bundled under his hairy wings, and high on the promise of a night-ride among thumping beach-dunes, he graced the stone foyer with
the quizzical gift of an interrupted laugh
When I was first tricked into this craft of verse, there came to me another young man entranced by the primitive jarrings of rap. He told me that he had come from a town in central New Jersey bound by the rituals of a vigorous adolescence, football shows and high school superstars; he called it, with a fine sense of irony, "Bricktown, the white ghetto." Rap was popular, loud, full of false ego and the illusionist's bravado of self-sufficience, and it was spoken. It was for him, I think, a something exotic, and was soon followed by an interest in Jamaican political movements as expressed in song, their weedy vision of corrupt Babylon, an eternal city-of-sin, along with the compensating idea of a smuggler's paradise as refuge for the last lost tribe of Israel, as they thought themselves.
There was in this fancifulness, this extreme imaginativeness, this frank and foreign enthusiasm for everything beyond the cold globe of the self, as I now discern, a dramatic impulse in operation.
Here was no ordinary imagination satisfied by the encrusted secretions of its own chance whimsy
I think now that I saw in him the furious trying-on of faces. An exchange rate for visions that ascended so high, and dropped at such prodigious speeds, that I grew to suspect that some special genius had been tapped, that something that had less to do with humanity, and more with its potentialities, was at its rapid work in his life. Perhaps it was some modern instance of that histrionic talent a blinded Nietzsche detected in branded Wagner, praiseworthy and blameworthy youth. Perhaps it was the cyclonic drama that comes to those who are at heart uncertain and reach for aggrandizement as for some saving tonic. But success never came to his planned controversies, and public notice was modestly withheld. He became, to some of his friends, like an embittered critic, an untameable shark wandering in the ignorant sea, always biting and never satisfied. To me, he always retained the dignity of an unanswered intellectuality, his curious fist still full of questions. In his house he would talk news for hours, critical and incisive, and full of illuminating detail; from amid his litter of papers on the black couch he held forth like some aging, unpublished Voltaire, his mind undimmed and waspish, offering an ungrateful world his still vital stings.
In those days the sun was a dagger, concentrating all of its beams as through a sky-held magnifier to toast the year-round natives golden and pinch my pale brothers and I (deposited for two weeks each year by the callous north wind and a big, friendly American DC-10) a tender pink. Our destination was south of Cuba and west of the Hesperides, a soft island of molded sand that got washed away by a hiccupping deep every hundred years or so, exposing a raw rainbow-boned reef visible from space. This was where my cleaver father laundered all of the glorious, hard-won cash that he didn't want the pedantically intrusive, knob-nosed government to sniff out and make him pay those silly, feed-the-poor taxes on. The only buildings on the island not tacked together out of razor-edged tin and spiffed up by incandescent splashes of a sort of bird-lime paint, were the banks. Monstrous blocks of turreted, slit-windowed bunkerlike banks, fully garrisoned by English-speaking importees, squatted in ominous force in the island's only town, peering out with an concrete indifference at the thinly whipping palms and slender longboats piled with pearl-diving boys sporting luminous goggles.
the solemnly vooming plane
I remember from the ride over that the solemnly vooming plane had more than just the half-lidded windows adults slept under like curled iguanas from which an adventurous child could grab a view of the lemon clouds and distant turf pealing by. I am always somewhat thirsty by nature (no diabetes, just inordinately thirsty, thank you), my mouth clapping dryly when I yawn, my lips chipping into white fritters and when I was little I would absolutely distend myself on ghastly amounts of liquid, preferably a half-gallon or so of fidgety soda or dark, delicious quantities of purple-flavored Kool-Aid, but I would even quench myself on a faucet-forced torrent of dull water if nothing else unfurled and presented itself. I had already bothered the perfumed stewardess for four or five very large glasses of what the tropically-spirited airline called its Simian Champ drink, smiling at her slight, bending form with lips empurpled with gratitude. And so I ended up sitting strapped into my energetic red seat with what felt like a blundering grapefruit balanced directly on my bladder when we hit a pocket of wicked turbulence.
I must have made an effective face just then, because my dad instantly slapped off my belt buckle and gave me a wobbly shove down the jittery, jitterbugging aisle towards the sealed silvery cocoon of the restrooms. Having managed to twist open the reluctant latch, I maneuvered past the blue, Incalike design of a space-traveller on the door and slid into the suddenly silent compartment, kicking it shut. I noticed a puffed, familiar face dodging and ducking in time to my roll and yaw and made my anxious way towards the commode huddled against the far wall.
The instrument was solid, buffed steel, as if giants had squatted in the broom-closet I was pinched in; I had prepared myself with a few shorthand gestures and the quick taunting aside of my snug cotton briefs and was just leaning in to get my final bearings when I stopped short of dousing the distorted, dishonest fat man image of myself that I could see roughly stencilled against the rear rim of the bowl and let out instead an involuntary gasp. There, beneath me, beneath my stoutly sneakered feet and dangling amazement, where only neutral water had ever rustled before, the sky whispered.
Through the punched-out end of the shining funnel, looking down, clouds rippled and passed in the same unhurried, mysterious and magnetic blue then only recently available on color TV, and which I had only seen above and about me, a comforting absence that frayed into a greater absence. I had never expected the sky to be put to such a disconcerting service. I ladled a trial gob of spit with my young tongue and let the wind catch it and twirl its glassy ribbon counter-clockwise out of my pouted mouth. I watched my crystal matter spritz and disintegrate, a little death. That seemed to work OK. The sky had swallowed it wholeheartedly, an intimate kiss. When was one first anything other than Onanistically at one with the universe? Nervous as I was, I decided to give the real thing a shot, and imagined my father's coaching hand on my bland shoulder.
Imagining my father's coaching hand on my bland shoulder, I closed my eyes
It was our first winter in paradise, as the flair-panted travel agent had named it. Perhaps, if our cranky memories could be searched, or sifted, we might be able to rehearse other names, other colors. It was a strange island spot, a stone in the ocean; a black volcanic liberated of its native Caliban until my dad winged in. Or maybe, dwelling in the distracted haze of the past, it is actually some type or taste of an involuted, infolded space, like a physicist's undone laundry, and not the island haven the glossy brochure proclaimed at all, with no long stretches of unblemished sand tastefully spiced by ripe brown native boys singing hymnals after dark.
Whatever it was, our squeaking wheels touched it and our silver wings groaned when released by its buoyant being of their humid load of air. The airstrip's attendant, whose dark trousers were enlivened by nimble piping, and who had rolled the streamlined stairway to our squat airplane's door, lifted his blue policeman's hat in greeting before hunching off with all of our crammed winter bags under his thin arms. He trundled them to the custom-officer's desk in a cavernous aqua-blue room , disturbing the game of caribbean solitaire in which he had been immersed (in that quaint island version, voodooic queen outranked staunch aces). A frowning queen of hearts pinned my still snow-booted toe as he gave our bursting bags the standard shuffle and no lurid contraband emerged.
The five of us had trouble getting all the cases through the far door that dawned on palms which our porter-cum-custom's-officer-cum-police-chieftain had managed to wrangle to his dinged desk with a gibbon's ease, and had to wave goodbye with only four stiffly wiggling fingers, all of our thumbs still stuck through slipping handles.
Once at the huts, adorably florescent and fashioned of an enduring type of concrete, we let our northern layers of zippered skin slither from us in a sweating frenzy that eventually pooled at our feet in a species of languid gratitude. Old skins and old whims (as represented by the fragrantly sticky multi-hued stain of a forgotten popsickle picked up at the Newark terminal and allowed to bloom thus darkly on my dark December coat) were left in a soggy stack by the front egress, not to be re-touched or re-donned until the last, lingering tick of the vacation had passed and we were ready to reassume the cold masks and colder duties of our remote, home, higher hemisphere.
My brothers and I, all boys, spent a few gummed moments twisting out of our snowpants
My brothers and I, all boys, spent a few gummed moments twisting out of our snowpants and screwing back into our handy mom's proffered shorts before racing out the pliant backdoor towards the hunkered gem of the ocean. Looking back down the cross-hairs of time's telescope, I spotted the droning outline of my dad (already on the phone conducting his sinister business) and the docile, backlit slide of my mom, methodically filling the empty drawers with our horded summerwear, and efficiently slipping lifeless thing onto thin hangers. From the dark, angular closet, a ghost-white shirt shook its sleeves in parting as we scampered headlong down the sweetly simpering beach.
We were met at the drooling lip (or perhaps it was knee-deep on the lascivious tongue) of the peacock-blue sea by the two underaged representatives of a blonde quartet that composed the entire tidy family of one of my dad's harum of business associates. The dissolving names of the two before us, standing in the photo, as it were, long and tan with white shorts, come galloping up from memory's transmogrified mess, in one of its babble of reassigned languages,--- which correlates strangely (do not ask me how) with its hazy tendency to switch beloved heads and plop them on the glimpsed frames of IDless bodies, giving some blonde and tanned cousin a pale and darkly furred torso, or worse, wrenching some ebon-haired past-love with a classic nose and twinkling eyes onto the still grinding pelvis and shoulders of a cheap pick-up (one of those fated matings tinged with incestuousness) whose active legs were patched together by a starkly orange pubis--- come galloping, as I say, these names, to the tip of my still remembering, still trembling tongue to tumble out in plain prose, this far from the original inspiration of the actual beach, as King and Courteous. Well, it is obvious that I have misplaced somebody's bags and tags, but it is as close as I can get, squinting into memory's dim box. As the men of the Fire League say, or chant at their bachelor barbecues, A hose is a hose is a hose.
It was not very long before the older of the pair, courteous King, not royally lonesome Courteous, got the idea of hopping into his bleached dad's Boston whaler, the Sun Temple, and hailed the rest of us, still swirled in sand, to abandon our half-melted castles and sagging minarets and join him where the tingling, tangled water thumped his prow. We jumped from our tepid tidepools, abandoning our squids, and leaving cruelly declawed crabs in our wake, and slogged against the rising tide to reach the uneven gunwale out of breath.
As we whisked along the island's edge, Courteous kept us entertained with stories of the family doberman pincher, often caught thrusting its whittled head into the neighbor's mailbox to retrieve shampoo samples, or of Courteous' own innumerable rescues from neighborhood hoods at the trained teeth of the dog, which died unattended at the end of its chain, barking at a lark. Soon we were looking into lunar reefs, navigating purple hazards, tooting creatureless shells that stank of brine, yodelling and crooning at top speed over the liquid undulance from which we had spilled out of bed as hubris-stuffed dollops of kaleidoscopic slime.
After an afternoon freshened by our escapades, we had wound up in a luminous little cove where the deep bottom sand pulsed blue in time to the lulling swells; monstrous turtles frolicked and played at semaphores with their four fleshly underwater wings. Our original excitement had quieted to occasional oohs by this time, and we were content to drift between measureless sea and measureless sky, or in and out of a fluttering sleep, trailing lazy limbs in warm sodawater.
There are rare moments, fugitive instants, that glitter with a recollected condensation when our span is wished up upon us again in sullen reverie, and time collapses like a circus tent down an unshakable centerpole, the radiant nodule of a nodding minute or sparked millisecond, reducing rounded shadows of events to mere flats, bringing us flush with the twilit distant past, erasing accreted differences between our current selves (a treacherous fiction) and the doomed, slavish selves that we were, which, although they seemed complete at the time, intense, capable, undecided, they must now repeat our ruinous film upon command, decisionless ghosts dissolving halfway up the same stairs forever, kicking out the stilts that keep our feet dry and separate us from the marmoreal, miasmic, mammalian mire of memory, reducing a vibrant now to a sanded then, collapsing space. Or, actually, I suppose, such magnetic moments enlarge us from our vague potentials and unrealized wholes into exact fractions, infinite in their compactness as failed stars--- as opposed to the puny view which history with its crooked stack of flashcards affords. Well, however it is, one such zinging instant was about to descend upon me then, nine years old and in a boat, watching clods deform and defoam above me, my tingling hand grounded in live currents.
But what if this sacred event were merely baptized in tired bathwater and Mr Bubble? So what! In my mind the constellation of differing blues takes on the fixed geometry of a premonition, a blue five of hearts licked to fate's crinkled forehead, pale sky, robust blue trunks warmly pasted against me, neutral blue bench plank before me, hopeless blue cloud-shadow diffusing and re-fusing all around my lightly flecked, heavily targeted, heavenly blur-blue eye. I can see now that I was ready then for the unknown next. There was a faint wrinkle-wrinkle sound in the water. Coeur-hearted Courteous, I think, snorted, while stately King squinted with sleek regality at the horizon from his pose on the prow. I still had my bright eye on the everlasting. And then, out of nowhere, out of an illusionist's hidden hat, out of the invisible ocean, it came.
Having no taste, or, at most, a fading aftertaste, or burp's hint, for the bilious and overblown, I suppose that I should simply present my phenomenon, have done with it, and click to the next slide. Very well. enough ghoulish suspense. Dimensions: twenty-four feet if an inch from blunt front to whiplike stern, side to side another shadowy twenty perhaps. General shape: flapping diamond. Skin: slick, oiled oil in shaded, rough under magnification. Mouth: a surreptitious incision invisible when not gaping wide enough to swallow in one convulsive gulp a pumpkin the size of a human head. Gills (for it was, indeed, a creature of the sea I met): a terraced series of similar incisions, following the graceful flow of line of the calculate-in-the-direction-of-infinity sign in calculus (a lower-case italicized f minus its horizontal stripe). Have you got these disparate parts firmly in hand, or in mind, rather? Very well. Toss them and think gestalt, gestalt. Has the monster materialized from your foam, or is the puzzle still jumbled? Oh, all right, all right, quit tugging my sleeve, I'll tell you, I'll tell you.
Like Botticelli's Aphrodite, flying from the hysterical slalom of the sleeping sea-soma, this awful shadow emerged, breaking the cursive crest of its sheltering wave, and sledded, an awesome twenty-four-by twenty of sea-beast, no more than four feet over our rickety deck. I recognized it instantly as the sweaty, living version of several smaller miniatures (all fearsomely detailed) I had seen printed dinkily in my well-thumbed Field Guide to Sea Lore. There it was called, in the all-caps title to its own article, THE MANTA-RAY OR DEVILFISH, by Wally Stevedore. The poor, lost fellow, out of his supportive element, seemed to sag and waggle a bit at his skinny tips as he loomed for that brief, hovering moment above the boat. Was there terror and fire? White cowardice in our young hearts and rubbery limbs? There was shade and sky, a shuttle of bright and dark that I now replay, a dripping instrument of the miraculous followed, in its pop-up appearance, by clinging tendrils of stage-smoke.
And then, poof! and it was gone. The apparition dissolved that, probably, the tuna sandwich on Courteous' breath combined with our raw boy-smells had called at a stroke from the zeus-azure depths. The placated boat, still sluggishly full of gas, wobbled like a robin's egg cradled in the inquisitive palm of a girl with glasses; this palm was attached, I am, sure, to my ghost half-sister who never quite managed to get born, but who I have always had, in my head, the most stubbornly glowing image of (nimbused or coronaed by a lucky sunset touching her hair with its radiant bubble). My heart, wrecked and wronged by nine years of wear and tear and care, seemed, for the moment, drained and spacious, a tapped swamp relieved of its dreams. One could still see the awkward shapes of clouds going divinely by.
in the backward abyss of memory still spot, the slow, maddened revolution of the great creature's moist sustaining eye
Also, and this I have concealed until the penultimate minute, I had spotted, in that torpid solstice, folded in our communal awning of shadow, up in the instantaneous blackness that had come whispering out of the sea to bury us (or save us, as I once overheard in some terrorist ceremony at a Satanic Church revivalist meeting held, covertly, in my own basement-- without my consent or foreknowledge-- from my pinched position behind the umber altar where I had been laying ant traps, and stuck under an inverted cross where the carved blood flooded up), and in the backward abyss of memory still spot, the slow, maddened revolution of the great creature's moist sustaining eye.
Gregg Glory