| "Cardinal Points" litetrary journal: www.stosvet.net |
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J.C.Todd IN LATE SUMMER THE SEA COMES TO THE CITY Pissing Knees bent, you tip your pelvis slightly toward the immaculate bowl and with the same hand that stroked me last night extend from its sheath the pink bud of your penis. For a minute, I think of Narcissus looking at Narcissus, his vision forever grounded on the shallows of that glance. But there is no limit like self-love in your act, only those always gentle fingers on your penis and the golden piss arcing from your body what it does not need. I lean against the door jamb breathing in the scent of your beautiful excess. Your hand slides back to the taut perineum pushing up until the last drop falls. Urine of the gods. I say this knowing you are not Uranus, not Jupiter Pluvius, certainly not a shaman making water on my naked body in order to charm the rain. You are clearly not, as Freud would rush to note, a girl with a garden hose snaked between her legs. No, you are the man Paul was too blind to be, flesh filled with light: atoms pulsing, nuclei of cells, neurons, dendrites, retese - all light transmitting light. My golden husband pissing in a porcelain bowl. On the Beach 9/18/01 Ebb tide morning of an almost new moon. And what's the sea brought up under stars? Constellations of seaweed and shell-bit scintilla, frayed lines. Ravel and Shatter. There's no way to make a tale from what's strewn underfoot. The on-shore breeze tumbles scud and litter, monarchs tremble in windshift, but not enough gale to say, Nor'easter. Is this the last day before war? A few knots out, a factory ship sails a town farther down beach, seining and freezing. Harvest, they call it. Have I ever imagined the daily lives of its catch — whiting, sea bass, mottled flounder, rays whose skin is soft as petals, pale gray nurse sharks - when I've dived with them in warmer waters? So many failures of attention. Lapses. The stump - legged gull picks at kelp, its familiar laugh an alarm for a flock to descend. What do they sense? I kick up a red star, a pink shovel, castle turret, drenched knot of an infant's sock. Remains of a day on the beach. Upwind, an island fabled in my childhood glitters and smolders. Manhattan. Back to it, I walk the salt-gauzed edge of what used to feel like mainland, squeezing the balled-up bootie. I can't stop hoping the sea carried the child away. In late summer the sea comes to the city It isn’t yourself you see at the end Of August. You are a reflection in A gutter’s standing water, and the flat-you, Swept up in traffic, an image, looking back. The rush of drive time like the rush of surf Just another noise fastened to the brain. The faster the speed—ambulance, squad Car —, the more headway into a boredom Repetitious as sun that blunts and stuns Until all seagulls look the same. Generics. The oddness of it, being hollowed by Not being able to notice detail. Imagine - what is it like to be left With a solitary thought, uprooted, Embodiment unmoored, pulled out from Beneath you by unfathomed undertow? Every last cell lost. In this way You learn distance from your memory. |