Hate Mail to my Muse

You give me the beat of mustang hooves racing across the plain, while the sky and clouds’ argument resolves into rain.

All this in an instant switches to a color-enhanced Andronicos food store, jars of dill and sweet pickles lining the shelves, Walt Whitman rubbing his beard by the cacao, traveler’s check in hand.

What am I supposed to do with this juxtaposition of chaos?  I am like a long-necked heron fishing in the pale blue water of a drainage ditch while the mud-flats of the bay lie just across the highway.

You hold out a series of jewels, brilliant and just out of reach.  Then laughing, pull back, toss me the cuteness of a kitten touching noses with a fawn.

An authentic experience?  Sure, but when the rubber hits the road, everything tumbles back into cliché, the childhood catechism learned over breakfasts of biscuits and red-eyed gravy.

I want the weight of a backpack filled with clanky noise – backhoes growling in competition with howler monkeys.

I long to gnaw, chew, and claw my way into the dung-stench of your lion’s den.  You deny it?  Claim to have a boudoir of red satin sheets and white down comforters.  Ha!  At best you live in a ramshackle barn, withered corn husks underfoot, pure abstraction in a galvanized bucket.

You think I love you?  I don’t.  I am tied to you.  Prometheus on the rock.  You make me incinerate my soul for you just to taste that one glistening orange drop of freedom.

To take you as a demon lover is to sleep with a scorpion’s nest under my bed.  There is no end to the battle.  I give up all, become a hermit, restrict my life, just to stay embroiled with you, David and Goliath, but where is my sling?

Give me stillpoint.  At night, when the stars murmur their songs, let me sing in their language.  I want to understand the slow undulation of a gray whale in the deep ocean, navigating the currents, and the whispers of the tide.

You think I’ll settle for being frozen in this layer of glacial peat and ice, a gorse bush prickling my cheek?  You think I won’t keep trying to squeeze out the one true and unique sentence that I will regard as the syrup from the belly of, you, the beast?

Will it be sweet?  No.  Toxic as hell.  Stinking like burnt Brussells sprouts, but singing with the love of the mystery, that singular trapezoid of chance, that heartfelt pump of blood upon seizing the perfect spiral sea shell by the growling waves, pink and strawberry red, glittering in the sun.

In Love with a Selkie

I grew shrill in wanting her, in calling to her from the shore,
in promising her anything, manic with regret.
She cared not, out in the estuary, floating on her back,
eating small bony fish and shrugging off my love.

Even when I overlooked the stench of rotten fish on her breath,
she scoffed at me.  When I was at my worst, when I gave her roses,
how her eyes smiled, as she edged back towards the surf,
trailing the flowers from her fingers.

Then months of nothing.  The redwoods dripped with rain.
The stray grey cat stayed a while, then left.
Back to waiting by the shore, seeing the empty rockery,
even the occasional seal, but where was she?

The woman I never fully believed in.
The Irish myth brought alive in Northern California.
She who broke my shifting expectations,
who scurried back to the water’s edge at the first sign of a fight.

When she came home pregnant, she took my hand,
placed it on her belly.  I pulled my hand away.
We sat on the sofa, as she put her pelt away in its box.
I longed to put a knife through it, to keep her here with me.

“This time I’m visiting until the baby is born.”  “Visiting?”
Her skin was still damp, with its boathouse algae smell.
I could hear the ocean in her voice.  The selkie in her was still awake.
“We’ll call her Riannon,” she said.  I simply held her hand.

the pelt

her pelt came wrapped in a package
like a mystery she could solve
during her empty nights

her living had reached a torment,
within closed doors,
behind suspicious looks

all her friends remembered
her creeping towards the water,
slipping away

land, she said, her shoulder to the sea
held layers of crying people
like torn oysters

she was longing to say, the seal is me
it’s a house, that pelt,
a liveable set of shoulders

when they kicked down the door
to the boathouse,
her jacket hung inside there in the night

already she was diving under the waves
swimming full tilt
in the cold glinting water

No Longer Drowning

In her dream, she swims without breathing,
gliding through the tranquil moonlit water,
without ever rising to the surface for air.
In her dream, the water is warm and soft,
easy to move through, almost airy.
She feels weightless, an astronaut in space.
Flipping and twisting, her stomach tight, her thighs taut,
she feels like a gymnast dismounting from the parallel bars.
Flowing through the water, swirling like an eddy,
in her dream, she grows gills and a tail,
silver, with a shimmer of green and blue.
The slightest flick of her tail jets her though the pool,
which expands into a pond, then a lake and an ocean.
In her dream, this peaceful swimming feels like home.
She decides to stay and never wake.