Oubliette billet-doux

Perhaps you have tried the best you can not to miss me. I have. Perhaps you have succeeded as I have done. Two weeks in the islands and nothing about me is the same except the old recurring dream of that sad familiar twitch that signals a need to flex the writtenword lonesome soul function and find some pleasure in the slow syllabic release of my sadness. Difficult to find, this sadness I used to speak of. Two weeks on the islands before I stopped scanning the hot honeyed horizons for the fissures of fault that must lay intertinged there, harboring some tenacious suspicion that just beyond the azure crest of the otherwordly beauty in that bay lay some scabrous discontent lurking. There must be, I thought, brooding, the painful tropic brightnesses
diffusing the late light awaiting a late date, awaiting some new relevatory tone of torment to sing its dirge, but no, only sweet samba songs there and yet I waited. And I waited still for misery to
pop its foreboding head out of the vivid Caribbean colors with a "Boo! Betcha thought you lost me," but it never came and I waited until I was finally capsized by a fat patient angel of
too-long-ignored weariness that sat down first on my eyes and then, finding no objection, settled blissfully to rest herself heavily in the very soul of me and after two days of sleeping deeply I found that my brain had shut up for good and what was left there was the question of what was left to do but silently don my trunks and go swimming. My hair a bed-tangled snarl doused in salty seawater and dangling. Glistening wet as I undertook to trudge back through the baked sand in air too hot to breathe and order, perhaps, a Monster Margarita, my own concoction, one of many. Oh the foolish quirks of joy.

I am sitting in the kelson corner of an establishment known as the Forbidden Pineapple by young men and women who are in love and listening earnestly to another of my heedless lectures about Postmodernist Conceptions of Justice. I have been here for a while and hearing my own voice wane into a tired rhythm I make a lame joke about how Capitalism ultimately isn't the answer, "sex is" and they laugh and we order more drinks, except for one shy and pinkish young woman who has been quiet all morning but now that the couples have scooted away she approaches to poke me and beam a modest compliment, complimented by the broad beam of her pleasant and somehow inviting smile. I lean back in my chair to dwell in the delights of the sight of her.

Do not think about sex, I had been telling myself when I roused from my stoic shroud of dread. Since there was no one immediately to talk to I undertook to do without company and make my own contentment. Dependent only on myself I determined to dwell on the worn and frangible delights of a few treasured memories. But this was not to be. The impressions all around untucked me from the envelope of myself. A blue bicycle parked and sparkling outside the warm morning rented room. The clouds' daylong parade of wondrous ghost elephants passing slowly
into the lambent evening sun lying low in a misty nest of cumulus blurred distance. Everything ephemeral and yet colorfully tangible, unreal reality, the palm fronds thick with stars, paradise trees shouldering eternal sky diamonds that were long ago once and future gods. The crescent moon, like a catclaw on the black drapery of horizon, the slick feel of a potter's fresh vermilion clay creation; the humid heat, the slick feel of cold marble countertops beneath slow sensitive fingertips; the appetite for endless lipsmacking freshfish, tonguing the red earthy cling of a heavy
wine's residue from too-dry white teeth; the straight hot black shadows cast on faded fallaway amber roads; the nearness of the sea or of a woman –these could fill my soul completely. I remembered the old terrors less and less and then it seemed not at all. Anger and rage gave way to casual curiosity, the casual sounds of the Islanders words, the eager pleasures of the nightflesh, the fulfillments that inevitably ensue unbusy days of leisurely seashore indifference.

A woman, this pleasant gift the island gods had set aside just for me, waiting in the shadow of a hypogeum and smelling like soap and glitter. Smitten. She sat on the couch a couple of feet from me, eyes hooded, mouth pursed, teeth smiling coyly, setting eagerly into the cushion of her soft underlip. We go well together. I put my glass down and stand up, flexing toward her, closer and then abruptly away. The eternal patterns of pelvic rotation, sublime and subliminal in its simplicity, its ecstasy. I kiss her forehead. It tastes sweetly of passion fruit.

Oh the beach wind in the middle of the night hiding cantillations of waves and bird and insect. The almond trees stretch and angle in the nightsand. A curious flier hums by my ear. Slap slap. I feel her flesh near my thigh, peaking out from the subtle sheet with each tender exhalation. Let us be violent with abandon. "Again?" the voice whispers as if within a pleasant dream. The summer winds teach us. We explore each other. We explored the island. By day we walked the varied earth and saw, on one seashore or another, the cities of men and their palaces. In crowded marketplaces where the spawn of cruise ships amble and bargain, milling and arguing over currencies and duties, we duty-free. Or at the foot of a mountain whose uncertain peak might be inhabited by satyrs, he had listened to complicated tales which he accepted, as he accepted reality, without asking whether they were true or false. Viewing down through the gracious graceful shade onto the sailboats moored in their crooked bay, the green lawns and the large and lovely houses, small from here, where the beautiful universe is slipping away into the clouds.
Higher where the rocky slope looks out to the land's end lighthouse on the tide-scratched point, and then the blue sea beyond in its long majesty, pulling at us with its depth and gravity and lullsong.

Two chocolate donuts, half bottle rum. I always forget how long it takes for girls to get ready. I hunt through drawers in boredom illicit, but allowed. Found little fabric pieces and sniffed at them surreptitiously. They smelled like... mmm... detergent. She did not return. I searched for her through the corridors that were like stone nets, along slopes that sank into the shadows. An outdoor concert of animalistic drums banging rage-like. The waves roaring in the the salty darkness, she owed me nothing, flee with impunity I reminded myself accompanied by that
self-perpetuating neuropsychiatric purr. Everything growing hazy. I waited into the night as a storm came. A gradual mist erased the outline of my hands, the night was no longer peopled by stars, the earth beneath his feet was unsure. Hours passed into further hours and I dreamed. I dreamed my trunks slid delicately down my bone-skinnied backside hide at the pull of an unseen hand. The land gave way to sea. Everything was slipping here. Awoke with a start drenched with sweat. Perhaps pleasure is only tempoary relief.

Lonesome soul junction indeed. In quiet desperation passed days and nights in deep-tanned flesh. One morning awoke, looked, no longer alarmed, at the dim things surrounding ; an inexplicable sense, as one recognizes a tune or a voice, that now it was over and I had faced it, with fear but also with joy, and hope.

Descent into memory, which seems now endless, and up from that vertigo. Nearly home. A seatbelt tightened, a chair brought upright and locked. So far away and yet closer now. Closer. I succeeded in bringing forth a forgotten recollection that shone like a coin under the rain, perhaps because I had never looked at it, except perhaps in a dream. The recollection
was like this:

Another boy had insulted
him
and he had run to his father and told him about it.

His father let him talk as if he were not listening or did not understand;

and he took down from the wall a bronze dagger,

beautiful and charged with power, which the boy had secretly coveted.

Now he had it in his hands
and the surprise of
possession obliterated the affront he had suffered.

But his father's voice was saying, "Let someone know you are a man,"

and there was a command.


The night blotted out the paths;

clutching the dagger, in which he felt the
foreboding of a magic power,

he descended the rough hillside that surrounded the house

and ran to the seashore, dreaming he was Ajax and Perseus

and peopling entire battles with his wounds.

The exact taste of that moment was what he was seeking now;

the rest did not matter:

the insults of the duel, the rude combat,

the return home with the bloody blade...

Another memory, in which there was also a night and an imminence of adventure, sprang out of that one. Why did these memories come back to me, and why did they come without bitterness, as a mere foreshadowing of the present?

In grave amazement he understood.

In this and every night he was descending,

love and danger waiting, always.

Poems to new gods needed writing

in the kinds of taxing hexameters his heart pumped,

murmured
thrum of plangent unmet people

searching the online seas for a beloved isle,

the call of the ruinous spirit poets

like finely attuned sparrows

on the branches of long sagging library shelves

shouting of magnificent destinies yet to be sung

and leave echoing a song

in the cavernous primal memories of future man.

These things we all know, but not all know those things that he felt when the plane descended into the last shade, the last shade of all.