From the Archives : The Voyage of Life (May 2014)

Roman fountain mask (replica) in Augst (Augusta Raurica), Switzerland.

I turn up the music on my phone and try to imagine

somewhere inside the song there’s a universe of wire,

cables shearing cables, tautening to the grand mazurkas

and Gymnopédie of the drunken mind — it all beguiling

to the point of how can you resist, already past hope

to the rapids of wine given-up and daydream ravaging

the riverbanks, cutting a wild way through the erstwhile

quietudes of childhood and pastoral preconception.

Even as branches dagger and tear at your crimson tunic,

Boatman, crazy high and weeping about this, your journey

from wellspring to delta, virgin to wastrel, just shut up

and inhale the secondhand gurglespray and haystink.

It’s too late. You’re already a part of this landscape

grievously altered before you could recognize the change

affected of wartide, the shoreside villages all burnt

to a cinder before you roll by, as you ascribe this lapse

to an involuntary daze of algae and rutter confusion.

You read that the river is this and that. A brown god.

A plunging demiurge. A place kids shouldn’t swim.

The imagination proved too thin and incapable to plot

a course through all the fallout. But here’s a raft, it said,

you’re welcome. Strung together of bramble fit for a bonfire

and morningwood, never did torn shoelaces so fare

shaved sticks down all the mud-holy rivers of Europe.

Floß, raft, radeau — whatever — the craft works despite

your best attempts at running aground, crashing into

as many neon buoys and wonted Loreleis in trashed night

as you confound hungover upon each next daybreak.

Like a Roman fountain mask, flood tinkles from your lips

like speech, unavertible, arraying the rank possibilities

of course and destiny as you stare on in utter bronze,

walled into perspective, barfing out the reflecting pool

before your sculpted eyes, the pupil like a pert nipple

cupped by nothing, a shadowy ring simulating the iris

and oxidized face in a transhistorical look of dismay.

You would rather suck, but no. There’s too much to be

communicated : a depthless world’s-worth of sewage

abluvion wise with cigarette butts, bird shit and E. coli.

The sixteen-tit Diana of the Villa d’Este is your muse

amid so much ejaculate, so many monstrously whetted

mouths aligned in a hanging garden of poetic spewage.

Or is it the gravel crunch underfoot, the spilled negroni,

the tipsy-tobacco verde bottiglia of the laguna? No no —

this poem is five hefeweizen deep, belly-up in the Bodensee,

unsure to exhale and sink into faux Mediterranean blue

still icy in June, to sleep under the poplars as the air reeks

of hash and Suite Bergamasque — the pleasures of living

in a turquoise minivan, roadtripping the amber noonlight

of your nineteenth Summer, so free to ruin everything.