Alongside II

In the aftermath, of an afternoon, when the conversation

with J went from Thomas Browne to Thomas Pynchon

In the undercurrent the feeling there was something important

as the topics, like waves, peaked, and then in the attics

of memory, names like gulls, shrieked for the intercessory

of an association by which one fills the the propagation

of knowiness, and tweaked, dressed in omiscence

the register of books, of quotes, of novelists and poets

Then the fact, the awful fact, after Boswell, the denial,

That maybe, it had ended, perhaps, a single canon shot

first in the distance, then with deliberate force

We are there, the two of us, as if it were a Courbet

picnic, estranged, and then broken into a fragment

of a rumour exercised in mouths which one dislikes

Could I only but then in the clouds hear your voice

But as sudden as the image was brought, then to wine,

then to repast, then to drunken stupour, then the mast

of my soul, my ship, totters, the sails are flung down

I want to swim to my love, to my lovely island

swim to her shores, and to home, in her words

I am tormented by the sharks of my apprehension

I create the storm, it comes as I start to reach a calm,

I whip up every letter, every serif, to become a belief,

there it is in the clouds, the thunder, the Gargantuan

weather beast, which with evil intent makes a wreck

of the least and most innocent, turns summer to winter

on the spot, and I drown in self-pity, a fathom

that knows no bottom, as in argument with devil,

I lose out, so Anne Sexton, now I am ready to close

a deal, ready to strike up a contract, I am ill at ease,

confused as a bottle in the sea, that does rattle with her,

She is the message, and the one I refuse to read

Love racks me, I walk the plank, I am at mutiny

with reason, I bring in everything, even the kitchen

sink, but I cannot read the truth, it will blind me.