Salt
Abashingly eerie that just because I’m here on the long
low-tide beach of age with
briny
time
licking insidious eddies over my toes there’d rise in me
those mad weeks a lifetime
ago
when I had two lovers, one who soaked herself so in Chanel that
before I went to the
other
I’d scrub with fistfuls of salt and not only would the stink
be vanquished but I’d feel
shame-shriven,
pure,
which thinking about is a joke: how not acknowledge—obsolete
notion or no—that
I
was a cad.
Luckily though, I’ve hung onto my Cornell box of pastness
with its ten thousand
compartments,
so there’s a place for these miniature mountains of salt,
each with its code-tag of
amnesia,
and also for the flock of Donnas and Ednas and Annies, a
resplendent feather from
each,
and though they’re from the times I was not only crass,
stupid, and selfish but
thoughtless—
art word for shitty—their beaks open now not to berate but
stereophonically warble
forgiveness.
Such an engrossing contrivance: up near a corner, in tinsel,
my memory moon, still
glowing,
still cruel, because of the misery it magnified the times I
was abandoned— “They
flee
. . . oh they flee . . .”
I’d abrade myself then not with salt but anapests, iambs,
enjambments, and here
they
still are,
burned in ink, but here too, dead center, Catherine, with
her hand-carved frame in
a
frame—
like the hero in Westerns who arrives just in time to rescue
the town she galloped up
to
save me.
Well, I suppose soon the lid with its unpickable latch will
come down, but the top
I
hope will be glass,
see-through, like Cornell’s, so I’ll watch myself for a
while boinging around like a
pinball,
still loving this flipper-thing life that so surprisingly
cannoned me up from oblivion’s
ramp,
and to which I learned to sing in my own voice but sometimes
thanks be in the voice
of
others,
which is why I can croon now, “My lute be still . . .” and
why I can cry, “For I have
done.”
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