Idol
54 Idol Twit twit twit —The Waste Land Quite the metal, the sea’s afternoon aluminum. Idle trolling around Isla Mujeres: some slack-jaw’s rock beach and rococo clapboard happenings lean to the lean-tos any mind might imagine. No one minds the dock witches cursing seven-foot coyotes, the suicides of mirrors. Twin kingfishers sleep their halcyon sleep. April’s perennials: crucifixion, Cadbury eggs, taxation, spring break. Thus the beers of Mexico are utopian —Negra Modelo, Sol, Bohemia— bobbing in the silken sand, each bottle its own idol —docile, benevolent, docile— idle, as each could cause great famine. This is why you fish. Because whales bring down ships every Ida of the 1890s couldn’t pay for with such silken ambergris. Meanwhile, the conch, ratted from the rock, hunkers in, is no consolation. Oysters swirl in brine, a wedge of lime. 55 Someone wails, Swallow! swallow! as you begin the ageless questioning after the skull’s wind, this gift your tongue makes a hollow thing of. How can thy heart be full of spring? you might ask four frat boys buoying on the hard deck of the beach disco. Two hoist a beer funnel as you flick your ashes. The mind then an open grave, a hull cavernous, sconce-haunted. The one squatting, funneling now—eyes rolled back, forearms aquiver—lights up in a slow burning vision of the eternal topless afterparty. Every Ida is there. Ida, you say, what is the last whale’s language? Swallow, swallow. ...
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