The Black Riviera

Human Geography

Human Geography Sometimes I feel the whole coast in my body. At night, homesick, this helps me get to sleep. Sand lies along my arm. Along the sand lies The outer pressure of all otherness, The twinning, twining ocean, gray or blue As the sky, black or green as depths and shallows. The rows of houses salted by its break, The roads peppered with sand, the thick shells crushed By riptides, tangle like limbs and weeds and water. But honestly, this wholeness is a segment. At most a draft sets off a memory. Skin prickling, eye flickering, a taste of brine, And I detect the heat of a summer sidewalk That dips and rises with the coastal hills Where wild oat, chaparral, and live oak now Are stucco houses scraping the fog's body, That vapor that burns to vapor by afternoon. The heat comes up, the hills descend and rise. A friend grimaces as a bit of glass Pierces his heel, grinding toward the bone. He sits down on a lawn, just like a tailor, Pinching the heel. It pouts a bead of blood. And I go up to someone's door for a needle. She stares at me out of a massive brightness, On such a hot day, blazing inside her house, Where glaring lamps and reflectors lean toward Something stretched out behind her. The borrowed needle Feels itself like a burning line of glass. And when I turn away, the day seems dark, Darker as her door clicks. She calls, "Keep it!" About the needle. Out, the spike of glass Is now invisible. The sequence, too— My age, my friend's identity, the woman— Invisible. Here's when the stucco town Grates like a shell to powder vague as fog And turns so smooth, the flanges, hinges, spurs, The spicules and ridges sanded off, Hushing itself to sleep without a name, 6 Softening, sieving fact and leaving fiction. And that is when I nearly fall asleep. But this can happen anytime. Awake, I drive all roads at once, wired with passion. It's always a surprise. I can never think, "Now I will feel the town where I grew up And brand it to myself here, far away." A gift—the feeling that flesh itself is a place And not, banal reliance, just the body, Working as always—but another thing. Then, I can drive back into a story, Any I choose, and pick it out again. My friend, heel in his hands, picks at the wound, A short, compact, fierce boy, fighting his pain. I am afraid to bother anyone. But he demands I go to the front door And beg a needle. No, it needs no fire. The glass is just below the heel's callus. We're 12 years old this summer. At the beach, The offshore winds of afternoon have raised Those rare, scooped-out, fast-running, light Breakers for body surfing that we like. I go to the door, knock, and it's jerked open. The body in it's just a silhouette Of shade and heat, a sunspot on the sun. Then black distinctions, crisp, cut-out, appear, Her curls of hair, the knots of bathing suit, Then cloth lines, pale flesh crescents, thigh and breast. She answers with a question, cutting quickly, And disappears. And I can't help but see it, Stretched out like a bed or body, what the lamps And the reflectors and the camera point at: A city done in miniature,a model, No one, nothing, else. The needle in my palm, She says, "I'm a photographer." And so, I tell my friend, as he forgets the pain Long past the house and nearly to the beach, 7 That in that house, hidden under the lights, I've seen what neither of us has ever seen, Even where flesh is sand, down at the beach, Exposed and everywhere, and yet and yet— I saw her and the camera set to take her. And so the story grows, as he colludes With me, encircled by our friends. It adds Whole tracts and housing projects, as her body Grows vast, its clarity as painful as The needle in the heel, which she herself, As we recount it, worked with surgeon's care. Friends beg to know the address—just the block!But know those stucco houses shunting down The low hills to the sea. Parched...