Figured Dark: Poems

Sail On, Sailor

Sail On, Sailor The lonely sea looks good. —Brian Wilson The ancient gods played tricks, pulling on bird skins to flutter among us–– here, the magpies all a-clatter, there, a horny swan. The truth is, we liked it–– lolling among the sulphurous vapors, puzzling out the meaning of a line. Until do-nothingness bored them and a god would crank down on a crescent moon to say Get up and get going! Consider Odysseus––years after slaying the suitors–– pie-eyed, fat, and drunk. Athena works a simple spell and the lonely sea looks good again, though by now, Homer had doddered away. Lacking consistent authors, these last tales are fragments, the shards nesting in smaller and smaller baskets–– a series of alternate end-notes in the Mythology of Graves. Does Odysseus step on a stingray while searching for conch shells, and die when the venom eensie-weensies up his leg? Or does Dante get it right? Odysseus, sailing west, augers the Big Kahuna of all waves within landfall of Purgatory, that sung-of Kokomo. No matter. The taste for Odysseus fades among the Greeks, caught in a wave 33 of civic pride and gathering capital–– his story one more toga flick on Dialing for Drachmas, the dub out of synch with the actors’ lips. Years go by, centuries pinwheel across the screen, until the story’s told again in Brook Watson and the Shark–– water streaming through his bushy, bushy blond hair and the men straining at the oars, a painting so perfectly posed––the fetch of the waves and the toothy shark chomping against them, the naked boy so near the shark’s mouth, we must finally look at the living man and say Oh, it only ate your leg! Which is the point of the story, though the lonely sea’s not looking so good now, is it? Looping us to Brian Wilson, making sweet harmony in Deuce Coupe and Pet Sounds, until the Sixties end and Mr. Id begins to unravel. Brian’s in Malibu, cutting a demo with Van Dyke Parks, the demigod of lyrics. Brian’s feet are in a sandbox––he loves the beach but fears the smog-brown sea, the baggies-drooping sea–– and he sits at a keyboard, torching a joint, the spring-tide of serotonin receding in his brain, begging Hypnotize me so I don’t go crazy. But Van Dyke yells, Shut up and play the song! Oh, su-weet song, leftover from the aborted Smile, lost grail of the Beach Boys. Brian sighs the tape rolls, he plinks the chords for an ancient chant set to a galleyed beat, 34 like a conch lifted to the same ear, three millennia after it was pulled from the surf: I sailed an ocean, unsettled ocean . . . 35 ...