O. on the Edge of the Western World

We were facing the west, out to the sea. In this case, the Pacific. A storm was moving in. You could see the line of squalls moving inland. She started shouting to some deity whose name started with a "T." Tiamat, that's what it was. The storm was moving in. The pressure was dropping. Enough to make you feel like the whole world around was dropping in some kind of spiral as the white gulls spun circles around us, defecating on O. in one case, or, floating on the 50-mile-per-hour gusts. We leaned in to the wind. She starts shreaking about Tiamat.

Then she starts shouting out Audrey Lord, and I'm looking around, trying to see if those huddled in their vehicles on the Highway 101 parking lot beach stop, just off the famed Pacific Coast highway in Lincoln City, Oregon, where the world's shortest river, the "D" River, emptying as it does from Devil's Lake ... trying to peak around to see if anybody is noticing us. Sand is blowing in our face now, and the rain is upon us. The wind, hitting the headlands now at 60 to 75 miles per hour, is pressing our rain gear against our bodies.

Tiamat. Audrey Lord. Then her own poems. O. looking like one of those sea queens on the front of old sailing ships. We are pelted with hail now, small stones, little bits of sleet. Tiamat and Audrey Lord. I laugh and dance and try to smoke, but it's no use. The wind blows out the lighter. The rain douses the cig. I act as if nothing is wrong. This is how you face the storm, like a scene from that movie, "Tempest," with John Cassavetes making circles in the air, saying, "Show me the magic. Show me the magic." Though rain dances are hardly necessary on the Oregon coast the winter of 2006, the force of the storm, blowing through us now, takes on the epic lyric of a howling she-wolf into the breeze, over the coastal hills, the Oregon plains, into the jet stream rising over the Cascades, sending global carpets of agitated moisture into the Midwest, where it spins all kind of hell.

Moved by the scene, getting home with O., somewhere, sometime, I don't remember when, I responded with my own furies cry into the wind, this pathetic little voice, first scratched onto a notebook, stewed up on the computer, and then thrown onto the computer, like some kind of Blakean prophetic rant!

She leans into the sea
keening a song
from the Madonna mirror
of the deep as hailstones
ring white pins honed from Hawaii
and a tide of low pressure
rounds up upon the shore
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
a crowny curtin of thorns

Unknowing from the unquiet
slumbers of lost ships
still melting in icy currents
below the surface,
the seagulls scatter
and defecate upon her:

Rise, O rise, storms across America
Your plastic passions await you
as cars stream in from the Orient
and gas passes through your ports
of entry, pleased, as they are
from the total penetration
of the perfect plan

Star of India, our captains
catch colds in the bowlegged
polarities of warm seas
and freezing skies
The sun, well-timed,
is a clock-face ticking,
hidden from our view

America, may the tilted jet stream
blow a gale of goth up your nose
May the ocean rise and plaster
a new continent where truth,
chased in the wind, wakes
the ghost dancers from
the Pacific to the Atlantic
before the living dead
can get out of bed

Shipwrecked sailors
found lost at sea
discovered homes
in their own faces,
in bindles of woody words
crushed to hand-length bits

After forty days of fire,
forty days of rain,
the northwesterly El Nino
sheared shanks of wind
off the Oregon coast,
then brought a low blow
to slap the soiled temples
of the City of Angels

Driftwood is piled fore desire
against sandy beach stumps
and stop gaps, infinite and wise:
Infinity stopped here for a day,
a deluge for the dead,
so I could admire
our wood chips,
our broken bones

A winter-long windshear
plucked the breath
from my pressurized lungs,
turning my fire to water.
I floated some, then burst,
mounted a floating oar
then sank into an orb
of sand

The sun, beyond the grey wail,
shaped a man inside here,
inside this calamity of clams;
one-part plastic,
one-part fishhook,
a bonney redwood mast,
a skull & crossbones flying,
walking the plank on dry land
without an anchor, who cares?

Setting of these banalities
of life aside, let me perscribble:
Glass floats on the beach,
I've found, and the ebb-tide
of the avenues are a roar
of trucks in the rain

On tuesdays, Great Food
is closed in a seaside town;
and what a tree lacks,
the wind whispers;
and loving couples
strand tennis shoes
on the frosty morning shores
as missiles are clicked
into load in the underground
caverns of Iran

Also this: The electric truth sheds
the oil slick skin off the CIA
and sickened seagulls
reel in the ninety mile winds
and Pennsylvania miners
with black lung bibles
defuse the threat
with another tragic
mind blast

The sun goes up
and Mercury goes
into retrograde
as our satellite's
telescopic echo fades
and techno-pop
becomes the sea
in which we wade

The camera's eye
is just a catch
for this cuckoo cluck house,
our mourning latch
and what is least
is that which lasts
as buzzard gulls sift
through black morning trash
and I try to unlearn
this noisy cache
of highway moms
speeding by bullet blasts
and taxi driver Thanatoss plants
look like gods in camouflage pants

Glass floats on the beach,
it's endless, at last!
The end is coming near
and it's coming here fast
It's time to drink
from the pirate's flask
and toast a tune
to all of that glass,
to the sun, the sky,
the nuclear smash,
the currents, the past,
the pounding surf,
the manic search
for meaning and gas,
the molten glow,
the melting snow,
the rivers that run
through those who know ...

Glass floats on the beach,
the ebb is endless,
it's here, at last