Rock the Boat

I dock and meet the woman from Islaroja. We sit at her kitchen table drinking red wine and eating peppermint ice cream. Our tongues burn. Desire is our boat.

All night we row hard against the tides. Our t-shirts, soaked, stick to our skin. Rain gathers in our mouths. At dawn, the boat wrecks on the Coast.

The wind off the bay is hot, close. An ibis moves from the calla lillies to a palmetto pine. Moths open and close their wings like pliers. We are beyond repair.

Rockville

What a tree's roots grasp and hoard make a mountain. Exposed, the mountain is boulder, cairn, wall; buried, it is challenge: drill down, then, it taunts. No fool to grasp a pick-axe, of course, and devote his life to lost causes, the wise man will walk away, seeking dark bottom lands, wide meadows, flat as-far-as-the-eye-can-see fields. For him, rocks ruin the plow, are at best a grave's friend.

Instead, he will live in one of those small towns comfortable as night lights along the turnpike, places where we stop to buy gas and talk over a coke while waiting for change. When we say skyscraper, in his skyblue eyes he will picture a grain elevator. When we say mountain, he will look down in mouth-open wonder at the closest stone.

Gulliver Visits the Stables

The eyes of chameleons roll independently of each other. Unlike our personalities: two eyes — one, the true us, the other, the suit, the costume upon which the day insists — which travel together, like a team of horses, dapple grays or Percherons, equally pulling a wagon load of vision.

Can't see a thing in the mirror? We ask our lover, our only testifier, whose eyes are either closed or rolling. And like people who videotape themselves having sex, or like scientists who try to photograph ghosts, the best we can say is, Say look, here's another picture of nothing.

The only time our horses part, splitting the cart down the center, is during the throes of orgasm when, writhingly transported, our eyes are capable of moving independently. This is one of the moments of magic our lives allow. At least we tell ourselves that, munching oats in our barn stalls.