Portraits of Friends - 3

To Oscar
...
Yea,

whiskydrowned, like shipwreckt men
who paddle away from the lighthouse
toward winedark waves,

we sought vortices in the grooves of records,
the sublime silences enraptured in the white noise
of unopened books.

We were the solitary ones who read aloud to no one:
at the back of the classroom we bespoke orations
marbled by meticulous men, & carried priestly books
like proud lovers gorged on the whiteboned immortal
dead, our thoughts configured by apparitions of order
in our unlikely context,

we, the self-taught californians,
who invented our own prestige.

You in your hi-desert heat heard
the plangent call for impavid voyages:
a sound of waves, a prodigal
horn impassioned by a slur of windcry.

(In you the stroke & counterstroke
of Coltrane, of Kierkegaard,
sublimest reduction.)

I then had awoken from suburb sleep
to a monstrous dream of riptides,
possessed of the image of one
who read H. Crane as if it were felonious:
we circumvented the curriculum
& constructed our own bridge
across that miasma of shopping malls
& raised trucks;

those obscene 6-lane roads,
and where no roads were paved the dirt & desert rocks,
kept us inward, hermits at a threshold
fashioned from borrowed erudition,
we trekked from towns to metropolises,
from cities to cathedrals & from letters to the words
that were bricks in the cathedral that was a book
that were pages, white pages like cloudy waves on which
our brown bookish galleon steadied itself & rocked & surged:

& onward through speeches
of women & gin, a philosophy of love
that in ample fugues led us
to the nightly-pier, exhausted
from talk and eager for dialogue
with the whorish untouched moon:

We gazed up at her with tremulous
washedout eyes,

'the seal's wide
spindrift gaze toward paradise.'

Thence came the waves, the waves
that came from lord knows where
those waves of stupendous godly
inebriation the forgetful waves
of remembrance, the virgin waves
of chastity, the spume waves of sex:

& in that car racing at 5am
when the outer sphere still swam
in the starspotted sea I remember
not what I remember clearly but
I remember the waves coming toward us
and you bellowed out that passenger window
in strange righteous sulfurous agony,

'Here comes the ocean!
and the waves,

where have they been?'
...