On The Rappahannock

It's the first sea-worthy
body of water
I pulled from
the nonsense morass, my
brain's fink
pretend memory.
So here and only here
we'll begin...
Because you are,
and such the nearness
of the closeness
of most forgetting,
so when I hear from you
water makes such clear obscure patterns
in places neither of us know,
I can feel it, and you can feel it
too, little hays of straw
in some Virginia
barn are nervous with a bit of breeze
and trembling. A mom
of the workplace
spun this lore from
the river I've just
loved at random:
since it's a saltwater
spider, jellyfish
often couchpotatoswimwander
inland, and the
swimmers, mostly
country girls, from
my co-worker Nicole (name
also of my most recent
great love) sprays the
fact of it through sound
to the maybe of believing it:
the summertime divers
get stung, and badly.
They rub aloe on it.
They scrape the scum
off catfish asses
with credit cards
and mortar-pestle
the stuff to numb
the blooded skin.
The lonesome keen
nods its head. A mason jar
of bourbon plus
a can of Coke, plus
truly human saliva
confounds it. When
drinking, it dreams
of itself and others.
When sober, it
parses the conscious
sound of it. Each
caught thought flounces
into a town. The
sheriff perverts
with his fancy star heart
the mayor. Bonnets
bustle and float
like magnet dandelions,
in the clearly unsteered air.
There, in the flax expanse,
was our past. Two Virginias
dumbing port wine
while riding the empty
aluminum baseball
bleachers in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The virgins were sheer flame.
One found a flopped bottle
of pink champagne in
the rectum of an
ivy league tree. A wedding
was corrupting in
a nearby place.
Big titty bells
were shaking.
The men were
solemly fondling.
White fetched
the problem of the
double cummer. Honeymoon
on the fire veranda.
A catalog of the gorgeous
calm filled by blinking:
a swallow-beyond-begging,
a woman, blonde naked,
smiling in a straw
cowboy hat, cicada
crackling muggy heat,
sashaying to the
kitchen to
disappear with a
fresh farmer's market
tomato fetched into
an upended palm. She
juiced the jelly fizz
of biting it. Then kisses
the idiot who relaxes
into just laughing. He
has a miser's welcome
of lonesomeness now,
but he knows--herein
lie his riches. The clear
path of fitty connections,
like a talented afro's
split ends, frays
through the foolishly
coolless first, last
in a lingo of laters,
the girl, the mid-curve, the
woman, the boy, the
bit-prom, the man
in hood, the New Jersey
of corrupt politicans
and capital rabbis
importing internal organs
like Jimmy Smith
on his, to the
childhood copping
poprocks from his
pappa, Walt Hudson,
who I embrace
as a heathen
with one toe
on the foot
on the flick floor
of the forsaking keen complete
ness, and a sweatbead, the living.