Oasis

I was bathing with an old swedish couple,

feet planted in the raw grain of the wooden tub

when the feeling came on, up from somewhere

In the community room of the japanese healing studio in south somerville

Or from the screaming jet pouring its heart out into oceans of sweat

Next to the Jewish lesbian union organizer

Who has just won a 6 week strike.

Flakes of dirt and skin swirl out

And all of it is too hot, steam pushing up

my blood. what life is left for us?

We fight with brittle nails for a place to sink the seeds.

Jake and Sid are dead and their ash seems to cloud the world

Like the gnashing fires of the west.

Our old homefeeling is gone, has packed his bags and fled over the hills.

Yesterday by the old watch tower, i stood still for 45 minutes

As the sky turned pink then grey then swallowed itself

With the forks and knives of the city. Is it supposed

To grow feeble with age, this desire? Or simply more cunning,

Sharper and quicker, to find the veins of this world?

I wonder if any fight is enough to satisfy this beast inside me

That wants to eat Nazis and fuck poets and

Suck the sap from my sweet brothers until we must all die of it

Or else live forever.

I climb out to the trees behind the mountain that stretch on for miles,

And try not to hear the cars, the white noise of sleep.

This society, these thousands of people where the light touched just before

It gave way to shadow, we are crawling into the wet earth of our end.

I feel it when i breathe now, the air is sticky with its gummy pulp.

Try to spend 10 minutes with it sometime,

Between the cold of our arms plunged into a great river seeking to become islands there.

and the creeping pollution of our choices thickening the blood.

Our joy is stung with it, brutal brightness of light that leaves polyps

Of darkness as you blink away in surprise.

As i rubbed my eyes in the tub, muscles all hot

And loose and swollen, i see across from me

The overweight swedish woman has laid her head back

Into her husband’s hand, and her belly rises above the water like

A whale, and her eyes close as her feet leave the ground,

Silked up by her husband,

hands thin and stiff, veins below the skin wandering , curling up around her

Thick limbs like dried flowers. She sighs.

He steps out into the deep

And slowly

Turns her

Back

And forth

And later when i am shaving my face in the steam of the shower

The touch of those hot blades on my neck is too much

And i lose them in the stream.

The gentle holding of that love,

How strange it appears to me, a bright room

I cannot quite make out through a snowy window,

How shocking the tenderness of their shared frailty.

We must move through this world with that too.