Wisdom is slow to find and hard
to keep these days, amid the screeches
of the sagging world, the distractions
of age and duty, amid the general
decrepitude of the old vision.
Sapientia or Sophia was how
that wisdom was represented
in the traditions, full-breasted
with the milk of truth, giving suck
to rebirth’s deepest oldest thirst.
Finding her amid these ever-more
difficult days seems almost impossible
but I have little choice; my mind
is shot with panics and blue dolors.
It’s find a door, pal, or the works
will shatter, and you don’t want
all the collateral damage to
these very ones you love, to
this home its taken years to build.
I dreamt a few weeks back
of visiting my father’s old church
in Chicago, the one we all left
lives ago when faith in God and
love was so shattered and lost.
The second floor was totally changed,
as if the inside architecture had turned
over many times, walls become halls,
halls now walls, doors morphing into floors.
The free high school I had attended
back then -- it’s still there today
- in my dream became a corporation.
The long table in the rectory
around which we had jeered
and grabassed and cried to
Jesus as we “studied” now a
boardroom, austere as an abbey’s
scriptorium but monied,
its fine mahogony so glossed
I see a face ghosted in its
surface -- me at 16 passing 50.
But there’s no one about, this
upper of the church empty,
almost a museum were it not for
the obvious relics of enterprise
-- Daytimers strewn down the
table amid a few volumes
of industry reference, a newspaper
opened to the stock quotes -- all
of that repacing our spiral
notebooks and New Testaments.
Its a lonely empty cold place and
the ley of reworked corridors makes
it hard to find an exit; but somehow
I end up in the sanctuary on the first
floor where a service is underway,
the big hall filled with happy people
instead of a few old people & bums,
led by a minister who seems like a good
guy, someone who remains.
At the Passing of the Peace I’m the
only one still sitting; a woman comes
up and gives me a hug anyway
and tells me everything will be O.K.
That’s the dream, but as I recall it
I segue to that night I visited Chicago
for the last time, en route in 1976 back
to the second semester of my sophomore
year. On a terribly cold December night
I had gone to a party put on by the bros,
those Puerto Ricans I attended classes
there in the free school in
my father’s church.
Their pad was fully equipped for
the alcoholic years I had also
graduated into, with half gallons of booze
on almost every table next to a
bong and a bag of pot, ashtrays
all overfilling with Winston butts,
the fridge stocked with Old Milwaukee
amid a plastic container with a
single slice of bad baloney.
The party was to be a reunion
of our tribe -- a bunch of guys
and gals who’d gone to Lakeview
Academy, who’s been so much
a part of that Church’s evangelical --
but none of it was warm; our highfive
greetings were with hands that
had each disappeared intdo dark
waters far offshore.
Everyone’s eyes were lit and feral,
disembowelled of the old belief.
I wouldn’t say they were fallen,
not like me, once the most visibly
Christian kid in the flock;
but the love and brotherhood
we freely languished in back then had fled,
escaped through cracks of our
self-abusing hearts, sucked out
the windows of that frozen night
and left to drift forever in the sky.
I got real wasted that night on
rum cokes and pot and speed,
talking for hours about lost
days and nights as the stereo
cranked out old standards by
Malo and Santana and The O’Jays.
There were moments when that
old joy was unalloyed, pure,
possible even now, that night;
but someone would go throw up
in the bathroom or a big cold
wind would shake the panes
and we’d remember what we became
and passed around another bong.
In that haze I hooked up with
Cathy, one of our crew back then,
sort of a camp follower from
a real high school who got passed
between all the boys except me,
the sad fuck virgin who mooned
too much and openly for one girl
he’d never get his hands on
until it was too late.
Forsaking the boys to their
more hostile antics, I talked
with Cathy long in the kitchen,
leaning against counters where
roaches roamed freely.
She was obviously warmed
by the novelty of me, my
interest in her and hers in me.
When the dancing began we took
to the floor between jammed-back
furniture, shakin it to “Low Rider,”
slow-dancing later to “Me and Mrs.
Jones,” slow and close and warm,
her big breasts pressed up into
my chest in the shape of the ache
that had me dying too many
far-Western nights back at school.
How relieved I was to have her
there with me on that dance floor,
cocooned enough from the party
which got more miserable as the
hours passed, more of a wake than
a celebration, the truth of where
we were all heading becoming too
evident in the drunken spats
that soon cracked bloody from the scabs,
Eddie threatening to gut Garcia
if he didn’t shut up about Led Zeppelin
kicking Santana’s ass, Ritchie crying
in the kitchen over Tina who left
him three years before, my brother
Will who still lived in Shytown
drinking jelly-jar-sized shots with
Edwin and Bernando, hollering too
loud and harsh with all that fatal booze
bronzing their brains into a single thirst.
We should have said farewell for
good two years before when we all
graduated, when my family split
in every direction, when we all
headed off into the downward spiral
of our lives. I hadn’t attempted suicide
yet but that hour was nearing in the night;
the jails were waiting for all of us,
outraged girlfriends holding the
ghosts of aborted children in their arms,
the bar-fights and crashed cars --
O that party was dead in the worst of ways,
revenant with who too reverenced
our errant ways for lack of what
we could find or make inside
my father’s fallen church.
But Cathy and I were having a great
time, drinking and talking and passing
a bong and dancing and kissing;
eventually we fled, about the time
the party was crashing into stupor,
fights and blood. Laughed and kissed
our way back down from Uptown’s
frozen slums, blithe to the danger
inherent in walking those streets
back to the El, perhaps kept safe
only by the big winds whipping
through the concrete canyons,
our asses sanctioned by greater
thugs mauled down from Edmonton.
Half frozen, we hugged each other
standing up on the El as we bumped
and ground our way south,
the elevated train whirling buildings
mere feet from our jolting window,
revelaing alternating scenes and
futures: rooms filled with Christmas trees
where children played with trucks
and rooms where drunks in their underwear
sat in stupor in chairs by the window
looking at us fly by, en route, like
souls, to the dictas of their hells.
Somehow we stumbled back to the
apartment she shared with two other
girls, and then from front door to her bed
it was one drunk greedy advance of a
retreat of a fuck, she allowing herself
to be walzed backwards kissing and
undressing all the way, falling at last
half naked on her bed. There with
hasty drunken fingers I unzipped
my whole chaste highly moral visible
Christian self, springing the dark
joy of my naked heart, the black
sulphuric lust of it,
Pulling off her big white brassiere
to free those breasts I had so swum
between as a favored scene to rapine
in my quiet pudpulls those years
I shared a bedroom with a couple
of the brothers in the row house
my family lived its last years in.
Free at last -- those breasts -- my
hands -- sampling for the first time
the naked truth I dreamed, cupping
and squeezing their heaviness and
fullness, thumbing at nipples which
wobbled drunkenly, pressing my face
into their walled crevasse as if
into a baptismal font, christening myself
a man at last as I drank the host
in one fast draught.
Panties off and she was naked and
I just lifted up my shirt and pulled
down my pants far enough to mount
her, half-erect cock into her cunt in one
full grunt, resting for just one second
for the shock of insides to slap
my spirit and then I was off, fucking
away with my face buried in her neck,
smelling perfume I’m sure today
some man would love what back then
I could only desire. (O how youth
is wasted on the young!)
My hands still grabbing at those breasts,
holding on to them as if for dear life
as my cock thickened and grew pent
for thirty forty strokes and then
filled immense, holding still for just
one second as the white flash cracked
my brain and sweet pleasure leapt out
of me deep into her womb, the
whole wave of passion flinging singular
and wild and then gone, never to return.
We breathed heavily for some
seconds as we cooled down,
passing out for a space; and then
-- in the manner of my blackout
drinking even then -- I was saying farewell
at the door, shirt half tucked back
in pants pulled back up half-witted.
Backpedalling through that door
as fast I had entered it. “Maybe now
you’ll write me,” she smiled kissing
me goodbye; I smiled as I kissed
her too, the “maybe” silent outside
but shouting in my brain, joyously
highfiving my bad boy self
that left never to return.
I never did write here -- and I don’t
think this way here counts -- but she
has always haunted me -- not quite,
more like the sweet fume of a fantasty
with bits of sour reality in its curl .
That memory today is somehow linked
to the harrows of my father’s church,
a place I haven’t seen for more than
30 years except when I dream of it.
It’s still there in me I mean,
gothic and presbyterian and grey
the same way that Cathy’s doe-brown
eyes still look up at me from her
heaving bed, those breasts lucent and
sweaty and filled with all I failed
to nurse from, in Sapientia’s way of things,
refusing the next offer of love,
turning instead to those paps
which streamed out the booze.
Perhaps I had to drink my fill of gall
to seek the milky mother of all truths
which no boozy desire can quite slake.
Last night I dreamed of driving to work
late and in a hurry, passing through
the downtown of Orlando, much built
up since I moved to this small town
30 miles outside the city.
Outside one of the new office/condo
towers there was a sign for a book sale
in a store I never knew existed.
40 Percent Off! the words exulted
at traffic that blithely hurried by.
There was even a manager in shirt
and tie by the curb, waving another
sign and pointing back to the door.
I was late but curious so I parked
and went inside, amazed at the postmodern
design of criss-cross beams and floors,
as if two species of spirit were alternated
in perfect balance here. I felt a presence
even though the place was empty,
devoid of any soul but mine,
drenching me with the dizzy sense
that I should know this place but don’t.
Sapientia showed me to the bookstore,
nippling me with the thought of new
books that I went far and further into
the structure, coming at last to a place
between the crossing beams where
the store was open and lit and warm,
a rack of books just outside the door
causing me to linger there, pulling
up a volume from the pile that was
about Jung’s influence on the disciplines
-- a textbook really, for a course
I would have loved to take back
when I drank more than I studied.
Could be good, I thought, and then
with the same reverential lysis
as in the first dream she returned,
my secret admirer and fountain deep
in me, revealing just her face and
heavy breasts but with great ardor,
suggesting though not quite showing
how she had sucked on my cock
a great while and wanted to bring
me off but good, squeezing it between
her breasts, cooing at me while
she milked the full sea of my cream
while heaven sighed Amen, Amen
I woke to the usual dark of night,
cat curled between my legs, my wife’s
shape close, turned on her side
away from me. Earlier in the day
I’d come into the study where she
was trying to figure out how to import
designs around a monogram.
I leaned down to look at the screen
over her shoulder and for some reason
reached my hands around to cup
and squeeze here breasts, just once,
so full with all that hauls and aches
and dreams and ages us and keeps
love intact somehow, even though
I get to squeeze ‘em but rarely,
usually in tandem with a boyish joke
that makes her laugh for just
a second and usually pull away.
I don’t know shit about wisdom today
but I sure need to milk it and how,
else something ancient yet immanent
slow starve off the root in me.
I’ll go anywhere the dream instructs
and say it all here, in that sense
that singing can be a physic
for what ails the world in me.
Let it lead to greater love, I pray.
Let the rains fall sweet and heavy.
Let the garden bloom again.
Let her spirit sooth the rages
in the conduit I can’t explain.
Make of this aging brain
my father’s mother’s temple,
a holy house without a name
for the forest anchorite I am,
wise only enough to remain
inside these wild feathers,
Mad Sweeney’s winging train.
Nurse me on those breasts again
O Sapientia, soul of this starving man.
