Song for DS
– for Donald Ogelive Scott Ken Meisel Sprawled out on the bed, your big hands like oysters lying folded across your chest like you were already inside your coffin before your heart surgery even took, you pulled me close to you, waving your daughter off, and you told me to bring to you The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, for I was to read it to you, before you slept. And leaning in to you, reading the lines, you closed your eyes, and you let the words enter your quiet solace and your torment. And when my tongue rowed over the sea’s marbled torrent – its waves lush with red and green intensities, its landscape of shells and other, misshapen junk of the deep and swell – you let the poet’s words amass in you, and you lay your head back in reverie, and in a quietude meant only for dreaming. And suddenly we were both at the ocean, your eyelashes flooded with quartz light, and the surrounding firmament of land and ocean turned loud and disoriented. And when you heard the poet speak so easily of strolling in trousers on the beach, you let your chest rise and wince and fall as we trundled past the capsized skiff – stormed and paralyzed there in the after- squall of waves and froth and aqua-lather where the sea gulls, like silly, after-supper trolley keeps lifted up and swooped, and they fell, dizzied, drunk, full of light, their short, aggressive beaks tangled with small crustaceans, popcorn, algae, and with the afternoon’s fading coronets – and when we stopped, you and I, to ponder how the ocean blurred and softened the sand, the shore, the entire strand before the sunset and the sea-fall rendered it agrarian, full of dark roots and pearls, and so many loop knots that we lost it in the draw and deliverance of the tumbled light that was expanding all around us, you raised your hand above my voice to say: the mermaids, singing each-to-each are here – to start their singing in the swirl and in the waves, and in the subtle falling shore light – and when we spoke that line together, you said: “I do not think that they will sing to me.” And at the edge of the sea, where haze from the horizon’s hot exchange of immanence and fervor spread, and the slip and fall of sunset hit, mapped the rest of the aerial line, one wave – advancing like a molten mermaid with its hair on golden fire – rose at us, and your daughter and I sat, our hands, wrapped around our legs to watch it hit, and spread. |
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About the Author: Ken Meisel is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, Swan Duckling chapbook contest winner, winner of the Liakoura Prize. His books are The Drunken Sweetheart at My Door (FutureCycle Press: 2015), Scrap Metal Mantra Poems (Main Street Rag: 2013), Beautiful Rust (Bottom Dog Press: 2009), Just Listening (Pure Heart Press: 2007), Before Exiting (Pure Heart Press: 2006) and Sometimes the Wind (March Street Press: 2002). He has work in Cream City Review, Rattle, Midwest Gothic, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Boxcar Review, Algebra of Owls, Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Broken Plate, Pirene’s Fountain, Firefly.