Something Solid: Aughts Philly: The Wilderness Sequence

 

 

Crowned

 

The routine social maintenance of our domain—
another drunken night at McGlinchey’s, eyes & ears
to the ground as usual, broken then only by your
arrival. It must’ve been Nick who met you first,
I don’t remember, but I saw you were fixated on
him. Hannah: novelist, politico, of course, but looks which
teetered ambiguously into divisiveness for those
who knew you— heavy brows, wavy hair, tall, a bit
tomboyish, also, but articulate, a charmer, & yet I
registered the sense that if I ever got you, it would
be something gratuitous, a surprise, because closed
seemed to be the fortress, & choosing Nick seemed
to betray a masochistic streak. That night, his front
swelled visibly with your arrival— I stepped back.

You were, must’ve been, I later realized, underwater
somehow, surveying currents, examining the wildlife,
surreptitiously & invisibly carving a watery path to me.
I had only what the male of the species always has—
the equipment to complete your circuitry, potent or
impotent in any time or context, waiting latent to
take our moment, make it crescendo through the reef,
weed, rock, as though destined, written into ocean’s
records an eternity ago, when all life dwelt in the ocean,
all encounters occurred in resplendent semi-darkness.
And all this still sitting with the gang at the Glinch,
holding your own with a bunch of macho punks, who
were taking something in Philadelphia by force, me
selected silently, the tomboy an Ocean Queen, crowned—

      Undulant

I’d made plans to meet you in Bar Noir
on 18th; you were there; we drank. What
happened after that, in the Logan Square
flat, is that in defrocking you knocked over
an antique lamp bequeathed to me by my
aunt in Mahopac. Serendipity, I thought,
stunned then into silence by your bedroom
élan. Outside, a sultry night simmered; this
night of all nights, scattered green glass littered
my bedroom floor, & I finally got taken, past
liquor, to what eternity was only in your mouth—
as though you’d jumped from a forest scene
(ferns, redwoods), a world of pagan magic,
into a scene still undulant with possibilities—

Denouement
 
Was it even you anymore? You took the podium,
began your screed: here’s what Philadelphia could be.
The night proceeded from act to act— our enemies
were taken aback— I now boasted big-boy curating
entanglements. I knew that place— the wrong kind
of underwater, piranhas hungrily looking for what might
be real to rip to shreds, offal everywhere—
was not for me, just as (to be stern) you were not for me either.
All your politico postures were about barnstorming fortresses
set against you, ravishing them through pure force
majeure. You were pure angel/demon, Hannah. I’d
have to retreat to the back of your consciousness—
an old conquest, not especially vaunted, burrowing down
into binds to find reality, missing unreality’s deliciousness—