From trackless paths of the seas I have come searching For the comet that must have Fallen to ground Somewhere on this shore.

Skin flecked with salt, muscles Covered with barnacles I have seen kings being burnt On their way to warrior heaven Above me. Secrets of the reefs, Sunk ships have settled In the creases of my skin.

Now I am neither man nor matter, I have become a seeker Wandering for signs, signals, Rumors, news, markers. I call her Nayantara As the ancients still remember her: Woman with a body of shells, Whose flower births aromas.

The starry eyed one, Who set my life adrift On ships of spinning clocks! Friend, have you heard, Even second hand or third, News of that corolla of light?

Notes:

After watching a corny movie Don Juan De Marco again (Why do I watch it if it is corny? Why do people drink? Why do people smoke?), for the fourth or fifth time, some words arose in memory. Words attached to my history, to past loves, and history yet to be born, loves yet to be celebrated, yet lived through. This woman, that these words blossom around (who as Nikos points outs in his brilliant ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ is just another aspect of the Universal Woman) then requires to be named, albeit temporarily. And tonight I call her ‘Nayantara’, very literally ‘Eyestar’. And for her, I hang this poem in this moonlight sky, so she that may find it, a crude flag, and know I exist.

geese arrive in four vectors of Vs

honking, inter- secting, whir- ling in circles

as they angle over my head and drop

to the water. As I walk away filled with

sudden happiness, (so sharp, so little) I send a pebble

Skittering across The lake. No sound. I turn to look at

the web of ripples and find in it floating a white stone: moon.

2004:10:24 18:15 Lullwater Lake, Atlanta

She comes around here, not often, As a visiting professor lecturing On some rare disease which afflicts

Only me. The season would be fall With its dense fingerprints Covering every inch of ground.

This is when the disease began, Jumping not from monkey to man But from something more abstract To something alive:

It came from the light and the wind Which kept shifting the light, a morning Disco strobe under which we groped for Each other’s mouth.

The symptoms? Blackbirds singing In the dead of night, broken pencil points Covering sheets of unformed words,

Pacing the avenues, as if awaiting something That is about to happen, knowing very well It rarely does. Foolishness.

They say it can be controlled, this plague, By dousing oneself regularly, till a cure Is found. She is the expert obviously

An authority that others quote, But who never answers my calls. The telephone rings and rings.