Risk-Scattered Sea
From this turbulent realm of academia and the murky legend of sterling indolence, far from the risk-scattered sea. Someday I will be plunged into succulent waves and doused by unresisting surf in a florid inundation, a deluge of voluble brilliancy, by fluent dint of the unimagined. But now I dwell in impalpable celerity and subtle pacification, and dream of pleasant inducements.
I knew a woman saucy and impudent, piquant, ample and froward, timorous yet relentless, unrelenting, gorgeous but blunt, tender and yielding, sometimes docile but fragrant with myth . . . a sweet tempest, lurid and active and quick. Her features were enhanced by an attitude billowy with old romance, and she seemed to regard the past as always present.
Years ago I stood on a streetcorner in Florence and watched the people. It seemed to me that the wavering throng lingered in ecstasy, cringing on the verge of some new sensation, mingling in a blaze of space, somewhat fond of elegant havoc, rash and liquid and ardent.
I want to wade through the ruddy, many-petaled sea of the American Dream. I want to forget all the women I have known and never regret and never compare.
In the hotel jacuzzi, it was lovely to have her whimsically entwining her legs with mine, and to hold her hot, slippery shoulder and play with her slender waist and pliant limbs in that warm, bubbling water. Years ago and far away . . . and then there’s today. Now I go back to cramming my head full of the critical theory I avoided during the semester.