Together we were criminal and victim holding the purse between us, pulling with great starvation until finally the strap broke, the friction ceased, the adrenaline overcame the chemistry and the break was final—I was inside her and she had me locked. The worm was inside the barrel of fresh red apples. We were actually signing a five year deal at last from the negotiating table—the bed being the oldest of negotiating tables—think King Arthur, Henry the 8th, Cleopatra—and straight to the inking…incarnate, somewhat groping for a truth and all this magical finality! But, I must say, what startles me even today, as I go back and to this, for the life of me there was then not a thing remarkable about our consummation, in fact it was extreme in the ordinary and I felt no particular lifting, no elevation of thought or feeling and I wish it had felt more like having jaundice or tick-fever…at least more immediate and therefore more gratifying—in some peculiar way I had dedicated myself to the job of immortalizing Ramona, to bring her to a new poetic Elysian pitch of feeling, perhaps appearance—that I could somehow replicate her physical beauty with one of emotion, a noumenon based on visions and dreams that come into us without the aid of a nose or an ear or the peepers and certainly not on the tongue where we were creating something quite different, something akin to a flesh fire via the french kiss, an alchemy replaced by physics, alchemy like poetry in which the writings tend to be obscure and difficult to understand—this too was hard to understand, given the buildup, that sex would be so anti-climactic—and with the end, a pull-out orgasm upon her stomach and hardly the hint of one for her—and all sensation had left me.
I felt like sixty fistfights. We were drunk...we had come so far and gone nowhere and in coming found that somewhere we were now not going anywhere...I was nothing more than a runaway Frisco dud discovering for the first time that poets are running out of things to overhear and master-write...experience was becoming the ten-second buzz...hence the lack of spiritus in the sexus...there was nothing to do but drift off into the inky sickness of a rich, too rich night...it’s said that generosity is the giving up of your demands & the criteria of your demands...and here I was demanding magic...my “love” was moving with the same speed and drive as any hatred I could think of, mine or otherwise...something appeared to be wrong in this but I was too necessary being evil and recovering from break-open heart to see it with much aplomb...a bed, the woman, a boozy haze, cigarette taste everywhere, and the poet riding atop his great demands...there was slippage and here I guess it meant sleep...self-deception needs the idea of evaluation and a very long memory...
Ramona was gone the next day. She had a running lie going to Lionel that put her by herself on Key Caulker and that half-truth had a shelf life that was up...she was gone on the 9 o’clock ferry and with her went the soundtrack...I was noticeably blank and what passed for thoughts went something like this: vajra, kundalini, turkey-neck, naka, fear of loser, breath, and dirty mind always...This second goodbye ushered in a period of two-weeks where nothing happened. The blasting furnace of new ideas and beauties was still...I was simply “hooked” into the machinery of romantic love...some dumb and caustic tale that I blithely took notes upon margin-like...Ramona and I passed emails back and forth and continued to plan on her leaving Belize en-route to Ecuador—Guayaquil capital city home and fantasy port-town where we could be together on something way south of a timeline & there would only be getting to know her beautiful mother in the academic twilight some Sundays and Saturdays where for the first time in my life I would’ve traveled to a far-off place alone on my own lyric journey to be with everyman’s siren fueled on naphtha and Latin hip energy...that was what kept my days like prison-slashes on a cell wall, and in between great dives into the ocean with my mother and the boys, I kept Ramona alive...underwater, like outer space, could be opium, could locate your mind, its nowhere-ness, not the brain storing memory but the heart, breathing compressed air and drifting along currents and ocean crayon-box colors of fish and coral, unreal moonscapes and bubbling life in every glance, Morey eels snaking and curling in a current, retreating on our approach, a nurse shark kindly laying on the floor of mother ocean and like a monk, allowing one of the dive masters to pull him in and roll him over like a dog, stroking the grey belly and beckoning us all near for a turn at it…the constant small truant school of yellow-fins that followed us for the entire dive hoping to grab some of the chum carried by the guys to attract barracudas and large groupers of twisted grown swirl sides that taste beautiful—the grouper—a fine fish to eat as I would find out in a few days...I could feel myself glowing underwater with a blue contract being written out of this break from my old turnabout city married life, this blue oral promise between the sea and me that was only possible because I was literally being re-born in a vast new chamber with both mothers there to guide and protect...
-Michael Price
