There’s nothing emptier than the broad flat littorals of afternoons by the sea; even under cloud cover the light hammers the mind into triumphal affirmation, a servile thrall. I swing in the hammock on the back porch watching the sea strum against grey skies, those firmaments mashed monotones of aether and salt, straining out, zero-summing any individual nuance. Solitary walkers down by the shoreline, pelican squadrons flying over the surf, a bobbing trawler far out in the grey blue -- all these signatures are leeched of present life and rendered into a singular photon so dominant as to door its vast dark other, those semphoric wraiths of past and future oblivion.
I doze, rocked by these eternally external motions of presence and absence. A wave washes over me and I find myself on my hands and knees of the porch, prying loose a board, then several, climbing down to the foundation of the house. I start to dig in the earth there, scrabbling until the outline of something appears in the dirt, apparently the roof of a much older structure. Then I’m walking through the living room and kitchen of this much older house which is familiar and not, as if a lost version of myself or some ancestor had once lived there. I try to read it as if I had pulled a crumpled draft from a wastebasket, exhuming a life from what is still there --- a Navy uniform hanging in the closet, a box of flatware and cooking utensils on the counter. I smell Jan’s perfume, a scent so sweet I feel my face pressed between her breasts, sniffing deep what she had once scented, my mind swooning deep into the calyx of some lush graveyard flower.
On the floor of a living room empty of furniture lies the doubloon, heavy and gold, like a manhole cover. I’m afraid to pick it up for whatever well it might uncap. I hear a woman’s voice calling my name faintly once and wake up. A girl is calling her dog down by the shore -- c’mon Duke, Duuuuuuke, Duke! The long steely-stately afternoon comes back into view. Nothing’s changed. I stay in the hammock for another hour as the day wearies on, wave after wave after wave exhausting itself on the shore, the breeze incessant, neither warm nor cool, neither close nor far.
I have no idea what to do next. History has brought me thus far, depositing my bankrupt heart here at this house of dreams by the sea, using the most damning means to bring me to this place, this unresolved end of stillborn beginnings.
Maybe that’s just how it goes. In the Grail Romances, the tale always fizzes at the end; Perceval wanders on, no longer to find the Grail Castle, Launcelot ages past his amorous steel, Arthur floats off to hibernate in the bosoms of his apple-maids, Merlin wanders in the enthrallment of Nininane. Those stories are like dreams, substantial and yet not, tearing every which way and then just sort of hanging over in a fading drone of waves at the shore.
Maybe it’s just the misery of mystery waking up into history. The end of the quest is a dissolution, as if the circumstances which prompted the journey -- hot blood for action, the promise of treasure, a young man's dream of dragon slaying and moonlit maidens -- ages past a midpoint and deflates, empties of that earlier purpose, eventually gives up the chase, and turns around, clopping lonely on a steed headed back to dayside sunders and surrenders.
My pen is poised over this page, not so much hesitating as stalled, awaiting what to say next. Asking the angelic orders if there is anything left to form adequate words for. But I’m not writing anything, just composing thoughts in a hammock by the sea of my 50th year, reminding the absent orders -- God, love, vocation -- that their birthright still has a pulse.
***
I watch a guy emerge from the house next door and walk down through the dunes onto the beach. He’s carrying a black case that looks like it houses a musical instrument. The sax I heard last night? He’s probably around 30, with dark, professionally groomed hair, wearing a Chicago Bears t-shirt and cutoff shorts. Pale as a northern whiteout. He gets down to the tideline and sets the case on the sand, letting the end tips of waves tickle its edges. Stands there scanning the horizon a while, then bends back down to open the case and haul out the saxophone. He grips it in a familiar way, fingers playing the stops, hefting it up and down, sideways and back, relishing or remembering its heft and feel; then swings it way back and then forward, as if to fling it with all of his might out into the surf. But he doesn’t let go; I only imagine that bent gold object whirlybirding out and plashing into cerulean foam and disappearing fast. Maybe he changed his mind, maybe he never meant to ditch sax in sea; whatever the case, he sets it the horn back in its case, clasps it shut, then hauls it up and walks slowly back toward the house. I try to make out his face; the details don’t quite focus but I read serenity to it. Or maybe the eyes are so empty they metaphor serenity, the way an infinitely gray afternoon by the sea is all a soul could need, forget desire and it plural, errant and dystopic hooves. Whatever. The guy passes out of sight and I return my gaze like a keel back to the sea, my mind content to stay lost there.
