I live my signifying, unrhymed, in St. Petersburg, but I am writing this scrambled treatise in Tallahassee, the tall hassle of paradise, the state capitol of Florida, the Sunshine State. I’ve come to escape the wind and water. Milton, the most literary hurricane to date. I am aware of the irony, but I leave it to you to determine which of the two blind figures I speak, the navel or the eye, the writer or the weather. Like the fixed fates of absolute knowledge, anachronism and air mass strengthen both. I do not belong to the Secret Order of Prude Frocks. I plan to ask a favor of the nightingales, to confront the autumn of Apeneck Sweeney’s animalistic materialism, to adjust Prospero’s radio station of operas, the unreal wasteland. Fact checking the pages of yet another failed escape, I ignored Debby and wrote during Helene. A few enjambed evacuation routes, Garamond’s Alexandrines, but nothing worth keeping because, on the way to the last real people, the rural table of contents of North Carolina, a new chapter paraded through paradise like a torus field with a foamy fingerprint.
A Hiroshima haircut for the home of the Rays, I was asleep when Sweeney Todd knifed the Trop. A muckraker of the imagination, I was Icarus. The whole construct fell like a crane from an unfinished high-rise. A cone of spaghetti models, blood around the eye of the sonogram, televised. Because 126 warnings are a preface to the birth of war, a Greek friend in Tarpon Springs helped me stuff tornadoes into a Trojan Horse. Air done in by Ariel, a Barbadian Caliban bugged my ear, “The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.” Interpretation: My verse (the non-traditional oral ruckus, those parts of my tongue that had not been straightened) was not safe. Prettier than darkness, phantom time is a mayhem as made up as the Middle Ages. I’ll be Tea Cake. You, Janie. Time to swim from sea to shining sea, rescue the practitioners of inconvenience and leave behind anyone dressed for Silver Woe. Once there was a bloom who memorized the graveyard, every lost paradise, including the arguments.
Super spreader of tropes and tropical spray days, we are more than oblivious readers, couples walking dogs as they leave arks. We’ve seen the rule breaker of skies, the morning star of Cliff Notes fall like a comet in the great drama of composition. Wrong lens attached; I want to recede. The calm before the storm is a cover story; the chemicals overhead have evolved, their white trails zig zag like broken highways. I’m like a hurler in the belly of Melville’s deep mob, the primate of canonical climate, a four-seam negative cleansing crossing the plate like a sweeper. Water vapor like worry emanates from the loop of the pupil not just the lip of the pool. Way down in the gulf of self, there will always be a torn curtain of fear, a blowout kit of uncertainty streaming like stress. A cyclone path like a psychopath, same war cry as the wind that whistles Dixie. Naples, the mobile home of the tempest, bookmarked twice. Ian and Irma with joint custody of Iago’s driver’s license.
Due to the uppercase fame of FEMA, there are no more epics to be made, no Homeric homers, not here, where Poseidon has no torch key. Closer to my inner Pan, the panhandle of pandemonium, that gate has closed. I’m not so worried about the lending library known as landfall, the harmful hand of Occupation waving like spineless yucca greeting the live oak of sidewalk furniture. I no longer trust the classics. Like the ouch of Okeechobee, one infidel fits all. I am, simply, looking for a great truth to peel. Waiter, bring me oranges. I’ll pass on the boarded windows, contaminated water, and overturned coffee cups. I’ve felt the fatigue of writing in cafes, the fat glue that binds everything to a bagel, the tea spilled by relief funds. In Florida, nature has a habit of ripping pages from her notebook just to edit the coastline. While we were busy looking at our pagan devices, a whole civilization of cathedrals was murdered with a manuscript and several of Old Possums’ practical cats, no sympathy for the victims of her pawed purge. Milton’s litter projected to be a Cat 4 or Cat 5 of surging projectiles; the whole litter box tossed onto the beachfront like clumps of unscented sand.
Passed over, marked safe, same blood above the wetland door as before the flood, our geographical loyalty contains faith-based anxiety, so we prepare and pray, waiting till the end of the seasonal ordeal for one of those “aha moments,” louder than the no in Seminole, to make the whole Closed Mic, sheltered in place, appear anti-literary and alive again. •
