KIM GOLDBERG
I hope to arrive at a feminine ending
when my time is spent upon this punchy
sea, its flattened beach hammered senseless with
masculinity then throttled in afterfroth and left to
silently devolve back to elemental
granules of glass and calcite
They say the feminine
ending is weak – a mousy stub of
receding breath preparing forthcoming air for the
next penetrating thrust of attention (look at
me!), crouched as a comma, head bowed, serving up her vacancy
with downcast eyes (I am transported now to a
Japanese tea ceremony in rough-hewn hut nested
into ragged upthrust mountains among rakish
pines, but then I just finished reading
Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes in which
the feminine ending was immutably tragic)
Yet my feminine ending will be magic –
a bareback ride on a piebald mare who never
sways or bucks or startles
at man-shaped cedar trunks but
carries me straight as a paradigm to the nebulous
guts of this feminine earth where all the unexploded
packets of air reside, those that
did not prematurely ejaculate their sacred
identity, that had the smarts to
retain their mystery (and thus their alchemical powers
for the price of identity, after all, is mortality) And
I will spend the rest of my days (which no longer
really exist on this timeless plane, but
clichés will follow you to
the grave – see what I mean?) loafing
with my amorphous sisters of
indeterminacy, invisible
to the sequined spume and bombast atop each
wobbly juggernaut of wave lofting fleetingly
from a dark and rolling hollow
