Having made it through to the city of Angels — through the protocols of the city of Devils, it’s said, which is every other city in the world not gifted with this peace, such pacific quiet and calm, Ben’s arrived: the deadend, no pass, the end of one end, the other ocean, deeper and vaster than ever what He’d been used to before. He stands on the shore just taking it in, pajamapants under robe rolled to His knees, then over them — a wisedup if not yet wizened American boychick who should’ve been born with rivers in His veins and huckleberries in His eyes, lost once gone wading in a world ever stranger…fixes His self and senses to the waters’ descent from the sky, and with hands on His waist, legs held proudly if embarrassedly wide, soaking, submerging, icing His great Rhodes’ toes, their nails fallenin in the salt and polar suspension, toes then feet and then heels on up to His shriveling scrotum, tittytwisting numb grained with floes of ice atop the whiter sand, wondrous to Him in how naked it is and how placid. He wades to His waist, then stops, drowns no further. A beach behind Him seeming of one long grain, stretched out longingly, beached — a minyan of menschs in waterwings and varicose trunks engaged in prayerful splash; then beyond them, partitioned, screenedoff with cloud over which He can only tiptoe and squint: modest womenfolk, just girls if recently marriagable lazing on their stretch of sand set aside, simple, sallow, though gorgeous, too, though only their insides are tanned, if only with passion, their legs probably toned to perfection under their cabañas and umbrellas of skirt…He’s thinking, what Miami would’ve been without the deathrate. As here it’s open and pure, and all wrong: this is the wrong ocean, it’s false; this ocean has no history, is no revelation. A flock of schnorring seagulls takes flight, an eclipse of their wings, two-by-two pigeons following as Ben steps, without turning around, from the water to sand, one foot in each, nothing’s firm. He can wander no further, He can’t conceive of a further, has reached the edge, the limen littoral — genug, dayeinu, enough is enough. Must limit at the risk of destruction. Help me help myself. Know when to stop. Saideth Hanna, who was Israel’s wet frolic.
We here on land break like the waves, constantly, relentlessly — but to think that each of these private breaks is impermanent, soon assimilated back into the flow, and that all of this breaking, such cleaving, serves only to strengthen the race…at least, that’s what we’re constantly telling ourselves: you want out, you got out; forget, forsake, change your name and your address, your nose and your friends and those pants, see what I care, go and intermarry the winds…a foam of white about the mouth, an angry trickle, a receding life. Ben’s no longer as young as He once was, and spring, it’s forever past. Despondency’s to put it pareve, neither fish nor fowl, nor the milk of the fish, nor the milk of the fowl. Not the land nor the sea now, He’s returned to the middle, the eminent neither, call it the shore: hateful in its indecision, inconvertibly so, willfully unsure, and unsettling. To break or to cleave is the question of any next wave, curled like a questionmark, cupped — which is to ask thusly of its wake, quickly withdrawing: to cleave or to cleave, which will it be, to rend or, to hold fast. Depends how you ask it. What shades you put into your own private gust. Nowhere is next. He is where He is, and is lost.
Ben quits the shore as if leaving the presence of majesty, facelessly, in reverse, having done what He’s done, having had experiences, tales to tell the kinder, the grandkinder, the spiel of stories late at fiery night and, if ever, Shema — and it’s only then, when the ocean’s finally small, then the beach and its promenade bench out of mind, does He turn Himself around, to wander on east again, His nostrils winding fallen feathers from His progress, a weather of that and their gulls’ sullying shpritz to flap down upon His head as reminders, toward the quarter of His arrival. A memory of the first ocean to lap at the shore of His mind. The floor of all creation from whence we arose to beach ourselves back when, the seabedded bodies of His and our kind. Having nowhere else to wander, having exhausted this space in its manifold states, now only to head Himself back…where to head to what though’s the question, another, a last; to wander still and always. Return. A sigh awash with realization, kelpy knowledge. A homecoming, then, an ingathering to prodigal prodigy-hood, say — where I was still young He thinks, when loved and perfect and me…even if that might mean Joysey again. And to show for it all — to exhale the tongue, to save with His breath — only the salt from His tears.
