Crossing the Gulf, 1969
She’s come undone played on the radio over and over that summer and despite the psychedelic paisley of her mini-dress, the undoing of the girl in the song was not drugs, her mind did not dissolve before her body did, no, it was the other way around. I, as yet undone, worried about the undoing’s inevitable arrival, whirling myself into a storm pattern like the one blowing north into the Gulf, 900 millibars of pressure, 174 miles an hour, Camille making landfall near Bay St. Louis where all those St. Stanislaus boys got grits sprinkled with saltpeter for breakfast and where the Sacred Heart brothers kept close watch as the girls from Our Lady Academy strolled along the beach, barefoot, swinging their shoes by the laces, their skirts hitched up, girls who would go on to college at Spring Hill and write their boyfriends at Loyola, Loyola where I was majoring in history and virginity, being undone the storm lurking off the coast, a lure and a fear, beauty and terror huge as a tarpon rising toward a lamp in the dark, its arch, its flail, its iridescence as it smacked down, a body thoroughly spent crashing back into the water.
MAUREEN NO MORE SENDS HER POEM THAN THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD CHIMES IN AND SPARKS A REVERIE
I’m seven, the age of reason, hoping to find a girl like me, she writes, then up pops Frank in D minor about seventeen being a very good year, and twenty-one, too and thirty-five, as were all the girls to be had in all those years. Then Bobby Goldsboro begins to croon “Blue Autumn,” which I used to play repeatedly because it helped me to feel what I couldn’t yet feel, to know what I didn’t yet know, far from home, poring over de Tocqueville at my desk, my roommate writing a letter to her boyfriend in Jacksonville while drying her hair, the bonnet of the dryer inflated, blowing hot and loud, her pink-nailed pinky dabbing Wind Song cologne onto each sheet of powder-blue stationery. Eighteen, the age of treason: in hell before I even learned how to sin. Soon enough I would be in bell bottoms slung low on my hips, patchouli-scented hair uncombed, and soon fleeing the country with a guy with no papers, and soon pregnant and soon too far away to afford the phone call.
