“I wept for him as for a wife.”
—Gilgamesh (Shiduri’s By the Sea, Shin-eq-unninni)

The sloe sits warm—a brackish purple bruise
that will not heal. I taste the cedar still,
sap-sweet and bitter; how we split its boughs
and made a doorway in the mountain’s will.
Enkidu laughed, the wind inside his hair
was wild as goats along the shale-scarred seam;
we wrestled dusk to ground. I felt him there,
hard flank to flank—more oath than any dream.
We felled Humbaba, yes, his resin breath
rose like altar-smoke smoke about our thighs;
the axes rang—twin pulses out of death,
two shadows locked beneath the gutted skies.
Shiduri pours. I drink what cannot stay.
His name returns, as salt on lips of clay.

“A straw hat on, my eyes flushed, might I resemble the former
preacher who painted a pool table and then maimed himself?”
— Rush Rankin (Descanso Beach Club)

The seaweed bends with the ocean, a field of women
kneeling, then standing row upon row, as if to offer
a benediction to the shore. Already I forget I am
floating in this frigid Catalina water,
not some ghost surveying southern France—
nor an ominous crow or a half-mad painter
scanning a landscape after a pint of absinthe—
A boat circles above me, the black chain from its anchor
stretches like an umbilical cord to the blanched florets
of coral below. The motor hums. A large woman peers
over the side as I ascend, her distorted contours
growing in and out of focus—and I am free,
more so than Van Gogh waking in Saint Rémy,
a dark habit caressing his cheek.

“Beside the sea she lives, the woman of the vine, the maker of wine.”
— Shin-eqi-unninni (the Waters of Death, beyond the Mashu region)

My tavern is exclusive and discreet,
the customers irregular at times;
some drink from flasks of lapis lazuli
while others tip bejeweled carafes of wine.
Above the bar I dedicate a frame
to every famous patron I have served—
that’s Ea on the left, a tortured mage,
who drowned his sorrows when he drowned the Earth.
The Stone Men used to come on Saturday
to numb their week of service on the ship—
they were a stoic lot, but always paid
until one client smashed them all to bits.
He said his name was Gilgamesh, I think—
he crushed the pink umbrella in his drink.