Curlyhead was bellowing Puccini and making the boat rock. The sun shone like a Majolica clock. The sea boiled noisily. I lay down like a child in a box. It was my birthday.      Above, on a cliff, a mule pissed on us. Then the dragging chain as we lurched into the chasm. Archaic cooings: Byzantine blue. J removed her tortoiseshell glasses, crossing her pretty legs. C thoughtfully stroked his goatee. I sat up, as in a coffin after three hundred lovers. Starboard, an oar-blade splashed emeralds against valedictory black. Once again, description, unemotional shorthand for sublimated wisdom, fails to conjure what we felt; the poem years for something more. Like me: childless. My love & I: gutted words. My prick: like an instrument for an altar or surgeon's table, shiny & maleficent.      Stalactites, like jaws, bedeviled us. Sunlight struck the sandy bottom: Giotto blue, the Tennessean said; Florida blue, the tobacco queen said; Cognitive blue, I, the unanalyzed, said. Nothing from Curlyhead, who rowed vigorously. Then a serpentine thing, with five pairs of legs grasping at us, appeared beside our little boat, unidentifiably damaged,      as the young man was, who boarded our bus going home. His arms flailed spasmodically. His face was pinched like a retarded boy's. I dedicate this poem to him, whose unneediness shamed me, demanding I acknowledge the best in myself, whose arms & legs racked the blue lapidary air, as if burdened by ropes, lantern, & pick, while he bantered brilliantly to himself, the mind struggling to overcome the stick that is the body.
		Excerpted from The Visible Man by Henri Cole. Copyright © 2000 by Henri Cole. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Photo credit © Susan Unterberg