Warm arm, cool arm

Going to the beach this weekend,

I pack the muse's gauze, myself,

its appetite for inscription un-

ambiguous to me; irresistible. 

I have worn colours or stripes, 

tattersalls and checks to assure 

others, I have a change of shirt.

That is the plain meaning of such

gestures.

I rebel against wearing others.

I wonder, that it ever seemed a

courtesy to manipulate one's in-

carnation with petty statements.

My present to my bride, long ago,

was an Ansel Adams zone system

portrait of myself in the dunes

at San Gregorio beach in Calif-

ornia, barefoot in baggy khakis

and a white shirt. The appetite

of white reciprocates that of

life, does it not, for true in-

scription, spontaneous and un-

bent. As a frame, nothing else - 

reflective sterling silver, 

almost excepted - so invites re-

gard, perception, considera-

tion, remembrance. Adoption.

Our infamous hottie in the white

T has lately been reconstructing

this conception of the suspend-

ed white field, as a japonesque

noren he presents as a guest-

book. It calls to me the vision,

probably in the back of everyone's 

mind, of the high and canopied 4-

poster in St Lucia, of sumptuous 

white linens, as a field for in-

finite erotic elaboration.

The shirt of ampleness and ad-

justable openness in white is

evidently a blessing of fate,

not an invention: for phenomenal 

sensitivity to light, and more so 

to air, a quality of permeability 

reserved for nothing less than this 

provenance, availing infusion, in-

halation, exhilaration, flight.

It hasn't a lesser side. Warm 

arm, cool arm: where else would

one leap, to be the plainest word?