Byzantium

The seagulls plane in to rest, raucous, among the less raucous Siegels: Miami Bich. An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered sport shirt upon a stick. This must be our Byzantium, Yeats’s holy city of the desireless old, safe and artificial. But not such forms as Yeats’s Grecian goldsmiths made, instead the enormous, square, same hotels, balconied like so many highboys with their drawers drawn out. A great sewer pipe drains from this tiny strip of artifice, out, out, miles out, into the unfastidious Atlantic. Along its shoreline, unfastidious, the Atlantic returns a lovely nuisance: Portuguese men-of-war. Purple, inflated, arteries spread out, they wait, breathing in their way, for the killer sun. Lung transplants unfastened from a dying animal. Even the palm trees look decrepit, brown shrunken heads. Afflicted by some blight, I am told. Empathy, perhaps.

The men have breasts. Their skin is reptilian, plated with fine crystals that glint under sunlight like mica in sidewalks, They seem all to have been recruited by a secret navy. Each has his light blue, peaked yachtsman’s cap: sudden admirals. At high, hot noon, worn with shorts, they seem parts of a weak disguise, equipment more efficient in the Bronx. But the Bronx, Yeats would have told you, is no country for old men. Nor for old women. The women are enveloped: caftans, dashikis, babushkas, even gloves. They bare sections of skin in nervous jerks, shy as pervert flashers. Sand enforces a sensuousness. Every stride is contrapposto, over-elaborate; much tiring readjustment in the frail pelvis. And no clavicle goes unadorned. We are a people who hang things around our necks, totemic logos that announce the faithful, or the shrugging agnostic, or the considerable sect of those now allergic to penicillin.