DA IN FLORIDA (Salvador Dali Museum, Florida)

I could swim in this light ~

forever, the blown-glass sky

and mother-of-pearl water of

St. Petersburg harbour. Too little breeze for Christopher Colombus to come ashore | with his shipment of crosses,

banners and armour for the sprawling malls; so his descendants’ armada of yachts loll and quiver

in their impressionist moorage.

What in heaven’s name are Salvador and I doing here? Florida the bad taste

haven for Canadians whose clocks have frozen and need melting. True, roseate spoonbills prowl the marsh, a long tail

of seashore flicks behind the dragon : fire at Cape Canaveral, an asphalt tongue licks the Keys, along which our rental

car pitches its voice, chord modulations so far out on the ocean

I can see the Christ of St. John of

the Cross towering

forward from Salvador’s old world

crisis of faith to his well-healed

Florida patron and museum home. At a loss for reasons for being

here, besides: cheap

vacation and my wife’s yearning

to blend her childhood and my young stoned adult memories of the Magic Kingdom. How her father said he wanted to return

as a pelican on a wharf post. How I became, behind the wheel the inimitable Toad, oblivious to commodification: the dominant theme parks we’ve escaped from into this

- motif museum, the glare from Dali’s barren landscapes, pinging off a cranial harp, an autosodomized virgin, clipping his father’s Freudian beard, disintegrating memory. I have never been attracted to his carnival of atonement before, but now my wife, seduced, stands behind Dali’s wife, who leans out their villa window overlooking the water, a sailboat

in the distance, Gala’s back to her husband’s

brushes and canvas; the landscape beyond

could be Florida, but the light

emanates from Gala’s blouse and skirt,

the ripe aplomb of a woman who knows other women will unenviously adore her in the presence of

their dumbstruck and delirious men.

This painting is old-fashioned, pastoral,

tender, serene.

The rest is cannibalism, apotheosis, extravagance for posterity, conquistadores

- lunging ashore to convert

their caravels into carparks

centuries hence, Christ staring down

from the cross at golfshirts and Wonder bras. Some epiphanies epoxy you

on the spot, you can’t move and

you know there’s another stained

glass window framed in the walls

through which you gawk at the world

and which rainbows your room with revelations. Not the presence of Dali in Florida:

startling, at first, but just another conquest

of the irrational, no more surreal than

Pirates of the Caribbean, Gater Bowls,

and weapon-in-the-glove-compartment paranoia. But outside the museum. I know young Salvador painted this harbour, in The Tower Mill studio Ramon Pitchot provided, before the break

with his father, the Church, the softer impressions of forerunners who saw too much

in pastel waters, hazy bathers, shimmering smokey afternoons, commerce distanced and stilled. Before all the amputated

symbols, and before God the prosthetic.

I am brushstrokes on this canvas,

my back to my wife. Bemused to be so placid in this milky affluent sublime, gazing at tax shelters, and photographed beside his monied benefactors’ monument to a fountain of eternal enigmas

of flamboyant desire.

Richard Lemm