Adolescent Bacchus in his grape wreath lies semi-sheathed in front of a bowl of figs, grapes, pears, apples & a loose peach, & his eyebrows are penciled in for all the world to see he is a god & real, sexy, muscular & with a summer paunch, late summer, patches out a window of hay & green fields what he is perhaps looking at, so unchanged is the scheme & always drawn to human scale, posing in a dank basement to get the shading right, so the summer is all in his dark round eyes: if your silken skin can stand another bite, plump evening, it will not show on his body, his right nipple left of center so nearly perfect we are mirrored there; Art fusses & the pool of wine in the hand-blown carafe won't blink, nor will his offer of a taste held out to you change you in the head, because in fact he may be showing you what he's about to sip & never share; I hate to think what you are doing now, over there, gone from me as distantly as a century in a world that lifts its taboos more easily than we ever wanted to lift my body off of you, in other words, never, typically a day & night, my idea about love misshapen into a sound, no, into an argument or a story I forget, I've had a rough night with the power cut, hours of pounding in a bowl of mountain thunder, eyeballing this medieval town illumined by the oldest trick in the book, God's theatrics like a drunk lit from within coursing a way home across the pitched sky; a blessing upon your sun-drenched August morning, your former furnace-blasted city gone middle management into computer lines while I prepare to leave my own adopted alien culture, a burning reduced to a smell inside a memory inspired by a word like "hay" or "sunflower" & not the other way around, as Proust thought -- it starts in the abstract & races to the heart like lightning to an apple bough in a pastoral, love, a scene, darling, wherein one person cuts into another with a disdain borne out of the past & recreated in the present as if it were real, causal, a subject open to criticism, interpretation, theory, preference; so you hate me now too, as then in a sweaty room so electrified together we had to be shouldered out of that world, black & blued to be spared a fire whose flame tips came too close to the truth: our father who art in heaven & not in his right bed puts out the cigarette & tires of his glory; now that you are free & have done with me without so much as lifting a finger & I imagine happier for it, red buttocked by the lake of your youth where it is safe to say we were a nightmare, a match in a haystack, it is here meanwhile they've had to plant the ubiquitous sunflower for the oil lost during a freeze of their famed olive groves, a country brought to its knees making of woe a supplication & a remedy; they say Caravaggio killed somebody & anyway was a pagan & a homosexual; if you put a coin in a metal box a twenty watt bulb comes on for five minutes in a cold corner of a church & up rises one of his portraits tourists in a dozen languages crush in to view until the light cuts & no one budges, massed in the cave staring at the eye socket which remains; someone then has to cough up the change or forget about it, it's always the same, too cheap or stupid, too passive, until some lame bystander catches on, & the burning lasts forever for another five minutes, all eyes tortured to the wall, the characters that live on the wall, in the paint, in a stable or what have you, a reflection of universal law; they seem real, stopped forever proffering red wine in the lake of some long-stemmed glass, say, with a crown of late summer purplish grapes & autumn leaves; an adolescent with a woman's face & a man's boyish hairless chest, a killer perhaps, & certainly a drunk & a queer or whatever, just the same, someone somebody or some several knew intimately, by the stained teeth & weathered hair, so real you could lick the flesh like a cat daydreaming over cream with a thoughtless expression, like when you're thinking or think you're thinking about those too distant to be made out coupling in a field of freshly-mown hay, a thousand eyes of sunflowers on them. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: OSCAR HUMMEL by EDGAR LEE MASTERS TO COLE, THE PAINTER, DEPARTING FOR EUROPE by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT VISION OF BELSHAZZAR by GEORGE GORDON BYRON THE TUFT OF KELP by HERMAN MELVILLE THE LITTLE HILL by EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY |