Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, COUPLING, by JANE MILLER


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

COUPLING, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Adolescent bacchus in his grape wreath lies semi
Last Line: Of freshly-mown hay, a thousand eyes of sunflowers on them.
Subject(s): Relationships


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.





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