A Love Poem

This is meant to be pastiche,
A motley collection of borrowed imaginings,
Set together in unschooled lines; the aims
(Since every collocation commences with the muse)
Are to write as clearly as possible, and to speak the truth.

You may be wondering who I am. Have you seen
A bare brunette, skinny, yawning eyes,
Asleep in the pit or picking his nose?
He was hunched over a long book, his attention
Split: one thought lingered over cool Greek assonance,
Homeric rhythms; another marshaled fingers
Through flaking hair, a pock-marked face; but a lazy eye
Had reservations, a special thought for your zebra scalp,
Your gaunt face, body almost a child’s, hoping to hear
A surprising bellow, a skater’s voice, chill tones.

But I always see you, slumped on a step, or smoking
Over a cold, stone bench, chatting with a hip girl,
A shag-haired friend. I ventured a word, once,
An ill-timed whisper. You were sitting at a computer,
Piecing together an essay on Faust.
I don’t remember what I said, only the feeling of regret
When you dismissed me; but secretly I was pleased.

I’m always pleased to fall short of beauty:
It’s absolute beauty that I crave, the extravagant blaze
That burns me, or, to borrow a phrase,
The candle engulfed in a double-edged flame,
A fiery finger jammed through the wax
Devouring it from both sides. The guys I see

Are useless, worthless, but I endow them
With an infinite worth, my imagination works them
Into glistening pewter, shined steel, all the delights
Of the perfect word. I may be ugly, but I aspire
To live in a glossed cage, a crystal palace
That gives an angry arc to the dawn, a sudden embellishment
Or augmentation that scatters the spectrum
Into fracturing geometries of sound.

I’m getting carried away; my olive-skinned muse
Is slippery as oil, my object always sliding out
From greasy hands. What was my whisper?
Beautiful boys, your own beauty I was hoping
To skeletonize in mere words. I am in danger of losing
Both my intellect and the exterior structures
That intellect craves – that is to say, myself.

I think too much; my thought diminishes me,
It has made me sickly and pale, I brood like a corpse,
I am razor thin. Dissection has turned me
Into a skilled dissembler, knowing every word
Can be replaced, in any case, with something
Just as appropriate, if not more-so. What do I want?
What plan is imminent in this scalpel sharpness,
When even the words are impassive and cold?
To freeze moments, to recapture, in someone else’s frame,
The body and real presence of my past?

I remember a frozen lake, music and snow;
The feel of gliding, pushing always
From the left, all the seduction of freedom in motion,
Until, through the stupor of my blind thoughts,
A speed, a rush that lifted me into the air,
My dad’s descending swoop, large hands
Lifting a small boy abruptly into the sky,
And the burgeoning eaglet soared.

I miss those other days,
Curled between mother and father,
The double progenitive force,
In an impossibly wide bed, working
Back into my seeds, the stark enclosure of beginnings
In a universe too large. When I hold a boy
My body longs for this –
To become the surface of another seed,
Container of ethereal secrets.

I have transformed love into a great secret,
A delicate, jeweled box that remains always clasped,
A precious cachet of emeralds and diamonds,
Staining my imagination alternately green
Or entirely blue, while I whine, howl, slobber, and cry
At the lid, gilded, at the hour-glass keyhole,
Whose secret is simple and vast as time.

So you are staring into an uneven blaze of traveling photons,
That somehow, perhaps even through chaos and reticence,
Have assembled themselves into this presentation of words,
A language of incorrigible loops and neat circles
That represents what I would never say,

Especially not if the pressure of my gawky body
Were to impress what I imagine is a smooth, pale chest
And two slight iridescences, projecting
From milky skin like little knobs that I could turn
(Ludicrous) to bury myself in your heart:

For even then I would not bite your ear-lobe, and sob
This nothing strain into your skull, the intricate knots
Of your brain. I would be too shy, the rituals of sex
Would weigh me down, even as what weight I have
Pushed you into the foam, impaled you on a pillow
Of close-stitched thread. So why do I write?

What is the significance of this rambling verse,
Impassive and way-less minutiae, gravitating
To the center of a confession which doubtless
Is not even true, since I betray
My own thoughts, the real weave of myself
In these translations?

When I began, I admit it was formless,
I followed my thoughts, I chased them
Like half-remembered dreams – or night-mares,
And I was pursued: spider-webs, ivy tendrils,
Snares snapped at my progress, all my negotiations
Of the fameless landscape dripped across sleepy eyes
Like a gauze of a tear-stained vision, while my hands
Grasped at the dissonance, pursuing these figments,
These frightening pigmies. Of course I knew

That I was going to write a great poem,
And I was going to write about love, and your form
Which was rapidly swelling from cupidinous bud
Into bitter fruit, a crab-apple, a little lump in my heart
That throbbed whenever I saw you, yet would not allow itself
Extension into fantasies, the imagined lover who raps on the door
Twice, then enters, scrapes off his clothes, lies in my arms
Like a passing bliss, like headlights
That illuminate a ghostly room just as quickly
To disappear, to rejoin the night, to become nothing more
Than a dim palpitation of crickets, the slight soprano
Of screeching wheels, a night-wanderer or the shrill bass
Of his broken bottle, and gruff laughter – this would be my theme.

I would write about all my lovers, or rather
Every beloved who for a time had captured my brain
Like an engine roaring in a muddy rut; I would relive
The dull sense of expectation, the impatience,
The sheer frustration of it all, but this time
It would be set it out in verse – verse which is never eternal,
But maintains the appearance of changeless stability because,
Even if Poland was twice not Poland, yet a Slavic Shakespeare
Remained to weather the tyrants, the parade of enlightened despots
And Holocaust victims, these people with their angry, pale faces
Clambering en masse for a bit of blood-stained earth; yes, through it all,
Some poor, hopelessly idiosyncratic Shakespeare,
Refitted to a harsh, stranger’s tongue remained
In that ram-shackled hobble of a library
To inspire Czeslaw Milosz, whom I’ll admit I’ve never read.
But it was there – it survived like a faint ember,
Ready to ignite it all again, ready to devour
Miles of frozen tundra and impoverished crops, the shtetls
Pogrom weary, licking their wounded limbs like flies
Resting on a bit of old dung;
In this hope I decided to record my loves.

So now I have sent it to you, a preliminary sketch,
These mottled pages glistening with the sap and dew
Of my excrescence. I imagine your eyes
(I’ve never even seen you closely enough
To ascertain a color – if brown,
Then the soil of my form; or are they milky blue,
The snot-green sea? A composite,
A mixture of porn and pent observations,
Agonies in a stolen glance later reassembled, scratched
With a thick, dark chalk – imprecise lines
Blurring into shadows, a dull frame, a black height)
I imagine your eyes will scan now, puzzled.
Is this a stranger, some half-forgotten friend,
A drunken acquaintance? A lover lost,
A prank, some idle sport? A poet
Or composer of occasional verse, an obsessively
Criminal mind? The clock and the calendar
Have their private reasons for dismay: the other day

A girl was raped. A waddler, albine hair, tattooed
Skull and dragons, eyes obscure, emerged
From an unsuspecting car and seized her
To sate something growing inside him, ugly, pale
As his scalp, nourished of moonlight, pruned
With each divination, inconspicuous cruisings
Round Eliot Circle, under a frowning sky.
Did he especially worship one lithe beauty,
A celery stalk, bursting blond, with attractive eyes?
Or was his harvest for grapes that, squeezed,
Ferment into the punishments of wine? Perhaps,
Like a dawdler at a fruit-stand, he tucked an apple
Under his coat and ran, only to discover, on the street,
That it was pulp, pounded meat, but he in his hunger
Ate her, dropped the sullen core like a sack
Of sapless sticks, and now he drifts by the cold
Risings of the sun, and the heart-breaking moon.

Perhaps you think I am going to rape you,
That the bulk of my body, so familiar to me,
Every inch explored and melancholy,
Aims at the target of your flesh with a singular intent,
That my eyes are a binocular extension, cutting
Through the rays of space into the between
Of your drapes, of your lanced shadow,
So that my wicked, clutching fingers, cramped
On the device, might feed into a gyro-scoping brain
The peeling layers of your dress, until only the skin,
Shaved of all accoutrement, revealed in its true form,
Sang a helpless song; and you think that I am an impatient
Connoisseur of this music that dangles between the sinking
Sunlight and the oblique perorations of your body, unmarred
And aloft in the speckling hues of dust; well,

Beauty could not accuse me of ignorance, and I keep
A heady cult of music like a flask about me; I yearn
For the strong drink of intoxication that is vouchsafed
Not to the profane, but only the man of delicate fingers
Who plays over each stop with the consummate skill
Of an eloper, never interloping, but he is always held
Close to the eternal heart of things and glimpses
Their half-secrets veiled in the fortunate cache of the stars;

Nevertheless, it is my ambition never to violate,
To handle each manifestation with the care
Of a Ming vase. Yes, I would like to turn it over
In my hands: who doesn’t want a chance to trace
The margins of pale China like ridges
On a whirling dragon’s back – the dragon
Who is the river, and the river that is the dragon?
But the taming delicacies of music forbid
The incestuous turmoil of hearts, these cascades
Of air mingling with rapids and rapid despair
Bursting over the prairies like a thunder
To sweep them away in a cloud of dust.
I could never use you, my lust is quicksilver
Art that I can never touch, the messenger
Of podiums and promenades behind the velvet rope.

So I end where I began: what have I been able to say
About love in an hour, a week, these twelve days’
Labour? Or what can I say to you? Surely I will awaken
From this verse like a strange dream, vexed,
A half revealed mirage of mixed imaginations,
A sculpture quarter-formed in the bleeding rock,
Whose eyes are not yet and forever tears
Rough with the ash and sweltering decay
Of the desert, whose lips are puckered brittle
With the song of a lost land fading
To an echo of tuneless sand.

Oh, if there were a name I could call here twice
A magic word that would reveal all this talk of love
Redounded finally and wholly on myself, that my song
In double apostrophe closed into a formless globe,
A protean myth whose every change revealed the truth
More truly and more strange – but love is a journey
Outside of the self, love is the soul in shackles
Revealed, love is the fleeting leaf turned gold
In an autumn of peerless shadows. If my sail now fattens
In the ripe wind, if my keel flattens out towards the horizon
And I float across unknown seas,
Then let these words be a prologue, the seers’ guidance,
Prophecy of another realm beyond verse, beyond self,
Boundless, infinite, and eternal, a latitude of pure aesthesis
Unrealized, undreamt, forgotten, and misremembered,
At which I will aim my catch, unbaited and alone.