Why I like it: it's always dicey (for me) to read about sex and romance in poetry. It gets too....goopy and mopey-eyed. But put that sex and romance inside a gay boy bar and now you've got my attention. Other than my love for all things homosexual and male, I like the unexpected juxtaposition of his childhood memory.
(I'll admit though I can't decide if the wet and holy bit at the end is a bit too uncomfortable and I'm not sure why. Too vivid? Those words don't belong together? But that's also part of what makes it great.)
At Pegasus
They are like those crazy women
who tore Orpheus
when he refused to sing,
these men grinding
in the strobe & black lights
of Pegasus. All shadow & sound.
“I’m just here for the music,”
I tell the man who asks me
to the floor. But I have held
a boy on my back before.
Curtis & I used to leap
barefoot into the creek; dance
among maggots & piss,
beer bottles & tadpoles
slippery as sperm;
we used to pull off our shirts
& slap music into our skin.
He wouldn’t know me now
at the edge of these lovers’ gyre,
glitter & steam, fire,
bodies blurred sexless
by the music’s spinning light.
A young man slips his thumb
into the mouth of an old one,
& I am not that far away.
The whole scene raw & delicate
as Curtis’s foot gashed
on a sunken bottle shard.
They press hip to hip,
each breathless as a boy
carrying a friend on his back.
The foot swelling green
as the sewage in that creek.
We never went back.
But I remember his weight
better than I remember
my first kiss.
These men know something
I used to know.
How could I not find them
beautiful, the way they dive & spill
into each other,
the way the dance floor
takes them,
wet & holy in its mouth.
No comments:
Post a Comment