What Holds

(c) 2007

“What still holds and rises also seeks to perish” ~Gottfried Benn

1.

This first time I am in your bed, my mind travels

toward you over the terrain of a history

we did not share. Jealousy rises but does not hold.  

I cannot grieve my dolorous partings, lovers

shed, like brittle, peeling parchment of sun-burnt skin,

or set aside like those scratched L.P.’s

whose power to evoke a truncated nostalgia

have been squandered by time’s fissures.

I cannot fault your loving others.

I bury my nose in your pits like a dog

that rolls in one stench or another, hoping

to carry vapors of our sex under my nails.

There is no sense, in this knot of limbs and lips,

of perfection, and because of that, none of perdition.

I am at last, not afraid of being lost to the tedium,

to the toils of two fragile humans offering solace

they have learned perhaps painfully, how to give.

I want to go back and hold from the beginning;

but I never had the right or the attitude

to pull you into my embrace until I traversed

a humbling path that stripped me of arrogance

and entitlement, embankments which served

only to keep us apart.

2.

We seem captivated by the deliciousness

of not knowing, as though we have turned our affection

into Schrodinger’s cat; enamored with the possibility

that we exist, simultaneously, in all possible states,

waxing, waning, alive and dead.

We want it all: possessiveness, freedom to move on,

obsessive unrequited love, companionship

and the familiarity of sitting in the same lawn chairs

night after night, watching an undifferentiated moon tax.

How long can we hold this pose,

to keep what rises from perishing?

3.

Before I die let me sip a café au lait in Paris.  Let me

stroll the Louvre, taking in Cezanne’s L’Estaque,

and Monet’s water lilies; the blues and lavenders

like one last, perfect sunrise. Before Death,

that bored cat, rakes and toys his toll, let me hear

a Chicago blue’s master wail soulful harmonics

of life turned inside out, blurring the tragic with beauty.

Let me ride a mustang bareback in Montana

where that horizon is so vast striations of the troposphere

to the exosphere ladder between heaven and wheat.

Let me write poems that strangers will read in their own

rough, tenebrous nights, finding something propitious

and healing, a hope easing departure.

Let me savor an average man—that is, you—

and recognize my own ascending reflected back.

Let me pretend we have always been a part of each other

and that when I die you will hold some part of me dear,

unforgotten come nightfall. Let our last embrace

be as tender as our first, and in that moment,

that without guile, or regret, I accept Death

as though he were as sincere as I believe you.

4.

Let Despair rise and fall as it will. 

It has lost its teeth, its pin pricks and hooks. 

Despair cannot hold. Let it perish.

Today the sheets are sticky with us; hairs curling

labia and thighs are matted with your cum. 

Suddenly it is clear, the fierceness I searched others for

emitted from a fixed point in my own feral core. 

I watch pleasure wash and wash over your face

and know at last my own complicity.

I let you have it—have it all—my truculence

that drains you until your legs shake,

too weak even to open your eyes. 

And then, here, have my languid receptivity;

as if stroking stokes the savage within you to rise.

I do not wait for you to raise it on your own.

I am here purely of my own crude resolve.  So what

if you have pictures to hang, that there are dishes

stacked in your sink? What do I care that later today

I’ll brood alone in my unlit apartment making sense,

of happiness’s dimensions and time’s boundaries?

Right now I am picturing in my mind’s eye my history

of pernicious lovers and they are cheering me on,

as if they had loved me for this, for my own

savage grunts, my fecund power.

5.

At last I can say that you are enough for me—

that at this moment, which is not true love, which is not

the flowering of forever—this morning

where sunlight streams through venation blinds

and illumines your cock in day’s certain light,

where the once thick, black forest of hair

on your belly and thighs thins into strand

after soft strand, this moment which is comfortable

with forgiveness at our failure to gravitate

in our first attraction, pardon for our slack bodies,

all ties to our youth cut beyond memories rabid clinging.

I imagine Death will forgive my multiple lives,

for making room for him only at our last rising.

One day yet you will come to me like Pan

stepping from the green thicket. Push apart my legs

like birch branches and drink from me

as if for your first time. This well will be full for you. 

There will be an evening wind, distant dogs baying.

Become drunk on me as I have become on you.

Push your fingers in, scoop out what salty fluids

spilt there, let me taste what we have done. 

Some other day, I will approach like Aphrodite

and command your masculinity play homage

to the incarnate feminine that never truly dies.

For now, it is enough that I am here

—I am here— asking you to sigh out

whatever is coalescing in your soul:

words simply will not do. 

In this moment, it is enough that the robins

and flickers outside your room chirp

their own alleluias, because you are here,

every hold feeling inextinguishable.