I could trace everything: where you’re
soft, where rough, the taut and slack
of your body I know in the biblical sense.
I could describe all that, call it metaphor
for the inscrutable, and embarrass you
standing here in your bones, covered
by your black pants and shirt, your successful
tie and suede jacket, professorial yet
a little rakish—a good and lyrical surface.
I could deconstruct you in front of everybody,
point out your internal contradictions.
Your bald head and hairy chin could
stand for the more complex issues.
I would circle you like the blind man
describing an elephant, making the error
of parts, while you head on out the door
like Wallace Stevens, keeping his
private and cryptic language, never a word
of family, never an allusion to poetry
at the Hartford Insurance Company.
I can hear your body being that quiet,
modest, only decorative enough to affirm
our mutual taste.
God, I don’t know,
I just wanted to say something in honor,
and it all looks so confessional.
The body is what teases me, Eliot
in his banker’s suit, fingering his spectacles.
Williams returning from rounds,
shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal hairy
(or not) arms. Bishop, stepping out
of the tub, a few rolls at the stomach,
a little too much weather around the eyes.
thin white underneath the white—
but secret thigh muscles, powerful
enough, I imagine, to keep all that grace
under pressure.
Happy, angry, or sad,
I am utterly drawn to this mystery, as if
it were the magnetic center of life, a pole—
oh, and then the Freudians will start in
on me, with their connective tissue of prose!
Memphis the cat is kneading my chest,
press-press, press-press, her eyes blankly
earnest, mouth watering. She doesn’t
give a hang if I’m her mother or an iconic
stand-in, it’s the flesh she loves under
my sweater, the body of my body of work.