We must bear away the body to another place.
—Oscar Wilde, Salome
Then said I, Here am I; send me.
—Isaiah 6:8
The product of poor radiography,
this one rectangular window through which
the faintest of flowers might be seen.
As each plastered, vegetative eye awoke in traction,
and sought to be dismissed
from the unreliable dispensary to which it was tied,
so too did I petition to be moved
into any upper room that might have me.
Let the next who comes invite me so:
If night can take it, shall we thread it like a spider,
glance around its unlit cistern
complecting our moonstruck strands
toward the vortices we’ve kept from thus exploring.
Let him knock with a promise of books. Good looks,
cut-away collar, skinny black tie.
The pocket protector with his name engraved.
For the bandages were still to be unwound.
Had I ever thought about being saved?
No. I had only ever thought about being spent.
And unmended in my bones,
I fostered such attraction to this ardent host,
himself the aseptic argent lancet
brought to pierce me in my side.
It was his first penetrating glance
that filled me with a sudden surge of blood,
wrack, rent & bungle of my corpus.
Let me say I stank like the rim of hell in all my lust
and would have blushed at my own heat
if not for the shameless eagerness in his eyes.
The world is full of lovely but tragic boys.
Get me on the joy bus, I said.
Nobody ever really rides the joy bus.
He prepared a place for me in empty houses,
received me in the shaded summer lawns,
wrapped in our own light jackets at the riverbottoms,
hid in manzanita clumps, the brake, the brittlefern,
in the foyer of a Pentecostal church
where we took our gladness to spite the pious,
took the praise of God as an offering of our bodies,
each of us crouched in the doorway in turn,
mouth to the vine, lips to the eucharist,
flesh of my astonished flesh.
Jon, my elder; Jon, my boy.
The body is dead to us: naughty, then gone.
Suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jon; I will kiss thy mouth.
Let him be born of every ash that glows
in the oil drums of winter parks.
Let lesions disappear, let brittle bones be knit.
Let the integrity of every artery be restored.
There is no God but that which visits us
in skin and thew and pleasing face.
He offers up this body. By this body we are saved.