FROM Apollo

O let me clean my spirit of all doubt,

Give me the signature of what I am.

 

OVID, The Metamorphoses, II

TRANS. HORACE GREGORY

 

I

With a shriek gulls fled across a black sky,

all of us under the pier were silent,

my blood ached from waiting, then we resumed.

“You’re just like us,” some bastard said;

and it was true: my hair was close cropped,

my frame reposed against a piling, my teeth

glistened, my prick was stiff. Little by little

they had made me like them, raptly feeding

in silhouette, with exposed abdomen,

like a spider sating itself. For a moment,

I was the eye through which the universe

beheld itself, like God. And then I gagged,

stumbling through brute shadows to take a piss,

a fly investigating my wet face.

 

 

II

Stay married, God said. One marriage.

                  Don’t abortion. Ugly mortal sin.

Beautiful gorgeous Mary loves you

                  so much. Heaven tremendous thrill

of ecstasy forever. What you are,

                  they once was, God said, the beloved ones

before you; what they are, you will be.

                  All the days. Don’t fornicate. Pray be good.

Serpent belly thorn and dust. Serpent belly

                  sing lullaby. Beautiful gorgeous Jesus

love you so much. Only way to heaven

                  church on Sunday. You must pray rosary.

Toil in fields. Heaven tremendous thrill

                  of ecstasy forever. Don’t fornicate.

 

 

IV

The search for a single dominant gene—

“the ‘O-God’ hypothesis” (one-gene,

one disorder)—which, like an oracle,

foreknows the sexual brain, is fruitless.

The human self is undeconstructable

montage, is poverty, learning, & war,

is DNA, words, is acts in a bucket,

is agony and love on a wheel that sparkles,

is a mother and father creating

and destroying, is mutable

and one with God, is man and wife speaking,

is innocence betrayed by justice,

is not sentimental but sentimentalized,

is a body contained by something bodiless.

 

 

VI

On the sand there were dead things from the deep.

Faint-lipped shells appeared and disappeared,

like language assembling out of gray.

Then a seal muscled through the surf,

like a fetus, and squatted on a sewage pipe.

I knelt in the tall grass and grinned at it.

Body and self were one, vaguely

coaxed onward by the monotonous waves,

recording like compound sentences.

The seal was on its way somewhere cold, far.

Nothing about it exceeded what it was

(unlike a soul reversing itself to be

something more or a pen scratching words

on vellum after inking out what came before).

 

 

X

To write what is human, not escapist:

that is the problem of the hand moving

apart from my body.

                                    Yet, subject is

only pretext for assembling the words

whose real story is process is flow.

So the hand lurches forward, gliding back

serenely, radiant with tears, a million

beings and objects hypnotizing me

as I sit and stare.

                              Not stupefied. Not aching.

Today I am one. The hand jauntily

at home with evil, with unexamined feelings,

with just the facts.

                                Mind and body, like spikes,

like love and hate, recede pleasantly.

Do not be anxious. The hand remembers them.

 

 

XI

When I was a boy, our father cooked

to seek forgiveness for making our house

a theater of hysteria and despair.

How could I not eat gluttonously?

You, my Apollo, cannot see that your hands

moving over me, the plainer one,

make me doubt you, that a son’s life is punishment

for a father’s. Young and penniless,

you serve me lobster. Scalding in the pot,

how it shrieked as I would with nothing left!

Please forgive my little dramas of the self.

And you do … in an interruption of the night,

when one body falls against another—

in the endless dragging of chains that signifies love.

 

 

XIII CYPARISSUS

“I am here. I will always succor you,”

he used to say, a little full of himself.

What did I know? I was just a boy

loved by Apollo. There had been others.

All I wanted was to ride my deer,

who made me feel some knowledge of myself,

letting me string his big antlers with violets.

One day, in a covert, not seeing the deer

stray to drink at a cool spring, I thrust

my spear inadvertently into him.

Not even Apollo could stop the grief,

which gave me a greenish tint, twisting my

forehead upward; I became a cypress.

Poor Apollo: nothing he loves can live.

 

 

XIV

This is not a poem of resurrection.

The body secretes its juices and then is gone.

This is a poem of insurrection

against the self. In the beginning was the child,

fixating on the mother, taking himself

as the sexual object … You know the story.

In the mirror I see a man with a firm

masculine body. Mouth open like a fish,

I look at him, one of the lucky ones

above the surface where the real me

is bronzed in the Apollonian sun.

I stay awhile, mesmerized by the glass

whose four corners frame the eyes of a man

I might have been, not liquid, not pent in.