Blur

Little Lamb,

Here I am,

Come and lick

My white neck.

WILLIAM BLAKE

 

1

It was a Christian idea, sacrificing

oneself to attain the object of one’s desire.

I was weak and he was like opium to me,

so present and forceful. I believed I saw myself

through him, as if in a bucket being drawn

up a well, cold and brown as tea.

My horse was wet all that summer.

I pushed him, he pushed me back—proud, lonely,

disappointed—until I rode him,

or he rode me, in tight embrace, and life went on.

I lay whole nights—listless, sighing, gleaming

like a tendril on a tree—withdrawn

into some desiccated realm of beauty.

The hand desired, but the heart refrained.

 

 

2

The strong sad ritual between us could not be broken:

the empathetic greeting; the apologies

and reproaches; the narrow bed of his flesh;

the fear of being shown whole in the mirror

of another’s fragmentation; the climbing on;

the unambiguous freedom born of submission;

the head, like a rock, hefted on and off moist earth;

the rough language; the impermeable core

of one’s being made permeable; the black hair

and shining eyes; and afterward, the marrowy

emissions, the gasping made liquid; the torso,

like pale clay or a plank, being dropped;

the small confessional remarks that inscribe

the soul; the indolence; the being alone.

 

 

3

Then everything decanted and modulated,

as it did in a horse’s eye, and the self—

pure, classical, like a figure carved from stone—

was something broken off again.

Two ways of being: one, seamless

saturated color (not a bead of sweat),

pure virtuosity, bolts of it; the other,

raw and unsocialized, “an opera of impurity,”

like super-real sunlight on a bruise.

I didn’t want to have to choose.

It didn’t matter anymore what was true

and what was not. Experience was not facts,

but uncertainty. Experience was not events,

but feelings, which I would overcome.

 

 

4

Waking hungry for flesh, stalking flesh

no matter where—in the dunes, at the Pantheon,

in the Tuileries, at the White Party—

cursing and fumbling with flesh, smelling flesh,

clutching flesh, sucking violently on flesh,

cleaning up flesh, smiling at flesh, running away

from flesh, and later loathing flesh,

half of me was shattered, half was not,

like a mosaic shaken down by earthquake.

All the things I loved—a horse, a wristwatch,

a hall mirror—and all the things I endeavored to be—

truthful, empathetic, funny—presupposed

a sense of self locked up in a sphere,

which would never be known to anyone.

 

 

5

Running, lifting, skipping rope at the gym,

I was a man like a bronze man;

I was my body—with white stones

in my eye sockets, soldered veins in my wrists,

and a delicately striated, crepelike scrotum.

Sighs, grunts, exhales, salt stains, dingy mats,

smeared mirrors, and a faintly sour smell

filled the gulf between the mind and the world,

but the myth of love for another remained

bright and plausible, like an athlete painted

on the slope of a vase tying his sandal.

In the showers, tears fell from our hair,

as if from bent glistening sycamores.

It was as if earth were taking us back.

 

 

6

In front of me, you are sleeping. I sleep also.

Probably you are right that I project

the ambiguities of my own desires.

I feel I only know you at the edges.

Sometimes in the night I jump up panting,

see my young gray head in the mirror,

and fall back, as humans do, from the cold glass.

I don’t have the time to invest in what

I purport to desire. But when you open

your eyes shyly and push me on the shoulder,

all I am is impulse and longing

pulled forward by the rope of your arm,

I, flesh-to-flesh, sating myself

on blurred odors of the soft black earth.