To hide the tenderness of our
passion, vulgar language anchors
the spaces where our words
fail to rise, and so years ago
during the war, somewhere
on the endless, moonlit Pacific
a soldier stopped me a moment
not with the abrupt obscenities
spoken at day, tribal language
of men without women, at war
but with a lonesomeness, with
a longing spoken only out loud
in the company of one not there :
“It’s indescribably rich in the dark
isn’t it? This soft mist, outlines
of boats in the convoy make it
seem as if the long strong limbs
of my woman are what cause
the rhythmic heaving of this
bloody ship. And the wind is
like her hair in my face. And
the foam and blue-green glints
of light are like her fleeting smile.
Can you see that faint red gleam
on the water like flesh in moon-
light is red from your memory
of flesh?” How unlike a soldier
he was, I was, how I could not
did not want to see what he saw.
On liberty once I met a sailor
at a bar; his frank little eyes
tugged at my weakest spot
and when our talk turned to art
when we found the same thing
roused us, he entered that deep-
down place where I live, stirred
the memory of an old, old, love :
a golden lad (first love is always
golden—or at least the feathered
clouds were as they turned to wings
rose in a throaty, blue-green sky
as we sat in my windowsill). Yet
this image the sailor set loose in me
was greater by far than the man
himself—gone, quickly, like spray
on your face which leaves the taste
of salt, the bitterness of finding
and losing all in a few hours—
a soldier, a sailor, the golden lad—
disappeared into the foam below.
That soldier briskly rubbed my
close-cropped head and whispered
“It feels good—like a brush”
then laughed quietly, went down
to the black deck, though perhaps
he wanted to stay. There is much
of unallayed lust among bodies
in close proximity, lads with limbs
as smooth as a woman’s, (though
I’ve always preferred the hairier).
Love separates from lust, our minds
stand aside like a disembodied
thing obedient only to its own
ideals, our bodies go on slaking
their desires, not of love, but of
disgust in the bowels of each other.
Still—I began to notice also a red
glint on the water like the red we re-
member of flesh in the dark or
the year of letters and poems
to a sailor at sea—what a shock
to understand when he returned
I was simply carrying on a tender
kind of poetry with myself—
nostalgic, a bit tearful, full
of the baying of the fog horns
at the fog—not even a dog
baying at the moon.