Song of a Reformed Headhunter

identification / identification I think I will identify myself as a guest. An alien is so outlandish. I am your guest. In the house you describe as a beautiful book about damn ugly people, I live as Nick Guest. I ache for class and mourn for Robbie in Atonement . To Howard’s End I come as Leonard, pity’s guest. There are house rules for a vacation orgasm. The mind closes the doors softly like a good guest. My friend is buying his first house in New Hope. He has invited me to be his weekend guest. The good hosts in The Odyssey throw a great feast while stories are a grateful answer from the guest. Sometimes Jee is Odysseus, sometimes Penelope. Homer, if not a home, makes me a host and guest.

habit / habiliment A string of pearls? More like a ring of wooden beads. These verses, smoothed by fingers, are rosary beads. How many kisses have I threaded with his name! I wear to bed my suitors pockets full of beads. The costume green was awful. Obscene was the heat till it broke like a string, and the rain fell like beads. The tightest cell is loosened by the smallest entrance. The boy brushes past the curtain of colored beads. You have been asked to guess the weight of the pig. The answer can be found in mummy’s jar of beads. The beads are pearls in this one sense: they irritate the flesh to cream with meaning all over the beads. Love, what would you give Jee for all his ancestors? A mirror? A religion? Give him seven beads.

fautes / fault You smell your fault as readily as you hear a bell. Ignorance rings a school bell, ego a church bell. The loop of wire moves along the twist of wire. Steady your hand or desire will sound the bell. I ache for the beautiful young men I pass on streets. They do not know they are beautiful bronze bells. Out of the party chatter rises a cathedral. My tongue keeps ringing my head that is the bell. Jee has heard of, but has not heard, the one-hand clap. He has tapped many bodies but has not heard the bell. I hope perfection does not lie in quietness. A poet builds his house in the fading of a bell. The fading is a fault but silence is an itch. More unendurable is the unrelenting bell.

fading / fade-out This house has no landline. It has three mobile phones. Face touching face, we speak as though we’re on our phones. My ears are losing your dear voice. You have not called. You left text, but not voice, messages on the phone. Last year I fell in love with an email, undressed and stoked his body, while he stoked mine, on the phone. Last March mum called to say dad has a lung disease. Freud likes to listen but he does not like the phone. What tragic heights can be averted, and what depths, if Romeo could get Juliet on the phone. We now suffer a vague continuous anxiety. We do not lose but are always losing the phone. You know the question when midnight abruptly rings. Pick it up. Don’t worry. It’s Jee on the phone.

exil / exile Even the siren, pushing routine off the road, must travel by a highway code to gain its road. The east may ride the prospector into the west, but night exchanges with the day a ring of road. The campfire dimmed the school buildings round it. The stack of wood, kerosene-soaked, smelled of the road. Just as the arrow flies in exile from the bow, you promise not to think of him along the road. He has become the small country you imagine leaving behind. He is the country and the road. Sea-salt tastes your blood but your nose lives on land. That’s why Jee drinks and drives on this sign-posted road. The road that underwrites a way out of repeat, when you look for it, looks like any other road.

VM and JF hosted a book party for me at their lovely apartment in Woodside last night. It was a spendidly casual and friendly affair, with plenty to eat and drink, and good talk to be had. Friends from my school mingled with friends from my other life, and the two worlds did not collide, but met on the common ground of a warm spring evening. Windows were thrown open. A police siren blared its passage through my reading at one point, but it was received like a needle by the fabric of the evening. Someone has just returned from Paris. Someone else returned from Japan with viral pnuemonia. And yet another person cycled to MoMA that afternoon and back, for it was the kind of day when one would cycle across the bridge into Manhattan. Someone was there who represented a past love. Others came as husbands, and then became their own persons. Someone gave out flyers to his coming solo art exhibition. Someone else gave out namecards for the journal he edits. Someone brought a delicious pumpkin c...

The human figure, his own and others', preoccupied Picasso to the end of his life. "Mosqueteros," an exhibition at Gagosian of his late paintings, curated by his biographer John Richardson, is violent and heroic. The painter, here in various guises, is a musketeer, a matador, and a clown. The women are giantesses. One of my favorites in this exhibition is "Femme" 1972, a mountain of a woman who dominates what looks like a park. The sex in many paintings are explicit, the figures not so much coupling (with the connotation of freight cars) as grappling, the cubist angles further contorting bodies and movements. Often, the man in these scenes pushes his face into the woman's face, as if to seize her by his eyes alone. In "Etreinte" 1972, the penis may look unimpressive, but not the huge straining arms and legs, against a backdrop of cheerful blue waves. He grapples not only with humans, but also with superhumans. The self-portraits strive to outdo mas...