Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The final one in the series. I'm done. vouloir-saisir / will-to-possess The summer does not hold to love and it has love. I would release him but what is holding me? Love . Shooting his load, the Buddhist monk kept his eyes open. What is the black bird in the window? Love . Last night my ex fucked me as if it was our first. What do we share when we don’t share a house? Love. The banks don’t hide a wish to hold the river up. If power builds a dam, what will bring down power? Love. As Monet lost his eyes, his hands grew more abstract. The color of the water lilies? Blue? No, love. When Henry James wrote, “You have time. You are young. Live!” what does the Master mean? I think the man means love! Jee, the unlikely initial of God, you wish so much for Paul, and so much for Paul wish for love.

union / union To dream of union is to dream the world in words, the multifarious world conferring with two words. Pick up a fragment of the world, let’s say, a stone, and feel the heart— hard and soft —in the palm of words. Lean on a week as you would on a walking stick and learn the long and short of time-travel in words. When a backdoor is pried open and shows a cave, do you go in or stay out of the house of words? You know the ups and downs of falling deep in love. You know the stairs, that train station, are made of words. The knife is for the wound. The road is for the shoes. Honey and vinegar don’t lose the taste of words. Thank god Paul is not Jee and neither is Jee Paul but between Paul and Jee a world, a dream, all words.

tel / thus Among the ways to take a good look at a tree, the best is to lie down and look up at a tree. I can no more hold you by naming qualities than sacred names scratched out in bark possess the tree. All that I touch of you are touches and not you. A torn branch does not make the tree less of a tree. Your life—your speed—moves independently of mine. Looking elsewhere does not hasten or slow the tree. Being is your glory, which no one can take from you, unless they take you down, for burial, from the tree. The demon of despair, the angel of desire, the many leaves that flutter on an unmoving tree. Jee, lay your anguish on the ground and look up. The tree. The sky. The tree. The sky held by the tree.

seul / alone Your slight curve intimates there is another shoe but everyone here walks the streets without a shoe. I will not settle down with less than beauty, so I will go to bed night after night with my shoe. The pier walks you to see the seals swimming in pairs. They slip by on their flippers, are not stopped by shoes. It took me a lost time to stumble onto land in search of love. My feet still pinch like brand-new shoes. How do I write about a pain you do not share? Hanging from the traffic light is a leather shoe. The poem writes for relief and not for empathy. It is my foot that is unbound from my old shoe. Today is Field Day and the sun is bringing lunch. You will fast, Jee, however, and walk in love’s shoes.

retentissement / reverberation The Christmas crowd is roaring round the circus ring. The bear is tearing up the master of the ring. A stone dropped in the water does not see the ripple. A tower struck by lightning does not hear bells ring. On an abbey’s lawn I learned to make a daisy chain from serious young men stretched out in a scattered ring. I often think I moved my life to the wrong country. The call is not for me whenever the phones ring. Tempted to switch these verses round like playing cards, I do, sometimes, to hear the cash register ring. One thing leads to another, as one day the next, but there are nights that huddle in a silver ring. You have big ears, Jee, which are losing their hearing to the bloodthirsty circus cheering for the ring.

regretté / regretted If I should die today, the world has still its sun and nothing is, my love, less mournful than the sun. I have ambiguous feelings about piecework. The country I come from produces too much sun. I wish to be killed by a fit of jealousy. Yours. Give me a tank top the color of the sun. Thinking of death, the last three verses start with I. Thinking of death’s antipode, they end with sun . As far as poems are from person, or as near, so far and near revolve the planets round the sun. I would love you with such a warm and bright import that you can say, when I am gone, he was my sun. Or, if you like, you may love me so totally that I will say, when you are gone, he was my sun.

ravissement / ravishment I shuddered, surprised, when you took me in your mouth. It was as if you took my cock and not my mouth. A shudder is a premonition of suffering before surrendering to the pleasure of your mouth. The soft nothing of it! A cotton shirt against the skin. Don’t tear away the cover of cloth from my mouth. My feet have walked on the sea sitting on the sand. My mouth has tasted the light wetness of your mouth. A needle’s eye is not made for a needle’s eye but your mouth pulls a thread and closes tight my mouth. I have not yet described the treasure of your tongue. I think my mouth will keep it secret in your mouth. Jee was so ready for a ravishment and you were most ravishing when you pulled out of my mouth.

obscéne / obscene Stop making a big scene about your broken heart. Put it back in your pants, the soft and weepy heart. If history is a roll-call of militant men, the lover has no place in history but his heart. I am unmoved by daily pictures of the dead. A poet sings of toads and strikes straight at my heart. A porn star has nothing on me when it comes to the business of pumping the last drop from the heart. Was Sade outrageous about a turkey and a pope? No more than fucking up a surgeon with a heart. To be a psychic, a witch doctor or a cook, I have to be well versed in matters of the heart. The obscene is a view Jee finds congenital. Between a poem’s legs is found a poet’s heart.

My tongue fingers the sharpened knifepoint of my teeth. They bite off other tongues. They are man-eating teeth. Love did not give me a vote in my mutant birth. Behind my tender kisses hide my carving teeth. The muscle of your jaw cramps when you sing or yawn because at night, beside a grave, you grind your teeth. There is always a touch of humor in the monstrous. There is a bone of laughter held between the teeth. I am a lover but a poor horseman. I read somewhere that you can tell a good horse by its teeth. Many men complimented Jee on his sweet smile. I don’t trust flattery. My smile shows too much teeth. I broke my love. Where there were eyes, there are now peepholes. Your bleeding mouth denounces all my bloody teeth.

I miss my train and end my travels in a station. I cannot ride the whistle of wind out of the station. He had a feeling for vast things that come and go. He came from a small country with one train station. Today, like yesterday, work will be taking a train. The other constant change is passing Bliss Street station. The 7 train rattles my window at all hours. A window is not a station. A window is a station. My poems, I realize, have a weakness for definitions. Definitions are a quick stop at a small station. I could compare my love to many awful things. How else to wait out the long wait at the last station? Wait, Jee, though the winds blow hard at this elevation, wait till iron time pulls in and stops at your station.

jalousie / jealousy The wine has turned to water, then to vinegar. The guest will finish up the bridegroom’s vinegar. Tell me you have not kissed another man since when. May your mouth taste on every cock my vinegar. A stone will eat better if seasoned in a sauce. You let me dip my bread into your vinegar. I want to savor every dish served in the feast. Why soak all, like the vulgar, in the vinegar? I will say it plainly. My heart is very sore. My head is swimming. I will write in vinegar. A common proof of love, they say, is jealousy. The Chinese thinks that rice invented vinegar. He complains he is thirsty. What do we have, boys? Soak a sponge, Jee, and offer him some vinegar.

induction / induction I take my theory of winter from the violin. A lot of love is cold, so sings the violin. You can as soon induce a law from idioms as learn to bow by listening to a violin. Last night the world fell back a step and bared its teeth. A god was humoring a mortal violin. If two French kisses do not constitute a proof, then neither is a violin a violin. Waking up from the sleep of composition, love hears, from a distance, the smashing of the violins. The lover writing to his love, it is not like any composer writing for the violin. So many things inspire Jee to sing but you transform a human voice into a violin.

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.

étreinte / embrace The big-armed angel left and leaves behind a wound that sounds the heart but looks nothing like a wound. To close the wound the lovers clasp the other tight. They know that letting go will open up the wound. Mother would daub a cut with yellow medicine and mint a gold coin of the skin. I hoard these wounds. The world, holding so many things, so many nothings, is best represented by the body and its wounds. When I think I can live with being queer all my life, a morning happens, and the scar unlocks the wound. A subtler metaphor marries a man to a man. Comely gods and goddesses leap out from that wound. My tongue flickering his ass, Hermes asked for more. A cock was all Jee had on him to cure his wound.

errance / errantry My horse is massive white. My flag is also white. The scarf I wear around my heart is bleached to white. My first love, the physicist, went by the name of Strange. He has become a stranger the way hair turns white. The point at which a lover changes to a friend is not a point. Not pink. It is a shade of white. Allergic to flowers, he hangs photographs of lilies. His rooms are painted green. I remember them as white. You know the magazine by its bright yellow frame. You know the men you love to read have skin called white. Although all flesh is heading for the earth, my love, why do you hurry it by tanning what is white? To apprehend every multicolored flickering thing, refract, Jee, in two densities the passing white.

écrire / to write Deep in your words, you realize you are your own father, and son, beloved, lover, but most of all, a father. The man, a big Broadway producer, spreads my ass. I wonder—write—how good a lover was my father. About this man whose kisses are fading from my mouth I write, and make him up as if I were his father. That these poems will not resuscitate the past does not stop me from writing once upon a father. The bitter truth is this: I write alone at home. Here are no lover or beloved or son or father. When she conceived of God, Mary warbled a hymn. Mary let out an O, when fucked by James’s father. Jee can write O, O, O, O, O, but they are zeros. Realizing this, he can again begin, Our Father . . .

drame / drama No tropical undergrowth has stepped into a grove but I think our second date is a kind of grove. After the hours made love, they put on their shoes. They are forbidden from re-entering the grove. The animals of thought are sacrificed to it. My hands empty bowls of semen round the grove. Repeat a word of power, like a ritual bird, until the non-repeatable comes from the grove. When my body forces in between the trees, it finds another place—a beach—and not the grove. Before they piss, they ask forgiveness of the trees. The soldiers know the nameless thing done in the grove. Love is the name we give to what cannot be named, past is the time, and where we worship springs a grove.