SEER
His friends from college told stories
that made them laugh to convulsions
about the moments, stoned or sober,
when he pulled some classic stunt
with an innocent face or could not remember
and asked them to tell what he had done.
When he lived in a distant city,
they heard about the curious time
police were called as he walked the edge
of his high-rise apartment’s flat roof.
He was there, he said, to catch the stars
falling in August, as each one spoke
a word he would set in a complex grid
about the disasters timed to happen.
We thought that drinking or doses of drugs
had made him wild with wide eyes,
calling us to babble at midnight
and weeping until the first light.
I saw him once on the ninth floor
of a new facility opened nearby.
The staff enjoyed him and listened
to the music he played for hours on end.
“I am the guitar of God,” he said.
“The pills they feed me make me confess.”
He told about walking one day naked
in the park he reclaimed and made into Eden,
where liquid colors dripped from the trees
and the dead bees returned to life.
He was the vessel of hid divinity,
sent to heal the division of nations.
The very last time I saw him, he stood
as silent as death, against the wire
dividing the milling inmates from guests.
His hand, like fire, brushed mine
and passed along the deathless virus.
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Figure Study
A catalog of used books
described a half-price portfolio —
photographs of figures —
sepia compositions or shimmering
monochromatic watercolors
of natural beauty in bare rooms,
and “softly edged outdoor portraits
with the merest hint of color,”
as if it described a dish
of some culinary enterprise.
Here are richly grained
figures of saturated colors,
capturing reflective moods,
“simply the play of light
caressing a body’s curves,
charged with a landscape’s
environmental meaning.”
The figure is stripped bare
of any transgressive dimension
as a sign of enlightened love,
a spare and geometric scaffold.
If so, then the hell with it.
These pieces are as innocuous
as flocked wallpaper
hanging in a hidden hallway.
Here the camera’s alchemy
has turned the body’s heft and weight
into pure, non-perishing spirit.
It turned totally Platonic,
leaving the body husk behind.
But the figure in clear light
should remind us that beauty
comes and goes, and flesh
withers as soon as grass.
We love what can not last.
________________________________________
NOTHING HAPPENED
Nothing happened. Nothing could. You slept,
with sudden starts, as though to catch yourself
from falling or pulling back from any close
body stretched along your sprawling length,
while you dreamed of dolphins in tumbling pods
pushing against each other, pushing to shore
and beached, as you broke the surface of sleep
to gulp, vibrating with sound, breaths
in sudden succession, the pumps of a starving heart.
Inside this night, within your tussled bed,
you looked — if anyone watched — collapsed on your back
like Adam fallen from the ceiling, pushed
by that digit extending from God, rigid
and floating above this mortal world, on the backs
of sensual angels, while he wore a night-shirt.
Your skin — chalky like gesso, dried by desert
exposure or shelterless days lived at sea
straining to hear the “ping” of sonar echoes
or the “click” of porpoise speech — contracted when drafts
of night air raised like a ghost or a kiss
the soft down at your hip, as your testicles
shrank back in primordial fear inside
the sack tingling within the bone vault
of your thighs, unguarded as midnight passed.
Nothing happened. Your sealed eyelids fluttered,
as if they trapped a luna moth in a purse —
and once opened the captive creature would fly
with its wings fanned and reaching to feel freedom,
but into a world of frost or predator birds.
From my bed my lustral soul rose and followed,
miles away, as I watched the shuffle of lights
from occasional cars bend through panes of glass
to reach and recede across the empty ceiling
as I pictured you beside me, while nothing happened.
Royal Rhodes is a poet who lives in a small village, near a nature conservancy, a green cemetery, and Amish farms.