THE GOLDEN BOWL
(DOGSTAR)
Bleeding heart lily lemon
being the
gleaning of
what was no longer understood in
the instant of its being dreamt
meant
I was learning
like a wasp
the art of being fumed
the sun-dial
silver
grid-iron
of a poem
pear of hyacinth
anguish scold’s bride and
its
terms
to be cursed with
flight and yielding to
the sun for
my neck what was the kissing as
left of it by an asp
my little
hazmat
creeping arson widow’s trellis
left to
this its
own devices
ranunculus
catapelta known only in the lost light delicacy of a novel
it can’t quite remember
being
belvedere and trellis trestle and upper mullion
from which one might see a
person
such as
this one on the
verge of being caught
Dogstar
Venus my Aeneas
further roughing
up the canicular
the difference between which and
the blighted wreck of my novel being
one of use
all of it without the hive its
everyone remainder in fiction
of stillness and drone after drone upon drone
whereas
nothing
now is useful
here—
I can’t
emphasize this enough
July judas chair and the peony
staging
just how little I’m
doing being made to do
or
is
this how it feels to be put
to
use
sunlight being a
euphemism for combustible writhing
decay
making you
your parasol and pocket
of oranges
something like
the sun the
pagoda steeped oxygen of the justice of
a book
(its clean sharp useless spine) falling like the sun on a helpless thing (it takes someone once in a poem a carrion a swarm in a novel to understand) such vanquishing exposure and above it
determined as a
temple a
small boat of
Oceana roses
I wake each morning to gold mine Aeneas my Aeneas my
gold Aeneas
each morning
wake to gold
but mine is missing
WHAT MAISIE KNEW
(PIZZERIA)
Given how muggy it was at our table
checkered red & white waxed on one
side
excitingly suede-like
on the other
I might have been surprised
their nipples
were so expressive
were I not
so startled
by them altogether
then riveted
unconcealable
under thin shirts
advertising Beck’s
sweat-stained the acrid moons
beneath their pits further darkening
as they sat & laughed
their nipples:
impossible
to think about
without tempting
the disaster already invited by
trying not
not to
to think
of them of
of
which all of which
already
surely
I was
enough aware
even only if in
my head
to call them
pert
mischaracterizing the easiness of their arousal
that of their nipples
versus
more enigmatically
them and
theirs
its swag and swelter
versus the unconcealable
pertness
mortifying responsiveness
of my own
its spectacular and obstinate
refusal
to be curbed or warded
off
like a horse from the gate
whose response to the twitch
its bit
is only always this hell-bent
zeal the
inexhaustibility of which
in relation
to the fear that spurs it
being at this point
my most
my only
athletic if not quite boy-like
trait
My fear
its coltish
brio
colliding
with their languor
it would lie
down dusty and die
if it could
at its feet
probably tan probably
sprouting hair
first dark oblivious
on the knuckles
of their easy toes
it would lie there
down
or even shamelessly
under
this very table
and if as I
recall
this was happening at a pizzeria
[red & white check
of oilcloth meaning
I was wearing
one of my pizza shirts
red & green candy stripes
likely
many sizes too large the
stupid
stubborn idea
(first but not last
idiot ideé fixe
of nascent narcissism-in-triage-training)
it could
hide
the soft
pale mole-spot pasta of my arms
across
from
them and their muscles
(words like “bicep” and “pec” which to my body
if you could call it
a body were
inapplicable)
their stains and pits
likely also
growing hair
lucky the burning
of my blushing not
burning the pizzeria
down
the jukebox
the parmesan cheese shakers
the parents our parents
at the adjoining table to smithereens
surprising
and disappointing
I would have
set it
all on fire first and foremost me and my
hideous
impeccable disastrous
cotton
its Italian flag
infinite difference
between
their shirts and my shirt
like
the
chasm
between
the way
their being boys
touched languidly, easily
their also already being men
how they just slipped
into each other
versus
the way
my being one a boy
if you could call it this that a boy
stood itself on the edge of a chasm
and strain your eyes
all you liked
there was no
being or becoming a man zero man
on the horizon
anywhere
the horizon’s
horizon
how I got
there
(girlfriend
sports friends who were boys themselves growing
up into men who didn’t
find you
risible wasn’t how you got there this was there impossible
let alone wife children man’s hard jaw infinite easy body
how you got there
I didn’t have a clue from here and no
one
was giving one
as when my second-grade grandmotherly teacher
whose name I can’t remember
(insofar, I tell myself,
all of the inner resources
were being pooled, emptied
into the project of trying not to bewhatever this
was, spending
like no tomorrow)
she taught me a shortcut
to tying shoes, because (and this surely related to
the larger predicament, its genome) bunny ears
escaped me
there was no trick like that
for this
the chasm
from which there is no view
at all
spin round all
the way round
like a girl dancing like Diana Ross
in the outfield before the ball drops never
in your glove
I touched
pertly
repellently, inexorably
only
this intractable girlishness
with which nervously
I permitted myself
this one
thing
as though in the absence of Drew Barrymore
conflagration concentrating
all my mortified self-censorious energy
if I could execute this
into a single action without calling
was my only attention
option to myself
and whereas others
would have chosen
flipping
through the oversized, laminated menu
the jukebox
pipetting the scrunched
up straw wrappers
into worms
I chose
“something simpler”
holding my glass of Pepsi
and in my nervousness
my hand
went up that cylinder
and down
sweating the night’s heat
and I
disastrous
didn’t know
why
they were laughing
why
what I was doing was
funny
up and down and
nearly hysterical with
the dread of not understanding as it dovetailed
with their effortless swagger
I said
I said
what? it feels good!
and they
just sat and laughed
Michael D. Snediker is the author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (2009) and the forthcoming Contingent Figure: Aesthetic Duress from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. His book of poems, The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (2013), was a Lambda Finalist for Poetry. His poems have appeared in journals including The Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Cream City Review, jubilat, and Maggie. He is Co-executive editor of The Offing, and Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston. He is grateful to the Corporation at Yaddo for the beauty, joy, and time in which the manuscript from which these present poems are excerpted was written.
You can see more of Michael Snediker’s poetry on At Length here.
