Once I was a rompish lad,
breasts tied down with strips from a granary sack,
my fop of hair pomaded neat
for parlor visits with the wives of each new boss
but tousled after-hours by regional girls
in tight frocks who believed in the Holy Lord
on Sunday but on others in the holy, knock-kneed
heat of promise my gaze spurred. What pinked cream,
what brown and burlesque epicenters I dialed free
from their small towns. Every time a dress dropped
like a red curtain from their bodies I felt like a clay
model of a man, come to life. Until the tinder
of the woman I was caught fire one night
and burnt the binding loose.
In our world “chameleon” seems a smarmy thing,
but I assert we are governed by water
and shape-shifting becomes us, naturally.
Now, I look like a fumbling, base yearling,
which draws men to me in droves.
Doves quiver under my skirt
on holy days and I stand still and matte
as an untouched beauty queen. Even
the governor has sent his gold-rimmed card
up to my frilled abode. There are just so many
flavors says the butcher, who parts my flanks
with red and practiced hands. For the banker,
I slip coins in every fold until I’m bullet-bright.
The news reporter palms my arched back,
wordless. Who does not ache to be
a luminary in their own field?
Mine is the silk and bluff
of the body, mine is the wheedling
of pleasure: coaxing the cock’s funny
grandstand, soft, quick, praiseworthy
of thigh, bankrupting the heart
for the same unnamable
strut I will not miss a beat of.
For the marriage of flesh and breath
I am traveling every road-rail
towards constellations pinned
in expectant human bodies
(undoing each bind, slipping the live
lover from the eyehook).
For the marriage of flesh and breath
I am learning the wooded language
of sacrament. Of ferocity.