Body of Flame

Joe Ahearn

After, lolling, cock half-engorged,
casually smoking a cigarette,
he thinks of Catullus--the scented bed-sheets,
the oiled golden lover, the soft morning breeze
from the Lake Como shore--
Catullus, who, it seems, fucked
with a certain abandon, and teased
the old Greek meters into Latin.
Loved most by Pound, who found
the sexual license fitting.

Catty old Catullus, who may have been beautiful,
loved boys and courtesans, and wrote taut poems in praise
of the hard upstanding dick.
One hopes, in heaven,
to speak with him....

--The body of light, Pound said, comes
from the body of flame. One thinks
of being dead two thousand years
and looks for a more sober metaphor....
Sex is pleasure, just pleasure,
and the emptiness after is not well-lit.

Light comes, it may be, as the web comes from the spider,
from some inner stickiness, drapes itself beautifully
in unwanted places, waits eight-legged
      and hungry

for the trembling of its strands,
for prey enmeshed in beauty,
which may be like the finger
that plucks the strings of a lute.

One hopes, in that moment, back arcked,
the belly-groans coming, the hard relentless jetting
      about to begin,
that one is beautiful. Probably, one is not.
But the light comes, as it did for Catullus,
the golden Italian light, and one rises,
beautifully self-ravaged, body blazoned with ichor,
      upwards, into it.
To vanish. And thus to wake, encased in
moon-glow, in luminescent skin,
to grope for cigarettes, the candles
having dimmed.

Joe Ahearn