Shame

He’s a twilight ghost, nearly a pattern against the gentle
shadows that nettle the freeway off-ramp. And I would hardly tender
a lengthy stare in his direction, fearful that our looks should cross.
But now, his sloppy form inclines against the dusky hollyhock,
and from the darkness, branching out before him: a lancet
of skin that, with the murky elegance of a mourning dove trained

upon preening a feather’s shaft, he is stroking. That languid train
which cargoed my father to Archangel halted once, near a gentle
stand of pines. And the luckless young woman who should glance it
to avoid a mired hole in the train floor where others tended
to their bowels unashamed, she ambled off and was hawked
by a Russian guard who, with his bullet, followed her across

the field, left her a squalid heap in snow. Does this tragedy cross
my thoughts now because, in unabashed moments, I feel trained
to bear another’s yoke of shame? My own innocence, so cheaply hawked?
Can the amorality of pleasures, groans and effluence seem genteel,
ever? I’ve tried hard enough to own up to my worst moments, tender
though they be to prod and break open with the clumsy lancet

of my conscience. Once, for instance, as a young man, my plans set
to travel Poland, I lurched from a wet dream into a puzzled stare across
a train’s compartment, where a stranger’s marvel grew tender
at my arousal—simply hapless, and no worse. But when the train
huddled into a border station, where, at an officer’s behest, I gently
edged off my winter boot and let fall forth a meager roll against my sock—

zloty notes, a souvenir to forfeit, but worth a month of wages earned ad hoc
for some, and flaunted now to cheapen up this stranger’s life—this, a lancet
of shame, to me, much sharper than sex’s peccadillos. And what of any gentle
thought to sex, even in the father who must bathe his palsied daughter’s cross
of genitals, look upon them with that selfsame disgust for nostril, anus, train
himself to squelch all pity for what might be her own desire, simply tend her

and leave it be? Better to pass the sponge headlong. And when the tender
temple of my lover asks for touch, inviolate though this seems, will I hock
an honest act of love, for public’s sake? Easy to say “never.” Into gloomy terrain
of duty to a private list of sins, though, we addle, lose our nerve, glance at
rigid, disapproving faces for our signal, that we may shoulder forth their ugly cross.
Best to let the dusk, then, flourish with indifference on the man who is tangental

even to the traffic. Who won’t pretend or balk from guilt, since what supplants it
yaws like a tomahawk pitched into the darkening, hostile path, and crosses
our distance, constrained to know me, as his foe, or as unashamed, and gentle. 

© Karl J. Sherlock