I spot the hills With yellow balls in autumn. I light the prairie cornfields Orange and tawny gold clusters And I am called pumpkins. On the last of October When dusk is fallen Children join hands And circle round me Singing ghost songs And love to the harvest moon; I am a jack-o'-lantern With terrible teeth And the children know I am fooling.
Edwin Bodney - "When a Boy Tells You He Loves You"
When a boy tells you he loves you
It'll be the first time you hear this
It is late and he isn't even there to tell you this in person but instead from a car ride home from a bar in Chicago he is there on business
And of course you will smile
Because he sounds like he means it
Because you believe him
Because a boy has never handed those words to you like crushed black berries in the palms of his hands
Firm, young, full
Waiting to taste sweet with you, his arms, creeping vines begging to touch the sun, and your face saying; here
Take everything I have ever touched to be closer to you
His breath waiting to be folded into a love note passed in between the nape of your neck and his front teeth
He will remember the time you told him you felt safe in his mouth and he will never grow hungry...
Just distant
When a boy tells you he loves you
You will hear music
The voice of your past lovers dancing up your throat
Your stomach, in after hours cabaret, still waiting on the last call
That was when you learned that when a boy says "I love you" he means I am getting ready to be inconsistent with you now
This boy will tell you that he loves you
Not long after he had you waiting for 2 hours in front of a cocktail lounge
Patience is something you are working on
But no, not for him
When he asks you to tell him that you love him back, you will be in a car in the parking lot of a late night diner
You will watch the words fall into your lap like a spilled glass of white wine
You will remember the day your courier pigeon heart got lost in the wind because that was a message it did not know how or where to carry and one by one the boys have fallen as silently as the birds do
So eloquently they used to speak until I asked the questions that broke them into ghosts
That bled me into a corpse with so many questions of my own for the soil but they're tongues do not know simple
The things I should be hearing, the things that will make us living men in this time of insatiable yet dying lovers
When a boy tells you he loves you
Only to become silent like a folded sheet of tissue paper
Not wanting you to decrease him into the truth
Do not crack your face into the fullest crescent moon of the tapered bottom of a blackened sky
The masts are mostly gone, Walt. Pleasure-sailors ply the harbor, piloting fiberglass forty-footers down from the North Shore, one at the wheel, one to haul sail and sit, staring over the water’s face.
A swimmer, strong and lucky, might make it, cutting an angle across the current, ebb up, flood down. Jumpers, too, are rare, these days: a train is more reliable, that third, electrified rail, half-covered, always visible.
On the river, among the boats, you rode the ferry low against the water’s breast. If you mean to stand in the same place today, old man, it’s moved. I would not find you on the Brooklyn boat, but browsing over the east-facing rail of the Staten Island Ferry.
Coming back, you stand in the docking end, grasp the safety chain, hold the mass of Wall Street towers in your encompassing gaze.
You know me, standing at a window twenty stories up, whether I recognize you or not. Your curiosity seeks me out, its bare and ample limbs embrace me. There is that between us that lets me know you.
I, detaching myself from the human I, Henri, without thick eyeglasses or rubberized white skin, stretched out like a sinewy cat in the brown grass to see what I felt, wrapping my tail around me, hiding my eyes. I slept. I waited. I sucked air, instead of milk. I listened to pigeons murmuring. Scratching my ear, I couldn't tell if I was male or female. The bundled energy of my life drifted along somewhere between pain and pleasure, until a deerfly launched an attack and anger, like a florist's scissors, pinched the bright chrysanthemum of my brain. Overhead, the long enfolding branches, weighted down with Venetian green, suffused the air with possibility. I felt like a realist, recovering from style. Grief and dignity swirled around discreetly, transferring to me an aura of calm, as I lay in a shawl of gold light, licking my paws, licking my throat, my smooth imperturbable face revealing nothing, even when I thought about my first loves, surface and symbol, rubbing against me, humping in the shadows, making my whole body tremble. I purred, watching an iridescent blue beetle imbibe chlorophyll from a leaf. I flared my nostrils, hearing a starling splash in an amphora of rainwater. With my paws in the air, exposing my ripe belly, I rubbed my spine, a little drunk on the ultraviolet rays and on myself, I confess. Then the sky cleared. Birds were flying. I felt a deep throbbing, as from a distant factory, binding me to others, a faint battering of wings against glass that was the heart in the lovely dark behind my breast, as I was crouching to tie my shoelaces, feeling strange in the meaty halves of my buttocks, until I sprinkled a little earth on my head, like Hadrian reunited with the place he loved.
The stars flow beneath the water The clouds freeze or collapse In laughter, lure like a pledge Like hockey, trust, language Approach and spit on a flower Cruelly and scream in the forest Of mildness, portrayed by art As endless steps into the sky But while all this is going on An aimed surmise, noiseless As the heaven that gathers it Banishes beauty-hemmed man To bed, as sleep extinguishes The planet in whirring dreams Where slowness flows to be Breathless, like a bicyclist.
He lies on the grass. One hippogriff of cloud becomes another: expanding, contracting. It’s all unreal, the same sky and river, the scent of living things. The last of the ice floes passes on the water, shears in two pieces against the bridge. He studies his hands, bitten fingernails. Every time he turns he feels the stamping hooves,
the great herd. A man can get used to anything, grow accustomed to a change of seasons, each snap of the moon. Even when he’s stretched out on this slope he hears a steady thrumming. It’s a long way off, but he lies still, pretending. Once he put candles in each window of her body: a thousand wavering lights. Back then he knew about fire.