"9 Muses," Mykonos
Would I have known you
in '69 just off the port,
the blue-door disco,
village women dressed in black
and Motown sounds making you
homesick for freeways and urban squalor?
Drunken teen or seventeen
twirling on the square beside the harbor,
so "lost" the Greek men had to point your way
back to the room up whitewashed steps.
Long-haired youth in ratty jeans
making the climb to Paradise
above the waves of salty green —
by sleeping bags stretched on the sand —
your sun-dark skin
your ragged looks,
kaleidoscopic play of sea,
a disco floor and twirling lights,
the boy you were —
the man you are, the ninth muse
is my dancing
heart, our bodies
clinging tight.
The Shower at Night
(For H.F.)
The day's heat in corners of the shed
where wood and cobwebbs meet
is slick with falling water,
a hotness on old planks.
Above us pinewoods and summer stars
your body leaning close
to mine and silence
in its steady flow
sprays through the August air.
Creased in this wetness
beating like a vein
the smooth roundness
below your waist
holds every falling drop
like water on a leaf's rim;
against the fastened door
the pounding of your back
to stains of blackened moisture
soaked up by thirsty boards
and to its steady pouring
the round and arching pipe
spills silver on our faces —
this midnight spent on Fire
Island.
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Santorini, 1997
Your body at night, like a fresco
in profile, salacious, wine-drunken
to the waist, some Baccus pornographic
our two torsos in this room,
red-drenched by sun
animated by love —
the carnalilty of night
and drawn in every pose
a corporeality
as smooth.
Spattered on the walls
of this cave, dripping from our
hands, this offering
estatic.
Big Sur (For H.F.)
By fog the turning road
is almost lost, the vertical
of trees above the lodge —
a giant forest running east
for miles. And from the heated
grate inside our room, the flames are
moving, their lights a wavering blue
— aurora borealis
fringed by cold — the dancing fires
of North. And you and I tonight
like two explorers
off compass from the life we
thought we knew, the routine hours
kept on our daily city paths, now find
in wilderness the certain truth, that something
deep stays undisclosed. And like two
men who've searched for things majestic, we
hover in this silence each on each
pressed to the other's body like the ground
to hear the sound that beats and leads us back.
WALTER HOLLAND is author of a novel, THE MARCH (NY: Masquerade Books, 1996), and a book of poetry, A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEARS: POEMS 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992). His poetry, essays and criticism have appeared in many gay magazines and periodicals. He has just completed his Ph.D. at the City University of New York. His dissertation topic was American gay poetry since World War II.
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