Writer's Block: Forever young

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An inventive question. Since youth wouldn't do much for me, as my own natural youth certainly did not, I would offer it up to some hottie actress or rock star babe, such as a Scarlett Johansson or a Miley Cyrus - but for a price.

Writer's Block: Forever young

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An inventive question. Since youth wouldn't do much for me, as my own natural youth certainly did not, I would offer it up to some hottie actress or rock star babe, such as a Scarlett Johansson or a Miley Cyrus - but for a price.

Banish Desire, hah!

Today’s sonnet is by Mr. D. A. Powell and was published most recently in 2009. The title “corydon & alexis, redux” alludes to Virgil’s Second Epilogue. As the editors point out, “Long a scandal to schoolteachers, and a delight to educated homosexual men, the Second Epilogue treats the erotic love of one male shepherd for another.”

In Powell’s redux, he writes in his voice as an older gay man who despairs of love, which is the more tormented in his desire for young lovers, and he remembers when he has tried to banish all feelings of love from his life, but he realizes that desire burns in us as long as we live and are able to sigh.

_ _ _

and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself
and grows in clusters

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges
itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as
god’s own ribs

what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling
branches
yearning for that vernal beau. for don’t birds covet the seeds of
the honey locust
and doesn’t that eye have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats
foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by
the nape

guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs
and brush

what was his name? I’d ask myself, that guy with the sideburns
and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I’d expire with
him on my tongue

silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a
misguided preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut
our sleepy eyes

-- “corydon & alexis, redux” by D. A. Powell

Banish Desire, hah!

Today’s sonnet is by Mr. D. A. Powell and was published most recently in 2009. The title “corydon & alexis, redux” alludes to Virgil’s Second Epilogue. As the editors point out, “Long a scandal to schoolteachers, and a delight to educated homosexual men, the Second Epilogue treats the erotic love of one male shepherd for another.”

In Powell’s redux, he writes in his voice as an older gay man who despairs of love, which is the more tormented in his desire for young lovers, and he remembers when he has tried to banish all feelings of love from his life, but he realizes that desire burns in us as long as we live and are able to sigh.

_ _ _

and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself
and grows in clusters

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges
itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as
god’s own ribs

what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling
branches
yearning for that vernal beau. for don’t birds covet the seeds of
the honey locust
and doesn’t that eye have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats
foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by
the nape

guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs
and brush

what was his name? I’d ask myself, that guy with the sideburns
and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I’d expire with
him on my tongue

silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a
misguided preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut
our sleepy eyes

-- “corydon & alexis, redux” by D. A. Powell