Which Makes Me, I Guess, The Muddy Colorado
…carved with the curious legend of my youth…
— Stanley Kunitz
What we learn from most pornography is
that a great many primates so professionally beautiful
as to make one’s teeth ache
have had congress with a great many other such primates,
though only a few seemed really that into it.
What only a specialized, expensive or amateur category of porn
reveals is that occasionally one of the immortals will,
as in Cavafy’s poem, condescend to love up
an ordinary person. Even the Grand Canyon
was full before it was empty: over the eons
many breathtaking, sometimes medicated concavities
have been filled to overspilling by unexceptional convexities
who just happened to lean into the right gloaming, urinous doorway
at a lucky small hour of the night. Even I,
who about 1981 heard a boy I loved at summer camp in Maine
tell a girl, when he thought I was asleep, that he might have loved me
except that I was not good looking—I, even I, in time
came to have such regular traffic with gods lovelier than he
as to shake my teeth all but loose. Was this because
I got better looking, or just that even the gods’ hungers
have their reasons que la raison ne connaît pas? Whatever.
This fluid exchange lasted so many years that
even what was often over-praised as “hard as rock”
wore down by degrees to the deep ditch you see
before you. (I began tall but was brought both low and deep.)
Though I don’t recommend
the vulgar glass overlook, still, camerado,
if you step to the edge of this
strange history, I promise you’ll thrill
to the vast, acrophobic layers of emptiness—
