Black Roses
Aaron Shurin
Entre Ríos Books, 2024
Edition of 80
When I was born ages ago, little did I know that a strapping 18 year-old soon-to-be poet would be walking into his first gay bar in San Francisco. Janis Joplin would soon be moving into the Haight followed by her debut with the Big Brother and the Holding Company. Strange to think that I too was alive and breathing but without the command of any language whatsoever! Now on the eve of turning sixty, I can see on the horizon a time when I will return to non-being, curious what the endgame might look like when language too will make its rightful exit. Do erotic adventures still await or am I already out to pasture? It’s natural to look for answers in the poets that have preceded my own brief advent.
Edward Field turned 100 earlier last year! More than 25 years ago, I remember giving a poetry reading at Posman Books and Ed leaning back in a chair afterwords saying, “Tim, you are a very juicy boy!” No one had ever called me that or since! I remember nothing else about that afternoon. His poems like “Maria Callas” and “Greta Garbo” and “Marlene Dietrich” which I first read in literary magazines before they were bound by Black Sparrow into a thick collected (Counting Myself Lucky was it?) are not only burned into my brain but anthologized in Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (2000) which I had the privilege to curate thanks to the invitation by another Ed, Edward Foster of Talisman House Publishers. Also gathered in those robust pages are some of Aaron Shurin’s “Involuntary Lyrics.” In the previous year, Ed Foster had brought out Shurin’s The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems. And before that, I had discovered some of his earlier work, including A’s Dream (O Books, 1989), Into Distances (Sun & Moon, 1993), Unbound: A Book of AIDS (Sun & Moon, 1997) and was hooked.
I once heard Stanley Kunitz read “Touch Me” when he was fast approaching 100 years old to an audience that included his wife who was sitting in the front row of an auditorium at the Borough of Manhattan Community College: “What makes the engine go? / Desire, desire, desire.” How his voice and body shook when he added: “One season only / and it’s done. / So let the battered old willow / thrash against the windowpanes / and the house timbers creak.” This raging nonagenarian! So many of our best gay poets did NOT survive the AIDS pandemic. We will never know what further erotic adventures and long wakes of literary detritus they might have left behind had they lived. As a gay man, I continue turning to my tribe of elder gay poets who have somehow survived into their advanced years for answers to the erotic mysteries of life and art, something a steam room full of trolls or reels of GDILF porn couldn’t otherwise give.
Rumi was 37 when he met Shams (who was 59 or 60, the same age I am now!). Four years later, Shams disappeared (and/or was murdered by one of Rumi’s sons and thrown down a well). In the two and a half decades that followed, Rumi would be blessed to have two younger companions, the goldsmith Salaḥ ud-Din-e Zarkub, and the scribe Hussam Chelebi. Rumi lived to be the ripe old age of 66 even if there is perhaps nothing intrinsically absolute about one’s actual age. Take John O’Donohue, for example, whose Anam Cara is one of my favorite books, a book I have gifted on countless occasions. In addition to a deep meditation on what it means to meet and nurture a beloved Soul Friend, O’Donohue (who was both a poet and priest) reflects on the four seasons of life from Spring to Winter, each season roughly spanning twenty-years. While going out on tour to support the book, he unexpectedly dropped dead of a heart attack at the ripe old age of 52. Remarkable that he possessed the wisdom of a life fully lived. One can only suspect some secret inner clock had been guiding him towards completing his life’s work, perhaps the same old ticker that guided Shams of Tabriz. Each of us will face an apocalypse on the last day of our lives—life as we know it will simply come to an end. How shall we prepare for it? And whom can we turn to for wisdom and comfort?
All this to say that Aaron Shurin’s latest offering from Entre Ríos Books is an utter gem. An edition limited to 80 copies (I have copy 59/80 as synchronicity would have it!), Black Roses is a hand-sewn chapbook of ten prose poems, each poem no longer than a page. Up until now, I have always thought of the poet Aaron Shurin as a kind of elder brother rather than an elder per se, but now I must acknowledge this august fact too as he writes at the height of his powers. Neither Yeats nor Frost (nor even Whitman) went gentle into that good joyless night. Nor were they all that playful. Check out Shurin in “The End of the Beginning”:
It’s mesmerizing—I love it—I hate it—What is it?—on a clear spring Thursday with wind topping the cottonwood trees and the crows arrayed in a phalanx of surrender. A
rhyme is inevitable when your wig flies off in a gust like a runaway kite: it’s a speck
on a desperate flight in the towering light.
Hard not to feel giddy after landing on those triple rhymes. Shurin revels in gravity and levity, in the poem’s “suspended relay of attraction and retreat,” all the while addressing his Beloved:
You’re my ghost for all time, with your rictus set like a hockey mask and your heart
sliced open to the core. In the vast structure of chance a rhyme is a return to paradise.
I wipe my hands; I couldn’t ask for more.
Like loose threads hanging on the backside of a tapestry, Shurin’s poems are interconnected and constellated. The hockey mask above hearkens back to another mask just three poems prior in “My Home There”:
Who am I? The margin of error and the tomb of pleasure and bottomless erasure. Who am I? I am Squirming Bird—hatched on the fifth eclipse to the sound of shrieking
gulls— but some people call me Twiglet. Hey Twiglet, your mother sucks birdseed. Hey Twiglet, there are skid marks on your face mask. Yo, Twiglet, your prick just ran off
with a goldenrod.
If you ever wanted an image to capture pandemic anilingus, “skid marks on your face mask” would more than do the trick! Three decades after the advent of AIDS, such dark times feel nothing if not cyclical:
My home there—infanticide nest—yes I did it—blood has dominion—where a jury
yea or nay will deliver me out of this insufferable forest—selva oscura—out of this
trapdoor, out of this shrink-wrap, out of this sinkhole, this stink bomb, this tar pit,
this colossal blunder, out of this wipeout, this piss pot, this interminable dirge . . .
Trump 2.0 looks a lot like Reagan 2.0, only this time around, can the courts save us? In the opening poem, “A Beneficent Light,” Shurin invokes his vatic calling:
I can’t repair and I can’t forget the indignities so I catch a measure that resembles
a form and cast a spell on my verses to stupefy the populace. Rain sizzles. Ergonomics
hobble the diligent faithful, I cry lumps of tears to mobilize sympathy. I wanted to
be a poet to validate my loss.
Such lamentation leads our noble rider into landscapes of surrender far beyond the ken of Stevensian heteronormativity:
Forgive me for extending my metaphor and using description to bolster commentary
and commentary to shore up the nouns. I’m penetrated by language and screwed by
my natural rhythm, what’s to be done? I’m here to represent the real with my ass in
the air . . .
Perhaps only an actual bottom can hit rock bottom, marking the catastrophic journey of inward and downward the Greeks knew all too well, Parnassus no longer the realm for mere humans to ascend to, freedom stripped down to barest bones. At this chapbook’s conclusion, there is only “the escape” into erotic pleasures verging on the lingual and the cyclical, pressed into the chapbook’s pages like those blackened eponymous roses:
Dear Friend, dear population, what is the endgame, I lost the map of moons, how do
we know when we arrive, who says we’re here, where’s here and who’s that? Are we
starting once more or is it finished, are we finished? I’m done with ornamental grammar,
strip the sentence down to its noun and verb, a thug of meaning. On the solstice we
ran to the beach to watch the ocean devour the sky; we escaped with no clothes and
