The next poem came from a guy at the Vermont Studio Center--
he's this amazing artist named Tim Stotz.
And Tim was very mysterious, you know, beard
and the dark eyes, and sitting in the corner,
and drawing women at art openings and stuff like that.
And-- so I asked him what he was working on,
and he said "I can't tell you."
And so, about a week later, I said, "come on, Tim,
what are you doing?"
He said, "all right, well why don't you
come over to my studio?"
No, he said-- "I can't show you yet, but I'll tell the story."
Then he told me this story about growing up
in a family where he was really just
bullied to the point of nearly abuse by an older brother,
and how he used to escape into the woods behind his house--
he grew up in Massachusetts-- to sort of escape the situation.
And he would sort of escape into there,
and sort of become prince of the woods
and live in his imaginary world.
And he said, there was this one day-- when he was about 12--
when his brother was really giving him a hard time,
and he ran out into the woods and went to his usual spot.
And there was this box, and he opened the box.
This box was, like, rained on.
It was just sitting there, and it was full of porno magazines.
And he said-- but he looked at me, and he said--
you have no idea what a strange and numinous experience
this was--
[LAUGHTER]
--but he put it really well, he said,
"I felt as if the inescapable inheritance of being a man
had come to greet me, and I was terrified.
I was terrified."
And so then, so, I wrote this poem,
but I really want to tell you about this painting,
because it was really amazing.
He finally let me come into the studio,
and I looked at this thing, and I went, oh my God!
Because it looked as if he had collaged
a self-portrait out of butterfly wings and flower
petals, and I was amazed by it.
I could tell it was collage, and I was just stunned,
because he was he was a realist, figurative painter.
And the color tone and everything was perfect.
And I just went to say, oh my God, this is so amazing.
And I walked up close, and they were all cut-outs from porno
magazines, and he had built his body using the color tone all
of the different women that were in these porno magazines,
and it was called Resurrection of the Shattered Body.
It was one of the most powerful things I've ever seen.
And so, here's this guy's body, and it's made up
of thighs and breasts and--
you know, it's just amazing.
So I wrote this poem for Tim, and it's not nearly as funny
as the story, but here I am.
So this is called "The Beautiful Names."
"Dark shaft.
The milky pearl.
At the top of the milkweed, pod about to unfold.
Stalk erect in the shadow of the pines, sliver of light burning
through like a finger, probing it,
that droplet at the tip of the pod.
Moist, white, dew.
And the gravelly paths lined with them, on either side,
cattails like a stand of scepters
through which the boy comes running, panting
for air by the auto shop and abandoned garage,
house burned to its foundations, away.
From the brother waving his dick around saying, look, see it?
Dark of the closed shared room, away.
To the cool eden, electric green of moss on rock,
iris at the cold, clear stream.
He's twelve.
His brother's a bully, pinning him to the wall
until he can't breathe, rubbing the wet-dreamed sheets
in his face, saying, this is what it is to be a man,
butthole, do you think you're a man?
This is what it is.
The brother, coaxing his straining cock along,
dark shaft for the milky pearl.
The father, blustering into the house like air, vanishing.
The mother, who clings, who will not let him cling.
Heat of the closed shared room, But the iris
above the orange lichen, bending to the cold clear stream, bud
unfolding, wasp crawling in and then out again,
the yellow sugar, and the wasp buzzing away,
and the flower still standing, stalk unbroken by love.
And that was love, wasn't it?
But how could he be sure?
Unmarked as it was by words or blows,
his brother's fist, his classmates' snickering,
dirty words for dirty girls in a huddle
at the edge of the soccer field.
Yellow in the tongues, blue flame,
a sudden flush suffusing his cheeks.
But who put the box at the foot of the pine?
Festooned with fur, a green procreation of moss and mold
at its conventional edges, split at one seam
from the weight of the first fall rains.
The moist, white, dew which he does not see,
as he makes his way through the raspberry bracken to the small
pond where he cannot have a body,
where he can be breath on the water.
Press of the closed shared room.
The morning's failure, nature's failure,
the cool of the ferns with their seductive hairs like Robin's
hair, like Celia's hair, all the girls
he knows flitting through his head like butterflies.
He's twelve, he can't be rid of it,
until the green light falling.
The dragonfly skimming and leaving its z shimmering.
Wink of gems in its vanishing trail, diamonds
small as the heads of pins, this glade and pond,
this green brightness, like a stage
lit up in a ring of dark trees where
he has come with a stick of birch, where he has come to not
have a body, and the split box sagging at the foot
of the pond, which he sees now.
Wet, black letters under a rim of moss, to which he
bends with a probing finger.
He's a boy, he will not be rid of it.
So the cardboard splits, so he pulls it open.
Wet magazines stacked like cards, his pick, his flesh
fortune.
And he lifts one, pulls up a sticky page, and thighs
without torsos, breasts without faces,
in a wheel of burgundy, dusk, and rose,
how can he not have a body?
Here in the green a close world, this burlesque of flesh
called easy woman, sopping object, ridicule honey,
soft box for the thumb to plumb through,
how can he be rid of it?
He knows the names from his brother's textbook:
calyx, lepidoptera, labia, clitoris,
he thought they were beautiful.
As he spreads the pictures down on the ground, his eyes,
slow and tracing finger.
He's a boy, he will have this body.
What will he do now with the beautiful names?"