16

That night I read Michael’s poems.

I sat, under the lamp, in the secure and warm hotel, turning the pages carefully. I didn’t want to be hasty. When I had finished the thin book, I reread the poems carefully. They, at least, deserved that, and I had begun my reading hoping they would give me some clue to the boy himself. They didn’t, really. They weren’t confessional poems; they were poems in defiance of, and in celebration to, certain objects. All the objects had a tendency to become phallic.

The voice in the poems, even with my limited knowledge of contemporary poetry (like others I read it less than I respected it), seemed to me to be derivative: it was the sexual vocabulary, I supposed, that he claimed as his own. The anthologists, it became apparent, were going to have trouble with Michael. I sat there, a man with a thin collection of pages in his hand, thinking about the poems. I didn’t like them. But as I thought about them a curious thing began to happen. In the first place, I found that I hesitated in my choice of the exact descriptive word to apply to them: were they obscene? But even as I attempted to apply that word to them, I found that I was already in my mind qualifying that to mean something less than censorable. Very well then, if not obscene, how about “erotic”? Was “erotic” just, since what I wanted was the just, the fair word? Well, no: not erotic. They used to (in more innocent times) say that about the Indian Love Lyrics, didn’t they? Erotic was those special limp bindings and those black-and-white line drawings of emaciated Englishwomen holding lilies at the edge of solitary garden pools. You couldn’t say erotic. All right then, how would “salacious” grab you, I said to myself, a little desperate now and still wishing to find that elusive category to which the poems could attach themselves. Again no, I was forced to admit, because you could see there was something abrasive about the sex. I looked again at the poems.

The sex he celebrated took place in a world not quite my world: it seemed more destructive, more finally poisoned, tiled like a great urinal, aimed at one like a gun, a world like a Santa Fe boxcar packed with doomed steers, a world that made the shattering noise of a motorcycle on a banked speedway, skidding, caught in an oil-slick, and the poems suffocated, lashed out, howled, were battered by that world. I could see then that he meant the sex to be the one elementary good in that uncontrollable world. But it did not succeed in presenting itself as the thing he intended it to be. These penetrations he wrote about, this great tangle of legs, took place like bank hold-ups. The place was being broken into. All the burglar alarms were ringing. Squad cars were on their way. He didn’t mean the sex to be what it seemed to be to me. He meant it to be an affirmation. To be the poetry of some cosmic orgasm. To be the veritable thrust of life. He meant it to be mythology.