sw00337v-10.poem8

Venturings



 [ Prenote:  I do not hide the fact my sensibility is Gay-oriented,
                but my physically-active Gay days were short-lived.
                My first encounter occurred on my 32nd birthday.  It
                was not planned, but I did// allow it to be.  Less than
                five years later/ my last such encounter occurred.  I 
                do not know the exact date, but a syphilis scare was
                the reason.  I turned 32 in January of 1973.  The 
                poem below was written in 1985. ]  


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 A Look In


     1

Because I'm a writer,
I am marginal.

Were I not marginal
and not a writer,

human life
would be less full.

So I confess,
and speak for you.

So I rejoice,
and speak for you.

Out of my oddness,
an ordinate balance.

Do not the maimed
often heal us?


     2

A 44th year absorbs my body;
a 30th year words arouse me;
a 20th year a woman shades me: well, and ill;
a 14th year admitting keeps my heart embracing
chests of men;
a 40th year Catholicism spikes my spirit;
one more year, over & over torn apart
by the horses of my intransigent cares,
I disrupt me.

And yet my left eye
giggles at my
right eye.

Across the Gulf of Mexico,
from the Yucatan to Louisiana,
ruby-throated hummingbirds
buoy dreams;
still, just the other afternoon
I watched a dead tupelo leaf
held by a yard-long filament to
the leaf-end of a bur oak twig
turn, spin, wind & unwind in the mischievous air.


     3

The winds are every shape and color,
stopped as they are by every shape more dense than they are
so that even when they most rave, and blast and bear
in fearsome and contorted howling frail humans
and sundry of their artifacts and facts of nature
not themselves, they are molded by/ what they rive
and pass in their transparencies (however blurred)
the hues of white and (into black) all the grand diminishments
of white.

I am the winds, countering the obstacles,
sometimes as a feather might, sometimes as wrecking balls,
unsure of my approaching moods orhow the winds
others are will change my force and clarity, and temperature,
or how the non-wind obstacles/ will kink my moves.


     4

Eclectic,
stubborn,
yet likely to change,
because I'd imagine
the breadth and depth
of all that is human,
light words
as well as dark
(and all the colors
and intensities)
flash from me.
I do, however,
admit I whiff undertones
of teasing, irony, sarcasm
which othen enough--
perhaps mistakenly and so unfortunately--
are aimed at the wrong "object";
and which perhaps,
too much at times,
obtrude.
Still, it sometimes seems the only way
I can cut the sweetness of the sentimental
and the sourness of the didactic in me;
for--however momently the requisite fruit
of the green dreams of a fertile heart--
I do often mean
to be sentimental
and I do often mean
to be didactic,
though I know
how unpalatable
they are to many.


     5

Let them mingle: the mind's eye & the termagant.
Let the corkscrew the heart is
open the bottles our spirits wait in.

For thirty years I have typed & scribbled,
erased. erased. trying somehow to put together
my scattered life trying to root the universe.





Brian A. J. Salchert