Monday, July 24, 2017

Enemy, A Memory Poem, Spring/Summer 1974

Theseus and the Minotaur.  from Pompeii, Museum of Italy, Naples

Kyle

We gauge ourselves by ideals
Beholding our noble nature as a guide
For us and all humankind

Then came you

Then the lawful turned lawless
passion resorts to pain
Love to lust
no regard to reason, to wisdom
To evil or to good
just the desire for the taste of blood

Such were you, a specter
I do not recall how or when we met
At the 7’s maybe, the Gardens, Stone Soup
But the attraction was there

Magnetic, hypnotic
I don’t think we ever spoke
I know not the sound of your voice
Yet, I’d know you
In a crowd, I’d know
50 years later

It was primal, like sex
But it was not
We both wanted to do
Harm
Instinctive opposite
You the dark, eyes and hair
I, blonde, blue eyed, fair
Not good  not bad
It
caused us to chase each other
In the black midnight
Down the alleys of Beacon Hill
And there between Brimmer & Charles
Below the towering Advent steeple
silent cop car, spotlight
enclosed in our lethal
just as we’d caught each other
the police slammed us against their car
i can still feel their sexual frisk
one
Grilled us with questions, accusations
yet
Commanded, sternly, kindly, strangely
to go
Go
One south, one north
And not, not to meet again
I walked in the lone blacken streets
not one mortal soul about
Far far into the quiet night
Circling beyond Mass General
To return to my Russell Street home

Months later, in the heat of summer
we did meet again
In a distant seaside town
Our radar detecting blocks away
switched sides to avoid that
Journey
Eyes locked, vulpine
until we could see no more
the passion a pinhole in our eyes

                                                                         j.m. frase-white,  July 2017

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