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