USA

DanielYHarris@msn.com

The Artist Model

     Draw your pleasure—paint your pleasure—
               express your pleasure…  
              -Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) 

You walk out of Bonnard’s mango-colored light,
walk out of something to name
would make it vanish, pure, undiluted, bare
face and legs and breasts
defying the empty space
                                     and smile—your lower
lip pink to the tilt
of a soft chin and neck.
  
The world is unreal and you’re in it like a cameo,
stripped of line, edge, unassisted by shade,
as if your boudoir-skin were caressed  
by your pose and shapes dissolve
and outlines swoon.  
  
I have no defense and reach for you with my eyes,
my hands, then my sex lit like a painted
fetish, enters and we are the ones
in Le Jardin Sauvage, no longer wild,  
gone together, protean and slippery
before the sun goes down  
and it gets cold.  

Amour Fou  

        Love is sublime or it is nothing. 
            -Honore de Balzac

When I grunt and groan and quiver under a deluge
of touch and lose myself to a barer self,
skinned to the savage peak of pleasure,
it is you that I think of.
                                   You,
the rarefied  
and sensuous one, the suzerain of balance
with style, fragrant and supple
though not florid, even for Venus  
in Saturn, fated Roman names—how they collided
the day we met. I am your dandy and you are my muse
left to augur mood, how, in time, routine
may dull the bright sounds of the heart
and the void may nag its blank to act. Let it act!
It will outlive us, began before us, conceits
and all, and waits in us to draw our final breath.  
  
No matter. The day is not flat  
and we are not in decline from grace,
tilting down to age in jowl and wrinkle.  
How will it turn out? I intimate for your ears
and query doubt. My eyes are claws. Stay with me
to see and grab the outcome and linger  
to prowl a sense of normal things.
For in this normal is our self-reliance,
what remains when colors murmur gray
and a faint light in fog fades, yet is strong
enough to keep us awake
in the refuge of our arms.

Quotidian 

               The malady of the quotidian….    
                              -Wallace Stevens

There is a residue of light and shade
to be esteemed, I suppose, in beauty poems,
in spite of the hubris to publish
them for market share—
  
and yet, amid protest from purists,
are not these words (even the clever ones
that recede to origins of first love)
market share themselves?
  
That is if one could break the silence,
avert denial, quixotic in the face  
of dread—to compose our own retorts
like romantics who have at least one
  
reader: our lover, our metalepsis  
of light and shade. But silence is a sore
healer affected in the wrong places  
to punish the myth we give to others
  
who come late to sentiment and stop
to listen. Be alone together then  
in the residue of light and shade—never  
mind the malady of the quotidian
  
rising in its extreme purples in bleak ages  
of ice and wind and neater mould to confute  
that our love is original to us, each time,
routine-regular and good.  

Awake

Eyelids of a clock—fold and click because they blink
a second hand to bend and tick and hold the next hour
in check to slow the flow time takes to spoil.  
  
I am keeping you awake, keeping you moving
through the Victorian cloister of your rooms, keeping
you awake idling through the white noise of television,
  
awake with the fuzzy subject of love, penetrating pours
and calling on the phone, to home your like in me. Immoderate
depth of desire to wrap myself around you, takes an hour
  
more than the hour freely given, pushed to the limit
and keeping you awake in the solid source of motion spent
on joy and selfish to the core. Forgive me! There is care
  
behind these layers of hubris, these volumetrics of cling:
the care that you might disappear, or will not stay to rapture
routine, to gloat over idols of nothing, kissing neck and hands
  
when another hour passes, another hour slated for the slow
hurry of dawn, that heft of awe that it happened again.  
I submit to the bold scold of keeping you awake
  
and promise to drift in the low hum of a close distance.
Comb that soft fretwork of hair, braid it, and put it up.
Take your beauty to the vapory ridge of rest and sleep!

The Enthusiast

            The love which devours life itself…  
                           -Algernon Charles Swinburne

  
Call him the heart cudgel—the enthusiast
who obliterates, devours, among the blessed
who thwart the hypnotics
of drone.  
               Call
him the core of this love then, if by core intent  
is not mere rote—a handful of sky
picks the whitest star,
brighter than beam or ray.   
                                        To read his heart,
his probity and second thought—contour evades limit,
vast, opaque at the dreadful
moment of truth, without loss or blur,
he possesses and is possessed by her.
  
Then hail the inviolate her,
the infernal cute that sustains in silver and white
ornaments of holiday—he will love
her at mid-life and sing that his is a love  
that devours life itself.  

© All Copyright, Daniel Y. Harris.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.