Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Someone Naked and Adorable

D AV I D K I R B Y Someone Naked and Adorable When I see the sign that says “Nude Beach,” I scuttle right over, though when I get there, all I see is three guys who look like me, two in baggy K-Mart-type bathing suits and one in a “banana hammock” of the type favored by speed racers and the lesser European nobility, and as they wait for the naked people to appear, all three scowl at the sand, the water, the very heavens themselves, the clouds as raw as the marble from which Bernini carved the Apollo and Daphne whose bodies rang like bells when the restorers touched them, like the bells of Santa Croce that summer that woke me and Barbara every morning in Florence, which we called, not “Florence,” but “Guangdong Province,” because Hong Kong was in the news a lot in those days, and Hong Kong is near Guangdong Province, and the bells would go guang! dong! as though a drunken priest were swinging from the bellrope. Now surely that is “the music of the spheres” (Sir Thomas Browne) as opposed to “the still, sad music of humanity” (Wordsworth), which is just some guy playing a violin in the corner. Or four guys: a string quartet, and not a good one, either, 304 ❚ The 2000s one that meant well but hadn’t practiced very much, or maybe one that hadn’t even meant well, that just wanted to get paid, maybe meet a scullery maid or two, perhaps a nymphomaniacal marchioness. . . . What the hell do people want, anyway? Why does Barbara adore the cameo I gave her that depicts Leda and the swan, an episode in interspecies relationships that just gives me the creeps? There must be something there about being, not dominated, but overcome— about allowing oneself to be mastered by a force greater than oneself or just another person who has taken on temporary godlike powers, for life has a sting in its tail, like a chimera, and you can no more draw that sting yourself than you can tickle yourself, whereas another person can do both. Why, in the “cabinet of secrets” of the Archeological Museum in Naples, I saw a bell in the shape of a gladiator at war not with another warrior but with his own Schwanz! It had rolled up on its back, if a penis can be said to have a back, and was clawing and snapping at its master with the nails and teeth of a lion! And in turn he, the gladiator, was slashing back with a broadsword in one hand and some kind of lion slapper or Schwanz slapper in the other! Slap, slap, slice, slap! That would sting, wouldn’t it? And it’s a bell, remember, The 2000s ❚ 305 so the whole was meant to be struck and struck hard, be it by angry bachelor or vengeful wife! Dong! And given the choice of which part of the bell to strike, who wouldn’t strike the pecker-penis, the ravening lion of unrequited desire? As if to say, you’re the one who’s causing all the problems, you’re the one body part who’s making trouble for all the others! No, no, we want something else altogether, for, as wise old Mr. Emerson says in A Room With a View, Love is not the body but is of the body, the one we are waiting for there on the beach, rooted in the sand like shore birds, our every atom tingling with desire. 306 ❚ The 2000s ...