Beautiful Dreamer

From The Art of Daring

I have thought of writing as a form of—or perhaps the record of—a resistance to difficult realities that we, as writers, nevertheless, as if unavoidably, make it our quest to look at all the more closely, even as we again resist them. I’ve also considered writing as both the result of and the enactment of a restlessness of imagination, a desire to abandon our selves to what we suspect we should resist, even as we know that to resist entirely would likely lead to a form of death-in-life, which is somehow worse than death itself—isn’t it?

Years ago, I saw something that, by now, I believe I neither should nor shouldn’t have seen: a young man leaned completely naked against a half-fallen tree in a forest clearing, while two older men variously had sex with him, doing the things men do with one another, but roughly, with the roughness especially of indifference coupled incongruously with desire—for desire is many things, but nothing like indifference. It was clear that all three of the players were there by agreement. Eventually, it was finished. The two older men left. The young man, smiling, looked up and straight out toward me. He’d known I was there, all along. He closed his eyes, then. He slept. And I watched him sleep.

That’s one version. And here is another:

Beautiful Dreamer

And when the punishment becomes, itself, a pleasure?When there’s no night that goes unpunished? The largerveins show like map-work, as in Here winds a river,here a road in summer, the heat staggering up from itthe way, always, at triumph’s outermost, less chromaticedges, some sorrow staggers. Parts where the mud,though the rains are history now, refuses still toheal over. Parts    untranslatable. Parts where, for wholestretches, vegetation sort of strangling sort of make-shiftsheltering the forest floor. To the face, at the mouth especially, that mix of skepticism, joy, and panic reminiscentof slaves set free too suddenly. Too soon.—Which way’sthe right way? New hunger by new hunger? Spittingon weakness? Raising a fist to it? The falling mouth fallsfarther. Opens. It says: I was the Blue King. I led the dance.

“Which way’s the right way? New hunger by new hunger?” The catalyst for the poem was sexual, and in a sexual context these questions are especially troubling. “New hunger by new hunger” is one way of conducting a sexual life; whether or not it’s the “right” way, whatever that might be, is debatable, but it’s certainly true that to move from one sexual hunger to the next one can lead to trouble—though trouble is not automatically a given, just a possibility; to have emerged unscathed from risking that possibility is, for some, a very real part of sexual pleasure.

Poetry.

Sex.

There’s a kind of sex that is less about power than about the unpredictability—and the flexibility—with which that power gets divided between and among the parties involved. Initially, in the scene I mentioned earlier, the young man had seemed the embodiment of weakness, the passive instrument of the two older men. But I eventually saw something like triumph in the young man’s smile, and an absolute sense of control throughout his body, even as he allowed others to control it. It was as if he were instructing them exactly how and when to control it. The two older men, then, as weakness. And the young man as—what? pliant master?

How about: poet mastering, for now at least, his demons? That may seem a bit of a stretch, but it is also true that, though the poem arose from a sexual scenario, I had somewhere in mind that the questions—”Which way’s the right way? New hunger by new hunger?”—might be applied to writing: without the constant abandoning of one hunger for a new one, the desire to keep moving into discovery, how can a writer ever grow, either by deepening or by...