It takes special people to make me write sexist. Which proves that
dropping a masquerade really is possible.
MAGICIAN, YOU
Your ankles behind your ears indeed entice,
more than the cut of your dress
more than the luminous liquefaction
that hints (or not) at things I'd think might come,
But first please move your Promis'd End someplace else,
and get your fabled gymnastic act out of my face.
Few men will tell you the truth. No matter.
Few men will tell anyone the truth
because to lie about desire is to prove oneself
either the Forbidden City's chief eunuch or
a testosteronic machine envied (only) by other men.
But truth: often what we want we find revolting
as much for the fact of desire as for its object.
So if your body weren't presumably normal
(allowing for lumps and normal cellulite in someone our age)
you'd instead remind me of Olga Korbut
or some other anorexic gymnastic kooz
who'd sleep with Ceascescu's son to position yourself
on something besides the balance beam.
It was Rilke who said every angel is terrifying.
He never met Tony Kushner, and besides,
they weren't each other's types,
but it's still a sort of truth and I'm still stuck with it.
I'm fighting back the image of Emma Thompson's panicked Angel
trying like mad to get her ankles from behind her ears
because she got them caught in those pain-in-the-ass wings.
And I'm losing.
KTW/10-1-08
--
Ken Wolman http://bestiaire.typepad.com http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
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"I have been watching you; you were there, unconcerned perhaps, but with a strange distraught air of someone forever expecting a great misfortune, in sunlight, in a beautiful garden."--Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelleas et Melisande
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