My False Faith
My first doubt came with my first real sin
though I longed for a simple faith, I longed
to be oblivious as a boy playing
ball in a sunlit field.
Stepping from bright sunlight into the dark
dank church I could not see, I could only
smell wet plaster and the pungent cedar
timbers. I knelt at the feet
of the statue of the Madonna, her robe
dipped in the molten blue of the serene
sky I left behind to plead for forgiveness,
to pray to change, to pray
to be like other men – upstanding – not
to hide watching, different and desiring.
After a hundred Hail Mary’s I could
hear her breathing. She seemed
to sway, her arms outstretched, not to embrace,
but for balance, her first toddling steps were
to be made for me. Still she came no closer;
painted pink, her lips did
not part, did not speak and I felt bereft,
left with a keen nostalgia for the Divine
that would never again be mine. There were
sins I dare not divulge
to this day. I prayed for N. dying in
his narrow bed, brow burning with fever,
a glistening moustache of sweat where no hair
had yet to darken his philtrum.
His pending death had to be a punishment
from above. I prayed that it be mine, not
his. I promised not to touch him again
if Heaven would spare him!
I wrote these confessions, false promises
in Greek in the margins of my notebook
so that no one could read them. I offered
my life instead, but my mother
still grieved for Guido and I was her last,
her only son while N’s mother had four
other boys. And so went my petty, my
puerile bargaining with the Virgin.
The next day with N. fully recovered
from the flu, the sniffle fear had inflated
into pneumonia I could not escape
my plague, nor resist the dark
rose of his budding body, so I just
kept breaking anew my vows not to touch
the boy sacrificing his innocence
to my lewd caresses.
Red Rags Where My Heart Used To Be
Winter seemed to return the day we left
the home we had known for two years for Valuta.
The sky was blanched, the countryside, muddy
and bare. In ploughed fields, water
brimmed, furrows forming long canals. Under
dark, bloated clouds lay an expanse of ruin.
The smell of smoldering coal, the smell of charred
bodies stoked our fears.
Our wagon had to go around huge mounds
of debris blocking the roads. In this wreckage
of land, in this land of wreckage there was
no one. The groaning wheels echoed
from deep craters left by the bombs as if
the sound of pain were the only sign of life.
In the rubble that had once been homes, here
and there from twisted beams and
crumbled walls hung red flags, really just rags,
sagging with rain, warning against sleeping
bombs. Three marked our house, less fit to live in
without G. than without walls.
We had worked all day loading the wagon
with our belongings. N. helping. Impressed
by our middle class things, a silk pillow,
a rare vase, he seemed to enjoy
the work so I enjoyed it too. Now he
was walking beside me behind the cart,
his shirt was drenched with rain and sweat, his coarse
trousers were mud-splattered, his dark
curls matted, and this made him all the more
desirable to me. G. was gone. Even
though I had N. nearby, constant, caring,
hanging on my every word,
the boy was not truly mine. In my reckless,
unruly –– in my O so stubborn heart,
without the sex the world calls a vice, no
other love could suffice.
