Robert Klein Engler
.TALK TO ME.
Maybe it was just a coincidence. I happen to look
up and out the train window to see an 18 wheeler
speeding as fast as we speed down the Kennedy
Expressway. A man in his truck. Purple and Chrome.
Lights flashing off lugnuts. Taking his rig home.
It is an argument like a vine, that twists and sprouts
around a dead tree, through the iron fence, about
the water can. Love goes where it will. Mostly, it
goes to the light which is another word for beauty.
Praxiteles drew light from marble. What’s my duty?
There is a hand that makes light shine from flesh.
Imagine it here at this time in the late Empire. What
must it be to die in the arms of truth? To see down
the highway to an opening that promises more
than that opaque vision of Petronius, who pours
a warm bath and then watches as his blood flows
from his slit wrists. Ah, the high fliers and princes
of power, consider the spinster who spends her
summer growing a rose. She kept herself from sin
and didn’t bother him and his wife ever again.
The Cardinal of Milwaukee had a love like hers.
It cost him 450 thousand dollars and a “Dear Paul”
letter. This, after he pulled down the old crucifix.
The north wind rattles a flag pole in the park.
The watch hand skips ahead from mark to mark,
skips like the meter of a sonnet. There may be
a deep love in our words, too, that are pulled
from the gush of darkness behind a declaration.
The fullness of time draws up the tulips, hones
the lies, wrinkles flesh, cracks our dry bones.
The question now is not ‘What is truth?’ but
‘How to live by truth?’ Power has all it needs,
while the monk buys off silence with silence.
Touch me here or there. Lovers pass in a blur.
Desire is the illness, confession a talking cure.
A Red Tail Hawk glides like a black, paper cut-
out against the blue sky. Just seeing it makes me
stop. This is an ominous beauty. This is why
angels say “Fear not!” when they appear to men.
Then, something small scurries past once again.
Let him moonwalk across the stage and then
sleep tonight with two boys in his wide bed
like Nero, and touch them with his white hand,
the glove of ice, the cotton white hand of death.
He proffers a kiss, and then takes a deep breath.
I’d like to talk with a man who was a beautiful
youth and loved to completeness. Just to hear
how when his hair turned white what he makes
of an 85 year old Brazilian bishop shooting cloy
videos in bed with a naked, 19 year old alter boy.
I’d ask him what he makes of it all. Is the Lord’s
plan his plan. When you come into the world
of flesh expect to get cut. Bells clang. Crossing
gates lower their arms. Commuters wait up front.
Do hawks nest? I only see him when he hunts.
Author Bio
Robert Klein Engler lives in Oak Park and Des Plaines, Illinois and sometimes New Orleans. Many of Robert’s poems and stories are set in the Crescent City. His long poem, The Accomplishment of Metaphor and the Necessity of Suffering, set partially in New Orleans, is published by Headwaters Press, Medusa, New York, 2004. He has received an Illinois Arts Council award for his “Three Poems for Kabbalah.” Some of his books are available at Lulu.com. Visit him on the web at RobertKleinEngler.com.
