—1st–2nd Century CE,
                                Archeological Museum of Corinth, Greece

A partial view is best. We fill in the rest.
I love most the lake through a fringe of maple. 
It seems eternal. 

Borrowed scenery makes the line of beauty certain.
The volcano framed within a garden, the pagoda 
mirrored in water, the moon gate holding a texture
of stone and sophora.

Moonlight, too, has its charm.
Your body in chiaroscuro, at ease,
free from harm. The sheet that hides the deceased
reveals the living in the billowed sail
of your breath, taking and giving, unceasing.

What quickens is eyesight over bare feet, bare 
shin that thickens to muscled thigh and torso 
in half-light, bare but for a half-draping of tunic
over one pectoral, one nipple,
leaving one nipple, one pectoral bare.

Desire made eternal because framed in stone, 
as bone frames a body’s desire,
precious because living, not sempiternal,
as stone, with time, fails to be eternal.

Lost to time? Both hands, the head—
and yet, part to whole, this quintessence 
of him after twenty centuries
would be the lost essence of you, 
head and hand, in the twenty-first.

The hunter’s task is hunting game, 
but his relief, shaped from stone
not flesh, aches to hunt without relief, 
constant in the desire of stone 
to remain unmoved, eternally 
unrelieved.

We’re alive and done hunting, love,
and you, in relief not of stone 
but of self-shaped flesh, 
stay constant in aching desire, 
whose task is mine to relieve, 
gamely, for the asking.

//

Author’s Commentary:

Placed next to a squat, white dehumidifier and several electrical conduits at the Archeological Museum of Corinth in Greece, the unsung piece that I found captivating was a fragment of a relief from the gateway to the local Roman agora, the Propylaea. The wall label read “Relief of a Hunter with his dog, 1^st or 2^nd century A.D.,” although the small, headless dog soon disappeared from the drafts of my poem. About life-sized, the hunter, also headless, wore the Greek tunic, the chlamys, that draped over his genitals and part of his torso but left the right side of his muscular body visible. 

The poem meditates on the aesthetics of the fragment in art and life, especially a partial or occluded vision extended through artistic or imaginative means. I consider the Chinese and Japanese notion of “borrowed scenery” (借景), in which distant landscape features, like mountains or bodies of water, complete the view from within a garden, as well as the sensual chiaroscuro of everyday life, like moonlight on the shadowy body of a lover. When I gaze at the relief of the hunter, its sublimity, which Longinus (1^st century CE) defined, in part, as “vehement and inspired passion” and “elevation,” arises from the dignified eros of the half-naked body, the inherent pathos of its time-worn fragmentation, and the extension of my own imagination into its missing spaces. 

To fall in love with a fragmented relief of a man may be a one-way enlargement of artistic imagination, but to be in love with an actual man is to know enacted desire in two directions, the self and the “self-shaped flesh” of the beloved, in a commingling of desire and imagination. Many of the pieces that are coalescing into my third book—after Divine Fire and The Eclipses—are love poems that seek, among other things, to render the ways in which love shapes the appearance of the world.

If the poem arose from the thought that a headless statue of a man could be gorgeous, whereas a headless man in real life would be something else entirely, the form of the poem ended up dictating its content. Internal rhymes, slant rhymes, and repetitions of sounds guided the making of the poem. As each echo created its own minute frisson in the act of writing, so sound itself shifted the gruesome inspiration into a meditation on artistic beauty and living desire.