storeeze

Amidst old smoke and stale perfume of a broken night, a seraphic voice posed a question in the dark— to tremble to hear a moan to sink into unguent warmth in a sacred retreat. In the green room, yellow gloves lay on a coffee table. She lit a cigarette and gazed at the fine rain. I took her scent and felt her breath. Her nostrils flared, an arabesque veil of smoke drifted into cloudy gray-green eyes. A nicotine-stained finger crossed my lips. “Have we spoken?” A hot blush came to my cheek. “Your blood is warm.” “I read Bishop Sheen.” She forced a laugh and blew a jet from under dark lashes. “I adore Coblenz. Kiss me.” She tasted of tobacco and stale mint. I slid fingers to her nipples. Her bosom swelled, a tremor crossed her face. “The wench is dead—would you like a trip to Greece?” (That’s where I want to go.) White-velvet breasts C-section painted nails on a cold-hard floor. I woke to a curving figure in a wide-brimmed hat, black-spike heels, cigarette and eye-liner staring in a mirro

Pythia arose from The Education of a Young Gentleman , a nonfiction short story which tells of the late-night encounter between a 19-year-old boy and a 29-year-old married woman in a highly charged sexual atmosphere. She is fixed and unattainable at the conclusion of the poem, like the characters on Keats Grecian urn. My style tends to be sardonic. My words are on the definite side, they don't caress each other. My first sense of literature was from the 19 th century writers. My introduction into culture and politics was high school Latin.  Pythia owes much to Catullus and Lesbia,  Thackeray and Vanity Fair, Eliot and Prufrock.  Why poetry? A poem is an attempt to take the human, the historical, and the finite to the realm of the universal and infinite, which, on the face of it, is impossible using the materials of this world. Yet I try to distill feeling, emotion, what it is to be alive, and moments in life, in order to create an alternative world. I’m not above using ficti

Pythia owes a debt to the poets Catullus and T.S. Eliot. It brings myth to modern life, traces of the past lying beneath the surface of the present. The poem is bookish and raw. It reaches across history and it has personal concerns. It casts antiquity in today’s imagery. The poem is a distillation of a short story by the author, The Education of a Young Gentleman . In the first stanza, a woman extends an invitation during a night of debauchment. She appears in the guise of a muse in the second stanza and seduces the boy with a tantalizing image of mature erotic beauty. She gets the tipping she desires in the fifth stanza and leaves him disillusioned in the last.  The boy achieves momentary harmony with the muse, has a sexual awakening, gains a measure of self-discovery, and turns it into a personal mythology.  a.  Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, sits in a cauldron on a tripod, making her prophecies in an ecstatic trance state, like shamans, and her unintelligible uttering. The tripod