Donald Platt

XVI. Male Model Resting
—From Male Venus Rising

                        I am too old for him,
this poetry-slam circuit rider who shouts his gay free verse
                        through bars in Boston,

beautiful man whose red-blond hair falls coyly across his freckled face
                        until he tucks the strands
behind his ear and looks at me with blue-black eyes that blaze

                        like lightning strikes
on rainless nights over hayfields waiting to go up in flames.
                        I want love’s scorch-and-burn,

but he treats me like the father I could be, my forty-nine years
                        to his twenty-two.
We sip hot chocolate at a kitchen table within earshot

                        of his mother who introduced
us. He’s given me a chapbook of his poems. I am supposed
                        to be “encouraging.”

I’m jealous of his poems, of their pain, of how easy gay sex
                        can be, collision of flesh
on flesh, one-night-stand fender-benders or three-way, freeway wrecks

                        from which no one walks away
unscathed. I want a love that “totals” me, but sex at fifty is always
                        complex. I cannot live

my heterosexual years over. I cannot be Verlaine
                        to his Rimbaud. I am
only stodgy “page verse” to his heart-in-your-mouth slam poetry,

                        those blue quartz eyes
whose color is quarried from clear, cold, spring-fed lakes, deep aquifers
                        that keep love’s water table

full. I finish my hot chocolate, praise his good poems.
                        He will live the love
I cannot have. John Singer Sargent at my age sketched Nicola

                        in watercolors
resting on a bed. The walls are a wash of cool aquamarine.
                        Sunlight reflects off

torso and thighs so his body shines blindingly. He’s closed
                        his eyes, head laid back
on a white pillow, left hand behind his head so we admire

                        his pumped-up biceps.
His right arm gathers the folds of red silk sheets and holds
                        the slippery gleaming fabric

against his white ribcage as if it were an armful of twenty
                        long-stemmed rust-red roses
that Sargent has just given him for his birthday. In the background

                        the brown wooden stairs
up to the mezzanine parallel the diagonal of Nicola’s
                        torso. Our bodies are a stairway

we climb slowly, languorously from one floor to another.
                        Nicola has drawn
his left leg toward him. His knee makes an upside-down V. A small

                        triangle of scarlet silk sheet
hides his genitals. The folds of drapery serve only to disclose
                        the bulge of his half-erect

penis. I remember waking early in a college dormitory.
                        My roommate slept naked.
It was hot. In his restless sleep he’d thrown the covers off.

                        First hesitant sunlight
fell across his thighs and showed me how his hard-on rose
                        from red-gold ringlets

of pubic hair. His cock was longer and thicker than mine.
                        Uncircumcised, a swollen
purple-red and orange-red, the shank’s chafed skin was mapped

                        with big, blue, knotted veins
and the finer purple ones. I stared. I wanted to touch it. Two rocks
                        struck sparks within my loins.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Donald Platt’s seventh book of poetry, One Illuminated Letter of Being, was published by Red Mountain Press in 2020. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Nation, Poetry, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Tin House, Southern Review and Paris Review as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000, 2006 and 2015. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1996 and 2011) and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in Purdue University’s MFA Program.