Donald Platt

XVIII. Figure and Pool
—From Male Venus Rising

No wonder then that Sargent
reclaimed his picture after the scandal and repainted Madame X’s
                        fallen shoulder strap,

put it back in its “proper” position, over her shoulder blade, and never
                        exhibited anywhere
his album of nude male figure studies. I too hesitate to say

                        my love for men out loud,
that new desire I’ve only just discovered late in middle age
                        though it’s always been

an underground river that ran beneath my adolescence. It percolated
                        through sandy soil
into hidden springs, wells, still pools I saw myself in

                        when I leaned close.
In my high school’s cream-tiled shower room, I would imagine
                        naked women

to make my small prick start to swell, lengthen, and become as big
                        as those of my schoolmates, snapping
wet towels at each other. I watched them while they soaped chests, necks,

                        shoulders, arms, backs,
stomachs, buttocks, cocks. Rinsing off, they let the hot stream splurt
                        over their faces, across

torsos and thighs. Before toweling dry, they slapped the water
                        from their bodies.
Once the wrestling coach chose me as his partner to demonstrate

                        a quick escape.
He got down on hands and knees, had me grip him around the waist.
                        The room was humid

from sweating flesh. Steam hissed from rusted radiators. I felt
                        each inhalation of breath
expand his taut stomach beneath the damp gray T-shirt.

                        “Hold me harder,” he roared.
“Don’t hold me as if I were your girlfriend.” The other wrestlers
                        snickered. I blushed

and clamped down. “That’s better,” he said. The boy I wanted to hold,
                        though I couldn’t have said it then,
was my rival, Charlie Langtree, who was already taking calculus

                        and knew how to translate
Catullus. We were each assigned a poem to write out. “Just now
                        I surprised a darling boy

screwing my girlfriend, and I—may it please Venus—yoked myself
                        to them, ploughed him
with my hard cock.” I went scarlet. I thought of how I’d fallen

                        for that schoolboy joke—“Bet you can’t
bend over, look between your legs, and spell ‘run’ ten times as fast as you can.”
                        “Are you in? Are you in?”

I’d stammered out before I got it and stopped. When the boys dared Charlie,
                        he merely laughed,
“Don’t be so incurably vulgar!” He usually wore khaki pants, a wool

                        blazer that matched his rusty
auburn hair, which curled, I thought, like marble acanthus leaves
                        on Corinthian columns.

His wide blue eyes were more beautiful than any girl’s. He had
                        bruised circles under them
from studying all night. He skipped his senior year to enter

                        Harvard, was first in our class
while I was always second. They called us “dorks” and “grinds.” Too proud
                        and shy to talk to him,

I hated and adored him. In 1917, one year before
                        Nicola left Sargent,
they visited Villa Vizcaya, the Miami estate of millionaire

                        Charles Deering. Sargent painted
watercolors of black workers swimming nude and lolling in the shallows.
                        The water laps

their hurdler’s thighs. They lean back in the shade of banyon trees.
                        One man straddles a smooth
driftwood log and stares in disbelief at the fully dressed

                        artist as if to say,
“Get rid of that ridiculous hat and shirt. Strip naked with us,
                        let the sun darken

your white skin.” In another watercolor, a black man stretches
                        full-length on his stomach
and gazes into a tidal pool that gives him back himself,

                        the pebbled bottom, the sun
behind purple clouds. Light and shadow dapple his bare back,
                        buttocks, and legs spread wide

into a wishbone’s Y. Palms flat on hot sand, biceps flexed,
                        this black Narcissus leans
down to kiss the self that trembles the tidal pool’s still surface.

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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.