The Love of a Good Man (The Poem)
This poem appears in The Love of a Good Man and The Love of a Good Man: The Queer Epic Poem.
This first of the sixteen cantos of this epic queer poem of 652 lines (give or take)—that embodies an exuberant and unholy union between T. S. Eliot's "Prufrock" and J. F. Shade's "Pale Fire"—appears below.
And how should I begin?
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?
. . .
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. —T. S. Eliot
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
It is the writer’s grief. It is the wild
March wind.
. . .
Man’s life as commentary to abstruse
Unfinished poem. Note for further use.
—J. F. Shade
"Pale Fire"
It's always the same story. Whenever I get obsessed with ovoid obduction,
I forget that the night is a time for great, desperate crime
Duly performed under the hammered moon.
The fire bites me as I try to feed it.
Why would you tell me about my inverted apostrophes, you scoundrel?
Why would you laugh when your own mother had just died?
The swich licour disappears in Moloch's maw,
Faster than she could make appear her pack of Wilkinson’s,
Faster than you can mouth Bruderschaft. You begin here, with a Russian dedication,
Over the road, out, brambles like barbed wire, a single light on
As in a prison cell, as over Guernica, or anything.
And why should care I for the moon’s pale spot?
The skies today were teasing mindcock, gently pickling it.
There are young men on the promontory watching ships in the harbour.
I decide against dancing a merry jig.
I decide against showing my face to them.
Their pockets are full of lies, so they don’t look.
I look, and they are transfixed, as if here, in this harbour, they undress
With their hungry yen the beautiful, sooty flesh of the universe.
One has an atlas of sacred places under his arm.
When he is certain that his companions’ gaze is on the horizon fixed,
He moistens a finger, puts it in, curling nary a page.
The only timekeeping left to us, I think, is the lilting word,
As impatient crows imitate Bohr, peck at Heisenberg.
My shadow creeps with me along the fence. I tell it about my winter vacation,
How they take my entrails out at the end of the second act,
How I stuff handfuls of teeth in my mouth,
Just in time for the encore.
My shadow, it cares not for theatre. She lives by miracle
Of having looked in gutters for tales to tell.
You turn to me then, "I haven’t been counting. Is this our fifth rain?"
I nod, but I don’t know for sure. The sky, it falls apart in manageable pieces
Onto the madmen huddled by the flame. I wonder,
When did arrows stop passing through deer?
You talk about the healing properties of frost.
My heathen tongue is as delectable as native in your mouth, pink with fricatives.
It is a good evening.
It does not matter whether any of this actually happens.
We both know the unspoken rule that lives as writ. Quod sanguinat perit.
The fire fails to warm. Let’s go inside.
The entire poem is available in The Love of a Good Man from JLRB Press.