Song: Backwards Man
Year: 2013
Viewed: 68 - Published at: 3 years ago

Dennis O’Driscoll is in the National Gallery at the moment

                       looking at the Titians with another Irish poet, and this one

is Seamus Heaney, who seems destined to be not only

 

             the first Noble Laureate I’ve encountered but also, unless

                       Toni Morrison plops herself in my lap and ruffles my hair

and tells me how adorable I am, the last, and he, too, is as sweet

 

             as he can be—“full of sermons-on-the-mount,” as Melville

                       said of Shakespeare, “and gentle, aye, almost as Jesus”—

and in this fashion do the three of us, the two genial
 

             and self-assured Irish poets and the American one

                       begin to talk not of poetry or the weather but the circuses

they’d seen as boys, with Dennis saying that often the person

 

             who tore tickets bore more than a passing resemblance

                       to the sword swallower, just as the lady on the tight wire

seemed very like the one who sold candy floss during

 

             the interval, but when I ask them if their Irish circuses

                      featured side shows of the kind I saw in the American South,

they say, “No, no,” and when I say, “No Bearded Lady, then,

 
             no Camel Girl, Human Unicorn, Three-Legged Boy?” they say,

                       “No, no, David, nothing like that,” which should be enough

of a signal to me to move on to Renaissance portraiture

 

             or the fragile truce in Ireland or any of the hundred subjects

                       I could discuss with these kindly and learned gentlemen,

though my nervousness begins to play the part of the bullying

 

             schoolmaster to the reluctant schoolboy that is my stupidity

                       yet who knows enough to stay in the wings and not butcher

the tune or the lines it hasn’t mastered, but no, no, the pedagogue

 

             will have his way, and so I begin to babble about the clowns,
                       the elephants who were so sad and so incontinent,

the marvelous food—the kettle corn, elephant ears, funnel cakes, fried dill

 

             pickles, and, best of all, the corn dog, than which there is no

                       delicacy more sublime—though mainly I’m banging on

about Backwards Man, the freak who frightened

 

             me most, because he wore a ratty bathrobe and stood

                       in profile and began to speak in an awful voice

as he turned in a half circle from the ankles up, finally

 

             facing in the opposite direction, even though his toes

                       still pointed forward. And when you’re a kid, when

everybody’s first question to you is, “What’re ya

 

             going to be when ya grow up, young fella!” you can’t

                       help but wonder, What if I grow up to be Backwards

Man and spend my days contorting myself before

 

             gaggles of horrified schoolchildren, standing there

                       with their stomachs sticking out and their buck teeth

and looking at you as though you’re some kind

 

             of monster, which you are, though the worst thing

                       about you is that horrible voice, that drone of despair

into which all happiness vanishes, all light, joy,

 

             beauty. And who will love the Backwards

                       Man that is you? Can you imagine having sex

if you’re backwards? Not that a certain contrapposto

 

             isn’t desirable: why, just upstairs in this same

                       gallery is one of the most erotic paintings in the world,

Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid,

 

             in which little-boy Cupid is crouched slightly behind

                       yet twisting back toward the naked goddess whose

saucy nipple peeps between his splayed fingers,

 

             and she seems as though she’s on the verge of slipping

                       her tongue into his mouth, and you can’t tell whether

he’s turning toward her with lust or away from her

 

             in repugnance, because it’s his mother, for Christ’s

                       sake, although, for all that, this is the kissiest art work

any artist has ever produced, kissier by far than any

 

             statue by Canova or Rodin, indeed, so kissy

                       that it makes me think of the poem by Catullus

in which he says, “Give me a thousand kisses,

 

             then a hundred, / Then another thousand,

                       then a second hundred, / Then, constantly, another

thousand, then a hundred, / Then, when we will have

 

             done that many thousands of times, / We will confuse

                       the count, so that we ourselves

don’t know.” Seamus Heaney says there are three kinds

 

             of poetry: civic, public, and political, and of these,

                       I think I must be writing the first kind

and therefore am a civic poet, if not the kind that, say, Auden is,

 

             going on about how people and cultures develop and interact

                       with each other as well as an uncaring

natural world, but another kind altogether. I’m the poet of circuses

 

             but also art galleries and snacks. Really, though, I’d like to be

                       the poet of kindness and learning. Oh,

and kisses! And encounters, of course—chance encounters.

( David Kirby (Poet) )
www.ChordsAZ.com

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