"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
Tim Mayo's first full-length poetry book, The Kingdom of Possibilities, was published this April by Mayapple Press. It was also a finalist for the May Swenson Award. Mayapple Press is a small press established in 1978 by poet and editor Judith Kerman. Editors say, "We specialize in contemporary literature, especially poetry and works that straddle conventional categories: Great Lakes, women, Caribbean, translations, science fiction poetry, recent immigrant experience, Judaica." Tim has kindly permitted me to reprint two poems from his collection below. His finalist poem from our 2007 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest can also be read here.
The Wild Boy of Aveyron
(Paris, 1801)
I named him Victor to vanquish the animal in him. I tried to teach him to name his own needs, to have his words rise up from the core of his body, ball up in his throat, then push out in well formed vowels quelling the inarticulate.
But all he could gargle out was the word lait as if somewhere between tongue and throat the muscles that made his words had lost their way.
Lait became his insistent call for love and the angry expression to all the words neither my little briberies of milk nor my punitions could ever make him say.
Later, I tired and returned to Paris, but sometimes, in the dark non sequitur of night, when dreams should take me away, Victor comes and shakes me. I watch him press his nose against the window, confused by its impenetrable glass,
and I see the moon’s milk-glow fracture down upon his face and the hills, caged between the mullions, huddling outside.
Then grinning with a feral joy, he pulls again at my sleeve saying his one word over and over, until he turns back, and tilting his head up, he opens his mouth wide and waits for the moon to pour in...and I fall asleep.
****
The Beautiful Woman
You stare at the jagged tic-tac-toe of her scars where once a downy peach fuzz grew, and you realize how beauty is an emotion from which desire splurges like a prodigal. How it often burgeons, a sudden flower from a dark and unexpected place where you believed nothing grew.
But here...now...the livid white knots of her skin seem to muscle into purple before your eyes all of that past pain which, to you, is only the discomfort of what you see and the embarrassment of being caught as you imagine the indignities she suffered for each mark.
So you glance up at her face hoping she hasn't noticed how the un-erasable remnants of her past have kept you transfixed. You look into those eyes, dreading the wise, sad look back, the dismissal of it all that will scar you, too, possibly for life.
