The old temple, the eastern hills, the forest, almost no visitors, thatched gate, raked sand blurred by rain, mossy stones, carved footprints of the Buddha: all that familiar for anybody who knew that place. But here’s a new thing: a pointed leaf rested on the lip of a copper basin, held by a pebble, water trickling over like a thread. Who made that? How long would it last? I want to say something about Art, but now I’m remembering a guy who drank a slender stream from my dick in the alley behind the Bijou Cinema Triple-X. Married, kids, investment banker, for years came to me in Brooklyn, a long trip from the east side, until I asked to meet in a diner, told him I’d read a book that said I needed “to create an empty space for something better.” He looked sad, said OK while shaking his head no. For a long time I thought I’d been a fool to throw away what little I had. The water arcs off the leaf, a drink for a sparrow in the gravel. I think I’d been trying to leave my mark with my dick. All my life, like a kid peeing his name in snow.
Syrinx
We drove straight through, Ohio to New Mexico.
Him at the wheel, me in the back.
23 hours straight, with stops to piss.
I picked him up at the conservatory, where he played the flute.
Me at the wheel, him in the back.
Playing Debussy’s “Syrinx” from memory.
Unlike absolute music, this music told a story.
Gas station Cokes, gas station pissoirs of the 70s.
Where we looked straight ahead, not aside at each other.
The story, maybe one wanted it, maybe the other didn’t.
Winter, a time of year when people visit their families.
He picked me up at the conservatory, where I was a singer.
I asked if he knew “Syrinx,” to show I knew what’s what.
When I was in back, I didn’t sing him anything.
Can’t remember his name. I can’t call up his face.
What would I have sung, to show I knew what’s what.
Don’t look up Syrinx: it’s the usual Ovid shitshow.
I wouldn’t have sung anything about the great god Pan
or her hiding in the reeds his breath blew through.
We drove straight through. We never touched each other.
Garden, 1964
To hang in a hammock of Spanish Lace vine and eat sour cherries from the warm branch. To let the pits fall. In a bowl, to grind the hard orange berries of mountain ash and mix the paste with water from the hose, dyeing strips of cloth and drying them to see what color they’d turn out. The smell of mother in the house making jam out of our pears, too sticky and sweet, but the wish to hold the cool flesh of one pear now against my forehead.
The long canales that emptied rain from the roof into a stone gutter that circled the house, then ran into the street like a brook. When there was no rain, to run the hose and pretend it was my own river working through the thicket of lilac, white blight on their summer leather. To talk to myself about things I had read. To help Hutch the handyman carry the bucket, mix cement in the wheelbarrow, sit with him while he rolled a cigarette. Bonnie the border collie following him too as he laid the bricks so cement oozed out between the rows. For decoration, he said, the cement petals hardening and for years breaking off a little at a time. To wake one Saturday, the war we supported escalating, to find Hutch sitting on my bed in the basement room he built for me. He had even dug a hole for a window so I could have light down there. Leaning into my side, whispering, entreating. The upper world muted and still, father at work and mother asleep. Overhead, mint in the pebbles where the spigot dripped.
I have a fever as I remember this, the same age now that he was then. I think I might have loved him. I think I can sleep now.
Patrick Donnelly is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019). Willow Hammer is forthcoming from Four Way Books in spring 2025. Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin was 2013 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Slate, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, and many other journals. Donnelly is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire, now a center for poetry and the arts. Donnelly’s awards include the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, and a 2018 Amy Clampitt Residency Award. More at www.patrickdonnellypoetry.com
