Naked Athletes As Landscape by Charles Bryant
BackNaked Athletes As Landscape (from 'Waddon Ponds' 1980, originally entitled 'Mindscene') Sturdy swell of bee-inviting grassy banks; outstretched athlete's muscular thighs draped in soft green silk; a landscape of such athletes, side by side; barrel-vaulted chests awave with small wild pansies, wide-eyed daisies. Mysteriously intense, air full of thunder, unshed moisture, all the hollows expect refreshing rain. As if those athletes, every tender one, anticipate the after-exercise in showers huddled side by side again beneath a dripping faucet flank by massive flank and all aglow with hard excitement. Mist round mountains' rocky loins swathes nudity with prudish wreaths; upright athletes these who stand and stretch arm high, wistfully sigh remorse for shyness not yet overcome by masculine attainment, the huge relief of having done what is not yet undone, as it were, still buttoned and clothed. For who will tear the texture, unweave the fabric densely twined? 'Much better had that nudity been bare, not secretly hidden', the watching watcher says who would have such forms stripped, open to the eye and to the touch, living Michaelangelesques, nude angels. The hooded disbelieving crow waits patiently, watches and waits in an arm of a blasted tree. A wandering stranger, he who stepped from the height as down a stair, similarly beautifully naked (such forms proliferate in empty air) descends with blue eyes full of malice for what he will not see, his mind at rest, locked in eternal verities that neither grow nor fade. Stagnation's in the valley fogs and damps where hesitating purpose strays and moans and hands reach out to stroke an arm or thigh, and then retract. Side by side they lie and dream of fraught conjunctions, purple gold and crimson. But fear restricts their channel, makes it ebb. There are some among them, one or two, blood-princes of the world that they enact, who do the thing the others wish to do, like full streams flow by several stages down to a bottomless sea. Here's the paradox, known only to the few: arrested movement alone is totally free, forever poised to act. Cursed hands - the athletes understand the ban which binds them massed apart - curved full lips that prayed and strayed across a willing body and a face glowing with a separate grace; a voice like sniggering water, glance of an outrageous god who would admit no bound or bar but traced the curving line from head to foot. From the silver birch wood: music; choral yearnings and a piercing pipe; sounds of dancing, chanting; corporate life beneath the thick dark leaves around the central fire, naked bodies, scent of human sap, welling fountain of the happy free. Here the intertwinings mesh where body moulds to body, mind to mind finds double relief, sensation seeks sensation. But even that is, strangely, not enough. Still there's something lacking, something lost, a wide expanse of darkness. Breaking cover like a fearful animal, an unclothed Bacchic boy bounds across the yielding turf in panic desperation, falls at the stranger's feet; and looking up discovers the image of thirst's fulfilment: stocky thews, broad chest and narrow waist, upright pulsing member and a glance full of mastering pity and remorse as if he'd seen the whole of things and wept at man's depravity. Arms that held creation, feet that straddled continents and seas; a mind that peered through shape and form and purpose and sensed the end of everything; the one companion-lover, fastest friend; the wandering deity-stranger. Gazing on that dream, the boy's transformed, slowly as the blinking of an eye, into a sickly fading flower that imperceptibly shrivels and dies. Cries from the birchwood mock him in pursuit as the mountain's master, presence of the mountain, clustered peaks, waves his jewelled wand above his head in a storm of cracking thunder; and as the dim mist clears, folds his arms and sinks into the earth.
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Uploaded: July 23rd, 2008 @ 12:28 pm
Author: brychar66
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