At the Grave of Hart Crane
Dark, heavy clouds, like swollen sheet rock, pressure waves.
Gulls float, together, probably not even weighing
a pound apiece, tiny twitches of their muscles moving
them this way, that way, in the air columns.
(That’s, like, zero body fat.) Ash-
gray top feathers protect white pinions. So easily
they glide, a group. (Does my breath stink?
I don’t know, I mean, I, um, can’t
really say.) A straight couple
on a beach blanket (daubs of ocher or burnt sienna)
wrestle a wrecked umbrella. Wind flipped
the frame, tugging that pink tulip,
snapping, whipping, wild, fiery,
into an empty space
behind the guy’s head.
On the balcony, my partner reads:
Dancer from the Dance,
A Boy’s Own Story,
War and Peace,
The Bridge.
*
Yesterday, he and I sashayed, swished, holding hands.
We stared down at cargo netting, washed-up, half-buried, a ragged
black fine-mesh polyester rectangle twisted
into a sort of figure eight, or that “hourglass”
va-va-voom form, thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six:
the frayed loose ends of threads were a fringe resembling
spider lace hanging off the gown worn
by Morticia Addams,
ovoid hips bulging atop wet, beige grains
sculpted, by rippling backwash,
into ridges, stomach muscles, rock-hard abs.
Two hot college jock types sauntered past.
“Find something attractive?” the shorter mocked.
My countertenor baritone responded,
“It makes an interesting shape in the sand.”
O, I could hear those assholes thinking, “Oh,
come on, we don’t need to know about all that now,
do we, ‘interesting shapes in the sand.’
Gazing upon us, you packers are obviously picturing
that famous scene in From Here to Eternity,
Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift entangled
in the surf, kissing, fisting, romantic
score swelling.” Through the mist, a mixture
of titanium white and silver nail polish, we saw no single
illumination source, the sun just a golden smudge,
a dirty-looking rainbow
glittering like a covenant,
red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
*
Drunk, once, near Cuba, on an Atlantis gay cruise ship
tossed by outer bands
of an oncoming hurricane,
I tumbled across the bouncing
dance floor, common time pounding.
On the aft deck, leaning against the railing,
I beheld rave lasers strobing,
the Pride flag colors radiating
further and further out, throbbing over
the oily, rocking sea,
pivoting, excited, unstable, gyrating
around the inky, thundering sky,
and then a searchlight’s steady beam,
probing darkness,
distracted me from lightning,
found land –
Christopher Davis is the author of four collections of poetry: The Tyrant of the Past and the Slave of the Future, winner of the 1988 Associated Writing Programs Award; The Patriot, published by University of Georgia Press in 1998; A History of the Only War, Four Way Books, 2005; and Oath, Main Street Press, 2020. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1985, and is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at UNC Charlotte (teaching there from 1989-2022).