Scene:
Hotheaded cowboy rides off
to wreak havoc and revenge.
Older friend follows
to protect him.
Friend lassos firebrand,
who falls to ground, furious.
Older man restrains him
until rage is spent,
tears flow.
Enraptured in a front seat of the theater,
half-eaten Three Musketeers bar forgotten,
I feel the snare of the rope, jarring fall,
hot tears on my face.
My body awakens to muscular rage,
the delight of restraint, the freeing
of a potent
eroticism.
(No. 80 in a series of responses to Han-shan’s Songs of Cold Mountain)
Another childhood cowboy poem, probably reflecting a) how popular cowboy movies were when I was growing up; and b) the power of film images. Also, probably my first homoerotic poem. This is the sort of childhood recollection that sexual radicals (and lots of the rest of us) knowingly chuckle over, given the innocence and ubiquity of the precipitating image. But then, just how innocent were those images?
While I wound up being mostly straight if a little kinky, what may also be going on here is an early yearning for a healthy container for naturally arising anger. I had no such model or container, and lived to pay a healthy price for its absence.
(Numeric reference to Han-shan’s poem reflects the order of presentation in Burton Watson’s translation, presented as Cold Mountain, Columbia University Press, 1970.)
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