Pride Month, and other Haibun - 12. On Desire’s Wings

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On Desire’s Wings

Haibun

 

Inspired by a painting, and coming back to it time and time again – looking and studying, and knowing the key to understanding it was all there – the answer hit me. It is indeed all there, and it is indeed understandable to most anyone who’s chanced a moment of bliss, carried away on the soul’s wings of desire.

 

A glance over the shoulder can

Unfold a fan-deck palette of

Every painterly shade that’s known

By the very brushstroke of love.

 

Like traces of pencil outlines

Intending to hide below paint,

Washes of outrageous colors

Can layer transparent and faint.

 

A lover on his haunches, soft,

With breathless fulfillment's halo,

Rewards his lover’s contentment

Like a mirror on fire with his glow.

 

Moments before, the artist’s back

Had stretched as a canvas beneath

His man’s broad hands in hot caress

Trembling under the assault’s sheath.

 

But now, glistening through spent pleasure,

With Tom’s abdomen in his sight,

Apprehensions irrelevant

In John are allowed to take flight.

 

For, hidden to the world outside,

Drear safety’s notion holds no stake –

Not race, nor age, nor station speak

Deference to the oneness they make,

 

And all the world’s aspiring lies

On class and distance as protection

Break, to fall in this post-climax

Moment of sublime connection.

 

And so, the artist’s eye captures

As sure as any camera lens

This moment for a future work

To show how love with paint contends.

 

With every truth hidden, exposed,

For the briefest of long moments

Spread over canvas like lover’s hands

Immortalizing the events

 

Where two become one for awhile

And in adversity arouse

Pleasured understanding in those

Whom possibility allows.

 

Feathered strokes of a paintbrush can

Release the sheltered in us all,

Daring each person to let go

And let too-treasured precepts fall.

 

◇ ◇ ◇

 

How too have I been in likewise position; been placed to experience the moment portrayed in paint. John Singer Sargent glancing behind in the rapturous climax of gloriously connected sex, to see his muse and love – Thomas McKeller – panting, sheened with light perspiration, glancing away to catch his breath and let the mental waves of contentment continue to lap the shores of his temporal being. Sargent captured it all in paint, especially the most-private, most-true to the eye, but largely unseen truth of their soul’s Socratic wings of desire.

 

Nature’s great quantum

Shows scales, rough and protective,

Can feathers become.

 

 

~

 

Thomas McKeller

by John Singer Sargent, circa 1917

 

 

 

 

 

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