Carl Boon

A Case for Passion

He had a figure skater’s thighs,
had memorized paragraphs of Proust
in French, drank black coffee, laughed.
I wanted the shapes of his skin
on my sofa, his language of demise
and rebirth, the words he made
that made me feel different. Already
my father was gone, my sister
to discover her passion in the hills
past Veracruz. And in my house--
where my mother lit candles
at Lent—to be different was a curse.
I looked at my body, my impatient face,
the fine black hairs that made a path
hard center toward soft becoming.
So he might kiss me there and make me
the man I was meant to be, in a novel,
mesmerized. Sometimes he came
on a Sunday with a packet of poems;
how good Octavio Paz, how good
the light between his lines. Too shy
to kiss him or to touch his hand,
I crawled away to the kitchen
where my mother sat awkwardly,
a woman with a pencil, a woman
and a purple flow. A crossword puzzle,
cafe con leche, Jesus on the wall.
Below them, me, transgressor, lover,
impure to love’s architecture,
quick design. If I should clutch his knee,
the world might explode, leaving me
and all these fragments I might gather.




--
Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Posit, The Maine Review, and Diagram. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Boon recently edited a volume on the sublime in American cultural studies.