Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water (BOA Editions 2016). A Cave Canem fellow, he earned his MFA from the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2015, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, New England Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Paris-American, Memorious, and other journals and anthologies. He is the Social Media Coordinator for The Offing.---------
Sans Souci
Sanssouci Palace
Potsdam, Germany
1. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St. Thomas
We saw for a moment
laid out among us the body
of the complete human we failed
to be. What field did
the disciple pass
to encounter Him who
double-crossed all
boundaries? Green-white tufts
of angelica
crushed
beneath His toes—dusty
from the tomb—
scent the air,
the smell of a world in which
nothing rots or grows putrid.
Cruel body, which gathers and leaves
such sweetness.
Only darkness in the painting,
the body’s inmost color.
2.
I believe in art more often than your cock.
We thought a getaway would loosen us up,
shake off our post-Freudian feelings.
We should work on us, I say. (Sorry,
I’m an ice queen.) You light a Turkish cigarette,
its smoke not so different from the incense
in the nearby church housing a saint’s
gilded hand—if not flesh, then body be gold.
Can’t you just suck me off? (I’m alive.)
Sometimes drinking beer together, chilling
the sweat on our chests, is enough.
You lean against the French door,
all the hairs of your body black and glistening.
I turn to minutiae and away from you.
3. Anthony van Dyck’s Pentecost
Tongue
alight tongue aloft tongue inspired
eyes look up
tongue in darkness
tongue flickers
a whipstitch
bolt
of lightning binds
sudden clouds tongue debased
oyster tongue
tucked between palates
not satisfied
flame-tipped
like the disciples’ hair and black
beards
lapis tongue chalk tongue lead
tongue renews
twice burned tongue
coaxes honey from stone
4.
We ghost past each other this morning,
after a long evening of wine, without
reproach or welcome, like the day-long
rain locking us in. It sweeps the roof
with repetitive strokes. We take for granted—
we are so accustomed to these bodies.
You lick your lips, brush my unshaven cheek,
and say You look at me like a painting
you think you know all the names for,
the paints, the colors while I’m bobbing
between your legs. Our reflections
live silently in the French door pane
between lightning strikes, a kind of pleasure,
refining their gestures in another room.
5. Etching of Adam and Eve
It’s not
in any of the stories—
you’d have to use your imagination
anyway—this cave scene lit
from within,
light like Rembrandt’s—
light of the mind, light
of fireflies in heat.
The luminous dark is etched
like stone after centuries of ice
and water, those clasped bodies
indistinguishable
from mossy crags
and the stream, molten
in its brightness,
breaking above them.
Lean in. The painter said
they’re dying.
I think they’re gathering food.
6.
Slowly eat out my asshole, slowly while bees
lave daffodils on our balcony and remember
each bloom with dance. You growl. I lick
your armpits. Come, come for me, you say,
our moans made fluid on our canvas of a bed.
Travel makes one adventurous. To know
and glory in our bodies’ torque and bristle.
We ran from His body in the gallery,
afraid, aching to be sore. There was no halo
in the painting, but there’s a cock ring here.
You teach me what the Old Masters can’t—
the crimson flush running over you already
fading into memory—yours are the hands
that master and finish me with a final stroke.
City of Rivers
All this—the bridges, the market, epitaphs—
were under silt not long before we came
to the city that marks time by rising floods.
As we pass a shop on stained stone streets,
a glassblower fashions an urn from fire and air.
Lace-makers scrub rust from a door’s agitated joints.
This is the city, someone said, you never enter into
the same way. I wanted this passage for us, abandonment
and remaking, the cicada stripping itself from itself.
Despite peach iced tea, the heat sticks to us like flies.
Even the plaster walls of our rented room sweat.
Where we going tomorrow, you ask, emerging, naked,
from a cool shower. Rivulets chart your body’s cartography;
they steam and shine and lift themselves to you.
Heaven and Earth
Rain connects heaven and earth.
The colorless city shines outside our window,
distant marble domes like fresh snow.
Water pours from every duomo,
their gargoyles’ sputter song. Rivers tow
boats into annulling fog, aimless, slow.
We tarry here. In the Commedia a soul said O
pilgrim, we are citizens of one true city. Go.
Rain connects heaven and earth.
Never own more than you can carry, locals know.
Bloom and shed like an apple bough.
I know this and have nothing to show
for it like stone seraphs at their ledgers. None blow
horns to call us to an end. Let’s drink bordeaux
tonight darling, shamelessly, below
the angels’ eyes and make them blush: speak low.
Rain connects heaven and earth.
The rivers, stained as if by wine, are indigo.
Flashes stain the skyline’s smooth tableau.
Lightning’s nimble fingers thread a bow
into the ombré sky and then will sew
new stars into the hem or maybe throw
it all away—how easily bodies blow
apart, warp and weft, wake and undertow.
Pin me. Mend me. We’ve
got so far to go. These are the lessons I cleave
to in this city, which weaves
and unweaves, weaves and unweaves.