Handsome men, my Ptown cottage guests were all of Steve’s generation, in their fifties and sixties. I was in my late-thirties. They wanted to know what my parents had thought of me spending so much time with an older man when I was a teen.
“Was your mom a fag hag?” a man with a broad, craggy face asked.
Maybe in a former life?
“Initiation,” though not the first poem in Groom, was the first stab at explaining Steve.
How did he pull it off?
37 to my 14, he looked
my mother in the eye, nice to meet you,
Susan, like a bible salesman,
yes mam, something you don’t mind
him getting dirty: the ritual
prelude to what wasn’t
unlike a first date. He’d gathered
beforehand she was single. Still,
in that reprehensibly reputable
suburb, it was ballsy.
I always thought I’d write prose about those “crazy” times. Crazy Steve. But after four off-season months with the sand dunes of the cape curled around me, poem after poem, against the backdrop of those elder Ptown statesmen, brought him back.
Studying abroad more than twenty years ago now, I’d seen my first Caravaggio painting—paintings, actually, a pair—in person. Absolutely dominating that tiny, ancient, once-private chapel off a square in Rome, the still-wet-looking oil of The Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1601) has haunted me ever since.
You probably know the story: a bounty hunter of Christians is blinded by a flash of light on the way to persecuting more Christians. Saul is checked, chastised, blinded, and rebranded as Paul the evangelist.
First you see this massive, bareback pinto. You’re walking into a Christian sanctuary, you’re expecting cherubs and Bam! this brute, real thickness, this flesh confronts you, like a defensive end, which, good luck, it’s your job to block; this horse, who looks a little confused, too, to be standing there in the spotlight. Then, taken aback, you follow the horse’s eyes down to Saul, splayed in the foreground, floating on a sensuous raft of loosed, lurid equipment, soft-lit like the cover of a gay romance novel. The only other witness in the painting, hidden behind and holding back the horse, is a bareheaded, barefoot peasant, a groom—a signature, sinister Caravaggio anonym.
When I tried to write about the painting over the years, checking in with the coffee table art book I brought back from Rome, Saul always came out in latently violent, sexual terms.
Once the torrent of Steve poems began, I returned to the painting, now recognizing my teenage self in Saul—oblivious, trusting, favored, drugged. I tapped into the myth, not only of Saul and Caravaggio, but also of Vulcan, that most abused god of the smithy and fire, who was said to have first experimented with metallurgy by enclosing a coal in a clamshell, and under the world’s largest cast-iron statue of whom I was raised in the once-steel town of Birmingham, Alabama.
On the Road to Damascus
after Caravaggio
A bolt breaks the shade and knocks
Saul clean off his horse. Unbuckled,
his naked legs are ravished, his cheek and neck
flushed by the light’s concussion.
A coal in a clamshell,
auroral, the faint stubble
at his chin and burning cheek.
The light strikes his throat white.
The backs of his hands in shadow.
A friend, poet Rita Mae Reese, encouraged me to look deeper into the painting, turning me on to Teju Cole’s piece in The New York Times Magazine “In Dark Times, I Sought Out the Turmoil of Caravaggio’s Paintings.” Cole’s meditations on the complexity of Caravaggio resonated with my own disturbed sense of having been mentored in a place of damage and pain. “And when we are there with him,” Cole writes, “we sense that he’s no mere guide. We realize that he is in fact at home in that pain, that he lives there. There’s the unease.”
I kept writing poems about the painting; interspersed, the series frames Groom. Walking a ridgeline of high desert hills in Ucross, Wyoming, I found myself thinking more and more about the groom.
The groom’s behind the horse,
turning it back from Saul
in the foreground by the bridle,
his other hand gentle on the soft
white muzzle.
His balding pate and deeply
rutted, obsequiously bowed brow…
– from “The Groom”
For centuries, there had been no horse; there’s not one in Acts. It seems to have crept into the narrative with the Renaissance. In both the Sistine chapel and in Bruegel, someone is holding Saul’s steed back while the stricken rider writhes on the ground. But those are such busy, public scenes. In those previous depictions, if it’s in fact a horse groom and not a fellow soldier, you still can’t make out his face or bearing toward Saul. Caravaggio’s groomed moment is that much more private, more intimate.
In particular, Rita Mae pointed me to the tangle of legs underneath the horse.
His bare feet, that vein
down his calf—the groom’s legs
blend with the horse’s. It’s complicated,
I said once to a survivor, who wasn’t
having it. But to disentangle
even a toe, an ankle—it never fully
resolves, even after you see the hoof
raised over Saul.
– from “The Groom”
As I composed and revised and lived with the poems of Groom, I began to untangle the snarl of admiration, need, self-blame, and fear. Slowly, the scales were dropping from my eyes.
Like that great, troubled painter, when his first version of the conversion of Saul was rejected by his patron, I had to revise the picture I had painted of what happened to me on the road to manhood.
In this version, the voice
is Paul’s speaking back to Saul
about what he saw
when the scales fell off—
not days, but years,
decades, after.
At love’s command you lay down
under the raised hoof.
…
You lay beneath the voice
telling you, you count, you’re special.
His power over you,
his banner:
it was a raised hoof,
not love’s roof,
you were raised under.
– from “Revision”
“It seems obvious / enough,” I write in the last appearing and last written poem in the Caravaggio series.
Saul [is] slumming it in his finery.
The mare assured nothing’s amiss.
Who gets off, who bestows,
who cedes, unseeds, who has a say,
a gardener, an open flower.
– from “Last Pass”
The groom is behind it all: knocking Saul off course, knocking him out, “taking risk by the bit”; the trusting mare (my mother) “assured nothing’s amiss.”
But though it colors the art, seeing the manipulation behind my experience doesn’t negate the beauty, the genuine wonder and warmth I felt at times, no more than Caravaggio’s unscrupulous lifestyle negates the majesty of his chiaroscuro. Nor does it necessarily make me feel the hurt, the betrayal and anger, I know are down there. I’m still working on that.
