Excerpts from The Saint of Sodomy

Selected excerpts from: THE SAINT OF SODOMY
Verse and fiction by WILLIAM TARVIN

From The Saint of Sodomy:

The jet touched down; a dazed Don left the plane in
Darkness, shoved down an uterine stairway
To macadam. "Is nothing allowed to remain in
Its cherished womb?" he pondered. "Is the fairway
Ever fair?": the question next to hold co-reign in
His mind, now grounded after fourteen airway
Hours. He looked around. "Where is the terminus?"
A third sad thought, as he boarded the shuttle bus.

While he moves through this and that slow airport line,
Let's take in Don, our Epyllion's gallant.
He's 36, accepts his youth's decline,
Wears orthopedic shoes, and holds askant
His sagging stature; his crewcut blond hairline
Is graying. Looks unheroic, I grant—
Except in height (midway between Napoleon's 5' 6",
And Nelson's 5')—but soon you'll marvel at his heroics.

The Arab woman ahead looked like a Rorschach,
Black enigmaed in her abaaya from head to toe.
"A breathing, breeding mummy." Don's mind drew back,
Having used that final word, non comme il faut.
"'Twas I, not she, who's driven me to this whore-shack
Of a country." The customs line, more stop than go,
Inched forward. Don strove with firmness not to eye the handsome
Checker. "To do so I'd have to undo myself, aye, and some

Other things about me." His thoughts continued on
As stark confession. "His moustache, acreage
To swoon me." (Now it's out: No pale paragon,
El-Cidic, or from some Virgilian page
A mannequinish mirror is our Don.
Rather a gay, reared in a closeted age
Where Artifice reigned—O Muse, make my words so lyric,
That all who read will judge Don's epic as Homeric!)

After that (enclosed in parentheses) on
Don Jaunt's arcite, next know he held within
His dreams of the manly body with more of less on.
He paused to eye the male garb Arabian:
"Surely I can't desire a man with a dress on!"
He hoped, still gripped by what Society termed Sin.
(Thobes, they're called, the long white robes that bedeck them.)
"But the thin cloth shows each crotch!" Despite his throes to check them,

Don's eyes shot round like sparks from a fiery volcano
As he found a terminal seat, all bones a-weary,
Save one. "Cease! Too toward a glance and all can know
What I am, . . . but each seems hung as the dromedary
This country's noted for, not a weak-kneed soprano
Among the lot," he marked, and quickly cursed his dreary
Fate: "Only the fallen, the depth of the fall can know."
With that he slipped into sleep, his thoughts tortured and eerie.

For 600 lines or so let us leave
Our airport-stranded hero to reverie.
Too soon mayhap he'll wake to find a sleeve,
Drool-smeared, a nose that works too well, one eye
Mattered, the other beyond handkerchief,
And head to the toilet, seeking reality.
For now, we let him slumber, sleeping off his dose
Of jetlag. (But, Reader, you're not allowed to doze.)

Don's sleep is well-deserved, but you and I
"Must post o'er land and ocean without rest"
To find what brought Don Jaunt to this strand. I
Began in medias res (acknowledged best
By all but Byron), and dropped him in sandy
Saudi Arabia, but what's our hero's "quest"?
To answer that grave query, I think it may be an
Apt time to delve into his life pre-Arabian.

* * *

From Upon Shakespeare's Couch:

WT: Let us assume, for this poem, you were
queer, William Shakespeare, better did prefer
the fair young friend to the mistress black,
then I can lie upon your couch—

WS: "And talk!"
Your rhymes are slant; and you would make me Freud
(As if he'd not done that enough). You've scanned
My sonnets; now my person's played on, toyed
With, a pensioned metaphor, on command
Invoked and curtained to the stage you've set:
Backdrop, framework. But at the back who's framed?
Not I! Go seek out long-eared Lyly or get
Raleigh, a captive audience, or have tamed
Marlowe, now there's a chap more of—

WT: "[My] ilk."
Break off your sonnet, Shakespeare. I would talk.

* * *

What dog and cat moments we had,
Larry and I! And then he woke,
saw what he had done, had become, shook
with indignation, rolled from the bed
and never spoke to me again. How simple simple passion is,
dog-and-cat passion! That hot sliver of penis
trembles, and there is a hurt look
in his and his bitch's eyes,
but spent, they untangle, and trot
off, in their eyes not a glint of guilt.

From Portrait of a Statue as a (Very) Young Man:

I thought, after I had hung up without an answer or a "Goodbye," that in time it had been Neils out, Todd in, but in place it had been the reverse. Timewise, Todd had decided it over coffee that first afternoon: "I will move in with you," he had announced, not "Do you want me to move in?" or even "I want to move in." So even before I—preoccupied not with rehearsing what I would say to Neils, but with how the second bedroom could be converted into a workshop for Todd—stumbled over two suitcases as I stepped across the threshold of my place, the decision had been made, timewise.
Neils sat rigidly on the sofa, his face scrunched up by his angry eyes, transfixed beyond my shoulders on the door. His body was excessively clothed, as novel to me as it must have been for him, my not having rushed straight home from the university to begin my eight-hour pampering regime. He rose. In the clothes, his body, at its full length, looked more massive, and (I will confess) a tinge of rue squiggled across my mind, like an operating-room blip, that I had known him almost wholly in the nude.
He stomped past me, careful not to brush, snapping, "Ain't puttin' up this shit." I still had not risen from my knees onto which I had tumbled. With one hand, he seized the separate straps of the bags, bringing them together, and dragged the perch on which I had alit from under me, tossing me onto the carpet.
At the doorway, however, I noticed a slight pause between the turning of the knob and the opening of the door, time and place enough for me to cry out something. But I did not. Not looking toward me, his eyes intent on the knob, he grimaced, "I'm splittin'."
That word is probably as good a "segue" as I will get. Todd and I are in bed; it is three days after the slab of Carrara marble had arrived—almost a week after Withers had told me to urge Todd to hurry up and finish with me, to take Neils out of his hairs, to portmanteau his two expressions for the sake of brevity. I had just completed my last desperate attempt to brighten Todd's eyes, downcast in thought since the Carrara had come.

"Splitting Adam," he cried out, it having dawned on him what I had just said, the rounding off of my narration of the Antaeus myth with the commentary: "I've always thought that when Hercules uplifted Antaeus—separating him from his mother earth Terra—was the first instance of man splitting the atom." He struck his head towards mine, with all the zero-to-the-bone suddenness of a snake's lash, and pitted his against my lips . . . for the first time.

"The tables are turned," I am sure you are thinking, remem bering my slur about Harold's centuries-long snail's pace in wooing Hylas. Consider, however, at least, we slept together, something Harold never got. In fact, I had free run of his body, but before that night he had never bent to kiss me, never dropped a hint to indicate he cared if I were there, never—how shall I say it?—swelled to a passion. "Dead stone? stone dead?" you might ask, but I never did.

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