The Boy with a Flower Behind His Ear
By Rick Barot
1
When you have been on trains on buses on the road with someone
for months living with each other’s filthy teenager things you don’t
expect him to come up with a neat shirt and black trousers from
the bottom of his backpack on the last night which is what he did
looking like a waiter his hair windblown across continents now cut
as if for a ceremony his blue eyes like the summer’s oceans but
before the dinner and the next morning’s flights to separate places
we had to go find Karl Marx’s grave taking the underground across
the city walking under the rippling trees of the cemetery the green
of the place like cinematography and finally we are standing in front
of the famous man’s enormous bronze head and I am looking at him
looking at it I am looking at the side of his smiling face his ear
and the speck of shaving cream I point out to him wanting to touch
him there thirty years his white shirt ahead of me on the path back.
2
On the podcast the psychologist talking about death and our need
to accept death describes a state he calls an anticipatory resoluteness
with solicitous regard for others that will make your life seem an
adventure profused with unshakable joy those were his exact words
I wrote them down understanding that what needed such breathless
saying I have brought to one word you the one word encompassing
all language all tasks all meaning you like those saints in paintings
working with a skull on their desks like the psychologist saying that
the knowledge of death makes for an enlightened life but instead
of knowledge or a skull on my desk there is you and the little blur
the little flicker the little bloom of it on the page you which is only to
say he was right the scholar of poetry who insisted that the work
of poetry is the work of preserving the fact of the beloved the you of
the beloved the work of poetry is preserving the face of the beloved.
3
Like the boy with a flower behind his ear who’s been interrupted
in his pleasure a pleasure first figured in the sprigs of jasmine and
rose in a round clear vase on the table the water in the vase so full
as though it’s just been filled the leaves of the flowers also full
of the glossiness of the clean water and of the plums and cherries
also on the table the fruit rendered by the painter in a tumbling
cascade just at the base of the boy’s torso where the painting is
in shadow is shadowed with a kind of privacy the last and long
part of your looking where you will finally notice the boy’s finger
bitten by the lizard still dangling from the finger the lizard that
must have emerged like a snake from the Eden of those fruits
the boy’s recoil figured in the gasp of the mouth and the shoulder
torqued from its white blouse the shoulder that’s also jasmine and
rose in the Roman sunlight describing it these four hundred years.
