I heard James read this yesterday and before he started he said (paraphrased): “I hate to tell you what a poem is about before I read it, but I this has do to with a picture my friend took and - I loved it - it was this picture of graffiti that simply said Sex in the Rain which I thought deserved a poem.”
I imagined at first some kid & his girl had come
to this dank & rotting covered bridge searching
for a dry, hidden place to wait out a summer storm.
I thought they must have made love - I wanted
to call it love - & they had meant to memorialize it
with all these words sprayed over the rest of the graffiti:
simply, Sex in the Rain in dripping, fading red paint.
But then I let my mind wander back to the dim-lit
caves of Lascaux, to the finger of the lone, ancient
hunter who traced those careful stick figures of stags
in blood & ochre. What if it wasn’t magic or religion,
I thought, but raw hunger that drew what he ached for
but could not catch? Instead, I imagined a teenage boy
not unlike myself, sulking off in the middle
of an August night so humid he could almost taste
his own pulsing need with each new breath. See how
his flashlight beam coaxes a glint from crushed cans,
cigarette wrappers & shriveled condoms & watch
as he measures every letter of the most perfect
scene he’s never dared to conjure: a man next to him,
their bodies one shadow as rain begins to tap a beat
on the walls of the bridge. He takes out his paint can,
shakes it & he writes it. He writes it big.
