Half

​ Jasper Johns, Handprint, 1964

Half your hand is blue.
Half is red. Half is yellow.
Half is green & half is you.
Half is me & half is cello.

Half is fuck & half is pain.
Half is sight; half sound.
Half night; half day. Half rain
Half pleasure. Spin me round


On our unknowable circumference.
Radius me. Break me in half.
I don’t care what I turn out to be.
Paint me: make me different.
Make me cry & make me laugh.
I don’t care what we turn out to be.

I will not have sex

with the date who studies
forms of enjoyment
literate in the lingo
of theory fuckboys
visiting from Boston here
the old haunts of queers
Central Park will humid as hell be
reservoir alight with longing
we will make out we will kiss each
other’s necks go out on a limb
of language maybe
maybe not a cloudy haze
a quieter hue

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)

David Hockney, 1972 

1.

All beiges, tans & teals.
Concrete & tile. Tabula

rasa of chlorine & cool,
where the bigger boys,

all blond & toned,
strode through the pool

in swooping crawls,
where my limbs twinged

tight, lungs gulped, gasped,
always hunched, scrawny,

never spontaneous, never
the splash or spring, synergy

of arm & leg, that butterfly
spin, that caught breath,

that good tired—years
of lessons as a kid & still

I can’t tread water.
Now I float on my back,

a starfish puffing
its chest, squinting

at the sun. Like that,
my mind works in the water,

thoughts dulled & spinning
to the edge of the pool,

my finger almost touching
the cool & solid wall.

2. 

Now the Hockney spans
before me: canvas rippling

beyond the museum walls.
Those SoCal hills I know

so well. The water before it:
always the water. Where

light tricks itself into revealing
more than it should: the boy’s

unfounded innocence or the painter’s
unfocused gaze, flowing outside

the bounds of the swimming pool
in a greedy detail we delight in,

luster of porcelain tile shadowed
by the standing figure, an artist

looking everywhere & nowhere,
framed in the landscape, distant blues

whose mountains, eucalyptus languor
whose green & bitter scent

brings me to this second home,
holding my breath against

the crystalline acrylic.