Barechested and Full of Vigor

Barechested and Full of Vigor


I’ve been writing poems in my underwear as of late—
the white kind with the blue and yellow stripes
along the waistband—as this summer
lights trees on fire and blows its hot breath
in through the windows, evoking
an old girlfriend of mine, who was never big

on talking. And when I stand from the chair
and peel my thighs from the cushion’s red vinyl
and walk to the bookshelf across the room,
I wonder, as I drag my finger along the slim, rigid spines,
if any of these poets, whose words I can no longer live by,
had written any of these poems in their undies:

Keats by candlelight, let’s say, in a pair of long ones
that fall just above the knee, barechested and full of vigor,
the illness that will kill him not yet traversing his veins.
He closes Chapman’s Homer, rests it on the edge
of the desk, and takes his negative capability to a new,
albeit partially naked, extreme. Or Rilke, maybe,

watching the lone window of his tiny apartment,
a Paris frost collecting on its panes, as he contemplates
Apollo’s torso (that mutilated piece of Greek sculpture),
its inner brilliance, his own death. The fly of his checked boxers
open enough to allow a small clump of his pubics
the pleasure of basking in the moon’s hard glow, the night

so hollow and cold. Or down in Chile, the leaves of palms
hanging limp in surrender to the heat, I can see Neruda,
oblivious to the sun’s torment, prancing around his home
at Isla Negra in a pair of shocking blue jockeys,
the elastic waist slowly slackening. He reads a recent draft
of one of his odes. He sings it loud, testing his music,

hand waving as if holding a baton; those short, little lines
like heartbeats. It’s the summer he croons for, that “red violin”
whose song has surrounded me now in this room,
where the shelves have gone ablaze and the poems
have begun to burn, slowly at first and then with great gusts
of flame, each word exploding like dynamite.


Dan Memmolo

Posted over on Main Street Rag