The Ballad of Gaol
“Homosexual” wasn’t even used
in print until 1892. LAD was 21;
Wilde, 37. Ex-boyfriends, Robbie
Ross and Turner, turned against them —
testifying: too brazen.
An adjective. To Carlos Blacker, another
good friend eventually advised:
“The best thing he can do is
drink himself to death, or better yet, shoot” —
The Blackmailer’s Charter of 1885; indecent
letters in the hands of Alfred Wood, a rentboy;
LAD’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry
(These antique names, so faerie!)
proceeded having him declared: bankrupt.
His wife would pay him off, if he agreed
in May of ‘97, at his release from Reading Prison,
never to contact her, or their three children.
His lawyer: his ear was syringed of discharge
inside the wire grating of a rabbit hutch. “A poet
in prison for loving boys loves boys.”
For 2 years, earning a meal
required he crank the screw
10,000 revolutions. Gruel; diarrhea.
“It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is
always midnight in one’s heart.”
The most famous criminal of his era —
Shorn, his photogenic locks. And bathed
in used water, given potassium bromide
for what, in a few years, we’ll call
“cruising.” Piccadilly, or Knightsbridge
Skating Rink. “The gods are strange
and punish us for what is good and humane.”
The blooming laburnum and garden lilac.
“Why is it that one runs to one’s ruin?”
Oscar Wilde, a.k.a. Sebastian Melmoth,
you’d never recover; you’d indulge —
A sex tourist in Naples! The humiliation
of being refused a dinner reservation.
The enemy of Victorian morality
and the raw banality of days,
presented the bill, then asked to leave
hotels in Nice and a forest village in Fontainebleu!
Recognized everywhere, the most celebrated
pervert in Europe: Paris, Rome, Sicily,
Switzerland! “My existence is a scandal.”
No country, effeminate.
Still, extravagant: a dressing bag,
embroidered. A nickel-plated bicycle, a gift.
A bottle of Pernod absinthe on the washstand,
scattered papers, clothes, and a bowl of ash:
the final unkempt rooms at Hôtel d’Alsace.
Blue wallpaper, with chocolate-colored flowers.
“Unfurnished, I am my own master.”
Bloated, drunk, disgraced, admiring for hours
A Man in a Black Shirt, 1897; Charles Shannon’s
self-portrait. From May until November,
your final months, you’d suddenly meet Rodin
who welcomed you on
a personal tour of the Gates of Hell
at the Exposition Universelle!
Before a pauper’s burial at Bagneux
in 1900, without a headstone —
In 1898, artistically bereft at l’Idée,
boating and bathing in the Seine;
poor, in debt, you would publish
anonymously, as Prisoner C.3.3.
* * * * *
Lorca
—for Wayne Koestenbaum
A bucket of quicklime;
an unmarked
pit. Two
anarchic bullfighters
and a schoolteacher
dumped
roadside, between Alfacar
and Viznar —
Perhaps I’ll finish hearing
the value of the sea
at Málaga
come to the window . . .
War. An abstract
seascape;
a day at the beach
memorialized:
Still Life with Waves,
August 18th
1936. So alive, this
geometry!
In Santander,
bombed
on the parapet,
my “secretary”
Rafael Rodríguez Rapún
to whom
I’d dedicate
The Dark Sonnets, withstood
the anniversary
battle, raising his arms.
The waves, the waves,
a fresh gauntlet.
He had, a Falangist
bragged
in a crowded Granada
bar, shot me “twice
for being ‘a fag’”
to celebrate. Federico
García Lorca, I’ve known
and not known
such dubious coterie —
Said my family,
in 1980, to the papers:
“We would have shown him
the door!”
Envy, a green lash —
Horse
of exhilarations.