DONALD RAWLEY

Steaming
(for Harry Burrus)

I know who I am
in a Maui hotel steam room,
traveling like others
in May, in a low tide,
after riots in Los Angeles,
poisons, and God.

I am steaming,
watched, and watching
on a tropical morning
behind etched glass doors,
and hot, champagne marble walls.

The other men in this box
have flown from obscure cities,
checked off and ripped
like a grocery list.

They do not speak,
but inhale each other's musk
as a reassurance.

A teenage boy
stares at my penis.
He is calculating his future.

A businessman with flapping breasts,
crossed legs, and a scarred gut,
leaves his towel like a blossom
on his crotch and dreams.

Others assess who I am,
my muscles, and back
red eyes, and burnt skin.
How I create my pleasures.
They could have sprung from stone,
soulless, white, ball-eyed, and mute.
Each with a safe distance,
a wife, a lover, and a speech--
but silent.

I slow my pulse in sweat,
breathing a damp curtain
of eucalyptus
hissing under one light.

Sleep, forget, sleep, remember.
It is all I can do.
My abdomen jitters
in a sucked heat.

These men are flaccid and ignorant,
girlish examples of religions
I do not know.

And we are alike.
We are beaten, escaped, foreign.
We are only divisions
of those who cry and wait.

 

Steaming © 1993, Black Tie Press. All rights reserved.

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