Asymmetries (after Spencer Tunick) by Philip Metres, courtesy of World Literature Today (2010)

Asymmetries (after Spencer Tunick) by Philip Metres, courtesy of World Literature Today (2010)


Longing to grasp the familiar, names
-----against the anonymous
appendages & naked flesh, a nipple the eye
-----could nuzzle, to hide in
dark islands of hair, I near the photo –

-----as if the body erotic
could shield against the camera’s scalpel.
-----In its distance, the bodies
without faces line a riverbank, shade
-----into some darker shadow...

obeying the desire of gravity. I’m thinking
-----of Iraq, how they lay out
each disinterred nest of femurs & ribs
-----on separate sackcloths,
trying to punctuate the run-on sentence

-----of oppression & unfettered
blood. All’s asymmetry. After making love,
-----once you said every face,
split in half, fit so precariously, so comically,
-----we spent the next half

-hour shading one side of our faces in the mirror,
-----then the other. This world
is centaur: half dream, half nightmare.
-----Wandering the gallery,
we drift onto an imagined balcony

-----& gape at the traffic
of bodies jamming the crossroads, im
------mobile sculpture of
pure fact, dangling odd-angled & earth
------bound us.




Read more in the recent issue of World Literature Today.