Eyes the color of winter water, <br />eyes the winter of water where I <br /> <br />Quoits in the Spartan month <br />Hyacinthius, the game <br />joins us, pronounces <br /> <br />us god and boy: I toss him <br />the discus thinking This is mine <br />and the wind says Not yet <br /> <br />Memory with small hairs <br />pasted to pale wet skin <br />(the flower hyacinthos, <br />perhaps a fritillaria, not <br />the modern Hyacinthus orientalis) <br /> <br />After he smells of orange groves, <br />spreads white ass meat for me <br />him with a hole drilled in him I try <br />to fill: I ease my way into his orchard <br /> <br />(the ornamental Liliaceae <br />genera, including the spring <br />-flowering Crocus and Hyacinthus, <br />and the summer-flowering <br />Hemerocallis or day lily; also <br />Amaryllis, Hippeastrum, and Narcissus) <br /> <br />A blow struck by jealous Zephyrus, or <br />Boreas, by other accounts: <br />his skin annotated by the wound <br />that explicates his mortality <br />in red pencil, wind edits him down to <br />withering perennial, shriveled bulb <br /> <br />(perhaps a pre-Hellenic god, his <br />precise relationship to Apollo <br />still obscure, though clearly <br />a subordinate) <br /> <br />Him with a hole I keep trying <br />to make, dead meat of white <br /> <br />blooms in hand <br /> <br />(onion as well, garlic, leek, <br />chive, and asparagus) <br /> <br />And where he was <br />this leafless stalk (bluebell, <br />tulip, torch lily, trillium: <br />snowdrop, Solomon’s <br />seal) I break to take for my own, <br />black at the core of blossoming <br /> <br />(a bell-shaped nodding flower, <br />usually solitary)<br /><br />Reginald Shepherd<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/apollo-on-what-the-boy-gave/
