Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2024
The Wrestlers, poems by John Philip Drury.
The Wrestlers
Take Down
Grappling in a hotel,
their gym this afternoon, she’s got him in
the ladder hold,
squeezing his neck, legs locked around his waist,
a scarf of breeze
brushed over shining flesh.
But he pins her
repeatedly to the mattress, and she bucks up
her neck and bites—
Reversal
then flips him and rides hard,
her fiery hair riffling his eyelashes.
Her torso contorts.
Like a surge of fog tumbling over a roof
and burning off,
like waves of solid ocean
and rocks that shatter
into spindrift, like starfish on oyster, they give
until they give.
Escape
With night, the vanity lights up.
She knots his tie, tugging it snug;
he fastens her brassiere, then slips
his hands around to heft her breasts,
but she’s as fluid as the rain
that smears the window, mixed with flashes
of red and yellow, out the door
without a sound except the hush
of pumps on carpet, the challenger hunched
on a footstool in the lit arena.
Pindaric Victory Ode
in Two Haiku and a Tanka
The sumo wrestlers
loll in cherry-blossom shade,
bees circling thick toes.
Noon sunlight unscrolls.
Grass calligraphy blurs, eyes
flit shut, fists open.
Not even grumbling
Kawasakis can rough up
these napping giants
who dream of blue pools, clear sky,
a hold they don’t strain to break.
Ghazal of Lust
It may begin as exploring, a kind of Wanderlust
of the soul. But officially, it’s still filed under “Lust.”
You feel it rising from your toes, your fingertips,
your gut, your groin: titillation and/or lust.
It breaks the bank. It makes you hot with fever,
eager to obey your mad commander, Lust.
Deadly sin? How about master of ceremonies, seer
moaning, pilot mooning, his moorings planned for lust.
Desire as the problem? Keep it coming, nirvana or bust,
revels of enlightenment through senses and more lust.
© John Philip Drury
John Philip Drury is the author of five books of poetry: The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and most recently The Teller’s Cage (Able Muse Press, 2024). His first book of narrative nonfiction, Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.