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"Rafael Campo's "The Enemy" moves with naturalness, speed, and balance between experiences of domestic love--a couple of gay men, celebrating rites of daily ordinariness--and scenes from a doctor's life. We turn to Campo for frankness, freshness, and the tang of truth, and we are rewarded."--Rosanna Warren, author of "Departure"

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The Enemy

By RAFAEL CAMPO

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Rafael Campo
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3960-1

Contents

I. The Enemy...........................................................................................3Dialogue with Sun and Poet.............................................................................4Addressed to Her (Provincetown, June 2002).............................................................5"Elsa, Varadero, 1934".................................................................................6Night Has Fallen.......................................................................................7Personal Mythology.....................................................................................8Piranhas...............................................................................................10Brief Treatise on the New Millennial Poetics...........................................................12El Viejo y la Mar......................................................................................13Ode to the Man Incidentally Caught in the Photograph of Us on My Desk..................................14The Enemy..............................................................................................15God, Gays, and Guns....................................................................................17Patriotic Poem.........................................................................................18Post-9/11 Parable......................................................................................19Sestina Dolorosa.......................................................................................21What Passes Now for Moral Discourse....................................................................22II. Eighteen Days in France............................................................................27III. Toward a Theory of Memory.........................................................................47from Cien Sonetos de Amor..............................................................................51A Simple Cuban Meal....................................................................................52The Sailfish...........................................................................................53Ganymede, to Zeus......................................................................................55After the Long Drive...................................................................................57For Jorge, after Twenty Years..........................................................................60Song in the Off-Season.................................................................................61Catastrophic Sestina...................................................................................63Toward a Theory of Memory..............................................................................67Patagonia..............................................................................................68Defense of Marriage....................................................................................69The Story of Us........................................................................................71The Sodomite's Lament..................................................................................72Equinoctial Downpour...................................................................................73Pantoum for Our Imagined Break-Up......................................................................74The Changing of the Seasons............................................................................75Once, It Seemed Better.................................................................................76IV. Dawn, New Age......................................................................................79Dawn, New Age..........................................................................................80Allegorical............................................................................................81Progress...............................................................................................82The Crocuses...........................................................................................83Crybaby Haiku..........................................................................................87"SILENCE = DEATH"......................................................................................88Clinical Vignettes.....................................................................................90You Bring Out the Doctor in Me.........................................................................92Composite of Three Poems from the Same Anthology by Williams, Rukeyser, and Sexton.....................93Tuesday Morning........................................................................................95Arriving...............................................................................................97Absolution.............................................................................................98On Doctoring...........................................................................................99

Chapter One

Dialogue with Sun and Poet in memory of June Jordan The sun is making arguments again. Today, its dappled chattering through leaves persuades me that the world deserves reprieve. You're dead, and though your subjects were contained in poetry that sometimes flustered me- I wanted to restore some order in your fridge, to witness Palestinian outrage somehow more dispassionately- I see now it was you who rewrote me. The sun refuses any compromise, insisting on the beauty of its rays, like you, illuminating how we're free yet not. Democracies of bugs and sand, fat kingdoms of the SUV, we're all beneath what both of you, great fireballs of life, have helped me better comprehend as truth. It's June, too bright to be the end of days that some foretell; the sun has more to teach, and soldiers still have distant wars they might imagine never starting. Instrument of peace, I take this pen into my hand to write, the morning almost over now. Flood the page with light, burn the house down, is what you say. Arise. I understand. Addressed to Her (Provincetown, June 2002) On seeing you that second time last night, Pat Benatar a disembodied blare amidst a night yet ravenous for dares, I thought I'd talk to you, to ask you why you let him grab your bangled arm that way. Presumptuous, I thought myself, to want to enter in your narrative of hurt. A sparkly rhinestone necklace named you "Kaye"; your tan was richly oiled, as if burnished more by hand than sun. A teenager flashed by, his skateboard growling come-ons as he eyed your heaving breasts. I wondered, too, how your caress might feel, if not to me, then to another. Around you glowed the plinkering arcade, like summer carnivals where I played straight. "Stop it-hey, you're hurting me." I smothered her, desperate to remake myself, her body so soft I prayed it might accept me, hold impressions long enough to be retold as truth. Kaye, I wanted to so badly I made myself forget what you must know: You turn to him, so awkwardly bent back, too beautiful to resist, the night gone black, and offer your unyielding, human soul stretched taut-forgiving him, forgiving us. "Elsa, Varadero,...