Cavafy's Double Helix
by Con Chapman
The store was closing for good, and so I purchased a book of poems by Cavafy,
that poet of ruins and tombstones, and fragments from disintegration.
In some cases they recalled a double helix, two strands coiled around an axis.
He led a double life, clerk by day, Captain of Pleasure by night,
bemoaning a beautiful boy of whom no statue was made before he died,
and another, consigned to a grim shop, never to taste the pleasures of the city.
He lived upstairs from a whore house, across from a church, down the street
from a hospital—poised between flesh, forgiveness and death, he said.
The bookstore is being picked clean, like the rotting carcass of an animal
on the road by carrion birds. I can only imagine his lust for young men
like himself, their legs entwined like his columns of broken lines, like ruins.
Cavafy died at age 70 to the day, neatly completing his three score and ten.
He loved discreetly, knowing the stigma there is in scandal, laconic to the end.
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Waiting for the Barbarians between flesh, forgiveness and death...
like the intersection here or maybe intertexuality of poem and bio of a poet. now must read Cavafy--
This is strong writing, Con. My favorite of your pieces I've read. The movement sentence to sentence has no flaws. Great closing: "Cavafy died at age 70 to the day, neatly completing his three score and ten.
He loved discreetly, knowing the stigma there is in scandal, laconic to the end."
Wonderful Piece.
Thanks all. When I post this on other sites you can see the gap down the middle that he sometimes used, like one person facing another. It didn't work here.
Bootiful.
Heh. Formatting issues!?!
On Fictionaut?!?!
Unheard of, I tell you!
Strong work.
Really solid writing.
Like the duality of Cavafy's life and work, and the closing of a bookstore being picked over by carrion lit birds.
I attribute recent interest in Cavafy's poetry to the reading of his "Ithaka" at Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis's funeral in 1994.
Very nice homage and writing.
Thanks.
Very gripped by the piece. And now, of course, you've forced me to go find some of Cavafy's poems! But even not knowing them yet, I'm caught up in your bio-narrative with its evocative & suggestive lines.