Hymn and Palinode*
Sarah B. Boyle
i.
The beautiful boy is an ache in my teeth pressing
in every startling direction Smooth and ghostly and
unceasing his whole body shimmering in the leaflight
a mistake welcoming and begetting beauty
Concussion of sunshine the first flash of desire striking
breaking apart before the strange eyes of sundown
The boy made plain The boy feels the loss festers
ii.
The nightingale sings the contagion of beauty My
milk face dazzles you And you submit beneath
my silver palm The small bird makes greetings
from another world
My tiny heart-shaped heart beached and fragile brain
bereft and newborn The boy is odd and delicate
austere and inadequate The sudden saccadic feather
breaths red luminous and missing
iii.
The endless weight electrified arcing arching breaking
the glittering sword dance given green pliancy and
hundreds of pink particularities
Human knob the tool he holds A slap so low
a legion of imperfect wishes to remain forever in the
mind of beauty arise and shatter on the stones
iv.
I was under it or staring down at it woven into its face
its torso of wonder open and cupped rapt and risen up
a great army of pain and awe washed with brine
and three times queenly
An awful smell branching lurching in the interrupted
instant An underground garden terrestrial and
casting down abrasive in his devastating lap
I whip and cut the night to stripes
v.
The boy made beautiful horse desire severe arranged in
full force Lifting out from his center out in out in
out in in in A devastating moment I turn away from
the sweet honeysuckle the sweet william the horseboy
Flower to fig to rot We break
fall to our knees Behold
our violent trembling
longing through the lessening
*All the words in this poem were sourced from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just.
Sarah B. Boyle is a poet, a mother, an activist, and a high school teacher. She is the author of the chapbook What’s pink & shiny/what’s dark & hard (Porkbelly Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in Lunch Ticket, Menacing Hedge, Entropy and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of the Pittsburgh Poetry Houses and reviews editor for Hyacinth Girl Press. Sarah B. Boyle is online at impolitelines.com.
