Feeling

Last night I watched Weekend, the 2011 film of an encounter between two guys who clearly need each other. Fairly heartbreaking, and very, very well done indeed – writing, acting, all of it. They go through the usual chaotic mistakes of a hasty encounter between strangers, then as they realize they want to spend more time together try to connect more honestly – but with a time limit. The best things in the script are the amazing moments where they hit something very deep – glancingly, exposing themselves almost by accident, as things they mull over in the private back stages of their minds come out into the unexpected intimacy of meeting somebody you like (and have sex with).

I was thinking of a poem by Mark Doty that I first read just a few weeks ago – it startled me, conjuring up some of the more heartbreaking encounters of the 1980s and 1990s (well, for me, mostly between 1977 and 1997):

Theory of Beauty (Tony)

Somebody who worked in the jail house kitchen

cooked up some grease, burnt it black, scraped

the carbon from the griddle. Somebody made a needle

from the shaft of a filched Bic, ballpoint replaced

with a staple beaten flat; then the men received,

one at a time, faces of Christ looking up through

streams of blood from a thorny crown,

or death’s heads looming over x’s of bones.

But Tony chose, for his left shoulder, a sign language

glyph, a simple shape, though hard to read;

he had to tell me what it meant. He flicked

his lighter and spilled flecks of dope on the towel

across his lap, brushed his bare stomach as though

he might have set himself aflame. He said,

It stands for Love. Then what seemed indifferently

drawn, hardly a sketch, became a blazon

that both lifted and exposed the man who wore it,

as he fumbled with the lighter, too stoned to fire

the pipe he held, using it to point to the character

on his arm, making plain the art of what was written there.