Of all the many gay-themed Web sites out there, this one, Woolf and Wilde, is one of the Grumpy Vegan’s all-time favourites.
Obviously named in honour of two literary icons, Woolf and Wilde bring together photographs depicting intimacy between men sometime ago with poetry which adds intense meaning and fresh insight.
Were these two men wrestling in the countryside lovers? Indeed, are they wrestling at all? The poem suggests that they maybe but we will never know. Which is fine by the Grumpy Vegan. Because the look between them and the body language suggests intimacy between men which, if it were more prevalent today, would surely help to dissolve all that stupid, silly macho nonsense we all have to put up with for no good reason.
You are a murderer
No you are not, but really a wrestler
Either way it’s just the same
For from the ring of your entangled body
Clean as leather, lustful as a lily
Will nail me down
On your stout neck like a column, like a pillar of tendons
The thoughtful forehead
(In fact, it’s thinking nothing)
When the forehead slowly moves and closes the heavy eyelids
Inside, a dark forest awakens
A forest of red parrots
Seven almonds and grape leaves
At the end of the forest a vine
Covers the house where two boys
Lie in each others arms: I’m one of them, you the other
In the house, melancholy and terrible anxiety
Outside the keyhole, a sunset
Dyed with the blood of the beautiful bullfighter Escamillo
Scorched by the sunset, headlong, headfirst
Falling, falling, a gymnast
If you’re going to open your eyes, nows the time, wrestler
Image: unknown
Text: Sleeping Wrestler by Mutsuo Takahashi from Poems of a Penisist, 1975, translated by Hiroaki Sato
