Ariga: Poetry: Several poems by Doug Tanoury

Confession Of A Pedophile Priest & Other Poems

Confession Of A Pedophile Priest

"Forgive me Father for I have sinned"
And broken the sanctity of holy vows
With a single kiss
Of a sleeping hermaphrodite.
Oh, I have traced with my mouth
The pink crescent shade on one perfect cheek.
I brushed my lips across radiating warmth
And inhaled the strangely sweet scent of sin,
A mere trace of odor,
A slight smell of ripeness
Like the last fruits of late summer.

"Well, Aqua Velva my genitalia"
My voice is the song of the castrati.
The Jubilate Domino of my tongue
That touches and shapes each word
And mingles with the moistness of each new note.
Within the dimness of dark boundaries
And in the of fogginess of faded demarcations
I am hopeless to help myself
Or fight off the gnawing temptations
That grow so irresistibly
Into the fullness of compulsion.

"The sin of Sodom"
In the quiet of the sacristy
And in the twilight of the corridor
That leads to a bedroom
I suffer the burning flagellation
Of angel feather kisses,
In a litany of misguided desires
That is the limpness of a eunuch's lust
And can never be satisfied
By the most solemn benediction
Of yet another young boy's body.

Building

It sometimes feels as if each word is a brick
And the space between each line, a layer of mortar,
That will dry slowly and harden with time,
For it is the simple rules of symmetry that apply
And a certain one up the other construction
That brings to lines a lightness and geometric grace
And to angles the sharp contrast of light and shadow
That is the secret of the pediment and pilaster
And the articulated magic of the cornice.

It is the one line written by Theodore Dreiser
"Who shall interpret the language of stones?"
That somehow endeared me to the man.
And I recall it often and whisper the question,
Sometimes half silent, Often out loud,
As I stand facing each new façade or run my hand
Against the cool smoothness of granite and
The sandy roughness of hewn limestone.

It is with shape and form, the building blocks
Of structure, that I speak to you now,
With plumb lines and yard long levels,
With rock cut and laid with precision,
With pigment mixed with plaster,
And with stone that is somehow budding
New foliage, flowering and beginning to bloom
And to grow to span the distance from earth to heaven.

Cloud Boulevard

In Pennsylvania coal country,
Near the Pocono's,
Where far horizons rise to the sky,
I know that today the town of Hazelton
Is oddly still in the sunlight
Like a cat sitting on the window sill,
And Cloud Boulevard stretches greenly lush
With long lawns that lay before tall wood frame homes,
And it seems to me
That time advances with a lazy reluctance
On afternoons such as this in mid-May.

I have come to walk on Cloud Boulevard
And to remember my life here as a stranger,
A life lived
At what now seems a great distance away

Words On The Road

On the road leading from town today,
My thoughts ranging on a rural landscape
Of barns in varying degrees of dereliction
And lean slightly to one side
Next to the perfect vertical of solos,
Some with domes and others without,
Against a background green of newly planted fields,
I thought of her, quite suddenly she came to mind,
Just the way she always does, with no more foreshadowing
Than a sunlit afternoon in late May,
And just barely, I heard the words, so silent,
They teetered on the threshold
Of audible perception,
And echoed in that nether region
That is not quite reality, where one would call it
Perhaps an aural hallucination,
A momentary confusion of the senses,
An illusion of a fleeting nature
That makes the wind seem to
Whisper, or the breeze
That would bend the tree limbs to
Mimic human speech and say
To me in a single breath,
No, more a hoarse exhale:
"Quo Vadis?"
And remember the introspections and
Revelations that occur to a sole traveler
Upon a lonely stretch of road,
That makes even the most determined and resolute
Slow their pace or perhaps fully stop
And reflect on their destination and
Question for a moment their mission.

Today's Situation

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Confession Of A Pedophile Priest & Other Poems

Doug Tanoury

Today's Situation