Mapplethorpe
by Jack Fritscher
Caro Roberto! He loved cameras, Kools, Coke, and
for two years me flying round-trips together SFO JFK.
Lying in each other’s post-coital arms slugabed on his mattress
on his black plank floor at 24 Bond Street,
his photographer’s tongue licked my writer’s eye,
in the morning rolling hard over me to reach the ringing phone,
saying “Ciao, Principessa,” loving princesses and actresses
and dancers and the seven-foot calla lilies in my California garden.
“Patti’s a genius,” he confided, canonizing her face twinned with his,
screening me rushes of Patti in Moving and
Robert Having His Nipple Pierced
(with Patti keening poems on the soundtrack)
while his kitchen table caught fire from his forgotten cigarette.
There were always three people in his love affairs.
Gone, touring, singing, marrying someone else, widowed,
the Smith girl burned in his brain
She was he and he was she in his solo portraits of her and himself.
At the after-hours Mineshaft bar, the democracy of anonymous sex
leveled the playing field of stardom, yet
he was a camera, cool, coked, aloof, a voyeur
turning the two floors of wild orgy into a casting call.
He ran his career like a department store,
ambushing trendy couples in SoHo galleries, saying,
“If you don’t like this picture, you’re not as avant garde as you think.”
He was the goat-footed Pan, holding my hand in restaurants,
shopping together down Christopher Street for small Satanic bronzes
invoking Rimbaud and Verlaine, inspiring his own
famous flowers of evil, pistils and stamens, vaginas and cocks.
Late one night I sat in the gunsite of his camera
witnessing him work his process cool without drama.
I love you, he/I said, as he shot me, until
two years of lust evaporated to sweet friendship.
At the end, dying young, he filmed flowers more than faces
because he could no longer stand eyes looking back at him
through the safety glass of his lens.
He loved. She loved. I loved.
I got his seed. She got his ashes.