REGINALD SHEPHERD

"Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair"

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In the painting by Guido Reni of Saint Sebastian

in the Palazzo Rosso, which reproduction makes available

to those who travel only on the page, the saint to be 

(he’s not yet assumed by artifice, encumbered

with perfections) endures continual martyrdom 

with a visual sigh, gazing almost directly upward 

as if to ask What now my love, or hum a chorus of

Is that all there is, the body always some song

or another. The eye tramping the simulacrum 

of a surface hands have touched can’t help but note

how lush the uncorrupted flesh appears: the curve, for one 

example, of the waist (narrowest circuit of the boy),

just beneath the instance of an arrow’s entrance, or

the shadow just above the tangled loincloth that is surely

pubic hair. One grasps that sainthood is an attribute of youth,

the wondrous fair, as in old ballads; they always end.

The boy in the Eagle Discount Supermarket, 

for another, an apparition in a backwards baseball cap 

appraising cuts of meat in artificial light, 

deciding what he can afford

to buy, how much each cut costs. I love the ground

on where be stands. His face? Unverifiable.