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Arnold de Vos
Nakedness Is
Your Priestly Robe
Poems
To Thiago Rodrigues Viero
J’ai dit: ‘Ton amour est mon ami et ma famille.’
(Djalâl-od-Dîn Rûmî, Rubâi’yât)
Foreword by Mia Lecomte
English translation by Adeodato Piazza Nicolai
E
Eloquent Books
New York, New York
Some of these poems (Cross-dressed as a Man, Seen in an Eatery,
Ambush, My God is a Young Boy, In the Valsugana Frost, Icarus and
The Hand Not Given) were published in Italian and in English in
Metamorphoses (Vol. 14.1-2: Other Italies/Italy’s Others edited by
Thalia Pandiri, Amherst/Northampton, Mass. 2006); the poem
Together was published in Chroma Journal 7/Spring 2008, p. 41.
Copyright © 2008 Arnold de Vos. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without
the permission, in writing, from the publisher.
Pastel on page 10 and drawing on page 63 by Orlando Gasperini.
Eloquent Books
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ISBN: 978-1-60976-967-3
Printed in the United States of America
Book Design: Bruce Salender
CONTENTS
FOREWORD by Mia Lecomte .............................................. 5
POETIC STATEMENT ............................................................ 9
Cross-dressed as a Man .................................................... 11
Seen in an Eatery.............................................................. 12
In Love ............................................................................. 13
From the Cupola of Marble Veneer ................................. 14
Transfiguration ................................................................. 15
In the Humble Sun of the Flesh........................................ 16
We Shed Sunday's Best.................................................... 17
Next to My Shadow.......................................................... 18
In the Gurbì Beneath the Olive Tree ................................ 20
The Body is a Lantern ...................................................... 22
My God is a Young Boy .................................................. 23
I Made a Fortress of My Heart......................................... 24
Despair Is a Flower .......................................................... 25
In the Valsugana Frost ..................................................... 27
The Sound of the Blow-out .............................................. 28
Ambush ............................................................................ 29
To the Moon ..................................................................... 30
Icarus ................................................................................ 31
Identity.............................................................................. 32
Redeemed Intellect........................................................... 33
Sublimation ...................................................................... 34
A Bird On a Branch.......................................................... 35
I Took Off the Mask and You Saw Me............................ 36
I Was Not Born Inside a Tent .......................................... 37
If I Kneel, I Am a Stack of Books.................................... 38
My Prayer Niche .............................................................. 39
If a Returning Prayer Could Reach Us............................. 40
Love Is a Beardless Black-Eyed Youth ........................... 41
A Youth Flexible as a Reed ............................................. 42
O You Who Arouse My Body ......................................... 43
Golgotha ........................................................................... 44
From Subtraction to Subtraction ...................................... 45
We Were Created But Not Completed............................. 46
From Linen Cloth ............................................................. 47
To the World in Front of Me............................................ 48
In the Silence of the Room............................................... 49
Hope ................................................................................. 50
The Beat in the Harem ..................................................... 51
In the Erg .......................................................................... 52
The Hand Not Given ........................................................ 53
Thirteen Lines .................................................................. 54
Loca neglecta.................................................................... 55
Together............................................................................ 56
The Body’s Ethics ............................................................ 57
What Is Implicit in Poetry ................................................ 58
Telescoping Tubes............................................................ 59
May God Raise You......................................................... 60
BI(BLI)OGRAPHICAL NOTE ................................................ 61
FOREWORD
We were created but not completed
Nakedness Is Your Priestly Robe opens with the heartwrenching prayer of a prisoner who is “cross-dressed”:
“…Moved,/ I rock you in my earthly/ universe/…/ I hold
my flesh in my arms/…/ as a result of the spotted skin/
that separates me from you” (Cross-dressed as a Man).
The profound meaning of such “disguise,” and of the
imprisonment it causes and is a consequence thereof,
resides entirely in the change of the incarnate being who,
with painful self-awareness, proceeds across the abyss of
his own amorous sentiment. In an autobiographic profile,
Arnold de Vos calls it “homoerotic” love, a specification
certainly circumscribing the range of so much pain,
without however diminishing its universality, the excesses
and the recesses of an exalted and exalting presenceabsence by means of which the outlines become bare
coverings of the human disguise in the solitude of his
prison.
Therefore only “the soul/ yeasted by the absence of
clothes” (Next to My Shadow) can be consigned to death;
without the mask, the nakedness remains “beneath the
mantle/ of a body I uneasily adopted” (I Took Off the Mask
and You Saw Me); a nakedness that is appropriately the
cloth, a priestly robe, material for the sacralizing cut and
sew of erotic ecstasy.
A prayer addressed to the Father, followed by
others: addressed to other fathers, and sons, and to the
spirit, in a desperate sounding of a strident trinity
incapable of achieving wholeness and satisfaction through
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Arnold de Vos, Nakedness Is Your Priestly Robe
a loving harmony, but able only to celebrate its own
intrinsic and “triumphal discord” (Sublimation).
Disoriented by the jarring co-presence of the various
‘selves’, wherein only love possesses the force to attempt
a re-union―“My god is a body that returns me to God”
(My God is a Young Boy)―de Vos figures a mystery of
his own crucifixion: “O you who arouse my body,/ you
satisfy my mind: I hang between the two,/ a pendant and
on the cross” (O You Who Arouse My Body); in love, he
entrusts himself to the second person of the trinity,
charged both with guiding and resolving the
schizophrenia. It is, however, assigned to the man who is
always and solely the son, “born twice” (What Is Implicit
in Poetry) because of a paternity twice denied. Incorrupt
and perfect beauty, is a contrast and a complement to the
destroyed natural landscape of “rotten banks” and of “the
sun that smells of piss” (Transfiguration), or the unnatural
one of “a kitchen whose face is undone” (The Sound of the
Blow-out). The beauty of youthfulness is “…a naked
figurine/ [that] slightly comes to my attention,/ I weigh
and study it with crooked/ stares. An old man” (Despair Is
a Flower). Son incarnate as potential saviour, solely in
virtue of the body―“I answer my own questions/ because
I have a body at my shoulders/ that evolves my being
human/ from the grains of sand that make us up.” (To the
World in Front of Me)―and, thanks to this, capable of
moving, in a blasphemous orgasm that can only truly arise
from the gut, “from the burning bush of the pubis” (In the
Silence of the Room) to God: “You are the spy-glass
through which I see you, God/ expanding at the hand of
creation/ that holds you back, like the allure/ of this
charming tool in my hand” (Telescoping Tubes).
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Arnold de Vos, Nakedness Is Your Priestly Robe
Son descending from the word, magnificent
inspiration―“Come back often to get me, word/ bending
God to prayer” (In the Gurbì Beneath the Olive
Tree)―word that descends raw, “dart-like” and able to
heal even “the atypical” (Redeemed Intellect), the basis of
a quotidian and religiously literary resurrection: “If I
kneel, I am a stack of books/ intentionally fallen on the
floor/ to unfold on the right pages/ the enclosure of
prayer” (If I Kneel, I Am a Stack of Books).
Son inexorably destined to fail while pursuing the
crooked path of the “concert for man-made instruments”
(From Linen Cloth), to endlessly keep on walking toward
“the way stations/ of the body” (My Prayer Niche) in a via
crucis that is both desolate and cynically self-aware.
Born in Holland, Arnold de Vos lived many years in
Tunisia and now resides in Italy for quite some time. He
has written in his mother tongue (Dutch), in English, in
French and now his poems spring forth spontaneously in
Italian, in a prolific and almost automatic outpouring. His
geographic, linguistic and sexual migration delineates the
kaleidoscopic existence of a “counter figure,” a double
(May God Raise You), that causes further reverberations of
those convoluted thoughts about the trinity: “I lay next to
my shadow/ on the wall, shadow without thickness, yet/
hawk-like and pouting. Loved and hated/ as the loved one
by the beloved” (Next to My Shadow); it remixes, without
results, the fanciful fragments of “the human puzzle
always with one missing piece” (From the Cupola of
Marble Veneer).
The only road to salvation from this centrifugal
entrapment, the only hope ― which is not insignificantly
“a woman of pleasure/ virgin forever” (Hope) ― seems to
abide in a personal, creatural, and universal nullification
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Arnold de Vos, Nakedness Is Your Priestly Robe
that systematically proceeds from subtraction to
subtraction: “Only a tall flight ends on the ground./ The
very need to fly/ makes the precipice slide,/ the sea bottom
generate/ shoals” (From Subtraction to Subtraction). Thus
one ultimately attains, after the failure of all additive and
multiplicative attempts with absolute zero, a pacification
with nothingness. This nothingness is attained by means of
a poverty in all its aspects, and is seen as the only way to
sublimate both personal and worldwide evil.
It is from nothingness that a daring wind draws its
strength to blow across these poems; it is from the desert,
and not only the one in the sun-drenched Tunisian
country-side, that the words of de Vos chase each other in
a flight of classical elegance, refined by echoes, so as to
mingle themselves with “remote ages and cultures” and
outline some form of personal lightness of being.
You circle over. Meanwhile “a bell calls to mass/
the murky soul of the world.”
Mia Lecomte
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Arnold de Vos, Nakedness Is Your Priestly Robe
POETIC STATEMENT
Born in Holland at the dawn of World War Two, I have
found in poetry a form of reparation and refuge from the
ills of the world. Inspired by the flagellating beauty of
humans and things, poetry however extorts from me, as if
under torture, confessions that tend to be wrongly
interpreted, thus causing further lacerations.
The virtually conflicting rapport with the reader
often causes me to escape into remote ages and cultures,
in which the poets dealt with issues that are consonant
with mine: the homoerotic relation, the transposition of
the bipolar tension in the man–God relationship.
Particularly fascinated by the Sufi poetry of
Arabian-Persian derivation, I have attained an
understanding of the Middle–Eastern world by
assimilating the writings of Annemarie Schimmel, the
refined Islamologist departed in 2003. Years spent in
Tunisia have contributed to my cultural enrichment as a
poet who wholeheartedly prizes poverty in all of its forms
as the only means for sublimating the ills of the individual
and of the world.
Arnold de Vos
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Arnold de Vos, Nakedness Is Your Priestly Robe
CROSS-DRESSED AS A MAN
Inside the metallic voice
of your stars, Father, I discover
how deeply one of your
tormenting sighs engulfs me, a scream
whose call I cannot answer. Moved,
I rock you in my earthly
universe, I silently stroll with you inside me
in the garden between the dark and ruined paths
of what cannot be: I cannot get out
of myself. I hold my flesh in my arms
among the blind flashes of reflected
lanterns, as a result of the spotted skin
that separates me from you.
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Arnold de Vos, Nakedness Is Your Priestly Robe
SEEN IN AN EATERY
To eat just one dish, having this graceful,
divinely quick body descended to earth
to go hunting, to fish,
or maybe to make honest love
in a country of thieves, spendthrift among the poor
even of your half-moon smile, with eyes like brown
stars
longing for God
among imbeciles illiterates idiots dumbfounded in love
as I am; you spin around my world
and don’t attack
even me: totally willing to fly to heaven with you,
a thief among thieves, stuffed chair among chairs.
Lucky
the chair that will hold you,
the angel that flies over you, your clothes too tight
fitting. But you've no blemish:
you eat just one dish, having this graceful,
divinely quick body descended to earth. And you stand
above me.
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