Poem

Fire Island

after Derek Jarman’s My Very Beautiful Movie

SHOLTO BUCK

Before the orgy, a friend told me he cried
watching Derek Jarman’s My Very Beautiful Movie.
I was sitting on his bed, slowly taking off my shirt.
I embarrassed myself then, saying declaratively
that I hadn’t seen it and movies do not make me cry.

My friend laughed. I’ve been known to fall
in love with what breaks me. An attempt
to cross boundaries, a poem, a wedge
of light sliced in the dune.

The film is six minutes long, and I watch it
in the Melbourne Airport without sound, so I can write
about my life. On the screen, a thin man is naked
on the beach, a starfish curling

in his hand. The image looks like water
pooling in an eyelid. A warping piece of glass
and the slope of his hard shoulder. The star

is a porous shell. Shattered
piles of wood on sand. He makes
a shape with his elbow. His leg,
silhouettes into a dick.

Gay guys come to fire island to look at water,
and to participate in orgies. A story
that’s been told. My face reflects
on airport glass and back

to the wooden ruin, the part of the sand that is a border
between wet and dry. I am concentrating
on what’s in front of me. This horizon is
a flat and definite reality.
A shelf you could lean an arm on.

The wool of a wave flows in. I pause on
his speedo in the sand. The starfish rests
between his lips and thumb, counterpoised
by the horizon. A lilac line

cut between a cell-red blob.
Scans and scans of ocean
glass. The sky lowers on the star, turning
pink and moving slowly out of focus

This response was commissioned by Gus Fisher Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days, 2024.