Every Pub Crawl post includes a journal publication of mine—in chronological order from earliest to most recent—with notes about context, craft, autobiography, or close reading. This week’s Pub Crawl features “Batman in Berlin.” It appeared alongside two other poems of mine in La Petite Zine (winter 2000), an online journal created and edited by Daniel Nester.
Batman in Berlin
Walking along Surf Avenue I see the Berlin night
scurry from the headlight of a Citroën.
When I turn the next corner,
Batman casts a shadow over moonlit Gotham
and I know I am back in the city,
where footsteps echo and shadows loom,
and climbing down the stairs
to the cool sand beneath the boardwalk,
I am Orpheus descending,
down on my knees before you can say blow me.
Here in the dark I slake my thirst
for lies that taste like truth.
Here in the dark, the Heliconian Muses
thrust the vatic staff down my throat
and I assume my poetic mantle.
Here in the dark you press me against the pylon.
I come in my jeans.
I come close to love.
Notes
“Batman in Berlin” appeared in La Petite Zine in the winter of 2000 along with two other poems, “Instead of Names” and “After,” which appeared in Beachcomber Mike as Pub Crawl #2 and Pub Crawl #3. Together, these poems constituted my second journal publication after “What the Falconer Sees” appeared in the inaugural online edition of Brooklyn Review that same year (featured in Pub Crawl #1).
I wrote “Batman in Berlin” sometime in late 1997 or early 1998. I wanted the poem to be lurid in the manner of classic first-person detective novels like those of James M. Cain, a spirit also evoked by the Batman comic books of my 1960s and 1970s youth. The reference to a Citroën in Berlin was a (perhaps abstruse) nod to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the novel that sparked my middle-school love affair with John le Carré. Of course, I analogize all of those references—detective novels of the 1930s, espionage novels of the 1960s, comic books of the 1970s—to my own sexual adventures under the boardwalk in Brighton Beach in the 1990s.
Moreover, I turn the whole thing into a scene of poetic investiture, conflating not only the poetic with the erotic, but also the noir impulse with a kind of BDSM sensibility—as if Batman were drawn by Tom of Finland rather than Bob Kane. Orpheus descending into Hades to rescue Eurydice—a story best known from Book X of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—becomes the speaker going down the stairs from the boardwalk to the under-the-boardwalk to cruise for gay sex. The Muses who confer poetic powers on the Greek epic poet Hesiod in his poem Theogony (The Birth of the Gods) by bopping him over the hand with a staff of laurel here bestow their musical gifts via oral penetration, aka throat fucking. In fact, the lines
Here in the dark I slake my thirst for lies that taste like truth.
echo the words of the Muses to Hesiod in the Theogony. I discuss this at some length in Rejected! #1, a post that features my poem “Investiture,” which likens the emergence of the poetic impulse with the passage of the adolescent into puberty.
I’m keeping this post mercifully short. If there’s anything else you’d like to know about this poem in particular, or my conflation of poetry and sexuality as expressions of creativity, I urge you to drop a comment below, and I will address your questions or comments as best I can.
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