% % all the lines of the body, all the long accelerating passages of energy reach towards the sex hanging in its triple ease. The hands are too large, enormously capable, but the body is not yet grown to their capacity. They are in league with the head which stares off into the distance seeing what must be done. Yet the message is the sex is the source of doing. At the museum too I watched the watchers. The young women looked at the David as if they could learn something, the older ones as if they knew something or longed for something, the men with a mingling of envy and pride. 1 he morning after I saw the statue—sleepless, up early walking the streets—nothing open, no coffee, finally an espresso bar with a sleepy-eyed girl turning the key. Inside I stood at the bar when three small dark Italians walked in looked at my hulking Scandinavian frame, started to snigger, and I swear I heard Goliath among the nudges and winks. I must feel self-conscious about being a middle-aged man among a busload of young Davids. They like me, though when I walk through the streets with one of their young women, I am their enemy, the one they must kill before they can come to their kingdoms. % X ^ n o t W r °ng. middle age. It leaps outward making the world ring with his will. Ve live in an age where that energy suspect. We suspect i t in ourselves, j r women suspect i t for us. Maybe they arc . ' why do I feel such loss? x am supposed to meet some o f my young friends by Romeo and Juliet’s balcony. Instead, I think I ’l l have another with my comrades here. I t is good to s it in the setting Italian sun waiting for women to walk by, drinking bittersweet Campari, thinking o f David, thinking o f how his bodygrew to his hands, how he became both poet and king. And how do we learn to do this, become our richest selves and yet not burn with the w ill’s corruption? T h e re is, beyond, a fear— as a friend o f ours once said, “Great Nature has another thing to do to you and me,” so the body goes its way, still clinging to its old desires, carrying us with it. When David’s blood cooled about his kingly bones, they brought him Abishag—thatyoung chick—to look at, and so I s it here with my friends watching the women walk by, my languid friend slipping deeper into melancholy, my angry one becoming more ferocious in the fading light. Writer Nils Peterson lives in Campbell, California. Artist Stephen Leflar is a frequent contributor to CSQ. He lives in Portland. Tth ink of another kind of masculine figure— a Poseidon or Zeus, as male and as naked as David, his arm raised to hurl a thunderbolt or trident, the statue in Athens, that attribute lost now in the Adriatic. This body is filled out, balanced, mature, muscles alive with living. The genitals are there, but part of a fuller man. His is the energy of an accomplished, masculine
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