The Enemy

Rafael Campo

"Rafael Campo's "The Enemy" moves with naturalness, speed, and balance between experiences of domestic love--a couple of gay men, celebrating rites of daily ordinariness--and scenes from a doctor's life. We turn to Campo for frankness, freshness, and the tang of truth, and we are rewarded."--Rosanna Warren, author of "Departure"

Acknowledgments xi
I. The Enemy
Dialogue with Sun and Poet 3
Addressed to Her (Provincetown, June 2002) 4
"Elsa, Varadero, 1934" 5
Night Has Fallen 6
Personal Mythology 7
Piranhas 8
Brief Treatise on the New Millennial Poetics 10
El Viejo y la Mar 12
Ode to the Man Incidentally Caught in the Photograph of Us on My Desk 13
The Enemy 14
God, Gays, and Guns 15
Patriotic Poem 17
Post-9/11 Parable 18
Sestina Dolorosa 19
What Passes Now for Moral Discourse 21
from Libro de Preguntas 22
II. Eighteen Days in France
Eighteen Days in France 27
III. Toward a Theory of Memory
from Cien Sonetos de Amor 47
A Simple Cuban Meal 51
The Sailfish 52
Ganymede, to Zeus 53
After the Long Drive
>For Jorge, after Twenty Years 57
Song in the Off-Season 60
Catastrophic Sestina 61
Toward a Theory of Memory 63
Patagonia 67
Defense of Marriage 68
The Story of Us 69
The Sodomite's Lament 71
Equinoctial Downpour 72
Pantoum for Our Imagined Break-Up 73
The Changing of the Seasons 74
Once, It Seemed Better 75
October, Last Sail 76
IV. Dawn, New Age
Dawn, New Age 79
Allegorical 80
Progress 81
The Crocuses 82
Crybaby Haiku 83
"Silence=Death" 87
Clinical Vignettes 88
You Bring Out the Doctor in Me 90
Composite of Three Poems from the Same Anthology by Williams, Rukeyser, and Sexton 92
Tuesday Morning 93
Arriving 95
Absolution 97
On Doctoring 98
Sick Day 99