ADAM TAVEL, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

On a Photograph of Scott Weiland
at the Virgin Festival, Calgary, 2008
         for Andrew Dewald

Mascara smear, megaphone, your Rolex glints
sundown at the lens. It’s early in the set
because your shirt’s still on, your loosened tie
a dangled crow beneath your scarf. This look

part glam, part corporate intern overtime
is seven years before your heart gives out
while wasted groupies wilt and clack their phones.
The weight you lost stays lost—so gaunt the press

declares each tour a relapse. How does it fray,
the patience for pretending to be saved
for kids, new wife, the band’s back catalog?
Each city’s shrieking girls swarm at your bus

and hold their baggies up beneath the glare
of loading docks behind the stadium.
Resist, we say, and shrug at songs that seem
mere remnants of our adolescent rage,

a dead decade, a movie we can’t stand.
How many times are you in court until
you dress the same for gigs—a wry apology
for what we claim as ours, your body bent

into a note you still could hit? The mic
hangs at your side, a tuning interlude.
You’re staring now beyond the dusk-drenched crowd,
those cloaked machines that fade the stage to smoke.

I rediscovered Stone Temple Pilots in the summer of 2020, a band that was among my favorites in the early nineties, and through the wonders of YouTube, watched several dozen performances throughout their career that I had never seen. I was struck by Weiland’s weary earnestness at the end, by the newfound restraint with which he performed, how there was no boy left, and more than anything, how strong and expressive his voice remained live. Early middle age seems pathetic until you’re there, so now that I’m there, I couldn’t help but reassess Weiland through that lens. At the time, I was already hard at work on an ekphrastic manuscript that was obsessed with how we see and gauge and judge. When I came across the photograph referenced in my poem’s title, the rest was, as we say, history. The poem tumbled out in pentameter, and my slant rhyme and internal rhyme grew out of my subject. I spent my teens deifying rock stars, so perhaps my ultimate, if unconscious, yearning was to reckon with my own gaze. (Or should I say: with my gazes? Or should I say: with that old lie? The old lie that goes: surely we don’t choose what we see.)

Adam Tavel is the author of six books of poetry, including three new collections: Green Regalia (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022), now available from the publisher and from Amazon, Rubble Square (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022), and Sum Ledger (Measure Press, 2022), both forthcoming later this year.