Return of the Naked Man

In Robert Tremmel's sly, playful poems, the naked man contains multitudes: alternately bodied and bodiless, Muse and mused-upon, happy to disrupt life on earth and observe it from afar. When the man is, as in "Saturday Night," "out in his garden / with an open bottle of Budweiser / and an old pie pan / from Baker's Square," his vision is cosmic, as he also ponders "his drinking buddies / the slugs, already / stirring deep beneath / the lettuce leaves." In "Somewhere There is This Lake," the boundary between the earthly and the sacred is even more thrillingly tangled, to the point where there is no more boundary. The man realizes his boss's mind is "completely riddled / with bullet points / and she is pointedly / ignorant of the riddle / and infinite points / that are the naked man / himself, sitting there / in a straight-backed / chair, silently / watching the drama / and the riddle / of the infinite points / that are the woman / sitting in front of him." If the naked man has indeed returned (from exile? the future? the great beyond?), he also never left. Through his eyes, all things are not just possible but probable.