As an openly gay man, I think everything in my life—including my writing—is queer at some level. Everything I do is necessarily a reflection of my sensibility, of who I am inside. But having said that, I also believe that queerness is only one aspect of identity. There’s gender, there’s race, there’s nationality, regionality, the degree to which one is or isn’t a sports fan, a foodie, etc. When I walk my dog, I presume I’m a gay biracial man from Massachusetts who has lived in Missouri for a long time—but I’m also “just” a dog walker, and it’s likely that none of the identity markers I mentioned are going to occur to me, unless something happens to make them occur—someone yells a racist slur from a passing car, for example.
The same goes for how queerness works in the poems. I was once told that I stopped writing gay poems around the time of my third book. The comment came from a frustration that I was writing about wrestling with ideas like fidelity and mortality, as opposed to my two earlier books that specifically looked, here and there at least, at sex between two men. I think fidelity and mortality are also issues that pertain to queer people. And always, when I write of these subjects, it’s through my sensibility as a queer man, that’s always the context. To say that these aren’t queer subjects is reductive and demeaning. Why should we assume that our queerness is grounded entirely in sex? Surely queerness is as multifaceted as being human, itself—queerness is a manifestation of being human.
I’ve also been told that my way of writing is queer—that I have queered language in some way. I think what’s meant is that I tend not to adhere strictly to the demotic mode that governs most contemporary American poetry. Rather, I have a fondness for sentences that deploy syntax in more complex ways, which is to say that I make use of complex sentences characterized by dependent clauses and inflected syntax—not always, but in part. I can see how this can seem a queering of the reigning mode, yes. But it’s a kind of sentence-making that’s straight from the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, a tradition that governed most sentences in English and American literature up through Modernism. Which is to say it’s a very old tradition, but like many things old, can seem radical when so many have forgotten it. I’m oddly queer—an outsider—because of upholding tradition. I think queerness is a little like coolness. The truly cool don’t think they’re being cool, they’re just being themselves. Most of the time that’s how I feel about myself as a queer man—by whatever name, I’m just being myself.
To All Appearances
We drove to Head of the Meadow beach because we’d always
meant to, and never had, and we’d been wanting
to swim again.
and it was as if all those years of surrendering differently but with
equal abandon to joy or sorrow—depending on which
had come when, and in what form—had vanished:
we stood precisely at that point in being young that’s
just before the moment when what we expect
is one thing, and what we hope, another.
We swam until it no longer looked like swimming, but instead
more like trying to rescue whatever inside ourselves had mattered once
from ourselves, by moving farther away from it.
What We Did, Who We Did It With
… any room, really, across which
the light breaks like a rough sea,
the light washing over the walls’
colorlessness, its trophy-lessness,
then the light not so much receding,
wavelike, more like staggering
elsewhere after a fight won, but
barely, an effect of having had to—
before entering the room—make its
way through the sycamore leaves
whose only constant has been
a movement patterned, it seems,
after impatience itself as to
which wind to bow down for,
which to resist, or at least
try to, though leaves can know
nothing of course about volition,
in this respect the leaves are so
little different from the light,
they may as well be the light, for now
superintending the room,
its walls, its lone door half open,
to be shut carefully and walked
indifferently away from, why look
line”line”back at all—don’t—they
may as well be the sea
the light roughly breaks like …
Barbarian
—You know that moment when you’ve left someone,
even knowing you could stay with him and it could work,
and there’s no one else, nothing like that, still you don’t
go back, is that what’s meant by free will, or is that
fate—what it’s been,
all along? Sometimes—even here,
in what I hope is the early part, still, of the second half
of my statistical life, where I’ve figured out how to be
mostly alone, left alone, as in that’s how I want it—it’s
as if I’ve let myself down, which only has to mean
I’ve expected too much of myself—“of,” not “for”; about
that much, I think I’m still quite clear. Likewise,
like being told to write a love poem without images or
maybe two exceptions
can seem the only way I’ve known how to love a person,
but that makes it sound like a bad thing. That
can’t be right … At this time of year, the best light arrives
just before nightfall. It’s when the trees seem most
what they’ve always been: trees not questioning
their necessarily unpersuadable selves, trees beneath
which, after storms especially, I find the occasional
downed bird, dead or, more difficult, still dying. Who can
say what it counts for, but I believe
not nothing. That I’ve rested my head
on the ground beside it. That in
what was left of the light I sang to it. Hush now.
You’re not the first piece of gentleness to have crossed this hand.
