These poems from
my book, The
Alchemy of Opposites,
are
made available here primarily for students in my English 386 class to
supplement the section, "Poetry and Personal Identity," in X. J.
Kennedy and Dana Gioia's
An
Introduction to Poetry, 10th edition. Since there are no
poems of gay identity in this section, I provide these from my own
book.
Survivor
A poet said of her mastectomy
she hadn't known to remember
the last time a man
touched her nipple.
Likewise,
I don't remember the last time
I failed to use a condom.
Some memories linger:
secret places where tongue & lips
no longer probe, the salty, sometimes bitter,
sometimes sweet taste of what
I never taste today.
Nothing like the poet's loss
you probably think.
Consider then
the loss of a hundred
once familiar faces,
faces that blend into one black space
like the entrance to a cave,
a bat cave with guano rotting,
exuding ammonia, poisonous to human breath.
Think of two hundred eyes sinking
into black holes, sinking until they lose
the power to see. Think of bone decay,
dumbfounded bodies,
reeking of concentration camp.
Feel that magnitude:
understand what I've been spared,
notice the barbell on my back,
the pressing need to make the words,
my words, my witness, my loud whistle,
vital as oxygen.
All the Young Men
They come in Pre-Raphaelite curls,
androgynous shoulder-length straight hair,
brown and blond, red and black;
they part their hair like boys,
like surfers, like curly-headed angels;
they razor-cut their sides, then plaster what's left
in rows on top, they make corn-rows,
crew-cut faces of youth, ears, napes,
divine military cuts, tails, spikes,
sideburns that command my eyeballs
like their earrings, their tank tops, tits,
shoulders, arms, their delicate masculine hands;
their denim, their leather, their slim, tight
trousers, their hairy legs, their toes,
their sacred feet; they walk like warriors,
like tender initiates,--they have no inkling
they are holy. Sacred as ancient herms,
they mark boundaries, invite devotees.
Negative
For years I avoided the clinic.
Others announced or whispered
their test results, each occurrence
another hammer, another chink in the hive
falling like a dead bee at my feet.
My fears were like strange insects
flying hard into a light bulb,
a wolf whining, pawing at the door,
a baby squealing through the wall.
More than death, it was division
I feared: pain parceled out like welts,
a barbed fence between positive & negative,
on the margin again.
A mother with white hair who lost her son
tendered my test result,
an impossible gift: nonreactive.
Now I understand the notion
that dead bees leave behind honey,
that every insect, every burning light bulb,
every wailing wolf & screaming baby--
every one is enmeshed in the great
mysterious, swirling ball of the living
and the dead.
Hanging On
Every man/woman/institution
that ever claimed either of us
or tried to claim us
conspires now to keep us apart,
despises the idea of my wanting
or having you, another man,
from another culture,
who speaks with lilting Latino L's
I love to hear.
They would prefer us loitering
by some toilet or park bench,
locked up in solitary boxes;
they want our lifeblood
stifled by tobacco, cocaine, alcohol.
They want stinking embarrassment
like a fart
or a festering welt.
Better, they'd like to have us
wasting alone on hospice beds,
pain eating like permanent guilt,
or no bed at all--a cardboard
hovel under a freeway,
till what they call
the consequences of our behavior
betray us unto death.
If we must be, they want us
separate from each other, martyrs to their
bizarre notion that biology makes mistakes,
that my loving you in any
physical way is some crime against nature,
some injury to their inarticulate greed
to weld power like a chisel,
to hammer us into gravel.
Here is my answer:
I believe in biochemistry,
I believe in connecting tissue with tissue,
filling up vacuums.
I want us to come at the same time
a thousand times,
to put my lips to yours
and hang on for sweet, sweet life.
from
The Alchemy of Opposites (St.
John, KS: Chiron Review Press, 2000).
Copyright © 2000 Clifton Snider
See also "
Aspen in the Wind" (scroll to
the last poem on the page), "
Epithalamion,"
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and
Homoerotic
Poems by Lord Byron.
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Page last modified: 6 September
2003.