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This may sound queer, but in 1985 I held the delicate hands of Dan White: I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk was made monument—no, myth—by the years since he was shot. I remember when Harvey was shot: twenty, and I knew I was queer. Those were the years, Levi’s and leather jackets holding hands on Castro Street, cheering for Harvey Milk— elected on the same day as Dan White. I often wonder about Supervisor White, who fatally shot Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk, who was one of us, a Castro queer. May 21, 1979: a jury hands down the sentence, seven years— in truth, five years— for ex-cop, ex-fireman Dan White, for the blood on his hands; when he confessed that he had shot the mayor and the queer, a few men in blue cheered. And Harvey Milk? Why cry over spilled milk, some wondered, semi-privately, for years— it meant “one less queer.” The jurors turned to White. If just the mayor had been shot, Dan might have had trouble on his hands— but the twelve who held his life in their hands maybe didn’t mind the death of Harvey Milk; maybe, the second murder offered him a shot at serving only a few years. In the end, he committed suicide, this Dan White. And he was made presentable by a queer.

Just when I had long outgrown those late-night seizures in my hand, those involuntary impulses return to make my fingers twitch like the tips of twigs after the bird leaps off the branch— what a crafty little devil, bouncing back all feathered and ticklish, jittery with pleasure when it finally finds its nest. The sheets become as damp as the sweaty shirts that cling to the backs of men at the dance, and how I pity the girls who undress their lovers before sex. When I started loving other bodies instead, allowing other temporary guests to mold their shapes inside my flesh— a torso of my arm, a shoulder of my mouth, a waist or a buttock of my leg—I had no need to concentrate my rapture to a single sticky place since every movement in my skin was slowing down inside the vat of honey I was swimming in. Oh bath with tongue, oh alchemy of heat and bed. The memory of so much sex enough to keep me sated in the quieter evenings of my third and final age. So imagine my surprise when those possessions from my adolescence woke me up again, but in the guise of scribbling from my pen. Not fancy or confession but something in the middle, like the mole that snuggles in the space between my breasts, that glorious discovery that makes the men cry out, the women shudder with anticipation or intent. It's more like poetry, because it whistles through the paper like the weekend afternoons I summoned passersby from behind the window's curtain. What wonder to seduce with sound, granting serendipitous fantasy—here a table with rotating thighs, there a closet panting with exhaustion, there the eye of the voyeuristic clock bold and looking to be satisfied with one pair of feet pointing at two opposite corners of the room, three fingers always vanishing inside the cluster of four hands that motion slowly left, slowly right— the capricious current of the underwater flower, five limbs comparing lengths and flexibility, their competition sabotaged by the arrival of a sixth contender, seven escalating levels in the throat— whimper, grunt, moan, sigh, whine, hum, groan, cry—oh, and if we're lucky, thinks the grinning clock, we will spiral up the scale (and down again) a good eight times, nine would be too much to ask, though not impossible since there was once a record-breaking tenth, remember? Eleven minutes for a quickie; at least twelve positions for a marathon

I’m a’kickin’ but not high, and I’m a’flappin’ but I can’t fly. — Florence Church A carpet of light, the ocean alive < half a moon muting the stars. I tell myself despair    is just a bad attitude:Get up, I say.Look— and the shimmer spends its name in my head. _____ These days    midlife holds the jagged edge: my nephew in prison, a prisoner> friends insane with work or sick of trying to be loved, my parents handing over their lives like evidence: my good mother, her mind     a trail of crumbs in a woods flocked with birds. --/-- To raise a child    break it like a wild horse — bend the will:get up, get dressed. I remember Emlen School staring me down, my lunch box, September: the spiked fence freshly painted. Then, the goodbye from my mother who’d fought my hard hair, lipstick like mist on my cheek. --/-- That instant when eyes meet and slide away — even love blinks, looks off like a stranger. With: Who are you with? --/-- I suspect everything. Outside the air moves a giant bird I cannot see. Still laced in this brown body: my aging heart — a-loom     a-loomdoom— still minds my thoughts, but rolls his eyes. _____ To see >< to be seen:  the life of the visible.  Don’t be shy. Glances pick my face. Once, I was a sperm and an egg, but they didn’t see me. --/-- Too small to walk alone: I held my father’s index finger. Philadelphia police caped in their black jackets — big badges     almost hungry — looking at us. --/-- In a mall: say a food court on Saturday     or a stadium just before the game. There’s this drone, this steady, muttering thrum punctured by packages — plastic this, paper that — torn and torn. “It’s hard not to be hungry.” --/-- Time     for bed: my mother reading The Three Little Pigs

1. THE SACRIFICE On this tile the knife like a sickle-moon hangs in the painted air as if it had learned a dance of its own, the way the boy has among the vivid breakable flowers, the way Abraham has among the boulders, his two feet heavy as stones. 2. NEAR SINAI God's hand here is the size of a tiny cloud, and the wordless tablets he holds out curve like the temple doors. Moses, reaching up must see on their empty surface laws chiseled in his mind by the persistent wind of the desert, by wind in the bulrushes. 3. THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT We know by the halos that circle these heads like rings around planets that the small donkey has carried his burden away from the thunder of the Old Testament into the lightning of the New. 4. AT THE ARMENIAN TILE SHOP Under the bright glazes Esau watches Jacob, Cain watches Abel. With the same heavy eyes the tilemaker's Arab assistant watches me, all of us wondering why for every pair there is just one blessing.

I was climbing up the sliding board When suddenly I felt A mosquito bite my bottom And it raised a big red welt. So I said to that mosquito, “I'm sure you wouldn't mind If I took a pair of tweezers And I tweezered your behind!” He shriveled up his body And he shuffled to his feet, And he said, “I'm awfully sorry But a skeeter's got to eat! Still, there are mosquito manners, And I must have just forgot 'em. And I swear I'll never never never Bite another bottom.” But a minute later Archie Hill And Buck and Theo Brown Were horsing on the monkey bars, Hanging upside down. They must have looked delicious From a skeeter's point of view 'Cause he bit 'em on the bottoms, Archie, Buck and Theo too! You could hear 'em goin' HOLY! You could hear 'em goin' WHACK! You could hear 'em cuss and holler, Goin' smack, smack, smack. A mosquito's awful sneaky, A mosquito's mighty sly, But I never never never Thought a skeeter'd tell a lie.

Mosquito at my ear— does he think I’m deaf?

I see the mosquito kneeling on the soft underside of my arm, kneeling Like a fruitpicker, kneeling like an old woman With the proboscis of her prayer buried in the idea of God, And I know we shall not speak with the aliens And that peace will not happen in my life, not unless It is in the burnt oil spreading across the surfaces of ponds, in the dark Egg rafts clotting and the wiggletails expiring like batteries. Bring a little alcohol and a little balm For these poppies planted by the Queen of Neptune. In her photographs she is bearded and spurred, embellished five hundred times, Her modular legs crouching, her insufferable head unlocking To lower the razor-edge of its tubes, and she is there in the afternoon When the wind gives up the spirit of cleanliness And there rises from the sound the brackish oyster and squid smell of creation. I lie down in the sleeping bag sodden with rain. Nights with her, I am loved for myself, for the succulent Flange of my upper lip, the twin bellies of my eyelids. She adores the easy, the soft. She picks the tenderest blossoms of insomnia. Mornings while the jackhammer rips the pavement outside my window, While the sanitation workers bang the cans against the big truck and shout to each other over the motor, I watch her strut like an udder with my blood, Imagining the luminous pick descending into Trotsky’s skull and the eleven days I waited for the cold chill, nightmare, and nightsweat of malaria; Imagining the mating call in the vibrations of her wings, And imagining, in the simple knot of her ganglia, How she thrills to my life, how she sings for the harvest.

When did you start your tricks Monsieur? What do you stand on such high legs for? Why this length of shredded shank You exaltation? Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me, Stand upon me weightless, you phantom? I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory In sluggish Venice. You turn your head towards your tail, and smile. How can you put so much devilry Into that translucent phantom shred Of a frail corpus? Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air, A nothingness. Yet what an aura surrounds you; Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind. That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: Invisibility, and the anæsthetic power To deaden my attention in your direction. But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer. Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air In circles and evasions, enveloping me, Ghoul on wings Winged Victory. Settle, and stand on long thin shanks Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware, You speck. I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air Having read my thoughts against you. Come then, let us play at unawares, And see who wins in this sly game of bluff. Man or mosquito. You don't know that I exist, and I don't know that you exist. Now then! It is your trump It is your hateful little trump You pointed fiend, Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you: It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear. Why do you do it? Surely it is bad policy. They say you can't help it. If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent. But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp. Blood, red blood Super-magical Forbidden liquor. I behold you stand For a second enspasmed in oblivion, Obscenely ecstasied Sucking live blood My blood. Such silence, such suspended transport, Such gorging, Such obscenity of trespass. You stagger As well as you may. Only your accursed hairy frailty Your own imponderable weightlessness Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching. Away with a pæan of derision You winged blood-drop. Can I not overtake you? Are you one too many for me Winged Victory? Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you? Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you! Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

Mosquitoes, with needle-noses sucking blood from elbows, cheeks, and chin why were you not designed to thrive on brine, on swine, or likewise-spiny porcupines? SLAP! SLAP! SLAP!

Somewhere outside Kyoto's line, she said, they stumbled across the famous garden of moss, the smallish sign so plain it could have been overlooked. No temple, only moss. So they entered the walkway with little expectation, the silence creeping in, much like expectation. Instead of leading them to the garden directly, two monks had led them to a different task, requested they copy three hundred characters, the ink and paper set down for the task. And this, too, was a practiced form of prayer, left behind for those who had forgotten prayer. The monks left brushes, ink, and bowls of water. They asked the seekers to write, to pray. But prayer, any prayer, wasn't easy. The brush and ink, the doubting hand, made not for simple prayer. And even as I write this, I do not want to pray. This story changes nothing; I do not want to pray.