478 Identity poems

O father bringing home crates of apples, bushels of corn, and skinned rabbits on ice. O mother boiling lentils in a pot while he watched fight after fight, boxers pinned on the ropes pummeling each other mercilessly. And hung on the wall where we ate breakfast an autographed photo of Muhammad Ali. O father who worshipped him and with a clenched fist pretended to be: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. O you loved being Muslim then. Even when you drank whiskey. Even when you knocked down my mother again and again. O prayer. O god of sun. God of moon. Of cows and of thunder. Of women. Of bees. Of ants and spiders, poets and calamity. God of the pen, of the fig, of the elephant. Ta’ Ha’, Ya Sin, Sad, Qaf. God of my father, listen: He prayed, he prayed, five times a day, and he was mean.

Rosebud, So. Dak., 1960 we all went to town one day went to a store bought you new shoes red   high heels aint seen you since

I was someone's honor's student once, a sticker, a star. I aced Home Ec and Geometry; I learned to stab a fork, steer my mother's car. Old enough to work, I refreshed the salad bar at Steak & Ale, scarcity a line I couldn't fail. The summers between university, interned at AT&T, in the minority outreach they called Inroads. My boss, Vicki, had two roommates, whom she called, simply, The Gays, crashing on her floor. That was before I was gay, I won't try to say with a straight face. Like anyone really cares, I care. What I'm trying to say: all this prepared me for these squat blinking office accessories. The dry drinking after the accidental reply-all. By now there's a lot to lose. Little by little, I have become so careful, no talk of politics, or orientation: I let them say, he's “a homosexual,” without an arch correction. At a fondue buffet in Zurich, our dumb- founded senior group director—when I let slip, damn it, my trip with a twenty-year-old—inquired, They're always over seventeen, right? I told her of course, god yes, and, seething, smiled, which I'm famous for. I didn't want to scare her. But I tell you, I'm keeping score. E-mail is no more than a suicide I'd like to please recall. Note my suicide. I'm paid to multitask, scramble the life out of fun: Monday I will ask— every dash a loaded gun, every comma, a knife— you to bury the black-box file.

It snakes behind me, this invisible chain gang— the aliases, your many faces peopling that vast hotel, the past. What did we learn? Every twenty minutes the elevated train, the world shuddering beyond the pane. It was never warm enough in winter. The walls peeled, the color of corsages ruined in the air. Sweeping the floor, my black wig on the chair. I never meant to leave you in that hotel where the voices of patrons long gone seemed to echo in the halls, a scent of spoiled orchids. But this was never an elegant hotel. The iron fretwork of the El held each room in a deep corrosive bloom. This was the bankrupt’s last chance, the place the gambler waits to learn his black mare’s leg snapped as she hurtled towards the finish line. * * * How did we live? Your face over my shoulder was the shade of mahogany in the speckled mirror bolted to the wall. It was never warm. You arrived through a forest of needles, the white mist of morphine, names for sleep that never came. My black wig unfurled across the battered chair. Your arms circled me when I stood by the window. Downstairs the clerk who read our palms broke the seal on another deck of cards. She said you’re my fate, my sweet annihilating angel, every naked hotel room I’ve ever checked out of. There’s nothing left of that, but even now when night pulls up like a limousine, sea-blue, and I’m climbing the stairs, keys in hand, I’ll reach the landing and you’re there—the one lesson I never get right. Trains hurtled by, extinguished somewhere past the bend of midnight. The shuddering world. Your arms around my waist. I never meant to leave. * * * Of all that, there's nothing left but a grid of shadows the El tracks throw over the street, the empty lot. Gone, the blistered sills, voices that rilled across each wall. Gone, the naked bulb swinging from the ceiling, that chicanery of light that made your face a brief eclipse over mine. How did we live? The mare broke down. I was your fate, that yellow train, the plot of sleet, through dust crusted on the pane. It wasn't warm enough. What did we learn? All I have left of you is this burnt place on my arm. So, I won't forget you even when I'm nothing but small change in the desk clerk's palm, nothing but the pawn ticket crumpled in your pocket, the one you'll never redeem. Whatever I meant to say loses itself in the bend of winter towards extinction, this passion of shadows falling like black orchids through the air. I never meant to leave you there by the pane, that terminal hotel, the world shuddering with trains.

For Erna Brodber Be ye my fictions; But her story. — Richard Crashaw I can bring a halo into the night cave, quiet with music (do not ask the music), to her shaded there in the moon; her fine spectacles steam their pond rings; her animal eyes fix on the lintel of the door as the wax owl glances back at me. I am her little cotton tree the breeze combs white into a final note, her diminuendo poco a poco ... Moon-afro, myself outpaces me in wonder of her. She goes off and I seep under the black sprout of her house, to rise a salmon bell on the hill dissolving mild cloud fractals, without grief or malice.

If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake. 1975–2010

“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,” my father would say. And he’d prove it, cupping the buzzer instantly while the host with the swatter stared. In the spring our palms peeled like snakes. True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways. I changed these to fit the occasion. Years before, a girl knocked, wanted to see the Arab. I said we didn’t have one. After that, my father told me who he was, “Shihab”—“shooting star”— a good name, borrowed from the sky. Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?” He said that’s what a true Arab would say. Today the headlines clot in my blood. A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page. Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root is too big for us. What flag can we wave? I wave the flag of stone and seed, table mat stitched in blue. I call my father, we talk around the news. It is too much for him, neither of his two languages can reach it. I drive into the country to find sheep, cows, to plead with the air: Who calls anyone civilized? Where can the crying heart graze? What does a true Arab do now?

because my voice was not the right voice and could not be understood I stood before the mirror— a murky glassen word this mouth can’t shape right to this day — and was made to watch my teeth and lips being imprecise. So this is why I come across a Southron and not from Yorkshire, or Sri Lankan; but I’ll complain no more about this clarified and potent tongue for when the moustached gent at US Customs asked me in his hapless twang are you a terrorist, my borrowed posh it sure abashed that poor colonial; and it was of course what my child-face perceived or could not in the glass which made of me a scrutineer of sound, a listener for and into every glitch in the aathma, the script, the avid void of English.

I am so done with feeling Xmas Amaryllis grow in places where thralls go free I am not quite enough for the woodland; promoting myself again after all accused men have been named In Casablanca I wait for livestock to come through luxe doors for thighs to grow less through absorption My killer is not going to be invited to this Ornamenting party and I am blue daisies casting O’s wide in anointment Now that he’s gone I am free to torch down the Valley                        la spiaggia of pure Purple                         small neck in hand

Gay little Girl-of-the-Diving-Tank, I desire a name for you, Nice, as a right glove fits; For you—who amid the malodorous Mechanics of this unlovely thing, Are darling of spirit and form. I know you—a glance, and what you are Sits-by-the-fire in my heart. My Limousine-Lady knows you, or Why does the slant-envy of her eye mark Your straight air and radiant inclusive smile? Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning. The bull-necked man knows you—this first time His itching flesh sees form divine and vibrant health And thinks not of his avocation. I came incuriously— Set on no diversion save that my mind Might safely nurse its brood of misdeeds In the presence of a blind crowd. The color of life was gray. Everywhere the setting seemed right For my mood. Here the sausage and garlic booth Sent unholy incense skyward; There a quivering female-thing Gestured assignations, and lied To call it dancing; There, too, were games of chance With chances for none; But oh! Girl-of-the-Tank, at last! Gleaming Girl, how intimately pure and free The gaze you send the crowd, As though you know the dearth of beauty In its sordid life. We need you—my Limousine-Lady, The bull-necked man and I. Seeing you here brave and water-clean, Leaven for the heavy ones of earth, I am swift to feel that what makes The plodder glad is good; and Whatever is good is God. The wonder is that you are here; I have seen the queer in queer places, But never before a heaven-fed Naiad of the Carnival-Tank! Little Diver, Destiny for you, Like as for me, is shod in silence; Years may seep into your soul The bacilli of the usual and the expedient; I implore Neptune to claim his child to-day!