“If I saw it
I felt it
If I felt it
I learned from it.”
—Peter Gizzi, “EVERYDAY I WANT TO FLY MY KITE,” from Now It’s Dark
“Generalizing is part of what causes depression. The more we generalize, the more separate we become. The more we get specific with each other, and actually hang out, and actually try to solve the problems, the better life is.”
—Taylor Mac
In The Changing Light at Sandover
The hierarchies of heaven
Are revealed to James Merrill
And his partner David Jackson
By their familiar, a handsome
Young Jew from 4th Century
Greece named Ephraim, whom
They contact via a Ouija
Board, their fingers guided
Over the alphabet on an overturned
Glass tumbler bathed in just a touch
Of rum, if I remember right.
Through Ephraim we learn
The world is about to be ended
By the Angel Gabriel
Who has grown fed up
With humankind (I think
For him the last straw
Was the Atom bomb)
But none other than Wystan Auden
Recently deceased at the time
Of the poem’s composition
(Again, if I remember right)
Is engaged mightily in pleading
Our case, the case for human life
For life on Earth, that it continue
And continue without end,
Not only to Gabriel
Though all the other angels acknowledge
It is G’s sole right to pull the plug
On us if he so chooses, but to everyone
In the beyond presiding
Over the universal forces
That move in their particular ways
Through our doings here at home.
That a gay poet should be charged
With speaking on behalf of all humankind
To the alltime glitterati behind
The veil is a notion appropriate
To a lunar eclipse in Gemini.
Life on Earth is a queer fact.
Everything is such a reflective
Surface. And yet, the second I relax
The specificity with which I apprehend
What I apprehend, all goodness
Congeals: everything is not
Everything, it turns out—even if it is. A forest
Of particulars, though it can be reduced
To data, dies without the animating
Compassionate heart of the poet
(Hermes bless us) and I like the thought
Of Wystan Auden arguing on behalf
Even of heterosexist hell culture
A tired housewife who’d hate him
Parking at Wal-Mart, lifting her daughter
Out of a plastic carseat. Wystan Auden
Pleading her case, not only the cause
Of hipsters, gays, intergalactic freaks,
The types who might for example read
This poem, the one I’m writing now.
Cat Power, Moon Pix, 1998.
I have a sore throat. I think a lover
Gave it to me. Now I guess I shouldn’t go anywhere
It could be the plague. You will judge me
For enjoying any love or pleasure so I’m only
Going to tell you the least of it.
I keep trying not to swallow so I won’t
Feel it, it will go away, but there it is,
Unmistakable. The childhood
Feeling of Coming Down With Something.
We broke the bed the other night.
On Election Day I was so anxious I used
My phone to make five men come
This is a skill I acquired from a physician’s
Assistant in Weehawken a few months ago.
A weird skill that when I relate it to friends
They express simultaneously disdain for its
Not being physical and maybe a little envy
I don’t know, it adds something to my day
To hear men moan my name while ejaculating
All over themselves. I’m not exactly sure WHAT
It adds to my day, but it adds something.
It is an extremely Mercurial way for sex to move
Illusion upon illusion, reflection upon reflection,
Having very little in fact to do with me
Yet the energy was generated and guided by me
And the energy warmed me. What even is sex
It seems not precisely to live inside a body
Yet ignites within and about a body
Almost like what happens with Tesla
Coils. The air stiffens, an arousal angrier
Than what happens when you and your lover
Are together in person:
You have to say dirtier, more specific things
There’s a melancholy silliness to it
I don’t know if it was Satan or what that taught
Human beings sex, but the eyes of the devil
The lolling tongue, the cruel animal voice
The whole rhetoric of human arousal is a hermetic
Act: imitative, highly impersonal, furious as blood
Like the blood standing up in the veins of the warrior
In one of Rilke’s Duino Elegies—the furies
Of generations boiling your blood
Which are not specifically you
Which is also why I’ve said nothing
Of love. I’ve said nothing of love
Because I’m not in it
But there are things I need to keep circulating
Around me in order to function as a person.
And if I were a gay man you would not question it.
But I feel like the air is love, the air itself
My auric bodies, enrobed in it, I do not feel
Unprotected, I do not feel cold. What are you doing
Erica Dawn texted me on election day afternoon
I’m trapped in sex jail I said and it’s inside my phone
You’ve rescued me.
We decided to go for a hike, do a ritual
To protect the electoral process.
There’s more I wish I could say, or I wish I’d
Written this a different way, but Mercury
Keeps bending my lines around the truth.
The element of Air is that through which
We seem to move, suspended in space
Or, hard and wet, phones in hand,
Separated by space, or when we are together
And you whisper I wish I could crawl
Inside you, still separated by space, and that’s
Exactly what I’m going to do. The element
Of Air might be the element we least understand.
What separates the Moon from Aldebaran, what
Keeps her there where she is, and me here?
What animates the space (is space the word?
Is Space the place?) between us? How much
Of the universe is in the particles I breathe
Now, in and out, through my sore throat
In my broken bed, from where I now write you?
My teacher told me the reason we cook turkey
On Thanksgiving is as a sacrifice to the Lords
Of the Air. When Saturn and Jupiter move into
Aquarius Air will take up its dominion over us
Even more fully than before. It sounds like more
Loneliness and more sophistication. Or maybe
(Since Saturn rules both Capricorn and Aquarius)
It will really be about structure, but instead of Time
A renewed consciousness of Space
Will legislate our lives. It feels weird and queer.
It feels specific, vague, digital, sexual, if love is in the air
And not specifically in me, if my heart,
Roseate and wet, were to tremble in the sky
Alone, visible to the naked eye like a planet, turning
And tuning its way thru my career
Analyzable by instruments, adorable
In frolicsome feeling, a rubber
Ball to be taken down out of the stars
Played with by a child
Or the true sun, the sun itself
Inside me always
Tricked about with language
And with flesh
But shining through my every
Distortion, or so I pray.
And shining through its every
Distortion. And so it is.
Enya, “Aldebaran,” 1987.
