Use it up, wear it out,
make it do or do without.
In their fortieth year of marriage she took
barbiturates in two handfuls; he took
a mistress to Reno and soldiered on.
Maybe love is the enormity of what we lose.
Maybe love is what fills
what we lack.
Maybe love is only making do.
For my son, who had to ask me twice
If ever you think I couldn’t hear you, know:
sometimes we are treading
water, sometimes we are watching
history happening one slow monstrosity at a time,
and sometimes
I bend myself to write because
it is the only labor I can do.
Sometimes I know that something you will read about is happening, sometimes
the world’s sharp teeth are right outside the door, and yes
sometimes you say my name and I don’t answer. Son,
I am pouring ink from wounds that you can’t see.
Cork City, January, 2007
That Friday that it pelted rain in Cork, and we went out despite it,
Down the Western Road towards the long white bridge;
The day we saw the swans, white as chalk and heedless of the rain.
Up Sunday’s Well towards the gaol we put our heads down
and walked against the current in the gutters.
I saw the raindrops beat across your back
and hid my hands from January’s cold.
The world was strange and silvered, and I watched my breath
cloud and dissolve beneath the fall of rain.
Still we kept walking, both of us knowing
we’d follow the other til the weather cleared.
What I learned from walking in circles.
Our local library recently opened a permanent labyrinth installation on the library grounds. It’s a lovely setup, and since one of my many hats is Big Ol’ Medievalism Nerd I was excited to explain a little bit about the history and significance of the concept to my kid.
We’ve walked it twice together so far. I’ve walked labyrinths for meditative purposes before, but it is actually remarkably hard to meditate effectively when a charging-ahead six-year-old emphatically demands a high five any time you pass one another along the labyrinth way. My explanation that this space was created to be a walk done at a thoughtful pace did not hold water with someone who looked down and saw BIG OL’ STONE MAZE TIME.
My child is an absolute treasure. A good listener, thoughtful, gentle, overall easy to parent. But children are ultimately still children. Mine rocketed ahead of me, holding out a hand for a high five every time we passed, stopping only when I was not moving at a sufficiently brisk pace.
Children are loud. They are obstinate. They are emphatic and pushy and demanding and aggressive and, in general, distressingly human. And sometimes all I want is for shoes to go on feet, ass to go in car seat, Minecraft to be turned off so we can eat dinner before it’s midnight, et cetera. And all the kid wants is, apparently, to do exactly the opposite of that thing as fast as humanly possible.
Sometimes my kid is charging in the opposite direction from me, when I’m just trying to get centered and go at a reasonable pace.
And yet, I thought, as I watched myself reach out every time to give what my child needed and wanted from me, contact across the invisible space between us. And yet, we are going to the same center, even when we’re moving in the opposite direction.
Even as I type this it seems like the kind of incredibly pat and too-perfect nonsense that parenting blogs so often indulge in. Like this moment of zen and connection in the labyrinth magically kept me from later getting impatient when a four-minute walk to the library building became a drawn out affair that took nearly fifteen even though we were running almost-late for a kid’s event and I really needed to pee. Reader, it did no such thing.
But it was a nice moment. One I could stand to try and remember more often.
We’re moving towards the same place, even when we’re working at it in opposite directions.
What I’m Reading Now: The Stonewall Reader
Okay, it’s a slightly disingenuous post title this week because I actually recently finished this one, but I thought it was worth talking about.
This year, of course, is the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and so Pride month was a bigger deal than usual for the community. In the run-up to Pride I realized that — although I’ve read plenty of Queer theory and modern works of biography by Queer authors — I had read very little written by those who were actually there in the community when Stonewall happened. I knew our history by dint of having researched it myself, but I knew it as it was written afterwards. So I picked this up.
I have mixed feelings on this book. On the one hand it’s incredibly valuable for us to read our Queer ancestors in their own words, especially since we lost so many of them in the AIDS crisis. Some of the pieces in this book are incredibly moving and some of them are hilarious, transgressive, or sad. One or two of them are experimental-ish pieces and . . . eh, they did not land for me.
However: because these selections were written in a different era, they’re full of language and attitudes that are . . . uh, challenging. I took a long time reading this and it was partly because I wanted to give myself some time and space to process my discomfort. Lots of the writers featured were in the Mattachine or the Daughters of Bilitis and their narratives are, as a result, very emphatically assimilationist. Some of them speak dismissively of Butch and Femme women, or Trans women, or stereotypically femme gay men. Most of them use terminology that is outdated. I don’t think that makes them less valuable as reading material. It just means they have to be read carefully, with a lot of perspective on how much our community’s use of language and ideals have evolved (and, uh, also how much they haven’t, because we were definitely still quarreling like cats in a bag even in 1960whatever).
On the whole I’m glad that I read this one, but I think it was most valuable to me as a source of names to pursue for future reading (that’s usually how anthologies work, anyway).
this is a poem
This is a poem I did not write for you,
Although you still were in it: every line
Bent
Around your absence, like the light through water.
This is a verse I wrote without you there.
This is me feeling out the space with language
and stretching my words into the place you left.
This is my fingers taking up the slack
and drawing tight the thread you helped me spin.
This is a mending, maybe, or a beginning.
This is a poem I did not write for you.
On Moon Day
Moon Day is a holiday in our household. I think it started as kind of a joke when the kid was little, when every new thing presented an opportunity to make something new and kind of silly that was just ours, the three of us.
At some point it got more serious, in the sense that it’s still a very casual holiday but it’s no longer just something we flippantly say in the morning on July 20. “Happy Moon Day!” We have cake. We commemorate Apollo’s landing. This year we had a party, with a ton of food and friends and board games. I made a layer cake and my kid and my oldest nephew helped me decorate it with craters and edible silver spray paint.
Things change. Things that were silly become sacred. Things that filled the whole of your sky like the brightest, fullest harvest moon of all slip away and shrink to a silver sliver and then, sometimes, they’re gone.
Earlier today I told the kids a couple stories about my childhood, which happened less than a mile from where I’m typing this now. They were sweet memories, vague recollections of happy times, populated largely with people I may never see again. I left that part out, because it is Moon Day and today is not a sad holiday. It’s a day for commemorating an act of courage and hope and stunning human insolence. Today is for remembering we can take steps that those who came before us never dared even conceive of. It’s a very Queer holiday, when you think about it.
I had to spend part of today re-emphasizing a boundary with someone who took me and my wife’s coming out badly. It wasn’t a happy experience. It hurt and I second-guessed myself all the way through it. And I thought the same thing I thought when I was first preparing to share our news: you know this could be a goodbye. And who knows, maybe it is.
Sometimes lights go out and don’t rekindle. Sometimes people can’t change. Sometimes you leave things behind you didn’t want to lose, because they are too heavy to carry with you on the next part of the trip to whatever impossible place you are going.
But who knows. Sometimes against all odds a ship made of featherweight foolishness is lofted up on currents of math and audacity and touches a new world. Sometimes the once-dark moon is in a waxing crescent, and the world holds its breath and a new thing happens, inconcievable, incandescent.
Sometimes it’s Moon Day. Sometimes that’s enough to get by on for now.
What I’m Listening to Now: The Cryptonaturalist Podcast
https://www.cryptonaturalist.com/blog/2019/7/17/episode-26-glow-tiger
One of my poems is featured in today’s episode of The Cryptonaturalist, so this is a perfect opportunity for me to talk about the podcast!
The Cryptonaturalist is one of my absolute favorite podcasts. It’s dispatches from the titular Cryptonaturalist, who narrates his adventures and encounters with various cryptids. We’re not talking about Sasquatch or Nessie, though. We’re talking about the Teacup Whale, a cetacean the size of a Boston terrier who sings a single life-changing song if you make eye contact with it. Or the Book Fox (aka the Inkhound, Text Fox, or Gutenberg’s Fox), prowler of midnight libraries.
This show is wonderful. It combines a healthy dose of the whimsical and weird with a deep and entirely genuine love for the natural world. It has echoes of Welcome to Night Vale in the way it embraces the eldritch and inexplicable in continuity with the mundane and knowable, but it’s a much gentler kind of storytelling. Also, the narrator and creator, Jarod K. Anderson, has a truly marvelous voice that’s incredibly warm and soothing. It’s just nice to listen to.
Every episode includes a segment of “Hidden Lore”, short fiction or poetry that fits the themes of the show. I love how seamlessly these bits blend in with the larger narrative portion of the show, and I especially love the fact that I’ve found several new poets through the segment!
Listening to an episode of The Cryptonaturalist feels like the moment you get near the top of a hiking trail and get a sudden glimpse of landscape through the trees. Like the breathless stopped-time sensation of watching an ant carry something many times its size. Like the good shivers you sometimes feel when you look up from the campfire and remember you are a very small primate surrounded by a truly staggering amount of dark. You’re doing yourself a favor by giving it a listen.
Chokecherrying
There is an art to harvest.
Loop the bucket over one wrist and with that hand
reach to grasp the branch and draw it down.
Make a rake of your fingers, pass them quickly through the stems.
Repeat. Repeat again.
Don’t squeeze, or you will crush the fruit. Avoid the leaves and twigs;
like the cherry stones they are heavy with poison. Leave
every third branch you come to without picking.
This fruit feeds the bears and winter birds.
Wipe the sweat of August from your brow and drink deep before
proceeding. Resist the urge
to lick your fingers clean. There is no sweetness there.
First you must sweat your way along the bank,
wild onions sharp-crushed beneath your heel, mosquitoes
pricking at your blood.
Repeat until the bucket brims.
Go home. Wash, sort, boil. Wipe
the kitchen sweat away from your sunburned neck.
Boil. Stir. Boil. Can. Boil. In the end
you’ll catch the ruby summer fast in jars, but first
you will learn what all your mothers learned by doing:
There is an art to harvest, and
Some sweetness must be earned.
Part II: Why I Came Out to My Parents
I almost had the conversation with my parents half a dozen times. When my mother responded to a magazine article including a lesbian couple’s wedding photo with “Ugh, gross.” When the Supreme Court ruled for equal marriage. When it became clear in 2016 that my parents and people like them had successfully put evil men who hated my people in power.
Every time, I walked myself back from the decision. It would not bring me joy, or closure, or a miracle change of heart in these people who I loved but could not trust. It would not make things better.
And my parents were, if not perfect, still people who I loved and could not quite imagine losing. They were mostly good grandparents to my child, who adored them. They were willing to listen to me when I laid down boundaries about what kind of things I wouldn’t tolerate being said around my family. It was painful, imperfect, but enough.
But things change. In our case, my spouse began her medical and social transition. And from the moment she told me she was pretty sure she wasn’t a man, I knew our imperfect balance with my parents was no longer acceptable. Maybe it never had been.
I was ready to tell them that day, but it was several very long months before I finally did. I waited until my wife was ready, because it was ultimately as much her story as mine. I talked to her, to my friends, to my therapist.
Eventually, I wrote my parents a letter. I told them I was bisexual, that my wife was a trans woman, that we would be staying married, that our child already knew and was adjusting well. I invited them to stay part of our lives if they could do it with love and respect, that I’d answer questions if they were asked respectfully, that I wanted them to take time if they needed it.
My father responded by texting me a verbally abusive message as soon as they received the letter. I blocked his number and set up filters so that emails, if he sent them, would be set aside until I was able to cope with them.
My mother said nothing for weeks. We had previously spoken every single day on the phone for at least a few minutes. Eventually she made a sporadic attempt to re-establish contact, but she did it by refusing to discuss the subject of my family or her silence. Eventually, I told her I wasn’t going to pretend things were unchanged between us. That was the last conversation we had.
I don’t know if they’ll change. I don’t believe that they will. A certain breed of American religion takes up too much space in the fabric of their lives. They are not people inclined to reconsider their positions. I sometimes wonder how I, raised by them, managed to become one.
But I was so fucking tired by the time I came out. I was tired of the labor involved in maintaining enough of an edited version of myself for them to love. I was tired of stress dreams and catastrophizing. I was ready to get on with the life I had built.
I am openly Queer with my friends, in my public teaching and writing, in the way I present to strangers. I love the life I have, the one my wife and I share, and I’m honestly done with wasting energy on trying to keep people in it who can’t love the people we actually are.
It’s still painful. I can’t imagine a universe in which it wouldn’t have been. I’m immensely glad that I didn’t come out when I was younger and more hopelessly dependent on my parents’ approval for my emotional well-being. As it stands, I’m surrounded by people every day who remind me that the person I really am is worthy of loving and knowing wholly — and that is a beautiful relief.
Queer Corvid 