Poetry | July 19, 2023

Coming Out

1989

 

On the fire escape, someone gently strumming a guitar.

And a woman whispering. If I sit up,

I’ll see the glow of their cigarettes in the dark.

 

I am eighteen, lying on a friend’s couch

on cushions that raise a ghost of dust when you lie back.

Fingers laced behind my head, eyes open.

 

A construction crane waits, hook suspended,

to swing wildly forward and scoop me from my life.

That’s how I live, how I’ve lived for years.

 

*

 

My brothers and I watch Star Trek.

A shifting cloud and Dr. McCoy with a tricorder standing in front of it—

Kirk places his hand on McCoy’s shoulder as it drifts closer.

 

Step back, Bones.

Then the cloud drifts farther off.

One might say desire, but there was no clear sense, no image of what was desired.

 

One might say sex, but I had never seen sex, never seen

even a picture of two men kissing.

Once, between classes in a crowded high-school hallway, the bell just rung,

 

the sudden crush of bodies

knocked me into the back of a classmate. For a moment,

the front of my body—

 

maybe I had forced it, maybe half-intentionally—

pressed up hard against the back of his.

I’d noticed him in gym, his shoulders, the thin patch

 

of hair rising up his stomach

when he turned toward his locker to shuffle off his shirt.

No: no body, no identity, no articulation, not

 

even a word, just the shapeless cloud, the tricorder

beeping and McCoy’s troubled expression:

I’m reading hemogloblin, Jim. I think this thing drinks blood.

 

*

 

Thirty years later, I can’t recall another moment

of such stark cognition: the strumming, the whispering

going silent, the couch falling away

 

and letters flaring, laying themselves down

like a rope bridge spanning a dark gulf.

Word and the sudden correspondence of word to thing.

 

A sentence appeared in my head. That’s all

that happened: one sentence. I spoke it unbidden,

stood at a microphone in a dark auditorium

 

in which every chair was occupied

also with myself, a thousand of me filed in for a one-sentence

performance: What you are,                                                               that is what gay is.