It’s Winter Solstice in San Francisco, and the Radical Faeries
are throwing a sex party. I have your blessing to go.
Instead I bought booties for my brother’s new baby,
had your bike tire replaced and came home to write poems.
They’re about earthquakes, and you won’t believe this, but
this morning there was an earthquake here.
I’ve come back from my Harlem apartment to see you,
but only for this winter break.
Now you’re in Westchester for a few days visiting
family. You stopped by Manhattan to get my glasses,
used the keys I made you. I feed your cats.
It’s so domestic, I don’t know if I can stand it.
But I like your style, the walls you’ve painted red,
and you even humored me before you left,
went with me to get a Christmas tree.
I’ve learned to ask for a “Charlie Brown.”
The salesman came back with a wonky,
patchy thing, sold it to us for cheap.
There’s no way to stand it up straight,
so the little minaret you use for a star leans 45 degrees.
It’s fine, I wanted it mostly for the smell anyway.
I cover the water bowl under the tree with aluminum foil
so your cats won’t get urinary tract infections.
The morning doves bill and coo on the bars of your fire escape.
It’s almost like having a balcony, and I water
the plants you grow there, but it reminds me
of disaster just the same.
The French call it roucoulement—the cooing, I mean.
Ah, their pretty words.
I know a couple who’ve been together twenty-four years now,
They’ve lived that whole time in the same
little studio on Market Street,
near the old Mint. Can you imagine?
Some years, pigeons build their nests on the ledge
outside their open shower window.
Well, not nests really.
Pigeons just lay a few twigs
down to keep their eggs from rolling
off any stone surface.
This spring, Ruven decided to put the eggs in a carton and
move them to a lower ledge.
Who knows if the birds abandoned their eggs,
not finding them where they expected,
but it seemed more humane than the previous spring,
when David just flicked them off.
I wrote my first happy song today.
Four major chords.
Does optimism have to be so simple?
The amount of reflection seems so small,
like a convict’s mirror.
Maybe I’ll put in a minor bridge.
There needs to be an epiphany, doesn’t there?
I clipped my toenails,
made a sandwich.
I’ve eaten too much.
There’s a Buddhist idea that this pain
is on equal footing with the pain of
not eating enough.
Pain is pain.
But I wonder if that’s an idea put in there
for the American Buddhists.
Like the way the “mother meditation”—
imagining your enemies as your mother,
or imagining them having been your mother in a past life,
I always forget which—
has to be changed to the “grandmother meditation,”
a tribute to our Western complexities.
Does this all sound bourgeois?
I never got to middle-class, I don’t know which parts to detest.
In Amsterdam I came to love the stolid fathers
who walked their daughters to daycare each morning
past the Red Light showrooms—
Surinamese hookers in French-cut panties—
without batting an eyelash.
I drank Heinekens with German boys in the punk bar,
watched the flickering video of two women
sewing a third woman’s labia together
while a man laid his head on her thigh and lovingly
lapped at the blood.
I showered with women at a public pool
with a co-ed locker room. Danced in the gay Muslim bar
on Ramadan, no one drinking, the women twirling dervishly.
I took my classes in the old hospital building along the Singel.
The professor said the connection between sex and love
was just a sociological construct, and a recent one at that.
We talk about the erotic because it is about so much.
You spent the night in your fuckbuddy’s bed last week;
the boyfriend (the FB’s BF)
tiptoed in the next morning to get his socks from the dresser,
chatted you up casually, then went to work.
Now we discuss over the phone whether we can be evolved,
what “evolved” means.
I’ll visit Kansas again for work next month, meeting
with those standardized-test specialists.
“Kansas is actually flatter than a pancake,” one teacher told me
without irony, “They did a study at the university.”
The Department of Education puts me in the Holiday Inn “Holidome.”
There’s a Pac-Man-shaped swimming pool
and a miniature putting range all the rooms open onto.
The plants, curtains, sheets, carpet, pillows—
all reeks of chlorine, and there’s no natural light.
How did a Fred Astaire movie title get put on this building?
But downtown Lawrence is actually quite charming.
I spot rainbow stickers in café windows
and find the gay newspaper and cruisy section
of the KU campus all on the first day.
It feels like going home
because my mother was born in Kansas,
or because I don’t feel safe.
The articles in the test forms can’t mention dinosaurs
because it raises questions about a world before Jesus, about Darwin.
The phrase “millions of years ago” gets changed to “a long time ago”
in articles about spiders, planets, or yes, even earthquakes.
Stories about birthdays get thrown out
(Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays).
When the teachers ask if I am married, I say “no.”
We are becoming family.
Next year, we’ll spend Christmas together.
Things are leaning that way.
The house where the Faeries are having that party is a Victorian,
like many of these painted ladies—
they’re so easily split:
the servants’ quarters become a dungeon,
the madwoman’s attic a home office with bay view.
The gingerbread eves outside provide shelter for homeless men,
who park their shopping carts in the driveway,
just long enough to urinate.
I’ve tried tricking, per our arrangement.
One guy I met in Chelsea,
by the time we got to his brownstone, he said,
“You know your problem? You think too much.”
Meditation helps with that, I guess.
And going home with smart people.
Other attempts go better, even well.
I am a dilettante: to connect
without connection is the art.
I think even after we evolve, there’ll be times
I’ll prefer to stay home with the cats.
At uncertain moments, all the flat states between us
come as a comfort.
After this winter break, we’ll need
some sea change, some shifting fault to move us
I don’t know
forward, together.
For now, we joke about walking
through wormholes
in a nanosecond
me to California
you to New York
then returning to our respective oceans.
Your physicist friend in Berkeley speaks of such things—
wormholes, strings, six dimensions we don’t perceive.
The theories seem silly to me,
the way the archaeopteryx,
Bonobo chimpanzees,
or you or I—you and I—
must seem to those teachers,
that professor.
I want to stitch the coasts together,
with strong, taut thread.
Brent Calderwood's poetry has previously appeared in The Chabot Review, modern words, and Through Our Eyes. His essays and reviews have been published widely, including the January 2008 issues of The Gay & Lesbian Review and Lambda Book Report. He received a 2007 Lambda Literary Foundation Fellowship for poetry, and was a 2007 Chancellor's Fellow in English Literature at the CUNY Grad Center.
