How I Became a Poet

I became a poet during the passing bell from 1st to 2nd period on Monday, November 4th, 1985. I was seventeen. We had just finished reading ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen in AP English. The textbook we were using was Sound and Sense, edited by Laurence Perrine, 4th edition, 1973.

In W.H. Auden’s biography by Edward Mendelsohn, one paragraph mentions how Auden conceived the 1933 poem, ‘A Summer Night.’ Auden describes “a vision of agape,” “what it really means to love your neighbor as yourself.” After that, he was a different kind of poet. He was a different kind of man. I think that I had just such an experience in high school with Wilfred Owen.

After reading his poem, I looked down at Owen’s capsule biography. I dwelt on the dates. 1893-1918. I saw a young man, handsome, not much older than myself, dying pointlessly, one week before the war ended. My throat closed. I had trouble swallowing. I remember struggling to force something embarrassing down. “I might have loved him,” I thought, “I might have died for him.” Then, the bell rang. I moved mechanically to Calculus. The rest of the day dissolved in a fog.

I am probably the least mystical person you are ever likely to meet. My first major in college was Astrophysics. I have never been able to afford fantasies. Not since my parents divorced, anyway, when I was nine. Not since my disgusted stepmother discovered my diary in 1988 and learned I was gay and my father threw me out of the house.

I left that night with nothing but my wits, a little Latin, and my encounter with Owen. I survived. I put myself through school. I believe that brief moment I spent with Owen is why I write poems. It is certainly why I still love my parents. They are just as human as me. Even my stepmother. She drove me to school that drizzly November morning.

The only inhuman person I have ever known was Mr. Anonymous, an irritating roommate who liked to come home from therapy, flop on the couch, and compare family horror stories, in a sort of perverse version of Irving Berlin’s song, ‘Anything you can do, I can do better.’ One exasperating evening, while I was ruining a new shirt, I told him that the only truly horrible thing about life is that life is not entirely horrible. “The Devil is in the details,” I hissed, “these bleach spots are Hell.”

The problem of existence would be much easier to solve if we were able to walk straight from the womb to the grave unimpeded by beauty—if we were not tied so tightly to such sturdy chairs. If only we could stop imagining how excruciatingly lovely—how deep—how blue—lake Lucerne once looked to us as children, in 1911. If only we could stop comparing that impossible color to the eyes of this pimply, vaguely self-conscious youth—a virgin—removing his rifle from his shoulder, in order to rape our unconscious daughter, in 1943.

All I have is a voice. Someday, I would like a student to pick up something that I wrote and experience that feeling of sympathy I felt when reading Wilfred Owen. I am forty-three. I am gay. I am not wealthy. It is unlikely that I will have any children. Still, I would like to leave something behind for future generations. I would like it to be a generous vision, but a real one. For the lack of a better word, I would like to call it ‘love.’

Ménage

Loneliness, insomnia and I—
The strangest bedfellows you’ll ever see—
Toss off our sheets together and we try
Our best to keep each other company.

We pick the blankets from the floor. We find
Some satisifaction studying the shade:
Bright diagonals dance up one blind
As Fred and Ginger danced across the stage.

Nothing calms our restless legs. We kick
Phantom spiders tickling prickly feet;
We rub our soles and wait; but we can’t trick
Our senses. These sticks generate no heat.

Or nothing like that warmth I remember
Reaching for—half-dreaming—fingers blue,
Frozen, teeth chattering, ribcage tender,
Where I received an elbow from you.