Forever is composed of Nows —

’Tis not a different time,

Except for infiniteness

And latitude of home.

From this, experienced here,

Remove the dates to these,

Let months dissolve in further months,

And years exhale in years.

Without certificate or pause

Or celebrated days,

As infinite our years would be

As Anno Domini’s.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves— 
And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—

Always at dusk, the same tearless experience,
The same dragging of feet up the same well-worn path
To the same well-worn rock;
The same crimson or gold dropping away of the sun
The same tints—rose, saffron, violet, lavender, grey
Meeting, mingling, mixing mistily;
Before me the same blue black cedar rising jaggedly to a point;
Over it, the same slow unlidding of twin stars,
Two eyes, unfathomable, soul-searing,
Watching, watching—watching me;
The same two eyes that draw me forth, against my will dusk after dusk;
The same two eyes that keep me sitting late into the night, chin on knees
Keep me there lonely, rigid, tearless, numbly miserable,
       —The eyes of my Regret.

^{for Nica, Mary, Ryan, et al.}

A friend on a rival team confesses  
they’ve always been into it.  
As a kid, they locked themselves in a closet  
to read Trivial Pursuit cards.  
They wanted to know everything. 

Their team is named Shooting Nudes. 
We are Butch Believers.  
The next category is Famous Dykes.  
The whole bar is packed and smells like  
bike sweat and Cosmo slushies.  

Our best guess is that it was Audre Lorde  
in ’89 advocating for Palestine.  
On the fly, we struggle to spell  
Stormé DeLarverie, but we’re hoping  
bad handwriting hides it, huddling closer 

so no one hears our answers.  
Meanwhile, the National Park Service  
erases the letter T in twenty places  
from the Stonewall Monument website.  
Slime mold? Whiptail lizards? The category is  

Queer Ecology. Now, a federal directive 
threatens to cut gender-affirming  
care for youth in our city.  
The category is Gay for Pay.  
Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank.  

Cleverness I know can feel exclusive  
but here I lean into my friends’ literacies, 
their wisdoms my shelter. 
The forty somethings know the local lore,  
the bygone parties: Donny’s, Pegasus,  

Operation Sappho, while The Gen Z kids ace 
the tech round, scribbling the name of  
a translesbian hacktivist on a canceled sci-fi show.  
It turns out being an autodidact is  
the unspoken prerequisite for being queer in America. 

Will we nerd ourselves into futures  
of intergenerational knowing?  
In our time, the Press 3 option  
of the youth suicide hotline 
was created and deleted.  

In booths with curly fries, 
we turn to each other and say:  
Kiki. Bussy. Bulldagger.  
Kitty Tsui. Vaginal (Crème) Davis.  
Truths our bodies internalized arise  

in quick crescendos like this one: 
Bernard Mayes founded  
the first suicide prevention hotline 
in the country. I know this because  
he was a dean at my college and the first 

audaciously out educator I ever met.  
Monthly he held a donut hour, 
I was closeted then, so I showed up early 
to squeeze onto a cramped couch 
and listen: In 1961, he leafletted streets 

with a phone number safe to dial 
and then waited by a red rotary phone 
certain that many would call.  
The category is Gay Rage.  
Name the band and the song: 

Bikini Kill, “Suck My Left One”  
Bronski Beat, “Why?”  
Princess Nokia, “Tomboy” 
Planningtorock, “Get Your  
Fckin Laws Off My Body”

It was many and many a year ago,
   In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
   By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
   Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
   In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
   I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
   Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
   My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
   And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
   In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
   Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
   In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
   Of those who were older than we—
   Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
   Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
   In her sepulchre there by the sea,
   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time—
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two—
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

12 October 1962