Editor Michael Montlack chose a poem of mine to be included in Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on Their Muses, published by Lethe Press. The poem, “National Anthem, 1991,” describes my memory as a nine-year-old first hearing Whitney Houston sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before Super Bowl XXV. I wrote the poem in 2011, with submission to the anthology in mind. The poem begins with the line “Before so much of your grace was spent,” which I instantly regretted when I first heard the news of Houston’s tragic death. In a review of Divining Divas in Next Magazine, James Fitzpatrick lists the poem as a “standout” due to its timely nature.

"Bamboo Grove," by Wang Wei; calligraphy by Kuo-Hsiung Chen

“Bamboo Grove” was translated using a “crib” found in Wai Lim Yip’s Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres (University of California Press, 1976).

* (1) to keep him company by shining; (2) illumination; (3) the primary meaning of shining

Yip’s 1976 translation is:
I sit alone among dark bamboos.
Strum the lute and let loose my voice.
Grove so deep, no one knows.
The moon visits and shines on me.

In my distranslation of the poem, the chinese character for “man” introduces a secondary person into the scene, so that the third line, “deep forest man not know,” becomes “so deep no one knows who you’re with.” I call it a “queered translation” of the original because the ambiguity and secrecy of the romantic scene pictured is enriched by queering the characters: two men meeting to literally make music in the woods. My bending the poem toward this reading was also in part brought on by the final two characters of the fourth line, especially the first definition of “shine” offered: “to keep him company by shining.”

The second, “A Place Named for Deer,” was translated after reading 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated, by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz (Moyer Bell Limited, 1987), using the crib provided in that text.

But we can be helped toward it.
True love gave me time,
Gave me, for myself alone,
This whole open day
We would have spent together.

True love gave me this—
Harder to find
Than a hummingbird’s nest,
Rare as the elusive
Scent of arbutus
Under sodden leaves,
More welcome than a cup
Of spring water
After long drought.

I hold it in my hands,
I breathe it in,
I drink it,
While fifty-nine years
Of ardor and tenderness,
Of struggle and creation—
The whole complex bundle—
Falls away in a streak of light
Like a shooting star,
As the soul,
Unencumbered,
Alive, ageless,
Meets the pristine moment:
Poetry again.

From “The Most of It” by Robert Frost

the handle breaks clean off and there is no longer
a way to hold the knowledge of a hard day’s work.
The man who smiled at you once in the street.

-

I stood at the edge of a field
afraid to enter. I stood at the edge
of a field of her, birds gleaning

then lifting from seed
without reason or wrong-
doing. It was like a kiss

how she steered away, on her bike,
how I ran after, my face red with want
that last day of first school.

-

The boys dancing for money on the A train
know the exact shapes of their bodies:
they wheel and leap, flex to pose and bend to clasp

each other. The man in me
catches ab and wrist, shirt falling
above pec, held there. The halting, wet navel.

-

The original heart had no valves.
You placed your fingers inside instrument’s bloody bell
to change its pitch. As suddenly:

choruses of drills, hammers, keys in locks.
Fields of garlic sweetened in the ground.

The world’s women continue their work of rejoicing,
and the men—pretending nothing has changed—
weep in the dark, afraid of what might happen.

I thought it was tanagers until I met them.
Then they ate the figs from our yard, all at once.
We were going to serve them at our wedding.
I want to surprise you like that, just once.

Can I know what word you’re going to write before you write it?
Can you tell me the word and I’ll write it down?
Can you give me a title, and I’ll read you the poem from memory?

Can you ask me the next question?
Can you ask me all my favorite questions
and write down all my answers? And sell it?