Richard Jeffrey Newman

I have not posted a Frag­ments of Evolv­ing Man­hood piece on a long while, mostly because my atten­tion has been focused else­where, but I have been work­ing these past cou­ple of weeks on an essay that is pretty impor­tant to me and since it fits in the “Frag­ments” series, I thought I’d share some of it. I’d love to be able to call the essay “The ‘Cunt Poem’ Chal­lenge,” and I will prob­a­bly send it out with that title, but I am bet­ting not a few edi­tors will have a hard time with it. In any event, here is the excerpt. Please be aware as you read that the first para­graph is the intro­duc­tion, which I think you need for con­text, while the sec­ond and third para­graphs are from later on in the essay.

The leader of my first grad­u­ate poetry work­shop — this was 1985 — was telling us about a chal­lenge she’d issued to the men in the group of poets she hung out with when she was younger. “None of you,” she said she told them, “will ever write a suc­cess­ful ‘cunt poem,’ because, when it comes to cunts, men only under­stand clichés.” We all laughed, the three of us who were men per­haps a lit­tle uncom­fort­ably, and then she informed us that a poem her chal­lenge had inspired was in the anthol­ogy she’d assigned as our text. I read that poem four times when I got home that night, find­ing it harder to believe with each read­ing that any­one could have thought it deserved pub­li­ca­tion. Not only did it rely on pre­cisely the kinds of clichés I under­stood my teacher to have been talk­ing about, end­ing, for exam­ple, by call­ing women’s gen­i­tals, with­out irony, “the gates of par­adise;” but the entire poem was built on the biggest cliché of all, treat­ing The Vagina it dis­cussed — because I still can­not help but think of the word as cap­i­tal­ized and in ital­ics, even though it never appears in the poem — as noth­ing more than an object of the poet’s con­tem­pla­tion, like the Gre­cian urn had been for Keats, as if all the vagi­nas The Vagina rep­re­sented were not in real­ity attached to the liv­ing, breath­ing bod­ies of actual women.

///

The first thing I did was trash every poem I’d writ­ten to that point. Then, once I’d let go of the bag­gage all that old work rep­re­sented, the poems that became my first book, The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), began to take shape. At last, I felt like I’d found a lan­guage in which I could speak about my body as my own, in which my desires and my fears, my vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and regrets, my joys and my fail­ures, were mine and no one else’s to give mean­ing to. Com­mit­ting to that lan­guage meant com­mit­ting to a rad­i­cal hon­esty about who I was, both as a sur­vivor of child sex­ual abuse and as a man; it meant reject­ing utterly the rhetoric of invis­i­bil­ity with which the man who forced his penis into my mouth had so effec­tively and for so many years hijacked what I had to say.

That kind of hon­esty is pre­cisely what is lack­ing in the clichés my teacher defined as the lim­its of the male imag­i­na­tion when it comes to writ­ing about women’s gen­i­tals. Take, for exam­ple, the cliché that ends the “cunt poem” I spoke about at the begin­ning of this essay, “the gates of par­adise.” The dis­hon­esty in this metaphor lies pri­mar­ily in the way it objec­ti­fies women’s bod­ies, describ­ing not women’s expe­ri­ence of being embod­ied, and not even men’s expe­ri­ence of women’s bod­ies as bod­ies inhab­ited by women, but rather the par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence men have of our own bod­ies when we have sex with women. It praises women’s gen­i­tals, in other words, not for being what they are, but for how men can use them, and so, on a cul­tural level, ren­ders women as invis­i­ble and voice­less as I was ren­dered by the men who used me. To meet my teacher’s chal­lenge, then, to be a male poet who writes a suc­cess­ful “cunt poem,” is not sim­ply to find a non-cliché way of call­ing women’s gen­i­tals “the gates of par­adise.” Rather, it is to dis­cover lan­guage that will make vis­i­ble the women whose gen­i­tals they are, unwrap­ping from within a male per­spec­tive the lay­ers of mis­con­cep­tion and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion in which they are bound by the sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of women that is so cen­tral to our cul­ture. It is, in other words, a pro­foundly polit­i­cal endeavor, one that requires a man not only to refuse com­plic­ity in the inher­ent vio­la­tion that sex­u­ally objec­ti­fy­ing women is, but also to artic­u­late a way of being a man who sees women as sex­ual beings that does jus­tice to who they are as human beings.

This was for a long time what I thought I was going to call my sec­ond book of poems, though I was told to shorten it to “All That Strug­gled in You Not to Drown,” because the poem of the same title, a long love poem for my wife, is my favorite poem in the book. Recently, as one of the read­ers in “Body of Work,” the Queens in Love with Lit­er­a­ture (QUILL) kick­off event for 2011 – 2012 – I am on the QUILL advi­sory com­mit­tee – I had the oppor­tu­nity to read “I Fell in Love with All That Strug­gled in You Not to Drown” accom­pa­nied by dancer/choreographer Keomi Tarver’s impro­vi­sa­tions. The entire event was about the inter­play between dance and poetry. Mine and Keomi’s per­for­mance was cap­tured in these two videos. The text of the three poems, “Poem from the Barnes & Noble Café,” “I Fell in Love with All That Strug­gled in You Not to Drown (Move­ment 1)” and “Wait­ing for It All to Crum­ble Step by Step Beneath My Feet,” appears below. (Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t know how to make this Word­Press tem­plate play nice with the orig­i­nal lin­eation.) I hope you enjoy them:

Part 1

Part 2

*********************************************************************

Poem From The Barnes and Noble Café

1.

When I started walk­ing
I wasn’t count­ing steps.
I was think­ing how these days

were not what I’d hoped
life would reduce me to,
but when I crossed the street,

the switch that throws itself
inside my brain
when­ever I walk alone

threw itself, and I was mouthing
num­bers, tal­ly­ing each stride
as if I were build­ing meaning.

Then I was here, in the book­store,
look­ing for that vol­ume
on Iran­ian cin­ema, which I found

more eas­ily than I thought I would,
so I rode the esca­la­tor
down to Music — a whim;

I haven’t bought a CD
in months — and almost knocked
an olive-skinned man

with a black and white kef­fiyeh
wrapped around his neck
into Brit­ney Spears’ nearly naked

card­board flesh. I grabbed his arm
to steady him; he gripped me back,
and some­one slow­ing down to watch

might’ve thought we were old friends.
He con­tin­ued on. I turned, stared
at the fringed fab­ric hang­ing down

the brown leather of his jacket—
so much like a tallis, I thought—
and recalled my own keffiyeh,

bought twenty years ago,
after Sabra and Shatila, from a
Black man with French-tinged English.

A shill for the Arabs,
my grand­mother bit into air
I know she wished was him

when she saw it. I wish
the kef­fiyeh had meant
sol­i­dar­ity, or sym­pa­thy, or anything

bet­ter than escape, but it was
an escape, and wear­ing it
was a kind of freedom,

as there is free­dom in wan­der­ing
these aisles, putting aside
Tan­ger­ine Dream for Axiom of Choice,

for a blues com­pi­la­tion we could dance to,
or for the Klez­mat­ics, whose music
on the sound sys­tem also

invites dance, and so I’m danc­ing
a small shuf­fle into Show Tunes,
remem­ber­ing Sur­prise Lake Camp’s

Fid­dler On The Roof, the boy
who played Tevye, fat and ath­letic,
and when he danced, his belly

bounced out from under
his white shirt, and his tzitzis twirled
in the red stage lighting

like poorly placed stripper’s tas­sels,
and we all clapped, laugh­ing,
singing along, hoping

it would never end. I moved him
the way I move myself, step-by-step
through the choreography,

keep­ing time with a chord
on the grand piano
that echoes in me still

as I bring the songs I want
to the cash reg­is­ter. I sign for them
as I’ve signed for so much else in my life

and take the esca­la­tor up three flights
for a cup of mint tea. Turn­ing
from the counter, I catch

in the cor­ner of my eye
the kef­fiyeh from down­stairs
open­ing to a square, folding

to a tri­an­gle, and the man
I bumped into smiles at me,
nods at the chairs he and his friends

are get­ting up from, drapes
the cloth around his neck,
and leaves. On his table,

The New York Times: priests
using chil­dren for sex,
and George W. Bush wants

money to pro­mote mar­riage
and to fight a war he says
will rid us of our fears.

I’m think­ing how much
the world needs fear right now,
to step back from the mouth

of what has not yet hap­pened,
like you’d want a sui­cide bomber to do,
or a sol­dier with orders to shoot civilians.

When you and I danced at our wed­ding,
arms raised, hands trac­ing
Per­sian rhythms in the air,

and when they lifted us on chairs
and danced the hora, your fam­ily
and mine, what­ever we erased

it was not dif­fer­ence,
and so music is an answer
to the ques­tion I’m try­ing to ask,

for it is noth­ing when we come together
if it is not rhythm and melody,
coun­ter­point and harmony,

and you push your­self against my mouth,
and I’m kiss­ing every year you’ve lived,
each thou­sand years of your country’s history,

the cen­turies of Islam, car­pets
woven, chil­dren
nursed, harvests

lost to the weather, the will
of god, all of it
vibrat­ing live beneath your skin,

and you guide me, with your own hand
take me to the spot
where fear and hope, pain

and joy, merge to become
the irre­ducible fact of your flesh,
and it’s like when the band reaches

the last beat, and the dancers
hang sus­pended
in the final resolution:

It is peace, and if they, if we,
could stay there, there would be peace.

2.
I remem­ber Joe tak­ing Patty and me one night to Jones Beach. Don’t try to swim, he warned. The under­tow will drag you out. We walked in up to our ankles. Patty started danc­ing, kick­ing her legs up in a clumsy can-can, splash­ing me till my shirt was soaked through. When we got home, we slept in the same bed.

After the mur­der — Rose, Patty’s mother, was found stuffed in a hall closet, stabbed six­teen times with a ser­rated knife; Joe was the only sus­pect, but there wasn’t enough evi­dence to pros­e­cute — after the mur­der, I kept to myself, hud­dled with friends Patty didn’t know. When she came to tell me she was leav­ing to live with her aunt in New Jer­sey, I stood away from her, a mono­syl­labic Bye! my only answer.

When Joe came a few weeks later to col­lect his stuff, the woman from next door hid in our hall closet, the one where the ter­mites had swarmed ear­lier in the year. She knew, she said, things she was afraid to tell the cops.

That was also the year Sandy got sick for the last time, and she knew she was going to die, had refused to be my girl­friend because of it. I didn’t go see her, never, that I remem­ber, wor­ried she might want to see me — and then she died.

I’m not being hard on myself.

I know I was only thir­teen, and love at that age denies dying, but now I’m forty, and the lit­tle boy who calls me Richard instead of Dad could die tomor­row. As could you. As many will, even per­haps the man with the kef­fiyeh, in whose paper I read another head­line: three youths, Arabs, arrested in France for bomb­ing a syn­a­gogue I could’ve been in, and of course Israel should pull out now, and of course Palestine’s inde­pen­dence should be declared this moment,

the earth trans­formed to a tent where we all break bread,
each of us car­ry­ing what we’ve seen
the way musi­cians carry music
in the moments before they start playing.

This poem appears in my first book, The Silence of Men.

Wait­ing for It All to Crum­ble Step by Step Beneath my Feet

I watch you walk away from the first sex we’ve had
in more months than either of us would like to admit,
and my breath catches at the light shin­ing
from the full naked­ness of your back, as if your skin
has taken in the long bright­ness that held us
as I held you hold­ing me, and now
that the sun has moved past our win­dow,
your body alone illu­mi­nates this room;

and from the gar­den down­stairs
that is a gar­den I have car­ried in me
since I was younger than the lit­tle boy
whose play date has granted us these hours,
children’s laugh­ter, an adult’s call
not to swing so high, and the same squeak
from when I was Shahob’s age
of the swing itself, a rusty metronome
keep­ing the beat of my life in Jack­son Heights,
where I never thought I’d set­tle down.

Yes­ter­day, I sat in the garden’s south end
think­ing that I have never almost died,
not even the way my friend
who would’ve been beneath
the World Trade Cen­ter
“almost died,” except
she’d found just months before
a new job in another state,
so she was teach­ing
The Com­edy of Errors in Col­orado
when the first plane hit.

The garden’s morn­ing quiet
was more quiet than usual.
No pigeon con­gre­ga­tion searched
the cir­cu­lar wood-chip mid­dle for food;
no squir­rels for­aged; but then
a black shape spread its wings against the leaves,
cast­ing a shadow on the 52 building’s back wall,
and I under­stood the bones picked clean
that we’ve been step­ping over
when we walk the quiet cen­ter
the gar­den is at night.

The hawk allowed the air to carry it
to a branch mid­way up the oak that wasn’t here
when this grass was a foot­ball field for me and Clau­dia Joel
and Sun­days meant din­ner and Wild King­dom
at grandma and grandpa’s. In one episode,
Mar­lon Perkins — or maybe it was his assis­tant Jim—
wres­tled in a South Amer­i­can rain for­est river
an ana­conda thicker in my mem­ory
than my thighs are now. I didn’t know
the scene would not have made it to the screen
if he had died, so when I saw the snake
pull beneath the river’s cur­rent
what I was sure would be
that man’s last liv­ing day,
I closed my eyes,
as I close them now,
want­ing to see the moment
he broke the water’s sur­face
back into life, but it’s Armon’s
face that comes to me,
too scared to climb the fence,
and so he turns, hop­ing there’s a path
to lead him to the other side,
but it’s moon­less moun­tain dark,
and he can­not know that where he steps is dirt
that’s been wait­ing at the cliff’s edge for days
for a rea­son to crum­ble.
Tomor­row,
we will hug his par­ents and his sis­ter
in their grief and maybe find some words
to help them heal, but also
we will stand there giv­ing silent thanks
our son is not the one we’ve come to mourn.

Before you took him with you to Iran,
Sha­hob drew a map con­nect­ing here
to wher­ever there was in his imag­i­na­tion,
trac­ing each part of the jour­ney
on its own sheet of paper. This way,
he explained, I could find you in an emer­gency,
and you would not get lost on your way home.
He mixed and matched the sec­tions
till the con­tours fit the shape
the trip made in his mind;
we taped them together and he smiled.
Now I can leave, he said, kiss­ing me.

The night Pres­i­dent Bush ordered our mil­i­tary
to teach what the TV news com­men­ta­tor called
the true mean­ing of ter­ror to those mon­sters in Afghanistan,
I dug with Sha­hob through the rock
hid­ing in our liv­ing room
dinosaur fos­sils we had to find
before he could sleep, so focused
on dig­ging ever deeper into the pri­vate earth
he’d con­jured for us to explore
that I did not once raise my eyes to the win­dow
fram­ing the col­umn of white smoke
still ris­ing from the lower Man­hat­tan skyline;

and as I sat yes­ter­day in the gar­den,
fill­ing myself with these mem­o­ries,
the moment came back to me when watch­ing
that same smoke through that same win­dow
trans­formed the child safety bars
the law required us to install
into the bars of a closed cage, and I thought
how each day since Sha­hob was born
has mapped our lives for us,
and will do so until we die.

The hawk took off again,
swooped low to the ground,
but noth­ing was there for its claws to close on,
so it rose, majes­tic, to rest its wings
among the branches keep­ing sun­light
from the spot in the children’s gar­den
where par­ents set their sons and daugh­ters up
to play with water.

When I tell you what I saw, you’ll insist
those moth­ers and fathers need to watch the sky,
that a bird of prey wants prey and doesn’t care
if it’s a pigeon, a squir­rel or a child.

///

The phone rings
just as the flush
fin­ishes: our boy
call­ing that he’s ready
to come home.

I worry for him, you say,
pulling on your clothes,
pick­ing up where we left off
before we got undressed.

Before you know it,
he’ll be old enough to draft,
and if it’s not Iraq, it will be Iran.
Imag­ine! My son drafted
to invade my country.

You lie down next to me,
drap­ing one denim-covered leg
across my penis
that is half in love
with ris­ing again.
Smil­ing at the inhaled plea­sure
the ges­ture draws from me,
you push my arms
above my head. This was fun,
you whis­per, as if our son
were already home. If we had time,
I’d do you again, with my clothes on,
and the rule would be
if your hands moved
from where they are right now,
I’d stop.
I smile back
but then you’re out the door,
and I know you’re try­ing not to make the list
of all the ways you’ve thought that he could die
before he should. Me? I’m replay­ing
the magi­cian we watched last night,
the table­cloth he pulled from under­neath
a wine-glass-filled ser­vice for four
with­out spilling a sin­gle drop.

Sha­hob asked me how it’s done
and would not accept my igno­rance.
What do you imag­ine the secret is? he kept asking,

because noth­ing he imag­ines
feels impos­si­ble to him.

I Fell in Love with All That Strug­gled in You Not to Drown

First Move­ment

Inch­ing the car today
past what Sha­hob called snorts
for his first eigh­teen months of words,
the rhythm cir­cling in me
was a riff the com­poser in my head
lifted whole from the song—
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps”—
that sent me back to Flo­ral Park, the bird
Jamie and I watched flap wounded to the ground,
and how he lied when the cops found his gun.

Then the beat changed, fast
triplets I drummed the wheel to,
con­jur­ing you instead, pen in hand, the desk lamp
cast­ing your shadow large against the wall behind you.
You whis­per the lines to your­self as you write them,
believ­ing this joy lan­guage brings
is all you’ll ever want. You’re sev­en­teen,
and your poems hint, or maybe more than hint—
I’ve asked but you say you don’t remem­ber—
that a daughter’s life, or a wife’s,
is less than you hope for, and so maybe
your par­ents feared the promis­cu­ity they were taught
that women who dare what I am dar­ing
here at my desk
become addicted to, or maybe
poetry kept you from your school­work.
All you’ll say is they pres­sured you to stop
and you did.

The traf­fic eased,
and the DJ played “Born To Be Wild,”
and as I sped singing past Lakeville Road
hop­ing to make up lost time,
I was singing for you,
aching to know the girl you were,
to have been the teacher, no, the friend
to whom you showed that first ghazal
you couldn’t keep to your­self,
because love means giv­ing the world
the room it needs to move through you,

and love, in this past I am imag­in­ing for us,
was the word you stitched your cou­plets with,
as it was also, corny but true,
the cho­rus I turned the car off in the mid­dle of—
The Bea­t­les’ “All You Need Is…” — when I parked.

In class, we talked fash­ion: pierc­ings
and why men shouldn’t wear thongs
unless they’re strip­pers,
and not one of my stu­dents
thought pink on a man
could mean any­thing but gay,

and I remem­bered—
no, it wasn’t mem­ory;
you’ve never told me — I imag­ined
you get­ting dressed for school the first day
of the pub­lic wom­an­hood
the aya­tol­lahs gave you no choice
but to learn to wear.

The breeze has been my lover,
you recite to your­self in the mir­ror,
and the sun, and you tuck
under your chador
the last few strands of hair
you need to cover, check
the length of your sleeves
and that your ankles
if you have to run
won’t emerge into light.
And I have let the ocean pull me naked to its chest,
and with my fin­gers probed the earth’s flesh,
and filled my mouth with its fruit.

Then you pick up your book bag, call good­bye,
and appear next in this film I’m script­ing
with the front door closed behind you,
a fledg­ling crow with no wings to spread
and a gaunt­let of ene­mies to walk.
You move out into the gaze
of Tehran’s great male eye,
step­ping small onto the street
where, when you were eight,
you left that flasher
stand­ing by your sister’s bike,
con­vinced you wanted
what he held in his hand
and all he had to do
was wait right there
till you returned
with your mother’s per­mis­sion,
and he did wait — you watched him
through the front win­dow of your house—
long enough that you feared
he’d never leave, but then, finally, he left.
Now, stripped of any words
that might pro­tect you,
con­vinced your cover
will never cover enough,
you move for­ward,
fill­ing your eyes with noth­ing
that is not the three inches of air
directly in front of your face.

****************************************************

In case you’re inter­ested, I have since changed my sec­ond book’s title to Because Men Only Under­stand Cliches–mostly because I think it makes a really inter­est­ing fol­low up to The Silence of Men, which was the title of my first book.

The first time the old man who lived in the apart­ment at the top of the stair­case said hello to me, he stopped for a moment as we passed in the court­yard and smiled as if he’d known me my whole life. The sec­ond time, he did the same thing. By the third or fourth time, a rit­ual of greet­ing had grown between us. When­ever we saw each other, he would smile and say hello first; I would smile, say the same thing back, and then, for a long silent moment, he would fix me with his gaze while I stood there, too hap­pily embar­rassed to move, wish­ing when he walked away that I’d done some­thing, any­thing, to pro­long our conversation.

I think of him as “the old man” because of how young I was when I met him — I was thir­teen — but he was prob­a­bly not much older than the forty-nine-years-old I am now, if that old, and so he was the per­fect age for me to see in him a pos­si­ble sur­ro­gate father. My par­ents had sep­a­rated when I was three; my step­fa­ther had recently left us; and I was des­per­ate for some kind of pater­nal atten­tion and approval. So I was thrilled when the old man one day in late sum­mer did not keep walk­ing after our usual exchange, ask­ing me instead, “When am I going to see you?”

I fig­ured he was lonely, like Mrs. Schecht­man had been when she lived in the apart­ment next to his, and the thought of vis­it­ing with him like I used to visit with her made me happy. “Soon!” I answered.

Not too long after­wards, I was on my way out of our build­ing to meet my friends. The old man hap­pened to be walk­ing down the stair­case lead­ing from his apart­ment to the front door, which we reached at the same time. As I went to turn the knob, he held the door shut with his left fore­arm, maneu­ver­ing me with his right till I stood face first in the cor­ner near the mail­boxes where the door frame met the wall. Cov­er­ing my body with his own, he ran his hands beneath my shirt and up the legs of my shorts; he groped my chest and belly, squeezed my butt, cupped my crotch, and he kept whis­per­ing hoarsely into my ear, over and over again, “When am I going to see you?”

I had no words for what he was doing, no train­ing such as young chil­dren get now in how to scream no! to scare off an attacker. All I could do was stand there till he was fin­ished; and when he was fin­ished, I ran. I don’t remem­ber how far or how long or in which direc­tion, but I ran as if I could leave my skin behind, as if run­ning would turn me into another per­son. When I stopped run­ning, in the small park across the street from the Lutheran Church, I sat a long time with the knowl­edge that my run­ning had undone noth­ing, that my body was still the body he’d touched.

Even if I’d wanted to tell some­one — and I didn’t — I was sure no one would believe me, so I pre­tended noth­ing had hap­pened. When the old man passed me the next day and said hello, I said hello back the way I always did, forc­ing myself not to see the ironic twist he added to his smile. After a cou­ple of more times, our hel­los began to feel nor­mal again, and I told myself that maybe it hadn’t hap­pened. Maybe he was just a lonely old man who liked to say hello, and as long as he stayed on his side of that hello, I felt — or, to be more accu­rate, I con­vinced myself that I was — safe.

Some weeks later, as I sat with my friends in front of our build­ing, the old man came home from food shop­ping and asked me to help him upstairs with the bags in his shop­ping cart. I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t. To do so would almost cer­tainly have raised ques­tions for my friends about why I was being so rude, and the last thing I wanted to do was explain myself to them. So I took the bag he pointed to and fol­lowed him up to his apart­ment, where he opened the door and motioned me in ahead of him. The bag was heavy, so I stepped inside, think­ing I’d leave it by the door and get out as quickly as I could, but he was too fast for me. As soon as the door shut behind him, he pushed the shop­ping cart to the side, took the bag from my arms and dropped it to the floor. The cans at the bot­tom landed with a crash that shook the whole apart­ment. Snaking his arms around my waist, he undid my belt and unzipped my pants, push­ing them down so they fell around my ankles. All I could do was stand there, frozen to the spot where my feet had stopped mov­ing. He took me by the hand and led me to the couch against the wall. He sat down. Look­ing up at me with a wide smile — I have the dis­tinct mem­ory that he’d taken out his two front teeth — his eyes, at what I imag­ine must have been the fear in mine, grew ten­der. “You’ve never had a blowjob before, have you?” When I shook my head no, his voice filled with con­cern. “But don’t you want me to love you?”

In the silence with which I responded, he took my penis in his hands — I remem­ber think­ing his fin­gers were like a cage — and he told me how good it was, how beau­ti­ful and big, and then his own pants were down, and I was sit­ting on the couch, and his penis, large and pur­ple, hung in front of my face. His voice came from some­where above me, urg­ing me to play with it, at least to touch it, and I don’t remem­ber if I did — no, at this point, my mem­ory goes white, like the blank space in a video of which a por­tion has been erased, though I can still feel his hands on the back of my head. Then I see myself walk­ing to the door, unlock­ing it, clos­ing it behind me, and some­how I am next in my bed, curled in the fetal posi­tion, where I stay until my mother calls me for dinner.

The next day, the old man saw me stand­ing by myself in front of our build­ing. He didn’t come close, just stood some dis­tance away and pleaded with me to go upstairs with him again. This time, he promised, would be dif­fer­ent. He would move more slowly, be more gen­tle. I said no, ignor­ing his fur­ther pleas until he left me alone, which he did for the rest of the time he lived in our build­ing. I still nod­ded in recog­ni­tion if I was with some­one when he saw me — I did not want any­one won­der­ing why I didn’t — but oth­er­wise I did my best to ignore him, and he seemed con­tent to ignore me as well. Even­tu­ally, he moved away, and what he’d done to me receded even fur­ther into the silence I’d wrapped it in, and I pulled that silence around me like a pro­tec­tive cloak. No one else ever had to know.

The fab­ric of my silence started to fray when, at nine­teen years old, I read Adri­enne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence. At the time, I was inter­ested in Rich as a poet; I knew noth­ing about her as a fem­i­nist. Indeed, fem­i­nism itself was barely on my radar as some­thing with a sub­stan­tive rel­e­vance to my life, and so I was sur­prised to find myself enthralled and ener­gized by the polit­i­cal and explic­itly woman-centered con­tent of what I was read­ing. Then I came to this pas­sage from “Cary­atid: Two Columns:”

[T]aught to view our bod­ies as our total­ity, our gen­i­tals as our chief source of fas­ci­na­tion and value, many women have become dis­so­ci­ated from their own bodies…viewing them­selves as objects to be pos­sessed by men rather than as the sub­jects of an existence.

As soon as I read those words, a small voice in my head began to speak. “But what about me?” it wanted to know. “What about what hap­pened to me?” I sought out other fem­i­nist texts and read vora­ciously, dis­cov­er­ing in the fem­i­nist analy­sis of men’s sex­ual vio­lence against women a vocab­u­lary for nam­ing what the old man in my build­ing had done to me as the vio­la­tion it was. More impor­tantly, though, being able to name what he did made it pos­si­ble for me to tell oth­ers, and when telling them did not bring the roof of the world crash­ing down around my head, I found the strength I needed to con­front my abuse more fully by going to coun­sel­ing. In a very real sense, then, I owe to fem­i­nism what­ever heal­ing I have achieved.

If I stopped here, even those of you totally opposed to fem­i­nism would prob­a­bly be nod­ding your heads. “Of course you’re a fem­i­nist. It makes per­fect sense.” Yet to stop here would be to reduce fem­i­nism to a kind of self-help ide­ol­ogy, implic­itly deny­ing that fem­i­nism is also a pol­i­tics. More to the point, it would be to gloss over the fact that com­mit­ting myself to those pol­i­tics has been part and par­cel of my healing.

Not too long after I first read Adri­enne Rich’s essay, I was work­ing as a sum­mer camp super­vi­sor in New York’s Hud­son Val­ley. The leader of a train­ing ses­sion we were required to attend told us he would use the word she as the generic pro­noun when dis­cussing how to deal with campers who might choose to tell us that they’d been sex­u­ally abused. Since most abuse hap­pened to girls, he explained, refer­ring to both boys and girls as vic­tims would give us a skewed pic­ture of real­ity, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for us to respond appro­pri­ately. I felt like I’d been punched in the stom­ach. It wasn’t just that he so blithely dis­missed my expe­ri­ence. What he said seemed to imply that the sex­ual abuse of boys and the sex­ual abuse of girls were so rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent in nature that we could not talk about them in the same con­text. If that were true, it called into ques­tion every­thing I thought I’d been learn­ing from fem­i­nism, sug­gest­ing that the strength I’d been draw­ing from that learn­ing was based on a false premise.

My body rebelled at this idea. Each time I tried to tell myself that the ses­sion leader was right — because the weight of his exper­tise made it hard to think he wasn’t — I wanted to crawl out of my skin no dif­fer­ently than I had after the first time the old man in my build­ing touched me. Still, there was no deny­ing that the books I was read­ing said not one word about my expe­ri­ence. Girls and women were abused and exploited in those pages, not boys, and cer­tainly not men. I’d found myself in Rich’s essay, in other words, as well as in the other fem­i­nists texts I was read­ing, through a process of anal­ogy. To take another instance from “Cary­atid: Two Columns,” when Rich wrote about how the val­ues of our cul­ture “equat[e]…manhood…with the objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of another’s per­son and the dom­i­na­tion of another’s body,” I under­stood her to be describ­ing, with a chill­ing accu­racy, what the old man in my build­ing had done to me, even though she was talk­ing explic­itly about men’s sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of women.

This anal­ogy only grew stronger as I began to see very pre­cise par­al­lels between the old man’s method of “seduc­ing” me — because that’s what I think he thought he was doing – and the meth­ods for get­ting women into bed that some of my male friends talked about using. I remem­ber, for exam­ple, a dorm room con­ver­sa­tion from when I was an under­grad­u­ate. The “stud” among us – call him Liam – was talk­ing about the kind of women with whom sex­ual suc­cess mat­tered to him the most. These were, he said, the women who resisted, the ones who made him work for it, forc­ing him to prove that he could bend them to his will — I think he actu­ally used those words — because get­ting them to have sex with him made him feel most like a man. As Liam described how he sized such women up, I sud­denly real­ized that the old man in my build­ing had sized me up as well, that he had to have been watch­ing me before the first time he said hello. I was a shy, awk­ward and needy kid, so he gave me the kind of atten­tion that would make me feel noticed and that I would there­fore want more of. Liam talked about this as the “stage of flat­tery.” Then, once the old man could see in me a grow­ing desire for his atten­tion, he must have assumed that I also desired (per­haps with­out real­iz­ing it) every­thing else he wanted to “give” me as well. Accord­ing to Liam, a woman who resisted at this stage really wanted sex but was afraid of being labeled “easy.” She needed to be “taken,” he said, so she could give up her self con­trol with­out feel­ing guilty. Fol­low­ing what I am sure was a sim­i­lar logic, the old man used the force he thought was nec­es­sary to push me past the fear he believed was keep­ing me from express­ing my true desire. How else to explain the ques­tion he asked me before my mem­ory goes blank, “But don’t you want me to love you?”

Iron­i­cally, this par­al­lel between the two men was com­fort­ing. It affirmed for me that there was no rea­son to believe my expe­ri­ence of abuse dif­fered in any essen­tial way from the expe­ri­ence of a girl or woman whom a man had sim­i­larly vio­lated. The ses­sion leader had to have been wrong. Yet there was also no avoid­ing the fact that the fem­i­nists I was read­ing placed me as a man in the same cat­e­gory as the two men I have been talk­ing about. Here, again, from “Cary­atid: Two Columns,” is Adri­enne Rich:

Rape is the ulti­mate out­ward phys­i­cal act of coer­cion and deper­son­al­iza­tion prac­ticed on women by men. Most male readers…would per­haps deny hav­ing gone so far: the hon­est would admit to fan­tasies, urges of lust and hatred, or lust and fear, or to a “harm­less” fas­ci­na­tion with pornog­ra­phy and sadis­tic art.

I was fas­ci­nated by pornog­ra­phy; I had fan­tasies that com­bined lust and fear; and it was impos­si­ble to miss the cyn­i­cal accu­sa­tion in Rich’s use of the word “per­haps.” More tellingly, though, and damn­ingly, I had to admit that when Liam explained what it took for him to feel sex­u­ally like a man, I could not help but mea­sure myself against the stan­dard he set. I didn’t have a girl­friend at the time, and I wasn’t hav­ing sex, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t some­times make me feel inad­e­quate. How­ever, it was only after I met a woman who rejected me because I was not “man enough” in pre­cisely Liam’s terms that I began to under­stand how fully the sex­ual val­ues to which he sub­scribed were also val­ues I had in me, whether I wanted them or not.

I met “Ling” through one of her suit­e­m­ates, “Denise,” who sat next to me in the class I was tak­ing on Shakespeare’s come­dies. The three of us spent an after­noon talk­ing and jok­ing in the library when we were sup­posed to be study­ing, and we hit it off so well that soon I was walk­ing across cam­pus a cou­ple of times a week to hang out with them and “Naomi,” the third woman with whom they lived. Some­times, if I stayed too late, I’d sleep on the couch in their suite and go back to my own dorm in the morn­ing. One such night, Ling and I stayed up talk­ing on that couch. I don’t remem­ber a sin­gle thing we said except for the fact that she told me about her expe­ri­ence emi­grat­ing as a young girl from China to the United States, but I know I felt good as I walked back to my dorm the next morn­ing. I liked Ling a lot, and I hoped that our talk­ing might lead to a roman­tic relationship.

The day after that, I saw Ling on cam­pus walk­ing with Naomi past the library. I called out to them and ran over to say hello. Instead of say­ing hello back, how­ever, they started mock­ing me, call­ing me “lit­tle boy” and “cow­ard.” I couldn’t imag­ine they were doing any­thing other than jok­ing with me, so I started to laugh with them. When I tried to ask Ling how she did on the test she’d had that morn­ing, though, the two women backed away, laugh­ing even harder and hold­ing up their hands to tell me I shouldn’t come any closer. I was con­fused. I called that night, but Denise told me Ling wasn’t there and that it would prob­a­bly be a good idea if I didn’t call again. Ling had been very insulted that not once dur­ing the time we were talk­ing on the couch did I even try to kiss her. I called a cou­ple of more times after that, hop­ing I’d be able to tell Ling how much I really did like her, but the one time I got her on the phone she was so clearly not inter­ested in talk­ing to me that I stopped call­ing. I nei­ther saw nor spoke to her again.

I was heart­bro­ken. More than that, though, I was angry and ashamed. I replayed the whole night over and over in my mind, try­ing to fig­ure out which raised eye­brow or touch on my arm or sig­nif­i­cant gaze I should have under­stood as Ling’s cue that it was time for me to kiss her. I just could not see what she clearly thought should have been obvi­ous. I tried to imag­ine how the night might have gone dif­fer­ently, cre­at­ing a sce­nario in which I leaned over and kissed Ling gen­tly at the edge of her mouth, as if I’d been aim­ing for her cheek and missed. She sat back, looked at me for a long moment, and then, of course, kissed me in return. Each time I played this scene in my head, how­ever, my anger and shame only increased. I still didn’t under­stand how I was sup­posed to have known that Ling wanted me to kiss her. As my sense of inad­e­quacy grew, the sting of Ling’s mock­ery grew as well, and I started to think that maybe I was indeed no bet­ter than the weak, cow­ardly and inef­fec­tual lit­tle boy she and her friend had told me that I was.

Once again, though, my body rebelled, and a nau­sea rose in me. Instead of mak­ing me want to crawl out of my own skin, though, this nau­sea was accom­pa­nied by a rage that pro­pelled me past Ling’s skin and into her body. Now, in the scenes I played in my head, I saw myself “tak­ing her” the way Liam had described “tak­ing” women who were afraid of seem­ing too “easy,” except I didn’t real­ize I was fol­low­ing Liam’s script. Then, once, as I imag­ined myself putting my hands on either side of Ling’s face to hold her still while I kissed her, I had a sense mem­ory of the old man in my build­ing putting his hands on the back of my head to pull my mouth towards him. I was mor­ti­fied. I spent the rest of that day alone, try­ing every­thing I could think of to twist what I had imag­ined into a shape that was not what it was: pre­cisely the kind of rape fan­tasy that Adri­enne Rich had writ­ten about. The fact that Ling might truly have wanted me to “take her” — whatever “tak­ing” might have meant to her — was beside the point. What mat­tered was that I’d imag­ined myself “tak­ing her” out of rage, to prove I was a man, not in response to any­thing I knew about Ling’s actual feel­ings or desires. In Rich’s words, I had “equat[ed my]…manhood…with the objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of another’s per­son and the dom­i­na­tion of another’s body.”

I swore I would do every­thing in my power to unlearn that equation.

At the heart of my fem­i­nism, then, is a para­dox. On the one hand, as a sur­vivor of male sex­ual vio­lence, I stand with women against the cul­ture of man­hood which pro­duces that vio­lence and which the vio­lence in turn per­pet­u­ates. On the other hand, as a man, I am — I have no choice but to be — impli­cated in that vio­lence. The chal­lenge with which fem­i­nism con­fronts me is to make sure that I never allow myself to stand on the same side as my abuser. Meet­ing this chal­lenge has not been easy. It is often uncom­fort­able to call other men out on their sex­ism; and it can be sim­i­larly uncom­fort­able when some­one calls me out on mine. Per­haps the most dif­fi­cult thing, how­ever, has been resist­ing the temp­ta­tion to wear my sex­ual abuse as a badge of dif­fer­ence, as if hav­ing been forcibly pen­e­trated by another man — because I am con­vinced that what I can­not fully remem­ber did in fact hap­pen — had some­how emp­tied me of the man­hood I was try­ing to prove in my fan­tasy with Ling, the same man­hood that Liam val­ued so highly and that is at the root of male sex­ual violence.

Because I have been coerced into the posi­tion that this kind of man­hood usu­ally reserves for women, in other words, it is easy to feel that my rela­tion­ship to this man­hood is essen­tially the same as a woman’s. Yet what­ever else may be true about the fact that I was sex­u­ally abused, the social and cul­tural con­text in which that abuse exists does not por­tray either the boy I was or the man I am as a sex­ual object in the way that it per­va­sively por­trays women. Nor am I sub­jected to the daily depre­da­tions of misog­yny and dis­crim­i­na­tion, indi­vid­ual and insti­tu­tional, that women expe­ri­ence because of their sta­tus as sex­ual objects. Finally, because I am a het­ero­sex­ual man, there is no escap­ing the fact that both the plea­sure this objec­ti­fi­ca­tion is designed to deliver and the advan­tages it is sup­posed to con­fer are meant quite explic­itly for me.

It is, in other words, as if there are two voices speak­ing within me: the voice of the man who is try­ing to own up to and change the cul­ture of male sex­ual vio­lence and the voice of the man who, as that culture’s vic­tim, feels like he has noth­ing to own up to. Inte­grat­ing these two voices has been the defin­ing chal­lenge of my life, per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally and cre­atively. I called my first book of poetry The Silence of Men because I was break­ing the silence in my life that had resulted from keep­ing these two voices sep­a­rate. More, I hoped my poems would speak to and for men whose lives were shot through with a sim­i­lar silence. Writ­ing essays like this one also lets each of the men inside me have his say, allow­ing me to speak about what the old man in my build­ing did to me, while still doing jus­tice to the com­plex rela­tion­ship between who I am because of what he did and the man I have been taught I am sup­posed to be.

Fem­i­nism showed me how to con­nect the old man’s inhu­man­ity to the inhu­man­ity of what I have been taught; and fem­i­nism is the only pol­i­tics I can name that explic­itly com­mits itself to a world in which that kind of inhu­man­ity is no longer accept­able. That is why I am a fem­i­nist man.

Cross posted from The Take­back.

The poems are from The Silence of Men. Here they are:

Light

In the dream, my life was smoke: I couldn’t breathe.
So I ran, unwrap­ping myself down the beach
till your skin, the ocean, lapped at my knees.
I dove in. Your voice was a cur­rent,
a melody gath­er­ing words to itself
for us to sing, and we sang them,
and they swirled around us, iri­des­cent fish
bring­ing light to the world you were for me;

and then I was water, a river
wash­ing the night from your flesh,
and I cra­dled your body ris­ing in me
till you were clean, glow­ing,
and when you sur­faced, glis­ten­ing,
there was not an inch of you I didn’t cling to.

Ethics Of The Fathers

Moses received the Torah from Sinai
and passed it on to Joshua, who gave
it in his turn to The Elders, and love
or duty, or maybe both, explain why
we still hand it down, even if we die
doing so. The Church burned us alive,
the Romans did worse…but you who give
your­selves to goy­ishe women, you lie
with their gods as well, and so we cast you out.
The rabbi paused, whis­pered Come back, and left
the stage. No applause. Behind me, a man laughed.
Beside me, a woman squirmed in her seat.

In love, my love, I’ve given myself to you,
nei­ther god nor god­dess, and not a Jew.

After Drought

Knees rooted in the bed on either side
of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat
bent in sum­mer wind, a bam­boo shoot
ris­ing, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud
swelling, a swal­low sculpt­ing air, a freed
white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot
beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat
lifts me away: I’m not ready. Out­side,
foot­steps, voices. Two men. Gig­gling, we pull
the sheet around us till they pass, but if some­one
does see, what will they have seen? A cou­ple
mak­ing love. No. More than that: They will
have seen the com­ing of the rain; they will
have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen.

This past Sat­ur­day, my col­league and friend Mar­cia McNair inter­viewed me about my book of poems, The Silence Of Men, on her BlogTalk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen.

Mar­cia is a per­cep­tive reader and won­der­ful inter­viewer and her ques­tions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favorite part of the con­ver­sa­tion was about the poem called “Work­ing The Dot­ted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girl­friend and I had sex, and she was a vir­gin. What I liked best about Marcia’s read­ing of this piece was her notic­ing my mother’s pres­ence in the poem and how that started me talk­ing about some­thing I often encounter but have never given much seri­ous thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncom­fort­able with their mother’s sex­u­al­ity, and I don’t under­stand it. Or, to be more accu­rate, while I under­stand intel­lec­tu­ally, I don’t get it emo­tion­ally. As well, they often it pro­foundly dis­turb­ing that I am not made uncom­fort­able not just by the idea of my mother as a sex­ual being, but by the fact that, when I was grow­ing up, I knew – that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she cer­tainly did not rub it in my face either) – that she had sex­ual rela­tion­ships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occa­sion­ally go to bars, or danc­ing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick some­one up her­self, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it seemed to me per­fectly nat­ural. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other sin­gle 30-year-old women did when they social­ized? My mother has been a sin­gle woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expected her not to have one or to keep it hid­den from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was grow­ing up, and it never seemed strange to me or wrong or awk­ward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was hav­ing sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awk­ward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is some­thing I want to write about, some­thing I had never really thought to write about until Mar­cia brought it up. Here is the poem:

Work­ing The Dot­ted Line

I don’t remem­ber what vaca­tion
I was home for, or how Beth
man­aged to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apart­ment to our­selves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s hang­ing crys­tals
scat­ter­ing the after­noon sun­light
in small rain­bows that shim­mied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretch­ing
ner­vous along the length
of the daybed’s mat­tress,
and my fin­gers trac­ing
the ridges of her ribs
as she tugged at my erec­tion.
I’m ready. Let’s do it!

It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first con­dom,
and I’d for­got­ten to read the direc­tions,
so I stood there grow­ing soft,
squint­ing at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I needed to learn
was on the inside.
I ripped the card­board open
and sat read­ing on the bed’s edge,
thumb­ing the foil-packed
lubri­cated cir­cle,
try­ing to visu­al­ize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dot­ted line,
our pro­tec­tion, like a gold­fish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slipped from my grasp
and landed under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I picked it up,
it was cov­ered with the dust
and small par­ti­cles of dirt
that set­tle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was kneel­ing hard
between Beth’s open legs.
She raised her­self on her elbows,
smil­ing that the sec­ond skin
we needed to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the instruc­tions called
the reser­voir tip — I thought
of the dams hold­ing water back
in the moun­tains near where she lived
and what would hap­pen if they broke—
her smile dis­ap­peared
and bunch­ing the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lifted
her butt onto the pil­low
we’d heard would make things easier.

I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and climbed up onto her,
try­ing with one hand
to be grace­ful and accu­rate
and with the other
to bal­ance over her
with­out falling.
At her first gri­mace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clamped shut and then
star­ing wide, her voice
a whis­per through clenched teeth,
Just do it! Get it over with!

So I entered her again, try­ing
from the tight­ness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out any­way,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nos­ing down­ward
towards her navel,
and I placed my palms
against her cheeks,
I can­not hurt you like this!

Look, it’s going to hurt, she said.
There’s no other way.
And I’ve cho­sen you!

And since I wanted so much to be her choice,
I kissed her eye­lids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hol­low of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giv­ing way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
hold­ing her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a sin­gle motion I breathed through
like I was lift­ing heavy boxes.
She screamed into the mus­cle
just above my col­lar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.

We said noth­ing after­wards.
We didn’t cud­dle
or smile at each other as we dressed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My word­less­ness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wanted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.