Gilgamesh

We lived on a lake with Muscovy ducks.

Interior decorators flush with furniture plans,

the ducks thrust with the thrust of youth.

We met at the gay community center, called Compass,

in Lake Worth, where they sponsored “The Coming Out Group,”

with Forest, our skilled leader. Transsexuals met before.

You were fifty, I thirty-nine—

somewhat late to begin a life together for the first time;

we had begun to see announcements in the New York Times,

so we knew it was possible to print:

“Paul O’Shaughnessy and Spencer Reece were joined on a celery green love-seat . . .”

Five years we had, not forever, but something still.

iii

Our consent took a long time.

There were lulls. We played Scrabble:

I arranged the tiles and you kept score.

Sometimes we rolled the dice and read the I Ching.

We went about our days unseen and we loved that.

I placed too many books against the walls—

Capote, Madame Bovary, a biography of Anne Boleyn.

You complained about the clutter.

“Where will guests put their suitcases?” you asked.

Sometimes, we squabbled about money.

Often, you stretched out upon the double bed,

your skin no longer young, pebbled, freckled, known by me.

The city was jammed under your nails from construction work,

callused hands that knew bar-joists. Yours was an Irish body

formed and punished by the tin-colored rains around Croagh Patrick.

Beyond you, manatees, scarred by propellers,

huddled in the power plant’s warm waters.

Palm fronds and their shadows shook wildly as pornography.

On the edges of our dreams was the sea,

which the moon walked across with soft footsteps.

Our dog, a Lab-mix named Butch, chewed a bone at your bare feet.

Butch moved like a shadow on the sea’s floor.

Big and black, he came to us abused—

who does such a thing and why is it permanent?

We fed him a daily Xanax tablet before he pulled us

on his manic journeys that had no arrivals.

vii

When we visited your Aunt Annie in the nursing home,

her walker dominated the room like an empty kennel.

She did not know who I was, her senility rendering me oblique.

Long ago, when your mother died,

your father sent a letter and a photograph of the four children to Killeen,

asking Aunt Annie to come. As she strove across the sea,

she watched the Connemara ponies disappear,

then Knock, Letterfrack, Roundstone, and Cashel Bay blurred,

blurred and blurred until they were nothing but green.

She left Ireland for good and raised you

and your three sisters—Joan, Ann, and Maureen.

In America, she went about her days unseen.

On her day off, she lit four candles for each one of you

at the Shrine of St. Anthony on Arch Street, in Boston.

She never married. She adored you.

When we visited, she kept saying:

“Paul, Paul, I have to get the cows across the stream.”

viii

We overlooked Pelican Lake in Juno Beach

where caregivers and patients from the Alzheimer’s Support Group

awkwardly commenced their semi-detached dates,

eating potato chips off paper plates

and feeding their broken bits to the ducks.

Eyes vacantly connected in Florida,

where born-agains with failed marriages sent pamphlets

to Jews so they could be saved by Christ:

to conquer and subdue was what Florida was for.

There, we napped while the ducks strutted and preened

with greasy black-green plumes and speckled red pates;

it looked like they had mashed crayons on their heads—

a sort of evolutionary mishap. Developers demanding more room,

the ducks were sated, companioned, unbundling with poop.

A retired couple volunteered,

instructing residents in the tango—

the lady had white stained tights, the man a tambourine.

The tango emoted from a boom box

as the residents gathered in a crescent moon of wheelchairs.

Aunt Annie watched and talked about her cows, the stream.

We stood behind her like groomsmen.

Out the windows, Boston pontificated.

You were distracted, distracted

until one day you said, “I do not desire you.”

You had always been honest.

You wanted a younger man, between twenty and twenty-five.

The day blued around us—

our book of changes came to a close.

Your Christ-kiss issued no more.

You were what you had always been, only more so—

Irish and unavailable, darling.

The horizon became a handsaw.

When I could not reach what I loved the world was rent.

xii

A friend had a stillborn, and her marriage ended.

She did not name the infant.

I had coffee with her at the Greek restaurant we liked.

She talked about going back to teach at Dreyfoos, the arts high school,

and one student, in particular, an effeminate male

with acne who dreamt of Juilliard, a way out.

Florida luxuriated out the window—

the fire bush, the cornflower blue plumbago, the Mexican petunia.

I sold my library, my piano. I boarded a train.

Seagulls diminished, gray specks, gray motes.

The therapist in Fort Lauderdale made no more appointments for us.

The migrant day laborers

out in Pahokee and Canal Point on Lake Okeechobee gleaned

and went about their days unseen.

The orange groves’ fragile hemispheres wobbled on their stems.

Sugar cane fields burned. Electrical poles gleamed.

Buck hoists and bucket trucks broke through the possum’s sedge.

The Everglades sighed its nervous extinction.

xiii

Aunt Annie had lost her index finger in Coventry, during the Blitz.

Repeatedly, she rubbed the stump.

xiv

Perhaps you walk now there with your young men,

meaty St. Augustine grass under your feet,

moving discreetly, undetected, perhaps you speak of dissatisfactions,

of politics. The Atlantic narrowing to a flushed, sanguine strip,

the fishing boats alone in the dark, murmuring,

hooking, perhaps the young men love you at first sight

and plead with you to stay. I95 and a1a pulsing down

Palm Beach County’s spits like blood, perhaps

your face tightens tenderly in response to what you see.

Translator's Notes:

Q & A: Spencer Reece

Why is this poem called “Gilgamesh”?

The poem is called “Gilgamesh” because that ancient Assyrian myth, which survives in fragments in Genesis, is the story of two men in love. It exists only in shadow in Genesis, as redactors took pieces from it but left the homosexual love story on the cutting room floor. I thought it high time the story be brought back. The idea of it has been with me for a long time, but it took two decades to find the right place for it. At first the basso profundo element of death resonated with me, as Enkidu dies in the myth, and twenty years ago was the high time of aids. What I am resonating with now is the love that was there in a relationship; I am also, unfortunately, cataloging the end of that relationship, as one of the men in the poem pursues his desires for immortality (another theme of the myth).

We saw an early—and very different—version of this poem that was written as a single, unbroken narrative. What made you decide to break it up into sections or “fragments”?

This poem went through many rewrites (and had many different titles), as those near me know and have had to endure! I am a slow worker. Unfortunately, sometimes it is right at the end that I see the possibility of enormous changes. This poem began as screenplay dialogue; then separate prose poems; then haibun, which combine prose and haiku; then one single free verse poem; then finally I remembered visiting the Yale Babylonian collection in Sterling Memorial Library last year and seeing how the actual Gilgamesh epic was carved into tiny clay cylinders and was in fragments. The fragmentary nature, I could see, quite clearly echoed the relationship being memorialized.

One can’t help but think of Elizabeth Bishop when reading this poem. The wry tone (“You wanted a younger man, between twenty and twenty-five. / You had always been honest.”); the understated pain (the last line!), the density and clarity of the details (those opening ducks), even the Florida landscape (“the state with the prettiest name,” as Bishop said): it all brings her poetry to mind. Can you say something about her influence on you and this poem?

I have always loved Elizabeth Bishop, it is true. She is one of the masters for my time on the planet. I could reread her letters until the cows come home. My passions for disclosure do not always seem in harmony with her silences, but I have loved her understatement nonetheless, and her painterly eye. There is nothing like it.

Florida speaks to poets in a curious way, I think. It is baroquely florid, humid, there is a slowness and heat one associates with poetry. I think I am saying goodbye to Florida in the poem, which saddens me a bit.

This poem is notably different from the current period style: it’s a first-person narrative; it’s “I” isn’t fractured or “destabilized”; it employs images to express and elicit affect; and it moves, despite being in fragments, very patiently and linearly toward its conclusion. Are you conscious of these things at all when writing, even if only to react against them?

No, I am not so conscious of what is being done in my time. I need the poems to be understandable to me, if that is what first person narrative means and being “linear.” I know Wallace Stevens champions obfuscation, but it does not seem to be what I am drawn to, although I love Stevens deeply; but, after all, wouldn’t you agree it is just as hard to write something clear as something obscure?

Memoir bores me. But in poetry, the autobiography becomes something else entirely, somehow selfless. To be “fractured” or “destabilized” are not personal goals, artistically or otherwise. I am unconventional but always trying to adhere to convention, at times more successfully than at others.

A striking element of the poem is the way that huge life events get no more emphasis than quick, visual impressions: “I sold my library, my piano. I boarded a train. / Seagulls diminished, gray specks, gray motes.” Why is this?

Why the human activities in this poem are given equal weight to the natural world was not a conscious thought prior to writing the poem. But certainly, to live in Florida is to be aware of the smallness of humankind in relation to nature. And in the places I love—Florida, Wyoming, Maine, Minnesota, the seascapes near the church I am serving in Westerly, Rhode Island—what I love is the vastness. I feel small in comparison, and in my smallness I hear God more clearly.

Could you explain this line: “Your Christ-kiss issued no more”? Why “Christ”?

Perhaps I am influenced by my time at seminary, and the moments of Christ’s intimacy are more present in my mind. We studied the Secret Gospel of Mark, which may very well be a hoax, but may also not be, which suggests Jesus had a secret one night stand with the Beloved Disciple. The ideas of Queer Theory, as proposed by writers such as Dale Martin and Riki Wilchins, make the seminarian aware that Christ may have been anything. He is beyond labels. Maybe we all are.

The poem deals with what occurs outside our given texts, for there is absence that is meaningful outside the text, as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault have elaborated. Sometimes I don’t know why I do certain things in a poem, and it is only years later that I realize what I was trying to do. To my mind, though, the idea of Christ kissing another, romantically, has been as submerged as the love affair in Gilgamesh.

Source: Poetry (April 2010)

Q & A: Spencer Reece

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