Category: Poem

“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters.”

—James Baldwin, Another Country

That’s how James Baldwin describes the fallacy of believing he is living a secret life and how it’s only a secret to himself and not at all to those around him, who know him or who encounter him each day. For those who see the secret before the dissembler does, they have a way of laying him bare, sometimes to cause harm, sometimes not. My being laid bare came with a name scrawled on a boys’ locker room wall in an Illinois high school in 1965.

Flesh Eater

Whispered around me, irritating
like a cloud of gnats 
swirling around my head
in the sheltered harbor of
a classroom; in hallways
with no teachers about,
shouted loud enough to sting,
again, again, again.

Flesh Eater

Conceived
months before,
in a ski lodge bed
above the Mississippi,
but never uttered,
the name saved for later,
by a boy
with a felt tip marker
sketching dreams
late at night, 
wide awake, 
a whispered conversation.

Ever done it with a guy?
My queried passion bred
an answer 
on proper technique that
he expected. 
Right Guard-laced 
sweat, metallic taste, 
an almost heaven
followed by shame.

A rural roadside ditch, 
gravel scarring knees
my only footing,
leaning in, caressing
backseat-straddled thighs
as rows and rows of corn stalks
penetrate spring soil.

For the last time,
still nameless, still safe
but for the
interrupting stillness,
an eerily green sky,
a felt tip marker in his hand.

Like Dorothy 
outrunning 
the twister,
outrunning fate,
but no cellar shelter waits,
only my mother, 
an agitated and angry Auntie Em, 
wondering why I’m late 
where I was, 
why my knees are caked in dirt
as the town's sirens wail: 
take cover. 

Names are born
on locker room walls
and sometimes it’s 
yours, no matter
how much you deny it,
and you learn what you are
in third period
English
right before lunch.

Flesh Eater

Photo credit: Stephen Barnes

I went to a small choral music school, Westminster Choir College, during the late 1960s. I enjoyed walking into town leaving the campus and turning right onto Hamilton Street until it became Wiggins. When I passed by Princeton Cemetery, I’d love picking up a stick and running it across the iron fence bars as I walked by, something about the percussive sound and feel of the stick in my hand was reassuring. I also held my breath until I had safely reached the other side of the graveyard. Just in case a parasitic spirit was looking for an unsuspecting host. That cemetery always made me think of my first gin and Wink, a tart cocktail that was offered to me by an upperclassman who lived off campus in a rented boarding house room on Madison Street. One night, loopy after consuming more of the grapefruit flavored potion than I should have, I somehow got turned around as I made my way back to campus and ended up in the cemetery at Aaron Burrs’ grave. Somebody on the sidewalk—it must have been another Choir College student—seeing me on the wrong side of the fence called out, “Westminster’s this way,” and I followed him home.

Hold
	your breath
passing cemetery’s view
to the corner your safe
a break
	would prove
the first to go
might well be you

A children’s game
on a summer afternoon
as the sun shines through
	iron
		fence
			casting
				bars 
on the sidewalk

		—March 1968

Rediscovered this relic written when I was a college sophomore, when it seemed we were all writing poetry.

The crowded street
parts it way
as a young boy 
finds his way
through a dreamlike world
of games and candy

Down warped steps he goes
his god to meet
a nickel in
and then retreat
to a world of
bongs,
twangs and
rings
of misled dreams
in happy hours
of childhood

—Fall 1968

Sometimes words, whether a poem, a lyric or a piece of prose, can touch us immediately upon hearing them and stay with us forever. This happened to me during a Christmas Eve service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County in Lincroft, NJ in 1983. I was serving as the church’s music director, so I was thankful for a break in the many carols, anthems and musical interludes being performed that night when it came time for a unison reading toward the end of the service. The minister at the time, the late Harold R. Dean, led his congregation in a reading of an excerpt from an epilog to a story by William Henry Harrison Murray in his book Christmas in the Adirondacks (1898). As a community we read aloud together… “Ah, friends, dear friends, as years go on and heads get gray, how fast the guest do go! Touch hands, touch hands, with those that stay. Strong hands to weak, old hands to young, around the Christmas board, touch hands.”

The words resonated with me deeply and the reading passed all too quickly. I needed time to process what we had just recited together before rushing into the next musical selection. Luckily there was a period of silence following the reading, which afforded all of us present a moment to reflect and a chance to take hold of the nearest person’s hand.

I recently came across Murray’s full epilog, which he originally wrote as prose, and share it with you in verse form below. What a wonderful blessing or toast to share with friends and loved ones when gathered together this holiday season, especially at a time when our civil discourse appears all but dead and we grow weary battling mutant virus variants that plague our world.

Ah, friends, dear friends,  
as years go on and heads get gray—  
how fast the guests do go!  
Touch hands, touch hands  
with those that stay.  
Strong hands to weak,  
old hands to young,  
around the Christmas board, touch hands.  

The false forget,  
the foe forgive,  
for every guest will go  
and every fire burn low  
and cabin empty stand.  
Forget, forgive,  
for who may say that Christmas day  
may ever come to host or guest again.  
Touch hands.  

 —William Henry Harrison Murray