They are standing together, on a crowded street in the city,
full of attitude and defiance. The bald one
is wearing a leather jacket, just as the folks from Missouri expected.
His back curves a little. His shoulders hunch. He is, perhaps, forty-five.
The other is taller, younger,
thin where his older companion is lean.
His face is impenetrably pretty. He is laughing.
He drapes his arm around his lover's shoulder
and they look at me, briefly, from twin pairs of eyes, brown and grey.
In the gaze of the bald man I imagine I see
a flickering beacon, weary, ancient,
the shadow of a bonfire on a pagan hill
centuries past
smoke rising in skeins of grey ash to the moon.
In my office, other gay men work with us.
The skinny young one, shy. That fellow whose laugh
is softer than the laugh of other men, who wore
a pink Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat on Halloween.
The two stocky administrative assistants over in Training,
funny, bitchy, trading sarcastic jibes, making us all laugh.
You know and you don't know about them.
They know you know.
Sometimes one comes along who lets you know
it's all right, he is out, and you can gossip with him
about past lovers.
In each man's eyes, the smoke and fire.
Subterfuge, caution, sometimes trust.
The spiky wheel around which their lives revolve
their sexuality,
their demon urges.
When they speak the truth to you, it is this:
I am a man with desires,
my desires define me.
I am rough or tender in my love, I want
a man like me to hold.
I think I see them surging together in the dark
in the hazy moonlight
their bare skin dappled blue and white.
I love them for their fierceness
for their solid lust.
I love them for the way
sex makes them what they are
and how they admit it.
I yearn to be as defined as they
by my own desire
to wear it like a stickpin on my lapel
to say, I am a woman who wants
a man like me to hold
to take into my bed and into me,
sliding under sheets that burn with our heat.
I long for their defiance
and for the day when all lovers walk the street
admitting to our fires, unashamed,
all outcasts, together.
6/9/96