This is a poem that plays with gender,
plays with time and space because there
are any number of places where it could happen.
A poet critic friend of mine opined in a book review--
that had nothing to do with me--
that perhaps the stance of the young woman poet
was sitting, looking inside and into the room in which she
was seated, whereas the young male poet tended
to be looking out the window.
And I think that was just a little trigger that
started this poem happening.
It's called "The Boy."
"Is it the boy in me who's looking out
the window while someone across the street mends a pillowcase?
Clouds shift.
The gutter spout pours rain.
Someone else lights a cigarette.
Because he flinched, because he didn't twirl around,
face them, because he didn't hurl the challenge back.
Fascists?
Not faggots, swine.
He briefly wonders, if he were a girl, he writes a line.
He crosses out a line.
I'll never be a man, but there's a boy crossing out words--
the rain, the linen mender, are all the homework
he will do today.
The absence and the privilege of gender
confounded him-- soprano, clumsy, frail.
Not neuter, neutral human, and unmarked--
the younger brother in the fairy tale except, boys shouted,
'Jew', across the park to him when he was coming home from
school.
The book that he just read about the war,
the partisans is less a terrible and thrilling story,
more a warning, more a code, and he must puzzle out the code.
He has short hair, a red sweatshirt.
They know something about him, that he
should be proud of, that's shameful if it shows,
that got you killed in 1942.
In his story, do the partisans have sons and grandparents?
Is he a Jew more than he is a boy who'll be a man someday?
Someone who'll never be a man looks out
the window at the rain he thought might stop.
He reads the sentence he began.
He writes down something that he crosses out.