MAY WE SEE THROUGH THE HOLES IN OUR HEARTS

Whump. Thump. Clonk.
 

This time of year the tall black walnut trees around our place drop large round projectiles at random. They hit hard enough I want to wear a helmet when stepping outside. As I don’t own one, I sometimes I hold my hand over my head as I cross the yard. The thing about walnuts is I can’t see them coming.
 

This is so true of much in my life. For 34 years I didn’t see foresee my coming out as a gay man. Neither did my parents, family, church family, children nor wife.
 

Maybe we see only what we want to see. Nothing in my world or worldview had prepared me for the concept that one could be both gay and Christian. As a child, I’d sworn allegiance to the Christian flag (“and to the Savior, for whose kingdom it stands”) every Sunday in junior church. Like their co-conspirators the Communists, homosexuals were fearful, dark shadowy figures whose presence in the world boded no good for the cause of Christ or country. I could no sooner see myself as one than the other.

But maybe I’ve trained myself not to see. My husband Dave gets bothered that I seldom use the headlights’ high beams when driving at night. He turns to me from the passenger’s seat and asks, 

“Don’t you want to see what’s up ahead?”
 

Guess not.
 

I keep out of the office gossip loop at my workplace. I figure if something’s coming down the pike, I’ll hear about it in due time. No sense getting worked up about rumors that may never pan out.

Maybe I should have seen this coming, but I didn’t: the month my twin sons turned 14 they were of legal age to obtain a restraining order to stop our weekly visitation time; they did so. We’d spent time together regularly for 10 years. They told the judge they were uncomfortable with what they’d seen of my homosexual lifestyle.

How best to see anyway? When I was a boy I thought eyeglasses were cool. Not everybody wore them. They set people apart in a socially acceptable way. I thought if I wore glasses I’d fit in. If people noted I was different from them, they’d think it was the glasses. Doesn’t make sense to me now, but children make their own accounting of the world.

I was 13 the autumn day my dad drove me home, my first-ever pair of glasses on my face. The corn stubble in the fields we passed amazed me, the way each stalk stood out in sharp relief from its neighbor. With enhanced vision, what did I see? Ruin and decay.

Good training, perhaps, for what was to come. When I came out as a gay man in mid-life, I lost wife, children, family support, church connection, friends, court cases, career, and more. I learned that loss sometimes sharpens one’s ability to see. Unable to rely on others for support, I learned to look within, follow my own internal vision for the future. I wish this were always, everywhere true.

A writer-teacher friend advocates writing haiku as an exercise in focus and editing. Start with five syllables about some natural object, she says. Use the seven syllables in the second line to describe its essence. Dig deep. In the third and final line, use five syllables. Open up to some broader, more universal observation.

Finding a subject for my latest haiku was easy. I picked up one of last year’s bombshells and held it in my hand. Imagine if you will a cracked walnut shell. Half-globe. The one side, a dry, black, rounded ridged shell. On the other, a flat heart shape punctuated with two elongated dark holes—chambers once filled with nutmeat, since consumed by insects. From this side, the walnut looks for all the world like a miniature owl. I hope what I say of it is true for all of us who sustain loss, experience emptiness:

Cracked walnut, wee owl;
Your insides were eaten out,
granting you vision.

This essay appeared in the September 2012 issue of The Community Letter

"DYING, WE BLOSSOM." WHO AM I TRYING TO KID?

"We think we know everything; we don't know shit." 

Eighteen years ago a drag queen used this line in a play I attended. She might well have been speaking for me. I'd recently come out as a gay man and come out of a right-wing fundamentalist Christian worldview, one in which I'd thought I pretty much knew everything. I'd come to understand I didn't know shit.

I still don't. And life keeps reminding me of this. 

A few weeks back at a weekend writer's retreat I wrote a haiku poem. I was pleased with my effort:

Green pine cones stay closed.

Brown ones open like roses.

Dying, we blossom.

The retreat leader had outlined the basic structure of haiku. It consists of three lines with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five again in the third line. "It's good editing practice for writers," she said. "You have to pare down your message to 17 syllables."

Traditionally, haiku poetry deals with nature. We were instructed to focus on a particular object in the natural world, asked to describe it in two lines. By the time we reached the last line, we were to broaden our vision and address some universal aspect.

I wrote about a pine cone, yes, but really I was writing about my process of coming out as a gay man. The years I spent with my eyes shut tight, my emotions shut down, anger brewing underneath. The process of coming out to myself and others in my mid-30s. The way my marriage withered, as did many relationships, as did my roles as father, son and brother. At the same time, the way something inside me uncurled, unfurled; I came alive, began to breathe. 

Dying, we blossom. I like how these five syllables capture my coming out experience. I like how they speak hope into the mystery of the Beyond. Maybe our great, gray, gay poet Walt Whitman has it right, "Death is far different than we imagine. And luckier."

Maybe. Or maybe both he and I are full of shit.

This past weekend our aged black lab Maddie was severely injured when a car hit her on the county lane in front of our house. Earlier this summer she'd taken to sleeping out of doors at night, not caring to navigate the four stairs up and into the house. When Dave called her to breakfast Friday morning she didn't show. She'd been doing that, too—refusing food for up to three days at a stretch.  Dave called again. He heard a yelping from out by the roadside, saw something black. Maddie. 

She relaxed as soon as she saw him. He called for me. What could we do? Nothing. Nothing but be present to her even as we waited for the veterinarian to arrive to euthanize her. 

We sat with her for three hours. She seemed relatively free of pain, relaxed, alert, aware. We talked to her, stroked her gently. She raised her left front paw and pressed it against us, her customary way of returning affection. 

We told her thank you. We reminisced about our 13 years as a family, how much she was a part of it. How she'd slept at our bedside, howled when we made love, followed us about the yard as we did chores, for several years accompanied me to the office, was a familiar and welcome sight at the design agency where I work. She'd been a gentle soul, tolerant of chickens and grandchildren. While she'd bark at raccoons, she'd learned to give deer a wide berth. 

The vet arrived with death in a syringe. We gave Maddie the best release we knew to give. 

I'd watched her carefully in those closing hours of her life. If she blossomed in death, I missed it. Yet so recently I'd prated on about us blooming as we let go of everything. As tears welled in my eyes, I realized again I don't know shit. 

I'm working on putting that into 17 syllables:

      Car-struck, our dog dies.

  The world rushes by, dammit.

  These are empty words.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the August issue of The Community Letter.

GOD'S COCK

Some days lessons lie around every corner. Browsing a used book store recently, I happened upon a book of Eastern European fairy tales. It includes a story called "God's Cock." This title delights me. As both a chicken enthusiast and as a gay man, I find the idea of God's cock, um, divine.

According to the Serbian fable recounted in the book, God sees the earth is barren and sends a cock to make it livable. Right away, this divinely empowered rooster rolls a powerful egg out of a cave. The egg cracks. Out of it flow seven rivers to water the earth and make of it a paradise. The landscape grows lush, green. Animals arrive, and people.

God's cock watches over the human beings. He spreads his wings over the earth. He crows at regular intervals. He wakens the people at sunrise, signals mealtimes, work times, when to rest, when to sleep.

For me, a cock's crow represents one of the joys of country living. But not everyone feels this way. The people in this story grow tired of listening to God's cock. They want to make their own decisions about how to order their days. They pray God to remove the offending creature. God answers their prayers and banishes the Great Rooster in the Sky from paradise.

Before he leaves, the cock flies down and crows this warning, "Beware the ocean!" 

Alarmed, the people send a watchman to the top of a nearby mountain to keep an eye out for the ocean they've been warned against. There is no ocean to be seen, but the watchman dutifully trudges up the mountain every day.

Without God's cock to wake them up and keep them on track, the people eventually grow lazy, bitter, mean and greedy. In the end—their end—they bring about the destruction of their own paradise.

They break wide open the divine chicken egg. They don't want to lug water from here to there. They figure if they break the egg, water will flow evenly all over the land, no need to carry it from the rivers. 

At first this seems to work. But the water keeps coming and coming until it forms an ocean in which they all drown. Their own greed destroys them. The danger is within. The sole survivor is the watchman on the mountain. 

I shudder as I finish the story. My own nation courts ecological disaster, races through natural resources like there is no tomorrow. Maybe there won't be. Every day I do my part to chip away at the egg. What am I thinking?

This is one way I read the story.

On another level, the story says to me, "God sent you a cock for a reason. Listen to what it has to say. Pay attention." 

For many years I lived as if I didn't have a cock, as if what I had between my legs had nothing to say to me. Sure, it grew hard at the thought of men, but I discounted and ignored the implications of this message. I knew what church, mother and wife demanded of me. Why should I listen to what some cock has to say? I chose to suppress, deny, go numb/dumb. The enemy is within. 

And don't think the matter has been settled entirely in my favor. I continue to wrestle with a strong streak of repression.

Hearing this, a friend tells me he faces the opposite challenge. "My problem is I think with my little head instead of my big one," he says. "I recently had a breakthrough. I've committed myself to slow down, breathe and think with my big head before taking any action."

We are all different. Maybe this is why one of the two admonitions scribed on the temple of Apollo was, "Know thyself." Maybe this is why the other was, "In all things, moderation."

Maybe this is why we are gifted with bodies—and cocks—and good books in the first place. Do we know? Can we listen? Will we understand?