Androgyny, FROM THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW, 1978
Hi everyone - it was 1978 - was I prescient? Or just androgynous?
Androgyny
So you woke up holding it— the aura of possession which surrounds a single thought. Not apperception, a halo, an obsession.
You couldn’t comb your hair without turning to stone. You were imagining it even under the plumbing: water steaming up your glassed-in skeleton.
With his hands between your legs you dreamed the gold wings of the parenthesis
and saw the lenses of his eyes as center of the afterthought—
but you were wrong. And wrong to love the sun’s blunt easing in through the screen. They beat you because you let them.
But seeing him in the parenthesis of sun, in the gold of the museum, you thought: she is my brother
and you saw the dream physiognomy, the dream muscles, the whole new breath.
And you were right and you didn’t know it
as no near-human, womb-consciousness ever knows the moment before it is about to be.
—Carol Muske-Dukes
VQR, Autumn 1978
I should have contextualized the "history" of this poem! Thanks to my friend, the poet Cecilia Woloch, who did do so! In facr, the Virginia Quarterly Review pulled this poem from its archive & re-published it, unbeknownst to me, on their poem-a-day site. Another friend, poet Lisa Russ Spaar, forwarded "Androgyny" to me, or I would never have discovered its "re-entry" into the world. Nor would I have had the opportunity to wonder what I was thinking exactly when I wrote it in 1978. Thanks to everyone for your comments - I'm still thinking...
Incredible.