I’ll never have a son or daughter.
I slaughtered any likelihood of that.
It’s not just that I’m gay. There are other
ways to foster progeny than through
.
the customary man and woman family plan.
But I’m content to be the witting beneficiary
of unwitting chance: the coupling of a father
and a mother in the sanctioned pleasures
.
of the ancient dance, which however by some
measures failed by not producing others through
new fathers and new mothers to the line.
My brother’s sexual proclivities reflected mine.
.
Venus never met our penises: Mars perhaps
too often has. And yet I’ve known a kind of jazz
epiphany through procreative sexual abandon:
libidinizing life – as if that were the apparatus
.
of a wife with whom I’ve peopled my New York.
(Blake sat naked in his London garden, singing
to his progeny of poesy, heralded by angels
in his trees.) I am among this city’s legacies.
.
New York is my spouse and child; I am its.
If I have a generative purpose, here it sits.
But am I only apparatus? Do I have blood?
I dream I’m standing with my father and my
.
brother in a downpour of precipitating mud.
Solipsism drops in dollops of itself, discarded like
denatured coffee grounds, forgotten by the pot.
My epitaph’s a rueful laugh: “I’m all I’ve got.”

Both full and sometimes slanting (“line”/”mine”/“jazz”/“apparatus”) these interlocking rhymes drive the ironies in this meditation on the deficit of sons and daughters. The narrator’s voice (“It’s not that I’m gay”) delivers a wry self-analysis of “sexual proclivities” against personal choice, like Blake’s, the poem insists, “singing/to his progeny of poesy.” The rhymed couplet that closes the poem seals this “rueful” epitaph for a self “denatured.” --Kathleen Hellen