Ghazal for My Selves, as Samson & Delilah

Summary

No, I've really hit the jackpot.

—James Baldwin, when asked, “Has being gay been a disadvantage?”

I am the woman about whom my mother warned me: dangerous

& philistine. I have tempted truth into the honeyed light of day

from the thorax of a lion and fed it, with my fists, into sorrowed mouths

whose fertile worry hives in the ears of girls like vagrant dayflies

to keep them from slumber that might steal their hair. Some of us are born

supernatural: some of us wake to find the secrets we shared were daydreams

instead, pollinated by fear. I need not say I killed the lion: I need only remember

the sweetness of surprise in place of my mane. Let me introduce you to daylight:

it was my hands that held the shears, my mouth the comb. I have never been

unclean. Pull the pillars down around my chest at the first sign of daybreak,

& tuck me in to that blanket of stone. O, that you would make me feeble,

asleep upon your knee! That I was born to love this weakness as I do the noonday

shade. Cup your hand to the stubble of my skull, the sticky underneath: out of the eater,

something to eat and out of the strong, something gentler still: every day

I wake still warm and breathing. I never mourn the muscle lost. Forget foxes, or flame: I

am the son about whom my lover was warned would feed the night to day.