Boys to men

Men Will Be Boys” at the 2013 Minnesota Fringe Festival | Twin ...

As much-admired men in the public sphere fall, I am deeply saddened by their tumble-down because some, like Louis CK and Kevin Spacey, are genius. And we are going to need a boatload of genius to counterbalance the idiocy we now see in Washington, DC.

I am wildly grateful, though, that at last there has come a moment of public reckoning for men who would use their prestige and power to assault women with impunity. And I am very much for town-square pillorying if this serves as a warning to those who even contemplate the kind of beastly violations that lately have come to light.

Yet, I don’t think there is a woman living, or dead, who has not experienced, or witnessed, our culturally nourished abuse and diminution of women. Even the best of boys learn when they are toddling that they can run roughshod over girls. Daddy and mommy might even think it cute — the emerging machismo of their male offspring. And what high school locker room has not enwalled its share of towel-snapping teens snickering about the school “slut” who gave it up the night before?

Why, just the other day, while waiting at a crosswalk, I was standing behind a group of adolescent boys who were laughing about a tweet one had seen, which posed these questions: “Why do girls wear whore costumes for Halloween? Aren’t they supposed to dress up as something they are not?”

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The designated survivor

 

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It is as if you had arrived in a brown basket on a porch near St. Paul, a piece of bonnet poking out the one side and a wintry mix coming down. You couldn’t help but look up, mouth an O, but all you could see were four sets of dark eyes staring back down, blinking. Or more like a great tumbledown from a brilliant sun to a duller one, the fall through space across a frigid crosshatching of having-all-but-given-up-on-yourself and for what: a guest room with a busted lock and a Princess phone?

Thetis with her glistening feet

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When I was a child, I had a dream I was running fleet-footed from my mother’s house, past the homes of the young girls who shunned me, past my elementary school, past the old Catholic church, past our railway station, past an empty park bench, past the five and dime all the way to Jones Beach, where I crossed what seemed a mile-long expanse of burning sand so I could dive into the water and sit at the bottom of the sea. There, I discovered I could breathe easily and well if I took small, sip-like breaths. In my 20s and 30s, I ran through streets, up and down hills, and around tracks. I didn’t much like it, running, but it was the only thing I could do to persuade myself I was free. In recent years, I discovered long-distance walking around and around an indoor track, where I again found a kind of freedom so long as I didn’t stop. Now it appears I have badly torn my Achilles tendon, what with all those many miles of my moving sorrow from pillar to post.

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October

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I will tell you about the naked oak in our yard and about

my dead robin, June, who couldn’t fly south for winter

and about the Cooper’s hawk that swooped down to eat

the poor thing, pecking first at a dull eye, while close by

two cracked eggs, each the size of a large jelly bean,

lay oozing yolk and about the cold sky pulled thin and

plumed across my low horizon and about Hyena, with

his pail full of silver buckshot, who shouted from across

the avenue, “Wanna lick my lollipop, pancake tits?”

while behind him two fat boys cackled, with Br’er

Rabbit, the older by some years, in Daddy’s pink shirt

and about mother leaving for the City, her thin

lips painted plump, and about my gray lunch

congealing in a tin pan that sat on the top rack of a

cold oven and about the canned peaches she dumped

into a tea cup and placed on a shelf in her

refrigerator. But not yet and not here

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