Where Desire Plays Out as Allegory

Reginald Shepherd's poems have accompanied me now for thirty years, nearly the entirety of my writing life. Rereading them is like reading a second language: each time I turn again to Reginald's queer lyric practice, my fluency returns from the part of the synaptic map dedicated to its syntax, grammar, and vocabulary. And another self, the one who possesses that fluency, also returns, bringing with him the strange, pained sensation of a sleeping limb awakened. I mean rereading Some Are Drowning (1994) or Angel, Interrupted (1996) both returns Reginald to vivid life and reminds me how inextricable his work was from my younger self's sense of what's possible in the art. This summer I've been rereading his poems in the context of The Selected Shepherd (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), a long-overdue retrospective sensitively edited by Jericho Brown. In honor of its publication and the care Brown has taken in introducing new readers to the work, I offer here my own belated tribute to my friend Reginald with the hope that these new readers will go on to seek out all of the poems and essays in which he left song and thought so deftly intertwined.

My own first encounter with Reginald's poetry was the kind of event upon which a young poet's sense of vocation often depends. This was 1994, when “Two Versions of Midsummer” came out in an issue of Black Warrior Review, the literary journal run by MFA students at the University of Alabama. I was a frustrated undergraduate there. Unlike Reginald, whose mother ensured that he received a good education, I hadn't finished high school, and also unlike Reginald, I'd never aspired to be a writer. I was more interested in feminist, queer, and AIDS-related activism than coursework, but that poem, along with “He and Sleep Were Brothers,” which appeared in BWR two years later, prompted me to ask, “Poetry can do this? Why did no one tell me?” Both poems were elegiac, erotic, lyric, and intelligent. They helped steer me decisively toward my future double life as an autodidact and serious student of poetry. They would also remain touchstones for me as I moved through undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate education and into a writing life. Why?

In the ’90s, few living gay poets were published outside of queer venues, and if you lived in a rural area before the internet, it was nearly impossible to find their work. In those days of HIV/AIDS before antiretrovirals were more common and effective, in that analog era before algorithms, to open BWR and find Reginald's poems was a literally transformative chance encounter: it made possible the queer life in art I now live. In his poignant introduction to The Selected Shepherd, Brown recounts how important it was then to find the work of a living Black gay poet:

I was around twenty-four years old when I first read Reginald Shepherd's poem “Semantics at 4 P.M.” in an edition of the Best American Poetry edited by Rita Dove. I read the poem and phoned an older and published poet I knew and said in a most accusing voice for which I should probably now apologize, “Hey, who is Reginald Shepherd, and why haven't you told me about him?”. . . The poem itself does not identify its speaker as gay, but if there is a queer voice, I believed I was reading it . . . He was a gay, Black poet who was alive. And many of the other ones I loved were dead. He was not Carl Phillips, and he was not Forrest Hamer. So, there was yet another one of us out there, and I needed to know what the hell he was doing if I was ever going to figure out what the hell I was going to do.

Brown would have read this poem in 2000, the year of Dove's Best American, or soon after. And though I felt a similar urgency when I first read Reginald's poem in 1994, it wasn't just because it was so rare to encounter the work of a living Black gay poet. From his first book to his last, Reginald explored an aesthetic with which I immediately identified and which I found singularly electrifying. I still do. Take the opening ten lines of “He and Sleep Were Brothers,” a poem later included in his second collection, Angel, Interrupted:

    Night pays out her promenade in pallid goldenrod, 
a mesh of stems and clustered blooms 
fleeting as fall. Ghost lights halo 
a clouded-over moon, then dissipate, 
till dawn discovers me asleep at last. No one 
could keep your perfect skin. I keep it 
in this drawer, a page that holds the light 
the way it should have been. When light left 
it left its shape, an amethyst's shadow 
traced on the papered-over windowsill . . .

Reginald had a musical ear informed in part by a lifelong love of Hart Crane's prosody. Though his own lines feel formal because of their elevated diction and their carefully crafted integrity as individual units of semantic meaning, they don't really rely on the regular metrical pulse that underpins many of Crane's lyrics. Instead, Reginald's lines move through alliteration, clever wordplay, and flagrant phrasal beauty: the plosive ps of the poem's first line, for instance, and the near-rhyme (depending on your pronunciation) of promenade and goldenrod. They also rely on his exacting calibration of syntax and enjambment—the way, for instance, “a mesh of stems and clustered blooms” stands alone as line and image before it withers, “fleeting as fall.”

This passage also contains a related cluster of Reginald's signature moves: apparent paradox (“No one / could keep your perfect skin. I keep it . . .”); favored nouns and images, such as flowers, the moon, night, light, skin, page; syntactical progress through chiasmus (“When light left / it left its shape”); as well as the characteristic conflation of skin and paper, interracial desire and writing itself. This is the trope with which the poem also ends, its recapitulation and variation capturing, as many of Reginald's earlier poems do, the relation between wanting and writing, loss and lyric, the rapturous encounter and its inevitable passing:

                                                 . . . The sun 
falls out of sight like a stone in a lake 
flung by a boy I never was. Leftover light 
floats in your wake, white ripple in an empty pool, 
white shadow on a slowly darkening page.

Another reason I linger over this poem is that it encapsulates the way his poetics differed from the prevailing poetics of his era: most of Reginald's poems resist narrative and are built instead from the meditative medium of his distinctive lyric voice, a voice that some readers, Brown argues, will hear as intrinsically queer. But it's neither “queer” nor “voicey,” in what now seems the homonormative style of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems (1964)—chatty, witty, camp, pop-cultural, and mimetic of speech. Brown locates Reginald’s poems’ lyric queerness in its quickly shifting attitudes and aesthetic attributes—“sassy, ecstatic, elegant, and cosmopolitan.” Absolutely. And I also locate its queerness in its allegiance to and unembarrassed embrace of lyric's more obvious artifices, particularly its refusal of mimesis. “Here is / some blond man,” Reginald writes in one of his droll moods, “stalled halfway down a slope / called realism in a long white car.” Sounding very little like everyday speech allows his poems to move unimpeded through personal, cultural, and political histories, blending myth, autobiography, allusion, and historical fact until “one scumbled world” appears.

This queer aesthetic joins him to Crane and to the filmmaker Derek Jarman, after whose death from an AIDS-related illness Reginald wrote the powerful elegy “A Plague for Kit Marlowe,” a sequence of four sonnets dense with allusions to Jarman's 1991 film version of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II as well as Marlowe's poems. Like Jarman's more experimental films, Reginald's poems mostly insist on atmosphere over plot, on imagery over narration, on description or interpretation over literal action, and on allusions to literature, film, and music as forms of queer world-making. They are, as we would say now, a “vibe.” And though their truest setting is the printed page, the poems remain open to the skies of Chicago, where Reginald lived for about a half-decade, moody with lake-effect weather that changes the written light. For it is with the page that Reginald captures what he calls in his essay “Why I Write” “the luminous moment” in all its power and intrinsic ephemerality. I've always admired that the luminosity of these moments does not set Reginald's lyrics apart from history—they are “a piece of the world that has survived.” Thus, one of my favorite of Reginald's lines, the stunning claim at the close of “Black Ice on Green Dolphin Street”: “Even historical weathers leave a trace.”

***

Here are some of the historical weathers into which Reginald Shepherd was born on April 10, 1963: he grew up, as he writes in the essay “To Make Me Who I Am,” “in the Bronx in various housing projects and tenements and housing projects (in that order).” He was raised by his beloved mother until she died suddenly when he was just shy of 15, after which he was sent to live with relatives in Macon, Georgia. Despite this profound loss and dislocation, his mother’s educational ambitions for him and his aptitude for standardized tests ensured that he went on to attend college. At Bennington, he was mentored by the poet Alvin Feinman, whose support and aesthetic influence proved almost as pivotal as Reginald's mother's death. Feinman encouraged him to continue writing, and Reginald went on to earn MFAs from both Brown and Iowa. His mother's passing haunts his AWP Award-winning first book, Some Are Drowning, and largely recedes into the background of his poems until his fifth, Fata Morgana (2007). And though his baseline aesthetic remained largely unchanged at his own death, other historical weathers left implicit and explicit traces on the poems throughout his career: chattel slavery, Modernism, the Moynihan report, Gay Liberation, Reaganomics, HIV/AIDS, and ’90s identity politics, to name but a few.

But Reginald was careful about which of these historical weathers left identifiable traces in his poetry. Citing his childhood of urban poverty and his position as a Black, gay, HIV+ man, Reginald refused to perform anybody else's idea of what his identity should be—whether that anybody was white or Black, straight or gay—and he remained sensitive (some would say over-sensitive) to any hint that his economic background or identity enjoined him to write in any particular style or about any particular subject matter. This never stopped him, as he himself admits, from writing powerful, searching poems about his lived experience, and indeed, his positionality, coupled with his exemplary intelligence and sensitivity, meant he was uniquely suited to write through the tangled relations of race, gender, sexuality, and language. At the same time, he was not blind to the fact that the literary traditions he most loved did not anticipate and would not necessarily welcome or recognize his participation. “The art that saved me,” Reginald writes in “To Make Me Who I Am,” “has so often belonged to the wealthy and privileged that it's hard to remember that it's not merely an ornament of power.” He was painfully aware of poetry's longstanding relation to wealth and privilege, and this awareness profoundly shaped his poems, essays, and anthologies—which, in turn, saved me.

A decade younger than Reginald and part of another generation of gay men that lost many of its elders to the epidemic, I looked to his apparently self-assured and savvy navigation of our era as one possible way through it. Once I embarked on my own career, we became collegial and then friendly. From 2004 until his death, we kept in touch via regular emails and irregular phone calls, during which he acted a bit like an older gay brother: both bullying and encouraging. Reginald could be blunt and frank—he dismissed my first book as juvenilia—as well as critical and pugnacious—I watched his digital fisticuffs with awe—thus his encouragement was especially meaningful. Despite his outsized impact on me, we met in person only twice: first in Chicago in 1998 when I was an adoring MFA student to whom he granted an interview, then in New York in 2008 when I was on an AWP panel he organized: “Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics.” Though he was already struggling with his health—I remember him lifting up his shirt in the bookfair to show off a nasty scar on his abdomen—he had not yet been diagnosed with the stage four colon cancer that would kill him on September 10, 2008, when he was just forty-five.

I've never been able to bring myself to reread our correspondence, but Reginald was so brilliant, passionate, and well-appointed with opinions that I often find myself wondering of some new development in politics, literature, or technology: what would Reginald think about this? While he was alive, I read everything he published. I hotly anticipated each new book of poetry, and, when he began keeping a blog, dueling with others online, and publishing essays, I likewise followed his keen critical practice, which informed and sharpened my own. On certain subjects—such as the appeal of opera or the value of identity politics—we disagreed without losing affection or respect for each other. Industrious, fluent, and prolific, Reginald published six books of poetry, two anthologies, and two collections of essays between 1994 and 2011 (this count includes two posthumous volumes edited by his beloved partner and executor, the anthropologist Robert Philen). Possibility was one of Reginald's key critical terms, and his belief that poetry expands the possible infused his work and made it a continual site of inspiration and potential renewal. His oeuvre offered me one of my earliest examples of a living queer poetics as well as a seductive, viable alternative to the dominant aesthetics of the time.

In the ’90s and early aughts, the Poetry Wars between the Language writers and the mainstream poets Ron Silliman pejoratively called “the School of Quietude” were still going strong. Aesthetics were highly policed. For poets whose work didn't choose between experiment and autobiography, radical poetic form and identity politics, or theory and confessional candor, critics invented new terminology: elliptical, hybrid, third way, post-avant, etc. These labels were used to describe experimental work by the generation of poets that included C. D. Wright and Thylias Moss as well as by Gen Xers like Dan Beachy-Quick and Cathy Park Hong. And though these labels described very real aesthetic tendencies, none of them stuck in the ensuing melees over their critical value. By 2008, Reginald had coined his own term, “lyric postmodernisms,” which he defined, in the editorial introduction to his anthology of the same name, as poetries that

integrate the traditional lyric's exploration of subjectivity and its discontents, the modernist grappling with questions of culture and history and language's capacity to address and encompass those questions, and the postmodernist skepticism toward grand narratives and the possibility of final answers or explanations, toward selfhood as a stable reference point, and toward language as a means by which to know the self or its world.

As with other poet-critics past and present, Reginald's essaying and anthologizing were a means by which he defined and clarified the terms of his own poetics. Certainly, his poetry effected the kind of integration of lyric subjectivity, modernist questioning, and postmodern skepticism he so valued in the work of the poets he anthologized. For me, “lyric postmodernisms” also usefully neutralized what had been a highly combative and exclusionary discourse. Descriptive rather than prescriptive, “lyric postmodernisms” avoided the territoriality of the white avant-garde who dominated critical discourse about experimental poetry, and who had entirely excluded the work of Black gay poets (in addition to the work of almost everyone else). In Lyric Postmodernisms (2008), Reginald does not repeat their mistakes, and I value still his singular editorial sensibility, which brought together marvelous poets as different as C. S. Giscombe, Brenda Hillman, Timothy Liu, Nathaniel Mackey, and Martha Ronk. Rereading it alongside The Selected Shepherd reminds me just how much Reginald accomplished during his short life—and how much it all deserves to be revisited, reassessed, and celebrated.

***

For instance, Angel, Interrupted remains for me a career highlight, the apotheosis of Reginald’s aesthetic theories. Why? Likely because it's the most openly sociopolitical of his books—many of its poems are set in a Chicago beset by Reagan's disastrous neoliberal economic and social policies—and also because it ends with his first poems about living with HIV, with which Reginald was diagnosed in 1994. Two of these poems, “Loved” and “West Willow” (not included in Brown’s selection), are also love poems to his then-partner, filmmaker and Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone. The book as a whole achieves a balance between alienation and intimate contact, frustration and fulfillment, defensiveness and vulnerability, critical rigor and unabashed gorgeousness. In poems like “Desire and the Slave Trade” (also not included in Brown’s selection), Reginald operates in a double register, where desire plays out as allegory. Here's the poem's opening:

    Contempt, my old inquisitor, across 
the widening winter weeks our needs 
converge, conquistador of manifest extinctions 
and hemispheres, into a knot 
my fingers have been bloodied 
trying to untie, separating the raw fiber 
from the seeds. I'm always calling you 
my friend [. . .] How could I accuse you of the miles 
of milk-white cotton shrubs, the frost 
that settled early on my countryside?

In this passage, as in so many of his best, historical weather and the speaker's interior weather converge in eros and sexual need. Here, as in many of his poems about desiring white men, he confronts history head on: among the symbolic cotton, he places the racialized contempt of the “you,” the admission that “I'm always calling you / my friend,” and the question that ends the stanza, an open inquiry into the nature of the speaker's own attachment as much as it is also an inquiry into his putative friend's. The rest of the poem takes us on a curated tour of the slave trade's US history intertwined with the painful psychodynamic between the Black speaker and his white erotic partner before casting ultimate judgment in its final lines: “It might be easy / to live among those muddled white / confessions. I could never be that man.”

Reginald's poems live among whiteness by appropriating and redeploying some of the myths in which it has clothed itself. Reginald especially loved Greek myth and built the world of his poems in part from its repurposed figures and scenarios. His attachment to these myths began when he was a kid, when they offered him imaginative refuge from poverty, racism, and alienation: “Greek mythology,” he writes in “To Make Me Who I Am,” “represented an elsewhere and an otherwise to my uninterestingly unhappy life.” The role myth plays in his poetry is necessarily different. What he writes about Linda Gregg's poetry is true of his own: “The mythic intensities of her work are the infusion of the actual, that which merely exists, with the substance of the real, that which exists beyond the contingencies and ephemera of the quotidian.” As in Greek myths, Reginald's “gods” personify power and reside in a realm adjacent to but removed from our own. In “The Gods at Three A.M.,” for instance, they visit a gay club, their erotic unavailability as palpable as their physiques. “Don't try / to say you didn't know the gods are always white,” Reginald writes, “the gods / are drunk and don't feel like talking now, but you / can touch their muscled backs when they pass.” Such gods—aloof, beautiful, immortal, immoral—hover over much of The Selected Shepherd, and their presence reminds us that their adjacent realm is the real, whose distance from the actual replicates privilege's insulation from the damage it does to others. “They that have power to hurt,” he writes, “are seldom told of it.”

Though many characters from Greek mythology enter and exit his poems, Reginald employed two figures most prominently as avatars throughout his career: Narcissus, most present in the earlier poems of Angel, Interrupted, and Orpheus, most present in the later poems of Fata Morgana as well as the title of his first book of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx (2007). Both figures, it's important to note, feature in myths in which they are the masculine half of a doomed dyad (Narcissus and Echo, Orpheus and Eurydice), and in both myths both halves die. It's not much of a stretch to read the loss of his mother into his identification with these myths, but to be honest, I've never found the Orphic myth especially compelling. Ever since Jean Cocteau's persuasive film version, Orphée (1950), and Jack Spicer's subsequent appropriation of Cocteau's vision of the “poet as radio,” the myth has felt fairly played out. Reginald's version of it, however effective and poignant in poems like “Orpheus Plays the Bronx,” doesn't offer much by way of a fresh take.

But his appropriation and redeployment of Narcissus remains for me the most profound and provocative of his interventions into myth. Reginald, an avid reader of critical theory, favored Adorno, Jameson, and other Marxist-influenced thinkers. I can't find a single theorist of race in his archive of works cited, so whether or not he intended the allusion, his Narcissus embodies a Fanonian analysis of Blackness and subjectivity in a white world, as in the opening seven lines of “Narcissus and the Namesake River”:

    It was a lie they told about Narcissus, a libel 
on his name. He never loved himself, not anyone 
who looked like him. Narcissus didn't know 
his own profile. There were no mirrors 
in those eras, just helpless echoes. He fell for 
what he wanted to fall through, a man he'd never 
  
  
be: that's desire, the long arm of the father's law . . .

In one interpretation of its semantic meaning, this passage captures the racialized conflict at the heart of Reginald's erotic vision: rather than the putative sameness of same-sex desire, rather than the stereotype of gay men's inflated self-regard, Reginald finds first difference and, later, both absence and mistakenness. “The other is a lack; the self, delusion,” he goes on to write, “He wasn't suffering from self-delusion, just a mistake called // identity.” This poem offers a succinct account of what I'm tempted to call Reginald's early career proto-Afropessimism, whose suppositions at times echo those of Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952):

In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one's body is solely negating. It's an image in the third person. All around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.

Whether or not he read Fanon, Reginald rewrites the myth of Narcissus with similar difficulties and atmospheric uncertainties in mind. His Narcissus falls not for his own reflection but for whiteness: “a man he'd never // be” returns as a potent echo of the claim at the end of “Desire and the Slave Trade,” “I could never be that man.” Black being and masculinity are at issue in these poems, and the provocation of Reginald's version of the Narcissus myth is that it offers an opportunity not for revolution but for description, not an occasion for dis-alienation but rather a statement of his existential and erotic reality. Neither resistant nor resigned to it exactly, Reginald was aware of the implications of his version of this myth, asking in “Black Ice on Green Dolphin Street”: “Why worship whiteness always, what virtue / in that candor, what quality?” Desire, that “long arm of the father's law,” seems to be his answer, and he's disarmingly frank about it throughout his career, though perhaps nowhere more so than in “Nights and Days of Nineteen-Something,” a poem Brown describes as “wholly original and quite gorgeous.” “I never wanted love / from him,” Reginald writes there, “I never wanted him / to ask anything of me but suck my big // white cock.”

***

Reginald might have been an unapologetic “snow queen,” as Brown notes in his introduction, but he was “always clear about the troubles made by whiteness and about the fact that whiteness always arrives wearing empire and capitalism as its clothes.” I too admire this clarity, as well as Reginald's candor and perspicacity about his erotic preferences—which is why I question Pitt's decision to market The Selected Shepherd via the myth of Difficulty. “An Introduction to the Life, Work, and 'Difficulty' of Reginald Shepherd” promises the back jacket copy, a line that, even with its qualifying scare quotes, strikes me as problematic. To be labeled “difficult” as a person or a poet is always pejorative and dismissive, but for Black folks that label has also often been a verdict sentencing them to literal or social death. To label a Black, gay poet as “difficult” anticipates, justifies, and perhaps even ensures his work's eventual disappearance. As Michael Palmer once wrote of the so-called “Misty Poets” of China—whose name, given by the government's campaign against “spiritual pollution,” menglong, denotes “misty” but connotes “obscure”—such a label has

Nothing to do with the complex interweaving of inner and outer worlds, the private and the public, the personal and the official, the oneiric and the quotidian, the classical and the contemporary. Nothing to do with the act of resistance to cultural orthodoxy their work represents, and nothing to do with their critical deconstruction of the language of power and oppression. Nothing to do with the quest for a radical and responsive subjectivity, a lyric instrument of discovery and disclosure.

Here, Palmer could be describing and defending Reginald's work, which accomplishes all of the above and more in the late capitalist context of US democracy. In fact, it was in this fraught context for Black, gay lives that Reginald rejected the myth of Difficulty, as in his late essay “On Difficulty in Poetry”: “It's often said that 'difficult' poems exclude potential readers. I feel excluded by poems that give me nothing to do as a reader, that offer me no new experience and nothing I didn't already know . . . I don't want to be patronized or condescended to, as a reader or a person; I would prefer that the poet assume that I am both intelligent and interested.” Reginald's poems do indeed assume their readers are both intelligent and interested, in part by offering them the “complex interweaving of inner and outer worlds” that Palmer finds in the dissident poetics of Bei Dao and his peers. Reginald's work rewards close attention with an immersion in the aesthetic world he fastidiously fashioned line by line, lyric by lyric, and, over the years, book by book.

Thus one of the most potent joys of The Selected Shepherd, and of Brown's editorial acumen, is the resulting immersion in a compressed, intense iteration of Reginald's built world. For his selection, Brown has judiciously chosen from each of Reginald's six books as few as ten poems and as many as fifteen, and in doing so, offers readers a useful introduction to his body of work and a crash course in his poetics. Reginald largely wrote shorter poems, and each of his books clocks in at around a hundred pages; at one hundred sixty-three pages, The Selected Shepherd offers less than thirty percent of his total body of work, which is all the more reason to seek out his individual volumes, as Brown in his introduction generously encourages readers to do. Another reason to seek out Angel, Interrupted as well as Fata Morgana is that they're such compelling books, complex and fully realized, emotionally and conceptually satisfying. Reginald carefully crafted “the coherence of a poetry collection,” writes his partner and editor Robert Philen in the foreword to the posthumous Red Clay Weather (2011), and “was also concerned with poetic sequence and what the sequence of poems could do.” Both Angel, Interrupted and Fata Morgana achieve coherence through persuasive sequencing. Like Hart Crane's White Buildings (1926), both books begin in alienation and grief and end with love poems whose lyric beauty captures some of the unabashed romanticism and intensity of “Voyages,” the masterpiece with which Crane ends his book.

The other reason to seek out Angel, Interrupted and Fata Morgana is to read these love poems, which Brown doesn't include in The Selected Shepherd. “I hope that other Shepherd fans will read this book,” Brown writes, “and be upset enough about poems I couldn't include that they post them and teach them and promote the books where they are included.” Obviously I will, but not before protesting the omission of these poems from Brown's selection. Earlier in this essay, I wrote that, in many of Reginald's most powerful poems, desire plays out as allegory. What I meant was each figure represents values fixed in a dualist system: the desired offers whiteness; the desirer inhabits Blackness. Writing allows these figures the agency to move within that system toward and away from each other, but they are fated to touch only what the other represents. There's no true meeting possible, as in the potent poem “Narcissus at the Adonis Theater,” where the desiring speaker watches XXX films in order to “view his body's lesser secrets / at my leisure, and all the disappointments they represent.” For him, pornography offers the same old allegory, but with a measure of control, power, and distance that insulates the speaker from betrayal. “I'll pay to see the play again,” he writes, “attend the moment you, pale as any mirror, / give your white skin to me.”

But Reginald's love poems offer a different vision of relation, one still determined but not overdetermined by inherited power structures—which is why their omission from The Selected Shepherd bothers me so much. Brown doesn't share his criteria for selecting the poems he did, but one unintended consequence of his editing is a lack of poems written from within reciprocal loving relation. And though any selected poems must inevitably offer an incomplete account of a poet's work, a more faithful version of Reginald's oeuvre would have included his vision of loving and being well-loved. Brown's selection gives the unfortunate impression that Narcissus got stuck at the gay club with “the gods in backwards baseball caps,” consigned forever to long for what he can't have, which was hardly the case. Though Reginald's love poems can't exit the racial binary of white and Black, their logic is no longer allegorical, no longer limited only to the lack that feeds on and is fed by desire. Freed from “the long arm of the father's law,” they no longer employ Greek myths either; from them, the gods have been banished. Why? “A god can't do it,” he writes in “Light Years,” a god “wants to touch all that / mortality, but his hands slip through / it.” Because of his generation and his serostatus, love for Reginald was always bound up with mortality, the one thing the gods of Olympus can't know.

Reginald seems to have written the love poems at the end of Angel, Interrupted and Fata Morgana in a bid to live without, and thus beyond, myth. These poems charge the actual with power by laying claim to the real, refiguring it as a divine realm accessible to mortals. Such is the boldness of lovers! I want to end this tribute with “You, Therefore,” which, like Fata Morgana, is dedicated to Robert Philen. In this poem, Reginald writes with the vulnerability of addressing not an allegorical figure but a known and beloved interlocutor. No one in the poem wears the clothes of myth, and in fact, the poem's final line claims for the couple a kind of freedom that Reginald's poems rarely claim. Of course, he dresses the poem in his signature lyric finery. What follows is patterned with nearly all of Reginald's most beloved gestures—alliteration, wordplay, phrasal beauty, exact enjambments, apparent paradox, favored nouns and images, and chiasmus—even as it proceeds through the accretion of phrases connected by colons and not through sentences with conventional grammar. Its ravishing, romantic close does not betray Reginald's intrinsic sense of loss and alienation—“home is nowhere”—while celebrating the temporary refuge offered by both love and poetry—“therefore you, / a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all.”

   You, Therefore
 
    For Robert Philen
 
 
You are like me, you will die too, but not today: 
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine: 
if I say to you “To you, I say,” you have not been 
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost 
radio, may never be an oil painting or 
Old Master's charcoal sketch: you are 
a concordance of person, number, voice, 
and place, strawberries spread through your name 
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me 
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear 
(late rain clinging to your leaves, shaken by light wind), 
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight: 
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium, 
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star 
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving 
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is 
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, 
when there was no snow), you are my right, 
have come to be my night (your body takes on 
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep 
becomes you): and you fall from the sky 
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth 
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees 
and seas have flown away, I call it 
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you, 
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all 
and free of any eden we can name