Hilde Weisert

Hilde Weisert is co-founder of this Society. "Sex" was published in Fedora and Ms.

Sex

For years, it is something other people
own, and when you assume your
promised title, it's as authentic
as calling your parents by their first names:
Impossible, though it can be done.

This you solve by inventing it.
Without precedent, extracted
from history, it can be yours.
The room light is phosphorus,
and you are in no one's house.

Then, by the midpoint of your life,
you find you have been home-
steading it all along, joined
the generations and old mammal pioneers.
With them, you are in on it, the mystery

lived in. At night, the candles wash
the chair, the beams, the red table
in secrets. In the morning, your hands round
and full on the coffee mug, your claims to this place
settle on you like the sun.

You settle into your house of dark and light
and seasons, as if the light would always hold —
not finally, know the weight of its complex waves
and shatter sight in a spray of fractions;
as if the cycles would always hold

the mystery — the weight of the mystery not,
finally, overturn all returning. As if
this could not be: that one day, one man's
simple gender would stun you, the familiar
all at once unknown, and memorized like a flash burn;

and his absence the thin whistle that all at once
troubles the sky with your utter eviction. That even your hands
would be dispossessed, all gesture a confused search
through the ash; that you may, or may not,
have lived on the leveled street you wander.