By Dale W. Boyer
( Jan Morris lived and wrote as James Morris until she completed a change of sexual role in 1972 ) .
Exile is no more than absence, and it can take many forms.
His national origins were indeterminate. His manner
was a mixture of the florid, the stiff
and the deliberately outrageous.
He had explored
the homosexual stews of Karachi, and investigated the polygamy of the Mormons.
He did not solve the mystery.
Organically inclined towards neurosis, he himself found only failure:
Night after night I see him peeling off his gloves with a sigh to return to his lonely lodgings. Goodnight, Herr Doktor. Better luck next time, eh?
Here is another cameo of exile's disillusionment:
Bound together only, whether willingly or unwillingly, by the imperial discipline,
Head held high, emerging from a pile of Roman ruins.
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself.
A great quarrying gash in its flank …suggests to me a scar of surgery.
The officers have turned in their saddles to see what is happening. Did some of them guess that the saddest of angel messengers was passing by?
The clock-hand moves; the angel has passed.
( When this fearful zephyr has howled away,
not a soul is going to be whistling that love-aria from Act 2 --
not even me…I can't remember how it goes ) .
Wistfully the marble tritons blow their horns, regretfully
Neptune and Mercury linger upon their entablatures.
Sometimes he feels he is cracking up or fading out, and he avoids the newspaper obituaries because…
How sad that her bonfire that night,
which she saw as a beacon of truest dedication, should have been interpreted ever since as
a conflagration of betrayal. But what she did, she did for love.
An ironic gift…to attract and to sadden, both at the same time.
Even imagined love is true!
An alarmingly androgynous figure of Victory crowned it, winged and helmeted.
I have always been attracted by the idea of a life of crime.
Dale W. Boyer received his MFA in writing in 1993 from Vermont College, where he studied with Mark Doty. He lives in Chicago with his partner, Scot O'Hara.