Alas, I know he is the hermaphrodite whose love looks up through the appletree with a golden indeterminate face. While we drive along the road in the evening, talking as impersonally as a radio discussion, he tells me, 'A boy with green eyes and long lashes, whom I had never seen before, took me into the back of a printshop and made love to me, and for two weeks I went around remembering the numbers on bus conductors' hats.'
'One should love beings whatever their sex,' I replied, but withdraw into the dark with my obstreperous shape of shame, offended with my own flesh which cannot metamorphose into a printshop boy with armpits like chalices.- reading, for the thousandth time, Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, about her tortured and ecstatic affair with the married poet George Barker. I have to go now stab myself repeatedly - everytime I read this book I desire to stab myself or wear a hairshirt, or dance on fire, such is the pain of such brilliance and beauty.
