STATE LINES
Jacques Rancourt’s poem doesn’t comfortably fit the conventions of the sonnet — a 14-line love poem written in meter, with patterned rhymes. His formal departures enact the restlessness felt by the poem’s speaker. Sonnets are usually private poems addressing a lover. The reader eavesdrops but occupies a space away from the unfolding drama. I like how Rancourt’s poem complicates our position, suggesting our complicity in a culture that has generally failed to sanction gay love — “We call this a marriage, but it isn’t/ called that outside/ this room.” Rancourt accomplishes something I thought impossible. He has written a love poem, a sonnet, that might also serve as an instrument for civic compassion.
The Same Word
Last night I watched the drag queen’s hip-pad drift down her leg
and distort the full moon of her figure. By dawn you won’t recall how I hummed her song to you while you were sleeping. We call this a marriage, but it isn’t
called that outside this room. It isn’t called a thing. I’ve searched for a word that means what I mean it to — how we are a part of the world as much as we are apart from it —
and it does not exist. Still, we make of this thing an imitation, an effigy. Still, we make it each day because we exist, weary phantom, as both the flesh and the illusion,
because we live together even if we live as a drag queen does, drawing applause from a world that holds her at bay.
“The Same Word” is from Novena © 2017, by Jacques Rancourt. Appears with the permission of Pleaides Press. All rights reserved.