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AKA Paul Douglass Quin (Latinate-Irish, Little Darkmirror Wolf: In a glass darkly, darkglass, seen-unseen, not all there, uncertainly unclear, fits me well). My dad unexpected a boy – got me. At Columbia Hospital for Women had to choose a name for his dick-born child; recalled the DJ who set him dancing on a Sunday. When he disowned me, I dropped an N (less Anglo) and doubled the S (my hero Frederick).

Proudly dick-born, proudly queer, nowadays officially non-binary, old so male or female pronouns, whatever – as it’s been for years – until society picks a third set, fuck the impersonal plural. She/Her for those who think I violate the rules of He/Him (I vote for Zhe/Zhor/Zhon but whatever emerges is fine).

Born DC, Chicago months later, SF at 3, Canterbury Hotel, wartime, 7th Fleet filled the town. Dad betrayed his heart for safety. He and Ma got on well; never saw them kiss. Don’t know he’d come back to us if she weren’t preggers (water under the bridge). FBI loved him, inventor of fingerprints, became their CSI guy, traveled the state, seldom home but always a presence. Taught me to pass but I didn’t learn to lie.

Uneventful childhood: Park Merced, Palo Alto, San Jose (when it was country). Johns Hopkins, sexual awakening not without drama, Writing Seminars (those early years their embarrassment, so the Seminars pretend I don’t exist), city planning, more drama – everywhere they hated fags – printing had no shame so I stuck with that. Back to SF a hippy, crisis of conscience, a year in Hamburg made me long for home. 

The Haight, radical community, the Mission, politics, the Castro, addiction, recovery, computers, teaching, romantic obsession, Bar Mitzvah (finally), Aids, parenthood (How unlikely! What joy!), love at last, Paris, Spain, Italy, Maw, what now? Peace, love and understanding. (What’s so funny?) Tomorrow is here. L’chaim.

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(three poems)

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What do I mean by ‘red’?

Not what you mean.

Wittgenstein rumbles around, asking:

Does ‘red’ mean the same thing as showing a sample? 

Like a paint-chip red?

A red pair of briefs? A red light?

One thing I understand: My red

Is not the red of others.

Younger folks, as the world makes them didactic,

Think of Pantone colours called ‘red’.

But Pantone isn’t able to give what I call ‘red’,

Only shades of pink made of magenta

The only red in Pantone’s world.

My world’s reds start with birds:

Red-headed tanager (called ‘Western’),

Scarlet tanager, Robin red-breast

Ring-neck pheasant hanging in the shed

To age (does anyone still shoot game?

Or let it hang in the shed to age?)

Then, of course, come rainbows,

Traffic lights, Holiday lights,

Poinsettia, Paul Scarlet roses

On country fences in the heat.

Later in life, Rembrandt spoke to me 

Of reds, and Gauguin’s Tahiti showed reds.

Later Warhol, Basquiat, Haring reds.

At work, printers seduced me

Mixing reds from rare earths,

Creating elusive shades, perfection.

In Murano, the grandfather finds red

In the furnace-glow; in Lille, the dyer

In roots and blooms and ground-up rock.

What is ‘red’? A thought.

An image in my mind I can only

Hope to suggest to you

With the word ‘red’.

Knowing you won’t understand

Without context, coaching –

And even then

Likely not.

Red.

My red.

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Burr

Underbeneath the bridge

Where the river runs through,

Secrets and lies lie shadowed

In eddies of rotting detritus:

Chaplets of daisies lovers wove, Garlands

Cast by mourners far upstream . . .

In the dark, foetid mosses rise.

I cross above; underbeneath wait

Dark reflections of conscious joy, which

When I least expect, sneak out

To fill my beating heart

With grief.

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Aunt Tim

Is there a secret without shame?

Is the fox-fur, complete with glass eyes,

Fascination or is it shame?

When she draws that line up her leg

Before pulling on nylons, is that shame?

No shame in lameness, none

In boyfriends, though the family

Claimed shame at her funeral.

Shamed to know me, on TV

As poster-child of Aids. We never 

Spoke again; I loved her still,

No secret, no shame. She’s so

Normal, her fake smile,

Bright eyes, cloche, the Fox.

But we know: All our

Secrets fester into shame.

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(prose)

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In the flat, calm water

Beyond the reeds where I sit, reflections of smooth cerulean blue crepusculate. Of a sudden, what to me, who am old and recall such things, what look like hippopotamus ears disturb the still surface, followed by the appearance of a smooth, grey mound, which memory reads as hippo’s back. It opens and out pops the head and shoulders of what appears as a young, tousle-haired, ginger lad. I know my vision is some part illusion, tricks of memory overwriting sensory sense, because there are no ginger folk for decades now, and lads, well years have passed with only we grizzled elderly isolated and alone in this marsh. What part illusion? Any actual? How much deception? How much hope?

Makes me recall the Seven: Every seven shimmering years, every cell in every body is new. Of course, not that we become new people, for these evernew cells grow, slow and sure, from old as we ourselves from ancestors evolve, but in spite of scientific reality, there are, might one say, out beyond the reeds of reality into the mirror-like calm of deeper waters, ripples on the glassy surface (a sense of hippopotamus ears), a hope that comes like the parting of a curtain into an unexpected, unexplored room, with new vistas out unknown windows on an unfamiliar side of the house; same house, new sights, new furniture, new gowns, new rugs, a hope that what the seven years bring is not more-or-less the same but transformation, instinctual rebirth. 

So at seven, the first skin-shedding gave me long pants, a pocket knife (all the boys had one; we covertly played forbidden mumbletypeg in the dirt behind the stairwell - I was better at that than flipping pennies or rolling marbles; didn’t lose my vision until I was 10 but never had coordination). I learned to make bacon-grease gravy (for those nights when gravy on toast was dinner), started changing beds and doing laundry. Had been doing dishes a while, but suddenly needed no stool. Dishes emerged like hippos from soapy water, promising better tomorrows, clean and hope-full. Oh dishes!

At 14, second revise. Got my work permit that very day, cleaning the cleaners after the two old Ukrainian women left. Mopped, dusted windows, wiped counters, scrubbed the bathroom. Of course, took off all my clothes, the consciousness of and delight in being naked one of the gifts of my twice-renewed flesh, this nakedness plus frequent orgasms my first bite of Adam’s apple, though (hippopotamus ears) the implications of this lust for life and community were yet to emerge. Grew six inches that summer, in height too. Studied for my bar mitzvah amid piles of Czech treasures, the succour of refugees. Became transfixed by the sight of Robbie’s bulging jockey shorts as we sat on the bed until midnight playing War. Failed to chop down a palm tree (earned the ‘wood’ is rubber.). Loitered in the arcade, in the pool showers, without being able to get in trouble. Still not one of my skills, trouble. More renewals needed. 

At 21, although as a result of legalism and little to do with my newly novel body, I became bar-legal, content (In truth I was restive, but didn’t know any option for getting out of pretence) to spend Fri/Sat nights drunk on beer, flirting uselessly with a bartender, whomever. Did I destroy my newly-renewed cells or speed their replacement? (The hippo’s back breaks the surface of the waters, stays obscure.) Montréal, the Haight, police riots (Confronting reality is self-confrontation: Frightening, unknown, transformative.), exile. 

At 28, home from Hamburg, a lust for connection, a striving (Ginger lad’s head appears - is it a lad? Or a chimera? Is it even ginger?): Elections, graphic arts, religion, gay rights, baked bread, whole poached salmon swimming in aspic (Whence comes that? Dreams of bright rivers flowing clear?), epilepsy, past lives. Falling in love. Again and again.

At 35’s transition, all about the Gay: Gay commerce, Gay society, Gay culture, Gay paradise, 12-step sobriety, hopeless loves, house on the island, fantasy aesthete. About the Gay - but also, inexorably, about pesky, powerful External Forces: Assault, brokenness, poverty, illness, the glory and the terror, motorcycle, wanderings, muscles by the lake. 

At 42, as new life grew relentlessly out of old, I grew from future plans and dreams into unanticipated disaster and bright, new joy: Death, faith, community, near-death, disability, the power of love, heartbreak (again), fatherhood. Renewed cells brought me back to basics, with hope that I might now live to make it right, plant the seed of change. Future generations, they might grasp, might even know a mirror’d lake, hippo emergent, ginger youth - I in this life, even in this renewed life, could merely witness, neither conceive nor understand. Black holes, DNA, just a clue, the surprise of recognition but only the vaguest clue. This new me revelled in a brave, new world of emergent wonder and constant delight, all the while imagining that imagination required no willed response, drifting without clue on and in a joy of reeds, wonderment, lush reeds which flourished, died and sank to the foetid, fertile muck below, where future glories began to grow, as yet without regard to the vast, glassy lake beyond. 

At 49, chrysalis rent asunder. An emergent, renewed self began breaking free to start to take responsibility, face the fissure between dreamland, where I preferred to live, there in the reeds of the marshy verge, and the actuality of the vast, mirror’d lake that is our mother. Or child. Whatever - it is life, vast, mysterious, confrontational life, into which one must launch a skiff or soar above on softy wings. Something, a doingness that needs must ground our sense of being. I then began, in this seventh septennial regeneration, as all life is but beginning, to venture into the lake. Our act is over only when the fat lady sings at our funeral, over but never done - seed of the future, as each renewed me grows out of the discarded self, which once was new, promising and bright. For the first time I became single, started dating, began exposing myself to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, so to speak, the process of learning who is my self and finding a way to life. Life and True Love. Homelessness. Opportunity. Debility. Confusion - if I cannot be he who I thought I was to become, who am I?

At 56, new life burst from old. Who ever said it was easy, to split open and shed a skin?

Then 63. Once a parent, always that child in my heart. But the kid does grow, high school passes and I too must move on. What does one do after the Main Event? After dreams are played out or accomplished? As strength fails and life has consumed hope? That’s why we live in regeneration. Ninth time around; how does one find strength yet again? It comes. It comes with hope. But not always courage or desire. Having tossed aside many past lives, then this one not broken off but brought to ripe conclusion, my exhausted mind suggests this is a time to keep steady, sip the nectar of familiar fruits. Or ought it be a septennial experiment in newness? I spend this season in indecision alongside enjoyment: A small voice keeps telling me to learn to swim.

Do I even recall 70, ten reincarnations of this oddbody?  I basked (or sometimes cowered) in twilight, that much I remember, the shadows and the fading light. As stars started to shimmer on the slick surface of life’s lake, I began, too, to reflect, look back on life, darn the holes, ground myself in the power of the love I have borne, do bear, for those who care for me - and for those who abuse me. How can a person whose way is through the vale of forgiveness understand what it means to forgive? It’s life, plain and simple, life; the challenge is, on life’s journey, that one not lose sight of self, this dissolving, reconstituting, amorphous self, nature’s dark hole - or is it Dark Matter?  Beginning strokes, I venture beyond reeds. Flailing in unfamiliar depth, fearing that, leaving my marsh I’ve left all nurture, I splutter, swallow quarts of unfamiliar, clear lakewater and nearly drown. Strong arms hold me; my flesh may be changed but Love is constant and constantly by my side. I can learn to swim; I shall. 

Then 77, all my resolve dissolves in the confusion of the everyday and renewed time becomes more blur than framework. This does release the mind. I do roam more freely - is it the renewed cells? Or is it Parkinson’s, piece by piece dissolving my brain? This septennial passage in the enjoyment of which I am now engaged, what’s it about? Being immersed in the wash of week after week, in the roiling wake of other peoples’ life traumas, it’s not clear whether I have learned to swim, and thus will in timely fashion come up for air, or whether I shall drown in the confusion of a discombobulated, upside-down world over which I can exert no control. Or maybe the time for control, for attempting control, has thankfully passed and now becomes, all cells renewed, a time for understanding. Perhaps the re-grown objective isn’t perfection but grace? I’m underwater with it now. I may be growing gills or I may learn to walk on mudflats - Time and morphology will tell. 

Awaiting now 84, my next overhaul, I sit here hoping for a bolted femur to fix itself (A healing bone is, I presume, part of the complete, new me under construction.). I dream my dreams - or someone else’s? Who knows, the world is a mess. I recall only fragments - if ever the dream completed itself, no matter; all that remains are fragments. Will I ever know the actuality of the hippopotamus? Of the putative ginger youth? Or even of the reeds and the lake? Likely not. But a renewed world, a revised me is on its way, coming to a venue near you soon. What world? What me? What venue? Of mystery is life made, mystery and a constant morph.