Charlie Bondhus’s masterful, heart-wrenching new poetry collection, All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), could not have been written in any previous generation. In the closeted centuries following the Greco-Roman era, the poetry of gay male love and the poetry of war have only been permitted to overlap in sublimated and metaphorical ways. Bondhus merges them candidly, but the story this book tells is more elegiac than celebratory.
The alternating narrators of Heat, a veteran of the Afghanistan war and his homefront lover, seem free from their forerunners’ self-conscious anguish about sexual orientation. They can admit openly how sex between men is like martial arts grappling, how killing can be orgasmic and the camaraderie of soldiers more intimate than lovers. They can savor the flowers in their backyard garden without weighting down those fragile stems with the entire burden of their erotic communication, and without fearing that attention to beauty makes them unmanly.
But despite this unprecedented openness, an unbridgeable rift separates the lovers, and that is the tragedy at the heart of this book. Combat changes the veteran in ways that his partner cannot comprehend first-hand. His feelings are hardened like scar tissue. He can’t fit in, can’t understand the relevance of the civilian routines that he left behind. He eventually goes back to the war, not because he believes in it, but because it’s the only place he feels at home.
The past few years have brought high-profile victories for gay and lesbian inclusion in mainstream (some would say conservative) institutions like marriage, the church, and the military. After the celebrations fade, there’s an opportunity to look critically at the social structures into which one has been assimilated. Heat suggests that participation in systems of oppression doesn’t end with the waving of the rainbow flag.
Charlie has kindly permitted me to reprint these poems from his collection, which won the 2013 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award.
Sharing a Bed
I remember the first evening in bed,
making love with the lights on.
Outside the window, a hanging basket
of red impatiens
and a ruby-throated hummingbird.
In late spring’s greenish light
my head was a bowed peony,
your torso,
a grand urn
of tissuey ranunculus.
Summer found us sharing a home
with mismatched furniture,
plagues of ragweed and clover
choking the thin, dark spaces
between our together-time.
Like angel’s trumpet, I craved
the cool white suddenness
the moon brings,
and when it came
silent as a cloud
our limbs were not the marble of roses,
or the patrician regularity of zinnias,
but the cheap, unsung beauty
of daisies, wild pinks.
Hornets nested in our heads.
Butterflies settled on our eyelids.
Morning’s first finches began to sing.
My arms were full of nettles and lamb’s ear.
****
Wood Gathering
In November we gather
straight branches into bundles,
and carry them
past flowerbeds
we stopped tending
last spring, to the shed
door which always sticks
in cold weather.
I want to ask you
how long since the seasons
became the same,
neither sun
nor perennials penetrating
our ribs, to the place where organs
slump like frozen vegetables?
When the snow starts,
you will cross
the backyard, and tugging
and grunting, pull open
the shed, where what
we’ve gathered is stacked neatly
as bones. Wordless
(we have no use for lips),
you will track dirt and ice
across the carpetless floors
and drop the flaking
wood on the fire,
filling the house
with the easier
kind of warmth.
First, pink rushes
to fingertips. Next,
skin cracks as heat
refills the heart
like hot water
into a cold glass. And then
like a body
rising
from a thawing lake,
and bumping heavily
against the sheet ice:
a pulse
or what remains of love,
brushing the underside
of the wrist,
a feeling
brittle as firewood,
finite as frost.