Food for Saints: I tire of the argument

a poem about belonging

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For Discussion

Amelia here. This poem is the beginning of a conversation between the poet (Cjersti) and the essayist (me), but we also want you, our readers, to be part of the creative process because it's much more fun this way. Please join in, even when your thoughts are less than half baked.

• Yesterday was Donald Trump’s inauguration. How does current-day politics and culture reduce our identities to a list of labels? What do our time’s favored labels—pronouns, sexual orientation, race, etc.—say about what we value?

• Is this unique to our time, as Culture War critics would say? Or is it a universal way we humans “find a toehold of understanding on the slipperiness of our complexity?”

DIatoms. Kostas Tsobanoglou, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons; Diatomea–Schachtellinge from Kunstformen der Natur (1904) by Ernst Haeckel

Finally, how does it affect you personally to think that God sees you and fully appreciates the incomprehensible complexity of your being even when you yourself are baffled?

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I tire of the argument

I wonder if you ever thought
the queerest part of you was not your oriented self-identity,
those streaming codes of habitual being
wrapped around the pole of some meiotic spindle,
the compass point you used to navigate from the uncomfortable past
into the presentation of today?
Not the beingness of femality,
or the havingness of chromosomal possessions,
or undefined personhood only visible through
the juxtaposition of assigned relationships…

You think I experience my day-to-day in a vaginal-framed reality.
Which may be true, when I notice it
and remember to submit to the caricature
for your sake,
so you can find a toehold of understanding
on the slipperiness of my complexity.
But the reality I know deep inside is one
unbound by labeling—it is only me in there:
the parts I like and the ones I don’t,
the inescapable parts and the untrainable ones,
the ones I won’t know about until I’m older,
and the invisible spiky ones other people see
when glaring back at me.

I wonder if you know your depth
is not a static quantity of interest
held by the eyes of someone in a red hat riding the train?
Nor is it a categorical assessment of your causal factors
mapped by years of academic inservice into a multiplicity of selves
that shatter the unified you.

These are my diatomaceous qualities
pointing out fiercely in uncountable dimensional planes:
- Intrepid curiosity
- Competitive efficacy
- Inherited divinity
- Humble maternity
- Cheeky serendipity

The enmeshment of these puzzling facets
was a source of surprise and discomfort for some years, and shame
I could not reconcile their
oppressive weirdness,
until I realized it was a game of
solitaire
winnable only through divine artistry.
I was not the player but the practiced game,
not the musician but the music itself,
not the artist but the unfinished glorious artifact,
not the poet but the tone spoken through the microphone
at the inauguration of the truth.