In praise of granite

A new poem, in the Atlantic

The Atlantic is publishing a new poem of mine on their website today. It’s called “Pemaquid lighthouse revisited,” and it’s about Peter and me revisiting a geologically striking promontory in Maine last year. It’s also about being married, and about being gay and being married, and about time. It’s sort of a knockoff of “Tintern Abbey” and sort of an answer to Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone,” a poem that also discusses homosexuality in rocks (which I wrote about for The Atlantic years ago, as it happens). At one point, Auden describes the young men in his poem as “at times / Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step,” and as kind of a riposte to that anxiety of Auden’s (what would be so terrible about being in step, Wystan?), I wrote in alternating five-beat and six-beat lines, so that every pair of lines is, as I put it in the poem, “in step the way one always is in time / and differing the way one always does in time.”

Please take a look!