Some mornings, leaving my girlfriend’s    house, I’d glimpse my whole existence,all its eras, as a single arc—unified, unbroken.    I saw a person who kissed mostly men,wrote poems in the prevailing style, owned a cat.    I saw a different person after that,and before, I saw a little girl.    What was I saying? That there werethese different selves—I need you to see them—    they were shapes made out of lines, and thenone day they all began to cross, the lines,    as if by some obscure designthe analysis of which became the purpose    of my life. Or maybe the pattern wasmy life, and its analysis    merely my living. Sexuality is,after all, a formal concern:    finding for one’s time on eartha shape that feels more native than imposed—    a shape in which desire, having chosenit, can multiply.    And isn’t love itself a typeof rhyme? And don’t gender and genre share one root?    Maybe I really am a poet,needing as I do from these imperfect sets,    which constitute a self, the lie of sense.