Just as the Duolingo dialogues with characters who just happen to be queer (most recently Bea mistakes someone she sees in the store for an ex-girlfriend, and Bruno and Héctor disagree about a song which played on their first date thirty years ago) delight me with their normality, I'm loving Queer Nature, an anthology of poems by 200 poets past and present. My first foray introduced me to Judith Barrington's "The Dyke with No Name Thinks about Landscape," whose last stanza, after love, terror and other experiences with people in natural settings, goes like this:
6
Now she is lying on a blanket, the sand below
moulded to the shape of her body.
Sudden swells lap the shore beyond her feet:
a barge has passed by.
trudging down river with its load
like a good-natured shire horse
its throbbing lost now behind the breaking
of that great wave which seems to rise from the deeps.
The turbulence is quick: a lashing of the sand
followed by September’s lazy calm
as the river moves unseen again,
cows from another world low on the far shore
and the seagull’s body, a fragile handful,
dangles gently between its two tremendous wings.
The trouble is not nature, she thinks
But the people who say I’m not part of it.
They’re trying to paint me out of the landscape
says the dyke with no name
but her thighs in hot sand remember a horse’s warm back
as the wind makes a great wave from Oregon to Beachy Head.
