What is marriage for? The answer to this question should determine what we think about same-sex marriage. If marriage is for legally recognizing life partners and giving them a suite of benefits, then we are discriminating against same-sex couples by not allowing them access to this institution. They are clearly capable of the same affections and the same aspirations for their lives together as heterosexual couples.

If, on the other hand, marriage is for encouraging people who make children together to be coupled and to stay coupled to raise those children, then in this respect there is a clear and meaningful difference between heterosexual and homosexual couples. And therefore nondiscrimination should not be required either legally or morally.

Does this seem to you a reasonable approach to the problem?

In the Mountains

White stones stick up from Bramble Brook.
Red leaves sparse against a cold sky.
No rain now on the mountain path.
My clothes wet from the high green brush.
--Wang Wei

On the Other Hand, You Could Have Been Run over by a Truck a Couple years Ago

The tool best fitted to your hand lies centuries deep in an undiscovered midden.
Your onetruelove's parents will be born this year.
That man in the rumpled gray suit you passed in the Taipei airport, speaking what language you      
     couldn't even guess--he would have been your best friend.
The animal that would come to you most readily to have you stroke its soft hard flank was the
     assemblage of bones you shuffled past with your third grade class.
The medicine that would still your fine tremors is locked in the bark of the big tree in your yard.
The recipe for the malted milk cake your grandmother always made you is on a page stuck to another
     with a dab of frosting in a cookbook your mother just sold in a yard sale.
Your favorite and most secret perversion is advertised every day in the Battambang Herald.
The language in which you would write your best poems is spoken by three old women in a high
     valley of Irian Jaya.
The only surprise party of your life dispersed without a trace that night you worked late last week.
The knowledge that will change everything, on its journey of millennia, riding on the light from a
     distant star, is now only a hundred years away.
And yet I, now with memory failing,
in this house built the year I was born,
I am here for you.



That woman in the Taipei airport wearing outrageously clashing colors, she would have been your
     best friend.


And yet here,
with memory failing,
sitting in this house
built the year I was born,
I am for you.
      

Dry and Brittle in the Spring

A leaf from last fall
spitted on a new green spike.
Emerging tulip.

The Maumee in Flood, from the Veterans' Bridge

Sunlight ripples
over shadowed water;
hope, across the heart.

Ever-Gloomy Heian Buddhism

Imagining My Death and Cremation

Sad to end as just
a green haze drifting pale
over distant fields.
--Ono no Komachi

My Two GED Students, 1970

My Two GED Students, 1970


Cherie’s not home
when I get to her place
in the projects across from Gunckel School.
So I bullshit with George awhile
and he gets five dollars
from me for wine--
Pear Ripple, the new flavor.
And when she comes through the door—
twenty-three, tiny,
with her three kids
and her hysterectomy scar
showing above her lowriders—
we hide our orange plastic cups
and I have her read Langston Hughes:
A poem?
It ain't no poem here.

David sits in his wheelchair
at his mom’s dining room table.
We work on the beginning algebra
I taught myself the night before.
He drinks a mug of beer
for his kidneys
and laughs, choking,
about some asshole buddy of his
who made it out of Nam OK,
But signed on to some secret
mission to Cuba
and got his balls blown off,
and now he can walk,
but there’s nothing between his legs.