from: Changing What We Mean

by Eloise Klein Healy  

Turning your back, you button your blouse. That’s new.

You redirect the conversation. A man

has entered it. Your therapist has given you

permission to discuss this with me, the word

you’ve been looking for in desire.

You can now say “heterosexual” with me. We mean

different things when we say it. I mean

the life I left behind forever. For you, it’s a new

beginning, a stab at being normal again, a desire

to enter the world with a man

instead of a woman, and of course, there’s the word

you won’t claim for yourself anymore, you

who have children to think of, you

who have put me in line behind them and mean

to keep the order clear. It’s really my word

against yours anymore in this new

language, in this battle over how a man

is about to enter this closed room of desire

we’ve gingerly exchanged keys to, but desire

isn’t what’s at issue anyway, you

say to me. Instead I learn a man

can protect you in a way a woman only means

to but never can, and my world is too new

when there’s real life out there, word

after word for how normal looks, each word

cutting like scissors a profile of desire—

a man facing a woman, nothing particularly new

or interesting to me. I’ve wanted only to face you

and the world simultaneously, say what I mean

with my body, my choice to not be a man,

to be a woman with you, forget the man’s

part or how his body is the word

for what touch can contain, what love means.

If this were only about desire,

you say, I’d still desire you.

But it isn’t passion we’re defining, new

consequences emerge when a man and desire

are part of the words we hurl, you

changing how you mean loving—this terrible final news.

from: Passing. Copyright 2002.