Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John Ashbery's queer politics - gay poet

Let me start by hypothesizing backward. The final scene, "you" sliding "down on your knees" for "precious jewels" is a rather transparent scene of fellatio. This activity then retroactively defines the "it" that peoples the lines above it. "The day you did it / Was the day you had to stop, because the doing / Involved the whore fabric" suggests that having gay sex troubles the "whole" ontologic "fabric" of the speaker or addressee. It both leads one to reimagine one's place in the world and offers leverage, via a secret that expresses itself everywhere, to reimagine the world itself differently. The steeple becomes "so / Innocent" only in the context of a phallic loss of innocence; its innocence is a product of being penetrated by "it," the fantasy of gay sex, which could offer the steeple a context in which it would become uninnocent. The list locating the "it" - "the evil that is not evil, / The romance that is not mysterious, the life that is not life, / A present that is elsewhere" - gestures wilth decreasing specificity to homosexuality. "The evil that is not evil" specifies homosexuality in religious discourse; "the romance that is not mysterious" respecifies it in relation to heteronormative courtship suggesting that homosexual romance, shorn of courtly circumlocutions and custom-laden circuitry about sex, cuts to the chase; "the life that is not life" zooms further out to suggest that homosexual lives do not show up on the birth-marriage-death map of heterosexuality; and the "present that is elsewhere" suggests in the largest sense that, because of its banishment from dominant heteronormative discourse, queer lives always happen "elsewhere," they are always temporally spatialized outside of the "present." The poem's first stanza concentrates on homosexuality's movement outward to bigger and bigger othernesses that depend on homosexuality's position as the other in a heteronormative discourse of morality, erotics, ontology, spatiality, and temporality, until it "Involve [s] the whole fabric. . ."

The kneeling moment in the poem, in its ripple effect on the fabric of reality, makes this "you" "teeter[] on the edge of this / Calm street. . .// As though they are coming to get you" (143). Since the whole world has been rearranged in the subjective experience of gay sex, it seems that some regulatory agent should have noticed the anomaly and arrived to eliminate or correct it. But none does: ". . . there was no one in the noon glare. . ." (143). Since this ecstatic reorganization met with no external crackdown, and the giddiness and exhilaration of inhabiting an alternative "present" is apparently livable, the speaker moves into the fourth stanza with a new knowledge and approach:

The light that was shadowed then Was seen to be our lives, Everything about us that love might wish to examine Then put away for a certain length of time, until The whole is to be reviewed, and we turned Toward each other, to each other. The way we had come was all we could see And it crept up on us, embarrassed That there is so much to tell now, really now.