How to be a Man

Don’t tell me how to be a man.

If I want to wake with the dawn on Easter morning,

crawl out sleepy-eyed into the lawn’s cold dew

and lie wrapped in a blanket of sunrise

as the heat of day burns the tomb from wet limbs

and the first light of the songbirds

sends streaks of yellow across a field of blue;

if I want to write a sonnet on sea-foam

or on the seaweed that wrapped around me once

when I was young and its tentacles were like a baptism;

if I want to climb an evergreen tree

like it was the mast of a man’o’war

and sit in the sky with the wind

as my only friend,

then I will. Leaving you, arms

wrapped around your knees staring

at your navel, trying to remember the manliest

way to unfold yourself. Until you decide

whether your works are enough to earn a rite of passage

—and even after that—

don’t try to tell me what manliness is. It’s not

for you or me to decide, thank God.