POET'S ANATOMY
435
aspect, his sexual organ. Even today, I don't think I was really
wrong about that. Some of the bewildering enigmas about how
things get created- both in the universe of physics and in that of
art-later seemed clearer to me: the tense forces released in the
approach and separation of opposites; the paralyzed shimmering
when they are put unstably together. But for the reader who may
remain shocked, despite all philosophical reflection, by the story
of my brother and me, I'll add- for your most serious consideration–
that it was precisely these years of incest which in the long run
kept me from the terrible perversions of homosexuality.
During this period, my face thinned, my features became clear
and delicate, my body lengthened. Unreasonably, I suspected that
lowed all of these changes to Sandy, as though by his attentions
he had given me a new physical being. My gratitude was inwardly
slavish. I thought of very little else except of him. I was utterly
uninterested in school, other girls, boys. Only the things Sandy
said to me seemed important, though I must admit that that was
partly because they seemed mysterious. Once he rattled off: "Politics
makes strange bedfellows, too. But there's something very satisfying
about that. After all, we need the illusion of democracy, though I
suppose it's only a question of whether we want to be ruled by the
same few or a changing few." He was tucking me in for the night
at the time. I didn't sleep for hours, puzzling over what he meant.
Another evening, while he was working away at his biology
assignment, I remember that he commented, "Weare just the begin–
ning, you and I, the single cell. We're the binary fission of ourselves,
out of which will later come the more highly developed forms of life
and specialized reproduction."
I never forgave him for going away to college. I was desolate.
But the night before he left he sneaked into my room, and for the
first time we spent the entire night cushioned together, like two
Egyptian brother-sister princelings
in
a temple over the Nile, watch–
ing the river of clouds through my window-tearless and serious and
dignified at parting, as befits royalty. "Since I'm going away," Sandy
mused out loud in his endless peroration, "let's make it an entering
wedge. It has to stop some time-"
"Does it? There'll be summers."
