This post was submitted by selena

Ah, coming out of the closet. How lovely that sounds! You are now in a big, light room, instead of a dark, tiny, constraining one. The closet is a defining and ubiquitous metaphor about the gay experience.

But the metaphor has limitations. As permanent a shift leaving the closet can be personally, it turns out that in every new community, every new group of friends, every new job, you have to come out all over again. And over and over again. Each time you have to gauge how this information will be received. You have to decide how to come out: drop hints, dress yourself with clues, or find an excuse to mention it outright. You have to decide when: during the first conversation or months later. It’s almost always awkward. The closet doesn’t just go away.

I’ve always lived in accepting, open communities and worked in liberal workplaces, so I can make those decisions at my leisure. But sometimes, it’s obvious that the closet is a necessity for reasons of basic safety. At best, you can be evasive and vague. At worst, you have to lie.

Elizabeth Bradfield’s “Site-Specific Adaptations” is a brilliant poem about huddling in a closet on the Manitoba tundra. There are so many elements at work in this poem: an election ramping up the sense of wariness and urgency, a natural context underlying the bleak landscape and the discussion of nesting habits, and— most interesting, I think— the standpoint of speaker as the transformed, rather than the fibber. Their relationship cut up to fit the narrow expectation of the group, and she learns about her sex change over the phone. Through Bradfield’s economic lines and dextrous handling of a range of characters and a complicated, nuanced situation, the poem has a great deal of power. It hits home.

Site-Specific Adaptations

November, 2004

This winter, I became a man.
It happened the first week of November
while my girlfriend guided
photo tours of polar bears.

For a week in Manitoba, she wakes,
eats, and rides the tundra buggies
with tourists over eskers, lending
story to what they see. This year, though,

another landscape competes
with what’s running the boreal
treeline: she and I
are on the ballot. Our home.

Our tax burden and hospital
visitation rights in eleven
states. She’s wary. Bans talk
of the election. But still,

to some of them she looks
suspect: short-haired, short-nailed,
with a walk that’s wide and expects
to be made way for. Out on the tundra,

she tries to keep them focused—
Look at the fox digging
for his cache of meat. But,
no bears in sight, a bored wife turns

from the view saying, ‘So
have you left anyone at home?’
My lover says, A gyrfalcon!
Until the last few years, we knew

almost nothing of their nesting habits.
It’s November 2. Four more days
with this group, seven with the next,
then she’ll come home to me.

What weather they’re having—
mid-twenties and clear, bears
at the bay’s edge in golden light
testing the new ice, hungry for seal.

Four more days in the buggy. Four more
dinners of careful talk. My husband
is a poet, she finally says. For the first time
not risking this truth and hating

that what she loves
could bring her to this lie.

From Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) © 2004 Elizabeth Bradfield.

Intrigued?

Elizabeth Bradfield is a naturalist, web designer, and poet. She grew up in Tacoma, WA and lives and works in Cape Cod and Alaska. She received a Stanford Stegner Fellowship, and her collection Interpretive Work won the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle, and was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award.

For more, check out her website, and find new recordings of poems at From the Fishouse

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