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Poem	It is the boy in me who's looking out the window, while someone across the street mends a pillowcase, clouds shift, the gutter spout pours rain, someone else lights a cigarette? (Because he flinched, because he didn't whirl around, face them, because he didn't hurl the challenge back—"Fascists?"—not "Faggots"—Swine! he briefly wonders—if he were a girl . . .) He writes a line. He crosses out a line. I'll never be a man, but there's a boy crossing out words: the rain, the linen-mender, are all the homework he will do today. The absence and the priviledge of gender confound in him, soprano, clumsy, frail. Not neuter—neutral human, and unmarked, the younger brother in the fairy tale except, boys shouted "Jew!" across the park at him when he was coming home from school. The book that he just read, about the war, the partisans, is less a terrible and thrilling story, more a warning, more a code, and he must puzzle out the code. He has short hair, a red sweatshirt. They know something about him—that he should be proud of? That's shameful if it shows? That got you killed in 1942. In his story, do the partisans have sons? Have grandparents? Is he a Jew more than he is a boy, who'll be a man someday? Someone who'll never be a man looks out the window at the rain he thought might stop. He reads the sentence he began. He writes down something that he crosses out.
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