GLR July-August 2022

Moses Parts the Red Sea I didn’t think to ask God to make me a boy. With nipple-hint & widening hips, I anchored my bloated stomach to the table & filled myself for years with stale rolls. Pupils swollen in grief. When the red current came, swift movement & sly, its breadth felt outside of me. A calculated distance between the Israelites & Egyptians. This blood was never mine. Years later now, at the fertility clinic, a doctor whose white coat I mistake for an angel’s wings asks me if I’d frozen any eggs, as if the future is something you can plan for. The thing about sex is its unpredictability: the heartache an XX chromosome can wreak. The danger signs of an inverted Y, sounding, always, like a question. At 22, I wrote my own commandments, chiseled hormone surge & clitoral growth into my spiraling DNA. At 22, my brain stopped spiraling. At 22, I became God. The light in my brain is as steady as the sun shadows on the first day. The slant of moon beams on my wife’s face, praising every hair & crease is, my God, so good. On the seventh day God rested. & so we rest now, legs looped like starfish, my ovaries eggless & hers full, tiny bodies wrapped in shimmering sac, safe from clam or mollusk. The darkness at the window has no teeth. I catch stars in my flattened nipples & tonight,

by Simon Russell Beale), by now an elder gay statesman who late in the previous century had bravely defended his friend Oscar Wilde from scurrilous attacks. We know from an early scene in the film—which pitches forward to an aging Sassoon sitting in morose silence in an empty church with his adult son George sitting nearby—that the war encouraged a spiritual crisis of faith in Sassoon, who is about to convert to Catholicism. The film has several similar “flash forwards,” with an austere and angry Peter Capaldi play ing the elderly, moody, and intemperate Sassoon, who has mar ried well if not wisely. Without the therapist W.H.R. Rivers to guide us through these postwar scenes, we deduce that Sas soon’s experience of the Great War, the loss of his younger brother Homa and of his friend, the poet Wilfred Owen, shook Sassoon’s psyche to its foundations. These developments, and his companionable marriage to Hester Gatty—which had grown desiccated and unsatisfying to both partners—had left Sassoon emotionally unanchored and quick-tempered, angry at the world and at himself. Although the film ends on a note of possible familial har mony for Sassoon, there remains a dreadful sense that a life of great promise has curdled into one of disappointment and sour ness, the price that Sassoon paid for leading a “shadow life” in England’s moral straitjacket in the first half of the 20th century. If not a rousing paean to the doughboys of the Somme or the gay poets who loved them, Benediction has a steady, stately tempo, several sharply etched performances, and a visual richness to counter the mournful nostalgia it imparts.

under fine hair & slight belly, my staff emerges, rising, upwards, like a prayer.

R EMI R ECCHIA

cissists we have Glen Byam Shaw (played by Tom Blyth), who was a favorite of Novello’s before Sassoon came on the scene, and Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch), the supreme model of a supercilious social climber who takes up with Sassoon after Novello has dropped him. This daisy chain of “pretty boys,” as even Sassoon’s mother characterized them, leaves us wondering just how injudicious Sassoon was in his choice of lovers. What fleetingly rescues this stretch of the film is the occasional ap pearance of Robbie Ross (played with tender understatement

July–August 2022

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