As I read, I found myself focused on those ampersands as they appeared between and in the midst of the troubles of the poet’s life, and somehow imagined them as figurative symbols of a woman unable to escape the expectations of society. Though I’d just started reading her, I was aware that so many of Rossetti’s poems dealt with the plight of women, whether succumbing to male temptation in “Goblin Market” or the way women exist only to look beautiful in her sonnet “In an Artist’s Studio.” Rossetti herself never married despite having a number of suitors, which was also true of Jane Austen and Emily Brontë, whose sister Charlotte, meanwhile, didn’t marry until her late thirties, a few months before her death. It was as though these women could not be both devoted to their personal passions and fulfill the expectations of their society; they had to relinquish romantic love to be fully themselves.

I was supposed to have it better because I was a man. I was supposed to make my way in the world unencumbered. Yet reading that poem, I realized how little of myself was really mine, when so much of me had been molded by my desire to be worthy of other people’s approval. I keenly felt what it meant to be trapped in between with nowhere to go, to never be truly alone, to never be seen as yourself even by the people you know best. Ironically, it was wearing my dainty little dress that gave me a sense of true rebellion against the expectations of society, yet still, I could only do it on specific occasions, because I was too afraid that doing it in my daily life would lead to rejection.

Instead of dwelling on these thoughts, I turned to the index of that thick volume to look up Heaney and discovered a whole fifteen-page section devoted to his work. The next time I went downstairs and for the rest of that year, I walked gingerly when I passed his door, to make sure I didn’t disrupt a bout of inspiration.

—

On a stone bench that was cold to the touch, a shy man named Thomas told me in a crackling tenor, overtones piercing the low rumble of cars on Memorial Drive, that he was a graduate of MIT, that he specialized in holograms, that he wanted to be with someone nice. His teeth were too big for his mouth, but he had an otherwise presentable face, a nose like half a steep mountain that I liked, since I came from a land of flat noses. It was a brisk April morning in JFK Park, one of those days when the grass glowed nearly yellow in the bright sun.