His power and efficacy had been impressed on me

by a series of Roman Catholic drivers,

one of whom took me to the church on Wodehouse

Road when I was seven or eight. I kept

the card-sized picture he’d given me, in which

Christ looked like a blond sixties flower child,

his face and blue eyes tilted slightly towards heaven.

It was this image I prayed to, going down Marine Lines,

or stuck in a traffic jam in Kemp’s Corner. I found

a good excuse not to do P.E.—the murmur

that the stethoscope had discovered when I was three years old.

My parents took me from doctor to doctor; at first

diagnosed as a hole in the heart, then an obstruction

to a valve. My blood whispered loudly

with my heartbeat. I watched as the others touched their toes,

or executed a somersault on the “horse”;

or hung, primate-like, from the Roman rings,

and thanked the Almighty I had the means to convince

my mother to write a note: “Please excuse my son

from P.E. today.” School, then, was a place

of lonely observances, where a role was already

created, of watching from the sidelines; meanwhile,

we’d moved to the apartment on Malabar Hill.

The solitary quest for the other had started

long ago; the first desire was for

myself. As a child, I’d often stare

at my body in the mirror, in the silence, appraising,

weighing, sometimes touch the mirror, feeling the pleasure

was mine, but that I was being pleasured as well;

that private feeling of separateness

and connection. Later, I began to compose the secret

object of my search from odds and ends, nipples

and navels; sometimes a woman in a bikini, alone

in an advertisement; sometimes, without knowing it, the gods

and goddesses in my father’s Outline of Art;

gods more than goddesses—as if I was still searching

for myself—the mirror, in this case,

was the picture of the gods. I flicked the pages. For a long

time the mirror stage lasted, and those Roman bodies

were touched by the hue of my skin, by my sweat,

by sameness and its odd allure. I saw a print

of a painting of Saint Sebastian, his arched torso

pierced by arrows. I couldn’t distinguish

between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual passion

from the carnal. These gods were among

the earliest pornographic pictures I beheld.

The hardbound books in my father’s library; besides

those on industrial growth, and development,

and fiscal policy, and the World Bank,

were the Grolier Classics—relics of his love

of prosody and line—the Divine Comedy,

and Paradise Lost, long unopened, but whose titles

spoke worlds. I thought Paradise Lost a tropical island;

the Divine Comedy a farce. Among the books

was a consumptively thin and freckled copy

of T. S. Eliot’s Selected Poems, bought

for a shilling and sixpence in London, and shipped