You Are Jeff

The first stanza reveals the poet’s prevailing strategy of combining vivid depiction of physical action with an ambiguous use of the second-person pronoun (“You”) and metaphorical language that reveals its meaning only partially and gradually. Two handsome twins ride their shiny motorbikes, one following the other, but there is a “hairpin turn” in the road, the first apparent metaphor suggesting a turnabout or a crisis. “You,” whom the speaker addresses, is “in love with” one or both of the Jeffs. Perhaps “You” is unsure which twin to love since they have different personalities. One “will want to take you apart, and slowly” while the other “only wants to stich you back together.” Emotions run high. The decision could change everything, and the speaker advises “You” (another man? himself? the reader?): “Consider the hairpin turn. Do no choose sides yet” (Stanza 1).

Instead of moving the action forward, the next two stanzas employ anaphora (repetition of the same words at the beginning of successive lines or stanzas) and re-describe the motorbiking scene while adding new details. This is an example of Siken’s painterly approach. He develops this scene like a painter might, first outlining the main elements of a visual composition and then returning to them multiple times to give them depth and clarify relations between them. We learn more about the twins. They are both called Jeff, but one is more experienced and more aggressive than the other. In fact, his closeness with his brother has violent implications: “He is thinking that if only he could cut him open and peel him back and crawl inside this second skin, then he could relive that last mile again: reborn, wild-eyed, free” (Stanza 2). This is an ambivalent sentiment because it implies both affection and harm: I want to become you, but I may hurt you in doing that. These intense and conflicted feelings are mutual: “each Jeff wants to be the other one” yet “[t]hey are the same and they hate each other for it” (Stanza 3).

Meanwhile, the meaning of “You” has become more complicated. Not only is “You” in love with Jeff(s), as we know from the first stanza, but “You” also is one of the Jeffs. Moreover, the speaker and the addressee are identified as the twins: “you scout out the road ahead and I will watch your back, how it was and how it will be, memory and fantasy” (Stanza 3). At this point, it is reasonable to suspect that the two Jeffs might be twins only metaphorically. Considering that the poem appears in a collection dedicated to queer love, it is plausible to see them as two gay men, whose relationship is at a crisis point. Their flirtation may have reached the stage of deeper emotional investment, or maybe their relationship is faltering. Whether they are brothers or lovers, their emotional bond (fraternal or amorous) is imbued with conflict and danger. Loving implies the possibility of hurt. Intimacy with another may cause a troubling sense of losing oneself in the other person.

The first three stanzas raise the emotional temperature quite high and anticipate violence, yet what follows is striking. One brother pulls over and awaits his twin “with a lug wrench clutched in his greasy fist,” even though he also wants to sleep next to the other man “chest to chest or chest to back” (Stanza 4). This tension between love (or desire) and aggression remains unresolved. In fact, it is literally suspended in the air because Jeff does not hit Jeff with that wrench; instead, he throws it into the air, where “it looks like a star. […] It hangs in the air like that, spinning in the air like that. It’s beautiful” (Stanza 4). [For more on the symbolism of wrenches and stars, see Symbols and Motifs.]

Rather than resolve or clarify the heightened emotions of the previous stanzas, the poem suddenly shifts into an almost farcical register. God is hungry and makes himself two tuna sandwiches, but the fish has gone bad, and so have the two brothers, who are here identified with the Devil. “As they wrestle, you can tell that they have forgotten about God, and they are very hungry” (Stanza 5). They seem to be hungry for each other’s bodies, to caress or to injure, or both. Since their wrestling occurs when they are closer to the Devil than to God, some may perceive it as sinful. However, when these ultimate symbols of good and evil reappear in the poem, the distinction between them is hard to detect: “Let’s say that God is the space between two men and the Devil is the space between two men. Here: I’ll be all of them” (Stanza 23). The implication is that the moral value of an act or a relationship is relative and contextual. Nothing is “good” or “evil” in itself, but within a context and from a perspective. [See Interpretative Context.]

Returning to a more mundane setting, the reader finds “You” playing cards with three other men. Of course, they are all called Jeff, but only one of them is on the same team as “You,” and they are “winning big” (Stanza 6). The other two Jeffs turn out to be “your father” and “your brother,” but the one on the winning team is ”your current boyfriend.” What they have in common is intimacy: “All of them have seen you naked and heard you talking in your sleep” (Stanza 7). This scene suggests that various kinds of love between men exist on a spectrum. Your lover could be a kind of father or brother to you. Your current relationship may invoke childhood memories, like those in the italicized parts of these two stanzas. Jeff may be the name of all the men “You” has loved, and these loves—romantic or not, sexual or not—are all parts of “You” in complexly interrelated ways.

The wrestling twins reappear, but from a different perspective. A 12-year-old boy observes them from a passing car while his parents pretend to see nothing, which leaves the boy to make what sense he can of such physical intimacy. He has no brother and has “never experienced anything this ferocious or intentional with another person,” which appears to have a profound impact on him. The speaker tells the boy to make the empty backseat next to him “the shape of everything you need” and “say hello” (Stanza 8), which suggests the boy’s vague yearning for some version of the intimacy he observes. He may imagine another boy sitting next to him, and he is too young to distinguish between desiring a brother and desiring a lover. However, the poem has already established that fraternal and amorous affections between men overlap and intermingle.

The following stanza is a variation on that theme. “You” is in a “bedroom with bunk beds” (that and several other details reveal that this is a child’s room) and hears someone softly singing in the bathroom: “and he’s singing to you, even though you don’t know who he is” (Stanza 9). In addition to bunk beds, the room contains two desks and chairs, yet there is no mention of a sibling. If anything, the boy, perhaps the same boy as in the previous stanza, is lonely and longs for male company and affection, a man who would sing to him. Unfulfilled longing spills into the next stanza, in which “You”—perhaps now an adult—is in a hotel hallway, unsure if he is ready to walk into a specific room. This hesitation has happened before: “each piece, each room, each time you put your hand to the knob, your mouth to the hand, your ear to the wound that whispers” (Stanza 10). The intimacy of the “mouth to the hand” and the pain of “the wound that whispers” suggest that this recurrent situation involves heartbreak, love unrequited or expired. The boy’s inchoate longing has become the man’s more definitive desire, which repeatedly, if timidly, seeks fulfilment: “Open the door again. Open the door” (Stanza 10).

If the reader has not yet discerned the theme of heartache, another semi-farcical interlude spells it out. A heart with two heads “has been chained and dunked in a glass booth filled with river water” and dumped in the bay while the onlookers cheer. “Can the heart escape?” (Stanza 11). The metaphor of the heart as an escape artist, risking its existence to impress others, whose cheers of support may or may not be genuine, is both entertaining and poignant. When people tell you to love with all your heart, do they realize the risk of the heart’s demise in the filthy waters of the beloved’s indifference or disloyalty or loss? Plus, the heart is fickle: one of its heads may be “monologuing about hesitation and fulfillment” while the other “is drowning” (Stanza 11). It represents both the well-rehearsed rhetoric of love and the uncontrolled abandon of loving. It may also abruptly change course: “Who do you love, Jeff? […] You were driving toward something and then, well, then you found yourself driving the other way” (Stanza 12).

No wonder, then, that love (or desire) is compared to cancer and a bruise that will not heal. It is like “you’ve swallowed a bad thing and now it’s got its hands inside you. This is the essence of love and failure” (Stanza 13). Both love and failure leave deep traces inside you, or perhaps love inevitably leads to failure because it cannot last forever. It will end in death, if not in a break-up. The speaker pokes fun of the rhetoric of love, which imagines that love can have a happy ending: “it’s a love story, after all, a lasting love, a wonderful adventure with lots of action” where everything is as it should be. In reality, love hurts: “you need more stitches and the bruise cream isn’t working” (Stanza 13). Yet even as “You” is buying a jar of cream for the bruises, the afternoon light in the grocery store reminds “You” that love is not just a wound but also something precious: “Take the light inside you like a blessing, like a knee in the chest, holding onto it and not letting it go. Now let it go.” (Stanza 14). Cherish it while you can. Try to free yourself from it when you can cherish it no longer. Love makes bliss and pain inextricable from each other: “a blessing, or a bruise. Blood everywhere, […] the red light hemorrhaging from everywhere at once” (Stanza 15).

Once again, the poem shifts into depicting a more ordinary scene: “you and your lover are making out in […] a seedy bar,” but “in this dim and smoky light you can barely tell whose hands are whose,” and someone is buying you a free drink (Stanza 16). The scene embodies the unruliness of desire. “You” is kissing the one “You” chose, but others desire “You,” and maybe “You” desires others, too. Hands reach out, but whose hands and for whom? The description invokes gay bars with dark corners where men can yield to unruly desires. Are love and desire allies or enemies? Desire can boost love or destroy it, so the stanza ends with a warning which recalls an earlier symbol of emotional crisis: “Consider the hairpin turn.”

The intertwining of love and failure continues in several subsequent stanzas. The “checkered flag” at the hoped-for finish line of a happy home at the end of the road of romantic and sexual pursuits is never reached (Stanza 17). The “safe place where you could love him” has not yet been found (Stanza 18). The speaker describes the things a departed lover has left behind, or a succession of lovers since there is “the list with all of your names, Jeff. They are not the same name, Jeff” (Stanza 19). Some of the Jeffs in the poem are clearly former lovers. The twins reappear, but they seem unreachable, shifting from “motorbikes” to “a garden” to “a field of daisies”; in fact, they are “just one guy […] talking to you,” but “You” “cannot understand him” (Stanza 20). The connection has faltered, or it is broken, perhaps forever.

Death has separated two lovers. There are things they “used to dream about” and things they “used to do,” but now one promises to the other that he will “come back from the dead” and he is groping around “in a hallway […] walking toward the sound of [his lover’s singing] voice” (Stanza 21). The words bring to mind the lonely boy in his “suburban bedroom” hoping that the singing he hears is for him (Stanza 9) and the man in a dark hotel hallway trying to open the door, which is “the wound that whispers” (Stanza 10). The boy’s longing for what could be and the man’s brooding over what once was become two sides of the same coin in a place that “could be a city” or “a graveyard” or “the basket of a big balloon” (Stanza 21), where ordinary life, death, and the fantasy of freedom comingle.

The last three stanzas offer glimpses of hope. “You” was sick, but looking out of a “beautiful window,” “You” discovers “a beautiful view” (Stanza 22). Four Jeffs—two of them “are windows” and two of them “are doors”—“are trying to tell you something” though they will not “tell you everything” (Stanza 23). A revelation is possible, but its meaning will not be reduced to a name. Indeed, in the final stanza, “You” is “in a car with a beautiful boy” (perhaps this one real, and not imagined like in Stanza 8), and they love each other, so that when they touch, “you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for” (Stanza 24). A conventional name for it might be “love,” but this poem rejects reducing complex experiences to simple words, and it has prepared the reader to be suspicious of facile happy closures. The boy’s wonderful feeling may be the first rousing of affection and desire, or it may represent a man’s new affection and desire following those of the past. Maybe this time the two boys in the car will ride together all the way to the finish line called home, or maybe a hairpin turn in the road will disrupt yet another journey.