On Melvin Dixon: Vivacity and Witness

Besides being eloquent and courageous, Melvin was a vivacious man—one of the most alive people I’ve ever known—and had a wonderful blend of cosmopolitan erudition, blazing humor, and down-home wisdom. It was my windfall and profound privilege to be on hand for three pivotal moments in his life.

Before meeting him in the flesh, I served as an anonymous reader-advisor on his first book of poems, Change of Territory, which thrilled me with its unfettered queer candor and vivid descriptions of North Carolina, my mother’s home state. Later, by chance, in the fall of 1983, we were invited to read together at the 92nd Street Y. Melvin proved to be a dynamic and impressive reader of his own verse, bringing the Southern world, the piedmont of the poems, to full life.

In 1985, I was visiting novelist Michael Cunningham in Provincetown when Melvin and his partner Richard Horovitz showed up as prospective buyers; I happily vouched for the two of them, and they ended up purchasing Michael’s place. My friendship with Melvin and Richard blossomed when we became neighbors on Cape Cod, sharing both local and literary gossip. Melvin’s physicality and pealing laughter, our animated times together on his sunny deck overlooking the lapis of Provincetown Harbor, still remain incredibly easy to summon.

Richard was an administrator for the Ford Foundation, and he and Melvin spent significant periods of time in Dakar, which enhanced Melvin’s salient work as an able translator and scholar of African literature. I loved hearing Melvin’s stories about Senegalese culture.

In 1992, I was in the audience at OutWrite in Boston when a spellbinding Melvin delivered, a short time before his death, his fearless and rousing speech “I’ll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name.” This was both deeply inspiring and devastating, as he spoke so candidly about Richard’s death and his own harsh struggle with AIDS. The speech was both a rallying cry, in that era of ACT UP, and a stirring challenge to the audience to live more truthfully and decisively, in a time of grave crisis for our beleaguered community.

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We did our best, our utmost, Melvin and I, in our second volumes, Love’s Instruments and Soul Make a Path through Shouting, respectively, to bear cogent witness, to find arrow-sure language for the love and catastrophe we were living through in the premier decade of the AIDS pandemic.

Here’s an elegy titled “Marathon” that I wrote for Melvin that limns what was almost certainly the most arduous choice of his life:

For Melvin Dixon
In Memoriam (1950–1992)

Sensuous and hilarious wit,
Nothing on this roiling, breakspirit earth
Could have readied you
For the doctors’ stark edict:
There is a small window of time
To save your sight;
Choose your eyes,
And leave your lover’s deathbed.

Choose, choose—
The word, keen as a scimitar:
Better to go blind, anointing
The chalice of his last breath?
Better to see, bereft
Of merciful closure?—

When the simoom of contagion—
Shared world, shared semen,
Shared needle, shared blood—
Is hushed at last,
Perhaps then I’ll grasp,
How you outpaced the minutes,
Hectoring wings,
How you raced home from surgery,
The lapis of the bay intact,
To his blessed persistence:

Love of my life, you can ebb now,
Being-without-end,
Pass your sight into me.

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What would irreplaceable Melvin have made of twenty-first-century America? I know he would have decried the emperor-is-naked awfulness of Trump and the MAGA phenomenon, rejoiced at RuPaul’s dynamic drag ambassadorship (despite the current noxious cycle of drag demonization), and cheered when our friend, Black queer poet John Keene, received a MacArthur fellowship and gave an inspiriting acceptance speech at the National Book Awards.

Let me express to CM Burroughs and Poetry magazine my heartfelt thanks for this compelling portfolio and celebration of Melvin’s important, indelible work. In honor of Melvin’s achievement as a poet, novelist, translator, activist, and scholar, in honor of the fire and livelong beauty of our youth together, I reach across time and space, three decades, to say to my fabulous cohort and literary peer: Well-written, well-translated, well-fought, well-lived.