Uniform

Louis and I had this theory that nobody knew
we were fucking. Uniforms could do that to a bloke —
help him blend in with a crowd. Only once, at a party,
did I ever see him without the shirt, collared and blue,
the high socks and striped scarf. All day at school,
stuffed and starved, I wanted to get them off him
as a way of loving him in them. Later, those first
February afternoons, our uniforms wilted in his room.

Nobody knew. But surely we inspired envy, our moody
solitudes and companies — a chance hand on his chest,
over the school crest — or our shining morning faces
in the supermarket, shimmering back to us in the glass
jars of olives. Behind us, watching, was Jackson McCarthy,
noted homosexual. Eater of olives. Writer of poetry.

Jackson McCarthy

I read this poem first at a Starling launch party in August last year, and people really seemed to like it. It’s one thing when a poem ticks all your own personal checkboxes: desire, love, Death, time, boys, mysteries, the night, vision, dreams, happiness, the dark furniture of the radio, Arcadia, blue jeans, blond hair, the vantage point of language where words sound before they mean, the city, parties, Louis, inexplicable sorrow, the past, beauty, mirrors, consent, solitude, virginity, and you. But it’s another when a crowd of real-life people click with it, too.

I think of ‘Uniform’ as an Italian sonnet (or at least in its typographical layout it appears to be) — but then it gives us a sudden English turn at the end. And I think this formal arrangement is mimetic of the tricks the poem’s playing on its readers about author, speaker, and confession: you start the poem thinking it’s one thing, but finish realising it’s another. I was writing a number of free-verse sonnets at the time, which I felt a little guilty about: it’s like sonneteering on easy mode. But you need some sort of formal scheme, no matter how defanged, to give you resistance; something to write into. I found even the most basic measurement of the sonnet — the terminal volta at the thirteenth and fourteenth lines — to be extremely productive for a while. You do twelve lines, then you do a twirl.

I would like to think this poem has a bit of nice sound patterning, including that delicious internal rhyme in the eighth line that to my shock and horror sounds clearer, I think, than the rhyme between lines thirteen and fourteen. Well, I guess I honestly have no clue what I’m doing — but then again, I do trust my own taste, my only gift. You can’t decide in advance or preempt what mode of work will become available to you, but you can shape it with your good judgement. If I get stuck I go for a walk and think of beautiful things: boys’ faces, the music of Poulenc, my parents, the water, my life.

‘Uniform’ was first published in The Spinoff’s Friday Poem column; I’m grateful to Hera Lindsay Bird for choosing it.

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. His work has been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere, and he currently serves as an editor at Symposia. You can read more of his work here.