She’s a chicken. She greets me like I never expected: She alights so suddenly, shockingly, like all animal movements when seen from a human perspective, total commitment, wings hammering, neck gyrating, a feathered flurry of friendliness. I fear no animals other than spiders, and certainly not chickens, but her abruptness and intensity make me turn and shrink and wince by instinct.

Now I know her name is Rosie. Now I feed her dandelion leaves and look forward to cuddling with her. Now I’m someone who, once a week or so, hangs out with a flock of chickens. 😳

Amy and I talk, as we walk a mile into San Francisco Bay on a narrow spit extending from Coyote Hills Park, about one of our favorite features of polyamory: We each have opportunities to learn other ways to live and breathe and experience the world, the kind of learning that involves being fully present in all the little cracks and crannies of the day with a person who knows in different ways than you know. Through endeavoring to enhance my intimacy, I am changed.

‘Cause I’ll be you and you’ll be me…there’s lots and lots for us to see

Jonathan and I cluck back and forth endlessly, loving music and defining ourselves through what we desire and what we don’t. My listening identity always grows through what he shares with me, but like all learning it’s meaningful only when it anchors in or tugs at the edifices of what I already think I know. Oasis is pure pop–rock pablum, not rich musical nourishment; that I still think I know. But I have learned that the crafting of an incredibly yummy, oh–so–listenable album like (What’s the Story) Morning Glory is its own aesthetic accomplishment. The sounds swell and ebb in an expert flow for the better part of an hour, and just when the wash over the power–chord furies of “Hey Now” to the sunny radio–jangle simplicity of “Some Might Say” lurches into the the mordant repetitive whine of “Cast No Shadow,” and you think you might have to strangle Liam if he draws that nasal note out one moment longer, you surface buoyantly with the breeziest song on this (or nearly any other) album, a song so breezy that Amy asks about it from across the house the very first time the album is on the stereo…

And I want you to say “Do you know what I’m saying?”…But I need more

She’s a wood elf. She’s happiest when cavorting naked under the stars. She nurtures plants and chickens and cooks meals for her 99–year–old grandmother and sews and knows everything there is to know about sewing machines and studies cinematography and wants, like me, to learn every single one of the things. She is a mother to six adult children. She used to manage live sound production for a giant evangelical church. All of this except the hunger to know is utterly beyond my experience, my feeling for the flow of life…until now. Her name is Jessica. Through knowing her intimately, I am changed.

Lots and lots for us to do…She’s electric, can I be electric too?

She’s a karaoke kinkster. She and I revel in imagining how “She’s Electric,” a bawdy romp about an unnamed muse that sparks the male singer’s salacious sketches, might sound deliciously different in her mouth at a future karaoke night, might mean much more, magically, if she wails lines like “But I quite fancy her mother…and I think that she likes me” or “She’s got one in the oven…but that’s nothing to do with me” to the queer crowds that are her newly chosen home. When we embarked on our poly voyage two years ago, I worried that I would never know how to relate romantically beyond the structures she and I have sculpted so thickly over more than a quarter century. How could I be, as a lover, other than I am for her? But freed by her crackling queer confidence, her liquid lightning lesbian love, I have discovered new ways to admire her, new ways to be myself with all kinds of people of multiple genders in multiple combinations of embrace. I have found my own coursing queer current. And yes, even through Amy, still, I am changed.