The Closet Professor

Spring Rush

By Aaron Smith

The college boys have pulled their shirts
off and are playing football
on the lawn. Their farmer tans pink
in the afternoon sun. They toss

and jog, slight fake and almost
tackle. One puts his face too close
to another one’s stomach, grabs
the guy’s waist—steady—to keep

from falling; then a damp armpit on the back
of his neck, as a blond wraps his arm
around him in a quick guy-hug. I am old-
er and pretend not to see, furtive

in sunglasses, looking at them, past
them, at them. I could ruin the game
by watching the wrong way—professor gawking
at students; even a shift between them

could change everything: a hand more than
smacking an ass, someone pressed too long
against a humid chest. Crash of skin,
body pushing body into perfect crush.

Their biceps bulge, un-bulge, bulge again.
It’s not that I want them. I’ve had enough
men, and yet I can’t stop looking at them
while trying not to look at them.

About the Poem

Aaron Smith has a way of holding up a moment—one we might otherwise dismiss as simple, ordinary, harmless—and revealing all the longing, all the humor, all the complicated ache underneath. His poem “Spring Rush” captures a scene many of us know all too well: young men tumbling across a sunlit lawn, roughhousing with the kind of careless intimacy that adulthood slowly chisels away.

The poem opens with a tableau of shirtless college boys playing football, their “farmer tans pink in the afternoon sun,” their bodies moving with effortless confidence. It’s a familiar choreography to anyone who has watched young men at play—how easily they invade each other’s space, how unselfconscious their closeness is, how they grab, steady, press, and laugh without a second thought. Smith catches each gesture with almost photographic clarity:

one puts his face too close
to another one’s stomach…
a blond wraps his arm
around him in a quick guy-hug.

What he’s really capturing, though, is the speaker watching. Not intrusively, not predatory, but with a mix of wistfulness and restraint—half nostalgia, half desire, and a healthy dose of gay self-awareness. “I am older and pretend not to see,” he admits, slipping on the protection of sunglasses, watching but trying not to watch. Smith renders the tension of that gaze with startling honesty. He knows how easily a moment like this can break, how a look held too long can change the boys’ play, turning innocent roughhousing into something self-conscious, something policed.

It’s the familiar queer balancing act: seeing without being seen seeing.

One of the most poignant lines comes near the end:

It’s not that I want them. I’ve had enough
men, and yet I can’t stop looking at them
while trying not to look at them.

It’s a line that resonates with age, experience, and the complicated beauty of queer desire. Wanting isn’t always erotic; sometimes it’s longing for a kind of ease, a kind of freedom, a kind of uncomplicated belonging that many of us never got to fully inhabit in our younger years. The poem complicates the gaze—it’s not a hunger for the boys, but a hunger for the days when closeness wasn’t dangerous.

Spring Rush is tender, observant, and unflinchingly honest. It holds space for that bittersweet place where desire, memory, and self-restraint overlap—where we both relish and mourn the distance between who we were and who we have become.

About the Poet

Aaron Smith is an award-winning American poet known for his candid, queer-centered writing that blends desire, humor, vulnerability, and sharp cultural observation. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, he is the author of several acclaimed collections, including Blue on Blue Ground, Appetite, and Primer. Smith’s work often explores gay identity, aging, pop culture, and the messy intersections of intimacy and longing. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Yale Review, Court Green, and Best American Poetry.