The first time I remember seeing you was when I was in 7th or 8th grade. I was 13 years old and full of the anguish that comes with that age plus the added sadness from still feeling not quite at home where I lived, the idealized longing for what I'd lost. There was a "poets in the schools" thing, and you came with Arthur Butler to my school and both of you were so much cooler than I'd ever imagined poetry to be. I loved poetry but thought it was like, mostly spinsters and sadness or long rhymes or both. Together we all wrote poems about what our names sounded like, smelled like, and you didn't choose mine to read which hurt but less than I was usually hurt by these kinds of things. I was enchanted. It did not feel like children writing forced rhymes and acrostics, it felt very adult and exciting.
The next time in university. My best friend and I would adopt people and follow them around campus and report our findings; this may have only happened once but it became a way of thinking for me so it feels like many times. I adopted a woman with a fascinating haircut and a face lit with an inner processing that I guess I'd call Slavic now, that kind of watchful calculation that is simultaneously present and a million miles away. My friend picked you; her report was more interesting. Sometime later, you came to Kathryn Hohlwein's class and read "Howl" with spit flying from your mouth, you were howling. And then you both talked about how Ginsberg performed it, what choices you were making when you did it differently. I was 18, maybe 19, writing furiously by then, and thinking about writing all the time, but I hadn't thought about performance and poetry together, and a door opened.
I know you were friends with my friend, but I don't know when you and I became friends, I don't know if it was friendship, it was mostly you talking with overwhelming passion and volume about something and me listening. Which is fine; you knew more than I did. In my recent move I found about a dozen drawings you'd done when you lived in my apartment, which I had forgotten about. A month? Two? The thing about forgetting is that half the time you don't even realize you've forgotten; it's just gone. I remember going to an event you organized, a tribute to Jack Kerouac, and I had a necklace I wore all the time and Victor Wong bent to look at it, touched me briefly, and I told everyone for years that Victor Wong touched my chest and that was my nearest brush with celebrity. But I remember feeling like part of something, to the extent that I ever feel like I belong; in my mind I am on the periphery of wherever I am, but just feeling like I belonged in the room at all was incredible.
You organized so many poetry readings that they blur together, but I remember one that I was in with Arthur Butler and Scott Soriano. You introduced me to the concept of how mismatched performance was messy and potentially the most beautiful. Arthur, all rhythm and images (and the 13-year-old in me crowing with delight), Scott put a steak on his face and sang "Au Jus", and me with sad girl poetry. My family came, Arthur Butler talking to my sister. I remember Ann Menebroker came to one reading and stayed after to tell me she liked my writing which is just, the honor is so much. It meant the world to me to be treated like I mattered, doing what I wanted to do.
Looking back it is stunning to me that you never tried to make anything sexual about our relationship, back when I was young and impressionable and probably would have done anything for your attention, which you just gave freely. I remember two women that you were with, in the time I knew you, and that you spoke of them in glowing terms, as artists in their own right, not as muses. I find this remarkable now.
You could be very loud, you could be very rude, you rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. You were self absorbed like I guess many artists are. When I was in my 30s we were back in touch for a bit, and we'd sit on the floor of your apartment listening to music and talking about poetry and talking a lot about people who didn't understand you and your genius, but we also talked about my life. I paid for dinner and you paid me back in paintings, which I cherish. Your health was never good, and we fell out of touch; the next time I tried to find the number didn't work, and you never figured out social media, and I thought: well, not everybody needs to stay in contact. It seemed to me that you might have been dead, and I have lost enough people before they die that I know their death isn't the end of anything for me, other than the end of a possibility.
I don't know why I took the news of your death in October so hard. I hadn't seen you in two decades, I think. And I don't necessarily wish we'd stayed in touch; I don't think I had anything to teach you and you had already taught me so much. By example: Be chaotic. Do what you love. Plunge into things and let the world catch up. By warning: Don't care so much when people don't like what you do. I'm working on it.
There's a parallel world where I am still there, writing.
There's a parallel world where I am still there, not writing.
In both of those worlds and in this one, you changed my life. I'm so grateful.
All day I carried you with me
nestled in the crook of an autumn leaf.
I smudged you with perfume,
Sugar and apples
If you had come before spring, you
would have stayed, you
would have had little choice.
I would have woken
to your breath on my neck.
All day I did what I always do
in my haze of semisolitude.
At night I will wash the plate, the cup,
my single serving life
wash my hands, singing,
and watch you disappear
After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones
something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.
After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones grown
something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.
August arrives in the dark
we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it
how can it be so late all at once
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself
My heart has grown rich with the passing of years,
I have less need now than when I was young
To share myself with every comer,
Or shape my thoughts into words with my tongue.
It is one to me that they come or go
If I have myself and the drive of my will,
And strength to climb on a summer night
And watch the stars swarm over the hill.
Let them think I love them more than I do,
Let them think I care, though I go alone,
If it lifts their pride, what is it to me
Who am self-complete as a flower or a stone?
Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers,
bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of
is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications.
Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing.
And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately
I can't stand them, the shelves of canned beans and soups, freezers
of identical dinners; then the snowflake-diamond-snowflake of the rug
beneath my chair, rows of books turning their backs,
even my two feet, how they mirror each other oppresses me,
the way they fit so perfectly together, how I can nestle one big toe into the other
like little continents that have drifted; my God the unity of everything,
my hands and eyes, yours; doesn't that frighten you sometimes, remembering
the pleasure of nakedness in fresh sheets, all the lovers there before you,
beside you, crowding you out? And the scouring griefs,
don't look at them all or they'll kill you, you can barely encompass your own;
I'm saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it's spring
and it's starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.
Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned
into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come
up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their
curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come
home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,
happiness, music, ambition.
And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.
* * *
Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you
for everything.
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.
Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
Your want a better story. Who wouldn't?
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I'm the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I'm not. I'm not the dragon.
I'm not the princess either.
Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
shut up
I'm getting to it.
For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
confidence
but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I'm out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I'm the dragon. Big deal.
You still get to be the hero.
You get the magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you're
really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
I'm not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not
feeding yourself to a bad man
against a black sky prickled with small lights.
I take it back.
The wooden halls likes caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Crossed out.
Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all
forgiven,
even though we didn't deserve it.
Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up
in a stranger's bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
And the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view
of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
smiling in a way
that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
I looked out the window and said
This doesn't look that much different from home,
because it didn't,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
We walked through the house to the elevated train.
All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful
mechanical wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn't say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you're so great, you do it—
here's the pencil, make it work . . .
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time.
Forget the dragon,
leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.
Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
in gold light, as the camera pans to where
the action is,
lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see
the blue rings of my eyes as I say
something ugly.
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,
and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
There were some nice parts, sure,
all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas
and the grains of sugar
on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry
it's such a lousy story.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
years later, in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
these luxuries.
I have told you where I'm coming from, so put it together.
We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .
When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison
.
I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.
tuckova 