109. “WHAT MIRACLES WEE HARMLESS LOVERS WROUGHT”

From the Archives

(June 2005) Mmm. Am eating an iceberg lettuce leaf filled with chopped tofu, carrots, celery, peppers, noodles, and hoison sauce and love how crisp the lettuce tastes against those darker flavors.

Tonight’s sit-on-the-deck-and-watch-the-fireflies-while-pondering-the-meaning-of-life topic is love (that bitch). Now this is going to seem like a great big leap at first, but I’ve been thinking about the US’s Christianists/jihadists who were forced to identify a new enemy after the fall of Communism in order to continue raking in the dough of the paranoid um hateful faithful. But what new enemy could be powerful enough to incite the fear and hatred and calls-to-arms required to replace something so big as Communisim? Why, homosexuality, of course ... coz love—or at least that dare not speak its nam—iis oh so threatening to the fearful heterosexuals.

Then THAT got me thinking about John Donne.

I am fascinated by seventeenth-century Western writers in much the same way as I’m fascinated by Lost Generation writers and artists and Writers of Witness in general. Why? Because the belief systems that that their cultures were built upon crumbled around them and left them facing a differently illuminated world.

Fortunately, instead of looking for a convenient new enemy to give their lives meaning, though, these artists instead discovered whole new possibilities for expression.

The discovery of heliocentrism and the consequential collapse of the Great Chain of Being cosmology caused a sea change in the seventeenth century, and left poets with the difficult task of trying to find new meaning. So what did these poets do? Well, unlike the American jihadists who reached for hate, these creative types reached for love and made this relatively new romantic phenomenon the subject of their works.

Donne’s explorations are particularly fascinating because he wrote so much process poetry. These loose lyrics allow readers to journey with him through a process of discovery that immerses us in his various examinations of love.

In “The Flea,” a man tries to seduce a woman by claiming that, since a flea bit them both, they’re already one anyway, so why not REALLY become one? He says it better than that though:

It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee.”

Interesting premise that definitely competes with some of the bad pick-up lines I’ve heard in my time!

In “The Sunne Extasie,” human bodies are merely statues that hold lovers’ souls and they’re useful only insomuch as they serve as vehicles that allow “pure lovers” to meet one another. When lovers’ souls are joined, the poet says, they are mixed together by love, and this alchemy produces a newer, purer growth. This transplanting of souls is the path to self-knowledge, which makes lovers immune to change.

The spiritual aspects of love are what’s important to Donne, who asserts that very little changes after one body dies.

(See Medea protest that lovers’ bodies are useful for oh so many good things—but she nevertheless gets his point)

Love transcends the rules of nature, he says, is impervious to fleeting physical reality because it remains for all time, even after our bodies are gone.

(That feels true for Lynne. She's still with me all the time. But so painfully absent now.)

On a lighter note, I will not say to which of my friends this Donne line s dedicated, but here’s the line:

faire, browne, from the country, from the town, a weeper—virtually any type will do, so long as she does not demand fidelity—I can love her, and her, you and you, I can love any, so she be not true.

Don’t you just know that if Donne were alive today, he’d be an acoustic-guitar-playing, side-burned old hipster hanging out in Starbucks trying to pick up chicks?

82. CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

From the Archives

(April 2005) Huh. My Dukie friend just e-mailed me to say that an emu is loose in Durham! Several people have apparently spotted it and called the cops, who humorously note that they can't exactly outrun an emu.

What fun!

Meanwhile, here’s a heart-breaking piece I’ve been working on for a couple of months now.

THE HOLLERIN’ CONTEST (draft)
Every June, in Spivey’s Corner, North Carolina, hollerers gather to share their lexicon of calls. Many bring their calls down from the mountains, where they developed these sounds to convey specific information across great distances concisely. An anticipatory bark might tell a wife that her man is one valley away and heading home; a piercing howl might say he’s broken his leg and needs help right away. I imagine the hollerers’ mournful voices drifting over the mountaintops, coloring the fog as it settles in.

A phalanx of Duke residents and I, wearing scrubs and beepers, wander the alley of vendor tents and crafts displays. The fact that I’m on call and must be ready to leave at a moment’s notice looms large in my mind as I study the nuances of the callers’ sounds and eat my bag of kettle corn.

A cacophony of other sounds competes with the contestants’ calls. The deejay by the kids’ rides plays nursery rhymes. Vendors shout out their wares as we pass them. Car alarms reverberate off the sound equipment as a businessman barks into his cell phone by my ear. The teenager beside him describes her new Guess jeans to some disembodied person on the receiving end of her phone call who has probably never even heard of a hollerin’ contest.

It is difficult to imagine a place devoid of any other means of communication, especially here. Research Triangle Park is headquarters to so many high-tech. communications companies, after all, a virtual Promised Land where cell phones and wi-fi–enabled coffee shops and gas-station fax machines and household T lines deliver and receive information instantly. Despite this ever-present technology, though, I have not mastered how to convey some information across great distances with accuracy.

The emcee insists that hollerin’ is the earliest form of precise communication between human beings, but I know it’s sex. Yeah, I talk a good talk beforehand, but I never really communicate with someone until we make love. My previous communications sound right, but they are guarded, selective, partial, incomplete. I reveal glimpses of myself through a copy of some poem or a humorous story about my workday or my careful, measured replies to personal questions. These words offer insight into who I am, but I dispense them from behind a protective wall that hides my vulnerability. Until I stand naked with someone, until we discover how to speak to each others’ bodies without the need for words, I am incapable of conveying love or deep emotion in unrehearsed syllables.

•

The first year that you loved me, you studied my hands in public until you knew that I knew you were doing this. Good hands, you called them. Made for fucking. Your friend Deborah inevitably called when we were deciding if we were hungry enough to get out of bed. You laughed when her call came through, said, “that would be Deborah,” told her that yes, as a matter of fact she had done it again and that she was speaking to a well-fucked woman.

We had our own language of calls then, a holy vocabulary between us.

Later, in a restaurant, you studied the thumbs that had been inside you as I remembered moving them toward that specific spot near my tongue that makes you gasp unintelligibly, each of your unarticulated sounds and movements leading up to that moment conveying so much information: where and when and how and how much and with how much intensity—precise instructions that you conveyed without ever speaking a word.

I told you later, over dinner, in whispered words that made you blush from your neck up to your hairline, exactly what I would do with my hands when we returned home and we stared across the table at each other, anticipating the moment when my entire hand would disappear inside you, reducing you to babel. We shared this quiet language of whispers in such public places.

This morning, in the emergency room, a migrant worker howled in misery. Unable to articulate the source of her pain in words that I could understand, she curled into the fetal position instead and howled at me, her dark eyes desperate. ¿Como esta usted? and the few other phrases that I learned in orientation conveyed nothing useful to either of us, so I ordered a battery of tests and sent the nurse for a translator, did what I could to apply deductive reasoning to our babel as I used my hands to search her body for some physical clue that could tell me how to heal.

Bodies convey information even when their owners can’t. They send signals to the lymph nodes that trigger them to swell sufficiently to indicate an infection; cause pupils to dilate enough to indicate a concussion or drug overdose or loss of brain function or any number of other medical conditions; dispense tears to indicate depression in patients who insist that everything is fine, just fine, just couldn’t be any better, doc. Our miraculous, fragile bodies enable us to communicate love through physical expression more profound than any word in our vocabulary, but they keep their own language too.

People who lose loved ones share a unique language too. ICU waiting-room conversations reflect this language in anguished glyphs of hope and denial and sorrow. These glyphs whisper Failure to doctors who lose patients too, but Hope is the primary word of this whispered lexicon—until I deliver the coup de grace that demolishes any possibility of it with as much distance as I can muster: We tried to save your wife, but her heart was damaged. We tried to save your son, but he is gone. Your Daddy is dead. Your grandmother has passed on. I am so very sorry for your loss.

How did the hollerers isolate that specific sound that represents loss, that mournful call that can make a stranger choke up, missing someone? Adrienne Rich knew the sound. There is no other language for it, she assures us—we have to call it grief. In my case, my friends call it bravery, too, tell me what a great job I’m doing holding up, remaining in control.

Poets reminds me that my walls do not protect me, though, that studying your blue eyes failed to provide sufficient insight into your interior world, your dishonesty. My grief moves over me in waves, becomes a mountain that I lug around inside me, that makes me obsess about that phone call I made when you discussed a meal that you had prepared the night before. For yourself, you said, this meal worthy of Gourmet magazine. Your voice said other things, too, though. And later, when I showed up unannounced and you blushed deep red from your neck up past your dimples all the way up to your red, red hair, you reiterated that you were alone, just sitting there alone because you just wanted some silence, even as I noted the two wine glasses on the counter, the dishes stacked in twos on the dining room table, ready to be put away.

I need a new language to hold all this pain, a deep-throated and gutteral holler that can convey this staggering loss.

I am on this earth to learn, after all, to at least attempt to articulate my experiences authentically and in meaningful sentences, to organize these rabbit screams that escape from me sometimes. I want to do something with these I do and forever memories that have ended so abruptly now, translate our ten years of a shared language that remains so acutely on my tongue into meaningful sounds and phrases.

I write words on charts that heal patients’ bodies, speak knowledgably about immune disorders and disease and disease prevention, but know that I have become a child again—someone who requires a cardboard wheel to identify what I am feeling. I study this wheel that is divided neatly into two concise outer sections. Am I happy or am I sad? The answer is obvious. Your body, our language, are divorced from me now. I will not see you grow old or even wrinkle around your deep dimples and what I feel is anguish. I keen in sobs loud enough to announce our broken union to our neighbors, to my patients.

I do not give you to him, but I have let you go—have walked away and know I must keep walking. I do not know this ground and yet I walk it, take these first strange steps toward a new vocabulary—some descriptive holler that can locate the hollow behind my eyes where I always feel you gone—search for a word that can make me me again.

62. SEX

From the Archives

(March 2005) Woody Allen said “I don’t know what the question is, but sex is definitely the answer.”

My cheating pal is cheating again and I feel dirty knowing about it. And I wish I didn't have to watch her repeat this all-too-familiar pattern.

She craves intimacy and asks woman after woman out seeking connection, then runs as hard as she can when she finds it. The more attracted she is to the woman, the harder she runs (or she has another affair despite being in love with this woman, effectively destroying their intimacy and thwarting their potential, which somehow makes her feel safe and in control).

She's in a long-term relationship now that is safe, but it has never provided the intimacy that she desires. Or, as another pal said, her partner is safe, and my pal knows taht her partner will never introduce any monsters into the equation.

My friend has always been terrified of internal exploration and seems incapable of acknowledging her fears or what's going on inside that makes her unable to endure intimacy and, ultimately, leaves her miserable. Like me, she has a strong need to be perceived as competent, in control, and capable of keeping a firm handle on things—only she doesn't have the creative outlets that I have that (sometimes) balance that control and she runs away from self-awareness the first time it brings up anything scary (whereas I seek it out, for the most part).

She's been having an affair with a woman who has really helped her get beyond some of her walls and they say they’re in love with each other, but my friend has now run away three times when this woman has left everything behind in order to be with her.

I hate to see a relationship end, but I hate even more to watch her screw up because she's so afraid to let down her guard and risk getting hurt.

I think a place where my friend can expose herself and feel unconditional safety—in a relationship or, if she would tell the truth to her shrink, with her shrink—might allow her to figure out what makes her this afraid of intimacy, of digging deep, but she can't let her guard down enough to trust or accept intimacy when it is offered to her. And now she's messing up her affair, which actually seems good, by continuing to see a third woman (who will express intimacy and then my friend will find another woman and . . .).

I've thought for some time that sex is the key to getting past my friend's walls, is the thing that might give her access to those scary places in a way that doesn't cause her to run away because she's exposed and naked and might get hurt. She lets her guard down sexually (eventually) and is sexually curious, so B&D just might be the thing that will allow her to trust a woman.

I keep hoping she'll find some determined femme who's so alluring that she'll go to new sexual places with her despite her fears, someone who will dominate my friend in a safe manner so that she can finally lose control and see that she survived it.

Guess we’ll see.

14. BITTERNESS

From the Archives (March 2005)

BITTERNESS
by Olga Broumas

She who loves roses must be patient
and not cry out when she is pierced by thorns.
—Sappho

In parody
of a grade-B film, our private
self-conscious soapie, as we fall
into the common, suspended
disbelief of love, you ask
will I still be
here tomorrow, next week, tonight
you ask me am I really
here. My passion delights

and surprises you, comfortable
as you’ve been without it. Lulled,
comfortable as a float myself in your real
and rounded arms, I can only smile
back, indulgently
at such questions. In the second reel—

a season of weeks, two
flights across the glamorous Atlantic, one
orgy and the predictable divorce
scenes later—I’m fading out
in the final close-up
alone. As one

heroine in this
two-bit production to the other, how long
did you, did we both know
the script
meant you to wake up doubting
in those first nights, not me, my daytime
serial solvency, but yours.

11. BEGINNING WITH O

From the Archives

(March 2005) Listening to Marilyn Hacker, a dyke master of formal verse and sonnet sequences, describe her writing process made me hyperaware of meter (even though I only occasionally write formalist poetry).

So here’s a brief poetry lesson to introduce a couple of excellent dactyls by Olga Broumas:

To write metrically is to measure and you can measure 4 different kinds of meter: accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic, and quantitative.

Dactyls fall into the accentual-syllabic category, the most common type of meter in English.

Poets measure the number of accents and the number of syllables using the basic unit of a foot, or, a rhythmical pattern that generally contains one accented syllable and one or more unaccented syllables.

A dactyl is one of 4 feet mostly widely used in accentual-syllabic meter—iamb, trochee, anapest, and dactyl.

Poets also use substitute feet—spondee or pyrrhic—to vary rhythm.

Note the following diacritical marks: ‘ , or the acute accent, represents an accented syllable, and X represents an unaccented syllable.

A dactyl is ‘XX, as in “faithfully.”

That’s all very technical and distancing, but let’s go for the stomach now and read two of Olga Broumas from Beginning with O.

LINE OF THE HEART

Up the long hill, the earth rut steamed in the strange sun.
We, walking between its labia, loverlike, palm to palm.

•

LINE OF THE MIND

The branch splits in two: I will eat both the male
and the female fruit. Gnaw back the fork to its simple crotch.

1. SUSTENANCE

From the Archives

(February 2005) The only intimate relationships I have ever been able to sustain for very long are ones with brilliant, headstrong women who are comfortable enough with who they are to not be threatened by my independence. I seek these women out, am drawn to them across rooms and crowds, am entranced by them.

I love brilliant minds, but know myself well enough to know that I am headstrong and incapable of remaining in a relationship if it compromises my ability to be my whole self.

I need space—lots and lots of space. I need hours of sitting alone—sometimes while the grass I know that I should mow grows taller—and a partner who understands that, while I may appear to be doing nothing, I am actually pondering the mysteries of my peculiar universe.

I need to do this in order to write, to thrive.

My big questions. The ones I ask repeatedly when I write or read or stare at the ceiling or consider pedestrians at the stoplight never vary much. They are

What does it mean to be human, to exist in a world where so many people brush up against you and color your life, then vanish?

What does it take to sustain some kind of faith in a world where mind-numbing atrocities are commonplace and the quest for the newest consumer product is offered as the stuff that will sustain people?

What does it mean to live in a world where God isn’t a profound concept, a verb, but is instead an angry weapon of social control hurled at nonconformists?

What makes some people cling to such narrow worldviews, swallow themselves and their longings?

How can one love authentically and on a long-term basis in such a world and sustain that love without losing herself?

How can one live as authentically as she can, taking in as much as she can and giving out as much as she can, and still manage to go to work every day and be productive?

What does compartmentalizing oneself for a job do to one’s soul?

What would it take for me to let go of my worries about financial stability and trust that following my path as honestly as I know how will provide enough sustenance for my existence? (I have mostly taken this route and am not debt-free, but am at least doing what I want to be doing—most of the time.)

And those other hard questions:

What do I do with my treasure chest of violent memories?

Is it possible to do something useful with them, to sift through them until they cease to control me?

How do I transform the terror that my body remembers as vividly as my brain into useful words, insight?

How do I let go of the anger that helped me to survive when I needed it and move beyond it to a place where I control it instead of it controlling me?

How do I learn how to take care of me?

How do I manage to trust people? And

How do I extrapolate a sustainable world from this jumbled mix of images, insight, scents, and random couplings—find the poetry?

Ferron already asked my constant questions: “Where can the quiet be? Where do I live in me?”

I have been fortunate enough to be loved by independent women who are not threatened when I go off wandering in my head. We are tethered at a common center but move away as individuals staked together by the magic of love. And we return to that center to ask deep questions and cook noodles and fuck and gasp and love each other. And, even after all this time, I remain amazed that two bodies can live in that sacred space that surrounds you when you love someone and lean into her precious body while doing anything together—washing the dishes or taking a walk or reading the newspaper in bed, or, and especially, making love—and there you are in that sacred center where you know each other at so many different levels, yet are still discovering new ways to love each other there.

That, to me, is what Heaven must be— that sacred place where the insights you gain from the world are balanced by that hard-to-find, loving space you share with someone else.