This is Nicole. She is one of many students that enrolled in a translation course in Germany which focused on my first poetry collection, the sometimes girl. All the students know how much your songs mean to me and as part of a presentation they performed at the end of the year-long course, Nicole chose to learn this song and perform it.
So, for what it means to me, Happy Birthday.
For the first time today
I see for the first time
Throwing myself away
Into the flood of chance.
~Muriel Rukeyser
Who cares very much really about where desire originates, or how it mysteriously grows, when nothing has transpired between the initial flame and the finality of knowing it exists. What could be more defeating than trying to figure out where my desire stems from, let alone work to explain it to somebody else.
Just think how poverty-stricken I’d feel without it. Empty. It’s them who boast no desire for anyone or any one thing I feel sorry for. I pity them. Why desire, some ask, when that which I look at is so far out of reach?
Some people can only keep to worry how to proceed from one moment to the next. Desire is something they deny or send upstairs to live in the head and say nothing of it.
I do ask myself sometimes whether or not it is wise for me to spend so much time thinking about you when I could be off thinking about other things, dragging my mind like a leash through different places, up through pines and under fences. I even go so far as to try it. I listen to a different type of music, I read a woman’s magazine instead of a poetry book, I create noise in my head so I can’t hear sentimentality weeping, lost without you.
It never takes long before I come rushing back like a child who’s threatened to run away from home and when reaching the corner of the block is overcome with grief and loneliness.
Over the past several days I thought for many hours if I could stand to lose my desire for you and I realized I couldn’t. I could never stand for it. Nothing compares to the happiness I feel when I’m listening to your music, when I’m planning my next trip to see a show. I think about discussing things with you like philosophy and religion, weather and music. I want to sit in a corner booth somewhere in a tiny cafe maybe in another part of the world where it might be easier to hide away and ask have you ever seen the sunlight as it’s first coming up over the red rocks of Sedona, its brightness is like catching a sword, and when you’re on the road for a very long time do you ever get that old Minnesota ache in your bones. And maybe even something out of the blue like, do you want to make out? I’d be joking but I’d laugh to see your expression.
Okay, so I wouldn’t be joking.
It don’t matter who loves who. Either you love me or I love you.
So what. Let’s beat it with a shoe. Because love can’t talk. Love can’t explain why or how or when it’s through.
As a stranger I write, as an ordinary woman I write for every ordinary woman. I write down what thousands feel. As the moon stretches its limber limbs, as the hibiscus spread their yellow tongues and red lips.
As the night comes falling from the sky.
Try to see this as Monet would. Open, balanced in motion, but open.
And so the light stacks up. The stars express themselves. The moon coelesces into something beautiful. Unity with the sky. And the night comes falling.
I lose myself in bony thought. I turn myself into a single drop of blood, holding in my palm the smallest berry. The smallest berry to place on your tongue, like freedom like smoke like a whisper, who cares where it goes.
Love is like a berry, bright and immediate. Then again the anchor of stability, the twenty two of forty four, the eleven eleven. Red of propriety, of indulgence.
I am drawn and God only knows what draws me.
I wish my life consisted only of you. Without interruptions. Without the blind face of the sun barging into my room each morning. No alarm clock, no predatory obligations.
I drove my daughter and her friend to see Lucky You yesterday. The first thing she said to me once she arrived home was “hey mom, they played Like a Rolling Stone.” She also told me about your image on the back of a taxi. I suppose I need to see the movie now.
It thrills me that she notices. I stand on a golden thread.
I started a poetry journal the beginning of this year. It’s really taking off and I keep thinking, deep in my heart, if I should find a way to ask you to allow me to publish some of your lyrics. I must be crazy.
I must think that in some corner of my world stands a saint of deliverance. Ask and you shall receive.
My heart just breaks when I think of you. It breaks and is mended then broken again.
You are my love. And so many other things. I just want to write this poem that shouts to the sky, echoes off ruins, screams in places no human foot has touched, no human eye has seen. Oh I am a haunted woman.
I thought someday I would grow up. That so many idle beneath your every move. It’s astounding.
My friend, the woman from Germany, sent me an mp3 of Changing of the Guards covered by Patti Smith. I must have listened to it a dozen times. See, even Patti has lost breath over you, must gaze through the elixer of your aura with affectionate eyes.
I’m not alone. I wish I were. I wish I were the only woman to understand your electricity. It’s a selfish thought.
What I lack in words I make up for in feelings. My heart corresponds by banging against my breastbone. My mind is often unresponsive or too responsive. It challenges me with obscenities and so I ignore it.
You’re wonderful. You have a philosopher’s thought. I mean, honestly, you leave me in suspense. I live my life suspended, waiting for your next move. It can get chaotic at times. A manifesto of real life versus new life, or rather, the dreams I wish I were living now.
The truth of the matter is I’ve always been impulsive but I’ve never been impulsive about you. When I have somewhere to go I ask will it rain? Will I need a coat? What if the humidity crucifies my hair?
When I am going to you I don’t ask anything. I don’t clench my fists. I don’t wonder about the weather. I only feel terrific, on the verge of explosion, consoled briefly and many, many other things.
I love being exposed to your perpetual wonders.
If there is an afterlife
whose world is parallel with this one,
perhaps, as some say, an invisible door
that is always open, inviting souls
to spend their timelessness coming
and going, touching the soft hair
of the living, whispering without words
in our ears how not to be lonely,
bearing their silence over us while we
weep at night before falling into an exhausted
sleep, I will remember you in the next life.
I will remember you through every
ever-changing door how you are right now
in this life-
like a population of ideas.
Ideas so brilliant I want at once to keep them
to myself and show them to others, both I want.
Some things so simple like the color and volume
of your hair, bedroom eyes and the dark theatre
of your mind. Nothing is simple. Not even your eyes.
These are human wishes but I will wish them again
in the afterlife.
I will remember how much I love you for many
reasons and even without reason, just because.
Because love is such a long road and I am a traveler
looking for adventure and you are adventure I know
as soon as I find you all of the ancient sadness I
have collected on my bones will suddenly fall away,
perhaps. Perhaps.
I will then be so light and free. I won’t need memories.
My father died, I know, with so many unresolved wishes. He was anxious, I remember, to reply to a letter from his sister. He talked about maybe, finally settling down in one place rather than traveling the high and low countries in a Chevy van. He terminated more pavement than anybody I know. Knew actually. His friends and associates ranged from business men to vagabonds. He could eat out of a can for weeks. I remember when we cleared out his things, my sister and I, we found oodles of cans of soup, chili, black beans.
I don’t want to perish with unresolved wishes. I want to fulfill them all. I want to experience my wishes until I know them so well I could wear them like any of the dresses hanging in my closet and yes, they would fit. I suppose what I want is to grow up into a wider truth than my father knew or was able in his lifetime to arrive at.
My sister and I settled our travel arrangements to Indianapolis yesterday. It’s so confirming now. If only you knew the wrangling we get when people we know hear how far we are willing to travel to see one of your shows. It’s difficult for many people to embrace with intimacy the one thing they love the most. I don’t know why. For me, it’s never been something to pose about or pretend such longing does not exist. If spending my mortgage payment on airline tickets is considered madness then I would rather be mad.
Sometimes my life flashes before my eyes for no apparent reason. I’m not sick. I didn’t just experience a near miss on the highway. It just does. These illuminated flashes of light from infancy to the unknown. Throughout, I am struck dumb by your image. And so I know, at least one wish will not go unattended.
