Parchments

When I lived in Ohio, I found a treasure trove of used books. It was an old church, renovated as a bookstore. It was creaky and drafty and I got a particular thrill of finding 'U.S. Military History' in the pulpit. The pickings were slim, but the hunt was a joy. The smell of old books is better than the smell of old money. I just want to writhe around on the floor, surrounded by old books.

I'm lucky to have three near me now. Today was Wilson's Books, in what seems to have formerly been an auto repair shop, or gas station. I found a 1949 printing of James' The American, a beautifully bound and well-maintained 1979 copy of Madame Bovary (with illustrations!), a restored edition of Plath's Ariel, and a collection of poems by Adrienne Rich.

The James has a sticker from the original bookseller. B.H. Blackwell LTD, in Oxford. I wonder what strange route it took to arrive in a sweaty little Florida town.

An excerpt from Rich...

But art requires a distance; let me be
Always the connoisseur of your perfection.
Stay where the spaces of the gallery
Flow calm between your pose and my inspection,
Lest one imperfect gesture make demands
As troubling as the touch of human hands.

from Love in the Museum

Update: My favorite thing to find is a book full of marginalia (as it sounds, notes scribbled in the margins). Ariel is FULL of scribbles from the previous owner. My favorite so far - beside the lines "It can sew, it can cook, it can talk talk talk", she has written the word OBJECTIFY.

How utterly appropriate.

Artifice in Honesty

Consider this...

This is just to say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
-William Carlos Williams

When did we reach the point of forgiveness based on honesty? When the little boy said 'I cannot tell a lie' and confessed to chopping down the cherry tree, that trite story from our grade school history classes (George Washington, for my non-U.S. readers) - what sorry mistake did that place in our value system?

Are we to place more value on honesty than we do morality? Isn't honesty just a sheepish way of saying, 'I got what I wanted, too bad you were in the way at the time.' There is no implied apology. It is just a veiled way of doing as you like with no guilt involved.

All along I've said that I value honesty and truth above all else. In fact, what I value is deep moral standing. If you (You) can look temptation in the face and say...no...my word is more than this. My self-respect is more than this.

Surely there is more than meek honesty and weakness there. Here. Wherever. If I can stand and say this is what I am not, will never be, and I will carry those words for as long as I'm able, it can't be that hard for others?

"I value friendship above all else," just before you sleep with someone who isn't yours. "I like to give things a fair shake with no distraction," and yet still a nonrejection-rejection after picking up with your past. Be with me, be with me, be with me....leave me alone.

I hold myself to a very high standard. But it's a standard I know that I can maintain. And you? Why do you let yourself be less than what you should be? Why do you let your words mean nothing?

The butt-ends of my days and ways

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool.
-TS Eliot, Prufrock

I saw a play recently, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard). I'd seen it before, read it even, but it had been many years ago. I found myself amused, still, but also disturbed by the inevitability of their fate. Unintentional fools, led this way and that by unseen hands. I wondered suddenly at the metaphor to all of us. I am always struck by the change in my perception of things as I grow older (my trousers that evening were, in fact, rolled).

My resulting desire to live a little stronger was made easier by my companion for the evening, a man who is adding an unexpected kerthump to my normal pulse. I'm glad of it, though wary. Do I dare, do I dare?

Will it make all the difference?

I've always detested Robert Frost. Standing at a fork in the road, poetically rambling about his indecisiveness.

Decide already. Left. Right. It doesn't matter, just do it.

But I'm standing at a fork in the road. And I'm poetically rambling, even if only in my own head, about my indecisiveness. And there is this pale rope around me, and it's pulling me in one direction. And that rope feels wonderful. And rough. And comforting. And frightening.

Dialogue with Understanding

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

From T.S. Eliot, East Coker.

Self

I'm wearing a body that isn't my own.
I'm thinking thoughts I finished before.
I'm in this place again.

I'm done here, for now.
I'm too open, soft.
I'm pierced with no regard.

I'm losing ground.
I'm deep in sleep.
I'm unable to resist.

I'm endless, intolerable, choking need.
I'm loathsome.

Foreshadowing

I told him that I like hydrangeas
Big bloomy bushes of blue or pink
I like them because they aren't common
No hustler roses, no vague lilies
They were my grandmother's flowers, hydrangeas
What I neglected to say is that they smell of loss and death and things left unsaid.

Wear it like bones, like skin

A man sent this poem to me once. Long ago. He said it captured me exactly. I'll let you decide.

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

by Kim Addonizio

Pierced

My heart is in my hand,
and my hand is pierced,
and my hand is in the bag,
and the bag is shut,
and my heart is caught.

-Jean Genet

Eat me.

I woke with a poem settling on my lips, and the heaviness of arousal sitting on my hips like a tired but welcome old gargoyle.

The poem...

In a stillness she feels the feast begin,
a dark nothingness that envelops her feet.
She sees them in her mind's eye,
small squirming sharp-toothed wormy creatures,
nibbling away at her bone and flesh.
Squinting down she watches as,
bit by bit, she is gnawed away.
Disappointed by the lack of pain,
WHY DON'T I FEEL
she remains unmoved by the threat.
A vague beat of heat as they devour her sex.
A barely-there tug at her torso.
Gentle relief there, at her tongue
WHY CAN'T I SPEAK
And then her eyes know no more.
Now, at her last refuge, in that cold place in her mind, finally it is there, that icy pain that slices and removes...

Until all is black strangeness.

Snakes on a Crane

This morning, I saw a long-legged bird scratching for worms. I was still fifty yards away or so when I saw the bird pull up a very large worm. As I got closer, I realized it was a small snake. It was twisting and writhing, and the bird tipped up its head, trying to gulp the snake down its throat.

As I went past, I watched. I was torn between wanting to save the snake, and a philosophical call to the circle of life. I don't have any particular fear or hatred of snakes, nor any great love for them either. Same with birds. I suppose my decision to do nothing was born from my ambivalence rather than any hesitance to intervene.

I continued on my journey, thinking of the snake and the bird, and was reminded of a poem by Stephen Crane...

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter
And because it is my heart."

White Corset

I want a white corset
Straight-backed and resolute
Deceptively virginal

Kneeling behind an almost open door
Stricken by fear and desire
Blindfolded against my judgments

My nose ears mouth envelop you
I am pliant, open, soft
Bend me, hold me, bind me

It bubbles up slowly
A quiet resistance, a gradual push
But soon I am biting hitting
screaming flinging my heat
and tears of rage and want and need
and giving in

Over the edge, I'm taken
In ways I never understood
Dark blooms on paleness
Drops of red litter the virgin
Stained with color and belonging
Until no longer sure where corset ends and I begin.

Even then

Take my dreams and take my mind
That were masterless as wind;
And "Master!" I shall say to you
Since you never asked me to.

From 'Because' by Sarah Teasdale

I've been feeling myself into a corner. I tried to turn it off, made myself weak-kneed with passion over the thought of hands and eyes. It wasn't enough, I couldn't disengage.

I can't continue to just feel, it's disarming. What am I without my walls?

They are back. In force. With their friends and extended family. It will take an army now.

Wild Nights, Wild Nights!

I've been gripped so tightly by my desire
that, in the mornings, my legs run
with the cum squeezed from me
in my dreams.