The Way

You know love is a long daily drive
over the same territory—everything
is familiar; the highway signs, the billboards,
the restaurants you've been to,
the motels you spent a week at one night;
the only interruptions are the miles of road construction
jagging your clarity, your pace slowed for your safety.
In your rear view mirror is displayed
the contents of the trunk: all the pierced flat tires
and oily rags, the detritus of trips passed into memory now.
You change the radio station to a good song.
I reach a hand to your cheek, pressing gently
the backs of my fingers to your same tender flesh.

Don't you know? Don't you know?
There isn't any map—no map, no map,
only this road being traveled.
And I refuse to be just another hitchhiker.

Tied in the Seventh

should we walk him?
(you & your many words)
what good would it do?
the day is a shower of errors
(I know you in your gray
machine, lessening the distance
between us—don't tell me
this isn't true love)
he grounds out to first
but the runner advances
finally the time ends
no runs scored (somewhere in
the vague lands between this room
and Illinois' southern tip
you are thinking of me)

but still no decision
one to one tie
it's the bottom of the seventh
(when will you be here?)

Interesting use of baseball as a metaphor. I watched the cubs pretty incessantly from 1974-1980. Of course this poem is from the period when Alison lived in southern Illinois outside of Carbondale. Her husband went to school, civil engineering, at SIU-C. She often drove up to Springfield, several hours on the backroads, to the other parts of her life that she kept in town. I believe this poem references a grey fastback type of car, a gremlin, that she had about this time. Later on she acquired a karman ghia. We really had a very weird, fucked up love affair going in those days. I was part of it, and pretty demanding, but she was like a person living many different lives. I think about her sort of as Neal Cassady, carrying on with different people in different rooms at the same time. She once wrote a poem about keeping the pieces of her life in different boxes. No doubt that was true.

Moon's Lady, 1977

Mark me well Moon's Lady
as you sit on your gold throne
wearing your ghost tiara
ovular like your womb
My hands have sharpened the blade
during the passage of a
thousand days
and you may occupy
the turned away face of the lunar
sphere, and I may not understand
what I cannot see
but your murder has come to me
as a sacred act
I only do what I do out of
the love you have misplaced

and though it may not come to you
this way, I know I am
magician/warrior, divine bear,
occupier of these words
discoverer-murderer of
you in your lunar pose


This piece features the first use of "divine bear" in my work. I discovered the phrase while perusing a book of names in Knoepfle's office at SSU one day. I looked in the OED and got the same info there. Of course I told Knoepf about it and he was impressed with the implications. Poets you know. The poem is clearly another round in the Alison/Tim story, the one where we talked about sex as violence, because, as catholics, it certainly was violent for us. I think a lot of people in the D/s world (dominance/submission for you innocents) come from a catholic background. Always trying to figure out how to live in a world where pain is method of achieving grace.

Lunar references are meant to point to the feminine, to the "other" as Simone deBeauvoir writes in the Second Sex, a book that had a profound effect on me. With that in mind, the last line posits a masculine sense for the "victim" here, implying her feminine self was a "pose" which needed to be murdered. Early goddess religion stuff wandering through there, as well. That comes from Alison's repeated dreams about red-headed priestess doing human sacrifice. There is some sense of that in early celtic archeaology. Certainly the celts did sacrifice humans (peat bog people). And it is quite probable they had priestesses doing the sacrificing. The red-headed part is also interesting. Alison herself was a striking blonde in the old days. I'm sure her hair has darkened somewhat, though being a classicly vain woman she probably colors it. Clearly Alison's real roots come through Ireland, but probably, genetically she came from the Vikings that conquered and ruled Ireland and who brought the blue eyed blonde genes into that pool. I've been reading Cadfael's Summer of the Danes, and there is much reference to the blonde nordic viking women from Ireland. No surprise then. AsBjorn is certainly Danish, through northern england (the Danelaw, 850-1060 roughly). So far enough back we probably had ancestral stroking going on. My feelings for Alison seemed to come from deep inside, so I suppose racial memory is a possibility. Or reincarnation. Or some damn thing. I just hope I don't go through this in another lifetime. That's a desperate concept.

Bad Faith

Jump hard into playing that game milady
Night is a samovar & you are sucking
this life out of me. Stars are burnt (diamonds
as a form of coal); the alien life form
tokes up on the gems in your eye sockets
Down at the harbor's last available wharf
the ropes are knotted with pithy remarks
the cold sea water is a metaphor
spawning this big fish; not moby dick
of course. You are still in court,
your briefs filed, your slim tush on its throne.
The vinegar cunt flush mixes with smoke
from your past. Is there an alien taking
my desire? Is there an obvious joke
in the ever present stiffie? Sad fire,
extending through the timezone.

Another bitter round in the Janne story. Written in the last couple of years, noting that she is now a lawyer in Las Vegas. The sea represents time, the fish is me and my death. I suppose I just find it so unreasonable to be betrayed by someone who I know loved me. Not like I ever did it, you know (sarcasm there).

new life

I go pale here
you come constantly
into my mind/I
watch you move
wherever I go/your
voice repeats
my words/I see your
long cool legs
walk close/I vaseline
my lips with you/you
keep my soul repaired/I
go pale here/the static
air comes lightening
your hands/trace my neck
my body hums outloud/
do you sleep now?
do you dream of me?
can I keep your fine
soft hours in my hands?
do you know how much
new life you mean
to me?


A poem from January of 1973, while I was still living with Becky McGovern before she threw me out on Valentine's Day for writing poems like this to Pat Smith. My friend Marion who is at ISU this semester asked me a while back why all my love poems were so dark. Here is a poem, from a series of poems, where the love, the passion, is the basic theme. I always fall very hard. I truly loved this person and thought she would always love me. That turned out to be one of those things people like to believe but isn's actually true. Life goes on.

Notes: Pat used vaseline to moisten her lips pretty much constantly. We also used it as a general lubricant. The use of the word "pale" comes from the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed and John Cale were both major sources for me in the 1970s. I still respect them both, though I haven't listened to them in some years.

telstar

those long
structures/up and
down the street
looking in your
witch well/like prima
facie evidence and
the hands/my hands
specify/their own
diversions/my lips find
their diversions/specified
my understanding of
your flesh
grows this month
like swift flight
of clouds/over a
four state region
recorded/by telstar

This was a poem for Pat Smith, written sometime in early 1973. I was living down Sixth Street from Pat and Larry's house and John and Sandy's house and seeing Pat all the time. Telstar here is meant to signify both a weather satellite and the song by the Ventures. The metaphor hopes to call up the driving beat of the guitar piece, somewhat in the manner that kind of music is used in Pulp Fiction.

from Outtakes

off on this
morning's El my
last glimpse of
you today/maybe
I'll live through
this afternoon
chasing personal
demons of the kind
that wire you
up/maybe I won't
but I am wired here
and lonely/glimpsing
you/through this
borrowed machine
your hair/spread out
blonde corona/walking
away to the world
which doesn't deserve
to share you

From a series of short poems written in Lincoln Park in the fall of 1973 and mailed to Alison Gaughan. She showed them to Knoepfle and he used them to start his chapbook series, based on money from a donated fund he was able to get out of the university. The poem is one of many poems I wrote to Pat Smith. Although she was thirteen years older than me, with two children and a professor husband (not to mention a professor lover, John Knoll, who was married to her best friend), we seemed to get along quite well. The first several years of our relationship were mainly based on sex. Joel's mother, Becky McGovern, was not very sexual. Or maybe I was very sexual. In any case, Pat had lived with Larry for fourteen years and they hadn't had much sex, and she was not happy about it. So she would be available essentially any time I wanted, and this maintained through most of our relationship. She also was somewhat more adventurous than Becky McGovern, who had pretty strict rules as to what was okay with her.

When I eventually split up with Pat I still slept with her for about another year while living with Bradway. Bradway was not a giving person, shall we say, and getting sex from her was always a certain amount of work. Unless she wanted something from you; then she would do whatever it took to get her way. At least that is how she was with me. Hopefully that has nothing to do with how she is now.

I did love Pat. It was only after I came to understand the contempt she held my work in that I had to separate from her. She loved her vision of me, not the me that actually existed. Maybe that is always the case. Kimberly seems to know the real me, and forgives me that person, and so I trust her more than anyone else.

Heart

this heart is poseidon roaming
turmoiled oceans of other people's lives
trident clutched to a fallow breast

this heart is a wheel turning
on the track of days wearing
its tread away like skin

this heart is a hunter
cross-pollinating the random universe
in search of death and/or resurrection

Nobody really knows.

I hump my pillow in
the empty chamber of this day
trying to discover some reason

but nothing equals nothing
the ratiocination of time
is as close to a true story
as you can get

(and I am)
alone and horny, afraid of love

this guy pain is an omnipresent priest
at the altar of this heart
he waves his hand, requiring my sorrow
he waves his whip, expecting her forgiveness

This poem comes from the years living alone after Becky Bradway abandoned me for her vision of a world without an incestuous father and with a famous and successful poet. I was pretty sad in that time. Having Paige kept me alive. Without her I would certainly have made Becky's first wish, for my suicide, come true.