Unfaithful, An Elegy

there was always a talking head in that kitchen
on scarritt street (it was) my mother's distant voice
reminding me of all that I had left behind
while Pat cooked the chicken livers and
drained the bottled PBR her smile seeming
a measured remark to my boozy indolence

we were all drunk during that time we kept
ourselves drunk drunk mostly on cheap
beer and extravagant ideas exchanging hopeful
notes of how much we thought we wanted from
this living this time upon the wheel

she had her kids and I had one too
we wrote our books and fled the normal
days living hard within the fantasies of our
fictions re-reading the best parts and playing
cards while smoking maryjane and the friends
the friends we had a gaggle of them then
their egos seeking a warm fire of appreciation

they came to drink Pat's beer and smoke Pat's dope
and hang out and talk with Tim his ratcheted
up ego expanding every idea to the size of
a galactic superstructure how many different
stories wandered through that day and night
of desperate differentiation?

the grand poet popped in to get his ass kissed;
he wasn't getting that at home he confided.
His poet's wife herself a semi-writer
rode her fictional beast into holiday inns,
in that slow deliberate fashion like her feet
were bound so many thought it was her husband
but it really was her hidden self and on the couch

the gentle poet, as he styles himself these days,
lisped his lists post-marine stylings his voice
uncomfortably shrill his personal life a long
yet dull tale of divorce and recrimination
his verse an appendix of western american song

there were others, ones I loved, ones Pat tolerated
particularly the blonde femme fatale who's behind
I can still remember in these hands honestly she just
confused us both, Pat and me, and Pat made sure
to note this fact every chance she had and why not,
one had to wonder if there was a sly game afoot

I could never tell, I was truly the most
innocent in this country. Irony, though, they
bonded in that most cruel way, the young blonde
and her sister from another decade, sorting through
their derision at my failures, me not being
the famous artist they had both counted on

me absconding with the talented broken girl
in the wake of my worst crime that infatuation
with Alison, someone truly innocent here but played
by both her mother and by Pat my losses sneered
at by those cruel women both of whom I loved

I see this dark tear staining drama
from the safety of the decades
and still I am the fool within its territory
and even in the end I read Pat's words her constant
bitter refrain that I was not the man she needed
me to be and I wish for time to travel back
and let me in on that great secret love she sacrificed
for my art an art that she ultimately
did not even believe in an art I have
long since abandoned

its been a terrible journey, this lifetime, this
post youth facade of humility and minor memory
yet nearly every drug filled night of games and hats
and tragedies and kisses lost in scotch and cigarette
smoke exists like ghosts within my otiose brain
sometimes examined and mined for catchy metaphors
these scenes are schlepped across the years
in a makeshift understanding

Are you out there, somewhere, Pat?
Did you ever find a reason for the sudden departure?
I know you never forgave me, despite clear evidence
that what I did was probably for the best for
both of us and certainly for my daughters, two
in twenty years. There surely is a reasoning afoot
in that.

I hope you have met the Lady now. You have if you
have faced the many self-absorbed falsehoods you
told your self in the name of pride and
vanity. I know that I will follow you in that
long march to truth, and that my trip will be no easier
than yours. We all awaken to the lucidity of dying,
catch ourselves on the way out of this flesh,
remembering the scenes and words, feelings, ideas,
all that makes the flesh of self, beyond these simple
complex physical organisms that we ride through time.
I hope you are well. I truly loved you. It was
a series of mistakes for both of us. I wish you
Peace now in your mother's arms.

I truly wish I had been a different man, or had a different life. So much is clearly error in regarding those years with Pat Smith. She was a fine person who deserved a good life. I provided a lot of heartbreak, though much of our lives together was happy for both of us. I know she would've been better off without me, of course. But I was a charismatic guy in certain ways, and I was possessed of a huge confidence in my art, in the very idea of art. And Knoepfle supported that evaluation, if not enthusiastically, then because he could make use of it himself. She took that evaluation, and Knoll's kind words about me to heart. I really never knew what I was doing. I was desperate to get away from Becky McGovern. She was a difficult person to be with, an only child, and very puritanical about sex. Pat, on the other hand, came from a marriage where there was little sex so she had developed into being quite an adventurer. I was a young man. I think if I had had the opportunity to spend more time with Janne H. I might not ended up with Pat, but who knows? The thing with Janne, what the hell ever it was, went on for years and years. Really, the whole time I was with Pat, Janne lurked. Pat had terrible anguish over it and you can see in her poems that this is the central fact of living with Tim. Of course, it wasn't just Janne. There were several other women and I was probably a terrible flirt in general in those days. Pat beat me up one afternoon on South Grand; physically beat the shit out of me. I didn't fight back. I think that one was about Becky Bradway, who I was fucking in the afternoons on the couch in the living room, under the watchful eyes of Maurie Forgmigoni's remarkable painting of Pat that dominated the room. By then I should've understood that Pat didn't care for my work, and she was definitely pissed off about the Alison thing. Yet she defended me to others on that score. And she sat down and wrote a novel about two 13 year old twins discovering sex, each in their own way. She was clearly one of them. The one who just went off and had sex with some random boy. The other twin had an affair with a much older guy. I think back on this sometimes and remember that when Pat actually was 13, the seminal event of that part of her life was that her mother committed suicide in Hinsdale, where they lived. She climbed into their airstream and took an overdose of barbiturates. And Pat's father hardly made it through that time. What she must have had to endure, her little girl self suddenly discovered to need to be the one that got her father through that time. How incredibly difficult that had to have been.

Well, this is all a form of self flagellation. Pat was not a saint nor a sinner. But she could sing a song and write a good poem and a fine novel. She hosted many a nice party. And she could drink a lot of beer in her prime. I truly hope she is in a peaceful place now that she has shuffled off the mortal coil.