popsong

then there is the girl turned into
ventriloquist dummy, promising teenage
fidelity—or worship—equalizing
man's failures with god's
its something/not a canvas by Balthus
nor a compact mirror by Nabokov
but a memory of her taste; metallic
in recent filia, oranges & mints
her tongue learning his chariot shape
dead sea salt running in the saliva
of this oasis. She still captures
what is real in me~I still maintain
photographic mental contact
so that this air, frisky
in the fall's early heat, seems
rife with her musk. Now she sweats,
almost eighteen, in Maryland no doubt
the walls move in that city of ghosts
& this man, he turns into a pop song
a glissando of sadistic chocolates
still slightly nazi, but by way of wilhelm
reich, not third. Such it is—
no puppies or kittens dropped
in her period of neuroses.
will we not all bear the blame
when the role is called up yonder?
the shadow knows
but he don't evaluate.
the recognizable shape of her breasts
is in the palms of these hands
I hold over my eyes.

This poem is about my greatest mistake. Partly it attempts to deal with the hard fact that she was too young at the time and somehow reconcile my stupidity with my actual passion for her. It starts referencing her father (ventriloquist): he was a powerful figure in her life and in her mother's life. Although he was terribly handicapped as the result of polio in his youth, he was a regular marvel at manipulating women. Including his own daughter. At the time this was written I knew, had heard, that she had gone to Maryland to attend a ballet high school, and was living with him again. There is a brief reference to the pop psych figure, Wilhelm Reich, who had a following in the fifties, talking, as he did, about the importance of orgasm in our lives. I think once you've become accustomed to the place of orgasm in your normal physical life and once you've truly examined the experience, it becomes hard to live without the experience. There is a distinct magic in the energy release that comes with the physical act. That it becomes more complex with the sophistication of the mental reality simply makes it ever more powerful. In some ways it is a drug, but a drug that can be used to reach magical states. In any case, in the orgasm there is always a sense of the Divine. If you don't know this, then you are not really paying attention.