Rain on the West Side Highway, red light at Riverside: the more I live the more I think two people together is a miracle. You’re telling the story of your life for once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words. The story of our lives becomes our lives. Now you’re in fugue across what some I’m sure Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea. Those are the words that come to mind. I feel estrangement, yes. As I’ve felt dawn pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light? Close between grief and anger, a space opens where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder.
XIX
Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesions pull away? When slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know - two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine - look at the faces of those who have chosen it.
Across a city from you, I’m with you, just as an August night moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep, the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight - or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin, G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder, falling asleep to the music of the sea. This island of Manhattan is wide enough for both of us, and narrow: I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face lies upturned, the halflight tracing your generous, delicate mouth where grief and laughter sleep together.
XVII
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder not merely played but should have listened to us, and could instruct those after us: this we were, this is how we tried to love, and these are the forces they had ranged against us, and these are the forces we had ranged within us, within us and against us, against us and within us.
There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees, A quiet house, some green and modest acres A little way from every troubling town, A little way from factories, schools, laments. I would have time, I thought, and time to spare, With only streams and birds for company, To build out of my life a few wild stanzas. And then it came to me, that so was death, A little way away from everywhere.
There is a thing in me still dreams of trees. But let it go. Homesick for moderation, Half the world’s artists shrink or fall away. If any find solution, let him tell it. Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation Where, as the times implore our true involvement, The blades of every crisis point the way.
I would it were not so, but so it is. Who ever made music of a mild day?
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t regret those. Not the nights you called god names and cursed your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch, chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness. You were meant to inhale those smoky nights over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches. You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still you end up here. Regret none of it, not one of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing, when the lights from the carnival rides were the only stars you believed in, loving them for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved. You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.
It’s not the best walk I’ve had, not by a long shot, down 86th street from 3rd Avenue to 18th Avenue
but it’s mine and I’ve gotten used to it, the spots where there is no shade in the blazing summer sun or the way the forest by the park smells just like the one back home.
But in the rain, it takes on a certain feeling, cause no one is else is walking 2 and a half miles in wet flip flops with Greetings From Asbury Park in their ears
and if they are, well they aren’t doing it down 86th street cause it’s empty nearly the whole way and the rain has been coming down for weeks now washing away the snails and the leaves that cling to the stone wall by the big houses near 13th Avenue.
When I pass our window, you are already inside, dry, though you must have been caught in it too. Your feet up on the coffee table, the orange light glowing, the cat in the window, a book in your hand, killing time, waiting for me, because I am late, and because there are drinks to be made and stories to tell, inside, where it’s dry.
Every way ends, every road, every foot-path leads at last to the hill-crest— then you retrace your steps, or find the same slope on the other side, precipitate.
I have had enough— border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress.
O for some sharp swish of a branch— there is no scent of resin in this place, no taste of bark, of coarse weeds, aromatic, astringent— only border on border of scented pinks.
Have you seen fruit under cover that wanted light— pears wadded in cloth, protected from the frost, melons, almost ripe, smothered in straw?
Why not let the pears cling to the empty branch? All your coaxing will only make a bitter fruit— let them cling, ripen of themselves, test their own worth, nipped, shrivelled by the frost, to fall at last but fair With a russet coat.
Or the melon— let it bleach yellow in the winter light, even tart to the taste— it is better to taste of frost— the exquisite frost— than of wadding and of dead grass.
For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life. I want wind to break, scatter these pink-stalks, snap off their spiced heads, fling them about with dead leaves— spread the paths with twigs, limbs broken off, trail great pine branches, hurled from some far wood right across the melon-patch, break pear and quince— leave half-trees, torn, twisted but showing the fight was valiant.
O to blot out this garden to forget, to find a new beauty in some terrible wind-tortured place.
Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine - tender, delicate your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond of the fiddlehead fern in forests just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come - the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there - the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth - your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you in my rose-wet cave - whatever happens, this is.
XV
If I lay on that beach with you white, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Stream and lying on that beach we could not stay because the wind drove fine sand against us as if it were against us if we tried to withstand it and we failed - if we drove to another place to sleep in each other’s arms and the beds were narrow like prisoners’ cots and we were tired and did not sleep together and this was what we found, so this is what we did - was the failure ours? If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
