from Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Feast or Famine
I knew the Manhattan you grew up in well indeed—
the Upper West Side— gruesomely built of blocks
of primitive brick & stone. But, for you, with two
orchestra musician parents, a ticket into New York
Bohemia, bagels & lox from Zabar’s, then nothing,
popcorn, then back to Zabar’s. Whether feast or
famine, no forced schooling for you, just days at
home with paints and canvases, from a young
age, for company, hours of repetition, breakthroughs.
Always unease, that what you wanted to paint
was too formal, too advanced, for the land
of Warhol & Koons. You were ready for Philly.
PAFA, drugs, dykes, all in preparation for
finding it, your mind’s precious Rosetta Stone.
Your vision grew limpid as your life went crazy—
ensconced in the Center City beau monde,
directing traffic, wedded to an Irish witch
who wished you the worst in the end, every
distillation of visual perfection in your brain
found refulgent form, as you found time to
fall into my arms as well, & I rode analogous waves—
why it was all lost then was simple— the girls,
your girls, didn’t like it. They were threatened
by a genius they knew to be easily trounced.
I never let you go. I still won’t: the halcyon
nights we spent remain the guiding light of
my life, in this world & beyond, you & Mary,
& bruises or afterthoughts be damned, Rosetta Stoned—
There’s no safe way to say it: Carrie liked
being beaten. The rape fixation is one I
couldn’t satisfy. Poverty begrimed eyes more
starkly, deathly blue than Jen’s, jet-black
bangs a Gothic translation of Jen’s golden
ones, I couldn’t give her what she wanted,
not well. So, the night our wars took on flesh,
I found myself strained, poked into being
pushy, pushed myself into aggression which
wasn’t really in me to express. Spaced, in a nowhere
space between her legs where I both was
& couldn’t be, the light in the dorm room
remained on, made garish an engorged sense of horror
we both had: I did it. A Gothic incision: doom.
Something gloomy about small towns, small town
girls: macabre undercurrents follow them around,
amidst the farms, lakes, forests, extended foliage.
The grim reaper likes forests as much as cities,
& the naked flesh of small-town nubiles is as
Hawthorne’d as an even more abject Hester Prynne.
Cobwebs, soot, mud, grease, blood— it’s all
smeared on the two-backed beast, when & if
it happens there. Now, it had happened to
me twice running— suburban, well-situated,
unused to being blood-drenched, ripe to hit
my head on rocks. Jennifer made loud noises
to cover the anguish. Carrie waited darkly
to be punished. The seed-carrier was ignorant. No bliss.
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