Pub Crawl #3

“Instead of Names” (La Petite Zine, Winter 2000)

Every Pub Crawl post includes a journal publication of mine—in chronological order from earliest to most recent—with notes about context, craft, autobiography, or close reading. This week’s Pub Crawl features “Instead of Names.” It appeared alongside two other poems of mine in La Petite Zine (winter 2000), an online journal created and edited by Daniel Nester.

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Instead of Names

Now I wait in familiar locations—
the park, the promenade,
any place I think you might find me.

When you arrive, I sidle up—
no words offered by way of introduction,
just a lie I tell with my eyes,
to grant permission or deny it,
to hide my shame at being self-absorbed,
cobbled together of disparate parts—
posture, hair and nails, clothing.

For a while you stay and I think it’s what I wanted—
to kneel before you beneath the trees,
beside the dark river, under icy stars.

When you leave, you leave me wanting more.
Long and cold as the river this night goes on.

Walking, I listen to Lady in Satin
till the stars fade and the gray morning
washes your dusty image from my mind.

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Notes

As you’ve come to expect if you have been reading my recent posts featuring poems from the early to mid 1990s—another poem of direct address to an object of homoerotic desire. As I’ve long said, I’m nothing if not consistent. I found that groove with my first “grown-ass” poem, “Casual, Anonymous,” drafted in December 1991, and I did not look back for years.

As per usual, the poem is completely imaginary in the sense that it does not recount any one autobiographical event. Also as per usual, there are bits of autobiography throughout. The park is Central Park. The promenade is the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, also called the Esplanade. Did I cruise the Promenade IRL? Yes. Did I connect with guys on the Promenade? I think so, but any specifics are long forgotten. Did I suck any dick on the Promenade? I mean, not that I remember—but I wouldn’t put it past me.

Notice that it’s “any place I think you might find me,” not any place I think I might find you. The speaker is on a mission to make himself the prey. He lays himself out like bait. He wants to be hunted and found, but: Question for study and discussion: What does he want to happen after he is found?

Making oneself prey turns out to be quite an active endeavor, as the speaker “sidles up” to the anonymous addressee. Who, by the way, does not even appear to know that he is being addressed. In the classic Michael Broder homoerotic poem of direct address, the other usually is fairly if not completely detached from the imaginary poetic scenario. The relationship, such as it is, lives largely if not entirely in the mind of the speaker.

Some random autobiographical stuff

Doing these close readings of my own poems is like reading a memoir, or maybe preparing to write one. Yes, there are the constant references to cruising for sex in public places (“the park, the promenade”). In this particular poem, there are also some musical references. “When you leave, you leave me wanting more” is not necessarily, but may well be a reference (only in my own head, not the kind of reference I meant for any reader to notice) to the song “Dangerous” on the 1990 Depeche Mode album Violator. My boyfriend Tony was obsessed with Violator that year, and I was obsessed with Tony.

Dangerous
The way you leave me wanting more
Dangerous
That's what I want you for
Dangerous
When I am in your arms
Dangerous
Know I will come to harm

And the last stanza mentions Lady in Satin, a 1958 album by Billie Holiday with lush arrangements by Ray Ellis. When I took walks at night on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, I would often listen to music on my Walkman. How historically accurate is this poetic reference to Lady in Satin? Actually, I don’t know. I may well have had Lady in Satin on cassette and listened to it while walking on the boardwalk. Regardless, I’m pretty sure Lady in Satin showed up in that line as a way of evoking a very particular brand of melancholy, and so I could get the delicious words “lady in satin” in there, and because the rhythm of the whole line is just so perfect—three dactyls followed by a spondee.

Craft Tip: Jot down interesting lines and phrases as they come to you and fasten them somewhere you can see them. Over time, they will fall into place like pieces of a puzzle. In the early to mid 1990s, the wall above my desk was littered with such scraps of paper. That’s how key parts of “Instead of Names” came into being.

For example, the opening stanza:

Now I wait in familiar locations— 
the park, the promenade, 
any place I think you might find me. 

And the end of the second stanza:

cobbled together of disparate parts—
posture, hair and nails, clothing.

I would cut up looseleaf paper into strips of maybe six lines or so, and keep a stack of these handy. I favored an emerald green felt tip marker in those days. I can’t recall how long these particular scraps of verse may have hung push-pinned to that wall before I started playing around with some connective tissue that would hold them together in a single poem. But eventually they cohered.

By the time “Instead of Names” made it into the manuscript of my book This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), I had acceded to somebody’s suggestion that I delete the last two stanzas, so the final stanza becomes

For a while you stay and I think it's what I wanted—
to kneel before you beneath the trees,
beside the dark river, under icy stars.

I mean, sure, that’s fine. But even if that edit makes for a better poem, the shortened version does not feel to me like it’s the “real” poem. It feels curtailed. I want that man to leave. I want the speaker to get up off his knees. Does he feel sad? Ashamed? I want that long cold night, those stars to fade, that morning to dawn. Every time I read this poem, I hear a seagull call out as the memory of last night’s trick fades. I want that seagull.

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