The Secret Life of This Life Now #25
25th in a series of 31 brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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Another Monday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. Forget about my selling out the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. I’m here to finish something I started, and to tell a story that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…
You can get both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!
This is post #25 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.
We are up to the fourth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The fourth poem in this section is “Cases.” I’m not sure how it escaped my publisher’s chopping block, as I don’t really think it belongs in this book.
The poem goes through the cases of noun declensions in Indo-European languages, giving an example of the characteristic usage of each in a sentence about a river. It’s a lesson in syntax in couplets.
What the hell, I’m going to include this whole thing here:
Cases
Nominative, locus of being;
the river rises, the river falls.The genitive’s whole, that of which one is part,
as the river’s breath that sweetens us.To the dative we abject ourselves,
as to the river we bring what we love.Accusative: what we inflict upon another
as we enter the river.Ablative—case of separation or, paradoxically, accompaniment:
We emerge from the river whole.Where is the locative (vestigial in extant languages)?
Where our children wait patiently in the river?By means of the instrumental we achieve our end:
With the river we enter eternity.Vocative, whom we supplicate or implore:
River; oh, River; you, River!
Imagine that! A poem in This Life Now that has nothing to do with AIDS, homosexuality, or adolescent angst! Or does it?
“Cases” was written in April 2005, just a month before I finished my MFA at NYU. I may have written it for Phillis Levin’s craft class. I thought she would appreciate its preoccupation with the mechanics of linguistic syntax.
I promised juicy stories and home truths for this edition of Secret Life. Not sure I am up to delivering that, with federalized National Guardsmen patrolling Los Angeles county, and an ICE officer deliberately shooting an Australian journalist in the leg with a rubber bullet.
I will just pick up on a bit of the boyfriend timeline from my last post, where we touched on my breakup with the social worker in 1997, followed by the fling with the opera director and the six-month relationship with the merchandiser. For a while I really did lay off the boyfriend sauce. Then, in the summer of 1999, I took my first ever real life grownup solo vacation to San Juan, and of course met this guy on the beach outside my gay guest house, and proceeded not only to date him, but to fly back and forth to San Juan a few times to see him, and ultimately I invited him to come to New York to live with me and be my love.
During that same period, I met one of the most courageous, creative, imaginative, and honorable young men I have ever known. He grew up in an affluent farming family in Mexico. He had a physically abusive father who would not accept him or even tolerate him when it became known that he was gay and had HIV. So he ran away. On his own. By himself. Made his way to New York. He supported himself as a dog walker while building his photography portfolio. Yes, I met him at a bath house—the now defunct West Side Club, to be exact, which some readers of this essay may remember fondly. We started seeing each other. The chemistry was…so healthy! Looking back, I think that was the problem: He saw me in the way I wanted to be seen, and I wasn’t used to that, and I pushed him away. My excuse was the guy from San Juan. But I think that was just an excuse.
I think that was just an excuse, because a few months later, with the guy from San Juan having quit his civil service job in preparation for coming to New York to live with me and be my love, I met the man who would become my husband. At a launch party for the second issue of LIT, the journal of the New School MFA program in creative writing. I was there with my roommate, a young woman who, in fact, had dated my social worker boyfriend back when they were college kids in a southwest city that shall remain nameless.
We stood at one end of the room munching on crudités, and I spotted this guy in a charcoal grey turtleneck sweater with a thick head of curly dark brown hair, sort of darting around, air kissing Fran Gordon at one end of the room before alighting beside Marc Bibbins and Ravi Shankar, who were students in the program and whom I knew via my duties at the weekly reading series I hosted at the Ear Inn on Spring Street (more about my Ear Inn gig perhaps in an upcoming Secret Life).
“Who’s that cute little Jewish guy,” I said to my roomie. She flashed the smile of a friend who had now known three to five of my most recent boyfriends, including one who had been her boyfriend.
I had quite the smooth move for finding out who the cute little Jewish guy was. I walked over and sidled up to Mark and Ravi and said, “Hey, guys. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”
The rest is a once celebrated, now infamous chapter of New York City Gay Poetry Mafia History. But I’m over 1200 words here, so we’ll come back to this fateful meeting next time. I guess this edition of Secret Life turned out pretty juicy, after all, despite my gloom in the face of the burgeoning police state. And there was even a home truth.
À la prochaine.
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I'm so enjoying this step by step walk through the book.
Love it. So unfinished… I want MORE! Thank you!