Detail of painting by Stefano Cipollari used as cover art for This Life Now

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Another Thursday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. I started this series with the goal of selling off the remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. But now I’m here to finish what I started 27 essays ago—telling a story of love and loss 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 #28 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 seventh poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The seventh poem in this section is “Civil Union.” In keeping with recent Secret Life practice, here is the poem in full.

When I die, you say, you can take
hot young Russian boys home
and have sex with them in our bed;
but you must tell them about me.
Here I should capture you
in a deft array of telling details
that bring you to life in the reader’s
imagination; but I will not—
while yet you hold me in your arms at night,
let me betray nothing more intimate
than the roommate who blamed you for his cat’s diseases,
or the police raid on the Moscow discotheque.

That, you may have guessed, is a poem about the ex-husband, the precocious poet. I am not going to go into the details of his time in St. Petersburg, the police raid on the Moscow discotheque, or the roommate who blamed him for his cat’s diseases. Those are his stories to tell.

How convenient for “Civil Union” to be the poem for this edition of Secret Life. Just the other day, I was giving you the sort of back-of-the-envelope version of our meeting, courtship, and marriage, with a brief coda about our divorce. I was so in the tank for same-sex marriage. Here’s a letter of mine that was published in The New York Times in 2003, about three years into my life with my ex-husband.

To the Editor:
I appreciate David Brooks's support for gay marriage (column, Nov. 22), but I am dismayed that he minimizes the significance of the constitutional issues at stake, complaining that liberals frame gay marriage as a civil rights issue rather than as a moral imperative.
What the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision put in play is same-sex civil marriage, which is indeed a civil rights issue.
As a gay Jewish man, I can already marry my male partner in a synagogue and obtain a traditional Jewish marriage contract. What we lack is the ability to obtain a state-issued marriage license that would give us rights of inheritance, visitation, custody and entitlement.
Yes, I want my partner to get my Social Security check when I die, and that is no trifle, but rather the equal protection of the Constitution of the United States.
MICHAEL BRODER
New York, Nov. 22, 2003

Ironically, perhaps—or perhaps it is only poetic justice—our being civilly married made splitting up infinitely harder than it would have been had the state not recognized our intimate partnership. And infinitely more costly just in dollars and cents terms, which even we poets have to think about now and then, especially when our access to essential needs like housing and health care are at stake.

Be all of that as it may, here we are. Wow, did ever a sentence mean less that that one? But that’s kind of how it is. One big shoulder shrug. I thought…but nah. I’ve become fond of saying I was a volunteer, not a victim. My therapist looked at me a bit quizzically when I said that at a recent session. “I want to preserve a sense of agency,” I explained. Which led me to compose and text myself the following poem as I waited for the bus after my session:

I said volunteer not victim.
She said it can be hard to see what’s going on underneath.
I understand your desire
to preserve a sense of agency, she said;
but that complicates your ability
to see what was really happening.
I felt my expression transform, my face.
That’s what makes it a story, I said.
She seemed unsure where I was going with this.
The story, the novel, the movie—
That’s what would make it compelling.
That the victim’s desire
to preserve a sense of agency
prevents him from seeing his partner
as a predator and himself as prey.
Pardon me, I said. I’m always looking for what makes the story a story.

I mean, in the end, I think that’s what this whole Secret Life odyssey has been about. What makes the story a story. Can’t that be said to be the driving force of all poetry in and beyond the Anglo-European world since Whitman and Dickinson? The modernists, the confessionals, the New York School, the Beats?

Yes, I missed my calling as a literary theorist and critic. Or have I missed it after all? Last I checked, I’m not dead yet. Another new poem, very little this time:

Everybody dies — Stephen Sondheim
I’m still here — Stephen Sondheim

Twenty-eight down, three to go. We’re almost done with this Secret Life thing.

À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fire-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.

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The Secret Life of This Life Now #28