The Secret Life of This Life Now #30

30th in a series of 31 brief essays about the coming and going of a book.

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

---

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

---

Today is the last Thursday of Secret Life. Next Monday, I finish telling the behind-the-scenes story of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. Having followed this story of love and loss, some of you may even want to read the book. So note the following—

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 #30 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet (sometimes more), and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the penultimate poem in book, “Buffy Rerun Poem.” My ex and I were great fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV show based on the star-studded 1992 movie. Below is the first half of the poem.

It’s one a.m. and I’m lying in bed,
watching a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
talking to you on the phone.

I tell you Buffy is ice-skating,
and you tell me it’s the episode from season two
where the assassins come to attack Buffy on the

skating rink,
and Angel leaps onto the rink to save her,
and afterwards they kiss

and Angel pulls away in a moment of self-loathing
and says,
I still have my vampire face on,

and Buffy touches his bumpy vampire forehead and says
I didn’t even notice.
You are right, of course, about every detail—

they unfold on the muted screen at the foot of the bed
as I watch and you narrate from 200 miles away;

As I did so many other things we shared during our marriage, I was the one who discovered Buffy. Often in the fall of 2000, while the precocious poet was at workshop in the second year of his MFA program at NYU, I would do laundry in the basement of our pre-war apartment building on the northwest corner of 57th Street and 8th Avenue, just off Columbus Circle. One night, while folding laundry in our bedroom and flipping channels on the old-school TV set atop the dresser facing our bed, I came across an episode of Buffy, a show I had never watched. It had started in 1997, so it was already in its fifth season. I was immediately captivated, and told my ex all about it when he got home after post-workshop pizza and beer (I can’t remember the name of the bar on University Place where the poets used to go after workshop).

The following week, we watched Buffy together, and from then on, we were hooked. Season five—no spoilers—proved to be highly consequential for the series as a whole. We needed to catch up! And again, pre-streaming—so we bought all five seasons to date on DVD, and watched them in rapid succession (“binge-watching” avant la lettre).

That fall, my ex went off to Provincetown, where he had been awarded a prestigious fellowship to a seven-month residency along with 19 other emerging writers and artists. It was on his list of dream bio blurb credits—along with Yaddo and Bread Loaf—and he ultimately attained all three (including the coveted “work-study” positions as waiter, assistant head waiter, and head waiter at Bread Loaf, before that aspect of that program was shut down in 2019 over concerns about sexual harassment and racism).

So there you have the real-life background for the poem’s reference to the speaker talking to the beloved on the phone past midnight one evening, recounting a detail from an episode of Buffy, which the speaker is re-watching on DVD, perhaps to assuage his loneliness in the absence of the beloved.

The contrast between my persistently poor memory and my ex’s “powers of recollection” are a theme in a number of my poems. Here is one, in full, that first appeared in the journal Softblow and later in my book Drug and Disease Free under the title “The Rock.” It refers to the speaker’s same sense of P-town abandonment as “Buffy Rerun Poem.”

Was it mine before it was ours,
this rock we call our own,
where we perch with coffee and bagels weekend mornings?
I can't remember that far back, or what I did
before I had you and your powers of recollection.
I must have invented the past, yesterdays that had to be,
to suit the mood I was in or provide a clue
to whatever happened next.
Today I sit here alone and ask myself if you exist
or if I only imagined you, without you here to tell me
whether or not we ever met.

Okay, why stop now? Here is what I think is the final poem in this sequence of abandonment poems, this one having less to do with memory and more to do with sheer pain and sorrow. It, too, appears in Drug and Disease Free.

I can’t blame you

for cheese left out on the counter
overnight, hat left on the subway seat
as I dashed from local to express.

Can’t blame you, away in your manger,
nestled in some swaddling, doing your thing.

How unfair of you to leave me like this,
accountable to no one but myself,
left to my own devices—

We know where THAT leads.

When I visit you there, it is analgesia only,
not healing.

You must come back to me,
to the nest I feathered for you,

the blanket-lined cardboard box
where I dropped you by the scruff of your neck.

You must doff your charade of being anything at all without me.

You must come home, and be my due.

I was proud of the precocious poet for having been awarded the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship; but at the same time, I was baffled and sad and felt abandoned. He had a perfectly good apartment around the corner from Central Park with an entire bedroom as his own private workspace! I thought of residencies like FAWC as essential options for writers and artists just getting out of school and facing uncertainty about where they would go and how they would pay the rent. That wasn’t the situation the precocious poet was in. The precocious poet primarily wanted a fellowship/residency credit in his bio when it appeared on his forthcoming first book of poems.

Do I sound bitter? Well, I mean—It took 20 years, but we did, after all, eventually get divorced.

Don’t worry too much—You’ve only got one more of these essays headed your way. After that, you can shower off the toxicity for good. And I assure you, the book ends on the most sweet and tender of love poems. 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.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:

1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.

2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.