The Secret Life of This Life Now #23
23rd in a series of 31 brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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As another emotional crisis recedes, I’m taking a shot at keeping these Secret Life essays coming out twice a week, ideally on Mondays and Thursdays. It’s no longer about unloading the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. It’s more about finishing something I started, and telling a story that may resonate for some readers.
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 #23 in this series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, reading a snippet and chatting a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.
We are up to the second poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The second poem in this section is “The Remembered One.” Remember Marcos, one of the beloveds I lost to AIDS in the 1990s? Well, he’s back, and (grâce à Obi Wan Kenobi) more powerful than you can possibly imagine. He enters the poem in the second stanza, shown below.
I dreamt of Marcos last night.
I thought he came to be buried,
to be done with; but no, that caramel devil,
leaving his tangerine swim trunks wet on the floor,
toweling his gorgon hair as he sits in my lap,
numbing me with the poppies
of his opiate grin and reasserting his claim:
The first draft of what became “The Remembered One” was written in December 2006. Marcos had been dead eleven years. I had been with my husband for six years and legally civilly married for two years. Marcos is pissed off about this.
Why should you get the house,
the husband, the PhD, while I chew on dirt
and feed succeeding generations
of night crawlers?
It was a good question. Marcos later suggests that I might be happier down there with him, that his realm is better suited to the life I had lived before my current spate of health and happiness. If you’ve been keeping score, you may see a connection between Marcos’s suggestion here, and lines we looked at a couple of of poems ago that give the book it’s title—
and this life now is the better life, but oh,
how the cool sand calls.
After leaving high school as the kid who did not want to do anything he would not feel comfortable telling his mother about, I had ultimately lived quite an adventurous life in my post-college years. Some of it in Paris, London, and Rome, some of it in Jerusalem, some of it from east coast to west coast and northern states to southern states, most of it the City that Never Sleeps, and a lot of it under the boardwalk at night in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and often on my knees. I loved that life. I almost died for that life. So Marcos’s suggestion was not without its appeal. And he even showed a keen insight into my husband, suggesting that the latter might enjoy life with “precious memories” of me even more than he enjoyed life with the living, breathing me. Funny, how wise can be the people we encounter in our dreams.
Okay, I was going to go on a bit more, but that is simply too perfect a place in which to leave it for now. Back next time with more home truth. À la prochaine.
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