Letters to Bruce Isaacson

Dear Bruce,

Today your poem arrived in the mail and I am struck by the rich imagery. I am greedy. I want to read more. Yes, I do think it’s good, and yes, it deserves publishing. Problem with longpoems is finding a home—but home is easier to want than to have. (To twist a line of yours). Perhaps a chapbook.

I only have a few moments before I go to the Post Office to mail this.... Also in the mail today, a letter from Partners of the Americas looking for a coordinator—to take on the artist exchange for SF/Mexico City. Fractaline structure. If only they’d called me three months ago.

I feel so committed to the Soviet exchange that it’s hard to even consider revisiting Mexico again. I said I’d think about it, come Sept. It, too is a part-time job... so it’s possible, but crazy-making... so what else is new? My CAC grant is also a part time job, but part time in the non-profit (prophet?) sector means 80-hour weeks as it is.

Oshit! I figured out last night that I’m leaving for the Soviet Union in ONE WEEK so mail those books pronto if I’m to get them on time—verdad? I can’t even count time at present... burnout.

More stuff arrived today for me to courier over to Russia including material from a Leningrad contact who wants to do a traveling whale show... Bizarre grassroots structures and crabgrass. This be gettin’ out of hand, mon!

Anyway, what can I say to you as I prepare to escape to the other side of the world—that I’m in love with your writing? Did our tongues really find truth and/or faith for a moment under a full April Fool's moon? And I am glad that it happened. Sorry for the form it took. And you living in exile in the Big Apple.

Back in October, I was determined you would remember me when you kept forgetting who I was (I know, yet another sleasy poet introduction) but I was not prepared for the form that it took.

How do you spell trouble? Apparently it's: Maureen. So sorry. My girlfriend who warned me off you got it all wrong. It wasn’t you who was Trouble! It was me. How odd for a good Catholic girl to find herself on the other side of the love triangle equation for once. Like the song: I've looked at love from both sides now...

And I hope that you heal your wounds—both physical and heart wounds. I feel that I have only just come out the other side, but then, I did a lot more time with John Oliver Simon. I'm not sure what half-life of the relationship I'm exorcising now or if it's an exponential thing.

Ah well, I only hope there’s no residual negative Pavlovian response left. Sometimes, late at night, I hear it in your voice. I appreciate when we’re done with all the adrenaline talk, burning up the telephone lines at 3 AM—when you tell me I don’t have to wear the mask. Then, small fragments of the secret emerges (who I really am) and I feel so vulnerable.

I shall always think of you in the sauna’d summer of New York City. screaming obscenities at air conditioners at three AM. I fantasize about meeting you in front of St. Basil’s in Red Square in late August, when the white nights begin to wane, and the ordinary rhythm of light and dark return us to our proper senses but I can still taste your poems on my tongue as if they were alive as the August blackberries. And we can love the way love loves best—across an ocean or two.


Maureen 1/11/1992

B—

I’ve been back from Russia exactly one week and speaking of love affairs with hardly any people in them—today your ex-girlfriend, Barbara, called to ask if we had an affair while you were in SF last fall, and if I’m still having some sort of affair with you now. She said my contact with you (especially via letters or poems) is a continuation of said affair and probably connected to delusions on my part.

You wanna know how it makes me feel when she suggests I’m having a one-sided affair with you? Is that what you’ve been saying to her? That I’m chasing you across continents like some deranged French Leutenant’s Woman? 

I’ve hardly even been in the USA the past five months and am far too busy teaching, writing grants and articles to be with friends—let alone, have a transcontinental affair with you. No matter that I've been living in the USSR with my Soviet lover all this time. I would like to know where this misinformation is coming from and why it continues to surface like scum long after the fact.

Why the long phone call from Barbara today? Why am I still in the middle of all this? I try to explain our meeting was a peripheral accident—a matter of some poems, etc., that there is nothing going on... how many times have I said this? 

To wit, she tells me you show her my letters (tacky) as evidence. Betrayed trusts. She tells me she can’t sleep at night because the thought of my spreading possible rumors of her calling me and hanging up—disturbs her. Disturbed indeed. Spurned woman.

And now, I in turn, write to you, feeling unjustly accused of something I didn’t do, won’t do. Wouldn't do. I know the late night calls began when this whole mess started, and I deduced—perhaps unfairly—she was behind all this. 

What if I accept Barbara’s statement she has only called me two times in her life and has never hung up without identifying herself? She’s called me more than twice—because I record such things in my journals—who said what, etc. I could pull out dates, etc., but what’s the point? Who’s the jury? Who’s the judge? Maybe the two events are unrelated. But we all keep feeding the cycle.

Maybe this whole thing is pointless—even writing to you now—not because I have future plans for you, as she suggested—but because I get pissed off when I feel I’m being used as a scapegoat. If I’m unjustly accused I go to the source (you) because otherwise it gnaws on me. 

Ok, so maybe it isn’t fair to rip off at you because she says things to me. She’s a free agent, can say whatever she likes about me, believe whatever she wants, but it also involves you and me—I get so frustrated by all this. Maybe this is a plea to stop the insanity. It’s not productive. 

Granted, I’m angry with you for inadvertently involving me in your domestic affairs and your decision to “end” to our “relationship” with “no further contact”—as if our contact were a threat to your relationship with her. I’d hoped your decision to sever all ties with me (such as they were, dangling participles aside), was so you could successfully patch things with Barbara which meant I’d no longer be involved in this absurd situation. Hallelujah!

She informed me that you cut off all correspondence with me because it was a matter of building trust—yours and hers. She made an ultimatum—either her or me. But I keep saying BUT WE’RE NOT HAVING AN AFFAIR! Why doesn’t anyone listen to me? Why do my words come back to haunt me distorted out of context, blown out of porportion? Used as weapons against me? Now even my answering machine message is suspect. 

When she told me she thought we were still carrying on because my answering machine message says something cryptic about an electronic message and your poem to me mentions the word electricity—what should I have done? Laughed or screamed? At least she admitted to being paranoid then.

So I took your damned books to Russia, I reported back to you, and received an abrupt reply—no further contact. And felt betrayed. Though I don’t agree with your decision, I had no choice but to comply. No matter that I was walking around wounded for days wondering why. No matter that my respect for you diminished, that I thought you were spineless. 

It wasn’t my decision to contact you a second time. Blame it on Vampire Myke, fate, etc. In fact, when he said to call you, I refused, because I was so angry I didn’t want to talk to you. I didn’t even want to bring those books to the USSR because it was a grim reminder. I did it because I believe in your work, not because I was harboring false hopes about you. 

Imagine how I feel right now after schlepping those books half-way around the world. Pushkin said in matters of the heart, its better to be a sinner and enjoy it, than to be innocent and unjustly accused of sinning. 

The problem is, in the very act of writing to you, this contact—in Barbara’s definition—means something is “going on.” Damned if I do and damed if I don’t. I guess it’s best you’re back in Brooklyn. I honestly don’t know what I’d do if I saw you at this point because I no longer quite know who or what to believe.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but my affaires DO have real people in them. Please, if you’re assuming I’m having one-sided affairs with you in the future, at least let me know in advance, OK? Then I can tell or not tell the person I’ve been involved with the past five months I’ve been unfaithful or not unfaithful or something like that. And we can add yet another layer of melodrama. Beware the waiting room. 

Maybe you’re like Fowles’ central character Nicholas in The Magus who is a pawn in the godgame--a series of human illusions about something that does not exist. “The final truth... when the difference between fission and fusion lay in a nothing, a tiniest movement, betrayal, further misunderstanding... fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh....”

2 Feb 1993

SHORT PANTOUM FOR THE BABARIAN

SHORT PANTOUM FOR THE BABARIAN

Calling it love, why do we choose to suffer instead;
because we feel it anew with each passing?
Inside the skull of night, I hesitate to disturb the spider's web.€
Blue skin on the surface of the water. It's beginning.

You talk about corporate structure and high finance,
trapped in the prison of your own choosing.
Our governments consider bilateral disarmament.
We proclaim the moon's in void. I live in the country.€

And feeling used, you said we all use each other
Freudian slip. They say Freud was a cross-dresser.
Plant a tree so it may discover quadralateral symmetry.€
What does he know of the incestuous relationships of poets?€

I am sending you stones because I know nothing else.
The oracle tells us to be like trees, upright & strong€
My friend says each relationship is a stepping stone.€ L
Yes, winter is a voyage across the dark tundra sea.€

Inside the skull of night, I hesitate to disturb the spider's web.
Calling it love, why do we choose to suffer instead?

5/29/92

LARGO DESOLATO

LARGO DESOLATO

While drying my face in the shower mirror 

I cursed you because each time the phone rings 

that click severs me like stilettos

Maybe it isn't your X who hangs up each time;

but once she screamed how you beat her

and was I satisfied? As if I had done the act.

Once you and I licked sweet poems,

anchoring them firmly with stamps,

pony-expressing our hearts with postage due.

Damned if I didn't curse you  

and the mirror fell off the wall

dividing my face like the San Andreas Fault.

And I don't know if it's you or me

who is destined to serve time.

Blame it on a bad crop of chardonnay,

unseasonable rain, a ruined harvest—

but life is like that.

We're experiencing a drought

and no one is conserving water,
 not even the moon.

When my mother's lover died

I hated him in the way only a 12-year-old 

who saw the ugly evidence, could.

The way he used her, unforgivable even in death. 

But I had to allow my mother a refuge of memory 

resurrected in her fulcrum time of need.

Grief polishes the facts until they outshine themselves. 

But silver tarnishes in sunlight,

in drawers and in the cavities of desire.

5/9/90

line breaks

SALVAGE JOB

Another page falls from the calendar.

My ex-lover writes he named the unborn son Isaac.I fall for another man named Isaacson
and dream of a boychild with one arm missing.
During the steep night, owls shift seasons
with the moon. No secrets kept from stones.

When a student asks: do you know Dr. Whitte, the poet?
I'm stunned: a hole slowly fills in on itself.
From that spring visit to his table a half-life time ago,  
small venial stars festered in my womb.
Nearly dying, I've long since paid for my sins.
I no longer trust the sun; we've killed the earth with love.

...missing text

My dreams tell me to dig deeper into the earth 
as if my life depended upon it. I am carnelian & lapis.
Beneath the bridge I find jasper and rare shells.
Tremulous mudflats, every inch alive with invertebrates.
Though no longer in love with the idea of love
I still crave chocolate in late afternoon.


I cannot see ahead, but I remember the past.
I comb the wind with fingers of the dead.
I cannot see the past, but I remember the future.
Is there a reality, and who is to answer?
Seeking islands of refuge, we bleed back into the sea.
Tidal interstice, seasons drift, clouds hold no answers.


This time, I won't open like a flower.
This time, I will endure blossoming stones.


1989/1990
rev. 1992

LIVING WITH BEARS

LIVING WITH BEARS

We are all immigrants and what sustains us 

is the failure of desire and need.

Each question you resurrect from the debris of childhood

I want to believe in, but I come from a long line

of bear worshippers who survived the potato famine.

I don't eat red meat. Icons in dark niches, guttered candles, 

a menorah, and the ritual of our bodies—

there's always an ocean, a continent, or a lover in the way.

One of the wounded, you're trapped in the dark heat of the city

instead of feasting on onion domes in the Red Square with me.

I taste your words as if they were ripe

huckleberries pale with bloom in late August.

But I'm omnivorous. Did our tongues really find the faith?

We could spend a lifetime looking at the ground, or love.

The phone rings, your exlover reminds me

with silence, of what we have in common.

Kiev celebrates a millennia of civilization.

Sasha says in Russian, There is no verb to be in the present. 

It is understood. We do not live with white bears, 

tovarishchi, are you all capitalists, then?

We are the same people. We are breaking the images.

He says, Afghanistan is Russian for Vietnam,

pulling on a cigarette with his good hand.

An idea called napalm has melted his face.

An American vet trembling like a lover, offers a light, 

and touches his hand, the half-formed word brother on his lips.

The steppes have no natural boundaries.

No more bison, cossacks or mongols sweeping the open plains.

I am lost on the limitless horizon. Mnogaya leta.

Voices sing with the quality of wind on the land.

The future is no more uncertain than the past.

And yes, the failures between us are what we know best.

But even at fifty below, the arctic pools, the polinii

don't freeze over, where in winter the bears come to feed.

Within the earth, wood grows upward without haste & without rest.

Sometimes I hear it in your voice —

vulnerability slips in and we find sum totals

have nothing to do with tenderness or faith.

A brittle sheet of gold foil tremors 

the geography of who we are.

7/28/89

COLD WAR

COLD WAR

What if it's 1950, we weren't born yet.

There isn't a Berlin Wall.

Kennedy hasn't been shot.

The American Dream is in full slumber.

What if Rudy Valens's plane hadn't yet crashed,

no Big Bopper, no monuments to James Dean,

or Kerouac toilet papering the road.

What if we'd been around then,

going up in smoke, drag stripping

dangerous curves through the redwoods.

Perhaps our parents were thinking of marriage,

or at least sex, in the back seat of a Ford.

What if we were our parents

watching Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy

for the first time around, no reruns.

Everything in black and white.

The Sunday Barbecue.

Cocktails with the neighbors.

The American Dream hasn’t woken up.

No Fifth Amendment. No AIDS.

Homelessness is a third-world concept.

Howl hasn’t been written. No Suburbacide.

No Kaddish of words for the walls we build.

Instead, we liken kisses to radar missiles

and split atoms, confusing fission with fusion.

It took a Chernobyl to thaw the Cold War.

What if we invented memory

because things seem more real in print.

Especially when they aren't true.

Stigmatas nailed down on paper.

What if this were a thalidomide poem

borne without words?

4/29/89

POEM TO A LOVER'S LOVER

Listen, I already know what it's like
to be on the other side.
That was me in the gray dress
orbiting behind the revenge of the camera,
because my man chose a blonde
his daughter's age to replace me
at what was supposed to be our reading.
I know what it's like to be betrayed.
What can I say? Who wants a poem
from the "other woman" that says:
For eons poetry has fed on the betrayal of love
and is fond of the victim's point of view.
That there are no casual spectators.
That we all err on the side of love.
Perhaps it's fitting we remain
disembodied voices over the phone lines,
though I already know who you are.
If not me, then who will accept your calls
late at night? Because I am not
the other woman—

Poetry is.

4/28/89

ONLY GAME IN TOWN

          —for Bruce Isaacson, whether he likes it or not.

In the name of poetry sometimes
we go out of our way to invent trouble:
why we stole a few kisses against
the polite company of wolves,
how the answering machine found us out;
she assumed the worst;
our poems shattered against cold glass—
separating air from air, light from light—
She calls again to rant about bad poets
writing bad poems about who they've fucked.
I can say nothing to soothe her,
to convince her it's a mistake—
this tale only exists on the page.
But I asked the I Ching anyway
who would rub ochre on your chest
and watch the sky unfold blue secrets.

The oracle said, The marriage of thunder & wind
takes place according to immutable laws;
ground water is an invisible army filling the empty places.
It said, Those who run off are permitted to escape.

Like stealth planes flying over occupied space,
we avoided radar detection only to deliver ourselves
into enemy hands. Silos tracking missiles.
I am not another soldier of the Red Army swelling
in the slippery ranks of Stalin's bottomless heart.
We come to understand completion is reached
by systole, diastole: what endures
is merely poetic fodder.

I dreamed my horse labored for breath
as I walked the isolated beach
calling your name to the empty wind;
my dead grandmother came to take me home—
there was nothing left to eat but spoils.
Who sings in the night—wolves, or the wind
tying gordian knots? Escaping us both,
you've gone into exile, a half a year and a world away.
Late at night, the phone rings. No one the line—
your old lover and I keep in touch.

4/23/89

L' APRES-MIDI

L' APRES-MIDI

     —For Bruce Isaacson

in homage to Robert Sund & Georgia O'Keefe

You have found me out,
slipped in clean as a knife,
your poems lucid as a white room
in late afternoon where
I want to stand before you
pre-architectural. Slip off these words
into something more comfortable,
reveal the inner curve of femur,
the hollow of pelvis framed
against the purity of desert sky
& feel your breath sing against my ribs.

Where my breasts flowered
your disembodied hands harvest
brilliance arcing on blank pages.
We burn against the night's silence
lost, looking for home.
I taste your words on my tongue,
dreaming them as if they were alive,
incandescent as flanks of white horses
in the rain—your poems shed light,
nuzzle breathless in my ear.
It's not so much the words themselves
but the way they touch
the muddy river where, for a moment,
our tongues found truth hidden in the roots.

There is a curve of eyebrow,
an alluvial valley that speaks
of such tenderness, we turn stones,
& turn them again. What does it matter
if the sun will die, your kisses like stars.
The physics of writing consumes us.
Not ambivalence. Not the other sin.
It cannot hide serpentine from the river—
the brightness from within—a burning moth
circling the pale fire of your eyes.

You tell me : too many loves in our past
& slip into the Paris night, well armed,
calling it by the clear light of poetry
because love also requires such brutal attention.
Can one name the instant when the heart
of the untamable beast ignites or dies?
Afraid of what it might be,
in the naked room, what are we then?

4/18/89

YET ANOTHER POETRY READING

YET ANOTHER POETRY READING

                     Sex is like a glass of water.
                        ——Alexandra Kollantai
                          —for Bruce Isaacson

You know it happens each time I read poems
about sex & death in the afternoon.
One poet or another wants to follow me down
the smooth truncated saplings of bar stools,
& small infields of hallways & closets—
Call me on the carpet saying, You need a good man.
It's been 6 months & at the erotic poetry ball
the last barbarian in black leather
& studs sweet-talking me in Spanish
tangles up the night in my blue silk dress,
saying, I know you. Verdad?
We neck a bottle of chardonnay & steam up the sunroof.
Not quite unrequited lust in the cab of a pick-up.
Who's keeping score? You get to second base,
I steal third but home is an illusion.
Where does Einstein sleep? We confess
our tongues collude at the speed of recovery. Besos del mar. 
When you let down my hair, tuberoses, primordial
star-scented edens fall beneath your knee
giving up their bounty all at once——both acrid & bitter.
There is a fine line of distinction between perfume,
the sweet smell of decay & desire deep in the jungle.
Statistics change with each cycle;
we continue to make love in the mirror
of each other's eyes but I've prepared for this by eating
Russian chocolate in late afternoon.
My girlfriend's pissed, waiting out in the cold
for us to stop all this sexual innuendo
so we can go home saying, You straight women are all alike.
Men come first. Says you're trouble with a capital “T.”
She's right. I want to ride you across wheat fields
of midsummer Russian steppes,
Tchaikovsky's violin concerto
plying more than sum totals of notes or words.
You want to follow me. Down the road, headlights
never abandon us though we travel at a snail's pace—
breaking speed limits tho not the speed of light.
If sex is death, let me die a little in your arms again
because death is dressed in violets, the color of mourning
but I've said this somewhere before in a poem
to another man. Where does consumation begin
or conception or addiction? If it weren't so late
in the season we could listen to the rain on my roof
but the tiny dog-faced violets know the direction of dawn
without knowing the concept of east or death or spring
training. In the ball courts of Chichen Itza,
the gods wait for the climactic ending; both teams
lose their heads but I lose your address.
Poets are cheap. We will do anything for a good line.
More than once I've caught our names coupling in print.
It's beginning to look suspicious
& we're always the last to know.
Tomorrow we will wake up pretending it was a dream
but our words unzip the secrets of the universe
& we come down so hard
even the Milky Way screams, Galactos.
If you look closely, you can still see the old moon
on the sidelines coaching the new moon to steal home,
saying, Slide, slide. The bases are loaded.
It's an easy victory.

4/9/89