Road weary, after a long weekend away from home, I slept until 9:30. I'm sure I was asleep by midnight, nine hours' sleep is atypical for me, a sign I'm truly tired, and I did not get enough sleep at the CPITS conference. I took a nap as we drove home, what funny dreams I had of Arthur Dawson, just now coming to life.
It was after the CPITS conference at Walker Creek Ranch that I first began to have prophetic dreams about him, which, to my consternation, came true as we walked up the path to the reservoir. Pieces of the puzzle fall into place, telling me that this man will have a significant impact in my life. Pay attention.
I'm still trying to sort out what he is to me besides a CPITS poet that I've trained in the 1980s. We've known each other for ages, but it wasn't until three years ago that I let down my guard, and we began to know each other personally.
The problem with my attraction is that he encompasses all my male qualifications. But he is happily married to Jill, whom I also think is terrific. So I keep my distance, afraid something may begin, that shouldn't come to be.
I remember Ken Larsen saying he didn't think that Arthur was my type, when I confessef that I had a mad crush on him three years ago. And I think he meant Arthur wasn't as strong-willed as I am. Perhaps I'd walk all over him. I don't know I haven't seen that side of him, but he is constant and determined—like water at a steadfast pace.
He keeps a light hidden under that exterior and there is a lot more there than meets the eye. You have to look closely. He doesn't brag or do the all those male things to boost his ego, and is therefore much harder to read.
Anyway we went to Sanger together, sharing the driving, and we shared a cabin, as we had arrived around midnight in the rain. We didn't talk about rooming together, it was just understood. Nothing happened and we made no passes at each other, we just couldn't stop talking, and laughing all night long.
We spent a long time downloading the personal stories. So many of our stories were based on other stories to preface it. It got to the point that I had told him so many things I couldn't remember what I'd said before. So we devised a cue, to ward ward the other off, saying Cut if we'd already heard the story. And we mostly talked about our travel adventures, and funny incidents on. And we have been to so many of the same places: an obscure lake in Ecuador, or a remote Indian village in British Columbia etc.
At one point near Los Banos, I laughed so hard, I wet my pants. I did have a full bladder at the time, and the name of the town didn't help I'm sure. I had an attack of dyslexia, incorporating odd words. I can't remember how I arrived at Robert Floss for Robert Frost. We were talking of chance, deciding which road to take, John Oliver Simon and I used to flip an old coin at the crossroads, or at the X or Y roads. And the chromosomes too.
I got a card from John from Colombia. Arthur and I discussed the difficulty of finding good traveling companions, nothing like a third wheel. How he describes most people he's met on the road. And in two years, he's done a lot of road traveling with Jill. I miss traveling with John, it's what we did best together.
I think when Arthur and I both went through our mother's deaths, I had already gone through my father's, it forged a bond, a common experience. That opened us up to all our vulnerability. He and Jill invited me to a day of the dead celebration. I didn't go, in my collective grief, I withdrew. In my vulnerability I couldn't succor comfort there.
But hey I'm getting too serious here. What I want to write about are the funny incidental events from the weekend.
Saturday night we didn't party as we were very tired poets. We read poems and then drifted off to bed. Arthur and I decided to go hot tubbing, talking up a storm as usual. I felt uncomfortably fat, so I was hiding my body. Perhaps there was a sexual awareness growing between us. Arthur tended to keep a larger distance than when we were clothed.
Naked he is very beautiful with his curls, and his Davíd mouth, and I think of the Greek statues, and how the half-life of his skin takes on the quality of polished marble. I know that my breasts are beautiful in the gloaming. And the water is too hot so we perch on the rim and chatter on.
As we make ready to leave, a deluge of rain pours from the sky. Not standing on ceremony, I grab my clothes and streak across the back patio to the main cafeteria, buck-ass naked. He has a raincoat and dresses in the rain, wrapped in the towel. Organized. I watch him stop at the gate to retrieve something, he stares at it a minute, making me curious.
We stand underneath the eaves watching the sheets of water cascade from the sky. We could be in the tropics, it has that feel to it. It's like Tikal in the rain. He hands me my underwear, saying, You might want these. I'm embarrassed. I could have sworn he had a funny look on his face. Perhaps there is the temptation there after all. Perhaps I imagined it.
We navigate our way to our cabin and the road is underwater. We skirt the issue taking the high ground and head toward the lights shining warm in the velvety darkness, like moths to the incandescent glow of skin and cabin lights.
There's a settling in, and the acceptance of a bond between us, we never name nor define it. I talk of a piece I'm writing on quantum physics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, I explain that in by the naming of a relationship, we change what it is, or what it isn't. We meddle with the outcome. The dilemma of seeking clarity, versus the acceptance of what it is, screws us up every time.
In this way I discover his father was a physicist. Los Alamos. By this time I'd confessed just about everything about Mary Walsh and the Manhattan project and he thought his dad might be able to get me information on her. In this telling of relationships and quantum metaphor, I describe my prose poem,
The Arc in the Dark of the Year, but I could also be talking about relationships existing in a parallel universe.The possibility or the existence of a deeper connection on another plane of reality.
He reads me a poem on physics, it's wonderful. I reach for my poem only to find he put my bag on a chair across the room. Since I'm naked under the covers, I don't want to get up or make a mad scramble for my nightgown. We'd already gone to bed once already, and turned off the light, only to get the urge to read more poems to each other.
He says want me to get it for you? Which is ridiculous, for it's on my side of the room, and he's in his underwear. He is a little too tongue-in-cheek teasing me over my false modesty based upon shame, because I think I'm too fat (I'm not).
We are already naming things and I didn't want that to happen, not with him. I preferred the ambiguity of potential. But by teasing me, I remember three years ago, at a CPITS conference, we were dancing so hard that runnels of sweat trickled down our bodies. I'd had a migraine all day and was dressed in sweats, not intending to dance. So I fashioned a sort of halter top from my sweatshirt, with sleeves tight across my back, and the body like a bib across my breasts.
We were dancing so hard, he was spinning me like a top, our arms sliding in and in and out of knotted formations, until we were a Gordian knot. He was spinning me until my sweatshirt threatened to take flight across the room, causing a stir of excitement in the room with the men loving the potential of dancing breasts.
I was Phaedra unveiling my charms, but then shame crept in, and I struggled to be modest, which only made him spin me even harder. Was I imagining a glint in his eye? The enigmatic man had more pique then I gave him credit for. Titillation?
Again, the fear of defining it comes to mind and thus changes the reality of it. I reneged on reading my poem, rather than have him cross the room nearly naked to bring my poems to me, naked in bed, and therefore opening up that door of possibility—for that was what brought into circle, the focus that we were naked together in a bedroom, the thin distance of twin beds and the potential of two people reaching out to touch each other like God and Adam in the Sistine Chapel that spark of inspiration. Subtext and context.
Me, the older and theoretically wiser one, at 43, he's 37, six years younger than me, trying not to notice his body. Surely he sees my eyes slide over his body as we lie in our separate beds facing each other.
Do I refuse to see that his eyes slide over me and that I try to remake the intention of his glances into something asexual. That I cleanse myself of impure thoughts as if I were both the cause and the problem, with only myself to blame? I caution myself, put unchaste thoughts out of my head. And turn out the light and think about sex to the tattoo of the married rain. Is this a one-way attraction? I want to be able to deliver him home to Jill touched, untasted which I do manage to do.
Does she worry about him? I think he is a faithful man but perhaps infidelity has never arisen though they've been married for years. I detect a small glimpse of her when she touches his knee as she retrieves the phone. I make my escape, hugging him on the porch, and driving home into the night, knowing that they will make mad passionate love within the hour while I'm still driving home, and it keeps me safe to drive home like that, in the darkness, in that final darkness.
On Saturday night I told him about the prophetic dreams I had of him three years ago and how they were coming true, there were several clues this weekend. Things I couldn't dream up. The clincher was when he handed me my underwear, it was as if the gods transpired against us to break our vows.
On the way home, we stop often Isleton for a platter of crawdads and beer collecting our own On the Road memories. The waitress mistaken us for lovers, neither of us bother to correct her. It is our secret. As if we couldn't ignore what continues to stare us in the face, to tempt us.
I have trouble keeping my thoughts pure, as if he could read them. I reveal my my Catholic self, the pagan self smoldering under that brassiere, or jockstrap of faith. She hands Arthur the check in saying he wins the prize for being the best looking man in the dining room, we're alone in the dining room, and I add, And at the bar too, for that matter. It just slipped out, I hope he did not hear it.
Because we are not used to each other, we are not always in sync, but we quickly adjust our rhythms to match. It's most noticeable when we sing, and already I know the danger of singing together, for Oleg and I once poured our souls into each other until passion took root and consumed us, forbidden in the face of marriage vows. Separated wife or not. To give into something greater than the self, or to observe the rules and customs of the potential world when in reality moral valves have little to do with sexual appetites.
Steve Garber who cannot resist the siren call, has been married for years. We stopped at the Kings River on Sunday morning. Veronica Cunningham, Steve, Arthur and I stop for for lunch and goodbyes at Piedra, a crossroads on the Kings River. Steve confessed that he's often been unfaithful to his wife, as if it were something out of his control, and perhaps it is. I don't want to know this.
Over the years, I have felt his eyes slide over me, and carry on, but I am not his type, and that shields me from his sexual indiscretions, but by rejecting his amorousness, I also avoid that coldness and distance that he is capable of, which frightens me.
I am somewhat flattered by his sliding eyes and certainly have done the same to him, but I am immune to his kind of man, for our minds haven't made love. That click hasn't happened, and I feel I have to slide up and down a theoretical dance pole searching for the right notch by which to communicate. I am shy of him, and that distance is a protection.
In his confession he becomes more vulnerable, and I like him more for it. Perhaps there is a foil of antagonism between us that this allows us to become closer. I value and appreciate him but I am also afraid of him, for if he were to pursue me, could I resist him? On any or any man that I am attracted to?
Then there is the notion of attraction, containable to a degree, the flirtation a booster adding a false piquancy to our interactions the old carrot tease at the end of the donkey stick.
It's not love, but it does make us glow from within, and brings us joy. Is that such a sin? Who'd have thought that I have would have so much trouble with the ninth commandment coveting another woman's man? I guess it's something as old as humankind, this coveting thing.
All my men belong to other women Jim, Trygve, Sean, so why not Arthur? Because I know Jill, and it seems they are have a happy marriage. The others are always in a state of limbo. Jim is on-again, off-again with Nancy, Trygve, the same thing, and Sean is separated. All of them are in flawed relationships. So it's easier to pretend all of this is merely in my head, putting the blame upon myself, rather than opening up to the potential.
Besides, I think if something were to work out between us, the mutual guilt over Jill would erode and destroy what little potential for happiness we might have had as a couple, for he is the kind of man I would really fall hard for. There would be no turning back.
Could I just have a little fling with him and be satisfied? It's possible, but the seduction is in the giving of everything, and holding nothing back. With the others. it's merely transitional; we're not talking of the kind of love that requires that you give up everything. So we practice denial, and call it friendship, and let it go, until something else comes along to strip the pretense away, leaving us naked after all.
added 11/17
