PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

That photograph? Oh, nineteen twenty-nine;

the summer just before the market crashed;
and just a few days before our own crash---
before he walked away from me, and both
of us in tears. We said no more: 'twas o'er.
Addiction is a ghastly monster, more---
so much more---powerful than love, although
romantic souls are not inclined to give
even a little credence to that fact,
the central fact of my life, and my loss,
despite the decades that I have been clean.
He was my senior by some twenty-three
years---a poet and a scholar whose renown
was regional (but, in about a year
he was appointed, by the President,
to be ambassador to one of those
small countries that the Nazis would destroy;
or that the Russians would annex after
the war; but you can look that up yourself).
I was waiting a table when he asked
me out to lunch. The courtly way he spoke,
the compliments that rolled out of his mouth
(all metaphors or similes, I think),
his intent gaze when he just looked at me,
and claimed he saw a Beauty that no words---
his, or some other poet's---could describe.
He dressed better than any businessman,
better, even, than any pimp I knew.
And when Augustus, who was, then, my boss
rebuked me for talking too much to him,
he whispered something, later on, to Gus,
that caused the color to drain from from his face,
and nothing more was said about how much
time I spent talking this man whose words
and ways began to work their way into
my heart. Flowers first---some expensive bouquets,
delivered by the florists' boys to me;
and then a book, The Divine Comedy
(I still have it, the only souvenir,
and keepsake that I have from him). But what
did I know of books, much less poetry?
A girl more comfortable in speakeasies
than speaking to a man of learning: what
chance did I have? But he insisted: Love
dissolved the differences between lovers.
And I wanted---desired, above all else---
to think that was a fact as constant as
the evenings' stars. It was not, but I still
pretended so. I told him that I had
two sons---Hayden and Gunther (that was true).
I did not tell him that my parents had
taken Hayden because they thought that I
was unfit to raise him. I told him that
Gunther's father, Merrick, was, then, no more
part of my life except as father to
my younger son. Truth is, Merrick still loved
me---and made awful scenes with tears and shrieks
when I returned home (and I did not tell
this poet who loved me). What good would that
have done?---to drive him right away?---to tell
him that I was unworthy of his love,
because I knew another man loved me,
a man with whom I had my second child,
a man too lazy to keep up a job,
a man who, like a leech, lived off me, just
so I would have someone (other than my
parents) to watch Gunther when I was gone,
to work, or to those precious afternoons---
when poetry made itself tangible
in kisses and caresses, that were bound
by promises and plans we made for life
together. All the time I spent with him,
I loved him. Only when we were apart,
too many things pulled me too many ways:
Gunther, for whom I would have sacrificed
my life; the asshole who had fathered him
(for whom I would not give a pile of dog's
poop), and who wore the predatory mark;
also my parents, holy rollers, both,
whol often told me just how damned I was.
And when they met the poet, their contempt
was openly apparent. He just laughed.
I think they thought he must be like the others
with whom I had associated since
my adolescence, but his qualities---
which they had hardly any chance to learn---
were greater than anyone's whom I had loved,
or had befriended. They never knew this.
He brought the stars down to lay them before
my feet---which he preferred unshod but sheathed
in sheerest silk, and I obliged him, often.
That photograph---we brought a picnic lunch
out to his cousin's farm, which had been held
by his ancestors since decades before
the colonies had separated from
England. I had climbed up to sit
upon the old stone wall. Laughing, I posed,
with stockinged feet, through several photographs.
But still . . . no matter how bright was the day,
the shadow of addiction still lurked close
to me; cocaine, worse even than bootleg
whiskey or gin; the plague of opium
had sunk into my body. He did not
suspect how often I had whored to earn
the money for a dose, how much I had
been raped by men who paid me well to rape
me without fear of reprise. Once he asked
me how I liked to be loved, and I said,
gently the way a girl might love a girl
(yes, I had some experience with that,
too, when I was nineteen, it came to naught).
And he promised to love me gently, like
a girl, despite (he laughed) the clumsiness
of most male bodies, including his own.
One night, as we sat in his rooms, before
a fireplace (record cold night of July),
he knelt before me and slowly unhooked
my purple stockings from the garter belt's
clasps, and rolled them down, and off, and then
he kissed and sucked my bare feet, taking each
toe into his mouth. How I gasped and squirmed
with pleasures I had never known before.
I would have torn my clothes off for him then;
but, just as that thought crossed my reeling mind,
a message came from Merrick that Gunther
had taken sick, he thought (might be the flu).
A hunters' cadence pounded in my heart.
I went home, and my son had not been sick.
It was another ruse, another way
for Merrick to detach me from the love
with which, he knew, he never could compete.
The end came shortly after that. One day,
a Wednesday I think, while we had lunch
I asked him to stop by my apartment
that evening, to meet Gunther and to spend
some time with us. You would have thought that he
had won some grand prize in a lottery,
so happy he seemed. But, an hour or so
after, when he came back to pick me up
from work and take me home, I thought about
what he might notice (for his eyes were quick,
his senses, all of them, acute and keen),
I told him that we needed to postpone
our evening, just a day, so that I might
clean up the place. Hurt anger crossed his face
for just a moment only, as he asked
me if I was still serious about
our love. Of course I was, I answered back.
More silent on that drive than we had been
on any other, we said our goobye
until tomorrow far more hastily
than we had up until that dreadful day.
Later, I found a note, penned in his hand,
delivered to my box. In it, he said
no easy way existed to tell me
that he could not see me any more.
I wrote my own note in reply and sent
it by a messenger. In it, I said
"Say no more, tis o'er," what a bastard rhyme
it was, but those were the first words that crossed
my mind. I did not plead with him to give
me one more chance. I knew, then, that he knew:
that he had figured out the small, sly clues,
the differences between the said and done.
however slight and miniscule they were.
He did not seek me out again that proved
he knew. I did not seek him out again
to prove that he had been correct. My friends---
who had told me how fortunate I was
(even skinflint August had declared me
blest to be loved by a man like that;
"worshipped" I would have said, did it not sound
so arrogant)---were oddly silent in
the face of this. Even the poet's daughter,
whom I had met and whom I thought a friend,
did not communicate, but then, I did
not even ask her to help reconcile
her father and me, although she knew more
about him than anyone then alive.
Each day after seemed longer than a week;
of tedium; each night seemed longer than
a winter's chill and darkness in the far
north. Then October brought the market's crash.
Having a lot of nothing I did not
lose much more than that, but some of the men---
to whom I had prostituted myself---
lost all they had. A couple, cowards both,
threw themselves out of buildings to smash on
the sidewalks, with their debts and messes left
for others to clean up. At the next
election, voters turned against Hoover,
and tossed him out, and brought Roosevelt in.
And Roosevelt, wisely, appointed the
poet, whom I had loved and hurt so much,
a diplomat. The Senate did not block
what it considered such a modest post.
He served in Central Europe seven years,
returning to this soil in time to die
before Hitler invaded Poland to
commence the second world war. I went to
the funeral, just one more mourner quite
unknown to anyone there. Once a week,
I visited the grave. My sons often
inquired about that, but I could not tell
them what had happened. I bought all the books
that he had written, and many of those
that were written about him by scholars.
Alive he had been formidable, but
deceased, his reputation soared. His poems
were taught to college students, and disputes
about the meaning of this or that line
filled academic journals. The love poems---
noble, but filled with an unspoken grief---
stood as a towering mystery (for whom
were they composed, and about whom? they asked)
on which college professors raise careers,
and students' dissertations won degrees.
I know the truth of this because my son,
Hayden (the older), earned his P H D
with such a paper, because he had known
how much his mother had admired the poems.
Four decades have past since I loved that man.
And heroin still wrecks young people's lives,
and steals the love that they may have enjoyed.
I am an old woman, not beautiful
and not desirable. Soon, I shall die,
having remembered every day since then
of what I lost, how much I lost, and why
I lost it. The Love Poems declare the tears
he shed for me, and I have been punished
a hundred fold for each and every one.
He would not have demanded that for me,
but I would yet demand it for myself
I wonder if Dante had thought about
a circle, in the lowest depth of Hell,
for those tormented by their memories'
perfect, precise, and sharp accuracies.

Starward