I would say something is brewing inside. I was going to say something stirs but that's from somewhere else I can't bulls-eye, but brewing inside, that's the thing. Something like sadness and joy.
Oh, it's here, ready, electing itself. Lucy’s tattoo, lines from Elizabeth Bishop, years before I’d come to love poetry, and I was mad, that she’d felt so much loss, been hardened by someone, and mad she loved that ferociously, the way I wanted to be loved and the way I wanted to be loved by her.
Half of myself is on him, someone I'm newly loving, waited a year for this moment and what a gift, I want to say, but it's beyond that – it's finding the thing you thought was lost, or you didn't know you wanted and needed, like loving Lucy after I thought, after Kellie, I thought it wouldn't be possible, or for me, to love again, romantically, which at the time was the only thing I thought love was for/about/the subject-object. So, this guy who I met unexpectedly, besides me, reading to us, my life twisted into this moment.
A break, to ask about how he wrote his poem, “Unexpectedly”, about his family dog, him, wife, daughter, the dog dying after a grand mal seizure, his tears, the lake of deep blue inside – the way it transfigures his face, the way I want it to keep going, to keep rising on up inside, up and out, erupting like I want to erupt, the loss of Lucy, the love we shared, the hatred of our failure, the letter I wrote – all the things I loved about her, all the things I hated that blocked us loving each other – the thing coming to me now, the hairs on my body standing in recognition, the thing I said to her after we met my friends at the bar on Chapel Street no more than a month into knowing each other, this, the first time I said it, "I want to shout from the rooftops, for everybody to hear, I love you Lucy T", how she wanted me to tell her again. How the next morning, in bed, hungover, stomach troubles at that time undiagnosed, the stomach turmoil dominating, my necessity of using the bathroom in my studio apartment, its horrific location opposite the Murphy bed, my knowledge that I would not and could not use it while she was there so I sent her home somehow, in my actions, distance, pushing her away, and it's my stomach I blame and choose to locate as the source of my distancing but I cannot say it wasn't fear, that her love would smother me into oblivion.
And it's not that Lucy was “the one”, she wasn't. A decade later I know that now. No-one is, no-one can be, there is no person that is an answer to a question that I once had, “who will complete me?” and I am not the answer to someone else’s question either.
Back then I was wearing it, proudly, my ecstasy and relief and explosion of finding who felt like my twin, separated, unfairly, the joy in finding one-another, then the grief, it wasn’t enough, our respective boulders to the giving and receiving of each other, these just contours though, a tangent to the Big Thing – that it happened, that we did it, we touched perfect love, the oneness the Buddhists speak of, we saw it in each other, a mutual recognition. For so long I blamed myself for our inability to continue life together, to forge a shared living. I know she hated me for my failures, my boulders/obstacles. I feel her here now, in these tears, in the breeze licking my arms, the small bursts of wing and private language around me. I know she's here but doubt says I’m making it up. Doubt says she hates me more than she loves me. Doubt says something even more obliterating, I’d settle for hate, but not this, not indifference. And I both loved and hated myself for this almost obsession, the question of “why?” dominating my life for a decade. Time seemingly out-sizing us, Lucy and J, that's what she’d call me, my own special name. I belonged in her mouth.
Back then I was wearing it…
and here is where Jake, who’s name I now know but didn't a few minutes ago, he's where he asked in the middle of that last sentence, who are we and what are we doing up here, and I resent, for a few moments, the interruption. I resent the pause then reversal of tears, then I start talking about why I'm here. He asks more beautifully curious and therefore loving questions, and I feel myself relax into this moment of meeting, out here among the streams of sunlight, mountains. I tell him that I knew, in the first five minutes of meeting JJ, I knew he was a person I needed to be around, wanted to be around. I knew he knew something precious about life and gave it away to whoever wanted to hear, and it's not like a lecture or philosophy or anything didactic, imparted from above, it's just in the way he lives – how he radiates love, how unafraid he is to live it, how in fact he seems to celebrate it, our aliveness, here, now, how nothing has to be eliminated for this celebration to occur. That's why I’m here, I tell Jake.
Jake that’s why he writes too, to help kids like himself who’ve had messed up lives, seen a lot of shit, he says. I nod, he clarifies, I grew up in the foster care system. My mind quickly flashes on abuse of all varieties and I feel my heart reach out to him. I feel something like gratitude, try to tell him, comes out not in the way I mean it, which is, I love you, Jake, and on behalf of all the kids who didn't know they needed your translation of hardship and survival and love into language, thank you, for loving them, for loving yourself, thank you for your love for me right now, as fleeting as I know it will and must be, for now, anyway, and I pause thinking the thing with Lucy has passed, only to remember what I wanted to tell you, about the necklace I wore every day, the necklace that saw her every day – it was a kind of amulet for me, a bronze pendant, wolf paw-print on one side, wolf head, staring straight out, on the other, the same paw-print that a few years later Sarah would get a tattoo of, to remember our brief romance in Tasmania, the same necklace I would lose, the one possession that was my most loved, most treasured, lost, and here Elizabeth Bishop comes back, first seeing the book among the others that he, JJ, would read to us from in our class on the porch of the Range Rider Lodge in Silver Gate, Montana, just outside of Yellowstone – and of the poem tattooed on Lucy’s ribs. I tell JJ the only lines I remember and he tells me the name of it, because he has such a reverence for poetry, such a love of life translated into language, into art, into love. These are the lines I remember*.
losing you is not so hard to master say it (Write it!), like disaster
Love,
Jed
*original poem by Elizabeth Bishop here
Postscript: there’s a poem I wrote immediately after this piece, which is a kind of accompaniment to it, and because I will submit it for publication in a litmag, and because litmags don’t consider poems previously published in public places like Substack here, and because I still want to share it with you, I am making it available in private, for paid subscribers.
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