Today Written in December 2012

  

About a poem from April 18, 2012

 

I remember being overwhelmed when she sent me this poem, and rereading it all these months later, I understand why.

The poem gives an incredible and unobstructed view from inside her, as opposed to the poems she posts for public consumption, in which she hides the meaning behind clever abstractions, leaving it up to reader to decode.

“I woke at four. Again. Terror filled me, but the faint traces of conversation from the night before jolted me into semi-consciousness,” she wrote. “I haven't showered! He will come, I know, my gut pounded, almost to the point of nausea. I am not ready. But I am. I always was. Even the second I met you, before that. I don't understand, though I understand much, but I understood I had to quiet the doubt, the Past Disappointment and shower, damnit. Just in case.”

The internal monologue style is straight out of James Joyce, the reality and then the unreality of reactive thought, as if the read (in this case me) is inside her head, seeing what she sees, hearing what she hears, and aware of what she is thinking.

“He came. And I wish he had, though he did, and there he was. (Am I selfish because he didn't? I'm getting ahead of myself once again,) she wrote.  “I had set my alarm amidst all my doubt. Three minutes before he texted: ‘I'm two minutes away.’”

BOLT. UP. NOT. READY. WAIT.

“’He has to look Her in the eyes,’ I said silently. It's okay. He's just here to hold me. Keep telling yourself that, Cub,” she wrote. “I was in the midst of utter panic. I did not tell him. I did not have the strength. But he gave it to me when he encircled me with his strong arms and his calm -- though frightened -- voice that would have mirrored mine, if I had had the strength to speak.”

The breathless of reading this again after all that has happened since still leaves me breathless, as if I’ve floated back in time to a more innocent (yet not so innocent moment) carried there inside her head.”

“But all I could do was breathe. And once more, the rhythm of it slowed, miraculous, endearing. The sight of him unleashed a river through the thin fabric of my sleep pants. (Were they sexy enough? Why are you thinking that??,” she wrote. “I tried to face away from the inevitable lip meets, so soft, so in synch with me, so desperate but not needy; wanting. WANTING. Like the forces of earth pushed us together, magnetized our bodies.”

Now, perhaps even then, the tone of his poem struck me a lot like a romance novel, and not one of the suggestive types, but the kind that puts it all out there for you to swallow whole.

“And he touched me in places I so badly wanted but so badly wanted to deflect; for his sake, and for mine. But we could not help it,” she wrote. “God, or whatever resides there above, help us. Forgive whatever it is that is whatever it is.”

Soap opera or not, the rush of it, the power to persuade caught me up and dragged me along on a journey I already knew where it would end us.

My heart pounded in my ears. I wanted so badly for him to be in me, with me, moving in me; spread myself wide open and I let myself. Why?? I don't. Do. This,” she wrote. “It's impossible. But so gutwrenchingly not. Help me. I'm delirious; I have to "taste" Weehawken, but he's tasting me -- my skin, my smell, my sound, my lips, and he feels so good and so right and holy shit my career is flashing before my eyes; his life, heaven forbid she ever finds out. But please. You deny a man his pleasure, you deny a man his obligation to seek it out in other places, my justification-brain told me. Sure. It has nothing to do with your needs, Cub.  Ace NOT in the hole, but in the whole. That'll make it better.”

There is an intense sense of justification here, excusing things because of the desperate need to satisfy the moment, and after so many months of ups and downs and sideways, it is hard to get back to what that moment was and what it meant, although again it was obvious where it would end up.

“But you're already there. You've been there, you will be, it's inevitable and greater than us individually, than our collective willpower,” she wrote. But what to do? I couldn't believe I was so close. ‘This can happen,’ I thought, because with each thrust, each gentle circle of his fingers, his mouth, feeling his skin pressed to mine, my face buried in his neck, I felt the possibility of my own climax. This.

Never. Happens. Please. Again. But please, save yourself.”

The end line is utterly shocking because it comes out of nowhere and yet seems to define it all, like two people drowning in a sea of despair with only one life preserver between them, who to choose to save, and why?

 

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