II. Longing
Returning home
I have no home
Returning to Original Mind
I’ve never been
Longing for embodiment but always a limb
dangling outside the window of a bus barreling
towards an unknown destination.
Your texts picked-up tempo this week.
You made a mistake, you say. Years ago,
you didn’t run away with me.
You didn’t ask.
You’re convinced I’m the one who represents your freedom.
You miss me. You want me. You long for those skinny
long legs you felt-up on a Manhattan bench in the dark.
I let you. I let you keep longing.
Who am I anyway?
Your filmstrip plays on loop and I keep getting hotter,
younger, fiercer and more challenging to your present way of life.
I long for her too, this demanding lady.
She snaps us into presentness and reads us poems that feel like we wrote them.
She takes you to Nova Scotia and sets up a life with you. We roam the fields forever
and the tide is a constant rhyme like making love slowly each morning as the sun rises.
You miss her; You’ve never met her.
You want to hold her and fuck her and eat oranges and say I’m sorry.
Your longing keeps her alive. A picture more high-def than reality.
My father used to call me “Suzanne” from the Leonard Cohen tune:
Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river
She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And when you want to tell her that you have no love to give her
She gets you on her wavelength and lets the river answer that
You’ve always been her lover…
My mom’s version of me is riding a motorcycle in a Neil Young song:
Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a Harley Davidson
Her long blond hair flyin’ in the wind…
Colliding with the very air she breathes…
In college, Dustin used to come over drunk and tap-out poems on my typewriter while I was in the other room painting self-portraits. He called me “Caroline” in his poems and I understood why. I was his Caroline, in my red night-dress and tap shoes, tapping-out my shuffle-ball-change routine on a cardboard square:
Sally-wants-her-change-back
Sally-wants- her-change-back
In astrology, we all have a Rising Sign. It’s different than your Sun Sign.
Your Rising Sign signifies how others see you.
And so, we are very much that mirage-self, that projection, constantly responding to other’s
responses to us. Each encounter a new kneading of the clay of the self until we are left with a
small figurine, an idol, a decoy.
Who won the Trojan war? Nobody knows.
Was it the true statue that was toppled and confiscated, or was it a copy?
Was Helen even there? Or just the idea of her?
You keep texting me. Sometimes very tenderly.
So tenderly I fall asleep wanting to believe you, planning a trip
to meet you meeting her. Suzanne by the River.
Where at last we will live out our days touching earth and each other
or just a few days in a fancy hotel fucking and dreaming and overcome by loss.
