They betrayed you, didn’t they? Everyone marching you down the line from birth to death used you even as they propped you up, the precious rag doll with the delicate fine porcelain mask you were. Your feckless foe and charms–your beauty and your sex–betrayed you. How could you know?
I could imagine your life that way, narrate it so. Or I could finger-trace the lines of the stolen silken bodily moments with your lover–impassioned with danger and secrecy, danger of the war with impending loss of your lover and the father of your child, as well as the secrecy of your affair. Your story. Who were they to take your lover, your secrets, your letters and your world with so little regard, to throw you in a prison of injustice and debt? The iron of your manacles was brutal in hypocritical cold, the jailers murderously callous. They took your love, money and life. I hate them.
I dreamed your dream once, was your dream, a sister from ecstatic vision and prescient sight, warming your mind like the lynx enwrapping your belly. The sweetness of half-lit rooms and pleasant chaise-lounge velvet bethroned bodies bathed in halogen bulbs of passionate witness. Give me your seed. Implant your vision of Veronese wood tables engraved with curled tresses that beckon our baby’s bonneted hair and make my cells crave yours in hours of the early morning upon awakening from suffering sleep. I ache. Take me with you. I will dust off your prison hurt and make your beauty mesmerize love again.
I cannot face the blank page. I close my eyes, fingers frozen above the keyboard in readiness to strike the letters that form the words that fall into sentences, sentences to paragraphs, filling the blank with black. Writer’s block again. A surprise text from my beloved interrupts my agony as does the barging into my room from a disgruntled teenager who loudly complains she waited hours to no avail only to be denied the very coveted object of her desire, a new phone.
The phone rings and the voice to my ear asks me if I’m working. No, how can I? I ask where s/he is, s/he who must sneak love in a shoebox and an envelope of emailed bathroom love notes so the wife and children will not know. I love my love in so many ways: the sharp wit, keen pragmatic wisdom and common sense beyond most and all the while sentimentally apt to fall for a romantic tune and a sway dance, singing and sighing, even as s/he urges to bite and confine me with the unparalleled force of painful passion, the one s/he loves, destroy and own me. S/he is almost home, so s/he whispers a quick “I love you” and s/he is gone. The silent space fills the room. The laughter in the next room disrupts the delightful pain of longing. My life as me is a rocket ride of amazing torment and painful contentment.
The life of a mistress is one of denial, of empty space to be filled with fantasy of future memory. Her profile reveals a deep desire for punishment and deferred pleasure. She is judged and typecast as the scorpion fly, the Lilith of Eve’s prize, ever in human consciousness, but in reality, she is as fluid as the stories she floats in and out of, the ever flux of human flesh yearning for more in the quest for meaning. She provides links, fills hollow caves with patches of light, just enough to see the illusion of shadows. To judge is to play the fool.
Joyce Carol Oates in her essay, “They All Just Went Away” ponders the tendency of women to hurt themselves, to give up their space in deference to others. Each time I read this essay in preparation for class, I sink into her words.
Above all, the real is arbitrary. For to be a realist (in art or in life) is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are. That there is no design, no intention, no aesthetic or moral or teleological imprimatur but, rather, the equivalent of Darwin’s great vision of a blind, purposeless, ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no ‘products’–only temporary strategies against extinction.
I think of humans coupling for love, marriage and children as survivalist needs for safety, security and self-perpetuation. Passion, however, is relegated to the realm of possibility and unpredictability. Sacrificing security is painful but paramount for passion, sometimes a worthwhile tradeoff. The mistress seeks and provides pleasure where safety breeds contemptuous boredom and the cancerous kill of the fire of desire, but there is a cost.
As a woman and as a writer, I have long wondered at the well-springs of female masochism. Or what, in despair of a more subtle, less reductive phrase we can call the congeries of predilections toward self-hurt, self-erasure, self-repudiation in women.
While the empowered mistress writes her role as protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain, and sadist and masochist as she loves with abandon and shadows love, aches in abandon, the nature of the mistress is often one of self abnegation and longing desire; threadbare hope and the coat of imagery warm the space, but the intangible is the self-inflicted torture, passion without presence, longing. She waits alone. This masochism is also the source of creativity of the writer. She, an other in self abnegating aloneness, borrows mystical moments of self-evisceration–the awe and radiance of others’ pain and joy–to disappear in their destruction and reappear in their resurrection Phoenix-like from the fire since passion burns born in torment. She is both agency and objectification, the meta-narrative of reading the reader reading the writer.
The writer is a mistress, with her drive toward self-punishment, in writing absolution and taking on the sins of others; she creates in hardship and pain, in triumph and longing desire, her shadowy figures tasked with completing the possibilities of the what if and should not. She is judged and critiqued. Her life drawings show us who we are. Sometimes she shows us what we don’t care to see or even dream. S/he tails the taboo.
Yet what could possibly be the evolutionary advantage of self-hurt in the female? Abnegation in the face of another’s cruelty? Acquiescence to another’s will? This loathsome secret that women do not care to speak of, or even acknowledge.
I don’t know. I won’t be judged. The mistress and the writer are independent and free to choose their stories, write them with the beginning unknown, the ending imagined and the middle lived suspended in the shadow of the snip of the scissors’ ever-so-slowly closing blades.
Shadow Dancing
Your silhouette twirls me in a pony skirt umbrella.
I falter and still to take my bow to your dark smile.
My fingers fondle high cheek bones of ionic spin.
They poke through to the wall behind you in jest.
I stroke you yet thumbing the thin strands of hair.
You hover in my chest and feet dancing me witty.
Though silence spaces the crackled sonic voice.
It fills dark deep dread of distant lost connection.
So electrifyingly fill my ear in warm static breath.
Sigh trigger heat-pour down from my neck to toe.
Body-sense wisps of thin caress a sweet timbre.
A hand in tones transmitted in aural wood chime.
Shade palms settle upon the dip of my shoulders.
They soft sweep across the bones tracing burden.
Feather touched windless air drifts across my face.
I fall back into the deep curtsy of a shadow dance.
The song circulates my bloodless fill of time spent.
Memory kissed moth flutters of your lullaby sweet.
Twenty moons shine liquid ether ossify you to me.
How does it feel to be stuffed in a box
un-Houdini-like in chain-full eye locks?
How does it feel when you try to get out,
to be sealed up despite all your shouts?
How do you see shred of light in a crack
when dignity shards slice into your back?
For pain is a powerful dictator and names
are but words with swords slain too true.
How does it feel to be told to be enough,
to be more so you become the right stuff?
How does it feel to be typecast as a “girl”
when desire opens as ship sails unfurled?
How does it feel to be set up in the scene,
your role cast as the naif of ever green?
For prison is the picture someone holds
whether true or false that can’t be denied.
How does it feel to forfeit claim to the self,
your skin adorn-worn like an animal pelt?
How does it feel to be stripped naked down,
a number-tattoo name on all that you own?
How does it feel to be absorbed in an idea
not who you are nor what you hold dear?
For murder is the mayhem of false claims
and stolen names and imagery of a body.
Come to me
Be in me
Lie by my side
Thumbnail my spine
Soft-brush my face
Look in my eyes
Finger-loop my curls
Ear-breathe my sighs
Toe-touch my heels
Elbow my side
Arm-snuggle my neck
Chest pound my breath
Come to me
Be in me
Lie by my side
Miss Carly is large and wide and witty in frills and curls.
She laughs her great big O lips open like sails unfurled
Revealing white washed toothy rocks beneath the bow.
Sweet meats and candied nuts, she eats stern to prow
Slicing, chomping and dipping her pain in syrupy swirls.
Her heart is big and soft and fat like the sloop of a smile.
She loves with cloying quotes of snips of poems in piles
Atop a pine dresser of smoldered stains of incense stubs.
Fond of scenes, the woman shouts, “Aye, there’s the rub!”
For no known reason nor time and place, none I reconcile.
Miss Carly is single and lonely and sad in her loft on high.
She peels the pity from artist friends like lemon to rind
Causing some internal cringe and outward nervous laugh.
Prizes, patronage, palimpsestic poems and photographs
She gives, sipping sweet tea afloat a sailing ship of sighs.
Her sunsets painted and sea becalmed, her puppet primps.
The magic made by canvas painters, mere circus chimps,
Is poor compare to bread and cakes Miss Carly foreswore.
For she is set on turbulent vomitous seas to settling shore
To lose her sea legs, her fine girth and sycophantic simps.
Some might call you a rapist. I know you thought yourself one long ago, but funny how that doesn’t matter now. You were an enrapturing Minotaur, as graceless in body and limb as you were fluid in serum tongue, like mercury measuring my heat.
I was an older child (who looked like you), as you were too in retrospect, only much older than I though not so today. You merely sketch the outline of adult now in your busy importance.
Back then, you taught me heavenly hurt love, called me Lady, read me the mythological scenes of poetry penned just for me, the words mere song seeping into my uncomprehending color-less imagery. It might have been Frost or some other celebrated required reading poet; I know not now and memory is a poor substitute for imagination, but I knew there was magic and I was enchanted–lying on your cot, head cradled in the tee of your forearm and elbow, both of us facing the opened pages held fast above our upturned eyes and the Beatles Rubber Soul album playing “Norwegian Wood” softly below the bass hum of your words.
Staring at the mind-image that was you while in my basement bedroom reverie, I later wrote you letters of teenage wonder and blossoming wander lust and…just lust. Truth is, we were narcissistic flings, a trip into fantasy backpack floats through alpine crests of European mists, of narrow cobblestoned canals and sweet Portuguese Porto, a tent, a station, a kiss, a forest fuck, all for the flavor of black and white romance in tender hearts of sweet meats and fleshly oats of breakfast cereal dreams.
I want to write about you, tell them how good you are
Seated on the stool beside me in this old seedy bar
Where I feel like I’m the only one here on Main Street
As you dip me in dance-sway, swinging low on my feet.
And your wife is home waiting not knowing I even exist.
You tell her you’re working late-early to cover our tryst.
Even to my husband’s mind I work long for me and him
So he thinks nothing of my telling him, “I’ll be at the gym.”
The kids know no better since they have their own lives.
With need for money, your car and someone who drives,
Kids take your cash and don’t care much for your advice.
They say you don’t know their friends or music or minds.
Now you and me we have something surpassing it all.
We have heat and steam and fire inside the hotel walls.
You toss me and I stay flung while you flatten me in bed
And not a thought of her and him or the kids in my head.
There’s my coat, my hat and my shoes for running home.
Here’s my panties, my shirt in the dark room on my own.
I have nowhere to go, no one to confess my lover’s skill.
I walk home alone, buy me a beer for something to swill.
Life as a cheater, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a drunk
Hiding secrets and letters and love inside a rusty trunk.
Lonely as queer loving hags like me with no way home,
We tramp from room to room taking any a tossed bone.
Out of lies and tired of deluding yourself with lusty love,
You leave me, pretend your shiny life is high and above.
But you and I both know that underneath your floor is rot
And grown in the cracks of your loined heart a mossy sot.
So give me your number and tell me your name, my dove.
Show me your smile and your ass; I’ll take out my glove
And wind up my arm to let fly the anger-ful powerful sting
For love is a splendorous obsequious onerous ugly thing.
Held in breath there is yet the wind about her.
She stands with a sway and walks with stillness.
I want to change her shadow in two steps two.
But her gait is slippery in her foggy wilderness.
She waits her turn to pass me without a glance.
Her sleek is smoke and stale beer and wine.
Some reproach her the time of day she sleeps.
But I wake to find her near me disinclined.
Not a chance I have to make her see my eyes.
She travels past herself while others wait to see.
Will she pick up and leave the road she’s on?
No way to swim the future disappearing sea.
She left me there on Venice Beach note-less.
Friends we shared asked about her last steps.
I had no answers to give but to shrug and blush.
Her story mystery lives where she’s air’s caress.
I Long to Hold Some Lady from The Spice Box of Earth
I long to hold some lady
For my love is far away,
And will not come tomorrow
And was not here today.
There is no flesh so perfect
As on my lady’s bone,
And yet it seems so distant
When I am all alone:
As though she were a masterpiece
In some castled town,
That pilgrims come to visit
And priests to copy down.
Alas, I cannot travel
To a love I have so deep
Or sleep too close beside
A love I want to keep.
But I long to hold some lady,
For flesh is warm and sweet.
Cold skeletons go marching
Each night beside my feet.
The scene is set in this song from the outset, longing for a body, any body (some lady) of not just the female kind, but one ascribed “lady” characteristics, suggesting manners and carriage, not just woman, which is neutral along the lines of female, a mere nominative term. In just the first line, a reader can see what Leonard Cohen is about in this song. Him.
His use of a mistress, the one night stand, a body, for his purposes, whether that is sexual or inspirational–the muse–is obvious. He refers to what he desires as “lady” and “flesh” and “bone”, which suggest the physical body and sexual desire, but he also uses words like “distant” and “perfect” and “masterpiece” along with religious figures of pilgrim and priest, suggesting the female figure as muse, on her pedestal, in his mental loins, a mere image for idolatry. But in the end of the poem, it becomes clear that woman is merely a placeholder for his own masturbatory lovemaking, the love he cannot travel to as it is so “deep”, I would posit inside of him, is the love of a woman….because he is so busy loving himself.
Leonard Cohen’s image as poet-lover is not unknown to others who know his music and writings, the lover who dabbled with so many women (Joni Mitchell one of the more famous of them), committing to none, and painted them on the walls of his imagination in his music and in his schtick, his gig, the crooner surrounded by the chick backup singers. Whether act or true story of his inability to attach/commit, he is devoted to promoting and expressing that romantic self image in just about everything he writes: Cohen as being Cohen. And that’s not a bad thing.
I like Leonard Cohen’s music and writing, most all of it. He is a caricature of a beat generation figure of freedom of expression and romantic love mid to late 20th Century style. He is historical. The brush strokes of his collage poetry is delicate and flavorful, like his last few lines: “For flesh is warm and sweet/Cold skeletons go marching/Each beside my feet.” The contrast of warm flesh, evoking the blood and bone imagery throughout, juxtaposed with the cold skeleton, life and death, is stripped purely in binary anatomical, biological terms. The romantic notion of craving someone gets reduced to blood, bone, and death. It is not macabre so much as a revelation that the “lady” was a mere idea in the first place–mistress muse of his imagination.
One may begrudge him for being a user and abuser of women for his purposes like any rapist, or one can judge him a showman plying his trade full of promotion and self-selfish love, or one can enjoy a poet using symbol and metaphor in his own style. Give him a break? For “there is a crack in everything (and everyone). That’s how the light gets in.”
In the gaze of the other 