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It started
out as two poets flexing their writerly muscles.
Dueling banjos.
alchemist@boreal.bard.com:
spring
crashed into summer
late
last night with an amazing
electrical
storm I wish I could have
saved
for you.
carpetbeater@foundation.jp:
It
reached me.
For
the past 24 hrs.
I
have been
writing
obsessively
about
storms.
I began to
sense a body of work emerging from the correspondence.
History
is full of such examples.
The correspondence
was fruitful and brought us closer to wholeness.
(I would like to return to those times.) We became mutual muses.
But then, muscles relaxed and what modesty struggles to keep concealed
was let loose,
carpetbeater@foundation.jp:
i
have known 54 year olds.
have
seen their graying hair
and
broken backs,
their
battles on all fronts.
have
seen the way they wear
experience
like layers of cologne.
these
are men who know how to waltz.
you're
so handsome,
I
can't take it!
alchemist@boreal.bard.com:
i
have known 33 year olds
have
seen them upside down
tying
knots around my ribs
like
fingers clawing at forever
carpetbeater@foundation.jp
oh,
jesus....
and like the
waxy-petaled hedges in the courtyard here,
carpetbeater@foundation.jp
al,
take some some good bread,
well
buttered,
cinnamon-sugar
on top—smell of gardenia
something
like that:
spicy,
warm, luscious
and the iris
deep blue in the glade of striped maple there,
love bloomed.
carpetbeater@foundation.jp
Such
a turn-of-the-century romance,
Internet!
We're
so 90's, aren't we?
alchemist@boreal.bard.com:
except
for temperature and humidity
we
know little
beyond
our imagination
of
you me and this
carpetbeater@foundation.jp:
If
I were one of those
frou-frou
drinks
with
the little umbrellas
at
that Polynesian place
on
Route 1 in Saugus,
I'd
be the "Kamikaze".
What
kind of frou-frou drink are you?
alchemist@boreal.bard.com:
i'd
be the suffering bastard.
your
inconsistency alarms me.
carpetbeater@foundation.jp
Al,
You want consistency?
I'll
show you consistency!
Tuesday,
meatloaf;
Friday,
fish;
Saturday,
intercourse;
Sunday,
mass.
There—-happy
now?
You see me
as a free radical because I can jump orbits
and be located in two places at once. Maybe you'd like me
better if I were a neutrino, a nonexistent particle,
with no mass or charge.
I'm a real
physical object, even though I cannot be isolated.
I come in six flavors: up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom.
Yeah, I'm a crazy little quark. Chaos in Khaki.
You seem to have a slower metabolism.
What kind of sub-atomic particle are you?
alchemist@borealbard.com
top
heavy.
bottom
sweet.
salt.
carpetbeater@foundation.jp:
oh,
jesus...
Alchemist,
you boil me down!
Your
writing besots me,
so
simple and spare,
almost
Japanese,
like
my Russian grandmother's
nesting
wooden dolls,
humble
seeming yet
containing
multitudes, or
like
the Land O'Lakes butter box,
picture
of an Indian Princess holding
a
butter box with a picture of an Indian Princess holding...
Your
writing is like
the night sky
in
Nova Scotia in winter.
The
stars come out
and
keep coming out:
Infinity
plus one!
I brought
you a little War Rug to use as a mouse pad.
I ended up
giving it to your wife.
First she held it backwards, then upside down.
I flipped it and righted it for her and she exclaimed,
"Ooh! A lady bug! Cute!"
"Actually,"
I told her, "it's a hand grenade.
It was made in Afghanistan during the war with Russia."
"But
it looks just like a lady bug."
"Hand
grenade."
"It all
depends on your point of view," she said, as if we had
agreed to disagree.
But some things
are non-negotiable, like socks.
It is not easy to find acrylic argyles up there, which are your favorites.
You gave us each a pair, so touching. Then you gave us a table
you made yourself. The table
has no legs, to me it is an altar,
the kind they leave fruit and flowers on in Japanese shrines.
You gave me some pressed flowers from your garden.
You gave my husband a small vial of blue lotion from your own
personal batch of after-shave. What am I to read into that?
Walter Benjamin
wrote, "A criminal career is a career like any
other." You stole my typewriter, infiltrated my mind, abducted my
body,
vandalized my heart, and at certain moments, usurped my own personal
sovereignty but
still, are neither thief, nor rapist, but a saint.
Sometimes
St. Mary Magleden, Patron of Wayward Wives,
sometimes St. Edward, The Confessor.
You are like
a technological innovation, something I never needed, but
once
experienced, I wonder how I ever got by without it. You're a real
bitch, a moist insatiable wench, you muse me.
You asked
me what I want. I told you just this: a moment of grace. Then I
changed my mind and told you that
I didn't want much, only to suck the
marrow from your bones. It would have taken the devil incarnate to satisfy
me, but you turned out to be an angel.
carpetbeater@foundation.com
Imago
Mine,
Was
love for you at first
a
continual toothache of the heart?
In
later years did it become
a
mild annoyance?
The
sun visor is an
old
beloved car:
You
flip it up
in
order to see clearly
as
you drive off into
the
rest of your life
but
it keeps falling
d
o
w
n
alchemist@borealbard.com
how
do you know everything?
carpetbeater@foundation.com
Because
I'm smart, well-educated,
and
I don't live in East Bumfuck!
(I
live in Far East Bumfuck.)
But
there is more to it than that.
If
I know
things
it
is because
you
read the rocks,
I
read you.
"I don't
believe in fairy tales", you said.
"I do", I told you. I have to.
Listen:
Some fairy tales remind me,
writes Czeslaw Milosz,
of driving at night
and having a hare jump
in the path of the car.
The hare had
been
going somewhere but
has now lost
its train of thought.
The hare doesn't
know
how to get out of
the beams of light
so it runs straight ahead.
I am interested
in
the kind of philosophy
that would be useful
to that hare
trapped in that moment
in those headlights.
alchemist@borealbard.com
what
you
can't
supply
is
what
fairy
tales
always
have:
an
ending.
Having met
the Thief off-line makes for a new interpretation.
I wish I had read him more carefully, especially the part where he said,
alchemist@boreal.bard.com:
leave
here
while
your
memory is
still
good.
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