How to Save Your Own Life (37 page)

They dance the dance of dreamers as they sleep.
This dreamers' dance: the pattern of their lives.
The partners change, yet always stay the same,
the partners bow, their hearts collide & break.

Slippers beneath the bed, bare toes toward heaven.
Soles cradled in the sheet, the dancers sleep.
They dream they dance & dance & dance again.
They dream the dance of dreamers without feet.

What is the question here? I cannot say.
I am asleep, my tongue is blurred by death.
I spit the pits of death across the bed.
I love my love, yet eat him while he sleeps.

Death is confusing, life more confusing still.
Alive, we dream & dead, who can be sure?
Since all we have are dreams, let's join our beds.

Not wanting to write
for fear that anything—
the passion for the page,
the love of carbon ribbons & erasers—
will distract me from your face,
from your eyes green
as the flickering base of flames,
& your tarnished copper hair.

 

My love is thick as rust
& just as hard to scrape off.
It glows like the green roofs of Paris:
it shines in the sun like dropped pennies.

 

I fix on your face
until I am blurred & bleared,
until my eyes cannot focus
& all words become one.

 

Oh let me write you into my life!
I am afraid of rust & tarnish,
but even more afraid of this gleam.

 

When my eyes have taken you in,
when my body has eaten
& spat you out,
when my heart remembers to beat
& my fingers remember the pen—

 

will I still remember you then,
boyish & sly—
yet a total eclipse of my sun?

This is the dirty laundry poem—
because we have traveled from town to town
accumulating soiled linen & sweaty shirts
& blue-jeans caked & clotted with our juice
& teeshirts crumpled by our gloriously messy passion
& underwear made stiff by all our joy.

 

I have come home to wash my clothes.
They patter on the bathroom floor like rain.
The water drips away the days till you.
The dirty water speaks to me of love.

 

Steamy in the bubbles of our love,
I have plunged my hands into hot water
as I might plunge them
in your heart.

 

After years of spots & splatters,
I am finally coming clean.
I will fly to you with a suitcase of fresh laundry,
strip my clothes off, heap them on the floor,
& let you scrub my body with your love.

As we bought the furniture
we thought it would root us together:
every chair would be a child,
every mirror a glass for our passion,
every painting a patch of cracked wall
covered & covered forever.

 

But now we are moving on—
& all our treasured junk
which seemed so solid, so unmoveable,
is like ashes in the fist of a mourner
outside the crematorium.

 

Scatter it over the sea!
I am moving to a bare house on a bluff
overlooking the Pacific.
I will furnish it with the multicolored love
of my red-bearded, green-eyed lover,
with the crushed kaleidoscope of our passion,
& the bottle glass we find along the beach,
& the pure unclouded sunlight that we pour
over & over each other.

 

If we don't have a bed,
we will make nourishing love
on the sunstruck kitchen floor.
If we don't have a chair,
we will rock
on each other's thighs.
If we don't have a table,
we will eat out of each other's
delicious bodies.
He will lick honey from my cunt,
I will cover his cock with jam
& suck it off like a hungry baby.

 

Take the desk, the analytic couch,
the posters we bought in dead Vienna.
Take the scholarly journals, the brokerage receipts,
the money, the money, the money,
& churn your worthless stock.

 

Put coins in your pocket;
they will not buy you love.
Make a blanket of bonds & passbooks;
they will not keep you warm.
Quilt yourself over with checks;
they will not bounce for you as I did.

 

You will be solvent & sane
huddled in the coinage of your coldness—
but I am gone.

In the redwood house sailing off
into the ocean,
I sleep with you—
our dreams mingling,
our breath coming & going
like gusts of wind
trifling with the breakers,
our arms touching
& our legs & our hair
reaching out like tendrils
to intertwine.

 

The first time
I slept in your arms,
I knew I had come home.
Your body was a ship
& I rocked in it,
utterly safe in the breakers,
utterly sure of this love.

 

I fit into your arms
as a ship fits into water,
as a cactus roots in sand,
as the sun nestles into the blazing horizon.

 

The house sails all night.
Our dreams are the flags
of little ships,
your penis the mast
of one of the breeziest sailboats,
& my breasts floating,
half in & half out
of the water,
are like messages in bottles.

 

There is no point to this poem.
What the sea loses
always turns up again;
it is only a question of shores.

—PABLO NERUDA

 

Now that you're here
I'll have to finish the book
on my back,
hard to write love poems
when no pens flow up,
hard to write love poems
in the midst of it,
hard to write at all
with you in bed.

 

I used to fill
my empty bed
with words for you.
Simile sheets
& warming metaphors.
In the caesura of our love,
I wrote to you.
I linked our thighs with words;
our hips pumped ink.

 

Now we are living by the sea—
which has no rhyme.
Now our bed is salty & the sheets
are printed with white messages.

 

Only the ocean exists—
& you & me.
We write in foam
upon each other's lips.

We used to strike sparks
off each other.
Our eyes would meet
or our hands,
& the blue lightning of love
would sear the air.

 

Now we are soft.
We loll
in the same sleepy bed,
skin of my skin,
hair of my head,
sweat of my sweat—
you are kin,
brother & mother
all in one,
husband, lover,
muse & comforter;
I love you even better
without sparks.

 

We are pebbles in the tide
rolling against each other.
The surf crashes above us;
the irregular pulse
of the ocean
drives our blood,
but we are growing smooth
against each other.

 

Are we living happily ever after?
What will happen
to my love of cataclysms?
My love of sparks & fire,
my love of ice?

 

Fellow pebble,
let us roll
against each other.
Perhaps the sparks are clearer
under water.

At the furthermost reach of the sea
where Atlantis sinks under the wake of the waves,
I have come to heal my life.

 

I knit together like a broken arm.
The salt fills in the crevices of bone.
The sea takes all the fragments of my lives
& grinds them home.

 

I wake up in a waterbed with you.
The sea is singing & my skin
sings against your skin.
The waves are all around us & within.
We sleep stuck to each other's salt.

 

I am healing in your arms.
I am learning to write without the loss of love.
I am growing deeper lungs here by the sea.
The waves are knives; they glitter & cut clean.

 

This is the sea's surgery.
This is the cutting & the healing both.
This is where bright sunlight warms the bone,
& fog erases us, then makes us whole.

After the first astounding rush,
after the weeks at the lake,
the crystal, the clouds, the water lapping the rocks,
the snow breaking under our boots like skin,
& the long mornings in bed . . .

 

After the tangos in the kitchen,
& our eyes fixed on each other at dinner,
as if we would eat with our lids,
as if we would swallow each other . . .

 

I find you still
here beside me in bed,
(while my pen scratches the pad
& your skin glows as you read)
& my whole life so mellowed & changed

 

that at times I cannot remember
the crimp in my heart that brought me to you,
the pain of a marriage like an old ache,
a husband like an arthritic knuckle.

 

Here, living with you,
love is still the only subject that matters.
I open to you like a flowering wound,
or a trough in the sea filled with dreaming fish,
or a steaming chasm of earth
split by a major quake.

 

You changed the topography.
Where valleys were,
there now are mountains.
Where deserts were,
there now are seas.

 

We rub each other,
but we do not wear away.

 

The sand gets finer
& our skins turn silk.

It's never easy for me to reread myself. Thirty years after writing
How to Save Your Own Life,
I find myself blushing. Of course Isadora Wing is my doppelgänger. Not everything that happened to Isadora actually happened to me, but it might as well have. I ask myself how I dared to be so vulnerable, why I was such a daredevil in my life and on the page. It was partly my own self-destructiveness and partly the times.

In the seventies, we thought we were going to remake marriage to include experimentation and openness. It didn't work, we discovered, but our idealism was real enough. I miss that idealism. I find these millennial times too cynical. We expect less and less honesty from each other, from public officials, from lovers, from friends. Hope is out of fashion. Everything has been said about the seventies except that it was an exuberant and optimistic time. We thought we were changing the world. And change it we did—if incompletely.

In
How to Save Your Own Life
I used my own life as a template for the metamorphoses that were going on between the sexes. Innocence, adultery, betrayal, and divorce—they're all here. I grew up in a world where women wanted to be Doris Day, came of age in a world where we longed to be Gloria Steinem, and watched my daughter reach womanhood when many of her contemporaries wanted to impersonate Bride Barbie all over again.