Less Dove than Doubt

Pursue her heart?

You lack the art. Can’t play the part.

Under her oppressively alluring spell,

you handle very little well.

Love? Less fluttering dove

than shuddering doubt. A candle

burning yearning out, a pallid sputter.

Love makes you stutter.

.

Evolution of a Bedroom

above: in situ on Facebook. below: cut and pasted here.

Evolution of a Bedroom

The most recent "on this day" reminders Facebook has been coughing up included, today, pics of my first onerous trip to Ikea - which I made a year ago. God I hated that place (tho thank it on my knees for my bed!). But as I thought of the bed I love which I got there and the bedroom I love that it's in, my memory's dominoes tumbled further back to the plans I'd drawn for my-home-to-be a few months before ferrying in the cold to Ikea Hell.

I love looking at the drawings I drew. Because they turned out to be of what's here now! To all you architects and contractors and interior designers, this would be daily fare: drawings (duh) become reality. But to me! - and especially because the architect who thought they were fine is a Yalie (among whose impressive architect grads I know more than a few) - hooo-eee did this ever seem not only like a personal best, but evidence (which god knows I tracked and reported every bit of here) that this thing WAS going to happen. So the grim memory of Ikea (which again I bless) spawned what I feature here: this visual depiction of the Evolution of my Bedroom. Which is to say, the creation of a kind of heaven.

The pics: first you'll see the library I slept in on east 10th street for a long long time. It's a kind of rich Edwardian excess, like the whole rest of that apartment was, something I liked a lot - once loved a lot - enough to think I would still probably engender some version of it in any new home. But oh, the more THAT notion ripened, the more it rotted. I do not (it turns out) LIKE Victorian/Edwardian clutter. And this had been that, god knows. So the difference between that shot and the solo shot of my bedroom next to it mostly underscores the blunt fact of that shift. I am in a clear well-lighted large space and in the 9 going on 10 months I've been here I've not deposited anywhere in it ONE single blobby mass of piled stuff. So it turns out I really do like it this way better....

But a bedroom is more than space, open or cluttered. And to have a studio AND a bedroom - is to be granted prospects of personal life which still seem beyond luxury to me. That they reflect me in essential ways - and are so different - describes another kind of richness: whose divisions proceed from gentle separations in me -- what I guess I must always unconsciously have intended to be reflected in the identities of each of these rooms. To know the luxury not only of being able to shift your energy from one space to another, but to have that space welcome and make an exactly appropriate body for it - well, I don't know, maybe all you guys out there have long been doing this, particularly if you live in actual houses, but to me it's new stuff.

It isn't new stuff that New Yorkers tend to create wonderful personal spaces. I've long maintained that New Yorkers who love New York (ergo who stay here no matter what) know how to create home almost instinctively - partly the instinct of self-preservation: you need a haven here - and (it turns out) I need a haven here not least, dare I use a word I mightily dislike, "artistically" - which is to say, to have a place that invites me to make manifest in very specific ways those particular portions I glean daily from the enormous content of the city's glory. New York is like a great big Id. It requires a supple ego to learn how to be a generous but discerning arbiter of what gets 'in' & played with - to moderate the city's overwhelming DRIVES - and for that, you need a 'home' which embraces and encourages - not generally, but which does so for the specific eccentric peculiar YOU. I know so many people - I'll immodestly claim I've been one - who've made studio apartments seem like les enfants du paradis - 'children' (if you can call homes that) of each of our very particular sense of - (only word I can think of) - the sublime. (Dick Bories, Reed Woodhouse, Donna Boguslav, David Schechter, Frank Koumantaris, Rick Shupper - oh so many others! - I'm thinking of you.) You don't know you're in a 'small space' - even if by a tape measure somebody decides it is one.

This was really true of Quentin Crisp's home. Like Whitman, it contained multitudes, but they did not swamp you. They were the visual & spatial reflection of something that you experienced as indistinguishable from what you knew of Quentin's core. And that was one amazing core.

Anyway, this is very heady stuff to the likes of me. Which is why I've gone on about it now and probably will continue to do so for the rest of my wackadookacockatoo existence.

.

Here, Gone

Hush! Watch! Barely touching,

hovering above the skin, a fingertip 

attunes and wields: though

fingertips know more about the skin 

they cause to blush, of course, 

than what the skin conceals.

Someone else just riffled through

you like a random breeze – tickling,

teasing, breeding weakness

in the knees. At times like these

you wonder if the wonders never

cease. Of course they don't –

and this one won't, although already

it kaleidoscopes to memories.

Touch withdrawn: here, gone.

.

How Abashed One is to Find Oneself So Easily De-Boned

Terrible to sever heaven from a heart –

although as you succumb to understanding

what had just lubriciously colluded with your hope,

maliciously created this scenario, this promise

of alluring interlude, the prospect of a lover who’d

convinced you he would prove to love (or anyway

pretend to) just enough to stay the night – at least

you’ve learned, with all its yet and yet and after,

severing’s a cunning art. Again (you dope) you lost

the part: cold-shouldered by the covert soulless

laughter in his eyes, despising, through a show

of caring for, the profitless silly scene of you.

The putative love would not remain.

Queasily quick, it crashed in the brain,

left your unusable body behind,

un-drained, maligned, disowned.

How abashed one is 

to find oneself

so easily de-boned.

.

Do It For The World

What to do today? Put yourself on display!

What could be better to do

for the world than to give it a view of you?

.

How Could You Not?

She committed her audacity now thirteen

years, six months ago. What did she know

when she was dying? – at the edge of dead,

lying comatose in bed – too bewitched to say?

Now you pray in January for a mystic snow

to freeze the moment that she’d died: to numb

the heat she didn’t feel, then couldn't feel,

to clarifying cold. (Outside, July had fried.)

She did feel cold. Remember when she told

you to turn up the heat (diction elegantly neat):

"How could you not? It's freezing!" Appeasing

dying bodies isn't easy. “How could you not?”

she’d asked, with careful syntax, even now,

unmasked. In your dream's Sargasso Sea

last night three women's heads arose in front

of you. Only one appeared to notice you.

They didn't look like her, but they were she.

(After “were” not “her” but “she.”) But they’d

not come to lecture you grammatically, much

less to tease or pique. Death doesn’t speak.

.

how does one pronunce "mais ici" en français? do you elide from "mais" to "ici"?