The Brooklyn Rail

KAY

You and Mike were the supers in our building in the Cass Corridor, and all three of us were poets. You were a young woman from cornfield Minnesota. In Poetry Detroit, I find a couple of your poems from the ’70s, both expressing a need for silence and a spiritual connection with the earth. In late night phone calls, you’d listen to my new poems. One day after I threw my manuscript in the garbage bin out in the alley, you convinced me to go back for it. While digging around, I found a bag of antique women’s clothing. In a swishy dress, I coaxed you to leave your baby with Mike and go out with me to Alvin’s. We liked the sound of the words when ordering—Give me a scotch on the rocks—but in fact neither of us were drinkers, both easily tipsy. We flirted with some friends at the bar, like the characters in my poems—that night I was tough Lorraine and you were the vulnerable ghost girl out on the town. A guy I was seeing walked us home, and you remind me in a recent phone conversation that we stood out front of our building taking turns kissing him. We were happy to get home safe. A few days later, I turned off the bath and went back to the typewriter in my bedroom to change a word in a poem. A man was standing in the middle of the room. I pivoted, crumpled up the poem and ran. He chased me out of the apartment, locking the door behind me. “My children.” Half dressed, I pounded and screamed. Neighbors came, you and Mike came, a body builder from another apartment broke down the door. Miraculously, the children were still asleep, and he had gone back out the window. The next day, you helped us move upstairs. Not long after that, I moved to New York and you moved to Romeo, north of Detroit, a small town for a small-town girl.

 

 

H.D.

You were almost six feet tall and very elegant. Your first boyfriend, Ezra Pound, named you H.D., but sometimes he also called you Saint Hilda. You travelled to Vienna for analysis with Freud, and he helped you recover from a nervous breakdown, war terrors, writer’s block and discomfort with your bi-sexuality. You called him Papa. In ’81, my professor, Charlie Baxter, suggested I read your epic poem, Trilogy. At the time, I was a bit skeptical about the religious figures. Even though I was raised Christian, and my mother had visions of Jesus calling her when she was ill, I regarded religion as an illusion, maybe necessary for some, but not for me. But your figures were not exactly religious; instead, they were part of your personal mythology, along with the Greeks and Egyptians. The poet Barbara Guest explains in your biography that the angels and religious figures “were always present in an unconscious nourished from childhood on Moravian history and doctrines.” The Moravians were a small pacifist protestant sect who had settled in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where you grew up. I can’t help but wonder if these figures wandering around in your unconscious also may have contributed to your nervous breakdowns. After living through two horrifying wars, in Trilogy you make a plea for peace and for the scribes, the poets, to be recognized, to prophesize, to learn from the ancients. After all, destruction from war wasn’t new, it had happened before. And it will happen again. The lady comes, carrying a blank book. Isn’t that your book? Isn’t that you? The lines of the poem slowly emerge on the pages—like a palimpsest—gods, goddesses, angels, wisemen and the women around Jesus meld one into another, like a dream, as you call forth with your word-alchemy the feminine principle, to create anew with wisdom and love the creation continual, and this knowledge is passed along through the ages, by scribes, artists, magicians and by you, to all of us, the poet’s dharma—a half-burnt-out apple-tree / blossoming

 

 

MAUREEN

In ’88 Lewis asked you to write a blurb for my first book, Smoking in the Twilight Bar. Over the years, we hung out at poetry readings in New York, Tucson and in Boulder. While we were teaching for Naropa, we talked on the phone for hours. The year before the pandemic, in our seventies (both with grown children, and grandchildren), we circled the country on a reading tour. I taught you yoga, and even though I try to be optimistic, I had to keep up with you, especially in Albuquerque when my lungs didn’t like the altitude, the cold air and the dirty hostel where we were staying. I couldn’t breathe, and you helped me carry things upstairs. You could stay up all night talking about poetry. Once we sat in the Walmart parking lot, making tempeh-tuna sandwiches on a cutting board, and we laughed at ourselves. Problems? Sure. Someone was always in a hurry, someone was irritable, someone was snoring, someone forgot to take a photo, someone said something to hurt the other, someone needed to be alone, someone was cold and there weren’t enough blankets, someone was worried about what was going on at home. But look at that mountain, that cloud formation, the wind turbines, those poor cows corralled like that, clink clunk, someone’s shoulder caught in a cramp, someone wants to eat real food, someone wants to kill the bully, but someone is a pacifist, someone needs to write alone, someone needs to be alone. Now I call you up if I can’t think of the right word. I say that all my relatives died around my age, and you advise, that’s not the way to think about it, Barb. I had trouble sleeping, but you could fall asleep anywhere. Two months in a car and fifteen poetry readings later, at the end of the trip, I was camping out in the room in your basement. When I went upstairs to ask you a question, you were in a U shape on the sofa, sound asleep. Another time, you were leaning on your mother as she gazed out the window, sound asleep. What a gift, to be able to sleep like that.