This weekend had to be one of the most lovely weekends I've had in a long time.
It began with Lori, blueberries, and a bookstore. Then, rum and poetry. It's a true friend of mine who will read poetry to me while drinking rum and pineapple juice. Some people want sex with their alcohol. Me, I want Apollinaire and Piercy. Sappho and Dickinson. I want words tilting off the tip of the tongue, touching the teeth, leaving lips formed in o's. (Lori is quite good at forming her lips around odes.)
As the evening lengthened, I sent a tipsy Lori home to ready myself for a date. Yes, a date, my friends. Anxiety and reluctance accompanied me in my preparations. There is nothing that will make one feel so much their worthlessness as meeting a new person. Exhaustion, more than anything. Stuttered thoughts, renunciations of confidence: that was how the date began.
There was a bowl of coconut chicken soup, shared, while the sun silhouetted Shannon. Then, we went for ice cream. The rum from earlier, and the long week, made me heavy, made me exhausted, and my anxiety pulled me even heavier. The night, however, rebelled in its youth, refusing to yield to the mundane pressures of human weariness, so I invited Shannon back to my apartment for a movie.
After the movie, there was a bit more rum. My poetry books, however, remained closed. My body, however, opened to the possibility--the potential--of creating my own poetry with a soft and pretty woman. Oh, but the body is a fickle, fickle element of water and earth--mud. The body is not always wise. The body leaps, while the mind is still obsessed with the gradients of an uneven landscape. My body or my mind? Which should it be that leads me? (it is the body that is natural, isn't it? the mind made of cruel and uneven shards?). Of course, in the end, it must be both--the body and mind and this combination could be conceived as heart, but I will tell you now, that my heart has been eaten and it lies at the belly of some unfathomable demon called myself.
I said to Shannon: What I'm about to say is completely uncharacteristic of me. I do not want anything serious, but I'd like to kiss you. Can I kiss you without stirring up uhaul issues? Would you be okay with that?
Yes. Nod. Agreement. Sex. Good sex. Passionate, soft, poetic sex. A poet should not tell but show...but I'd only write abstract metaphors for weightlessness, and it's the flesh most want, after all.
One night turned into a weekend of skin to skin and sleeping (barely), cradled. I have needed this--what Shannon gave to me; what I took for myself. After J., to be held just so, through the night-to have arms wrapped and tangled, lips bruised and raw from want was to be awakened like a Grimm woman. Throughout the waning nights, I gently reminded Shannon that our sex was casual--that I couldn't commit--that I won't commit to anything more. Be careful of your emotions, I reminded her gently at one of the softest moments, reminding myself, as well. It is easy to fall into softness rather than exist uncomfortably within yourself, and I am enjoying (enjoying?) my discombobulated, solitary state.
But, even so, I liked Shannon more than I meant to like her, and we've agreed to continue to see one another, casually. No promises. No commitments. No entangled, thread-bare promises. My mind�and heart�and more silent spaces are elsewhere, now--where they should be, I think.
In the midst of my weekend with Shannon, I spent time, also, with Tiffany. We drove to Amherst, and although it was too late to visit the Dickinson Homestead, we walked the streets, took photographs of one another, and went, near twilight, to visit Emily Dickinson's grave. I became overwhelmed. I became lost in such a depth of feeling that to translate it here seems too powerful, still, for me. I will write, however, that Tiffany left me alone at the grave, and there, sitting behind her tombstone, I read her own poetry to her and wept. And when I could not read any more, because my voice was cracking, I thanked her softly--she has saved me from myself many, many times.
As night fell, we left Amherst, and we were escorted to Boston with fireworks on the horizon in small towns and cities along the way--each point in the horizon held possibility just as my thoughts turned in every possible way back to Emily Dickinson and Lori reading poetry and that one particular freckle below Shannon's right eye.
And last night�last night, I completely immersed myself in the ocean for the first time in my life. The sun was setting, and I came, again, into poetry.