This Is Why I Loved You

Your opal eyes
Your sea-blue eyes
Your sky-blue eyes
Your ice-blue eyes
Your gray-blue eyes, your periwinkles
Your hazel eyes
Your violet eyes
(almond-shaped and almost cubist)
Your indigo eyes
Your topaz eyes, your sunkissed lashes
Your turtle-sundae eyes.
I loved your black shiny hair
Your turquoise streaks
Your blond parade
(your hair that speaks)
Your red-sown hair
(cosseted in its own knot)
I loved my friends without sorting things first.
I loved your ringing in the ears
Your Rolling Rock
Your rough-hewn jaw
Your three-day beard
Your mercury
Your staggering toward me
in a werewolf dementia
in your navy mugger's cap
(I loved you and would have shown it to the moon)
I loved your nifty pronouncements
that drifted like seagulls over the pay lot.
And later, your country squire's avant garde
Your full-grown beard
Your handsome sons
Your spirited daughters
I loved you because you had good taste.
I loved you because I learned many things from you.
I loved you because you fed me.
I loved it that you read out loud to me.
I loved the personalities of your women.
We didn't lean.
I loved the country you were born in.
I loved its theater and rock n' roll.
I loved your classicism.
I loved earth more than I loved you, first;
I loved the animals, second;
I loved the children of other people in the wildest, most abstract way,
without irresponsibility or possessiveness.
I loved your passion
and your maroon eyes.

Pochoir Prints in the Cooper-Hewitt

by E. A. Séguy (1889-1985)

The woman & he are talking

The man was wishing other men might be able to hear and listen and watch her speaking (like a man), but she looked nothing like a man. She looked animated, even convivial, enchanting, aimless, graced by bullets in her rack of pewter hair, airy, coquettish. She talked like a stock report. He felt like calling his broker. He opened his menu and the topic a little wider: Had she seen Man on the Moon? She had not seen it, but she had watched man walk on the moon during her childhood. Had he read Man on an Orange Carpet? No, he had not read many books that year. It was from six years ago, anyway. She turned away from him. No one she had talked to had read Man on an Orange Carpet. She would keep asking. This woman just stops, he was thinking, just bed hops: she didn't look like someone who could hop, much less crawl. She might be like that: faring for herself on four poster after four poster. He liked someone with more volume than this woman seemed to have. She seemed shouldery. Give her shoulders a good shake when he came back from the bar with his hors-d'oeuvres, but she might think he was a good ol' boy, treating her like a guy. She seemed unlikely to want to be treated like a guy. Not a guy, not a jumpy kitten. A starer at the wall? Do you stare, he might ask her, but it was a rude question, like staring itself, like gaping. She was drifting because he was not acting on any of his impulses, any questions he might have asked to keep the conversation going. What are you thinking, he could ask her, to buy some time. Wine? She let her glass out to him to fill it. It was her second, his almost third.

"Bitter" Revision

I guess let's just talk about it: hope. I guess let's just think about it: money. I guess let's just cut up for an hour or two: nine laughs. Let's agonize about church issues.

I was so steadfastly there, not charging, not nagging, not expecting, not asking, never needing to beg (paid by work), charitably giving thoughts and words and listening out one at a time for two decades. Now I'm old. Men are just starting out on the path of the parasite, the manly collection plate, to increase them, to buy them, to get one, to buy one and take one home, a divorce nuptial, their gaining a girl (again) or this time a hen with a little purse on a little strap or an industrial doctor's bag or a clicky set of equals, King Care.

Ah so, so I look better than I aged. I'm not a cheap date, as I had once made proud of being. I need steak or a doctor's drug to keep my weight from shredding. The Jews eat cattle but not pig; the Catholics eat a bone slice of Him. I try to talk with Him, but he's crowded by insiders. I was a loser. I mention it. I mention liking meals at chain diners as much as meals at good Italian restaurants. The sign of the prostitute is her diamond engagement ring. Gays' "marriage is love" intrigues Greek men upstairs.

I loved without marriage and the men loved without divorce and we loved a twenty-four-year-old eating and how gracious she shone over a tame bottle of beer. Yours is yours, mine is mine.

What did they want the favored ones for? Good mothers. What did the favored ones pay? I was thinking that the feminists pounding the city pavement had increased rent with every footstep, not that I was not one, but we had not earned our money at it or put our money together: "Women" was too broad a category. The favored were coming to buy our men from us, without our sad work we put into it, without the love we showered on them, without the lost decisions we left up to them, as we were practicing, always practicing.

Bitter Tide

I guess let's just talk about it: hope. I guess let's just think about it: money. I guess let's just cut up for an hour or two: nine laughs. Let's agonize about church issues. Let's counter violence with appetites. Let's charitably caretake Wagonmaster's appetite for violence. You spotted him twelve years later, over the phone. You declared you knew all about him, that I had a thing for bad guys, for the violent types. I chided you for not letting me in on your man knowledge, which you didn't. The girls/babes/chicks/shebas were violent themselves or countered none. One had been choked, and I acted like I didn't care. She had not cared when mine had pelted me with the words I had heard come from her, the c word, for one, which I now use about our down theres. My down there (pointing), a genuflection was it before. Now (thanks, gratefully, to Daphne Merken's recent writings about sex) I realize my life as a sexual beggar or beggar who is sexual has only just started. Men want to be paid, and since I didn't charge to now, they are my competition for getting paid; for me it's too late; for them it's just beginning ... the later-in-life male whores, the second act.

I was so steadfastly there, not charging, not nagging, not expecting, not asking, never needing to beg (paid by work), charitably giving out thoughts and words and listening to one at a time for two decades. Now I'm old. Men are just starting out on the path of the prostitute, the manly collection plate, to increase them, to buy them, to get one, to buy one and take one home, a divorce nuptial, their gaining a girl (again) or this time a hen with a little purse on a little strap or an industrial doctor's bag or a clicky set of equals [squeels on her heels, vooz, twos, strues blue true coos, bazooms, shrooms, runes and stoons, stoon dones, les drones, peonies, ponies, phonies, cronies, bone monies, Shoney (a euthanasia), vroge heir], King Care.

Ah so, so I look better than I aged. I'm not a cheap date, as I had once made proud of being. I need steak or a doctor's drug to keep my weight from shredding. The Jews eat cattle but not pig; the Catholics eat a bone slice of Him. I try to talk with Him, but he's crowded by insiders. I was a loser. I mention it. I mention liking meals at chain diners as much as meals at good Italian restaurants. They were putting gas in a car when they fed me: men. Next they will be paid by jerking a guy/by rubbing a guy like a boss they haven't met, their new gal's ex-husband, that is hers by law, but no one views laws that way. The sign of the prostitute her diamond engagement ring. Gays' "marriage is love" intrigues the big guy upstairs. The gays all have good jobs.

I loved without marriage and the men loved without divorce and we loved a twenty-four-year-old eating and how gracious she shone over a tame bottle of beer, even smoking like Uma in the dance number, a bad girl, a girl to get you in trouble with her bad ass black manager of a dad's dad. So I'm broke, on public assistance, diagnosed, barely shouldering, barking and call on you cheated. Yours is yours, mine is mine until death makes its frenzied curtain call over my live womb, then my live breast, then my live neck, and live green eyes, and live midsection and live tail. Eighteen thousand was the most I ever earned in a year.

What did they want the fat ones for? Good mothers. For what did the fat ones pay at the office? I was thinking that the feminists pounding the city pavement had increased rent with every footstep, not that I was not one, but we had not earned our money at it or put our money together: "women" was too broad for our category. The fat women were coming to buy our men from us, without our sad work we put into it, without the love we showered on them, without the lost decisions we left up to them, practicing, always practicing for a bigger better day.

Six Poems

Catnip

Orange fur corpuscle
of instantaneous muscle relaxant

silly little smart one
girl of no big vagina

smells air,
remembers boys from outdoors.

They hook you, you lamb.
Pensive and listening,

leap to the floor.
More catnip, more ironing board.

1986

Graffiti non gratis

Shake with a lemon semen fruit
Lunch inner pocket in egg

Oleo yellow hard flakes
smoothed, anyhow, overspread

Large, disarming candidate
for garbage pail

Not while I’m here

You’re out selecting leaves
for Disney Contest, World’s Fair

I want you somehow more alone
not foreigner, you can’t go

Lunch under hemlock, boy
in upper branches. I’m a little amazed

but you say, I am about shy
and secretly ornery.

1986

a wiener/

a wiener is a lovely thing it fits
a wiener fits in the every/every fit in a wiener
is a lovely fit
a fit so fitting in a wiener is a lovely fit
every fist is worse than every wiener
a wiener is a prize fist/a fighting fist/a fist
and it lies down
a wiener lies
down
to brood
and all the melting in the wiener
broods/and in the wiener sparks and sparks
a moment to climb up
a wiener when it’s climbing/tickles every hair/a hair
on a wiener is a great protuberance in desire
a desiring wiener climbs
in every hair/a hair
on a climbing wiener
is desire

1985

Evening at Christa Forster’s with Tim Liu, Dave, Eddie Selden, and Chuck Scott

How I would like to see myself:

paws
pink
rings
eyes

How I would like others to see me:

paws
pink
rings
eyes

How I feel about sex:

cold
freshwater
white sand
dead fish

How I feel about death:

I didn’t want to get married anyway.
My beauty is wasted.
I’ll take off my dress.
May I put my cigarette out on this floor?

1990

The Question Was What You

7/9

I said, after a tiny preamble, night day, diversion, tactic, yak:

You owe me.
He said, "I owe you what?"
"You owe me either."
"Either," he said.
"Either," I said.
"You owe me a book, a very, very good book, one not easy to demolitionize, or, you owe me a child."
What, he bowdlerized.
Book, I sermonized.

7/11

After a tiny preamble, night day, diversion, tactic, yak, I said:

You owe me.
"Owe you what?" he said.
"Either," I said.
"Either," he said.
"A book—a very, very good book, one not easy to demolitionize—or a child."
What! he bowdlerized.
Book, I sermonized.

The Question Was What You

7/26

Gave me, that was all.

1995

SSMARQUEE.SCR
Hear your dreams ...

In my dream, he and she were screwing, and I was screaming her name.
He came too fast with women who came. He needed one who couldn’t come.

We searched hospital beds for my bald-eyed grandmother.
The word on the street was at ninety she could hook.
She mentioned every cop by name.

1996

F.I.T.S.

I, too, had a great father, and now he is dead. He died in 1992, while I was still studying at University of Houston in the Ph.D.-turned-M.F.A. program in fiction. He was a chief ally in my writing, in endeavor itself. On one of our Saturdays he called and asked, "Do you know who Clarice Lispector is?" He had started riding the bus, tired of driving in from the suburbs and wanting the exercise of walking. He had befriended, while reading fiction by women authors on the bus, a man who was a translator of Clarice Lispector, who rode the bus to the U of Minnesota. Yes, I had heard of her; I had even taught her. I was thinking, Lispector is too little known for my father to be mentioning on the phone, and, even people at my school don't know much about her, yet here it is.

My father had traveled on business several times to South America and had taken Spanish before the trips in order to participate. He had brought back handmade souvenirs and currency from each country. Each time he travelled, we watched his plane take off and land. These are things I left out of my self-presentation in Houston. Rarely were the descriptions of people's fathers complicated. Each woman said it once, and everyone remembered it forever: "doctor," "movie producer," "came over on the Mayflower." I was quiet on the topics of the past probably because I had already written a novella based on childhood and thought I was done with that.

By the next summer (1991) I had been scouring for "guides," books that would let me categorize something I was writing myself. I wanted to know that what I was writing WAS categorizable, not that it wasn't, because I was having a breakdown writing it. I felt that just knowing that it belonged somewhere in a tradition would help me buck up (under the scrutiny of the class who had categorized my short stories as "experimental"). No one else was having a breakdown while attending. Later I heard that one woman had a breakdown (and went to the hospital) after the Illinois state Supreme Court had ruled against her for having used someone's real first name in one of her short stories and a man had had a novelist's breakdown during a fellowship year.

Years afterward, well out of it, I found, a little late, Lispector's CRONICAS, a collection of short "intimate" essays published in a major Brazilian newspaper, Jornal do Brazil (collected and translated decades later by New Directions). Perhaps what I wrote in the early 1990s was most like that, though I had written without an audience, and she had written for a huge audience, Saturday readers.

My father was a microbiologist who visited my fourth-grade class to teach the children about germs, about how germs collect on their fingers, even after they wash, and how these germs incubated in petri dishes and grown in augur sprout fungal clouds, each one a little different like fingerprints. He handed back the kids' germs in the petri dishes on a return visit (the dirtiest of the kids, the baddest of the boys, did not seem riled then by their overgrowths; they thought their germs were THE coolest because the MOST or the BIGGEST). For a prize, he gave each kid a bottle of Tame cream rinse that he had brought in a box from his company, the Gillette Company.

This is the type of memory I wonder about in considering autobiography now: If the children grown were to remember my father's visit to the school, would they remember it as a dirty trick or as a lesson: Germs are all around us, washing only does away with some of them, and some germs are even good or normal. Perhaps one of the kids in our grade even BECAME a microbiologist! He was not doing evil university research or stashing the kids' germs or itemizing them in any way. It was a lab science lesson before we were quite old enough to have lab science. He was inventing Fathers-in-the-Schools ...

Head

Z. is asleep
Z. is sleeping
soft on his Indian-
and-blue-eyes face,
bald as his Head,
bald and personable
as his one-and-truly prick.
Z. is atoned.
Z. is stoned.
Z. is in his 10th Step,
exactly
where he started.
Z. is fortunate,
though not a son
anymore.
Z. takes lewd
suggestions
with little blinks
of his everlasting
eyelashes.
Z. enters nirvana,
not nervous
not envious
of nervosa,
not tanked.
Z. is about right.
Z. eats queens' greens
for a side to his
acorn squash
and pork belly.
Z. misses Miss Ann.

(c) 2001 by Ann Bogle