| volume 3 of dames rocket: 1976 march - august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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In this volume I discover Queenie's, the lesbian bar of the time, and with it the lesbian community in Vancouver. Erotic intoxication. Not long afterward I find the lesbian artists. When part 1 begins we have had to leave 2706 Eton St, Luke is still in England, I have just gotten back from California, am living in the Avalon Hotel at Pender and Cambie, upstairs from the Women's Interart Co-op studio, and get to know a hockey player who is a wonderful kisser. At the end of part 1 my first sight of 820A East Pender when I lose a coin toss for it. At the beginning of part 2 we get this Chinatown apartment [where I will live for 25 years] after all, and I paint and repair. In part 3 begin to be aware of my neighbourhood. On a quick trip in Nellie's Pinto to bring Luke to his grandparents in the Peace River Country I learn to drive. In parts 4-6, cataclysm. At an Interart Co-op screening of my film and others, I meet a woman who feels like fate and leads me into a labyrinth years long. Part 6 begins with a warning dream that turns out to be true. reading notes: Octavio Paz, Simone Weil, Armand Schwerner The tablets, Sappho, Violette Leduc Therese and Isabelle, Gertrude Stein, Judith Thurman on Dinesen, Ai in Cruelties, Coleridge, Ursula Le Guin The dispossessed, Joanna Russ The female man, The Portable Jung, Charles Olson, Valéry, Bachelard The poetics of reverie, Le Guin Left hand of darkness, Brigit Riley, Hofmannsthal Letter of Lord Chandos, Idries Shah The Sufis, Sylvia Tyson There is a fountain, Mary Staton From the legend of Biel, Weil Waiting on God, Rilke Book of Hours, Diary of Malte Laurid Brigge, and Duino Elegies, Mrs Willit, Dune, Octavio Paz, Anne McLean Diamond Lil, Michael de Courcy The urban wilderness, Leonard Bernstein. mentioned: Fred Gougeon, Coco, Queenie's regulars ((Jackie, Elva, Mickie), Della Rice, Leah Rosling, Steven Steenback, Nellie Van Leeuwen, Nora Blanck, Paul Kinsella, Luke, Gordon Kidd, Ferron, Gayla Reid, Judy Morton, Holly *, Karen and Lillith, Elaine *, Vera Williams, Jan Abbey, Jean Mallinson, Maggie Shore, Wende Davis, Jane Perks, Judy Ritter, Candy *, Stephanie Judy, Cheryl D, Trudy R, other sometimes members of the Women's Interart Co-op group (Marjory *, Barbara Grieg, Shelley Mackintosh, Phyllis *, Madeleine Duff, Ardele Lister, Judy Lynn, Susan Ksinan, Karen Chapnik, Paula *, Millie *, Judith Sandiford), Nellie's friends and team mates (Carol, Barb, Sheila, Aline, Myrna, Marnie, Laurine, Pat, Padi, Laurie, Ano, Joannie, Gordie, Po, Chris, Sappho, Diane, Cathy, Patrice, Jan, Marg, Mimi, Marilyn), Vic Doray and Norma at UBC Biomedical, Don Carmichael, Joe Comerford, Anna of the Greek Islands restaurant. Pelletier benefit at the Fishermen's Hall, the Gay Caucus, Co-op Radio, Room of one's own periodical, the Berger Commission hearings.
Beverly Simons, Edward Weston, Adrienne Rich Diving into the wreck, Chantale Akerman, Bridget Riley, Gass Omensetter's luck, Anne Sexton, Duncan The HD book, Ann Mortifee, A strict law bids us dance, Journal of Suzanna Moodie, HD, Charlotte Mew, Joanna Field, Oregon Women's Land Trust, the Internationale, Katherine Butler Hathaway The Little Locksmith, Marguerite Duras Détruire dite-elle, Catherine McKinnon She's like a swallow, Beethoven Mass in C. |
Wonderful kisses with a postperson hockey player (wing), brown-faced, driving her racing-back car fast up to the lights like a man, pulling up in front of the hotel and waiting until I'd unlocked the door before she went off with a wave. She kissed with the corners of her mouth too, it was more conscious kissing than I'm used to - suddenly I thought, oh, pay attention. I'd asked a girl to dance, Esther, who seemed frozen for fear I'd try to pick her up and asked another, who wouldn't - and then Nellie sat down like a hockey player in the penalty box, with her knees relaxed on either side of her wrists, and said "I just got back from playing in a hockey game." It's the glamour - I'm telling myself - but the way her corners of her mouth kissed me so carefully - oh freedom! oh women's heads with their clean hair, oh woman's brown neck, oh face like I never felt under my fingers before, with a long concave plane from the cheekbone like a shoehorn - oh honest brown eyes - the postwoman who puts her arms around Mary the secretary who is weeping because she has to have another operation on her eyes and may go blind and her husband died ten years ago and she is supporting children - forty year old secretary in a furniture company. - What happens for it to be possible to put your mouth to a stranger's mouth and read exactly who they are with you. I was startled because I hadn't fancied her, I'd felt nice with her, but thought she'd soon bore me because she was being social in an almost jock way, and I was remembering the electrified intimacy - like electric harmonica - of talking to Paul at the Mozart in the morning - and then she parked in front of the hotel door and I opened my door and turned to her and she leaned forward and I kissed her cheek and she kissed mine and she hesitated but didn't push and I was in a flurry of decisions fast as feathers and said, yes alright - and the new feel of her mouth and I'm still thinking about what this is going to commit me to and then all at once I notice how she is kissing me and I pay careful attention and hang onto all the edges of her moving mouth as if I were dancing by standing on her feet as she slowly moves them, one at a time - and she's noticed that I'm there, and I'm squeaking a little and holding the side of her head very lightly, just to have my hand on her head, and I stroke her neck, and hold carefully onto her tongue and roll as she rolls and she's breathing a little raspy and I take a distance and she squeaks too and I open my eyes and see her dedicated eyelids and touch the side of her face and begin to smile because I understand that she's got to me but that I'll feel railroaded if I go home with her - and slowly resurface our two mouths onto our own faces and she says why don't we spend the night - and I say because I'm scared to death I'll end up feeling like I got picked up in a bar. I thought of that, she says, that's why I didn't bring it up before, but people have got to meet each other somewhere. There's a lot of time, I say and it's true I want to think about her and what to do next. - Waiting such a long time at the barrier for Luke to come through - a lovely tall girl all in black, and black stockings, her nose red from crying, standing at the barrier and looking and looking, fearing they weren't coming, and then through the door came a tiny old mama, all in black with a black kerchief, and a tall old dad with a thin fine face like hers, an ordinary East European or Portuguese sister with them - the girl's face was entirely red and I was crying too and Paul was hugging me and laughing. Luke came through at last sitting on his baggage on a trolley. I went round and squatted in front of him just as the woman was saying "Who's going to meet you?" "My mom!" he said and held me tight round the neck. - Comes for us in jeans and jean jacket and scarf, like a well-groomed young man, clean and her hair still wet - she's a dewy white body feeling like no body I've ever felt, her skin tight and like roses, not velvety, but like petals - white except where her face and neck attach dark and porous like a farmer's face - her compact secret body, smaller than me, perfumed with something French - the face and the manner hiding her, this soft-voiced sweet woman, her little breasts like birds' heads pointing in opposite directions. I'm understanding about gay women that the point about them is not their masculinity but the secrecy of their femininity; it is not advertised- - She gives me a look - I say, "What was that?" - she says, "I think I am feeling shy." "Good. Me too. I am feeling it in my stomach." We both look at our plates and drink our wine. "Where are you?" she says. "I'm thinking about kissing you" I say. "Good idea." She jumps up, brisk, and starts to clear the table. I stand around handing her the wrong things. We go into the bed-sitting room where she's turning off lights and replacing the record and I make Luke a bed on the fur rug she spreads. And she takes off her shirt, just like that, and I take my Syrian dress off and there we both are in jeans and she takes hers off and there's her whole white body, legs and triangle of hair and I take mine off too and then what? Brave - her face looms in front of me and she looks at me as I look at lovers - her whole face is a straight line from her center. - Stanley Park, driving past cherry tree clouds like abrupt fogs near the ground. The mermaid, a woman jogger with her teeshirt moulded to her bra, the tall trees, closed tearooms. We're holding hands against Luke's back. Park and go to the zoo, stand inside the monkey house eating popcorn. Luke at the first cage, laughing and laughing at the monkeys, there by himself in her raincoat with a hood and the sleeves rolled up, reaching almost the ground around him, holding a bag of popcorn. We were further up to the darker end, hugging and kissing. Walked the park holding hands, two same-sized women in post office raincapes. I understand all the seeds of hurt and dismay that are in it - already I'm holding back my reaches because I don't want to impress her, want her to keep all the power she can keep - oh, Nellie, in your whole existence, your spirit, your delicacy, with no help from your schools or home - the beauty of your face in the dark pronouncing, in Dutch, the name of the town where you were born, and wonderfully strange in its unfamiliar familiarity. "Rotterdam." Both of us disappear into your mother's story, seventeen, pregnant, shotgun wedding, nine children, crying as she packs to immigrate, fallen uterus she had to put a wooden ring inside herself when she had her period died of cancer of the womb at forty-one. "My bedroom was over theirs, and I could hear them talking at night." We come out of the story in a posture it has washed us into. I'm wrapped around her holding her shoulders and we are perfect. - Dreamed of a roomful of women at a conference, sitting on the floor dressed in Afghani-like silks, brocades, etc. I ask Chantale [Akerman] and another filmmaker "What do you do when you're unemployed, can't make a film?" Chantale replied "I research what seems important to me, I track it down until I understand what it is, in it, that is important." We have the house - visions of white light - old wood - floors under the lino. [820A East Pender] - Fucking as a neural rolfing technique, my head and a strip of lower back buzzing as if the orgasm were trapped there, hands also. What really does happen? Woke light instead of heavy. The fucking cries downstairs coming up clear as music through the heating vent. I stood in the middle of my kitchen and closed my eyes and sang a hymn that vibrated in my legs. Reply to theirs. - Days banging nails out of boards - disassembling, assembling - reading not a word - writing this unpoetic note at the end of the day by candlelight. Pleasures today - Luke coming and stroking my bare chest with the palm of his hand, before I was really awake - Nellie vanished early, and I woke alone clear in my own day - the kitchen has lilacs in it - this morning it had a countertop and the closet was scraped ready to polyfill a little more. Tonight the counter, wet dark and full of cockroaches it was - the little Viet Cock with their thousand eyes watching from the edges of raised wallpaper - is gone and the closet has beautiful brown-black-silver pots on one shelf and white and blue plates on another. Last night when I'd had a little sulk I opened my eyes to see Nellie's face on the pillow looking like the girl on the tractor - "'Nellie is half boy' my mother used to say, and she was proud of it too" - I was vacuuming her into me through my eyes and through hers, I was coating my inside with her like a breath - oh Nellie, and nothing I wanted to say either - just staring into her ravished with love, which is attention - her narrow face, her features all with one push - - Berger Commission hearings on Co-op Radio. A nun from Okallah, fluent and poetic about environment - cedar - the idea of the commission is lovely, a traveling circus in which individual people and representatives of groups of people present briefs, in all their shy or suave idioms, talking about all sorts of issues - what can come of it - will the corporations win? Demolishing the t&g off the side of the building on Abbott - Peter the man with long red pigtails helping, with Maggie's hatchet. These days of immediate tactical concerns - plaster falling down at the ceiling, four rooms and a corridor needing intelligent labour - in what order? all at once? - thought of the poetics of renovation - I like the fixation on material but I miss my intelligence and feel stupid when I stop to write. - Last night we went to sleep with my arm over her. Even in the dark I think of her body as white. When she lies on her back her breasts are like warm stone. Her body holds together, torso in one piece. Mine, when I lie on my back, is like a field of boulders - chest, hips, thighs, separated from each other by spaces where the skin retreats. In bed last night, had a sensation in my breasts like open drawers. Thought of the Dali painting and wondered how much art I could understand as kinesthetic analogy. - Maggie in the big chair away at a tangent, sitting like an old female frog, too much of her, serrated and toothed with her full of feelings hands, salamander, but avaricious, a glitter, a lurk, when I looked at her in the beginning I had to look away, her mouth bare and stretched into speech like a fishmouth. She's not a dry and furry animal, she is one of those who is not slimy but makes us think of slime. She is too much. She read three recent poems, one very fine, another about coming to see me that ended "Do not fold here, do not cut on the dotted line." - Look at myself in the mirror and see how grey and old I look - hand shakes - I am playing with poisons all day - stripper, solvent, plaster, gloss paint - bruises, cuts - forget to eat and have no money for protein - debts, threatening letters, telephone doesn't work - loneliness - Paul away planting trees - rain - can't find things which have no place to be put - am oppressed by just the inconvenience of everything - need looking after - feel too old for the women's community to fancy me - too specialized in my own way to be nice to friends like Judy Lynn. - Nellie comes over and I say "This is Nellie, she's the pilot I told you about." Nellie sits down. "This is also the lady who dumped me" I say. "That's some introduction" says Jane as Nellie flees. I feel much better and buy a beer for $1.25 and tell Wendy the waiter she's smiling again and talk to Tish about radical lesbianism - and after a while see Nellie leave by herself and run after her and she says can I take you home and I say surely and we hold hands through the quiet dark streets and park outside, magically, under a streetlight, so the windshield frosts up while the motor runs - and we're both happy and we still love each other and speak beautifully and clearly to each other and do not fall away, and she says my letter was beautiful and clear and I am happy she understood it, and she says she's been thinking a lot and I say some of the things that have made me heavy - and she meets them all sweetly but honestly and we kiss and hold and desire each other and I imagine a campsite for us and we leave happy in that way and then I have to wake Lilith to get in. - What will happen when I meet a peer? - A little mouse maybe 2 inches long is dodging from cover to cover making its way - where, in this kitchen, for a mouse to want to go? Here he comes back, flashing at four corners like a tiny cart. And into the bathroom - - The bathroom being painted green, and the wood coming clean. And today I bought a very beautiful little picture that was in a corner of a Chinese shop - two women doing something in a field - winnowing? They are so alike they could be the same woman from two angles and in two different moments of her posture - tall sturdy women - faces not visible - negative spaces very strong around them. The skirt of the one who is slightly forward, overlaps the other figure. They seem to be standing in a moment of perfect harmony with each other. They are like two mountains. My mouse just whisked into the pantry closet and I hear chewing. It's the sunflower seeds. S/he threw itself out and around the corner. The women's legs, by their stance, are the strongest part of the picture. Sexy picture on account of it. Also the inner body feels the strength of the legs in their posture. Because the arms are raised something seems to be rising out of the legs, a lift, like something hydraulic, sap - a pressure - low angle - I can feel the lift from their origin on the ground, which is drawn as a flat plane with a suggestion of immensity about it. - A wonderful western light that came in after 3 days of rain. The last rain, hard, was like a rain of light. Padi is gone and sure enough Nellie is interested, wearing perfume again. When I held her and when I kissed her long goodnight I was all there, batting my breasts against hers soft and definite, holding her shoulders, holding her head - heating like an electric kettle, in a steady rise in pitch - oh, oh and breath deeper - wanting, all there - I am a will and she knew, too, what was necessary. "If you wanted me to stay would you ask me?" "Would I ask ..." - stalling - "I think my pride wouldn't let me." Goodnight she said and I went gasping to my bed - touching my own breasts - there's no doubt I crave her bodily - crave and love - but how she bored me, talking - craving her bodily is more powerful or truthful, curiously, and so I do not hesitate to say she bores me. - Spent a day working badly - making holes in the new green plaster - preoccupied with sex - that's what it is? Wondering what the meaning is of the depth of that concentration. My body, when I approach yours ready to let myself out, like a kite, rippling outward but cautiously and with intense attention, does rise, and I like it rising, and when I yank it tumbling down I wonder what sort of exercise it was to rise and what kind it was to yank back. - We made love, and then we brought each other in a businesslike way and then Luke came in and she petted him while I fit myself along her back and resonantly sang hymns of praise - all creatures who on earth do dwell - it was a ringed moment, a completely satisfied peaceful humming moment. How incredible she said and I had a secret pleasure at hearing again her peaceful truthful unevasive Nellie. I went and got her. She agreed to come. - Neighbourhood - rise of happiness when I look around this brick space and see benches, our expanded living room, little light green feathery trees bobbing. Heat in the shelter of some small pines that make the blue sky behind them look like Portugal. Luke is lurking up on the dug hillside irritating me with little noises - a Chinese woman in green trousers crosses the square, her shopping bag creaking - a young man in plastic sports pants and a teeshirt that says 75 on it sat opposite and drank a Coke - a swallow crossed the square 4 inches from the pavement - man in warm jacket carrying a hard hat crosses along E. Georgia - bird chirps - 2 more women (Chinese) with shopping bags - train blast - a boy on an orange bicycle - hammering at the renovation on the corner - blue spire on the Orthodox church - a telephone - regular hammer blows - the train again - a Chinese woman in pink pant suit, with shopping bags - crying children - a man greets her as she goes up Hawks Ave - children's voices - birds - quiet pink of an azalea bush - blue striped sheet on a line, with roses printed over the stripes - blue and orange plastic over, I presume, a boat in a backyard - squeak of a clothesline hauled in - smart young Chinese woman in pink plaid and a Woodwards bag, and her husband following after with 2 more Woodwards bags - white station wagon with a red canoe on it - slow black suit old man in straw hat - black dog - a line of clothes advances across a back yard, shirts and pyjamas - sheets hang like huge flags or signals on a line higher up - sheets like rippling snow on account of their shadows - Hawks Grocery, 7-Up boarded with plywood - a red box trailer nose tilted down at the curb - a Chinese woman and 2 girls - a cough - a white man in a brown felt hat, footsteps cracking on the grit - "Drawin' pictures?" - airplane - furry white clouds - they are in the north as usual - a girl approaching, skipping, with a branch of bamboo like a green torch making arcs in front of her - talking to her friend in Chinese - a boy on Hawks smacking a ball into a glove - the end house, there are 3, grey with cream corner boards and red asphalt shingle roofs - one is checkered with grey and green on the porch roof only - all have chimneys near the peaks of the 4-sided roofs, like stems on apples - the end house has a grey-blue picket fence enclosing a yardful of long grass - I've dried my hair here - Luke has gone off - a non-Chinese girl on a rattling bicycle, with a striped lolly - another non-Chinese girl with a striped lolly, shoving a rattling pushchair with a baby girl in it - a shadow of vapour passing over the page - a cough - selfconscious manly man with grey hair in rigid waves and a hand in his pocket - sound of wind - a car starting - the sheets nearly blown horizontal - Chinese man with a plaid jacket over another kind of plaid shirt - my hand's shadow with an intense Mach band around it - German shepherd lifting his leg over some iris - Chinese man in a jacket with a fur collar - crows - - Waking. Hallway unfurnitured, a paint tin, camera roams it, bits of wood, rags - radio music, but not nearby - child's legs appear, camera finds woman sleeping on the floor, she opens the sleeping bag and lies naked with the male child standing looking down at her - she strokes her belly - he passes into the next room and pees, the camera roams past him and back along to the woman who is putting on a white Indian shirt over her jeans - she turns on the radio - takes one of the plugs out of the wall socket and plugs in the kettle - unplugs the kettle and pours the water in the bathtub - c/u of cockroach swimming for the edge of the tub - puts more water in the kettle - finishes making coffee - the child appears dressed - she turns the coffeepot nicely - puts on khaki jacket with large pockets - in the pockets puts a big notebook and a paperback - takes cup in one hand and coffee in the other - goes barefoot down the stairs, child trailing - clumps out in yellow clogs - down the alley carefully - down sidewalk to park - to seat in brick plaza - pours coffee - child appears with quart of milk and candy - he runs queer barefoot run - his face is dirty - he goes off again - she has book on her knee and scribbles - clogs off feet bare - it's hot - she has on crystal necklace - a young man with a newspaper sits on another bench after a time - look at children and men in suits going to church - another woman in cutoff shorts and a red teeshirt and sandals appears - the child is with her, and he's carrying a Tonka tanktruck - woman #1 gets up and goes to meet woman #2 and gives her a long hug while man with newspaper watches - woman #1 leaves - comes back carrying a tray with coffee pot, cups, toasted homemade bread - sets it on the brick, pours coffee - child says "Ellie would you like a squirt of milk?" and squirts milk into her coffee from the hose of the tank truck - - The sander - my corridor - sleeping last night with polyurethane fumes making my muscles hurt - finished blond clean floor, all one color, making a middle class apartment of my place - counteract with little devices like a poppy seed envelope glued onto a map of BC - in the pouch Nellie's only note and a pelican feather from Mexico. Our house is beginning to be beautiful - the blue in Luke's room. - The joy I felt when she called me to lunch and there was hot cooked food in front of me! Told her how my loneliness made me speedy in the bed building and she said she could tell - by the split wood, crooked nails - sensed that as soon as she came in. - Wonder how many of those six women went home and wrote in their journals, Marjorie, small and today she was bright and quiet; Jean [Mallinson], denim and Indian cotton, blue eyeshadow on, being pretty and her hair blonded, but her face stumbling with pain, secret knowledge of betrayal, yes it has marked her; Wendy [Davis], laughing her braying nervous laugh reading the story of how when she started out simply to get rid of her virginity she ended up engaged; Jan [Abbey] with her grey rigid face and elegant brown hands and feet, saying How do you read when you heart's pounding; Maggie [Shore], the eccentric she is, in weird faded blue summer denims and sneakers and socks and woolly legs sitting knees wide apart and hair pretty around her face, putting her mouth out like a crooked megaphone to speak her poems, she found her voice, as she says. These days there are nectarines in the stores. Jean's divorce poems, all raw; her damage, her happiness in what she reads and thinks. I'm a striding woman in this khaki jacket with my limping silver boots and crowbar balanced on my shoulder. - Nellie - arriving at her house and measuring my wildness against our old adjustments, couldn't look at her out of shyness and lecturousness - she was delighted by some shine my loneliness had given me, a loosened life in my face and heat in my body - there was a passage in our love-making where she had been licking me and I moved so I could be next to her head, and she had 2 fingers inside me and fucked me so rarely we were all inside out to each other pure lamb-peacefulness hum hum hum when I touched her I couldn't compete with her ease and inspiration and I felt sorry for that, but when she came I held my hand on her labia to feel the tick tick of the convulsions. Then we were both transformed into clear glass our best possible simplest most delighted selves and we shone at each other in such an intensity of childish joy I didn't know what to do with it - this human duet - I said, Now we have to get married, because it has to stop - by which I guess I mean we biologically need to turn into somebody else, it is the moment of escaping or transforming, but instead of course we touch the base and go up to bat again. When we were lying on the hallway carpet in and on all sorts of quilts, last night, trouble and drama broke out downstairs - Lillith in new guises, two of them - one the blackmailing hysteria of pretend suicides, the other a good hard bitchy fuck-you secure anger. We were alarmed; remembered our own battles; called the next moves; laughed; and hoped for peace. This morning it's continuing. The point about Nellie yesterday was the way she met me - it was Nellie as promised by the hockey player's goodnight kiss. Attention and aggression in perfect equilibrium. I am curious about how Nellie goes from woman to man and back - when she sat on her bed naked except for her little black dressing gown, she was all girl - I'm trying to remember whether a man at those moments is a girl too - no, there was never a man who could hold the delight as Nellie does . Then Nellie puts on shirt, vest, pants, jacket ,and her face goes severe, she's a close-shaven but weathered man, hands in pockets, wearing a ----? expression - self-enclosed. What kind of man does she look like, not a professional man, a man turned inward, standing with his hands in his pockets looking out to sea, frowning a little, but - maybe that's why she looks like a man - safe in his body, which is not threatened. Body and face both become mannish - she puts it on, with her clothes. It is hard to remember the body she has underneath her clothes. I imagined her differently dressed, to preserve the girl, put her into a halter dress and sandals, but her legs would rebel. When she was girl, she sat with her legs folded to one side, as a small graceful body can do, toes pointed. - A month ago when I sat on Kits Beach, hair on end, Nellie at soccer with Luke, two women passed both alike in short hair dark skin dressed alike too. I stared at them because they were intelligent European lesbians in the uniform of. "You were reading a newspaper and eating yogourt." "And you were with a woman who looked like you - it was a book, not a newspaper, and I was eating cherries out of a bag." I telephoned Cheryl because Mo said she had films she was reluctant to show. I didn't call anyone else on my list. I called her again to tell her the show was on. She said she'd be there. I was at Judy Lynn's party and today roofing in the sun. Forgot. Arrive at the party. Phyllis said "This is Cheryl, who was looking for you." I saw again the woman who sat on the floor talking to Karen. Darkness and a black-eyed ... "Oh" I said. "Oh." "Yes" she said. Went to talk to her and Karen and began to notice the care of her phrases. "Do you work with mushrooms?" "Do you ever have a dream where you're walking down a corridor through a lot of familiar rooms, and then you open a door ---?" I don't say anything, I dive behind the armchair, jump up and look into her eyes smiling, duck down, jump up, flash flash blue light - oh I love you because - oh is it possible - oh - oh -. "I've had that dream at least two times a year for twelve years." You're making my hair stand on end." Comfort, instant comfort, because she's there and speaking my careful language. Wanted to sit near her, joy and relief. She was wearing a jean jacket and little work boots. Her profile had Nero in it. She seemed to give me a style in relation to her from the first time I talked to her. A comfortable excitement. When I had ducked behind the chair it pleased me that this expression was happening so freely and exactly. The foreignness her mode gives my tales of bars and old dykes and young blacks - only artists are her friends she says. - Abrasive evening, the way those people would not support what I said. They would fall silent and stay silent. When I went out of the room they would explode into talk and laughter. Even C, when I asked her who the other two women of the four were, said "I don't have their names." Such a hostility in them. Skinned alive, by the time I left. - Come home from Cheryl's house feeling I've already outgrown: feminism, 'strong women', the Co-op, novels, eros (but no), the community, money, personal emotion. She's the antithesis moving in fast and I like it, a different version of human: and yet, excavating anger, she pronounces, and I know I have always - before - at root been delight and risk. She selfsharpening sickle scorns.
And why on account of this, stoned, did I have such a strong physical pull toward her I weighted myself in my chair to keep from embracing her. Physical light. It came out like a thought, I never decided to say it. "I'm afraid to get more stoned than I am because if I do I'll jump on you." "You're a funny kid. What will you do when you've jumped on me." "I don't know." "What will I do." "You'll scream and run away." Oh have I let that out I thought. - Farron's invitation to the band, learn drums she says. "There's our drummer." This whole group is adolescence revised. How long will it take? - Imagine - I have imagined but not thoroughly - a friend who could be counted on to understand correctly - how much faster I could leave the social infancy behind. Did she have that? She speaks as if she did. - Your play - and the other waits, without impatience, to see whether the visit will be returned, a formality of faith, there is no seducer here. Oh is it you? The first time you called me, "This is Cheryl. How's things?" and I said how I was (astonished) and your voice quaked and mine quaked in reply (oh warmth coming off you and your daughter standing in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs) and when I had hung up the telephone I lay thrown against the wall with my mouth open, and my heart banging me like a drum, flung down, shocked - wise-body, what you don't know. You're making history for me. - C and Nellie, who couldn't meet except in me, the two creatures who balance each other, both evading me, as I want them to. Nellie's absences always forcing me to think what I am connected to this woman for. I think immediately of a certain look she has, her best look - that is Nellie the pilot, Nellie the possible, Nellie in my mythology some practical truthful light white unowned power, man-woman at the gear lever or steering wheel - crying a few tears, setting humorously and deftly to licking a clit, cooking a meal, building a work bench, relaxing and seducing whoever she finds herself next to. Cheryl building her image to me as refusal, the dark side of her face sending out one flash of - When I think of our tiny history it seems to me as beautiful as a legend, and beautiful on the level of legend, because it wakes me up to my real hunger. Imagine a friend with whom there were no false steps The friends and lovers of legend knowing how to glide in the tension of attraction without giving up and easing themselves. "I don't relax" says she. Oh nor I! Not in yr little kitchen. - Electrifying sense of secret kinship in a chosen people. None of the stupefactions of reassurance. Silence in which messages grow.
- Who was alert, she or I? Whose vigilance knew first that we could transpose to a key closer to our private mode. - Impatience with Wendy because she seems to me to be wallowing but she is persistent in explaining that she needs 'strokes' and hugs and thanks and praise and has little of what I need (objective excitement) to offer. I kept insisting that she could step out of her anxieties like old clothes and go free, but she doesn't want to do that. I give my hide a shake and go off at a cross guilty lope to cash the family allowance check and buy
When I went to bring Luke his lunch all the children had already sat down with their packages in front of them, and there sat Luke with only a cup of milk. I put his lunch box in front of him and he peeked in and ducked and smiled because there was a nectarine and a Chinese cake. - It seemed wise and delicate to me, to leave as she did when I could have stood up holding her and shaking for much more of the late night. - I had to wait until she invited me. In the hallway, I wait, the stairs drop into dark. She stands next to them and says what I had prepared to say, "I want to hold you." And I jump up, and our arms collide finding the way around. And she stands like a pillar because it is me coming to her, and my true impulse is to move my face over her neck and cheek, I want to touch her head with my head, there's no sex, it is loveliest love, I find myself rolling my face over hers, bowing my head onto her shoulder, meantime I'm aware she's holding me with one hand and I say "what are you doing with you other hand?" Meantime I'm shaking like a motor on idle - a purr of fear - our breath is the same, two lines in Morse ------ -----. Diagrammed they're identical. I don't want to stop, she does. "I'm gone," she says, "I'm glad t'know ya." I have nothing to say, she goes down the stairs and I stumble to bed and lie awake listening for her coming back because it is too soon to part. I wait. I'm glad to wait. I feel the air full of miracle, all substance is more awake. "There was another time," she said, "It was at Customcolor. You were looking at slides." "You went by with someone." "It was Trudy." I remember that flash, like recognition of secret membership. I thought it was lesbianism. - How could she not love someone who showed such joy, meeting her? Most people make do with a very rough approximation of their capacities. - At Judy Lynn's today I kept hanging about her hall mirror admiring my brown thin belly; the purple satin windbreaker from the alley, plaid shirt tied up. - Reading an Inuit woman talk about how her people are vanishing, I began to sob, rock, weep; I am so far from my griefs that someone else's story acts for my pretext to cry. - Leaning against the wall, drinking fast (but that's not why), saying "And also I think I was angry with you because you've made a little fissure in me," drawing a zipper on the sternum, "and it's made me very hungry." "Do you think I haven't been fighting that all week?" "I'm glad I'm not in it alone." "You never are, it's always two people." "But you're never sure, it always seems possible that you're the only one." Trudy is beautiful. She's water, C is rock or soil, sandstone, a cliff. She's a flash of rivers ... a river of lights. Three black women walking up Hastings to and from the Ovaltine. Did I start to tell old stories, because Trudy hadn't heard them? I did. - Spent tonight not looking at Cheryl but this is what I saw. Spectacles and a beautiful line from forehead down the outer cheek, with hair next to it. At the café, talking about what wanting is, Trudy says "You only want what you have." C says "You can want something that's right in front of you." T says you can't. C and I, in chorus, cry out "Yes you can!" and we all laugh because we mean each other. - A woman sitting nearby says she used to live there, "In this cold-blooded intellectual place the most cruel? extraordinary? things happen." We look out the window and see Cheryl and Trudy below on the sidewalk, Cheryl with a stick. She lifts it, clubs a baby dead, and they carry it away together. I leave by a back door. Woke up confronted with the dream like a landslide, a fact. - I was longing for you on the bus. I want to pile myself up along you and just wait, what else is there to do. Three bodies at the table shining their faces at each other like flashlights, sometimes right and sometimes left. When I hear the train pass, it's like what I want, the soft crash of bodies swaying together by the weight of breath and heartbeat alone. Crash, crash, crash, that's why I stop to listen to it, and think of waves. I was longing for you in the old way, of adolescence and before, pressing
my body down on beds. What does it mean, it is so occult. I can hardly attend
to it unless I'm in science fiction. The pattern it is making, and with
that dream in it like a lidded box or a closed cupboard in which is sealed
- the antithesis, the reminder, an evil genius, an imp. Drunk to fall into free speech - gathering your wrist and turning like a Ferris wheel around it - acts - a month's photographs of elegant shit - six months' of kitchen tables - friends pointing - how different I am - my poems about objects held still. - You have to understand that I'm alien, I am a country person and you don't know what that is, and I only know because of my fear of you (although I know what I am). But I need to sometimes go to sleep and wake up next to you, because it's different from your game of will.
- My lovely body, that has never been so before, and dances, as I saw in the window, with a lithe sway at knees hips and elbows. New time, back to bare feet and jeans and plaid shirt. Work on laughing less or not at all. I would like already to be acting in the new way. - They making love next to me, Trudy putting her back along me so that I could feel their fucking like amplified heartbeat. No noise, very soft, breath, breath withheld, ahh. They talk quietly. - It's true, that of/in that last test-embrace, it was Trudy who made more of a mark. They're even in me. We made that adjustment. "Watch out for Trudy, she gets under your skin." - "Trudy taught me all I know about fighting." Cheryl angrily, "There isn't one who's a model." She pried up my fingers to touch my nipples, when I was catatonic. "You're so passive. You're so passive. You were always so outright about what you are and what you need. It blew my mind." Trudy caught one - "What did you say" she said. So I told her, but this time aloud. The familiar sobs, turn into full sobs, break out too. They stop and attend to me, it has begun like pleasure. C lies on top of me, but she taunts Trudy, "Did you take this woman to heaven? What did you do to this woman, did you take her to heaven?" - In legend, the wonderful flexibility of those who know: when they come to their fate, they move more quickly than they know possible - and they extend themselves to accept miracles. Listen my soldiers, it doesn't stop there, we play our parts too well, and there'll be more nights when we confuse ourselves, just so that we can come out again to this joy of clarity which means that we've been tested. My ladies: there's no one could stop us. There's no one else. But can we be doing something beyond testing the rudimentary loyalties of cunt-access? - Partly I've been losing interest in El Yep because what she's best at, even, seems such a partiality and so blind - the connections don't go far enough. - When I was looking at Cheryl, her face turned into a series of men's faces, most of them diabolic, with beards and shaggy eyebrows. - How I can always hear insincerity in language. How I read faces and bodies. - Suddenly it's C again, drunkenness and in it the direct reach to the wrist, and rotating around it; "This thing is here;" oh knife, oh being, stranger, metal, oh unsmiling minimal, it's here again and I'm longing for you again; and your shadow, your addiction, my twin, gadwoman and hesitation, whose slightness in itself gives to the hands / undeniably. Beautiful two, locked together like arms of a fairground ride, dizzying; and you can unlock your gazes for the second-fractional time / jolt of inertia - on your way to reversals. - A blankness because I can't see ahead except for unsatisfied hunger. Neither of them will have me. The fog of repression will keep coming down on me, and I will be left holding a shoulderblade like a hardback, a wrist like a bottleneck, while their whole souls fly out to meet apart from me. It's a grief. I haven't forgotten how they crowd and addict each other. And yet: to open them like sarcophagi and guitarcases (should I fast from metaphor and see whether it's possible to feel I'm thinking?) and crawl in with them and close the lid and be enclosed. - They are patient and faithful, they're sweetly precisely passionate, they are willing and / idle. - My loyalty scurries, afraid of accidentally making a choice. No choice must be made. But in truth I have chosen, more than once. (As they have? It scares me more to think of being chosen than it does to think of being excluded.) On the last night, Cheryl and I were closed in together and I was starting to move freely and sing, when suddenly C stopped and said Trudy! I lay stunned and shuddering between them while they made their adjustment. I put my mouth to Trudy's nipple and felt her feel it, and she had her hand on my jeans crotch seam, and we hung onto each other's mouths, and yes we had found each other. And we stopped. "There are no rules!" cried Cheryl. But there are careful adjustments and we are patient and willing. Then when Cheryl wanted to do the same with me, I couldn't find it, I was detached as if I'd had a secret. We took time and moved slowly but Trudy came and went and I felt an unsuccessful entertainer. And then Cheryl lay stunned, blue veins in her thighs. - Are we really remaking our cultures? We can work out of our experience and our community with each other, but what experiences are we giving ourselves, and what form of community are we using each other for? What's the erotic for? Intimacy. Love. Confusion. It is support but also undermining. My project is still to learn to pay attention.
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