Equations: Dialectic Form (2021)

#12
Here I am in New England, getting killed. It’s summer, there’s weed
around, booze. I’m perched on a ledge, feel I’m being pushed off. Look
who’s here to visit: Wendy, two years older than me, who has two pieces
coming out in Poetry. My first major piece has been out two months. We
immediately become big shots to each other. Wendy has slightly bronzed
skin, brownish hair lightened towards dirty blonde, a voluptuous body but
a way of holding herself that suggests she finds her own body
embarrassing, somehow unworkable. Yet even her diffidence is enticing; it
makes guys want to ram through those defenses. Our equation sinks into
place: I’m a young Poundian firebrand, she’s got all the spiritualized
quirkiness of Emily Dickinson, but with sex appeal. We are standing,
having drinks in my room, smoking cigarettes in the balminess (open
windows, flies). There’s a party down the hall we abandoned to smoke in
peace. Somehow, a wind current comes into the room and does a loop so
that the door closes: a minor miracle, or a universe sign concerning what’s
meant to happen next. It does: I reach over, begin with gropes, which
soon turn into kisses. As we go into this, Wendy lets her hair loose from
her pony tail. We are two geniuses, kings and queens, and this is within
days of Heather, her positing of me as underling. Such is a life in the arts.
When a surfeit of symbolic material lands on two souls, they (sometimes)
have no choice but to act them out. As I enter her, Wendy becomes a
symbol of my own artistic potency, and I of hers.
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