Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008

Two-Hour Wait in Toronto

206 f r o m g o u r d s e e d t w o - h o u r w a i t i n t o r o n t o The sweet tone of our desiring on the phone, Rachel, is I want us to lie down and kiss, or breakfast out in the sun at the restaurant near the P.O. Do you feel me feeling this? Lana Turner, love goddess, whom I notice here in the Toronto Star, is seventy. Her first movie, a bit-part walk-on in A Star Is Born, 1937, came the year I was born. Her story is mine. We’re discovered in the Top Hat maltshop across from Hollywood High wearing this trademark sweater, which we never took off, not for a one of our seven husbands and a slough of real and publicist-invented romancers. No critic ever took her seriously. This is also true of me. Real-life drama came to Lana when her teenage daughter, Cheryl, stabbed to death Lana’s hoodlum-lover, Johnny Stompanato, who was threatening to disfigure Lana. Cheryl was cleared on grounds of justifiable homicide. Maybe some violence threatened me too in the early fifties, that I didn’t understand my role in, and can’t recall repressing. Then came 1957, and while Lana was Oscar-nominated as the steamy mistress in Peyton Place, 207 f r o m g o u r d s e e d I am taken to bed by three TWA stewardesses in the luckiest string of summer nights ever threaded upon bare, forked being. Is it repulsive, or funny, or just a marvel, how we peak and moon around and change partners, and wonder why we went where? Nothing much since. One season on Falcon Crest. Lana resides now on the twentieth floor of a posh LA highrise with two large terraces as exquisitely shaped as her breasts used to be, turning their one hundred eighty degrees from the desert to the Santa Monica Pier. It’s her ivory tower, and since 1969 she has been quote “celibate by choice. I am very close to God. I read the Daily Word, and I have learned to meditate. The age-thing is just a bunch of numbers.” Unquote. I couldn’t agree more. Rachel, I get smoothed and here, with you coming toward me, on the phone or in flesh. The plane is taking off this second. You may not tolerate my silly-Lana. So make me honest. I know another beautiful Rachel, a Rajneesh sannyasin who has written a very trying-for-truth book called The Orgasmic Mirror, a journal of spiritual feelings and sexual connections. • • • 208 f r o m g o u r d s e e d She and I are not lovers. Shall we share erotic tanglings, you and I? Who else but us will ever read this? If the phrasing’s good, many. Would I trade what and who I want for beautiful language that holds the desiring and a little of its satisfaction? Do I have to choose? Can’t I have both? How will men and women be more open in ten years? Keep those predicates jiggling, camerado. We’re slanting into Cleveland. I want to unwrap you, button by button, by snap, by zipper. I want to nurse your nipples. My desire wants inside yours and then to change, saying the shifts as we go. I see Lana meditating with a coffee maker drippling nearby, her eyelids identical to the Buddha on her vanity. And now going out for a semi-reclusive lunch, salmon sauce, spawning hunger spread over her reaching into some table condiment. In Cherokee the question is, “How deep is your well?” Not “How’s it going?” the car metaphor. I want our native wellsprings mixing, but I don’t want to live together, or help 209 f r o m g o u r d s e e d raise your little girl, though I love her. I have raised two children, more or less, but could we see each other more? And I don’t want to hurt your husband’s feelings. I don’t want him to know. For God’s sake, these I don’t want’s. I don’t want to covet another man’s wife, but I do. Is there a way of...