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On the Meeting of García Lorca kathleen peirce It’s the late eighties. I’m with Gerald Stern and Phil Levine in the kitchen of the house Phil’s renting for a semester as a visiting professor at Iowa, where I’ve either graduated or I’m still enrolled. It’s a painter’s house, somebody I haven’t met who’s gone somewhere else to think and work. The house is full of things I could spend the day looking at, and the three of us fill it further. Perspective feels strange because nothing there belongs to any of us, and close because it’s a home, though no part of this is ordinary. I think I remember a dark bed built into a wooden alcove off the living room, three walls to hold sleep in, a near surround. I wanted that. I still do. There were paintings with a lot of black. There may have been, I’m almost sure, vigorous plants growing in and out of the kitchen window, but who would have such a window in town? There was coffee, surely, and one or two of us eating something while leaning over the kitchen sink. Jerry and Phil are talking, talking, going over everything, biting at each other and laughing together in the same sentences . We might have just come back from a drive in the country, possibly from looking for quilts the rural women on the outskirts of Iowa City cut and sewed their worn clothes to make and maybe were willing to sell. We had begun to hang quilts in our living rooms in those days. Probably we pulled over for tomatoes or peaches or corn. Years will pass before any of my poems 155 will mean anything to anybody but me. Jerry hasn’t yet collapsed with heart trouble, Phil hasn’t yet called to give me the news. I’m five years into a marriage I’m sure will last forever. Jerry’s in love, or about to be. Phil has Franny. We’re healthy. Poetry’s hard. I am in love with my life. Phil understands that my hometown is a factory town. He’s the first person who’s asked me to say more about candling eggs in the basement of the Sara Lee plant in Moline. I laugh telling him about having to shout push my eggs down, please to the men who loaded the conveyor with the crates. I tell him I believe I thought about sex nonstop through every shift that winter. He asks me what my father did for a living. He understands that I think I’ve survived my childhood. I understand that he and Jerry have everything I think I want. Because I adore them I believe they are always adored. I am so strangely at home with them I think they always were at home in their lives. Phil says he has something for me, and leaves the room to get it. Could I be happier? Poetry is hard, and Phil has a beautiful gift for me. He comes back to the kitchen, Jerry’s singing something, Phil passes me Lorca’s Poet in New York. I’m about to enter my real life. He says the anger in it was a big help to him, and he hopes it will help me. He thinks it will. It did. It does. ...

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