The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction)

Part II
Christian says you all might want to know about where I live. Like the princess I often am, I live in a ballroom.

Seriously, I don’t have much stuff and I live in a big ballroom on the third floor of a rambling old house in NW Portland. I love the light. I live for the light and the beautiful old floor. The place still has a carriage entrance (now it is a sun room) and sometimes when it is the middle of the night and I can’t sleep for crying or I am up writing or having sex I can hear the music and see the minuet.

I have a ballet barre, yoga mat and mirror and my bed and some storage chests but that is pretty much it. I do have my own bathroom at the top of the stairs with a claw foot tub. You might as well know right up front I have “issues” with food so it is a good thing I share the kitchen. I am not bulimic; thank the gods. I decided early on that purging is just way too gross, although I have plenty of friends who indulge. Even guy friends. Gross!

I suppose I should tell you about Christian, speaking of guy friends. No one gets it about me and him. He is more than twice my age, still good looking in a worn overused sort of way. I met him at a café. Coffeehouse really, he goes there to play chess but I met him at a poetry reading there. He knew right away, even when I was reading the worst rawest crap that I had talent.

Pretty much all the guys say that but he really meant it, I could tell and he has read everything and knows about everything literary. I mean who needs Google? I’ve got him. He’s a mess as a person, but I don’t care about that or the fact that he sometimes creeps my friends out because he isn’t like anyone else, because he believes in my worth as a poet, unreservedly.

He gives me big shit when I mess up or rely on fragments or tired images. He pushes me to write better, better, best. I push that in me too so we have the same agenda. My family, my friends, they don’t understand poetry, especially contemporary poetry and they want to be supportive but would rather I take up Sky Diving or Mountain Biking, some passion they can understand rather than this weird art form that causes me so much pain.

David Remnick, he’s the editor of The New Yorker, he said in an interview I read recently when asked about The Decline of Literature in American Culture”…

“I think poetry’s a more serious and obvious problem. Well, let me put it this way about poetry: I totally realize that we are limited in what we publish every week—two or three poems—and as a result we don’t have a governing aesthetic. There’s no one school that dominates, no two or three poets that dominate…”

No governing aesthetic! I’d say, other than the only decent poems we are going to publish are those by poets who are presently dead (Elizabeth Bishop for example) or those in translation…

Oh, I’m sorry. I used to aspire to get published in the New Yorker. What a fool I was! I’d be embarrassed to be in those pages now. Yeah, me and Mr. Chinese Silk Robe, stupid eagle poem Henri Cole. Yuck.

I do think David Remnick is kind of cute though, for an older guy. I’d serve his gelato any day. Even if he couldn’t tell the difference between a good poem and a dog if they each snuck up behind him and bit him on opposing cheeks.

Okay, now I am getting crude, time to get the heck out of here. I have exercising to do before work.