pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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LOVING DESPITE DESTRUCTION

Several friends who are grieving lost love right now and I have been supporting each other, and I can report that I seem to be slowly locating my heart again. It still feels more like a spent charcoal briquette than a living beating thing with atriums and ventricles pushing life and passion and lust and discovery and wonder through my veins sometimes though.

Pottergrrl asked me today why I got involved with Buzzcut. Why her?

Well, Buzzcut was my first stab at coming out of the deep chill I have been in since I found the Ginger with Dickboy and we both said we wanted to keep things casual. I am certainly not in love with her and don't even know her that well, so the question is a good one.

Here's what I wrote back:

Part of the reason, I believe, is simply that I have been lonely and isolated and so was longing for affection, for connection.

That being said, I could have slept with many women by now if that was all I was after, but didn't give them the time of day.

So why Buzzcut? I believe it was because I recognized a kind of vulnerability in her and connection with her that grabbed my interest. Plus she's really smart and a delicious flirt.

I am not pursuing friendship with her anymore though because she let Philly, her (fucking) NJ girlfriend, read my blog.

I explore personal things here because it's a relatively anonymous venue—which means that I feel incredibly violated by this action (as any therapist, which she is, should understand).

And Buzzcut, being Buzzcut, managed to make this all about her too, writing back to tell me how she felt about Philly reading my blog, but failing, again, to note that I might have an actual feeling over here too.

So why did it take the time it took for me to back away?

Because I saw vulnerability and fear and gasping need beneath her careful distancing and that is tender to me.

I think, in some ways, I wanted to be a safe haven for those vulnerabilities—which I recognize a shrink will say is codependent—and wanted her to know that I can be a safe place where she can go deep with me and be okay.

She dropped her protective façade when we slept together and I know how much that must have terrified her . . . especially because we both signed up for casual.

I dont know what sex is like for you, but it's one of th'e places where I find transcendence.

I didn't expect this experience with Buzzcut, frankly, and don't think she expected it with me either. But we connected at a sexual level where neither of us expected to go.

I don't always like the timing, but am not afraid to go there; it scared the beJesus out of her though.

Still, she went there with me and more than once.

I am open to continuing down a path like that to see what develops, but not with someone else's heart in the picture and not with someone who is so emotionally inconsistent and self focused.

•

Computergrrl limits herself to casual relationships right now because she has interior work to do.

I like that. I respect that. But, in my experience, when I say that I only want to be casual with someone and tell myself all the reasons why I am better off alone—I can focus on the Great American Novel; I can compile a new collection of poems, I can sculpt, I can play the guitar; I can paint; I can sit with my emotions and find the me that isn't defined by the woman I am fucking, yada yada yada—I inevitably meet someone who makes me realize that I don't so much want to be alone as I want to give my attention and time to someone who is worthy of it, who challenges me and makes my eyes pop open in wonder at least occasionally and fucks me wobbly and makes me think in new ways and digs deeper than she's gone before, who expresses her love openly and is loyal and consistent and caring (and, please, is it too much to ask that she actually be kind too?) ... and, when that happens, I realize that I can get to all those places that I previously believed I had to mine alone with another person, and with renewed passion.

Pottergrrl wrote this kind message to me:

Bird: This thing that happened to you was a calamity, but it is also presenting you with opportunity on which there is no ceiling. Relax, do inner work. You are at an exciting place in your life. A person whom you love but could no longer respect, has done you the favor of leaving you. Thousands of paths are open to you. Send a request out to the universe for people who are supportive. Don't settle for the selfish Buzzcuts of the world. So what if she dabbled then ran; she is also not the one, and she saved you the heartache of discovering it later on. You have inner treasures and talents that most people don't even know they should covet. Jebus' advice about not throwing your pearls to swine is really true. Don't waste your time, and don't regret that the people you care(d) about will never understand the nature of what you have to offer.

•

All this puts me in mind of a poem that I really like—one that reminds me that the spark of love warms us and drives us to poetry even when we face hum-drum aspects of our lives, when we want to keep sleeping but must hurl ourselves into the flame.

THE UNWRITTEN POEM
by Louis Simpson

You will never write the poem about Italy.
What Socrates said about love
is true of poetry—where is it?
Not in beautiful faces and distant scenery
but the one who writes and loves.

In your life here, on this street
where the houses from the outside
are all alike, and so are the people.
Inside, the furniture is dreadful—
flock on the walls, and huge color television.

To love and write unrequited
is the poet's fate. Here you'll need
all your ardor and ingenuity.
This is the front and these are the heroes—
a life beginning with "Hi!" and ending with "So long!"

You must rise to the sound of the alarm
and march to catch the 6:20—
watch as they ascend the station platform
and, grasping briefcases, pass beyond your gaze
and hurl themselves into the flames.

•

Finally, today is the nineteenth anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident, which occurred at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union. An explosion and fire that occurred in Reactor No. 4 sent radioactivity into our atmosphere and killed thirty-one people instantly.

Sadly, Savannah River Nuclear Power site—the site where I pulled radioactive alligators onto airboats to tag them and identify their abnormalities for an ecology lab (always good training for an MFA in poetry!)—is the most contaminated place on earth even AFTER the Chernobyl disaster. That sandy plot of South Carolina land with US Government stamped across it also has the odd distinction of being a Superfund site that the government is pouring billions into for cleanup while simultaneously being a site for new bomb production, thanks to GWB's so-called thinking. So, essentially, we are making a Superfund site even more contaminated as we spend billions cleaning it up!

I guess burying all those radioactive fuel rods in cardboard boxes like they did wasn't the BEST idea.

10:25 a.m. - 2005-04-26

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