She has written hundreds of poems, all of them like that. I am all in favor of personal expression but I think I know crap when I see it. Should I tell her what I think?
—Turkey Lurkey
PS My lawyer got the drunkenness charge reduced to Public Unsteadiness and so I’m going to AA. Should I tell my lady friend about this, too?
Dear Turkey, Do not be honest with a poet or she might slit your throat with a serrated steak knife. Poets do not accept criticism gladly. A sour word about their work makes them very very quiet. Turkey hunters are Sunday school teachers compared to poets, whose murderous impulses toward enemies real or imagined are not to be underestimated. Their feuds go on for decades, their vendettas rival the Venetians’ for sheer malice. Tell the poet that her poems mystify you with their depth and resonance on many levels, and let it go at that.
PS Save the news about AA for the right moment when she’s a little snappish with you and you need to make her feel guilty.
Dear Mr. Blue,
Please forget that angry letter I wrote. I am terribly sorry. I met a wonderful man at a reading of mine and he’s one in a million. I wasn’t wearing a low-cut blouse at the time, but then we came to my place and it disappeared entirely. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
—Moonflower
P.S. I wrote you a poem:
Whoever you
Are
Who just smiled
And waved
Across the abyss
Of shrieking febrile blackness,
The tom-tom ostinato
Of your liquefied amplitude
Has Saved My
Life.
Dear Mr. Blue,
I am the turkey caller in love with the poet. Last week, I got a letter from the Zoroastrian girl from Rawalpindi whom I used to live with. She said she loves me and wishes to move back to the U.S. but needs money for a passport, and—I made myself a big drink (I’ve been on the wagon for three months since my gun-discharge incident) and I sold my house, sent the money to Nhunu, and moved in with Mom. (Mom and I have always gotten along well.) I don’t know how to explain this to my poet friend, though. And then Mom hired a private detective who found Nhunu in a commune run by a voodoo cult. Lots of chicken slaughter and blood smeared on people and candle wax and nakedness and so on.
Mom said, “That bitch has put a spell on you, Brian. That’s why you’re mooning around like a teenager. You’ve been cursed. Let me call Father Fred and have him put a stop to it.” Mom is a devout Catholic. Of course I feel bad about Nhunu and her voodooism but more than that I’m worried about Katherine (she’s the poet). I’ve written to Nhunu and asked could she please return the $175,000 I sent her when I was drunk. No response yet.
Meanwhile, Mom went into my computer and found naked pictures of Katherine, and boy did she give me a piece of her mind. She said, “Now you got yourself another chippy in addition to the voodoo gal in her black capes and plumes and leather lace-ups, muttering incantations. You’ve got a bad poet with droopy little tits. One’s got her hooks into you for $175,000 and the other one has got you drinking again.”
Well, I reminded Mom how she bailed out my younger sister when she got pregnant by that drippy piccolo player in the high school marching band whom she had sex with on the band bus because she “felt sorry” for him. (How you can have unprotected sex on a bus with someone you don’t even like is beyond my comprehension.) “What could I do?” Mom said. “She’s my daughter.” She then called Father Fred to do an exorcism. He came over and gave me a brochure, “What to Do When Temptation Tiptoes to Your Window.”
Now I find myself obsessed with Katherine, doing our chart (I’ve gotten into astrology, now that I’ve lost my turkey calling jobs due to my drinking) and the vectors and trajectories are pointing toward a Great Confluence. Should I ask her to marry me, even with all my problems?
I hate to worry Mom, who is nearing the end of her earthly sojourn, but when I told her I want to marry Katherine, she cried, “Et
tu,
Brian! Go! Betray the mother who brought you into this world! Go with your droopy-titted poet or your voodoo gal! But before you do—go get the butcher knife and plunge it into my heart! Because that’s what you’re doing. So do it!” It took a long time to get her calmed down, meanwhile the detective called to say that there’s no trace of the $175,000. I want to do what’s right. Love has no limits. Love is giving without reservation, giving joyfully. I am pretty sure I want to marry Katherine.
—Turkey Lurkey
Dear Brian, Let me call you Brian, okay? The $175,000 is gone. Kiss that good-bye. As for marrying Katherine, have you ever considered poverty and celibacy? There are groups of men who practice both and they live in handsome brick-and-stone enclosures in scenic rural areas and they seem content with their carpentry, bread baking, brandy distilling, or whatever they do. Do a Google search on the word
Trappist.
Send for a brochure.
Dear Mr. Blue,
My boyfriend Brian and I are very happy living together here in my place. He is drinking less and his mom doesn’t call so often now that she’s in the nursing home and he seems to have forgotten about turkey calling, which is a blessing. I’m sorry, but it was getting on my nerves. I’ve quit nagging him about neatness on the theory that we need to let housekeeping seek its own level while we sort out our feelings. I have this awful retroactive jealousy thing and find myself very upset about his ex-girlfriend Nhunu the voodoo queen and the $175,000 that she stole. As I wrote to him in a poem,
I think of you
And the unutterable
Dented madness
Of the testicular dialectic of snakehips
Gyrating that hymns my solitude
—O I have been a very very bad poet
But why did you
Let her take you
To the
Cleaners?
Am I just ridiculously petty and lacking perspective? I can’t seem to let go of this.
—Moonflower
Dear Moonflower, Young love is replete with sweet pangs and retroactive jealousy is one of them. It’s a sort of greediness born of happiness, trying to extend the romance back into the past and bump off all rivals. Be happy, move forward, live memorably and your romance will attain a rich history of its own and the distant past will fade. It might help if you’d stop writing poems for awhile, though.
Dear Mr. Blue,
I am a woman cop, 32, in St. Paul (don’t print that), single, trying to spread my wings after a long rough spell (cancer, drugs, grad school, a guitarist boyfriend), and I have a crush on a coworker with beautiful green eyes who even under standard fluorescent lighting looks terrific. I sure wouldn’t mind if he hung his parka in my closet! Unfortunately, I’m in Vice, he’s in Homicide—so we’re strangers, and I’ve been thinking of making a Secret Admirer card and slipping it in his slot. I’ve written him a poem but I’m afraid I may have gone overboard and it would embarrass him: What do you think?
Here in this dark world like an alley in a film noir
And me the broad in the red dress smoking the cigarette,
I look across the busy street and suddenly there you are.
My dear, you thrill me, although we’ve barely met.
And though it’ll probably turn out wrong
And lead us into a month of breakup hell,
I want to dance with you to a Frank Sinatra song,
And have a drink, and take you to a small hotel.
We’re no angels, we know what time it is—
Me in Vice, and you my love in Homicide—
We know how soon the champagne loses the fizz,
How soon the audience gets glassy-eyed.
And yet I want you. Tonight. Lying next to me.
No matter what comes afterward. Linda. Ext. 1573.
As a backup, I wrote a limerick:
There is a young man with green eyes
Who makes my hair follicles rise.
I would unstrap my gun
And my clothes, one by one,
If I knew he’d remove his likewise.
Which one do you think would work the best? You can be frank. I’ve been looking for someone ever since that shithead guitarist finally got out of my life. Everyone says, You’ll find Mr. Right when you stop looking for him, but maybe I have found him and he doesn’t know it. We talk sometimes around the coffee machine and he never asks what I’m doing this weekend. Mostly we talk about the Twins or Vikings or his mom’s health problems. I just want him to show some interest or something. Is that too much to ask? Am I trying too hard? How can I avoid scaring him off?
—Smitten
Dear Smitten, Get out of Minnesota. This is not a state where men can accept getting a poem from a woman, especially not one as frank as yours. Try New York. There, a woman can sleep with anyone she wants to sleep with and nobody says boo about it.
18
Copenhagen
In the midst of my long drought, I met a Danish woman named Lone (“Pronounced LOAN-uh,” she said sweetly) and for a couple months she became the Glorious Woman who would rescue me from myself. The name was on her place card at the Max Henius Society dinner sponsored by the Danish consulate and her place card was next to mine. She had short red hair and a big grin and she led me out onto the dance floor and we gyrated vigorously to a Dixieland band and sat down and held hands through the speeches—Denmark is a nation of after-dinner speakers and there were fourteen of them that evening, each one proud of his ability to be funny in English. I was completely potted. Henius was a chemist who ran an institute of fermentology in Chicago in the 1890s, a farsighted man who tried to persuade the beer industry to stave off Prohibition by cleaning up the American saloon and making it into a beer garden with good food and white tablecloths, but his advice went unheeded and soon public tippling was outlawed by the beady-eyed Baptists, and Henius returned to Denmark, where the finer things of life were still appreciated.
We all drank a toast to Henius, and to Queen Margrethe, and to the president, and to amity between nations, and in my alcoholic fog, I sat at our table and listened to an engineer discuss wastewater management, and then turn to the woman on his left and resume a conversation about the male superior versus the canine position in coitus. Danes are so free with each other!
Someone at the podium up front was yakking about trying to make a difference in the world and not just earn a lot of money, and lo and behold, it was someone introducing me for my award. What was it for? I hadn’t the faintest idea. Little did they know how drunk I was. I managed to rise to my feet and take a bow, but no. They wanted a speech. People were waving me toward the front, so up to the podium I went. Someone handed me a glass of something. A vodka sour or something. My fine motor skills failed me and I dropped it—on myself, unfortunately—as I grabbed the microphone and bent it toward me and it made an explosive rumble.
ME: I thank you so much for this award. It means a lot. A person never really imagines that something of this sort will come to him.You just do your job the best you can and you never think that someday you’ll be standing in front of a group as distinguished as this and receiving this tremendous honor from the Danish people. This is so neat. Of course I couldn’t do it by myself and I want to thank a number of people, starting with my wife, Iris, who could not be here. She has been my inspiration for so long and—you know how it is: you never tell a person who is so close to you just how much they mean until—well, until you do, and that’s what I’m doing right now.
I got teary-eyed about Iris and talked about my writer’s block and living in New York and The New Yorker and the problem of girlish writing—the speech was going very well! People were enjoying it! I talked about Iris and her crazy people and old Gus at the open house and saying that to the TV cameras—and then Lone guided me back to my seat. I was grateful to her. People clapped.
I had an ugly tear-shaped Lucite trophy in my hand. I told Lone I hoped to visit Denmark someday.
She said, “Come over and stay with me in Copenhagen.”
She meant it.
“I could stay in a hotel,” I said. “Really. There’s no need to put you to a lot of inconvenience.”
“Nonsense. I live alone in the heart of Copenhagen. You’ll stay in my apartment.”
So I went. Flew SAS and landed at Kastrup Airport early in the morning, in the lovely rain, the air fragrant with green grass and coal smoke, and took a taxi past the green soccer fields and a stream of bicyclists in bright yellow and red and green rain gear biking to work, poker-faced Danes queued up for buses, streets of brick apartment houses with brown tile roofs, stone churches with green-and-gold steeples, the Royal Theatre in its sooty stone castle, over the train tracks, to a narrow street and a door with a golden 3 above it, and Lone’s big, old, echoey apartment with fourteen-foot ceilings with plaster moldings of flowers and fruit—it looked as if they’d just finished drafting the Treaty of Ghent and gone out for breakfast—and Lone had made coffee. She poured us cups and I thought, How remarkable to fly across an ocean to be with a woman you don’t even know. She wore a sort of rose-colored wrap over her pajamas and was quite happy to see me. She said that we’d have to go see Rosen borg Castle and the Marble Church and the walking street and Ma gasin and Tivoli and Karen Blixen’s house, and then she said, “But first you must come to bed and sleep.” Through the open window, the smell of the sea and the whoosh of express trains racing north toward Elsinore, and a police siren like in an old spy movie echoing off the gray stone buildings, and the telephone rang its musical Danish ring, and she didn’t answer it, she closed the bedroom door, and then she and I were kissing, and then we descended into the soft white bed, under the down comforter, and embraced, our two coastlines gently washing against each other.