The Secret Life of This Life Now #27
27th in a series of 31 brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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Another Monday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. While those remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, sit in that box, I’m finishing what I started 26 essays ago—telling a story of love and loss that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…
You can get both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!
This is post #27 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.
We are up to the sixth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The sixth poem in this section is “Later Than I Would Like It to Be.” Okay, Secret Life is feeling generous in its old age—Here is the poem in full.
Shadows lengthen on the cold pavement,
October stains the leaves on dry, rustling trees,
you become loam in the ground—
dissolve, disintegrate,
like words that made no difference on first hearing—Words like:
Nobody has the flu for nine weeks;
see another doctor;
drinking will kill you before the virus has a chance.Words like:
You do not have to die;
I love you;
I love you anyway.Words like:
It’s okay, it’s okay.
Guess who? If you thought you would’t see Tony again, well, as Tony would say, “later for you, hon.” This poem is sort of a companion to “The Remembered One,” in which Marcos came back to me in a dream to invite me to join him in the nether realms. I don’t think “Later Than I Would Like It to Be” needs any explanation. I missed Tony and I wanted him back. I still do.
But that’s the Inferno. We left off last time when I was just about to enter the Purgatorio. Just after the precocious poet pressed his card into my palm with his number written on the back, flashed his impish grin, turned on a heel, strode briskly away, and left me there on the dance floor of the LIT 2 launch party at The New School, wanting more.
This is not the place for an exhaustive account of our courtship and its aftermath. My mother—who delivered eleven boys (no girls) in the course of seven pregnancies, of whom four were live births—called me her Last of the Mohicans. The precocious poet was the last of my boyfriend Mohicans.
From roughly ages 20 to 40 there had been Randy, Chet, Erving, Tony, Michael I, Michael II, the unnamed social worker, the opera director, the merchandiser, and the boyfriend in San Juan. Opera director was very short-lived (the relationship, not the man, thank you God—the man is alive and well and directing opera to this day), but for some reason he gets on the list. Not on the list is the dog-walking photographer from Mexico—It was too brief, and having lost him makes me too sad. And mind you, that is a list of people I dated, watched South Park with, whose family members I met. Recounting my purely sexual adventures with guys I never actually dated would require many more installments of Secret Life. There were also a number of men who fall between those two categories—men from whom I wanted even a little bit more, but did not get it.
But from roughly ages 40 to 60, there was the precocious poet, and only the precocious poet.
We met in March, boyfriended in April, and shacked up in May. I put a ring on it in 2003. That year, we organized a World AIDS Day reading at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City with an incredible lineup of poets. We got married—civilly, legally married in the state of Massachusetts—in 2004. We bought a house in 2005. Life ensued. There were MFAs and PhDs all around. There were jobs, academic and non. There were books published. Essays in academic journals and edited volumes. We travelled the continent. We saw the Patti LuPone production of Gypsy both at City Center Encores! AND on Broadway. We had it all.
And then…not so much. He moved out of our house in 2021. We signed our divorce agreement in 2023. Our divorce was finalized in 2024. And now it’s now.
And that’s really all I’m going to say about that. Maybe more later, maybe not. Secret Life is never planned in advance. I often pick up where I left off, but, seeing as how I have already cut to the chase of divorce, I’m not sure where I would pick up from.
There will probably be poems, memoirs, autofiction. Or not. I feel like this is a good time to quote the wonderful Spanish expression, el mundo es un pañuelo, life is a handkerchief, which I learned from one of my graduating seniors at the Rudolf Steiner school on New York’s Upper East Side in 1988. But it’s probably completely irrelevant. I like saying it, anyway. And I like saying À la prochaine.
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