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PARTISAN REVIEW
back to the time when I baked endless loaves of black bread, guised as a
peasant girl, hair in a thick braid down my back, my full flowered skirts
and simple blouses something to see . Don't turn away! It's all
true .. . I lived with a poet, another one, they have always been my
weakness. We found each other, blindly, like two moths who seek out
the flame that they don't know is fatal! He came to a kind ofsmall fame
in his click and then one day went down the alley in Brooklyn-a re–
markable place, so elegant in its regular whatchamacallit-down the
alley with the garbage and threw himself away. When he rerurned he
was-someone else! Now I understand that he has become a model for
characters in vicious, ugly, and slanderous novels that are written by a
friend of his-some friend! Once a dedicated fake alcoholic, now he
supports the apple juice factories or orchards or something. Silly me!
I
But then! He was fire and music! How I baked for him! He became
~
angry when I gave a good friend ofhis , another poet, a little poon while
he was away at work. Odd . Now he walks the lonely streets, an odor of
rose hips emanating from his beard. How he would have laughed had
he seen me a scant few years later in my Muzzis and Cazzos, tresses
done by Mr.John, the sculptor turned coiffeurerorwhat do you call it?
barber? Whatever, my hair, my clothes, my tattooed garter done by
Crazy Clyde in black and crimson. See it? Don't be ashamed, silly
\
Martin! How memory recalls life at the oddest times, how it is relentless
in its works, so that we all are serfs to its gross custom, like the configu-
rations ofits works or not! How long it has taken me to learn this simple
rule ifyou choose to call it a rule . I do-but then, life is not negotiable
. .. is it, Martin?
My heart seemed to claw at my spleen with fangs of burning fire
and I felt my legs giving way. But Fate was not to be! I steadied and we
walked on and on and on . . .
. . . certainly I was on the brimstone path by now, how do
I
know?
I flung myself on its rocks and other sharp things it has there on it ,
thorns and things. All around it-how one can get hurt there! Often I
would cry out in my helplessness these very words. And the answer
would come, always the same: Bajji's dark lines-' 'The pinching shoe
gives pain until it is removed." But I was not yet ready to believe it. I
found myself, with Tom's blessing, in Taos, where I had gone to find
"place." It is only there and in other spots like it that this phenome–
non occurs. Artists know this. Instead I found an ex-war hero whom I
