ROBIN MAGOWAN
language of mushrooms) or eating them. how could this latter
be any more dangerous than any other thing one might do.
i
am
trying, beginning to see with the third eye. it is dark and
probably cold outside. the tree is green iridescence through
the window. the nite rings with many bells, rattles sometimes
/ike
a
tamborine, is still, cool
as
the sea.
"Meanwhile your writing has gone down to
a
point. " What
goes down, comes up, everything is possible. see how the
sun rises over the earth. you are
so
very good at writing
shadows, and then writing them "mown, moan" away. it's
wonderfully fertile.
As
your muse I shall sometimes be foam on your beard.
and i love you
so
i chant for you and i love you
(sometimes i
am
distressed with
my
being here alone, some–
times distressed with other things)
(there is
a
gentle mist from the clouds that brightens on the
leaves and makes
me
calm and possessed)
231
Social portraits elude me; nonetheless I must try. As the later
letters show, Ling was suicidal. But what woman worth knowing
isn't? This was exacerbated by drugs, her equivalent of a woman's
mascara or high-heeled shoes. She needed these props to get herself
off, and to bind men to her, make them forget whatever else they
may have previously seen. Moreover, it was this drug language that
spoke in her. At that time who she was sexually was still up in the air,
and her husband's running out on her and a succession of one-night
stands hadn't eased the problem. This may have been why I was sum–
moned, as I had ideas about exactly this sort of thing; cheap, easy
ideas, I might add, earned at an all too blithe distance. But my life
was committed to intimacy, to a driving down, so far as it is possible,
into those magic nets which I saw as the basis of all poetry. And this
went back a long way to those Long Island summers when I took a
mat out into the long waves and went bird watching. Ling's living
with me was, I think, a last-ditch effort to prove to herself that she
could be that expert seamstress, cook, foot-kisser, and bottle-washer
rather than this moll up beside you in your front seat as you roared
along, knocked down a few trees, tossed up a frame house, then,
the dream half-complete, got bored and drifted off-that whole
mindless history that is any Western town.
