ROBIN MAGOWAN
237
that. But I couldn't follow her unless I was willing to pick up a gun
and there underground join the coterie of her lovers.
A little earlier, back from Death Valley and very much in love, I
had written:
So the night was good to me like curtain
Like tent, rope, and sheep
Slip them into my underwear
Let them be this dead last regret
That I'm here with you and only writing.
If my writing could make marshmallows disappear
If my writing were lead frosting and stars
I'd give some of it to you
Like a gun to silhouette your greenness
These stockings that you take off to lay beside me
In the place that leads back to my original grain
In the forest next to your heart
Where the jelly wore a mint mask
And one day the stocking peeped out of the well
And was this darkness, drinking kindness
That flowed like a rope all over me
Numbing me
to
myself
Bringing me into this mute flower
I cannot call my anything
My day-to-day love, my only well.
Ling was I, I was Ling. This confusion of selves, of pronouns, exists
in an affair as long as the "well" opposite remains your destiny. An
interchange of selves is in this sense an interchange of futures. Un–
fortunately most of us remain single entities; we have only one road
and must go it alone. Anything else is a luring us out into that
black moonlit pond that so many myths describe. Of course there is
no reason why, for a moment or two, we can't plunge in, swim
about, and drink off our heads-which may be why the notion of a
muse has proved so tempting to poets and musicians. But we can't
abide without discovering that the goddess is, as a friend put it, "a
BAAAD, BAAAD,
BITCH GODDESS
who will come out of the
grave to eat you, to destroy you,
to
make you unhappy, unstable,
to close your eyes to dawn and lure you into the blank cave where
albino plants whirl in the dead current."
But an infatuated man doesn ' t see such things. All I knew was
