E Mail to Damniso Lopez #6

E Mail to Damniso Lopez #6


"Beore I answer your questions about
Linda, Jackie, Greer, and the Seventeen year old
Whose name you do not know
And I cannot remember-but she went back
To her home in Ireland
And married an Old Catholic
Who was a closet Atheist,
I almost forgot you asked about
The quasi-Japanese who
Use to own a bar in Seattle,
But came to Tampa to be a massagist
And rubbed men until they had a mystic vision.

Damniso, you know how I aspired
To become a Jaques Lacan.
I have been psychoanalyzing this woman
Who is one of the beautiful women
I have ever seen. I was studying
Her face the other evening as we shared
Wine, a Peterson's Shirez.
The contours of her face are enchanting,
They are shaped like a sculpture
Of Lucca Della Robbia. The way
Her face curves under her eye
Down to beginning of her cheek
Is aesthetically exciting. It is a delicate
Beauty. As I look at her, I want to kiss
Every inch of her flesh, but I have
To control myself and not let
This intense love of her destroy
My objective psychoanalysis.
I am not on this earth to be happy
And have love, I am only here
To psychoanalyze. I seek eternal truth,
Not my personal happiness.

Well, Damniso, I discovered
That this woman has lived a life
That everyone should struggle not to live.
She is an example
Of living a type of life
That should be avoided.
Her type of life will only lead to insanity,
And she with her hallucinations
And beliefs borders on insanity now.
She is insane, this woman believes in God.

But she has survived a background
Of having a husband
Who came from old religions and the old days
When gays were persecuted and condemned.
Her husband
would not face the fact he was gay,
Tried to prove he was not
By having sex six times a day.
He related to her through logic
And logically caressing.
This impoverished woman
Has never known the touch
Of a man's hand who really loved her.

You know, Damniso, when I think of her,
I think of Maud Gonne and Yeats.

Her husband treated her as an object
And his marriage was a mask.
It resembled the typical American marriage
When the woman is reduced to an object,
And is not to a figural being, an allegory, a symbol.
She is not a vision
As when a willow becomes a green wind
That wrinkles away the epidexis
Of the river's fixed surface
And becomes an epiphany,
And this is the way love should be.

In her existence,
The simulated ordinary
Defamiliarized
The extraordinariness
Of the ordinary.

Her life became like a soldier dead
On a busy street corner with
A vandal-destroyed mail box
In the whore section of Iraq.
She was given a medal post humorously
For serving a vague and indeterminate cause
Of having children, grandchildren,
Great grand grandchildren
And talking all the nonsense and lies
That all the respectable citizens
Of America talk.
Now she is only an uniform
Covered with medals and honors,
Only an uniform with no flesh inside.

I was with her
When for a moment, she refused the stability
Of comfortable past habits,
Of comfortable false beliefs,
And succumbed
To true and radical form
Of skeptical behavior,
Became intoxicated
With supreme happiness,
The tepid and false underpinnings
Of her fraudulent existence
Were transformed. She was freed
from a few moments
From the stabilizing role
Of her acted
And her pinned butterfly life.
She flew,
Flapped her wings, fluttered.

But her ascent into the beyond,
The real, crumbled
When among her grandchildren
And great grandchildren.
She immediately became a norm, a nun;
Once again she was a cipher.

The last time I saw her,
She said to me
And then hurried away,
"Frost's poetry allegorizes concepts
Of Heideggerian phenomenology."


Duane Locke

Posted over on Unlikely Stories