Lucille & Poetry

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Each day he walks a little deeper into the canopy’s shade.
When he calls home, he says he’s never felt more alone

—Joshua Michael Stewart, “Multitudes”

One

My friend had a turtle named Lucille, and she kept her in this tank with a couple
of small hermit crabs that made a home of whatever thing she dropped in there
with a hole big enough for their bodies. When the crabs died, she’d fish them out
and give Lucille a treat for the days or maybe weeks she had to swim around dead
bodies of old roommates. Turtles are cursed with slowness, but also longevity.

Thick skin is not enough in any art; you have to have a shell for the arrows
and the bullets and the rocks they lob at you hoping for a headshot. You will hear
poet after poet talk about wanting to heal the world like they’re trying out for
Miss America, but what they mean is they would very much like the world to hurt
in just the way that it will need their words. Everyone wants to be Walt Whitman.

Two

Everyone wants a war for their art. We threw a party when my friend got out
of the Marines, and out of his second marriage. It was at our other married friends’
house, who’d eventually divorce, too, and almost all of us were drunk or high, so
half of us took ourselves to the guest room, started taking off our clothes. I thought,
Is this an orgy? Am I part of an orgy? And then I thought, No, I have a choice here.

I put my shirt back on, looked at the shadows of my friends, tried to make out who
was climbing onto whom, and I thought of a Dane Cook joke where he says, “Let’s turn
off the lights and play who’s in my mouth,” and I wanted to laugh, but I lurched instead
and tried to find some shoulder or head in the dark to steady myself toward the light
showing through the doorframe. My friend, the marine, said, “Pussy,” pushed me out.

Three

Have you been to AWP? It’s the conference hosted by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
Lots of frenetic and awkward energy. Mostly it’s the hungriest among us reaching out
for a little acknowledgement, for communion with others who might know how it is
to be forever in the company of your past and your future and your imagination,
and still feel so—how did it go?—so impossibly, imperially alone. Kay Ryan went once.

Don’t ask me why I didn’t stay. There were at least three other marines, friends
who asked about how gay I was because I didn’t really seem that gay, but I think
they meant how down I was, how slutty I was, how I’d feel about taking multiples
of marines, but I’d done that, and it’s not nearly as sexy as you think. One of you
is eventually the middle bun in a Big Mac. One of you is an extension, a pretense.

Four

Kay Ryan probably got so much shit for the essay she wrote about AWP. It’s all
good now, of course. Now it’s up on the Poetry Foundation website. Everyone has
a laugh at her acerbic observations. She described sitting in on a reading and realizing
it wasn’t for her. But she couldn’t just walk out; it would have been rude, especially since, as
she tells it, there were not enough bodies there to hide among. I’d say, “Hey, Kay! Pussy!”

I knew these guys in a throuple. It’s always the most boring lot, the incessant chatter
about real estate or their last trip to “PV” (which translates to Puerto Vallarta when
one pulls their head out of their ass). They introduced him at brunch as if they didn’t
know he was all anyone was talking about over mimosas, he could’ve been their son,
he was so beautiful. When he was gone, it was like they’d lost a pet they’d forget about.

Five

My friend decided one day to let Lucille go, right into a lake. A turtle who had never
been in more than a gallon of water, who had lived maybe longer than that throuple’s
third, didn’t look back like a dog at the vet. She just pushed herself into the darkness
of the murky waters, into all of that bacteria, the foreign bodies, into the slime of it,
the mess of it, as if she couldn’t wait to get as filthy as possible, to let herself go.

We live in an age of affirmation. Almost anyone will say yes to a blurb, but maybe
they can find a way to bow out, eventually. A sudden illness, a daughter they think
is losing herself. Writers can be dramatic, it’s what we do. It’s kind of our thing. Who
could argue? Who could protest the writer you really like, who catalogued his
mental state, every day? Rough. Shot of him in Austria, in New York. So rough.

Six

It wasn’t always like this. Won’t be like this always. Alexander Pope enjoyed the cut
he could make with a verse. They crucified Jorie Graham, said she showed bias, favor,
in contests she’d judged. Quelle horreur! As if we all aren’t continually doing the same,
all of us running around asking, “Who’s in my mouth?” Tony Hoagland’s “The Change”
was problematic, a poetic sin that is not forgiven until you are dead. At least dead.

Today we try to be nicer. You can throw bread on the water, and they tell you not to,
that the geese and the ducks will get fat or sick, but nobody listens, they just want
to feel like they are contributing to the ecosystem, they want to see the lips of land-
bound fish or a turtle come up—blurb, blurb, blurb. The older poets will tell you, almost
immediately, how much they hate being asked to blurb—get that out of the way.

Seven

And I have a friend who asked two dozen people to blurb his book and everyone
but one said yes and, man, he was pissed at that one guy like I was pissed at the one
guy who had just posted about how every motherfucker with a car could go to hell
(because his heavenly ass always rode a bike) and said he thought I was mean for no
reason. I tried not to let it bother me. I don’t want to be problematic. I’d rather die.

A long time before Lucille found her freedom, we all went to New Orleans,
and I ordered turtle soup for the table. My friend, Lucille’s owner, said, “How could
you serve me turtle soup? I have a turtle!” I said, “You don’t even like that turtle!
Half the time you forget she’s there!” And she looked at me like she finally saw me
for what I was, some motherfucker swerving his big ass truck into the bike lane.

“What do you mean? I love Lucille?”