A Letter to a Famous Poet
by Fiona White
It’s the summer of 1999 and you’re sweating. You have this manic sort of look in your eyes. I push the hair out of your face and you don’t stop grinning at me. You grab me. We’re lying on your bed, so it’s easy for you to wrap your arms around me.
You look up at me and it’s a look for the ages. Not the type you’d see in a romance movie, but in a thriller when the final girl has finally killed the monster. A mad victorious look that can only be conceived from pure accidental genius.
“I’m gonna be someone,” you say. I laugh, not because I don’t take you seriously, just because you always have a funny way of wording things. You always say the oddest things at the most random of times.
“I’m gonna be a legend, I swear, I just know it,” you continue. I stop laughing, pull you up to me, and give you a kiss. “They’re gonna make biopics about me, and paint murals of me on the side of indie bookstores, and kids are gonna read my shit in their lit textbooks.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” I whisper against your forehead.
“Dunno, them, I guess.” And we laugh and hold each other in your busted futon you always swear counts as a bed.
And that’s how the dream goes. It was once a memory, once happened. Of that I am almost sure. But now it only lives in my subconscious. Just like you. It comes to me sometimes when I sleep. My dreams are cruel like that. They won’t let me forget you.
Now, I’m going to tell you something, and you have to promise you won’t say “I told you so.” But the other day, I was walking down that old street where my brother used to live. You know the one, you met my mom there. She told you to watch your language, you told her to “fuck off,” and I prayed that the ceiling would cave in and put me out of my misery. It was all a very memorable affair, all on that street, right? So I was walking down there, and I don’t know if you remember, but there’s a cute little bookstore there, owned by a married couple. They even have a cat. I think we went there once and you called it “a place a fake reader shops to buy pretty books for their decorative bookshelves.” Well, that same cute little bookstore has a mural of you. Right on the side of the building with all the important writers. You’re in between Shelley and Frost. I laughed so hard when I saw it that I spooked the cat they have behind the window, next to the display of Atwood’s new book.
I’m not going to lie, it took me back. They got your likeness good. Your eyes are off though, too tranquil. None of that fire that threatens to burn everything around you, especially yourself.
I had an innate reaction when I saw you on the wall, I squared my shoulders. And suddenly I wasn't there anymore, I was back in our living room.
I’m standing on an apple crate you swiped from the local grocers. I’m barefoot and the wood is poking into the bottom of my feet. I’m trying so hard to keep still. My muscles are burning. I’m wearing jeans and an old work shirt of yours. It’s too big on me and hangs off my left shoulder, exposing it.
I feel like one of those show dogs after a rally, made to stand on a podium and look all pretty. You aren’t even looking at me, you’re reading Fitzgerald so intensely you’ve accidentally folded the cover back even though you hate when people do that. You're muttering something, mouthing the text maybe. I want to get up, but the last time I moved you yelled at me. I look at the VCR clock behind you. It’s been four hours. I’m supposed to be an inspiration for you to write. A session between artist and muse. But I don’t feel inspiring. I feel like a houseplant.
It takes another hour before you finally set down your book and rapidly pick up your notepad and pen. You freeze and run into the kitchen to get another glass of wine. When you get back, you write faster than I have ever seen anyone write. It’s a hurried, frenzied sort of writing. You don’t stop at all, not even to look at me, your muse. You haven’t looked at me in two and a half hours.
When you finish, you toss the pad to the chair next to you and down your wine glass in one foul swoop.
You look up at me, eyes alight with something I think I will eventually be able to understand, but never will.
“Come on, Darling. What are you doing? Come down and read what we’ve made,” you say, and motion for me to hop down. I do, and when I read the piece you’ve just made, I nearly cry. It’s like fall, this raw, unpredictable fiery thing that’s memory haunts you long after the last red leaf has fallen. I look up at you like I always do after reading your poems, and study your face. A face that kisses me, that screams with uncertain anger, that is constantly flickering between madness and genius. Somehow beyond that face, is the skull that holds the brain that conceives these beautiful brain worms. I almost can’t believe it.
“So what does my Mary Rose think?” you ask, but your smile gives away that my face has already told you what I think.
You always called me your “Mary Rose” after some famous medieval ship. I was never able to tell you it was a tragic nickname. ‘Cause the Mary Rose sank. Now it just rots on display in Portsmouth, a byproduct of a bygone era. Too subtle of a fall to even be a tragedy.
“I love it,” I say. And you laugh and go get another drink, leaving the small living room to go to a place my memory can’t follow.
I can’t seem to escape from the memories. Their assault isn’t constant, but subtle and unpredictable. The other day I went to get the mail. The wind was blowing that savory salt water air and the moment I breathed it in, I was back in Gloucester. It’s 1994 and you’re standing on the beach. The wind is picking out your curls, separating them. You’re laughing and telling me this ridiculous take on Frankenstein. You know it’s ridiculous of course. You always love to present the craziest interpretations of anything. You say it’s to keep me on my toes and make me think outside the box. But I know you do it just to make me laugh. And I always laugh, because how could I not? You’re standing there giving me a piece of yourself you never express on paper, a smile reserved just for me against the backdrop of our favorite beach, gentle waves, and incoming storms framing your silhouette.
Maybe I am like a ship because if I lose control of my mind, I swerve into uncertain waters. One slip, one stumble, and I’m back into the seven years of our life together. A life I am still unable to process.
A part of me hopes if I write down all the things I never said to you, that it would bring me closure. I know what you would say to all this internal turmoil though. “Then just move on.” It’s not as easy as that. Reminders of you are everywhere. You know, my niece came over the other day. She showed me her English textbook. It’s the new edition. It has your poem in it. Not just any one. The one you wrote about me. It wasn’t for me though, I know that. It was for the love of language, of the arts. The first and greater of your loves. Honestly, I have tried to forget it, but it infested me in ways I can barely explain, memories and soul.
There it be
The love of my Mary Rose
No greater of a ship art thee
Thou whose wood is pristine
Whose sails beckon me
They are an agent of the wind
The foreground to the sun
One gaze upon their wooden deck
Sets my heart ablaze
And my mind forever lost without their guiding light
So sappy. So ridiculously unnecessary. So unbelievably pointless. So uncharacteristically heartfelt. It doesn’t feel like you, but at the same time, it feels as if it is all of you. Every word you never had the courage to speak flows seamlessly in page after page of scribbles, poems, half-finished novels, screenplays, and songs. Pages that littered our shared apartment. Pages I had to be the one to pick up after all was said and done.
I am not a ship. I am not a muse. I was an out-of-my-depth lover to an out-of-touch poet. You are the greatest love of my loves, your expressions of love the most sincere I have ever known. Your lies, the most deceptive cruelty I have ever felt. But to everyone else, you are the world’s tragedy. A postmortem renaissance man whom everyone adores, but cannot find in themselves to love. As I cannot find it in myself to adore you. For I loved you too deeply, tragedy and all.
And if this were another genre, a solely romantic story, another life, another world if you will, I do not storm out of our apartment on that fateful November night. We sit and talk everything out, and I’m honest with you. I tell you that I am worried for you, that I know everything isn’t fine.
In another world, I stop driving away from you and our home. I turn the car back around and I find you before it’s too late. I push open the door despite the fact that your body blocks it. Like one of those viral “super strength in the time of need” stories your aunt posts about on Facebook. And the first time your name ever appears in print isn’t your obituary, but when the local newspaper publishes a story about how I found you in time and saved your life from alcohol poisoning.
In another world, I never even met you. I ignored you and never asked you to get a drink with me. You never wrote that first poem about me on a napkin on that bar counter with that chewed-up old pen you stole from the back. That pen that now sits in a box in my closet with everything else you left behind. Because in another world, we never met, and I never fell for you, and you never felt whatever it was you felt for me. I like to think that in that world, you live.
But this isn’t another world. In this world, I leave that November night and drive to my mother’s house. And when she pauses comforting me to answer the phone, I feel a horrible sense of dread that I just cannot for the life of me place. In this world, I get to see my mother’s face melt within itself as she breaks the news to me.
In this world, I am a footnote in your Wikipedia article. I am the “survived by his partner” in your obit. The symbolic Mary Rose English students write theses about. The role that goes to a C-list actor in your biopic. Now the phone rings with interview requests. Interview requests I have ignored since that one reporter in Tampa asked me a question I can’t seem to shake.
“Did you know he was going to die that night? Did he?”
I couldn’t say what I needed to back then. I couldn’t tell you the truth while you were still here, so I’ll be honest now. I’ll answer the question that made me flip off that interviewer and leave. But only to you. Promise not to tell? The truth is I think a part of me must have known it would end like this. Since the first time I saw your face hanging out of a car window, wind blowing your hair and a careful smile on your face, I have known, like how the Mary Rose must have known that tragedy was to come when it entered the eye of the storm.