My friends: If thirty people gather in a room
there is no need for winter heating. For ten years
I have shared your B.T.U.’s, and I think at the same time
of all the summer evenings when fans and airconditioners
were helpless against our being together and our smoke would
burn
each other’s eyes raw. We are both better and worse
since we met. Better and worse to be warm than lonesome.
Last spring the young writer came again, and we spoke of friends.
But this time he looked at me with his doctor’s eyes in his head,
hooded and light like a river turtle’s, and talked of their wounds
and drives and systems of aggression, hostility and need,
until I saw them, the skeletons of big fish, stand
around him, bleached and quiet. I am not that safe, I said,
from the hands of my friends, nor are they that safe at my hands.
It is in the strain, in the reaching of the whole mind to see
what it is that is coming toward us, what we are coming toward,
as the earliest essays on Wallace Stevens’ poetry
touch and retouch the lines, trying to tell, but the words
are just behind the tip of the tongue-it is there, below
knowledge, before the settled image, that the lovely, hard
poem or person is befriended. Friendship is that sweaty play.
But believe me, my friends, we are in the late essays. A decade
has used us so that when we go out, we are at home.
We know each other’s gestures like a book, we can hide
nothing personal but the noises of sex and digestion and boredom,
can leave each other only when we go to bed
or to work-the canvas, the class, the court, the consultingroom,
typewriter, or lab. I am trying to say our friendship is dead.
Surely the jig is up. We’ve pinned each other down.
We know which of us will like which new novel, and why,
which of us will flirt, and with whom, and how long it will go on,
which of us are jealous of what in each other, and which fake, or lie,
or don’t shave their legs, or don’t like cheese, and very soon
your smallest children will tire of naming my couch pillows,
black, white, green, lavender and brown.
And worse: I have seen you betray affection, make a fool
of your mate, and you have seen me. I’ve watched you cringe and
shake
and writhe in your selves, and you have seen me in my hospital.
I have given you paper faces and they have grown lifelike,
and you have stuck on my lips in this sheep’s smile.
If I could get free of you I would change, and I would choke
this stooge to death and be proud and violent for a while.
As long as the moon hides half her face we are friends of the
moon.
As long as sight reaches through space we are fond of the star.
But there is no space, and what light is yours and what is mine
is impossible to tell in this monstrous Palomar
where each pock is plain. I cannot dry you into fishbone
essences, I have grown into your shape and size and mirror.
I think I see you on the streets of every strange town.
We know the quickest way to hurt each other, and we have
used that knowledge. See, it is here, in the joined strands
of our weaknesses, that we are netted together and heave
together strongly like the great catch of mackerel that ends
an Italian movie. I feel your bodies smell and shove
and shine against me in the mess of the pitching boat. My friends,
we do not like each other any more. We love.
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