The
Muse This Time, R. Zamora Linmark
“Funny,” said my fourth, “you can cook up a poem about bumper-to-bumper
traffic, but when it’s time to write about me…” How do you explain to someone
who makes you come thrice a week and gives you head and foot massage at bedtime
why it is much easier to write about gridlock in the land of diesel than return
to that humid night in Makati, where we had met, in a Korean-owned steam room,
a misnomer since lust provided the heat.
The fifth and sixth were more demanding. “Screw the acknowledgment page,”
said the fifth. “I want a biography that sings,” said the sixth. Completely
unaware they were making the same request an hour apart from each other, I told
them, “What do you take me for? a mail-order poet? Dial-a-poem?”
“I don’t get it,” said the third. “You can create beauty from a dead fish,”
said the second. “Destroy buildings in one line,” said the first, “but you
cannot write about the good ole devil?”
Their words are stinging now as I approach twilight. Truth is: love’s hard
to live with. I forget to set the alarm clock, I buy everything on credit, I
start making up words, I call in sick to the world. “Are you a poet?” asked the
second. “A lover?” asked the third. “Just shut up and write,” said the first.
I can’t. Nothing is entering. Except the voice of my first lover, the one
who set the picture straight. “The problem with you is you think you’re Woody
Allen in Manhattan.”
Gershwin’s blue clarinet, black-and-white Big Apple, an ice cream parlor. At
the counter, Woody is buying Hemingway’s daughter, Mariel, a milkshake before
he delivers the bad news. Tears coursing down her cheeks, she asks, “Why?
Because I’m too young? Because I don’t know Rita Hayworth from Veronica Lake?
Because I’m not Diane Keaton running with you in the rain?” They split, then a
minute before the credits roll, he changes his mind. “I’ll take you back,” Mariel
says, “when I return from London.”
That’s the closest to my idea of love: watching the skyline, making out,
making mistakes, making believe desire means it’s with somebody else, then
breaking up, and, if we’re lucky, forgiveness that comes right before take-off.
There, I’ve said it. What more can one want? A lover who loves me as much as
the rain. Rain, and, from the opening credits to the closing heart, Gershwin.