she found herself thinking of calling her ex-husband.
Then she met a girl in the neighborhood who worked in a midtown massage parlor. Donna tried out there and liked the security of it. There was a man in front to deal with anyone who tried to cause trouble, and the work itself was mechanical, almost clinical in its detachment.
Virtually all her tricks were manual or oral. Her own flesh was uninvaded, and there was no illusion of intimacy beyond the pure fact of physical intimacy.
At first she welcomed this. She saw herself as a sexual technician, a kind of physiotherapist. Then it turned on her.
'The place had Mafia vibes,' she said, 'and you could smell death in the drapes and carpets. And it got like a job, I worked regular hours, I took the subway back and forth. It sucked— I love that word— it sucked the poetry right out of me.'
And so she'd quit and resumed freelancing, and somewhere along the way Chance found her and everything fell into place. He'd installed her in this apartment, the first decent place she ever had in New York, and he got her phone number circulating and took all the hassles away.
Her bills got paid, her apartment got cleaned, everything got done for her, and all she had to do was work on her poems and mail them off to magazines and be nice and charming whenever the telephone rang.
'Chance takes all the money you earn,' I said. 'Doesn't that bother you?'
'Should it?'
'I don't know.'
'It's not real money anyway,' she said. 'Fast money doesn't last. If it did, all the drug dealers would own the stock exchange. But that kind of money goes out the way it comes in.' She swung her legs around, sat facing forward on the church pew. 'Anyway,' she said, 'I have everything I want. All I ever wanted was to be left alone. I wanted a decent place to live and time to do my work. I'm talking about my poetry.'
'I realize that.'
'You know what most poets go through? They teach, or they work a straight job, or they play the poetry game, giving readings and lectures and writing out proposals for foundation grants and getting to know the right people and kissing the right behinds. I never wanted to do all that shit. I just wanted to make poems.'
'What did Kim want to do?'
'God knows.'
'I think she was involved with somebody. I think that's what got her killed.'
'Then I'm safe,' she said. 'I'm involved with no one. Of course you could argue that I'm involved with mankind. Would that put me in grave danger, do you suppose?'
I didn't know what she meant. With her eyes closed she said, '
'Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind,'
John Donne. Do you know how she was involved, or with whom?'
'No.'
'Does her death diminish me, do you suppose? I wonder if I was involved with her. I didn't know her, not really, and yet I wrote a poem about her.'
'Could I see it?'
'I suppose so, but I don't see how it could tell you anything. I wrote a poem about the Big Dipper but if you want to know anything real about it you'd have to go to an astronomer, not to me. Poems are never about what they're about, you know. They're all about the poet.'
'I'd still like to see it.'
This seemed to please her. She went to her desk, a modern version of the old rolltop, and found what she was looking for almost immediately. The poem was hand-lettered on white bond paper with an italic-nibbed pen.
'I type them up for submission,' she said, 'but I like to see how they look on the page this way. I taught myself to do calligraphy. I learned from a book. It's easier than it looks.'
I read:
Bathe her in milk, let the white stream run
Pure in its bovine baptism,
Heal the least schism
Under the soonest sun. Take her
Hand, tell her it doesn't matter,
Milk's not to cry over. Scatter
Seed from a silver gun. Break her
Bones in a mortar, shatter
Wine bottles at her feet, let green glass
Sparkle upon her hand. Let it be done.
Let the milk run.
