A small story about Ai and Poetry.

I grew up in a very small town. This town had little to recommend it, but it had one thing: There was another, slightly bigger town, next door. This slightly bigger town had a SUNY. This particularly SUNY had a really good set of poets, and an excellent writing program.

The high school I attended had a program where the understimulated could spend half of their senior year taking classes at the SUNY. I signed up to take an introductory creative writing class, taught by a Well Known Poet. As the program required, I set up a meeting with the poet to ask him if this was okay.

It was, he said. But not quite. As luck would have had it, he had heard me read the year before that at a student reading-- a little poem about a shy girl who would rather dance with a broom than a boy. He thought I belonged in the advanced poetry seminar instead of the introductory course.

I was flattered. Of course I was flattered. I was seventeen, and allowed to participate in a largely graduate poetry seminar. The next youngest person in the class was 21, and a senior. He's the main character in my story about Ai.

The next part of the story was predictable-- the next-younger-poet and I became lovers. I was flattered. Of course I was flattered.

For the sake of background, it's important to know more or less all the writers in this environment were Deep Imagists and Transcendentalists. It was all Whitman around a bonfire and Robert Bly and Wendell Berry and William Carlos Williams and Galway Kinnell. We only read the confessional poets in order to talk about what a shame it was they didn't go beyond their limitations.

RIP, AI. (January 2, 1947-March 19, 2010)/ "Conversation" by AI

Conversation

for Robert Lowell

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of silk dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that’s where I’m floating,
and that’s what it’s like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?