It would have been better just to talk to her, introduce myself, but I was already seeing someone, and while I had few scruples about that, there must have been some proverbial line, albeit porous, because I didn’t. Some other operative principle was in play, and even if the basic intentions weren’t terribly refined, the end was not what it seemed to others. Maybe it was as dangerous as they all thought. I’d certainly never considered poetry to be a much of a threat before. Afterwards, there was no denying it. Poetry had consequences, unintended but still: it made things happen.
But, no, I didn’t talk to her or even try. Instead, like I had several months earlier, for another woman, I printed up a poem I wrote and left it on her car. Of course, it was written about yet another woman, but that didn’t matter so much—she’d never end up knowing who left it, anyway. Probably. At least I had no intention, in the main, of revealing myself as the author, or the freak who frequents parking lots to leave verse on women’s cars. It does sound a bit creepy, unless you like getting poetry left on your car, which I don’t imagine many women do, these days. There was, probably, never a time when they did, either, unless they had some idea who might leave it, and liked the idea, or even approved of verse in general. After all, they might prefer prose, novelistic discourse, maybe non-fictional first-person autobiographical narratives of remorse and redemption, or neatly organized stories with easy openings and final endings, in which case poetry would never make much of an impression, no matter who left it. But that was the point—not knowing. The mystery was the fun, something exciting for me and, I assumed, for her.
Yes, I had some hope the poem might seem sexy, but there’s not much in it that is. It just doesn’t lend itself to that sort of reading experience. Sure, the poem idealizes the “Heart of the Mouth"—the lips—but also problematizes them as a site of contradictions. Not only a place of beauty but of anger, animosity, and desire. How wonderful and horrible the mouth can be:
Those lips—where faith is restored
In long forgotten lands, where
Deep-running waters course through
Underground caverns, like hair
In the wind—ask me closer.
Those lips, whose purpose is clear
Enough to drink, like citrus
On the tongue, attention they
Command. Those lips, when they move
Tell me listen, “Did you hear
Rumbling earth, schisms of heart
Shuffled back into the deck?”
Those lips worn in front, pouting
To achieve effect, against
My neck pressed, warm breath like steam
From volcanic mouth, part to
Show the teeth. Those lips wander
Into limbo, hardly look
Back, as if behind doesn’t
Count, even if it circles
Around for another pass,
Insists on being taken
Seriously, not unlike
A natural disaster,
Tornado or typhoon, come
Ashore in a torrential
Rage, those lips, heart of the mouth.
I won’t deny that an orifice, as a focal point in the poem, has sexual connotations, of various sorts, but other than a refrain that apotheosizes “those lips,” there’s not much in the poem that’s prurient. It doesn’t even recommend any action be taken with these lips. They’re lips without a face, disembodied and abstracted. But, then, it’s entirely possible to make it mean what you want. As Oscar Wilde said, “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.” On the other hand, since people are generally interested in the origins of poems, I may as well say that this one concerns conflicting feelings, even condescension, for the woman I was seeing at the time. Clearly there is desire in the poem, but also hope and ambiguity, instability, tension, even an unflattering depiction of ignoring what’s not right in front of your face. So, leaving it on a car for another woman or two? There’s more going on here than a simple, salacious come on. All that, though, is besides the point. What matters most is the audience. The reader makes the reading. I only wrote the thing.
And put it under her windshield wiper, like a flyer you’d find on your car after a day of shopping at the mall or exercising at the gym, though those don’t usually elicit the same reaction. I didn’t stop there, not after leaving her the poem. I left a note a few days later, saying I hoped she liked it and, if she did, to wave enthusiastically towards the East, where the other office building stood. I thought this a neat feint, just in case there were problems. The note was too much, though. As soon as I got back into the office, and went to the window, I saw security guards cruising around the upper level parking spaces looking at windshields. Someone must have seen me. Just as they find the note a security car arrives, followed soon after by she herself and a bunch of co-workers or friends. I wasn’t about to go down there. I had a pretty good idea what all the commotion was about, but why such a hullabaloo about a poem, or was it the note? As I sat in the office, watching events unfold from the seventh story, their palaver down below went on without cease, and so did my increasing unease.
Someone must have seen me put the note on the car. The parking structure was open to anyone who happened to look down from the office building. It was only logical to think I could be recognized at any time. Anyone among the hundreds, maybe thousands, who worked in the same building could suddenly point at me, “You! It’s you! You left the poem about the mouth!” Just entering the building would be fraught with danger. There was no way around it: I had to go down, step forward, claim the poem, and note, as mine. Better to try and contain the problem than have some stranger confront me in the elevator. I could have just sat there in the office, ignored it all, turned my back to the window and plowed on with things as normal. But I didn’t. I locked up the office and went down the elevator to the parking structure.
They were all still there when I walked up to them. I tell them that it was my note, that I’m sorry for causing all the fuss, that I didn’t mean to scare anyone, her—never but once looking at her eyes. One woman demanded to know if I’d left any other poems. Yes, I said. One of the security guards tells me to stand off to the side, telling another guard to make sure I don’t take off. I tell him that I need to get back to work, I’m not supposed to be out of the office for long.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he says.
He asks if I have a car, when I left the other note, on who’s car, if I’d left one on a white truck… Which I haven’t, of course. They tell me that someone else has been leaving notes on cars, that another woman was followed to a bank machine by some guy who exposed himself and threatened to rape her. It’s not clear if there’s one guy or two but suddenly suspicions center on me, especially since, they say, I fit the description. So they call the police.
When the officer shows up the security guard tells him I “definitely fit the description.” The officer frisks me, takes my identification, and puts me in the back of the police car. I sit there for a long time, panic setting in, until he comes over to read me my Miranda rights and asks what kind of car I drive.
“I don’t have a car,” I say, “I have a bike. I take the bus. I ride the train.”
He goes back over to the crowd that’s growing larger as the evening rush to get home thickens. Someone produces a sheet of paper, which must be the offending poem itself, and hands it to the officer. They look at me in back of the car as he talks to them. On and on it goes, their deliberations. Are they talking about how awful I am, how disgusting, or are they discussing the merits of the poem, perhaps scanning its lines and what’s inevitably between them? Might they be considering the images?
“Is there a regular rhythm, or something looser?”
“Wait, how many syllables in each line?”
“Is that an attempt at structure?”
“Lips? That’s erotic, right?”
“Oh, yes, it is, very much.”
“Yeah, definitely.”
“Ah, I see it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh.”
When the officer comes back to the car he asks, in a friendlier manner, why I left the poem.
“I thought it might be kind of romantic.”
“Ok, well, another woman is coming from Milwaukie, about 20 minutes away, to identify you, to see if it’s you who accosted her,” he says.
I’m done for now. Even though it’s not me, too much has gone wrong for anything better to happen. She’ll say it was me, for sure. When she arrives the officer leads her to the car to examine me. At first I look straight ahead, out the windshield, but then I turn to her as if to say, “Here, look! Do you think it’s me? It’s me, right?” She looks in the side window, searching for some recognition. She’s trying hard.
“It’s hard to tell,” she says.
I imagine calling my boss from jail because I’ve been arrested for indecent exposure and attempted rape, telling her she needs to get down to the office, and quick, because no one’s there at all, and hasn’t been for hours. The officer opens the door and asks me to step out.
After a pause, she says, “No, he was much taller.”
He tells me to sit in the back again, shuts the door, talks to the group, and then gets in the driver’s seat. As he’s driving away he asks where he should take me and leaves the crowd standing there, staring at us as we go.
“I’d suggest you don’t do that poetry thing again,” he says, “but do what you want.”
I think to myself, I’ve had enough of this poetry thing, quite frankly, to put me off it for good. When I get back to the office, I’ve been away for almost 90 minutes, and I’m lucky nothing’s happened while I was gone. There’s a huge sense of relief that I’m back up above all the chaos created by a poem, and its prose follow up. I can coast now—the worst is over. I should be able to ride up and down the elevator, after a few days, without any problems.
When I go into work the next day, Wendy, the Assistant Manager, gives me a fax from the Vice-President of the company who has suspended me because of sexual harassment complaints. My intended audience clearly didn’t care much for my verse, prose, or method of delivery. Neither was she satisfied with me being arrested in front of all those people, who would have preferred both big and little heads on a platter. I take the new calmly at first, trying to explain that I hadn’t done anything wrong but, when Wendy just shrugged her shoulders and said “I’m sorry,” I blew up and stormed out.
Some days later I had to return to the office, as Leslie, the Manager, had arranged a phone conference with the Vice-President. I thoughts about putting up a fight to keep my job, having talked with a lawyer, but there wasn’t much point. The company wouldn’t keep me on and it was already too uncomfortable to go back. Leslie even said that I had scared Wanda when I blew up the other day. I asked her to apologize for me, to say that I hadn’t been angry at her but terribly upset about losing my job. When we made the phone call to the Vice-President, the first part of the conversation revolved around the meaning of the poem, with him making the argument that it was obviously provocative. If I had wanted an audience, now I regretted having one, as the poem was no longer what I wanted it to be but what he was making it. We offered competing interpretations—me saying it was hardly provocative at all but he insisted on the poem’s lurid possibilities.
“It’s obviously . . . it’s clearly, uh, about . . . oral sex. You’re basically telling her you want it. I mean, these details, um, about the mouth, it’s clear you’re asking, telling, her to do it—‘those lips’—right? There’s not much else to say. It’s pretty clear, over the line.”
Sitting there with Leslie, an attractive older woman, while the Vice-President’s voice leaked from the speaker phone, with his sexual suggestions, was like a setup for a pornographic movie scene, only this was the opposite of sex, a kind of aversion therapy for verse. Neither of us looked at each other as we listened to him quote the poem as if it were Henry Miller, knowing that liking it would be a punishable offense. She also seemed to pity me, as if I had fallen off the corporate path to lifelong happiness. There was no way to win. He would determine the poem’s meaning and effect, and she appeared to agree. Those lines were no longer mine. The New Critics would have been proud. In the end, I was asked to “voluntarily resign” or be terminated. I shook Leslie’s hand, walked out of the office, calmly this time, and went down the elevator for the last time.
Not long after all this happened I fell in love with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Then I wrote my Master’s thesis on John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a poem I barely understood. I started my doctorate thinking I would write my dissertation on Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Though that’s not how it turned out, I did find Milton and Byron along the way. I visited Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields and tried, on two occasions, to get into St. Michael's Church in Highgate, where Coleridge is buried, but had to settle for the house across the street where he was maintained by Dr. James Gillman. The Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey always overwhelms—Chaucer, Spenser, Tennyson, and so many others all together in one eternal resting place. I went to Wales to walk where Wordsworth had, to see Tintern Abbey and hike to the top of Mt. Snowden, though I could have taken the train; and Twickenham drew me from Hampton Court because Pope lived there in the eighteenth-century. The poetry thing, well, it just couldn’t be helped. Even if it’s been primarily a private preoccupation, without any more unsuspecting victims of my verse, there have been many more poems since I was arrested for leaving one, and its prose follow up, on that woman’s car. Those people standing around in the parking lot may have thought me a rapist-poet, maybe even a creative pervert. Sitting in the back of that police car sure made me feel like something awful, and getting fired gave me enough justification to feel I’d suffered for my aesthetics. But I wasn’t a rapist, or even much of a threat, though I understand the fear and anxiety. I barely suffered and that woman’s experience might very well have been frightening, given the weird shit that happened there. It’s even presumptuous to consider myself a poet, having barely enough good poems for a book, even to this day. But if that smile led to leaving the poem on her car, and if leaving that poem got me fired and, in turn, took me any distance towards the poets I’ve come to know and love, then I will be looking for the next car in need of a few choice lines of verse.
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