Eerie Calm

Several people have expressed their amazement at how well I seem to be handling the situation. And I have pretty much agreed. Outwardly I have projected a stability that has even surprised me. I have been able to get on with things in a pretty remarkable way. I have recently acknowledged the sort of eerie calm that has come over me. I have moments of severe sadness; when I look at my bruises, touch my nose, see the reddish brown-tinted circular blood stain left on the carpet.

Until June, I never told anyone about the black eye I got in April. The utter absurdity and embarassment at having to explain to my boss, my first week on the job at the Pentagon how I got it. I think it's sick that I allowed it.

The fight started at a bar, over the color of a military patch. I thought it was a joke the entire time. I was positive it was green, he insisted it was blue. Who gives a damn? He did obviously. He left me at the bar. When I finally got home he was following me from room to room with printouts from online supposedly proving his point. I was tired and disgusted. I just wanted to sleep and told him to please leave me alone. He got so angry that I wouldn't hear him out that he pushed me into the wall, and cracked his head and against mine which effectively closed my eye up. An almost immediate and horrific black eye. I played with makeup for awhile the next day but it didn't do too much, only for my eyelid. And I thought I would maim him each time I looked in the mirror.

Cleaning my own blood from the floor after it was all over in June was wrenching. I couldn’t get it all. The droplets were clustered so densely, like pinpoints on a map of a metropolitan area- a massive one like NYC, where there are so many locations that they bleed into each other; it was too much. I keep thinking about the sharpness and nothingness that I felt when he slammed my head on the floor for the last time. He defensively mentioned that there wasn’t even any blood to dispute my claim after I cried out in horror that it had to be broken. Moments later the blood started flowing. All over. My work clothes, my Pentagon badges and a few very substantial drops clustered on his daughter’s painting from art camp. When I packed his things I made sure to fold her artwork up, leaving the blood stains visible.

This is not supposed to happen to me. Cliche but it's what I have thought all along. And what I have heard endlessly from people who know me well. I am skeptical, savvy, mistrustful to a fault, and intelligent. But lapses in judgement for different reasons plague us all. Yet my mind can't yet fully connect the gruesome story with me. Hence the calm.

"Nabokov Waiting to Happen"

First thing's first. The Cary Grant thing. I am fascinated with language in general, particularly the unique and poetic names given to things, places, and other parts of speech. And there really is a hybrid tea rose named after Mr. Grant - not surprisingly it is beautiful and quick tongued.

Did I write a role for myself 8 years ago? I wrote that poem At Syracuse in 1999. It seems to be my true path- with some creative license of course. Add a few years to the nymph and hold some of the overt lust that is contemporary creepiness and my concentration on that story seems eerily developed.

When I'm back in NY, I'll be able to use all of the extensively intense material that was my life in DC for the past 5 years. I have documented things and created poems along the way- but was not in a rhythm. God knows I have enough fodder. Lolita at work, Capitol Hill, Bush administration position, White House visits, steak aiding the transition from server to political appointee. Men; some good, most I can laugh at now, except two. And it is those two that I predict will provide more creative inspiration than a really good road trip.