Our Past, By Anne Waldman

You said my life was meant to run from yours as

streams from the river.

You are the ocean I won’t run to you

We were standing on Arapahoe in front of the Silver

Saddle Motel

They had no rooms for us

I wore high red huaraches of Mexico & a long skirt

of patches

You had traveled back from Utah

I thought of the Salt Lakes, seeing them once from a

plane they were like blank patches in the mind or

bandaged places of the heart

I felt chilly

I had just ridden down the mountain with a car full of

poets, one terrified of the shifting heights, the

dark, the mountains, he said, closing in

I said Wait for me, but I have to go here first, or, it’s too

complicated, some kind of stalling because I

wanted you

You were direct, you were traveling light, your feet

were light, you hair was light, you were attentive

Were you rushing me?

We walked by the stream, you held me, I said I have to

get back soon because he’s waiting, maybe he’s

suffering

I think the moon was waning

You walked me back along 9th Street under dark trees

The night we met, June 6, we’d come out of the New

York Church to observe a performer jumping over

signposts

I was with my friend, a mentor, much older

You were introduced to him, to me

You said you’d followed me out from that night to where

the continent divides, where my heart divided

I wrote poems to you in Santa Fe

You followed me all the way to Kitkitdizze

I waited for you, when you came I was away

I drove miles to speak with you on the telephone

I met you in Nevada City after nearly turning back to

put out a fire

We went to Alta, the lake of your childhood

I wanted to stay forever in the big room with all the

little white beds, like a nursery

You were like first love

All the impossibilities were upon us

We never had enough time

In Palo Alto where they name the streets after poets I

admired your mother’s pretty oriental things

In San Francisco we ate hurriedly at the joint near the

opera house

I lied about going to Chicago for your birthday in New York

I lied about spending Christmas with you in Cherry Valley

I will never forget the dance you did to the pipes of

Finebar Furey on New Year’s day. You kept your

torso bent to protect your heart

Then I moved to Colorado

We met and sat in the yard of a friend’s brother’s house in

Missoula, Montana

It’s wonderful the way this city turns serenely into

country with no fuss, the city is shed, or is it the

other way around, the country falls off into the

city?

It was how I wanted us to shed our other lives at least

when we were together

In that yard you made me feel our situation was

intolerable

We seemed to be in constant pain

When we parted at the small airport early that morning

my heart finally ripped

In the spring back in New York, things got darker

I was sick, my head was swollen

I remember reading to you about the Abidharma on a

mattress

I had trouble speaking

I behaved badly and embarrassed you at the uptown

party

A part of you had left me for good

You’d given your loft over to weekly parties

You were having a public life. I felt you were turning

into me

I wanted our private romance

Was I being straight with you, I wondered?

I let you think things of me that weren’t true. You

thought I was wise & couldn’t be hurt

Then I had the person I lived with and what could

be said about that?

That summer you visited my hotel in Boulder. We

slept on separate mattresses. I felt I was trying to

imprison you and after you left I couldn’t go back

there for days. When I did I found a dead bird had

gotten entrapped, struggled fiercely to get out

The following winter I waited for you in sub zero cold,

wearing black. I was told you’d come & gone. You

didn’t return. We spoke on the phone for a long time.

I said I was going home and falling in love with someone

else. You said It sounds like you want to

My mother heard me crying and came to me in the

bathtub and said O don’t, it breaks my heart! I

told her I was going to the hell for a while I’d often

made for others, karma worked that way. Bosh

karma she said.

We met briefly in Portland, Oregon and New York

We’ve corresponded all this time, following the details

of each other’s lives and work

Your father has recently died

My baby son grows stronger

Tha last time I saw you you were standing on my

street corner

As I came toward you you said What a youthful gait

you have

From “Blue Mosque” by Anne Waldman; from “The Portable Beat Reader,” edited by Ann Charters (Penguin: 650 pp., $15.95)