Ann Pedone ~ In Bed With Susan Sontag

Antigone in NYC

I hate writ­ing about myself
I leak, I bruise eas­i­ly, I’ve nev­er
Known how to pose for the cam­era
And I’ve been told that
My horni­ness would make me
A ter­ri­ble sub­ject for a book

But this is where we’re at
The begin­ning of the twen­ty
First cen­tu­ry
In a stu­dio apart­ment at
110 Morningside Drive

I left San Francisco when I was 17
I came to New York to dis­cov­er all
Of the beau­ti­ful things

Because I have the sex­u­al
Stamina of Grace Kelly
I was accept­ed as grad
Student in the English dept
At Columbia University

For six years I stud­ied Barthes and Lacan,
Butler and Foucault

When dur­ing a talk on Antigone
My dis­ser­ta­tion advi­sor pen­e­trat­ed me with his
Left index fin­ger
The next day I became a poet

There are many beau­ti­ful women
In New York and
Like Whitman, I want­ed to
Make a new life for myself
So I went down to St. Mark’s
Bookshop
And bought a copy of the
Susan Sontag journals

And what hap­pens is
Every time I fin­ish a page
I take out my phone and pho­to­graph it

At night I get into bed
And scroll through the pho­tos
And what it feels like
It feels like that night last sum­mer
When we pulled over on the Taconic and
You took it out and asked me to blow you

I read some­where once
That a jour­nal is the­ater
Or in oth­er words
If all this works out
Would you come over here tonight and
Kiss me with your mouth all the way open

~

Key Bank

Because I was haunt­ed by the impos­si­ble
Ratios of poet­ry to sex
For nine months
I walked the streets of upper Manhattan

I was eager, I had no mon­ey, I was ambi­tious, I was vague

At night my apart­ment was full of men from the
Mexican con­sulate, young run-aways, women with breasts

Incomprehension is the high­est form of ero­tism
I have start­ed to read French

The night we first met
I had wok­en up in my wide bed
Picked up the first vol­ume of the jour­nals
And walked down Morningside Dr

I had not had a sat­is­fy­ing orgasm since I quit grad
School and I saw you
Standing alone in front of Key Bank

Against all odds of soci­ol­o­gy, I gave you my number

The next morn­ing I woke up in your apart­ment
Walked into the kitchen, made a pot of cof­fee, and
Abandoned, once and for all, the cult of the sign

The light com­ing in through the kitchen win­dow
Was very bright and so I took my t‑shirt off, threw it
Into the sink and shout­ed to you down the hall­way that
Gertrude Stein was right all along
Poetry is a machine
That con­verts horni­ness into language

~

Pastoral

No one in New York lives in the present
So I decid­ed to take a week­end and go up to Bard

I was sit­ting on a bench in Grand
Central hav­ing a cof­fee and
Counted thir­teen women and four men
Who walked passed with­out
Seeming to know my name

I didn’t feel the need
To for­give them and so I
Turned my bag upside down
And emp­tied it out onto the floor

When an old­er woman
Grabbed the con­duc­tor
By the shoul­der and said,
It’s true, the pas­toral as a poet­ic form
Is impos­si­ble in New York

Without hav­ing to ask, I opened to
Journals, page 57

[Undated, most like­ly
late February 1950.]

Quis—who
Quid—what
Ubi—where, when
Quibis auxiliis—by the
aid of what
Quia—why
Quo modo—in what
man­ner
Quando—how

Sontag loved lists
But didn’t always show­er
Every day and she nev­er
Knew her father

Latin is such a sex­u­at­ed language

Reading the jour­nals I’m filled
With a con­stant dis­com­fort
Like find­ing your­self
In a hotel room you know you
Shouldn’t be

And yet you stay
Even though it goes against
All good sense
And discretion

Because this is exact­ly the kind of stu­pid­i­ty
That will make me a good writer

~

Jan. 20. 2008

Since I’ve been in New York
I’ve had to beg for it many times
But you are so good at call­ing a cab and
Let’s agree that metaphor is use­less and nev­er
Think about what’s
On the oth­er side of the Brooklyn Bridge
Without regret I’ll hold your hand and
Whisper in your ear that
Poetry is bet­ter than any porn ever could be
Because when you write it all down, every last thing
You are no longer a sign and you are no longer a woman

~
Ann Pedone is the author of The Medea Notebooks, and The Italian Professor’s Wife, as well as sev­er­al chap­books includ­ing The Bird Happened, and per­haps there is a sky we don’t know a re-imag­in­ing of sappho.