I begin with a poem about adolescents in rural Michigan.
It is called As Children Together.
When I was in high school, it was at a time
when we were what we called then greasers,
and this meant that we teased our hair very high
and then smoothed it over into a sort of motorcycle helmet
shape, and put hairspray on it and wore white lipstick
and black eye makeup.
And we thought we looked beautiful.
And our mother said that we looked embalmed,
so it wasn't that effective.
I started telling this story last night in Las Vegas,
and you are all laughing, but I gave a reading in Las Vegas
last night, and to my horror, I looked up
and tried to soften the story because they were still
doing that.
But my best friend was a woman named Victoria Champagne,
her real name, and Vicki Champagne was more developed
than I was, and so she had more boyfriends than I did.
And she preferred to have boyfriends
who were in the service, as you know that period
was the Vietnam War, but she preferred this
because she thought they looked handsome in their uniforms,
but mostly because they were never around,
so she never had to what we called then do anything
with them.
And so she had all of the advantages of boyfriends
and none of the disadvantages.
The problem is that I lost track of her
because I went away to college, and she got married
and took her husband's name and her family moved away
when the Depression hit Detroit, and we haven't seen each other
in years and years.
And so I wrote this poem to try to find her somehow.
And I knew maybe I wouldn't, but it was an attempt,
and I did find three other of my high school friends
through this poem.
Not Vicki yet, but this is for Vicki.
Under the sloped snow, pinned all winter
with Christmas lights, we waited for your father
to whittle his soap cakes away, finish the whiskey,
your mother to carry her coffee from room to room, closing
lights, cubed in the snow at our feet.
Holding each other's coat sleeves,
we slid down the roads in our tight black dresses,
past crystal swamps and the death face of each dark house
over the golden ice of tobacco spit, the blue quiet of ponds,
with town glowing behind the blind white hills
and a scant snow ticking in the stars.
You hummed blanche comme le neige
and spoke of Montreal, where a Quebecoise could sing,
take any man's face to her unfastened blouse,
and wake to wine on the bedside table.
I always believe this, Victoria, that there
might be a way to get out.
You were ashamed of that house, its round tins of surplus
flour, chipped beef, and white beans, relief checks,
and winter trips that always ended
in deer tied stiff to the car rack, the accordion
breath of your uncles down from the North,
and what you called the stupidity of the Michigan
French.
Your mirror grew ringed with photos of servicemen,
who had taken your breasts in their hands, the buttons
of your blouses in their teeth, who had given you the silk
tassels of their graduations, jackets
embroidered with dragons from the Far East.
You kept the corks that had fired
from bottles over their beds, their letters with each city
blackened, envelopes of hair from their shaved heads.
I'm going to have it, you said.
Flowers wrapped in paper from carts in Montreal,
a plane lifting out of Detroit, a satin bed,
a table cluttered with bottles of scent.
So standing in a platter of ice outside a Catholic dance hall,
you took their colors in your fine, chilled hands
and lied your age to adulthood.
I did not then have breasts of my own,
nor any letters from boot camp, and when
one of the men who had gathered around you
took my mouth to his own, there was nothing other
than the dance hall music rising to the arms of ice trees.
I don't know where you are now, Victoria.
They say you have children, a trailer
in the snow near our town, and the husband you found
as a girl returned from the Far East, broken,
cursing holy blood at the table, where nightly
a pile of white shavings of is paid
from the edge of his knife.
If you read this poem, write to me.
I have been to Paris since we parted.