by John Mattingly
I wrote my first poem to Mary Lou in 1955 when I was in second grade. I saw her as an angel with a ponytail, a Venus in pumps and bobby socks, the future mother of my children and recipient of the bacon I would bring home as father of our big family. Or, at the very least, a girl I could talk to without her boyfriend Hank hanging around, making me feel like a misplaced traffic cone. To impress Mary Lou in the winter of 1956, after a big snowstorm during which I had seen her walk in the footprints post-holed into the snow by Hank, I wrote:
The deepest footprint in the snow, will fill or melt, just let it go.
The “footprint in the snow” was, of course, meant to be Hank, a kid who was probably handsome and clever. I hoped Mary Lou would let him go in favor of myself, a better choice to walk her home in the snow, carrying her books after school. She read the poem and came to me and smiled. Yes, the poem worked – either that, or Hank’s favor faded coincident with the poem – and when Mary Lou let me hold her hand one afternoon on the slow walk home carrying her books, I followed with another poem,
There is something in a human touch, that matters very much.
After receiving this poem, Mary Lou kissed me, and later went behind a chair and pulled down her underpants, gifting me with a fledgling glimpse of the Promised Land. This is when I realized that the main reason for writing poems was to gain favors with girls. Indeed, all through middle school, high school and my one year of college, I found that writing poems and letters and essays – and yes, even novels – was the quickest way to win female affections. I even went steady with a cheerleader, Rhonda, who was going out with the quarterback of the football team, Tiger. She left him for me because of one of my poems, which had a lot of gibberish I’ve since forgotten, but I will never forget the last line:
If Autumn comes April and aging is young, Hickory Dickory, what have I done?
At the time, it came as a total surprise to me (and no less so to Tiger) that I could win the heart of a cheerleader with a poem, a simple arrangement of nonsensical words that didn’t seem nearly as difficult, daring or downright romantic as the prowess of a muscled hunk of a man capable of throwing a pear shaped ball with remarkable precision that might even harken back to the days when humans were hunter-gatherers, and spear-chucking skills put food on the table, contributing directly to human fitness as a species. But the right poem had an ineffable charm, a catchy way about it that was irresistible. I had to admit in the case of Rhonda that the poem was mightier than the football. The more poems I wrote to Rhonda, the closer I ventured to the Promised Land. The poem that ushered me into the Promised Land will forever be interred in my private Vault of Love, except to say that it began, Your hair, not like silk which is too quickly slick, but like the simple sway of seeding summer grasses …
It is a fact that women read more than men and I believe women are more impressed with the written word than are men. Women read books, magazines, letters. Men, on the other hand, watch moving pictures. Or glossy pictures. So a man who writes increases his chances of enjoying female companionship and affections, and also of finding a good mate by the simple virtue of understanding that the way to a woman’s heart can be found with words.
In the 1960s, my poems such as In a town where one shot kills everyone, what right has anyone to a gun … were every bit as romantic as Dylan’s Lay lady lay …
I can vouch for this in my own life, weak as it may be if I was trying to publish it in an academic journal. Because I came of age in the 1960s, after the pill and before AIDS, I had a lot of fun and five wives, and in all cases, my romantic success could be traced back to my poems and letters. I say this because my success could not have been attributed to my ordinary appearance and standing, nor to the dirt, grease and constant, low-level smell of diesel fuel and manure that followed me around as a farmer. Women somehow found their way to my various farms, and written words of love were sharper than Cupid’s Arrow.
After the deluge, getting taller and taller as the mud clung to my boots, I rose to heights where dreams of seeds in your belly were pushing shoots …
I think most men who spend serious time writing will confess (perhaps only in a room with the lights off) that “being a writer” of one stripe or other has helped their love life. I don’t know if this works consistently in reverse – that is, if men are more attracted to women who write. Men may be intimidated by women who write, men being more comfortable with pictures, and writers can never underestimate the importance of readers. Writers are actually quite common. Good readers are not, and the best of them are usually women. It is far more important for a writer to find a reader than for a reader to find a writer.
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A friend of mine, John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War and other wonderful novels, admitted to me over burritos in a Taos restaurant one evening that being a somewhat famous author was largely responsible for the extravagance of his love life. With some remorse he noted that rock stars were horning in on writers as preferred objects of female affection, but rock music was, in a sense, poetry set to sound, so writers still had a chance. Nichols had hundreds of lovers and also enjoyed five conjugal adventures.
Like Nichols, I drifted away from writing poetry in favor of novels. For a time, I even thought of poetry as a lesser form, an easier form, a way to put a few choice words on a page and call it something. After all, within the text of my favorite novels there are sentences and paragraphs that, if removed from the general text and placed on a page, would qualify as great poems. The first poem that changed my mind about poetry as a form worthy of effort was by William Carlos Williams: Everything depends on the red wheelbarrow.
That was it. That was the entire poem (at least as I now recall it), and I suddenly understood that the power of a poem obtained from isolating a simple truth in a titivating way. Like an aphorism of some feature of life. I often looked out my window at my tractor and thought: Everything depends on the John Deere 4960. Because it did. Without it, I could not work the field. But more than that, in the metaphysical realm, everything depends on everything else, equally, so one can choose anything as being what everything else depends upon. Because it does. Even from the perspective of quantum physics, where we consider the sub-structures of matter itself, if certain objects are not placed perfectly in the atom, the entire universe will suddenly contract to the size of a pin head.
I might conclude from all this that my poetic successes with women are curious, contorted and somewhat concerning. Or again, it might be attributed to a metaphysical connection with important universal dependencies hanging in the balance. Or, alternately, it might be sourced in the fear that, in the absence of such balances provided by the perfect word at the perfect moment, the universe could contract to a pinhead.
You pays yo’ nickel, you takes yo’ pickle.
John Mattingly cultivates prose, among other things, and was most recently seen near Poncha Springs.
