CANTO 59
Letter from Laura Recently, my beloved poets, by chance someone brought me a copy of the first forty-nine
cantos of The Petrarch Project, and I saw at once that it was about us, and was all the more
eager to read it since the writers are so dear to my heart. Having lost them in reality I hoped at
least to create an image of them from the words. But nearly every line of this poem is filled
with ambiguity and distortion as it tells the pitiful story of our condition and the direction which
you, my only love, continue to go. The ambiguity, I suppose, is in the many voices of the poem.
You and Bromige have several voices, a voice as each of yourselves in the first person and a
third person omnipotent voice, which I take to be the narrator. On top of this you both have a voice in the persona of Petrarch. And, then, there are some
minor characters who deliver a line or two. The corporal has a voice, and I occasionally hear the groaning of a German guy dying from a gunshot wound. Also, Laura is given a voice, and this is where the story seems to get distorted, as there seem to be a wide variety of Lauras. In your case, Frencesco, there are several Lauras from the past, and that is fine, since I can see it has been awhile since you've
received any tenderness. These Lauras, I can see, are now dead to your ardent affections. The
present Laura, which I take to be me, I recognize as through a glass darkly, and as for Petrarch's Laura, all I can say in my guise as Heloise is that she lived two centuries after me. As
for your
collaborator, he has only one Laura, his present wife, Cecelia. In this letter you do carry out the promise you made your friend at the beginning, that he would think his own troubles little or nothing, in comparison with yours. He's
had his strokes and his diabetes, and you've had your cancer and broken legs, but whereas he
has a beautiful, blonde Laura, named Cecelia, in his present life, your yidam has been the
Wrathful Lion-headed Dakini, Simhamukha for many years. All the characters in Spade bewail injuries to their physical bodies and finally find surcease from the treacheries of life in the Sufi Fourth Heaven. You poets certainly
do have your ways. Only the abominable jealousy and violent attacks of the Neocoms could drive poets to such a state. Your compassion is boundless when you gloss over what at their instigation was done to your distinguished poetic and publishing work. I have heard of the plots against you and the foul slanders spread against you and the scandal stirred up among many people because you have created works contrary
to custom. Your spirits hold up well against the intolerable persecution that you've endured at the hands of the present regime. Imagine being called mere language poets at this stage of your careers and being stripped of your
laurels. You brought your sad story to an end with the enthronement 0f Thom Gunn in the
Fourth Heaven. No one, could read or hear this story dry-eyed. In this second set of cantos, you seem to be suffering on the level of the romantic heart, and the wounds are inflicted on your psyche rather than your body. My own sorrows are renewed by the detail in which you have each told of our meetings and partings, in my stepping from the shadows and changing everything, and especially in the online romance using instant messenger. The wings of angels were definitely singed by that electronic intercourse. All of us here at the Inuit School are driven to despair of your suffering, and every day we
await in fear and trembling the latest rumors. We beg you to write of your perils in which you
are still storm-tossed. XOXOXO Laura Letter from Francesco at first, after having the radioactive seed implantation, i was feeling bruised and glowing wildly
and needed healing vibes from everyone, now i feel better since i feel less oppressed by my
cancer and released from the deliberation of the should i? shouldn't i? wait and see, mental games going on in my head, the operation really no worse than a kick in the groin with a
steel-toed boot, i hardly noticed, yesterday, i went down to my bone doc and had him remove
the pins from my right ankle, so i can sit in the lotus position without the pins pressing into the rug, no excuse now for not being able to sit in the full lotus the doc gave me a few local anesthetic shots around the ankle, but then he couldn't find his
screw driver, so i told him it would be ironic if i had to go out to my car and get my philips-head,
and he said his screw driver was special, but that a small allen wrench would do, finally, he borrowed his office partner's instrument, and went to work, and he got them right
out of there, couldn't feel anything, but the idea of little screws being screwed out of my ankle made me twitchy, so i got on a passing cloud shaped like a
garuda bird and flew to snowy tibet while they worked, and the nurse gave me a count down there's number 2, one more to go, squit, squit, squit sounds, very small threads, squit, squit, ik,
whoa, i felt that one, but keep going, not much of an incision, so once the screws were
removed, i hardly cared about the radioactive seeds, & i did pass a seed, must've made it down
a little passageway in the prostate, caught it in my handy radioactive seed screen and put it in
my personal lead-lined pillbox, very doctor tellerish, went to the urologist this morning, who told me i'm fine i had a list of questions, are the rivets in my jeans picking up radioactivity? "no," told him that i
showed the seed i passed to a friend, will that hurt him? "no, you get more radioactivity w/an
x-ray," i told him i was becoming concerned about all this radioactivity, so they covered me
with a lead jacket, am i being overly cautious? "yes," how many times did you insert the needle
with the seeds? "about 2 dozen," how many seeds did you plant? "over 100," did you put some
extras around the tumor? "2 or 3," are the effects of the hormone treatment going to conflict
with the radioactivity as it relates to getting an accurate psa reading? "probably, so we'll wait
for 3 months to get a blood test, anything else?" oh, yes, remember you weren't sure exactly
what a curie was? it's a unit of radiation determined by disintegration, 3.70 X 10 to the tenth
power per second, named after madame curie, one of my heroines, did you ever see that movie
where she and her husband make a vat of radioactive soup & distill the radium until they have a
lump that glows in the dark? well, i asked the guy from oncology how much a curie was,
"that little guy with the mustache?" yes, i asked him, and he told me that one curie was a lot, that
we're using microcuries, small amounts that are decaying fast, he sd, "you have a very analytical mind, francesco." guess i won't be having psychic surgery in the philippines finally, I ask this of you above all else: at present you are over-anxious about the danger to my
body, but then your chief concern must be my attaining the two accumulations of merit, and you can show your care by the special support of prayers chosen for me be mindful of me, francesco