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Patrice Vecchione In Response To Rachelle Escamilla

in my throat too, but this is a good place

In response to the poems of Rachelle Linda Escamilla

A discomfort began in my low belly and rose up to my mind, circulating through my body upon reading Rachelle’s note to her poems, the part about placing an ad for sex. Not a moral recoil but a kinesthetic one, returning an aspect of my youth to me in one abrupt, uncomfortable, oh, so sad jolt.
 
What sex was for me then was often and often disembodied. I used my body in wishful trade for love, gave it away, really, from a glance I later or right away wished I’d not thrown to a parting of lips and a parting of legs. Mine. I threw myself away, time and again, like so much unwanted waste. Then I would enter a cavern past the locked door. It was cold there and I was alone.
 
Never would I have wanted recreational sex yet was often a man’s recreation. Not by force, by choice, or choice of a sort. That one, that a woman, would find pleasure through casual, rather anonymous sex, arrived at via an ad is entirely beyond me. Sexism at work? No, I don’t think so, rather a lack of comprehension, a psycho-physical lack of it. Sex was a means to an end, often a failed one, but not always. This was the mid 1970’s, the 1980’s and how things were done. It was sex first and maybe later love or maybe not. It was a commerce that failed me, mostly. Until I came through that via a love of women, an equality of desire that righted me.
 
Rachelle puts a call out to “fellow transcendentalists.” A return to Emerson? Or is this a new definition that at age 58 I’ve missed? Pretty much everything has always been inclusive of and gone beyond what greets me at the sensory level, though those 5-plus senses are what give the world and love to me and with what I give.
 
Escamilla’s authority delights me: “Raise yourself to my liking,” she writes. I cheer but from some distant, well-padded sideline.
 
In Dear Mister G, “Finding you between the lines and clicks of the –
a muse is all I ask for.” Yes, in some far recesses of this memory there is that, the thrill of anticipation. A Muse. I remember the frenzy of so much unknown, the hunt for inspiration, that electricity, and how love for the writer is so often a duality between a human other and the sizzle of inspiration. Now it is my greatest thrill, the lust of inspiration, that absolute divinity.
 
A photo of me arrives in an email, and there she is that older, middle-aged woman I recognize as myself, and for once I like what I see, don’t wish for that younger, smooth-skinned version. I see the stability that I never believed would be mine. My husband asleep in our shared bed in our small house and I sit by the fire on an early winter morning, catapulted back in time by a group of stirring poems.
 
There is much more in Escamilla’s work that could lead me further into response, her Cyst poem, for example and how yesterday on the long walk I took “the cold winter air caught” in my throat too, but this is a good place for stopping and allowing the poems to continue walking through me, for that is what Escamilla’s poems do, bring me back and then forward into this new time, a written urgency I am grateful for.


Patrice Vecchione is the author of two books of poetry The Knot Untied and Territory of Wind. Her two nonfiction books are, most recently, Step into Nature: Nurturing Imagination & Spirit in Everyday Life, from Simon & Schuster/Beyond Words and prior to that from McGraw-Hill, Writing and the Spiritual Life: Finding Your Voice by Looking Within. About new book, Jane Hirshfield said, “Step into Nature illumines the intimate connections between inner and outer, contemplative and wild, and shows the reason these connection reasons matter.” Patrice offers writing workshops for adults and children and is leading a writing retreat in Santa Barbara this spring. More at patricevecchione.com

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