Dear, Brutal

For those with an interest in my books, this might be a useful revelation, from the writer's life. The character "N" in Chimes, who appears here:

N was the girl with the olive skin. We continued to dance around each other, loving but not committing ourselves. At a party at someone’s house in Elkins Park, we went outside together and my hands were gripped by something and they went all over her. It was a big wave and it was coursing through me into her skin. I had no me, I was permeated by the feeling of two-in-one; the third that walked beside us took over. Yet, when I called the next day, N would not commit to it ever happening again, or even to continue going out. I had an intimation that this was to be my life: full of beautiful, difficult women. N was the first and an archetype that remains visible to me when I mate, or even meet, another beautiful, difficult woman that is for me. I have a muse, she is like this: recalcitrant and blue.

...is the same character who appears in Cheltenham Elegy 420:

The Junior Prom deposited me (and fifteen
others) on the floor of her basement. I could
barely see daylight at the time, and at three in
the morning I began to prowl. I was too scared
to turn on any lights. She emerged like a mermaid
from seaweed. I needed comfort, she enjoyed my
need. We had gone out— she was bitter. The whole
dialogue happened in shadows. No one was hooking
up in the other room, either. You spiteful little princess.

...and she's in Two Teens Trilogy as well. These two poems are spaced four to five years apart, and I had to deal with her brutishness (shot through, on the other side, with incisive intelligence and intensity) through those years. She (and we) didn't always intend to start fires, but sometimes it just seemed to happen that way. And she was a decent muse in other ways I'll talk about later.