Tea With the Tigress: Ten Years Inside the Strange Machinery of a Life
I don't think Tea With the Tigress is primarily a book of love poems, although love is everywhere in it.
I don't think it's primarily a book about sex, although there is plenty of that too.
And despite the number of poems involving death, loneliness, aging, memory, physical vulnerability, poetry, absurdity, wolves, celestial bodies, Richard Brautigan, used clothing, zombies, alcohol, buses and people behaving badly, it isn't really a book about any of those things either.
I think Tea With the Tigress is a book about being returned to the world.
That is much easier for me to see now than it was when the book appeared in 2023.
The subtitle is Poems 2010–2020, which makes the collection something of an accidental autobiography. The poems weren't written to document a decade. They accumulated while a decade was happening. When gathered together, however, they preserve something a deliberately written memoir probably couldn't: the strange proportions by which a life is actually experienced.
Huge things sometimes occupy three lines.
A ridiculous thing can occupy a page.
Sex becomes astrophysics. A trip becomes a joke. A flower becomes an existential event. The human heart becomes machinery. An answering machine becomes an excuse to make jokes about dead composers.
And somehow all of it belongs together.
The opening poem, "Tigress," contains the proposition upon which much of the book operates:
when a wise man meets
Tigress in the jungle, he
says, thank you, my love
It is funny, but it isn't merely funny. The tiger isn't defeated. The tiger isn't domesticated. The supposedly wise man recognizes what has arrived and gives thanks for it.
That's a pretty good introduction to the next eighty pages.
The World Comes Back
Reading the old Zombie Logic Blog alongside these poems makes the decade feel much less abstract.
There I am watching horror movies at ridiculous hours. Collecting Monster Club artifacts. Playing old computer RPGs. Writing about Hot Wheels, Queen albums, Hamm's beer signs, pennies, fantasy football, poetry feuds, Richard Brautigan, bad jokes and things I found on my hard drive. I invent Dr. Millard Rausch's post-zombie-apocalypse biography. I create imaginary Outsider Poetry organizations. I remember motel rooms. I make jokes about Presidential Physical Fitness Awards.
And I keep writing poems.
It would be easy to dismiss all of that as clutter. I don't anymore.
It's the material of the life.
One of the smallest poems in Tea With the Tigress is "Avocation":
since you never
had time
to behold
this particular
downspout
I went ahead
and did it
for you.
That little poem may explain a surprisingly large portion of my work.
Someone has to look at the downspout.
Someone has to remember the forgotten movie, the weird sign, the motel, the bus station, the ridiculous conversation, the object nobody else thought worth saving. Someone has to look at all the supposedly insignificant things while everyone else is busy looking at the significant ones.
That was what Zombie Logic Blog was doing during these years, too.
And apparently so was I.
Jenny Enters the Poems
But there is another enormous presence in Tea With the Tigress: Jenny.
Not simply Jenny as subject, but Jenny as an alternative way of encountering the world.
One of my favorite examples now is "May." The speaker is in his laboratory "pissing away April" while she is in her studio preparing the colors of the coming month. He wants to interrupt her but fears that doing so will cause "Garbageman Green / Peonies" and "Poopsicle Lilies" to erupt from him.
Having recently revisited the old Zombie Logic posts, that poem suddenly looks almost documentary.
Again and again in those entries, I wander into a room and Jenny has made something.
Sometimes I understand it.
Sometimes I don't.
Sometimes it takes me four paintings to figure out what she's doing.
The domestic world of these poems isn't presented as retreat from the larger world. It is where the larger world keeps appearing. Tea, paintings, dresses, desks, flowers, food, bodies and jokes continually open trapdoors into something enormous.
"Waiting" may be the clearest early statement of it. Love is compared first to an apple harvested too early, then startlingly to a heart awaiting a surgeon's scalpel, and finally to tea being prepared for afternoons of conversation at a shared desk. The poem ends with two people occupying the same room separately, waiting for their love "to steep."
That double desk may be one of the most important locations in the book.
Not Paris.
Not Greenwich Village.
Not some mythical poet's garret.
A double desk.
Two people making things.
The Body Becomes Strange
The body in Tea With the Tigress is never entirely dependable.
Sometimes it is erotic. Sometimes comic. Sometimes cosmic. Sometimes it is essentially a machine whose warranty has become questionable.
In "What Makes Me Tick," the speaker's mechanical aortic valve becomes something simultaneously industrial and alive:
My St. Jude 27 vavgj-515
Mechanical aortic valve
Thuds like a war bird's wings
In a hummingbird feeder.
That's one of the central transformations of the collection.
The machinery doesn't destroy the poetry.
It becomes poetry.
Later, in "Changing Lanes On an Empty Highway At 3:22 A.M.," the speaker takes inventory of medications, operations, age and diminishing speed, then cautiously moves into the passing lane anyway. He knows something "younger, faster, / More capable" will eventually overtake him.
But for a moment he accelerates.
That strikes me now as one of the key poems in the collection.
There is no grand declaration of triumph.
The car changes lanes.
That's enough.
And Then There Is Sex
There is a lot of sex in this book.
Some of it is tender. Some is ridiculous. Some becomes astronomy, geography, classical music, wine criticism or military history because apparently simply describing sex would have been too straightforward.
"The Yellow River" turns a drunken navigational error in bed into a disastrous military incursion and concludes, perfectly, "War is hell."
"Sunday" sets up an elaborate sexual encounter before revealing in its final joke that the activity under discussion is apparently doing the taxes.
"Astrophysics" calculates a kiss along the Y axis of a shoulder as though intimacy were celestial navigation.
This is important because the erotic poems aren't really interruptions of the more serious material.
They are the same material.
The body that can break is also the body that desires.
The body that ages still reaches for another body.
The body that contains machinery still wants to dance.
Mortality doesn't negate appetite in this book. Mortality makes appetite urgent.
The Poet as Fool
There is also an argument about poetry running through Tea With the Tigress, and the poet generally loses it.
Good.
"The Old Hermit Speaks of Poetry" imagines poems escaping like ducks from a broken pen. Instead of chasing them, the old poet drinks his wine and wanders into the hills, only to discover that the poems have been waiting there all along—in rocks, trees and a brook laughing at the fool searching for them.
"Discourses In Poetics" takes the solemn master-and-acolyte tradition and slowly dismantles it until the Master is apparently attempting to access someone's bank account.
That's closer to my conception of poetry than any manifesto I could write.
Poetry matters tremendously.
Poets should therefore probably not be trusted with it.
The dedication page establishes the governing philosophy before the collection properly begins, quoting my middle-school principal Joe Parks: "Mr. Vaultonburg, you amuse only yourself."
Forty years later, that seems less like criticism than permission.
The Old World Is Still There
The book isn't entirely domestic renewal and comic eroticism.
Older ghosts keep wandering through it.
"Playing the Short Stack," which we've just encountered again while rehabilitating the Zombie Logic archive, reduces an entire losing position to a poker table where the speaker can't formulate a comeback because he can't even see his opponent behind her mountain of chips.
"Pockets" imagines wearing a dead stranger's Salvation Army suit while typing poems on a Smith Corona and occasionally checking the pockets to see whether the previous owner left instructions.
"Beaten" needs four lines:
Every face
At the bus station
Is a torn
Lottery ticket.
Those poems come from the same imaginative territory as the older Zombie Logic material we've been excavating: buses, bars, thrift stores, motel rooms, people who have lost, people who are still playing anyway.
But something has changed.
The speaker isn't quite as trapped inside that world anymore.
He can look back at it.
From Tigress to Wolves
The final portion of the collection begins to sound noticeably different.
The poems become quieter.
More elemental.
Wolves appear. Trees appear. The moon appears. Solitude stops being merely isolation and starts becoming a landscape.
"Unravel" may be the hinge:
as i unravel
I become miles of new thread
to weave with again
That poem now sounds almost prophetic.
By the time we reach "Lilacs," the heart is described as a bomb shelter emerging from an "endless / Winter of discontent." The speaker remains wary of love, but the window is open.
And then comes "Full Wolf Moon 2020":
full wolf moon bays down
on grey, oily streets howling
for its lost lover
Read from the vantage point of 2026, it is difficult not to hear the poet who would eventually write Small Songs for Weary Travelers beginning to emerge.
The attention is changing.
The jokes aren't gone. The weirdness isn't gone. The city isn't gone.
But the poems have started looking outward.
Tea With the Tigress
That's why I think the title is better than I previously understood.
The Tigress isn't simply a woman.
She isn't merely love or sexuality either.
The Tigress is life when it becomes dangerous enough to be worth approaching again.
The wise man doesn't conquer her.
He doesn't explain her.
He meets her.
And says thank you.
Across Tea With the Tigress, the speaker repeatedly does exactly that. He says thank you to love, sex, absurdity, art, jokes, bodies, mechanical parts, memories, old clothes, bad decisions, flowers, wolves, buses, darkness and another day in which something strange might still happen.
The book ends near grief, but it doesn't end in defeat. "End Punctuation" imagines two people leaning into one another like parentheses around the story of their love.
That's an extraordinarily appropriate image for the collection.
Because Tea With the Tigress is itself a set of parentheses.
2010–2020.
Ten years enclosed between them.
Inside are several lives, a tremendous amount of nonsense, some darkness, quite a bit of sex, a mechanical heart, a double desk, a woman making paintings in the next room, wolves gathering at the edges, and a poet gradually discovering that surviving the world and paying attention to it may actually be the same activity.
The copyright page credits Jenny Mathews with the cover and illustrations for "Halloween 1974" and "The Perfect Crime," while Tré created the remaining artwork and provided design and editing help. That makes the physical book itself strangely appropriate: other people helped surround these poems with images and give the decade a shape.
And perhaps that's what I see most clearly now, after going back through the old blog.
I thought I was wasting an astonishing amount of time.
Watching movies. Writing jokes. Collecting things. Looking out windows. Making blogs nobody seemed to read. Falling in love. Getting older. Writing poems about downspouts.
Turns out I was living.
And fortunately, I wrote some of it down.
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