Because this is not a story about her life. At least, she doesn’t think so.

At any rate, her father never had any money. He was from New York, born in the Bronx on the eve of the Second World War. Before he became a poet, he was a Marine. And before he was a Marine he was a petty thief. And before that, he had been a child, presumably. Clare’s father’s name is John Dariush. As he recounts in his early book-length poem, Of Thee, written when he still deigned to employ the English language, he has a mother of uncertain Polish extraction and a father who as a preadolescent during the second decade of the twentieth century fled the persecution of Christian villagers in a remote eastern pocket of the Ottoman Empire, to settle first in Melbourne and then, as a teen, in the Big Apple. Clare has never met her paternal grandparents and doubts they are alive, given the date of her father’s birth. Her mother seems to know nothing about them.

Clare’s father attended the Seminars, starting in 1960, on a fellowship for vets. In 1963 he returned to New York City, where he hovered around St. Marks and became briefly attached to Warhol, appearing in a screen test that flatters his pale eyes. Later, scholars associate him with Ted Berrigan, so-called magus of the LES poetry scene. There is a passage in one of Berrigan’s journals in which he and “Johnny” steal steaks from a deli, mashing them into their pockets and sauntering bloodily out. A nominally more established Dariush met Trudy Elwil a decade later at a gallery opening when he offered her a fresh apricot from a pint he had recently lifted. Trudy saw her chance and proceeded to offend her family. Clare, born in 1980 and brought home to a Spring Street loft, is proof of these activities. It is no nominal piece of luck that Trudy is as talented a paramour and general social being as she is. Dariush’s presence waned in direct proportion to the accrual of years and memory on the part of his daughter, until he was permanently residing in a chambre de bonne within striking distance of the Buttes-Chaumont, somewhat famously and very perversely composing all his work in French, and, in a final twist, dead.