In 1967, I stepped out of the Port Authority bus terminal with a plaid suitcase. My desire was to become an artist. Perhaps I lacked the necessary skills, but I had the willingness to develop them, for I believed in the truth of my calling. It had come to me like an ecstatic vision. There was no Faustian pact connected with my vow, no expectations from godly elements. I knew I would be on my own, yet still hoped for a compatriot, and Providence led me to him.

Robert Mapplethorpe was an American boy, raised in a devout Catholic family. He had played the saxophone in the high-school band and won an R.O.T.C. scholarship to study graphic arts at Pratt Institute. His mother had great hopes that he would enter the priesthood. But his father envisioned him rising in the ranks of the military, with commercial-art training to fall back on. Robert had pale skin, green eyes, and dark curly hair that was cropped close. He was slightly bowlegged. In accepting the path that his father had chosen for him, he was rewarded with an apartment, shiny knee-­high leather riding boots, and an allowance. At Pratt, he proved himself to be an exceptional draftsman and, for a time, walked the expected path. No one suspected that another self was growing within.

At the age of twenty, Robert laid down his saxophone, his robes, and his rifle. He had experimented with LSD. He looked in the mirror and saw neither a priest nor a future captain in the R.O.T.C. He saw himself. Gazing in that mirror, he committed to art in an instant, and just as swiftly all else was stripped away: his scholarship, his apartment, his allowance, his shining boots, and, most profoundly, his father’s approval. He stayed for a while in a small empty room of a friend’s apartment. He slept on a simple white iron bed, surrounded by his portfolios. That was the boy that I met in the summer of love.

We rescued one another. He had been shunned and disowned. I was recovering from the emotional and physical scars of a difficult childbirth, and the decision, at only twenty, to give my daughter to another family. I gave Robert a silver ring with an anchor; he gave me one in gold. Having little money, we seldom went out at night. We’d play Tim Buckley records and look at our books on Picasso and Surrealism. On rainy evenings, lying together, I’d tell him stories or sing him little songs, and he would slowly sit up to have a cigarette, the sheet at his waist. I would glimpse the changeling aspects of my artist: a fragile sailor, a fleeting coquette, or a young geisha with the smallest touch of rouge on the lips. Perhaps he sensed a duality in me, the tomboy who had spurned girlish things but secretly yearned for a Communion dress. On Palm Sunday, Robert gave me another kind of dress, a tattered thing of handkerchief linen. It resembled the tunic worn by the woman in “Liberty Leading the People,” by Delacroix. I called it my liberty dress.

The Chelsea Hotel, 1971.

Emerging from our cocoon in Brooklyn, Robert and I moved to the Chelsea Hotel. Robert immersed himself in photography, seeking to push the form’s boundaries. He was soon to meet his great companion and future patron Sam Wagstaff, who fully appreciated his work. Our room was too small to work in, so I wrote poetry in the Chelsea’s lobby, crossing paths with a whirlwind of musicians and writers.

Eventually, Robert began staying in a loft close by; I continued living in the hotel with my adventurous new love, the playwright Sam Shepard. When I was given the opportunity to read my poems at St. Mark’s Church, opening for Gerard Malanga, I wanted to try something new. Sam suggested that I find a guitar player to match the energy of my verse, and I was intrigued by the idea. I had just met the writer Lenny Kaye, who worked at the record store Village Oldies, and he mentioned that he played a little guitar. Lenny never hesitated. If I envisioned a car crash, he replicated one. If I wanted to sing a blues song, he strummed the chords.

In the spring, Sam and I wrote a play called “Cowboy Mouth,” in which we played the lead roles. Sam added directions for a section where our characters improvised a fight. I had never improvised onstage, but Sam said not to worry, that it was impossible to make a mistake. His method was simple: if you miss a beat, invent another.

In 1973, I moved into a small apartment on MacDougal Street, across from Kettle of Fish, the bar that ­Kerouac once frequented. Robert came by one morning with some peyote buttons wrapped in a handkerchief. I was hesitant to misuse a sacred drug, but I trusted Robert and we shared it. Time became meaningless and the morning melted into evening. Where did you go? he asked. I had entered a hollow mountain that had no peak, and a magnificent bird appeared that bled into whiteness. The bird flew to the mountain’s crest, and his noble head became the peak. I could see within and without. Fifty-­two stars fell, faces of destiny, transforming into a pack of cards. And what about you? I asked. Robert smiled. It’s all here—I made it for you. He handed me a talisman, a slim length of rawhide knotted and strung with glass beads, a cowboy rosary.

We walked down Bleecker Street to the Pink Tea Cup. Robert ordered pancakes, and I had catfish with grits and black coffee. I remember thinking that, even under the influence of a sacred drug, he was the artist and I the storyteller. No one thinks as we do, he said. Then he went off into the night.

In the evening, perched on my fire escape, I read Mrabet, Genet, Cossery, and Paul Bowles. I made couscous. I listened to Patty Waters and danced alone to the Velvet Underground. I acted in Sam’s plays. I liked being onstage, but I was growing tired of the repetition of theatre, mouthing the words of another person night after night. I preferred writing and speaking my own words.

At St. Mark’s Church, I had been invited to read with Jim Carroll and Allen Ginsberg. I was fortunate to appear with these great poets, but I still felt the urge to push further. I chanted and sang my poems, often accompanied by Lenny on electric guitar, in art galleries and libraries, on rooftops, and even at a planetarium. Bob Dylan was my model: his language, his way of walking, his snap-tab collar shirt, dark glasses. But I never once felt like him; I felt like myself.

Lenny and I were gaining a small, supportive following. Rimbaud served as a guide; as a teen-ager, I’d been struck by “A Season in Hell,” which was as much ignoble confession as poetry. You’ll always be a hyena, Rimbaud writes, tearing himself in two, wrestling with the civil war of his personality. I sought to follow him down his shattering spiritual path, to expand musically. We enlisted the pianist Richard Sohl, who was younger than us, with long golden curls. He was intuitive, classically trained, and could play the concertos of Mendelssohn, show tunes, rock, all with the same insouciant air. I could endlessly sail over Richard’s rhythmic chord structures, and Lenny was freed up to play interpretively. We became an entity, three to tangle, as Lenny would say.

There was no plan, no design, just an organic upheaval that took me from the written to spoken word. We practiced in a room behind the old Victoria Theatre, on the west side of Times Square. Amid heavy rains, we held auditions for a guitar-and-bass player. Ivan Král, a gifted refugee from Czechoslovakia, stood apart from the rest, most of whom refused to play in a band with a female leader. Our drills included hours of seamlessly merging poetry with three chords, providing me with an undulant field to riff on.

In 1974, we found like minds in Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, both poets, who formed the group Television. They had built a small stage at CBGB, the derelict bar on the Bowery. We were all striving for the new, merging poetry and rock, stripping away artifice. The next spring, we paired with Television and began a five-­week stint at CBGB. We played Thursday through Sunday, two sets a night. The small bar, with its pool table and graffitied bathrooms, was still under the radar. There were raucous nights and sparse ones. There were sound problems, equipment failures, tears, and small triumphs. No one was documenting failure; each night, we could explore the inner world of our songs and the outer reaches of improvisation. Traipsing through the band’s flow, I wasn’t afraid of stumbling, and simply followed Sam’s advice when I did. Lou Reed came by, as the nights became more electric. Robert did, too, in his motorcycle jacket. By the end of April, for the first time, CBGB was turning people away.

In June, 1975, we played the Bitter End, in the Village. It was our first performance with a drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, signalling that we were truly a rock band. The moment I stepped onstage, I knew something was different; I could feel it, like high humidity on the skin. Afterward, Bob Dylan entered our dressing room. I heard that unmistakable voice call out—­Any poets back here? Filled with adrenaline, I blurted out—­I hate poetry. I don’t know why I said that, but he just laughed.

For a time, we lived on the same street, and sometimes he’d take me wherever he was going. One evening, we went to a loft in the West Village. The people were somewhat older, and I felt that I was suspiciously observed. I sat at Dylan’s feet, and he picked up an acoustic guitar and played every song that would appear on his “Desire” album. The songs were a blessing to hear, but after a while I grew restless. He was getting ready to play another song when I stood. Are you splitting? he said. Yeah, I said shyly. It’s not really my scene.

Bob never seemed offended by anything I said, so I felt free to speak my mind. I can’t say we were friends, but he seemed to trust my opinion. He needed a screenwriter for a movie he was planning, and I suggested Sam. Later, he asked if I knew any girl singers for his new record.

Well, I’m a singer, I said.

­No, I mean a real singer.

I’m not a real singer?

­No, he laughed. I mean, you’re more like me.

I pretended to be slighted but I was pleased.

At times, I wished that writing was my sole vocation, but some force continued to draw me elsewhere. I found an apartment close to St. Mark’s Church, a sixth-floor walkup with a tub in the kitchen. Tom Verlaine lived next door. We didn’t have telephones, but our kitchen windows faced each other, and we’d call out or just find each other on the street.

I didn’t stray too far east, as there was a lot of hard-drug activity past Avenue B. But within our perimeter was St. Mark’s, with its dogwood trees and small graveyard; there were egg creams at Gem Spa newsstand, scrambled eggs and challah bread at B & H, Italian bakeries and early-morning vegetable stalls. The East Village was strangely silent late at night, its streetlights almost mystically artificial, as if they were part of a movie set.

Walking home from CBGB one evening, I saw a red ball sail across an enclosed playground. I thought that I heard someone say catch, but no one was there. Quickly turning a corner, I nearly collided with a lone husky, which stopped and stared at me as music streamed from his white eyes. I later hummed fragments of the melody to Lenny. The chords fell to hand as we composed a song called “Free Money.” The lyrics—“Scoop the pearls up from the sea, cash them in and buy you all the things you need”—were written for my mother. We all wish for things beyond our grasp; she dreamed of having a big house for our family, on a cliff overlooking a river.

In our practice room in Times Square, I would stop mid-song, inspired, to write down alternative lines. “Redondo Beach” was originally a poem written in the Chelsea Hotel lobby; Lenny, Richard, and I developed it into a reggae song. When I had difficulty with lyrics, I turned to Tom, whose own output seemed inexhaustible. He shared one of his methods, randomly opening my notebook to an account of a dream I had of Jim Morrison, asleep and bound in chains within a marble likeness. In the dream, I could feel Jim’s life force stirring and I cried, Break it up, Jim, break it up! I cried until his marble cocoon split apart, and watched as he emerged winged and flew away. Mixing bits of this dream with stray bits of conversation, Tom and I crafted the lyrics to “Break It Up,” which Tom simultaneously set to music.

As the band readied our songs for recording, I contemplated our mission. The heroic dreams of my youth, of rising from humble origins, were now being fulfilled in the strange and unanticipated form of an album. We had been signed to Arista, a label run by Clive Davis. There were other labels that had expressed interest, and that had offered more money, but only Clive offered the creative freedom I required.

For our producer, we chose John Cale, as we appreciated the sound of his solo albums. Cale agreed to fly from London and take us on. Around Labor Day, Lenny, Richard, Ivan, Jay, and I arrived at Electric Lady, the studio that Jimi Hendrix had built. We walked past the cosmic space murals lining the halls and entered Studio A, where Cale was waiting. The fellows spent the entire evening setting up our equipment. At midnight, we recorded our version of “Gloria,” the Van Morrison classic that seemingly every fledgling rock band had covered. Tackling it was an initiation of sorts, and an answer to those attempting to corner me, to demand self-­identification. Richard laid out the opening chords as I half-sung the words to “Oath,” a poem I had written in 1968. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” It was a vow to be accountable for my choices, in life and in art.

I knew very little about recording and wanted to preserve the veracity of a live performance. I was a novice, sometimes unreasonable, desperate to protect our work, suspicious of any changes, excessive overdubbing, or suggestions of strings. This led to some contentious moments, but John did his best to satisfy the desire for authenticity. One of our songs, “Birdland,” was a mutating piece, a metaphoric voyage of birds in underwater flight. Having no set lyrics, it promised to be the album’s purest improvisation. John found merit in it musically but questioned the idea of winging it lyrically. When I insisted, he challenged me to prove myself. He kept pushing us to reach further, as we went through several exhausting takes. I had just read Peter Reich’s “A Book of Dreams,” and I reimagined the scene of his father’s funeral: the son believes that he sees the lights of his father’s spaceship and pleads to be taken with him. Words, no longer my own, expressing the son’s transfiguration, generated a kind of phosphorescence. We burned through an emotional field dominated by the boy’s desperate cries, as Lenny emulated screaming blackbirds on his Fender Stratocaster. John, visibly shaken, finally declared that we had done it.

I kept an eye on all things: the album’s sequencing, its ad copy. The liner notes served as a kind of poetic manifesto. When I was young, I had lamented that I wasn’t a boy. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a boy; I wanted the choices that boys seemed to have, but as myself. I wanted freedom, and, as a child, that meant wearing flannel shirts and blue sneakers. In adolescence, it meant shunning makeup and nail polish, and not shaving my legs. At twenty, it meant defying any predetermined model of feminine behavior. When we finished the album, there was concern about how I was presenting myself. Robert had taken the cover photograph, and the art department airbrushed it, smoothing out my hair and touching up facial idiosyncrasies. I refused any such makeover and confronted Clive; Robert’s original image was quickly restored.

The poet stands alone, but in merging with a band is obliged to surrender to the wonder of the collective. Our band had birthed a work together. We understood that it was not going to appeal to the mainstream. We hadn’t made it to garnish fame and fortune. We made it for the art rats known and unknown, the marginalized, the shunned, the disowned. I decided on the title “Horses,” which evoked the stampeding current of the world, the pitfalls and possibilities of youth. ♦

This is drawn from “Bread of Angels.”