Passion, Not Beauty

Thanksgiving

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 19:47:00 +0000

The day before, a student emailed me. She wanted to interview me about a poem I'd published. The poem talks about the death last summer of my father and my student, Chris.

She asked me: tell me about your father.

And it's haunted me all the things I wish I could have said about him.

Chris--that was easier. I didn't know him very well, since I knew him mostly in class, as a student. I knew he had a special connection to Tennyson's poem, "In Memoriam," which I'd had the honor of teaching to him. I knew he had a sharp intellect and a welcoming, sunny personality. I'd not known the name of his boyfriend, his mother, his favorite color. I'd known the essence of him, maybe, but not its many petals.

My father: there were so many of him to say. The dad I grew up with, who taught me how to shave and how to tell the truth. The dad who put others first.

And there was the man I didn't know, the person he was before he became my father. The barefaced twenty-something who coached an all African American basketball team who escorted him nightly from the gym, against his protests, because he'd received threats. The guy who owned a green Porsche. The person who fell in love with a woman named Dora, for whom he converted to the Mormon faith. The bad Mormon who drank whiskey and smoked pot.

The guy who took my mother dancing. Who flew her from Indiana to Daytona Beach for their first date.

Then there was the illness that occupied his body for the last ten years of his life. There was the meanness. The racist epithets. The cursing. The fists balled up and swung at anyone who tried to shave him.

Which of these should I remember, which of these should I erase?

For which of these should I offer the most thanks? Without one of them, I'd be missing some part of me today.

I mourned my dad in parts, though there are days when I grieve him, like today, whole.

Valencia

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 05:39:00 +0000

I want to stir the river of the past, urge the silt up from where it is resting, surface it to light.

I want absence filled with grainy recollection.

Every poem takes the lost moments and rebodies them into something new. Apply a little lightning, a little music, voila, the past lives again, new.

A few new year's eves ago, I was alone in a Spanish city. No, I was not alone: I felt alone. I was with a sonnet of people, 14 of them, each with their voltage of wants. I was in love with one of them, though it was ending, had ended. My grandmother was newly dead. (That phrase, "newly dead," kept perch on my brain, edging closer and closer to the end of the ledge it wanted to throw itself off). I drank and smoked and went out into the public square, dressed in drag. Each of us in the cold, in a wig, wearing sequins and curls. (I looked like Large Bo Peep). And everyone in the square wanted our picture; cars slowed so passengers could properly capture us, their little beacons of joy. We stayed up until 6am to watch the ball drop in New York City. I was alone but on the edge of something raucous, something cheerful and welcoming, and it ostracized me more.

This year: the two of us, in a house out in the woods, isolated, away from civilization, on the couch, his feet up in my lap, mine in his, looking like a human-infinity-symbol, spilling memories. The quiet around us. We should have felt alone.

But we had the whole world with us then.

Happy new year, unaloneness. Happy new year Valencia, which was called City of Sands and City of Valor, but which I know as a city of memory, stowed on the shore, where the waves bring back all you thought lost.

Rescue

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 04:35:00 +0000

The first semester at the new college is done. I love new beginnings, the sound of an engine leaping to life. The mind wrapping itself around and around the tree, blooming anew. The gerund refusing ending.

What happened taught me I could live with my regrets, that they too would restart, rebound: that they would redraw their boundaries, the country becoming smaller, or I am looking at it from farther up the mountain, from the helicopter, from space. That rescue was possible. That rescue was another country.

So, too, love.

Now: two glasses of wine, a plush blanket covering the carpet in front of the fireplace, new music playing softly, the living room window slightly open. The thin horizon of cold air lifting us toward some other place we are going toward, where we will arrive at the beginning of another story.

This Is What I Need

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 03:44:00 +0000

We were on a hotel terrace, smoking cigarettes, looking out over the Mediterranean Sea. That endless blue, the sound of always calling. He was telling me, "I'm in love with you, don't you see?"

We had loved each other once before, for a year.

I said You broke my heart, and he held me. It was night by then.

I said no for a month when he asked Can we be lovers again. (A man loved me through a month of my nos). I do not know which of us to blame: him for asking, me for relenting.

Please, if I could only love him back I said to the invisible force that separates minutes from each other and makes them into months.

What happened in the twelve months after the terrace: He loved me deeply and well. It was almost enough for both of us.

Now he's lost because he loved a lost man.

I got so tired of failing him I can't forgive myself. Now he's taking photographs of a life preserver, captioned, "Lo que yo necesito."

You love something, you move closer to its light. The heat melts your edges. It feels so good after the cold southern Spanish sea. The heat comes in waves, carrying you past buoys and breakers. When you look back, the shore where you'd laid your shoes is a glimmering shoal. It might as well be a mirage. You become the thing you love. You change, you mirror its form.

When he said I need to forget you, his voice broke in a way I'd never heard.

I could not say, But how will I remember myself if you go away?

The harm I did him, green jagged glass in the sand, the only markers of the way back.

Now

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 00:55:00 +0000

The life is wet clay in search of hands.

What will mold me. Make me better.

Maryland is crazy for crabs, divided into two shores. Mine, the eastern, is the playground of the yachted and summerhoming. It seems to me less diverse, more redneck, more conservative. It seems strangely like the home of my childhood, the sleepy town in central Florida.

Am I home I wonder. What circle have I traced back. What chance will I be given to right the wrongs in my life.

I have, you see, some regrets.

When I Get There

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 00:31:00 +0000

It's almost sunset in upstate New York. Subdued blue hour. The clouds in the distance seem to stair-step from blue to a hazy lavender. Distance looks real from here.

Moving again; in a few weeks I'll be a Mary in Maryland. That's the joke I keep telling people. Or sometimes I say, puzzled look fixed on my face, "I wonder if they'll consider calling it Fairyland?" No one laughs, which means I am making them uncomfortable. They don't know how to reply, because of the gay thing or because it's just not funny. Both of these things amuse me.

Moving makes me feel like a nostalgic fortune teller. I keep wondering, will I be happier when I get there? I am ruthlessly discarding the little things that have clung to me. Why does that make me feel like the I I am is changing?

I have been known to visit the places I used to live. What part of me did I leave there. Is it recoverable. Who painted over it, do they own me now, are they just renting?

What I am I leaving here. What I am I leaving here on the page. What voice do I say it with.

It's all boxed up, the life is measured in square cardboards, my rooms scrawled across them in permanent marker. Why am I comfortable discomforted.

Hello from the little bridge, the between.

I'm walking toward you, a grin on my face.

Arriving There

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:03:00 +0000

Ithaka
C.P. Cavafy, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Asking

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 07:04:00 +0000

Asking for Directions

We could have been mistaken for a married couple
riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago
that last time we were together. I remember
looking out the window and praising the beauty
of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world
with its back turned to us, the small neglected
stations of our history. I slept across your
chest and stomach without asking permission
because they were the last hours. There was
a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new
Chinese vest that I didn't recognize. I felt
it deliberately. I woke early and asked you
to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more,
and I said we only had one hour and you came.
We didn't say much after that. In the station,
you took your things and handed me the vest,
then left as we had planned. So you would have
ten minutes to meet your family and leave.
I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion
and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was
aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest
and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you
through the dirty window standing outside looking
up at me. We looked at each other without any
expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still.
That moment is what I will tell of as proof
that you loved me permanently. After that I was
a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker
which direction to walk to find a taxi.

--Linda Gregg

That Year

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:30:00 +0000

That was the year of quiet, one day threaded wordlessly to another. I read a lot. I cooked at least one amazing meal. I ironed joyfully, even my towels. I shoveled snow onto overbuilding hills of blank white drift. I did not delete my grandmother's last message on the phone, promising to call another night.

A reason for silence: What could I say that would not scatter her. What could I say that would not be pitied. Please, get that look off your face.

A reason for silence: I remember the color of the shoes I was wearing on April 1. Blue sneakers, reminiscent of Converse, with orange suns almost exploding on the sides. I bought them in Spain, with a man who'd fallen out of love for me. He said they looked "muy guay." It was the first day I wore them, because it was Spring finally. And then I talked with my brother, and I drove to a friend's house and she held me, she said sorry, I'm so sorry.

A reason for silence: the only thing visible out of a hospital window in Seymour, Indiana was a bar that sold liquor and was open at 11am, and closed at 6pm when we finally left.

If I let go of these fragments, the vivid images swimming up and straining against the surface of my silence, I would remember, maybe, the whole days, not just the essence of them, not just the clear distilled sound but the noise, too, of being human, that anti-essence of us which clamors and will not be satisfied until there is a train in the distance sounding a horn after we have shut off the beautiful music in another room.

Why was I elsewhere isn't the question. The question is, I was whole when it happened. I'm whole, and grateful. I live in a town named after a German city, in an elsewhere's twin. I can hear the train. Good night.

Postmarked October 27, 2010

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 18:45:00 +0000

Which was two days after she died.

I should be more precise.

Six days after she had a stroke that devastated her brain to the point that she had no measurable neurological responses to pain, light in her eyes, a voice at her ear. Four days since I left my home in upstate New York, three days after I arrived in Indiana. (It took one taxi, two buses, two planes, and 17 total hours).

Two days after we took my 93 year-old grandmother off of life support, a post office in Miami postmarked a birthday card she'd forgotten to send me. Someone--her renter? my uncle?--had dropped it in the mail.

Two days after I watched her body stop, her cursive hand moved through time and space to reach me.

It reads: "Happy birthday. I can't tell you this in person. But I will be with you all day."

Safety

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:30:00 +0000

You don't have to lock your car here, he said. He was crossing the little street from the academic part of campus to the parking lot, where I was walking away from my car, which beeped twice to acknowledge that I had, indeed, locked it.

I never lock my car, he said. Or my house.

I said, It's habit.

He said, You should feel safe here.

We were close now. I could see small tufts of white hair like steam evacuating from his ears.

I'm a gay man in America, I said. Safety is a luxury.

Bah, he said. You don't have to feel that way here. There' some anti-minority sentiment up this way, but you don't have to feel that way.

I thought briefly about saying Matthew Shepard's name, but knew I'd have to explain an unshared history. The air was exhausted in my lungs.

His car was parked next to mine, too close to the lines. Maybe someone should steal it, the man said, getting into his car, laughing. In his rear view, I must have looked like the majority, I must have seemed saved.

Blackwater

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:08:00 +0000

You know when a beautiful man introduces you to a song that strikes you to your core? They reverberate in you. They're interchangeable, and yet completely resolutely themselves.

Maybe the man is walking the streets of his city. Maybe he is swimming at night, in a heated pool. Now he's waves, I can breathe him in.

I used to hate being in a body.

But it allows such amazing things. The marriage of art and flesh, emotion and sight. Distance and limit.

Tainted Love

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:45:00 +0000

We were sitting around a table, drinking and eating pizza. There was music on in another room. Their daughter, a very cute one and a half year old, was asleep.

We were talking about love. It was very Raymond Carver of us.

We all told stories about acts of love. The grand gestures are extinct, I said. But then Chi told a story she'd heard from a friend of a friend. Once upon a time, at the end of a good date, a couple who'd been dating for a year or so went to bed. And then the man asked his girlfriend if he could screw her armpit.

The gestures are not dead, I said.

Ooooo, baby, let me get some of that dry socket action, Timmy said.

After that, no one could speak. The tears crested our eyelids and ran down our cheeks. We were laughing so hard the dog ran to each of us, worried about our well-being.

When we calmed down, I said I hated Valentine's Day. That it was just a set up for weight gain, disappointment, or armpit debauchery.

Chi said, Valentine's Day is a holiday aimed at the wallets of couples and the depression-strings in single people.

I poured more wine. We all ate more pizza. I played Devil's Advocate, saying maybe I was wrong, maybe it was kind of nice, to have one day to celebrate love in the world. So much seems dedicated to tearing it down, especially for queer people.

Timmy said, Valentine's day is just a stupid holiday between Christmas and Easter.

Oh, no, I said. That makes it the taint of holidays.

I'm With Muriel

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:15:00 +0000

In a week, it will be 2 years since I broke up with my ex-boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Two years. I. A week from now: the saddest and happiest day. We both of us needed to be unshackled from what we'd become: misery in a king-sized bed.

It is hard to think of me as someone with an ex. Mainly because I feel fresh as a daisy. I've had my heart broken and I've grown stronger. I lost myself in that relationship a little, I'm ashamed to say. But I didn't lose that core sense of playfulness, or my vulnerability, or the ability to transform. In the immortal words of Mariel Heslop, "I'm a New Person!"

The night I broke up with Brandon: The relief I felt when I said we needed to break up. There: the bridge had been washed out, the snow finally broke the icy branch upon which it had laid for too long. The kind of relief that breaks your heart.

His exact words, my boyfriend of five years: "Oh. Ok. Well, have a nice life."

It has been a nice life. I've learned to live in the silence Brandon gifted me. It hasn't been easy, to live in such quiet, and at times I thought I would not survive it. In the immortal words of Muriel Heslop:

"When I lived in Porpoise Spit, I used to sit in my room for hours and listen to ABBA songs. But since I've met you and moved to Sydney, I haven't listened to one Abba song. That's because my life is as good as an Abba song. It's as good as Dancing Queen."

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 04:32:00 +0000

We were talking about the cruel man again.

When I think about him, I feel stupid and lost. I feel once again how it is for the hull to rupture, to fall into the fissure and keep falling for a long time. But slowly.

I think about the morning we woke up together, and he rose naked from the bed. He had only been passionate with me then. He had been kind. He got up and opened the blinds and then his body was where the light was absented. Outside his window, Inwood was all vibrant radiance. I could hear the sound of the city rising up, cars in the street, traffic on the bridge, kids down below playing basketball on the courts. He was naked, facing the city, no shame.

Months later, in the same bedroom, the blinds open, he gave me shame.

So we were talking about him again. I was trying to kill my shame, but that's not what I said.

I said he was cruel to the boy you loved.

I shouldn't have said how, but I did. I didn't realize I'd make you hurt. Sometimes I forget. That the body is a sea, it ripples when disturbed. That the wreck does not lie peacefully when it is entered.

If I call you down here to rescue me, you will drown.

I want you safe. Standing on the wrecked prow, I will not call your name.

Orpheus

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:43:00 +0000

Visitation

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:11:00 +0000

I think often of this poem of Mark Doty's when I want to re-learn: grief is transient, the present won't always look this way.

It won't always look the way you think it will, when you remember it. The past is never dead. "It wasn't that way at all."

VISITATION

When I heard he had entered the harbor,
and circled the wharf for days,
I expected the worst: shallow water,

confusion, some accident to bring
the young humpback to grief.
Don't the depend on a compass

lodged in the salt-flooded folds
of the brain, some delicate
musical mechanism to navigate

their true course? How many ways,
in our century's late iron hours,
might we have led him to disaster?

That, in those days, was how
I'd come to see the world:
dark upon dark, any sense

of spirit an embattled flame
sparked against wind-driven rain
till pain snuffed it out. I thought,

This is what experience gives us,
and I moved carefully through my life
while I waited…. Enough,

it wasn't that way at all. The whale
—exuberant, proud maybe, playful,
like the early music of Beethoven—

cruised the footings for smelts
clustered near the pylons
in mercury flocks. He

(do I have the gender right?)
would negotiate the rusty hulls
of the Portuguese fishing boats

—Holy Infant, Little Marie—
with what could only be read
as pleasure, coming close

then diving, trailing on the surface
big spreading circles
until he'd breach, thrilling us

with the release of pressured breath,
and the bulk of his sleek young head
—a wet black leather sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice—
and his elegant and unlikely mouth,
and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,

and the way his broad flippers
resembled a pair of clownish gloves
or puppet hands, looming greenish white

beneath the bay's clouded sheen.
When he had consumed his pleasure
of the swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,

in his own admired performance,
he swam out the harbor mouth,
into the Atlantic. And though grief

has seemed to me itself a dim,
salt suspension in which I've moved,
blind thing, day by day,

through the wreckage, barely aware
of what I stumbled toward, even I
couldn't help but look

at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness

which is no burden to itself.
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?

——Mark Doty, from Sweet Machine (1998)

Toska

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:59:00 +0000

Sweet longing, a kind of sadness that you're already done with, a sadness you recollect nostalgically. Hard to explain, my friend Alex said.

Then he said, "Hand memories." I think he was making a sexual joke, but I couldn't figure out the context. Only the punch line remains.

I wonder what my hands will remember of Tucson. Rubbing shampoo into your jet-black hair, turning it white so that you looked forty years old. Making coffee in the "cottage." Holding the manuscript pages of so many talented poets. Sliding open the doors. Closing them. When you kissed me, my hand was on the back of your neck.

We kissed until one of us let go. The other of us kept his eyes closed, his lips slightly parted, waiting. When he noticed the kiss had stopped, he smiled.

He opened his eyes.

Christine Garren, "First Time"

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:37:00 +0000

First Time

On Sunday I was in an upstairs bedroom on the bed, being forced.
I saw us on the face of the mirror, the dune of our white flesh.
Afterward, I looked out through the window where it was summer.
The sky was cloudless, and under it vines twisted around the birdbath.
And a bird threw down its image on the grass. I thought of the world
unfolding itself in another country, of another girl's story--
not here, because I knew that God was in the yard,
because the yard was beautiful and he had stayed
mute among the monarchs.

from the book, Among the Monarchs (U Chicago, 2000)

The Desert

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:10:00 +0000

Somehow, people find a way to live. Even in extreme weather, under untenable circumstances. The lightning comes to punch the earth, the rainstorms punish: and the people here exult. I've never seen a people so collectively shining for rain.

I feel very fortune-cookie-wisdom to say this, but I'm realizing that what I'm given I must celebrate. Not, perhaps, loved or rejoiced. Hearbtreak, for instance. The man who told me he missed me, then treated me like a lost thing. I know I needed to be lost, taken out to sea to wash up on another shore, somewhere they don't speak my language. I think he's found someone he wants to hold, and I think he's happy. And that makes me glad.

I can learn new tongues.

Yesterday, I sat with a friend for a long time, watching the sunset, drinking frozen dessert drinks: rootbeer liquor and ice cream and whip cream drizzled with chocolate wine sauce. The sky turned a cream color first, then aubergine and lavender and mauve. It was so big my heart wanted to break open. To empty what it's carried too long, to be filled vibrantly. My friend and I sat and cracked pistachios, talking about that strange quality of love whereby we are made new again. He was in a long relationship, yet this new man makes him feel like an explorer on an undiscovered continent.

A bird landed in his pool, flapping its wings, struggling. It gave up just as my friend netted him, lifting him safely out, speaking to him in the soothing tones of a father with bandage in hand.

The sky bloomed, the glow swam in the trees. We were quiet a long time. I didn't feel the threat in the world. I was happy then.

Dream

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Thu, 28 May 2009 05:39:00 +0000

In the dream I was telling you about, I was startled by who was waiting for me at the table. A blind date that revealed a person I knew. He had bright, dark eyes in which a fire would last for a long time. Eyes that you could keep warm by. A small straggling goatee that might never catch up to his face. Long eyelashes. This way of holding his neck to the side, so that what he says he kind of tosses to you, apprehensively with a sense of danger tinging the words: saying but apologizing.

But what I couldn't say, what at the moment absolutely shocked me out of the story and into a moment of what must have looked like dumb silence: the dream took place where we were, the same small white tables dressed plainly, the same tiny chairs, the bare walls painted a faint yellow.

Maybe it's just a trick. So much deja vu. Like something I'd forgotten in the chimney that has been summoned back to use, the ember-grayed brick flickering back to life. Put your hands in front of me. Rub them together, gently.

Conflagrations

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:17:00 +0000

At night, windows open, the wind just right, I can hear the freight train coursing through my pretty little town. Sometimes, I think, Take me with you; sometimes, I think about hopping on that sucker and riding it all the way to Montreal or Alabama or wherever it goes. I could leave my life, leave a me-sized hole in the middle of it. I could find myself in another context, on a dirty mouse-ridden train. I could be wrapped in the mournful sound that men love, through the tunnels in the cities, through the greening countryside, in the rain and in the light. I could watch it all pass by me. I could light old cardboard on fire in the middle of the night, then throw it from the train. I could watch the fire die out in the cool air, I could leave the charred pieces of myself behind and hurtle towards someone new, a station that holds me, for a while, anyway, and I will rest there before the whistle blows, and I'm warming the tracks again.

Islands

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:31:00 +0000

One of my favorite poems has always been "Crusoe in England," Elizabeth Bishop's masterpiece meditation on alone-ness. Here's a snippet:

Now I live here, another island,
that doesn't seem like one, but who decides?
My blood was full of them; my brain
bred islands.

I'm sending smoke signals to a dispersing sky. I'm arranging tree limbs to spell out my name on the beach. I'm mountain-top-waving my tired arms. I'm tired of waving.

Rescue me, goodbye.

On My Sadness

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:44:00 +0000

It's come to this. There were lines drawn in desert sand. Cacti refereed. There was an austerity through which a wind whistled. You know the whistle: guns are about to be drawn.

But I won't defend myself.

I am sometimes possessed of a sadness. Nothing, it seems, will draw it out. It's grown roots. (It wants "to live a life backwards.") I do what I should: I machete it down, keep it manageable, throw metaphors around it like a balm. It retreats, becomes invisible, but I know it hasn't died.

Sometimes I look at your photograph and the familiar feeling blooms in me.

Sometimes I think that blooming is the way flowers force us to notice the rot on the petals, the cuts in the stems from careless passersby.

You were a passerby I let stay too long. I opened when I should have shut. I metaphored when I should have chilled to my seeds. I mulched when I should have pesticided.

In the summer, I'll see the desert. I'll see lightning and thunderstorms miles off in the forever-stretching sky. It won't be the streets I walked with you, hand in hand, and it won't be the car we drove in, singing songs. It will be new. I'll be prepared, then. The answers, like heartbreak, will come.

The Tyrannies I Swallow

noreply@blogger.com (James Allen Hall) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:50:00 +0000

Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," from The Cancer Journals.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been.

[...]

But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and the pain will either change, or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.
I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

[...]

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?