Christine Garren, "First Time"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?