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

Visitation

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

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"

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.