in third person
Because writing is the highest act of love for one’s self, she leaves her notebook unopened when it matters most, when the desire to speak turns against itself before she has the chance to hear its calling. What she recognizes instead is what she’s always known: a seering self-hatred that blocks that delicate, shifting, mud-soaked trail that art takes to reach her, and with it, destroys her all. Without her art, there is more of her to hate. In place of the truth she meant to serve and had been waiting to hear, her desire to do nothing expands.
In her empty hours, there is only room for rage.
When it matters most, she prefers to forget she is a writer, pretends she isn’t living the agony of the one who was born to write, to record. She thinks her pain comes from being an artist. She wouldn’t know that the source of it all lies in her saying “no” each morning, each evening…
How could you blame her? When the urge to speak was an urge that was loud and obvious in her, she was crushed and punished for what she released through her mouth. So if only because the punishment for speaking was more than she could bare, because she needed a safe space to live in more than she needed her freedom, she began to whisper in writing what couldn’t be said out loud. But as she grew, and her desire for freedom became stronger than her need for safety she lost the urge to speak. What was so quickly muted and hidden to avoid the rage of the woman raising her has become an unrecognizeable urge to her. That sudden irritation, those moments when everything looks hideous to her, when she can’t bare her bird’s cry for attention, when her life seems to her, all of a sudden, a blank page of unanswered chances, wasted hours, when her symphony of regrets rises louder than her choir of past joys, all of it is the now unfamiliar calling for her to speak, to say what she meant to say. Except either she can’t remember anymore, or she can’t understand the benign calling disguised in all those awful moments.
If Poetry Were a Man
She enjoys the company of men who silence the poetry in her. She loves the hurricane of men, her endless anger against the endless list of wrongs they do to her; it keeps her from having to listen to those sad words. She hates the pathetic voice that comes through in her solitude. When she can’t hear it, she can’t be made to feel guilty for leaving them it unanswered. She can simply say, “nothing comes to me anymore” at the time when words comes to her strongest. But why is the pain of men more alluring to her than the flood of relief that writing delivers? Why their hell, instead of the hell of writing that gives to her something she can keep, something that is forever hers, something without legs and lungs full of pain they spill into her body?
The problem is, despite all the lessons life has tried to teach her, she still stubbornly believes she could be happy if loved, and that only in love lies her chance for happiness. What she wants is simple: a large delivery of love, and with it, the end of her sadness…
***
Men who think they are in love with her read her writing, search her art for signs of themselves in her mind. They watch her loose and lonely on the road and desire her — the her she displays, not the child she hides. And when they come to know her, they hate her child. So she tries again to give them the nomadic artist they believed her to be. Like her photos, she pretends she is strong in her loneliness.
But her hair is shorter this year. She’s no money to move as far. She once believed in the act she gave them. Now, she no longer believes, but she, like the men who think they love her, wants the idea of herself far more than the truth of her.
***
And to the man who truly loved her, and whom she loved…she didn’t mean to push you away so strongly. Her soul resisted, it wasn’t her. She wanted you. She tries to pretend she isn’t waiting for another chance. But she is, and she knows that the part of her that resisted you will resist just as strongly as it did before, and there’s very little she can do to stop it.
A poem she wrote a few years ago…
poetry’s a man who may or may not notice
her today
a mile in the sleet is nothing, a train missed, a hem torn
in the hurry nothing. The promise not to smoke
goes where it came from and she takes the winston,
borrows money to pay for coffee she could have made,
holds the last page of the last chapter in her gaze to give
him time. Oh if poetry were a man and man
a mute harbor, tell me what hour would pass without
her words pouring in the white ear and what evening
without her wrist by its white bed? Every bench along the
malecon he passes is hers, every evening he spends in
the bakery, hers, every reason to pass his balcony, hers.
What chair? What beggar’s stall with the words passing
and she with her hand extended, unanswered? What timed
passion, what limit to madness? Come to her in a man
and watch her follow. No verse would pass the avenue
unnoticed. She’d visit every draft in its city, pound its door.
Plead for it. And every time he comes with his fists is the last
time, every warning, the last. And still he bangs the walls,
breaks the plates, leaves her calls unanswered. And still she
sits and sits and still no volkswagen, still his silence. And when
it comes, because it comes in a man, she’ll hold her words,
wear her prayer silks, raise her hands above her breasts, thank
god for it . And when he leaves and enough time has passed
she thinks it will come again in a grey trenchcoat beneath
a yellow awning, behind him, a beggar, behind the beggar,
her. In another minute, he will bend to tie his right shoe
and she will pass him the way strangers do when they wish
to be spoken to. And in the mind where a woman goes
to be a woman, he will follow her down the stairs, through
the train, not his, but where he wants to go now. In a town
where lovers keep her from the page and bring to her poems,
where thoughts remain permanent children in the nursery —
where an artist’s mind becomes like every other mind and nothing
passes a poet’s ear without a troubled woman
turning her neck to catch its gaze.
the end of the wick
What if she insists, but through no fault of hers, her fire finds it end at the last of her wick. What then? What does she do when the city she hates won’t release her, when it binds her with debt and her art and her broken means of escape (a van that is forever waiting to be fixed…)?
She’s afraid she’s become like them. A city woman. A woman whose ambition to succeed overwhelms her original desire (and promise) to live freely, and live well. She calls it discipline but she isn’t sure. Is it right to give up the road and the sea for a dream? But what if the road and the sea are just as much a part of that dream as her art is? Can’t she have them all? Her art, the sea, the road, some success? And if not, if forced to choose, what to her is most important? She lives the same hell as the main character does in Love and Garbage: the hell of the one who refuses to choose, and in refusing one hell over another, ends up having to live in them both.
She misses the seabound woman in her, the painter with her doors open to the water, the sand on her body, the shore replacing the sound of this awful city silence. Hisham Matar one said, “There are different kinds of silences.” And in choosing what we want for ourselves, we are choosing the kind of silence we can bare. The silence of being with the wrong man, the silence of being alone, the silence of sacrifice, the silence of the road, the silence of the crowd, the silence we mistake for silence but is our voice speaking to us in the most truest of languages.
