"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
"It’s not an accident that at any given institution, the “diversity advocates” are often those white liberals who enjoy a certain missionary or white-savior relationship to minorities …The fundamental power structures and relations remain the same: the subordination of the faculty or staff person or student of color to their white colleagues is kept firmly in place." — Dorothy Wang
1.
There had been no intimacy left between us
and I have felt freer to say what I couldn’t say before.
You would like it if I constructed a mirror of conformity
that gazed only back at you with a crony admiration.
I don’t miss redolent flowers that stink with a vainglorious scarcity.
I don’t miss anyone who wants this scarcity as their life.
Dotted eyes blink in an ivory tower vase.
Your white fragility made me a handmaid to your
every whim, even as you witnessed the racism I endured.
In your white world you disparaged me,
crossing the boundaries I thought were sacred:
gossiping about my dead husband’s fidelity,
bemoaning all over town your imagined losses,
regretting that you were a witness to discriminations
against me when you thought you lost power.
You revealed a specious self and pelted this quality at me.
I decided not to look away. I decided to see you clearly
and allow didactic language to make a case for itself in poetry,
to write about the personal, to tease out the articulation
of power systems, of what this room displays or disposes.
2.
At first I thought you were nice. Nice is benign,
a marker, a thing: a decorative blue leather of sense-making.
You had me fooled: I bought the chair
but not the comfort. I am now seeking comfort.
I will behold truth but not congeniality.
You didn’t appreciate my sometimes lack of conformity
nor what informed it, my racial upbringing because
maybe I didn’t look refined. But I might have looked
refined in my own culture, with my own.
I struggled as a child to conform to my white
friends’ standards, and even as I child I knew this.
As an adult I fretted in the valence of this,
and thought about this compromise every time
I experienced shame in your presence. And how
this shame multiples in the presence of people like you,
of which there are just so many. So many in high positions:
cabinets, chairs, selections and boards.
I ache in my reclining chair with the hard-won consolation
I now possess from effort to hope in the goodness of others.
But not in those who are “self-otherseeing.”
People in Bloom’s world. Literature in high-up spaces.
You spoke in your truth about me—not sharply or astutely—
and I experienced every single intonation of its racism.
How excoriating is your specialty and you churn it like butter.
How it mines good intentions, slanders, then you slather it on.
3.
What of bullying? What many of us went through in childhood, chockfull—
a meanness I have seen among girls, and now women who don’t like women.
A misogyny that builds its discourse on elitism requiring distinctions
and arcane order plus a facile beauty to cajole.
I saw you first as a guiding, obsequious charm, the kind in a bewitching chandelier,
that which is white-washed around its candle-edges quietly scribbling names
on a neoliberal clipboard, a twinkling of lit-armor above the coffee table.
These are my direct statements of which I have evaded until now.
I am building words now with their own architectural highlights:
of the pallor of the windowpane, the dismal portrait, and in particular,
what I think about demolished friendships that have been painstakingly nurtured,
and who in them has the privilege and who does not.
I thought to mark their endedness with the boundaries they crossed.
To say: you are not me.
4.
You have not experienced any discrimination that changed
your pointed machine—white as the daylight lily gun.
How sharp a clean boundary is. One person is a grandiosity mashed-up in acres
of domestic fabric whose life never gives in to equity,
believes they need not be driven to compassion
or understanding or equanimity or concession.
I thought of the obsolescence in mismatched ambition
and how it’s pleasant to skirt around these systems of takeover,
staying far away and aching for a surrealist touch.
I’d rather be a useless nightlight to a peacock than to be the peacock,
at least my light will brighten a dreamlike shadow.
Why do you think you deserve everything there is for a body
or a mind to seize from desire? Are desires the opposite of impasse?
And that if we experience loss as it opens us wide open to life giving us up?
Living does run in and out of the fleeting like a wind dead
to a wooden door but forever moving its course of action.
Nothing is unchecked by vanity or a limp charity and when you grace me
with such unbecoming intention so underhandedly mounted in unkindness.
5.
I see it squarely as I have seen brows furrow at my offending existence.
It’s easy to see through it when you aren’t white and have felt sodden eyes
of disdain in a forever mode. Happening when you want only acceptance (not even currency!)
in a room with your own innocence nobody has liked for many years.
I was loyal to your ever-needing wishes, like my parents to employers,
like I was to employers. This is the sense of race relations
and their crossing over to power with white women
who always meant to misguide you to their boot.
Beliefs can collapse race into gender and feminism
is friendship with ethics. I wrote this to freedom.
I wrote this to unburden myself from niceties toward those, like you,
for whom people are disposable, are handmaids, stuffed chairs,
mouths stuffed just the way you like it.