It’s not your face
Or the color of your hair
Or the sound of your voice, my dear
That’s got me dragged in here
Cat Power, “Living Proof”
I remember during the summer of 2007, as the heat reached over 110°F in the Sonoran desert of Arizona, I’d turn on my heat absorbing black car and wait until the A/C made it possible to actually remain inside. That summer it seemed that the things keeping me going were the double Americanos, impossibly hotter than the weather, and Cat Power’s album The Greatest. It was during those June and July months that someone recommended I read Brenda Hillman’s book Bright Existence. For some reason since that summer I’ve never been able to separate the poet’s beautiful words, of love found and faded, from the singer-songwriter’s voice. So here are four excerpts of poems by Brenda Hillman paired with four Cat Power songs.
When we part, even for an hour,
you become the standing on the avenue
baffled one, under neon,
holding that huge
red book about the capital— ;
what will you be in the next hour,
— bundled to walk
through creamy coins from streetlamps
on sidewalks to your car, past
candles reflected in windows, while
mineral sirens fade in the don’t
return,— driving home past
pre-spring plum blossom riot
moments of your thought…
Those trees rush to rust leaves,
each a time-hinge with great energy—
they can’t bear inexactitude.
News of revolts in the squares —there—
& here, the envious have gone to cafés
to speak in order to leave things out—
Love, literature is in flames,
it was meant to be specific—;
you have driven past these rooms
ten thousand times to make your report;
make your report;
never forget how you felt—
Brenda Hillman, Excerpt from “The Hour Until We See You”, 2009
Both artists make use of life’s details to prove that, regardless of how small the gesture, love makes us feel like we can play with dragons and glide through clouds. Brenda Hillman’s poetry is the smart romantic comedy we’ve yet to see in the movie theater. It’s witty but hopeful, surreal yet down-to-earth. Her words are the bedtime stories every woman should keep, where the heroine’s strength is her kindness and determination, and, not unlike Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, searches for love while attempting to remain objective and with reason.
Last year, on the sun-spilled deck in Marin
we ate grapes with the Russians;
the KGB man fingered them quickly and dutifully,
then, in a sad tone to us
“We must not eat them so fast,
we wait in line so long for these,” he said.
*
The sight of food going into a woman’s mouth
made Byron sick. Food is a metaphor for existence.
When Mr. Egotistical Sublime, eating the pasta,
poked one finger into his mouth, he made a sound.
For some, the curve of the bell pepper
seems sensual but it can worry you,
the slightly greasy feel of it.
Brenda Hillman, Excerpt from “Food”, 1993
A left margin watches the sea floor approach
It takes 30 million years
It is the first lover
More saints for Augustine’s mother
A girl in red shorts shakes Kafka’s
The Trial free of some sand
A left margin watches the watcher from Dover
After the twentieth century these cliffs
Looked like ribbons on braids or dreads
A dream had come right over
With a sort of severe leakage
Ah love let us be true to one another
Went down to the ferris wheel
God’s Rolodex
Brenda Hillman, Excerpt from”Sediments of Santa Monica”, 2000
Cat Power’s voice sounds like drinking whiskey on the porch on a Sunday afternoon. It’s comfortingly familiar without falling into sugary overload. Her lyrics are also quite captivating and tell the tale of a hopeless romantic who manages to still live in the real world. There’s a whimsical melancholy to her music, like a storyteller who keeps telling the fable while being fully aware that it will never work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gGBl3hxXoA
no one but you knows what occurred
in the dress you wore in the dream
of atonement, the displaced tree in
the dream you wore, a suffering endurable
only once, edges that sought release
from envy to a more endurable loss,
a form to be walked past, that has
outworn the shame of time,
its colors sprung through description
above a blaze of rhizomes spreading
in an arable mat that mostly
isn’t simple but is calm & free—
Brenda Hillman, Excerpt from“The Bride Tree Can’t Be Read”, 2013
Both Brenda Hillman and Cat Power have become in their own way voices of contemporary women who struggle to balance vulnerability and strength, beauty and heartbreaking reality. They make us, as readers and listeners, focus on their interpretation of the different aspects and levels of love, so that we ourselves can decipher what these emotions entail for us.
