Tea

THE TEA ON TEA

This is not a book about Aids. I offer this at the outset, because I know that in the short-hand way in which books are discussed, catalogued, reviewed, marketed, introduced, Aids will inevitably be touted as one of the cries of the book's occasion. I do not deny this disease its impact. But I deny its dominion.

I began Tea as a chronicle of a relationship. Having not written for a year following the relationship's terminus, I was compelled to begin writing again, and I took my failed relationship as subject. Because I was unable to contain the first lines I wrote, I turned my notebook sideways, pushing into what would traditionally be the margins of the page. These lines, with their peculiar leaps and awkward silences, became the strangely apt vessel into which I could pour my thoughts. I took fragments and made new statements from them, just as I wished to reshape my life from its incomplete bits.

For every thought I had of Scott in writing the first poems, I had as many thoughts of other loves—friends, lovers, "tricks"—who had passed through my life. And so I wrote of them also, reenacting the serial polygamy that had characterized my life. I do not mean for this condition to signify anyone's experience but my own: I had moved through the world a sexual libertine, unfaithful even in the way I conflated the touch of one lover with thoughts about another.

As memory required me to revisit the deaths of many of these men, I realized that I ran the danger of writing a collection in which death was a consequence of my "lifestyle." (I use quotes here, because I do not really understand the difference between a life and a lifestyle, aside from the fingerpointing. I am nevertheless happy to be accused of the style.) Some who read or who do not read this book will hold that opinion. But the truth was—is—that my life is a consequence of those deaths. My relationship with Scott was in part a failure of our understanding of the times. Our fear of knowing our own HIV status was one of the powerful forces that held us together and drove us apart: we saw each other alternately as the possibility of salvation and as the possible instrument of destruction. Because of this, we simultaneously loved and hated each other with a kind of emotional violence.

While I was writing these poems, a well-known poet, who is also queer, cautioned me against "using Aids as a metaphor for a consumptive relationship." I do not understand "metaphor." I have the sort of mind that lumps together odd events, that enjoys the simultaneity of experience. My parents divorced during the Watergate hearings. The backlash against disco coincided with the Reagan administration. I was hospitalized for a nearly fatal accident while my friend Andy was dying, the first of many I would lose to Aids. If two objects occupy the same space, is one a metaphor for the other? If so, then life is the cause of death; love, the root of unhappiness.

Yet there is a way in which Aids moves through the text, just as other forces, events, and characters move through it. Because I based these poems on my own experience, I had to uncover the subject that drove the writing; and so I had to walk down many corridors in order to find what was at center. Along the way, I had to write about failed love, destitution, prostitution, disease, homelessness, and a myriad other subjects in order to discover that the true hero of the poems is survival. This is how I came to put the elegies at the front of the book. I rise out of ashes. To survive is an astonishing gift. The price of that gift is memory.

* * *

The title of the book may puzzle some. Before I wrote Tea I had written a collection entitled Lunch. Tea seemed to be the next logical step. I chose tea as a central figure not only for this reason, but also because it has such wonderful resonance for me. "Tea" was a term from pre-Stonewall days that is still a part of the queer argot. Originally, when queers still referred to ourselves as "queens," "having tea" was a natural extension of one's royal masquerade. However, "tea" the beverage was not necessarily involved in "having tea." Instead, "tea" was a session of gossip exchange. If one was invited to "tea," this usually meant that one was going to be privy to some scandalous information.

A public area in which men gathered for sex (and gossip too) was hence a "tea room." And the last trip to the bars before the weekend ended—on Sunday afternoons—became the "tea dance." Tea. A wonderfully glamorous word to adorn rather unglamorous rituals.

With all of these coded meanings, I suppose one might be tempted to read the title as a furtive gesture. I did not intend to be furtive. Rather, I wished to bring into the language of the poems all of the kinds of speech that I have heard around me—tall speech and short speech, the proper and the vernacular. I honor my dead in the attempt to recapture their voices.

* * *

Despite any hardship, I see what a blessing my life has been. I have written this book for the men who did not live to write their own stories: David Damon, Ricky Encinas, Michael Montero, Fidel Bady, Daehn Lebhardt, Lewis Friedman, Victor Martinez, Nick Wilson, Ken Penny, Andy Moore, Jeff Mahoney, Jon Burnett, Ernie Lopes, Sylvester James, Gary Deal: a list that once begun has resisted closure. This is not about being queer and dying. It is about being human and living.

—D. A. Powell, 1997

Tea Leaves

Such are the final, unenviable forms that survival assumes.

—Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured

[to end and to open with a field: andy buried under a
hunter's moon. deer born of headlights]

to end and to open with a field: andy buried under a hunter's moon. deer
born of headlights

I had meant to be first among us dead. swerve toward atonal tinkle of
glass. powerpole

death puked me back out of its paunch: indigestible clump. naked and
suffering the return of sense

in a separate ward andy made no smash: wrack of lung. scrap of chassis.
towed to the yard

what cried out in the woods between us. the owl that shrieked: I was the
one who shined into the ground

the ground refused me. the ground that would leave the easy prey to be
scavenged and take and take


[gary asleep in his recliner. this prison work
clobbers him. today let the men stand unguarded]

gary asleep in his recliner. this prison work clobbers him. today let the
men stand unguarded
he is overwhelmed by his own cells. a furtive shiv behind his eyes:
searchbeams opaque and anil

he dreams a wall: desert beyond where nothing is not jagged or barbed.
breathing hard he scales
hands numb nopales: swollen but withering inward nerveless. the
sensation of pinpricks

one long last watch: ectomorphic lockdown. he draws the early pension.
incomplete...